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Today on the site, in honor of Friday the 13th, Bob Levin brings us an account of the scariest EC artist, Graham Ingels originally written for the never-published catalog for an EC exhibition opening today. I gotta say, with Wally Wood and Johnny Craig (and everyone has their little canon), Ingels continues to astonish me. The sheer weirdness of his drawing is organic and exceptional -- really can't be approximated. It's just a few steps beyond what anyone would consciously decide to do. Here's Bob:

Gaines would call Ingels “Mr. Horror.”  Stephen King saluted him in his short story “The Boogeyman,” for his ability to “draw every god-awful thing in the world – and some out of it.”  The cartoonist Jim Woodring once considered Ingels’ work “the product of a diseased mind or something”  And me, in retrospect, I fingered him as “The Little Richard of Comics.”  I mean, when rock’n’roll came in, if you were in a car, with your parents, and the radio station you’d selected erupted  with “A-wop-boppa-loo-mop.  A-wop-bam-boom,” your taste – your intelligence – your entire way of being became suspect. Same with Ingels and comics.  His work caught you the most evil-eyed, purse-mouthed grief. 

In Ingels’ world men were weak or avaricious, imbecilic or maniacal, and women sluts or hags.  They populated fetid swamps, decaying mansions, moldering dungeons.  Their bodies drooped and distended; their features melted and dissolved; their muscles strained agonizingly; their limbs angled impossibly. Every part of them reflected horror.  They bore bony, elongated, clawed fingers,  over-sized, over-sharp teeth, lust-filled, hate-filled eyes.  They were regularly buried in the rain, and, from the mud, repeatedly arose, rotting, drooling, seeking revenge.

The elements scourged Ingels’ panels.  Blackness enveloped them. Their word balloons bore jagged edges or dripped.  The lines which enclosed them, instead of imposing order, wavered.  Hands groped beyond them; phones dangled past them; The Old Witch’s warted chin drooped over their edge.  Faces spun within them: on one side in one; straight up in the next; on the opposite side in the third.  Long shot alternated with close-up.  Points-of-view shifted, from floor to ceiling.  The viewer lost hold on the ordinary.  There was no solidarity, no consistency, no principle to cling to.  Everything decomposed – like those corpses seeking revenge.

Elsewhere:

I think this is comics-related, in so far as it relates to Frank Santoro and also Danzig's own comic book line, Verotik: The Misfits are getting back together.

Ryan Holmberg previews his upcoming Breakdown release, Katsumata Susumu’s Anti-Nuclear Manga.

Here's a kind of funny post from Drew Friedman about R. Crumb sitting in Nike's Mark Parker's place and looking at Friedman's original art for a story about Crumb. Got all that?

Oh, this is a groovy old Siegel and Shuster strip. 

—News. The controversial anarchist French cartoonist Siné died late last week. We will have an obituary soon. Michael Dooley has a piece on him at Print, including samples of his work.

Back in 1955, while still in his twenties, he’d already received France’s Black Humor award, Le Grand Prix de l’humour noir, for his stunning, Saul Steinberg-inspired “Complainte sans Paroles” collection. A few years later, L’Express began running, and occasionally rejecting, his controversial political cartoons and commentary. A lifelong provocateur, Siné’s support of the Algerians during their war of liberation against France during that time regularly raised the hackles of the newspaper’s readers. His milder, pun-filled cat books earned him widespread public popularity, and his other books include a biographical series titled Ma Vie, Mon Oeuvre, Mon Cul! (My Life, My Work, My Ass!). He was a Charlie Hebdo regular from the early 1980s until 2008, when a piece that could be viewed as either satiric or anti-Semitic, and which was potentially libelous—and for which he refused to apologize—led to his dismissal. He did, however, file, and win, a wrongful termination suit against his former employer.

—Interviews & Profiles. The National Post profiles Annie Koyama.

“Annie took a real chance on me,” says Michael DeForge, a comic artist who has been publishing with Koyama since she flagged him down at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) in 2008. At the time, he had only a few self-published mini-comics to his name, but with Koyama’s belief in his work, DeForge was able to find an audience.

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, occasional TCJ contributor Daniel Kalder talks to Alejandro Jodorowsky about his career.

One of my favorite comics is Son of the Gun, the series you did with Georges Bess about Juan Solo, the South American mob enforcer with a tail.

That is the boy who died. That was my son who died.

Really?

Yes, the main character. I used photos of him to make this character. I’d never done this. I had wanted to make a movie, but when he died I didn’t do it.

Son of the Gun definitely reads and feels like a movie.

Yes it was, but when he died, I did it as a comic.

For CBR, Gilbert Hernandez talks about collaborating with Darwyn Cooke on The Twilight Children.

A lot of times when people collaborate who have their own careers separately collaborate there's a lot of head butting. We were head-less. [Laughs] We basically just let it happen. Let it happen the script, let the art happen, he just let himself do it. That worked really well. We'd like to do another project together later on where he writes and I draw, so we'll see about that.

Mia Nakaji Monnier interviews MariNaomi about her new memoir for The Millions, and among other things, discusses why her mother doesn't read her work:

She’s never done drugs, or — she’s just coming from such a different place. And she’s my mom. So I would tell her these really horrible parts of the stories to distract her because she’s also very curious, and I knew that at some point she wouldn’t be able to resist. So one of the first things I told her was, “I wrote about my first blowjob. The guy didn’t wash himself, Mom. Do you really want to read that? I drew flies around his penis, Mom. Do you really want to read that?” And she’s like, “No, no, I’m never reading it.” I even tested them out a little, thinking maybe I’d show them a couple of comics and see if they could handle it. There’s a story about when I mooned a little kid, and my mom read that and she said, [gasp!], and I said, “Okay, that’s it! If that shocks you, we’re done.”

For The Beat, Alex Dueben interviews Roberta Gregory.

I did get a job doing production art for Fantagraphics just before they moved to Seattle from California. This is all the pre-digital before-computers production, using a darkroom and a stat camera to turn glossy photos into halftones, literally pasting up magazine pages on boards, and so on. I had been working on medical magazines and car magazines during most of the 1980s, so the work for Fantagraphics was not much different. When I was working for them in Seattle, I think Kim or Gary suggested I try a comic book. Naughty Bits was going to be just a short lived collection of stories but Bitchy Bitch turned into a character and took over the series. It ran for 40 issues and I am sure I could have gone on much more with it.

Frank Santoro talks to Noah Van Sciver at this year's PIX:

PIX 2016 | Noah Van Sciver Interview from Frank Santoro on Vimeo.

—Reviews & Commentary. John Porcellino writes about clearing most of his convention schedule for the year.

The amount of time and travel that artists are expected to endure to make the convention rounds is untenable. Cons are (can be) fun, and it’s still a blast to meet your fans and friends face to face. I personally still get a kick out of standing behind a table covered in comics and seeing what happens. But the toll this is taking on cartoonists is very real. For me to attend DINK (a one and a half day show) required a day of prep time, two days of travel, doing the show, two more days of travel, and then two days to overcome the lack of sleep and food. Even if I do well at a show the amount of money I make could usually be made up by staying home and doing a few pieces of commissioned artwork. The truth is driving cross country to sell a $5 comic to someone is pretty much the most inefficient method of comics distribution there is.

Mark Evanier tells a few anecdotes about his personal experiences with B. Kliban, including an ill-fated television series.

I ran into B. the first day of the con and he greeted me warmly. I told him I was working on the TV show based on his characters. He said, "What TV show based on my characters?" I told him all about the project. He knew nothing about any such deal and ran off to his hotel room to call…well, someone — his agent or his lawyer or his publisher or…I don't know who he called.

Abhay Khosla reviews Michel Fiffe's Copra at length.

COPRA is a comic that the SUICIDE SQUAD, by virtue of existing in the DC Universe can never be because it is a comic fundamentally suspicious of, derisive of, dismissive of the underlying message of superhero comics: that power can be used responsibily [sic], that our world has space for heroes, that violence can solves problems. COPRA is so intoxicated by comic’s [sic] formal properties that perhaps the fact its content isn’t so peppy can easily be overlooked, ignored. COPRA has cheap genre thrills, but plays them like a black comedy– unburdened by a DC universe context that makes no sense i.e. that the kind of power let loose within COPRA can co-exist with a moral universe.

