DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE

TCJ Review: Sediment

2012-01-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

I reviewed Sediment, the absolutely stunning new artist's book from CF, over here at TCJ. (Um, The Comics Journal. So many acronyms!!) Starts like this:

The latest release from Providence-based noise cartoonist Christopher “CF” Forgues is something of a departure from his previous output, but it’s one that makes sense. Over the past decade or so, CF has gone from a marginal figure in the culty art-comix circle to perhaps the most influential cartoonist making noncommercial work on a regular basis. Though his stories in Powr Mastrs, Kramers Ergot, and The Ganzfeld (among numerous others) ring with conceptual focus and clarity of execution, the biggest reason for Forgues’s catapult to the top of the other comics heap is his often imitated but never equaled drawing style, which fuses childlike simplicity to virtuosic nuance beneath a pencil line that crackles with a raw energy wholly its artist’s own. The more work he puts out, the more CF emerges as that rarest of creatures: a true visionary who has chosen to devote himself to making comics. Read more

"Red Windows (In Los Angeles)"

2012-01-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

New comic. Not saying much about this one yet because there'll be more soon, but if you must know it's kind of a sequel to my comic "Hipsters". Go check it out right here. (It's pretty.)

How To Read Art-Comix And Why

2012-01-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

Sans Genre X

Into the valley. Sometimes you stare into a microscope for so long that you only remember there's a world a million times wider outside the lens when somebody taps you on the shoulder. Such is life as a reader of American art-comix. The relatively low cultural visibility of all comics makes the medium something that's at least moderately difficult to follow without being motivated and passionate about it, but when you start talking about the cutting edge of avant-garde sequential art, you're talking about a specialists-only interest. It's a precondition for work that only makes it into maybe fifteen or twenty retail outlets nationwide, that relies on tumblr websites for publicity and paypal for money more heavily than anything else, and most of all, has such a tightly knit community of followers that it's often difficult not to wonder whether the audience for the stuff outside of cartoonists and critics numbers in the triple figures. But every once in a while the uninitiated folks to whom you insist that acts of unfettered artistic expression get at "previously unseen potentials" and that risograph printing is "the most beautiful production method going" and that Gary Panter is "the fucking bomb" actually get themselves interested and decide to take the plunge.

Almost always, the result is confusion. Especially for people with a pre-existing image of what comics are and how they work (which these days is pretty much everyone of the age and inclination to check out some more difficult comics -- Watchmen and Walking Dead, like it or not, have become pop currency), confronting work that uses pages and panels and quite often even a word balloon or two but doesn't subscribe to the same precepts as the mass-market "graphic novels" named above, can be a befuddling experience. It gets even more so because the few corners of comics' critical body that are capable of expressing simple opinions with a modicum of intelligence are almost uniformly rapturous and equally vague in their praise of such work. The story I usually tell here for some color is the tale of The Day My Brother Visited And My Copy Of CF's City-Hunter Came In The Mail. I studied the pages of what might be the quintessential arty-comics zine of the past few years consumed by transports of delight; he gave it a quick flip-through, handed it back to me, and shrugged "dude, this comic sucks."

I knew I was right -- leave the fact that I write for the Comics Journal and as such all my opinions about comics are automatically correct out of it, the mere fact that anyone could look at the comic and be so enraptured by it indicated the abiding worth of it. But art-comix, almost exclusively, don't come to you -- pulling the value from them can be a difficult task. Luckily, I recently had the issue brought to my attention again, by a pen pal who asked for some tips for accessing and appreciating more esoteric comics. Since not quite knowing how to get around inside these wonderful books is anything but an uncommon complaint, I thought it might be good if I shared a few simple strategies on how best to appreciate art-comix. Pencils ready!

Look at the pictures. That might sound obvious, and it's true for any kind of comic you might run across. But the great tragedy of the "graphic novel" era, in which comics have risen slightly above the status of a cultural joke and onto the Barnes and Noble shelves and the aging hipster professors' curriculums, is that the mainstream acceptance they've been afforded has come with an unprecedented emphasis on the writerly qualities of the books that have made it to the NY Times/AV Club canon. The pictures serve the story, yes, but they're also an equally lively and much more immediate vehicle for individual aesthetic expression than narrative. In most art-comix, this is the facility for expression that's being given the better part of the workout. I like to think about the relationship between pictures and words in art-comix as being like that of music to lyrics in songs: the words certainly count, but the reason to listen is what's underneath them. They use the word "art" in the name for these books with reason: the best art-comix are an exercise for the eyes and the mind, the content they hold based as much in concrete visuals as abstract plot points.

Forget what you know. Coming to art-comix from superhero comics, especially, makes for a bumpy road. Leaving aside the obvious aesthetic differences for a moment, the best way of processing information presented within the two idioms is vastly different. What superhero comics emphasize above all else is essentially sameness: readers are encouraged to look for dialogue between what they're reading at the moment and previous issues, or classic stories featuring the same characters, or books from the same publisher that feature other characters, or all of the above at once. Pretty much every corporate superhero comic exists as a tiny sliver of something the reader is encouraged to see as seamless and continuous, a vast reach of inextricably connected story material. Art-comix, on the other hand, frequently disconnect from themselves, even in the shortest of stories. Random digressions, subplots that never follow up, pin-up pages, "commercial breaks" of varying length... rather than shoehorn every possible idea into a single plot a la Grant Morrison, the preferred route of comics' avant-garde is to let ideas coexist as separate entities from one another, even if they happen to share the same cover or even the same page.

The ideal mindset to enter an art comic with is something as close to passive reception as possible: reading actively in an attempt to make as many connections between what's at hand and what's come before is usually a mistake. Instead, try to see everything for what it is. Find what value you can in every page, every panel, every drawn form and line of dialogue before moving on. More likely than not, the neatly tied narrative fulfillment we're trained to look for as pop-media consumers in a historically Judeo-Christianate country is not forthcoming, so embrace a more hedonistic reading style and focus your energy on pulling as much enjoyment as you can from what your eyes are resting on this second. If it links up later, that's great. If not, who cares? You'll be looking at something else by then.

(New) world building. Frequently -- maybe even more often than not -- art-comix won't make a whole lot of what's commonly referred to as "sense". Scenes switch setting midstream, words and pictures don't match up, characters come and go without warning, and figurative content jacknifes into abstraction at the drop of a hat. Where so many comics stress the patient, meticulous evocation of a world that corresponds as closely as possible to our own, art-comix embrace the differences, the fact that any world printed on paper is never even going to come close to what's outside your window. So take them as they come. The world you're inhabiting while you're on the pages of the book is never supposed to be the one you live in; revel in the surprises and discoveries that figuring out its individual logic entails. Accept what's on the page as reality, no matter how unfamiliar or nonsensical it may seem. It's meant to be that way. Comics are a powerful tool for escapism, after all, and few will take you to a further remove from reality than art-comix.

Bad is good. This one works along the same lines as the last. We're trained to interrogate drawn images for as much faithfulness to reality as possible: reproducing the look of the world around us for artistic purposes is the most common goal in everything from figurative painting to movies to photographs to comics art. We're also told to value professionalism above pretty much anything else, but when people who draw like "professionals" produce terrible comics with such frequency, passion stands revealed as the truly necessary component of exciting work. Leave your classical illustrative values at the door for art-comix. Books that contain worlds removed from the logic of this reality have no obligation to replicate it visually. Savor the imperfections of the art, the deviations from both realism and common artistic shorthand. The parts that look wrong are the parts that define the outer limits of the world you're reading, the easiest ways to see that what you're involved in is different from usual. Sometimes being individual is a more important statement than being pretty. It's why you dyed your hair purple in seventh grade. All it takes is training to get things right: send anybody to commercial-art school for a decade and they'll be able to draw like Neal Adams. But the stray marks made, the liquid medium splattered, the hiccups in form and style that riddle art-comix are the property of their creators' hands alone.

They cost too fucking much. Yes they do. Grit your teeth real hard, is my advice. Nobody's getting rich here. Being part of something that only a handful of others are means paying premiums. Look at it this way: if Marvel knocked a dollar off their cover prices, maybe a few ancillary titles might get canceled. If most art-comix were any cheaper they simply wouldn't exist, because their creators couldn't be making comics. If you're buying it you value it, so you should damn well value it.

Tool and technique. Since the artists are also usually the most effective proselytizers for art-comix, it's easy to come away resentful, feeling like you're reading a bulletin from some cartoonists-only clubhouse meeting. And as with all comics, an appreciation for artistic technique adds to the reading experience. But there's no need to sign up for a correspondence course if you want to enjoy this stuff. The main thing is to view the art you're reading as art: not abstract information, but real substances pressed or scratched or smeared or xeroxed on a page. If there's any aspect of art one should enter the noisier regions of comics ready to appreciate, it's the tactility of the media used to make the comic, something we can all understand. Art-comix tell the stories of their own creation, calling back to the components they came together from. The dust of a pencil line speaks in a different voice than the trail of ink left by a pen. The filmy sheen of marker colors is something entirely separate from the buff crust of dried paint, even if the tones themselves are exactly the same. The charming waver of a freehand line against the eerily mechanical feel of a rulered one. Look for as much in the building materials of the comic as the comic itself: they're a part of it too, after all.

These are only a few strategies that you might find useful; there are certainly plenty more, many of which you may have already found or be yet to find on your own. All of my instructions rely on sweeping generalizations made about a wide-ranging and incredibly vital corner of comics, so depending on the book your mileage may vary. Of course, the real fun begins once you master reading art-comix and bring the reading methods honed there back to your favorite mainstream comics: insurrection, bitches. And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the release party for the new issue of Kramers Ergot!

Thanks to Messrs. Dave Morris of Calgary and Corey Mullee of Williamsburg for asking the question.

Your Wednesday Sequence: Bernard Krigstein (part 2)

2012-01-18T19:24:00.000-08:00

I think the latest installment of my Robot 6 column is the best one I've written. It starts like this:

Short version: Bernard Krigstein was the best artist to work for the best genre-comics publisher of all time (EC), unsurpassed in his masterful use of sequencing, but — this is the important part — frequently hemmed in by the undercooked stories he was assigned to draw and the limited length he was given to explore what dramatic potential they had in. Krigstein never drew a story longer than twelve pages. However, the way he went about solving these problems, as we’ll see, was a big part of what made him not only unique but truly great.

And now to business.

Here’s a prime example of how Krigstein seamlessly elevated less-than-inspired script material. Saddled with wordy, adjective-weighted narration that nonetheless transitions between scenes at the snap of a finger, from bundled up on the streets of London to pajama-clad in a hotel room with a single narrow panel in between, Krigstein has no hope of giving the action a blow-by-blow reading. The rapid jump cutting employed here is a necessity, not a choice; but look at just how elegantly Krigstein carries it off, by placing an element in each panel that ties it to both the previous and the next. We move smoothly from the lamp in panel one to the streetlight in panel two to the wall torch occupying the same exact spot in panel three. Then Krigstein takes advantage of the strict top-to-bottom reading the high, thin panels he’s boxed into creates, ending panel three with his character’s feet before featuring them in the tier’s final frame. It’s an incredibly awkward format somehow made to flow like melted butter, a beautiful little bit of work. Read more

"Imaginary Art Show"

2012-01-17T20:17:00.001-08:00

I made a new comic, and I really like this one. I think you will too. Click here to read it.

This one is exactly what it says in the title: a picture I made of an imaginary art show. Actually, it's an art show I dreamed, not just imagined: one very quick flash in front of my eyes in that last moment between sleeping and wakefulness where you aren't seeing the world around you. If you want to "take a step back" and see the whole thing at once, click here. Dream images are incredibly important to me as an artist for a few reasons: first, their meaning isn't immediately clear, which makes drawing them much more engaging than simply fleshing out the details of a picture you've already consciously contrived. It's a process of discovery. Also, that lack of pre-contrivance tells you about yourself as not just an artist but a visual thinker -- like, what images are really coming out of my head when I'm not chained to the realism of capturing waking life, or even a more constructed fantasy world. Drawing dream images is a good way to figure out what your truly natural facilities as an artist are. Plus, I think they always hold a strong element of enigma, like a question without an answer. There is never a conscious idea about them, never anything they've set out to accomplish. They're simply here because they're here. Other dream comics I've drawn are here and here.

So I dreamed about a gallery exhibition, and it looked like this: two photos printed onto big canvases sandwiching a circle of eight two-panel watercolor comics with only color in them; and those sandwiching another piece, the same size, with "3120" written on it. Everything up against a beige wall, with the top of the whole thing maybe nine feet off the ground. I couldn't recall all of the color combos on the watercolor pieces, only that they looked somehow futuristic to me: color harmonies that aren't really in popular use now but looked like they would be one day. I've been going to a lot of galleries here in LA lately, and thinking more about the rather comics-specific element of sequencing that comes into the way they're hung. (Frank Santoro and I had a chat about this that you can listen to here.) It seemed like a fun challenge to create a gallery show in miniature, and so rather than drawing everything on one sheet of paper, I set about creating what's basically a 2-D diorama: I painted the "wall" sheet beige, drew the "photos" on the most canvas-y paper I had, chopped down a sheet of xerox paper into nine little pieces to do the watercolors on, and then pasted them all up in the configuration in saw them hung in my dream. Not a bad way to spend a free afternoon. Go check it out!

Links's

2012-01-17T01:11:00.000-08:00

Images To Haunt Your Fucking Nightmares: Alex Ross does Jimmy Corrigan.

- BREAKING NEWS: Seminal psych-comics Brett Ewins, whose Judge Dredd storiess are like a model for how to make by-the-numbers action comics visually exciting, has been embroiled in an incident that sounds like it wouldn't be out of place in an issue of 2000AD...

- Best Eurocomics being made? It's all Ruppert and Mulot, you ask me.

- And this is a photo of Killoffer. How much more of fucking pimps are French cartoonists than American ones? It must be at least 83%.

- Shit Comics brings you the Panels of 2011. Who am I to argue?

- A jewel amidst seas of nothingness: George Elkind on Tintin.

- Oh, I'm sure you super fucking care what my favorite four records of 2011 were, right? (Cold CAVE!) Well, listen to me yakk about 'em on my new favorite podcast Them's The Vagaries here (about an hour in). I totally forgot to list that Araabmuzik album though. Also that new Prurient.

- Brandon Soderberg of Comics For Serious, perhaps the comics critic whose work I most miss seeing on a regular basis, put in some serious time on Them's The Vagaries as well, delivering a brilliant, fiery address on the state of comics circa now. Not to be missed: part one, part two. Brandon also put one of my comics on his best of 2011 list! Therefore said list is Correct.

- Nobody shit-talks Grant Morrison like Eddie Campbell shit-talks Grant Morrison.

-Speaking of whom, Frank Santoro's comics-as-criticism blog post on Campbell's How To Be An Artist book is super fantastic.

- The world's best comic shop has a tumblr.

- Better to be silly than a pansy, of course.

- Tim O'Neil nails Marvel's current publishing practices. Like, with a nail gun level of nailing it.

- Michel Fiffe is on the crowdfunding circuit for the next issue of his comic Zegas. According to prominent critic Matt Seneca, issue 1 was the shit. So give him your money.

- And as always, my art porn graphic novel AFFECTED continues apace. However, I think I'll be bringing it from its usual twice-weekly posting schedule down to once a week in order to serve up more satisfying chunks of story as the ending draws ever nearer. So look for it Mondays, and then look again on Tuesdays cause I am late sometimes. I just posted some sick fighting pages. In addition, I have a new, weird, but seemingly quite popular short comic up at my other comics website. And I have another short on my table right now (hence this link post instead of putting in the work on a real blog post), so stop by again in a couple days to see that one. UPDATE: Here it is, looking lovely if I do say so myself.

The Next Big Thing

2012-01-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

O Plexo Holistico (2011), by Diego Gerlach. Barba Negra (Brazil).

This is why I do what I do. When you're a Noted Comics Critic you get a ton of rando emails from people who want to send you their comic. I never turn one down, but until recently I've never been quite sure why that was. Just like the ones I buy at the store, most of the comics I get sent are real awful, and then a couple are ok or even pretty good. It's cool when that happens because then I get to learn about something I wouldn't have otherwise. Still, as I said, if you'd come out and asked me at any point last calendar year why I subject my mailbox to such an utter deluge of manila-enveloped comics, I probably wouldn't have been able to verbalize why. But then last week I read the copy of O Plexo Holistico, a slickly produced magazine-format Brazilian import comic that the book's creator, Diego Gerlach, had asked about sending me a while back, and here it is. Why do I never turn an offer of a comic in the mail down? This is why.

I feel... I dunno, I feel like the record exec who stumbled into some Midlands club on some a dingy night and discovered Black Sabbath? This comic is luminous, hugely exciting work, but it's also so out of nowhere that I still have trouble figuring it out. The fact that I'm the only guy in the country with a copy only increases that perception of O Plexo Holistico as a phantom comic, something not quite real even though I can read it through and hold it in my hands.

And so, an explanation, if only so I can convince myself that this thing is really going to sit on the shelf between Nipper and 100 Bullets: this is a silent all-action comic, almost completely free of "story" as such. What replaces narrative is meticulous, intensely disciplined motion tracking, a single sixteen page fight scene planed open with a surgeon's eye, panel after pyrotechnic panel pulled from one simple chain of events. The participants in the extended smackdown are the lucha wrestler/superhero fellow featured on the book's cover and a hipster Teen Wolf type with psychic powers. What happens on the pages is simple: the hipster kid's concentration on getting wasted in a skatepark is broken by the appearance of the masked man ("Nil", if we're going by the lettering emblazoned in scotch tape across his chest), who announces himself by pissing on a wall covered in posters of a werewolf. Angered by the insult to what we don't yet know is his secret identity, the kid brains the superhero with a barrel full of garbage, and proceeds to take the physically powerful but mentally hapless figure apart with a telepathic assault barrage after switching into werewolf mode. The fight over, he shifts back into a kid with cool clothes, and that's all, folks.

It's a lot of fun, both hilarious and gripping, and pretty much any comic that goes in this intently on a single subject -- not just a feature-length fight, but a silent one, with nothing at all in the way of the acts of drawn violence -- has got something to recommend it. But for all Gerlach's kinetic blocking and high-volume impact shots, he seems at least as interested in using his epic fight scene to put on a formal show and exhibit the stunning aesthetic of his work. Up front is the book's lack of the gridded layouts so typical of art comix: rather than hitting one to the next in regimented lines, these pictures explode all over each other, multiple drawings sharing the single canvas of the full page. Gerlach never tries to cram too much into one space: most pages only feature two or three panels, but they're big ticket pictures that swagger up and demand your attention, rolling in slow so you can really feel each one's sick crunch. Once the imagess switch from physical to psychic conflict, the Kirbyist banging is replaced by a swift-flowing, deeply psychedelic stream of lines and screentones, culminating in what's sure to stand unchallenged as the year's best vomit scene. Throughout, the intent remains unchanged: these are drawings by an artist who's going for your throat via your eyes, his each panel more expressive and ruthless than the last.

Sure, this is style over substance, but that's perfectly okay -- better than that, it's pretty amazing -- when the style in question is something so fresh and unexpected. There are moves swiped from Paul Pope and Katsuhiro Otomo here, of course; after all, it's a fusion-era action comic. But much more noticeable is the inspired fusion of the detail-rich, gloriously mean style seen in the work of Rafael Grampa (the last young action-comics stunner to come out of Brazil) with a strong strain of the deep-underground, allusive, almost sadistically dark tone and raw, personal, geometric design work found in work by Providence noise-comics makers Ben Jones and CF. The deep-focus punchouts and perfectly rendered explosions of body fluid of Grampa are backed up in O Plexo Holistico not by the cliched settings of Westerns or superhero stories, but by the tortured, symbol-strewn cityscapes of the scariest art comix. And on top of all that, Gerlach has somehow managed to create what may be the first post-Jonny Negron comic, shooting his pages through with plenty of the '90s anime gestures and reverberating compositions that have come to be associated with the medium's current coolest new artist.

This glossy yellow magazine, made far outside the fractious, self-obsessed American comics scene, feels like a downright revolutionary site, a place where the divisions between what we think of as "mainstream" and "alternative" in this country disappear, or become irrelevant: Gerlach has created a deeply impressive piece of work that pulls equally from the furthest cutting edges of both. So just call it cutting edge comics if you need to call it anything, and hope we'll be seeing a lot more soon.

You can order a copy of O Plexo Holistico from its Brazilian publisher here, though I understand copies may be hitting the States in select locations at some point. You should also check out Diego Gerlach's flickr here for the most baller Spider-Man picture ever.

Your Wednesday Sequence: Bernard Krigstein (part 1)

2012-01-11T22:41:00.000-08:00

God, before I even did the first one of my sequence columns over at Robot 6 -- I mean like, the second I got the idea that I was gonna start doing them -- I knew I was going to have to dig deep into Bernard Krigstein. As far as revolutionary approaches to putting drawings together on a page go, he's pretty much it: an unparalleled genius who remains far ahead of the game. The only problem facing me was picking a single Krigstein sequence that stood out as a shining, emblematic example of his genius; a task which, unfortunately, I've failed at after attempting it for a solid 40 weeks running. Why do you think it's taken me so long to get around to him, after all? Anyway, there's a silver lining to it all: this week and next, I'll be spotlighting a shit-ton of Krigstein's best sequences, discussing what makes each of them so wonderful and unique. The hope is that everyone will come to the same conclusion I have: Krigstein was simply too good to be summed up with one example of his craft. So check out part one here, and get ready for plenty more.

PS: if you draw comics, this stuff is mandatory reading....

"Ghost House"

2012-01-09T08:03:00.000-08:00

I made a new comic. You should go look at it here. I've been looking over some of my earliest efforts at making comics lately, the stuff I did back before I could draw. That photo-collaged work obviously loses something to its lack of handmade content, but I like the directness of it, how willfully I was going about doing "experimental comics". Much as the mannerisms of drawing style are a part of comics, the way I interact with the medium it also takes a lot of setting aside before I can get to the actual content. Photographic imagery is more objective, maybe more communicative. "This is a picture of ______", with nothing getting in the way. I also think found imagery is a fun, useful thing to bring into my comics, because it dictates content that I wouldn't have thought up myself.

So: I found the photo negatives that make up this comic at LA's famous Fairfax Trading Post today, in the bins full of random old pictures. I love looking at photo negatives a lot more than I like looking at finished photography, I guess because it doesn't look like the real world looks at all, but still unmistakably represents it. Negatives are a lot like drawings that way. And strips of negatives, like the ones in the middle of this comic, are about as close to the comics form as photography gets. They're always so small, though -- these pictures are about half an inch tall in real life -- that it's tough to really live inside them, to drink them in as imagery. (Though that too is undeniably part of their ghostly charm.) So I thought I'd blow them up and put them online, big enough for the eye to really inhabit. I think the resulting photocopy-machine grit is a pretty tasty extra, deteriorating the objective quality of the photographic image a little bit, bringing it back into dialogue with drawing. But it's like a drawing done by a machine: human hands are still nowhere near this stuff. Negatives always creep me out, and I know I'm not the only one... maybe that's why. Regardless, that's where the title "Ghost House" comes from. Check it out.

Year One Art

2012-01-04T16:59:00.001-08:00

Over at Robot 6 I wrote my first column of the new year up extra good. It's a special edition on David Mazzucchelli's art in Batman Year One. It seems to me like the art of that comic more than a ton of others gets short shrift, probably because it serves the story in such a subtle and considered way, rather than calling any undue (or even due) attention to itself. But boy is it there, and boy is it great. I talked about the way Mazzucchelli finds a place for both that deep subtlety and more typical superhero pyrotechnics, the way his four-tier layout throws off the usual rhythm of action comics storytelling and mirrors pop music, the uniqueness of the particular moments Mazzucchelli chooses to draw, and a lot more. It's kind of a companion piece to that "Dark Knight Art" thing I wrote a while back. Slowly makin' my way through the canon here! You can go read it if you want to.

End It All

2011-12-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

2011: the best.

*******************

NEW COMICS

1 and 2. Color Engineering and Garden, by Yuichi Yokoyama. Picturebox/Nanzuka Underground.

I've harbored the opinion that Yuichi Yokoyama was making the best comics of anyone working for years, but with the dizzying one-two punch of these books, he stated it in blazing day-glo letters for all to see. Garden was "lit comics" introduced to hardline experimental literature, a near-endless journey through human history and technology that ends in apocalypse and a hint of rebirth. That hint is ravishingly elaborated upon in Color Engineering, which may prove to be the best and final word in art-comix; a completely overpowering visual tour de force that strips the mechanism of comics storytelling back to its most basic elements before reconsidering them and giving them a polish for this new century. Yokoyama's output in 2011 is best described as a two-part textbook, a map of where it's possible to go -- not just next year or next decade, but next epoch. Like all the truly great stuff, it's better seen than described. I wrote about these guys here, and I interviewed Yokoyama here.

3. AFFECTED, by Matt Seneca. Self-published online.

Whatever, I liked my comic better than all the other ones this year. If I didn't I wouldn't make it! It's mostly because AFFECTED is (obviously) the exact type of content I want to see getting put out there, but there are also things I know I'm doing (because I'm the one doing them) that I wish I saw a little more of on the new racks. A cursory reading of the past decade's aesthetically satisfying American comics gives little to no indication that we live in a nation at war, or that we're experiencing a very real shift in the way we live our lives, or that this thing the internet exists. I also think one of the most valuable things happening in comics right now is cartoonists' folding of the pure-visual punch of last decade's art-comix into more considered literary structures, and the way young cartoonists are beginning to interact more directly with the medium's history on the page -- as critics and commentators rather than just followers. It's up to you to decide whether I'm succeeding or failing, but I'm having more fun doing my best to achieve these things than I am reading any comics. (Besides Yokoyama.) I got interviewed about AFFECTED here and here and here.

4. Obsolete, by Mikkel Sommer. Nobrow.

If you're looking for a perfect comic, look no further. Danish artist Mikkel Sommer's slow-burn crime thriller Obsolete is a stone masterpiece from start to finish, not a panel wasted, not a ropy, scratched line out of place. Beautifully printed, told mostly without words, brutally short and to the point, shocking and touching in the same gasped breath, it's almost frightening in its economy. Single gestures tell of years' experience, scribbled landscapes cough up their fractious histories, and characters flower into vivid life with a glance or a plea. Though Sommer's Frank Quitely-meets-Gipi art and ice-cold sense of pacing and plot are astounding, what's most impressive about Obsolete is its tone, which throws the nervy futurism of Scandinavian crime literature over a heartbreaking Mideast War fallout narrative. It's a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky to see something this accomplished -- we're talking Eisner-on-Spirit, Ditko-on-Question levels of bluntly stated, transcendent genre comics -- from such a complete unknown. After such a formidable display, Sommer deserves our full attention. To my great shame, I didn't review this one yet, but rest assured I will soon. In the meantime you should definitely buy the thing, and then you should read Nina Stone's note-perfect take on it here.

5. 2001, by Blaise Larmee. Self-published online.

In a year of formalist comics, Blaise Larmee's gorgeous, ephemeral 2001 managed to be both the prettiest and the most relevant. It's a stunning thing to look at, filling every computer screen it's spread onto with a minimal, hauntingly evocative black and white world that moves with the verve and decisiveness of youth. Larmee's drawing has developed to a point where it can stand comparison with just about anyone else making comics at the moment, and each panel of 2001 is a treasure, more than enough to keep frozen on the screen and simply stare at. But what makes the comic so exciting is how relentlessly it pushes the reader forward, whisking the eye down and down until the experience of reading it comes just about as close to animation as still images can get. Larmee has found a new acme for webcomics, something that truly can't be replicated on the printed page, and the 2001 site is its home environment, a place not a little bewildering in its beauty, one it seems impossible to get tired of visiting. I wrote about 2001 here and I interviewed Blaise here.

6. Kramers Ergot 8, edited by Sammy Harkham. Picturebox.

The joyous explosions of color and noise and brilliant ideas that were Kramers 4 through 7 are probably the best printed summations of the bull market that comics experienced last decade, comics conceptualized as a (if not the) vital, modern art form with all the potential in the world. It was a creative flowering on a level that's only been seen in comics a few times before. But every wave crashes to the shore eventually, and this new, quieter, more focused Kramers brings the comedown with a laser-beam focus. Rigid, complex story structures bracket in the visionary drawings, the small size of the book pens everything in a little tighter, and the ideas on every page seem to broil at finger-burning heat rather than bursting outward. It's angry comics for apocalyptic times, but beneath the book's dour pessimism (itself a highly engaging virtue) is a picture of a new world for comics, one that has perhaps reined in the excesses of the utopian vision Kramers previously put forth, but one more realistic and workable for that. And all conceptualizing aside, it's got knockout stories from an all-star list of the best cartoonists going, including career highs from CF, Dash Shaw, and Johnny Ryan. I wrote a little bit about it here.

7. Daredevil, by Paolo Rivera, Marcos Martin, and Mark Waid. Marvel "Fuck Marvel Comics" Comics.

Given the current state of mainstream comics, it looks pretty damn impressive when something that doesn't allow itself to be aesthetically compromised by its milieu in any way comes along. Daredevil is just that, a superhero book that wants to be a superhero book and does so beautifully. It's a shame that the most noticeable aspect of this series is its lack of crossover marketing hype, inappropriate attempts at "maturity", knee-slapping editorial gaffes, et cetera, but c'est la guerre: that leaves all the more room to marvel at how well Mark Waid can layer vicious fighting and deft character acting and seamless incremental plotting into page after page of beautiful (and beautifully produced) drawing by Rivera and Martin. It's craftsmanship, not art, to be sure, but this is work for hire that its creators deserve to be very proud of, perfectly pitched as the kind of high-octane escapism the marketing department needs it to be, but also a virtuoso-level workout for the fundamentals of action comics. They don't all have to change the world or even the medium, but it would be quite something if they could all be this beautiful and fun to read.

Honorable mention. Love & Rockets New Stories #4, by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez AND Ganges #4, by Kevin Huizenga. Fantagraphics (both).

Both of these comics are completely amazing on every level, and are probably better than many of the ones on the list. But they're also both ongoing series that have spanned many years of greatness at this point, rather than anything that belongs to 2011 exclusively. They're not listed, but they're on the list. Read them.

*****************

TRENDS

1. Newspaper/broadsheet-format comics.
This one's been boiling up to steam for a good few years now, but it really bloomed this year. What started with Sunday Press Books' re-presentation of classic newspaper strips in their cartographic original size has turned into a full-blown revival of the original delivery method for comics, the massive single newspaper page. It seems like everyone who's anyone in non-mainstream comics (and a few people from across that border too) had something out on a broadsheet this year, and the results are certainly looking like a reconsideration of what's possible in comics. The surface level thrill of simply seeing more from our favorite cartoonists on every page is just as material a part of why broadsheets are great as anything else, but the storytelling possibilities that the extra space is opening up for artists who always seem to be pushing against something in their more traditionally formatted work has the potential to permanently change what we expect from comics. This year Matthew Thurber and Benjamin Marra packed graphic novels of content into a few pages, Blaise Larmee redefined "comics interview", Jonny Negron brought the classic "cutaway view" shot to a Hieronymous Bosch level of head-spinning perversity, and um, Michael DeForge drew the most baller fucking Fantastic Four comic ever. (That matters as much as all the rest of it, folks.)

Of course, the cloud behind the dazzling silver lining is that a lot, maybe even the majority, of cartoonists doing this stuff are still trying to get paid for it. But if that does end up happening, it might very well bring lasting positive change to the economics of comics also. A single page from a cartoonist at the top of their game is as much a desirable piece as a canvas by a master painter, and by encouraging artists to focus on just that -- the page, and not the issue or the book -- broadsheets are reminding us how important every little piece of this art form really is.

2. The risograph.
The what? Get hip fast, son: the risograph is changing the look of comics' cutting edge in a hurry. It's an absurdly simple transition for minicomics and zines: what if, instead of printing your scummy piece of shit in black and white on a normal xerox machine, there was a contraption that allowed you to put some color to those lines? The products, as most impressively exemplified in books printed on the machine by Ryans Sands and Cecil-Smith, come close to revolutionary. Suddenly the cheaply printed, hand-folded, late-night-stapled zines in the corner of the comic shop are the prettiest, most visually arresting things in the building. Riso printed comics are both boldly futuristic in their sense of difference from anything that's come before and strangely nostalgic in the way they put the laborious, mechanically-produced aspect of comics on display in an era of seamless digital gloss.

It's quite something to see minicomics finally put on the equal visual footing with the mainstream that they've always deserved; but even more important are the possibilities risograph printing is allowing the artists who've gotten in on it thus far to explore. The waves of color and printing-machine grit the process bathes the comics it touches in are a veritable tone factory, lending the work an intense tactility, one only enhanced when the ink colors up your sweaty fingertips. Small wonder, then, that the most visible of the riso printed books, Thickness, is also probably the medium's best-ever erotic anthology. New technology, put to new use. A great thing is happening, and it looks as though next year will only bring more of it.

3. Sex comics.
Not exactly new and certainly not universally welcomed, but vital and necessary nonetheless. What kind of case for relevance can a medium present without some truly great erotic art, after all? While it's responsible for a lot of Europe's most lyrical and lovely works in comics, and a lot of manga's wildest excursions into the unknown, pornography has always been a touchy place to go in American comics culture. From under-the-counter sales of bootlegged "Tijuana Bibles" in the earliest days of the pamphlet format to obscenity raids on the saucier undergrounds to the crippling misstep made by the modern era's dominant publisher of intelligent comics, Fantagraphics, in their ghettoizing of porn as a potential-lacking moneymaker, it's been a hard road to legitimacy for sexualized sequential art here in the States. However, that seems to be changing. The aforementioned Thickness anthology is leading the charge, but 2011 also saw a sexy anthology from perennial alt-comics cool kids Closed Captioned Comics, mass market highbrow porn books from crossover superstar Dave McKean and bonafide Great Cartoonist Chester Brown (even if they both totally sucked), harsh-noise erotic interludes in the new Kramers, a killer art-porn webcomic from yers truly, and most importantly, a general acceptance of these things from both critics and fans. It seems as though comics isn't afraid of having a sex life anymore.

What's really exciting, ahem, about this new crop of porn comics is the sense of a wild new frontier they provide. American comics has spent a solid eight decades coming up with eye-popping new ways to show people fighting a few different times a month, and now the other way people have vigorous physical interactions is finally opening up. The formal possibilities are just about endless: Jonny Negron's leapt out early as the man to watch, but fascinating new voices are cropping up all the time, and established ones are rushing to join the chorus. That's not to mention the enticing possibility of translated foreign sex comics coming along to teach everyone a lesson or three, which seems too good an opportunity for enterprising publishers to leave on the table much longer...

*******************

CRITICISM

Three big ones this year. Tucker Stone's recent interview with Tom Spurgeon is a masterpiece on both sides of the mic (or um, modem), a gentle, often hilarious planing open of the diseased guts of the comics industry -- both mainstream and alternative -- that leaves the question of what to do about the mess we're in where it should be, in the hands of you the passionately concerned. Read it here. Adam McIlwee's postmodern detective story about his attempts to unravel Blaise Larmee's online persona is the best profile piece a cartoonist has received in years, and seems almost like a step forward into a new kind of writing about human identity, one that takes the complications of the internet age into full consideration. Read it here. Finally, the pseudonymous White Shasta's confession to impersonating CF on twitter is full of the same art-and-identity concerns: lyrical, personal, abstract. But it also brings the missing element of comics criticism -- the pictures -- to fully developed life, making it more engaging and affecting a read than innumerable typed works on the medium. Read it here.

********************

JUNK I WROTE THAT I DIDN'T HATE

- On Jack Kirby, Gary Panter, and what we see when we look in the mirror

- My two part kiss-off to caring about Grant Morrison comics

- A survey of the unexplored territory provided by webcomics

- Here's where I singlehandedly beat Drawn & Quarterly out of 2000 sales of that fucking stupid Chester Brown book

- Stealin' Geoff Johns's soul, take it bitch

- Eulogy to Gene Colan, who was murdered by Marvel Comics

- That time I smoked that Punisher comic

- "Idiots", a short story I wrote about my inability to make it work with a girl was dating, disguised as my hugely popular DC Relaunch article

- White Shasta unmasked

- GARY PANTER INTERVIEW

- How we look at comics, I love this one

- Aaannnd, Jeph Loeb makes a lot of comics about his dead son.

*****************

COMICS I DREW

Here and here.

Happy New Years. Stick around for more in 2012 if you've a mind.

"Iceland"

2011-12-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

I made a new comic about finding out the place my girl and I used to go ice skating when I was a kid got closed down. It's pretty great. You can read it here. Below is the essay I wrote to go with it.

I guess it's hardly anything new to be making nostalgic comics about old buildings (hello Eisner, Seth, Ware, like a billion other dudes), but that's what makes it kind of nice. Not quite the same as covering a song, more like writing a new one around a familiar old chord change or something. It's fun to create subject matter that's nothing new in order to focus on finding a way to make it your own. And also, I mean... this one is all real, and it does hit pretty hard to come home for the first time in years and see everything torn down or shuttered. Just a while ago Berkeley had a big fire that took out the place I used to play pool as a teenager too. I guess this kind of thing has always been happening, but it seems to really have been in the air for the past few years.

Chris Ware was obviously a big influence on this comic: I drew it here in the Bay Area, where unlike LA there's actually a shift in the weather toward winter, so I really wanted to capture the cold tone Ware hits so beautifully. I'm not sure how well I did. Blaise Larmee's 2001 was another big touchstone; the ice-skating sequence was originally blocked out exactly like that comic is but I changed it up because it was really a little too close. Most of all though, this comic owes a big debt to Frank Santoro. Frank's new Blast Furnace Funnies comic tackles some pretty similar subject matter as this one with an incredible amount of elegance, something I tried to capture as well. He was also the one who told me I should start doing my linework in color, something I haven't really been able to do in Affected because of how regimented my process on that book has become after drawing hundreds of pages of it; but also something I've been eager to try. I'm going to do my next book with color linework, so this was sort of a "workshop" attempt at figuring out some of the basics. Finally, a recent talk with Ryan Sands about short stories and page size helped me think this through.

I'm fairly happy with how this comic turned out. I really like the layout, it all seems like one big motion to me. Some of the drawings are good, some could be better, mainly because I tried drawing on ultra smooth Bristol paper instead of the really toothy stuff I like to use. I don't like when it's too easy to make a line. I think it accomplishes what I was trying to do all right. Those of you who've followed my work for a long time will note that this is another comic about the same girl I always make comics about; "get over her!" I hear you say. Well, this is probably the last one like this now that I have rewritten the ending to Affected. As an unheard goodbye, I think I like it well enough. Go check it out!

World Scene Report 2011*

2011-12-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

What It Is.

We still die and we still go to market. This morning my mother sent me out to get a bottle of rye for the Christmas party they were throwing later and I dropped by the comic book shop on the way back, talked with the boys, picked up two riso'd minicomics and that Daredevil.

Right now, I can go out and get a North American comic that draws from all over Europe and Japan as well. We are in a peaceful and productive mode of cultural exchange. This is a renaissance, people. No matter how it feels to be here.

The governors of Nueva España, now called Mexico, wrote of themselves as "we who have been placed at the end of time". It always feels like the world is ending.

We all of us look out our windows upon change, but I don't think anyone would want to go back to the way things were. Technology will not save us but it can help. And it seems like everyone "in the scene" has a clear image of something better.

We'll get there.

Because so many have fought the good fight. A Kirby panel exploding into atoms of xerox-machine grit. The sands of time symbolized by old newspaper and Yokoyama panels and Moebius hatching. The four frames from a superhero monthly that stay with you for a lifetime. And the books full of art that you keep your whole life. Zines. Tezuka. Knowing we do it here as good as anybody else did it. Being part of something.

No matter where we go from here, we can only go forward.

Images from all the great comics I've read over the past three days:

1. SFSF Supplementary File 2A by Ryan Cecil Smith, self-published
2. Daredevil vol. 3 #7 by Paolo Rivera and Mark Waid, Marvel Comics
3. "Hell's Angel" by Yoshikazu Ebisu in Comics Underground Japan, Blast Books
4. "Little Red Riding Hood" by Juani Ta in (ku)š! #7, Bidriba Grafiskie stasi
5. Paranoia #1 by Kipper and Paul O'Connor, Adventure Comics

*DTU turns 2

Your Wednesday Sequence 37

2011-12-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Ditko's World #1 (1986), page 19. Steve Ditko.

Today on my Robot 6 column, I talked about the sublime design sense and pure cartooning Steve Ditko has fallen into during his under-discussed "modern period", sidelining into ideas about use of black and white space on the page, comics as a vehicle for abstract information, and the strange career of an artist who should have been a cult figure but couldn't help creating Spider-Man. You can read it here.

Inkstuds Year-End Total Insanity Edition

2011-12-20T09:49:00.000-08:00

... featuring me!

That's right folks, I was recently invited to participate in a critics' discussion of the best comics if 2011 on Robin McConnell's endlessly wonderful podcast Inkstuds. I was joined by Tim Hodler and Joe McCulloch, two very smart men who are both more articulate and possessed of a greater understanding of comics than me. It was a really great time: two hours of non-stop back-and-forth comics talkin' with some of my favorite critics. And I even got Robin to lead off the show with some prime LA noise rock! You should probably go listen to the podcast right here.

Dead Art

2011-12-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

once more into the breach

Avengers X-Sanction #1, by Ed McGuinness and Jeph Loeb. Marvel.

This is how I pick the superhero comics I'm going to read nowadays: I go to the store once a month to get that Daredevil and that Wonder Woman and then I kind of look around for some old nonsense to spend the rest of what's in my wallet on. I defy you to find a better way of doing this whole "reading mainstream comics" thing. I fully understand that I'm in the minority on this, but I've ceased picking up current superhero titles in hopes of finding any artistic value whatsoever in them. (Again, that Daredevil's an exception here, people.) Today though, I had something a little more specific in mind. It's been too long since I read any so-awful-it's-at-least-interesting superhero comics, and I'd been hot for this one since I saw the teaser image of Cable below in Marvel Previews.

Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness on Rob Liefeld's greatest creation: there's an itch this combination scratches really really well. Over the past half-decade Loeb's gone from a well-enough-respected (in those circles) superhero writer to just the worst hack working, scripting comics that are almost like conceptual art in how few of the requisites of competent storytelling they give the reader and how far they push the envelopes of loudness and saccharinity and suspension of disbelief. Loeb's stated somewhere or other (or maybe he hasn't, and this is just comic shop clerk rumor) that the only measure of success he applies to his comics is the number of copies they sell. By this measure, he's doing okay. I mentioned that he wasn't always that way -- he was never Alan Moore, but once upon a time his work indicated that he was perhaps trying now and then -- so I could note something everyone who gets a little too into their superhero shit's noted: his work started its migration toward its current state right around the same time his teenage son passed due to cancer. It's understandable. What people don't talk about, though, is how interesting Loeb's more recent comics are.

There is a purity of intent -- of spirit, even -- that mainstream comics attempting to "be art" or "say something" never attain. At some point the aesthetic goals bump up against the ad pages, the computer lettering, the losses in translation caused by the assembly-line method of collaboration employed in manufacturing them. The idea always loses something to the form. But Loeb's comics are downright Shakespearean in the immensity of their surrender, their acceptance of what they are. They may be tales told by an idiot, sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is no gap between conception and execution in them. Loeb quite obviously wants his comics to be mindless and bruising and both easy and surprisingly difficult to read (because they speak the little-known language of hardcore superhero continuity)... and they are. Exactly what he wants them to be, in full measure. The thing is, you can't dodge the pitfalls of superhero comics when you're making superhero comics. To make work that isn't corrupted by commercialism, you have to aim for those pitfalls, to throw yourself into the pit. Loeb has. It's understandable.

And Ed McGuinness! It's been a good while since I've looked at a new comic featuring his art, but the sight is always welcome. His style is singularly suited to Loeb's writing: it's superhero art on steroids, the shiny surfaces and straining figures of modern photoreferenced hero comics reintroduced to the classical cartooning value of exaggeration. Muscles pop from bodies and veins from muscles on McGuinness's pages, faces contort in agony or surprise or even just the effort of outlining a conversation's particulars, and the panel borders of the quirkily blocked layouts almost bend outward with the sheer volume of what they contain. McGuinness is one of a few American mainstream artists to have based a successful career in embracing the manga aesthetic -- or more specifically, what the superhero community thinks of as "the manga aesthetic", one in which names like Tezuka and Tatsumi may as well not even exist and even Otomo is a pretty distant memory. Everything is drawn from the screaming, byzantine substance of '80s and '90s action manga, which emphasized deformed, explosive action and dirtied up the cleaner cartooning style of Japanese comics with diagrammatically detailed machinery, architectural cityscapes, crumbling facades, trash.

McGuinness crosses Kirbyist superheroics with this aesthetic quite successfully: everything he draws appears to be made out of some miraculously strong and flexible derivative of rubber, perhaps the Fantastic Four's famous "unstable molecules". But there's a strong horror vacui pushing back against the slick polish of McGuinness's cartooning, one that suits a Rob Liefeld-derived comic perfectly. Panels are packed into pages like sardines, spotted blacks give way to intricate crosshatching, and the characters are framed so tightly in every panel that their figures often have to overlap the boundaries of the individual rectangles, sprawling out into the free space on the page. It's an approach as addictive as crystal meth, and one that actually manages to work as comics, too. McGuinness comics read well, fluffed up with hot air though they may be. Looking at his pages is like taking part in the kind of epic action figure battles you never quite had enough imagination to pull off as a kid.

Finally, this comic stars Cable, which automatically makes it super complicated to explain -- and that, of course, makes it nicely indicative of superhero comics as a whole. For those who don't know (and I'll be the first to admit that I don't fully understand the story here either), Cable is a mutant warrior from a dystopian future who came back in time to prevent the world he grew up in from occurring, but I think he also goes back and forth to fight battles in the steadily worsening future timeline too. Then he's also a Christ figure because he's trying to save the world by redeeming it and because he's Phoenix's kid and she's a Virgin Mary figure (hellooooooo). But he's also kind of a Virgin Mary figure too because he just adopted a girl named Hope who's the for real mutant messiah and he's raising her to grow up and save the world or something. Oh yes, and he's half robot. Also he had a punk rock activist phase that was pretty baller.

This comic features Cable finally getting to the part of his future timeline where shit gets real and there's a nuclear winter he wanders around in waiting for his robot body parts to grow back. I'm pretty sure they don't explain how or why the nuclear winter happened but maybe I'm missing something. (There are actually a lot of things in this comic that they might have explained but I didn't catch it.) But if you were thinking that's the only future timeline running through this book, you'd be mistaken: there are also a few flash-forwards to Hope watching Cable die, apparently. Why or how or when this happens isn't explained, and neither is how Cable knows he's going to die. Cable runs into some kind of alien guy in the nuclear winter timeline and gets told that it all happened because his daughter died and couldn't save the world. Also that he has 24 hours to live. There's a pattern here: none of this stuff is explained either. This is all exposition, though: the main part of the comic is Cable realizes he can fix everything back to how it was (which is like, very slightly less shitty) if he goes back in time and kills all the Avengers. He makes a big deal about how he's a military man and this is a war with a limited time to be fought, but doesn't kill a single person despite spending the majority of the issue with both Captain America and the Falcon tied up at his mercy. The issue ends with a gun shooting off-panel, which we all know means that miraculously it didn't hurt anyone.

It's a really stupid comic, and it isn't even approachable in its stupidity, but there's a lot of appeal to how Loeb writes it nonetheless. He makes sure we know who every character is, both civilian and superhero names. He has people explain what they're doing as they're doing it. He doesn't go nuts trying to make something as nonsensical as Cable's backstory make sense. This shit is hard to understand, but it's easy to read, and that's a fairly singular virtue in superhero comics these days. And I really appreciate how allegorical and allusive the continuity stuff is, honestly -- there's no way anyone could possibly render a coherent Christ narrative from all the information about messiahs and world saving and world destruction that this comic and those it makes reference to contains, but just the fact that it's trying is really pretty cool to me, the fact that this stuff is intended as superhero comics with straightup biblical undertones about the for-realz Second Coming even if it totally fails at being that. When people talk about superheroes as modern gods they're either being purposefully ignorant or just retarded, because those Greek and Roman myths were actually intended as teaching parables and people really believed in them, but in the very small column of religious outsider art, this X-Men stuff stands tall as hell. It's heady material, and the fact that it fails on multiple levels means it's bad, but it's not that much less exciting than reading something good to try and keep track of what's going on in all those levels when they're this bizarre.

So haw haw, superhero comics sure are dumb, but they can look cool sometimes and the cynical laff value they provide is matched by little else, right? Well yeah, of course, but there's more going on in Avengers X-Sanction, surprisingly enough. We've got grizzled old Cable (only superhero with gray hair who isn't the older version of a more recognizable one?) fighting to prevent a "bad" but deeply indeterminate future (or a few of them, actually) that's chiefly characterized by the death of a member of his father-child dynamic. Willing to kill anyone and cause any level of destruction to preserve what he's got. And it's not there in the text at all, but these are feelings Jeph Loeb must be on intimate terms with. A willingness to kill in order to change things, a desperation that could turn back time, a grief that dares any peril. These are the genuine emotions of a father who's lost his child, and it's only because they're run through the stylistic mechanism of superhero comics that they look so absurd, so ingenuine. It would be a fascinating treatise in how what genre comics are kill the personal artistic expression of the people making them, but this is Jeph Loeb we're talking about: the writer who has perhaps embraced the conventions of the idiom to the greatest degree of anyone going right now, who has shown the most willingness to work within them without pushing back.

I imagine a few possible scenarios. Maybe Loeb knows how doomed to fail his attempt at creating a personal story that realistically depicts the pain of a dead child's father is within the milieu he uses but simply doesn't care and goes for it anyway. Maybe he thinks that superhero comics is a tonally appropriate place to work with this kind of content and actually believes that what he's doing is like, "good" or some shit. Maybe he has no consciousness that the story he's telling, which after all is Generic Action Comics Plot #2313, is even relevant to his own personal experience and this stuff is just bubbling up out of him unbidden -- which would make sense given that he's been pinned to such commercial work for so long and hasn't been able to create any art that really deals with his loss head-on. (Except that one Superman short where it gets put into Actual DC Continuity that Clark Kent used to hang out with Jeph Loeb's Son as a kid and was really upset when he died. I'm convinced that story is the reason they found it necessary to do that relaunch a few months back, but I digress.) Finally, and I hope this is the one -- it's certainly the only one where the comic works out as intended -- this is Loeb, who looks like this, in full on wish-fulfillment Avatar mode, living vicariously through Cable, killing with conviction and without mercy to save his kid. Maybe -- hopefully! -- this is even Loeb raging against the superheroes that prevented him from spending more time with his boy while he was still around, finally letting the resentment that has to come with a multi-decade career writing these things rip out of him long and ugly.

In other words, Jeph Loeb's pain is too big to fit on the scanner bed, and this is what it looks like:

So that's what I thought was noteworthy about this comic, the fact that it seems to be a uniquely personalized statement expressed in the medium of sequential art, and in a corner of that medium so incredibly ill-suited to supporting it. It's something unique for superheroes to say the least. But there's something else going on here too, something I think is worth mentioning. I read Avengers X-Sanction right after the new issue of that Daredevil, the final page of which is the letter column, and in that letter column was this:

It's a story from one Percy Yap of Edmonton Alberta, about how his girl died of breast cancer a few years back, turning his world into a joyless place, robbing the comics he read of the meaning they had once held for him. But then he found the new Daredevil, which he and I agree is the best hero book around at the moment. "For the first time in a long time," he says, "I could feel the joy of reading a comic book slip back into my life."

Are superhero comics stupid, are they juvenile, are they artistically compromised to a usually-fatal degree? They are. But these are the comics people care about, this is the stuff that actually means something to the greatest number of human beings. It isn't Ghost World, it isn't Blankets, and it isn't Jimmy Corrigan. Somehow this stuff -- this stuff -- touches hearts, it consoles the despairing, it mends people's lives. And if I can't see it, and if you can't see it, maybe we're individuals of higher standards and more rarefied tastes, but maybe we just need to get with the fucking program.

Your Wednesday Sequence 36

2011-12-14T16:27:00.001-08:00

"Jimbo" strip (1988), page 4. Gary Panter.

This week on my Robot 6 column, I talked about a particularly choice Gary Panter page, one that spotlights each of his many different drawing styles. Even though I did that big interview with Panter a while back, I realized I've never really dug into analyzing what makes his art work as well as it does. It was a real pleasure to be able to do so, and I was pretty happy with the way the column turned out. Go give it a look, I think you'll enjoy it too.

um linkblog

2011-12-12T16:22:00.000-08:00

all these links are old, wah wah who cares

- Above: Fiffe and O'Connor do Beta Ray Bill. Look out.

- Total blockbuster: Gary Groth interviews Carmine Infantino. That's the top of the heap for comics critic and superhero penciler, yakkin' for your pleasure right there.

- It must just be Daredevil o'clock up in here, because not only did Tucker interview Mark Waid (who's currently steering one of the two superhero comics that I have to think about before I condemn the entire genre outright), Robin Barnard completed his epic cover version of Frank Miller's Daredevil #186, thus proving yet again that he's far and away the best human xerox machine operating.

- Great CF interview, done before everyone (including me) started asking him these same questions over and over again. Also the last two comments are pretty hilar.

- Damn dude, this is a ma zinggggg: the Least Exciting Action Sequence Ever.

- Missed this one last time: Jog's take on Color Engineering is better than mine (big surprise).

- YES: IDW is reprinting Otto Soglow's minimalist masterpiece The Little King in what looks like a pretty baller format. Soglow (little bit here) might be the biggest missing piece of the newspaper-comics reprint puzzle that's been so wonderfully constructed over the past decade. This is gonna be a buy-on-sight book if there ever was one. Garrett Price and Gus Arriola next please! (Google them.)

- Speaking of old comics, here's a bushel of old Gluyas Willaims comics for your pleasure. Williams has gotten some praise from the cognoscenti in the past few years, but no reprint love, maybe because there's old books by him cluttering up the cartooning section of every half-decent used bookstore in the country. Fun stuff. The selection linked to are from a daily comic Willams did that had no name but should have been called "Annoying Shit" -- few were better at capturing the way the high drama of mundane bothers and slight irritations unfolds.

- Hell yes they do. The cool thing about Rube Goldberg's early strip Don't Some People Ask The Biggest Fool Questions is how it presents six panels that could each easily function as single-image gags in sequence, the general topic forming the only connection between one and the next. It's pretty typical of "early comics", I guess -- guys trying things because they actually hadn't figured out what worked well and what didn't yet.

- Eddie Campbell on bitchez' feets. Not the first consideration a cartoonist brings to the table, but speaking for myself there's been no article I think about more when I'm drawing comics since I read it. "Remember that Eddie Campbell article!" my brain screams at me whenever I get my pen past a female character's shins. Essential reading for people who draw, and also lots of fun for those who don't, I'd guess.

- My all-time fave record label, Living Tapes, upgraded from a myspace to its own website a while ago. LA local represent.

- Finally, after an unscheduled hiatus due to technical/medical difficulties, my comic AFFECTED has roared back into action with a pretty awesome fake-Frank-Miller's-Sin-City sequence, and will resume its regular Monday/Thursday update schedule. Get readin'.

Brooklyn Comics Fest Report

2011-12-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

I went to the greatest comic book show of all time and then I wrote a highly enthusiastic diary of it for Comics Alliance. You can read it by clicking here. This article may also function as a review of some of the year's best comics (the new Kramers Ergot, Jonny Negron's latest works, Ben Marra's astounding "American Psycho" zines, Frank Santoro's breathtaking Blast Furnace Funnies, and Michael Comeau's indescribably wonderful bootleg Wolverine comic Hellberta). And as if that weren't enough, it includes an exclusive preview of that sexy new Kramers I know you're all salivating for! Helloooooo! Get to reading!

Big Audio Dynamite

2011-12-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

The setting: New York City, shortly after the two-part comic book overdose that was the fabled Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and the equally legendary Second Avenue Comics Warehouse.
The players: Tucker "the mouth from the South" Stone; Joe "please, it's just Jog" McCulloch; myself.
The comics: a boatload of the newest cutting-edge art comix from the Fest, and a bounty of crusty back-issue-bin treasures from the Warehouse.
The form: this podcast. If you don't want to hear me and Jog and Tucker talking about comics together for well in excess of an hour, I'm genuinely mystified as to why you're visiting this website. GO

(UPDATE: Jog proves once more why he is a better human being than the rest of us by annotating the jesus out of the podcast, in case you just had to know what a dude's body coming apart due to voodoo looks like.)

Two Marvel Pages

2011-12-07T19:46:00.000-08:00

Analyzed here and here on Robot 6. Romita and Rogers: two of the unsung best. Check 'em out...

The AFFECTED Interviews, part 3

2011-12-05T17:25:00.000-08:00

Hopefully you're not sick of interviews that involve me in some way or another yet, because this one's a blockbuster every inch of the way. For the third time, my boy Adam McIlwee has picked my brain clean on the topic of my comic AFFECTED, which he aptly characterizes as "art porn". (I might add that it has guns and fighting, plus people in it get high a lot. You should go look at it if you haven't yet.) I'd imagine you read this blog because you're interested in my ideas about comics, and I tend to drop a greater volume of them in these interviews than anywhere else, so go read. I love you.

Larmee/Seneca: Friday

2011-12-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

intro/Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday

MATT SENECA: So I guess we should wrap up back at the beginning. How do you see comics right now -- the form, the market, the community, the whole thing that falls under that word.
What’s the state of our union, if you will?

BLAISE LARMEE: Well, the people are good. I really like some of the people I meet. And then I like their comics. And if I like someone’s comics often it’s a way of liking my image of that person. Or it’s a real part of that person. Maybe comics gives this sort of … maybe there’s a humanist tendency in it because the hand is very much alive and it’s so narrative, it really seems like a human activity.

MATT: Does comics seem small to you, in comparison to other forms? I agree with you about its human aspect, and aside from the presence of hands in the finished work, a lot of that feeling for me comes from the sense that it’s very close-knit and none of the history’s so far in the past as to be invisible yet.

BLAISE: I can connect with people one on one in a way that’s impossible in groups. Or at least, most groups I’ve participated in. So the whole ‘community’ aspect of comics is really gross to me. Gross in an unhealthy way. Like, impure, incestuous. Like the dads are having sex with their sons. It seems to limit growth.

M: I think you and “comics” have different ideas of what growth is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be saying that growth is incorporating a wider aesthetic/formal range of work. For most people in comics I think growth isn’t something horizontal, but vertical: this climb toward better, more complex stories.

B: Right. Like a family business passed down, like building on top of what you already have rather than setting off and building your own home elsewhere.

M: Something just occurred to me: we’re only now starting to enter a time period in which new cartoonists have come up knowing that comics history is documented, “safe” in hardcover books and university archives. For so long, the mentality wasn’t just reactionary (ie “why SHOULDN’T we build on what’s established, that stuff is great”), but downright protective -- if the past wasn’t a working part of the present there was a real danger that it would disappear forever. From that mentality you get the generational saga of comics, as well as aberrations like the collector’s market. I think only now are cartoonists who feel no responsibility to also be archivists emerging.

B: Yeah, you see that?

M: Well, we’re here talking about this stuff, aren’t we?

B: We’re archiving this …

M: You got me there. But let me ask you straight out: do you feel any obligation to comics’ past?

B: If you’re making comics you’re going to have that reading no matter what. I agree with what you said about archivists and collectors but with the internet everything’s being archived.

M: Hmm... you can’t archive the print form itself though, and that’s inherent to a lot of past comics. Let me put it another way. When I asked you about influence you talked about your friends’ comics, and Scott McCloud, and I know you’ve mentioned CF before. But all those people are part of comics’ present. And when we were talking about comics being cool, you equated “cool” with a present moment. Am I right in thinking that’s what you want to capture, not the past?

B: I dunno. I mean ‘the present’ can be reified and as soon as something’s reified it’s part of the past in a way. It’s lost its potential. As art enters art history it becomes illustration of concepts or historical context or whatever. And this in my mind is what protects comics and narrative art from criticism that demands some sort of ‘4th wall breaking’ aspect of art. But maybe art always has this potential to totally disorient and captivate you. Obviously you can’t do that with the Mona Lisa … or maybe you can … but it’s so reified - ‘la joconde’ - that it’s quieted. So that’s what I mean when I say the past. A reified past. And the idea of the present as the threshold of that reification process. But reification has its own economy and things go in and out of being ‘things’.

M: For me what’s exciting about the current present in comics is that a lot of the past is being reintroduced as living art. A lot of the reprint stuff is both unread and unheralded. It’s like work from the past is able to contribute to the aesthetic present -- a lot more things are “things” now, I guess. Comics history is no longer linear, we have work from every era (even though it’s only a century of history I’m talking about) in the “present”. It’s like the way classical culture contributed so heavily to the Renaissance. All that said, though, this doesn’t feel like an especially good time for comics. Do you think we’re in an “up” period or a “down” period right now?

B: What do you mean, comics history is no longer linear?

M: Like, everything is available and there’s no section of the past that’s been fully absorbed and incorporated. There’s work from every era that’s being introduced as new via reprints. None of the past is “dead”, we can still get yields of living art from all of it.

B: There’s some visual artist I was looking at and he draws from Tintin, Moomin, and Akira - the comics. And that’s it, as far as comics go. I like that austerity. When everything’s available … I mean that’s the fantasy … a giant feast laid out and you can eat everything. It’s difficult to talk about ‘comics’ as a whole because it’s really these autonomous narratives - Akira, Moomin, Tintin - that are experienced singularly. They don’t relate to this larger narrative in the way that art does. At least, not immediately. At the same time they’re more difficult to reify. The romance comic was reified. The superhero comic. Gag comics. But Akira can’t be reified, really. I mean, there’s the image of the guy walking to his bike, or powersliding his bike, but that’s more the image of the promotion for Akira.

M: I think it’s all a matter of perspective, though. Like, in Europe Tintin is incredibly reified -- he has his own museum! Same with Moomin, to a slightly lesser degree. And there are people who can know comics history backwards and forward but only like, say, Titian, Lichtenstein, and Picasso paintings. I think you nailed something when you talked about austerity of influence though, because it’s only when you’re aware of the past that you can know you aren’t going up the same dead-end trail as someone did before. I think that’s one of the main reasons internet comics is such an appealing thing, because it’s almost this formal guarantee that you won’t end up in the same place as anyone in print did. Like, even pages of a print comic scanned and put on the internet are a really different experience than the print version.

B: Yeah, it’s fresh ground. I mean, comics itself. I think that’s the draw for a lot of people. It’s hard, though, because they’re drawn in and there’s all this renovation to make it seem like a historical space. A sense of unity in creating the image of legitimacy. And maybe that’s why I’m avoiding this question about the state of comics, because if I’m feeling positive I do see it as this unstructured series of semi-autonomous spaces.

M: I think that’s definitely the most productive way to look at it. Maybe even the only way forward -- if you see the practice of comics as creating your own autonomous space rather than following in the footsteps of giants. Let me ask you this then: you talked about how comics seemed innovative and exciting when you first started, and how now those winds seem to have slowed. What do you feel is the tenor of the thing now? Just the feeling of it.

B: Uh … the feeling is just some people on tumblr and flickr. I mean, that’s where I get my breeze. And there’s some printed matter that comes out of those sites but that’s more about the preview images and the announcement than the actual book. In my mind.

M: Do you like that it’s that small a site, or wish it was bigger?

B: I dunno. Sometimes I get that feeling where you’re new at school and you’re just hanging out with other people with whom you have in common the fact that you don’t have any friends.

M: Does it feel positive? Like a productive place? Or not?

B: I mean … I follow less than 20 people who make comics. I mean as far as tumblr is a ‘site’ … which it is … but in a funny way where no one knows what your dashboard looks like. And the dashboard is the site, in my mind. So really it’s your own site, your own party, and the way in which the guests interact is sort of up to you. But anyway at this party … actually I guess I have two parties since I have two tumblrs. One is mostly cartoonists. And not much happens. Mostly reblogs. And i don’t feel connected to that tumblr because my name isn’t attached. The other party is I guess people I like … people I feel connected to … but none of them make comics. This is the dashboard connected to my personal site. And so it’s strange. I don’t get much response from people I like.

M: Do you think you inhabit an autonomous site, then?

B: Yeah, in a way. In the sense that the only thing I can see as ‘progress’ within comics is self-produced. And I guess I would consider my ‘peers’ in comics as those who can recognize this progress. One of the things being on tumblr has changed in my work is being able to see the people who reblog you. Creating images then becomes creating audience. If you don’t like where your images end up you stop making those images. There are a couple tumblrs I follow in a web 1.0 way, where I have to go to their url. and there’s something about purity in that, preserving the autonomy of these users, both of whom only blog about themselves. I guess I’m attracted to these narcissistic types, at least for awhile. I think it’s also about preserving my autonomy as a consumer. Where I don’t have to have the responsibility of being a ‘follower’. Yeah I guess autonomous sites are … I can’t imagine any other kind of mode of production that would interest me. Even the idea of a collective would have to be my personally constructed image of a collective.

M: So do you still see “comics” as a useful term for the work you’re interested in making? I think we agree about the necessity of comics to go outside itself... but I guess there must be a point where it goes so far outside that the word “comics” stops being a relevant categorization. Do you have any investment in staying within “comics”?

B: I dunno. The altcomics tumblr is about mapping ‘comics’ but is that useful, to cling to this medium-specific way of thinking about work? I feel like making publications is enough. I mean that’s really a ‘medium’. Whereas comics is this collection of stylistic and formalistic tics. I was asked to be in an anthology recently and I sent them something I felt proud of and got back a nice email asking for something more traditional. This is a familiar narrative, but these are actually really progressive guys. So what does that mean, a traditional comic? This is where the definition becomes relevant.

M: Your guess is as good as mine. Is it anything beyond formal parameters to you? Does comics have a “spirit”?

B: No, it’s just a loose collection of things. It’s a weird math. Like you can add word balloons to a classical painting and it would probably be accepted as a comic. Or you can make a grid and do anything within each panel and it would be accepted. Or make a drawing and then make a similar drawing but change something. But it can be a crutch. Or just a platform for experimentation. But also a crutch. A good drawing can just be a good drawing. But adding more drawings will enter it into this context that becomes relevant when you’re dealing with a higher authority (publisher/editor) who for most people represents this context.

M: Does anything represent this context for you?

B: Certain websites, publishers, critics, creators, schools, publications, the way the mainstream records these things.

M: Anything that defines itself as being a part of “comics”?

B: Yeah, that’s pretty much the only qualification. Not evenly distributed, obviously.

Larmee/Seneca: Thursday

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

intro/Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday

MATT SENECA: I’ve been meaning to ask, with 2001 on hiatus and Cruise as your current project, are you going to be doing any drawn comics any time soon?

BLAISE LARMEE: The last Cruise had a little drawing in it. I’ve done maybe 5 more pages in that “interview format” that ran in Smoke Signals. The last couple pages actually seemed French in like, a really indulgent and lazy kind of way. Um, but no “Young Lions” type stuff anymore. Probably. I dunno.

MATT: Is there a place you want to push the typical comics narrative to? Even Young Lions, which was more novelistic than the rest of your stuff, was fairly elliptical. Is there a kind of thing you’d like to see more comics doing with their narratives?

BLAISE: I guess … if I were a teacher, say … maybe an excercise I would give would be to make a comic that doesn’t try to innovate, isn’t “experimental” or abstract, and maybe also that doesn’t exploit “what comics can do”. Like, a comic that would be better as something other than a comic. I mean, this is the exercise I feel I’ve given myself. I don’t trust that innovation within the medium will result in any progress outside of the comics realm.

M: I can’t bring myself to type “you should draw a superhero comic” in response to that without laughing. Is the outside-comics progress you’re talking about influence on other forms?

B: Progress is something I think about a lot and it’s impossible to … I don’t even have the basic language to explore it. I get lost in these circuitous and self conscious loops. I mean at some level it seems everyone involved in creating community is involved in creating a shared language. The architecture of community. Like, you see this in flickr groups, in local economies, subcultures, academia, all that stuff. And looking at it all from afar it seems arbitrary where you build. Maybe it’s just what language you respond to and what language you can speak. I’m aware of comics as this vernacular but everything else is probably vernacular as well. Like if you’re just engaging with these large, removed constructions like academic language -- I mean that’s its own abstraction, obviously. It has its own limitation. I guess maybe a difference is that people in comics know they’re only speaking to each other whereas academics and artists imagine they are interacting with something larger than just their sphere. I at least like that image more. Even if it’s illusory.

M: Are you saying you want to interact with those other spheres, the fine arts and academia? Because one of the things that was always exciting to me about your comics was how well they fit into the larger sphere of (this is meant in totally positive terms) hipster culture. And how it felt like you were aiming for that and didn’t have any stigma about it, as opposed to how like, even rock bands or fashion labels will try to distance themselves from it. That was probably the biggest thing I saw in your work that I tried to bring to my own. Do you just want a different sphere than comics, or do you have a specific one in mind?

B: I think I make it difficult for anyone to be a “fan” or even a friend. Like, if I feel something I’m doing is becoming successful I’ll stop doing that. If I make friends it’s only the ones that are constantly moving themselves that last for me. I hate the idea of being stuck in a stagnant community where your “role” is extremely articulated. I feel like the spheres I am interested in constantly reevaluate their position.

M: I can see why comics’ obsession with its continuous biographical narrative would be tough to deal with then. In comics even if you are constantly changing then you get slapped with “innovator!” or “provocateur!” and get stuck there. Do you feel like the comics community doesn’t have much to offer a person with your goals?

B: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, the comics community is solid, right, it’s a real thing. I have no image of it except as this … collection of books and blogs. The image I have is very solid. For awhile it wasn’t. It was wild, it was innovative. It felt like strong winds were blowing through the comics shop.

M: Do you think comics changed, or you changed?

B: I think comics didn’t change. The winds slowed to nothing. Or maybe they died awhile ago and I was just encountering the echoes. I was catching up on the comics narrative (the past decade). Maybe it was the economy. I’m sure that was part of it. It really felt impressive to me that there was all this money being spent in such frivolous ways. Like, that really destabilized my conception of worth. That’s maybe what was … that’s one reading of that work that stays with me.

M: The high presentation values that got given to such lo-fi work?

B: It didn’t even come down to high presentation values - I’m not talking about the sort of “comics page as object” thing that sort of came to be the standard way of publishing art comics - just the time and labor represented in the work. Or presented rather. Or represented, I dunno. Like, also the commitment of printing 1000 copies of something that seems valueless in a market sense. I think that was what was inspirational. Hedging big bets on what in hindsight might be seen as highly undervalued work.

M: I think that mindset would never have existed without the long single narrative of comics history though -- just because it seems to spring directly from like, “how is this amazing comic in the quarter bin?” The desire to publish those amazing quarter bin comics while they’re still new. Is it possible to want to be part of an art form without romanticizing something about it, do you think?

B: Why do you ask?

M: Because you seem to have a lot of the same feelings as me about the sphere of comics -- I spent a lot of time, years and years from when I was a kid, on the outside of the community looking in, and pretty much as soon as I got inside I started looking out again, wanting to bring in other things and disengage with a lot of what the community is. I romanticized comics to an incredible degree, I pictured comics artists as like, millionaire superstars as a young kid, and then cool underground rock stars as a teenager, and that was what got me going. And I think the reasons I still want to make comics are maybe more romanticized pictures of things than truthful appraisals. You’ve got a pretty dispassionate way of analyzing comics, but when you mention the image of wild innovation bringing you in and then dissipating once you had a clearer picture, it seems like you also had this romanticized view of some things that became less prominent.

B: Like what?

M: This view of comics as a place where your artistic interests could be given an opportunity for both free rein and evolution, I guess.

B: Yeah. But I think in any environment I would seek the limitations, the periphery of what’s acceptable. I was also younger, more “collegiate”. I remember a year after I moved to New York I was genuinely surprised I didn’t “make it”. I had a blog and I was just updating it every day. It got maybe 10 views a day or something. No links or comments. And I thought, I really felt like I was just plowing away at this work that was really significant. And it was! But it was this sort of collegiate naivete that I sort of left behind when I left New York. After this was the “ironic capitalist” phase where I sought to create little value and promote it heavily. But this phase was also good in that it related me to the outside world, not just the feedback loop of my art and myself. I was frustrated that I was forced to “grow up”, to develop a praxis in addition to a practice. Before that I just wanted to be discovered.

M: Are you glad you weren’t? Because I mean... to a pretty good extent you did “make it”, Blaise. People buy your books, people read your webcomic, people talk about you in pretty much every critical organ that’s worth anything. Do you think that could have happened for you without your having to shed some of the naivete you talk about? Or would you have wanted it to?

B: The first narrative I wanted was Adrain Tomine’s. To be published at 17. Or rather, to achieve stability at a young age. And now, seeing his narrative, how he’s developed, I’m glad I went a different route. Or rather, it would have been impossible for me to go down that route. I mean, any venue in comics where my desires have not been realised -- like I used to fantasize about being in um … the Fantagraphics “art comics” anthology … right, MOME! - yeah, now it’s all sort of … not a relief, but not a “missed opportunity” either. But I was still happy when Aidan got in.

M: And now Mome isn’t a thing anymore anyway. I think a lot of people in comics feel the same stuff we’re talking about, this sense that we’ve ridden this wave for a while and now it’s hit some new shore and we’re just waiting around for something else. So going outside comics, or not wanting to engage with what it is right now... that makes sense, because it’s not so lively at the moment.

B: It could easily be a survival impulse. It’s sort of required now … the flexible worker ... the permanent part time worker.

M: Well, that isn’t just comics either. You have no idea just how many individuals here in LA “have a production company too”. If anything maybe the last few years have been a crash course in how tied to the national economy comics are.

B: Apparently luxury industries are thriving. Maybe this is why I’m looking in this direction. Maybe people are looking to invest in other currencies. There was some article about … maybe it was Slovakia … how it became a member of the European Union not because it was a good idea economically, but because of the signification of it. The idea of “class” and even “cool” maybe.

M: That’s interesting because comics switched identities so quickly. Like Superman coming out of the phone booth, ahem! For a century it was low-class and uncool and then suddenly it was the New York Times arts pages and celebrities trying to be seen with books, and now that that’s dried up a little there’s an identity crisis. Where are we now, do you think? High, low? Cool, uncool?

B: There was that sort of adolescent flaunting the newly reclaimed identity of “comics”. Maybe nationalistic. But it was … in the style of … identity movements. I think that was shortly after people started identifying as “nerds” and “geeks” … like, just after alt porn took off. I think its reclusive, interior quality makes comics difficult to integrate -- or translate -- into broader outlets. So it either becomes an awkward prop in a photoshoot -- the cover always as stand-in for comics, for the interior and for the medium/culture, never cover-as-cover -- or it becomes a vessel for content, and for juxtaposing content against a sort of easily reviewable/accessible format.

M: (I just gotta say that this is dope how we’re both “voices” in comics who came up during/after the mass-acceptance phase, and we’re here analyzing it as history.) Do you think the wider media fixation on comics-as-medium, often, as you mentioned, at the expense of appraising the art or content comics were presenting, fed into the pro-comics, medium-specific chauvinism so many comics people carry? Like, did it make that mindset okay?

B: Wow, chauvinism is the perfect word for that. Yeah I think the wider media became a threat sort of, like it threatened the boundaries, the autonomy of this tradition which I’m going to assume hasn’t been too welcoming to outsiders. And my memory of that period is mostly white males “defending” this medium, warning of all this heritage that might be lost in translation, losing this medium to a wider culture. Maybe there’s a parallel with those who defended the book against Oprah’s Book Club or punk against disco.

M: Harold Bloom and poetry slams. It’s always “the death of art” and then somehow it always doesn’t happen. Maybe everyone in comics grew up reading stories where belief in the literal end of the world and all humanity was required to make the narrative work and that’s why everyone’s so paranoid about change that goes beyond slight modifications to how the pages look. Do you have any particular idea about what “the future of comics” might look like?

B: It’s hard to talk about comics in that sense because it’s sort of … it’s like, what’s the future of fan communities. It’s an international style of local community in a way. Or that’s my image of it. There’s parallels between the otaku and the webcomics fan and all these other kinds of fans … and there’s overlap … but there’s also this “insider”-ness to it all … that’s kind of what being a fan is … having this image of being inside a culture, or making your own self an embodiment of this culture, so you can always look around you to see yourself. I mean ideally I guess comics would sort of dissolve or … I dunno.

M: Stop being a community and just be a form? I’m thinking of how saying “the film community” would be really silly... or “the music community”, same thing.

B: Right. I guess “comics community” is used because it’s a lot smaller.

M: Closer-knit, too. I mean, I think I’m pretty open minded about these things but it’s still slightly gross to me when people who like Spiderman won’t read Love and Rockets. But would I feel the same way about the teenager at the Katy Perry concert’s refusal to listen to my Polish harsh noise album or whatever? I think the real thing is that comics people insist on thinking small. It’s one of the dearest parts of their identity.

B: Yeah. And it does seem dear in a way, especially if you’re processing this community/identity with language developed in this local=good era. Where local is seen as a mode of resistance to globalisation and the destruction of cultures and traditions.

M: It comes close to paradoxical. The only reason you’d want “comics” to expand is because you care about “comics”... like, we aren’t talking about our work specifically, or the ones with Green Lantern in them specifically, but a whole idiom. But the problem we’re talking about is a community made up of people who are invested in “comics”, not the average mass-media consumers who know what they like and are basically ignorant of everything else. That mass audience are the people comics needs to reach, exactly the kind of people that those who are interested in comics’ expansion are opposed to seeing become a part of the sphere.

B: Yeah. Jason used a phrase a couple times, “blue collar snob” … something like that. Anyway, I’m not sure medium will be the path to unity. Or it seems like that idea only exists because of this small, tight-knit history. Maybe I’m wrong. Do you think a fan would be into [Jason Overby's] 2101?

M: Probably not... well... I dunno. I like that comic, but I do wonder about its audience. There is this reactionary fervor against something that doesn’t look like it took anything from anything, if you know what I’m saying. Like even your stuff has certain callbacks to other comics, there’s the CF connection in Young Lions, 2001 looks a little like Winsor McCay. But Jason Overby, Renee French, Austin English, that stuff seems to get comics “circling the wagons” against people who come in wanting to use the form but making work in which attention to its historical narrative can’t be inferred.

B: Austin and Frank Santoro have their comic book store street cred. The job demands incorporating difference, as far as audience and work go. Jason just makes no effort to have any sort of working class likeability. (At least in his comics. He is the friendliest guy ever in person.)

M: “Blue collar”, “working-class” -- do you see this stuff as inherent to the community comics has constructed?

B: Yeah. It’s about hard work, the sweat of the brow.

M: Which is weird, because it feeds into a market that hasn’t been populist for a good three decades. I don’t necessarily think that “blue collar snobbery” is keeping anyone away from comics though. Nobody would be reading this stuff if it weren’t for all the roughnecks nose-deep in Eightball down at the comic shop. It’s just a weird specificity of the community. It seems like you’re pretty eager to embrace comics’ status as a luxury market though, what appeals to you about that?

B: I see a gap in it that could be filled, I guess. Price is contested but it’s rarely engaged directly. Actual worth value … methods of appraisal … are rarely questioned. They’re manipulated, and there’s reactions against this manipulation, but these seem to happen in pretty comfortable and familiar narratives, pitting the heartless corporation against the average joe fan. It’s system vs individual, it’s just “business as usual”.

M: Is there a more aggressive engagement of price-as-content you’d be interested in seeing? I mean, it’s content that’s tough to go anywhere too unexpected with, I think...

B: Why do you say that?

M: Up and down, high and low... it seems like one manipulation or the other to me. But I could be missing something.

B: You mean it’s all artifice?

M: I wouldn’t put that judgment on it, I’m just saying that the ways you can manipulate it seem few.

B: I had a theory at some point … this was in my first interview I think I expressed this … that maybe creators get so caught up in the demands of the medium - the construction and deployment of an idiosyncratic template - that the content suffers for it, gets marginalized. Like, it seems ironic that form is - according to this reading - the essential draw for most cartoonists and perceived demand for content is like the guilty conscience hounding the creator. Like how many cartoonists say they like to draw but they need to work on their stories? Or at this school, say, the focus seems to be on learning and building a language. Form. But it’s strange that Frank Santoro is out there by himself, pretty much, working on form. And even he can’t let it stay pure form, he has to plug in content. It’s strange to me. This binary, this dualism, I guess it comes from its assembly line history. And where that’s led readers, what their expectations are.

M: Totally. It’s always astonishing to people when form actually manages to propel content. But that’s what comics is, that’s what art does! This is where your conceptualization of price as art is intriguing to me, because the assembly-line process that keeps comics stuck in this binary system of writer-to-artist construction is purely a byproduct of comics that function primarily as commodities. Take away commercial concerns and I think the number of collaborative comics would vastly decrease.

B: Hm. It is interesting, this system that requires more than one person to create an effective comic. Even the way “auteurs” work by writing first, then penciling, then inking. A mimicry of this industrial system. I guess this is where the idea of re-establishing a bridge with this fan base worries me. Or why I never thought about it. I think creating a void -- this has been described as the feminine mode of seduction -- and an image of beauty on the other side of this void, this is a good model.

Larmee/Seneca: Wednesday

2011-11-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

intro/Monday
Tuesday

MATT SENECA: I want to talk a little more about your lack of interest in comics history, just because it’s such a unique relationship to past work for a cartoonist to have. You’ve talked about how old comics weren’t calculated to be art, but pure product; do any comics that are designed as commodities first interest you?

BLAISE LARMEE: I think the real question is where do you exist as a consumer and where do you exist as a producer.

MATT: So where are you as far as comics are concerned?

BLAISE: I’m a producer. But I’m also in this territory that assumes you’re a consumer. I gave a talk here recently and it was - I just found this out - really negatively received. I didn’t want to talk about the past, about images or objects I’d made, etc. I wanted to function as a producer, talking about production processes that exists in parallel with actually making things - where the process gets lost in the images/objects … but people wanted a sort of “reading” of my past.

M: Do other cartoonists’ production processes not interest you?

B: Those of close friends do. And this is maybe not … I don’t want to ‘write off’ that question. But … I mean, ultimately I’m not interested in drawing styles, I’m interested in real people and real narratives.

M: Do you not see the historical narrative of “comics” as having much to do with the process of creating a modern comic? Or is it that the narrative just doesn’t compel you?

B: It seems like a closed system to me. It doesn’t hold much currency outside of itself. It doesn’t have a healthy import/export relationship with other cultures.

M: I think you could argue that it doesn’t have one at all.

B: Well there’s the Wertham trial. That carried signification. But that was an isolated phenomenon and comics was really just a scapegoat. And there’s Persepolis and whatnot but then comics is really just a container for content. Although now that I type that it seems rather attractive. I guess because it devalues comics as a medium. Persepolis made headlines last week but i don’t think the comic was mentioned - just the film. Anyway I guess the content doesn’t really interest me either.

M: I think this is where the perceived division between form/content I was talking about earlier comes from: the wider culture and media only pick up on one aspect of the comics they take into account.

B: The informational aspect?

M: Yeah. The subject matter. Though I will say that many of history’s great cartoonists don’t seem to have cared a ton about form and just wanted to produce content.

B: I guess the form was provided for them.

M: That’s interesting... but nobody gave it to them, none of the newspaper guys were actually looking at Hokusai or Topffer from what I understand. All those attempts to relate comics back to stuff like hieroglyphics seem really false to me. But the lack of one Genesis moment or even a consciousness of creation in comics is conspicuous. Do you see a lot in comics that comes from other art forms?

B: The father of comics is an absent father. Yeah, I saw a comic today that came out of an art context. But it was really bad. Anytime I see art that reads as comics I hate it.

M: That surprises me a little, just cause your stuff reminds me of Jim Shaw. But I know what you mean. How do you feel about comics when they try to do “fine art” -- like single-composition pages and stuff?

B: What are single-composition pages?

M: Jim Steranko type stuff... or Gary Panter... Pages that exist as sequential, “paneled”, but also as posters or paintings. There to be read but also to approach like a canvas.

B: I don’t know. I just don’t like reading comics. So if I’m looking through an art book and I see a comic … it brings me back to a reality. Because I have a lot of distance between myself and art. I can see the products, the images, the narratives I want to see. I can focus on a few artists and be rewarded with a massive elliptical narrative. But comics are too close, too present.

M: Too close historically, or in proximity to everything else in comics?

B: It’s where I work.

M: My immediate thought in response to that is that the comics narrative has a lot of interesting “characters” whose biographies are maybe better to engage with than their work. Does the historical “cartoonist” -- working-class, uneducated, put-upon, supporting a family, maybe he fought in a war -- appeal to you at all? It's no longer a living species, of course...

B: I prefer cartoonist as child. Playing with crayons. Picasso’s children.

M: What cartoonists do you see as inhabitants of that archetype?

B: Austin English, Genevieve Vidal, Julie Delporte, maybe Brian Chippendale.

[comic by Brian Chippendale]

M: All the artists you mention are pretty open to readers/readings that come down somewhere outside the boundaries of “conventional comics”: there’s at least some intersection with the “finer” arts. Is that a part of enjoying comics for you, or do you think the character you want the cartoonists you read to inhabit just ends up making comics that fall somewhat outside the norm?

B: Again I think I would rather not read comics. But my friends happen to be cartoonists because of events in my past. But I also do admire the way they are able to navigate the shitty terrain. I think they aim for art but they are using twigs for arrows.

M: Can comics be art?

B: I don’t think so. I think at times it does, but like the Wertham trial these events are isolated. But I’m biased because I position myself between these two domains, as an importer/exporter, consumer/producer, so my stability depends on their distance from each other.

M: That’s interesting. I’m thinking about how art has made big strides past the figurative since comics came about in the late 1800s, and how comics have remained almost the last outpost of great figurative artwork... but whether that’s a reaction or just a lack of culture I don’t know. What should comics be if they’re not going to be art?

B: I’m going to give a negative answer. I feel like this is obvious. I may be playing this character that I’m used to playing in this sort of context, and maybe this is limiting development of some sort of progress. I really don’t want to be the antagonist. It’s just this situation where comics seems isolated and I want to effect larger structures. or less isolated structures. Comics should aim for art. But that’s not enough, obviously. Or the actual outcome could be like a dog that catches the vehicle it chases. But production in art is something very specific and demands a lot of consideration. There’s a lot of built-in structure. I’ve never considered this structure, I’ve never produced inside it. I consume its products, often translated into books or images and texts dispersed online. There are a lot of parallels between art and comics, and perhaps my negative/positive attitude toward comics/art would be reversed if my production/consumption arenas were swapped.

M: I think it almost certainly would be. There’s probably even a simple equation for it: the people who consume the most comics seem to have the least interest in art, and I guess you’re saying vice versa. I wish I could read the same exact number of pages as I draw, haha. Are the larger structures you think art effects and the ones you think are built into it the same?

B: I don’t know, it’s hard to tell if art effects anything other than its own domain.

M: Which I think it’s pretty obvious is also true of comics -- but comics operates on a much smaller scale. Would you like it if comics became a mass medium, with the audience that film or music has?

B: That would be something. I think what art produces is a constant remapping of its territory. Comics is pretty indistinct, yet it is also very distinct. Its territory is small yet strongly grounded by a grassroots economy.

M: Does significant market expansion have to happen before significant formal expansion can?

B: Maybe abandoning territory is as significant as expanding it.

M: I assume you mean commercial territory. I think the danger of abandoning the superhero support-system is that then the only financial recourse remaining to cartoonists is the gallery, which you don’t seem to think is the answer either... or is that not what you meant?

B: What’s the superhero support-system?

M: The “mainstream”, the sort of commercial engine that keeps the rest of comics running via trickle-down economics. Is that the territory you’re talking about giving up?

B: Uh … is this trickle-down a real thing?

M: For myself and the people I know who buy art-comix (or whatever)... including your stuff... it’s almost entirely people who got into superhero comics between childhood and middle age and then decided to “find out what else is out there.” So yeah, it is to me at least.

B: I think these giant cultural forces will be mediators no matter what. But a community that emerges from this can sustain itself without those larger forces - it is not dependent on them. Your community of buyers would still buy art comics if superhero comics disappeared.

M: True enough -- and I think a lot of them have given up superhero comics like I have -- but there’s a question of the community’s growth and sustainability that I feel like I should at least mention. The people I’ve been able to get into art-comix via the community around my writing are, I think, 100 percent coming from the “mainstream”. I know that’s not the case for all or maybe even most art-comix buyers, but it’s still a fair amount of them. And it’s more all the time: a constantly occurring process. Take away the Point A of that process and Point B becomes nonexistent for a lot of people, because you need to have caught the bug before you start going to trade shows and leafing through zine racks and hitting up obscure artists’ websites. I’m not sure alternative comics can sustain itself, by itself, at its current level. Even the retailers that sell the more mass-market friendly stuff are superhero stores, with literally like eight or ten exceptions. I think the level “other” comics reach without any help from superheroes is not enough to make them at all significant. Even the alt-comics websites get a boost from mainstream traffic.

B: There’s a lot of room for innovation. Reconsider dominant labor-intensive forms of practice. Explore alternative models of publishing and distribution. Project artificial scarcity and artificial demand.

M: Are these the ideas behind your Cruise project?

B: Yeah, Cruise is born in part out of exasperation with existing economic models. It’s a tentative step towards a more lightweight, efficient, adaptable model.

M: People are commissioning these zines from you, right? They’re not pre-made?

B: No, no one’s commissioned me. They’re all pre-made.

M: Can you run through the economic model you’re using real quick?

B: I was going to make a 16 page comic in an edition of 50. Due to a sequence of mistakes I ended up with 50 covers that I liked and an abandoned interior. Instead of an edition of 50 I decided to make 50 unique booklets with the same cover. Each booklet is released individually and arbitrarily.

M: So it’s a limited financial commitment for you to make. What jumps out at me is the quality of uniqueness -- how do you feel about the mass-produced-object status comics have historically held?

B: I think it’s fine. I just opened the wikipedia page for “post-fordism”. Post-Fordism is characterized by the following attributes:

* Small-batch production.
* Economies of scope.
* Specialized products and jobs.
* New information technologies.
* Emphasis on types of consumers in contrast to previous emphasis on social class.
* The rise of the service and the white-collar worker.
* The feminization of the work force.

M: What type of consumer are you emphasizing?

B: I think I am sending out a signal through aesthetics, through style. The consumer who buys Young Lions may simply be interested in an interior, closed narrative - the narrative in the book or the narrative surrounding the book (which is pretty closed). Cruise doesn’t have any established territory other than the site through which it is presented and sold and advertisements. It’s more a currency in itself, or the imagination of such a currency. The narrative is its movement. Its consumers effect this movement.

M: Are you going to be documenting the movement itself in any way? Or is that up to the consumer?

B: I thought about that. I mean it is all documented of course. But so far it’s private. I think I will consult with shareholders before going public :)

M: Do you think strategies for selling comics that aren’t based on subject matter (“content”) are going to become more prevalent?

B: Well with Cruise you could say there is no content. But you could also say that there is nothing but content. The last three releases used polyester film for the interiors, so you can see from the preview image - the scanned interior - straight to the inside covers.

M: Before the screen, and maybe even more relevantly the browsing tab, became a vehicle for reading matter the page was a lot less negotiable. Do you think the see-through page can support more conventional comics?

B: Why do you say the page was less negotiable? Lack of search function?

M: You had to move through it to get anywhere else. Turn it -- which strongly implies reading it. Now our paths through media are not as linear. Tabbed browsing. Chapter-skipping and multiple endings in DVDs, the decline of the album in music.

B: I see...

M: Though now that I think of it I felt like 2001 was more linear than a print-format comic in many ways...

B: Yeah, I don’t understand how “non-linear” readings can occur if time moves linearly. Maybe authorship can shift around. Maybe we can talk about compression. Or elliptical narrative.

M: Compression seems like a greater possibility with online comics. It’s a lot easier for readers to vary the pace they read at and change their experience of the comic by doing so when it’s just a big scroll instead of pages to turn. And elliptical narrative... I find myself using a ton of jump-cuts in my online comic, like five times as many as I see in print. It just feels native to the medium of presentation. Though 2001 was sequenced with like, the opposite of jump-cutting...

B: Yeah, 2001 is super linear. The space is linear too. Or the way in which it’s navigated.

M: Were you at all surprised by how your comic read in the scrolling format?

B: I just looked at it. It’s kind of like comics, or books in general, in that the only way to find stable ground is by reading, where the flow of texts/images finds a sort of stability, like the way the images in a film strip or zeotrope become stable at certain speeds. So in this, unlike in Cruise, the content is hidden, or latent, within the comic itself. It’s traditional in this sense.

M: Yeah, Cruise sounds pretty experimental by contrast. Did coming back to the more traditional medium of print make you want to get more experimental with your content?

B: I’m still interested in both forms. And I feel Cruise is still ultimately, in a way, an image object - an absence of the material thing itself. At least this is how most people encounter it. It’s presented and sold online. Its informational content is laid bare. This is its public narrative.

M: Comics where the imagery and the narrative just occur in different spaces?

B: Maybe just emphasizing the public narrative over the private. Or focusing on the split between the two. But yeah, I guess that’s a nice way to phrase it.

M: The private narrative you’re talking about is the individual reader’s experience of the comic, right?

B: Yeah. The hidden experience.

M: And then the public narrative is what, critical response? The internet “noticing” the existence of the physical comic?

B: It can also be the image of that response or discourse. I mean it can be a private sort of fiction, the individual “reading” this sort of theater which the author creates props for. Like the way a work can seem like a manifesto. You’ve had that feeling I’m sure. A statement that demands a response.

M: Do you hope a lot of people who get these zines create work in response to them, reviews or whatever?

B: Um, nothing so direct. Like, the response can go unrealized in public. It can just be assumed that it occurs.

M: Hmm, I’m picturing the “public narrative” you’re talking about emphasizing as something that you stop authoring at a certain point... which I guess is always the case if it’s constituted of people’s readings... but documenting the sections of that narrative that other people “write” isn’t something you’ll be doing?

B: I think you were talking with Whiteshasta about how being in the public “meme-ory” might not be the best gauge of success. The actual public narrative is usually this kind of meme-oriented thing.

M: Sure, it reduces the totality of content to a few ideas or images. Is that degrading of presented thoughts into soundbites part of the reason you stopped doing comics blogging?

B: Yeah, maybe. The style and attitude of our blog would get a lot of response but never the actual content. The ideas we were expressing, apart from basic ideas of “cool” and “youth” - the basic branding stuff - none of those ideas were engaged with in a public way. But it was still … there was still the feeling that people were processing these ideas, reacting to the surface maybe, but still processing these ideas. But we were compromising anyway by having this branded surface. I think that part was integral. We just didn’t anticipate the response. I think we got bored with it.

M: I think if you want a significant response to the deeper ideas you were working with you might have to wait a bit, because the responses that end up mattering will come via comics and not blog posts. I mean dude, I drew my whole Flash comic based off stuff you were saying there!

B: What was the Flash comic based off of?

M: A couple things... some stuff you said about drawing with pencil, the idea of art as autocritique, and especially the stuff about comics criticism having to move onto the page as opposed to existing in this separate sphere from the work itself. Seeing Young Lions too, I guess...

B: That’s funny … I wonder if … well I feel everybody kind of interpreted that post (I think it was titled “criticism” or something …) … I wasn’t suggesting that critics make comics! (not that there’s anything wrong with that. obviously we were critics making comics) or be more creative or anything. Just feel implicated … is that the post you were referring to?

M: “New Criticism” [now offline], yeah. That wasn’t how I took it -- the real thing I got from it was that comics need to engage more thoroughly in self-analysis than they have. Or analysis of process. The idea of comics having multiple “surfaces” or “screens” now also made (and still makes) me think about how if that surface appearance/narrative of the work doesn’t have as much currency as it used to, it should be replaced with something. Oh, and this is funny - Jason Overby left a comment on that comic and then deleted it before I could see it -- and I would have given anything to know what it was, ha ha.

B: Yeah, I just saw that. Can you expand on the multiple surfaces thing?

M: Well, it wasn’t something that I actually read in a Comets Comets post, but when I saw your thing about the physical copy beginning to function more and more as a “trophy”, it was like... I mean I can boil it down to just saying that my thought was “well then comics need to come harder with the ideas if their physical aspect doesn’t matter as much as it used to”, but it’s a little more complicated. I have a huge amount of reverence/fetishism for comics as objects, like old crumbling back issues and also shiny new hardcovers, whatever it might be. And if that physical aspect stops being “what the comic is”, period, because there’s an online version, an app, a phone version... objects have a great deal of “spirit” for me and I felt like as a cartoonist there’s this onus on me to make sure the work retains the same amount of spirit even without the object there to imbue it with any. So I drew this raw-ass comic on top of old pieces of paper whose actual substance had a lot of personal, emotional meaning. Does that make sense?

B: I’m not sure. I feel I encounter that spirit in images that document objects. Maybe the image even captures something latent or hidden in the object. It’s still in relation to this object. But then maybe the spirit for you is your image of the object.

M: That’s a good way of putting it. When I share an actual physical space with an object I can form my own image of it. Even a scanned comics page, which is flat and doesn’t have a ton of texture, is so different than the physical version just because of the light in the room, you know?

B: Yeah. For me the irony in that line of thought comes from the fact that the book is literally a composite of scanned pages.

M: Yeah, that’s why it works better for old comics, where the original art was just this byproduct of drawing for the print process and you can’t see much of the original in the printed object. At a certain point in history comics art started being about reproducing an original and then, yeah, it does lose some power.

B: What loses power?

M: The book version. Like, if I compare a Gary Panter original page to one by any artist to have worked before like 1965... I’d way rather see the printed version of the old comic, because that’s the thing they’re doing this art in order to create. But in modern comics it’s just scans from the originals, and you get the sense that the original art is truer, better. Though I think comics art made specifically to be run through xerox machines helps mitigate that.

B: I’ll just say that I feel translation is a very relevant field.

M: You’re not wrong. I’m just the kinda guy who always gets jealous of people who know how to speak Russian when I’m reading Dostoyevsky, ha ha. Do you not prefer the online version of 2001 to your paper drawings for it? Or the printed Cruise to your web page about it?

B: I threw away the 2001 originals when I left Portland. With Cruise … one of the ads is going to be in anthology put together by Scott Longo. It’s going to be 100%, a facsimile. The value of the original becomes invisible, or conceptual, or material I guess.

M: “Invisible” and “material” almost seem contradictory... though I guess you’re asking whoever buys that one to pay for the literal “invisible material” that the film pages are.

B: Yeah :) actually I really liked that one, it had a black and white photo from a newspaper and some of this color ad on the other page rubbed off on it in this really subtle way. And I put a transparent overlay on it as sort of “protection”. And I didn’t even staple the newspaper, it’s being held in between the overlay and the cover. Yeah, it really felt archival, like preserving this image/object. Also the photo was of a painting.

M: That’s awesome. Are you familiar with the trend of “variant covers” in mainstream comics?

B: Yeah. That seems like a smart idea.

M: Duuuude, we may have just found the nexus point where the cutthroat capitalism of superhero comics and the highbrow conceptualizing of art comics intersect! The best superhero variant cover has all these blood splatters all over it but the blood is done in RED VELVET. like the cake flavor. Anyway.

Larmee/Seneca: Tuesday

2011-11-29T00:04:00.000-08:00

intro/Monday

MATT SENECA: So is it that cartoonists need to come at comics with a new mindset...?

BLAISE LARMEE: Cartoonists need to be willing to abandon comics.

MATT: Comics history? Or the formal devices that have characterized comics until now? They might be the same thing...

BLAISE: Yeah, the whole orientation toward preconditions, foundations, and building a sovereign medium. There’s too much fear of translation. Film, especially, is seen as a threat.

M: You talked earlier about comics as a general way of conceptualizing sequenced images. In that case can you turn the tables and conceptualize films as comics?

B: Film is its own thing, obviously. I sometimes feel like I’m in a movie whereas I never feel like I’m in a comic. Although I’ve been in comics. That is interesting. For me comics is a more abstract or virtual text, whereas film is integrated into my immediate perception of “reality.”

M: Well film is reality in a lot of ways, moments of real time that actually occurred, just reproduced for viewing at a later date. Or at least it has been in the past. Now with computer effects bringing most films closer and closer to animation, which is just comics at 24 frames a second, do you think that gap is closing at all?

B: I don’t think computer effects will do anything. The Netflix model makes movies more a part of disposable culture, though. And more navigable/disruptible. Still, the formal differences are vast.

M: That’s interesting, because I see comics as being on the opposite trajectory, into hardcover books and archive editions, trying to position itself as far away from the disposable as possible. Do you see it that way? I guess webcomics confuse the issue...

B: Yeah, I guess both mediums are responding to their economic environments.

M: So anyway... you were saying that basically comics has yet to develop defining characteristics beyond basic formal ones?

B: I feel like formal preconditions are one and the same with this whole notion of comics-as-medium. This is the mentality that must be transcended.

M: Are “mediums” something that exist for you? Like is painting a medium?

B: Yeah, and comics can be read as a medium. But this reading was retroactively constructed, and in a time when the established mediums were being deconstructed to the point that it was almost boring.

M: Right, comics used to just be considered a backward subset of literature.

B: Yeah? I don’t know.

M: Sure, that’s why people get pissed when you call it a “genre”. Do you see it as more something that developed out of the visual arts?

B: I don’t know how it started. I think more out of newspapers. And animation. But I’m talking about underground comics and Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud.

M: That was the road to “medium”, yeah.

B: Scott McCloud was so modernist … he wanted this new beginning divorced from the past, the liberation of form from content. That’s why it feels like comics was invented in 1993. That book became the form.

M: Do you think comics needs more texts like McCloud’s books to develop as a medium? Is that the kind of self-critical work you’re saying it lacks?

B: McCloud’s book is the medium. All developments undertaken for the medium add on to the narrative of “the medium” he created.

M: Hmm, have you ever read Eisner’s textbooks? Sequential Art, Graphic Storytelling? McCloud was riffing heavy on those....

B: The theme of McCloud’s book was the blank slate, the new beginning. He figures Eisner into his history (and credits him as inspiration) but the history is so revisionist that Eisner is in effect created by McCloud.

M: Lolz. My main problem with reading McCloud is that those books are completely lacking in poetic capacity, which is something I think a lot of other comics are pretty good at delivering. Can the self-reflexive and the poetic be combined?

B: Self-reflexivity is built-in to the format. The book literally flexes in on itself. The modernism of McCloud is extremely seductive. The promise of the future, the potential, the threshold. The Obama campaign. Now upon reflection we see how this infinite vision was also completely singular and authored. The hand drawn empty vessel.

M: So any promise of a blank slate delivered via comics is a false one, basically. Dude, you should read Grant Morrison’s Animal Man comics, that’s the one thing I can think of that comes close to McCloud, but it’s all superheroey and "fucking crazy, man!". Are you saying that comics, being this hand-made, meticulous thing, can’t avoid having some aspect of the poetic to them?

B: The poetic is useful as a means of opacity and privacy - keeping the author’s intentions somewhat in the dark. On the other hand I think a lot of critics are drawn to the poetic because it creates a pool of text that they can find their own way through and then present these trips as criticism.

M: Exactly, without opacity built into works the critic is useless.

B: Critics love to try to see through the text to the author. Or rather, to construct their own image of the author, using the text as a sort of puzzle.

M: Well, it is a lot of fun, even though you have to confront the fact that you're on some total bullshit at some point. So do you think comics should put the author on display more frequently? How do you feel about “autobio” comics, where the author is examining something else (not the form)?

B: I really feel something other than the form should be examined. Modern artists focused on the form in order to free themselves from powerful institutions - the church, the state, the public. The only institution in comics, really, is comics itself. “What is art” was a useful question because it was kind of a synecdoche for “what is church/state/public/etc”. “What is comics” is only relevant for comics fans, and I think we see this question mostly in contexts where the modern art narrative is nostalgized and re-staged in a seemingly virgin medium.

M: This is where a strong working knowledge of comics history seems essential to me, but you’ve talked about not being so interested in that. How can we build upon narratives we’re unfamiliar with?

B: That’s a really good question. My answer would be focusing on trajectory - movement itself - rather than specific origins of departure.

M: Chain of influence is an idea that has a ton of currency in comics, but right now more and more interesting new cartoonists seem to come at the medium from a unique place. Everybody used to just start out as copyists and work their way into an individual voice, now the journey is figuring out craft. You haven’t been shy about declaring CF to be a big influence on your work -- are there any others (besides McCloud) who hold as big a sway?

B: I don’t identify as a reader of comics.

M: Do you not read any, or just not a lot? or is it more about the connotations that identifying as a comics reader holds?

B: I meant it more as the sort of identity statement that’s acceptable these days.

M: Right, the one that also makes you a partisan of “comics culture”. What about that culture don’t you want to engage with?

B: I guess the reader - or consumer - orientation.

Larmee/Seneca: Monday

2011-11-28T00:12:00.000-08:00

Get hyped. Not only is Blaise Larmee one of the most talented and challenging young cartoonists to have surfaced over the past decade, he's also one of the most notable members of the cartoonist/critic club. Whether it's in his boundary-breaking webcomic 2001, his gorgeous, ephemeral debut graphic novel Young Lions, his near-punk truth-to-power blogging, his concept-heavy zines, or even the work he publishes via Gaze Books, Blaise projects the kind of provocative spirit comics could use a lot more of. In an artistic community that's more closely knit and self-involved than ever, Blaise may be most notorious for his detachment: the comics he's most interested in are his own and those made by his friends. It says something about how committed to its own orthodoxy comics is that Blaise's statement that he prefers his own drawings to those of Jack Kirby is at all surprising; but then, it can take a unique viewpoint to point up just how unique a place comics is. It's something Blaise seemingly can't help but do with every project he turns his efforts to.

I've been wanting to interview Blaise for quite a while now, but once Comets Comets, the main outlet for his comics criticism, was taken offline this summer, that goal was joined by a practical desire to see more of his writing out there. When we finally did get together online for a chat, it ran so long and ranged so far and wide that we both figured it didn't look much like an "interview" anyone would want to read. But just about everything Blaise had to say was worth getting out there, so what will follow over the rest of this week is a series of shorter conversations on various comics-related topics. Blaise's non-fan, creation-first outlook on the comics form is one that produces a highly unique opinion of just about every aspect of the form it touches, so I think you will be as pleased as I am that we did our best to talk about everything under the sun.

MATT SENECA: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is how you see comics as a whole medium, the divisions the “industry” enforces within it set aside. As a single art form among many others. You’re fairly unique among young cartoonists in that you don’t have the concern for “comics” the community and historical narrative that say someone like Michael DeForge does, so as just a young contemporary artist, what makes comics different from other media?

BLAISE LARMEE: Comics, in the word itself, emphasizes the pluralised object.

MATT: Right, the commodity.

BLAISE: Painting also functions as a noun but it is a verb as well. It is a practice.

M: Whereas you can’t “comic”. And there’s no adjective for comics either, no “painterly” or “filmic”. Which is why the question of what comics are in opposition to other media is tricky....

B: Medium specificity in itself is tricky. Has investigation of comics-as-medium resulted in any progress other than introducing comics into certain markets?

M: I think the main thing it’s produced is an awareness of history in comics’ younger practitioners - an awareness that wasn’t always there for young people who decided they wanted to become cartoonists. But I know you’ve gone on record about not being very interested in comics history...

B: Comics never had a modernist period. It never had an establishment to rebel against. It never cohered into any sort of federated structure, although that is always the image one hopes to convey when using the word “comics” - a site where all of these local narratives can be represented. Comics history has always been a local history, dispersed, with a deficit of cultural currency.

M: Well, I think if comics has any establishment it’s cultural, not aesthetic. You’ve engaged with that culture via blogging and your general internet presence, and occasionally ruffled people’s feathers by doing so -- do you think rebelling against comics culture is useful?

B: I think even direct opposition is too much involvement. Like, it’s not worth negating.

M: But not worth following either, I’m assuming. Is comics enough of an establishment for the “outsider cartoonist” to exist, or is that where everybody using the form is?

B: I like my relationship to CCS. [Note: Blaise currently holds a fellowship at James Sturm's Center for Cartoon Studies.] I am different and my difference is being incorporated. But this is a specific example.

M: It’s probably still a relevant one, just because it’s reflective of how comics has incorporated iconoclasts before. When people like Crumb and Ware come along with idiosyncratic styles there’s less of a reactionary backlash than a picking-over of their methods for useful takeaways. Maybe that’s why comics hasn’t really gone through modernism -- it hasn’t needed to. Do you agree with that? And do you think it’s a useful way for an art form to progress?

B: You’re talking about how comics is accepting of creators?

M: Of creators who bring stylistic or formal innovations to the table, specifically. Underground comics were a big response to the sort of trite content that was necessary to pass censors in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but then it became “cool” and got sort of taken up by everyone pretty quickly...

B: Honestly I think my problem with comics is that they are not cool...

M: Do you see that as an inherent problem, or the current circumstance?

B: I think it is possible for comics to be cool. Picturebox still presents a kind of cool, though it seems more like a residue, or a paste, than a vibrant present moment. I think 1-800-MICE could become retroactively cool at some point. But I guess the problem with the present moment - and this is also a historic problem - is the massive interiority of comics and the neglect of their distribution as objects. With Fort Thunder the interiority swelled to a point that it became a sort of exteriority. I mean, the space itself is a good illustration of that.

M: I think the availability of free webcomics is going to close the gap on the distribution question at some point, though heaven knows what that means for cartoonists’ ability to eat.

B: Webcomics stlil seem massively interior. Like, in the same way that 4chan is massively interior. 4chan can be referenced as a thing - a community or whatever - but the images/texts that compose it get lost in the overall fabric. It’s like the cover of a book vs its insides.

M: So you’re saying with webcomics everything is more like the cover?

B: No, like ‘webcomics’ is the cover. Like, that is what will get an article in the New York Times. and an individual webcomic will be like a detail of the overall ‘image’ (cover) being covered.

M: That’s the case with all new media though, don’t you think?

B: Yeah … hm … and the New York Times is really bad at covering art in general … but … hm, it’s really hard for me. It’s confusing trying to think about vernacular versus … the opposite of vernacular.

M: “Formal”?

B: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Or Catholic maybe. Like, I guess my religion is academic/artistic thought, so that seems to be the highest authority for me. But it gets confusing when, say, the New York Times also presents itself as an authority and it doesn’t even seem to be aware of those academic/artistic transmissions.

M: I think any institution that big is just always going to have a hard time with the new.

B: I was trying to imagine what the New York Times comics section would look like.

M: It would be the McSweeney’s comics section.

B: God.

M: Getting back to interiority in comics... you talk about it as an impediment to “coolness”, and I think it usually is/has been, like in Chester Brown, Ware, whoever else. But the two webcomics I show “cool” young people are yours and mine, and with both what people seem to connect to is that they’re relatable, with young characters. I think that’s a necessary component of “cool” - it has to be interior on some level to grab people maybe?

B: Yeah. Or I can see how it could be perceived as interior. Or often is interior. I mean, cool is just one articulation of this site that I’m interested in, which I think could also be articulated as the revolutionary site, an ecstatic present moment in which the future seems wild and the memory of the past changes. The threshold of something. I think the “cool” I’m thinking of might just be an image, impossible to enter. But being on the threshold of that image.

M: So it’s not something you can embody? Like, with how you dress or whatever?

B: I think fashion, in a general sense, not necessarily limited to fabric, is related to this threshold. “In is out.” “Out is in.” It’s wildly unpredictable territory.

M: If there’s a route to “cool” for comics, do you think it’s more tied to content or visual appearance?

B: I try to collapse the two.

M: Well sure, every cartoonist does, but like... ok, which do you think would be cooler, Jack Kirby drawing Young Lions or you illustrating a Kirby style comic?

B: I guess the latter. I don’t like other people’s drawings as much as my own.

M: Do you think the visual aspect of comics is “stronger” or “hits harder” than the story/information-containing aspect? I think a lot of people “inside” comics think they should be exactly equal, but for people outside the culture do you think one is more attractive?

B: I guess I’m in the camp that thinks it’s pretty much impossible to say something does not qualify as information.

M: I think most people who don’t have a big interaction with mainstream comics see it that way. Superheroes, work made for hire, that’s where the distinction comes from.

B: Children’s literature also delineates authorship into “writer” and “illustrator”. “Goodnight Moon” depicts a bedroom. There is the text of the object next to the illustration of the object. The words “red balloon” next to a drawing of a red balloon. I would argue neither aspect is redundant. Maybe the room could be viewed as a site of contested authorship. But I wouldn’t say both parties have equal power in or access to that site.

M: I think it’s the same thing in comics, though there are two sites we’re talking about really, and they’re connected in a really weird way: the page and the culture. In the wider “comics culture” the words are always the nexus of authorship and the pictures merely proceed from them. On the page it’s often different sets of information being communicated by each thing. I guess I’m not talking so much about pictorial content as style. Like, Winsor McCay’s red balloon drawing versus Steve Ditko’s. Do you think a cartoonist’s style can be more or less appropriate to the story content they’re creating?

B: I can’t divide the totality of the creator into distinct aspects. Some creators have bodily intelligence - you can see it in the figures they draw - but they write bad stories and dialogue. But we must judge the totality of this person.

M: How much does a comic’s formal quality -- innovation, boldness, whatever -- affect your reading of how cool it is? (I’m using “cool” as shorthand for the place you want to see more comics going...)

B: It’s important. I think part of my problem with separating form from content is the absurdity of this question in the face of architecture. I rely on a lot of spatial terms - interiority/exteriority, the site, the threshold - in describing comics. This content/form division is real, I think, but I’m not sure how to incorporate it into this spatial/architectural model.

M: More literalism, maybe? Like, you can have interiority of content -- say a dream comic or something -- and interiority of form, like weird layouts. Content sites, like setting, and formal sites, like color schemes. If you take Impressionist painters’ multiple pictures of the same place at different times of day as comics, I think it’s possible to do a reading where the different images have the same content but different form. Does that sound right, or are you talking about something different?

B: Content is 3D, form is 2D?

M: I guess what I’m getting at is like... content is always an abstraction, the idea of whatever you’re communicating. Form is more literal, the sensual aspect of the work. Shapes, colors, size. In comics it’s tricky because formal tools like sequencing or layout can communicate abstract information. But I think the division exists to some extent or another in all comics that are out there to date. Probably abstract comics come closest to lacking it.

B: I’m not on the same page with you. Language is … let me find a quote … “language is not [...] a mediation between thought and the real.” The rest of the quote is kind of hard to explain. But basically as thought opens up to me, in language, I experience the thing itself. Does that make sense? In the articulation of a thought the thought is discovered, or entered, or the thought opens up to us.

M: Yeah, that makes sense. Tying this back to what we were talking about earlier, do you think formal innovation can lead comics into its own “modernist period”? Is it only the formal strictures of comics as they’ve been created in the past that need to be rebelled against?

B: I mean, there’s aspects of modernism present in the comics narrative today that are really gross.

M: Yeah?

B: Pretty much any sense of progress as a “medium” divorcing itself from everything around it. Any sense of triumph of “self expression”. Any sense of “innovation” as something that will lead to more innovation.

M: What aspects of modernism would you like to see become part of comics?

B: Maybe I’m just nostalgic for kindergarten. Or nostalgic for a time before I was born. I’m not sure. All articulations of modernism that I respond to have a sort of aesthetic fascism. But it’s also a fascism that I welcome. At root is this idea of progress.

M: Do you mean “aesthetic fascism” in terms of a strong individual vision, or a contempt for the “other”, or...?

B: I guess both. The individual vision is downplayed, but it’s still really prominent. Like, twitter is a good example of an articulation of a modernist tendency. The structure for creating and dispersing information is extremely regulated, aesthetically, using an “authorless” modular architecture. And the whole “brand / brandless” aesthetic is that of childhood as illustrated by vector graphics. And there’s this sense that order will persist and cannot be subverted.

M: So are you a fan of instructional comics, like the “how to put on your oxygen mask” ones on airplanes? Or Will Eisner’s Army training manuals, you ever seen those?

B: I haven’t seen those. I like the image of direct communication. Like, anything in Helvetica carries that image. Some aspects of punk culture seem to idealise that image. Like, direct, simple, 3 chord manifesto on how to overthrow the establishment. I also like the image of the other “dropped onto” a foreign order. There were these suburban style government housing projects next to where I lived and these black refugees occupying/being occupied by this space.

M: That appreciation or propensity for the “image” of things -- it seems to me that comics is the ideal medium to present those kind of basic situations or ideas, because the pictures make it so direct but it can still carry a lot of complex information. Did you come to comics wanting to tell fictional narratives like most people do, or was it always more about putting over ideas?

B: I think it was always about images. The image of power and gender in superheroes. The image of subculture later on.

M: Is there a specific image you’d like your comics to communicate?

B: I guess now it’s more about ideas, including the idea of the image and the image of the idea. Comics is a useful metaphor for communicating a sequence of images.

M: Why is it a metaphor?

B: I mean the way you can talk about a “text” without necessarily referring to a book. Comics as an applied conceit.

Next Week On DTU

2011-11-25T11:26:00.000-08:00

MATT SENECA: So is content not enough? Does comics need to interrogate its language before it can say anything of value?

BLAISE LARMEE: It needs to do both at the same time.

Coming up on Monday: a week of conversation about pretty much every aspect of the comics form imaginable with Blaise Larmee, the most exciting cartoonist/critic to have hit comics in years. I've been wanting to interview Blaise for a long time; what I came away with when it finally happened did not disappoint. Prepare your caps -- they'll soon be peeled.

Your Wednesday Sequence 33

2011-11-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

"Pablo Ferro Films" (1967). Victor Moscoso.

At Robot 6. Go read. Try not to drool at that picture.

A Conservative Medium

2011-11-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

Last week everybody got really upset at Frank Miller for making a critical statement about the Occupy Wall Street movement -- one in which the comics great sounded more like one of his macho, trigger-happy characters than an informed or reasoned political commentator. It's the kind of statement a lot of people have come to expect from the increasingly conservative Miller, but it was my immediate thought that comics shouldn't be surprised when this kind of reactionary thinking emerges from anyone associated with the medium.

The sequence above is from half a week of Frank King's classic, influential Gasoline Alley strip in 1927. It's neither the first nor the most famous instance of King poking fun at the post-World War I, pre-Depression modernist arts scene: in a much-reprinted Sunday page from a few years later, the strip's father-son duo Walt and Skeezix take a dreamlike meander through a post-Impressionist landscape they see in a museum canvas and emerge decidedly unimpressed. "That was an awful dream!" Skeezix exclaims in the strip's final panel, after being told by one of the painting's distorted inhabitants that "there is no way out". "Or was it a dream at all?" the boy muses to a knowing audience.

The politics behind King's critiques of modernism are interesting enough to warrant some unpacking. In Gasoline Alley's golden era of the mid-'20s through early '30s, comics were still very much a "low", populist art, with a few Gilbert Seldes paragraphs on Krazy Kat about all the form had to show as far as cultural cachet goes. King, an engaged observer of the modern arts, was doubtless aware of his status as an artist for the masses rather than the privileged few -- a status all cartoonists of his day shared, and all but enough to count on one's fingers do today as well. While it's unclear whether or not King himself resented this, he certainly got mileage for his strip by tapping into a kind of populist resentment of a high-art scene that was making rapid strides away from relatability and depictive realism toward theory, formalism, and personalized expression.

King himself was an experimentalist, pushing the formal boundaries of comics in ways that still echo today in the work of cartoonists from Ware to Quitely and beyond, so perhaps it's unfair to paint him too heavily as the reactionary artistic conservative. But then again, his conflation of Einsteinian physics with the modern literature he satirizes hints at a real unease with the changes occurring in the wider world around him, not just its high art. It's easy enough to do a reading of the homespun, quiet Gasoline Alley as a staunchly conservative "family values" strip, and the answer to Skeezix's question about whether early 20th-century modern art might all just be a bad dream has implications for the wider form of comics, not just King himself. That answer, of course, is a resounding "No" -- since the Sunday strip in question's publication in 1930, figurative painting and drawing have only receded further into the background of the contemporary arts, and literature has suffered a near-total loss of its pre-eminence as a storytelling medium.

King's criticisms of abstracted modernism as a resolutely figure-based, humanist artist-in-comics are almost prescient: as painting has moved further and further toward the theoretical, comics have stood out in greater and greater contrast as the last refuge for the great figurative draftsmen to ply their trade in. A similar phenomenon can be seen in comics' relationship to prose fiction, perhaps best exemplified by the major chain bookstores' reliance on comics to stay solvent as the printed book went the way of the dinosaur. The conventional action of comics comes close to insisting on the story and the figure, and where it doesn't the market certainly does. As comics have grown from a medium of simple stories intended for children into one patronized by amateur historians and archivists wary of any idea that breaks the continuity of the perceived smooth progression from its past to its present, works in which theoretical or abstract concerns are more prominently displayed on the page than figurative ones have routinely been met with outright hostility, a retrenching of comics' self-policed borders: we don't have any room here for that. The fact of such works' publication and popularity with a small specialty audience means little. They have not caught on. They have not changed the mechanics of the comics world the way modernism changed literature and the fine arts.

If comics are not quite the final bastion of figurative art and novelistic storytelling, they are not too far away from it either. They are at the very least a place for traditional artistic values that have been discarded elsewhere thrive. Of course, comics' acting as a repository for lost wisdom doesn't preclude its ability to function as a progressive site for innovation as well; but it makes things harder. When a medium grows a preservationist focus, a simultaneous focus on expansion both becomes more difficult and can constitute a challenge to the relevance of what is being preserved. Viewed from this angle, it seems very much that comics is just a conservative artistic space. The community's slight lean toward political liberality (common enough in artistic circles) aside, comics more than any other medium during the past hundred years has been built on nostalgism and resistance to change. Artists' total failure to push back against their editorial overlords and stand strong for a space in which they could have a proper means of artistic expression is the story between the lines of the universally accepted statement that "reduced strip sizes killed newspaper comics". And the newspaper strip's replacement as the medium's most popular delivery mechanism -- the pamphlet genre comic book -- has undergone only one serious challenge to its hegemony over the past seven decades: the small-press underground comic, whose intense popularity in the mid-to-late 1960s rivaled that of the superhero books for a period that lasted perhaps a thousand days in total.

The narrative that the comics community has spun as a counter to this idea is one of increasing freedom of content and artistic virtuosity: comforting thoughts, and not unsupportable ones either. But audience acceptance of the work that gives this narrative its merit has been patchy -- so much so that the vast majority of the artists whose work functions as its evidence are unable even to make a living from their comics alone. The people who read comics and give comics their money have never been comfortable with material that goes beyond the look and feel of canonized past works. How bizarre and unhealthy is it that "artistic growth" in comics is and has been almost totally restricted to finding different ways of working within the same set of formal boundaries that have remained in place since the 19th century? People have to see those better, braver comics for the notion of their very existence -- let alone their growing prominence -- to have any currency. And they don't. Comics, by and large, wants more of the same, and if it reminds us of some rose-colored and distant past, so much the better.

All this being said, however, it's difficult to know where to go from this point. While a few comics have successfully discarded the figurative and the narrative to break new ground for the form, few would argue that these works are as satisfying or engaging as the best of the medium's more conventional stories. Personally, I even find it difficult to imagine that the kind of concerted exploration that painting gave abstraction and hard theory a century ago would yield results as valuable as the works of a Picasso or a Duchamp in comics. For me, and for almost every other participant in the comics industry I've spoken about these issues with, comics are inherently narrative, inherently figurative, and while work done outside these boundaries can be interesting, it can never get at the highest potentials for excellence the medium offers. Perhaps the only thing that can be done with this opinion is to admit that the notion of inherence, of nature determining form, is the bedrock of the conservative mindset -- to acknowledge that just because you can see there is a problem doesn't mean you aren't a part of it too.

I fail to see anything surprising about Miller's statements -- neither as the views of an individual or a statement made on the behalf of comics as a whole. Artistic conservatism is cultural conservatism. Miller merely speaks a politicized version of the mindset that's been a part of comics from the cradle.

Your Wednesday Sequence 32

2011-11-16T16:17:00.000-08:00

Gasoline Alley Sunday page (1934). Frank King.

Yeah yeah, I couldn't find the exact date that page was published on like I usually do, get over it. Try looking at just how beautiful a piece of comics it is instead, my God! As I explain over in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column, I think this might just be King's defining piece of comics art -- whimsical and experimental, with an adventurous form that's perfectly suited to its content as well as its warm, homey (see?) tone. Just wonderful, probably my favorite page that I've written about on this column. So go read me rhapsodizing about it, talking about why single Sunday pages are the best single pages, and dissecting just how intelligently King gets past the trouble comics has in simultaneously depicting motion through both time and space, right here. I was really proud of how this column came out, you won't be disappointed.

A Treatise On Optics

2011-11-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

Sans Genre IX

I've been having trouble reading comics lately. Not because of moral qualms with the material or difficulty in finding good ones or the pull of other media -- there's no "lately" about any of those things. No, I mean I've literally been having trouble reading them. The act of reading is a pretty remarkable thing when you come down to it, a singular act of will and concentration that we somehow experience as passive enjoyment. Maybe my brainpower is just ebbing away from me, but I'm finding it increasingly tough to see past my own vision and onto the page. There are so many things mitigating between a page of comics and our ability to make a perfect visual capture of it. The quality of light in any room changes a comic's color scheme the second it's opened. There's excess visual information surrounding every comic no matter where or how we look at it, at least until the point that it's held so close to the face we can't read it at all anymore. And then there are the barriers the eyes themselves place in between us and everything we see: sunspots, fuzz, the bridge of your nose in the periphery, the impossibility of taking in everything at once. Sight is the only way we have to access comics, and sight is imperfect.

It's comics' ability to get past so many of sight's imperfections that make the form such a special thing. Film and photography face many of the same problems as natural vision does -- lens flares, unwanted visual information, lack of ability to achieve total focus -- at least one of these things have a way of making it into every photo. And even though digital tools that can correct all these problems are rapidly being developed, those tools can't legislate the way a piece of drapery wrinkles and folds, the way a lock of hair falls, the expression on a face. Accident and happenstance will forever be a major compositional force, and the main contextual force of art forms that use machinery to capture documentary images from the world around them. And whether they realize it or not, when the photographer or the filmmaker begin using the computer to create from whole cloth, they've left the realm of the photographic for drawing. Drawing, in which the artist's vision is the sole motivating force, where the problems of vision can truly be left behind.

But the influence of the photograph has done much to dilute the power of drawing, the art of the picture. Unwanted happenstance may have a great deal of influence over the content of every photograph we see, but the prevalence of photographic imagery has created a knee-jerk impulse toward a documentary quality in drawings that aren't meant to carry it. Without excess information of some kind, the line of thought goes, pictures look like pictures, not representations of the real world that can be read into. Hence the strain of modern comics art that has gone far afield from the word "cartooning" in an effort to engage readers on the same quasi-realist grounds that film does. It's a troubling departure from the early cartoons and engravings the comics form grew out of, which in turn had roots in symbolist painting. Handled correctly, no amount of information a picture can hold is "too much". But where once all pictorial information took the faculty of invention in order to make it into the work, today most imagery contains at least something that the artist didn't intend but simply "shot". For centuries even incidental information was designed to give the image further relevance, added context, or autocritique. Today comics are more likely to be stuffed with lines and shapes and colors that can't be described as anything more than "background detail" -- meticulous documentation of extraneous surroundings -- unremarkable, interchangable, irrelevant.

This is why the blank backgrounds and empty spaces left open and free of lines by the cartoonist carry so much more power than the crumbling concrete and flaking facades of the mega-detailer. The comics form, once again, is in thrall only to the imagination that powers the hands putting images to page. Much has been made of comics' ability to leave the real world's laws of physics and anatomy behind in presenting their apocalyptic battles, but the reality is that comics need not present anything in keeping with the real at all. There is nothing unavoidable in drawing, none of the accessions that photographic imagery is forced to make to visual information other than the content it depicts. In fact, it is impossible to draw something you don't mean to.

In comics all that exists is what the artist wants us to see -- and in the best comics, that means if it doesn't play a role in the story it doesn't exist. Look at the drawings of a Roy Crane or a Chris Ware, a Yuichi Yokoyama or a Jack Kirby. They are silent, pure, free of noise and anecdote. Free, in fact, of the world, of the billions upon billions of tiny distractions and happenstances that clutter up the days and prevent us from attaining the clarity given to superheroes who can see through the pages to their true purpose. The look of reality, in which the biggest difference from fiction is perhaps the existence of the totally irrelevant, is an impossibility for comics, and the best not only acknowledge but embrace this, creating unified drawings in which everything has a role to play and the connection to the world around us has been decisively severed. This quality, of course, is hardly unique to comics -- great visual art across the spectrum of media carries it. But comics is the only medium in which we actually read the pictureplane, in which engagement with the form necessitates an attempt to draw meaning from, rather than simply observe, pictures. Hence, the existence of extraneous information on the page is not just glossed over, as in film or photography: it is analyzed, which dulls the impact of the aspects of the picture which carry relevant information. And by contrast, comic book drawings in which every bit of the picture serves some conceptual purpose are the form operating as precisely and effectively as possible.

To possess natural sight is to understand that some of what we see with our eyes is not, in fact, "real". There are tricks of the light and afterimages, blind spots and blurs, and these things all translate to the photographic image. Because of their status as a story as well as a pictorial medium, only comics present an inhabitable world in which everything we see is real. If it's on the page it's included: not only does comics lack a mechanism to point out visual information as being subjective or nonexistent, it's (at least thus far) wholly uninterested in doing so. The ability to legislate an entire, uninterrupted reality with the work of human hands seems a much more intriguing proposition for most artists.

This quality of comics, in which everything visible must be judged as true, is what makes comic book drawings that carry visible traces of the tools used to make them so wonderfully intriguing. When we look at real-world objects we understand that the layers of light suffusing them or backgrounding them or covering them over aren't their substance, only the way we perceive the wood or stone or plastic or whatever else it is that makes them up. But comics are made of medium, brush or pencil grain, digital fuzz, the folds and overlaps of an uneven paint job. On the page there is no disavowing these things, no saying that they aren't as much of what the pictures are as their content or their characters. They are both the construction of the world inside the comic and the way back out into reality, evidence that somewhere someone manufactured these things. In reading prose we can imagine events that take place in a photographic, real world, the characters as flesh-and-blood humans. But comics take away the reader's ability to imagine their narratives occurring anywhere but within the parameters of the artist's visual style. The fact that it's all just drawings is always apparent, always part of the reading experience. Perhaps comics are inherently metafictional, pocket worlds that constantly tell the stories of their own creation along with the stories they're designed to be telling.

It goes right down beneath the lines, to the paper they're printed on. If the grainy excesses of an ink line are part of a comic's reality, no less can be said for the xerox grain blanketing the pages of a minicomic, or the chips of wood pulp dotting comics printed on newspaper. And comics' readers can't help but pay attention to these things; the format of the book legislates a comic's reading experience as much as the colors of the ink used to print it or the font it's lettered in. In comics, every bit of the object matters. By comparison, how many novels get noticed for their paper stock, or paintings for the qualities of their canvas? The action of reading comics encourages a deep, investigative visual contemplation above all else, a systematic mining of each page for all its details. The ones that are there all matter. And everything else doesn't.

The perfect comic, then, is the one in which every fleck of ink, every slightest color modulation, every tiny waver of every tiny line, is a part of the artist's vision and intention. Even if it happens one day, this comic in which happenstance plays no part whatsoever, it will still be an impossible thing to experience. Its reader will turn on a light to read it, and open their imperfect, afterimaged, fuzzed out eyes, and see the comic covered over by the real world around it, see something beside the world on the page. Artistic intention is a failure the second it meets its audience. But on the comics page, at least, it lives and thrives. The only hurdle comics can't negotiate is human biology itself. Everything else is within reach.

DTU Interview: Yuichi Yokoyama

2011-11-10T17:44:00.000-08:00

Oh my god oh my god oh my god you guys, I just interviewed Yuichi Yokoyama over at Comics Alliance! There's a couple reasons that this is a pretty sweet moment for me: Yokoyama's by far my favorite cartoonist going, and this has been nothing short of a career year for him, with not one but two books coming out that are better than all the other ones, and then there's the fact that English-language interviews with the man are few and far between. Yokoyama's a delightfully Warholian interview subject, with a persona that comes across as elevated and robotic as his comics are. I asked the questions, and there's no denying that he answered them with economy and precision. It was a cool contrast with my last couple of interviews, which were like long and anecdotal conversations.

Anyway, go read the interview already, it's me and Yokoyama talking about comics and stuff! If you're unfamiliar with the magic that is the man's work, peep this Comics Journal article I wrote on it last week. Or you can just check out the excerpted pages from Yokoyama's eye-destroying new book Color Engineering below the interview, brought to you by an eyebrow raising team-up between Comics Alliance and Picturebox. Get going!

Your Wednesday Sequence 31

2011-11-09T17:07:00.000-08:00

Mystery In Space #71 (1961), page 6. Carmine Infantino.

This week on my Robot 6 column, I talked about a page by the artist who might be my favorite guy to draw superheroes ever, Carmine Infantino. I think the page above is an absolutely stunning piece of unconventional comic book storytelling (look at how effortlessly he makes that weird layout just work for him!), and I was happy to have the chance to dig into it. I tried to include a little bit of background on Infantino, too -- he's so hyped up as "dude who drew the Flash that one time" and "dude who did the little yellow circle on Batman's chest" that I think a lot of people miss what makes him really special. You don't want to miss THAT, do you? Okay, so go read the article already!

"Tryptich"

2011-11-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

I made a new comic. You can read it here. In hopes of getting more of my blog readers over to my comics, I decided I'd start posting the short process essays I include with my comics over here too.

The life of Lou Gehrig was only equal to the story of Galahad and the collected works of Curt Swan on Superman as a heroic and even like, mythic narrative for me as a kid. I could never figure out what attracted people to figures like Jesus when constructs with more immediate power and greater apparent purity existed. Lately I've been feeling a sort of contemplative sadness about the fact that the rational mind can't just force itself to believe in God, so I thought drawing comics about the substitutes I used for that idea when I was a kid might be a good way of getting at some kind of spiritual solace.

I've also been looking at a lot of triptych paintings in an effort to pull as many of painting's lessons about picture-making as I can from a strain of it that still has a lot in common with comics. Triptychs usually carry a very sincere type of religious imagery too, which is a big plus for me right now. The idea of doing what I could to deify Gehrig (who I think has the most tragic and poetic life story of the 20th century, hands down) by creating a triptych of him was really appealing. I thought I'd make a "triptych squared" -- three pages of three panels each -- to bring the piece a little more in line with comics. It had to be wordless, of course, so the real effort of it was distilling thirty-seven years of life into nine images that told as much of the whole story as possible. I read a few biographies and narrowed it down to these ones from a list of fifty or sixty possible one-panel scenes, about thirty of which I drew thumbnail sketches for. I made an explicit point of not watching the Gehrig biopic "Pride of the Yankees"; it's a phenomenal film but I saw it so many times as a kid that I didn't want its visual dictation of these scenes in my head any more than they already were.

Animation art is the other thing I've been trying to absorb a lot of recently. The stylistic dissonance between line animation of figures and painted backgrounds in 20th century cartoons has always really fascinated me. I explored it a little in that "Haunted Bike" comic I did a while back, but that was before I had really begun to make a study of this stuff, plus I drew that one in like two hours while I was drunk. I tried to do it the right way this time. Disney films pre-1980 probably have the most sumptuous and impressive painted backgrounds I've seen, but those are just impossible to follow, it's like trying to outdo Rembrandt. And I didn't really want to use paint, because I don't have an effective way to superimpose my figures over the backgrounds. I found a model to follow in the backgrounds for the Bruce Timm/Eric Radomski/Glen Murakami Batman and Superman animated series: basic color shapes, good use of shading but never too meticulous, and you can always see the brushstrokes if you're looking for them. Something between Art Deco and Impressionism, but such a basic, utilitarian use of paint that it also recalls the "paintooning" done by Jerry Moriarty. Backgrounds that drop out and push the figures forward but have enough life and prettiness to them to stand up by themselves. It's very "comics" to me. I marathonned my Timm DVDs while I drew this strip.

It didn't come out exactly how I was picturing it -- at one point I seriously considered erasing all the backgrounds and just leaving the inked figures floating in a blank space, which I still think would have made a stronger graphic statement. But I didn't want this to be some crazy conceptual avant-comix thing. I just wanted to make a tribute to Lou Gehrig. So click here for that.

Your Wednesday Sequence SupaSpecTac DeluXXXury Edition #2

2011-11-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

This week on my Robot 6 column I interviewed the great Benjamin Marra about the mechanics of comic book storytelling, spotlighting a couple of his phenomenal pages along the way. I've been wanting to talk about Ben's approach to sequencing for a while now: his comics are the wildest around but they're always just flawlessly composed, with an incredibly cool control of the information on the page. As far as action storytelling goes right now, some artists get more baroque, but for my money no one's as effective. Ben had some really fascinating secrets to reveal in our chat about his working methods, and on top of that he can talk you through Jack Kirby's pages like nobody else. Head over here and read it; you just might learn a thing or two.

Yokoyama's Rubicon: Humanity/Color/Transcendence

2011-11-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

Boy, I just realized my "best comics of the year" list for 2011 is going to be pretty hilarious. Why's that? Because my three favorite books of these past ten months are all by the same cartoonist! I've talked here and there about how amazing the comics Yuichi Yokoyama has been releasing are, but I haven't really cut loose on an in-depth analysis... until now. You can read my thoughts on Yokoyama's Garden, Baby Boom, and Color Engineering at The Comics Journal today, in a massive blog post that I've been thinking through for the past four months. It's really good, and the comics it's about are, I think, the best ones to come out since I started writing about the medium on the internet. Which means a ton of good reading for you! Click here to go to the article, or if you're gonna be stubborn about it here's the first little spoonful:

Yuichi Yokoyama’s first full-length graphic novel, Travel, tells the story of a journey, and ends with a destination. Over the course of its nearly 200 silent pages, readers watch the progress of a train’s riders through a series of stunning, occasionally futuristic landscapes, and are thereby implicated in the journey themselves. The book’s final few pages show the three passengers whose embarkation begins the story leaving the train and taking a quick walk to a sea shore, where the froth of crashing waves prohibits further movement, literally ending the comic in its tracks. It’s a bold statement about form: sequences of panels depict motion, and when the motion must stop so must the comic. Every comic is a journey, a movement through something to something, and as such the only logical end point is a cessation of that movement.

Yokoyama’s second graphic novel, the recently translated Garden, also follows the logic of motion from beginning to end, of journey to destination. But in this book Yokoyama complicates things: Garden also begins with a destination, and for over 300 pages readers are invited to wonder if the journey it depicts is the same utilitarian movement through space depicted in Travel, or an end unto itself. Read more

So AFFECTED

2011-10-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my long comic AFFECTED just wrapped up today. I am really proud of it -- at this moment, out of all the comics I could direct your attention to, this is the one I most think you should see. If you haven't read it before, it's a dark 'n' sexy meditation on the current state of America that manages to tie Craigslist prostitution, the Iraq War, urban decay, the power of violence, and Hollywood culture up into a neat little bow. If you have been reading, suffice it to say that the new pages are the best ones yet, and that they deliver the titular line to boot! Come on, like you haven't been curious to know why this thing is called what it's called!

I really hope everyone who visits my blog will go check this comic out: it's where all my theorizing and idea-spinning about comics gets a practical workout, and it's also where my heart is. I work my hands off for the criticism I post here, but I'd die for AFFECTED. So go look.

If you've been following along, the new pages are here; if you haven't checked in since last time I posted about it, start here; and if you're new to the whole thing, the beginning is right here. Go read, go enjoy.

Your Wednesday Sequence 30

2011-10-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Great Adventure (1978), page 102 panels 4-10. Milo Manara.

My latest Robot 6 column spotlights one of my favorite cartoonists, Milo Manara, who in a lot of ways is also one of the most overlooked. Not commercially -- I mean, a lot of my favorite artists are fucking around in the world of 100-copy print runs -- but critically, because Manara's stuff (not the page above, but probably the majority of the other ones he's drawn over the course of a 40-year career) has such a prominent intersection with pornography. Only now is any of his work getting reprinted in the US, and boy are the books overpriced. Well, I thought I'd give you the chance to check out a great little slice of Manara comics absolutely free, and to read what I had to say about it to boot. Do so here.

Oh yeah, I'll hopefully be writing a big article on some Manara comics soon... once I figure out which ones to tackle.

SKNIL

2011-10-25T12:17:00.000-07:00

Little later than usual this month, but here goes your list of worthwhile internet time-sinks. Wait, is that an oxymoron?

In the future comics will be divided into the categories of pre- and post-Color Engineering.

- I bet this is the best comic you'll read today: Frank King's early masterpiece/Little Nemo ripoff, Bobby Make-Believe.

- When I wrote this I also reread the Comics Comics roundtable on Al Columbia's Pim & Francie, a book that only looks more and more prescient as time goes on. I think the revelation (contained on this Inkstuds interview, I think) that the destructed drawings in that book weren't an affected conceit -- ie, they weren't purposefully tarnished but simply reproduced as they looked after being left around the house, torn up, whatever -- makes that book even more interesting.

- George Elkind's best yet is also the best thing anyone's written the quietly perfect Boy's Club series. Also I totally sold him that copy of Memories.

- Ed Piskor's new webcomic is gonna be good.

- Nina Stone does a better job of explaining why I don't like to read Warren Ellis comics than I ever could.

- Moebius who? If you wanna talk sick cartoonists, let's talk Titian. Open the image files for these two paintings of Diana and Actaeon in separate tabs and go back and forth between them. Classic myth boiled down to two indelible sequenced images, the fundamental core of comics. Look at how well the pictures rhyme with one another, how simply and beautifully they illustrate comics' basic logic of action and reaction. God damn.

- Of all the many great moments in the history of comedy, my current favorite is "Bugs and Elmer: A Symbolic Discourse", curated by Bill Boichel of Copacetic Comics. Go here and get ready to pop a neck-vein laughing.

- Blaise Larmee gives a lecture at the Center for Cartoon Studies. His "evil clone" of my boy Adam McIlwee's Lust Brigade blog also yields up some new drawings. Check 'em out before they disappear. And speaking of whom, here's a Larmee interview that probably not a lot of you saw. It's really interesting.

- Tucker Stone. Via Tucker Stone.

- Also via Tucker: a video that made the rounds on twitter a second ago, but is well worth preserving for posterity. I showed it to my sister and she goes "this is too intense I think." This is what the DC relaunch should have been like, oh SHIIIIIIIIIT

- James Romberger's article on the violence in recent Neal Adams comics is one of those ones where you go "yeah, I know!" multiple times while thinking about a topic that's never even occurred to you before. Meaning: it's really good.

- The Frank Santoro blog you've never seen.

- Missed this one: the always erudite and engaging Sean Witzke interviewed by Eric Messinger. (Eric also talked to me a while back if you didn't catch that one.)

- My boyz hold it down in the belly of the beast. #soproud

- Finally, I don't care what you think: my comic AFFECTED is getting hot as fuck, so you better hop aboard before it goes bananas in November.

I interviewed the Greatest Living Cartoonist...

2011-10-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

... Gary Panter. It's up now at The Comics Journal. Far and away the best interview I've done. Go read.

Fighting Americans

2011-10-20T22:43:00.001-07:00

Separated at birth:

Here's a Jack Kirby drawing of the Fighting American, a character he created after he got screwed out of Captain America and figured if the entire American comics industry was going to build itself up by copying him, he could do worse than ripping himself off.

Here's a detail from the astounding new Yuichi Yokoyama book, Color Engineering (much more on which soon). There's no way this is a coincidence.

I've often wondered about Yokoyama's stylistic similarity to Kirby, usually concluding that it must just be one of those things. I'm not sure how available Kirby's work is in Yokoyama's native Japan, and from what I understand he doesn't hold a particularly high place in the Japanese canon of comics either. But here's Japan's best cartoonist, Yokoyama, doing a straight-up Kirby quote. Now I'm thinking the perceived disconnect between Yokoyama's world and Kirby's is mainly in the way they're marketed: Kirby has the commercial empires of Marvel and DC pushing him, Yokoyama goes through one of the US's artiest publishers to get his work out here in the States. I read Yokoyama's drawing of a Kirby character as the kind of homage to the master that it seems like every American cartoonist performs at least once, as well as a simple, bold reading of Kirby himself. That stuff may be filling the millionaires' pockets today, but it's still as crazy and adventurous as it ever was. After this drawing, the spirit of Kirby hangs over the rest of Color Engineering, adding a welcome varnish of pop-comics sensibility to the stunning new work of one of the form's premier avant-gardists.

Your Wednesday Sequence 29

2011-10-20T08:35:00.000-07:00

Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 (2011), page 89. Jaime Hernandez.

What they're all saying is totally true: Jaime's work in the new Love & Rockets is some of the best comics ever. Forget everything else you're reading right now (unless it's Yokoyama), and go get that comic, because it's just better. Seriously: in light of comics like the new Jaime's existence, all this coverage of the New 52 (hinky hink hink!) and whatever else just seems gauche as hell. This week everybody is talking about Jaime, so I thought I'd add my voice to the chorus by analyzing the gorgeous page above in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. Check it out here. Starts like this:

I don’t think I’m advancing anything too controversial when I say that if there’s a Platonic ideal for the comic book page, it’s a piece of sequential art that works both as an assemblage of individual panels and as a single, unified artwork. This, of course, is a lot easier said than done. When gridded layouts are discarded to turn the page into a poster-style piece of op-art there’s always some readability being sacrificed, and the grid is all too often a vehicle for cartoonists to work inside without paying sufficient consideration to what sum their page’s parts are creating.

Jaime Hernandez squares that circle in the page above, a slice of comics that flows like fine wine from panel to panel but stands rock solid as a full-page unit. The basic conceit of the page is that it isn’t unified by a dual identity as one single picture or any fancy layout tricks, but an immediate, cohesive sense of motion that every panel supports completely. It’s not always beneficial for comics to be “pictures that move”, but Jaime is a classicist through and through, perhaps the purest one in comics right now. Every panel here is story information above all, a drawing that communicates something of substance as clearly and crisply as possible. That’s true of pretty much everything Jaime’s drawn for the past two decades, but on this page the story is bracingly simple, and every panel works toward a common goal: closing the perceived space between the characters inhabiting two separate frames. Read more

TCJ Review: Prince Valiant vol. 4: 1943-1944

2011-10-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

In my most recent appearance over at The Comics Journal I banged out some serious praise for the latest volume of Hal Foster's masterwork Prince Valiant, newly reprinted by Fantagraphics. Prince Valiant is an interesting comic -- when I think about it I know abstractly that it has no case for being called the best comic ever, as it was for decades from the 1940s to the '70s or thereabouts. But whenever a new volume comes out I get so deeply lost in Foster's art and the romance of his stories and settings that I'm constantly thinking to myself "this is the best comic ever!" I guess I will have to conclude that Prince Valiant isn't NOT the best comic ever, and leave it at that. Or actually, I won't be leaving it at that, because I've got another 1500 words on it right here. Go read them.

DTU Interview: "J-Shasta"

2011-10-18T00:41:00.000-07:00

Here are the facts:

This February I interviewed the current leading man of art-comix, Christopher "CF" Forgues, at the Hooded Utilitarian website. The comments section was closed because Frank Santoro had recently suggested to me that closed comments were generally a good idea, and because I hadn't learned to laugh at HU's semi-legendary pile-ons yet. Noah Berlatsky, who edited the interview, told me that closing comments "wasn't ideal", but was gracious enough to let me have my way. Other than that, I didn't catch any flack for it.

At least not for a while. Later in the month I received an email from a person or group of people called "VCR Ltd", using the email address "cfamalgamated". In a short, articulate, but strangely tongue-in-cheek message, they praised the interview while castigating me for closing comments. These days I usually throw emails like that one straight in the trash, but back then I was more open to indulging the internet and all the weirdness specific to its artier regions, so I responded. I can't say how glad I am that I did.

Though I've never met the pen pal who's in my email contacts as "VCR" but also messages me as "T-1000 Energy Savings" and most recently "Yellow5", I had a pretty good idea of who he, or maybe she, was. The recently shuttered Comets Comets website overseen by cartoonists Blaise Larmee and Jason Overby, while notable for its oblique, occasionally impenetrable approach to comics criticism, was perhaps most famous for its inflated comments threads, which took everything from advertorial spam comments to elementary-school poetics as fair game for discussions about the high-art status of the form. These threads tended to follow online conversation about Larmee and crew to other sites, inducing conniptions in editors and readers alike. The one exception was Noah Berlatsky himself, who ran a few deeply fascinating blog posts (including a swooning critical appreciation of Overby) by someone calling themselves "Cough Syrup" on his website early in the year, apparently in the mistaken belief that they were written by CF himself -- the chosen artistic idol of Comets Comets and its associated personalities. (UPDATE: Noah informs me in comments that it wasn't until after the pieces were posted that the identity mixup, quickly corrected, occurred.)

At the same breakfast with Frank Santoro during which he suggested I close comments on my CF interview, he told me he had discovered that "Cough Syrup" was the same person responsible for all the conceptual comments on Comets Comets, as well as a CF twitter account that had recently been revealed as the work of an impersonator. "I figured it all out," he said. "It's nobody, it's some kid from Louisville." Combine all this with the bizarre CF fan email and a comment from Cough Syrup on a link to the CF interview I posted to my website and I had a pretty solid idea of who I was communicating with, even if I didn't know their age, occupation, what they looked like, their level of involvement in comics, or even whether they were male or female -- I'm always careful to use gender-neutral pronouns when emailing with this person. There wasn't anybody else I knew of who was up to the same things as Cough Syrup (or JCorp, or VCR Ltd, or T-1000 Energy Savings, or whatever else they called themselves), and I enjoyed talking to them.

Then on Oscar night in March I came home from a party blasted on bath salts, and in the wee morning hours I discovered a new message from my mysterious correspondent, containing only the text "this me" and a link to the utterly phenomenal webcomic 1981. It was a revelation: not only did the page contain some of the most beautiful digital image-making I'd seen, it also carried a bold new sense of the computerized comic's habitation of physical space. 1981 spills out over the edges of a laptop-sized screen, leaving the reader to scroll around inside its 360-degree environment, following the diagonals and waves of its lines. More than a comic, it's a landscape to explore and discover, a piece of art to interact with physically as well as intellectually. When it came time to design a page for my own webcomic, Affected, there was no doubt in my mind as to who I needed to ask for guidance.

When I wrote about 1981 back in March, I emailed its creator to ask how I should refer to the author of the work and received the answer: "1981 is created by David Gray with conceptual oversight by JCorp." When I asked a few weeks ago how I should refer to the person I was interviewing, the reply was another "this me", followed by the name "J-Shasta". The implication is that Gray/JCorp/Cough Syrup is also White Shasta, a twitter and blogspot/tumblr user who hung around Comets Comets and who Blaise Larmee describes as "an anonymous person online whom I feel close to". When I mailed my pen pal a package of old comics I'd finished with, I was given the name "Minty Frech" as the recipient -- and a post office box in Louisville, Kentucky. It would appear Frank Santoro was right all along, and this artist who uses the internet itself as a medium is really just somebody from the heartland with a modem. But looking at 1981, as well as the various imagery posted on Comets Comets by JCorp and the spectacular "confession" written by the perpetrator of the CF twitter hoax, it's also clear that this is somebody with things of note to say. A few of them follow.

MATT SENECA: 1981 is definitely a unique comic. There isn't really anything else out there in the field right now that I can compare it to. Could you talk about your influences and what you wanted to achieve by making it?

J-SHASTA: I like the idea of suspension a lot. Vincent D'Onofrio's character in The Cell and Plato's world of forms, for instance. The hero and setting of the ideal human quality: spectral.

So if I had a goal it would be to create a world that one could fall into and become static. And that could be peaceful and liquid or totally alienating. Have you ever tried DMT? Just kidding.

A couple novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pierre Guyotat that I read a few years ago really influenced the way I think about space or at least clarified thoughts I already had. I was looking at the video game Flashback some when I made that as well. I think in 1981 the characters are the images and they are twisted and become not just projections but objects within new projections. Not unlike you and me.

It's nice to think of abstract things as free zones of open possibilities but also as mechanized parts of an unstoppable progression, or in the case of 1981, a regression, where maybe the origin story turns out to be a curse.... if that makes sense to anyone but myself.

For the record I consider it unfinished.

MS: That idea of image as character is really interesting, because it gets at a core truth of comics, where we're asked to assign personalities to cartooned symbols (ie the circle and dots and squiggles that make up Charlie Brown are neurotic and depressive, et cetera). Is that a concept you came to through interacting with the comics medium, or some other way?

J-S: Less comics and more encountering conceptual art, performance art, minimalism and experimental film in college where the aesthetic representation of raw material overwhelms any kind of action or narrative or illustration of human desires...and yet, there are the desires, inside us! 'I wish I was somewhere else' for instance. Or 'I want to kill this artist'.

The vacuum abhors itself, it doesn't need me. And so it is a better character or at least a better actor than me. Because it is perfectly concealed. Without flaw. How lucky.

Wrestling with imagery that gives very very little and does not instantly impress made me value and be more aware of the process of how and why I imagined what I did in response to all kinds of stimuli, not just art. Consciousness being the vigilant animator of life.

I guess in high school I realized that investigating interesting music and movies and books to find that perfect level of being enthralled that came so much easier as a younger person was like chasing mirages and after a while you confuse the chase with the goal and yes, your things play you. Ideas too. There are many ideas that I have embraced and then shed as they lost their aura. Or maybe they shed me?
So, collecting but also file sharing and image viewing online. One thing creates the frame of reference for the next thing, as actively as a person interprets your dream for you. This is just memory colliding with the eternal present, right. I have no firm ground to stand on but the sands of time that move right through me. That's the name of an ironic post-rock revival band from 2014 that is wildly unpopular.

Maybe it's a tangent but I will say that if the Information is anything like its hosts, it does not want to be free.

And 1981 is a little 'dead inside' compared to the way engaged readers easily empathize with Tin Tin or Christopher Robin or Richie Rich or Calvin or Archie or Jason Fox. I guess there's a heart down below. If people enjoy the site/comic I imagine it's because they can see it.

MS: How did you get into comics? Can you sketch out the path that led from your first experiences with the form to creating 1981?

J-S: I discovered a worn and tattered Mickey Mouse comic on Christmas Eve in my great-grandparents' magic basement when I was 5. By the time I entered kindergarten 9 months later, it had been destroyed by mold. Comics will never replace that singular night.

If I work till I die I would like to build a giant prison one million panels tall by one million panels wide by one million panels deep of nothing but robotically mechanized mirrors and deep inside there would be a hole and overlooking the hole would be a burning tower with a solitary switch on a white plastic plate that when flipped would open all the windows and the radiation of the sun would bounce off every mirror at such an angle that the perfect image would be centered on a blue orb that floats above the hole and it would be swallowed.

MS: Sick. There's a significant push and pull between traditional craft and its absence in most of the work by Co-Mix contributors, and yours seems as much a part of that as anything else. What's your take on pictorial craft, how important do you think the painterly (for lack of a better word) values championed by Frank Santoro, among others, are to making comics?

J-S: Thanks for the compliment! I think Frank wrote a compelling conspiracy theory about outdated ideas of the harmonic balance between chaos and order in his essay series for TCJ. I enjoyed following his descent into madness!

This being said, I really like illustrators like Harry Clarke and Lynd Ward. Craft is really just a matter of how precisely you wish or are able to depict your ideas and is not strictly related to technical finesse, in my opinion. Naturally, this can involve being imprecise or sloppy or glitchy if that helps you to communicate a particular idea: such as the deterioration of the image, the limits of perception, how cool things look when they are acidy, or any other number of hi-concept themes.
Lo-fi fanatics are as grating as anyone else. It is 2011. The future may look more like an oscillating Grape Shasta rhombus that is shattering apart in infinite hi-res drips than something less computery looking uh, I guess... whewftah!

MS: How did you create the images that make up 1981?

J-S: I created 1981 using Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and MS Paint. I sketched at least half of the individual images beforehand using ballpoint pen on bar napkin or note paper to get an idea of the progression of movement and scale. The results are a mixture of freehand drawing, default shapes, cutting and pasting, and other fairly rudimentary image editing techniques. And I prayed a lot obviously.

MS: How essential is the digital medium, the online format, to your artistic process? Do you think you could make something as interesting as 1981 without a computer?

J-S: It is not essential but digital space is shaping my brain my image my voice and perceptions in only the newest and freshest 2.0+ ways imaginable so until we break through 0 and 1 to -1 or ∞ or whatever lies in wait that can be represented by a couple squiggly lines, I feel compelled to acknowledge the present horizon that we are collectively cresting like a pack of lemmings wearing sunglasses and drinking Surge and playing a computer game where we control the livelihood of adorable avatars of ourselves that is named Lemmings. But I like all kinds of media, even the old variety.

There is no reason for me to hang my hat on 1981. I was not even born then for one thing. With or without a computer whatever I do next will be better. And better and better. Don't u feel like we r all improving?

[When you say without a computer I take that strictly to mean that no editing or finishing is done on a computer and the internet is not used to share documentation of the event/object. Is this even possible? At this point I would have to be a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it to escape the outstretched fist of the web. But like anyone, my dreams are art and they are much better than 1981. Or the real world in general at times. I am sorry that they are not for sale.]

MS: Right now we have a steadily increasing number of comics that interact with digital processes on some level or another. How do you think digital tools and the internet are going to change the comics medium as a whole?

J-S: In the future more comics will appear shiny.

MS: You might be best known for impersonating CF on twitter for a few months (which you then wrote my favorite blog post of the year about). That post, though, didn't really give a clear reason as to why you began impersonating him in the first place. Care to tell us now?

J-S: Over the last couple years, Chris Forgues transformed from respected artist to pied piper to icon. I wanted to both reanimate and re-martyrize CF's sacred digital corpse using an uncomfortable social media platform. If that is not comic(s/al), I do not know what is.

MS: You've contributed various images and designs to the Co-Mix blog. What attracted you about that particular site and group of people?

J-S: I originally read the graphic novella Young Lions as a ghost story. Since then it has been revealed that there really was a 'Holly' and apparently he died last summer. I believe in resurrection and so I attempted to commune with the survivors and revive his lost spirit. It's still unclear if these efforts were worth it. Only God knows.

MS: You've also told me you're the person responsible for most of the "conceptual comments" on that blog and the articles about it and its participants that have popped up on other sites. Those things have fascinated me for a while, and infuriated plenty of Important Comics People -- what is the idea behind them?

J-S: Between October 2010 and late spring 2011, I contributed over 400 comments under various aliases to the Co-Mix (aka CometsComets) weblog. During this period of time I commented anonymously at many other web sites under posts related to the Co-Mix crew, at times criticizing those characters in a very hostile manner.

It is hard to choose one single motivating factor behind all of this activity, but one of them is the spike in popularity of 4Loko. The other is a desperate reaction to the factors that made the death of NASA and SETI possible. Basically, I was driven by the fear of silence.

MS: Do you know why Comets Comets shut down?

J-S: Gosh Matt, I just want to go Home.

You can check out 1981 here, and J-Shasta's comics-as-criticism posts on the Hooded Utilitarian here.

UPDATE: conceptual commenter SCHOOL's Blogspot profile yields a webcomic (here) that appears to date back to 2001.

Kirby's Taint

2011-10-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

ha ha, I know right?

Yes, Jack Kirby is amazing. I love his comics, and I love the frenetic, idea-driven style of comic he created and eventually perfected. What I don't love is one specific outgrowth of his influence. Before Kirby, the Platonic ideals of action comics art were Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, both essentially realist figure artists. A massive part of Kirby's genius was his arrival at a way of cartooning the human figure in motion, using foreshortening, large areas of spotted black, and his own titanic style to create a convincing simulation of reality that owed precious little to realist anatomy. That's not to say Kirby didn't understand realist values -- his early comics testify to at least as good an eye for the figure as the average Golden Age artist, and he's on record about the lessons he learned from both Foster and Raymond.

But the artists who inherited Kirby's sphere of greatest influence -- that is, superhero comics -- had a new ideal to work from. Kirby's followers are almost uniformly victims of his success. No action artist since has assembled a cartooned style that presents dynamic figure drawings as successfully, and the Foster/Raymond fallback of inserting realism where dynamism falls short has warped into something that simply doesn't work. Rather than wedding realist, workable anatomy to Kirbyist gesture, composition, and dynamism, the common solution seems to be a combination of Kirby anatomical distortion (the over-muscled men and blow-up women stereotypical of superhero comics) to more realist, observation framing.

Example:

The tiny head, lack of neck, thick wrists, squat posture, and tree trunk legs work in Kirby's version because it's a sharply foreshortened action shot -- not only are some body parts hurtling toward the camera and some thrown back, the anatomy is less likely to be noticeable as non-realist (which it is) because we're paying attention to the pose. And the impact of the picture is actually enhanced by seeing the figure thrown out of proportion -- it's like hearing a musical dischord, it puts you right on the edge of your seat.

The modern version (example above by Olivier Coipel, who I actually think is better than most and don't intend to call out specifically) pulls from all Kirby's anatomical distortions and none of his dynamism. A completely static pose is only made more problematic by the obvious lack of attention to realist anatomy. Though Kirby's version is much more broadly cartooned, it's a far more convincing piece of artwork because it's fully aware of what it's doing. It has an internal logic that the work done in his shadow lacks, with its strange combination of observational framing and dynamic figure. Kirby's characters always moved, and as such they were designed for constant motion. Freeze them in place and they fall apart, as today's superhero art is showing on a weekly basis.

My advice to the modern action artist: go look at some Hal Foster comics before you get to Kirby. We can't all be visionaries, you know.

Your Wednesday Sequence 28

2011-10-12T16:47:00.001-07:00

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (2009), page 23. Al Columbia.

I wrote my latest Robot 6 column on the page above. If that's a gag strip, and its action certainly mimics one, it is friggin' black humor. But look at it! Al Columbia at his queasy finest! I really got going when I talked about it too, so click this link to read all the thoughts on comics as a wildly inaccurate, non-realist ("unrealist"?) tool for representing reality it brought up in me. Is sequential art the medium of visionaries? I think so. First paragraph below:

Of course, no matter how realistically drawn or meticulously framed they get, no comics can even come close to accurately depicting reality; or even approximating it, really. When the human eye takes in the work of comics’ great photorealists — Alex Raymond, Neal Adams, Alex Ross — the message it sends to the brain speaks of a certain closeness to the look of the real, but the first thing it tells us is always that we’re looking at a drawing. This is why comics seem somehow lacking whenever they position themselves in competition with film: what that medium depicts is reality, stripped of a third dimension and re-presented at a later date. Comics, which can never escape their fundamental identity as works produced by human hands, are a medium of approximation, forever suggesting the existence of their content, never crossing the line into literal reproduction of anything that’s actually happened in the real world. Read more

"Hipsters"

2011-10-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

I made a new comic and posted it here. Part art-comix, part autobio, part illustrated response to the new feature film "Drive", which is amazing but not as good as its soundtrack. (Holy shit, that soundtrack you guys.) It goes way rougher and cartoonier than I usually do, which was a fun change -- brought on in part by my current reading project of all the Kramers Ergot back issues, and in part by happening to have some Frank Quitely 2020 Visions comics sitting on my drawing table for the past few days. Also drinking while drawing. Anyway, the thing is called "Hipsters" and it's about hipsters, which seems like the most appropriate topic to make an art-comic about. It's really pretty. Go look at it!

Foster's Physiognomic Faces

2011-10-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

I started in on volume 4 of Fantagraphics' new Prince Valiant reprint series yesterday. Best long-running serial action comic of all time? You better come with something Kirby if you want to convince me otherwise. Prince Valiant might just be the comic that held the "greatest of all time" title in the popular opinion for the longest period of time, and while I can't really make the argument for that, it still does what it did just as well as when it was first published, and what it did is what action comics (including pretty much everything superhero) have tried to do since -- a time period that covers the entire history of the comic book format. As far as beautifully drawn escapist entertainment goes, I literally can't think of anything better.

Hal Foster's comics also have more of a basis in high realist portraiture than just about anything that came after. Prince Valiant builds impressively fleshed-out characters for an action comic, and a lot of the heavy lifting is accomplished by Foster's breathtakingly observed close-up shots, which basically paste personality traits onto the faces they depict. In itself that isn't so special -- it's one of the things cartooning's designed to do, after all -- but it's a much more difficult task to accomplish given the level of realism Foster worked at. In a Foster comic every face is a construction of active muscles beneath layers of skin and (often) facial hair, themselves covered over by all manner of ornamental hats and helmets and headdresses... but the distinct features, as well as the characteristics they're meant to communicate, shine through regardless.

Given the globetrotting-adventure aspect of Prince Valiant, it's inevitable that representatives of many nations and races are given the full-panel portrait treatment, which means another impressive if sometimes slightly problematic aspect of Foster's artistry ends up in the spotlight. The way he constructed those faces varied depending on the heritage of the individual he was drawing; not so remarkable when oe character's European and another Asian, but a fascinating and refreshing testament to the consideration the artist put into his strip when the differences between a German face and a Swedish one make it onto the page. The downside of this is that Foster did a good amount of tiptoeing along the edge of racial caricature, but his emphasis on realistic physical construction kept him a great deal more reigned in than most of his contemporaries. (Except when Prince Valiant went to Africa, oh boy.) Anyway, I've been having a great time looking at how well Foster nails the physical differences between his pan-European cast -- differences too subtle for most cartoonists' styles to do much more than barely hint at. And honestly, there's lessons to be had from the way he mixes caricature into realism for his less savory pictures of non-European characters too. So with that said, below is a gallery of Foster faces and their corresponding nationalities. Check it out.

English (this was the English-Canadian Foster's default facial type for "noble" Europeans of indeterminate background)

Italian

Tunisian

Turkish (ahem)

West African (double ahem, though I suppose Foster deserves credit for keeping his caricatured Africans in the background. This image, printed at about the size of the head on a dime, is the biggest size he drew one at in Prince Valiant. Which is a problem in and of itself, but one preferable to the kind of racist grotesquerie cartoonists reguarly indulged in in the 1940s...)

German

Palestinian

Norwegian

Finnish (I know, weird right?)

French

Scottish

Mongolian (considering the "Yellow Menace"-styled caricatures of Asian faces that were de rigeur in comics during the World War II years, this is a marvel of restraint.)

So there you go. Hal Foster kill them all.

Your Wednesday Sequence 27

2011-10-05T01:40:00.000-07:00

Wolverine #3 (1982), page 9. Frank Miller.

Yes folks, it's Miller Time on the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. The obvious choice for a Frank Miller sequence would have been one of his meticulously choreographed fight scenes, but try saying something original about one of those besides "damn son, this is meticulously choreographed!" So instead I chose this page from Miller's most high profile drawn-but-not-written comic, the original Wolverine miniseries, a collab with the ever-verbose Chris Claremont. I riffed a little on the heavy Japanese influence visible in Miller's approach to the sequence, and how well it deals with the problem of Claremont's wordy writing, which according to the comments section elevates this page to "literary cinema"! Holy shit! Anyway click here to read it, or if you're really that on the the fence about the whole thing, here's a paragraph to get you going:

For all that Frank Miller deserves as much credit as any other American cartoonist for bringing Japanese comics to these shores, the intersections between his own comics and manga are somewhat surprisingly limited. It’s obvious from a flip through a vintage Miller comic that he’s fascinated by the work of Goseki (Lone Wolf and Cub) Kojima and Katsuhiro (Akira) Otomo — but beyond that powerful one-two punch, and maybe a bit of Golgo 13‘s Takao Saito, the chain of Japanese influence on Miller’s prime-period work is either subtle or nonexistent. Which doesn’t have to be any kind of problem; after all, the Miller of the early-mid 1980s was conducting a balancing act with the cartooning mannerisms of three continents, unifying the systems of visual codes used by comics from America, Europe, and Japan into a single style before anyone else even thought to do it. But it’s nice to see Miller go for a more purely Japanese moment on this page, one that calls back a lot further into that artistic tradition than his usual action manga debt-paying goes. Read more

Blaze of Youth

2011-10-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

One of the things that separates the Great Cartoonists, capital jee capital see, from the rest of the great cartoonists milling around the comics industry, is the quality of their ephemera. Comics has enough one-off masterpieces of various lengths to keep you busy for a decade, but finding markably lesser work created by those masterpieces' authors that still has something of substance to offer can get pretty difficult. I'm talking about comics like McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Tezuka's Astro Boy, Ware's Quimby the Mouse... work that forms the lower echelons of a master's canon but remains essential for what it tells us about its artist. To cut to the chase, I'm talking about comics like Jaime Hernandez's 1983 short "Hopey", which succeeds as a piece of comics on its own merits but is far more interesting taken with the benefit of hindsight, as a pivotal step in Jaime's multi-decade career.

More than any other comic Jaime ever drew, "Hopey" feels youthful. As far as the story goes, that's got its ups and downs: it gains plenty from the palpable energy imbued in all Jaime's "Locas" stories, but it's dogged by the cloying cuteness the artist couldn't quite drop until 1987 or thereabouts (which, not coincidentally, is when he started producing real masterworks as well as fascinating curios). Where the feel of exuberance and freedom really benefits the comic is in the art, which for the first time ditches the Noel Sickles/Steve Ditko illustrative bent of Jaime's earliest work for the length of an entire story, stripping away excess linework to center itself around the graphic boldness of black shapes set in white space. (Footnote here, cause I can't resist: why does nobody ever talk about the numerous intersections between Jaime's work during this period, when Love & Rockets was the alternative comic, and that of Paul Smith, who was drawing the superhero comic, X-Men, right at the same time?)

There's a massive sense of excitement at play in this comic, the unhinged glee of a kid with a new toy. Jaime's early sci-fi stories follow in the mold of Roy Crane and Bernard Krigstein, forever searching for a way to put a single line in place of many, to imply texture or drapery with a few stray marks. As his skill set grew, though, more and more Alex Toth leaked into his pages, which began leaving orchestrated areas of linework behind in favor of single, contorting inked areas that impled more and more of a panel's contents. "Hopey" sustains this approach for a full eight pages, using hatched linework almost exclusively as a gray tone and relying on sparse, solid blacks and whites to put over pictorial information. It's an approach that Jaime has been refining ever since -- by this point he's got it down to such a virtuosic system that it's tough to argue the contention that he's the greatest B&W cartoonist of all time, even if you don't agree with it. Here, though, it's a novelty, and watching Jaime piece together a beginning, middle, and end without deviating from it is like watching a talented amateur walk a tightrope. The moments or trepidation and hitches in balance are what make it so exciting.

The most immediate advantage of Jaime's chiaroscuro approach is its potential for high drama, which is taken direct, frequent advantage of in "Hopey": this comic is lit like a Fritz Lang movie, full of sprawling shadow blots and razors of white light cutting through black. It's a far cry from the unerringly honest Southern California lux perpetua of Jaime's current work, and it overdramatizes the slice-of-life content regularly, but the dizzying smack of a comic in which a car passing by a few kids walking down the street lights up the panels like an atomic explosion is undeniable. Just about every drawing in this story is a new chance taken, an idea about minimalism and how best to show something with as little as possible. It doesn't always work (as in the panel above), but there's a palpable joy of drawing at play here. You can almost picture Jaime (then all of 24 years old) at the drawing table, excitedly figuring out the drastic effect that the next miniscule change in light source is going to have on the way he draws his characters and their surroundings. Or at least I can, cause I feel the same thing all the time. Tonal appropriateness comes in a distant second to the experiment of the thing in "Hopey", which sees an artist weighing the tools that would eventually lead him to stylistic mastery for the first time.

It does all come together and work in a few places, though, and when it does it's pretty spectacular. Seeing the young Jaime's enthusiasm for dynamic shots and impactful sequencing (he hadn't shaken off all the influence of genre action comics yet, not by a long shot) combined with the older Jaime's poised sense of reserve and economy is pretty breathtaking. The steady balance in how the bright-to-black fade above is orchestrated, or the rhyming areas of horizontal white blotching on the car and vapor trails below -- these are the building blocks of something much greater, an artist spinning out the most assured work of his career to date, discovering it on the page, unfiltered and not yet put in any kind of practical working order.

"Hopey" veers back and forth between masterful and mediocre time after time in eight pages, which probably would have made for a frustrating read at the time. But reading it almost thirty years after the fact, with one of the greatest bodies of work in comics history rolled out in its wake, makes that exact inconsistency the joy of the thing. The gusto put into panels that miss the mark as often as they connect is part of the fun. Musical analogies are always apt when you're discussing Jaime's vintage work, and this story reads like a demo tape or early album by an iconic band listens: perhaps not so satisfying on its own, but the moments when everything locks into place and calls back to high points yet to come are a thrill all their own. "Hopey" is the place where Jaime first really gave a workout to the tools he'd later use to do this

and just recently used to do this

and seeing that is something you can't get anywhere else.

Sacrifices

2011-09-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

When you're doing the whole "life beyond comics" thing, every little once in a while something pops out of your interactions with other ideas and hits you as something that dialogues with the world of comics. Superhero fans see their icons as avatars of the same forces personified in latter days by gods and demigods, partisans of art-comix draw direct lines from the work of canonical painters to modern-day zine makers, and very much so forth. Well hey guys, I got a new one for ya!

Lately I've been reading some about the sacrifice of living beings (often humans) in ancient societies, and more specifically scapegoating. The modern use of "scapegoat" as a single life representative of all that's wrong with a culture doesn't quite catch the term as it worked back when it was actually a thing. More often than not, the human scapegoats chosen for sacrifice or ritual slaughter weren't the reviled outcasts with nothing of value to contribute. When you kill those guys it's culling, which is a like a grosser version of doing the laundry: not an affirmative community-building exercise so much as just making sure your shit isn't getting all nasty. The sacrifices that were seen as serving a positive function usually centered around the killing of a fully assimilated, respected member of the community, one who embodied its values and morals.

Ritual sacrifice (again, culling is a different thing) is a rare occurrence in societies where subsistence is a difficulty, for obvious reasons. In cultures where waste is more or less acceptable, where a surplus has been built up and excess is considered a force to be reckoned with, it's much more common. The basic idea is to kill someone who represents not something bad, but too much of a good thing -- drawing a line to point out the place where something seen as a positive cultural value becomes a negative. An overzealous warrior, an uncommonly fertile woman, a precocious child... be too much of what you represent to people and you become not just expendable, but an example to be made. Think about the word as it's used outside of killing: giving up something important for the greater good. The ethos of sacrifice remains part and parcel of modern American culture: see everything from a nation of McDonald's eaters' revulsion for the obese to the moral condemnations of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and My Lai, which just killed the enemy way too good to be stood. Hypocrisy or demarcating the boundaries of acceptable behavior? U-Decide!

Can you see where I'm going with this one, or do I need to provide a few Helpful Examples?

If you insist...

EC COMICS

That picture up there is "A Man Taken By Surprise", an oil painting done by Bernard Krigstein, the leading artistic light of EC Comics, right around the time the company he worked for was being systematically dismantled by the medium's new self-censorship board. Estes Kefauver's 1954 Senate hearings to determine whether or not comics were the cause of American juvenile delinquency (verdict: unproven) were themselves a form of ritual slaughter, though more of a culling than anything else, assigning all blame for a massively complicated societal problem to a form of artistic expression and attempting to discontinue its practice in order to solve said problem. But what happened in Kefauver's wake was perhaps comics' first, and certainly its most historically significant sacrifice. Rather than submit to government censorship, comics publishers banded together to create a list of regulations that would ensure nothing even remotely objectionable would make it to the pages of a printed comic again.

The new Comics Code included provisions that seemed intended specifically to shut down EC, then far and away the most popular line of books, as well as the closest thing work done in the comic book format had come at the time to legitimate art. In essence, crime and horror comics, EC's bread and butter, were completely illegalized, cutting down one of comics' best ever lines in its prime as well as dealing the idea of comics as art a blow from which it would take well over a decade to recover from. EC was a dangerous company not just for the high murder-and-dismemberment quotient of its most popular titles, but also for its near-monopoly on artistic talent, the freedom it allowed its artists, its tendency to discuss the base, nasty realities of the hard-capitalist comics industry in its letter columns, and the gorgeously illustrated polemics for racial harmony and social change it led a string of Shock SuspenStories issues with. EC was too good for comics: too literate for a pulp medium, too controversial for an economy based entirely on depriving kids of their dimes and nickels, and too powerful for less successful publishers to deal with. Though it personified a massive amount what was good -- and accepted as good -- about comics as an art form, there was a point at which the community at large believed that if EC didn't go, it would be the entire industry. And so it went.

ROB LIEFELD

In the comics community's internet age, there's no more reviled cartoonist than Rob Liefeld. Though his comics still tend to sell okay, the drop-off from his heyday at Image Comics has been millions of readers, quite a few of whom seem to truly hate his guts. Of course, the dropoff in readership for comics in general since 1991 or thereabouts also numbers in the millions, thanks to the collapse of the market for speculation on "collector's item" issues and an endless amount of terrible comics pumped out to service said market. There's a desperate current underlying a huge amount of conversation about comics, a hysterical tone that whines where did all the readers go? The reality -- bad comics and worse marketing -- is far too systemic to be changed without getting rid of at least ninety percent of people employed by publishers of sequential art in America, which of course will never happen. So in the blighted field comics has become, it's much more convenient to find a whipping boy, someone who rode the rise to a high enough level that he can be blamed for the fall.

Enter Liefeld, who set sales records with hyperkinetic, often logic-free comics whose amplified exteriors belie a deep knowledge of exactly what the commercially lucrative audience of teen and pre-teen boys is looking for. The claim that Liefeld's massively copied but never quite duplicated style is what "ruined comics" is as common as any topic of conversation in comics circles, and blaming the entire economic cycle of boom and bust that accompanied the speculator craze on him is similarly de rigeur. In this, Liefeld is a scapegoat as we use the term today: an individual who, for the community, embodies all that's gone wrong since better times.

What qualifies Liefeld as a sacrifice in the more traditional sense is the substance of the criticism against him, which focuses not on his exploitation of the artificial speculator market, but his style of comics making. Both the vastness and extent of fan hatred for Liefeld come close to paradoxical when one considers how easily the majority of comics being published can be tarred with the same brush that covers Liefeld over daily. Criticism of his furious, line-heavy, anatomy-free art style can be applied to fan darling Jim Lee word for word, and the claim that Liefeld's comics are caffeinated, meaningless exhibitions of yelling an fighting is true of just about everything that comes out from a major publisher today. Strangely enough, Liefeld's purity of commitment to liney art and high-octane actionfest stories is what marks him out for abnegation by the very audience that eats such things up. The fan culture's general hatred toward Liefeld is as potent an example of sacrifice to demarcate cultural boundaries as any. We'll canonize overworked art and harebrained stories, the message goes, but only up to the point represented by the work of this one individual.

ALAN MOORE

If Liefeld's rejection by the same fans that once worshipped him is a continuing ritual to inure mainstream comics against what's seen as the "low", fan culture's recent rejection of its one-time chief deity, Alan Moore, can be seen as a similar action brought on by a fear of the "high". In his mid-1980s commercial prime, Moore mashed up what was and remains the beating heart of American comics, the superhero genre, with virtuosic displays of literary technique and psychological theorizing. What was even more remarkable than the craft value of Moore's comics, however, was fandom's wildly positive response to them. In doing the same thing Liefeld did (albeit in a very different way) and showing up superhero comics for the hollow farces they all too often were and are, Moore struck a nerve, more or less singlehandedly elevating the quality that fans expected from their superhero stories.

In the masterpieces Watchmen and Miracleman, superheroes were painted as decidedly inferior to, and indeed unworkable within, this new intellectualized approach to action comics. This was the part everybody missed, and despite the occasional brilliance of Moore's post-'80s work outside the corporate genre comics, the overwhelming fan support has never followed Moore into alternative comics. In recent years Moore himself has lashed out at the questionable business practices and low quality native to the superhero industry in a sequence of bewildered, frustrated, but generally eloquent and well-reasoned interviews, fan reaction to which has been overwhelmingly negative. Basically, the comics community has turned its back on Alan Moore, with current fan darling Jason Aaron delivering a hilariously childish, generally well-recieved attack on Moore and literary-superhero-writer heir apparent Grant Morrison making reductive comments about his work into a minor cottage industry. The same people that elevated Moore chose to stay behind rather than follow him beyond the small-minded kind of stories he made his name by reconsidering, and in his absence he's become a mockery, an example of the bad things in store for those who question the governing paradigms of comics, both in fandom and industry. Moore was lauded for telling comics to reach higher, but at some point he just went too high for most readers' comfort.

***

In a sense the ebbs and flows of consumer acceptance and commercial feasibility discussed above are simply native to capitalist industry, which mainstream comics, at least, is very much a part of. (Alternative comics, with its reliance on government grants and emphasis on community support for less-than-stellar work, has its own set of problems.) But the venom with which the comics community greets its scapegoats, and the willingness with which it puts old heroes to the torch, goes beyond simple booms and busts into something more atavistic. We are a sacrificial culture, one that has real trouble burying work that's no longer useful without spitting on its grave, or marking out communal boundaries without unnecessary vehemence. Comics culture's most recent sacrifice, that of Jack Kirby's heirs after they lost the lawsuit by which they hoped to reclaim their father's creations from Marvel Entertainment, may just have been an all-time high in reprehensibility, with fans crawling out of the woodwork to declare allegiance to their spending habits over giving what was due to the man who provided the material for them.

None of this is to say that comics doesn't also practice scapegoating, but that's too big a world for one blog post to even approach. If there's a point to be garnered from shining the spotlight on the sacrifice phenomenon, it certainly isn't anything cheery or positive. Maybe it's just that this is why it's bad when an entire art form can't garner anything but a tiny, fanatical audience: the general shittiness of people living together in a confined space begins to sink in. Or maybe it's that we are such a culture of excess that we are choking ourselves, and really do need sacrifices of some kind, firm boundaries between the comics that are allowed to exist and the ones that have to be done away with, solid statements that there can be and often is too much of a good thing.

You think?

Your Wednesday Sequence 26

2011-09-28T18:39:00.000-07:00

New York: The Big City (1981), page 6. Will Eisner.

Over at my Robot 6 column this week I wrote on a page from Will Eisner's criminally underrated graphic novel New York, which has more great examples of one-page comics storytelling than anything short of a great newspaper-strip compilation. I talked about the uniqueness of Eisner's career (he was a man of many hats, to say the least) and how interesting it is that he basically used the same style through all of its phases. Also his formal mastery -- just look how controlled and clear that page is! Anyway, go read the article, it starts like this:

Will Eisner’s transition from superhero comics production lineman to game-changing action comics auteur to early master of the graphic novel is really something of a stunning career path when you think about it. It happened over such a long period of time that it isn’t seen as the kind of bold, unexpected move David Mazzucchelli’s sudden dismissal of Marvel heroes for one-color art comix is; but past Mazzucchelli there isn’t really anyone else who’s had a career in comics that traced so many disparate paths. Imagine, for context, Bryan Hitch cranking out Blaise Larmee-esque underground webcomics 10 years from now, or Jim Lee announcing his intent to take the reins as the new artist of Prison Pit. Read more

Sequence Is Magic

2011-09-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed Jason Shawn Alexander's comics quite a bit, but I think his paintings are even better. I found the image above on his website -- details from a few of his paintings smashed together in one image, not intended as a comic per se. But it works incredibly well as a piece of sequential art, a beautiful comics page. As impressive as each painting is, put together they harmonize, dialogue with each other, even though they weren't made with the intent that that would be what they'd do. Put in sequence, they can't help it. There's an inherent appeal to the comics form no matter what's in the pictures, to simply seeing different sized rectangles set onto one big canvas together. The image above, an accidental comic that still looks incredible, is a great demonstration of that.

Your Wednesday Sequence 25

2011-09-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Tintin In Tibet (1959), page 15 panels 7-9. Herge.

In my latest Robot 6 column, I compared the effects the most influential practitioners of American, Japanese, and European comics (that's Kirby, Tezuka, and Herge) have had on their art form. I also talked about the density of comics pages and how little that factor seems to be thought about or talked about. Then I wrote on the gorgeous sequence above, which might just be my favorite thing Herge has drawn. You can read it all here. Starts like this:

Figuring out the density of a page of comics is one of the most important challenges that a cartoonist faces between idea and finished product, but it’s also one that’s frustratingly tricky to talk or even think about. How does one measure how much happens on a page other than pointing and saying “this much?” And how does a cartoonist decide on the optimum amount of story to convey with each canvas? I’d hazard a guess that most of the time for both reader and creator, these aren’t conscious practices, and the varying densities of different cartoonists’ approaches simply occur rather than being plotted out.

The vast majority of American comics on both sides of the mainstream/alternative divide stick to the rhythm of (roughly) six panels to a (roughly) three-tiered page, sequenced from character action to character action, with maybe three seconds of time depicted in-frame and five or so passing in each gutter. Japanese comics tend to move a little quicker: a few less panels per page, a bit less time taken up in each individual one. European comics, on the other hand, typically have much more density than their American counterparts, with more panels per tier, more tiers per page, and more story time taken up in each image. Some of the difference in density of information can be chalked up to the average size the comics are published at: in Japan, digest-size books are most commonly the final state of comics, so less is crammed onto the page than in American “comic-size” comics, which in turn can fit less than album-size European books. Read more

On The Trail of Martin Millard

2011-09-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

My back-issue find of the year surfaced at the comic shop in Los Angeles, wrapped in painted Jerry Moriarty covers and printed on heavy black-and-white paper stock that recalls the California public school textbooks of the mid-1990s. It's issue number 2 of the Ben Katchor-edited Picture Story magazine, an anthology of comics and theoretical pronouncements that takes up the high intellectual demands placed on the reader by Art Spiegelman's Raw (generally accepted as the opening salvo in the explicit positioning of Comics As Art), but with none of that publication's reactionary posturing or uptown snootiness. By the time of Picture Story's 1986 release, Raw had done a great deal of the hard work for it: no longer did a magazine of comics have to distance itself from superheroes or address the worthwhile aspects of commercial comics' history. All Picture Story does is present the form as it is and could be, with short after stunning short putting forth a wide-ranging but aesthetically unified vision of comics as the medium for the "common thinking man", approachable and unpretentious but full of ideas about drawings and stories that can't quite be contained by any other art form. In that sense, it's one of the earliest examples of the modern comics anthology, in which the material's worth is a given and all that matters is the context and presentation of it.

But the most surprising thing about Picture Story #2 is that amid a treasure trove of stellar work by All-Time Great Cartoonists like Katchor, Moriarty, and Mark Beyer (not to mention the mind-expanding contributions of Peter Blegvad), the best comics come from a complete unknown by the name of Martin Millard.

Two short stories by Millard, one five pages and one four, bookend the issue, unified by thematic similarity. The first, "Truck Journey", is exactly what it sounds like, a wordless document of a delivery truck driver's passage from London to Dover through the thick darkness of an English night. The driver stops for a cup of coffee, continues, drops off his delivery at the despatch office in Dover, and spends the night in a hostel before refueling his truck and heading down the road once more. The quiet tone and observational quality of the tightly gridded pages bring Chris Ware to mind, but the flawless mid-20th century period detail and clusters of dense, energetic pen lines also have much to do with the work of Eddie Campbell. Millard's "Truck Journey" pages balance flow and density with an ease that's all his own, however, switching from strings of close-up coffeehouse snapshots to the widescreen gloom of a truck barreling through moonglow, headlights blasting pure white onto the road as it blurs by. The pull of the comic comes less from the story information than the impulse to see how Millard will draw whatever he draws next -- artist and subject are perfectly matched here, the craggy, casual virtuosity of Millard's pictures bringing a pin-point clarity to the gray English highways we can all see hazily somewhere in our imaginations.

There is an intense tangibility to Millard's penwork here, which trails long, gently unspooling lines through open areas of white space and stamps down bold shapes filled with the near-black of his tight crosshatching. These are drawings whose existence as lines made on paper is just as important as their depictive quality: the fuzz of light shadowing marks on a pant cuff or the blots of stubble on a pubgoer's cheek are instances of ink that catch the eye as much as the full effect of the panels holding them. Millard's unruled panel borders, his use of hatching to fill black space, and the resolutely handmade stray marks scuffled across his backgrounds all help bring the comic close to the aesthetic of early observational film -- wavery, grainy, and somehow truer to life than what our eyes show us most of the time. Though an aching nostalgia runs through "Truck Journey", it isn't due to any sentimentalism on Millard's part. Rather, the world he depicts is so beautiful and feels so close at hand that the reader can't help but wish to have been a part of it whenever it was real.

"A Trip To Wales", the second story, goes even further into the documentary roughness of "Train Journey", stripping away even the thin coat of illustrative polish covering that story and leaving the bare bones of a diary entry in comics -- one which isn't quite discernible as either fact or fiction, taking up residence in between in the territory occupied by the best yarns. This time the journey referred to in the title is taken by train, from London to Milford in the Welsh countryside. The narrator (who himself is never glimpsed, acting strictly as the conduit for the reader's viewing of his story) watches the rain and passing stations from the train, eats "a moderate meal at a high price" aboard it, debarks in Milford, meets an old friend at a pub, suppers at his house, and then takes the train back home. No small amount of warmth is curled in each 20-panel page, the dreariness of industrial Wales counterpointed by Millard's studies of the human bustle beneath the scaffolding and derricks and his detailed descriptions of the food and drink partaken of during the journey. Here, unlike in the previous comic, the story is everything, its smallest wrinkles brought to paneled life for our consideration.

As before, Millard's drawing is the real delight, though what sticks out about "A Trip To Wales" is the jettisoning of the stylistic mastery that runs through "Truck Journey". Each small panel is sketched out with incredibly broad strokes, a few lines implying whole landscapes, the compositions pulled strictly from the world as seen, the camera mounted firmly on the ground and its subjects brought to life with little more than a scribble or two. The casual grace and confidence behind Millard's line is hugely impressive: the story is like a master class in showing as much as possible with as little as possible, and the varying density of Millard's scratched marks betrays a nuanced understanding of tone and texture. The scenes Millard depicts are never less than perfectly clear and readable, as are the pen-in-hand gestures that brought them to life (the squiggles of rendering line in every frame slant down and to the left, giving the whole thing a feeling of speed and unity that makes it hard work indeed to stop reading). Rather than word balloons or text boxes, Millard captions each of his drawings with a few lines of text, handwritten with the same brusque elegance that powers the drawings. It's a trick Kyle Baker would make much use of later in his career, and the breakdown from the jagged refinement of "Truck Journey" to the freehand ebullience of "A Trip To Wales" recalls the similar breakdown that occurs halfway through Frank Santoro's Storeyville -- but Millard was there first in both cases, with these two remarkable comics from 1986.

I came away from Picture Story #2 convinced I had discovered the work of a bona fide Unheralded Genius, a cartoonist whose work stood shoulder to shoulder with that of Katchor and Moriarty while pointing forward to that of luminaries like Ware and Santoro. However, scouring the internet for further Millard appearances was next to useless: he had apparently dropped off the map after his brief surfacing in Picture Story. I could find no comics by him for sale, few mentions of Picture Story and none of his work in it, and hardly any clues as to who the man even was.

But there is another fragment of Millard art in Picture Story #2: a quarter-page advertisement for a minicomic called "Wartime Experiences", showing an observational two-panel gag strip about anti-German paranoia drawn in a style somewhere between that of the two stories featured in the anthology itself. A crudely handwritten note following the comic encourages readers to send four dollars to the Picture Story offices in Battery Park. 1986 was the early days of minicomics, and 25 years is a relative eon for a xeroxed, low-run piece of sequential art to survive over. Needless to say, I myself have never seen a copy of Wartime Experiences, and my attempts to purchase one using the internet were utterly fruitless.

However, I was able to track down what seems to be the sole mention of the comic online. English zine artist Ed Pinsent's online gallery of UK minicomics contains the scan of Wartime Experiences' cover seen below. And not only that, it has information on two other British minis that Millard contributed to. The first is 1989's Ugly Mug #3, which also featured work by Brendan McCarthy collaborator and Fantagraphics publishee Carol Swain. The second is 1988's Fast Fiction #25, the page for which gives the most compelling clues I've found as to Millard's existence beyond his nine pages in Picture Story. The table of contents listed reveals that Millard drew a three-page story called "Sudden Disappearance" for the issue, and the footnote Pinsent provides states "Martin Millard, also a painter, was associated with Jerry Moriarty’s Picture Story magazine." Here, finally, was a concrete link between Millard's brilliant entree into American comics and some kind of presence in the UK comics scene.

From what I understand, Fast Fiction was a long-running minicomics anthology and mail order service founded by notable critic Paul Gravett in the early '80s before being handed off to Pinsent. Sold at bimonthly comics conventions in Westminster and through the post, Fast Fiction was a highly visible and well-remembered platform for the minicomics aesthetic in the UK, as well as a home for early work from prominent artists like Swain and Eddie Campbell. And, as it happened, Martin Millard. Martin Millard, who was also a painter.

There is a website -- oddly designed and apparently rarely updated -- showcasing the paintings of a UK-based Martin Millard, but at such small size and low resolution that it's next to impossible to discern any mannerisms and hiccups of style that might give a clue as to whether this was the same man who drew those brilliant comics a few decades ago. There is no mention of any comics work there, and it's a common enough name. To make things even more perplexing, the website's "Information" page is completely blank. But one of the headings under which Millard's paintings are listed under on the main page is "Multiple Images", a tab which leads to a small gallery of pictures like the one below, all reproduced at miniscule size -- but comics nonetheless, paintings of different subjects set into sequence on a single page, with something of the brusqueness that characterizes the image-to-image sequencing in "Train Journey".

A bit more searching unearthed mention of a Millard art exhibition in Fall 2010 at Potterton Books in Kensington, entitled "Town & Country" -- and a PDF copy of the catalog for the show. The catalog's brief introduction refers to Millard as a "local artist". It also reveals that he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975, which places him at the school while Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman were teaching classes there, only a few years before students like Mark Newgarden, Drew Friedman, and Kaz took Spiegelman lecture courses that turned into Raw contributions. If ever there was a place for a cartoonist to have come from, this was it.

Finally, the Potterton Books website led me to this painting, scanned at a size big enough for it to be scoured for clues as to its artist's past. The casual mastery of the black marks are the same, as is the easy facility with shadow and light. But what really does it is the scrawled note captioning the painting, which tells the viewer that this is "13 Mallard Street, Chelsea, the house where the author of Winnie The Pooh lived." It takes a bit of study, but it's recognizable as the same hand that captioned each panel of "A Trip To Wales" with warm, understated descriptions of pictures that barely clung to depiction.

Below that is the signature of Martin Millard, who, it would appear, is a painter living in London.

* * *

NOTE: I've contacted Millard as well as Katchor and Pinsent in hopes of fleshing out this article with some solid information to complement my guesswork and online sleuthing. Hopefully there will be more about Millard available soon.

Developing....

Deathcast: Episode 4

2011-09-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Cover your ears! Another episode of my quarterly-ish podcast on all things comic booky is up right here, and as always it's better listening than whatever you've got the itunes doing right now. Yes, the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that this episode is hosted at a new url than my last ones, but that was cause they wanted me to pay a hundred dollars before I could record anymore at that address. You don't even want to know what percentage of my yearly income that is. So look for a new podomatic site every four episodes from here forward, I guess. Topics I discussed include:

* Yuichi Yokoyama's new (and impossible to find) book Baby Boom,
* The incredible new Daredevil series and the slightly lackluster new Batwoman series,
* Recent back issue finds, mainly the Ben Katchor edited Picture Story #2, which is the dopest anthology of all time,
* The process I use to draw my comics pages and my own "anxiety of influence" as a cartoonist,
* Russian models,
* Why I don't like/even read any Vertigo comics,
* The most underrated and overrated cartoonists,
* Comics as commodities versus comics as art,
* The moral failings of Grant Morrison's new book Supergods

...and like a million other things too. With topics of discourse contributed by Special Celebrities Tucker Stone, Sean Witzke, and Frank Santoro! Listen up!

jacksurvives.blogspot.com

2011-09-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

(here)

I wrote a new piece of criticism about one of Jerry Moriarty's brilliant Jack Survives comics. It's a two-panel strip that was published in the Ben Katchor-edited Picture Story #2, which is my new favorite comics anthology of all time. (Sorry Kramers.) Rather than being printed one panel after the other, though, this comic is printed on the inside front and inside back covers of the magazine, making simultaneous viewing of both pictures impossible. Instead, you have to flip the pages of the magazine back and forth to engage with the piece as a comic and not two individual pictures. I like the idea of putting the element of sequence completely in the reader's hands, and I thought it would be fun to make a digital version of the comic, effectively separating the images by posting them on different pages and forcing the reader to click on a link (the internet version of "turning the page") to complete the comic. So that's what I did, and then I wrote a little essay about Moriarty's piece, bookended by a little essay on sequencing the artist himself wrote for the same issue of Picture Story. Check the whole thing out right here.

Your Wednesday Sequence 24

2011-09-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

New Gods (1984 reprint series) #6, page 30. Jack Kirby.

This week on my Robot 6 column, I took a break from the usual program of talking about art by cartoonists nobody's ever heard of to go in deep on a page by the King of Comics himself, Jack Kirby. I used the gorgeous piece of comics above to talk about Kirby's unusual approach to sequencing, the harmonious quality of his overall page designs (just look at those two white panels!), how his action blocking got a lot sharper after his drawing ability degraded, and the way he rarely did the kind of typical choreographed moment-to-moment storytelling that has since become the "correct" mode of action comics. The Comic Book Resources fanboys haven't jumped all over the thread to castigate me for questioning the validity of some of Kirby's choices, so now's the perfect time for you to get over there and check out what I wrote. Starts like this:

The comics-critical landscape that has sprung up around Jack Kirby — often the man himself as much as his work — in the past few decades can be worryingly polarized. Though there’s plenty of good, clear-headed writing on what Kirby did with and for comics, there’s reams more of both hagiographic praise (which is fair enough, because this is one of the great artists not just in comics but of the 20th century) and the-emperor-has-no-clothes teardowns (which is also fair, because no one short of world leaders can really be said to deserve the amount of hosannas that have been heaped on Kirby).

Of the brickbats most commonly thrown at Kirby’s golden legacy, one of the most compelling is that he very rarely “told a story” in the traditional manner with his sequencing. Especially in his action scenes, Kirby’s storytelling style was often simply too wild to support “correct” sequencing, with each panel giving a clue to the content of the next and every prop and figure grounded in recognizable three-dimensional space. In Kirby fight scenes characters transmogrify from one physical state to another between panels, hurl each other across vast chasms of space before clashing again within an instant, and reveal heretofore unknown powers as the conflicts crescendo. Usually there’s just too much going on in a Kirby fight scene for the traditional values of motion tracking and choreography to hold much sway. It’s also why Kirby comics are so verbose: take out the explanatory word balloons and you haven’t a hope of understanding the specifics of what’s going on half the time. What Kirby captured in his action scenes wasn’t the balletic wax and wane of physical confrontation so much as impact after impact after impact. It’s up to his readers to decide how valuable an approach that is, but its undeniable that he did it brilliantly. Read more

Linkin' Park

2011-09-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

Time again for our monthly survey of what's bustin' heads on the comics internet....

(holyshit, Frank Frazetta sketchbook page!)

- My boy George Elkind started a comics blog, and he's kicking out the top-drawer criticism with downright wild abandon. Seriously, guys: Broken Windows is already primed to be the new big destination on the comics internet, and George gets better every time he posts something. If you don't know, now you know. So go.

- Johnny Ryan gives with some killer comics-as-criticism on the book I love to loathe, Chester Brown's Paying For it. LOLZZ.

- If you're a fan of art in any capacity, you need to get hip to Rodin's erotic watercolors yesterday. But ESPECIALLY if you're a cartoonist (aspiring or otherwise), absorbing the quick gestures, flat painted color, and above all the godlike confidence on display in these drawings comes close to revelatory. It's the human figure as cartooned -- yes, cartooned, simplified and rendered into a basic assemblage of pure shapes -- by the hands that sculpted some of the most famous bodies of the modern age. That is to say, cartooning by a dude who knows his shit better than anyone to ever have worked in comics. This stuff is up there with Kirby, with Herriman, with Moebius. Worship.

- As the DC relaunch soldiers on, I get more and more skeptical that superhero comics were ever actually a proposition that had something of value to give to the art form. And more and more when I think of the good ones, I think of Bill Jemas era (2000 to 2003, roughly) Marvel Comics. Then I figure that it's just because those were the books I myself was reading when I really fell in love with monthly hero books. Luckily, bona fide Dangerous Minds Tucker Stone and Noah Berlatsky just teamed up for an epic inter-blog discourse on the Cable comics of that time period, and yeah, those things were objectively good. Read to remember/find out why.

- Anybody who knows what this Brendan McCarthy "Ark" comic is (or if it is/was anything at all), drop the knowledge please.

- Michel Fiffe puts together an exhaustive history of the alt-comix world's close encounters with the superhero genre, in an article that's as fascinating to read as at least half the comics it discusses.

- Adam McIlwee put together my favorite comics-related blog post of the year with his Blaise Larmee profile, but I already linked to that one. Fear not: there's a sequel, and it gets so much better.

- My own reaction to the Larmee/McIlwee duel can be seen here.

- If the new Kramers Ergot isn't the upcoming comic whose release you're anticipating most breathlessly, you must know about some shit I haven't heard of. I read this Tom Spurgeon interview with Kramers compiler/prime mover Sammy Harkham to whet my appetite, and then I read this one too. Workin' on an article about Kramers right now, as it happens. When it comes around it'll knock your socks off.

- After forever changing Daredevil and the work of Jim Steranko, the inimitable Robin Barnard turns his xerox-machine-like gaze on... um, me. I got the originals of these in the mail the other day, and good heavens, to behold such beauty is unlike anything but sweetest love...

- Secret time: I read a lot more fashion blogs than comics blogs these days, and this one is my all time fave. Mary Eng probably influenced my writing style more than any other blogger -- she's slowed down on the couture writing lately in favor of equally interesting culture blogging, but the stuff from like mid to late 2010 on is really incredible. Have fun.

- My webcomic Affected continues apace, with chapter 4 having just wrapped up and chapter 5 begun just this morning. Get onboard while the getting's good! I also just posted yet another brightly colored "comic about a girl" to my other webcomics site, should such things be of interest to you.

- Finally, on a more serious note: Dylan Williams, publisher of the excellent Sparkplug Comic Books, has passed away far, far too young. A fellow alumnus of Comic Relief in Berkeley, Dylan first got in touch with me last winter and has comped me Sparkplug books ever since. I got back to LA from New York a few days ago and the latest envelope full of cutting-edge sequential art was sitting on my doorstep with his name on it. A little more than 24 hours later, I found out he was gone. The world's lost a great guy, and comics has lost a hugely important publisher (as well as a heck of a cartoonist). Listen to his Inkstuds interview here, buy some Sparkplug comics here, then raise your glass. That's what I'll be doing. Rest in peace, Dylan.