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Check out the new short video thing at the Cold Heat site.

Color separations!

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Well now PictureBox has big plans this weekend. We’re releasing Matthew Thurber’s 1-800 MICE #2, Comics Comics #3 and The Ganzfeld 5: Japanada! at MoCCA at NYC’s Puck Building, all day Saturday and Sunday, booths A14-16. Lotsa signings all weekend:

Saturday

12-1: Lauren Weinstein and Matthew Thurber
1-2: Gary Panter and Brian Chippendale
2-3: Paper Rad
3-4: Mark Newgarden and Megan Cash
4-5: Brian Chippendale and Frank Santoro
5-6: Taylor McKimens and Dan Nadel

Sunday

12-1: Taylor McKimens and Matthew Thurber
1-2: Lauren Weinstein and Brian Chippendale
2-3: Paper Rad
3-4: Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro

Patrick Smith: “Caterpillar”, 40″ x 48″, oil on canvas

AND! I’ve curated an exhibition opening Friday night!

CANADA
“New Mutants”
Curated by Dan Nadel for PictureBox
Opening Friday, June 22, 7-9 pm.
Artists in attendance.

CANADA
55 Chrystie St.
NYC 10002
Wednesday – Sunday 12-6 pm.

The artists:

Melissa Brown
Brian Chippendale
Julie Doucet
C.F.
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Ben Jones
Amy Lockhart
Sakura Maku
Frank Santoro
Patrick Smith
Michael Williams

The show:

CANADA presents an exhibition of imagist paintings by emerging North American artists. This group of artists is linked by its unabashed use of representative imagery in service to surreal and oblique narratives. These artists find their lineage in the midwestern explorations of the Hairy Who, deep dish surrealism of Gary Panter, the raw beauty of H.C. Westermann and the fantastics of Max Ernst. Like their artistic ancestors, the artists at hand use a private symbol language to assemble communicative pictures. This is not decorative psychedelia or overheated allegory, but rather deeply personal and formally constructed images marked by an absence of irony and an attention to the formal elements of a cartoon and vernacular based vocabulary.

Five of the eleven artists exhibited are based or have roots in Providence, RI’s fertile arts culture. Melissa Brown’s (now based in Brooklyn) mixed media landscapes elevate the horizon to an experiential hallucination, while Brian Chippendale’s collaged images enact his own cartoon narratives on an epic scale. C.F.’s all-over images accumulate dozens of small moments, forming an idea of a distinct visual sensibility. Ben Jones, of Paper Rad, presents flattened portraits of anonymous cartoons in search of a plot, while Michael Williams paints midlife crises of universal hippies. Exiting Providence, Vancouver’s Amy Lockhart’s paintings are meticulous visions of characters in midstream, while Texan Trenton Doyle Hancock’s tactile visions of his Mound-world capture a brief narrative moment. Julie Doucet, based in Montreal, creates painted objects that function like images–her drawn vocabulary suddenly occupying three dimensions. Pittsburgh native Frank Santoro combines a comic book sense for action with a traditional painter’s attention to detail. Two New Yorkers are engaged in painted introspection: Sakura Maku used texts to layer and subvert her jangly images; Patrick Smith’s portraits of spaces and faces made of and living through surreal forms are striking passageways into another consciousness.

All of these painters refuse to be pigeonholed, allowing themselves and their images to change and mutate through multiple media.

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Frank just e-mailed me this. Maybe we have another Love & Rockets kind of situation in the making. Which would be exciting.

They do look a little like Castle and Joel Cannon, if you squint hard enough.

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Most of you’ve probably already heard the news elsewhere, but for those of you who haven’t, the serialized version of Cold Heat has been discontinued.

See the details here.

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If you want to avoid (mild) spoilers, don’t read Sean T. Collins’s brief review of Cold Heat #4 before the actual issue. But when you do read it, you will know that he is right.

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I know a lot of Comics Comics readers have already seen Marc Singer’s recent part-right, part-way-off-base review of MOME, because I recognize the names of a lot of the commenters there, but if you haven’t seen it yet, the post itself and the comments that follow are pretty interesting.

Via Jog — who, by the way, somewhat recently wrote one of the more insightful reviews of Cold Heat (drawn, as you probably know, by CC editor-at-large Frank Santoro) I’ve yet seen.

Speaking of Frank, judging by their Website, Copacetic has only a few copies of his ’90s masterpiece Storeyville left, and I believe they’re the only place where you can still purchase it. So this may be your last chance if you want to get your hands on Storeyville in its original format.

Finally, and via Tom Spurgeon, a Steve Gerber anecdote from Marvel’s Tom Brevoort. [UPDATE: Gerber has responded.]

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I’ve just returned from Tokyo, where I had a whirlwind adventure in Manga and art. I’ll have some very special related announcements soon. In the meantime, as Tim has noted, Comics Comics 2 is out and about. Look for it in a store near you, and in the Diamond catalog for February shipping along with issue 1. Also, I’m proud to announce the release of Cold Heat 2, which will be available through Diamond in January, and monthly thereafter.

Anyhow, Cold Heat remains a 12-issue series by Ben Jones and Frank Santoro about Castle, an 18-year old Ninja. It features truly groundbreaking concepts in story and art, and also every issue contains a one-page piece of fiction by Tim. Below is an excellent description by Bill Boichel, CC 1 contributor and the owner of our favorite comic book store. Copacetic Comics. Cold Heat is available from PictureBox Inc.

Cold Heat #2
By Ben Jones and Frank Santoro
Picking up where the first issue left off, Cold Heat #2 revs it up a few notches and takes us on a whirlwind ride through the dis-united states of the disturbed American psyche. Series artist, Frank Santoro once again refuses to play it safe. This time around he pulls out all the stops and takes the chances that most other artists wouldn’t take even if they could. Leaping into the artistic no man’s land between the well established borders of pre-existent genres, Santoro combines the propulsive narratives of mainstream American heroic adventure
comics, the exaggerated expressiveness of Japanese manga, and the naivete of self-published autobiographical comics with his own experimental ideas to create a totally unique comics cocktail that will knock you for a loop. Cold Heat takes the outside in and then brings the inside out—demonstrating how our internalization of international affairs creates monsters in our minds that are every bit as dangerous as anything we’ll meet on the street—and by so doing helps us see our place in and find our way through the mess of our world.