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Today on the site, Greg Hunter checks in with Gilbert Hernandez about his many recent and upcoming books.

You know, if there were other books like Blubber coming from other people, I’d probably just do a few issues and then back off. But since nobody’s going to go where I’m going there, I’ll keep doing it for a while.

I don’t know. I just know that I have to separate it, because it’s a different audience. There’s a large audience for comics, but I’ve discovered there’s just groups of people who like different things. They like their comics to be certain things. If I go too far in Love and Rockets with fantasy, or crazy violence-type stories, people will be asking, ‘When are you going to stop doing that? [I want] Palomar. When are you doing to do this?’ They always want me to do what I’m not doing.

But—that’s not entirely crazy. I can see where they’re coming from. ‘I read Palomar stories and felt really connected to the characters. This other stuff is something else.’ And since all those something-else’s are different aspects of my personality, I have to find different places for them. You’ll notice the sex in Garden of Flesh is different from the sex in Blubber, say. ... Yet it’s still sex, and most people see it as the same thing, but of course, it isn’t.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Other than Brigid Alverson's always-excellent news roundups and infrequent features, Robot 6 hasn't really been Robot 6 for some time now, but it's still sad that it's now officially over entirely. Tom Spurgeon has a bit of commentary. The slow atrophy of the intelligent comics internet continues.

I have no idea what this means for comics in general. I would assume this is a choice by CBR's new owners to focus more on broader, more popular content to try and make the site maximally profitable.

Faith Erin Hicks writes about emotion and pacing in comics.

I consider [Naoki] Urasawa especially to be a master of emotion and pacing. When I first started reading his comics, it was like light struck my brain; finally I saw what I’d been trying to do for years right there on the comic page in front of me! I like the way he lays out his emotional scenes a lot. Here’s an example (read right to left):

Urasawa uses repeating panels and decompression to draw out the emotions of a scene. In this single page there isn’t a lot of movement. It’s literally just two characters staring at each other, but the tension rises going from panel 1 to panel five. Gesicht (the man)’s expression doesn’t change between panels two and five, but we literally feel his anger rising off-panel, concluding in the close up in panel 5.

—News. The Boston Globe writes about the Center for Cartoon Studies and its outreach to a local veterans hospital.

Cartoon students and faculty have been working with veterans to tell their stories — some harrowing, others heartwarming — in comic-book form.

The resulting comics are a far cry from the Archie and Superman comics an earlier generation of GIs kept under their cots. The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) has just released the first product of this unique collaboration: a 48-page comic book called “When I Returned,” a wide-ranging collection of tales adapted in illustrated form from the lives of New England veterans, from one World War II survivor’s experience in a German P.O.W. camp to a Vietnam veteran coping with post-traumatic stress disorder through his art.

—Interviews. Paul Gravett interviews the Dutch cartoonist and Bosch biographer Marcel Ruijters.

The information about [Bosch's] person is quite limited. Too much has been lost - if it had been recorded at all. As a result, a lot of nonsense has been written about Bosch, so it takes some time before you know how to weed out the bad books. And one has to learn a lot about the time in which he lived. For instance: yes, there are references to alchemy in his work, but the church was not against alchemy, so that rules out the popular misconception that he was some kind of heretic, which determines what kind of story you are going to write. On top of that, getting your historical facts straight is one thing, creating a meaningful story out of it, with believable characters, is something else!

Scoop talks to Columbia University's comics librarian, Karen Green.

So, yes, I was given the go and I began with award winners. I found lists of every Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award winning title, and I bought all of them and I had to decide how and what to buy, given that I only started with $4,000. I was nervous about justifying my purchases. I worried that any suspect title would bring the whole project crashing. After I bought all of those books, I started looking at what creators kept reappearing, and then I bought their entire corpus. I started reading blogs like The Beat and The Comics Reporter, and going to cons and festivals, and showing up at book launches, and going to publisher events. I was meeting everyone I could and asking them their advice. Most of them didn't have any experience with academic libraries, so I got a lot of public library advice, which was frustrating. But I kept building. Now, I started in the summer of 2005, and then in the spring semester of 2007, our Heyman Center for the Humanities hired Art Spiegelman to teach a comics course, and I was his librarian. I asked him for a list of the essential titles for an academic comics collection, and he sent me a few dozen. So I bought those, too.

—Misc. The New York Review of Books has posted a selection of Glen Baxter cartoons.

Here's a preview for the upcoming HBO documentary on last year's Charlie Hebdo attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCl68Lz-uD4

Today on the site, Keith Silva reviews Enough Astronaut Blood To Last The Wintermakes by Derek Van Gieson.

Enough Astronaut Blood To Last The Wintermakes for a strange bit of business. First, it’s an odds-and-sods assortment of illustration, microfiction, and photography chronicling Derek Van Gieson’s salad days in New York City. Second, who in the hell is Van Gieson? And last, how does a little known artist rate the sort of pseudo-retrospective reserved for more long-lived, let alone well-known, artists?

Let’s take the second part first.

Now relocated to his home state of Minnesota, Van Gieson has previously published only one title: Eel Mansions. Originally released as a series of six minicomics (Uncivilized Books, starting in 2012, collected in 2015), Eel Mansionsfollows an ex-military, ex-Satanist, ex-children’s-variety-show auteur named Armistead Fowler and a put-upon indie cartoonist named Janet Planet, as each navigates their own self-made hells. The series also includes seemingly non-sequitur strips like “The Negative Orphans”, “The Record Store Guys”, and Janet’s own “Milk City Comics”. To call Eel Mansions eccentric or eclectic leaves out both its charm and its downright weirdness. Think A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron if Daniel Clowes made references to ’80s synth rock and baroque Brit pop and added more dancing. As a cartoonist, Van Gieson is singular to a fault, an artist who has never met a page he has not wanted to dribble, slather, and soak in ink. His chops as a writer rest in a narrow band of offbeat humor, record-shop bravado, and self-awareness that, at times, gives a reader the sense it’s all a put-on, a rock-and-roll swindle.

Elsewhere:

This is a very nice piece about a collaboration between The Center for Cartoon Studies and the White River Junction VA Medical Center.

Vice-Presidential candidate Mike Pence was once a cartoonist! 

And lastly, an ode to Enid Coleslaw's style.

Chris Mautner writes about Lynda Barry's new collection, The Greatest of Marlys.

If you were asking me (and I’m just going to assume that you already did, very quietly, to yourself just now) what the essential quality is for any worthwhile “young adult” author, I would say it’s first and foremost honesty. The ability to accurately convey what it’s like to be 7 or 12 or 15 without delving into sentimentality or cliche is a tougher skill than one might suppose, given by the plethora of bathetic or worse stories lining bookstore shelves these days.  

It would be reductive of me to put Lynda Barry in the YA camp – her work routinely transcends such narrow genre specifications – but she meets that standard easily. Few cartoonists are able to detail the various joys and bitter hurts that line the path to adulthood as well as she can, often in a voice that might not sound like our own, but certainly resembles someone you know or once knew.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. RIYL checks in with married couple (and first-time professional collaborators) Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden.

Comics Alternative talks to Leela Corman.

—Commentary. Laura Andrea Garzón Garavito writes about what she calls the "new wave" of comics in Latin America.