Joe McCulloch, thank god, is back from vacation, but is feeling a little under the weather, so we'll be posting his usual guide to the Week in Comics! later tonight. In the meantime, here's a brief taste of what he's working on, a review of the new Cinema Purgatorio anthology, which provides an excellent excuse for Joe to explore the sweet world of his beloved Avatar Press.

A few weeks ago, the website FairPageRates.com disseminated the results of a 127-person sample size poll concerning payment for professional work in the comic book industry. Amid various comments concerning the undesirability of working for high-profile 'indie' publishers such as BOOM!, Zenescope and Bluewater/Storm Entertainment, there is a brief and telling mention of Avatar Press:

This is understandable. Established in the latter half of the 1990s, the age of the industry crash, as a veritable fallout shelter for sexually-driven 'bad girl' comics, Avatar quickly seized on the possibility of recruiting name writers tested in mainstream genre comics and allowing them leeway to publish aggressive and extreme content. Today, they are known mainly for one of those projects: the comprehensively violent pseudo-zombie series Crossed, a going concern since 2008 and still trademark & copyright Mr. Garth Ennis, whose name you will also be seeing on the Preacher television show soon enough. This, more than anything, has cemented Avatar's identity as "a downmarket gorehound press" per Tim last week, though the same publisher is also behind the industry news/gossip site Bleeding Cool, and maintains a side-specialty in sexy girl comics via an imprint, Boundless.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. I haven't listened to this yet, but was excited to wake up this morning and discover that my favorite (non-TCJ-affiliated) comics podcast, Rina Ayuyang and Thien Pham's Comix Claptrap, has returned after a two-year-long hiatus, and their first guest is Tim Hensley.

Guest host Sean Ford takes the reins at Inkstuds to interview Malachi Ward.

Japan Times profiles Rokudenashiko.

You’ve probably heard of Japanese artist known as Rokudenashiko (“good for nothing girl”), who was arrested in 2014 for sending the 3-D data of her genitals to patrons of her successful crowdfunding campaign to create a vagina-shaped kayak.

(According to Tokyo Reporter, Rokudenashiko has recently been fined 400,000 Yen for her crime.)

The Society of Illustrators has posted video of Ryan Sands talking to Rebecca Sugar:

—Reviews & Commentary. Ng Suat Tong isn't particularly fond of screenwriter/internet-punching-bag Max Landis's Superman: American Alien.

My first impression on reading Superman: American Alien was that it seemed like a decently written television series. The kind you might find on a small cable channel littered with demographically targeted YA themes about young powerful people grappling with their powers.

It's nice to see Ng writing again so much recently.

—News. Longtime Farm News cartoonist Rick Friday was fired from his position after he published a cartoon mildly criticizing Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, and John Deere.

After the cartoon was published last Friday, Mr. Friday said he was told in an email from an editor the next day that the cartoon would be his last for Farm News because a seed company had withdrawn its advertising in protest.

Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's This One Summer has been banned from a Minnesota public school district's library after a single parental complaint.

Henning School District has no policy addressing selection or reconsideration of library materials. The school district was contacted when we couldn’t find any policies online, the superintendent said that there is no policy but there is a procedure in place where a parent can complain to the principal and the principal will decide what to do. No consultation with the librarian is required. No consultation of professional reviews is required. The book doesn’t even need to be read in its entirety.

Finally, Oni Press has announced that they are starting a new imprint devoted to educational sex comics, starting with Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan's Oh Joy Sex Toy.

[EDITED TO ADD: This post was written on very little sleep this morning, and included a few errors—one typo and a mistaken description of Oni Press. Both have been corrected, but my apologies.]

Today on the site we have Cynthia Rose on a great-sounding caricature show at the Museum of Decorative Art, in Paris.

From Caricature to Poster takes you back to a lost moment. In the fin de siècle poster boom, it’s quite a surprise: ads and promotions created entirely by caricaturists. The story of how this happened is quirky – but it’s as real as that of Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge or Mucha’s Sarah Bernhardt. You can see it now at Museum of Decorative Art in Paris.

Along with Art Nouveau, French poster art created the defining graphics of la Belle Époque. The posters also changed design and typography. Yet no sooner had they bloomed than their industry lost its leaders and, as their art degenerated, so did its commercial power. Panicked, the ad men at its helm sought replacements – and, rapidly, found them in a thriving French humor press. For a brief moment, this offbeat pairing flourished. Then, because of World War I, it was forgotten.

Whether they made pornographic pamphlets or best-selling weeklies, caricaturists had always served as their own promoters. But suddenly letting them loose on corsets, breath mints and bicycle tires? This was a dare whose irreverent results resuscitated an industry. Yet the show does not center on why the posters worked. Instead, out of their tiny history, it delivers something bigger: an important look at the legacy of Philipon’s pen.

This is the founding myth of French caricature. It was created November 14, 1831, when the editor Charles Philipon went on trial in Paris. Philipon, then 29, ran a year-old weekly by the name of La Caricature. There, his team there was one-of-a-kind, with graphic stars like Paul Gavarni, Honoré Daumier, J.J. Grandville and Traviés de Villers. (Balzac was another enthusiastic contributor). The journal was notorious for its provocations and, by that November date, Philipon had been subject to eleven prosecutions. This time, his drawings were charged with “outrage against the person of the King”.

Elsewhere:

I had no idea author Philip Pullman was releasing a graphic novel in 2017. Looks intriguing.

I missed this late-April interview with Toronto-based cartoonist Michael Comeau, who has completed his Hellberta comics project.

This exit interview with Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin is a good look at current critical and publishing landscapes.

I enjoyed this conversation between the painter Nicole Eisenman (whose work should be required viewing for anyone interested in narrative and figuration) and Grace Dunham.

Finally, go forth and purchase new comics from CF in an all new format.

Today, Ryan Holmberg is here with a new column on the complicated role of Nakashima Kiyoshi at the intersection of art and power in Japan's Nuclear culture. If you don't know who Nakashima is, read on!

The other day, for the first time in my life, I was personally offended by kawaii. I have found it silly, gross, frivolous, and stupid on many occasions, but never offensive.

“Wouldn’t you like to have this cute little puppy dog hanging in your house? It’s an image of the artist’s own puppy dog. Wouldn’t you love to share it with your family?” said the beseeching salesman to the old lady in the third floor gallery at Maruzen Bookstore in Nihonbashi.

I was heading back to the subway station after a coffee with a Los Angeles director about a documentary he is making about ninja and pop culture, when I chanced upon a sign outside Maruzen advertising Nakashima Kiyoshi’s print show. This is an artist that recently crossed my radar for reasons explained below, but in whose work I would otherwise not be interested in the least. I popped into the show hoping I might learn something about him, not expecting that that something would be that he’s a weasel.

And we also have the final day of Sara Lautman's week contributing our Cartoonist's Diary. Thanks, Sara!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—History. The New Yorker posts an excerpt from Michael Maslin's new biography of Peter Arno.

In those earliest months, there were a number of happy accidents that pushed the magazine toward lasting acceptance by the readership [editor Harold] Ross sought to cultivate. One of them occurred the day, in the spring of 1926, when Philip Wylie spied some drawings of a pair of older women in Arno’s portfolio. Arno hadn’t intended to submit the drawings of the women—they were just sketches he’d been fooling around with. According to Wylie, Arno “rather self-consciously and reluctantly” brought the drawings out of his portfolio. Wylie passed the sketches to Ross, who initially found them “too rough,” but took them home and showed them to his wife, Jane Grant. She found them delightful. The sisters—christened Pansy Smiff and Mrs. Abagail Flusser, or the Whoops Sisters—were introduced in the pages of the magazine in April of 1926. They were not just sweet little old ladies—they were naughty, boisterous, grinning “wink wink, nudge nudge” sweet little old ladies; their language laced with double entendres. As often as not, the captions contained the word “Whoops!”

Al Jaffee explains the origin of the Mad fold-in:

—News. The Kenyan cartoonist Gado and the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar have been awarded the 2016 Cartooning for Peace Prize.

“Gado and Zunar remind us how fragile this liberty remains in Africa and in Asia as well as in other regions of the world. Through their commitment towards open and transparent societies, Gado and Zunar, who have received threats in their countries of origin and can no longer practice their profession, confront us with our responsibility to preserve freedom of expression and act in order to support the combat of those who cannot express themselves through their art”, declared [Kofi] Annan.

—Money. TCJ regular Rob Clough is faced with some extreme medical bills and looking for help.

Zainab Akhtar and Clark Burscough (Thought Bubble) have joined up to start ShortBox, a curated comics subscription service.

—Reviews & Commentary. Martin Dupuis writes about Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's ultraviolent crime/sf story, Hard Boiled.

It’s slapstick Looney Tunes violence gone ballistic (a man gets his arm ripped off and then stabbed WITH it). Almost to the point of being able to read it as a cyclical commentary of how comics had become plagued with gritty hyper violent stories after the influence of Miller’s late eighties work. It’s almost as if Miller and Darrow are addressing this by going all the way with it as a marker for and end point. You want to play this game, here is as far as it can get pushed in commercial comics – now move on and bring it somewhere new.

Today on the site: Day four of Sara Lautman's diary.

And Katie Skelly on Cathy Johnson's new book, Gorgeous.

The heart of Gorgeous’s story is a collision between ideologies on the move. In the dead of night, two reckless young punks take off after ruining some band’s set and smash head-on into an oncoming college student’s car. As they offer their assistance, the lead punk’s worldview is laid out overtly in binary dialogue; you’re rich, I’m poor; you’re girly, I’m tough, etc. The real essence of the characters is revealed by the end of the night: the “anarchist” punks feign sincerity in playing at chaos but are ultimately selfish, pillaging. The college sophomore, Sophie, who at first appears green and uncertain, demonstrates herself to be a determined, even stoic young woman on her way to self-actualization. Her circumstances (which we connote by Johnson hitting three solid, albeit somewhat-clichéd, beats of budget trouble/scholarship/student athlete) present a real chaos that demand her focus and management, or else she will succumb to a failure that will set her back irreversibly. It’s here where the length of the story eventually hobbles Gorgeous; at 60 pages there is only so much character depth Johnson can plunge into, and while we spend almost equal time with Sophie as we do the punks, the punks do little more to function as dimensionless aggressors in the end when weighed against the student’s narrative.

Elsewhere, it's a mostly non-comics link day today:

If you are in NYC, get thee to Matthew Marks Gallery to gaze upon these drawings by the late, great Ken Price, master sculptor who also made incredibly works on paper with clear affinities to Moebius, Moscoso, and, most of all, Herge.

If you are a human being interested in visual culture, take a deep dive into this newly launched online archive of work by Robert Brownjohn, one of the great post-WWII graphic designers, known for his work on Goldfinger and Let it Bleed.

If you have $25 and some wall space, buy this John Pham/Kramers 9 print.

Ken Parille has some thoughts on the first issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze's Black Panther.

1. This comic is a test. If a writer of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s rhetorical power cannot create an interesting, unusual superhero comic when working within the current “corporate production method,” then perhaps no one can.

2. It’s certainly unfair to make any book a test case, and, ideally, the production method should be irrelevant to our enjoyment or assessment of a comic. It’s just that, in practice, the contemporary editorially-driven, division-of-labor approach tends to produce slick comics that rarely rise above skillfully executed competence. (Black Panther #1’s credits list a writer, artist, colorist, letterer, designer, assistant editor, editor, executive editor, editor-in-chief, chief creative officer, and more.) Editors always have the final say. They’re charged with brand protection: corporate characters generate a lot of revenue, and when so much cash is at stake, it makes sense, they seemingly believe, to play it safe. Yet based on what he’s said in interviews, Black Panther #1 is exactly the superhero comic Coates wanted to create. His vision was in no way diluted by the editorial process.

3. Like many readers, I was excited when I learned Coates would be writing a comic. I assumed the result would be artistically less safe than most of what shows up in America’s comic-book shops every Wednesday. ...

And we also have day three of Sara Lautman's week making our Cartoonist's Diary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. In a much-needed bit of good news for 2016, Atena Farghadani has been released from prison.

Ms. Farghadani was first arrested in August, 2014, after posting a cartoon on Facebook in protest of the Iranian Parliament’s plans to restrict women’s reproductive rights.

—Reviews & Commentary. Steve Duin makes the case that EC Comics are underappreciated for their progressive politics.

"This material is painfully relevant. Agonizingly relevant," [curator Ben] Saunders says. "I wish the spectacle of racist cops shooting African-Americans in the back was part of the bad old days. But it's not.

Robert Boyd writes about Rokudenashiko's What is Obscenity?: The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, about her arrest and imprisonment in Japan on obscenity charges.

Rokudenashiko specialized in non-fiction comics, and when she saw an ad for vaginal reconstructive surgery, she thought it might be a good subject for a first person non-fiction comic. After she had the surgery and documented it in manga, she had the idea of making a mold of her manko. She made a cell phone cover out of it and decorated it, calling it a “Deco-man.” A columnist saw it and suggested she do a workshop on making Deco-mans.

The problem was that pussy is quite taboo in Japan. She was accused of being a pervert and a sex addict, and her husband divorced her. She tried to make a living creating manko art, but it was impossible to publicize the work.

—Interviews & Profiles. Susan Cole speaks to Rokudenashiko in advance of her TCAF appearance.

Is there something about Japanese culture that makes your work especially vulnerable to attack?

There is a fixed and pervasive mentality that men can treat women’s bodies as objects, but women who express their own gender are not tolerated. Women who speak clearly about themselves sexually are reviled. On top of all this, I freely use the taboo word “manko” to refer to my vagina. “Manko” means pussy, it means cunt. It can be very derogatory, but it’s used very casually and without weight to refer to the vag (by women), and is a normal part of pillow talk as well. The only place it’s not used is the doctor’s office. Well that, and the police station....

For The Fader, Zainab Akhtar has written a profile of Annie Koyama and Koyama Press.

For its first six years, Koyama Press functioned somewhat like a non-profit organization: Annie funded local artists’ ventures—street art, zines, comics—then gave them all the proceeds. An insomniac, she spent nights scouring the internet for the work of young, little-known cartoonists and gave them the opportunity to publish their comics, often for the first time. On an immediate level, Annie’s generous yet meritocratic approach validated the work of artists who were otherwise written off by the established alternative comics community, which often views this new generation of cartoonists working primarily online as somehow less legitimate.

It's a solid piece, but I'm a little baffled by the claims in the last quoted sentence; I can't recall seeing any resistance at all to Koyama's artists, certainly not from the alternative comics community, where everyone seems to love Annie and her roster. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. A minor point in any case.

Hilary Brown at Paste talks to Brecht Evens.

I’m not into [Charles] Burchfield’s realistic work. The periods I like are a summer he seems to have had as a 17-year-old, and his late period, from his 50s on I think (I’m making an effort not to Google this). He then even picked up some of his adolescent watercolors and expanded on them, adding pieces of paper as you’ve seen. Some of these early watercolors, and all of the late ones, have something psychotic about them. Sound, touch, all the other senses come into play, heightened, translated into inventive marks with a brush. He makes mosquitos and electric wires buzz, birds fly by too fast to see, the sunlight causes mirages, and the sun itself becomes a black dot, as would appear when you look at it for too long. This psychotic vision, or just a clear and more complete vision if you like, has been linked to effects caused by his heart medicine. I don’t know how that explains the adolescent watercolors…maybe teenagers tend to get a bit manic-psychotic in summer. Now I’m thinking of Newton… Anyway, the idea of this very rural, doughy-looking quiet type, standing in a marsh with his rubber boots, doing magnificent and visionary watercolors because of his heart pills, makes me happy.

The most recent guest on Inkstuds is Caitlin Skaalrud.

Comics Alternative talks to Chester Brown.

Today on the site, we have day 2 of Sara Lautman's diary.

We also have Eszter Szép on An Olympic Dream, Reinhard Kleists’s biography of Samia Yusuf.

Biography, memoir, and autobiography are possibly the trendiest genres of book-format comics; one cannot even list the titles that have been published since the recent boom in the early 2000s. Some say that there are too many graphic biographies and memoirs already, and that they repeat the same tropes – but I like them. I like feeling connected to the story, even if its characters feel remote at first. It seems to me that connection is the ultimate aim of nonfiction biographical comics: to use the comics repertoire in a way that conveys immediacy and relevance to the reader.

By connection I do not mean that a certain historical period is evoked accurately or that a certain milieu is represented faithfully. All that is necessary, but not enough. By connection I mean the authenticity of a personality that appears through the pages. Connection is achieved by making me ask the same questions and contemplate the same choices which the characters do.

