Today on the site, Chris Mautner reviews the latest Fuzz & Pluck book from Ted Stearn, The Moolah Tree.
The world of Fuzz and Pluck is populated with deluded and frustrated characters and abounds in disturbing dreams and odd transformations. At one point in their quest to locate the tree, Fuzz and Pluck come across a swarm of angry bees, which ends with Fuzz covered in mud and Pluck swollen to twice his size in stings. There’s a frightening dream sequence early on where Pluck cuts off his legs in an attempt to make bait for fish and then Fuzz is torn by two stray threads asunder, until nothing is left of him but two eyeballs.
That Fuzz would have such an unsettling nightmare should should not be surprising to those who have read their previous adventures. Both Fuzz and Pluck and >Fuzz and Pluck: Splitsville had an element of horror to them, however slight. Think of their initial appearance with the cheesecake character that everyone ends up devouring. Or the creepy half-grapefruit villain in Splitsville. Or the little girl’s toys that tear off a duck’s wings in order to attach them to Fuzz (also from Splitsville).
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Sam Thielman at The Guardian speaks to Ben Katchor.
I was looking at 17th-century draftspeople and not comics. [Nicolas] Poussin, and Rembrandt, and the whole other world of anything but commercial art. I grew up reading comics, but then I discovered a whole other world of picture-making. They didn’t all make comics, but they made heavily narrative pictures. Poussin was a philosopher-painter, he wasn’t just a painter, so there was a big literary angle to these images. So I looked at that. That’s what was always interesting work.
You can’t keep recycling what’s happening. The critique was that I didn’t like how most comics were drawn and I had to draw differently than they did. If you don’t have a critique of what you’re doing, you may as well not do it. Just go on and be an apprentice to somebody and do what they do. That’s a pretty deadly direction to go in. Robert Crumb was looking at Albrecht Dürer, and looking at Doré and these incredible draftsmen of the 19th century. He was looking at early newspaper comics.
The AV Club talks to Ed Brubaker about his comics and his work on the new HBO show, Westworld.
When I first came here, I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, “Well, you’ve got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, ‘Well we love this, but we can’t publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person.’ There’s always room for a great issue of Batman at DC Comics, but networks have a limited amount of shows they can put on. You could do a pilot that is everyone’s favorite pilot at the network and they all say, “Yeah, but who’s going to watch this?” They’re not just judging shows on, “Is this good?” They’re judging it based on how many people will want to see this in our estimation. The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you’re still making a living in comics, that really helps because you’re not desperate for someone’s permission to write for a living.
Mike Dawson has put TCJ Talkies into hibernation and started a new podcast with fellow cartoonist Zack Soto called Process Party. The guest on the first episode is Vanessa Davis.
The RIYL podcast's latest guest is Dash Shaw.
