BLOG

Today on the site, Marc Sobel interviews Wizzywig creator Ed Piskor. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:

MARC SOBEL: I know you went to the Kubert School for a year, but are you mostly self-taught?

ED PISKOR: Yeah.

MARC SOBEL: Talk to me about how you learned to draw. You started to touch on it when you mentioned all the free time you had, but can you give me a little more detail?

ED PISKOR: Yeah. I relate hip hop culture a lot with my learning to draw because… There’s this certain mind frame. All through school I was definitely one of the worst people at most things, but with drawing I could at least hold my own. There was no way I was going to be able to beat anybody in any kind of organized sport or anything like that but I was at least a contender in the drawing thing. And the hip hop mind frame helped because people would snap on my work. They’d say something like ‘That sucks, man. I can’t believe you drew that,’ or, ‘do you need glasses?’ Shit like that. We would just bust on each other for being able to draw. So that provided a natural incentive to do better work because I thought, ‘oh man, I have to blow these dudes’ minds next time.’ Of course that never happened. Even when I got to a point where I was reasonably sure that I was better than them, they could still cut me down, which was cool. It was character building.

MARC SOBEL: So you were putting drawings in front of all your friends on a regular basis?

ED PISKOR: Yeah, we all were. When I was in sixth grade, there was this weird period where comics were really popular with everybody. Even a lot of the jocks were into them. This was after the “Death of Superman” and the first coming of Image Comics.

Everyone was buying these things, even football players, but most people were never looking at them. A lot of dudes would have Comic Buyer’s Guides, the new ones, or their Wizard Magazines in class all the time and they would be calculating their wealth. <laughter> It was like, ‘oh man, I’m worth $15,000 this month.’ So the cool people were into this shit for a brief time and it was really a cool thing to do.

Elsewhere:

—Tom Spurgeon takes the initiative and interviews First Second senior editor Callista Brill, who wrote that online essay about when cartoonists should give up that got up so many people's noses. They discuss that post and a lot of other First Second business as well.

—In another post that has spawned a lot of angry arguments, colorist Jordie Bellaire writes about an unnamed convention that refused to invite colorists. I'm not sure I understand her stated reason for not naming the convention, as I think they're more likely to change their policy if public pressure is brought to bear, but it's possible there are other factors I don't get.

—The wonderful Same Hat blog has video and images from a televised jam-comic competition between Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino!

—Philip Nel talks about annotating Crockett Johnson's Barnaby.

—Jeff Trexler is almost always worth reading on the Siegel/Shuster/DC legal battles.

—The great Bobsy Mindless is somewhat surprisingly disappointed with Grant Morrison's latest Batman Incorporated.

—Stephen Bissette raves about a new history of post-'50s horror comics.

—Adam McGovern concisely explains Frank Miller.

—Adrian Tomine made a recent appearance at Skylight Books, which is now on YouTube:

—Not Comics: Today is the final day the PBS website is offering free streaming of a documentary about the artist and designer Wayne White, which may be of interest to readers of this site for its interviews with Gary Panter and Matt Groening:

Watch Beauty Is Embarrassing on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

On the site this day:

Patrick Rosenkranz on the late cartoonist Alan Shenker AKA Yossarian:

His friends described his lifestyle as a “flaneur” or a “downtown habitué.” “He did what all New Yorkers do,” said Maryann. “He complained about everything. He sat around drinking coffee at cafes. He talked to everyone. He was totally righteous and he never sold out.”

His old friend Rex Weiner, who co-founded the New York Ace with “Honest Bob” Singer, relates an anecdote about his old friend in an obituary in The Paris Review. He describes how the East Village Other was on its last legs in 1972 and the Ace was the new kid in town. Yossarian drew a cover for the new paper showing a meat cleaver chopping an eyeball in half.

“With this cover he’d created especially for us, Yossarian was declaring his allegiance to the ACE, betraying EVO, to which he’d contributed many cover illustrations, and its paternal leader,” said Weiner in the obit. “EVO’s logo was the all-seeing eye, and for our cover Yossarian had placed an eyeball on a chopping block split by a butcher knife, as if to say, “EVO … You’re DEAD!”

And Abhay Khosla steps in for Tucker to wrap up what felt to me like a long week, with a lengthy imagining of the most important event of the week.

Elsewhere:

Marjane Satrapi is following Bernie Krigstein's lead: into painting. And Arnold Roth is staying the course with an exhibition at MoCCA/The Society of Illustrators.

After this I can only hope for the Tekno Comics True Hollywood Story (see above).

Bob Oksner. Never enough Bob Oksner. Some fine narrative drawing here. Or as I like to call it: Cartooning.

Have a good weekend!

Sean T. Collins checks in with another installment of his Say Hello! column, in which he interviews up-and-coming artists. Today, he talks to Heather Benjamin, and as the initiated might guess from the review we ran a few weeks back, the interview is NSFW. Here's a brief exchange:

There are times when I look at your work and it feels like a really explicit and direct response to depictions of women by your peers. Sexuality has returned in a big way in alt/art comics over the past three years or so—are you seeing stuff you particularly like or dislike as you look around?

Yeah, I started noticing more and more explicit material in art stuff recently. I love a lot of older art involving sexuality, but as far as work being made currently, I honestly don't particularly even gravitate towards art that includes sexuality; that's just what I personally draw. I don't have a huge interest in seeing drawings of naked people and dicks and tits and cum over the place, and I'm really not necessarily psyched on seeing it becoming more of a trend, either. If it's done well, of course I enjoy it—you know, if it seems like there's another element to it that I can get down with, that it goes deeper than just being a weird empty porn drawing because that's "shocking"—but that particular subject matter isn't something I feel really strongly about seeing and reading and whatever else. I feel pretty indifferent about it, unless it's saying something extra or if I think the drawing is gorgeous, but I'll love a drawing if I think it's done beautifully no matter what the subject matter is.

