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Today on the site, Dash Shaw reports on his selections for the great Metrograph theater store in NYC. The Metrograph is hosting Dash's film, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, this weekend. 

The animated movie I wrote and directed, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, opens this weekend in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The Metrograph theater in New York let me decorate their walls with original artwork from the film, and I also curated their small upstairs bookstore, which carries rare DVDs, film-related books, and issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. They asked me to pick books and DVDs that felt related to my movie, or that a cinema-going audience would be interested in. Here are some of the things I selected, and why.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a German animated film by Lotte Reiniger done in cut-out silhouettes against color fields. Made in 1926, it’s likely the first feature-length animated film. Although it’s well known, I’m always surprised how few people have actually seen it. Reiniger’s silhouette work was a key inspiration for Kara Walker. This movie is the perfect embodiment of “independent cinema”—the means/budget is tied to the aesthetic. It’s more powerful because it’s minimal. This is truly an “auteur” movie, much more so than the larger-scale collaborative films of the French New Wave that defined the term. The silhouette sequence in High School Sinking is an homage to this movie.

Elsewhere:

Here's a look at the growing Pittsburgh comics world from the perspectives of longtime mainstream comic book store Phantom of the Attic Comics and Tom Scioli.

The Doug Wright Award nominees have been announced.

Interesting looking word/picture book Playground of My Mind is discussed at Hyperallergic.

Today marks the TCJ debut of cartoonist and writer Sloane Leong, who reviews Josceline Fenton's webcomic, Hemlock.

While many of the main cast members, including Baba Yaga and her three servants, hail directly from old folklore and communicate with some of the lyrical syntax of their traditional origins, Lumi and Tristan provide a more contemporary entry point for readers with their modernized witty language. Tristan’s constant anxiety and Lumi’s melancholic but outspoken personality combine into a charming rapport that complements the comic's unhurried pace. Slow pacing and indulgent, unnecessary scenes are a common pitfall in webcomics, given that they’re frequently created and updated in real time, without time to reassess and edit, and often with little or no buffer. Hemlock doesn’t stagger but keeps a steady, measured pace. Still, the lack of intensity and unchanging tempo make for a sometimes tedious narrative simmer. This pace is no doubt intentional on Fenton's, mirroring the storybook mood of Lumi’s wistful but tense and long-lived life.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's This One Summer has topped the latest ALA list of most-frequently banned and challenged books.

“I think there is clearly a general theme relating to sexuality that certain people are uncomfortable with in books for young people,” Mariko Tamaki told the National Post by email.

“So if your book contains any mention of sexuality, it’s likely to end up in this list.”

[ALA representative James] LaRue chalked up This One Summer’s detractors to being “Velcro parents” — a kind of supercharged version of the helicopter parent.

“I think it falls back into this terrible fear that many parents have that their children are growing up,” he said.

—Interviews & Profiles. The Fandor movie site talks to Dash Shaw.

If I do want to place myself somewhere, it’s with cartoonists who make animation. I don’t want to compare myself to him, because I think he’s the greatest ever, but I’d pick something like the first Astro Boy series created by [Osamu] Tezuka. That’s a case where he was a comic-book artist who wanted to make animation. He relied on his skills as a cartoonist to make cinema. You don’t need to know that to enjoy his work, but for me, it was definitely inspiring. I got a Fandor subscription because they had those kind of unusual animators, and I’m a million times more inspired by that than any animation in TV or contemporary movies. I basically just watched those kinds of avant-garde shorts and anime made before 1990.

DW talks to Guy Delisle about his latest book, Hostage.

We wanted the book to be an immersive experience for the reader. I wanted to enter [kidnaping victim] Christophe [André]'s mind and, and to the best of my ability, recreate what he went through. I guess I wanted to know what I would have done or felt if I had been in his situation.

The most recent guest on Inkstuds is Jonah Kinigstein.

Hi there, today on the site is RJ Casey's interview with Carel Moiseiwitsch, who is known to comics audiences for her work in Twisted Sisters, Wimmen's Comix, and Weirdo, among other publications. 

In Twisted Sisters 2, you have a story called “Impasse”. The story is set in Morocco …

Yes, I spent quite a long time in Morocco. I was very influenced by the French bande dessinée after I spent some time in Paris. I loved the French cartoonists’ work and thought their drawings were so incredible. I was very influenced by the French graphic artists. Someone said to me, “Why don’t you just do an autobiographical piece, since you never do that.” I used to just find stories and newspapers and things like that. But I thought, OK then, so I did that one.

Was that story done with etching or some sort of stamp-making?

I was using scratchboard with razors.

That style seemed to be way more popular amongst artist in the ’80s and ‘90s than it is now. You did it so well, and Penny Van Horn, but you don’t see it too much anymore.

Right. It’s seemed to have fallen out of style. One of the reasons I don’t use that style anymore is because I can’t get the good scratchboard anymore. I used to get that from England and it was really good. I can’t get the right ink because it’s all acrylic based now. It just doesn’t look right, so I had to give it up and I was really good at it. I tried looking for all the materials in England. I tried ordering it. It never worked, so I just gave up. It needs to come back! It’s a good medium.

In “Impasse”, the story’s all about anxiety and issues regarding commitment. Are these things that you still deal with or suffer from?

Good question. That certainly is true of me. I finally met the guy who is able to withstand my anxiety and I’m still with him. [Laughs] He’s a very brave man.

Does this anxiety stem from art or …

Just life in general. The art scene has contributed to it though, especially in Vancouver. I just couldn’t stand it. And I’m also always involved politically, so sometimes I get a lot of harassment for that. I still do my own work, but I stopped trying to show it and just stopped … just stopped.

Did you ever feel like you were part of an art scene? Or always outside those scenes?

I was somewhat involved. Not that involved, but somewhat. I really liked that I was welcomed to comics. And those women and guys, I liked them. It was really fun to get involved, because I felt a bit rejected after trying to make it in Vancouver. In London, when I lived there again, I started to get somewhere, but my son became ill, so I came back to help him. I lost that momentum. I’m really just a loner, though. An outsider.

Elsewhere:

I don't usually link to PR, but Moebius news is a little different for me, so here's some good news.

Glen Weldon on Cathy Malkasian's Eartha.

And congrats to our contributor and friend, Dash Shaw, on a string of premiers for his excellent film My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. Check this site for dates in a city near you. 

Joe McCulloch is here as usual with his indispensable guide to the Week in Comics, highlighting the most interesting-sounding releases new to stores. Spotlight picks this week include new titles by Anna Hafisch and Eric Kostiuk Williams.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart has been indicted for “helping an armed terrorist organization while not being a member," and faces up to 29 years in prison for his anti-Erdogan cartoons.

His work is often critical of Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian regime, but also of Fethullah Gülen, the alleged leader of last summer’s attempted coup, and of terrorism and extremism in Turkey overall. The substance of his work belies the government’s contention that he’s a Gülen Movement or PKK stooge.

Jim Morin of the Miami Herald has won this year's Pulitzer for editorial cartooning.

Marvel continues its PR hot streak with the news that Indonesian artist Ardian Syaf planted coded references that have been commonly interpreted as having anti-Christian and anti-Semitic connotations. Marvel has said that it will remove the artwork from future printings of the comic, and that some form of disciplinary action will take place.

—Interviews & Profiles. For Archinect, Julia Ingalls talks to Ben Katchor.

“The strips are kind of written in a half-dream state,” Ben tells me over the phone. “I’m not fully asleep when I’m writing them, but I’m somewhere in between. A lot of them have this free-associative kind of quality as when I’m in a dream, but then I’m awake and I can edit them, make them coherent in some way.”

Tom Spurgeon talks to Jim Blanchard.

I rarely read comics nowadays. Occasionally I'll re-read an old R. Crumb comic or Kirby-era Fantastic Four reprint or something like that. But, I'm not drawn to them, so I don't really have any needs to be served by the comics industry. I see Fantagraphics' output when I visit their wonderful store in Georgetown, but that's about it. Most of the modern "indy/alternative" comics I see from the U.S.A. don't engage me. Too self-conscious and niceity-nice. There are a few exceptions. It seems like comics in America stopped evolving around the same time rock music did in the '80s and '90s, but I'm out of the loop so I could be wrong. To me, the last great comics generation was the group that came up in the early-mid '80s: Clowes, Bagge, Kaz, Friedman, Hernandez Bros., Burns -- all with amazing, unique artistic chops and all on a par with the best of the previous generations' cartoonists.

New podcasts include Frank Stack at RiYL and Gabby Schulz at Comics Alternative.

—Reviews & Commentary. LARB has been running a lot of comics writing lately, including Brad Prager's review of Pushwagner's Soft City

DAWN BREAKS over a modern apartment complex in the very first pages of Hariton Pushwagner’s dystopian graphic novel Soft City. The sun peers back at the reader from a single eye at its center. Its hundreds of fine, radiating lines call to mind a wild mane, the strands of which resemble heads of hair in William Blake’s work — paintings such as The Ancient of Days (1794), or any of a number of plates from The Book of Urizen, published in that same year. Pushwagner’s eye of providence invokes an array of eschatological meanings. The divine watches us with an organ akin to our own.

and Lily Hoang's review of Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

Ferris’s genre-bending narrative is part horror story, part noir. Karen makes herself into a detective — donning a trench coat and hat to fulfill the stereotype — when her upstairs neighbor Anka is found dead. Although there is no explicit evidence of foul play, Karen devotes her time to searching for clues that might support her suspicion that Anka was murdered. As an amateur sleuth, Karen patches together a retrospective narrative of Anka’s enigmatic life.

Today on the site, Richard Elder returns with part 3 of his examination of Ernest Hemingway appearances in comics. 

When the Comics Journal ran the first two parts of this series (which you can read here and here), we asked for readers to help us find other appearances of Ernest Hemingway in comics history. They didn’t disappoint.

The first two parts chronicled the author’s colorful appearances in Superman, Shade: The Changing Man, Cerebus and 40+ other appearances. In the selections below, readers directed us to Hemingway references, adaptations and homages across the comics publishing landscape.

Samurai Crusader (1996)
Reader Phil Rippke pointed out Hemingway’s appearance as the sidekick in Samurai Crusader, a manga series by writer Hiroi Oji and artist Ryoichi Ikegami (Crying Freeman and Mai, The Psychic Girl).

“The titular character is visiting Europe and meets the burly, two-fisted adventurer Hemingway and together they try to foil a plot to start a World War. Viz translated it into English and published a three volume series from the 90s,” Rippke wrote. “It’s definitely worth tracking down.”

Elsewhere:

Drew Friedman writes about his New York Observer encounters with presidential son-in-law  Jared Kusher. The fun of this piece is so much in Friedman's particular "who me" wise-ass tone in his prose. 

Tom Spurgeon interviews longtime Washington state illustrator/cartoonist Jim Blanchard. 

Not-comics: Raconteur Glenn O'Brien passed away on Friday. He was influential in art, style and prose, and had long career in publishing (Interview, High Times, etc) and writing (Artforum, GQ), as well as a prolific life in advertising. Worth reading about to think about if you find valuable what he represented.

Dash Shaw wrote a "filmmaker's letter" for Landmark Theatres about how he created the original comic story that became My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (and includes a pdf of the comic).

When I was a high school student, in the nineties, there were two main schools of comic books: autobio comics on one end and adventure comics on the other. I liked both of them. The idea behind this short story was to combine these two opposing schools; so I had a character named Dash, and it was based on real feelings and experiences, but it was thrown into a boy's adventure-style action comic. Whatever's true in it has been warped to favor the main character's perspective, which is often how autobio stories are. It's also a joke about how most stories are; like how we know Indiana Jones is George Lucas' fantasy, and it's based on his real interest in archaeology and history, but it'd be sort of sad and pathetic if he just named the character "George Lucas."

RJ Casey wrote about contemporary sports art (with a look back at cartoonist Willard Mullin) for The Classical.

Mullin acolytes and understudies carried this style forward in the 1950, ’60s, and ’70s. Murray Olderman penciled and shaded photo-realistic renderings mostly of football and tennis players. He then filled the frame with highly-stylized gags full of stats and jokes. He was—is now, in his late 90s—a polished polymath and pioneer in the field, an original whose only critique is that he maybe slummed it up in caricature work a bit. Olderman more than made up for that with his productivity and in the fact that he was also an accomplished journalist in his own right; he had a hand in creating the MVP trophy in many of the professional sports leagues.

For The Guardian, JA Micheline writes about Marvel, diversity, and the company's self-inflicted wounds.

Marvel is a business, but it’s a business that attempts to sell comics to a demographic that has demonstrated a categorical, historical (and ultimately violent) disinterest in anything that is not built explicitly for them, rather than seeking to expand by making concerted efforts to entice other people into the fold. Marvel is certainly subject to the demands of capitalism, but it sets its attempts at inclusivity up for failure when it continues to push white men as its “real audience” and makes them the metric for success.

The Doug Wright Awards have announced that Katherine Collins will their 2017 Hall of Fame inductee.

Collins is the creator of Neil the Horse, one of the handful of comic book series published during the 1980s in English Canada. The book was a whimsical throwback to the world of pre-World War II cartooning and popular culture, starring the titular Neil, a rubber-limbed horse drawn in an Ub Iwerks style, in a series of fantasy adventures alongside his best friends, a cigar-smoking cat and a sexy animated marionette, trying to make it as song-and-dance hoofers in the world of musical comedy.

The Comics Alternative podcast interviews Peter Bagge.

It's another day here in New York. Today on the site, Irene Velentzas reviews Jeff Lemire's Roughneck. 

The story begins effortlessly with the simplicity of Lemire’s inside cover page, a single image that adeptly introduces the remainder of the text. With such images Lemire demonstrates his candid ability to say so much with so little. A sparse tree, off-centred, standing in a bank of snow, alone in the dead of winter. The tree is naked and vulnerable, it stands prey to and yet against the elements, it reveals no answers. How big is it? A towering tree, a young sapling? It’s impossible to know. It is simultaneously natural and unnatural in its composition. It conveys, ever before the first question of the text “That him?”, the inscrutability, the barrenness, the isolation of Derek Ouellette. Asking the reader to come along on a journey through Pimitamon’s barren landscape and Derek’s mind to find beauty in the wild and stubborn nature at the heart of this man and the environment that shapes him.

Links:

Jonathan Chandler has a fine online comic over here.

The Baffler looks at Iron First and finds some pathways to a larger and sadder thing. Think pieces like this don't interest me that much, but this one's alright. The Marvel diversity story (summary here) is likewise not that interesting in the sense that expecting entities with a history of questionable racial/sexual/economic politics to act in some way progressive is like hoping Fox News will do the same. It's just not built that way. I would like for that not to be the case, because kids love superheroes and there should be more diversity there. But until the current craven white guys are not in power there, it's gonna be a slog, and I suggest reading something else entirely. I'm actually a little surprised that Disney wants to endure so much bad PR again and again. At some point they'll look at the tiny blip on their balance sheet and think, "gee, we should step into the 21st century". But that's a long shot. 

Today on the site, Joe brings us into April with comics and more comics.

Elsewhere:

Attention Ryan Holmberg fans: He is speaking at Baruch College tomorrow. 

Tim is back, and with him some balance has been restored. Maybe. In honor of his return, I will unfurl some deep thoughts...

This past weekend I visited the Raymond Pettibon exhibition at the New Museum, which served as an excellent reminder that I don't like Raymond Pettibon's artwork very much. I have enjoyed his zines, and I think he's fine, but the stuff never reaches past itself. It's a 40 year slog through various parts of American culture (surfing, baseball, hippies, religion, murder, etc.) that manages to never rise above or offer any perspective on it. His text, embedded in numerous drawings, is never more than on-the-nose and pat. In a way the show is like a three-floor installation of a Graham Ingels or Frank Frazetta (two obvious influences): It shows us plenty of "awesome" things but it's just that thing and only that thing, and I find that ultimately dull in a museum context. As a 16 page zine, yes, ok. Or even seeing, as I have, a half dozen drawings on a wall. But he's just not an interesting enough mind or hand to sustain three floors. I prefer the Mike Kelley dive into the same material -- the transformative approach rather than regurgitation.    

Ah, what a relaxing two weeks of child care and Olympian detachment from the comics internet. I wonder what's been going on in my absence?

Ha ha ha. Good cop/bad cop works again.

Elsewhere on the site, R.C. Harvey is here with a new column on Gluyas Williams.

Williams was soon also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, which had been launched by Harold Ross in February 1925. Although Ross began soliciting cartoons from Williams almost at once, the cartoonist did not produce anything for the magazine until 1926. “Ross would write,” Williams told Marschall, “but I’d say that I was based in Boston and I didn’t know enough about New York to be of any use. And then he finally sent me a cartoon idea about the house wrecker who has the wrong address.

“I did it and sent it over, and Ross sent it back and said that it won’t do: he said to get more fun into it—have a woman taking a bath while they’re taking the bathtub out and like that. [Cartoons with women in bathtubs were standard fare in the Ballyhoo magazine comedy of the period, but I doubt Ross thought along those lines. He did, however, make suggestions that Williams couldn’t accept, whatever they were.—RCH]

“Ross said to change it and put those things in it, and he’d buy it. I sent it back just as it was and said, ‘No, I wouldn’t touch it because my idea of humor was understatement rather than slapstick.’ And Ross wrote—oh, how I wish I’d kept that letter!—it was a wonderful letter, saying, ‘You’re perfectly right. I’m going to change all my ideas on drawings. Of course that’s much subtler your way and better.’

“And after that letter,” Williams concluded, “I thought to myself that this was an editor I’d like to work for.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are too many links I've missed, so I'll dole them out.

—News. Longtime great New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler has passed away. Here is the NY Times obituary.

Some of Mr. Ziegler’s subjects were recurring ones, like the Lone Ranger, hamburgers and comic-book characters.

Superman appeared more than a dozen times. Mr. Ziegler depicted him changing his clothes in a telephone booth while a cat (or is it Batman?) surreptitiously watched from a nearby window, going to therapy to face intimacy issues with Batman, and being forced to hand in his cape after testing positive for anabolic steroids.

Mr. Ziegler was not a big fan of the Man of Steel, he wrote in a New Yorker blog in 2013, but “he’s a guy in a cape and a body stocking and he can fly, which makes him amusing and fun to draw.”

Richard Gehr interviewed Ziegler for this website in 2013, and their conversation is well worth revisiting.

I went to the Fillmore a few times and saw the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and…I don’t know if we actually saw Quicksilver. There were a couple of concerts in Golden Gate Park. The last apartment we had in San Francisco was on Stanyan Street, right across from the park, so we used to be there quite a bit. That’s when I started doing cartoons and figured I should move back East if I wanted to be serious about this.

I also took six months off to try to write. I completed this novel I thought was good when I was writing it, but turns out it wasn’t.

While I was doing this writing, or trying to be a writer, Brian [McConnachie] was in New York and he was also trying to be a writer. He was also doing cartoons on the side, but he can’t really draw. He’s a terrible artist but he has funny ideas, so he started selling stuff to National Lampoon. And he said, “I can’t even draw and I’m selling cartoons. You can actually draw. Maybe this is something you might wanna think about.” So I did. I started kind of fiddling around with it, and then I found that I really enjoy doing it. I mean, I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I found I could do it. So I started doin’ that and then thought maybe this would be a way to make a living without having to sell my soul in some awful job.

I was doing a lot of cartoons in San Francisco. I think I sent some stuff out and it all got rejected. Then I thought maybe I should go to New York and actually visit some of the magazines and do an in-person thing. So I went to New York for like a week, and stayed with Brian and his wife. That’s when I decided we should move back there. If I’m ever gonna make this work, it’s not gonna happen in San Francisco. We packed up the bus again, got a U-Haul, and attached the bus to the back. Jean-Anne and I had a kid at that time – the first kid, Jessica. They flew back to Chicago and I drove from San Francisco to Chicago and met them there, spent a weekend, and then drove the rest of the way to New York. Once I got settled in New York, they took a plane and followed. It was just me and Blanche, the dog, in the truck. That was a good trip.

Marvel sales VP David Gabriel gave an interview to ICv2 in which he blamed falling sales of Marvel titles on reader disinterest in diversity.

What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales.

We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.

Check that same link for Marvel's later scramble to clarify Gabriel's comments and reverse the PR damage.

This of course sparked a lot of outrage in various corners. I'll share just one viral response (to another response), G. Willow Wilson's.

If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.

There's much more out there.

I don't believe Dan linked to the Bloomberg profile of Dilbert creator (and Trump-whisperer) Scott Adams a couple weeks back, but it's a must-read if you missed it.

Adams’s house is a shrine to the cartoon character that made him rich. One section, visible from the pool area outside, clearly resembles Dilbert’s head, with two oval windows for eyes, connected by a thin line that suggests spectacles. “They look out from the cat’s bathroom upstairs,” Adams told me. The structure is full of indulgent quirks. In the kitchen, Adams installed three microwaves so he “can make a lot of popcorn at once.” Nearby, he transformed a bar area (Adams doesn’t drink) into a display case for Dilbert books and paraphernalia. Other features include a 10-seat movie theater, a gym, and a room filled with beauty salon equipment, where his ex-wife (now Adams’s personal assistant) used to host spa days for friends. Off to the back is an indoor tennis court.

Slate announced the nominees for its annual Studio Prize.

Alison Bechdel was named Vermont's latest cartoonist laureate.

Okay, there's a baby spitting up in the corner I have to attend to, so that will have to be enough links for today...

Ironically, given my spiel yesterday, there's nothing new on the site today. It's been a busy week of content, so I suggest poking around the site and settling in with something of interest. Here are some fine links:

Barbara Nessim is a wonderful illustrator who has mostly been overlooked -- her work in the 1960s was hand in hand with Push Pin in establishing the look of commercial psychedelia. Great, linework and a luminous, bendable sense of color and form. There's a great-looking show in LA right now.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters gets the Fresh Air treatment.

Here's a report on Art Spiegelman in conversation with with Paul Holdengräber about his book, Si Lewen's Parade.

Today:

Brad Mckay speaks to Joe Ollman about The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, and related matters.

And now we have The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, a long-form graphic novel biography that focuses on a very complex and tragically human character that you sort of pulled from the dustbin of history, really. It seems like you’re playing outside of your sandbox here a little bit. Can you explain how you came to this project? 

It was just a thing I was researching in the background for years. Seabrook had this really weird, interesting life—he knew all these famous artists and writers—and I was surprised that I’d never heard of him before. So I just started researching him, then bought all his books and I thought he was a very good writer.

When did this happen?

I looked at my notes recently and the first ones I had about him were from 2006. So that’s 10 years that I had it kind of in the background, five years of those being committed to writing and drawing this thing nearly full-time. But it wasn’t much of a conscious decision. I toyed with the idea of doing it, and then I had a script written, and then all the research was done, so I was like “I guess there’s no excuse not to do it.” It was daunting though, because it was big. 300 pages, y’know. I discovered Seabrook in an anthology of zombie stories edited by Peter Haining called Zombie. The story was “Dead Men Working in a Cane Field”, a famous Seabrook story that’s an ostensibly true story of these zombies working cutting cane—it’s great. But what really interested me the bio of Seabrook in the book which gave me a glimpse of this guy; all the people that he knew and his life, plus he was an alcoholic, a cannibal, a bondage freak, and all this stuff.

Elsewhere:

Chris Mautner writes really nicely about Demon Vol. 1, a great book from one my favorite cartoonists, Jason Shiga. I think, as far as I can tell, that Shiga has nicely escaped the comic world orbit into some kind of regular world success, which is awesome for the world.

Marty Two Bulls Sr. talks to Alex Dueben about his editorial cartooning, his other projects, and journalism. He's the finalist for the Herblock which is this week.

More on the only important comics-related event this weekend. Seriously  -- I got an email listing comics events this weekend and I nearly threw myself in front of a bus just to stop the agonizing boredom it brought on. Wegman and Thurber, take me away! Make me laugh. Make me feel. Feel me up! Anything to distract me from endless panel discussions about anthologies, librarians, and dead people. Maybe comic book conventions should go back to showing old video tapes of anime and 1970s Marvel TV shows. Also, can we go back to calling them comic book conventions? I keep writing and deleting thoughts in this space -- mostly questions I have about various people and ideas... and the longer Tim stays on paternity leave the less restraint I'll have. That kid better grow up fast! Anyhow, here's the good news:

​"No Maine Is An Island"

On the site today, Greg Hunter talks to Maggie Umber (Time Capsule, Sound of Snow Falling) on the eighteenth episode of Comic Book Decalogue.

Well folks, the beat goes on. Apparently it's MoCCA this weekend in New York! Can you believe it still exists? Good heavens. Anyhow, here are some events, including one with noted Legion of Superheroes author Paul Levitz, and another with our own fearless leader Gary Groth! I hope there's some ice cream in this for me. Seriously. The best news is that both Sammy Harkham and Kevin Huizenga, National Treasures both, have new comic books coming out.  

Best of all this weekend: Matthew Thurber and William Wegman are opening a two-person exhibition in Brooklyn. That's a beautiful thing!

In other comics news, the Paris Review has a fine interview with Pénélope Bagieu, author of the new Mama Cass graphic bio, California Dreamin'. And Heidi MacDonald brings news of the Neil the Horse reprint -- a beloved 1980s comic that has aged... well, we'll see. 

I thought more about what I wrote yesterday and realized that my instinct is to be defensive, for fear of being called a killjoy. But then I remembered that I actually like so much superhero stuff... I just like it done well. It should go without saying that there's nothing inherently wrong with the genre. What I guess I find depressing is that the jump to this stuff is somehow held up as rebellious. It smacks of reactionary politics and head-burying by once "sensitive artistes" indulging in... not their own ids, but someone else's. It's an odd kind of role-playing in public. Publishing-as-cosplay, maybe? 

Today on the site, Joe McCulloch takes us on a walk through the present of comics. 

Elsewhere:

Ben Katchor: The agony and the ecstasy.

Michael Chabon talks nostalgia, and mentions Superman, too.  

I don't care about either of the links above, but, y'know, gotta fill the space! I actually find Chabon especially irritating in almost everything he writes. Remember when he had his own comic book version of the fictional comic book from his novel? Ooof. Anyhow, a side note: I read the much-hyped Crime Destroyer #1, the first release from All Time Comics, a Fantagraphics imprint funded by writer/artist Josh Bayer's brother, Sam. It is basically a sub-par Marvel or DC comic from the early 1980s... imagine a random issue of Indiana Jones or Legion of Superheroes written and drawn by a couple of young hacks as a try-out for the "big time." It's not bad-good, or kitsch, or anything on which you could hang a reason for liking it. And of course it's vaguely misogynist and racist, but so is the amped-up pop culture world it comes from. All the publicity that money can buy positions All Time Comics as daring and both somehow new and somehow classic. It's none of these things. Bayer's writing is overly verbose and mostly incoherent. The drawing by old-time hack Herb Trimpe (now, along with fellow hacks Al Milgrom and Rich Buckler, somehow regarded as an important artist -- so depressing) is badly composed, static, and without a trace of distinction. Even the lettering is terrible -- crooked, inconsistent and crowded. Some recent superhero riffs, like, say Copra or Street Angel, have actual narrative momentum, personality, and individual points of view. This is just soulless and boring. I suppose some of this comes down to being unable to differentiate between good work and the work you liked as a kid. Or, rather, work with interesting qualities and the work you remember fondly. 

Worse (since my own problem is that I somehow care), one of the big selling points for this line, both in interviews and in Bayer's editorial in Crime Destroyer #1, seems to be that it's wacky and transgressive that supposedly "snooty" Fantagraphics is releasing superhero comics -- a genre which somehow becomes Trumpian code for populism. How is that true? Fantagraphics, by its own lengthy, page-after-page confession/admission in the recent 40th anniversary brick, has been releasing garbage, including superhero comics, for decades: Amazing Heroes, John Byrne comics, impossibly long novels by Charles Schulz's son, and imprints including Eros, Monster and others I'm forgetting. That's not a knock. I'm actually proud to work for a publisher that will do anything it takes to continue publishing great material and doesn't spin a line of bullshit about community or connection. I would hope and guess that Sam Bayer's money is very green and very plentiful, so my Seattle brethren held their noses, closed their eyes, and took it like champs. Plus, some of my freelance friends are earning solid (and easy) paychecks working on these comics, and money is hard to come by in this biz. So, for my friends' sake, I guess I hope this line will last until the money or attention span runs out. As Bob once said, you gotta serve somebody, and, on a spiritual level, this is not that much worse than the very few other outlets that pay money for art. So, finally, in it's favor, the money-beats-all viciousness of All Time Comics is perfectly 2017.

Today on the site:

Frank comes back with his Riso journey, this time talking to Ryan Sands, publisher at Youth in Decline.

I really think it is interesting that riso and the “art book fairs” of Printed Matter have run concurrent – meaning we are seeing more “zine” people at comics shows and vice versa – can you speak to this loose crossover? I feel like your label sort of runs in that corridor…

Whenever there’s a tool that has lots of funky ways you can mess with it AND a fairly low cost to experiment and make mistakes, this sort of machine is good for folks that care about all the details of physical book production. I get super bored by books that are simply “risograph-themed” anthologies, but I love seeing “art book” folks use it in unexpected ways – like the thermography technique of Colour Code Printing to create elevated inks and push the envelope with the machine. That said – at its heart, the machine was intended to be a blue collar workhorse for schools and churches and offices to churn out hundreds of pages a minute for cheap, so I bristle a bit at the trend of high-end “risograph prints” in limited editions. I saw a gallery show in SF recently that had a 3-color risograph print for $40!!! Are you kidding me? That shit cost like $0.90 to print and you could make 1000 prints in an afternoon (including drying times!).

On a less cranky note, some of my favorite risograph books are actually not comics at all, but text-heavy magazines and journals. When I visited Motto in Berlin back in 2011, I saw a bunch of poetry zines and literary journals published on risograph – my favorite in this vein is the queer film journal Little Joe Magazine. Their embrace of a limited spot color palette feels vintage without being slavishly retro or lame. So nice.

Elsewhere:

-Tomorrow night the great Brian Chippendale is opening a show of his new paintings at one of my favorite galleries, Safe Gallery in Williamsburg. Go check it out. 

-TCJ-contributor Philip Nel discusses children's books that address the ideas and realities of refugees. 

-The NY Times has a lengthy obituary of Skip Williamson.

-Tributes to the illustrator Jack Unruh.

-I always enjoy an interview with Daniel Clowes, and here he is talking Wilson.

Today on the site:

Frank Young interviews the Tumblr phenom Samplerman.

Do you consider yourself a cartoonist? What led you to creating your “Samplerman” persona?

I am a 46-year-old cartoonist. I’ve been writing and drawing comics for more than 25 years, without any popular success, I have to admit—perhaps because of a lack of self-confidence, not harassing publishers enough, taking no answer for a “no thanks,” and no longer posting my pages (lots of improvised and unfinished stories) on my obscure blogs.

I have always chosen the DIY way to make my fanzines and minicomics: it is affordable and it mostly requires commitment and time. Due to lack of feedback, I’ve felt discouraged from time to time. Sometimes I can’t believe that I’ve kept doing this for so long instead of finding a real job…

I’ve been obsessed with comics all my life. I would have liked to be a comic strip cartoonist, but that career doesn’t exist in France. The conventional formats here are the hardcover, annual 44-page book or the black and white, 300-page one-shot graphic novel. I’ve always been attracted to arts of all kinds: poetry, radio, cinema, animation, the avant-garde, experimentation and the borders of communication. I’m also drawn to abstraction, distortion, destruction, surrealism, sociology and politics. Most of my past comics are kind of absurd and meaningless (nonsensical, to say it nicely). At the end of the day, whatever I am doing, the path from a panel to another has become for me the ordinary way to explore this alternate reality (comics) where I feel at home. So yes, I think am a cartoonist; a weird cartoonist.

Hence the question could be: “Are the Samplerman pieces strictly comics?” I would answer: “Depends on how restrictive your definition of comics is.” If the reader considers certain of my “stories” just as a sequence of panels without any logical connection, I am fine with that, but my works are at least a failed attempt at doing a story from a cartoonist’s neurasthenic brain.

 Elsewhere:

Our friends Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer talk about their upcoming anthology, Mirror Mirror II. 

And Michel Dooley remembers Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson with an image-heavy post.

Today on the site we have Gary Groth's lengthy 1985 interview with Bernie Wrightson. It's a great read.

GROTH: Again, about the Frankenstein book, what I’m interested in finding out is what is the intent of the illustrations? Are you intent upon adding another dimension to the novel?

WRIGHTSON: Not really. I started this in 1976. All this time, and all this work, all this effort and aggravation and what not have gone into this simply to embellish this old book. Which, when I started out, I thought was a terrific book. Now, six years have gone by, and I don’t think it’s such a terrific book, anymore. Okay, we’ve got some good drawings to go in there, some of them are spectacular. And for anybody who does like the book, this is going to be a real good edition of it. My personal feelings have nothing to do with that at all. You should just buy the book because you want it, and enjoy it, and don’t worry about how I feel. When I did the drawings, I was really involved with the book and my intentions were really good when I did them. They had to be or my drawings wouldn’t be that good. I really believe that an artist can’t communicate to a viewer unless he really pours himself into it and tries to do that. And I tried to do it with that, and they work. So, I’m not apologizing for that, I’m not apologizing for anything, I’m just saying that I’m glad I’m still not doing it, because my attitude has changed completely.

GROTH: It sounds like you think a little less of the book now than when you first started.

WRIGHTSON: Yeah, I guess I do.

GROTH: Who are some of your favorite authors?

WRIGHTSON: Stephen King.

GROTH: Poe, I guess? Or isn’t he one of your favorites?

WRIGHTSON: He was real good to start out with, but I don’t think I’d ever read him again. Wells, H.G. Wells, in limited doses.

GROTH: Lovecraft?

WRIGHTSON: Nah. He was always a little too ponderous. I have a hard time with the language. There are a few things that he’s done that I’ve really enjoyed, but for the most part I can’t take him.

GROTH: What do you like about King?

WRIGHTSON: What do I like about King? Damn near everything. The guy has an uncanny knack for creating characters who are people that you know, just really solid people. A storyteller par excellence. Absolutely riveting from the first page. A terrific command of the language and colloquialism and slang and bullshit and whatever. And on top of that, he can scare the fucking pants off me.

GROTH: That’s what friends tell me.

WRIGHTSON: Have you ever read him?

GROTH: No, I never have. And friends have told me that they’ve actually gotten frightened reading his books. And I can’t imagine that.

WRIGHTSON: If you’ve never experienced that, I envy you. Because I wish I could re-experience that feeling for the first time.

GROTH: I keep intending to read The Shining, but I’ve not gotten around to it.

WRIGHTSON: I think you ought to start out with Salem’s Lot.

WHITE: How about Firestarter?

WRIGHTSON: Firestarter and Salem’s Lot, I think, are the two best stories he’s written.

Elsewhere:

Robert Silvers, the truly legendary editor of the New York Review of Books, passed away on Monday. The New Yorker has a series of tributes.

Peter Bagge talks about his new graphic biography of Zora Neale Hurston over at CBR.

Comics culture: The Paris Review looks at bodybuilding and the old sand-kicking ads.

First up -- good news! I'm so happy to report that Tim Hodler and Lauren Weinstein welcomed a baby girl into the world yesterday. 

Today on the site we have an obituary for Bernie Wrightson by Steve Ringgenberg.

Born in 1948, to a working class Baltimore family, Wrightson didn’t recall receiving a great deal of encouragement for his early artistic endeavors from his parents, but as he observed in a 2015 interview in Comic Book Creator, “I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember.” Comic books and comic strips were early influences, with Wrightson citing Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, drawn by Mac Raboy and Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane as his favorite comic strips. Wrightson was only five or six when he began reading EC Comics, the most visceral of which, as drawn by Graham Ingels or Frank Frazetta, had a profound influence on his aesthetic. Another big influence on Wrightson was horror films: He was fortunate to be in the “Monster Kids” generation, when Famous Monsters of Filmland began publishing, and Universal released its “Shock Theater” package of old horror films for syndication, spawning a host of local late night horror movie hosts like Baltimore’s own Dr. Lucifer, played by faded movie idol Richard Dix.

Popular interest in dinosaurs had a resurgence in the late 1950s, providing another piece of Wrightson’s influences. While he remembered loving Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, other, more cheaply done dinosaur films failed to impress him. As he recalled in the same Comic Book Creator interview, “I saw that Lost World remake with Claude Rains (1960), and that was a huge disappointment…you couldn’t fool me with plastic horns on a big lizard…” Another great early influence was the Ace Books editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs featuring covers and frontispiece illustrations by Frazetta, which Wrightson credits with getting him to start reading novels cover to cover.

And the great Joe McCulloch brings us his weekly dose, but with comics listing to follow later today.

Elsewhere:

A look at a mostly under-known aspect of Betty Boop.

Ben Schwartz on Michael Tisserand's George Herriman biography.

Bringing Wilson from page to screen over at The New Yorker.

Today on the site, we have a 1984 interview with the late Skip Williamson.

And it's another sad day for comics, as Bernie Wrightson, a beloved artist of numerous comics and books, has passed away after suffering from brain cancer.A fine summary of his life is on his own web site. Wrightson specialized in post-EC horror, emerging in the early 1970s to co-create Swamp Thing, draw covers and stories for DC, short stories for Warren, and co-found "The Studio", a space on Manhattan's Upper West Side where he, Barry Windsor Smith, Michael Kaluta and Jeffrey Jones worked, and about which an influential book was published. Wrightson is perhaps most acclaimed for his illustrations for Frankenstein, which were rendered in an elaborate pen and ink manner reminiscent of one of his heroes, Franklin Booth. He also collaborated with Stephen King, illustrating books including The Stand. Wrightson created his own character, Captain Sternn, who was featured in the print Heavy Metal and the anthology's film version. The artist went on to draw Batman, the Punisher, and in recent years returned to Frankenstein. There's more, of course, and we will have a full obituary soon, as well as an archival interview. I will say that, personally, Bernie Wrightson was the first artist I ever really studied. Starting when I was about 10 or 11 I ordered his posters out of the Bud Plant catalog and read and re-read his 1991 monograph, A Look Back, so many times that it fell apart. It was through Wrightson, and his old friend Joel Pollack (the founder of Big Planet Comics) that I learned about 19th and 20th century adventure illustration, to which I've returned in the last couple of years. Wrightson was the comic book heir to the EC horror line, and I suspect that if his influence on comics waned in the last couple of decades, it flourished in film via directors like Guillermo del Toro, who, like me, grew up on the stuff. I moved on from Wrightson somewhere just south of 18, but I have a a huge amount of appreciation for the work, in all its dedication and drama. He was at his best in Frankenstein, which I can still recommend, and whenever he moved into a his brushy horror mode, often in images for posters and portfolios. 

We are sad to report that another underground comic book great, Skip Williamson, has passed away. Patrick Rosenkranz has written his obituary.

Here's the trailer for the documentary on the artist:

and here is a 2012 interview with Williamson. 

We will have an archival TCJ interview shortly.

Rachel Davies has interviewed R. Sikoryak, primarily about his strangest and most ambitious literary adaptation yet, a comics version of the iTunes users' agreement.

Because I try to adapt heavy, important works of literature, usually, like Crime and Punishment or Wuthering Heights, it sometimes gets daunting to struggle with a work that people are very familiar with, and that has characters that people really love. What was great about the Terms and Conditions for me was that there’s no narrative, and no one has an emotional attachment to it, at least not in the same way. I certainly don’t! It freed me up, it liberated me from having to worry about being faithful to it because there’s not a narrative to be faithful to. And it doesn’t lend itself to illustration in an overt way. I wasn’t interested in choosing a text that would be cinematic [laughs], I was interested in a text that didn’t have those concerns that I usually have when I’m doing a text. By choosing a text that had no narrative, it meant I could use the narratives of the comics that I was parodying to provide drama, or suspense, or humor. It was, in a way, a relief. I don’t know how I could do this again! [laughs] But for this project it was kind of a break from the way that I normally make comics.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. The Guardian interviewed Sikoryak too.

Sikoryak has been praised by some for making T&Cs more accessible, which he finds baffling. He just enjoys the challenge of making something dismissed as unreadable readable. In his eyes, convincing someone to read terms and conditions is just like getting someone to read “worthy” classics they feel guilty about skipping, from Camus to Beckett and beyond. “I like using texts that are perceived as important,” he says, “and that includes iTunes T&Cs. All my work is an attempt to bridge the gap between what we call high art and low art, what we think is important or serious, and what we see as frivolous and meaningless. Often, that boundary doesn’t exist.”

Raymond Briggs shares his writing day for the same paper.

Ho ho, those were the days! When one had a “writing day”. Before the advent of No 1: old age, and No 2: partner, wife, whoever, getting long-term incurable illnesses. These slightly disturb the cosy pattern of the working week. A whole day to yourself! When was that last experienced?

In 1958, I got my first 30 bob a week bedsit and was earning a living as a self-employed illustrator. This was what got me into writing. I was often amazed at how bad some of the stories I was given to illustrate were. Golly, I thought, I could do better myself! So I tried to write one and sent it to the editor for some advice. To my utter amazement, he said he would publish it. Just shows what the standard was. Me, a kid of 24.

And the most recent guest on Process Party was Eleanor Davis.

—Reviews & Commentary. It was Will Eisner's centenary last week, and many tributes were written (some we linked to already), including a piece by R.C. Baker in the Village Voice:

Packaged in a Sunday newspaper supplement, the self-contained seven-to-eight-page Spirit stories proved a hit with readers, and by 1941 the young artist/writer/entrepreneur had a busy studio employing a staff of ten. As with Rubens before him and Warhol later, Eisner's name was signed to artwork he never touched; many soon-to-be giants of the medium, including Batman creator Bob Kane and future Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, did apprenticeships in the Eisner studio. In a mark of his business savvy, Eisner insisted on owning the rights to his characters, and he even had the prescience, as war with Japan threatened, to buy a wholesale quantity of finely crafted Japanese ink brushes — which he preferred over domestic brands — fearing that imports might soon come to an end. Decades later he would joke that he was still using brushes from that stockpile.

And by Michael Dooley for Print:

Eisner’s graphic style was often balletic in its grace. One Contract tale opens with a full-page aerial perspective of Dropsie Avenue with its stoops, fire escapes, clotheslines strung from building to building, its elevated subway line in the distance, and many other minutely indicated details rendered with deft, casual brushstrokes. Then it’s followed spread of panels that indicates a swooping down onto tenants chatting from their windows, then a zoom through to settle in on a domestic scene. With spare use of captions and cartoon balloon dialogue, a bounty of exposition is compacted into three small pages with breathtaking fluidity.

Osvaldo Oyola echoes Barthes with an essay about the pleasures of reading serial comics.

At the time that I began regularly reading Marvel superhero serial comics, it was pretty much assumed that any series that began was meant to go on for as long as it sold well enough, regardless of changes to creative team, or even sometimes the very title of the book. When the martial arts craze that inspired the Iron Fist series started to die down, for example, it was combined with the also struggling Luke Cage, Power Man (which had already renamed from Luke Cage, Hero For Hire) to make Power Man & Iron Fist starting with issue #50. It would go on with the two characters teamed up for another 76 issues, cementing an iconic friendship that was essentially mandated by the market, but would become a defining aspect of both characters. I tried to be a regular reader of the series soon after I encountered the pair guest-starring in an issue of ROM Spaceknight, looking for the first part of the two-part story that crossed over between them—how novel such a thing seemed then!—I found other issues that drew my attention. I was taken by its premise and sense of exploring a seedier part of the Marvel Universe. Still, I was unable to read as many of the issues I would have liked, nor could I count on getting every issue each month (actually, it was bi-monthly which made finding it even harder before the days of the pull-list and the advent of the direct market). In reading the first volume of Power Man & Iron Fist (which lasted from 1978 to 1986), I was always engaging with fragments of a larger unknown (and some ways, unknowable) whole.

Ray Davis connects Cerebus to the alt-right.

Not so much Cerebus-the-character, who Jeet Heer picked as Trumpalike a year ago. More Cerebus-the-comic-book: a Shoah-slow train ride from geeky lulz to lunatic-fringe antifeminism through a series of cosmological mother-in-law jokes. Beginning with MAD parodies of teenage-boy-aimed comics, Sim took his hard-earned technique into realms in which it's a less, let's say, established bearer of light: the Flaming Carrot and Druckerized Lou Jacobi dropped wisdom on the moon; Druckerized Maggie Thatcher led execution-torture for the matriarchal dystopia; Druckerized Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway rotated with Druckerized Marty Feldman and Mick Jagger and Batman/Wolverine/Punisher.

Jared Gardner wants people to start archiving webcomics.

It is always worth thinking about the history of earlier storage media when making predictions about the future. Film is as good an example as one could hope to find: a vastly popular medium with international reach and lots of industrial and institutional support. At only 120 years from its origins, one might imagine that the history of cinema is fully at our disposal. Sadly, this is not the case. Today, only about 20-25% of all silent films produced in the United States between the origins of cinema and the end of the silent era in 1927 still exist. In some part of the world, that proportion is considerably lower; for example, in Japan over 90% of all film made before 1945 is believed lost forever.

—Misc. Dangerous Minds has turned up an old Charles Mingus anti-bootlegging comic strip.

As one can see from the signature at the bottom left, the strip was executed by Gene Bilbrew, an African-American cartoonist whom some credit with creating the first black superhero, the Bronze Bomber. Bilbrew had once been an assistant to comics legend Will Eisner. Later on Bilbrew worked as a fetish artist at Irving Klaw’s bondage-oriented Movie Star News/Nutrix company; Klaw also discovered Bettie Page.

Finally, Clickhole gets some a-mazing quotes from Stan Lee. (I know.)

I knew I wanted to publish comics, but I was too lazy to learn how to draw, so I had to find an artist that was dumb enough to agree to make my ideas instead of their own. Jack Kirby was the perfect patsy, a dull-eyed rube with incredible artistic talent and no common sense. I paid a visit to his house while eating a big chicken parm and offered him half if he agreed to be my art slave for the rest of his life. He immediately accepted the deal and scarfed down the half-sandwich. I never paid Jack anything after that chicken parm, and he never fully understood how raw that deal was for him, though he suspected. When Jack passed, I felt some guilt, so I gave half of a Sprite Zero I had been drinking to his widow. I know that’s what he would have wanted.

Today on the site, it's a snowy day and Santa Joe brings you the new comics.

Elsewhere:

Al Jaffee interviewed over at Vanity Fair. It's nice that Jaffee has had such public appreciation these last half-dozen years. 

Passings: 

The New York Times on Jay Lynch.

Classic big foot New Zealand Cartoonist Murray Ball passed away.

Today on the site:

Katie Skelly reviews Eleanor Davis's Libby's Dad.

Davis returns to her toolkit once again to explore the landscapes between language and reality, threat and violence. However, Libby’s Dad’s grasp doesn’t quite take the same hold as any of the How to Be pieces. A short story about a group of prepubescent neighborhood girlfriends, Libby’s Dad finds its tension in one of the girls spreading a rumor that Libby’s newly divorced father had threatened to shoot Libby’s mother as the result of some unknown argument. Libby’s father has also treated the girls with the utmost hospitality, ordering them KFC, allowing them to eat sweets after dark, letting them use the pool in his new midlife crisis pad. Philosophical questions rise up for the girls: how could someone be dangerous and generous at once? How could they possibly be close to someone who could also destroy all of them? And the eternal question: is it ever possible to really know someone? All of Davis’s usual pieces are in play: a child’s lack of grasp of nuance; an environment capable of enveloping its characters with its visually and psychically overwhelming elements; an ambiguous distance between truth and fiction; a paranoid whisper-down-the-alley; and an intrusion of imagined violence and mental illness — all diffused within pages of them reaching their greatest pitch. Why?

Elsewhere: 

Joe McCulloch talks Tatsumi over here.

Not much comics news, but comics-adjacent painting: R.B. Kitaj has a great retrospective in New York at Malborough, and here's a fine piece of writing on it.

Anyhow, today on the site we have two of our great cartoonists in conversation: Phoebe Gloeckner and Julia Gfrörer. The two spoke on the occasion of the release of Gfrörer's recent book, Laid Waste. Here's a teaser:

PG: You just said that you’re working on the drawings; you have it all written. Is that your typical process? Do you write the whole thing out? Do you script it? What do you do?

JG: I thumbnail and script it at the same time. And then pencil it and ink it, so it’s all penciled now, and I’m just inking.

You generally do it in different passes. It general, you have the whole thing worked out, and then you return to the beginning, and start inking, and so on?

Yeah. Usually I’ll kind of jump around. I won’t do it straight from beginning to end, but I’ll do whatever part I feel like doing. If I’m feeling not super into it, I’ll ink a page or draw a page that I feel like is going to be fun or easy — when there’s not a lot happening in it. In this Flesh and Bone sequel, yesterday, I was feeling unmotivated, and there’s a page where the witch is spinning with a drop spindle. And then the thread gets tangled, it does that thing where it twists in on itself and makes a tangle. That was really easy to draw, it was just several panels of thread spinning and then tangling up. It went really quick, and I was like, this is really motivational. It was like: BAM, I finished a page.

You got into the swing of things.

Another question I had is about collaboration. Amongst your collaborations — and I don’t know all of them — I’m thinking of the work you did with Sean, and they were adaptations of Poe stories. That was just something I would just expect you to do on your own. I would totally trust whatever you would come up with, your interpretation. I’m wondering: why the collaboration, and how did that change your work?

The porn adaptations of Poe, that was Sean’s idea. He sent me the script for the first one before we really had a relationship, he just knew my work.

[Laughs.] That’s very seductive.

I know. [Laughter.] I read it, and when I realized what was going to happen in it — at first I was like, “Who does this guy think he is?” To try to improve on Poe seems like a gutsy move. When I finished reading it, I was like, “This is amazing.” I was really into it. I did end up drawing it. Then, it just became a thing we do for fun. I don’t usually collaborate with people. I drew some stuff for Anne Elizabeth Moore for a magazine but she hired me to do it. With Sean, I really like his writing, I think he as a good sense of what is going to be good for me to draw: what I’m going to enjoy drawing, and what’s going to look good drawn by me. We’ve done a couple Poe/porn books. We did a comic called Hiders, which was just a 4 page one about these two young women who turn into werewolves together. But they don’t talk about it when they’re both human.

Elsewhere:

Hooo wee, look at that great Kim Deitch drawing from the 1970s in our little window.

Podcast updates: Tucker Stone (who hangs out with Tim much more than me, which makes me secretly sad but I'll get over it) talked Punisher over here. At Comic Books Are Burning in Hell, Joe McCulloch and Katie Skelly talk Insufficient Direction and then Joe and Chris Mautner discuss Pretending Is Lying.

Reminder: The Women in Illustration Tumblr is on quite a roll lately, especially with the always amazing Margaret Brundage.

Over at the New Yorker, Paul LaFarge details the true life of one of a character in his new novel about H.P. Lovecraft. Salient line: "Who keeps track of the lives of fans." One of my favorite things is to track certain strains of fandom... I love the fandom that seeded underground comics, the fandom that resulted in so much commerce in the 1970s and 80s and the fandom that birthed this magazine and Fantagraphics. And now the fandom that keeps a thousand zine and comics fairs in bloom.