Comics Comics

Ware is Everywhere

2009-11-07T10:00:00.001-05:00

In a recent Inkstuds interview, Seth said that that three most influential contemporary cartoonists are Crumb, Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. For Seth, what sets these three apart is not so much the quality of their work, as the fact that they've changed the syntax of comics, greatly expanding the range and depth of stories that can be told in the medium. I agree with Seth, with the proviso that Gary Panter and Lynda Barry also belong on this list.

Will Staehle cover of Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs

The type of influence Seth was talking about is fairly subtle: in the case of Ware it means making other cartoonists aware that comics can have minutely delicate shades of emotional meaning hitherto unexplored in the medium. But Ware's influence on some artists is also more blatant in the sense that he's clearly informed their style and design sense. Recent examples of Ware-inflected design include the cover for the new Michael Chabon essay collection, an art catalogue designed by Ellen Gould, and a illustration by Mark Matcho from the August 24, 2009 issue of Time Magazine.

Ellen Gould's design for Imaginative Feats art catalogue

Certainly Ware has raised the bar in terms of design, just as he has done for comics, but it is odd to see Ware pastiches popping up all over the place. I'm divided on how I feel about this phenomenon. On the one hand, most of the Ware-influenced art is quite good: if you're going to steal a style you might as well do it from the best. On the other hand, in Ware's work his style isn't just for show but is integral to the total artistic package. To take use his style for other purposes almost seems like your missing the point of what it is that he's doing.

Mark Matcho illustration for Time

Comics Enriched Their Lives! #15

2009-11-06T16:36:00.009-05:00

Most of the collectors whose libraries we bought were dead years before the libraries came to us, so the only way we could judge the level of eccentricity in the collectors was the books themselves, or from other evidence. ...

An Orientalist named Paul Linebarger, whose father, we were told, had been Sun Yat-sen's lawyer, had absolutely wonderful books, but he had other things, too. He was an early expert on psychological warfare, which I believe he later taught. In one of his closets, for example, we found a huge pile of anticommunist comic books in Mongolian. Paul Linebarger also wrote science fiction, under the name Cordwainer Smith. And he had an interest in ladies' lingerie. One of the more unusual things we bought from his estate was a bra mannequin, complete with bra. Several drawers full of bras we let lie.

—Larry McMurtry, Books: A Memoir

I realize that most of you have probably never heard of Smith, but that's okay. We won't shy away from celebrating the unjustly obscure here. Scanners need no longer live in vain.

[via]

Decoding Steranko

2009-11-06T09:13:00.011-05:00

I had the good fortune of meeting James Romberger at this year's MoCCA festival. James is, like me, obsessed with color in comics. So, we're becoming fast friends.

He also has conducted a remarkable interview with Steranko. The magician/escape artist/cartoonist is in rare form. My favorite part: "When the men who created the rules and rhetoric of the comics form got together to decide on the architectural details, they failed to invite me. Consequently I found no reason to subscribe to their tenets. When I joined their ranks in 1967, the narrative devices that had been adopted and sanctioned for about half a century were considered untouchable commandments that were permanently etched in stone. Pages, panels, captions, and balloons were the essence of the comics format, all artifices considered unalterable by my peers."

I asked Mr. Romberger if he would mind me putting up a link. He said OK but wanted me to mention that it is only an excerpt from a much longer, fairly comprehensive interview that has yet to find a home in print. If we ever print another issue of Comics Comics maybe I'll beg him to let us publish it.

Check it out here.

Teach House Styles

2009-11-05T01:10:00.010-05:00

I studied cartooning at SVA and recently visited CCS, and so how to teach comics has been fluttering around in my mind for a while. What follows is a suggestion of how to run a Cartooning BFA or MFA course, just a potential direction that I think would be worth considering…

Instead of hiring teachers based on their achievements (and many of the current teachers are geniuses, no doubt about it), hire people who previously worked for many years in a now-defunct house style. Someone who drew Archie for years and is now selling their originals at Comic Con? Hire them. Did they draw Hanna-Barbera comics for years? Hire them. Did they ghost draw a daily comic? Hire them. Look for people who knew exactly how to execute a project on a regular basis and know, completely, the ins and outs of that particular assignment. They know everything about how that unique (now outdated) comic job should be done. They lived it.

The courses would be titled their house style—Archie, Hanna-Barbera—or I also think it’d be possible to get someone who has an expert knowledge of something like Little Lulu or Nancy or Astro Boy comics. There would be no courses devoted to “tools,” no penciling or inking classes. People can learn that elsewhere, like in their foundation year drawing classes. When that separation of responsibilities is brought into the cartooning class it’s usually based on an American production model that leads to people struggling with a tool for a whole year when they’re naturally suited to something else. The house style comic courses would require all of the students to draw everything with the same tools: whatever students write with naturally in non-art classes, probably just a ballpoint pen and paper. Everything tool-wise is nuts-and-bolts, no weird “try a Conté crayon” moments or “how to use a rapidograph” lessons. That’s for other classes.

The entire year-long class taught by these teachers would be based solely on teaching their house style. This would do a number of things:

The critiques would actually make sense. The teacher knows exactly how these stories are drawn, paced, structured, etc. Most of the cartooning class critiques I’ve been in are totally scattered, surreal happenings where the teachers are alternating between talking about character design, inking, storytelling, whatever. All of the students have different goals, and they’re often showing four pages of a long project out of context. Believe me: Usually nobody knows what the hell is going on. Everyone having the same goal (example: to tell an Archie story) would level the playing field. The teacher would know what they need to do to make it fit the assignment, how the characters behave, and the students would, over the school year, slowly hone in on the target, critique after critique.

Personal style and originality would be put on hold. In our current cult of originality, the pressure is to have a personal style as soon as possible, and the classroom environments often have this mentality as well. Everyone is freaking out: “What’s my style? What’s my thing?” It’s too much too fast. This race for originality has, over the years, spread from that future-goal timeline to just after college to (now) inside college itself. A safety zone no longer exists. For the most part, hardly anyone is hiring newbies fresh out of college to draw in a house style and then expect them to grow out of it. If these classes are explicitly devoted to learning a specific form, the anxiety for uniqueness would disappear and everyone would breathe out and look at their comics. The college would be the safety zone and after they graduate they’d start doing their own thing.

The more outdated and inapplicable the house style is, the better. They only have the understanding; they're not being bred for a specific job that currently exists.

These would be year-long courses, so students would devote a substantial amount of time figuring out these comics. Most cartooning courses are extremely rushed-through. That’s understandable, since if you’re trying to teach a general Cartooning course, there’s probably a lot to cover! But these wouldn’t be general Cartooning courses- they’re very specific. And focusing on a specific world of comics for a whole year, I think, would offer more than week-long (one class) samplings of different worlds.

Finally, and maybe this goes without saying, I think there’s a lot to learn from digesting these house styles I’ve suggested. Regardless of what kind of comics you’d want to do later on, it’s probably going to involve some of the same elements that comprise these house styles.

This is all based on the assumption that the students are there (and pay to be there) to learn something, and the teachers exist (and are paid) to try to teach the students things. If they don’t believe that cartooning can be taught, then they aren’t involved in this exchange.

Students will probably hate this plan because they’ll want to work on their own comics. They’ll be pissed off for Sophomore Year, start to do their own thing through/inside a house style Junior Year, and then maybe Senior Year would be open. I donno. I’m still plotting this thing out…

Proto-Graphic Novels: The Prequel

2009-11-04T09:00:00.011-05:00

In the aftermath of Jeet's recent post on "proto-graphic novels," the inimitable Eddie Campbell has generously agreed to let us post his excellent review of an A. B. Frost collection, Stuff and Nonsense, and Rodolphe Töpffer's Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. The essay originally ran in the 260th issue of The Comics Journal, from May/June 2004. As usual, Campbell's voice is unmistakable, and his ideas are ignored at the reader's peril.

Jeez, I'm making this sound too frightening. It's actually quite funny. As the Coca-Cola company so memorably put it, "Enjoy."

Live Free or Blog La-Z

2009-11-03T12:51:00.019-05:00

I had planned a better post, but scanning problems are delaying things a bit, so here's a few links to tide things over.

You know, there's a prominent comics link-blogger who likes to go on and on about how hard it is to put these things together, but based on my limited experience, it actually seems like a great and incredibly easy way to post stuff online, even when you're busy with a day job, a baby, election day, scanner foul-ups, early morning meetings, etc. If I was actually paid to do this every day, I bet I could get a routine going with my RSS feeds where it took me less than an hour to round up links to all of the "important" comics ~~blogosphere~~ blogonet sites every morning. Kind of fun!

1. Austin English is a great guy and all, but he has weird ideas about what's ugly and what isn't. (And seems to compare Denny O'Neil favorably to R. Crumb, an aesthetic crime that should not go unpunished. (Jk Austin! Sorta.))

2. I knew about Talking Lines, but didn't realize there was another interesting looking new R.O. Blechman book out.

3. Birthday tributes to Steve Ditko weren't even a dime a dozen yesterday, unless you pay way too much for your internet service, but this one, despite its brief length, was particularly provocative and original.

4. Naoki Urasawa talks process. [via]

5. A too-rare interview with Peter Blegvad appears in the new Believer. [via]

[UPDATE: And I didn't realize it when I originally posted, but the issue includes a TON of good comics material that I should have mentioned.]

6. Almost every post Jog writes these days is worth linking to, but since everyone already reads him anyway, what's the point? That said, this review of J.H. Williams III and Detective Comics is unusually thorough and well-wrought, even for him.

7. And here is an insightful appreciation of last week's Chris Ware New Yorker work. Click on it; it's not boring.

8. Finally (but not leastily), for those of you who didn't notice, this weekend brought the grand debut of our newest online team member, the great Jason T. Miles. Please make him welcome and stay tuned for more. I don't want to ruin his next post by giving anything away, but it sounds pretty awesome.

