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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.

On the site today:

I'm pleased to welcome writer Rudy Rucker to the site. His most recent novel is Turing & Burroughs. (Described as: "What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs's wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos?"). So who better to review the two new Burroughs-centered releases, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me and The Lost Art of Ah Pook: Images from the Graphic Novel. And so:

The results are staggering—the best pictures of dicks that I’ve ever seen.  I think in particular of an image in The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, showing a Mayan musician with an epic hard-on that reaches up to the strings of his electric guitar. A little insect-man with a curled proboscis and a dangling ball-sack stands on the neck of the guitar.  Wonderfully jagged fields of force trail from the guitar to the musician’s hand.  This design was made for a 1978 Burroughs-inspired “Cumhu T-shirt.” Cumhu is a Mayan character in Ah Pook.  If and where this T-shirt was ever marketed isn’t explained.  In any case, McNeill and Fantagraphics should consider reissuing reissue this transgressive T.

Elsewhere:

Some videos now (thanks GB): Here's comics-relevant artist Jim Shaw on the occasion of his retrospective at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

http://vimeo.com/51432225

And here's Justin Green in Portugal.

Holiday shopping alert: Noel Freibert posters. I love the wonky geometry of these designs.

Hey it's Brother Voodoo.

And Robin McConnell talks to Ruppert and Mulot.

It's Tuesday, which means it's Joe McCulloch talking about the new comics day. This week, he's also takes a long look at the latest comic book from Stammerin' Steve Ditko:

Tucked away in the midst of all this meaningful mayhem is a six-page chiller that could have come straight out of The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, had that august forum abandoned the supernatural entirely for a hardcore focus on psychological distress. Nobody in American comics has ever mastered the art of people freaking the fuck out like Steve Ditko, and that's what we get in this Poe-like flyover of a thief who can't stop believing that all eyes are upon his guilty brow.

I tend to find these kinds of stories the most humanizing of Ditko's works; for all his invocation of the excellent potential of the human mind, the visceral kick of his art comes from his profound sensitivity to anxiety, obsession, self-loathing: the mess of human living in a damned fallen world. Looks at that guy's head *splitting in half* in panel 4 - is that a photocopier effect? Definitely it seems like a foreign technological incursion; all those broken sentences read otherwise like the collapse of language in the face of unutterable realizations, words transformed into marks in perfect parity with the lines that compose the bodies of every Ditko hero and villains. These are stories where everybody says what they mean, and... what they mean... is...

Well, you can read it, right? Can't you see? With your own eyes?

And again, we've added another round of tributes to the Spain Rodriguez post. If you haven't checked it out for a while, it's worth doing so. New contributors include Sharon Rudahl, Craig Fischer, Charles Dallas, and M.K. Brown.

Also, Fantagraphics has a post giving us all a sneak peek at the upcoming print issue of The Comics Journal, and it looks pretty amazing.

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Speaking of Steve Ditko, he's still corresponding with fans.

—Chris Ware is here to help you with your holiday shopping, both with a long list of his favorite gift books, and a blog post about the books he most enjoyed reading this year.

—Steven Weissman goes comics shopping with Mario Hernandez.

—And I haven't had a chance to listen to this yet, but it's got to be good on some level: Josh Simmons interviewed by Dean Haspiel.

Dan is unavailable to blog right now, so I'll be your replacement host this morning. Today on the site, our columnist Shaenon Garrity makes a long-awaited return with a new piece on three genres of webcomics that are surprisingly underproduced.

Around the time my webcomics reading list included one comic about two married female itinerant laborers in space, one about eighteenth-century Bavarian religious politics, one that was at the time devoted to drawing gag strips based on Nancy Drew book covers, and one with a holiday installment entitled “The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas”, I started to suspect that Rule 34 had officially extended from pornography to webcomics, and there was now a webcomic on literally every subject conceivable to the human mind. That was two whole years ago.

And yet, despite all the thousands of comics knocking around in the tubes, some genres remain surprisingly underrepresented.

We have also continued to add new additions to our Spain Rodriguez tributes post, including a contribution from Kim Deitch.

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Wired has a lengthy excerpt from Alan Moore's introductory essay for the Occupy Comics project.

—Sean Kleefeld has pulled out a bit from Sean Howe's Marvel Comics history worth remembering whenever the Pearl Harbor anniversary comes around.

—And I missed this earlier this year, and can't remember where I finally learned about it, but someone at Drawger has posted the entire contents of Frank Tashlin's How to Create Cartoons.

Well, so far here in Miami Art is winning against Comics. Last night I saw some fine Copleys and the best Picabia painting David Salle never painted. But not a back issue in sight. Where's a Frank Santoro when you need him? This is, in fact, seven years to the week that Frank and I flew on down to Miami and heard the alarming news that one artist friend had a stash of weed strapped to his scrotum. Alarming, but somehow not discouraging. Yes, in those halcyon days one could glimpse a Paper Rad skate ramp made from cardboard amidst the Miami glitterati. Also: People now dead that were then alive. Anyhow! I finished my installation this evening and I'm all set. So, on to the internets.

Today on the site we have a profile of John T. McCutcheon by R.C. Harvey. Harv! Tell us what you know:

Newspaper artists furnished all the illustrative material for the papers of the day. The halftone engraving process for reproducing photographs had been perfected in 1886, but it was not adapted successfully to the big rotary presses until the New York Tribune did it in 1897.  Until the turn of the century, newspaper sketch artists were graphic reporters, covering all the events that photographers were to cover later. McCutcheon drew pictures of everything. He illustrated major news events, often working from sketches made on-the-spot. A typical day might include a trial in the morning, a sporting event or crime scene or a local catastrophe in the afternoon, and an art show opening or a flood or fire in the evening. When not dashing from event to event with a pad of paper under his arm, he worked in the office, doing portraits of politicians and dignitaries, and decorations for a variety of columns and stories. At the beginning, he was more illustrator than cartoonist, and he also wrote occasional feature pieces and newsstories.

What else is happening? I don't really know, but here goes:

Sean Howe keeps delivering the goods. Here he is on Ms. Marvel.

I'm one of the only people I know who likes George Wunder. So I guess this is made for me. Wunder drew the oddest faces this side of Boody Rogers and did paintings of early American history for a book in the 1970s. Those are weird weird weird. I love them.

Slow links day? Maybe. I'm on the run, though, so I ask you to ponder George Wunder until the next one of these rolls around.

Today we have Rob Clough's review of Julia Wertz's latest book, The Infinite Wait, a very funny book which probably hasn't received enough attention. Here's how he opens it:

In a sense, the heart of each of the three short stories in Julia Wertz's memoir The Infinite Wait is the impact that discovering comics has had on her life. Ostensibly, the book is broken up into "Industry", a chronological account of her life as seen through her job history; "The Infinite Wait", her account of learning that she suffered from chronic systemic lupus; and "A Strange and Curious Place", a love letter to the first public library she haunted as a child. While each story can be read as discrete narratives, the truth is that this book is a sort of recapitulation and revisitation of the themes and events she explored in her first three books (The Fart Party Volumes 1 & 2; Drinking At The Movies). There's a deeper level of narrative, thematic and emotional complexity that becomes more apparent as one reads the book for a second time. Wertz doesn't exactly disown her earlier works in this book, but she goes into detail as to why each of them makes her uncomfortable from her current perspective.

We are still continuing to add new contributions to our page of Spain Rodriguez tributes. Since Monday, Art Spiegelman, Gary Groth, Noah Van Sciver, and Sam Henderson have joined the ranks. We are still waiting on a few more, so don't forget to check back in every now and again. We are also posting another short interview with Spain conducted by Gary in 2001, and regarding his then-unusual foray into the world of online comics.

Elsewhere:

—Speaking of comics that deserve more attention, Boing Boing has gathered a bunch of comics figures' recommendations for best-of-the-year lists. I don't agree with all of the choices, and think there are many titles that belong on those lists that didn't make it, but still ... there are a lot of decent or better comics coming out these days.

