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Today marks the return of Sean T. Collins with a review of Julia Gfrörer's popular webcomic, Black Is the Color. Here's Sean:

As befits a comic that mostly takes place in a rowboat going nowhere in the middle of the ocean, Black Is the Color frequently collapses time and space into one another. Often its two-panel rows, or indeed entire pages, will depict a contiguous space split between the panels, the passage of time conveyed by the movement of your eye from one panel to the next within that space. Clouds drift and morph; a lonely cabin looks out over the sea; a storm descends over multiple pages, dwarfing a lone doomed ship; merfolk make idle chatter while watching men burn and drown; a mermaid descends through fronds of seaweed after leaving her dying lover to the daylight.

Elsewhere:

—The same Sean, inspired by the recent Diary of a Teenage Girl film teaser, resurrects his 2003 interview with Phoebe Gloeckner. Among her other accomplishments, you can definitely list memorable conversationalist.

—Grant Morrison always gives good interviews, too, though I have to say that the example he uses here to argue for how comics alone can accomplish things impossible in other media (having Superman break the fourth wall to talk to the reader about the devil) is rather depressingly unambitious — not to mention not hard at all to imagine being done in other media.

—Chris Randle's interview with Geneviève Castrée at Hazlitt about her debut graphic novel ends our comics discussion trio nicely.

—Paul Gravett writes a long essay on Roy Lichtenstein, his recent show at the Tate, and his legacy as it relates to comics. (Dave Gibbons makes a guest appearance.)

—Michael DeForge's Lose #4 is reviewed by Ale Hern at The New Statesman.

—I don't know Dorothy's last name, but I really enjoy her series of super-short Nancy appreciations at Comics Workbook, and am glad she put up a new one this week.

—Via reader e-mail comes this article I missed on Josefina Larragoiti’s Editorial Resistencia, a publisher trying to establish a market for serious comics in Mexico.

—Has any other publication boasted a dream team of cartoonists to beat the old Chicago Tribune? Not many... (via)

Today on the site... well, I wrote about an unusual comic/narrative/art project called The Magician.

Byrne’s succinct description of The Magician (published in an edition of 20 by Marquand Books) is: It’s set in a public bathroom. The Magician is this character that goes through and reconciles opposites. Every misunderstanding I have about the universe is documented in these objects. And creation myths, too. But it’s all tongue-in-cheek.” The Magician takes different forms. He is a sleeping figure. He is a hand. He is sperm. He is a cape.

Elsewhere:

Truman Capote and New Yorker cartoons.

Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and Drew Friedman discuss Harvey Kurtzman on the Leonard Lopate Show.

This article on the publishing biz and technology was zooming around the web yesterday.

From R. Fiore comes Petra Haden singing the Superman theme.

And here's one I knew nothing about: A teaser for a film version of Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Today Joe "Jog" McCulloch is here again with another column on the Week in Comics, to which he has attached an essay on the great and mysterious Gerald Jablonski. I'll leave it to Joe to explain Jablonski, other than to say that reading his work will cure the attentive reader of any certainty she might possess about "rules" that must be followed when creating comics. And also that there are very few times I have laughed as hard as I have when reading Cryptic Wit #2 out loud.

Elsewhere:

—As you no doubt have heard, last week a dispute erupted over whether or not the Chicago public school system would be pulling Persepolis out of 7th grade classrooms. Here is an article at the Chicago Tribune, and here is a recent roundup of reaction at Robot 6. Search around if you want more -- there's plenty of commentary out there, though it's pretty repetitive. Usually in these cases I can sort of understand the rationale for censorship, even while almost always disagreeing with it, but this time around, I'm at a total loss.

—In the department of reaction to The Comics Journal: Glen Weldon raves at The New Republic over issue 302's Maurice Sendak interview, and a reviewer at the A.V. Club uses the occasion of a Fantagraphics-published book on popular music to flail at a tiny straw statue of Gary Groth he'd apparently built for himself in the early '90s.

—Stephen Bissette and Richard Gagnon are trying to use media coverage of the next Spider-Man movie to draw attention to Marvel's treatment of co-creator Steve Ditko.

—Lisa Hanawalt racks up an unusual accomplishment for a cartoonist: being nominated for a James Beard Award.

—Gil Roth interviews Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Matt Wuerker.

—Chuck Austen tells his fellow Tokyopop creators to "move on."

—Finally, via the entire internet, a short PBS video on webcomics:

Today brings us the return of Jeet Heer to this site. We have missed you, Jeet. Here he interviews Walter Biggins, who is leaving University Press of Mississippi after 14 years, where he published some of most significant prose books on comics. Some of my favorites are: Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s, and Howard Chaykin: Conversations.

Elsewhere:

Here's a beautiful Connor Willumsen comic originally worked on for our own Frank Santoro's correspondence course.

A Xerox bought on eBay from TCJ-contributor Ron Goulart leads to some thoughts from Paul Tumey on Cole's early technique.

David Lasky interviewed.

Tom Spurgeon picks up and comments on the recent internet meme going around: working for free.

More online comics: Thomas Herpich at VICE.

Finally, I know I'm showing my age here, but when I was an 11 year-old comic book fanatic, this comic somehow seemed old, hard to find, and mind-blowing. All those heroes in one place? Unthinkable.

We started our week with a question from Ryan Holmberg, and we end it with a full-blown column. This time in What Was Alternative Manga?, Holmberg looks at a Japanese-language comic from the Philippines, involving mad scientists and cloned women, and wonders about its origins:

Hypothesis: it was designed for sale to Japanese male businessmen and sex tourists, who were sometimes one and the same. This makes sense not only time-wise, but also content-wise.

Tourism exploded amongst the Japanese in the 1970s. Thanks to increasing affluence and a strong yen, more Japanese had the ability to travel both domestically and overseas. In Japanese studies, one often reads about the “Discover Japan” campaigns initiated in 1970, targeted primarily at young women, urging them to find themselves through trips to exotic corners of their country. This is also the period that young artists and middle-class Japanese began flying to the centers of European civilization, or hopping across America from San Francisco to the Grand Canyon and over to the Big Apple. In the pages of Tezuka Osamu’s COM circa 1970, there are a couple of articles about its artists visiting the States, Nagashima Shinji in New York, Fujiko Fujio meeting Roy Thomas. Meanwhile in Garo, Tsuge Yoshiharu was becoming famous with literary versions of his solitary sojourns to fishing holes and hot springs in the Japanese countryside – not organized tourism, obviously, but a sign that the romance of travel was beginning to grow in various corners of Japanese culture.

Elsewhere:

—The digital manga service JManga announced that it is shutting down at the end of May. Johanna Draper Carlson has commentary.

—The Harvey Awards are now accepting nominations.

—Dylan Horrocks draws Jack Kirby, and explains the provenance of that famous "Comics will break your heart" quote.

—Interviews. Jaime Hernandez talks to Hazlitt, James Vance talks to CBR, and Julia Grörer talks to Inkstuds.

—Lea Hernandez remembers Toren Smith.

—Drawn & Quarterly has announced their fall list.

—Kickstarter kontroversy kontinues.

—The Robot 6 team talks about reading digital Marvel comics on the new app.

—Grady Hendrix at Film Comment writes a short history of Mad magazine's movie parodies.

Today on the site R.C. Harvey reviews Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen's Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary. The Harv has written not only a thorough examination of the book, but also added some of his own memories of the man. So check it out.

The chief occurrences of Capp’s life are treated in great detail: the loss of his left leg at the age of nine and the probable psychological consequences; his education at a succession of art schools he was too poor to pay tuition to; his apprenticeship to Ham Fisher and the dispute about who created the hillbilly Big Leviticus in Joe Palooka; the resulting feud, its nastiness, and Fisher’s attempt to smear Capp’s reputation; Capp’s emergence as a pop culture celebrity; his shrill attacks on the New Student Left on college campuses; his notorious visit to John Lennon and Yoko Ono; the subliminal eroticism in Li’l Abner; Capp’s extracurricular sex life, preying upon show girls and college co-eds, and his fall from grace as a result. In every instance, the book offers insights into these events that are new to me (and I’ve researched Capp’s life for my book, at least as much as publicly available documents permit).

Elsewhere:

TCJ-contributor Sean T. Collins writes about the web comic Haunter.

Cartoonists on rabbits.

Publishers Weekly reports on SXSW and SelfMadeHero.

Richard Brody on Pixar's storytelling.

A Kirby "rant" from Rob Steibel centered around the Captain America #200 letters column.

Today, Rob Clough reviews the Runner Runner anthology. Here's some of what he had to say:

Greg Means is well known for his "Clutch McBastard" zine alter ego as well as for editing the exquisitely designed Papercutter anthology. Runner Runner was his contribution to Free Comic Book Day 2012 as well as a staple at his convention tables. Far from a throwaway freebie, this lean minicomic has a killer lineup of excellent work. It seems like Means will be concentrating on Runner Runner as far as his anthologies go, as he's discontinued Papercutter and Nate Powell has announced he is doing a comic with Al Burian for this year's Runner Runner. The anthology is mostly comprised of West Coast cartoonists, including a number from Means' home base of Portland, Oregon. As such, it's an excellent sampler of the most experienced cartoonists from that scene (as well as a smattering of other good cartoonists) who are mostly known for their minicomics.

Elsewhere:

—Avi Steinberg has a great short review of Maurice Sendak's last book on The New Yorker website, linking it to Sendak's first unpublished book, which he created as a child.

—New progress seems to have been made in the age-old quest to find the secret origins of MAD magazine's Alfred E. Neuman. (John Adcock has more.)

—The New York Times profiled a day in the life of comiXology CEO David Steinberger, written just before the Marvel promotion that knocked out the site's servers for two days.

—Michael Barrier has a short essay on Walt Kelly, illustrated and explained through publicity photos taken for a Chuck Jones-directed Pogo animation special.

—Paul Di Filippo reviews Lynda Barry's Freddie Stories, Glen Weldon reviews Ben Katchor's Hand-Drying in America, and Craig Fischer reviews Bernie Krigstein's Messages in a Bottle.

—Maren Williams at the CBLDF blog writes a short history of the end of Australian comic-book censorship.

—Via Twitter, Erik Larsen argues, "If you need to include an arrow to tell readers which panel to read next your page is a failure. It should be obvious." Which seems more or less like a comics equivalent to "invisible style." And like invisible style in film, its use-value depends on what kind of comic you are making.

—For his day job, Chris Mautner profiles a local comic-book collector.

—Not Comics: What a great photograph. I know it's hipper these days to dig Keaton and disparage Chaplin, but I don't care what you say. City Lights, man.

—Also Not Comics, But Closer: Here's the trailer for a new documentary about a group of artists not so dissimilar from cartoonists, sign painters:

(via)

It's Tuesday and that means while you were sleeping Joe McCulloch was writing about the week in comics.

Elsewhere:

TCJ-contributor Nicole Rudick interviews 7 Miles a Second artists James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook for Artforum.

There is a new Seth book on the horizon and it sounds excellent.

George Lucas has a proposal for a "Cultural Arts" museum with a heavy illustration and cartooning emphasis, which could be interesting. Lucas once was a backer of a comic art gallery in NYC some 30 or more years ago. Aside from his Rockwell collection he's known to have one of the largest George Herriman collections. Who knows what else is in there...

This the first review I've seen of Renee French's TOON book, Barry's Best Buddy. I'm looking forward to that book.

Click here for fear.

Attention Chester Brown: Louis Riel photos found in Australia. That's a commute.

It's pix from the Society of Illustrator's Harvey Kurtzman opening.

I've lately been amazed at how corporate hacks and apologists have reinvented themselves as "historians" but that's showbiz, folks. In any case, I'll let you guess which of the panelists at this talk have anything relevant to say about the topic.

Ryan Holmberg has some questions for you.

And today we republish Gary Groth's 1996 interview with Barry Windsor-Smith, from TCJ 190. Here's a sample:

GROTH: I don’t read mainstream comics much but we get piles of them in the office and I look at them once in a while. And because I read them as a kid and I can go back to that Kirby and Ditko and Stan Lee stuff and so on, I have this morbid curiosity about why they look like such unadulterated shit these days. I read interviews with contemporary creators who write and draw them and they seem to be very excited about what they’re doing. And I wonder about why the stuff is so wretched. I wonder if it’s just the Zeitgeist or if it’s just the creators themselves or if it’s me.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I know exactly what you’re saying. I have the very same wonders myself. You and I can just sit around and scratch our heads over the phone, because I don’t have any answer either. Yeah: is it the Zeitgeist? Are we missing something? Is it the same now as it was then but we just didn’t know because we were in a different position then? This sort of questioning comes to us all. It has been the standard cliché for decades now, from the ’60s with rock ’n’ roll, or at least the British invasion style rock ’n’ roll, where people would say, ‘They can’t play, they’re only playing banjo chords. Whatever happened to Ella Fitzgerald and Satchmo and hey, Frank Sinatra — now there’s a voice!” And all this sort of shit that I went through when I was a teenager, absolutely adoring everything I was hearing, from the Beatles to the Stones... Well, actually I was extremely judgmental even then: I fuckin’ hated the Dave Clark Five because I could see them for the no-talent copyists that they were! But I loved anything that I thought was quality, and I certainly thought Lennon and McCartney were.

