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Joe McCulloch is talking about a blast from the weird past today, Michael Zulli & Stephen Murphy's Puma Blues, which is being republished/continued by Dover Publications, until now not much known for comics publishing outside things like their reprints of Lynd Ward and the like. (Dover actually just announced a whole new line of graphic novels, and you can see more details in this Publishers Weekly report from Calvin Reid.) As usual, Joe also has a guided tour of this week's most interesting-sounding new comics releases, and spotlights Kerascoët & Hullbard's Beauty in the process.

And then we have Jeremy Sigler's review of Dash Shaw's new Doctors. Here's a bit of that:

Set in the future, the story is about a wealthy woman, Mrs. Bell, who slips at a public swimming pool, hits her head, and dies. As the narrative unfolds, we discover that upon her death, Mrs. Bell’s corpse has been displaced from the conventional morgue and brought by two so-called doctors—Dr. Cho and his daughter Tammy—to a creepy Brooklyn basement where, with the help of an assistant named Will, they attempt to head off Bell’s spirit in the afterlife and convince it to return to life.

The doctors claim to be rescuing Mrs. Bell before her post-death “fade to blackness,” but it takes quite a lot of deception and coercion to pry her away from her fairly cushy stay in the afterlife.

Meanwhile, we sense that business is not going so well for Dr. Cho’s pioneering practice. The finicky machine they use to enter the afterlife is an aging dust-covered computer, outfitted with equipment vaguely reminiscent of vintage electroshock therapy. At one point, Dr. Cho blows the dust off the tangled wires in his computer’s hard-drive to get it going again—a wink at the classic dystopian sci-fi world run by obsolete machinery from all eras. Fearlessly, Tammy lays down on her back, side by side with the corpse of Mrs. Bell, allowing her living brain to be hooked by cables to the dead brain of the corpse—the connection creates a portal between life and death. And this is how the therapy is administered.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. The Supreme Court decided not to review the Shuster estate case against Warner Bros.

—Misc. At Boing Boing, Monte Beauchamp explains the idea behind and presents excerpts from his recent book, Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World.

—Reviews & Commentary. The previously skeptical Paul Constant has very strong praise for the new edition of The Best American Comics, guest edited by Scott McCloud. Zainab Akhtar likes Brandon Graham's Walrus.

And TCAF co-founder Chris Butcher weighs in on the recent online debates surrounding cosplay and changing convention culture, and his post will probably drive a lot more discussion. Here's a brief excerpt:

I think Denise Dorman’s railing against the ‘instagram’ generation is hilarious but actually has a point–she’s just not using the best terminology to describe what is an actual phenomenon–before 5 years ago, no one (in their right mind) would go to a show thinking that they were an ‘attraction’ without buying themselves an exhibition space, a booth, an artist alley table, something. However, in the last few years the number of people who think that a badge (whether paid for or comped) entitles them to an audience within a convention space is on the rise dramatically. It’s been pegged as cosplayers, and honestly there are more cosplayers at shows than ever, and more professional cosplayers who are going to shows to make money and build an audience. Cosplayers attending shows as businesspeople, who aren’t contributing to the economy of the show.

But professional cosplayers (and I think there’s an important distinction there between people who cosplay and people who earn money cosplaying) are literally nothing compared to the other social media personalities who have begun to call comic-conventions theirs. Where previously you had nerdlebrities like Wil Wheaton building a social media empire out of their cred, today’s social media personalities have amassed huge followings through their postings, videos, and photos on YouTube (largely) and other video and media services. They are the product, they have 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 subscribers on social media, and they announce that they’re going to COMIC-CON X and all of their fans should meet them there. It’s easy to see how that’s a boon for a convention looking to sell tickets… they get a crazy-popular ‘guest’ and they don’t have to do any of the work of actually bringing this personality as a guest. The dude with the media badge AS the thing being covered. But tell me that a fan motivated to go to a comic show to see a dude who talks about shit on Youtube is gonna buy the same way, at the same level, as the fan motivated to go to a comic show because she likes comics.

It's been too long since we've been able to offer you a new installment of Richard Gehr's great column, Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists. Today, he's back, with a profile of Zachary Kanin. This is an excerpt from Richard's new book collecting and expanding upon his column, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker's Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists, which will be available at bookstores tomorrow. Here's a bit from the middle of the Kanin piece:

A week before graduation, a human resources person from The New Yorker called the [Harvard] Lampoon office to inquire if anyone might be interested in becoming cartoon editor Robert Mankoff ’s assistant. "I answered the phone, so I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’" Kanin recalls. His interview with Mankoff consisted of the editor talking to him "for like an hour and a half, and then he was like, ‘I didn’t ask you any questions. Go write an essay.’" Kanin’s response included a section analyzing successful and unsuccessful drawings from the magazine’s cartoon archive.

At the time, the assistant art editor’s duties consisted of reading the mail and sorting out submissions from regular contributors. Kanin would then go through the hundreds of unsolicited submissions the magazine received each week and pick out anything showing promise amid the slush. Another large part of the gig involved sifting through the thousands of weekly Caption Contest entries, which took him two or three days. Other administrative duties included answering phone calls and e-mails, and he provided quality control for images and links on the magazine’s early website.

Kanin began submitting his own cartoons his second week at work. Technically, he’d mailed his first New Yorker submission to Tina Brown when he was but in second grade: "Hey, Tom," says one hunter to another while standing over Donald Duck lying in a pool of blood, "I think you'd better take a look at this one." His earlier rejection behind him, Kanin sold his first cartoon in September 2005. His timely rendition of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin Olive Oil," as its interior caption reads, consists of a half-empty uncorked bottle with flies buzzing about it. "It’s not one for the ages, but I was happy about it," he declares.

Mankoff offered his assistant a cartooning contract during the editor’s 2006 Christmas party. "I called my parents after the party, and I was really excited. My mom shook my dad awake and told him, ‘It’s like winning an election!’"

(As noted at the beginning of his column, I will be appearing with Richard at BookCourt in Brooklyn this Sunday afternoon, where Richard will give a presentation about his book and answer questions, and I will attempt not to accidentally short-circuit the sound system or knock down all the shelves or burn down the store.)

We also have Rob Kirby's review of Jesse Jacobs' Safari Honeymoon:

Safari Honeymoon is essentially a three-character adventure tale. The plot is simple: a newly married man and woman spend their honeymoon on safari in a mysterious jungle with a young man acting as their guide. The guide was first seen in Jacobs' gripping, compact eight-page mini from last year, Young Safari Guide, fighting to survive the attack of the ferocious spawn of a dreadful crawly creature. By the time he reappears in Honeymoon, the young man has become grimly expert and efficient at staying alive in the wild, knowing the habits and tricks of various parasitic, monstrous creatures infesting the jungle, creatures that forever await their chance to find new hosts, new sustenance.

The safari starts out idyllically enough, with the guide showing the couple myriad exotic sights and sounds of the jungle, waiting on them hand and foot. But he makes no bones about the ever-present danger all around them. After he pulls a hideous centipede-like creature out of the husband’s ear, he explains: "The creature will penetrate any orifice. Most likely it passed through your rectum while you slept.” He cautions them further: “Have you folks been wearing your butt plugs?” Clearly, one needs to be prepared for what this particular jungle has in store.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Tom Spurgeon interviews Renée French.

—Chris Mautner reviews a bunch of new books.

—And Ed Piskor visits his childhood home:

Today Rob Clough looks at comics published by Pikitia Press.

I was happy to run into Matt Emery at SPX 2013, who handed me a pile of comics that he had published. His Pikitia Press is located in Melbourne, but Emery is a New Zealand native and unsurprisingly publishes the work of a number of Kiwis as well as Aussies. There’s a scene there that’s always been small but feisty; however, it seems like the alt-comics scene has grown dramatically in the past five to ten years. Here’s a look at Pikitia’s offerings.

Elsewhere:

The Boston Herald racist cartoonist controversy continues.

Ben Katchor writes about an exhibition in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Steve Heller tells us a bit about some Time Magazine covers by the great Artzybasheff.

And finally, you know you grew up as a comics fan if you were just a bummed out by this announcement.

Today, Frank Santoro returns to his Riff Raff column, after a few months traveling the world as an ambassador of comics. Now, he's back,and talking about his most recent trip, to the Entreviñetas Festival in Colombia:

I think, for me, what was most exciting about Entreviñetas was that the audience in Colombia seems hungry for comics—and are coming to the table with very few pre-conceived ideas as to what comics are and who they are supposed to be for. There were lots of younger people. During a panel discussion on the topic of what the “graphic novel” term means, a teenager asked, “Doesn’t graphic novel just mean 'more expensive?'” I had to laugh. It made me think about all the “Comics versus Art” discussions in the States over the last thirty years as somewhat meaningless. I mean, I guess if a kid in the U.S. asked the same question at a panel I might think the same thing—but listening to the question translated from Spanish into English into my earpiece, I just burst out laughing.

And Paul Tumey is here to talk about Patrick McDonnell, with a review of The Mutts Diaries. Tumey admires the strip, but is disappointed by the book:

Mutts, Patrick McDonnell’s sweet, smart comic strip has joyfully chased its tail across the funny page sections of newspapers and book collections for the last two decades. The strip, written and drawn by a cartoonist who co-wrote a deeply admiring biography of George Herriman (Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, 1986), has functioned both as a daily treat and as a deconstructed, minimalist heir to Herriman and Krazy Kat.

Even though Patrick McDonnell's Mutts comic strip is sublimely designed to work on multiple levels, it comes perilously close to losing its charms in the dumb, exploitative packaging employed in The Mutts Diaries, a collection that Andrews McMeel Publishing has created to launch its AMP! Comics for Kids imprint (what amperage or amplifiers has to do with comics, I’m sure someone will let me know). The mid-sized, cheaply priced trade paperback is, as the accompanying press release informs us, “a collection tailored for middle-grade readers.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. Oliver Sava conducted a super-enjoyable, lengthy interview with Simon Hanselmann.

Michael Cavna spoke to New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly about nominated for the Thurber Prize.

Alex Dueben talked to Charles Burns.

—Reviews & Commentary. MariNaomi, who recently put together the Cartoonists of Color database, has written an article for cartoonists who want to include characters of (a different) color into their work, and talked to artists like Keith Knight, Whit Taylor, and Elisha Lim about their own thoughts on the matter.

James Romberger reviews a slew of comics he found at SPX. Rob Clough looks at Koyama Press's new kids' comics.

—Kirby vs. Marvel. A few of the stronger analyses of the recent settlement and its implications so far (we will have our own soon) have come from Charles Hatfield, Alison Frankel at Reuters, and Kurt Busiek.

—History. Smithsonian magazine has another big article about Wonder Woman and William Moulton Marston written by Jill Lepore.

Phil Nel visits the home of Crockett Johnson.

Scholar Frank M. Young remembers researching comics history back in the days of microfilm.

—Misc. Finally, and for some of you maybe most importantly, Jack T. Chick has released an app.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2014/10/marvel-kirby-dispute-is-over-but-larger-copyright-issues-remain/

Well today we have Cynthia Rose on the work of Nine Antico, who will soon have her first English-language book out towards the end of the year.

Working with a novel-like accumulation of detail, Antico tells their stories using cinematic ploys. Her books move via close-ups and long shots, establishing frames and jump cuts. She also plays with narrative structures and often shifts our point of view, pulling back in order to reveal that things were not what they seemed. Although her characters are drawn realistically, sections of their faces, figures or surroundings are missing. She handles everything to do with her art, including the color, herself.

And Hazel Cills reviews Mis(h)adra.

“No way. This can’t be right,” Mis(h)adra’s protagonist, Isaac, wonders ominously in a flashback, “This is me?” It’s a scary question to contemplate for someone experiencing an epileptic seizure for the first time. Iasmin Omar Ata’s comic Mis(h)adra is a story about the daily life and struggles of Isaac, a college student who’s just trying to get through parties, midterms, and his struggles with epilepsy. 

Elsewhere:

Slow news day....

I saw bits of this, but this might be the first complete listing of the ICAF / OSU schedule. Sounds good.

As long as Gabrielle keeps making comics I'll keep linking to them. And this one is really good.

This Ryan Cecil Smith mini-comic sounds cool.

Today, Joe McCulloch is here with his usual buyer's guide for the Week in Comics, with spotlight picks from John Porcellino and Dash Shaw.

Sean T. Collins is here, too, with a review of Sophia Foster-Dimino's "Sex Fantasy". Here's an excerpt:

Her line is clear, clean, and precise, ideal for her geometric interpretations of the human face and figure. Her intrapanel layouts emphasize the diagonal, creating a sense of dynamism-in-stasis that largely abrogates the need for panel-to-panel continuity of motion or setting; she can draw what she needs to, and only what she needs to, to get her point across. She repeatedly nails gestures: A panel from issue #1 uses a pair of faces (one upturned and downturned), a blocked-black head of hair, hunched shoulders sloping down, long legs reaching up, and an arm the eye follows downward like a child on a slide to emphasize an outstretched hand gently proffering a much-needed tool as though it's a drawing of the Childlike Empress giving Bastian the grain of sand that is all that is left of Fantasia. Her clothing and prop designs are inventive and singular, yet observed and easy to parse and contextualize. It's hard to be this easy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Spending Opportunities. Last Gasp is crowdfunding their fall publishing lineup. And Sparkplug Books has just a couple days left on its Kickstarter, and is just a couple thousand short right now. Both of those publishers are well deserving of your support.

—Reviews & Commentary. David Ulin wrote about Porcellino's Hospital Suite at the LA Times. Ruben Bolling likes the John Severin EC collection. Bob Temuka reviews Gilbert Hernandez's Bumperhead.

—Profiles & Interviews. Prominent book-world interview Robert Birnbaum talks to Roz Chast, and is surprised she's content to identify herself as a cartoonist.

Steven Heller has a profile of Richard McGuire and his upcoming Here at The Atlantic.

Tom Spurgeon interviews Dan Steffan, the comics retailer and filmmaker behind the new John Porcellino documentary.

—History. The New York Times published a bizarrely ahistorical article about New Yorker covers, acting like the shift to topical covers just happened rather than starting way back in the Tina Brown era. Spurgeon takes this in stride like Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye ("It's okay with me"), and maybe that's a wise reaction, but this is really shockingly ignorant coming from the Times and I can't figure out how the editors let it by.

Finally, if you're Facebook-compliant, Eric Reynolds has your time machine to the Fantagraphics van from twenty years ago.

