Hey it's Jog's Day here with this week's new releases and gems of bygone years.
Elsewhere:
Speaking of gems, here's a profile of cartoonist Julia Gforer. And also at The Beat, a two-part look at the Grant Morrison comic Zenith.
Here's Tom Scioli on Keith Giffen and there's profusely illustrated interview with Howard Chaykin over here.
Brian K. Vaughn talks comics and digital platforms over at CBR.
Good morning. Today we introduce a new occasional column from Paul Tumey, "Framed!" In the first installment, "The Lost Comics of Jack Cole", Tumey tackles Cole's very early years, after explaining why the exercise is necessary:
Jack Cole kept secrets.
When he was in high school, Cole would quietly sneak into his family’s kitchen in the middle of the night where he would assemble and wrap a sandwich for his school lunch the next day. Back in his room, he would hide the sandwich inside a hollowed out book.
His boyhood room contained cabinets Cole – a sort of small town Buster Keaton -- built, complete with hidden compartments. One of these compartments held electronic gear Cole had assembled that allowed him to eavesdrop without detection on his family’s telephone calls. Much like his 1940-41 comic book character, Dickie Dean, a boy inventor (who lived in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Cole's hometown), the young Jack Cole was endlessly resourceful.
Smuggling a sandwich to school allowed Cole to secretly save his lunch money to invest in his passion: cartooning. Cole eventually saved up enough quarters and dimes to buy correspondence courses from the Landon School of Cartooning -- courses that his father, a small business owner, had refused to subsidize.
A career born from such stubborn resourcefulness and playful secrecy is bound to hold some surprises. Over half a century after Jack Cole’s life abruptly ended, we are still discovering his secrets.
[...]
A study of Cole’s lesser-known –and mostly forgotten – comics and cartoons sheds light on his greatest work, his Plastic Man stories and Playboy cartoons. It also reshapes in fun, manic Plastic Man fashion our current narrow understanding of this secretive, influential 20th century pop artist who was never interviewed, never profiled in his lifetime, and rarely even photographed.
Elsewhere:
—Tom Spurgeon has written the most thorough obituary of Kim Thompson to appear yet. You ought to read it.
—The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library's Dylan Williams Collection is looking for help identifying the creators of minicomics.
—The Daniel Clowes MCA show in Chicago has gotten more coverage, in the Chicago Tribune (with another look at Clowes's Chicago landscape I linked to last week, only with newer, more in-depth annotations), and a review from Noah Berlatsky in the Chicago Reader, and gets in an argument in the comments with a representative of Pigeon Press.
—I missed Ted Rall's recent column announcing the death of editorial cartooning after before the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention. Matt Bors, a young cartoonist mentioned in Rall's column, wrote about the same AAEC event, including a great Pat Oliphant anecdote. Then Tom Spurgeon interviewed Bors yesterday, which I haven't read yet, but it's top of my list for today.
—Fuel for true believers & haters: The New Yorker's cartoon editor Bob Mankoff did a TED Talk.
—Box Brown talked to the Beat about changes at Retrofit Comics.
—The Guardian has an interview in comics form with the family behind The Phoenix.
—Not (exactly) comics: The Splitsider tells the story of the National Lampoon magazine.
—Not comics at all, except tangentially. Last week, a woman claimed that she was sexually harassed at a science-fiction convention by a prominent member of that community, and chronicled what happened when she tried to report him. The post went viral, which led to further developments. Seeing as comics is similarly dependent on a convention culture, this seemed worthy of note.
Hey it's Friday and Tucker is back to enliven your weekend.
Elsewhere:
Rutu Modan has a Culture Diary up at The Paris Review.
The great Ron Rege is selling a print from one my favorite strips of his (which I also happened to publish 10 years ago).
I missed this Alex Dueben piece on Congressman John Lewis and his new graphic novel, March.
This is a day of missed: There's a new book out edited by Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester? Sign me up.
Have a good weekend.
Today we bring you Robert Kirby's review of the new Ulli Lust book, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, which has proved itself very popular in my household. Here's a bit of Robert's review:
Thus begin her adventures as a 17-year-old Austrian punk rock girl ambling her way across Italy in the summer of 1984 with her newfound friend in tow, a tall, gangly girl named Edi. With no money or passports they forge ahead by sheer force of will, armed only with the invulnerability of the young and rebellious. Though Lust’s youthful exuberance and energy are severely tested by the inevitable pitfalls an attractive young woman will encounter hitchhiking in a country bound by traditional (i.e. highly sexist) cultural mores and traditions – and by the personal betrayals of certain fair-weather friends – this is no glib Live-and-Learn morality tale. One of the reasons the book is so successful is that Lust let the experience gestate over years, allowing for a certain distance and detachment. She captures perfectly and without judgment the complex social, cultural, and personal maelstrom she willingly entered into that summer, offering readers a wonderfully vicarious thrill in the process - especially readers like me, whose travelogues are generally limited to the “what I ate that time I went to Reykjavik” category.
