It's Tuesday, which means Joe McCulloch is here with his usual, indispensable guide to the Week in Comics, highlighting all the most interesting-sounding releases coming to the direct market. His spotlight picks this week are from Lisa Hanawalt and James Kochalka.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Roger Angell remembers the late New Yorker cartoonist Frank Modell.
His line was deft, and his ideas unpredictable; a unicorn on a unicycle, for instance. Also a man who is leaping from a burning building toward the firemen’s landing net cradling a large canvas in his arms. “I believe you’re right,” a male spectator says to his companion. “It is a Chagall.” And what could be better (as I once noted) than Frank’s turtlenecked downhill skier, his broken leg up on a hassock, who is being visited by his dog—a dog bringing a single slipper? It’s clear that the dog is more upset about the accident than the dolt in the chair.
The Wall Street Journal talks to Roz Chast.
My parents consciously raised me to be a nerd. It was as if they deliberately decided, “Let’s avoid the heartache of having Roz fall in with the wrong crowd by not letting her fall in with any crowd.”
A Moment of Cerebus has posted an excerpt from Room #39.2's interview with Deni Loubert.
Dave [Sim] decided as an interesting experiment -- he called it the "Summer Of Acid" -- he would do an acid hit every day and then do a comic book on it. Couple that with the fact we had just gotten a photocopier. So he did an issue where he would draw a picture -- this was truly an acid idea -- blow it up on the photocopier and then cut it into panels. So each panel was a sixteenth of a drawing with dialogue. It became a game with the fans. You'd have to [buy] three copies of the book if you were going to do it right. You had to [buy] two copies to fit the big picture together, because the pages were back to front, and then you had a third copy you kept intact. I have met people at Comic-Cons who've fitted the whole thing together and wanted me to authenticate and sign them. He was fucking floating on acid all month. He started losing it and getting angry. By about the second week he was becoming incoherent and hearing voices. Finally one night we had a big fight and he put his fist through the wall. I had to call 911 and have him committed.
—Misc. Speaking of Dave Sim, all volumes of his Cerebus have just been available for download online, on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis.
Chris Pitzer of AdHouseBooks has posted a lot of old rejection letters and fan mail that serve as a sort of time capsule to comics past.
—Commentary. Ted McKeever is quitting comics.