Today Bob Levin visits us with one feature comprised of two book reviews, both on under-recognized cartoonists: R.L. Crab and Erik Nebel.

R.L. Crabb, an ex-newspaperman and rock band lyricist, the author of about 20 comix, and a contributor to a dozen others, is a word guy. Scablands, his latest, is available from the author (P.O. Box 313, Nevada City, CA 95959).

Crabb is writing in the present, but a spat of recent deaths has led him “to gather up the fragments of my life.” Most tellingly, his parents, who had been secretive about their life, had passed, leaving an unfillable hole in his and motivating his wish “to lea ve something of myself behind.” The result is an assemblage of stories, most of which occur in eastern Washington state 20 years ago but enlivened by rollicking recollections of the Bay Area, between 1984 and 1990, and Atlanta in 1973. Star-quality pizzaz is achieved by references to gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, porn film moguls Jim and Artie Mitchell (none of whom actually appear), and that “shadowy figure of myth and legend,” the cartoonist Dan O’Neill, who does. Spiritual depth is provided through dippings into, extractions from, and reflections upon Drummers and Dreamers, the tale of Smowhala, a 19th century prophet among the Wanapuni Indians.

And George Elkind reviews The Bad-ventures of Bobo Backslack.

Elsewhere:

The big news is that, in something of a surprise, Marvel and the Kirby family have reached a settlement. The story, what little there is, is here. And Tom Spurgeon reacts. We will have our own coverage shortly. Here's a great tribute to Kirby's DC work of the 1970s via this post of Forever People original art.

In yet more art showcase news, here's Jamie Hewlett's uncollected and perhaps final comic strip series, Fireball.

Another nice comic over at The Nib, making great use of the screen scroll format.

Scroll into the comments of this Facebook post for some fine John Porcellino commentary. And look out for our forthcoming interview with John by Sarah Boxer.

Finally, hey, another Steve Ditko Kickstarter. I love Steve Ditko, but does it strike anyone else as odd that these publishing efforts rely on from-scratch crowd-funding each time? Usually a sound publishing model allows for future books to be planned. But hey, sound business and comics usually don't go together. Sadly.

Today, Nicole Rudick is back with a review of Anya Davidson's School Spirits, which so far hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. (Rob Clough wrote about it for us this summer, if you want to compare notes.) Here's how Nicole begins her review:

Anya Davidson has described School Spirits as a book about female friendship. And it is: Oola and Garf are the Maggie and Hopey of death metal, best friends who weather the storms of high school, petty crime, and youthful infatuation together. Still, that’s a bit like saying Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. Their friendship, like all deep friendships, is foundational; it is a fact through which Davidson examines aspects of gender from a specifically female perspective. What’s refreshing about School Spirits, and what keeps it from feeling didactic, is that Davidson doesn’t try to tackle stereotypes head-on; it’s not the point of the book. Instead, the notion that gender isn’t represented by a set of characteristics is woven into the fabric of the story. It’s a given in all of Davidson’s work to date that typical male and female roles aren’t simply reversed or questioned but utterly dismantled.

School Spirits is divided into titled chapters, and the stories feel like interconnected vignettes. The book opens with Oona and Garf trying unsuccessfully to score tickets to a Hrothgar concert from a radio show, and then follows them through a day of school, hanging out with friends, perpetrating criminal mischief, and, finally, attending the Hrothgar concert. Oona and Garf are “weirdo girls,” as Davidson has described them; their appearances and behavior don’t hew to conventional notions of femininity. Oona resembles a gangly Tintin with a reverse quiff and spends a good part of the book on a wild, desperate tear through the city with a security guard hot on her heels. Garf is more sanguine than Oona, but resolute in her sense of self, as when she castigates her friend Inga for prioritizing her looks: “You’re a math genius, Inga,” she cries. “Stop trying to pretend you’re normal … You’re a freak like us!”

Also, today is sadly the final day of Kayla E.'s week running our Cartoonist's Diary feature. It's been one of the most inventive takes on the column yet, so I hope you haven't neglected reading it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. At The Point, Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado write about the comics of David Mazzuchelli and Chris Ware from an architectural perspective.

Paul Gravett on the history of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella.

Laura Tanenbaum at Dissent writes about Alison Bechdel, motherhood, and psychoanalysis in the age of the memoir.

Domingos Isabelinho considers Chester Brown as a Gothic artist.

Dan's "What Nerve!" show gets a rave by The New York Times' Ken Johnson.

Brad Mackay writes about appearing in, and later watching, the new documentary about Seth, Seth's Dominion.

—Comics-Adjacent Books. Kevin Kelly picks out a fascinating-looking collection of drawings from the Soviet gulag created by a 1950s prison camp guard.

And somehow until I missed that there's a newly translated novel by the great Julio Cortázar, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires, in which he imagines his life as it intertwines with the plot of a (real) comic book.

—News. MoCCA's moving to Chelsea.

On Monday, the Supreme Court is due to decide whether or not they will hear the Kirby v. Marvel case. [UPDATE: Now it's being reported that there has been a settlement agreement.]

—Misc. Nicole Rudick (again) makes an entertaining visit to Gary Panter's studio.

Zainab Akhtar gets a photo-tour of Sam Alden's comics collection.

Antonin Baudry (Weapons of Mass Diplomacy) is opening a bookstore in NYC's French embassy.

2D Cloud has another photo-heavy SPX report.

—Interviews. The New York Times catches up with Richard McGuire as his Here is put on exhibit at the Morgan.

Paddy Johnston talks at length with Ken Parille about The Daniel Clowes Reader.

Alex Dueben talks to Gilbert Hernandez about Bumperhead and the Eisners.

—Kim Thompson. Yesterday would have been his 58th birthday. Eric Reynold remembers him via a photograph. Marc Arsenault remembers him by way of an issue of Zero Zero they worked on together.

—Funnies. Anders Nilsen created a comic for the New York Times.

On the site:

Here's Richard Gehr on the excellent new Gilbert Hernandez book, Bumperhead. I love seeing Hernandez work in all his modes. I can't think of a more diverse and in the pocket cartoonist right now, and this is really an excellent book.

Gilbert Hernandez nails his title character’s emotional essence in the very first panel ofBumperhead, the prolific cartoonist’s hormonally overdriven anatomy of adolescence. Fatefully named and thoroughly pissed off, a preadolescent Bobby Numbly stares defiantly at the reader as childish taunts ­– “There’s a bump bump bumperhead here! Thumpin’ bumpin’ bumper! El Bumpo!” – join background clouds in a perfectly weighted composition filling two-thirds of the page. His tormentors are a couple of neighborhood boys in Oxnard, California – Los Bros Hernandez’s own hometown. Presumably less “semi-autobiographical” than last year’s bittersweet Marble Season, Bumperhead looks at sex, drugs, and rock with as much knowing sympathy as its predecessor explored childhood mysteries, obsessions, friendships, and disappointments.

Kayla E. visits us with Day 4 of Cartoon Diary.

Elsewhere:

This is an interesting interview with Kelly Sue Deconnick about her adaptation of the Barbarella translation for the new Humanoids edition of the classic graphic novel. It's always been a funny read for me -- verbose, tangled dialogue to my ears, but wonderful drawing and storytelling. I'm looking forward to reading it again.

I'm always poking around comic and illustration art auction sites. I see very interesting glimpses into visual culture and, sometimes, the sensibility of a collector. So this Ray Bradbury estate auction is pretty intriguing. It's everything from his art collection (including some very fine Foster and Capp originals) to his personal awards to his ties to his LPs. Take a trip. (via PT)

I love this story about the animator Frank Moser, maker of high velocity drawings.

And there's no more Marvel for Milo Manara.

Oboy, R.C. Harvey on the late, great Edward Gorey! This should be fun:

Gorey’s 200-year-old house at 8 Strawberry Lane in Yarmouthport was built by a sea captain, Nathaniel Howes. A conventional two-story structure originally, it was modified by extensive alterations in Victorian times and gradually assumed a distinctive aspect all its own. Subsequent developments have only added to its unique appearance. With its flaking exterior paint and a vine that had invaded the premises through a crack in the wall, the place embodied its bachelor occupant’s eclectic enthusiasms and eccentricities. Its walls were festooned with bookshelves, which were jammed with books, videotapes, CDS, and cassettes; and the floors were littered with stacks of the same as well as finials of all description, occasional lobster floats, cat-clawed furniture, an old toilet with a tabletop, and a small commune of cats.

A compulsive collector and consumer of every aspect of the culture in which he was immersed, Gorey was a man of enormous erudition whose tastes and interests ranged from cultivated esoterica to trashy television, all passionately studied in an effort, he told [Stephen] Schiff, to “keep real life at bay.” In her book about Gorey, Karen Wilkin asserted that “he appears to have read everything and to have equal enthusiasm for classic Japanese novels, British satire, television reruns, animated cartoons, and movies both past and present, good and not so good.”

And Day Three of Kayla E.'s week making the Cartoonist's Diary. Hers are like no other Diaries we've run so far.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Misc. In 1947, Life magazine asked ten cartoonists (including Frank King, Chic Young, Milton Caniff, and Chester Gould) to close their eyes before drawing their own characters.

In the wake of the Spider-Woman controversy, Marvel has apparently decided to cancel several upcoming Milo Manara covers.

The winners of the 2014 Comics Workbook Composition Competition have been announced.

Ryan Sands has another strong SPX report.

—Interviews. Mark Voger at NJ.com talks to Drew Friedman about his comics history/portraits book, Heroes of the Comics.

For Banned Books Week, Print's Michael Dooley talks to Keith Knight about his own experiences with censorship

Brian Cremins talks to Marnie Galloway.

Jillian Tamaki is a guest on Make It Then Tell Everybody.

—Reviews & Commentary. Ng Suat Tong writes about Luke Pearson's Hilda comics.

Because he is unstoppable, Joe McCulloch is back with the week in comics. And Kayla E. returns with her second installment of her cartoonist's diary.

Elsewhere:

Lauren Weinstein has a great new comic strip online.

This is a fascinating conversation about the mechanics of independent publishing, as seen through the microcosm of small magazines. this kind of frank discussion of the economics of culture publishing. (via NR)

Oh goodness, this is quite a crew in the limo. Al Jaffee content inside.

This is a great set of original pages by Mort Meskin from 1950 or 1951. Stellar ink work and some truly odd perspectives on the fourth page.

Finally, here's a great 1961 early Seymour Chwast cover.

First off, Whit Taylor is here with a report from SPX, including an account of her visit to the Library of Congress and a peek behind the scenes of the Ignatz jury process. Here's a sample:

As everyone continued to look at the art, I sat down with Warren to talk to him about the show. Warren started volunteering at SPX in 2002 and eventually became the executive director in 2011. For him, coming from the corporate world and managing “large multimillion-dollar projects,” running this show was a lot less stressful, and an avenue for exercising his creativity. He noted that he and his staff received no compensation for SPX, explaining that because there was no personal monetary gain their motivation for running the show was intrinsic. Warren’s goal for SPX was to “provide a low-cost event for people with the understanding that the economy is tough for people in their twenties and thirties.” He proudly mentioned that SPX had booked the Marriott until 2016, so that hotel rates would not go up for participants for a few more years.

Warren’s business savvy has been noted as a large reason for the SPX’s relatively smooth sailing and operation. But it’s been less publicly apparent that Warren’s attention and interest in comics’ past, as well as the current comics landscape, is what keeps the show both honoring comics history as well as keeping it relevant to the emerging generation of younger cartoonists.

And if you missed it, please don't neglect to go back and check Joe McCulloch's SPX report from last Friday, which was posted too late to be excerpted on this blog but definitely deserves your attention:

I wasn't seeing any "SPX people." There's usually not a lot going on in Bethesda, at least in the area surrounding the Marriott, so you can generally spot a potential attendee by their mohawk as soon as you're off the highway, but this Saturday there was nothing. It was raining. The TopatoCo van, smiling bravely in the parking lot, was the only clue that the con was even happening.

Immediately upon entering the hotel -- and this was not an impression that subsided as I collected my badge, chuckled at Mr. Wheeler's good humor, and entered the show floor -- I noticed that the crowd seemed more diverse than ever before, and by that I don't just mean there were as many women as men (although that, as usual for SPX, was true); there were a *lot* of younger teens, kids with parents. Attendees over the age of fifty. Average folk. Usually, in spite of my attendance at the show for nine years' running, I'd expect to feel at least a little out of place, given my tragicomic haircut and the oversized long-sleeved shirt I'd grabbed at random when I'd noticed it was chilly that morning, giving everyone pause for a moment to ascertain whether I'd come to the show in literally my pajamas, but by god I suddenly felt normal.

As a result, I immediately wondered if alternative culture was dead.

And also, today is the first day of a new artist's take on our Cartoonist's Diary feature. This week, it's Kayla E., and I won't describe her first entry except to say there's a George McManus connection...

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. The Wall Street Journal talked to Roz Chast about her NBA nomination. Vulture talked to Alison Bechdel about her MacArthur grant (and her disinterest in film). Fumetto Logica has a lengthy interview with Adam Hines.

—Even More Convention Reporting. Derf Backderf reports from SPX, and Chris Mautner and Brigid Alverson discuss what it all meant.

Deji Bryce Olukotun interviews the co-founder of the Lagos Comic Con, which just held its third year in Nigeria.

—Reviews. Oliver Sava writes about Gilbert Hernandez's new Bumperhead.

—News. Brian Michael Bendis has shut down his long-running message board.

Today on the site, we present Chris Mautner's interview with the young British cartoonist Luke Pearson, and they discuss everything from Scandinavian folklore to the potential perils of being typecast as a kids' cartoonist. Here's a sample:

Many of the Hilda books thus far, especially the new one, involve creatures and characters that seem menacing or meddlesome at first but turn out to be harmless or beneficial. I was wondering how conscious you were of this theme and how it ties into your desire to have Hilda avoid violence.

I'm very conscious of it and worry about how quickly that could (has?) become trite. I suspected that people might roll their eyes and take a stab at the ending as soon as the Black Hound even appears. So I try to make the details and the unfolding of that outcome as interesting and unexpected as possible. It's definitely connected to avoiding violence but also to avoiding antagonists in general. I don't particularly want to pit a little girl against some supernatural villain who's out to get her. That would change the tone of the series completely. I have one real "bad guy" in mind that could potentially come in towards the end of the series, but really I think any true antagonist of Hilda's would just be some other kid. I'm not against depicting violence or anything and it does occur to some extent. The Nisses are pretty violent towards each other, the elves trash Hilda's house. I tried to show that the Hound is dangerous; it's not a misunderstanding or anything. I'm inclined to finish each book on a positive note because they're standalone stories and everything needs to be resolved in some way. I just don't want the resolution to ever be Hilda bashing some evil creature's head in and for that to save the day.

Also, Joe McCulloch has the first of our two planned SPX reports. Here's Joe, in his inimitable style.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. A parent protested the availability of Persepolis to high-school students at an Oregon school board meeting. (Via)

Popular comics blogger and retailer Mike Sterling has decided to open his own comics store.

Bleeding Cool has a story about a petition signed by cartoonists including Art Spiegelman, Lewis Trondheim, Mattotti, and Posy Simmonds regarding the treatment of former Angoulême director Gilles Ciment.

—Interviews & Profiles. J. Caleb Mozzocco has a short profile of Gilbert Hernandez (who already has another book coming out) over at the Las Vegas Weekly.

Until recently, I missed that the often excellent Canadian literary site Hazlitt has a podcast, which often interviews cartoonists. This week, its guest is Michael Cho.

—Reviews & Commentary. Collectors Weekly has a lengthy piece on pioneering female cartoonists.

Tim O'Neil and Oliver Sava roundup recent releases at the AV Club.

Rob Clough offers his thoughts on how SPX has changed during the Warren Bernard era.

Dan linked to this Alexander Chee piece at Salon yesterday, and I've seen a lot of comics people posting it on social media approvingly. In it, Chee talks about the Roz Chast National Book Award nomination and the Alison Bechdel MacArthur grant and discusses how often literary award jurors express difficulty with knowing how to evaluate comics in a literary context. While I absolutely agree that many cartoonists (including those two) produce work at least as artistically complex and worthy of celebration as that of the prose works nominated for awards, I also think those nameless jurors have a point: comics is a different art form than prose. In a sense, nominating a graphic novel in a category dedicated to prose novels is like nominating a film in an award category devoted to live theater. Chee elides that point and attacks only the straw-man argument as to whether or not comics are worthy. I want to be clear here that I do not in any way think Chast is unworthy of nomination (I haven't read the other books nominated, but bet hers would be one of my favorites if I did), and the Bechdel award is obviously okay considering the eclectic nature of the MacArthur grant. But there is something odd about a comic competing against prose books—they work in extremely different ways—and I don't think it does anyone any favors to pretend people who notice that are somehow ignorant. It's ignorant to pretend otherwise. Chee undoubtedly knows this on some level, as is indicated by his remark implying that someday comics should have award categories of their own. Until that happens, confusion is going to be impossible to avoid.

Today on the site, Max Robinson on The Auteur Vol. 1.

The Auteur is a comic concerned with the process of the creative process. And not in the way that Oscar-bait movies about movies tend to be. The Auteur’s philosophies about the birthing of art are largely merciless in their honesty. For Nathan T. Rex, creative conception is selfish, even violent. When a starlet he hired purely based on the caliber of her breasts refuses to do a nude scene, T. Rex feeds her a bunch of manipulative BS about the power of art. “Good art is never easy. Creativity takes courage. To become truly immortal, an artist must escape all human limits.” For Nathan T. Rex, making art is not a righteous act, it’s often a criminal one as he finds himself ditching a growing pile of human remains into the ocean.

And elsewhere:

It was a big day yesterday for awards: Roz Chast was shortlisted for a National Book Award for her graphic novel Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Alison Bechdel won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called "Genius" grant. Congrats to both! Here's Alexander Chee at Salon on how/why comics fit into the cultural awards process. 

Publishers Weekly has a SPX round-up here, and R. Sikoryak posted his funny panel doodles from the weekend.

Sort of comics: The great Jim Shaw talks about his spectacular painting show (featuring some familiar Silver Age characters) on view at Metro Pictures in NYC right now.

And dept. of self-promotion: Artinfo on the catalog for my show, What Nerve!, which opens tonight at the RISD Museum of Art.

Today on the site, in honor of the release of Sugar Skull, we're happy to republish Darcy Sullivan's comprehensive (then) 1992 interview with Charles Burns. Here's a taste:

SULLIVAN: What other markets were you breaking into at the same time? You did get into Heavy Metal. When did that take place?

BURNS: Around 1982 or ’83. It didn’t pay great, but it paid, so that was nice. The El Borbah strips were serialized in there, and at that point I was starting to take the strips that appeared in Raw and sell them in European markets. That was where my other income was coming from. But it was a trickle, it was very, very gradual. I was trying to get a strip in The Village Voice, and I had a little one-panel strip that appeared in the The Rocket [a Seattle-based rock tabloid] for awhile. A couple of them got reprinted in that “Raw Gagz” [#8]. They were dumb one-shot gag cartoons. I wasn’t very comfortable with that, to tell the truth. I had made up a bunch of samples, and I was supposed to get this space on the back of The Village Voice, because supposedly whoever was doing that was going to be booted out or something. There was something weird there. I was talking to the editor about it, and he was encouraging, but I was never very happy with what I had come up with.

At that point Art Spiegelman was working for Playboy, and that was really big bucks. I remember trying to create a one-page strip for Playboy. It was kind of a romance throwback. I just never could get it. Art was trying to help me: “You’ve just gotta think about what Hugh would like.” And I never could figure out what Hugh would like. My stuff was still much too weird for them. I had a strip called “I Married a Maniac,” about some woman who’s chained to the bedpost, and she’s washing dishes. Their response was, “Uh, Charles, you’re not quite getting it. The guys who’re reading Playboy don’t want to think of themselves as sexist pigs. They’re not going to think that’s too funny.”

SULLIVAN: You were critiquing the Playboy ideal.

BURNS: Yeah. Then I was trying to throw in this sexy humor, but I just could not get with it. It was really lame.

SULLIVAN: Lots of big, buxom gals, though?

BURNS: Well … I was too embarrassed. I ended up doing stupid stuff. A woman comes home and her husband’s in a giant bunny outfit, and he says, “Come on, honey, can’t you get in the mood?” Just real stupid.

SULLIVAN: How did Art feel about working for Playboy and trying to meet that Playboy ethic?

BURNS: He was doing it for the money. It was one of the games in town. He was smart enough to figure out how to play by their rules, and did it. I think it was fairly painless for him. But it was pretty painful for me.

We also have Daniel Kalder's review of The Final Incal.

The original Incal is a tough act to follow- so esteemed in some quarters that Humanoids were recently able to charge $79.95 per volume (that’s for 48 pages of art in their luxurious “coffee table” format) and find an audience for it. That’s almost $500 for six books, which have been published many times before over the last three decades. But Final Incal is also a damn entertaining read, with pretty spectacular artwork by Ladrönn, and quite good artwork by Moebius. (The aborted volume of After the Incal is appended at the end, cleverly giving the book the same circular structure as the original Incal series.)

Elsewhere:

The longtime editorial cartoonist Tony Auth has passed away at the age of 72.

Heidi MacDonald has a story and video about/of Simon Hanselmann's "marriage to comics".

Here's the latest interview with Drew Friedman over at Gil Roth's site.

Pretty interesting piece here about an old Canadian comic book coming back into print, and with a rather illustrious artistic lineage, too.

Finally, here are some thoughts on Jerry Moriarty, who is often worth thinking about.

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for Joe McCulloch to provide a guide to this week's most intriguing new comics releases, including Sean Ford's Only Skin and Charles Burns's Sugar Skull.

And speaking of Sugar Skull, we also have a more thorough review of the conclusion to the Nitnit trilogy, written by the great Richard Gehr. Here's a bit of what he has to say:

Could the colorful Hergé-inspired trilogy Charles Burns concludes with Sugar Skull be read as a formally audacious sequel to his black-and-white masterpiece Black Hole? "A hole is never just a hole," Burns has said of the series, which launched in 2010 with X'ed Out and continued two years later with The Hive. And the lacunae, tunnels, cavities, orifices, and other absences so present in these three books cover a lot of the same creepy-ass territory as their diseased-adolescence predecessor – although his trademark meticulously rendered deformities are relegated to a fantasy realm. This time around the emphasis is on the biological consequences of the sexual desires thrumming though Burns's young fertile creatures.

Besides providing a delightfully Freudian read with heavy emotional repercussions, Sugar Skull also offers a final opportunity to enjoy the trilogy in all its fine Franco-Belgian drag prior to the inevitable single-volume repack. Hergé has been called a thieving magpie of imagery, and Burns wreaks artistic justice by inverting both Hergé's narrative style and star. Tintin becomes Nitnit, the oneiric representation of Doug, whose three-stage development from the late-seventies art-punk wannabe who calls himself Johnny 23 to a slacker record-store clerk several years later is chronicled. Snowy the dog becomes Inky the cat, who leads Nitnit down a grungy hole on X'ed Out's first page and returns for the trilogy's uncanny conclusion. (Burns's books are also littered with desert skeletons reminiscent of the dead dromedaries Hergé snagged from photographer J. Pascal Sebah and dropped into The Crab With the Golden Claws.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—SPX. This was the first SPX in something like a decade that I wasn't able to attend, and of course the Social Media has made it seem like the most entertaining ever. As Joe mentions in his column, if all goes well, he will have a report from SPX up for us later this week. We also plan to publish another SPX report in a different mode, from Whit Taylor (who you may remember from her excellent piece on the Comics & Medicine festival earlier this year). In the meantime, we'll all have to make do with what we can find elsewhere online, including Brigid Alverson's photo report from the Ignatz Awards.

—Interviews. Tim O'Shea talks to the Magic Whistle artist (and occasional TCJ contributor) Sam Henderson.

The aforementioned Charles Burns talks briefly with Françoise Mouly and Mina Kaneko about the connection between Sugar Skull and Tintin.

Zachary Clemente catches up with Annie Koyama.

And my coeditor Dan talks to ARTnews about his What Nerve! show.

—News. The Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Tony Auth has passed away. Here's his home paper obituary.

After 40+ years, a lot of Maurice Sendak work is leaving the Rosenbach Museum, in order eventually to become part of a planned Sendak museum in Connecticut.

—Reviews & Commentary. The New Yorker has a long piece by Jill Lepore on the hidden history of Wonder Woman (with a cameo from Margaret Sanger). I assume this is either an excerpt or includes material from her upcoming much-anticipated book on the same subject.

Domingos Isabelinho writes about Brian Evenson's book on Chester Brown. (I think he's right about those intestines.)

Bobsy gives the Mindless Ones treatment to Multiversity #1.

Sean Kleefeld talks about the complicated promotional strategies that Marvel has to pursue in order to get its cinematic house in order.

Today on the site:

Julie Gfrorer returns with her latest column.

Birds and other flying creatures are associated with Mercury, the wing-footed messenger god, and thus with intellectual thought, ideas, and communication. Birds sing to one another and can be trained to speak and carry messages for humans who tame them, and like thoughts, they freely explore places beyond human (physical) reach. Inspired ideas can seem to be soaring overhead; we glimpse them and hope they will choose us as their perch. Untethered birds are impracticable ideas, ideas not yet snared by the ponderous necessity of action. Sometimes airborne imagery denotes wishful thinking: an unrealistic fantasy is a “flight of fancy,” a daydreamer’s refuge is “cloud cuckoo land.” When a flock behaves unpredictably or attacks, insanity is implied—the subject’s own thoughts are trying to kill them.

Grant Snider, in “Collecting My Thoughts,” presents himself as at the mercy of his untamed mind. In the form of winged animals, the thoughts swarm, buzz, evade, impose, stupefy and loom. He gets the better of them only twice—his “bottled up thoughts” (trapped safe in a jar) and “thoughtlessness” (the thought/bird apparently slain with a slingshot) allow him to feel in control, but now he’s attacking them, rather than engaging. And the rest of the time he’s content to let the thoughts run roughshod over him, while he plays the role of their hapless observer, apparently unmotivated to chase them down, preferring to be resigned to his neurosis.

Sean T. Collins reviews Gabrielle Bell's July Diary.

At first glance, Gabrielle Bell’s six-panel daily diary comics don’t have a lot in common with the Mines of Moria sequence in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings . Or at any number of subsequent glances, I suppose. But the more Bell I read, the more I think they share a primary strength: a sense of space, of environment. Autobio slice-of-life comics, by the nature of what most of us tend to do with our lives every day, often consist in large part of conversations, either with a small number of other parties or within the head of the diarist as they go about their day. Unless those conversations reference a specific landmark, cartooned depictions of them can, and often do, devolve into dialogues that could be taking place anywhere, or nowhere. They have all the spatial context of action figures or dolls or sock puppets held aloft by the cartoonist, one in each hand, and made to speak with the voices of the participants. 

Elsewhere:

Here's a preview of my show opening on Thursday at the RISD Museum. The article itself is filled with misquotes and bad information, but hey, it's publicity baby! Quick notes: I'm the curator of the show; Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield didn't use YouTube and Vimeo to distribute their work; I never published "Forcefield". etc. etc. But, other than that, dive in!

SPX is over, and here are the Ignatz winners. And go over to the SPX Tumblr for lots of photos from the weekend.

Chris Ware is serializing a new graphic novel at The Guardian.

And finally, Sean Howe has unearthed a very early clipping about Jim Steranko -- maybe the earliest recounting of Steranko's escapist stuff.

Fantagraphics is launching a new imprint, Fantagraphics Underground, which will publish books with potentially low commercial appeal in very small print runs. You can read their press release about the announcement here. It's an interesting idea, but one that inspired more than a few questions. Dan posed them to Gary Groth last night, and you can read that interview today. Here's a small taste:

DN: Who is the editorial director of this imprint?

Gary Groth: I am.

Why [lead off with] Fukitor? That seems like a particularly controversial choice.

Both books could be considered controversial choices. One is certainly a prime example of transgressive art and the other is a relentless attack on modernist art and beloved and successful artists such as Warhol, de Kooning, and Schnabel. I'm glad you asked me this because I've been wrestling with this for awhile. Jim Rugg, an artist I like and respect, was the prime mover behind Fukitor (he edited the collection). I am admittedly more ambivalent about it than Jim, who is a passionate advocate, but I ultimately concluded that its mockery and ridicule of the more idiotic aspects of pop culture makes it worthwhile (and funny). I know, of course, that that is not everyone's interpretation, and I don't discount the possibility that it is both a symptom of as well as a response to a rancid pop culture, which makes it a more difficult work to navigate.

I think it's a publisher's obligation to take risks; I could probably publish safe, respectable "literary" comics or solid, "good," uncontroversial comics for the rest of my life. I think it's important, personally and professionally, to occasionally get outside your comfort zone.

We also have Dominic Umile's review of Michael Cho's new Shoplifter, the latest comics publication from major publisher Pantheon, and I believe their first comics debut. (Certainly one of their first.) Here's some of that review:

The budding kleptomania in Shoplifter isn't as extreme a case as the one that Canadian comics creator Pascal Girard recounts in 2014's funny and also love-and-misdemeanor-driven Petty Theft, but like Girard's Sarah, who calls book-stealing "a bit of a rush," Corrina Park finds comfort in the inherent sense of danger. Exiting the store with stolen goods is a break from the hours she spends fantasizing about leading an isolated novelist's life or mulling her own overt difficulty with interaction: "I'm so bad at groups," she confesses. "Sometimes when everyone is talking, I start to get self-conscious." Peeking out from under a head of black bobbed hair that never quite crests the shoulders of her peers, Park is cast as diminutive, disconnected, and alone, even in an enormous city that's overrun with people.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—More Mouly. Alex Dueben talks to Françoise Mouly about the expansion of her Toon Books.

—More SPX. Chris Mautner has some advice for attendees.

—Reviews & Commentary. Pascal Wyse at The Guardian looks at the way cities have been portrayed in comics, from Batman to the work of Sophie Yanow.

Rob Clough looks at recent work by Sam Alden.

Virgil Texas straight-facedly considers how comic strips remembered 9/11, and finds Garfield lacking.

Dana Jennings at the New York Times considers two recent reprints of EC war comics.

—Spending Opportunities. Top Shelf is having their annual massive $3 sale.

Gabrielle Bell is selling original art from her July Diary series on her site.

—Misc. Zainab Akhtar got Michael DeForge to give a photographic tour of his comics collection. I like his organizational style.

The whole weird Greg Theakston/Kirby Museum art borrowing controversy continues to grow and mutate. John Morrow spoke up about it yesterday.

—Video. Finally, courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books, here's Ben Katchor:

Today on the site we have new contributor Hazel Cills writing about Yumi Sakugawa’s I Think I’m In Friend Love With You.

The ways in which people express and compartmentalize their loneliness is comic artist Yumi Sakugawa’s thematic trademark. Her viral mini-comic I Think I’m In Friend Love With You, a neatly drawn love letter seemingly drafted especially for the world’s most introverted, is perhaps the work she’s most known for. But her latest, Never Forgets, is an exploration of a more abstract strain of alienation, the sort of bodily disconnect that forces a woman to efface herself to become a more admired, “true self.”

Ken Parille takes a look at some usual problems for new comics in 2014.

In this column, I typically look at cartoonists, artists, and comics that I like, focusing on those that do interesting things in unusual ways. This time, I examine five recent comics that didn’t work for me. I tackle a specific problem in each narrative that represents the comic’s larger troubles, as I see them. I conclude by recommending a few new books and answering the question, “Who is the best American-comics-influenced British writer?”

Elsewhere:

Monday is the deadline for the latest round of enrollment for Frank Santoro's Correspondence Course.

Jerry Beck has a fine book review round-up on recent publications by Barks, Rosa, Friedman and others.

Paul Gravett interviews Keiichi Tanaami, the Japanese psychedelic artist who has experienced a surprising resurgence over the last decade, and who I published in The Ganzfeld and Electrical Banana.

Hey, you can now get a gander at the Fantagraphics Complete Zap set. the astonishing comics aside, Patrick Rosenkranz's oral history is great. Is it expensive? Yes, yes it is. But you can also buy the comics for less than $20 if you want to go that route.

The Guinness World Records organization and proclaimed this man to have the world's largest comic book collection.

It's always a good day when another Paul Tumey column comes down the pike, and today is a good day. He's talking about Alley Oop:

It was the Dr. Who of the 1940s, a comic strip that traveled though history with verve and panache -- not to mention lots of wisecracks. Only, instead of charming, eccentrically dressed Englishmen wielding sonic screwdrivers, there was a practically naked caveman with a stone ax. Begun in 1932 by Vincent Trout Hamlin (1900-1993), Alley Oop continues to this day, ably written and drawn by Jack and Carole Bender and appearing in about 600 newspapers.

Alley Oop is an iconic American newspaper comic strip character. His nipple-less, six-packed, Popeye-armed body is as memorable and weird as Dick Tracy's hooked nose and Little Orphan Annie's blank eyes. No history of 20th century American comics, no matter how slight, would be credible if it didn't include Alley Oop. Aside from that iconic status, why should anyone today care about the early years of this ancient, dusty comic strip?

For me, a comics nut who was occasionally and momentarily drawn in by Hamlin’s singular visual language, but never fully “got”Alley Oop before, the answer lies in the strip's seventh year, a good chunk of which can now be found between the slate grey covers of Alley Oop 1939 (Dean Mullaney, editor, introduction by Michael H. Price, IDW Library of American Comics Essentials, 2013). This spiffy little volume presents, with the typical smart design and good production qualities we've come to associate with Dean Mullaney's Library of American Comics books, the daily episodes of the strip's first time travel adventure, from March 6, 1939 to March 23, 1940. You read that right: time travel.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. After many years of avoiding commentary on Israel, Art Spiegelman has provided an illustration for a Nation article on the conflict in Gaza. He shared the art (and some of his thoughts) on this Facebook post. The Forward (the Jewish paper which originally ran his In the Shadow of No Towers) has more on the story.

—Podcasts. Roz Chast makes an appearance on Gil Roth's great Virtual Memories podcast.

Roman Muradov made me laugh out loud two or three times on his episode of Inkstuds.

I also very much recommend the Tom Scioli/Ed Piskor episode of Tell Me Something I Don't Know, though the spirited defense of Rob Liefeld near the end of it left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Artists legitimately get their inspiration from all kinds of sources, which I'd never want to question, but I didn't really get any idea why the general reader (and particularly one who didn't grow up at just the right time) would want to read Liefeld. This isn't aimed at Ed P., who said he wasn't interested in convincing anyone, but any others out there who want to spread the word on Liefeld (I hear scattered reports of their existence) should try to get more specific about what's so great about him if they want to raise his stock. You know, make the case. What Liefeld stories (or pages or panels) might convert a skeptic? If he's really worthwhile as an artist, it shouldn't be impossible to communicate why.

—Reviews & Commentary. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has reprinted a 1980 essay he wrote on the legacy of MAD magazine, on the release of the awful Up the Academy movie.

Literary blogger Ed Champion thinks Michael Cho's Shoplifter finds the cartoonist pulling his punches.

Interviews. Tom Spurgeon talks to Françoise Mouly. Alex Dueben talks to Farel Dalrymple and Eleanor Davis.

—Spending Opportunities. Sparkplug Books is running a modest Kickstarter to fund their fall line.

—SPX Previews. Rob Clough has posted his annual list of creators and publishers to seek out at SPX. Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly has an article on the festival's 20th anniversary. Panel Patter has a slew of SPX coverage up, including Rob Kirby's interview with Sophie Yanow, and Whit Taylor's interview with Josh Bayer.

