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It's Wednesday here at TCJ, probably means it's Wednesday wherever you are: that's how days work, most of the time. Today, we've got our last look back at 2018 before committing ourselves fully to 2019. It's a special edition of our Retail Therapy column, with a whole mess of retailers swinging by to let us know what a "Best of" means to them as readers & retailers.

It's also time for day 3 of Ellen Lindner's Cartoonist Diary. In this installment, she's getting her Instagram on.

Our review of the day is of the most recent Street Angel release, from Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca. Courtesy of Marty Brown, it continues the Journal's tradition of liking Rugg related items.

In fact, some of the most fun Rugg and Maruca have is when they’re cheekily referencing an elaborate backstory for Street Angel that never gets shown in the books. Each successive volume seems to push the boundaries of what is possible in Street Angel’s world, and vs. Ninjatech is perhaps their most delightfully bonkers hardcover to date, going deeper into the Shiraz Thunderbird Expanded Universe than we’ve seen before. Typical Street Angel encounters tend to happen at, uh, street level: she gets into a fight after school or rescues a dog or goes trick-or-treating or finds a dead body in an alley – all things that could reasonably pop up in a homeless girl’s periphery on a given day. In Ninjatech, we start to see the larger infrastructure (“the ninja industrial complex”) of the world she inhabits. It’s like Rugg and Maruca’s season 3 of The Wire.

Ramble # 3: I watched that scene at the end of Sully that's made up, the one where he makes people feel bad by being the best dad with the second best mustache (Aaron Eckhart has the best mustache), and at the end, the Breaking Bad lady apologizes to him on behalf of America for not giving him the Best Dad award earlier. Clint Eastwood made all that up, apparently. I'm in Austin, what do you want from me. I found some deal to rent a tiny shitbox car for 7 bucks a day, but they didn't have any shitboxes, and the guy behind me in line was being a real Charlie Asshole to everybody, so the dude at the counter said "lemme help you out here". His "help" turned out to be a giant red pick up truck. It's great! I keep accidentally driving over curbs because the fucking thing is huge, I love it. Great food out here, FYI. I'm no foodie--my doctor actually told me i'm in the minority of the population who has no emotional attachment to food, that I view it purely as fuel--but I can tell the difference between good and great. Great stuff here!

I'm in Austin for a show, and I got to see a whole big presentation on the history of graphic novels, but it was a history that starts in 2006, because it was a history on making lots of money in graphic novels--so you can skip past all that stuff about underground comics and zines and what not, get right to the kids stuff they're now doing million count print runs on. It was interesting in a way, seeing how much of the financial legs of this thing has been built off of basically five people (3 creators, one marketing director, whoever the buyer was at Target back in 2010), a giant entertainment conglomerate that prints comics as an afterthought to their global movie empire, and a huge, never-ending beating stream of goodwill. But it was also a reminder that progress doesn't necessarily take everybody with it, which is painful. 

Like everything else, the most exciting parts where the tinier revelations, about how the mechanics of a basic panel to panel transition becomes so useful in a classroom, or how the experience of personal expression that eludes some children falls immediately into perfect flow when comics are touched upon. It's nice, after so much time in 101, to hear a conversation getting taken past the introductory stage. It's not the conversation I had expected, but the older I get, the less my hunches are turning out to be correct--i'm starting to develop a taste for surprise. Luckily, as my doctor said: that shit is just fuel.

Everything's back to normal here now. First, R.C. Harvey is back with the third installment of his multipart series exploring the legendary feud between Ham Fisher and Al Capp. In this section, Fisher meets Capp and things start to take off.

Fisher’s self-aggrandizing embroideries betray his version as somewhat fictional — his generously offering lunch to an impoverished stranger, Capp’s naming Joe Palooka his favorite strip, Fisher’s taking pity on the poor lad and creating a job for him. Later in the article, Edgar quotes Fisher claiming to have “started the trend of comic strips away from vaudeville skits toward continuous adventure stories”; in fact, by 1930, Roy Crane at Wash Tubbs was well into telling adventure stories that continued from day to day. Fisher also told Edgar that he “innovated the use of current events as story backgrounds”; I suspect Caniff was a little ahead of Fisher with Terry and the Pirates set in China.

According to the Capp clan’s version of the events of his employment on Joe Palooka, Fisher, after a few months, went off to London on a trip with Flagg — just disappeared, Capp said. Interviewed by Carol Oppenheim at the Chicago Tribune on the occasion of his retiring from Li’l Abner in November 1977, Capp said, while Fisher was gone, the syndicate phoned and asked for four more weeks of the Sunday strip.

“Out of loyalty,” Capp said, “I didn’t mention Fisher’d vanished. I wrote the strip myself. But I wasn’t going to have anything to do with that stupid prizefighter; so I put in my own characters — the hillbillies. They were hilarious. But when Fisher came back, he fired me.”

Capp maintained that he’d conjured up the hillbillies from his memory of those he’d seen in his youth on that fabled trip through the South; he took Joe Palooka into the hills and staged a match between the champ and the meanest of the hillbillies, a ribaldly uncouth character named Big Leviticus. This episode became the bone of contention between Fisher and Capp, giving rise eventually to the most scandalous incident in the profession’s short history.

Ellen Lindner is back, too, with the second day of her Cartoonist's Diary.

And we also have Jason Michelitch's review of Tommy Redolfi's biography, Marilyn's Monsters.

Marilyn's Monsters is a new book trapped by old ideas, and Tommy Redolfi is an artist overpowered by the myths he seeks to manipulate. Redolfi's book is an attempt at a dark allegorical fantasy version of the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. While effectively creepy at times, with a few intriguing conceits within its nightmare vision of Hollywood, mostly it seems that the energy of Monroe -- her particular mixture of power and tragedy -- proves too wild and elusive for Redolfi to know what to do with. He ultimately falls back on cliches, both in his understanding of Monroe and in his use of genre tropes, and for all the Lynchian dread and ghostly weirdness Redolfi can muster, the book doesn't really deliver much more complex a take on Marilyn than Elton John does in "Candle in the Wind."

The story follows Norma Jeane, soon to be Marilyn, as she travels from Nowhere, America to the land of Holy Wood, a magical forest settled by vaudeville performers and transformed into the source of the world's movies, which are sent hither and yon through a complex system of iron pipes. Here, Norma will be scouted by the shadowy, eldritch powers-that-be, and transformed from a human woman into the ethereal, glowing icon of Marilyn Monroe. It's a weirdly charming plot conceit that places us firmly in the realm of allegorical fable, and Redolfi's art presents almost all the human characters as something akin to grotesque New Yorker caricatures. Everyone and everything is a little (or a lot) unsettling to look at, which makes the eventual introduction of Marilyn as a literally glowing beauty queen all the more pronounced.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Oni Press has named a new editor-in-chief, Sarah Gaydos.

Gaydos joined Oni in April last year as editorial director of licensed publishing, following a multiyear stint at IDW Publishing, where she was group editor of titles that included Star Trek and Jem and the Holograms. At Oni, based in Portland, Oregon, she was responsible for existing titles such as Rick and Morty, as well as acquiring and developing new projects based on existing intellectual property.

In a blog post, John Porcellino announces that he will be pulling back on his work providing comics distribution through Spit and a Half.

Like all of us I'm sure, I grow more and more alienated from the modern world with each new day. I'm broken down by the constant cycle of bad news, horror, stupidity, greed, anger. In the pre-Distro days, if I was overwhelmed like that, I'd be able to retreat for a while, hide for a bit, regroup. Draw, think, walk in the woods, heal. But with the Distro that's an impossibility. There's always another email, always another order. PLEASE don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly humbled by and grateful for the support the Distro has gotten from the community. It's an honor to serve you all! But the time has come for me to pass on this mantle to the next generation. It's just not a job one old dude can do on his own anymore.

—Reviews & Criticism. Jeet Heer reviews last year's consensus pick as comic of the year, Jason Lutes' Berlin.

Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters. Berlin features a large and diverse cast: workers and plutocrats, communists and fascists, bewildered liberals and political activists, Jews and anti-Semites, pacifists and street fighters. What unites them is the shared experience of living in a crumbling democracy, where economic chaos, distrust of the established order, and rising violence all work to destroy social cohesion. On a personal level, this means the characters are all tested, again and again, to show empathy, and even the best of them sometimes fail these tests. But the redemptive thrust of the book comes from the resilience of solidarity and hope even in the darkest times.

For the New York Times, Robert Gottlieb reviews Mark Dery's Born to be Posthumous.

There are mysteries within the mystery, and for Dery the mystery that matters most is that of Gorey’s sexuality — he gnaws away at it relentlessly throughout the 400-odd pages of his narrative. Was Gorey straight? Not very likely. Was he gay? Probably, but not actively. Did he have any sexual life at all? Was he asexual? Gorey himself addressed the question in an interview he gave to Boston magazine late in life. “I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something. I’ve never said that I was gay and I’ve never said that I wasn’t.” Responding to the direct question “What are your sexual preferences?” he replied: “Well, I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I’m gay. But I don’t identify with it much.” Dery makes much of the fact that when the interview was reprinted after Gorey’s death, the final two sentences were suppressed, but by the time this particular reader had reached Page 410 of “Born to Be Posthumous,” he was so tired of the endless speculation that he wouldn’t have perked up if it turned out that Gorey’s interests lay in extraterrestrials.

Robert Boyd reviews a selection of various comics, from recent Shortbox output to Noah Van Sciver and Johnny Ryan.

Noah Van Sciver is an extremely talented alternative cartoonist probably best known for his hilarious series of books about his poet-manque character who calls himself Fante Bukowski. One Dirty Tree is about his growing up in a run-down rental house in New Jersey. the street address was 133, and it had a dead tree in the front yard which lead one of his brothers to name it One Dirty Tree. He was from a Mormon family with 7 brothers and sisters, including Ethan Van Sciver, who has become one of the faces of Comicsgate. Ethan is a very talented artist who was quite successful for a while drawing mainstream superhero comic books. But he drifted over into far right politics and online harassment, burning many bridges. Noah never mentions this aspect of Ethan's life in the book, but he does depict Ethan as a budding comics artist creating his character Cyberfrog while still a teenager. Amazingly (or maybe not), Ethan is still trying to make a go of Cyberfrog, crowdfunding it to self-publish it. To me, these two brothers are exemplars of the difference between mainstream and alternative comics. Not because of Ethan's politics (although there has always been a whiff of the fascist in superhero comics), but in that Noah has advanced to a much more subtle and adult type of storytelling while Ethan, a 44 year-old man, is still drawing fucking Cyberfrog, a character he made up in high school.

At Jacobin, Imen Neffati argues that the Charlie Hebdo of recent decades is a betrayal of its original leftist ideals.