And I'm sorry to tell you, but Tim and I are subbing in for Joe McCulloch today, who is vacationing, as far as we know, far away from comics. Now of course it takes two of us to even just pinch hit for the might Joe, and we can barely even do that! Here's our meager offering.

Elsewhere:

I happen to disagree with  Ng Suat Tong on his negative assessment of Frank Miller's drawings but I wouldn't argue it because we're just coming from two different places entirely. I thought DKII was his best work. And I understand why people would dislike this  new stuff. It's ugly and incoherent, but coherent Miller isn't that interesting to me, and I like ugly sometimes. Free of his obvious influences -- Eisner, Adams, Moebius, Kojima -- he just made weird work. Intentional? Maybe not. Maybe so. We'll probably never know.  It's not genius or anything... just odd end-of-career work by a pulp artist, kinda like Lee Brown Coye's late work. Consistent in its weirdness. Certainly the covers he's drawn in the last year are all of a piece, and make sense as slightly deranged mark-making.

Speaking of deranged, here are photos, all by the same fella (emphasis on fella), of 1970s cosplay. I want to hope that there were far more drugs (or rather, better and illegal drugs) involved then. The Cheech Wizard costume, I must say, is nothing short of magnificent.

Today brings a new guest contributor to our Cartoonist's Diary feature: Sara Lautman.

It also marks the return of our original webcomics columnist, Shaenon Garrity, who offers a report from the “Masters of Webcomics” panel at the Silicon Valley Comic-Con, with Jonathan Lemon, Jason Thompson, Jason Shiga, and myself, as well as Andy Weir, who started his creative career with the webcomic Casey and Andy but is much better known now for writing The Martian.

Weir’s appearance was the worst-kept secret in San Jose, and the audience began applauding as soon as he walked onstage in a face-concealing space helmet. When, at Whelon’s direction, he slowly removed it to the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra, another round of applause broke out. The ostensible subject of the panel was “How can making a webcomic form the foundation of a career in the creative arts?” and there was no doubt which of the panelists had managed it most spectacularly.

But none of us had started with the idea of building a career. Except for Shiga, who was late to the Internet, everyone got into webcomics around the early 2000s, and we all agreed we had no idea what the Web was going to be. “There wasn’t any plan,” said Lemon, who decided to try cartooning after a stint in the Peace Corps. “I deliberately started drawing with absolutely no plan, no characters. The idea was to see what developed and what I liked doing.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. My co-editor Dan has outdone himself with a genuinely must-read essay in Art in America about Ben Jones and C.F.

The two most important cartoonists of their generation, Ben Jones (b. 1977) and Christopher “CF” Forgues (b. 1979), are also two of the least recognized. Working together, often under pseudonyms, they changed the form and content of comics as few other artists have, radically distorting extant storytelling genres and emphasizing experimental approaches to drawing and printing. In 1999, when both were art students in Boston, they began collaborating under the name Paper Radio. Over the next few years, they produced hundreds of works ranging from exquisite silkscreened books to photocopied zines to early Web-based graphics. The narrative forms they explored were equally varied. A Paper Radio publication could contain subversive fan fiction about the Muppet Babies, elaborate fantasy adventures, psychedelic space operas, or crude slapstick gags. All of these works circulated in small editions among an audience of like-minded artists and musicians, members of a largely unchronicled New England subculture whose aesthetic continues to seep, credited or not, into popular visual forms, from music videos to subway advertisements.

At Tits and Sass, Tina Horn and Caty Simon argue about Chester Brown's Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.

Tina: When I was a teenager, I thought Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was the shit, because it taught me more about what the Bible actually teaches than most of the aggressive Christian kids at my high school. Mary Wept puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis: a Christian highlighting the hypocrisy of other Christians through rational interpretation of their text.

Caty: When people say that Judeo-Christian values oppose prostitution, it gets me fuming, because it’s a lot more complicated than that. There are plenty of heroic whores in the Bible, and many more Biblical heroines who explicitly had transactional sex at some point in their stories. So I enjoyed how Brown highlights the stories of women like Rahab, the prostitute who sheltered Hebrew spies from discovery when they scouted out the city of Jericho, and Tamar, the woman who whored herself out to her father-in-law in disguise in a complicated plot to expose his hypocrisy. I only wish he’d included the story of badass Judith, the woman who beheaded the general Holofernes as he lay drunkenly asleep in her tent after possibly purchasing her services, ushering the Hebrew army to victory.

Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, Ng Suat Tong takes exception to Chester Brown's Biblical interpretation skills, and Brown shows up in the comments to plead his case (and explains why he has no plans to republish his Gospel adaptations from Yummy Fur).

I seem to recall that, many years ago, Suat wrote a negative review of the gospel adaptations I did in Yummy Fur and Underwater, and I agree with his general assessment of that material. (I can’t say that I agree with the specifics since I never read the whole piece.) I’d prefer it if that work wasn’t reprinted. - See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2016/04/the-good-and-faithful-chester-brown-and-the-parable-of-the-talents/#sthash.RNZ0tmg1.dpuf

—News. And finally the Creators for Creators grant (affiliated with Image and Iron Circus Comics) has begun accepting submissions.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter talks to Anya Davidson, one of the most fluid and natural cartoonists around today. She of course is the author of School Spirits and has a story in the new (excellent) Kramers Ergot 9.

Elsewhere:

Good news for Tim Hensley fans -- his Sir Alfred No. 3 is now available. Like Tim's previous book, Wally Gropius, this is a complete and utterly perfect masterpiece. As a work of cartooning, biography, comedy, and conceptual rigor it just can't be beat. Get it as soon as you possibly can. Chris Mautner will have a review for us soon, and in the meantime, revisit Tim Hodler's interview with the artist from 2014.

Frank's own Comics Workbook brings us a report on the 2016 Fumetto Festival. Hard to believe it was 2009 and 2010 when I attended. Seems like yesterday. I'm getting old.

Publishers Weekly reports on the new plan for Heavy Metal hardcover volumes. I'm not so into the new work I've seen, but I hold out most likely foolish hopes that the brand has access to its deep history.

Finally, I'll fall for this listicle: Time travel stories in comics. 

Today on the site, Rob Kirby is here with a review of Rokudenashiko's What Is Obscenity?

In July 2014, artist Rokudenashiko, aka Megumi Igarashi, was arrested on obscenity charges at her home in Tokyo. Her crime? Creating cute little anthropomorphic toys and other items designed from a mold of her own vagina. What specifically caught the attention of authorities was her design for a boat shaped like a manko (Japanese for “vagina") that she created with the support of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Because she enabled her backers to download the 3D art with which to create their own manko art, she was charged with "distributing obscene materials." Though the censorial forces against her are formidable, Rokudenashiko's outrage and fighting spirit spurred her to fight back, and in What is Obscenity? she tells the story of her incarceration, her efforts to clear her name, and much more: the book is a funny, smart, and pointed call to arms for freedom of artistic expression against antiquated and patriarchal repression.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—I missed this Paste interview with Paul Kirchner about the recent reprint of Murder By Remote Control (which he created with the late mystery author Janwillem de Wettering).

Once you start admiring your work too much, you never get better, so I would never say anything I did was perfect. Wally Wood described satisfaction with one’s own artwork as “infantile self-love.”

In his review of the book for The New York Times, Gahan Wilson wrote, “I wished that the drawings had occasionally been a little more ethereal when depicting subjects vaporous and dreamy; their continuing solidity never quite gets past the literal kind of make-believe you encounter in circus posters.”

As a fan of Wilson, when I read that I thought, “Did I do something wrong?” It has always been my intent to draw the surreal elements, the visions, with the same sense of weight and reality as everything else. That’s the whole point, really, and it has never occurred to me to do otherwise. And I like circus posters. So I decided that this was just a difference in artistic vision, and not a knock on me. There are always strong points and weak points in anyone’s style, and what makes it strong in one way makes it weak in another. You have to come to terms with that.

—Inverse has a brief interview with Ben Sears.

—The National Cartoonists Society has announced this year's Reuben Award nominees.

Today on the site it's R.C. Harvey on Bill Holman.

In late 1934, Holman heard that Joseph Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, was looking for a Sunday comic strip that would display the paper’s civic-minded support of such public servants as policemen and teachers and, in this case, firemen. “I had sold a lot of firemen cartoons to magazines,” Holman said, “and the idea of firemen running around all over in red trucks seemed like a good gimmick to hang things on.”