It's Joe McCulloch with your week in comics!

Elsewhere:

The closing of the comic book store Bigkatt's, and the effect of that closing on the community.

This is a fun and groovy anecdote about a very early Bill Griffith drawing of Mick Jagger.

Here's a nice profile of Gary Panter on the occasion of his new painting show.

Here's another take on the Friedman and Beauchamp comic book history books.

Good morning and sorry for the somewhat late blog post -- I plead unexpected automotive problems. Today we have Sophie Yanow's interview with Simon Hanselmann. Here's a bit of that:

What is this wedding you're doing [at SPX]?

I was joking about having a fake wedding, and then Cohen at Fantagraphics got really excited about it and said, "We'll do it, it'll be real." It's a publicity stunt, basically. I'm going to buy a wedding dress. Grant and I have to get drunk and go to the wedding dress strip and buy a wedding dress. I'm worried about how much it's going to cost. It's a fake wedding; DeForge is my best man. It was going to be officiated by Gary Groth, but I think Chris Mautner is doing it now, from Comic Book Resources. There's going to be cake, balloons, I'm getting married to comics. It's going to be a beautiful, emotional, symbolic kind of tribute to my love of the craft. I'm kind of nervous about it now, because I kind of have to write it, like it's a comedy bit in a way. And it's very heartfelt in a way. I'm kind of a bit crazy. It will have meaning to me, but it's just kind of a lark as well. I'm going to do a talk at Parsons, I've got my list of all the stuff I have to do, I'm going to do Gridlords.

Yeah, Gridlords is fun.

I think DeForge has organized like ten gigs, playing music. I've got so much to do in three and a half weeks, and I'm trying to get 8 weeks ahead on Vice, and I'm going stir crazy in this little prison cell of my own making.

Are you going to be playing those shows too?

Yeah, I'm doing all of them. I play music, I'm terrible.

I listened to it, I liked it. I like noisy stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I hang around with people in bands and that make music, so I just try and do it. When I lived in the UK I did a lot of gigs. I played the Big Chill, a big weird festival. There's like Glastonbury, and the Big Chill. Somehow I ended up playing there with Lily Allen and Kelis. It was weird, and I played a lot of gigs, but they were terrible. Sometimes people wouldn't want to pay me, like I'd hang around and be like, "C'mon, I want my hundred pounds. AHEM. You heard my MySpace, you heard what I sounded like, you knew what you were in for." I'm nervous about it because I haven't played gigs for a long time. My old band got back together recently. But we just get really drunk and it's very shambolic. And it's kind of mean as well. Horse Mania, my band, is weird. My friend Karl Von Bamberger is weird. It's very confronting and really tests the audience. So I don't know how it'll go with Creep Highway. Yeah, people are mean in Australia. People like mean stuff.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Anne Ishii talks to Michael DeForge.

—Rob Clough writes about Drew Friedman's Heroes of the Comics.

—BuzzFeed of all places has a history of Viz.

—And finally, the New York Review of Books has unlocked a 1985 essay on Peanuts and Krazy Kat by Umberto Eco. Nicole Rudick shared some thoughts on the Eco piece here.

Well, I'm in Providence for a week to install my exhibition, What Nerve! So I come to you from deep within a Hampton Inn hotel room. It's cold in here! Last night I went to a music show organized by Carlos Gonzalez over at CF's place. Here's a bad photo of the flyer:I was allllmost the oldest person there, topped by the only other people I knew: Brian Chippendale and Ara Peterson. Old old old.

Here are some Forcefield dudes in mid-installation. 

Here's a detail of Jack Kirby's Dream Machine, which I've been living with for two days. It does not ever get old. 

OK, enough of me... today on the site:

Speaking of Providence, here's Rob Clough on U.D.W.F.G.

That Fort Thunder aesthetic is kept alive in the Italian anthology series U.D.W.F.G (Under Dark Weird Fantasy Grounds). Editor and publisher Michele Nitri is obviously enamored of this style of storytelling, as he's published the first chapters of five different serials from five different artists all working in this style. Brinkman is the name most familiar to English-speaking audiences, though his visual approach will appear startlingly different to anyone who hasn't been following him in recent years. The visuals in his serial "Cretin Keep on Creepin' Creek" are dark grey smudges with a dense, black background. The video game and superhero comic elements present in his earlier work have been mostly expunged in favor of a soupy, atmospheric approach. The visuals are actually quite similar to the work he did for the Cave Evil game a couple of years ago.

And here's Sean T. Collins on Molly Colleen O'Connell's Don't Tell Mom.

In Don’t Tell Mom, Molly Colleen O’Connell successfully realigns form and function: She grants the poetically absurd sexts featured on each of this zine’s drawings of cellphones the power to derange not only the physical objects that convey them, but logic and language themselves. The message, about the distorting influence of sexual desire, is received loud and clear.

Elsewhere:

The Brooklyn Book Festival has released its slate of programming, including a panel moderated by our own Nicole Rudick.

I always love caricatures on restaurant walls, and The Palm had tons, including many by famous cartoonists. Well, not for long...

The Sunday Press is having a helluva sale on its inventory of gorgeous and enormous books.

Today we feature the return of Matthias Wivel's Eurocomics column, and it's been way too long. In this installment, Matthias writes in depth about the work of French-Beninese artist Yvan Alagbé, and his recent return to the characters from one of his key books. But Matthias also examines the artists' group Amok, the sociopolitical legacy of French colonialism, and much more. Here's a sample:

Alagbé’s brush-and-ink cartooning is alternately lush and sparse, scruffy and exacting, black and white, with echoes of Muñoz and Aristophane Boulon. He selectively lends texture to areas of focus, while leaving others defined only by contour. Although he makes selective use of symbolic passages, he is a realist at heart, attentive to facial and bodily expression. At times he errs on the side of the obvious, but he also occasionally catches real moments of ambiguity as well as emotional clarity—the combination of apprehension, skepticism, boredom, and impotence drawn on the faces of the siblings listening to Mario’s tales of African adventure; the genuine expression of affection shown by Mario as he speaks to his daughter on the phone; and so on, moment after moment.

Alagbé modulates his rendering skillfully. Everybody, whatever the color of their skin, alternately appears lighter or darker, and specific physiognomic traits, particularly those of the black Africans, are occasionally emphasized to contrast strongly with their white surroundings, reflecting the social context. The point, however, seems to be that in a graphic world consisting uniquely of black marks on white paper, everybody is black.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Chris Ware follows Robert Crumb as the second cartoonist to get major interview treatment in The Paris Review. They've posted an excerpt of Jeet Heer's talk with Ware online. Brian Heater at Publishers Weekly catches up with John Porcellino before the impending release of his Hospital Suite. The Atlantic talks to Pat Oliphant. Paul Karasik interviews Jules Feiffer in comics form. Alan Moore talks Lovecraft. Liz Prince talks about growing up a tomboy.

—Reviews & Commentary. Paul Constant on Jim Woodring's Jim. Robert Wringham on R. Crumb. Sarah Moroz on Quentin Blake. Robert Boyd on a variety of different comics.

—Misc. Michael J. Vassallo has more on Stan Goldberg. Gene Luen Yang gave a well-received speech on diversity at the National Book Festival. Small Press Previews may turn out to be very useful.