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Yes, that's a new painting by Ebisu.

If you’re anything like me, you must be wondering, “What does Japanese comics legend Ebisu do these days?” And you must also wonder, “Does he paint in his underwear?” Well, never fear, because here are the answers to all your questions. And mine, too. And some I didn’t know I had. You’ll be happy to know that we (ahem, PictureBox) will be selling work much like what is pictured in the link in just a few short months. If you poke around (NSFW) the rest of this site (an art agency) you’ll find some good information on Ebisu and Nemoto as well, not to mention a rather more eccentric artist, too.

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Check out this review of Dash’s new book. And then click over to his blog. He has another new book to put on your radar. Bodyworld, the awesome webcomic, is now an amazing hardcover comic book. Forgive the hype, but I’m really excited about Bodyworld. I think it’s going to make folks think about the way comics are constructed from the inside out. It’s a very freeing, very compelling way to read a comic. And something I don’t think I’ve really seen before. Over and out.

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Further to Dan’s excellent post on Wally Wood, one way to think about Wood’s career is to realize that he followed a pattern common to commercial comic book artists of his era. Think of Kirby, Ditko, Kane, and Eisner (and maybe also John Stanley). All these cartoonists started off as journeymen artists, had a mid-life crisis which made them try do more artistically ambitious work, but ended up being thwarted either by the limits of their talent or the constraints of marketplace.

Jack Kirby had his midlife crisis in the late 1960s. He already had a formidable body of work, arguably the best adventure cartooning ever done in the comic book form, running from the explosive patriotic bombast of the early Captain America to the mind-stretching cosmic adventures of the Fantastic Four and Thor. But by the late 1960s he was tired of playing second fiddle that blowhardy glory-hound Stan Lee. So Kirby made is big break for DC and became the auteur behind the hugely ambitious Fourth World series. I’m very fond of the Fourth World series, and even enjoy the aspect of them that is most often mocked, Kirby’s peculiar writing style, which to my ears at least has a kind of vatic poetry. Be that as it may, DC comics wasn’t willing to give the series the support they deserved and the books were canceled mid-storyline, leaving us with the fragments of a promising epic. Kirby would go on doing fascinating work, but he never really got over the sting of losing the Fourth World. None of his subsequent work had the same crazy ambition as the Fourth World.
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Our new site looks great, so I’m ashamed that my first post will be a series of quick pointers, not an impassioned and well-researched essay like the other guys have been writing lately.

Here are are few things I think people on this site will be interested in:

1.Not comics, science fiction. R. Fiore has a very good essay on changes in the science fiction field, jumping off from an earlier piece by Tim Hodler (or T. Hobler, as Fiore called him in an earlier draft of the essay). Go here. 

2. Not comics, climate change. I have a long article in today’s Globe and Mail on the attempt by some bloggers to discredit the science of climate change. Think about it this way: if the world heats up and we face an environmental catastrophe, it’ll be hard to enjoy comics. Go here.

The core paragraph:

The key objection to the work of bloggers such as Mr. McIntyre is that they are engaged in an epic game of nitpicking: zeroing in on minor technical issues while ignoring the massive and converging lines of evidence that are coming in from many disciplines. To read their online work is to enter a dank, claustrophobic universe where obsessive personalities talk endlessly about small building blocks – Yamal Peninsula trees, bristlecones, weather stations – the removal of which will somehow topple the entire edifice of climate science. Lost in the blogging world is any sense of proportion, or the idea that science is built on cumulative work in many fields, the scientists say.

3. Not comics, everything else. Earlier this week I was on the Michael Coren show as part of an arts panel. We talked abut everything under the sun (Sarah Palin and the Family Guy, Sikhs in werewolf movies, a new comedy about suicide bombers, the Olympics, Tiger Woods). Everything but comics. Go here.

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"I know! Let's wreak vengeance on the forces of evil!", B. Kliban, 1973

And…. we’re back! Phew. You may now resume your lavish praise of this site. Or at least begin the backlash. Maybe everyone was too busy thinking about Jim Lee to worry about us. I hope so. Anyhow, on with the blogging.

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Weird Science 16, 1952 (original art)

Wally Wood’s life and art exist in the space between two comic book stories. The first, “My World”, published in Weird Science no. 22, 1953, was written by Al Feldstein as a tribute to the 26-year-old Wood, who drew it. In the story, an unseen narrator describes his daily experience of reality juxtaposed with panel after panel of spectacular fantasy scenes, consisting “. . . of great space-ships that carry tourists on brief holidays to Venus or Mars or Saturn . . . My world can be ugly . . . Landing at night and entering my cities and killing and maiming and destroying . . . My world is what I choose to make it. My world is yesterday . . . Or today . . . Or tomorrow . . . For my world is the world of science fiction . . . conceived in my mind and placed upon paper with pencil and ink and brush and sweat and a great deal of love for my world.” The final drawing of the comic has Wood smoking a cigarette at the drawing table and looking a bit wan. It’s an evocation of the celebrity of Wood-the-cartoonist published by William M. Gaines’ EC Comics, home of Mad, and the publisher for which Wood did his most famous work.

Twenty-two years later, Wood, having long since broken with Gaines and Feldstein and by then a cautionary tale to his peers, wrote and drew “My Word” for Big Apple Comix. It is again a breathless narrative complemented by stunning drawings, but this time it’s a trip through a hellish New York. A furious Wood closes his introductory monologue with “Anyhow, since I have three pages in this mag, I’d like to comment briefly on the universe.” And off he goes. After some muggings, some light S&M and the requisite pile of shit, Wood, apropos of nothing, leaps on art: “That mysterious process by which one’s fantasies enrich the lives of others… and the pockets of publishers. But it is worth it, for there are the fans.” And here we see a naked boy prostrating himself saying, “Do what you want with me! Kick me! Fuck me! Shit on me! I love you! By the way, your old stuff was better…” Wood closes with a distorted version of “My World’s” final panel: A squat alien at the drawing board, smoking and saying, “My word is the word I choose to make it, for I conceive it in my mind and put it down on paper with a lot of sweat and love and shit like that, for I am a troglodyte. My name is spafon gool.”
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You’ve probably seen the links around the comics webonet, asking people to go to Adult Swim’s website and vote for Michael Kupperman’s Snake N’ Bacon to air on the channel.

You should do that. But don’t forget to return on Monday to vote again, this time for Alfe.

There may be a tough decision in the future if these two champions go up against each other, but I’ll leave that Sophie’s choice up to you. For now.

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I got a chance to meet Moebius in March 1992. It was in New York City and I was working at Jim Hanley’s Universe on 34th Street. He was doing a press tour for the Silver Surfer mini-series he did with Stan Lee. Remember that one, True Believers? (Did you know that in French, “The Silver Surfer” is the “Le Surfer d’Argent”? Which can sorta be translated into “The Money Surfer” because “Argent” is a word for both “silver” and “money” in French?)

Anyways, I was 19 at the time and still a huge Moebius fan. I was such a Moebius fan, in fact, that all my friends called me “Frankius” back then. Some still do. And man, is it a bitch to explain that one to people who don’t know who Jean Giraud is. Wait, you don’t know who Jean Giraud is? Then click around and come back. Cool? Cool. He’s basically a guy who drew Western comics and then drew Sci-Fi comics.  Really good ones.

So when he came into the store and I got to be one of the kids who hovered and made sure he was cool and had water, whatever. There was a line of people coming to get books signed. There was one Blueberry fan. Everyone else had Moebius books to get signed. In every book he drew a quick but perfect sketch. Usually a figure. Perfect proportions. Perfect gesture. It was pretty fun to watch.
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The other day I received the kind of email that I always dream of, to be frankly nerdy about it. Herbert (“The Wigglemuch”) Crowley was  the most mysterious cartoonist I documented in Art Out of Time. And he mostly remained so after publication. But two weeks ago a woman in Zurich identified herself as Crowley’s niece and sent along some pictures and info about Crowley and said she’d be in NYC in a week and would I like to meet with her. Well I did, and we met, and, yes folks, there is a Herbert Crowley archive. Not a huge one, and not quite enough to fill out his entire life, but quite a bit, including voluminous sketchbooks, a scrapbook, passports, and more. Now, when I published Art Out of Time, I knew nothing, not even birth and death dates. I know a whole lot more now, and as I learn yet more I’ll update you, my tiny, tiny public. (more…)

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We Win!

Animator Ben Jones and shopkeeper Sammy Harkham beholding an advance copy of Art in Time. Look for it May 1! Event info and plenty of goodies to follow. Watch this space.