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Today on the site, Annie Mok interviews Eleanor Davis.

One of the most desperate feelings that I contend with, and that I feel like a lot of folks contend with, is—like, you mentioned earlier, like a desperate sense of isolation. Not being understood, being cut off from the people around you. In that way, wanting to have an effect on the reader isn’t manipulative. The purpose of it is to try to have a connection in some way. Like, if I have this strong feeling, I’ll make this other person who’s so disconnected from me, who’s so far away from me, make them mirror that feeling. Then that will help me feel a little less alone. Will help me feel a little less scared of the feeling. I don’t know.

One of the things that feels odd to me about people’s response to Happy is that—I tend to think of those stories as sad and a little bit cynical, but people respond to it in a positive way, and say that it feels uplifting to them. What they mean is that it’s a relief to read something that they see themselves in, or they feel a connection with me as the author of the story. It’s really complicated, and maybe a little bit of a burden in some ways. Before I put the book out, I was far less aware of the audience. These stories were made seeking an audience, seeking people to relate to, people to connect with. When I found them—it kinda freaked me out.

And last Friday, we published my interview with Richard Sala, about his latest book, Violenzia, politics, serialization, horror, and once making a child cry.

I actually once made a little kid cry by telling him a spooky story. He was the nephew of one of my exes and we were watching after him and telling him stories and he listened to my scary story about a monster who lived in a cave, then suddenly burst out crying. It was awful. I've never stopped feeling horrible about that. I also remember being extremely upset myself by an EC comic, reprinted in one of those Ballantine paperbacks and which I was probably too young to read. It didn't scare me, it just depressed and disturbed me on a level I had never felt before. It was so bleak and cruel. I couldn't sleep and went down to the kitchen in the middle of the night where my mom was also still awake and sitting at the table smoking a cigarette. That human connection and small talk was enough to reassure me and I went back to bed. And despite what Dr. Wertham might want you to believe, that story didn't make me run out and kill people, it made me want to be kinder to people because life is so horrible. Take that, Wertham!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton has died at the age of 76, after a car accident in Kentucky.

Robert Mankoff has gathered a selection of Hamilton's cartoons.

Carol Tyler and Boulet have won this year's Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize.

A new $30,000 Creators for Creators grant for cartoonists has been announced.

—Interviews & Profiles. Slate interviews Chester Brown about his new collection of Biblical adaptations, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.

Your central contention is that Mary was a prostitute. Why was this an important assertion for you?

It’s important because I’m someone who’s involved in the sex worker rights movement—at least to some degree, at least an ally in the movement. It seems to me that Christianity is the force behind the opposition to prostitution, starting with St. Paul. The condemnation of sex work and prostitution all comes from there. If I want to attack that sort of thinking, why not attack it at the root? Christianity.

A Moment of Cerebus has published the first part of Dave Sim's enormous 2003 interview with Chester Brown. This is a true meeting of comics eccentrics.

How did I know you were going to see it as a gender thing? Having met rational women and overly-emotional men, I fail to find convincing your contention that women are emotion-based and men are reason-based. You're right that there isn't a universally agreed on perception of what reality is and that there's a clash of views-of-reality going on, but I don't see that clash divided between emotion-based beings and reason-based beings. I think the division is between everyone. I think that, if we were able to somehow create a society that was completely made up of Sim-approved reason-based humans, there would still be people in that society who would seem crazy to the majority.

Alex Dueben talks to Brian Chippendale about Puke Force.

Maybe I'm spoiled because I play drums in a pretty wild band and those shows are definitely cathartic, so I'm not sure if releasing books can compare. The release of "Puke Force" feels OK because it is political. Certain aspects of politics do change quickly, so you want your satire to come out when it's still relevant. But luckily, or unluckily, divisiveness and paranoia has only been increasing since I started "Puke Force," so I'm still pretty on target.

I think we all do live with all these concerns and obsessions, and as an artist, I take time to dig them out and work with them, make connections. Excavating internal garbage, that's the job.

—Misc. Dangerous Minds has excavated the Feds 'n' Heads board game invented by Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton.

Paul Karasik has dropped by to review Carol Swain's 2014 book, Gast. We ran an excellent Sean T. Collins piece about the book back then. More the merrier, I say.

Gast  does what good literary fiction does, it transports you to a specific location, introduces you to specific characters, and takes you to unexpected and very satisfying conclusions…and it does so with spare text and precise pictures. Swain is a keen observer and a stringent editor; every panel is intentionally composed and framed, every word balloon lean and to the point. But the effect is the opposite of being left with a sparse, cold, shorthand. Her charcoal and ink drawing is lush and textured. In paring down the exposition, the reader is asked to work a bit harder than in the typical graphic novel, and that extra bit of work is part of the pleasure of reading Gast.

Links today are all publishing previews!

Moebius at Dark Horse in detail at last -- sounds OK.

Chester Brown's new book at AV Club.

Grant Morrison's debut issue of Heavy Metal.

Today we bring you Aug Stone's interview with the Dutch artist Hanco Kolk.

“So we were at a great secondhand bookshop by Pier 7 and Peter [de Wit] hands me Al Hirschfeld’s Show Business Is No Business. And I said, ‘Woah, I’ve never seen this before!’ I immediately fell in love with his lines, his fluidity. I wanted to master the same simplicity, the seemingly simple drawings. I did my own version and worked on it with a brush until I got that line. Years later I saw a Hirschfeld original and it appears that he didn’t do fluid lines at all! He made them little by little with his pen. But he got me to find this line that I have and it’s served me well.”

Served him well it has. Kolk has forty books to his name, a handful of album covers, and his long-running daily strip S1ngle was even turned into a television show. This year he’ll be releasing The Man Of The Moment as well as a new S1ngle book, drawing his version of Spirou (“I was really proud they asked me”), and making the posters for the Stripdagen festival in Haarlem. Comics, it seems, was always in the cards for Kolk.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. There is too much Ta-Nehisi Coates hype to keep track of right now, (I haven't read Black Panther #1 yet but I would be amazed if it lives up to a fraction of the hoopla -- and I am a Coates fan) but a couple of items that stand out include Evan Narcisse's profile at Kotaku and J.A. Micheline's interview at Vice.

At Comics Alliance, Caleb Mozzocco interviews James Sturm for the 10th anniversary of First Second.

—Commentary. Bill Boichel talks about Jackie Ormes.

—Misc. The University of Chicago Library is currently showing an exhibit of Daniel Clowes's creative process, and many of the images are online.

Gabe Fowler isn't sure whether or not there will be a CAB festival in New York this year.

Tom Kaczynski appeared in a Levi's 501 ad in the early '90s. "Tom, he's cool."

Julia Wertz has been evicted from her NYC apartment, and is selling lots of stuff (art, books, etc.) before her move.

Today is the last day to vote for the Eisner Hall of Fame awards.

Today on the site: The second and final part of the Wimmen's Comix Oral History is here.

Roberta Gregory:  I went up to the Bay Area a couple of times to visit the Wimmen’s Comix “wimmen” but I didn’t really feel all that much different than them. I wanted so much to move up to the Bay Area, even going so far as to apply for jobs there, but it never seemed to work out. I think of it to this day as my “real” home. But I also made friends with Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, who published several comics under their Nanny Goat Productions imprint in Southern California, and they were a big help and inspiration to me. I think their Tits and Clits first issue came out just a bit before the first Wimmen’s Comix, if one wants to sound competitive, but there were so many wonderful creative breakthroughs for women in the 1970s, culture, music, arts, any possible boundaries never seemed to matter.

Shary Flenniken:  Becky Wilson [who co-edited #6] asked me to do something and I was like oh, color, that’s fun and I can just do a one off joke? I was in other comics when people invited me. I did a sex education comic for Lora Fountain. She’s a wonderful person and she was very involved in important issues.

Jennifer Camper:  Each issue had different editors, and a theme, which could be interpreted broadly. I was contacted by the editor by mail. The only guidelines I recall were the page size and a deadline, I suppose it was implied that the work shouldn’t be sexist or racist or stupid. I mailed in veloxes of my work. We signed contracts from Rip Off Press, and the page rate was $25.

Leslie Ewing:  The experience provided an opportunity to learn how to create comics that could either be funny first and activist second–or, the other way around, depending on the situation. The experience helped me solidify my identity as an activist cartoonist.

Mary Fleener:  This was in the pre-Internet Age, so everyone wrote letters and postcards and everyone talked on the phone a lot, and as a result, you get to know people. That was the best thing I got from being in Wimmen’s, meeting whomever was the editor for that particular issue. Even though the hub and scene was in San Francisco, I felt like I was part of something that was exciting and interesting.

Elsewhere:

Peter Arno, who is the subject of an upcoming biography by, is profiled by Ben Schwartz.

Comics-related: famed publisher (Grove Press) the late Barney Rosset's long-in-the-works autobiography is on the way. 

Here's a nice and heavily illustrated history of early Canadian comics.

As always, Joe McCulloch is here to improve your Tuesday with his indispensable guide to the Week in Comics!, highlighting all the best-sounding comics new to stores this week, with special spotlights on books by Ta-Nehisi Coates/Brian Stelfreeze and Guy Adams/Jimmy Broxton. He also writes a memorial to the recently departed mangaka Mikiya Mochizuki:

This past Sunday saw the death of Mikiya Mochizuki, a manga pro for over half a century, best known for the energetic and bullet-riddled motorcycle action series Wild 7. Debuting in 1969, and continuing in various media forms well into the 21st century -- there was a live-action film in '11, though older Japanese audiences would better remember a '72-73 television drama -- the series concerned the activities of a group of criminals recruited to battle yet-worse crime in a semi-official capacity, thus evading the needless restrictions of legality. It is not especially well-known in English, with only a 1994-95 anime video series and seven volumes of the earliest manga (via the now-defunct ComicsOne) officially released.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Sharon Eberson profiles Bill Griffith.

“All life is a blur of Republicans and meat” has proved to be one of his most popular catchphrases — and one of the best-sellers on T-shirts and other merchandise sold on the artist’s website.

“It seems nonsensical, but not when you think about it,” Mr. Griffith said. “There’s a joke about French humor, that it exists on 17 levels, and Jerry Lewis was the 18th level, he was so deep. I think Zippy is on multilevels. Some people get the first level, some the third and some all 17, and I’m happy when they do.”

And here Griffith is again, shopping for "beatnik" comics:

Bill Griffith Searching for Beatnik Comics from John F. Kelly on Vimeo.

Tripwire has re-published its 2006 interview with Dave Gibbons in three parts.

Actually all the constraints I put on myself, and I was very happy and comfortable drawing Watchmen like that. It simplifies things from the point of view of storytelling to have the shape and number of panels of a page preset, and also you become very expert as a result of composing a picture in a very familiar space. You know where the hotspots are, and how much detail it can take, and the exact effect it’s going to have in context. I think most artists would tell you that restrictions enhance creativity. You can be told that the art can be any size, any format, and then be told that “it’s got to be this size, now do it” – that’s what really gets the juices flowing.

Gil Roth interviews Phoebe Gloeckner.

And The New Republic talks to the aforementioned Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new Black Panther.

Earlier versions of T’Challa gave you the romance of monarchy without any account of the horrible things that monarchs actually do. So I wanted to think this through. Don’t get me wrong, I like T’Challa but that’s the point. So often it’s not evil people, it’s the system.

I know there are limits in art, but I reject them as long as I can.

—Commentary. Copacetic Comics owner Bill Boichel explains Harry Lucey:

The recent controversial editorial from Riss in Charlie Hebdo is not strictly speaking a comics story, but Adam Shatz has written a very good piece on what's so disturbing about the essay.

Aside from ageing veterans of the French-Algerian war, no one in France talks about ‘the Arabs’ any longer. Instead they speak of ‘the Muslims’. But France’s Muslims are the descendants of that Arab peanut vendor – and, all too often, targets of the same racist intolerance. Like the racism [James] Baldwin encountered among his Parisian friends, it often wears an ennobling mask: anti-terrorist, secular, feminist.

—Spending Opportunities. Only a few days left on the Retrofit Kickstarter.

—News. Valnet has purchased the prominent comics news site, Comic Book Resources.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter brings us the eight installment of Comic Book Decalogue, in which Gabrielle Bell discusses Ulli Lust, This Dog Barking, and we get a cameo from Aidan Koch.

Anyhow, it's been a strange blustery weekend here in New York. I read Kramers Ergot 9, which features the best Matthew Thurber story... ever; a sustained moment of cartooning genius by Dash Shaw that demonstrates his intense and shocking level of control over the medium and the reader; Jesse Marsh-level brilliance from Steve Weissman; brilliant philosophy from Anya Davidson; all-out-20th century jams from John Pham. Also, one goddamn good Tux Dog page from Ben Jones, who rides in to remind everyone that he's still the funniest guy in the room. Overall this is a decidedly cartoony issue -- much more about about the goofy cartoon curve, the flick of the wrist, and nearly Seattle-in-the-early-1990s levels of ironic humor. It's great to see all this work between two covers -- only pal Sammy could pull something off this comprehensive without it being heavy-handed. Plenty of surprises and new voices. That's all I'll say for now... I have other thoughts, but please go out and get this book -- whatever you think you know, you need it, trust me.

Also, because I have so little to link to, I might add that Tim and I went to see Batman vs. Superman last week and while Tim loved it more than me initially, I have since grown to love it a lot. It's a totally bonkers romantic comedy. Definitely not good, but also perhaps somehow "beyond good and evil" (get it???). I highly recommend it, and I really wish I had gotten stoned beforehand, because that would have made it even more awesome. I feel totally superhero satisfied and don't need to look at superhero comics now for a long time. Dapper Dan over and out!

Oh, here's a link: The Paris Review's continuing series of Lydia Davis adaptations is here with the latest by Hallie Bateman.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter reviews Nick Drnaso's Beverly.

A cover blurb from Chris Ware reads: “A debut book by a young writer-artist who has not only absorbed but also advanced beyond the comics which have preceded him. Beverly is the finest and most electrically complex graphic novel I’ve read in years.” This is an effusive endorsement from one of the greatest cartooning talents living or dead, and damning in its own way. What book could live up to those words, from that artist?

At minimum, Beverly is a work that many of Chris Ware’s readers will warm to, in part because it shares the cool temperament of Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown stories. And although Beverly doesn’t have the symphonic qualities of those works or the sheer technical virtuosity, that’s not really the point. If Ware weaves a tapestry of despair for his readers, Drnaso has opted to smother them with a gloom pillow. It’s a valid, effective approach, though it leaves Beverly open to similar critiques.

And we have the final day of Ginette Lapalme's tenure creating our Cartoonist's Diary. Thanks, Ginette!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Commentary. Brenda Cronin at the Wall Street Journal writes about the career of longtime New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno.

—Interviews & Profiles. Pedro Moura conducts a somewhat academically oriented interview with Nick Sousanis.

Hmmm, I don’t think I’ve played Unflattening against conventional comics at all – especially not the ones you cite. As I say on that page, I do prefer to call them “comics,” and I think my work very much fits in the comics tradition from Batman to McCloud to Vaughn-James. There are some things that I do that are perhaps unique to me (lack of direct narrative and recurring characters) which should be the case with every author at some level, but I see it as a comic that happens to be presented in a different forum. A Duchamp-ian urinal perhaps!

Forge magazine interviews Patrick Kyle:

—Misc. Guinness has named Al Jaffee the holder of a new world record with the world's longest professional career as a cartoonist: currently at 73 years and 3 months!

—Not Comics. Rolling Stone has named Brian Chippendale as the 91st greatest drummer of all time.

And this isn't comics at all, but if you remember that bonkers Robert Crumb interview in the Observer last year that Crumb ended up publicly disavowing, then the latest nutso article from the same interviewer may seem familiar in its methods.

And if you're in New York, tonight Alex Dueben (who put together the amazing oral history of Wimmen's Comix we began publishing yesterday) will be speaking to Reinhard Kleist at the Goethe-Institut. Kleist will also be creating a live drawing.

Today on the site we have an obituary of Jess Johnson, written by former TCJ-editor Robert Boyd.

And we're pleased to have part one of a two part oral history of Wimmen's Comix, the complete run of which has just been published in a great two-volume set by Fantagraphics. Alex Dueben's interviews with many of the key cartoonists (Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, Barbara Mendes, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Diane Noomin, Phoebe Gloeckner, et al) covers a ton of new territory, not least of which is each contributor's fascinating paths to the medium, as well as publishing biz history, tons of context about the sexual politics of the time, and so much more. With a few exceptions, these cartoonists are rarely interviewed. Earth people, here's an open call: I want feature length interviews with everyone in this oral history. Let's open up the history of underground comics. Email me.

Here's a bit:

Trina Robbins:  I get to San Francisco and I discover, isn’t this wonderful we’re all here doing underground comics–well, it wasn’t. The guys didn’t include me. Later there were so many [cartoonists] but in the very early seventies, the first few years, it was a small group of guys and they all knew each other. It was a clique. Most of the comics in those days were still in anthology form so if they were going to do a comic, they’d call each other up and say, I’m going to do a comic, do you want to contribute six pages or four pages? Nobody called me. Nobody invited me into their books. Nobody invited me to their parties. The underground newspapers in the Bay Area were still carrying comics and they were a whole other group. They were much more open and that was wonderful because I wanted to draw comics for somebody. Underground newspapers had just started and if they were going to do an article, I’d read the article and on the spot, draw an illustration for it. I was getting published and I was drawing for people who wanted me to draw for them.

Meredith Kurtzman:  I was at the School for Visual Arts. I had one comic published in The East Village Other, but that was it. I can’t remember how I got involved with It Ain’t Me, Babe. My father knew Trina and Kim Deitch and I remember visiting them when they lived in a storefront on Ninth Street. We weren’t great pals or anything, it was more my father knowing all the underground comics people. They’d come to our house for dinner sometimes. I don’t think there was anyone else in that first issue who I really knew.

Trina Robbins:  Someone showed me what must have been the first issue of It Ain’t Me, Babe, which I had always thought was the first feminist newspaper on the West coast, but I later learned that it was the first feminist newspaper in America. I phoned them and said, I’d like to work for you. There was a be-in at Golden Gate Park and we met at the be-in and I wore a t-shirt that I had designed that had this strong and angry looking heroine and said under it “super sister.” They thought it was wonderful. They were in Berkeley so after that every three weeks or so I would show up at Berkeley and be doing drawings for them. I was also doing a lot of their covers and a comic on the back page. After working with them for a while, they gave me the moral support to say, I can put together a comic book.

Lisa Lyons:  As I remember, Trina called and asked if I’d be interested in taking part in It Ain’t Me Babe. No email or texting back then. How did she hear about me? I don’t know. Everybody knew everybody, or at least everybody knew somebody who knew somebody else on the Left in the Bay Area. I was a political cartoonist for the Independent Socialist Club and its newspaper Workers Power, and did work for many anti-war, civil rights, and social justice organizations, including the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, SDS, the Farm Workers, and the Peace and Freedom Party. My work appeared regularly in Liberation News Service. I illustrated Barbara Garson’s MacBird, which was translated into many languages and became a stage play.

Also today, Ginette Lapalm's cartoonist diary, day 4.

Elsewhere:

On a related note, Rachel Miller wonders about one of the cartoonists in It Ain't me Babe.

Sean Howe on another mystery: What has become of the Comic Magazine Association of America files?  It's possible these are gone forever, but it's equally possible some collector acting as a "historian" has them and is "saving them for a book." I've heard that a lot about a lot of stuff.

Frank Santoro's Comics Workbook is aggregating news over on its web site. Check it out.

Over on Facebook, here's a look at the great Spain Rodriguez's last freelance job.

Today, we are publishing an English-language version of an article that originally appeared on the Italian comics website Fumettologica. It's a roundtable discussion featuring colorists from various countries, talking about their process, how digital tools have changed the profession, and more.

Matt Hollingsworth: I think there's a fundamental historical misunderstanding of what was going on with coloring when the transition to digital was happening. At the time before I made the transition myself, I was doing mostly color guides, like most colorists. These color guides were just that, guides. These were handed in and then handed off to someone else to interpret. Earlier on, this process was more primitive. But around the time Oliff was doing his thing on Spawn, the people interpreting our color guides were called separators and they were doing that work on computers, same as Oliff. So, we basically had a middle man between us and the final colors, and they more often than not ruined our work. Oliff had fantastic artists doing his separations. They were amazing colorists in their own right. A lot of other seps studios had technicians and not artists and they often did a bad job on the seps. This is not to say all separators were bad, but the vast majority of them were. Some pages would come out great and you could tell that that separator was good and an artist. Most of us made the switch to computers so that we could do our own separations and avoid having other people destroy our work.

We also have day three of Ginette Lapalme's Cartoonist's Diary of her trip to Tokyo.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles.
The Johns Hopkins Hub talks to Ben Katchor about comics, politics, and cities.

In New York, at least when I was starting out, it was possible to live cheaply. That made a big difference in the amount of free time I had to make not overtly commercial comics, things that you just wanted to make and get into the world. So that's probably easier to do in a less-expensive real estate market. That's basically what cities have become—they're attractive entertainment places for affluent people. If you don't have money, you may be better off in a little town with a garden and less of a crushing overhead.

The Guardian talks to Daniel Clowes.

His characters also often miss things that the careful reader can see. “A lot of what I write about is what someone wants to present to the world, and then what they really are,” Clowes says. “What I play with a lot is the text, which is a lie, and then the image is the truth.”

When asked why he wanted to spend so much time on a single project – the book [Patience] is also his longest, at 180 pages – Clowes is frank: “I did not want to.”

The Huffington Post talks to Austin English.

From the start, it was clear to English that his style diverted greatly from the classic comic book formula. The artist explained to me that the first rule of cartooning, to his understanding, is that the characters must look consistent from panel to panel, from beginning to end. When making his own images, though, English couldn’t resist changing figures from one panel to the next, turning over the visual guidelines he’d just established. “The urge to break the rules is completely irresistible,” he added. “When I draw the comic for a second time I want to make a larger stomach or bigger feet.”

—Misc. For The Paris Review, Aidan Koch adapts a Lydia Davis story.

Joe McCulloch would like to tell you about the week in comics, and has added an appreciation of the late Jess Johnson to his usual column.

When most readers think of Johnson, they think of “For Fuck’s Sake”, from the Fanta/Eros anthologyDirty Stories. A sprightly nightmare of self-loathing annihilation, in which malevolent teen girls and their Beagle Boy lovers torment a frail boy in ladies’ underwear — culminating with a rifle blast into the rectum — the story anticipates the inflamed cruelties of artists like Josh Simmons, though Johnson often gives the impression of working in raw-nerved imaginative memoir.

And Ginette Lapalme returns with the second day of her diary.

Elsewhere:

Here is an Inkstuds interview with Jess Johnson.

Hyperallergic has a fine short text on Puke Force.

Gil Roth speaks to Tom Tomorrow.

Ken Parille, probably the leading scholar of Daniel Clowes's work today, writes a new column about his latest book, Patience, with loads of extra commentary and annotations on its allusions and themes.

In 2011, as Clowes was writing Patience, he was reading about Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, a late nineteenth-century group of mystics, paranormal investigators, seekers, and crackpots. Blavatsky (who believed in time travel) created her own religion. She assembled the belief system described in her treatise The Secret Doctrine by gathering concepts central to many religious and philosophical traditions, especially Eastern mysticisms. Clowes has said that Patience is his attempt “to create [his] own religion,” and the book is propelled by a mystical world-view embodied in its time-travel circularity, a vision of a cosmic order that lies just beyond our perception, recognition of the interconnectedness of all things, and embrace of contradiction. Patience believes that opposing impulses — whether ideological or aesthetic — can live side by side, yet somehow (perhaps only through the magic artifice of fiction) be absorbed into a larger, coherent whole. Clowes’s comic is disconcertingly violent yet contemplative, brightly colored yet psychologically dark, grounded in genre conventions yet not a genre comic, visually cartoony then hyper-realistic, horrifying and affirming. It upholds Clowes’s belief, rooted in his interest in artists like Hitchcock and Nabokov, that a work of art can be a universe and a religion unto itself. (As our world turns increasingly virtual, Clowes makes his cartoon worlds more material. With thick pages and sturdy cover boards, Patience proudly asserts its existence. It’s a heavy book.)

Today is also the first day for a new edition of A Cartoonist's Diary. This week's Cartoonist is Ginette Lapalme, and she shares her impressions of a trip to Tokyo.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Rachel Cooke at The Guardian profiles Riad Sattouf.

Sattouf, who drew a regular strip for Charlie Hebdo until a few months before the attacks, is not only half Syrian, the son of a Sunni from a village near Homs; he is also the author of a celebrated graphic memoir, whose title is The Arab of the Future. Whether he likes it or not, the media is quite determined to enlist him as a spokesman on Syria, if not the entire Islamic world.

So far, he has proved resistant to their efforts. It’s true that from the moment the demonstrations against Assad began in 2011, he was filled with foreboding: “I was sure there would be a war, and I was convinced it would lead to the complete destruction of the country.”

But this is as far as he will go. “Nice try!” he’ll say, asked a question he’d rather avoid.

Gil Roth talks to political cartoonist Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow).

We live in a world created by 21-year-old coders with no life experience, and we’re trapped in their little brains now. It’s like that Harlan Ellison story, "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream".

At The A.V. Club, Shea Hennum interviews the aforementioned Dan Clowes.

Every time I see a blockbuster movie, I find myself wondering about the guy in the background who got shot. [Laughs.] I think it’s that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall—where he does that thing we had all been waiting our whole lives to see, which is: There’s a shootout and Schwarzenegger just holds a random bystander in front of him to block the bullets. And that’s always the thing that everyone thought of as a kid, “Why wouldn’t somebody do that?” And then when he finally did it, it was such a mass relief to the audience. [Laughs.] But I remember days after thinking, “I would almost rather see the movie of that guy”; you know, that guy gets up and goes to work and gets on an escalator and then all of a sudden he gets killed. What a weird day for that guy! [Laughs.]

—Misc. Jaime Hernandez drew the cover for the new New Yorker and talks briefly about hot dogs.

Today on the site, Mat Colgate interviews Dan White, comics critic and cartoonist:

What was the first comic you published?

There were a few abortive attempts. I tried working with friends to write stories and quickly realized that working from another person’s script is difficult, but that working from a script from someone who doesn’t know how to tell a comic story – even though they might be a fan – is even more problematic, because you’re being asked to do something in a panel and you’re like “I can’t do that, that’s eight different things you’ve asked me to do”.

The big break through was when I moved to Brighton after university and picked up a couple of local self-published comics by Danny Noble and Paul O’Connell. I thought “I’m going to give this a go”, so I did a comic called Beau And Me. It was about a guy in his 20s and was infused with my experiences of  living in a city. It was real world storytelling but I made the main character a little wolf guy and his friend look like something out of a Ralph Bakshi cartoon. So these cartoon characters are telling a slightly bittersweet tale of 20-something angst. What an original idea! But it was liberating and it worked. I just kept doing it until it was done, and then I got it printed up and started selling it.

What was it that was so liberating about going for that approach rather than just going straight in and doing a sci-fi epic, for example?

I had big plans about doing certain comics, but then you realize that your artistic skill set isn’t suited to the 12 part mega-epic involving drawings of other planets. Also I’ve always been a fan of Raymond Carver, who could carve out intensely meaningful moments from the everyday without going into soppy sentimentalism. I realized that by having a fantastical element I could satisfy my interest in drawing weird things, but that welding that to the mundane meant that I could also look into what it’s like being a person and living now. It was a practical decision, but I found the alchemy of it really appealing.

Elsewhere:

Comics-vid: It's Bill and Frank talkin' Bob Powell.

Comics-crit: Nick Gazin reviews the hits and misses of late.

Comics-adjacent: Here's a good look at the influence of the Pee-wee's Playhouse aesthetic.

Comics-movies: I'm a sucker for Valerian and Luc Besson, so here's a look at the director's upcoming movie.

Comics-cash-in: Here's the NY Times on Glen Weldon's history of Batman.

Today on the site, we present a new episode of Mike Dawson's TCJ Talkies podcast. This time around, cartoonist/publisher Austin English and editor/scholar Bill Kartalopoulos discuss Daniel Clowes's Patience, but they do it the long way around, via a 1963 issue of Superboy, and a reprint of Blutch's Peplum.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Daniel Clowes is all over the internet these days, including a profile by TCJ.com alum Sean T. Collins at The Observer.

“I haven’t been in a fight in a long time, but as a young man…” He pauses. “I can’t say I was ‘in a fight,’ but I got the shit beaten out of me several times. I remember the feeling of when you get hit in the head, and it flashes to white and you’re just like—” He makes a sound like a zombie in the process of being brained. “It’s just this jarring shock: Boom, there it is, and then it’s over and you’re sort of lost afterwards. I really wanted to capture that.

Jessica Gross interviewed him, too.

There’s also something about saying the names of your own characters that is really embarrassing, I’ve found. I was talking to another cartoonist about this and we realized we never say the names of our characters unless we have to. You just say, “the guy in the story.” There’s something deeply embarrassing about thinking, I just made up this character and now we’re talking about him.

Tripwire talks to Howard Chaykin:

Whereas Gil [Kane] demonstrated, albeit with a skepticism borne out of having spent his entire adult life in the field, that a career in comics could be at least somewhat rewarding, [Wally Wood] was so profoundly self loathing and self destructive that by the time I met him he was a ghost, a feeble echo of the towering talent he’d been throughout the fifties and early sixties. He was still breathtakingly proficient with a brush, however – able to transform my barely creditable effort, not to mention the work of at least one non-artist who simply traced stuff, into his own recognizable style.

So I wanted to be Gil Kane when I grew up, but I lived in terror of ending up like Wallace Wood.

—Commentary. Artist Matt Jones writes about six things he learned putting together his recent book, Ronald Searle's America.

Searle’s prolific output was driven by a genuine love of drawing and a rigid work ethic. He kept a meticulous deadline chart on his studio wall detailing the multiple assignments he was juggling at any given time. Art directors attested to his unfailing ability to meet deadlines and thorough exploration of the brief. He often submitted multiple finished variations on a theme for them to choose from. Even in his late-eighties he continued to work diligently. His wife, Monica, complained that she never saw him as he spent up to 11 hours a day in his studio.

Today on the site, we're thrilled to have Peter Bagge interviewing Kaz, focusing mostly on the early years. Great, great stuff from two giants of the medium.

BAGGE: Almost all of your work is set in a rundown, urban residential landscape – not unlike Hoboken or Jersey City, though more depressed than those places are now. Might this be the Hoboken of your youth permanently planted in your psyche? Or perhaps because you moved back there when you started doing comics in earnest?

KAZ: Yes, Hoboken and Jersey City did look like Betty Boop backgrounds back in the 60’s. It’s perhaps a psychic space that reflects my own run down mind. But the simple truth is that I like drawing depressed backgrounds and interiors as well as weird architecture. 

BAGGE: Your interiors always include naked light bulbs, pealing wallpaper, broken plaster, torn shades and wobbly floorboards. You should have been an interior decorator! Ha ha. And the exteriors include abandoned littered sandlots and people going in and out of sewers. Stuff that kids are fascinated with, actually (or at least when we were kids).

KAZ: Yes, sewers are fascinating. I love the idea that there’s an underground world connecting the whole city. I lost a lot of Spalding rubber balls down sewers. My brother Vincent accused our mom of shoving his dog, Zero down a sewer after she was sick of taking care of it. He claims a friend saw her do it. When he confronted her she denied it. The dog just disappeared. Zero the sewer dog.   

BAGGE: I just heard Zero’s echoing, ghostly bark!  Since you mentioned Betty Boop, I’m guessing those type of backgrounds also evoke cartoons and comics from the 30s and 40s that clearly had a huge influence on you. Were you always drawn to that old-timey stuff, or did it start to grow on you once you were out on your own?

KAZ: I think I always liked it. I never considered it old timey. Just different. The underground comics that influenced me the most had the same feeling. Robert Crumb and Kim Deitch. But yes, I was drawn to them because they looked like Hoboken. I found drawing plain suburban houses, storefronts, and strip malls pretty boring at the time. 

Here's a fine documentary on the cartoonist Richard Thompson.

Steve Wozniak brought a comic con to San Jose -- crowds ensued.

A handy guide to the Batman / Superman relationship over the years.

Joe McCulloch is here as usual with his regular guide to the Week in Comics, and this time he takes an extended look at

the newest work from Julie Doucet, one of the absolute titans of the Canadian alternative cartooning generation to rise to prominence in the 1990s - her new book, Carpet Sweeper Tales, arrives in comic book stores this week. It's an unusual work, which some readers will probably slot in with the 'post comics' collage or mixed media output Doucet has shown in books like Lady Pep (2004), which is to say it won't be read as 'comics' in the way a new (let's say) Chester Brown book will, even if the new Chester Brown is 1/3 prose-format annotations.

Rob Clough is here, too, with a review of Jennifer Hayden's The Story of My Tits.

As a rule, I tend to detest cancer memoirs because they tend to be reductive in how they treat the narrative of the protagonist, usually showing them as victim or hero (or some combination thereof). The reality is that cancer, devastating as it is, is simply a disease. It doesn't alter character, and nor does it make a person's narrative instantly compelling. The reason why The Story Of My Tits works is that it's about much more than cancer; the hook of using her breasts as the book's focus may be gimmicky, but is enormously effective. It's a gateway that allows her to tell her own story without seeming too pretentious or precious. Hayden has the rare ability to depict emotion without indulging in sentiment, which I think is due in part to her willingness to laugh at herself on nearly every page.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. KQED talks to Daniel Clowes (this is a good one).

I heard that Oakland Museum exhibition was great, but it also sounds a little bit like being eulogized before your time?

It absolutely felt like that. It was like attending your own funeral and hearing what people say about you — which was all very nice. There’s a movie called Scarlet Street that opens with Edward G. Robinson going to his retirement dinner, and he’s presented with this gold watch and everybody pats him on his back and then that’s it. He leaves and he has no friends or life after that. It really did feel like that. It was weird. I disassociated myself from it and started to just think of myself as a collector of Daniel Clowes artwork after a while, because you’d see name tags on things like they were on loan from a collector — but it was ‘on loan from Daniel and Erica Clowes.’ I would be so proud. Like, wow, I have artwork loaned to a museum!

Little Village talks to Gary Groth about 40 years of Fantagraphics and The Comics Journal.

Looking over the interviews I’ve done, there are different slants to them. Some were contentious, closer to debates than interviews, such as Todd McFarlane or my illuminating (to me) one with Scott McCloud and Steve Bissette about creators’ rights. [There were] those that were more journalistic or historical in nature—I think my interview with Kevin Eastman is a high point, but there are a number of interviews I did with Silver Age artists like Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert. I love the interviews where we get into the nitty gritty of the art and the art-making and explore the philosophical disposition of the artist: Robert Crumb, Ralph Steadman, David Levine, Burne Hogarth, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, off the top of my head — Jesus, six artists who are so utterly different from each other!

Syracuse.com talks to Roz Chast.

She decided to try submitting to The New Yorker just because her parents subscribed to them. She collected every cartoon she had and dropped them off in April of 1978.

"I never thought I'd be doing cartoons for The New Yorker," said Chast. "I didn't think what I did was commercially viable. I thought, 'What's there to lose?' I didn't have my hopes up."

Sex magazine talks to Aidan Koch.

Today we have Chris Mautner on Mark Beyer's Agony, the first release from New York Review Classics.

Most of us have at one time or another suffered from the nagging suspicion that the universe is out to get us. Or — even worse — that our suffering, whether brought upon by malevolent forces, just plain bad luck or random occurrence, will never end. That will always be just one damned thing after another, ad infinitum.

Which is exactly what makes Mark Beyer’s work so appealing and funny. Beyer takes that self-absorbed conceit (because, really, the basic cri de coeur of this type of angst is “why me”?) and expands it to absurd levels on the comics page, using his grotesque and at times primitive art style to create a hellish and unrelenting nightmare for his protagonists, where the basic question isn’t “will things ever get better” but “what type of misery awaits us around the corner?”

And R.C. Harvey on the meaning and origins of the ongoing newspaper downturn.

First, consider the source of the stories about the death of newspapers. That news is lofted  mostly by large, metropolitan newspapers. Small city newspapers (dailies and weeklies) aren’t complaining. Why not? Because they’re not in the kind of trouble big city papers are in. They still get sufficient revenue from advertising, display and classified: local businesses have no place else to advertise. In big cities with hordes of national chain stores (rather than small town Mom ‘n’ Pop establishments), businesses advertise nationally via television. Newspapers lose out. And classified advertising has all but disappeared. Newspapers lose out big time.

Finally, to drive the nail in the coffin, readership is evaporating. The most populous newspaper reading demographic is the 55-and-older category. And newspapers appear too busy wringing their hands at the loss of the 18-35 age group to find ways to exploit the other demographic. I’ll come back to this in a trice. But before I leave small city newspapers, their apparent fiscal health is small comfort to us: few of them run comic strips, and those that do, don’t run many. But that is, for the nonce, beside the point. The continued existence of small town papers serves simply to make my point: the newspapers that are in trouble financially in this country are big city papers.

Elsewhere:

Amazingly, Frank Santoro and Chris Diaz have unearthed and posted an interview I didn't even know was recorded: My infamous (to me at least) interview/quiz with Dan Clowes in 2010.  Look how young I am! Only 6 years ago but oh how I've aged.

Paul Karasik's final Angouleme round-up for the year 2016.

Dan Clowes (again!) interviewed over at Salon.

Paul Buhle on Bill Griffith and romance comics.

Today, we bring you the final day of Jen Lee's week contributing our Cartoonist's Diary. Thanks, Jen!

And Greg Hunter is here, too, with a review of Garth Ennis and John McCrea's The Demon: Hell's Hitman.

The issues collected in Hell's Hitman, dating to the mid-'90s, are not much of a talking point, even among fans of the issues’ writer, Garth Ennis, and they're probably best remembered as the birthplace of Tommy Monaghan, later the title character in Ennis's Hitman series. DC released this collection with little fanfare, perhaps to coincide with Ennis's recent All-Star Section Eight series, a belated Hitman spin-off surrounded by little fanfare itself. Ennis and Etrigan make for a counter-intuitive pairing; the Demon speaks in verse, precluding the scenes of between-fight bullshitting that fill Ennis titles like Preacher. (The release may also be part of an effort to put as many Garth Ennis collections on the market as possible before the Preacher TV series premieres.) Ennis himself admits in his author's note at front of the collection, "I see some things I don’t like, but an awful lot more that I do.” In short: Hell’s Hitman is an especially weird bit of back-catalog excavation, both in its narrow appeal and its wild vacillations in quality.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Gilbert Hernandez is the latest guest on Inkstuds.

Alex Dueben talks to Jeff Nicholson about coming out of retirement for Through the Habitrails.

I was just not getting enough returns for the energy. Which is hard to really quantify. It's not just financial. Some form of success whether it's financial or fan reaction or critical acclaim. There are different degrees of success. Something could sell really well like "Ultra Klutz" #1 and make lots of money. Something could get really awesome reviews like "Habitrails." Something could have a cult status. I don't know, but there's a threshold where you need a certain amount of whichever form of success it is to make up for the fact that you're making comics on the evenings and the weekends.

Xavier Guilbert talks to Dragonhead creator Mochizuki Minetarô about a new story, Chiisakobe.

When I’m drawing, even if I’m not conscious of it, the situation of Japan always seeps through. It’s like I was feeling with my skin what is happening around me, in Japanese society. When I was working on Dragonhead, there was the Kôbe earthquake in 1995, and that tragic event probably influenced the narrative of this manga. Prior to that, there had been the bursting of the bubble economy in Japan, during which everything which was highly coveted became worthless overnight. There was nothing left for us, and for me it was as if invisible monsters where hiding out in the world.

—News. Ted Rall is suing the L.A. Times for defamation.

The suit, filed Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, also contends that The Times fired him unfairly.

Hillary Manning, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in a statement that Rall's allegations in the lawsuit were unfounded, adding: "The Times will defend itself vigorously against Mr. Rall's claims."

In sad news, Zainab Akhtar, who runs the valuable and well-liked Comics & Cola blog, has announced that she will be shutting down her site at the end of the month, citing racism and sexism in the comics community.

—Misc. Mental Floss has published an oral history of the Garbage Pail Kids, featuring Mark Newgarden, Jay Lynch, and many others.

Newgarden: Arthur Shorin was the final word at Topps, period. So the line was probably drawn depending on whatever Arthur had for breakfast that morning.

[John] Pound: Religious elements didn’t fly. One little gag sketch had a little kid like Moses receiving GPK stickers instead of the Ten Commandments tablets. Then things, gags that were suicide-related, like someone hanging themselves, you didn’t want to promote that as something kids might do or try.

Steve Kroninger (Freelance Artist): There was one of a kid in an oven. It was a sketch from Mark or Art. It got painted but didn’t get final approval.

Newgarden: I don’t believe we ever put a baby in an oven.

—Technical. It has come to my attention that several people have sent me emails over the past few months which I never received. I believe the problem has now been fixed, but if any of you have sent important emails and never heard back about them, please resend. Thanks.

Hello people, today we have Annie Mok's interview with Michael DeForge on the occasion of the cartoonist's latest book, Big Kids.

DEFORGE: I frequently have a hard time organizing my memories, or certainly from key parts of my life, and particularly traumatic parts. A lot of the way I circle the same themes and topics… I would have a hard time writing something overtly autobiographical, but by having all these different fictional parts of me, or fictional vantage points of certain moments or thoughts… it’s the only way I’ve been able to maybe objectively… or not objectively, but come close to objectively, looking at what it was that happened, or what I was thinking, or the mental state I was in. I found my memory has been fairly unreliable, and it’s taken a lot of parsing. It took me awhile to feel like my life had a linear narrative. And I know, logically it actually doesn’t. But it’s easier to think of it that way than as a bunch of unrelated pieces of information. So I worked pretty hard to try to piece something together with what did seem sort of like a lot of loose change. My stories are pretty meandering, and sometimes possibly even arcless. That’s sometimes how I look back on how events actually unfold.

And Jen Lee's diary continues with Day 4.

Elsewhere:

What you and I have always wanted: An oral history of the Garbage Pail Kids, featuring copious images, to boot.

Former (and perhaps future?) comics editor Marc Weidenbaum recalls his days in the strip trenches.

Pal Anne Ishii interviews Japanese artist Rokudenashiko, whose controversial fortcoming book Ishii has packaged for Koyama Press.

A surprisingly in depth profile of groundbreaking female manga artist Keiko Takemiya over at the BBC.

Today, we are happy to welcome Todd Hignite to the site, who has conducted a new, fascinating interview with Daniel Clowes.

TH: With Jack as a character, there’s this almost dream of omniscience running throughout, he’s the author of the story, ultimately directing events, but on another level, is he something of a stand-in for you, revisiting your earlier work? I got a real shock at a certain point and undoubtedly started reading too much into this, imagining clues and references in specific panels, backgrounds, locations, perhaps aged versions of previous characters, and dialogue…

DC: (laughter) I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case, but I can say that I was definitely very influenced in the story by my own work because I had spent so much time putting together the Modern Cartoonist art show and monograph, and then that was followed immediately by compiling The Complete Eightball, so I was very much in the world of my own comics in a way that I’ve never been. Normally, I try to not look at my own comics at all, and I try to be influenced by things outside of not only my own work, but outside of comics—I try to find unfamiliar things to be influenced by in each book, and in this case I was really kind of immersing myself in my own work, using myself as a reference in the way that in an earlier book I might have used Charles Schulz or Johnny Craig, or somebody like that (laughter). It was kind of an odd experience and I did find myself creating little glimmers of recognition with old characters and giving little nods to previous ways of working, maybe.

We also have Day Three of Jen Lee and her Cartoonist's Diary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Eleanor Davis shares the unsurprisingly well-stocked comics shelves she grew up with at her parents' home.

—Eve Kahn at the New York Times writes about an exhibit on display at NYC's Museum of Jewish Heritage, featuring sketches from a WWII prison camp drawn by MAD magazine contributor Max Brandel.

—And this has been going around the internet, so likely many of you have already seen it, but R. Crumb took on Donald Trump in 1989. Further unforeseen developments make this not quite as harsh as you might like, but it's still pretty mean.

Joe McCulloch files his weekly dispatch today and Jen Lee brings us day two of her diary.

Elsewhere:

There's a newsletter of Comics Journalism now -- subscribe here.

TCJ-contributor Tim Hanley has a new book out about the history of Lois Lane.

A review of the production-as-performance anthology made at Angouleme, Dome.

Mark Badger has gathered his intriguing "abstract Kirby" drawings into an e-book.

Today on the site, we present the third installment of Ron Goluart's Connecticut Cartoonists series. This time, he writes about Quality Comics -- and Jack Cole.

In 1940, publisher Everett M. “Busy” Arnold moved his Quality Comics line (Crack Comics, Smash Comics and other percussive titles) from New York City to Stamford, Connecticut and brought a band of cartoonists with him. Among them were Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Reed Crandall and Gill Fox. The major characters that his magazines would deliver to the nation’s newsstands were Plastic Man, Blackhawk, The Spirit, The Human Bomb and, eventually Torchy.

Arnold had worked in printing since graduating from college. He was involved in printing the comic books that Cook and Mahon had begun since leaving the fold of the pioneering Major Malcolm-Wheeler Nicholson. This line included such winning titles as Funny Pages, Funny Picture Stories and Keen Detective Funnies. Busy had been following the lack of success of these comics, so he decided to start his own line and hook up with some affluent partners. He made a deal with The Register & Tribune Syndicate, owned by the affluent Cowles family, and acquired two more well-connected partners. He started with Feature Funnies, a simulacrum of the pioneering Famous Funnies, which reprinted newspaper comic strips. Soon after the advent and impressive sales of Superman, Busy realized that superheroes were selling better than reprints of Joe Palooka and Dixie Dugan. Changing the name of the magazine to Feature Comics, Arnold set about acquiring his own stable of super humans.

We also have the first day's installment of a new Cartoonist's Diary. The artist this week is Jen Lee.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Benôit Crucifix talks to Peter Maresca of Sunday Press.

After the publication of Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays there was no real future imagined for Sunday Press. I had accomplished what I could not get a “real” publisher to do — create a fully-restored, full-size edition of the Winsor McCay classic — and I planned to continue to work at my “regular job” in digital entertainment. But the success of the book was rapid and widespread and after a few months I started thinking about another project, and when Chris Ware approached me to work with him on a similar volume for Gasoline Alley Sunday pages, I could not turn down that opportunity. After Sundays with Walt and Skeezix and McCay’s Sammy Sneeze I apparently was an actual (albeit accidental) publisher and then kept going. Looking back, I wish, as would anyone, I knew then what I know now about the process. Over the years I’ve learned a great deal on restoration and color as well as what makes a good book, and I think the latest, Society is Nix and White Boy display that education.

—Commentary. Ta-Nehisi Coates previews and writes about the creation of his upcoming run on Black Panther.

Ideally, the writer offers notes in his script on how the comic book should look. This requires thinking with intention about what a character is actually doing, not merely what he is saying. This is harder than it sounds, and often I found myself vaguely gesturing at what should happen in a panel—“T’Challa looks concerned.” Or “Ramonda stands to object.” I was lucky in that I was paired with a wonderful and experienced artist, Brian Stelfreeze. Storytelling in a comic book is a partnership between the writer and the artist, as surely as a film is a partnership between the screenwriter and the director. Brian, whose art is displayed here, doesn’t just execute the art direction—he edits and remixes it.

—Not Comics, But Close Enough. Edward Carey writes briefly about writer/illustrators such as William Blake, Thackeray, and Alasdair Gray.

William Makepeace Thackeray may not be thought of as an artist, but he was a very fine one. He longed to illustrate Dickens, but when he was turned down he wrote his own novel, “Vanity Fair,” partly so he could illustrate it himself.

—Misc. I didn't realize Miranda July's parents published Phoebe Gloeckner's Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Today on the site:

We're proud to excerpt Tahneer Oksman's new book, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, which looks at the works of seven women cartoonists. Here's a bit, beginning with Vanessa Davis.

Published in 2005, Spaniel Rage is a collection of what Davis describes, on one of its title pages, as “diary comics and drawings that I made in sketchbooks from 2003 to 2004.” Assembled in a thin, soft-cover book about 10 inches tall and 7 1/2 inches wide, the text can most accurately be categorized as a graphic diary or journal. In this chapter, like autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune and others, I do not distinguish between the diary and the journal. Some critics make a debatable distinction by correlating journal writing with an intended public audience and content that is less so-called personal. This distinction sets up a hierarchical dynamic—with the diary often cited as a “feminine” and the journal as a “masculine” form—between two modes of writing that have, despite their differing histories and genealogies, become otherwise indistinguishable.

Elsewhere:

TCJ designer and illustrator Mike Reddy and TCJ writer Jay Ruttenberg have teamed up in the most delightful way: An illustrated guide to "Musicians You Should Know."

Slate has published Colson Whitehead's introduction to the New York Review's edition of Agony.

Broken Frontier on Patience. 

Here's a very brief profile of the fascinating Dorothy Woolfolk, an early editor at DC Comics involved with, among other things, Wonder Woman.

Today, Tasha Robinson returns to The Comics Journal to interview the popular cartoonist and podcaster Alex Robinson (no relation) about his new graphic novel, Our Expanding Universe.

I had done Too Cool To Be Forgotten, and at one point I hit a rut with that, so I did this Lower Regions story, which was just fun to draw. There’s no dialogue, it’s just straight-up pantomime adventure. I had so much fun doing that, I was just like, “That’s it, no more people sitting around talking about their feelings. My next book is going to be a fantasy D&D type book.” Like most of my books, I set out with a vague idea and just started improvising from there. I got about 80 pages in, complete penciled and inked pages and everything. This one had dialogue.

And I just stalled out on it. I realized I don’t read fantasy novels, and I have a hard time taking it seriously enough to write a legitimate story about it. I could write the other story because there was no dialogue. It was very simple. The protagonist fights a monster, kills the monster, moves on to the next one. But any time I started having dialogue and characters, and “Okay, what’s this character’s motivation, and how are they relating to each other,” the whole thing just fell apart. It really rattled my confidence. I think that made starting another book extra difficult: “Oh my God, what if I start working on this and I flame out again?” I think that slowed me down at first. There came a point where the story kind of clicked, and I worked a little faster after that, but I was very gun-shy at the beginning.

Rob Clough is back, too, with a review of Whit Taylor's Ghost.

As in Tom Hart's Rosalie Lightning, there is no pat ending with everything magically made better. Instead, there are affirmations of humanity and the power of creativity (it is implied that the two interstitial stories in this book, both regarding loss, were created when she chose to be treated at an inpatient facility), as well as a willingness to confront feelings of loss.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Gil Roth interviews Glenn Head.

I’d always been really wowed by the idea of artistic freedom, but that was all just an idea and not a reality. Actually being on the street and talking about artistic integrity is a joke. It’s a joke that’s laughing at you.

Neil Patel speaks to the Swamp Thing and Miracleman artist John Totleben.

[Swamp Thing's look] evolved. I had a better handle on how the way how he should looked right from the start. I’ve been a fan of the original series right from the beginning. I introduced Steve [Bissette] to the series when we were in the Kubert School. He’d never seen it before. We were trying to come with our own thing, but I’ve got to say Swamp Thing is a hard character to draw. For one thing, he’s a difficult character to catch I think a lot of times.

—Reviews & Commentary. Susan Karlin writes about the decision to cut cartoons from the revamped Playboy.

"I think it’s a stupid move," says Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who drew for Playboy in the late 1950s to early 1960s. "If it’s simply a matter of rebranding, why not just change the type of cartoons they run? There are more and better cartoonists today writing in alternative media and graphic novels. It’s a whole new golden age for cartoonists."

Chris Ware writes about the inspiration behind his latest New Yorker cover.

Most mornings, after I drop my eleven-year-old daughter off at school in Oak Park, Illinois, I drive my wife to the west side of Chicago, where she works as a teacher in a public school. Along the way, we’ll frequently pass a few of her students waiting for the bus, huddled in hoodies with their backward backpacks and my wife—it’s against Chicago Public School policy for a teacher to offer rides to students—will recognize and wave at many of them, citing an affectionate anecdote (“He’s one of the smartest students I’ve ever had”) or a bracing detail (“She beat up her boyfriend”) or a horrifying story (“His brother got shot”).

For Today's Inspiration, Joseph V. Procopio writes about the Italian pinup cartoonist Niso Ramponi.

—Misc. Retrofit has launched a Kickstarter for their 2016 lineup of books from Eleanor Davis, James Kochalka, Leela Corman, and other creators.

Today on the site, Anya Davidson reviews Dan Clowes' long-awaited Patience. 

The male ego gone awry has been a theme in Dan Clowes’ work since the beginning of his long and spectacular career. One thing that makes his best work so indispensable is his rigorous examination of the topic from many perspectives, both male and female. Even very troubled characters become sympathetic thanks to his uncanny ear for dialogue and his trenchant sense of humor.

And RJ Casey profiles the prolific young cartoonist Adam Buttrick. 

Buttrick is a 31-year-old Michigan native who for the past three years has made his home in Columbus, Ohio. He is married and studied Japanese and history in college. He has been drawing comics “in one form or another since childhood,” but says that he didn’t become serious about it until 2009, when he first attended, and was inspired by, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. In just a few short years, he has garnered tremendous praise and appreciation: a “Notable Comics” recognition in The Best American Comics 2014, an Igantz Award nomination, a 17-page spread in The Best American Comics 2015, and an invitation to contribute in the next installment of Kramers Ergot.

Elsewhere:

I want to remind everyone again about the Queer Japan Kickstarter.

I also want to remind everyone to support National Treasure Ron Rege. Subscribe to his offering. 

The NYT covers the NY Review Comics imprint. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Marvel CEO and renowned nice man is involved in something...weird.