The Magic

| September 1, 2015

Hiya,

Today Joe is back, but he got waylaid with Comic Zenon and the comic book listing will come later today. Be patient.

Elsewhere:

Please go support Frank Santoro's efforts to expand his comic-making school. He has great stuff for sale and he's the heart of all that is good in comics.

An early fanzine publisher has passed away -- that generation was so important to the preservation of our history.

Underground cartoonist and painter The Pizz has passed away.

And big changes at the Marvel movie empire.

Broken Curls

| August 31, 2015

Well, Tim's still away and I've kept my gripes to myself, so no trouble yet. I'm very pleased that Paul Tumey has rejoined us, and this time with a video piece about Clare Victor "Dwig" Dwiggins, a mostly forgotten cartoonist with a wonderfully spindly line.

For about the first third of his busy and active career, Clare Victor "Dwig" Dwiggins (1877-1958) employed an effervescent, dense and decorative visual style. He also drew numerous depictions of appealing and slightly screwy Gibson Girls, which tied in to his Bohemian take on life.

But, around 1913, something happened – and DWIG shifted. The sexy women and screwball exuberance of his work changed to a simpler, less dense, more abstract style. He became obsessed with dwelling in the idyllic past of his small town childhood growing up in the mid-west in the late 1800’s -- putting the names of his boyhood chums into his work, and disappearing into his studio for hours every day to live in simpler times.

Today, these indulgent and loving depictions of boyhood by Dwig can seem cloying and overly sentimental, but Dwig was sincere and authentic in this work. Perhaps one reason his later work fails to connect with many readers today is simply that we did not have the sorts of adventures he did -- digging up dead cats at moonlight to remove one's face with punk water, or tramping around the country with a pack of friends. If he were working today, perhaps Dwig would be turning out a comic strip version of "Freaks and Geeks."

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon interviews Rob Goodin.

13 great R. Crumb drawings in honor of his 72nd birthday.

Not comics, but relevant: I love lists like this guide to Tarantino's influences/references. There's comics-relevant stuff in here, too.

Another Done

| August 28, 2015

Today Glenn Head bids us farewell with the last day of his diary.

Elsewhere:

Ron Rege announced the availability of the second part of his mini comic series Continuing the Weaver Festival Phenomenon. Highly recommended.

Nick Gazin has a big comic book review round up over at Vice.

Hey, it's new Jon Chandler from Breakdown Press. Jon is also highly recommended.

And finally, today would have been Jack Kirby's 98th birthday. Tom Spurgeon has his usual epic image post.

Ta Da

| August 27, 2015

Well, Tim has gone on vacation for a week, so hold on the furniture around here -- traditionally I somehow go off the rails right about now.

Today Caitlin McGurk and John Porcellino discuss I Never Liked You and Summer of Love with Mike Dawson.

And Glenn Head checks in for day four of his diary.

Elsewhere:

Very sad comics biz news: Bergen Street Comics, my local store and home to TCJ contributors Tucker Stone and Matt Seneca, has announced it is closing. I really enjoyed that store -- everyone did a great job there. Excellent selection, neighborhood-oriented, and very friendly. Everything you could want in a comic book store in 2015, really. My best wishes to everyone there.

Hey, I haven't seen this yet: Mould Map 4 coming soon!

And here now, and hopefully in stores everywhere is The Complete Hairy Who Publications. Go out and get it. I'm extremely proud of it.

Onward

| August 25, 2015

Joe McCulloch has his usual guide to your Week in Comics!, with spotlight picks including a children's graphic novel from Craig Thompson and a superhero-ish manga called One-Punch Man.

And Glenn Head is back with day two of his week contributing our Cartoonist's Diary feature. In this entry, he remembers learning from his father in 1968 what it means to be rich.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Guernica talks to Gilbert Hernandez:

[Luba has] mellowed with age. I’ve seen that most people change as they get older. At a certain age, people start to explore different areas of their personalities. So I did that with Luba; I decided to make her as complex as I could. A lot of her rage had come from defensiveness. She’s the same person now, but she doesn’t have the outbursts that she used to. Although those [scenes] were probably really enjoyable for the reader, I had to move on. That’s difficult, because she’s probably the best-written character I’ve created.