That's it. I hope you found at least most of those worth reading. Nothing is more annoying than linkblogs full of garbage. On second thought, I have to admit that maybe this isn't that easy to do exhaustively if you hope to maintain any kind of quality control. Maybe it's just me, but I'm finding less and less of interest in the actual comics ~~blogosphere~~ blogonet these days. Writers outside it seem more thoughtful lately. Still, ninety minutes tops.

Quick One #3

2009-11-02T12:28:00.007-05:00

Edward Penfield, 1906. Kelly Collection.

Very quick one in this case.

1) I really enjoyed this post at David Apatoff's blog, Illustration Art. It's an excellent explanation of what to look for in a Leonard Starr drawing. Even if the work itself is not to your liking, the flair for craft shines through. My friend Norman prefers early Neal Adams strip work, as well as Alex Kotzky. I don't have an opinion on the matter, but I bet a lot of other people do, and that's why I love comics

2) T. Hodler turned me on to John Crowley's writing. Recently Crowley wrote about the lovely sub-genre of comics created within fictions. The discussion begins with his Oct. 16 post. [And continues Oct. 20.] Love Crowley's header art, too.

N.C. Wyeth, 1917. Kelly Collection.

3) About 6 weeks ago, under the auspices of old pal and fearless comics collector/historian Warren Bernard, I visited the Kelly Collection of American Illustration in Virginia. I've seen some amazing collections and this really knocked me out. It's a private museum of the great period of pre-WWII American illustration, 1890-1935, with deep holdings in Leyendecker, Harvey Dunn, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, among others. These paintings and drawing hold up remarkably well. I was particularly struck by the expressive hatchwork of Leyendecker and the nearly-sculptural attention to paint of Cornwell. Harvey Dunn was a revelation of me, as the paintings seemed more vibrant and energetic than anything in print. It's all contained in a gorgeous museum setting, complete with extensive information and archives. I particularly liked the focus of it -- no pulps, no pop -- a tight look at one spectacular period of image-making. It's not even the period of illustration that most resonates with me -- but I can't imagine this collection, so beautifully curated and hung, not being an affecting experience for anyone, no matter their aesthetic proclivities. In its dedication to an oft-neglected artform, the collection is a national treasure. For now, I believe it is open by appointment to scholars only. If you fall under this category, make the pilgrimage.

What the Comics Journal Does Right

2009-11-01T14:51:00.005-05:00

The Comics Journal, as I noted in an earlier posting, needs to re-invent itself to make it relevant for the new era we’re in, a period where there is a much greater public interest in comics combined with a much more fragmented discourse about comics (found mostly these days the internet). It looks like the editors of the Journal were thinking along the same lines as I was, because they’ve decided to radically change the magazine by upgrading its web-presence while transforming the Journal itself into a twice-yearly upscale publication.

These are promising changes, although much will depend on the execution. I think one way to guide the magazine forward is to look at what it does right. Here is a list of highlights from the most recent incarnation of the magazine (the more compact, literary magazine format they started with issue #288 in February of 2008).

The Deitch family issue (292) was the stand-out interview. By conducting separate interviews with Gene Deitch and his three sons, Gary Groth created almost a new genre: a family saga in the form of oral history. With each Deitch offering conflicting accounts of their family life, we got a rounded image of their careers, one that read like a novel. This was one of the best issues ever. There have been other strong interviews (like the ones with Trevor Von Eeden, S. Clay Wilson, and Jason) but the Deitch interviews stood out for telling a cohesive story.

As for the critical essays, I think the Journal was strongest when its stalwart critics wrote long think pieces. Gary Groth’s novella-length, keen-eyed piece about the relationship between Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman was superb as both portraiture and analysis. It gave a much livelier sense of what Thompson was like than the recent documentary Gonzo, or any of the other films about the notorious journalist.

Although many found it too long, I though the symposium on the Michaelis’ Schulz biography was important and necessary (full disclosure: I participated in the symposium). There were serious problems with that much-praised book, and it was good to get Monte Schulz’s objection to it in print for the record, so that future students of Peanuts won’t treat Michaelis as gospel.

Other strong pieces of writing were R. Fiore on Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague and Tim Kreider on Bill Mauldin. In general, Donald Phelps is the magazine’s most genial and idiosyncratic voice, although he often writes about things other than comics. I know many people have a hard time with Phelps’ rambling, quirky, allusive prose but his essays always give me a new way to look at art, something few critics can achieve. I have to confess though that I’ve never developed a taste for another dense Journal stylist, Ken Smith.

The strength of the magazine is in presenting essays that have a depth of analysis that can’t be found elsewhere. Most writing on comics tends to suffer from a shortness of breath: small reviews and bite-size blog postings. The Journal, at its best, doesn’t settle for such small snacks but offers a full-course meal.

Among its reviewers the Journal has a contingent of solid, trust-worthy writers: Kent Worcester, Rich Kreiner, Shaenon Garrity, and Kristian Williams, but they tend to get drowned out by crankier and less-informed critics, writers who mistake abrasiveness for insight. The magazine’s review section does seem too diffuse and scattershot. I’m never quite sure why some books get reviewed and others don’t. There’s a lot of good critics on the web now – Rob Clough comes to mind right way. The most promising prospect for the next incarnation of the Journal is to recruit these writers (I know Clough has already signed on).

Visually as well, the magazine has improved greatly in recent years. But if it comes out less frequently, there is more room for growth and experiment. Fantagraphics has a great design team which consistently puts together wonderful looking books. A Comics Journal that looks more like a book would be really exciting.

In terms of the print magazine, my strong sense is that the Comics Journal has always been strongest when Gary Groth has been most involved with it: his interviews with cartoonists have always set the gold standard in terms of being informed by the deepest research and asking the most searching questions. I’m thinking here of the classic and memorable conversations Groth has had with Chaykin, Crumb, Gil Kane, Jules Feiffer and many other creators. Now Groth is of course a very busy many with many broths to attend to, so the amount of time he gives to the Journal has wavered. But with two issues a year to put out, he should be able to reshape the magazine into something more closely resembling his own sensibility.

The Journal has often been accused of being just a mouthpiece for Groth’s opinions. To my mind, it’s regrettable that the Journal hasn’t often enough been Grothian enough.

BEHOLD! THE ULTIMATE MAN!

2009-10-30T05:33:00.007-04:00

The only thing I'm really obsessive about is trying to find the real worth of something and my relation to it. It doesn't matter whether it's comics or anything else, you know. So that's an ongoing process. It's a matter of possibly trying to find, to develop, what I know so that I can grasp things that I'm only seeing in an overt way. You never get to the essence of anything. What you do is just peel back layers. I just wanted to pass the first couple of layers. I feel like my whole life is wasted if somehow or other I respond to a lifetime of work exactly the same as the fucking fans.

—Gil Kane, 1977 conversation with Gary Groth included in his tribute "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Remembering Gil Kane", The Comics Journal #222, April 2000

The first comic book I remember getting my hands on was Superman Special 1983 #1, written and drawn by Gil Kane. I obsessed over this comic book. The chunky drawing composed of spindly, coarse lines and bold, slanted hatch marks gave everything a tactile and chiseled look that made the unreal seem real to my young, impressionable eyes. I must've spent hours studying the cover alone: An angry Superman shoving his fist in the air, lines radiating out from under his cape, a giant flash of fire and smoke echoing his rage ... A large, disembodied head hovers behind the man of steel ... nervous hands reel, anticipating what might happen ... and what happens is lurid, colorful, intense, over the top ... an oratorio of a comic book, full of bubbly slime, furrowed brows, sweat bullets, clenched fists, tornadoes, tsunamis, an erupting volcano and Superman. Lots and lots of Superman as he navigates the silly world of mere mortals ... and it's the "mere mortals" part, which today makes me find Gil Kane's frustration, smoldering and pinched between Superman's black eyes.

Tonight I made the rounds; visiting several different quarter and dollar bins. I came home with a nice haul. I used to do this with more regularity but too often I found myself revisiting the same bins with the same shit, so now I go less often giving the retailers time to replenish their stock of cheap, unwanted comic books. For me, these bins are where it's at. Flipping through thousands of grimy, moldy, water-damaged comic books in one night can be a heavy trip. It's not out of the ordinary for a prismatic range of emotions to move through me as I spend hours digging through what seems to be the world's supply of Image comics. But more often than not, by the second or third hour, I've settled into an undulating balancing act, sliding back and forth from cosmic excitement to common existential dread.

Gil Kane's work on Superman Special 1983 #1 is fucking awesome. But it's not enough.

It's over! He's gone ... destroyed by his own ambitions! His mind and body couldn't endure the trauma of endless accelerated mutation! Ambition pursuing its own ends, indifferent to the world about it ... corrupts all! No matter how well-intentioned, ambition without compassion makes us ... not more ... but less than human!

—Superman's thoughts from panels 1 and 2 from page 43 of Superman Special 1983 #1, written and drawn by Gil Kane.

separated at birth?

2009-10-28T09:25:00.006-04:00

Dash Shaw and David Mazzucchelli.
I know, I know, a ton of cartoonists have done the same thing with the balloon tails. But I thought this was funny.

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2009-10-27T12:04:00.004-04:00

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APE

2009-10-25T20:06:00.011-04:00

Best in Show

Malachi Ward

Zack Soto

Brandon Graham

George Mensah

John Pham

Grant Reynolds

Various

Frank Santoro here. My notes for last week's APE show. I think this about sums it up. Fun festival. Sure has changed tho' in 15 years. I'll say one thing: Comic-Con running it seems like a good thing.

APE
San Francisco, Ca
2009

Dean Haspiel

Last Gasp mixer

Ben Catmull

Tim Goodyear

Dylan Williams

North Beach

Saturday
Dean Haspiel (told a great story about Howard Chaykin)

Tom Devlin is funny

Unclothed Man book looks good

Mike and Janice at Fantagraphics are good people

Jon V signing

John Pham mini-comics score!

Alvin, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Haven

Marc Bell in a good mood

Steve Oliff is the secret history of color comics in one person

Personal Stories panel
Dean Haspiel: inject personal drive into work for hire
Dash And Phoebe Gloeckner steal show

Chicken dinner and Bob's donuts

Sunday

Marathon crowd noise wake-up call

Jeff Smith and Dash conversation. Jeff's APE thoughts.
1994 to now. Seemed genuinely excited at how things have changed.

Slow Sunday

Webcomics panel
(monetizing and formating same old shit. like conversations about the internet in the '90s - all that familiar "it's gonna be like this..." double talk)

Grant Reynolds

Zack Soto

Ryan Sands

girl with Tintin 24 hour comic (Angie Wang)

Brandon Graham is really good.

George Mensah (Ninja comics)

Keeping it real department: Ron Turner pushing dolly of boxes

El Toro burrito

Joe from Image / Shannon from Stumptown

Jesse Moynihan

Brett Warnock

Monday

North Beach hangout w Dash/ City Lights

Two More Oliff Akira Color Guides

2009-10-25T12:12:00.003-04:00

Cynical/Naive

2009-10-24T13:18:00.017-04:00

I've futzed around with this piece after initially publishing it, retaining the ideas but rearranging and clarifying a bit, I hope. Anyhow, I normally try (though not that hard) to avoid writing about press, but I must note a few things about David Hajdu's review of Crumb's Genesis in the NY Times Book Review. Look, I'm not cynical enough to dismiss the Times, as many do, as stodgy or useless, etc. Instead, I'm somehow naive enough to still believe in it as an institution that has tremendous resources and can produce great work. Nevertheless, I also realize that (and sort of understand, from a logistical point of view) irresponsible or ill-informed writers like Hajdu slip by when writing about a somewhat specialized topic. After all, this stuff matters most to those of us who take it as a primary subject. But in the spirit of trying to improve the discourse around comics, Hajdu should be addressed. Especially because again and again Hajdu pops up with some ill-formed opinion or straight up error (and we at Comics Comics, like groundhogs, pop up and object like the big fucking nerds we are). So, onto the review. In a somewhat positive, though oddly condescending piece, Hajdu commits a number of blunders. We'll start with this doozy:

"The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! Nothing left out!" brags a banner on the cover. This is scarcely the first time the Bible has been adapted to comics pages, of course. In the first decade of the comic-book business, the man who claimed to have invented the medium, M. C. Gaines, founded a whole company on a line of 'Picture Stories From the Bible.' (When he died suddenly, his young son, William M. Gaines, inherited the company, and in a 20th-century case study in the enduring vagaries of primogeniture, the son discontinued the Bible strips and started publishing lurid, spicy crime and horror comics.)

Given that Hajdu wrote a book (The Ten Cent Plague) involving those exact "lurid" comics, he should also know that Crumb's "brag" on the cover is a knowing nod to his medium. As with the works inside, Crumb's cover text and design is a consciously mid-century comics stance. That is, like Crumb's childhood comics, the cover is garish and loud, and interior pages rely on established cultural/visual types and straightforward storytelling in the Stanley/Barks vein. It's a brilliant, thoroughly subversive choice that works both on a literal and meta level, commenting on the history and form of comics-the-medium. And further, as Hajdu well knows, Bill Gaines sought to produce, yes, sensationalist comics, but he also instituted the most rigorous set of standards yet (and in the case of crime and horror comics, maybe ever) imposed on comic books. He aimed for literary quality as he understood it. Hardly just the "lurid, spicy" comics of Hajdu's description, though he was obviously trying to make a cocktail party smarty pants comment about fathers and sons, blah blah). And yes, the Bible has been in truncated comics form many many times. But as Hajdu also knows, that is hardly Crumb's point. His task was a word-for-word adaptation.

And then there is this classic:

At points, Crumb withholds exactly the kind of graphic details he built a career on revealing: In an image of circumcision, he shows us two splatters of blood, rather than the actual penis being cut. Onan practices coitus interruptus turned away from us. This book, I believe, is the first thing by Crumb ever published without a single image of flying sperm or a sharp blade approaching male genitalia.

Besides the sheer idiocy of saying Crumb "built a career" (whatever that means in an underground context) on anything besides drawing exactly what he needed to draw, the facts are simply wrong. Crumb has been making "clean" comics right alongside his "dirty" stuff for over 30 years now: American Splendor; the blues biographies; the P.K. Dick biography; the Kafka book; right up to his recent masterful memoir of his brother Charles. This kinda knowledge is not the area of specialists -- it's the stuff of Amazon.com and Wikipedia. Crumb doesn't need me to defend him (oy vey) but his efforts deserve better than this utterly wrong characterization. It is all the stranger since Hajdu has, in fact, interviewed Crumb himself and would have to be willfully and then persistently ignorant not to know better.

But wait, there's more:

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative.

This seems an especially disingenuous statement. First, Hajdu's interpretation of Genesis is strictly that of a believer -- I can't see how, as an irreligious reader, you come away with that interpretation. I mean, there are two conflicting accounts of creation. Not exactly orderly. Also, Crumb is not, as far as I know, an anarchist, but he is, by his own account, spiritual. Which is to say, Crumb seems to be exploring the sacred. Maybe not Hajdu's sacred, but sacred nonetheless. A quick scan of Crumb's statements (From Vanity Fair, just one Google search away: "I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality") on the matter will give you that much.

Anyhow, one wonders why an author would persist in writing about a subject he clearly disdains and isn't interested in actually learning about, but I guess that's between Hajdu and his own idea of the sacred. Next post I'll be happy, I promise.

[UPDATE: I realize it seems odd/rash to pick on this one piece of writing out of the avalanche of material devoted to Crumb's Genesis, but it strikes me so wrong headed that it just needed to be addressed. If nothing else, given the talk of mature comics criticism, etc., it seems important to me to address writing that, whatever else I might say about it, aims for seriousness, and is generated by someone who claims a certain authority in the field.]

Full Circle

2009-10-22T15:20:00.024-04:00

Dan just somehow hacked into my computer and stole my planned post almost word for word, but that won't stop me. Those of you who aren't color blind should hie thee to Same Hat, like, now to see some of the incredible work that inspired Frank to "riff" on Steve Oliff. Color nerds united.

Then wish you were at APE so you could have bought some of these yourself. The picture of Frank that was going around kind of scared me, but now I think the trip would have been worth it.

UPDATE: Also, I feel bad for linking to this for some reason I can't put my finger on, but I can't help it: Frank Miller has been leaving appreciative comments on toga-crazed warmonger Victor Davis Hanson's blog, a sampling of which can be found here. [via] I kind of don't believe the ones at the end where he repeatedly decries anonymous commenters as cowards, but the others seem genuine.

And whether it's Miller or not, I agree with him: "Use your real names, or I will call you cowards."

New Paradigm

2009-10-22T14:55:00.003-04:00

Brian Chippendale is writing really fucking good criticism. It might be a new paradigm. Connecting images and genres and being damned funny, at that. Oh, also, there is a new Lightning Bolt record out. It also rules. Hi Brian! Hi!

nose gang

2009-10-21T10:11:00.005-04:00

Hey y'all! Ramblin' Frank Santoro here with a Comics Comics news report of sorts. Mr. Dash Shaw and I recently traveled to San Franciskie for the Alternative Press Expo. The "Nose Gang" was in full effect. It was a pretty good show for the most part. No complaints, no drama. Some interesting panels; lots of interesting people. I'll be posting a full report later in the week but just wanted to say hey.

Also, I haven't seen this linked to so I thought I'd post it here. Mr. Sean T. Collins has conducted an interview with Brian Chippenedale. Pretty great.

P.S. Best portrait of Jon Vermilyea ever.

Talking Comics in Philadelphia, or thereabouts

2009-10-21T09:32:00.004-04:00

Haverford College, which is just outside of Philadelphia, is holding a conference on comics starting tomorrow and running till Sunday. I'll be there taking part in a panel discussion. More interestingly and importantly, Eric Drooker and Lynda Barry will also be there. For anyone who hasn't had the Lynda Barry experience yet, I'll just say that she's by far the best public speaker I've ever seen in my life. The comic world has some great talkers, notably Spiegelman and Panter, but Barry is in a league of her own. No one who has a chance to hear her talk should miss out.

More information about the event can be found here.

Quick One #2

2009-10-20T10:00:00.001-04:00

My hero.

Oh, this a good one. NBM, as part of its Forever Nuts series of reprints (by the way, I like how NBM has carved out a niche doing books like this that are not obvious but have immense scholarly value -- the early Bringing Up Father being another wonderful project) recently released Happy Hooligan, which collects a bunch of Opper's comic strip from 1902-1913. This is stupid art at its best.
Opper was 42 when invented Happy, and unlike a lot of his comic strip peers, an accomplished illustrator. But he seemed taken with grungy new medium and designed a comic strip that is literally knock-kneed and hobbled -- a real roustabout -- to fit into the century. Nothing so graceful as Nemo for Opper. Nope, it is rough drawing and tumbling antics all the way. Opper seems to have intuited that a handful of wonky lines could add up to a character and that character business and action was the best thing going for mass appeal. But coming to it mature, the man knew how to delineate form, no matter how simply: Each figure is distinctly distressed.

As a storyteller Opper's gaze never wavers. It's always that head-on, unmoving view of the action. Poor, good-hearted Happy Hooligan -- he gets jobs, tries to help people, attempts transactions, but all for naught. Or at least, all for just our entertainment. He stumbles, falls, and breaks, but never badly. Like a stilted ragdoll, HH always comes back.

The book itself is good. I'm grateful to have a color collection of these strips, even if I'm not always clear on why these particular strips were chosen for publication. The supplementary essays do add up to a solid portrait of the man and where the strip fits in comics history, and include a truly bizarre 1934 photo of Opper and Alex Raymond; the older man was lauding this new young star. Two more different approaches to comics could hardly be found.

The best part is just how entertaining these strips are. They feel contemporary in that Opper went for both nonsense and physical (and often both simultaneously!) gags. In their static staging and reliance on full figured action, some of these strips remind me of Gary Panter's recent work. Plus, HH is just such an odd looking character with his round head and soup can hat. I mean, just look at some of the non-Opper merch this strip inspired. It couldn't be any more bad/good if King Terry himself designed it.

Needless to say, I'm starting a HH fanclub. Who's with me?

The Proto-Graphic Novel: Notes on a Form

2009-10-19T16:16:00.009-04:00

Artistic innovation always outruns the vocabulary of critics. Artistic forms and genres are created long before there are words to describe them. Cervantes didn’t know he was working on a great novel when he wrote Don Quixote; he couldn’t have: the novel as a distinct form didn’t exist then, nor would it exist for centuries. If you had asked Cervantes what he was up to, he might have said he was writing a burlesque of courtly romances.

On the same principle, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells didn’t know they were writing science fiction novels. Wells might have had some idea late in life when science fiction as a genre emerged and his earlier work, which he might have thought of as scientific romances, were co-opted as pioneering examples of the genre.

The same principal is true of the graphic novel: now that the form exist, we can see all sorts of ancestors of the form. Books that previously existed as isolated oddities can now be seen as precursors of a form.

In the previous post, Dan mentioned that R.O. Blechman’s The Juggler of Our Lady (1953) can be considered as a proto-graphic novel. True. The same can be said of the many woodcut novels of the early 20th century, as well as the much earlier work of Rodolphe Töpffer. Other candidates for the form include Myron Waldman’s Eve (1943), the 1950 thriller It Rhymes with Lust (done by the team of Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin), Milt Gross’ He Done Her Wrong (1930), Don Freeman’s Skitzy (1955), as well as a number of works from the early 1970s by Martin Vaughn-James. Raymond Briggs probably belongs on this list.

Just today a publisher sent me Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip, a proto-graphic novel originally published in Italy in 1969, and now available in English thanks to the good offices of the New York Review of Books. I’ll have more to say about the book in another post, but it is an interesting example of Magritte-inflicted surrealism not dissimilar to the contemporaneous work of Vaughn-James.

As more and more proto-graphic novels come to light, we can start seeing some commonalities in the form.

Here are a few things these books tend to have in common (although there are exceptions to every rule):

1. The cartoonists who work on them tend to come from a background outside of commercial comic strips or comic books, either from the fine arts, from children’s literature, or from avant-garde literature. The exceptions here are He Done Her Wrong and It Rhymes with Lust.

2. The works tend to be allegorical or dream-like rather than realistic; that is to say the characters and stories tend to be emblematic rather than follow any of the rules of verisimilitude or psychological realism.

3. In their time, some of these works were very popular and successful. That’s certainly true of Töpffer, some of the woodcut novels, and The Juggler of Our Lady. But there is little sense that they belong to a tradition or are created by a communal context (the woodcut novels might be the exception). Often the cartoonist involved only did one or two such books (Vaughn-James seems to have been more persistent than most).

Most of these books in there time were sports, isolated mutations, freaks of nature. But when we bring all these books together, they do seem to form a sort of tradition: not perhaps a strong tradition like the novel but a quirky, wayward and at times prophetic tradition, like 19th century science fiction.

PS: Someone should make a list of all the proto-graphic novels. That would be a worthwhile resource.

Quick One #1

2009-10-18T17:19:00.005-04:00

I’m going to try to sneak out some quick little thoughts on some recent books and ideas knocking around my brain.

I want to begin with Talking Lines: The Graphic Stories of R.O. Blechman. A longtime favorite of mine, Blechman is a master of the shaky line school of cartooning, his mark as unmistakable as, say, Herriman’s. Coming into his own in the 1950s, Blechman absorbed the lessons of linear cartoonists like Steinberg and just kept refining and refining so that each mark actually means something. You won’t find anything extraneous in a Blechman drawing. When combined with a judicious use of spot colors, his delicate images pop to life, becoming communicative graphics on a page. As a cartoonist, he’s unusual these days: he’s a yarn-spinner and a moralist. These tales are subtle examinations of a theme or subject. This, as well as use of the page, rather than the panel, as a storytelling device, seem to bring him in line with 19th century cartoonists like Caran d’Ache. But his urbane concern with current events, social mores, and city life make him resolutely modern. Blechman resolutely looks outward and at the world around him: No moody ruminating or action adventure here. More clear eyed commentary on life. I think of him like I might think of the writer Joseph Epstein: a bemused observer whose wit always surprises.

And Blechman, of course, has had one of the great modern careers (the kind it’s sorta impossible to have anymore) in graphic communication, covering animation, illustration, design, and comics. His other essential book, The Juggler of Our Lady is, as Seth notes in his introduction, one of those inbetween tomes that seems to be a proto-graphic novel.

So, go out and get this fine book. It, like D&Q’s other recent essential archive project, Melvin Monster, is one of those volumes that knocks my vision of the medium slightly askew and reminds why I’m bothering in the first place.

Time Flies

2009-10-14T17:08:00.011-04:00

There's an extensive and entertaining new interview with Benjamin Marra on the computers right now. It feels like only yesterday that I dug the first xeroxed issue of Night Business out of my bag of SPX junk, and read it in astonishment, wondering if Marra was a genyuwine idiot. Turns out he's not! I'm surprised Paul Gulacy never came up, though... Come on, Ben! You used to admit it. Instead you name Piero della Francesca? Really? Just joking around, of course. All CC readers already know about Night Business. Fun stuff. I'm getting a little punchy lately.

Which brings me to this sorry strategy: I've bought and read some new comics worth reviewing recently and I'm just going to announce it online now so I won't be able to talk myself out of writing about them later. And some seriously provocative "think pieces." (Actually, I don't have any of those in mind, but it shouldn't be too hard to fake.) Really, I would most like to just get a good Cage Match going, but don't think I'll be able to dodge crying babies long enough for an all-day event any time soon.

(Note to self: Maybe the others can be shamed into doing one without me. Yeah, this time, I'll play the Dan role...)

Gutter Connections

2009-10-14T16:58:00.005-04:00

There’s one of those weird gutter connections on the Apple Movie Trailers site right now. Watch two advertisements make love through time and space. It’s an animation so it’s not always there.

There should be a blog documenting this stuff. Get to it, bloggers!

Aw, probably one already exists.

So Who is Noah?

2009-10-13T14:55:00.003-04:00

Comics Comics Correspondent Paul Karasik wrote in to note that he has discovered a startling relationship between one Biblical family, one group of knuckleheads, and a certain cartoonist. Watch this space for more revelations.

Hayao Miyazaki Talks about Gekiga

2009-10-12T16:23:00.013-04:00

In Starting Point: 1979-1996, Miyazaki talks about how influential the gekiga movement was, and how he moved away from drawing gekiga. It’s interesting if you’re a fan of Miyazaki and gekiga, or just Miyazaki’s mangaka years.

These gekiga presented the message that things don’t go well in this world. Drawn by manga artists who had suffered through misfortune — in particular those who hung out around Osaka (though I must apologize to people in Osaka for saying this) — gekiga were filled with their grudges and feelings of spite, so there were no happy endings. The artists made every effort to provide cynical endings. For a student in examination hell, this disillusioned perspective seemed totally refreshing.

I had already decided to spend my future drawing pictures, so I was trying to draw ones filled with grudges and spite. Yet, as I didn’t have a concrete blueprint for my future I was filled with anxiety.

As we grow from childhood into youth, this anxiety grows exponentially, and we worry about how on earth we should live our lives. Our anxiety forces us to look for an antidote that will rid us of this feeling as quickly as possible. We want to find that something will help us grab our own chair in this world and sit in it.

I chose manga as a weapon to fight against anxiety, and, as I mentioned, at first I drew gekiga, story-oriented manga. Just about that time I saw Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent.) For me, it was a kind of culture shock. I began to have doubts about gekiga...

From a section titled “Manga-style thought is dramatically influencing Japanese culture:”

So why are manga now influencing so many areas of culture? I would say one of the biggest reasons is because with manga it’s not necessary to read what you don’t want to read...

People take a completely different approach with other forms of entertainment. I really don’t think, for example, that many people would leave a theater after watching only five minutes of a boring film. And it’s probably why people have such strong opinions about films. They often sit through films even while feeling angry and wondering why the heck anyone made the thing in the first place. People don’t get angry about manga because if they don’t like the stories they won’t finish reading them. I think we can say this is one of the biggest cultural characteristics of manga. It’s no wonder that manga criticism is such a barren field.

Another hallmark of manga is that an almost limitless deformation is possible. To give a somewhat dated example, in Kyojin no hoshi (Star of the Giants), an entire episode concludes while the character Hyuma is throwing a pitch. Everything about life is encapsulated in that one pitch, and the artist depicts a whirl of recollections in the time it takes for the ball to travel. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than the Japanese pulling off something like this.

(skipping ahead…)

When works created in this fashion are taken to places like Europe, where people have no exposure to what I have been discussing, they tend to go crazy over it. It was true of the Japanese manga and anime Candy Candy, which really took off in West Germany, Italy, and even France. Of course, now it’s Sailor Moon, and they say that in Spain everyone is nuts about the work, with even adults watching the show, enthralled. [laughter] This sort of thing is actually happening.

There’s a reason shojo are interesting. They depict the inner workings of the mind, so no one draws anything they don’t want to see. And in the images depicted, what we see is not the character, but what the character is looking at. And the stories become interesting because they deform thoughts and psychological states in a more pure fashion.

Anyway, it’s hard to slice out passages like this. Check out the book if you’re interested.