I spent a very long day yesterday in Storybook Land, New Jersey, so may have been too discombobulated when I got home to recognize interesting news, but in any case I wasn't able to find quite as many links as usual. Here's what I've got:
—As you may have heard, a group of scholars have changed their minds about which is the first "true" graphic, now nominating something called the Glasgow Looking-Glass from 1825 Scotland (and thus prior to Töpffer's Obadiah Oldbuck). Here's a selection of images from the publication.
—Hogan's Alley has a ton of photos from the most recent Reuben Awards.
—A promotional video for Art Instruction, Inc. featuring a cameo from Charles Schulz.
We hope you're following the ongoing Kim Thompson tributes. Here's a new one by Jeet Heer about Kim the critic.
The mark of strong critics is that you take their views seriously even when you most sharply disagree with them. Or as F.R. Leavis once said, the essential critical sentence is “Yes, but—“ There were many occasions where my own impressions diverged sharply from Kim’s. I’ve tried to like Dave Sim’s Cerebus because of Kim’s eloquent advocacy, but I’ve never been able to quite see in that work what Kim did. Kim was also dismissive of Jack Kirby’s 1970s work in ways that I thought were unfair. (! generational divide might be at work here. In my experience it helps to be born after 1965 and not grow up with Stan & Jack era Marvel comics to appreciate 1970s Kirby). The mental arguments I’ve had with Kim are as much a part of my education as the words he wrote.
And Chris Mautner brings us an interview with Carol Tyler.
Loss is a very big part of the book and I experienced loss while finishing the back part of the book. I think one of things I’ve learned this year — I’ve never seen anyone . . . I watched my mother die this year, being attentive to the end of her life and now my sister’s got this disease. When I drew “The Hannah Story,” I had just lost my job. The emotion of loss is powerful and one of things I recently come to realize. You actually do go through a period of mourning that’s physical.
There were lots of other losses too. In fact, last year was the suckiest year ever! I had to put my dog down. You name it. All the worst shit you could deal with I had to go through. Everything from my house being robbed twice to my daughter’s car being stolen. Justin & I got invited to [Europe] and I got sick on the trip. Some weird virus that lasted two months. Twenty-two days of fever and being bedridden, unable to move. I had a reaction to the virus and ended up with reactive rheumatoid arthritis. I couldn’t move. It traveled around different joints in my body. Couldn’t roll over. Couldn’t walk. I remember when I could finally move my foot one day, “Wow. There’s hope.” After the fever broke, I had lost 25 pounds and weighed 119. This was in November.
Elsewhere:
Ben Schwartz remembers Kim Thompson at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hey, new books in the works from Jim Woodring and Dan Zettwoch, respectively.
An NPR review of Rutu Modan's The Property and a CAKE post from her publisher, D&Q.
And finally, an interview with Benjamin Marra.
Tuesday is the day before new comics come out, and Joe McCulloch has your weekly guide to the most interesting-sounding new releases.
We are continuing to add to our collection of tributes to Kim Thompson. New additions include those of Mike Catron, Helena G. Harvilicz, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and Tony Millionaire.
We also have a ten-minute video from the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con, in which Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, and Mike Catron discuss the early days of Fantagraphics.
—A nice off-site tribute to Kim Thompson from Matthias Wivel and a very funny one from the inimitable Bully.
—Greg Hunter at Big Other reviews David B's Incidents in the Night, and Impossible Mike at HTMLGiant reviews CF's Mere. It's nice to see some of the smaller literary sites engage with more ambitious comics instead of just slumming.
—Chicago Weekly interviews Ivan Brunetti, Gil Roth interviews both Brunetti and Michael Kupperman, Inkstuds interviews Cathy Malkasian, and Tell Me Something I Don't Know interviews John Porcellino.
—Dan Clowes draws Chicago, and explains the picture.
—Mark Waid explains why he isn't getting any money for the incredibly successful Man of Steel movie, which apparently uses some ideas from comics he's written.
—I don't advertise too many of these kinds of thing on here, but tomorrow Last Gasp is having a huge underground comics sale.
Today we have tributes to Kim Thompson from David B., Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Al Columbia, Mark Evanier, R. Fiore, Sam Henderson, Paul Hornschemeier, Eric Reynolds, Joe Sacco, and Chris Ware. Here is Daniel Clowes:
Kim had, from my vantage, what appeared to be an enviable life: a happy home, and an unending pride in his calling. He was truly a gentle, kind soul, though he always thought of himself as a bit of a punk, I think. I don’t remember ever seeing him angry, and he treated even the lowliest of adversaries with good-natured acceptance. Dave Sim has probably lost his only sane defender. Kim knew he and Gary had done something beyond what anyone could have ever imagined and he seemed continually giddy over what turned out to be an astounding and indelible achievement.
