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Preface: I wrote this in my notebook after discovering last week that the conclusion to the major re-launch of the 1980s series Nexus had hit the stands. Steve Rude, one of the biggest “indie” comics creators of the last 25 years, made a comeback — to the sound of crickets. No one cared. To me, that meant the Direct Market was really finally and absolutely dead. Everyone said it was dead last summer when Love and Rockets abandoned its pamphlet comic book format and went to an annual trade paperback format. Like Love and Rockets, the fate of Nexus was bound up in the history of the Direct Market. But unlike Love and Rockets, Nexus was suited for the “alternative mainstream” fan. It was a particular kind of adult superhero book that appealed to a seemingly more sophisticated audience than the regular superhero comics. The DM supported titles like Nexus and allowed them to thrive. Not any more. Maybe everyone’s just had their fill of Nexus but the news of this indie’s end got me thinking about the bigger picture. The end of Nexus represents, to me, a window of time that has closed. The new regime is upon us at last, and I wrote this to simply mark the time. Also, the below is really an exploration, for me, into ideas that my friend and mentor Bill Boichel of Copacetic Comics has expressed to me for years—in his store, over the phone, in emails, in class lectures. The “bridge” and “tree” metaphors are pure Boichel. Thanks Bill, for letting borrow your melody line and riff on it here.
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The bridge is over. From 1975 to 2005, the Direct Market was the bridge from the old world “Comics-as-ephemera”, returnable periodicals model to the new world “Comics-as-Literature” bookstore model. The bridge changed comics, saved it from sure death on the newsstand and put comics in a place of permanence. Everyone in Comics has noted the consolidation of the DM and the rise of the chain bookstores & the internet as venues for new work. Now, this year, more than ever, I seem to be repeatedly noting to myself the real split between the mainstream and the alternative sides of comics.

During the heyday of the Direct Market in the late ’80s and early ’90s mainstream and alternative comics were together in one marketplace because there was no other option essentially, no bookstore support, no internet. What that meant was the two traditions were folded together. Gilbert Hernandez and Steve Ditko were on the same rack literally and figuratively. The old mainstream guys influenced the young alt guys, there was a clear traceable legacy. One could see Bernie Krigstein’s influence on Dan Clowes, Jack Kirby’s influence on Chester Brown, Ditko’s influence on Hernandez. It was a singular perspective essentially. One big sandbox. One tradition.

The market can now support multiple perspectives. It is not a monolithic community. There is no official definition of Comics now. It’s too big. Finally “comics” doesn’t just mean American mainstream super-hero action adventure stories. (Well, comics never meant just that genre, but y’know what I’m saying: Marvel and DC have lorded over the form for almost 50 years.) In 2009 you can walk into a comics store like Copacetic Comics in Pittsburgh and see no superhero comics on display at all. There are enough “alternative” or “literary” comics/graphic novels out in the world to fill a whole (small) store. And there are “alternative” publishers who don’t use (or are shut out from) the Direct Market and who use book trade distributors to get the work out to stores.

So we got what you might call a bifurcated market. The two traditions, once folded together in the same market, have split. There are two sandboxes now. What that means is that if you grew up reading comics from, say, 1999 to now you didn’t necessarily have to read superhero comics to get your comics fix or even go to a store that sold both. This is a good thing. It’s a new audience, and a broader one than maybe any of us old school dinosaurs could have anticipated. I’ve spent far too much time ranting about “the kids not knowing their comics history.” Well, I’m over it. I don’t really feel the need to explain who Marshall Rogers is anymore, or convince anyone that late ’70s Kirby is actually really good. Figure it out for yourself.

This new audience, I think, is alienated by superhero comics and associates the genre with corporate America. They don’t like it. And who can blame them? They wonder why folks like me keep extolling the abilities of some guy who drew Spider-Man. They could care less. I had a student tell me, “Yah, it’s beautiful art but it’s Spider-Man.” This too, this palpable attitude, is a good thing. After all, aren’t Batman and Spider-Man just corporate logos these days?

Comics history is like one big tree where McCay and Herriman are the roots, Kirby and Caniff are the trunk, Crumb and Spiegelman are big branches, and the rest of us schlubs are up there somewhere. It’s all connected. Each generation has its precursors. I would assert, however, that for the first time in comics history it’s possible to graft new identities upon the tree without being schooled in the singular tradition, without growing out of the singular tradition. One can choose precursors from other traditions, not just from comics.

I see Persepolis as an example of this grafting. It is at once outside the tradition of comics and within the boundaries of the form. I feel that it was only possible to come into existence because of the split that happened some time in the last 10 years. I’m sure that’s no big revelation for most of you, but it’s something to consider as we move forward into the next decade. It’s now possible to bypass a very particular, esoteric education in “mainstream” comics, and go right to its “alternative” and also to the avant-garde. It opens the door for “vertical invaders,” for artists from different traditions to make work and to find an audience. The marketplace will support a book like Persepolis, I think, precisely because it is divorced from the old world model. Satrapi’s free from the “Tree of Influence” that’s existed in comics; she’s free to draw in a straight-forward generic style that is appealing to a vast audience. (Think of it this way: As “straight-forward” or “realistic” Clowes’ style in Ghost World is to a schooled comics reader, it looks baroque and affected to a non-comics reader.)

One could say comics like L’nR and Optic Nerve may have been the first to appeal to this emerging audience. But I feel that those books didn’t/don’t cross over so much as Acme Novelty Library or Persepolis because the styles of the Hernandez Brothers and also of Tomine are essentially derived from the mainstream comics and illustration tradition. I feel that it was Ware’s choice to reach beyond the mainstream tradition back to the newspaper strip golden age that has allowed him to have such a diverse audience. It seems this new emerging audience still connects particular styles back to mainstream comics. I’m curious to see how Mazzucchelli’s new book does now that he has “unlearned” all his mainstream tricks. ( I also think Seth’s eventual collection of Clyde Fans will “cross over” to an audience beyond comics. He has a style that has little to do with mainstream comics. Interestingly enough, Seth said recently: “I am converting Palookaville into a hardcover format this year. I love the old comic format but Chris Oliveros convinced me that the work would do better if we moved on to this new direction. It’s kind of sad, passing of an era and all that.”)

So, here we are: Summer 2009. Whatever system we have now, it’s working. Pamphlets still get published even if they only serve as advertisements for the collection, GN’s sell better and better, downloads are happening, comics are on Kindle: whatever works. However, in the process it feels like a real division has been formed between the “mainstream” and the “alternative” factions. A division that was always there underneath, forming. But now it’s ruptured and split the marketplace.

Which brings me to Comic-Con. San Diego Comic-Con will always be some sort of Oscars for our community. But whose community is it anymore? Increasingly it’s the motion picture industry’s community. It’s not about “the work” anymore. It’s definitely not about the creators or even the comic book dealers. It may be cool for most mainstream creators or fans but what’s in it for us in the “alternative” community? Not much. So I gotta wonder why “we” still go. I can certainly understand why Fantagraphics and D&Q go (it’s the biggest show of the year, duh) and that Comic-Con is still profitable for them. But for me and my comrades over here on the fringe of the fringe we feel like we’re getting priced out of our own neighborhood. The split seems this year to be more pronounced than ever and it looks like those in the “mainstream” have no choice really but to hold on for dear life as they become co-opted even further into corporate America. They really have no choice. They sold themselves out years ago.

But the alternative comics community does have a choice. So give me TCAF, SPX, MoCCA, SPACE, Stumptown, and the “alternative” circuit and tell Comic-Con and the Direct Market, “Thanks for the memories.” The bridge is over.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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(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!

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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.

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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.

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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.