Friday Feb 26th NYC. Have a night on the town with the endangered species known as Manhattanus Cartoonistas.
The SOHO GALLERY FOR DIGITAL ART
138 Sullivan St. NYC, NY 10012. This Friday from 8 – 11 pm.
Burger King's true nature
Do not let this injustice stand. I don’t know how long this contest will last, so go to the site now to cast your vote for integrity, solid values, and Neon Knome.
[image found via]
Kirby's models: Glorious Godfrey and Billy Graham, Big Barda and Lainie Kazan, Funky Flashman and Stan Lee
Graham: This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.
Nixon: You believe that?
Graham: Yes, sir.
Nixon: Oh, boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.
Graham: No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.
Kirby knew evil when he saw it, and he used that insight in drawing his comics.
Yes, that's a new painting by Ebisu.
If you’re anything like me, you must be wondering, “What does Japanese comics legend Ebisu do these days?” And you must also wonder, “Does he paint in his underwear?” Well, never fear, because here are the answers to all your questions. And mine, too. And some I didn’t know I had. You’ll be happy to know that we (ahem, PictureBox) will be selling work much like what is pictured in the link in just a few short months. If you poke around (NSFW) the rest of this site (an art agency) you’ll find some good information on Ebisu and Nemoto as well, not to mention a rather more eccentric artist, too.
I promise not to link to every nice review about the book, but Tom Spurgeon’s is the first substantive take on the book and he does a better job than I ever could of explaining it and what I hope is its appeal. It’s heartwarming, even for grouchy ol’ me, to have my work, and that of the cartoonists, so well discussed.
Check out this review of Dash’s new book. And then click over to his blog. He has another new book to put on your radar. Bodyworld, the awesome webcomic, is now an amazing hardcover comic book. Forgive the hype, but I’m really excited about Bodyworld. I think it’s going to make folks think about the way comics are constructed from the inside out. It’s a very freeing, very compelling way to read a comic. And something I don’t think I’ve really seen before. Over and out.
Further to Dan’s excellent post on Wally Wood, one way to think about Wood’s career is to realize that he followed a pattern common to commercial comic book artists of his era. Think of Kirby, Ditko, Kane, and Eisner (and maybe also John Stanley). All these cartoonists started off as journeymen artists, had a mid-life crisis which made them try do more artistically ambitious work, but ended up being thwarted either by the limits of their talent or the constraints of marketplace.
Jack Kirby had his midlife crisis in the late 1960s. He already had a formidable body of work, arguably the best adventure cartooning ever done in the comic book form, running from the explosive patriotic bombast of the early Captain America to the mind-stretching cosmic adventures of the Fantastic Four and Thor. But by the late 1960s he was tired of playing second fiddle that blowhardy glory-hound Stan Lee. So Kirby made is big break for DC and became the auteur behind the hugely ambitious Fourth World series. I’m very fond of the Fourth World series, and even enjoy the aspect of them that is most often mocked, Kirby’s peculiar writing style, which to my ears at least has a kind of vatic poetry. Be that as it may, DC comics wasn’t willing to give the series the support they deserved and the books were canceled mid-storyline, leaving us with the fragments of a promising epic. Kirby would go on doing fascinating work, but he never really got over the sting of losing the Fourth World. None of his subsequent work had the same crazy ambition as the Fourth World.
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Our new site looks great, so I’m ashamed that my first post will be a series of quick pointers, not an impassioned and well-researched essay like the other guys have been writing lately.
Here are are few things I think people on this site will be interested in:
1.Not comics, science fiction. R. Fiore has a very good essay on changes in the science fiction field, jumping off from an earlier piece by Tim Hodler (or T. Hobler, as Fiore called him in an earlier draft of the essay). Go here.
2. Not comics, climate change. I have a long article in today’s Globe and Mail on the attempt by some bloggers to discredit the science of climate change. Think about it this way: if the world heats up and we face an environmental catastrophe, it’ll be hard to enjoy comics. Go here.
The core paragraph:
The key objection to the work of bloggers such as Mr. McIntyre is that they are engaged in an epic game of nitpicking: zeroing in on minor technical issues while ignoring the massive and converging lines of evidence that are coming in from many disciplines. To read their online work is to enter a dank, claustrophobic universe where obsessive personalities talk endlessly about small building blocks – Yamal Peninsula trees, bristlecones, weather stations – the removal of which will somehow topple the entire edifice of climate science. Lost in the blogging world is any sense of proportion, or the idea that science is built on cumulative work in many fields, the scientists say.
3. Not comics, everything else. Earlier this week I was on the Michael Coren show as part of an arts panel. We talked abut everything under the sun (Sarah Palin and the Family Guy, Sikhs in werewolf movies, a new comedy about suicide bombers, the Olympics, Tiger Woods). Everything but comics. Go here.
And…. we’re back! Phew. You may now resume your lavish praise of this site. Or at least begin the backlash. Maybe everyone was too busy thinking about Jim Lee to worry about us. I hope so. Anyhow, on with the blogging.
Weird Science 16, 1952 (original art)
Wally Wood’s life and art exist in the space between two comic book stories. The first, “My World”, published in Weird Science no. 22, 1953, was written by Al Feldstein as a tribute to the 26-year-old Wood, who drew it. In the story, an unseen narrator describes his daily experience of reality juxtaposed with panel after panel of spectacular fantasy scenes, consisting “. . . of great space-ships that carry tourists on brief holidays to Venus or Mars or Saturn . . . My world can be ugly . . . Landing at night and entering my cities and killing and maiming and destroying . . . My world is what I choose to make it. My world is yesterday . . . Or today . . . Or tomorrow . . . For my world is the world of science fiction . . . conceived in my mind and placed upon paper with pencil and ink and brush and sweat and a great deal of love for my world.” The final drawing of the comic has Wood smoking a cigarette at the drawing table and looking a bit wan. It’s an evocation of the celebrity of Wood-the-cartoonist published by William M. Gaines’ EC Comics, home of Mad, and the publisher for which Wood did his most famous work.
Twenty-two years later, Wood, having long since broken with Gaines and Feldstein and by then a cautionary tale to his peers, wrote and drew “My Word” for Big Apple Comix. It is again a breathless narrative complemented by stunning drawings, but this time it’s a trip through a hellish New York. A furious Wood closes his introductory monologue with “Anyhow, since I have three pages in this mag, I’d like to comment briefly on the universe.” And off he goes. After some muggings, some light S&M and the requisite pile of shit, Wood, apropos of nothing, leaps on art: “That mysterious process by which one’s fantasies enrich the lives of others… and the pockets of publishers. But it is worth it, for there are the fans.” And here we see a naked boy prostrating himself saying, “Do what you want with me! Kick me! Fuck me! Shit on me! I love you! By the way, your old stuff was better…” Wood closes with a distorted version of “My World’s” final panel: A squat alien at the drawing board, smoking and saying, “My word is the word I choose to make it, for I conceive it in my mind and put it down on paper with a lot of sweat and love and shit like that, for I am a troglodyte. My name is spafon gool.”
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