Today we bring you Adam Smith's interview with Wally Fawkes (a/k/a Trog), the British cartoonist behind the long-running strip Flook, and who had a parallel career as a jazz clarinetist. Here's an excerpt:
Did you find it a challenge to draw a week’s worth of Flook strips while regularly playing jazz gigs?
Keeping the playing and the drawing together, that really became more difficult. There was a time in ’54 when I had an offer to go to Geneva to play with Sidney Bechet with a Swiss band, and to produce a stockpile, because that was about three or four weeks, everybody was filling in--I was doing the outlines, and everybody was filling in, like Neb, [Ronald Niebour]. They all got together and supplied me with a stockpile of strips so I could go away to Geneva and play with Bechet. Then from about ‘55, our band became more and more successful, the touring increased, there were continental tours, and I was heading towards a nervous breakdown, the strain of it all was just too much, and I knew what I had to do. I knew I wouldn’t make any money out of playing; unless you’re a bandleader, you just don’t. And to keep the music, which I loved, safely on one side and really concentrate on the drawing. Which was a very good decision. So I left Humph in ’56.
The sleeve of The Troglodytes’ 1960 EP “Flook Digs Jazz”
Have you toured since then?
For a while I had a band called the Troglodytes. We did the occasional tour up north; it wasn’t really touring, just the occasional weekend, like a Saturday night gig. The Trad Jazz of Chris Barber was sweeping, and you had to have banjo. We got a bit tired of that noise, and we were trying to move away from that painting-by-numbers school of music. Gradually it came back to the pub, and I’ve spent the rest of the time playing in pubs. The occasional concert, but now I’m not really playing at all--I decided to quit while I was still at the bottom!
Then we get to George Melly, who took over from Humphrey Lyttleton...
The different writers brought different things to it. Well, Flook became George.
If there’s something serious on display here, it’s Millar’s critique of superheroes themselves. The challenge he’s chosen to throw at his band of costumed adventurers is one that nobody on earth has managed to figure out, and given that none of these characters is being presented as much more than a low-watt bulb, there isn’t a lot for our heroes to do once they figure out their interpersonal drama but lose. That alone is reason to keep reading, given the extreme rarity of seeing the heroes of a big event comic go down in defeat, and the generally more-interesting stories that happen when they do (see Watchmen, The Winter Men, et cetera). Millar’s no Alan Moore as far as any question of craft or quality is concerned, but Jupiter’s Legacy has a hint of Watchmen’s timeliness, showing the impotence of superheroes as they take another step down the intra-comics popularity ladder. There’s a very fun metafictional layer to this stuff for all you elitist asshole Comics Journal readers out there: after 75 years of reigning supreme in the wake of the Great Depression, the clock’s run out for the cape and cowl crowd, whose kids would rather party and do drugs and have bed-ruining sex, like they do in (shudder) alternative comics. Millar might be going for an obvious metaphor in linking the fall of superhero sales to the waning of market capitalism’s successes, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to watch the dominant powers of our lifetimes dither as they wither. Here more than anywhere else, superheroes are revealed as an outmoded idea, one whose time has well and truly passed.
Elsewhere:
—I'm still catching up to some things I missed while away, so excuse the few links that may seem old or familiar, please.
—A senior vice president of HBO and co-founder of HBO Go has joined comiXology as the company's CTO. Calvin Reid has a report. This seems like a potentially signal development.
—Sort of Comics: The New York Times has a story about Jeffrey Babbitt, a New York-based longtime comics fan who was apparently randomly killed last week, and who had strong ties to Forbidden Planet on Broadway.
Today, Ryan Holmberg continues his exploration of comics in India with an interview with Kailash Iyer, co-founder of Comix.India, an independent comics anthology.
Issue six came out last year. Will there be a seventh?
I don’t think so. The books aren’t selling well. Indie comics in general in India don’t have much of a market, and even within that context, Comix.India hasn’t sold much. We are not seeing a return on the investment of even the effort put into getting the books out. Secondly, we are having a problem with Pothi. The first two issues are out of print. Despite being a print-on-demand, you can’t order them anymore. I am not sure if it’s a printer issue or whether Pothi is no longer interested. If there is going to be another issue, my plan is to put it up as a free download. Since it’s not selling, you might as well give it away for free, so at least the contributors get exposure. I will check with Pothi again whether there is a chance that the books will be made available again. If there’s not, I want to release them as free pdfs, if the contributors are willing.
It seems that today, unlike when I first came to India five years ago, or even three years ago when I first read Comix.India, there are a number of groups doing indie comics, like Manta Ray in Bangalore, or the Pao Collective in Delhi. New artists potentially have other venues now.
Yes, artists and writers do have more options, but most of the Indian labels are still rather small, so they only have limited openings for unproven talent. I also believe most publishers source out and invite people to collaborate, rather than having open submissions, because most of them have a specific focus.
Elsewhere:
—The 2013 Harvey Award winners were announced this Saturday in Baltimore. Saga continues its streak this year. Robot 6, with which we share several writers, won an award, too. For some reason, the Harvey site hasn't yet published an official list of the recipients, but you can find them on their Twitter page.
—Sorta Comics. Edward Carey lists his ten favorite writer/illustrators, including such as Tove Jansson, William Blake, Maurice Sendak, and Edward Gorey, most of whom are cartoonists by one definition or another.
—Penny Arcade is obviously a comic strip, but I'm not sure it makes sense to say that its regular Penny Arcade Expo is a comics convention. Still, this editorial by Rachel Edidin explaining why she will never return to the event is worth pointing out here. Really, some of the worst aspects of internet, video game, and comics culture all rolled up into one ball.
—History. Frank M. Young has another excellent post up on his Stanley Stories blog, this time exploring early work by Stan Lee which seems to be heavily influenced by John Stanley. Michael Vassallo has his own excellent post on Noel Sickles.
The "correct" way to read this two-page spread, of course, follows the traditional left-to-right zigzag down the left-hand side of the spread and up to the right and back down. [But] I think they can be understood visually by reading them "incorrectly"--by beginning in the top left and then going across the center dividing line of the center.
Gilbert Hernandez's quasi-autobiographical Marble Season is a remarkable work of verisimilitude as well as a gift to his long-time fans. The snapshot he provides of his brothers and neighborhood friends growing up is filled with the kind of detail and emotional truths about how children relate to one another one would expect from the man behind Palomar. What's interesting in this book about the rituals and social interactions of about fifty years ago is how Hernandez subtly brings up the ways in which pop culture became a pervasive force that was unifying in some ways but also homogenizing. In the early '60s, every little kid was affected by the power of radio, TV, and comics. Even the cover suggests a Jack Kirby-esque clash between titans. The more widespread availability of TV, the dominance of rock music on the radio, and the new wellspring of popularity that comics enjoyed made negotiating one's cultural environment a dizzying feat.
Elsewhere, I'm finally starting to halfway get into the swing of things, link-wise:
—The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is always good on Robert Crumb, and he has recently posted his original review of the Terry Zwigoff coumentary. Bobsy at the Mindless Ones has a take on Crumb's Genesis that doesn't match up with mine (I wrote about it a million years ago in TCJ 301), but which is smart and certainly worth taking on board. The kill-your-father anti-Crumb wave of late among younger cartoonists and comics critics is very odd to me (it hardly seems to notice, let alone account for, vast swathes of his work, not to mention his deep influence on nearly every aspect of the medium) but I guess unsurprising. [I'm not really meaning to implicate Bobsy in that last sentence, by the way. It's simply a general observation. Poor writing on my part.]
—Jeffrey Gustafson, in an otherwise not entirely unreasonable essay, is the latest in a long, long line of comics fans to take offense at Alan Moore saying modern mainstream comics stink without offering any specific counter-examples. Wonder why that is? He also seems to think "Sturgeon's Law" is an actual law.
Kurtzman stood somewhat apart at EC. He considered horror comics “immoral.” (What he thought about the others was probably not much more positive.) His reputation today primarily rests upon his having created, edited and written the first twenty-four issues of the satiric humor comic MAD, whose impact on a generation used to the cozy cliches and platitudes of the Eisenhower Age was immeasurable.(After leaving EC, Kurtzman launched three unsuccessful humor mags, Trump, Humbug, and Help, before settling in at Playboy, where he created and wrote “Little Annie Fanny” for twenty-one years, providing stimulation of a different sort.) But before any of this, at EC, Kurtzman produced what have been recognized as the first “anti-war” war comics. With them, the novelist/ newspaper columnist Pete Hamill once wrote, Kurtzman “revolutionized the form…. (His) combat stories were hard, bleak, free of rah-rah patriotism. They were about men, not costumed superheroes.”
Elsewhere:
People, people, the great Brian Ralph is on tour for Reggie-12, which is a great oversized collection of the excellent comic strip. Go get the book. Go see Brian.
Well, I'm back from the wilds of Maine, and it seems like the site is more or less intact. I guess I missed another comments-thread tempest, but, without having had time to really look at the discussion closely, the arguments seem somehow less inherently divisive (with some obvious exceptions) and more like talking past each other (with other obvious exceptions). It would take more time and thought and close attention to respond as fully as I probably should, but the main issue at hand isn't going anywhere, and will and should be addressed on this site in the future. The overwhelmingly white demographics of North American independent comics creators, when mixed with a very strong tradition of intensely personal comics in which many of the most celebrated works deal in provocation and even deliberate rudeness, unsurprisingly leads to various artistic and social tensions, possibly irresolvable. One reason for hope might be found in noting how the typical depiction of women has changed in comics since the heyday of the undergrounds—sexism is clearly still a live issue, but things aren't what they used to be, and I have no doubt that the increased and increasing prevalence of female creators [and readers, editors, publishers, etc.] is a big part of that. Anyway, complicated issues here, and ones that likely aren't going away any time soon, with or without deliberate action—but deliberation rarely hurts.
Joe McCulloch is here, as he is every Tuesday morning, with his indispensable weekly report on the most interesting-looking new titles available in direct-market stores.
After having spent a week without access to the internet, I am way behind on links, but here are a few I noticed while I am catching up:
—Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement from feature film-making. His Nausicaä of the Vally of the Wind still seems to be to be one of the great achievements in comics.
—Jeet Heer's In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman is previewed by Anne Kingston at Maclean's.
—Saga continues its streak by taking home the Hugo.
—The important and influential science-fiction writer and editor Frederik Pohl has passed away at 93. Christopher Priest at The Guardian has an obituary.
—Dash Shaw speaks to the California College of the Arts:
The greatest value of a book like Society Is Nix is that it gives us the work of forgotten cartoonists of the past who were so different — and so good — that they shock us into meeting their work in the moment, without any cultural preconceptions.
For example, consider Kate Carew.
Born Mary Williams, she traveled in the 1880s from California to New York City where she landed a job as a writer-cartoonist with Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, the New York World as a writer and cartoonist. Rewind that sentence. Think about it.
One of Kate Carew’s “Carewatures” – this time with John Barrymore and herself
A woman. Traveled across country (alone?) to the biggest, most vital city in the world at the time. Got a job on a paper run and staffed by men. Cartooned. She did all this in the 1880s through the early teens. American women got the right to vote in 1920. Got it? Okay, let’s go on.
Mary Williams adopted the name “Kate Carew” and wrote candid, witty interviews with luminaries of the day, including Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, and the Wright Brothers. She adorned her interviews with her unique “Carewatures,” and often drew herself into the scene. Imagine Oprah Winfrey as a liberated woman caricaturist-interviewer in 1900 and you have an idea of who Kate Carew was.
Her sole comic strip was the splendidly idiosyncratic The Angel Child, which ran in the World’s color Sunday supplement from 1902 to 1905, and featured a spirited and independent little New York girl who is a forerunner of the famous Eloise. A splendid example of The Angel Child can be found on page 99 of Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915, edited by Peter Maresca and published by Sunday Press (which is basically Peter Maresca).
Today on the site, Robert Steibel makes debuts a new monthly column devoted to the story texts Jack Kirby wrote on the margins of his pencil art. It's predictably epic.
For the last three years I’ve been doing a daily weblog about Jack Kirby called Kirby Dynamics which was my version of the Daily Show meets Saturday Night Live focused on the life and work of Jack Kirby — I covered news stories and analyzed the history while also trying to have fun along the way. For a bunch of reasons I decided to pull the plug on that project, but as we move towards Jack’s 100th birthday I still wanted to keep my toe in the water, so my thanks to the editors of The Comics Journal for giving me a chance to do a monthly column I’m calling “Jack Kirby: Behind The Lines.” It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to honor Jack’s career here at The Comics Journal. As long as comics are being written and drawn I’m sure TCJ will be at the vanguard of comics scholarship and comics journalism. I’ll try not to ruin their website.
The reason I picked the over-used cliché “behind the lines” for this series is probably going to be pretty obvious. Each month I’m going to take a look at Jack Kirby original pencils and examples of Kirby original art — images that reveal information not in the final newsprint publications. I may also take a look at some scans of Jack’s pencils from the 70s and compare those to the printed books. Mainly I want to focus on Jack’s famous margin notes from his 1960s work so we can get a glimpse into the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee collaboration.
I’m also calling the column “behind the lines” because Jack literally fought behind enemy lines during the second world war. Jack served in the 3rd army, 5th division under General Geroge S. Patton. Here is a photo of Jack at basic training in Camp Stewart, Georgia, July, 1944.
Elsewhere online:
Speaking of Kirby, MTV Geek has a week devoted to his characters.
Well, Tim is on vacation this week so I'll try to steer this ship solo. Today on the site Joe McCulloch will regale you with tales of new comics along with a sure-footed digression.
R.C. Harvey profiles and interviews longtime, multi-career cartoonist Dick Locher. Here's Locher on the beginning of his time with Dick Tracy:
Harvey: What did you do on the strip?
Locher: I did all the backgrounds.I was with him for four-and-a-half years, and in the last year, his wife Edna came to him and said, We’re going to Hawaii.And he said, No, I’m not.He never took a vacation.Never.He’d take a day off, but no vacation.She says, We’re going to Hawaii.And he says, No, we’re not.And she says, Dick’s going to put in the figures for you.And he said, No, he isn’t.[Laughter]He never let anyone touch the figures.And she insisted.So I did the figures while he was gone for a week.And he came back, and he looked at ’em like that [over his glasses], and he took a razor blade and scraped a lot of them off and said, Naw, that’s not right.But he didn’t scrape all of them off.He liked some of my drawings.And he let me do more and more.His brother did all the lettering.Ray.And I did all the backgrounds and helped with story.He used my story about Tracy stranded in the canyon with Professor Whitehall from Scotland Yard.He liked that story.
Harvey: Oh, was that the one where they were stranded on an island in a canyon with steep, unclimbable walls, right?
Locher: Yes.His theory, and I give him a lot of credit for this practice, was, Let’s put Tracy’s ass in jeopardy.And I said, Let’s have him on a deserted island.Good idea, he said—I haven’t done that before.How’ll we get him there?Well, I said, let’s have him on a plane with a hijacker who makes him jump.And he said, Fine.It was his idea to put Whitehall there.He’d been there for a long time and he’d lost weight.He was skinny, had a white beard, long white hair.Now, Gould says, how are we going to get him out of here?That was right about the time the U.S. Army was doing a lot of missile firing, so I said, Let’s have a wayward missile land in the canyon and the army will follow it, find Tracy, and take them out of there.So that’s what we did.It was fun.I was sitting on a cloud.
Elsewhere:
Tom Spurgeon talks to Daniel Clowes Reader-editor and TCJ-contributor Ken Parille.
Today on the site Carter Scholz returns to review Dash Shaw's New School.
The most radically innovative feature of New School is its thick overlays of color that at times all but obscure the drawing and lettering underneath. There is a definite vocabulary to these overlays. They’re entirely absent from the New Jersey chapter, except for a dark blue/ochre mix used to signify Danny’s precognitive dreams. (He dreams blockbuster movies yet to be released: Jurassic Park and X-Men.) A variety of palettes and patterns occupy the other chapters, with less clear significance; sometimes they’re clearly reflective of Danny’s mood, but it’s hard to say why chapter 4, for instance, favors dots, plaids, and checkers. In the last two chapters, photos are used, which creates a more direct counterpoint between the two layers of images.
Today in Riff Raff, Frank Santoro explains what will happen when you try to sell your comic book collection.
Louie was astonished. He showed us old X-Men comics that had $15 price tags on them. Comics that had $20 price tags on them. Lots of them. Spahr looked up one of the comics on eBay. X-Men #137. The death of Phoenix. The last copy, in a similar condition, went for $2. Shipping was more expensive than the book itself.
Over the span of roughly a year (Feb 2011 to Oct 2012), Delporte chronicled the emotionally chaotic, physically taxing aftermath of a breakup, examining and illustrating her emotions, flights of fancy, memories, and ups and downs in quick but minute detail. With her poetic visual acumen, Delporte takes you places you may have been before, but makes them all a lot prettier. Unlike the effectively stark black and white panels of fellow Koyama Press author Jane Mai, who delineates her bouts with anxiety and depression in Sunday in the Park with Boys, Delporte’s pages are gorgeously rendered in soft, radiantly colored pencils that belie the quiet grief at their core.
—Laura Sneddon writes for The New Statesman about the political dimension of recent comics, talking to Joe Sacco, Stephen Collins, Paul Cornell, and Grant Morrison. And then she talks to Morrison again for The Guardian, but this time focuses primarily on his upcoming Wonder Woman.
Today on the site Tom Scioli rejoins us with a close look at Silver Surfer #1 (1968):
Silver Surfer #1 is a comic worth examining closely. It has a lot of things colliding at once. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back in Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s working relationship. The Silver Surfer series is possibly John Buscema’s finest moment. It’s Stan Lee’s first big self-conscious stab at creating something ambitious and meaningful. It’s also a good example of what Lee’s writing is like when you subtract Kirby or Ditko from the equation. There are some interesting narrative flourishes, but also a leaden storytelling instinct and deep misunderstanding of his own co-creations.
This isn’t the first time I read this comic. It’s the second. My copy is coverless and was previously owned by David Hazelwood who signed it. I wasn’t about to shell out big bucks for the comic that made Jack Kirby leave Marvel.
And elsewhere... four links that will take you places to look at things. And that should hold you over if nothing else.
First thing this morning, take an astral trip to tomorrow's comic shop new-releases shelf with Joe McCulloch, who will point out the most intriguing titles and tell you a little about them. Before that, he will try to buttonhole you with a mini-essay on webcomics. Your call on whether or not to listen (no one can see you through your computer -- or at least we can't), but I've found it's almost always a rewarding experience.
After that, you're going to want to get some place comfortable and block out some time to read, because Jeff Trexler is here with a massively informative article, "Taking Back the Kirby Case", which not only recaps the recent Marvel v. Kirby ruling, but takes you through the whole judicial history of work-for-hire and explores a long-shot legal strategy that might get the Kirbys their copyrights. This is highly recommended:
[As] I re-read last week's opinion affirming that Jack Kirby's Marvel material was work made for hire, I started noticing certain aspects of the three-judge panel's reasoning that made me wonder if there were more to this case than just another reason for creators to feel discouraged. For example, in her 2011 summary judgment opinion against the Kirbys, Judge Colleen McMahon began with a most unusual disclaimer, all but apologizing for the fact that her ruling was grounded in law, not fairness. The appellate court made no such distinction. Instead, its Marvel v. Kirby opinion sent the clear message that its ruling was fair and just.
