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I’ve started to wonder whether what I read as a child wasn’t more important. […] And then there was Pif le chien, a comic book published by Editions Vaillant and sponsored by the Communist Party. I realize now when I reread it that there was a Communist bent to many of Pif’s adventures. For example, a prehistoric man would bring down the local sorcerer in single combat and explain to the tribe that they didn’t need a sorcerer and that there was no need to fear thunder. The series was very innovative and of exceptional quality.

—French novelist Michel Houellebecq, interviewed in The Paris Review No. 194

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For your pleasure, we now present the off-panel first-appearance-by-implication of beloved DC character Grant Morrison. Created by Don McGregor & Gene Colan in 1984, Morrison is notable for having never directly interfered in the action of his originating series, Nathaniel Dusk: Private Investigator, an out-of-continuity detective series (of added historical interest for being among the first division-of-labor comics series colored directly from an artist’s pencils). Morrison’s hands-off presence as a comics player was subsequently and radically reversed as chief among many DC character revisions proffered by the 1988 Animal Man series, in which “the Writer” Grant Morrison displays direct and seemingly unlimited control over storyline action, doubtlessly in support of the evolutionary theme present in the series at large, to say nothing of later related comics works.

While ostensibly killed by writer John Ostrander in a subsequent issue of Suicide Squad, Morrison has nonetheless endured as a pliable (if elusively identifiable) presence in DC or DC-owned comics, ranging from Planetary to Seven Soldiers. He shares a name with author and music video personality Grant Morrison, although it is unknown if McGregor and/or Colan were aware of this other Morrison — potentially through contacts established or submission present in the immediate wake of British writer Alan Moore’s arrival on the North American comics scene in the early ’80s — at the time of his creation.

This has been your Extremely Reliable Comics History for 9/21. Pricing information on upcoming releases follows:

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Hey there, True Believers! Welcome to Comics Comics Sunday edition. I need one more week to pull together a coherent continuation of my romance comics posts, so here’s some gossip from last week’s SPX. Well, not gossip, but some “thoughts” about the show one week later. I was going to skip posting a report cuz Dan’s pics and Tom’s pics basically tell the story. But I figured traditions exist for reasons, and it’s a tradition to do the SPX round-up. So here goes.

Really missed BC – Brian Chippendale – this year. An advance copy of If ‘n Oof was waiting for us at the hotel convention. It’s completely insane. Eight hundred pages of hammers dropping on my head. Brian just ripped it. Art comics – hardcore art comics – are alive and well. I think BC is gonna stun everyone with this new one. He was supposed to come down for the show but since the main shipment of books is still a couple weeks away it didn’t really make much sense to ask BC to come down and show off that one copy. Actually, that would have been fun to watch. (more…)

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Alert: Cross posting here, but I can’t resist: Here’s Karl Wirsum talking with me (stress-relieving margherita margarita in hand) about his current show, which I co-curated.

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I mean, really quick, since Tim totally wiped out my time yesterday by “forcing” me to read the essay below.

I wanted to point out this very kind appreciation by longtime fan/historian Don Mangus of the work of Jerry Grandenetti, news of whose passing just popped up. I particularly love Grandenetti’s spikey work on his Spirit homage, The Secret Files of Dr. Drew, which I sadly had to cut from Art in Time. For my money, Grandenetti, who had some training in architecture, went to psychedelic places The Eisner Studio didn’t manage, but nevertheless, he did so using Eisner’s machinery. His ’70s work for Warren, as Don mentions, also is worth a look – he made woozy large scale drawings on the comics page, somehow conveying a teetering physical motion in gray washes. Here’s an old interview with him, and a good summation by Jim Amash.

And finally (ahem, I’m flying all day, so a longer post will happen after the plane lands) [UPDATE, 9/19: ONE DAY LATER: THAT POST ON RAND HOLMES IS HELD UP, MUCH LIKE THE TRAFFIC ON THE PCH. DON’T BE MAD.], please point your browsers to The Wisdom of Caleb, a new comic by James Jarvis and Russell Waterman, of Silas and Amos fame. It’s off to an excellent start . I’ve been a fan of ol man Jarvis for a long time and it’s a thrill to see him condense it all down to a few or just a single panel. Plus, the “new” style is killer.

