Yokoyama Live Drawing!

As Tim noted below, I seem to only post PictureBox-related crap. And true to form, here's another one. But never fear! I am working on a long review of The Hunter. That will happen soon and my good name will be cleared. Anyhow, many moons ago, while in Switzerland for Fumetto, I shot this footage of Yuichi Yokoyama doing a live drawing demonstration. The camera's a little shaky but it's still a lot of fun to watch him conjure these faces onto paper. San Francisco denizens take note: Yokoyama will be making his first U.S. appearance on August 15th at the new Viz Pictures store, New People. The store in general looks extremely exciting and Yuichi designed fixtures and other interior details of the store. More details to come. Sadly he's not able to continue on to NYC or anywhere else this time, but has promised me that he'll do a proper U.S. tour in the year ahead. So, look out for that! In the meantime, enjoy the picture.

Happy Birthday Dan! a/k/a Big Blog Announcement!!!

Happy 33rd birthday, Dan! (You are now the same age that Jesus was when he was crucified. What have you accomplished so far with your life?)

Most readers have probably already noticed one of the ways we've been celebrating Dan's big day here on the blog: We're adding a few new voices to the mix. There's no denying that in recent months Dan, Frank, and I have found ourselves returning again and again to the same old subjects: I dither endlessly trying to figure out which word to use about what, Frank "riffs" on color ad nauseum infinitum, and Dan posts transparent publicity blurbs for PictureBox and/or his friends. It's getting a little tiresome for all of us.

So it's my pleasure to welcome two amazing writers to the fold, Jeet Heer and Dash Shaw, comics luminaries who surely need no introduction. (If you do need introductions, click over to their sites and start browsing around—you won't regret it.) Most likely, they will both be gracing us with their online presence once or twice a month, and we couldn't be happier that they have agreed to participate. They will undoubtedly enrich the site greatly in the weeks to come.

By the way, there will be more surprises in the near future here at Comics Comics, so don't forget to keep checking in.

Thanks, everyone.

Groundwork of Evangelion: 1.0 / “cinematic” comics

This is my first post here. I’ve never regularly written about comics, or anything else, before so please “go easy” on me and forgive my poor word-writing ability. Thanks to the CC crew for inviting me to participate. I will try to post once a month, unless my previous posts become too embarrassing.
Groundwork of Evangelion: 1.0 (2008) is a collection of preparatory drawings and pencil tests for the (forthcoming to the USA) animated movie. The pencil test drawings usually follow a grid but occasionally a single frame is enlarged to cover two tiers. It reminds me of how sometimes when a newspaper strip was collected into a book format the publisher would print a single panel larger than the others. Since everything was originally drawn to the same scale, a single panel would have larger text and the ben-day dots would be bigger, oppressive. It’d give it a Pop art aesthetic for just one panel. Or the old Crockett Johnson Barnaby reprints where the publisher stacked the panels Yummy Fur style. My favorite example of this is a Little Orphan Annie reprint where all of the panels were spaced out strangely, still following a grid but with unusually large gutters. Each panel was orphaned from the others. I wonder if the cartoonists themselves approved any of these decisions.

Anyway, this book isn’t really a comic book or an ani-manga (stills from a movie arranged as a comic for no good reason- see the Pantheon Scanner Darkly release) although you could read it as a confusing one. And it doesn’t have the fanboy nerd-fest feel of one of those “concept art” books, where you can see endless drawings of how a mecha looks and what all of the parts supposedly do.

This is a book of ephemeral, notational drawings for a movie that I haven’t seen yet. Large portions of it look like if Cy Twombly drew a comic.

Other parts look like portraits of character scenes where the “performance” in the drawings are still being worked out. Since it’s all light-boxed from previous drawings, it has a thin-line traced drawing look like Warhol line drawings.
They’re marked with little notes that I don’t understand. All of the Japanese I once knew is gone, and I don’t know filmmaking vocabulary anyway. Unlike comics, which have a widely-known “insider” language (“these bubbly shaped frames around the words mean the character is thinking- is that cool with everybody?” “yeah, okay”) this is a totally foreign “insider” language used by the people at the studio to communicate to each-other. They weren’t drawn to be published for a wide audience; but here they are, published, and I could go into Kinokuniya in NYC and buy a copy. Awesome.

It seems like “cinematic” is used as a derogatory word for a comic because it suggests that the comic was designed for the reader to use it as a springboard to imagine something that it’s not. Obviously, most cartoonists would like to think that they’re making comics as opposed to imaginary movies awaiting a budget.

Since this is published and I could get a copy before I could see the movie, I’m left with a book that stands on its own in my mind. I know the characters from the animated series, but these drawings are too abstract for me to connect it to a specific scene. It’s too incomplete for me to use the drawings to imagine what the movie will be like.

Chris Ware and other cartoonists have frequently dissed the idea of “cinematic” comics in a variety of ways:

http://writing.umn.edu/docs/speakerseries_pubs/Glass_Ware.pdf

“Some of the best comics, I think, are still from the turn of the century, when the medium was still being developed as a language. And each particular artist developed that language to suit his or her own particular vision, which I don’t think has happened since the 1940s, where it’s just absorbed- this sort of ready made language of, sort of cinematic close-ups and dissolves and long-shots and that sort of stuff.”

I just googled “Chris Ware cinematic interview” and pulled this up. He’s said similar things in interviews I remember reading. I think Ware’s the greatest living cartoonist, but what’s strange about this argument to me is that:

(a) So many of the early newspaper comics that Ware and other cartoonists love and appropriate from have a language based in theater (like Thimble Theater). There’s a lot of theatrical staging in contemporary cartooning. Why is theater somehow more akin to comics than movies? When these early cartoonists were drawing comics, it made sense to be influenced by theater because it was an extremely popular medium, like movies are today. In fact, I think movies are a little tiny bit closer to comics (as a medium) because film is on a 2-dimensional plane while theater is 3-dimensional.

(b) What’s wrong with drawing from a “cinematic” language?

Here’s another Chris Ware quote from http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/03/chris.ware.qanda/index.html

“I don't like to think of my work as 'cinematic.' A movie is passive -- you're watching it, taking it in. Where a comic strip, it's completely active: you have to read it, search it for meaning, for the connection with your entire experience and your memory. Yes, you do have the illusion of watching something happen in a comic strip -- but if it's done well, it comes alive on the page like a novel. A novel is the most interactive thing ever created.”

I don’t think Ware is creating an either/or argument here. I don’t think he dislikes ALL movies, or feels that ALL movies are “passive.” I don’t know him, but I’d be surprised if that was the case.

This Evangelion book makes me think of “cinematic” comics in a positive way; not passive; one of many modern languages that comics can react to.

