Today at The Comics Journal, we're looking back...at The Comics Journal? Hey, why not? It's still Stan Lee O'Clock right now, probably will be for a while longer. Back in 1995, the Journal reached out to a whole pack of talented folks--where else will you find a list that goes from Mary Fleener to Will Eisner?--about their take on Stan Lee. Whether it's a working relationship, a night out at dinner, or a stack of books, it's a really unique piece of work. Here, for example, is Spain Rodriguez.
His books were really a bell ringer, that comics were something to look at again. I never met the guy and I’ve seen him on TV a bunch of times, he seems like a big promoter of the stuff I like. Jack Kirby’s commentary in the interview with him that was in TCJ, one of the best things I ever read in the Journal, talking about how he walked into the room, and they were carrying out the furniture and Stan Lee was sitting on the chair crying, and he went over and comforted him and basically introduced his idea for the new line of comics. All those Marvel comics were the first bell that comics were coming back.
When the Comic Code came in, I just stopped reading comics; I didn’t even read the EC comics. The Comics Code was just such a humiliating cop-out, an injustice compared to William Gaines standing up before the Kefauver Committee. I like to think of myself in that tradition of comics, rather than the Goldwater tradition. Those Marvel comics, they seemed to have some kind of psychedelic subtext that’s kind of hard to pinpoint, but there was something about them. All the stuff that was going on around ’65 — everybody dropping acid — and reading those comics, they seemed to be giving us some kind of message and putting some kind of color into the world that wasn’t there before.
Today's review comes to us from Matt Seneca, and it's a big deal: Yuichi Yokoyama. Outdoors, an older Yokoyama title that's seeing rerelease via Breakdown Press, is here to take the stage. Here's Matt's opener:
If Yuichi Yokoyama isn't the best cartoonist currently working, he's on the list. I can't think of anyone else who combines such an iconic drawing style with such clarity of storytelling, or such ingenious use of the comics form with such forward-looking themes, or such an experimental edge with such bone-simple approachability. I see Yokoyama's influence everywhere in today's artsier comics, and I believe that in time he'll be seen as one of this period's leading practitioners of the form. Such being the case, any new offering of his work is a delight. Outdoors, newly translated for Breakdown Press by Ryan Holmberg, is a minor work, collating three shorter pieces made for the Japanese website Ecologue in 2009. But minor work from Yokoyama measures up favorably to the major work of most other names you can throw out there. Outdoors provides no shortage of mind-expanding pleasure while filling a gap in its creator's back catalog and allowing for a fuller understanding of his art's essential concerns.
