Cover, Walt and Skeezix Volume 1, Chris Ware (after Frank King).

Top portion of Stumptown poser, by Brandon Graham (After Chris Ware after Frank King).

(Just so there is no misunderstanding, I want to make it clear that this post is not meant to be a criticism  of Brandon Graham. His poster is lovely and I’m gratified that the Walt and Skeexiz books are informing the sensibility of younger cartoonists. The full Stumptown poster can be seen here. Thanks to Tom Spurgeon for calling attention to this poster. Everyone should buy the Walt and Skeezix books!)

From "Mysterious Suspense" #1, Oct. 1968; art and story by Steve Ditko, dialogue credited to D.C. Glanzman

“Hello, this is Chris Ware, listen, I’m stuck in a Charlton comic… no, LISTEN, I am trapped inside a late 1960s Charlton comic book, ’67, ’68… the same way it happens every time! Every fucking time! It is absolute hell in here, the paper quality is garbage, the coloring is off-register… no, no I’m subsisting on onion gum and trick black soap. Yes, I’ve built mighty astronaut muscles in double quick time, can we just… Steve Ditko. D-I-T-K-O, I think it’s a superhero thing, everybody’s talking about ethics. Look, you’ve gotta hurry, I – I think I’m a self-portrait. Wha- yes, I’ll hold, thank you.”

***

(I do believe Jordan Crane’s Uptight #4 is set to show up at some stores this week — ‘some stores’ meaning Midtown Comics in NYC — despite its absence from Diamond’s nationwide list, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested in continuations of both the serials from issue #3.)

On the Line: A 6″ x 6″, 48-page Image collection of artist and type designer Rian Hughes’ comic for the Guardian newspaper (written by Rick Wright), apparently informed by the sharp-angled stylings of Gene Dietch. I primarily recall Hughes’ comics work for the clean line-type work in the Grant Morrison-written Dare (and the other materials collected in Knockabout’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows collection), so this should be neat to see. Samples here (scroll down); $12.99.

Mid-Life: This is a new semi-autobiographical work from Joe Ollmann and publisher Drawn and Quarterly, as showcased in Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the artist a few days ago. A man remarries and has another child in middle age, leading to much stress and some infatuation. Preview; $19.95.

Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness: This is a new U.S. edition (published by Bloomsbury USA) of a 2010 Blank Slate Books collection of comics by Darryl Cunningham, focused on true tales from working in a psychiatric ward and the artist’s own experiences with depression. Samples in this Bart Croonenborghs review; $15.00.

Leonard Starr’s Mary Perkins, On Stage Vol. 8: Covering the period from May 5, 1966 to November 19, 1967. Covering it with DRAMA. Introduction by David Apatoff; $24.95.

The Original Johnson Vol. 2 (of 2): From IDW and ComicMix comes the second half of Trevor Von Eeden’s comics biography of boxer Jack Johnson – I don’t think any of this particular material was released online, as was the first 100+ pages of the project; $19.99.

The Secret History Omnibus Vol. 2: In case you’ve been waiting on the hardcover collections of this Jean-Pierre Pécau-written immortals-navigate-world-history series, published in English by Archaia, here’s your second shot. Compiling issues #7-14, corresponding to one original album each, with a whole lot of art by the redoubtable Igor Kordey. Tome 21 is due in France next week, so expect another one of these bricks soon enough; $34.95.

Genkaku Picasso Vol. 2: Just about everybody appeared to dislike vol. 1 of this Usamaru Furuya youth manga series, but – ahh, I thought it was all right. Part if it was I just enjoyed the game Furuya — of Short Cuts and the upcoming Lychee Light Club, along with several considerably more ambitious and well-regarded scanlated works — appeared to be playing with his lead artist character’s appearance, adding lucrative ‘feminine’ design tropes in a manner that makes him look as ugly as his defiantly standoffish attitude to basically everyone. Also, he keeps a dead would-be girlfriend in his pocket like an otaku fetish doll, except when diving into people’s minds to solve their personal problems, a feat accomplished in reading their psychologies like early 20th century editorial cartoons and monkeying with the non-labeled component parts to some occasionally useful effect. I mean, it’s certainly not a Best of 20XX contender, but as an eccentric, faintly self-effacing take on a pop comics premise it’s got some daffy entertainment value; $9.99.

Bakuman Vol. 3: On the other hand, I didn’t keep up with this world-of-manga-creation series from the creators of Death Note after vol. 1 (review here), but just the other day I was gently urged to give it another shot, on the basis that vol. 2 evidences a considerably more shaded aspect of the vehement popular-success-at-any-cost focus and rampant, defiant chauvinism of the opening chapters, complete with the introduction of an even less overtly pleasant writer/artist rival for the series’ teenage creative team. Now I’m even farther behind; $9.99.

Slam Dunk Vol. 14 (of 31): I mean, it could be some of the commentary I got on that review was spot-on — and since I don’t read ahead in scans, basic structural information is probably going to be more accurate than anything I can guess — and Bakuman is basically a sports manga of a fairly orthodox character, only with ‘making comics’ as the sport and, impliedly, the young sportsmen in the lead picking up some character-building lessons as they grow into men via organized conflict. I’ll also add – here’s one of the great sports manga of the ’90s; $9.99.

Biomega Vol. 5 (of 6): And rounding out the Japanese week, Tsutomu Nihei nears his end; $12.99.

Creepy Archives Vol. 9: In which, oddly enough, this Dark Horse series of Warren magazine reprints (#42-45) begins to line up temporally with Dynamite’s similar, younger line of Vampirella magazine reprints, seeing an influx of Spanish artists from the Selecciones Illustrada studio begin to arrive on the scene. With Richard Corben, Tom Sutton, Frank Brunner, Dave Cockrum, Mike Ploog, Rafael Auraleón, Felix Mas, Luis García, Jose Bea and others. This volume appears to feature an introduction by Richard Arndt, whose bibliographic lists of b&w horror magazines and early independent comics series are utterly invaluable; $49.99.