Elsewhere:

—Nicole Rudick reviews Gary Panter for the LARB.

—Jim Rugg is not just a quality cartoonist and excellent podcaster, he's also a very good comics blogger when he puts his mind to it. In his latest, he compares Hellboy on paper to Hellboy digital.

—Interviews Dept. Brandon Graham times two. Annie Koyama. And Weekly Shonen Jump editor Andy Nakatani talks to Deb Aoki.

—Kyle Baker put a metric ton of his comics online and available for download, totally free. (!)

—Matt Madden delivers his first quarterly report from Angoulême.

—Finally, a short video presentation on racism in early comic books from historian Darren R. Reid (via):

Well, I wanted to interview TCJ and Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth about the new EC line, and began by asking him to respond to a review. Gary turned in a fine essay on the subject instead, with both close readings of some comics and a broader aesthetic investigation of the publishing company.

The question of how artistic values apply to comics was rarely ventilated by its practitioners in the first 50 years of the comic book and for good reason: the entire context of the comic book was devoid of self-understanding or self-reflection. The wider culture never took comics even as seriously as it took its movies, never demonstrated any appreciation for it, never rewarded achievement in any way — because the wider culture never saw an achievement there worth rewarding or cheering, and mostly for good reason.

The artists toiling in comics who cared about such matters were few and far between and usually at the level of craft, not art. The few artists who did have a sophisticated grasp of the concept, or the integrity to implement their beliefs, toiled in obscurity (such as Barks or Stanley) or were marginalized (like Kurtzman and Krigstein). There was no place for them. (The cultural context of newspaper strips was entirely different, but the cartoonists in that area still thought of themselves as something less than artists — as newspapermen, cranking out dandy entertainments to build readership — of which Caniff was probably the nonpareil practitioner and proponent. Although George Herriman thrived in this context, thanks to the patronage of Hearst, the absence of a genuine aesthetic context had its drawbacks — just as our more self-conscious age of artistes has its own set of drawbacks.)

Elsewhere:

The underground illustrator and cartoonist Yossarian has passed away. We'll have an obituary shortly.

Auction sites have become of the best places to trip over unexpected visuals. Here's an illustration sale. Check out the William Steig drawings.

This article made people mad on the internet.

Sean Howe posts information about a sale of original Marvel artwork that may have taken place during a time, the company used to maintain, that no artwork was being sold.

A list of notable manga covers of 2012. Via.

The three-day weekend is over, and Joe McCulloch is here with another of his weekly looks at the new comics in stores, and — oh no! He's talking about Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss 2!

Fast-forward to 2012, and Black Kiss 2, the prequel/sequel to Chaykin's 1988-89 LA adult noir, and the bleakest comic he has ever made. This whole post is inspired by Tom Spurgeon, who, after expressing disturbance at the lack of online conversation about the series, declared it "almost ruthlessly unpleasant" and, ultimately, "the anti-life" - he's not wrong, this is a sordid comic almost beyond compare, but what fascinates me is Chaykin's misanthropy not so much directed at his fellow human beings, but against art. Specifically, the cinema.

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Lilli Carré talks to Robot 6 and Janelle Hessig talks to Amanda Verwey.

—Dylan Horrocks on Creative Commons, Creative Commons on Dylan Horrocks.

—Paul Gravett remembers Les Coleman.

—Editorial Cartoons: The New York Times reviews an exhibition devoted to how cartoonists of the time covered the Holocaust, and NPR talks to current cartoonists about how they draw Barack Obama.

—Dave Sim has a long update on how the funding for his Strange Death of Alex Raymond is going.

—Dave Weigel at Slate crafts a paean to Rob Leifeld, and the recent reboots of his comics by other artists.

Pressing matters kept Tucker Stone from being able to finish his column for this morning, but he says it's on its way, so check back in a day or so, and it may be here.

In the meantime, we have an excellent new review for you: the great Eddie Campbell on Matt Baker. Here's an excerpt:

Baker was the master of a stylistic phase of comic books in the late 1940s, wedged in between the superhero and the horror comics, known to the fans and collectors as "good girl art," which is to say comics that constituted a kind of narrative version of a pin-up. That’s likely to put it more in the realm of kitsch than art, like a lower-brow version of girlie calendars. I’m sure it is to be explained sociologically as a form of reading that fed the tastes of a generation of young returning servicemen who were reading comic books when they were sent away and who weren’t sure what they were supposed to be reading when they were sent back except that they were now interested in sex. Why comic book fans might be fond of it sixty years later would take too long to figure out. The best one can say is that the period look gives it more of a charm than its more recent equivalent, but then that would be admitting that it looks dated. [...]

The more interesting, I would say mature, phase of Baker’s work falls between 1949 and 1955, during which time he specialized as a freelancer in romance for St. John’s line of comics.

I am glad that Campbell is spending more time with his own comics, but oh how I miss his blog!

Elsewhere:

—Heidi MacDonald reports on the ongoing troubles at Scott Rosenberg's Platinum Studios. Where comics are king.

—Editorial cartoonist and editor Matt Bors writes about plagiarism (self- and otherwise) in editorial cartooning, and includes examples.

—A throwaway 1977 story from Joe Kubert on how DC and Marvel comics are made.

—Brandon Graham knows how to blog.

—Reviews: Dustin Harbin on Ruppert & Mulot's Barrel of Monkeys, Christopher Stigliano on Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, and Jason Dittmer on Brubaker & Davis's Captain America.

—Finally, a couple of videos for your weekend: Quentin Blake on creating a story on the page (which I can't figure out how to embed here), and Bruce Parsons' short documentary on Jeffrey Brown:

We're back again. Here's R.C. Harvey weighing in on 94 years of Gasoline Alley, which now has multiple volume series collecting different eras of the strip. Who would've ever thought, just ten years ago? Anyhow, no matter how many times I read the basic contours of the history, it's worth it for these kind of bits:

King, according to the legend, held that anyone could learn to draw, and to prove his point, he bet a few of his cronies in the Tribune cartooning suite that he could teach the mailroom delivery boy, Perry, to be a cartoonist. According to report, he gave young Perry a pad and pencil and sent him out into the world to draw everything he saw. After a while, Perry could draw, and in 1926, King took him on as his assistant, from which lowly station, Perry eventually graduated to do the Sunday Gasoline Alley.

Much of that is true, but what is usually left out is that Perry, in addition to being the mailroom boy, was at the time helping Carl Ed on the Harold Teen comic strip; he was scarcely an untutored drawing novice. At the time Perry took over the Sunday Gasoline Alley, he was doing a Sunday strip of his own, Ned Handy, Adventures in the Deep South, which he’d launched in 1945 while continuing to assist King but gave up when he went solo on the Sunday Alley.

Elsewhere:

This article wins the "not-a-dream-not-a-hoax" award. I bet this not as uncommon a story as one would think. It's about an artist named Arthur Ashod Pinajian, who drew comic books in the 1940s and created "Madam Fatal, the first cross-dressing superhero, for Crack Comics", and then... read on.

Entertainment Weekly offers a substantial preview of Paul Pope's long-awaited Battling Boy graphic novel.

And two for the fun pail: Jim Rugg in on a serious roll. And our man Kim Thompson finds the naughty in Foster.

It's been too long since our last installment of Richard Gehr's excellent "Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists" column, but now the long wait is over, and Richard is back interviewing Jack Ziegler, who's been published in the magazine for nearly 40 year, and now lives in Kansas. Here's a brief excerpt:

GEHR: Did you read The New Yorker at home?

ZIEGLER: No. It was in my friend’s home. [Laughs.] We had Life, Look, Time, and The Daily News. My father didn’t like The New York Times. I had the feeling he might’ve been a Republican, but we never talked about that.

GEHR: Was it [television writer] Brian McConnachie's parents who bought The New Yorker?

ZIEGLER: Yeah. I’ve known him since we were six years old, probably. His parents always got The New Yorker. So it was always at his house. His mother was kinda nuts. [Laughs.] She was an ex-showgirl. And his father had a small company in New York that made industrial films. Brian lived about a mile and a half away from me. We used to walk and meet each other halfway. Then we’d wander off somewhere.

[...]

GEHR: McConnachie has said you used to visit the homes of cartoonists like Basil Wolverton and Bernie Krigstein.

ZIEGLER: Not Basil Wolverton. We used to look for the addresses of comic-book artists in the phone book. Krigstein lived in Queens off of Queens Boulevard, not far from where we lived, so we visited him one day. And once in the city we went to EC Comics and met a few people there. I remember one visit to Atlas Comics, which became Marvel, eventually. The people there were very nice, very tolerant of these little kids coming in all excited. It was fun. I remember visiting the guy who drew Blackhawk and watching him actually draw a page. It was really quite something. I had totally forgotten about that until right now.

Elsewhere:

—The Toronto Comics Art Festival just announced the guest list for this year's show, and it's some lineup! Perhaps most impressively, they're hosting the North American debuts of Taiyo Matsumoto, Gengoroh Tagame, and Blutch. What with the similarly ambitious recent guest slates at SPX and BCGF, it feels like we're in a sort of golden age for this kind of show. I wonder how long it can last?

—Interview Dept.: Tom Kaczynski talked to The Rumpus, and Roger Langridge (Popeye) talked to School Library Journal.

—Paul Gravett has a long, thorough "best of 2012" list up, filled with comics that didn't get a lot of attention.

—Aspiring cartoonists should definitely take the time to read this career advice passed along by Kate Beaton, at least if they haven't already seen it through the million other websites who linked to it earlier.

—Alan Gardner rounds up recent controversies around political cartoonist Bill Day, alleging plagiarism and self-copying.

—I'm not the world's biggest fan of Max Allan Collins's crime fiction, but his newest pulp novel is set against the 1950s comic-book hearings and features a thinly veiled Fredric Wertham stand-in.

—Caitlin McGurk at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library has a nice post with a gallery of Richard Guindon cartoons.

Joe McCulloch as your week in new releases, with a hardy detour into The Flowers of Evil.

Elsewhere:

If you're in LA and you like comics, go see the great Carol Tyler at UCLA on January 31st.

Here's Tom Spurgeon with a Collective Memory for Keiji Nakazawa. Boy, it's slim pickings out there for him. There's so much in the comics internet and yet so very little.

Don Lawrence + The Bible. Oh the British photorealistic style. How I used to hate it. How I love it now. Not love it like I need to own it, but love it like I'm so glad the aforementioned comics internet exists so that I can look at it for a few minutes.

NSFW: Wally Wood's Malice in Wonderland. I know I'm in the minority here, but I think Wood's admittedly really sad final years produced some visceral, gnarly and altogether fascinating work. It's gutbucket stuff and I wouldn't make claims for its greatness, but it's good comics. Clear, natural storytelling unencumbered by... I dunno... ambition or something.

In advance of an exhibition, the illustration blogger David Apatoff is posting some thoughts on the course of 20th century illustration. Helpful hint: He thinks it went downhill. I disagree, but I always like reading about Howard Pyle and the rest of the gang.

Here is some fine official information on the comic book artist, packager and publisher Charles Biro.

I've never heard of this series of books from the 1980s packaged by Byron Preiss. Nice line-up and, bonus, the late Lebbeus Woods designed the logo. Huh.

Finally, I enjoyed this round-up post by TCJ-contributor Sean T. Collins.

Today on the site we have Rob Clough's extensive interview with cartoonist and Oily Comics publisher Charles Forsman, focusing mainly on his publishing experiences, and including a lot of surprisingly frank talk on money:

How much do you make, in both of terms gross and net, from Oily during a month from subscriptions and/or online purchases alone? How much do you make per show? How much of this gets back to the artists? In general terms, do you make enough money from Oily to partly support yourself, or does the money simply get channeled back into publishing to keep it afloat?

So I can give some very rough numbers. I think my gross is probably somewhere between $1200-$1500 per month. Take out about $500 for printing, shipping, and royalties, and I think I am left with 700 to 1000 dollars. This seems high to me as I say this. And to be honest I am a little embarrassed. It just seems weird to be making any money off of mini comics. But I have to remind myself of how much work I am putting in. If I wasn’t doing this I would be working a job making the same amount of money and Oily wouldn’t exist. This money basically helps me eat and put gas in the car. Oh, and go to the movies. Melissa and I are young and live as cheaply as we can. I feel really blessed at my current status and I do my best never to take it for granted.

I pay the artists in copies of the comics that they can sell for themselves and a 10% royalty on every copy I sell of their book. When I started I was paying a quarter to the artists, but I quickly figured out that wouldn’t work in the long run. Ten percent is pretty comparable to what most publishers pay their authors in royalties. It’s pretty funny that even at such a small scale I found that number to work. I wish I could pay them more. What publisher doesn’t want that, though? I think most of them are pretty surprised that I am paying them anything. It’s not a ton of money, but it is something. I hope to figure out a way to pay them more in the future.

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Several interviews for you, including Ron Regé at Expanding Mind, Joe Sacco at the Comics Reporter, Dan Slott at the Village Voice, Jay Kinney at Print (complete with a ton of illustrations), and Arthur Jones at Study Group Comics.

—Jeff Trexler susses out some of the meaning behind last week's Superman legal rulings.

—Chris Mautner picks out six "criminally ignored comics" from last year, and I agree with most of them. (Though I do feel obliged to point out that the review we ran of the Burroughs Ah Pook books, by Rudy Rucker of all people, was criminally ignored itself, at least within comics circles.) The really sad thing is that Chris's list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many noteworthy comics being released these days. We hope to continue improving in our coverage of them.

—Anders Nilsen has a new short comic online which is getting a lot of deserved attention.

—The World Socialist Web reviews a bunch of contemporary superhero comics, from an unsurprisingly political angle.

—Sean Kleefeld has interesting commentary regarding the recent announcement of Jennifer Holm to the CBLDF's board last week.

—Here's a spot for my periodic reminder that if you are a fan of the aforementioned Rob Clough's work, he has a ton more of it on his own site. Today that includes notices of three new autobio minicomics, from MariNaomi, Whitney Taylor, and Margo Dabaie.

—Domingos Isabelinho reviews Fred's Le Petite Cirque, and one of the great literary bloggers, M.A. Orthofer (who is more or less comics-averse), reviews the new edition of Osamu Tezuka's Message to Adolf.

Today on the site:

Tucker Stone rolls in with his weekly bundle of comics.

Gabrielle Gamboa wraps up her week-long diary for us with a photo & drawing narrative combo. I've enjoyed having Gabby's beautiful watercolor work grace our site.

Elsewhere:

This will, I'm sure, be sussed out in the coming days, but the Siegel family lost a major ruling in the Superman litigation.

Oldster corner: Vintage Swedish posters for Hollywood films. And some fine work by John Held Jr., who is always better than I remember him. Sometimes in my foggy brain I think "oh, the flapper stuff", but then I see something and it's sharp and he worked with such range. Nice examination of a Kirby/Fantastic Four sequence here.

In more current biz, Tom Spurgeon interviewed Mark Waid. And Nick Gazin does a best-to-worst round-up. I like a "Best of" list that proclaims itself the best "Best of" list. And it's really a good list.

I am, like a few other people I know, excited for the return of Girls. And here's Lena Dunham's ideal bookshelf, complete with Doucet (underrated choice) and Clowes, as every bookshelf should be. I'll always have a soft spot for her work since she featured Multiforce in Tiny Furniture. What can I say.

Today on the site we bring you a review by David Mandl of the new collection of Jay Kinney and Paul Mavridres's Anarchy Comics. It looks fascinating -- I'd read most of the contributors on anything.

Kinney and Mavrides’s creation brought together an irreverent-bordering-on-nihilistic punk sensibility, serious (but never dry or pedantic) lessons in anarchist history, freshly illustrated texts by such infamous revolutionaries as Emma Goldman and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and that favorite anarchist sport, satirical potshots at mainstream leftists.

Anarchists have always prided themselves on their internationalism—not surprising, since being anti-government is about the only thing all anarchists agree on—and Kinney took that attitude to heart, assembling a far-flung coterie of artists for his comic and emblazoning the catchphrase “International Anarchy!” (or “International Comix!”) on the front cover of every issue for good measure. In its lifetime Anarchy Comics featured contributors from the Netherlands, Germany, England, France, and the US, including Clifford Harper, Spain Rodriguez, the team of Yves Frémion and François Dupuy (aka “Épistolier and Volny”), Gary Panter, Ruby Ray, Gilbert Shelton, Donald Rooum, Melinda Gebbie, and more than twenty others. The majority of the work appearing in the comic was original, but Kinney also commissioned translations of several pieces not previously published in English—most notably the series “Liberty Through the Ages” by Épistolier and Volny.

We also have day four of Gabrielle Gamboa's Cartoonist's Diary of her recent residency at ACA in Florida. Today's entry involves a road trip to Gainesville and SAW.

Elsewhere, as usual, there is more comics-related material to read and listen to on the internet than is good for you.

—The aforementioned Jay Kinney appears on Boing Boing's Gweek podcast.

—Other cartoonists whose interviews you can read or listen to include Jaime Hernandez at EW, Steven Weissman at The Writing Disorder, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story author Sean Howe at The Comics Reporter, and Chris Wright (whose Black Lung was one of last year's best surprises) at Inkstuds.

—Yesterday brought the announcement of the end of the Comics Buyer's Guide after 30+ years of publication. John Jackson Miller has commentary. Longtime readers of the Journal will know that there's a lot of history between CBG and this magazine; if you're a subscriber, today might be a good day to read our very first issue in the archives, which includes a long attack from Gary Groth on CBG and its founder Alan Light. (Actually, Gary himself warns in his recent introduction to the issue that it "should only be read by those with a borderline pathological interest in the histories of comics fandom, The Comics Journal, Fantagraphics, or me; may there be few such unfortunate souls out there." So use your best judgment.)

—In other news I'm not sure what to make of, Brigid Alverson reports that Tokyopop has relaunched its website, and Bart Beaty passes comment on a new presidential selection procedure introduced for the Angoulême festival.

—Misc.: Gary Panter writes a brief appreciation of Dick Briefer, Dangerous Minds resurrects a sadly prescient 20-year-old New Yorker cover from Art Spiegelman, and Eleanor Davis wins a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.

And now 2013 has begun in earnest. Joe "Jog" McCulloch is here with another peek into the comic-shop window to see this week's new books, prefaced by a typically unexpected comparison between the work of Aidan Koch and Sergio Toppi:

Toppi, of course, is a fairly prolix narrator, while Koch avowedly considers "what is the minimum information needed to move the story along?" Here, we see a rather cinematic pull-back from a darkened window, although it's as impossible a portal as Toppi's hanging tower. Shoots of vegetation grow around it, and we enjoy an isolated image of the greenery as the Blonde Woman's telltale hair sweeps by again, accompanied by her lingering night. I find this beautifully evocative of movement, though not depictive of such; rather, the juxtaposition of images details those sensory pickups -- nature's little "cues" -- that approximate the interior and exterior stimuli of motion.

Gabrielle Gamboa is back again too, with the second day of her week writing the Cartoonist's Diary column.

And finally Kristian Williams is here with a review of the first volume of The Graphic Canon.

Elsewhere:

—7 Miles a Second creators James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook get profiled over at Publishers Weekly. One interesting thing to note is that Van Cook, who worked as a colorist on the book, is given equal billing on the new edition. James e-mailed me to point this out, saying, "I fought very hard to get Marguerite co-author status; which I have finally accomplished with this edition. I came up against a lot of resistance to the idea that the work of a colorist in comics could deserve co-authorship status." (Related: I missed this Romberger interview regarding his Post York at CBR last month.)

—The same New Year's e-mail and link cleanup that brought to light that last link also reminded me that I forgot to link to Alex Dueben's short essay on the eclectic nature of Art Spiegelman's career, published by Fortune magazine.

—Which leads me to this recent review of Scene of the Crime, a Brubaker/Lark/Phillips crime comic, which appeared in The New Statesman, and is notable mainly simply for being quite obviously the work of a writer deeply familiar with the publication status of various cultish comics, and unafraid to display that insider's knowledge in an article aimed at mainstream readers. No big deal -- it just struck me for some reason.

—I know that Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy has often been touted as the dictionary definition of the comic strip, but I didn't know that this was ever in fact literally the case.

—Daniel Best has reprinted "Truth, Justice, & the Corporate Conscience", a long essay on Siegel, Shuster, and creators' rights written by Steve Gerber in 1975 for Rolling Stone magazine (which never ran it).

—Huib van Opstal wrote a long illustrated piece for Yesterday's Papers about the early international history of comics.

—Paul Gravett interviewed Nina Bunjevac, and Tom Spurgeon interviewed Tom Hart.

—Finally, Matthias Wivel points us to a short profile of Shigeru Mizuki, which includes a translated reprint of a major story, "War and Japan".

Welcome back. It's a busy week here!

Here's one I'm excited for Arthur Magazine's Jay Babcock interviewing Ron Rege Jr. about Ron's latest book, The Cartoon Utopia. I interviewed Ron for TCJ almost 10 years ago, and the time spent since then has been fruitful for the artist. It's unusual to see a cartoonist translate metaphysics to the page with so much wit, poetry and clarity.  Jay does a great job here sussing out Ron's process and studies.

JB: Where do you see your personal spiritual practice going, outside of art?

RR: I don’t know right now. I’m at a point of mystery with it, at this exact moment.

JB: But you don’t find yourself drawn to a certain school, or lineage? Or… ‘you know what, I think it’s really the Alchemists for me.’

RR: No, I don’t.

JB: Like, ‘Now I really want to head to the east…’ Or, I want to go deep on this one.

RR: No, I don’t think there’s any one in particular that I want to delve more into. I wanna keep being open to all of the different aspects. I didn’t attach to any one. I’m not like gonna get into Zen now, or any particular one. From what I know, there’s probably even more obscure aspects that I’d like to look into, but I still am very generally fascinated by the wide gamut of everything. And I want to keep that enthusiasm. To me, it’s important to not pick one little thing. If anything, it’s about the unity of everything and everyone into one thing. It’s weird to me to go and talk to somebody who’s into one thing and doesn’t know about another thing. To be like this weird little section. Which seems weird because it’s all so interconnected.

JB: What about going beyond belief and speculation? What about practice?

RR: That’s something that I definitely struggle with. I don’t have a very great practice of anything. My practice has come through my personality and the way that I approach other people, and deal with other people, and then issues with my life. I’m very interested in my dream practice right now: the differentiation between waking life and sleeping life.

JB: You have a strip in there about the Tibetan dream yogas.

