Today Robert Loss discusses Mark Beyer's recent retrospective exhibition.
The temptation in looking back at this compelling exhibit, which the Urban Arts Space described as “the first in-depth retrospective” of Beyer’s work, is to search for a trajectory, a progression from one aesthetic or subject matter to another concurrent with the artist’s biography or history. Retrospectives encourage this, don’t they? Well, it was there if you wanted it. Following the exhibit’s route, you began in “With Text: 1975-2011,” starting with mainly black-and-white comics, including a wall of original Amy and Jordan comic strips, and proceeding to the commercial art of New Yorker covers and commissioned album art and posters, where words became images themselves, and his animated series The Adventures of Thomas and Nardo, where words were only spoken. You concluded in “Without Text: 1975-2012″ which was largely comprised of silkscreens and reverse paintings on plexiglas, absent of words or motion.
And yet, any argument the show might have made about the progression of Beyer’s work by dividing it into “With Text” and “Without Text” was leveraged by the fact that each section covered Beyer’s entire career. On the other hand, Beyer stopped publishing comics in the late 1990s and has returned to the form, so far as I know, only once.
Chris Mautner is here with a review of the inaugural volume of TwoMorrows's history of U.S. comics, John Wells's American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1960s. Here's an excerpt:
This is the first entry in TwoMorrows's extremely ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the American comic book industry in America. Running from the 1940s to today, the series proposes to detail all the “pivotal moments” that occurred both behind the scenes and within the comics themselves, with different authors tackling different eras.
Just glancing at that timeline, though, gave me pause. Why start at the 1940s? Why not begin earlier? I understand that TwoMorrows wants to focus solely on comic books, but even so, to ignore the first forty years of the newspaper comic strip, which, to put it mildly, laid most of the groundwork and influenced many if not all of the cartoonists that worked in the first few decades of the industry (to say nothing of the high aesthetics of the work being done during that period) seems problematic at best. Turning the book over in my hands I wondered: Is this going to be a thoughtful, engaging look at how the industry has changed over time, or just a fannish reminiscence of bygone years?
Elsewhere:
—Talk talk. Tom Gauld talks to NHPR, Gilbert Hernandez talks to The Portland Mercury, Liza Donnelly talks to Cartoon Movement, Blutch talks to Craig Thompson.
—Award fever. Voting is now open for the Eisner Awards, with the ballot available here. Eisner judge Charles Hatfield addresses the recent controversy over Frank Santoro's Before Watchmen comments. SAW has announced their latest round of micro-grant awardees. And the Doug Wright Awards has begun an auction of supervillain-related original art to help fund itself. Details are here, and the first item up for bid is the following piece from Seth.
—Critical commentary. J. Ryan Strandal reviews the new Ben Katchor book for LARB, and Kailyn Kent writes about cinema, music, and comics for HU.
—Miskellaneous. The terrible self-promoters over at Drawn & Quarterly get profiled by Huck magazine. A U.S. District judge has ruled that Superboy rights belong to DC. Ruben Bolling talks about organizing the following film, featuring an impressive group of cartoonists:
A boy named Barnaby wishes for a fairy godmother. Instead, he gets a fairy godfather who uses a cigar for a magic wand. Bumbling but endearing, Mr. O’Malley rarely gets his magic to work — even when he consults his Fairy Godfather’s Handy Pocket Guide. The true magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson’s clean, spare art. Using typeset dialogue (Barnaby was the first daily comic strip to do so regularly) allowed Johnson to include — by his estimation — some 60% more words, giving O’Malley more room to develop a rhetorical style that, as one critic put it, combines the “style of a medicine-show huckster with that of Dickens’s Mr. Micawber.” In its combination of Johnson’s sly wit and O’Malley’s amiable windbaggery, a child’s feeling of wonder and an adult’s wariness, highly literate jokes and a keen eye for the ridiculous, Barnaby expanded our sense of what comics can do.
