Today is a day to send shout-outs to the Center for Cartoon Studies, located in White River Junction, VT and recognize it’s many good deeds. While my shout out should be a loving essay on how teaching comics has had a strong effect on storytelling and how the bucolic yet isolated campus in rural Vermont allows students to focus in on making comics, or the print room or the other great things about the faculty which includes James Sturm and Steve Bissette, I don’t have time for that.
Instead I will just direct you to Rob Clough’s series looking at the WORK of CCS grads (which he didn’t tag with CCS, shame shame shame), and spotlight a few of them:
• Chuck Forsman, now putting out an exciting new action focused comics series, THE REVENGER:
• Melissa Mendes, who is serializing a great comic called The Weight.
• Colleen Frakes, creator of Island Brat and much more, including StevenUniverse fan art.
• Melanie Gilman creator of the Eisner nominated webcomic As The Crow Flies
• Sean Ford creator of Only Skin and Shadow Hills.
• Eleri Mai Harris whose non fiction comics grace The Nib on numerous occasions.
• Alexis Frederick-Frost artist on the Adventures in Cartooning series.
• Sophie Goldstein, whose The Oven is coming out later this month and is amazing.
……and dozens more. I have to leave the office now or I would spend hours more looking at the great great yards from this school. Someone smarter than me needs to look at how the precepts taught at CCS have changed cartooning, and how Sturms ideas about applied cartooning are changing the business. But for today…just a shout out.
I don’t know why this news hasn’t been picked up at every entertainment blog everywhere. A comic book has been optioned for a live action “tv” show. Actually not just optioned: THE SHOW IS IN PRODUCTION! And PHOTOS OF THE STARS ARE ONLINE. Granted, there are a few quirks that make this news somehow less newsworthy than fanboy casting daydreams masquerading as “exclusives.”
#1 — it’s an indie comic. Chuck Forsman’s TEOTFW was originally published as a series of mini comics, and is now a collected edition from Fantagraphics. It’s a stark, dark and intense story about two teenaged psychopaths who go on a road trip and invade an empty house. When the house’s owner comes back, even more stark and dark things happen. As I was reading this I was thinking, “Man, if they were going to make a movie out of an indie comic, this would be one to make into a movie.”
#2 — the actual title of the comic is not one that is fit for a family newspaper. TEOTFW stands for The End of the Fucking World, the mini comic’s original title.
#3 — It’s happening in England. The comic is being adapted into a series of live action videos by up and comics UK director Jonathan Entwhistle. A test pilot is being filmed, which, if picked up by Film4 will eventually be shot for release on Vimeo. And the Starkweather/Fugate-type narrative is being shfted from unenployed America to unemployed Britain.
The TV version stars Craig Roberts, best known from Submarine, and Jessica Barden (Coronation Street) as James and Alyssa, the two tortured leads. As seen on Entwhistle’s sodial media, the visuals match the comic very closely. Forsman wrote on his blog that Entwhistle came across the comics at GOSH! in London, and noted:
P.S. this doesn’t make me a millionaire or more important than you.
…which is indeed an important message to repeat. But hopefully, this project will work out and more copies of TEOTFW will be sold, and more people exposed to Forsman’s excellent work as a result.
Lots of stuff so let's get to it!
§ Sometime Beat contributor Laura Sneddon looks at 2013 in Comics and even though this list is mostly front of the Diamond catalog, there's a lot to be excited about.
Every year I publish my list of favourites, and every year I always realize I’ve forgotten a few due to absent-mindedness or, more likely, my cluttered office. So here are a few more, which I’ll append to the original list:
There’s something quite special about the unadorned, simple black-and-white mini-minicomics that show up every few weeks from Chuck Forsman’s subscription series, which offers comics from a number of cartoonists like Melissa Mendes, Michael DeForge, Max de Radiguès, and more. They’re small things, and short to read, so unlike the growing pile of unread books by my bedside, they are actually inviting rather than intimidating when it comes to reading them. And they’re cheap and disposable enough that they don’t feel like precious objects. They feel like little gifts when they come in the mail. It appears that subscription memberships are currently closed, but at the very least you can head over to the Oily Boutique and order the books a la carte for a buck a pop.
Patrick Kyle released the collected book of his comic series Black Mass this year, but for my money I’m much more excited by his latest series Distance Mover, which like Oily Comics, I’ve been getting in the mail every month as a subscription. Each little book is a risographed art object, and I enjoy seeing Patrick’s work grow more abstract and even further from the traditional norm than Black Mass which already eschewed panels in favour of a freeform fill-the-page-with-drawings method. Each issue in the mail comes with goodies like extra prints or zines. Subscriptions are likely closed as the series nears its end, but you can order books directly from Patrick’s site, and read the first three issues (in black and white) online.
Dustin’s Diary Comics made the list in previous years when they weren’t even this good — the great thing with a project like this is being able to literally see the artist improve over time. This fourth issue comprises more of Dustin’s just-like-the-title-says diary comics, and his drawing chops remain as honed as ever, but it’s the multi-page story Boxes that is the real zinger here. In it Dustin reflects on the diary comics themselves, and how comics have affected his day-to-day perception of the world around him, for better or for worse. Yes, meta journal comics about drawing said comics aren’t anything new, but Dustin’s gifts for thoughtfulness and introspection make it a special thing, and a powerful unexpected product of having distilled his life into four panels, a page at a time, for the past few years. You can read Boxes online for free (full disclosure: I am featured in the story), and buy all of Dustin’s books and prints at his online store (which currently offers 35% off orders of $50 or more with the code DHARBMAS).
I knew my list didn’t feel right without any reprints of classic comic strips. Nancy seems to be a love-it-or-leave-it strip, and I am firmly in the Love It camp. Nancy is the granddaddy of the gag strip. Often surreal, and always impeccably drawn, there is nothing quite like it. D&Q got a head start in publishing John Stanley’s Nancy comic books, which are certainly fun, but these Bushmiller strips are the real deal — perfectly constructed comic strips with not a line or word wasted. It’s been said it’s harder to not read a Nancy strip than it is to read one, and for that alone these books are a virtual masterclass in cartooning.
In a list of Great Cartoonists Who Weren’t Cartoonists, Jim Henson would top the list. Is there a better example of simple, contrasting character design than Bert and Ernie? Jim Henson famously kept a journal with simple one-line entries. It was a proto-Twitter account that, of course, is now a Twitter account. This book, Imagination Illustrated, compiles the most notable entries in chronological order and fills the pages with sketches, drawings, photographs, storyboards, and ephemera to create a scrapbook of the Muppet creator’s professional life, and is the perfect piece of nostalgia for a Muppet-loving child of the 80s like myself.
Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Popeye
Chuck Forsman created a print that tells the story of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but looks like a Sunday Popeye comic strip page. View it full-size on Flickr, and get a print here.
Delightful