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I’m going to Minnesota for the holidays, so there won’t be any posting from me for a week or so. Dan may pop in now and again, but just in case events intrude, please accept these Christmas reading recommendations to hold you over ’til Yuletide’s done.

Merry Christmas!

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Yes, I forgot a book that was very important to me on a personal level, coming at a time when I needed a distraction or three. As a result of being tied into a bit of a black hole of a time, I left it off the list. Renee French’s The Ticking is a deeply profound and loving book about self-acceptance and artistry. Her artwork hit a new peak, the soft pencil forms evoking such powerful emotions in every panel. I can’t recommend it highly enough…put at whatever number you like.

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I know that you abandoned Ronny Rocket… If you’re not going [to] make it into a film, perhaps a graphic novel–?

Are you a psychic?!

Wha… you’re doing that?

I’m doing that. It’s in the early, early stages.

To me, comic books are the closest thing to creating a film without actually making the film.

You’re a very sharp guy. That’s exactly what’s happening. It’s almost helpful to the film to realize that in another form and maybe see some things that may help you later.

The original Ronnie Rocket film script

Of course, Lynch has tried his hand at cartooning, with decidedly mixed results.

Case closed!: Movies aren’t comics, and comics aren’t movies.

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In his final years, Sagan recalled a “blustery fall day” when he was about age five, looking out the living room window at Lower New York Bay. The water was choppy and the sun was about to set. His mother came by the window and they gazed toward the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of the sea, World War II was beginning. “There are people fighting out there, killing each other,” she told him. Carl replied: “I know. I can see them.” She fired back: “No, you can’t. They’re too far away.”

This seemingly trivial incident gnawed at Sagan. His adoring mother had contradicted him! He later wrote: “How could she know whether I could see them or not? … Squinting, I had thought I’d made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and dueling with swords as they did in my comic books.”

In honor of Carl Sagan, who died ten years ago today.

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I was kinda bummed to see the PW Best of 2006 critics poll. I contributed to it, thinking that we’d each have our own lists in there as well. Maybe I didn’t read the instructions close enough. No big deal, but I feel totally disconnected from it as it stands, so I thought I’d post the list I made in a slightly revised form, at the very least to promote the books I really believe in. As for their list, I just don’t get it. The Bechdel book I found pretentious, overwrought, and really poorly drawn, and Scott Pilgrim is cute teen stuff, that I guess cute teenagers like, but…huh? McCloud? Lost Girls? Ugh, don’t get me started.

And while I’m bumming your trip, I heartily suggest everyone read Gary Groth’s essay on the book Eisner/Miller in the current Comics Journal. It’s an excellent piece of criticism that goes to the heart of the problems with contemporary comics criticism and historical writing (and dimly relates to how, in any sort of sane world, Fun Home and Scott Pilgrim could rank above Kim Deitch and Carol Tyler). It also pokes further holes in the Eisner legend, which is an ongoing “hobby” of Gary’s, and one which I fully support.

My faintly revised list:

1. Shadowland by Kim Deitch (Fantagraphics)
Another masterpiece from Deitch, who, more than any other cartoonist working today, is in full control of the medium. This tragi-comic yarn is moving, terrifying and deeply deeply awe-inspiring. The man is a national treasure.

2. Late Bloomer by Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)
Released at the very end of 2005, too late for best-of lists, Late Bloomer towers over 2006. Tyler’s timeworn but eloquent voice is much needed in comics. Late Bloomer is that rare thing: a wise book. Neither pretentious nor showy, it is full of insight, perfectly drawn, and one of the few to insist on truth above all else. A risky, bold work of art and indisputably the best book of 2006.

3. Or Else 4 by Kevin Huizenga (Drawn and Quarterly)
Kevin’s epic attempt to explain the universe on a micro level was a moving and humbling comic—expansive in scope and filled with the good-natured love and nimble curiosity that marks his work.

4. Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein (Henry Holt)
Weinstein’s book is perhaps the most important of the year for widely introducing a unique voice. Like Tyler, Weinstein comes at comics from the outside and has none of the baggage and stylistic tics that plague so many others. Hers is a clear, funny and humane voice and together with her gorgeous, evocative linework, it makes her a compelling talent.

5. The Squirrel Mother by Megan Kelso (Fantagraphics)
A wonderful collection of short stories by Megan Kelso. Pitch-perfect cartooning and closely observed tales of family, history and America make this a gem-like volume. Kelso is certainly one of our finest cartoonists.

6. Lucky by Gabrielle Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
Bell has a wicked ear for dialogue and draws some of the most nuanced body language in comics. Her first book of mature work displays her talents to great effect. Despite the familiarity of the subject matter—20-something ennui—Bell makes it all new again with her eye for detail.

7. A Last Cry for Help by Dave Kiersh (Bodega)
This is a hilarious comic book version of a 1970s teen sex romp. Genuinely erotic in parts and always funny, Kiersh’s book is a delight.

8. Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
Jaime remains the king of understated emotions and concise cartoon language. This wonderful book about hitting middle age and letting go of old memories is one of his finest works.

9. Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown (Drawn and Quarterly), even in reprint form, demands respect. His liner notes and stellar covers make this re-serializing qualify as a “new book”. It provides an unparalleled insight into one of our most important artist’s feelings about his crucial work both then and now. More than just history, it feels like Brown asserting and reconstructing his identity as a cartoonist.

Reprints:

It’s been a great year for them. My favorites are Jeet Heer and Chris Ware’s superlative Gasoline Alley series and Dark Horse Comics’ Magnus Robot Fighter. About as far apart on the spectrum as you can go, but why not? Frank King and Russ Manning both understood body language and space extremely well, but put it in service to, um, very different content. Drawn and Quarterly’s Moomin book and Tatsumi series are also favorites, as well as Fantagraphics’ Popeye book.

Notes:

Despite all the interest and activity from major publishers, this year once again demonstrates the virtues of small, brilliant publishers like Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics. Nurturing unique artists, growing with them, and releasing quality work remains the best (and oddly unique to these two companies!) business model. All the hype and money in the world can’t beat it.

And, I’d be remiss as a publisher and a critic if I didn’t mention Ninja by Brian Chippendale (PictureBox). I know it’s rather rude to put my own book on the list, but it’s how I really feel. In terms of formal daring and drawing, no other book this year has gone further with such success. Chippendale, like Gary Panter before him, uses drawing as a form of expression, turning comic visuals into a multi-layered medium for real mark making. His long form meditation on urban life, gentrification, war, friendship and violence is moving and profound.

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There is increasing interaction between images and language. One might say that living in society today is almost like living in a vast comic strip.

Having seen only a few of his early films, I don’t quite know what to make of Godard, and I can’t always tell if his statements are profound, pretentious, hollow, or all of the above. This quote, however, struck me as kind of insightful, highlighting the way advertising and other public signage has allowed language to invade the landscape, and how those juxtapostions somewhat resemble the mechanics of comics. Or something like that.

If I was feeling up to it, I’d try to explore the idea further, but last night was the office holiday party, and my brain hurts. It probably works best as just an aphorism (and in its original context) anyway.

BONUS GODARD/COMICS CONNECTION: If his Wikipedia profile can be believed, Godard once told Elliott Gould that his two favorite American writers were Jules Feiffer and Charles Schulz.

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I was wrong, and in a good way. Ivan Brunetti‘s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, is starting to get some well-deserved hype, this time a longish, overwhelmingly positive review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. This is an unalloyed good thing, both for Brunetti and for the field as a whole. But…

Well, maybe it is just a little alloyed, but only because the reviewer was one lazy and condescending (at least in this instance) critic named David Hajdu, who is probably best known for his book about the ’60s folk scene in Greenwich Village, Positively 4th Street. I say lazy and condescending because it is quite clear from reading his review that he didn’t bother to do the relevant research, but still felt qualified to act as a generous mandarin, bestowing status on a “disreputable” art form that has finally earned his good graces.

Take for starters his description of the book’s editor:

Brunetti, a comics artist and writer himself, is best known for his comic-book series “Schizo,” a hodge-podge of spare, poetic vignettes heavily influenced by Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts.”

It seems likely to me from this that Hajdu only read the two pages of Brunetti comics included in the book under review, but let’s be generous and assume he skimmed Schizo‘s unusually gentle fourth issue. Hajdu clearly didn’t bother checking into the earlier issues, which might well be the most scarifying comics ever drawn. “Spare”, “poetic”, and “Peanuts” are not the words (well, “poetic” maybe, but not the way Hajdu means it).

Here’s a less important one:

[Brunetti] likes the funnies to be funny; we get few adventure stories — not even, among the historical selections, a panel of “Little Lulu” or Carl Barks’s “Donald Duck,” both of which were more dramatic than literally comic.

