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Archive for October, 2009

There were plenty of happenings to note at this year’s TCAF – the Doug Wright awards, Frank Santoro gracing my sketchbook with Jah Batman, the relentless growth of the Scott Pilgrim massive – but the most purely joyful was seeing a delighted Yoshihiro Tatsumi sit before fans lined up out through the door. “Great strip rescued from moldering obscurity” is a familiar comics story by now, yet too many of those cartoonists died amidst poverty or just indifference, unable to enjoy their own reclamation. Tatsumi can, and clearly does. Grim gutter chronicles like Good-Bye, A Drifting Life’s rueful social history: not the most intuitive candidates for new multiple-language readerships, but deserving ones.

I spoke to Mr. Tatsumi the day before TCAF began, on a high floor of a swanky hotel. He was meeting journalists all afternoon in their restaurant. It was a gorgeous day, summer’s first; Tatsumi’s wife spent most of our interview gazing down at the unbroken blue of Lake Ontario below. (They are a stylish and completely adorable couple.) We had this conversation as an ice cream sundae slowly liquefied around his spoon. Tatsumi laughed more than I expected, and sometimes he would stress a point by making violent gestures towards his chest, as if stabbing himself through the heart. Can the highlight of your festival precede the actual event?

(I owe a few people thanks and my gratitude for their help with this interview. To D&Q’s Peggy Burns, who arranged it, remaining unflappable even when a series of minor disasters made some fuckup writer late; to ace translator Jocelyn, who shadowed our words on the fly; and to Mr. Tatsumi, who gave me his time. Sheila Heti and Jeet Heer made separate assists during the long process of getting this thing published somewhere and I owe them both drinks.) — Chris Randle

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Chris Randle: A Drifting Life is about the formation of gekiga, but I’m wondering how you would characterize the style of the book itself.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi: In Japan everything’s always read the opposite of here, so I think about the design as two pages, and if everything will be reversed I think about that before I design – of course [the individual panels] as well, but I want to have a balance to the whole thing. When it flips I’m uneasy about it, but there’s no way around that.

[The translator wonders if that was precisely what I wanted to ask about, and I clarify that I meant how Tatsumi would characterize the artistic style of A Drifting Life in comparison with the gekiga period it’s about.]

YT: When I was writing back at that time – I was really enthusiastic, I had a lot of passion when I was drawing gekiga. But now gekiga and manga are [the same thing], so even if you draw gekiga, it’s just called manga. Comparing my passion with that time… I was much more passionate then.

CR: I interviewed Adrian [Tomine] a week or so or ago, and he thought – to him the book has a “symphonic” quality, because it moves back and forth from the stylized sections about you and your collaborators to these photo-realistic depictions of Japanese history and pop culture at that time. And I’m just wondering if this structure was consciously planned out beforehand…

YT: There’s 48 [chapters] in total, so you think of those and then you go into detail and write them. I thought about 60 or 70 different sections, but the circumstances of the [Japanese] company that is publishing it, as a serial – they stopped it in the middle. There’s still 15 or 20 more stories. I guess you don’t realize that it was stopped halfway through…

CR: No, I had no idea.

YT: The last two or three chapters are really rushed-through. I was forced to end it there. In any case, I’m going to write the rest of it, so…

CR: One part that I thought was really interesting in the book was your mention of negative news coverage about what the young artists were drawing – the “vulgar manga.” Could you describe that in more detail?

YT: The parents were really up in arms about these bad books. Manga at that time was different than it is now. It was friendly manga, so little kids could read it too… On the page you have the same number of panels, the people move from left to right and they’re all the same size and it all looks the same on the page… There was no movement or anything like that. We took inspiration from movies, doing zoom shots or close-ups. Using the camera. We wanted to use these techniques in manga, really violent movement. We were trying to move the panels in a realistic kind of way, to make work without lies, true work. In work before, for example, if a samurai cuts someone-

CR: There’s that great line from the book: “If a person is stabbed, they bleed.”

YT: Even if a person’s head was cut off and fell to the ground there was no blood, nothing came out. Like an onion [Tatsumi chuckles]. Even if the head was separated from the body it looked like the head was still alive… You couldn’t really say that would have a bad influence on kids. So we came in and took a bat to the whole thing. We did more realistic work, more photographic almost. In Tezuka Osamu’s work animals speak, and people answer them. I think that’s probably the influence of Walt Disney, but when we wrote mysteries it’s no good if animals are talking. If a dog watches a murder or something and you know that the killer escapes – if the dog says “oh hey, that’s the murderer,” that’s not really a good thing. So we didn’t draw things like that. We drew realistic things, like the strong feelings of happiness or sadness that people have. Close-ups on the main character to really show their anger – when you’re looking from far away there’s not really a lot of power in that angle. When you’re drawing a work like that, of course you’re going to see blood. If you compare that manga with the children’s manga up to that point, they just couldn’t forgive – they wouldn’t accept that kind of manga. The [parent-teacher associations] were like, “let’s just not buy it.” A lot of them sprung up all over Japan to boycott the work.

CR: That’s fascinating to me, because this was only a couple of years after the exact same thing essentially happened in the U.S., with parents and politicians and other figures in society trying to ban or boycott violent crime comics.

YT: Yeah, it was the same thing.

CR: You mentioned Tezuka, and there’s a few times in the book where he’s depicted as an icon. Obviously he was a great influence on you, but I’m wondering why you made that specific choice to depict him this way – there’s the silhouette on the train at the start of the book, and then he’s sort of shown floating above the sea near the end.

YT: That was how I felt about Tezuka at that time. I mean, when I was a kid I thought of him about on the same level as God. I really wanted to draw that honestly. Right now I don’t think many young people are buying Tezuka’s work in Japan, but at that time… he had a halo, and lights came off of him…

CR: To me, reading later Tezuka books like MW or Apollo’s Song and comparing them to his earlier work, it seems he became influenced by the new style you and others were already exploring. Do you agree with that? It’s almost as if he internalized the critique…

YT: We were imitating Tezuka when we became mangaka. [Then we created] what became gekiga, and Tezuka Osamu took an interest in it. Our work was all called “dramatic pictures,” he knew that, and kind of got angry, maybe? [Tatsumi laughs]. He fell down the stairs a little bit, he came down a few rungs… I think there was definitely some influence from us, but when we met with Tezuka and talked with him he would say, “Oh no, my work’s definitely not gekiga, it’s definitely manga.” But before we lost him [Tezuka died of cancer in 1989], when we talked to him, he would say: “Maybe my work is getting a little closer to gekiga, you never know.” … I really wanted him to just keep drawing manga no matter what. Gekiga was a world of – it was us, who were regular crazy people, and to have Tezuka Osamu come into that world… I didn’t really want that.

CR: Later on, after the events that you depict in A Drifting Life, you worked with a studio of assistants…Do you think you were a good teacher, or at least a good boss?

YT: I was a pretty selfish boss. I wasn’t really a good boss. If you use an assistant it stops being your own pictures, right? It’s not all your work anymore. Part of it is your work. So when you publish that… it’s hard for me. I always drew all the characters, and then the backgrounds, the details, the extra stuff – drawing the squares for the panels, shading, erasing the pencil marks – all those kinds of things, I had five assistants doing that. If you didn’t have five assistants you couldn’t get magazine serial work, because you had a deadline every week. You had to put out at least 30 pages a week. With just one person, with just yourself, it would be impossible, you just couldn’t work. So even though I had some people who didn’t really do a lot of work, I had five people.

CR: Are you still friendly with any of the collaborators or peers from those days, like Matsumoto or Takao Saito?

YT: At first there were seven of us, and then we had eight. And of those people now I’m really good friends with four of them. The other two don’t draw gekiga anymore, they’re doing different work. So there’s only two of us now that are doing gekiga, me and Saito Takao.

CR: Some of these artists are still almost totally unknown here, and perhaps they’ve been forgotten even in Japan as well. Are there any books or works that you really think should be rediscovered and published here, like yours was?

YT: I don’t really read anything recently, for some dozens of years I haven’t been reading anything…Japanese manga, we’re not really all together, we kind of keep to ourselves. This might sound a bit snotty, but – I read something like Golgo 13 and I’m maybe ten pages into it and I start thinking of something else, my thoughts just go somewhere else. It’s kind of a bother, so I just don’t read it. It’s not just Golgo 13 but anything that’s popular, you know? Even if I read it it just doesn’t go in my head. There’s a big gap between me and the younger artists, in terms of age, so even if I do read someone’s work I don’t feel it. I’m not moved by it. I’m sorry I have to say that, but…

CR: No, that’s okay. Is there a conscious way you approach political content in your art? Like the Hiroshima story from Good-Bye, or the anti-American protests at the end of A Drifting Life… are they just part of society’s broader story?

YT: In Japan, with politics and politicians there’s really nothing I personally can do, but what I can do – political unrest or the lives of the citizens, I’d like to express that somehow. When I was writing about Hiroshima in that story [“Hell”], I was broke forever, and everyone around me was broke. I was angry about that, you know? Japan has become such a rich country, and here we are, so why aren’t the politicians taking that extra money and giving it to us, giving it to the citizens? It’s the same now in Japan. It doesn’t change. My own dissatisfaction, my frustration, I put that into my work. At the time I wrote “Hell” I always worked for magazines, so I could write freely like that. “Hell” was written for Japanese Playboy, in fact. No one would publish that kind of manga, so it was kind of a surprise that even Playboy would give me work. I think I’ve left behind some really good work. I’d like to just keep writing like a novelist, keep writing for as long as I can. I’m pretty satisfied.

CR: I’ve heard that you’re already working on the next volume of your memoir and have a few hundred pages done, so I assume you’ll be doing that for the foreseeable future, but I’m wondering if there’s any books from before, after or during your gekiga period that you’d like to see reprinted… I want to see the one with the giant snakes.

YT: I have so many. If you put my short stories and my longer volumes together, I’ve written about a thousand pieces. I’d like to [recover] as many of them as possible. I plan on writing the continuation of A Drifting Life within the near future. If I don’t do it soon – I don’t have that much life left, you know? [Tatsumi laughs.] I gotta do it as soon as possible.

Labels: Chris Randle, Drawn and Quarterly, Jeet Heer, TCAF, Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Revisiting the 2009 TCAF Mainstream/Alternative Comics Panel

by Dash Shaw

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Read Comments (35)

Robin at Inkstuds was kind enough to have the TCAF panel Frank, Robin, Robert Dayton, Dustin Harbin and I participated in transcribed by Squally Showers. He sent me the transcription a few weeks ago and I finally got around to reading it.

Frankly, I thought this panel sucked, due to nobody in particular’s fault. But I think most panels are meandering and boring despite having intelligent moderators and participants. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations. Anyway, I’m just going to excerpt sections of it here and intersperse it with some new commentary.

I wasn’t sure what the point of the panel was and, reading the transcription now, I don’t think anybody knew what the point was. If the point was to hear Frank speak enthusiastically about Kirby and Steranko, it succeeded and that’s definitely an enjoyable, worthy reason to attend a panel. No joke.

But I fear that the panel was interpreted as a statement that “alternative” cartoonists having affection for “mainstream” comics is noteworthy or unusual or “new” somehow. It’s not. “Alternative” cartoonists bemoaning the abundance of boring, mundane mostly-autobio work is a false feeling to me. There are a lot of autobio “real life” stories, but they’ve always been dwarfed by the pseudo-“mainstream” genre work, even outside of Marvel and DC. Look at Oni Press and Slave Labor Graphics and Antarctic Press and Caliber Comics and Tundra and on and on. Look at the Hernandez Brothers. Look at the wave of alternative comics in the nineties… Zot (which somehow looks both really dated and also pre-Tezuka reprint boom ahead-of-its-time), Bone, Kabuki (don’t forget that Scarab spin-off series!), Madman, THB (fucking Escapo! still lookin good a decade later,) etc.

