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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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Well, I’m back from 10 days in Paris and Amsterdam, and a good time was had by all. Or at least I had fun.

It was all work all the time, but I like my work, as you’ll see below. Ostensibly I was there to hang an exhibition of work by Brian Chippendale, Julie Doucet and Paper Rad, as well as all the PictureBox books at Le Monte-En-L’Air, an excellent bookstore/gallery run by the might Guillaume. The show opened on Tuesday, March 27th, with myself and Julie D. in attendance.

Blexbolex

Julie D and Stephane Blanquet

But, being me, I squeezed in some other activities. I went to see Bruno Richard, king of the Parisian drawers and a collaborator with Pascal Doury in the groundbreaking zine ESDS, which began in the late 70s and continues to this day. To my mind, Richard and Doury are hugely important and massively overlooked–providing much of the impetus for things like Le Dernier Cri. Occasional collaborator Gary Panter sent me to Richard, who simply blew my mind with paintings, drawings, and fantastic books.

Proofs for a silkscreen book.

I also visited a number of other artists and publishers, L’Association, Cornelius, and Blexbolex among them. On my last day in Paris, I went to see Moebius (from one end of the spectrum to the other!), who greeted me warmly and we discussed a variety of projects. He was incredibly nice and very complementary, picking up immediately on what Frank is going with Cold Heat (“it’s like painting with the colors”) and enjoying Ninja, too. What a treat.

And then it was off to Amsterdam for non-comics business, interviewing master illustrator (and the designer of the Yellow Submarine film) Heinz Edelmann, as well as artist and designer Simon Posthuma.

And now I’m back. Quite a few books heavier. Phew.

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Sometimes I think the much-respected Jog tends to write at greater length than he really needs to, but he’s still the best, most reliable, and easily the hardest working regular online comics critic I’ve encountered.

He is also, inexplicably, one of the very few who even try to understand where Paper Rad is coming from, and he’s just delivered a sharp review of their latest.

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Saturday, 11/18, 1 pm, Julie Doucet, Brian Chippendale and Paper Rad will be signing their new books, Elle-Humour, Ninja and Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales at the New York Art Book Fair, at the Chelsea Art Museum, 22nd st. and 10th ave.

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Here’s the problem with running a magazine and a blog: there’s just not enough time. I’m in the midst of closing my Brian Chippendale and Julie Doucet books and editing the next Ganzfeld. Things are hectic. That said, I have been meaning to write a lengthy blog entry on some new Manga and Scott Pilgrim. So much so that I keep carrying the books back and forth from home to office and back again, looking for the spare hours to sit down and write. I expect to find them over the weekend. Until then, here’s a totally lame list format blog entry.

Current Comics Reading List (from memory):

Enigma by Peter Milligan. This odd 90s relic from Vertigo Comics is, well, really odd. I hope to write about it extensively when I’m done.

Sub-Mariner in Tales to Astonish. Bill Everett rules.

I tried to read Civil War from Marvel, just to see…like dipping a toe in the ocean. Man, what a drag. Superhero comics these days are so dour. This is no exception. Kinda boring and short on any real appeal or insight.

Monologues for the Coming Plague: A remarkable new book from Anders…it has the kind of light hearted philosophical heft of William Steig books from the 40s and 50s. Searching, funny cartoons.

William Steig original drawings at Adam Baumgold Gallery. 13 original drawings from The Lonely Ones. These are more lush, striking and daring than I ever imagined, and I already loved the book. Steig, like Steinberg, burns so bright on the page.

Power of 6 by Jon Lewis. One of my favorite cartoonists from the early 90s boomlet returns with this superhero comic. It works–funny, exciting, and authentic. It’s so nice to see his drawings again.

Various Paper Rad mini-comics. I’m combing through for some old material for an upcoming Paper Rad digest book.

Eddie Campbell’s Fate of the Artist. I’m not sure what to think yet. Campbell is a fascinating cartoonist, and this oddly formatted tome is no exception. But I’m still reading it and wondering about it.

Oh, and also various issues of Alter Ego. Hmm.

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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

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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!