—Which leads us nicely to Ng Suat Tong's review of Mattotti and Zentner's Crackle of the Frost.

—Words Without Borders has a new webcomic from David B. and Hervé Tanquerelle.

—ICv2 has a two-part interview with the perennially underrated Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

—Finally, here's a new (to me) Tumblr devoted to terrible editorial cartoons. (via)

I'm in Miami this week for the art fairs and, in particular, the NADA Art Fair, which is suddenly a family affair. If you're in Miami, come on by. Alas, I will not be trying to sell Real Deal back issues to contemporary art collectors, but I'll be hungry for some good comics talk. I can see you a Boody Rogers if you'll raise me a Dori Seda. Or you can always place your ace in the hole: Dick Ayers. Bring on the comic book gabbing. Maybe I'll finally get to the bottom of that comics vs. are conflict I hear so much about. I'll take a survey. Maybe I'll solve it while balancing 3 mojitos on my nose. Who knows.

Well anyway, all of this is to say two things:

1) If you know of some awesome back-issue joint in Miami Beach, let me know.

2) My blogging this week will be ever even worse than usual.

Ok, it's today:

In addition to the usual comic book opining, Joe McCulloch has some thoughts on Alan Moore's foray into short filmmaking.

Elsewhere:

The big news is that Karen Berger is resigning from her position as Executive Editor & Senior Vice President at DC's Vertigo imprint. She's made quite a legacy there. More details as they're available.

Here's CNN on manga artist Takehiko Inoue of Slam Dunk notoriety.

This looks interesting -- an iPad and/or PDF periodical of journalism in comics form called Symbolia. 

Steve Heller highlights a kind of hilariously modernist (thought though beautiful) design by the great Bradbury Thompson for the Famous Artists Schools 1963 annual report.

And best of all, here's Seth on the demise of Bazooka Joe.

Today, Craig Fischer turns in an essay, "The Lives of Insects", reflecting on photography, comics, and Eddie Campbell. Here's an excerpt:

In many of his recent books, Campbell combines changes to his visual style with stories about the satisfactions and challenges of being an artist. Fate of the Artist is all about Campbell losing himself as a cartoonist, father and man; on the first full story page of the book, Campbell declares (in third person) that “the artist has come to despise his art, his self and his readers.” “You can all go to fuck,” he says to us while in bed, exhausted, lying in a pose that echoes Henry Wallis’ famous painting The Death of Chatterton (1856) and the rest of Fate is an assemblage of vignettes and narrative games that display the symptoms of Campbell’s mid-life crisis, including hypochondria and writer’s block. Fate ends with Campbell’s adaptation of an O. Henry short story, “The Confessions of a Humorist” (1903), where a successful humor writer, a twin for Campbell himself, grimly strip-mines his family and friends for ideas (“I became a harpy, a moloch, a vampire”). The humorist only finds peace when he quits writing and takes a new job as an accountant for a mortician, and it’s clear that Campbell wants a new job too: he’s tired of exploiting his family for material, tired of being a comic book auteur, tired of being.

The tributes to Spain Rodriguez continue to pour in. Some of the new contributors include Trina Robbins, Carol Tyler, Glenn Bray, Joe Sacco, Mary Fleener, Justin Green, R. Crumb, and Lorraine Chamberlain. More are still on the way, so stay tuned. We have also posted a Spain sketchbook selection originally published in The Comics Journal in 1992.

There are many, many links to get to, so here goes:

—First, two more sad deaths to report: Jeff Millar, the 70-year-old writer of Tank McNamara (and popular movie reviewer), and Josh Medors, who passed away from spinal cancer at the age of 36.

—Good interviews with interesting comics-related people include: Chris Ware at Rookie, Julia Wertz at the L.A. Times, David Hine at the Graphic Novel Reporter, and Paul Krassner at Print.

—Apparently, there will be no more Bazooka Joe comics.

—A former cartoonist turned neuroscientist is studying the effects of reading comics on the brain, and his work has been profiled in Discover.

—Jeff Trexler speculates about the possibility of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons regaining the copyright of Watchmen as early as next year.