Hmm. Little Lulu always seemed pretty funny to me.

More from the maestro:

[Brunetti] is indifferent, even silently hostile, to superheroes, none of whom appear anywhere in the book … There is no question that the vast bulk of superhero comics are factory-made product, rather than works of individual expression; still, at least a few mainstream comics published in recent years — including a series of Batman stories drawn by David Mazzucchelli, who has other work in the anthology — are as artful and subtle as some stories in this book.

Mazzuchelli‘s work on Batman is greatly accomplished, but so many of his other, non-superhero comics are superior that it would be very strange to include it while skipping the rest.

More than that, considering the nature of this anthology, Hajdu’s argument is just silly. Only when discussing comics do people feel the constant need to glorify or excuse work on licensed properties in this way. You’d never find a critic reviewing an anthology of contemporary literature and bemoaning the lack of excerpts from Star Wars novels. (Who knows, maybe there’s a book about Yoda that’s just as good as the story about a novelist suffering writer’s block at Yaddo—it would still feel out-of-place in a book meant to showcase stories that are personal and intimate.) If Hajdu really feels like comics are now finally “suitable for adults”, maybe he could treat them with the respect (and expectations) accorded to other adult media.

Hajdu continues by calling for the deletion of Aline Kominsky-Crumb‘s “clumsy noodling” and praising Kim Deitch “for her [sic] cynical romance with the past and sheer kookiness of spirit.” I love Kominsky-Crumb’s work, but I guess I should give Hajdu a pass here, seeing as everyone’s entitled to their own taste. But would it be too much to ask that, if he’s going to say an artist may be “the literary voice of our time”, and do it in the New York Times, that he actually bother to conduct enough research to get the Possible Voice of Our Time’s gender right? [UPDATE: The Kim Deitch gender mix-up was apparently an editing error, in which case the writer should of course be excused.]

Here’s his final paragraph, a wonderful mixture of clichés, misconceptions, and patronization:

Now going under the name graphic fiction, no doubt temporarily, the comics are all grown up, and this anthology represents the most cogent proof since Will Eisner pioneered the graphic novel and Art Spiegelman brought long-form comics to early perfection. What other kinds of art or entertainment invented for young people ever transcended their provenance as kid stuff? Not coloring books, nor paper dolls, nor board games. There are no Etch a Sketch drawings in the Museum of Modern Art and no View-Master slides in the International Center for Photography. While it took more than a century for the medium to be accepted as suitable for adults, the fact that the comics made it here at all testifies to their resilience and adaptability.

Ugh. Well, I guess it’s good that comics are more of a legitimate art form than the old View-Master, but this seems like faint praise to me.

(By the way, this isn’t the first time Hajdu has written about “grown-up” comics for a prominent cultural publication, or the first time he’s proven himself not quite up to the job.)

I should stop whining. What does it matter really? It’s nice overall that the big cultural arbiters are recognizing comics, and these mistakes aren’t really that important. But it would be even nicer if the people deciding what art is serious and legitimate would take their own jobs just as seriously.

And what is Hajdu up to next? He’s working on a new book, a history of the comics. As he graciously acknowledged in a 2003 interview, it’s something he “knew virtually nothing about before”, but he’s found that doing the research “is the fun part”. I hope that the new year finds Hajdu having lots of fun.

BONUS GRIPE:

Oh, and one more thing, related only in general theme: When you’re putting together a large-scale, scholarly exhibit of the Masters of the American Comics, ostensibly in order to demonstrate the artistic significance of the form and its practitioners, and you display one of the most famous and iconic comic book covers of all time, go ahead and make the effort to find out who drew it. Don’t just credit Harvey Kurtzman on a guess. Especially when Basil Wolverton‘s signature is clearly legible, right at the bottom of the page.

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UPDATE: This post has been somewhat edited from its original form.

You know it’s a great year for comics when an anthology as strong as Ivan Brunetti‘s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories isn’t an obvious front-runner. Considering its quality, the stature of its editor, and the publisher, this book hasn’t gotten as much hype as I might have expected, at least so far. Maybe it’s just Seth cover fatigue. (I hope the same syndrome doesn’t kill off the Dick Tracy series before it gets to the volumes set in outer space.)

Of course, it might just be that most people who really follow comics are already familiar with most of the contents—or at least think they are—and are accordingly less likely to get enthused about a collection of comics they already know. (Of course, as I mentioned a while back, I’ve been surprised by some comics fans’ selective sense of comics history before, so there might be more unfamiliar material here than is apparent.)

Whatever the reason, this is a truly remarkable book, and I surprised myself by plowing through the first half in one sitting, even though I’ve read probably 90% of the material previously.

Brunetti has said that he conceived of the book as something like a Norton anthology for comics, collecting the work of the very best and most (artistically) successful North American cartoonists of the last thirty years, and for the most part, his selections are impeccable. It’s difficult (though not impossible — no Gilbert Shelton? No Jack Jackson? Etc.) to think of important cartoonists from the last three decades who aren’t represented.

Of course, not all of the cartoonists here work best in short form, so some of the selections don’t show the artists at their strongest or most representative. And considering the general thrust of the anthology, some of the selections are odd, and lead the reader to wonder. Why include five pages of pre-WWII comic strips and ignore nearly every newspaper strip from later years (other than Barnaby and Peanuts)? Why leave out so many artists from the underground days? Why include outsider artist Henry Darger, and once you have, why not include a half-dozen others? For that matter, why pick so many young cartoonists who may not actually belong in a book of this type yet?

At least part of the answer to these questions is that the book as originally planned was much longer. Yale decided it needed cutting, and Brunetti had to remove a big chunk of the book. (On a panel at this year’s Small Press Expo in Bethesda, he said that he found it a lot easier to cut out the work of dead cartoonists than live ones, which explains the chronological lopsidedness.) The other, more important, part of the answer lies in the personal nature of the book, something Brunetti is clear about in his introduction, where he writes that his “criteria were simple: these are comics that I savor and often revisit.”

That he took the criteria seriously is evident throughout the book—all of these comics repay rereading—and many of the more obscure or idiosyncratic choices help give the book a much more individual-feeling tone than you would usually find in an historical anthology. Brunetti writes that he sought to highlight “vital, highly personal work”. His own cartooning has always been highly personal, so it’s no surprise that he would value the trait in others. It is nice to find that he approaches his editing from a similar perspective.

In fact, half of the fun in this book is following the thought process implied by his selections, and their placement. The anthology opens with a page of Sam Henderson, followed by a Mark Newgarden section, which is not unlike a Norton anthology of twentieth-century theater beginning with a Marx brothers sketch, followed up with an excerpt from Waiting for Godot. With an opening salvo like that, you know the editor’s on the side of the angels.

Basically, the book may or may not be worth your money if you already own a lot of this work (if you do, you have a great library), but it’s still probably the finest anthology of so-called alternative comics yet published. It certainly beats the hell out of the lousy book that the Smithsonian put out a couple years ago. For someone who wasn’t already immersed in the field and its history, and wanted to learn more, this is just about as perfect an introduction as I can imagine. And even if you consider yourself a full-on aficionado, there are still bound to be at least a few revelations here, whether in discovering a comic you’ve never read before, or in re-experiencing a comic in a new context, one planned by an expert and a clear lover of the form.

[DISCLOSURE: My wife, Lauren R. Weinstein, was one of the contributors to this anthology.]

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Again, “not comics”. But hey — it’s in the spirit of the holiday to cut corners a little. Let old Bill Lee explain.

(via Beware of the Blog)

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This first volume of E.C. Segar‘s complete Popeye comics is going to be very tough to beat for comic book of the year—and this has been an amazing year for great comic books.

I don’t know if Popeye is the best comic strip of all time—or even what that would mean, exactly—but it is without question my favorite. It’s been said before, but if you only know Popeye from the enjoyable but repetitive Fleischer cartoons, you really don’t know the character at all. (The late, lamented Robert Altman‘s flawed film version got closer to the original Segar flavor, with a large cast of eccentric characters and understated humor, but it ultimately misses the mark as well.)

The original strips are funny and fantastic (in both senses of the word). They’re the rare adventure strips that are driven as much by character as by plot. With its bizarre creatures (the Goons, the Jeeps), indelible characterizations (Wimpy, Olive Oyl), and impeccable timing (each day’s strip building beautifully on the one before), Thimble Theatre worked as only a serialized comic strip could. It’s like early Wash Tubbs mixed with Mutt and Jeff, but with monsters and witches and hamburgers—and three times as funny! I can’t imagine higher praise than that.

Read the book. And save room on your shelves for the next five volumes. They keep getting better. Which means “comic book of the year” is pretty much foreordained for a while, at least until 2011.