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From Creepy #64; art by Howard Chaykin, words by Rich Margopoulos

Yes, comics are always racing to your friendly local merchant, but some arrive faster than others! For example, apparently Midtown Comics in NYC is expecting a whole stack of Fantagraphics releases this week, including the Lorenzo Mattotti-drawn Stigmata and vol. 2 of Pirus/Mezzo’s King of the Flies, but Diamond doesn’t have them listed for this week. As a result, you’ll want to keep your eyes peeled – you never know what might turn up.

I’ve been reading a stack of new Steve Ditko comics lately — you might say I am Paying Attention — but I don’t want to comment until I’m done, so let’s go right into the new releases:

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Hello and welcome to Comic Comics weekend edition. This week I asked the great John Porcellino to talk a little bit about drawing his comics at print size – or as John likes to say working “100%.” Please enjoy.
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Hey all,

Mr. Frank asked me to write about making comics at 100%, or the same size as the published form.

I started making lots of drawings as a kid, using scrap paper I found in my Dad’s office. So I grew up drawing on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. I also began making little booklets… paper of various sizes folded in half and glued along the “spine” which I’d then fill with stories and drawings. When I was a freshman in high school, I realized that if I folded letter-sized paper in half, and drew my comics on them that way, my Dad could photocopy them at his office and I could hand them out (without staples or binding of any kind) to my friends. Thus was created my very first zine: a D&D/Cerebus inspired comic called Tales of Hogarth the Barbarian Pig. At the time I was almost wholly unaware of the comic book world. I played D&D, and the hobby shop in my area carried copies of Dragon magazine, which featured a satiric comic in the back called Phineas Fingers. Somehow I saw a copy of Cerebus too, and lifted the animal idea without ever reading the comic itself.
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On the Comics Reporter site, Tom Spurgeon commented on my earlier Sugar and Spike posting. Tom’s entire comment is worth reading but I wanted to quickly address Tom’s key point: “I don’t feel confident going as far as to suggest — as I think this criticism does — that that there’s no audience for this material presented that way, or that a better audience might be had by skipping this endeavor entirely…. I still think given the inability to snap my fingers and change that company’s culture that I prefer this stuff out on someone’s desk than back in a closet somewhere.”

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In a recent (or recent-enough) interview, the invariably insightful Lynda Barry noted that, “There was a group right before Matt and I started who were in the Village Voice — Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Stan Mack, who did Real Life Funnies. And I finally met him and he doesn’t look anything like he draws himself, which I thought was hilarious. There’s all these people who were in the early National Lampoon — but now it’s as if they do not exist…. When people say, ‘You’re one of the first women cartoonists,’ I say, ‘Nooo, there was Shary Flenniken and M.K. Brown and Trina Robbins.’”

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Normally I’d be overjoyed at the news that DC comics is at long last doing a book reprinting Sugar and Spike, the delightful kids comics Sheldon Mayer started in 1956  and continued working on till 1992. Chronicling the misadventures of two talking babies (who can communicate with each other and other kids but not adults), Sugar and Spike hasn’t received the critical acclaim doled out to Carl Barks or John Stanley, but the series has a real sweetness to it that is worth cherishing.

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Above we see last weekend’s reading material, Mike Howlett’s The Weird World of Eerie Publications, a 2010 Feral House release focused on the one of the shadiest corners of the b&w horror magazine scene of 1965-83. It’s a breezy piece of fandom enthusiasm, heavily illustrated; the meat of the book, for me, comes in a single 85-page chapter toward the end that walks you person-by-person through every artist that ever worked on Weird or Witches’ Tales or Tales of Voodoo or any of the rest, doling our their backgrounds and explaining their approaches.

The vast majority of the Eerie Pubs stories were either retouched, gored-up reprints of pre-Code comics or remakes of pre-Code comics — ‘scripted’ by handing the artists photocopies of the original stories and asking them to accommodate the same narration and dialogue — which isn’t exactly a recipe for critical adulation, so I suspect a bunch of Howlett’s information will be new, particularly concerning the large contingent of Argentinian artists on the payroll. But even more interesting to me was the information on the all-important Eerie Pubs cover art, which was my first exposure to the stuff, via a gallery included on one of Something Weird’s dvds a few years back.

Indeed, Howlett’s interest in the material is not unlike that of a dedicated exploitation movie enthusiast, thrilled by the shameless money-making antics of bullshit magnate Myron Fass (NSFW – and boy, who would ever name a magazine FLICK, as if it’d look like “FUCK” on the newsstands, gosh that’s silly!) while working through the actual magazines’ tendencies to fail to credit artists or ruthlessly slice ‘n dice and recycle material. Like a low-budget movie crew happening upon a prime, cheap location, the acquisition of a big cache of Johnny Bruck cover art from German sci-fi paperbacks would prompt the Eerie crew, in 1971, to not only launch a pair of similarly cheap sci-fi comics magazines but make over the existing horror lineup in sci-fi style, perhaps until the stash ran low. Sizzle before steak, etc.

Yet the lingering style (by which I mean the cover style) of the Eerie Pubs didn’t come from Bruck, or moonlighting Selecciones Ilustradas artist and Warren contributor Fernando Fernández, or Argentine artist Oscar Antonio Novelle, whose work is detailed for the cover seen up top – no, I agree with Howlett that the ‘face’ of Eerie was one Bill Alexander, perhaps the most prominent black artist of the b&w horror magazines, albeit in terms of works displayed rather than credit given, which really made him nearly invisible.

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Comments Off on The Mark You Make Is The Mark You See

When I was in high school (10th grade?) I saw Masters of Comic Book Art. It was a videotape collection of interviews with Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Berni Wrightson, Frank Miller, Moebius, Dave Sim, and Art Spiegelman. Somehow, I was able to dub my own copy and used to watch it when I would draw. It was really inspiring back in 1988. Still is, I think.

The one interview that kind of baffled me as a teen was the Art Spiegelman interview. He was the only artist represented who wasn’t on my radar at the time. He didn’t draw costumed heroes or genre comics. He was drawing something from his own experience but using comics to flip the script. Spiegelman was talking about how he wanted to feel like he was writing. He said he was using office supplies to draw with like typing paper and white out.

Then he talked about how most comics are drawn larger than they are actually printed. He explained how the lines become smaller and how there is a refinement process that occurs with the artwork. And then he said that’s what he didn’t want to happen with Maus – that the refinement process created a distance between the reader and the maker. He said that he wanted it to feel like a diary – that he wanted the mark he made to be the mark you see. (more…)

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“Better you look corned beef hash in the face than live in constant expectation of a warm bird and a cold bottle.” So advises Eugene Zimmerman in his recently reissued 1910 how-to book, Cartoons and Caricatures. First, I like this “face facts, you might suck” advice to a young cartoonist, and second I like the idea of Corned Beef Hash (now making a big comeback at old-timey restaurants all over Brooklyn!) having a face. It soothes me somehow.

Anyhow, this reissue is one in a series of books from Lost Art Books focusing on forgotten turn-of-the-century cartoonists, most of whom did caricature, illustration or gags for now-forgotten magazines before these things were avidly reprinted in book form. (more…)

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Wimbledon Green will be back.

I don’t know why this hasn’t gotten more attention, but a few days ago Bryan Munn reported the happy news that a new Seth graphic novel will be coming out later this year. It’s a prequel to Wimbledon Green, offering a look at the early days of The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. I suspect that the work Seth has done researching the lives of Jimmy Frise, Doug Wright and other classic Canadian cartoonists might inform this work. In any case, this is certainly a title to add to the growing “books to look forward to” list.

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Okay, these are both gimmes, basically, but since there are two of them, maybe that’s the equivalent of one solid post. Plus they’re both literary, so you know this is some well thought out bloggery.

First, in the immortal words of Paul Hardcastle: 19.

Rocketman, like comic books, is assembled by the Raketen-Stadt in order to serve Their designs. When he no longer serves Their ends, They dismantle him. But fragments of him survive in Pynchon‘s text. No one who reads Gravity’s Rainbow will forget the legend of Rocketman, the greatest preterite super-hero of the postmodern world. For a moment, he defied Their will and fought for truth, justice, and the Pynchon way.

—H. Brenton Stevens, “‘Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s . . . Rocketman!’: Pynchon’s Comic Book Mythology in Gravity’s Rainbow“

I haven’t actually done more than skim that essay yet, by the way, as I am currently nearing the halfway mark in Gravity’s Rainbow, and don’t want to spoil things for myself. From a cursory perusal, it looks like Stevens may miss or downplay some of the subtler comic-book connections going on, such as the repeated Plastic Man references, but more knowledgeable others (and a future me) are better positioned to determine that. I will say that at this point I better understand why Thomas Pynchon tapped Frank Miller for the cover, a move that no longer seems intentionally perverse, but rather extremely apt—I just wish Miller hadn’t ultimately turned in such a relatively restrained image.

And now, 20:

At first I was read to. My grandfather had taught Greek and Latin at Columbia, and he read to me from a book that had abbreviated versions of The Odyssey and The Iliad—plus a lot of classic fairy tales, which, as you know, are extremely disturbing. Then I began reading on my own. I read mostly Westerns. My parents approved of that, because at least they were books. But when I got into comic books, they disapproved. I would read them by flashlight under the covers. No one realized in those days that 1930s Action Comics and DC Comics, Superman and Batman, would become legendary in American culture. They taught me a great deal about narrative—lots of invention and no pretense of realism.

—Harry Mathews, interviewed in the Spring 2007 issue of The Paris Review

Also no real surprise, considering the various Ou-X-Po connections, but there you go.

[Tip of the hat to DB for the latter.]

P.S. I finally got a copy of Neonomicon #3, so anyone interested in the CCCBC should find and read a copy before next week if you want to follow along.

UPDATE: Since I posted this, I found a more up-to-date and comprehensive article about Pynchon/comics connections online at The Walrus, written by Sean Rogers. I recommend it and you can read it here.