I actually have this strong memory of an uncle of mine whom I greatly admired. He was a musician, played jazz. I was over at his house one day, I was only about 15 or 16, the Beatles had been around for about a year or so — at least in Britain; they hadn’t hit America yet — and he was sitting there just trashing them. Saying, “They can’t play any notes. You call that singing?” And I really disliked my uncle from that moment onward. I’ve never liked him since. Because he seemed to totally sell out himself as a musician. In other words, he wasn’t broad-minded enough to see that there is always new music. And he insulted one of my favorite things. So I’m dreadfully afraid that I’m doing exactly the same thing now!

GROTH: [Laughs.] You’re turning into your uncle.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I’m turning into an old complaining fart. There are so many people, I hear it all the time: “Oh my God, I’m beginning to sound like my dad!” It’s a standard routine for stand-up comedians nowadays.

GROTH: But seriously, there is a maturing process, and some people go through it and some people don’t. And I think in some ways you do start sounding if not like your dad, at least like people you remember as having antiquated attitudes.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Somebody you don’t like. I can remember a long time ago, you did a major interview with Jim Steranko.

GROTH: Whew—you’re talking 25 years ago.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. And you seemed absolutely in awe of Jim at the time.

GROTH: I was.

WINDSOR-SMITH: And you were young. And Jim was lapping it up because we know what an egoist he is. But in recent times, or at least within the last eight or five years, I can remember when you totally trashed him in print for some reason. It wasn’t out of hand, there was some purpose behind it; I forget what it was. I was thinking, “Gee, what happened to Gary in the meantime?” Yeah, we’ve all changed our taste — I guess. And now, Steranko was pretty damn good at what he did. We know it was derivative to a degree, but some of it wasn’t. So for the people who were working at that time in that heyday of Marvel comics, Steranko certainly gave far more energy to his books than your average guy. Certainly he was no genius on the level of Jack Kirby, but who the hell was? So Jim’s material was innovative to a degree, exciting to a degree, good for what it was. So why do you not see Jim’s work in that perspective? Or do you?

GROTH: Looking at his Marvel work, I can’t help but see it as thin and anemic. Whereas Kirby was genuinely original, and Ditko was too, Steranko was a compendium of graphic tricks and gimmicks picked up from various sources inside and outside of comics. So I don’t think he’s... If you look at it closely it tends to fall apart. It doesn’t hold up to very close scrutiny.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I agree with you. I was thinking that way back when.

GROTH: Yeah. Well you were probably ahead of me because as you say, I was in —

WINDSOR-SMITH: I was right in the thick of it and I was functioning in the same capacity as a storyteller. So I could certainly see through Steranko.

Elsewhere:

—The much-missed-around-these-parts Jeet Heer wrote a review of Ben Katchor's new Hand-Drying in America for the Globe & Mail.

—Jonathan Clements has a tribute to his friend, Toren Smith.

—William Blake scholar Mark Crosby has a great post analyzing Maurice Sendak's use of Blake imagery in his last book.

—CBR talks to Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson about writing for Marvel.

—Domingos Isabelinho writes about OuBaPo founding member Jochen Gerner.

—ARTnews has a piece on a 1950s mural Saul Steinberg made for the World's Fair.

—That B. Kliban guy was funny.

Ron Goulart returns to the site today with a remembrance of Fred Ray.

Although Fred Ray is best remembered for the two decades he devoted to drawing DC’s Tomahawk, he had already been in comics for several years before he took over the buckskin-clad hero and, in the early ‘40s, he did some of the best straight adventure stuff in the comic books of the time, as well of some memorable Golden Age covers.

Frederic E. Ray, who usually signed himself Fray, was born in Pennsylvania in 1922. He always had an interest in history as well as in comics, and his major influences growing up were illustrators Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Frederic Remington, as well as cartoonists Hal Foster and, most important, Noel Sickles. He was impressed, too, by a nonfiction newspaper strip called Highlights of History by an artist named J. Carroll Mansfield.

Elsewhere:

A Kickstarter campaign for the book Sullivan's Sluggers gets ugly and then gets uglier.

Thomas Nasts's traveling murals.

A tribute to Al Capp's various activities.

More on Jerry Ordway and thoughts on "ageism" in comics.

Cartoonist (conflict of interest alert) and author of Men's Group: The Video, Ben Jones, gets a preview here.

An essay on Tumblr and photography, some of which could be applied to comic book pages as well.

And finally, enjoy the weekend with the old National Lampoon and this great bit about John Lennon  from its 1972 Radio Dinner LP.

Before getting to the regular body of this blog post, please allow me to reproduce the following statement from Kim Thompson (introduced by Gary Groth) in full:

Kim Thompson has been my partner at Fantagraphics Books for 35 years. He's contributed vastly and selflessly to this company and to the comics medium and worked closely with countless fine artists over that time. This is a tough announcement to make, but everyone who knows Kim knows he's a fighter and we remain optimistic that he'll get through this and report back to report to work, where he belongs, doing what he loves.

– Gary Groth

I'm sure that by now a number of people in the comics field who deal with me on a regular or semi-regular basis have noticed that I've been responding more spottily. This is because of ongoing health issues for the past month, which earlier this week resolved themselves in a diagnosis of lung cancer.

This is still very early in the diagnosis, so I have no way of knowing the severity of my condition. I'm relatively young and (otherwise) in good health, and my hospital is top-flight, so I'm hopeful and confident that we will soon have the specifics narrowed down, set me up with a course of treatment, proceed, and lick this thing.

It is quite possible that as treatment gets underway I'll be able to come back in and pick up some aspects of my job, maybe even quite soon. However, in the interests of keeping things rolling as smoothly as I can, I've transferred all my ongoing projects onto other members of the Fantagraphics team. So if you're expecting something from me, contact Gary Groth, Eric Reyolds, or Jason Miles and they can hook you up with whoever you need. If there are things that only I know and can deal with, lay it out for them and they'll contact me.

On behalf of Kim, we would like to encourage anyone who would like to reach out to him to feel free to send mail to him c/o Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, or email.

As an editor, publisher, translator, and writer, Kim's importance to North American comics (not to mention this magazine) would be difficult to overstate. He is not just a personally inspiring figure, but is also an extremely friendly, helpful, & enormously fun person to work with. We wish him a full and speedy recovery, and can't wait for him to be back.

————

On the main body of this site, we have another installment of Richard Gehr's excellent and too-infrequent "Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists" column. Today his subject is Charles Barsotti. Here's a brief excerpt:

GEHR: How did you end up at Hallmark in Kansas City?

BARSOTTI: I answered this ad in Advertising Age and got a call from this guy in Chicago. Hallmark then sent me a psychological test but I just set it aside. Then they shot Kennedy, and the atmosphere I ran into the next day in San Marcos was a little too much. I figured, "It’s time to buckle down, take the psychological test, and get serious about this." Anyway, Holly [William Hollingworth] Whyte wrote a book called The Organization Man, and he had things to keep in mind when you’re taking a psychological test for a big organization. I remembered to say things like, "I love my father and my mother both, but I love my father a little bit more." That kind of thing.

GEHR: Was Hallmark your first real art job?

BARSOTTI: It was really writing, at first. I was in the editorial department and then switched to contemporary cards.

GEHR: Was that where you began cartooning seriously?

BARSOTTI: Rapidographs had just come out and I splurged and bought myself a set. I was doing some sketches, and a friend of mine in a different department of Hallmark asked me if I would use that style to illustrate a little pamphlet of Ogden Nash poems. So I did it on my own time, and it got me in trouble in my department. That’s the way Hallmark's bureaucracy worked. That sort of set me off, and I sent some drawings to Mike Mooney at The Saturday Evening Post — and didn’t hear anything. The next weekend, I sat down and did another big batch of these things. I sent it in and thought, "Oh, this is it. This isn’t working." But! I got a call from Mooney at work. I thought it was a joke, but he said he had turned the big hallway at The Saturday Evening Post into a gallery. "I’ve got your cartoons up and down it," he said. He was a very ebullient fellow. Then I went there and met the editor, Bill Emerson.

Elsewhere:

—Steven Heller writes about an interesting Thomas Nast project I don't recall ever hearing about before: a traveling series of murals used in performances to tell the story of the American Civil War.

—Carol Tilley takes to Boing Boing to explain her recent Fredric Wertham research.

—Colleen Doran has given a two-part interview to SciFi Pulse, in which she discusses her recent experiences publishing comics online.

—Ben Katchor has a new strip online.

—Paradise Valley, Arizona is trying to raise funds to build a bronze monument to Bil Keane.

—The Belgian cartoonist Didier Comès and Studio Proteus founder Toren Smith have both reportedly passed away.

—Via Drawn, here's a short clip from the upcoming Stripped documentary, dealing with how webcartoonists make money:

Today on the site:

Rob Clough reviews Ellen Forney's Marbles.

A lot of “graphic novels” coming out from major publishers these days really seem to be variations on the graphic memoir. A cynic might say that many of them derive their hook from being about death, illness, abuse, tragedy, etc. An alarming number of them have come from first-time long-form cartoonists and are aimed squarely at the sort of mainstream reader who enjoys this sort of confessional, miserabilist but ultimately triumphant story about tragedy and unfortunate circumstances. I’ll rattle off a few titles in this vein: Cancer Vixen,Stitches, The Impostor’s Daughter (perhaps the most egregiously manipulative example of this sub-genre). As someone who has long found autobiographical comics to be rewarding on any number of levels, some of these books feel like a distressingly cynical way to make money on the part of the publishers. Life and death is big business, after all.

That’s why it was so refreshing to read Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me. It’s less a story than it is a therapy journal comic, but Forney’s instincts as an entertainer kick in even on the dreariest of pages.

Elsewhere: Good news and bad news.

This piece by freelance writer Nate Thayer about payment is fairly typical, unfortunately. The Atlantic responds.

Related: More from artist Jerry Ordway on his relationship with DC Comic.

Only slightly related by dint of money/ethics. Artist Chris Sprouse has withdrawn from drawing that Orson Scott Card Superman comic.

Speaking of Superman: More developments in the Siegel/Shuster case. I won't even pretend to follow the recent round of developments.

And on an up note, the first round of guests for SPX 2013 has been announced, and our own Frank Santoro is among them.

Today on the site, Joe McCulloch brings you the Week in Comics —and endorses one of last week's.

Elsewhere:

—The often excellent essayist Joseph Epstein writes about Saul Steinberg at The Weekly Standard, and Michael Kammen touches on the same subject in his L.A. Review of Books essay which primarily concerns Thomas Nast, political cartoons, and public art.

—Cartoonists are talking money. First, read veteran artist Jerry Ordway's thoughts on being sidelined at DC. Mark Evanier comments. Then read prominent webcartoonist John Allison's post wherein he writes about feeling like his means of making a living is threatened by the migration to Tumblr. Matt Bors comments on that.

—Faith Erin Hicks is interviewed by Jim Rugg, Jason Lex, & Ed Piskor.

—Dave Sim responds to Comics Journal Chester Brown coverage, by way of explaining why he's against prostitution.

—Reviews. Robert Boyd reviews five semi-recent comics; Noah Berlatsky reviews the reissued 7 Miles a Second for Slate; The Advocate reviews Gilbert Hernandez's upcoming Julio's Day.

—Michael Dooley interviews Denis Kitchen about his new Al Capp biography.

—Chris Mautner explains where to start with Winsor McCay. (Personally, I'd give a beginner John Canemaker's biography before expecting them to shell out for the Sunday Press books.)

—Julie Doucet and Simon Bossé have started a Tumblr devoted to mail art.

—The Siegel/DC Superman legal battle continues.

—Justin Green's introduction to book-burning.

I know this is classically "TCJ" of me, but "Will Eisner Week" seems silly. I like Eisner's work very much, particularly The Spirit and the near-hysterical melodrama (that's a good thing) of A Contract with God, the gauzy false history of The Dreamer, etc. But the ongoing deification of the man does his actual achievements a disservice. As Gary Groth has written many times (that it's never sunk in is a testament to the unique mix of self-love and self-hatred that is comic book culture for men over the age of 40. What my generation does with all this stuff is up for grabs. Maybe nothing. Maybe it'll be "Fletcher Hanks Hangover Day" in 30 years. Or "Rory Hayes Mondayz".) the best way to appreciate an artist is to be realistic about what he did. I'm all for appreciations and weeks and blah blah. Couldn't it just be Will Eisner Day: A guy who managed to make a buncha good comics and inspire people? Or Will Eisner Weekend: Read comics by his assistants! Or Will Eisner Hour: Read Hawks of the Seas!

