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Harvey Pekar will be missed. [More and more. And more.]

[And more and more and more.]

[And Tom Spurgeon collects it all.]

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Last month, I wrote an essay for an online magazine about Birgit Jürgenssen, an Austrian feminist artist whose heyday was in the ’70s and ’80s. In 1994, she issued a booklet called BICASSO Jürgenssen. (It looks exactly like the kind of hand-drawn, simple zines Nieves publishes.) Turns out it’s a facsimile edition of a journal she kept in 1957, when she was 8. She’s unschooled as an artist (she’s 8, so yeah), but in copying works by Picasso—hence the conflation of her name and his to create “Bicasso”—she’s clearly trying to work out some basic ideas while also exercising her imagination. BICASSO Jürgenssen made me think of Brian Chippendale’s Ninja, which incorporates drawings he did in sixth grade into a larger story completed nearly two decades later. All of this made me wonder if there are other comics that are similarly built around work or ideas from childhood.

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Back in the Comics Journal #126 (January 1989), R. Fiore wrote about a Plastic Man comic that made a nodding reference to Jack Cole. “It’s especially galling when Jack Cole is one of what I think of as the Prisoners of DC,” Fiore observed. “DC doesn’t think reprinting Cole’s Plastic Man, or Beck and Binder’s Captain Marvel or Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly would be profitable enough for them, but they’re unwilling to license them to other publishers for fear of hurting sales of cold crap like this.”

That was 21 years ago. The situation has since improved slightly, but not enough. DC has given us eight volumes of Plastic Man (alas in their hideous Archives format) and allowed Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd to do their Jack Cole book. There have also been books reprinting Captain Marvel (and I’m eagerly anticipating a Captain Marvel volume from Abrams that Chip Kidd is working on). And there were a few Mayer stories in the Spiegelman/Mouly Toon Treasury.

Of the three artists named by Fiore, Mayer has been the worst served by DC. He did thousands of pages of very entertaining kids comics, most notably Scribbly as well as Sugar and Spike.  In an ideal world, the best of these comics would be reprinted in a format similar to the John Stanley Library D&Q put out. At the very least there should be a thick, 300-page Best of Sheldon Mayer, as rigorously edited as the Toon Treasury or Art In Time. If DC doesn’t want to do such a book, there are other publishers who would be happy to take up the task. Sheldon Mayer spent the vast majority of his life working for DC as a writer, artist and editor (he was actually at the company before Superman was first published). If the people at DC had any sense of obligation to the artists who created their company, they would give Mayer a “best of” volume. But as things stand, Mayer remains in death the most luckless of the “Prisoners of DC”: still trapped in a copyright prison with only the occasional, very brief release into the freedom of republication.

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Ryan Holmberg wrote this excellent piece about Yokoyama’s recent work (I’d be remiss not to mention that while we iron out how best to bring Baby Boom to these shores, PBox is offering a new limited edition book that contains work in that vein, BABYBOOMFINAL), and kindly offered it to Comics Comics.

Ryan, take it away:

If you put the first three Yokoyama Yuichi books together, you have a composite image of the development of a landscape for leisure tourism in Japan, and a playfully dystopian view of its ramifications. In New Engineering, there is the construction of various sorts of landforms and public works projects mainly for recreational use. In Travel, three men ride in one of the icons of Japan as technological and administrative master of space and timetables – the high-speed Bullet Train – consuming landscape from the comfort of their padded seats en route to a seaside getaway. In Garden, a phalanx of men pass through a modern sculpture park-cum-obstacle course – reminiscent of that television show Takeshi’s Castle – playing recklessly with its objects, leading ultimately to the park’s destruction. The association made on the Transatlantis blog between Yokoyama’s structures and Isamu Noguchi’s posthumously finished Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, likewise with man-made mini-mountains and cuboid “play sculptures” for climbing, I think is spot on. In general, I think it useful to think about Yokoyama’s reworking of modernist avant-garde forms (like Futurism) and fantasy architecture (like Boullee’s “Cenotaph to Newton”) through this lens of recreational play, and by extension tourism, considering also the recurring motifs of the sightseer and photographer, especially in a work like Garden, its trespassers the perfect image of the thoughtless tourist group, their activities linked, at the end, directly with the destruction of the consumed landscape, which blows apart in an apocalyptic hurricane. In these and other examples, you have various facets of modernism – mass mobilization, advanced military, surveillance, and transportation technologies, visionary architecture, geometric abstraction, the Futurist obsession with speed and sensation – retooled for a leisure economy, something that has particular resonance in Japan, following the collapse of the Bubble Era and its attempts to physically reshape the archipelago for a first class “leisure society” of parks, art, and resorts. (more…)

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By some cosmic fluke, the Mark Twain Foundation has just released a previously unpublished essay (written circa 1889 or 1890) by the great writer taking issue with an argument I made in a previous post. The full essay can be found here. An excerpt:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man.

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Well, my favorite comics critic (ahem, present company excepted), Brian Chippendale, is currently on the road in his other role as Lightning Bolt hammer god. While on the road he’s frantically approving proofs for If ‘n Oof, which, yes, sir, is at press! All 800 pages of it, all flexi-bound with spot varnish and funky endpapers and oh so much more. Sir Dustin Harbin was even kind enough to receive a FedEx of proofs for Chipps and deliver it right to his sweaty hands! Phew. Anyhow, here’s a killer video of Brian in action, the night before he approve the final files for the cover. Note the July 4th fireworks.

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This past Sunday was Independence Day in the U.S., which means UPS had Monday off, which means new comics don’t arrive until Thursday, so Diamond didn’t update their release list until yesterday – hence the ’24 hours later’ status of this post (again). It’d be cliché to insist I spent the extra time reflecting on American comics, so instead here’s Michael Jackson as drawn by Suehiro Maruo, from 1991’s The New Comics Anthology, edited by the late Bob Callahan. This was very possibly the artist’s first comics work to see print in English, predating Blast Books’ 1993 release of Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show or Maruo’s infamous Planet of the Jap contribution to Blast’s 1996 Comics Underground Japan anthology, and it stands in a unique context. If the 1980 debut of RAW marked the beginning of the ‘alternative comics’ era — and believe me, there’s alternate choices — then ’91 serves as its natural bookend, since that’s when the final, transformed, bookstore-distributed digest RAW appeared. That was also the year of Kitchen Sink’s first latter day Twisted Sisters anthology, a term used for marketing on the cover of The New Comics Anthology, which endeavored to designate ‘new’ comics as loosely categorized trends. Maruo found himself categorized with new ‘punk’ comics of Gary Panter inspiration, as opposed to the historically-informed ‘vaudeville’ of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge, although I think 20 years of ensuing exposure to the artist’s work have revealed him to be a wry traditionalist of his own, of a more direct lineage with early Garo artist (and Doing Time author) Kazuichi Hanawa, to say nothing of a prior century’s printmaking. Indeed, the comic above draws an amusing analogy between MJ’s Bad-era costuming and your typical Japanese boys’ school uniform as seen in many a Showa fetish Maruo epic; in the end he spins so fast his head explodes, which matches the rather goofy horror comic disposition of several Maruo shorts.

This, of course, is another function of criticism: providing a continuum of revised understanding of foreign works, filling in absent context and discussing historical positioning, often to challenge the received wisdom about an otherwise aloof, potentially language-barred artist, a constant hazard online today in the midst of enthusiasm for foreign language works. Maruo’s work was the only New Comic from Japan, and thereby suggested assumptions about the state of Japanese alternative comics from his idiosyncratic example, one that today stands out more for its unique aesthetic departures, much in the way that mainline manga used to be often sold in its heaviest, most detailed, violent sci-fi form, there perhaps to make it seem more in line with American expectations for popular comics.

For more in expectations and delay, here is your American Thursday:

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Gil Kane, an artist whose interviews are always worth reading.

Autodidacts. I often think William Blake is the prototype for many modern cartoonists. Blake was a working class visionary who taught himself Greek and Hebrew, an autodidact who created his own cosmology which went against the grain of the dominant Newtonian/Lockean worldview of his epoch. The world of comics has had many such ad hoc theorists and degree-less philosophers: Burne Hogarth, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Lynda Barry, Howard Chaykin, Chester Brown, Dave Sim, Alan Moore. These are all freelance scholars who are willing to challenge expert opinion with elaborately developed alternative ideas. The results of their theorizing are mixed. On the plus side: you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books; Robert Crumb’s Genesis deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible; Lynda Barry’s ideas about creativity strike me as not just true but also profound and life-enhancing. On the negative side: Dave Sim’s forays into gender analysis have not, um, ah, been, um, very fruitful; and while Neal Adams drew a wicked cool Batman, I’m not willing to give credence to his theories of an expanding earth if it means rejecting the mainstream physics of the last few centuries. Sorry Neal!

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If you click here you’ll find a podcast of a lively discussion of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism. Panelists include Schwartz himself as well as R. Fiore, Brian Doherty, Sammy Harkham and Joe Matt. Lots of contentious ideas are put forward (and some Comics Comics regulars are insulted) but I want to focus in particular on Matt’s statement that he doesn’t need to read criticism because he can decide for himself what’s good or not. That’s not an uncommon opinion and I think the proper response to this contention depends on what we mean by “criticism.” If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.

The best articulation I’ve ever read about the necessity of criticism came from an essay Henry James wrote in 1884 on “The Art of Fiction.” Here is the crucial part of the essay:

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honor, are not times of development—are times, possibly even, a little of dullness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere.

This is perhaps the first and last time Joe Matt and Henry James have been brought together in the same discussion.

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Pope/Ware collage

Just a lazy Saturday post here. Frank came up to Brooklyn to hang out. We spent a couple hours at the great Time Machine yesterday and dug up some fun books. I really wanted to get a beautiful Planet of the Apes coloring book I saw there.  They’re all archived online as PDFs here. Of course it’s better with the faded, toothy yellow paper, though. (more…)