How to use this Page

Add a Comment

Exhibitors at Comic Arts Brooklyn this weekend were kind enough to send me listings of their books—as usual there is something for everyone. I received so many listing I’m dividing this into two parts. Many thanks to the creators who took the time to send me news of their work. It looks to be a very exciting show.  Enjoy!

 

---

---

---

Uncontested Spaces

Keren Katz

Each contributor is given 6 to 9 pages to work with. Anthologies—in my view—suffer from short unfocused contributions. A 50 page anthology full of one page strips often never rises above being a sampler. Our format allows for the reader to enter any artist’s world and stay there for a solid amount of time. As with issue #1, this anthology features 3 artists with radically different approaches—the reader is allowed to move from one aesthetic to another, with just enough time in each to feel and think.

---

SANTO SHOES

by Marlene Frontera

Published by Sonatina Comics
Available at DOMINO BOOKS

Saint Francis of Assisi is one of the most celebrated religious figures in history. Known for his endless compassion toward animals and the environment, our man is an icon of divine benevolence. But all fame aside, I bet you’ve never caught him on a beach day.

Santo Shoes is a collection of over 50 images that bring new energy to the legacy of Saint Francis. From the hills of Umbria to the shores of Puerto Rico, Marlene Frontera’s imagery pulses with the same gentle spirit that the saint so graciously strove for in life.

---

In a Succulent Universe

A riso printed zine combining succulents and space!

 

 

---

Add a Comment

Responsible for some of last year’s most visually arresting comics in the form of Winter’s Knight: Year One, Robert Ball’s next project is going to be launched at ELCAF: ‘Dark Times’.

 

With an immediately distinctive style, his polygon…y artwork stands out – but here he seems to be working on a less angular, more realistic artistic style. Interestingly, this also seems to have more scale than his past comics, as well, focusing on what looks to be a dystopic future in which human bodies pile up in scrapheaps, too many to get rid of.

And the style keeps changing, from what the previews suggest. One section even reminds of Frank Miller’s ‘Sin City’, in fact. This is an interesting project from an artist who keeps on experimenting and pushing his work. Look out for it at ELCAF!

If you’re not at ELCAF? Keep up to date with Robert’s work right here!

Display Comments Add a Comment

It’s not too soon to start planning: Comic Arts Brooklyn has just announced its 2014 dates: November 8th Mt. Carmel church and a few satellite locations. The above art by Benjamin Marra should get you in the mood.

Exhibitor applications are available here. Applications will be open until June 1st.

PLUS: here’s the video of the City of Glass panel from 2013 with Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli, Art Spiegelman, and Paul Karasik with guest appearance by Bill Kartalopoulos.

Add a Comment

The idea for Miss Hennipin, a new release from Sonatina’s Andy Douglas Day, began as a summer day’s unassuming illustrative dalliance and briskly developed into Day’s main creative output. Now fully realized into a loaded 164 page, color-filled book, Miss Hennipin is another supplement to the diverse and teeming indie comics milieu, upholding the kind of innovative enthusiasm that creators like Austin English, CF, and Jason Overby cranked out during the initial influx of “new minimalism” comics. Similar to his previous comic, Chauncey, Day constructs an omnibus of vignettes detailing the life of its eccentric and cantankerous title character and her mask-donning moppet Mokumbo. It’s a cureless attempt to cipher any direct path of meaning or narrative from Miss Hennipin, and I might go as far to say pushing to do so takes away from what the comic sagaciously thrives in. Purely expressive and endearingly strange, Miss Hennipin is an abstract sketch not meant to be unraveled.

The backdrop for all the freewheeling mayhem is Day’s peculiar illustrative style. Constantly deviating from being hand drawn in ink, watercolor, crayon, and pen, along with a fluctuation of paper type, Day captures an unadulterated preciousness of the page. The pencil drawings are at times crude and bizarre or slightly caricature but overall highly gestural and communicative, allowing the viewer to emphatically warm up to the eccentric and whimsical figures. I also really took to Day’s coloring–infused sporadically within the mainly black and white makeup, the splashes of color work as an embedded metonym, subtly bringing touches of vitality to the settings and breathing a zest to the contours of Miss Hennipin’s hair. Just as his materials wavers, so do his renderings of the many characters in Miss Hennipin. While it’s easy to recognize the defining features of Mokumbo’s geometric mask or Miss Hennipin’s exaggerated cat eyes and many hairstyles, there is an unmistakeable spontaneity in the way Day slightly modifies his drawings from page to page. You can almost sense the compulsion behind the lines, a kind of graphic improvisation, as if Day handed you each individual comic as he completed it. It’s this immersion with Day’s creative impulses that give Miss Hennipin the weight of its intimacy, as a book that shifts and varies much like the every-changing nature a growing artist.

The greatest joy in reading Miss Hennipin is how Day strives, above all else, to convey a pure essence of the nonadult. I specifically choose the word ‘nonadult’ over childlike or juvenile because it conveys the most adequate impression of the work. I also don’t mean to say that Miss Hennipin is too simplistic in regards to the scribbly illustrations or too innocent in its curious diction—I prefer to consider the work as pushing against constraints of a fixed field of meaning, in which verbal and visual means work together in an expressive combination. In order to enjoy the humor and creative looseness, I had to let go of trying to obsess over aligning each page in a larger, familiar narrative sequence (something that’s immensely hard to do for someone who loves narrative structure). Miss Hennipin is simultaneously a book of stories and a book of not stories.

