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When I was in L.A. I got to hang out with John Pham and Jon Vermilyea. Me and Regé drove with them to the beach. We got there right before sunset. Then we walked up to the Santa Monica Pier. Skeeball and funnel cakes!

It was nice to see John Pham in his element. I’ve usually hung out with him in the cold of winter & that seems all wrong for him. He’s from L.A. so he looked relaxed and right at home.

But somehow he had never been to the Santa Monica Pier. So he was happy to indulge the tourist in me. The four of us hung out in the arcade for a bit. Highlights included Pham on one of those dance machine stomp video games – and also me and Regé playing two player on the Terminator game. We both had laser rifles. (more…)

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Back in August of last year, my friend Sebastian Demain sent me an email that said he was opening a gallery in Los Angeles. He and his business partner Ethan had rented a multi-use space where they could have art shows, performances, happenings, whatever. It’s a long corridor of a space in a basement – perfect for a gallery.

So I was lucky enough to be invited to have a show there. Sebastian asked if I had any paintings that looked like my comic Chimera. He said he liked my “classical” style. The inaugural show of the gallery was a Lee “Scratch” Perry painting exhibition in November and then there was a Nazi Knife group show in December. I was to be the third show. Felt like good company.

Dem Passwords, the name of the gallery is derived from a Lee Perry prose poem (a 3000 page Word document) where Lee writes about “dem passwords” one needs to know to get into places of power – of Black power. It’s pretty heavy and reflects the gallery’s many faces. CF played a show there. Coppertone. Pink Dollaz. It’s already become quite a scene. I mean Jerry Heller was at my opening so that should give you an idea of how strikingly L.A. this spot is. But more on that later. Lemme get back to my story. (more…)

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I’m sitting in Ron Regé Jr’s apartment in Echo Park. Morning time. There is a woman below the window who is clipping, pruning the green around the white flowers. Lots of birds. Sun. I miss the sound of birds outside my window. Just the lonesome raven calls out in the desert of New Mexico.

I’ve been here 3 nights so far and Ron has been kind to host. He lives in a second story apartment in one of those pre-war white adobe corner jobs. There’s four units and it feels quite comfortable if you know and like your neighbors – and Ron does. He said it’s like Three’s Company. The other day people just started stopping by. “This never happens,” Ron said. One after another long lost friends were appearing in the little apartment. Just as one would leave another would drop by. It was like a rolling party. It never stopped for two whole days. The second day was even funnier because a photo shoot was happening next door. So there was a make-up trailer parked outside with loads of pretty girls parading up and down the stairs. Unfortunately, I had slept through most of it – exhausted from the earlier parade.

I rummaged through Ron’s zine collection. I found a few CF zines, a Rozz Toxx manifesto, some Kaz Strepak zines, and Ron’s Cambridge Massachusettes city sponsered teen anti-drinking scratch-off postcard.

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I wanted to do a post on the connection between illuminated manuscripts and comics but then I got sidetracked a little bit. From what I understand illuminated manuscripts were made like modern “assembly line” comics. They divided up the labor to construct the book. One guy did the calligraphy, another did the drawings, another did the “inking”, another the color and yet still others bound the book itself. Thinking about this also got me thinking more specifically about how I find it interesting that many of the leading alt/art cartoonists of yesterday and today come from interesting and varied religious backgrounds. Like maybe we’re all re-incarnated monks who used to sit for hours laboring over some miniscule drawing back in the 15th century or something. I’m kidding of course. But when I started thinking about my friends who are cartoonists who “had religion” I was surprised – or maybe I wasn’t – by the list I compiled. I dunno if there is a connection between “religion” – or “faith” – and comics – but there is something there. (more…)

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Herewith the second part of our excerpt from the Highwater oral history. Bostonians, Go check out the show, opening tonight. We pick up with a discussion of the Highwater look and feel.

Highwater Style

Kurt Wolfgang: I felt like things were going kind of a different way, and Tom was really doing them right, not as a businessman, but as far as a publisher and as far as his idea of what a publisher’s job is, which I agree with about 99.999 percent. He put it in really basic terms to me a few years ago [at the Highwater reunion] in Scituate. And I didn’t agree with that statement when he first said it because it seemed too simplistic. He said, “A publisher’s job is to discover and expose and nurture talent.” To me, looking from a capitalist point of view, well, gee, then no one’s going to publish R. Crumb. But he said, “No, someone will always publish those guys. They’re not the good publishers.” To really find things and nurture things, I think Tom’s publishing philosophy probably had less to do with the actual books come out than with making things happen that make those books possible.

I think when a lot of people look at Highwater they think of crazy design and textured paper and rounded corners. That’s all they look at. These are people who probably wouldn’t like that kind of comics anyway. So when you throw all that stuff on I think that they think you’re trying to deceive them. But I think with Tom the beauty of it all has nothing to do with the design of those books, as I said it’s part of a whole, as amazing as it is. The things that him and Jordan did and bounced off each other. I think with those two together, I think that you’re really talking about Highwater. Jordan, at least from a design perspective, is a really big part of that. Him and Tom were bitchy old ladies and trying to prove each other wrong at all times. And wonderful things come out of that. (more…)

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Greg Cook and TD Sidell were kind enough to offer us some excerpts from their catalog for “Right Thing The Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books“, opening October 1st at Fourth Wall Project in Boston. Greg did a great job on the oral history. So here’s one excerpt and there’ll be another on Friday. We pick up in 1997, as Highwater dude Tom Devlin published his first full book…

Coober Skeber 2: Marvel Benefit Issue debuts at San Diego Comic-Con in July 1997.

Tom Devlin: After I did that first anthology, and it was really kind of aggravating, and hard. But like anything, the sense of accomplishment once it was done was great. The harder something is, when you actually complete it and look at it and see that it worked out somewhat, there’s a bit of a rush. So I started to try to come up with what I’d do next.

I very specifically remember that I had three ideas. I remember talking to Ron and he said, “You should do superheroes.” Because my ideas were to do a children’s activity book and each cartoonist would do a page. It would be a puzzle page or a maze or all the typical stuff that would be in children’s activity books. The other one, actually the one that I kind of really wanted to do, was do an oversized Sunday newspaper and everybody would do sort of a classic strip or something they really liked in their style. Everybody would do a cover version. I remember partially the reason I picked that is that Ron was a really big Popeye fan and so I wanted Ron to do Popeye. I was a really big Pogo fan, so I was going to draw a version of Pogo. Then everybody else would just have to do whatever. And then the other one was superheroes.

I had done a bunch of signings at The Million Year Picnic. And it was a bunch of alternative people, like Tom Hart, Jason Lutes, Seth I think had been there by then. Just everybody you think of who’s still around who was doing alternative comics. There were like 15 people involved in five or six signings. We would just hang out and we’d always end up talking about superheroes. That was something I thought was funny and irritating. All these people who are trying to do something new still have these deep roots in superheroes. I wanted to do the superhero book to sort of be the end of that. Okay, you’ll all do your superheroes and that will be the end. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. (more…)

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1. New Richard Sala site.

2. The kind of readers who frequent this site have probably already seen this, but if not, you really should check out Daniel Raeburn’s website. Last week, he posted free pdfs of all four issues of The Imp, which includes an unfairly large proportion of the best and most insightful comics criticism of the last fifteen years. This is essential reading.

3. New Matthew Thurber site.

4. David Bordwell delivers a typically meaty essay on the downsides of episodic, serialized entertainment, focusing mainly on the prime delivery method for the highest grade junk of this type: television.

Having been lured by intriguing people more or less like us, you keep watching. Once you’re committed, however, there is trouble on the horizon. There are two possible outcomes. The series keeps up its quality and maintains your loyalty and offers you years of enjoyment. Then it is canceled. This is outrageous. You have lost some friends. Alternatively, the series declines in quality, and this makes you unhappy. You may drift away. Either way, your devotion has been spit upon.

It’s true that there is a third possibility. You might die before the series ends. How comforting is that?

With film you’re in and you’re out and you go on with your life. TV is like a long relationship that ends abruptly or wistfully. One way or another, TV will break your heart.

Incidentally, along the way, he quotes the late, great Gilbert Seldes (best known to funny-page aficionados for his seminal essay on Krazy Kat).

But the main interest here for comics readers, or course, is that, at least here in America, their medium of choice is the second most popular purveyor of long-lived serial entertainment. Though with comics the heart-breaking potential is even greater. From Blondie and Gasoline Alley to Batman and Spider-Man, a surprising number of ancient titles are still around, potentially offering a lifetime of fiction featuring the exact same characters. (That the recent cancellations of strips such as Cathy and Little Orphan Annie have received so much attention is testament to how rarely such cash cows are allowed to expire.)

It is sometimes fun to wonder what it might be like if television was run like the comics industry — would The Beverly Hillbillies still be on the air, with its fifth cast, rei-magined to exude a “grim and gritty” atmosphere? I guess Dallas was sort of like that… And then there’s Star Trek. And 90210. Ah, maybe this isn’t so much fun to think about after all. The Bordwell essay’s still worthwhile.

5. Finally, I like it when Sammy Harkham writes about comics. He does it too rarely. Last month, he published a short but sweet post on artist and beermonger Ron Regé. This led to an interesting exchange in the comments about the practice of constructing comics stories out of a collection of smaller, interconnected strips (e.g. Ice Haven, much of David Heatley’s work, Wimbledon Green). One particular anonymous commenter was very much against the practice, considering it a trendy cheat, doomed to appear as dated in the future as ’90s-era CGI “morphing” does today (my analogy, not his/hers).

Derik Badman draws attention to two previous posts worth reading on the subject, written by Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer.

I end up on the boring but correctly neutral side of another anonymous commenter in that thread—”Who cares if it is a trendo or a gimmick?”—but I really do enjoy the effect of this kind of comics “mosaic” when it’s done right. And generally, even when an artistic technique is considered newfangled, gimmicky, or showoffy, there’s a good chance it has actually been around for a long time. (See Steven Moore’s recent The Novel: An Alternate History, for an entertaining recounting of a few millennia worth of examples of literary postmodernism, all somehow predating capital-M Modernism by centuries.) And this same phenomenon seems to be true in this discussion as well. One name in particular that doesn’t seem to be coming up yet (unless I missed it) is John Stanley. In fact, a big part of the enjoyment for me of reading his Melvin Monster and (especially) Thirteen Going on Eighteen books has come from the inventive and surprising ways in which he builds his issues through combining standalone stories. I am sure there are many more (and better) examples of pre-’90s and ’00s cartoonists doing this kind of thing, but my main point is simply that nothing new exists under the sun, a clichéd insight that’s been repeated by about a million morons like myself, probably since well before it appeared in Ecclesiastes. Let me say it once more for old time’s sake.

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Finally, the Year We Make Contact. What better way to celebrate than with an all-CC links roundup?

1. Dan takes to the internet to discuss Ron Regé and Joan Reidy’s Boys with Tom Spurgeon.

2nd: The Daily Cross Hatch begins a multi-part interview with the always voluble Frank Santoro.

3. Speaking of Frank, Cold Heat has been appearing on a lot of best of the year lists, including here and here. And Dan’s Art Out of Time made a most important of the decade list.

4. Also, Jeet’s been doing some great posts on gay representation in old newspaper comics on his other blog, which you have probably already read, but if not: here and here.

5. I think Dash might have a book out this week or something?

6. And finally, this isn’t the most interesting video in the world, but it seemed important to post, if only for the light it sheds on the now apparently settled-for-good Mort Drucker controversy. I still don’t understand that quote from the book I mentioned, though…

[via]

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NEW YORK REPORT

Thurber and I drove up together from Pittsburgh. The rest of the gang was in a big van that Kevin drove like a maniac. After the stop at the diner, we drove along route 22 thru Pennsylvania and up to Altoona. Got on I-80, which winds through the Appalachians, really pretty deep focus views with snows, and drove and drove. I remember we stopped at some super small town’s sprawling grocery store, and the lot of us wandered the store looking for something or other. But that was it. No exciting road adventures. Just a jaunt to the big city.

Matthew is a great conversationalist. Good with word play. We talked a lot about wanting to do more zines. Something public that one could print cheaply, small editions of 300 or so. Selling them on a website. Collecting the good stuff later in a cheap trade or giving it away online. Who knows? Who cares! Just make work. Back to basics. Both of us had pamphlet comic books go the way of the dodo. We were brainstorming. Thurber driving. Dunkin Donuts in Stroudsburg.

I had soup with some friends on 2nd ave and the went over to Matthew’s place to crash. He and Kevin were looking through old sketchbooks and drinking beer. Kevin’s got these amazing lists and diagrams of what he’s planning for some sequences. Ideas for comic book titles, random thoughts or observations, notes to self. The usual sketchbook stuff but sharply focused and clear. A distinct voice speaking. All beautifully, economically drawn or written.

Matthew showed us some new 1-800-MICE pages. I wish I could make such remarkably funny drawings as Thurber. The characters are so real to me like Jim Woodring’s characters are real, how they inhabit a space all their own. But beyond that, Thurber’s making these slapstick Dada talkies that just cut like a Buñuel movie. They’re great scenes strung together, great comics.

Then it was Saturday morning, bright December sun and light dusting of snow. Cats on fire escapes. Brooklyn. Thurber and I got up early and headed into Manhattan. He went to work. I went to see missed friends. Kevin said something about finding a diner or somewhere to draw. The signing was at four or five. We all barely had time eat before it was time to meet the throngs of Kramers fans out there.

I wish. I guess New York is always kind of a pie in the face. Meaning I can’t help but get my hopes up for any opening or signing or whatever I have here. I always hope all my friends will come, I hope there will be new people excited about the same things I’m excited about. Y’know, ahem, the heart of Saturday night. In New York. But in New York, there are a thousand things going on the same night. You’re lucky if you can get most of your friends from different worlds in the same room.

Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is an awesome book store. They have a couch and a cool old portable record player. Gabe Fowler, the owner is always flippin’ a fat platter. Oh, and they sell comics, and these new things called “graphic novels”, and lots other cool stuff. When I got there at 5:30 the signing had already been going on for an hour. There were so many of us it was like some ’70s jam rock band with twelve members playing a small party. I remember standing there watching Adrian Tomine, Kim Deitch, Ben Katchor, Sammy Harkham, and Matthew Thurber all “signing” at once, drawing on the limited-edition prints that come with the book (if you buy it from Buenaventura or through certain stores). It was a little overwhelming to say the least. Or intimidating. One or the other. Or both.

I mean, I’ve met Ben Katchor a few times. But, um, it’s Ben Katchor. I always think, “What do I say? What do I say?” Talk about Nabokov? The soup place on Second Avenue?

So, the store got 25 copies of the books and they were all pre-sold. In theory Sammy was to bring more along, but Buenaventura was selling through their advance shipment so fast they could barely keep up, it was nuts. Most customers, according to Gabe, wanted the book signed by all the artists but they had to come to the signing and do it themselves; the staff (Gabe, Keri and Lindsay) weren’t going to pass around 25 giant books to get signed. It was tough enough getting all the prints signed. It was a good idea but what ended up happening is that only a few of the pre-order customers came in to get their book signed. And they, Gabe said, came in early, picked up their book before all the signers were around, and asked when their signed print would be ready. Since the signers weren’t all there yet and all the prints weren’t doodled on, the pre-order customers hung around for a bit then split, content to pick up their print later.

So, we, the signers all just jammed on the prints, not on the books. And, well, it was kind of weird. Fun, but weird. More like a craft party than an opening or a signing where there is a direct connection between reader and maker. I think people there to meet the makers were a little shy to interrupt someone like Kim Deitch when he’s drawing. I’d been to other signings at Desert Island and they were really happening, really loose. But this night was just kind of low key and stoic.

The traffic jam of cartoonists (John Pham, James McShane, Ron Rege, Adrian Tomine, Ben Katchor, Jonathan Bennett, Kim Deitch, Gabrielle Bell, David Heatley, Matthew Thurber, Jesse McManus, Sammy Harkham, Kevin Huizenga, and myself), no one having their book “personalized”, AND the fact that there were no books to be bought by someone walking in off the street made the whole thing kind of odd. Fun, but odd.

Don’t get me wrong, people were laughing and carrying on, and y’know, it’s cool to sit next to Kevin Huizenga and watch Yakov smile ear to ear while having all his Huizenga comic books signed. It’s cool to rap with Gabrielle Bell and talk to Randy Chang, but I see them all the time. In New York at least. It felt more like a small party for all the New York alt-comix people, which is awesome, but I secretly hoped that it would be packed with “new” comics fans eager to check out this amazing book they’d read about somewheres. I’m beginning to think that this “new” audience for comics and graphic novels that is often trumpeted by the mainstream press doesn’t actually exist or at least doesn’t come to events like this. It’s always the same people. Great people, but still the same people. It’s fun but that sheer excitement on the faces of fans in Pittsburgh was absent on the New York stop.

Oh, and my showdown with David Heatley was pretty anti-climatic. I saw him come in say hello to Adrian Tomine and then check out the store copy of the book over near where I was standing. We shook hands, said hello. That was it.

Mark Newgarden, Dan Nadel, Dash Shaw, my friend Reid Paley, and I went and had a drink afterwards, totally unawares that there was a party for the event that we were missing. Luckily, Sammy called looking for us and soon we found it. Down by the elevated tracks of the J train, Bill K. and Austin English and a bunch of other folks have this unbelievably swell loft apartment. One of those dream New York apartments that has enough room to fit 50 people comfortably. The atmosphere I was hoping for at the signing was in full effect. It was loose and more like the other events at Desert Island.

I stood around and talked, got a little drunk, I can’t really remember. It was fun seeing the non-locals mixing with the locals outside events like signings or festivals. Fun watching Sammy and Dan argue. Fun to realize that the people assembled are some of the few artists, writers, makers of things, promoters of things that I really care about. One of those times when I stumble home without cursing the world.

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KRAMERS ERGOT #7 TOUR DIARY
PITTSBURGH PA
FRANK SANTORO

The Pittsburgh stop on the Kramers tour was pretty awesome. Well, I mean, for me, it was just a thrill to see Pittsburgh represented on this tour. Bill Boichel, Copacetic Comics owner and comics guru, put the whole thing together over at this great bar called Brillobox. We had a Storeyville signing there last year and it went pretty well. So we figured why not go two for two? Sammy was like, “Why not do it at the Copacetic store?”

“Dude, the store can only manage like five people at a time. It’s as big as your kitchen.”

So, imagine a second floor bar with a big open floor and a stage at one end and a bar at the other. Wood paneling and Christmas lights and horror movies on the screen above the stage. The main bar is downstairs, so the upstairs isn’t crowded with tables and that let us spread out and accommodate the giant Kramers books. Plus Bill set up a bunch of local guys like Jim Rugg, Tom Scioli, the Unicorn Mountain and Encyclopedia Destructica crews, the master Budai, and myself. A family affair. I brought my Cold Heat zines and my boxes of back issues carefully selected for the discerning comics fan. Anyone need a Brendan McCarthy Paradax set? I got ’em cheap!

It didn’t feel awkward, like signings or openings usually do. We all just kind of stood around, sat around. John Pham and Ron Regé went to get pizza across the street. Thurber found his way from the bus depot and made it all the way from NY. Sammy and Kevin were already signing books. My dad was there. It was easy.

Slowly friends were showing up. Folks seemed really excited actually, nice. A vague air of respectability in Pittsburgh actually goes a long way. Hard to explain. We’ve been in a recession since ’82, the rest of the country is just catching up with us. So, like when something good actually materializes here, we enjoy it as best we can. There were kids who I never see smile smile. It was pleasant.

I think Bill pre-sold like 20 copies and, I think, every person who bought one came to the signing. It was pretty steady. Not the tables tho’—Kevin scowled a few times cuz I kept reaching for french fries and shaking the thin table. Whoops, sorry Kev! There was a personal connection between maker and reader, the readers, like I said, being genuinely thrilled to be meeting the likes of Kevin, Sammy, Regé, and John Pham, all of whom hadn’t been to Pittsburgh before. Jacob Ciocci, Matthew Thurber, and I are always around it seems, ha ha. We got respect, but damn, people totally stutter in front of Kevin. It’s kind of sweet.

That was the big difference between the Pittsburgh signing and the New York one. In New York, the books were mostly pre-sold, but New York being New York not everyone showed up to have their book personalized. I’ll get to that later (there being way more to the story), but I just want to point out that this kind of excitement, this book and tour like this does a lot for places like Pittsburgh. Totally different receptions by the general fans. There were plenty of folks in New York, don’t get me wrong, who were excited by the book and the makers in attendance, but it’s so much more reserved. It’s not the only event in town that night worth going to, y’know?

Regé split to hang with Jacob at his house around the corner from the bar. The rest of us went to find some decent grub and wound up at a busy college hangout that serves Mexican food. It was fun to see my comics friends, peers, who I usually only see at the same cons and festivals now hanging out in my town, doing something new. They can now appreciate how hard it is to get a good meal in around here after midnight.

Later we nerded out at my house a little bit when I busted out the stack of old comics. Most of them had never seen that Charlton “Children of Doom” one-shot by Pat Boyette. “Did you know it was drawn only slightly larger than the final print size and had these black-and-white panels in order to save time? It was drawn in like two weeks.”

Thurber and Sammy stayed up smoking cigarettes and talking most of the night on the back porch. I could hear them complaining about art supplies. The rest of us hit the hay.

The next morning I made coffee and eggs for everyone. We went and picked up Bill Boichel and then Regé and headed over to Copacetic Comics. I really wanted everyone to see the store before we left.

We all crowded inside and Kevin starting asking about old Captain Easy reprints: did Bill have any? I think he ended up buying the Speak of the Devil collection. Bill told Sammy about the Proper Box sets of CDs from England that are super-affordable collections of great jazz. Thurber bought that Gahan Wilson Classics Illustrated edition of The Raven. That’s it, the usual comic book banter. Bill just has so much good stuff stuffed into such a small space it is pretty amazing—and fun to watch people digging the store for the first time.

I’ll spare everyone the giant tangent riff that comes to mind, but it goes something like this: Bill Boichel was in his late teens and early 20s when he started doing shows, running comic conventions. Then he set up his first store in a run-down mill town part of Pittsburgh and that store saved my life. Now, twenty years later, something like this tour comes to town literally because he created this outpost in the first place. Twenty copies pre-sold? Of a hundred dollar book that could be bought somewhere else online cheaper? That’s a loyal customer base. That’s a business. And remember, this is Pittsburgh, not L.A.

Then we got on the road and headed to New York, Friday a.m. post-rush hour. It was a perfect sunny, snowy winter morning. There’s a great diner on Route 22 outside of town. It was Regé’s birthday, and he’d missed breakfast, so we decided to stop and have a good meal before we were deep in the Pennsylvania mountains with even fewer options.

We went to this little chrome railroad car, Dean’s Diner. We all squeezed into a corner booth and I realized how “L.A.” Regé and Sammy looked, how “NY” Thurber and I looked, and how we were a bunch of knucklehead cartoonists sitting in a diner along with hunters in camouflage and the like. Two hunters in fact, only three arms between them, tho’. Next to them, an old guy who looked like a mechanic in coveralls. Then three waitresses in powder blue uniforms and us, the cartoonists. Six of us. Talking about Moebius and Mazzucchelli’s respective line weights. Did you know Moebius drew straight in ink without pencils underneath? And Mazzucchelli did his layouts for Year One slightly smaller than the printed comic so he could see how his line would reduce?
Ah, finally. I’ve found some real friends in this life, ha ha.