Abiding

| August 7, 2013

Today Paul Tumey continues his deep dive into the Lost Comics of Jack Cole.

As he was making his regular rounds in 1937 to the offices of various New York magazine publishers, selling a few cartoons here and there, Jack Cole may have begun to realize he needed to widen his scope in order to make it as a cartoonist. Fortunately for Cole, he was in the right place at the right time. A massive new market for cartoonists was opening up – the comic book. Originally a re-formatted book-like pamphlet reprinting of Sunday newspaper comics, the success of the idea generated such a growing demand that savvy entrepreneurs began to supply comic book publishers with original material.

One of these entrepreneurs was Harry “A” Chesler. His quirky, quotation-framed middle initial was an affectation, designed to make him sound more important. It’s said that Chelser sometimes told people the “A” stood for “Anything.” In 1935 or 1936, Chelser began congregating artists and writers into rented studio spaces and paying them small amounts of money to create material that he could then sell to comic book publishers, including Centaur, MLJ (later known as Archie Comics), Street and Smith, Fox and Fawcett. Some of the writers and artists who worked in the Chelser shops at one time or another went on to become legends in comics: Jack Binder (who later opened up his own shop), Otto Binder, Charles Biro, Carl Burgos, Lou Fine, Creig Flessel,Gill Fox, Fred Guardineer, Paul Gustavson,Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert,  Roy Krenkel,  Mort Meskin, Mac Raboy, George Tuska, Bob Wood, and – of course – Jack Cole.

Elsewhere, many things at once:

I liked this post about the perpetually underrated Chris Reynolds.

Paul Karasik's graphic reporting has been very rewarding, like this one.

Don Simpson covers our own Frank Santoro.

Benjamin Marra has announced a new, very fun looking comic.

And Mick McMahon is my favorite 2000 AD artist, in case anyone asks.

 

 

 

 

Beneath His Powdered Wig

| August 6, 2013

Today it's time for Joe McCulloch's helpful guide to the Week in Comics. As usual, before he gets to the service-oriented portion of his column, Joe takes the time to examine one of the more esoteric byways of comics history, and this time, he goes even deeper into the weeds than usual:

Published in 2007 by the Arbor vitae in association with art agency Taktika Muzika -- an exhibition of the 322 photographs taken for the book toured at the same time -- Cecil's Quest is a very lovely 10.5" x 8" landscape-format hardcover, probably conceived as an art book as much as a comic, though it is certainly not a mere catalog of photographs. I am unaware of any prior comics works by Skála, though he has illustrated some children's books, and is doubtless aware of the storytelling capacity of images arranged in a sequential manner. He appears to have done basically everything involved with the creation of the book alone, from the building of models to the shooting of photographs, probably including the English-language lettering, although a translator (Robert Russell) is credited, as well as a lithography studio which aided in the graphic design and (presumably) the physical development of the photographs.

Elsewhere, there are ten million links:

—Interviews. Alex Deuben interviews Kim Deitch, Inkstuds interviews Dash Shaw, Hero Complex interviews Wolverine co-creator Len Wein about the new movie, the New York Times asks New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff about his cultural interests, Houstonia magazine talks to Terry Moore, Benoit Peeters and François Schuiten talk to Naoki Urasawa (!), and the Paris Review blog talks to Lisa Hanawalt. Whew.

—News. The Billy Ireland Library has announced a potentially major new comics show, and the Sequential comics app from the UK has now launched in the U.S. and elsewhere.

—Uncategorizable. Faith Erin Hicks draws a diary strip from her time as a guest at Comic-Con, noted garbologist Tom Devlin digs through Michael DeForge's trash, Tom Scioli revisits the work of Barry Windsor-Smith, Sam Henderson relaunches his website, Chris Mautner reviews the latest Mickey Mouse collection, and Frank Zappa collaborates with Robin, the Boy Wonder.

Slow Speed

| August 5, 2013

Today on the site: Ryan Holmberg on a comics cafe in Mumbai:

“It’s in the suburbs,” I was told. But what this means in Mumbai is not what it means in the States. Despite the unpleasant realities of sprawl in America, there is still a lingering notion that the ‘burbs are between town and country, combining the best of both: convenience without crime and congestion, green and fresh air while still being plugged into the grid. Not so in Mumbai, where suburbs means, simply, at the fringe of municipal limits and, more importantly, relatively affordable real estate. It does not mean freedom from big city troubles, for while things might be more spread out in the Mumbai suburbs, with more big leafy green tropical trees, the traffic is worse than in town and the roads are a permanent wreck.

