Here’s a quick look at what’s happening in Lucerne…
Group interview time! Santoro, Weinstein, me, Forgues, Yokoyama. Major topic: Hemingway and humanism. Also: war comics.
Very large painting by Yokoyama, circa 1994
Part of Frank’s installation.
Part of Lauren’s show.
Oh, there’s this.
Brinkman here in spirit but not body.
I do love Ever Meulen.
Mark Newgarden makes his presence known.
More later.
Well, two-thirds of Comics Comics will soon be in glorious Lucerne, Switzerland for the Fumetto Festival. That’s right, I’ll be there with Frank Santoro as well as Lauren Weinstein, C.F., Yuichi Yokoyama and others. PictureBox itself has a nice exhibition of work by these artists and the festival sounds pretty great in general, with shows and/or talks by Mark Newgarden, Mat Brinkman, Blutch, Shary Boyle and others. Frank and Lauren are already there and apparently Frank and Blutch had a drawing contest of some kind, resulting in a nicely Swiss “even draw”. Anyhow, I’ll be there from April 1 to April 6. Hey Europeans, come see us!
In the spirit of hope (and commerce) PictureBox is holding a massive, two-week sale on nearly everything on our web site! It’s a cold world out there, but what better way to pass the time than curling up with a visual book! Each book is a stimulus package for the soul! Plus every purchase from now (January 16) until February 1 will include a FREE copy of Paper Rad’s DVD Problem Solvers.
So, here we go:
* Been curious about Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art? This masterpiece has been lauded by everyone from Women’s Wear Daily to the New York Times to Eye Magazine, and it can be yours for just $20!
* Ever wondered about who made the best record covers of the 1970s? In awe of Houses of the Holy, Dark Side of the Moon and Electric Warrior? No need to be frightened, for all will be revealed by buying For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. It, too, can be yours for $20!
* Beguiled by mythical trappings and enamored of contemporary art and writing by my generation’s best imaginations? Then dig into Trinie Dalton’s MYTHTYM for just $15! It’s like going to a museum, reading the best book ever written, and watching a movie all at the same time!
* Curious about the book about which the New York Times exclaimed: “Few cartoonists of the moment are weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama – his work obsessively diagrams architecture and design … Travel is remarkably entertaining.” Travel can now be yours for just $9.95!
* Want to dip into a graphic novel on nearly ever top ten of ‘08 list? Interested in Dune? Philip K. Dick? What about masterful drawing? Well, my friend, check out C.F.’s Powr Mastrs 2, now just $10!
* And then there’s Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby! The Village Voice crows: “By depicting human behavior at its worst, Nemoto recalibrates the limits of what we can bear to consider on a page of comics.” Damn straight. Yours for $8.95!
* Many consider Lauren Weinstein’s The Goddess of War a shortform masterpiece of graphic storytelling. I sure do! Richard Gehr calls it a “A blend of Marvel’s Thor comic, a Wagnerian space opera, and Anthony Mann’s Westerns” Sounds right to me! Yours for just $7.95!
* And, good heavens, where else can you find Michel Gondry’s visionary memoir/manifesto/guru-text You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It? The man is a genius, and the book is a helluva a lot of fun to read. Inspirational and educational too! Now just $6.95!
* Wait a minute, what about The Ganzfeld 7? Co-edited and designed by Paper Rad’s Ben Jones, this final issue actually elicited an email from one notoriously cranky woman stating “It’s the best thing ever! And I’m not even stoned!” Yours for just $25.00!
* I know you’ve been wanting to buy Gary Panter, which remains PictureBox’s finest hour, but needed to first purchase a pedestal to hold its 10 pound weight. Now you can, since it’s just $30!!!!!
* All of these books, not to mention our older, equally remarkable books, like Frank Santoro’s Storeyville (just $8.95), Brian Chippendale’s Maggots (just $8.00), Cheryl Dunn’s Some Kinda Vocation (just $8.00) and Paper Rad’s Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales (just $6.95) are all on sale. Not to mention prints, posters and much much more. Get down with it!
* And remember, PictureBox wants you to have these books because we have your best interests at heart!
This sale will self-destruct on February 1.
Happy hunting.
Love,
PictureBox
A Brit adrift in Japan has reported back to me. Mr. Jon Chandler, a fine cartoonist in his own right, sent me a link to these unbelievable photos he took of Yuichi Yokoyama doing a live painting demonstration a few days ago. Follow the link and pick your jaw off the floor. Thanks, Jon.