And we've also dug up his original review of Ronin from The Comics Journal #82 (July 1983).
Elsewhere in comics:
Tom Spurgeon offers a Kim Thompson primer and 5 for Friday.
And an interview with Jim Rugg by TCJ-contributor Chris Mautner.
Today we bring you Michael Dean's affectionate, funny, moving obituary for Kim Thompson.
[Gary] Groth and Michael Catron had formed Fantagraphics in late 1974 and had begun editing and publishing The Comics Journal out of Groth’s apartment in College Park, Md., in 1976.
“Within a few weeks of [Thompson’s] arrival,” Groth said, “he came over to our ‘office’ — which was the spare bedroom of my apartment. It was a fan-to-fan visit. Kim loved the energy around the Journal and the whole idea of a magazine devoted to writing about comics and asked if he could help. We needed all the help we could get, of course, so we gladly accepted his offer. He started to come over every day and was soon camping out on the floor. The three of us were living and breathing The Comics Journal 24 hours a day, as scary as that might sound.”
Thompson not only stepped into the breach of the ongoing workflow, he bailed the company out of the first of its occasional financial crises by turning over a $1,000 educational nest egg from his grandparents. According to Catron, “I’m sure we were up to our eyebrows in bills as usual, and he offered to tap this fund to get us out of it. I’ve never thought of it as Kim’s buy-in of the company.” He was already working for free and when he perceived that the magazine needed the money to survive, he handed it over, no strings attached.
It was soon clear that Thompson had become an integral part of the Journal and Fantagraphics. Groth said, “At some point, maybe a year after he arrived, we simply gave him a third of the company. I remember the three of us discussing it in the living room of my apartment. He was putting in as many hours as we were and was as fully involved in the magazine as we were. He was, as [Joseph] Conrad, said, one of us.”
I met Kim Thompson a few times, but mostly only knew him through e-mail, and through the many, many amazing books he edited, translated, and/or championed. For the most part, it has been a wonderfully convenient thing that Dan and I have been able to edit this site from our homes on the East Coast, but at the same time, I have always regretted not being able to work with the team at Seattle more directly, especially Kim, one of my earliest publishing heroes and someone whose wise and cant-free advice and opinion has always been extremely influential on me; even when I disagreed with him I learned a great deal from how he expressed himself. I always assumed I'd have the chance to get to know him better. Over the past couple of days, as Dan and I have been exchanging e-mails with Gary, Kristy, and others back in Seattle about how to cover Kim's passing, I kept irrationally wanting to wait and see what Kim would have to say...
Kim changed the life of everyone involved in comics for the better, in ways large and small, direct and indirect, and many tributes and remembrances to him have been published online. I am sure I have missed many, but a few that have stuck out to me include those of Blake Bell, Robert Boyd, Rob Clough, Simon Hanselmann, Charles Hatfield, Domingos Isabelinho, Jason, Chris Mautner, Heidi MacDonald, Dean Mullaney, Chris Oliveros, Ken Parille, and James Vance. This does not include the many words on Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms, too many to sift through. It looks like Tom Spurgeon, who wrote some particularly touching words about Kim on Twitter himself, is collecting some of the most notable Twitter and Facebook entries here.
We are gathering tributes of our own to post on the site soon, as well as some of the highlights from Kim's writing for the Journal over the years. In the meantime, a few examples were published on the old incarnation of this site: Kim's excoriation of Don McGregor's Detectives, Inc., and a roundtable on translation that he participated in. I also love this e-mail debate between Kim and Gary Groth over the merits (or lack thereof) of Dilbert, which is actually very revealing about the differing, complementary attitudes that made the Kim/Gary team such a formidable and well-rounded editorial collaboration. And it makes me laugh.
By coincidence, our other offering for you today is an excerpt from Incidents in the Night, the new book by David B., one of many cartoonists who Kim helped introduce into English. His legacy lives all around us.
Jaime Hernandez said it best yesterday on Twitter:
"While Gary's the in-your-face ballbuster, Kim was the quiet ballbuster. Both were needed to save comics. Good job, Kim."
Kim Thompson passed away yesterday. He'll be sorely missed. Kim's contributions to comics, not to mention to TCJ, are too numerous to list here. We'll have much more writing about him in the days to come. For now, I urge you to check out a great series of blog posts he ran over at the Fantagraphics site. These "Editor's Notes" are invaluable mini-essays on European comics. Here he is on Gil Jordan. And on Trondheim's Approximate Continuum Comics. And on Marti's The Cabbie. Finally, check out the two best English-language essays on Jacques Tardi (and read his TCJ interview, too)
Would any other publisher write like this about his own books? No, not really. Kim's devotion and articulate passion set him apart. There's more on the FB site. Just click his name and read on. There is also a nice interview with him about European comics over at Inkstuds.
