Fine Art.

Found on a cluttered table set up on 23rd street covered in pieces that ranged in size from 2 inches square to about 10 inches square . The many paintings featured a variety of cartoon characters, often engaging in sex acts. Popeye and Olive Oyl, Blondie and Dagwood, even The Little King (he doesn't wear underpants) were among the appropriated work. A few pieces jumped out and surprised me. Direct transcriptions of Ivan Brunetti's Schizo panels in acrylic paint on little stretched canvases. Here are scans of the two "Ivans" I picked up.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Need-Based Criticism

When the issues of “what comics needs” and “what kinds of criticism will help the art” surface online, I often want to respond; yet I find something a little odd about the way the questions are posed. I don’t really want to make pronouncements on behalf of an art form. And the “what comics needs” way of thinking often implies that criticism is the answer, and it gives critics more power/influence than they really have to diagnose the situation and bring about real change. But here goes anyway:

Much has been made recently of the need for a 'negative criticism' that takes certain comics to task for their failures. Advocates of this position argue that comics can’t grow unless more of this type of criticism is written. But the causal logic (and historical realities) here seems a little off; it makes negative criticism prior to good comics. Advocates of this position believe that negative criticism currently does not exist in a sufficient amount, and yet, I believe, Americans are living in a time of a great growth in quality comics that didn’t require critics in any direct way. Certainly, in a general sense, a more robust critical climate might have a positive effect by elevating standards, but the current standards for cartooning -- the work of Clowes, Ware, Brunetti, Tomine, Kevin H., and others -- are already incredibly high. {Editors could help a lot with standards by employing a constructive criticism that happens before publication: see my short piece here. I’d like to see more critics hold editors accountable for the lack of actual editing . . .}

And while I read a lot about negative criticism, I read less about the need for analytical criticism -- an approach to reading in which the critic focuses on explanation over judgment. I think that if more of any type of criticism is needed it’s this. What matters to me is: does the critic help me to understand something about the comic I likely couldn’t/didn’t figure out myself? does the critic’s reading help me to pay attention to other comics in a new/different way? does the critic challenge conventional wisdom about reading/interpretation that goes beyond praise or condemnation and into thoughtful analysis? Often, if I come away from critical writing with one new concept or way of thinking, that’s enough. And a greater presence of writing that helps and encourages people to read comics carefully would, I hope, lead to something like the higher standards that the NC proponents want. It’s important to note that reviews and negative criticism can be analytical -- but in practice they often aren’t, or at least not to the degree I think would be helpful. (Though it’s certainly always fun to read a well-written takedown of some lame comic. . .)

Currently, the most exciting place for this kind of analytical criticism is online -- but it would be nice to see more in print. I think The Comics Journal especially could do some positive thing in this regard -- some suggestions:

1. a recurring feature in which different writers analyze at length an influential comic of, say, the last 10 years. It should be heavily illustrated with examples, something I’d like to see much more of in writing about comics in general -- people digging deep into images . . .

2. a feature in which writers and cartoonists focus on an aspect of comics theory that is presented in a way suited to a non-scholarly but well-informed readership -- it should be free from the tics of academic writing yet engage issues important to both academics and general readers.

3. a feature in which cartoonists talk in detail about a small portion of their work; for example, a discussion of all the choices and decisions that went into a single panel or page.

4. analytical interviews: interviews that avoid that typical biographical approach and ask probing questions about the work.


Irrelevant images from Tippy Teen #12 (Tower Comics - 1967) [I love that the money has $ signs emanating from it -- and that the exclamation points in the balloons are so stylized.]

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Mod Gag

This is the inside front cover to The Modniks #1 (1967). I can come up with a few guesses about the gag, but I am not sure I get it. Is he offering to set their hair since they are not interested in getting it cut - what exactly would that entail? Do you have any explanations? The art looks like Lee Holley . . .

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

POV and Autobiography

David Chelsea, a cartoonist who doesn’t get the kind of attention he deserves in art comics circles, has released a strong new minicomic from Top Shelf that includes two stories done in 2005 and 2007 as part of the 24-hour comic “movement.” The first story in 24x2 is particularly interesting to me because of claims that Chelsea makes about truth, autobiography, and cartooning strategies of representation.

He argues that well-known autobiographical comic creators like Crumb, Pekar, Paley, and Spiegelman “get it wrong.” They falsify experience by employing what could be called an “objective camera” point of view instead of a “subjective camera,” which would truthfully represent experience by showing only what the artist saw when he/she lived the events of the story. Objective camera implies, for Chelsea, that an observer other than the cartoonist is doing the recording; and so, for example, the cartoonist/protagonist can be seen from behind, when the cartoonist should only show what appeared in front of him. I doubt Chelsea thinks that these artists are really wrong (perhaps he does, though; he uses the word “wrong” nine times on the first page.) Perhaps he just wants to make us aware of a strategy employed in conventional auto-bio that he thinks needs to be examined.


