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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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Last night I had a dream I was back in high school and I was giving a report on an unknown work of literature; the stakes were high, as I could see my teacher (whom I did not recognize) had already locked several students in cages. My selection was an obscure serial that ran in 2000 AD in the late-’80s, the title of which I cannot remember although I surely knew it then. My thesis was that it was an attempt by Tharg and his crew to incorporate the tropes of video games into the comics form, perhaps to cope with the new medium’s threat to the magazine’s young readership; the plot concerned a team of scavengers, a boy and a girl, hunting for tiny glowing orbs in a ruined mall, in fact the very mall I used to frequent years ago, which is odd in retrospect. Gradually, it was revealed that the scavengers’ masters were the ones producing the orbs by murdering living things, in addition to collecting them. “It’s about Thatcher’s England,” I can recall saying.

I don’t know who the writer was. Me, I guess. The artist was José Ortiz, of the Spanish series Hombre (with Antonio Segura), and the British series The Thirteenth Floor (with Alan Grant & John Wagner), and many, many American issues of Creepy and Eerie and other Warren magazines of the 1970s, for which he was the most prolific artist in all of their history. Like most everything that was Warren in the ’70s, it vanished into the dealer’s tables and flea markets, but for an odd while he was mainstream comics. I should have told my teacher. Can I have an extension?

So:

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I’ve been doing research recently on Lynd Ward (whose wordless woodcut novels were just published by the Library of America). I found a trove of New York Times reviews of these early books—they all appeared between 1929 and 1937—and in each, the reviewer has a hard time taking the material seriously.  Take, for instance, a 1933 Times review of Prelude to a Million Years. The review is by John Chamberlain, a syndicated columnist and book critic.

What the ‘reader’ will make of a series of woodcuts which tell this story is conjectural. For our own part, we wish Mr. Ward would employ his dexterity in catching shades of emotion in the illustration of other people’s written stories. The art of painting, or of the woodcut, by its very static nature, is not a good medium for drama, which must march. It is a platitude, of course, to say this, but the platitude has not yet convinced Mr. Ward.

Aside from the laughable “critical” faculties at work here, it’s interesting that the idea of pictures standing in for words seems such a difficult concept to grasp. Chamberlain feels that pictures in books are for illustration; they are secondary to the words and ought to play a supporting role. What might he have said of a comic book, in which words and pictures work together, often on equal footing?

The reviewer’s small-minded conception of the medium makes this quote by Ward, part of his 1953 Caldecott acceptance speech, in which he so succinctly describes what comics alone can do, all the better:

No other medium in which the artist can work has that particular element to offer, and it is that one thing that makes the book a form something different for the artist from what it is for the writer. It is true that the writer works with a succession of words, paragraphs and chapters that because of their sequence in time have a significance completely dependent upon that time sequence; but the turning of the page is not essential to that sequence, and, save at the end of the chapter, is more often than not likely to be an interruption that is tolerated rather than utilized for its own sake. For the artist, however, the turning of the page is the thing he has that no other worker in the visual artist has: the power to control a succession of images in time, so that the cumulative effect upon the viewer is the result of not only what images are thrown at him, but the order in which they come. Thus the significance of those coming late in the sequence is built up by what comes earlier.

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I just sat down and re-read thru the new Love and Rockets issue. Shame on you, True Believer, if you haven’t already dog-eared this one. Please, please order this one today and thank me for urging you to do so. As Mr. Heer has already pointed out on this site – Jaime Hernandez has outdone himself. I mean, I’m a cynical super fan at times who often believes he’s “seen it all” and then something like L ‘n R New Stories #3 comes out and just slays me. And like I said, if you haven’t read this one yet – shame on you. I’m talking to you in your pajamas in the front row. Go click around the internet or put some clothes on and hoof it down to ye olde comics shoppe and buy this one. Do it now!

I’m struck by how Jaime lets the story dictate the layout and the pace. I’m gonna try and walk you through, so follow along with me… if you haven’t read the new issue, stop here. I may possibly ruin some plot points for you. Fair warning. (more…)

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When Titan’s recent collection of Beetle Bailey landed on my doorstep a few weeks ago, I don’t think I’d read more than half a dozen strips of the title in almost two decades. But throughout my childhood, I pored over the strip (along with everything else in the funnies section) on a daily basis. Considering how long Beetle Bailey & co. have been a part of my mental furniture, I have had a surprising amount of difficulty thinking of what to write about the strip. (Hence my linking to that terrible, terrible cartoon yesterday, for which I apologize.) After all, whatever you may believe about its quality, Beetle Bailey is undeniably one of the most influential comic strips of all time; debuting one month before Peanuts, and six before Dennis the Menace, BB joined forces with those titles to usher in a new era of newspaper funnies. (Usually somewhere in that sentence, a writer would feel obligated to utter that old incantatory phrase, “for better or worse,” but it would be more accurate to say that their influence was for better and worse.) As a sixty-year-old strip still boasting the involvement of its original creator, it is one of our only living links to a now vanished golden age of cartooning.

So why is it so difficult to find something worth saying about it? (more…)

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Been prepping for the New York Art Book Fair all week and it opened last night. So, this is to say: No damn post this week. However, if you care about heta-uma, King Terry (more Terry stuff than has ever been in North America at one time), psychedelic posters, Karl Wirsum, Moebius and other awesome things, you owe it to yourself (more or less) to come see the PictureBox 300 sq. ft. room at PS1/MoMA. Specially designed, fully immersion. 2nd floor, room 203. It’ll blow your mind. Pix here.

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Today’s post is running late, but in the meantime, please enjoy this related entertainment.
Something to think about the next time someone tells you they don’t make ’em like they used to.

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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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Yeah, that’s right: I flip through foreign-language magazines looking for the comics. This is from a bookmark tucked away in a recent issue of Snob, a Russian-language lifestyle glossy which I’m told is common to newsstands in the NYC area, presumably given an especially liberal construction to “area” in that I’m three and a half hours away by train. As you can see, it’s an installment of John Deering’s Strange Brew, initially reading “It really tortured my soul to create this one…” Since I cannot read Russian, I don’t know if the same joke is being communicated presently, or if some advertising or Russian lifestyle-related jest has been covertly substituted, but I think all of us can agree, nonetheless, that making fun of gallery art and artists is as potentially universal a language as has yet been conceived.

Er, let’s get right to the release list:

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