When I was a student at SVA in the early ’00s I was mostly hanging out with the Meathaus guys and almost all of them were doing “alternative” sci-fi/fantasy/horror/whatever genre comics. Some later did more “alternative”-leaning books for DC or Vertigo. Tomer Hanuka did Bipolar (the last issue of which was essentially a Bizzaro World Aquaman story) and later did the Midnight Mass covers for Vertigo. And, of course, Farel Dalrymple did the great Omega ~~Man~~ the Unknown series after doing his solo, surreal Pop Gun War series that, aesthetically, is in the post-Marvel House Style world similar to Jim Rugg (Street Angel from Slave Labor). Even Thomas Herpich’s (who I adore) second book was mostly science fiction short stories. Meanwhile the amerimanga artists at Tokyopop and Oni were doing sci-fi/romance/fantasy comics.

There’s been wave after wave of “alternative” comics with ties to “mainstream” comics from the ’80s to today, unaffected by some horrible glut of boring real-life comics that people complain about. I’m not saying that those books don’t exist (they do). I’m saying that I don’t think there’s been a point where one genre was threatening to extinguish the other.

Frank Santoro: Is everyone … I’m going to talk as if everybody knows what I‘m talking about. If you don’t know what I‘m talking about, please interject at any time. But basically, it’s like Kirby of course created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, but then in the ‘70s, when he went back to Marvel, he was doing these really crazy books like 2001, which was essentially based on the movie. But by issue 5 it had nothing to do with the movie. [laughter] What’s really interesting about this comic is … can you scroll ahead a couple of things … it starts off as this crazy battle and—couple of more?—and he goes to The Source which is, if you remember 2001, the black monolith. I call it The Source. [Robin laughs] Can you scroll ahead one more time? He’s coming out of this battle—one more, one more—and then it’s just like it’s all—keep going one more, a little more, a little more. [murmurs of dissent.] Where’s the locker room?

Robin McConnell: Oh, it didn’t make it in.

Frank: Oh bummer. Well, anyway, it’s like a game. It’s basically like, was it Heroesville?

Dash Shaw: Comicsville.

Frank: Comicsville. So it’s like a game. It’s like a virtual reality game. So this whole episode in the beginning is just this game but it’s like to me, it was this treatise on Kirby’s idea of what being a hero is or was. It’s a game. It’s like a sport. I think it was transparent about what all his comics are about. To me, this particular comic wraps it all up, I horde this comic whenever I see it in the bargain bins. A lot of people don’t like this late style, but I think this is the kind of style that I think is carrying on. It’s still, I think, very fresh. It’s not like his old stuff. It’s really different. I think it’s really ahead of the curve and I’m running out of steam.

Robin: When did this come out in comparison to the New Gods stuff?

Frank: This was after the New Gods stuff. So this is post-DC. He got canned from DC. All of his DC books got canceled. Then he went back to Marvel. This was around the time he was doing The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, the Captain America/Black Panther stuff. Anybody who read that Captain America—Madbomb, those issues. Those are really great. Anybody else want to riff on [inaudible, 2:47]

Robert Dayton: You know what I find really interesting about his 2001 stuff is it’s almost like a mantra. You buy every issue and as a kid you probably feel ripped off, because every issue goes exactly the same. At the end of the issue, a caveman or someone back in time, meets the monolith. The End. Next issue: Same thing. It’s almost like reading Gerald Jablonski’s comics. It becomes like a mantra. It’s just repetition. It’s kind of fascinating reading each and every issue, because even the series, like basically he did a Treasury edition of 2001.

Dash: Yeah, it’s insane.

Robert: Which is insane. It’s massive. It’s huge. It’s gorgeous.

Frank: It’s beautiful. You know those oversized treasuries? Remember those things from the ‘70s? It’s an adaptation of the movie, right?

Robert: Yeah.

Frank: But it’s totally different. It’s Kirby-style. It makes no sense.

Dash: He got some production stills from the movie that you can see that he directly swiped from.

Frank: Yeah!

Dash: And then he just connected it with like just Kirby stuff.

Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert: And Kirby was such a collage artist, too. So in the Treasury edition, there’s all these crazy collages.

Dash: The sequence right after this where it moves into the reality is really nice, too, because the reality turns out to not … I don’t know if …

Frank: Yeah, well see, he’s playing this game.

Dash: This isn’t real. Like sometimes when I …

Frank: Like self-heat chicken dinner? He lives in this giant apartment complex and then it’s just this thing. It’s Mountain Air.

Dash: But that beach scene isn’t real.

Frank: So it’s all Matrix! It’s like Matrix. It’s all … but like pre- … whatever, go ahead. [laughter] Go ahead. Go ahead.

Dash: I was going to say when you flip through a lot of these comics, my first reaction is these are way too wordy. I don’t know. Do you have that feeling?

Robin: They’re wordy, but …

Dash: But then in this sequence, you flip through it and you think that “This is actually real,” but all of the text is about how none of this, “This isn’t a real seascape” and everything like that. It’s a juxtaposition.

Robin: Do you find this is one of the more Kirby doing a better job of mixing the two.

Dash: Well, he wrote these, too.

Robin: Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying. Sometimes the story isn’t as strong as the art.

Frank: Well, I think the story is equally as strong as the art. I mean … go ahead.

Dash: Well, I don’t think he would do this the Marvel style if he was doing it for himself. Right?

Frank: Right.

Dustin Harbin: I would have thought with the wordiness that this was in the Marvel style. Because the story looks so clear with that page layout and then all these words were kind of scotch taped on top of it. Which is kind of the Marvel style …

Frank: Well, he wrote, all of Kirby’s stuff, you look at the originals in like the Kirby Collector or whatever, all of his stuff, he has all of the dialogue written in the sides or the back and then Stan or whomever just kind of cleaned it up a little bit. So I think that he’s still doing it in that style, in that way, because I think Mike Royer edited these also, so he helped clean them up. But for me, this was a real gateway comic—just to go back to the main thrust of the panel. It’s like, I was really into Kirby but this was way out there. I didn’t like his ‘70s style. I thought it was really wack and I hated it for a long time. It took me a long time to get into it. But to me, this starts heading into this alternate world. I don’t want to say alternative comics, but it’s just so different from what he had been doing for the 20 years previous that, like I feel like this is what ends up influencing the current generation. So …

It’s hard to read this and not think of Mazzucchelli, both since Asterios Polyp came out recently and he’s one of the kings of the “mainstream”/”alternative” fusion artists. Polyp has some stellar examples of this. My favorite sequence in the book is when Polyp, the “paper architect,” builds a tree house. I told Mazz I loved this scene and he said: “Kirby.”

Or how about this Steranko-esque film still-like panel of Asterios and Hana at the beach, pausing in silhouette, below. I like the melodrama of it. It’s ballsy.

Frank: The Escape Artist. Yeah, so Steranko, after Kirby—Kirby was a big deal in the ’60s, but then in the late ‘60s, there was this guy who was really kind of like the new regime was Jim Steranko, James Steranko. He took Kirby’s style and made it really design-y and really modern.

Robin: Deco pop, almost.

Frank: Deco pop is a good way of describing it. This particular story on the right, this is Bernie Krigstein from the late ‘50s and this is a Steranko story from the early ‘70s and a horror comic from Marvel. Can we click ahead one? And you can see he’s doing all these really wacky layouts and stuff like that. It’s not very … like this face is very Kirby to me and a lot of the figures are very Kirby, but as Dash likes to point out if you think Kirby’s anatomy is messed up, Steranko’s is even more messed up. He’s just doing it. So a lot of these figures are really cut-out figures and stuff. But he’s doing a lot of things with time that hearken back to what Krigstein was doing in the ‘50s.

Dash: The Krigstein comic is “The Master Race,” that Spiegelman likes so much to talk about. He did an article in The New Yorker about it.

Robin: Yeah. I think he first did an essay back in [inaudible, 11:14]

Frank: See, this is the subway going by and all the figures going by fast. He’s breaking up the time like way differently. I mean, this is ’59 …

Robin: This is earlier than that.

Frank: Really?

Dash: I want to hear Frank … you called this cinematic before, those panels. I’ve heard that used a lot. I don’t know if you used it.

Frank: Did I say that?

Dash: Why do you think people call those kind of panels, tall …

Frank: Oh, the tall panels. Because it breaks up the time differently. I think it’s a way of like Kirby is all about it’s not instantaneous moment to moment. It’s more like every ten seconds or something. You see the punch, then you see the reaction. But he’s doing every … this is like five seconds or whatever. This is like an instantaneous thing. Cinematic … I think so, but it’s just more like … Steranko’s cinematic in the sense of his framing, I think. His framing is way more …

Dash: If you scrolled, those long horizontal things like this.

Frank: Oh this. Yeah. Well, I think that’s cinematic because in the late ‘60s, everybody went panorama in the ‘60s, so it’s like your eye, I think, is going across these panels.

Robin: It’s kind of like the whole Orson Welles …

Frank: Deep focus.

Robin: That long …

Robert: The pan. You know what I was thinking? I was looking at these and speaking of cinematic, I was really thinking that Steranko’s a lot like Brian De Palma. That’s because both De Palma and both Steranko, for a lot of reasons, actually, they both use a lot of genre tropes. Like this is an old dark house kind of story. Also, De Palma would always make you conscious that you were watching a film and I think Steranko makes you really conscious that you were reading a comic. That’s what the framing—I mean, De Palma would use a lot of split screen and you see the way things are divided up here. Also, the way that they acknowledged the old masters: Steranko acknowledging Krigstein and Kirby and De Palma acknowledging Hitchcock, most especially.

Something that Jeet Heer touched on previously on CC, and was also asked at the TCAF panel, was how necessary it is for readers to track or be interested in artist’s influences.

Audience member: [inaudible, 45:45-] I mean, there is value to knowing stuff. It’s okay, but if you just want pleasure and it doesn’t matter to you and you’re getting the pleasure and something’s hitting the pleasure button and you don’t know that it’s just a third generation knockoff, then it’s okay. At the same time, if you want to be an informed reader … [continues]

Dash: I think if you’re coming to this panel, you want to be an informed reader.

Audience member: … reading the best work …

Robin: The main thing is you enjoy comics. Let’s see what that person enjoyed.

Robert: If you like this, you might like this.

Robin: That’s exactly it. Without being commercial thing like DC’s, “You like Watchmen, here’s the next thing to read.” You like Brandon Graham? Read Moebius, you’ll love it if you haven’t read Moebius. That’s kind of the conduct of people who love this stuff and reading it is rather important. There are so many comics to read, and people don’t really know that. And good luck at finding this stuff for an affordable except for the horrible Incal reprints that are re-colored.

Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary for readers to be informed about this stuff. It’s only of interest to people who care. But, I think the big “trickle down” effect IS interesting. I care. Not for an “I know who’s ripping off of who! Ha ha!” annoying reason, but because it’s telling a wider story about the psychology of artists. If you’re someone who’s interested in that, it’s worth tracking what was coming out when, or who was reading what when, because the “trickle down” effect over time is more exciting, to me, than holding a romantic belief that everyone’s working in a vacuum devoid of influences. All of the artists struggling to reach that “vacuum”/influence-less state are revealing in their own way.

Obviously, I don’t think people should feel that artists are handed a menu of what came before them and starting ordering things (“I’ll have a little bit of Kirby sprinkled with Sol Lewitt, please”), and I don’t think people should feel artists are necessarily having a conversation with other artists exclusively (“Ware did this, so I went the other way.”) The motivations are a tangled web encompassing a million things. It’s the whole psychology of the person. If you’re happy never reaching a conclusion, just bouncing around reading comics history or whatever, then it’s a journey worth making. Or at least a panel worth attending.

Huge thanks to Robin again and Squally Showers, Robert Dayton, Dustin Harbin and Frank.

Here’s a random Gray Morrow Edge of Chaos spread, because it rules. Show n tell.

Labels: David Mazzucchelli, Farel Dalrymple, Jim Rugg, panels, Paul Pope, TCAF

SPXreport3

by Frank Santoro

Saturday, October 3, 2009

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Last one. Very brief. Sort of like a comment in the comment section of the last post.

One of the best parts about SPX is the hang-out after the Ignatz Awards. I’ve never actually attended the awards, but I like the drinking afterward. Anyways, me and Ed Piskor were bullshittin’ for awhile. Girls Roller Derby was the subject. And then we made fun of Jim Rugg. A laff riot.

Then James Kolchalka and I starting riffing on some of his old mini-comics. I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite one. It was Paradise Sucks. When was that? 1994? Then I just went off about how important John Porcellino’s Spit and a Half distro was to me and “the community” back then. And somehow, I was able to use that as a springboard for telling James that he “won the war” for us. Cuz, for me, when I saw James’ hardcover Sketchbook Diaries in New York City bookstores in ~~2002~~ 2004, I felt like he had won. Meaning, he was able to carry his lo-fi personal vision to the mainstream venue without altering his voice.

Mr. Kolchalka reminded me that that big hardcover only sold so well, but that he appreciated what I was saying.

What am I saying? I’m saying that the lesson of the “small press” is that one can hone one’s personal voice within a support group of like-minded folks without making fatal concessions to the larger marketplace. And in these days of 500-page graphic novel debuts, it’s an important lesson. I could go on and on, but I think it would be like preaching to the choir.

The rest of the con was great. But since I think we’re all tired of SPX reports, I’m ending mine here. See you next year!

Labels: Ed Piskor, James Kochalka, John Porcellino, SPX

SPXreport2

by Frank Santoro

Thursday, October 1, 2009

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We were in the back this year. Unusual, but not bad. A flowing artery within the event. The big seller was the Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. The question on everybody’s lips was, “How did Ben do it?”

Monster Men sold well. That thing sells at shows. New Anya Davidson wowed the kids early. New 1-800-MICE awed them later. New Cold Heat platters moved at an even clip. Dan wasn’t grumpy. All was well.

It was a quiet year in a good way. We didn’t have a big new book out. It was a little different than it’s been in the past. Like maybe we just enjoyed being there instead of feeling the “we need to do well at this show” kind of pressure.

Right at the outset of the show, the con’s lasting image was burned in my brain: Kim Thompson and Gary Groth carrying a wooden palette piled high with empty boxes to the exit door by our table. They weren’t fucking around. No interns, no “assistants.” Now that’s what I call, “Keeping it Real” (Dave Chapelle voice).

Jon Vermilyea had his new silkscreen comic and a bunch of prints for sale. Jon’s like a rock star now. The Simpsons comic has sealed his reputation! (Mr. Burns voice)

And next to Jon V was John P! The man himself, John Porcellino. I have actually never met my Midwestern pen-pal of 16 years. So I hugged him. Always a charge to meet one’s heroes.

Meanwhile, Dan Zettwoch and Kevin Huizenga laffed at me while I set up one of my back issue boxes. I thought I’d make a killing off my stash of old Zettwoch zines. But he had reprinted the ones I was selling! Foiled! Still, I sold an original mini-comic edition of Glorianna (Super-Monster #14). According to Bill Boichel, it’s the “greatest mini-comic of all time.” I think Kevin sold like a thousand of those things a few years back.

Does Mr. Oliveros really know how hard Jessica and Allison work during this con? They move a lot of books. It’s like a science. A warship. They sail in and take no prisoners.

Back at the stealth submarine that is PictureBox, I was pleasantly surprised to see my “back issues” were being perused by the usual disaffected con attendee. “I have this” was the oft repeated exclamation. Sold a bunch of Brendan McCarthy and Kevin Nowlan. Still surprised how many folks ain’t hep to Mazzucchelli’s “Angel story” in Marvel Fanfare. Seeds of Rubber Blanket.

Rolling deep this year, the Jog/Mautner/Tucker posse scattered the crowd as their trained Terminator-critic eyes scoured the tables. Look out Loretta! These guys were causing trouble everywhere they went. I saw most of the now infamous critics’ panel where Tucker walked out to use the bathroom. Instant classic.

Sean Collins’ “New Action” panel was a lot of fun. An insightful and enjoyable panel. And I thought the audience was into it. I hope I didn’t repeat myself too much. I think it went really well, tho. Check it out here.

Then I was starving. Ah, good ol’ Tasty Diner. Milkshakes and veggie burgers. And Kevin talking about Little Lulu. Instant classic.

[More soon. Just wanted to get something up during the work week.]