 Eisner is neither the father of the "the graphic novel" nor is said "graphic novel" even a "uniquely American art form". He was a popularizer and an advocate. This has all been written about ad infinitum over the last decade or so. But! Writing this kind of thing is more or less pissing in the wind. This precise little blog post will not convince anyone. No argument can, actually. There's a kind of calcified fandom in place rooted in a striving emotional attachment to a father figure and the hopes for acceptance of the idols of one's youth. Kind of like the terrible "nerd culture" that's sprung up. It just won't budge. It's not disingenuous: I think that whoever wrote those taglines actually believes them, and all that takes is a certain passivity and (maybe) willful blindness. I suppose the irritation on my end is that obscures the facts and pushes what limited resources there are in this medium onto something both false and unnecessary. Telling someone to read a graphic novel is like saying "Watch some TV" or "Read a Poem". Why in the world would that matter? Well, anyway, another ranty aside down the hatch.

Well, speaking of Boss Groth, here he is with a sadly truncated interview with artist Jerry Moriarty.

GROTH: Do you think all the arts have essentially the same creative process: writing, painting, making music?

MORIARTY: I think that they share. I think collaborative arts are different. I recognize certain tricks when I see Actor’s Studio guys on TV talking about their process. Christopher Walken, on one of the shows, he said something about, they’d all get their scripts, and he would go through his script and take all the punctuation out, so he wouldn’t know if it was a question or whatever. And so he delivered a line without any knowledge of whether it’s a question or exclamation, so the actor he’s playing to would freak. And I just love that, because it’d make the other actor improvise, somewhat. Of course, he’s in the dark himself, because he took all the punctuation out. I think that’s nice.

Another actor said that, on the stage before an audience, if you got to the point in the part where he’s supposed to cry, he doesn’t cry, because he wants the audience to cry — because if he did cry, then the audience wouldn’t have to cry, because he fulfilled what the need was. I love that, so when I hear these things, I find connections.  But I think the real distinction is collaboration, because they have to work with someone else in that moment, whereas writers and artists generally don’t. So, it’s like a tightrope, there’s no support at all. No net at all. You survive the fall, but you know the fall exists. There’s no support structure for you. It could be a lifelong thing, like the Henry Darger life — I don’t know if he sensed that. I think there are differences. Jazz comes the closest to my sensibilities.

Elsewhere:

It's a Groth-a-palooza. Here he is on the other side of the mic with Tom Spurgeon.

Steven Heller writes about the new Al Capp bio over at The Atlantic. That book, which I just finished, is long on gnarly anecdotes about Capp (which I'm all for) and very short on any kind of aesthetic analysis or coverage of the process of making that strip. Kinda like author's bio of Will Eisner. If you're gonna write one of these books it seems odd to be disinterested in the visual aspect of what your subject did.

Two recent tributes to the late Spain Rodriguez. One from Artforum and another, an absolutely essential memoir by the great Ed Sanders. Don't miss it, at the very least for Sander's description and accompanying photos of an art show he mounted at his space, Peace Eye, in 1968. If this reaches Ed Sanders somehow: We'd love to see more of those photos! Was this the first gallery exhibition of underground comic art?

More underground: A little bit on a previous iteration of Robert Crumb's published sketchbooks. Click around for a nice cover gallery.

And finally, Gavin Lees reports on an Elfquest panel at this past weekend's Emerald City Comicon.

After a short break, Tucker Stone is back with Comics of the Weak, along with his compatriot Abhay Khosla. Tucker takes on the latest big moves in superhero comics, and Abhay talks about Orson Scott Card.

Elsewhere:

—Robot 6 talks to First Second editor Calista Brill and designer Colleen AF Venable.

—Garry Wills names Doonesbury the best political writing of our time, and picks a Garry Trudeau title as the one book he wishes Obama would read.

—Have we mentioned yet that TCJ contributor Sean T. Collins is spotlighting different webcomics every Wednesday? He is.

—Max Allan Collins picks 11 "most controversial" comics of the Wertham era for the Huffington Post. He is also interviewed by Colin Smith.

—Linguist Neil Cohn continues his response to Eddie Campbell.

—Finally, a 1987-aired 20/20 interview with Gary Larson (via):

Today on the site:

R.C. Harvey looks at the cartoonist Stan Lynde and finds a complicated artist behind decades of western comic strips.

He realized he had achieved most of those things, but he also found that as time went by, he had to work harder to maintain the image—“not only my public image, but my own image of myself. I found that I didn’t dare look back over my life too closely because I didn’t like what I saw there. The failures, the excesses, the broken marriages, the people I had hurt and disappointed—these were all swept under the rug, but that old rug was getting pretty lumpy, and I knew what was under there—and I didn’t like it.”

Although he didn’t actively consider doing another comic strip, he realized, deep down, he still wanted to do one, but didn’t quite know how to get there.

“My god had failed,” he wrote, “because my god was myself—and it was the only one I’d ever really known. This self-god, the Great Ego, the Almighty Me, had led me through divorce to booze, to attempted suicide, and to most of the known sins. I still couldn’t recite the Ten Commandments, but I had broken most of them at one time or another. And I had done a pretty thorough job of breaking myself, as well.

“I realize that all this doesn’t sound like anybody’s finest hour, but it was for me. I had encountered, at age 46, a brick wall, both personally and professionally; I stopped running, surrendered, and turned to Jesus. Like all those people I used to deride, I became Born Again. And Jesus did more than change my life: he restored it. He enhanced it. And He began the process of repairing the lifetime of damage I had done to it.”

Then in the late spring of 1978, Lynde’s agent phoned him and told him that Dick Sherry, president of Field Newspaper Syndicate, had expressed an interest in Lynde’s creating a new strip.

And we conclude our preview of TCJ 302 with an excerpt from Warren Bernard's look at Wertham and the 1950s Congressional Hearings.

Elsewhere:

The artist and DJ Magnus Johnstone has passed away. I know very little about his life and not much shows up online. I think Ben Jones or C.F. turned me onto to Johnstone's zines maybe 10 years back. Those zines are stirring collections of drawings, sometimes narrative, most often not, but certainly of a piece with what goes on in New England. Most recently I was pleasantly surprised to see his drawings in Alan Licht's book Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Artists like Johnstone kind of hover on the periphery... I never quite knew where to place his work, but I liked it very much.

I asked Chris "Pshaw" Cammett to comment on his colleague:

One of the great misconceptions people had was to quickly judge the drawings of Magnus without thinking. If you didn't consider the intention Magnus wanted to express then you lost a key element in the greater realm his drawings could deliver. Maybe his work was harder to ingest because you had to think. His work had an eerily consistent motif that appeared as if Magnus was channeling a precisely and detailed vision of our primal future. Humans were reduced to infantile adults, surrounded by strange new toys, and entitlements of royalty with all the trappings of our base foundations revealed. Deciding not to apply a little scrutiny to his Manga zines would leave one lacking at seeing reoccurring themes of ironic humor, social psychology, erotic hypocrisy, and political protest evident, to name a few.

From my understanding, I think some artists were shocked by the honesty of his work, and maybe their offhand rejection of his value was more a scorn of their own artistic failing. The craft of his Manga drawings were as true as their expression, and exhibited small signs of any other recognizable inking style. His vision was always on point and well-conceived, delineated in fly-on-the-wall perspectives that were addictive to the eyeballs and the mind.

Here are a few drawings from his site:

There's a bit about Johnstone's role in Boston hip hop here. My condolences to his family.

Still elsewhere:

TCJ-contributor Sean T. Collins has the only thing you need to read about Grant Morrison and death.

Heidi MacDonald picks up on this rather brilliant idea for a company: A crowd funding fulfillment house.

Jesse Hamm contributes a detailed post about Alex Toth's linework.

And Brian Chippendale wins my very own video of the year with this use of his childhood flip books.

R. Fiore helps February come to a close with a typically excellent end-of-2012 column that will gladden winter-hardened hearts. He apologizes for the tardiness, but speaking personally, I prefer reading these kind of things nearly any time besides December and early January, when my eyes are most likely to glaze over at the sight of a top-ten list. Here's a bit:

[Skippy's] full-scale revival had to wait until the Crosby estate got over its preoccupation a trademark infringement case against the makers of Skippy peanut butter. This was a real life Rocky story, in that it featured a dauntless but hopelessly overmatched underdog motivated by principles meaningful only to itself subjecting itself to round after round of merciless beating before succumbing to inevitable defeat. With this crusade lost beyond the hopes of the most determined Quixote, they have finally been prevailed upon to authorize a comprehensive reprint of the cartoonist's masterpiece.

The positive side of all this is that it held Skippy back until the comics publishing industry was ready for it, and the LOAC collection is absolutely gorgeous. However poorly they may have chosen their battles, the Crosby family proved to be admirable custodians of the archives. The lengthy introduction takes us through Crosby's 20-year apprenticeship, starting as a teenager, and illustrates how he took the tropes of early newspaper cartooning and developed them into something that was simultaneously completely conventional and completely original.

In other news:

—Chris "Achewood" Onstad is attempting to transition his well-loved strip into the world of TV animation.

—Reviews of Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen's biography of Al Capp are beginning to spring up. Here's one in the Boston Globe. The Al Capp story provides some pretty rich material for a great book if the right biographers get hold of it...

—Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) has been named the winner of this year's Herblock Prize. (Perkins was the first cartoonist (& nearly the first person) I ever interviewed, a million years ago. I remember him being very gracious to a young and clueless idiot who didn't know the first thing about how to do the job.)

—MoCCA has announced the formation of a juried prize, picked by a panel including Karen Berger, Gary Groth, Nora Krug, David Mazzucchelli, and Paul Pope.

—Stephen Bissette makes an interesting comparison between the treatment of superhero comic-book artists of the past with the SFX artists behind the superhero movies of today.

—HiLobrow recently began publishing a serialized version of Philip Francis Nowlan's Armageddon—2419 A.D., more or less the dry run for Nowlan's Buck Rogers strip.

Joe McCulloch brings us the week's releases, as well as some thoughts on Richard Kyle and early fandom. Kyle is a fascinating figure whose magazine Graphic Story World remains a touchstone in early comic book history. He also famously commissioned Jack Kirby's "Street Code." I interviewed him a few years ago and have yet to transcribe it, but one of the days...

Still, from this excerpt, we can glimpse the true thesis of Kyle’s essay. He is fascinated by that most second-half-of-the-20th-century of all aesthetic preoccupations: the division between “art” and “trash,” which we might rephrase to ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. “Art,” to Kyle, appeals to the emotions and the intellect, while “trash” appeals only to one, yet because trash is embodied in “the spirit of the thing,” it can evade the scrutiny of art’s critical practice, and, sometimes, in its perennial success, prove itself more important. Specifically, “costume heroes” of the Golden Age disregard personal interest in favor of “idealistic beliefs of justice and right,” their dual identities emphasizing the capacity for the ordinary within the extraordinary, the simple humanity latent in the liberation of joyous power – “the hearts of these paper dolls.”

Thus, the “[e]ducation” of Victor Fox — “blue jeans gaping at the knees, being drummed out of kindergarten” — was that his eventual darkening of the superhero milieu in Blue Beetle, amping up sexualized peril for the heroines and stripping down the villainesses’ attire as the vogue for crime comics crept forward, only led to his rejection by a public given to “a mean streak of decency.” On first blush, this seems patently absurd – the (adolescent) public quite obviously loved pre-Code crime and horror comics; that’s why the Senate held hearings for a fast-crashing Bill Gaines to melt down over. But then, Kyle himself was a writer of adult-targeted crime novels, and perhaps saw a distinction between superhero comics and other types, the former appealing bang-on to impressionable children through the unique traits of the comics form, “where symbols can artistically replace representative realism more easily and convincingly than any other story-telling medium,” allowing idealism to flower.

Elsewhere:

David Lasky points us towards his earlier work.

A fine gallery of 3-D comic book imagery.

Stoner 70s fantasy over here.

OMG: A comic book character is dying this week, guys.

Some new Marvel editorial tips.

Not comics: Documenting the installation of Jay DeFao's The Rose at The Whitney.

This morning marks the return of Charles Hatfield and his column on children's comics. This time around, he writes about a frankly awful-sounding Fairy Quest: Outlaws, a title that has very representative flaws. Here's part of the column:

The premise leans hard in the direction of Fables, complete with a setting called Fablewood “where all of the stories that have ever been told live together” (compare Fables’s Fabletown—or, for that matter, Once Upon a Time’s Storybrooke, though, to be fair, work on Fairy Quest predates the launch of that show). The twist here, besides the fact that Fairy Quest aims to avoid the barefaced adultness of Fables, is that, instead of familiar characters being run out of their Homelands by an evil Adversary, this book has familiar characters trying to get out of their homeworld for freedom’s sake. Fablewood is a dystopia, suffering under the despotic bureaucracy of a “Mister Grimm,” a narrative traditionalist whose mantra is “Keep your story straight—do not deviate!” Grimm runs the storybook world like a police state, issuing penalties and punishments for every departure from the conventional narrative logic. As the oft-invoked words “straight” and “deviancy” suggest, there’s potential for social commentary here (recalling, perhaps, Pleasantville, with its conflict between “black and white” and “colored” citizens). The authors, however, don’t rise to their own bait, and the implications of the premise remain unexplored.