The Lady Collective website interviews publisher Annie Koyama about life in her twenties:

My first job when I was of legal working age was in a women’s clothing store in a suburban mall. I certainly didn’t fit in as the store sold spongy, synthetic clothing to middle-aged women. Customers would pee in the dressing room wastebaskets and I’d have to take the wastebaskets downstairs down a long, dark corridor to get to the washrooms. I was making some of my own clothing at that time so needless to say, I never used my employee discount.

Adrian Tomine on his new New Yorker cover:

I think it’s kind of beautiful and hilarious to see people eating their organic kale and quinoa salads while gazing across the opaque, fetid water.

—News. You may have seen some online reaction to this story about a few incoming Duke freshmen declining to read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I think those students are making the wrong choice, myself, and hope they change their minds, but it is worth noting, I think, that this isn't a book that's part of their curriculum -- it's intended to be optional -- so I'm not sure this is actually worth much consternation. Students finding an excuse to avoid optional summer reading is a pretty dog-bites-man story.

—Not Comics. Kate Beaton picks her ten favorite "warrior princesses" from history.

—Misc. Frank Santoro wants to buy the house next door and turn it into a comics school. Read his explanation here.

Workbench

| August 21, 2015

Today, Rob Clough returns to the site with an extremely enthusiastic review of Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing's children's comic, Flop to the Top:

Working with her cartoonist husband Drew Weing (no stranger to comics for kids) in a style that's closer to Davis' hand on her adult comics but still unlike anything either has done before, Flop To The Top is the single best book in the entire Toon line. It is a perfect marriage of line, color, shadow, dialogue, and message. There's a gag or multiple gags on every single page, with a high concentration of background eye-pops adding extra laughs but not cluttering up the narrative. The gags continue to build in lockstep with the emotional narrative of the book, culminating in a well-earned moment of sincerity mixed with humor that is rare.

And sadly, today also marks the fifth and final day of Rina Ayuyang's week drawing our Cartoonist's Diary feature. Thanks, Rina!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The LA Times released a strongly worded, lengthy response to Ted Rall's recent complaints about his firing. The Times hired its own audio experts, conducted another review, and stands by their decision. Ted Rall disputes their account here, claiming that the Times statement is "a blizzard of misdirection, trivialities and distractions." If you are interested in the case, you owe it to yourself to read both carefully and decide on your own who's creating the blizzard.

In the end, this was a freelance position, and a news organization has the right (and even the obligation) not to hire anyone whose credibility they distrust; Rall's other contention, that the paper let him go on the behest of the police, is much more serious. I have not yet seen any strong evidence of this presented by Rall, but then again, that's something presumably difficult to provide. Barring the revelation of new evidence, choosing who to believe on this seems to come down to a judgment call. [EDITED TO ADD: But see this too.]

—Interviews & Profiles. Nicole Rudick visits Aidan Koch at her studio for The Paris Review.

Unless I'm mistaken, we neglected to link to last week's episode of Fresh Air featuring Phoebe Gloeckner.

We’re All Emotionally Bankrupt

| August 19, 2015

We've got a double dose of comics for you today. First, Leslie Stein, the artist behind Eye of the Majestic Creature, who reviews the film adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's Diary of a Teenage Girl in the form of comics.

And then Rina Ayuyang is her, with the third installment of her week's residence in the Cartoonist's Diary spot. Today, she asks her mom to go with her to the museum.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Ignatz Award nominations have been announced for this year. I may have missed it, but I haven't seen much controversy online about the picks.

I don't normally post promotional preview stuff like this, but I can't help myself when it's Jaime Hernandez on Archie.

—Reviews & Commentary. Yesterday, Dan linked to one of the two Peanuts essays going around online this week. Here's the other one, by Kevin Wong at Kotaku, arguing that Peanuts got ruined when Snoopy started fighting the Red Baron and light whimsy became the main focus. That's an old, popular argument -- I remember a big cover feature in the New York Press making the same claim at length some fifteen years ago or so. The opposing critical side argues that people place too much emphasis on the "dark" elements of Schulz's work because dark subject matter is irrationally considered more adult and sophisticated. Of course, in actual fact both sides are wrong/right, and Peanuts contains multitudes, and did so from beginning to end. There's light whimsical humor from the very earliest strips. Wong mentions the following strip from 1995 (long past the beginning of the Joe Cool era), but dismisses it only on the basis that it's not a "fully-formed joke." Well, it made me laugh out loud when I opened to it in the latest Complete Peanuts volume.

peanuts+fsf

Anyway, it's not hard to cherry-pick weaker or stronger strips from any era to make your case. But arguing that Peanuts isn't good in later years because Snoopy doesn't act like a real dog seems a little beside the point.

More importantly: it's obviously all right to prefer one era or tone over another. (In fact, my particular taste in Peanuts isn't that far off from Wong's, though I'm much more impressed with Schulz's consistency.) But one of the great strengths of the daily newspaper strip is its flexibility. Schulz knew exactly what he was doing.

Whit Taylor recommends three sites that feature feminist comics.

I don't believe we've linked to the relaunched Trouble with Comics site yet. Here's a post where the members discuss the concept of the "perfect comic shop" that demonstrates the site's strengths nicely.

And finally, Shaenon Garrity considers the prospects for a post-Fables Vertigo.

Repent

| August 17, 2015

Today on the site, artist Jim Shaw is here with his report of a trip to Comic-Con, taken along with his 15-year-old daughter:

I am trying to figure out the ways to approach the one Silver Age artist scheduled, Ramona Fradon, who is a new idol of mine and won’t appear until Friday. As I wander the periphery dedicated to the art that inspired the Comic-Con originally, I realize that the things I once bargain hunted through, old comic books and original art, had inflated faster than the real estate in my gentrifying neighborhood. Silver age comics that were seven dollars twenty years ago are now priced at $700. I feel lucky to have collected a bit in the old days, and realize that the seemingly expensive reprints I now hunger for are a bargain. This inflation is probably tied to the appearance of auction houses that, as far as I know, are as rigged as those in the art world I normally inhabit. The real reason may be tied into the new world of post-reality economics, in which inflation has nothing to do with rising wages and stock prices have no relation to the productivity of the companies whose stock is being traded. It mostly seems to relate to a world of excess wealth searching endlessly for an investment that pays higher than interest rates, usually that forgetting most such investments are risky anomalies followed by crashes. Some of that excess cash seems to be ending up in the old comics market.

And we are excited to welcome Rina Ayuyang, as she begins her week contributing our Cartoonist's Diary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Paul Constant has found a weekly home over at the Seattle Review of Books.

Andy Oliver writes about Babak Ganjei.

Michael Dooley at Print picks the 21 best comic-book artists at Comic-Con from a design perspective.

—Interviews & Profiles. Kate Beaton was on Make It Then Tell Everybody.

—Misc. Now even major newspapers like the Chicago Tribune are doing those photographic tours of comic shelves thing -- this time with Aaron Renier and Jessica Campbell.

The lit magazine Nat. Brut (which often has a heavy comics content) is having a fundraiser. (Editor Kayla E contributed to A Cartoonist's Diary a while back.)

A dictionary of comics onomatopeia?

Yellow

| August 14, 2015

Welcome to the end of the week. Today we have two of my faves -- Keith McCulloch in conversation with Kevin Hooyman, who has just released his new book, Conditions on the Ground. Two old pals from back 1990s Providence. Both great storytellers.

KM: It seems the comics fan is more righteous than other fans. They would pay.