—Printer problems led to the loss of many of Colleen Doran's negatives, and she is looking for help in restoring A Distant Soil.

—Sean Howe catches a nice bit of red-pencil work in Stan Lee's introduction to Origins of Marvel Comics.

—Laura Sneddon reports and adds her own thoughts to a discussion about gender-balance issues at this year's first installment of the British Comic Awards.

—At a formal event in Montreal, Alejandro Jodorowsky was given the title of "Grand Rectum."

—Wired has an unsummarizable story up about Portland cartoonist Chad Essley and his relationship to the fugitive software mogul John McAfee, currently "sought for questioning in a Belizean murder case."

—Our own Joe McCulloch writes about the late director Tony Scott at film site Mubi, which naturally leads to a lot of Jack Kirby discussion.

Today on the site:

We will continue to post tributes to the late Spain Rodriguez as they come in. And Tucker, Abhay and Nate bring an extra-long version of the column. Tucker has many comics reviews and Abhay explains Grant Morrison for the un- (or just under-) initiated.

My favorite part of the “Grant Morrison Vs. The Word Aspiring” section was Morrison declaring, “I was even a guest on panels at comics conventions”, referring to a UK comic convention that took place somewhere between 1979 and 1982. We’ve all lived long enough where admitting you attended a comic convention in the UK between 1979 and 1982 is a strategy for winning an argument, and not character evidence being used against someone accused of interfering with preschoolers. Bam Pow.

See? You have your Friday all set now. Elsewhere:

-The Washington Post on Spain.

-Chris Ware gets the lengthy New York Review of Books treatment. Plus bonus Gore Vidal quote.

-The late 19th/early 20th century German magazine Jugend held many comic and illustration treasures. Here are some.

-Dan Zettwoch on holiday time.

-The latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell is up. Good news: Punisher is discussed.

-To play you into your weekend: It's The Hulk on drums.

You all know by now the sad news: underground comics legend Spain Rodriguez died yesterday at the age of 72. Patrick Rosenkranz has written our obituary for the artist, a Buffalo native and member of the Zap Comix Collective. Here's an excerpt:

He was born and raised in Buffalo, a blue-collar city in upstate New York, where his colorful and formative upbringing provided a wealth of anecdotes and legends for his later comic stories. He picked up the nickname Spain at around 12 years old, when he heard some kids in the neighborhood bragging about their Irish ancestry. He defiantly claimed Spain was just as good as Ireland, so they began calling him that. It stuck.

[...]

The usual suspects often criticized him for his depiction of violence and sexual activity, but he didn’t really care. “I’m just a crude dude in a lewd mood,” he would reply. Comics were his chosen medium of expression and he wielded his pen and brush with impunity.

“It seems to refer to the core of the American vision or the democratic vision, that there’s an aspect of yourself that you owe to your society in terms of omission and commission, but there’s an aspect of your life that you don’t owe to anybody. This is something that there’s a constant fight over. In terms of underground comix they certainly broke through that fifties fantasy that conservatives are so dedicated to maintaining, despite that fact that it was a fantasy in the fifties, and now it’s an absurd charade. Comic books are really something that are part of some core of this country. And that’s the struggle. Liberty and justice for all should mean you can say what you want. Unless you can show some tangible harm I’m doing to somebody, fuck off. That’s the battle line I want to be on. I intend to remain here until they carry me away on my back. If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, I think the undergrounds were really a continuation of the American Revolution. Hell, it sounds too grandiose, but so what?”

Rosenkranz visited and profiled Spain this spring, in conjunction with his most recent book, Cruisin' with the Hound (which was reviewed by Jeet Heer for this site in June). In honor of Spain's legacy, we have reposted Rosenkranz's article, as well as a two-part interview conducted by Gary Groth in 1998. We will also be publishing a collection of tributes to the man, starting with a beautiful comic strip from Bill Griffith, along with remembrances from Gary Panter and Mario Hernandez. We plan to add to that post throughout the following days, as more come in.

Also worth a look is the short documentary, Trashman: The Art of Spain Rodriguez, directed by the late artist's wife, Susan Stern: