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One fine day in Lucerne, Switzerland I gathered Frank Santoro, Lauren Weinstein and CF around a table to interview Yuichi Yokoyama. Via his translator he responded to all of our various questions. What we didn’t know was that later, after a few beers, his English got a lot better! Alas, we didn’t record his musings on soccer, baseball, fishing, and Donald Judd. Next time. For now, herewith a conversation with some of the best bugged out minds of my generation and one doofus (me).

April 2, 2009

Dan Nadel: Maybe we could talk for a few minutes about adventure and motion, since everyone here does adventure comics, often involving action — approaches to action.

[Everybody stops to think]

Yuichi Yokoyama: Being here at this moment, at this table, with the publisher, Dan Nadel, this is an adventure. I am surrounded by foreigners, this is also an adventure. I cannot speak your language, that is also an adventure. I have never thought about it before, why it’s an adventure… I don’t think I’m going to draw any so-called “actions.” Not anymore. I’d like to draw an impression of something very quiet, philosophical.

CF: Well, it’s hard to think about what action is, because anything that’s moving is in action, or is an adventure. And everything’s some kind of quest of the will, even if it’s a very unimportant thing. And at some point, it becomes adventure or it becomes action, but it’s always that way. So, in some ways I feel like the hardest thing to do in comics is to make nothing happen, because the panels are always moving forward, so you always have that energy of action, and you always have that energy of adventure, and it’s very hard to “still” that. I think I’ve been trying to do that. The way you show pacing, how fast you make a fight move, is a really strange thing. How the time between panels can be so many different things — it could be like a half second or a number of seconds and the only way you can tell is by the drawing itself. So it’s very weird . . . it’s not rational.

YY: What you have said is very interesting. It’s rather human, very human. After forming actions with rapidity, then you have to read from one panel to the other, quickly — that is very exciting, but you like to go back to another side of humanistic . . . you like to think about “quiet”.

CF: I like to think about everything, but the problem is that, I think, some things are harder to get than others, harder to achieve. I think one of the hardest things to achieve is a sense of stillness. Let’s not say that, even, let’s say a sense of non-action. And quietness is action, too, in a lot of ways.

YY: In my case, I do not have any “stories,” as such. There are no stories in my manga–just the impressions in each panel, that is what I want to consider. In a Hemingway story two friends of Nick Adams get out of a train somewhere in a very humble, dirty, small, coal mining town and they go to the bar. It’s a very rough bar, and they are treated very badly, and they plot their revenge. But don’t take revenge; there’s no story. They go back to the train. Such a simple thing, there’s no story, but there is something lurking in the background anyway. That is what I want to take out of the story. I want to express this sort of thing without words, so readers have to “read between the lines,” between the panels.

CF: And why do you want to not draw action anymore? Because of that?

YY: No, I wouldn’t say that I want to stop completely 100%. For instance, I would like to draw a war for 1000-2000 pages. From the beginning, only scenes of fighting, and the end, the last page, after 1000 pages, they’re still fighting. For that, I need a tremendous amount of time. With my present technique, it takes an enormous amount of time. If I find out I can employ a special technique within a very limited amount of time, I might start action manga again. If I use a magic marker, like in Baby Boom [A new book he’s drawing in a different style], maybe it’ll happen. I’d like to make my own technique to draw faster for this special idea of the 1000 page war comic. I’m very ambitious, I always want to compete with time.

DN: Do you want to compete with other artists or just yourself?

YY: I don’t want to compete with others, I want to draw for myself.

Lauren Weinstein: With the war comic, would you re-enact a battle that’s already been fought, or is it your own war?

YY: It would blend what I have seen in the past through movies, on television, the newspaper, and in photos. I don’t want to describe any humanistic feeling, but at the same time I don’t want to describe any death scenes. For instance: Take an empty town, but the person in the manga thinks that there must be a lot of enemies in this dead town. In this case, nobody can be dead, there are no enemies there. I’m trying to think of how I can avoid a scene of dead bodies lying on the floor. So many things I have to solve technically. If I figure out a technique for that kind of scene, then I can start drawing it.

CF: Why are you avoiding the human? Why is the deleting of human concerns in the work important?

YY: I’d like to read such a manga myself, nobody else writes such manga, that’s why I write, so basically the purpose is to draw manga for me, not for others. Self-contemplation.

CF: Are there any artists working today that you feel connected to, in any way, any kind of artist, contemporary artists?

YY: I mostly feel kinship with Japanese artists.

CF: Who?

Y: Tadashi Kawamata, he lives in France. He used to he used to make oil paintings. Now he’ll use a a piece of a tree, a broken board, or other scraps to create a new building. He’s always invited by art festivals all over the world, he’s considered one of the top artists in Japan.