Today on the site we have Tom Scioli's look at the very first published comic book work by Jim Steranko. Tom investigates the story panel by panel like a comics archeologist.
According to the Grand Comics Database there is one story in issue #1 of Double-Dare Adventures, "The Legend of the Glowing Gladiator," that at one point was credited to Steranko. The database has since been corrected by "Manny Lunch". Now the story is credited to Red Skull co-creator Eddie Herron and penciller Bob Powell .
I'm not interested in making the case that these two men did not work on the story. In the multiple-hands assembly line of comics production, I don't doubt that these seasoned professionals did their part. The case I'm making is that this work bears the indelible mark of one Jim Steranko, and is the first published comic book story he wrote and drew.
And elsewhere:
This has been circulating around the web: Milton Glaser and Lee Savage from 1968. Check it out while you can.
Kim Thompson passed away this morning. He was an immensely important figure in comics history. On a personal note, he was very supportive of me and Tim, and we were thrilled to know him just a little bit over the last couple of years. We'll miss him. Gary Groth wrote his friend and partner's obituary at the Fantagraphics site.
Today, we bring you part two of Zak Sally's enormously entertaining interview with Peter Bagge. This time around, they talk Bagge's recent work, politics, piracy, and how selling convention sketches resembles prostitution. Here's Bagge on editing Weirdo:
While I was the managing editor of Weirdo for that brief period, the harshest criticism I got was from the other contributors, who would be offended by the work of other artists I ran. For example, I reprinted a three-page comic strip by S. Clay Wilson that originally ran in Screw magazine. Screw magazine probably told him, "Be your S. Clay Wilson-est, go crazy and break every taboo." So he just went nuts, drawing the most sexist and racist and scatological comic he could possibly think of. He really went overboard, and I loved it. [Laughs] So I reprinted it.
You see, one of the things that was great about early underground comics is the way they gleefully and compulsively broke every societal rule imaginable. It was very cathartic to see that, and it was one of many things that helped loosen up our culture. But by the '80s, those rules started to tighten up again, largely from the left, surprisingly, and under the guise of political correctness. The false notion of direct causation—that, say, a depiction of rape causes someone to commit rape—was gaining a lot of traction again, which made it easy again for people to demonize and ban material that they didn't like.
The S. Clay Wilson strip was obviously meant to fly in the face of this new political correctness, yet artists who were offended by it kept saying, "It's been done before, time to move on." To which I said, "No, it's obviously time to do it again." [Laughs]. I felt that critics of the strip were being disingenuous when they said "Wilson isn't funny anymore," since I don't think they ever thought he was funny. They simply felt that now was the time to say it out loud, and over and over again. A number of artists said they'd no longer contribute if I ran a strip like that again. So I ran another strip by Wilson that was even more offensive. [Laughs] That may sound childish and spiteful on my part, which it was to some degree, but I also thought those strips were very, very funny, so it wasn't solely about making a point.
Elsewhere:
—Missed it: Mark Millar got an MBE.
—Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season was reviewed in The Guardian, and Jaime Hernandez was interviewed at the BD and Comics Passion festival.
—Tom De Haven has reposted a 1986 essay on Dick Tracy he wrote for Nemo.
—Anne Ishii profiles Taiyo Matsumoto for the Japan Times.
—Darryl Ayo starts a rambling but interesting and probably necessary discussion on the state of independent comics and who exactly is reading them, anyway.
It's the second day of the business week and Jog is clocking in.
Joe also reviewed the new Superman movie, and writes about violence and director Zack Snyder in general, over here.
Brian Hibbs on Kickstarter and the retail biz. And Alan Moore on Kickstarter looking for funding.
Looks like The Smurfs will get the archival larger format treatment.
And Dean Haspiel debuts a new local hero web comic.
Today marks the return of R.C. Harvey, who in his latest column takes a long look at George McManus's classic Bringing Up Father. A sample:
In the strip, McManus never explained how Jiggs gained his wealth. In most histories and newspaper accounts over the years, it was said that Jiggs, who had worked as a simple laborer, got rich by winning the Irish Sweepstakes. But not according to McManus, who, in 1920, related Jiggs’ “autobiography” to a newspaper reporter, to wit: Jiggs was born in Ireland. He came to this country expecting to find gold on the streets of New York, but found bricks and cobblestones instead. He became a hod-carrier. Romance came into his life when he met Maggie, a waitress at a small café, who put heaping dishes of corned beef and cabbage before him. They were married, and Jiggs became thrifty. Instead of carrying bricks, he bought and sold them on commission. Then he manufactured them. Street brawls in the old days in New York provided a great market for Jiggs’ bricks, which were harder than ordinary bricks. He grew rich. (In another telling, Jiggs grew rich selling bricks to Ignatz in George Herriman’s strip, Krazy Kat.) At this point in his career Maggie and their daughter Nora acquire social aspirations. And that’s when the trouble began.
Zeke Zekley, McManus’ assistant since the mid-1930s, regaled me with yet another origin of Jiggs’ wealth. McManus told him the story, tongue-in-cheek no doubt. It went like this: When Jiggs was working as a hod-carrier, his employer was another Irishman named Ryan. Ryan liked Jiggs. He liked him so much that he gave Jiggs a dime every time he, Ryan, made a thousand dollars. Ryan got very very rich. And so did Jiggs.
Elsewhere:
—Interviews. Tom Spurgeon talks to James Vance, and Brigid Alverson talks to Lucy Knisley.
—Profiles. Paul Gravett writes about Enki Bilal, and Adam McGovern writes about Wally Wood.
—Too late for this year, but Chris Mautner has six comics to read on Bloomsday. You should really be reading Joyce instead anyway.
—I don't quite understand how this comic book for the blind is supposed to work.
—Hannah Means-Simpson reviews "Alan Moore's" Fashion Beast.
—This looks like it will be a good exhibition.
—It's never a pleasure to agree with Tom Spurgeon, but I have to admit he's right on this one.
—It's 2013 and people are still discovering the comics of Jack Kirby. His granddaughter Jillian Kirby remembers the cartoonist for Father's Day.
Tucker returns this week. I'll let him do the heavy lifting. Let's dive in.
Elsewhere:
CAKE is this weekend and Chicago magazine has some tips.
Should you happen to be in Westminster, BC this weekend there's a comics conference going on.
It's a Tom Kaczynski process post.
Tom Scioli explains a Superman story and does a nice compare/contrast with an Alan Moore story. And The Awl looks at how Superman has changed.
Finally, here's a trailer for a book I'm eager to check out, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island:
Good morning, folks. Today we've got the latest installment of the indefatigable Rob Clough's High-Low column, in which today he reviews six new cartoonists you've probably never heard of before. Here's a bit:
[Matt] Rebholz is new to the world of comics after spending years as a print-maker and fine artist, as well as an art professor at the University of Texas. For fans of alt-comics who enjoy work with a fantasy or genre bent, these comics will be a revelation. Rebholz is an astounding draftsman who who is also a skilled and fluid storyteller. Fans of Brandon Graham, Kaz Strzepek, Brian Ralph, etc. will want to give these books a long look, because Rebholz not only is capable of delivering a tense and fast-paced action comic, he's able to do it with a sense of humor and quirkiness. The Floating Head Bounty Killers is as descriptive a title as you'll ever see, as one MODOK-like floating head is hunting a criminal in a bizarre landscape that mixes what seems to be Aztec or Mayan statues and images with weird trenches and creepy swarms of maggot-like creatures. After the heroic floating head completes his mission and is rewarded, Rebholz pulls the rug out from under the reader with a hilarious twist that leads into the second issue of this series of self-contained but connected stories.
Elsewhere:
—Jeff Trexler, who's always worth reading on legal comics issues, talks about the recent Gary Friedrich/Ghost Rider reversal.
—The Paris Review has a short excerpt from Ivan Brunetti's new Aesthetics: A Memoir.
—Sina Sparrow interviews Gilbert Hernandez.
—This is going to make a lot of money. (Thanks, F.)
—Nicolas Labarre on Alex Raymond, Dashiell Hammett, and Daniel Clowes.
—And three, count' em, three videos for you.
Zak Sally:
Maurice Sendak:
And Art Spiegelman:
http://vimeo.com/68135338
Today on the site Richard Gehr returns with an interview with New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren.
GEHR: The New Yorker used to really depict the city through its cartoons. It taught people how to look at New York in a very specific way. It constructed a New York just as much as movies did.
KOREN: Well, it did that when New York figured more in the drawings, which it doesn’t now. There’s this great Ralph Barton drawing from the thirties, with garbage men throwing garbage cans around in a giant courtyard. It was a beautiful drawing. And that was New York. That was exactly what New York would be like. He had a way of characterizing the almost primal and demonic noise made by the garbagemen. It was fascinating. He got a lot the city's abrasiveness as well. There were so many drawing like that. Alan Dunn was a consummate draftsman of the city. Charles Addams got a lot of the city with that Halloween cover [October 31, 1983], with the wonderful contrast and great point of view looking down on the taxi and the doorman. There was a lot of that. Now, I’m not so sure.
GEHR: Are you conscious of doing social journalism as a cartoonist?
KOREN: In a way I'm always conscious of that, because that’s what I’m really interested in. I hearken back to those nineteenth-century French caricaturists and, in particular, my mentor Monsieur Daumier. I just love his feel for subjects, his sense of the moment of their lives, and how he reads character in relation to their social situations, what they’re doing, and where they are on the social ladder. I draw a lot of inspiration from that. I’m not a sort of person who mixes that easily. I always sit on the sidelines looking, taking it in. I've learned a lot from artists like John Sloan, Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and the Ashcan artists, who were really out there looking at New York in social terms. That fascinated me.
And elsewhere:
The Ghost Rider lawsuit is... back. Tom Spurgeon has a brief analysis. Here's the Reuter's report and the ruling.
I'll always link to Brian Ralph news.
Hey it's a ton of Black Flag flyers by Raymond Pettibon. Not comics but pretty damn close enough.
I didn't know that most of Donna Barr's work was available digitally.
The Kus anthology is having an exhibition.
And more New Yorker for you today -- the drawn journal of Joana Avillez.
Today's Tuesday, which means that Joe McCulloch has your Week in Comics ready for you, along with a long bonus essay on Jay Disbrow:
Needless to say, the Jay Disbrow comic most pertinent to this column is 1979's The Flames of Gyro, a historic work not for its content but due to its positioning: it was the first all-original, full-length comic book published by the nascent Fantagraphics Press, until then notable mainly for its acquisition and recalibration of The Nostalgia Journal, a fanzine soon to undergo a title change.
Disbrow too was marginal. As with not a few artists, his career had been wiped out by the adoption of the Comics Code late in 1954; in fact, save for a small handful of romance stories with the Farrell Comic Group and an obscure two-color religious magazine in '57 (Zondervan Publishing's The Centurion of Ancient Rome), he had not published any sequential art since. However, as he told Zone, "[w]hen Gary Groth... offered me complete editorial freedom on the comic, I decided to go ahead with it."
And because Joe is all about cramming all kinds of incongruous things into tiny spaces, he's also hidden a short piece about the Walking Dead video game somewhere in there...
Elsewhere:
—First off, as all the vote-grubbers out there have already been telling you over the past few days, you only have a short time left to vote on the Eisner Awards.
—Interviews, both short—Vanessa Davis, Kevin & Zander Cannon—and long: Lisa Hanawalt.
—Jessica Abel updates readers on her (almost a) year in France, with husband Matt Madden and family.
—Clifford Meth has a long post up about the Don McGregor/Dynamite/Lady Rawhide situation.
—M.A. Orthofer reviews Osamu Tezuka's Ayako.
Quick Audience Participation Section:
—I hope you enjoyed last week's Blood & Thunder archive featuring the J. Kochalka "Craft is the Enemy" debate. If there are any other classic letters-column debates or interviews from the Comics Journal past you'd like to see again, please let us know. Sifting through more than three decades' worth of argument means we're bound to miss out on some of the good stuff.
—Would you people like it if I posted book trailers when I come across them, or is that too weird?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WKJ2bLOM8VI
—I don't care what you guys want, I promise to never ever link to anything called a Google Doodle.
Today on the site we have part one of Zak Sally's interview with the great Peter Bagge.
This is something else I wanted to talk about, your whole generation of cartoonists—you know, the brothers Hernandez, Clowes, all those guys— the amazing thing to me is that the climate for comics was so different back then. In the lost interview we talked about what possible models you could have had for thinking I’m going to try my damnedest to make a living off of this, because there were virtually zero models for this outside superhero or genre stuff. And then for you it actually worked. I mean we talked about the fact that you found some old undergrounds, and you found a Crumb comic– and those were…
Well, to back up a bit, I fancied the idea of being a cartoonist since I was a kid. I mainly liked daily newspaper strips, all the funny stuff, and later MAD. But after a while, those two seemed less and less a realistic option for me. I saw the daily strips getting worse all the time. By the time I got out of high school I didn’t see anything in the daily papers that inspired me, or made me think, “This is a good direction for me.” The opposite was happening. And MAD was very much a closed shop, and locked into a tight formula, and I didn’t like MAD‘s competition much. So while I still fancied the idea of being a cartoonist, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Then, while I was in art school, I went into a record store that had a rack full of underground comics, and it was the solo comics by Robert Crumb, in particular, that floored me. What I loved about Robert Crumb’s solo comics was how he treated the traditional comic book format as a blank canvas, and just did whatever he wanted from cover to cover. It was all him: one guy inked it, one guy lettered it, and there were no ads for Twinkles or BB guns. It was just all him. And then there was what he did with it. I loved the way he drew, and I loved his sense of humor just as much as that I loved what he did format-wise. So as soon as I saw that, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do. And while Crumb was my favorite, I liked many of the other underground cartoonists, too: Gilbert Shelton and Bill Griffith, and a lot of others. Kim Deitch, Robert Armstrong, and Aline Crumb. Sadly, I also assumed that since their comics were so fantastic, they must all be millionaires.
