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You’ve read the blog, you’ve absorbed the hype, now it’s time to actually see what Comics Comics is all about. Could Dan be the new generation’s Art Spiegelman?! (Wha’!?) Only one way to find out – come out this weekend and buy all his junk!

This weekend, Comics Comics will debut at the MoCCA Art Festival in New York City’s Puck Building. Stop by and pick up the premiere issue, t-shirts, and the latest PictureBox releases. Many great artists and cartoonists will be at our table throughout the weekend, including Paper Rad, Frank Santoro, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Gary Panter, Matthew Thurber, David Sandlin, Taylor McKimens, and Jonathon Rosen.

Besides the magazine, PictureBox will be releasing:

Two new comic books: Cold Heat #1, by Ben (Paper Rad) Jones & Frank Santoro, and Incanto by Frank Santoro.

Two new books: Gore by Black Dice and Jason Frank Rothenberg, and Me a Mound by Trenton Doyle Hancock.

Jessica (Paper Rad) Ciocci’s limited run artists’ book, Pig Tales.

A series of large offset “posters for your dorm room or crash pad” by Brian Chippendale, Gary Panter, BJ & Frank Santoro.

And of course, Dan’s amazing new anthology, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, just published by Abrams.

If you can only pick one day to attend, make it Sunday, as Dan will be presenting a slide show based on his book at 4 pm.

(Personally, if I didn’t have to be at the convention all weekend, I’d spend Saturday at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in Madison Square Park or the Phil Karlson double feature at the Film Forum. You can do whatever you want.)

Then, this Saturday night, between 7 and 9 pm, join us for our magazine’s launch party at Participant Inc in the Lower East Side.

Beer and other beverages provided.

PARTICIPANT INC
95 Rivington Street
NYC, NY 10002

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It may seem as though we are hopelessly mired in old comics, but maybe that’s the mood we’re in right now. There’s plenty of interesting current work and I’m sure we’ll get to that soon. But, for now, take a look at this original art by Chic Stone and Bob Powell from Tales to Astonish 67. Like a lot of the work I’m most interested in now, the linework, pacing, and compositions are pretty generic, but on each page there are some indelible images. Check out the middle tier on this one. There’s real drama in that sequence, as hokey as it may seem. Or, how about the top right panel here? Note the wonderful scale shift (shades of Little Nemo) and the sense of suspended flight. And of course there’s also unintentional (?) camp here. So what makes these images so powerful? It’s these dramatic moments, stripped of all extraneous adornments, that make these kind of comics worth seeking out. I wrote a longer piece about a related topic in our debut issue. Anyway, as pen and ink drawings (as opposed to the color printed comic pages) these images remind me of the components of paintings by the likes of Christian Schumann, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Gary Panter all masters of placing mostly mute “characters” in what their mutual teacher, Lee Baxter Davis, calls “psychodramas”. Of course, these artists take it all much further with their use of paint, surfaces, etc., but in some ways the principle is the same: tension-filled narrative image making. Somehow, though, I think of Stone and Powell and their peers as accomplishing small miracles: enacting dramas in the unlikeliest of places and eliciting surprising reactions.