This face-off over fairness was both a challenge and a clue. Could it be that the case has exposed fundamental problems not merely with how Marvel treated Kirby, but with the law itself?
The answer to this question could determine whether the Kirby family has any chance of having the appellate court ruling reversed. Unlike the U.S. Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court does not have to rule on every case submitted for review. Instead, it grants certiorari to — that is to say, it accepts — only a small percentage of the thousands of petitions it receives every year. Its basis for choosing a particular case typically goes beyond a factual dispute, such as whether Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, or Steve Ditko deserves the most credit for creating Spider-Man. Instead, the Court looks for a legal issue on which appellate courts disagree or that raises important constitutional concerns.
There are also videos from Ware and Joe Sacco's appearances at the festival, which I found via FP.
—Also from across the Atlantic, the Glasgow Herald-Scotland has a list of the "50 greatest graphic novels of all time". It's a weird but solid list, in that I don't think many would pick these fifty books in this particular order as their own top 50, but the books are worth reading, so it is more useful than a lot of these lists.
—Also in list news, Spin has declared that two of the worst cultural moments of the '90s were related tocomics.
—Graeme McMillan tells the readers of Time about Jack Kirby, and Douglas Wolk goes to Slate to tackle that old, old playground debate: who's better, Marvel or DC?
—The CBLDF has posted the speech Charles Brownstein gave on manga freedom in Tokyo.
—The L.A. Times reviewed the new Optic Nerve from Adrian Tomine.
—Joe McCulloch and Janean Patience have part three of their Marshal Law conversation.
I'm sort of back from a sort-of vacation. A vacation from this site, at least. So I welcome myself back with Eddie Campbell, here today reviewing Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life.
The title I take to be a no-confidence vote in the concept of tomorrow, which might be ironic since the style is forever finding hope and a passing joy in details such as the way the author observes to her own healthy fleshiness. The back cover blurb helpfully leads us to believe it is a ‘coming of age novel.’ While this cannot be said to be untrue, the term always leaves me with the feeling that I just witnessed some ‘potted thinking.’ It implies a coming to terms with the expectations of the adult world. The whole project, again, is at odds with this. There’s a feeling that the protagonist would as soon set it, the conventional world, on fire, though the author may be more accommodating. There is a rejection of the organization of the world, from organized faith to organized crime. It is about the pursuit of nihilism as a route to integrity. Ulli Lust has the intelligence to look at her life and make a book of it.
Elsewhere:
Tim certainly has been thorough in my absence, and even attempted a mean-spirited rant. He's just too good a person.
Here's Rob Clough with an excellent analysis of New School, probably my vote for most-ambitious and rewarding comic of the year so far.
Today on the site Tucker Stone, who recently told me, “Everything’s coming up roses for Tucker Stone”, and then ordered some terrible vegetable fries he soon regretted, is sticking to his critical vibe, reviewing a new edition of Lone Wolf and Cub, Paul Pope, Adrian Tomine, Prophet, and Kick-Ass 3.
And now, instead of a buncha links, I have to get something off my chest. I am irritated by this Ignatz nomination for a Garo tribute book called SP7: Alt. Comics Tribute to GARO Manga, edited by Ian Harker and Box Brown. Here’s why…
No. I don't care one way or the other about that. I would really like to recreate Dan's "sell your boots" moment, and even asked around to try and find appropriate targets for a rant—I received suggestions ranging from Craig Yoe's reprinting of John K's Comic Book to a recent Steve Geppi Facebook posting—and for a while I even considered just writing a terribly inflammatory essay and posting it as if it was written by Dan, but I think it's better not to force it right now. I will deliver my "surprise" at a moment when it isn't expected...
No, wait. I am pissed off about something completely inconsequential: that stupid Peanuts/Smiths mashup Tumblr that so many soul-dead people are linking to and reblogging and acting like they are actually amused by instead of admitting that it's the most obvious and tired concept possible. In fact, the internet in general and the comics internet in particular is filled with worthless trivia and vaguely clever amusements to distract cubicle slaves from their empty existences, and they aren't working any more. The worst thing about this particular example is that it isn't actually that terrible; its biggest offense is just the vague feeling it inspires of Didn't somebody do this already? Far worse are all the people linking to it and praising it to the skies and just the general culture these days of everything being utterly wonderful or totally worthless. Obligatory two-minute hate followed by obligatory two-minute adoration, followed by the predictable backlash and then the backlash against the backlash. The internet age was supposed to deliver the publishing means of production to the masses and allow a billion different voices to flourish, but it sometimes feels like North American culture is more conformist than ever.