Elsewhere:
The writer and SF contributor Iain Banks passed away.
The New York Times profiles Qatar-based cartoonist Khalid Albaih.
Joss Whedon said something about wanting more female superheroes and apparently it caused controversy.
I sometimes forget that Lewis Trondheim has a blog. That's pretty nice.
I could look at this Jack Davis page for a long time.
Chris Mautner, what are you reading over there?
And Tom Spurgeon interviews CF, whose books I publish.
Shaenon Garrity returns with another batch of reviews of webcomics sent in for analysis. Here's a bit of what she finds:
The characters in Cat Prentis communicate in sassy Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style dialogue, and the comic shows a big Buffy influence in general, from the premise of a super-powered teenage girl fighting demons to the bad guys’ habit of posing as human and then suddenly revealing evil crinkle-faces. Between that and the Shakespeare material, suggestive of Neil Gaiman’s take in Sandman, I can guess that the creators were teenagers at just about exactly the same time I was. Cat Prentis updates things with plot twists involving possessed classroom computers and iPhones, but this is still a very ’90s monster-fighting comic. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Elsewhere:
—Calvin Reid and Heidi MacDonald have a comics-driven report from BEA.
—Heidi also put up a post stitching together a few creator interviews and Twitter discussions about their dissatisfaction with DC corporate decisions.
—Speaking of which, I'm really glad no one has put together a site like this about me.
—Interviews. Robot 6 talks to NPR blogger and Superman biographer Glen Weldon. Tom Spurgeon talks to cartoonist Ben Towle and writer/scholar Craig Fischer about their upcoming panel at HeroesCon.
—Criticism. David Ulin at the Los Angeles Times reviews Joe Ollmann's Science Fiction. Sarah Horrocks reviews Suehiro Maruo's Laughing Vampire. I keep meaning to link to the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell, on Cynthia Copeland's Good Riddance, which I think after a slightly shaky start turns into probably their best episode ever. I think partly because having a single topic allows them to approach it from many angles, and partly because the book lies a bit outside their usual hunting grounds, and leads them to fresher insights (though I did want to rap them all on the head at one time or another--gently and affectionately, of course. Come to think of it, an urge to rap heads is probably a good thing on a debate show.). Anyway, really great stuff.
—And Mike Lynch draws attention to a short Charles Addams documentary on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yNQzlJCkRMc
Today on the site Sean T. Collins interviews Simon Hanselmann. Here he is on the characters he's most associated with:
Meg, Mog & Owl, I’ve discovered, are not very well known in America. It’s British, from the Seventies. Huge in Australia. I adored them when I was learning to read. I recall drawing some comics in a mock Jan Pienkowski style in my teens.
My Megg, Mogg & Owl were kind of an accident. I drew a one-off thing of a witch and cat for a gallery show in 2008 and just kind of liked them and wanted to draw more. I was in the middle of my stupid graphic novel and needed an outlet for fun, quick stuff. I added “Owl” in as a roommate and it just kind of exploded and became my main focus. I love these characters. Sometimes I forget that those old kid’s books even exist. And there really are zero similarities beyond the names and the “classic grouping” of a witch and her familiars.
I do worry about the legal side of it sometimes. Are those extra “G”s enough? The fact that the characters are completely lacking in any similarities? Is that enough? I was stoned and I mashed together my life and a blurred, beloved memory from my childhood. Is that a crime?
Somebody wrote me up into that wiki entry about eight months ago, dubbed the comic a “pastiche.” I edited it out of the entry, paranoid it would ruin my book deal negotiations with a cease and desist order. I ended up signing a deal and they don’t seem to think it’s an issue. I guess as long as the title on the cover isn’t Megg, Mogg, & Owl there shouldn’t be a problem. It’s “art.” It’ll say: “for adults.” TW: many, many things.
Last year I did actually write a script to pitch to Cartoon Network with all the names changed. “Steven” kind of works for Owl but I could never nail the others. I really really don’t want to have to change the names. Not at this point. It would be so fucking weird.
Dammit, I want a TV show. Actual serious goal: Get a TV series picked up at some point in the future. It doesn’t seem impossible at all. Oddly realistic. Just work hard. Attention producers: live action. Lindsay Lohan as “Megg,” cat puppet voiced by Nick Bakay, Eddie Murphy in an Owl suit. Special guest Robert Downey Jr. as “Werewolf Jones.” Half bong jokes, half pit of despair and depression.
Elsewhere:
Brigid Alverson covers some recent graphic novels for teens.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian on the "triumph of queer comics".
And Gilbert Hernandez interviewed on the CBC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0l3CHXk5CCY
Today we bring you a classic bit of Comics Journal "Blood & Thunder", the much-discussed and hotly debated series of letters regarding James Kochalka's "Craft is the Enemy" argument, which began in 1996 in issue #189, and continued through several issues, attracting disputants such as Jim Woodring and Scott McCloud. Here's a famous bit from Woodring's letter in issue #192:
Kochalka, you are wrong. Craft is control; it is the ability to create according to one's intentions, not in spite of one's limitations. Imagine saying that a writer doesn't need to know how to write, or that an architect need not be concerned with "craft." Well, I can imagine you saying it.
Was your point that craft without content is not great art? Well, no shit. Everyone knows that. Craft fairs not your cup of tea? Tut tut.
To describe Pollock and de Kooning as artists who were great despite a lack of craft is absurd. They may not have been great draughtsmen but they both had oodles of craft as painters, which is after all what they're known for. Both men were obsessed with getting exactly the effects they wanted and they worked like demons to develop their particular crafts.
You say there is "no such thing" as good drawing. Wish it into the cornfield, Jimmy! I've got an idea; why don't you re-draw the pictures of Heinrich Kley, preserving only the ideas. We'll see what role craft plays then.
Thanks to Kristy Valenti for putting this all together.
Elsewhere:
—Awards news. The Joe Shuster nominations have been announced. No Straight Lines won a Lambda Literary Award. Michael Cavna talks to Reuben Award winner Brian Crane (Pickles).
—Interviews. Actually, there are a ton of good ones out right now, including The Telegraph's profile of Gilbert Hernandez, The Believer's discussion with Alan Moore, Michael Dooley's talk with Peter Kuper, and Paul Gravett's interview of Junko Mizuno.
—Criticism. Novelist and sometime TCJ contributor Tom De Haven has started a blog, and posted his Masters of American Comics essay on Winsor McCay. Comics Journal All-Star Bob Levin writes about EC and Al Williamson at the Broad Street Review.
It's the day after Monday so that must mean Jog is here to set it right.
Elsewhere it's a sloooow newsday:
Robin McConnell has posted a for-sale PDF version of his Inkstuds book.
Peter Kuper profiled.
And here's a Kickstarter campaign and trailer for Very Semi-Serious, a documentary about New Yorker cartoonists.
Today on the site, Craig Fischer writes about his complicated, changing feelings about Michel Rabagliati’s complicated, changing Paul stories:
Recently, after hearing that a new Paul book was on the way (Paul Joins the Scouts, forthcoming in English from Conundrum), I re-read all of Rabagliati’s books, and liked them much more. Optimism and simplicity do characterize his comics, but I discovered complexities there too, especially when I traced connections among the various books. Although each graphic novel stands alone, the entire Paul project is Rabagliati’s ongoing, thinly fictionalized autobiography, with each book focused on a particular period in his life. The Paul books all share the same chronology and many of the same characters, and across multiple volumes Rabagliati’s autobiography gradually assumes a greater density, closer to that of life itself. I’ll explore this density by talking about the organization of one individual Paul novel, Paul Goes Fishing, before sticking my toe into the deeper sea of networked motifs and narrative strategies in the series as a whole.
Elsewhere:
—For whatever reason, the New York Times has gone comics-crazy recently, running not only that kinda strange Karen Berger profile last week, but also Douglas Wolk's notices for new books by Lucy Knisley, Ulli Lust, Jeremy Bastian, Michael DeForge, and Lisa Hanawalt; a Peter Keepnews review of Brad Ricca's biography of Siegel & Shuster; and Deborah Solomon's review of Victor Navasky's Art of Controversy.
—The Rumpus has a dual profile of Victor Kerlow and Josh Burggraf; the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle has a profile of Noah Van Sciver; and Gengoroh Tagame was profiled twice, once at the Huffington Post (w/ video), and once by Chris Randle at Hazlitt.
—Rob Clough rounds up a bunch of recent minicomics.
—Chris Ware was the keynote speaker at the recent Denver Comic Con, and Hannah Means-Shannon reports on his speech.
—Townsquare Media has purchased Comics Alliance.
—Roz Chast, on art and death (via):
Today on the site:
Tucker Stone has some choice words for you.
Elsewhere:
Tom Tomorrow has a catch-up post that is pretty fun to peruse.
Philip Nel and Eric Reynolds talk Barnaby on Inkstuds.
Here's an interview with cartoonist Nina Bunjevac.
The New York Times profiles outgoing Vertigo chief Karen Berger. Tom Spurgeon has some thoughts on the profile itself.
And here's a report on the ongoing Book Expo America over at The Beat.
