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Who Wears Short Shorts? Robot Fighters, That's Who.

More notebooks, mostly relating to The Comics Journal:

Panter as Talker, Manning’s Kinkiness. Gary Panter was in Toronto last night speaking at our local art’s college and of course I went to hear him. Among his many other talents, Panter is, along with Lynda Barry and Art Spiegelman, one of the greatest talkers in the comics world, indeed one of the world’s great talkers period. He’s lived a great, rich life and has a storehouse of stories but more importantly he can, like Barry, talk about creativity with a directness and honesty that forces you to rethink all your fundamental assumptions. And, like Spiegelman, Panter knows more about the history of art than the entire faculty of your typical Ivy League university. During the talk, Panter mentioned that as a kid he was attracted to Magnus, Robot Fighter in large part because of the kinky short shorts (or was it a proto-mini-skirt) Russ Manning had the hero wear.

This reminded me of the great Arn Saba interview with Manning which ran in the Comics Journal #203. During the interview Manning asks Saba if he’s read the Tarzan novels. Saba says no and the following exchange occurs:

Manning: It is a superb novel. And in it, Jane is about to be raped by the big ape and that’s just the theme he used all the way through it.

Saba: I was aware of that from reading the comic versions of it, yours included. Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic thing, that imagery, because in this primeval jungle you can take primeval sexuality and symbolize it through all these various creatures: the women with the hairy brassieres and all these things … [laughs] I’m embarrassed to say I notice these things and react to them.

Manning: Well, I hope my readers do.

Saba: The fact that all the women in Opar have these strange, long, pendulous, fur things hanging down between their legs – they’re very penis-like things! [laughs] That’s what they look like to me, anyway.

Manning: Just cloth.

Saba: Cloth, but they’re so long and sinuous. [laughter]

Manning: I don’t know if that came out in just a design sense or instinctual or what. They probably look right, so I drew it that way.

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Joe Matt's Beguiling days.

More notebooks:

My Favourite Shop. When comics-friendly guests are in town, I like to show them The Beguiling. I’ve given tours to Kent Worcester and Bill Kartalopoulos among others. Like a well-packed suitcase, The Beguiling contains more goodies than one can easily imagine being squeezed into so small a space. Tucked away in odd corners are the real gems, especially the frame original art, which includes McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebid Fiend page, a Krazy Kat Sunday, and a Jesse Marsh Robin Hood Sunday. In the book side of things, the genuine riches are the volumes that almost no other comic book store would think of carrying. The French language selection in particular must be unparalleled in the Anglophone world, and I’ve met people who have driven hundreds of miles to find bande dessinee not otherwise available. There is also a smaller but still impressive selection of Japanese books; and of course the English manga collection is dauntingly large. I love how some choice out-of-print books are mixed in with the new books. If you wanted to supplement the Fantagraphics Peanuts series with a dose of nostalgia, The Beguiling offers paperbacks by Holt Rinehart Winston and Fawcett reprinting Schulz’s masterpiece.
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Glenn Head's Hotwire Comics

Below are some jottings from my notebook. They are not substantial enough to be essays but might spark some thought or debate.

Praise for the competition. Lots of spitballs have been thrown at The Comics Journal‘s new web format, some of them hurled by mutinous writers from the Journal itself. I care more about content than format, so I don’t agree with the general line of criticism. For me the biggest problem with TCJ these days is that there is an overabundance of good stuff. It’s hard to keep up with the magazine since it offers so much to read every day. Put it this way: the magazine features long essays by Donald Phelps, Gary Groth, and R. Fiore. These aren’t just three of the best comics critics around, they are among the best essayists around period. Phelps is a critic of the stature of Manny Farber or Pauline Kael. (In fact, the Library of America’s great volume American Movie Critics has essays by Farber, Kael, and Phelps). Fiore and Groth are a notch below that Olympian level but there essays are as good as anything found in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer or n+1. Aside from these key writers, the magazine offers regular essays from a strong cohort of intelligent, informed critics — Clough, Worcester, Ishii, Kreiner, Suat Tong, Crippen, Garrity, etc. (Anyone who isn’t on the list shouldn’t be offended, I’m writing off the top of my head.)
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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.

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But if you’ve ever wanted to know Howard Chaykin‘s favorite movie about the music industry (American Hot Wax), or what all-time-great Comics Journal critic Robert Fiore thinks about Robert Clampett (“Tex Avery in a minor key, though where Avery mostly rode the road of excess, Clampett was a genuine surrealist”), check out their responses to those and other questions at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule’s spring break quiz in three parts.