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ACTION THWUP! Howdy and welcome, True Believers, to Comics Comics’ weekend edition, I’m your host, Frankie the Wop. No review of a comic or a soapbox rant from me this week cuz I spent most of the week swimming. And also preparing for a radio interview over at Inkstuds. Mr. Robin McConnell was kind enough to ask me to participate on a show about “fusion comics” where we could talk to two of our favorite fusion guys, Brandon Graham and Michael DeForge. What is fusion? We’re not really sure, but if you listen to the show, you might get an idea of where Robin and I are coming from. What follows are my notes that I looked at while on the air. There were a lot of riffs that I didn’t get to, so I thought I’d share them here. For ideal readers only. (more…)

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Michael DeForge, Brandon Graham and our own Frank Santoro do some fun comic shop talk with Robin McConnell on the latest Inkstuds podcast. Consider this a CC-approved way to procrastinate from whatever life is imposing on you right now.

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Dark Horse has recently published two fine and nicely obscure reprint volumes. The first I’ve been neglecting for a while, but not for lack of love. It’s the complete John Carter of Mars by Jesse Marsh. Yep, 114 pages of Mars action by the Dell master himself. The three 1952-3 comic books reprinted within are among my favorite Marsh works, since the material so readily lent itself to Marsh’s obsessions with modernist forms and contemporary art. (more…)

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Following last Thursday’s post, my friend and colleague “Jolly” Jeet Heer graciously sent me the following letter, written by Charles Schulz to Walt Kelly in 1954. I’m not sure how much light it shines on what Schulz thought about how his strips would be read when collected (at least unless we read between the lines, as I invite you all to do), but it is definitely a fascinating glimpse into his mindset at the beginning of his career, and displays well his trademark humility and understated humor.

A transcription of the letter can be found after the jump:

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Ah, the passions of youth. Could this letter, found in the 58th issue of Fantastic Four, be the first published opinion of James Wolcott?

[Tip o’ the mouse to Senses-Shatterin’ Sean Howe for the scoop!]

UPDATE: And the answer is … Yes!

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In 2005, I went to Russia, and my husband and I decided we would look for Russian comics while we were there. I tried asking in bookstores, but the clerks all gave me a funny look and said no. We finally found a few random copies of something called 2002, which looks pretty terrible, but no stores carried anything that approximated what you’d find at bookstores in the US (that said, our chain bookstores—Border’s, Barnes & Noble—have shit selection of anything other than Marvel and DC collections). Just lately, I started reading José Alaniz’s Komiks, which is the first study of the form in Russia. (It was published by the University of Mississippi Press, which—side note—has a great catalog of comics criticism, including books by Charles Hatfield, Joseph Witek, and CC’s own Jeet Heer.) So I started digging around on the interwebs for some translated materials, but again, there’s not much. There seems to be plenty of creating going on in Russia (there are now two international festivals: BoomFest in St. Petersburg, and KomMissia in Moscow), but it’s hard to tell how much of the work is any good. My guess is that the brilliant-to-crap ratio is probably the same as it is in the West. So here’s a slightly random selection of some work in translation and some that’s not. (more…)

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From "Chi's Sweet Home"; art by Konami Kanata

Yes, kitty. Lots of manga indeed.
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One of the few comics I’ve read recently that does not feel like it’s nostalgia driven or overly genre based. The press release for the book says it’s science fiction, but it feels like some weird hybrid of slice-o-life daily office life banality mixed with an action movie. The hook is that through time travel, whenever the clock hits 11:11 pm the protagonist switches from office life to action-hero life and thusly gets to experience both as the story moves forward, instead of the usual zero-to-hero plot development. Okay, maybe it is genre-based sci-fi. Still, it doesn’t FEEL like some re-hash of a genre comic book or a self-referencing comics nod. There’s even a comic book that is read by the zero/hero within this graphic novel that is used as a narrative device but that doesn’t FEEL nostalgic to me either. Hurm.

But all that is so inside baseball. I guess it’s from working at Copacetic. Like I can’t explain a lot of comics to customers in “comics terms” cuz most of our customers are fairly new to comics. So me explaining that it is Kindt’s brushwork that keeps this rollicking tale from coming across as a re-hash, or that his brushwork is, to me, a flowering of the alt 90’s Mazzucchelli/Pope bang-it-out approach and is a beautiful counter-point to all the slick photo-reffing schlubs who can’t draw an action scene to save their lives—that just barely makes sense to them, or maybe even to you, True Believer. But I gotta try, and will, for you, Believer, before I move on to how I pitch it to the lay people. (more…)

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Young Lions, by Blaise Larmee, is the story of a three-artist performance group comprised of Alice, a wealthy snob, Wilson, a didactic leader, and Cody, who is dreamy and less ambitious. The book opens with Cody saying, “Our conceptual art group is not going as planned.” Later, there’s a party. Cody and Alice go to “The New Museum” and enjoy it. At a performance the trio meets Holly, who is presumably a non-institutional being who nearly becomes a fourth member, but serves to illuminate to character and audience the inner lives of the three primary members. She is an ethereal muse. The crew travels to Florida; they fail at a quasi-Spiritual act; on a walk, Alice remarks how much better her experience would be if it were in a museum; Holly is left behind; they return to normal life. The book is well paced and nicely drawn in pencil, smudges and detritus left in, rendered somewhere between CF and Jockum Nordstrom (the topic of another debate: right down to the lettering style, it’s a lot of CF, but who cares? Influence is inevitable. Four years ago it was Brinkman. There will be others.); it is frequently beautiful, especially when Larmee allows himself to render a detail: a lamp on page 25, or Cody and Alice languid and relaxed on page 51. (more…)

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Lo! It has come to pass. We are pleased to announce the winners of our fierce Comics Comics Thor Know Prize Contest. As you will remember, the job was to re-color this pathetic little jpeg. The Comics Comics faithful poured forth with a fervency rarely seen on these servers. We present you with the ten best of the best, in no particular order (because that would be an epic task unworthy of Asgardians). After some dithering, we declare Jim Rugg the winner, and recipient of his very own Thor comic of dubious vintage!

Jim Rugg

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