Blog Flume

New Grid

2012-01-19T16:33:00.000-08:00

My new column is up at The Comics Journal .
It's kind of a "2011: Year in Comics" review essay.

New GRID Column at TCJ: Discussion Forum

2011-11-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

My new column will be up at The Comics Journal on Thursday.

I make ten observations about Daniel Clowes's The Death-Ray that I hope will kickstart a conversation about the comic.

B F F

2011-10-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Willoughby, c. 1998-2011.

Little Bear

2011-10-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Got the news this morning that our precious boy has aggressive and incurable cancer.

- - -

Best. Cat. Ever.

- - -

Justice League #1 Examined

2011-09-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

My sixth GRID column will be up at The Comics Journal on Monday.

It's a look at the new Justice League #1.

Normally I write about comics I like and try to explain what's interesting about them.

This time I take a different approach.

Teacher's Pet

2011-09-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ditko at TCJ

2011-08-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

My fifth GRID column is up at The Comics Journal . The essay is about:

Ditko and Satire
Sick Humor and Black Comedy
Mania, Laughter, and Death
Performance and Parody
Pantomine and Inter-Panel Narrators
Jokes and Wordplay
Naming and Allegory

2011-08-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Announce

2011-07-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

See here.

Unemployment

2011-07-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Paying for It: "Critical Libertarian Aesthetic Visual Theory"

2011-06-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

My fourth GRID column is up at The Comics Journal here, a "fantasy three-way" "conversation" about the art in Chester Brown's new graphic novel, in which I play all of the roles.

Jack Kirby and Chris Ware

2011-05-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

My third GRID column -- "Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware" -- is now up at The Comics Journal here.

Ivan Brunetti Interview

2011-04-19T11:23:00.001-07:00

At The Comics Journal, I interview cartoonist Ivan Brunetti about teaching.

Absolutely Normal: Looking for Ann Roy

2011-03-30T10:53:00.001-07:00

I would appreciate any information anyone has on the cartoonist Ann Roy (Ann Roy Emmitt). She published a collection of cartoons in 1947 titled Absolutely Normal. Please email me at my hotmail account: kparille at . . .

2011-03-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

Tiptoe, little bear.

2011-03-20T11:31:00.001-07:00

Tiger.

2011-03-19T01:45:00.000-07:00

Shady.

2011-03-18T11:39:00.001-07:00

Wilbur.

2011-03-17T14:15:00.001-07:00

Willoughby.

Moto Hagio at TCJ

2011-03-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

My first GRID column for the new TCJ.com is up; it's an essay on Moto Hagio's short story "Bianca."

danielclowes.com

2011-02-21T17:33:00.000-08:00

danielclowes.com

News, info, and other random stuff including:

an upcoming exhibition
original art available
an unpublished portrait of Glenn Beck
and more...

We're working on it so check back over the coming weeks for updates...

New Lisa Hanawalt online...

2011-02-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

New Lisa Hanawalt stuff online here.

I'm not familiar with Anna Wintour but still thought it was funny. Oh Lisa!

Richard McGuire and Cartoon Polymaths

2011-02-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

Friday, February 18, 2011 7:00 p.m.

"Richard McGuire, whose work is featured in the Cartoon Polymaths exhibit, has pursued an extraordinary multidisciplinary career. He is the founding bassist of the seminal no wave band Liquid Liquid, the author of several groundbreaking comics, the illustrator of numerous ingenious New Yorker covers, and the director and designer of the animated short Micro-Loup and the closing segment for the animated anthology film Fear(s) of the Dark. McGuire discusses his career and answers questions in this spotlight event."

"This event is in association with an exhibit Bill Kartalopoulos curated at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons the New School for Design called "Cartoon Polymaths," which is about artists whose work proceeds from a cartoon sensibility to embrace multiple media. Artists in the show are Winsor McCay, Tony Sarg, Saul Steinberg, Mariscal, Richard McGuire, and Paper Rad. There's also a specially commissioned 2-page full color comic by Kevin Huizenga in the free exhibit booklet on the subject of the show."

Some more info about the exhibit here:
http://newschool.edu/parsons/subpage.aspx?id=59621

The exhibit runs through April 15.

Daniel Clowes Bibliography: 10 Years

2011-02-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

February 1 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Daniel Clowes Bibliography, a project I began researching in 1999. In the mid-late 90s, David Pautler put a bibliography of Clowes’s work online at wraithspace.com (long since gone), which (if I remember correctly) had around 200-250 items. With David's permission, I took that information as a starting point and began using various search engines, library databases, store for-sale lists, eBay, correspondence, etc. in an effort to identify as many items as I could. Currently, the bibliography has around 1400 items, though I'm sure many others exist.

It's been through a few formats with different sections and subsections; the format I’ve had for the last few years is, I hope, an arrangement that makes it easy for users to locate an item they're searching for, or to see all of the work Clowes has done in a given category. I have also gathered material from the main sections of bibliography into two lists:

Stories in Eightball, Lloyd Llewellyn, and DC Collections, an alphabetical, cross-referenced list of stories in his two comic series and his books.

Uncollected Stories, a list of stories/strips that have never been collected into a Clowes anthology.

Initially, the site had no updates section, and a few users requested one; so I have been keeping a record of updates since July 2002. Users occasionally suggest that I provide images of each object, but my goal is simply to track down items, place them into the bibliography’s categories, and annotate them -- when it’s useful to do so. Some sections have more details -- here, for example, I identify all of the contents (with page counts) of each issue of Eightball -- while other sections are simply a list of items.

A number of people have been helpful along the way, and I thank them here.

http://www.danielclowesbibliography.com/

Books I Really Liked and Wrote about Twice in

2010-12-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

Daniel Clowes's Wilson:
Another tour de force by a cartoonist who never stands still: a post on style and one on drama.

Tim Hensley's Wally Gropius:
What do you say about the cartoon ineffable? I tried here and here. {Ok - This last one was written in 2009, but the collection came out in 2010.}

Charles Burns's X'ed Out:
This comic offers a deep look at Tintin's unconscious by a master psychoanalyst. More commentary is here.

If I had a "Best of" or "Favorites of 2010," these books would be at the top.
---
For other writing by me on the flume in 2010, see here.

The Lisa Hanawalt Interview

2010-11-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

Lisa Hanawalt's work is funny, smart, innovative, and a lot fun to look at. What follows is an illustrated interview conducted with Lisa via email. Please click on the images to enlarge them; there's so much that's worth looking at closely.

KP: Your comics are very unusual in terms of genre. The two issues of I Want You feature things like “list comics,” mock "how-to” illustrations, funny animal stories that look nothing like traditional funny animal comics, and “illustrations on a theme” comics, like “Worst Sandwiches” or animals with funny hats. This atypical approach makes me curious about your history as a comics reader. Did you read mainstream, alternative, or newspaper comics growing up?

LH: My Dad used to read me the funny pages every Sunday, and our house was full of Far Side and B. Kliban books. I read some alternative comics as a teenager, and I made zines and drew comics with friends, but I never thought of myself as a cartoonist. Maybe that’s why my approach to making comics seems different . . . I grew up loving them, but I’ve been equally influenced by paintings, fiction, comedy, movies, and I’ve had enough distance from the world of traditional comics to not worry if my approach is atypical. When I started making minis, I wasn’t even sure that they were comics -- they were just illustrated lists jumbled together with sketchbook drawings.

KP: Your sense of comedy seems pretty idiosyncratic to me; can you point to an artist or comedian that has had a direct affect on your work?

LH: I think I’m most strongly influenced by Kliban’s absurdist/Dadaist gags, the grotesqueness and awkward timing of Ren & Stimpy, Marbles in My Underpants by Renee French, everything about Tony Millionaire, and David Lynch. I also watched a lot of Steve Martin and David Zucker movies. My family is funny, so that's had a powerful affect; Dad is a consummate punster (he nearly cried with joy when I made my first pun, something to do with “solid dressing”), Mom seems serious at first but she can be a connoisseur of silliness, and my older brother Alex is an obnoxious riot in the best way. I started drawing funny and disturbing things as a kid partly just to get his attention.

KP: When I saw your Boy’s Club strip in a recent issue of The Believer, I first thought a comic by Matt Furie (the creator of Boy’s Club) had mistakenly been attributed to you -- you’re very adept at mimicking his style. Did you copy other cartoonists and illustrators in this very precise way as a part of your learning process?

LH: I’m so happy people were fooled by that! The folks at McSweeney’s were very confused. It was surprisingly difficult to write a Boy’s Club comic and I think I failed at that part -- Matt’s comics are genius in how deceptively simple they are. But I am a pretty good parrot and I used to mimic other artists all the time. I did stuff in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, Ralph Steadman, Tony Millionaire, Phoebe Gloeckner, etc. I think that’s a natural way to learn and find a personal style, even though those copycat drawings embarrass me now.

KP: In many of your comics, especially the He-Horse and She-Moose stories, you seem particularly engaged with fashion and elaborate patterns in a way that I haven't seen outside of ‘60s and ‘70 girls’ comics. What influence has clothing and fashion played in your work?

LH: I think of fashion as extremely fun-to-draw eye candy . . . all those weird stitches, zippers, buckles, and folds, etc. And because I don’t take it too seriously, I like to focus on the most absurd and least functional items; I could draw stupid hats perched on animal heads for eternity. I also like the idea of animals paying so much attention to how they adorn themselves. I don’t think my drawings are the most flattering portrait of the accumulation of clothes; the compositions are cluttered and the patterns clash and vibrate in this anxious, over-caffeinated way.
KP: Are there any young cartoonist who you feel a kinship with, artists whose work shares something in common with yours that you respond to?

LH: This will sound cheesy but I feel kinship with most young cartoonists and artists. Part of what attracted me to Brooklyn was living in close proximity to lots of talented people my age who are working their asses off. It's hard to pick out specific people . . . I feel like my attitude and ambitions are similar to Matt Furie's, but our work is completely different. I relate to people who put a serious effort into drawing really dumb things.

KP: The “comics world” -- both mainstream and alternative -- is often described as a “boy’s club” that’s not always welcoming to women. Are you conscious of this in any way?

LH: I like to pretend it’s a non-issue, but I also think the planet is a boy’s club. Dwelling on it too much would drive me crazy, but I still worry about being pigeonholed and marginalized. A lot of readers found the “Menstruation Terminology” pages to be the most disturbing part of I Want You #1, but I’m really glad I included them. I’m not going to use my comics to pontificate or get overtly political, but I’m interested in illustrating my view as a female frankly in ways that people haven’t seen before.

KP: The kind of work you do, the “gross” aspects of some of your comics -- with your interest in things like abnormal skin conditions -- seems somewhat unusual for female cartoonists. How have readers, both male and female, responded to this aspect of your work?

LH: Just based on my influences, I never thought it was unusual for women to be gross; I’ve been reading Renee French and Phoebe Gloeckner since high school, and later I discovered Julie Doucet, Shary Boyle, Sue Coe, Jenny Saville (the painter), etc. There are so many female artists who focus on grotesque anatomy and sexuality -- it’s strange that that’s still shocking and subversive to most people. I’ve definitely gotten comments like, “You’re funny/gross for a girl,” but judging by the response to my work, I’m pretty funny and gross for a guy too.

KP: Can you trace your interest in drawing things like skin problems and facial deformities to anything in your childhood . . .

LH: I suffered from some gnarly acne at a young age, so maybe that triggered an interest, haha. I think it’s an instinctual thing; we privilege faces and they’re probably the first representational thing we start drawing, so disfiguring them is an obvious way of expressing anxiety and horror. It’s all part of my inveterate focus on morbidity. I draw those things partly just to get them out of my head.

KP: Is that letter from I Want You #2, in which the writer chastises you for the crude and misguided nature of your work, real?

LH: Yes, it’s actually from a dear friend who I’ve known since I was a little kid. I think he believes I’ve morphed into something he’s fundamentally opposed to, but he doesn’t understand that my sense of humor was just as twisted when I was nine years old. I’m ok with people finding my humor too blue or my drawings too disturbing; they’re definitely not for everyone. But questioning my morality is kind of unfair.

KP: People often say that the alternative comics world is not always responsive to humor comics, that readers prefer character-driven fiction. Is this an attitude you’ve seen?

LH: Not really, I mean, I recently heard Michael Kupperman say something to that tune (about the reception to his own work), but I haven’t experienced that attitude first-hand. And I don't think it matters too much. As much as I love the world of alternative comics, I try not to be concerned with how well my work fits into it.

KP: Some of the He-Horse and She-Moose stories are character-driven pieces, driven also by the strong desires and anxieties of the protagonists. And “Saturday Night” (IWY #2) closes with a profound and almost unanswerable question about the relationship between anxiety and happiness . . .

LH: There was actually a long pause between the writing and inking phase of “Saturday Night,” because I was so worried about it being cheesy . . . but it’s certainly genuine. I’m interested in that relationship and how anxiety can feel like such an integral part of a personality that it no longer seems like a problem: “This is just how I am.” So I’ll keep exploring that, at the risk of being too earnest. But I think if I drew myself saying those things (instead of He-Horse) the comic would be unbearable to me.

KP: Your 2008 minicomic, Stay Away From Other People, has a few short pieces that either are, or gesture toward, autobiography. But I Want You doesn’t have any pieces that are quite like these earlier ones. Are you not interested in creating autobiographical or diary-type comics?

LH: Most of the narrative artwork I made until about three years ago was diaristic, and while that felt cathartic, there was also something gross about exposing myself so much. So in I Want You #1, I experimented with making my autobiographical stories a lot more abstract by turning them into funny lists or drawing people as animals. It still feels intensely personal, but now there’s a filter and it’s a more of a secret where these different elements come from . . . I’m not just barfing myself out onto the page anymore. That confessional style really works for some people, though. I love reading juicy diary comics.

KP: When I read and then reread “Extra Egg Room” in I Want You #2, I had a different response each time. At first, it seemed genuinely disturbing -- the idea of all of these birds flying down the horse’s throat looks like a gagging nightmare come to life. But later, it seemed funny and almost magical -- and a chance for you to draw striking and unusual images. I'm wondering what sort of response or responses you have to a story like that, either when you are drawing it or when you reread it: do you see it as disturbing or funny or both?

LH: That story is very personal; it came directly from a sketch I made while flying and feeling totally panicked while also laughing at my own irrationality. I think that’s why it’s impossible for me to separate what’s disturbing from what’s funny about it. He-Horse is terrified . . . but then his speech is overly formal and there are all these cartoon-ish elements that make the phobia seem silly. I consider a story a success if it can result in opposing reactions; I don’t want anything to just hit one note.

KP: You draw in a number of different styles, but tend to reserve your most detailed approached for animal illustrations and animal narratives. Does the story/idea determine the style or vice versa?

LH: Maybe the style is arbitrary, but there’s usually a strong case for it in my mind. “Extra Egg Room” could have been done in watercolors, but with a disturbing narrative like that I’d worry about the emotions being overwrought. Watercolors feel more moody and expressive to me, while the sparse and more precise line art is a method of pulling back and letting the disturbance be more intellectual. I like using watercolors for silly lists and faux how-to’s; they add a bit of warmth where you’d expect the illustrations to be more clinical, maybe. I like how “The Worst Sandwiches” look almost velvety.

KP: In I Want You #1, a few stories use traditional gutters between panels. But none of the stories in #2 do; consecutive panels typically share the same border, so there’s no white space. Is there a particular reason for this? Is there something about the blank space of the gutter that often doesn’t look right to you?

LH: I’m accustomed to seeing the page as one big thing (probably because I come from a painting background), so all those white borders feel unnecessary. But I might use them for something in the future.

KP: The lack of gutters increases the sense of controlled chaos, allowing patterns in one panel to brush up against different patterns in another panel. This seems to be part of your “aesthetic” and sense of humor in some of the stories -- you like a little chaos, such as the car and plane crashes on the covers to I Want You #1 and #2 . . .

LH: That’s an excellent point about the lack of gutters -- if there were white spaces around the panels it would reduce the sense of chaos. I want the artwork to be enveloping to the degree that the page disappears a little bit . . . formal elements like panels create distance from the story and draw attention to the fact that “this is a comic strip.” And it’s true that I like a LOT of controlled chaos in my artwork. I love drawing fights and collisions, and there’s something really sexy in that tension. My favorite thing is in movies or theater, when there’s a perfectly dressed set with tons of carefully positioned props, and then of course at some point everything goes to pieces, all the drawers have been pulled out and emptied onto the floor, and maybe someone has swiped everything off of a tabletop and/or wrecked a cake. That’s the most satisfying thing to watch.

KP: What projects are you working on?

LH: I’ll start drawing I Want You #3 soon, but first I’m taking a short break to mess around with papier mache. I’m a clumsy sculptor, but it’s challenging and kind of fun, and it’s always revitalizing to take a break and make work in a different way. I felt like I was getting into a rut, maybe. I’m actually slated to install a window display next week at Desert Island, (a comics shop in Brooklyn) so I’ll be foisting my hobby on the public! Part of it is literally a piñata, so people will get to bash it to pieces when the installation ends.

KP: How has winning the Ignatz for “Outstanding Comic” at SPX this year changed your life?

LH: It motivates me to move on, make new work, and not lean on that recognition in any way. I mean, I’m incredibly honored. But I Want You is my first published comic and I still feel sort-of freshly hatched … so I can’t linger on it. I feel like I can be so much more outstanding.

Please visit Lisa's website. Please see this review of Lisa's I Want You #1 I wrote last year.

2010-11-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

Fans of great writing about music should check out this piece by my pal Scott Saul on Thelonious Monk at the Boston Review. Scott is the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties and he also writes for The Nation.

X'ed Out: Review Notes

2010-10-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

[From Hergé: The Calculus Affair]

[From Charles Burns: X’ed Out]

Earlier this month, I sent in my first piece for The Comics Journal, a review of Charles Burns’s X’ed Out. [Note: it's now up at the Journal's website.] When The Journal was only a print publication, reviewers knew that readers, who had to go out of their way to purchase the magazine (in dank ‘n dirty “specialty shops”), would likely be knowledgeable about comics. But because the journal is now online, anyone interested in reading a review of X’ed Out might find mine through google. So past assumptions about who might be reading and what “the general reader” would know, for me at least, are no longer valid.

I find writing reviews a challenge. The format typically requires a focus on summary and evaluation, blending the modes of consumer guide and opinion piece. I wanted to try to write a review that gave “the general reader” what she would expect, yet would offer an interpretation of the work -- I wanted the review to be equal parts analytical argument and “buyer’s guide.” [Special thanks to Anne Mallory for commenting on drafts of the piece.]

What follows are notes I compiled while reading XO, rereading Burns's Black Hole + Tintin volumes, and writing the review; many contain ideas that didn't make it into the review. Since they were typed, I figured I’d post them here . . .

*

What’s so interesting about X’ed Out is the way it builds upon aspects of Burns’s last graphic novel, Black Hole, and comes out of Hergé’s Tintin stories; it’s as if Hergé did an adaption of Black Hole, not so much by reimagining the plot, but by turning its mood and iconography into a kind of psychological ‘adventure’ story. It doesn’t just use the look of Tintin, it acts as a kind of internal reading of the world of Tintin, an analysis of what’s there and what isn’t -- what's x'ed out of Tintin, what's really at the other end of the hole. [And though I based part of my review on this premise, there’s a lot more that could be said about it. I eliminated material on this topic to keep the focus on XO.]

My reading of X’ed Out is informed by Burns's approach in his comic strip Random Access, which runs in the comics section of The Believer. These strips can be narrative or non-narrative, often working on an associational logic; sometimes Burns makes obvious connection between what’s depicted in the panels, and at other times the logic seems arbitrary. In a way, Random Access is a kind of bridge between Black Hole and X’ed Out. And the compositional method of RA plays out on many pages of X’ed Out. RA replicates the ways that Doug (X’ed Out ’s main character) experiences aspects of his life. Images clearly have a power and an attraction that the artist and/or character does not understand -- so the image returns as a kind of haunting -- a search for an explanation of its power that never comes . . .

Doug’s girlfriend Sally, who appears often, is associated with the mother, who is fully absent. Though his mom is mentioned (and perhaps visible in a single photo), she never is seen in the comic. Doug’s father descends into the basement whenever the mother is mentioned (the descent motif). The mother is hidden, a source of fear. “The mother” could be connected to “the breeder,” who looks like Sally and appears in the Nitnit dream world (if that’s what it is). The collective archetypal and horror approaches that Burns takes invite a reading in which “the mother” = “fear of biology” -- “the mother” is the source of the (dead) fetuses and embryos we see throughout the story. In fact, the mother is connected to one of the defining images of the comic: the egg that appears on the front and back covers and throughout the story (and also to the many black holes, “the vagina as absence” -- a primal male fear). The absent mother hovers over the story.

The mother/the female is the origin of life, and all of Doug’s existential problems originate in a disgust for life and food (again, the egg) and therefore the maternal. Also, the egg Burns uses is literally a symbol for Hergé (the mother or father figure in whose creations XO originates): it appears on the cover and in the climactic scene of Hergé’s The Shooting Star.

The book’s focus on Art. Doug’s performance art, Sally’s photographic art, Herge’s art, art exhibitions, the punk band “The Happy Fetus” -- Patti Smith (and Tori Amos cover art allusion?)

Art, eros, and violence: Photo of Sally slitting her arm. - Doug seems attracted and repulsed.

The relationship between Lucas Samara’s art and Burns’s – compare Sally’s altar with Samara’s photographed staged autobiographical environments. (Dark room scenes)

Polaroid scrapbook pages as analogues for comic pages -- and non-narrative aspects of these two grid forms. Discuss the nature memory and visual narrative. Also: Doug’s pill calendar as grid analogue.

XO appears to have a psychological and narrative center: 1970s Doug dreams/hallucinates many of these scenes, especially those with the different versions of the Nitnit characters. So everything emanates from him. Yet, this doesn’t seem right or fully explanatory. The cut-up, non-chronological aspect of the text destabilizes all readings. The center is diffused -- Doug is not really the main character. Doug’s life imitates Nitnit’s dreams, not the other way around.

The grid here is often not connected to order, stability, rationality (what that regular grid typically offers) -- but to sadness and pain -- refer to opening line of comic.

Compare exotic world seen in XO’s ending to scenes through Tintin: holes, ladders, dense groupings of buildings . . .

Black hole and wound panels from Tintin. (TT in America . . .)
Scenes of “flow”: blood, river, and toxic waste – these scenes bring up the question of origin; the source for the waste is never revealed. Also why are there Tintin skulls in the chamber near the toxic waste? River as Styx (underworld -- descent motif). “River flows under me, dragging me down,” Doug says.

The X of X’ed Out: wounds, bandages, scars, X marking the most important spot: Doug’s head. X as repression; blocked out. X marks the treasure on the map, but here the goal is marked out, is inaccessible. X as cartoon symbol for eyes of a dead character; x as poison marker.

Trauma and adolescence -- Black Hole versus Tintin.

Horror archive: blood, skulls, chambers, opening/doors . . .

If some of the scenes are Doug’s dream, then all of the character/objects/actions in the dreams are versions of Doug --Doug as maggot, Doug as black hole, as fetus, dog/animal on raft.
Connect XO with RA, William Burroughs’s “cut-ups,” and Tintin. Poetic lyricism and non-narrative panels transitions.

Inky and Snowy, Burns and Tintin -- also cigarette “burns” as artist’s visual signature pun

Pink blanket in XO and Black Hole -- comfort

Burns’s color use and Herge’s – significance of color in XO as transitions and memories. The lyricism implied by colored panel – content that is disembodied, disconnected in clear ways from a sentient or “camera” p.o.v.

Panels without image content: color, text.

Characters and the “open mouth”: hunger, waiting, passivity.

Opening line: who is the “I”? – this is the constant question – like the disembodied “I” of some lyric poetry.

Character’s names and uncertainty.

Art, connected to sleeping, adventures, and Little Nemo. Tintin and Nemo—different tones.

Burn’s approach to horror vs., say, EC comics.

[use Pop-tart box with '7 cents off' coupon to identify story’s time period]

The Nitnit character has popped up throughout the years, in RA and various illustrations that Burns has done.

Missing - APE 2010

2010-10-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Two copies of a large, expensive book (see picture) were stolen from our booth this past Sunday at APE. We know that they were taken from us, Pigeon Press booth #120 (see map below), sometime between 10:00-11:00 am on the morning of October 17. We’re putting this out there in the hope that someone might have seen them being taken from behind our unattended booth or being carried away that morning. If you were an exhibitor in that area of the San Francisco Concourse, please let us know if you noticed anything or might have taken any pictures in that area during that time period. It's unfortunate that this happened and we'd really like to get the books back. If you have any information or might have seen these books this weekend please let us know.

-Pigeon Press

Books missing from Booth #120 shown in red. please let us know if you might have noticed anything that morning between 10:30-11:00 especially if you were an exhibitor in the green area shown.

Boy's Club #4 & I Want You #2...

2010-10-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

...available at APE this weekend, order direct from pigeon-press.com [Nov 2010], or ask your local comics retailer to carry them.

Comics Criticism, 1970-2010

2010-08-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

A few things I read recently and liked:

Rob Clough on Kevin H. Clough gets at what's great about Ganges: the philosophical content, formal imagination and inventiveness, and visual charm.

Sam Lipsyte on Daniel Clowes's Wilson. Lipsyte's a great novelist and carefully engages Clowes's work, especially the dialogue. He avoids the kinds of critical generalizations that flatten a text (and make a reviewer look careless), and instead sees Wilson's complexities and humanity. A very well-written review.

Alan Choate on Crumb's Genesis. There's a lot of ok criticism on the web, but there's little that's this thoughtful and informed.

Tim Seidler and Jon Hazell on Herb Trimpe (a letter published in 1970 in The Incredible Hulk #131). Though they are critical of Trimpe -- an artist I like (his Hulk covers of this era are masterpieces) -- their visual trope-based criticism is eye-opening. The writers clearly don't like what they see, but they back up their opinion in an effective and entertaining way. I just bought 40 1969-1972 Marvel comics, and this letter has me reading them in a new way, paying far more attention to how artists stage aggression, violence, and fight scenes, key features of these comics. You never know where you'll find interesting criticism . . . [click to enlarge]:

Ripped from Tomorrow's Headlines

2010-08-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

I scanned this clipping because it reminded me a little of events depicted in Wally Gropius. Some fellow stole a 1.4 million dollar tax refund check--doesn't say how--from a real estate magnate--apparently the 45th wealthiest man alive--then impersonated said magnate to deposit the check at a bank. The funniest part is the suspect listing "smoke shop" as his occupation on the paperwork.
Also in the news, I recently appeared on the radio program Inkstuds. I note this mostly because my coworker Jim Ellwanger created 4 amazing 5-minute medleys from his collection of radio jingles for the breaks. Listen to the battery in my phone die!

Crumb's Genesis, The Pastoral, and Presence

2010-07-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

In a reply to Ng Suat Tong in an ongoing discussion of Crumb’s Genesis, I commented on a panel that I think is particularly successful in ways that get at why Crumb’s adaptation as a whole is compelling -- the pastoral tableaux that opens chapter 2:

I wrote: "Alongside of Adam, Eve, and a few birds and rabbits, God rests against a tree after creation, hands on his knees, eyes closed. I can’t quite explain why, but the decision to show God resting this way is a moving and unexpected choice; God seems strangely human and naturalized, just after his world-creating supernatural powers have been demonstrated. There is a little idealizing at work in this pastoralism of this panel, but it is of a very earth-bound, domestic kind."

Many paintings of Eden in the tradition that Suat refers to focus on Adam and Eve, and those that include God never show him (as far as a I know--which isn’t that far) resting as human characters often do in religious and secular pastoral images.

[Shepherd and Shepherdess: Abraham Bloemaert, 1627]

In the Edenic scene, God is usually positioned above the earth-bound Adam and Eve, floating on a cloud (a cliché Crumb avoids) as he condemns his creations:

[The Expulsion from Paradise: Charles Joseph Natoire, 1740]

In Crumb's very different imagining of the exile, God, feet firmly planted on the ground, stands behind Adam and Eve, without any regal or magical apparatus (clouds, crowns, angels, heavenly effects) to separate him from them:

I like the fact that this resembles a father kicking his misbehaving kids out of the yard.

Even when a heavenly figure is depicted standing (as in Aureliano Milani’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve below), obvious visual cues (halo and color choice) signal that it is outside of the physical reality Adam and Eve inhabit:

As seen above, many representations show Adam and Eve with the fig leaf or positioned to hide their genitals, which Crumb repeatedly exposes, as part of his “literalism” and commitment to the physicality and “presence,” both of God and humans.

Buenaventura Press Gone Out of Business Sale - San Diego Comic Con 2010

2010-07-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

Since I already have the booth that I reserved from last year I'll be in San Diego this week at booth #1734 (near Fantagraphics and D&Q, directly across the aisle from Giant Robot.)

Here's what I'll have for sale:

All of the BP titles including Comic Art Magazine, Boy's Club by Matt Furie, The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld.
Some of the few remaining copies of Kramers Ergot 7 which has been unavailable since last year. It will never be reprinted so here’s your chance to grab one before they are gone for good
All of that "Other Stuff We Like." Rare and imported goods that we've gathered over the year through our travels and were previously available in the BP Webshop. Minis, foreign anthologoies, artist's books, silkscreened goodness, etc...
Warehouse finds including back issues of Comic Art Magazine, and long out of print mini comics...
A ton of original artwork and obscure prints from my personal collection by many of our favorite cartoonists.
Rare comics and books from my personal collection.
Also stop by throughout the weekend for daily blowout sales.

Lisa Hanawalt and Johnny Ryan will both be with us. Come by to get your books signed and to check out their new prints and original drawings!

28 Recent Clowes Interviews and Features

2010-07-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

UPDATED 7.20
In some of the excerpts I have reprinted here, Clowes talks about a few issues that may be of interest to those who have read or written about his recently released graphic novel Wilson.

NPR 7.20.10

San Fransisco Bay Guardian 6.16.10
SFBG You've always had a really strong interest in perversity and human weirdness, and that’s not so central in Wilson. Was that a conscious move away or a permanent move away, or just a change in interests?

DC I think that’s true, you know. I always had a real interest in outsider culture. When I first began doing comics, that kind of thing was so inaccessible. I had a little group of friends who would send me all these weird things. You’d find out about little groups of people who were all linked together by some really odd interest, but they were so segregated. They’d maybe have some little newsletter that they all communicated through, but it felt like the world was filled with these little secret societies. And ever since the Internet has taken hold, it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels like the minute anybody hears about any weird little perversion or interest or anything like that, that everybody finds out about it and they know all about it, so it’s sort of lost its interest.

The Guardian (UK)6.13.10

Chicago Tribune 6.8.10
"I wanted the (title) character to feel about things much the way I feel about things," he said. "He's just hopelessly inept at getting it across, the kind of person who doesn't want to be dishonest in any way. He wants people to like him in his worst possible state, and he's gotten so used to that, so used to expecting the world to tag along, he has no sense of what an off-putting creep he's become.

"The thing is, I look for commonality no matter how objectionable a character. Still, it's not reality. Compared with reality, I barely scratch the surface."

Vice 6.1.10
[Wilson] reminded me of myself quite a bit, which wasn’t too hilarious.
Ha. Yeah. I find though that the people who are actually like Wilson are the ones that really do not like the book. I’ve had a few people who say that he’s unbearable. They’re often the people who are sort of insensitive to others and have a lack of awareness of how they come across to people. It’s interesting, it’s like they’re seeing themselves and it’s really painful. People who tend to not be so much like him, at least in his anti-social behavior–they have more sympathy for him.

East Bay Express 6.2.10
"I'm a little surprised at how often the term 'misanthrope' comes up" in discussions of the book, said Clowes, who will be at Diesel (5433 College Ave., Oakland) on Thursday, June 3. "While Wilson holds his fellow man and woman to an impossibly high standard, he seems to have a constant, unfulfilled faith that each person he meets will live up to those ideals." Badmouthing passersby for not admiring his dog, imagining his dying father calling him a miserable slob, "he's like the opposite of a misanthrope in a way: someone with an inherent faith that each human interaction will lead to a satisfying connection despite an overwhelming history of failure and isolation," Clowes said.

LA Times 5.30.10
But in some ways, Wilson shares Clowes' DNA. "I think we have a similar worldview," the author allows. "And his sense of humor — finding humor in the razor's edge between tragedy and comedy — there's a lot of resonance between me and him."

Oakland Tribune 5.25.10
"Wilson has a noble struggle," Clowes says. "He is trying to get something bigger out of his life. He's expecting other people to live up to his vision of how things should be, and they don't."

San Fransisco Chronicle 5.18.10
"Certainly a lot of what he says is me if I had an unfiltered id, if I was able to speak without any self-censorship. Because I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people," Clowes explains. "As my wife says, I'm Wilson's victim. I look like a good listener, I think, so people are always sitting down at my table, sort of unbidden, and telling me about their years of alcoholism."

National Post 5.14.10
“I kind of realized that it was never going to coalesce into one [style]. I had to use them all, for it to work. That just became clear. [Wilson] had to shift as much as these styles,” he explains. “That’s actually something you can do in comics that you can’t do in any other medium. I don’t think you could make a movie where each scene is in a different style of filmmaking without it seeming really hard to watch. It’s too jarring. But somehow ... people are used to seeing a bunch of different styles on the funny pages.”

Torontoist 5.14.10 [part two]
Torontoist 5.12.10 [part one]
Clowes: Well, I wouldn’t say approaches necessarily. The one example I can think of, in terms of techniques, is making comics that are easier to change around. Certainly when you’re making a film you really have to make every second count because it’s very expensive. Before you make the film you really have to cut away absolutely everything that’s not essential. And the first time I had to do that, I found it at times really painful to lose things that I thought were great. And then later on I realized how useful it was for me to be forced to do that. In comics I was never forced to do that, I could just go on as long as I wanted, nobody was editing me, paper is cheap. And on this book, Wilson, I really took it to heart to chop away everything that was not essential. Not to keep anything I thought was just exposition or just for the sake of being part of a storyline.

Portland Mercury 5.14.10
Well do you want the reader to empathize with Wilson at all?
I've found the people who seem to get the most out of the book are the ones who have to begrudgingly admit that they like him or that they kinda agree with him. And then there are readers who are just utterly resistant to him. Where he's just alienating and not someone they want to throw their lot in with. Right off the bat they're not willing to make that leap. I mean they might find it funny but I don't think they're getting as much out of it as those who are generous enough to find some humanity in the poor fellow.

Do you empathize with him?
I find I do more and more. As I was working on the book I found him endlessly entertaining. He was just such a good character to work with. It was never not fun to see what he would do. It was always sort of a surprise. You could just throw anything at him and he kind of has his own thing, it's not something I'm in control of necessarily, he sort of steers where the jokes would go, and so it was endlessly fun to work with him. I didn't really look at him as good or bad. And after the book was done I could see that there are a few points in this story that are really going to challenge a reader to empathize with this guy. But I find myself defending him more and more. I think he's actually right about a lot of things but perhaps he doesn't say them in a manner that is easily acceptable to the whoever he's talking to. But it doesn't make what he's saying or thinking wrong.

LA Weekly 5.13.10
When you were writing Wilson, did you have a specific range of years that you were working with?
I did have it sort of figured out. I wanted it to be as timeless as possible. I have him using a pay phone in one of the strips. It's really supposed to be 2008 or so, there weren't a lot of pay phones, but it's still plausible. He's certainly the guy who would walk eighty blocks to find a pay phone because he doesn't have a cell phone. It kind of fit his character. It's generally in the 21st century. The ending strips I think are maybe in the future, they're maybe 2014, but it's in the first fifteen, twenty years of the 21st century.

Amazon 30 minute podcast

Mother Jones 5.13.10
MJ: So what are the outsider nerds into now?
DC: I don't think there are any outsiders anymore. It's good for the outsiders; I don't know if it's good for our culture. I think it was good to have this mass culture that we all reacted to in some way. I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to—like disco.

Willamette Week 5.12.10
Do you ever get bored with making comics, or is it more fun now than when you were younger?
I have to say, it gets much, much more fun. When I was younger, it was such a struggle to get what I was trying to achieve, I would work and work and work to just get one page right, but then you’ve got to do the next page. I had to do that with Velvet Glove, I had to keep that style going for 150 pages, and that got really tiresome. And I was constantly just going, “That looks horrible!” and feeling terrible about it. In the last 10 years, I like the way the drawing looks, and it feels sort of effortless.

CBC Q podcast 5.6.10

The Star (Toronto) 5.6.10
About Wilson, as a character, it would be kind of hard for readers not to make a connection between you and Wilson himself.
(He takes deep breath) Apparently not. . . (he laughs). He’s certainly written from within, but he’s not at all like me in most ways. I’m not the kind of person who can come up to a person and sit at a table and start talking. Wilson is completely uncensored. He has no self-regulating mechanism. He is like a walking id who does not filter himself to make himself more palatable.
I’m very much the opposite. I’m overly polite and quiet and shy, and sort of more the victim of the Wilsons of the world, often. On the other hand, I kind of admire that. I wish I had a little bit of the Wilson in me. I like that he doesn’t change anything to make himself more lovable. He wants to be loved, but he’s not going to do it on anything but its own merits. The funny thing is I’ve found that the people who seem to respond really negatively to Wilson are the ones who are the closest to him.

The Eye 5.5.10
“I’m like a target for the Wilsons of the world,” says Clowes. “My wife said that he’s my nemesis, because every day I’ll try to get out of the house and I’m always complaining about the guy who sat next to me and started blathering on about god knows what. But in a really profound way, I also really admire that kind of guy. I often feel the same need to [do what Wilson does], and yet I’m this reserved Midwesterner who’s not going to sit down at somebody’s table in an internet café. I can’t even imagine doing that. But I kind of wish I could.”

Gothamist 5.5.10
Why did you decide to draw in different illustrative styles for the different pages?
Well, when I actually sat down to draw this thing, I thought I better come up with a style for this. And I'd drawn different books in different styles, and I thought I'd come upon the perfect style that encompassed all of what needed to be said about this guy, and I just couldn't decide on one. I kept veering really drastically from the most cartoon-simple style, to the most detailed, over-rendered, drawing-every-eyelash kind of style. Ultimately I decided the only way it would work is if I had all of these, and if each strip had its own reality and its own personality that was related to the others, but kind of different in the way it sort of modulates the humor, and deals with the emotions of the story. In some cases I wanted it to just read as a joke, and others I wanted it to seem like a joke but actually it's the furthest thing possible from a joke.

Yeah, I liked how parts of it are very funny, and parts of it are very sad and intense.
It's a difficult line to walk. It's interesting, It involved a lot of changing things around and a lot of editing to it to flow correctly. I wanted it to set up a pattern at first, wherein the you think it's just going to be goofy, unrelated jokes—and sort of halfway through you'd realize there was a reason behind the sequence all along.

Weekly Dig 5.4.10

Express Night Out 5.3.10
» EXPRESS: "Wilson" strikes me as a story that's intrinsic to its form. How important is that to you?
» CLOWES: It's certainly more interesting to do that, because I always feel that if you can explain what you're doing or if you could just as easily write it as a screenplay or a short story, you're probably better off doing that — it's much easier than drawing a comic and much less time consuming. There's got to be a reason you're hunched over a drawing board eight hours a day. But I felt Wilson could only work as a comic character. It'd be very hard to imagine an actor playing him. It's possible that it could work as a weekly sitcom, but something where you're with him for a long time, like a movie, I think it would be unbearable to some degree. In a comic you can go at your own pace, and you can stop if you're feeling [laughs] oppressed.

Washington City Paper 5.3.10
WCP: Wilson’s a fairly unlikable individual—apparently incapable of having a conversation that’s not about him. He actually seems like a sociopath to me (and I see that the book’s back cover describes him that way, too) without any redeeming graces. Why did you create such a consciously unappealing character?
DC: Likable characters are for weak-minded narcissists. I much prefer the Rupert Pupkins and Larry Davids and Scotty Fergusons as my leading men. And I actually kind of like Wilson. He’d be fun to hang out with in short and finite increments.

New York Magazine 5.2.10
{Check this one out for Clowes's comments on his influences in Wilson}

DCist 4.30.10

Time Out New York 4.29.10
What do you think about the fact that you’re always being accused of having misanthropic characters, especially, say, in Ghost World?
I would hope that if you really read the work carefully, that wouldn’t be all you took away from it. Because certainly that’s not my intention. And I often don’t see the parts that people find especially grim and depressing. I usually find whatever I’m doing to be funny. And often I’m surprised when people say, “I was so depressed for two weeks after reading that comic.” Not me. When I work, my wife hears me upstairs laughing at my own stupid jokes. [Laughs

The Phoenix 4.27.10

Also: The Believer May 2010

Crumb's Genesis and Comparisons, Briefly

2010-07-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

The fundamental achievement of Crumb’s Genesis for me is that it avoids something that’s central to so many illustrated versions of the bible or representations of biblical scenes: Crumb rarely idealizes his subject matter. He is not creating an inspirational text, a magical text, or a sympathetic mythology -- nor is he mocking the bible. The wonder of Crumb’s Genesis is not the unknowable wonder of God’s ways but of people’s actions as the bible recounts them. If there is reverence in Crumb’s work, it’s for the flesh, for the materiality, both ugly and beautiful (though more often ugly), of biblical characters and the things they do. Crumb’s Genesis, then, despite its use of visual source material from biblical film epics and other religious ‘propaganda’ (even comic books) is in a different genre than these previous adaptations. In an interesting and substantial post, Ng Suat Tong compares Crumb to another tradition of biblical art by invoking Michelangelo, Blake, and others, arguing that, if we look at images from these artists side-by-side, we’ll agree that Crumb gets the worst of it.

Blake and Crumb can make for a valid comparison, but it helps to keep alert to many key differences. For instance, Blake is a mythologizer who uses biblical and non-christian mystical works to create his own counter-metaphysics; he was not an illustrator of the bible in the way that Crumb is here. Crumb is, as he says, treating Genesis as a “straight illustration job.” Very differently from Blake (who created a vast religious system, complete with numerous characters and a poetically realized anti-dogma), Crumb acts as a “straight man” to the bible. He’s not putting in "any jokes," he tells us, for that’s not the straight man’s job (for biblical “jokes,” see Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”); rather he is bringing out and interpreting the carnality, power, beauty, and worldly absurdities that he sees as already present: the bible delivers it own dark comedy and tragedy. I feel a greater sympathy with Crumb’s strategy than I do with, say, Michelangelo’s. In its refusal to idealize, Crumb’s seems more ‘real’ to me. The thickness and gritty texture of Crumb’s line and character designs (thick legs, thick lips, thick fingers) tell a truth about the Book of Genesis obscured by more reverential approaches. (It's almost as if the medium of cartooning is better than painting for this text . . .)

And Crumb's God often looks a lot like Blake's -- it all depends which image you select. Suat uses perhaps the most famous: Blake's The Ancient of Days. But I have selected a detail from his God Judging Adam:

Followed by Crumb's:

They look very similar to me: Intense, stern, white-robed patriarchal males with long flowing white hair and beards, sporting furrowed brows of disapproval as they point and chastise their creations. Equally powerful images by two great cartoonists.

Also, Michelangelo and Blake are not illustrating the same thing in the images Suat uses; I think the figure in Blake's Ancient of Days is his god-like character Urizen, who, in Blake's mythos, represents values often opposed to that of the Christian god; in fact, Urizen embodies some 'satanic' attributes, at least as Blake sees them. These artists have different beliefs and each one’s version of god is really an image of a very different character, though they are close enough visually to make a valid comparison.

On a thread at ComicsComics Noah Berlatsky asks Tim Hodler: “Do you feel that Crumb’s Genesis can in fact stand next to Blake?” I would answer yes, but you have to be clear about the grounds of the comparison. And as the above images show, Blake and Crumb -- at times -- have a similar coarseness to their work that connects them and their methods as it distances them from Michelangelo. But as a mythologist, Blake’s work, like Michelangelo’s, is often more idealized and lyrical than Crumb’s. Perhaps coarsely put, Blake is metaphysical and Crumb is physical; but even this doesn't prevent them from participating in a related tradition of religious iconography.

