I’m pleased as can be that our own Tim Hodler and Lauren Weinstein are now the proud parents of Ramona Salley Hodler, a healthy baby girl! Ramona arrives with superb comics pedigree and is our newest, most promising blogger. Welcome to the team Ramona! Love to Ma and Pa.
I’m going to make this quick and comics-related. Everyone at the fair, Companhia, and the US Consulate was nice and treated me much better than I deserve to be treated. I can’t figure out a good USA reference for this book fair. It’s sort of like the San Diego Comic-Con, only all books and “normal” people (lots of families.) It took place in three large boxes. This first photo of the exterior looks like a Tom K panel:
The standard comic size in Brazil is smaller and a slightly different ratio.
Andre told me you can chart the Brazilian economy of the 80s and 90s by looking at the cover price fluctuations of Akira, since it was being serialized through that time.
Andre’s father edits this magazine, Piaui , and in the latest issue they ran an excerpt of Crumb’s Genesis. The magazine is huge (about 11 by 14 inches) and on great paper and the excerpt looks totally amazing in it. I’m psyched for that book.
I was on a panel with the twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba where I was asked how to increase literacy among Brazilian youth.
Later that day the fair threw a party and I was told it was taking place in a park so I just wore a t-shirt. It turned out it was in a mansion in a park. Snoop Dogg filmed this music video (3:53) there. I told a prose novelist I was feeling underdressed and he said: “Don’t worry. You’re a graphic novelist. It works.” Ha! True story.
Okay, here are some more scans of things I acquired. This first artist, Lourenco Mutarelli, I hung out with a little bit. He does great sketchbooks filled with gorgeous, raunchy drawings. I hope that those are eventually published or put online or become available somehow.
These are random other things:
I went to Rafael Grampa’s studio in an ex-beauty salon in Sao Paulo but I don’t have any good photos of it. Rafael’s working on a series that Dark Horse is publishing in 2010 titled Furry Water and I flipped through some originals and it’s crazy. His personality can be felt in his drawings. They’re aggressive, funny and full of life. Dude can draw.
Now Comics Comics may return to more thoughtful posting.
This cover is a special delivery to my Fanta Friends:
The first story would interest the new Marvel Friends:
I got this at a comic shop called H Q Mix in Sao Paulo. It’s open 24 hours (!) on a block of mostly theaters and actor’s bars. There is a famous whore house around the corner.
Andre Conte is the editor of the Companhia das Letras comic division. I spent most of my trip hanging out with him and Juliana Vettore, a publicist at Companhia, and David Grann, since his The Lost City of Z book was published in Portuguese by Companhia. Grann’s latest New Yorker piece, “Trial by Fire”, came out right before we left NY for Rio.
Andre and I had a lot to talk about since we’re about the same age so we read all of the same comics growing up. It’s nice that Joe Madureira and Wildstorm are at least conversation possibilities. Here’s Andre:
I’m pretty sure that the store owner (above corner) edited this anthology, Capa. He didn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Portuguese, but I think that’s what he was communicating to me.
Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon came with us to the store since we went right after a joint discussion/signing at a mall bookstore.
More Brazil stuff later.
There are some good comments threads going on in earlier posts that some of you won’t want to miss. Various comics luminaries and personalities showing up and all that. Here and here and here. Just saying.
Here I am in Taos, New Mexico. I visited the Earthship Biotecture site. Pretty remarkable. Unbelievable actually. Check out the documentary Garbage Warrior. It’s the best “Art” I’ve seen in years.
RELEASE PARTY
Tonight! Friday! Sep. 11! At Desert Island!
540 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg
(L train to Metropolitan and one block uphill)
(718) 388-5087
from 7 to 9 PM
Featuring a special costumed karaoke performance by Ambergris “en regalia”
In my experience, Prince Valiant is an easy comic strip to admire (all that evident artistry, that labor-intensive craftsmanship) but a hard one to warm up to. In his recent, very persuasive posting on Hal Foster, Dan admits that it took some work on his part to find a way into Prince Valiant. I think for a certain type of reader, resistance to Prince Valiant is a natural instinct. Any appreciation of the strip has to come to terms with why it can be, at least on first glance, so off-putting.
To my mind, the best account we have of this forbidding and stultifying quality in Foster’s work comes from the fiction writer Clark Blaise. In his 2001 collection Pittsburgh Stories, there is a tale called “Sitting Shivah with Cousin Benny” where the narrator offers this illuminating riff:
Every Sunday for as long as I’ve been conscious, there’s been a Prince Valiant on the comic page. It can’t die, it’s eternal, and I’ve never read a single panel. It’s beautifully drawn, and the most literate script in the paper, postmodern before there was Postmodernism, new age before there was New Age, camp before there was Camp. With all that mad hair, that costuming, that intricately irrelevant story line, you’d think he’d have his lone, crackpot, visionary advocates, but no one talks about him, he has no explicators. Even Krazy Kat has its exegetes. What mad consortium thought him up, who pitches his stories every week, who keeps churning him out? Who pays for it? Has anyone ever read Prince Valiant? It’s too late for me to start, too much has gone on, I can’t enter that theatre any more. In some way I feel I’m not good enough for Prince Valiant, just like I wasn’t good enough for ‘The Voice of Firestone’ or the East Side of Pittsburgh or for Cousin Benny.
(I should add that Clark Blaise is a really great writer; he is part of the strong cohort of Canadian writers from the 1960s that includes Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, and is equal to the best writers in that generation).
(As sort of related to Comics Comics)
Jean-Paul Goude (because)
Lou Fine (Because of Gil Kane)
At 29, Hal Foster bicycled from Winnipeg to Chicago. He was in search of a new market, having already achieved the dubious title of most popular illustrator in Winnipeg. Seems like the stuff of a Guy Maddin film, but, nope, it was just Foster, one of our sportier cartoonists (there are apocryphal stories of the artist shooting wildlife out his studio window.) That was in 1921. Ten years later he became the regular artist on the Tarzan comic strip, and six years after that began publishing his masterpiece, Prince Valiant.
I came to Foster and Prince Valiant just recently via Wally Wood. Wood’s trees, the artist long maintained, were Foster’s trees, and Wood’s sense of composition and figures in motion was heavily influenced by Foster’s balanced and graceful panels. Sure I’d read Foster before, but I’d never found a way in. Fortunately, Fantagraphics recently released Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-38, and I was able to absorb the material in a wholly new way. After doing some reading I dug up a copy of The Comics Journal 102 (1985), which features a fascinating interview by Arn Saba (also look for her Caniff and Gottfredson interviews in other issues) with a then-retired Foster. He comes across as a melancholy man but confident man, as humble about his work as he was sure of his abilities. Asked about his inspirations, Foster replies, “I would say inspired by the beauty of my own work, and the loveliness of the stories that I stole from better authors. I always worked alone.” On more cartoony strips: “I don’t know why it is that some fellows can draw a little kid like, what’s his name, Charlie Brown, with just a round head, a round nose, and no particular body, and yet give the thing a personality. I still can’t understand that, and where the little things he says, and the funny little illustrations, are more real than some of the best drawn strips, the adventure strips.” Yes, that’s the master of comic strip realism talking about the virtues of a simpler approach. Or at least the virtues of Schulz. Intangible authenticity and emotional “reality” are not the first things one thinks of when approaching Foster, but as Saba so eloquently explains in her long introduction to the interview, in many ways they are the crux of what his work. In Prince Valiant, “Foster created the quintessentially American interpretations of the King Arthur legends, complete with a nuclear family, the democratic ideal, and the man-child hero whose boyish hi-jinks often lead to high adventure.” Saba tightly defines Americana here, and to that list I might add “idealism tinged with tragedy”, as the strip begins with the boy Prince losing his mother and embarking on a solo quest to find himself. Foster imbues this and all of the other strips I’ve read with a modest humanity. Where Foster’s illustration heroes N.C. Wyeth and J.C. Leyendecker tended towards grandiosity and dynamism Foster emphasizes the human scale of these adventures and keeps things relatively quiet.
I can see where readers might cringe at Foster’s idealism and, well, cleanliness. There is nary a hair out of place, no nod to the dirt, grime, and grotesqueries of the time. Even when Val skins a goose and wears its skin as a mask — a mask later swiped by Jack Kirby for his character The Demon — it’s bloodless. But Foster’s sensibility is so wonderfully innocent and immersed in depicting virtue and honor that to let anything else in would have polluted a clear, defined well of ideas. Prince Valiant is a perfect pre-angst fantasy in which rational justice wins out.
Foster’s artwork completely reinforces the ideal order. The page above is arranged with larger set-up and concluding panels sandwiching a middle section of rapid action, expertly choreographed so that readers can follow Val in and out of a room, and then savor the ultimate conclusion in the last couple panels. A demonic but playful Val, a terrified Ogre, and finally a clearly victorious hero. The figures, while well posed, are never stiff — they have an inner life and animation. Also, Foster, while a stickler for detail, knew when to leave it out: Most of the action plays out against solid colors — yellows and blues expertly rhyming with one another to create a unified page.
This page is remarkable for its wide range of approaches, settings and emotions. In the beginning Val make an emotional proclamation (swiped from a film still, perhaps?) and then Foster races him off to the forest. Look at that bottom left panel. After a couple panels of plain backgrounds, Foster immerses us in the forest (A damn straight Wally Wood forest) with great detail and then, with some flourish, exists Val onto a plateau above the “sinister castle” a skull perched just behind him. Val is on the cusp, and the weight of his adventure is made evident by the panel size and velocity of the action. Meanwhile, the yellow of Val’s shirt picks up his cloak, while the various browns of the woods and cloth are all delicately arranged for maximum readability.
Both of these pages also reveal a key part of Foster’s appeal: He shied away from the chiaroscuro and noir angularity of the Caniff-ian school of adventure comics and instead kept his spaces fairly level, colorful and enticing. These are comics that look accessible but contain a tremendous amount of quiet sophistication. Foster’s sense of place, color, and body language is just stunning. But again, he was never showy. It’s a realism that never calls itself “realistic”.
And the story itself? I thoroughly enjoyed it. Foster himself seemingly didn’t have great ambitions besides to write something that satisfied him and entertained his readers. I found this first book completely engrossing. Prince Valiant opens up a world that I wanted to stay in — a wide-eyed early 20th century approach to fantasy with a now-vanished sincerity and wholesomeness. It’s an all too rare pleasure in comics. I now understand why so many cartoonists after him sought to regain that Foster magic, despite the futility of such an anachronistic exercise: It’s a near-perfect distillation of purity (the high moral pulp sought by mid-century guys like Gil Kane and Alex Toth), skill (inarguable drawing ability), and success. Wally Wood chased it his entire career, and was asked to try out to be Foster’s replacement on the strip, but was not given the gig. But everyone from Russ Manning (who was an heir to Foster on Tarzan) to Charles Vess to Ryan Sook (his Wednesday Comics Kamandi) have tried to claim a little bit of Foster’s legacy. And of course the comic strip itself continues under different hands. But it is not so much the characters I’m attached to, but rather Foster’s masterful spell.
I confess to not having anything terribly profound to say about Foster. I suppose I’ve been surprised by and taken with the sensitivity, grace, and fluidity of his work, as well as what a fine comic strip Valiant really was. Foster understood page design and the interplay of color and form about as well as anyone I can think of in the 1930s, but recently he tends to be relegated to illustration rather than comics history. Certainly I’ve made that mistake. The recent reprint publishing activity has had all sorts of interesting effects, particularly in the way certain artists are re-contextualized. The revival and re-packaging of Valiant is particularly significant, as it no longer seems like an oddball project in the Fantagraphics catalog, but rather a prestige item that takes it place alongside other relevant books like Love and Rockets and, dare I say, Prison Pit (in terms of cartoon clarity and craft, the two have something in common. I also loved Prison Pit). This new project gives Valiant something it was long missing: currency. And I’m looking forward to exploring more of it in the years to come.
I wanted to post something fun for this weekend. But honestly, I don’t have the time to write about all the awesome old comics my pal Robin McConnell just sent me in the mail. (Can you say, “Blazing Combat f**cking rulez”?) I guess I’ll have to save that for next time.
So, I thought I’d post a link to an old favorite of mine from the CC archive. It’s a post about Jack Kirby’s last issue of Mister Miracle and how Kirby uses a sort of personal symbolism. It was a fun post to write and there are a lot of great comments in the comments section by Dustin Harbin, Charles Hatfield, and Dash Shaw amongst others. So, I encourage you, True Believers, to check it out and add your voice to the exchange.
Please click here to continue reading.