If this is getting incoherent—"these people like something I don't" doesn't match well with "everyone is exactly the same"—then so in some ways was my model. But it occurs to me that this rant still isn't going to work, because I didn't pick an appropriately polarizing target. I will try again a bit later. In the meantime, here's a buncha links.
—News. As alluded to above, the nominations for the Ignatz Awards have been announced. Many people have already noted the fact that all five nominees in the Outstanding Graphic Novel category were created by women--notable on top of that is how natural-looking a list it is; of the four books I've read, not one is a token.
Archie artist/writer Dan Parent has revealed that a story involving Archie characters taking a trip to Russia has been rewritten in protest against recent anti-LGBT actions in that country.
—Interviews & Profiles. NEA Arts magazine interviews Dan Clowes. Laura Sneddon recaps panels featuring Chris Ware and Joe Sacco at the Edinburgh book festival.
Here's a couple things I never thought I'd see: Molly Crabapple interviewing Warren Ellis for The Paris Review, and an interview with Crabapple herself at Talking Points Memo. (Actually the second one doesn't seem so strange, considering her recent politically oriented work.)
—A category allowing me to perpetuate the same kind of bullshit I was ranting about earlier. This newspaper mix-up of Far Side and Dennis the Menace captions has been going around for years—I think I first saw it over a decade ago—but it's going around again for some reason, and it's still funny to me.
I had zero interest in seeing the R.I.P.D. movie until I learned that Jeff Bridges based his character on Jim Woodring's Frank! Now I would like to see the three-minute YouTube video showing evidence of this that gets made about a month or two from now.
Adrian Tomine went to the White House.
Orson Scott Card rants aren't as much fun now that the whole world knows about them. Apparently I'm now so old that the only thing I can be a hipster about is weird political creeps. I have to admit that Card's kept the quality up.
Today we have a double-shot of columns for you. First comes the long-awaited return of our European correspondent, Matthias Wivel, who writes about the winners of the main categories at this year's Angoulême festival—Christophe Blain and Willem—and what their respective books say about the current state of French cartooning and satire:
Blain is no doubt one of the most talented draftsmen in comics today, his line and color always exquisitely tasteful on the page. Eye candy. But he convinces less as a cartoonist. His facility seems to affect his panel-to-panel storytelling, in that it comes so easy that he never appears to think much about the choices he makes. It reads clearly enough, but the narration is gassy and distended—it seems as if he lets one panel follow the next without much premeditation, an easy overflow. This results in endless sequences of talking heads, with each panel showing only limited invention in terms of carrying the dialogue (some of which could easily have been cut in the first place). And although his dashing interpretation of de Villepin has iconic qualities, his limits as a caricaturist are revealed in his more true-to-life approximations of such central players as George W. Bush and Colin Powell, who are stilted and jarring in the company of their eloquently rendered co-stars.
Look, the French are justified in being proud of their government’s stand on the disastrous war in Iraq, but does it need any more vindication? Ultimately, Quai d’Orsay is little else than an attractive-looking stroke book for the French national ego. A cinch to get rave reviews, sell out print runs, and win the award for best comic at the biggest French comics festival, but hardly worth the attention of anyone genuinely interested in the politics it claims to lampoon.
Then comes Frank Santoro with a Riff Raff riff on comics made by fine artists—Katherine Bernhardt, Gary Panter, and Matt Leines, to be precise. A sample:
Matt Leines can draw his ass off. He can fill a gallery full of drawings and paintings and make solid artist's books: zines, mini-comics, the usual. That's fairly uncommon, I think. To be able to do both so well. I don't know many mini-comics or zine makers who can scale up and present their work in a gallery setting. A few. But not many.
This untitled booklet of drawings is essentially a comic because the images unfold in sequence. Each spread is one drawing. It moves forward similarly to, say, Moebius's 40 Days in the Desert. If you've seen that book then you know that the images sort of repeat and change as they fade into each other as we, the reader, turn each spread. A familiar but fairly uncommon way of doing comics.
—News. New Republic pinup Mark Millar is shutting down Clint magazine. Ahmad Akkari, one of the leading critics of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's decision to publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad seven years ago, now says he was wrong. As he's also apparently no longer a fundamentalist, and his former colleagues are unrepentant, this is perhaps more of a personal story than a sign of anything large, but it seems worth noting.
—Miscellaneous. The just-announced deluxe edition of Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her features illustrations from Jaime Hernandez. Some chain of links I no longer remember led me to a June Bookforum interview with the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. In it, Knausgaard compares his acclaimed autobiographical novel series My Struggle (Mit Kamp) in both theme and approach to feminist women writers from the 1970s. Which reminded me of this Gabrielle Bell strip from just a week earlier, which references Knausgaard. The two dovetail together nicely.
“At first,” Lynde said when I interviewed him in 1992, “the strip [Rick O'Shay] was something of an anachronism. It dealt with the twentieth century intruding upon this sleepy little Montana town. But the readers tended to want their West to be the Old West. And I kept hearing that, and finally, I thought to myself, that’s what I want too. So in the late sixties I adopted a centennial theme: if it was 1969, it was 1869 in the strip. And I kept that going. Once we were in the Old West,” he continued, “I felt I had to be authentic about it. Charlie Russell sort of set the standard.”
Montana’s Charles M. Russell, the cowboy artist, is celebrated for the fidelity of his portraits of the Old West. “Painters of the West today are locked into doing it very authentically;” Lynde said, “—you don’t find much successful impressionism of Western subjects.”
Through his art, Russell “has achieved the status of sainthood in Montana," Lynde went on. "No politician can succeed in Montana unless he's for Charlie Russell and against gun control," he added with a grin.
That's R.C. Harvey, in his fine obituary for the late Western cartoonist and novelist Stan Lynde, who passed away last week. The piece is packed with information, but those who want to know more should refer to Harvey's last piece on Lynde, published on this site in February.
—This kind of social science study is notoriously tricky, but it matches up with my own experience (but then I would think that) and could be applied to comics and so...
My therapist insists that my desire to 'read' comics in a language I cannot understand is indicative of a conflict-adverse pattern: if I can never *completely* read something, I can evade the disagreements that arise from adopting a firm position on matters of taste, thus avoiding pain. Likewise, the act of composing a dubious metaphoric 'response' to the week's Mark Millar controversy allows me to benefit from the cheap heat generated by a goofy-ass New Republic profile -- one not concerned with (or cognizant of) Millar's forebears enough to note that a SIICKKKK idea like "What if the U.S. government started giving away superpowers as a recruitment tool?" was straight-lifted from the likes of Marshal Law -- while foreclosing on the complexities of direct confrontation with touchy emotional and political issues, thus avoiding pain.
That's Joe McCulloch talking, and his therapist sounds pretty smart. This week, before offering his customary roundup of the highlights of the Week in Comics, follows his neuroses while providing a tour of unusual manga and comics moments which Mark Millar's recent New Republic profile, like a nibble of Proust's Madeleine, has conjured in Joe's mind.
As the more astute readers among you will have noticed by now, Dan is on holiday, and so you'll have to bear with me on the blog all week. Last summer, when I took a vacation, Dan seized the opportunity to crack the internet in half by way of an unexpected rant, coining a minor catchphrase in the process. I don't have any similar plans, but it would be nice to have some kind of surprise waiting for Dan when he returns, so I'm open to suggestions...
Elsewhere:
—Jillian Kirby, Jack Kirby's granddaughter, takes to the L.A. Times to launch and explain a new Kirby4Heroes fundraising campaign for the Hero Initiative:
One example of my grandfather Jack’s charitable nature can be seen in an anecdote my father shared with me on many occasions. It took place during the Bar Mitzvah of my grandfather’s nephew in a Lower East Side Manhattan synagogue in the early 1960s. After the service, his nephew’s family, being of modest means, had just a simple buffet served in the large entrance foyer of the synagogue. Noticing a homeless man standing in the open doorway, just looking in at the celebration, my grandfather Jack immediately walked over to the man, took him by the arm, led him into the room, sat him down at a table and served him a plate of food. Not a word was spoken between the two men.
My grandfather, himself having grown up in poverty, knew hunger. This act of kindness, typical of my grandfather, inspired me to raise money and awareness for the Hero Initiative, because a charity that helps others in the comic book community and gives aid to those in need exemplifies the devotion my grandfather Jack always had for his fellow man.
As a work of narrative comic art, The Bungle Family effectively went unseen over its quarter-century span except on the daily and Sunday comic pages of American newspapers, with no shelvable record or cinematic adaptation of any kind. Yet the strip appeared in hundreds of papers with virtually no drops from its early years through the ’40s, when Tuthill closed it down to almost universal protests from readers and editors, yielding to their entreaties once for a revival run of a few years, then retiring it firmly in 1945 for good. (For two more decades, Tuthill lived quietly as the wealthy squire of tiny Ferguson, Mo., relishing his days away from drawing-board demands, never knowing the attention that still unborn comic-strip fandom would have brought him from the ’60s on—and perhaps not caring.)
Today brings the return of one of our most popular recurring features, Richard Gehr's "Know Your New Yorker Cartoonist" column. Today, he talks to George Booth, and here's a sample:
GEHR: Tell me how you came to work on Leatherneck while you were in the Marines.
DIONE BOOTH: I think you could title this piece, "Always Faithful."
BOOTH: Just like I wanted to please my folks with that clarinet, I worked at the print shop until I left Fairfax and went into the Marine Corps. My folks stood with me in June of ’44, when I volunteered. I’m signing the contract and staff Sergeant Harry K. Bottom…
GEHR: Unfortunate name.
BOOTH: I don’t have any trouble remembering it. Harry K. Bottom asked, "What do you want to do in the Marine Corps?" We were fighting Japan at the time, and I said, "I want to draw cartoons." Logical thing. And he wrote it down; he had to. Two years later, I’m out in Pearl Harbor waiting to go home after VJ Day, because every G.I. in the world is going home. I'm sitting in the Quonset hut, and a telegram came to headquarters saying that PFC Booth can come to Leatherneck magazine as staff cartoonist. They were losing all of their staff, and they'd looked in the file and saw that I wanted to draw cartoons. They said I could come to Washington provided I reenlist at the end of the war. Well, I could go back to Fairfax, too. But I knew what that was like: I would go back there and get a job in a printin’ office, operating a linotype, and probably never get out of there for the rest of my life. So I said I’d reenlist. And the other Marines would bring their buddies back, six and seven at a time, to look at the geek who was going to reenlist. They stared at me like they couldn't believe anybody would do that. They were so sick of the war. So I gambled and went to Leatherneck. I was recalled in December of ’50. I went to Camp Pendleton again, and Commandant Shepherd called me back to Leatherneck a second time. So it paid off for me. It was my education.
Here is the basic, bare-knuckle truth, not to be parsed out of existence by legal hair-splitting or the revisionist application of a law that postdates the works at issue: there is nothing in work-for-hire law that can account adequately for the facts of Jack Kirby’s foundational, indispensable, and still generative contributions to Marvel.
—I don't follow retailer issues as closely as I should, but it seems noteworthy that prominent retailer Brian Hibbs, in the comments to the angry-at-DC post I linked to last week, has announced his resignation from ComicsPRO, related directly to their handling of "recent DC moves". Another retailer with a popular online presence , Michael Sterling, has a note on his experiences with the DC 3D-cover allocation here.
In the early years, in the years when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster shaped his adventures, Superman contended with, and blocked, corrupt politicians and lobbyists, venal munitions dealers, cynical manufacturers of unsafe automobiles, greedy exploiters of mine workers and factory workers, and the tormentors of ordinary working men and women driven to the brink of despair and suicide by the seemingly untouchable forces of Big Money. But even though his social activism was toned down later, by corporate fiat, Superman has continued to practice philanthropy, not for the tax deduction but for the satisfaction of helping others in need. Period. And I feel sure he’d be mortified and embarrassed by any offers of a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Originally published as a series of short minicomics through his own Oily Comics micropublishing concern, Chuck Forsman’s The End Of The Fucking World (TEOTFW) is an incredibly assured debut for an artist who’s been making huge strides since graduating from the Center for Cartoon Studies. Given how many excellent minicomics he’s made (especially in his Snake Oil series), I hesitate to call this book a “debut”, yet for many it will be their first exposure to Forsman’s work. Forsman’s main storytelling interests revolve around the aimless, most especially teenagers as they react to their parents. He has a knack for giving voice to a certain sense of ennui and desperation for connection and meaning, yet manages to do so in a way that avoids navel-gazing and static storytelling.
This article is a depressing reminder of a vastly popular corner of comics, and its attendant opinions.
And in better news, musician and really great, overlooked cartoonist Michael Hurley is getting voluminous coverage in the new issue of Arthur. It's good to see something like this happen, and a reminder that there are still "discoveries" to be made.
It feels good to have Frank Santoro back on the case. Today he continues to cover comics that have fallen through the cracks, and finding valuable material about the technical aspects of comics production even for those who might not be interested in these particular comics on their own. He also takes a look at early, indie-era Ed Brubaker:
I think the Beto and Chester influence in Brubaker's early work is cool. I'm not trying to make a joke here. Have you ever readLowlife? It's interesting to see Brubaker change as he was making this early work. It's like you saw the writer in there but weren't sure how all that was going to come out. Brubaker seemed to work through his influences and then found his own voice on the other side - he didn't try and sidestep them.
Elsewhere:
—Rick O'Shay creator and Western cartoonist Stan Lynde has passed away. The Washington Post has an obituary. We should have more coverage soon.
—Lots of DC-based discussion out there right now. J. Caleb Mozzocco gathers up recent reviews and think-pieces on the company's current creative direction. Robot 6 picked out the perfect quote ("We publish comics for 45-year-olds" -- so that's why I'm not into them lately -- I thought I grew out of them, but they outgrew me!) from Paul Pope's appearance at San Diego. Retailer Brian Hibbs is angry, and goes on at length, about the "staggering incompetence" of DC's cover promotion for their upcoming "Villains Month". For more vintage DC talk, see Marc Nobleman's just-posted 2006 interview with the late Batman artist Lew Sayre Schwartz.
—In non-DC superhero news, The New Republic has an informed profile of the you-say-provocateur-I-say-troll comics writer and Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar. Noah Berlatsky comes around to at least one of Daniel Clowes's comics: The Death-Ray. And Sarah Horrocks writes about how the state of the industry has affected professional colorists for the worse.