Judicial Fumetti and Narrative

2010-07-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

The front page of the print edition of today’s New York Times features a fumetti about the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings. The photo comic emphasizes design over chronology, yet it maintains a clear sense of the “story” being told. In other words, while the sequencing of the images has narrative implications, the comic does not follow a time-based ordering: the symmetrical design gives me reason to think that the photos are not shown in the order in which they were taken. It's not really a narrative comic, in the traditional sense -- but it's not non-narrative either . . .

Kagan, as the subject of the hearing, is at the center of the grid, surrounded on every side by a male senator. All of the senators in column one look to the right, as those in column three look to the left; so all face the center column, the one occupied by Kagan (only her face looks toward the reader/viewer). And for balance, the senators above and below her face the opposite direction from each other.
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I would call this a semi-narrative comic because there is a kind of ‘story,’ but one without a plot. The image sequence is a-chronological and there’s no way to tell (from the comic) what the real sequence might have been. Narrative comics typically feature characters who reoccur within the story, but here no one appears more than once (yet Kagan is the implied subject of every panel). Despite this, there’s a continuity of place and time that holds the ‘story’ together.

One of the metaphorical 'narratives' here is about hands as dramatic and emotional signifiers (only one senator's hands are not visible), perhaps another is about gender and power -- Kagan is the smallest main character, and if we know she will get confirmed, then the hearings are really about the performaces of the senators, the larger characters. Appropriately, the comic’s 'punch line' -- the last panel -- is a photo of Senator Al Franken, a former comedian (and we see both hands of a senator only in this last panel).

We are always told that western comics read from left to right, but this kind of ‘news fumetti’ (like some advertising comics) really doesn’t. Of course, you could read it this way, and it would work. I'd guess, however, that most readers would randomly scan across/around the images to get the 'story.' Reading order doesn’t matter and closure between panels seems absent. The 'story is told by the structure of the page -- Kagan surrounded, literally "boxed" in from all sides. The gaps between the frames, then, are non-narrative spaces.

Q&A with Tim Hensley

2010-06-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

"I thought it would be fun to do a serious graphic novel with a character whose head looks like an inverted curling stone..."

Reading and Why

2010-06-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

In a recent post at The Hooded Utilitarian, Ng Suat Tong uses numerous ideas from Walter Benjamin as ways into an insightful discussion of comics criticism. Along with text from Benjamin, the thread features quotations and comments from a number of HU contributors, and me. Most of the writers, myself included, paint a fairly positive picture of their motivations in writing about comics. But such uplifting beliefs seem like only a part of the picture. No doubt, we are often motivated by things like a genuine desire to “express ourselves”, “learn about something by writing about it,” “entertain”, “raise the public discourse,” or “elevate standards.” All worthy goals . . . But

there are many other possible motivations, ones that we -- or speaking for myself, I -- would usually prefer not to think about. What follows below is a post I wrote a few months back (I had posted it once and then deleted it, thinking it too negative . . .).

_______________________________________________

When I'm tempted to write a screed against an artist, comic, or graphic novel, one I'll be clever enough (or self-deluded enough) to present as an “objective critique” (though clues to my real motive for writing will inevitably rupture this academic veneer), I try to remember to ask myself: “Why is it that I take this as a personal offense against me?” It’s one thing if the art endorses truly hateful or harmful ideas -- but otherwise, why am I so worked up? Why don’t I say, “This sucks” and move on? Or write a critique that deals with the art in a reasonable way?

But I sometimes think something like the following, which I'll put into words more honest than those I typically allow myself: “I need to set straight those readers and critics who just fail to get it, who foolishly admire X. If they were honest and read X carefully, they would feel just as I do. Must . . . correct . . . wrong . . . ideas. (My hard-drive has a few nasty critiques un-posted, like the first drafts of letters a therapist might suggest you write to your parents but not send . . .)

Sure, plenty of comics and cartoonists stink, and do so aggressively. But that’s life, right? I can enjoy a well-written critique of anything, but when it’s wildly out of proportion to the “offense,” the critic should do the hard work, not of analyzing the comic, but of analyzing his/her motivation: “Why does this make me so pissed off/angry/hurt/unappreciated? What sacred ideas of mine does it threaten? Am I even aware of these feelings or their origin? Do I evade dealing with them by characterizing my motivation in the unassailable terms of “high standards?” All of this, I can attest, is a lot less fun than going off on some cartoonist or comic book, or even another critic.

Perhaps at some level we all write because we want some kind of validation; it’s not simply a need to express ourselves or to direct fellow consumers toward or away from a given “product.” “My attack proves to others and myself that I am one who calls it like I see it -- Like It Is.” (Or: "My praise proves what a nice guy I am.")

(The Hyper-Aggressive Misreading always mistakes the subjective reaction for the objective fact.) And the best way to build yourself up is by tearing someone down, right?

The hyper-aggressive misreading likely stems, not from the critic’s interaction with the text, but from his/her ideas about something more amorphous, some kind of internal conflict triggered by, and then projected onto, the text (which therefore becomes invisible to the critic, obscured by self-deception). So the ostensible “reading” reveals only truths about the unsettled reader, truths that remain to be critiqued.

Hawthorne

2010-06-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2010 issue (36.1) of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review was just released. It features ten essays on Hawthorne's writing for children, one of which is by me:

Weathercraft

2010-06-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

" How to Read Weathercraft; or, How I Read It and What I Learned."

1. Read only the interior pages, the story proper. Do not read the material on the book jacket, which gives information about the characters, their world, and the story. Do not think about the significance of the title, and do not look closely at the cover.

2. After a first reading, then read all of the material on the jacket: realize how much you missed, how much you could have understood if you had read with greater care. Realize, also, that if you had thought about the title (and/or the cover image), many scenes that mystified you would have been clear. Acknowledge that you are an inattentive, and at times even a sloppy reader; but don’t get down on yourself. It was great to begin with, and will be even better the second time.

3. Read it again; during the second reading, achieve a new, but still incomplete sense of clarity, much like MH himself. Realize that a good comic changes each time you read it; ponder the implications this has for any theory of comics; such theories typically do not have a good sense of the roles played by different types of readers in creating meaning, nor do they recognize what happens to things like closure on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th reading.

4. Watch the video at the Flog, in which cartoonist Jim Woodring works his way through the book. Again, realize that many of the things he talks about are clearly presented, but that you didn’t pick up on what was being laid down. Also, understand that some of the imagery is highly personal to Woodring, and so what it means to him and him and how it works in the story, is inaccessible to you, though on the book jacket he promises to explain some of it if you ask him in person. Plan to do so.

5. Read it a third time, thinking about Woodring’s video commentary, and recognize how cohesive it is. There’s a real clarity to the plot and to Woodring’s character designs and panel compositions. You will think that, in some way, the key to much of this is the artist's omnipresent wavy line, but will be unsure.

Plan to return to Weathercraft soon.

Buenaventura Press Closed

2010-06-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

In January of 2010, I closed the doors at Buenaventura Press in Oakland, California. I was forced to let go of the dedicated employees who had worked so tirelessly for so little money in order to create art that we all believed in. This meant that I had to abandon all current and future projects and discontinue sales and distribution.

I deeply regret having to take these actions, but the press experienced a devastating financial blow that made it impossible to continue. (I will release more details about this problem in the future.)

I consider myself lucky to have collaborated with many of the best cartoonists and artists of this generation. I am genuinely proud of the books and prints that the press released, and I am extremely grateful for all of your support.

-Alvin Buenaventura

Best American Comics Criticism

2010-06-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

In the introduction, editor Ben Schwartz frames the just-released Best American Comics Criticism in terms of ‘the rise of literary comics,’ which unofficially began in late 2000 with the simultaneous release by Pantheon of Daniel Clowes’s David Boring and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. Though the growing prominence of the 'literary comic' provides a context, BACC’s reach is far greater, including pieces published from 2000-2008 on children’s, superhero, and newspaper comics, as well as literary graphic novels. Schwartz includes many kinds of writing, such as reviews, interviews, introductions to collections, historical and analytical essays, panel transcriptions, etc. -- and even a court document and two comics. In the pieces, novelists, critics, and academics write on comics; cartoonists talk to each other; cartoonists write about artists; critics interview cartoonists, etc . . .

The above lists get at one of the collection’s great strengths: it offers an extremely wide range of writing produced over eight years. Although I can imagine critical disagreements with some individual pieces, it’s harder to imagine objections to the philosophy behind BACC and the volume as a whole. While there’s a great deal to be learned by reading any such collection, Schwartz’s editorial approach makes BACC far more entertaining than I would have thought a collection of criticism could be.

(See the introduction and table of contents here.)

N.B.: An essay of mine is included, but don’t let that dissuade you from buying it; there are over 30 other pieces.

“My Cola Silo is Out Back”: Wally Gropius

2010-06-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius was released a week ago, and while I closely followed the story during its Mome serialization, the book (which has many new pages) is a whole nother thing. It has quickly become one of my favorite graphic novels. Here are some reasons why:

Parody and/or Something Else?: It’s Hard to Describe
What is it? Is it a parody? Maybe, but Hensley’s sense of parody is so original that it’s difficult to characterize the book or his approach. Wally Gropius is formally and thematically parodic in that it imitates visual, character, and plot conventions of Dell, Harvey, and Tower teen comics and children’s comics. For example:

 The “teen comic that never misses an opportunity to pun” -- like Harvey’s Bunny (one of the “Blog Flume’s Top 50 Comics”) or dozens of other 1960s comic books. (Click on images to enlarge.)
 The “male teen pop star pursued by countless female fans” -- like DC’s Swing with Scooter and many others.

 The “omnipresent visual money pun” -- objects in the shapes of money symbols -- which, of course, come from Richie Rich. (“Cola Silo,” I assume, is an allusion to Uncle Scrooge’s Money Silos.)

 The “adult condescension toward teenage habits” -- from every teen comic ever.

 The familiar character types and drawing styles -- from comics like Richie Rich, Ponytail, Thirteen Going on Eighteen, Tippy Teen, Beetle Bailey, etc . . .

 And the libidinal/obsessive energy present in Harvey Comics, Archie, and countless teen comics is taken to a disturbing place -- taking the “grope” in “Gropius” to new highs and lows.

In this last instance, Wally Gropius is the kind of parody that works as commentary on the earlier material, by exposing, in an exaggerated yet insightful way, energies/ideologies that animate the source comics [more on this later]. But this, too, oversimplifies things . . . The comic is too odd to be described as “commentary.” It seems far more synthetic than parodic: it blends recognizable influences into something truly new (I always avoid the word “truly,” but in this case it’s needed). And yet, it’s not that far from being a teen comic -- remove a few scenes, a few words and it’s kind of “tween friendly.” It’s hard to describe.

Sensical or Nonsensical?
The dialogue and scenarios are often weird/absurd, but they always make sense; they can easily be understood as exaggerations of, or skewed takes on, typical tropes of kid’s comics. The plot of Wally Gropius has been described as surreal or random, but it’s coherent and far more complex than I first thought, especially when I read it during serialization. You’ll likely need to read it few times before you can understand how some of the characters, such as Plenty, fit into the narrative, and how Banks and the reporter are connected. The apparent sense of absurdity might distract an inattentive reader (I include myself in this group) from the fact that things fit together in very specific ways.

The Joy of Drawing
The book is an encyclopedia of cartoony facial expressions and bodily gestures, and should be studied at the CCS as such. WG radiates a real sense of joy, of “cartooning unfettered.” The visual surfaces -- bold colors, elegant compositions, and assured inking -- are extremely inviting. Enjoy the faces and hands in this sequence:

The Ludic Punisher
Puns rule, both visual and verbal. Take the subtitle, for example: “The umpteen millionaire” -- Wally is a “teen millionaire.” The “ump” in umpteen foreshadows the many sports jokes/puns, which all seem to stem from the Huey Lewis’s “Sports” album conceit, a metaphor that pervades the comic. Umpteen also oddly modifies “millionaire” (traditionally what comes after umpteen must be a plural noun) in that Wally has umpteen millions in the bank. (And umpteeen just sounds funny). [See another Hensley ump joke here.] See also the back cover’s riff on Ox, Fort Knox, Babe the Blue Ox, and “olly olly oxen free.”

Writing and the Logic of Saddest and Married
Hensley is one of the best, and most idiosyncratic, writers of text in comics. Toward the end of the novel, Wally launches into a brilliantly executed disquisition on the linguistic and logical problems of marrying a girl who also must be “The Saddest Girl in the World.” A compelling interrogation of “the limits of language” by a recently-pummeled teenager millionaire at his wedding; and it’s also brilliantly staged by Hensley.

Allusive Density
Part of the fun of rereading is finding more puns and allusions, such as the images and literary references to suicide -- Mishima, Sylvia Plath, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. It’s a web of allusion, jokes, and puns about things that are funny, and things that aren’t . . . The constant visual jokes also recall the side-features in kid’s comics that asked readers to find the dozen eggs -- or the like -- in a single drawing.

Money-pun in lower left corner: "Penny pinching"? "Money’s tight"?

Quote Ability
Hensley creates unforgettable phrases that, if there’s any justice in the world, will appear in all of the best quotation dictionaries:
“The Book as Art Object”
Like Clowes with Wilson and Ice Haven, Chris Ware with Jimmy Corrigan and recent Acme Novelty Librarys, or Seth with George Sprott, Hensley in Wally Gropius has exercised careful control of every aspect of the book’s design, creating a beautifully designed object that seems strangely modern while clearly showing its debt to earlier forms, such as the European album format of Tintin collections:

Note the band across the front cover with the subtitle and the head of the main character (the red-headed Wally is Archie [freckles] + Tintin [rouge cheeks]), and “Hensley” is placed where “Hergé” would be; also note the style of the encircled page numbers). For all of Hensley’s interest in past comics, there’s little that’s really nostalgic about the book and its design. Though it gives off a comforting sense of familiarity (evoking the thick covers of a beloved children’s picture book), this feeling is challenged by the book’s at time uncomfortable contents. And the peculiar clarity of Hensley’s drawing and inking on the cover -- and a phrase like “the umpteen millionaire” -- instantly tell us that we're not in Riverdale.

Sex and Sublimation
Gropius tells a strange story about sexual desire and sublimation. One of Wally’s songs argues for teenagers redirecting their urges into a sport (there’s that metaphor again), in this case a marathon ping pong session that must end in frustrated teens spewing vomit, which perhaps functions as a “surrogate oral ejaculate”: the body will ‘out’ its desire in some way. This part of the narrative about human nature and self-censorship -- like much of the book, really -- lives on the edge of cartoony comedy and disturbing revelation. The book’s approach is all the more profound because it blends ‘funny’ and ‘upsetting,’ such as when Jillian beats the shit out of Wally: it's a "boy meets girl, girl beats boy" story . . .

The book deals with many such “issues,” and could be read in a number of “serious” ways: as parable about celebrity; a meditation on female suffering, histrionics, and culture (or a reimagining of teen Sturm und Drang in the “Bieber-fever” media climate of the early 21st century); a critique of beliefs underlying the popularity of sports and connection between sports and patriotism (or an exploration of a nationalistic sentimentalism); a harsh critique of misdirected mothering; etc . . . While I think it’d be fine to see the book as “about” these things (as a parody that criticizes or even mocks some of its subjects), this approach also seems misrepresentative. . . There’s a weird tension between the book’s appealing surfaces and its “content” that disrupts attempts (at least my attempts) at generalizing about the comic.
As Hensley recently said at the LA Times blog: “I have a love/hate relationship with those old comics. There are things about them I'm nostalgic about, but there are things about them that infuriate me as well.” These conflicted feelings play out in the book.

Each Panel / Page is Beautifully Designed

The book’s size (printed larger than it was in serialization) is a real plus in drawing attention to the elegant, uncluttered panel compositions.

Hensley’s Skill as a Letter and Title Designer

Color and Space
A while back, I wrote about a number of other things I liked about the comic: http://blogflumer.blogspot.com/2009/09/gropius-in-space.html

Other Highlights:
+Best use of photo/drawing collage since Fantastic Four Annual 3.
+Oddest Abu Ghraib allusion, one that makes sense in the context of the previous panel’s images and reference to patriotism and sports.
+Most Disturbing Scene of Extispicium in a Teen Comic.

Eight Sources For Further Study:
1. Eric Reynolds Interviews Tim Hensley at the Flog
2. Gary Groth Interviews Hensley in Mome
3. Amazon Message Board Interview
4. Five Questions for Hensley at the LA Times Blog
5. Daniel Clowes on Wally Gropius at The Daily Beast
6. Dash Shaw on Wally Gropius at Comics Comics
7. National Anthems
8. Huey Lewis and Sports

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

2010-05-26T19:37:00.001-07:00

This Sunday, there's a can't miss event. Unfortunately, it's across town at Cinefamily and starts exactly when the event I'm now attempting to promote ends! Oh, well, I'm pretty sure my parents will still show. Come one, come none--there may not be another event like it for quite a while.

Printmaker Jordan Rae sent me this lo-fi work-in-progress photo this morning; he's printing a black velvet poster out of my salute to Successories. The remaining black flocked portion runs along the lines of an elementary school glitter and Elmer's project. Jordan explained he has to add black shavings to a sticky ink base, possibly using a DDT-type sprayer and hazmat set-up of tarps last seen on the TV show Dexter during disembowelment. Wish him luck! The end result will be on sale Sunday. He's also working on some other artist prints which he plans to sell online.

Finally, last weekend's Silverlake Jubilee street fair was something of a wash. The patrons seemed most interested in the traffic jam of amuse bouche fusion trucks lining the street. These upscale "roach coaches" are a craze in L.A. at the moment, with people monitoring Twitter feeds to discover transient locations to line up for Kimchee sliders. If we had had a bookmobile and some vegan stroopwafels, we might've been in business. During our downtime though, Ted Stearn, fellow Mome employee currently among those carrying the serial burden, drew this funny version of Wally, no longer "waiting for a flood."

Clowes, Wilson, and Drama

2010-05-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

The most obvious antecedent to the episodic structure of Wilson is the daily comic strip and its familiar "a few panels of setup followed by a panel with a punch line" format. But another influence, one that can account for some of what makes Wilson so strange, is the theater. Clowes has said he conceived of his previous comic, Mister Wonderful, as a "two-man play." This gave him a chance to play dramatist by trimming down his approach: in much of the story, two characters just sit and talk. In a recent interview, Clowes noted that theater was again on his mind as he worked on Wilson, a "one-man play" that develops theatrical conceits in ways that reveal some profound ambiguities of narrative practices present within comics.

Mister Wonderful used an expansive archive of comic techniques -- speech balloons, thought balloons, interior monologue boxes, fantasy scenes, flashbacks, and unusual formal approaches -- to give us access to Marshall’s thoughts and feelings:

But Wilson strips away nearly all of these devices, featuring only the present-tense image overlaid with the word balloon:

But "word balloon" isn’t quite right. Convention has taught us (or perhaps deceived us) that what appears within a word balloon is spoken. At a recent talk on Clowes’s book tour, an audience member asked if Wilson was speaking or thinking the text that appears in the balloons. "That’s a really good question," Clowes replied; "I’m not sure."

In Wilson, the balloon (it’s not quite right to call it a speech balloon when referring to Clowes’s work) has no single function -- sometimes it implies spoken text, other times thoughts, and elsewhere its meaning can’t be fixed: “I’m not sure.” Clowes is rarely schematic with these things. Just because a type of balloon functions a certain way in one strip doesn’t mean it works the same way (or needs to be interpreted the same way) in another.

Here’s where the dramatic conventions come in: In the traditional theatrical soliloquy a character speaks to no one. But a soliloquy is often interpreted as if it’s unspoken, as if it embodies the uncensored and most truthful thoughts of the character (Wilson is uncensored -- hostile to others and himself, for example -- in a way that most people are only in their heads). It is spoken, of course, because that’s the way to deliver thoughts on the stage. The book’s second strip (and many others) fit neatly into the soliloquy mode:

On this kind of page, Wilson, essentially alone on stage, speaks-thinks to himself; the balloon signifies speech and/or thoughts. But the soliloquy has another strange aspect. Even when other actors occupy the stage near the soliloquist, tradition suggests they simply do not hear him-- they act as if he isn’t talking (because in a way he’s not) or as if he isn’t there. Many of Wilson’s single-page "blackout gags" take this approach: he says awful (and awfully funny) things to people, yet his speech gets no reaction from them. In the vaudeville blackout gag, the theater’s lights are cut off immediately after the joke. There’s no reaction from other characters, only from the audience. And this often happens in Wilson: Clowes cuts the scene right after his hero speaks. The last two panels of "The Money":

A sense of Wilson as documenting ‘Wilson alone on stage’ is reinforced by his many phone conversations. He talks, but we never once hear the words of his interlocutors:

Throughout the comic, so much of the action is off-stage or off-page: these are the same thing in Wilson. Other characters begin to feel like props in the main character’s psychodrama -- they don't have quite the same "ontological" status as he does.

A few strips replicate the visual perspective of being in a theater: the static position of an audience member watching a play. The characters are drawn at the same size in each panel and are fully visible:

(Clowes discuses the above strip here.) There are no filmic shifts of perspective implying a moving camera or a mobile viewer; the scene is unedited, as it would be in a playhouse. And the panel border becomes an analogue for the proscenium arch, creating a frame that houses the actors and scenery -- the entirety of the fictional world available to the viewer.

--------------------------------------------
When I first wrote about Wilson a few weeks ago, I mentioned that one way to think about the strip was as a “dramatic monologue,” a poetic form connected to theatrical conventions. This discussion of the form may offer some ideas that can be applied to Wilson. . .

Also: Here's an odd "reaction shot"; perhaps the "inscrutable" Pippi's response to the always antagonistic Wilson appears as the image on the screen:

2010-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Wally Gropius now in stock at Fantagraphics Books and Amazon, in comic shops next week, sources confirm... Short graphic novel futures... Buy ink shares... Sell fumetti at one and a quarter... Disney/Marvel announce Howard the Donald... Brokers broker... Freddie Mac floats art comics imprint... Wall Street empty as investors sift back issue bins... Copy of "Mome" sells at auction for 45 mil... Tim Hensley "relieved," processes ad groups in cubicle...

NSFW

2010-05-08T06:33:00.001-07:00

For a long time I had saved among my paperwork a xeroxed rant of the type usually found stapled to telephone poles that was given to me by my friend George Woods. His girlfriend at the time worked downtown under what was then the B of A skyscrapers in a mall bookstore and was given multiple copies by the author himself, a Balwant Singh Choudry. I've always enjoyed the neural telemetry and meticulous/hopeless documentation found in these sort of tracts. It's as if the author feels so forsaken that he overcompensates by imagining he is under relentless scrutiny. At the end of 2006, a decade after receiving the screed, I decided to illustrate it for the anthology Kramers Ergot 7. Because the book's page size was that of a broadsheet, I tried to replicate the hideous gradient fills found in modern Sunday newspaper coloring. There's also my usual lifts, this time from Woody Allen, B.C. and brethren, and Prinzhorn Collection psychiatric art. I'm sure the likeness is not even close.
It reminds of when I worked in the complaint department at a computer company, and someone wrote in that their laptop had been stolen by the FBI/CIA/Catholic church and also mentioned deployment of a time machine. As a joke, I prepared a form letter, a portion of which read, "We do indeed have your laptop." Obviously, that wouldn't have been a good reply. I still hope Choudry would enjoy this comic, though I suspect he is no longer among us.

Lady Pugaga

2010-05-07T04:54:00.000-07:00

Check out this new t-shirt design by Lisa Hanawalt (I Want You). If you like it click here. Available tomorrow Saturday, May 8 for 24 hours and then gone... oh well, tough luck. Only $9!

35 short 'essays' on comics

2010-05-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

The Blog Flume has been on the web for 30 months. In that time, I've posted around 35 short illustrated 'essays' (a few of these were initially written for other publications). I tend not to write reviews (though I have done a few); often, I find some aspect of a comic that seems interesting to me and try to develop my ideas about it in a way that will (hopefully) make these observations interesting to others. The methods I use and the issues I explore vary, but I would call an approach I often use 'visual close reading': I focus on details -- and often on formal aspects -- that lead me to ideas about the artist's aesthetic practices and perhaps to observations about cartooning as a whole.

Rather than produce something new, here they are, identified by key terms and somewhat organized, but in no particular overall order:

Casper, Harvey Comics, single page, close reading, form, the great page.

Richie Rich, Harvey Comics, design, money, sex, gender, power, close reading.

Tim Hensley, Wally Gropius, form, color, space, Walter Gropius, children’s comics.

Daniel Clowes, Wilson, multiple styles, narration.

Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven, genre, stillness.

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World, dialogue (last line), close reading.

Daniel Clowes, Mister Wonderful, word balloons, narration, psychology.

Steve Ditko, word-text relationship, design, reader expectations.

Steve Ditko, representation, abstraction, beauty.

Steve Ditko, movement, close reading.

Jack Sparling, Tiger Girl 1, superhero parody, stupid but good.

Sammy Harkham, Crickets 2, genre, humor, review.

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty 19, design, form, shape and color leitmotif.

Lisa Hanawalt, I Want You 1, form, types of comics, narrative.

Alex Nino, multiple styles within a story, DC Comics.

Jack Kirby, aging, psychology, horror, DC Comics, reader expectations.

Dave Sim, Glamourpuss, punctuation, editing.

Marvel Comics, Girl Comics 1, gender, editing.

Roy Liechtenstein, lettering, design, comics.

Tomine, mini-comic, style.

Pete Morisi, design, Charlton horror comics, stillness, appreciation.

Pete Morisi, static, stillness, design, Charlton western comics.

Charles Schulz, Peanuts, punctuation, prose, poetry.

Charles Schulz, Peanuts, time, narrative, background, conversations.

Teaching comics and describing style.

Four Great Stories of 2007, Clowes, Ware, Tomine, Gilbert Hernandez, close reading, general commentary.

Kelley Jones, Doug Moench, Batman Unseen, “quality entertainment.”

Ivan Brunetti, John Buscema, Avengers, design, unintentional connections between panels.

Ivan Brunetti, New Yorker cover, design, sentimentality, Central Park, close reading.

David Chelsea, point-of-view, subjectivity, autobiography.

Ted May, Injury Comics, art comics, adventure/action.

Jason, Sshhhh!, Ugo Rondinone, high art, appropriation, swipes.

John Stanley, Thirteen Going on Eighteen, shading, craft.

Critics, artists, validation, cartoon elite.

Criticism, analysis, reviews, close reading, judgment, negative criticism.

Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, criticism, approaches to interpretation.

On "The Comics Revival.

On original art and collecting.

Also:

Abner Dean.
[Faces by Sal Buscema and Frank Giacoia, from Nova 12 (1977)]

A Few Ways to Think about Style in Wilson

2010-04-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

When you open Daniel Clowes's Wilson, the end-papers suggest what becomes clear as you read further: there are as many Wilsons as there are cartooning styles in the comic.
Here’s are some of the ways you could “read” Clowes’s approach in his new graphic novel [spoiler-free commentary].

1. Each style represents/suggests how Wilson thinks/feels about himself in that scene.

2. Each style represents or evokes how the narrator feels towards Wilson on that page -- different styles can encode differing degrees of sympathy; an important part of the story is how the narrator feels about his protagonist.

3. Each style represents how other characters within the fictional world of a given scene (the notion of setting is necessarily unstable in a multi-style comic) would or might “see,” and perhaps, judge Wilson.

4. Each page represents specific traits of Wilson’s “physical-emotional portrait” that the author/narrator wants us to focus on in that scene.

5. Wilson is a moody guy -- so the styles evoke/play off of his differing moods in an intuitive way. As Mr. Ames from Clowes's Ice Haven might argue, “There is no translatable content contained within each style: it is simply an aesthetic mood, and therefore is beyond the ability of words to characterize it.” Perhaps the styles are not about anything -- rather they create a visual rhythm, a kind of plot that overlaps and diverges from the narrative plot.

6. It is as if Clowes has farmed out the pages of Wilson to a host of carefully selected “ghost” cartoonists, whose approaches are suited to the scene in the story they draw. Each style evokes the specific interests of a different narrator, who -- naturally -- would not describe Wilson and his world with the lines and cartooning language used by others -- just as, given the same plot, a group of writers would all produce something dissimilar.

7. Taken together, the shifting styles represent the inaccessibility of the real Wilson. As with the endpapers, which signature -- which face, which style -- is really his, or Clowes's?

8. Despite all of the styles, there's only one Wilson -- it’s the familiar paradox of identity: we are constantly shifting in our affect (our style of the moment), yet somehow stable in our “essence.”

9. The drawing styles are less significant than the shifting approaches to coloring: Wilson is a kind of “dramatic monologue” played out in a series of changing visual looks/moods defined largely by Clowes’s color palette on that page. You are supposed to ‘feel’ color and or style rather than ‘see’ and then translate them.

10. Many novels pretend that a person can be fully known and understood by another person -- such novels narrate the words, actions, thoughts, and feelings of a character with a great sense of certainty: “She thought this.” -- “She felt that.” -- "She was that." But thoughts and feelings are muddy and murky: who can ever fully know their own mind, let alone that of another? The styles of Wilson represent a refusal to participate in the lie of certainty and consistency -- in place of such assurance Wilson substitutes a series of beautifully executed styles that give us an honest, and therefore incomplete, portrait of a compelling character . . .

11. Mix and match any of the above: use whatever one seems appropiate for a given page and/or reject them all.

"I Hate Superheroes": 1965-67

2010-04-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a stack of ACG (American Comics Group) comics from the mid-1960s. I was surprised, though perhaps shouldn't have been, that, within the letters columns of a few titles, raged a long-running debate about the presence of -- and the merit of -- superheroes, especially in what many readers believed should be strictly mystery or supernatural titles. A few letter writers even expressed extreme hostility to such heroes (one signed his letter only "Costume Hater"). At the link above, Don Markstein says that

"reader demand [for superheroes] was incessant, and in 1965 he [Richard Hughes, ACG editor/writer] finally gave in. Adventures into the Unknown launched Nemesis and Forbidden Worlds launched Magicman. Hughes's lack of enthusiasm for the long-underwear guys was reflected in the readers' lack of interest in them."

If the letters I have read are any indication, while many readers wanted only horror or fantasy, many readers were deeply invested in "costume characters" and were happy to see them in ACG titles. And, at least in his public role as editor on the letters pages, Hughes often expressed enthusiasm for the "supernatural superhero" that appeared in his comics, which he might have created as a way to appease the demand of both camps of readers. As he notes in AIU 173 below, however, ACG decided, from that point on, to concentrate on supernatural and fantasy stories, not superheroes. [There is a history of ACG that perhaps answers questions about Hughes's personal beliefs.]

Although many letters do not deal with the issue of "costume heroes," I have scanned each column in full because there are other things of interest in them (especially fan and editorial discussions of ACG artists like Ogden Whitney, Chic Stone [and his work with Jack Kirby], Pete Constanza, and others). It's also interesting to read these fan letters because their approach to reading, criticism, and interpretation is often so different from mine -- the readers often focus on questions of science, consistency, believability, and adherence to genre and marketing conventions. [Click and on each image, then click again to enlarge.]

Adventures into the Unknown #162 (1965)

From Unknown Worlds #46 (1966):

Adventures into the Unknown #163 (1966):

Adventures into the Unknown #165 (1966):

Adventures into the Unknown #173 (1967):

Children's Literature and Critical Trends

2010-04-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

This recent collection from Palgrave includes an essay I wrote on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women that was first published in the academic journal Children's Literature.

Stanley's Shading

2010-04-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

Like nearly everyone, I enjoy John Stanley’s cartooning in Thirteen Going on Eighteen -- the looseness of his characters, their constant sense of motion, their expressive faces . . . But there’s one thing that doesn’t always work for me:
his approach to shading.

Sometimes, I’m not sure how to interpret the hatching. While it often serves a typical function of either representing shadows, reflections in glass, or the texture of a surface, at other times it’s not clear how the shading is supposed to “read”:

It's confusing to me when the shading appears at opposite angles in the same panel, as in the second above; it might imply two light sources, but I doubt that's what Stanley intends . . .

It's a little excessive at times and so is at odds with his otherwise successfully minimalist approach.

The shading below may be intended to amplify the characters’ excitement, and therefore to express two functions simultaneously (shading and emotion lines). But the lines almost overwhelm the figures:

I’m not sure what’s being communicated in the upper right-hand corner of the first panel:

It occasionally appears as if Stanley uses hatching to fill spaces that don't need to be filled. Or the shading outlines the characters in a way that distracts us from their facial expressions . . .

Here’s an attractive page that avoids these issues by using objects on the walls or in the room (where hatching might have been used to fill space) and a feathered-edge circular lighting effect in panels 4 and 5:

His shading is more minimalistic, and I think more effective, in the ½ page strips:

There's a real clarity in the above two examples that keeps attention focused on the characters and gags.

These are minor complaints about a minor aspect of Stanley's work, and the heart of his skill lies more in his writing and figures than in the background details of the cartooned environments.

2010-04-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

Jerry Moriarty at Parsons March 27, 2010

2010-03-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

Black Buzzard

2010-03-25T03:53:00.001-07:00

Adrian Tomine sent me this image and asked if I could imitate the lettering. This was the original cover to Black Blizzard, but was not drawn by Tatsumi. Adrian also said he wanted the title to resemble a pulp paperback. I was thrilled and slightly puzzled to get the assignment.

I looked through an old Speedball lettering manual and found an alphabet whose characters were vaguely kanji like.

This was the first sketch.

Next was pencils and inks. The outline was in case Adrian wanted to knock out a white shape around the letters. The trickiest part was making sure the "L" and "I" didn't merge, turning the logo into "Black Buzzard." This became the final art, and Adrian opted to fill in the letterforms so as less to compete with a busy layout.

Here were two other attempts. The first was maybe more in the spirit of the original image, but ended up being too "chop socky."

This was my personal favorite, more rustic and rough hewn, with the old snow gimmick. I tried a sketch imitating the "Icee" logo, but it didn't work. If a death metal band forms as a result of this book, feel free to use these.

Here's the great final cover; in stores now and so forth...

Girl Comics 1 and Lost

2010-03-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

Girl Comics #1 gets off to a shaky start on the cover, with the first in a series of clichés that run throughout the issue.

The “battle of the sexes” joke might have been relevant in the days of Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs or as a late ‘60s image on Marvel's superhero parody comic Not Brand Echh, but it doesn’t work here. The editors likely want us to think of the concept as fun or campy, but it seems like an approach that would have been suggested and quickly rejected. Not only is it too obvious for a female-creator anthology, the unimaginative way it’s executed undermines the otherwise (hopefully) good intentions of the collection. It’s a hackneyed way to think about gender, taking the focus off of the artists as artists and putting it onto the fact that they are women who compete with men for work at Marvel (perhaps this focus is inescapable . . .). Also, we know that the female character will win the contest (could you have a Girl Comics cover that shows Iron Man beating a distraught She-Hulk or a teary-eyed Dazzler?), just as we know this victory will be short lived: the male–centered rules of the Marvel Universe demand it . . .

In this contest context, even the phrase “Women of Marvel” feels sketchy -- see here for why. (And is “women” added to compensate for a possible reading of “girl” as demeaning?)

Colleen Coover’s introduction has nicely drawn and colored art, but the clichés return in the dialogue and draw attention away from the attractive images.

The heroines’ phrases are less than inspiring: “we each are unique” and “We strive for excellence.” A Google search for “We strive for excellence” reveals over 19 million uses -- it’s one of the great expressions in uninspired self-promotion/advertising. And I don’t believe that Spiderwoman is really motivated by striving for excellence -- it’s got to be deeper, and stranger, than that . . .

The sexes battle again in the collection’s second story, which is driven by one of the cover’s clichés -- machismo under assault:

The male gods and superheroes have something at stake -- the thing that always seems to be worrying them: their masculinity. Why should it matter to Spiderman that She-Hulk is stronger than Iron Man? But he’s upset, as is Wolverine, who grabs his belt buckle; he’s got to keep it together. And why should it matter to these female creators?

The story “Moritat,” which features Nightcrawler, is the most ambitious in the collection, referencing the 1930 Marlene Dietrich movie The Blue Angel in a number of ways. But it’s hard to follow the narrative thread -- I’ve read it a number of times and can’t follow the logic from panel to panel (Why is there an explosion on page 2? or is this what happens when Nightcrawler teleports? But why would he be teleporting? When he reappears he’s only a few feet away from where he was . . . Could the bad guy really get knocked out by a shoe? What is the woman doing backstage? Is the audience unaware of the battle that’s taking place backstage -- isn’t the curtain open? Why don’t they seem worried?). The story is compressed into too few pages (the editor should have given it more space), and its ending is odd for a female-centered anthology. Nightcrawler saves the attractive young woman (who is a double for the cabaret singer -- both of whom look like Dietrich) and the last panel suggests they might have sex as his reward. The old “male saving the endangered female and screwing her” is an odd choice for a female-centered anthology. I always thought that, perhaps wrongly, this was a fantasy only a male would write.

Early in “Moritat,” a character tells the cabaret audience that “Tonight we return to the old standards. The songs that have served us for decades -- ”.

But are the comic's readers -- and the creators -- really served by a return to clichés that have been around so long?

Casper, Formalism, and the 'Great' Search Party

2010-02-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

If asked to pick a great comic book page, most readers (myself included) would likely point to a formally inventive page, one that uses the elements of comics in a way that immediately draws our attention to issues of construction. Candidates for a ‘great page’ would show the conscious design skills of the artist, such as the pages of Chris Ware or David Mazzucchelli, who rightly have been seen as expanding the vocabulary of comics layout and narrative. And such a page would open into numerous interpretive possibilities -- in other words, it would give critics a lot to talk about: questions of balance, symmetry, anomalies, echoing shapes/imagery, visual patterns, the semantic meanings of stylistic choices, etc . . .

When I first read a Casper story titled “Search Party,” I paid no attention to any page -- they all felt unremarkable. And in many ways, this page is unassuming:

An eight panel grid with few details, it has the almost bleak minimalism typical of Harvey comics. As in nearly every Harvey title, the premise that guides every story, every page, and every image is encoded in the comic’s title. Given that this page is from Casper the Friendly Ghost, it is, not surprisingly, about Casper trying to be friendly, despite the fact that his ghostliness gets in the way (he unintentionally scares people . . . or fish).

The more I looked at the page, though, the more organized and interesting, almost bafflingly so, it became.

The page has the simplest of visual and emotional rhythms: anticipation followed by disappointment, as Casper navigates from valley to lake to canyon and finally to a cave in a series of parallel exits and entries, all while searching for a lost boy. [Note how the page begins and ends with an opening: the gap of panel 1 and the cave of panel 8.] Positioned consistently toward left of center, Casper always looks and moves from left to right, a hyper-conventional choice in comics, as is the use of the ‘democratic grid,’ in which a page’s panels are the same size.

As a momentary release and variation, Casper doesn't appear in the important last panel (the dark cave is positioned where the white Casper is in previous panels), which sets up the joke of the next page (which you should be able to guess). . . The panels fall into a kind of question/answer pair, and lines in each panel in tiers 1-3 seem to connect to each other, perhaps unintentional or intentionally, bonding the pair (I have added three red lines in the gutter to show this in the image below [click all images to enlarge]).

Nothing’s remarkable about all of this, yet I find it very attractive and ordered.

But the second tier is strange, almost like an optical illusion that employs the 'special mechanics of comics':

The left side of the first panel shows Casper coming down a ridge,

but then the panel becomes a kind of implied cross-section image. It looks like a cross-section because a lake can’t really be this way otherwise – all of the water would drain out.

So the point of view is complex and artificial in order to set up a simple gag -- there is really no place that a character within this fictional world could see the image each panel portrays (this sequence is so odd to me that I’m not sure if I’m even describing it right – though I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get at it.) It appears in the first panel that you could ‘kind of’ be looking at fish at the top of the water,

but the next panel refutes this -- the POV in the right side is underwater, while in the left side Casper is coming toward us -- so this side is not a cross-section.

So, due to these many simple design choices on the part of the artist (Warren Kremer?) the page stands out without advertising itself as formally inventive.

Part of the attractively bleak minimalism of Harvey comics seems to come from imperatives of the Harvey house style, which is perhaps the most consistent and long-used 'look' in the history of American comic book companies. The style was designed to be easily and quickly replicated by writers, artist, and colorists (I love the large fields of pale yellow, blue, and green that define so much of the Harvey aesthetic, seen in the above page). But the formulas shouldn’t encourage us to overlook the virtues.

So is it a great page?; I don’t know. But it’s one of my favorites.

PS: Here's an interesting little visual echo that's easily overlooked: three mushrooms in a panel and three corresponding rocks across in the next:

It's another way to bind consecutive panels into a pair, and it's Bushmiller-esque.

Teaching Comics: Describing Style

2010-02-14T13:45:00.000-08:00

Recently in my American Writers class we read three comics: "Hazel Eyes" by Adrian Tomine, "Near Miss" by David Mazzucchelli, and "Island of Silk and Ectoplasm" by Matthew Thurber (all from Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Vol. 2). In the hour and 15 minute class period, we discussed many aspects of these comics, but our particular focus was on “style.”

I find that the best way to begin to talk about something as amorphous as style is to talk about small samples of at least three artists/texts at once. It’s easier to see the traits inherent to one object when you compare it to two others; similarities and differences stand out more clearly. I selected these comics because I wanted stories that were generally analogous (all are representational, narrative comics), but were different stylistically, without being radically dissimilar.

Tomine:

Mazzucchelli:

Thurber:
I wanted students to look at questions of "basic visual style" within a panel, not at style as related to things like dialogue, the pacing of the plot, page layout, the recurrence of certain images, etc . . .

To start, I had the students review each story (which they had read prior to class) and then look at one or two panels from each that featured a main character, side by side with panels from the other stories. I asked them, "On the most basic visual level, what non-thematic elements do they have in common, and how could we describe them?"

I’m sure that many lists of terms could result from this question. We generated a lot of ideas and agreed upon the following as important, forming a list that’s far from exhaustive. (It actually helps discussion to have a somewhat narrow set to focus upon.) And then I asked for "descriptive ranges" for each:

Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Light and shadow: use of black and white (or colored) areas
POV – “camera” angles: close-ups to long shots; below the focal point to above it

Because these narrative comics involve many human figures, we came up with some specific terms/ideas for the figure drawing aspect of the style:

Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces

In our discussion of the three artists, we most often returned to these ideas:

Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces

When students used terms like "realistic," "life-like," "exaggerated," or "cartoony," I asked them, “In what ways?” or “Where and how?” And we tried to distinguish, as much as possible, between descriptive and impressionistic terms (though ones like “rugged,” which one student used to describe Mazzucchelli's line, seemed to fit in both categories.)

Before we could be sure that our descriptions were accurate and helpful, we looked at other panels by the same artist to determine if we were oversimplifying things. Style is hard to pin down . . .

Part of the purpose of class session was to come up with terms we could use when reading style in comics throughout the semester, and to realize that words like “realistic” can be useful -- but we should ask “realistic in what specific ways?,” given that a figure can be realistic in its proportions but be drawn in a gesture that seems cartoony. Or the body might appear realistic, but some aspect of the face (perhaps, the eyes) appear more cartoony.

All of this led us into a productive conversation in which we were able to talk about the relationship between stylistic and thematic issues within each comic. Most of us are confident when discussing themes, so when talking about style we often strayed into thematic concerns; part of my job was to keep us focused on style for the first part of the class and then open it up to the relationship between theme and style for the remainder. It’s not as if the two are really distinct within a text, but it’s helpful to treat them temporarily as if they are. It gives students a greater appreciation of an artist’s scope and method if you do, I think.

Frozen Morisi

2010-02-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

In a nice essay on cartooning published in The Walrus, Seth discusses the "frozen" nature of images within the comics panel :

"There is something very lovely about the stillness of a comic book page. That austere stacked grid of boxes. The little people trapped in time. Its frozen and silent nature acting almost as a counterpoint to the raucous vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. Of course, the drawings aren’t really frozen. When we look at them, we immediately invest them with life. That little ink world pops into life as our eyes move across the drawings. I actually find it very difficult to look at a cartoon and hold on to the stillness. The essence of the cartoon language carries a kind of animation with it. This is true even with a single drawing, but it is especially evident when one panel is placed next to another. That juxtaposition creates a tension that implies motion and time. This illusion is one of the medium’s primary charms."

I agree that it's "difficult . . . to hold onto the stillness," and many artists (especially those working in action-oriented genres) don't seem to want us to linger too long, as this might threaten the story's sense of continuity or our immersion in it.

For me, part of the peculiar genius of Pete Morisi is the strange way that his drawings capture and hold stillness -- the feeling of frozen-ness -- in a way that almost seems intended to disrupt our desire to move from panel to panel. It's hard to talk about the effect that an artist's images have on us in anything other than abstract ways, but many of his panels feel almost sculptural, and so work against the animation that Seth rightly sees a key feature of narrative comics. His characters often appear like drawings of a sculpture of a person, rather than a 'direct' representation. (Many of his horror comics feature sculptures -- usually of people -- in backgrounds and margins of panels.)

This sense of stillness can be found throughout Morisi's comics (I talked about it in his horror comics around two years ago), but his Westerns are my favorite in this way. Try as I might, I can't "invest them with life." Yet this doesn't impede my enjoyment of these comics; in fact, it does the opposite.

A.
B.
C.
D.

E.
Even his odd decision to split the panel in two and put the dialogue in a faux gutter instead of a balloon (which he does elsewhere) de-emphasizes the action and diminishes the urgency of the dialogue because it's not directly connected to the speaker, as it would be in a balloon.

"Don't move," then, seems to be Morisi's imperative to his characters.

{Images are from late 1950s Lash LaRue Westerns, published by Charlton.}

Cartoon Ecology

2010-02-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

It can be "entertaining and enlightening" to look at similar words/objects/scenes as drawn by different artists. The following pairs of images are from "Benny Beaver," which appeared in Casper, The Friendly Ghost #1 [1949], and "Ecology Beaver," which appeared in Comic Art #9, by Tim Hensley [2007].

Opening Panel:

Gnawing:

Holding a book:

On his dam:

Abstract Ditko

2010-01-22T09:46:00.001-08:00

Those interested in Steve Ditko and abstraction in comics should check out this post by Andrei Molotiu and the comments on the Abstract Comics blog.

I Shoot Myself Being Interviewed

2010-01-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

Here was an exercise in disorientation. It seemed I could either concentrate on speech or filming, but neither at once. The result at least follows in the online clip tradition of puppy antics. Witness Lisa Hanawalt, Paul Hornschemeier, Sammy Harkham, and John Pham under similar duress here.

Richie's Ledger: Money Sex Power

2010-01-16T13:38:00.000-08:00

The single-mindedness of Harvey Comics' characters -- Little Dot’s obsession with circles, Casper’s desperation to find a friend -- is matched only by the intense repetition featured in the design of Harvey comics. Nowhere is this better seen than on the cover of Richie Rich Bank Book$ #32.

Symbols for money – dollar and cent signs – appear 13 times, gems 6 times (9, if you count the 3 in "Richie Rich" in the upper left corner), and “Rich” appears 10 times. Add to this a glittering gold bank, a wad of bills in Richie’s hand (certainly not fives or tens), 2 bank books, and a very large account book in the shape of a dollar sign, with dozens, perhaps 100s of dollar-sign shaped pages (that's at least 34 representations [symbols, words, objects] of wealth).

A house ad for Harvey Comics in the issue ratchets up this financial frenzy even further.

During the month this comic came out (August 1977), Harvey released 13 different Richie Rich titles: Vaults of Mystery, Cash, Jems, Riches, etc . . . But as the weeks passed, the value went up for the "giant" comic in the final column: week one was Millions; week three Billions, and the final week culminated with a wealth so vast it couldn’t be named with a word that corresponds to something: Zillions (even the Zs echo the shape of a dollar sign.)

If the comic has a hero with riches beyond measure, the perfect antagonist must be a threat to this wealth, which was built on the energy of the workers. His antithesis:

It's no wonder that on the first page Richie expresses the capitalist-hoarder's worst fear -- a workers' revolt:

"Gasp! Have the estate workers gone crazy?"

Luckily, things are not what they seem. The workers are only carrying out Mr. Rich’s orders, no matter how crazy they are.

And what are we to make of the cover's exchange between Gloria and Richie, or perhaps more accurately, between her and his money book? Given that Richie Rich is a children’s comic, it might seem crude to suggest that the account book and its placement are sexually suggestive.

But children’s books are usually written by adults . . . If the characters were adults, we might say:

The phallic shaped book represents the male’s totemic power; he uses his superior access to wealth (his ‘inheritance’ as a male) as a form of seduction. The male occupies the literal ‘seat of power,’ sitting in a purple chair ( the color of royalty, which in the US means Rich People) and he is positioned in a Masonic mystic triangle formed by three gems. And the female is off to the side, looking on excitedly and admiring his ‘account.’ His masculinity is a form of exaggeration and ornamentation (gems even have their own tassles), like a male bird’s mating dance. Gloria’s face and hand gestures communicate her surprise at, and her appreciation of, the phallus/book’s ostentatious size and shape, saying, ‘I’ll bet I know what kind of book that is.’ She is responsive to the ritual display he enacts for her benefit -- and for us, as he looks at the viewers, for we are the third party in this love triangle. Had she placed a 'bet' as she suggests, she would have won. She certainly knows what kind of book it is in a literal sense: a book that records and displays the Rich family's riches. But does she know what kind of book it is in a symbolic sense? Like the superhero comic, the children’s humor comic can often explore an erotic power fantasy, playing out a cultural script about gender, money, and desire -- a sexual economy that the child (Richie, Gloria, the reader) intuits yet cannot articulate.

But they're not adults; they're just kids in a kid’s comic . . .

Money Aura

Gallows Humor Exhibit in Detroit

2010-01-12T14:17:00.001-08:00

You know the year is off to a good start if I'm searching for myself on Findagrave.com; I'm listed more than once! I also have a small drawing in the exhibition "Funny/Not Funny" at the University of Michigan's Work-Detroit Gallery: January 22, 2010-February 26, 2010.

The Smartest Kid in China

2010-01-11T09:01:00.001-08:00

Courtesy of Tim H. comes this link to a flicker set of 54 photos of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan ("Traditional Chinese Edition").

A Cover of the Decade

2010-01-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

“Sentimentality” has become a bad word, a term used to describe art that wants only to make us feel good about ourselves: Through its excesses, the sentimental text manipulates us, generating a heightened emotional response that confirms our belief that we are deeply sensitive people. But there are other kinds of sentimentality than that practiced by, say, Thomas Kinkade or the Lifetime network.

This New Yorker cover by Ivan Brunetti, my favorite winter scene, shows a restrained sentimentality that’s seldom seen, perhaps because it’s so difficult to pull off. The cover references and revises a number of familiar sentimental scenarios:

First—a girl under the moon, a traditional pairing that evokes a longstanding association of femininity and the moon, and often suggests an imperfect romance (romantic scenes often occur under moonlight). The figure could be viewed, sentimentally, as one of pathos simply because she is skating alone. But the “romance” here does not look outward toward an absent lover, but inward; the skater’s eyes are closed, and there’s a contemplative, contented expression on her face.

Second—a classic formulation of sentimentality is “virtue under duress,” and we see a muted version of that here. While the image "feels" placid, there’s a sense of danger. Ignoring the obvious concerns, the skater (flaunting convention as many literary sentimental heroines have) has jumped the fence during the New England ‘January Thaw’ (the cover is dated January 8th).

Yet there's also a figurative sense of safety that's created by the design. She is within an implied 'circle' that's formed by all of the circular objects in the image:

Some traditions of sentimental art feature strong moral and visual contrasts, creating a moral-aesthetic value system. Brunetti’s cover recalls this approach, but is far more subtle. The cover is balanced by opposing images/objects, but is never symmetrical.

The moon is somewhat aligned with the path and the skater; the blue fields of the sky and the buildings are echoed in the water and its light ripples, but in different shades. The natural motion of the skater (her curlicue trail) reacts with the barren, ‘weeping’ trees and against the rising skyscrapers that tower over her; and the doodle-like looseness of her legs and body are set against the firm lines and block shapes of the buildings. Her naturalness appears to confront both the city’s artificial constructed-ness and the creeping dangers of nature – she’s “on thin ice” (the cover’s title). We can see her as actions as admirable, but also a little reckless; perhaps she should open her eyes. We have a sentimental investment in her; we worry. [The tone of the marginal drawings also balances the main image's mood -- they’re a series of light comic gags about melting.]

In many literary and visual traditions, the favored sign of sentimentality is the tear. One harsh critic of 19th-century sentimental novels even created a “lachrymal index” in which he derisively listed instances of characters crying. While there are no real tears here, teardrops and teardrop-like gestures are plentiful: the snow dripping from the tress, the dozens of lit windows (which are not square but teardrop shaped), and the melting New Yorker logo (if it were to worry about the cover’s protagonist, its tears might be white).

All of these images, plus the scenario itself, suggest the pathos of genuine sentimentality without the excess associated with the mawkish type. Holiday images often drown in their own sentimentality, but this cover, like the skater herself, moves lightly on its surface.
_______________________________________________

*Here are a few images that feature skating in New York’s Central Park, a visual tradition in which we could think about the New Yorker cover --

Winslow Homer: Skating on the Ladies’ Skating Pond in the Central Park, New York (1860):

Currier and Ives: Central Park Winter - The Skating Ring (1862):

Thomas Kinkade: Skating in the Park (1989):

2009-12-25T04:42:00.001-08:00

A Book of the Decade: Ice Haven

2009-12-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

There is a panel in Daniel Clowes’s “comic-strip novel” Ice Haven in which a boy named Charles tears up a paperback copy of The True Story of Leopold and Loeb.

It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.

Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.

Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.

Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,

others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,

one narrates through letters,

and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?

For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.

Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)

features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.

The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.

The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.

Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.

Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.

You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.

On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,

and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”

In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.

Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.

The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.

Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”

In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.

It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.

[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]

Norakuro on the street.

2009-12-22T10:46:00.001-08:00

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Self-Storage

2009-12-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

These were drawn over the years for Giant Robot group show grids and are parked here in the spirit of blog as self-storage unit. I think the kanji says, "Piss off!" I copied it out of a Japanese-English phrasebook.

Abner Dean's Notebook, Part IV

2009-12-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

There used to be a door here

Our ever changing maze – eyes that you once looked into have become opaque. But, while it’s sad (this disappointment of you – you, unfulfilled) why should there always be a door for you – have you one for others. There never was a door anywhere – magic doors exist only in tales calculated to arrest our development and continue our servitude to debatable standards. They have you – with your futile searching for magic doors to ease your bruise. Will you never discover who the “they” is – or will you just continue seeking the temporary solace of an occasional door that you thought you remembered being open. Create a world without need for sanctuary. It’s a sanctuary from yourself.
_______________________________________________

I hate apple pie

We’re trapped again by our submission to convention – to the average – to the great, universal nothing. All you have to do to be handed nothing (which most of you have learned to digest so that it supports life like the substance a steer browses on) is stand in line. Everyone can have his share if he doesn’t seek further. Is there anything better than apple-pie?
_______________________________________________

Everyone must have a label

I put all those labels on by myself – and notice I have an eraser because quite often I’m wrong. Fortunately these labels are only visible to my own eyes – and I’ve had the experience of being contradicted – “he is!” – “he isn’t!” “She is!” – “She used to be!” – “She isn’t!” I seem to have neglected my own label – I’m much too modest. There’s the other side of this idea. Everyone should indeed have a label – easily legible – no confusion – names and numbers of every player. Whom shall I say called? Friend or foe? Will the Senator from the honorable state say what the hell he really means! – Label, son – where’s your label? Not to hide behind – but to reveal you – or how I wish for a time of a universal label – one that says beware of imitations – without this sign it is not an authentic human being.

American Boyhood from 1830-1885

2009-12-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

The University of Tennessee Press has just released Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and 'The Boy-Problem' in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. I began the project around a decade ago, while a graduate student at the University of Virginia. A few chapters have been published along the way, but I feel a sense of relief and satisfaction that the book is finally in print.

A few related things:
1. An old Blog Flume post that has images from boys' books of the period, some of which appear in the book.
2. An uncorrected proof of part of the introduction (it's close to the final version).
3. An excerpt from the UTP's promotional copy:

. . . Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885.

Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys’ novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture’s ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, “The Medicine of Sympathy,” Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that “boy-nature” posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys’ conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century – to investigate not only Alcott’s fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to “be a man.” Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy’s sense of himself and his masculinity . . .

Mechanicals

2009-11-23T06:26:00.001-08:00

Here is unused artwork by Daniel Clowes for Victor Banana's album Split. I think I may have pasted these up around the same time the Neil Smythe CD was being mastered. The Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron soundtrack had sold well enough to break even, so, drunk with power, I assumed I would be able to release a whole line of products. There's a panel in the Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron book this reminds me of--a character admonishes, "I'm sick of everybody using my store as a through street!" Since the formats are now forgotten, I've posted these templates for any old-timer who wants to make a cassette for their big rig.

Abner Dean's Notebook, Part III.

2009-11-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

[Part one and part two . Click on images to enlarge. The commentary in italics below the cartoon is Dean's.]
__________________________________________________

Nearer to the heart’s desire

As long as there’s anyone making a more beautiful mud pie in a column of sunlight in the heart of despair -- there’s hope. Hope for a world reconstructed. Nothing has to be the way it is. Only the earth has continuity (or what we consider continuity in relation to our limits) -- man is not complete -- nor are his mores. He and they are changing. There is a slow and bloodless revolution in progress. None of our concepts or constructions are necessarily permanent. Out of a good mud pie may come a new world.

It would be easy to read this drawing as a condemnation of the character in the sunbeam, who seems completely oblivious to the suffering around him. (He looks at the dog, not at the parade of people). In this way, he seems to share the sense of self-delusion often possessed by Dean's main characters. But here, as elsewhere, Dean's comments show an appreciates for those who try to imagining new ways of seeing, thinking, and making art. Even if the result appears comical (an ordered mound of dirt and water), it shows a desire to imagine -- and to try to create -- a better reality, one that can have positive social consequences.

So rather than coming from above, it is as if the beam of light emerges (like the flower) from the mud pie, a comment on the generative power of art, and its ability to illuminate social realities in an abstract way. Perhaps Dean is telling us it's not that the main character ignores the suffering around him, but that the others overlook the hope in their midst.

[In the third to the last sentence, Dean writes (gradual) in a different pen above "and," suggesting that he may have wanted this sentence to read: There is a slow and gradual and bloodless revolution in progress.]
________________________________________________

There’s a place I want to take you to

Funny our relationship -- funny our struttings. Birds preen their feathers -- we caress our secret knowledge -- and use it as the lure. It’s a comment on our own lack of magic. Never do you say, “I want this place where we are to have magic for you.” It’s always the secret, the far, the elusive, the seemingly special -- the obscure that you use to fascinate. What happened to your power -- to your poetry where you are. If it doesn’t exists here it wont exist for you or her anywhere.

I like to imagine that Dean not only wanted us to take the title's pronouns as referring to characters in the cartoon ("I" = man and "you" = the woman -- though I think the reverse works, too, as both seem to be willing partners in this game), but to see the pronouns as referring to author and audience: "I" is Dean and "you" is the reader. And Dean is often equally elusive when it comes to the exact place he wants to take us to --

Unintentional Connections

2009-11-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

I was reading a '70s issue of The Avengers and I thought about Ivan Brunetti. In his excellent book

he points out "some common pitfalls," one of which is "unintentional connections" between images in different panels:

A page in The Avengers #152 [1976] (pencils by John Buscema) seems to have this problem:

Two connections -- the leg in panel 1 'joining' the arm in 3, plus the torso in 2 'jutting' from the hip in 1 -- create some visual confusion and impede a clear reading of the fight scene.

On the first reading, the connections felt like a flaw to me, but looking at the sequence again, I'm not so sure. When you take in the page as a whole, they give the fight a sense of circular motion. Or they're a result of questionable planning. . . [The cover of the issue is by Kirby and Ayers]

Love Punishes the Guilty!

2009-11-09T08:42:00.001-08:00

This story was originally published in The Comics Journal Special Edition of Winter 2004, but in black and white and on a single page measuring 12 by 12 inches. Reformatting it meant redrawing the opening:

Maybe this new version will appear years from now in a barrel scraper.

Abner Dean's Notebook, Part II.

2009-11-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

[See here for part 1, which explains some things.]

________________________________________________

This thing has meaning [click on images to enlarge]

The beginnings of philosophy -- now if you can only find the meaning you have the all. But it’s good even if you only come to the point of suspecting a meaning. If you can be part of the flow and aware of it at the same time (which doesn’t seem apparent here) you can get out of your bucket.

________________________________________________

Some days I feel confident

Confidence in itself has no real validity -- mayhem and horror have been created by people with confidence. Humanity should always be, perhaps, in a state of semi-confidence. Confidence obscures awareness -- resists understanding and denies relationships and rights. No man individually has a right to confidence.

In a different pen, Dean added "(individually)" with an arrow indicating that this word should be inserted after "man." So, the final sentence first read: No man has a right to confidence. Dean's philosophy emphasized that understanding our connection with others was crucial if we were to understand ourselves, so it's not surprising that he would see the "right to confidence" in social terms.

The Believer 2009 Art Issue!

2009-11-05T10:25:00.000-08:00

We're pleased to announce that the new 2009 Art Issue of The Believer features:

An exceptionally spectacular crossover cover by the estimable Charles Burns
Paintoonist Jerry Moriarty (The Complete Jack Survives) in conversation with cartoonist Chris Ware

The debut of the new monthly "Comics" spread, including all-new strips by Tim Hensley, Lisa Hanawalt, Matt Furie, Charles Burns, Al Columbia, Tom Gauld, and many more, edited by Alvin Buenaventura

A huge fold-out double sided poster with art by Jerry Moriarty
An interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb by Hillary Chute
An interview with cartoonist and musician Peter Blegvad
and so much more...

Unseen on Covers

2009-11-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

A few days back, I wrote an appreciation-analysis of Moench, Jones, and Madsen's Batman Unseen #1 and #2. The comics racks at my local shop has somewhere around 70 new comics today -- and Batman Unseen #3 is the only cover to have a word balloon. This choice clearly seems to be part of the author's decision to evoke a retro feel, and though a word balloon on a cover shouldn't seem like a risk, given current trends, it almost seems a little subversive; and it's a small reason why this comic stands out to me . . .

The Notebook

2009-11-03T13:39:00.001-08:00

Abner Dean’s papers include notebooks in which he commented on dozens of cartoons from his 1947 collection What Am I Doing Here? In this commentary he adopts different personas: in some he talks as if he were a character in the drawing; in others he sympathizes with or scolds characters or the reader in his own voice; in many he offers either straightforward or obscure observations on the cartoon; and in others he moves between these approaches. Dean’s comments are a strange and compelling form of criticism on his own work, the kind that we don’t often get to hear from an artist. I don't know why Dean wrote these kind of notebooks, when they were written, or if he ever shared them with anyone . . .

I use quotations from the notebooks in an essay on Dean in Comic Art #9, but on the blog today (and in the next few weeks) I will post cartoons and writing from Dean that did not appear in that essay. [Dean's text is in italics below, in part because it's in cursive in the notebooks -- click images to enlarge.]

_____________________________________________
I'm important

Well! don’t just stand there! Prove it! I don’t have to prove it –– I got monuments, coats of arms, bigger feet than you have –– smaller feet than you have –– a higher forehead –– anyway I descend from ancestors. The record is written –– I can coast. I’m the fulfillment. I’m really a bauble headed brachycephalic babitt in this response. Is it possible that anything yet is a monument to my own importance or yours? Our survival so far is pure accident –– and the accident has humored us long enough it seems. I can prove I’m important not by monuments to my past ego –– but by a continuous developing state of logic and peace. I can’t be important by myself. Take back your metals and your monuments. etc.

_____________________________________________
You can give too much of yourself

Of course you recognize yourself -- you're the man inside the lunch counter! Or are you someone else in this group? Look again -- inside yourself.

2009-11-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

Unseen

2009-10-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

Perhaps out of some misguided allegiance to my youth (when I was a “reader-collector” of Marvel and DC comics), or even out of some need (equally misguided) to prove to myself that I'm not an “art comics snob,” I've long been scanning the new comics racks for a mainstream-superhero title that I could “follow.” With the exception of Marvel’s Omega the Unknown (by a team fully outside of the mainstream stable of writers and artists), nearly every comic I have purchased or read in the store (a lot) has been a disappointment, especially the horrible Jimmy Olsen one-shots of the past year. Even the work of Grant Morrison (I just stopped reading his Batman and Robin), is a kind of letdown. I have been told for decades, and once believed, that Morrison is not just a great writer of comics, but a great writer. In his current Batman series, Morrison creates villains who are pretty creepy, scenes that are somewhat disturbing, and avoids most of the clichés that bury other writers. Frank Quitely’s art is stylish, but his line is so thin at times that it seems to disappear into the color. The comic’s solid, but that’s about all I can say for it.

I have been reading another Batman series, one that rises above corporate sub-mediocrity to the level of interesting and successful entertainment: Batman Unseen.

[click images to enlarge ]

What first attracted me to the comic, and one of the main reasons it works, is Michelle Madsen’s coloring, which manages to be both “moody” and bright, almost garish (attractively so) in its gloss. She avoids the coloring clichés that plague many current superhero comics, such as "muddy brown scene with indistinguishable characters" means “this story is seriously intense and grim.” Here is her "signature" in first panel of issue #2: a stained glass window with blocks of bright colors.

The way that artist Kelley Jones designs the white spaces on some of the pages functions in concert with Madsen’s color schemes. Jones uses a lot of white space and large gutter-like areas to ensures that all of the elements of the layout are easily read. And the pages often have an "airy" and open feel, a look that's surprising in a comic that uses so many horror tropes:

While computer fonts typically clash with the natural hand of the artist, Madsen's bold coloring of the sound effects here integrates them into the look of the panel and page by echoing the colors of nearby objects -- I still prefer hand lettering, but the coloring helps:

The comic evokes the simple and blocky color patterns of silver age superhero comics and makes use of computer-based shading effects in a manner that's unobtrusive:

Though Jones’s art often creates the dark atmosphere typical in Batman comics, it always displays a nice blend of comedic exaggeration and horror tropes; so the story never gets weighed down, trying to tell us visually that we must take it seriously, even when we are seeing some fairly dramatic images of Gotham:

(I like how the areas of red and yellow stand off against the grays and blacks. Even a night scene that's dense in Jones's trademark shadows and thick black areas somehow becomes bright.)

The humor in Jones’s art is not ironic or parodic -- the story is a crime drama and works as such; but again, there’s something about the cartoony aspects of his art that keep the brooding within bounds, as in this dutch angle panel with angular shadows:

Subtitled “A Lost Tale of Bruce Wayne as Batman,” Batman Unseen appears to be completely outside of the cosmic crossover continuity chaos that makes so many current mainstream comics unreadable for me. It’s a bit of a throwback, a very pulpy comic with a mad scientist-invisible man, and some two-bit hoods directed by a super-villain type. But writer Doug Moench never overplays his pulp hand in a self-conscious way, and nothing is being revised, rebooted, etc . . . There’s very little pretense: it’s far more entertaining detective fiction than collectible superheroic drama, and it helps that the comic focuses more on the cast of criminals than on Batman.

One pulpy feature that works very well is the way that Moench and Jones open each issue’s many chapters with an image of Batman as a kind of host-narrator, a silent version of the horror comic convention of the comedic narrator. There’s a light humor to many of these set ups that, for a moment, takes us out of the narrative's continuity and contributes to the comic's "ludic sensibility":

Here’s a two-page spread from issue #1: an ad for a DC comic (Blackest Night) followed by the last page of the Unseen story. It offers an unintended contrast, one that sets Jones's approach side-by-side with the typical machismo that pervades many superhero comics. In the ad, all of the characters' hand and mouth gestures and poses evoke, in their "extreme attitude," the unfortunate excesses of the 1990s Image comics house style. Jones uses some similar gestures and poses, but renders faces, hands, and bodies very differently. And the attractive, light and loose lines he employs to draw the disappearing scientist and his lab materials shows an artistic playfulness and stylishness absent in the ad and comics like the one it's selling:

So far, Batman Unseen has been an entertaining comic.

Halloween is Magic

2009-10-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a three-page story from Bugs Bunny #102, November 1965. Bugs demonstrates some tricks that you might find useful at a Halloween party.

Black Light Poster

2009-10-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

3M

2009-10-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ken Reid

2009-10-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

These images are admittedly just the result of curious web surfing after watching an old sort of frustrating BBC documentary series called Comics Britannia, a portion of which mentions Ken Reid as an unsung hero. Creepy Creations, not mentioned, reminds me of Plop! covers. Jonah is supposed to be Reid's best work, a character who sinks a ship in every episode in a neat inversion of British naval supremacy.

Tim Hensley, puzzle.

2009-10-02T17:37:00.000-07:00

Act quick. If you want to own 1 of an edition of only 5 hand painted wooden puzzles by comics genius and resident 'flumer' Tim Hensley go here. [5 sold, 0 to go, will do our best to keep this updated... image above, only an example. Each is individual and varies in particles]

Boy's Club

2009-10-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

Please check out Sean T. Collins's review of Matt Furie's Boy's Club 3. One of my SPX highlights was Matt's comments on the "Make it Funny" panel. And he did.

Music Self Played… Is Happiness Self Made!

2009-09-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice old ukulele, decorated and designed by Carl Ed for the Harmony instrument company. There are some great big photos of the uke online showing off the neat cartoon decals and candy colored paintjob. Pretty neat little toy.

As a side note, Google has gone and scanned the entire run of LIFE magazine! A wealth of great photography (including many by my favorite, Margaret Bourke White), and journalism, unearthing small gems of knowledge like the fact that Fort Knox looks like a Banjo Ukulele from above.

Banjo Uke photo linked from the great Antebellum Instruments blog.

Samm Schwartz, Fashionista

2009-09-21T08:26:00.001-07:00

Samm Schwartz is primarily known for his tenure on Jughead, but he also drew stories for Tippy Teen. Part of his work reminds me of The Swami Brahmin in the film The Loved One, who the character Aimee Thanatogenous writes for lovelorn advice. The Swami turns out to be a swarthy cigar chomping worker bee.

Readers would mail letters to comics like Tippy Teen and Millie the Model with their own clothing designs, a sort of inverted precursor to Cosplay, and the artists would incorporate them. Unfortunately, none of the correspondents' drawings have ever appeared; I'm sure they would give the interpretations a run for their money. What I find interesting is how the poses reoccur whether it is Dance Time or Prom Time.

Tippy Teen folded and was later repackaged by Atlas Comics as Vicki in the seventies. To make the stories less dated, sideburns (pictured) and flared pants were added to the artwork, here by Schwartz's cohorts. There was no reader participation.

Below are scans of a quilt made by my wife from fabric scraps found in a drawer in my mom's sewing room. Note the "Samm" signature in the "Candy" swatch. To a bolt found in a fabric shop, Schwartz had nearly broken the fourth wall, but when and why I do not know.

Correction

2009-09-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Ken Parille and Dash Shaw for their flattering blog posts about Wally Gropius. Not to appear ungrateful, but imagine my dismay, however, when both failed to mention the following source material:

This book, easily found on the shelf of every neighborhood thrift store, is much less expensive than commercially available books of poses and hands, though no less ineffective.

Jerry Moriarty

2009-09-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Please check out the two-part interview with Jerry Moriarty at Inkstuds: part one, part two.

Family Guy

2009-09-17T15:21:00.001-07:00

"Yeah, on Tuesday, September 22nd at 7:00 p.m. at Family Books in Los Angeles, there's going to be a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror #15 launch and art shew. Sammy Harkham, Jeffrey Brown, Jordan Crane, Tim Hensley, and Matt Groening will be signing books 15 hours before they hit the shops."

On the Genre of Autobiography

2009-09-14T15:30:00.001-07:00

I learned how to draw comics from library books. Old tomes like Jack Markow's Cartoonist's and Gag Writer's Handbook might explain to render art twice up and use a number 2 brush and ink so the photostat camera could recognize it. By the time I finally assimilated this knowledge picked up piecemeal over the course of many years, photostats were replaced by TIFs from scanners and everyone began drawing same size using colored pencils. In an attempt to avoid being a casualty of mere history, alongside my published work I inadvertently created this four panel strip:

In a sense, this was my true unmediated expression--pure, deeply personal. There was no attempt at composition, containment lines, language... If it resembled stabs in the dark or the frustration with the humidity of the day, it did not trouble me or cause me to reflect on its implications. Perhaps it was an attempt to chase my own ambulance--in recognition of the unplanned obsolescence on both sides of my drawing table.