KH: Yes. I guess so. And everyone is supporting each other. It can be a problem. When I go walking around the comic shows I will see people I only sort of know and I HAVE to buy their comic.  Like I went to buy this one comic I wanted, from this girl whose stuff I liked, and she was sold out, and the guy at the table next to her was like Hey I remember you and I had just tried to buy her comic so I’m obviously shopping, and my immediate response was like Oh i gotta buy yours .

KM: How much was it?

KH: Oh they’re all like five or ten dollars. I have to. I don’t know why. Especially if i just sold a bunch, just take the cash around and buy stuff. It’s just support. It’s good. It works. Because it’s all people who don’t have much money buying comics from each other, kinda just telling each other to keep going…  you’d like some stuff.  There’s good people. There’s some energy in the comics world right now I think. Kids are really into it. “Kids” again. But this time really kids — under 25. deeply into it.

KM: Where are they all?

KH: They’re all over. It’s international. They’re at these fairs — they’re at home on their computers. They’re making comics.  Or they’re in these little DIY cities like Richmond or Providence or… they’re all over.

KM: How do you find out about em?

KH: Well I find out about them, and I’m not saying this is the right way to do it or anything,  through Tumblr. I think that’s a comics scene. Unless theres a bigger one somewhere else. But I stumbled onto the Tumblr scene. That’s almost like a community because everyone is just posting. It’d pretty great because people just post the latest shit they drew. Everyone’s pushing each other in a way… there are some people I follow on Tumblr that are super productive that I really admire and feel pushed by. To see people cranking out thirty pages in a month.

And Aron Nels Steinke closes out the week with the fifth day of his diary. Thanks for the great week, Aron!

Elsewhere:

Alex Dueben talks to Zeina Abirached.

Paste speaks to Evan Dorkin about the finale of The Eltingville Club.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum & Library needs your help identifying some fine looking romance art.

 

Reenactment

| August 13, 2015

Phoebe Gloeckner

Today Aron Nels Steinke is here with the fourth installment of his week drawing the Cartoonist's Diary feature.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Phoebe Gloeckner. One of the great side benefits of the release of the film adaptation of Diary of a Teenaged Girl is the slew of great interviews with Gloeckner. Two particularly good ones come from Sean T. Collins at the AV Club and Whitney Joiner at The Rumpus. But even shorter ones, like Nancy Updike's at The Muse, are strong. Laura Miller writes about the book and movie over at Slate.

—Interviews & Profiles. It's Nice That talks to Françoise Mouly about New Yorker covers.

In Print, Steven Heller talks to Nick Sousanis about Unflattening.

Jeremy Dalmas has a short talk with Ariel Schrag.

—News. The imprisoned Iranian artist-activist Atena Farghadani has deservedly won CRNI’s 2015 Courage in Cartooning award.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists is calling for an independent investigation of the LAPD/LA Times/Ted Rall situation.

The Seattle Weekly has named Ellen Forney best cartoonist in Seattle.

The 2015 Kirby4Heroes campaign to raise funds for cartoonists in need has launched, and the LA Times has a story about it. The group is run by Jack Kirby's granddaughter, Jillian Kirby, and her goal this year is $20,000.

Segment

| August 12, 2015

On the site today:

Day 3 of Aron Nels Steinke's diary.

And here's R.C. Harvey on the great Otto Soglow.

His first published effort in a freelance illustration career, however, was earlier, for Lariat Magazine, a cowboy pulp.

“Soglow had never been out of New York,” reported the King Features promotional booklet Famous Artists and Writers, “but his cowboys were real authentic.”

Soglow once said he found his first job by thumbing the telephone directory and writing down the names of all the publications. Said he: “I took a handful of drawings and started to call on publishing houses. I started at the Battery and worked my way uptown from there. The following day, I started from the street I left off the previous day.”

When he got to 34th Street, he landed a job for a publisher of cheap pulp magazines (perhaps Lariat Magazine). “I received seven dollars for my first published drawing,” he recalled for Jerry Robinson inThe Comics. “From then on, I decided to become a cartoonist.”

By 1925, when Soglow joined the art staff at the New York World, he had abandoned illustration in favor of cartooning. At the World for about a year, he produced a series of satiric comic strips; he also continued to freelance, contributing cartoons to Life, Judge, The New Yorker, Collier’s, and other leading magazines.  On October 11, 1928, he married Anna Rosen; they had one daughter, Tona (whose name was composed of the last two letters of her parents’ names).

Elsewhere:

The Safari Festival in London is coming up next week, and here's a bit about its organizers, Breakdown Press.

Longtime editor/cartoonist Mort Todd discusses Cracked and his Charlton revival.

Look, horribly colored vintage Jack Kirby art published by the new Heavy Metal! As a wise man once said, even in death Kirby keeps getting fucked. Often by people who sing his praises.

Fire

| August 11, 2015

Jon Vermilyea

Joe McCulloch has your weekly guide to the most interesting-sounding new comics in stores, plus some thoughts on Dragon Ball Z.

The nostalgia I felt watching the film had really nothing to do with anime or manga; I'd never even watched Dragon Ball Z on television. No, what struck me was how much this movie felt like an old Marvel superhero comics Annual, cramming a whole bunch of characters together for a 'big' (yet somehow also low-stakes) story set in active continuity but not especially effective thereupon.

And Aron Nels Steinke offers the second installment in his week as our Cartoon Diarist.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Over at The New Republic, Jeet Heer wonders if the best comics are made by auteurs or collaborators.

Rob Clough continues an informal series of reviews on autobio comics with a piece on Corinne Mucha.

Greg Reese writes about Guy Colwell's Inner City Romance.

—Interviews. Someone calling themselves Neonpajamas talks to Jon Vermilyea.

Zack Smith talks to (Christopher) Priest about Black Panther.

—Money. This is a lot of money.

The most dedicated critic in alternative comics, Rob Clough, is raising funds.

Random Images

| August 10, 2015

Hi there, I'm back from a week away. Let's plunge in:

Chris Mautner reviews Marc Bell's Stroppy.

Taken at first glance, Marc Bell’s cartoon universe seems to be a persistently sunny anthropomorphic place, a magical, happy-go-lucky world (or worlds) where everything from the food on your plate to the landscape is capable of coming to life and greeting you with a smile and a handshake. Bell’s comics are stuffed to the gills with adorable, oblong creatures that crowd his panels in the best Elderesque, “chicken fat” manner.

But for all the visual liveliness and good humor, there’s a good deal of danger and malevolence present as well. It doesn’t take much, for example, for the cheerful little creatures to get stepped on, squashed or eaten, or for seemingly decent characters to run afoul of random calamities. Bell’s protagonists can seem just as easily plagued by anxiety as they can be blessed by a divine nonchalance.

And Aron Nels Steinke joins us for a week of diaries.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon interviews Glenn Head.

My show, What Nerve!, which is now in its last week, got a very nice write-up in the New York Times and a thoughtful essay over at Hyperallergic.

Best things I've gotten in the mail lately dept: The Boring Room by Yoshiharu Tsuge. A bootleg (I assume) translation of this incredible story, perfectly packaged in zine format.  And no, I'm not telling. Terror House No. 2 by Sammy Harkham. If beautiful may be used, that's what this collection of horror images is. Also, bonus Beardsley-like drawing of a flaccid penis by, I guess, Sammy. It's an easter egg in this DVD? A message from Dr. Freud?

Big Night

| August 7, 2015

Nate Patrin makes his Comics Journal debut this morning, with a review of the first issue of Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos's new comics anthology magazine, Island:

In the heady late-aughts days of Brandon Graham's WordPress blog Royal Boiler, he'd freely post sketch pages, previews of upcoming work (typically King City panels), and personal work anecdotes -- but he'd also act as a curator. Each post usually included a bunch of scans of comics he'd found in stores or somewhere online: old-school manga, bandes desinee, comics from the '80s black-and-white indie boom, or whatever high-profile recent releases caught his eye, all with his own personal notes on what he liked about the character design or line weight or background detail. Like Scorsese in film and Questlove in music, it seems like Graham's the kind of artist who seems as intent on preserving and advocating for his medium as he is in adding to it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. Phoebe Gloeckner talks to Vice.

But was it painful to write the book at all? Did you, at times, feel you had been victimized, either when you were going through "the situation" or afterwards?
I realize that as a teenager I didn't really have a lot of the experiences that other teens have. I didn't have a teenage boyfriend, a real one, and I couldn't tell most of the people I knew that I was having any relationship [at all]. My mom would say, "Why don't you have a boyfriend?"--it sort of cut me off from my mother. I was basically alone. There were no adults that I could talk to at all about anything. I kind of mourn that. I kind of missed a certain part of growing up. I had something else, but I never shared innocence with a kid.

And then, after everyone found out, I was told that I shouldn't talk about it. In my mind I wasn't dwelling on anything--I was telling this story. Probably because I was always told not to tell it, and I was like, why the fuck can't I tell it?

—Commentary & Reviews. Derf Backderf strongly defends Ted Rall against the Los Angeles Times.

Rob Clough finds himself underwhelmed with Lucy Knisley's Displacement.

At Hazlitt, Pilot Viruet advocates strongly for Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet.

—Funnies. Steve Brodner "live-doodled" the first GOP debate last night.

Ends & Odds

| August 6, 2015

Robert Kirby is here this morning with a review of the collection of Jillian Tamaki's SuperMutant Magic Academy.

The complete collection of Jillian Tamaki’s popular webcomic SuperMutant Magic Academy, which she drew over four years beginning in 2010, melds a satire of Harry Potter-type magical fantasy tropes with real-world teenage drama and observational comedy, shot through with dreamy, poetic surrealism, straight-talking truths, and existential angst. That’s quite a mix of genres and tonal qualities; the fact that it all works so seamlessly is a testament to Jillian Tamaki’s great skills as a writer and artist. Tamaki channels the everyday concerns of teenage years with hilarity, heart, and deadly accuracy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. Roger Cohen at Vanity Fair has a lengthy profile of Charlie Hebdo, focusing on the problems presented when an anticapitalist publication is suddenly infused with enormous amounts of money.

It is of course easier to take a detached or critical view of money when one does not have any. With millions have come machinations. Charlie Hebdo is now 40 percent owned by the parents of the paper’s murdered editorial director and cartoonist, Stéphane Charbonnier, or “Charb.” Laurent Sourisseau, the writer and cartoonist known as “Riss,” owns another 40 percent. Eric Portheault, the finance director, owns the rest. Their shares, once worth little or nothing, are suddenly worth a lot.

Many Charlie staffers are unhappy at this tight concentration of newfound wealth. In an extraordinary manifesto published by the daily Le Monde in late March, they declared, “We refuse that a handful of individuals take control, either total or partial, in absolute contempt for those who make and support” the paper. The 15 signatories asked, “How are we to escape the poison of the millions that, through exceptional sales and also donations and subscriptions, have fallen into the pockets of Charlie?”

Heidi Macdonald at The Beat reports on a new arrangement between SPX and Nickelodeon in which convention attendees will have the chance to be evaluated for a potential animation deal.

—Interviews & Profiles. Paul Gravett writes about Keiji Nakazawa, creator of the great Barefoot Gen. (Coincidentally, Last Gasp has just launched a Kickstarter in the hopes of publishing a new hardcover edition of Barefoot Gen.)

Emily Neuberger at Word & Film interviews Phoebe Gloeckner, just as the film adaptation of her Diary of a Teenage Girl is about to be released.

W&F: Few works in any medium chronicle the awakening female sexuality. Did you want specifically to address this?

PG: Frankly, I've never written a book or a story or drawn a picture with the idea of addressing anything in particular. The confusions and emotions engendered by experience are what drive me to create.

Alex Deuben talks to Eddie Campbell about his return to Bacchus.

—Podcasts. The two most recent episodes of Inkstuds feature Marc Bell and Emma Rios. The two most recent episodes of Make It Then Tell Everybody feature Simon Hanselmann and Ryan Sands. Comic Books Are Burning in Hell returns from a long hiatus to discuss new comics by Gilbert Hernandez and Adrian Tomine.

Next Page

| August 5, 2015

Today, we have a new episode of Mike Dawson's TCJ Talkies podcast. This time around, the great cartoonist/editor Sammy Harkham talks about an under-the-radar European import from a few years back, M. Tillieux's Murder by High Tide.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. A site called BizNews.com has a lengthy, career-spanning interview with the most prominent cartoonist in South Africa, Zapiro.

I applied to, it was accepted, at the school of visual arts [sic] in Manhattan – it was my first choice. And that was because Art Spiegelman, the great Art Spiegelman who did Maus, the Holocaust story in graphic novel form – about his own relationship with his father and his father and mother survived Auschwitz, and this had also changed my life to read that book, so that’s where I went. And a weird thing happened – on the day I arrived, I went to sign up, and that was the thing of course I was the most excited about. And they said: “Oh, Art Spiegelman? He kind of hasn’t taught here for about a year.”

Oh dear.

So I was devastated for about a day and then regrouped, and thought there happened to be Will Eisner and Harvey Kurzman – two absolute giants of cartooning who are teaching here, so I’ll go to their classes and I loved that, and after a year of study there – I was doing really well now, really nailing all the courses and the school gave me a huge exhibition in New York and at a place that they normally reserve for the alumni of the school. And the head of the school happened to be named Rhodes, by the way, he comes up to me and he says is there anybody you’d like to meet. And I say: “Well there is, come to mention it.” And I told him the story about Spiegelman and he was very, very embarrassed and he immediately set up a meeting and I ended up doing an independent study with Spiegelman for a semester.

For The Guardian, Cece Bell talks at illustrated length about how she made her children's graphic novel, El Deafo.

—Misc. The next volume of Best American Comics will be guest-edited by Jonathan Lethem, and will feature a cover by Raymond Pettibon. Pretty solid choices there.

—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough reviews Sarah Laing's Let Me Be Frank.

At Comics Alliance, writer J. A. Micheline announces a personal boycott of Marvel, based on recent controversies and longstanding minority representation issues. Leaving rhetoric aside, her stated demands—Marvel hiring three Black writers and using three LGBTQ lead characters—don't seem unreasonable as personal cut-off points, especially considering Marvel's size and cultural footprint.

Online Access Restored

| August 4, 2015

Joe McCulloch is here with his usual Tuesday-morning guide to the week in interesting-sounding new comics. He also expounds at length about one my own favorite manga titles: Kōji Aihara & Kentarō Takekuma's Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga. An excerpt from the middle:

In this way, Monkey lacks the call to arms or the righteous sarcasm you might expect from an American satire; instead, its characters accept the terrain as given, and move to analyze it, without any gesture toward affecting change. It is, nonetheless, not a kindly study: the core joke of Monkey is that manga, as a commercial art, can be understood fully -- indeed, mastered -- through the adept clicking together of pre-made commercial parts; there is no shame in swiping poses or ideas from other artists, as comics is fundamentally a language of shared symbols, which can only realize meaning through simple variations on repetitious usage. This is illustrated most vividly through likening the desirous components of "ladies' comics" (from which josei would later distinguish itself as a less porny manifestation) to falling Tetris blocks, but the machinations of shōjo romance are likewise compared to the rigid formalities of sumo wrestling, while the sexual conquests of a seinen erotic comedy hero are presented as conveyer belt sushi - very mechanical! With the wave of a finger, Takekuma observes that no other type of young men's manga is relevant: everything boils down to the immediate gratification of desire by the most streamlined means.


Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. A Moment of Cerebus republishes an essay by Bill Watterson on George Herriman's Krazy Kat.

Duncan Mitchel writes about the exploration of stereotypes in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

RJ Casey writes about Dan Zettwoch.

—Interviews. CBR talks to Kate Beaton.

—Misc. There's a new issue of the UK-based comics magazine Off Life available, in both print and digital form.

Joost Swarte did the cover for the latest New Yorker. He is also apparently launching a new magazine of his own.

—Video. Alison Bechdel appeared on the Seth Meyers late-night talk show last week.

Hammer Meet Nail

| August 3, 2015

Today on the site Brandon Soberberg reviews Gilbert Hernandez's most recent comic book, Blubber.

This brutal little one shot from Gilbert Hernandez constructs a libidinous circle of life via six loosely connected strips of blackly comic body horror, creepily cute animal weirdness, and nightmarish nature documentary deadpan, occupied by spindly creepazoids and bowling pin-shaped monsters. A few strips seem to reference, riff on, and playfully jab the work of alt-comics big guns like Michael DeForge and Johnny Ryan and overall, it reads like an unimpeachable indie veteran giving the comix scene the business. It's a head scratcher and a reactionary work.

Slow news weekend, I think...

Here's Variety on Dave Cooper and Johnny Ryan's TV show, Pig Goat Banana Cricket.

And I wrote about Suellen Rocca, of the Hairy Who, over at Hyperallergic.

That's about it from here!

 

Oh Why Bother

| July 31, 2015

Today on the site, R. Orion Martin explores the world of Chinese web comics, interviewing two artists who publish primarily via online social media, due partly to the country's tightly controlled publishing environment.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The always controversial political cartoonist Ted Rall has been fired by the Los Angeles Times over a disputed story about a 2001 jaywalking incident. The Times explains here, and Rall defends himself here. [UPDATE: Rall has another post up today, with an "enhanced" version of the audiotape evidence of the 2001 encounter.]

Bluewater Entertainment, the schlocky publisher of hacked-out biographical comics on people like Sarah Palin and other flashes in the pan, has changed its name to the most preposterously idiotic thing it could: StormFront. As most people know, and the briefest Google search would have revealed to the comics publishers in question, "Stormfront" is also the name of one of the most prominent and notorious White supremacist websites in the world (no link). Any bets on how long it will be before they change their name again? I'm surprised they've made it three days....

—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough takes a hard look at Dustin Harbin's Diary Comics.

At Paste, Shea Hennum has a good piece on how many big comics-news sites have endlessly and breathlessly plugged sales news on the Marvel Star Wars tie-in comics while ignoring the more impressive sales of Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan. I do think it is worthwhile to note that while I have no doubt that cultural bias plays a role in this, it is also true that many of those sites, while nominally about comics, in actuality devote an enormous and ever-expanding amount of space to movie and toy news. They aren't exactly trying to capture the art form in its essence; they're trying to get clicks from a certain demographic. This doesn't invalidate Hennum's analysis in the slightest, of course.

What If?

| July 30, 2015

Today:

Greg Hunter talks to cartoonist Caitlin Skaalrud (Houses of the Holy)

Elsewhere:

Lauren Weinstein posted one of the best short stories I've seen since, well, her last post earlier this year. Lauren's on a roll, and good on our pal Nicole Rudick for publishing this amazing piece of art at the Paris Review.

Phoebe Gloeckner is having another well-deserved moment in the sun, via the film adaptation of her masterpiece The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Ines Estrada calls attention to this book she co-edited about Mexican zines, a topic about which I know nothing. The book looks great. Gimme!

Here's are two questions for the peanut gallery which will do nothing for my reputation:

1) Does anyone remember which issue of the Fantastic Four opened with a splash of The Thing making/admiring an anchovy pizza? Here's a free idea for all your movie execs: A solo Thing movie in which he roams around "New Brooklyn", raging against micro brews and condo developments! Furious about pour-over coffee! Take it, it's yours.

2) Remember What If? Who has a favorite What If issue? What a funny premise for a comic that I took so seriously as a kid. I wish it still existed, but for ALL comics (What If Louis Riel was Immortal? What if Chunky Rice was a Wolf?) and that Daniel Clowes wrote them ALL and Rick Altergott drew them ALL. Dream team! Youth! Happiness!