Perhaps I should be grateful for that, given the number of formulaically “dark,” dystopic takes on fairy tales and old storybooks that comics have offered up (lately we all seem to be living in a world designed by American McGee). But Fairy Quest is generic in the most tiring way. Reading it reminded me of Underwhere, another deluxe yet underwhelming fantasy comic Paul Jenkins was involved in some years ago: all the expected pieces are there, but nothing new leaps out. There is beautiful cartooning on display, but nothing makes extraordinary demands of authors or readers.

We also have a few more free samples of The Comics Journal #302 for you. Today, it's a short bit of Gavin Callaghan's piece on proto-cartoonists such as William Blake:

The writer-artist (or artist-writer) is a problematic figure for many reasons. A hybrid figure in either medium, literature or drawing, he or she is suspect. The literary world, for its part, often displays an almost aniconic idolatry in its repudiation of image in favor of language; while the visual world, compelled to reject figurative renderings as mere “illustration” in its promulgation of the extremes of abstraction, often dismisses out of hand the writer-artist, who actually dares to combine figurative images with the additional blasphemy of the written word. But whether they are called pictorial writings, as they were by Austin Osman Spare, or American hieroglyphics, as they were by Vachel Lindsay, or Illuminated Books or stereoscopic printing, as they were by William Blake, the time has come for us to finally recognize it as cartooning and be done with it, and allow the cartoonist to assume a proper place in literary and artistic history.

Elsewhere:

—Sam Sacks ventures into somewhat similar territory in his post on The New Yorker's blog praising the illustrated book.

—Neil Cohn offers a short academic response to Eddie Campbell's Rules of Comprehension.

—Julie Doucet still doesn't want to return to comics.

—Richard Sala talks to the back-up-and-running Tom Spurgeon.

—Scott Edelman wonders about the differences between the covers of romance novels and romance comics.

—Stephen Bissette tries to resurrect Binder/Grandenetti 1960s-era For Monsters Only.

—Two looks at interesting shows: Art Spiegelman's CO-MIX in Vancouver, and The Art of Harvey Kurtzman in New York.

Good morning, friends. Today we have another sample of the 302nd print issue of The Comics Journal for you, Tim Kreider's consideration of Chester Brown's Paying for It. Here's a bit:

It’s some sort of testament to Brown’s fearless honesty in addressing such a taboo subject, about which there is apparently only one publicly acceptable opinion, that so many reviewers have gone out of their ways to make known their moral — and, in some cases, physical — revulsion. New York Times critic Dwight Garner, in describing a scene where Brown admits to being excited by the possibility that he’s hurting a prostitute he’s fucking, adds: “I cringe even to type that sentence.” Brown has said in an interview that he was disturbed by this incident, too, but he didn’t cringe at portraying it. And although I’m frankly made a little queasy by that scene too, I also admire Brown, as an artist, for showing it to us without the cover of some preemptive self-castigation. The unattractive truth is that men (and women) are sometimes aroused by things that are, in the light of day, creepy, disturbing, degrading or cruel. (Though I should also draw a distinction here between enjoying such things in fantasy or consensual play and actually doing them.) One of my female friends said the book “confirmed some of [her] suspicions about the male psyche.” The part of Paying for It that most resonates with me is (annoyingly) not in the book itself but elaborated in an endnote; Brown explains how, every time he used to see an attractive woman on the street, he’d imagine that there was some theoretical sequence of events that would result in her having sex with him and immediately condemn himself as a coward and a loser for failing to ask her out.

We also have another installment of Rob Clough's High-Low small-press column, this time gathering up ten recent minicomics of note. Here's a bit where he talks about relative newcomer Zejian Shen:

Shen is part of the Collective Stench group, a collective I was entirely unaware of until her comics showed up in my mailbox. To say that her style of drawing and sense of humor line up precisely with the sort of comics I like is an understatement. Each one of these comics is a sheer delight, reminiscent of two of my favorite cartoonists: Chris Cilla and Matthew Thurber. There's a touch of the grotesque and bizarre in her work, but she also mines the same kind of Dada absurdity that informs Thurber's comics so hilariously, as well as his surprisingly iron-clad command over both plot and character.

Upset Cats and Let's Do It are short, one-joke comics. The former is exactly what it sounds like: drawings of cats dramatically expressing their woes, with captions ranging from "a mystery" to "I hate peanuts" to (hilariously) "TETSUO!" The latter title initially seems to be about having sex in any number of locations, but as the comic is folded out, it turns out to be something far more grisly. Shen has a nasty streak in her work that pops up in unexpected ways at surprising times, and this is a good example of that tendency.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews We Missed: Richard Sala at CBR, Drew Friedman for the National Cartoonist Society newsletter, Colleen Doran at CBR, and Tom Kaczynski at Hooded Utilitarian.

—That Tom K interview was conducted by James Romberger, whose reissued 7 Miles a Second just made the NY Times bestseller list, a pretty heartening development. It's a pretty amazing book, and it would be a shame if it fell through the cracks.

—Cartoon Movement reports that one of their Palestinian cartoonists, Mohammad Saba'aneh, has been arrested and detained by Israeli authorities, for as-yet unspecified reasons.

—Glen Weldon at NPR responds to the recent Orson Scott Card/Superman controversy productively, by listing several recent comics and graphic novels with nuanced and compelling stories about gay or bisexual characters.

—I can't imagine anyone will agree with all of R. Crumb's casual assessments of cultural figures, but man are they fun. This time, he talks about a lot of writers (Kerouac, Miller, Roth, Sartre) and artists (Picasso, Peter Max). The must-read portion this time around is his discussion of Hugh Hefner, which includes an extended bit on Hefner's relationship with Harvey Kurtzman.

—Aspiring cartoonists, take note: WFMU has dug up a 1946 instructional record from Art Ross on How to Draw 1000 Funny Faces.

—Tom Spurgeon's review of All-New, All-Different X-Men #5 matches my thoughts almost exactly. (Wait, that isn't funny. Here's hoping Comics Reporter is back online soon, if only so's Dan and I can steal his links.) [UPDATE: Looks like CR's temporarily moved to Tumblr.]

Today on the site: Eddie Campbell discusses his rules for comics comprehension:

Occasionally I see a well-regarded comic wander across the view of a regular person. It happened on my travels recently when I was a houseguest of a friend, a 70-year-old lady who makes her living as an artist. While I was there she was working on some etchings to go into a limited edition anthology of poetry on the subject of war. I mention this simply to show that this person understands pictures. The mail arrived and among it there was a volume of Bryan Talbot’s Grandville, which her husband had bought. She opened it and checked it, in order to let him know by phone that it had arrived. While idly looking at the pages she confessed to me, after putting down the phone, that she didn’t know how to read these graphic novel things. I took a quick look and said, “My first thought is that I can completely understand what you’re saying, because I can see that the author in this case has broken at least three of the basic rules of comprehension.”

Elsewhere:

-An appreciation of Ted White's Heavy Metal editorship.

-A preview of the upcoming psych-comic reprint, Jodelle.

-Hey, it's psychology for designers. I thought that was called advertising.

-C.F. has a four-page comic in the New York Times.

-And Marc Bell goes Prada.

Today is Tuesday, which means it's Joe McCulloch alerting us to all the new comics day. As usual, he adds a mini-essay on some object of obscurity, which this week is basically European horror films from directors like Jean Rollin and the great Louis Feuillade (whose movies I strongly recommend to any fan of Richard Sala).

I should have spent the weekend reading comics, but instead I shut myself in with the book to your left, Kier-La Janisse's 2012 House of Psychotic Women, published by the happy sleaze merchants at Godalming's FAB Press, purveyors of heavily-illustrated, intensive studies of Eurohorror and world exploitation cinema, and, not coincidentally, one of the primary forces behind convincing me that writing about things to a potentially imaginary audience was something I'd be interested in doing.

I'll always have time for their wares, and Janisse's "Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films" is a worthy selection, being the sort of extended nonfiction essay that climaxes with a pill-addled vision of Argentine character actor Alberto de Mendoza appearing before the teenaged author in full costume from the 1972 Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee vehicle Horror Express and approaching her bed with glowing eyes. Textually, this occurs in the midst of a disquisition on the neurotic portrayals of director Andrzej Żuławski, which are later compared to those of Lars von Trier's Antichrist - my kind of book. Soon, I was poring over my own movie resources and making my own connections.

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Some interesting sales figures and analyses have been released over the weekend, including John Jackson Miller's post claiming that overall, around $715 million worth of comic books and graphic novels were sold in bookstores and comic stores last year. (Several sites have mentioned that this is the highest yearly comics sales figure since 1993, but as Miller updates his post to clarify, that due to inflation and higher per-unit costs, that comparison is somewhat misleading.) Also, retailer Brian Hibbs has put out his annual BookScan analysis.

—Tom Spurgeon gathers the latest developments in the ongoing Orson Scott Card controversy.

—The other kind of icky internet flame-up going on lately involves DragonCon's continued involvement with co-founder Ed Kramer, who has been accused of child molestation. DragonCon recently issued a statement explaining their present inability to resolve the situation as they would like.

—The CBLDF has an interview with Mike Diana of Boiled Angel. I probably haven't ready any Diana work in more than twenty years, but those images are burned into my brain.

—Dave Sim talks about his upcoming art auction through Heritage.

—Lynda Barry gave a convocation speech at Lawrence University this year:

Today:

My conversation with cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, whose The Voyeurs was one of my favorite books of 2012 and remains lodged in my brain. Gabrielle's matter-of-fact tone just burrows in deeper with each reading. Anyhow, here a bit where I berate her for how she spends her time:

NADEL: What have you been doing?

BELL: I don’t even know. [Laughter.] I’ve been doing portraits on the Internet.

NADEL: Right, the Skype portraits.

BELL: And that takes a lot of time. And that’s pretty much it.

NADEL: And that was just straight up, you needed rent?

BELL: Yeah. Also, I just wanted to try it. Seemed like I was broke, and I had this idea, and I saw that nobody else was doing this on the Internet, and I was like, “Maybe I can corner this market.”

NADEL: Why Skype?

BELL: Last year I did it from photographs. That just didn’t work for me. It was just — I worked too hard on each one, and they always came out feeling stiff and awkward. Maybe because I’m not formally trained as an artist. I just don’t know what I’m doing. And then it took so long, and then the same thing is happening with the Skype project, but I like them a little better.

NADEL: But what’s the difference between a Skype image and a photograph?

BELL: Well I guess, for one thing, everybody is in the same position. I like drawing people’s portraits. So I guess the idea is that I’m sitting on a street corner doing portraits, only it’s on the Internet, in the comfort of my own home. That was the idea.

NADEL: And it’s like 40 bucks a shot?

BELL: 35, but —

NADEL: That’s cheap!

BELL: I know.

NADEL: You’re not charging enough!

BELL: That’s what people say, but —

NADEL: You need a business manager.

BELL: [Laughs.] I need a lot of things. And a lot of people.

Also, here's another preview of TCJ 302, this time featuring the Toon Treasury Think Tank.

Elsewhere:

It's digital vs. print over at Tom's place.

Nick Abadzis names his desert island comics.

Neal Adams is doing an awesome job of being Neal Adams.

You can now download Reid Fleming comics and pay what you wish. That's a fine comic.

These days I hesitate to mention Jack Kirby on this blog since it inevitably leads to a deluge of bizarre outpourings/Tourrets-like symptoms/cries-for-help, but I can't resist. Here is the original art for 16 pages of a 1966 Thor story, and, yep, it's pretty great to look at. Just spend some time looking at all those scale shifts.

Finally, this is a good idea and an excellent online exhibition for a project commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Armory show, in which even some cartoonists exhibited.

We've got two things for you this morning. First, a rare interview with the underground legend Gilbert Shelton, creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, providing something of a casual snapshot of his current Paris life. Here's a bit:

How long does it take you to do a page?

Oh, I don’t know. Forever.

One of the things I’d heard you say is that when you moved to France, you were able to finally tell people what you did. That there was a prestige afforded to comics that you didn’t find in America.

Yes. I used to tell people that I’m in the publishing business. But here I can probably say that I’m a cartoonist, or a "dessinateur de bande dessinée."

Did they know your stuff well here?

Yeah. It’s well known. It’s been around for a while. The problem is that the French comic book industry publishes around four thousand new comic books every year. That’s more than a hundred a week. And the bookstore owners can’t cope with that. They know the Freak Brothers and they know they can sell some, so they can order that.

We also have your usual Friday installment of Comics of the Weak. Somewhat disturbingly, Tucker Stone continues to mellow.

Elsewhere:

—The Orson Scott Card/Superman controversy continues, with an official response from DC, editorials and reports about the matter reaching The Guardian and The Huffington Post, and various comics figures holding forth on the subject.

—Drawn & Quarterly has a late but strong entry in the Angoulême festival report race.

—Ryan Sands announces a new book, and, very promisingly, a new quarterly comics zine and publishing house.

—William Mesner-Loebs needs help.

—Jeet Heer pointed to this short take-down of Watchmen from The American Conservative. There's some smart pushback in some of the comments.

—And here's a video essay on the Scott Pilgrim movie that talks about the formal challenges of adapting comics to film: