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Well, Frank was certainly up early this morning. I also worshiped “The Studio” as a teenager. It was, for me, my first encounter with “art” that I took to be accessible and somehow applicable to me. Oh lord, looking back on it now it seems so silly. I’d feel much much worse about this if Gary Groth didn’t feel the same way when he was that age. Anyhow, the appeal of that stuff was to see somewhat baroque, overripe illustration in fine art trappings. It’s ironic, of course, because the illustration they were referring to was, by the 70s, eclipsed by Push Pin, Brad Holland and the like. The Studio was, if anything, thoroughly anachronistic. But charmingly so. And, in their avid production of portfolios, prints, and assorted “fine art” ephemera, unique for those days. In a way, they anticipated the Juxtapoz-ish illustrators-making-bad-fine-art gang. Another point of interest is that, with the exception of BWS, all of those guys contributed comics to Gothic Blimp Works or The East Village Other, their pages sitting next to work by Deitch, Trina, Crumb, etc. It’s funny to think of a time when those worlds (fantasy and underground) mixed. This was perhaps helped along a bit by someone like Wally Wood, who straddled both sides of the fence, albeit briefly. Then it splintered a bit, with guys like Richard Corben occupying their own niche in the underground scene, in opposition to Crumb, Griffith, et al, who disdained the EC-influenced genre material. In a way, what guys like CF and Chippendale are doing now is related to those early efforts at underground fantasy comics, except coming from a very different mentality.

Also, I think Tim is right that Crumb was the first to make fun of the dainty falling leaf-as-signifier-of-meaning.

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Brain’s still broke from SPX, but here’s two links in the meantime:

1) Craig Yoe has posted a cover of “Jug Band Music” by the late, great Wally Wood.

2) Jog has written a great review of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs 1. I need to stop linking to Jog — just bookmark him, please.

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Today Tom Spurgeon offers an excellent explanation of the appeal of Wally Wood. I remain fascinated by the late work of Wood. His and Ogden Whitney’s work have occupied my brain for the better part of a year now. Both create such odd, tactile visual spaces and both, in some ways, are under-appreciated. The recent biography of Wood, Wally’s World, by Steve Starger and J. David Spurlock does little to remedy that. It’s a slapdash affair that at times borders on incoherence. There’s a great book to be written on Wood–it just doesn’t exist yet. In the meantime, check out Tom’s succinct take on a unique artist.

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Ok, there were some real material benefits of MoCCA besides the aches and pains described below. I picked up two excellent comics (and some other really good ones, but these stand out).

First, Knitting For Whitsun by John Bagnall. Bagnall is a British cartoonist who has been around since the ’80s. He tells particularly English stories with a smooth, sinewy line that’s somewhere between psychedelic and, as he puts it, ‘musty’. His attention to the particularities of Englishness brings to mind vintage Kinks songs; it’s all in the carefully chosen details and dry, bemused wit. He has some fine features, like “Disappearing Phrases”, about exactly that in British culture, as well as reprints of weekly comic strips that, Ben Katchor-like, examine Bagnall’s urban English terrain. Bagnall has something to say and a lived-in voice that makes these tales a pleasure to read. Highly recommended.

And second, Kim Deitch was sitting down the row from the PictureBox booth selling his wares and dispensing wisdom. I picked up a copy of BANZAI!, a 1978 title by Deitch and underground peers Roger Brand and Joel Beck. Kim wryly told me that he’s the only living artist of the three; Brand and Beck apparently both lived a bit too hard for their own good and passed away in 1985 and 1999 respecitvely. Anyhow, this comic book contains a couple of stories by each artist. Deitch’s central piece is a hilarious romp about a porn store robbery and features one of his more arresting images (it involves a bullet and a blow up doll). Beck’s stories are amusing anecdotal yarns, but the real surprise here are Roger Brand’s two stories. Brand was an assistant to Wally Wood and it shows. One story, “In More Innocent Times” documents Brand’s youthful excesses in Berkeley in fine lined Wood detail. Another story, “The Longstain Taint”, is a Faust-like story of compromise rendered in thick brushstrokes reminiscent of (that other icon of comics) Harvey Kurtzman’s best 1950s work. It’s compelling reading and Brand seems engulfed by it. The stories are verbose and densely rendered, reeking of a kind of desperation you don’t feel much anymore. They read like stories that had to come out. I never thought much of Brand, but these two tales make me want to explore him a bit more. I often forget that much of the underground was about telling stories of all kinds and packing as much into a short story as possible. It’s a ’50s comic book model, rather than than a literary one; constrained by the boundaries of the comic book genre at the time. The ambition was in the work at hand, not the career. BONZAI! is a great glimpse at some fine work by the still-top-of-his-game Deitch and two underground talents that never quite made it.

Finally, I got to spend some time with PShaw, the Boston-based cartooning enigma. I highly recommend all of PShaw’s comics (particularly his Strings book), and was lucky enough to have a look at his original art as well. His meticulous lines and ink washes are miracles of cartoon imagery. We hope to feature him further in an upcoming issue of our little mag.