Created in 1969 by François Cavanna and Georges Bernier (alias Professor Choron) — both from working-class backgrounds — Charlie Hebdo began as a weekly supplement to another magazine, Hara Kiri, which had established itself in 1960s Gaullist France as an anticapitalist, anti-consumerist, alternative, avant-garde, and counter-cultural form of journalism, reliant on parody and surrealist content. Habitual objects of Charlie Hebdo and Hara Kari’s attacks included powerful institutions such as the advertising industry, the army, and the Church.

The project took a particular turn in the 1990s. Charlie Hebdo had been discontinued in 1981 just a few months after the election of France’s first Socialist president, François Mitterrand, and Hari Kiri followed suit at the end of that decade. When Charlie Hebdo was resurrected under the editorship of Philippe Val in 1992, a specific fraction of the working class — immigrants — and a specific fraction of immigrants — Muslims — became its targets.

Martin Dupuis looks back at Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns.

Miller’s contour lines are thinner than [Klaus] Janson’s, they have less thick and thin contrasts and make for a flatter result when looked at in black and white. But the restraint seems like a deliberate choice that allows Varley’s colors to play a significant part in the image making instead of it being an afterthought. It’s subtle, and in no way am I saying that Janson’s inks are bad – its just a slight difference that has recently been made apparent to me after years of feeling that some panels were slightly different than others. Below is Janson on the left and Miller on the right:

Janson’s rendering is slightly more “realistic” looking, Miller more caricatural. Janson inks the shadow on the bridge of the nose, Miller leaves it open for Varley to sculpt. Look at the thicker brush strokes used on the left in comparison to Miller leaving shapes empty and letting Varley use color to create definition.

Min Hyoung Song reviews Yeon-sik Hong’s Uncomfortably Happily.

To be candid, I struggled to get into this book. The title Uncomfortably Happily is awkward, suggesting perhaps that something idiomatic failed to translate from the original Korean. (I speak Korean like a five-year-old, so don’t ask me if this is the case.) It’s also very long — almost 600 pages — and dense, full of smallish panels and a lot of text. The images themselves are drawn in a rudimentary style, to the extent that it can be hard at times to differentiate between Hong and Lee.

Moreover, the book presents Hong as highly irritable and full of complaint. At the start, the copyeditor of the press he works for calls to request revisions on the comics series that Hong is writing for them. Hong resents being called so early. He resents requests in general. He resents having to work. All of this resenting doesn’t make Hong a likable person.

But as the story progressed I began to appreciate its willingness to let Hong’s flaws show.

—Interviews & Profiles. The Virtual Memories podcast interviews Kriota Willberg.

It's 2019, and you've arrived just in time for our first Cartoonist Diary of the year, from Ellen Lindner! She'll be here all week. Today, she's starting things off with a look at some idiosyncrasies that you might identify with: an ear for confusing accents, and a love of public transit.

Our review of the day comes to us from H.W. Thurston. This time around, H.W. is looking at one of the best looking books of recent memory, Roman Muradov's Vanishing Act. Are looks everything, though? Let's see what the review has to say:

To be honest, I’m still not sure whether I liked it, or whether I thought it was smart or merely clever. Part of that is due to the fact that it is often esoteric and hard to follow (I had to actually write down the story as I read it in order to keep track of what was happening)--though not in a way I take issue with, exactly. It feels deliberate. But it’s a bit like trying to decide whether or not I like Ulysses. To judge whether an obscure thing earns its obscurity, you have to find a way to clarify it in the first place.

And today, we've got another chapter in the history that was Stan Lee for you: a giant interview from a college visit, first published in an issue of The Journal published back in 1978. There's a decent amount of meat in here, but it also features a handful of very specific questions from college students...and those kinds of questions weren't any better in the late 70's than they would be now. Dig in!

EZRA GOLDSTEIN: Well, the obvious follow-up to that is, “Yeah, but is it art?”

LEE: None of us are going to live long enough to really come to any conclusions about what art is. I've been arguing that subject, or discussing it, all my life. I don't have the remotest idea, really, of what art is. I don't think that any two people have the same concept of it. Maybe the only thing you can discuss is, is it good art or bad art, and that of course is subjective also. I would say, though, and there's no way I'm going to convince anyone who disagrees, but I do feel that comic books are art, just as plays are art, and movies, and television, and sculpture and ballet and dancing are art. Maybe playing the Jew's harp and the kazoo are art. I think that anything you do that is creative is art. Whether it is good art of not depends on how well you do it. I think, for example, certainly comics presently do not enjoy the prestige of opera. But, I think there can be good comics, there can be good opera, there can be bad comics and there can be bad opera. I'd rather read a good comic than listen to a bad opera. I'd rather listen to, or see, a bad opera than read a bad comic. I think that quality is the big determination for any form of the media. I think, again, anything really can be an art, and anything virtually can be art, depending on how it's done.

And then there's this, rolling around in my head: While Aftershock has gotten off to a rough start, mostly because it uses the publishing model of taking comics writers who have been hitless for multiple years and partnering them with artists who often lack talent, energy and craft (you need at least one of the three to coast)--which, when you say it out loud, should probably just be called "the Dynamite model"--at least one of the more recent Aftershock books is as compelling as the "it's late, let's watch this" entertainment they're most similar too. That aside, their most recent advertising campaign is maybe the most embarrassing one I can remember, and I'm saying "maybe" because a more definitive answer would require looking at other advertising campaigns for the other comics publishers whose publishing model consists of trying to turn mediocre television scripts into more colorful mediocre television pitches at a rate of speed faster than comics retailers can realize they need to cut their orders. Calling the sorts of comics Aftershock publishes--which are aesthetically indistinguishable from many comics published by IDW, Image, Dynamite and whomever else there is currently churning this stuff--"dangerous" and "edgy" is only mildly less embarrassing than that IDW comic they have that talks about punk rock in a fashion that makes me feel like i'm 14, being embarrassed by my father attempting to rap at a summer camp skit night. Does no one want to age gracefully anymore? While writing this, I thought to myself that Aftershock's advertising campaign does actually do an excellent job of letting me know what the actual comics are like by calling them "dangerous" and "edgy", and by the same token it probably repulses younger people who wouldn't like those comics, so maybe it's a great idea after all. Point taken, Aftershock! Ramble #1 over.

Ramble #2: the other thing that I had to roll my eyes about was this particular news: Greg Rucka's gonna write Lois Lane? I have no allegiance to any particular portrayal of Lois Lane, although I do think that the old post-Byrne 80's/90's one depicted her pretty well as a tough, smart lady with a unique personality, and I dug the comics after she found out Clark had been lying to her for so long although that particular thread should've have run longer--but can there be a worse choice for a Lane comic? Rucka's bonafides as a guy who isn't totally gross seem to be legit, but he's got another set of bonafides, which are that the only way he has ever known how to write a powerful female character is to A) make her a drunk, B) make her a depressed, sour drunk and C) give her all the traits of a depressed, sour drunk but not depict the alcohol or depression, which means she's just angry and fucked up all the time with no convenient explanation. I guess you could count his run on Batwoman as breaking the mold, but is it really replicating the mold when you copy Bruce Wayne's backstory entirely, staple some Alice In Wonderland schtick to it, and let JH Williams draw a bunch of pinwheels? C'mon, son. There's gotta be a better way!

And we're back!

This is the time of year when we ask all of our contributors and other comics figures to send in lists of their favorite comics of the year. We got an even bigger response this year than last time around, so these lists should keep you busy for a while.

For most of the titles there wasn't much consensus, but when all of the votes are tallied, here is the TCJ Top Thirteen of 2018:

1. Jason Lutes, Berlin (Drawn & Quarterly), 16 votes
2. Julie Doucet, Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet (Drawn & Quarterly), 13 votes
3. Eleanor Davis, Why Art? (Fantagraphics), 12 votes
4. Lauren R. Weinstein, Frontier #17: Mother's Walk (Youth in Decline), 11 votes
5. (tie) Tommi Parrish, The Lie and How We Told It (Fantagraphics), Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam (First Second/Avery Hill/self-published), and Lale Westvind, Grip Vol. 1 (Perfectly Acceptable Press), 9 votes each
8. (tie) Yvan Alagbé, Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures (NYRC), Nick Drnaso, Sabrina (D&Q), Hartley Lin, Young Frances (AdHouse), Olivier Schrauwen, Parallel Lives (Fantagraphics), Noah Van Sciver, One Dirty Tree (Uncivilized), and Jim Woodring, Poochytown (Fantagraphics), 8 votes each

Note: If all votes for works by Olivier Schrauwen, Noah Van Sciver, and Lauren R. Weinstein were added together (each artist received multiple votes for multiple works), the list would have been somewhat different. The top 13 artists of 2018 would then be 1. Lutes, 2. Van Sciver, 3. Weinstein, 4. Doucet, 5. Davis, 6. Schrauwen, 7. (tie) Parrish & Walden & Westvind, and 10. (tie) Alagbé & Drnaso & Lin & Woodring.

We also published Edwin Turner's review of the new edition of Steinberg's The Labyrinth.:

Steinberg's Labyrinth is a maze of aesthetic transfiguration. His illustrations show a full command of brush, nib, ink, and the various qualities of paper itself. Steinberg's lines course through the wordless novel, tangling the reader into cartoons and cubisms and caricatures, blemishes and brushstrokes, dots and loops that simultaneously satirize and substantiate mid-20th-century modernist art, when commercial illustrations and comics were transmuted into Pop Art. Under each seeming squiggle is an assured hand and an even sharper mind.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The tally above has been corrected, after a few errors in tabulation were brought to our attention.]

Today at The Comics Journal, we've got that giant interview you've been craving: it's Sean T. Collins & Phoebe Gloeckner, talking about what went into her selections for the most recent edition of The Best American Comics. And speaking of that word "best"--

To get deep in the weeds a bit, when you’re selecting the best comics—

Okay, get rid of that word. Get rid of that word, because it’s not possible. OK, yeah, you’re choosing the “supposed best” or “so-called best comics,” right, yeah?

Mmhmm.

What is your responsibility to your leadership? What do you think when you’re possessing them? Well, I don’t fucking know. [Collins laughs.] No, honestly! I’m not thinking I’m choosing the best because I know I am the filter. What matters to me is, Do I like it? Did I like it more than a number of other comics? If the answer is yes, maybe I’ll include it, because what else do I have?

Our review of the day is by our own Matt Seneca, who took a look at another recently translated monster of a work from New York Review Comics--it's Edmond Baudoin's Piero, recently translated by Matt Madden.

