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Hello and welcome to Comics Comics weekend edition. I am your host, Frankie The Wop. In an effort to promote more crossover blog warfare, I have asked Mr. Robin McConnell over at the beloved Inkstuds to host the audio portion this week’s program.

I spoke to Mr. Kevin Huizenga and Mr. Jim Rugg at the Pittsburgh Independent Comics Expo (PIX) back in October of this year. Organized by Copacetic Comics and the Toonseum of Pittsburgh, PA, this event may be the beginning of something special. Very laid back, very beautiful location and all the indy comics you could hope for in western PA, it was a successful show. I think it may pan out to be an important show for midwesterners as there aren’t too many indy shows for regional creators. (Pittsburgh is basically halfway between Chicago and New York for those who can’t imagine it on a map)

I also spoke with many of the exhibitors and attendees at PIX. I will be posting those interviews hopefully in the coming weeks. Truth is, I’ve had some difficulty with the audio files and am trying desperately to preserve them. So, if I did interview you or your friends at the show, please forgive the delay in making them available. Thanks.

Click on the link below and head on over to Inkstuds. Make sure to open another tab while listening to the audio and check out Robin’s tour diary where he visits Al Columbia, Steve Bissette and others. Sounds like a fun trip (I’m jealous!).

Kevin Huizenga and Jim Rugg in conversation. Annoyingly moderated by Frank Santoro.

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Dwight Macdonald: one of Gary Groth's heroes

On the Inkstuds program earlier today, Gary Groth, Ben Schwartz and I talked about comics criticism with Robin McConnell. The pretext was Ben’s recent anthology of essays and interviews on comics. You can listen to the show here. The discussion ran all over the place. Among other topics discussed:

1. The transformative  role played by Gil Kane in getting people to talk about visual storytelling as well as literary narrative, and in general Kane as a spark for comics criticism and enthusiasm about comics.

2. The difference between art and entertainment.

3. The importance of destructive criticism (with discussions of the relative merits of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Dwight Macdonald). I wish I had remembered to mention John Metcalf, who belongs in this tradition.

4. The seductive dangers posed by Mencken’s style.  Again, I wish I had remembered Christopher Hitchens’s great sentence about the impact of Mencken on some of his dimmer imitators: “No wonder, then, that in his ill-tempered and misanthropic shape, [Mencken] has been adopted as a premature foe of ‘PC’ by the rancorous crowd of minor swells who put out the American Spectator. ”

5. Why Mark Beyer, David Collier and Kim Deitch need critical champions (although Gary mentioned that there is an essay by Gary Giddins on Deitch’s work. I had no idea that this essay existed and will now have to track it down).

6. The reputational status of Eisner and Spiegelman.

If you are interested in these and related topics, listen to the show.

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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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Comics shop reverie. Ah, the new store. Up in the clouds. Heaven. Copacetic rules the roost in Pittsburgh. Best feeling shop in town. I guarantee it! I work Sundays folks, come on down! Take a seat in the easy chair and read the funnies. Have a coffee.

This was a big week for a fanboy/wanna-be-critic like myself. Can you say “paradigm shift?”

Let’s count ’em off: Bulletproof Coffin #2, Orc Stain #4, King City #7 (I know, that came out weeks ago but I missed it and had to re-order it), The Man with the Getaway Face preview, and the new Matt Kindt graphic novel, Revolver. What was I saying about the Direct Market being dead? Sorry, I was high. This has been a great summer already for my new drug: Fusion comics. My term for what Charles Brownstein calls “Boys Comics.” And the Direct Market is delivering my fix, so who’s complaining?

Leading off, The Bulletproof Coffin #2 By David Hine and Shaky Kane. This is my dream comic. I’m in love. This comic is my girlfriend. At this point I wouldn’t care if she fucked my best friend. This comic can do me no wrong. For me, it’s a perfect mashup of styles that POPS with bright colors and dripping blood. The whole book looks really sharp, I think, and the story’s clever unfolding owes a lot to its design. There’s another comic-within-a-comic interplay (Shield of Justice cover to your left) that twists up the story and makes it all swing. If you couldn’t find issue one, I’d say you could still jump on board with #2 and not miss the train. There’s a great synopsis on the inside front cover that made me laugh. Reads like a comic book, like serial entertainment. And for me, really, it’s just the joy reading a Shaky Kane comic. Talk about Fusion – Shaky’s able to somehow subtly, easily shift styles that it really creates a jarring, discordant note in the story. (more…)

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Gil Kane, an artist whose interviews are always worth reading.

Autodidacts. I often think William Blake is the prototype for many modern cartoonists. Blake was a working class visionary who taught himself Greek and Hebrew, an autodidact who created his own cosmology which went against the grain of the dominant Newtonian/Lockean worldview of his epoch. The world of comics has had many such ad hoc theorists and degree-less philosophers: Burne Hogarth, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Lynda Barry, Howard Chaykin, Chester Brown, Dave Sim, Alan Moore. These are all freelance scholars who are willing to challenge expert opinion with elaborately developed alternative ideas. The results of their theorizing are mixed. On the plus side: you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books; Robert Crumb’s Genesis deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible; Lynda Barry’s ideas about creativity strike me as not just true but also profound and life-enhancing. On the negative side: Dave Sim’s forays into gender analysis have not, um, ah, been, um, very fruitful; and while Neal Adams drew a wicked cool Batman, I’m not willing to give credence to his theories of an expanding earth if it means rejecting the mainstream physics of the last few centuries. Sorry Neal!

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Pulphope versus Darth Shaw.

Robin McConnell as Emperor, er, moderator. From TCAF 2010.

Listen to all the pulse pounding action over at Inkstuds.