Nabokov and Comics Revisited

Vladimir Nabokov’s love of comics has been discussed on this blog before. Equally interesting is the flip-side, the love cartoonists have for Nabokov. Here are a few examples:

1. Jay Lynch interview, Comics Journal #114:

Lynch: Sure. Sometimes, I think that Nard N’ Pat is pretty much derived from James Joyce’s Ulysses and that Phoebe is nothing more than improvisations that spin off from Nabokov’s Ada.

Lait: How many times have you read Ada?

Lynch: Eight or nine. Jackie has known me for years, so he knows that I think Nabokov’s Ada is the greatest, most complex piece of fiction ever written. Once I did a thing for RAW called "The Goodnight Kids." It’s full of Ada references. I figured if one person deciphered that, I’d be fulfilled.

“The Goodnight Kids” can be found in Raw vol. 1, #5 (1983).

2. Dan Clowes interview, Comics Journal #233, discussing his graphic novel David Boring:

Clowes: I was certainly inspired by Pale Fire, I think, with his undependable narrator, or maybe he is a dependable narrator, it’s hard to say. The way he sort of references this text, that being the old comic book, and sort of re-imagines it into what he wants it to be.

When I was reading Pale Fire, I remember the thing I really responded to was the idea that I had, as a kid, read comics that my brother had left lying around, and I had tried to take from them some unconscious message that wasn’t necessarily there. I thought that was such a great thing in Pale Fire how this unreliable critic who’s sort of mis-analyzing this whole epic poem that John Shade has written, is actually creating this whole new work of art that’s possibly even superior to this great poem itself.

Clowes also included a Nabokov joke in Eightball #17: a gag cartoon titled "The Lepidopterist." David Boring is full of allusions to Nabokov. Perhaps the most subtle is a statement made by the hero to his lover, "You're the original of Wanda." (p. 92.) Nabokov's last, unfinished book (which will finally be published this fall) is titled The Original of Laura.

3. Chris Ware interview, Comics Journal #200:

Ware: There is a segment in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is trying to describe the accumulative effect of a number of events going on in his visual field as he comes upon an accident scene in his front yard. He has to go through three or four paragraphs to describe what’s happening, and he excuses himself and the limits of his medium for its inherent lack of simultaneity. This is, of course, something you could presumably do in a comic strip, though it wouldn’t be nearly as funny.

4. In his novel Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov described a fictional animated character named “Cheapy the Guinea Pig.” In the anthology Zero Zero, issue #27, Al Columbia did a one-page strip imagining what Cheapy looked like.

Plodding Along

As some readers may remember, a while back I suggested that it would be nice if we could all agree on an adjective that could do the same work for comics that "literary" and "cinematic" perform for literature and film. For various reasons, the post proved somewhat controversial. In the end, the most popular suggestions were, if I remember correctly, "cartoonic," "pictographic," "Herrimatic," and "McCloudy." Later, the great cartoonist Mark Newgarden told me he had thought of the perfect word, but had forgotten it before running into me. It is a maddening thing to reflect upon for too long.

Anyway, in the comments to Friday's post, gentleman Jeet Heer recommended an essay about Nabokov and comics by the scholar and cartoonist Clarence Brown. Coincidentally, in the piece in question (which mostly concerns instances in Nabokov's writings which Brown believes are informed by the aesthetics of comics), Brown advocates for another possible contender to the comics-adjective crown:

I needed a word that conveyed the sense of "comicstrippishness" but that would be less clumsy, a word that conveyed something like the soul or essence of the comic strip. ...

Chess is essentially an abstract play of force and counterforce constrained within a rigidly measured grid of relationships; as such, it is quite independent of its material incarnation in patterned board and pieces. Similarly, the procedures of pictorial narrative, the left-to-right movement of figures against a ground and in sequential frames, can be adumbrated in verbal patterns. That, at least, is what I attempted to name when I came up with the term "bédesque."

The French call a comic strip "la bande dessinée," or popularly "la BD." My coinage bédesque has passed the test of satisfying the linguistic intuition of native speakers. I tried bédesque on Alain Besançon, the writer and political philosopher, who was on an opportune visit to Princeton. He first countered with bédique but then decided that he liked bédesque better.

—Clarence Brown, "Krazy, Ignatz, and Vladimir", Nabokov at Cornell, edited by Gavriel Shapiro

"Bédesque" has the advantage of a French etymology, as "cinematic" did, but also has a disadvantage in that "la BD" isn't as commonly used in English as "cinema" has been. Somehow I don't think this will take off, though I can't think of any practical objections offhand other than that comics fans are likely to reject it as pretentious. In any case, I haven't been able to find any other references to the term online. Oh well: More grist for the mill.

Paul Karasik on Fletcher Hanks

Paul Karasik is the very first cartoonist I interviewed (well, as an adult. When I was 13 I interviewed Paul Ryan for an 8th grade paper and made a case that he was vastly under appreciated, natch). That first Karasik interview became a lengthy examination of comics history and was published in the very first Ganzfeld back in 2000 with considerable help from our own Tim Hodler and the beloved Patrick Smith. When we debuted the issue, Paul sat behind our table at SPX and helped flog the thing. Why, mine eyes, they grow misty just thinking about it. Ok, wiping away the tears from my keyboard, I now present, nearly 10 years later, Karasik v. Nadel: The rematch. Paul looks better than ever: He's in lean, tanned, fighting shape, while I am old, graying, bitter, hunched and prone to mumbling. Paul won again. Sigh.

Thanks to Gabe at Desert Island for hosting a fun evening and asking me to interview Paul on the occasion of his book signing for the fantastic second Fletcher Hanks volume, You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation. Click below to listen to the interview.

Lost & Found

1. A vanishingly small subset of readers will be interested in this, but for those of you who enjoy discovering the hidden connections between Nabokov and comics, under-appreciated great-novelist John Crowley believes he knows the answer to one of the master's more obscure comic-strip allusions. (An allusion that apparently baffled Alfred Appel Jr. himself, no less.)

His answer is here.

2. These are all over the internet already, but I would still feel remiss if I didn't draw your attention to the comics coverage at The Onion AV Club and Vice this week. Some of the content in both is a little hinky (Is "hinky" a word? Does it mean what I want it to mean?), but some of it is pretty good and shouldn't be missed. In particular, I recommend the interviews with Seth (who I was pleased to learn is a fellow Dick Ayers appreciator), Michael Kupperman, and Al Jaffee, as well as a top ten list from Gary Panter.

July Tour Diary

Hey Everyone, Frank Santoro here with a scene report. Please enjoy:

Thursday July 16th: Drove up to NYC from Pittsburgh, PA. Made it by 4. Mazzucchelli/Nadel talk at MoCCA was at 7 so I had time to rest. Found a parking spot right outside my summer sublet studio good thru the weekend. Yes! Dash rolled by and I showed him the rare early Yokoyama story that I had xeroxes of. Well, they're Dan's xeroxes and I had "borrowed" them for a few months. Never got around to making my own copies, oh well. We walked over to MoCCA. Humid as hell. But that means there's lots to look at New York. Broadway and Bleecker is like a catwalk. Ahem.

Anyways, we thought we'd get to the talk early and get a good seat. Everyone else had the same idea. It was packed. Said hi to Dan and to Mr. Mazzucchelli. Made my way to the back. Stared at the art on walls. It has to be my favorite exhibition of comic originals, ever. Maybe the first career overview I've seen that doesn't feel like a highlight reel. It's a reflection of strengths and of rhymes. Lines of thought. Sounds and pauses.

The talk was great. I thought to myself that David's apprenticeship in the belly of the beast (Marvel) has afforded him a POV that not many other (any other?) cartoonists working outside of mainstream comics have these days. And specifically to "alternative" comics, there is no one who learned within the tradition of (mainstream) American Comics who's making new work at his level. Mazzucchelli talked about unlearning many of the approaches to comics that he developed because of the nature of the business of comics, of monthly deadlines. I think what's so interesting about this "unlearning" is how it broadened his scope and how he can do both; how he's choosing to challenge himself. Meaning he's choosing a new phrasing style like a musician. He can play standards like no one else and then his own compositions are like some Duke Ellington 12-piece orchestral suite. He can do both. How inspiring is that?

Friday July 17th: Went over to Desert Island with one of my "Hype-Up" boxes. Y'know, the usual mix of "retarded" comics from my collection for the discerning reader. All three bux each! So, run, don't walk, run over there and see what you're missing. Talked to Gabe about doing something for his free comics newspaper Smoke Signal. Had a taco and a Mexican Coca-Cola (the kind with real sugar) next door.

Met Ray Sohn and his wife, Tomomi, over on 14th and 8th. We walked up to the old DIA Center where Dan was having his talk with Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis. Boy, was it humid. Another great talk. Aubrey's a total ham and told story after story. If you don't know who I'm talking about, well, click around the interweb and then come back. Cool. You back? Awrite. So, anyways, Aubrey hammed it up, made fun of Dan at every chance and basically regaled the audience with stories about Syd Barrett, Marc Bolan, Paul McCartney, and just about everyone else involved in the '70s Rock scene. His best friend is Robert Plant. He said, "Paul McCartney, who's staying at the same hotel as I am here in New York, asked me if I wanted to go to his concert tonight, but I said, 'No I've got to do this bit at the museum for my book.'" He gave Dan a sideways glance and Dan grinned widely as if to say, "Why wouldn't you just go...?" Haha. It was a riot.

Went out to dinner with Ray and Tomomi. Talked about the idea of abstract comics. About narrative comics. About the differences in the practices of narrative art and "non-objective" art. Ray's making these square drawings that are like updated Stuart Davis abstractions but still feel "narrative". It's a weird gray area in the practice of 20th-21st century Art that hasn't been explored much. Single images strung together or shuffled to create a web of narrative is nothing new. But somehow when one thinks about how most comics have a very specific linear narrative and how the practice of most Modern Art has been to deny that narrative thread, to break with the old traditions in Art, it does make one think about the potential for a new type of practice in Comics. I dunno. Good dinner conversation, though.

Got caught in the downpour coda of a hot humid Friday night.

Saturday July 18th: Woke up early and got ready for class. Another "Hidden Tempo" class in my studio. Just getting organized. Had to rule a bunch of paper. Make templates. Set up the room. Was kinda nervous cuz I didn't know most of the people taking it this time. Last time I almost knew everyone. Still, it was great. I did my song and dance. They drew, they laughed at my wacky theories, and then they all flipped out when I proved my theories correct by using their own drawings. Haha!

After class I got a text message from Dan: "Lee Perry is playing a secret show in Gowanus. You're on the guest list. Starts in an hour." Some days, I just love my life. Rushed over to Carroll Gardens on the F train. Found the outdoors club, the old Project Room on Bond Street, a stone's throw from the old PictureBox office. The sun was going down and it was just the most amazing scene to behold. Me, Dan, and Helene Silverman standing around taking in said scene when here comes Lee Perry decked out in full regalia, walking towards us like a general. His road manager, Sebastian, is leading the way with Lee's luggage and I run over to lend a hand. Sebastian is the generous soul who invited Dan and me to Lee's house when we were all in Switzerland, and this is the first time we're all seeing each other again. It was just amazing; the timing couldn't have been better. It's not everyday you get to see Lee Perry play a show. I was standing five feet away from him while he sang. The sky was that perfect magic twilight color.

Hung out with Dan and Helene over at her house. Gary was at band practice with Devin. Helene made pizza. Dan told some funny stories about the projects he's juggling. From the sound of it, Art Out of Time 2: Electric Boogaloo should be pretty good. Anyways, Dan's really entertaining some nights, and he was hamming it up worse than Aubrey Powell, haha. Just kidding, Dan. Good times, good times.

Sunday July 19th: Got ready for my second class. Smaller this time, only four people, which was fine cuz I was a little beat. Matthew Thurber and Dash Shaw were two of the "students" so it was basically a hangout. I still did my song and dance. The students still laffed at me. And again I watched them all marvel at how their own drawings prove my friggin theories. Go figger. Maybe I know what I'm doing.

After class me and Dash went and had a burrito. He's on fucking fire. I've never met someone who works as hard as Dash does. He's got a bunch of projects on the stove and a bunch of festivals coming up. A Portuguese edition of Bottomless Belly Button is coming out. Portuguese? Who gets a Portuguese edition of their comic made? Maybe French, maybe Spanish, but Portuguese? I guess that book is doing okay. Sheesh! We talked about Mazzucchelli and this idea of "apprenticeship" in comics, how it's sort of faded away. We talked about that Trevor Von Eeden interview in the Journal again. What if Von Eeden would have taken the offer to draw Year One? Would Mazzucchelli have taken the same path? Of course.

Talked about SPX and the next TCAF. Then I realized that Comic-Con was this week and thought, wow, no one I know is going. No one's even talking about it. The comics world is so fractured now. What they do has nothing to do with what we do.

Hung out with Aaron at the studio. New issue of Cometbus is out and looks great. We got caught up and drank coffee til the wee hours of the night. He split and then I crashed out on the floor. Got up at the crack o' dawn and packed the car. Time to get outta Dodge. Take the money and run. And that's just what I did. Six hours later I was back in the "City of Champions" (what you didn't know Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup this year?).

Anyways, thanks to everyone who took my class this past weekend. It was truly rewarding. Really. Thank you. Over and out.

Fletcher Hanks! Live! (Sort of!) Thursday!

It's my honor to grill Karasik at the event below!

Come out to celebrate the release of "You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!" by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik.

Thursday, July 23, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Discussion at 7:30 with signing by Paul Karasik to follow
Desert Island
540 Metropolitan Ave btwn Union and Lorimer
Brooklyn, NY

Karasik will speak with comics historian and publisher Dan Nadel about Hanks's legacy, and both will take questions.

Fletcher Hanks, who worked under pseudonyms such as Henry Fletcher, Barclay Flagg or Hank Christy, is one of the more mysterious comic book artists active in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His work stood out for its weirdness and themes of brutal vengence, but little is known about the artist himself. Among his comic book heroes are 'Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle', the lumberjack hero 'Big Red McLane', and the cosmic superheroes 'Stardust, The Super Wizard' and 'Space Smith'. 'Fantomah Mystery Woman of the Jungle', is often called the First Female Superhero. Hanks' work appeared in Fox, Fiction House and Timely Publications for three years (1939-1941) before he abruptly stopped making comics. What little is known about the artist's fate is outlined in two collections of his work both edited by cartoonist, Paul Karasik. 'I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets' won an Eisner Award and the second volume, 'You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!', when combined with the first, comprises the Complete Fletcher Hanks.

also: Fletcher Hanks coloring books (with Charles Burns cover!) FREE with purchase of the new book at the event.

plus: a limited edition Hanks screenprint will be available at the event and is now available for preorder.

Heinz Edelmann 1934-2009

Heinz Edelmann, March 2006

I'm very sad to write that one of the truly great illustrators of the 20th century passed away today: Heinz Edelmann.

Most famous for his design of the Yellow Submarine characters and conception of a number of key scenes in the film, Heinz had a truly remarkable career as an image maker spanning the early 1960s until just a couple years ago. His talent lay in combining rigorous conceptual thinking with gestural mark making and a late modernist, playful sense of graphic design. He could draw in a delicate outline or a slashing brushstroke, but whatever it was was always adapted to the individual problem he was trying to solve. In this his guiding lights were Picasso and Steinberg, and his peers in late 20th century illustration include Milton Glaser and Tadanori Yokoo, though he surely would have dismissed such a comparison as overly generous. Amongst his achievements are an amazing series of posters he both drew and designed, hundreds of book cover designs, and scores of illustrations for the German edition of JRR Tolkien's books. The latter series was excerpted in The Ganzfeld 7 and a sampling of the former can be seen here. He was also a very well regarded teacher at Stuttgart's Academy of Fine Arts. One of his finest pupils, the illustrator/designer Christoph Niemann, wrote a great tribute for Graphis some years back.

Illustration for Twen, circa 1968

Newspaper illustration, circa early 1990s.

In 2006 I spent a couple of wonderful days in Amsterdam interviewing Heinz about his life and work. He was a true gentleman with a delightfully wry sense of humor and an honest humility. I had a great weekend with him and his wife Anna, as well as their daughter Valentine. They welcomed me so warmly and allowed almost a dozen hours of Heinz's time. Heinz had a lot to say about his work, the medium in general, and the history of image making in the 20th century. Those conversations will see print one of these days, though now I of course wish it had been much sooner. He was never less than brilliant. I'll miss knowing he was out there -- a beacon of intelligence, morality and aesthetic quality. Rest in peace, Heinz.

Early 1970s ad for Tolkien books.

Must Be Those Other Beatles...

I just can't resist: This article in the NY Times is truly, um, "special". I'm not sure even your average fanboy feels as strongly about the Image Comics reunion (I'm somehow surprised these artists are still even alive -- shouldn't the weight of history have crushed them or something?) as The Times' Mr. Gustines, who begins his article with this whopper: "IMAGE UNITED is akin to a Beatles reunion." He must be talking about these Beatles. Wow.

Mazzucchelli MoCCA Audio Evidence

I do believe Mazzucchelli won this round! But I shall have my revenge. Some day. Anyhow, here is the audio recording of our conversation. A good time was had by all. Thanks to MoCCA for asking us to do this and for putting on a great night. Click below to stream.

This is Just Baaarely Related to Comics

But if you've ever wanted to know Howard Chaykin's favorite movie about the music industry (American Hot Wax), or what all-time-great Comics Journal critic Robert Fiore thinks about Robert Clampett ("Tex Avery in a minor key, though where Avery mostly rode the road of excess, Clampett was a genuine surrealist"), check out their responses to those and other questions at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule's spring break quiz in three parts.

Two Weekend Reminders

This is a selfishly "not comics" post, but I must plug a couple of things. Well, first, please note that, technology permitting, on Sunday I'll post the delightful conversation with David Mazzucchelli. Now, the plugs:


Tonight in NYC!

Designer/photographer/filmmaker Aubrey (Hipgnosis) Powell is making a rare U.S. appearance in celebration of the release of For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis (PictureBox).

Artbook at X and PictureBox invite you to join AUBREY POWELL for an event in honor of

FOR THE LOVE OF VINYL:
The Album Art of Hipgnosis

with a slide show presentation followed by a book signing.

FRIDAY JULY 17
6 PM - 8 PM

ARTBOOK AT X
548 West 22nd Street
New York City

About HIPGNOSIS and FOR THE LOVE OF VINYL

Formed in 1968, Hipgnosis was the biggest and best design firm for the biggest and best bands of the classic rock era, creating iconic imagery for the likes of Pink IFloyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, 10cc, Yes, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Paul McCartney, Syd Barrett and Styx, among others.

For the Love of Vinyl is the first book to document their output in detail, focusing on over 60 package designs – from cover to label – written about in entertaining detail by the men who created them.

AND!


Please check ye ol' PictureBox Auctions ebay moniker, as well as PictureBox Gallery. I'm working with the owners of some rather remarkable collections of comics, illustration and, yes, original movie poster art. So there's all kinds of stuff going up for sale including originals by Milton Glaser, Victor Moscoso (ending today!), Gahan Wilson, and much much more.


There'll be regular updates....

Mazzucchelli vs. Nadel!

Please join the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art - MoCCA for
David Mazzucchelli and Dan Nadel in Conversation
Thursday, July 16, 7 P.M.
at MoCCA, 594 Broadway (between Houston and Prince), suite 401, New York, NY 10012

Mazzucchelli and Nadel will discuss Mazzucchelli's work, and the exhibition, Sounds and Pauses. Mazzucchelli will sign copies of Asterios Polyp and other books after the conversation.

That's the official word. Come watch us duke it out!

HighLow

This is funny. I found this quote in a folder on my desktop. It made me think of some of my friends who find themselves on the fence between Art and Comics. Or is it the rapidly gentrifying warehouse district between the two? You know what I mean. Maybe it won't make you think of the "space" between Art and Comics. Maybe you won't think it's funny either, but I do. Insightful too. It's an excerpt from an interview with Gary Panter by Mr. Spurgeon from Comics Reporter.

-----------------

PANTER: I seem to make old guy comics now. I remember working for this animator back in the '70s: Tex Henson, who had been at Disney in the '30s. He was drawing these stupid comics that looked kind of like Spike and Tyke. Bulldogs and cats and stuff. And I thought, "Gee, what an idiot. I'm doing this advanced, Clockwork Orange-y stuff. I'm in the future, and he's back there with his stupid bulldogs." Now I'm drawing bulldogs and cats and squirrels. What is that? I can't be hip and fresh and young. I'm not that anymore. I try to be, so that's sort of what I can do.

The full interview

Ben Jones Approved

Ben Jones has risen from his bed to pronounce things upon us in this interview. Imagine him saying these things (he looks like Heston in Soylent Green) on a busy street corner in 1895. Macho. Authoritative. Jones!

Dave Sim/Neal Adams on Color

Hey everybody, Frank Santoro here again this week with an excerpt from Dave Sim's Following Cerebus No. 9 where he interviews Neal Adams. A great interview all around, but one part of it really caught my eye. It's a long story that Adams tells about how he managed to re-organize DC Comics production department's approach to color and how Adams "updated" their color chart. It's a great, funny story. And I reference it a lot in my rants to friends and I want to reference it in future articles. So, I thought I'd post the original story from the source. But like I said, it's really long. So, I wrote a letter to Dave Sim and a few weeks later I got the "okay" to reprint the excerpt in full. I think it's an interesting story that Adams tells, and an important one. It's these moments in "comics history" that often get swept under the rug, yet they are often moments that ripple through the years and can be seen later as "game changing" events. Please enjoy.

Thanks to Mr. Sim.


DAVE SIM: Rather ungraciously I couldn't resist interrupting at this point and dragging Neal tangentially off-topic to find out if what he was referring to was a rumor I had heard about, centering on the chocolate-brown color that Neal had pioneered on the cover of Batman No. 245, a color which was formed by using 100% cyan, 100% magenta, and 100% yellow; one on top of the other.

NEAL ADAMS: The science of art and the art of science are wonderful things because they don't mix together all the time, but they mix together a lot and one of the areas where they mix together is the science of mixing colors. You can make millions of colors just by mixing the different percentages. And the question is, "How many colors do you start with?" You start with three: red, yellow, and blue. You make a guide with percentages of colors, and that guide is made up of dots of color. Dots of red, as an example—if they are spaced far enough apart and are small enough—will make an area of those dots look pink. Smaller red dots spread further apart will look light pink. If you add an area of blue dots, you'll get a light purple, and so on. And, doing comic books in the 1960s, what you had was 25% of yellow, 50% of yellow, 75% of yellow, and 100% of yellow; 25% blue, 50% blue, 75% blue, 100% blue; 25% red, 50% red, 75% red, and 100% red. With these percentages, mixing them together and using them individually you would get 64 different colors to work with.

DC Comics, at the time I joined the firm [laughs], they had 32 colors. And I didn't quite understand it until I got their chart, and I noticed that they didn't have what we call "tone yellow." They did not have 25% yellow and 50% yellow, and I did not understand why that would be, because I had done a syndicated strip and all kinds of other process-color work using the same basic chart, and I thought, "If you have 25% and 50% of red and blue, why don't you have 25% and 50% of yellow?" It didn't make sense. So I asked around a little bit ... kind of quietly ... and, apparently [laughs] at some point to save money in some weird way at some weird time they decided to do without "tone yellow." So that if you see a DC comic book from back in "them thar days" you notice that all the Anglo-Saxon flesh is pink. You don't continue to notice it because after you turn the page you're reading the story and it isn't a glaring difference but the flesh is pink. Whereas if you looked at Marvel Comics from the same time period, it's more of a flesh color—25% red, 25% yellow. Because they only had 100% yellow at DC, if you tried using that for a flesh tone you'd have orange flesh. You couldn't have all the subtler colors with "tone yellow" values. You lost HALF of the colors. Instead of 64 you had 32.

So, when the full impact of this hit me, I went to see Sol Harrison [DC's production director at the time] because I was coloring stories with a color palette of 32 colors instead of 64. And I asked him about it ... which is one of those stupid things you shouldn't do, as I would find out ... and he said, "No, we don't have 'em because it costs more money. By not doing these colors, the company is saving money." Well, if you were talking about a whole range of colors, that might be possible, but if you're just talking about 25% yellow and 50% yellow, it seemed to me that that couldn't be the case. How could two tones of yellow cost that much extra money?


So, I thought about that for awhile. And then I went and talked to some people around DC Comics and asked them if they had noticed this. Most of them hadn't. So I went to Carmine Infantino, [DC's publisher at the time] and asked Carmine and Carmine went in and asked Sol and Sol explained that it was "too expensive" and as far as he was concerned, that was it, the subject was closed. And I thought, well, that didn't work very well. I just ended up back at Sol Harrison. So the question was, "How to get around Sol Harrison?" So, I went to Joe Kubert, who was an editor at DC, as well as the great artist he's always been, and I said, "You know Joe, 'we here at DC' [laughs' we don't have tone yellow." He said, [flawless Joe Kubert impression] "Really." I said, "Yeah, you think we would." And he said, "Well, Sol's probably saving money." And I said, "Well, okay that's probably true, except that Marvel has got tone yellow." He says, "Let me see." So, I pull out a Marvel Comic and show it to him." "Yeah," he says. "Darn. I wonder how they can afford it?" I said, [laughs] Yeah, I mean it's Marvel, Joe. It's Timely Comics." [Marvel—which was really just what was left of Timely Comics—was pretty much of an under-financed shoestring operation compared to DC in those days]. [Sim laughs] "Yes, that's true. Hmm. I'll go see Carmine about it." I said, "No, I saw Carmine already." So, he said, "Okay, I'll go see Jack." Jack Liebowitz, the head of the company. So he walks away and disappears into Jack Liebowitz's office, about time for a 4 or 5 minute conversation. Liebowitz comes storming out of his office in his pinstripe grey suit, his little mustache twitching and he goes down the hall into Sol Harrison's office in a rage, muttering things like, "That son-of-a-bitch Goodman [then-Marvel publisher, Martin Goodman] wouldn't pay one G-damned dime more for his G-damned colors than I would. G-damn it." Things like that. [Sim laughs] And he goes into Sol Harrison's office, and he says, "Sol, how the hell much more is it going to cost to get tone yellow? Marvel's got tone yellow, what the hell is going on?" And Sol says, "Well, we're saving money." "Martin Goodman is spending more money on his comics than I am? That's bulls--t!" Sol said, "Well ... I'll call the separators." So he picks up the phone, and calls the separator up in Connecticut. The separator hired housewives in Connecticut to come in and do the separations. The brushes that they used looked like the back end of brooms. And they weren't very subtle about what they did, and it occurred to me, having been up there, if it was the same guy [laughs], he didn't give a damn about tone yellow. So Sol calls the guy, and it turns out that this guy did the color separations for Marvel and DC. So, Sol got on the phone and—trying to "prime the pump" a little bit said, "How much more would it cost us to get tone yellow?" You know: setting the guy up to give him the right answer.

SIM: "Thousands of dollars."

ADAMS: [voice of doom] "Yes, thousands of dollars, way too expensive for YOU." But, of course the guy had a close working relationship with Marvel AND DC so there was no way that he could give that answer. So what he said was, "You want tone yellow? You got it." [Sim and Adams laugh] So Sol said, "Uh, yeah ... we'll ... we'll take it." And hung up the phone. And Sol turns back to Jack Liebowitz and says, "We'll, uh, we'll be getting tone yellow now." [laughs] The actual conversation took about fourteen seconds. That day DC got twice as many colors as they had they day before.

SIM: I don't think you'd even want to look back over the years of DC Comics to see how long they had been without tone yellow.

ADAMS: [picturing it] [laughing] Exactly. So, you can see right there that i should have learned my lesson not to ask Sol questions like that. If I asked him a question he would invariably tell me, "No, you can't do it." And not only that, he would explain to me in great detail WHY I couldn't do it. It actually got to the point that if I asked Sol if you could do something and he said, "No, you can't," the odds were that you probably could and easily.

The next one ... the story that you are referring to ... was when I asked Sol, "Why aren't we using the dark colors? I mean, it's bad enough that we only have 64 colors to begin with, but we're losing about a third of the colors because we're not using colors like 100% yellow, 100% blue and 50% red [all in combination]. And the answer was, "Well, you can't use any color that adds up to more than 200% because then there's too much ink on the page, and the paper will slide off the press." So, I said, "Well, Sol, we're kind of printing on [laughs] toilet paper." [Sim laughs]. I think the paper that we're using absorbs any amount of ink pretty quickly. I could understand if we were doing Newsweek magazine with some slick paper stock like they use that maybe the paper would slide a bit, but this is pretty much the crappiest paper you can buy and I don't think the ink is apt to slide on it."

SIM: [laughing] "Sliding? Sliding is not the problem with this paper."

ADAMS: He said, "Well, that's what we had to do during the war." During the war? [Sim laughs] You're talking about WWII, right? "Yeah, we had to save money." Well, yeah Sol, you saved money by using lots of different kinds of paper when there were paper shortages during the war, but, Sol, now that paper is readily available again [laughs] we tend to use all the same grade of paper, the worst grade of ultra-absorbent toilet paper that's available.

Stupid conversation, I don't know why I was going on with this conversation, I think I just wanted to hear the litany of bulls--t that was attached to his one was. So he says, "Just don't use any of those heavy colors." And I said, "Sure, Sol." [laughing]

SIM: Don't go over 200% total color.

ADAMS: So I immediately went to my desk and immediately and in as many places as possible used as many colors that totaled more than 200% as I could. Just to find out. I wanted to see a book come in that slid all over the place on the press. [Sim laughs] In fact, I brought a book to Sol, and he said, "See, it's off-register [color sticking out over the holding line in the drawing] here." I said, "Sol, virtually every page DC has ever printed has been off-register because our production standards are crap!" I did a sky color on a couple Batman's where I think I did 25% yellow, 25% red and 100% blue—which still didn't add up to 200% but which was still considered "out of bounds" at DC at the time. After awhile, people were coming up to me in the production department and saying [awe-stricken voice], "Did you create new colors?"

Oh, God [laughs], "Come and burn me as a witch!" No, it's not that I'm creating new colors; it's that you guys aren't using the colors that you have.

SIM: [They'd] basically amputated a whole section of the color chart saying, "We can't use anything from here over."

ADAMS: [laughs] That's right.

Weekend Clean-Up

(Artist's rendition of my vacation)

I was away kayaking, fishing, having water balloon fights, eating ice cream, and doing other "manly" things this past week, so I've been designated "weekend boy" by my compatriots. What have we learned this week?

Well, for one thing we had an off-blog discussion about the incredible Trevor Von Eeden interview in The Comics Journal. Truly the must-read of the year so far. Like the Dick Ayers autobiography or the Dave Stevens book, it's a pretty incredible record of a cartoonist's psyche. I mean, all the stuff about Lynn Varley alone is remarkable -- almost (Ok, maybe totally) too candid. Also, it reminds me of how the TCJ interviews use to be -- the totally off the cuff candor of Kaluta or Conway or Chaykin in the 1980s. I think it's less that the Journal has changed (though it has) and more that the culture of comics has shifted so much in the last 20 years. After all, by contrast that interview with Ba and Moon (contemporary young "hot" artists) is remarkable for its contentment and happiness. I mean, the industry is still bizarre but the rewards and possibilities are so much more...lucrative. Comics isn't small anymore, I guess, and certainly what's left of public bitching now occurs more on message boards and blogs than it does in the old style interviews. But someone who lived through all of that could speak to this better than I.

Of course, Von Eeden was/is very talented, which is pretty much what distinguishes it from, say, a million other interviews you could do with superhero artists and why I'm at all interested in him. That's what I love that he talks about more or less drawing in ink, rather than tracing pencils, and that he's unconcerned with any conceptual logic to his layouts -- they seem to just evolve from whatever he feels like doing. Luckily the drawing and storytelling remains clear. I suppose that's the trick.

Oh, and I sure liked Frank's Brinkman review. I'm of course biased and I've been meaning to ask Mat to confirm a few things. Certainly Frank's thoughts about relating to the work seems dead on. I also wanted to note that so much of what makes MF work has to do with Mat's experiments with multiple generation xeroxing and the scale shifts throughout a page. Those are miraculous compositions which, as Frank so eloquently noted seem unimpeachable.

Finally, we learned from Lauren Weinstein that I'm against social interaction and a "killjoy" (oh, Weinstein, you're in trouble!). She may or may not be right. Next week we'll have a cage match about that very subject. Also, we have intuited that we will never be as cool as Al Jaffee, but oh lord we can try. Plus, we at CC have given birth (we're competing with Lauren!) to a new feature which will be unveiled soon. The suspense must be killing you!

Helpful Answers to Stupid Questions

As you know, I've been trying to answer an important historical conundrum: Where did Al Jaffee get the idea of depicting fish skeletons whenever he draws someone vomiting? After a long and mostly fruitless quest, eventually one of my correspondents suggested that I just ask the Master himself. So I did, mentioning Will Elder and the James Ensor drawing from last post, as well as commenter BVS's theory about the Dutch fish. Very graciously, Jaffee answered me via e-mail:

As to vomiter's discharges I can't say how I came to include such things as fish/chicken bones and even false teeth (see wretching jackal in NATIONAL PERSPIRERER article...MAD #??). My childhood pal Will Elder and I shared a similar cartooning sense of humor and certain bodily functions we found funny simply because the media and refined people generally tended to make believe they didn't exist.

The Dutch people do indeed swallow small fish whole. I was on a Mad trip across the Zuyder Zee some years ago and for lunch we dipped into a barrel, pulled out salted fish and (YECCH) swallowed whole. We did not pull the bones out. I guess the fish were small and aged with soft bones. This is a Dutch delicacy.

The drawing with guys upchucking huge fish is wild. I wonder if it's some sort of 19th century gag (I'd gag too with a whale that size in my gut).

Anyway, thanks for the info and I hope I answered your question.

Dan tells me this is possibly the greatest post I will ever publish.

Your Weekend Plans

Tonight! Brooklyn! Devin & Gary featuring Ross! Come see the vibes.
The Market Hotel
8 pm.

Tomorrow in Brooklyn!

Conversational Comics continues at Union Pool!
2pm
Telling Stories: Fiction in Comics with Jessica Abel, Jason Little & Matthew Thurber
panel discussion followed by drinks.

[UPDATE, FROM TIM: The CBLDF has just put up the audio from the last Conversational Comics event, with David Heatley, Lauren Weinstein, and Julia Wertz, and you can listen to it here.]

Tossing Around the Old Medicine Ball

Surprisingly, I still haven't figured out a grand unified theory of comics reading. (I do think that Eisner/montage bit at the end was kind of stupid in retrospect, though not regrettably so.)

However, after much research, I can finally report that Frank's comment about David Mazzucchelli's theory of comics simultaneity ("The page is taken in as a whole, the two page spread. It's not one image at a time. And it's not necessarily linear in so much that it's all absorbed at once and then accepted as 'ordered.'") is absolutely spot on. At least when you're reading Mazzucchelli comics. It's kind of amazing really. It works with everything from Batman to Asterios Polyp. I don't know how he does it, but it's true: entire spreads enter the reader's brain instantaneously.

But the two-page-spread simultaneous reading thing doesn't seem to work with a lot of other comics, at least not for me. And not just inferior comics, either; some of the best comics around don't work that way. So more research is needed. I'll be in my study.

================================

In the meantime, though, here's a new stupid opinion: I like Philip Guston just fine, but I think it's time that cartoonists started appreciating other painters now and again. (Always lead with a straw-man argument—that's the blog way.)

Like, for instance, why aren't cartoonists all over James Ensor? (If they are, and I've missed it, someone please correct me. (Actually, according to French Wikipedia, at least one European comic drew inspiration from him.))

Lauren dragged me to an exhibit of his drawings years ago, and I loved it, but I didn't really get how great he was until I went to the retrospective that opened at MoMA last month.


For the most part, Ensor didn't really attempt any of the sequential-art proto-comics often associated with people like Hogarth or Goya, and he had a tremendous range of tone, subject matter, and approach, but there's no question that he often displayed the soul of a cartoonist.

For example, check out the famous self-portrait he painted in 1883, and revised five years later to add a hat and other evocative details.

Or for that matter, his later self-depiction, "My Portrait in 1960":

(This one in particular doesn't work in the same way without its title, which essentially functions as a caption.)

Most of the work included in the exhibit loses even more power than art always does when seen via the internet instead of in person, particularly the two enormous (and enormously complicated) drawings of Christ entering Jerusalem, and Christ revealing himself to the people. It's impossible to tell when looking at them online, but they're packed with incidental characters and background details that my comics-rotted brain can't help but compare to chicken fat. He also often uses typography in a subtle, interesting ways.

Anyway, I could go through the exhibit pointing out drawing after painting after etching as possible kinda-sorta-like comics examples, but really I just wanted to use this as a setup to ask if anyone knows where Al Jaffee got the trademark fish bones so many of his characters disgorge whenever they vomit?

Because if you zoom in on "The Strike", and move your attention to the figures leaning out of the windows to throw up on the right, I think we might have something like a 19th-century Belgian precedent!

IMPORTANT UPDATE!: I found out the answer to the fish-bones/vomit question from the man himself! Read it here.

Lauren Weinstein interview

Check out this interview with Lauren Weinstein over at Inkstuds Radio. I've yet to listen to it but I'm sure it's great, Lauren's always got something insightful to say about Art, and Life, and the World. And after globe-trekking around Midgard the last few months to various comics festivals, I'll bet she's got some funny new stories to uncork.

MULTIFORCE notes

Hey CC faithful, Frank Santoro here this week with a riff on Mat Brinkman's Multiforce. How do you write a review about someone as influential as Mat? You don't. Well, I don't. Won't. Writing about Teratoid Heights would be one thing, but a Multiforce collection? Kill me now. If I do a straight review, it'll be 5000 words. I've got that much to say about this book. It's terrifyingly good and an indispensable record of possibly the most important serialized comics of the post-Ware era.

And I'm not just saying that—cuz honestly I usually prefer Brinkman the artist—the poster designer, the sculptor, the installation artist, the "draw-er"—to Brinkman the cartoonist. I could appreciate the touch and accuracy evident in the comics but ... I just didn't feel like diving in, I guess. I'd seen his first collection, Teratoid Heights, and liked it but liked it like I like most silent Jim Woodring comics. I always think, "Wow, that's beautiful", then flip through it in two seconds and put it down. So I mostly engaged Brinkman's comics this way. A lot. Even when I'd see a stray Paper Rodeo laying around, I'd just read a few of the gag cartoons within Multiforce—I wouldn't really sit with it for any real amount of time. Sometimes I'd quickly decode the sequencing and be impressed by the architecture of it all, but I still never dove in. The water looked really deep.

I guess I was more interested then in studying the other side of the Fort Thunder coin: Chippendale. Chipper's formal grid appealed to me, then as it does now, as something to contain the energy and vitality of the drawing. Brian's comics often fix the reader's eye upon the protagonist and then MOVES the reader through the corridor of action sort of like a single-POV video game.

In contrast, Brinkman pulls the camera back and allows the architecture of his world to UNFOLD in its own time, at its own pace. By doing so it feels to me as though the narrative action turns back in upon itself which opens up numerous readings. The pace slows down as one sequence SCALES into the next, alternating and differentiating each moment while maintaining the whole. Brinkman creates CENTERS of visual interest and of narrative importance that ROOT the progression of the panels and map the way for the reader. The reader accumulates the story through this natural unfolding and "spiraling" back rather than being MOVED through the space like Chippendale.

So, Multiforce. Seeing the strips together completely altered my feelings towards Brinkman's comics. I could see the complexity of his page layouts (when I would read each installment separately) but I never dreamed how beautifully it would all fit together as a serial comic strip. Each strip forms a section of the map which permits the reader to navigate the startling jumps in scale.

For the uninitiated: I'll try and describe the plot ever so loosely. A race of Giants attack Citadel City. The Micro-Men evacuate in a Giant Mega-Mobile Man life-form. Battles abound. Chaos ensues.

Got it? Great. Basically, it's all set up for Mat to showcase his drawing chops. But instead of going all out and just wowing the audience with carefully trained money shots, Brinkman organically spins a line of thought that spiderwebs 'cross the page. Up, down, diagonally, inside and out, piece by piece, branch by branch the story of the Micromen and Giants spirals in upon itself and unfolds according to an incredibly articulated framework of panels and gag cartoons that run parallel to each other. This is not the steady beat and sheets of sound of Chippendale, this is some haunting vibration of cosmic strings.

And truly do the lines vibrate. Brinkman seems to be concerned with how the drawings "read." Crisp lines, fuzzy Xeroxes, greys, blacks, noisy whites. What's created is a language and a "vibration" for each character and each set-piece. It's an appealing mix because the characters and the landscape really interact. This interaction creates a deep pool of activity. Our view as readers isn't limited to a single POV, so we can choose each view. Citadel City pulses and breathes, it's a stellar coral reef, inviting us as readers to stop and watch the aquarium contained within the page.

I really just sit and stare. It feels like reading a Sunday page comics section. But it's all one artist, all one story. Sorta Quimby the Mouse, over-sized Acme Novelty Library in that way, if you will. Multiforce has that level of visual complexity. I am overwhelmed by that information and then drawn in by the playfulness of the story. (And contrary to some critical readings of Brinkman, there is story in spades. I'm so tired of folks saying Fort Thunder artists didn't tell stories.) I'm freely moving my eye around the page like I am looking at an abstract painting. And what happens is I spy a simple gag cartoon that is embedded within the flow of the story, like the gag might just float free, panel-less beneath a larger grid. These vignettes, these parallel lines of thought and narrative reinforce each other and allow the story to breathe. It all moves forward, spinning in time like a living breathing world. LOOK:

The other thing for me is that this "serial Sunday page" comic speaks to me because it's of my time, of my generation. It speaks to me more than Herriman, or Gould, or Crane for that matter. I think it's a testament to Brinkman's insight as a cartoonist of his time that he chose to do large format serialized comics at the moment in comics history right before all these reprint books of old serial strips are being published. He's plugged in to the vibe, man. He, like Ware, wrestled the large format back from the dustbin of history and brought a new energy to very specific compositional and narrative "strategies" that have been laying dormant in contemporary comics for decades. I swear it reads like a multi-track recording, a harmony, some way of composing and executing that reinforces the story and, for the last time, spirals the narrative upon itself. I find it unbelievably sublime and appealing to read.

And everyone knows that the spiral contains all of the possible geometrical formations, right? So this is no pudding-school comic. The pieces of the multifaceted storyline grow together and create a life of their own. The web that's fastened is a solid structure, a jewel that reflects each point of the story as it turns. Like some galaxy contained in an aquarium, Multiforce vibrates beyond the comic book page. Mat Brinkman may be the spiral architect of this generation of cartoonists.

Pops is Tops on July 4

LISTEN TO THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG BIRTHDAY BROADCAST TODAY OVER AT WKCR FROM NEW YORK CITY!
also available on itunes.

Batman Rips

Grant Morrison doesn't really need the attention of Comics Comics, but I'm due for a post and his two most recent books are rolling around in my head. To start with, I ought to note that until his recent All-Star Superman, which I loved, I hadn't found a lot of his work too interesting. I liked Animal Man but found The Invisibles, The Filth, etc. etc. more or less incomprehensible. But I have always been impressed with the sheer verve of the guy, and his uniquely British ability to become a "personality" as much as a writer. It's that Michael Moorcock thing. Gotta love it.

He seems at his best when taking everything he knows and distilling it down into a seemingly straightforward story. He is also saddled with the unfortunate disadvantage of often pretty lousy artwork, placing undo emphasis on his dialogue and ideas. With Frank Quitely he actually has an equal collaborator. Quitely's nuanced, beautifully composed drawings actually convey meaning. This allows Morrison to shut up and let the pictures tell some of the story. Y'know, cause they're comics and all. Their recent Batman collaboration is a perfect example of brilliant superhero comics.

Anyhow... really what I've meant to write about is Batman R.I.P. and Batman: The Black Casebook. I read R.I.P. and could basically understand the idea of it: Morrison's Batman has experienced the last 60 years of comic book adventures in just 15 years of "his" time. And this becomes impossible for his brain to process. A villain tips him over the edge into insanity and he develops a second personality to cope. Then there are fights and he disappears. It's a tough slog. The main problem is that the artwork by Tony Daniel adds nothing to the story: no character development, no set pieces -- just gritted teeth and stiff action. It's so funny -- after all this time people kinda forget that comics are best when word and image complement each other. Morrison has spun this elaborate tale, but Daniel can't bring it to life. Batman's anguish is never manifested in a visually compelling manner. Nor is his madness. It's all drawn in the same high-energy, hyper-scratchy, distorted manner. The colors never change, etc etc. Basically, nothing the comics does well is harnessed to tell the story. So, while I get the feeling Morrison must intend more for his stories --I mean, the clarity and depth of his work with Quitely in Superman and Batman is just stunning and in such sharp contrast to his other work.

The most interesting part of R.I.P. is its oddball spin-off: The Black Casebook. It's a modest 144 page trade paperback -- flat colors printed on off-white newsprint -- filled with reprints of the stories Morrison used as research for Batman's history in R.I.P. He focused on the most outlandish of the 1950s comics, replete with atomic fear, aliens, personality switches, and anxiety. It's a wonderful book in a lot of ways (OK, the cover design is bad, but I'll live) and I love the idea that Morrison treats the "off-model" history of a character/property as canonical. He simultaneously re-jiggered the history of the property by bringing those stories back into print and also treats the "mythology" seriously, under the kind of charming assumption that everything written is admissible.

And then, as a project it's the first time I've seen an "artist's choice" project with a popular super hero since the Spiegelman/Kidd Plastic Man/Cole book. It's great to see just a slice of Batman viewed through the eyes of clever writer -- I'd love to have see another writer or artist take a crack at this kind of historical project. Bringing that level of subjectivity to the topic and treating as part of an ongoing creative process is pretty fun. Plus, of course the work inside the book is fantastic. Many of the stories are written by Bill Finger, who really can't be lionized enough as a comic book writer, and drawn by Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff. Sprang's angularity and grotequeries make him a little stronger than Moldoff, but just by a hair. They're both fantastic artists and crisp, clear storytellers. So go check it out -- Like D&Q's recent Melvin Monster, The Black Casebook is a lesson in the complex art of deceptively simple comic book storytelling.

Is this a pretty lightweight post? Yep, I think it must be summer.