I haven’t read any comics by Frédéric Boilet, but CC editor-at-large Frank Santoro has, and he doesn’t like them.
He and Derik Badman got into an interesting conversation about Boilet’s Yukiko’s Spinach in the thread following Badman’s equally interesting review, and since Frank has decided not to write about the book for CC, I thought I’d link to it here.
He’s on a roll!
Frank just e-mailed me this. Maybe we have another Love & Rockets kind of situation in the making. Which would be exciting.
They do look a little like Castle and Joel Cannon, if you squint hard enough.
Most of you’ve probably already heard the news elsewhere, but for those of you who haven’t, the serialized version of Cold Heat has been discontinued.
See the details here.
That was Dan’s subject line for the e-mail in which he sent me this.
If you want to avoid (mild) spoilers, don’t read Sean T. Collins’s brief review of Cold Heat #4 before the actual issue. But when you do read it, you will know that he is right.
Kurt Vonnegut, who sometimes wrote what he called “comic books without pictures.”
(Which isn’t strictly accurate, I don’t think, but now’s not the time for arguing.)
UPDATE: The Daily Cross Hatch has some short tributes from cartoonists.
Well, I’m back from 10 days in Paris and Amsterdam, and a good time was had by all. Or at least I had fun.
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.
Packaged sets of Comics Comics issues one and two are shipping to comic shops through Diamond this week.
Pick ’em up.