Part of the pleasure of Day’s work lies in reconnecting with the childlike sensibility, welcoming the delightful pretense that nothing absurd is going on at all. Both the title character, Miss Hennipin, as well as Mokumbo, occupy a distinctive space in being neither a fully realized adult or naivete, invoking disturbing collisions between lurking juvenile desires and displaced adult longings. “The Religious Phase,” a story where Miss Hennipin drunkenly rages to God about being a perfect creation thanks to herself, encapsulates Day’s ability to depict his characters as flawed, scandalous, and lewd yet always remaining comical. Every vignette seems like a charade of classical children’s storybooks, where character roles are disconcertingly warped and any semblance of an allegorical lesson is completely quashed. There are many times where the text works in code, not to unleash any ultimate significations, but rather in a way that operates like the adult secret language latent in clever cartoons for kids. The accompanying soundtrack for Miss Hennipin, likewise created by Day, is titled “bubblegum buisness,” an otherwise innocuous phrase but really is Miss Hennipin’s code-word for sex.

I first took notice of the expressive and additive effects of a complementary soundtrack with Brendan Leach’s Iron Bound—the limited flexi-disc record by the official work’s band The Newark Wanderers. The book and music worked to inform each other, the sounds drew from influences ranging from Japanese gangster films to Phil Spector, amounting in an elevated and active multimedia experience. Miss Hennipin‘s soundtrack is an endearing mix of lo-fi, distorted tones and saccharine guitar, harmonizing smoothly with the comic’s display of sparse and fleshed out art and narrative. It’s unclear if the titles are meant to represent certain breaks in the book, yet many of the 16 tracks do serve to usher an evocation of certain places and moments. One the album’s longer tracks, “One-Eyed Creeper Man who lives in Sand” is surprisingly catchy in addition to nabbing the amusing creepiness of Mokumbo’s silence or the alphabet Counts wiggling in the manor’s crevices.

Miss Hennipin is published by San Francisco’s Sonatina, a dynamic indie label that has been releasing a number of boundary pushing experimental comics from the likes of Aidan Koch and Jason Overby, and Day’s newest release is a notable addition to their roster of cartoonists that continually pursue stylistic ricks. You can pick up Miss Hennipin at the Sonatina website, and if you happen to find yourself in San Francisco come April 4^th, Day is hosting a release party featuring a number of other comic-related activities.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Upon first impression of Fumio Obata’s new graphic novel, Just So Happens, I was struck with a lot of similar impressions that arose whilst reading a related, albeit a hastily associated work, Glyn Dillon’s Nao of Brown. Sure, both recount stories about a Japanese woman who now call London home and likewise are authored by men who have a history of working in animation, but these correlations are as redundant as clumping their narratives into the category of ‘graphic novels’, or even as mere examples of international comics. Where Just So Happens splits from its resemblance to The Nao of Brown is in how it emerges as an end product that investigates cultural identity within globalization in a way that fruitfully hones its roots in not only Japan but also as largely influenced by European visual history. Yumiko takes the lead in the story and upon returning home for her father’s abrupt funeral, finds herself immersed in a confrontation of personal cultural difference, manifesting in reality as well as in the mystic esthetics of Noh theatre. Just So Happens is a unique graphic undertaking in the concept of transcultural works. Obata visually and thematically blends Japanese and European visual culture to compose a tale that is dynamic in its hybridity, and thereby conceives a poignant graphic narrative that exposes cultural identity as a process of constant change.

Obata’s style has appropriately been described as a melting pot of manga elements and the ligne-claire method characteristic of Bande Dessinee cartoonists. This designation rings true in regards to the luminous, illustrative skill that Obata delivers in the pages of Just So Happens. Page after page is remarkably filled with expressive simplicity and detail in his characters, consistently matched with that of his backgrounds. Obata’s equal attention to every element of the page’s content is wholly evident—it’s often the intricate, surreal landscapes of Japanese mountains that are the most captivating in their delicacy. Even the mishmash of his characters’ soft outline uniformity with the rich washes in their backdrop work synchronously in creating scenes that induce a dreamlike, Murakami-esque imagery, regardless of whether the portrayed place is in Japan, London, or the in-between fantasy world in Yumiko’s mind. Obata’s aesthetic influence is seemingly more grounded in the craft of Franco-Belgian comics, and while it permeates throughout the work, it is Obata’s subtle, figurative infusion of classical Noh theater that creates an interplay amidst these two styles, splicing together the nostalgic and historical implications of these nation-specific art forms.

From the get go, Yumiko’s struggle to negotiate her Japanese heritage and current British inhabitancy is an almost too recognizable conflict—the works of Gene Yang and Adrian Tomine have similarly delved into examining inner struggles of cosmopolitan identity. Yuminko doesn’t stand out right away as an exceptional character to express this dilemma. At first, she represents a hodgepodge of the stereotypes of assimilation: the icy, emotionally-guarded Japanese woman dating a British man, repelled at the sight of other Japanese people passing by. The adamant rejection of her culture is clear to almost everyone but herself. What drew me in to Obata’s handling of Yumiko’s character was how he addressed her national dismissal without being too overtly affectional. Yumiko’s subconcious friction unravels within her mind, enacted by a mirror of her stoic psyche, the stone-faced Noh performer.

Yumiko’s first interaction with Noh theater is captured in a flashback as she comes across a performance during a summer stroll. The Noh performer thus becomes a reoccurring phantom and is rendered in some of the book’s lushest brushstrokes, its enduring image absorbs Yumiko’s subconscious along with the pages it penetrates. The Noh performer and Obata’s adaptation of its dramatic makeup is saturated in the core of Just So Happens, revealing the work as a versed reinterpretation of both Japanese and European imagery. Obata’s choice coloring echoes the naturalistic pigments of Noh masks, hence capturing the distinctive Noh quality of the profound beauty that exists in the transcendental world, including the mournful elegance involved in the sadness over death. Yumiko’s own detached remorse is reflected in her disorientation with the ambiguous effect of the Noh mask, and as the story carries on, she discovers the expressionless face is not based in a cold indifference, instead the mask embodies a paradox of concealment and revelation. The Noh theater is traditionally based in the stage as a complex metaphysical realm, where the spectators and actors create meaning through joint effort. Yumiko ultimately appeases her inner-torment by surpassing her inactive role as bystander, in both Japan and London, by willingly engaging a fundamental aesthetic rule of Noh, the hana (flower), in which a perfect balance of performance and reception is achieved.

