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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Self-Storage
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.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
American Boyhood from 1830-1885
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 . . .
Monday, November 23, 2009
Mechanicals
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.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Abner Dean's Notebook, Part III.
[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 desireAs 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.]
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Unintentional Connections
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]
Monday, November 9, 2009
Love Punishes the Guilty!
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.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Abner Dean's Notebook, Part II.
[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.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Believer 2009 Art Issue!
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
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Unseen on Covers
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 . . .
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Notebook
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.]
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Unseen
So far, Batman Unseen has been an entertaining comic.
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:
Friday, October 30, 2009
Halloween is Magic
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.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
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