It’s my duty, both as publisher and “critic” to call your attention to a new mini comic by up and coming young cartoonist Gary Panter. This is Gary’s first new Jimbo story in years and it’s a complete masterpiece, distilling both the abstractions of his recent paintings and his gag-strip timing into one truly awesome comic. It is, along with the new Acme Novelty Library, my favorite damn comic in months. It actually made me like comics again. And again. Conveniently, it’s only for sale at the PictureBox site. Get it now. It’s just fucking astoundingly good. Other favorite recent comics reading: Bottomless Bellybutton and Ranxerox vol. 1-3. Oh, and geez, I re-read Travel last night. It’s better than I remembered, and I published it! Try reading the commentary one page at a time. It’ll do things to you. Also, how come no one is violently offended by Monster Men? Are you people out there finding it in stores? I love it for its often brilliant writing, pacing, and matter-of-fact sexual horror. But that’s just me. Ok, see ya!
This weekend at SPX PictureBox will unleash some serious chaos on you. Lauren Weinstein, CF, Frank Santoro, Timothy Hodler and Matthew Thurber will be in attendance.
PictureBox will debut new zines by Dash Shaw and Santoro. AND we will have limited advance copies of the books below.
The Ganzfeld 7
Edited by Dan Nadel and Ben Jones
Art directed and designed by Ben Jones
Edition of 1000
This is the final issue of The Ganzfeld. We got excited and just skipped 6 and went straight to 7. For this one we’ve really stacked the deck. Ben Jones art directed and co-edited the whole thing, even providing covers. Inside the 288 page, full color book is new work by: Brian Gibson, Lauren Weinstein, Taylor McKimens, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Jessica Ciocci, Chris Ware, Mat Brinkman & Joe Grillo (24 pages of collaborative drawings), Erin Rosenthal, Keith McCulloch, Peter Blegvad, Joe Buzzell, Jon Vermilyea, C.F., Eddie Martinez, Chuck Webster, and many more. There are features on Marc Smeets, Joanne Greenbaum, Heinz Edelmann and Pshaw. And there are comics by Ben Jones throughout. It’s a brick. A monument. A terror. Available at very few outlets and pretty much only online.
If that weren’t enough it comes packages with 4 more items only available as part of the package:
-Problem Solvers, the DVD, by Paper Rad. EXCLUSIVE to Ganz 7
-A 12 page zine collecting the best of Kathy Grayson’s blog
-A 24 page pamphlet examining the work of L.A. genius artist Bob Zoell by Norman Hathaway
-An 18×24 two-sided poster by Lauren Weinstein
Travel
Yuichi Yokoyama
All SPX copies are signed with a drawing by Yokoyama
In Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel, the storyline is as linear as it is sharp: it is the long, silent and crystalline description of a train ride undertaken by three men. The subject Yokoyama depicts here is less the landscape around the train (the distance covered, the regions travelled through) than the actions within the train itself. As the train moves, the three men walk through the string of cars and are confronted with the vehicle’s architecture, its machine-like environment. By above all, they are confronted with the stares and the physical presence of other passengers. Travel is a journey into the contemporary Japanese psyche – a brilliant, wordless graphic novel. Bookforum has written of Yokoyama: “Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal.” This edition features an introduction by cartoonist and historian Paul Karasik and commentary by the author.
Powr Mastrs Vol. 2 follows hot on the heels of this elusive artist’s first volume– in a series of six graphic novels–which was one of last year’s most anticipated debuts. C.F. comes out of the mythic Providence, Rhode Island art and noise scene–his musical alias is Kites. In a recent profile The Comics Reporter observes, “Contrasting sharply with many of his flashier contemporaries, C.F.’s primary skill lies in overlooked nuances of comics storytelling, in particular pacing.” His distinctive voice and intricate rendering skills have attracted attention from the groundbreaking comics anthology, Kramers Ergot–he was included in the fourth issue, and featured on the cover of the fifth. Here, C.F.’s epic fantasy–an allegorical tale where power, physical identity and even gender are always in flux–picks up steam: Buell Kazee sneaks down into the cellar of the plex knowe crypt and conjures trouble; Tetradyne Cola takes a nap and dreams of Monica Glass and the lemon sparklers of star studio; members of the Marker clan compare notes on their magical crimes and the witches of Lace Temblor conspire over transmutation night.
Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby
Takashi Nemoto
“Nemoto is the undisputed master of filthy comics. His work is brutal and horrifying and sure to shock even the most jaded comics reader. And yet underneath all his absurd depravity is a beautiful and touching story of a father’s love for his giant mutant sperm son.”-Johnny Ryan
At long last, this underground Japanese classic has been translated into English. A seminal work of manga from the mid-1980s, Monster Man Bureiko Lullaby is a Candide-esque tale–if you can picture Candide as a mutated sperm brought to life by radioactivity. Unremittingly explicit, this is the comics equivalent of Henry Miller at his best: direct, honest and insightful while simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. Tokyo-based Takashi Nemoto, who was born in 1958, has been called the R. Crumb of Japan: Nemoto and Crumb share a similar, surreal drawing style and pessimistic, satirical stance, for which both have faced their share of negative criticism. Due to his unapologetically squalid subject matter, Nemoto has long been a controversial figure in Japan–clashing violently with mainstream Japanese morals–and is just now receiving some critical success there. Reviewers are finally looking past his gross-out humor to find farflung influences and connections like Mark Twain, Otto Dix and Andre Masson. Book design by King Terry.
See you this weekend!
Sorry I haven’t posted for a while — still recovering from a surprisingly turbulent Thanksgiving. I’ve been mulling a review of the Black Dossier, but am not sure if I have much to say that hasn’t already been said — though I liked it a little more than most people apparently did. We’ll see.
In the meantime, in the comments to Frank’s Galactikrap review, reader Luke Pski pointed out a really terrific post written by cartoonist and all-around great guy Tom K. on Yokoyama’s New Engineering. The J.G. Ballard comparison is brilliant, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it first.
I wrote this review in my notebook a few days after SPX this year. Recently, I thought about posting it, and as I was assembling this, Patrick Markfort wrote an excellent review of it over at Comics-and-More. But I thought I’d post mine anyway. So here goes: Maybe I’m biased but my favorite SPX comic so far has been Brian Chippendale’s Galactikrap #2. This comic sort of got lost in the shuffle after Maggots was released and I think that’s too bad. It’s an awesome standard digest-sized 52-page black + white mini-comic with two card-stock silkscreen covers stacked on top of each other. The story begins on the inside front cover, so the second cover is actually page two of the story, but the feel of the book is that there are two covers — you know what I mean, geez.
As I said, the story begins on the color pages — it made me think of some Japanese manga where the first and last few pages of the book are colored with a limited palette, while the rest is in black-and-white. (When I mentioned this to Brian he said that’s what he was going for a little bit) It’s especially nice because the color section informs the B+W section and lets me re-imagine how the B+W pages might look in color. It’s an interesting tension and one that Chipps has in much of his work, but not often as directly as in this particular comic. The open, playful colors also really help to “open” up the dense B+W panels. I can see it all in a new light.
Brian is economizing in new ways by “fixing” the page layout & moving the reader THROUGH the panels very directly. The depth of focus is deeper & wider than usual for him. He fills the frame with focused “speed lines” and mark-making. Nothing new but it seems to me this is a different Chipps than Ninja or Maggots. I think his poster and collage work are more center stage here and in service of the comic’s narrative velocity (and responsible for it in many ways). Brian’s always frenetic but here it’s a focused energy that is well organized with diamond-like precision. The action scenes throttle by with unheard of speed and terror.
Terror? Well, it’s like Brian can create this labyrinth of locales, of settings that feel very real and solid. He renders livable landscapes that teem with energy and scope. And when shit goes down in these mutant sci-fi worlds, I feel present, there. It’s uncanny. I think Brian has absorbed this single-camera point-of-view from certain comics and early video games, and that view has mutated into this buzzsaw that cuts away view after view of worlds unseen and hidden. It’s like you’re inside Brian’s notebook when you’re reading Galactikrap — and the stories are playing on an animated reel that just keeps rolling.
The comic is broken up into three sections, more or less. The first section could be read as a sorta Seinfeld momentary mishap, or it could read as a window on to a class struggle — strip away the mutant sci-fi futurepast setting, and it’s a story about consumers getting fucked over by the MAN. It tells the story of Su Long, a cute girl with a funny hat, trying to buy a muffin with her debit card. Her card gets denied. She rattles off her 35-digit account number to customer service over her “cellie”, and is told that her card has been deactivated because she recently made several purchases in a “strange part of town.” So the bank puts her card on hold because of suspicious activity. Su informs the customer service agent that because of this she’s now stranded in said strange part of town “with no money and no way home. And no muffins.”
This section is laid out in a way that creates a grid when the comic is held open — two same size gutterless panels per page. This is repeated for most of the comic — and when it does change, the layout goes full-page. The POV of the “muffin story” is also fixed — a medium shot of the muffin stand, the proprietors, & the customers. Figures come in and out of the frame, and the stationary shot of the transaction gives it, well, a stillness, and a sort of deadpan sitcom tone that works quite well. The characters’ expressions and dialogue create a subtle play of tensions and genuine laughs that reminds me of The Simpsons somehow.
The stillness and dry humor of the muffin section perfectly sets the table for the second section, which is an action bonanza that really must be seen to be believed. These are bigger, fuller panels. I believe they are drawn smaller, & that Brian’s enlarging his images much like he does in a lot of his poster and collage work. Consequently, the panels open up and because the panel structure is still fixed, the narrative breathes in ways I don’t normally associate with Brian’s pages.
There’s enough air for the action to really catch fire in the second section. A sewer devil has stolen a mother’s baby, and the Deep Cutz Force, a three member “pitch black ops team” goes after them. Sent by the military to gather children for “covert use, parent surveillance, foster home directionals, high school white washes, super soldier experiments and the needs of the State.” Fuck yeah! This is my kind of comic.
Deep Cutz Force takes off through the sewers, and meets up with the devils for a showdown. Clear and precise, yet open and free, here Brian is less concerned with mark-making just for the sake of it and instead appears focused on using the lines and his customary ballz-out approach to move the reader through the story. The pages fly by. The force of the lines and the movement and action of the characters are remarkably staged in this section. It all comes together beautifully and is executed with a certain skill that I feel is above and beyond Ninja. The action explodes at the tail end of the fight scene when Raw Star, a cute girl with cool hair and hot hands, shows up to blast a devil in half. But where is the child? Behind a well-guarded door that leads us to section three.
The third section opens up with some Teamy Weamy members trying to find a public bathroom. They try to use Snakezilla’s bathroom which is, like, a giant store in a building shaped like Godzilla. Only the assembled team is tricked by a member of Gang Gloom who slugs them with a bat, and sends them flying into a trap door beneath Snakezilla. The comic ends with a cliffhanger of the characters falling into a bottomless pit. These last two pages are printed in color on the heavier silkscreen covers.
Is it genre stuff, like a mainstream comic? Not really but close. Brian can do what no one else can do. Look close: it’s Brian’s TONAL perception that allows him to “see” these drawings, these movements, and fix them to the page. What’s fixed really is the SOUNDTRACK of the narrative. The marks, the velocity of his lines and the organization of space and movement — it’s musical. One’s eyes know (and one’s body feels) the BEAT and moves with the drawings. Rolling, rolling. Sort of like manga, sort of like some American action comics, but it’s effortless here, very much like the clearest manga but more like a John Coltrane blowout version of it or something. Brian’s playing the song sideways — he’s more like Yokoyama, really, than anyone else in American comics. I think Yokoyama’s work is the clearest of all manga I’ve come across; it’s musical to me, and it even almost looks like sheet music. The reader’s eyes follow the symbols and marks so fluidly that it creates a completely different experience, for me, than reading almost all other comics. There is a similar BEAT that moves the reader through Chippendale’s Galactikrap, one thats been there since Maggots. So just as Yokoyama is using the form to tell his futurepast adventure stories, so too does Brian use genre trappings to get at the heart of the movement, the action, the beat.
PictureBox will debut 6 new titles at SPX:
Books:
Powr Mastrs by C.F.
Maggots by Brian Chippendale
New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama
Storeyville by Frank Santoro
Newspapers:
Cold Heat Special #1 by Jon Vermilyea and Frank Santoro
Wu Tang Comics by Paper Rad
We will also have the new issue of Brian Chippendale’s Battlestack Galacticrap, a new mini by Frank Santoro and assorted other goodies.
C.F., Brian Chippendale, Frank Santoro and Jon Vermilyea will be on hand to sign books.
Signing Schedule
Friday:
4 pm – 5 pm: Jon Vermilyea, Brian Chippendale and Frank Santoro
5 pm – 6:30 pm: Brian Chippendale, Frank Santoro and CF
Saturday:
11:30 am – 1 pm: Brian Chippendale, CF and Frank Santoro
2 pm – 4 pm: CF and Brian Chippendale
4 pm – 5 pm: Jon Vermilyea and Frank Santoro
On Monday, Oct. 15 in NYC:
PictureBox and D.A.P. Present
A mega book signing featuring:
Frank Santoro : Storeyville
Brian Chippendale : Maggots
C.F. : Powr Mastrs Vol. 1
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Monday, October 15, 2007
Spoonbill & Sugartown
218 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Tel. 718.387.7322
In the latest Comics Journal, manga critic Bill Randall asks who will publish modern master Yuichi Yokoyama in English. Well, look no further. PictureBox is releasing an English version (though still reading right to left) of Yokoyama’s first book, New Engineering, in October. Travel, his second book, will follow in 2008, which will bring us up to date just in time to release a third, as yet untitled book that, having seen chunks of it, I can safely say is next level stuff. Randall’s analogy to Fort Thunder is right on. In fact the first time my friend Mike Buckley showed me the work he said “it’s like Brinkman crossed with Chris Ware.” Pretty much. It will be released simultaneously with Chippendale’s Maggots, CF’s Powr Mastrs, Santoro’s Storeyville and Weinstein’s Goddess of War. Yes, it’s “go time” at PictureBox HQ.
So there you have it: Your Comics Journal response of the day (great issue, by the way).