I begin with this to preemptively dissuade readers from thinking of Leaping Windows – India’s first comics café, located in Versova, near-ish the sea just northwest of the large and tangled “suburb” of Andheri – through the clichéd American lens of “comics in the suburbs.” Leaping Windows is very much an urban institution. Were it not, it could not exist. Despite being geographically inconvenient for most of Mumbai’s population, Leaping Windows has done well enough to inspire a second outlet in Bangalore. This is thanks to a diversified business model. It not only has a café with a full menu, free wi-fi, and a quietish place for locals to come and chat or work. It also has a library with a collection of some 2,000 comic books (counting only the trade paperbacks and graphic novels) that you can use for 30 INR an hour (that’s 50 cents in your Richie Rich dollar). It also has a membership program through which comics can be borrowed, delivered straight to your door (4500 INR for a one year, approximately 75 USD).

Elsewhere:

A chunk of Jeet Heer's forthcoming book about Francoise Mouly is now online.

Also from Jeet, "a precursor to Steinberg?".

This is an amazing set of Jack Kirby photos.

And Tom Spurgeon has some stats on young cartoonists.

 

A Great Topic For a Panel Discussion

| August 1, 2013

It's Thursday, which means it's Frank Santoro Riff-Raff day. This time, he reviews two new releases (Mare Odomo and Lala Albert) from Sacred Prism, and recaps last weekend's Philly Alt Comic Con, which apparently included a lot of moments like the following:

Long, involved, raging conversations about Tony Wong were applauded, wait—that was just me talking loudly to no one in particular, I believe. The sound of one hand clapping.

We also have audio from Mark Waid's interview of Russ Heath at San Diego.

Elsewhere, I only have three links, but they're all good ones:

—First, Nat Gertler has an excellent historical post on the how and why behind Charles Schulz's introduction of the character Franklin to Peanuts.

—Then, ICv2 has a two-part interview with DC co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. Turns out that despite what you may have heard about battles between editors and creators, fleeing creators, imploding Vertigo, etc., everything there is totally great right now.

—And finally, a half-hour interview of the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, conducted by Art Spiegelman in 2001 (via):

The Opposite of What You’d Expect

| July 31, 2013

Good morning, everyone. Today, we are republishing "50 Years of Mediocrity", a controversial 1998 article written by the cartoonist Sam Henderson, about his disappointment as a student at School of Visual Arts in New York, prompted by a celebratory issue of the alumni magazine:

Now we get to the work of students past and present. “A Day in the Night of a Comic Book Artist” is a portfolio of the best from Joe Orlando’s class. Orlando asked his students to show themselves at their drawing board, and his example can be seen. A young man looks in a mirror above his drafting table trying to get the right face for the page he works on. He is surrounded by tools, and in the background are visions of superheroes, aliens, and spaceships. The results are basically other versions of the same drawing. Most students draw the same lamp and chair but add slight variations like different angles or the ultimate SVA cartooning major’s wish-fulfillment fantasy— a bed nearby with a girl sleeping in it.

Fifteen years later, Henderson has a few regrets about how that story panned out, and so we also have a new article from him talking about how his attitude towards SVA has changed. Here's a bit:

I heard secondhand how pissed off some people were about the piece. One faculty member (whom I didn't know) apparently told his students not to read it. I trashed one artist who supposedly told someone at the comic store he worked at that he'd kill me if he ever met me. I knew a couple teachers socially who thought I was throwing them under a bus.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews with Superhero Creators. Grant Morrison talks at length with USA Today about the end of his Batman run and the beginning of his work on Wonder Woman. Also, longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont talks to Sean Howe about the new Wolverine movie, and not getting a mention in the credits.

—The Funny Pages. Derf wrote a longer update about his previously mentioned firing by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and the end of his long-running strip, The City. Which led to a truly inspired rant on the Comic Strip of the Day site about the current state of newspaper publishing. Matt Bor continues his doom-'n-gloom tour, talking to Truthout about what he believes is the dying art of editorial cartooning.

—Money. Jim Keefe, artist on the Sally Forth and Flash Gordon strips, talks about how cartoonists should price their work. Gary Tyrrell talks about the latest Kickstarter controversies.

—Heidi Macdonald does a end-of-show recap of the winners and losers of Comic-Con, and catches the welcome and imminent re-publication of Katherine Collins's Neil the Horse.

—Tim Kreider writes about designing book covers.

—A South Carolina Christian advocacy group has attacked the College of Charleston's choice of Fun Home as one of several books recommended for incoming freshmen, calling it "pornographic."

—Ben Towle enthuses about the French cartoonist Chaval.

—Tom Spurgeon has a very strong short review of Geneviève Castrée's Susceptible.

—Jason T. Miles writes about the origins of his upcoming horror anthology Insect Bath (and has set up a preview Tumblr for it, as well).

—The Los Angeles Review of Books has a video interview with Sammy Harkham.

