Alert: Cross posting here, but I can’t resist: Here’s Karl Wirsum talking with me (stress-relieving margherita margarita in hand) about his current show, which I co-curated.
I mean, really quick, since Tim totally wiped out my time yesterday by “forcing” me to read the essay below.
I wanted to point out this very kind appreciation by longtime fan/historian Don Mangus of the work of Jerry Grandenetti, news of whose passing just popped up. I particularly love Grandenetti’s spikey work on his Spirit homage, The Secret Files of Dr. Drew, which I sadly had to cut from Art in Time. For my money, Grandenetti, who had some training in architecture, went to psychedelic places The Eisner Studio didn’t manage, but nevertheless, he did so using Eisner’s machinery. His ’70s work for Warren, as Don mentions, also is worth a look – he made woozy large scale drawings on the comics page, somehow conveying a teetering physical motion in gray washes. Here’s an old interview with him, and a good summation by Jim Amash.
And finally (ahem, I’m flying all day, so a longer post will happen after the plane lands) [UPDATE, 9/19: ONE DAY LATER: THAT POST ON RAND HOLMES IS HELD UP, MUCH LIKE THE TRAFFIC ON THE PCH. DON’T BE MAD.], please point your browsers to The Wisdom of Caleb, a new comic by James Jarvis and Russell Waterman, of Silas and Amos fame. It’s off to an excellent start . I’ve been a fan of ol man Jarvis for a long time and it’s a thrill to see him condense it all down to a few or just a single panel. Plus, the “new” style is killer.
Exceptional one-person comic strips like “Little Nemo,” “Krazy Kat,” and “Peanuts” were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as “ghosting” and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source — to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer “John Alton” as we would of “Humphrey Bogart” — isn’t just a taxonomic convenience. It also reflects frustrated feelings of gratitude and intimacy, as evidenced by the career of Walt Disney comics artist and writer Carl Barks. Although Barks wrote, drew, and inked his own work for decades, his employer blocked fan mail and withheld contributor credits on the theory that sales would decline if children thought anyone other than Walt Disney was involved in the comic books. As a result, Barks wasn’t successfully contacted by readers until 1960, and his first interview (conducted in 1962) was only allowed publication in 1968. Given no clues other than style, loyal fans identified and collected Barks as “The Duck Artist,” “The Good Duck Artist,” or simply “The Good Artist,” the last eventually inscribed on his gravestone.
—From “High, Low, and Lethem”, a just-posted, confidence-killing essay in which the great Ray Davis takes nearly every subject I’ve written about for Comics Comics over the last five years—from Steve Gerber and Carl Barks to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown and the auteur theory’s connection to comics, among others—and writes something actually worthwhile, intelligent, and stylish about them. He shows me up as a lazy halfwit actually. The funny thing is that I’m fairly certain he’s never heard of me or Comics Comics at all, and the confluence of thought is purely coincidental. Oh well, I guess I need to try harder.
Clowes's Wilson
As soon as Clowes’s new graphic novel was published I read it one gulp. But I didn’t want to write about it immediately away because it’s a book that deserved careful and slow re-reading. I’ve gone back to it often. Here are a few notes.
Initial impact. It’s hard not to fall into clichéd language of book reviewing: Wilson hit me like a punch in the stomach. Wilson is such a great character. He takes misanthropy to a new height while remaining all too humanly frail. The phrase “painfully funny” gets thrown around but I think Clowes reached a new limit in telling a story that is both hilarious but also sad and harrowing.
sitting on her front step joyfully appreciating a world in which she is an aberration for doing so—are very much the same as Kris Kelvin’s unreal existence in his very real past on the surface of the planet, at the close of Solaris. (more…)
Amazing the things you can find at a comics show like SPX. I mean, I hadn’t expected Mark Millar’s comics magazine to be so well designed! Or distributed by Drawn and Quarterly! “I hope the little girl cuts someone,” I grinned to Tom Devlin, who looked slightly more than halfway toward the verge of tears, and maybe vomiting, which was understandable. I was pretty upset they’d moved the Miss Maryland Teen USA preliminaries to another weekend too, leaving the official SPX hotel neighbor slot to be filled by some sort of medical conference (which later became a wedding reception, perhaps spontaneously).
Much to my embarrassment, it was later explained to me that LINT is in fact the subtitle to ACME Novelty Library #20, while the Mark Millar comics magazine is titled CLiNT. This is so you might look at the title a certain way and mistakenly (hilariously) think the magazine is really titled CUNT. “But mom,” I said, “that’s an awful name for a magazine! And disrespectful to Rory Hayes! There really are no ideas left. Alan Moore was right.” I noticed then that she was softly weeping over the phone, as is her tendency. God, it’s not my fault the apple harvest festival isn’t until October!
I was interviewed by Sean T. Collins over at Marvel.com about my Silver Surfer story for the Strange Tales II series. Check it out!
Hey hey hey. What’s happenin’? SPX is what is happening and there’s no time for me to continue my series on romance comics and naturalistic drawing. So here is a related post from last summer. It’s about P. Craig Russell’s color work from the early ’80s published by Pacific Comics. Last week in the comments section to my weekly post there was a mention of these comics and I thought I’d rerun the post I made about them. Check it out if you haven’t already. Over and out.
This comic tore me up by which I mean it wrapped me up and held me. Death grip. Eyes closed, squeezing too hard to nothing. SCARY. This comic is WEIRD. I picked it up from the quarter bin. The art looked good, the colors strange and… um, it was a quarter. And by the tenth page I couldn’t take it no more and had to get up and wash the cover, seriously. Quarter bin comics can be GRIMY. Normally I can take it but in this case the grime was comprehensive. It was plaque. Real lived in terror page by page and despite what I’ve seen it’s hard to reconcile what David Wojnarowicz has seen… I take a paper towel and hold it under luke warm water until its soaked and then I squeeze it until I have a damp wad of paper towel in my hand, then I shake the thing out and wipe down the cover (this is how my Grandma taught me to DUST).
Title: SEVEN MILES A SECOND
Writer: David Wojnarowicz
Artist: James Romberger
Colorist: Marguerite Van Cook
Year: 1996
This comic keeps its distance. Toes on the edge. You can see EVERYTHING. Every God-damned thing. Every sad sad thing. Everything antagonizes in this comic. Everyone is a VICTIM, which could be a criticism but I don’t mind. This comic describes an out of control helplessness, always tragic and leading to one thing: DEATH. And sometimes dying can be beautiful if not ecstatic. FLEETING. We have very little time and what time we do have is out of our control. “The minimum speed required to break through the earth’s gravitational pull is seven miles a second. Since economic conditions prevent us from gaining access to rockets or spaceships we would have to learn to run awfully fast to achieve escape from where we are all heading…”
I’ve seen this cover a million times. I’ve known this cover forever. Where has this comic been? Why haven’t I read it before? What took so long? (more…)
