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To commemorate the release of the new Comics Journal Library volume collecting Zap interviews, and the release of The Complete Zap, we are posting a lengthy, previously unpublished interview with late Spain Rodriguez, conducted by Patrick Rosenkranz in 1998. (It doesn't appear in the Zap Interviews book.) Spain had some stories:

ROSENKRANZ: When did you realize there was such a thing as an underground press?

SPAIN: It was The Militant, which was a Trotskyite newspaper, which had been around. You could also pick up The Weekly People, which was on a lot of the corner sidewalk newsstands, which is the newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party, a real old party, a pre-Marxist Party that comes out of the 1800s. The layout of the newspaper was always great, because you could always get into an argument with somebody. The newspaper was about this big and with those big block letters and the arm and hammer, which is some association with Armand Hammer’s father, who was a socialist. There was a connection between that Arm & Hammer logo and the Socialist Labor Party, which is from the turn of the century. They had this great logo. You’d just sit over there with the newspaper and somebody would give you an argument about it.

ROSENKRANZ: Did you consider that an underground paper?

SPAIN: It was an alternative paper. It wasn’t really underground. The first underground newspaper in Buffalo, we did. We put out something called Pith. The guy who really got it together worked at some silkscreen place. It was a silkscreen newspaper that we put out that had all this wacky stuff in it. I don’t know where he got the title. It was a pithy title. He was a strange guy. A story that says everything about him is: One time he was going to New York. He was a strange-looking guy, even by today’s standards. He looked a little like Orson Welles. He had a beard and had loud rose-colored glasses and would wear this hat. It was a New Year’s hat and it was spray-painted black, with an Italian flag sticking up. He wasn’t Italian. He was a big guy. He had this sweater that hadn’t been washed in a long time and it had these little beads on it: these pants that came up to here and sandals.

Some guy like that, especially in 1965, would attract a lot of cop attention. It was about four o’clock in the morning we’re going through or around Schenectady, where the cops were known for being nasty. The cop pulls us over and sees him and … Hey, man! The head guys from every police department around there. Here would come the state cops and different cops. He had this way of talking. He would say this strange stuff but in a conversational tone. They started talking to him and he was saying all this weird stuff and after a while they just start walking away. He was the editor of Pith. His name was Gary Stevens. Unfortunately, he committed suicide. They entrapped him in some drug bust and he was facing time. The sad thing, in Buffalo — I wasn’t there at the time — I think if they had gotten enough community support behind him, they might have helped him to stave off that kind of depression about the jail time. Or brought him out here. He killed himself. He was a real strange guy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Paul Morton at the literary site The Millions has an interesting, ambivalent take on the Scott McCloud volume of Best American Comics, saying that comics have divorced themselves from irony.

Inés Estrada presents her idiosyncratic take on the year in comics.

Richard Metzger enthuses over The Complete Zap.

Robert Boyd reviews a bunch of minicomics he picked up at this year's CAB.

Tim Callahan is excited about Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison's Pax Americana.

—Interviews. Frank Quitely himself gives his views on that comic in an interview with Newsarama. (Colorist Nathan Fairbairn discussed the comic, too, at his own blog.)

Chris Arrant talks to Derf Backderf.

—Misc. Frank Young shares a bunch of one-page pantomime Little Lulu strips from John Stanley.

The PEN American Center is auctioning off classic or important books that have been annotated by the authors. One volume that may be of interest to our readers is a copy of David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik's City of Glass.

Happy Friday. Today we have Jeff Trexler weighing in on the Kirby settlement.

On Veterans Day Marvel celebrated Jack Kirby’s military service with photos and recollections from Kirby’s son Neal. Does this collaboration prove that the Kirby heirs triumphed in their fight for justice, or did their settlement betray creator’s rights?

A little over a month ago, the Supreme Court was on the verge of giving new life - or dealing the final blow - to the attempt by Jack Kirby’s son Neal and daughters Barbara, Lisa and Susan to claim the copyright such iconic characters as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, X-Men and the Avengers. What the Court would have decided we may never know for sure, since the company and the family settled just days before the scheduled date for the Court to decide whether to take the case.

Elsewhere:

Here's one-time  underground cartoonist and founding Screw art director Steve Heller on Zap.

TCJ-diary contributor Kayla E. has launched a Kickstarter for the anthology she co-edits, Nat Brut, and she's such a good thinker and the new issue certainly sounds promising enough for me to briefly set aside my aversion to Kickstarter.

Hey, I was on NPR on Wednesday talking (with Norman Hathaway) about my new book, Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream.

Book industry: Ursula K. Le Guin is awesome (I mean, I knew that already, but this is extra).

Frank Santoro has a new column for us following up on his experience at CAB, but this time he focuses on how the market for the back issues he sells has changed.

The most interesting thing to me is how sets of the original issues (of a series) are nearly impossible to sell. For years I had a set of the original Black Hole issues for sale. It never sold. Charles Burns himself would stop by the table, at different shows in different cities to see if it sold. I just couldn’t move it. At cover price alone (for all the issues together) it was more than double the cost of the collection. I finally took it out of circulation because Mr. Burns’s stare was too much. (I had a set of the original appearances of The Rocketeer in Starslayer but Chris Oliveros broke up the set 'cause he was only interested in one of the issues that had a Steve Ditko Missing Man back up and asked me to cut him a deal.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Consortium has begun distributing for Secret Acres and Alternative Comics.

Jillian Tamaki has won the Governor General Literary Prize.

—Interviews. Virtual Memories talks to Jules Feiffer.

—Commentary. Jared Gardner looks at recent developments in funny animal comics.

—Misc. Zainab Akhtar has a report from this year's Thought Bubble.

Master letterer Todd Klein is six entries in to a history of digital lettering.

David Brothers has ended his popular decade-old group blog, 4thletter!

—Video. There's a short documentary online for the new Art of Richard Thompson book:

The Art of Richard Thompson from GVI on Vimeo.

Today we have Gary Groth's 1991 interview with Robert Crumb, part of our ongoing spotlight on Zap.

GROTH: Don’t you think that representations of sex in the media can affect people, just like 40 years of being indoctrinated by Playboy can affect people?

CRUMB: I think anything that is propaganda or panders to people is definitely not good for them. They’re just pandering to people’s weaknesses, and trying to undercut the next guy in the competitive marketplace. But that’s anything; you can say the same thing about breakfast cereals with a lot of sugar in them.

GROTH: Yes, but misogynistic work could be pandering to the misogynistic impulses of misogynists.

CRUMB: But pandering cannot be truthful. There’s a dif­ference. You’re trying to appeal to a market in order to sell something.

GROTH: So in assessing a work you’re really relying heavily upon the motives of the artist.

CRUMB: Absolutely.

GROTH: But most of the time you really don’t know what those motives are.

CRUMB: But honesty rings true. Of course it takes somewhat of an educated taste, or a certain cultivation, to see what’s true and what isn’t — which means you have to look at a lot of work and make comparisons over a period of time. As a kid you don’t perceive those things quite so much. Kids can’t be expected to see what’s truth and what’s pandering. Kids are much more susceptible to victimization by marketing schemes and aggressive sales.

And Greg Hunter on Fukitor:

Fukitor is a collection of rebellious gestures performed on repeat. The book, a bellwether title for Fantagraphics’ F.U. Press imprint, brings together entries from cartoonist Jason Karns’s series of the same name. The individual stories are genre pastiches of about five-to-ten pages in length. They typically feature murderous ghouls or hyperviolent men of action or both. They are designed to accommodate as many instances of bloodshed and rape as possible. Much of the advance buzz surrounding Fukitor took the form of a debate concerning Karns’s depictions of sexual violence and his use of ethnic caricature. Some aspects of this conversation are larger than Fukitor, and if the book represents failures of empathy within the comics community, people besides Karns share responsibility for those lapses. But Karns alone is responsible for his book’s failures of imagination.

And elsewhere:

A piece on a new Richard Thompson documentary, and the trailer here:

And here's a Jillian Tamaki interview:

Good news: Sean Howe has a new book on the go, and it's comics-adjacent. Check out the news here.

Here's a Nate Powell interview in comics form.

And here's an interview with manga artist Hiroaki Samura.

Joe McCulloch has your weekly guide to the best-sounding new comics out in stores this week (spotlight picks from Lynda Barry and Régis Loisel), but starts things off by looking at a fairly obscure collection from Blutch:

This too is part of the character of the work - I'd argue more prominently so than Blutch's carefully parceled marshaling of sonic lines. No, the Jazzman strips are often jokes, and this is an old-but-good one: the too-cool yé-yé singer is unmoved by booze, smoke and sex, but throw on some Duke Ellington and he is open-mouthed and post-coitally limp. It's like a Carl Barks gag page, though Blutch takes different strips in different tonal directions. A horn player is seen beating a woman bloody, then rolling out to the club to reduce the audience to tears. A black superstar basks in the public adulation of Paris, only to spy provincial women grimacing at him behind his back. A promoter lazes through a parade of sub-par players, only to perk up at the sound of truly great playing, then scowl and storm away upon discovering the musician is a woman. Lee Morgan is shot dead by his lover, prompting a bassist to kiss his long-suffering wife. A harried woman in a nightgown, cleaning up after her unconscious husband, stares at a shirtless man practicing in a window across the way, and she lays down satisfied.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Michael Cavna talks to Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the most controversial cartoons about Islam of all time. Rose has a new book coming out.

Andrice Arp has ten questions for Simon Hanselmann.

—News. The third annual British Comics Awards were announced, with Isabel Greenberg taking Best Book, and Posy Simmonds making it into the Hall of Fame.

—Misc. Richard McGuire did the cover for the latest New Yorker in the style of Here.

Add W. C. Fields to the list of wannabe cartoonists.

Also, The New Yorker has its special "Cartoons of the Year" issue out now. Looks like it might be worth picking up for the two-page Paul Karasik article on a Charles Addams gag alone.

Today Julia Gfrorer, who just released an excellent and terrifying new comic with fellow TCJ-contributor Sean T. Collins, brings us a column about Aidan Koch's recent work, first serialized over at Comics Workbook. Aidan has also just released a new book I'm quite fond of entitled Impressions.

Some languages depend more heavily than others on sequence to convey meaning. Word order in Latin is fungible because each word in a sentence is inflected to denote its role: “Agricolam amat puella” and “puella amat agricolam” are the same, since the accusative “-am” ending indicates the recipient of the verb’s action. In English, word order is more important: “the girl loves the farmer” and “the farmer loves the girl” describe different matters entirely. The syntax of comics is expressed through order, proximity, and repetition: we learn what an image is doing on the page almost entirely by examining its position among its neighbors. Not all cartoonists draw attention to this–in fact many labor to make the psychological interval between each panel as unobtrusive as possible. In Aidan Koch’s “Configurations”the interval is central, impossible for the reader to ignore, and in a sense that’s what this comic is actually about: the struggle to glean narrative significance amid disparate objects and incidents, the search for a meaningful story arc within seemingly random events.

Ok, what else?

If you're in NYC tonight, come see me and Norman Hathaway at 7 pm at The Strand. We will chat about our new book Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream, in which we document the life stories of two fantastic modernist designers responsible for everything from The Cubs uniforms to Wrigley's Gum packaging to Catalina Island. Dorothy Shepard was the first major female modernist designer in North America. Experience the love! Need more convincing? Here's the best piece I've read about what we were trying to do with the book, courtesy of our pals over at The Paris Review.

More Paris Review: TCJ-contributor Nicole Rudick on Megahex.

Nice interview and article on Zap over at the Chicago Tribune.

I like this series on digital lettering by lettering maestro Todd Klein.

And here's a fine interview by Tom Spurgeon with the perennially underrated cartoonist Eric Haven, who has a new book out from Adhouse.

Jill Lepore has gotten a lot of attention and given many interviews for her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, but I don't think anyone has asked her the kind of questions that occurred to cartoonist, Wonder Woman enthusiast, and occultist Ron Regé, Jr. Here's a sample of their discussion:

Can you tell us anything about Marjorie Wilkes Huntley that might not have made it into your book? Her presence in this story is a bit mysterious, and seems almost secretly pivotal. She enters Marston's life at such an early stage, and remains involved with the family until the very end. She was an early suffragist, and visited Ethyl Byrne. Did she first introduce this idea of plural relationships? I was halfway through preparing this interview when I noticed your footnote that explained that Elizabeth Marston told her children that "everything was explained in a box of documents that were in a closet in Huntley's home" and that Huntley had later burned the box saying that "the world isn't ready for this, I have to destroy it." For all the "incense burning" feminist fans of Wonder Woman, what more can you tell us about her? I'd like to note that as a cartoonist, as well as a magical thinker, the fact that Huntley actually helped ink and letter the comics is pretty significant!

I am frustrated that I was able to discover so little about Huntley. She died alone, in a nursing home, and she had no children. So far as I can tell, she left no papers, and, as you point out, I did come across evidence that she may have destroyed them. I was thrilled to find some correspondence from her in Gloria Steinem’s papers at Smith. And there were other treasures, here and there. I was especially intrigued by a photograph that I found—it’s reproduced in the book--of all three women, sitting on a garden bench: Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway Marston each hold an infant; Huntley holds a baby doll. For the record, I am unconvinced that Huntley actually burned her papers, and I would not be at all surprised if, one day, they turned up.

We also have Rob Kirby's review of Spankies, a collection of internet-addicted art school grad humor comics from Nick Sumida. Here's how Rob begins:

In the prologue to his debut book, Nick Sumida receives an online game called Snackies. He describes it to his roommate: "You play this narcissistic millennial with an art school degree and an addiction to outside validation." Various parts of the gameplay involve putting cookies over your eyes to avoid seeing a deluge of student loan bills, and experiencing a nervous breakdown in a café while thinking about death. Sumida apologizes that it's not multiplayer while his roommate remains unimpressed: "What a weirdly specific and boring game." Welcome to the Snackies universe.

In Sumida’s world it is imperative to hide your slightest flaws and insecurities from the world, lest you be made vulnerable. Your suspicion that the future might be a bleak, existential black hole may well be true, and pretending you have even a chance at a fulfilling relationship is a big fat cosmic joke – at your expense. But Snackies is no nihilist vision; the book is the work of a delightfully demented, wonderfully imaginative humorist and satirist.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. I think we missed this interview with Seth from the London Yodeller last week. He's having some year.

Alex Dueben talked to Aisha Franz for Comic Book Resources.

—News. A sedition investigation has been opened against the Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar. Three people were arrested for selling his books last week.

—Reviews & Commentary. Hillary Brown reviews Walter Scott's Wendy strips. That's some funny stuff.

Rob Clough is about halfway through a month-long look at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Zainab Akhtar looks at Darryl Seitchik's Missy.

Dominic Umile has what I believe is the first review I've seen of Richard McGuire's expanded Here, which I'm guessing may cause a bit of a stir upon release.

—Misc. I know it's harmless, but something about the fact that they've begun selling adult Underoos makes me sad.

Hey, it's Thursday! Today we have Frank Santoro, with whom I spent a quiet Sunday evening discussing the finer points of "liking" vs. "really liking" things. It was a warm autumn evening and we were hippies. Anyhow, here he is on CAB, the comic book convention held last weekend here in Brooklyn.

I had fun. Good sales. Same as last year. Which was great. It felt less crowded however maybe that was good? It was so packed the last couple years that often you couldn’t see anything so I dunno when I came up with the same numbers as last year I was fine with it being less crowded. You could actually walk around. Anywhere else it would be a blockbuster but in Brooklyn it felt like we were all talking about how “slow” it was. So that’s something to chew on.

Lala Albert’s Janus has to be the book of the show. At least for me. Lala can fucking draw. And this new story is a killer “identity” riff that feels so timely and NOW. Exciting stuff. Check it out!

Elsewhere:

Here's The Japan Times on a film called Tatsumi, which animates the titular author's works.

Hey it's Jim Drain, sometime-cartoonist, all-the-time artist, on his week in culture.

As a kid I was fascinated and thought this scene was pretty much the coolest thing in the world.

Oh the glory of Drag Cartoons!

First, Ken Parille is here with a new Grid column, and he's tackling a subject that I'm sure everyone is happy to keep reading about, James Sturm's "The Sponsor". But Parille being Parille, he brings something new to the table, examining the strip from 14 different perspectives, at least one of which will probably appeal to you:

Online tweets/posts/etc. about comics (or any subject, really) often seem like futile skirmishes in an unwinnable war. Each critic takes a narrow position and holds that territory, refusing to grant any validity to divergent arguments. Isn’t it possible, especially when talking about art, that different and even contradictory interpretations can be equally valid, that a short comic strip, for example, can communicate its meanings (if that’s ever the right word to use when talking about art) in opposing ways? In other words, isn't it possible that a comic can simultaneously express X and Not X, with both interpretive camps being right? I think so.

Recently, James Sturm’s online strip “The Sponsor” (read it here) has generated a lot of commentary that takes the form of “It clearly can mean only X.” Making no effort to look for evidence that complicates or undermines their claims, these writers lack "interpretive sympathy": they fail to identify with readers whose experiences lead them to very different conclusions. They also overlook a fact about reading comics: one element — a line of dialogue, a facial expression, a subtitle — can simultaneously suggest different interpretations.

Below are fourteen responses to “The Sponsor”. While writing each, I tried to imagine what it was about the comic that would lead a critic to view this reading as the “correct” one. When I first read the strip, it seemed fairly transparent in its “message” (which is never the right word to use when talking about art). But now I’m unsure that my initial response was anything like “true” or “accurate.” (Doubt can be a positive interpretive approach.) As of today, I don’t agree with all — or even most of the claims — I make below. But trying to understand each as I was writing it — to act for a moment as if it were true — was instructive. To me at least.

And then we have Sean T. Collins's review of Aisha Franz's Earthling. Here's how he opens:

Aisha Franz's faces are an architectural marvel. Their features bunch up in the center of great round white circle heads crowned with hair that looks sculpted from clay. They're bookended by apple cheeks drawn with a perpetual blush rendered as circular gray scribbles, as though a physical ordeal or an uncomfortable emotion were always only scant seconds in their past. Eyebrows, wrinkles, creases, and smile lines push the eye toward the beady eyes and pug noses they ring. (The look is very Cabbage Patch Kids, but there's a reason those weird-looking things made millions.) They broadcast emotion from the center of the head like a spotlight focused down into a laser -- curiosity and confusion, peevishness and puckishness, boredom and loneliness and anger and, very occasionally, satisfaction and delight. In a book where Franz's all-pencil style -- the lack of inks and the deliberately boxy and rudimentary props and backgrounds suggesting a casual, tossed-off approach completely belied by Franz's obvious control of this aesthetic -- works very well, those faces work best of all.

The story is another matter.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. The National Book Foundation hosts an interview of NBA nominee Roz Chast.

Smoky Man talks to the contributors to the Italian anthology U.D.W.F.G., including Mat Brinkman.

Drew Friedman answers five questions for Book Soup.

Hannah Berry, Kevin Huizenga, and James Lloyd talk about their participation in the WWI-themed anthology, Above the Dreamless Dead.

Newsday checks in with Jules Feiffer.

Tim O'Shea talks to Eric Haven.

As part of a longer interview about his writing in general, novelist Will Self talks about his start as a cartoonist.

—Reviews & Commentary. The A.V. Club reviews new titles by Jeff Smith, Mickey Zachilli, and others.

Gary Panter appreciates Richard Lindner.

Adrian Hill has published the next two parts of his examination of the William S. Burroughs/Malcolm Mc Neill collaboration, Ah Pook is Here.

—News. The Rosenbach Museum is suing Maurice Sendak's estate for allegedly refusing to turn over rare books as dictated in Sendak's will. Among other books, the dispute involves several Beatrix Potter titles, which the estate apparently considers to be "children's books" rather than "rare books."

Heidi MacDonald has a photo report from last weekend's CAB.

Amazon has released its list of the best comics of 2014.

—Funnies. A few people sent me this collaboration between Zack Soto and Connor Willumsen.

Today on the site: Joe McCulloch's latest news about life in comics.

I raced through CAB on Saturday with just 2.5 hours of free childcare courtesy of my mom.  My faves were Lale Westvind's latest publications, Breakdown Press (New Ines Estrada, Lala Albert, Conor Stechschulte, Connor Willumsen), Noel Freibert and the unstoppable Leon Sadler, briefly ported over from England and having the great American adventure.

And there are some art/comics articles on the internet worth checking out:

James Ensor looks like CAB, or CAB looks like James Ensor.

Via Bill K., A Finnish animation.

Jeet Heer wrote a great Twitter essay on Steve Ditko, Ayn Rand and Spider-Man.

And here's a good evaluation of the problematics and politics around the acceptance of the work of comics-influenced artist Allen Jones.

Now watch this, all of you, and despair...

Today, we are happy to present an excerpt from the oral history of Zap Comix compiled by scholar Patrick Rosenkranz for the forthcoming collection of Zap.

In September 1969, the Berkeley police raided the Print Mint warehouse to seize all their copies of Zap #4, but owner Don Schenker had been tipped off and had moved their stock to another location. When they saw bookstores and distributors getting busted, the Zapsters suspected they might be next.

[ROBERT] WILLIAMS: We just thought we were all going to get arrested somewhere down the line, because there had never been material like this. Remember, 1969 is when the first adult magazines ever came out that showed pussy and asshole, and this was just flipped, to actually have this in a printed magazine that went through a printing press. You know, anything before that was just some secret thing.

[ROBERT] CRUMB: There was an organized, systematic, repressive action taken against every aspect of that outburst against the system, including alternative print media, by the powers, agencies, and institutions of the corporate state. It is not paranoia, but the fact of history to say these things. They didn’t sit back and passively watch while Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage. They had their think tanks staying up nights plotting and scheming new techniques to squash, neutralize, and co-opt this threat to everything they held dear. They constructed sophisticated strategies for instilling fear into the general population. You could watch it happening all through the ’70s and into the ’80s. Fear was a weapon the bastards used very effectively.

[GILBERT] SHELTON: There was a lot of pressure at the time. I guess a lot of people have forgotten how paranoid everyone was, that we were either going to be rounded up and all put in prison camps, or just shot down on the streets by the forces of reaction. Things didn’t look so good in ’68 and ’69.

WILLIAMS: There was a shaky period there in ’70–’71, where we thought the government was going to clamp down. There was a chance there that the country could have swung to the right. We know for a fact that they were reconditioning internment camps in Eastern and Southern California and Arizona where they put the Japanese in, and there were remarks about doing it from the government. We stuck our necks out already so we might as well stick them out all the way and violate everything.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Chris Ware writes about the story behind his latest New Yorker cover.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian briefly reviews Joe Sacco's Bumf (which is very much in the tradition of Zap, and which I predict will blow a few of his more recent readers' minds) and Jean-Pierre Filiu & David B's Best of Enemies.

Zainab Akhtar reviews newish work by Rob Davis, Stephen Collins, and Hermann.

—News. Koyama Press is going digital via Sequential.

Jim Woodring receives the Lynd Ward Prize.

No one writes catalog copy like Zak Sally.

FAIR WARNING-- please DO NOT send it back for any of these reasons:

it is physically difficult to read.

yup. there are literally MILLIONS of books that are very easy to read, physically. this is not one of them (but maybe if you get through it you can find out why). [Etc. ...]

—Interviews & Profiles. Here is a transcript of Alan Moore biographer Lance Parkin's live interview with Moore, conducted a few weeks back for the UK publication of Parkin's book.

—Controversies. Russ Heath recently wrote and drew a strip for Hero Initiative about Roy Lichtenstein's use of a Heath panel for one of his most famous paintings. As the mention of Lichtenstein in comics circles usually does, this quickly spurred a lot of vehement and largely predictable arguments online (although noted Before Watchmen participant and apologist Darwyn Cooke doing the strip's lettering added an ironic new sideshow to the main event). The issue of whether or not Lichtenstein exploited cartoonists' work for his paintings is in my opinion more complicated and less clear-cut than either side will usually admit, but however you feel about Lichtenstein, it's important to remember (as Evan Dorkin pointed out on Twitter) that his paintings only affected a relatively small number of artists -- the comics industry as a whole exploited many, many more.

Second, after nearly a week of nonstop debate over the recent James Sturm strip, I don't think anyone needs my take on things, but there are still a few things I think worth saying that I haven't seen said. Tom Spurgeon had what I thought was a reasonable response last Friday, if you aren't familiar with the controversy. And Brandon Graham drew a very effective response strip of his own, depicting a version of the story in which the characters react in a positive manner instead of a negative one. It's a fun strip, and I can see why it's so popular, but I wonder if people would have liked it so much if the Sturm strip wasn't already there for context and comparison. That may seem obvious, but what I mean by that is I'm not sure stories in which the main characters always do the right thing make for the best, most lasting art.

Let me be clear here if I can. I think the debate over the strip's perceived sexism is largely a healthy, useful, and important thing, even though I don't fully agree with that reading. (I think any reading of the strip that doesn't include its premise -- that envy and fear of a (female) fellow artist's perceived success is akin to a pointless, harmful, and debilitating addiction -- is at the least incomplete. I also think that if a reader isn't already familiar with the culture surrounding 12-step recovery programs, that central premise is clearly a lot harder to discern.) There are always multiple competing valid readings for any work of art, and everyone is entitled to their own response. Discussions about the political implications of any work of art can only be enriching, assuming they are entered into honestly, and people don't have to agree on every particular to learn from each other's perspectives.

But there has been another popular response to the strip that I think is far less defensible, and much less healthy, and that's the apparent belief that artistic depiction of bad behavior necessarily equals endorsement. (Obviously not every detractor of the strip falls into this trap.) While Graham's strip is excellent as a response to Sturm's, I think if Sturm's initial strip had taken the same tack as Graham's, it would have been much less effective, and frankly, unmemorable. It doesn't take too long imagining the application of this approach to other stories before you can see why. Suddenly the three little pigs all responsibly build their houses out of bricks. When the witch in the wood meets Hansel and Gretel, she feeds and comforts them for the sake of kindness rather than cannibalism. Macbeth chooses to set his ambitions aside, and the jury in To Kill a Mockingbird quickly agrees to Tom Robinson's acquittal. Obviously we would have to lose a great many stories.

Sometimes art provokes uncomfortable responses. Kafka, who wrote better uncomfortable fiction than just about anybody, once famously said, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." I don't think I'd claim so much for Sturm's strip, but the fact that it explores discomfiting territory is a point in its favor. The same is true of the debate it inspired.

(By the way, this little-noticed tweet provides interesting context to the whole business.)

On this exciting comic book convention weekend we present Matthew Thurber's Letter to a Young Cartoonist.

What is the meaning of the Internet? And what can be done about it? I am 36. Like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno I come from Another Time, the pre-Internet era, to guide you, Young Cartoonist through the architecture of Hell. Young Cartoonist, born in 1990 (shudder!!!) I ask you, what does the Internet mean to you? Is it your preferred medium? Is it your Life? Is it your Wife? An altar of sacrifice, at which you offer up your artwork, hoping to feel like someone cares even tiny bit? Even one Like?

Historically cartoonists drew on paper. Why? Only because it’s available and cheap. People who draw will also draw on tables, on their clothes and shoes, on walls, and on bathroom stalls. People will draw with sparklers and with lawnmowers to create crop circles. People will draw with invisible lines to connect the dots in the Milky Way. It is evident that people who want to will draw in any available format, whether it is a beautiful sheet of hot-press watercolor paper or a virtual 3D space in Google Sketchup or the skin of a water buffalo. The desire to make marks comes with no predetermined appropriate surface.

Elsewhere:

I'm pleased to report that I have seen a copy of Frank Santoro's new comic, Morgan, and it rules very hard. Go forth and acquire it at CAB! Also, be sure not to miss Leon Sadler and Lando's table, as well as the Breakdown Press table, which has some fine debuts from Inez Estrada, Antoine Cosse and Ryan Holmberg's latest vintage manga publication by Matsumoto Masahiko.

In NYC for the CAB? I suggest you visit Tomato House tonight for Anya Davidson's art show, as all as Takeshi Murata's Om Rider at Salon 94 on Bowery at Stanton.

A graphic novel account of union negotiations at NYC's beloved Strand bookstore has just been published. More here. 

The Beat has a round-up of people misunderstanding James Sturm's very funny and accurate comic strip.

Steve Heller previews the new Ed Emberley book.

Today, Dan Nadel interviews the great Italian cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti about his newest book, Hansel & Gretel, and many other things. Here's a small sample of their conversation:

Are these all the images you created or are there some left out?

No, normally I use everything. I did maybe two or three more images for this main subject. I did three versions. One I put inside and the other one I only used for myself. It’s incredible how this work came out. It came in a very natural way. I ‘d like to make all the books like this.

(laughs) I was just going to ask. Is that unusual for you? Is it usually more organized?

No, I’m quick for my kind of images. For my research, for my paintings. Normally, I’m quick. I make many, many images with the pen and also the brush. For my personal drawings and paintings, I’m very quick. I like illustrations I can do in two days, one day. Luckily, I’m quick. But for some books, I take my time. I do after I think after I do. And for my stories in comics, for my stories I’m very slow. For other stories like Jekyll and Hyde, I’m much more quick.

Hansel and Gretel was just one or two weeks?

More or less. Maybe less.

That’s fast.

After Hansel and Gretel, I decided that I was really interested in this kind of method, so I started to make other images in a very free way. Only black and white. There was not a story, but there was a sort of an evocation of a story. I did an exhibition in Bologna of 50 or so of these works.

We also have Robert Kirby's review of the last eight minicomics releases from Kuš!, the Latvian publishing effort. Here's his introductory paragraph:

Kuš! (pronounced "koosh"), the Latvian Comics anthology launched in 2007, recently sent me their eight most recent minicomics, half of which were released in late 2013, the rest earlier this year. Each 24-page mini is a solo effort from a different creator in their growing stable of Latvian and international artists. Each creator employs elements of fantasy or magical realism in his or her stories, with one piece being flat-out science fiction (albeit in a very whimsical fashion). Even the one comic that appears to be a straightforward, grounded-in-the-real-world story—Oskars Pavlovskis' Lucky—dips into the Twilight Zone before the final page. The comics and artists featured by Kuš! often work in an elliptical fashion; the stories revel in ambiguity, traffic in surreal imagery and storylines, and are frequently grounded in the conceptual rather than the concrete. Each mini has a brief, well-written synopsis on the back cover, which can help the uninitiated suss out some of the more abstract tales. They are all 4" x 6", in color, impeccably designed and produced, making them collectible little art objects.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Biographer Lance Parkin has posted the final interview he conducted with subject Alan Moore in four parts so far.

In advance of CAB in Brooklyn this weekend, Al Jaffee.

Peggy Roalf at DART interviews cartoonist/illustrator Jonathon Rosen.

The latest guest on Anshuman Iddamsetty's Arcade podcast is Nina Bunjevac.

Alex Dueben talks to Copra creator Michel Fiffe.

Zainab Akhtar talks to Swedish cartoonist Erik Svetoft.

Tom Spurgeon talks to comiXology's Chip Mosher about their Submit program.

—Reviews & Commentary. Nicholas Lezard writes about Hunt Emerson's Calculus Cat.

Martin Wisse writes about the online controversy surrounding the James Sturm comic Dan linked to yesterday.

Ruth Margalit writes about the disturbing messages of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree.

—News. As just about everyone reported yesterday, Bill Watterson has released the poster he has drawn to promote the next Angoulême festival, and announced via interview that he won't be attending the event. Because hers was the first post I saved, let me send you to Brigid Alverson for the details.

Today on the site, Sean T. Collins on The Basil Plant.

When considering a comic this simple in form, the natural assumption is that function will follow. Panel by panel, page by page, the story will proceed in linear fashion, building meaning like a block tower. It’s comics as a solidly written college essay, or even just one paragraph therein, each sentence serving just enough of a purpose to connect its neighbors, the whole equalling the sum of its parts precisely. That’s how it seems The Basil Plant will operate—at first. First-person narrative captions float above a series of self-portraits, describing a method of anxiety management that’s novel, though not dramatically so: “When my anxiety is too great to bear, I sit in the sun and eat a pear. “I can’t remember how I got to this method, but it works.” There are flourishes here that might cause your ears to prick up a bit — that rhyme in the first panel, or the way Lannes situates herself on a park bench with no visible means of supporting itself, floating in midair as if existing for no reason other than to support her.

Elsewhere:

James Sturm has a pretty funny comic online that addresses a very common cartoonist's disease. I guess people are mad about this comic, but I can only find "So and so is mad about this comic" type messages. I dunno, seems like a pretty dead-on satire to me.

The best news of the upcoming weekend is Anya Davidson's solo exhibition in Brooklyn at Tomato House.

Here's a bit of a Renee French interview.

I'm inexplicably glad to know about this DVD release. Also, when is someone smart going to write the Bob Kane story. The contracts, the clown paintings, the ghosts, Hollywood, etc! My favorite kind of cartoonist story.

And something is a'brewing at Angouleme with new Bill Watterson art, thus sending all of the comics internet into a tizzy.

Today on the site, Joe McCulloch is here with his weekly guide to the best-sounding new comics in stores. Before he gets to that, he also takes a look at the time Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub) wrote an American Wolverine comic:

X-Men Unlimited #50, marking the one and only appearance of Kazuo Koike as writer for an American comic book. Koike was actually a Marvel superhero veteran of a sort, having worked on a Hulk series way back in the early ’70s at the time of the publisher’s first effort at cracking the manga market via Kodansha (the same effort that led to Ryōichi Ikegami on Spider-Man), but he only became well-known in English-speaking environs via Frank Miller’s boundless enthusiasm for Lone Wolf and Cub, the popular swordsman series Koike wrote for Gōseki Kojima. Miller, of course, had gotten to indulge his Japanese fascinations through a very prominent 1982 Wolverine miniseries with Chris Claremont, so the character’s relation to manga stuff had been at least somewhat well-established already.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Gil Roth talks to frequent TCJ writer Richard Gehr about his new book on New Yorker cartoonists.

Alex Dueben speaks to Jill Lepore, the New Yorker writer behind the new Wonder Woman/William Moulton Marston book.

Hogan's Alley has republished a profile of Hy Eisman, a prolific ghost artist for decades of comic strips, including Bringing Up Father, Smokey Stover, Tiger, Blondie, and more.

—Reviews & Commentary. Robert Boyd reviews books by Charles Burns and Dylan Horrocks.

For Bookslut, Brian Nicholson reviews Marguerite Van Cook & James Romberger's The Late Child and Other Animals, as well as Aisha Franz's Earthling.

At Slate, Glen Weldon reviews the Jill Lepore book mentioned earlier.

Brian Cremins has a fun personal essay on The Curse of the Werewolf.

Publishers Weekly has announced their best comics of 2014.

Today on the site: Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash sit down (virtually) with Philip Nel to talk about their long-awaited new children's book, Bow-Wow's Nightmare Neighbors, debuting Saturday at CAB. I'm a huge fan of these books and these artists, so all of this is a real treat.

Philip Nel: First there was Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug, and then the six Bow-Wow concept books (2007-2009). Now, five years later…Bow-Wow returns! Where has he been? (Since I know you both, I have some sense of why the long-awaited Bow-Wow’s Nightmare Neighbors [2014] was so many years in the making. However, on behalf of Bow-Wow fans everywhere, I had to ask…)

Mark Newgarden: There were several reasons for the gap between books. First, it took us awhile to come up with another long-form story that we felt was as strong about as Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug. Secondly, our original editor Tamson Weston (as well as the marketing and sales team) left Harcourt when that company was in flux and it made sense to move on to another publishing house. Fortunately Bow-Wow was adopted by Neal Porter and installed at his new kennel in the Flatiron building at Roaring Brook Press/ Macmillan. Thirdly, Bow-Wow’s Nightmare Neighbors grew into a much more involved and time-consuming project than any of our other books. At 64 pages, over 100 images and 0 words, this is far from a typical picture book.

Megan Montague Cash: And lastly, we have had some serious interruptions by some real-life nightmare neighbors. We live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which now seems to be ground zero for all the new “luxury housing” in the universe. Dealing with a troublesome development project next door stole a great deal time away from our book (as well as the rest of our lives). These problems are a lot worse than Bow-Wow’s and so far, there is no real-life resolution like the one that we were able to imagine for him and the ghost cat mob from across the street.

Nel: I hope your happy ending also involves a long nap.

Newgarden: It will!

Elsewhere:

On the other side of the spectrum, here's a lengthy profile of the upcoming Zap box set over at the NY Times.

And here's a good excerpt from TCJ-contributor Richard Gehr's excellent new book, I Only Read it for the Cartoons -- a chapter on Roz Chast.

This is a rather remarkable story, with accompanying visuals, of a trove of recently saved newspapers.

In honor of Steve Ditko's 87th birthday yesterday Tom Spurgeon posted links to various Warren stories by the great artist.

And finally, I enjoyed this article on Gilbert Hernandez and the depiction of time in comics.

Today we are publishing my interview with Charles Burns, in which we discuss Sugar Skull, his slow working methods, learning not to censor himself, and much more. Here's a sample:

That was another thing [Todd] Hignite included in that In the Studio book — it has a bunch of different drafts you did of a picture of a ghoul, I don’t know what it actually is.

Sure, yeah. That’s it, I forgot. That’s actually a fairly good — that’s just a single image for a cover, but it would be similar for working a page. Breaking down a page and figuring it out. But that’s kind of the way I work.

What was amazing about to me was how much it changed and it’s not like it ever was a bad drawing, but in some ways the early version was just so different and so less interesting than where you ended up at in the end. I know that’s the goal, but it still almost feels like you have to have faith in your own ability to eventually get it right – you don’t worry about too much at first.

That’s something really important, for me anyway. And that’s the way that I write as well. It’s not sitting down at a keyboard and writing a script and thinking, oh shit, what’s the next line? I sit with cheap notebooks or cheap sketchbooks and just fill them up with ideas and maybe pieces of dialogue and bits and pieces. I keep circulating through all those notes. Go back to those notes. So nothing feels cut in stone or permanent. It all feels like it’s open and I can move in any direction that I want.

It’s starting with a lot of information and slowly, slowly distilling it down to something that’s concrete. So maybe that says something about my personality that I’m very cautious and very careful about all that stuff, but I don’t have the kind of brain that can sit down and write beautiful dialogue and a beautiful story. There’s people who certainly can do that work really quickly and just do amazing work, but I don’t have that facility unfortunately. I wish I did, but I don’t.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. In a move that presumably stems from the recent legal settlement, Marvel has begun printing creator credits for Jack Kirby on many of its titles.

J. David Spurlock The Wallace Wood Estate is suing Tatjana Wood over the possession of some Wally Wood art.

—Interviews & Profiles. Aeon has a lengthy profile of Alan Moore.

Alex Dueben interviewed both MariNaomi and Simon Hanselmann.

—Reviews & Commentary. For the NYRB, Sarah Kerr reviews the big two recent books on Wonder Woman.

For Hyperallergic, Dominic Umile reviews the new Tim Lane collection.

—Funnies. Study Group has published a whole slew of Halloween-related webcomics.

Today on the site, Frank Santoro comes to us with an interview with Manuele Fior, a cartoonist Frank only just told me about, but who looks very exciting.

How has the evolution of Italian comics affected your work? Because I think, if I am not mistaken, you really began to make it as a comics maker in France. And Italian comics have their own pace and their own crisis and their own moments when they have slow down so it’s not a business anymore so you have to look for alternatives. How do you think being part of comics both in Italy and France has influenced your work?

I think it influenced me 100%. I see myself belonging to a certain Italian tradition of comic makers. The maestro for me, the reason I chose to make comics is Lorenzo Mattotti, maybe he is not so well known here in South America but when I read Fires, a Lorenzo Mattotti graphic novel from 1986, I decided to push for this job. And of course Lorenzo Mattotti comes from some comic artists in between Italy and also South America, Argentina, like Alberto Breccia, José Muñoz, Hugo Pratt. You know, comics in Italy have a very schizophrenic story: they were very popular in the ’70s when Hugo Pratt made Corto Maltese, Guido Crepax made Valentina and in the end of the ’70s beginning of the ’80s there were two groups that revolutionized the comics world: Valvoline, the group of Mattotti, Igort, and Charles Burns, who was living in Italy at the time, and the other one was Ranxerox, with [Tanino] Liberatore, [Stefano] Tamburini, and Andrea Pazienza. When I read some comics of Andrea Pazienza and Mattotti it was clear that something changed forever. They opened a door I could never shut. It’s like the first time you see Moebius, you put some books in the box then you put some new books on the shelf, a new story opens its wings. That for me was Mattotti and Pazienza. So I am definitively sticking to it but of course I am living in France so I am very influenced by a lot of people, by the work of L’Association, the work of David B, we are sponges so we take a bit of everything so we make the best out of it.

Elsewhere:

Via Francoise Mouly, here's a gallery of Chris Ware New Yorker covers. I like these very much. And on that front, I wanted to make a special note that the great Lorenzo Matotti is making a rare NYC appearance on Saturday at McNally Jackson for his book Hansel and Gretel, which is spectacular looking.

Bill Kartalopolous has written a comics primer over at the Huff Po.

Everyone should check out this original art auction from the legendary Jay Lynch. The man should be paid for the description alone.

It looks like Stan Lee finally beat Stan Lee media.

Today, Greg Hunter reviews the new Humanoids edition of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella, paying particularly close attention to the way Kelly Sue DeConnick's adaptation of the text differs from previous versions. Here's a short sample, but read it all:

Forest couches the sexual aspects of the Barbarella stories within a thoroughgoing cheekiness, and in fact he was ambivalent about how readers received his comics. (From Gravett: “Where I saw humor and the expression of liberty, all they saw was ‘la fesse’ [literally, ‘the butt’].”) But if Barbarella is a figure of freedom, that freedom does not exceed the bounds of Forest’s fantasies. The stories don’t pathologize her actions or frame a dangerous circumstance as the outcome of those actions. And yet it’s never difficult to remember that these comics are the creation of a dude.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Movies News. Seemingly every site on the entire comics internet (not to mention non-comics cultural sites) is extremely excited about the latest casting and scheduling announcements about movies potentially being made featuring characters who originated in comic books. I guess most of those places are really more about enthusiasm for superheroes (or "geek culture" in general, ugh) than about comics per se, so it's not out of line for them to spend so much time covering movies instead of comics (I'm sure it helps the bottom line in terms of traffic, too). But it also reveals how far comics really do still have to go. Twenty years ago, people who liked comics and believed in what they could be would defend the medium by comparing it to film, and saying, "Imagine what people would think about movies if almost all of them were about superheroes." That hasn't quite happened yet, but it's not a crazy thought any more. But the comics press is largely still mired in the same superhero-centric, fannish magical thinking as ever. Imagine if every literary publication you could think of ran lengthy, anticipatory celebrations of every announced cinematic adaptation of a book, dissecting the possible casting choices, etc. Wait a second, I just remembered the last few years' worth of arguments over the 50 Shades of Grey and Harry Potter and Hunger Games movies. Never mind. It's actually spreading. I guess it's nice to know it's American culture in general that's regressing and not just comics in particular.

—Reviews & Commentary. At The Believer Logger, Adrian Hill has published the first of a three-part exploration of the artistic collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill (Ah Pook is Here).

Over at Hazlitt, Jeet Heer reviews the new Wonder Woman history by Jill Lepore.

J. Hoberman has a rave at the New York Review of Books about Dan's What Nerve! show.

Marc (Not the Beastmaster) Singer emerges from retirement to take stock of the latest Grant Morrison comics.

John Adcock looks at soap opera strips.

Jonathan Jones remembers Marie Duval.

Brian Hibbs notes a baffling Wonder Woman cover-marketing decision.

Neel Mukherjee writes about the conclusion of Charles Burns' recent trilogy.

I admire Tom Spurgeon's positive attitude, particularly as my response was more just that old people like to complain and still send letters to the editor.

—Interviews & Profiles. The aforementioned Jill Lepore was a guest on NPR's Fresh Air.

Via video, the New York Times profiles Lalo Alcaraz.

The great New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross was a guest on the Virtual Memories podcast.

Rob Kirby talks to Cara Bean.

Blexbolex talks process.

Today on the site: Joe McCulloch has your week in comics.

Elsewhere:

This is the ultimate fanboy comic book porn. And I love it.

As usual Grantland has a nice history of a Marvel character followed by the casting news itself.

Richard Gehr points to the unlikely meeting of Frank Zappa and Mary Worth.

I love a good collection dump.

This list of "scary" comics is only notable for its omissions.

Welcome to the week. Chris Mautner is with us this morning, bringing along a lengthy interview with Michel Fiffe, the cartoonist creator of Copra and Zegas who has recently begun a side-career as a writer for Marvel. Here's a sample of their talk:

Was Zegas received well online or in the Act-i-vate Primer at all?

The Act-i-vate Primer was ignored and the Zegas stuff that was online didn’t make a dent, either. My friends liked it a lot, but it never clicked beyond that. That same story, “Birthday”, was then relaunched for MTV Geek, a site which reportedly got millions of hits a day. Not a peep from that. I knew that the platform wasn’t necessarily the problem, it was the work. It just wasn’t clicking with an audience. During this entire period, I would also occasionally make sample pages for mainstream publishers, just to exhaust every possible avenue in order to try and get paid to do this comics thing. Nothing came of that, either. It was a frustrating period.

So how did you move beyond that?

I thought making better work would take care of everything, I thought that really taking stock of what I wanted from comics would lead me to the answer. I felt like time was running out but I still had this desire to make comic books that hadn’t diminished after all this time and thought that was worth something. Plus I was getting tired of huffing barge at my day job.

“Huffing barge”? What exactly was your day job during this period?

I built props and costumes for sports teams and Broadway shows and for parades. It was a fun job, a creative, challenging job, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do for more than a couple of years. I was there for seven.

So how does that lead to “huffing barge?” I apologize for the segue, but I’m intrigued by the euphemism.

Barge is the highly toxic adhesive that we used to assemble many things. We used respirators and ventilators and all that, but it’s a little much sometimes. We also worked with latex a lot. We made rubber molds, sculpted puppets. It was definitely a career, but I didn’t want it to be my career. I wanted comics.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Roz Chast was one of three winners of the first annual Kirkus Prize.

In support for the Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart's legal problems, Martin Rowson has been recruiting cartoonists to draw caricatures of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Seth Kushner's cancer is no longer in remission. His family's gofundme page.

That extremely ambitious/expensive Tezuka Kickstarter I mentioned last week has drawn criticism from fans. Deb Aoki has the best rundown on the controversy I've seen.

Alexis Deacon has won the first Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story prize.

—Reviews & Commentary. In a surprise move, John Adcock compares Chester Gould with the Canadian painter Alex Colville.

—Misc. Here's a post gathering a lot of old illustrated Paramount Records advertisements, which were very influential on R. Crumb's blues comics.

Today on the site:

From the archives comes Gary Groth's expansive interview with the great Ralph Steadman, most famous for illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson books.

GROTH: Did you know who Hunter Thompson was?

STEADMAN: No, I had never heard of him before. Anyway, I went down there [to Louisville] and I met him after two days and we spent a drunken week looking for the rattled face of Kentucky, the ghastly sight that Hunter knew so well, and we finally found it in the mirror of our own face at the end of the week. The ghastly look, the rattled look [Chuckles]. I had done my drawing before I got back to New York. I spent a lot of the time in his hotel room drawing these pictures and he hadn’t done anything. He was in this stage of trying to help his mother with a personal problem; he didn’t talk about it much. He had a few family problems. He introduced me to his two older brothers, and he also maced someone that week, in a restaurant. Everybody was maced because when you spray mace in a bloody closed area, everybody gets it, everyone was going, “Ahhh!” In a restaurant!

GROTH: What were the circumstances?

STEADMAN: To get me out, because I stated drawing people and things were getting ugly. If he hadn’t had mace, we would have been in trouble.

GROTH: Who did he mace, the waiter?

STEADMAN: Somebody stumbling over: “Hey buddy, you can’t do this to me.” Hunter would say, “I wish you’d stop that ugly habit of sketching people.”

GROTH: He just carried a canister of mace with him?

STEADMAN: Yeah. And I guess we got on well because I was quite different. He said I always said everything was “teddible” — not terrible, but “teddible.” He had a funny way of saying it. I used to listen to what he said. He made me notice things I’d forgotten. So, anyway, I went back to Scanlan’s with the drawings and I hadn’t drawn a single horse. The editor said, “Didn’t you see any horses? Can’t we have one with horses in it?” So I did one drawing of a horse with a big dong, and also a Texan with his pants open and his own dong hanging out.

And on the other end of the drawing spectrum, here's Robert Kirby's review of John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite.

The Hospital Suite is a deeply revealing, heartrending account of King-Cat creator John Porcellino’s descent from a normal life into a seemingly endless series of physical and mental health problems, problems that threatened to derail his life for good. Like many Porcellino fans, I knew somewhat vaguely that he had dealt with a number of health issues beginning in the late ’90s, but I had no idea of their magnitude. The Hospital Suite (amazingly, his first book of all-new, all-original material), records it for posterity. Intense and harrowing, it’s a must-read for fans of Porcellino, fans of the medical auto-bio comics sub-genre (Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year, Ellen Forney’s Marbles), and fans of alt-comics in general.

Elsewhere:

Most important thing: The great Gladys Nilsson,  a member of the Hairy Who and a hugely influential and important artist in her own right has just opened a deeply compelling and at times shockingly honest solo show up right now in NYC at Garth Greenan Gallery. It's a must for anyone in or visiting the city. Don't miss it. Also, I did the interview for the catalog, which is available at the gallery.

Also very important: I think this video preview means that Ben Jones' new cartoon, Stone Quackers, is debuting Sunday night on FXX. This is the best cartoon Ben has done. I have seen an episode and I fell in luuuuvvv.

Another of my favorite artists, Leslie Stein, recently began serializing her diary comics over at Vice.

Gee, New York Magazine hearts, uh, whatever you call these kind of comics now (not mainstream, not genre, but... I dunno)... here's a lengthy piece on DC's John Constantine.

And that's what I have. Enjoy your weekend.

Today in his column, Frank Santoro follows up on his recent trip to Colombia by spotlighting a South American cartoonist named Berliac and his graphic novel, Playground:

This is a comic about John Cassavetes. It strikes a chord with me because it is very similar to another favorite comic of mine that is also about Cassavetes: John Pham’s Substitute Life: My John Cassavetes and Chris Ware diary from a 2002 sketchbook zine. Both use the comics form to study the process and output of the great film director. They also critique the dominant forms of comics and the comics industry by using Cassavetes' struggles with Hollywood as an example and metaphor. The authors’ own reactions to Cassavetes and their notes about these reactions/thoughts are used within the comic book narrative to tell Cassavetes' story—and the authors’ projection that they are living and participating in their own Cassavetes movie.

And then George Elkind is here with a review of Antoine Cossé's intriguing J.1137. Here's a sample of that:

Does it ever feel like you’re in a movie? That odd sense of constant performance, and constant dislocation, is exactly what this comic trades in. Throughout J.1137 a “voice-over” of sorts continues over all its parts and frames, an ongoing string of not-quite-narrative caption, muddling its many layers.

For example: the title character ("J" for short) is an actor—and an android, believable and animated as an imitation of life. He’s in a movie currently in production, and is famous for roles in others—we even spot a billboard for one, though we never learn any titles. Through all this the comic acquires a rounded sense of a world with more layers to it than a fancy cake, most of its parts smoothed together with equalizing assurances of their shared falseness. That voice-over stitching this all together acts as the prime catalyst; even after the word “Cut” it continues, seeming to shift between characters, roles, and sources. At times it even appears omniscient.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Prosecutors in Turkey are trying to send cartoonist Musa Kart to prison for nine years for the caricature he drew of the former Prime Minister. [UPDATED TO ADD: This morning, Kart was acquitted.]

—Interviews. Martin Dupuis speaks to Chris Wright about his bizarre pirate comic, Blacklung.

Paul Constant profiles and interviews Gary Groth after his Stranger Genius Award win.

—TCJ. Last week, Fantagraphics posted an excerpt from the upcoming volume of TCJ interviews with Zap artists.

Alex Buchet picked out some of his favorite TCJ covers over the years.

—Misc. I usually admire Abraham Riesman's writing on comics for Vulture, and it's very possible (even probably) that he didn't write the headline for this, but "tragic and disappointing" seem like astonishingly hyperbolic words to connect to Marvel's cancellation of The Fantastic Four.

This massive 31-book Osamu Tezuka Kickstarter is a little nuts, and apparently aimed at manga fans with very deep pockets. (If I'm reading it right, you have to kick in 150 bucks before you even get a single book!)

—Reviews & Commentary. Josselin Moneyron discusses Masahiko Matsumoto’s The Man Next Door. Zainab Akhtar previews Lala Albert's Janus.

And in an outlier review for the New York Daily News, Eydie Cubarrubia is slightly baffled by Scott McCloud's Best American Comics volume.

Today on the site, since you've been good, here is Ryan Holmberrg uncovering YET ANOTHER hidden facet of manga history: komaga.

Without komaga (literally “panel pictures”), there would have been no gekiga. Moreover, because by the mid 60s gekiga had become lingua franca in comics for adolescent boys and young men, and because without gekiga it is unlikely that the “cinematic” would have become the obsession that it did amongst manga critics and historians, one could also say that without komaga neither manga or its discourse would exist as we know them.

Despite this, komaga’s creator, Matsumoto Masahiko (1934-2005) has only recently been resurrected from the archive. Yet still has his work barely registered within the mainstream of manga scholarship, which remains stubbornly Tezuka-centric in focus.

And Sean T. Collins is here with a review of Carol Swain's new book, Gast.

Murder mysteries are defined by their central, structuring absences. A hole occupies the space where a life once lived. That hole can never be filled. But through an investigation of the facts, an uncovering of the truth, and a pursuit and capture of the killer, we can define and discover the shape of the hole to a degree of accuracy sufficient to put a cover on it, so that the still-living may proceed past it once more.

Gast, a graphic novel of exquisite and accomplished empathy and restraint by alternative-comics veteran Carol Swain, tells a story centered on a hole far harder to close up than most. It proceeds with the methods and mechanics of investigation and discovery. The scene of the crime is visited. The victim’s routine is examined. The friends and acquaintances of victim and suspect alike are questioned. Evidence is recovered and cataloged: a discarded make-up bag, a shell casing, a stain on the bedroom wall. Means, motive, and opportunity are all established.

Elsewhere:

Here's a great overview of Moomins creator Tove Jansson's prose output.

Book publishing department: I like the look of these cover designs. It's nice to see more innovative approaches to repackaged classics. Penguin, of course, also had a great series of cartoonist-illustrated covers.

I almost forgot that Ed Piskor's wonderful Hip Hop Family Tree is still being serialized! Here's the latest. Not only that, but all-time great cartoonist Ben Katchor is still serializing his strip in Metropolis, and it's online, too. It's fun to read comics!