DC Universe Legacies #9 (of 10): I haven’t kept up on this summary-of-continuity-as-it-stands series from writer Len Wein – it’s ‘common man throughout fantastic history’ device just hasn’t been clicking with me. Still, there’s been some nice art scattered around from the likes of Joe Kubert and Frank Quitely, and this issue’s got a backup story from Bill Sienkiewicz; $3.99.

Deadpool Team-Up #885: Likewise, this particular Deadpool comic has art from Philip Bond. Uh, there isn’t really eight hundred Deadpool comics out there – for instance, this week there’s a Wolverine #1000 anthology comic, and an issue #5.1 which I believe indicates a ‘stepping aside’ to allow new readers an opportunity to get acquainted. Preview; $2.99.

SpongeBob Comics #1: The editor of this United Plankton Pictures anthology comic (distributed by Simpsons specialists Bongo) is Chris Duffy, who put together a pretty impressive slate of artists for Nickelodeon Magazine back in the day, so you might want to keep an eye on it. Debut contributors are James Kochalka, Hilary Barta, Graham Annable, Gregg Schigiel and Jacob Chabot; $2.99.

Excerpt from David Collier's Chimo

If the past is prologue David Collier’s new book Chimo, which will be widely available in early 2011, will probably receive far less attention than it deserves. For me, the four great Canadian cartoonists are Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet and David Collier. Of the four, Collier has received the least praise and press. So it’s worth inquiring what makes Collier’s work so special and also ask why his appeal, so far at least, has been limited.

Thanks to the Beguiling, I got an early look at Chimo and it has all the peculiar qualities that distinguish Collier’s output. The book is a free-ranging memoir that deals with Collier’s life-long relationship with the army. He joined up in the 1980s when he was in his 20s. He initially did only a few years and then became a full-time cartoonist. Launching his eponymous comic book series Collier’s was published by Fantagraphics in 1991.  But more recently Collier rejoined the army, in part to participate in the Canadian War Artists Program but also to work as a regular soldier.

Collier has already done a few stories about his soldiering career but Chimo offers the most extensive account yet, and is his longest sustained narrative, clocking in at over a hundred pages (with samples of Collier’s earlier military cartooning filling out the book).

Anyone who knows the cartoonist will immediately recognize that “Collier in the army” is an inherently rich topic because he is among the least-likely soldiers imaginable. Collier is very much a man who goes his own way. He’s not very good at following instructions and has the disconcerting habit of almost always speaking his mind. Compared to David Collier, other cartoon-soldiers (Willie and Joe, Sad Sack, Beetle Bailey, Dopin’ Dan) are the very models of military propriety.

Private Collier

Reading his latest book, it occurred to me that Collier is not unlike Wilson, the anti-hero of Daniel Clowes recent graphic novel. To be sure, Collier is much more benign than Wilson, but both the cartoonist and the fictional character have an ornery honesty and an unsettling bluntness. If you can imagine Wilson telling his own story and possessing a much stronger self-awareness and talent for self-reflection, you’d have a good idea of what Collier’s latest story is like.

Like his earlier works, Chimo is a stream-of-conscious narrative, a story that weaves back and forth in time, that ruminates and wanders. At one point, Collier draws himself looking like Andy Gump, and it occurred to me that Collier’s work belongs to the tradition of mid-western cartooning that I’ve been tracing in various books. Cartoonists like Clare Briggs, Sidney Smith, and Harold Gray weren’t just interested in narrative but also cared about the daily texture of life. Their characters have a tendency to wax philosophic, to use incidents and events to reflect on human nature and the meaning of life. The same is true of Collier. He’s the most essayistic of major cartoonists, at least since the glory days of Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

This essayistic quality sets Collier apart from such peers as Seth and Chris Ware, both of whom have been more influenced by contemporary fiction and design. Collier is a year younger than Seth but Collier’s art and storytelling, not to say his sense of design, seems more rooted in an earlier tradition of comics storytelling. Collier’s lack of a design sense is a real problem, as witness the off-putting cover of Chimo. I often wish that Collier (or his publishers) would ask Ware or Seth to design Collier’s books. They’d not only put together a nicer package, they’d also, paradoxically, find a way to highlight the strength of Collier’s art that his own covers hide.

What immediately struck me about Collier’s comics when I first read them was his draughtsmanship. He had clearly been influenced by Robert Crumb, whose cross-hatching density and gnarly line he inherited, but Collier also had a distinctive thatchy and roughhewn quality to his work, as against the bouncy roundness of Crumb’s style.

Collier’s essayistic storytelling style calls to mind not just older artists like Sidney Smith and a certain strand of Crumb’s work (stories like “Where Has It Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?” and “Trash”) but also the autobiographical comics of Spain Rodriguez. As with Spain’s work, Collier is given to abrupt shifts from one scene to the next. You have to puzzle out, often, what Collier is up to, what are the thought processes that link one anecdote to the next. Characteristically, we only find out what the title Chimo means in a wayward panel halfway through this book.

Collier’s stories, in both Chimo and his earlier comics, perfectly match his art: wayward yarns about eccentric characters, they reflect a world rarely seen in art or literature. Whether writing about soldiers who sneak out for a little unregulated rest and relaxation or about historical tricksters like Grey Owl (an Englishman who pretended to be a native)  or prickly athletes like Ethel Catherwood, Collier has a penchant for noticing eccentric characters and telling their stories with an intense, non-judgmental honesty. Some of his characters are punk rockers living in downtown Toronto, others are soldiers preparing to go to on global peacekeeping missions, still others scientists who experiment with drugs. What unites them all is their unwavering individualism, a quality that Collier as an artist shares.

Visually Collier excels not just in depicting the natural landscape but also, a much rarer quality, in capturing the feel of industrial and post-industrial urban life. No one artist that I know of has better captured the tone and texture of Hamilton, Ontario with its aging smokestacks and redolent machine age nostalgia

Collier is not, as I’ve hinted, an easy cartoonist to grasp through a quick read. You have to work at his comics a little, make an effort to understand what he’s doing and the connections he is making. But the rewards for this effort are manifold. Collier has the rare ability to take the reader inside his own mind, to show the world through his eyes. Once you tune yourself to his wavelength, Collier can change the way you look at the world. Cartoonists who do that are very rare and worth cherishing. I’d encourage everyone to pick up Collier’s latest work and also to go back and revisit Collier’s earlier comics, especially the stories in Portraits from Life and Just the Facts. Chimo will be hitting quality comic book stores in March.

Here’s the full quote:

evan dorkin says:
December 2, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Re: monographs etc, yeah, I understand that, but two thoughts, likely not well-thought out -
Although not a monograph, when the Love and Rockets sketchbook came out it was a minor bombshell, imo. The idea that relatively few people in comics weren’t hungry to see more of Jaime’s work and art and life…I dunno, I guess I just don’t get it. But I still think that we’re in a different era, when so many notable books are coming out that you can write long-ish preview articles each and every week and still miss solid-to-excellent work.
Second thought — releases like the Complete Alec and Weathercraft and Sacco’s last book weren’t monographs, and in the comics community it felt as if these significant works were noticed in passing. I’m sure everyone reading this can name more than a few books released in the past year that they felt were unjustly and surprisingly overlooked, and not just personal favorites created by obscure (even more obscure?) cartoonists. I kinda understand why Jack Survives wasn’t bandied about on websites for a long while, but some others –? I feel as if Wilson and The Book of Genesis garnered more mainstream press than discussion “in comics”. it’s like — everyone goes “holy crap!” when these books are announced, but when they’re released everyone seems to be talking about the next Holy Crap announcement or talking about All-Star Superman (not a knock — maybe the character-based books just offer up more fun things to discuss with more people than Captain Easy or King Aroo or whatever?) or talking about…nothing.
This is emotion-speak more than analysis-speak, I admit. Just a gut feeling. Too many books/books of note? Burn-out? Superman? Nature of the internet? ADD?
Anyway, it’s a great book. I’d love one on Gilbert to place next to it, myself.

So, I thought I’d riff a little bit on what I think Evan is getting at – because I definitely remember when the L ’n R Sketchbook came out and how big of a deal it was for many of us at the time. I will be over-generalizing and painting this whole picture with broad strokes, so please forgive me if I ramble and can’t tie this all up with a nice little bow by the end of this post.

It seems to me that there used to be more of a “general consensus” attitude about hot button topics in comics. Whether the topic was “Kirby” or “Indie Comics” or whatever, there seemed to be room within the comics shop (where these discussions took place) for everything to exist on the shelf together, literally and figuratively. Most folks hated Kirby (“look at how he draws square fingers”), and most of those same folks loved Mage, which was an “indie comic”. There was a real interest in non-mainstream work, because in the indies you didn’t have the Comics Code. So there was a sort of groundswell of fans that wanted something else.

And then of course the mainstream companies started giving the fans that something else, and indie, gritty, realistic adventure comics basically destroyed the market in the mid-1990s. By that time though the other upstart indie creators like Los Bros., Burns, and Clowes were sort of migrating out of the comics shop and into the legitimate bookstores. We all know the story, right? Well, I may be totally off the mark but I think some of the excitement within comics of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s has just been spread around so much that “within comics” that feeling feels flat in comparison to the old days.

Meaning there definitely is more mainstream press coverage of books like Wilson or the new Joe Sacco (there was a BBC roundtable on the book for Christ’s sake), and, I think because of that, there is less of a discussion of Clowes and Sacco within comics or on the comics blogs or wherever, because those creators are well known to us and there isn’t that discovery or shock of the new anymore. A lot of the kids who I see at Copacetic or at shows often don’t want to be bothered with comics history or something new and “adult” like Ware or Sacco. And they don’t like superheroes either. And they don’t like Los Bros. because there are too many girls in bikinis every issue. They want to discover something new or claim something new for their own rather than cling to a specific history that is already written out for them. And so they leave Clowes and Sacco to the mainstream press and don’t really chime in when the topic on a comics blog is “Ditko.”

And who can blame them? There’s a real disconnect. I can extol the virtues of back issues and comics history until I’m blue in the face, but the truth is that comics is growing beyond its own familiar borders. It’s so fractured now that we don’t have to all be conversant in all the current releases and hot topics or ancient history. I feel like I meet people who are new comics readers all the time – and when I ask them what they like, they invariably say, in one form or another, “all kinds of things.” They like Sin City and they like Ghost World. They like Naruto and they like Barefoot Gen. They might like Kirby but probably not, cuz they don’t like superheroes. They’ll look at the Ditko horror story in an old Charlton but they won’t buy the old comic. They will buy the horror reprint book with Ditko stories in it, tho’. There’s a disconnect – they didn’t grow up on comics – and they only want to buy “books.” And hey! That’s okay.

I guess I’m just trying to wrestle with my own feelings about the way things are changing within comics. The whole “embarrassment of riches” aspect of what’s available and of what’s being published these days is something that we all are contending with. It is hard to keep up with all the great books – new ones and reprints. Maybe the reprints are squeezing the new books out of the discussion sometimes. Who knows? Maybe the core fans of established creators like Burns and Clowes and Los Bros. don’t read or write blog comments much. Who knows?

The “embarrassment of riches” argument makes me think a little bit of indie film and the whole American jazz scene. Remember when there were a ton of indie movies in theaters and Hollywood was banking on the next Tarantino? Well, that’s over, right? Hollywood’s fractured and there are probably more filmmakers than ever crowding out each other for a screen in NYC or LA. That sort of feels a little like comics these days. Lots of new work and a limited direct connect to the fans. The old channels for distro are drying up and folks are scrambling trying to find online solutions. I have no idea what’s going on in indie film these days, do you? Is it me or was that just part of the “general consensus” attitude of the pre-internet ‘90s? I feel like I talked about Tarantino and Jarmusch and Wong Kar-wai with total strangers on the BART train all the time back then. Sort of like I talk comics with total strangers these days. It’s in the air. But for how long? Forgive me for being melodramatic. It’s just that I remember when the shit hit the fan during “comics golden ages” of the recent past—like in ’87, in ’96, and in ’08—and the whole industry went south. Fast. When I hear the “it’s a Golden Age” talk I start playing my Duck and Cover training video.

I’m saying we should be happy we argue and have a fractured, fucked up scene and try to foster it to stay fucked up. Jazz musicians and fans used to argue bitterly about how bebop was bullshit and that the New Orleans tradition was the best. Now most of those guys are dead and there’s no one who replaces them really. The musicians change styles, the fans change tastes, they get older and it all fades. I mean, think about it: jazz was the most popular art form in America sixty years ago and now it is just gone. Gone! There are financial foundations for the art form just to keep it alive. Finding a guy to argue jazz with these days is like looking for parts for a ’29 Ford Roadster. I don’t want comics to necessarily to be like it was in the old days but I do want that feeling of revering certain comics and certain creators in a way that this current ham-radio blogosphere doesn’t allow. Discussions in person or in letters columns were easier to navigate. You could say “Fuck You” to someone’s face in the comics shop and then the next minute be talking with them avidly about a Batman movie. Things don’t seem to play out that way on the interweb. I feel like sometimes I wanna crawl through fiber-optic cables and slash people’s throats and that’s no good. But I do think it’s good that we all have these different opinions and tastes. It’s fucked up but it means we’re still alive.

Okay, okay, lemme try and reel this back in a little bit. It was a bitter pill to swallow when I had to “sell” Love and Rockets to a new reader when I worked at a comics shop. It is hard to remember a time when I thought Los Bros.’ star would dim in the hearts of new fans. But I would just do just my best Bill Boichel impression and would explain that it was like The Beatles, insomuch as they changed everything. “Well, I never liked The Beatles,” said the twenty-year-old college sophomore. And as a retailer or a guy working for a retailer, what am I supposed to say to that? Basically, I have to say, well why don’t you check out this Akira or this All Star Superman. What do you think I say? I can only try and meet them halfway. Tastes change.

Confidential to Evan: I’m agreeing with you. Please don’t make fun of me too much in the comments section.

Amazing the things you can find at a comics show like SPX. I mean, I hadn’t expected Mark Millar’s comics magazine to be so well designed! Or distributed by Drawn and Quarterly! “I hope the little girl cuts someone,” I grinned to Tom Devlin, who looked slightly more than halfway toward the verge of tears, and maybe vomiting, which was understandable. I was pretty upset they’d moved the Miss Maryland Teen USA preliminaries to another weekend too, leaving the official SPX hotel neighbor slot to be filled by some sort of medical conference (which later became a wedding reception, perhaps spontaneously).

Much to my embarrassment, it was later explained to me that LINT is in fact the subtitle to ACME Novelty Library #20, while the Mark Millar comics magazine is titled CLiNT. This is so you might look at the title a certain way and mistakenly (hilariously) think the magazine is really titled CUNT. “But mom,” I said, “that’s an awful name for a magazine! And disrespectful to Rory Hayes! There really are no ideas left. Alan Moore was right.” I noticed then that she was softly weeping over the phone, as is her tendency. God, it’s not my fault the apple harvest festival isn’t until October!

Pertinently enough, ACME #20 continues the prior issue’s motif of apparent production errors taking on deliberate and meaningful narrative properties; while a seeming color flub in the outer space portion of issue #19 actually revealed the subjectivity of the story’s narration, #20 at times sprinkles its pages with tiny image dots — a ‘lint’ of production — as a means of evoking sensations beyond the reach of comprehension. Turn to the back cover of issue #20, and you’ll find a pair of incomprehensible tiny words in the center of the blue paper band, floating like loose date, but really they’re the echo of one Jordan Wellington Lint, one of the periphery teen bully characters in Chris Ware’s larger Rusty Brown narrative, whom this issue follows from cradle to grave as a sort of mid-story interlude.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that portions of the story also appeared as Ware’s contribution to Zadie Smith’s 2008 anthology The Book of Other People, and indeed this may be Ware’s most thematically ‘literary’ work ever, awash in gnawing male lust for sex and power and tragic guilt and sour, neurotic ambition and nagging, spoiled dreams and women thrown aside and religion and violence and Mother and a symbolic biting of the thumb representative of the thumb’s murderous power over the humble ant, the dotty lint of natural life, and a triple-shot of contemporary import in the form of corporate financial shenanigans, sexual intolerance and media-saturated detachment from ongoing foreign conflicts. If issue #18 was a blueprint of a life among architecture, and #19 studied the lingering concerns of the (frustrated) creative mind, this one demands no less than to address American life as witnessed by one F.C. Ware.

Appropriately, then, we have some wide vistas as seen in the above image. An interesting departure for the this issue is that Ware’s characteristic iconographic techniques seem more inclined than ever toward simulating experiential properties, rather than depicting interrelationships from an omniscient narrative view. So, early pages use simple labeled images to approximate a child’s sensations of the world — sometimes breaking off into a flurry of word-picture combination to illustrate a child’s thought processes — while, toward the end of the book, the panel-to-panel narration becomes befuddled in the manner of a failing mind. Common to the second quarter of the book are ‘wide’ establishing panels (again, as seen above) bordered by tight narrative panels down bottom. You know:

This is from Jim Steranko’s 1981 adaptation of the motion picture Outland, produced for Heavy Metal magazine and never collected in English, although it’s been posted online (presumably with permission) here. Having recently finished a long conversation with Matt Seneca on the topics of Outland and Jack Kirby’s 1976 comics version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was inevitable I’d make some mental connection between Steranko & Ware, two comics artists fascinated with building up pages from tightly coordinated word-picture interrelations. Nearly every ‘page’ (actually double-page spreads) in Outland consists of a huge ‘master’ image with bordering or inset sequential panels confining character relationships to reactions in little boxes. Prolific narrative text or long chains of word balloons otherwise cover the area, breaking the characters apart from the (extremely simple) story being told and confining them in the isolated mining outpost that serves as setting for the action. Paradoxically, such wide images afford the characters no escape – it’s a claustrophobic work, stiff and harsh, nearly unwavering. Airless, oppressive.

Ware isn’t opposed to a bit of narrative- appropriate oppression himself, although he is a far more varied and thoughtful architect than Steranko ever was. There are three (forgive me) ‘Outland-style’ pages in ACME #20 — which is a landscape-format book, so it’s really just one page each, not double-images — each of them adopting a different tone. The football game I’ve scanned here establishes the might and expense of wasted college life up top, then (sequentially, with the big image serving as panel #1) diving at Jordan “Jason” Wellington Lint’s isolated person, popping inside his mind to contrast his confined desires and personal obsessions with the spatial ‘weight’ of the outside. While we’re studying his thoughts, he’s already off to bed.

What I’ve described is the second of Ware’s Outland pages. The preceding first depicts a city tableaux with a smashed car at rest on snow streets, then dives into the tiny boxes below to depict activity inside the car both before and after the scene depicted in the wide panel; there, the massive top image is the enormity of time dwarfing even as big a personal event as a vehicular accident. The succeeding third such page is another snowy city, as glimpsed through a window, dominated by a man’s reflection (and, sure enough, reflections thereafter become another big, grown-up motif, as if picking up from a young man’s fancy for widescreen action); the small bottom panels there merely continue the action, with the top image representing the enormity of the character’s anxiety, symbolized by his face splashed across the landscape. As the last of the three Outland images, it makes the character’s confinement personal: he is dwarfed by (1) landscape (2) population and (3) his own futile ache for something better, maybe three great concerns for Chris Ware, he of mighty buildings and charted activities, and scorched depression.

There’s a lot more at work in ACME #20, like how mini-images insinuate themselves into panel borders as subconscious feelings, or how dots — those beloved primal elements of comic book coloring — take on a pliable representative/symbolic force as everything from tiny ants to the sensation of getting stoned or building toward orgasm, the commonality being accumulative force, perhaps in that dots must accumulate to provide comic book color; ants, smushed by Lint as a child, even though they are living things, are a crucial personal image, infesting his guilty mind. This is a map of the mind, this comic, except almost fully sequential: born on page three, each succeeding page brings J. Wellington Lint closer to death. So Ware endeavors to render his comics techniques experiential, as a most appropriate homage to a bit player in a bigger graphic novel.

But I’ll stop there; the book is not yet formally released. Here are a few that will be:

Prison Pit: Book Two: Continuing Johnny Ryan’s much-enjoyed fight comic, vol. 1 of which provided maybe the most unexpected bit of successful East-West comics fusion for 2009. Two huge battles dominate these 116 pages, one of them extensive enough to mutilate lead character CF into an entirely new character design, and the second foregrounding the motif of bodily (often sexual) function-as-transformation as a specific means of plot advancement. Parts of this one reminded me a bit of Josh Simmons’ House, which could be taken as a treat or a warning, depending on the reader’s disposition. Preview; $12.99.

Berserk Vol. 34: Oh, and here’s one of the prime influences on Ryan’s approach, Kentaro Miura’s sprawling fantasy combat opus, now in the dowsy space where Dark Horse’s English-language collections have caught up with the Japanese editions, with no means of serializing the (delay-prone) ongoing action as it happens. Note that vol. 35 is due in Japan at the end of the month. Preview; $14.99.

Detroit Metal City Vol. 6: And wrapping up our Johnny Ryan showcase for the week, here’s the sparkly-pop-singer-moonlighting-and-excelling-as-a-death-metal-hero comedy he and Anne Ishii were talking about the other week. This one’s up to vol. 10 in Japan, so Viz has some space to catch up; $12.99.

Too Soon? Famous/Infamous Faces 1995-2010: Being a new 204-page Fantagraphics hardcover collection of illustrations by Drew Friedman, who probably didn’t need a link to his website as a means of your realizing who he his, but still! Samples; $29.99.

Koko Be Good: Nice looking book of the week about which I know little save for its looking nice #1 – a new First Second release by illustrator Jen Wang, jumping off from an earlier webcomic with a 304-page watercolor story about a young woman trying to be a ‘good’ person, as prompted by a young man departing on a foreign humanitarian mission he doesn’t feel so convinced about. I predict struggles and antics. Preview; $18.99.

Lucky in Love Book One (of Two): A Poor Man’s History: And #2 – a new hardcover account of a short man’s romantic longings in and out of the WWII era, plotted and drawn by comics and animation veteran Stephen DeStefano, with a script by one George Chieffet. Preview; $19.99.

The Harvey Comics Treasury Vol. 1: Casper the Friendly Ghost & Friends!: This appears to be a relaunch of Dark Horse’s efforts at releasing vintage Harvey material, following five softcover volumes of b&w and color character-focused stuff. This new series is a bit smaller (6″ x 9″) and a lot thinner (200 pages each vs. 400+) but entirely in color, and apparently primed to mix a bunch of different characters in around a ‘focus’ character, Casper in this case. A bit less expensive too. Preview; $14.99.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface: This is the new Kodansha edition of what is now rather obviously the final longform comics work by Masamune Shirow, a deeply odd, initially marginal manga figure whose detailed-in-every-way sci-fi approach found much purchase among American readers, where expectations were different. Shirow eventually spent more time working in illustration and gaming/animation concepts, spending much of the 1990s serializing this series, which he then massively reconfigured for a 2000 box set edition to replace much of his detailed pen work with shiny, defiantly garish digital color textures and environments (and explicit sex scenes), only to adjust it again (sans most of the sex) for a 2001 mass market edition.

The final result (and note that the extracted pen ‘n ink bits were collected by Dark Horse as Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor) is a barely-coherent morass of technical jargon, opaque corporate-political intrigue and seething sexual desire, with seemingly every female character thrusting her genitals at the reader at every conceivable opportunity while shouting dialogue three steps removed from machine code at any graphical elements in the vicinity. Of course, this makes it all worth flipping through; it’s almost as if every predilection that ever appeared in a Masamune Shirow comic has been deliberately cranked to the maximum, just to blow out the speakers on the old car’s last drive; $26.99.

Peepo Choo Vol. 2 (of 3): This Vertical-published Felipe Smith production, following various over-the-top culture-shopping parties on a collision course of US-Japan misunderstanding, would have to be this year’s SPX grand champion in the ‘people bringing the series up to me without any prompting whatsoever’ division. Everyone thought it was really funny, and I basically agree. Here’s more. Review of vol. 1 here; $12.95.

The Bulletproof Coffin #4 (of 6): And here’s more of David Hine & Shaky Kane. I don’t mention a lot of continuing series in this column, unless it’s been a while since an issue came out or there some topic that’s worth mentioning, but I ought to say I particularly liked how reality started to break apart and merge again in issue #3. Preview; $3.99.

Joe the Barbarian #7 (of 8): Meanwhile, the penultimate issue of this Grant Morrison/Sean Murphy series arrives from Vertigo. Owing to apparent scripting delays — not an unknown phenomena when long or long-ish Morrison series approach their conclusion, as readers of Seven Soldiers will recall — the final issue probably won’t appear until November; $2.99.

Daniel Clowes: Conversations: And topping it off with your book-about-comics for the week – a new 240-page University Press of Mississippi collection of discussions with the title artist, spanning 1988 to 2009, edited by Ken Parille & Isaac Cates; $22.00.

Hello!

Commercial interruption! We are doing a soft launch of the new PictureBox site… now! Over there you will find a whole mess of new stuff. Original artwork from Real Deal and Tales from Greenfuzz, drawings and paintings by Mat Brinkman and Milton Glaser. The new Jimbo comic by Gary Panter, a brand new Yokoyama book. The famed Garo catalog by Ryan Holmberg, a Japanese Jimmy Corrigan poster by Chris Ware, tons of vintage comics and more. The site is not perfect yet, but we’re working on it.

Besides all the “new shit” there’s a whole mess of new content, with much more on the way, to be announced shortly. For now I just wanted to do a quiet test with you, the CC faithful. Ease into it and enjoy.

Essays on Chris Ware.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an piece in a new collection of critical essays devoted to Chris Ware (The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, edited by David Ball and Martha Kuhlman). Now, thanks to the wonders of Google Books, parts of that collection are now online, including the whole of my essay. You can look at the book here. The entire book is very much worth reading with many fine critical essays. You can buy a copy here.

My essay begins like this:

In 1990,Chris Ware, then a twenty-two-year-old student at the very beginning of his career, made a pilgrimage to Monument Valley, Arizona in order to investigate the life of George Herriman. Author of the classic comic strip Krazy Kat, which ran in variety of newspapers from 1913 until the cartoonist’s death in 1944, Herriman used  the other worldly desert landscape of the region as the ever-shifting backdrop to his comics. Along with the adjacent area of Coconino County, Monument Valley inspired the dream-like lunar landscape that made Krazy Kat a rare example of cartoon modernism. Eager to learn more about the sources of Herriman’s artistry, Ware felt he had to see landscape of jutting buttes and flat-topped mesas that the earlier cartoonist had so creatively incorporated into his work. This hajj to the Southwest was an early manifestation of Ware’s interest in the history of cartooning, a persistent fascination that has been much more than an antiquarian passion and has had a profound influence on Ware’s body of work.

Foxhole #1 (1954) by Jack Kirby.

More gleanings from my notebook:

Herriman’s Missing Signature. Michael Tisserand has a question: “Does anyone know (or have any ideas why) George Herriman generally no longer signed neither his daily nor his Sunday comics in their final years? How uncommon is this? Are there any reasons having to do with comics production, or is this a purely personal decision? I also noticed that there were periods of time in Herriman’s early stint at the Los Angeles Examiner where he didn’t sign his comics. These are the only comics in those issues that are unsigned.” Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Jack Kirby Was the 20th Century. Jack Kirby was the immigrant crowded into the tenements of New York (“Street Code”). He was the tough ghetto kid whose street-fighting days prepared him to be a warrior (the Boy Commandos). He was the patriotic fervour that won the war against Nazism (Captain America). He was the returning veteran who sought peace in the comforts of domestic life (Young Romance). He was the more than slightly demented panic about internal communist subversion (Fighting American). He was the Space Race and the promise of science (Sky Masters, Reed Richards). He was the smart housewife trapped in the feminine mystique, forced to take a subservient gender role (the Invisible Girl). He was the fear of radiation and fallout (the Incredible Hulk). He was the civil rights movement and the liberation of the Third World (the Black Panther). He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey). He was the old soldier grown weary from a lifetime of struggle (Captain Victory). There was hardly any significant development in American 20th century history that didn’t somehow get refracted through Kirby’s whacko sensibility. Jack Kirby was the 20th century.

Those Sexy Canucks. Canadian film directors (Atom Egoygen, David Cronenberg, Dennys Arcand) are notably obsessed with outré sexuality. What can we say about Canadian cartoonists? Chester Brown’s next book will be about his relationship with prostitutes. Julie Doucet has depicted a menstrual period that overflows to drown out a city, and a woman who performs fellatio on a beer bottle. Joe Matt, honorary Canadian, has spent much of his life editing porn movies. Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, is about a teenager who falls in love with her teacher. Unease at gender ambiguity is a potent theme in Dave Cooper’s work. Dave Sim … well … we all know about Dave Sim.

Why Notebooks? If you don’t write down your thoughts, they flit away from you. More to the point, it’s hard to know what you think until you’ve made the effort to put it into words. Unarticulated ideas have a ghostly half-life, like a still-born child, half-way between a promise and a prescence. Keeping notebooks can therefore be forms of thinking; not that notebooks always or very often live up to that ideal. Guy Davenport – the great essayist, short story writer, and occasional cartoonist – recommended the notebook method to the publisher James Laughlin. Some of Davenport’s (typically brilliant) notebooks have been published in his collection The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art, as well as a very obscure literary magazine called Vort. My own notebooks are a pale and shallow homage to Davenport’s masterful efforts in the genre. Of course, Davenport never would have posted his notebooks on blogs.

The Origins of the Death Ray. “A lot of people I went to high school with that were really nasty, evil little brats and when I see them now they’re all running recycling centers and things like that, but I can still see it in them. They still have that nastiness, but they just sort of learned to bury it somewhere. But it’s still there. And I don’t think people change very much. I think that the whole notion of a character arc is sort of false,” Dan Clowes in interview with Matt Silvie, The Comics Journal #233 (May 2001), pp. 58-59. “To make a long story short, I ran into Stoob at the dump. First time I’d seen him in twenty years. Turns out he runs a recycling center on the west side and does something else with solar energy or something … a real solid citizen. I wondered if he knew how lucky he was. Guys like him turn up on their feet. He even asked about Louie, if you can believe it. Mister Nice-Guy. He couldn’t fool me, underneath it all he was still the same guy. Nobody every changes,” Andy in “The Death Ray,” Eightball #23 (2004), p. 40.

Books Have Family. From my essay in the upcoming Chris Ware essay collection: “the design elements of the Walt and Skeezix books deserve attention. First of all, these books have a similar look and feel to the Jimmy Corrigan hardcover. Placed next to each other on a book shelf, the design of these volumes bears a striking resemblance to the Jimmy Corrigan cover: all of these books are oblong, with dust-jackets in muted colors (highlighting pink and yellow); in each book, the space on dust-jacket is thoroughly exploited, displaying art on both the inside and outside.” Evan Dorkin in a comment to an earlier post: “But for a further, and I think very real, example, if you hold up the George Sprott book along with the Doug Wright book, it’s kind of hard to tell which book is about a fictional person and which one is about an actual cartoonist, as they both seem to be about Seth’s design.” Side by side, Jimmy Corrigan looks like the son of Walt and Skeezix, the Collected Doug Wright looks like the brother of George Sprott. Books are like people, they have family too.

Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking

I’m in the book so I won’t say too much about it except that the editors are very intelligent and the table of contents (pasted below) looks promising. The book will also have a lovely frontispiece by Ivan Brunetti.

As it turns out, my contribution to the book is relevant to the discussions we’ve been having here at Comics Comics about book design and reprints of old comics. My essay is about Ware’s work on the Walt and Skeezix series and the Krazy and Ignatz series, which I try to place in the larger context of the history of comic strip reprint projects and also tie to Ware’s thematic concerns in his own comics with family history, the legacy of the past, and the pathology of the collector mentality.

Here are a few relevant passages from my essay:

My contention is that in restoring artists like King and Herriman to the public spotlight, Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor-creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work. In other words, Ware’s book designs are a form of canon formation, a way of filling in the gap of missing archival and historical material, and creating for comics a sense of a continuous tradition and lineage….

Innovative artists often invent their own ancestors as a way of giving a pedigree to their work. There is a sense in which Franz Kafka invented Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot invented John Donne. Prior to Kafka, Dickens was read as a popular entertainer who specialized in heart-warming picturesque tales. Kafka’s fictions and comments on Dickens recast the Victorian novelist as the dark writer of claustrophobic allegories such as Bleak House. Similarly, Eliot remade John Donne, largely relegated to the status of a literary curiosity, into a major precursor to modernism. In the field of comics, Ware has engaged in a comparable rewriting of the history by offering a new reading of past masters. Challenging the standard view of comics history, which has highlighted the work of realist illustrators such as Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Jack Kirby, Ware offers an alternative canon that prizes cartoonists who practice either formal experimentation or focus on everyday life, such as Rodolphe Töpffer, George Herriman, Frank King and Gluyas Williams…

In searching for ancestors in earlier comics and trying to recast the history of comics to highlight work that is similar to his own, Ware is part of a larger effort by like-minded cartoonists of generation. Art Spiegelman, a mentor who offered Ware an early national venue in RAW, has often written on comics from the past and sought to resurrect selected masters, notably Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Cole. The Canadian cartoonist Seth has staked out a claim to the tradition of New Yorker cartooning, Canadian comics, and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (in the last case, designing a multivolume series that parallels what Ware has done with King and Herriman). Chester Brown, another Canadian cartoonist, has creatively appropriated the style of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. In effect, Ware belongs to a cohort of contemporary cartoonists who are both doing innovative work in the present and in the process re-writing and re-mapping the history of comics….

All of this goes towards explaining why I don’t share – in fact, I can’t even fathom – the objections to Chris Ware’s design on several reprint projects; or Seth’s design on the Peanuts series, the Doug Wright book, and the John Stanley library; or Adrian Tomine’s work on the Tatsumi series; or Chip Kidd’s various reprint books. In each and every case, we have a talented contemporary artist who is creating a connection between their aesthetic concerns and older classic works.

That’s how art history and literary history gets made: by living artists connecting with the past. Art history is not just a museum full of old paintings of Jesus and the Madonna, it’s the connection between old art and modern visual concerns. Literary history is not just a dusty shelf croaking under the weight of old books, it is the connection between the living literature of the present and old books. By writing Ulysses, James Joyce gave us a new way of reading Homer and Shakespeare (Hamlet is everywhere in Joyce’s great novel). John Updike did a series of books inspired by The Scarlet Letter (A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, S); these novels made Hawthorne’s venerable text newly urgent.

In the case of comics, we’re lucky that artists are not just connecting with older works and thereby creating a living tradition, these contemporary cartoonists are designing books that make this connection a felt reality, something we can see and touch and hold in our hands. That’s why the books designed by Ware, Seth, Tomine and Kidd are so great: they make visible and plain how the best work of the past informs the best work of the present.

But enough of my ravings. Here is the table of contents for The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball, “Chris Ware and the ‘Cult of

Difficulty’”

Contexts and Canons

1. Jeet Heer, “Inventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon”

2. Jacob Brogan, “Masked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy”

3. Marc Singer, “The Limits of Realism: Alternative Comics and Middlebrow Aesthetics in the Anthologies of Chris Ware”

4. David M. Ball, “Chris Ware’s Failures”

Artistic Intersections

5. Katherine Roeder, “Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History”

6. Martha B. Kuhlman, “In the Comics Workshop: Chris Ware and the Oubapo”

7. Isaac Cates, “Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams”

The Urban Landscape

8. Daniel Worden, “On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of ‘Building Stories’ and Lost Buildings”

9. Matt Godbey, “Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories,’ Gentrification, and the Lives of/in Houses”

Reading History

10. Joanna Davis-McElligatt, “Confronting the Intersections of Race, Immigration, and Representation in Chris Ware’s Comics”

11. Shawn Gilmore, “Public and Private Histories in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan”

12. Benjamin Widiss, “Autobiography with Two Heads: Quimby the Mouse”

Everyday Temporalities

13. Georgiana Banita, “Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness”

14. Margaret Fink Berman, “Imagining an Idiosyncratic Belonging: Representing Disability in Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories’”

15. Peter R. Sattler, “Past Imperfect: ‘Building Stories’ and the Art of Memory”

Contributor Biographies

Chris Ware’s Primary Works: A Guide

WORKS CITED

I was at Angoulême last year, but this was my first trip to the comics museum there. It had an exhibition of older comic originals with newer cartoonists covering the older page, plus the permanent exhibit: a timeline with a bunch of originals and books in glass cases and occasional videos. The original for this page of Johnny Craig’s “Split Personality” was especially moving. That second panel! Wobbly inky lips and cross-hatching! It’s like a pulpy Persona still.

Of course I loved seeing the Ware originals. They had a red pencil Quimby the Mouse page in the permanent collection. Ware’s exhibit at the Whitney Biennial was a life-changing experience for me. The under drawing, measuring… It’s shocking how raw the drawing is. His drawings look so clean when they’re shrunk and colored in print. In the originals they look so labored over, sometimes even crude. You can see the struggle, his thinking on the page. The Quimby original at Angoulême was such an object; the cut zipatone, the scale, the juxtaposition between the interior panels and the more illustrative background landscape. It was engaging by itself, beyond just being preparatory work for a print book.

The Cornelius Red Colored Elegy book is gorgeous. It has red spot color. All of the Cornelius books are unified—they’re clearly a line with a consistent sensibility across books—but you get the personality of the individual artist on the covers. It’s artist first, publisher second. Hayashi told me that they’ve recently released his short animations on DVD in Japan. You’d have to order them from amazon.co.jp and have a region-free dvd player to play them. He was sweet and humored my dumb questions. At festivals like this you find yourself jet-lagged in a taxi with Jose Munoz and you’re thinking, “Holy shit, what do I ask Jose Munoz? What do I ask Jose Munoz?!” and you end up just bugging him about random things. Try to milk those ten minutes for as much as you can.

The Manga Building had a One Piece exhibit, complete with cosplayers and prop sand dunes and palm trees. It was shoulder-to-shoulder packed. The whole thing had a fun energy. One Piece originals look exactly like what you’d think they would look like.

As you’ve probably heard, “dedications” (signings) are important in France, but Ruppert and Mulot have raised the bar. Ruppert did a drawing of me on the first page of the book, then turned to the last page and pulled out a pre-made stencil that marked different points. After placing dots on the last page using the stencil, he used a stamp to make a small frame at the center square dots. Then he pulled out an X-Acto knife and cut out the center of the frame and the outside areas. He glued the center of the frame to the inside back cover and then cut out the original drawing on the first page. He placed the first page portrait inside what he cut out, flipped it around and put the cut-out together, to hand me a small portrait in a paper standing frame as his “dedication.” Damn. In the States you get a drawing of the main character’s head with a word balloon saying, “Hi (your name here.)”

While I’ve acquired a lot of pulpy 60s and 70s Franco-Belgian comics, I know very little about them. 90% have cool covers and then you open it to see Caniff hackwork. But there’s some gold in that other 10%. I got some good Luc Orients last year, but the best thing I found at this Angoulême was this Michel Vaillant BD and some kind of Little Nemo homage book.

I wanted to get this Lucie Durbriano book last year and I didn’t. It annoyed me for a whole year until I went back and got it.

This woman in Germany, Ulli Lust, did a really dense, long comic about two girls on a road trip, drawn in pencil with a green spot color. It came out in German recently. Wish I could read it.

10 Euros for the complete Airtight Garage! I nabbed it before Frank!