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Sam Osherow at Jaffe's

A while back there was a discussion on the Comics Journal message board about the “first” comic book store. Two things need to be said about this conversation:

1) There’s some great research into the history of comic book stores and the direct market being done by Bob Beerbohm, so we should look forward to his findings.

2) The search for firstness seems simpleminded to me, whether it’s the first comics, the first comic strip or the first comic book. The fact is cultural institutions and forms don’t just emerge full-blown but always evolve out of earlier institutions and forms. So the first of anything can be disputed.

3) The comic book store had many precursors, including the used book store and the head shop. We need to study the history of these institutions to figure out where the comic book store came from.

In issue 57 (2000) of Canadian Notes and Queries (my favorite literary magazine), Don McLeod has a great article about Jaffe’s Book and Music Exchange in Calgary. That’s where Don used to buy old comic books. He would go on to become a distinguished expert on Canadian book history, as well as an editor and writer. With Don’s permission, I’ve scanned his article, which is well worth reading for those interested in the pre-history of comic book stores.

Don McLeod's article page 1

Don McLeod article page 2

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Chester Brown's Paying For It

Normally I wouldn’t post out of turn but I had to share this, especially since I don’t think anyone else has posted it. If Amazon.com is to be trusted, this is the cover for the most eagerly anticipated comic book of 2011, Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Post Script: It looks like I jumped the gun if not the shark. Sammy Harkham (see comments below) says this is not the cover. Oh well … I guess I’m just too eager to see the book.

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The new Inkstuds book

As Jog mentioned last week, the Inkstuds book is now in stores. Jog avoided saying too much about it for conflict of interest reasons, and I have even more conflicts than he does. I wrote the introduction to the book, which also includes the transcript on an interview with me, Dan, and Tom Spurgeon.

But Comics Comics has a long and noble tradition of **ahem**Dan Nadel**ahem** shameless self-promotion, so I’ll say a few words. It’s a very handsome book, amply illustrated with examples of the cartoonists work. And to his credit Robin McConnnell has interviewed many cartoonists who have rarely if ever been questioned about their work (notably the great Ted Stearn). Finally and unexpectedly, the interviews read very well in print. Even though I’ve listened to many of the interviews before, I’ve found that when I read them I pick up on nuances that I missed as a listener. So if you’re interested in contemporary comics, I’d suggest picking up the book.

Here’s an excerpt from my intro:

Among the many comics interviewers, the best were Verne Greene, John Benson, Arn Saba, Gary Groth, and Todd Hignite.  In the early 1960s, Greene, who then drew the strip Bringing Up Father, hosted a radio program on WRVR in New York City where he chatted with peers like Chester Gould and Roy Crane, getting them to share in the secrets of their craft. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Benson conducted path-breaking interviews with comic book artists such as Bernie Krigstein and Gil Kane, where they spoke honestly about the commercial limits of the form and their artistic ambitions. In the 1970s, Arn Saba, then a young cartoonist with an enviable gig at CBC radio, interviewed such venerable comic strip masters as Hal Foster, Floyd Gottfriedson, and Milton Caniff, catching them in the twilight of their career…..

I’ll add a regret that I didn’t talk about Tom Spurgeon as one of the great interviewers, since he’s done some really deft quizing of both mainstream comics artists, and a wide range of contemporary art cartoonists and also writers about comics. I know from my own experience, that Tom is a really acute reader whose questions are like x-rays in the way the lay bare the insides of a book. 

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In the not so distant past, libraries weren’t such great places to go to if you wanted to read comics. Typically a library would have the Smithsonian comics volumes, a few New Yorker albums, and odd volumes reprinting a few years of the better known strips. The situation is changing rapidly now, largely thanks to increased academic attention on comics. More and more in academic and public libraries, its common to see on the shelves the mainstays of the comics canon. But the integration of comics into the library hasn’t been a smooth process and there are still problems, notably the inability of librarians to figure out where exactly graphic novels should be shelved. Does Maus belong with the other comics, for example, or in modern literature or in European history?

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Seth's cover for Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean

Seth, as I’ve said more than once, is an artist with many sides to him. It’s hard to see him “in the round” because he’s always off doing something odd in some obscure publication or out-of-the way museum. One of the nice things about the new incarnation of Palookaville as an annual modeled after the hard-covered, stiff-papered full-color luxury magazines of old is that it’ll make it easier to showcase the differnt strands of his work: his sketchbooks, photography, commercial art, card-board sculptures, essays writing and ad hoc ruminating can call be housed in one convenient location.

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Jack Coles' The Claw

When I first read Greg Sadowski’s Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, I was a bit disappointed. My preference is for anthologies that have a strong editorial vision like Art Out of Time or The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Supermen! seemed like it was governed less by an editorial imperative than a chronological one. Some of the comics in the book are very strong (especially the stories by Jack Cole, Fletcher Hanks, and Basil Wolverton) but many of them also seemed primitive in a bad way (crude, simple-minded) rather than a good way (Hanks’ vitalism).

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Did you know that Al Capp’s FBI file (in slightly redacted form, alas) is available online? Go here.

An excerpt:

Both Al Capp (also known as Alfred G. Caplin) and John Kenneth Galbraith are, of course, well-known to the Bureau. In the past, Capp has been praised by the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and its publications for some of his comic strips which have implied, among other things, that the American economy was being mismanaged by vicious tycoons, that several persons were converted to outcasts because of questioning concerning them by government investigators and like matters. In 1961, a Congressman criticized Capp for unfair attacks on law enforcement officers in his comic strip, “Li’l Abner,” and, that same year, Capp wrote in a column that during the 1930’s he was too poor to pay a membership fee in a social club that turned out to be the Young Communist League.

God forbid anyone think that the American economy was mismanaged by tycoons.

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Lynd Ward

One of the great things about the Library of America series is that it encourages renewed attention to unfashionable books. Journalism is very present-orientated; magazines and newspapers need the hook of a new book as an excuse for revisiting a classic. Thanks to the LOA, we’ve had major critical essays in places like  The New Yorker and Harper’s on John Dos Passos and Manny Farber.

Lynd Ward is the latest beneficiary. The Library of America has issued a two volume set reprinting six of his wood cut novels, expertly introduced by Art Spiegelman. This set has already elicited a thoughtful review essay by Sarah Boxer in Slate (see here). (more…)

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Jason Logan and Leanne Shapton are two of the most interesting visual artists around. They both have new books out and are holding a joint book launch in Toronto on Saturday. I’ve pasted information about the event below and would encourage anyone in the Toronto area to go to this event:

A government pamphlet re-imagined as a volume of iconic paintings, a book of dusty, smoking frontiersmen — and a secondhand bookshop dedicated to uncommon interests.

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Dwight Macdonald: one of Gary Groth's heroes

On the Inkstuds program earlier today, Gary Groth, Ben Schwartz and I talked about comics criticism with Robin McConnell. The pretext was Ben’s recent anthology of essays and interviews on comics. You can listen to the show here. The discussion ran all over the place. Among other topics discussed:

1. The transformative  role played by Gil Kane in getting people to talk about visual storytelling as well as literary narrative, and in general Kane as a spark for comics criticism and enthusiasm about comics.

2. The difference between art and entertainment.

3. The importance of destructive criticism (with discussions of the relative merits of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Dwight Macdonald). I wish I had remembered to mention John Metcalf, who belongs in this tradition.

4. The seductive dangers posed by Mencken’s style.  Again, I wish I had remembered Christopher Hitchens’s great sentence about the impact of Mencken on some of his dimmer imitators: “No wonder, then, that in his ill-tempered and misanthropic shape, [Mencken] has been adopted as a premature foe of ‘PC’ by the rancorous crowd of minor swells who put out the American Spectator. ”

5. Why Mark Beyer, David Collier and Kim Deitch need critical champions (although Gary mentioned that there is an essay by Gary Giddins on Deitch’s work. I had no idea that this essay existed and will now have to track it down).

6. The reputational status of Eisner and Spiegelman.

If you are interested in these and related topics, listen to the show.