Your Pshaw! for the day is brought to you by Comics Comics 4, which features yet more of the above gag series.

A Frenzy of Goddess of War Mania

It's going to be a challenge, but I'm going to try and keep the hype for Lauren R. Weinstein's amazing new The Goddess of War to a minimum on this blog, even though it's clearly the best adventure/science fantasy/romance/Western comic book released in years, if not ever. (I'm not biased.)

But just this once, here's some TGoW-related news:

1. New York magazine presents a special preview excerpt!

2. Lauren has started a blog. (We'll see how long that lasts. Enjoy it while you can.)

3. There will be a signing/release party for the book from 4 to 7 pm this Sunday, at Desert Island in Brooklyn, which will also feature the debut of a brand-new silkscreen print and a new window installation Lauren (& friends) created for the store.

4. There will be an even bigger signing/reading/performance on Tuesday night at Manhattan's legendary Strand Bookstore, starting at 7.

5. And if you're still not convinced, here are some good recent reviews of the book from Jog and Alex Cox.

6. And finally, as mentioned once before, the PictureBox site is currently featuring a photographic tour of her studio.

It's Here!

Now buy it! New Comics Comics for sale here!

Comics Comics 4 Debuts!

Just to fill out some of the details of Dan's announcement and get more people psyched, here's more info on what you'll get with the latest issue of Comics Comics, debuting at San Diego this week:

* A cover story and interview with the mysterious Shaky Kane

* A package on legendary Topps man (and not-so-secret comics guru) Woody Gelman, drawing on research from Patrick Rosenkranz and featuring Art Spiegelman

* An editorial on the declining profile of traditional comic books by Sammy Harkham

* Giant comics and illustrations from Dan Zettwoch, Mike Reddy, and Jon Vermilyea

* Brian Chippendale on all the latest superhero comics

* Joe "Jog" McCulloch on Gerald Jablonski

* Aragones-style marginal comics from PShaw!

* An exploration of Kentaro Miura's totally bonkers manga Berserk

* A list from an anonymous but highly regarded cartoonist

* Contributions from Eamon Espey and Benjamin Marra

* More!

Speak of the Devil (finale)

Gilbert Hernandez has just released the last issue of one of the most exciting and enjoyable comics mini-series in years. Why hasn't this been seriously reviewed? Maybe the critics are all waiting for the trade paperback to come out. Isn't that always the way? I can't tell you how many people revealed to me that they haven't been reading this series, that they are "waiting for the trade".

Well, their loss. Cuz, for me, this was a series that got me back into the comic store, looking for it every month. When I guessed right and checked the stands on the day the last issue was released, it was a thrill. A thrill to spy it on the shelf, and a thrill to race home and read it under lamplight, and a thrill to have the shit scared out of me during the finale. Isn't this part of the experience of being a fan of a series, of a periodical? How could "waiting for the trade" beat the ratcheting up of suspense from month to month, as I wait for the next issue? It couldn't. But unfortunately that's the world comics are released in these days. It's as though the issues are just an advertisement for the trade paperback collection.

I can't bring myself to really review the last issue of Speak of the Devil. My Beto fix and the high I got from this series are too out there to really explain. I'm in love with his layouts. They are incredibly sophisticated and have an architecture all their own. Gilbert knows what he's doing, trust me. You might not dig the style he's employing but you can't NOT see how Beto uses rhythm and tone like a musician. His comics are a complex code of directions and signs, symbols, minor and major keys.

The drum I keep beating with this comic is that, for me, it's really like some obscure late night TV noir directed by Fritz Lang that at first glance is campy, has awkward dialogue, is in black and white: most viewers flip past it, miss it, miss the purposeful staging, "blocking" of each scene, maybe watch a bizarre fight scene or a wooden kiss, but usually discard the lot as pulp, genre, formula. Yet that Fritz Lang movie and this Beto comic are equal in INTENT. They are genuinely artful, terrifying and strange, playful almost, and these poems go unnoticed by most because they're not really LOOKING. It's incredible. I feel like the attentive geeky fan going LOOK! Look at what he's doing! Triple backflip and he nailed the landing! It's the Beto Olympics!

