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Dash and I will be rolling into Toronto’s TCAF this weekend, May 8 and 9, with a full slate of programming and, natch, a full assortment of PictureBox books covering two tables. I’ll also be signing and selling Art in Time for all you history buffs out there. Come by the booth, go see Dash at his signings, and come see us both jabber on about comics.

Spotlight: Dan Nadel’s Art in Time
Saturday, May 8th, 10:30 – 11:15am, Learning Center 1

Publisher and comics historian Dan Nadel will discuss and show images from his new book, Art in Time, while addressing how comics history gets constructed and how the theme of adventure in comics has expanded and contracted over the years. Artists discussed will include H.G. Peter, Willy Mendes, Sharon Rudahl, Jack Kirby, Bill Everett.

-Spotlight: Paul Pope and Dash Shaw
Saturday May 8th, 12:00-1:00pm, The Pilot

TCAF Featured Guests Paul Pope and Dash Shaw are two of the most exciting creators in comics, mixing their influences and innovations to create groundbreaking work. Now Inkstuds Radio/Podcast host Robin McConnell will moderate a conversation between these two creators about the role that influences play in creating comics, ranging from traditional comics to film and music and from classical to contemporary works. This also includes a discussion of education, some key points in creating your own vision in comics, and an examination of how to make influences work and finding out where they lead you.

-Indie Comics Japan: Manga Outside the Mainstream
Saturday, May 8th, 1:45 – 2:45pm, Learning Center 1

Comics from Japan are called “manga”, and the very word inspires a very particular idea of style and presentation in the minds of many readers. But manga is just the Japanese word for comics, and the styles, presentations, and ideas contained within that medium are as interesting and diverse as the sorts of comics being produced in Europe or North America. Join publisher Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc., translator/production coordinator Ryan Sands, Fanfare/Ponent-Mon and manga.about.com representative Deb Aoki, translator Jocelyene Allen, and moderator Christopher Butcher to discuss the many treasures manga has to offer North American readers!
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Here’s the best thing I got on my Free Comic Book Day (which I spent exploring semi-local stores I’d never been to in the informed company of Robot 6’s Chris Mautner): Barbarella, the second Grove Press edition, with Jane Fonda on the cover.

These days the late creator Jean-Claude Forest is in the unique position of having a later, more ambitious work in print — 1979’s You Are There, drawn by Jacques Tardi and released in English by Fantagraphics — so it seems just the right time for me to stumble upon these name-making early ’60s originals, which I’d never read; Heavy Metal serialized and collected the 1977 third series of the franchise (Barbarella: Le Semble-lune) as Barbarella: The Moon Child, so that was the extent of my exposure. I still haven’t finished the book, but I love the way Forest draws the character with these really heavy-outlined eyes, which I know is based on the look of Brigitte Bardot, yet it gives her this slightly weary quality, like she’s seen some truly awful shit in her adventures in space, sinister stuff that’s still lurking around in the panel gutters, but it’s not gonna stop her, it’s not gonna push her life around.

I also picked up a big moldy bag of Star*Reach back issues, #1-7 for $8.00, half-expecting moths to fly out. It was hiding in one of those shops that’s apparently a converted living room, lined on ever wall with bowing shelves of dusty, warping softcovers with clusters of comic books packed in between. There’s treasures in those walls, provided you define “treasures” as “the 1992 Millennium publication of Weird Tales Illustrated, featuring Harlan Ellison, P. Craig Russell and Tim Vigil, not on the same story, though.” But nothing beat Star*Reach, not at those prices.

The brainchild of Marvel/DC writer Mike Friedrich, Star*Reach represented a small but critical development in North American comic books – arriving in 1974, just past the initial wave of undergrounds and three years prior to Heavy Metal, the series exploited Friedrich’s contacts in superhero comics and various strains of fanzine culture to form an ongoing anthology of ‘mature’ genre work (involving topless ladies on the front or back covers of the first three issues, naturally) with more of a mainline-informed illustrative style than the horror/sci-fi undergrounds. It was labeled “ground level” comics, and sold catch-as-catch-can through the crumbling head shop market, the infant comic book direct market, personal subscriptions and direct mail advertisements. Fleeting or re-purposed work by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano mixed with early stuff by Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, and young Canadian scriptwriter Dave Sim. Issue #7 from 1977 boasted a contribution by Sitoshi Hirota & Masaichi Mukaide, possibly the first-ever commercial English-language release of manga in the United States, although I don’t know if the piece was actually amateur work specially prepared for American submission. Mukaide wound up sticking around at Star*Reach and its sibling titles, then re-teaming with Friedrich after it all shut down in ’79 for an enigmatic Japanese-published collection of comics apparently aimed to tantalize Western readers; it was titled simply Manga, and manifested at some undated point in the early ’80s, after which editor Mukaide seems to have vanished entirely.

Such are the mysteries and rewards of Free Comic Book Day. I also bought a 3-D Clive Barker comic for a dollar, because I heard 3-D was here to stay. In the interests of resistance, here are some more expensive comics that sit flat on the page.

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I am obsessed with the music from the animated 1967 Spider-Man cartoons. Not the theme music but the background music. Part jazz, part James Brown soul, part psychedelic rock—it’s all a big mash-up of styles that marvels the ears and makes me dance around. Anyways, Bill Boichel and I have been trying to track down the music sans voices and sound effects for years, but to no avail. Today Bill forwarded me this discovery (which had been sent to him by one of his regulars, Phil Dokes): two blog posts from WFMU’s blog on the subject.

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It’s a rainy Sunday morning here in Fumetto. The Kirby show is up, three floors and around 150 pages later. Here are some photos from the weekend thus far. I should note that not shown here are the superlative 1940s and ’50s pages we have on display, including the cover to Boy Commandos 23, unpublished Black Magic and Foxhole covers, the entire “City of Ghouls” from Fighting American 2, and more. I’ve so enjoyed walking through Kirby’s career, watching his visual world change and expand. Paul and I have also been lucky enough to be joined by two of our lenders, Tom Morehouse and Tom Kraft, as well as Rand Hoppe of  The Jack Kirby Museum. Just having spitballing history and theory with these guys has been an incredible education. Now I need to see the rest of the festival.

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Check out this Brian Chippendale interview from WRNI in Providence, RI.

Remember Chipper’s new book is due out in a few months, True Believers, so don’t despair. There’s a short video on the radio’s site that shows some new pages from his forthcoming book, If ‘n Oof.

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When Ben Katchor was in  Toronto last week, one of the many interesting things he mentioned is that while reading the new anthology Farber on Film: The Complete Film writings of Manny Farber, he had been struck by how frequently the great movie critic made reference to comics.

As I noted before, Manny Farber had many ties to comics, going back before he could even read. Richard Thompson once opened an interview with Farber with the following anecdote: “In one of his baby pictures, Manny Farber has the costume and the face of The Yellow Kid; as he explained, ‘Our parents used to dress us in costumes from all the comic strips.’” In 1944 and 1951 Farber wrote two brief but extremely perceptive essays on comics (which can be found in a volume Kent Worcester and I co-edited called Arguing Comics). In these essays Farber was among the earlier writers to appreciate Harry Tuthill, Ernie Bushmiller and Stan MacGovern. Farber woud go on to be an early champion of the Warner Bros. cartoons. He also served as an important inspiration to Donald Phelps, whose quirkily written and deeply perceptive essays are among the greatest body of comics criticism we have. And as a painter, Farber incorporated comic strip elements in his work.

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Another morning here in Lucerne. A couple pix to illustrate my current state of mind.

No more of these until the shows are up! Almost there…

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Here I am, back in beautiful Lucerne for Fumetto. The sun is shining, the sandwiches are fried and the beer is delightful. Oh yes, and there are comics, too! Many, many, many comics. Also, one Ben Jones. I’m here for my and Paul Gravett’s Jack Kirby show and Ben is here for the Ben show. There are various shows coming to life, including artists like Brecht Evans and Thomas Ott, whose life-size anatomical scratchboard (!) images are stunning and horrifying. It’s all pretty fun. The whole schlemiel opens on May 1. If you’re anywhere near Switzerland I must insist that you attend. If nothing else to take in some damn fine Kirby art. We have close to 200 pages (including all but two pages of Fantastic Four 54) and the site of all them has turned even me, cynical, grumpy, altogether jaded me, into a quivering lump of a fanboy. Gravett and I keep nudging each other like, “Can you believe this shit?” Anyhow, here are some pictures…

And this is all before we’ve even hung the show. Sorry to brag. It’s just too much fun. More tomorrow, including some Ben Jones candids, more gushing and more Kirby!

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FOOTBALL RIOT AT SMURF VILLAGE – not an uncommon sight, I hasten to add. Those lovable (and almost certainly delicious) blue creatures may be best remembered in the U.S. as a mega-merchandising juggernaut accompanied by a five million-episode television cartoon, but those old ’60s/’70s albums by creator Peyo and co-writer Yvan Delporte (editor-in-chief of originating magazine Spirou for some of that period) were lean, tight little comics, marked by a rather jaundiced view of societal stability. The Smurfs are always fighting, be it from Flanders/Wallonia-inspired linguistic differences (Smurf of One and Smurf a Dozen of the Other, seen above), catastrophic and possible inherent flaws of the democratic system (King Smurf) or an old fashioned insect-borne rage contagion (The Black Smurf, or sometimes The Purple Smurf if your region cares to head off a particular allegorical construction); if this is supposed to be some kind of anarcho-socialist utopia, its maintenance costs are transparent indeed!

Don’t mind me, I’m just counting the weeks until the (apparently) late August debut of the new English-language North American line from NBM/Papercutz, albeit (apparently) to be published at the same smallish 6.5″ x 9″ dimensions as NBM’s Dungeon paperbacks. Still: vintage Franco-Belgian stuff for $5.99 (unless you want the same-sized $10.99 hardbacks) sounds like an okay enough side-effect of the continuing march of movie franchise continuations, here a live-action/CGI whatsit from the director of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and two of the screenwriters of Shrek 2, coming soon, 2011. Starring Neil Patrick Harris as Johan, so you know they’re going all way back into the 1950s Belgian kiddie komiks, by which I really mean the 1976 animated movie The Smurfs and the Magic Flute, co-directed by Peyo himself, having worked in animation during WWII with several future principals of the mighty Marcinelle school of Belgian comics art. Teenage Peyo wasn’t immediately accepted into Spirou with Franquin and Morris and such, which makes it a little ironic that the Smurfs’ international assault left Peyo’s clean but rather dispassionate iteration of the period’s style its sole lingering image in a lot of places, the U.S. not the least of them.

Comics and movies, folks. What else do we have?

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In the 1972  fanzine Sense of Wonder #12, Russ Manning published an enigmatic “see if you can guess” essay on Jesse Marsh. Without naming the artist, Manning takes the reader through the progression of the mystery artist’s style, beginning with Four Color Comics and ending with Johnny Mack Brown. Manning situates Marsh’s style from first-hand knowledge of Marsh’s influences, but goes further by describing the difference between an artist like Gould and an artist like Foster: design versus composition. It’s a quick theoretical detour, but one Manning would come back to later in interviews about his own work. Over halfway through the piece he declares Johnny Mack Brown #2 (featured in its entirety in Art in Time and chosen—I swear—before I even read this article!) a masterpiece, and then explains why in as close an analysis of artistic style as I’ve read from that period. Manning gets inside the work like a fellow artist but with the enthusiasm of a fan. And Russ Manning was, in fact, a fan. He began as an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine artist and, via Tarzan, made the acquaintance of Jesse Marsh, who got the younger artist his first job at Dell. Eventually, of course, Manning would succeed his mentor on Tarzan. By the end of the piece, Manning, with rhetorical flourish, reveals his subject to be Jesse Marsh. Anyhow, these two men, so different in style, were closely linked as artists and friends. It’s a study in contrast and lineage, and also a somewhat opaque subject, since both men were very private and possessed full lives outside of comics. Maybe this independent streak, something common to the handful of comic books masters on the west coast, was recognized and respected by the two friends. In any case, here is some fine evidence of an unusual artistic friendship.