Yesterday, I mentioned that Kramers Ergot 7 was so big it was on both sides of the family, but did I also not mention that Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction Volume 2 set a blizzard on fire and threw typhus in prison? Kerrang called it "SKULL SHRIVELING MAYHEM...(BRUNETTI) BLEW OFF MY FUCKING FACE TO A PRIME INTEGER." Gladys Merriwether at Good Housekeeping noted that it was "Easier to tote than Comic Book Tattoo...(Provides) endless source material for scrapbooking and decoupage."
Unfortunately, because I am in the book--full disclosure--and because the publicity department of Yale University Press may have indirectly requested blog entries, I suppose to create some sort of imaginary viral phenomenon, and because Mr. Brunetti himself may post on this blog, I may not be at liberty to tell you I find the book inspiring. Brunetti has a neurotic taxonomic associational sense that will draw a parallel between Naughty Pete and Ron Rege or between the washes of Ben Katchor and Frank Santoro. He's also able to parse a seriousness of purpose in Eugene Teal and Elinore Norflus. This is not 52 pickup, but a book I can imagine being taught in school, to which I can only exclaim, "Hooray!" and/or "Rats!"
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Volume 2 of Volume 2
Monday, November 10, 2008
Texas Size Graphic Novel Night
Kramers Ergot 7, the book 9 inches smaller than the fist of Chuck Norris, will be celebrated at a release party at Family Books in Los Angeles this Sunday, November the 16th, at 7:00 pm.
Alvin Buenaventura, Martin Cendreda, Matt Groening, Sammy Harkham, myself, Jaime Hernandez, Walt Holcombe, Geoff McFetridge, John Pham, Ron Rege, Johnny Ryan, Souther Salazar, Josh Simmons, and my parents will be in attendance.
There will also be an exhibition featuring original art from the book.
Ivan Brunetti speaks about his new anthology...
Ivan Brunetti on An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Vol. 2 from Yale University Press on Vimeo.
Ivan Brunetti on “An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Volume 2” from Yale University Press – Video director John Kuramoto brings together dozens of images from leading indie comics artists featured in the book, along with commentary by its editor, award-winning cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. For more info, click here.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Peanuts Punctuation: Prose and Poetry
One thing that interests me about comics is the way that cartoonists use punctuation, especially within word balloons. Charles Schulz is particularly interesting in that his habits seem to change throughout the 50-year run of Peanuts. I can't say that I have read all of the strips, but in skimming through over a dozen collections from different decades to prepare this post I have noticed a few recurring practices and shifts relating to the use of the ellipsis. One thing I rarely see is a sentence that ends in a single period. His common practice is to use the edge of the word balloon as a kind of replacement for it:
Here's an exception from the early 70s:
Punctuation that would be normal for so many cartoonists, is strange for Schulz.
In the early years of the strip, he used some very unusual ellipses; sentences can end with as many as seven periods:
Here's one with five:
This practice, which often appears to be a design feature -- to make a balloon more visually balanced in some way (as above) -- doesn't seem to last too long. I could not locate many ellipses that go beyond four once we leave the early to mid-50s. {The seven period one above is also especially appropriate semantically, coming after the word "wait."}
A favorite form for Schulz is the two-period ellipsis. At first I thought this might be used only when space would not allow for a standard one -- but I quickly realized this isn't the case. From 1963:
There are many such occasions when he could have fit in three. I wonder if the two-period ellipsis reads differently to him than one with three . . as a pause with a different meaning . . .
A few late-90s collections show a heavy use of the two period version, much more so than earlier strips do. Somehow this relates to the shaky line and minimalism of the later strips and may add, in a small way, to their strangeness:
It's often a slight mystery to me why he made the choice that he did; and I can't think of another mainstream comic strip artist who takes an approach to the period/ellipsis quite like Schulz's.
His work is only one example of the ways that text in comics -- and especially in word balloons -- is liberated from the kinds of 'rules' that govern prose. It's a way that comics can be aligned with poetry, which shows far more openness and freedom with punctuation. Schulz, for example, almost never ends sentences with a period, a standard stop in essays, short stories, and novels (of course, he makes extensive use of ? and !). I tend to think of balloons as more like a blank page of poetry than a blank page of prose -- a place that's fairly wide open
Monday, October 20, 2008
Before and After
I love seeing before-and-afters of pretty much anything. From New York City, to Dr. Zizmor's patients, and a well done, carefully shot before-and-after really makes my day. (I recently went out of my way to visit the Physical Graffiti buildings on St. Mark's place.)
I like them for the same reasons that I always loved Highlight's for Kids' spot-the-differences activity spreads. This series of photographs of Twin Peaks shooting locations is tops. Rarely do fans work so hard to get the correct camera position/lighting/composition to really observed the differences of a place. This one gets it right. I revel vicariously in the experience of a Twin Peaks fan, so dedicated, so unflinchingly geeky, wandering around what was the "Great Northern" lodge matching pine-knots to screen captures taken from their DVDs. Well done. All this nostalgia is making me hungry!
Now, I hope they head a little farther down the coast now and take some definitive before-and-afters of Astoria, OR and the principal Goonies locations. It's been done thoroughly, but the bar has been raised.
p.s. Vertigo, then-and-now.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Atom, Breen, Smoke
"Smoking is for Squares" (from The Atom #15 [Oct-Nov 1964]). Paulette Breen was awarded the title of Miss American Teenager in 1963. Here's a picture of her:
She later appeared in a number of TV shows (Happy Days, Quincy, M.E., The Krofft Supershow {as Wonderbug}) and movies.
See here:
http://www.tvrage.com/person/id-50906/Paulette+Breen
http://www.pageantopolis.com/international/american_teen-ager.htm
Banjo/Brain pickin'
Eddie Adcock, live from the Operating Theater.
Watch the BBC piece after a short commercial, or see Good Morning America's coverage below:
Monday, August 25, 2008
Drawing Power.
I'm posting my own optimized jpgs of a few comic strips I drew for this weekend's Washington Post.
They printed okay, and its exciting to see it printed on newsprint in full color, but the WP online translation is kind of hard to look at. Maybe this will look a little bit better. The strips were written by Bob Thompson, the author of the piece. Possibly the most fun I had was drawing my own versions of other peoples book covers for the cover illustration (above). Click on the images to view them larger.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Unabridged
Courtesy of the Peanuts Collector Club FAQ
It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
by Snoopy
Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out!
A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived
in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was
growing up.
Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was
making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in
Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas
who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the
daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head
of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men
rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves.
A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An
uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the
coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more
importantly, he had learned something about life.
THE END
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Cartoon Appropriation
In a Barnes and Noble a while back, I was flipping through a thick, glossy, and expensive art/fashion magazine and came across a feature titled “Moonlighting,” a kind of implied narrative that alternates between stylized S&M-like photographs and minimalist cartoon drawings. The piece (called a “site-specific insert” by the magazine) was credited to Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, but the drawings looked just like those of the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, who I assumed was a collaborator. As I looked more closely, however, I began to realize that the cartoons were altered and redrawn images from one of Jason’s graphic novels, Sshhhh!
The two-page spreads in “Moonlighting” typically have a photo and a drawing that each take up a full page and are placed side-by-side. Here are two representative pairs:
1. 
2. 
The magazine’s art editor offers the following commentary and interpretation as a set-up to the piece:
New York-based mixed-media artist Ugo Rondinone is a master of appropriation. Either by looping footage from Antonioni or Fassbinder to atmospheric soundtracks, building minimal "Sol Lewitt"-style sculptures or placing his own face into famous fashion editorial spreads, his work comments on the omnipresent cultural re-formulation and recycling so often found in contemporary art. Rondinone takes us on a journey of an unhappy cartoon raven set against a bakkdrop [sic] of black-and-white rubber suit images reminiscent of S&M and sexual fetishes. By contrasting these obviously oppositional contexts, Rondinone’s critique is even more explicit, a reference to the impossibility of creating a stable identity in an ever-changing, completely "renewable" society, where anything and everything is possible.
This language echoes the ways that many art critics have talked about Rondinone, emphasizing his appropriation of celebrated artists and filmmakers (who are usually always named), his use of pop culture detritus (such as cartoon animal drawings - whose artists are typically not named), and his destabilization of aesthetic and identity boundaries and categories. The editor’s phrase “oppositional contexts” (and the boundary blurring that it supposedly creates) refers to the division of the work into a sequence of photos and drawings, as well as oppositions such as clothed/naked, night/day, human/animal, erotic/mundane, etc . . . Yet, perhaps the name-dropping (Antonioni and Fassbinder) and name-withholding (Jason) reinforces, rather than blurs, a familiar opposition (one unremarked upon by the editor): high art and low art, which is here connected to the binary of credited/un-credited. Why drop Jason's name if it won't give you any fine art cred? And that assumes, of course, that you are familiar with his work in the first place . . .
Here are some of the images and source panels:
A.
B.
[Note some of the odd choices Rondinone makes in the redrawn image above as compared to the source below, in particular the way the wine bottle becomes more like a chunky milk bottle and the disappearance of some of the chair's legs -- and those that remain seem splayed.]
C.
[Note the differences in the lines that define the walls, which seem rather loosely and unevenly drawn above. Jason's lines are simple and relaxed, but they are always carefully executed.]
D. 
E.
I would argue that Jason is not only the master appropriator for his idiosyncratic blending of elements of funny animal, horror, and slice-of-life comic book traditions, but that his work already contains within it a series of “oppositional contexts” that truly destabilize the kinds of categories that the editor claims are undermined by Rondinone’s approach. The majority of the oppositions in “Moonlighting” are already fully at play in Jason’s work, as well as many others: clothed/naked, night/day, human/animal, erotic/mundane, quotidian/horror, stasis/drama etc. And much of Jason aesthetic -- and his humor -- comes from the ways that he seamlessly moves between contrasting genres and expectations with a consistently deadpan sensibility. “In all of Rondinone’s work,” one critic claims, “the artist is interested in disrupting boundaries”; yet the alternating structure of “Moonlighting” tends to keep many boundaries intact; I like “Moonlighting,” especially for the way it combines two narratives whose relationship is evoked but never clarified, but it also seems a little heavy handed, especially when compared to some of its source material.
These are two of the source pages for the panels in “Moonlighting”:
1.
I like the way that this gag about the couple's living situation works; in the beginning of book, the animal characters are almost completely humanized, so we are surprised to see that the protagonist lives in a nest. Yet this reversal of logic gets modified again when we see the couple realize that the nest will not work, and so they select an apartment and look less than excited about it. (Are they wistfully looking out at the nest in the last panel?) Nothing in "Moonlighting" seems as interesting as this.
2.
Here the horrors of everyday life -- the almost oppressive weight of mundane activities -- intertwine with ominous yet comedic panels of a newspaper-carrying skeleton, who seems passively to haunt the main character, perhaps as a reminder of a tragic event we have witnessed earlier in the story and others to come. This is also an unusual, non-scatological take on "bathroom humor": why is the skeleton in there -- does he just use the bathroom as a place to read? And it seems funny to me that the bird character doesn't need to take his pants down . . .
Perhaps Rondinone was attracted to Jason's work because of its interest in everyday life (a concern of the Swiss artist), and its deep sense of stillness, repetition, and pathos (as seen in this page from Jason's Hey, Wait . . .) 
all of which it somehow maintains while at the same time being gently (yet not always so) comic:
Even the titles of these two novels -- Sshhhh! and Hey, Wait . . . -- suggest some of the sense of quiet and slow pacing that are hallmarks of much of Jason's work.Coda:
Carl Barks certainly appears to have been an influence on Jason's work, and we can see some of Jason's appropriation of the famous Donald Duck/Scrooge McDuck artist in these images from a Gyro Gearloose story. Here is Jason's main character followed by Bark's Gyro:
And here are typical background characters, who often seem more blandly human, particularly in their dress, than do the protagonists:
Other Blog Flume "Side-by-Sides":
Miriam.
Roy Lichtenstein.
