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Today on the site, Alex Dueben interviews José Muñoz.

Were you always interested in crime stories? What did you read or watch?

Well, from my side, during my adolescence and early youth, we – Oscar Zárate and myself – lived mainly in the cinemas watching many international films, looking at and reading historietas, books—but never as many as Carlos Sampayo— always being in a lot of high, middle and low tragicomic narratives with words and images, only with words, only with silent or isolated images, sometimes falling down into a word that could be read as a constellation of meanings. I was interested in shapes, cities, white lights and black blacks, fog. Gifted German and Middle Europeans people arrived in the USA escaping from Hitler’s madness and, with their darker expressionist mood, aggravated the light and shadows of Hollywood’s minds. This cruel world enriches our figurative, narrative talents with the lack of meaning of the script of life. At that time the USA saved those people; many, many thanks, truly. Your country, you also, saved them, and they gave you their talents.

In South America we have nothing to thank your military-industrial politics for, nothing at all. Instead, we have been systematically molested by the imperial programs, ignorance, and paranoias of the United States. In my late twenties, coming from politics, before the organized South American killing of lives and hope — Allende, Pinochet, Kissinger the killer, Videla, etc — I began to focus my horrified interest on crime stories because they look just like reality. And, now with some distance, I could say that for the same reason, this too has led to my horrified lack of interest today.

Elsewhere:

I saw hints of this on social media, but this article is all I've seen that recounts the awful recent harassment by "fans" of female Marvel employees. 

Great post here on a rejected Ronald Searle cover.

Gyna Wynbrandt is the latest guest on Process Party.

And Gary Groth is interviewed on KCRW.

Joe McCulloch is here with his usual guide to the Week in Comics (new titles by John Hankiewicz and the Hernandez Bros.) and tops it off with an extended pictorial essay on Geoff Darrow.

Some may have gotten hold of La Cité Feu ("City of Fire"), the image suite he drew that was inked by Moebius, or the big Bourbon Thret album released in France, both in the mid-'80s. In English, there was one Bourbon Thret story published in Heavy Metal (Mar. '85), and another published in Dark Horse Presents (#19, July '88), but for myself and I suspect a many U.S. readers it was the 1990-92 series Hard Boiled, a collaboration with Frank Miller, that introduced Darrow's approach. What you see above is what I think is most readily associated with "Geof Darrow" comics - a scene teeming with hundreds of small events, marks of life: from people to advertisements to cracks on the wall to litter on the street. The main 'event' of the page, a car crashing through a wall and careening toward an orgy, the book's protagonist clinging to the front end, is given relatively slight prominence in comparison to its surroundings; there's a word balloon, and a flash of yellow, contrasting with the rest of the image to draw the eye, but as Darrow himself is photographed distinctly amidst his studio, so does the action of this splash seem to occur as only one thing among many in the comic's existence.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—The most recent episode of the best and least frequent non-TCJ-affiliated comics podcast on the internet, Comic Books Are Burning in Hell, is all about Hellboy.

—At the also too infrequent Mindless Ones site, Illogical Volume reviews the work of Julia Scheele.

For all that it’s a hip, well-designed package, capped off by a picture of a rakish girl Robin smoking like the baddest kid in school, IDLMHN#1 isn’t exactly short of drama. The first story ‘Positive‘, written by Katie West, deals with a panic about an affair and the pregnancy that might follow, and the rest of the strips that follow is of a piece with this opening.

Scheele’s flair for making her design tell the story impressed me to the extent that I was too busy looking at what she’d done to actually see it. Perhaps you will understand why I became such a poor reader if you observe the way ‘Positive’ moves from dreamy blues to raw autumnal colours, and overlays its action with graphical representations of the child that could yet be, literalising the protagonist’s idle speculation.

—Graham Nash is auctioning off his underground comics art collection, including the cover to Zap #1.

—This Facebook post (and subsequent ones) by Rich Tommaso on the dangers and difficulties of making a life's career as a cartoonist is generating much-needed conversation.

Today on the site, Bob Levin reviews Purgatory (“A Rejects Story”) 

From the art, the uniform of Frankenstein’s father reveals him as a policeman. The depiction of Frankenstein’s mother reveals her to be white. Through the art, Frankenstein’s subjective sense of the world is expressed. In the locker room, one of the (modestly) prose-described “overly-aggressive… athletes” becomes a KKK-hooded nightmare. The class-room “beasts” are all snouts and gaping, sharply fanged mouths.

Then there is Frankenstein’s portrayal of eyes. Especially his. Haunted. Dreamy. Startled, Scared. Windows to the soul, I’ve heard. Sometimes his eyes are simply lovely, the promise in them immense. Then, at the end, the author’s photo shows them opaque, sealed behind Steampunk shades, above – is it? – a Mona Lisa smile.

Elsewhere....

Longtime Mad writer Stan Hart has passed away.

RM Rhodes features Druillet over at  Comics Workbook.

Good looking new comic from Seth online. 

PW looks at the most recent SDCC.

I enjoyed reading this lengthy piece about the author's friendship with Flo Steinberg.

Today on the site, Alex Wong interviews Jonny Sun, the artist/author and Twitter personality, about putting together his first book, aliens as listeners, art as therapy, and deciding to stop being anonymous.

You’ve mentioned that putting this book together helped you figure out some things personally too.

It was huge. When I started thinking about the book, I was in the most insecure point in my life, it was definitely the most difficult point in my life. I started a doctorate program, and I was in a lab doing work that was not interesting to me. I felt very intimidated and had imposter syndrome. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I felt like I had no control of what I was doing.

Whenever I get in situations like that, I turn to creative work. It’s something you can control and I know what I’m doing. The book originally started as this small piece of creative therapy, and that’s when I really grappled with the idea of mental health and realized that maybe what I’m going through here isn’t what everyone is going through. I started realizing I had anxiety and depression, and started seeing a therapist.

The actual experience of going to therapy played into the book’s narrative. I see the alien character as a listener, someone who is more quiet. I think my relationship with my therapist informed that a lot. I was just thinking a lot about how I felt better after going to therapy, and what exactly that meant for me. This book became this metaphor for therapy but also another way for me to work out ideas and thoughts, and to put things to images.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Howard Cruse writes about his experiences cartooning for Playboy.

Giving four whole pages to an unknown newbie was apparently too much for Hefner to swallow. But despite that rejection, though, Michelle thought I still had a good chance of cracking “Playboy Funnies,” especially if I came up with more comic strip parodies. Not multi-page ones, maybe; ones that could slip smoothly into the small spaces that would be allotted to strips in“Playboy Funnies.” She was confident I would make the cut, but my first step would be to go home and work up sketches.

Not all of them would need to be parodies, she explained, but some should be. They could be sexually randy; Playboy was a magazine for grown-ups, after all. But they would need to be acceptable for newsstand display.

In practical terms that meant that, while naked females and sexual innuendo would be welcome, practically de rigueur, I should not take my freedom too far. No erections and no penetration, she explained, was the rule at Playboy.

As a cartoonist with roots in uncensored underground comix, I was fine with being funny about sex. Eager, even. Compared to undergrounds, mainstream comic strips were relentlessly prim. That primness was what I was being invited to parody, and I considered that sexlessness overdue for roasting. My point of view was: What would it be like if sex were matter-of-factly embraced by our cartoon favorites instead of being invisible?

Comical incongruities came to mind effortlessly.

—At The Guardian, James Reith writes about Maurice Tillieux's Gil Jordan comics.