The turning point of the book is Yumiko’s crucial confrontation with the Noh specter, as she enters the spirit world that Noh is aimed to represent. It is here she settles the inner crisis of her own private struggle, unmasking the cultural chaos latent within, in an operatic climax as the pavilion’s pillars crumbles away. This controlled frenzy is rendered spectacularly, equivalently simulating a visualization of the space in Noh drama. The panels where Yumiko envisions this imaginary space are the most spectacular twinkles in the otherwise calm color washes, notably the flaming, bold use of reds, blacks, and white when Yumiko finally lets emotion pierce her disconnected psyche.

Where Just So Happens falters as a whole is the ellipses-heavy, facile text. My main complaint is the choice in font—the chunky lettering clashes compared to his gesturely brushwork style, and I wish he didn’t fill so many balloons with onomatopoeia since there are some points where he colors in sound effects to create their own background of flying letters and marks. Without diving too deep into the long-debated argument over whether or not the text and image need to work congruously in order to be an effective piece, I solidly accept the weakness of Obata’s dialogue alongside the splendor in his art. I don’t believe Obata intended the story to be taken too seriously, and if anything the simplistic, conversational dialogue is interspersed nicely within his larger panels, allowing the flowing nature of his art to slow down the reader’s eye, to take in his backgrounds in a contemplative course of time.

Set for release stateside later this month by Jonathan Cape with a French translation coming in April, Just So Happens is a memorable addition the growing indie graphic novel body. Fumio Obata accomplishes a compelling graphic narrative that rebuffs the unsatisfactory national/international binary that classifies comics as belonging to a single visual framework, demonstrating the rich and diverse international heritage emerging from unrecognized creators. The incorporation of the strong bandes desinees visual style and the Noh theater aesthetics is an understated and intelligent choice for choreographing a vibrant display of emotional composition. The graphic novel’s simplistic narrative is the backbone to the engrossingly dreamy landscapes and Obata swings the pendulum from reality to dream masterfully, allowing his stylistic magic to spew from the page.

For more information on Fumio Obata and Just So Happens, check out his charismatic and engaging blog.

 

 

 

 

Display Comments Add a Comment

Indie comics folk around Brooklyn and beyond have been quietly grieving over the imminent end of Cartoon House, a giant loft in South Williamsburg inhabited by a bevy of cartoonists over the years, and scene of many someday legendary comic book people events. In the first in a series of micropress profiles for Publishers Weekly, Robyn Chapman looks at the history of Cartoon House and the publishing companies of its three most prominent members, Bill Kartalopoulos, Austin English and Dave Nuss.

As cartoonists moved in, the parties became frequent and, at times, legendary. The final Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival after-party last November was packed shoulder to shoulder with cartoonists from Chris Ware on and featured a spontaneous wrestling match between Hot Dog Beach’s Lale Westvind and RAV’sMickey Z.

More than being an ideal party locale, Cartoon House offered Kartalopoulos, English and Nuss a comfortable space in which to publish. In a city where the one-bedroom “micro apartment” measures just 300 square feet, it’s a luxury to have enough space to store book inventory.

Cartoon House was indeed one of a kind, and the last throwback in the city limits of the group living situation that often fired up idealized visions of New York City: a big raw space where artistic folks could be wacky and creative. It was also the place where you could dip cookies into frosting and call it a snack. Cartoon House is definitely a “you had to be there” thing, and if it wasn’t as protean as Fort Thunder, it will probably give birth to as many stories.

Bill K. informs us that the final move out date is in November—the raw space will probably be divided up into a couple of apartments which will rent for sickening amounts. Will there be one more big party? It would be sad if there weren’t.

Add a Comment

This is the golden era of indie comic, artistically and even financially, at least in term of the number of publishers, CAFs and cartoonists who wake up every day excited to be cartooning. It’s a movement that is aesthetically and formally as exciting as anything else going on out there.

All of which makes the Jason Karns Kerfuffle all the more unusual. Indie comics circles don’t have kerfuffles—defined as in depth analysis of the social, racial or gender-based meaning of a certain comic or statement. Those are for nasty old mainstream comics. In case you missed it (and you probably did) it started when Frank Santoro, the cartoonist, comics educator and archivist, posted a thing called New Small Press Comics over at The Comics Journal. As he often does, Santoro just took pictures of comics he liked. Santoro is a comics liker, and if you’ve ever been with him while he goes through an old long box full of old weird comics, you know he is the Nicola Tesla of comics liking, exploring bold new vistas on a daily basis where few can hope to go. This time out Santoro praised the work of Marc Bell—just about everyone likes Marc Bell’s weirdo humor comics, right?– and Jason Karns who, among other books, does a comic called Fukitor which looks like this:


If anything, this reminded me of a somehow more life affirming version of those torture covers everyone was appalled by the other day. If struck me that Fukitor was firmly in the same camp as the Cannibal Corpse stuff everyone told me was fun loving and adorable, and I was maybe going to mention this, but then it really didn’t interest me that much so I didn’t.

The comments on that post at TCJ quickly turned negative however, as people pointed out how racist the book was—Karns’ hero goes around squashing mostly brown people who are portrayed as terrorists. I’d throw in “jingoistic” as a description as well. Oh and misogynist but isn’t everything. The book’s defenders lauded it as edgy and daring, while others suggested that racism and misogyny aren’t all that edgy and daring. Santoro actually backed away from the book pretty quickly—it’s obvious that Karns is one of those energetic and imaginative artists who has so far chosen to work in the gross out genre—and Santoro was responding to the energy not the content. Karns himself eventually showed up in the comments to stand up for his right to be “subversive.”