Though one of the classic comic strips, Barnaby was never a popular hit — at its height, it was syndicated in only 52 papers. By contrast, Chic Young’s Blondie was appearing in as many as 850 papers at that time. As Coulton Waugh noted in his landmark The Comics (1947), Barnaby’s audience may not “compare, numerically, with that of the top, mass-appeal strips. But it is a very discriminating audience, which includes a number of strip artists themselves, and so this strip stands a good chance of remaining to influence the course of American humor for many years to come.” He was right.
Elsewhere:
—Egyptian cartoonist Magdi El Shafee has been arrested and imprisoned by security forces for dubious reasons. [Please see Ethan Heitner's comment below, and the World War 3 Illustrated Tumblr, for more information.]
—Since the last time I posted on this blog, the comics internet erupted with controversy over the Eisner Awards judging, especially in regards to past comments by Frank Santoro (who, as all readers surely know, is a Journal columnist and my friend), only to die down almost as quickly once the facts came to light. At this point, I don't know how much there is to add to what's already been said, but I think that Tom Spurgeon and Heidi MacDonald are both well worth reading. (My take in a nutshell: You want judges who have strong tastes and opinions, and Frank is one of the most knowledgeable people about comics I have ever met in my life.)
—In other awards news, the Stumptown awards nominations have been announced, and are now open for voting, and Natalia Yanchak, one of the Doug Wright Awards judges, writes about those awards for the Huffington Post.
—And in still other awards news, Sammy Harkham's Everything Together has just won the L.A. Times Book Prize.
—Librarian Carol Tilley writes about the recent Persepolis debate for the CBLDF.
—Small publisher news: Sparkplug Books has announced that Virginia Paine will be taking over ownership of the company, and Domino Books owner Austin English announces an imminent move that will affect several small publishers and cartoonists, including Domino, Rebus, Revival House, etc., and says this would be a particularly good time to buy some Domino books if you're so inclined. (I'd guess the same is true for Rebus and Revival House.)
Castrée chronologically documents every hurt, every slight, every refusal of affection, and every thoughtless maternal dismissal. A child tends to crave routine, affection, agency, and a certain solidity from her parents. From her single mother, Castrée apparently received a life of constantly shifting emotional quicksand.
Elsewhere:
Ivan Brunetti is auctioning off an original comic strip page to help fund his student's anthology, Linework #4. The page, originally published in The New Yorker, is beautiful and I've seen the earlier issues, which are accomplished and beautifully put together.
And let me send you into the weekend with this bit of non-comics I've been enjoying: The Organist episode 3. It's a podcast from The Believer and KCRW that covers a bunch of topics. Good stuff.
Today, we have Shaenon Garrity's latest column, which this time around is a lot more personal than usual, chronicling her history with Joey Manley's recently shuttered Modern Tales webcomics site:
Joey had a plan for making money. By 2001 he’d begun talking to cartoonists, sometimes over email, sometimes in person. He’d made contact with an eclectic group of webcartoonists in Chicago and was wooing small-press creators in the Bay Area, taking them out to dinner and talking Internet. His plan: a subscription-based webcomics site. Maybe 30 artists, ongoing serials, a monthly or annual fee to read the archives, with the profits split between the artists based on number of hits. In the spirit of old pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, it would be called Modern Tales.
Meanwhile, Joey was educating himself about webcomics. He set up a podcast, Digital Comics Talk, and a comics review site, Talk About Comics (which continued for many years in various forms, eventually morphed into Graphic Novel Review, and finally passed away peacefully in its sleep). He hung out on message boards. In a corner of the online world that was, back then, small enough that you could be Known pretty easily, he was starting to be Known.
I don’t know how Joey found my comic Narbonic, probably through the Bay Area indie crowd, but at some point it made it to the bottom of his list and he emailed me. He recruited me all sneaky-like. I know, because I kept the email.
Also, we have Dominic Umile's review of Ian Culbard's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's Case of Charles Dexter Ward:
Action-packed comics don’t often owe to depictions of characters sifting through moldy correspondence, deciphering archaic language, and unlocking mantras typically reserved for cellars or graveyards. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is largely driven by words, but Ian Culbard -- evidently also prone to unearthing dusty texts -- has adapted several novels for the comics medium and nabbed the British Fantasy Award for Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (2010), so he knows well how to move the author to a stylish visual format. There's lots of talk here, yellowed newspaper cut-ins, and letter reading, each set on black pages. Culbard's slope-chinned cast wears angular-cornered overcoats and facial expressions styled with minimal line work. They're dead ringers for the affluent, early 20th century Brit zombies he drew for The New Deadwardians (2012), perpetually serious figures who mull documents and converse in the tall, plush chairs preferred by the era's upper class. But within these dialogues and rigorous literary exploration lie an urgency and a textured work of horror.
—Michael Cavna (also an Eisner judge this year) interviews Ben Katchor.
—Buried at the bottom of this promotional blog post is the news that Chester Brown has apparently rewritten all of the text and dialogue in The Playboy for a new paperback edition. He's sort of becoming the Henry James of sex comics.
—Alan Moore talks at length about Nemo: Heart of Ice and his upcoming Lovecraft series Providence with his favorite interlocutor, the man whose name must be copied and pasted to be spelled correctly, Padraig O Mealoid. Also, video has emerged of an old Moore performance of his hard-to-find CIA conspiracy book Brought to Light.
—Image publisher Eric Stephenson talks the Saga/Apple/comiXology controversy, and the line's upcoming schedule, with CBR.
—Not Comics: An interview with J. David Spurlock, the co-author of a new collection of Margaret Brundage art. Brundage may not have been a cartoonist herself, but her pulp magazine covers were a huge influence on early comic-book imagery.
—Apparently, there's a long Les Coleman essay on Mark Beyer in the most recent issue of Raw Vision.
Yeah, a lot of your earlier work was more metaphorical and fantastical, less realistic.
I feel that I’m done doing more fantastical things. Who knows, maybe in ten years I’ll be singing a different tune. But it’s weird, because as I was making this book based on reality, I’ve encountered people who’ve said, oh, I wish there was more fantastical elements in this. And I personally feel there’s enough fantasy out there, there are enough beautiful landscapes. In the past, I think there were two factors in making those kinds of fantastical comics. The first factor was mainly that I was terrified, because I felt I still was under this impression that whatever happened at my house when I was a kid was nobody’s business but my own. And the second factor was that I was lazy [Laughs.] My default mechanism was to draw landscapes that were more from my imagination, and that’s kind of easy to draw, because you can make your pencil go and not have to look at anything. And for this book, because I wanted it to be as close to reality as possible, I had to find images, and I had to think of what kind of tree there would be in this or that geographical place, and in some cases look at photographs too, and I personally feel a lot more complete now that I’ve done that, as an artist I feel that I can do this! I can pull it off! And I just feel like a grownup about it. Also I care way more than I used to about facts, I think that all stories deserve to be from… even if I’m making stories that are not autobiographical, that are totally coming from my head, I like the idea that there would be these facts that could anchor it to a specific place in the world.
It's a slow news day. Here are a few morsels:
The 2013 Eisner Awards have been announced. We're pleased to be nominated for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism.
It's always a good day when a new Stanley Stories post appears. This one on stories published in 1946.
And the under-new-ownership Alternative Comics announced a whole slew of releases centered mostly around the publisher's core cartoonists, a lot of whom really have been missing from the last handful of years of the publishing boom. More news, the best of the day, really: It's Reggie-12.
It's Tuesday again, which means it's Joe McCulloch's guided tour of the Week in Comics, along with his thoughts on Yoshikazu Yasuhiko.
Elsewhere:
—Department of Politics. Over at Hazlitt, TCJ columnist Jeet Heer reviews Victor Navasky's new book on political cartoons, The Art of Controversy, by way of Hitler's cartoon problem. Paul Gravett examines Margaret Thatcher's influence on British comics. And Françoise Mouly and Toon Books have started an "Agitprop" section on the Toon Books Tumblr. (Here's Sue Coe on animal farming.)
—Department of Interviews. Gil Roth, who I had the pleasure of meeting at MoCCA, just posted the first "live" episode of his Virtual Memories podcast, with special guest Ben Katchor. Alex Dueben at Suicide Girls talks to Ann Nocenti, who has had an interesting career. Michael Cavna talks to internet celebrity and Simon's Cat creator Simon Tofield.
—Ars Technica reports on the final outcome of that strange, lengthy The Oatmeal/FunnyJunk legal battle from last summer. Apparently, Charles Carreon is out $46,000.
John Hilgart returns to the site with an interview with Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta on their new Starstruck push.
Elaine – This book will have 80 new pages of very detailed sequential art that will need to be drawn, inked and lettered. Our basic goal is $44,000. That would allow Michael to finish the black and white artwork, me to finish the script and layout, pay for the lettering and print signed and numbered, hardback books and mail them. Plus, other incentives.
If we can get $69,000, the whole 140 pages will get new, fully painted, digital color. If we make what we need for the color, the painting can start right away on some of the many finished pages, while Michael is drawing new ones.
We’re hoping to finish the work by end of December of this year. Then we’re allowing a couple of months to get the books printed.
I used to love going to the previous iteration of this comic-con.
Here are five things being thought about by comics people that Tom Spurgeon knows (guest appearance by yours truly).
Tucker Stone's been doing a lot of laundry lately, and watching a lot of Mexican television in consequence—experience which colors his latest review column deeply:
I wouldn't say I look forward to these shows, because I keep bringing things to read, assuming this is the week I'll fight the temptation to stare, but it didn't take very many trips before I started to respect these shows, a whole lot more than I would have expected to. They're well-made entertainments, built around very base, very broad concerns: sex, money, violence, family. The people in the fictional stories are trying to get ahead, with some relying on hard work, and others relying on trickery. Love seems important, although loyalty is what they talk about most. The game and talk show hybrid relies more heavily on schtick, with the humor usually coming via very feminine fat men; the women give it to you straight, while dressed just on the classy side of risque. I don't respect these shows as art, but they don't want me to. They just want me to pay attention, and while my own ignorance keeps me a bit removed, they're incredibly successful at doing that.
And elsewhere on the internet, I'm not having much luck. Sometimes, there's a lot of news, sometimes there's a little.
—Chris Ware's Building Stories won the 2013 Lynd Ward Prize, with Lili Carré's Heads or Tails and Theo ELlsworth's Understanding Monster also picking up honors.
—Elaine Lee talks to The Beat about her Kickstarter-supported Starstruck project.
“Operation Vaporizer” is a short sharp shock of a war/sci-fi/horror comic, narrated by a veteran reminiscing about his time with a top-secret unit that tested an experimental telepathic weapon in the jungles of Vietnam. The Full Metal Jacket-style slang (“I was in The Shit”) and the dingy green and red-orange palette root the thing to the period, providing a solid platform for diving out into the Weird.
This morning on the site we feature the return of Bob Levin, and his look at Chris Ware's Building Stories. Now based on Twitter conversations from a few months ago, I know a lot of you will immediately begin complaining that everyone has already read enough about that book, but (1) you haven't, not really, (2) get used to it, because books like this (ambitious and largely successful) tend to get talked about for a long time, and (3) Bob Levin is allowed to write about anything he wants. Here is a very brief excerpt, especially designed to annoy a certain kind of person:
The second day I slit the cellophane wrapper.
Elsewhere:
—The longtime New Yorker cartoonist Ed Fisher has died at the age of 86. That magazine's cartoon editor Bob Mankoff announced the news on his blog. The New York Times has an obituary here. Mike Lynch and Michael Maslin offer their own thoughts on the artist.
—Apple has reportedly decided not to offer Saga #12 to iPhone and iPad users due to two pages in the issue featuring somewhat distorted images of gay sex. Series writer Brian K. Vaughn responded by declining to change the images in question, and directing readers to other outlets (and the CBLDF). You can see one of the images in question below.
[UPDATE: ComiXology has issued a new statement today, contradicting earlier reports. I find this all somewhat confusing, and don't understand how to reconcile comiXology implicitly confirming the original story with this new information, but there it is. You can read the statement here.]
—The Doug Wright Awards have announced the members of the 2013 jury, including Julie Delporte, Pascal Girard, Jonathan Goldstein, Joe Ollmann, and Natalia Yanchak.
—Paul Gravett profiles Belgian cartoonist/architect François Schuiten.
And Joe McCulloch rounds it out with his week in comics.
Elsewhere:
MoCCA Fest returned this year. It was vastly smoother, well organized, and altogether pleasant. Here is one roundup and another.
And here's a manga business overview. Oh, here's some wondering after Vertigo.
Finally, a recommendation: The Harvey Kurtzman exhibition at the Society of Illustrators in NYC is excellent. I've seen Kurtzman originals before, but to see so many covers, and, best of all, a full set of rough breakdowns for an EC war story, was an unusual treat. Kurtzman's pencils have all the gestural verve I always felt in his brushwork, but it's that much more immediate here. The Bill Griffith exhibition upstairs is smaller but full of excellent work, both single drawings and complete strips, from throughout Griffith's career. Like Kurtzman, Griffith is both a master satirist and a highly skilled artist devoted to his craft. It shows in the work.
In 1956, [Julius] Schwartz chose Infantino to pencil a tryout issue of a new version of the Flash. Working from a script by Robert Kanigher, Infantino’s pencils on “Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt!” in Showcase #4 (September-October 1956) achieved a new kind of superhero action, emphasizing design and movement, with a kinetic quality that was exhilarating. Infantino’s design for the retooled Flash — an all-red costume except for bits of yellow — was like a sleek, modern sports car. His visual conception, along with uncommonly mature stories by Robert Kanigher and John Broome, sold the reinvented character to the burgeoning number of baby boomers who were looking for something new and exciting. The success of the Flash led to the reinvention of Green Lantern and other Golden Age heroes at National/DC, which in turn inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four in 1961. Later comics historians would identify Showcase #4 as the kick-off for what came to be called the Silver Age of comics.
Elsewhere on the internet, as we wait for the deluge of MoCCA fest reports. (I went Saturday. It seemed much improved in terms of organization, I met up with various people I like to see, & I got some interesting-looking comics I haven't read yet. Otherwise, I didn't get a strong sense of how the people at tables felt about the show.)
—Peter Bagge was interviewed by Reason:
Which alerted me to the fact that somehow I missed that Bagge had reviewed the new Al Capp biography.
—Tom Spurgeon, who was in fine form at MoCCA, has interviewed one of the other big '90s humor cartoonists, Bob Fingerman.
Comic book artist, writer, art director and publisher Carmine Infantino has passed away at the age of 87. The introduction to Gary Groth's definitive interview with Infantino best sums up the man's achievements:
Like several others in his generation, Infantino began his career by doing a number of different jobs — writing, pencils, inks, even some support work — for a variety of publishers and titles. His strongest work during this period was for Shelly Mayer at National, where Infantino worked on popular second-tier superhero titles like Flash and Green Lantern.
Infantino produced his most fondly remembered and important comics art for DC in the “Silver Age” of the 1950s and 1960s. He was the artist on the title which marked the beginning of this period, the revamped Flash, from its launching in 1956 into the mid-’60s. His art on Adam Strange, with its elaborate cityscapes and elegant line-work, remains for many the quintessential American science-fiction comic. In 1964, his work on what was called the “new look” Batman saved that title from cancellation and pointed the way to several refashionings of the character of the next 25 years.
A popular artist and extremely effective cover designer, Infantino scaled back his artistic output at the height of his powers to become DC’s artistic director. He eventually became publisher in 1971 and then president of DC. In all of these positions, Infantino presided over a number of experimental titles and laudatory publishing efforts: comic-book version of pulp characters like The Shadow and Tarzan, the fan favorite Green Lantern-Green Arrow series, the Fourth World saga of Jack Kirby, and the revival of C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel among the high-profile efforts; the luscious Sergio Aragones/Nick Cardy Bat Lash and the active recruitment of Filipino artists among his most important, lesser-known efforts.
We'll have further coverage next week.
Infantino was not the industry's only death this week. New Yorker cartoonist Ed Fisher passed away, and longtime Archie writer George Gladir also died.
Today, Rob Clough reviews Miriam Katin's Letting Go:
The entire book is drawn in colored pencil. This adds a vibrancy and immediacy to the comic that makes it look like it was ripped right out of Katin's sketchbook. It also allows her to shift from naturalism to a cartoonier style with little effort. Katin's own self-caricature is one of the best I've ever seen from an autobiographical cartoonist. The scribbly lines of her hair, the slightly pointy nose, the tiny but wriggly eyebrows that express so much emotion and the way her posture alternates between slumped shoulders and excitedly active tell the story of a woman who is so often bursting with energy. In real life, Katin is poised, stylish, and charismatic, so it is funny to see her depict herself as slightly disheveled and neurotic in the pages of her book.
And Lucy Knisley is on day four of her Cartoonist's Diary.
Elsewhere:
—Speaking of Katin, she drew a fun short comic about the NYC launch of her new book tour.
—Another sad comics death this week, with the passing of European cartoonist Fred.
—In a smart get, Tom Spurgeon interviews the Society of Illustrators' Anelle Miller about this year's MoCCA festival. It will be interesting to see how things go there this weekend. People seem enthusiastic about the show in a way I haven't noticed in years.
—The CBLDF has posted a story and short documentary about Ryan Matheson, the young man arrested while crossing the border into Canada a few years ago, because of various manga images customs found on his laptop:
—It's been too long since we had a good debate about how much work Stan Lee did versus how much Jack Kirby and the other Marvel artists did, so I'm sad Stephen Bissette posted this old "Bullpen Bulletin" that I'm sure will put the matter to rest forever...
—Sean Kleefeld finds the missing link in the Prince Valiant/Jack Kirby Demon story... And an unexplained something that had been nagging at my subconscious for years is suddenly free and clear.
Today on the site, Sean Rogers has a lengthy review of Ben Katchor's latest book, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, which collects over a decade's worth of color strips from Metropolis magazine.
Few books are as communal, as catch-all: every page a new hero, a new tale, a new voice. Or, rather, the same voice, a collective voice: Katchor yanks at his sentences with his characteristic taffy-pull between narration and dialogue, so that each merges into and props up the other, so that each person talks like the rest, and everyone contributes to the same conversation. A strip that begins with a narrator pondering the “velvet rope and stanchion” as “that most pernicious symbol of corporate greed,” accompanied by a management figure extolling the system’s virtues, soon opens its ranks to welcome in people off the street—“middle-aged men with hernias, unwed teenage mothers and tattooed first offenders”—who stage small, symbolic acts of rebellion, ducking under the ropes, violating the inflexible rules of the queue. “The physical expression of our free will,” they say, as Katchor draws them teetering, acrobatically off-kilter but assured in their acts of defiance. The effect is bathetic, of course—a bold “act of transgression” turned quixotic, the body awkwardly contorted to ridiculous effect and little gain—and yet Katchor, and the people who populate his America, will find their triumphs where they can.
And Lucy Knisley continues her week here with day three.
Elsewhere.... it's kind of a slow new day, aside from various PR blasts. So, really you oughta just read Sean's piece, above, but if you must leave this site, well here you go: The Decadence crew from the UK is discussed in this podcast. Hey, it's Billy Possum! This is a classic "Oooooh Comics" story. And the great Dylan Horrocks is having an art sale with amazingly affordable prices.
As on every Tuesday, today is the day that Joe McCulloch gives you his rundown of interesting-looking comics new in stores.
And it's also day two of Lucy Knisley's week as our cartoon diarist.
Elsewhere:
—Bob Clarke, RIP. Tom Richmond and Mark Evanier have reminiscences. I'm sure more are to come. Clarke was one of the great finds of the Feldstein era of MAD, with a gift for pastiche that helped him create many memorable covers and parody ads into the '90s.
Here's a Peanuts parody by Clarke from around 1961 (found here):
—Another sad death: Paul Williams. He has no direct connection to comics that I am aware of, but as the founder of Crawdaddy (the first serious magazine of rock criticism) and as a promoter of (and later literary executor for) Philip K. Dick's writing, his cultural impact looms large. (Here's his 1975 Rolling Stone article on Dick that really got the ball rolling.)
—Stefan Kanfer writes about George Herriman and Krazy Kat for City Journal, and Robert Boyd reviews six semi-recent comics on his art blog.
—Sean Kleefeld posts an old Life magazine story explaining why Al Capp finally decided to let Lil' Abner get married.
—If you frequent more superhero-centric parts of the comics internet, you may have heard that Valiant is planning to relaunch the old Quantum & Woody series, without the original creators' involvement. Prompted by this, V.R. Gallagher reposted some old thoughts of Q&W writer Christopher Priest, and offered some of her own on working in superhero comics as a minority.
Well it's a new day here, but hey, let's take a walk around memory lake with R. Fiore, who does not have fond memories of his decades-past debate with Harvey Pekar, which we recently posted.
I committed myself to several positions that I realized were ill-advised, but rather than pulling back on them I doubled down. On top of that I was in a savage mood generally, for reasons that had nothing to do with Harvey Pekar or his ideas. It had to do with a premature return to the world of dreary but remunerative work after a couple of years of working at a fun job with Fantagraphics, due to some very poor decisions I had made. In retrospect my performance in this conflict reminds me of nothing so much as that fight where Mike Tyson got frustrated and bit a piece of his opponent’s ear off.
Let's pop around and look at some comic book conventions. Here's a super-depressing panel at WonderCon: The Creator's Role in the Future of Comic Publishing. More and more comics is just a buncha different worlds, with no shared knowledge and zero historical awareness. Its like the '80s never happened.
If there was historical awareness you might find the idea that Ben Jones was on a WonderCon panel about Axe Cop pretty funny. There's a victory there of some kind. Times sure have changed. I wish there some more Bobby London in this Quick Draw post, but I'll take what I can get. And Ann Nocenti was in the spotlight at the big Con. She remains a nostalgic favorite for Daredevil. On the other coast, Gil Roth goes to the Asbury Park Comic Con.
There's something about The Phantom. Just like Tarzan, but that purple and weird colonialism. I always want to read it but am mostly content remembering it projecting onto it.
First off, after a month or so off not sleeping and cleaning up strange liquids all over his home, Tucker Stone has finally returned. And he's brought his old pal Abhay Khosla with him. This column, it's all catch-up reading, and Gaiman vs. McFarlane.
Elsewhere, the news is a little light this morning:
The extravagance of his graphic inventions inspired similar excess among those who attempted to describe what they saw going on in front of them. In Newsweek: “The line drawings of Partch’s angular and rectangular characters have something in common with the tragic figures of Picasso’s Spanish War ‘Guernica’ … But Partch’s men, with their bushy or bald heads, pop eyes, bird-beak noses and cavernous mouths have their own particular brand of frenzied insanity, which makes them funny in almost any situation.”
Partch’s cartoons, said Goldstein, “made a style of drawing and thinking, with roots in cubism, surrealism and dada, part of America’s daily life.”
And Collier’s movie scribe Kyle Crichton thought Partch’s work “revealed plain signs of a pathological condition.”
The anonymous author of the Partch entry in Current Biography (1946) noted that “a Vip character sometimes wears an expression of dazed or wondering imbecility, but more often is glaring at some person or thing with fanatic intensity. … One Partch admirer has said, ‘the cartoons are funny if you enjoy remembering your nightmares.’” But it is not recommended, according to another critic, that Partch’s cartoons “be probed and examined for deep hidden meanings.”
And around the web:
Joanna Draper Carlson writes about her approach to crowd-funding comics.
We've got a double shot of bande dessinée for you this morning, with two reviews of Humanoids releases. First, Joe McCulloch on the wandering American Terry Dodson's Muse:
Reverie is critical to Muse -- originally titled Songes, or “Dreams” -- a new collection of bandes dessinées drawn by Terry Dodson, a prolific 20-year veteran of the American superhero scene. It is fruitless to summarize such a long career in just a few sentences, but I think it’s fair to suppose that an artist who’s titled his homepage “The Bombshellter” is best known for his drawings of women, specifically the kind of top-heavy heroines who all but erupt, at times, from their tight ensembles, bounding into action with a twinkle and grin. But unlike the similarly-interested examples of Guillem March (who faced a terrific blowback over a Catwoman cover last year) or Adam Hughes (widely admired yet also prominently criticized), Dodson has evaded any wide denunciation for sins of depiction. He is one of "the good ones" - the girlie artists whose commitment to high-quality drawing supersedes more fundamental qualms over their aesthetics.
And then newcomer to TCJ.com Daniel Kalder on District 14:
Picking up District 14, I was mildly concerned. The first couple of pages show an elephant disembarking at Ellis Island, taking a shower, and then getting ripped off by corrupt officials who want to seize his mysterious seeds. The elephant makes a break for it, fleeing directly into a crime scene where a stag-headed mobster is delivering a suitcase with a severed chicken’s head in it to a man in a black suit. Shots are fired; the elephant meets a plucky news photographer with a beaver’s head; hi-jinks ensue.
Shite, I thought. Is this going to be completely trite Euronoir like Blacksad, a pile of clichés enlivened only by the gimmick of giving stock characters animal heads?
Elsewhere:
—LitReactor has a brand-new interview with Phoebe Gloeckner; Chris Mautner has an interview with a top recent contender for the title of most likeable person in comics, Rina Ayuyang; Mark Kardwell at Robot 6 talks to 2000 AD "reprographics droid" Kathryn Symes; and Nick Gazin drops in super-short interviews with Ben Jones and my colleague Dan Nadel in the middle of his latest Vice column.
—If you prefer your interviews multimedia, then Inkstuds talks to the cult-artist Sadler brothers here, and Jared Gardner talks to Ed Piskor there:
—Jeet Heer drew my attention to the following George Herriman panels from the March 25, 1931 Krazy Kat daily strip, which seem relevant to the case currently being argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jeet came across the image at Michael Tisserand's Facebook page, who suggested their relevance. Jeet wrote about another possible connection between Krazy Kat and gay culture in a blog post about a DC-area Krazy Kat nightclub.
This is an aptly named article about DC Entertainment. I'm interested in how far a major publishing company can take its "we're a buncha dicks" image. Pretty wild.
In 1972 Weaver commissioned four artists associated with the Terry Ditenfass Gallery to make comics for an issue of Graphis magazine focusing on comics (he is nicely bracketed by contributions from Alain Resnais and Milton Glaser). In his accompanying essay, "Experiments in Time-Art", Weaver dilates on the power of the strip to transform visual art: "The artist working in the narrative strip medium can extend the single instant backward or forward in time. Not only can he move slowly or suddenly or not at all, change his mind, hold his audience in suspense, sustain a mood, surprise or destroy; he can virtually wire his pictures for sound."
We also have Sean T. Collins's review of Michael DeForge's online Ant Comic:
Ant Comic, Michael DeForge's magnum opus (so far; give him time), tackles the big issues—sex, war, parenthood, family, labor, love, the Other, death—with such brio and ease that it's more like a shopper methodically checking items off his grocery list in a supermarket he knows like the back of his hand than an artist grappling with the stickiest issues imaginable. That's because, in this story about a handful of insects living in a black ant colony that makes a disastrous decision to go to war with the red ants who live nearby, he's found the perfect vessel for all his preexisting preoccupations as a cartoonist.
Elsewhere:
—Department of Interviews: The Beat talks to Bob Fingerman, The AV Club talks to Douglas Rushkoff (who talks comics, among other things), Mono.Kultur talks to Chris Ware, and Gainesville Today talks to Tom Hart (about SAW).