Tillieux took Hergé’s “clear line” drawing style and muddied it; where Tintin’s world is clean and sparse, Jordan’s is grimy and littered. The same can be said for the storytelling. Whilst critics adore Tintin for its conceptual complexities, Hergé’s stories are often straightforward adventures peppered with throwaway gags. But for Tillieux, gags have consequences: what you might think is a joke will turn out to be a crucial plot point. Tillieux took familiar comic tropes – then complicated them.

—And it's hard to believe that July is almost over, and we haven't linked to Gabrielle Bell's annual month-long July Diary comics yet.

Today on the site we have Sarah Horrocks interviewing Katie Skelly about her new book, My Pretty Vampire.

Something that is a recurrent theme in our conversations is the idea of the hustle and scamming. A segment of the population would use words like “earned” or “achieved.” Why do you think you phrase things that way?

Honestly, I just think it’s funny. I like to see how people react when I say, “I’m just grifting here.” But I’m also terrible at letting myself enjoy things. I think it’s a way for me to mentally distance myself from any idea of success, because I don’t want to let it slow me down.

Is success scary? How would you contrast the difference between the fear of success, and the fear of failure–because you’ve had both, yeah?

It is scary, because it feels ephemeral. But I also don’t think I’ve quite got it yet. I kind of let go of the idea, I think. I don’t set big goals any more, I just want to go as far as I possibly can with what I’ve got.

So getting into the new book–as an artist you’ve evolved rapidly in just the few years I’ve known you. How do you perceive the changes from Operation Margarine to My Pretty Vampire?

Lots of ways, really. I think it’s more stylistically accomplished on the whole. The drawing got better, the color adds so much more to the mood. The horror is right there at the forefront, you don’t really have to go digging around for it. My eye sort of gets wider for background and mise-en-scene.

Hey, on that note, New Yorkers: Go out to the Strand tonight and see Katie in conversation with Gary Panter and Leslie Stein, moderated by Nicole Rudick. Those are some great, great people.

In other news, Mike Diana has some new products out in the world, and Breakdown Press has announced its fall slate.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter reviews Kristen Radtke's widely acclaimed Imagine Wanting Only This, and seems to have come away largely unimpressed.

Imagine Wanting Only This follows Radtke’s narrator/avatar across several years and locations, placing Radtke first at a site of an early-twenties cohabitation and then at graduate school and afterward. As the years advance, her narrator’s curiosity about declining cities and structures grows into true fascination, leading to an ambitious, international survey of ruins during her time in grad school. The circumstances surrounding this project are severe: the passing of an uncle, the passing of a friend, and the possibility of a hereditary heart condition. To critique the resulting work is not to suggest that these events deserve anything less than real empathy. But the memoir blurs exploration and consumption in a manner that may make some readers queasy, and the visual choices on display undermine the effectiveness of the book.

Scenes with the potential to intensify Imagine’s themes of decline and decay—a wake, a breakup call—are often blunt in their execution or awkwardly staged. Radtke’s grayscale, photo-referenced artwork registers as not drawn but traced, with static sequences across panels and unnaturally smooth figures within panels. The approach to light and shadow gives most objects, including people, a plastic sheen; the placement of certain captions and speech balloons appears to be a last-minute consideration.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent guest on Virtual Memories is Ellen Forney, the most recent guest on RiYL is Mike Diana, and the most recent guest on Process Party is Carta Monir.

—Misc. The Bristol Board has published a nice old Marie Severin splash page which features secret caricatures of many Marvel personalities, from John Romita to Mimi Gold and Sol Brodsky.

The annual Comics Workbook Composition Competition has been announced.

By traditional and demand, today is Jog's day of posting. He will bring it to you tonight.  

Elsewhere:

Here's a very nice local profile of Geoff Darrow in the Chicago Tribune.

Tom Spurgeon gathered some of the relevant publishing news from SDCC in one post.

And finally, Frank Santoro has announced the Comics Workbook Composition Competition 2017. Go here for details.

Today on the site, Frank Young reviews Sunday Press's new Rube Goldberg collection, Foolish Questions & Other Odd Observations: Early Comics 1909-1919.

American wit has the furrowed brow and cautious stance of a boxer. Its affect may be dry, ironic or absurd, but its goal is to lay us among the posies—to cause that ker-plop moment as we absorb its blunt impact.

This hasn’t changed much in the last century. The assault has become harder, fiercer. TV sitcoms, stand-up and mainstream movies pelt us with brute force as they bruise the boundaries of what’s shocking, startling and amusing. Alas, the American comic strip, which has been on life-support for decades, barely manages a feeble swat anymore.

As shown by this, the latest in Sunday Press Books’ vintage American comics reprints, we’re not far removed from the earthy thump of Rube Goldberg. Goldberg is forever linked to his invention cartoons, which still inspire young creators to design what Wikipedia dryly calls “…deliberately complex contraption[s] in which a series of devices that perform simple tasks are linked together to produce a domino effect.” They’re one facet of a long and ambitious comics career that spanned slapstick and melodrama, social commentary and a big Bronx cheer.

The set-up of Foolish Questions, Goldberg’s first successful comic strip series, is familiar to anyone who’s read Al Jaffee’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” a longtime feature of Mad magazine. Formula: well-meaning person asks painfully obvious question; gets smart-ass reply by deadpan recipient.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Eisner Awards were announced, with some solid winners and plenty of head-scratchers. Most gratifying, possibly, is the induction of both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez into the Hall of Fame.

Flo Steinberg, Stan Lee's secretary and a key presence at Marvel during its most culturally vibrant period, died yesterday morning at the age of 78. Her replacement at Marvel, Robin Green, wrote a story about her in a story about Marvel for Rolling Stone in 1971.

Hundreds of letters came in every week from fans, and Flo was the one who opened them. One time there was a letter addressed to Sergeant Fury from a man in Texas, a real rightwinger, who said, "I notice in Sergeant Fury that you're anti-Nazi. Well, if you're anti-Nazi, that must mean you're pro-Commie, and you're all a bunch of no-good dirty kikey commie pinko people, and I have a gun and I'm going to come to New York and shoot you." It was addressed to Stan Lee and the Marvel Comic Group.

Flo passed the letter around the office, and everyone got hysterical because this guy was going to come and machine-gun everybody. Flo didn't know what they were hysterical about because she was the one who went out to meet the people. Flo was loyal, but for a hundred bucks a week you don't get shot. So they called the FBI and a man came down. He said, "Wilkins, FBI," and Flo said, "Steinberg, Marvel."

—Reviews & Commentary. Hillary Brown writes about Andrea Pazienza's Zanardi.

Zanardi is a book that inspires surprisingly complicated feelings. Usually, when I don’t like a comic, I put it in a pile of things destined to leave my house, and I don’t look back. Zanardi has been sitting in a box for weeks, mostly because I hated it, and yet it’s still here. These comics, focused on the titular character, appeared in Italy between 1981 and 1988, after creator Andrea Pazienza died of a heroin overdose. They are foul and rude and nihilistic, full of drug use, misogyny, casual violence, crime, manipulation and general rotten behavior. Zanardi screws over his friends because it amuses him. The attitudes demonstrated throughout are decidedly retrograde. The stories also don’t hang together particularly well; instead, they have a vaguely pornographic feel, with panels strung on the most basic whiffs of narrative—but each plot thread leads to a simple obsession with debauchery.

Megan Liberty writes about the "Something Unusual is Happening" exhibition at Printed Matter.

Other comics in the show contain more traditional plot elements, including text bubbles and characters. Lale Westvind’s Joan the Drone Pilot & Mary the Drone (2017), printed with blue ink on pink pages (except the cover which is red ink on cream), is the story of a world that exists in several dimensions, with those in charge controlling those trapped in the lesser plane for profit, until Mary arrives and attempts to escape. A heavy-handed metaphor for our use of technology, or technology’s use of us when in the hands of advertisers, it has a more traditional structure, with spreads divided into panels and text in word bubbles and boxes. But its dense imagery, heavy lines, and block shading, reminiscent of ‘70s and ‘80s pulp comics, make it at times visually dizzying and challenging.

An anonymous writer has begun a site called Reading Doonesbury, going back through the strip's whole history and connecting it to current events.

What set Doonesbury apart from virtually every other mass-market comic strip in 1970 was that it roots were firmly planted in the youth and campus culture of the time. Like Walt Kelly’s Pogo before it, Doonesbury brought pointed political and cultural satire to the funny pages. What was different about Doonesbury, however, was that its style, as much as its content, reflected contemporary values of youth rebellion. Trudeau jokingly referred to the “urgent scrawl” that defined his early strips as evidence that he was producing “cartoon vérité.” [1] Trudeau sees his early work as not merely a commentary on its times, but a product of them: “If Doonesbury looked like it had been created in a stoned frenzy,” he maintains, “then that was evidence of its authenticity. The strips were dispatches from the front.”

HiLobrow has been running a series of short posts by Jacob Covey, who has designed many of the best-looking comics of recent years, as he discusses book design.

Barcodes exist in service to commerce and if not in opposition to art then certainly with disregard of it. 99% of publishing’s barcodes are unnecessarily large, positioned in the lower right corner, and printed on a white field to maximize efficiency for human checkers. Distributors say they must be on white to read correctly but the red light scanners of barcodes read white the same as red.

—Interviews & Profiles. Dana Jenning at The New York Times profiles Gary Panter.

Mr. Panter, 66, is creatively footloose and has never been content to just draw comics and paint. (He’s represented by the Chelsea gallery Fredericks & Freiser, and his art has been shown worldwide.) He’s done light shows, puppetry, design, printmaking, sculpture, and plays rock music. He honed his early hack-slash style of punk pen-and-ink on posters and album covers for bands like the Screamers, the Germs and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Oh, and there were three Emmys in the late 1980s for his set design on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” (“I’ll talk about anything — except Pee-wee,” he said, laughing.)

Explaining his jack-of-all-trades attitude, Mr. Panter, who grew up mostly in rural Sulphur Springs, Tex., wrote in an email: “I am wired to make stuff. Life is short and these various mediums have different things to offer, so I am seeing what I can do.”

Today on the site: Robert Kirby on Tom Van Deusen's  I Wish I Was Joking.

I Wish I Was Joking is a short collection of Tom Van Deusen comics that originally appeared in publications and series such as Intruder, The Seattle Weekly, and Sam Henderson’s The Magic Whistle. Van Deusen describes these strips as “nonfiction, autobiographical” comics, but each story is clearly a tall tale of escalating absurdity. A few describe Van Deusen’s creepy encounters with famous people and reality television contestants that clearly never happened. But that’s the fun: Van Deusen’s keen sense of the ridiculous and wise-guy comic timing create stories that are over before you want them to be.

Elsewhere:

It's Comic-Con right now, so here's a pretty good history of the event from Rolling Stone. 

There's a very fine looking Quentin Blake exhibition up in London.

Today on the website, RJ Casey interviews Jason Murphy about violence, abstract art, narrative incoherence, kids' comics and his recent story, "The Character".

Is The Character a child?

No, but I feel like I was connecting with the design because of some of those childhood cartoon emblems like the Odie ears, the Mickey feet, and the Dopey butt. His design is a symbol of my childhood, but much of his story is based on my present reality. Does that make sense?

Sure. Was it easy for your kids to connect with it then? Do they read your work?

They do enjoy it, and they are very supportive. They’re both seven, so they are at a great age for making art. I probably get more inspiration from them than they do from me. I feel like they connected with my work more when they were three or four though. Much of my narrative work is silent, so I would flip through the pages with them and we would make up sound effects together.

You feel like they’ve aged out of it somehow?

[Laughter] Yes, they are much too sophisticated for it now. Three to four is my wheelhouse. I don’t know, they like it. They just don’t connect with it the way they did at a younger age. They’re making their own work now.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Sam Thielman profiles Gary Panter on the occasion of Songy of Paradise.

Panter, who spent a year-long fellowship at the New York Public Library studying Milton in preparation, has put a lot of himself into it as well. He describes himself as “Christian-damaged” but admits that religion does obsess him.

In fact, Panter says that he experienced his own formative vision, in a manner of speaking. Back in 1972, he “took a shitload of bad acid”, an experience that disturbed him so badly he had to leave school for a year. The memory of it still haunts him: “There’d be composite creatures made of vacuum cleaners, all kinds of devices,” he says of his trip. “And then they’d be covered with thousands of roach clips each holding a butterfly wing or a playing card, and they’d all be stop-motion animated, and going, ‘Come with us!’” This was not the organic and spiritual experience he’d hoped for.

Alexandra Alter talks to Junot Diáz about his new picture book, which should be very interesting. Diáz is one of the most comics-fluent novelists around.

A year and a half ago, Mr. Díaz was driving in Miami with a friend and her young daughter, when the little girl became restless and demanded a story. Mr. Díaz obliged and began telling her a tale he made up on the spot.

As the story grew more elaborate and detailed, Mr. Díaz’s partner, the author Marjorie Liu, who was also in the car, recorded a video on her cellphone. She later wrote out a transcript of the story and urged him to publish it, but Mr. Díaz didn’t think it was good enough. “I was my typical curmudgeonly self,” he said.

It might have ended there. But Ms. Liu sent the video to his agent, Nicole Aragi, who encouraged him to revise it and develop it into a children’s book.

The most recent guest on Comics Alternative is Gabrielle Bell.

The New York Times has published its obituary for Sam Glanzman.

Today on the site we have a roundtable about the best comic released thus far in 2017, and easily one of the best of the last few years: Songy of Paradise. We convened critics Rachel Davies, Craig Fischer, and Nicole Rudick, along with cartoonist Sammy Harkham, to discuss it with me and Tim by email. 

NICOLE RUDICK

In his interview with Dash, Panter says, “I don’t want to be a person that’s just nailing the same nail in over and over.” This is partly why I never feel disappointed by his work. He’s always approaching it from different perspectives, but it remains of a piece. If he feels he’s exhausted the approach he took in earlier books, it’s great to see him tackle this text in a way that makes sense in relation to its particular complexities. Later in the interview, he talks about artists’ early work frequently being the most intense of their career, the kind that “blows your brains out.” Adventures in Paradise was that book for me—I never saw comics or art the same way again. It was for me, as Panter puts it, a way out of a cage (one I didn’t even know I was in). But that sort of experimentalism is unsustainable over the course of a long career, and at some point, you’re just spinning your wheels. This new book is sophistication of a different sort. It feels textual in a way his other comics don’t. I went back and read parts of Milton’s poem and was reminded that it’s not only a dialectic—in which Jesus, having a vision in which he argues with Satan, comes to realize a truth—but that but that there’s a conceptual textuality too. For instance, in the first part of Milton’s poem, God tells Gabriel that he has begun “To verifie that solemn message late, / On which I sent thee to the Virgin pure / in Galilee, that she should bear a Son.” That message resulted in Mary’s conception, so that Jesus is himself the message, the words or text that were relayed—he was conceived by language. And later, Milton describes the “great duel” between Jesus’s vanquishing of Satan “not of arms” but “by wisdom.”

That dialectic comes through in the way Panter has simplified the narrative and the art, in comparion to his Inferno and Purgatory, as well as the language, as he explains on the book’s title page: “Hewing to John Milton’s Epic Poem Paradise Regained but Without Milton’s Verbosity.” So he’s not only toned down Milton’s more circuitous linguistic style, he has also, as Rachel pointed out, tweaked the classical verbiage with hillbilly slang (which is as expressive as anything Milton came up with). I’ll admit that I haven’t completely reasoned this through—and some of it may sound rather obvious—but I think that part of Panter’s “translation” of Milton’s language is done by putting the story into comics (as opposed to, say, retelling it in prose). Pictures are language, too, and images work on two levels here: as symbols of a metaphysical language (the Assyrian, biblical, and Javanese stuff, for instance) and as narrative language (i.e., storytelling). Craig, this is the same stuff you’ve identified in the earlier books, but here it’s honed to fewer sources yet is, to my mind, equally ambitious.

Elsewhere:

Over at Inkstuds two of our favorite contributors, Joe McCulloch and Katie Skelly, talk about the latter's new book, My Favorite Vampire.

Wonder Woman artist Nicola Scott discusses her work on the character with W Magazine.

The latest guest on Virtual Memories is writer-about-comics Ben Schwartz.

Joe McCulloch is here as usual with his indispensable guide to the Week in Comics (spotlight picks this week include new books by Gary Panter and Gou Tanabe), along with a short essay on the latest from Seth:

Ridiculous as it may seem to refer to an artist of Seth's success and renown as underestimated in some sense -- and, actually, I'm of the type who considers success and renown to encourage the use of shorthand to summarize a notable artist's traits, often leading to discreet underestimations -- few have discussed how careful he is in preparing books of unfinished parts so that they read as coherent statements of ideas. He is like Chris Ware in this way, and it's not only a consequence of book design. Clyde Fans: Book One, for example, balances its two Parts as directly opposed in terms of narrative presentation and character motivation. Part One is a veritable one-man show in which Abraham Matchcard, aged air circulation mini-magnate, caught extraordinarily post hoc, walks us through his neighborhood in the then-present of '97, detailing his own life story as a good-not-great salesman while expounding upon local haunts, household knickknacks, and all the things that come to summarize your footprint on this world. Part Two shifts the scene to 1957, finding Abe's timid brother Simon absolutely failing to live up to each and every virtue of his brother's worldview, as just described to us at length. Abe talks directly to the reader; Simon is viewed from omniscience as we follow his disastrous sales tour of bustling Dominion, images from inside his head often interrupting panel sequence, so that his nervous pondering suffuses and frustrates the objective of connecting with customers and the world at large, i.e. customers.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Maya Barzilai interviews James Sturm about the reprint of his Golem's Mighty Swing.

The golem story resonates with most artists and writers as it is at the core of what we do: creating something and hoping it goes on to have a life of its own.

I encountered the golem story in the pages of the Marvel comics that I read as a kid in the 1970s. In addition to the short-lived “Golem” character from a run of Strange Tales, The Hulk was mistaken for a golem in a 1970 issue. The golem was also one of the few explicitly Jewish characters that I encountered in comics. Later I became aware that almost all of Marvel’s foundational characters have Jewish roots. It’s obvious now, but as a 10-year-old you don’t see it.

Nicholas Eskey talks to Jason Shiga.

I assumed out of the gate that Demon would likely never be published. But instead of trying to make it “more-friendly” to publishers, I wanted to double down and make something even more unpublishable in both form and content. This includes varying issue sizes, from 4 pages to 60 pages, having an all-black issue and of course the depraved content which we’ll talk about later. The plan was that I’d release it as a series of self-printed minicomics over the course of 2 years, then call it a day.

Rob Clough is expanding to include other contributors to his High-Low blog, starting with Whit Taylor, who interviews Miranda Harmon.

But when I sit down and spend time making something with more intent, it can be difficult because I don’t want to hurt anyone with my work. In one journal comic, I show myself explaining to a therapist that I feel, “rotten.” After I made this comic and put it online, a friend who almost never reads any comics at all sat me down and, crying, told me I’m not rotten and that she was worried about me. I was surprised because I nearly forgot that when I put a comic online, it can be read by anyone! I still think that when I make something it’s only for me and a handful of my friends to see, but the reality is different.

New New Yorker cartoon editor Emma Allen talks parenting with cartoonist Emily Flake (video).

The most recent guest on Process Party is Eric Haven.

—Reviews & Commentary. Toni Bentley writes about the mysterious painter and quasi-cartoonist Charlotte Salomon.

In February, 1943, eight months before she was murdered in Auschwitz, the German painter Charlotte Salomon killed her grandfather. Salomon’s grandparents, like many Jews, had fled Germany in the mid-nineteen-thirties, with a stash of “morphine, opium, and Veronal” to use “when their money ran out.” But Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal. It was Herr Doktor Lüdwig Grünwald, not “Herr Hitler,” who, Salomon wrote, “symbolized for me the people I had to resist.” And resist she did. She documented the event in real time, in a thirty-five-page letter, most of which has only recently come to light. “I knew where the poison was,” Salomon wrote. “It is acting as I write. Perhaps he is already dead now. Forgive me.” Salomon also describes how she drew a portrait of her grandfather as he expired in front of her, from the “Veronal omelette” she had cooked for him. The ink drawing of a distinguished, wizened man—his head slumped inside the collar of his bathrobe, his eyes closed, his mouth a thin slit nesting inside his voluminous beard—survives.

Mike Lynch remembers the late Martin Landau's short career as a cartoonist.

Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist at the New York Daily News in the 1940s. He was just a kid, assisting other cartoonists (the Daily News' theatrical caricaturist Horace Knight and, later on, THE GUMPS cartoonist Gus Edson). He was seriously thinking that he would maybe be a pro cartoonist one day. Actually, he was; he assisted Edson for several years in the late 1940s, graduating from drawing backgrounds and lettering to drawing THE GUMPS Sunday pages.

Finally, RIP George Romero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNIGTSdKPl0

Today:

On the twenty-first episode of Comic Book Decalogue, Greg Hunter and Michel Fiffe (Copra, Zegas) talk Hellen Jo, Larry Hama, Ernie Colón, and more.

Elsewhere:

It looks like the Valerian movie is coming out this week and, I know, there are lots of comic book movies, but I really like Luc Besson and Valerian, so, uh, here's a look at the comics.

And maybe this was known already, but Galaxy Magazine, home of great illustrations and SF, is now archived online.

Today on the site, Alex Wong interviews the cartoonist Hellen Jo, primarily about her translation work on Yeon-sik Hong’s recently published Uncomfortably Happily.

Alex Wong: As a cartoonist yourself, how did you relate to Hong’s personal experiences?

Hellen Jo: I can’t tell you how many times I’d stop translating, simply to shiver in a moment of are you kidding me right now? The parallels between the book and my life were ridiculous and uncanny. I’d translate a page about the main character avoiding his editor’s pleading calls, and literally within the hour, I’d get an urgent email from an animation director where my revisions were, which I would then ignore. I’d spend a few hours having a spiraling panic attack, then attack the weeds in my yard to de-stress, and then I’d sit down to translate a chapter where Hong did the exact same thing.

Hong and I also had similar reactions to stressful situations: panic, indignant anger, complete avoidance. The translation work ended up becoming a mental and emotional echo chamber as well, which I had never expected. As the first person to translate the book into English, I felt very much like Uncomfortably Happily was destined to land in my hands so that it could pat me on the back and say, “Hey, you’re not alone. We’re all freaking out together!”