Over Christmas while visiting his grandmother in Crawfordsville, Holman drew up a sample Sunday strip and when he returned to New York, he offered it to Patterson. “He wondered if I could keep it up,” Holman said, “and I told him confidently that I could.”

The manic Smokey Stover debuted March 10, 1935; Holman said the name came to him while watching a smoking stove. The strip continued with the Tribune-News Syndicate until Holman retired in 1973.

The title character is a fireman, Smokestack Stover, and while the strip also features his boss, the fire chief Cash U. Nutt, the activities just as often involve Smokey’s wife Cookie or his son Earl or their cat with a perpetually bandaged tail, Spooky, who, for a time, starred in a companion strip of his own before joining the firehouse gang.

Holman, Stephen Becker said in his Comic Art in America (1959), “threw himself into his work with unmitigated glee,” adding: “The profession of comic strip artist has supplied nothing closer to a baggy-pants burlesque comedian than Bill Holman. Holman wears neither baggy pants nor floppy shoes, and his work has none of the bluish quality of real burlesque; but his inventiveness, his verbal juxtapositions and misunderstandings, and his irrepressible manglings of the English language are the marks of a man to whom reality is subordinate to art.”

The art was the art of the pun, both visual and verbal. The jokes around which Holman arrayed his maniac word play were tame left-overs from what pop culture critic Don Phelps calls “decrepit vaudeville.”

TCJ artist and designer Mike Reddy has a fab humor piece up at the New Yorker, written by TCJ contributor Jay Ruttenberg.

Ron Rege reports back from Australia, in pictures.

Did I know that there's a film about Al Capp featuring Spain and Trina Robbins? Did you? Good lord.

Hi, it's Monday. We're back again. Today we have Annie Mok's conversation with Julie Doucet about the artist's latest book, Carpet Sweeper Tales.

MOK: What was your initial draw to fumetti—to this material—as opposed to another source for images?

DOUCET: I found some fumettis in a garage sale, and I kind of like the look of it. It’s very cheaply made, and I tried to make other projects with that, more comics-form-like—full pages with many panels—but I never could get around with it. The project originated more from the text, really. I wanted to make text with made up onomatope like words more than anything else, but I figured that it was maybe a little too hard to take, so I decided to add the pictures. I ended up cutting up the pictures I liked in the fumetti and create my own narrative out of it. And then wrote the text. Of course you have a precise idea of what you want to do when you start, but then it drifts along the way. It ended up not being 100% sound-like text but a mixture of it with existing words. And the way I work with the cutout words is that I start with the leftovers from the project before. I pick one word, and I try to build something around it. It’s the starting point. It doesn’t look like it, but it is quite a lot of work.

Elsewhere:

Social media and a few comic book sites are abuzz with the jarring juxtaposition of the firing of longtime DC/Vertigo editor Shelly Bond with the continued alleged protection of an allegedly serial sexual harasser in the company named Eddie Berganza, who is the head of the Superman group of titles. These two facts have little to do with one another, but together point to a company that has a serious behavioral problem on its hands, and it appears to be part of the corporate culture. This wouldn't be a surprise 20 years ago, but given the new value attached to these properties, I'm surprised that Time Warner hasn't nipped this in the bud for purely financial/PR reasons. Bleeding Cool has a solid round-up.

The Guardian speaks to R. Crumb on the occasion of his new Art & Beauty work. Unintentional hilarity ensues. I've never been that moved by this ongoing body of work. The drawing never quite transcends its photograph sources to become something that gives visual information back to me. Those drawings are a little dead. I'm curious what cartooning Crumb has on the burner.

TCJ-contributor R. Orion Martin has a profile of Chinese cartoonist Yan Cong at Hyperallergic.

And here's a by-the-numbers look at Jack Kirby over at The Boston Globe.

Hard to say much about the major cultural news of yesterday. But there are comics to be discussed, so off we go.

Tim Hanley is back with us for a review of the long-awaited Wonder Woman graphic novel written by Grant Morrison. Here's a bit:

Marston was a psychologist who believed that women were superior to men and would soon take over the world, and he created Wonder Woman so that young readers, especially boys, could get used to the idea of powerful women and prepare to submit to the loving authority of the coming matriarchy. He and Peter used bondage as the central metaphor for his theories. There was a definite aspect of kinky fetishism therein, but the metaphor largely holds. Among the Amazons, with women in charge, bondage was fun and pleasant for all involved, but when men were in charge, whether it was Hercules, Axis soldiers, or Dr. Psycho, bondage was unpleasant and often rendered women powerless. Morrison was inspired by this unconventional approach, and has been talking about bondage and sexuality in the original Wonder Woman comics in nearly every interview in which he’s discussed Wonder Woman: Earth One over the past several years.

Morrison and Paquette continue their critique of patriarchal society when Wonder Woman first arrives in the outside world. She’s appalled by everything about modern society, no more so than when she sees elderly women in the palliative care ward of a hospital and exclaims, “Our sisters, dying? Their lives, their wisdom — lost forever, unrecorded? What world is this where women perish alone… afraid…” It’s a powerful scene, and the military hounding her and clearly having designs on the mysteries of Amazonia further underscores the critique of our society.

The book delves into the utopian side of Marston’s beliefs as well with the advanced matriarchal society of the Amazons. Their home is beautifully illustrated by Paquette, a dazzling city of unique architecture and advanced technology that marries the classical and the futuristic wonderfully. They live in peace there, jousting on kangas and riding flying motorcycles for fun with no disease or death because of their purple healing ray, an invention of Marston and Peter. Without men to get in their way, the Amazons have created a paradise.

Elsewhere:

The Paris Review has Matthew Thurber's amazing comic take on his surname, excerpted from Kramers Ergot 9. The great Joe McCulloch will bring us a review of KE9 soon enough.

Here's a review of Mary Wept Over the Feet Of Jesus over at Boing Boing.

I recently just stumbled over a pretty rich web site for the underground culture chronicler Clay Geerdes, best known to comics readers for his early coverage and publishing of underground comics and mini comics.

And finally, here's Sophie Goldstein interviewed at Inkstuds.

Today on the site, Tahner Oksman reviews The Complete Wimmen's Comix.

...it is the very unevenness of the resultant collection that makes this publication worthy of its new, reprinted form. Reading through the eighteen issues, which span twenty-two years in all, including a notable seven year gap between issues seven and eight, one gets the sense of a somewhat diverse body of women trying to navigate individual artistic modes, to find their voices and styles, while continually bumping up against what it means to be published in a venue that, by its very name, suggests marginality and difference. This collection is as much a historical document as anything else, tracing late-twentieth century representations of women’s issues – health, relationships, sexuality – as they are shaped by the times. In the first eight issues, for example, around the wake of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, we get a number of sometimes pedantic, sometimes more artful accounts pivoting around women choosing to get legal or illegal abortions, and experiencing the consequences; following Stonewall and the early LGBT movement, we get stories of coming out, romances blossoming and sexual explorations thriving alongside newfound political consciousnesses, activist stirrings. In these issues, we also see early works by women who would come to dominate parts of the landscape of contemporary comics – short pieces by Diane Noomin, Roberta Gregory, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Joyce Farmer, Lee Mars, and Sharon Rudahl (the list, as you might imagine, goes on).

And Frank Santoro is here with a write-up of Simon Hanselmann's latest collection.

The episodes on this collection take place during Megahex (according to the title page), and like the first Fantagraphics collection, the styles subtly change. I think it was smart to shuffle the on-model-ness of the episodes. What it does, I think, is give Simon the freedom to alter the style or approach as the episodes progress and the series expands. Time is less linear and more simultaneous. It's like an early episode of The Simpsons---when you see the early character designs you don't necessarily think it is happening at the beginning of Simpsons history. So regardless of when an episode in the Megahex and now Amsterdam collections were made, they all sort of jigsaw together into a refreshing smoothie on a summer day. And even if one episode sort of informs the following episode in terms of linear time, the ordering of the episodes in the new collection echoes my memory of the other episodes and feels expansive and so there's room for surreal character displays that aren't set there to drive the plot. The style sifts are not jarring and in fact help set each episode apart.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Via a press release to CBR, DC has announced the "restructuring" of their Vertigo imprint, as well as the dismissal of editor Shelly Bond.

Bond has been with DC Comics and specifically Vertigo since 1993, the same year the imprint was formed. In her time at the company, she's worked on some of the most celebrated comics of the era including "The Sandman," "Sandman Mystery Theater," "The Invisibles," "Fables" and "iZombie." In 2012, Bond became Executive Editor of the Vertigo line, following the departure of longtime Vertigo head Karen Berger. Last year, Bond made the move with many of her colleagues to the west coast, as DC's editorial operations shifted from New York City to Burbank, California.

Nick Sousanis has won the Lynd Ward Prize for Unflattening.

“‘Unflattening,’” the jury noted, “is an innovative, multi-layered graphic novel about comics, art and visual thinking. The book’s ‘integrated landscape’ of image and text takes the reader on an Odyssean journey through multiple dimensions, inviting us to view the world from alternate visual vantage points. These perspectives are inspired by a broad range of ideas from astronomy, mathematics, optics, philosophy, ecology, art, literature, cultural studies and comics."

—Commentary. Paul Karasik pays tribute to the recently departed New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton.

The caption reads, “For some reason, we weren’t appealing enough to those awful little bastards everyone hates.”

The craft of gag cartooning often overlooks the workmanship of the caption. In this case the whole amalgam of drawing and words is ignited by three words: “for some reason”.

—Interviews & Profiles. Ruben Bolling talks to children's book author and cartoonist Mo Willems about a new exhibit of his work.

“On one level, I want it to be established and proved that this work is art: legitimate, difficult, non-accidental. And on the other hand, I want to inspire kids to see that is achievable, easy, and worthwhile,” he explains. “The exhibit is not the point. The point is when the kid goes home and starts drawing his own drawings.”

And The Stranger profiles Simon Hanselmann.

I asked him how his year was going, and he said he'd been through some shit. He said he'd just gone through the "horrendously horrible" and lengthy visa process. Hanselmann was in a noise-music band called Horse Mania ("Horrible name," he said), but two weeks after Hanselmann got to Seattle, his bandmate of 10 years died. His art dealer, Alvin Buenaventura, died two weeks after that. "It's been a weird fucking time," he said.

He continued: "And my mom's got cancer. She told me a week before I moved. She's like, 'Don't feel guilty—don't stress about moving away.' But she clearly wants me to come back. I've just buried myself in work."

Welcome to Wednesday. Today we have Annie Mok reviewing fellow TCJ-contributor Mike Dawson's book Rules for Dating My Daughter.

Mike Dawson delivers an uneven collection of personal essay-style memoir comics, occasionally thoughtful, but often thoughtless in its concern for others. The stories, culled mostly from The Nib, Kickstarted to fund production, and now published by Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books, focus on parenting in a hyper-masculine, capitalist, culturally volatile age. While I enjoyed some elements of the book, many rattled me (I’ll get to those in a moment).

One comic essay has Dawson looking at his daughter’s infatuation for a Disney princess show called Sofia the First. Dawson wonders: what does the show’s implicit acceptance of a ruling class mean for his daughter, taking that in taking in these stories?

Elsewhere:

The good people at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum blog about another new acquisition. 

I'm fascinated by the new talking points that have sprung around R. Crumb, straight from his gallery's press releases. Theoretically and economically moving him out of a comic book context is key to establishing a more robust primary market for whatever he still has to sell. So on comes the talk of media and selfies and the like. Fine by me. Lord knows the discourse around him in comics hasn't exactly been interesting. Funny to watch.

This sounds like a great exhibition over in Australia.

The 2016 Eisner Award nominees have been announced. Frank Santoro offered his commentary here. Me, I'm holding out for a No-Prize.

Most importantly: Hillbilly comics!

Joe McCulloch is here with your usual guide to the Week in Comics!, highlighting the most interesting-sounding new titles in stores. This time, the spotlight picks include Kramers Ergot 9 and Corey Lewis's Sun Bakery #1. He also writes about Yo-Kai Watch 3 for some reason...

Yo-Kai Watch 3, you see, has several of its major characters exploring the exotic and fanciful world of the United States of America, complete with "Merican" (メリケン) versions of several familiar and easily-merchandised yōkai spirit creatures previously established by the franchise, as well as some new faces. However, the North American localization of the Yo-Kai Watch games, cartoons and manga thus far have elected to shift *everything* to a vaguely American locale, complete with less ethnically distinct names for many characters ("Keita" becomes "Nate", for example). At the beginning, the cartoon style of the character designs facilitated such national (and, unavoidably, racially-tinged) modification, but now there is clash - witness above the debut of Tomnyan, the Merican version of the series' superstar character, Jibanyan, a red cat yōkai. Tomnyan is exactly the same character, but blonde-haired and blue-eyed; what will this mean in a localization where we've been coaxed into thinking that everyone is maybe sorta white? My personal guess is that they'll end up splitting hairs between regions of the U.S., that helpful melting pot. Tomnyan... Tomcat... Tom Cat. Tom Sawyer, cards, dice - he's a riverboat gambler!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. The Guardian has published Barack Obama's introduction to the final volume of the Complete Peanuts.

That’s what made Charles Schulz so brilliant – he treated childhood with all the poignant and tender complexity it deserves. He gave voice to all its joys and anxieties – a spectrum of emotions that run from the start of a new baseball season to the anguished “Augh” that comes with losing the big game. He explored the emotions that we too often forget kids feel until we’re reminded that we once felt them ourselves.

Bart Beaty points out where Artnet goes wrong talking about R. Crumb's art-world profile.

The article evinces a significant myopia that might be all too typical of parts of the artworld. Artnet alleges that "it wasn't until his solo exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 2005 that the artist gained mainstream recognition". Where to begin?

Kate Beaton takes on Cloak and Dagger.

Sean Rogers writes about Blutch, Julie Doucet, and Simon Hanselmann.

Freely adapting passages from Shakespeare’s Caesar and Petronius’s Satyricon, Blutch draws cities like Grosz, atrocities like Goya and gardens like Matisse. Peplum’s broad strokes may thus seem familiar – the hero undergoes an odyssey where he is beset by pirates, bound by barbarians, ravaged by an Amazon and tempted away from his prize by a comely boy-servant – but the execution is all Blutch’s own, confounding and febrile, like some dream version of myth.

—Interviews & Profiles. CBR talks to Chester Brown.

In "Mary Wept," I'm saying that I think Jesus approved of prostitution, not that the men who wrote the Bible did. While those men usually disapproved of women engaging in non-marital sex, they weren't writing simple morality stories, so there are instances where individual "sinners" seem to escape negative repercussions. One shouldn't mistake that for approval of "sin."

Benoit Crucifix talks to Adrian Tomine about editing Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

I began the project purely for a selfish reason : I wanted to read more of Tatsumi’s stories. I’m not at all a historian with regards to Japanese comics, and I’m reluctant to make any claims about Tatsumi’s place in comics history. I just know that his work resonated with me in a way that other comics from Japan hadn’t, and I’m very glad that he found a broader readership.

Hello there, I'm back from not being here. Looks like the place is still in one piece and all that. Today on the site we have Frank Young with a look at the joy and madness of 1950s Dick Tracy. I'm happy to see someone getting at the sheer strangeness of the strip.

What made—and makes—Chester Gould’s work so damned compelling? There is much about Dick Tracy that has long been taken at face value, and never deeply explored. Gould’s aggressive, angular art style, and his off-kilter visual juxtapositions, have gotten lip service from the art world, and from a handful of writers on comics whose viewpoints can outwit the trap of nostalgia. Its gallery of stylized caricature-villains is always mentioned, in mass media, with a mixture of awe and condescension.

There is much more going on in Gould’s work—but it requires a devoted scrutiny. It asks its reader to pay close attention, to notice small, seemingly unimportant details and to accept and process arcane information, some of it inexplicable. Its voice is hugely eccentric, didactic and arrogant in its self-righteousness.

Elsewhere:

On Friday the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum announced the acquisition of Jay Lynch's archives.  This is great news, and I hope will lead to other cartoonists of that era doing the same -- there's not a lot of first person archival material in public collections, so the more the better in terms of really understanding the history of the medium.

Carol Tyler posted a brand new comic strip, which is always good news. It's on Facebook. 

Matthew Thurber uploaded a fine new video over the weekend:

Truly amazing dept: Andy Warhol in conversation with Herge in 1977. I was just looking at the newish Herge book from Rizzoli and there's a nice section on his surprisingly diverse art collection.

Here's an excellent Alex Toth 1950s story.

Sort of comics: Those Sea-Monkey ads in 1960s-70s comics? Here's a NY Times article about a current battle over the property, which sure sounds familiar.

Not comics: Psychedelic beehives!

Today on the site, Rob Kirby reviews the latest slate of Kuš! minicomics, including books from Ingrīda Pičukāne, Tara Booth, Hanneriina Moisseinen, and Aisha Franz.

The latest quartet of Kuš! minicomics (pronounced "koosh!") offers up yet another excellent sampling of the many and varied comics dished out by this Latvian art-comics publisher. For production value and design, the mini Kuš! series represents the pinnacle of what the minicomic art form can achieve. Of note: it wasn’t until several days after I’d first read them that I realized that all four comics were by women (the mini-Kuš! quartet of issues 30-33 were also all-female creations).

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The CIA agent turned political caricaturist Vint Lawrence passed away. (The New Republic has gathered some of his work.)

Vint Lawrence, a CIA para­military officer who helped organize a secret war in the jungles of Laos before becoming a critically acclaimed artist and caricaturist, illustrating wild-eyed literary giants and wide-eared politicos for such publications as the New Republic and The Washington Post, died April 9 at a hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 76.

—Interviews & Profiles. Noel Murray talks to Dan Clowes.

Clowes started Patience when his son was barely out of preschool, and now he finds himself the father of an 11-year-old — which is itself a weird kind of time travel. “Parenthood changed the way I view characters,” Clowes says. “And the way I view humanity. I would’ve thought that you have a lot more input into raising a child, into how they turn out, then you actually do. The best you can do is sort of help them realize who they are, and not dissuade them. It’s not as interesting in a way to be a writer when you come to grips with that. You want to believe characters are controlled by the events in their lives, but that happens so much less than you’d think.”

Lucy Davies conducts a brief interview with Robert Crumb on the occasion of a new gallery show in London. (T Magazine has a preview.)

I try to meditate for 35 minutes every morning but don’t always succeed. I’ve learned that I need meditation to keep life from overwhelming me, to maintain some calm and detachment. As [Charles] Bukowski once wrote, “When I bend down to tie my shoes in the morning I think, ‘Christ almighty, what now?’”

Alex Dueben spoke to Al Jaffee for his 95th birthday.

I walk everywhere, I work five or six days a week, and I still get plenty of ideas. I won't live long enough to get to all the ideas that I've put into files. I think it's very important to work, to have something important to do, when you're old. Just sitting around watching television or rocking on a porch is just inviting the grim reaper sooner.

Today on the site, Ron Goulart returns with his column about Connecticut Cartoonists. This time, he focuses on three: Leonard Starr, Warren King, and Gil Kane (his collaborator on Star Hawks).

A time when adventure strips were dying and funny ones were filling their slots was probably not an ideal time to try to peddle a jumbo one. But, since it had long been my ambition to write a comic strip, I did not share my thoughts with Flash Fairfield. I did, however, suggest that instead of a Raymond idolater, NEA hire a popular contemporary comic book artist who was steeped in science fiction and drew in an up-to-date manner. Specifically, Gil Kane. Nobody at NEA had ever heard of him, but when they saw samples of his work and learned that he’d drawn Spider-Man, they were impressed. NEA and United Features had a dinner for all their Connecticut artists, writers and executive. After the dinner Gil and I were invited to have drinks with some of the visiting executives. One of them asked Gil if he could send him a drawing of Spider-Man for his grandson. And he said, “My boy, I’ll draw it for you right now” and turned over the large paper place-mat and drew a complex drawing of Spidey swinging through a Manhattan nightscape. The executive was obviously delighted. And I thought, “We’ve got a deal.” And we did.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Biographer Michael Maslin talks Peter Arno.

Q: It's hard to imagine the magazine without Peter Arno. How responsible was he for the development of the modern New Yorker cartoon?

A: Ross called Arno the New Yorker's "first pathfinder"; it's true that Arno was, in those early years at the magazine, finding his way, along with Ross, and Rea Irvin, to what we now recognize as the New Yorker Cartoon. Could the New Yorker Cartoon have happened without Arno? His two peers at the top of Ross's ranked artists, were Gluyas Williams and Helen Hokinson -- both incredible artists, both well represented in the magazine. Their work was graphically opposite Arno's: gentler; their captions subtle. Arno's work hit hard and fast. He wanted the readers to experience an instantaneous connection: drawing, caption, Bam! Had his work not been in the mix, who knows if the magazine's cartoons would've headed where he took them.

The Guardian talks to Simon Hanselmann.

When not putting himself in mortal danger, Simon Hanselmann is responsible for the cult comic series Megg, Mogg and Owl. “If I don’t do stupid things every now and then, I will run out of stupid things for Megg and Mogg to do,” he says. “If I stop being a fuck-up, then Megg and Mogg will soon just be about managing European translations and Skyping with network executives.”

—Commentary. Longtime Mad editor Nick Meglin remembers the magazine's art director, Leonard Brenner.

During one long, boring cover conference going nowhere, Lenny finally stood up and with a colorful display of profanity stated that he had had it and was going to lunch. Seizing a similar escape route, I followed, flashing a middle-finger salutation saying, "Here's our next cover idea, guys — MAD, The Number One Magazine of Good Taste," and exited.

When everyone cracked up, Lenny did an about face and declared, "Now, that's a great cover idea!" He was dead serious and so insistent that several of creative team started to lean in his direction. I pleaded, "Hey guys, it's just a joke, let it go," but despite my protestation, the group voted to show the mock layout to our publisher, Bill Gaines, the final arbiter of covers (his one editorial involvement in the magazine's content).

Bill asked incredulously, "Do you really want to do this?" I said, "Not me, Bill!", prompting Lenny to describe me in a volley of adjectives of which "chicken-hearted bastard" was the most complimentary and mentionable in mixed audiences. He ended his tirade with, "…and people will be talking about this cover for years to come."

—Misc. Frank Santoro is auctioning off Chris Ware art to raise funds for the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency.

Today, we are very pleased to present Charles Hatfield's review of Chester Brown's latest book, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, which melds Brown's interests in Biblical interpretation and sex work.

Tacking back and forth between comics and apparatus, I see a kind of detective story taking shape, starting from the Gospel of Matthew’s unexpected inclusion of women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary—in the genealogy of Jesus, then chasing clues from there. Brown interprets the Matthew genealogy as a kind of coded hint meaning that Mary was a prostitute. A good chunk of Mary Wept—almost a hundred pages—is devoted to retelling the stories of these Biblical women, in the order they are named in Matthew. Each has a chapter of her own. A further chapter, the seven-page “Mary of Bethany,” tells the story of Jesus’s anointing by a woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene, perhaps a prostitute—an incident recounted in all four Gospels. That anointing, Brown reminds us, literally “made Jesus a christ” (183); that is, the ceremony of anointing identified Jesus as messiah. (The Greek Khristos arose from a verb meaning to anoint, used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, mashiah.) Brown speculates that the ceremony may have had a sexual dimension. Ultimately he stresses a heretical, law-defying point: that a woman who was very likely a prostitute “had the spiritual authority to anoint Jesus as a christ” (252).

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Salon talks to Brown about his new book.

Have you discussed your ideas with mainstream Christians and gotten a sense of how it strikes them? Have people gotten angry as you’ve talked about it?

I’ve really only talked about it with friends of mine, and most of my friends are not that religious. I do have one very good friend who is a Christian, who is obsessed with the subject, as I am too… When I told her about the idea of the book, she was very offended, which is not surprising. When I was done the book, before it was published, I gave it to her… She was very offended, and found it blasphemous. But for some reason we’re still friends anyway.

The Spanish publisher of Richard McGuire's Here has produced a video of the artist:

"Aquí", de Richard McGuire from Salamandra Graphic on Vimeo.

The Beat talks to Sonny Liew about The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye.

I mapped out a timeline of Singapore’s history alongside major comics works and creators. For example, I would look at the year 1961, when Marvel came out with Fantastic Four and juxtapose it against what was happening in Singapore at the time. Aside from a chronological matchup, you also had to find the stories and styles that would fit the narrative needs. Like the section about Malaysia and Singapore’s merger and separation– to me, the politicking involved had an air of childishness about it, so Peanuts or Pogo seemed like plausible vehicles. I picked anthropomorphic animals in the end because they seemed to provide the right flavor to the narrative.

The Washington Post talks to Grant Morrison about his new take on Wonder Woman.

Another twist in Morrison’s Earth One tale is the revelation that Wonder Woman already has an Amazonian lover — a fact she’s open about. Morrison views that turn as logical after, in his story, a barbaric act by Hercules plays a part in isolating Paradise Island from men.

“Women living on an island for 3,000 years together — you don’t give up sex just because you gave up men,” Morrison said. “And [sexuality] certainly is part of this culture. I’m sure they would explore sexuality, so all we did was we made a little bit more explicit. We talk about it."

—Commentary. The Paris Review has posted an essay by Edward Gauvin about Blutch's Peplum. (They've also posted a preview.)

“I’d had enough of parodies, the constant nods to this and that, the innuendo and authorial winks,” Blutch remarked, “all the mental crockery and referential baggage, the byzantine architecture of humor. I needed to do something pure, stripped down, fresher and more direct.” What better source than antiquity? Blutch set out to create the sequel to a beloved book he’d “never wanted to end”: the Satyricon. Already a motley tonal medley—prose and verse, comedy and tragedy, romance and satire—Petronius’s novel has survived only in fragments, a condition Blutch found conducive to leaving his artistic mark. “The people were all naked; all I had to draw was bodies moving through space. Peplum paved the way to a kind of musical physicality for me, a path I’ve been following ever since.”

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Wanzo reviews Ramzi Fawaz's book of superhero scholarship, The New Mutants.

DC comics most often embraced becoming or being seen as normal. In his discussion of DC’s Justice League stories from the 1960s, Fawaz looks at the team’s embrace of a universal human rights model, with its heroes epitomizing cosmopolitan citizenship. However, these characters were so often aligned with state interests that it undercut the series’ claims to advocate for a global constituency. Moreover, in their embrace of liberal individualism, these stories eschewed otherness. In a fabulous reading of a 1965 story, “The Case of the Disabled Justice League,” Fawaz recounts how the heroes become temporarily disabled after visiting some disabled boys. The superfast runner, the Flash, finds that his legs are glued together. Hawkman develops asthma and finds that flying requires too much exertion. The Green Lantern, who needs the power of clear speech to call on the power of his ring, begins to stutter. Green Arrow, the archer, finds himself without arms.

What is striking about these disabilities is that they go to the heart of what allows the heroes to have powers.

Joe McCulloch is here with his usual Tuesday guide to the Week in Comics!, running down all the most interesting-sounding comics new to stores. This week, he particularly highlights Barbara Yelin's Irmina and, of course, Chester Brown's much anticipated Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.

This week marks the release of a new work by Chester Brown, and with it a volume of supplementary text unseen in Canadian comics since Cerebus closed up shop at century's dawn. Over approximately 97 pages at the rear of the book, we are treated to an Afterword, Acknowledgements, notes on the comics, a 20-page addendum comic, notes on the Afterword, notes on the addendum comics, and then notes on prior notes, along with a 55-item Bibliography... or so it is in the uncorrected proof Drawn and Quarterly sent me. Maybe he's added more. As a reader, I tend to put each portion of the animal to use, and in this sense, coupled with the 'seriousness' of the religious topic, I think the book will be received as sort of a hybrid work, as was Brown's preceding Paying for It. It probably should be. Nonetheless, in the spirit of Christian charity, I will suggest that you -- the I-will-now-presume-sympathetic reader -- temporarily excerpt your initial experience with the book to the preceding 170 (or so) pages of comics, because they function in much their own self-sufficient manner, and actually register as far more pleasing without the interjection of the artist's prose reflections.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Riad Sattouf's Arab of the Future has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

—Mark Evanier remembers the just-departed Leonard Brenner, former production manager and art director of Mad magazine.

"The Beard" (that was his nickname) didn't write or draw articles in the same way as most MAD contributors you could name but he touched almost every page between 1958 when he joined the magazine and 1995 when he retired. Aside from publisher William M. Gaines, Lenny's name appeared on MAD's masthead more than anyone else's.

—Gil Roth interviews David Leopold, biographer of Al Hirschfeld.

Hirschfeld is an artist who discovered what he wanted to do early on, and works at it his whole life and gets better and better at it.

Today on the site, Annie Mok interviews Eleanor Davis.

One of the most desperate feelings that I contend with, and that I feel like a lot of folks contend with, is—like, you mentioned earlier, like a desperate sense of isolation. Not being understood, being cut off from the people around you. In that way, wanting to have an effect on the reader isn’t manipulative. The purpose of it is to try to have a connection in some way. Like, if I have this strong feeling, I’ll make this other person who’s so disconnected from me, who’s so far away from me, make them mirror that feeling. Then that will help me feel a little less alone. Will help me feel a little less scared of the feeling. I don’t know.

One of the things that feels odd to me about people’s response to Happy is that—I tend to think of those stories as sad and a little bit cynical, but people respond to it in a positive way, and say that it feels uplifting to them. What they mean is that it’s a relief to read something that they see themselves in, or they feel a connection with me as the author of the story. It’s really complicated, and maybe a little bit of a burden in some ways. Before I put the book out, I was far less aware of the audience. These stories were made seeking an audience, seeking people to relate to, people to connect with. When I found them—it kinda freaked me out.

And last Friday, we published my interview with Richard Sala, about his latest book, Violenzia, politics, serialization, horror, and once making a child cry.

I actually once made a little kid cry by telling him a spooky story. He was the nephew of one of my exes and we were watching after him and telling him stories and he listened to my scary story about a monster who lived in a cave, then suddenly burst out crying. It was awful. I've never stopped feeling horrible about that. I also remember being extremely upset myself by an EC comic, reprinted in one of those Ballantine paperbacks and which I was probably too young to read. It didn't scare me, it just depressed and disturbed me on a level I had never felt before. It was so bleak and cruel. I couldn't sleep and went down to the kitchen in the middle of the night where my mom was also still awake and sitting at the table smoking a cigarette. That human connection and small talk was enough to reassure me and I went back to bed. And despite what Dr. Wertham might want you to believe, that story didn't make me run out and kill people, it made me want to be kinder to people because life is so horrible. Take that, Wertham!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton has died at the age of 76, after a car accident in Kentucky.

Robert Mankoff has gathered a selection of Hamilton's cartoons.

Carol Tyler and Boulet have won this year's Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize.

A new $30,000 Creators for Creators grant for cartoonists has been announced.

—Interviews & Profiles. Slate interviews Chester Brown about his new collection of Biblical adaptations, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus.

Your central contention is that Mary was a prostitute. Why was this an important assertion for you?

It’s important because I’m someone who’s involved in the sex worker rights movement—at least to some degree, at least an ally in the movement. It seems to me that Christianity is the force behind the opposition to prostitution, starting with St. Paul. The condemnation of sex work and prostitution all comes from there. If I want to attack that sort of thinking, why not attack it at the root? Christianity.

A Moment of Cerebus has published the first part of Dave Sim's enormous 2003 interview with Chester Brown. This is a true meeting of comics eccentrics.

How did I know you were going to see it as a gender thing? Having met rational women and overly-emotional men, I fail to find convincing your contention that women are emotion-based and men are reason-based. You're right that there isn't a universally agreed on perception of what reality is and that there's a clash of views-of-reality going on, but I don't see that clash divided between emotion-based beings and reason-based beings. I think the division is between everyone. I think that, if we were able to somehow create a society that was completely made up of Sim-approved reason-based humans, there would still be people in that society who would seem crazy to the majority.

Alex Dueben talks to Brian Chippendale about Puke Force.

Maybe I'm spoiled because I play drums in a pretty wild band and those shows are definitely cathartic, so I'm not sure if releasing books can compare. The release of "Puke Force" feels OK because it is political. Certain aspects of politics do change quickly, so you want your satire to come out when it's still relevant. But luckily, or unluckily, divisiveness and paranoia has only been increasing since I started "Puke Force," so I'm still pretty on target.

I think we all do live with all these concerns and obsessions, and as an artist, I take time to dig them out and work with them, make connections. Excavating internal garbage, that's the job.

—Misc. Dangerous Minds has excavated the Feds 'n' Heads board game invented by Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton.