For 61 flavors of Tico Tico, visit WFMU.
For more of Ms. Smith…
These scenes are taken from the MGM film from 1944 Bathing Beauty.
Bonus: Update on the whereabouts of that Hammond. And, Ms. Smith herself. Look at that incredible signature!
Monday, January 14, 2008
Let's go below the border for some South American jive!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Tomine / New York Times
Today's New York Times Magazine (1/13) has a cover by Adrian Tomine. The feature story on morality also includes some large color illustrations by the cartoonist.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Reading Samson by a tree.
From Shorpy–July 1941. Youngsters at the Fourth of July picnic in Vale, Oregon. 35mm nitrate negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. Click the image to view a larger scan of this photo.
Reading: Fantastic Comics. Not sure which issue. Hopefully that one features a Stardust story.
Reading: Fantastic Comics. Not sure which issue. Hopefully that one features a Stardust story.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
The Book of Other People
A panel from Clowes's "Justin M. Damiano":
A panel from Ware's "Jordan Wellington Lint":
Trick Out Your Hoopty
Recognizing that many of us are discomfitted by the rigors of brand compliance at least to the extent of preferring one trademark to another, these are merely two examples to get you started. They feature Wally Gropius, Teen Millionaire--in usage since 2005.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
R. Crumb's Underground
I curated this big retrospective exhibition "R. Crumb's Underground," which ran at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last March-July, and is now traveling to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, opening January 26. Alvin posted these Yerba Buena pre-opening installation shots on his website during the original run, but here they are again for anyone who didn't see them... it also might be of interest for some of the folks who see the show in Seattle to compare and contrast.
I spent the week leading up to the opening in San Francisco working with all the great people at the museum on the installation, and I was really proud of how it turned out. It's always tricky working on these comic exhibitions--there's a great deal of responsibility to remain true to the work, while providing a historical/cultural context, as well as bearing witness to the process the originals go through in their functional life. So wall labels must provide a sound framework and lay out organizing thematic principles--without dictating terms. And photos, printed material, roughs, videos, and the like need to deepen the impact while not creating a linear cause and effect/connect the dots dynamic that can become way too overbearing. The proper balance is fine indeed, and you ultimately have to know how to step back and let the art speak for itself: it's of the utmost importance to create a respectful environment for the work and make sure the presentation and background you've devised are intellectually responsible, but then by all means get out of the way (I get the sneaking suspicion that many curators think the work on display is little more than clip art to shuffle around in composition of their grand artistic statement).
Anyway, this show in its SF incarnation was the most successful I've ever worked on at navigating these issues, and it was some fun. I can't make it out to Seattle to help with the installation this time, but I'm sure it'll be just as mind-bending there--we managed to secure an embarrassment of riches from many generous private collectors, galleries, and the man himself, so it'd honestly be sort of tough to go wrong--close to 200 originals (mostly ink on paper, 'natch, but also paintings and sculpture), with tons of your favorites as well as some true surprises. The show spans the homemade comics Mr. Crumb did with brother Charles when they were kids all the way to work from the last few years (including many collaborations), with an emphasis on the world-changing late '60s comics and sketchbooks.
R. Crumb's Underground at the Frye
Oh, and I visited Robert and Aline and interviewed them for an "audio tour" that accompanies the exhibition, so don't miss out on hearing their great stories. The show will head to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia late this year, so maybe some of you East coasters can also check it out. If the folks at the Frye are okay with it, I'll post my wall texts later in case anyone who can't see the show would care to read them.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Oxnard Boulevard at 4th Street
My wife Yoshiko's parents live in Oxnard, California, an hour outside of Los Angeles. They own a market in neighboring Saticoy where the freeway used to go. Oxnard used to be a small farming town. Yoshiko has often said her fellow high school graduates were bound for the military. The city barely has a skyline, one medium tall office building visible from the freeway. Over the years that we have driven up to visit though, it has become overdeveloped; where used to be farmlands ten years ago are now long stretches of strip malls and factory outlets.
Oxnard is also where the Hernandez brothers grew up, and I've often been struck by how the town appears to have seeped ineffably into their kinesthetic backdrop vocabulary. The ranch style houses found in Jaime's and Gilbert's panels can still be found on blocks where they haven't been replaced by new condos. On our most recent visit though, I would not have known that we had driven by where Rolly's Restaurant, pictured below, used to be if Yoshiko had not told me.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Moon Bloat Carrier
Thursday, December 27, 2007
This Again
One of the most tired and unimaginative criticisms of ‘alt comics’ is the following: desperate for validation by the literary elite, cartoonists create boring stories about the uninteresting problems of average people so that The New Yorker and their ilk will reassure them that they are worthy. This argument presumes an intimate knowledge of the cartoonists’ psyches that the critic never has; and those who make this argument are rarely good readers of the comic that’s right in front of them, so how can we put much faith in their analysis of a human being? Most artists would like to be appreciated by smart readers, but to reduce the many motivations that drive them to a single, overwhelming need to be loved by the ‘tastemakers’ shows a real lack of depth or suggests that The Critic is posing (“He’s too smart to really believe that, right?”). Why is he upset that others create comics that he doesn’t like? I assume that artists are trying to make a comic that they believe is good, interesting, funny, moving, or truthful, etc, even when I think it stinks.
Then The Critic will direct his attention to the reader, psychoanalyzing him by making (surprise!) the same argument. This reader, the critic says, thinks that “if the elitists like the comics I like, then I can feel good about myself and the comics I read; respectability, long sought, will finally be mine.” (I have never met anyone like this . . .) So, if you make or like a comic the critic doesn’t like, it must be because you are deeply insecure: he can see no other reason and can’t imagine that other people think differently than he does or like different kinds of stories. Why, though, does this critic constantly return to the issue of validation?
Comics in general have not achieved the status of, say, the novel, but the debate about acceptance is really on its way to being over, a fact that makes these complaints a waste of time, and a bit foolish. Comics by ‘alt-cartoonists’ in particular are being reviewed and printed in mainstream periodicals; their books are being published by major publishing houses, being made into films, and being read in more and more high school and college courses . . .
A cartoonist whose work I sometimes like and whose political essays I usually agree with makes some of these complaints here. Not only does Rall rehash these arguments and offer confident claims about cartoonists’ and readers’ sex lives, but he shows himself to be a shaky reader by the unfounded assumptions and misrepresentations he makes; for example, he calls woman in Ware’s strip a “spinster,” an often derogatory term almost never applied to anyone as young as this main character. Here’s another one: “Daniel Clowes' "Mister Wonderful" treads standard art-comics territory: unattractive boy meets dowdy girl.” It matters a great deal that these main characters are not a boy and girl, but two middle-aged adults with decades of relationship trouble behind them, a history that two teenagers simply could never have. Clearly Rall is trying to be cute here, but he intentionally misrepresents the age of the characters in Clowes’s and Ware’s comics to make them appear to be something they aren’t. If after reading a review/essay, you come away with a completely mistaken impression of what the comic is about, you know the writer is not to be trusted . . . . Is he afraid that if he describes them accurately, they might actually sound appealing?
“I don't know why anyone cares about what other people read,” Rall asks. It’s a good question, one he should ask of himself . . .
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Frank O'Hara
I am actually not very familiar with O'Hara's poetry, but I remembered this one from college, thus the orange.
Four Great Stories of 2007
The following is not a best-of list or a series of reviews, but short discussions of why these books are some of my favorites from 2007, and would be favorites in any year in which they appeared. I focus a few things that I find particularly interesting in each story as a way of trying to explain something that I find appealing about the cartoonist’s approach in general.
*Gilbert Hernandez Chance in Hell
One of the things that’s so compelling about Hernandez’s work is its use of striking visual shifts; he often transitions from (in film terms) a very long shot into a mid shot, or alternates directly between shots that imply a dramatically different scope. Moving between these kinds of shots draws a reader’s attention to the ways that various locations, geography, and the characters interact. This is particularly true in Chance in Hell, the first part of which takes place in a wasteland on the edge of a city:
Many of the longer views feature a beautifully stylized, yet almost oppressive sky, which seems on the verge of enveloping the characters:
He also often moves between starkly different perspectives and distances, and frequently uses high angle shots, as in the second panel:
Most eye-level shots assume an adult perspective (the image of the man on the first Chance in Hell page above takes a conventional adult point-of-view.) But in the last panel directly above, Hernandez draws from the child's level.
These different shots, angles, and shifting POVs help to create something that’s very hard to define, in Hernandez’s story or anyone else’s: its rhythm. And a way to get at one of the many kinds of rhythms found in a comic is to look at patterns the artist creates with shots or angles (or with the length of scenes, density of panel compositions, variation in the grid/page layouts, etc . . .). [Some argue that you should not use film terms to talk about comics. But as long as you recognize the many differences between comics and films -- i.e., the comic panel doesn’t frame out reality in the way a camera typically does -- I think you can use them whenever they are helpful.]
Also, note the careful design of the above page: the 1st and 3rd panel switch the placement of the sun and the girl (who is seen in silhouette towards the side of the panel); while the 2nd and 4th panels feature her figure in the center (and not as a silhouette.)
Hernandez has a sense of rhythm, scale, and drama that recalls adventure comics and films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, yet he has a genuine sense of strangeness and unpredictability that separates his work from conventional genre stories.
*Daniel Clowes Mister Wonderful
In a powerful scene from chapter 7, Natalie recounts some of her ‘relationship history’ to Marshall (they are on a blind date):
Some of Clowes’s weekly installments have a rhythm in part suggested by their serialization -- a kind of subtle punch-line at the end of each installment; and here the formal inventiveness of the penultimate panel quickly gives way to the traditional comics of the last panel, as Natalie’s emotional recollection is interrupted by the waitress’s mundane comment. Each episode of MW is remarkable for the shift in rhythms it employs, some of which are created by Marshall’s vacillation in moods; his conflicting desire both to confess and to withhold truths about himself from Natalie, the reader, and himself; or from changes in drawing and coloring styles.
[Here’s a different kind of word-picture moment from Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library 18, and one that's equally powerful:]
Much of the elegance of Tomine’s stories derives from the constraints he places on his comics. There’s a profound clarity in his work that comes from a decision to avoid many of the techniques other cartoonists use. These choices encourage us to focus on his dialogue and accompanying facial expressions and bodily gestures, and Tomine is a master of panel composition with a broad range of subtle poses and positions for characters:
The kinds of things I talked about in Hernandez and Clowes are often absent from his work. Tomine prefers mid shots and medium close ups and only occasionally uses slightly high angles -- this creates a rhythm different than Hernandez’s and yet one that’s equally engaging. Unlike Mister Wonderful, every page in Shortcomings uses either 6, 7, 8, or 9 square or rectangular panels arranged in a traditional grid and has a consistent margin size and gutter size; there are no thought balloons or narration boxes; sound effects are limited to roughly two different types of hand-lettered ‘fonts’ with some, but not much, variation in lettering size (page 43 is an exception); and there are no motion or emotion lines or any similar kinds of effects . . .
While avoiding many techniques, he employs some familiar, unpretentious devices that have long been staples of comics; for example, he repeatedly introduces a change in setting with a conventional establishing shot, often of the restaurant in which in a conversation is talking place or the theater in which the main character works:
He uses the whisper version of the word balloons, in which the balloon is made up of dashes, and the telephone conversation word balloon, in which the tail of the unseen speaker’s balloon takes the zig-zag shape often used to represent electricity:
Overall, his use of familiar cartoon devices in the context of his stripped-downed, austere approach creates a style at once elegant and friendly -- a very unusual combination.
*F. C. Ware Acme Novelty Library 18
Critics have sometimes said that Ware’s comics emphasize design over story, and that his formal innovations come at the price of limiting or obscuring the story’s emotional content. I’ll let this page, which addresses the alienation and everyday routines of the main character at different times in her life, answer those criticisms:
More so than many cartoonists, Ware repeatedly focuses on objects, showing how the most mundane item can be invested with emotional weight (perhaps in Ware objects perform the role of geography in Hernandez . . . ). The main character engages in reveries about other people’s lives inspired by seemingly random objects, such as a camera, or in this case, a hook:
Even though the objects are often depicted in small panels (and critics have said that such panels are typically read faster), for me these panel seem to want greater attention; we expect a cartoonist to center on people and places, and so when he focuses an entire panel on a lock we should linger for a moment and consider why.
Every now and then you read a comic in which a character describes or undergoes something unusual and meaningful that has happened to you, and the artist represents it in a way that seems undeniably true:
These kinds of moments are a hallmark of all of the cartoonist discussed above.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Kdo Chce Zabit Jessii?
In "Who Wants to Kill Jessie," a superhero, a cowboy, and a bombshell all spring to life from a cartoon serial in "Technical Review" magazine. It's one of my favorite comic book movies.
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