Daytime

| July 30, 2013

Today on the site, the incomparable Jog discusses new comics and Jae Lee:

Deservedly or not, Lee is infamous for his slow production of pages, and like the similarly-drubbed Frank Quitely, his emphasis on placing bodies in relation to one another in sparse environments — and Lee is very much a stronger communicator of spatial relations than physical contact — can easily be read as handing over a bunch of work to the colorist; I don’t expect the original pencils for this one consisted of much more than the panel borders and a pair of Bat-smears of varying distinction. That said, I am not reading Jae Lee’s original art, but instead laboring under a helpful fiction that when I refer to “Jae Lee” I am hopefully restricting myself to considerations of his drawings and layouts, with the understanding that the wholeness of the page is attributable in large part to June Chung.

Elsewhere:

The New York Times on the "creator participation" model of comics-to-movie biz.

Tom Spurgeon on Before Watchmen.

I missed this Ronald Searle exhibition fundraiser. Seems worthy.

Inflected Lines

| July 29, 2013

Today, we bring you the Comics Journal writing debut of a mysterious character named Waldo, who volunteered to review Kim Deitch's new book, The Amazing, Enlightening, and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley. It's an unusual review for many reasons, and here's a sample:

Deitch-TCJ-11

Elsewhere:

—There are several noteworthy comics notices out there, including Rookie founder Tavi Gevenson's review of The Daniel Clowes Reader for the Chicago Tribune, Roctober magazine's short but intense review of comics by Mickey Z and Michael DeForge, Daniel Kalder's review of Igor Baranko's Jihad, Noah Berlatsky's look at a zen strip from John Porcellino, and three recommendations from Jeff Smith.

—Portland's crowd-funded comics convention, The Projects, is in the final days of its Kickstarter drive, and hasn't made its goal yet.

—Tom Spurgeon has a nice, long interview with Charles Forsman.

—Gary Groth as a young fan.

—For Comics Forum, Andrei Molotiu gathers a list of terms useful for comics studies, from action-to-action transition to word/image irony, and provides illustrations here.

Weather Report

| July 26, 2013

Tucker returns today with a full dose couldn't make it today, but we have two reviews for you. First, Robert Kirby on Graham Chaffee's Good Dog:

I confess unfamiliarity with Graham Chaffee’s prior work. According to his bio he authored a 2003 comics collection, The Most Important Thing and Other Stories, then took a detour into tattoo art before completing this comeback effort. His drawings are appealing throughout Good Dog. He may not have the instantly recognizable, idiosyncratic style of a Theo Ellsworth or a Michael DeForge, being more of a solid craftsman along the lines of say, Dean Haspiel or Josh Neufeld, but his skills are undeniable. His dog drawings particularly shine. He deftly captures their body language and emotional states without undue anthropomorphizing; dog-loving readers will recognize that he clearly gets the whole dog thing—from the scratching of an itch to the quizzical cock of an ear, to the forlorn, tentative quality of a stray meeting a seemingly kind stranger. His human characters are also finely rendered, especially his more stylized drawings of the pool hall owners. Chaffee is also adept at using the art of comics to create some beautiful scene transitions and character arcs; at the peak of the story, one character greets his destiny in a grandly executed, poetic sequence that left me with a lump in my throat.

And Daniel Kalder on Alejandro Jodorowsky and Olivier Boiscommun's Pietrolino:

Pietrolino abounds in things that Jodorowsky loves. But the book is radically different from all his other comics in its unprecedented levels of restraint and even good taste. There is hardly any violence, precious little sex, no taboo breaking, barely any mystic-religious stuff, the plot is straightforward, and Jodorowsky dials down the symbolism. The tone is wistful, reflective, nostalgic, gentle, and melancholy. Pietrolino suffers, but his suffering is depicted without Jodorowsky’s tendency to abrupt tonal subversion; there are no sudden beheadings or wisecracks, there is no explicit parent-child sex. It’s the kind of Jodorowsky book you could show your mother, or a priest, or even a little girl, his equivalent of The Straight Story, David Lynch’s gentle yarn about an old codger riding a lawn mower to see his estranged brother one last time. And yet as with all—or nearly all—of Jodorowsky’s works, Pietrolino is at its core the tale of a wounded individual seeking healing, so it nevertheless fits neatly into his oeuvre.

Elsewhere:

Glen David Gold on corporations and Comic-Con. Always fun: D&Q at Comic-Con.

Robin McConnell interviews Phil McAndrew, while Laura Hudson profiles Neil Gaiman and looks at his upcoming return to comics.

Finally, it looks like Desert Island is putting on a comic book festival on November 9th, with Paul Karasik as programming director. Good news.

