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Hey True Believers, Frankie the Wop here with an installment of “Esoteric Comics History.” Today, we’re looking at Glenn Danzig‘s swipe file. This file is labeled “Michael Golden.” My friend and blood brother, Spahr Schmitt, has been telling his tale of encountering the Dark Son of rock ‘n roll for years. They talked comics, and about, uh, the anxiety of influence. Many of you may know about Danzig’s famous swipe, but I am surprised by how many folks do not. I love telling this story. I remember once telling this story in front of my publisher, Mr. Dan Nadel, and an assortment of comics folks. When I said “Crystar #8,” Dan shook his head and said, “I can’t believe I publish you. You have the most retarded stories, haha.” So this one is an old favorite. Try to imagine Danzig’s Elvis-like speaking voice when reading the tale below. Spahr would usually “do” Danzig’s voice, which always cracked me up.

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CC reader and my new pal Michel Fiffe (who has a great blog) sent me an email about a comic near and dear to my heart. Outsiders Annual #1 is a great color comic that I’ve written about and pushed on True Believers for years.

The artist behind the book, Kevin Nowlan, has posted some versions of page one of the comic. It’s interesting to see how he composes the pages for the balloons and text. There’s so much text! American comics are so…dense.

So click away and check it out. Thanks, Michel.

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MoCCA 2010. Not a bad time.

A low key festival. Good times, good times. No, seriously. It was a good show. Hat’s off to MoCCA for smoothing out the wrinkles from last year.

I had a full table of, ahem, curated comic book back issues for sale. Part of my ongoing “education project” in the comics community. Trying to steer the youth in the right direction. I just can’t stand idly by and not extol the virtues of a Frank Thorne comic or a Pat Boyette comic when a youngster peruses the Master’s Box that I lovingly assembled. I go into my glib salesman routine and “sell” them on the idea of looking at comics in a different way. MoCCA, the festival, may be about small press comics but my whole shtick is about history. And tradition. And selling comics, and making money, sure, but also about small press roots in newsstand and direct market comics, in fandom. So I assemble a ton of comics that are sorted through and re-presented as mini artist monographs. My own Art Out of Time.
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Hey everyone. By the time I get around to scanning all the great minis, zines and comics I got at this year’s MoCCA, it’ll be next week. So I thought I’d just write something super fast to check in.

All in all it was a quiet show. Not a bad turnout but pretty uneven. I had one of the most crowded tables at the thing, so who’s complaining, right? I just mean it looked like there weren’t a ton of people there. But then again the venue is gee-fucking-normous.

PictureBox had a good show, though, I think. And my table of comic book back issues was picked clean. We were always pretty busy and the vibe was mellow. I liked that it wasn’t 100 degrees inside or outside, but it just didn’t feel like MoCCA, which I always associate with summer. Still, who’s complaining? There were more cute girls wearing summery dresses there than ever.

The highlight of the show for me was catching a glimpse of Jaime Hernandez drawing a sketch for someone late on Sunday. Is it legal for someone to be as good as Jaime is and to be such a nice, cool guy? Sometimes you gotta pinch yourself and wake up from dreaming. Standing transfixed before the master while he conjured faces of his characters out of thin air was something I won’t soon forget.

Stay tuned for full report. Plus we’ll take a look at how Peggy Burns gets what she wants whenever she wants it.

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We don’t do much “Comics Business” news here at Comics Comics, but I thought it was interesting to see this article run in BusinessWeek today. It’s about apps for the iPad that Marvel/Disney and other companies are offering for digital downloads of comics. I know the end of standard “floppy” comics is still a ways off, but when I read articles like this in the mainstream press I get antsy. If new comics day and comics shops start to go away because of downloads (recall how many record stores closed within a couple years of the iPod being released) we will all be affected somehow. Just sayin’. Not trying to sound alarmist or start some crazy comment thread section. My dad emailed me the BusinessWeek article and it made me think that if my dad is reading about it then something is really shifting.

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Hey everyone. I just remembered that today, Friday April 2nd, there is going to be a Steve Oliff moderated panel at WonderCon in San Francisco.  Full details here.

The panel is about how computers took over coloring in comics. A subject close to my heart. And it reminded me that maybe some of our newer readers may have not read the interview I did with Mr. Oliff awhile back. He’s a really interesting figure in comics because he spans such a rich history. From four color to full color to computer color, Steve has done it all. Read what he has to say if you haven’t already. And go see that panel! Today!

Steve Oliff interview

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This appraisal of Garage Band by Italian cartoonist Gipi, first appeared in Windy Corner Magazine.  Thanks to Austin for letting me run it here on CC.

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Garage Band  by the Italian cartoonist Gipi is a remarkably deceptive comic. Originally titled Five Songs when it was released in Italy a few years back (2005), it’s a breezy read, quite enjoyable – arguably the most beautiful of his available works in English. Soft watercolor tones and thin contour lines that unite with marvelous energy and skill. Gipi has an amazing ability to capture the essence of each scene, to articulate all the important details without overwhelming the reader with such details. Yet, it’s a relatively “empty” read if one is looking for a solid story in the traditional sense.  And this is what I mean by it being a deceptive comic.  It’s 114 pages of strung together notes, poetic silent passages and bursts of energy. In that sense, it’s sort of like watching a great band practicing their songs. We see the stops and starts, the rehearsal of new material and the easy way in which some old songs are played effortlessly.  It’s all there, but somehow, I’m left wondering if the real show in front of an audience will be better and I’ll get to see, hear these songs played to perfection. And then I wonder if that really matters, and that maybe, seeing the band practice, hearing the demo tape is closer to some sense of perfection.

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Since it’s saturday and nothing is going on across the internets, I thought I’d link to this:

Jaime Hernandez’s favorite Criterion Collection films.  

Maybe this is old news, but it’s new to me.  Love his one line descriptions for each film on the list.

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Hey everybody. I thought I’d copy Jeet and post some of the things in my notebook that I’ve been carrying around for the last few weeks. Nothing super substantial but hopefully enough to get some discussion going in the comments.  I just got back to Pittsburgh after a week in NYC working with Dash on his animation project. He and I talked a lot while I was up there and I gotta get this stuff outta my head. Please forgive the randomness of these notes. Maybe someday I’ll turn some of these riffs into more well-rounded posts but until then this is it. 

Why don’t the old guard guys make graphic novels? As someone who loves tracking down old comics by Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Barry Windsor-Smith, Michael Kaluta, and other guys who made “art” comics back in the day, I often wonder why these guys don’t make long form works. Chaykin just did a new Dominic Fortune story but released it as a serialized comic book. His pair of Time2 graphic novels from the late ’80s were amazing and it makes me wonder why he doesn’t “do a Mazzucchelli” and really show us something. Is it the money? I figure he probably knows he can do it as a serialized comic and get paid. I’m guessing that not many publishers can offer guys like him a hefty advance so he can take time off from the pulps and focus on a long form book. But it’s kind of weird, isn’t it?  When I dig through my collection I come across comic after comic from the ’70s and ’80s by guys like Chaykin, Windsor-Smith, Corben, and many others that all held the promise of some future where they could make long form “adult” comics that would appeal to a wide audience. Well, the time is now and it’s strange to me to see them still doing serialized comics. Only Mazzuchelli made the jump. Will others follow his lead and do long form works that aren’t serialized? Does it matter? No, but it is weird, I think.
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What if Disney does away with the culture of freelance lifers at Marvel Comics and replaces pencillers and inkers with animators and storyboard artists?

WHAT IF? What if Disney takes control of the characters from the Marvel brass and assigns their own artists/animators to work on some properties like Iron Man or Spider-Man? Like what if they start developing a whole strategy around releasing a comic series that is intended be an animated series and also a live action movie? (And an iphone comic, etc, etc.) I just think that the parent company will eventually start orchestrating whole events around the launch of high profile projects and sort of blur the lines a little between what is a comic and what is an animated movie and who works on them. As it is now, it’s still the old system: there is a comic that fans love and then there is a movie version that many of the original fans despise because it is not true to the comic, the original text. I can imagine a comic that is developed at the same time as an animation or as a live action movie – which as Avatar has shown can be the same thing: animation and live action.
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