The superstructure of Baudoin's story does not differ much from the average memoir. Beginning in early childhood with a few scraps of pastoral reminisce, it proceeds through school days and adolescence to a conclusion at the cusp of adulthood. In its particulars, however, Piero is a radical book. The scattershot quality of the earliest impressions Baudoin shares remains even as the memories described move closer and closer to the present. Scenes whisk by in a panel or two, not leading into one another so much as they are placed in proximity. Transitions that jar at first come to feel downright liquid after awhile, with Baudoin's casual narration building up something that feels more like a museum exhibit than a novel, with each individual fixture to be left behind for the next at the moment one's interest is diverted.

Are you ready for the holidays? As both the father of a young child and a guy who is about to officiate a wedding ceremony in the part of the South where they talk about God like, a lot, I can guarantee you I am not! However, The Comics Journal does have one tradition left before we disappear up our respective chimney: our annual look at the Year In Comics! After you've finished today's reading, please return on Monday to find out what the luminaries, malcontents and professionals thought 2018 had to say for itself. (The comics, at least!)

Wotta rotten holiday season so far. But not here at the Journal, where the Quality Content keeps on coming. Today, we have an excellent report from Cynthia Rose of a Paris exhibition on Victor Hugo that tunes into something much more ambitious: a short history of French cartooning.

If French press cartoons are unashamedly rude, what's at the heart of such a caustic culture? To find out, you just need to meet its great practitioners. Some of their names, albeit dusty, are still revered: Honoré Daumier, Nadar (Felix Tournarchon), and André Gill. But many more – once celebrities with powerful pens – are now obscure. Outside of experts, who mentions crazy guys such as Henry Monnier and Jean-Pierre Dantan?

I found the answers in a current Paris exhibition, Caricatures: Victor Hugo On Page One. It's a show focused on the man who wrote Les Misérables, but one that tells his story wholly through caricature. In the exhibition are almost two hundred drawings, many rarely if ever shown, that take you straight to the art's historic heyday.

To revive that era, Hugo is a perfect choice. His eighty-three-year life (1802–1885) coincided with both technological change and huge events. A supersized ambition kept him at their centre and, being a Royalist who defected to socialism, every sort of detractor got to take a shot at him.

No human life supplies the satirist's every need, but that of Victor Hugo certainly came close. Hugo was a prolific, epic intellect and also an epic over-achiever, braggart, philanderer, self-promoter, schemer, liar, and nostalgist. His modern legacy may be the Les Misérables musical but the author's stardom was already global during his lifetime.

We also have a review from a new contributor Toussaint Egan, who takes an enthusiastic look at Ronald Wimberly's LAAB #0.

As a sequential media text, LAAB is a narrative of sorts, though not framed around the actions of any one fictitious character, but rather a discourse centered on the sordid history of an aesthetic entrenched within the complementary forces of racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. Per the issue’s opening essay, Wimberly cites theoretician Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" to outline how the anti-semitic caricatures created by the Führer cult to lull the German populace into stupefying docility during WWII were preceded nearly 200 years by the racial capitalist aesthetics of Thomas “Dartmouth” Rice’s Jim Crow character, the archetype of what Wimberly calls “the Nigger Aesthetic.” As he describes it, the Nigger Aesthetic refers to the "representation of the Black body, Black life and the corresponding way of seeing and thinking about the Black body, as informed by white supremacy’s stigmatization of the Black body and Black life.” Wimberly proposes that, in order to meet and nullify this pernicious strain of systemic defacement, artists must consciously prefigure the black body and its ontological history within the Western cultural imagination at the forefront of attention so as to eclipse the dangers posed through the tacitly unconscious consumption of these aesthetics. “I believe the presence of Black personhood itself erodes the lie of white supremacist aesthetics.” Wimberly writes. “The juxtaposition of the Black body and its inherent personhood with the reductive Nigger Aesthetics activates a political subjectivity. Like seeing, touching, smelling a human body vs. seeing a drawing of a human body. The presence of the body and its personhood is a material anchor to reality and therefore acknowledges the aesthetics and the political constructs relative to that reality.”

Today at The Comics Journal, it's time for Michel Fiffe's monthly look back, The Fiffe Files. This time around, he's got George Freeman up on the whiteboard.

George Freeman always comes to mind when I think of comic book powerhouses who can do it all. Freeman's got the goods: killer drawing chops, excellent timing, a sharp sense of design, and he gives his work enough of a cartoon shine to make it look fun and alive. He's like Michael Golden as inked by P. Craig Russell. It's exceptional work, but due to his erratic résumé, Freeman's never been closely associated with any one major title or character and thus, his work is easy to miss.

Our review of the day is also a dip into super-hero obsession: Noah Berlatsky, who remains on brand by shaking his head at the latest attempt by DC Comics to get Wonder Woman right. 

Usually when people discuss "adult content", they mean sex. But the original Wonder Woman comics by were saturated with themes of lesbianism, bondage,and cheerful eroticism intended to thrill and entertain children of all ages. Marston, who in his personal life lived in a polyamorous relationsip with two bisexual women, believed that loving submission to eroticized female authority led adults and children of every gender to peace, happiness, and matriarchal utopia.

Morrison and Paquette aren't quite true believers, but they obviously enjoy pretending. Volume 2 kicks off with Nazi superwoman (and Marston creation) Paula Von Gunther  invading Paradise Island with a battalion of storm troopers during World War II. She's quickly subdued (in various senses) by Queen Hippolyta and her warriors, who fire orgone blasts that convert Nazi soldiers to love as each cries out with an ecstatic "yes!" Paula herself realizes that she should submit to the love of women, rather than to the hate of man, and falls in infatuation in quick succession with Hippolyta and with Diana, aka Wonder Woman. Paquette's drawing of Paula's moment of transformation— eyes wide, expression rapturous—would please Marston mightily. That's exactly how he wanted his readers, girls and boys, to look at Wonder Woman—as a love leader who will restrain us, retrain us and lead us all to kink and virtue.

Over at The Scores, Varun Nayar has delivered a fine review of Sabrina.

Much of the story takes place in Colorado, occasionally flickering back to Chicago, where Sandra, equally listless and confused with the grief of Sabrina’s disappearance, spends most of her days indoors. Drnaso’s storytelling style excavates his characters context; his illustrations, reminiscent of airport security pamphlets from the early 2000s, scrub faces of expressiveness. The physical spaces, too, are equally nondescript: most rooms are under-furnished; beds lack frames; not a picture-frame in sight; and the only words that appear on the page are pieces of dialogue in speech balloons.

Over at The Montreal Gazette, Ian Mcgillis has the latest in Julie Doucet profiles, and it's one of the more involving ones so far.

As for a possible return to comics, she doesn’t rule it out. Nor does she seem especially bothered either way.

“Who knows? Not me. It would have to be something completely different from what I used to do, and right now I don’t feel I have any stories to tell. Besides, you go to a store like Drawn & Quarterly now and you open a few books … there are just so many amazing things being done. I tend to get discouraged when I see stuff like that.”

Over at BOOK RIOT, S.W. Sondheimer gets very specific about how the way the publicity department at DC Comics handled the Eric Esquivel fallout has impacted the way that site will be covering DC and Vertigo titles in the future.

Today on the site, R.C. Harvey continues his epic history of the legendary feud between Al Capp and Ham Fisher. He's still warming up at this point, with an introduction to the work of Ham Fisher.

In his own account of his life, Fisher was profuse in thanking “a good and gracious God for letting me be on my way at last.” He produced a daily column (“Cousin Ham’s Corner”) with caricatures of local celebrities and drew a cartoon or two, sports or political. After a year, he left the Record to join the staff of the city’s other paper, the Times-Leader, because, he explained, “they let me put my name bigger on the cartoon. That’s a fact. All we cartoonists are hams and my name especially fits me. But boy, it was great. I was a personage in our city. If I hadn’t been a cartoonist do you think that judges, mayors, the governor — well, in fact everybody — would have sought me out? I had a position of influence and power, but not too much affluence. Soon I was toast-mastering at banquets, getting good money as an after dinner speaker with nice little political plums thrown my way."

He confessed that he even drew political cartoons for both the Democratic and Republican parties. And then, he said, “came a mistake.” He joined a friend in launching a new newspaper. It lasted only about a year, but its collapse (due to the effects of a strike in the local industry, coal mining) was undoubtedly a blessing in disguise for Fisher. A couple of years before, in about 1920, he had been smitten with an idea for a comic strip, and if the newspaper had succeeded, his comic strip might never have germinated, and the pugilistic world would have been poorer.

We also have Josh Kramer's review of Vagabond Valise.

The Vagabond Valise, just out from Conundrum Press, is a new entrant for admission into the canon of very sad nonfiction graphic novels. It follows Chick-o, a stand-in for Canadian author Siris, through a long, disparate series of grievances and injustices in and out of the foster system in 1960s and ‘70s Quebec. There’s no question that it is sad: gross food, emotional and physical abuse, losing an adolescent crush when her house burns down. There is some rough stuff. But even though the contents sufficiently sad, I’m not sure that’s enough to make Valise good.

Siris has a scratchy line, likely from a nib pen, but it’s not super variable. There are few small details (forks on the dinner table are little tridents, backgrounds are sparse) and a loose hatching permeates nearly ever panel. This wobbliness can be endearing, and the art is on the more cartoony end of the spectrum, like Rocko’s Modern Life. There is a low-simmering magic realism a la Pee-wee’s Playhouse — Chick-o is a Lewis Trondheim-esque bird boy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Over at the Beat, Alex Dueben talks to James Romberger about his new book on James Steranko.

I did the interview with Jim intending to make it the main focus of the 3rd issue of a comics zine that Marguerite Van Cook and I were doing for fun, Comic Art Forum. But then it felt like it was so significant, and presented such a good opportunity to establish language for comics scholarship to be able to talk about the dovetailing relationship of art and text in comics, that I thought I’d try to get it done by a major publisher as a book. It seemed to need a biographical intro, which at the time I didn’t have the writing chops to do properly. At that point, one thing led to another and I returned to college at BMCC, then Columbia and CUNY Graduate Center. I spent a decade and a half completing my masters because I drew five books worth of comics and a few gallery shows in that time. Drafts of both of the essays in the book were originally done as papers for classes. The critical analysis training I got led me to writing for Publishers Weekly, The Comics Journal, etc. – and to teaching. So it has been a journey that took me to some unexpected places.

Just to note, I had originally counted 200 unique graphic and storytelling devices for our “Innovations” list that runs through the interview, but between Jim and I, we weeded out around a quarter of those as having been previously done by others – so Steranko was quite active in trying to not take undue credit for himself. And I retained my independence in writing the essays and assembling the book so it would have critical validity, rather than being an “approved” publication.

Also at the Beat, Romberger himself interviews Jim Woodring.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about that… what would have happened if my folks had sent me to a late 50’s-style child behaviorist? Christ. I’m sure they thought about it. Probably the stigma of having a certified nut for a kid prevented it. But the truth is that these visions and things were peripheral to an innate and intense metaphysical longing, that well-known nostalgia for the infinite that drives so many of us, which was and still is at the forefront of my consciousness. So I’m glad I didn’t get diagnosed, held back, drugged, shocked or subjected to whatever other barbarous rehabilitation techniques they used on wayward children in the Beaver Cleaver era.

At Paste, Hillary Brown talks to Ariel Schrag.

Paste: Is it hard for you to be so open about your life or does it come naturally? Has it gotten easier or harder over time?

Schrag: As a teen, I mostly wrote whatever I wanted to about myself and other people, which was freeing, but led to a lot of personal complications. Now, I’m more careful about not exposing others, which is its own relief, but can make the writing more difficult. Disguising people or fictionalizing autobio is just another layer of work. There is a sweet spot where you say what you want and it feels like the truth and no one gets hurt or feels exposed, but that spot is hard to come by.

The Comics Alternative podcast has two recent interviews up, a new one with Bill Kartalopoulos and another with Tom Hart.

—Reviews & Commentary. The Paris Review has published Harold Rosenbeg's essay from the new NYRC collection of Saul Steinberg's The Labyrinth.

Both because of his superb penmanship and the complex intellectual nature of his assertions, I think of Steinberg as a kind of writer, though there is only one of his kind. He has worked out an exchange between the verbal and the visual that makes possible all kinds of revelations. For instance, there is a drawing in which a triangle on one end of a scale weighs down an old, patched-up, decrepit question mark on the other. Axiom: A NEAT FORMULA OUTWEIGHS A BANGED-UP PROBLEM.

To build his labyrinth, Steinberg had only to draw a line from A to B on the principle that the truth is the longest distance between two points: the result is an enormous scrawl within which the original two dots appear as the eyes of the Minotaur.

As if the relations between words and objects weren’t complicated enough, Steinberg has thrust between them the illusions of the drawing paper. “There is perhaps no artist alive,” E. H. Gombrich testifies in Art and Illusion, “who knows more about the philosophy of representation.” A long straight line keeps changing its pictorial functions—first it represents a table edge, then a railroad trestle, then a laundry line, until it ends up in an abstract flourish. Steinberg is the Houdini of multiple meanings: the line with which he creates his labyrinth and entangles himself in it is also the string that leads him out of it.

The much-missed podcast Comic Books Are Burning in Hell (featuring TCJ all-stars Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Matt Seneca, and Tucker Stone) has finally dropped a new episode.

—Misc. Courtesy of Sean Howe, I recently learned about two YouTube videos of interest to old-school fans. First, an interview with Jack Kirby:

And then a "debate" between Todd McFarlane and Peter David.

Last week, some adjustments to the TCJ website made the backend of the site unusable for a time, which is why you did not see a blog post. Previously scheduled posts did appear that day. Since then, we've worked with the website programmers so that we'll be able to return to regular posting, and it is our hope that the upgrades we were in the process of setting up will appear without issue in the coming weeks.

On Friday, we featured Greg Hunter's most recent episode of Comic Book Decalogue, this month featuring Ben Passmore. In it, the BTTM FDRS creator discusses the impact of Prince of Cats, shelving a post-collegiate magnum opus, and when leather jackets and moshing came to hip-hop. (As observant readers will note, Greg refers to this as the podcast's penultimate episode. More about that later...)

Today's feature comes to us from the sorely missed Ng Suat Tong, who goes into great detail to refute recent criticisms of Mort Cinder that have focused on the book's plot and narrative mechanics.

There have been suggestions that Oesterheld dragged out and improvised the introduction of Cinder because of Breccia’s difficulties with finding the right look for the character—hence the strangely meandering first chapter (“Lead Eyes”). Yet whether this forced discursion truly affects the narrative as a whole is difficult to determine.

While the construction of Mort Cinder has been noted to be a flexible and collaborative effort between Breccia and Oesterheld, there are distinct and recurrent motifs in it which suggests it was not put together for reasons of mere entertainment or with little forethought. If anything, there is a coherence and depth in its plotting which suggests a steady hand at the tiller.

Last Friday's review came to us from Rob Clough, who took in Robert Dayton's Empty Bed and came away laughing.

Robert Dayton's The Empty Bed is a long howl and a laugh up his own sleeve. This is the multidisciplinary artist's first long-form comic, and its mixture of word and image has more in common with Ray Fenwick's typographical comics than anything else. This is a dense, splotchy pen-and-ink affair about a devastating breakup. Actually, it's not so much about the breakup as it is the long, long aftermath. That aftermath, featuring the dreaded "I love you but I'm not in love with you" rejection, is interminable, self-indulgent, self-pitying, and frequently hilarious.

Today's review comes to us from Tom McHenry, and it's of one of 2017's more inventive works, Sophia Foster-Dimino's Sex Fantasy.

Foster-Dimino excels at taking the fantastic and anchoring it to earth with well chosen details and physical stuff. Too much whimsy and nothing connects, but too much reality and nothing delights. With the right mix, though, the emotional stakes of every mode get raised for the reader: the comic, the tragic, the erotic.

The past week saw a flurry of action involving DC Comics, sexual harassment and online activism. As covered by comics websites like Bleeding Cool & The Beat, the general story followed what is now becoming standard operating procedure: a victim's public proclamation of harm, support from major industry figures boosting the story's profile, websites & social media users deducing and publicly declaring the name of the alleged predator, and then the firing of the individual. It took less than a week for this situation to reach that conclusion. One would hope that kind of pace will eventually find its way towards curtailing the abuses described in the first place. 

Today at the Comics Journal, we're spending our morning--and a healthy portion of our afternoon--drinking in Matt Seneca's epic column on the comics he found in France. You'll want to make sure you've got a fine relationship with a good comics importer for this one, friend.

In America, filling in a comic store's worth of shelves with anything besides every Batman trade inevitably becomes both a guessing game and a referendum on a proprietor's personal taste; the American comics industry just hasn't produced enough books that can be relied upon to sell over the long term for it to be anything else. France doesn't have the same problem, which is awesome! But the cloud hiding underneath the dazzling silver lining is that retail backed by a successful industry can become classic rock radio: a predictable parade of solid selections. 

What France has is better than what we have here (BD Fugue in Nice is an incredible store, FYI), but my meanderings on the Riviera felt a bit like a negative image of the shitty retail experiences I wrote about earlier this year.  Shopping for comics is fun, and one of the reasons why is how variable and random the experience is. It's not like going out to get office supplies! The same-y feeling I got from comic shopping in France wasn’t unpleasant - it was nice to see books that had something to recommend them enjoying unambiguous commercial success - but it was there. Nothing’s perfect, man - not when you’re engaging in late capitalism, but especially not when you’re buying comic books.

Our review of the day comes to us from industry stalwart, Ryan Carey. I couldn't remember the last time we reviewed some yaoi, and Ryan was happy to oblige. Coyote: how is that thing?

The tone Zariya establishes here is basically one of “YA minus the Y,” as we are introduced not so much to a pair of characters as caricatures, titular protagonist Coyote being shy, nervous, stand-offish, perhaps not entirely comfortable with his emerging sexuality, while the object of his affections from afar, piano player Marleen (I guess Coyote isn’t too introverted to avoid spending most of his nights hanging out in bars), is the stereotypical “dreamy” sort, all smooth confidence with just enough sensitivity to make him less out of reach than he at first appears. He’s Edward, only human, while Coyote is a lycanthrope Bella.

Did you catch Tim's not-so-subtle dig at me for linking to online comics? I sure did! In response, here's Kevin Huizenga's Instagram, which includes some recent hot fire, some pages from Emil Ferris next volume of Monsters, and Lauren Weinstein's latest Normel Person, which he should be linking to all the time, even on days when it is my turn to blog.

The best of list season is truly upon us, with a whole bunch of sites getting into the action. Meanwhile PW is shouting out the big books of Spring 2019, three of which are definitely pulsing with great Satanic power. But when it comes to best of lists, I, like Dominic Umile before me, have long since reserved my greatest excitement for this one: Adrian Curry's. It ain't comics (even if cartoonists do occasionally show up), but hey--we got a lot of those already.

We've got two reviews for you today. First, Tucker Stone himself writes about M.S. Harkness's Dxpx Dxxlxr.

A collection of minicomics by M.S. Harkness, D*P* D**L*R is aggressive, confident work by a cartoonist whose obvious affection for boldness and speed conceals a methodical structure and pacing. Comics that in other hands would have allowed for an exercise in crude mark-making so as to complement narrative tempo here play out with an eye towards broader legibility--this, more than other comics playing in the here-is-some-gnarly-shit-I'm-into genre, is a comic that won't seem foreign to a broader audience less willing to engage with obfuscation.

The three stories here all seem to be drawn from Harkness's life, or at least, from how Harkness chooses to present her life to others. (Harkness uses the same stand-in throughout, an angular character who also served as lead in her previous book, Tinderella.) Opening with a fast paced karaoke take on SZA that sees its protagonist tearing through enough life experiences to fill a whole shelf of comics from more sedate storytellers, this first tale features a bukkake sequence, a boot-removing assault as response to street-side cat-calling, a jail-bound musical, and a monster truck rally that makes it to outer space. Harkness shows no loyalty to any particular layout, going from one-page splashes to jam-packed micropanels, often toying with the style in which she depicts her lead. The flexibility allows for odd flourishes that give the story a wry humor that might not otherwise come across with the song lyrics that stand in for actual text.

Greg Hunter is here, too, with a review of Aubrey Sitterson and Chris Moreno's Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling.

Professional wrestling's relationship to the truth has long been a part of its appeal. Performers play heightened versions of themselves; matches have predetermined outcomes but take legitimate physical tolls; and the pleasure of suspended disbelief accompanies the thrill of an in-ring comeback or betrayal. Documenting the tradition’s history means contending with its layers of artifice—not just the competing accounts of various musclebound egomaniacs but also wrestling's stake in an embellished understanding of itself. So it's perhaps not just for brevity's sake that Aubrey Sitterson and Chris Moreno's new book settles for something short of history in its title. Their Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling recognizes wrestling’s complications but isn’t always a match for them, offering critical insights and fannish boosterism in equal parts.

Sitterson, the book's scripter, locates pro wrestling's origins in carnival athletic shows that crossed the country following the American Civil War, then follows its transformation into a worldwide phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century. Here and elsewhere, Sitterson has a weakness for excessive bolding ("Catch wrestling allowed holds below the waist, mitigating the Russian Lion's power, but he proved indomitable and was soon recognized as the world champion in England"), and his constructions are often clunky ("Much like in the carnival days, it would seem there was too much money on the table not to start at least partially compromising legitimacy for entertainment."). Even so, he makes these pages count, exploring the shady inheritances of wrestling's carnival pedigree and explaining how the tradition came to optimize its entertainment value.

Any credible understanding of wrestling is an international understanding of wrestling, and here too, the book delivers. Before surveying more recent figures and trends, Sitterson devotes a chapter to Japan's wrestling culture, from its growth after World War II to the divergent histories of storied promotions All Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro Wrestling. For the curious but uninitiated, Sitterson also clearly defines terms common to Japanese pro wrestling, e.g. "strong style" (a martial-arts-influenced tradition favoring strikes and kicks), and explains Japanese wrestling's less rigid face-heel (good guy-bad guy) binary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. IDW president Greg Goldstein is stepping down, and being replaced by the returning Chris Ryall.

Ryall will step into his new position on December 10. Earlier this year Ryall left IDW, after 14 years, eventually taking a position at Skybound Entertainment, a comics and graphic novel imprint at Image Comics founded by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman.

In a press release, Ryall said IDW is "where I’ve spent the majority of my career and I consider the company and its employees like family, so I am grateful for this amazing opportunity to return.”

—Reviews & Commentary. The annual Publishers Weekly critics poll has chosen Michael Kupperman's All the Answers as its comic of the year.

—Interviews & Profiles. At Smash Pages, Alex Dueben talks to Sophie Campbell.

You’ve drawn a lot of different kinds of work, but are those the kinds of stories you like reading and watching? Or just the ones you’re drawn to telling?

It depends. I usually don’t watch or read a lot of slice-of-life stories, I watch mostly horror movies and for shows my favorites are Grey’s Anatomy and The Flash, and when I read prose it’s almost always nonfiction (I read a lot of true crime stuff), and when it comes to comics I don’t see a lot of stories similar to how I write but I’d like to read more like that. I can’t think of any truly plotless slice-of-life comics off the top of my head.

Maybe Ariel Schrag’s old books, like Potential and Likewise, which I love, they’re slice-of-life-ish but also autobio so it’s not quite the same. So I guess to answer your question it’s for the most part the type of stories I’m drawn to telling, rather than the types I read or watch. Mostly I just like stuff with monsters and serial killers in it. [laughs]

Kriota Willberg talks to Ellen Forney.

One of my points in Marbles is (the discovery) that I am more creative stable. Stability is good for my creativity. Self-care and balance is a way to be more creative and innovative. Creativity is not necessarily fueled by mood swings. Passion doesn’t necessarily come from being off balance.

The most recent guest on the Comics Alternative podcast is Noah Van Sciver, and the most recent on Virtual Memories is Bill Kartalopoulos.

Today at The Comics Journal, R.C. Harvey returns to with the first in a series of columns looking at the relationship, the careers, and the fall of Al Capp and Ham Fisher. We hope you'll join us for the duration! It's rip-snorting--and here's how it starts:

The story of Al Capp and Ham Fisher, two cartooning geniuses, their rise to celebrity and their furious interactions with each other, is the stuff of epic adventure fiction, but here, it is fact.

At the peak of their careers, in the 1950s, they were superstars: Capp reached 90 million readers and earned $500,000 a year ($4 million in today’s dollars); Fisher, 100 million readers and $550,000 (over $4.5 million in today’s dollars).

Their creations were in movies and on stage.

Shamed by his colleagues at the height of his career, Fisher died by his own hand; Capp died in obscurity, disgraced by sensational news of his sexual scandals.

Today's review comes to us from Leonard Pierce, who leapt back into the trenches to review one of the multiple comics that Noah Van Sciver put out this year. It's One Dirty Tree, from Uncivilized Books. 

When you’re dealing with biographical comics, anything goes, as long as it feeds the story. Noah Van Sciver, probably best known for his sharp Fante Bukowski: Struggling Writer series, was raised Mormon in suburban New Jersey, a fact which, standing alone, gives his new book, One Dirty Tree, a strange cultural frisson to me. While intellectually, I’m aware that Mormons exist in every county, city, and practically every country, it’s hard for me to square the idea of this reserved, rule-bound, exceptionally fertile religion existing outside of my low desert youth, marked as it was there by a uniquely Western libertarianism and almost entirely absent of any kind of bohemianism. Such was not the case with Van Sciver’s family; his father was a temperamental but curiously artsy man who encouraged his kids to develop their individual talents and himself forsook the money he might have otherwise made as an attorney frittering away his time on an epic poem about his religion.

Today on the site, Frank M. Young completes his two-part examination of the unfairly obscure midcentury cartoonist Cecil Jensen. This time, he focuses on the cartoonist's post-Elmo career, particularly in his Little Debbie strip.

With this change, Little Debbie became Bizarro Peanuts, or Little Debbie Minus Little Debbie. The adult Debbie teaches a quartet of preschoolers who bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Charles Schulz's mega-popular characters. Unlike Linus, Lucy or Schroeder, these kids are so out-there that it might be a willful satire. Jensen was entitled to say “what the hell?” and try anything at this point.

In place of Charlie Brown is George Green, a ball of neurotic uncertainty with huge glasses. Standing in for Lucy, Violet and Patty is the brutally frank and aggressive Matilda Jones. In the most out-there twist, twin boys collectively named Barney Jones speak and act as one.

[...]

Jensen had, arguably, been doing a Peanuts-like strip before Charles Schulz. By the time of Peanuts' October 2, 1950 debut, Little Debbie had been in all-kid mode for two years. Both strips show children acting unlike children and exposing the foibles of adult life. Where Schulz's strip feels restrained and college-educated, Jensen's seems the work of an autodidact—a man who has been exposed to the same intellectual ideas, but through his own study and observation rather than university courses.

Jensen's humor is brainy and earthy. Like E. C. Segar, he seems at home in a rowdier world. Thus, this late Peanuts homage/satire is darker, harsher, and wackier than Schulz ever was in his work. This was a fitting end-game for the strip. It started as a sort-of knock-off/parody of Li'l Abner, which went places Al Capp avoided. So why not bring down the curtain as it first rose? This 11th-hour new direction is bracingly funny, once the reader readjusts their expectations.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—The Comics Alternative podcast talks to Conor Stechschulte.

—I don't link to online comics often, but Popula publishing new work by Ulli Lust is worth an exception.

—RIP. Pete Shelley.

Today at The Comics Journal, Frank Young goes back to the 1940's to take a look at Elmo in his first article on Cecil Johnson's unusual "enigma" of comics history.

Elmo was an odd fit for the Register and Tribune Syndicate, an Iowa-based concern that trafficked in America’s dullest strips. Jane Arden, Jack Armstrong, Ned Brant, Off the Record and other R&T features were popular—Arden was in hundreds of American papers. The syndicate was commercially successful, if artistically bankrupt, before Jensen showed up.

Bubbling over with eccentric characters and dialogue, Elmo also presages the laugh-out-loud novels of Charles Portis. Jensen would’ve been the perfect artist to illustrate Portis’ low-key novels such as The Dog of the South (1979) and Masters of Atlantis (1986), had time and space permitted. Jensen and Portis heed this golden rule: the nuttier the situation, the more deadpan the delivery.

Unlike Portis or Bob & Ray, Jensen’s comedic vision is quite dark. Elmo is a strip without one heroic character. Elmo is troubling. He’s too cheerful. Perhaps all those years of washing diapers at the orphanage, where he was raised, made something snap in his head. He is civil, polite and obliging, but he doesn’t function in a reassuring way. He may occasionally frown, or display anger, but most of the world’s good and bad bounces off him. He is a challenging choice for a protagonist.

Today's review comes to you from Martyn Pedler, and it's of one of the more warmly received super-hero revampings of recent vintage: The Immortal Hulk. It's early days, but he's on board for now:

It’s a canny take on the required immortality of corporate superheroes, making sense of all the deaths that never stick in ongoing continuity. Continuity that’s mostly dismissed here, with Banner’s casual narration saying “It was a complex situation. I'll spare you the fine details”. The Hulk’s status quo suits these kind of shifts. He has transformation in his gamma-infused DNA: man into monster, yeah, but also grey to green, dumb to smart, lone force of destruction to cuddly, collectable superhero. Ewing has fun with the last when one witness refuses to believe the Hulk’s all that bad. “Monster? Ol’ Jade Jaws? Come on, lady. He's a founding Avenger. He's been in movies.”

Over at Tumblr, the exodus of what made Tumblr exciting continues, with Liar Town USA posting their own "see ya later", which includes a mention of their next print publication. One hopes that many of the goodbye posts to come will include that kind of bittersweet conclusion.

Over at Image Comics, they're hosting their own piece of comics history. It's one of those oral history kind of articles, focused on the old Warren Ellis Forum, a place on the web where a whole bunch of people "got their start" as comics internet personalities, and where then able to see that turn into various kinds of careers. Hey!

Today at The Comics Journal, we're looking back...at The Comics Journal? Hey, why not? It's still Stan Lee O'Clock right now, probably will be for a while longer. Back in 1995, the Journal reached out to a whole pack of talented folks--where else will you find a list that goes from Mary Fleener to Will Eisner?--about their take on Stan Lee. Whether it's a working relationship, a night out at dinner, or a stack of books, it's a really unique piece of work. Here, for example, is Spain Rodriguez.

His books were really a bell ringer, that comics were something to look at again. I never met the guy and I’ve seen him on TV a bunch of times, he seems like a big promoter of the stuff I like. Jack Kirby’s commentary in the interview with him that was in TCJ, one of the best things I ever read in the Journal, talking about how he walked into the room, and they were carrying out the furniture and Stan Lee was sitting on the chair crying, and he went over and comforted him and basically introduced his idea for the new line of comics. All those Marvel comics were the first bell that comics were coming back.

When the Comic Code came in, I just stopped reading comics; I didn’t even read the EC comics. The Comics Code was just such a humiliating cop-out, an injustice compared to William Gaines standing up before the Kefauver Committee. I like to think of myself in that tradition of comics, rather than the Goldwater tradition. Those Marvel comics, they seemed to have some kind of psychedelic subtext that’s kind of hard to pinpoint, but there was something about them. All the stuff that was going on around ’65 — everybody dropping acid — and reading those comics, they seemed to be giving us some kind of message and putting some kind of color into the world that wasn’t there before.

Today's review comes to us from Matt Seneca, and it's a big deal: Yuichi Yokoyama. Outdoors, an older Yokoyama title that's seeing rerelease via Breakdown Press, is here to take the stage. Here's Matt's opener:

If Yuichi Yokoyama isn't the best cartoonist currently working, he's on the list. I can't think of anyone else who combines such an iconic drawing style with such clarity of storytelling, or such ingenious use of the comics form with such forward-looking themes, or such an experimental edge with such bone-simple approachability. I see Yokoyama's influence everywhere in today's artsier comics, and I believe that in time he'll be seen as one of this period's leading practitioners of the form. Such being the case, any new offering of his work is a delight. Outdoors, newly translated for Breakdown Press by Ryan Holmberg, is a minor work, collating three shorter pieces made for the Japanese website Ecologue in 2009. But minor work from Yokoyama measures up favorably to the major work of most other names you can throw out there. Outdoors provides no shortage of mind-expanding pleasure while filling a gap in its creator's back catalog and allowing for a fuller understanding of his art's essential concerns. 

Today on the site, Annie Mok interviews cartoonist Yumi Sakugawa, much of whose work deals with self-help, a genre that I've always been somewhat allergic to, but is obviously important to many people, and also one that seems to be growing rapidly within the comics medium.

I had a comic essay that I never finished that was supposed to go into the book [Fashion Forecasts] that explores my own intuitive process for choosing the right outfit. I see the daily choice of choosing your outfit as a mindful creative practice in honoring your own intuition and feelings and desires of that particular moment in time. I am looking for the right combination of colors, patterns, shapes, and textures intersecting with external factors (the weather, the season, the particular occasion the outfit is for, etc.) that creates a resonant "yes" in my heart--and sometimes it is a matter of the right lipstick shade or the right accessory that is the difference between a good outfit and a transcendent outfit. I don't necessarily always go out of my way to do this-- because I work from home, I oftentimes default to my daily uniform of tank top, loose pants, and a denim jacket--but some days and events or my own simple desire to put in the extra effort on a particular day call for calling in intuitive magic to summon the perfect outfit. It can be very personal and even spiritual-- to consciously choose the avatar you wish to present to the rest of the world. And because you begin to recognize the resonant "yes" in your heart when you wear the right outfit that gives you that feeling of wearing powerful energetic armor, then you begin to recognize that same resonant "yes" feeling in other aspects of your life--how you decorate your living space, how you create your artwork, who you spend time with you, how you spend your time, the experiences and activities and stories that really speak to your heart. And then all these little micro-moment decisions of resonance add up to you practicing powerful agency in how you wish to manifest your life, on your own terms, speaking to your own personal and sacred desires.

Tegan O'Neil is here with a review of another prominent genre of comics I'm usually allergic to, themed anthologies, this one Iron Circus's sci-fi collection, FTL, Y'ALL: Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive.

One of the volume’s immediate pleasures is seeing how different artists respond to the visual challenge of designing the Enterprise on a Walking Dead budget. CB Webb literally has a kid climb into a clothes dryer and blast off, cramped accommodations to be sure but one that neatly illustrates the book’s premise. A refitted subway car with a glass biodome stuck to its ass (courtesy of Nathanial Wilson) is probably my favorite. If given the opportunity a lot of people in 2018 probably would take the certain shot of dying somewhere other than Earth, even jammed into a home appliance, to the certainty of living on a pretty shitty Earth (cf. the whole “It’s a weird time in the history of the republic” thing).

It’s that context that gives the best stories in FTL, Y’ALL their bite. These are about escape as much as exploration. The stories here aren’t set in any kind of shared universe, so some of the stories are set against grimmer backgrounds than others. Mulele Jarvis’ “Cabbage Island” is a good example: the woman who builds a tiny ship to Alpha Centauri is racing to stay one step ahead of both a fascist police state and ecological devastation. “Things could get better,” someone says, to which our heroine replies, “No, they won’t.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. At the New Yorker, Joan Acocella writes about the work of Edward Gorey.

The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound. And it’s the plug being pulled. . . . And the whole thing is going down the drain like the bathwater.” Why? Because, Gorey said, James (like Mann) explained too much: “I’m beginning to feel that if you create something, you’re killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I am doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind.” He thought that he might have adopted this way of working from Chinese and Japanese art, to which he was devoted, and which are famous for acts of brevity. Many Gorey books are little more than thirty pages long: a series of illustrations, one per page, accompanied, at the lower margin or on the facing page, by maybe two or three lines of text, sometimes verse, sometimes prose.

At the New York Times, Ed Park reviews Jason Lutes's Berlin and Olivier Schrauwen's Parallel Lives.

The dirty secret about graphic novels is how fast they read; it’s rare for one to require more than a day or two to finish. (“I hated the lifetime of pain and struggle it took to create a thing that anyone could read in an hour,” sighs the cartoonist in Matthew Klam’s novel “Who Is Rich?”) Strange as it sounds, one of the virtues of “Berlin” is how it resists completion. It took me weeks to get through, at times backtracking in order to clarify who was who, always returning at last to a greater appreciation of Lutes’s vision and humanity. In the last pages, the book pitches suddenly, violently forward through time, as though to meet us — an ending so electrifying that I gasped.

Among many other authors invited by the Guardian, Chris Ware names his favorite books of the year, which includes Slum Wolf and two others:

In Slum Wolf (New York Review Comics), translator Ryan Holmberg, one of the world’s finest comics writers, smoothes out the folds and expertly sets the historical scene so that readers (and graphic novelists like me) find they still have a whole lot to learn.

The Paris Review excerpts a piece by Matt Madden on Edmond Baoudoin.

[Baoudoin] came to cartooning relatively late in life—his first album (as the French call their bound comic books) wasn’t published until he was forty years old, in the early eighties. From his earliest works, Baudoin focused on autobiography, making him one of the first French cartoonists to explore this genre, which has gone on to become one of the most prominent features of European literary comics. At the same time, his art—already confident, with an inky expressionist manner reminiscent of his contemporaries Jacques Tardi and José Antonio Muñoz—evolved quickly into a daringly loose, calligraphic brush style that has made him one of the most respected and recognizable cartoonists in Europe.

—Interviews & Profiles. Also at the New Yorker, Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes talk to Ronald Wimberley about LAAB.

I’m interested in Cedric J. Robinson’s idea of “racial capitalism,” looking at oppression not necessarily just pertaining to skin color but also through economic exploitation and the different strata in our society. It made me think, what is race but a narrative? It’s a narrative that comes together in various ways from different places … particularly how it relates to skin color. I’m interested in it because of how I feel. I have a visceral reaction, particularly in this moment, to the stories and the aesthetics that are really shaking our democracy to its foundation. Look at Trump—he’s literally just an aesthetic. He connects to people’s ideas and stories of who they are, how they view their own stories. That’s what Walter Benjamin and Brecht were talking about. Trump offers them a complete distraction from the reality of their life.

On CBS News, Garry Trudeau is interviewed by his wife Jane Pauley.

The most recent guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is Summer Pierre.

—Misc. In anticipation of a retrospective series of Mario Ruspoli's work at the Metrograph in New York, Le CiNéMa Club is hosting a short documentary Ruspoli made about the French cartoonist (and secret filmmaker) Chaval. It will only be online until Thursday, so watch it soon if you're interested in mid-century French cartooning or film.

Welcome to December, Comics Journal reader. We're starting things off with a new column about Old Stuff. It's Marc Sobel, and he's named it "The Strip Mine".

Bold Adventure was a short-lived anthology from Pacific Comics published in 1983. The issue’s main feature is “Time Force,” a nearly incomprehensible cosmic superhero story written by Bill DuBay with art by Rudy Nebres. It’s a Starlin-esque space opera[ii] about a mad god who tries to gain some power spheres to conquer the universe (where have I heard that before?). It’s a needlessly dense piece with the same stiff language that DuBay hacked out for years in Warren’s 1984/1994. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if this story was intended for 1994 since that series was cancelled after its 29^th issue in February of ‘83.

Nebres’ art is solid, as always, but it makes a huge leap forward from the first to the second issue. His linework in #2 is much slicker and more polished. GCD lists him as the only artist on both chapters, but I suspect there was an uncredited inker on the first issue while Nebres inked himself in the second. Who knows?

But forget “Time Force.” The backup features are the real draw. In both issues there’s an outstanding tale called “The Weirdling” with art by Trevor Von Eeden and inked, on the second part only, by David Lloyd, an unlikely battery but one that works exceptionally well. This was around the time that Lloyd was working on V for Vendetta and his style is similar here, but it’s Von Eeden’s pencils that really make this story shine.  

Today's review comes to us from Sarah Horrocks, and it's of Paul John Milne's Grave Horticulture--a real neat meatsack of comics that seems designed to boil the skin off your bones.

Milne can handle the pace of this kind of storytelling because he has those old school character designer chops that allow you to shorthand visually who someone is, what they stand for, and what their abilities might be--a talent that has faded out of the superhero genre under the weight of the contemporary predilection for toiling with childhood fanfiction in the big corporate IP graveyards. Milne is an artist who can effortlessly land a fiery car engine on the neck of a musclebound maniac and you immediately understand what that’s all about. And unlike most writers today, he can give an origin story for a character in two pages or less.

Last week on Twitter, the cartoonist Evan Dorkin pulled back the curtain a bit on the state of his career, the lack of progress on his popular Beasts of Burden series, and his concerns about the future. As you'd expect from that kind of delivery, it's a tough read. Bleeding Cool rounded it up.

Comics are free and available. Over at Popula, Trevor Alixopulos is mistaken if he thinks we can all identify with him (the problem is the solution: clean the chair) while Siobhán Gallagher gets specific about physical therapy. Over at The Believer, they've got a three-fer up for you--one on making it through, one on baking, one on being pissed off.

The latest episode of The Organist features Seth, Chris Reynolds, Ed Park and more, all in service of a conversation about The New World, which saw re-issue earlier this year thanks to the New York Review Comics.

Today on the site, Alec Berry files an update on the ongoing Cody Pickrodt lawsuit, which now involves a counterclaim filed by Whit Taylor.

Cartoonist Whit Taylor, one of the 11 defendants named in a defamation lawsuit brought by small-press publisher Cody Pickrodt, has filed an answer and counterclaim, making an allegation in civil court that the plaintiff raped her in New York City in December 2013.

Her response, submitted on Nov. 5, 2018 in Nassau County, NY, arrived with answers from cartoonists Hazel Newlevant and Morgan Pielli, who each assert more than 30 affirmative defenses. Eight other defendants offered a motion for dismissal, which questioned the court’s jurisdiction due to their residencies in other states, their lack of business within New York and their having been in other states when the allegedly defamatory statements were made. However, this motion has been withdrawn.

Defense attorney Aurore DeCarlo of C.A. Goldberg, who represents all 11 defendants, submitted the stipulation to withdraw on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018 after Pickrodt’s attorney, Joe Carbonaro of Carbonaro Law, amended his client’s complaint to address the defense’s Nov. 5th filings. DeCarlo described the action as a formality. The motion to dismiss had addressed the contents of the original complaint. A new motion must now be filed to meet the amended version.

The deadline to file a new motion is Jan. 4, 2019, according to the stipulation.

We also have a review of the new Sunday Press collection of E.C. Segar's prep-Popeye Thimble Theatre strips, written by Frank Young.

Christmas came early with the welcome arrival of this new tome from Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press, an important and joyous addition to the comics canon. One of comics’ greatest storytellers, Elzie Crisler Segar created a thoroughly American icon with the addition of the Spooneristic, squinty Popeye the Sailor. Popeye’s 1929 entrance in the daily Thimble Theatre marked a literal sea change in a decade-old strip.

In its first tenyears, Segar’s strip focused on the risible relationship of Ham Gravy, his sweetie Olive Oyl, and her brother Castor. He mined sublime comedy from this trio, but Popeye gave the strip star quality. His quirky can-do mindset was manna for Depression-era America. When the Fleischer brothers’ animated studio began Popeye cartoons in 1933, the mumbly tar overtook Mickey Mouse as the nation’s top cartoon character.

Because most of these pre-Popeye strips haven’t been reprinted, only those with access to the chipping, crumbly original newspaper pages or the courage to squint at microfilm are familiar with much of this work. This 13” x 17” hardcover restores to public circulation an unsung epic of 20th-century cartooning. For two years, Segar took Castor Oyl (and, later, Ham Gravy) out West, in a rowdy, atmospheric narrative that, like its desert landscape, is full of peaks and valleys. Segar wasn’t alone in achieving these mega-stories. Rube Goldberg did a similarly long sequence in his contemporary Sunday strip Boob McNutt—another marathon episode that deserves reprinting.

This sequence marks Segar’s rise as a master fabulist. As Paul Tumey notes in his informative introduction (one of three top-flight pieces in this book), Segar entered comics as a lesser light, and had the good fortune to develop his populist art on the clock. From its inception in January 1925, six years after the daily strip’s debut, the Sunday Thimble Theatre was a down-to-earth, rough-edged physical comedy, shot through with its creator’s school-of-hard-knocks philosophy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Lion Forge, which has repeatedly made waves with prominent hires and deep pockets, is restructuring, and confirmed to Publishers Weekly that it has laid off twelve employees.

In an interview with PW in September, Lion Forge founder David Steward II said the house had about 60 employees and planned to publish about 130 titles this year.

In a prepared statement, the company said, “We are restructuring from the top down, and across departments to ensure that our organization’s size and structure remains in line with our sales, as well as providing support for future increase in title output."

Former New Yorker editor and founder of the Cartoon Bank Bob Mankoff has launched a similar new site, CartoonCollections.com. It is being billed as "a way to spotlight and monetize thousands of works published in the New Yorker, Esquire, National Lampoon, Playboy and Barrons."

Cartoon Collections will also curate from the half-million works from the library of the recently acquired CartoonStock.com.

Mankoff says he is drawing upon years of hard-won lessons to try to create a destination site as part of a larger licensing business.

“The market for cartoons is large but widespread and dispersed,” Mankoff tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. “It needs a central place where anyone who needs one for any purpose can find what they need.

“Cartoon Collections will be that place,” he adds, “as it aggregates cartoons as Getty or Corbis aggregates photos.”

—Reviews & Commentary. Apollo Magazine has an appreciation of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, to coincide with a London exhibition of art inspired by it, which is also discussed.

In a Peanuts strip from March 1962, Charlie Brown and Linus discuss the nature of criticism. Linus was the strip’s intellectual: a gentle, fragile child, the stripes on whose T-shirt were almost as wispy as the hairs on his head, and whose security blanket D.W. Winnicott wanted to use as an example of the transitional object. The two boys are leaning on a wall, as they often do when waxing philosophical. ‘Of course I realize there will always be criticism,’ Linus concedes. Television in particular and even ‘higher arts’ such as theatre can come in for a rough press. ‘The most recent criticism is that there is too little action and far too much talking in the modern day comic strip. What do you think about this?’ ‘Ridiculous,’ replies Charlie Brown.

Mark Dery's biography of Edward Gorey continues to attract review attention, including new pieces at the New York Times and the New Republic.

One of the virtues of Dery’s book is its reminder that Gorey’s art was far more subtle, diverse, formally inventive, and just plain weird than his reputation for sinister whimsy suggests. In the 100-odd books that he published during his lifetime—books with three-word titles like The Fatal Lozenge, The Pious Infant, The Blue Aspic, The Disrespectful Summons—he experimented promiscuously with format. He crafted abecedaries (alphabet books), postcard sets, pop-up books, “slice books” (in which the reader can mix and match portions of an image to create new ones), and even a variant of the choose-your-own-adventure story (from 1987’s utterly confounding The Raging Tide: “Hooglyboo crammed Figbash inside a vase. If this strikes you as clever, turn to 11. If all this seems too terrible to contemplate, turn to 29.”)

—Interviews & Profiles. GoComics.com talks to Tom the Dancing Bug creator Ruben Bolling.

GoComics: When did you develop an interest in politics? When did you decide you wanted to be a political cartoonist?

I still haven’t decided to be a political cartoonist! Since the rise of Trump, I feel like I’ve been temporarily conscripted into service. Tom the Dancing Bug began as an apolitical comic strip, and I was fairly uninterested in politics when I started it. At some point, I realized that politics is another subject I can use to come up with my weekly idea — one more thing I can try to be funny about each week. As I introduced more and more politics in the strip, I got more attention, and I started to get more personally interested and invested. It’s reached a fever pitch right now, but I still hold out hope that someday soon the comic will start to reach a different equilibrium.

Today at The Comics Journal, we're pleased to share Patrick Dunn's in depth conversation with Ellen Forney about Rock Steady, her self-help (non)graphic novel manual for those living with mental illness.

My personal stories and my personal point of view, that’s coming directly from me. But I did a ton of research that’s available to anyone, really. It’s just really dry. You’d have to do a lot of work. Like, who wants to read those studies? I was a psychology major, so I find it really fascinating, I love that kind of thing. But it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to appeal to the general public, or people who read for pleasure, or for that matter have a mood disorder and are in an emotionally stimulated state. It’s hard to focus when you’re manic, it’s hard to focus when you’re depressed, it’s hard to focus when you’re anxious.

One of the things that is a strength of comics is that words and pictures engage your brain in a different way – I would say maybe in a more thorough way. I’ve heard from people who were bipolar who said that Marbles – and Rock Steady, for that matter – is the first book that they’ve read cover to cover in years. And I think it’s because of the power of comics. It’s specifically a self-help manual for when you’re feeling emotionally rocked. You’re not in balance and you need to soothe yourself or figure out what to use. Then you can go to a comic, or go to a self-help manual that’s in words and pictures. You can understand the information better.

Our review of the day is from Tegan O'Neil, and it's all about Winsor McCay...after a fashion. Out of all the non-Garth Ennis comics released this year, there's no better example of Jeet Heer clickbait than this McCay, from Titan Comics.

Winsor McCay as he appears in Smolderen and Bramanti’s account appears almost to be sleepwalking through the narrative of his own life. The most consequential thing that McCay does is draw, after all, and that takes up most of his time (which, to be fair, it does for most cartoonists). But as with his real life, the slightly fictionalized McCay we meet here also meets the likes Houdini, William Randolph Hearst, and George Herriman. Honestly, the narrative through-line is a bit difficult to follow without already knowing the contours of McCay’s career, so if you don’t remember which years he worked for which tabloid you will probably need a refresher.

But that points back to the weaknesses of the present volume, which can probably best be summed up by referring back to the book’s significant ambitions. McCay wants very badly to be a worthy tribute to one of the great cartoonists, one of the very founders of the modern art form. However it is also built around a plotline where Winsor McCay learns how to harness his psychic powers and travel in and out of the fourth dimension, AKA the dimension of dreams. In order to solve a crime involving ghost anarchists. Whether or not you appreciate that kind of fantastic insertion will indicate whether or not you finish the book or throw it across the room in disgust, but it is pervasive.

Over at AV Club, the list season has begun--and the AV Club is one of the first out of the box, and they're going hard. There's some good write ups to be found here, friendo. 

Today on the site, Alex Dueben interviews David Small about Home After Dark, his recent followup to the very popular Stitches.

It started with my friend Mike telling me stories about his youth. Mike is my same age, so we both experienced the culture and the styles of the 1950s, but from different parts of the country, he from then-rural Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and I from industrial Detroit. 

One morning, over coffee, Mike began reminiscing, in particular about one bucolic summer he spent with two buddies, all of them free of parental influence. They built a tree fort in the woods and, there, did guy things, smoking their first cigarettes, getting drunk, playing games in a junk-filled gully and hanging around the local soda joint watching the older teens, to see what lay in their future. To me all of this had a kind of legendary Huck Finn, quintessentially-masculine quality. I wanted to have been that kind of boy having those kinds of experiences, with that kind of freedom. So, I listened with a kind of hazy, inattentive envy until a little psychopath came into the story. At that point I sat up, paid closer attention, and taking notes. Because, I mean, who isn’t interested in psychopaths?

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Abraham Riesman interviews Nancy's "Olivia Jaimes."

About how long had you been putting comics online by the time you started doing “Nancy”?
I’ve been making comics in one form or another for so long. Ten years. Because, basically, as soon as I got on the internet, I just started putting things online. I mean, it might be like one thing a year. Not regularly, but for that long.

At what point in that ten years did it start to become an obsession where you started doing it pretty regularly?
I don’t know, maybe never. I mean, doing “Nancy” is the most regular I’ve ever been with comics.

That’s a big step up, if you’re all of a sudden doing a daily strip. How did you get from not doing “Nancy” to doing “Nancy”?
[Editor] Shena [Wolf] called me and was like, “Do you want to try out for ‘Nancy’?” And I was like, “Hahahaha, no way.” Not that I wouldn’t want it — it just seemed fake. And then I’m drawing the comics to submit for the test to be like, “Here’s a couple weeks.” And as I’m doing it, I’m like, “Hahahaha, no way, no way.” In a very Nancy move, it wasn’t like I was like, “No way they would pick me.” I was just like, “Obviously they would pick me, if they have any taste at all, because these jokes are so great.” But it didn’t really even feel real as I was signing the contract. I was like, “Hahaha, what a funny joke this is.” But, yeah, it worked out pretty good, and they’ve been really quite good in easing me into it, and giving me feedback, and having me go from not being a regular comic-maker to being “make one every day.”

The New York Times has an interview with Roz Chast, who has a new retrospective up in Manhattan.

The show includes some of the first cartoons you published, in a gay men’s magazine called Christopher Street, in 1977, right after you graduated from art school. How did you start publishing there?

When I got out of RISD [Rhode Island School of Design], I never thought I’d be able to make a living as a cartoonist. I didn’t really know where I would fit in: What I did wasn’t really underground, and it wasn’t really New Yorker-like either. I was living with my parents in Brooklyn, and I would take around a portfolio of illustrations. I got a bit of work, but I just thought, ‘God, I hate this.’ I didn’t want to be an illustrator. It’s going to sound so corny, but I was looking for some kind of sign. And then one day I found a copy of Christopher Street on the subway. I saw they used cartoons, so I called them up, and started selling them cartoons, for 10 bucks each.

The aforementioned Alex Dueben speaks to Ali Fitzgerald about her recent book, Drawn to Berlin.

A historical perspective is definitely necessary for understanding the complex political underpinnings of most countries, Germany included. For example, the rise of nativism in Germany is strongest in former G.D.R. areas, where the educational perspective on World War Two was not one of acknowledgement and atonement – students there were taught that the nazis were “other” while West German students used the word “we” when speaking about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

The fact of the matter is that Germany (and Berlin in particular) has always been a site of migration – and I use the journalism of Joseph Roth from the 1920’s to explore this in the book. A greater understanding of transience as cyclical allows us to have greater empathy for those fleeing war now.

The Jewish Ledger profiles Liana Finck.

Her latest book, Passing for Human, is more personal, a “graphic memoir” in which she focuses on the experiences of the women in her family. In the whimsical yet serious memoir, each woman is born with a shadow that guides her life. But as they age they eventually lose the shadow. The book, published in September, features a main character, Leola, who looks for her own shadow and the shadows of her female relatives.

“It’s half about me and half about my mom, and the thing we have in common is that we are women and we are artists, so that’s what it’s about,” she says.

The most recent guest on Inkstuds is Leif Goldberg, and the most recent guest on Comics Alternative is Liz Prince.

—RIP. The creator of SpongeBob SquarePants, Stephen Hillenburg, died this week at the age of 57.

Today at The Comics Journal, we're taking a look at Nick Thorburn's Penguins, thanks to Nate Patrin. It's a doozy!

That might be part of why Penguins, the graphic novel debut by singer/musician Nick Thorburn (Islands; The Unicorns), initially seems to operate from a basis of familiar shorthand. During a brief phone conversation with Thorburn, I picked up on the notion that his artistic influences and technique share a common lexicon with the last few decades' worth of indie and alt comics. There's the usual suspects in Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Joe Matt, and so forth, paralleling a teen-years interest in making DIY Xerox zines and following a childhood interest in the gag-driven simplicity of Archie comics. That's fairly unsurprising, given what emerges in Penguins -- a blend of juvenilia and melancholy that's grown into a default setting for a significant cohort that grew up in the same context.

To dig further down into what that common experience actually translates to on the page, then, takes more than just an interrogation of influences and comparisons. And if Penguins proves anything, it's that Thorburn has taken well to the narrative potential and visual simplicity of a mute, almost-faceless character going through physical mayhem in ways alternately (or concurrently) amusing and despairing. "I wanted to be as low-res as possible," Thorburn explained, "and have these characters that weren't quite human, weren't quite penguin, had no facial expressions, didn't speak… to me, having it be flattened like that made it all the more cruel." The old Mel Brooks line about the difference between tragedy ("when I cut my finger") and comedy ("when you fall into an open sewer and die") is blurred when the characters all look largely identical and it's unclear, save your own perspective and whatever mood strikes you at the moment, whether you're supposed to empathize with them or laugh at their misery.

Our review of the day comes from Ryan Carey, and it's of Becca Tobin's Understanding, which recently made its way into the world thanks to the Retrofit crew.

The relentless pursuit of diversion and distraction undertaken by Tobin’s protagonists can be an exhausting thing to witness, but it’s certainly never dull, narratively or visually : largely-borderless panels coalesce into intriguing page layouts that are never less than equal parts absolutely inventive yet intuitively easy to follow, while the characters themselves morph into unusual shapes and formations that are somehow consistently recognizable as being the same individuals that they were before. By and large they’re not doing anything you wouldn’t see in, say, your average Cathy strip, but Tobin (thankfully) disposes of that comic’s garden-variety neurosis and replaces it with explosions of vibrant color (okay, fair enough, except in the two-tone strips, but those are still quite effective in their own right) that reflect the deliberately, one could even argue aggressively, unconcerned outlook of the denizens of planet blob. Think of it, then, as Cathy with the consumerism dialed up to 11, then fed a couple hits of purple microdot.

Over at Popula, Lauren Weinstein's dropped her latest Normel Person. On Facebook, Mardou got into her home life.

Over at Talkhouse, Mudhoney's Mark Arm talks about the many side gigs he's taken on over the years, including a stint at Fantagraphics.

Over at Diamond, Craig Thompson's upcoming serialized comic series, Ginseng Roots, was discussed. 

Welcome back to the funny pages. This morning, R.C. Harvey returns with a look at the life and work of early comics master Art Young.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME as his marriage was dissolving, Young's political views were taking their final shape. In 1902, Young had returned to Wisconsin briefly to lend his pen to Robert La Follette's Progressive (Republican) campaign to be re-elected governor. But by 1905, Young had rejected the Republican politics of his heritage— including "all bourgeois institutions." And he had resolved never again to draw a cartoon whose ideas he didn't believe in.

Not all of Young’s cartoons were “political cartoons” in the current sense. He also drew cartoons that were simply humorous. And even his political cartoons were seldom of the modern sort, skewering politicians by name. Not at first. Instead, Young sent out barbed shafts aimed at general targets: bloated businessmen who ignored the plight of their workers. And it was for these that he declared his independence from any imposed point of view.

“I would no longer draw cartoons which illustrated somebody else’s will,” he wrote. “Henceforth it would be my own way of looking at things—right or wrong. I would figure things out for myself. If success came, well and good; but to win at the price of my freedom of thought—that kind of success was not for me. Though I perceived that much of life was compromise, in dealing with world affairs or with my own, I would have to sink or swim holding on to my own beliefs on questions of vital importance.”

In 1906, he graduated from Cooper Union where he had been taking courses in debate and public speaking. And in 1910, he realized that he belonged with the socialists "in their fight to destroy capitalism."

“Speakers for the Social Democratic party provided me with much food for thought,” Young wrote. “They attacked the whole capitalistic system, showed how its different units combined to exploit the producing masses to the nth degree, and how the press distorted or suppressed news to protect this system, of which it was a part.

“Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. ... I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.”

Matt Seneca is back, too, with a review of Shintaro Kago's Dementia 21.

For a mangaka whose work has just begun edging into official English translation, Shintaro Kago is in the rare and enviable position of needing little introduction. If you're reading about comics on the internet (you are), you've probably seen his art somewhere - that Flying Lotus album, old issues of Vice, random can't-unsee-it images on tumblr, or any one of numerous scanlations. It's actually somewhat surprising that Kago books haven't had a longtime presence in the comic stores of the West. I don't know that guro manga has a particularly large fandom here numbers wise, but it's certainly got a passionate one, and after Junji Ito and maybe Hideshi Hino, Kago is one of the idiom's biggest names. At its best (and especially when it's in color), his imagery transcends simple grossness for the truly uncanny, opening page- or screen-sized portals into a world that's impossible to get your head all the way around.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Gasoline Alley. This weekend saw the 100th anniversary of Gasoline Alley, which, at least in the original incarnation drawn and written by Frank King, is one of a small handful of works that could plausibly be held up as the greatest comic strip ever created. We've covered it many times in the Comics Journal, and today's a good day to look back at a few highlights, including R.C. Harvey's history of the strip's early years, a conversation with Jeet Heer about the recent Drawn & Quarterly reprint series, and Frank M. Young's review of a recent Sunday Press collection of Frank King work.

—News. Abrams Books has cancelled a forthcoming book by Jack Gantos and Dave McKean called A Suicide Bomber Sits in the Library, after widespread criticism online.

The graphic novel, written by the Newbery medal-winning author Jack Gantos and illustrated by Sandman artist Dave McKean, follows a young, brown-skinned would-be terrorist. It was due to be released in May 2019.

“When a young boy enters a library wearing an explosive vest hidden underneath his lovely new red jacket, he has only one plan on his mind. But as he observes those around him becoming captivated by the books they are reading, the boy can’t help but question his reason for being there,” reads a description from its publisher, Abrams.

Comics publisher Zainab Akhtar described the comic on Twitter last week as dealing with “an illiterate brown Muslim boy who goes into a library with a suicide bomb only to start having second thoughts because people seem so into the world of books and if only he could read”.

“Because reading will help the ignorant brown Muslim boy question/renounce his beliefs, you see, in addition to being some vague kumbaya about how a specific interpretation of culture will save the barbarian,” she wrote.

—Interviews. On last week's episode of Behind the News, Doug Henwood interviewed Mark Dery about his new biography of Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous. The most recent guest on the RiYL podcast is Tom Tomorrow.

—RIP. Nicolas Roeg

Bernardo Bertolucci

Ricky Jay

Today at The Comics Journal, we've got our latest installment in Retail Therapy: and we're close to home on this one, with Larry Reid from the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery!

What do you wish more publishers knew about comics retail?

I don’t order through the customary “direct market” distribution channels.  I always thought that model was unsustainable – even when I worked as Marketing and Promotions Director for Fantagraphics in the early to mid-90s. There were about a half-dozen direct market distributors then; now there’s only one, so I suppose that assessment was correct. I have a great deal of respect for retailers that can work within that complex system. I’m reminded of the perils whenever I visit mainstream comics shops and find hundreds, if not thousands, of comic books in the discount bins.

In keeping with the theme, our review of the day is of Bastard, the latest book from the prolific Max de Radigues. J. Caleb Mozzocco has the score:

It’s an admirable level of restraint on the artist’s part, making literature out of what could so easily be a generic genre story, partially by choosing what to show and what not to, even if what doesn’t get shown also tends to be the stuff that would likely have been the most fun to draw.

Instead, we watch the pair live their lives on the road, surviving off fast food and diners, scamming the cops and authorities, fighting off rivals and accepting help only when desperate, sometimes from a friend who turns out to be an enemy, sometimes from a stranger who turns out to be a kindly ally. While it would be wrong to call this a coming of age story for Eugene, it does chronicle a sort of end of childhood, as the idyllic but tenuous life he shares with his mom starts to come to  a close, and a new chapter for them both begins.

Over at Vent Scene, they're digging into Josh Pettinger's Goiter and getting pretty aggro about auteur theory.

Over at Bleeding Cool, they've got the latest on another comics related lawsuit, which involves a bar that made a comic book about mixology, which is one of those words completely identified with an unlikeable subculture that, in a twist of fate that never fails to impress, is completely unaware of how unlikeable its members are and would be incredulous to discover that the world rolls its eyes every time they open their mouths to talk about bringing back mint juleps, or whatever.

Over at Comicosity, Mark Peters put together a Jack Kirby post about big drawings just because it made him feel better. I can totally rep for that.

The US holiday of eating and buying shit begins tomorrow: your Comics Journal returns on Monday!