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It's Tuesday and so it's time for Joe to tell us about the week in comics.

Elsewhere:

Our own Frank Santoro was profiled by the Carnegie Museum of Art. I love Frank's house.

Speaking of pals, Ben Jones is opening a show in LA on July 11. It is many thousands of square feet, this show. I have seen a chunk of it, and it's a mindblower.

Enjoyed yesterday's interview with Leslie Stein and want to read her newest right now now now? Here it is.

Justin Green stained glass? Yes please.

Passings: The great old pulp and super hero painter Earl Norem and the ingenious art director Frank Zachary.

Welcome back to the internet. Today on the site, ace interviewer Gary Panter talks to Leslie Stein about her latest book, Bright-Eyed at Midnight.

We both have nocturnal lifestyles, which is great for making work, because the incoming people information slows down. You earn a living tending bar? Do you like it? And the solitude?

I do. I realized early on I wasn’t going to make a living drawing comics so I went for a job where I could make a lot of money in a short period of time so I could draw most of the time. It’s a very strange dynamic, spending most of my time alone with my thoughts and then suddenly being thrown into a situation where I have to talk to 100 different people a night. That was a huge part of me starting this project, feeling like I was giving away all my energy to strangers, and then being awake all night alone with no one to talk to. So I started drawing about my days, or nights, rather, and just threw them into the void with the idea that no one would really read them.

The rendering of your character self is very childlike and the color is a blazing flower corridor which adds up to the whole thing coming across as very hopeful and vulnerable yet dealing with adult issues. Like life, the whole deal is kind of heart breaking and yet tough.

I feel like the toughest thing to do in life is to give oneself over to vulnerability. I was having a difficult time during the year I made these, and I didn’t even really write about a lot of what was actually happening, but I feel like it’s in the open spaces. Really, why one is feeling any certain way doesn’t really matter, because whatever causes emotional pain doesn’t really exist, but whatever lingering emotion that comes from these events are reality, and are tactile in a way. I’m always more interested in exploring emotion over anything else. I have nothing to say, no social or political agenda. My art is graffiti. “We express whatever, whatever it is.” - John Coltrane

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. For Rolling Stone, our own Sean T. Collins spoke to Alison Bechdel on the Fun Home musical's Tony wins.

—Reviews & Commentary. Ben Schwartz writes about the paternal dynamic in Frank King's Gasoline Alley for The New Yorker.

John Adcock writes at length and in depth about the French editions of Krazy Kat.

Robert Boyd has posted an online version of "Comixploitation!", a slideshow talk he recently gave about the superhero comics industry's historical mistreatment of its most prominent creators.

Brian Nicholson reviews Gilbert Hernandez's Blubber.

—Funnies. Slate has republished a 1990 Lynda Barry story (originally from Raw) to celebrate Drawn & Quarterly's 25th anniversary.

—Misc. Caitlin McGurk at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library notes that several recent strips being sold on eBay as if they were Bill Watterson originals were actually fake, as the museum holds the originals.

Today on the site it's Matt Seneca review Sammy Harkham's Crickets #4.

It’s been about five years since the last issue of Crickets dropped, but one look at the surface of this one and all the giddy anticipation the new issue of a good superhero monthly invokes comes rushing in. Crickets 4 is an easy pick for Harkham’s best cover ever, pulling off the difficult trick of making small figures against a big background pop with ease and grace. The back cover’s even better, a piece of Technicolor randomness that may be the best single page comic of the year. But it’s the guts that count, so in we go: Crickets 4 continues “Blood of the Virgin”, a graphic novel that began serialization in the previous issue -- though if you didn’t know that you wouldn’t be lost for a second, so plainly stated and immediate is the way the story lays itself out. It follows the making of the titular movie, a low-budget ‘70s exploitation thing, and the studio-employed hacks spread thin between making art and making sausage in the process. The main character is Seymour, a slightly schmucky writer angling for more control and better aesthetics, all too aware that his chances for both are slim. Still, even commercial art has to carry some grain of inspiration in it somewhere, and Harkham, a committed acolyte of the kind of movies his story’s about, goes to great lengths to show the real workings of creativity that even the crappiest art project needs to power itself across the finish line. In page after tightly gridded page, we get the nitty-gritty of movie making, well researched and beautifully shown. Moments of individual genius push against the tight rein of the studio bosses; then costs overrun or somebody forgets to show up on set and the real world pulls right back. And in the balance something is born.

Elsewhere:

I can't stand looking for links these days, so instead I present you with another installment of stuff I've been reading. Not as DIY a list as last time (hey kids, send me your comics! I don't ever go to stores or anywhere really besides the playground -- someone could make a lot of money selling "zines", "vinyl records" and cool "lit" books in the parks of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn), but here goes...

I Hope This Finds You Well
Dan Stafford
Kilgore Books

This is a really lovely collection of Stafford’s “handwritten interviews” project. The interviews run from 2003 through 2014, each providing a decent snapshot of a particular time in each artist’s career. Adrian Tomine is still in Berkeley. It’s 2003 for Crumb, not yet grand-old-man time; Peter Bagge is just beginning his Sanger book. Stafford’s form letter style questions level the playing field so somehow Ian MacKaye and Jeffrey Brown exhibit the same amount of energy, for better or worse.

Blubber
Gilbert Hernandez
Fantagraphics

Gilbert is the cartoonist most deserving of a MacArthur Genius Grant and along, with his brother Jaime and Dan Clowes, one of the top three comic book artists working today. And in the midst of publishing a ton of graphic novels he's dropped this comic book containing a handful of riffs on gender, genitalia and money told in the artist’s scat-poetry style featuring various races of monsters. They are master classes in storytelling and psychological depth. Gilbert has become, in a sense, a minimalist -- using spare lines and ample white space to convey feeling. Gilbert’s only equal in this kind of free form mode is Robert Crumb circa early 1968-1974.

A Body Made of Seeing
Sloan
Self-Published

This comic belongs to a sub-genre I’ve been noticing online and at festivals -- the interior identity exploration monologue (long term for a genre, but who’s counting?) that is perhaps influenced by Edie Fake.  This comic uses pink and blue forms to explore a very young person struggling with his/her body/gender. The accompanying prose can be a little precious (“I pray there is magic in this sickness”), but I chalk it up to inexperience.

3 Books
Blaise Larmee
2-D Cloud

The new comics “personalities” like Blaise Larmee seek out attention in a way previous generations of cartoonists did not, which has led, in some cases, to the persona overshadowing the work. Here Larmee has attempted to make a book about the persona. This volume contains three bodies of work. It is formatted like a contemporary art theory book published by Berlin-based art publisher Sternberg Press, which is a little like a graphic novel packaged as a New Directions paperback: It telegraphs intent and desperation and courts exactly the kind of criticism that follows. 3 Books purports to tell three stories (and whether they're fiction or non-fiction is irrelevant. They're dull in either case): The first is the story of multiple sexual encounters between a fan and the author; the second a nude Skype session with a fan; the third a catalog of paintings that represented the author’s fictional “big break” in the art world. I guess this is supposed to comment on the power of the male author and be a send-up of the “the art world” or something, but it’s all so silly. The cartooning is mediocre photo-based drawing. The conceit of Larmee’s ascent in contemporary art is poorly sourced-- he goes on a bender at the Chateau Marmont! He sells all his paintings! He’s been blacklisted from galleries! The paintings look like Jerry Moriarty paintings! If you’re going to satirize comics and art expectations via format and content you have to get the details right. Here Larmee comes off like a message board troll -- raving about things and exhibiting no real knowledge, but giving off enough of an air of authority that people in the basement fest subculture of comics might just believe him. Lowest common denominator "smart" culture.

Today, Greg Hunter is here with a review of the latest issue of Ethan Rilly's Pope Hats, which sounds like a significant departure from earlier installments.

The new issue may initially disappoint readers who were expecting further adventures of Frances and Vickie; it’s centered not around a cast of characters but around a set of themes. (Although issues one through three also included some standalone vignettes, they read as peripheral to the Frances and Vicki pages.) Rilly maintains the neat classicism of his linework, but he’s a cartoonist with new preoccupations. His gentle looks at millennial malaise are absent. Instead, Rilly turns toward cases of outright alienation. Issue four is not as fun as previous installments—it’s a demanding work, by comparison—but the comic is also earnest and engrossing.

Although Rilly’s Frances character works on the margins of her profession, assisting a series of high-powered attorneys as an entry-level law clerk, the earlier issues of Pope Hats present her as a thoroughly relatable figure—someone who reminds you of, if not yourself, than a friend or a neighbor. But Pope Hats #4 belongs to some real outsiders. “The Hollow” is a science-fiction story featuring a mid-level space surveyor, a smartest-guy-in-the-room type who underperforms and clashes with his coworkers. Rilly manages to both follow this character and also create distance between the surveyor and the reader, employing a slightly queasy yellow palette and a series of claustrophobic grids (about sixteen panels per page, on average).

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Chris Ware wrote a short essay on the video game Minecraft, to go along with his latest New Yorker cover. This cover inspired a lot of very negative reactions on social media, which fascinates me, especially now that Ware has revealed more of the thinking behind the image. Ware's work almost always attracts a larger-than-average number of detractors (as well as unusual amounts of praise, of course), much of which is either obvious kill-your-daddy stuff or stems from transparent jealousy, but some of which seems to stem from genuine antipathy to his subject matter and approach. Even some people who generally seem to enjoy Ware's work have reacted badly to Ware's recent covers for The New Yorker, all of which feature what would seem to be characteristic seasonal New Yorker cover scenes, only with a lot more smartphone usage. What interests me about the negative reactions is not so much their content—critics have called these covers "trite" and "obvious"—so much as their vehemence, and the apparent assumptions that underpin them. I get why people would react to these with indifference; I'm having a harder time understanding the outright hostility and anger.

An increasingly common critical error in recent years has been the confusion of artistic depiction with the artist's approval. In this case, however, the detractors seem certain that Ware's depictions are always meant as disapproval. Ware's essay, which is at least ambivalent about Minecraft, and even fairly positive about the game ("If architecture somehow mirrors the spaces we carve in our memories and make in our minds, then something pretty interesting is going on here"), shows that assumption to be wrong, at least in this particular case.

We have all had it beaten into our heads not to put too much stock into artists' intentions, so set that aside for now. The point is that the cover image shows a scene that everyone agrees does happen all the time. "Trite," "boring," "Luddite," "technophobic," etc.: these are the common attacks on Ware's New Yorker covers. One thing I haven't heard said about them is that they are inaccurate or unrealistic. Kids do play Minecraft on sunny days. Parents do watch their children's talent shows through their smartphone cameras. Families (not mine) do spend Thanksgiving in front of the television. If Ware's cover showed the two girls playing outside with a ball instead of playing video games on a computer, it would have been just as common and well-rehearsed an image as the one he actually drew -- actually, it would have been a scene depicted far more often over the centuries. People might not have liked that more traditional and Rockwell-esque cover very much, but my guess is the responses would have been more in the line of bored shrugs than angry Facebook rants. For some reason, this particular topic is one that some people really don't want to see explored. This is a scene that it seems some believe should simply not be depicted, no matter how objectively. I wonder why.

Leela Jacinto reviews Riad Sattouf's Arab of the Future.

—Interviews & Profiles. Jules Feiffer talks to The Wall Street Journal.

Alex Dueben speaks to Peggy Burns about her new role at D&Q, among other things.

I don't know why this Greek blues site keeps talking to prominent cartoonists, but I'm glad they are -- here's Gary Panter.

Alexander Lu talks to Brandon Graham.

Joe Matt is more Joe Matt than ever in his 10-question interview with the Comics Tavern.

Vice talks to Nina Bunjevac.

Michael Hill of the Kirby Museum has gathered many quotes from Jack Kirby interviews in an attempt to show that the stances Kirby took in his famous TCJ interview were consistently held.

Today on the site we have Mike Dawson's TCJ Talkies with guest Box Brown discussing The Cute Manifesto, BORB, and other sundry items.

Elsewhere:

Yesterday Tim linked to a post about supposed disinterest in "fine art" among the under-40 set. I can't remember if I'm supposed to care who Michael Lind is, but the article is pretty dumb. There is more writing about art and exhibiting of art now than in any other time in history, much of it done by people under 40! Art News, Hyperallergic, Paper Monument, artist's book fairs all over the place, a zillion little publishers of art stuff, galleries in every nook and cranny of Brooklyn, etc. etc. It's fucking endless right now. The real question is: Where's it all gonna go when the money runs out?

TCJ-contributor Craig Fischer is co-hosting a great sounding panel this weekend at Heroes Con. Go forth and enjoy it!

Joe McCulloch is here as usual this fine Tuesday morning, with a guide to the most interesting-sounding new comics releases of the week.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The nominees for Canada's Joe Schuster Awards have been announced.

The CBLDF has a report explaining the recent protest by a 20-year-old California college student over the inclusion in a course of four graphic novels she and her family deem "pornography" and "garbage": Fun Home, Persepolis, and volumes of Y the Last Man and The Sandman.

Michael Cavna at the Washington Post shares some of the results of the #Draw4Atena campaign.

—Reviews & Commentary. Robert Boyd has comics on the mind again lately, with reviews of Bill Schelly's Harvey Kurtzman biography and the first print issue of Kayla E.'s Nat. Brut.

Sequential State reviews Josh Simmons's harrowing Black River.

Neil Cohn writes about a study that seems to show that the supposed universality of cartoon images is just that: supposed.

—Not Comics. Michael Lind wonders why no one under 40 cares about fine art—did capitalism kill it? I am posting this mostly to see if Dan likes it, is annoyed by it, both, or neither.

Today, Paul Buhle is here with a review of two Steve Lafler releases, Doggie Style: The Complete Dog Boy and Death in Oaxaca #1.

Steve Lafler is one of those too-late-for-Underground-Comix artists who nevertheless reflected the satirical affect of the 1970s in all its daffy and sometimes dopey energy. Too bad he was only 16 in 1979. On the other hand, he’s a still pretty young fellow practicing his art from Oaxaca, Mexico, in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Aidan Koch didn't just draw the cover for the new issue of The Paris Review, but also has a story inside. Here's a preview.

—Rina Ayuyang reads at the San Francisco Public Library:

—For those of you who do Facebook, Richard Sala remembers getting reviewed for his first comic in Heavy Metal thirty years ago.

—RIP Christopher Lee.

—RIP Ornette Coleman.

Today on the site:

Morten Harper brings us this profile of the prolific and dynamic cartoonist Bastien Vives, who you may remember from Frank Santoro singing his praises. I love the look of this work, though confess to still not having read any, just out of sheer laziness. I hope to get caught up this summer. Here's a bit:

I notice that you say "we" and "our". I understand that Last Man is made in the same way as an animated movie: you write the story, Balak does the storyboard before you and Michaël Sanlaville draw the pages. What does the series gain through this collaboration?

It was important for me to involve someone who is an expert at doing storyboards. French comics lacks this part, the staging of the story, normally it's just an author and a draftsman.

You've set up a "manga island" of tables with computers, monitors and digital drawing boards. Your collaboration seems to be very close, almost intense?

There is this notion that comic creators work in solitude. I've, however, always made comics together with others. At first my brother, then at art school and now here in Atelier Manjari. It's not only artistic collaboration, but the social value of being with other people that inspires me. We work on Wacom Cintiq digital drawing boards, and this immediate collaboration would be impossible if we drew on paper. We share files and work seamlessly on each other's pictures. I have to work in a much larger format than in print, and it is easy to scale the frames on screen. I also make many changes while I draw, and this is, of course, infinitely easier than on paper.

French publishers translate large quantites of manga, and the Japanese style has influenced severel domestic series. Still, Last Man is probably the first fullblood manga series made in France?

We do break away from the French tradition of one album in a year, which I think to the readers is quite unsatisfying, having to wait a whole year for just 40 new pages. The more frequent release schedule of Last Man would not be possible without the collaboration we've set up.

Elsewhere:

Best publishing news of the summer: Chester Brown bible comics (no, not those bible comics, other bible comics) coming next year from D&Q.

This event in Belgium sounds awesome. Here's Joost Swarte explaining a bit. Smart, exterior drawing is so nice to see.

It's all meanwhile, elsewhere today.

—Reviews & Commentary. Philip Nel has a terrific piece on Maurice Sendak, and what you can learn by reading his will.

At the New Republic, Jeet Heer writes about the recent Art Spiegelman piece on censorship and drawing Muhammad.

Rob Clough reviews Mike Dawson's Angie Bongiolatti.

—Misc. Quentin Blake has 7 rules for illustrators.

Annie Mok provides a guided tour of her bookshelves.

This Tumblr post and the comments thread following has a lot of advice on how to make money working a table at a comics convention.

—Crowdfunding. Fans of Chuck Forsman, Michel Fiffe, and/or Cliff Chiang might be interested in the rewards you can get from helping fund the Kickstarter of children's musician Miss Nina (spouse of former TCJ.com columnist Tucker Stone). Today's the last day.

Comics reviewer Zainab Akhtar is starting a Patreon to fund her writing.

—Interviews & Profiles. At the LARB, Laurie Winer talks to Fun Home musical writer Lisa Kron about the adaptation process, revealing some interesting thoughts on the original book.

Mark Frauenfelder interviewed Dan Clowes at Meltdown last Friday:

Today Joe McCulloch is here to provide comics nourishment for you and yours.

Elsewhere:

How was CAKE? How was it? Chicagoans, please report in.

Let's see... Alison Bechdel's Fun Home cleaned up at the Tony Awards.

This legal news about Tintin was pinging around the internet today. Here's a bit of context. 

Cat's outta the bag on the next Kramers Ergot, but I know that the cat will change moods and the bag will change colors. Here's a taste at least.

More future news... Brian Gibson, occasional cartoonist, great animator and Lightning Bolt-bassist has co-authored a game that'll debut on PlayStation next year. Also features graphics but Mr. Brinkman, This makes me want to get a PlayStation and learn how to play games.

Today on the site, Ken Parille looks at the first decade of Eightball.

It’s 1988. Daniel Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn series has come to an abrupt end, canceled by the publisher. And Clowes is relieved. Freed from churning out short comedic adventures featuring the same cast of characters, he’ll finally be able to develop a more personal and wide-ranging approach to comics. In the ’80s, prevailing wisdom held that a series needed to focus on a single character and maintain a consistent look. “The thought was,” Clowes recently observed,

that if you did stories in . . . different styles — if you combined the serious stuff with humorous stuff — that the result would be kind of discordant. But I also had the theory that if it was all by the same artist, and the artist was trying to be truthful or willing to let his unconscious or his intuition decide what was going to happen on the pages, then it would all kind of come together in a cohesive way. At least that was the theory.

His subversive theory was right. And the proof was Eightball, perhaps the most important American alternative comic to emerge from the twentieth century.

During its first decade, Eightball was a Mad magazine-esque free-wheeling anthology. A typical issue included five to seven short stories drawn in diverse styles, just as each Mad issue contained work by several artists with distinctive styles. Clowes moved effortlessly among genres such as autobiography, gag cartoon, and rant as well as fairy tale, short fiction, and cultural satire.

Elsewhere:

A new festival, with Tom Spurgeon as executive director, has been announced: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus.

Longtime cartoonist and staple of that long ago 80s/90s comics world Pat Moriarty is interviewed over here.

This story about Disney is truly beyond.

And Chicago's own CAKE is this weekend. Go find Anya Davidson and buy everything she has!

Today on the site, Frank Santoro is back with another of his Riff Raff columns. This time, he writes about a new zine created by Jim Rugg, in which he apparently collages together various panels and images from old '80s black-and-white indie comics to create a new story:

The narrative is: kill, kill, kill. Antiheroes standing on rooftops surveying cities. At night. Speaking to themselves in poor grammar with lots of spelling errors. Deals with the devil. Equipment diagrams and editorial delusions of grandeur. Often on the same page. What Jim did was group certain generic genre moments together and then sequence them as one story. An antihero from one comic will appear early in the sequence and then reappear later and sort of comment on the action that’s taken place in between. The zine reads as one story if you let it, the one story that every B+W explosion comic seems to tell: This is my city and THEY have taken it away from me and I must fight to save myself and my loved ones and I must fight and why doesn’t she understand me but it doesn’t matter because I will fight and by destroying the world I will remake it for her and for us and she will see and THEY will suffer and this is the stark future so GET READY because NEXT MONTH the final BATTLE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Now that you've read our own interview with Richard Sala from 1998, you might want to see what he's up to lately. Electric Literature talks to Sala here.

Chris Randle at Hazlitt has a good interview with Simon Hanselmann.

I'm late to this, but here is a conversation between Naoki Urasawa and Hisashi Eguchi about '70s and '80s manga.

Michalis Limnios talks to Bill Griffith.

—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough reviews a slew of new minicomics.

Publishers Weekly has a pretty solid list of recommended LGBTQ comics.

While writing about the Fun Home musical, Francine Prose also briefly comments upon Alison Bechdel's original graphic novel.

—Funnies. Boing Boing has an excerpt from the Drawn & Quarterly anniversary book, the first Joe Matt comic in a long time. (Commenters who have never Matt's work before are predictably bemused.)

Today on the site:

We have a great 1998 interview with the also great Richard Sala, who remains a favorite of this site's editors. Here's a bit:

SULLIVAN: You talk about subtext and what’s behind things, yet it’s all done at the level of the images and the symbols, because you employ characters who are always two-dimensional. That is, if they’re not one-dimensional. You don’t seem interested in telling stories about people with varied sides to their personalities.

SALA: Well, to be honest, I’m not, you know, all that interested in characterization.

SULLIVAN: You say it like it’s a dirty word, like of course you hate characterization! Who wouldn’t hate characterization?

SALA: What I’m writing are fever dreams. One person thrashing about in a world he doesn’t understand. Don’t bother searching for anything resembling a folly-rounded character. Don’t bother looking for any situation that has anything to do with reality. In other words, characterization is subordinate to plot and atmosphere. I’ll sacrifice characterization in a second for atmosphere. I don’t care what the character had for breakfast.

I mean, these stories are basically extensions of my own personality. People used to ask me, “Why don’t you do autobiographical comics?” And I would say, “I’ve been doing them. These are my autobiographies.” That’s why I did that one comic as a joke, “All About Me” — it couldn’t be less about me.

Elsewhere:

Some very nice Tove Jansson paintings here.

Gil Roth interviews Lorenzo Mattotti.

Drew Friedman recounts his time at the NCS Awards.

Joe McCulloch is here as always this Tuesday morning, to guide you through the week's most interesting-sounding new comics releases. He also writes about some of the manga included in the new 25th-anniversary tribute book to Drawn & Quarterly.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The young Iranian cartoonist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to over 12 years in prison for drawing a cartoon mocking some of her country's politicians over a vote on restricting birth control.

Over the weekend, Matt Bors made an official announcement about changes at The Nib. It is not entirely clear to me what these changes entail, other than a reduced staff, the cancellation of the regular weekly strips, and apparently a larger focus on "the network aspect" of the site. Does that mean more focus on contributions from unpaid volunteers?

—Reviews & Commentary. Alex Witt is not a fan of Ales Kot & Will Tempest's Material #1. Stephen Burt at the New York Times has mixed feelings about Scott McCloud's The Sculptor. The Herald Scotland is really into the 25th anniversary Drawn & Quarterly book.

Paul Berman writes about the protest against the Charlie Hebdo PEN award, and why France's most important anti-racism organization defends Charlie.

One of the PEN protesters, novelist Jennifer Cody Epstein, has since recanted, and written a letter explaining why.

Marc Singer writes about the G. Willow Wilson/Jill Lepore dustup.

—Interviews & Profiles.Alex Deuben talks to Ed Luce.

J. Caleb Mozzocco talks to Jillian Tamaki.

Ilan Stevens talks to Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Oliver Sava talks to Dustin Harbin.

—Misc. Ben Towle explains the Leroy Lettering Set -- which was used to create the lettering in the old EC comics.

Whoa — Aidan Koch did the cover to the new issue of The Paris Review?

Hey it's Paul Tumey and Tom Van Deusen on Yuichi Yokoyama's Garden, which I published what feels like an age ago. Good to see it still being discussed.

Paul: To start, I’d like to tell how this idea of discussing Garden with you came about. Tom, you and I are Facebook friends, and I posted a photo of one of my bookshelves. You made the comment: “Garden!” I was impressed that, out of all the great books on that shelf (Rube Goldberg,TinTin, Kliban, Tatsumi, etc.), you singled out the very one I would have mentioned if the situation were reversed. When I first read Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden, about a year and half ago, I was dumbstruck. I didn’t think that it was possible for me to have a new experience reading comics – and yet, Garden was just that. As fresh as a spring flower. I have read it many times since, as well as some of Yokoyama’s other books and I have become convinced it is an important book – not just in comics, but in art and literature and culture. When we step through the break in the fence on the first page, it’s like sliding down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. After I read Garden, the world seemed different to me.

Elsewhere:

Michelle Robinson Brand, an early underground cartoonist and later a colorist for various comic book companies, has passed away. I haven't seen anything other than Stephen Bissette's Facebook thread, unfortunately. She seems like a fascinating person.

Douglas Wolk covers a bunch of recent comics for the NY Times.

And Robert Crumb looks back on the places he's lived for the Wall Street Journal.

Today, we have a new episode of Mike Dawson's TCJ Talkies podcast. In this episode, he has two guests, Annie Mok and Kris Mukai, and they discuss two books: Michael DeForge's Ant Colony and John Porcellino's Hospital Suite.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Nib, the popular comics site edited by Matt Bors for Medium (and one of the few online gigs for cartoonists that regularly pay fair wages for comics work) is apparently undergoing some changes, according to blog posts such as this one by Nib cartoonist Ruben Bolling. My understanding is that an official announcement will be made in the very near future. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably report that my wife has occasionally sold work to The Nib.)

Earlier this week, Art Spiegelman posted a preview image of a cover he created for a special free-speech issue of The New Stateman, guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Yesterday, Spiegelman announced on his Facebook page that he has decided to pull the cover from the issue, after the magazine's regular editors decided not to run a Spiegelman strip on being a "First Amendment fundamentalist" (which has previously been published in The Nation).

Fantagraphics has redesigned its website.

—Interviews & Profiles. The Guardian has the latest in a string of entertaining Daniel Clowes interviews tied to the new Complete Eightball.

At Comics Bulletin, Eric Hoffman has a three-part interview with Mark Badger.

Charles Hatfield remembers the recently departed David Beronä.

—Funnies. Two strips run just this week by The Nib include this by Eleanor Davis and this by Mike Dawson.

In other parts of the internet, Sarah Glidden drew a strip on international forms of greeting for The Guardian, and Ed Piskor drew a strip on EC comics.

—WTF. This is an embarrassment.

Today on the site Cynthia Rose on the cartoonist Luz's book Catharsis, out this week in France, about the aftermath of the murder of his colleagues at Charlie Hebdo.

The cartoonist Rénald “Luz” Luzier, a Charlie Hebdo staffer, was born on January 7– the moment for eating a French cake called the ‘galette des rois’. This year, Luz spent the evening before it with his analyst. Thinking about his birthday, he told her, made him a little bit blue. Year after year, the day unrolled in a pattern. It started with parental phone calls and finished with a “surprise” dinner.

In between would come the year’s first meeting at Charlie Hebdo. To that, being a birthday boy, he had to bring a galette. In 23 years, he grumbled, nothing ever changed. His “special day” was one of hopeless predictability.

In his new book Catharsis (Futuropolis), Luz recalls this chat. But the memory comes after 114 pages of blood, phantoms, police, guns, media and hallucinations. Frenetic sex alternates with bewilderment and sudden rages flame up before they shrink back into shudders. All this tumult is pictured in different styles, sometimes with anarchic scratches and other times in orderly sequences.

The book is, of course, about how everything changed on Luzier’s birthday. But his confessional volume should have a wider interest. That’s because its subtext is the artist’s secret fear of an unforeseen loss of inspiration.

Luz describes it in a little preface. “One day, drawing left me. The same day as a bunch of good friends. The only difference was that the drawing returned, little by little. Both darker and more light-hearted. With this returning ghost, I talked, cried, laughed and screamed… This book is not a testament, even less is it a comic. It’s the reunion of two friends who almost never met again.”

Elsewhere:

Just two fine links for you today. First is the latest Dan Clowes interview, and second if a fine video interview with Gabrielle Bell.

Today, we are happy to present an extensive interview with Anders Nilsen, the ambitious and innovative cartoonist behind Big Questions and Dogs and Water, conducted by Marc Sobel. Here's a sample:

Sobel: There’s a whole theme about faith and religion [in Big Questions] that comes through with Charlotte and Betty, and their ideas about the bomb. Do you see that as a commentary on organized religion?

Nilsen: It is sort of a commentary on organized religion, but it’s more a commentary on certainty, and people that want to be certain about their interpretations. Whether that’s religion, or politics, or whatever, I always rebel against that idea... although, it was important to me in the book to give it a little bit of credit, too, because I think that people who have a lot of certainty about stuff can often get a lot more done, maybe for worse, but sometimes for better, too.

Sobel: What do you mean?

Nilsen: I’m actually working on a piece right now about optimism in which I’ve come to the conclusion that optimism, whether there’s good reason for it or not, is beside the point. It doesn’t matter. It’s just something you either have or you don’t.

There’s a couple of quotes by Winston Churchill that I came across while working on this piece, one of which is “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.” That is a great quote and it’s totally true. If you’re optimistic, you figure out how to make the best of any situation, which is really helpful, but if you look at Winston Churchill, yes, that philosophy helped him get through World War II, and helped him shepherd the nation through the blitz and win the war. On the other hand, he was the architect of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I, which was a complete and utter failure. Based on his great optimism, he managed to convince people through his charisma and will that if they put all the pieces in place, they could bust through the straits of Gallipoli, and, I don’t know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people died because he had this faith and this certainty that it was a good idea. Certainty and optimism can get a lot done, but not necessarily in a predictable direction.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. At the Critical Flame, Kurt Klopmeier writes about comics and time, focusing on Richard McGuire's Here.

Emily Greenhouse at The Nation is the latest to review Jill Lepore's Secret Life of Wonder Woman.

Botswana Beast reviews Material #1.

Brian Nicholson recommends the work of JT Wilkins.

At du9, Pedro Moura also writes about McGuire's Here.

—Interviews & Profiles. Also on that site, Xavier Guilbert talks to McGuire about returning to his original story 25 years later.

Jules Feiffer was a guest last week on NPR's All Things Considered.

At Vulture, Abraham Riesman interviews Geof Darrow.

Connect Savannah profiles Dame Darcy, who has apparently launched a new local television show.

Lala Albert gives Zainab Akhtar a photographic tour of her bookshelves.

—News. The comics historian David Beronä, who focused his studies on wordless comics, has passed away. Matthew Cheney has an appreciation here.

As Robyn Chapman reports, Printed Matter in NYC is moving locations, and could do with some help.

Today on the site Joe brings us the week's picks.

Elsewhere:

Roz Chast was the big winner at this past weekend's Reuben Awards.

More on that data analysis of the demographics of New Yorker cartoons.

History news dept.: The Chicago Tribune's archives are now online and searchable. Here's a great piece on Chester Gould. There's a lot of comics history in there. Also, you can obsessively read the daily comics page for decades. Become a shut-in!

And here's a look at the recent record-setting art auctions, with some discussion of how, or how not to deal with giving "royalties" to artists based on profit margins. This discussion has been ongoing since the early 1970s but is at fever pitch now as the money just gets bigger and bigger. There're some lessons for thinking about "moral" rights in comics here as well.

Today on the site we close out the week with Sam Henderson's final diary entry. Thanks, Sam!

And Greg Hunter reviews the stellar collection of Tadao Tsuge stories, Trash Market.

Tadao Tsuge debuted as a cartoonist in 1959, a couple of years after he began work at one of the for-profit blood banks in postwar Tokyo. He would keep the blood bank job for most of the 1960s, long after his first appearance in Japanese comics anthologies. In that decade, he also began to create the stories that appear in Trash Market, glimpses of daily life in the city’s impoverished neighborhoods. A modest cult emerged around the comics—“If Tadao’s readers are few by Japanese standards, his supporters are wholly committed,” notes the book’s editor and translator Ryan Holmberg—leading eventually to this English-language collection (and hopefully not the last volume of Tsuge’s work to reach the US and Canada). Throughout the stories, Tokyo residents—students, hustlers, veterans—argue, make plans, and frequently avoid saying everything they have to say. Tsuge’s comics are often dialogue-driven, and usually dialectic too, charged by tension and contradiction on page after page.

Elsewhere:

It's a sleepy Friday heading into the holiday weekend. Let's see...

TCJ-contributor Prajna Desai reviews Bharath Murthy’s The Vanished Path.

Best news of the month: An online Seymour Chwast archive has launched. Go dive into the work of one of the best illustrators/designers of the 20th century. The way Seymour thinks about picture languages, color, and typography is extremely important to cartooning.

The David Letterman send-off is over, but here's one last bit: A history of Harvey Pekar's appearances on the show.

Two non-fiction graphic novels have been announced, covering the NSA and Edward Snowden have been announced, the latter by Ted Rall.

Today on the site, R.C. Harvey is back with another installment of Hare Tonic, which is this time both a history lesson and a thesis, that cartoonists can be divided into two camps: figure drawers and storytellers:

Artistic expressiveness of a highly individualistic sort had never been particularly welcomed by traditional comic book publishers. The corporate mind, ever focused on the bottom line of the balance sheet, favored bland "house styles" of rendering and committee-generated stories, neither of which, given the compromise inherent in the process, would be likely to offend potential buyers. But the medium had always attracted creative people, and they had lived and worked within its commercial constraints, sometimes happily, sometimes restively. And as direct sale shops began to prove their viability, the economics of the industry seemed beckoning to more adventurous, more personal, endeavors. Still, the route to individual expression in mainstream publishing was a long and tortuous one; it was, in fact, not one route but several, each a tributary that followed a different course to a seemingly different objective, but some culminated in the 1980s in an artistic renaissance that found its impetus in all of the creative impulses of the diverse endeavors. And the renaissance flowered in the fertile economic garden of the direct sale shops.

For the sake of discussion, let me simplify the progression by positing that there are two traditions in comic book creation— the figure drawing tradition and the storytelling tradition. Neither is wholly exclusive of the concerns of the other, but each pursued its emphasis with slightly different results. Jack Kirby belongs at the beginning of the figure drawing tradition. The artistic preoccupation is rendering the human figure, and the comics were all anatomy and the figure in action. Kirby was not so absorbed in this endeavor that he neglected storytelling; that's one of the things that made him unique.

[...]

I put Will Eisner and Kurtzman at the headwaters of the storytelling tradition. Their preoccupation was less with drawing and more with story, with content. Their drawings were composed to serve the narrative, to time its events for dramatic effect; similarly, panel composition aimed at intensifying the impact of aspects of the story.

We also have the fourth day of Sam Henderson's week creating the Cartoonist's Diary column, in which the fledgling cartooning teacher ponders the perils of showing his students old cartoons.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The young cartoonist Atena Farghadani is on trial in Iran, facing a prison sentence for a drawing criticizing restrictions on contraception and birth control:

If found guilty of the crimes she is alleged to have committed, the 28-year-old could face years in prison.

What are those crimes? According to Amnesty International, they include "spreading propaganda against the system" and "insulting members of parliament through paintings." Ultimately, the spark for her legal woes seems to have been relatively simple: a cartoon depicting members of Iran's parliament as animals.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has an interesting interactive map showing various reactions to Charlie Hebdo (including censorship) around the world.

—Reviews & Commentary. The Doug Wright Awards site has posted a transcript of Seth's speech at the Giants of the North Hall of Fame induction speech for Merle "Ting" Tingley:

Sometime in the late 1960s Mr. Tingley came and visited my grade one class in Strathroy, Ontario. I imagine that year we likely had a banker or a doctor come visit as well… And maybe a policeman too… but I don’t remember those other guys. All I remember is the cartoonist.

Illogical Volume writes about Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman.

A few thoughts about working for Marvel/DC, as stolen from a Canadian friend who was trying to add a bit of clarity to my rant about Chip Zdarsky’s inability to say the name of Howard the Duck‘s “original creator”:

(1) In corporate comic, everyone is a scab because there is no union.

(2) In corporate comics, no one can be a scab because there is no union.

(3) Join the union.

What to make, then, of Grant Morrison’s dedication to superheroes, his attempts to imbue them with some sort of positivist power of their own, to try and find transcendent meaning in a series of commercially dictated genre tropes and characters that were sacrificed to them? When presented straight, in Supergods, this stuff feels as silly and desperate as it is, like an attempt to put a fresh golden frame around a thrice-stolen turd in the hope of selling it on eBay again. But in All Star Superman? Not so much. The sales pitch here is a lot more successful.

—Interviews & Profiles. Jules Feiffer and Neil Gaiman appeared on a panel together:

Turning his attention to Feiffer, Gaiman said, “I had a copy of The Explainers [an anthology of Feiffer’s weekly comic strip in the Village Voice, which ran from 1956–66] when I was about five. I didn’t understand a word of it,” to which Feiffer quipped: “Many adults can say that, too.”

Blaise Larmee interviews Leon Sadler:

At what point did money become a concern?

When I was priced out of London, left all my friends behind, still working full time at a boring job and there's no way I'll ever repay my debts or be able to raise the money for a deposit on a house.

Oh god. That sucks

[Laughs] I can handle it its been like this for so long.

Where are you living now?

I think when you see money being thrown at just so much shit it makes u think "why can't u make something really good and get paid for it"? I'm living in a cheap town near Nottingham called Loughborough. Hugh Frost (Mould Map editor) lives in Nottingham now so we can see each other more better.

Today on the site:

Sean Rogers returns to the site with a very thoughtful review of two books with overlapping concerns:

What precursors even exist for comics like Colville by Steven Gilbert or Black River by Josh Simmons? These are books that use genre not to entertain, but to carve away at something rotten. They document a kind of moral entropy—the creeping disintegration of everything right and good. The universe they depict is unjust, indifferent; their nihilism can be suffocating. The stories proceed according to the predetermined, inescapable logic of the snuff film: the people you see here are destined to die, and you are reading these comics because they will die.

I have read only Black River, and it's stuck with me. It is, if nothing else, a break from the friendliness of the "fest" minded comics culture of the day, carrying on an underground tradition of a certain kind.

And Sam Henderson logs in for day 3 of his diary.

Elsewhere:

The cartoonist Luz is leaving Charlie Hebdo, the NY Times reports.

Here's Gil Roth interviewing the great Chester Brown.

Zainab Akhtar reports on her first trip to TCAF.

Joe McCulloch is here this morning with his weekly guide to the Week in Comics!, this time with spotlight picks from Satoshi Kon and Adrian Tomine.

And the great Sam Henderson is on day two of his tenure creating our Cartoonist's Diary. Inn today's entry, he lays down the law to his new cartooning students.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Committee to Protect Journalists has released a report on the threats facing cartoonists around the world, including “censorship, punitive lawsuits, physical assault, imprisonment, disappearance and murder." It focuses on cartoonists ranging from Zunar in Malaysia and Aseem Trivedi in India to the staff of Charlie Hebdo in France, Arifur Rahman in Bangladesh, and Molly Norris in Seattle:

The fear of radical Islamic reprisal drove American cartoonist Molly Norris into hiding after she made a tongue-in-cheek call in 2010 on her Facebook page for an “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Norris’s cartoon did not directly depict the Prophet Muhammad, but included caricatures of a tea cup, thimble, and domino, according to news reports.

Norris received death threats from religious extremists, including the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who, before he was killed in 2011, wrote an article in Inspire saying that Norris’s cartoons made her a “prime target” for killing. She was advised by the FBI to “go ghost,” changing her identity, home, and job to preempt possible reprisals. Her former editor, Mark Baumgarten, said Norris has not been heard from since sending a brief farewell email in the fall of 2010.

The photographer and comics creator Seth Kushner passed away this weekend after a long battle with leukemia. Kushner leaves behind a wife and a young son, and the GoFundMe page they had originally set up for helping to defray the costs of his medical treatment can still be used to help them with funeral and other expenses.

—Reviews & Commentary. Mark Evanier reviews Bill Schelly's biography of Harvey Kurtzman. Tom Spurgeon reviews John Porcellino's King-Cat #75.

—Interviews. Paste talks to Jason Little.

Archie CEO Jon Goldwater talked to CBR about why they decided to cancel their controversial Kickstarter, claiming they stopped it to protect the creators from "negative attention."

—A/V. The latest guest on Virtual Memories is Chester Brown. The latest guest on Inkstuds is Last Gasp's Ron Turner. The latest guest on Deconstructing Comics is our own Frank Santoro.

The great comics historian Patrick Rosenkranz recently posted rare video from Art Spiegelman's 1991 Maus promotional tour: