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It’s a beautiful Saturday and you know what you need to do? Buy stuff from us! In the last 24 hours celebrity operators have been adding items like crazy! The PictureBox funpacks are online. You can have 3 graphic novels for just $20! Or 2 fancy coffee table books for $25. Not to mention issues of Comics Comics, and a promo poster, for $10. Here are some highlights:

Matthew Thurber drawings!

And 3 more on eBay!

More Dash Shaw art, like this beauty, below.

We’ve got an ultra rare copy of Kramers Ergot #4, signed and with a drawing by Sammy Harkham.

For just $50 Jason T. Miles promises to send you a package like this containing a wealth of rare zines and ephemera from his Profanity Hill project!

So what are you waiting for, kind readers? Some have asked us, “why do you need this money, this filthy lucre?” And we say, so we can pay ourselves back for our expenses and initiate new Comics Comics projects. Also, let’s face it: Looking this good costs money. You think Santoro rolls out of bed looking that handsome? Or Dash just happens to have such good hair? I think not. We need your help. You can buy stuff or just donate if you feel that you don’t want any more material goods in your life.

Thanks!

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Howdy True Believers! Frankie The Wop here with a rant for your Friday afternoon. We’re in the middle of a pledge drive here at CC and we thought we’d keep you faithful readers peppered with some thoughts on our beloved little community (while you groan at the computer screen waiting for the pledge drive to be over).

I was over at Jim Rugg‘s house yesterday hanging out and talking shop. He’s got this cool new mini-comic called Rambo 3.5 and I asked him if he’d taken any by Copacetic Comics to sell. “I haven’t had time,” he said. “TCAF was a couple weeks ago, I’ve got this show in Indiana this weekend and Heroes con is coming up soon. I’m almost sold out of the edition just from doing shows. I want to sell them to stores but the shows are more important.”

A light bulb went off in my head when Jim said that the shows are more important. Since the late ’90s when SPX and APE and other small-press comics shows popped up, there has been this yearly schedule that many cartoonists operate under. I know I try and have a new book out by MoCCA (which used to be in June) or by SPX in the fall. Nowadays, there is a convention every few weeks. I think this is a good thing. But it makes me think about how getting work into comics stores has become less of a priority for many cartoonists. The shows are the priority.

Also, this is the part of the argument that I think is missing when we all wonder why there aren’t more serial alternative “pamphlet” comic books out there. Retailer Brian Hibbs often argues that if 20 to 30 cartoonists each committed to two or three releases a year, that a critical mass would form so that every week you walk into a comics store there might be something that tickles your fancy. I think he is correct but I also think the fact that there are so many shows nowadays that many alt cartoonists and fans of alt comics just do not go into comics shops that often anymore because there really isn’t anything for them. The fans of such work know that they can wait until SPX or MoCCA or TCAF or just order from the artists directly or through distros like Sparkplug.

The other reason, I think that there are less serial pamphlets is because the market determines the form. The Direct Market determined that the pamphlet form was THE FORM. Now, the form is whatever tickles the fancy of the maker and what they can sell at a show. I know 20 to 30 alt cartoonists who release two or three comics a year but they aren’t serials and they aren’t pamphlets. These works don’t engage in the Direct Market’s periodical model. These works reflect the demand of the market which is generally geared towards handmade zines or trade paperbacks that are not serialized.

Anyways, I could go on and on. I know there are a a lot of different factors that make up the current marketplace and that I’m missing some important points. But I just wanted to float this one out there. The Bridge is over. We live in the era of The Show.

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Longtime readers of Comics Comics know that this is a labor of love — and it will continue to be, at least until we figure out how to “monetize” critical discussion of Harry Lucey and old issues of ROM Spaceknight. Once we get that settled, it will only be a matter of time until we are rolling in dough, Scrooge McDuck-style.

Currently, though, we are still somehow losing money, and it’s gotten to the point where we need to try and offset some of our costs. For lack of a better idea (and enough traffic to inspire advertisers!), we are launching a PBS-style one-week pledge drive. Nothing big and nothing too obnoxious, we hope, just a quick, deep, searching grab at our readers’ cash while everyone’s flush with springtime-inspired resolutions to give to charity. We are a good cause, more or less.

We have many delightful ways for you to GIVE US YOUR MONEY, all of which allow you, the kind reader, to receive something in return.

1) Comics Comics contributors and pals have donated artwork (see below!).

Frank Santoro is selling 10 gorgeous landscape drawings at a stunning $100 each. Dash Shaw is selling his Smoke Signal cover painting, a page from Bottomless Belly Button, and even a Spider-Man page, among other goodies. Dan Nadel is donating a Frank King original comic strip, rare Paper Rad prints, and other lovely items. New work will appear every day. Over the next few days you’ll see rare and unusual items from Sammy Harkham, Jason Miles, Matthew Thurber, and Lauren Weinstein (as soon as she goes into the basement to unpack her stuff!).

All of these items are or will be available at PictureBox’s eBay store, which will be updated from now through Thursday the 27th.

2) Johnny Ryan has very generously offered to donate his drawing services to the cause. Until May 27th,  for a mere $100, Johnny will draw an 8 x 10 portrait of you, the Comics Comics reader (or person of your choice), being “erotically violated.” This seems like the perfect gift for any occasion. Dedicated readers choosing this option should first order this “item” via PayPal. Send $100 to orders (at) pictureboxinc (dot) com and include your address and a message. Please also send a photograph to the same email address. Mr. Ryan will then get to work. Allow at least 60 days before delivery.

3) You can purchase “variety packs” of PictureBox books at a crazy good discount. These will also be available at the PictureBox eBay store.

4) If for some reason you’d like to support us, but don’t feel like buying anything in particular on offer, you can tip us any amount you like via the PayPal button below.

Thanks for listening in any case, and we apologize for taking up your time with something like this. We don’t plan on making this a habit, or even something that we will repeat. We just want to keep this dog-and-pony show running for a while longer. Thanks again.

—The Editors

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I was rooting around the internet and came across the cover art from Batman Annual #8 on Trevor Von Eeden’s website. This comic rearranged my brain as a youth. I think it’s the perfect synthesis of lines and color: the essence of comics, right? I know, I know, it’s Batman, but check out these pages over on Mr. Von Eeden’s site. The colors are by Lynn Varley. There’s a real tension in the art. There was something that always struck me about this comic. It was special. It took about twenty years to find out why. Here’s Von Eeden in his Comics Journal interview about this book:

“The Batman Annual was the culmination of many years of intense effort and serious dedication. Lynn and I finally consummated our relationship after I got this gig. I lost my virginity between pages 4 and 5. It was well worth the wait.”

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Here we have Leatherface as depicted in Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega (vol. 2, the color bits in the beginning), surrounded by a Jason X corps of armed enforcers. I’d always thought the villains in Biomega had a Clive Barker feel, but I hadn’t realized until this episode that they were possibly referencing specific characters—or just plugging characters in, as it seems here. This isn’t at all ill-fitting in Nihei’s world, already visually indebted to illustrators like Zdzislaw Beksinski, or the Biomega iteration of such in particular, much more of a seat-of-the-pants action spectacle than Nihei’s longer, earlier, weirder, transhumanism-scented action series Blame!—it’s pretty much Kamen Rider plopped down into a zombie movie to start off with, and there’s something fitting about distinguishing the evolution-minded villains from the rabble by dressing them like hard-to-kill horror movie icons, easily villainous superhuman ‘types’ fit for looping in. Long live the new flesh?

Other icons set to mix ‘n match:

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Pulphope versus Darth Shaw.

Robin McConnell as Emperor, er, moderator. From TCAF 2010.

Listen to all the pulse pounding action over at Inkstuds.

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 Earlier this year, Geoff Pevere wrote a fine article on his Frazetta fetish for the Toronto Star. (Pevere is a Canadian cultural journalist. He was recruited for the Doug Wright Awards jury this year, and at the awards ceremony spoke very eloquently about Seth’s work). When I told Geoff how much I liked his Frazetta article, he informed me he had a slightly longer version. This was shortly before the sad news came of Frazetta’s death. So in honour of the great barbarian artist, here is Geoff Pevere’s full tribute:

If love makes us do things common sense says we shouldn’t, I have loved the art of Frank Frazetta. Briefly, it made me a criminal.

I can’t remember when I first laid eyes on a Frazetta, but it was probably on the cover of Creepy or Eerie in the late 1960s. These were comic magazines for people verging on growing too old for comics, black and white horror anthology collections that happened to have some of the best art and writing in the field.

Not at all coincidentally, much of this art and writing was perpetrated by the same generation that had been instrumental in the rise and censorious crash of the industry during the 1950s. On these pages, these EC Comic-vets were free to let their imaginations run to places Comics Code-approved kids comics could not.

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Always a favorite, due to the hand:

From Baby, you’re really something!, a 1990 Fantagraphics-published collection of adult paperback illustrations by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010).

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Recently I presented my dear mother with gifts and purchased some comics from many nations: Belgium, Japan, Wolverine. Let me share them with you.

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The new issue of The Believer is out and is chock-full of comics goodness. First up, the fifth installment of Alvin Buenaventura’s “Comics” column. Some great work by Jonathan Bennett, Lilli Carré, Tom Gauld, and others. And Charles Burns ruins eggs for all time.

“Spiritual Dad,” a story by Jesse Moynihan and Dash Shaw, is tucked in the back of the issue. They’ve printed it vertically on a long section of folded paper, so it reads kind of like a scroll.

Gabrielle Bell’s done a strip (in glorious color!) that adapts a poem by Russian writer Sasha Chernyi about springtime and seasonal affective disorder in gnomes.

And finally, my interview with Dan Clowes, which covers a lot of his comics work—including his new book, Wilson, which really is phenomenally good—and his film projects, including the sad demise of his Raiders of the Lost Ark script. Burns, The Believer‘s resident cover artist, asked Clowes’s permission to make him look horrible for the cover image. It worked. His face frightened my kid. Somehow it manages simultanteously to be quintessential Burns and Clowes.