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 Earlier this year, Geoff Pevere wrote a fine article on his Frazetta fetish for the Toronto Star. (Pevere is a Canadian cultural journalist. He was recruited for the Doug Wright Awards jury this year, and at the awards ceremony spoke very eloquently about Seth’s work). When I told Geoff how much I liked his Frazetta article, he informed me he had a slightly longer version. This was shortly before the sad news came of Frazetta’s death. So in honour of the great barbarian artist, here is Geoff Pevere’s full tribute:

If love makes us do things common sense says we shouldn’t, I have loved the art of Frank Frazetta. Briefly, it made me a criminal.

I can’t remember when I first laid eyes on a Frazetta, but it was probably on the cover of Creepy or Eerie in the late 1960s. These were comic magazines for people verging on growing too old for comics, black and white horror anthology collections that happened to have some of the best art and writing in the field.

Not at all coincidentally, much of this art and writing was perpetrated by the same generation that had been instrumental in the rise and censorious crash of the industry during the 1950s. On these pages, these EC Comic-vets were free to let their imaginations run to places Comics Code-approved kids comics could not.

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Always a favorite, due to the hand:

From Baby, you’re really something!, a 1990 Fantagraphics-published collection of adult paperback illustrations by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010).

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I couldn't agree more.

Well, a little bit of news and some bragging.

First of all, please join me and Chip Kidd at The Strand (NYC) on Wednesday, May 12 at 7 pm for a lively discussion, slide show and signing for Art in Time.

And, I’ve received some very nice reviews from Entertainment Weekly (A-!), The Onion A.V. Club, and The Jewish Daily Forward, and have managed not to embarrass myself too badly in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

Ok, now go about your business. But don’t forget to come to The Strand!

UPDATE 5/15/10: New interview at Robot 6, where I really gab “deep nerd” with Chris Mautner, and book excerpts at the LA Times.

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Recently I presented my dear mother with gifts and purchased some comics from many nations: Belgium, Japan, Wolverine. Let me share them with you.

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The new issue of The Believer is out and is chock-full of comics goodness. First up, the fifth installment of Alvin Buenaventura’s “Comics” column. Some great work by Jonathan Bennett, Lilli Carré, Tom Gauld, and others. And Charles Burns ruins eggs for all time.

“Spiritual Dad,” a story by Jesse Moynihan and Dash Shaw, is tucked in the back of the issue. They’ve printed it vertically on a long section of folded paper, so it reads kind of like a scroll.

Gabrielle Bell’s done a strip (in glorious color!) that adapts a poem by Russian writer Sasha Chernyi about springtime and seasonal affective disorder in gnomes.

And finally, my interview with Dan Clowes, which covers a lot of his comics work—including his new book, Wilson, which really is phenomenally good—and his film projects, including the sad demise of his Raiders of the Lost Ark script. Burns, The Believer‘s resident cover artist, asked Clowes’s permission to make him look horrible for the cover image. It worked. His face frightened my kid. Somehow it manages simultanteously to be quintessential Burns and Clowes.

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Silkscreen, edition of 100. Available online soon from The Kirby Museum. All proceeds benefit the Museum.

Since I’m procrastinating a bit here on another rainy day in Lucerne, getting ready to pack up and head out to Toronto tomorrow, I thought I’d add a few more thoughts on Fumetto and the festival.

Ben Jones opened a very fine exhibition last week, consisting of large cardboard sculptures, some paintings, and a couple of wall drawings. It’s a good way to see what Jones is up to these days. We did a talk together on Saturday afternoon, walking through the show and tossing around arguments about form and hierarchies. I’ll post it when I’m back. Ben took off for Athens yesterday for yet another art show. Busy boy.

Anyhow, Kirby:

What has struck me about the current show is how much can be told even without displaying some of his “iconic” pieces, as has been noted elsewhere. For this, and for any audience really, it’s almost more important to see the work as work, rather than as propping up iconic properties. It’s easier to take in as comics qua comics, or in the case of his collage and pencil drawings: as highly personal mark-making.
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Artist's rendition of current state of mind of subject: Nadel. TCAF be warned.

Dash and I will be rolling into Toronto’s TCAF this weekend, May 8 and 9, with a full slate of programming and, natch, a full assortment of PictureBox books covering two tables. I’ll also be signing and selling Art in Time for all you history buffs out there. Come by the booth, go see Dash at his signings, and come see us both jabber on about comics.

Spotlight: Dan Nadel’s Art in Time
Saturday, May 8th, 10:30 – 11:15am, Learning Center 1

Publisher and comics historian Dan Nadel will discuss and show images from his new book, Art in Time, while addressing how comics history gets constructed and how the theme of adventure in comics has expanded and contracted over the years. Artists discussed will include H.G. Peter, Willy Mendes, Sharon Rudahl, Jack Kirby, Bill Everett.

-Spotlight: Paul Pope and Dash Shaw
Saturday May 8th, 12:00-1:00pm, The Pilot

TCAF Featured Guests Paul Pope and Dash Shaw are two of the most exciting creators in comics, mixing their influences and innovations to create groundbreaking work. Now Inkstuds Radio/Podcast host Robin McConnell will moderate a conversation between these two creators about the role that influences play in creating comics, ranging from traditional comics to film and music and from classical to contemporary works. This also includes a discussion of education, some key points in creating your own vision in comics, and an examination of how to make influences work and finding out where they lead you.

-Indie Comics Japan: Manga Outside the Mainstream
Saturday, May 8th, 1:45 – 2:45pm, Learning Center 1

Comics from Japan are called “manga”, and the very word inspires a very particular idea of style and presentation in the minds of many readers. But manga is just the Japanese word for comics, and the styles, presentations, and ideas contained within that medium are as interesting and diverse as the sorts of comics being produced in Europe or North America. Join publisher Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc., translator/production coordinator Ryan Sands, Fanfare/Ponent-Mon and manga.about.com representative Deb Aoki, translator Jocelyene Allen, and moderator Christopher Butcher to discuss the many treasures manga has to offer North American readers!
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Here’s the best thing I got on my Free Comic Book Day (which I spent exploring semi-local stores I’d never been to in the informed company of Robot 6’s Chris Mautner): Barbarella, the second Grove Press edition, with Jane Fonda on the cover.

These days the late creator Jean-Claude Forest is in the unique position of having a later, more ambitious work in print — 1979’s You Are There, drawn by Jacques Tardi and released in English by Fantagraphics — so it seems just the right time for me to stumble upon these name-making early ’60s originals, which I’d never read; Heavy Metal serialized and collected the 1977 third series of the franchise (Barbarella: Le Semble-lune) as Barbarella: The Moon Child, so that was the extent of my exposure. I still haven’t finished the book, but I love the way Forest draws the character with these really heavy-outlined eyes, which I know is based on the look of Brigitte Bardot, yet it gives her this slightly weary quality, like she’s seen some truly awful shit in her adventures in space, sinister stuff that’s still lurking around in the panel gutters, but it’s not gonna stop her, it’s not gonna push her life around.

I also picked up a big moldy bag of Star*Reach back issues, #1-7 for $8.00, half-expecting moths to fly out. It was hiding in one of those shops that’s apparently a converted living room, lined on ever wall with bowing shelves of dusty, warping softcovers with clusters of comic books packed in between. There’s treasures in those walls, provided you define “treasures” as “the 1992 Millennium publication of Weird Tales Illustrated, featuring Harlan Ellison, P. Craig Russell and Tim Vigil, not on the same story, though.” But nothing beat Star*Reach, not at those prices.

Art by Masaichi Mukaide

The brainchild of Marvel/DC writer Mike Friedrich, Star*Reach represented a small but critical development in North American comic books – arriving in 1974, just past the initial wave of undergrounds and three years prior to Heavy Metal, the series exploited Friedrich’s contacts in superhero comics and various strains of fanzine culture to form an ongoing anthology of ‘mature’ genre work (involving topless ladies on the front or back covers of the first three issues, naturally) with more of a mainline-informed illustrative style than the horror/sci-fi undergrounds. It was labeled “ground level” comics, and sold catch-as-catch-can through the crumbling head shop market, the infant comic book direct market, personal subscriptions and direct mail advertisements. Fleeting or re-purposed work by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano mixed with early stuff by Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, and young Canadian scriptwriter Dave Sim. Issue #7 from 1977 boasted a contribution by Sitoshi Hirota & Masaichi Mukaide, possibly the first-ever commercial English-language release of manga in the United States, although I don’t know if the piece was actually amateur work specially prepared for American submission. Mukaide wound up sticking around at Star*Reach and its sibling titles, then re-teaming with Friedrich after it all shut down in ’79 for an enigmatic Japanese-published collection of comics apparently aimed to tantalize Western readers; it was titled simply Manga, and manifested at some undated point in the early ’80s, after which editor Mukaide seems to have vanished entirely.

Such are the mysteries and rewards of Free Comic Book Day. I also bought a 3-D Clive Barker comic for a dollar, because I heard 3-D was here to stay. In the interests of resistance, here are some more expensive comics that sit flat on the page.

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I am obsessed with the music from the animated 1967 Spider-Man cartoons. Not the theme music but the background music. Part jazz, part James Brown soul, part psychedelic rock—it’s all a big mash-up of styles that marvels the ears and makes me dance around. Anyways, Bill Boichel and I have been trying to track down the music sans voices and sound effects for years, but to no avail. Today Bill forwarded me this discovery (which had been sent to him by one of his regulars, Phil Dokes): two blog posts from WFMU’s blog on the subject.

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It’s a rainy Sunday morning here in Fumetto. The Kirby show is up, three floors and around 150 pages later. Here are some photos from the weekend thus far. I should note that not shown here are the superlative 1940s and ’50s pages we have on display, including the cover to Boy Commandos 23, unpublished Black Magic and Foxhole covers, the entire “City of Ghouls” from Fighting American 2, and more. I’ve so enjoyed walking through Kirby’s career, watching his visual world change and expand. Paul and I have also been lucky enough to be joined by two of our lenders, Tom Morehouse and Tom Kraft, as well as Rand Hoppe of  The Jack Kirby Museum. Just having spitballing history and theory with these guys has been an incredible education. Now I need to see the rest of the festival.

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