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.
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.
All right, Dan’s in France, and I haven’t read any comics that have inspired me to write in what seems like forever. Which means it’s half-assed quiz time. My high-school German is extremely rusty. Have any of you ever heard of this book? Because if this description is correct (“a pseudo-art-historical treatise on the paintings found in the backgrounds of Donald Duck comics”), then I am curious.
In other Euro news, many of you are probably already aware of it, but I’ve really been enjoying the Danish metabunker blog. The long interviews with rappers and the like I mostly skip, but Matthias Wivel writes very intelligently about comics.
As you may remember, I love letters pages. So, in that great comic book tradition, we plan to institute a “letters to the editor” section in future issues of Comics Comics.
Were you angered by Paper Rad’s attack on art comics in the first issue? Impressed by Dan’s thoughts on the Wally Wood/Ogden Whitney connection? Do you feel compelled to defend Spider-Man from Peter Bagge in issue two? Do you have a bone to pick with one of our reviews, or an interview you’d like to praise? Whatever your thoughts, positive or otherwise, about anything related to Comics Comics, we’d love to hear them.
Thanks! If you submit a letter, please include your name, location, and phone number, and be aware that we may publish it (meaning the letter, not the phone number), either in the magazine or potentially on this site. Letters may be edited for space or clarity.
E-mail:
thodlerATgmailDOTcom
Mailing address:
Comics Comics Letters
PictureBox
121 Third Street
Ground Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11231
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.
I spent a few hours at the Comic-Con last weekend. It’s a pretty easy target, but I guess I was struck by the huge divide between my culture and theirs. With the parades of costumes heroes and oddballs, down-at-the-heels superhero artists, and just plain oddities, like Neal Adams, I wondered what all of this had to do with the medium of comics rather than the business and nostalgia of comics. The answer, of course, is that, historically, they’re one in the same. Comics, even in these pseudo-sophisticated days, are as trashy as ever. I can’t decide if I cynically like that or detest it. But as I sat at the Abrams booth signing my book, I kinda thought, “wow, I have nothing in common with these people.” Which makes me wonder, of course, who our (tiny) audience really is for Comics Comics and other PictureBox publication. Who knows. It’s a funny thing, selling these kind of books in that sort of venue, but it’s one among many, and when you’re marginal to start with, you have to try for as many little corners as possible. Eventually it adds up. But man, what a place. What a thing.
As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen to its Self-Defense Forces deployments.
“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”
Such characters have long been used in Japan to win hearts and minds and to soften the image of authority.
(via Making Light)
Packaged sets of Comics Comics issues one and two are shipping to comic shops through Diamond this week.
Pick ’em up.
The great caricaturist Drew Friedman has contributed a typically excellent strip to the New York Observer this week, about the guilty pleasures of great literary figures. In the process, he touches on a Vladimir Nabokov anecdote you may remember from here a while back. Funny stuff.
(Via Bookninja.)