This was a very, very rare example of the indie comics “community” getting into a Kerfuffle—I mean, of course the Comics Journal/Hooded Utilitarian axis loves arguing, but it’s rarely about anything that bears any connection to the real world, as far as I can make out. Darryl Ayo delivered the best slap down in the comments:

For something to be subversive it needs to both mimic and undermine the societal power structure. The society of the Western world is invariably white dominance and anti-brown. To be truly subversive against that power structure, a work of art would be clinging closely to that as well as poking holes in the structural integrity of the white power structure. Since nothing that we can see here in “Fukitor” does anything to undermine white power while it makes a big show of making sport of nonwhite people, it literally just is what it looks like.

Perhaps I liked this best since it mirror sentiments of my own. But anyway, the kerfuffle played itself out over the next few days. Santoro apologized. Karns climbed up a ladder into his getaway helicopter gloating,

Update – 9/2/13 – Orders have gone waaayyy up since some people starting bitching about this imagery. Thank you. Please, keep bitching.

Tom Spurgeon stepped all into it in a piece that ran several hundred words without actually mentioning the name of the cartoonist he was talking about, but averring:

I don’t know the work of the cartoonist in question, certainly not well enough to lower the boom with a racism charge.

And that got the kerfuffle going all over again! Because when you draw or write things that are racist…well, they are…racist. Darryl Ayo wrote again


There is no need to read a lot of someone’s work to determine if a particular project is racist. As a culture, we are past the era of equating “racism” with a boogeyman, an allegiance to a specific codified group that exists simply to hate people based on race.

….[snip].Jason Karns got exactly what he wanted. He got to be the renegade bad boy for a day, beholden to nobody’s wishes, offending without a care toward the offended. All in all, it was a good day for Mr. Karns. The rest of us were treated to yet another reminder of how Middle Eastern people can be casually dehumanized and how much of society’s dreams and fantasies involve brown people being reduced to mindless beasts, fit for slaughter. Good times.

And David Brothers, also weighed in.

Here’s what happened: someone posts a comic and reviews it. Someone else asks if it’s satirical or what, because it looks pretty racist. The creator of the comic rolls in, asks if people are censors, the pc police, and all this other nonsense. Cartoons aren’t real so who cares, you’re the real racists anyway, and a bunch of other idiot arguments. His cronies roll in, talking about how soft and cowardly the question-askers are.

Other people, myself included, point out that naw, this comic actually is racist, and if you’re riffing on something else that’s racist, you’re still using racist elements! Other people talk about how discussing the racism of something isn’t requesting a ban, and if your transgressive work is just replicating the same lazy ideas that transgressive works were doing 40 years ago, maybe your work is part of the status quo, not transgression.

I found all of this reaction very interesting. As I noted before, in the torture covers discussion, no one really disagreed about anything. There was much more dissension in the Karns Kerfuffle, probably because Karns himself came by to defend the work and that Organized The Protest. The overall reaction also made me proud to live in a country where depictions of members of a geographical group—one which we were at war with a few years ago and may be at war with in a few days— can still be actively and widely labelled as racist. Maybe we have improved as a society a bit since this happened:

Perhaps the most striking thing to me, however, was how little indie/art/literary whatever you want to call them comics are put in any kind of larger cultural context. It seem that that is left for the superheroes. Len Wein, Gerry Conway and Todd McFarlane were roundly vilified for saying that superhero comics—or the “mainstream” as they quaintly called it—didn’t have to have a subtext. “The comics follow society. They don’t lead society,” Conway was quoted as saying, which was kind of a tossed off statement, but sounded really wrong.

Laura Sneddon [who writes for this site] examined this whole idea in a piece called How Comics Got Political, quite rightly pointing out that

One of the historical roots of modern comics is of course the political cartooning of the early newspapers; the mechanical reproduction of images finally allowing art to be consumed by the masses rather than the privileged few, with cartoonists leaping at the chance to communicate complex political situations via their deceptively simple form. 

The idea of comics as a political tool is not without its controversies, from grumbles amongst novelists to riots over religious icon portrayals. Any fan of superhero comics can tell you that comics don’t have to be overtly political, but the recent insistence by creator Todd McFarlane that historically no comic book that has worked has been “trying to get across a message” was largely met by the rolling of eyes.

In the rest of the piece, Sneddon goes on to discuss the level of engagement with politics in their work with Stephen Collins, Joe Sacco, Paul Cornell and Grant Morrison. Obviously, Sacco’s work is some of the most valuable and powerful journalistic work being done in any medium, but’s notable that writers like Cornell and Morrison, who mostly write genre comics, are constantly being asked about the bigger meaning in their work, or claiming that it has a bigger meaning, a claim which a lot of people in the indie comics community would also scoff at.

And yet, it does seem that indie comics and cartoonists are rarely examined in a larger contextual way. This is possibly because the content involves a lot of what some call introspection, and others emo shoegazing—even the greatest one—and maybe because this kind of analysis if of a secondary interest of most of those creating and consuming indie comics? And to be fair, a lot of indie comics are created by an ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids. When they stray too far away from writing what they know, as Craig Thompson did with Habibi, the results aren’t awesome. Even a work as great as Building Stories is a personal story—on a most simplistic level, it’s telling us that it’s better to have a happy marriage than lie in bed every night wondering if you should kill yourself.

BTW, I’m not advocating for change here—like I said in the beginning, indie comics now exist in a wonderland where personal expression is the biggest concern, and that’s a beautiful, priceless thing that will eventually lead to even more powerful works. If I were to peg a second interest in art comics at the moment, it would probably be formalism. Critics like Santoro are most excited by the immediate emotional impact of comics art, up to and including printing techniques, an attitude that stems from the fine arts background of a lot of comics commentators and publishers, as well as being the primary focus of Ware and his admirers. (Mathias Wivel’s essay on Habibi quickly shifts from examining its politics to criticizing its inking technique.) And this isn’t in any sense wrong—there is ALREADY a huge tradition of comics, as Sneddon suggests, that deals with politics, subversion and radical ideas and they are rolling right along in various formats.