The Wind That Shakes the Blogosphere

| July 25, 2013

It's great to have Frank Santoro back, writing his Riff Raff column. This week, he writes about Chris Ware's Building Stories in his inimitably specific style:

I appreciate the way Ware is using the center of the page and sometimes the spread to focus the eye. Again, this is something that he's been doing forever — it's just that he is expanding his use of it and because of the assembly of Building Stories, the contrasting use of the center in each format really came through. The "all at once" reading of the spread feels more approachable within the framework of the whole. Meaning some issues of Acme start with "all at once" reading or start with "traditional" reading; there have always been different approaches to reading in his work. Yet with the structure of Building Stories I often found myself starting in the center of the spread or page, depending on where my eye took me, and would just go with it instead of stopping myself and starting in the upper left hand corner. Even if I was fast forwarding the story it didn't feel "wrong" like I was reading the last lines of a novel first & spoiling the ending.

One sequence that comes to mind is when our hero is drawing the landscape out her window. ...


Elsewhere:

—Comics & Politics. I missed it, but Matt Bors was interviewed about the state of political cartooning on CNN:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yASoV-ncExY

Derf Backderf, who isn't precisely a political cartoonist but often tackles politics in his work, announced via Twitter that he's been laid off from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

And Hayao Miyazaki has been criticized in Japan because his new film has been deemed by some to be insufficiently patriotic.

—Reviews. Gabriel Winslow-Yost writes about CF's new Mere for the New York Review of Books. Nicky Tiso writes about Lisa Pearson's It Is Almost That> at HTMLGiant.

—Conventions. The New York Times came back from Comic-Con with a report on the rise of digital publishing companies like comiXology. Rob Salkowitz, who wrote a book on Comic-Con, comes back from this year's show believing its cultural impact may have plateaued. Gabe Fowler's Desert Island Tumblr page is hosting an announcement.

—Interviews. Michael Cavna at the Washington Post interviewed Joe Sinnott after he entered the Eisner Hall of Fame. Marc Singer reports on a Grant Morrison public appearance in Scotland he helped host.

—Culture. Domingos Isabelinho writes about a special comics-focused 1971 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. Scott Esposito writes about the recent rediscovery of John Williams's novel Stoner in a way that will likely resonate to many comics fans.

It’s a Gas

| July 24, 2013

Today on the site: Listen closely to the SDCC panel on music and comics with David Lasky and William Stout.

Elsewhere:

I've completely missed this very funny Tumblr site by Zohar Lazar: Ignatz is Unfunny.

The Forward on Bob Fingerman's opening at MoCCA.

Here's a review of a book I'm looking forward to reading: The Strange Tale of Panorama Island.

I like this gallery of images from the last day of Comic-Con. And here are Tom Spurgeon's final thoughts on SDCC 2013.

And Doug Aitken interviews Raymond Pettibon.

Challenging the Concept of Free Content

| July 23, 2013

It's the time of the week when Joe McCulloch tells us about all the newest, most interesting comics coming out in stores tomorrow.

Elsewhere:

—Deb Aoki, formerly of manga.about.com, has launched a brand-new site this morning, Manga Comics Manga.

—Here are the winners of the 2013 Eisner Awards. Building Stories and Saga did especially well.

—I'm probably not going to link to a lot of Comic-Con reports this year, but I liked this one from Philip Nel.

—If your interest was at all piqued by the announcement of new S. Clay Wilson books on the way, please go to Justin Green's blog entry passing a message from Wilson's wife Lorraine Chamberlain about Wilson's current health and financial situation (you may remember he received a traumatic brain injury a few years ago), and information about how you can help (Green's offering an incentive of his own for doing so).

—This sounds interesting. Starting this August, Tom Hart's SAW will be offering an online comics history course.

—Tom Spurgeon interviewed Chris Roberson and Allison Baker on the one-year anniversary of Monkeybrain Comics.

—Sarrah Horrocks writes about Red Sonja.

—Jim Rugg inks John Buscema.

Street

| July 22, 2013

Today on the site:

R.C. Harvey profiles Helen Hockinson:

Parker and Hokinson shared an admiration for the redoubtable editor of The New Yorker. “We set great store by the judgment of Harold Ross,” Parker wrote, adding Hoky’s opinion: “When he pencils ‘Not funny’ in the margin of a drawing and I look at it later, I generally realize to my horror that it isn’t,” she said.

Although her relationship with the magazine and its editor was, for the most part, “extremely happy,” as Parker reported, there was an occasion of unhappiness when she discovered that Peter Arno was being paid more for his cartoons than she was for hers. This discrepancy doubtless arose because of Ross’s labyrinthian pay scale that resulted in higher pay for full-page cartoons—and Arno was diligent in opting for full-page ideas every time. But Hoky, put out by the perceived inequity, refused to send in any more drawings until the playing field was leveled. Ross promptly did the right thing.

Hokinson kept her pocket-sized sketchpad with her at all times, and once, at least, after her celebrity as the creator of the Hokinson Woman was established, her habit of drawing wherever she was gave her a chuckle. She was sketching at a flower show when she overheard a broad-beamed woman saying to her friends, “Watch out. I understand Helen Hokinson comes here for material.” Hoky, who was at that very moment unobtrusively drawing the speaker, giggled to herself but didn’t miss a stroke of the pencil.

 

Elsewhere:

That enormo Comic-Con over on the other coast generated some news. Tom Spurgeon kept a good running commentary. The Beat already has some panel summaries.

The New Yorker on Rube Goldberg.

And Harlan Ellison profiled by New York magazine.

The Influence of Slander

| July 19, 2013

Today, we bring you Craig Fischer's review of Michel Rabagliati's latest graphic novel, Paul Joins the Scouts. This piece of course acts as something of a pendant to the larger essay Craig wrote about Rabagliati's work recently, which he summarizes briefly within the new review:

Here on TCJ a few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about Rabagliati’s work before Scouts, arguing that readers can assemble a rough but consistent chronology for Rabagliati/Paul’s life from the events presented and alluded to in such “stand-alone” books as Paul Has a Summer Job (2002) and The Song of Roland (2009/English translation 2012). Scouts fills out the chronology further, showing us much more of Paul’s childhood than we’ve previously seen. I also mentioned that Paul’s father typically gets a lot more narrative attention from Rabagliati than Paul’s mother, but that too is corrected in Scouts, where Paul’s mother Aline is portrayed as a vivacious young wife frustrated by living in an apartment next door to two nosy relatives, one of whom is Paul’s great-aunt Janette, “seamstress, hat-maker and old maid” (17), who we’ve seen previously (as a much older person) in Paul Moves Out (2004/2005). The pleasures of the Paul series are two-fold: each individual graphic novel has a proper beginning, middle and end, and can be read on its own, but those who read the entire series notice reoccurring characters and motifs and can assemble a broader picture of Paul’s life.

Elsewhere:

—There's some kind of convention going on today, but I have no idea how to find out any information about it. It's really important to me that I know every bit of information about the big sfx movies I'm not going to see in two years, though. Truly at a loss here...

—Toronto developer David Mirvish is selling the "Mirvish Village" plot of land, which means that local comics institution The Beguiling will probably be needing a new location soon. The Toronto Star has the story.

—John Adcock & Huib van Opstal have teamed up with a post gathering two rare articles written about the mysterious Herbert Edmund Crowley in 1911 and 1915.

—Ng Suat Tong deploys Walter Benjamin's conception of kitsch while looking at the work of Frank King, George Herriman, Kevin Huizenga, and Jack T. Chick.

—Betsy Gomes at the CBLDF site has an interesting story about how a 1940 anti-comic-book law is being used today to prosecute the owner of a website that posted an alleged snuff video.

—Buster Keaton, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth fan

Animals

| July 18, 2013

On the site today: Good news: Frank Santoro is back with a new installment of his column. This week Frank remembers 2009 and has some thoughts on the lifespan of a comic. Stay tuned for more.

Elsewhere:

Sean T. Collins on Gabrielle Bell.

It's SDCC-time and The Beat has some announcements and here's a LGBT guide to the con.

Here's a local profile of Jim Rugg.

A review of Ulli Lust's Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life.

A remembrance of cartoonist Jackie Ormes.

Brandon Graham has been reading some Terminator comics.

Cui Bono

| July 17, 2013

After the success of the most recent Superman film (and made hundreds of millions of dollars), Michael Dean has written "Who Owns the Man of Steel?", a history of the rights battle over the character to show who exactly is getting paid, and why, and a good primer for those who haven't followed the situation closely:

You may be forgiven if you’ve lost track of who owns the rights to the protagonist of Man of Steel. On the other hand, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the legal seesaw between the heirs of Superman’s creators and Warner/DC landed solidly in favor of the corporation earlier this year, just before the release of its big-budget tent-pole movie.

An appeal of a ruling against the heirs of Joe Shuster is pending, but it is before the same appeals court that ruled against the Siegel heirs in January. Warner Senior Vice-President of Corporate Communications Paul McGuire told the Journal a ruling on that appeal is expected soon.

Marc Toberoff, attorney for the heirs, vowed to continue the fight. Warner, however, considered itself the winner of not just the battle but the war. “This is a great day for Superman, for his fans, for DC Entertainment and for Warner Bros,” the company announced, following the court’s latest ruling against Siegel’s heirs. If this is the end of what has been an epic struggle over control of one of the world’s most valuable properties, how happy an end is it? Is it really a great day for Superman, his corporate owners, and his fans? And what kind of day is it for comics creators?

Elsewhere:

—The Harvey Award nominations have been announced.

—Journal columnist Jared Gardner has launched a series of articles exploring Franco-Belgian comics translated into English.

