[Above, something doesn't smell right with John Kerschbaum. Below, downwind of a Dispatch.]

• Jeff Smith named guest of honor for Chicago’s Comic and Entertainment Expo in April 2010.
• Need to find a con in a town near you? Comic Book Conventions has relaunched their website under a new url: ConventionScene.com.
• Journalista has gone dark from July 3rd- 10th. The blog is scheduled to return on July 13th.
• The one, the only Neil Gaiman will be making an appearance at Comix Experience in San Fransisco for an hour and a half of signing/Q&A/reading on July 19th. There are only 100 tickets available for this event.
• Possible Lost comic book? Fans shouldn’t hold their breath. Creators will not “hold anything back for the final season of the show.”
• Num nums and comics all afternoon, sound like a treat! Join John Kerschbaum, Mike Dawson, and Alex Robinson for a cartoonist brunch at Bergen Street Comics in NYC this Sunday from 12-3pm.
• It seems like it’s not all bad news for print media: Mike Cotton, a long time staff member of Wizard, has been promoted to Editor.

–Natalie Shoemaker

With the Act-I-Vate strip, The End is Here, the German-born artist has adopted a far more serious storyline, also starring a cast of everyone’s favorite flightless Arctic birds.

For this third installment of our Subway Stories series, Baehr abandoned his penguin friends momentarily to bring us the story of an underground busker. “No Tips, Please” was written by Avi Kotzer with art by Baehr, who assures me that it is, in fact, based on a true story.

You can check out more of Baehr’s work (and plenty more penguins) at So What? The Artroom.

Those artists interested in submitting a strip to the Subway Stories series, please drop us a line at dailycrosshatch@gmail.com.

[Subway Stories #1: Raina Telgemeier]

[Subway Stories #2: John Leavitt]

It took everything within my power not to stick the name Pete Hornberger at the top of this post, but heck, as much as we all love 30 Rock (and we all do, right?), embracing Scott Adsit’s unhappily married, TV show producing alter-ego would come at the expense of the actor’s other contributions to the comedy world, including a stint at Chicago’s world famous Second City, spots on Mr. Show, and a writing/producing/directing/starring role on the brilliant, if short-lived, Adult Swim Davey and Goliath spoof, Moral Orel.

Oh, and perhaps most impressive of all, as stated in the interview below, the comedian once shared a room with Flavor Flav.

When he’s not making comedy or laughing at ex-Public Enemy members, Adsit is a big comics fan, as evidenced by appearances at a number of comic conventions (including the most recently NYCC) and on the guest list of our favorite live comics comedy talk show, Comic Book Club.

30 Rock returns to NBC on October 15th. In the meantime, Adsit will be appearing in front of the graphic novel shelves at Manhattan’s Forbidden Planet.

Who are you?

I’m an actor who sometimes writes. I’m currently on a show called 30 Rock and, until its untimely yanking, a different show called Moral Orel, which I also co-wrote, directed and produced. I also did some storyboarding on it. I liked it a lot. Some shut-ins might know me from the Tenacious D short about “The Greatest Song in the World,” while others will recognize me as a jubilant audience member at the Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav.

As I write this, I’m working with Dino Stamatopoulos, developing a new stop-motion Adult Swim show currently called Frankenhole, a title no one likes.

You should totally be my Myspace friend because:

It may make a come back one day.

What are you reading [comic-wise, naturally]?

Faction, Brubaker, Johns, Duggin, Noto, Brooks, Dini, Vaughan and I’ll follow the FF wherever they go. I also love reading Jess Nevins’s books annotating Alan Moore’s books. And Hader, Meyers & Maguire just did a great Spider-Man book.

Your favorite comic shop?

In NYC it’s Forbidden Planet, which recently revamped their floorplan, the result of which is like buiding a railroad hub on an airport runway.

This time next year, I hope to be penning the major motion picture adaptation of which comic:

The Ten Doctors by Rich Morris.

Assorted Scott Adsit-related comic fun facts:

I have no children, but I do have a sketchbook filled with League of Extraodinary Gentlemen sketches and paintings from some wildly talented, big shot artists. I’m an attentive father and raising it to worship a snake god.

–Brian Heater

In honor of Secret Acres’ release of the first-ever P.S. Comics collection, we sat down with Bay Area artist Minty Lewis to discuss the pretension of Italian fascism, the difficulty of drawing beaches, and why no one cares about the arm lengths of fruit.

[Part One]

Were you doing graphic design before you started making your comics?

I started making comics in 2003 and I started studying graphic design a couple of years before that.

Did studying graphic design lead you down that path?

No, the first comic I actually made was because my boyfriend ad the time—not Damien [Jay, Lewis's husband], a different one. He was doing something for the SPX anthology, and he said, “you should do it, too.” I said, “okay,” and I made a comic. Mine got in and his didn’t. I got some good feedback from that. I didn’t really set out to make comics. One thing led to another. I like getting feedback and knowing that people are responding to my stuff. I really like graphic design, but most of the graphic design stuff isn’t stuff that I feel that passionately about. A lot of the same skills go into comics, but you put a lot more of yourself into them, so it’s a little more creatively rewarding than graphic design.

Were you doing any sort of writing before that?

No, not really.

The way you described it, it seems that, in terms of making a comic, storytelling is foremost.

I think it’s something that I’ve always been really interested in. I’ve always read a lot of books and I’ve been interested in comics, but I think it me a lot time to not be intimidated by the act of actually producing stories myself. When I went to college, I took a lot of art classes, and I don’t think I put that much of myself into anything I did, because I was always intimated by the seriousness of it. once I started making comics, it was a way to make art and have it be more personal. It could be funny and I didn’t have to go to class and be critique.

Are the stories in this book based on events that have happened to you?

No, not necessarily. Bits and pieces are stories I’ve heard and sometimes they’re things that have happened to me and my friends or things that I’ve observed, but they don’t usually happen in the order I write them in. usually the actual story in the comics is made up.

But they do feel personal on some level?

Yeah. I can put my personality into them—that’s what I mean when I say that I put myself in them. I don’t mean that they’re autobiographical. When I was trying to make art in college, the things I was trying to be academic about were things that I don’t think were in-line with my personality. I wrote my thesis in college about fascism in Italian drama, and I’m not actually that interested in that.

That would make a great comic.

Yeah, I know! I feel like I align more with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. But it took me a long time to grow out of an academic approach to storytelling and making art. I don’t think that that kind of thing really suits me.

The stories all feel pretty real, despite the fact that they’re mostly played out by dogs and fruit. Why not just fill the roles with people?

I didn’t really make that a conscious decision either. The first ever comic that I made that I actually thought about was a Fruit Pals comic. At that point it was because it was a lot easier to draw fruit than people, because no one was going to say, “Apple’s arms aren’t that long.” I think it’s more effective when they’re fruit for people to focus on the dialog and what’s going on, rather than trying to identify who this person is and what they’re doing there and what clothes they’re wearing and what kind of haircut they have. I think it makes it kind of more universal when they’re fruit and dogs. I also feel like it makes it a little more ridiculous, because I don’t intend to have my comics be that serious. I feel like a lot of people come away feeling like they’re depressing or mean spirited, so I think it makes the tone a little lighter and faster.

Do you get that feedback a lot? That the strips are “mean spirited?”

Yes. Some people think they’re funny and charming. I guess there are two sides to them. But I’ve heard a few people say that they felt really down after reading my comics. Somebody Twittered and said that they had nightmares about mean spirited fruit after reading them.

Does that kind of feedback affect your work?

I don’t know. I think it must in some way. It’s not like I sit down and think about writing something that’s not mean spirited. I mean, I try not to be mean spirited, but I can’t help it! It just keeps happening that way. Or depressing. I don’t feel depressed or mean in my normal life, but I can’t stop writing stories that end up that way.

So you don’t want to sit down and write, say, a romantic comedy with fruit?

I feel like I could. Donuts for Lunch—that’s kind of a romantic comedy. But there’s always a depressing or awkward side to it.

Now that the book is here, do you feel as you’ve closed a chapter on P.S. Comics?

Yeah, I think I want to try something longer. I’m actually working on something right now that I’ll write and Damien, my husband, will draw. He’s a very good artist—and he’s agreed to this, this isn’t just my idea. The story’s about terriers and there’s a little bit of interior design involved in it. I’m imagining Damien drawing it, which is opening up  a lot of possibilities as far as things that I would avoid because I didn’t want to draw them.

In terms of their being too complicated?

In terms of things like beaches. Damien struggles with writing more than I do, so I think it could be a good marriage of the minds for us.

–Brian Heater

[Above, Matthew Thurber takes on Ike and Tina. Below, river deep, Dispatch high.]

• The Fart Party’s Julia Wertz will be at Bar Matchless in Brooklyn this Friday at 8:00.  She’s one of five storytellers who will be mining their past for powerful (and perhaps painful) tales around the theme of “The Beach Boys.”
• There’s another comics and drinking sort of event coming up at Union Pool in Brooklyn.  This one’s called “Telling Stories: Fiction In Comics,” and it’s happening this Saturday from 2:00-4:00 PM.  Jessica Abel, Jason Little, and Matthew Thurber will be speaking.
• Illustrator Molly Crabapple is launching the tour for her first graphic novel, Scarlett Takes Manhattan, with a series of steamy July parties, beginning this Wednesday at the Slipper Room in New York.
• Lar and Sohmer, the dudes behind Least I Could Do are planning a four-day binge of comics events in Montreal this August.  The list of cartoonists in attendance continues to grow!
• This Saturday in New York, it’s the Asian American Comicon, from 10:00 to 5:00 at the Museum of Chinese in America.  Only 250 tickets are available, so early registration is highly advised.
• The same goes for “The Persistence of Animation,” an animation studies conference happening this weekend, July 10-12, in Atlanta, Georgia.  Registration ends this Wednesday!
• Charlotte ComiCon, “The Best One Day Family Friendly Comic Show In The Country” is happening this Sunday, from 10:00 to 4:00, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
• Which American cities have the highest density of cartoonists?  The people deserve to know!  So do your part to help by adding more names to Tom Spurgeon’s list.

–Athena Currier

At some point we all become ambassadors—to our parents, to our friends, to strangers we meet at parties. We give recommendations and lend out worn copies with bent spines. We attempt to justify our passions as more than simple guilty pleasures. There is no guilt here. This is art.

Few statements in this world are more subjective than that last one, of course, so, for the hard sell, we compile lists of game changers—the Spiegelmans, Satrapis, Wares, and Moores—authors whose work has convinced the critics to assess the medium’s finest work alongside the world’s high art and literature. Because, after all, if a book is high brow enough to win over some stodgy old book critic at The New York Times, surely it will do a number on mom and dad, right?

Of course it’s a touch too early to bandy about a term like “game changer” for Asterios Polyp—that’s a distinction that will have to be bestowed upon the book by future artists. Despite the still drying ink on the title’s first printing, however, it doesn’t seem too early to add David Mazzucchelli’s new book to the personal lending libraries of some of this medium’s finer works.

Opening Asterios Polyp feels like cracking open the pages of some vintage art book, one stashed away on the library for a few decades, which pulsates and comes to life the moment its contents hit the air. Mazzucchelli, who has already established his talents in any number of corners in this medium, from Frank Miller’s Daredevil to Paul Auster’s City of Glass, seems, perhaps for the first time in a long and storied career, to have finally allotted himself sufficient stretching room, dripping these pages with free-flowing cartoon lines and splotches of electric neon ink.

Mazzucchelli clearly has something to prove on the pages of Asterios Polyp, to demonstrate just how nimble and whole his artist abilities truly are, adopting the aesthetic antithesis of the dark and ripped Batman of Year One, a free-flowing line borrowed from the cartoon cover of some early 60s beatnik jazz records.

It’s an attempt too, perhaps, to draw out some of the oft self-seriousness of a storyline that airs out male narcissism in a manner akin to the works that helped make Phillip Roth and John Updike famous. Asterios Polyp is a slow deconstruction of the male ego—the fortress constructed around himself by the titular world famous architect—if only on paper.  It’s a cautionary tale about the tenuousness of genius, success, and memory.

Mazzucchelli supplements his character deconstruction with a visual one, keeping with the architectural theme by showing us Polyp’s framework in those rare instances that he lets his guard down. Or perhaps its just that a woman—Polyp’s intellectually neglected wife, Hanna—is one of the few characters capable of seeing the man through decades-old layers of insecure posturing, the same innate bullshit detection that ultimately leads her to leave Polyp in search of her own untapped potential. It’s an action which, when coupled with a freak lightning strike, serves as the catalyst for Polyp’s obligatory journey of self-discovery and subsequent redemption.

In order to achieve absolution, however, Polyp must become Orpheus and rescue Eurydice from the grips of Hades. Again Mazzucchelli illustrates this act on dual levels, both through Polyp’s abrupt move to a rural community, working as a car mechanic, and through a dream sequence which finds the architect descending the circles of the underworld, a t-square-turned-harp clutched in his hand. And once again the author can be forgiven the tendency to literalize such subtext when so much story is swirling around at any one moment.

And, ultimately, the construction of memories is every bit as central to Polyp’s return to the land of the living. “To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time,” the character narrates toward the end of the book’s packed 344 pages over an image of a pocket watch a young Asterios pulled apart and never figured out how to reconstruct. “But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time.”

Dreams are every bit as essential as memories in Polyp’s de- and subsequent re-construction. After all in a sense they are the same thing, “because,” adds Polyp on the facing page, “every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.” Unfortunately for Polyp, however, such self-realization and redefinition cannot be achieved through memory alone. Far stronger catalysts are required here like divorce violence and forces of nature—catalysts that bring the character as close to the brink of non-existence as possible.

The amount that Mazzucchelli hurls at his protagonist—and, by proxy, his readers—is staggering. What’s even more impressive in the frequency with which his trials and experiments succeed. Asterios Polyp is the work of a veteran artist firing on all cylinders, who, despite having worked his way through the sequential art ringer for a few decades now, has managed to craft something remarkably fresh. Something that is sure to be borrowed from the libraries of plenty of self-appointed graphic novel ambassadors.

–Brian Heater

On a whole few entire mediums have been forced to fight as uphill a battle for legitimacy as sequential art. The past quarter-century has seen a number of breakthroughs in the battle, of course, with graphic novels of various stripes racking up lauds from academics and practitioners of high art and literature alike. In the process, however, one fundamental aspect of the art form has, perhaps, more often that not been sacrificed in favor of critical recognition: fun.

In the oft self-serious world of alternative comics, that once-essential cornerstone can prove rather elusive, and while we’d certainly be the last to decry graphic novels for being “overly serious,” it’s important not to lose sight of the humor and adventure that first drew so many of us to comics in the first place—both qualities that Johnny Hiro possesses in spades.

What artist Fred Chao has created with this volume is a rather graceful balancing act, focused a 20-something food service employee with little in the way of long-term career planning (in those respects a rather stock character in an independent comics scene so often focused on the insular troubles of their creators), who is rather clumsily thrust into adventure scenarios that often arrive in the form of real life manifestations of Asian pop culture—Hiro’s world is poplulated by giant lizards, Voltron-like robot teams, and samurai tech employees in business suits.

The book’s references expand beyond that continent as well. Chao’s book is a rollicking love letter to boundary-less pop-culture, which, by the end, has embraced everything from Night Court to Brand Nubian, with a clean visual approach that seems something of a cross between contemporary Manga and Herge, accented by some rather both layouts thanks to Chao’s keen eye for cityscapes and action scenes.

Chao shoves a lot into Johnny Hiro, sometimes at the expense of a cohesive storyline, but such indiscretions are easy to forgive—or even overlook entirely—in a book that’s this much fun.

–Brian Heater

_

[Above, Mara Lander's line-up. Below, the Dispatch's.]

- Adri Cowan

This isn’t that story , however—though it does involve some conspicuously-placed white powder–and a big wad of cash. For “Birthday Boy,” Leavitt borrowed a story from his friend Howard Des Chenes.

Leavitt’s work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Press. In his spare time, he is not a choral composer. You can check out more of his work here.

Those artists interested in submitting a strip to the Subway Stories series, please drop us a line at dailycrosshatch@gmail.com.

[Subway Stories #1: Raina Telgemeier]

In the seven or so years since she leapt headfirst into the world of alternative sequential art, by way of an SPX anthology, Melanie “Minty” Lewis has become an instantly recognizable name in amongst the San Francisco indie comics community. Four issues of P.S. Comics later, the artist’s fruit and terrier pals have become a staple of ‘zine racks throughout the Bay Area.

With the recent publication of a Secret Acres anthology of the same name, Lewis seems primed for recognition on a wider scale for stories that balance the unreality of anthropomorphic animals and produce with simple tales of daily human existence.

In honor of her first collection of stories, we sat down with Lewis to discuss her career as a graphic designer, life drawing classes, and why she doesn’t keep a sketchbook.

Have you been doing many interviews, now that the book is out?

I haven’t done any yet. I don’t think they’ve sent out the review copies yet. I haven’t seen the spike in interest, so far.

Have you been prepping yourself?

Yeah, I have all of my lines prepared for everybody, but they’ve haven’t started asking me.

Is there generally a push when you come out with a new mini?

There’s always pressure. I’m always worried that someone is going to say something. There’s always pressure with being evaluated at all.

You did an appearance [in New York] and one out in San Francisco. Is that the bulk of your prepping?

I think that’s kind of the end of what I’m planning. I just had that release party and reading on Thursday, and that’s what I was thinking about for a long time. Now that that’s over, I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I guess I’ll just move on to the next thing.

There isn’t going to be a big national tour, driving around to comic stores across the country, pushing your book?

If it was available to me, I think that would be fun. But I don’t think I have the wherewithal or motivation to do it myself. It’s a lot of work. Doing that one release party and reading was a very big source of stress for me, for a while. I’m glad that’s over. I can’t imagine having to plan something in multiple cities and having to coordinate with people and all that stuff.

What specifically did you have to do to plan for that show?

There were six people doing a reading. I had to get the people and figure out what equipment the bookstore had, like a projector. I guess with some of that stuff, if you were going to do multiple sites, a lot of that would have been taken care of already. The lowest common denominator of activies would have already been done. And also, getting people to agree to do it, getting all of the files, making sure the bookstore had the books.

A lot of small and boring things.

I didn’t know if the store was going to have the books, because Last Gasp didn’t ship them in time. Yeah, a lot of boring things.

The new book is pretty much a straight collection of the first four minis? Is there any supplementary material?

It’s not all of the first four minis. And I also had two other minis that weren’t PS Comics that are in there. And also my story that was in Pet Noir, and my story that was in the SPX 2003 anthology. And there are, I think, about 25 pages of new material.

Were those two minis pre-PS Comics?

No, actually. I didn’t have a good reason for not making them PS Comics, except that they were stand-alone stories. Most of the issues of PS Comics are 24 pages, and those were when I had a convention coming up and wanted to have something to sell, but wasn’t going to be able to do 24 new pages of material in time. Just This Side of Heaven is, I think, 14 pages and Donuts for Lunch is 28 single-panel pages.

You didn’t want to trick people into thinking they were getting something else.

I guess so [laughs]. They’re smaller and in a different shape, too. PS Comics are all folded in half.

PS Comics seems like more of a clearing house than a book that’s really cohesive, theme-wise. Are there strips that you won’t put in there?

No, everything I’ve created, comics-wise, I’ve published. There some stuff that was in the minis that I didn’t put in the book, just because I decided that it didn’t really fit that much with the stuff in there. But I don’t really make comics that aren’t intended for publication very much. And I don’t really do drawings that aren’t—I don’t really draw [laughs].

You don’t draw for yourself? You don’t practice?

I don’t really do that.

Any particular reason?

I think I’m not that free of a thinker, or something [laughs]. I don’t really doodle that much, and I feel like a lot of cartoonists doodle in their sketchbooks and come up with really interesting drawings. I have trouble coming up with something to draw if I don’t have a story or actual project in mind.

You don’t want to hone your craft outside of the comics?

No, I definitely do feel like that. I went to a life drawing class with MariNaomi. She goes to this class once a week. She says that it’s made her drawings a lot better and a lot more natural, and I went once, and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s hard to find the time for that. I feel like, when I’m making comics, I’ve already made time for that, so I want a result from it. Even I know that time practicing drawing is time well spent, but I usually just feel like I should be working on something for the comic, rather than to just get better—even though I know I should get better.

How much time do you generally spend working on comics? How much time does it take to create a mini?

Different ones take a different amount of time. For each one I’ve had a different schedule. For the last story that’s in the book, PS Comics, is like 28 pages, I think I was working on that for like four months. But that’s when I had a full-time job and would just go to a café and work on it during lunch. I did that really consistently. The Just This Side of Heaven mini, I took three weeks and worked really hard on it. I didn’t have a full-time job that would make me stick to a different schedule. It depends. I don’t know how many actual hours of manpower go into each one, though.

You don’t have a full-time job now, right?

Yeah, I took a layoff package. But I haven’t had a full-time job since the beginning of May.

What was your last job?

I was a graphic designer for Shonen Jump magazine.

Is that the path you’d like to pursue?

I like graphic design, but I don’t really want a full-time job again. I was only at the job for about a year. I had been freelancing. I would like to continue to be a graphic designer, but I would like to freelance.

Does working as a graphic designer during the day make you a better comic artist?

Well sure. I think it makes a lot of things easier. I did a lot of page layout for the book, and I think that helped. In terms of how things are arranged on a page or in a panel, I think it doesn’t hurt to be doing those kinds of things all day long.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater