Via Alvin Buenaventura, Brian Chippendale is pictured on the cover of the new June/July issue of the Believer.
After Lauren last month, that makes two PictureBox artists immortalized by Charles Burns in a row.
And if Eric Reynolds is right about Fletcher Hanks in August (who you may remember was included in Art Out of Time), we may be looking at something like a hat trick!
Sickness unfortunately prevented a full interview, but Dan was able to call in for an all-too-brief fifteen minute conversation at the end of last week’s Inkstuds podcast.
In other news, I have nothing to say about comics at the moment. But if you were intrigued by the Dick Ayers piece in Comics Comics #1, and live in the New York area, Ayers is making an appearance at the Big Apple convention tomorrow, and will doubtless be selling copies of his three-volume autobiography in comics.
It figures that as soon as I finally got around to publicly committing myself to a blogging schedule, I’d suddenly get swamped at work, find the air-conditioner-free book-strewn hellhole I call a “home office” rendered uninhabitable due to a heatwave, and generally find any excuse I could not to write.
Which basically just goes to show that transparency in business is overrated.
In that spirit, let’s get things restarted with a little intra-blog debate.
Last week, Dan wrote:
There’s been a lot of hoopla about the lack of women in the Masters of American Comics exhibition opening in New York in September, most of which I think is misguided. There aren’t any because, for most of the century comics were created almost exclusively by men. There’s no way around that.
Proceeding with all due caution into these dangerous waters, I think that Dan is generally right, but not entirely so.
For a couple of reasons. One, the exhibit does go all the way up to quite recent cartoonists, including Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware, and even if there weren’t many great women cartoonists in the old days (or at least not many who could actually be considered “Masters” by way of prestige and influence), that’s not necessarily true later on in the century.
As Chris Ware himself suggested in an April letter to ARTnews about their November cover story, Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists?, at least one great 20th century woman comic-book artist does exist, and Lynda Barry could (and should) have been included in the exhibit. Like any good comics “pundit”, I take my marching orders from Mr. Ware, and in this case, as always, he is right.
Secondly, as the older history of comics is further explored, you never know who or what is going to turn up. As Dan himself showed in Art Out of Time, sometimes great cartoonists fall through the cracks, and it can take years or decades before their work is rediscovered (if ever). Who knows what visionary, now-forgotten female cartoonists will find their way into the future canon?
Reputations change with time, as Melville’s did (for the better), and James Branch Cabell’s did (for the worse). One hundred years from now, their positions may reverse themselves once more.
In some future millenium, when museum curators are putting together an exhibit of “20th Century Cartooning Masters”, Boody Rogers may well be hung on the same wall as Milton Caniff, without anyone even realizing that in the actual 20th century, their names would never be uttered in the same breath.
Until that glorious day, let us find whatever small disagreements we can, and argue about them with passion and force, so that the time may pass more swiftly…
Dan hit the big time this weekend, finally recognized for his “comic book guru” status by that noted cartooning periodical, The Washington Post.
You’ve read the blog, you’ve absorbed the hype, now it’s time to actually see what Comics Comics is all about. Could Dan be the new generation’s Art Spiegelman?! (Wha’!?) Only one way to find out – come out this weekend and buy all his junk!
This weekend, Comics Comics will debut at the MoCCA Art Festival in New York City’s Puck Building. Stop by and pick up the premiere issue, t-shirts, and the latest PictureBox releases. Many great artists and cartoonists will be at our table throughout the weekend, including Paper Rad, Frank Santoro, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Gary Panter, Matthew Thurber, David Sandlin, Taylor McKimens, and Jonathon Rosen.
Besides the magazine, PictureBox will be releasing:
Two new comic books: Cold Heat #1, by Ben (Paper Rad) Jones & Frank Santoro, and Incanto by Frank Santoro.
Two new books: Gore by Black Dice and Jason Frank Rothenberg, and Me a Mound by Trenton Doyle Hancock.
Jessica (Paper Rad) Ciocci’s limited run artists’ book, Pig Tales.
A series of large offset “posters for your dorm room or crash pad” by Brian Chippendale, Gary Panter, BJ & Frank Santoro.
And of course, Dan’s amazing new anthology, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, just published by Abrams.
If you can only pick one day to attend, make it Sunday, as Dan will be presenting a slide show based on his book at 4 pm.
(Personally, if I didn’t have to be at the convention all weekend, I’d spend Saturday at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in Madison Square Park or the Phil Karlson double feature at the Film Forum. You can do whatever you want.)
Then, this Saturday night, between 7 and 9 pm, join us for our magazine’s launch party at Participant Inc in the Lower East Side.
Beer and other beverages provided.
PARTICIPANT INC
95 Rivington Street
NYC, NY 10002
Not to go on too much about my book, Art Out of Time, but while getting this blog up and running it seems a good source of material. Anyhow, a few major artists were left out of my book because their work was mostly anonymous and for licensed characters. They just didn’t fit. Perhaps my biggest regret is cutting Harry Lucey (1930-1980?), who, like so many of the other men who entertained generations of children, remains as anonymous in death as he did in life. His career in comics began in the late 1930s and he bounced around various companies in the 1940s, drawing such features as Madam Satan, Magno, and Crime Does Not Pay. In the early 1950s he helmed Sam Hill,
creating some wonderful stories in the Roy Crane/Milt Caniff/Alex Toth tradition of lush brushwork and cinematic compositions.
He spent most of his life, however, drawing for MLJ, which published Archie, among other characters, and later simply became Archie Publications. Lucey became one of the lead Archie artists, drawing the freckle-faced teenager and his pals throughout the ’50s and ’60s. He took some breaks from the business to work for an advertising agency in St. Louis, but otherwise was dedicated to comics.
Like Ogden Whitney, at first glance Lucey’s work on appears to be generic and undistinguished, but a closer look reveals the artist to be a master of body language, or, in more concrete terms, acting. Every aspect of a Lucey figure is drawn to express what that character is feeling at that moment. Posture, position, and facial expression are all geared towards maximizing that moment in the story. Take a look at this Sam Hill page by Lucey, and note the precision of his character’s movements, particularly Sam Hill’s relaxed smoke rings panel. 
Lucey was certainly influenced by film, but brings a cartoon economy to the proceedings that can only be accomplished in, well, comics. And, take away the words (as Lucey did in a remarkable Archie story, “Actions Speak Louder Than Words”,) from a Lucey story and readers still know precisely how each character feels and what that means for the plot. In that sense, Lucey’s cartoon characters seem alive on the page like few others.
The only real inheritors of this tradition are Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, whose Love and Rockets stories continue to be among the most eloquent and passionate comics drawn in the world. They, like Lucey, tell their stories through their character’s precise actions on the page, a topic addressed very nicely by Frank Santoro and Bill Boichtel in the debut issue of Comics Comics.
Anyhow, in most years Lucey penciled and inked a page a day, drawing the complete contents of the Archie comic book every month. Towards the’60s, Lucey developed an allergy to graphite, and reportedly wore white gloves while drawing. In the 1970s he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and, sometime later, cancer. He refused treatment for the latter and died in Arizona in the late 1970s or perhaps 1980.
A nice review of my book, Art Out of Time in the L.A. Weekly.