Still, I’m wondering if this riot of esthetic choices is ever going to be nailed down a bit more. As the world of comics explodes, I find myself lacking the critical background to even comprehend it sometimes. This was brought home to me the other day at my other job, when I was editing a review of Anya Davidson’s School Spirits. I had assigned a review of the book to one of my Publishers Weekly reviewers (who are anonymous by design) but when I got the review back it was pretty clear that he didn’t get the book at all, even though he liked it. As I read the book and struggled to bring the review more in line with useful analysis, I realized that I wasn’t even sure where to begin.

The book is published by Picturebox, which goes heavy into the fine-art formalism school I’ve been talking about—publisher Dan Nadel also co-edits The Comics Journal website, and published Santoro, so there’s an axis emerging there. Davidson contributed to Kramer’s Ergot so there’s another axis there. The Picturebox website describes School Spirits as “Beavis and Butthead meets James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which sounds promising and yet could be applied to almost anything, since Beavis and Butthead and James Joyce between them encompass most of 20th century art and literature. Davidson isn’t a cartoonist I’m particular familiar with, although I find her work fun to look at. Her narrative is dreamlike in its non sequiturs, but the art is more like, well maybe Johnny Ryan by way of Gary Panter if they met up at a tiki bar. It definitely approaches the “New Narrative” style that people were talking about in regards to things like Kazimir Strzepek and C.F. a few years ago. (That isn’t actually what it was called, but there is no “Guide to the Schools of Indie COmics” entry on Wikipedia.)

The failing I’m flailing around with above is all mine and not Davidson’s—I’m sure it doesn’t matter if she considers herself in the “new narrative” school or the “Kramer’s Ergot School” or the Chicago School, or whatever. She’s uniquely her own thing, and if that’s a detriment for someone writing a short review for a trade publication, it’s a virtue in every other arena. The most energizing thing about comics these days is you don’t have to be in any school. Each and every gem of a comic seems to exist in its own, infinite, contextless universe. This is also a product of the extreme hybridization of all forms as well. The “international style” of comics that is gaining ground in the actual mainstream (libraries and books) is one that draws equally from America, European and Manga influences, and the internet insists we mash everything up all at once all the time. Context seems to have less and less inherent value against this backdrop where immediate emotional resonance is the currency. Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics one of the most vibrant and relatable mediums of the day.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Ryan Humphrey posted this fantastic Simpson/Akira mash up comic on his tumblr last night and it’s been picking up a healthy number of notes since. The comic (which you can see below) is really striking, mainly, I think, because of those splashes of colour against that rich cream background, in the sense of drama and dynamism Humphreys evokes, and also in seeing the usually effusive Simpson’s characters strangely non-committal. The comic also struck a chord with artist James Harvey, who picked up the ball and ran with it, proposing to recreate the whole of Akira with The Simpsons cast, with artists who want to take part signing up to do particular sections. Here’s more from Harvey:

I took this idea to him (Ryan Humphrey), he gave it the go-ahead. Milhouse is Kaneda. Lisa is Kei. Bart is Tetsuo. Let’s do it.

I figured it all out. If you’re down, email the address below. In a few days, I’ll send you the cast list (which character from the Simpsons is which Akira character, though the minor characters will be left up to you) and I’ll tell you which 5 pages you’ll be working on. You can request a particular page, but it’s first come, first served.

If 468 people take part, we get to do all six volumes. Even if only 78 are down, we’d still get the entire first volume.

Since it’ll be non-profit, parody/satire, crowdsourced and distributed peer-to-peer, I feel like it’s juuust on the right side of the legal grey area it inhabits. If not- let’s do it anyway. I’ll take the rap.

if you want to be a part of this, drop me a line at  [email protected]

I’m interested to see how this goes: it sounds hugely fun. Often comic jams on the internet throw up some fantastic stuff, with artists putting their own interpretations on things and a host of styles and techniques on display. If you’re  interested in taking part, contact James at the email address above. Or just enjoy the comic like I did.

Add a Comment

Here’s a real Kickstarter based on a fake artist whose real work has been forged by Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton, both of whom are real living people and are not figments of fiction, unlike the artist who didn’t draw this comic strip, because he never existed. Got that? This is GOLDTIGER.

I’ll explain it properly. The idea of the Kickstarter is that Adams and Broxton have restored a classic, controversial comic strip created in the 1960s by artist Antonio Barreti and writer Louis Shaeffer. The strip was commissioned run in a national newspaper, but was deemed too risque and scandalous for publication. The strip was locked out of circulation, Barreti had a breakdown and spent four years in a rehab clinic in Turin. Shaeffer continued to send him new scripts, however, and the team kept creating more stories for their characters. Shaeffer sadly died, and following his death, Barreti vanished.

The stories have just been collected together, however, and restored. The artwork is enhanced and lettering fixed, and the first volume of stories will be put out via Kickstarter.

— The thing is, Barreti and Shaeffer don’t exist, and never did. GOLDTIGER is an all-new creation from Adams and Broxton, which collects 128 pages of comics into a hardcover book. But not just the strips are collected in the book: the idea is that readers will also be able to trace the fictional life story of the two creators, and their journey whilst seeing that reflected in the story. While the strips progress in a 1960s style, you’ll also see how Barreti and Shaeffer’s personal lives affected GOLDTIGER itself. So in essence, you’re getting two stories – the comic strips, which tell spy action adventures with more than a hint of sex; and the assorted bits and pieces which tell the story of fictional GOLDTIGER creators Barreti and Shaeffer.

It’s a madcap idea for a comics project, and the Kickstarter is currently 3/4 funded, with only three days to go. Head on over to the Kickstarter, and have a read of the concept in more detail! Broxton is a fantastic artist, and Adams a great writer. This is a real high concept, but one which looks well worth trying out.

Display Comments Add a Comment

The Chicago Weekly profiles cartoonists cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, who talks candidly about his teaching, low comics output of late, depression, and home town. Perhaps best known for his Fantagraphics collection Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti is a much respected foundational indie cartoonist. His two comics anthologies from Yale Press —Graphic Fiction and Grahpic Fiction Volume II -- are also just about the best introductions to literary and art comics of recent years.

Add a Comment

TweetArtist and designer Steven Sanders, curly of beard and intense of eyes, launched a Kickstarter yesterday for his new project Symbiosis. A massive 100+ page art book, Symbiosis is designed with the idea that people will be able to take the ideas and visuals created by Sanders and do whatever they want with them. They [...]

Add a Comment

A must read and a must-read for masochists top our linkage today, both returning to topics that were much on the minds of anyone in comics about 30 years ago — oldies but goodies. First and most importantly, library professor Carol Tilley has been going through Dr. Fredric Wertham's notes and found out that he was, to use a technical term, full of hooey.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Tweet This year’s MoCCA Festival is being eagerly awaited to see how changes made under the new Society of Illustrators management will affect a show that has yet to take the place on the show schedule that its location would be assumed to afford. So far everything’s been looking good and the announcement of the [...]

Display Comments Add a Comment

By Steve Morris

Neverendingly working Newsarama blogger Graeme McMillan has spotted a change in Marvel’s solicitations. Now, this may have come about as a result of a delay in art, or it may have come about because we exist in a cosmic tapestry, stitched and unstitched by the tapestrier, as may be their will or wont. But basically, issue #17 of Wolverine & The X-Men is going to kick aside the worthless cud like this ‘Wolverine’ feller out the way, in favour of an ALL-DOOP issue. Yes!

Doop, if you’ll recall, was created by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred during their run on X-Force/X-Statix, and is an all-knowing doopish green blob of infinity. He’s most recently been seen as part of Jason Aaron’s Wolverine-as-a-teacher series, in his new role as religious studies tutor:

All very well and good, I suppose. But what makes this news a bolt of blob-based brilliance is the surprise reveal that this issue will be drawn by co-creator Mike Allred. Grab your pom-poms, people. MIKE! ALLRED! Returns to Doop!

The issue will be released towards the end of September. Let’s celebrate by remembering the time Doop destroyed that jerk Thor.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Meanwhile, in Chicago it was the all-time greatest cartoonist confab, the Comics: Philosophy and Practice event, which was overshadowed a bit by the presence of a NATO summit in Chicago at the very same time—apparently traffic and security were taxing.

Christopher Borelli’s report is written contrasting the two summits, while noting the enormity of the attendees:

In the hall where most of the conference took place, at the quiet parties afterward and at the dinners, the visiting dignitaries were a heady, legendary bunch: R. Crumb sitting next to Ware, who sat next to Daniel Clowes. Gary Panter and Joe Sacco huddling behind them; Lynda Barry napping; Phoebe Gloeckner sketching. Art Spiegelman, smoke curling around the hands bunched at his face, sat with wife Francoise Mouly, art director of the New Yorker — themselves editors of a magazine, RAW (“The Graphix Magazine Of Postponed Suicides”), that made a few careers in the room.

Borelli’s account is full of lots of anecdotes—from fans talking to R. Crumb to Seth and Aline Kominsky-Crumb kibitzing on a panel. It seems to have been a kibitzing kind of weekend. Although there were no tickets left for the event, it seems that some people didn’t show up or had difficulty getting through the police lines, so those who got to see the panels were even more special than you thought already. One of them was cartoonist Jessica Abel, whose tweets are probably the best account of the weekend—hopefully she’ll write them up into a more quotable form. The panel with Charles Burns, Seth, Dan Clowes, and Chris Ware (!) seems to have been a treasure trove of great lines about making comics, along with a bit of the loneliness of the long-distance cartoonist thrown in:

Seth: to make book, have to have high confidence balanced with self loathing. Burns: self loathing v important. #comicscon

— Jessica Abel (@jccabel) May 19, 2012

Elsewhere, someone quoted Ivan Brunetti:

“Everyone who draws suffers a bit.”

We’re always amazed (and sad) to hear of the self-loathing of the world’s greatest cartoonists, but hey, as long as they keep drawing.

For visuals, Scott Roberts has some sketches and Ryan Standfest has a Faceb

Display Comments Add a Comment

While any noteworthy comics events are taking place this weekend, the not notable— and perhaps the most notable in recent comics history—is taking place at the University of Chicago’s new $114 million Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts: the Comics: Philosophy and Practice symposium organized by Hilary Chute. The line-up?

Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Francoise Mouly, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware

Sob sob. Everyone. (Except the Hernandez Bros., but then someone had to be left behind in case there was an earthquake, just like the Secretary of Agriculture.)
This CHicago Tribune has a preview that engenders even more sobs about missing out:

The rock scene had Woodstock. The jazz world famously gathered on the steps of a Harlem brownstone in 1958 for Esquire photographer Art Kane. In the 1920s, New York literati met at the Algonquin Round Table.

“It feels historic,” Bechdel said. “I realize how grandiose that might sound to someone who doesn’t know much about comics, but that’s the word that keeps coming to me. The whole thing just blows my mind.”

“It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of an entire art form,” said Paul Hornschemeier, a young, Evanston-based alternative cartoonist and illustrator acclaimed for his graphic novels. “I’m just not sure when they were putting it together if they realized how much genius they assembled. That hall only fits, what, 500?”

As the story notes, it fits only 474 people.

BUT

YAY the internet makes all things possible and the sessions will be live streamed! And hopefully archived for history. Not archived, the epic coffee breaks and dinner talk. Seriously, had we known this was taking place we would have ditched C2E2 (not that we don’t love you, C2E2) and gone to this. But instead we’ll just be glued to our livestreaming webcasts and the many reports of epic epicness doubtless to come.

BTW did we mention the event is FREE to attend (but long sold out)? God bless academia and educational grants.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Are we the last possible person to link to Michael DeForge’s poster for this Saturday’s Doug Wright Awards? Possibly. It’s also a reminder that we’ll be at TCAF this weekend! First time and we couldn’t be more excited! The webste has all the debuts, guests, party poop, programming and other info you could possibly need, so we’ll just direct you there for everything except to note that we’ll be moderating this panel on Saturday at The Pilot:

11:15 – 12:30 – Comics & Music
The visual and the auditory – two very different mediums.  But somehow, words and music combine in comics and graphic novels.  Three superstar creators talk about how their own music-based comics projects, and how they make them work. With Bryan Lee O’Malley, Kid Koala, and Arne Bellstorf.

Excited! See you there!

Add a Comment

If you haven’t checked out the Study Group webcomic site, you are missing some great stuff, which we hope to be spotlighting in more depth very soonish, but for now, here’s The Blonde Woman – Part 1 – by Aidan Koch, an abstract, mysterious opus that many art comics readers have been buzzing about. Koch is also the author of THE WHALE and other stuff you can see here.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Published by and available from Secret Headquarters.

Add a Comment

The featured guests for this Decembers Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival have been announced, and it’s pretty spectacular: CF, Jack Davis, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lisa Hanawalt, Chip Kidd, David Mazzucchelli, John Porcellino and Brian Ralph.

If you are like us, you are most excited about the chance to meet the legendary Jack Davis, who was not only an EC Comics mainstay, but one of the original MAD artists and one of the most influential illustrators of the 60s and 70s with his unmistakeable “bigfoot” style. So YEAH. Amazing.

Davids 87, will be making several appearances in New York, according to a Fantagraphics press release:

One of America’s most beloved and best known cartoonists, Jack Davis, will make a series of extremely rare appearances in New York City and Brooklyn in early December, to promote his new art book, JACK DAVIS: DRAWING AMERICAN POP CULTURE (published by Fantagraphics Books). A living legend, these personal appearances will be a once-in-a-lifetime op- portunity to meet one of medium’s greatest practicioners. 

On Thursday, Dec. 1 at 7PM, Davis will appear at New York’s renowned Strand Bookstore, in conversation with Fanta- graphics Books Publisher Gary Groth. The event will feature the world premiere of JACK DAVIS: DRAWING AMERICAN POP CULTURE.

On Friday, Dec. 2 at 6PM, Davis will be in attendance for an exhibition of his original art at the Scott Eder Gallery in Brooklyn.

On Saturday, Dec. 3, Davis will appear with Fantagraphics at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival, signing copies of JACK DAVIS: DRAWING AMERICAN POP CULTURE throughout the day and participating in a panel discussion with Gary Groth about his life and career (exact times t.b.a.).
Jack Davis arrived on the illustration scene in the euphoric post-war America of the late 1940s when consumer society was booming and the work force identified with commercial images that reflected this underlying sense of confidence and American bravado. Advertising agencies were looking for new ways to tap a rich and expanding market, and there was a vast array of media that needed illustrations. Davis’ animated and exuberant images possessed a sense of spontaneous energy that proved to have universal appeal in every medium he worked in.

Beginning with his masterful pen and ink cartooning at EC Comics, he quickly forged a reputation as one of the most versa- tile artists in comics, drawing humor, horror, and war stories. In Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, especially, Davis made a mark as a master of caricature, composition, and wild, anarchic crowd scenes, practically vibrating with energy.

After stints at MAD, Trump, and Humbug — three humor magazines that defined the satirical zeitgeist of the ’50s — Davis went on to become the most successful commercial illustrator of his generation, illustra

Display Comments Add a Comment

The nominees for the 2011 Ignatz awards have just been announced. The nominees represent the best of indie comics and were selected by a five-person panel consisting of Rina Ayuyang, Mike Dawson, Kris Dresen, Theo Ellsworth, and John Porcellino. Winners will be selected by attendees of the Small Press Expo and presented at the gala Ignatz Awards ceremony held on Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 9:00 PM with host Dustin Harbin.

Multiple nominees include Edie Fake, Michael DeForge, Sammy Harkham and Carol Tyler.

Outstanding Artist
Michael DeForge, Lose #3 (Koyama Press)
Edie Fake, Gaylord Phoenix (Secret Acres)
Renee French, H-Day (Picturebox)
Joseph Lambert, I Will Bite You (Secret Acres)
Carol Tyler, You’ll Never Know, Vol 2: Collateral Damage (Fantagraphics)

Outstanding Anthology or Collection
Black Eye, edited by Ryan Standfest (Rotland Press)
Gay Genius, edited by Annie Murphy (Sparkplug)
I Will Bite You, Joseph Lambert (Secret Acres)
Make Me a Woman, Vanessa Davis (Drawn & Quarterly)
Three #1, edited by Robert Kirby (Rob Kirby Comics)

Outstanding Graphic Novel
Gaylord Phoenix, Edie Fake (Secret Acres)
The Heavy Hand, Chris Cilla (Sparkplug)
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet Books)
Special Exits, Joyce Farmer (Fantagraphics)
You’ll Never Know, Vol 2: Collateral Damage, Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)

Outstanding Story
“Blood of the Virgin,” Crickets #3, Sammy Harkham (self-published)
“Browntown,” Love and Rockets: New Stories No. 3, Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
“LINT,” Acme Novelty Library #20, Chris Ware (Drawn & Quarterly)
“The most gripping mind-exploding triumphantly electric of our time,” Papercutter #15, Jonas Madden-Conner (Tugboat Press)
“Weekends Abroad,” Three #1, Eric Orner (Rob Kirby Comics)

Promising New Talent
Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, House of Twelve Monthly #3 (Comixology)
Tony Breed, Finn and Charlie are Hitched (www.hitchedcomic.com)
Jesse Jacobs, Even the Giants (AdHouse)
Jon McNaught, Birchfield Close (Nobrow)
Jesse Moynihan, Forming (Nobrow)

Outstanding Series
Crickets, Sammy Harkham
Dungeon Quest, Joe Daly (Fantagraphics)
Everything Dies, Box Brown (self-published)
Lose, Michael DeForge (Koyama Books)
Reich, Elijah Brubaker (Sparkplug Comic Books)

Outstanding Comic
Crickets #3, Sammy Harkham (self-published)
Danger Country #1, Levon Jihanian (self-published)
Habitat #2, Dunja Jankovic (Sparkplug Comic Books)
Lose #3, Michael DeForge (Koyama Press)
The Magic Hedge, Marian Runk (self-published)

Outstanding Mini-Comic
Ben Died of a Train, Box Brown (self-published)
Danger Country #1, Levon Jihanian (self-published)
Gaylord Phoenix #5, Edie Fake (self-published)
Morning Song, Laura Terry (self-published)
Trans-Utopia, Tom Kaczynski (Uncivilized Books)

Outstanding Online Comic
Alphabet Horror, Nate Marsh: www.alphabethorror.com
A Cartoonist’s Diary, Pascal Girard: www.tcj.com/author/pascal-girard/
Finn an

Display Comments Add a Comment

Chuck Forsman

The latest Sundays Volume will be debuting at the 2011 MoCCA Festival in NYC; Table #H15.  Check out the names involved below. We are very excited about this version!
SUNDAYS: Forever Changes
5×8
132 pages
300 numbered copies
Cartoons by

• Mickey Z
• Jeff Lok
• Ed Piskor
• Warren Craghead III
• Aaron Cockle
• Melissa Mendes
• Joseph Lambert
• Mark Burrier
• Alex Kim
• David Libens
• Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi
• Dane Martin
• Julie Delporte
• Michael DeForge
• Sean Ford
• Samuel C. Gaskin
• Scott Longo
• Jose-Luis Olivares
• Mari Ahokoivu
• Max de Radigués
• Damien Jay
• Lydia Conklin

Covers by 
Damien Jay
Edited by 
Chuck Forsman
Alex Kim
Joseph Lambert
Sean Ford

Also making it’s first appearance is the all new KIDS anthology edited by Melissa Mendes and Jose-Luis Olivares.  Kids will be available at the same table as Sundays, H15, right next to Secret Acres.

70 pages
contributors: 

• Joseph Lambert
• Dane Martin 
• Nate Beaty
• Chuck Forsman
• James Hindle
• Max de Radigues
• Lydia Conklin
• Robyn Chapman
• Alex Kim
• Amy Mendes
• David Libens
“Kids” is an anthology of comics by some amazing people, all having to do in some way with children or childhood. We, the editors, (Jose-Luis and Melissa) have been thinking a lot about kids lately, and how we’re not kids anymore, and how maybe now we’re supposed to be grown-ups, so we decided to put this together.

____________

Robyn Chapman

Editor and publisher Robyn Chapman is pleased to announce the debut of the new anthology This Isn’t Working: Comics About Ex-Boyfriends.  Six cartoonists share their personal stories about this sensitive subject.  Chapman has created a handsome, yet economical, showcase for their work. This Isn’t Working is the debut book from Chapman’s new minicomics publishing house, Paper Rocket.

Chapman selected 6 talented cartoonists to tackle this subject:

Cara Bean
Robyn Chapman
MariNaomi
Caitlin Plovnick
Liz  Prince
Jen Vaughn
 
This Isn’t Working can be purchased for $3 at the MoCCA Festival. Look for this debut book at the AWP table (M6).

_____

English Small Press

A bunch of UK Indy people are coming to MoCCA and The Forbidden Planet Intern

0 Comments on 2011 MoCCA Debuts as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment

The events surrounding Cartoon Polymaths ends with a bang with an outing for the comics slideshow series, Carousel. Someone go and report!

Add a Comment

I haven’t written adequately about the “Cartoon Polymaths” show currently up at Parsons, the NYC art school that teaches design and illustration. It is a concise but museum-level show about cartooning and cartoonists that really sets a new standard for how these subjects can be covered. Aside from showing movies and puppets and small Marischal-designed houses, it also has it’s own NEON SIGN. Wow. Curator Bill Kartalopoulos really outdid himself and got Parsons’ taleted design crew on board with a fantastic installation.

Anyway if you haven’t gone yet tonight is the night to see a talk with pioneering artist Richard McGuire, who was multi-media before it was in fashion. Deets below.

An Evening with Richard McGuire

Moderated by “Cartoon Polymaths” exhibit curator Bill Kartalopoulos

Friday, February 18, 7:00 p.m.
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
New York, NY 10011

Richard McGuire, whose work is featured in the “Cartoon Polymaths” exhibit running through April 15 at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, has pursued an extraordinary multidisciplinary career. He is the founder and bassist of the seminal No Wave band Liquid Liquid, which helped define the underground sound of downtown New York in the early 1980s. He is the author of several ground-breaking comics including the classic short story “Here,” published in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW Magazine in 1989, and widely acknowledged as an influential breakthrough work. He is the illustrator of numerous ingenious New Yorker covers, a children’s book author and toy designer, and the director of the animated short “Micro-Loup” and the closing segment for the award-winning animated anthology film “Fear(s) of the Dark,” among many other projects. On Friday, February 18, Richard will discuss his career and his working process, demonstrate the numerous ways Liquid Liquid’s signature song “Cavern” has been appropriated and utilized in various areas of popular culture, show drawings from his forthcoming book-length version of “Here,” and answer questions in this special spotlight event moderated by “Cartoon Polymaths” exhibit curator Bill Kartalopous.

This event is free and open to the public. The gallery will remain open following the event with Richard McGuire so that guests may visit the “Cartoon Polymaths” exhibit.

Upcoming public events will feature Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad and cartoonist R. Sikoryak. For more information about the exhibit, please visit: http://newschool.edu/parsons/subpage.aspx?id=59621

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is an award-winning campus center for Parsons The New School for Design that combines learning and public spaces with exhibition galleries to provide an important new downtown destination for art and design programming. The mission of the Center is to generate an active dialogue on the role of innovative art and design in responding to the contemporary world. Its programming encourages an interdisciplinary examination of possibility and process, linking the u

Add a Comment