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

There seems to be a real pre-Comic-Con lull on the comics internet lately, with the only thing I find many people discussing NPR's recently released list of 100 "favorite" comics. In the introduction, they claim the list is "personal and idiosyncratic," but to me it reads as anything but. The older material on the list is pretty solid, if generally unsurprising (Mary Perkins on Stage is one pleasant exception to this rule), but a huge percentage of recent material is just well-liked but unremarkable milktoast. I guess that's what's popular, but it's kind of sad for critics to give junk like this cachet. NPR would never fill a 100 best books list with so many James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer novels, even if they are what sell...

Today on the site: 

Longtime cartoonist Sam Glanzman has passed away at age of 93. Here is our obituary. He was best known for one of my favorite comic books of the 1960s, Kona, and various war comics for DC, most prominently his U.S.S. Stevens series of stories. His autobiographical graphic novel, A Sailor's Story, was released in 1987 and remains beloved by many. Mark Evanier remembers him here. There is a gofundme campaign to defray his medical costs here.

Here's an excerpt from my text on Glanzman and Kona for my book, Art in Time.

Ostensibly the story of a family—Dr. Henry Dodd, his daughter, Mary, and her two children—who are marooned on a fantastic island, Glanzman turned the title into a study of the white-haired Kona, a somewhat anguished and highly moral Neanderthal. Working first with writer Segal, then with legendary Harry Smith-collaborator, the beatnik Lower East Side Rabbi Lionel Ziprin, and then with his editor, the artist L. B. Cole (who also edited John Stanley’s Tales from the Tomb), Glanzman created visceral, gripping stories of near constant danger marked by Kona’s attempts to protect the Dodds from the mythical beasts that rule the island. Glanzman created pages, he noted, “that would hold the reader’s eye as single compositions; I didn’t want the reader to ever glance off the page.” This translated into page designs that usually neglected a panel grid in favor of panels or scenarios inset in larger drawings. Glanzman’s figures are in constant motion, running, fighting, falling—there is hardly room for a reader to take a breath. Working from “stick figure” pencils, Glanzman rendered his illustrations mostly in ink, which further increased the urgency of the imagery. Glanzman’s dialogue here and in his later war stories is marked by lyrical passages such as “Nobody wins wars . . . like these!” and “What guarantee do we have that to the animal kingdom . . . ‘Man’ is not regarded as the most hideous of all forms? The most bestial?” This pulp philosophizing in concert with frequent full-page drawings amplifies the drama, making the action and danger palpable. With Kona, Glanzman imbued real life into a hackneyed genre, and gave comics an unforgettable protagonist.

And still more:

This is a good piece of writing about Gengoroh Tagame. 

Finally, here is a very enjoyable look at the Moomin museum in Finland.

Today on the site, RJ Casey speaks to Kimberley Motley, the prominent attorney representing Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie.

Do you have any idea of what kind of toll this ordeal has taken on Matt and his family?

It clearly couldn’t have been easy. Matt’s a really good guy. He’s very humble and a great artist. It’s been hard for him to see his creation being used in a negative way, especially since it was created to be a funny, friendly frog. I think it has been shocking and disappointing to Matt. For me personally, I always see what happened to Pepe over the last year and a half representative of what’s happening in America. This is a wonderful country with a lot of possibilities and opportunities, but unfortunately, from my perspective, we’ve seen a lot of ugliness lately. I’ve seen a lot of negativity that is taking our country in a direction that I don’t like. To a certain extent, that is what has happened to Pepe. The alt-right has hijacked him and has tried to take this symbol as their own. 

I think a lot of that has to do with how the internet is set up and in a way still feels like the Wild West. How are you going to take that on? Is this unprecedented? 

It is, in a way. It’s difficult. Matt, Jason, and I believe in freedom of speech and want to make sure people can still celebrate Pepe. You can’t really control how Pepe has been used on the internet in the past, especially since he’s been turned into this meme. Dealing with the internet is difficult because there are so many users all around the world. Pepe has taken on a life of his own. However, what should not happen is people profiting off Pepe and the intellectual property of Matt Furie. That’s a big concern. I couldn’t make a tuna fish sandwich at home and stick a McDonald’s logo on it and sell it to people. The McDonald’s corporation would come after me. This is Matt’s creation and people don’t have a right to take his intellectual property and then themselves profit off of it without his permission. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Alex Dueben interviews Keiler Roberts.

What made you interested in making comics about yourself and your family?

Those are the people I know and can characterize pretty accurately. I’ve always been drawn to personal essays and stories, comics or otherwise. My favorite comedians dwell on themselves and their relationships. In fiction it’s always the characters that matter more to me than the plot. You can know a lot about the nature of a relationship by listening to the way people talk to each other.

The latest guest on Virtual Memories is Joyce Farmer, and the latest guests on RiYL are Françoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman.

—Reviews & Commentary. I'm a day late but I agree with Tom Spurgeon's guide to Prime Day.

Brian Nicholson reviews Daryl Seitchik's Exits.

Every sequence seems like a setpiece, playing with a limited palette. Not seeing the main character makes the reader more aware of negative space where that character could be, in order to follow along.

Today in mid-July we have Joe McCulloch busting in with the list of the week's releases. 

I've been traveling so a bit out of touch, but here's the news:

Bob Lubbers, longtime cartoonist, died on July 8th. He began in comics in 1940. He drew Firehair for Fiction House, and in the post-WWII years drew The Saint, Tarzan, Secret Agent X-9, and his own Long Sam. He was along a longtime assistant on Li'l Abner. Here's a good sampling of his work, and a longer bio here.

Today on the site, Ken Parille returns with a new installment of his column. This time, he writes an appreciation of Leslie Stein.

It was the unusual hand–written text that first attracted me to Leslie Stein’s diary comics. Instead of following the comics tradition of all capital letters, Stein makes surprising choices: some words use only lower-case cursive, others just lower-case print, some only traditional block lettering, while others move between these styles — and because she frequently changes text size and shape, some letters evade a clear-cut status as either upper- or lower-case, or print or cursive. It’s all done in an elegant, yet unpretentious calligraphy, the kind you might find in a thank-you note written by a thoughtful friend committed to the lost art of letter writing. Though she letters much of the dialogue in black, Stein uses color in an odd and stunning  way: a single line of narration, for example, might employ as many as eight different water-color hues.

The energy of her letters and colors plays out in her drawings, especially in her character designs. At Vice.com (where her color diary comics have been appearing since late 2014), her comics are occasionally described as “cute.” This is certainly true. There’s a real charm to the way she draws herself and others, and she presents scenes from her life with a gentle comedic sensitivity. But unlike so many online diary and autobiographical comics, Stein avoids the genre’s love of bland, relatable cuteness and its dependence on verbal platitudes and visual clichés. She approaches nearly every aspect of cartooning — lettering, coloring, figure drawing, backgrounds, page layouts, etc. — in an original and idiosyncratic way.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. At Lithub, Daniel Gross profiles Berlin creator Jason Lutes.

This year, almost a quarter-century after Lutes started the series, he will send the final chapter to his publisher. What began as an esoteric obsession, a fictional journey into the annals of history, suddenly seems timely. Berlin taught Lutes what fascism looks like—and although he knew he’d find it in old books and black-and-white photographs, he didn’t expect to see anything like it in his own country.

Petra Mayer at NPR asks several cartoonists (including Simon Hanselmann, Noah Van Sciver, and Katie Skelly) what comics mean to them. Skelly:

When I started drawing comics, it was to make my own reality.

At The Paris Review, Simon Otrovsky talks to Guy Delisle.

I read [Hostage subject] Christophe [Andre]’s story in the newspaper, like everybody else, and I thought the story was extraordinary because he escaped. At the time, there were a few French people coming back to France after a long time of being kidnapped. I remember this one guy, Brice Fleutiaux—he came back home and his wife had left him for another reporter, and it was really hard for him, and he committed suicide. Some people come back from a kidnapping, and it’s hard to be back home and have a normal life. I thought that escaping would be the best way to come back. There’s a recording of Christophe saying, I feel like the football player who scores the last goal and wins the match.

—Reviews & Commentary. At NYRB, Jon Day writes about Eleanor Davis.

The illustrations—sketched from the roadside during the journey—are charming: simple but evocative pencil drawings, some showing the smudges of the traveling hand, the impress of the snatched moments in which they were created. In their scratchy immediacy they bear witness to things seen and felt. Comics lend themselves to representing how a cyclist sees: the flatness of the bird’s-eye-view map set in contrast to the scene-by-scene illustrations of Davis’s daily experience. We are pulled into Davis’s perspective, seeing from her position on the road as well as from a close third-person view as if slightly above.

—Misc. Pittsburgh's ToonSeum is running a fundraiser in an attempt to expand its educational offerings. Rewards include various signed books, Drew Friedman t-shirts, and original art by Carol Tyler, among other things.

Today on the site:

I spoke with Simon Hanselmann about his comics life, his new book, and his future projects. 

Megg and Mogg is interesting, because it’s so many sitcom beats. It’s gridded out, as the great Frank Santoro would say. It’s on the grid, Simon.

Megg and Mogg’s just a sitcom on paper. It started out as a gag side thing, and I was like, “Yeah, it’s just like How I Met Your Mother but with drugs and based on old flatmates.”

On just a cartooning level, what’s the challenge in it for you, day to day?

I mean, it comes second, the cartooning in a way. 

Cartooning comes second in Megg and Mogg?

Well, yes. Definitely. 

What do you mean?

The drawing’s just in service of the story. I feel like I could just write them and stuff. I like writing the stories and pasting them out and thumb-nailing them out, and then it’s boring to sit down and do all this drawing. I mean, I enjoy painting and I do my landscapes and stuff. That turns out nice. I feel like a terrible artist. I’m very self-critical.I think I just enjoy finishing things. Just racing through to finish a project and just trying to win in a way and just get a lot of stuff done. It’s just this burning, like I have to get stuff done! I work all day, it’s all I think about. I feel guilty when I’m not working. So I enjoy it, but I dunno. It’s weird with Megg and Mogg, I just keep doing the same fucking thing. I did this sci-fi thing for the Lagon guys in their recent book. I did a bad job on this sci-fi strip. I feel like I did the worst thing in the book, it was a failure on so many levels. And to get back to Megg and Mogg was so comforting. I enjoy the repetition. I guess I have an OCD thing with just cranking shit out, and if I can crank the same thing out…I mean, so much of comics is so mechanical. If you do it like I do it, it’s so mechanical and methodical. So to just keep it simple, with the same thing. I am going to change up Megg and Mogg soon. I’ve been threatening for years to do this Megg’s Coven thing, a big mature Megg and Mogg arc where it evolves and deals with all my family history and mines that for funny stories and horror. But I’m finally doing that, I’ve capped it. The new book that we’re promoting right now, One More Year, the third in the trilogy, that’s it. I’ve got to pull the trigger, and now I have to do this Megg’s Coven thing. Which is gonna be weird, and I don’t know what’ll happen after that. I’ve thought about it into the future, but I guess I’ll run out of steam at one point. But for now I have this massive big new arc planned. It’ll be like 400 pages and take me forever to do. And I’m legitimately excited for it. I’ve been saving up this horrible, squalid material for a long time. It’s gonna be a real fucking doozy, hopefully.

Elsewhere:

In more signs of a changing convention and retail climate, longtime retailer Mile High Comics has called it a day with San Diego Comic-Con after 44 years. In a detailed letter, owner Chuck Rozanski cites the changes to the convention and recent difficulties with its management. 

Joan Lee, who was married to Stan Lee for 69 years, has passed away. She is also credited with inspiring numerous comic book characters. 

Today on the site, Shaenon Garrity finally finishes her epic binge-read of the entire Homestuck saga. An excerpt:

Rose and Jane are evil now.  They got possessed by a bad guy.  I think.  People are powering up to planet-shatteringly extreme forms like it’s hipster nerd Dragonball.

 

• Anyway, all the kids and trolls have a giant battle as a run-up to the even more giant battle against their bajillion final bosses, following the superhero/anime rule that the good guys have to fight each other before they can team up.  A lot of people get killed or partly killed and everybody’s planet blows up, and John blips back from being unstuck in time to find the universe in a complete mess.  Stupid teens with their stupid video game.

 

Never mind, they’re going to go back in time and fix it and make everybody less dead again.  It’s done more interestingly than the previous retcons.  Every time Homestuck repeats a concept, it does a better job of it, but man does it keep repeating.

And Keith Silva is here with a review of Charles Forsman's Revenger and the Fog.

Give Forsman’s Revenger comics a quick flip -- Revenger and the Fog is the second collected volume, paired here with a one-shot, Revenger is Trapped!!! -- and they appear as love letters to those twin arrested adolescent male thrill machines of the '80s: action movies and Marvel Comics. Think Commando and Cobra as well as lesser (greater?) flicks like Lone Wolf McQuade and Red Scorpion. Comics-wise Forsman channels Larry Hama and Klaus Janson at their workmanlike most awesome.

In her review of a similar genre send-up, Anya Davidson’s Lovers in the Garden, Katie Skelly challenges readers “to read Lovers in the Garden back to back with All Time Comics #1 and see the difference between absorbing and reinterpreting genre versus trying to sell it back wholesale for laughs.” I may disagree, a bit, on what Messrs. Bayer and Marra et al. are after in All-time Comics, but Skelly, who in her own comics absorbs and reinterprets genre like a boss, is on point. She nails the nitrous hit nostalgia gives an artist while simultaneously undermining making art that’s on par with the beloved primary text. Forsman’s voice may belong to a previous era and he may wish he could've hung out in the ‘Marvel Bullpen,’ but he has to reconcile that impulse in order to say something relevant, personal.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Jason Zinoman at the New York Times profiles the new cartoons editor for The New Yorker, Emma Allen, who hasn't taken very long to make her presence and sensibility felt.

Ms. Allen has a sprawling set of responsibilities: She also edits the daily cartoons for The New Yorker online; works on video and radio humor pieces for the magazine; runs its humor Twitter account; and for three years has edited Daily Shouts, comic essays that have become one of the most popular features on the site. (According to the magazine, in the past three months, traffic to those essays is up 60 percent from last year.)

Her ability to find new voices for Daily Shouts is what first drew the attention of The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick. “She was bringing in people and things that I hadn’t heard before, and sometimes you need to reinvigorate parts of the magazine,” he said by phone, adding, “We need to have a deeper exploration of the web, as far as cartooning.”

For Jezebel, one of today's best writers-on-comics, Chris Randle, talks to one of today's best cartoonists, Jillian Tamaki.

JEZEBEL: I was struck by how you placed “World-Class City” at the beginning of the book—you’ve made comics like that before, where the images are abstracted from the text, but I like leading off a bunch of short stories with a non-narrative piece. Did you have a certain effect or framing in mind there? Were the words written as a lyric?

JILLIAN TAMAKI: It was placed there mostly due to the format—the story is printed sideways to achieve a “continuous flow” effect. The story “Boundless,” which appeared on the Hazlitt website as an infinite scroll, is presented similarly sideways. It was [Drawn & Quarterly editor] Tom Devlin’s idea to put them as the first and last story. Perhaps the physicality of turning the book is annoying or interesting? Like entering and exiting a space.

At Artillery, Doug Harvey talks to Gary Panter.

A lot of the comics I have done are formalist procedural strategies that I am exploring or playing out, which sometimes makes for unreadable comics. So it’s good to also do comics like this one that also try to entertain while following some rules to produce them. Larry Poons used systems to arrange the dots on his early ’60s work—that made an impression on me. And also the ever-transforming work of Paolozzi and Fahlstrom. So those are models out of fine art for my comics.

Comics are different from paintings typically because they are trying to trap your attention for a while and take you on a little trip and maybe make some aphoristic point or joke. Painting is more of a shorter, arrested, indeterminate moment. A painting is a mood-influencing experience. The history of painting seeps in and the formalism of making and the abstract view and the processing of figuration if there is any, so painting doesn’t seem as linear to me. Though one can take strategies and apply them however you want.

And finally, the latest guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is the man of the hour, Howard Chaykin. I haven't listened to that episode yet, but I get the impression that it was recorded before the recent cover controversy and public-relations debacle that Dan mentioned yesterday. Dan linked to many relevant and valuable sources, but I did want to also link to one other perspective I found particularly useful, Abhay Khosla's. Abhay wrote about the various controversies surrounding it in three Tumblr posts.

I agree with Abhay about the potential value of offensive art, though this whole recent episode underscores one of the most important things to remember about creating it: if you're going to caricature something, you have to know what your targets actually think. In his FreakSugar interview (and those are three words I never hope to write again), Chaykin quite rightly argues that people should read material before criticizing it. (Incidentally, I don't think this argument makes sense when discussing cover imagery, which is the only part of a comic designed to be read out of context.) But Chaykin makes that argument about direct engagement only a few minutes after proudly announcing that he has made a solemn vow not to read any criticism about his work if written on the internet. If he hasn't read the critiques, how can he understand them? It's hard not to get the impression that Chaykin is fighting against a mediated phantasm. Chaykin could make better art—and better arguments—by dealing with the real thing.

Today on the site, Dash Shaw talks to Gary Panter about Panter's new masterpiece, Songy of Paradise.

This book doesn’t feel like it needs footnotes the way some of your books have. I just read it straight as a story. I thought, “Oh, this’ll be great interviewing Gary about this book, because I won’t have to do any research!” [Panter laughs]

Yeah, there’s tons of research underneath it, but you don’t have to have it to get the book. And really, it’s because the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan—I don’t know how many verses, five or six verses in the Bible—and Milton just lards it with words and allusions and his philosophy. And so it’s hyperinflated, but the story’s simple. One of my friends, John Wray, who was also in the Cullman Center, he asked me why I stopped using multiple panels the farther I went. But the farther I went, there was less said, you were just hashing over the same things in different categories, and they weren’t worth turning into comics in a way. I start realizing, “Well, Milton’s using all these words to say something that’s just two sentences often.”

Right, right. Yeah, I understand.

Oh, can I say one thing. I still interspersed a reading of Dante with this. I did the same thing as the other books formally, somewhat, in that I broke the pages down according to the same books and visions of Milton pretty much, divided among the 33 pages. And I still read Dante for lighting effects. So I didn’t address Paradise by Dante directly, but the lighting gets lighter or darker according to Dante or more stars or eagles appear, that sort of thing.

The lighting meaning the darks on the page?

As you’re going through, like on the first few pages when finally the Babylonian God appears, and there’s a moon in that panel. And that place in Dante’s Paradise is when the moon appears. And then as you go through, rings of stars or interlocking rings of stars or birds or the eagle appears… There are these big symbols that appear in Dante’s Paradise that are the stagecraft of the book, a hidden set of tiers. It’s not important, you don’t have to know about it, but that’s just how I did the book.

Elsewhere:

Tablet has a lengthy look at Eloise creator Kay Thompson's life and identity.

Continued proof that comics history remains under-explored, no matter how many books are printed: Jay Jackson's Home Folks, which appeared in African-American newspapers in the 1950s.

Longtime inker Joe Sinnott is profiled in the NY Times.

And over the weekend a controversy erupted online over the cover of the upcoming fourth issue of The Divided States of Hysteria, a comic book by Howard Chaykin, published by Image Comics. The cover image shows the aftermath of a lynching: a hanged man with a slur on a name tag and bloody/mutilated genitals. The cover can be viewed here. The first issue of the series was also offensive to some. In both cases, the arguments back and forth involve issues of intent, privilege, and the depiction of (and profiting from) particular acts and identities. Image, with Chaykin's approval, pulled the cover from publication and released this statement. That problems inherent in the statement have been well-annotated by Jordan Calhoun. Chaykin has responded here. The reaction to that statement, which is one of the clearest examples of a total generational disconnect I've seen in comics, is still unfolding on Twitter, and Sarah Horrocks has been particularly strong there. There are other strands to this story that pull in other Image creators (notably Brandon Graham), but going down those (many) rabbit holes becomes the stuff of a much longer piece of writing, and, to be honest, I haven't read any of the comic books in play here, nor do I keep up with Image. Anyhow, there are many good Twitter threads that articulate the issues with and around the cover/series. One could start with Michelle Perez.

Today on the site, the great cartoonist Mark Newgarden interviews comics historian and Harvey Kurtzman biographer Bill Schelly about his writing, and his latest book, which focuses on the legendary John Stanley.

Who was John Stanley? Can you describe some of the inherent difficulties you encountered in researching the life and career of this significant, yet (nearly) anonymous mid-20^th century multi-mass-media worker?

John Stanley was born in 1914, a son of Irish immigrants who was brought up in the Bronx, and lived in New York City environs all his life. He died in 1993. He only gave three interviews in his life, two of them being question-and-answer sessions on panels at NewCon 1976, the only comicon he ever attended. He shunned the limelight, largely because of his natural reticence plus an extremely self-deprecating attitude about his work, and a career that ended badly. In contrast, Harvey Kurtzman must have given forty or fifty interviews, many of them extensive.

By 2014, when I starting doing my research, virtually all his colleagues and friends, not to mention his birth family and wife, had passed away. Only a few had been interviewed about him. His son Jim Stanley, the chief caretaker of his father’s legacy, was born in 1962 and he was still a child when his father quit comics in 1970. So putting John’s story together, and tracing how one event led to another, was a challenge. I’m happy with the way it turned out. I was able to unearth a lot of previously unknown stuff.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Paul Morton interviews Guy Delisle.

This is the longest graphic narrative I can think of that takes place in a single room for most of it. There are a lot of movies that do the same, recently Room, but also Lifeboat and any number of adaptations of plays. Did you look to those films to develop any strategies?

No. I saw Lifeboat a very long time ago. I didn’t see Room. I saw part of it on the airplane. Movies are very different from comic books even though they look alike. I kept my drawing very simple. It’s a real-life story. The more you put special effects in a real-life story, the less it’s going to look like a real-life story. It’s going to look like a Hollywood blockbuster. I didn’t need to reference movies that are so different.

Tom Heintjes has reposted excerpts from several 1980s interviews he conducted with C. C. Beck.

—News. Tom Hart's Sequential Arts Workshop is now offering online courses for aspiring cartoonists, including various classes taught by Hart himself, as well as gag cartooning by Emily Flake and perspective drawing by Jason Little.

—Crowdfunding. Golden Age comics legend Sam Glanzman has entered hospice care. There is currently a crowdfunding effort geared towards both publishing a tribute book to Glanzmann and helping the artist and his family with medical and other expenses.

In 1939, while still a teenager, Sam Glanzman produced his first professional comic book art (under the tutelage of his older brother, Lew Glanzman). A few years later he entered WWII, serving in the pacific theater, as a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Stevens. After the war, Glanzman began drawing comics again and never looked back! Not only was he prolific, producing thousands of pages of art over the decades, but he showed himself to be a true storyteller. This can be seen best within the panels of the 4-5 page U.S.S. Stevens stories, based on his real life experiences -and those he served with- during WWII. These stories also happen to contain some of the first biographical work EVER done in comics. Along with speaking frankly about the horrors of war, Glanzman also bravely addressed issues of race and homosexuality, at a time when those things were simply not part of the conversation in mainstream comics.

It is the final day for the Comics for Choice anthology crowdfunder, co-edited by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and Ø.K. Fox.

Comics for Choice is anthology of comics about abortion. Cartoonists and illustrators have teamed up with activists, historians, and reproductive justice experts to create comics about their diverse personal stories, the history of abortion, the current politics, and more. Proceeds will be donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. Together with 70 member funds around the country, NNAF works to remove financial and logistical barriers to abortion access, so that everyone can have full reproductive choice.

—Reviews & Commentary. Former cartoonist Tim Kreider writes in favor of artists being allowed to satirize presidential assassinations.

Americans who take their kids to Saw and Alien movies still seem oddly shocked by violent imagery in political satire, maybe because most mainstream American editorial cartoonists have turned in such lazy, gutless, Donkeys-&-Elephants hackwork for the last half-century or so. Their British counterparts have always been crueler and funnier — possibly because they have a history of literal, rather than symbolic, beheadings in managing transitions of power. Crude images of sex and violence, gluttony and flatulence, dismemberment and cannibalism recur in the cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank, and persist in the work of their successors, like Ralph Steadman, who drew Nixon as a malignancy being excised from the heart of the Republic, and Steve Bell, who draws President Trump's head as a toilet.

Michael Dooley writes about Steve Ditko and shares a selection of his art.

Looking back, we see that he’d been conjuring up his hallucinatory images a full decade earlier than Dr. Strange, not to mention him being around 15 years ahead of Jim Steranko’s pseudo-psychedelic Dali riffs in his Nick Fury. And these images are all the more exceptional in their stunning transformations of traditional genre narratives—often hacked-out schlock—into startling, phantasmagoric apparitions.

—Misc. Comics historian and Crockett Johnson scholar Phil Nel is looking for some help with his latest batch of Barnaby annotations.

At the back of each book, I provide a catalogue of the comic strip’s many allusions — some of which are topical, and others of which reflect Johnson’s wide range of interests. For those unfamiliar with it, I should add that Barnaby (1942-1952) mixed fantasy and satire in its many stories of its five-year-old title character and Mr. O’Malley — Barnaby’s loquacious, endearing con-artist of a fairy godfather. Read all about them in the first three books! :-)

For Volume Four, here are a few allusions that elude me. Any thoughts? Any who help will of course be credited in the published book, of course.

Today on the site, Sloane Leong pays tribute to Meredith Gran's Octopus Pie, which ended its ten year run this month. 

Finally I took the plunge and started reading through Meredith’s extensive archives, getting to know Eve and Hanna, Marek and Marigold, Park and Olly. I got to read through Meredith’s format changes, medium changes, breaking into more metaphorical imagery, laugh as her gags became dynamically abstract and digressive at the perfect moments. My heart got to clench up during bitter break-ups, awkward attempts at friendship, heart-to-heart talks with parent characters, and longtime friends overcoming relationship hurdles or crashing headlong into them. There are a lot of characters that flow in and out of the story, carefully made to stay thematically on point while still playing to their personalities, never forced into corners where only hammy writing will get them out.

On top of all this, Meredith’s cartooning is world class. She made strong style choices from the start, building up her visual vocabulary into a fantastic set of storytelling tools that have only expanded as the story has progressed. As previously mentioned, she’s fearlessly experimented with page size, rigorously pushing each format until it felt like she’d expended its potential and then tried something new. The last few arcs of OP are sprawling and all-encompassing on the screen, letting the scroll pull you through decompressed character moments or jump through a non-linear sequence of memories. One of my favorite scrolling page moments is on pages 704-714 where the best (only?) depiction of a song-and-dance sequence literally gave my cartoonist-heart such a thrill, like I could hear the music as the character was singing.

Elsewhere:

The longtime creator of the Paddington Bear books, Michael Bond, has passed away.

Here's a nice look at the varieties of Steve Ditko's cartooning chops. 

I like the close looks at original art on Rob Stolzer's blog.

Today on the site, Brian Nicholson reviews Noel Freibert's Weird #6.

Before founding Weird Magazine, Freibert made a series of horror comics that existed in an obvious lineage that led from EC Comics through undergrounds and work in Warren magazines created by the likes of Richard Corben. These had a "host" character, and depicted transgressive acts. It was easy to see Weird as intended to follow in this tradition, with its title's similarity to Warren magazine publications like Creepy or Eerie. However, pretty quickly, within the context of the more obvious horror stories made by his fellow Weird contributors, the work Noel was making himself attempted a more Beckett-influenced sort of blankness. Now, with those other contributors absent, the horror has moved away from anything approaching genre tropes. Once a mood used to discuss the inevitability of death in semi-humorous fashion, now it is more of a Mark Beyer-styled wail of terror, an ambience necessary for discussing life in America. The humor present, evident in his even older zines, is this sort of slack-jawed vacant-eyed caveman Beavis and Butt-head, taking-acid-and-watching-Faces of Death thing. The imagery interpretable as "heavy metal" that I found so gauche can then be understood as related to this, as an attempt to signal that his sympathies lie with this sort of figure. They exist in a timelessly vulnerable position, that being the kid in a tribal society who eats the unfamiliar berries to find out whether or not they're poisonous. The politics are essentially an outgrowth from that vulnerability, the result of an artfulness that attempts to achieve a state of thoughtlessness, somewhere adjacent to zen but reflecting absolute brutality and decimation.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. For Artsy, Matthew Thurber provides the most Thurber-esque possible list of ten cartoonists every art lover should know.

[Keren] Katz’s work, like that of Matthew Barney or Mika Rottenberg, has its own logic. Her storytelling voice seems to link the divine nonsense of authors like Daniel Pinkwater, William Steig, or Edward Gorey with surrealist writers like Leonora Carrington. Her comics are Truly Weird, the highest compliment I can give. With drawings executed in confident colored pencil, her figures stretch, bend, and topple in a manner reminiscent of contemporary choreography. (Indeed, Katz studied dance and has mentioned Pina Bausch as an influence.)

The Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast returns with all four hosts (Tucker Stone, Joe McCulloch, Chris Mautner, and Matt Seneca) discussing Kevin Huizenga's Ganges.

In comics form, Anders Nilsen reviews Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

—Interviews & Profiles. Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes interview Gary Panter about his new Milton adaptation, Songy of Paradise.

I haven’t read Milton or Milton criticism, but this seems easy to follow.

Yeah, it’s different from my more formal, harder-to-read books. The story here is actually very simple. Satan says, “Hey, be my pal,” and Jesus says, “Noooo, you’re Satan.” And that happens over and over and over again throughout the whole story. Satan goes, like, “Hey, I’ll tempt you with food!,” and Jesus goes, “No, I’m not hungry.” “What about money?” “I don’t need your money!” That’s the nature of the Milton text.

The most recent guest on Process Party is Dustin Harbin and the most recent guest on Virtual Memories is Graham Chaffee.