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Richard Gehr is here with an obituary of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti.

Charles Barsotti – or “Charley,” as nearly everyone called him – was born September 28, 1933, in San Marcos, Texas. “Everything down there either had thorns on it or bit,” he said of his hometown when I interviewed him in January 2013, “and that includes the adults.” Howard, his father, sold furniture in San Antonio, where Charley was raised. His mother, the delightfully named Dicey Belle Branum, was a schoolteacher. Barsotti credited his hard-working parents with inspiring his own determined work ethic. “That, and fear,” he added.

And John Seven reviews Gabrielle Bell's new book.

Bell’s encounter with Dominique Goblet at Fumetto-Internationales Comix Festival in Switzerland gives insight to what Bell sees beneath the surface of her autobiographical work. Through lectures and conversations, Goblet unveils an autobiographical goal for Bell, an understanding that “there is no trueness,” in Goblet’s words, “just facts and the links that connect the facts.”

It gets to the heart of what Bell has done naturally in her autobiographical work before and strives to do more purposefully as she continues. Why does she challenge herself to these diaries when she also often mentions how dissatisfied she is by the prospect of doing them? What is she trying to attain by sharing these works that could easily function as private, daily exercises in cartooning of no interest to anyone else but the cartoonist? Is this part of Bell’s pursuit of a phantom called objective truth? Or is it her acknowledgement that we fashion our own truth, and her way of doing so is within panels on paper?

Elsewhere:

There's been a major development in the Kirby vs. Marvel legal case.

The Society of Illustrators is holding its Hall of Fame induction ceremony this weekend. Nice to see Ed Sorel and Al Jaffee on the list. Sorel is one of the all-time great illustrators, and one whose work is always worth a second and third look.

An interview with the authors of a new play about Jack Kirby.

And here's an author-centric look at the current Amazon wars.

Today on the site we have Rob Clough's review of Sophie Yanow's War of Streets and Houses. Here's a sample:

Sophie Yanow's autobiographical series In Situ reveals an artist whose understanding and experience of art, philosophy, politics and daily life are all inextricably bound together. Her new book, War of Streets and Houses, is a fascinating study of protest, privilege, self-awareness and political frustration. It's an eyewitness account of being part of the tuition strike at a Montreal university in 2011 as well as a meditation on what it means to protest, both on a personal and global level. It's also a philosophical and historical examination of the history of counter-protest and counter-revolutionary actions on the part of governments. Indeed, the comic's title refers to an infamous pamphlet written by a French officer named Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, whose co-opting of houses in Algiers proved to be a key strategy in defeating separatists in the 1840s.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. Chris Mautner talks to Lane Millburn. 13th Dimension interviews Larry Hama about working with Wally Wood.

—Profiles. Crime novelist James Sallis pays tribute to the French crime writer (and Jacques Tardi collaborator) Jean-Patrick Manchette. Mike Sacks talks to Tales from Times Square author (and Drew Friedman collaborator) Josh Alan Friedman.

—Reviews & Criticism. The NY Times reviews Nick Bertozzi's Shackleton. Rob Clough looks at recentish Box Brown minicomics. Benjamin Rogers is thinking about the format of concertina comics.

Leah Wishnia has a strong, impassioned report of her disillusionment following a recent visit to a comics show at the Scott Eder Gallery in New York.

I don't know if everyone will be able to read it, but David Heatley has a long post on his Facebook page making public his thoughts on his comics career, his relationship with and admiration for Chris Ware, and internet criticism.

—Misc. Bob Mankoff remembers Charles Barsotti. Jeff Trexler gets into the legalities of things like that recent Clickhole Calvin & Hobbes parody. Will Dinski drew a comic about going to see Art Spiegelman talk. Ben Towle remembers Chris Reilly. Calvin Reid profiles Conundrum Press.

Busy day here today:

Rob Steibel is here with his final Kirby column for TCJ.

Jack did not need to put that much detail into a piece like this. A few very simple lines would have given his inker Vince Colletta enough to go on. So why did Kirby pack so much detail into an image like this, using thousands of pencil lines to provide shading for the illustration, especially considering he worked under such crushing deadlines cranking out an average of three entire comic books a month? I suspect that Jack Kirby was very passionate about his work. I think he was a perfectionist, and I think he enjoyed illustrating a page like this. He was finding the image throughout the illustration process, experimenting, and interestingly that quest for perfection is similar to the journey Jack talks about in his directions for Stan Lee on this page: the “trail may lead to ends of infinity – but he can only redeem himself through this assignment.” And that’s what many artists do, yes they make a living if they are lucky plying their craft, but the process of creating imagery on a blank page can be an adventure into your own imagination and a great excuse to study history and art.

And Richard Gehr reviews Roz Chast's new graphic novel.

Like much of Chast’s work, Can’t We Talk is a formal triumph that at first glance looks somewhat a mess.The New Yorker‘s most stylistically experimental cartoonist, Chast draws single-panel cartoons and multipage nonfiction narratives for the magazine in addition to creating monumental lists, typologies, calendars, archaeologies, fake publications, and real children’s books. Chast rarely makes do with a single gag. Her cartoons are often mini-multiples. From the rocky collection of “little things” (“chent,” spak,” “kabe,” etc.) that comprised her first TNY cartoon, she has been the magazine’s preeminent underpromiser/overdeliverer. She also happens to be one of the magazine’s best writers, and the book gives her the space to expand on funny, anxious, and often infuriating things that happen in her cartoons when she wants to convey the full weight of the Chast clan’s considerable neurotic karma.

Elsewhere:

The great New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti has died. Richard Gehr interviewed him for this site just last year.

Cartoonist Matthew Thurber's excellent play Mining the Moon, which I saw and loved, gets a very nice review over here.

And I'm always happy to see more Blobby Boys.

Quick, quick! Joe McCulloch is giving a guided tour of the most interesting sounding new comics in stores this week. His spotlight pick is the collection of Wally Wood's Witzend, which really is an amazing object I've been spending a lot of time with myself over the last few weeks. A fascinating historical document, with lots of great comics, too.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. SpyVibe talks to Richard Sala. Tom Spurgeon talks to Mike Dawson.

I try not to link to podcasts I have not yet had the time to listen to, but here are several that I am guessing are worth it, based on past performance: Gil Roth talks to Seth. Dan Berry talks to Jason Shiga and John Martz & Dustin Harbin.

—Reviews & Criticism. Rob Clough writes about Chris Wright's Black Lung. Susan Burton reviews the Tamakis' This One Summer as a children's book in the NY Times. Gabriele Di Fazio writes about Sam Alden. Zaina Akhtar writes about Gipi.

—Misc. SPX has announced another impressive guest list. Michael Cavna of the Washington Post won well-deserved awards from the Society for Features Journalism.

And Craig Fischer is organizing a big panel for Heroes Con, and he'd like to tell you about. Link is here, and text is below:

Comics Regulation, Comics Censorship: Past and Present

For their 2014 mega-panel, cartoonist Ben Towle and writer Craig Fischer team up with a cadre of expert commentators to examine those moments when political and public outrage over the content of comic books disrupted the body politic. The panel begins with a discussion of the recent South Carolina Fun Home controversy, where legislators in the House of Representatives tried to reduce state funding to the College of Charleston as a penalty for using Alison Bechdel’s lesbian-themed graphic novel in a campus program. Present for the Fun Home discussion are Dr. Consuela Francis, a comics scholar and professor in the English Department at the College of Charleston, and Christopher Brook, the Legal Director of North Carolina’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Then we’ll reconsider one of the most controversial figures in comics history: Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of 1954’s Seduction of the Innocent (published 60 years ago) and outspoken critic of what he considered the negative effects of comics on children. We’ll be joined via video by Dr. Bart Beaty (the author of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture [2005]) and Dr. Carol Tilley (the author of an article about distortions in Wertham’s research) to chart the latest developments in “Wertham Studies.”

Finally, Craig will conduct a career-spanning interview with legendary industry figure Denis Kitchen. We’ll zero in on the censorship hassles Kitchen tackled as a publisher and distributor of underground comix, on his role in the founding of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in 1986, and on his involvement in the CBLDF’s highest profile case, the arrest and conviction of artist Mike Diana for obscenity in 1994 (20 years ago!). Join us for a thought-provoking exchange of ideas…and for a cake decorated to look like the seal of the Comics Code Authority!

This panel is sponsored by the ACLU of North Carolina.

R.C. Harvey is here with a report from this year's Reuben Awards. Here's a sample:

The formal climax of the evening is the presentation of the Reuben, the name of the trophy given to the “cartoonist of the year.” By the custom of the awards banquet, the Reuben is presented by the oldest Reuben recipient present—for years, that’s been Mort Walker (who won in 1953 for Beetle Bailey), but he was unable to attend this year; hence the next in age and dignity, Mell Lazarus (who won in 1981 for Momma and Miss Peach), presented the trophy this year to Wiley Miller, whose unique achievements in on the funnies pages of the nation’s newspapers exceed even the customary high standards set by previous Reuben winners, as we hope to convince you in a subsequent Hare Tonic PROfile of Wiley (his signature name).

Taking the podium to receive the trophy, his cherubic face aglow, Wiley began a graceful acceptance speech by noting that it was “a once-in-a-lifetime award.” He probably thought he was speaking figuratively, but it is also true literally. Only a handful of cartoonists have won twice (Milton Caniff, Dik Browne, Charles Schulz, Pat Oliphant, Jeff MacNelly and Bill Watterson), and after Watterson won in 1986 and 1988, NCS adopted a “one to a customer” policy. Never again will two Reubens decorate the mantlepiece of some cartoonist’s domicile.

And we also have John Seven's review of Conor Stechschulte's The Amateurs. Here's a sample of that:

Stechschulte spoke at the New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium about his influences in crafting The Amateurs, a mix of various heady ideas spurred on by a passage in a Werner Herzog book about the filming of Fitzcarraldo that relates a bloody scene involving some bumbling butchers in India in a bloody scene of carnage. This is directly reflected in Stechschulte’s story, a gruesome slapstick, as are the other influences he mentioned in the talk, including the film writings of Kaja Silverman, particularly in regard to disconnection, and the horror of Lovecraft. All these concerns, though, are filtered through Stechschulte’s personal approach and tempered by the most overt presence in the entire book — absence. Not just absence of memory, but absence of context, as if Stechshulte has stripped away explanations in order to focus his study on results. A sense of foreboding dominates the book, but foreboding of what? Nothing set the foreboding in place and there are no promises of solid reasons to explain the unease.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Criticism. Matt Kuhns looks more closely at Seth's Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, and realized it was much more nonfictional than he'd previously realized.

—News. Brigid Alverson delves into the fallout of the Graphic.ly sale, interviewing creator Dave Dellecese about alleged payment problems, among other issues. There will be a bone marrow drive in support of Seth Kushner at this weekend's New York Comic Fest.

—Interviews & Profiles. Paul Constant writes a mini-profile of Seattle Genius nominee and Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. BuzzFeed talks to Sam Alden.

—Misc. Luke Pearson, book cover designer. Smithsonian.com looks into the history of the "official" map of Gotham City.

—Funnies. Comics Alliance has a preview of the upcoming, long-awaited new collection of Jim Woodring's Jim. And Emily Carroll has up a new webcomic, The Hole the Fox Did Make.

Today on this site, here's Chris Mautner interviewing Katie Skelly, author of Nurse Nurse and Operation Margarine.

Both in Nurse Nurse but especially in Operation Margarine you’re drawing to a large degree on a certain kind of pulp comics and cinema that trade heavily on sex and exploitation. Despite its influences, Margarine avoids any overt sexualization of its characters, for romantic purposes or otherwise. Is that simply because you felt that element didn’t fit within the structure of the book or was there a more considered, deliberate or even political reason?

I think to this point I’ve tended to compartmentalize sex in my work; like, if I’m going to have sex in a comic, I just want to do a sex comic, even then it tends to stay on the cheekier side of X-rated (for instance the comic “Breeding Season” in Thickness #1 and the Agent 8 series I’m doing for slutist.com). I haven’t really found a way to work sex into my longer stories that feels natural yet, you know? There’s a little vignette where Gemma is post-coital in Nurse Nurse, but I think having sex removed from the equation in Margarine adds to the sense of detachment in that story. I mean sure, I took inspiration from Russ Meyer, but more the spirit than the letter. I think the character Margarine is so detached from her body that sex wouldn’t really enter her universe right then, and it’s implied that Bon-Bon gets used as a side piece, but it doesn’t do very much for her. I saw someone on tumblr say they thought there was room for romance between Margarine and Bon-Bon in the story, which I thought was an interesting way to read it.

Elsewhere:

Paul Karasik deconstructs a Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon on the... New Yorker site. Which reminds me of this photo of Arno, which remains very very strange.

Jesse Moynihan is on Inkstuds.

Here's a particularly nice Leslie Stein cartoon.

Photos from the Dan Clowes opening at Ohio State.

And here are some oddball examples of mid-80s underground art up for auction, including some Clowes work.

Today, historian and filmmaker Patrick Rosenkranz (whose own much-anticipated bio of S. Clay Wilson is imminent), writes about the art and comics collector, Glenn Bray, whose collection is featured in the recent Blighted Eye. Here's a brief sample:

Bray is listed as author, but [Lena] Zwalve contributed as much to the book as he did, he insists. “During production she said you don’t have to put my name on it, because I’m all over the book already, but now she says she’s kinda sorry she did not take more credit.” She does get star billing in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, with the inscription: “Lena Zwalve, to whom my love and this book are dedicated.” Not the same as a shared byline, but he spelled her name right. Zwalve was the founding mother of Tante Leny Presenteert, a Dutch underground comic series from the 1970s.

Their home is not a museum, says Bray, a retired hardware store proprietor. “We live here. And we don’t charge admission.” He does rotate the exhibition periodically, and many visitors have asked to bring friends to view their wide-ranging artistic accumulations. Bray’s taste runs to the satirical and the surreal, mostly by artists from the second half of the 20th century, but also embraces the current crop of cultural curiosities. Harvey Kurtzman’s comic pages are well represented in this collection, along with fellow MAD artists Al Feldstein, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and Basil Wolverton. The underground cartoonists have a large presence, especially Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, Robert Crumb, and S. Clay Wilson. More recent alternative cartoonists are also in the mix, including Dan Clowes, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Ware, Gary Panter, and Johnny Ryan. Several illustrators and fine artists from the early 20^th century are represented, including Gluyas Williams, Virgil Finlay, Alan Odle, and the focus of his current fascination, Art Young.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews. Granta talks to Adrian Tomine. The Quietus talks to Alan Moore, primarily about the influence on him of writer Iain Sinclair. Hogan's Alley has posted their lengthy interview with Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis.

—Reviews & Criticism. Tom Gill continues his examination of Tsuge Yoshiharu. NPR looks at Frank King's Walt Before Skeezix. Dominic Umile writes about I.N.J. Culbard's Celeste.

—Misc. There are only a few days left to vote for the Eisner Awards. The Daniel Clowes Reader site has found some old OK Cola ads.

Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal (Google Cache here) doubling down on the call for "conservative" comics written by their collaborator Amity Shlaes the other week. I will resist the urge to pontificate here, but will note that it's strange how they elide over the fact that Superman's most common early foes were ubercapitalist businessmen abusing labor...

Finally, the comics writer/editor/scholar (and TCJ.com contributor) Paul Buhle talked about his most recent book with Rick Perlstein on C-SPAN.

Hello, it's Tuesday and so Joe will take you through the notable releases of the day, with a side dish of Ping Pong.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon pointed to this post by Julia Wertz about publishing a new book. I was a little baffled by this part of the post:

If you cannot afford a book package directly from me, I highly encourage you to purchase the book directly from Atomic Books or your local comic book store. I understand that sometimes Amazon is the only choice, in which case, please try to buy the book from Atomic Books on Amazon, under Wunderpants Productions. When you buy a book from some random place, neither my publisher nor I see a penny from that and the sales does not count as a book sold for us...

I hope that's some sort of misunderstanding, as every sale, short of used books, of course, goes to the publisher and then the author. Or at least that's how I always did it. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd love to see more honest and frank conversations about publishing like Julia's. I often wonder how all these companies without distribution are getting by. The internet and the festival circuit are awfully expensive and labor intensive ways to distribute a book. Stores help a lot.

I will never tire of knowing that Arnold Roth posts new work online. It makes me happy. Does anyone draw like Arnold Roth? Nope.

Remember that Antonio Rubino stuff I blabbed about last week? Well it's apparently available very cheap right now. In Italian. But still.

David Brothers quit reading Marvel and DC comics and explains why.

And finally, Tom Gill on Tsuge.

Today, Rob Clough is here with a long, detailed look at cartoonist (and sometime TCJ.com contributor) Rob Kirby's latest comics anthology, QU33R. Here's a brief excerpt:

What's interesting about Kirby is that while he's been a prominent queer cartoonist and editor for nearly twenty-five years, he also sees himself and the artists he publishes as part of the greater alt-comics scene. The queer alt-comics scene is one that has evolved parallel to the straight underground scene, with surprisingly little crossover or awareness between the two audiences. Of course, that's never been the case for Kirby himself, who grew up reading Weirdo and worked to have John Porcellino distribute his comics through Porcellino's Spit And A Half. It's always been part of his mission to find ways to connect the two communities without compromising the identity of the queer community. This is one reason why the 2012 Justin Hall-edited No Straight Lines was such a landmark. While that totally uncompromising survey of queer comics not only won a Lambda Literary award, it was also nominated for the (quite mainstream) Eisner Award. Kirby's new anthology QU33R is very much a reaction to and extension of No Straight Lines. If the latter collection represents the past of queer comics (including the very notion of what it is to be queer in the modern day), Kirby wanted to assemble an anthology that provides a snapshot of its present.

Today also marks the return of TCJ all-star Bob Levin, who reviews Adam, the debut prose novel from longtime cartoonist Ariel Schrag, who, Levin says, previously "produced the most compelling rendition of adolescence by an adolescent I have ever read." Here's a snippet from Levin's review:

...Schrag ceased creating graphic novels. (She wrote, in Likewise, that the comic had overtaken her life. Her daily experiences were being shaped by a "predetermined" view of how they would fit into her book-in-progress. Perhaps, that is why.) She graduated from Columbia, in 2003. She wrote for the television series The L Word and How To Make It In America. She did some stories in comic form. But after publicly chronicling the most intimate details of her life, she was essentially quiet. Now Schrag has returned with a "non-graphic" (in the pictorial sense) novel, Adam (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Again, her protagonist is a Bay Area teenager. Again, sexual exploration is her major concerns. But now her major figure is male, Adam Freeman (a risky name choice, granted; but if repeated rapidly a dozen times, immunity can be acquired to its bludgeoning "Get-it?" aspect). Now his quest relocates quickly to New York City and is complicated by his exposure to the crossed-over (MTF and FTM), those who remain in-transit between arrival, and those at play with the varied permutations spread upon the table.

And finally, Dan forgot to mention in his blog post last Friday that we had published the latest review from Greg Hunter, this time on Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's very popular Sex Criminals. And here's a bit of that:

The world literally stops for Suzie and Jon when either of them has an orgasm. These characters can temporarily move around while everything around them remains frozen in time. In One Weird Trick, the two find each other. Not long after Suzie and Jon hook up, the couple decides to rob banks during this post-orgasm “Quiet” time. But even before the robbery scenes, Fraction and Zdarsky use their conceit to examine the different roles sex plays in the lives of ordinary people. In the story’s first installment, Suzie tells readers how alone she used to feel when the rest of the world froze—a sideways depiction of the failure of sex alone to complete a person. And an anecdote in which Jon describes his orgasm-power learning curve reads like a true account of puberty writ large. Even if genre comics have used the emergence of superpowers as a stand-in for adolescence since 1962 or so, the mix of excitement and confusion in these scenes is recognizable and vivid.

For much of One Weird Trick, Suzie acts as a guide to the reader, relaying the story’s events in the first person. If the comic’s overarching metaphor is strong, the line-by-line narration of Sex Criminals is the book at its weakest. Although Suzie isn’t likely to wind up in Avengers Tower before Sex Criminals ends, her narration resembles the self-conscious quippiness of Fraction comics like Marvel’s Hawkeye. In lines like the following, Fraction writes Suzie as if she’s fiction’s first self-aware narrator: “That [question] was rhetorical. You don't need to answer. We couldn't hear you anyway, this is a book and you are a person and that's not how it works.” This performed cleverness is a feature of Fraction’s writing across his body of work, and here as in elsewhere, it distracts from the actually clever moments throughout the story.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Bill Watterson's Return to Comics. So this of course was the biggest recent news around: Calvin & Hobbes creator Watterson returning from his longtime retirement from comics to ghost-draw parts of last week's Pearls Before Swine strips. Pearls creator Stephan Pastis explains how it happened here. Michael Cavna has more from both artists at the Washington Post. Apparently, Watterson and Pastis plan to eventually auction off the original art to help Team Cul de Sac fund the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Chris Sparks has more about that here. And our own Joe McCulloch had the best Twitter response to all this that I saw.

—Interviews. CBR's Alex Dueben talks to the great Gabrielle Bell. The Comics Tavern talks to Jim Rugg. And The Guardian talked to Alan Moore and others to try and get more details on the recently announced Electricomics app.

—Reviews & Criticism. When Jesse Jacobs' Safari Honeymoon gets review treatment at The New York Review of Books, and no one blinks an eye, it feels like we've really turned a corner. At Hazlitt, Chris Randle takes on Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's This One Summer. At his own blog, Rob Clough looks at the work of Luke Pearson. And Ladies Making Comics has a post suggesting various women they believe could have been included in Drew Friedman's upcoming Heroes of the Comics.

—Misc. For the first time, DC is giving Batman co-creator Bill Finger cover credit on a special issue of Detective Comics #27. (You may recall Finger's granddaughter's statement last month -- I'm not sure if there is any connection.)

