Cliff Sterrett's Polly from 1924, the year before he went wild.
For more on Sterret, you can read this nifty article by Jo Colvin about the cartoonist’s roots in Alexandra, Minnesota.
Don’t worry yourself too much with the text up top – it’s just one item of many from the recent Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, albeit featuring the artist of my personal favorite comic of 2009, Viz’s English edition of GoGo Monster by the great Taiy? Matsumoto. No no, don’t worry, Matsumoto wasn’t hidden away at some obscure table on the show floor — although you could be forgiven for thinking that, given the huge crowd and the crazy amount of stuff out for perusing — I just subscribe to the longview in comics convention terms. That is: the classic rule of comics show prudence dictates that you spend most of your time with comics you won’t easily be able to find outside the show, and I tend to extend that rule to spending time with comics outside the purview of the show itself that I otherwise won’t be able to access due to the geographical limitations of living in a bed of corn husks.
So Saturday had me at the Brooklyn Con itself — and I plan to write more about that later this week — but then Sunday also had me pursuing an unexpected hook up with old Warren magazines in Manhattan, which I believe is called ‘painting the town red.’ More pertinently to the image above, I also stopped by the Bryant Park location of Kinokuniya to mess around with their new releases rack. I think in the rhetoric surrounding manga and graphic novels and the decline of print format serialization in North American comics, there’s a real tendency to forget that Japanese comics typically don’t just drop on the market as books – there’s still a relatively large system of print serialization at work, not as mighty as it was years ago, no, but I think something like the weekly Big Comic Spirits still enjoys a circulation of a couple hundred thousand, and ‘shelf copies’ of recent issues can be a really fun thing to explore, especially when they’re inviting various luminaries from publishing history to contribute self-contained 30th Anniversary stories that aren’t likely to show up in book form any time soon. Hence: Matsumoto, my purchase of the October 25 issue (#45 for 2010), and the true purpose of the text up top.
Evan Dorkin made an interesting comment about how when the Love and Rockets Sketchbook came out in the late ‘80s it was a minor bombshell. And it was. He also goes on to talk about major releases by some big name cartoonists which were basically noticed in passing by folks within comics. He said that he feels as if Wilson and The Book of Genesis garnered more mainstream press than discussion within comics circles. Let’s go to the videotape! (more…)
I thought he was joking. But Norman assured me he wasn’t. A few weeks back, from the stage of The Society of Illustrators, Sam Gross announced that his iconic (and still REALLY funny) gag cartoon was going on the block for 20K. And lo, it has come to pass. I should initiate a Kickstarter campaign to buy this. By the way: Sam Gross: Still really fucking funny. And underrated!
Herewith the goods.
You get to the buy the front…
… And the back of this piece of original art!
Do it!
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget about the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival! Saturday, 12-9. PictureBox will be on the mainstage with Chippendale, Dorkin, French, Harkham, and Thurber! A gang if there ever was one.
“The overwhelming part about tragedy is the element of hopelessness, of inevitability.”
—J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms
In his 1987 essay “What’s so Funny about the Comics?” (reprinted in Comics as Culture), the scholar M. Thomas Inge defends the validity of the term “comics,” despite the fact that so many of the art form’s admirers express resentment for the pejorative connotations of that name, by basically claiming that the term is literally true, and implies very strongly that all comics are comedies.
He accomplishes this primarily by appealing to a fairly broad definition of comedy:
Not all things “comic” are necessarily funny or laughable. Comedy implies an attitude towards life, an attitude that trusts in man’s potential for redemption and salvation, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Since comic strips always conclude with resolutions in favor of morality and a trust in the larger scheme of truth and justice, they too affirm a comic view of the social and universal order. While Krazy Kat and Smokey Stover may appear absurd, they do not reflect on the world around them as being irrational or devoid of meaning, as in the drama of the absurd. Comic art is supportive, affirmative, and rejects notions of situational ethics or existential despair.
And Barry said things like this:
I stumbled on these magazines called Grade Teacher, which were sent to grade-school teachers every month, and I have a pile of them from the late twenties to the sixties. They have stuff like “Fun Things to Draw” or “Let’s Do Our Bulletin Board.” But the big ad sponsorship is from coal companies and asbestos companies: “Free giant charts for your class about how wonderful coal is!” The weirdest things are the art projects with asbestos powder, like “Lets make beads and make necklaces and wear them.” I am not joking.
You can read more of the interview here.
Moebius clouds in Jaime Hernandez's first Locas story.
I recently read some fairly depressing essays about the Hernandez Brothers, pieces that were so ill-informed that I despaired of “comics criticism” as a valid activity. To cheer myself up I went back to Todd Hignite’s The Art of Jaime Henandez: The Secrets of Life and Death. Beautifully designed by Jordon Crane, filled to the gill with original art and photographs, this has been justly celebrated as an art book. But I’m not sure that Hignite’s writing has received the praise it deserves.
Taken just by itself, Hignite’s text is a wonderfully compact monograph which manages to compress many insights into a small package. The book covers, among other things, Jaime’s family background, the influence of classic commercial comics on his art, his interactions with punk music and lowrider culture, the context of the direct market, and the evolution of Jaime’s art and storytelling.
