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Hey everyone, Frank Santoro here. I was asked by Ng Suat Tong to participate in a survey of comics criticism from the 2009 calendar year. I agreed as long as I didn’t have to nominate any of the pieces to be voted on. I just wanted to vote on the list that Suat provided me. Check this out for details.

So here’s the outcome. And below that are the pieces I voted for. This was fun. Thanks. I’m gonna refrain from writing about any of the pieces here. I think they are all pretty awesome. Comics criticism is a buffet these days. There is something for everyone.

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THE OUTCOME:
Top three, all with four votes each:

Robert Alter: “Scripture Picture” (The New Republic)

Joe McCulloch, “A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing
Mostly on the Art

Tom Spurgeon on Rereading

Remaining four, all with three votes each:

Eddie Campbell on Will Eisner and PS Magazine (30th August 2009)

Tom Crippen “Age of Geeks” TCJ 300

Dirk Deppey, “The Man Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight”

Andrew Rilestone on Watchmen

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WHAT I VOTED FOR:

Seth, “The Quiet Art of Cartooning” (Walrus Magazine)

Joe McCulloch, “A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing Mostly on the Art

Tom Spurgeon on Rereading

Derik Badman: Rubber Blanket

Ken Parille on Tim Hensley and Gropius

Douglas Wolk “Shades of Meaning” (New York Times)

Eddie Campbell on Will Eisner and PS Magazine (30th August 2009)

Dan Nadel on Hal Foster

Nina Stone: “The Virgin Read: You Need More Janet Jackson In Your Life, Power Girl”

Bill Randall: “Lost in Translation” TCJ 300

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BONUS: FRANK’s 2009 RAP-UP

Steelers win Super Bowl…Gary Panter paints a mural in a fancy museum…Watchmen is fine by me—just think if they would have made it in 1992…Fumetto Festival in Switzerland rules…TCAF is awesome even in new location…Canadians have their shit together…Kids still don’t know their comics history…Diamond raises minimums—and all but last indy pamphlets that haven’t already jumped ship finally do…

But indy folks still keep releasing pamphlets anyways. Why? I like to think it’s cuz they are easier to store than mini-comics. I have boxes of mini-comics that I can never look through like I look through my LP records or graphic novels that sit on a shelf. I used to love this about mini-comics, now it drives me crazy. My Cometbuses, King Cats and Battlestack Galacticraps all fit together. And my Low Tides and my Slime Freaks fit together. But then are way too many zines tied with string and dumb bindings that just make them impossible to store. I’ve been throwing those ones out. They’re usually pretty bad anyways. Except the new Coppertone zine…

Mazzucchelli show at MoCCA is awesome. And so is new book…MoCCA the con is an oven. Good crowd tho…Multiforce published…Nexus tanks. The Dude quits comics…Comic Con no longer viable for Indy creators, still viable for some Indy publishers. Con promoters duke it out over who gets to host Daisy Dukes when and where…Disney buys Marvel. DC stumbles. War declared. Goofy/Wolverine crossover jokes begin…

Penguins win Stanley Cup…

SPX was fun as usual. The rise of Ben Marra continues. Critics crowd roundtable and argue among selves…Kramers klan kills it with Simpsons comic…Prison Pit mania begins…

APE was weird, as always. The kids in the Bay Area don’t buy anything. Except Bone … The kids love to fight about C.F. … Kick Ass movie trailer looks cool … Crumb’s Genesis published … Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival was a hit.

New Comics Journal site launches, sputters, re-launches.
Final Crisis on Infinite Blogs Crossover begins, etc. (stay tuned).

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I like to think that former President Bush’s speech writers read old issues of Fantastic Four. Maybe one of them read #57 during the ramp up to the invasion of Iraq. I mean, doesn’t Dr. Doom’s dialogue in the first panel read like classic Dubya speak?

“I have been waging a ceaseless battle for PEACE — and for JUSTICE! But, in the course of that battle, I need WEAPONS — weapons with which to defend myself from the dastardly enemies of FREEDOM!”

“THERE, for example, is my mobile, all-powerful PACIFIER! It’s purpose is to come to the aid of those who are threatened by TYRANNY — or by INJUSTICE!”

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From BEM #36, a British comics fanzine published in 1980:

Boyette on attitudes:

“Most comic people from the East take themselves, and comics, so damned seriously. I read THE COMICS JOURNAL, and I can’t believe that those guys are talking about… and having emotional apoplexy over… comics! My attitude towards comics has never been that.

“I see everything in comics today but FUN. Where the hell is this enjoyment I knew in comics as a kid? The excitement of drawing and reading the comics?”

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Found this Ogden Whitney story that I’ve never seen before. From Where Monsters Dwell #33. You can find these pretty cheap. Lots of great reprints from the Marvel vaults. This particular Whitney story is a reprint from the early ’60s. Go hunt it down if you can. Over and out.

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I’m trying to pull together a nice, well rounded article on Mr. Janson. But it’s just lots of notes at this point. So until I get it together, here are some fragments:

St. George by Klaus Janson. I’m just gonna write about the art. The story is unreadable. Awful. But the art is really interesting to me. This was after Janson’s Punisher run in the late ’80s. And long after his fabled run with Frank Miller on Daredevil and also on Dark Knight.

He was doing art and colors at this stage in his career. Pencils, inks, and colors. Well, color guides; he wasn’t making screens or cutting film. What’s interesting to me is the way Janson used the available palette at the time to get such rich “dark” colors. In St. George I like how he mixes and matches bright “block out” colors next to layered browns and greens. Plus there is something about the black panel gutters and margins that really adds to the mood.

                                                                  St. George 

Check out how different the mood is in an issue of Daredevil from years before. Black pages were uncommon then because most comics didn’t have the option of full bleed printing processes. The tone of the newsprint lightens the colors and makes the whole composition read differently than the examples above.

                                                                  Daredevil

Janson was one of the few artists at Marvel who did his own colors. There is a real synthesis of his linework and the colors themselves. It’s a very sophisticated system for such a limited color process. In St. George, I can tell that he’s drawing for color. There are “open” containment lines and lots of elements in the backgrounds that are not delineated, I think, because Janson knows that he will color those elements accordingly. That is a very different thought process than most cartoonists who are strictly thinking in black and white.

Anyways, Janson’s comics stick out. I come across his St. George and Punisher comics a lot in bargain bins, and they’re always good. Solid drawing, solid color. Too bad the stories are inane garbage. Still, they’re worth a look. Janson seemed to understand what was possible in color comics. And he did this at a time when the processes were really changing. Pretty cool.

More soon.

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Hey everybody. Frank Santoro here. I’m still in “pitch mode'”after last week’s awesome convention. So, my post this week is another episode in my obsessive quest to understand mid ’80s independent comics. As usual, I ain’t got nothin’ much to say. Just riffing. Check this comic out if you see it around.

cover

Upshot Graphics, 1986. “A division of Fantagraphics,” it reads on the indicia.(Anyone remember the story with Upshot? Cuz I forget.) It’s called Flesh and Bones. Basically another Dalgoda vehicle. Jan Strnad. Good writer. Did some work with Kevin Nowlan that I like. Dennis Fujitake’s art on the lead story, Dalgoda, is solid, if a little stilted. A little too Moebius for me. But with none of the real drawing chops of Moebius. Anyways. Flesh and Bones was a book that re-presented Dalgoda and also had back up stories. Very good back-up stories.

Dalgoda art

I’ve seen this book in the bins for years but I spaced on who actually did the back up story. Well, it was Alan Moore. A reprint from a black and white magazine called Warrior from 1983. The story is called the BoJeffries Saga. For this version, it’s been shrunk and colored. A little hard to read at first. But once I got settled it played out like a pleasant little British comedy. You know. That wacky British humor that is sort of really subtle and eccentric at the same time? Yah. Great story. The art is like a leftover ’70s hodgepodge. Not bad. Steven Parkhouse. Cool image on the back cover. Should have been the front cover. I guess Dalgoda had to get top billing.

Moore’s story is about a rent collector. I could sort of read into this story from ’83 and imagine what Moore would go on to do. Basically, I would read into the rent collector character and imagine him to be Rorschach. What if Rorschach was sent around to collect the rent? Hurm.

back cover

   BoJeffries Saga 

BoJeffries Saga

This is that funny moment in 1986 when there was a sort of “Comics Renaissance” gaining critical mass. Alan Moore was part of that. So was Fantagraphics. And so was Heidi MacDonald.

Look at the article Heidi wrote back when there was no internet. It was a two-page article in this issue of Flesh and Bones. She’s asserting that Kirby, Tezuka, and Hergé are the “Gods of Comics.” Has her Pantheon of Comics Gods changed? I wonder…

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Just a quick post about the new issue of Cometbus. The awesome cover by Nate Powell alone is worth the price of admission. But there’s other “comics gold” in this issue too. It’s the story of how Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman came to teach at SVA.

Everyone knows about Punk magazine, right? No? Well, check this out and click around and then come back. Basically, this magazine recorded the early days of punk at CBGB’s. One of the magazine’s founders, John Holmstrom, went to the School of Visual Arts in 1972 before he helped start Punk magazine.

In the new Cometbus, there’s an interview with Holmstrom. And he tells the most fascinating story which I had never heard before. Apparently, Holmstrom wanted to take a cartooning class but SVA didn’t offer any. So he and some other angry students went to the president of the school and complained. The president told them to put a list together of the cartoonists they’d want to teach at SVA. So they put together a dream list which had Eisner and Kurtzman at the top. And the administration hired them!

Think about that. It’s like the secret history of punk rock (and of SVA itself). Holmstrom then wound up working for Kurtzman as his assistant. This relationship honed Holmstrom’s skills and determination to make a magazine that reflected his world. And that world just happened to be one of the most fertile and influential music scenes ever. Talk about passing the baton to the younger generation. Sheesh.

There’s more to the story, but the editor of Cometbus will kill me for spoiling it. So, just go pick the issue up and read it for yourself. Over and out.

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Just to continue this flurry of posts on Canadians, I thought I’d put up this quote from the cartoonist Seth that I found interesting. He’s responding to Dave Sim’s question about critiquing other people’s work. It made me think of a couple of previous posts about editors we did a while back.

The quote is from Following Cerebus #5.

Seth: […] I prefer the idea of an artist struggling to learn on his own and figure it out on his own, rather than, you know, being part of a gang that’s supplementing each other’s work with critique. I guess that’s just because my inclination is, I’m attracted to the image of the artist working alone and producing this complete work. For example, I don’t know how anyone can stand to work with an editor. I don’t really know how fiction writers have become used to that idea. I can understand working with a proofreader: that makes sense to me. But even working as a prose writer, if there was someone changing around all the sentences in an article I had written and as a result of that it turned out to be a better-written article, I’d have to conclude at the end that I wasn’t much of a writer.

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I read Jeet’s post about Jack Kirby and Dave Sim and thought about Kirby in the early ’70s. Specifically, his transition to DC from Marvel. So, I went down into my basement and dug out a DC comic from 1971. It’s a “Super DC Giant” reprint of all the Kirby Challengers of the Unknown material inked by Wally Wood. When were they first published, the late ’50s? And then I tried to imagine Wood being part of the Fourth World material, just inking one of the books like Vince Colletta did for Forever People. And then I smoked a cigarette. Man, that would have been amazing. For me, anyhow. They could have really turned up the romance angle. Look at those girls. Hubba Hubba.

Can you imagine Big Barda inked by Wood? Oof.

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Why do “art books” by comics artists usually have titles like The Art of [Fill in the Blank] and not just show the artist’s name? This has always confused me. Like when you go into Barnes & Noble or Borders, all the books in the Art section usually just have the artist’s name.

Hunh.