Finally, anyone who's been involved in comics for more than a few years is likely to find something they can relate to in this recent blog post from Jason Shiga titled "Webcomics, a Young Person's Game?"

Hey it's Friday. To sing out of the week is Mike Dawson with guest Sarah Glidden, who he spoke to about Joe Sacco.

Elsewhere:

Here's John Pham on Inkstuds.

I always like a good cartoonist conspiracy theory.

Another thing I like: 1940s Al Jaffee art.

Also enjoyable is the Comics Club Tumblr.

And here is something else to like, and carry into your weekend: Early Japanese animation.

Frank Santoro's here with his latest Riff Raff column, discussing new work by Malachi Ward. Here's an excerpt:

... We see a flashback of "what went wrong" in the city 62 years earlier. (Is it the same woman at a younger age? It's hard to tell only because she has a different nose but the same tattoo under her eye.) Ward switches from a six-panel grid to a three-tier set up with either nine or six panels to "open up" the flashback section. We see a young woman make her way through a large agitated crowd and lots of cops in riot gear. She and a young man make their way to the front line where the cops are. It's political rally or a speech by the President. Everyone is yelling. The crowd and the cops square off. I was impressed at how fast this transition from open seaside cliffs to crowded city riot worked visually within so few pages. Ward is able to use a combination of layout shifts and color accentuations to reinforce the scene visually. The cops are all darker in value on the page and the way they are shown in counterpoint to the rest of the crowd rendered in lighter colors is very well executed. Crowd scenes are the types of things most cartoonists avoid so I enjoyed staring at the details in this scene. Then the layouts shift back to the six-panel grid to end the flashback. That's solid comics-making in my book.

And we also have Craig Fischer's review investigating the latest Pascal Girard book via its connections with the great filmmaker Eric Rohmer.

A key to unlocking Pascal Girard’s Petty Theft is the book’s French title, La Collectionneuse (“The Collector”), a title shared with a 1967 film by New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer. Girard may have borrowed this title as a way of announcing a creative debt to Rohmer: both Rohmer and Girard are low-key, naturalistic artists who specialize in stories about self-conscious male protagonists navigating thorny romantic relationships. Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse is an entry in his “Moral Tales” cycle of films—called “moral” not for ethical reasons, but because the term moraliste in the Gallic cultural context refers to those writers (such as Stendahl) who take the interior lives of men and women as their primary subject. Rohmer himself described his characters as people who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open. They try to analyze; they are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself. They aren’t films of action, they aren’t films in which physical action takes place, they aren’t film in which there is anything very dramatic, they are films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That’s what Conte moral [moral tale] means.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Criticism. Dana Jennings at the Times reviews the new "Artist's Edition" of Jack Kirby's New Gods. TCJ regular Sean Rogers briefly addresses new work by Jaime Hernandez, Jesse Jacobs, and Mariko & Jillian Tamaki. Rob Clough writes about Gilbert Hernandez's Maria M.

—Commentary. Heidi MacDonald writes about the online controversy over SDCC's harassment policy. James Heartfield thinks the British Library's Comics Unmasked exhibit features too many superhero deconstructions and too little funny stuff. Mike Sterling thinks that DC's New 52 logos and numbering makes their covers confusing. Peter Huestis has problems with the new Random Acts of Nancy feature.

—Awards. The Shuster Awards have announced this year's nominations. Alison Bechdel and Nicole Georges won Lambda Awards. If you're eligible, don't forget to vote for the Eisners.

—Misc. Publishers Weekly profiles Roz Chast, and Joost Swarte starts a new Dutch comics publisher.

Today on the site: Ryan Holmberg gets back into Matsumoto Katsuji’s work.

Last time, I provided a brief overview of Matsumoto Katsuji’s early career, in honor of an excellent retrospective at the Yayoi Museum in Tokyo. I argued that Matsumoto’s famous Kurumi chan (b. 1938), oftentimes seen as one of the first commodity icons of Japanese kawaii, was probably based on a mix of Grace Drayton’s New Kids dolls and American jazz age cartooning. This time I want to focus on The Mysterious Clover (Nazo no kurobaa), a sixteen-page comic published as a premium insert furoku for “a girl’s best friend,” the magazine Shōjo no tomo, in April 1934. There’s a buzz around the manga’s formal innovations, and in a future article I will add my two cents about them. First I think it useful to see how Clover introduced a novel character type – a type reminiscent of the athletic and righteous young man described above, and thus more in line with stereotypes of proper Japanese boyhood than those of prewar shōjo culture, even though the character is a girl. It was a type, as we will see, that additionally reflects the influence of a specific form of American masculinity.

Elsewhere:

Artforum's new issue has a comics-focus. TCJ and I both make appearances in this article by curator Fabrice Stroun, who has also done great work on Jim Shaw.

Gil Roth interviews Katie Skelly.

Caitlin McGurk has a brief CAKE report over at The Comics Reporter.

As usual on Tuesdays, Joe McCulloch is here to offer a guide to the most interesting-sounding new comics available in stores this week. Highlights this time include books by Willy Linthout and Robert Crumb. But first, Joe has also begun to explore the comics of Hong Kong, and more specifically, the artist Li Chi Tak.

[He] is only known in English as a name in the credits to a movie: the 1996 Jet Li vehicle Black Mask, which was based on the artist’s comics. Wendy Siuyi Wong, in her 2002 survey Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua, notes that Li-the-artist was once heavily influenced by the Japanese mangaka Katsuhiro Ōtomo; his work in this 1996 book, Tiān Yāo Jì (created with Yuen Kin To), seems slightly more comparable to brawny action specialists like Takehiko Inoue or Kentarō Miura, though Li himself has cited influences ranging from Suehiro Maruo to Minetarō “Dragon Head” Mochizuki.