I think, however, that there are a number of ways in which his analysis could be complicated and taken further. Chelsea wants to draw our attention to an important choice that many cartoonists make, but there are a number of other choices he doesn’t discuss that I think are equally relevant -- and maybe even more important than POV -- to his argument.

The minute you put your experiences into comics, and certainly into the form in which Chelsea and many other cartoonists do, you are “falsifying” or modifying reality. There seems to me to be no reason to assume that a representational approach like “subjective camera” has any more claim on truth than any other. A cartoonist can easily re-imagine a personal experience from a more expansive point of view. And the rightness or wrongness, for readers at least (if not the cartoonist), will come from a hard to define aspect of the comic, often the way it relates to their experiences of the world; i.e., does it have 'the ring of truth?” -- whatever that is . . .

Chelsea relies heavily on rectangular panels and borders, yet we look at the world through a vision that gets fuzzier and less precise towards the margins of the field of view. So perhaps a more “truthful” -- which is to say a literately accurate method in Chelsea’s way of thinking -- would not use rectangular panels or borders at all, but would feature images that fade at the outer limits or blend into the margins of the page. Maybe something like one of Anders Nilsen’s page layouts would begin to get at this “truth”:

As its name implies, subjective camera is inherently limited, yet Chelsea often limits his panel choices even further to shots in which the implied viewer position is often only a few feet away from the objects he sees/draws.


I think it would be more accurate call his approach in 24x2 something like “subjective camera/close-ups.” It offers restricted notions of “subjective camera” and of human vision -- we can see with far greater variety in "shots," from intense close-ups to extreme long shots (see Dan Clowes's The Stroll below). But “subjective camera/close-ups” is a very effective strategy in creating the kind of claustrophobic anxiety and drama that Chelsea exploits in his second comic, Sleepless.

Also: Chelsea’s comic is black and white and most of us experience the world in a vast collection of colors -- in Chelsea’s own terms then, black and white should also be “wrong.” The same can be said about the many panels in which the background disappears, focusing the reader on the character in the foreground -- this, too doesn’t quite happen in real life; though peripheral details can be out of focus, they still are visible. Another potential problem for “authenticity” is that subjective camera comics often feature a character who looks at the cartoonist and therefore appears to be looking directly at the reader:

This can create a jarring sensation (though an interesting one in many cases), like when an actor accidentally looks into the camera. So a strategy that avoids this situation might appear to be realistic/truthful to most readers, even though it rejects the primacy of the cartoonist’s perspective. In this way, readers might think that Crumb, for example, gets it right by not generally relying on this POV.

Of course, I'm not saying that there’s anything wrong with subjective camera, only with claims about its relationship to truth. Dan Clowes plays with the idea of objectivity in “Daniel G. Clowes in ‘Just Another Day,’” a story about autobiographical comics:

And Clowes has one of the great 1st person-cartoonist POV stories, The Stroll, which is not explicitly identified as autobiography, but appears to be so:


Despite my differences with Chelsea, I like the fact that he creates a strip about approaches to narration, something under-discussed in comics. I hope people will checkout 24x2.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Future Acme

I hadn't seen this cover image on any blogs, and so thought I would post it. According to Amazon, Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #19 will be released in December.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

The Trons.

Found this while perusing a dorky guitar message board.

The Trons are from New Zealand. This is all I know about the Trons.
Direct Youtube link.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Nicely Drawn Boy

Here's a gallery of images featuring boys. These engravings, which are fairly typical of those in American books from around 1840-1870, are taken from boys' novels, a girls' novel, a teachers' advice manual, and an anti-corporal punishment treatise. Some of these will appear in a book I've written on 19th-century New England boyhood that'll be out in 2009.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

A Glamorous Life

Dave Sim and his fans and critics are going yet another round over the Cerebus creator’s attitudes towards women. I find it hard to get worked up over this issue -- Sim seems to be fairly isolated and so the only person likely harmed by his ideas is himself. Yet what does agitate me about his work is

all of the errors in it. His recent comic glamourpuss is loaded with proofreading problems; there are missing periods and misspelled words, and chronic inconsistency in the use of dashes, capitalization, possessives, and bold text.

These errors might not be important for some readers, yet I think they reveal a major problem with this comic and the production of alternative comics in general -- the lack of editorial oversight. Even more than artists, publishers and editors bear responsibility for this task. Their job is to present the artists in the best possible light: in other words, leave them alone when that benefits the work and make suggestions when it helps. Sim has no editor and proofreader (at least none are listed in the credits) and so does it all himself -- a noble goal, but in this case not the best choice. When I read comics by my favorite creators, I rarely find mistakes like this, and never to this degree -- they are obsessive types who pay attention to every detail. It’s also true that in a book of a certain length, it’s hard to avoid a few problems creeping in, even when you use a team of copy-editors. Yet a comic page typically has far less text than a prose page, so getting it almost free of these problems shouldn't be impossible.

You could argue, and you'd be correct to a large extent, that comics are different than prose, and therefore should not be subject to the same kinds of “rules” and expectations. In prose, for example, a sentence has some form of period-based punctuation at the end: ., !, or ?. But a sentence in a word balloon might not

and it can read just fine. The problem in general is one of communication and consistency. When the lack or (mis)use of punctuation leads to confusion/annoyance for the reader (the kind the artist doesn’t want), chances are something’s gone wrong. And the best reason to find and correct such problems is that a reader will stay focused on the comic and not be distracted.

If I were Sim’s proofreader, a quick count reveals around 90-100 things I would ask him about -- that's a lot for a 25 page comic (there is, granted, a lot more text on these pages than in most comics). Here are just a few of the problems as I see them in glamourpuss:

They begin on the cover: there’s no period in the last balloon.

Is this intentional? It looks OK to me, and had Sim been consistent in the book I would assume that it was intentional -- a strong artist can make any deviation seem right by the context in which it appears. The possessive of glamourpuss appears here as glamourpuss’ -- but on page 22 both glamourpuss’ and glamourpuss’s are used. Both of these forms are accepted (many prefer the latter), but why the inconsistency?


It doesn’t look to me like Sim is paying attention -- he seems to care far more about the art than the writing.

Periods:

I can’t find any consistency with his use of periods. Some sentences in caption boxes or balloons have them, some don’t. Some sentences outside of these have them, some don’t. This problem exists multiple times on nearly every page. The most important reason to use periods consistently is that they guide readers as to how to read the text - when a period was absent, I would assume that the sentence continued into the next part of the balloon. Then, it seemed like he used the frame of the balloon as a period. And when I thought I had this figured out, he would violate it and continue a sentence from a part of the balloon to the next.

Dashes:
Sometime he will use 2 followed by 1: “word -- word – word”
Sometimes 2 by 2: “word -- word -- word”
A character’s name is spelled as Skanko and later as Skank-o.

Bold:
There's no consistency when he bolds an ellipsis.
He will do this: "word word word . . ." and the ellipsis is in bold.
And then "word word word . . ." and the ellipsis is not in bold.
Page 21: he writes “Beyond Noir Style” and then “Beyond Noir Style”:

Quotes and punctuation:
Sometimes: “word.” other times: “word ”.

Production:
Part of a balloon is noticeably chopped off on page 24.

Etc . . .

And if this post seems pedantic to you, fair enough -- but "comics are art too," and why not have high expectations or at least the same expectations as those you have for other art forms? I've never met a poet or fiction writer who didn't care about such details. I wonder if comic readers/publishers have lower standards -- would they accept this level of problems in other kinds of books?

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Volume 2

This October, Yale University Press will release the second volume of Ivan Brunetti's An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. From Yale: "The book presents contemporary art comics produced by 75 artists, along with some classic comic strips and other related fine art and historical materials. Brunetti arranges the book to reflect the creative process itself, connecting stories and art to each other in surprising ways: nonlinear, elliptical, sometimes whimsical, even poetic. He emphasizes continuity from piece to piece, weaving themes and motifs throughout the volume." The front and back cover feature art by Daniel Clowes, who provides three new strips for the dustjacket flaps. Here's a short interview comic by Brunetti about the book:


{Both images are from the amazon.com listing for the book}

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Guitar Not Comics

This is the cover for a revised version of an instructional book I wrote that has just been re-released. I didn't come up with the title and the picture is not of me . . .

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Shamrock En Espanol

Recently I received out of the blue a copy of a Spanish edition of Mome in the mail, published by La Cupula. While I can only be awed and bewildered by the seemingly thankless effort involved in translating my work, I can also see how it must have proven difficult. In panel two, 'This be a sham reel" has become, near as I can tell, "This dance is pure theater." Also, "Stamps: They Can't Be Licked" has become, I think, "Stamps: Without Rival."

In the future, I suggest translating Mome as Momias...


Or even better perhaps, "Psychological Traumas from the Secret Archive of a Psychiatrist." I bought this historieta last year in San Diego mainly because of the box of Premium crackers in the upper right.

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

(Trapped Inside) The Magic

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Clowes New Yorker Cover

The May 12th issue of the New Yorker features Dan Clowes art on the cover(s)!

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.

Wizard Top 200

Dan Clowes's Enid Coleslaw, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, and Jaime Hernandez's Maggie and Hopey appear on the "Top 200 Greatest Characters of All Time!" list in the current issue of esteemed industry news and investment advice periodical Wizard. An interesting and surprising piece is the sidebar "Who's Sadder: Jimmy Corrigan or Earth-2 Aqualad?" Spoiler alert: Number 1 is

...click here to read the rest of this post...

...Okay, all done.