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Odin Smiling After a Particularly Noxious Release

Geoff Boucher reports about the Thor movie over at the LA Times. I know, I know, it’s just a movie. It has nothing to do with the many things I like about 1960s Thor. And I don’t even care about this stuff, except… C’mon guys, you couldn’t have designed even slightly better costumes? Honestly? It’s just lazy looking. There are many cool things about circa 1960s Thor, most of them beginning and ending with Jack Kirby’s literary and visual ideas. But among the coolest were the costumes! Mind-bendingly intricate mythological armor and sets with a nearly psychedelic color palette. Where is all that? These pictures look kinda like Iron Man. Or X-Men. Or whatever. Point, is, where’s the color? The scale? The imagination? It’s a movie, natch, and things have to somewhat simplified, and it’s Hollywood and blah blah. I know it all already. But… No one thought to call Walt Simonson? Hell, if I were them I’d call CF! Or William Stout! Or Moebius! Call somebody! Anyhow, thus endeth my pointless afternoon rant. Sigh.

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In 1991, the Santa Monica radio station KCRW broadcast an adaptation of American Splendor.  Dan Castellaneta (a.k.a. the voice of Homer Simpson) was part of the performance, doing the voice of Harvey Pekar.

This Friday at 7:30 PM Pacific Time, KCRW will re-play this adaptation.  Unfortunately, they won’t be able to archive it or put it on their website as a podcast. If you want to listen to this,   there is only one shot. If you live in the Santa Monica area, you can listen to KCRW. If not, you can go their website and listen to it as a livestream. KCRW’s website can be found here.

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Canadian Notes and Queries, re-done by Seth.

As I’ve pointed out before, there is a side of Seth that rarely gets seen outside of Canada, the design work and writing he does for small Canadian literary concerns. A good example of the care Seth puts into these projects can be seen in the new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries (CNQ), a very smart literary journal with a ridiculous title.  Seth has re-shaped the whole magazine from top to bottom. Aside from giving the interiors a new elegance, he also did the cover and supplied a two page comic strip about the magazine’s new mascots, the lumberjack Hudson (“I handle the notes…”) and the dandy Stanfield (“And I deal with the queries.”) This comic can be found here.

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Some of Pekar's best work can be found here.

I’ll have more to say about Harvey Pekar in a future post, but my immediate thoughts on his death can be found in this National Post obituary. An excerpt:

Harvey’s early stories, especially the ones that Crumb drew, remain his best work. With an impressive fidelity to reality, they capture the daily texture of office life, the bickering common to marriages and transient moments of exultation and despair. Thus, a typical story describes the frustration of “standing behind old Jewish ladies in supermarket lines.” This might almost be a stand-up comedian’s routine, but goes deeper when Harvey’s prejudice against “old Jewish ladies” is tested by an unexpected turn of events. Part of what makes these stories so great is Pekar’s fine-tuned ear for all sorts of American dialects, ranging from the many gradations of immigrant accents to African-American slang. Few American writers in any medium have been so responsive to the richness of American speech.

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Harvey Pekar is nineteen, and is a sophomore at Western Reserve University. He says that he has spent a lot of time hanging around a delicatessen, but, although sympathetic, would not call himself a beatnik.

—Contributor’s bio from the November 1959 issue of The Jazz Review (downloadable here), in which appeared the author’s first professional writing, an evaluation of Fats Navarro.

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oddly appropriate LLC Books Aeon Flux book cover

From a 1998 Animation World Network article by Peter Chung:

Here is a list of my personal favorite comics stories in no particular order. My choices are based as much on mastery of narrative form, as on originality of conception. Each of them appear to have been impelled by an inner vision; they are not comics inspired by other comics, but rather by dreams, obsessions, yearnings.

1. Baptism, Makoto-chan, Fourteen by Kazuo Umezu
2. Savannah by Sanpei Shirato
3. Mighty Atom, No-man, Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka
4. The New Gods by Jack Kirby
5. The Airtight Garage, Arzach by Moebius
6. The Incal Saga by Moebius and Jodorowsky
7. The Tower, The Hollow Earth Series by Schuiten and Peeters
8. The Jealous God, Envie de Chien by Cadelo
9. Be Free! by Tatsuya Egawa
10. Hard-Boiled by Geof Darrow and Frank Miller

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He titled one collection I Hate Poems About Poems About Poems, which is almost as good a title as that of his 2000 cartoon collection, Teach Yourself Fucking. … [Jeffrey] Lewis says he was also working on a history of radical cartoons that would draw upon his voluminous personal collection.

—From an obituary for legendary Fug, poet, anarchist, and cartoonist Tuli Kupferberg. R.I.P.

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Nothing beats a good ol’ local comics convention, so my Sunday morning was fucking invincible. It was one of those longboxes-atop-longboxes things, held in a local campus gymnasium so remote on school property a cosplayer took it upon himself to direct eager patrons in. The basketball hoops were still hanging; it was hot. To your left is my prime find, probably not the kind of revelatory funnybook (re)discovery that might open your eyes, heart, etc., but still: Fantagor #1, first Last Gasp edition, 1971, $5.00.

It’s Richard Corben, of course; I’ve been in the mood since reading an appreciation by critic David Brothers (very much worth reading for a perspective premised largely on Corben’s recent, front-of-Previews comic book work) and then belatedly discovering that the artist has returned to comic book self-publishing via Odds and Ends, a 32-page b&w compilation of assorted items, paramount among them a 20-page sequel to 1994’s color Corben release From the Pit. We can certainly draw a line straight back to Fantagor, the artist’s original (initially self-published) showcase series, although writer Starr Armitage and artist Herb Arnold also appear, foreshadowing the anthology format in which Corben would plant himself for many years – the seductive quality of narrating a comics artist’s path across the development of the form ensures that the younger Corben is typically identified as an ‘underground’ cartoonist, which is accurate, but it’s also true that his Warren magazines debut came in 1970 (Creepy #36), the same year as his initial contributions to Last Gasp’s Skull Comics and Slow Death, and only two years after his earliest fanzine appearances in Voice of Comicdom. In this way Corben bridges the gap between the EC (or thereabouts) horror-influenced faction of the undergrounds and the arguably more direct continuation of the aesthetic via Warren, while indeed anticipating the shift of the Warren magazines toward a less traditional ‘horror’ focus as the ’70s continued.

Five bucks was a popular price at the basketball con (as I have renamed it); I also picked up that enormous Treasury edition of Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dave Sim’s Collected Letters 2, because you know entertainment’s right around the corner when the first two words in a book of correspondence are “Gary Groth.” I felt so great I almost did a victory layup. Although, actually, I ran cross country in high school; I don’t really know what a layup is. And I can’t even jump these days without my ankles shattering. My presence on the internet may be diminishing, but make no mistake: I’m rapidly expanding in other ways.

A note on new comics methodology: I’m writing all this on Sunday night, because it turns out I won’t have online access until Friday. As such, this week’s selections are based on Midtown Comics’ list of 7/14 releases to Midtown Comics locations, which may differ in certain ways from Diamond’s own list of releases (updated Mondays), although neither list is foolproof, or a guarantee that your shop ordered anything besides X-Force diorama statues. But anyway:

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From Sean Howe, friend of Comics Comics, comes an unexpected discovery:

Detroit, 1963: Alberta Hunter, black, and Walter Stovall, white, arrive in town, five days after unsuccessfully attempting a marriage in Ohio, and seven days after graduating from the University of Georgia. At the University, Hunter and classmate Hamilton Holmes had been the first two black students accepted for enrollment, a desegregation that had been covered extensively by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker. Now, before they themselves settle in New York City, Hunter and Stovall go before a Detroit judge. They’re accompanied by a young white couple, Harvey and Karen, who have traveled with them from Cleveland to serve as witnesses.

They are finally wed on June 8. Because of Hunter’s history in the newspapers as a civil-rights figure, the marriage, secret for three months, becomes a mini-scandal in September—especially in Georgia, where such a union is illegal. Upon hearing of the marriage, Georgia Attorney General Eugene Cook responded, “We’re waiting to put both of ’em in jail.”

They never went to jail, of course. Alberta became better known as Charlayne Hunter-Gault; she was the first black staff member at The New Yorker, and an Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning broadcaster. While working at the New York Times, she successfully lobbied to have the paper change “Negro” to “black” in its standard usage. She and Stovall had a daughter before divorcing.

Harvey and Karen, the other young married couple who accompanied Hunter and Stovall from Cleveland to Detroit, were also divorced, in 1972.

Had the couples only met that week, when Hunter and Stovall breezed through Cleveland? There’s nothing to suggest why their paths would have intersected, except that Harvey apparently made friends easily with out-of-towners. In June of 1963, he was working odd jobs, collecting records, writing reviews for Downbeat, and talking about comics with another new friend, a recent Philadelphia transplant named Crumb.

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Harvey Pekar will be missed. [More and more. And more.]

[And more and more and more.]

[And Tom Spurgeon collects it all.]