Chris Mautner
What Are You Reading? with Marc Singer
Action Comics #5
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our guest today is Marc Singer, author of the very excellent book, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, which is an excellent, excellent book that you should read if you’re at all interested in Morrison and his work.
To find out what Singer and other members of the Robot 6 crew are reading this week, simply click on the link below.
- January 22, 2012 @ 01:30 PM by Chris Mautner
Robot Reviews | Three Golden Age collections from Fantagraphics
Action! Mystery! Thrills!
Action! Mystery! Thrills!: Comic Book Covers of the Golden Ages, 1933-1945
Edited by Greg Sadowski
Fantagraphics Books, 208 pages, $29.99
Amazing Mysteries: The Bill Everett Archives Vol. 1
Edited by Blake Bell
Fantagraphics Books, 224 pages, $39.99
Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics
Edited by Michael Gagne
Fantagraphics Books, 200 pages, $29.99
Our current publishing era has been dubbed the Golden Age of Reprints by a number of online pundits, myself included, and it’s not too hard to see why. Classic comics that fans and scholars never thought would make it to the bookbinders, let alone be available in an affordable version, are now coming off the presses at a staggering rate.
One of the benefits of this plethora of reprint projects is it allows us to re-examine certain noteworthy periods of comics history, help us discover long ignored artists and fully consider cartoonists who, though their names might have been recognizable, have largely been unappreciated except by a few. The alleged Golden Age of comics in particular has benefited from this scrutiny, not only in illuminating people like Fletcher Hanks but in showcasing work by folks like Jack Cole and Bill Everett.
One of the people leading the way in this specific endeavor is editor Greg Sadowski, who, in anthologies like Supermen! and Four Color Fear, has given average readers access to comics from well-covered eras (i.e. the early superhero and horror trends) merely by republishing stories that didn’t come from Marvel (or whatever it was called at the time), EC or DC.
Sadowski’s latest book, Action! Mystery! Thrills! has a somewhat even narrower focus, dealing entirely with comic book covers from the Golden era. It makes a certain amount of sense. While covers are still an integral part of marketing and selling a comic, they were even more essential back in those early, heady days, when you competed with hundreds of other titles and an eye-catching cover could mean the difference between profit and cancellation (or at least that’s what many editors and publishers of the time felt).
- January 20, 2012 @ 04:30 PM by Chris Mautner
What Are You Reading? with Zak Sally
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Today our guest is cartoonist, musician and publisher Zak Sally. Sally is known outside comics circles as the former bassist for the band Low, but inside comic circles, he’s known for great books like Like A Dog and the Ignatz series Sammy the Mouse, the collected version of which Sally will be releasing any day now from his own La Mano 21 press.
To see what Sally and the rest of the Robot 6 crew have been reading this week, click on the link below.
- January 15, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Pantheon to publish Chris Ware’s Building Stories this fall
Building Stories
OK, so after I posted my list of comics I’m looking forward to this year, my buddy David Ball was like, “Dude, what about Building Stories?” And I was all like, “Building the what now?” And he was all like “You know, man, Chris Ware, the thing he’s been serializing forever in stuff like The New York Times and Acme Novelty, etc.” And then I was like, “No way man, for realz?” And he was like “Totes, man.” And then he sent me this link and it’s totally true. New Chris Ware book comin’ atcha this autumn.
Did anyone catch this before? The Pantheon post seems to be at least three months old, but I don’t remember anyone talking about it beforehand.
- January 13, 2012 @ 07:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Six by 12 | 12 comics to look forward to in 2012
Are You My Mother?
With 2012 still fresh and new, it seems like as good a time as any to look at various publishing companies’ plans for the year ahead and pick out what looks good, or at least interesting. Because the year looks to be filled with so many delights, I decided to double down and offer not just six but 12 comics I’m really looking forward to reading. Obviously this list is reflective of my own, indie-slanted interests, so feel free in the comments section to tell me what a dope I am for forgetting about Book X by Artist Y.
- January 13, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Six by 6 | The six most criminally ignored books of 2011
Salvatore Vol. 2
It’s time once again for our annual look at six books that were, for whatever reason, unjustly ignored by the public and critical cognoscenti at large. With all the titles that are published lately, it’s no real surprise that some books fall through the cracks, though in certain cases it seems grossly unwarranted.
After the jump are six books that, while they may not have made my “best of 2011″ list, I think got nowhere near the amount of attention they deserved. There are lots more that I could include if I had the time. I’m sure there are books you read this year that you don’t think got enough praise either. Be sure to let me know what they are in the comments section.
- January 6, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Comics College | Jessica Abel
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
This month we finally break Comics College’s glass ceiling (what took us so long anyway?) with an in-depth look at one of the many notable female cartoonists to come out of the alt-comix scene of the 1990s, Jessica Abel.
- December 30, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! | Sweatshop
You know what would make a great Christmas present? A publisher announcing they’re going to collect this great, lamentably short-lived series.
- December 23, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Robot reviews | Batman: Noel
Batman: Noel
Batman: Noel
by Lee Bermejo
DC Comics, 112 pages, $22.99
Let’s get this out of the way first: The very idea of grafting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol story template onto the Batman universe is an inherently terrible one. Batman and Scrooge are two completely different archetypes. They have very little in common, and their character arcs go in wildly opposite directions. To do this sort of thing right, you’d have to first turn Batman into a real jackass — which I imagine DC would be reluctant to do — so that his eventual redemption at the end is all the more striking and heartwarming. That in turn raises the question of whether contemporary readers want a Batman who sees the good in everyone and spends more time helping widows and orphans than fighting crime.
Still, you can’t say this sort of juxtaposition is surprising. A Christmas Carol has been adapted in just about every medium hundreds of times, and just about every popular TV show or multimedia character has attempted a variation on it (I fondly remember the Family Ties rendition, for instance). Honestly, the only shocking thing is that it took DC this long to try something like this (and with that I await the reply of some knowledgeable fellow in the comments section to tell me that, yes indeed, DC’s done this sort of thing several times before).
- December 16, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Chris Mautner
A quick Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival photo diary
The main entrance to the Festival
Photo time once again! I had a marvelous time this past Saturday at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and thought I’d share some pictures I snapped of the proceedings during my brief time there. Click on the jump link to see the whole shebang.
- December 5, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Chris Mautner
This weekend, it’s the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival
From noon to 9 p.m. tomorrow the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (or BCGF as it’s more commonly known) will take place at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, 275 North 8th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show, curated by Picturebox, Desert Island and Bill Kartalopolous, has very quickly built up a reputation as being one of the “must-attend” indie shows on the East Coast, and this year promises to be the the most impressive and largest show yet with a murderer’s row of top-flight guests and expanded exhibitors list debuting some killer-looking books. Best of all, the show is free to attend, so
Click on the link below to read a run-down of who will be debuting what, when and where:
- December 2, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Comics College | Grant Morrison
Absolute All-Star Superman
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
Strap yourself in, kids, because this is going to be a big one, as we run through the lengthy and considerable career of one of mainstream comics’ biggest stars, Grant Morrison.
- November 26, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Please consider contributing to the Rosalie Lightning Hart Memorial Fund
Cartoonists Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) and Leela Corman (Queen’s Day) have experienced a terrible, devastating loss with the unexpected death of their young daughter, Rosalie Lightning. Vineyland creator Lauren Weinstein has set up a memorial fund via PayPal to help Hart and Corman in their time of need. Please consider giving if you have the time and financial ability to do so. Weinstein also says that anyone seeking information on where to send condolences should email rosalielightningmemorial@gmail.com.
I’m sure I speak for everyone here at Robot 6 when I say we wish Tom and Leela our deepest condolences and hope they find the strength to carry on in the face of such a heart-rending, inexplicable tragedy.
- November 19, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Collect this now! | 1963
Mystery Incorporated
You knew we were going to get to this series sooner or later, right?
- November 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Robot reviews | Donald Duck: ‘Lost in the Andes’
Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes
by Carl Barks
Fantagraphics Books, 240 pages, $24.99.
Is Barks overrated? Is he really the comics master that people claim he is or was it simply that most of his contemporaries — especially where Disney comics were concerned — were so dull in comparison? Did the mystique surrounding Barks — the fact that he worked anonymously for so long — stoke his legend? In praising Barks, are we merely praising the surface elements of his work and ignoring whether his stories are stand up to the sort of strong critical scrutiny? Does mere nostalgia drive the bulk of our interest in his work? As one person put it on Twitter: “Is the worship of Barks just another case of comics culture’s elevation of craft over everything?”
I really don’t think so. Certainly it’s easy to get lost in the surface elements of Barks’ comics — the simple, clean lines, the skilled detail in depicting other cultures and lost civilizations, the slapstick humor. I suppose to some extent there might be a few people who come to Barks expecting to have their molecules re-arranged and will walk away sorely disappointed and wondering what all the fuss was about.
- November 11, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner