His new show, Egypt Buncake, opens at Adam Baumgold Gallery.
That’s:
Marc Bell: Egypt Buncake
Friday, May 4, 6-8 pm
Adam Baumgold Gallery
74 E. 79th St. (off Park Ave.)
NYC
In the latest Comics Journal, manga critic Bill Randall asks who will publish modern master Yuichi Yokoyama in English. Well, look no further. PictureBox is releasing an English version (though still reading right to left) of Yokoyama’s first book, New Engineering, in October. Travel, his second book, will follow in 2008, which will bring us up to date just in time to release a third, as yet untitled book that, having seen chunks of it, I can safely say is next level stuff. Randall’s analogy to Fort Thunder is right on. In fact the first time my friend Mike Buckley showed me the work he said “it’s like Brinkman crossed with Chris Ware.” Pretty much. It will be released simultaneously with Chippendale’s Maggots, CF’s Powr Mastrs, Santoro’s Storeyville and Weinstein’s Goddess of War. Yes, it’s “go time” at PictureBox HQ.
So there you have it: Your Comics Journal response of the day (great issue, by the way).
In the meantime, I’m please to write that last Wednesday’s event at the fabulous Issue Project Room was amazing. Amy Lockhart’s films wowed the crowd and then Matthew Thurber’s Ambergris blew the doors off the place. While Thurber and compatriot Rebecca Bird warbled and whistled I unrolled a spectacular scroll drawn by the Thurber himself. Those of you who haven’t bought the first issue of his 1-800 MICE should run out and get it now.
After Ambergris came Gary Panter and Devin Flynn. Now, Gary hadn’t played in public in a few decades, but as some of you may know, has released a couple of records and a handful of seven inches. Fun fact: Ian McClagen of The Faces played in Gary’s first record, Pray for Smurph (1983). It’s a stone cold classic of skronk psych-country music. Devin Flynn is half of Pixeltan and an accomplished animator whose work can be seen on big and small screens. Together, well, they laid it down, man. While Devin thumped and keyed and bass-ed Gary let loose on the guitar with some serious Texas-style chops and a dry, high plains yelp. When he sings “I fought the Lord” I kinda think he might’ve, inbetween painting, drawing, and duding. One audience member called the performance “masculine”, and I think it kinda was. Well, when his big books comes out maybe we’ll send him on tour with his gee-tar.
Anyhow, it was a fine night, and we hope to do it again real soon!
It was all work all the time, but I like my work, as you’ll see below. Ostensibly I was there to hang an exhibition of work by Brian Chippendale, Julie Doucet and Paper Rad, as well as all the PictureBox books at Le Monte-En-L’Air, an excellent bookstore/gallery run by the might Guillaume. The show opened on Tuesday, March 27th, with myself and Julie D. in attendance.
Blexbolex
Julie D and Stephane BlanquetBut, being me, I squeezed in some other activities. I went to see Bruno Richard, king of the Parisian drawers and a collaborator with Pascal Doury in the groundbreaking zine ESDS, which began in the late 70s and continues to this day. To my mind, Richard and Doury are hugely important and massively overlooked–providing much of the impetus for things like Le Dernier Cri. Occasional collaborator Gary Panter sent me to Richard, who simply blew my mind with paintings, drawings, and fantastic books.
Proofs for a silkscreen book.
I also visited a number of other artists and publishers, L’Association, Cornelius, and Blexbolex among them. On my last day in Paris, I went to see Moebius (from one end of the spectrum to the other!), who greeted me warmly and we discussed a variety of projects. He was incredibly nice and very complementary, picking up immediately on what Frank is going with Cold Heat (“it’s like painting with the colors”) and enjoying Ninja, too. What a treat.
And then it was off to Amsterdam for non-comics business, interviewing master illustrator (and the designer of the Yellow Submarine film) Heinz Edelmann, as well as artist and designer Simon Posthuma.
And now I’m back. Quite a few books heavier. Phew.
After posting yesterday and then emailing a bit with Tom Spurgeon, I got an email from Peggy Burns (see, this is why it takes forever to publish stuff–we’re all just talking to each other all the time) and two things occurred to me: one, if we want the NYCC to be different, we should set up there and participate. As Heidi/Beat pointed out, the only way to make a change is to participate. So, what if PictureBox and Fantagraphics and D&Q, etc etc set up as a block and invited interesting guests? Change? Maybe. On the other hand, I’m not sure that anyone other than the mainstream comics fanatics will pay $20-$40 to get into a comic-con–not with the far easier and cheaper MoCCA just a few months away. But then, as I mentioned in the comments section, the fact is, the comics read by many of the artists I publish are NYCC-fare–Chippendale’s Berserk and Daredevil, etc….maybe it would be an interesting meshing of sensibilities. But then, the environment of the NYCC is just pretty hostile to anything not insanely loud and fannish. So, to be continued, I suppose, in more distracting conversations.
I spent a few hours at the Comic-Con last weekend. It’s a pretty easy target, but I guess I was struck by the huge divide between my culture and theirs. With the parades of costumes heroes and oddballs, down-at-the-heels superhero artists, and just plain oddities, like Neal Adams, I wondered what all of this had to do with the medium of comics rather than the business and nostalgia of comics. The answer, of course, is that, historically, they’re one in the same. Comics, even in these pseudo-sophisticated days, are as trashy as ever. I can’t decide if I cynically like that or detest it. But as I sat at the Abrams booth signing my book, I kinda thought, “wow, I have nothing in common with these people.” Which makes me wonder, of course, who our (tiny) audience really is for Comics Comics and other PictureBox publication. Who knows. It’s a funny thing, selling these kind of books in that sort of venue, but it’s one among many, and when you’re marginal to start with, you have to try for as many little corners as possible. Eventually it adds up. But man, what a place. What a thing.
The fine reception for Brian Chippendale’s Ninja continues with this excellent piece in Salon by Douglas Wolk.
Check it out.
Jack Kirby, one of the great artistic figures in comics, was also one of its great tragic characters. A true visionary in terms of drawing, composition and sheer conceptual heft, he has, in a way, never gotten his due. This astounding interview with him from 1980 offers a moving insight into his ideas and limitations (i.e. what the market dictated).
I recently picked up Darwyn Cooke‘s Spirit and Batman/The Spirit. Cooke specializes in nostalgia-inflected revivals of superheroes. His mini series New Frontier was an epic re-imagining of the DC Comics heroes. It was good fun–a light, affectionate version of Watchmen. I’m not sure it adds up to much more than beautifully drawn fan-fiction, which, minus the “beautifully drawn” is more or less what a lot of superhero comic books are these days. In Cooke’s case, the drawings really make the work. His style is the best version of the contemporary strain of comic book drawing that began with Bruce Timm‘s Batman animated series. Influenced by the design atmospherics of Alex Toth and, in a later generation, the smooth renderings of Steve Rude, it’s a cartoon language that embraces the dynamism inherent in superheroes while glossing over the violence and darkness that has been so prevalent in comics in the last 20 years or so. I like it for its elegance and it’s always-1920s look (even if that clean nostalgia feels extremely easy), but am slightly put off by how sexless and toothless it is. Toth had bite, especially in his pre-1970s work, with grit piled on top of his impeccable formalist sense, while Cooke smooths out all the rough edges, replacing all tension with a soft-focus nostalgia for an imagined past. But really, I buy most of Cooke releases, just to peek at the elegance of the drawing. With these two comics, though, I realized that problem is that appeal is, in fact, just the drawings.
The two Spirit comic books, both with Batman and without, are fun exercises, but feel soulless, like a storyboard more than a story. The Batman/Spirit emphasizes the humor in both characters, but does little with either, and The Spirit comic just demonstrates that the fun of that character was not super heroics, but rather the incidental, O’Henry-esque stories creator Will Eisner used the Spirit as an excuse to tell. But more interestingly, while the drawings are, as usual, slick and fun to look at, it turns out that Cooke isn’t a great comic book storyteller. Comic book storytelling requires pictures that flow into one another, and a sense of the page as a whole. Cooke, however, thinks more like the animator he once was, creating single isolated moments in sequence, as opposed to groups of pictures that work together. His panels are often crowded with information, weighing them down in a way that works against his smooth surfaces and slick drawing. It’s a curious problem–a good cartoonist who can’t quite frame a story. The similarly talented Steve Rude suffers from it too. I wonder if that level of polish simply works against the flow of comics. It’s over-determined, in a sense, preventing the motion of the story and keeping readers at a remove. Toth worked in a cartoon shorthand, always emphasizing both elegance and minimalism and allowing readers to enter the story with him. Cooke, in his eagerness to describe every bit of his nostalgic world, over-renders, weighing it down and leaving the rest of us to watch with disinterested curiosity.
