Friday, July 7, 2017
Hensley the Elder
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Skylight Bookmarks
Skylight Books is producing a series of bookmarks by local Los Angeles artists, "about 25 in total," according to their Instagram.
I'm in the first batch along with Niv Bavarsky.
(Or print these out and make your own activity giclee playset:)
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Sir Alfred No. 3 Nominated for Eisner Award
 |
| Favorite memory from working on Sir Alfred No. 3: In the middle of what Robert Lowell calls "Skunk Hour" on August 29, 2013, I opened the curtains of my second story window and saw three raccoons. |
Sir Alfred No. 3 has been nominated for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Single Issue/One-Shot.
(A few remaining straggler copies are at Fantagraphics, or you can download a PDF for a small fee at Gumroad.)
Upon hearing the news, I began wondering whether the publisher, Alvin Buenaventura, no longer alive, had ever won any comic awards.
The Buenaventura Press Wikipedia site lists three nominations. In 2007, Kramers Ergot 6 was up for an Eisner for Best Anthology. That same year, Vanessa Davis was in the running for an Ignatz for Outstanding Artist for her book Spaniel Rage (and her work in Papercutter #4 from Tugboat Press). In 2008, there was an Ignatz nomination for Outstanding Series for Injury #2 by Ted May, Jason Robards, and Jeff Wilson.
But Alvin’s obituary also lists a 2006 Eisner nomination for Comic Art Magazine #8 for Best Comic-Related Periodical, and Google tells me in 2013 the monograph he edited, Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes, was nominated for an Eisner for Best Comic-Related Book.
So I could certainly be wrong, as I’m not so good at keeping track of these kind of statistics, but it looks like maybe he never won an award as a publisher, and it makes me wonder how much it even matters.
Alvin was enmeshed in a fair amount of feuds, which may also have been something of a factor.
For myself, the nomination validates to a small but very real extent a lot of the incomprehensible hermetic privation creating the comic, so I am honored to be on the list.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Letters
I talk about the artist, comic books, and lettering at The Comics Journal:
http://www.tcj.com/lichtenstein-and-the-art-of-letters/
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Entombed
I was honored to have a page of my original art included in a donation by Annie Koyama of Koyama Press of more than 250 pieces by a cross-section of great cartoonists to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Ohio. There's a brief interview with her on Comics Reporter today about the transaction.
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Alvin Buenaventura
When I’m reading a comic — especially some weak 1970s’
DC or Marvel book — I’ll often imagine Alvin watching over my shoulder, not at all happy with what he’s seeing. In a soft monotone voice he condemns me for
wasting time on crap when there’s genuinely engaging, idiosyncratic work out
there, waiting.
He never actually judged me this way. If I mentioned a
comic that I liked and he didn’t, he’d reply with a barely audible “Hmm” or a disbelieving
“Really?” and move on. But I was always aware that Alvin, unlike me, had ‘preternatural
aesthetic discernment.’ Put less pretentiously, he was busy finding, supporting,
and publishing great artists (often the first to discern their merits) and had
no time for garbage. His dedication to great work was inspirational.
Sometimes I’ll read a comic and imagine how much Alvin
would’ve dug it, such as Simon Hanselmann’s brutally funny mini-comic Landscape, which dismantles the little worlds
of art comics and art-comics criticism. Alvin would’ve found its mean-spirited insight
uplifting and its cartooning immaculate. (It’s 2016’s best work of comics criticism.)
Then there are times I’ll read a comic and be unsure
about Alvin’s reaction — this realization makes me uncomfortable, uncertain
about the validity of my own response. He’s become my ‘comic-book assessment super-ego’
. . .
Without Alvin around (he left us one year ago today), I feel a little lost. He was my lifeline
to important new work, an advance scout taking a sharp machete to the garbage of Comicdom and
telling me, and the rest of us, what was vital. He had an unerring
sixth sense for Good Comics, as the books he published proves.
Yet I miss him most as a friend and collaborator. Our collaborations
weren’t always easy: one time he tested my patience beyond its breaking point (and
I his), but we eventually got past it. (I still feel guilty for failing that
test and wish I’d handled things better.) But so many collaborations were a
real joy. The two largest projects I did with him — The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist and The Daniel Clowes Reader — remain the
work I’m most proud of.
*
A few months after Alvin died, I was looking through
the “back-issue bins” at a local comic-book shop and came across several issues
of the 1959 Dell series Alvin. Normally
I’d buy one issue to check out a title, but this time felt that, though I
wasn’t sure I wanted to, I had to get them all. The feeling was odd, like an embarrassing
compulsion driven by the weakness of superstition: it would be wrong to leave them there. (Alvin wouldn’t have bothered with such
comics and certainly would've said “Really?” if I told him I’d bought them.) But
they were Comics, and their covers said "Alvin." So I left with them all.
Monday, January 9, 2017
The Most SUV of 2016
I have a cameo in the giant Fantagraphics Moto Hagiography "We Told You So," where Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean exercise some kind of inside baseball wisdom of Solomon culling from the relentless expanse of Fantagraphics' toil and dramatis personae.
It's hard for me to say whether it will hold as much interest for someone unfamiliar with the topic, especially since I lived through some of it so contentedly as a consumer and partial content provider.
It's kind of like a big issue of The Comics Journal about The Comics Journal or receiving a yearbook and never graduating.
Sir Alfred No. 3 was released and did pretty well considering the significant roadblocks in its way.
I added a price tag to the Gumroad download page now that we're out of 2016.
I did manage to retrieve the printer files from Alvin's computer last month thanks to the goodwill of his parents, so another print edition might appear somewhere down the line.
I see I was also fortunate enough to end up on some end of the year lists.
I am very grateful for these mentions. I sort of feel like I've aged out of what is most current in comics these days, so I appreciate that some folks enjoyed my work.
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