We also have James Romberger's review of IDW's third and final volume of their Alex Toth retrospective, Genius, Animated, edited by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell. Romberger has great respect for Toth, but not so much for this book. An excerpt:

Let me just say upfront that the production values in the now-complete three-volume biography of the cartoonist Alexander Toth are beyond reproach. Visually, [it] compares favorably to IDW’s other collections that I own and admire regularly, such as their exemplary Milton Caniff collections. One can quibble with the editors’ selections and the books’ design and I will—-but all of the art is shown in a generously proportioned format and the printing is very sharp and clear.

But for a series that claims to be the definitive statement on Toth, it falls short, because the text does not do justice to its subject. As biography, the account it presents feels skewed against the artist. Further, because of the books’ tendency to highlight the least interesting and most conservative aspects of what he did while ignoring or misunderstanding or failing to communicate in any meaningful way what makes Toth’s work so exciting and innovative, what is established is that Toth was a contentious man who became a particularly boring and cranky old fart.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews. Phil Nel reviews Richard Thompson's Complete Cul de Sac, calling it "one of two comic-strip masterpieces of this century." Douglas Wolk reviews several new graphic novels in the New York Times. Martin Steenton on Jesse Moynihan's Forming II.

—Spending Opportunities. Hunt Emerson has a Kickstarter going.

—Interviews. Joost Swarte explains the New Yorker cover he just drew. The Collected Comics podcast talks to Don Rosa. Dave Sim has his own internet.

—Misc. R. Sikoryak drew the cover for the New York Times Book Review's summer reading issue. BuzzFeed has been reduced to reproducing old TCJ message-board threads. Forbidden Planet notes an interesting-looking Vietnam travel book by Lorenzo Mattotti. Charles Hatfield is blogging his summer comics course. Binding comics seems like so much work, but I like looking at Michel Fiffe's posts about it.

—Funnies. Speaking of the Times, this week's strip by Michael Kupperman and David Rees was rejected by editors there, because of "too sensitive" subject matter, according to Kupperman. He's posted the rejected strip online here. As always, read the comments at your own risk.

It's a new week. Ken Parille leads us in with an essay on one of my favorite comic book artists: Pete Morisi.

Although many artists struggle with the comic page’s limitations as a static, silent surface, Morisi harmonizes with newsprint’s inert pulp essence. His peculiar genius lies in the way he seems to disrupt our desire to glide across a page. While it’s hard to talk about the specific effect that images have on us, many of his panels feel calming, almost a little hypnotic and “sculptural” to me, working against the animation that Seth rightly sees an important feature of narrative comics.

In fact, Morisi’s characters often resemble a drawing of a sculpture of a person, rather than a “direct” representation; and many of his horror comics feature sculptures in the panels’ backgrounds and margins.

Elsewhere in the world:

Tom Spurgeon interviews Noah Van Sciver.

The ebook comics company Graphicly has been folded into the print-on-demand service Blurb, leaving some questions.

Will Eisner's M-16 manual.

David Carr at the NY Times on the ongoing Hachette/Amazon stand-off.

Not-comics: Critic and poet Rene Ricard's memorial gathering.

First, we have the great Bob Levin here with us today, bringing the story of publisher Malcom Whyte to the masses. Everything Levin writes is worth reading.

Whyte had been an admirer of underground comix since the afternoon he had walked into Gary Arlington’s tiny store in San Francisco’s Mission District and been introduced to a tall, skinny fellow named Bob Crumb, who sold him a handful of first edition “ZAP” Number Ones for a quarter apiece. Whyte, as a married man with three children, who had been into, he recalls, “drinking martinis and not eating dope” had missed out on the early days of rock poster collecting, immediately recognized he was being invited into the ground floor of the latest exciting development in the graphic arts. He would stop by Arlington’s once-a-week, buy comix, meet artists, and acquire work from them. “They were interesting guys,” he says, “doing wonderful work, and I was in awe. I’d just go ga-ga.”

They were also artists whose choice of content had limited their audience and restricted their possibilities. By the mid-nineties, most of them worked in relative obscurity. Now, he hoped to bring them at least some of the attention and rewards they deserved.

Meanwhile:

—Interviews. The 2D Cloud site has a short talk with the pivotal former cartoonist (and new publisher) Julie Doucet. Make It Then Tell Everybody has a very worthwhile interview with Christopher Butcher, cofounder of TCAF. (I miss Butcher's blog.)

Speaking of TCAF, here is video of the panel featuring Lynn Johnston and Kate Beaton:

—Awards. The Society of Illustrators announced the winners of its first Comics and Cartoon Art Annual.

—Funnies. Study Group has a preview of Mark Connery's Rudy.

Also, this really is one of the greatest comic-book covers ever. (I'm not exactly out on a limb there.)

—Misc. Robin McConnell has a photo diary of the first leg of his and Brandon Graham's Inkstuds tour. And Travel + Leisure has gathered mostly the usual suspects into their list of the United State's best comic-book stores.

—Misguided Editorials. This anti-self-publishing editorial in The Guardian is fascinating, not because I can't follow the logic, but because its conclusions do not in any way match up with my own experiences with self-published zines and comics.

And probably the less said about Amity Shlaes's slapdash National Review editorial calling for conservative graphic novels the better. I say that not because of her political stance, but because of her lazy ignorance: she seems entirely unaware of the many right-wing(ish) cartoonists, including pantheon figures from Chester Gould and Harold Gray to Steve Ditko and Chester Brown; she credits Edward Said as co-author of Joe Sacco's Palestine; and thinks "manga" is a synonym for "fantasy," which leads to bizarre nonsensical sentences like this: "This attitude, high-minded though it be, is itself a bit of a manga." Readers of this site may enjoy her characterization of the cartoonists at White River Junction, though.

Today: Frank Santoro on Julie Delorte's new book.

I’ve been following Julie Delporte’s comics work for a few years now. I enjoyed Journal, her first book. I like seeing fragments of her work floating around online. Her handmade graphic approach is very refreshing to me and I think her work often looks particularly striking online. Journal was good, but it became slightly repetitive as a comic book. Each entry had its own strengths and sometimes the pieces seemed to not hang together all that well to make a cohesive narrative. (I get that it wasn’t a narrative and that it is a diary–I’m just saying the book’s strength was not in its structure.)

So I was slightly hesitant to check out Delporte’s new book, Everywhere Antennas, only because I figured it would be another diary. Even when I was flipping through it at first it looks like a diary that is going to stick to a certain layout and a certain way of delivering information: one or two drawings floating amongst some text. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the “information delivery” varied from section to section. For the most part it is a diary; however, there is a part in the middle which utilizes more of a traditional comics approach. I like the tension between this section (that is rendered in gray) and the rest of the book (that is in color).

And some links:

Great cartoonist (Quadratino!) and design and illustrator Antonio Rubino spotlighted at 50 Watts.

TCJ-contributor Nicole Rudick on Karen Green's poetry/art -blend book Bough Down.

This link made me think of Dash Shaw, though he's not to blame for that.

Apparently a comic-con in Toronto was not very good.

A lengthy examination of the Howard the Duck/Steve Gerber/Marvel legal fracas of decades ago.

Today, Matthew Thurber interviews the mysterious Carlos Gonzalez, creator of Slime Freak:

Tell me about what confusion means to you, and mystery. For instance, readers might never be able to get a clear picture of the whole story of Slime Freak. Does it matter?

Well, the majority of life is mysterious and confusing. There is rarely closure, as there often is in most stories and plot lines (my own included). Almost everything I encounter is in fragments. Most of the comics I read are from the quarter bin. I'm just jumping into some ragged issue of The Eternals, Dreadstar, whatever...

I like that. You don't need to read every issue of my comic, or any other ones to appreciate a weird hand touching a door knob, or a swollen, exotic mask being applied to a damp face. That's just good stuff, take it for what it is.

I hope people enjoy the journey they take with each issue, but whether it's "clear" or "practical" is not a huge concern.

Meanwhile:

—Criticism. John Adcock reviews V.T. Hamlin's Alley Oop Sundays. Calamity Jon uses an old Wally Wood/Joe Orlando issue of Captain Science to explain the power of forgotten junk comics.

—Interviews. Artinfo interviews Jayson Musson about his Bushmiller-appropriating paintings and sculptures. Alex Dueben talks to Paul Gravett. Inkstuds talks to Jordan Crane and Ron Regé, Jr.

—Digital. The comics-centric publishing site Graphicly has been purchased by Blurb. Alan Moore is heavily involved in a newly announced digital comics app (which apparently will also offer an open-source platform for any cartoonists interested in using it) called Electricomics.

—Funnies. Cartoonist-turned-nude-selfie-artist Blaise Larmee is releasing his second graphic novel, and Study Group has a preview.

—Crowdfunding. I think we've neglected to mention the latest Steve Ditko Kickstarter. There's also a new Robert Anton Wilson crowdfunding effort for a theatrical production which will feature Alan Moore.

—Misc. Gabe Soria has made a mix of every song referenced over the first 700+ pages of Jaime Hernandez's Locas stories. A piece of Tintin ephemera has just sold for $3.1 million, setting a new record. Zainab Akhtar retells the story of Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and OK Cola. Bob Sikoryak models as Charles West for The Onion.

Welcome back from the weekend, long or regular, depending on your locale.

Jog never breaks, though, so here he is with this week's picks.

And:

Tom Spurgeon has the Reubens run-down.

Paul Karasik has filed another graphic report for his hometown paper.

And finally, because I enjoyed a long weekend and can't quite work yet, here's a nice gallery of Shel Silverstein Playboy cartoons. 

On the site today Rob Kirby reviews Sam Alden's new book.

Sam Alden is among the most gifted of the young cartoonists I’ve come across in recent years. He has already established a sizable, rabid fan base through his Tumblr and deservedly won the Promising New Talent nod at last year’s Ignatz Awards, amidst a strong list of nominees. The two stories featured in It Never Happened Again display Alden’s impressive strengths as a visual storyteller. They feature completely different settings and characters, but have in common protagonists in search of things ineffable—perhaps unattainable. Each story casts its own strange sort of spell, making for a very strong debut book.

Elsewhere:

Ron Rege on Inkstuds.

The Washington Post on She-Hulk. That's a frightening thing to write.

Looking forward to reading this book: The Amateurs, reviewed.

Hey, Bergen Street Comics is publishing its first bookish book.

I could look at 1000 photos like this and never ever get bored.

I was also fascinated by this X-Men comic book when I was a young teenager. Here's an article about its making.

You've probably already read about it on Twitter and Tumblr and the other comics sites out there, or maybe right on this page a few moments ago, but nevertheless, we are proud to announce that the title to this blog post will be Movies V Television: Dawn of Comics. I don't want to reveal too many plot details (hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake!) but the basic premise is that those two great audience favorites, Movies and Television, are inherently superior to comics. Here's the twist: now that they are featuring characters and situations associated with comics, they simultaneously herald the triumph of the comics form! The more movies and television borrow ideas from comics, and the more we divert our coverage of comics proper to movies and television featuring comics-associated properties, the more comics wins! And then, and again, I don't want to get into details, but down the line, Movies and Television come into conflict and have a fight. This is a great comics tradition, and shows how the very best elements of comics can easily be transferred into other media.

There are rumors afloat that Video Games may appear in this blog post at some point, too. We may have some speculation regarding its possible box art costuming for you later on...

But first:

Frank Santoro is here today his latest Riff Raff column, which goes heavy on the grid.

A Japanese artist friend once looked at one of my "wordless" comics in a grid. He asked, "Which way do I read it?" because there was no clear motion sequenced out across the page. It was more of a collection of still landscapes. I said "any order" and he smiled.

And then Paul Buhle reviews a new book by Kevin Pyle and Scott Cunningham, Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun!

For a book aimed at kids, this one is chock-full of information, but presented so well in comics (and also charts and info-graphics) that the details are destined to move easily, and usefully, into young minds. At least this (old) reviewer’s mind thinks so.

Elsewhere:

—Movies. I don't see the new direction of this site so much as a reboot as a reimagining, and so let's reimagine that the most important thing for a comics site to spend a lot of time discussing today is that a somewhat transparently cynical movie producer made "controversial" [i.e., "baiting in an entirely transparently way"] comments regarding a not-very-popular female superhero character, and then went on to associate comic-book fans with wholesome chastity, and that this performance achieved its goal and got a group of beleaguered and very righteous comics fans on the internet talking about his movies. (No links.) [ADDED FOR CLARITY: Obviously the sexist aspects of the comments are worthy of condemnation. On the other hand, getting bent out of shape over things like whether or not the Hulk and She-Hulk are cousins is playing right into his hand.]

—Misc. A New York Times report on the Tom Wolfe archives resurrects the time Wolfe appeared in a cameo with the Hulk. (More here.) Joe Alterio on Kim Deitch. Michael Dooley talks to the cartoonists (and more importantly for our purposes, storyboard artists) Aaron Sowd and Trevor Goring.

—News. This roundup on the South Carolina/Fun Home legislative battle includes a lot of links to hilarious/disturbing video of posturing politicians.

—Video. Okay, enough reading already! Roz Chast speaks at Politics & Prose:

Herblock appears on Book TV in 1993:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFg8N4HvEus

And finally, Hillary Chute interviews Dan Clowes:

Today we have a previously unpublished interview with the late Dick Ayers.

AYERS: I came out of the war, and I was going to art career school on 23rd Street, I think it was. It was the first skyscraper! There was 23 floors, on which the last floor … You took the elevator, it only went 22 stories. [Clancy laughs.] Then you walked up the last, and you got to the school. Now, it wasn’t till many years later when somebody — when I was at a show — he spoke to me, and said” “Oh, that’s nice. You get paid for doing that. Doing those drawings on airplanes.” [Casey laughs.]

I got a kick out of that, because it’s really a nice, modern building now. So that went along and it was mostly doing commercial drawings, which I wanted to do: but I kept hoping I would find somebody that would get me more into the comic strip line — for which, it turned out, I realized, there WAS none! Nobody was teaching how to write and draw comic-book stories. I read a poster on a subway wall, and Burne Hogarth was starting a school. It was the beginning of the School of Visual Arts.

I was about a month late. The school had already started in September, and I was about October. I got to be interviewed by Burne, which made me just thrilled! He was my big idol at that time! We got going, and he said something to the effect that, “Your samples have only comic book art. There’s much more to it than that.”

I said, “Yeah, but I don’t like the idea of drawing the same character week in and week out. I’d like to have it so I do a cowboy this week, and a soldier the next week, and like that.” He admired that.

He started a course in writing that started me learning to write, which I’d never touched before, the schematics of doing the story and writing it. It came along fine. We did great, and I think I was the first student in his school to get work at it.

As I’m going into my class for about the first evening, there’s a fellow and on his notebook is “Bache.” Bache is MY middle name. So that made me stop and talk to him. I got more interested, and then I found out he worked for Joe Shuster right nearby, and then would go to the school there, too … which is what I did for quite some time. I penciled Funnyman.

Elsewhere:

Ooooh, new Julia Gforer. I'm a believer.

Sorta comics, but not really, but still... the original Disneyland prospectus.

More new Benjamin Marra is always good news.

I like this comic about a house.

Love this newspaper clipping about legendary comics publisher "Busy" Arnold.

Definitely not comics, but incredibly awesome: Takeshi Murata's (comics readers can see his work in Kramers Ergot 8) stunning sculpture, which debuted a week ago at Frieze.

Joe McCulloch wants you to know what new comics sound interesting this week, and he's here to tell you. Alex Toth and I.N.J. Culbard titles loom large.

Elsewhere:

—Ben Towle wants us to stop relying so heavily on film terminology when discussing comics. ["When we talk about and think about comics using film terminology, we’re not only confining ourselves to only engaging with certain aspects of the medium, but (for those of us who make comics) we’re confining ourselves to only telling stories in certain ways."]

—Twenty-five years of King-Cat!

—Rob Clough reviews minicomics by Sumida, Alexander, and Shively.

—Johanna Draper-Carlson notices some confusing aspects to the way the Diamond Previews catalog has chosen to celebrate "Women in Comics Month."

—Ed Piskor channels Rob Liefeld.

—Only Comics If You Squint. How Akira Kurosawa used storyboarding to refine his ideas.