RR: Yeah. But… I definitely am going through a period of really ultra fascination with everything. Life seems like — and I don’t know if it’s the life that I’ve created for myself, or if it’s just experiences that I have — I’m just fascinated all the time. The lights look brighter. The colors on the trees look more green. The things that people say seem way more significant. The vibes that I’m getting from people…the give-and-take, the push-and-pull with other human beings. And then I’m just amused and fascinated by they way that people act. Usually if I go out in a social situation, at one point during the night I’ll be just like, ‘Humans are ridiculous creatures! Just ridiculous!’ And I’ll think about all the interplay in social structures, different people I know — just what we’re eating and drinking, and the way that we’re… I feel like I’m a squirrel [watching the humans]… Suddenly I have this weird awareness of how utterly ridiculously fascinating everything that we’ve created is.

-Over the weekend we posted Tucker Stone's "19 Best Comics of 2012". It's a healthy and eclectic list that, whatever you agree or disagree with, is pretty reflective of the incredibly broad spectrum of the medium right now.

-We've posted the 2003 TCJ interview with Keiji Nakazawa by Alan Gleason.

-And today Gabrielle Gamboa begins her week-long residence as our cartoon diarist.

Elsewhere:

-Tom Spurgeon interviewed Sammy Harkham.

-The calculus here is simple: Bob Oksner art + "The Brat Finks" = Gold. We have no Bob Oksners anymore, though Johnny Ryan is close, and so, it turns out, is Benjamin Marra.

-And now I want you to hold your breath, count to 20 and watch this film by Yellow Submarine co-director (Heinz Edelmann never gets enough credit for his directorial role) George Dunning.

Ah, a new year, and another opportunity to take an arbitrarily determined change of calendar and use it as an excuse to get out of ruts. My personal biggest resolutions mostly have to do with replying to e-mails more consistently. In the meantime, I've spent most of the past two weeks offline, so there's a ton to catch up on.

First, Tucker Stone does have a column for us today, but is running a bit late, so check in in a few hours for that. [UPDATE: Make that twenty-four hours—it's up now.]

We also have Rob Clough's first review of the year, his take on Ed Piskor's Wizzywig:

Piskor clearly has his work cut out for him in drawing a book that features a lot of sitting around. He always has the reader in mind when illustrating a scene, breaking the book up into easy-to-digest vignettes, man-in-the-street features, look-ins on other characters, and flash-forwards to Phenicle's prison experience and railroading by the justice system. [...] Piskor is mostly about moving along the story. That said, he always adds a certain decorative touch even in talking head scenes; he always goes the extra mile to give us interesting people to look at. I especially like the way he draws hair--scraggly hair and beards on men, odd curls and swoops on women. He revels in the grotesque, creating characters with slumping postures, unkempt hair, shaggy eyebrows, and bad skin.

And Jay Kinney has turned in a late contribution to our page of Spain Rodriguez tributes, and explains the reason for its tardiness therein.

And here is a brief list of highlights from elsewhere on the comics internet over the past couple weeks:

—Jacques Tardi refused the Legion D'Honneur.

—Paul Karasik ate some Fletcher Hanks cookies.

—Bright Lyons took pictures of Brian Chippendale's studio in Providence.

—Maurice Sendak was profiled in the New York Times.

—Paul Gravett wrote about Diabolik and other comics in the Italian "fumetti neri" tradition.

—Interviews were given by Jamie Hewlett, Nate Bulmer, Charles Burns, Dean Haspiel, Matt Kindt & Brian Wood, Heidi MacDonald, Jenny Robb, Rob Clough, Mark Siegel, Marc Sobel, Alex Cox, Derf, J. Caleb Mozzocco, and Ellen Forney.

—Abhay Khosla summed up the year in comics as only he can.

—Jeff Trexler speculated on the state of Marc Toberoff's Siegel case.

—Comics writer Peter David had a stroke on vacation. His wife Kathleen David has been posting updates as to his condition.

—Pappy posted an old ACG comic story that features (my favorite) writer/editor Richard E. Hughes as an actual character.

—Dylan Williams's 1994 interview with Chris Ware, right after the release of Acme Novelty Library #1, was reposted.

—Mary and Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes won the Costa award, and The Guardian awkwardly stretched for ways to use "graphic" instead of comics. Hayley Campbell talked about it all for Channel 4.

—Michael Cavna wrote a great piece about Richard Thompson.

—Chris Ware drew a New Yorker cover, and described the inspiration he drew from recent horrific events.

Welcome back. We're planning a packed 2013 on the site. So we hope you enjoy the year with us.

First up -- while we were on vacation the sad news came that Keiji Nakazawa, known for his Barefoot Gen graphic novels, passed away. Matt Thorn wrote an impassioned obituary.

It is important to remember that when Nakazawa came to Tokyo, he did so with the dream of creating boys’ manga in the simple, cartoonish style that was popular in the early 1960s. Although he occasionally slipped into a more “adult” gekiga style, it was the style of the children’s adventure he was most most comfortable with, and virtually all of his anti-war works from “I Saw It!” onward adhere more or less to this style. The effect when applied to the most extreme horrors of real war is jarring and haunting, and arguably more powerful than a more realistic or slick drawing style would be, and in this sense can be said to be precursor to such works as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

And today Joe McCulloch catches us up on this and last week's releases, including work by Herriman, Wood, and, a collection of the mostly forgotten 1970s serial, El Cid.

As Consulting (reprint) Editor Dan Braun notes in his foreword to this 96-page Dark Horse hardcover, El Cid — published in 1975 and 1976, mainly in a single dedicated special issue of Eerie (#66) — was among Warren’s responses to the popularity of the Conan magazines and other fantasy comics of the time. Interestingly, unlike some of the Warren serials, El Cid boasted a dedicated artist: the supremely gaudy Gonzolo Mayo, whose decorative, ultra-’70s edge-of-comprehension style lends a rare flamboyance to scripts plotted out by seemingly everyone in the Warren offices (if always dialogued by publisher mainstay Budd Lewis).

Elswhere:

Tom Spurgeon posted a ton of interviews over the holidays and capped it all off with 50 Comics Positives. He's a machine! I particularly enjoyed his interview with Carol Tyler.

Comic book writer Warren Ellis has published a novel, and the NY Times liked it very much.

You know when it's a new era when you turn on the radio and there's a piece on Jacques Tardi. A good one, too!

Self-promo alert: Robot 6 previewed the Blutch book I'm releasing, So Long, Silver Screen.

And I'll leave you with a clip of the animated Barefoot Gen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCK4arVflHE

Well, this is my last blog post of the year. I know you'll miss my begrudging, skimpy link-blogging for the next week or so. But I'll be back! And we're leaving you with some goodies.

We have Tim's interview with cartoonist and Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynski:

Uncivilized was at first created mainly as a self-publishing vehicle. At some point, I was talking to Gabrielle [Bell], because she was coming to Minneapolis for the Rain Taxi Festival, and we decided to do this mini-comic together. It was just a one-off for this show, but it went really well, we got some good feedback on it, and we decided to make more of them. In the meantime, I thought, “Well, it’s kind of fun to do other people’s books.” So I started adding other artists to the mix, with Jon Lewis and Dan Wieken, who’s an artist in Minneapolis. At some point Gabrielle decided not to do The Voyeurs at Drawn & Quarterly, and asked me if I wanted to do the book. At that point I was just a mini-comics publisher. It took me a while to think about it. To really do justice to that book, I would have to become a proper publisher. That’s where it started snowballing. Once I said yes to that book, I was like, “Okay, distribution, I gotta figure that out. I gotta figure out where this is gonna get printed, I gotta figure out all that stuff.” Started making a plan to become a publisher, which is where I’m at now, I guess.

And we here's Hayley Campbell with an essay on complaining, awards, and women in comics:

i. that the British comics industry (in particular) will whinge (an English, whinier version of whine) itself out of existence, and ii. that WOMEN IN COMICS (campaigners, agenda-ers) are ruining it for women in comics. Hey wait, come back. Let me bend your ear a second.

Elsewhere:

The late John Updike on Big Little Books.

Those Burning in Hell boys on Mike Mignola.

And via R. Fiore, "the Terrytoons version of The Juggler of Our Lady, from 1958, which was probably Deitch's second best picture after Munro. This is a pan-and-scan version, but I've seen it a couple of times in full size Cinemascope. It was designed by Blechman [from Blechman's graphic novel] and narrated by Boris Karloff, which might have given Chuck Jones ideas."

Today we have a review by Doug Harvey of a new book collecting the Dick Tracy-quoting collages of the San Francisco artist Jess. Here's the review's opening:

Even among those familiar with contemporary art history, the relationship between comics and so-called “high art” is often limited to a few superficial talking points, boiling down to the early token recognition of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as great art and the wholesale and arguably condescending swipes of the Pop artists – particularly Roy Lichtenstein. Fortunately for all involved, the story is more complicated than that. Artists like the late Swede Oyvind Fahlstrom or Scotland’s Eduardo Paolozzi created complex works that honored original comic creators while looking to the medium’s innovations in pictographic language as extensions of the parameters of Modern Art. Europe was way ahead of America in recognizing the medium’s legitimacy, in a broad popular sense as well as in academia and the art world.

But there were pockets of brilliance in the USA too. One of the greatest-ever fine art interrogations of the funny pages has to have been Tricky Cad, created by the San Francisco artist Jess (Collins) between 1952-1959. An eight-episode series of cut-ups made entirely out of fragments of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, the five known extant collages have been collected and reproduced at a legible size for the first time ever in O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica edited by LA-based art writer Michael Duncan and published by Siglio Press -- who also released a stellar 2008 collection of NY artist Joe Brainard’s decades-long body of work deconstructing Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.

And as the year (possibly the world?) winds down, so shrinks the comics internet bubble:

—Tom Spurgeon has begun his annual year-end series of interviews with comics figures, this time starting out with Alison Bechdel, one of a small handful of artists who dominated the news this year. It's a good interview too, and a great way to start off a series.

—The mega-popular site The Awl has an interview with Sean Howe, whose history of Marvel Comics was another of the year's big books.

—Douglas Wolk reviewed a whole slew of comics for the New York Times.

—And finally, Spider-Man writer Dan Slott has reportedly been deluged with death threats via social media sites after the leak of an upcoming plot twist involving Doctor Octopus. This is depressing on several levels.

Well, last night we said goodbye to Gossip Girl. I was heartened when I recently met someone in his 50s who also likes the show. It means I'm not nearly as much of a loser as I could be. Also, I bet someone up north is softly weeping into his bound editions.

Today Joe McCulloch brings us his final comics list of the year.

And elsewhere:

Following on Tim's entry yesterday, here's more R.O. Blechman -- this time his classic take on Eustace Tilley.

Hey, why not spend your holiday season with Jack Cole? Don't answer that. But go check out two rare cover images and follow along for the duration.

No more pulp heroes at DC Entertainment. The over-90 crowd will be heartbroken.  More importantly: No more Spirit archives in print. Huh.

Not comics: The landmark magazine/edition Aspen is the subject of an exhibition in London. Nice piece on it here. Worth a look for the book-as-object crowd. (via). And this, too. More England. More book design quandaries to think about.

My gift to Tim this holiday season.

Today we have the final 2012 column of Sean T. Collins, in which he says hello to Aidan Koch, creator of The Whale and The Blonde Woman. Here's an exchange from their discussion:

Are you content with tone coming through even if the transmission of the narrative is incompletely received? Is the tone the important thing to you?

Oh absolutely. I mean, think about the idea of studying literature and the hundreds and thousands of students that have to pull theses and hypothesize about symbolism and undercurrents. I think it's fair to say that sure, those authors probably didn't intend the majority of what people speculate, and yet we recognize it as a valid undertaking. I think what's important is what the author does give us is a basis or guideline to such speculation. I'd much rather create work that's dynamic and compelling than overly explanatory or simply "readable." In comics especially, there is so much the artist has to work with in their favor between the written, visual, and sequencing. It's kind of like how film is to photography, comics are to drawing/painting. It's about the immersive experience.

Elsewhere, in no particular order:

—The Comics Reporter republishes a very funny Noah Van Sciver comic about traveling back to early '90s Seattle and applying for work at Fantagraphics.

—This piece at The Scotsman about the rise of graphic novels isn't anything new really, except perhaps in tone.

—Hogan's Alley republished an interview with the late Bud Blake.

—The Guardian has another long profile of Alan Moore, of the kind they seem to run every fortnight or two, but this is an unusually good one covering lots of new territory.

—There's a forthcoming biography of Ward Kimball that's apparently run into trouble with Disney.

—Milo George has transcript of a 1955-era Orson Welles talking about horror comics.

—James Romberger reviews a slew of comics. I always enjoy reading his take on things.

—I missed this studio visit with the publisher, cartoonist, and occasional TCJ contributor Austin English.

—MoCCA &The Society of Illustrators has announced the formation of a new steering committee.

—Finally, a couple videos from 1966. First, the legendary Gene Deitch's test film for a never-made version of The Hobbit (via):

And second, a vintage CBS Christmas message from R. O. Blechman (via):

It's Friday, but no Tucker today. He'll be back next week. Instead we have a special treat: Patrick Hambrecht and Dame Darcy on Heather Benjamin's Sad Sex. Be warned: the images within the review are very NSFW.

Elsewhere:

Jeff Trexler weighs in on the latest Superman ruling. More on that here.

Rising young comics fest CAKE announced Michael Deforge as a special guest.

Tove Jansson's Hobbit illustrations. (via)

Arthur is inspected.

Here's a useful guide (part 1) to some releases to look for in 2013.

Sequential hand gestures over here with Bruno Munari. Not really comics, but certainly in the ballpark.

Not comics except by proxy: The great Gene Wolfe is reissuing 19 of his out-of-print novels as e-books.

Not comics but of interest to me, so why not: A review of Bob Dylan's new art show that references the "Richard Prince did it" theory. Prince is a current fascination of mine, especially as a collector and user of artworks. He is able to recognize (or imbue) the uncanny in objects. Whether that's real or imagined is sorta beside the point. Also, I've grown to enjoy his gag cartoons on canvas, not to mention the joke paintings. And there's also his collecting and use of works by artists like Richard Powers and Bill Ward. Finally, Prince might be making the best artist's books around these days. Each is a lesson in concept, image selection and sequencing. It's all working in a jacked economy, of course, but even that luxury element doesn't bother me since it's so self-evidently part of the work/game. What's The Wire quote? "All in the game"?

Block out some time, because we've got a big one for you today, a long interview with Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez conducted by Dan and myself and Frank Santoro. Both Gilbert and Jaime were on that morning, and willing to talk about anything and everything. Here's one exchange taken more or less at random:

HODLER: I might be misremembering, but I believe I read an interview with you where you said that when you create stories, you kind of work at the beginning and the end and the middle all at the same time.

GILBERT: It’s different all the time. That’s probably most of the way I worked. Sometimes, I would just draw the last page real sloppy because I’m tired, I’ll do that as I start the story, and if I know what the ending is, I rarely know what the ending is, but I’ll draw the last page early on if I know what it will be. Like, Marble Season, my Drawn & Quarterly book, I drew the last page when I was halfway done with the book, because I didn’t want to get to that last page feeling, “I’m tired, I don’t wanna draw this page!” [Laughter.] That lesson came from one of the early Barry Smith Conan stories, it was “Red Nails.” Was it the end of the first chapter, or the whole…? The page where you can tell, Barry Smith, it was probably 4 in the morning, and he just couldn’t do it much justice.

JAIME: I thought the whole second issue was …

GILBERT: I think it was the last page of the first chapter, ’cause the first part was real intense and Conan gets chased by the dinosaur and he has to carry Valeria; and then at the end, it was the last page of the chapter, it looked like Smith handed it to Vinnie Colletta to finish.

NADEL: Oh, Colletta finished it?

GILBERT: No, it looks like it. Or Pablo Marcos.

NADEL: Oh. [Laughter.]

GILBERT: I can tell because it looks like Barry Smith was fried at 4 in the morning, and he's gotta get it into the office and it’s not done. I don’t wanna do that, so the trick is to do that page before you get to the end. Yeah. And the sloppy page might be in the middle of the story now, instead of the very end but not a lot of people notice. It’s very telling when it’s at the end.

I learned from those mainstream guys, that’s one thing. And I think a lot of indie artists don’t. And that’s why they can’t freakin’ tell stories or structure stories or have stories, ‘cause you gotta learn from the mainstream, the nuts and bolts of putting a comic together, anyway. Like Dan Clowes said, “You watch enough episodes of Mannix and The Twilight Zone, you learn how to structure a story.” These guys don’t. You know, story structures. I mean, they might be talented in their own way, but you’re not getting stories there. And I think that’s what makes our comics kind of awkward in the indie scene, ‘cause they’re actually stories. No plots, but stories still.

In other news:

—The Eisner Awards judges have been announced.

—In Buffalo, a mysterious illegal mural has appeared, celebrating the work of the late Spain Rodriguez.

—Tom Spurgeon clarifies a recent organizational news release from the CBLDF.

—Chris Ware appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show.

—Brooklyn magazine has a tour of Gabrielle Bell's apartment.

—Jenna Brager at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Hope Larson's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.

—The New Statesman has a slew of comics coverage out right now, including among other things Colin Smith interviewing 2000 AD's Al Ewing and Henry Flint, and TCJ's own Hayley Campbell on the UK comics boom.