CF: I realize this might be an impossible question to ask, but why is it that the manga that you want to read has those aspects, no story or anything, like that war comic?

YY: It’s very difficult to describe, but in my personal life I don’t respect human feelings. I’m very far from human society, I’d rather appreciate natural phenomena. I’m very interested in understanding how a bird might see things. I want to delete the human feelings because the reader wants to emotionally take sides with one particular person and I’d prefer they remain neutral. That’s why I don’t want to produce a scene where people feel sympathy with a particular person.

CF: I feel like I’m trying to do the same thing: Creating these situations where people would feel drawn to root for, or side with certain elements, but in the end hopefully there’s no one to side with. Hopefully there’s no one to say “this is good,” or “this is bad,” but still have those human elements in there, and draw people out.

YY: Not to be obnoxious, but I’d like to go up even higher than the human consciousness. What we all can do, as humans, is sort of very limited.

CF: That’s true, but I’m young and I think that’s where I have to begin. That’s how I feel right now.

YY: If we have another ten days, maybe we can go into more details, but I have to go back to Japan tomorrow.

DN: You started manga when you were 31, how did you first learn to make it, was there anyone you were looking at to help you learn to tell stories?

YY: 12 years ago, I switched from oil painting to making manga. I went to a second-hand bookshop and I bought this manga techniques book with a little money and started to train myself.

Frank Santoro: Well your style seems to have come fully-formed. It doesn’t bloom, it just… arrived. It’s just so unique that that’s, I think what we’re trying to…

YY: The first panels I drew, they’re not in a book. Of course, you didn’t see the original drawings, from when I was starting 12 years ago. I still have them but they’re so terrible that nobody would want to buy it or make it a manga. So you only saw the first book, that’s why you think it’s the way you described

FS: I think I’m speaking for everyone, but I speak for myself too, but I don’t see any influence from another style. I see you taking things from modern art, but not necessarily from other manga. So the synthesis of modern art and manga is very unique, and that’s what I think it’s fully formed.

YY: I believe you.

FS: Thank you!

DN: The thing about the Hemingway stories is that most people would say that those have a lot of emotional content because it’s all in the subtle interactions between the two men. Do you see those as having emotional content, or do you only see them as plotless sequences of actions?

YY: Yeah, from the beginning, I delete or disguise this emotion. I don’t see it.

CF: He just likes the grilling of the fish.

YY: All of the conversations in the Hemingway stories, I don’t find them to be very humanistic conversations. I don’t see the humanity. I feel they’re very cold and inhuman. There is something sticking behind the conversation which has nothing to with the warmth of human interaction. There are a lot of short stories with scenes of just people talking in a restaurant, and then I can’t detect any meaning behind those conversations; they’re meaningless. There is one scene in a Hemingway story, this one station scene: Tourists arrive in the station and they decide to go into the local bar and they sit and they encounter three or four local people from the city. They start to talk to each other. The tourists, this group of people, have ordered a very very expensive gorgeous champagne that they give to everybody. One of them explains, “I have just divorced, that’s why I’ve taken this journey” and he talks to the local people about married life. Then he leaves because the train comes, but before he leaves the bar, he tells the locals that they have to share the champagne that is left. But instead the locals bring the half-drank champagne bottle back to the counter and ask for money back. It’s a very humanistic story but it’s also very cold, extreme coldness.

CF: This is a fascination in your work that you’re actively pursuing at all times, and maybe this is inappropriate, but in your personal life I know you have a girlfriend or something. How does it relate to personal human relationships with your family, for instance?

YY: My daily life with girlfriend and with my mother and with my friends, it’s an absolutely normal human relationship, I respect my friends, I feel very warm feelings towards my friends, my girlfriends, and my mother, I eat regularly….

CF: I know that!

YY: So you’re suspicious that I’m also a very cold person

CF: No. I just think that when you’re doing something creative, when you’re exploring things that you’re fascinated by, it’s because you have questions about them; questions are inspiration. I have a desire, I think, to merge what I’m doing in my work and my personal life to some extent. If you’re always in your work trying to get to these higher levels that are beyond humans, to me sometimes it’s kind of sad that you can’t achieve them in your normal life.

YY: Have you ever been to Japan? I think the Japanese are very very emotional people. If you ever watch Japanese television, you will encounter every second, such a scene of appreciation, emotional extremes, emotional expressions. Always crying and uh, emotional. That is our national character. This emotionality disturbs me and I think that that I would say that within me there is an unconscious protest against this tendency.

CF: And you’re making art to reflect that.

YY: I think I do that very unconsciously, but I have to admit that it reflects in my work, as you’ve pointed out. Our emotionality is not like yours in America. It’s so shadowy; even if we express ourselves with joy, appreciation, excitement, somehow a shadow is behind it all. This is not like your emotional life, you express joy, sadness, pathos, enjoyment very differently.

CF: What’s the shadow, the shadow is infinity?

YY: It’s very ghostly. Our emotional environment in Japan doesn’t go up and down so much. It’s relatively balanced. Anyway, I think that geographically Japan is also a nice place to live. Very pleasant place. Under these circumstances, in time, humans become lazy, unambitious, very comfortable. Too comfortable. That weakens us. Like you, in America, when you laugh you open their mouth and the laugh comes out from here. Our laughing is not like that, but I find that your style is more healthy. It explodes. That’s much healthier than ours.

CF: But what’s funny is that “healthy” does not get results that are interesting or tell you things that are new. I think that being healthy or maintaining vitality doesn’t necessarily, or in most cases doesn’t give you results that are interesting or answers that you weren’t aware of, new information, I think, comes out of sickness and out of imbalance.

LW: You’re talking about asceticism though.

CF: It’s just an extreme, it could be decadence.

LW: A search for purity doesn’t mean decadence.

CF: I’m just saying limits of human ability just to survive, I just wanted to make the point that healthy is maybe a little bit beside the point, in creative work.

YY: “Mentally and physically,” this is very important to my creativity.

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Autobiography: My Life in Comics
2:00 pm @ Union Pool, Brooklyn NY
(484 Union Ave, one block from the Lorimer-Metropolitan G and L stop)

David Heatley (My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, Kramers Ergot), Lauren Weinstein (Girl Stories, The Goddess of War) and Julia Wertz (Fart Party, I Saw You) will discuss the process, pleasures, and problems of making comics based on their own personal lives and observations. Then stick around to get a book signed, hit the taco truck, and sip a summer drink with our featured cartoonists.

Suggested donation is $5. All proceeds go to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

More info here.

UPDATE: The audio for this event can now be listened to here.

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Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th
two different classes – same lesson
both days
noon to six
COMICSCLASS2700
with FRANK SANTORO
“DISCOVER THE HIDDEN TEMPO OF COMICS”

Hey Everybody. I’m offering my Comics Class again. I’m doing TWO workshop classes in New York City at the infamous Westbeth artists’ co-op on Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th. Be there or be square. It’s gonna be an intense, small class of six people. Not for beginners. Come ready to draw.

The focus will be on the student’s contour line drawing and composition. This class will explore the process of improvisation within a rigorously structured page design. Meaning students will learn how to find a framework of harmonic points on the comics page. These points act like a “tuning fork” and provide page proportions which allow the drawings to unfold in sequence while firmly remaining “in key.”

Seriously. See, the problem I see with most comics is that often there is a real lack of a consistent narrative pace. Comics can be structured like songs and utilize tempo, rhythm, harmonies, and melodies to change the pace of a story. It’s this invisible structure that will be explored, diagrammed, and discussed.

And as for the drawing end of it, we will be drawing in a contour line style. No shading, just lines. Some color. Students will be making a manuscript, a “print dummy” of sorts for making their own 16 page zine. Each student will be “improvising” upon a pre-existing story structure designed by myself. Straight ahead, no-frills drawing and composition, transitions and sequencing will be the order of the day. I will be working with each student one on one to really explain how structure and improvisation can unlock one’s narrative vision.

Email me: capneasyATgmailDOTcom if you’re interested. It’s 40 bux. Noon to six with a lunch break. Space is limited to six people each day.

UPDATE 6/26: There’s one spot left for Saturday and 1 spot left for Sunday. Thanks.

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Okay, Frank Santoro here, and this one’s for all the color nerds out there. It’s just my notes, fragments of an interview with a master.

Steve Oliff may be one of the best color artists in comics history. I tracked down the 30-year veteran of comics and asked him a few questions about some old color processes used in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He was kind. And patient. But please know that these notes, this “interview,” is really just to satisfy me and to add fuel to the fire of my own obsessions—so forgive me if this isn’t a super well rounded portrait of an artist. (And thanks to Steve.)

I was just reading, looking at everything Oliff had worked on, collecting the coolest and weirdest crap comics just cuz he’d colored them, and trying to make sense of how the processes changed over the years. He ushered in the computer era when he found a way to color Akira by the most insane process in 1988. And before that he worked on Marvel’s first full color comic magazine in the ’70s, The Hulk!, the first book there to use the “blue-line” process.

Blue-line. Blue-line color process. What is it? From what I understand, generally, it’s when the “black line” (the inked, finished art) is printed on an acetate sheet and then is also printed in non-photo blue on Bristol board at the same size. The acetate is usually hinged at the top of the board and brought down for reference. Anyways, the board gets the full color treatment, watercolor, acrylics, dyes, anything that’ll stick to the board. The colored page and the black-line page are shot by the camera separately. The idea is that the blacks stay black and the color stays balanced. You can paint the fuck out of it and still have these crisp containment black lines that’ll shape it all up.

An example of this process is found here. Read the intro paragraph about original blue-line comic art.

I got really into reading Howard Chaykin‘s Time² and really into trying to understand how Steve Oliff went about coloring it. Time² has a fresh, light palette that adjusts to the mood of the story ?very nicely. The light “pastel” palette was so different from the ?traditional four-color books on newsprint and the garish Baxter paper ?books of ’84-’86. ??”Flat” colors for the most part with slight airbrushed gradients that? presages computer color’s ubiquitous “modeled” color of today—a look that ?Oliff was instrumental in creating.

Yet, the effects achieved in? Time² are remarkable because they do not rely heavily on “modeling” ?and gradients; the colors are restrained and generally “flat.” Oliff ?arranged the mottled, impressionistic flat areas of color to create ?tension and mood and it worked beautifully. White Conté crayon ?highlights and watercolor paper-like textures reveal a hand? with a liveliness rarely seen in color comics. This approach ?pairs very well with Chaykin’s style, which is important to note.? Subtleties of color,? highlights, and patterning that mirror Chaykin’s style unify the color and line ?art, like a second voice providing a stellar harmony.

Note the blue flourish on the back of the policeman to the right. And how it rhymes with the sky on the adjacent page.

These flourishes and the simple painted sky background were? not possible with the four-color process. All “art” was made on the ?black line with the four-color process. A colorist may have implied a? stormy sky in his color guides, but it would be left to an unknown? “separator” to create the sky—a chance that most artists and? colorists were not, generally, prepared to make. It was very uncommon ?to see elements created by the artist printed on any of the color ?plates. For the most ?part the artist was limited to the black line, and the colorist to flat? color, screens and mechanical gradients notwithstanding.

Santoro: Was this (Time²) your first experience with the blue-line process?

OLIFF: Yes, this was the first time I’d tried the blue-line process. It was the second time I’d worked with Howard Chaykin, though. The first time was in 1978 on The Stars My Destination. On that project we just did full-color art. I was laying in the basics and Howard did the finishes.

On Time², Howard and I worked very closely. He sent me a pile of color references, from painted TV Guide covers to fashion photos. He had a late-forties to early sixties flavor to all of it. He does extensive reference research for his projects. That naturally carried over to the coloring.

Time² had a couple of things different about it. First, many of the pages were designed as double-page spreads, and could be linked thematically. I knew there weren’t going to be any annoying ads that could pop up randomly with God only knows what kind of a color scheme to compete with my work.

Then you have the real advantage of blue lines: You can use any paint, pencil, etc., that you want. I could use gouache (opaque watercolor). And in reproduction, that word “opaque” is crucial.

I’m going to digress a bit, but this is important.

Comics had traditionally been colored on the guides using Dr. Martin’s Radiant Transparent Watercolors. These guides were not used for reproduction, just as an indicator for the engravers and separators.

When people started doing full-color, they were looking for bright, saturated colors, which Dr. Martin’s gives on the original color art. However, when you try to reproduce the transparent colors, because of the crystalline structure of the pigment, and the bouncing of the light between the white paper and the pigment, the colors will over-saturate, and react weirdly.

With opaque colors, the light hits the paint and is directly reflected back to the camera or scanner without the trip under the transparent colors. This gives a much more controllable color that can be accurately reproduced.

Up to that point in my career, I had been using transparent dyes, felt pens, and only a very little opaque Cel-Vinyl animation paint. Gouache changed my whole approach to color. And best of all, I could mix the gouache thin enough that I could airbrush with it. (And there is a lot more airbrush work on Time² than at first meets the eye.)

One of the main things that separates Time² from my earlier coloring jobs was that I mixed up my own special palettes of colors to airbrush, and then I used some of those same colors to paint with. Then on top of that, I was using some of the leftover frisket (a masking film) to create patterns of color. For instance there is a big shot of a girl sitting on a couch. The pattern on the fabric is mostly used frisket pieces. We used spatter and colored pencil extensively to give texture.

I also used Pantone films to cast shadows over the colors once they were rendered.

And finally, Howard came back in and gave a lot of the faces hard edged color. He felt some of my color edging was too soft, so he cut in some highlights.

I was out of the loop on the proofs, so I don’t know what was going on in that department. Howard and the editors were more on top of that. Time² has been one of the most popular works of mine among colorists. I can remember Brian Haberlin mentioning it as one of his favorite color jobs before he became a pro. I think it still holds up. I’m proud of it.

The blue-line process changed the way colorists essentially ?”created” color. To get an insight on how different the process was, ?I asked Steve to compare Time² to another book he worked on only the ?year before: Mike Kaluta‘s Starstruck series.

When I worked on the Epic titles: Timespirits, Coyote, The Bozz Chronicles, and Starstruck, they were all flat color books. (Timespirits eventually switched to full-color stats for the last few issues.) It was an adjustment for me. It was like working on Captain Victory and Starslayer for Pacific, which I’d done in the early ’80s.

How were your guides interpreted for Starstruck?

I’m guessing ?paper seps that were then shot with screens to get percentages. This is more or less the same process that had been in place for fifty years ?in comic books.

Starstruck was separated by one of the old hand separation companies, probably Chemical Color up in Connecticut. They did a decent job considering I hate to write numbers all over my guides, so they were left to guess a lot about exactly which colors I wanted.

Your arrangement of bright flat colors in Starstruck, to me, really? suits Kaluta’s work. It feels like you really looked at his own color? work and really attempted to dovetail nicely with his line work. I? don’t get that feeling with Elaine Lee‘s colors on the first two ?issues. I also think it’s a very modern palette that holds up over ?time. Very fresh.

Starstruck had great art, and I was forced to think things through in a flatter way. However, I’ve never approached any project without trying my best to figure out which color approach best suits the story and the artist. Also, whenever possible I talked to the artists about what they were looking for in the color. My goal has always been to be a real collaborator on the art, and do everything in my power to bring out the best in it. That’s not always possible, but I tried whenever I could. I didn’t have much contact with Mike on that book, though. I was called in because the editor (Archie Goodwin) either wasn’t totally happy with Elaine’s work, or she was behind on deadlines.

Please elaborate on the mid-’80s and the choices offered: four-?color, blue-line, Photostats, grey-line. Did you feel that one process was superior or did you have? a preference? They are understandably different processes with their? own quirks. Did turning over your guides to a separation house and? getting back lazy seps fuel your interest in blue-line? Obviously with Akira that was an issue (I read your essay on Akira color), but before you really even thought about computer color, lets ?say in ’85, ’86, which process did you feel best represented what you ?were trying to do? Because from what I can tell you were doing? grey-line, blue-line, and four-color in 1986.

I was doing all different color styles around then, true, but I’d been thinking about coloring using computers as early as ’82-’83.

For me blue lines were a step sideways in my color evolution. I’d been doing full-color work since right after I worked for Howard in ’78. I was one of the first colorists to use the Marvel double-print black system that Rick Marshall put together for The Hulk! magazine. They called it SUPERCOLOR, I think. It was an attempt to find a blue-line substitute.

The idea of their system was similar to blue-lines, except that they printed two copies of the line art onto a type of Photostat that supposedly wouldn’t shrink (therefore preserving registration). I did full color on one, and the other was used for the line art. Between the two of them I could get a variety of effects. I could knock out the line art to get glass FX, and I could also add Zip-A-Tone to the black to get darker tones and set moods.

This system worked fairly well, but the problem for most colorists was that you had to work on a very slick surface that only took certain color mediums. I developed a system for coloring on them that worked well, but it wasn’t like working in paint and colored pencil, etc. I could use airbrush, however.

The problem at the time was that editors were looking for ways to economically get better color, but there weren’t many books to try things on. After the Hulk series got canceled, there wasn’t any work for a full-colorist.

That was a rough spell for me, but I got little jobs here and there until Pacific Comics began. They did flat color on newsprint until Bruce Jones’s Alien Worlds and Twisted Tales came out. On those they did the jump to Baxter paper, but the first issue of Twisted Tales was hand-separated. I did most of the guides for that issue. By this time I was coloring my guides on photostats, so I just did them like I was doing full-color even if I knew it was going to be flat separations. I put an acetate overlay on them, which was where I wrote in the color codes. (I REALLY hated putting those numbers in.)

That all changed on one Al Williamson story for Alien Worlds. They saw how nice the guides looked and decided to try to get a clean full-color shot, which they did, so they switched then and there to full-color. I still have a daily strip that Al sent me in appreciation for that job.

But the age-old problem of shooting full-color art was still there, so someone came up with the grey-line system, which was a watered-down blue-line approach. It worked up until the end of the Eclipse line of comics.

When Time² came out, and so did The Dark Knight, the blue-line was the hot way to get full color.

(Oliff would continue using the blue-line technique and his ?collaboration with Chaykin through 1988 with Blackhawk, from DC ?comics.)

Would you comment on this series briefly? I feel like you grew more? comfortable with the blue-line process here and created a palette and? look that was very suitable to the 1940s setting. Its a bit less? frenetic than Time², but still very “lively.” There are also more ?instances where you are painting in backgrounds that Chaykin is not delineating on the black line.

After Time², when Howard landed the Blackhawk series for DC, he got me signed on as colorist. All the stuff I learned on Time², I was then able to use on Blackhawk. My painting ability got stronger and cleaner, and Howard felt confident to let me add background and design elements. I still have many of those pages, and I’m amazed at how much work I put into them.

Would you elaborate on the grey-line process used ?at Eclipse? Was this the same process that Marshall Rogers used for? his Scorpio Rose comics? Did processes change at Eclipse and Pacific ?over the years? I’ve heard that Marshall was very involved in?developing Eclipse’s color process in the early ’80s.

I don’t know if Marshall had anything to do with the development of the grey-line system or not. The grey-line process was a hybrid of the blue-line designed for drum scanning. Blue-line traditionally had the blue line printed on heavy illustration board. That meant they had to be shot photographically. The grey lines were 10% line art printed on a flexible Photostat. That was what we colored. The black line art overlay was also flexible. The pages were done at printing size, and ganged up to scan a bunch of pages at a time on a drum scanner. I don’t know whether it was four or eight pages at a time, or what. This made the separations inexpensive, which allowed them to do full color at not too much more cost than flat color.

How did you feel about the Baxter paper books ?that came out in ’84? Camelot 3000 and the New Teen Titans. I’m not? aware of any “Baxter” books that you may have worked on.

I always thought that the Epic books I colored were Baxter books. But in general the first Baxter books were a bit much. The Baxter books did allow a wider range of colors, though. It was just that no one was quite prepared for it at first.

Moebius‘s Epic graphic novels. Were they? blue-line? Were all the Marvel graphic novels blue-line? Is the? Starstruck graphic novel from ’84 a blue-line process? Do you remember? what the first blue-line process book you saw was? I mean one that you ?saw in a production office or somewhere, not the final printed book ?but the board itself with the overlay.

Moebius was definitely blue-line. I don’t know about the Starstruck graphic novel. The Marvel graphic novels I colored were the double-print black system. (I’m not sure what the official name was for that system. I’ve just always called it that.) The Death of Captain Marvel, God Loves, Man Kills, Super Boxers, Revenge of the Living Monolith were all that system.

The only one that was totally different for me was the Alien Legion graphic novel. On that one I colored directly on Frank Cirocco’s art. I’m not sure what the rest of them were.

I don ‘t remember seeing any blue-line jobs in the office until after I had done a few myself. In addition to Time², I colored about three Classics Illustrated graphic novels for First Comics.

I asked a fairly reliable source about who ?actually interpreted the guides for the separation houses in the ’60s ?and ’70s and was told that Marvel and DC had the same separation house.? “It was little old ladies in Connecticut who made the separations.”? Have you ever heard anything like that?

Oh, yeah. That was it. Chemical Color. It was a standard line about the state of comic coloring. When it sucked, you could blame it on the “little old ladies in Connecticut.”

postscript: anyone with info on the “greyline” process, please email me. capneasyATgmailDOTcom

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I can’t help it, so I’m going to write about history today. Please hold your gag reflex. This is actually just a “fun” post. A simple one mostly for my own list- making enjoyment. I love books about comics history — I love the personalities behind them, I love their peculiar visions of a canon, and, of course, I love them for their information. Here’s what a I look for: Honesty; A clear purpose for the book; research distilled into solid prose; an original opinion or critical idea about the material; accuracy.

Herewith a list of my current favorite books about comics history, or older anthologies containing historically-based selections. Fuck it, these books are all on my “reference” shelf. That’s the criteria. OK? OK.

In order of current enjoyment:

1) National Lampoon Presents French Comics (The Kind Men Like). 1977.
This appeared the same year as the American Heavy Metal, from the same publisher. So, go figure. This book collects comics (many in color) from the French scene of the 70s and contains, as far as I know, the only English translations of artists like Sole, Lauzier and my personal fave, Lob! Who was Lob? I dunno. All of this work seems beamed down from another planet and, from what I can guess, was contemporary with Metal Hurlant, but more “straight” in a way. There’s no other book like it. I’d like a 300 page version of this book.

2) The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told. 1990.
Before there were magical programs to add that sense of volume that you know Alex Toth was always seeking in his color, DC put out books with simple flat color seps on uncoated paper. This one is my favorite, as it contains fantastic stories by Jimmy Thompson, Toth, Mort Meskin, even Sheldon Mayer and a wonderful Dan Barry story. There’s a great Bernard Baily Spectre story in here as well, and generally a good education on what all the old fogeys are talking about when they mention the golden age canon.

3) Confessions, Romances, Secrets & Temptations. 2007.
Shouldn’t we build a monument of some kind to John Benson? He is responsible for some of the best research, compiling and editing of comics history. Squa Tront, Panels 1 & 2, Humbug, and his two romance books. This is the prose edition, full of excellent and sometimes quite eccentric interviews with St. John romance cartoonists and writers. An indispensible peek inside the industry and its characters.

4) Masters of Comic Book Art. 1978.
A total schlock-fest of a book, but I love it for its dated version of who was a “master”. Robert Crumb AND Richard Corben AND Philippe Druillet. Oh, and Barry Smith for good measure. Seems idiosyncratic and personal to me and offers a nice period piece vision of a guy like Druillet who otherwise seems lost to North American comics. Side note: As I was getting ready to post this I noticed Warren Ellis’ post on Druillet and French SF comics. Such an intriguing topic and nice to see someone out there interested in it.

5) Les Chefs-D’Oevre de la Bande Dessinee. 1970.
A nearly 500 page brick of a book that anthologizes everyone from McCay to Angelo Torres to Franquin to Will Gould to Guy Pellaert to Don Martin to Moebius to Tenebrax and even back to Caran d’Ache. A heroic attempt to connect all the Anglo-European dots circa 1970. Awesome and inspiring.

6) Men of Tomorrow. 2004.
The best damn prose book yet written about comics. Compelling and fearless in Gerard Jones‘ willingness to tell the truth about the industry. I love his combination of culture and commerce and found it quite moving at times. Jones understands and can explain where, for example, Siegel and Shuster came from, culturally, and where they went artistically, and how, precisely, they were mistreated and, more tragically, how they sabatoged themselves, too. Tangentially: I’m amazed at how few people within comics seem to have read this book. It more or less exposes the true roots of “nerd culture” and the sad exploitation behind it all. Easier to look away, I suppose.

7) The Encyclopedia of American Comics. 1990.
Ron Goulart‘s masterpiece (and another man deserving of a monument). An indispensable guide to his sensibility and his knowledge. Goulart, like Benson, came along too early to be fully appreciated. This book, with its lengthy entries on the popular and obscure, covers a tremendous amount of comic book and comic strip ground, and seems to represent a gathering of facts from all over Goulart’s voluminous publishing career. It is sadly out of print, so someone re-issue this tome! It’s brilliant.

That’s it!

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I. Did Jean-Luc Godard ever consider becoming a novelist?

Yes, of course. But I wrote, “The weather is nice. The train enters the station,” and I sat there for hours wondering why I couldn’t have just as well written the opposite: “The train enters the station. The weather is nice” or “it is raining.” In the cinema, it’s simpler. At the same time, the weather is nice and the train enters the station. There is something ineluctable about it. You have to go along with it.

Brody goes on to call this concept central to Godard’s art, and “the basis for a grand theory”:

[Godard’s] idea is to define montage as the simultaneous recording of disparate elements in a single image, the simultaneity in one image of two things that would happen sequentially on a page—the train entering the station, the rain falling. In his view, the cinema does automatically what literature wants to do and cannot: it connects two ideas in one time.

II. Is this “montage” really a failure of literature, prose’s unachievable ambition?

How … does the work of reading a narrative differ from watching a film? In a film the illusion of reality comes from a series of pictures each slightly different. The difference represents a fixed chronological relation which the eye and the mind together render as motion.

Words in a narrative generate tones of voice, syntactic expectations, memories of other words, and pictures. But rather than a fixed chronological relation, they sit in numerous inter- and overweaving relations. The process as we move our eyes from word to word is corrective and revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before.

III. These quotes raise that age-old, brain-numbing question: Are comic books more like movies or more like literature? I’m not going to try to resolve the matter here. (Though really, of course, the answer is neither.)

With these particular quotes in mind, though, I recently started thinking about how exactly I experience reading comics. It differs depending on the comic, obviously, but I guess that my default way of reading the average, traditional comic is to first take a quick “skim” of the visual composition and art of the entire page (or two-page spread), then to proceed to a slightly longer glance at the art of the first panel. At that point, I usually read the narration and word balloons, and after that, I look more closely and patiently at the art. And then I go back and forth between the art and the words as often as is necessary to understand everything before moving on to the next panel. (And then sometimes I’ll have to go back to the first panel, sometimes I’ll skip ahead to look at the art for the last panel, etc. It wouldn’t be very entertaining to go on.)

Obviously, none of this is a conscious procedure, and I wouldn’t even swear that it’s perfectly accurate. And even if it is, it doesn’t follow that everyone else (or anyone else) reads comics the same way that I do. (Not to mention more complicated and/or idiosyncratically laid-out comics pages, like the endpapers in Ware‘s ACME 18 or nearly any page by Ron Regé, to pick just two of many possible examples.) But the main point is that, unlike cinema, and like other arts including literature, the process of “reading” comic books isn’t a simultaneous one. It’s not image and word at once, but one after the other after the other.

When people want to connect comic books to film (which used to be the main strategy comics fans employed to convince skeptical non-fans that comics were “art” before they switched to using literary fiction or poetry), Will Eisner is the name more likely to come up than any other. And there’s no question that he was obviously influenced by cinematic ideas of composition and lighting. But it just occurred to me that the one element of his work that is most consistently held up as “unique” to comics, the famous Spirit splash pages that incorporate the titles visually into the mise en scène (to steal some jargon), may in fact paradoxically be the most “cinematic” of all his effects. In a weird kind of way, they provide one of the only examples in comics that I can think of offhand that truly approaches Godard’s concept of montage, a simultaneous connection of two ideas that would normally be experienced sequentially—image and word—in a single instant.

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You may be interested in reading Dan’s latest interview with internet comics gadfly Chris Mautner, over at our Eisner-nominated rival, Comic Book Resources. Here Dan is on the effect I’ve predicted to him will be the result of some of his recent Comics Comics posts:

Can you peel back the curtain a little on Art Out of Time 2?

My main goal with Art Out of Time 2 is by writing reviews of other people’s books about history … to make myself as much of a whipping boy as possible. I want Jog coming after me, I want Spurgeon. I want to feel like I want to die when it comes out. That’s my goal.

In the rest of the interview, Dan actually discusses the Art Out of Time sequel without ducking the question, and also talks about recently announced new books from C.F. and Brian Chippendale, a Wilco collaboration, and future plans for PictureBox in general.

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I’ve heard some grumbling from more than a few people about the excerpt of Robert Crumb‘s upcoming version of Genesis that was published in The New Yorker last week (“staid,” “unimaginative,” “overly literal,” etc.). I think those people are wrong. And that they probably haven’t read the original Genesis recently, and don’t remember that the beginning is the most boring part. (Well, except for all the “begats.” But I assume Crumb has a good solution for that.) If the rest of the book is as “literal” as the initial excerpt, it’s going to get very strange, very soon.

I know this is a half-baked idea for a post, but Frank’s starting to get mad at me for being lazy, and fully baked post ideas may not come along for a while. In the meantime, why doesn’t everybody take a shot at telling me why I’m wrong? Am I just a soft touch, being too easy on Crumb? To my mind, he’s earned the benefit of doubt.

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If you couldn’t make it to MoCCA, or missed Frank’s panel with Gary Panter and Raymond Sohn for any other reason, here’s an audio recording of the proceedings. (Thanks, Ray!)

Also, Squally Showers has put together an excellent visual companion to the talk.

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MoCCA Madness

PictureBox will be at the MoCCA Festival this weekend, June 6-7, 11 am- 6 pm.

69th Regiment Armory
68 Lexington Avenue, between 25th and 26th Streets
NYC

PictureBox has booths 301, 339, 338

So, without further ado:

New from PictureBox for MoCCA!

Mat Brinkman: MULTIFORCE
Yes, you read that correctly — the entire saga at full size. 22 pages of comics genius. Sneak attack.

Ed Nukey Nukes and Jocko Levent Brainiac: PEE DOG 2: THE CAPTAIN’S FINAL LOG
A 60 page opus d’filth from 1986 co-created by an artist we publish whose name rhymes with Shmary Kanter. Just 500 made.

Lane Milburn and Frank Santoro: COLD HEAT SPECIAL #9
Not a season goes by without a slice of such goodness.

Devin Flynn and Gary Panter: DEVIN AND GARY GO OUTSIDE SPECIAL EDITION
Hand-collages unique objects. Just 100 made!

Raw Dog: REAL DEAL BACK ISSUES
First printings how available!

Lauren Weinstein: TWO GHOST STORIES zine

And new work from Matthew Thurber, Anya Davidson, Taylor McKimens, and others!

And…:

Festival Signing Schedule

Special Event: Frank Santoro and Gary Panter in conversation at 3:45 on Sunday in the programming room.

Saturday:

11 am-12 pm: Frank Santoro
12 pm -2 pm: Lauren Weinstein and Frank Santoro
2-3 pm: Matthew Thurber
3:00 pm-5 pm: Lauren Weinstein
5 pm – 6 pm: Frank Santoro

Sunday:

11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Lauren Weinstein
12:30 pm -1:30 pm: Frank Santoro
1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m: Gary Panter and Devin Flynn
4 pm – 6 pm: Lauren Weinstein

See you soon!