Gary Groth, editor of Fantagraphics, publisher and critic, said in a conference held in Bogotá last year, he felt Colombia’s panorama looked pretty similar to the one he had seen in the United States in the 80’s, which was a time for alternate exploration of both markets and formats. That means thinking comics through various lenses, thinking audiences can be broader than imagined, not only kids or old-time series followers, but a whole spectrum of different ages, backgrounds, genders, and so on. In this scenario, underground comix hadn’t even seen Maus yet! Just like it happened here!

—Misc. New work by Dan O'Neill!

Today on the site we have cartoonist J.R. Williams interviewing his old pal Peter Bagge about the new Complete Neat Stuff collection.  It's a treat to read these guys chatting about Bagge's early NYC days and the 1980s in Seattle.

You attended SVA for only three terms.  What did you come away with from your experiences there?  What sorts of things influenced your decision to drop out?

I dropped out mainly because I ran out of money. I needed a job — a FULL TIME job — to get by. But I didn’t miss the place, either. SVA made me take a lot of courses in subjects like painting, sculpture and photography, which mainly taught me that I didn’t want to be a painter, sculptor or photographer. Not that the teachers were all that inspiring. Most of them showed up late, hungover and eager to hit on their students. I had nothing but contempt for them. And the then huge sway of abstract and conceptual art dominated the school at the time, which was a great way for blowhards with no skills to make the rest of us feel like rubes. SVA — and the New York “fine art” world in general — was a total scam back then.

Once your decision to become a cartoonist had been made, how did you proceed, at first?  You said you didn’t really know (or socialize with) any other cartoonists at that point in time, and it seems that a few years would pass before you began to make connections with other like-minded artists.

Well, I started reading underground comics (especially R. Crumb’s) in earnest while at SVA, and decided “THIS is what I want to do.” But by then I was out of school and working day jobs. So I drew comics in my spare time, using tools like a crow-quill pen that I had no instruction in using, and, well…winging it. I drew a LOT, though. Obsessively, and naturally got better as a result, though I had a huge learning curve ahead of me. Comics are hard! Sure, “anyone” can make a comic strip (as many drunken accountants and dentists have informed me through the years), but to make a GOOD comic? I’d say dentistry is easier!

Annnnd elsewhere:

All humans should either run to a newsstand or keep checking Frieze.com, because Gary Panter has contributed a masterpiece of a 7-page comic using an entirely new coloring method that I'm not at liberty to disclose. Look closely at the comic and watch the patterning and the washes and you'll see something that, as far as I know, has never been done in comics. Also, it's an extremely funny and insightful strip drawn straight out, no penciling.

It's late August, people. That's it for now!

Joe McCulloch is here with his usual guide to the Week in Comics!, looking at all the best-sounding comics new to stores. And because it's a relatively quiet week at the stores, he's kindly offered a bonus short essay on The Crusaders.

I dunno.

There's a part of me that thinks "if your comic doesn't have a cover like this, you should just go home." I mean, holy crap - what's even happening?! I can't really describe the physics, or even the spatial relationships here, let alone the completely jarring and horrific juxtapositions of digital textures, but the fucking CHAOS of this image is fantastic. I want to see what's inside even before I notice that old-fashioned box in the upper left corner, and I realize Chick Publications is at it again.

Meanwhile elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent Inkstuds features Kevin Czap.

—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough reviews Tom Gauld's Mooncop and Lisa Hanawalt's Hot Dog Taste Test.

Her first book, a collection of assorted short stories and other ephemera titled My Dirty Dumb Eyes, was not quite the Full Hanawalt experience that I had hoped for. It was still really out there and funny, to be sure, but it felt a little safer and a little more measured & restrained. That's understandable, given that many of those pieces were assignments, rather than directly personal work. I was worried that her new book, Hot Dog Taste Test, might be similarly muted in content. Instead, despite the fact that most of it is a collection of work published in a food magazine, I found much of it to be not only Hanawalt's sensibilities fully unleashed, but also to be remarkably personal and even poignant at times.

At Best American Poetry, Laura Orem considers the "naked Trump" statues in relation to other political caricatures.

I've been very interested in the debate about the Donald Trump statues. Some find them offensive as fat-shaming, transphobic, or simply in bad taste. Others find them hilariously apt. I collected these 2-D caricatures from history because I wanted to pin down what it is about the DT statues that causes such a strong reaction, as opposed to other unflattering caricatures of him that are all over the media.

—Misc. The New Yorker published a new strip by Art Spiegelman, as well as a short selection of strips by other cartoonists that he considers one-page graphic novels.

Steven Heller looks at Trump.

The Comics Studies Society plans to start publishing Inks again next year, and it looks to have a very strong lineup of talent.

Hi there, today we have Annie Mok with a review of Lynda Barry's The Greatest of Marlys

Marlys continues D+Q’s reprint series of Barry’s entire output. The original edition, a floppy paperback from Sasquatch Books, gets an aesthetic update as well as a new comics introduction from Barry. The yellow brick of a best-of feels like a textbook, and thanks to the immersive nature of Barry’s comics, a reader can get lost for days in these semi-self-contained strips, picking up a few at a time at leisure.

The semi-autobiographical stories continues Barry’s juxtapositions of sweetness and horror in the lives of young people, but this group of strips lets a little more light in than usual (as seen in works like The Freddie Stories and Cruddy). One strip, “Who Are the Dogs?” goes down the list of dogs in Marlys’ neighborhood, each with wild, Muppet-y eyes.

Bleaker elements come through subtly, due to the child protagonists’ take on the situations. A strip called “Marlys’ Guide to Queers” ends with Marlys narrating, “If you see my Uncle John and Bill, please say I miss them and come back soon.” (My heart!)

Elsewhere:

Pam Butler takes a look at some rare Krazy Kat-related images and films.

Paul Gravett interviews Chinese cartoonist/illustrator Zao Dao.

Alex Dueben interviews Trina Robbins.

Frank Santoro's  latest benefit auction for the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency is a treasure box of Hernandez brothers artwork and ephemera.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter's latest episode of Comic Book Decalogue puts the questions to MariNaomi.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—The nominees for this year's Ignatz Awards have been announced. (One of the nominated comics is one originally published on this site, the Cartoonist's Diary contributed by Rina Ayuyang. Congratulations, Rina!)

—Mike Baehr profiles Leslie Stein for Bandcamp.

Stein has also been soliciting suggestions on Facebook for abstract paintings, and songs to interpret. “It’s such a fun exercise for me, and seems to make other people happy too. And at the same time, I’m learning about different music and communicating with people about something we love. I think I am also trying to have fun, and obviously my work is incredibly emotional, so those blend the joy and the pain.” For Stein, her work, whether abstract or narrative, is increasingly about emotional connection: “I’ve gotten some mail from strangers that thank me for sharing [my experiences], and then they share with me. A couple have made me cry. So lately, more than ever, there’s also been a desire to help people by putting out honest and caring work.”

—The Kansas City Star profiles Joshua Cotter.

“I don’t like to spoon-feed the reader,” says Cotter, who appears as a featured guest at this weekend’s Kansas City Comic Con. “Anything I read or watch that appeals to me the most is the work that makes the reader meet the author or director halfway. The reason I like (Stanley) Kubrick, for example, is he doesn’t explain everything. He doesn’t say, ‘This is happening. Now this is happening.’ ‘Nod Away’ draws the reader into the world and makes them become a part of it.”

—The latest guest on Inkstuds is Lawrence "Rawdog" Hubbard of Real Deal fame.

—Noel Murray writes about Peter Bagge and Neat Stuff.

For Bagge, the real turning point for him with Neat Stuff was the ninth issue, which was taken up entirely by one 30-page piece, “Hippy House”—an early Buddy Bradley adventure in which he starts gravitating away from his high school friends and hanging out with a local weirdo who likes the same kind of ’60s rock that Buddy does. In the story, Buddy is both completely obnoxious and painfully relatable. He represents everyone’s worst teenage self, at once awkward and cocksure, but he’s also striving throughout to figure out who he wants to be when his school years end. “I was revealing certain things about myself in that story that I was a bit self-conscious of,” Bagge admitted.

("Hippy House" is one of the greatest comic-book stories ever created.)

—Paul Gravett interviews the Chinese cartoonist Zao Dao.

Today on the site,Alex Dueben continues his look at Wimmens Comix with an interview with Nancy Burton.

As a younger person I have only a vague sense of the paper. Was The East Village Other political? Was it psychedelic?

The East Village Other had just started up and was very avant-guard and freethinking. In fact one of their top contributors later wrote a book exposing mind control. You might say people were thinking out of the box. Trina Robbins later acknowledged me as the first female underground cartoonist in New York, based on that work for The East Village Other.

Your strip was called “Gentle’s Tripout” or “Gentle’s Trip Out”? I’ve come across both.

Tripout is one word. 

Why was that the title?

Remember the slogan “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out?” “Tripout” is a play on “Drop out”

Did you sign the first strip “Panzika”? Or did that come later?

As I can best remember, I signed Gentle’s Tripout “Panzika” because that was my poet husband’s last name. “Hurricane Nancy” came later.

What was the first “Gentle’s Tripout” that you brought to EVO?

I don’t have an archive of The Gentle’s Tripout strip but I brought the first one I did to East Village Other as soon as it was done cause I thought it was a great idea. My belief at the time was Christ was gentle–that’s reason for the name–and my character was a gentle alien. In my way I was trying to say, have adventures and find you own truth.

Were you a big reader of comics then? Or as a kid?

I did read comics when I was young but my favorite images were pictures of cave paintings and Egyptian wall writings. The Sunday comics were great and I did love Little Lulu!

Elsewhere:

Columbus College of Art & Design is the latest art school to offer a comics program, which is especially good since it's in comics hub Columbus, Ohio.

Michael Dooley covers Trina Robbins' Dope comic reissue.

And happy anniversary to Floating World Comics.

Today on the site, we have a piece by Robert Elder on the many comic book cameos of Ernest Hemingway.

Celebrity cameos aren’t new to comic books. Both Stephen Colbert and President Obama appeared alongside Spider-Man, and Eminem got a two-issues series with the Punisher. Orson Welles helped Superman foil a Martian invasion and John F. Kennedy helped the Man of Steel keep his secret identity.

While working on Hidden Hemingway, my book about the writer's hometown archives, I fell into a deep rabbit hole: Ernest Hemingway appearances in comics. I found him battling fascists alongside Wolverine, playing cards with Harlan Ellison and guiding souls through purgatory in The Life After.

He’s appeared alongside Captain Marvel, Cerebus, Donald Duck, Lobo—even a Jazz Age Creeper. Hemingway casts a long shadow in literature, which extends into comic books. It’s really only in comics, however, where the Nobel Prize-winner gets treated with equal parts reverence, curiosity and parody.

But as author Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried) has pointed it, there is no one Ernest Hemingway. In fact, comic books provide a more nuanced view of Hemingway than other forms of pop culture, like the movie Midnight in Paris.

In the 40-plus appearances I found across five languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian), Hemingway is often the hyper-masculine legend of Papa: bearded, boozed-up and ready to throw a punch. Just as often, comic book creators see past the bravado, to the sensitive artist looking for validation.

Here, in part one of a multi-part series: we explore Hemingway homages, appearances and doppelgangers in comics, from the divine to the ridiculous.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—The Daniel Clowes auction for Frank Santoro's comics school is ending today.

—Comics Creator News has a long, compelling, and outspoken interview with Trevor Von Eeden.

Unfortunately, the folks at DC Comics chose to play a very mean-spirited and ill-advised “prank” on me, shortly after I’d started drawing the series—one with tremendous repercussions on my life and career. Newbie editor Alan Gold (who took over the editorial chores starting with issue #2) and I were summoned to a meeting to discuss the book (I forget whose office it was)—where there was only one chair available, for only one of us to sit. I refused three invitations to sit down, since there was no way I was going to sit, and have my editor stand around like an uninvited guest in a meeting that concerned us both. Alan then decided to break the ice, and after my third refusal, moved to sit in the chair himself. It collapsed completely to the floor, where he was left sitting flat on his ass, with all four legs of the chair splayed out around him. After a pause of about half a second, he laughed uproariously. However, I didn’t find that joke intended to be played out at my expense the least bit funny—as I said, I took my job very seriously—nor did I find funny the fact that the meeting mysteriously evaporated after that, with no explanation nor apology given about the strangely collapsing chair, and without a single thing about THRILLER being discussed.

—And Ruben Bolling was a guest on the RIYL podcast.

Today on the site, Joe McCulloch brings us the news of the comics world release schedule.

Elsewhere:

I'm actually "on vacation" this week, but I forgot to tell Tim and I have wi-fi and the kid's asleep, so I'll be here today and Thursday, just for you!

Spend your money here: There is a new issue of the great and long-running zine Cometbus, and it's all dedicated to comics in New York! Get it here.

Fun news: Ben Katchor will be on tour this fall for the very handsome reissue of his ground breaking (and still completely wonderful) Cheap Novelties.

Good times: There's no one I'd rather hear from about Suicide Squad (actually the only person I want to hear from) than our friend Tucker Stone.

Lose a week here: The vast mini-comic online archive Poopsheet Foundation is now live and awesome.

Gordon Bailey, one of the founders of The Nostalgia Journal (the fanzine that eventually became The Comics Journal), recently passed away.

Gordon Francis Bailey Jr., a contributor to early comics fandom in north Texas, passed away July 13 after a brief illness, according to his sister, Katherine Bailey. Gordon Bailey was part of The Syndicate — himself, Larry Herndon, Joe Bob Williams, and later Mark Lamberti — a group that created The Nostalgia Journal in the summer of 1974. TNJ ran for 26 issues before it was acquired by Gary Groth and Michael Catron of Fantagraphics and became, first, The New Nostalgia Journal and then The Comics Journal. Bailey helped organize early conventions in north Texas and Oklahoma, and wrote about some of them in Trek in Texas — The 1970s Star Trek Conventions, one of his 18 self-published books.

Bailey was born July 21, 1956, lived most of his life in Fort Worth, Texas, and died a few days shy of his 60th birthday at Harris Medical Center in Fort Worth, the same hospital where he was born. He graduated from Eastern Hills High School in Fort Worth and attended North Texas State for a year.

He fell in love with journalism in the ninth grade and though not eligible to take the journalism course, he sat in on the classes anyway and was appointed editor of his high school paper while still a junior. His first magazine was The BiWeekly Bomb — which was eventually banned by the high school administration. He collected comics, Mad magazines, and movie memorabilia throughout high school. Those loves persisted throughout his life. At 17 he published his first fanzine, Comic Fantasy Quarterly.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—In comics form, Ben Juers writes about abstract comics and Sasaki Maki.

For abstract comics to be effective, they have to escape both the chronic status anxiety afflicting their medium, and the temptation to guide the reader's eye too methodically and mathematically.

—As the much-needed compendium Meat Cake Bible sees release, Sean T. Collins interviews the great Dame Darcy.

Because I was raised on a ranch in Idaho and I was the oldest with only younger brothers I was naturally outdoorsy; I still am, with all my sailing adventures. I didn’t want to be considered prissy, and I did nutso things like ride horses through thunderstorms bareback, kicking the horses to run and jump over barbed-wire fences. But I also wanted to wear Victorian lace dresses all the time and have tea parties with my dolls. I was vehement about being girly in a family where I felt like I had to fight against everyone trying to negate and marginalize the fact I was a girl.

So to escape and rebel, I put on my lacy white petticoat, my lipstick, and my glitter heels and ran to the faggiest place anyone could go, a fine art school in San Francisco, when I got a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. Growing up that way, how did I have the chance to become anything else than the loud horrible passionate hardcore feminist that I am today? Love it or leave it, Patriarchy. It’s how I be.

—For The New Yorker, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan writes about the Berlin-based Indian cartoonist Sarnath Banerjee.

Banerjee’s success as a graphic novelist is, itself, a product of forces that have taken hold in the New India. As economic growth has fostered a new middle-class Anglophone reading public, interest in genre fiction has exploded. Indian readers of English can today find homegrown works of chick lit, techie lit, detective fiction, even what the scholar E. Dawson Varughese has called “crick lit”—fiction about cricket. India has long had a small but vibrant tradition of comic-book publishing, exemplified by the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, but today most major and independent Indian presses publish in the genre, while others are entirely dedicated to the graphic form. And, where popular titles of the past tended to depict Indian gods, fables, and folklore, today’s artists are interested in exploring the experience and contradictions of living in India now. When Banerjee’s first book, “Corridor,” about the patrons of a secondhand bookstall in Delhi, was published by Penguin Books India, in 2004, it was heralded as the country’s first graphic novel. In fact, that distinction belongs to Orijit Sen’s 1994 book “The River of Stories,” which chronicled the controversial construction of dams on the Narmada River. But, while Sen’s book was published with the help of an environmental-action group and had a limited release, Banerjee’s books, published by Penguin and HarperCollins India, have given momentum to a new generation of Indian graphic novelists.

Today on the site:

Shaennon Garrity takes a deep dive into Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck.

Homestuck was the fourth comic Hussie serialized on his website, MS Paint Adventures. Previous comics were scripted on the fly by taking suggestions from readers, and the early installments of Homestuck carry over the audience-participation element. But by this point Hussie’s fanbase was too big for the interactive element to remain workable, and it was mostly abandoned within the first year. Homestuck opens with a PC-game prompt asking you to enter a name for the protagonist, but you don’t actually get to choose one. He’s John.

Old-school video games form the central aesthetic, from the pixilated art to the game-based ways the characters interact with their world. For example, John and his friends have to handle items by turning them into “captchalogue cards” and placing them in an inventory. This gets confusing when they start playing a video game with its own rules within their already video-game-based world.

In the opening pages, Hussie plugs merchandise for his previous MS Paint comic, Problem Sleuth. I respect the hell out of that.

Hussie and I share a love of bad movies in general and the work of Nicolas Cage in particular. I didn’t know this when I mentioned Con Air in my own comic, and now all the nerds think I was making a Homestuckreference. Nic Cage exists beyond our petty mortal webcomics world, people.

“You pull up to your COMPUTER. This is where you spend most of your time.” John spends the next 50 pages IMing his online friends while making half-assed efforts to leave his room and check the mailbox. The narration isn’t kidding around here.

Lauren Weinstein's impossibly great and moving comic, Perfect Maine Vacation, gets a new home at Mutha. Lauren is here again showing how her ink gestures can equally serve realism and fantasy -- and her prose voice is as distinctive as her drawing. I also like the economy of it. Every panel moves us deeper into her story space -- there are no beats that ask that beg the "are you watching?" question, which is pretty common right now. It's a wonder.

Joshua Cotter is profiled over here.

Jules Feiffer's latest crime comic gets loves from the NY Times. I couldn't make sense of the last one, but I love the idea of this series. Actually, that's my reaction to like 90% of comics right now. It's definitely my problem, but then there are comics like Lauren's, or Anya Davidson's hilarious stroll through any-city USA via SF tropes, Gloom Planet. Anya is, under the disguise of rock/witchcraft/SF, becoming one of our keenest and funniest observers of contemporary life. So maybe it's all OK. I just can't READ everything anymore. That's what's so weird.

Today on the site:

Paul Tumey looks at cartoonist Gene Ahern's cartoon coverage of the 1928 political conventions.

You might have missed this. Gene Ahern, a popular newspaper cartoonist covered the tense, rancorous presidential nominations by sending Major Hoople, his Our Boarding House comic strip character, to the Republican and Democratic national conventions. It’s understandable if you didn’t happen to catch Ahern’s coverage in the funny pages. After all, it happened in 1928. That was a long time ago, in terms of American politics.  But the presidential race of 2016 is similar to that long ago race between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. According to Edgar E. Robinson’s The Presidential Vote 1896-1932, the 1928 presidential race was one in which “each candidate faced serious discontent within his party membership, and neither had the wholehearted support of the party organization.” Sound familiar? Beyond this similarity, the ensuing years have not diminished the amusement one can find in reading these cartoons and columns devoted to puncturing the hot air balloons of national politics.

Elsewhere:

Some nice Love and Rockets affection over at The Guardian. 

Is it a sign of the times that one of our 10 greatest living cartoonists is on Patreon? Money is a very personal thing, and we have no way of knowing of what Chester Brown needs and doesn't. Lord knows he has a supportive long term publisher. But, as he explains, royalties are up and down, and why not this rather than teaching or another "day job". Certainly if there's one artist to support in this world, it's Chester Brown.

Here's an oral history of Dark Horse on the occasion of the company's 30th year.

Bill Boichel reviews the best-ever book about George Herriman over at Comics Workbook.

And Frank Santoro has a nice auction of unusual Dan Clowes items going on eBay now for the benefit of the aforementioned Comics Workbook.

Today on the site Annie Mok talks to Maré Odomo.

MOK: As we talked about in our conversation in Comics Workbook #9, the intimacy in your work enacts boundaries. (Cartoonist Laura Knetzger blurbed that the comics are “Searching and sincere, yet guarded.”) In your series Internet Comics, the narrator of that work says “don’t @ me,” and here in this book, the narrator says, “I don’t care right now” and “If I see you, I will walk away.” Who are these narrators? Are they wholly you or a combination of fictionalized elements?

ODOMO: All of the narrators are me. Or versions of myself. They could be anybody but they’re actually me. They’re not anyone else.  Those pages are more about the person or people I’m addressing. In Internet Comics, I’m talking about like… having privacy. Or like agency. Like, treat me like a person instead of someone who makes memes for you to reblog. I’m not here for anyone to be like “oh this comic is literally about me” because it’s not. It’s about me, because who else is going to make comics about people like me?

“I don’t care right now” is… I don’t know, exactly what it sounds like. I didn’t really care about that page, I just knew I wanted to say those words. That page is kind of like “I can do whatever I want and I choose to do this.”

The “If I see you” page is about burned bridges and like all the people that screw you over or whatever and try to be friends or forget it ever happened. I’m not going to forget, I’m not going to fight you about it, but I’m not going to be your friend either.

Elsewhere:

Congrats to pal Dash Shaw, whose film My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is debuting at the New York Film Festival this year.

Leslie Stein is interviewed about her excellent new book, Time Clock, on Chimera Obscura.

And Emma Rios and Brandon Graham are interviewed over at the Paris Review.

Today on the site, Joe brings the good news.

Elsewhere:

The members of the Comics Workbook Roller Derby team each drew a page from a Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets story, with very fun results. As noted, Hernandez's compositions are so solid that nearly any kind of visual style can be layered on top.

Ina really excellent piece of comics reporting, Sarah Glidden trails independent party candidate Jill Stein for The Nib.

People, John Pham's truly astonishing Epoxy Cartoon Magazine is now available on his web site. Highest possible recommendation here.

Hey, Margaret Atwood went to Comic-Con.

Garry Trudeau talks about his new book, "Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump."

Today on the site:

Alex Dueben talks to Zack Davisson about translation and Kitaro.

For people who don’t know, who is Kitaro?

Zack Davisson:  Kitaro is a yokai—the last survivor of the Ghost Tribe of underground dwelling monsters. He is nearly indestructible, and has a wide range of powers and objects like his hair which can be fired in in a needle attack, and his powerful chan-chanko vest sewn from the hair of his ancestors.  He’s got magic sandals, a snake that lives in his stomach, and a remote-control hand.

Even though he is a yokai himself, Kitaro uses his powers to battle against bad yokai that threaten humanity—think of him as a Japanese Hellboy, only 1,000 times weirder.

I like that description of him as a Japanese Hellboy, which I think is very apt, though Kitaro skews a younger. Could you talk a little about what the yokai are? I know that you’ve studied this and written a lot about the topic.

That’s a deeply complicated question that has been the subject of several books! There’s not a single definition of yokai, any more than there is of “monster” or “spirit.” Everyone will have their own definition. For me, I go by the Edo period usage of the word, which is how Mizuki tended to use it; a personification of supernatural energy. There is an old belief in Japan that the world is infused with latent magical energy, and this energy occasionally manifests into physical form. This yokai energy can take almost any shape imaginable, visible and invisible. There are hundreds of thousands of different kinds. All of the mystery spots of the world, all of the beasties and boggarts, are all this same energy given form—yokai.

And we've added Michael Bartalos' childhood remembrance of Jack Davis to the late artist's tribute post.

And elsewhere:

Todd Klein remembers pioneering DC Comics letterer Gaspar Saladino in an excellent post about his life and work.

Ilan Manouach's comics-for-the-blind project is covered at Hyperallergic.

Paul Gravett interviews Alexander Tucker on the occasion of his new Breakdown Press book.

In a fascinating essay, Benjamin Schwartz describes teaching visual narrative to medical students.

And NPR profiles the late Kim Yale, co-creator of the Suicide Squad comic book.

Ah, it's been too long since we've had a Ken Parille column! But he's here today with a piece perfect for the dog days, "Comics Criticism: Seven Hot Takes for Summer 2016".

It was once the bane of the comics connoisseur: the “Comics Have Finally Grown Up” article. Enlightened readers know that for decades, if not centuries, cartoonists around the world have been creating sophisticated art for smart folks, young and old. Thankfully, that article, of which there have been too many for too long, has fallen by the wayside. But an equally specious think-piece is emerging to fill the vacuum: the “Comics Can’t Grow Up Unless It Promotes the Kinds of Things I Like” essay. Of course, the writer never puts it quite that directly.

In a popular subgenre of the “Comics Can’t Grow Up Unless...” piece, the writer argues that the “medium” cannot mature or progress unless it values and supports children’s and YA graphic novels. The majority of comics I read are for children and teenagers, but I don’t expect, or require, you to share my enthusiasm for Little Dot, Our Love Story, Bunny, Wonder Book of Rubber, Fast Willie Jackson, or Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (I also teach Children’s Literature for a living). It’s weird to say that “comics” won’t be fully grown until “it” embraces books for people who are not fully grown. Would anyone say the novel can’t mature unless it embraces paranormal teen fiction (which I’ve also taught)? No. Why do (some) comics critics say such weird things about comics?

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Columbus Alive profiles Caitlin McGurk.

Caitlin McGurk was destined to work in the comics industry. There were telltale signs during her childhood on Long Island. She remembers obsessively collecting and organizing comic book cards and admiring the pictures in the “Stations of the Cross” while waiting in the communion line at her Catholic church.

—Daniel Barron interviews MariNaomi.

Was there any point in writing your books where you felt like the filter needed to be turned on, or that you had to tread lightly?
Omigod, toootally. It’s so stupid. For example, I was telling a story about my boyfriend seeing me after hours. We were fooling around and I got my period. My parents were coming down the stairs and I shoved my boyfriend in the closet and he was covered in my blood. When I wrote it at the time I thought, “Well, my parents should never see this.” Because they didn’t know that I would sneak guys in. Also, “No one must ever see this because it’s so embarassing.” The whole time I was drawing I felt so mortified. And now I think back, “That was one of the best stories that I have! Why was I so embarassed by it?” I was a kid. Who cares?

—Caitlin McCabe at the CBLDF writes about Jack Davis.

His fostered talent at EC Comics, though, would land him in hot water with child psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham and within the pages of his infamous 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent—the book that began a decades long crusade against comics and ultimately the near destruction of the industry.

Among sixteen pages of reproduced illustrations from various comic books were two panels from Jack Davis’ The Haunt of Fear story “Foul Play!” The aptly named story recounts the tale of a dishonest baseball player who gets his comeuppance when his teammates decide to play baseball with his dismembered remains in the dead of night.

Andrew Farago, who knew the beloved cartoonist for almost a decade, has written our obituary for Richard Thompson.

With encouragement from editor and collaborator Gene Weingarten, Thompson found an ideal showcase for his own writing in the form of Richard’s Poor Almanac, a weekly Sunday panel featured in The Washington Post. The sprawling, madcap Almanac presented “misinformation in handy cartoon form” on subjects ranging from traditional almanac fodder like weather phenomena and local fauna to entertainment and political news. “The ideal cartoon [for the Almanac] was made up off the top of my head with no research, with only its own comic logic holding it together,” noted the artist in The Art of Richard Thompson.

The most popular installment of Richard’s Poor Almanac, however, was carefully researched by Thompson. Upon learning that George W. Bush had opted not to invite an official poet to his inauguration ceremony in January 2001, Thompson composed his own poem from Bush malapropisms, and assembled them into a free-form verse entitled “Make the Pie Higher”. The cartoon was widely circulated online over the next year, was set to music by multiple composers, and earned its own entry on the fact-checking website Snopes.com.

At the end of his story, we have also included a few more tributes to Thompson, from Mo Willems, Universal Uclick editor Shena Wolf, and the Pixar director Pete Docter, who granted permission for us to reprint a few comic strips Thompson drew during the development of the film Inside Out.

As a fan of Cul de Sac, I was in awe of Richard’s ability to develop
characters that were so wonderfully unique, specific and truthful. Alice Otterloop specifically seemed very close to the spirit of what we were after for Joy, so he seemed like he’d have a lot to offer. Rather than doing design work, I asked Richard to draw up some comic strips. My hope was this would help him focus on character attitude and acting, and not worry about what the characters looked like. This turned out to work well. [...]

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Sara Lautman is profiled on A Case for Pencils.

My natural inclination is to keep my hand moving the whole time I’m drawing, which makes the art messier. Shaggy drawing is more than fine with me. I love Edward Koren, Gahan Wilson, William Steig, George Herriman and David Sipress, all artists who draw at varying degrees of shag and movement.

—Politics. Signe Wilkerson, Ann Telnaes, and Jen Sorenson talk about drawing Hillary Clinton:

Garry Trudeau talks about depicting Donald Trump:

Jeet Heer wrote a "tweet essay" explaining Trump through Cerebus.

6. There's a long storyline where Cerebus becomes Pope. And part of how he maintains power is via polarizing.

7. Pope Cerebus does more & more extreme things, polarizing acts which lose followers but build a hard core of the faithful.

It's a day late (through no fault of his own), but Joe McCulloch is here with his usual guide to the Week in Comics!, highlighting the best-sounding comics new to stores, including new books by Dame Darcy and Jules Feiffer. He also writes a little on Queen Emereldas.

Kodansha's recent hardcover publication of Queen Emeraldas leans hard on artist Leiji Matsumoto's fame in the greater media world -- of the three pull quotes on the back cover, one is from Daft Punk, and another is from Pitchfork referring to Daft Punk -- but actually reading 400 pages' worth of these comics quickly highlights the severely martial aspect of this space opera's idea of gallantry. Emeraldas herself does star in some of these stories, but in many she functions like Sergio Corbucci's Django as the galaxy's coolest big sister to young Hiroshi, a floppy-haired Matsumoto youth with a hot-blooded desire to live free in the sea of stars.

The reason for the brief delay is that we asked Joe to review Kramers Ergot 9, and that piece went up on the site yesterday.

It must be stated up front that Kramers Ergot has made life far too easy for critics. Anthologies are often difficult to analyze, because most of them wear the pragmatic limits of their creation like flimsy invisible dust jackets. It is not uncommon, I think, for editors to surrender to chance when putting these things together; you can hook up with however many contributors you want, and coordinate as best you can with those contributors you want to pursue, and reject, in the face of plenty, those submissions you can't use, but to an extent you are at the mercy of what you are given. And indeed, there are anthologies most succinctly described as 'what was given.'

Kramers, however, has long offered a pillowy slipstream on which the featherweight may drift behind; in this group I include myself. Who could forget the technological acuity of Kramers Ergot 4 (Avodah Books, 2003): production so sharp that you were bade not only to read stories-as-stories or factor drawing-as-drawing, but to consider textural components and the play of media – and, implicitly, the character of reproduction itself in art primed for mass distribution?

And finally today, Philip Nel has joined us with another tribute to Richard Thompson, which he titles "Dancing on the Manhole Cover".

Cul de Sac is powerful stuff. In the panels of each strip, Thompson manages to capture the narrative chaos of daily life. As he told R.C. Harvey in a 2011 article, “I’ve always had a feeling that life is a series of non-sequiturs, and that we’re all untrustworthy narrators.” Nowhere is that feeling more palpable than in the scenes at Blisshaven Academy, the preschool attended by Alice, Dil, Beni, Nara, Marcus, Kevin (“Buckethead”), and, later, Sophie. In the fourth nationally syndicated Cul de Sac strip (13 September 2007), one of the students (Dill is my guess) asks “Miss Bliss, what kind of egg was Humpty Dumpty?” Storytime now derailed, the students start tossing out guesses. Nara: “A duck egg!” Marcus: “A GOOSE EGG!” Next, Alice ventures into preschool literary criticism, placing the nursery rhyme in a larger context: “I’ll bet he was the egg of that chicken who crossed the road,” she says. “’Cause they’re both thrill-seekers with dangerous hobbies.” Marcus responds, “Good point.” Changing the subject completely, Dill concludes the strip by saying, “Whew! I think I’ve learned enough for today. Miss Bliss, can I go home?” In the first week of strips, his characters already have distinct lives of their own.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—GG talks to kuš! about creating her story, "Lapse".

I work mostly digital these days. Again, it goes back to keeping things minimal. My earlier comics were done with pencil and paper but I didn’t like how after I finished a story and scanned it in, I would have all this paper to store somewhere. It also seemed like an extra step to have to scan and then have to clean up the scans when I could just draw directly on the computer. One thing I’m always trying to figure out is how to make comics more efficiently because they are already so time-consuming for me. Sometimes pen and paper is unavoidable because I’ll want a certain look or effect so I haven’t totally gotten rid of all my art supplies yet.

—This isn't comics, exactly, but Nadja Spiegelman has released a memoir about her mother, Françoise Mouly, reviewed today in the New York Times.

Nadja longed to understand her mother, and when she had achieved a measure of independence, she hit upon the idea of interviewing her. (It didn’t escape Nadja that she was following in her father’s footsteps: “Maus” was based on Art Spiegelman’s interviews of his own father.) Surprisingly, Françoise threw herself into the project with energy and candor. But candor is only the impulse to tell the truth: Truth-telling itself is rarer. Nadja sympathetically accepts the broad outlines of her mother’s narrative of her French childhood — Francoise’s brutal rejection by her own mother, Josée; the multiple infidelities of her plastic-surgeon playboy father, Paul; her admirable decision to escape her mother’s influence and begin again in New York. But she also notes some credulity-stretching inconsistencies. Here she picks up on a theme that threads through the memoir, the indeterminacy of memory. Nobody, neurological science tells us, really has a claim to the truth.

—Finally, Tim Lane has created a Patreon to help him with his latest project, a book on Steve McQueen.

I’m currently working on an interpretive biographical graphic novel about the actor, Steve McQueen. I say “interpretive,” for many reasons, but mainly because I’m using the life of Steve McQueen as a conduit to construct a picture of American culture that both shaped Steve McQueen, and was partly shaped by his influence. This book is artistically inclined - heavily influenced by works such as Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, and David Clewell’s Jack Ruby’s America. In other words, it is not a traditional biography. Rather, it is an experiment in what the potentialities are in writing about the life of a real person, and a more subjective consideration of how that person’s influence touched the life of the “biographer."

We've added a short essay by Charles Hatfield to our post of tributes to Richard Thompson.

Thompson’s passing hit me hard from two angles: a personal one, because his work had come to mean a great deal to my wife and me and because my own father has Parkinson’s; and a historical one, because Richard had come to represent, for me as for so many, the last great hope of comic strips in the newspaper funny page tradition. From my perspective, his Cul de Sac was the most refreshing newspaper strip of the past twenty years, with the richest set of loopy, endearing, maddening, beautifully cartooned characters. I consider it the last great example of the kid 'n' family domestic strip (home, school, playground, et cetera), and one of the most delightfully eccentric microcosms ever to grace the funny pages. The vein of comic strip art that includes Barnaby and Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes also includes Cul de Sac. Once I read it, I knew, I’d never look at comic strip children the same way again.

We have also published a new review by Craig Fischer, about It Is the Bad Time, a horror anthology edited by Kazimir Lee Iskander, and featuring mostly CCS-affiliated cartoonists.

In the book’s foreword, Iskander writes that he began to assemble Bad Time “after the first anthology project assigned to the students at the Center for Cartoon Studies,” and a subsequent e-mail to Iskander clarified that Bad Time wasn’t a class assignment. It was an extra, out-of-class project for students Anna Sellheim, Cooper Whittlesey, Tillie Walden, J.D. Lunt, Angela Boyle, and Iskander himself, all of whom have clearly internalized the CCS work ethic. (Emily Parrish is also a contributor, although she has not attended CCS.) These students make plenty of finished pages, in and out of class.

Bad Time focuses on horror, specifically the aim to cultivate a sense of dread in the cartoonists themselves. Again, Iskander from the book’s foreword: “My mission statement was simple—every artist involved should write a comic that would contain at least one panel that was frightening or traumatic to draw. The comic itself didn’t need to be traditionally horrific, although many would be.” And they are, although not every story is equally successful at transmitting fear and trauma from artist to reader.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Richard Thompson. We've already linked to many online tributes and remembrances, but they keep coming at a steady pace. Some particularly worth looking at include pieces by John Martz, Mike Rhode, and those gathered by Michael Cavna.

—Jack Davis. Patrick Dean has a nice memorial post about Davis at Playboy.

—Interviews & Profiles. Paul Gravett talks to Blutch.

I didn’t really choose this name, which is not so much a pseudonym as a nickname. Everybody has called me this since I was 15. It’s the name of a character from a popular comic at the time [The Blue Tunics by Lambil & Cauvin, in English from Cinebook]. My friends thought I resembled Blutch, in physique and attitude. Originally, it came from the rather puerile wish to cut yourself from your background, your parents, to be reborn as someone different. And then the nom-de-plume is a tradition in comics since the 19th century, in Europe at least, like Hergé and Moebius.

At The Beat, Zachary Clemente speaks to Jason Shiga.

I guess the big theme of the book is the meaning of life or what is it that adds value to your life and I think for most of us when we’re younger, it’s about survival of a sort. You want to make money, you want to meet somebody, you want to make friends but then you become middle aged and you have all those things. You have a stable job, you’re married, you have friends, you have a house and then you start going through some sort of existential crisis and wonder “what’s the point of it all?” That would be the theme of Demon and my answer, in case you don’t want to read the book.

Bleeding Cool talks to Howard Chaykin.

I can tell you now that 90% of the comic enthusiast out there today will only remember me for Star Wars, which had poisoned my career. Star Wars has sold countless millions and millions of copies and reprints over the years, while Flagg hasn’t; not by a long-shot. I’m not the sort of guy that does the work that comic book fans necessarily respond to, I’m just not and I understand that. Basically because when I started my career I wasn’t that good. By the time I was good, I just didn’t want to create the sort of work that would generate the sort of commercial portfolio that would be good for me. I just wasn’t interested. I had to find other avenues for my skill set, which I did, but at the time I wasn’t aware that I would be locking myself out of the mainstream.

The most recent guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is Andrea Tsurumi.

—Reviews & Criticism. Rob Clough writes about Lucy Knisley.

When I started reading her newest memoir, Something New, I knew it was about being reunited with her ex-boyfriend and their wedding. I dreaded another self-indulgent exercise. While there was some of that, I was pleasantly surprised at how homing in on an experience that was so specific, introspective and personal was so widely relatable and emotionally powerful.

Domingos Isabelinho writes about a recolored Alex Toth panel.

Why did (and does) the comics industry and comics readers accept such a thing? Because, you see, not all comics creators were born equal. There's a hierarchy that mostly goes like this: 1) the drawer; 2) the writer; 3) the editor; 4) the inker; 5) the colorist; 6) the letterer. As you can see above the header of "White Devil ... Yellow Devil!" was erased from the republished version. This happened, methinks, because it gave the writer too much of a star status (which is too much for a # 2). This means that colors can be changed, but changing some master's drawings isn't easily accepted by readers (or should I say, watchers?).

Dominic Umile writes about Joshua Cotter and psychedelic art.

Cotter darkens each corridor with a net of dashes, while the tech that engulfs the facility’s walls — frequently positioned behind his chatty scientists who turn to drugs, sex, or an iconic but mindless television series to stave off boredom — draws entirely on the analog control panels of vintage sci-fi films. There are glorious stacked decks with dials and screens and buttons and switches and worming ducts, each clashing with the more contemporary laptops and detailed tablet-type devices that appear elsewhere.

—Crowdfunding. John Kerschbaum and his family need financial help after their house was burned by a fire.

Czap Books is using a Kickstarter to fund their 2017 lineup, with books by Jessi Zabarsky, Kelly Kwang, and Liz Suburbia.

Today on the site we begin our tributes to the late Richard Thompson, with kind and eloquent words from Warren Bernard and Craig Fischer. With more to come.

And we present Jim Woodring's 2000 interview with the late Jack Davis.

WOODRING: Did you get a lot of fan mail while you were working at EC?

DAVIS: I don’t know why it is, but once your name is in print or in magazines, either people want to be a correspondent or fan, or write letters back and forth. I would get some letters, and I’d take them home and read them and maybe answer some, but if you start doing that, then you’ve got a correspondence going, and I didn’t have time to do it so it kind of petered out. But I still get letters and I appreciate them very much. I try to answer every one of them.

WOODRING: One of the reasons I was asking you about the horror strips, because there is, as you say, always sort of an element of tongue-in-cheek quality to them. Even the real scary ones kind of have a nice bouncy quality of your drawing. But I’m sure you remember Graham Ingels’ work.

DAVIS: Yeah.

WOODRING: I imagine that his horror comics were more frightening than anyone else’s?

DAVIS: I think so. It was really scary. It was kind of an old-fashioned type of telling it, like I said a ghost story. He really had that feel for it. Al Feldstein established the three characters. There was the Old Witch, and the Vault Keeper, and the Crypt Keeper. Everybody kind of had a way of drawing it. I think Johnny Craig drew the Vault Keeper. His was always clean, but to me it was never scary. It was beautifully drawn, but it was never scary. It wasn’t hairy or ugly. My stuff was ugly and not great. But Graham Ingels was an artist.

WOODRING: I used to look at his comics when I was a kid, and to me they almost looked like the product of a diseased mind or something.

DAVIS: [Laughs] Yeah. I never really got to meet him very much unless we happened to be in the office delivering work at the same time. He was a very quiet fellow. I was very quiet, too. I was pretty shy. I don’t know, all of that went out the window. [Woodring laughs.] But I think we were impressed with the people that fed us.

Elsewhere:

Our pal and valued contributor Tucker Stone (and friends) reflects on his site The Factual Opinion a decade on.

Hillary Chute went to Comic-Con and reports back for Artforum.

As if last week couldn't be any worse for comics, a Pearls Before Swine comic was pulled from newspapers. 

And our friends at Breakdown Press in London would like to tell you about the upcoming Safari Festival 2016. Dig it:

Date: Saturday, 27th of August

Time: 11am - 6pm

Venue: Protein Studios, 31 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EY

Website: safari-festival.com

Exhibiting:  .

Simon Hanselmann, Fantagraphics Books, Joan Cornella, Anna Haifisch Alexis Beauclair, Ally Russell, Anti Ghost Studio (Babak Ganjei, Rob Flowers), Becca Tobin, Bergen Street Comics Press, Breakdown Press (Joe Kessler, Antoine Cossé, Richard Short, Alexander Tucker, Zoë Taylor, JMKE), Brigid Deacon, Comic Book Slumber Party, Comics Workbook, Crumb Cabin, Decadence Comics (Lando, Stathis Tsemberlidis, Emix Regulus), Dilraj Mann, Disinfotainment (Mark Pawson), Donya Todd, Eleni Kalorkoti, Esther McManus, Evan Androutsopoulos, Eyeball Comix, Famicon Express (Leon Sadler, Stefan Sadler, Jon Chandler),Feminist Library, Gabriel Corbera, L'Institut Sérigraphique, Irkus M. Zeberio, Hope Not Hate, Jack Teagle, Jazz Dad Books, Joseph P Kelly, Krent Able, Kus!, Landfill Editions, Laura Callaghan, Lizzy Stewart, Luke Stewart, Matt Swan, Matthew Pettit, One Beat Zines, OOMK Zine, Otto Press, Retrofit Comics, Sammy Stein, Shaky Kane, Silica Burn (Will Tempest, Liam Cobb, Tom Kemp), Simon Moreton, Takayo Aikyama, Treasure Fleet, Vincent Fritz, Wai Wai Pang, Will Sweeney.

Tickets: Free Entry

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1018669398201775/

It's the end of a long week for comics. We've posted an obituary for the great Jack Davis and tributes to him are still coming in. Next week we'll have coverage of the beloved Richard Thompson.

Elsewhere, more like this:

The National Cartoonists Society remembers Jack Davis.

Remembrances of Richard Thompson by Michael Rhode and John Martz.

Cartoonist John Kerschbaum could use some help in a trying time.

And it's good to see some positive news: Drawn & Quarterly's winter releases. 

Yesterday was a terrible day for comics, as two immensely gifted and beloved artists passed away.

First came the news of the death of Richard Thompson, creator of Cul de Sac, probably one of the last truly great newspaper strips, and one begun after many people no longer believed that to be an achievable feat. Thompson was only 58 years old. We will be publishing an obituary and tributes to him soon. In the meantime, here is the notice that was run in the Washington Post, and here is the coverage from WUSA.

R.C. Harvey wrote about Thompson's work for us in 2012.

In the age of the emerging stick figure, it is refreshing—invigorating—to see actual drawing skill lauded so loudly. But Thompson’s talent doesn’t end with his drawing ability: his lines, interesting and sublime in their simplicity and complexity, merely visualize the world he has created in Cul de Sac, which Cavna describes as “a sly, whimsical skip through suburban life with Alice Otterloop, her friends Beni and Dill, elder brother Petey and her classmates at Blisshaven Academy preschool. It’s all about sidewalk discoveries, childhood invention, parents and other authority figures who are one step behind the children’s antics. At summoning our early years, Watterson says, ‘The strip depicts all kinds of moments than ring true.’”

[Pat] Oliphant says: “Thompson actually sounds like the kids he draws in that amazing strip. What a gift that is, to write the way you talk. No strain, no presumption—just simple, wry storytelling with characters you can care about and love. When did you last see that in comics strips? Not since Calvin and his tiger rode off into the sunset. You would never suspect it by looking at him, but behind the quiet, mild-mannered Richard Thompson exterior lurks the real Richard Thompson. I know he would hate to be termed a genius, but that is exactly what he is.”

You may also want to watch this short documentary, The Art of Richard Thompson:

The Art of Richard Thompson from GVI on Vimeo.

Another cartooning legend also died yesterday, Jack Davis, veteran of EC Comics, Mad magazine, and the illustrator of countless movie posters. It would be difficult to overstate the affection for him in the cartooning world. Davis was 91 years old. We will be publishing an obituary for him soon. Here is the first one published, from local radio station WGAU, here is a remembrance from Mark Evanier, and here is an obituary from the BBC.

We have begun gathering old and new tributes to Davis, starting with contributions from Drew Friedman, Gary Panter, Peter Bagge, and Joe Kubert. Here's Panter:

My favorite works by Jack Davis are his various monsters, standing solo like the door sized Frankenstein poster sold in monster magazines, or clumped in wretch piles of scratching,  drooling, leaky, hairy, fly blown, boil plagued and wart encrusted werewolves, vampires, lackeys, hoodlums, degenerates and brainless tools. He was really good at organizing a picture-- a hard thing to do when the picture has many elements. Jack Davis was continually spewing out crowd scenes of scheming teeming denizens to sell anything--movies, bathroom products, sporting goods-- a true commercial artist knocking the crap out but most often knocking the crap out of the park into a very identifiable place of personal expression. 

But I loved his monsters best--on bubble gum stickers, trading cards, and comic books. I am still looking for Yak Yak number two. I was completely smitten by Yak Yak one and took it on family vacation to a relative's quarter horse farm in Louisiana. I wasn't interested in horses, but was interested in Jack Davis's beatniks and environs. The comic mysteriously disappeared on the trip, though it was never out of my sight for long. I suspect conspiracy to trash theYak Yak #1 and an an adult, an arrested development adult, I found another copy of it. Hooray for Jack Davis the scribbliest form generator.

In 2012, we published a discussion between Davis, Gary Groth, and Drew Friedman, which you can listen to here.

Much more to come.

Today we have Ron Goulart on the Connecticut clan of Mort Walker and co. Here's a bit on the great Dik Browne:

As hinted at earlier, Browne was a colorful fellow and Richard Marschall says, “The stories about Dik Browne are so many that the books of the world could not hold them….Heywood Broun was described as looking like an unmade bed; Browne has been compared as an unmade bed with Heywood Broun sleeping in it….Browne was dressed in a typical unkempt and absent-minded way one morning and his wife, Joan, said good-bye with0: ‘I hope you get lost; I’d love to describe you to the police!’”

Stan Drake, friend and fellow golfer, said, “Dik Browne stories have become part of the passing parade. Entire golf tournament dinners have been taken over by Dik Browne stories….The night he was held up in an alley and fumblingly produced so much junk from his pockets that the robber walked away cursing... The night he was accosted by a prostitute and thought she was an old friend’s wife… it could go on for hours…and has.” Browne now and then joined the group of cartoonists and writers I sat in on. I was impressed by the way he was always discovering some new fact or idea that most everybody else had already discovered. And how he could discourse and speculate on it.

His magnum opus and greatest success was Hagar the Horrible and that will be dealt with in the next part of this essay. Along with such Walker enterprises as Boner’s Ark, Mrs. Fritsz’s Flats and Gamin and Patches.  Plus artists and writers like The Walker Boys, Bob Gustafson and Frank Johnson.

Elsewhere:

Go read Peggy Burns' wonderful speeches from the Eisner Awards. Congrats to all of D&Q.

So this is my new favorite comics web site: the BD collection in Angouleme. So many images, so much new information for me.

A rare thing: Arnold Roth process post, for Humbug no less!

Comics by great cartoonists occurring online is awesome. I could read Vanessa Davis comics all day long. Confident, funny, outward looking work. And Gabrielle Bell is our very own internal astronaut of the nervous system.  Here's her latest.