—Matt Madden, fresh off his entry into the French Order of Arts & Letters, files another long report from his and wife Jessica Abel's life in Angoulême.

—Michael Dooley previews the "Wonder Women: On and Off Paper" exhibition being held at the Women's Museum in San Diego concurrently with the upcoming Comic-Con.

—Michael DeForge was interviewed for the Your Dreams My Nightmares podcast, and Maris Wicks was interviewed by Tom Spurgeon.

—The Comics Internet®'s "favorite" French cartoonist, Boulet, goes to Vermont and CCS.

—Brian Michael Bendis answers a reader's question about Orson Scott Card.

Building Day

| July 15, 2013

Good morning, folks. Today we have another review from the indefatigable Rob Clough, this time his take on Thomas Herpich's White Clay. Here's a sample:

"Mensch" and "The Wedding Cauldron" are examples of just how comfortable Herpich is working in a fantasy milieu, even if both go way beyond the scope of a typical fantasy story. "Mensch" is about a soldier in some ancient war who falls and is replaced by a different version of himself, a better version who had been the better nature of himself that he had long ignored. Once again, the idea that there's a better version of one's self that's lurking out there, waiting to take over comes to the fore in this comic. The real kicker is that Herpich convinces the reader that this other self deserves to take over. "The Wedding Cauldron" is about a man discovering these impish little shape-changing creatures who perform mischief at a wedding he doesn't really want to be attending. The melancholy fellow feels his spirits lifted by following them into the forest, even as the imps are terrified that he will kill them, especially since one of their disguises works so poorly. Once again, Herpich is interested in people hiding and literally changing their identities, only it's from an outside perspective this time around.


Elsewhere:

—Interviews Dept.Journal writer Chris Mautner interviews Journal writer Marc Sobel about Sobel's new book, The Love and Rockets Companion. ICv2 interviews the indescribable Jack Katz on the republication of his First Kingdom.

—History Dept. No one's going to beat this series of posts by Todd Klein on the history of DC Comics for a while. Start here and keep going. And Ladies Making Comics does a short profile of the under-appreciated Dori Seda.

—Miscellaneous. The Lambda Literary Review gathers comics recommendations from LGBT cartoonists, including Harold Cruse, Ellen Forney, Roberta Gregory, and Justin Hall, among others. The Projects festival has announced their upcoming lineup. Jacob Canfield compares Steve Ditko to Jack T. Chick.

Social Jiu-Jitsu

| July 11, 2013

Tributes to Kim Thompson are continuing to come in, most recently from Paul Baresh, Bob Burden, Drew Friedman, Francesca Ghermandhi, and Jim Woodring. Here's a bit of Woodring's:

Kim was a master of social jiu-jitsu. When a well-known sci-fi writer gratuitously insulted him, publicly and in terms that would have driven most people into a vengeful rage, Kim absorbed it with his well-known chuckle, effectively neutralizing the venom and making the writer look like even more of a jerk. But his unruffled exterior masked a passionate nature and a gift for lethal invective. Like Mark Twain, when he had a grievance he would sometimes express his true feelings in a self-gratifyingly unrestrained letter that would never be sent, followed by the calm, rational, and eminently professional response that was his official reply. In my archives is a copy of a magnificently unpublishable screed he wrote but never sent to a business acquaintance, a letter which still makes my head spin with its relentless onslaught of caustic virtuosity. He could have been a polemicist as good (and as savage) as Philip Wylie or Christopher Hitchens if he had chosen to.

Elsewhere:

—Columbia University's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has acquired the archives of Al Jaffee. This is excellent news. I once had the opportunity to look at some of that work in person, and it was among the most impressive original comic art I've ever seen.

—Sky is Falling Dept. At Editor & Publisher, Rob Tornoe writes about the current difficulties facing aspiring syndicated newspaper cartoonists, and ICv2, Rob Salkowitz worries about the Amazon comics announcement.

—Philip Nel has conveniently gathered many of the best video interviews and other links related to Maurice Sendak.

—Clowes does Dragnet.

—Salon interviews Alan Moore, but not about comics. Mostly he just talks about why Dan is wrong about crowd-funding.

—Burgin Streetman has posted the rest of her Tomi Ungerer interview.

—Sean Howe, the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, talks with Dan Patterson about Marvel.

—Not Comics: That Dustin Hoffman video going around is very moving and all, but I prefer the one Martin Short made thirty years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuXYyc9UNv0

Lying Down

| July 10, 2013

In his latest "Grid", Ken Parille closely examines Acme Novelty Library 19:

Ware, who has often compared comics to music, uses the red circle as a visual leitmotif, a “short, repeated musical theme” that he associates with Brown and threads throughout the comic’s two narratives. It first appears as the razor’s cap and then as a pushpin holding up photos of the astronaut and his “first and only true love.”

Elsewhere:

Amazon is jumping into the comics publishing game. So far, so shitty.

On the bright side, here's a Gary Panter curriculum in pictures.

Paul Karasik draws the story of his local ferry.

Lists are more fun to make than to read, but here's one from a whole web site devoted to lists, and it's about comics, too. Go to it.

Al Jaffee roughs are better than most finishes.

Sort of comics -- or at least cartoon characters: Wrigley's Spearmen.

Fashionable Contrasts

| July 9, 2013

It's Tuesday, which means Joe McCulloch is here with his regular guide to the Week in Comics.

Also, if it's been a while since you checked in with our collection of tributes to Kim Thompson, you'll want to take another look at it soon. New additions have continued to roll in, most recently from Kim's Fantagraphics colleagues Jason T. Miles and Kristy Valenti, as well as an essay-length remembrance from Gary Groth.

I’ve sketched the highlights of Kim’s “career” (he would understand and appreciate the quotation marks — neither of us thought of this as a “career”), but it barely scratches the surface — it’s impossible to adequately convey his devotion to specific projects and to the goals of the company generally, the all-nighters we pulled to get books to the printer, the tens of thousands of hours hunched over typewriters and computer keyboards and manuscripts, his above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty proofreading. What I’d like to do, though, is to offer a few words about something I’m uniquely qualified to talk about: the intersection between our personal and professional lives.

As a publisher of cartooning, Fantagraphics Books was an outgrowth of The Comics Journal, so a polemical chip-on-the-shoulder was built into its DNA. As recently as the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the whole notion that comics was a bona fide art form was still alien not just to the culture at large, but even to the fan sub-culture, most of which inhabited this bland, gray area between a connoisseurial love of great cartooning and the worship of pure drek (often both at the same time). The only way to break this critical complacency, I thought —and it may not have been the most effective strategy (because it was less a strategy than a compulsion)— was to confront the artistic status quo head-on with the best criticism we could muster — and Kim was right there with me in this Quixotic endeavor, as his reviews of Ronin, Detectives, Inc., The Death of Captain Marvel, and other books attest. Without this zeal, I don’t think we could’ve made a difference.

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Elsewhere, lots of catching up to do:

—The long nightmare surrounding Dragon Con and Edward Kramer is apparently over. (Context here.)

—If you read the two-part Peter Bagge/Zak Sally discussion we ran a few months back, you recall how much of it had to do with the difficult economics of comics publishing today. Sally is now releasing the second volume of his Sammy the Mouse series, and talks a lot more about all of that in his announcement, in which he suggests ordering the book direct.

—Longish Reviews. Occasional Journal contributor Sean Rogers has a typically excellent piece on Michael DeForge at the Globe & Mail, and Michael Kammen writes about Victor Navasky's The Art of Controversy for LARB. (I think I have to read this book.)

—Frequent Journal contributor Chris Mautner has a roundup of recent books from Hic & Hoc. So does Rob Clough. Sarrah Horrock writes about Jiro Matsumoto. Impossible Mike writes about Gengoroh Tagame.

—Whenever I link to Bleeding Cool, I seem to get at least one irritated e-mail from readers, but they've got a couple fun recent posts up, including one on the time S. Clay Wilson worked for Marvel, and another on Jim Steranko's colorful Twitter account. (Gary's eventual essay-length tribute to Steranko will be a sight to see.)

—As with most (all?) art forms, the history of comics is perhaps most efficiently grasped as the history of the technologies involved with its production. Pioneering underground artist Justin Green is figuring out how the current technological changes affect his work in a brief blog post here.

—Robert Boyd has an excellent piece on the sad end of Domy Books in Houston.

—British sf author Alastair Reynolds remembers growing up on Eagle.

—And finally, Gary Larson on 20/20 in 1986 (via):

Game!

| July 8, 2013

Today: Rob Clough on Eamon Espey's Songs of the Abyss:

Songs of the Abyss, which likewise collects a number of mini-comics he's published over the past few years, is in many ways a more mature and cohesive work. At its heart, this book is about worship. It's about what we choose to worship, why we do so and the implications of this act. The essential point that Espey gets across is that what we choose to worship as a society and a culture has a savage component that is not unlike the way the Aztecs went about their ways: a vast civilization built on blood sacrifice, spectacle, hierarchies, false mysticism and degradation.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon on Aquaman.

Rob Steibel on Tom Scioli's masses of humanity.

If you can't get enough of me, here I am on the Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast.

Here's a lawsuit closely related to similar events in comics.

And the New York Times profiles the new Fox programming block ADHD, which has content adapted from comics and Ben Jones as its creative director.

Dreck and Drivel

| July 3, 2013

Today on the site, we are reposting three of Kim Thompson's most memorable early pieces for The Comics Journal, which, added to his review of Ronin and his famous 1999 manifesto calling for new "crap," may serve as a sort of miniature Best of Kim Thompson. These five pieces are just the tip of the iceberg, of course, and I hope that eventually we might see more of his critical writings (and possibly interviews—here's a good one he did with Sergio Aragones back in 1989) collected into print.

First we have Kim's 1978 review of the then-ongoing National Lampoon's presentation of the French cartoonist Claire Bretécher, much of which revolves around translation issues:

Translation is a difficult craft (or art). If the translator is less than fluent in the language of origin but fully conversant with the target language, the result is frequently a grammatically, idiomatically, and dialectically “correct” translation, but unfaithful to the original and in some cases downright nonsensical. On the other hand, if it is the target language that is the weaker of the two, awkward and ruptured translations abound. Upon buying the book and noticing the name of the translator, Valerie Marchant, I expressed some concern that it might be one of Bretécher’s cronies with an M.A. in English and that the book would boast a conflagration of massacred pseudo-colloquial English with gallicisms running rampant. (“I demand pardon of you.” “Oh, that makes nothing,” for instance.) Happily, I found this not to be so, and with a few awkward exceptions, particularly when coping with the labored ironic politeness that is the staple of French argument (“Quit it with this shit, please.”—“Mood Music”), the English dialog flows nearly as well as the original. Sadly, several strips are rendered pointless or even unintelligible because Ms. Marchant’s command of French was shaky enough for her to misunderstand the originals. A few examples will suffice.

Our second selection, Kim's 1979 review of a collection called Masters of Comic Book Art, displays more of Kim's theoretical side, and is also just fun to read for sections such as the following:

Undoubtedly the worst chapter is the one on Barry Windsor-Smith. Smith rose to fame in the early to mid-’70s not only for his highly illustrative approach to comics and his tremendously effective mood in Conan and a handful of other books, but also for his unique pacing and continuity (involving, in particular, successions of high, thin panels), derived in part from Steranko. The book communicates none of this. Smith’s entire comic book career is encapsulated in two comic book panels (which aren’t even in sequence); then, having done his duty by establishing Smith as an artist who once worked in comics, Garriock proceeds to offer what looks like a catalogue for Gorblimey Press, all posters and prints and paintings. This is absurd; while the latter are undoubtedly better in terms of draftsmanship and polish, they are utterly irrelevant to the comics medium.

In our third selection, 1980's "Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial", Kim gets right to the heart of The Comics Journal and its critical philosophy:

The question was thrown at me in person by Jack Harris, who then wanted to know why DC should help the Journal with news and cover reproductions when all the magazine does is denigrate his and his peers’ efforts; it was posed to the readers of The Buyer’s Guide by two of that paper’s most persistently lowbrow columnists; and it has surfaced in various guises in a number of letters of comment to the Journal.

The question is: “Why, if you have such contempt for the medium, do you publish a magazine about comics?”

If that one confounds you for a moment, as it does us, you can probably rally your faculties and mouth the predictable answer along with us: “Damn it, we don’t have contempt for the medium—we just have contempt for the vast quantities of dreck and drivel that deface it. The medium we love.”

Now this seems to me a pellucid answer to a question that was poorly thought out to begin with. Unfortunately, it appears not to be so. Generally, reaction to it is something along the lines of, “Well, yes, I understand that, but if you have such contempt…” etc. Clearly, a few words of elaboration on the subject are needed.

A note to our readers outside the States. Tomorrow is a big national holiday here, so we'll be on vacation until next week. Elsewhere:

—A new documentary about Tomi Ungerer has been made, and the Alsatian artist talked to NPR for the occasion. The Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves blog has the first part of another interview with Ungerer here.

—Publishers Merging. Dennis Kitchen's venerable Kitchen Sink Press is becoming an imprint of Dark Horse. Ross Richie and Jackie Cummins talk about the Boom!/Archaia merger here.

—Comics Enriched Their Lives! #22

—The upcoming Daniel Clowes Reader (which looks a-mazing) has a worthwhile promotional Tumblr.

—The popular Star Wars cartoonist Jeffrey Brown talks about his autobiographical work with Tim O'Shea.

—Paul Gravett profiles the French illustrator, editor, and creator of silent comics Marion Fayolle.

—Rob Clough picks out two worthy crowd-funding projects.

—Ng Suat Tong writes about Graham Chaffee's Good Dog, a book pretty much guaranteed to appeal to (and possibly addle the critical faculties of) all dog people—amongst whom I count myself. Even the notoriously cranky Suat himself seems to have been softened up.

—I missed this back in June, but Gerry Conway is asking for crowd-sourcing help to get DC creators fair compensation for their creations. (via)

—Finally, here's a very short interview with Sergio Aragones about Mad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIy3GCVddUU

(via)