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Last month, I wrote an essay for an online magazine about Birgit Jürgenssen, an Austrian feminist artist whose heyday was in the ’70s and ’80s. In 1994, she issued a booklet called BICASSO Jürgenssen. (It looks exactly like the kind of hand-drawn, simple zines Nieves publishes.) Turns out it’s a facsimile edition of a journal she kept in 1957, when she was 8. She’s unschooled as an artist (she’s 8, so yeah), but in copying works by Picasso—hence the conflation of her name and his to create “Bicasso”—she’s clearly trying to work out some basic ideas while also exercising her imagination. BICASSO Jürgenssen made me think of Brian Chippendale’s Ninja, which incorporates drawings he did in sixth grade into a larger story completed nearly two decades later. All of this made me wonder if there are other comics that are similarly built around work or ideas from childhood.

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Last fall, not long after Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days was published, I interviewed Al Columbia. I thought he might be a tough subject, reticent to talk about his work and himself, but he was quite the opposite: thoughtful, friendly, and easy to talk to. I liked him quite a bit, in fact. If you haven’t already bought the book, do it now.

NICOLE RUDICK: How often do you work during the day?

AL COLUMBIA: Pretty much from when I get up till I go to bed.

You draw all day?

That, and other things. These days, I don’t draw as much as I did a couple years ago. A couple years ago, I would work from when I got up to when I went to sleep, but that would either be a very long day or two days in a row. I spent a lot of time pushing that, going into two days and getting very little sleep and waking up and doing it again. I became very obsessed with what I was doing at the time. For many years, I wasn’t getting very much sleep. I was just working, working, working, working—until it just seemed to turn in on itself, and it became a weird experience to draw, a little less pleasurable. Not that it’s always pleasurable—it’s hard work—but it seemed to scrape at something inside—deep inside, actually—that made me uncomfortable. So I don’t draw as much as I used to.

When did you start?

Really young, very, very young, two or three. I remember seeing Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, on the television and falling in love with her. I tried drawing her face, and I remember it didn’t look right. So I drew it again, and it didn’t look right, and I drew it again. I got really upset: I kept drawing her face over and over until I got it as best I could, so I could remember her until next year, when she was on TV again. Back then, they would only show The Wizard of Oz once a year, so that was the only time I would get to see Dorothy. I was kind of heartbroken.
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The new issue of The Believer is out and is chock-full of comics goodness. First up, the fifth installment of Alvin Buenaventura’s “Comics” column. Some great work by Jonathan Bennett, Lilli Carré, Tom Gauld, and others. And Charles Burns ruins eggs for all time.

“Spiritual Dad,” a story by Jesse Moynihan and Dash Shaw, is tucked in the back of the issue. They’ve printed it vertically on a long section of folded paper, so it reads kind of like a scroll.

Gabrielle Bell’s done a strip (in glorious color!) that adapts a poem by Russian writer Sasha Chernyi about springtime and seasonal affective disorder in gnomes.

And finally, my interview with Dan Clowes, which covers a lot of his comics work—including his new book, Wilson, which really is phenomenally good—and his film projects, including the sad demise of his Raiders of the Lost Ark script. Burns, The Believer‘s resident cover artist, asked Clowes’s permission to make him look horrible for the cover image. It worked. His face frightened my kid. Somehow it manages simultanteously to be quintessential Burns and Clowes.

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Last fall, I saw the New Museum’s small show of work by Dorothy Iannone. A quick introduction. Iannone is a Boston-born artist, born in 1933, who started painting in 1959 and has since also made video installations, sculptures, and drawings. Her work uses explicit imagery—highly stylized, resembling Egyptian art and fertility goddesses—to describe both the “ecstatic unity” achieved with fellow artist and lover Dieter Roth and the female sexual experience. (Shows of her work have long been plagued by censorship; she’s seventy-five and, this show was her first solo exhibition in an American museum.)

The work from the New Museum show that has really stuck in my mind is An Icelandic Saga, forty-eight bound drawings depicting her trip by freighter, in 1967, to Reykjavik, where she and Roth first met. But it isn’t just pictures; there are words, too. Though plenty of critical accounts have called the drawings “narrative picture stories,” for me it adds up to comic book. There’s comparatively little written about Iannone and her work (considering she’s been making art for half a century), but from what I can tell, she never read comics. And that’s what makes An Icelandic Saga all the more interesting: She arrived at the medium from a completely different path.

Dorothy Iannone, "An Icelandic Saga." Installation view, New Museum.

Each page in the Saga roughly stands as a single panel (or panel-less page). Iannone uses hand-lettered text—commentaries, flashbacks, and interludes as well as detailed lists and shipboard menus—in cursive and block fonts to tell the story, and the black-and-white images mainly consist of flattened, front-facing figures. There aren’t any word balloons, but Iannone’s writing, in first- and third-person, moves between narration, reminiscence, and introspection.
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