Kim Deitch returns with the seventh part of his memoir-via-music, which continues telling the story of his time as a student at Pratt, and covers Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Jody Garland, and Eartha Kitt:
I’m lucky I got through the following twenty years with most of my whole hide. I am very humbly grateful to the man upstairs for that, too. I’ve always had the feeling that there was some kind of good angel watching over me. Take that any way you want. I’m just trying to tell the truth here as I see it. I don’t give a hang about trying to cut some sort of cool figure. I actively hate that kind of shit and there is altogether too much of it running around loose in this world. What I am trying to do is to do my best to pay off my unusually good luck by living a useful life. I may be some kind of a jerk (I guess it runs in the family), but I mean well.
And fan favorite Tucker Stone returns to the site with a review of Ryan Cecil Smith's bizarro sci-fi adventure comic, SF #1:
Smith first came to my attention due to familiarity--not with him, but with Kazuo Umezu, whose story “Blood Baptism” had served as inspiration for an exercise in adaptation that Smith has published in two parts so far. That series, “Two Eyes of the Beautiful”, remains one of the most unnerving pieces of fan-art I’ve read--beyond the plot, Smith’s panels in and of themselves read like adaptations of Umezu's tempo and pitch, copying the emotional noise that Umezu's work resonates with, all while ignoring the obvious temptation to directly clone his cartooning.
Elsewhere....
1. John Porcellino drew a tribute comic to the German publisher Reprodukt. If you ever get a chance to look at some of Reprodukt's books, I highly recommend it —they publish a lot of beautiful stuff.
2. The Ignatz Award nominees have been announced.
3. I don't think we've yet mentioned that the Staten Island branch of Jim Hanley's Universe suffered from pretty severe flooding earlier this week. Jim Hanley's is one of the best comic stores I've ever been to, and worth supporting if you are able to do so.
4. The Graphic Novel Reporter interviews Neil Egan, book designer for AbramsComics.
5. Matt Seneca is clearly wrong to call a particular movie trailer "comics", but it's the kind of "wrong" that hurts no one & helps many to clarify their thoughts. (Full disclosure: I've been similarly wrong myself.)
6. Dana Jennings (a former TCJ contributor!) writes at The New York Times about the latest wave of comics-related art books, and includes a mini-gallery of examples, comparing comics artists to their more highbrow brethren. Comparing Alex Toth to Matisse? Maybe, at least in that particular cover image. Jim Lee as "Dürer on steroids" is slightly tougher to swallow.
