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-I started thinking about how mainstream something like punk-as-fuck Nate Powell’s book could be in France. It was a surreal scene when Dash and I finally made our way down to the “mainstream” tent (Casterman. Dargaud, etc.) and in this high-ceiling circus to find Nate’s book displayed like a mainstream jewel. Kind of awesome. Seriously.

–Kaz Strzepek is a really interesting guy. Having completed two long installments of his serial Mourning Star, he’s sort of an an anomaly in the North American alt scene where the tendency is to produce 40 pages of fractured short stories every other year. He’s more like a French cartoonist in that he produces long adventure narratives. The subject matter and his drawing style kind of fit in to the Trondheim Dungeon school. So it makes sense that he’d be popular in France. He was pretty busy signing throughout the festival.

-Serge Ewenczyk, our publisher in France, really took care of us. He explained that it helped to sell books because we were there to do signings and meet the fans. He doesn’t publish any French artists so he’s carving out an interesting niche for himself in the big picture over there. Serge is publishing an anthology of American Splendor hits. Just think if Harvey Pekar would have made it to the festival this year? It would have been like being in a comic-book movie.

-Peter Kuper has amazing stories and has sort of seen it all. Peter’s been a hero of mine since the mid-’80s when I discovered World War 3. A total class act, Peter is the consummate pro who’s been to Angoulême like 7 times. So, sitting next to him discussing politics or Howard Chaykin was constantly entertaining. Also, did you know that his first comics job was inking Richie Rich?

-Dash is my brother and I love him dearly. The kid just kills it every time. Before he even arrived at the festival people of all ages were coming up to me and explaining to me how much they loved Bottomless Belly Button. Then I had to explain to them that I wasn’t Dash and that I was just sitting next to his pile of books for sale. They’d look disappointed but then happy when I told them that he’d be signing at the table Friday. So of course Friday was jammed with people lined up to get their Shaw books signed. Talk about performance art. Dash draws all over that brick of a book (Bottomless). It’s pretty cool. One time on Friday he was away from the table and a really pretty French girl came by to get a copy of his book. In a lovely accent she asked if I was Dash. I was like, “Yah, I’m Dash.” Just kidding. Okay, maybe for like a minute.

-Really awesome to see everyone from Fumetto. Das Fumetto Team, I mean. They are super excited for Dan’s big Kirby retrospective of sorts. More on that soon.

-Does anyone know the story about how Crumb’s Genesis went to auction and the prospective publishers had to write a letter and explain why they wanted to publish it? I heard one version and just want to hear someone else’s…

-Moebius booth. I could barely see him at his booth cuz there were so many people. I heard that there was a new Arzach book and was excited about buying it until I saw it. It looks like he colored it in, ah, color with Photoshop but printed it in grayscale. And there are no spreads. On the left hand page is the text of the story and on the right are comic panels. And the design of the book is awful. It was so disappointing I almost cried. It looked like a bad print-on-demand comic from a small press show. Black and white and gray. Arzach should be in color, no? I was so bummed out.

-Nice to see Mike Dawson’s friendly face. Still have never been formally introduced to Alex Robinson. They looked like they were having fun.

-Ex-Libres tent. It took me 5 minutes of looking at the word “ex-libres” to figure out it meant used books. Found some Corben hardcover albums for cheap. Dash snatched a Moebius collection that was right out of my grasp. Oof. Rain. Tons of used albums (meaning traditional BD-sized hardcover comic “albums” for all you riri’s out there) of crazy amazing adventure stories. It’s like being a kid in the 20th century in America before Spider-Man and Batman infiltrated our minds. It’s all Westerns and Sci-Fi and Adventure and Romance.

-We would sit for hours and hours drawing. Me, Kaz, Dash, and Peter. If we weren’t actually signing a book for someone, we were drawing in sketchbooks (Peter) or working on actual pages for a new book (Kaz) or just loafing about & shit talking (Me and Dash). Serge was like, “Frank, you’re a worse shit talker than Dash, haha”.

-L’Association books look weird. Sorry. Just had to say that. Communist? I mean, I get it. The mainstream BD albums are a little boring format wise after you see thousands of them. Most of L’Association’s small books look like Black Sparrow Press books, like an old Bukowski book and that’s cool, but then the interiors are usually black and white and it’s all a little too high/low for me. Row after row of same sized paperbacks with muted matte cover stocks bearing the names of bombastic auteurs. Faux grit. Forgive me for saying so, but it’s just weird. Sorry. Cornelius‘ books POP like comics should. Blutch’s Peplum book published by them is beautiful. It sizzles. To me anyways.

-Many leading American alt/art comics not as well known here. They say it’s because long stories are the way to go in France. The American tendency of short fractured narratives that comprise some sort of over-arching narratives don’t fly here. Even if those over arching narratives run into the hundreds of pages.

-I saw that Ben Katchor’s work got re-arranged when published here and it looked weird. They tried to make it more like a regular BD album. So the long wide book became a vertical album and skewed Katchor’s pacing. To me anyways. I think that’s the other thing here: They aren’t format crazy like we are in North America.

-And it was fun to just hang out at the bar every night. Met a lot of awesome people. It’s just a really pleasant atmosphere. I can understand French pretty well, so I think I had an easier time than most. But usually someone would step in and translate when we were all sitting around talking so it wasn’t too hard for the rest of the gang. (Hint to American cartoonists: just say “Enchante”—like this: “On Shawn Tay”—when you meet someone and then smile. Kaz put his foot in his mouth like every other hour trying greet a fan, haha.)

-Also fun to see some complete other culture that reads comics but without all the Marvel/DC bullshit. I mean, you’d see American mainstream comics here and there but it was like a blip on the radar. And I dunno, that’s kind of awesome. It felt very freeing.

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Here are a few notes that might help future research:

1. Wolverton. Crumb has often talked about his debt to Basil Wolverton, going back to the sacred cover of Mad comics #11. Interestingly, Wolverton and Crumb both adapted the Bible. I’d like to know how familiar Crumb was with Wolverton’s religious art (now available in the great Fantagraphics book The Wolverton Bible).

Above is a scene from Wolverton’s rendition of the Noah story.

And here is a panel from Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Notice that in both Wolverton and Crumb, the choppy waves have an oddly static look, as if they were sand dunes rather than water.

2. Billy DeBeck. I’ve never heard Crumb talk about Billy DeBeck but Crumb’s big-nosed style, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had a strong touch of DeBeck’s bounciness.

Above are two excerpts from Billy DeBeck’s work, one showing the character Bunky (the very eloquent baby) and the other Lowzie, the bonnet-wearing hillbilly.

And here is Crumb’s Big Baby (from Big Ass #1, 1969).

3. E.C. Segar. The creator of Popeye is much loved by Crumb.

Here is a panel from a Segar Thimble Theatre page (July 19, 1931). Pay close attention to the crowd, a jumble of noses.

And here is Crumb’s cover for Weirdo #14, where he pays homage to Segar’s crowd of fools.

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Motley crew: Dash Shaw, Frank Santoro, Serge Ewenczyk, Kaz Strzepek, and Peter Kuper. Serge is this gang’s publisher in France: éditions çà et là

Cub reporter Frank Santoro here with your Comics Comics 2010 Angouleme report. Okay, not really. I posted a diary of sorts about the festival over on my Cold Heat blog. It would have looked like a FlickrFaceSpace page if I’d have posted it here. It’s just lots of pictures. Thanks.

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Get our your Sharpies and your calendars and prepare yourselves to draw circles. Because February 15th has just been officially declared National Comics Comics Day!

You will see what that means very soon. In the meantime, it is not too early to be excited.

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Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study of a galloping horse.

This is the first of a new series of blog posts I’m going to be starting up under the umbrella title “Research Notes.” These posts will be quick notes on ideas that could (and maybe should) be spun off into larger, more polished essays. But in the research note I’ll just jot down the preliminary notion. Since Comics Comics has a very smart and articulate readership, my hope is that the notes will spark suggestions for how the idea can be refined and developed.

So the first research note is for an essay on “Comics and photography”; the idea was sparked by Dan’s earlier comments on the new Rip Kirby book (and by a subsequent conversation Dan and I had). Some quick thoughts:

Comics and photography were both part of the proliferation of images that occurred in the 19th century, the explosion of the visual made possible by mechanical reproduction.

To what extent were late 19th and early 20th century cartoonists like A.B. Frost and Winsor McCay, who did so much to introduce sequential movement into comics, influenced by the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge?

Winsor McCay’s motion study of a galloping bed.

Frank King was a lifelong shutterbug, at the vanguard of the first generation of middle-class Americans who used the camera to record family life. As Chris Ware and I have documented in the Walt and Skeezix series, photographs were a major source for King, who used family photos as a reference tool. Yet King only very rarely directly copied from photos; rather he used photos as a memory tool. And indeed, even King’s own photos seem somehow not to record so much a moment in time as a slightly-fuzzy memory of a moment. King’s photos are nostalgic and backward looking.

The Sickles/Caniff school is often linked to movies, and it’s true that Sickles and Caniff were great film buffs and absorbed much from the cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, not just classics like Citizen Kane but also B-movies with their slightly darkened sets. Caniff and Orson Welles had a mutually admiring correspondent. A fan letter to Caniff in the early 1940s smartly compared Terry and the Pirates to Casablanca. What hasn’t been investigated is the likely impact of magazine photos: the 1930s were the decade Life magazine took off as America’s leading photo-magazine. The use of photographs to record the news, particularly the darker corners of the Depression and the onset of the war, transformed the world’s visual imagination: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange (who was friends with George Herriman by the way), George Strock, and many others. Caniff was paying attention.

Socially and politically he was very close to many people in the Time/Life staff, who tended to be smart, internationally minded college boys like himself. The Luce magazines often promoted Caniff’s work, since he did the comic strips that most closely resembled their own aesthetic and political outlook.

If Caniff came out of Life, the post-war Alex Raymond was affiliated with Vogue. Depression austerity and wartime rationing were over and Paris was in ruins, so the post-war years were the period when New York became the world’s fashion capital. The first Rip Kirby story involves a fashion model; and the whole ambience of the strip comes from the fashion world. Raymond’s drawings weren’t just done in a photorealist style; they were distilled fashion shots.

If King used photos to pull him back to the past, Raymond was interested in snapshots that caught the present, the sleek and shiny now rather than the blurry bygone days.

Like Caniff, Raymond often photographed models. But when Raymond reinvented his style with Rip Kirby he was able to take this use of models and photos an extra step because of a new invention: the Kodak instant camera. Photorealist comics depended on this new technology.

Even among naturalistic, literal-minded illustrators, not everyone was a fan of photography. Here is Burne Hogarth’s thought: “[Hal Foster] is one of the great geniuses of the comic strip….Other artists were fixated on photographs; this guy worked it out straight out from his eye outward. He solved problems that very few people ever did. I began to realize that because when I had to draw figures that were flying, I sat down and draw those things, for Christ’s sake. I couldn’t have models pose. Milt Caniff many times had model pose. Stan Drake had models pose. The point I’m making is that those guys used Polaroid cameras all the time.” (The Comics Journal, #166, p. 75).

The decline of photorealism as a comics style might have something to do with the parallel decline of magazine photojournalism. During the years when Life was supplanted by television, photorealism lost favour as a cartooning style.

In sum, it’s not just the case that some major cartoonists were influenced by photography. More complexly, as photography evolved, comics followed along; the two art forms developed in tandem.

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I apologize for the bullet/tweet-like nature of this post. It’s the only way I could get myself to write it. Frank will do a better Angoulême post later.

I was at Angoulême last year, but this was my first trip to the comics museum there. It had an exhibition of older comic originals with newer cartoonists covering the older page, plus the permanent exhibit: a timeline with a bunch of originals and books in glass cases and occasional videos. The original for this page of Johnny Craig’s “Split Personality” was especially moving. That second panel! Wobbly inky lips and cross-hatching! It’s like a pulpy Persona still.

Of course I loved seeing the Ware originals. They had a red pencil Quimby the Mouse page in the permanent collection. Ware’s exhibit at the Whitney Biennial was a life-changing experience for me. The under drawing, measuring… It’s shocking how raw the drawing is. His drawings look so clean when they’re shrunk and colored in print. In the originals they look so labored over, sometimes even crude. You can see the struggle, his thinking on the page. The Quimby original at Angoulême was such an object; the cut zipatone, the scale, the juxtaposition between the interior panels and the more illustrative background landscape. It was engaging by itself, beyond just being preparatory work for a print book.

The Cornelius Red Colored Elegy book is gorgeous. It has red spot color. All of the Cornelius books are unified—they’re clearly a line with a consistent sensibility across books—but you get the personality of the individual artist on the covers. It’s artist first, publisher second. Hayashi told me that they’ve recently released his short animations on DVD in Japan. You’d have to order them from amazon.co.jp and have a region-free dvd player to play them. He was sweet and humored my dumb questions. At festivals like this you find yourself jet-lagged in a taxi with Jose Munoz and you’re thinking, “Holy shit, what do I ask Jose Munoz? What do I ask Jose Munoz?!” and you end up just bugging him about random things. Try to milk those ten minutes for as much as you can.

The Manga Building had a One Piece exhibit, complete with cosplayers and prop sand dunes and palm trees. It was shoulder-to-shoulder packed. The whole thing had a fun energy. One Piece originals look exactly like what you’d think they would look like.

As you’ve probably heard, “dedications” (signings) are important in France, but Ruppert and Mulot have raised the bar. Ruppert did a drawing of me on the first page of the book, then turned to the last page and pulled out a pre-made stencil that marked different points. After placing dots on the last page using the stencil, he used a stamp to make a small frame at the center square dots. Then he pulled out an X-Acto knife and cut out the center of the frame and the outside areas. He glued the center of the frame to the inside back cover and then cut out the original drawing on the first page. He placed the first page portrait inside what he cut out, flipped it around and put the cut-out together, to hand me a small portrait in a paper standing frame as his “dedication.” Damn. In the States you get a drawing of the main character’s head with a word balloon saying, “Hi (your name here.)”

While I’ve acquired a lot of pulpy 60s and 70s Franco-Belgian comics, I know very little about them. 90% have cool covers and then you open it to see Caniff hackwork. But there’s some gold in that other 10%. I got some good Luc Orients last year, but the best thing I found at this Angoulême was this Michel Vaillant BD and some kind of Little Nemo homage book.

I wanted to get this Lucie Durbriano book last year and I didn’t. It annoyed me for a whole year until I went back and got it.

This woman in Germany, Ulli Lust, did a really dense, long comic about two girls on a road trip, drawn in pencil with a green spot color. It came out in German recently. Wish I could read it.

10 Euros for the complete Airtight Garage! I nabbed it before Frank!

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“The real question is this: Are comic books good or are they not good? Now it all depends on what you want. If you want to raise a generation that is half storm-troopers and half cannon-fodder, with a dash of illiteracy, then comic books are good. In fact, they are perfect.”

Via Bill Kartalopolous, an audio file of a pretty terrific old episode of The Author Meets the Critics, featuring a debate with the infamous Dr. Frederic Wertham.

UPDATE: Oh, and gee, I should mention that this is a different episode than the one Tom Spurgeon highlighted the other day, which also featured Wertham, along with Al Capp.

Because of my dereliction of duty, let me point you to an article I only recently discovered was available online, Robert Warshow’s famous essay on Wertham and EC, in which he references the Capp/Wertham episode in question.

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Special CC correspondent Mark Newgarden reports in about his recently unveiled mural at Bill’s Bar and Burger in NYC:

This little mural was part of a four person installation at Bill’s curated by David Scher, painter, drawer, sketchbook wizard and sometime restaurant designer.

David, Dawn Clements, Katie Merz and I were asked to punch in at 2:30 am for two consecutive nights this past Dec. The big idea was total improvisation; BYOB (bring your own brushes). We had no solid idea what we would be doing, which wall we would be working on – or even what color paints would be on hand. No sketches, no plans, no forethought. Just caffeine, adrenaline and a ticking clock. This is pretty much 180 degrees from the way I usually approach things. What the hell.

Nobody from the restaurant seemed to be expecting muralists. The walls weren’t primed. There was some vague rumor that we would be painting on the ceiling. I walked behind the bar looking for a screw driver and was chastised to stay away from the liquor. David’s filmmaker friend showed up with some of the world’s brightest lights and most expensive video equipment. There was no coffee.

Dawn annexed the stamped metal wall in the back, Katie took the big landscape format to its left, David grabbed a corridor near the men’s room and I got an 8 x 8 foot square right next to the kitchen door. Everybody went to work. And everybody was good.

Go there and see.

I basically approached my space like a big telephone doodle pad. The carnivore theme was pure wish fulfillment; I’ve been off red meat for a while and was now decorating its shrine. We drew & painted til dawn, came back the next night and did it all over again. There was a smiling hostess and brewed coffee for part two, but titanium white was in precious supply. The back door flew open and shut all morning long as food deliveries and freezing snow blew in. We expired around 9 am.

David went back a third night for mop-up and sent me an email the next day: “Yours is the big hit, the staff loves it. One of the cooks was explaining it to me. I can’t do justice to his poetic exposition, but it was something like this: “The Americans are attacking the hamburger like Pearl Harbor.” I’ll buy that.

BILL’S BAR & BURGER
2 Ninth Avenue @ 13th Street
New York, NY 10014-1204

–Mark Newgarden, February 1, 2010