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Exceptional one-person comic strips like “Little Nemo,” “Krazy Kat,” and “Peanuts” were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as “ghosting” and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source — to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer “John Alton” as we would of “Humphrey Bogart” — isn’t just a taxonomic convenience. It also reflects frustrated feelings of gratitude and intimacy, as evidenced by the career of Walt Disney comics artist and writer Carl Barks. Although Barks wrote, drew, and inked his own work for decades, his employer blocked fan mail and withheld contributor credits on the theory that sales would decline if children thought anyone other than Walt Disney was involved in the comic books. As a result, Barks wasn’t successfully contacted by readers until 1960, and his first interview (conducted in 1962) was only allowed publication in 1968. Given no clues other than style, loyal fans identified and collected Barks as “The Duck Artist,” “The Good Duck Artist,” or simply “The Good Artist,” the last eventually inscribed on his gravestone.

—From “High, Low, and Lethem”, a just-posted, confidence-killing essay in which the great Ray Davis takes nearly every subject I’ve written about for Comics Comics over the last five years—from Steve Gerber and Carl Barks to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown and the auteur theory’s connection to comics, among others—and writes something actually worthwhile, intelligent, and stylish about them. He shows me up as a lazy halfwit actually. The funny thing is that I’m fairly certain he’s never heard of me or Comics Comics at all, and the confluence of thought is purely coincidental. Oh well, I guess I need to try harder.

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Clowes's Wilson

As soon as Clowes’s new graphic novel was published I read it one gulp. But I didn’t want to write about it immediately away because it’s a book that deserved careful and slow re-reading. I’ve gone back to it often. Here are a few notes.

Initial impact. It’s hard not to fall into clichéd language of book reviewing: Wilson hit me like a punch in the stomach. Wilson is such a great character. He takes misanthropy to a new height while remaining all too humanly frail. The phrase “painfully funny” gets thrown around but I think Clowes reached a new limit in telling a story that is both hilarious but also sad and harrowing.

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I saw Joe’s post that included Moto Hagio a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had the galley of the book in hand for a while. Still, not being a big manga reader, I didn’t expect to like the stories nearly as much as I did. But then smartly done genre tales make for some of the best literature, comics, film, etc. What I liked most about the different pieces in A Drunken Dream is the psychological form of sci-fi she employs (strictly speaking, the title story is the only sci-fi one, but I think a looser definition that incorporates the social aspects of the genre also applies here). I thought often of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The idea of a reality that is simultaneously real and imagined—like Rika’s appearance to herself and her mother as an iguana, or the little girl sitting on her front step joyfully appreciating a world in which she is an aberration for doing so—are very much the same as Kris Kelvin’s unreal existence in his very real past on the surface of the planet, at the close of Solaris. (more…)

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Amazing the things you can find at a comics show like SPX. I mean, I hadn’t expected Mark Millar’s comics magazine to be so well designed! Or distributed by Drawn and Quarterly! “I hope the little girl cuts someone,” I grinned to Tom Devlin, who looked slightly more than halfway toward the verge of tears, and maybe vomiting, which was understandable. I was pretty upset they’d moved the Miss Maryland Teen USA preliminaries to another weekend too, leaving the official SPX hotel neighbor slot to be filled by some sort of medical conference (which later became a wedding reception, perhaps spontaneously).

Much to my embarrassment, it was later explained to me that LINT is in fact the subtitle to ACME Novelty Library #20, while the Mark Millar comics magazine is titled CLiNT. This is so you might look at the title a certain way and mistakenly (hilariously) think the magazine is really titled CUNT. “But mom,” I said, “that’s an awful name for a magazine! And disrespectful to Rory Hayes! There really are no ideas left. Alan Moore was right.” I noticed then that she was softly weeping over the phone, as is her tendency. God, it’s not my fault the apple harvest festival isn’t until October!

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