And I then I ask around and no one's read it yet, and I think, You've gotta be kidding! You didn't see that as it happened? And that's the bummer of this post comics pamphlet era for alt and art comics. But that's another story ...

Comics Comics at Comic-Con

Oh boy, Comics Comics 4 will debut at Comic-Con! This one's got Shaky Kane, Dan Zettwoch, Woody Gelman, Brian Chippendale, Sammy Harkham, Joe McCulloch, Mike Reddy, PShaw!, Eamon Espey, Benjamin Marra, Berserk, and much much more (well, just a little more). Come by and grab one and argue about Alex Ross with us! PictureBox -- booth 1630.

Your Pshaw! for the Day

By Pshaw!

You're the Töpffer! (or, The Worst Blog Post Headline Ever)

There have been too many explosive and exciting posts around here lately, so how about something a little more sedate and twee?

The July issue of Harper's magazine includes a long review (subscription required) of David Kunzle's two recent and indispensable books on Rodolphe Töpffer. Written by art critic Jed Perl, it's generally a smart, thoughtful piece, and displays none of the condescension you commonly find in articles like this printed in the mainstream press. He still gets comic books wrong, of course, but it's kind of interesting (to me) just how he goes astray.

Most of the review is about Töpffer and the books themselves, and Perl only addresses Töpffer's relationship with comic books in general near the end of his article. First, he takes issue with Kunzle's speculation that Töpffer's work has been neglected by American comics fans because of "a narrowness of vision, a chauvinism that cannot bear to see the invention of so fertile, popular, and American a genre conceded to a European master.” Perl disagrees:

I’m not sure that the problem with Töpffer is that he is European so much as that his work is nearly two hundred years old. After all, much of the comic illustration done in nineteenth-century America can feel equally anachronistic to cartoon aficionados of our day. It is in the very nature of the popular arts, which are overwhelmingly oriented toward the present, that even their most powerful traditions will be reformulated with a vengeance that crushes the sort of art-historical niceties that quite naturally interest a scholar such as David Kunzle. Intellectually, I can see that Töpffer is on a continuum with the contemporary graphic novel, just as I can see that the silent movies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin are on a continuum with the comedies now playing at the multiplex. But viscerally, what I feel very strongly, perhaps most strongly, are the differences. What is most striking in contemporary graphic novels is the dizzying overlay of influences, the thickening stew of twentieth-century allusions. Graphic novelists like to mix elements of earlier comics and noir movies and potboiler mysteries and art deco and art moderne and create a contemporary brew, a brew that’s frequently laced with irony. And when I turn back from this work to Töpffer’s picture books, I find that I’m face to face with an unself-consciousness that feels alien, strangely and wonderfully so.

First of all, on the question of why Töpffer's neglected, I favor Kunzle slightly more than Perl, though both of them are basically right. (The fact that good, readily available English translations of the strips didn't previously exist probably hasn't helped.) What's more interesting to me, though, is just how alien and anachronistic Perl thinks Töppfer's work is. The most surprising thing about reading Töpffer, in fact, is just how contemporary and of-the-moment his comics seem. (Incidentally, I also think Perl's wrong about Keaton and Chaplin, whose films haven't aged poorly at all; there are still plenty of people who watch their silent movies for fun today, far more than watch dramatic silent films such as, say Intolerance. They aren't as alien as all that. I wonder if humor ages better than drama?) Barring the clothing styles, and the occasional reference to politics, culture, and then-current events, Töpffer's strips aren't that different (except in terms of quality and skill) from many of the mini-comics you can find sold at MoCCA or SPX.

Perl goes on:

The aggressiveness of so much comic art is fueled, at least in part, by a need to compete in the commercial world. I sense that pressure in the work of Hogarth and Daumier, whose caricatures can be fearsomely real, with evil and folly solidly evoked. Even Winsor McCay’s magnificent early-twentieth-century Surrealist dream-worlds have a sharp punch to them; they are meant to stand up to all the other news in the Sunday papers. Töpffer is a very different case. He approaches even the least sympathetic of his imperious professors and self-indulgent young men with a certain gentleness of spirit. It’s significant, I believe, the Töpffer originally conceived of his picture books as entertainments for his family and friends; he was, at least initially, remote from the commercial world, and could afford to affectionately embrace his nutty subjects.

Perl's kind of right here, and a lot wrong, in totally charming ways. First, while I take his point about commercial concerns, that argument cuts both ways; there's a reason for the cliché that satire closes on Saturday night. Daniel Clowes's "Why I Hate Christians" wasn't exactly a blockbuster money-making idea, for example. And, you know, Ziggy and The Family Circus seem to have done pretty well. Secondly, I think it's kind of wonderful that he thinks that "graphic novelists" are actually competing in the commercial marketplace. Outside of a few superstars and flukes, the newspaper strip world, and the DC/Marvel axis, comics has to be one of the least profitable media businesses in the world North America. It would be kind of great if this misconception spread around, though. And third, I think a trip to the USS Catastrophe site is in order for Perl. Töpffer's not the only artist making minimalist, gently humorous picture-books primarily "for his family and friends" and "remote from the commercial world." Signing himself up for a subscription to King-Cat wouldn't be a bad start, either.

I'm really not trying to pick on Perl here, because in the main, this is actually a fine, smart article. His errors of interpretation are only worth highlighting for the way they suggest that the public conception of the form may be changing (and the ways it definitely isn't). It would be kind of hilarious if this idea of the aggressive, wealthy, alpha-male cartoonist really caught on.

Bushwacked by Beckett

Astute readers of Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter will be "wowed" to find out that RC Harvey has "discovered" that Samuel Beckett and Ernie Bushmiller once corresponded, according to Editor & Publisher. Harvey writes:

"Another of Nancy’s most famous fans was Samuel Beckett, author of the supremely existential and endlessly impenetrable play “Waiting for Godot.” Beckett initiated a correspondence with Bushmiller that lasted for several months in late 1952 and early 1953. The exchange between the two, published in 1999 in Hermenaut No. 15 with an introduction by A.S. Hamrah, is a majestic example of two people talking past each other, neither understanding quite what the other is about but each assuming he understands perfectly. The existentialist Beckett assumed from what he saw in Nancy that he could write gags for Bushmiller, that his existential comedy would be in perfect sinc with the strip. But Bushmiller simply couldn’t comprehend what Beckett’s gags were; he saw no humor in them."

Hey, wow Harv! Maybe comics really aren't just for kids! That 1999 Hermenaut article was a pretty well known (and beautifully executed) joke. The drawings are by R. Sikoryak. Good to see E&P putting its reporting skills to use. This reminds me of the time Print magazine published their exciting discovery of "Telegraphic Art", as seen in The Ganzfeld 1. I was working like 3 desks away at the time, and the crack fact checking team there never bothered to ask if it was real. Tom rightly wonders if it's "too good to be true". It certainly is.

When Gary Met Philip

Panter vs. Dick. All the relevant links and info, plus a rare photo (not the more famous one at left) of Dick wearing his Rozz Tox t-shirt, courtesy of the best Philip K. Dick fanblog around.

(And there's a bonus Gilbert Shelton connection!)

Pre-Dementia

Courtesy of the Fantagraphics blog, here's a nineteen-page preview of Where Demented Wented, the first comprehensive collection of the work of gonzo underground genius Rory Hayes (co-edited by Dan himself).

I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

Fellow Travellers?

This probably doesn't deserve a post of its own, but since we closed the comments on the post where it would make most sense to put this, I thought I'd just point out an interesting credit that Pixar apparently included at the end of Ratatouille, according to Augie De Blieck at Comic Book Resources. If this is true, Pixar (at least sort of) agrees with Frank:

Our Quality Assurance Guarantee:

100% Genuine Animation!

No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts

were used in the production of this film.

"Realism" and excessive reliance on photographic reference aren't the same thing, after all, a distinction a lot of people got tripped up by, I think.

Craft in Comics 2.0 (finale)

Anyways, back to craft. Ahem. That last post was sort of bittersweet. On one hand, I'm kinda bummed that my panel with Jaime Hernandez and Jim Rugg basically gets boiled down to this routine about taste. I was trying to riff on photo-referencing, not so much on Ross or even the comics culture that spawned him. Take a look at the comments section for that last post, wade through them and see for yourself how few of the comments refer to photography and drawing and the exchange between the forms. On the other hand, I'm happy that I did touch a nerve. Something resonated. I'm interested in fostering serious discussion about the over-use of photography in cartooning. Photography. Cartooning. Two different disciplines.

During the panel at Heroes Con, I spoke about a particular teacher I had who was adamant about not using photographs as reference for drawing. Ever. If there was something that needed to be researched she would direct me to a vast illustrated encyclopedia. And if an illustration of the thing didn't exist, then I could go look in the regular encyclopedia. And then, we still could really only study the photo, we could make a drawing from it and then the photo had to be put away. We were to use the drawing we had made from the photo as the primary reference, that's it.

The idea was to make us carefully select the information we wanted to transmit with lines. She would talk about how when one draws from direct observation, one is choosing what to leave in, what to leave out and even reconstructing elements so that the drawing will "read" better. When one draws from a photograph, the space is flattened, the camera has already selected the lines, shapes, and forms for you. When you are outside drawing a tree, YOU are choosing what is in focus, what is not—there is an exchange between subject and viewer. That is the art. To be present in that moment. When you are making the lines, THAT is the moment of seeing, of looking. "Don't look at the paper," she would yell. "Look at what you are drawing!" For me, this is what is valuable in the experience of drawing, this focus, this intention. It's a very different process to draw a tree while sitting underneath it as opposed to drawing the same view from a photograph. The huge tree that moves and breathes is now lifeless and only about four by six inches wide and flat.

On the panel, we all talked a little bit about our schooling and how those experiences formed us, and how certain ideas we learned then are still part of our practice today. And for me, one of the limits I put on myself is not using photo references when composing my comics. Does that make me a better artist somehow? Maybe not, but it does lead me to make certain choices that yield unexpected and interesting results. For example, I'll draw all the landscapes for my comics from life, from just walking around, or from just out of my head. I like to think that it adds a degree of naturalism to my comics, but it does prove difficult when I need to set a story in an exotic locale. Yet, since I feel comfortable drawing everyday backgrounds and such it's not so hard to fake it out of my head. The conversational style of my landscapes that simply evolved out of the repetition of drawing from life serves me well in moments where I'm uncertain of how things should look. I can insert a believable setting for the characters and make it work, make the scene richer, fuller. And I like to think that those landscapes out of my head are more successful because they are not from photographs, and also because those landscapes contain my intent, my focus. Photos, even ones I take myself for reference, create distance between viewer and subject. That's not the scene I just experienced, just walked through... How often have we all felt that the picture just doesn't really capture the moment? That's precisely why I strain to draw out those moments in my comics, why I refuse to use photographs. They only upset the balance. And it feels false, honestly. Like cheating.

Anyways. There's room for all styles, approaches. But for me, I'm interested in DRAWING. I'm not interested in becoming a sort of movie director who utilizes actors, snapshots, Google image search, Photoshop, and every other available tool to create a hyper-realistic world. It's a comic book fer christ's sake. It's pen and paper. It's drawing.

Yet, I must admit that I do enjoy comics that contain plenty of photo-referencing. It can be done well. And of course all those drawings from photos are DRAWINGS too. I'm not trying to suggest that by using photos, drawing from photos is not drawing. It's just different. And I can enjoy it—to a point.

There still will always be a transition or two in a heavily photo-referenced comic that seems really stilted and wooden. I think what happens is that the comics continuity is hindered by another discipline's limitations. The still photo versus the moment-in-time in a motion picture, in a movie. Would folks who use snapshots of actors for their comics prefer to just film it and then capture a less "pose-y" position? Does that make sense? I mean, why not just film it and then at least you're getting the FLOW of it. Then you could pause the really great gesture or something. But then, why not be a filmmaker? See what I mean? It's a slippery slope. At least that's how my brain works. I have to set limitations.

"I set limits for myself," Jaime told the audience. "Like I only ever have four lines of dialogue at a time. If you have more, it's too much. I wouldn't read it. It's too many words. It's gotta be natural."

PREVIOUSLY: Part one, Part 1.5, and Part 1.75

Your Pshaw! for the Day

By Pshaw!

Happy Independence Day!

Craft in Comics part 1.75

Hey everyone. I'm going through my notes on the panel ("Craft in Comics" with Jaime Hernandez, Jim Rugg, and myself), and honestly, they don't capture the feelings I had about the panel, or how I feel about it a week-and-a-half later.

I guess the thing that resonated most with people is my rant about Alex Ross, and I just don't feel like turning my recollections about this wonderful panel I was on into a bitch-fest about Ross, but ... ah fuck it: It's not just Ross, it's this culture of photo-referencing in comics that grinds my gears. It's true, I hate Ross's work. He's got great technical ability, but big deal. Why is copying the nuances of a photograph such an achievement? That's not drawing! He's the worst example for a young artist to have, the worst role model. No one has done more harm to the form than Ross. It's not comics he makes. It's fumetti. There are no real panel-to-panel transitions as there are in "pure cartooning"; he's just putting photograph next to photograph in a way that some find pleasing. But it's not comics.

His original sketches for his pages—which I've seen in person—are lively drawings that capture the energy and action of the figures. I remember thinking then, "Why doesn't he just work those up into full drawings?" Instead, he'll literally dress models up in a costume and take pictures of them dressed as Galactus or Batman. But that's not Galactus, that's some guy standing on a washer and dryer in a basement. How do I know? Cuz Ross and guys like P. Craig Russell love to publish those photos for some reason.

There was a Conan book recently that I was flipped through and I could immediately see that it was referenced, because the referencing takes over. Did John Buscema or Barry Smith let their references take over their style? No, they were original enough, wise enough, to incorporate the references, to subsume them into their overall style. P. Craig Russell most often does the same, he's good enough to really USE the reference, but I always wonder why? Why bother? It distracts me as a reader, it ruptures the balance of his drawings, his lines, because it's clear that the drawing is from a photo. It sends the other drawings on the page that are not referenced into high relief. Photos flatten the perspective, the shape of the body, the sense of depth. And worst of all it's not Conan! Or Galactus. My suspension of disbelief is shattered at the moments I realize a photo is being used, and then that break is re-enforced when I see the photo that the artist was using, which they'll often proudly display like a trophy! Do they think that should be applauded? It's maddening!! When Kirby drew Galactus it WAS Galactus. Real. Manifest. Not some schlub in his underwear playing dress-up.

Think of Alex Toth. As far as I know he only occasionally lifted a photo straight. Like Neal Adams, he'd draw from it and then integrate it into his style so that it wasn't so jarring. These days that concern seems archaic. The more photo-realistic the better. And on top of that, look close at the more recent vintage of photo-referenced comics. Generally each photo has the same focal length. You can really imagine the "actors" sitting there on their couches, at their kitchen tables, in the car. It's so LAZY!! Point and shoot, ah, that panel's done, next! "Honey, will you stand over there by the window and look off in the distance? I need to nail this Catwoman drawing."

** More soon—also I'm not responding to comments on this one. On this subject, I have patience only to be dogmatic.

*** Photo-referencing isn't just a problem in mainstream comics either, by the way. Those guys are just easy targets.

PREVIOUSLY: Part one and Part 1.5

NEXT: Part 2.0

Reminder

I assume most of you have decided to send your letters to Comics Comics the old-fashioned way, and your missives are already in the mail. If not, do your duty, and don't let the Internet kill the old-school letters page. Because so far, our pickings have been slim. Surely someone is still angry with Dan about his Masters of American Comics essay from CC3! Do you love the space our large broadsheet size allows for artists to create cover images and comics? Or does trying to read the monstrous thing on the bus drive you insane? At the very least, you could take issue with Frank's assertion that Ronin is the best Frank Miller comic...