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Well now PictureBox has big plans this weekend. We’re releasing Matthew Thurber’s 1-800 MICE #2, Comics Comics #3 and The Ganzfeld 5: Japanada! at MoCCA at NYC’s Puck Building, all day Saturday and Sunday, booths A14-16. Lotsa signings all weekend:

Saturday

12-1: Lauren Weinstein and Matthew Thurber
1-2: Gary Panter and Brian Chippendale
2-3: Paper Rad
3-4: Mark Newgarden and Megan Cash
4-5: Brian Chippendale and Frank Santoro
5-6: Taylor McKimens and Dan Nadel

Sunday

12-1: Taylor McKimens and Matthew Thurber
1-2: Lauren Weinstein and Brian Chippendale
2-3: Paper Rad
3-4: Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro

Patrick Smith: “Caterpillar”, 40″ x 48″, oil on canvas

AND! I’ve curated an exhibition opening Friday night!

CANADA
“New Mutants”
Curated by Dan Nadel for PictureBox
Opening Friday, June 22, 7-9 pm.
Artists in attendance.

CANADA
55 Chrystie St.
NYC 10002
Wednesday – Sunday 12-6 pm.

The artists:

Melissa Brown
Brian Chippendale
Julie Doucet
C.F.
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Ben Jones
Amy Lockhart
Sakura Maku
Frank Santoro
Patrick Smith
Michael Williams

The show:

CANADA presents an exhibition of imagist paintings by emerging North American artists. This group of artists is linked by its unabashed use of representative imagery in service to surreal and oblique narratives. These artists find their lineage in the midwestern explorations of the Hairy Who, deep dish surrealism of Gary Panter, the raw beauty of H.C. Westermann and the fantastics of Max Ernst. Like their artistic ancestors, the artists at hand use a private symbol language to assemble communicative pictures. This is not decorative psychedelia or overheated allegory, but rather deeply personal and formally constructed images marked by an absence of irony and an attention to the formal elements of a cartoon and vernacular based vocabulary.

Five of the eleven artists exhibited are based or have roots in Providence, RI’s fertile arts culture. Melissa Brown’s (now based in Brooklyn) mixed media landscapes elevate the horizon to an experiential hallucination, while Brian Chippendale’s collaged images enact his own cartoon narratives on an epic scale. C.F.’s all-over images accumulate dozens of small moments, forming an idea of a distinct visual sensibility. Ben Jones, of Paper Rad, presents flattened portraits of anonymous cartoons in search of a plot, while Michael Williams paints midlife crises of universal hippies. Exiting Providence, Vancouver’s Amy Lockhart’s paintings are meticulous visions of characters in midstream, while Texan Trenton Doyle Hancock’s tactile visions of his Mound-world capture a brief narrative moment. Julie Doucet, based in Montreal, creates painted objects that function like images–her drawn vocabulary suddenly occupying three dimensions. Pittsburgh native Frank Santoro combines a comic book sense for action with a traditional painter’s attention to detail. Two New Yorkers are engaged in painted introspection: Sakura Maku used texts to layer and subvert her jangly images; Patrick Smith’s portraits of spaces and faces made of and living through surreal forms are striking passageways into another consciousness.

All of these painters refuse to be pigeonholed, allowing themselves and their images to change and mutate through multiple media.

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Introduce your little ones to Bow-Wow, the tenacious terrier star of BOW-WOW BUGS A BUG!

“Hip” and “witty” -Family Fun Magazine

Cartoonist Mark Newgarden (GARBAGE PAIL KIDS) and illustrator Megan Montague Cash (WHAT MAKES THE SEASONS?), the team behind Harcourt’s newest picture book sensation will present an audio-visual performance featuring it’s curious canine star! Included will be an amazing on-the-spot book collaboration between Megan and the audience (ages 3-8 and up) as well as a book signing, and other surprises!

The event will be hosted by Williamsburg’s beloved MINI JAKE, “A Modern Children’s Store” as part of their Grand Opening Celebration in their big, beautiful new location.

PRESENTATION AND BOOK EVENT
SUNDAY, JUNE 24
2:00 pm

MINI JAKE
at their new location
178 N. 9th Street
(between Bedford and Driggs Avenues)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 782-2005

For further info contact:

MINI JAKE
http://www.minijake.com
jake@minijake.com

BOW-WOW BOOKS
http://www.bow-wowbooks.com
(for bios, reviews, info, etc.)
bowwowbooks@aol.com

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Our friend and contributor Mark Newgarden has a fantastic new children’s book coming out in collaboration with our friend and hero, Megan Montague Cash:

Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug.

I highly recommend it for kids ages 2 to 82!

And so here is the blurb:

Cartoonist Mark Newgarden and Illustrator Megan Montague Cash will be signing their new wordless picture story at ROCKETSHIP in Brooklyn. 8 pm, Saturday June 2!

“What an odd, sweet, surreal, and hilarious adventure from Newgarden and Cash. It’s what Crockett Johnson, Ernie Bushmiller, and Rod Serling might have come up with if they shared a bench at the doggie park. I love it!”–Lane Smith

ROCKETSHIP
208 Smith Street
Brooklyn NY 11201
718.797.1348

www.bowwowbooks.com

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Because the print run of the second issue of Comics Comics has sold out, we are now making it available for free downloading over at the sidebar.

So if you missed out on getting your own copy (and unfortunately, this one really does work best in its oversize paper form), you can now finally enjoy:

Peter Bagge on Spider-Man!

An interview with PShaw! (He has posted a nice color variation of this issue’s cover on his own site, by the way.)

Part one of a far-too-long essay on Steve Gerber‘s cult ’70s Marvel comics (Howard the Duck, Omega the Unknown, etc.)! (By the way, don’t forget to read the article’s accidentally excised footnotes.)

Kevin Nowlan on color separations!

Dan on Dave Sim‘s Collected Letters 2004!

Mark Newgarden on Michael Kupperman!

A beautiful “perpetual calendar” by the legendary Justin Green!

Comics and cartoons by PShaw, Matthew Thurber, and Lauren R. Weinstein!

And more!

P.S. When you’re done, drop us a line. There’s still time to make the letters page for issue three.

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NOTE: As the second issue of Comics Comics is just now being distributed to many comics stores for the first time, this is a special encore presentation of an earlier post.

Well, it’s finally here in all its glory. The second issue of Comics Comics debuted at SPX, and it’s a pretty terrific bargain.

We’ve switched to a much larger size—the second issue is a broadsheet—and though we’ll probably have it available for downloading fairly soon, this is one you’re going to want to own and hold in your hands, if only for the beautiful, giant Justin Green “Perpetual Calendar” on the back cover.

Incidentally, I was surprised at how many people at SPX (ostensibly big fans of “alternative” comics) didn’t recognize Justin Green‘s name. All I can say to that is that he basically invented the modern conception of autobiographical comics, and he is easily one of the dozen or so most important comic book creators of the last fifty years. If you haven’t read his Binky Brown stories, you should buy them and read them immediately. Seriously. Don’t buy a single other comic until you’ve found the Binky Brown Sampler. It is better than anything else you could possibly be considering.

Of course, Green’s not the only contributor in this issue. Did you ever wonder how Peter “Hate” Bagge really feels about Spider-Man, and about the single issue of that superhero’s adventures he created for Marvel? You can find out in Comics Comics #2!

Do you like the strange and wonderful work of Matthew Thurber, recently named minicomics artist of the year by the Comics Journal? You’ll read more here, in Comics Comics #2!

Also, Frank “Storeyville” Santoro discusses the lost art of color separation with mainstream legend Kevin Nowlan!

Comics and a very rare interview from our cover artist, the enigmatic PShaw!

Dan on Dave Sim, Mark Newgarden on Michael Kupperman, gag cartoons by Lauren R. Weinstein, and the first installment in an epic, New Yorker-style (ha) exploration of the 1970s Marvel stories of Steve Gerber!

Does YOUR favorite store carry Comics Comics?

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UPDATE: This post has been somewhat edited from its original form.

You know it’s a great year for comics when an anthology as strong as Ivan Brunetti‘s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories isn’t an obvious front-runner. Considering its quality, the stature of its editor, and the publisher, this book hasn’t gotten as much hype as I might have expected, at least so far. Maybe it’s just Seth cover fatigue. (I hope the same syndrome doesn’t kill off the Dick Tracy series before it gets to the volumes set in outer space.)

Of course, it might just be that most people who really follow comics are already familiar with most of the contents—or at least think they are—and are accordingly less likely to get enthused about a collection of comics they already know. (Of course, as I mentioned a while back, I’ve been surprised by some comics fans’ selective sense of comics history before, so there might be more unfamiliar material here than is apparent.)

Whatever the reason, this is a truly remarkable book, and I surprised myself by plowing through the first half in one sitting, even though I’ve read probably 90% of the material previously.

Brunetti has said that he conceived of the book as something like a Norton anthology for comics, collecting the work of the very best and most (artistically) successful North American cartoonists of the last thirty years, and for the most part, his selections are impeccable. It’s difficult (though not impossible — no Gilbert Shelton? No Jack Jackson? Etc.) to think of important cartoonists from the last three decades who aren’t represented.

Of course, not all of the cartoonists here work best in short form, so some of the selections don’t show the artists at their strongest or most representative. And considering the general thrust of the anthology, some of the selections are odd, and lead the reader to wonder. Why include five pages of pre-WWII comic strips and ignore nearly every newspaper strip from later years (other than Barnaby and Peanuts)? Why leave out so many artists from the underground days? Why include outsider artist Henry Darger, and once you have, why not include a half-dozen others? For that matter, why pick so many young cartoonists who may not actually belong in a book of this type yet?

At least part of the answer to these questions is that the book as originally planned was much longer. Yale decided it needed cutting, and Brunetti had to remove a big chunk of the book. (On a panel at this year’s Small Press Expo in Bethesda, he said that he found it a lot easier to cut out the work of dead cartoonists than live ones, which explains the chronological lopsidedness.) The other, more important, part of the answer lies in the personal nature of the book, something Brunetti is clear about in his introduction, where he writes that his “criteria were simple: these are comics that I savor and often revisit.”

That he took the criteria seriously is evident throughout the book—all of these comics repay rereading—and many of the more obscure or idiosyncratic choices help give the book a much more individual-feeling tone than you would usually find in an historical anthology. Brunetti writes that he sought to highlight “vital, highly personal work”. His own cartooning has always been highly personal, so it’s no surprise that he would value the trait in others. It is nice to find that he approaches his editing from a similar perspective.

In fact, half of the fun in this book is following the thought process implied by his selections, and their placement. The anthology opens with a page of Sam Henderson, followed by a Mark Newgarden section, which is not unlike a Norton anthology of twentieth-century theater beginning with a Marx brothers sketch, followed up with an excerpt from Waiting for Godot. With an opening salvo like that, you know the editor’s on the side of the angels.

Basically, the book may or may not be worth your money if you already own a lot of this work (if you do, you have a great library), but it’s still probably the finest anthology of so-called alternative comics yet published. It certainly beats the hell out of the lousy book that the Smithsonian put out a couple years ago. For someone who wasn’t already immersed in the field and its history, and wanted to learn more, this is just about as perfect an introduction as I can imagine. And even if you consider yourself a full-on aficionado, there are still bound to be at least a few revelations here, whether in discovering a comic you’ve never read before, or in re-experiencing a comic in a new context, one planned by an expert and a clear lover of the form.

[DISCLOSURE: My wife, Lauren R. Weinstein, was one of the contributors to this anthology.]

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Well, it’s finally here in all its glory. The second issue of Comics Comics debuted this weekend at SPX, and it’s a pretty terrific bargain.

We’ve switched to a much larger size—the second issue is a broadsheet—and though we’ll probably have it available for downloading fairly soon, this is one you’re going to want to own and hold in your hands, if only for the beautiful, giant Justin Green “Perpetual Calendar” on the back cover.

Incidentally, I was surprised at how many people at SPX (ostensibly big fans of “alternative” comics) didn’t recognize Justin Green‘s name. All I can say to that is that he basically invented the modern conception of autobiographical comics, and he is easily one of the dozen or so most important comic book creators of the last fifty years. If you haven’t read his Binky Brown stories, you should buy them and read them immediately. Seriously. Don’t buy a single other comic until you’ve found the Binky Brown Sampler. It is better than anything else you could possibly be considering.

Of course, Green’s not the only contributor in this issue. Did you ever wonder how Peter “Hate” Bagge really feels about Spider-Man, and about the single issue of that superhero’s adventures he created for Marvel? You can find out in Comics Comics #2!

Do you like the strange and wonderful work of Matthew Thurber, recently named minicomics artist of the year by the Comics Journal? You’ll read more here, in Comics Comics #2!

Also, Frank “Storeyville” Santoro discusses the lost art of color separation with mainstream legend Kevin Nowlan!

Comics and a very rare interview from our cover artist, the enigmatic PShaw!

Dan on Dave Sim, Mark Newgarden on Michael Kupperman, gag cartoons by Lauren R. Weinstein, and the first installment in an epic, New Yorker-style (ha) exploration of the 1970s Marvel stories of Steve Gerber!

Does YOUR favorite store carry Comics Comics?

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Dan and I are relatively new to blogging, so it may be a while before this blog (and the magazine it’s related to) turn into the zeitgeist-changing juggernauts they’re destined to become.

In the meantime, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce ourselves.

Dan and I (along with the brilliant painter and Web designer Patrick Smith) worked together on the early issues of The Ganzfeld, a journal which, since my departure from its pages, has become a pretty amazing, sort-of-annual publication of art, comics, and design with very few peers.

Now, we’re putting together something a little different, Comics Comics, a magazine devoted entirely to comics, which we hope will fill in some of the gaps left empty by current comics criticism. It includes reviews, editorials by working cartoonists (the first issue’s op-ed is by Paper Rad), comics by such luminaries as Mark Newgarden and Matthew Thurber, interviews, lists, essays on comics past and present, and other whatnot. Also, it’s free. (You should be able to find it in the same kinds of places you can pick up Arthur.)

Here’s a quote from the introductory essay in our first issue, which should be available in most areas in the next couple of weeks:

This magazine aims to document contemporary and past comics from a pluralistic, affectionate, but critical standpoint. Many of our contributors are cartoonists themselves, and are in a unique position to offer their personal takes on the medium. One particular goal of Comics Comics is to shine a light on corners of the medium that we feel are underexposed (such as the work of Jessica Ciocci) and to examine the work of more celebrated artists (such as Wally Wood) from new angles. We’re also interested in the comics library, and to that end feature book reviews that span the whole history of the medium, from the obscure and out-of-print to the popular and widely available. In each issue, we will feature reviews, essays, and interviews, as well as more unusual features, and, of course, comics from our contributors.

I guess that’s it for now. In the future, posts will probably be a lot more informal. And more frequent.

Next week, I’m going to try to talk about a great Scrooge McDuck story from a new, excellent, and cheap Carl Barks collection, which I highly recommend purchasing if you don’t already have any of his stuff.

P.S.

One other thing I should probably make clear in the interests of full disclosure: I am married to the cartoonist Lauren R. Weinstein, so any mention I might make about how her new book Girl Stories is one of the best comics releases of 2006 should possibly be taken with that in mind.

Excelsior!