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Today on the site Karen Peltier profiles Lale Westvind, whose comics I admire more a lot.

Westvind primarily focuses on the potential madness of futuristic and alien worlds. Often depicting simultaneous perspective and motion, her characters bounce and blast their way through desolate deserts and impenetrable tangles of organic and mechanic matter. Departing from exploration of material worlds, Now and Here explores the liminal space of her protagonist’s psyche, simultaneously stretching infinitely while locked within the confines of thought.

Now and Here is a creation born out of the act of creating. Admiring her prep drawings for an upcoming animation called Cunt Eyes, Westvind wanted a vehicle for those images to be appreciated as static, allowing the viewer to soak them up to the fullest. “It was like making a comic backwards,” she recalls. “I picked the ones I liked and rearranged them, tried to put them in an order that might make narrative sense and wrote something describing each image. I had a vague idea of how I wanted it to work, but I definitely didn’t know what it was going to be about or what was going to happen until I was finished. In that way, my subconscious wrote it.” Now and Here captures the subjective nature of thought in a material way; it confronts the reader with the process of taking in visual information and assigning meaning through thought and the new visualizations those thoughts take on.

Hey, you'd think my being best friends with Santoro would entitle me to know there's a new Comics Workbook mag out in the world. But, like the rest of you poor slobs I found out via the internet.

Tom Spurgeon reports back on TCAF. Boy I don't miss going to festivals (yet). I don't know how Spurgeon does it. I mean, how does he talk to all those people? I would never be able to write up that kind of report without casting judgment against at least half of those people. Good lord. Spurgeon! What are you made of? Festivals. Oh boy. All except Lucerne. That I'll always miss.

Nice Barry Windsor Smith process post here. His revival of Pre-Raphaelite image-making is of a piece with other 1970s revivals (deco, for example), as well as the general '70s glittery excess. Sometimes it has an almost disco sheen, like it's one step removed from fashion illustration of the time. Hot kitsch.

Good to see some TCJ pieces featured in this Slate list of long form writing about comics.

In today's installment of her regular column, Shaenon Garrity takes a look at how the major comics awards have handled webcomics.

In the 2000s, webcartoonists struggled to be treated with the level of respect and critical recognition given to print cartoonists, which is the saddest sentence I’ve ever written. For many creators and fans, this involved a push to include webcomics in comics industry awards. There were also efforts to create an awards system specifically for webcomics, most notably the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, which ran from 2001 to 2008.

Nowadays, of course, the struggle is over and webcomics are respected by all. Although they still lack their own industry awards, most or all major comics awards now include a webcomics or digital comics category. Some have been recognizing webcomics for well over a decade. That can mean only one thing: it’s time to start nitpicking and judging them. How successful have webcomics awards been at singling out the best in webcomics?

And then, Brandon Soderberg reviews the new collection of Bobby London's remarkably weird take on Segar's most famous creation, Popeye:

About halfway through Popeye, The Classic Newspaper Comics — Volume One: 1986-1989, underground comix boundary pusher turned syndicated strip jobber Bobby London's aggressively contemporary take on our beloved sailorman, we find the Sea Hag (frequent nemesis to Popeye since 1929) turning Popeye's rickety hometown of Sweet Haven into a bougie tourist trap. The whole thing probably goes on a little too long (at about the point where an orphanage is closed and replaced with an arcade, the message is loud and clear), but then you recalibrate, lower the stakes, and think what in the hell, you're reading a fairly sprawling Popeye narrative that appeared in mainstream newspapers in the mid-'80s that's about gentrification, and well, how did this even come to be?

Elsewhere:

—News. The South Carolina/Fun Home controversy has a new dumb compromise. Laura Hudson reports on Patreon, the latest crowdfunding craze. Our boss Gary Groth has been nominated for Seattle's Genius Award. (He got a cake.)

—Misc. Derf says his goodbyes to his long-running strip The City. Deb Aoki wonders how to make manga more appealing to new readers. Colson Whitehead recommends a comic to Barack Obama. The New Yorker has images from Lynda Barry's show at the Adam Baumgold gallery. This year's Eisner judges talk about the nomination process. These may be collectors' items some day.

—Interviews & Profiles. The Washington Post talks to Roz Chast. The L.A. Weekly profiles Jaime Hernandez. The Village Voice talks to Mimi Pond. Alex Dueben interviews Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman on the 35th anniversary of their political anthology, World War 3 Illustrated. Chris Mautner talks to Noah Van Sciver. A Melbourne-based podcast interviews Simon Hanselmann. Make It Then Tell Everybody interviews Sam Alden. The Inkstuds road tour interviews begin with Mike Allred talking about eternity.

—Reviews & Criticism. Rich Barrett reviews a bunch of comics. Jared Gardner ponders three semi-recent comics about food. Rob Clough looks at the first books of new publisher Ray Ray. Domingos Isabelinho catches Hector German Oesterheld borrowing from John Ford. John Adcock reviews the new Gasoline Alley Sundays collection.

Paste has chosen the 100 "best" comic book characters, which revealed to me that this way of interacting with comics is completely foreign to the way I do. I like Batman as much or more than the next person, but is he a good character? If I think about him as a person for more than ten seconds, I get a headache. His most basic motivation — that his parents being killed by a mugger and a bat flying through his window inspired him to dress like an animal and beat up criminals on the street at night — is opaque and unconvincing. I suppose this is simply a leap of faith the reader is forced to make in order to enjoy Batman stories, but it is a leap which simultaneously makes Batman unintelligible as a human being. Which doesn't mean he hasn't been involved in a lot of very fun comic-book stories; I just am not sure he's a very good "character." Daniel Clowes's Wilson, on the other hand, much decried as a "jerk" on his eponymous book's release, still lives in my head years later as a three-dimensional, multi-faceted person. Ask me how he'd respond in any given situation —including the murder of his parents or a rodent infestation—and I'd have a pretty good idea. I haven't read that comic since it came out. Time to rectify that.

—TCAF. I hate most convention reports, but I don't hate this Secret Acres report of TCAF. Maybe because they made a bunch of it up reads like it's too funny to be true. And I don't hate anything Joe Ollmann writes.

—Video. Here's the annual "roast" video from this year's Doug Wright Awards:

And oh man, do I want to see this show:

—Finally. Dan made a big deal about what he called the dumbest press release ever a while back, in which he inadvertently revealed that he deletes most of the press releases he gets in his e-mail book every day without reading them. Because take a look at this. I won't bore you by copying & pasting the whole thing, just know that it involves the audio-only version of a Princess Diana comic book.

On the site:

R.C. Harvey, who wrote the introduction to the forthcoming Barnaby Vol. 2, looks at all things Barnaby:

Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, like Krazy Kat, appealed to a smaller audience than most comic strips.  Comics historian Ron Goulart says it appeared in only 52 newspapers in the U.S. at its height. But the strip’s readers were an appreciative elite.  Barnaby hove into public view a scant two years before the demise of the intelligentsia’s first love, Krazy Kat.  Beginning April 20, 1942, the strip lasted into the early fifties. It was revived on September 12, 1960 and ran until April 14, 1962, but many of the stories were retooled from the first run of the strip, which ended February 2, 1952. By that time, both Pogo andPeanuts were on the scene.

The brief decade of Barnaby’s first run was brilliant. Among its passionate fans was Dorothy Parker who wrote a mash note about the strip when she reviewed a Holt book of reprints in October 1943: “I think, and I am trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years.”  She admitted that her review was not a review:  it was a valentine, she said.

And Fantagraphics has given us another kind of valentine with the inauguration of its planned complete reprinting of the strip, Barnaby: Volume One, 1942-1943 (320 7×10.5-inch landscape pages, b/w; hardcover, $35) with prefatory essays by Chris Ware and Jeet Heer; Afterword and appendix by Philip Nel, Johnson’s biographer.

Elsewhere:

The Beat has a roundup of audio from various TCAF panels. And Chris Randle has an excellent diary of his TCAF experience.

This is an excellent idea for, well, anything!

Kate Reynolds on what the Image Humble Bundle might mean for comics.

Today on the site we have Art Lortie's obituary for the prolific comics artist Dick Ayers. Ayers worked on many of the most iconic Marvel titles and characters. Anyone who wants a vivid first-hand account of the comics business from the '50s through the twentieth century could do a lot worse than picking up Ayers's unusual three-volume comics autobiography, The Dick Ayers Story. It's too rough and disjointed to find a widespread audience, but it's a heartfelt and consistently surprising account of the creative life. (Once we get the Comics Comics site archives up and running again (a development that looks imminent) I'll try to share my review of that book.)

Elsewhere:

—At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny has written the kind of guide to comic book movies I can get behind. Kubrick, Godard, Melville, etc. The Jack Kirby/James Cameron connection is obvious as soon as you see it.

—Marc Meyers writes about Vince Guaraldi and how he attempted to translate Charles Schulz's Peanuts into jazz. That post also features a fascinating brief clip from the 1963 documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

—Speaking of Schulz, now is the time to buy his old Minneapolis house.

Today on the site Joe McCulloch has words of wisdom for us all.

Elsewhere:

Paste has made a list of the 100 Best Comic Characters.

Your Max und Moritz award winners.

Here's topical post of cartoons about Putin's Russia.

And Ng Suat Tong on Ms. Marvel.

Not comics: An interesting piece on the problem of too much work by one critic in a single book.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter reviews Box Brown's new biography, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend. Here's a sample:

Brown has done a fine job of aggregating anecdotes about his subject; this is a telling of the Andre the Giant story that requires little prior knowledge of the person or his profession. He also mediates his many sources through a controlled, consistent aesthetic. Brown works with a thick, black line; minimal hatching; and a manner of depicting characters, even the massive ones, as sets of soft contours. One of the book’s successes is Brown’s design for Andre himself—the wrestler looks at once like a flesh-and-blood human and like an icon. Brown examines Andre’s interiority less well.

Elsewhere:

—Reviews. Rob Clough takes on Lance Ward's (Lance Ward is an) A-hole. Whit Taylor reviews Seo Kim's Cat Person.

—Interviews & Profiles. Chris Mautner talks to Fantagraphics' latest announced artist, Ed Luce. Box Brown and his book are profiled in traditional Times-style comix-ain't-just-about-capes fashion by George Gene Gustines. Tom Spurgeon talks to Box Brown. Terry Gross talks to Roz Chast.

—Commentary. NCS president Tom Richmond responds to the New York Post's decision to drop its comics page via an open letter. Sean Kleefeld also has thoughts on the move.

Paul Gravett explains who invented the graphic novel.

—News. The Doug Wright Award winners were announced at TCAF, with Michel Rabagliati, Steven Gilbert, and Emily Carroll receiving honors.

A potential compromise in the Fun Home/South Carolina college-funding controversy has been suggested. Writers including Junot Diaz, Richard Ford, Dennis Lehane, and Emma Donoghue have joined a campaign against the funding-cutting legislators.

—Misc. Photographer Seth Kushner needs help finding a marrow donor.

Bushmiller collectors: Fantagraphics needs your help finding some Nancy clippings.

Today on the site:

Chris Mautner talks to Mimi Pond.

Can you walk me through the gestation period? Why did it take so long for it to come out?

After I left the restaurant I moved to New York and became a cartoonist and was making a good living doing that. At that point no one was talking about graphic novels. I always thought it should be a movie. I thought about doing it as a screenplay.

We moved to L.A. and I lived there long enough that I realized just how horrible Hollywood is and even if I did write it as a screenplay it could be taken away from me at any time and ruined. And I wanted to make sure that it got told the right way. So then I thought, “Graphic novel? That’s way too much work. I could never do that. That’s ridiculous.” I thought, “I’ll just do it as a regular fictionalized memoir.”

I fictionalized it because there was just too much stuff in real life; there were too many people who passed through there, too many personalities. It had to be winnowed down into a dramatic story. I wanted to catch the essence of what that time and place was and who those people were, but I didn’t want to have to stick to the facts.

It wasn’t until my son was born in 1992 and suddenly being a mother for the first time that a light bulb went off in my head that Lazlo, the real-life version of him, was everyone’s groovy beatnik dad. He had his own family. And yet he was hanging out with a bunch of twenty-something kids instead of spending time with his family. And I was like, “That’s not right.” (laughter) In his own way he was as good a father as he could be but l feel like he failed to protect his family. He put them through things … I don’t want to get into it in the [book] because I didn’t want to get that personal, his wife and kids are still around, and I didn’t want to make it about that as much as I wanted to focus on the restaurant.

When you’re in your twenties, it doesn’t occur to you to think about things like someone’s responsibilities and parenthood. You’re not thinking that way. I realized this character is much more complex than I had even thought. In some ways he was a wonderful person and an extremely important person for me because he was telling me and anyone else who was there that while this is what we’re doing right now, we’re just playing a part, and we’re going to do other things and we have to keep notes, because this is a story and it has to be told. Working in a restaurant is just a role we’re cast in the moment, but we’re going to go on and do bigger things.

And Robert Kirby reviews the long-awaited collection of Mark Connery's Rudy, one of my all-time favorite comics.

Enter Mark Connery. His minicomic Rudythrows all that comics pedantry out the window in a cheerfully anarchic spirit. Intuitive and spontaneous rather than practiced and formalistic, his hilarious, doodled-in-a-notebook-style comics emerge triumphantly from the id. It’s no wonder the tagline “Comics and Fun” accompanied many of the original minicomics collected here. Among the other taglines are “Zooty Comics for Grog Dogs” and “Bourgeois Entertainment for Stalinist Motherfuckers.” Welcome to the world of Rudy.

Elsewhere:

Here's a lengthy interview with the late Dick Ayers conducted by Roy Thomas.

Tom Spurgeon has publishing news about Study Group.

And here's Ed Piskor on video for Time.

Ken Parille is here with his thoughts on five recent books from Koyama Press. Jesse Jacobs, Michael DeForge, Seo Kim, Jon Vermilyea, and Ryan Cecil Smith are the artists in question. Parille: "I searched for a shared quality I could label The Koyama Aesthetic. Couldn’t find it. Each of the five books I discuss is ‘its own thing’ — and each deserves your consideration."

And then Paul Buhle is here with a review of The Best of Comix Book. For those who don't know, Comix Book is one of the more curious titles in comics history, an anthology of underground cartoonists (Justin Green, Kim Deitch, Skip Williamson, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman, etc.) put out under the aegis of Stan Lee himself.

[Denis] Kitchen badly wanted a breakthrough, and he always Thought Big. In those days, before multiplying big-budget superhero films, no one was bigger in comics than Stan Lee. Kitchen's idea was to get Marvel on board as publisher and distributor of what was, in fact, a stepchild of the Undergrounds. And probably just in time because the cops were hovering over the head shops that sold comix; worse, the counter-culture generation was steadily less counter, the former hipsters’ culture more mainstream. Time was actually running out, although that only become abundantly clear and final a few years later. Lee had also sought to lure Kitchen to New York and mainstream comics a couple times, and no doubt that smoothed the way to a business partnership of sorts.

Elsewhere:

—More Reviews. Tom Spurgeon has thoughts about Jesse Jacobs, too.

—Interviews & Profiles. Roz Chast on NPR. Steve Morris interviews Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Brian Nicholson has a short piece on Conor Stechtschulte at Splice Today. Colleen Doran talks about her restoration progress.

—Disputes. The uncredited Batman co-creator Bill Finger's family is not "all good" with DC, according to his granddaughter and despite DC assertions.

Avi Arad wants more credit for Marvel's movie success. [I'm putting a "rabbit hole" alert on that link for anyone who actually tries to understand it.]

—Misc. Drew Friedman has an outstanding photo recap of his show (and associated panels) at the Society of Illustrators.

—Video. Finally, here's Jen Sorensen's Herblock Prize acceptance speech:

Today on the site we have we a pre-TCAF special: Cartoonist Est Em, who is a guest at the festival, interviewed by translator Joceylne Allen.

ja: That’s great. …So why the pen name “est em”?

ee: (Laughs) Well, I came up from Boys’ Love, so I was against using my real name, and there’s actually another manga artist named Maki Sato. The kanji’s different, of course, it’s spelled differently.

ja: Sure, but the pronunciation is the same.

ee: The pronunciation’s the same, and both Sato and Maki are incredibly common names, so I figured my real name wouldn’t have any real impact. And I was playing around a little when I made my BL debut, I thought est em worked somehow.

ci: I said she should use “Sugar Roll”.

ee: “Sato” is “sugar” and “Maki” is “roll”, right?

ja: (laughs) I love it!

ee: Sugar Roll.

ja: So I’d be calling you “Roll” now.

ee: Yeah, “Roll”.

ja: I can’t even imagine! Roll, tell me about your career!

Elsewhere... here in New York the city is battening down the hatches for a massive amount of art fairs this weekend. Why, you can even find me slinging books at Frieze from Friday to Monday. Come talk to me about Atlas-era Gene Colan and watch as my co-workers stare in disbelief.

There have a few tributes to Dick Ayers. Michael Cavna has one at the Washington Post. And here is Ayers in conversation with Mark Evanier and Joe Sinnott.

One of my favorite periods of his work can be seen here and here.

And:

Paul Gravett on curating the largest show of British comics ever mounted.

Tim O'Neil has begun writing comic book reviews for the AV Club, and starts off nicely.

Here is some news about the upcoming Columbus, Ohio Clowes invasion.

Joe McCulloch is back with another of his weekly guides to the best-sounding new comics in stores. He also reports back from this weekend's Free Comic Book Day:

Being that my local shops had maintained their unbroken streak of never, ever, ever ordering the 2000 AD sampler, I decided to give this one [The New 52: Future's End #0] a shot; lots of people had been complaining on Twitter that it embodied everything wrong with DC superheroes, and, well - I was curious to see why. Immediately, I noticed that a crew of at least 14 people -- 4 writers, 8 line artists, an "art consultant," an undisclosed number of studio colorists, a letterer and a cover artist (which adds up to more than 14, since some of them perform multiple roles) -- was assembled to produce these twenty pages of comics, but that doesn't really bother me in and of itself; Future's End is going to be a weekly series, and if you were to specify all of the uncredited parties who work on the average weekly manga serial, including editorial, you'd probably get a similar-ish number. Hell, I *suspect* Keith Giffen (a credited writer and the aforementioned art consultant) is functioning in a manner not unlike a manga editor, supervising the page breakdowns with an eye toward clarity and consistency.

Elsewhere:

—News. Another important comics figures has passed away, this time the artist Dick Ayers, just a few days past his 90th birthday. Ayers is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Jack Kirby on The Avengers and The Fantastic Four, but Westerns and war comics were his personal favorites. Ayers also published a three-volume graphic memoir of his life in comics in the 2000s. Comics historian Blake Bell remembers visiting his home here. We will have more coverage here soon.

The Doug Wright Awards Kickstarter is almost over...

—Interviews. Françoise Mouly talks about the expansion of Toon Books into older markets. Julia Gfrörer and Sean T. Collins talk about In Pace Requiescat, their porn adaptation of Poe.

—Reviews & Commentary. Paul Di Filippo ponders the changing context of Calvin & Hobbes. Michiko Kakatuni reviews Roz Chast. Joe Gross at Rolling Stone has a mostly solid list of the top 50 non-superhero graphic novels. It's always fun to argue about those. Andrew Hickey writes about Dave Sim's early Cerebus. Robyn Chapman on seriously being a micropublisher. The old-school nerd argument about what killed Gwen Stacy has made it to New York magazine. The old-school Wertham debate has made it to BuzzFeed.

—This Is an Actual Quote. From Kevin Smith's paean to Batman in The Hollywood Reporter. "We won't let Batman go because, for such a ridiculous notion, he's so easy to believe in."

Well, it's Monday and we have a full week for you here.

First up, we have added Steve Ringgenberg's 1995 interview with Al Feldstein to the archive. We also have two appraisals by Craig Fischer and Mark Newgarden, respectively.

And John Seven reviews Alec Longstreth's Basewood.

Elsewhere:

Jerry Beck on the latest Floyd Gottfredson collection.

Aidan Koch has started a new series over at Comics Workbook. That's good news.

And here are some beautiful Sea Devils pages.

Today is a busy day here at at the Journal (and this week has been a busy week). First, we have Steve Ringgenberg's obituary of Al Feldstein. Here's a sample:

Gaines made Feldstein an assistant editor and, later, an editor. But it wasn’t Feldstein’s title that mattered. It was the personal and professional relationship that he and Gaines shared — a unique creative symbiosis that developed a remarkable way of working together to turn out a complete comic book every week, as required by EC’s schedule. It was, by the accounts of both men, a hectic, joyful, and creatively satisfying partnership.

Gaines saw it as his job to be the “springboard man.” He was taking prescription amphetamines at the time in an effort to curb his appetite and lose weight. He suffered insomnia as an unfortunate side effect, so he spent his sleepless nights reading horror and science fiction stories. A lot of them.

As he read, he’d jot down “springboards” — short, one- or two-sentence story ideas that he could pitch to Feldstein in the morning. As Gaines humorously recounted in EC Lives!, the program book for the 1972 EC Fan Addict convention, “after he [Feldstein] had rejected the first 33 on general principles, he might show a little interest in number 34. I’d then give him the hard sell […] He would normally write the story in three hours, breaking it down as he wrote it right onto [the art boards]. Meanwhile, I’d sit there … with a nervous stomach because I never knew if and when Al would come bursting back in and say, ‘I can’t write that goddamn plot!’”

Feldstein remembered it this way: “I used to drive him nuts because we would plot these together and I would say, ‘No, no, no, Bill, that just doesn’t work.’”

Still, it must have worked most of the time, because Feldstein wrote four scripts a week for more than four years, becoming, in the process, the most prolific scriptwriter EC ever had. The demands of his editorial and writing duties, however, forced Feldstein to forgo drawing stories around the middle of 1951. He continued to draw covers, though, for EC’s science fiction titles, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and their combined successor, Weird Science-Fantasy.

Today also marks the return of Mike Dawson, with a new monthly version of his TCJ Talkies podcast. In this rebooted reality, Dawson interviews cartoonists about books, but this time, they aren't their own!:

I was pleased to welcome Tom Hart onto the show for my inaugural episode, to discuss Craig Thompson's Habibi. I'd read Habibi a few years ago (in preparation to interview him on this show), but hadn't looked at it since then. My memory of it was that while the subject matter was dark, there was something about Thompson's artwork that made it still feel light-hearted.

I don't know where I came up with that impression, because that wasn't my takeaway from the book the second time around.

And Dan wasn't able to mention it yesterday on the blog when it first went up, but Frank Santoro turned in a Riff Raff column that hearkens back to his classic Comics Comics days, contemplating the influence of internet scrolling on the act of reading comics, among other things. Here he talks about Shel Silverstein:

Ever read The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein? It’s horizontally formatted scroll which is presented as a book. The format uses the periodicity of the book’s left side/right side spread for reveals. Each spread is one panel of a sequenced comic strip that goes on for about 100 pages or 50 spreads. Each spread has it’s own 1, 2 left side, right side rhythm and the “1” unity of each spread as one image. (It’s a great book, I think, because it is so simply presented as image and text.

Elsewhere:

—Al Feldstein. Mark Evanier remembers the editor/writer, as does Evan Dorkin and Christopher Bonanos.

—News. Naif Al-Matawa, creator of The 99, writes about receiving a fatwa from the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia.

Jonah Weiland has written an open letter explaining his decision to take down the old Comic Book Resources message board and start again from scratch, citing harassment and online trolling as reasons.

—Interviews & Profiles. The New York Times visits the home of Roz Chast.

Brian Michael Bendis talks about diversity and Spider-Man with Vulture.

—Reviews & Commentary. Ray Davis has continued his posts on M.K. Brown all this week.

J. Caleb Mozzocco writes about the recent Vertigo/Joe Keatinge flareup.

—Upcoming Events. Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, which is to most readers of this site what St. Patrick's Day is to alcoholics. Tonight, if you're in New York, is Fresh Meat at SVA.

—Misc. Michael Dooley follows up a panel in L.A. featuring Mimi Pond, Vanessa Davis, Ben Katchor, and Anders Nilsen.

—Catching Up with TCJ.com Contributors. Stories I neglected to link to in a timely fashion: Rob Kirby interviews Whit Taylor, Alex Dueben talks to Stefano Raffaele, and Daniel Kalder on Retroworld.

Al Feldstein has passed away at the age of 88. The longtime artist/writer/editor is perhaps best known for his long run (1956-1984) as the editor of Mad, but he was also a notable science fiction artist, and was a key editorial force at EC Comics, writing the now-famous Bernie Krigstein-drawn story "Master Race". We will have a full obituary shortly, as well as archival features. In the meantime, you can get a great feel for his talents by reading this 2013 Bob Levin essay.

We have also posted what may have been his final interview -- the uncut version of his February 2013 conversation with Gary Groth, an abridged version of which was used published in Feldstein's Child of Tomorrow, published by Fantagraphics.

Also on the site is Frank Santoro, with his newest column - this one with some thoughts on comics formats.

Elsewhere online:

Mark Evanier and Evan Dorkin each have tributes to Feldstein. You can see read a handful of Feldstein work over here and here are some great covers he drew.

Michael Dooley reports on a panel discussion featuring Ben Katchor, Vanessa Davis, Mimi Pond and Anders Nilsen.

Comics-related: You can now read David Wojnarowicz's journals, among other things, online.

50 Watts has a great look at Japanese illustrator Rokuro Taniuchi (1921–81).

And finally, Mimi Pond did a Reddit AMA.

Joe McCulloch has heroically managed to turn in his regular weekly column on the best-sounding new releases in comics shops, despite an unfortunate lack of dependable internet access. He still won't tell us where he is, but using a few computer tricks I picked up during an internship for a private investigator, I think I've tracked him down to somewhere in rural Nevada. What could he be doing out there?

Also, Rob Clough is back with a review of Katie Skelly's Operation Margarine.

If Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse represented a young artist stretching her limits in her first major work, then her follow-up book, Operation Margarine, sees Skelly working more in her comfort zone. There were times in Nurse Nurse when it seemed that Skelly wasn’t entirely comfortable drawing certain aspects of her Barbarella-inspired space fantasy. She simply didn’t have the chops to convey some aspects of the story, which led to some whiplash narrative shifts. That said, she still followed through and worked around her limitations as best as she could. Cartooning can be seen as a series of problem-solving exercises, and Skelly presented herself with a high degree of difficulty with her first book.

Elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Ng Suat Tong reviews Inio Asano's Nijigahara Holograph. Matt Leines reviews Brecht Vandenbroucke's White Cube. Whit Taylor reviews Michael DeForge's A Body Beneath. Gareth Branwyn writes about Anders Nilsen's Big Questions. Paul Gravett reviews a bunch of books. So does 2D Cloud's Justin Skarhus.

—Interviews & Profiles. Michael Cavna profiles Herblock winner Jen Sorensen. Kickstarter interviews Josh Bayer. NPR does Ralph Steadman. Alex Dueben talks to Richard Thompson.

—Misc. Rant fans might enjoy these responses to the recent Amazon/comiXology changes.

Relatedly, Marvel seems to be making moves that may hint at an Amazon escape plan.

—Video. Finally, somehow I missed this video earlier in the month, but here's Tucker Stone interviewing Nick Abadzis:

Though it is Tuesday, Joe McCulloch is not here. We understand that he is trapped somewhere in America without internet. This is every man's nightmare.

Luckily we instead have Kristy Valenti's Women and Autobio Comics Roundtable with Raina Telgemeier, Megan Kelso and Ellen Forney.

VALENTI: One thing I’d like to talk about — and this is a word you’ve all used — accessibility, and style. Do you think, in general, women cartoon more accessibly?

[Pause.]

 KELSO: Well, I don’t know if I can answer that fully, but one thing that I think about is that, when you see little kids with drawing and writing, it does seem like young girls are far more concerned with what their handwriting looks like than little boys. And, young boys that grow up to be cartoonists may be the exception to that. [Laughter.] In elementary school, it was almost like there was this competition to have the most beautiful, perfect, girly handwriting. And I’ve often wondered if that is connected somehow to the sort of comics and the approach to comics that women take as they become cartoonists. I think you could argue, women’s or girls’ fine motor skills often tend to develop more quickly than boys’, and so they are able to form, you know, uniform, attractive letters faster. And often — just what I’ve observed with my daughter too — a lot of girls seem a lot more interested in drawing early on than boys. But then, another generalization that I’m willing to hazard is that guys tend to be more interested in virtuosity, often, than communication.

I wonder if the stereotype of the male cartoonist with the absolutely diamond, precise style — like Charles Burns is the perfect example, clearly he developed this virtuosic approach to comics that is really separate from the drive to communicate. Because, as we’ve all established, comics work as a form of communication in a variety of drawing styles. And that you don’t have to draw in this almost machine-made perfection of the Hernandez brothers, or Charles Burns, or Chris Ware, in order to communicate, and I do wonder if that accounts to some degree to differences you see in the way men and women draw. This is a generalization, but women just being a little less concerned with virtuosity.

FORNEY: One thing that that makes me think of is Phoebe Gloeckner, because her comics work is kind of rough, you know? Bodies are distorted. And then you see her medical illustrations, or the pieces of art that she does that are kind of … just that she does in that style, are like really precise.

TELGEMEIER: Yeah, they’re totally virtuosic.

FORNEY: Exactly. And so, I imagine that that’s a choice that either comes intuitively, or she made a conscious decision to have that difference in the presentation of her narratives.

The Wall Street Journal looks at DC Entertainment.

TCJ-contributor Dominic Umile on Gabrielle Bell's upcoming book.

A nice local profile of Jason Lutes.

The Guardian published a weekend comics supplement. It's reviewed here.

Not comics: A reminder -- Robert Weaver was a wonderful and now mostly forgotten illustrator. His lines are casually electric, and very few other illustrators were as adept at blending realist figuration with abstract areas of space. Check him out. We ran a piece about him last year.

Not comics: Remember index magazine? Here's a little refresher. I still can't decide if I liked it or not.

When Dan isn't deliberately provoking everyone in the reading audience with dumb and/or pointlessly offensive arguments (I prefer his smart & pointedly offensive ones), he can perpetrate some pretty good comics talk. Today he's got a nice short and sweet interview with Ron Regé, Jr., regarding his recent self-published Diana, an underground reimagining of early Wonder Woman. Here's Regé:

In my exploration of the misfits and freaks of history that comprised much of The Cartoon Utopia, I had originally wanted to include the Marstons, as the whole bondage/plural marriage/lie detector aspect of their story was something I hadn't heard of until recently. It changed my whole outlook on her as modern character.

Elsewhere on the comics internet:

—Reviews & Commentary. The great Ray Davis writes about M.K. Brown (and Ed Bluestone). Sean Kleefeld questions the conventional wisdom that size prevents modern comic strip artists from making interesting visuals. Rob Clough reviews a slew of books. So does Abhay Khosla. Sean T. Collins wonders if comics has a "Netflix effect." We should all listen to Julia Gfrörer.

—Funnies. The Guardian just published a large special edition including comics from novelists A.M. Homes, Gillian Flynn, Margaret Atwood, Michael Faber, and Dave Egger created in collaboration with cartoonists Frazer Irving, Dave Gibbons, Roger Langridge, and Christian Ward.

—Interviews. Xavier Guilbert interviews Tom Gauld. The Ink Panthers talk Mike Dawson's Angie Bongiolatti. Make It Then Tell Somebody interviews Box Brown. Sophie Yanow was interviewed at The Comics Reporter. Publishers Weekly talked to Keith Knight.

—Sales & Spending Opportunities. AdHouse is having a big sale this month, as is was Dark Horse Digital. Josh Bayer is in the last week of his Suspect Device 4 Kickstarter. Dave Sim has launched another Kickstarter of his own, I think? (I couldn't quite follow that one.)

—News. In possibly the first sign of Amazon-related changes, comiXology announces changes to their iOS and Android apps. JK Parkin at Robot 6 has some analysis. Jim Woodring's Fran won the Lynd Ward prize. Al Jaffee, Ed Sorel, and Alex Raymond are new members of the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame. Zak Sally has started a new school. Jane Asselin writes about her recent experiences at XOJane.

—Misc. They apparently do Moomin differently in Japan. Alan Moore, writer of open letters. Slate ponders Rube Goldberg.

Hi, happy Friday. Looks like we've fixed the problem with this site. If you're still having trouble please let us know. Hopefully you're not, and so you'll be excited that Paul Tumey is here with a piece on the Seattle comic book scene.

Seattle has a new underground comics scene. One is tempted to say “again,” recalling the boom of the 1990s with Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, and the like. More accurately, the scene has endured. For a while now, participation in the Seattle comics scene has not been dependent on being a published cartoonist. Rather, it’s something one does, at one’s own level and the hell with commercial or social restraints. This attitude has nurtured a vibrant sub-culture that is only just now emerging. What we are seeing in the last year or so is the latest natural engorgement of talent and effort coalescing and expanding, like a pustule that could someday pop in goopy glory (goop is a quality that frequently occurs in the work of a cluster of the emerging new Seattle cartoonists who seem to delight in grossness and disfigurement, perhaps inspired by the twisted, organic forms found in the comics of  Bagge, Woodring, and Co.).

Elsewhere:

Ralph Steadman profiled at the AV Club.

Leon Sadler continues to be the best young cartoonist in England. When will people catch up with Leon? Hard to say. I hope soon. Beats the shit out of anything else, short of James Jarvis (speaking of new books) and Will Sweeney.

New comic from Lala Albert.

Sophie Yanow, interviewed.

Stefano Raffaele interviewed by Alex Dueben.

I think Sean Collins is involved in this Tumblr? It's interesting.

My first thought when I got this press release (below) in my inbox was "are these people retarded"? They know there was an actual sculptor named David Smith, right? Was that before or after the New York Times mentioned it? It's like naming your protagonist Franz Kline and then pretending it's a coincidence. And there's PR and then there's lying: Scott McCloud's first fiction graphic novel was published in 1998. It's here.

My favorite part of the release is the transparent pandering of the plot. He can do anything, but what will he do? OMG! And there's a GIRL involved? Booooonnnnnneeeerrr! A deal with DEATH? Wasn't that the plot of Bill & Ted's part 2? Or some Swedish shit? I'm surprised McCloud didn't squeeze in a zombie to complete the marketing potential. And gee, that palette sure seems familiar. Oh man, comics is such a fucked up medium right now, one in which artists who are supposed to be "smart" construct incredibly dumb books to appeal to some invisible marketing demographic. Well, I'm sure this'll make a great TED talk. So, without (much) further ado, here in all its glory is the stupidest press release of 2014. Have a good weekend. Try to forget about this part of comics (y'know, where it's become really safe and dumb). Order an actual good comic book from 2014 instead.

FIRST SECOND WILL BE PUBLISHING SCOTT MCCLOUD’S FIRST FICTION GRAPHIC NOVEL THE SCULPTOR IN FEBRUARY 2015

 The New York Times has the official announcement and a piece of excerpt artwork:

The Sculptor will be on sale on February 3^rd, 2015.

“I've wanted to tell the story of The Sculptor since before writing Understanding Comics, and the book's creation has turned into an incredible learning experience for me and, I hope, an exciting READING experience for comics-lovers. It took me five years to write and draw, and I promise I used every single minute to make it the best book I can,” says Scott McCloud.

In The Sculptor, David Smith is giving his life for his art—literally. Thanks to a deal with Death, the young sculptor gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands. But now that he only has 200 days to live, deciding what to create is harder than he thought, and discovering the love of his life at the 11th hour isn't making it any easier!

This is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond; of the frantic, clumsy dance steps of young love; and a gorgeous, street-level portrait of the world's greatest city. It's about the small, warm, human moments of everyday life…and the great surging forces that lie just under the surface. Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work; now he vaults into great fiction with a breathtaking, funny, and unforgettable new work.

“To work with Scott McCloud on any project of his choosing was a long held hope of mine. But to join him as he sheds the theorist and embraces ambitious, adult fiction—that's a dream come true. Scott is one of the hardest working authors I know, and he has tasked himself with a very tall order on The Sculptor. The result soars beyond my shamelessly high expectations,” says McCloud’s editor, First Second Editorial Director Mark Siegel.

Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Zot!, and many other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning 30 years. An internationally-recognized authority on comics and visual communication, technology, and the power of storytelling, McCloud has lectured at Google, Pixar, Sony, and the Smithsonian Institution. His online thoughts, stories, and inventions can be found at scottmccloud.com.

--

Gina Gagliano

First Second Books

Daniel Kalder reviews Frederik Peeters' Pachyderme.

Peeters' dream-surrealism has a different texture than Lynch's; the flowering vagina wall, talking corpse, phallic-nosed secret agent, and mysterious cold war sub-plot are all his own. The dead elephant recalled for me the funeral scene for the pachyderm in Jodorowsky’s berserk movie Santa Sangre. At the same time, given that Peeters is working in a Swiss/Central European context, there are undoubtedly other contributing factors to the narrative and art that many Anglophone readers will be oblivious to; literary, cinematic and other seeds Peeters is planting most of us will not pick up on. For instance, in an interview cited by his (skilled) translator Edward Gauvin, Peeters stressed the influence not of Lynch but rather the Austrian author Stefan Zweig: “I wanted to make it exotic. I thought a lot about Stefan Zweig’s novella ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman.’” Pachyderme is also more elegantly structured than Lynch’s movie: the realistic scenes set outside the hospital, occurring at strategic points in the narrative, hint at what lies behind the fugue state and establish an added layer of mystery/tension that draws the reader forward.

Elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough likes Mimi Pond's Over Easy. David Kipen at the Times reviews Liana Finck's A Bintel Brief.

—Interviews & Profiles. We missed this recent Publishers Weekly profile of Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know has a funny interview with Nicole Georges.

Sean Howe has been finding lots of weird Marvel-related stuff lately, like this Stan Lee interview conducted by Marc Bolan (!) and this public-access tv interview with Walt Simonson.

—Things I'm Not Sure Whether or Not We Already Posted, But Don't Mind Repeating If We Did. The Doug Wright Awards are halfway through their crowdfunding effort. New Powr Mastrs. Gary Panter gives a lecture at the Hammer Museum in 2010.

—Misc. Jules Feiffer has been named a member of the American Academy Fellows.

The Washington Post has a good followup story on the Fun Home/South Carolina controversy.

Justin Green reveals the most astonishing secret art history/comics coincidence since the great James Ensor/Al Jaffee find of 2009. (We've got to get those Comics Comics archives fixed.)

Finally, via Ben Schwartz, a short British Pathé film from 1962 showing a Punch editorial conference.

Today on the site Mat Colgate profiles the British comics collective known as Decadence:

Reading through their releases you get the feeling that both artists are asking the same questions of the same situations but that they are speaking in different languages.  Their work reads beautifully together, one almost completing the other. Both are pure sci-fi artists – if by sci-fi you hold to that old chestnut about it being set in the future but dealing with the now – but their approaches differ. Crudely, where Lando is the apocalyptic futurist, dealing with the nuts and bolts of worlds in strife and the realities of survival in far off lands, Tsemberlidis is the mystic – concerned with humanity’s evolution and possible escape routes from a destructive manichean present in which it is imprisoned within false divisions. If this sounds like some hippy throwback, well, perhaps it is, but the execution is sharp and unsentimental. There is no easy-way-out spirituality being offered here. Both artists are aware that hard choices need to be made if we are to escape the mess we have made for ourselves and that large parts of our way of living will have to be jettisoned. In the words of mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead, words which could stand as a masthead on every Decadence release (and were later appropriated by Brit space-cadets Hawkwind), “It is the business of the future to be dangerous”.

And Rob Kirby reviews Mimi Pond's Over Easy.

And elsewhere:

Tim mentioned yesterday that we now have all 300 issues of TCJ available for digital and print subscribers. Dig in.

Congratulations to Dash Shaw on being awarded a Cullman Center Fellowship by the New York Public Library. Related artists who have been fellows include Gary Panter and Ben Katchor.

Paul Gravett has a nice profile of Oscar Zarate.

Here's a very early article on Wacky Packages.

As many of you know, ever since this site relaunched three years ago, Kristy Valenti and her team have been diligently working behind the scenes to upload back issues of The Comics Journal to our digital archives. Today, we are pleased to announce that every issue of the original print magazine up to #300 is now available online to subscribers. This really is the deal of the century for anyone interested in the contemporary history of comics -- if you want to understand how we got where we are today, there is no better place to look than The Comics Journal.

Complete access to our archives is available both with a subscription to the magazine's print edition, and via digital-only subscription.

Joe McCulloch is here today, as he is every Tuesday, with a guide to the best-sounding new comics in stores (with spotlight picks by Mimi Pond and Evan Dorkin), as well as part one of a series of essays on pre-WWII manga, starting with the old-old-old-school giant-"robot" manga Tank Tankuro. (It probably says something bad about my parenting skills or my four-year-old daughter's future ability to fit in at school that this book is the one she most frequently asks to take with her to bed at night.) Here's a sample:

It is difficult to remain annoyed with Tank Tankuro, however; it is far too valuable a book. Other manga releases have afforded readers translated access to the comments of Japanese writers and critics, and not a few 'historical' releases append supplemental texts by western experts, but this one sees editor/co-translator Shunsuke Nakazawa offering a a rare and extensive overview of the pre-Tezuka eon, from the formative influence of Punch and Puck on Meiji period artists through the popularization of newspaper cartooning, the rise of children's entertainment magazines, the development of emonogatari and the proliferation of akahon - all rushing towards the cataclysm of World War II, through the American occupation and into the midst of the Tezuka phenomenon.

Running parallel to this is the life of Sakamoto himself, who offers additional, personal testimony (penned in 1964), as does his son, Naoki (new to this edition). Sakamoto, we learn, was a trained painter and advisee of emonogatari progenitor Ippei Okamoto, whose dissatisfaction with a children's samurai comic he'd been drawing for a newspaper company ultimately led him to Kodansha's Yōnen Club magazine -- yes, the same Kodansha which publishes Attack on Titan today -- where he cut loose with an imaginative serial about a strong boy inside an iron ball who can produce any item necessary ("like a chest full of toys," declares the artist) to defeat villains. Tank Tankuro was a big success, enough so that Sakamoto adapted some of the comics material into an experimental emonogatari variant format he dubbed manga-dōyō, with uniform rhyming text accompanying dialogued panels (see above, and note the lack of English-equivalent rhyming). Then, of course, came a collected book edition, the texture of which Presspop perhaps means to suggest through its own deluxe slipcased hardcover production.

This looks like one you're going to want to bookmark.

Elsewhere:

—Awards. Jen Sorensen and Angelo Lopez won editorial cartooning awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. The Hugo Award nominations were announced, and included comics such as Saga, xkcd, and Girl Genius (and incidentally, this year's slate kicked up an awards controversy that makes comics seem mature).

—Reviews & Commentary. Robert Boyd writes about Mimi Pond's Over Easy. Leo Carey at The New Yorker talks late Tintin (Flight 714). Rob Clough tackles recent Ryan Cecil Smith. At The Beat, Jessica Lee reviews selections from the spring "Oily bundle." Alicia DeSantis reviews Philip Guston's Late Works.

—Subscriptions & Spending Opportunities. Up-and-coming publisher 2D Cloud has begun offering full-year subscriptions to their lineup. The Study Group 2014 subscription crowdfunder is now into stretch goals. Julian Darius wrote an essay complaining that crowdfunding for comics is "broken" that I don't really understand, but I do know that people in comics love to argue about Kickstarter, so maybe some of you will.

—The Recent Troubles. Janelle Asselin has written a followup post regarding the fallout from her recent review of a Teen Titans cover, which led to violent threats from fans. Will Pfeiffer, the writer of the comic in question, spoke out against this response and asked fans not to threaten her any more. It is depressing that any of this needs to be said out loud to adults, but I guess it does.

—Interviews. R. Crumb and the East River String Band appeared on Soundcheck. Paul Gravett profiles Oscar Zarate. The Schulz Library Blog talked to Montreal's Julie Delporte. Gil Roth talks to comics librarian Caitlin McGurk. Paul Levitz interviewed Neal Adams for the 2013/2014 Taschen catalog. The New Yorker gives Jesse Jacobs a preview and the shortest profile possible.

Today on the site we welcome new contributor John Seven with his review of Beautiful Darkness.

Accentuating the “grim” in “Grimm” for both laughs and shudders, French comics writer Fabien Vehlmann and married illustration team Kerascoet – the pen name of Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset – take the precious trope of tiny fairy-like people wandering the land of giant people, and turn it on its own violent head, snapping its neck and leaving it to decay. It’s like the Borrowers found themselves stranded in Lord of the Flies, without either canceling out the essence of the other.

Elsewhere:

It's been a while since a Comics Books Are Burning In Hell podcast, and I'm relieved to link to a brand new installment!

Here's an overview of recent Oily Comics releases.

The great Ross MacDonald, interviewed.

An interview with Bob Fingerman by Brian Heater.

Finally, this is excellent advice on the business of being a cartoonist.

R.C. Harvey is in fine argumentative form in his latest column, in which he reviews various recent graphic novels including Bohemians, Darwyn Cooke's Slayground, Jules Feiffer's Kill My Mother, and the Italian SuperZelda. Here's how he begins:

As the humble comic book has graduated from the denigrated throw-away periodical to the esteemed and culturally significant “graphic novel,” the shelves of the nation’s bookstores have been increasingly polluted with the works of ambitious well-meaning comics enthusiasts who don’t understand the medium and whose perversions of it not only threaten the form but indoctrinate an audience with false perceptions: readers of such lame endeavors will have a skewed understanding of what graphic novels are and what the cartooning arts are capable of.

And SuperZelda: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald by Tiziana Lo Porto with drawings by Daniele Marotta; translated from Italian by Anthony Sugaar (176 6x8-inch pages, b/w with second color; 2011 One Peace Books paperback, $16.95) is a poster boy bad example of this defilement of the visual-verbal artform. We must stop praising such enterprises because they seem to elevate the form and start condemning them for demeaning it.

And it's the fifth and final day of Tessa Brunton's week of diary comics. Today, she leaves Disneyland and contemplates the "death zone."

Elsewhere:

—Brian Hibbs has an editorial warning against the possible negative outcomes of the Amazon/comiXology deal. ["There is not, I suspect, any reason to think that Amazon will not try to use their newly-increased leverage to squeeze out the largest profit margin that they can at the expense of publishers. This is a long historical pattern for them. Obviously, an Amazon-powered comiXology has far more leverage to do so than comiXology ever could have on its own. Because Amazon can now add its combined share of the print and the digital businesses to the negotiating table."]

—The New York Times has a short piece about the Off Broadway production of the Fun Home musical planning shows in South Carolina at the College of Charleston, which as most readers already know, has been recently threatened with budget cuts for including Bechdel's book in a reading program.

—Finally, we've probably been remiss in not drawing attention earlier to the recent outcry surrounding the response to this Janelle Asselin review at Comic Book Resources, in which she criticized the sexualized portrayal of a teenage superheroine. Asselin wrote a post on her Tumblr describing some of that response, which apparently has included threats of rape and other forms of violence. Heidi MacDonald has more on the situation in general. And Asselin has posted a survey for comics professionals and fans about their experiences with sexual harassment. The discussion of the problem has since expanded. It seems obvious that this kind of behavior is fundamentally wrong, and it's shameful and embarrassing for comics to be associated with it.

Today on the site, Frank Santoro reflects on his house and its spaces:

I moved some boxes around the other day but it just felt like I was playing Tetris for an hour and I gave up. It’s frustrating to remember what this house looked like before I took over. My grandparents must have had more possessions than me. Yet it doesn’t feel as spacious in here. I’ve tried confining all the boxes to one room, thinking it will seem more open in the rest of the house. It works until I start dragging boxes back out of the room to look for something. Then eventually putting the box back is like another round of Tetris.

And Tessa Brunton visits us with Day 4 of her diary.

Elsewhere:

Substitute comic book artists and collectors with musicians and record collectors and what you have here is comics-appropriate. Also, there is a Crumb connection! Even if not, it speaks so much to how our history has been found and written, and how much more there is to go.

This Pat Boyette strip is really killer.

The first issue of the classic British comics mag The Beano is up for auction.

This Blobby Boys video is very entertaining.