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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.

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A Ditko Act

Over the last few years, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Steve Ditko’s legacy, thanks in no small part to the various books written and/or edited by Blake Bell and Craig Yoe. This is all to the good: Ditko is, to my mind at least, one of the four or five most imaginative and path breaking visual artists ever to work in the commercial comic book field (the others, for what it’s worth, are Kirby, Kurtzman, and Toth). What tends to get forgotten, though, is the fact that Ditko, unlike the other masters, is still alive and in fact very busy.

Steve Ditko is 83 years old. In the last year he’s produced at least 150 pages of new comics (published by Robin Synder in the series A Ditko Act). By any reasonable measure, this venerable cartoonist much more prolific than many artists 60 years his junior. It’s unfortunate that late-period Ditko tends to be ignored by all but the most hard-core fans. Of course, Ditko himself is partially to blame, since these latest stories follow in the trajectory of his Mr. A work in being both forbiddingly didactic and shorn of any reader-friendly cordiality.  As befits a man of his ideological purity, Ditko demands to be taken on his own terms. And increasingly, Ditko’s visual vocabulary has an abstract and hermetic quality that makes it look like an alien script, one without a Rosetta Stone to help us decipher it. Ditko’s dialogue is also unique: more and more it has a telegraphic quality whereby information is conveyed in short phrasal bursts that don’t resemble anything close to human speech.

The most interesting thing about late-period Ditko how relentlessly stylized it is, achieving a level of cartooning abstraction almost worthy of Sterrett or Rege. To be sure, Ditko has long had a covert passion for abstraction — think of the weird backgrounds in his Doctor Strange stories. But late-period Ditko takes this tendency to a radical extreme. Artists late in life, Irving Howe once suggested, have a tendency to give up all that they no longer need, to offer up art that is unshorn and pure and blunt. I’m not sure if that is generally true but Ditko would make a good case study.

I’m not the writer to do justice to late-period Ditko  — it requires someone more steeped in his career and the history of mainstream comics than I am. But I will say that I hope some smart critic – Matt Seneca comes to mind, or my formidable blog-mate Jog – will look at this stuff and try to explain it. It’s  too interesting to remain the terra incognito of comics. I have a hunch at in the future there will be a general rediscovery of late-period Ditko, just as there has been an upward reappraisal of late-period Kirby.

Steve Ditko's The Madman (From A Ditko Act)

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As mentioned a few days ago, redoubtable L’Association co-founder Patrice Killoffer has recently enjoyed a second North American release for Q4 2010, following NBM’s publication of vol. 3 of Dungeon: Monstres, which collected his 2004 contribution to the sprawling franchise created by Joann Sfar and fellow L’Association progenitor Lewis Trondheim. This one’s a newer work, and not a comics job – it’s one of a series of illustrations created for The Man Who Refused to Die, a novella by Belgian writer Nicolas Ancion, published near-simultaneously in French and English (translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit) as part of publisher Dis Voir’s line of Illustrated Fairy Tales for Adults. It’s the second entry in the series, after The Adventures of Percival from artist Nicolas de Crécy and writer Pierre Senges (whose work Killoffer has also illustrated, in the 2004 Verticales release Géométrie de la poussière).

I can’t say it’s a very good book — feel free to skip this paragraph if you don’t want the mystery ruined — although Killoffer’s work is often quite nice. The plot concerns your typical doomed noir-ish private detective, investigating the possible sexual abuse of his great-grandmother at her nursing home, only to stumble into a terrible plot to surgically prolong the lifespan of extremely rich men, apparently based upon actual research by one François Taddei, who is credited accordingly. Everyone winds up either dead or immobile, with their minds digitized and left to collect dust with the rest of the world’s prolific and ignored digital detritus, still the closest possible thing to eternal life.

It’d have made a decent enough late-period short serial in Eerie, and maybe a fine Killoffer comic, but mostly we’re left with the artist’s lovely full and double-page spreads of gurgling entrails and swirling amoebae and dense metal piping – lavish spaghetti & meatball renderings of How Things Work, stripping away the skin of a few more straightforward illustrations of people gesturing in rooms. Oddly, it reminded me of another transformation from last week, one less depictive than housed in the comics form, and tangentially concerning another rebellious group of seven comics artists who came to define the 1990s, and comics of the future as well.

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Hello and welcome, True Believers, to 2011. For my first post of the new year, I wanted to do something a little more personal, and well, positive. I thought about writing something on the comics I got for Christmas – but the only one I really liked was King City #12. And if I write about the end of that series I’ll just spoil it for those among us who haven’t been able to track down the back issues. Should I list the comics I got for Xmas that I didn’t care for? Nah. I’m gonna try and write only about things I like this year. I’m getting tired of reading “oh I hated it” reviews. So I figure I’ll just do one of my typically rambling posts about the only book I really did enjoy reading over the Xmas break. Please enjoy this riff.

The book is Dizzy Gillespie’s memoir To Be or Not To Bop. I’m a big jazz fan and this book really set the record straight that Dizzy was truly the founder of the modern style in jazz. It’s basically an oral history with lots of interviews with his contemporaries in the 1940s. Time and time again each interview reveals that it was Dizzy who taught the modern style to everyone else. There were plenty of guys playing the modern style – or trying to – but Dizzy would literally show his bandmates and friends how to phrase things on the trumpet, on the piano, on the bass, on the drums. Apparently he could play just about every instrument in the band and birthed this modern style that would eventually become known as bebop. (more…)