Lisa Hanawalt’s illustrated review of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-bait World War I drama War Horse has a lot in common with Pablo Picasso’s immortal masterpiece Guernica. They’re both an example of their artists at the peak of their powers. They’re both an artistic response to a traumatizing early 20th-century military conflict. They both prominently feature horses. And they both contain, like, subliminal messages of skulls and shit. Three of those four statements are true — to find out which, read the review.

I don’t mind the jokes at my expense. I’m used to it. Seth and Joe [Matt] have teased me about paying for sex for years. I’m used to it.

—Chester Brown tells Tom Spurgeon that people can crack all the jokes they want about him and his patron-of-prostitution memoir Paying For It. I guess it stands to reason: “Gets emotional about things” isn’t high on a list of ways to describe Chester Brown, if that book is any indication. What’s more interesting to me is that Brown’s fellow Drawn and Quarterly-published Canadian cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth are the tough customers who hazed Brown into developing this hardened exterior. It’s a dog-eat-dog world up there.

In all seriousness, please read Spurgeon’s excellent interview with Brown, which largely eschews discussion of the book’s central topic/argument and focuses on the impeccable craft with which that topic/argument was deployed. And check out Spurgeon’s entire run of Holiday Interviews, featuring creators ranging from Colleen Coover to Stephen Bissette to Art Spiegelman to Jeff Parker to Jeff Smith, plus critics, journalists, activists and more. His comics-related New Year’s resolutions are worth considering as well.

I suppose it’s the mark of a good film that months after it’s release you’ll find any excuse to post any tangentially comics-related fanart thereof on the comics blog you work for. By that standard, Nicholas Winding Refn’s Ryan Gosling vehicle (rimshot) Drive is a pretty good film. And Miklós Felvidéki’s Drive-themed cover version of Jazzy John Romita Sr.’s famous “Spider-Man No More!” image over on the always delightful Covered blog is a pretty good piece of fanart. Still, given that the Driver’s jacket had a scorpion on the back in the film, I’m sure one Mac Gargan is pretty p.o.’d that Spidey’s biting his style…

Be a real hero and check out the remake next to the original at Covered, then visit Felvidéki’s website.

Most people would settle for being a death-defying stock-market genius and leave it at that, but noooooo, not Annie Koyama. She had to go and form Koyama Press, creating a home for acclaimed cartoonists like Michael DeForge and Dustin Harbin, and racking up Joe Shuster Awards for Outstanding Comic Book Publisher and, via the comics duo Tin Can Forest, Outstanding Comic Book Cartoonist. Not one to rest on her laurels, Koyama has provided Robot 6 with an exclusive look at her very strong-seeming 2012 line-up. It features new books from Tin Can Forest, DeForge, and Harbin–including the children’s comic The Playground War, whose cover you’re getting a peek at above–as well as the Koyama Press debuts of Jesse Jacobs (Even the Giants) and Julia Wertz (The Fart Party).

The full press release and the covers for the new Jesse Jacobs and Tin Can Forest books are after the jump.

[PRESS RELEASE]

2011 was a breakout year for Koyama Press that saw the publisher win 2011’s Shuster Award for Outstanding Comic Book Publisher, in a field of nominees that included Canadian publishing luminaries such as Drawn & Quarterly, and several of the publisher’s titles won major industry awards and made a number of “best of” lists. The year finished off on a high note with the launch of a beautiful new website designed by Squidface & the Meddler.

2012 looks to be an equally exciting year for the innovative publisher. Spring 2012 will see a new release from artist and illustrator Jesse Jacobs whose book Even the Giants (AdHouse, 2011) marked his major publishing debut after several award-winning self-published titles. Jacobs describes his new comic work, By This Shall You Know Him, as coming “out of the darkness of oblivion.” Within the book’s confines, Jacobs states that the reader will “bear witness to the limitless ambitions of a gang of celestial beings as they fiddle and fuss with all sorts of molecular arrangements, creating infinitely detailed patterns and strange new worlds brimming with bizarre life forms. Part art-book, part graphic novel, By This Shall You Know Him depicts all manner of beast running, crawling and slithering towards death’s cold embrace.”

Tin Can Forest (aka Pat Shewchuk and Marek Colek) whose Koyama Press debut Baba Yaga and the Wolf was nominated for the 2011 Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent, and won the duo the 2011 Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Comic Book Cartoonist will release Wax Cross also in spring 2012. The artists describe the new work as “an alchemical folk-tale set in the twilight of the modern age, when the moon has devoured the sun, the mechanical ocean has evaporated into silence, and the decaying corpse of electric current sleeps eternally in a casket of orange lichen. Featuring a cast of characters as familiar as the faded Polaroids in a photo album salvaged from the flooded basement of a condemned church, Wax Cross presents illustrated transcriptions of ectoplasmic revelation, fibrous and grainy folklore, and unbridled bestial merriment, accompanied by textual incantations and occult decoration.”

The New Year will also see Koyama Press publish Lose 4, the most recent issue the critically acclaimed, one-man anthology by Michael Deforge who Rob Clough of The Comics Journal has called “the most startling, fully-formed young cartooning talent to burst on to the scene since Dash Shaw.” 2012 will also see new work by cartoonist Julia Wertz, author of the autobiographical comics The Fart Party and Drinking at the Movies. Her work has received praise from a number of outlets including, Bust, LA Times, USA Today, The Comics Journal, and New York Magazine. Dustin Harbin’s children’s comic The Playground War will debut in the spring as well.

These books are just some of the new titles that are set to be released by Koyama Press in 2012, a year that promises to maintain the publisher’s momentum as they continue to promote and support a wide range of emerging and established artists.

Cover design by Robert Beatty

“You can tell I’m still making sense of it myself.” So says Sammy Harkham of the eighth volume of his landmark anthology series, Kramers Ergot, at one point during our lengthy conversation about the book. And indeed, Harkham’s side conversation is characterized by strategic pauses, halves of sentences that trail off and are abandoned as Harkham retreats, rethinks, and rearticulates. Despite his ebullient cadence – Harkham’s as great a talker as he is a tweeter – it’s quite clear that the amount of thought he put into this comparatively slim and quiet volume of his once-overflowing and raucous art-comics anthology is nearly overpowering.

So is the collection itself. Despite featuring a much smaller roster than previous volumes in the series, and despite a much less “noisy” visual aesthetic than that which has characterized the series since its phone book-sized fourth volume caused a sensation upon its release at the MoCCA Festival in 2003, Kramers Ergot 8 has an intensity that’s tough to shake. Contributors like C.F. (aka Christopher Forgues) and Chris Cilla craft uncomfortable but undeniably erotic sex scenes, which sit next to grim science-fiction parables from Gary Panter and Kevin Huizenga and gruesome horror tragedies by Johnny Ryan and Harkham himself. Fine artists Robert Beatty and Takeshi Murata contribute pieces as visually vibrant as the stories of crime and desire from Gabrielle Bell and the team of Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw are bleak. A cheekily provocative introductory essay from musician Ian Svenonius and a massive selection of racy reprinted Oh, Wicked Wanda! comics from the pages of Penthouse prove perplexing – but it’s a good perplexing, because it forces the reader to consider just how fingernails-on-a-chalkboard effective the rest of the volume is at discomfiting them.

With the book on its way to stores from PictureBox Inc. in a couple of weeks, Harkham took an hour before picking his two older kids up at school to talk about this very personal project. We started off talking about our respective babies; fitting, then, that by the end of the interview a fascinating picture emerged of what Harkham wanted Kramers 8 to be that proved every pause along the way was a pregnant one.

Page from "A Husband and a Wife" by Sammy Harkham

Sean T. Collins: Kramers Ergot 8 debuted at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in December, but your third baby debuted not long before that. That had to be a challenge.

Sammy Harkham: Knowing the baby’s coming, you work knowing that when that baby comes, things are gonna shut down. The book only got finished mid-September, and then the baby came. It was funny, because I drew my comic [for the anthology] when the book was done, basically. I thought, “I’ll do a simple issue of Kramers, I’ll do a story for it, and then I’ll get back to Crickets.” But editing, for me, is like working on my own book, as if it’s fully just me. I’m thinking about it day and night, and it’s hard for me to then think of a story within that if I don’t already have one that I’m working on. So at a certain point I decided I’m not going to be in the book. Then it was clear I needed to be in the book, because I wanted a very particular kind of story in it [laughs]. “I guess I’m gonna have to do it.” It was a flurry of activity August into September, then it was done, then the book was done, and then I was just…breathing, you know? But I felt like, “Oh man, I really should be working right now before the baby comes.” But since the baby came I’ve still been doing stuff. You know what it’s like: a lot of tricky hours, and getting used to weird working habits. You work for five minutes, but you try to make it a good five minutes. You try to break it up. And I try not to lose my temper. I get resentful of the people around me when they’re asking for my help and I’m in the middle of something. [Laughs] If I’m in the middle of writing or drawing something, I wanna finish the thought. So I’ve got to think of those Dalai Lama tweets I read earlier in the day. [Laughs] You’ve got to get into the headspace where you’re malleable in that way, you’re flexible.

But Kramers was late this year. Nadel wanted it in July, but I’ve never been able to deliver that book on time, never. This one was particularly hard because there were so few contributors, so I couldn’t lose anybody without it affecting the whole thing. Whereas in previous issues there are so many people that unless it’s a really big strip – it’s a shame to lose anything, you don’t want to lose anything, but you can. You can lose a one- or two-pager. But with this, if CF is running late, there’s nothing we can do. I told [PictureBox Publisher Dan] Nadel that up front: “I hope to get the book done on time, but if Panter’s not ready, if Christopher’s not ready, if any of these people aren’t ready, we can’t do anything.” [Laughs] We’re at the mercy of them, really.

Page from "Barbarian Bitch" by Anya Davidson

Collins: Was that something you factored in when you approached people?

Harkham: Not at all. Not at all. With this one, I was thinking of people who drew…I wanted a certain uptight energy, a certain rigidness to the work. That was a guiding principle. Then the people who don’t draw super-tight or super…I don’t know what the word is, but there’s a certain energy was going for, and the people who don’t necessarily conform to that, I thought, in a way define the book by what they aren’t. Leon Sadler, to me, almost defines the whole book by being so loose, because he really sticks out in sharp relief. Same with Anya [Davidson]. Those are the two people I think of as being kind of different stylistically, Anya and Leon.

I just wanted to get away from…I don’t know. [Pause] It’s a very hard book for me to discuss or to verbalize, because so much of it was intuitive. I wanted to do something that really felt different from what other Kramers were. It was really about thinking of a tone, and trying to think of who fits within that tone, and trying to create a vision of comics that maybe doesn’t exist, but to pretend that it does. Or to create it. Or to give the impression that it’s always there, but I really have to use spit and rubber bands to put together and give it that veneer.

Collins: The tone that emerged for me was a sad one. There was a melancholy to it. Maybe that what emerged for me from its spin on the sex and horror comics that are very much in the air right now. But beyond that, the strip I return to mentally is Kevin Huizenga’s cover version of a golden age sci-fi strip, which I found crushingly sad.

Harkham: It’s bizarre, right? It makes you really think about – tell me if you disagree, but you think of the guys who made the original strip, right? I mean, what is this? What is this strip? You’re right, I totally agree with you. It’s a really sad strip. It’s a very bizarre strip, and it’s a weird thing that someone did that comic knowing that the only people who were going to read it were children. It makes me think of Frank King working on Gasoline Alley, this idealized vision of what he wants his life to be, of him living with this son who in reality is very far away from him. Comics are often like that. Because of the nature of the work, it is often about escaping into a space and letting things live and breathe that in reality can’t exist. That’s often the impression on the last page of a Kim Deitch comic. [Laughs] I feel like he’s realizing that it’s over, and he’s like, “I kinda want to live with these pygmies forever in this miniature city that doesn’t exist.”

Collins: Now that you mention it, there’s a sense of loss to the book, too. Maybe it’s in the way the the sexy stuff sits against the horrific and angry and sad stuff, which spoils it or something. I think of Chris Cilla’s story, in which a sexual liaison is interrupted by a little kid who says, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.” It felt like something had been ruined. I came away from the book feeling… [sighs]

Harkham: Did you like the book?

Collins: I did! Oh yeah, I did. There was stuff that I struggled with…

Harkham: I ask that honestly. I honestly have no idea what reception the book’s going to receive from people. I don’t know if they’re going to take to it. And I’m open to that, I’m fine with that. I ask that question with my eyes open, not in a defensive way.

Page from "Mining Colony X7170" by Johnny Ryan

Collins: A lot of the stuff is very much in my wheelhouse. I love the direction that Johnny Ryan continues to go in.

Harkham: That strip is beautiful. It’s an ode to commitment and love. It’s a really rich story. Including Johnny in a book like this, where I wanted things to have a certain amount of restraint and emotional coldness, not the usual flop sweat and a gag every second – with Johnny, it was all about talking to him about the slow burn. I know Johnny well enough to know he’s really well read and a really smart writer. We’ve talked a lot about story and literature. It was exciting to bring him into this, knowing that when I mentioned his name to the other contributors, they were like “Huh, he doesn’t necessarily sound like a great fit for this,” and he really delivered. That strip is amazing. He doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, he doesn’t tell you exactly what’s going on, but there’s enough ambiguity and enough focus. I think it’s a really beautiful comic.

Collins: It feels like an answer to the Huizenga strip, too.

Harkham: That’s interesting. [Pause] That’s really interesting. [Laughs] Oh my God, I hadn’t thought about that!

Collins: These explorers searching for love—

Harkham: Looking for love, yeah!

Collins: –and finding these nightmares they choose to embrace.

Harkham: Cool. My struggle with Kramers is always looking at it so intensely and never feeling like it’s good enough. You want things to be better and better. I’m really hung up on narrative, so I always want better stories, and it takes me a bit of time to stand back from it and come towards it a couple months or years later and go “Oh, that’s a good issue.”

Collins: Kramers 4 had such an atom-bomb impact, and I think what a lot of people took away from it was the non-narrative material – the Fort Thunder contributions, the collage material. But the series has had a parallel thread of full-fledged short stories all along. Were you expressly trying to point in that direction with this new format?

Harkham: I wanted each contributor to do a somewhat meaty amount of material. So when you think about that—I broke it with Leon, but again, that helps define the rest of the book by having his section be all kinds of little bits and pieces. But besides Leon, I wanted each person to do a substantial amount of pages, or if not a substantial amount of pages then something that felt substantial. Comics are funny like that: A two-page strip can live in your mind like a 500-page book. So it wasn’t necessarily page count—I just wanted it to be really strong material. And it’s always a struggle to get that out of people, but with this one it was more like seeing if people could make a serious commitment. Most of those strips are over eight pages. Gabrielle’s is shorter and Kevin’s is shorter, but they’re all around eight, and beyond that. It’s a lot to ask of people, especially these days, when all the people I was working with have other projects.

Collins: The other week I reviewed the final issue of Mome for The Comics Journal, and to open the review I listed a bunch of anthologies that had come out over the past couple years, off the top of my head. There were two dozen easy. It’s a much more heavily anthologized era right now than it was when Kramers started.

Harkham: I think there’s a real need for it.

Collins: Why? And was that something you were considering when you were putting #8 together?

Harkham: To answer the first part, there’s always a need. People need an outlet for their work, and online is one thing, but having it in print is another. Comics lend themselves to short form, so it makes sense that there are going to be a lot of anthologies. To me, doing another issue of Kramers was more about…When approaching any issue, it’s always like, “What do I want to see? What do I feel a lack of as a reader?” I do read a lot of comics. I feel like I’m so heavily engaged with comics—too much, sometimes! [Laughs] Probably to an unhealthy degree. It’s crazy. You’re a writer of comics, so you know. You’re deeply involved as well. So it comes out of [thinking of] what kind of book I’m excited to see. Sometimes I feel like “Oh, everyone’s doing the work that I want to see.” Then there’s times like this, where there’s a kind of comic I want to see and it doesn’t exist, so I’m going to make it: “I want to present people’s work in a certain way that I don’t see it presented in. I want a context that I don’t see out there.” And starting to build from there.

That’s why I wonder about how people are going to respond to it, because to me, it doesn’t feel like there are many books like it. When Kramers 4 came out, there was a lot of resistance from within comics to that! [Laughs] I was still posting on the TCJ.com message board at that time. I was 23 and commenting on that board all the time. When people started talking about that book I was really excited, until everyone started shitting on it. [Laughs] But then people started sticking up for it. I mean, I know now that that’s always a good thing, when people dislike something enough to want to talk about it. That means it’s connecting on some wavelength, and that’s important. But with this, I don’t know how people are going to take to it. They might think it’s pretentious or they might think it’s too dry or something.

Collins: I bought Kramers 4 at MoCCA when it debuted, and I was on the TCJ messboard then as well. I remember the argument was like, “Is this comics? This isn’t comics!” That book won that argument so completely that it’s not even an argument people have anymore, at least not among art comics readers.

Harkham: People are over it. At the time I didn’t think the book was that far out. I thought it was a very normal thing, coming out of all the [pioneering art-comics publisher] Highwater books at that time. Don’t forget, [Marc Bell’s] Shrimpy and Paul had already come out, and [Mat Brinkman’s] Teratoid Heights came out either around the same time or just after, but Brinkman was doing work. All those people were doing work that was available, so to do an anthology including all those people did not feel like I was necessarily bringing anything new to the table. I was just trying to make a good collection.

I never focus on showing people stuff they’ve never seen before, because I think that’s a really shallow approach. It won’t yield so much great work by focusing on what’s new, what’s hot, what are people going crazy about this month. Comics people are very fickle. You mentioned that whole thing about horror and sex right now. Ben Marra started doing his thing the last two years, Michael DeForge, obviously Jonny Negron—there’s a certain energy in the air where people are getting really into doing unironic genre-based work, and it feels fresh. But in a year from now, maybe the hot new thing will be like Peepshow. It’s not a fickleness, but because the alternative comics scene is so small, there’s a lot of turnover, a lot of moving forward about what’s exciting. I try to avoid thinking in those terms.

So to go back to what we were saying, Kramers 4 was to me a very normal anthology. It was a big anthology, but I didn’t think I was necessarily bringing that much to the table. With this one in some ways I feel the same. But just seeing the response to the last issue… When that book got announced, the way people took to it, the negative comments that people had about that book – [they were] saying things I would never have thought of if I hadn’t read someone saying these things online, about making a book that was elitist. I guess I’m used to people second-guessing Kramers and putting a lot of their own baggage and issues into the work. Which is normal. Art goes halfway, the reader goes the other half, always. So if people want to look at a book and take the most negative view of why certain decisions are made, then that’s their prerogative, and I’m comfortable with that. So with issue eight, I know I wanted this book to be a certain way, and people may not take to it, and I’m okay with that.

I listened to the roundtable conversation [about the best comics of 2011] on Inkstuds [featuring critics Robin McConnell, Tim Hodler, Joe McCulloch, and Matt Seneca] and I thought that was really interesting. I’m listening to them talk about the book…[Laughs] I respect all those writers, but at first I was like, “No, I disagree completely. That’s fine, whichever way they’re taking to the book is fine, but I don’t agree with what they’re saying.” But as I listened to it, I realized they were teaching me something about the book. In a way, I was learning about what I was thinking. I realized they’re kinda right about a lot of their opinions about the book.

Page from "Epilogue" by Robert Beatty

Collins: The reason I brought up the debate over #4 actually ties into what I got out of that roundtable myself. Looking at #8, I have no problem processing the art from Robert Beatty and Takeshi Murata. I’d compare the opening stuff from Beatty to the opening synthesizer instrumentals from 1984 by Van Halen or Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada – it’s really appropriate that it’s called “Overture.” And the Murata stuff, the way it has this beautiful sensual vibrant feeling but depicts these weird, slightly sinister items of pop- and trash-culture detritus…I get what that’s doing there among these comics. The stuff I really struggled with were the intro from Ian Svenonius [Harkham laughs] and the Oh, Wicked Wanda! material at the back of the book. The Oh, Wicked Wanda! stuff looked gorgeous on that lovely paper you selected for it, but I didn’t really like them as comics. And there was just so much of it!

Harkham: [Laughs] I had a hard time cutting it down!

Collins: And the Svenonius—I just wasn’t ready for an introduction to a Kramers Ergot that ended with “ZAP! BLAM! POW!”

Harkham: [Laughs] I know – I’m with you, man, I’m with you! Have you read any of his writing?

Collins: I feel like I have, although I couldn’t tell you what it was. I have enough friends who are deep into his various bands, Nation of Ulysses or Weird War or Chain and the Gang depending on the friend, that I feel as though these things have filtered into me secondhand, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how or why.

Harkham: There’s a book that the record label Drag City released of his essays called Psychic Soviet that I really recommend. I’m only slightly aware of his music; I really know Svenonius as a writer. My only concern with including him was that for people who did know his music, it looked like we got some hip dude to write an intro – like getting a Morrissey to write an afterword, or Steve Albini or something. I was a little bit concerned just ‘cause it’s him. But as an aside, you should read his other essays.

Collins: Well, in that Inkstuds roundtable, Joe McCulloch made the argument that the Oh, Wicked Wanda! material at the end of the book was as if the Svenonius essay was saying “The prosecution rests!” The essay was about the way pop art nullifies and destroys art’s revolutionary potential, and here at the end of a book of underground comics you have this endlessly long, vaguely funny smut comic – choke on it. [Laughs] I wasn’t sure if I bought it, but he was able to contexualize them a lot better than I was.

Harkham: Yeah, me too. I think editing an anthology is not that different from making your own book, in that you gather bits and pieces that feel right and start making this overall thing. You don’t necessarily have a clear idea, you just know that you like these things next to each other. In the same way, when you’re writing a short story, you’re like, “Well, I’ve got this scene, and I don’t know what it means, but there’s something I’m really attracted to.” It resonates within you, something very simple – a guy barbecuing in the rain or something. [Laughs] You’re attracted to these little things and they all come together. I had some very clear ideas about why I wanted certain things, and then there are some things you’re unsure about. So listening to McCulloch talk about what he thought was very interesting. I don’t feel like it’s my place to say he’s 100% right, he’s 100% wrong – I just thought it was interesting. Once the book is done, it’s now owned as much by the readers as by me as far as what it means. I try to avoid getting in the way of that and saying “No, it’s here because of this.” I don’t necessarily want to effect how people read the book.

Page from "Oh! Wicked Wanda" by Ron Embelton and Frederic Mullally

Collins: I’ve heard that from artists; it’s really interesting to hear it from an editor.

Harkham: Well, you know, I have my own feelings and thoughts about Oh, Wicked Wanda!, and I don’t necessarily want to smother the reader with my take on it. I’d much rather they engage the work. If I wanted to, I’d run little paragraph intros before each strip to contextualize why I like them in my own editorial voice, but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily an exciting book to read. Every book, regardless of whether it’s an anthology or by a single author, should have a certain amount of ambiguity and mystery and tension. The only time those things should be lacking – and it’s debatable – is in a work of nonfiction. That’s debatable, because some of my favorite writers of nonfiction bring a lot to the table where they don’t have all the answers. To tie it into comics, Dan Raeburn’s Imp #4 about Mexican comics – he’s wrestling with stuff, and it’s interesting.

So Oh, Wicked Wanda!…It’s interesting, because I don’t think I thought it was gonna be hard for people to get through that stuff. I thought they’d have issues with it, but I didn’t think it would be hard, or intense in that way. You could make the argument that the book was almost meant to feel like you just sat through a grueling four-hour war movie, or some atonal music piece, and now here’s The Benny Hill Show as a respite. [Laughs] But it’s clear no one’s really taken it that way. Which is good, I guess.

Collins: Perhaps for this audience, the atonal stuff is our Benny Hill Show. Then you get to the T&A romp, and it’s like, “Aaaah! It’s Metal Machine Music!”

Harkham: But what is it? Is it seeing swastikas on girls’ asses? Is that a problem?

Collins: No, and that’s the thing. You said you thought people would have issues with it; I didn’t have any issues with it, I just thought it wasn’t that funny. Which is sort of the least critical criticism that anyone can ever levy at anything…

Harkham: I feel like that’s important, though. I can’t remember who wrote it – maybe you wrote it – but there was a [Comics] Journal review about the black humor anthology [Black Eye, edited by Ryan Standfest].

Collins: Yep, that was me.

Harkham: I only read one review of that book, and that was in the Journal, and you said you didn’t find it very good because it just wasn’t that funny. Remember? [Laughs] That, to me, is a very valid criticism. That’s something, as a reader, I’m curious about: How funny is a funny anthology? That’s important to me.

Collins: Okay, I feel a little better then. [Laughs]

Harkham: I know that for my own work, the most important thing is that it’s entertaining. That’s number one. Any deeper or richer intention should be behind that. The main thrust should always be “Is this scene funny? Is it good? Is it scary? Is it strong?” I want momentum, I want this thing to be moving. Any other concerns, like personal expression, honesty, truthfulness, whatever it is – all the stuff you really wrestle with when you’re in art school – should be in play in the background.

So I think jokes are important. Oh, Wicked Wanda! is a little bit trickier. It sounds like you still engaged with it, you didn’t shut down, but you didn’t find the jokes funny. I do think there are a couple other ways of reading it that make it kind of interesting. People who don’t even want to read it can just look at it and still like it without reading it. The first year I was looking at that stuff, I never read it. I was just looking at it page by page and thinking “My God, these are incredible-looking pages.”

Collins: Well, it sits so well on that paper stock that you can look at it along with the other airbrush art in the anthology literally on a surface level. You can look at the surface of the page and enjoy it.

Harkham: And I think that’s important. I do.

Page from "Warm Genetic House" by CF

Collins: You can also look at the Nazisploitation and S&M elements of the strip, and a few pages away you have CF’s strip, and you can get some resonance there. In fact, I feel as though the act of putting all the stuff that’s in here between two covers is almost like a game. I don’t mean that as a value judgment at all – or maybe I mean it as a positive one. The game is to try and puzzle out the context. “Okay, it’s a shorter, smaller volume; Sammy and Dan have said it’s the most focused one. So what is the focus? What am I not seeing?” Most of it I can make sense of, but the things that really stick out become a challenge. “What are they doing in here? What did he see?” That’s one of the pleasures of an anthology with a really strong editorial eye: trying to puzzle out the context the editor had in his mind when he put it together.

Harkham: Well, let’s see. Oh, Wicked Wanda! you had trouble with, and the Svenonius. [Long pause] Keeping in mind what we were talking about, about not wanting to smother readers with my goals or what I was trying to do…I definitely wanted to make something that got away from all the things that we take for granted when we think of anthologies, and when we think of comics, and when we think of comics within the context of the wider culture. When you pull it out of our little scene…One thing at play with Kramers 4 was that that book was, in some ways, a response to comics being embraced by the mainstream and by the wider book culture and art culture. 2003: Pantheon is releasing books, Fantagraphics and D&Q are now in bookstores, it’s becoming a regular thing, and comics are being presented more and more like literature in the way that they’re packaged, the way that the books are designed. [Kramers 4 was] my way of dealing with that, because I had no connection to that and didn’t grow up reading comics in that way. The Love and Rockets collections and the Jim Woodring collections were always 8 ½ x 11. They were just comics jammed together with covers in the back. [Laughs] They were just collections, really simple. Kramers 4, in some ways, was, “I want to get back to things being comics.” No context, no blurbs, just that energy of comics, throwing it all out there and leaving it to the reader to make sense of the work themselves.

When thinking about doing another issue of Kramers, I want to do something that’s gonna enter into that conversation of comics as literature and comics as fine art, but do it in a way that feels right where all those other books feel wrong to me. It’s a way of throwing out all the things we take as a given because that’s the way it’s done by Fanta and D&Q and First Second or whoever. You could make the argument that all previous Kramers have been about stripping context away, so let’s make one that’s all about context. So you think about having an essay to start the book. And you think about Takeshi Murata, who’s not a cartoonist, and I wouldn’t say those are comics in any form, but when you think of literary anthologies like Granta or McSweeney’s, often you’ll have somewhere in a book of prose a selection of sculptures or photography by a fine artist. Murata served that purpose. And you think about the size, and about trying to have meaty contributions and stories, and about a book you could buy at an airport bookstore and sit with for a couple days. That was really important to me.

One of the things that happens with the previous issues is that there’s a very off-handed way of giving the work: [in a singsongy voice] “Oh yeah, here’s Chris Ware, and here’s Martin Cendreda, and here’s CF…” I’m just tossing them out to the reader. With this, I wanted to present all this stuff with real respect and dignity. [Laughs] It gets a little bit tricky talking about this stuff, because I know that for everything I’m saying there’s a million arguments against it, and we could go into any one of these points and have a conversation. But I just wanted to make something that was really refined and clean and had a strong point of view. Someone mentioned that it’s an angry book, and I’m might agree with that. In a way I feel like I want to just throw everything out, and it’s a new start. [pause] Does that answer your question at all?

Collins: [Laughs] I think so! I don’t at all want to tease out of you some sort of revelation you’re not comfortable with because it proscribes reader reaction.

Harkham: I’m still figuring it out myself.

Collins: But the way you just described it makes me think that the fact that it’s a Kramers with a typewritten table of contents at the beginning is somehow the Rosetta stone of the entire project.

Harkham: Exactly. But dude, forget that. You don’t even need to go that far. Open the book, look at the endpapers: The endpapers are white. [Collins laughs] I’m serious! I am serious. Kramers has always covered every square inch of surface with content. It’s always been like “Just jam it in, as much stuff as possible, and if it’s not a good book, at least it’s a big book. [Laughs] One of these is bound to hit!” There’s a certain amount of insecurity when you’ve been working on an anthology for six months: “Fuck, I’ve got one month left. I’m gonna send out one last email to twenty people and be like ‘Who’s got something?’” With this, it was, “I’m gonna have a few people and I’m gonna give them space.” I told them all “I want your strip to start on the right-hand side, and I want it to be a certain number of pages, and I want it to be a certain kind of story.” I wanted to contextualize all this stuff, in a way that I never had before.

Cover of Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham

With my own work, with Crickets, it’s more like those old issues of Kramers. When it comes to how I present my own work, I like it to look like shit. I like it to look dashed off and simple and vulgar, so that when you read it, if there’s anything richer, it’s almost a surprise. I want to embrace all those exterior elements of a comic book so that it’s a little bit subversive in that way. Like, [Crickets #3’s lead story] “Blood of the Virgin” is called “Blood of the Virgin.” You know? And the cover of Crickets 3…I’m really proud of that issue, but there’s no signifiers when you hold that thing that it’s anything but a dirty, gross comic.

Collins: You went out of your way to trashify it.

Harkham: Exactly. [Laughs] I didn’t go out of my way to trashify it, but all my favorite writers, if there’s one thing in common, is that they write in a very direct way, with a certain clarity of thought, just saying things. I really respond to that. So Crickets 3 works for me [because] I wanted to make something that feels like a comic book, and all the things we think of as a comic book as comic readers. You get what I mean when I say that, because you’re engaging with the medium in that way. Crickets is very much a part of that conversation.

With Kramers 8, it doesn’t make sense to do that anymore. I’m 31, I’m not 23. It doesn’t make sense anymore to have everything be loud and crazy and messy. And anyway, everyone’s doing that for me. Everything kinda looks the way Kramers 4 looked.

Collins: BCGF looked like if Kramers 4 came to life.

Harkham: [Laughs] Well, that’s nice, I guess. I mean, I’m not gonna take credit for any of that sort of thing. But there’s a certain rough texture to everything, and that doesn’t really resonate for me anymore. If I look at the fine art I’m looking at, the books I’m reading, the fashion, the graphic design, all the things I’m interested in – it doesn’t look like that. So why do the comics I buy?

Let’s see if I can say this in a clear way so you don’t have to edit the hell out of it… [Pause] There are certain things, I don’t know what I should call them, but certain tropes of indie comics that are sort of a given. It’s a pretty incestuous community, the world of comics. I realized that if I stepped out of that a little bit and think of the wider context, there’s a way of approaching this book that feels really fresh, and yet feels like it’s connecting to the wider culture. Which I feel that comics have been doing anyway, for the last couple of years. Does that make sense?

Collins: Well, as we were just saying, it’s a Kramers with white endpapers, with a table of contents, with a prose introduction, with a cover that’s restrained even by the standards of #7. The package itself is making an argument.

Harkham: Yeah. It’s a difficult book for me to talk about because I feel like I’m still in it, even though I’ve been done with since September. I haven’t really been able to make sense of it. This is why I wanted to do this interview over the phone as opposed to me writing answers, because anything I would type, I don’t know how honest it would be. Over the phone, I can say I don’t have clear-cut answers or clear-cut reasons for making the book what it is, exactly.

But hopefully, with any piece of work, there’s multiple strands that are at play. Every time I would see your name come up in my email when we were communicating, I’d think of Game of Thrones, because I know you’re a big Martin fan. I’ve only just started that series, but he’s a good example of this. When you describe that book to someone, you can say, “It’s about this,” and it’s totally true, but you can also say “It’s also about this,” and that’s totally true as well. Not to say that Kramers is anywhere near a work like what George R.R. Martin’s doing [laughs], but you try to have multiple strands at play, multiple things that you’re working towards.

Page from "Childhood Predators" by Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw

With this new issue, there is that one strand: “Okay, I want to make a book that actually looks like a book, that can sit on a bookshelf with good prose and good graphic design and good records. I want it to be part of the wider culture.” All these cartoonists are doing very, very unique work, and if there’s one connector – I don’t know if this is true, but maybe – all that work feels like it’s a little bit outside comics. Despite being totally informed by the medium, there’s something about it that looks or reads like it’s not so incestuous. They’re not responses to other comics. It feels like they’re engaging the wider culture.

So there was that element of wanting to make something that’s pushing past comics, because comics as a medium is already going there. You already have comics in every bookstore. You have mainstream coverage of cartoonists. So it’s like, okay, if we want to finally engage with that instead of avoiding it…I can avoid it with my own work, but it’s not fair to do that when representing other artists and putting together collections of other people’s work. That was an exciting challenge, to try to do that.

The next thing was, what’s the point of view? That’s where Svenonius and Oh, Wicked Wanda! obviously add a lot. Maybe they throw a wrench in things, but maybe that’s good. Obviously I don’t want anyone to dislike any of the pieces. That’s always a problem when doing an anthology. Every review of an anthology, as a given, will say, “It’s great, but like any anthology it has its problems.” [Collins laughs] There’s always those strips you don’t care about, because every editor has their own definition of what’s good.

Collins: But as a reviewer, for example, I realized a few volumes into Mome that the fact that I disliked a few strips in each issue is a big part of why I enjoyed reading the series. It helped me understand, “Okay, why does a comic work? Why does a comic not work? What are these two comics that are only a few pages away doing so differently?” I found that really helpful. So even when there’s stuff that you struggle with or dislike – I understand that as an editor, the intention is not to put in stuff and say “Oh, no one’s gonna like this – let’s see what they make of that!” But as a reader, it’s an experience that a regular book can’t reproduce. “Advantage” is a weird word for it, but it is a unique advantage of anthologies that they present different works that you may have very different reactions to, all between two covers.

Harkham: I think it’s the job of the editor to make the right decisions so that all that work creates a bigger whole. If you think of each creator’s comic as a chapter of a novel, and each person is bringing a different idea to the table, and each one is working well off the other, then a bad anthology is when all that gets muddled. They’re just running whatever, or they’re just running stuff they like, and there’s no clear tone or feeling, and it becomes a muddled mess. You engage with it not as a book but as a bunch of different strips that happen to be bound together.

Like you said, there’s a lot of anthologies, so to do Kramers isn’t so much because I’m like, “Oh I have to publish this guy because nobody’s gonna see it otherwise. It’s more about going, “I want to see a certain kind of comic book, and I want to push the reader hard, and I want to break past their barriers, the perimeters of what they expect, and give them something fun, something different.” That sort of thinking goes into play when you’re making your own book – it just so happens that you’re working with all these different bits and pieces from other people, and you’re trying to build this Voltron robot out of all these pieces. [Laughs] You can tell I’m still making sense of it myself.

Collins: You’re saying so many things that sound like you’re talking about a comic you drew from beginning to end. [Harkham laughs] To me, that says a lot about what Kramers is.

Harkham: If you’re a cartoonist and you’re editing an anthology, it’s very much an excuse to live in the skin of other people, for sure. That’s definitely at play. “Man, I love this girl’s work, she’s amazing, and I wanna be involved! I wanna present this stuff my way.” You want to get your fingerprints on it. So that’s definitely there. I think it’d be easier to have a free-for-all and say, “Okay, I have this many pages, I just need to fill it.” If I did that, I could probably get an issue of Kramers out every year.

It was a good learning experience on this one, because with only having to deal with about twelve people, I thought it would be a much easier process, but it wasn’t. It’s a huge undertaking. It feels like a lot of work. I never know why afterwards. When I’m in it, I should write myself a letter and give myself notes, so that next time I’m like “I want to do another Kramers,” I can read it and remind myself. I always forget, and it’s always the same issues that come up. “Ohhh, right.”

You’re always at the whim of your contributors. I think I never get over that, and I think I always resent that. As a cartoonist, after a while you start resenting that you’re spending so much time on other people’s work and not enough on your own work. You just become this maniac by the end, where you want it to be done, but at the same time you’re like “Fuck, I spent so much time on this, I want it to be good. I really don’t want it to be a waste of six months. Or a year!” It’s always a struggle. It’s a lot of work. I’m always surprised that it’s so much work, but it is. I’m sure that Eric Reynolds [editor of Mome] would say the same. It’s a pain in the butt.

Collins: I feel good that I went through all 40 pages of Oh, Wicked Wanda!, then. I owed it to you!

Harkham: Well, hopefully, even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, you got something out of it, or it enriched something else, at least in the context of the book. I felt like it was important to run that stuff. I don’t feel beholden enough to anything that I have to run anything. I’m a harsh editor in that way: “Do I need any of this?” I don’t feel beholden to anybody in any way. With the Oh, Wicked Wanda! stuff, the only real question mark was how people were gonna respond to it. But maybe that’s always the way, when doing anything. You never know. You just gotta go off what you want as a reader. That’s how I approach my own work, that’s how I approach Kramers: Finding out what do I feel like looking at and reading, and then trying to make that thing.

Page from "Get Your Ass to Mars" by Takeshi Murata

Images courtesy the artists and PictureBox

Adding the RSS feed for Michael DeForge’s blog to your Google Reader this year was a bit like wrapping your mouth around the business end of a firehose. Barely a day went by without DeForge posting some beautifully strange, strangely beautiful new illustration or comics page. And at the rate he was producing work, there was no telling where it would be from — his two minicomics series, the art-world satire/science fiction Open Country and the kids’-comics oddity Kid Mafia; his ongoing bug’s-life black-comedy webcomic Ant Comic; “College Girl by Night,” his gender-bending contribution to the erotic comics anthology he co-edits with Ryan Sands, Thickness; the third issue of his flagship solo anthology series, Lose, from Koyama Press; various previously published works now archived at Jordan Crane’s webcomics portal What Things Do; comic strips and illustrations for magazines like Vice, Maisonneuve, The Comics Journal and The Believer; contributions to anthologies including kus, Smoke Signal, Gang Bang Bong, Root Rot, Sundays, and probably more that I’m forgetting.

But even more astonishing than the sheer volume of his output was its quality. As I wrote in CBR’s Top 100 Comics of 2011 countdown, DeForge published his four best comics last year, and many more thrilling works besides. I focused on that killer quartet of Lose, Open Country, Ant Comic, and “College Girl by Night” for this interview with DeForge, looking back on amazing year and teasing what’s to come in 2012.

Sean T. Collins: Sexy stuff first. I have a few questions about “College Girl by Night,” the story you contributed toThickness. Since you co-created and co-edit the series with Ryan Sands, I’m wondering which came first, the idea for the story, or the idea for the anthology it eventually appeared in? Did wanting to make smut also make you want to create a publication to house it for yourself and others, or vice versa?

Michael DeForge: My idea for the story came way, way later. I think that’s why I wanted to be slotted in the second issue instead of the first – when we decided to do the anthology, I had no idea what I wanted to draw yet. “College Girl By Night” was actually my second story idea, too. My original comic was going to be a homoerotic riff on the movie Class, starring Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy. I did all these character designs and had all these plans on how I’d draw their outfits and the prep school the comic would take place in, but everything fell apart when I actually started to plot it out.

Collins: Seems like two common threads connected the story you ended up doing with the one you abandoned, though — school and homoeroticism. Another chicken-and-egg question: Were these issues you intended to tackle all along?

DeForge: Not exactly – I intended each comic to be about shame and repression, and the school setting works out well for that. As for the homoerotic thing – I went through a few different versions of the thumbnails for “College Girl By Night” before I really sorted everything out. At first, his transformations back to male form were cartoonier and played mostly for laughs, and separate from any of the sex in the comic. In another, I didn’t show him in male form at all, and the transformations were only referred to in narration. Then the version after that was 3/4ths gay sex. It took a while before I figured out where I actually needed to take the premise.

Collins: “College Girl by Night” combines a lot of different genre strands. There’s the genderflipping element, which is common in manga and which you’re beginning to see infiltrate nerd and fanart culture here in North America as well. But the use of the full moon, and the “by night” suffix for the title, links the story to werewolves, which obviously also have a lot of cultural currency right now. Transformation and shapeshifting have a body-horror element, especially when they’re tied to sex like they are here, and body horror has been a touchstone for you for a while. So too has been the presentation of fantastical material in a deadpan, slice-of-life narrative style. And of course there’s the porn element, in that this gives you the opportunity to draw both straight porn and gay porn. Had you made any or all of these connections before you started working on the comic, or did they emerge for you later in the process? Would you say any one of them was paramount in what appealed to you about making the comic?

DeForge: They all came out as I was working on them. The title was kind of stuck in my head for a while, I think since it sounded like a good song title, or something.  I initially envisioned the final comic as being a lot goofier. I think my idea was to use the premise to make a bunch of lame jokes about college hook-ups. It would have been terrible.
I was hung up on the challenge of making a “sexy” comic, which seemed really far out of my comfort zone. When I was actually writing the narration for the story, it immediately went off these other directions – I became more engaged with those tangents than my initial plan. It stopped feeling like some one-off divergence into porn and more like a natural progression from the other stories I’ve been drawing this year.

Collins: At a certain point, the narration sort of peels back from the actual events being depicted. This is an effective way of packing more information about the character and his/her situation into the strip, but it also has the effect of making it seem like he/she can’t quite confront the tumultuous events of the comic, instead preferring to think and talk about other things. Is that a fair characterization?

DeForge: Yeah, that was the idea. At some point when roughing everything out, it started to make much more sense for the narration to be at odds with what was happening panel to panel.

Collins: It seems important to me to note, given that this is a porno comic we’re talking about, that the College Girl is really sexy. Frankly that’s probably not a word associated with your work very often. Can you walk me through the process of drawing an attractive character? How do you settle upon certain details that make them attractive without pushing it too far over the top?

DeForge: I’m not sure I’m even able to do it that well, so I’m glad to know you think I pulled it off. Sometimes I try to look at the drawings with fresh eyes and think, “This woman I drew looks like a bug-eyed alien. Why does she have a bobble head?”

I think Gilbert Hernandez’s character designs are a big inspiration for me.  Luba is the best example of a character who’s obviously incredibly attractive but also a bit funny-looking and a bit creepy all at the same time. He always hits the perfect balance with that stuff.

Collins: The irony there is that the ostensibly erotic elements of his work are an acquired taste even for some readers who appreciate other aspects of his comics. Certainly recently, with the Fritz-based material, he’s pushed the envelope very far. Presumably this is less of an issue for people picking up an anthology explicitly billed as erotic, but did you give any thought to similarly alienating any readers?

DeForge: No. That would be such a slippery slope, and require way too much second-guessing. I know I’m always going to end up alienating somebody anyway.

Collins: Open Country is one of the best art-school/art-world satires I’ve seen from comics in quite some time, but this isn’t the first time you’ve tackled that subject–there’s the intro to Lose 3 about the internship, there’s the Justice League parody you did where the other heroes complain about Hal Jordan’s stint in art school. I’m not sure of your background in this regard, but you appear to have emerged relatively intact and achieved some success at a young age–do these issues still affect you, or is it just good fodder for comics?

DeForge: I mean, I still spend most of my day stressing out about “the creative process” or whatever – and that’s probably true of most of my social circle, too – which is why it keeps making its way into my comics. I’m afraid it’s a well I draw from a bit too much at this point, though! I hope I’m not getting repetitive.

Collins: It’s fine with me. Open Country also shares with some of your other work, such as S.M., a depiction of a hallucinatory state. But given what your “normal” worlds look like, I’m wondering how you approach that sort of thing. How do you know…I guess the best way to put this is, how do you know what weirdness to reserve for altered states versus what weirdness to put in the everyday sequences?

DeForge: I think it’s mostly intuitive. In a few cases, I don’t want there to be very clean divisions between those states. Most of my comics end up having a dream-logic to them anyway, in terms of how characters react to things. 

But yeah, I can’t think of many comics I’ve drawn that end up in “normal” settings. Even when just drawing a forest or a city or a suburb, they’re always such stylized versions of those things.

Collins: The central strip in Lose #3, “Dog 2070,” is an object lesson in this. If you just read the words without really looking at the images, you could easily see it drawn by Adrian Tomine. When you open your eyes, it’s the world’s ugliest anthropomorphized dog-flying-squirrel-things wandering through a postapocalyptic urban wasteland, and occasionally gliding. Julia Gfrörer recently told me that she introduces the fantastic into her work because rigorous realism would bore her eventually. Is it the same for you? What do you feel you can access by these unusual settings and character designs that you can’t otherwise? I realize I may be asking you to eff the ineffable here.

DeForge: That’s a hard one for me to answer, because the reasons shift from comic to comic. Sometimes I’m more concerned about establishing a tone, sometimes I’m referencing genre, sometimes I’m just trying to be funny, sometimes the symbolism is supposed to be much more overt (like in Lose 3,) and it’s usually a combination of all those things. I generally want my comics to feel like dreams.

Collins: Do you draw on dreams directly? I often find myself really enjoying dream comics up until the point where the artist adds the “Dreamt on December 23″ or whatever tagline at the end. That sucks so much of the mystery out of it. There are exceptions — Emily Carroll’s dream comics come to mind — but to me a comic that employs dream logic without coming out and saying it’s a record of a specific dream is much more effective.

DeForge: Yeah, I tend to agree. There are cases when I’ve directly pulled imagery from dreams, but I try to just use those as jumping off points. That horse head thing in Lose 2, for instance, came from a dream. But I don’t think trying to directly transcribe one of my dreams would be very interesting to anybody. Usually, it’s the logic and tone I’m trying to recreate.

Collins: Ant Comic has a similar stylistic rupture to that of “Dog 2070.” It more directly addresses the setting and nature of the characters in the text, but there’s still an odd disconnect wherein the ants, centipedes, spiders and so on don’t “really” look like those insects, but like some symbolic representation of them. I have a hard time fathoming how you make those leaps between “here’s what I want to draw” and “here’s how I want to draw it.”

DeForge: I guess it’s not a leap I’m always conscious of when I’m actually working. For Ant Comic in particular, the character designs are all coming very organically, on a week to week basis. With the Ant Queen, for instance, I had a loose outline of what I wanted the Queen to do in the story, but didn’t know how I was going to draw her. And then when I doodled a version of her having a giant, brightly colored vagina that other ants would have to line up to walk inside of, it was like “Oh, of course that’s how it’d be, that makes perfect sense.”

Collins: Ant Comic‘s color palette is really amazing to me. It’s bright and neon-y in a way that’s very fashionable right now, but it doesn’t actually look like anything else — not like Paper Rad’s colors orThe Problem Solverz‘ colors, to cite the tradition I think a lot of today’s eye-melters sprung from. I’d love to know if you were looking at any specific comics or other works for inspiration when you settled on coloring the strip the way you did.

DeForge: Thank you! I am trying to force myself to use a new palette every week for that one. I had noticed I had tend to use these sort of washed out, yellowy colors in a lot of my work, and have been making a conscious effort to shake out of that. One recent strip had a color scheme that I almost directly lifted from a Chester Brown Comics Journal cover. For the most part, the color schemes in Ant Comic are inspired by a lot of 60s poster design.

Even though it’s a web comic, I’ve been designing the pages to be sized at 11×17, so I’m imagining them as giant Sunday strips as I work on them and want the pages to be as graphically arresting as possible.

Collins: Frank Santoro has located you in the “fusion” movement of young creators who combine influences from various world traditions and genres while still making idiosyncratic, experimental, art-first alternative work. I don’t guess that you’ll say no, but do you think that’s an accurate assessment? I ask because I have a hard time seeing what it is that you’re “fusing” in international terms. It looks very much like North American art comics to me, albeit like no other specific ones.

DeForge: I think it’s an accurate assessment, but it’s of course not something I’m ever actually thinking about as I’m working, so who knows.  I think the most visible international influence on my work comes from Japanese horror comics – Hideshi Hino, Kazuo Umezu, Junji Ito, Suehiro Maruo. Hino in particular.

Collins: So it’s more of a tonal influence, or an influence of subject matter, than one of specific technique in terms of art style, layout, pacing, or what have you?

DeForge: I’d say it’s still both – I think all those artists have definitely impacted my drawing style, although maybe not my layout or pacing.

Collins: Thinking about this again, it’s not hard to see your book Kid Mafia in the context of various creepy-kids comics from those artists, although the genre idiom is different. I can, however, see the profound horror and science fiction influence on your work. Actually, that’s not at all the right way to put it — you aren’t influenced by horror and SF, you’re making horror and SF, as far as I’m concerned. Those are popular options for altcomix right now, perhaps oddly so. Are you comfortable with that characterization? Do you ever want to do something more like an Acme Novelty Library or Optic Nerve, a more straightforward form of literary fiction?

DeForge: I’ve plotted out a few comics that I might want to start drawing next year that don’t have any fantastical elements at all – just people hanging around apartments and stuff – but I don’t see them a huge departure from my regular work, really, because the tone is still there, and I’m writing about similar themes. So I guess I would like to get to those stories eventually, but they didn’t come out of any conscious desire to draw something “literary,” they just sort of worked out that way.

Collins: I get it. The tonal consistency is certainly there throughout your work. At no point do they take a TOTAL dive into genre storytelling tropes, where human concerns are abandoned in favor of hitting various marks familiar to fans. Does that make sense?

DeForge: It does! I never sit down to draw a comic and think “Okay, time to draw a horror story!” It just works out that way. Except for Thickness, I guess, which is why that contribution was such a challenge at first. I actually *did* have to think, “You are drawing a porn comic for a porn anthology.”

Collins: What are your plans for 2012? I’m guessing you have a lot, if your past couple of years are any indication.

DeForge: The projects I’ve been devoting the most time to have been Lose 4, which we’re hoping for a Summer or Fall release, and the ongoing Ant Comic strips. Every few months, I’ll also be hoping to drop Kid Mafia and Open Country issues, but I’m not keeping those two on any tight schedule. I have a mini-comic that I’ve been incredibly late on that Secret Headquarters is going to print for me that should be out shortly too, and ongoing gag strips in Mothers News, Offerings, The Believer and Frank’s TCJ column.

“And there came a day, a day unlike any other…” Comics is rife with stories of team-ups and alliances formed to solve problems beyond any one member and advance the common good. Such is the story of Press Gang, one of the most intriguing small-press outlets to emerge in the year gone by. Comprising Portland retailer Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics imprint, cartoonist and editor Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books and Elfworld editor François Vigneault’s publishing house Family Style, Press Gang is described on its website simply as “like-minded publishers/packagers banding together.”

Each of its individual members has taken a forward-thinking approach to the work they put out: Leivian’s excellent store has a bold art/comics “house anthology,” the cheekily titled Diamond Comics; Soto teamed with former Comics Journal editor Milo George (with an assist by Bodega Books publisher Randy Chang) to transform his long-running artcomix anthology Studygroup12 into the promising comics/criticism hybrid Study Group Magazine; and Vigneault rescued Elfworld from languishing on original editor Jeffrey Brown’s to-do list, becoming a pioneer of the seemingly ever-widening crossover between alternative comics and fantasy adventures. Any alliance between these three is worth watching very closely.

So to celebrate Robot 6′s third anniversary, I got in touch with each member of the Press Gang triumvirate to ask about the past, present and future of the Gang and their places in it. The big news here is that Soto’s Study Group Comic Books will be absorbing Chang’s Bodega Books now that Chang has officially closed up shop, and will publish Kazimir Strzepek’s highly acclaimed fantasy saga The Mourning Star from now on. And check out oodles of exclusive preview pages from Elfworld #3 and Study Group’s forthcoming sg12.com webcomics portal, launching Jan. 16. But beyond that, there’s Shonen Jump-style phonebook anthologies, the return of old favorites after long hiatuses and, quite literally, magic…

Sean T. Collins: Beyond the fact that Zack works at Jason’s comic shop, Floating World, I know very very little about the origin of Press Gang. How did the three of you hook up?

Zack Soto: I’ve been friends with both Jason and François for several years now. I know François from tabling at APE over the years, and he moved to Portland in the last year or so. Since then, we’ve become pretty good buddies and talk out our projects with each other quite a bit. Jason I’ve known since he opened Floating World, more or less. I went to check out the shop in its first, extremely tiny, space. We’ve been friends ever since, and I guess a year or more ago I started working there a day or two a week. Last year we co-published Studygroup12 #4. I probably talk with these two guys about my crazy ideas and frustrations, and listen to them talk out their ideas, more than any other people besides my wife.

Press Gang came about initially from François and I talking about our various goals as small publishers. We both basically had the same ideas about strength in numbers and what that could mean. Promotionally, it’s as simple as being able to group together some like-minded publisher/packagers at more or less the same level of the industry and bringing all of our small followings to one point. Logistically, one of the obvious strengths is being able to send one or two people to represent the group at a convention and save money. Another benefit is when we have particular skills like silkscreening or risographing or what have you, we give each other sweet deals in our areas of production expertise.

We’re basically modeling ourselves after the Wu-Tang Clan. I like to flatter myself into thinking I’m the GZA but Jason keeps telling me I’m ODB, so oh well.

François Vigneault: I moved to Portland from San Francisco almost exactly a year ago. I was lucky enough to already know some a few cartoonists and publishers in the community up here, including Zack (who’s a loud-mouth like me, so I liked him right away), and after I moved up, I found lots of other very welcoming folks like Jason, who of course runs Floating World Comics. Now, after having been here in Portland for a year, I hang out with Zack all the time, and I’ve had some really great talks with Jason, just sharing ideas for projects, events, etc… Both of those guys have a very deep understanding of the ins-and-outs of the comics industry and it’s been eye-opening for me to just talk with them. Plus they’re both just good dudes, and hillarious… Along with lots of other amazing folks, they’re really part of what makes Portland such a great place to be in the comics community.

I’ve always really enjoyed colaborating with other folks; my small-press publishing house, Family Style, started out as a collective years ago, and I ran the San Francisco Zine Fest for 6 years. When Zack and I started discussing some of our aspirations for Study Group Comics and Family Style, it seemed like our goals really meshed well: Reach new audiences, publishing great work by new artists, and increasing the production quality on our books. It also seemed like some of the challenges were the same: Time and money, mostly! We hashed out some ideas: Could we exhibit at more shows if we split tables or booths between several small-press publishers? Maybe share some of our equipment and expertise to improve our books? Importantly, could collaborate without stepping on each other’s toes and driving each other crazy? Press Gang was born out of that desire to work with each other but maintain our independence.

Jason Leivian: Zack works with me at Floating World. I met him immediately after opening the shop 5 years ago. I met François shorty after he moved to Portland. He came in the shop to sell some Elfworlds. Zack and François approached me with the idea. I’ve just started doing more comic conventions this past year and I’m finding that business travel suits me pretty well. Press Gang will allow us to do more comic shows by splitting the cost of tables and at any given time at least 2 out of the 3 of us can make it to the shows.

Collins: It occurs to me that each branch of Press Gang has its own flagship anthology. In your case, Jason, that’s Diamond Comics — a name I always find funny, given its more common association in the industry. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the thinking and process behind the series. A newsprint house anthology for a retailer is such an unusual beast to me.

Leivian: [Providence’s landmark artcomix anthology] Paper Rodeo was what inspired me to do a newspaper anthology. I loved the idea that you might find this weird artifact around town with all these strange psychedelic cartoons and very little info about who made it or where it came from. I wanted to focus on experimental work from all over the world. Whenever a new issue would come out I would get a zipcar and drop off stacks around town, at coffee shops, bars, record stores. I think having a publication helped get a little bit of exposure for the store. I always enjoy it when a visitor from another state or country comes into the shop and they say “Oh you publish Diamond!” And then I ask about where they found it.

I’ve put the paper on hiatus to focus on some book projects, but I get the feeling I’ll be returning to the format in the future.

Collins: François, your primary anthology is Elfworld, the initial volume of which came out some years ago. In that time, the alternative comics landscape has changed so that science fiction and fantasy are much more common. Do you see Elfworld as a prophetic effort? How do you keep it fresh moving forward?

Vigneault: With Elfworld, I obviously have to give a lot of credit to Jeffrey Brown (who compiled the work in the first book) for originally seeing the desire for fantasy/sci-fi genre stuff in the alternative comics community; I know that when I first heard about his prospective anthology I was like “I want to be in that!” Since I published the first volume I’ve never lacked for contributors, I think lots of indie creators just want to cut loose with something fun… A lot of us grew up playing D & D, or reading Heavy Metal or whatever, but the dominant paradigm in alternative comics has been the autobio/literary fiction mold for a long while now. I think that the huge flowering of indie creators making genre pieces (folks like Sammy Harkham, Michael Deforge, Eleanor Davis, Jonas Madden-Connor, Johnny Ryan, Brandon Graham, Levon Jihanian, Malachi Ward & Matt Sheean, and Kazimir Strzepek, to name a few) might be a small sign that there’s a bit more confidence in the medium, that we don’t have to be self-conciously “literary” in our collective efforts for comics to be taken seriously? Maybe that’s over-reaching, but yeah, I see a trend, too, and I’m glad to be doing my small part with Elfworld.

As far as keeping things fresh going forward, it’s a challenge, but I love it. On the creative side, I think there’s a huge amount that can be done with fantasy comics… Even more so than sci-fi, it seems like there’s a ton of fairly unexplored territory. (Of course, I’d love to start putting out sci-fi comics by other folks, too… Maybe alternate Elfworld issues with Offworld!) In particular, I think there’s a lot of room for artists to develop stories that move away from out-and-out humor and into more subtle territory; I’m getting more submissions along those lines and I hope EW can be a spot for experiments to flourish. New creators keep surprising me with amazing work… Tom Biby has a comic in the upcoming issues that’s nuts, its an epic tale of ants fighting to save their queen from a mad cult… It’s very funny, but also just odd and exciting, just what I want out of a fantasy tale. And both Levon Jihianian and Jess Smart Smiley have offbeat, beautiful stories in EW #4 that are gonna knock people’s socks off, I think. Lots of good stuff.

On the production side, I am always just trying to improve how I present the artists’ work… I’m a firm believer that a comic should be as beautiful and enjoyable of an object as possible, a tactile experience. When I relaunched the series as a series of individual issues, one of the main reasons was the opportunity to be more hands-on in my production. Hence little things like the french flaps and letterpress-printed covers, or the new fantasy-inspired endpapers and table of contents for each issue, I want it to feel substantial, like someone has put not only love, but also thought into it. I mean, EW is still just a mini-comic, its no big deal… but I want it to be a cool as I can make it for my budget.

Collins: Zack, your home base is Study Group, which has been going on in one form or another for quite some time now. You recently shook up the format quite a bit after a grand last hurrah as an artcomix anthology last year — it’s now a fully functioning magazine, with interviews and criticism alongside comics and art. What prompted that decision? Were you looking at the existing landscape, or was it something you’d wanted to do for some time?

Soto: Study Group Magazine, as opposed to Studygroup12 the straight up artcomix anthology is something that’s been gestating for several years, actually. It goes back about 6-7 years now to when Dylan Williams and I were talking about doing a comics magazine to be called Longbox. I think he’d previously batted the idea around with Ted May, and for various reasons it never really gelled. the first issue of the magazine is dedicated to Dylan for many reasons, and that’s one of them. Those email chains between him and myself definitely helped me formulate what it is I wanted in a magazine about comics.

Fast forward a couple years and I came up with the idea to resurrect Studygroup12 as a comics journalism/comics anthology hybrid. I just love magazines about comics, from Nemo to Comic Art to Amazing Heroes to Destroy All Comics to TCJ, and I liked the idea of mixing art/comics content with interviews and critical essays. I pitched Bodega Press’ Randy Chang on the idea, and he signed on to publish. I then enlisted Milo George to be my co-editor. Milo is one of the great former editors of the long running Comics Journal, and we were pals online. He’s responsible for the Ft. Thunder issue and #250, among other milestones. Anyhow, it took us a while to get our feet under us and around when we were going to ramp up for the first issue, Randy decided he needed to take a short sabbatical from publishing, with the intent of having SG Mag being the first thing he published when he returned from said sabbatical.

SG12 #4 was actually done as a stopgap publication while I was spinning my wheels waiting for SG Mag #1 to move forward. My initial idea was that it’d just be a simple little photocopied zine with some silk screened inserts and covers, but as you can see, it ended up being a bit more elaborate than that.

After #4 was done, Randy more or less decided that he didn’t want to BE a publisher anymore, but he would give me whatever assistance he could in getting the first issue out, and advice about publishing in the future.

At that point, I decided to go ahead and formally make myself into a “publisher,” and started Study Group Comic Books. Even though I’ve printed and published several books and minis over the last 10 years, it was basically as a self-publisher. Now I’m looking at taking on a few modest projects besides my own work and SG Mag. I plan on doing a mixture of mini comics and offset books, mostly minis for the first year – though I think it’s more or less for sure that I’m going to take over publishing the next Mourning Star, whatever form that takes. I’m also going to be distributing all the old Bodega backstock, so I’m essentially carrying Randy’s work forward as much as I can. He’s a great guy who’s helped me a bunch and I loved the books he put out, so I’m really happy to be able to say that.

Collins: What does each of you gain from working with the other two fellows in Press Gang? How involved are you in their books at this point? I guess what I’m asking is how deep the alliance goes.

Leivian: The first thing is all our future publications will feature the Press Gang logo. We want to establish that as a thing. When we table at shows it will be as Press Gang. So we hope people start to recognize the name and if they investigate a little they’ll see who the members are and what we do. Down the road our goal will be to share resources. Between the three of us we have access to offset printing, silkscreen, letterpress, distribution through my store, and combined marketing and energy.

Soto: We mainly just use each other as sounding boards at this point, and we have a lot of plans to table at regional shows as much as possible. Everything is still in the formative stages at this point, but I can say that it already feels like Press Gang is fulfilling our original goals and we just have to take it one step at a time.

Vigneault: As Zack mentioned, for now we’re in a position to help each other out by exhibiting at more shows and lending each other our expertise and production abilities for now. We’ve come up with a fairly bare-bones structure that won’t make any of the current (or perhaps future) members feel constrained, but can also help to realize those key goals we all share: Expand our audience and improve our books. In the long term, who knows? It seems like there could be lots of room to grow, for instance, improving members’ distribution prospects, having a one-stop-shop indie comics website, or doing Press Gang micro-festivals. We’re easing into things for now. I remember that as we were discussing the ins-and-outs of Press Gang, that eye-opening two-part article on L’Association ran in The Comics Journal, and I was like “You guys have to read this!” Of course they already had. Collaborative efforts have a tendency to crash and burn, so its important to me that we create something flexible that can always be a benefit to the publishers involved, where we won’t ever be at each other’s throats. It’s fun!

Collins: What do you have in the pipeline for 2012?

Leivian: Next up is DIY Magic by Anthony Alvarado. Do you remember Arthur Magazine? They had a great column called “Practical Magic(k).” When Arthur ceased publication and went online, my friend started a new column in the same spirit, called “DIY Magic.” It’s all very real and testable procedures you can do at home to explore creativity and the potential of your imagination. It’s a series of recipes that can trick your brain into going a little crazy and benefiting from the knowledge that is found. My contribution is I found an artist to do an illustration for each chapter. It’s going to be a very handsome book.

After that will be a little digest anthology of comics. Basically a continuation of what I was doing with Diamond, except in book form. I like the Shonen Jump phonebook big brick of comics, so that was the original inspiration. I also have this naive dream that there should be these big phonebook anthologies on the newsstands or in vending machines, like that would get people back into comics like it did when I was a kid. I think I’m gonna call the series The Optimist but ironically I’m not necessarily planning on doing more than one.

I’m organizing an art festival in September or October of 2012 with my friends Dunja Jankovic, Lisa Mangum, and Justin Hocking (from the Independent Publishing Resource Center) called “The Projects.” Imagine a comic convention… with no tables. There will be a pop up shop so people can sell stuff, but tabling will not be the focus. It’s modeled after a European art fest with more of a focus on workshops, live art and music, panels and parties. We hope to bring over international artists and publishers like Le Dernier Cri, United Dead Artists, and artists from Croatia.

Vigneault: For Family Style, there should definitely be two issues of Elfworld coming out: #3, in spring, features a great cover by EW‘s founder Jeffrey Brown and comics by Ed Luce, Julia Gfrörer, Jesse Reklaw, Tom Biby, Malachi Ward, and more; #4, in fall, has comics by Levon Jihanian, Virginia Paine,  Michael Deforge, and many more, all wrapped up in a Tom Neely cover. There’ll almost certainly be another great issue of Ochre Ellipse by Jonas Madden-Connor, and I’ll have some personal work come out as well, including the start of Titan, a sci-fi story which will be serialized on the Study Group website, and a collection of my Bird Brain illustrated journals. I’m juggling Family Style with my work as an editor at Scout Books and being a student, but I’ve definitely got some plans to expand the line in the coming year. And Press Gang will be exhibiting at several shows in the coming year, including new ones for us, such as the Image Comics Expo and the Vancouver Comics Art Festival.

Soto: My goal is to be able to do two issues of SG Mag a year, so definitely at least one of those will happen, hopefully two. I’m also working on the next issue of my solo comic, Ghost Attack. It’s the first chapter of an intimate horror comic called “Maps.” I’m also FINALLY launching the studygroup12.com website again, this time as a webcomics anthology. That should be live by the second week of January. It will have new, weekly comics updates from Kazimir Strzepek, Jennifer Parks, Farel Dalrymple, Levon Jihanian, François Vigneault, Michael DeForge, myself, and Jason Leivian/Ian McEwan.

I guess some people might be excited to hear that I plan on running my long-lost Secret Voice comic on the site, starting in February. So expect lots of troll killing and magic tricks as there’s going to be new unpublished Dr. Galapagos comics coming out soon. I’m very dedicated to not just becoming someone who prints other people’s comics, so I’m going to be doubling down on my own comics production.

Other than that, I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing I can really talk about right now. 2012 will be very full, and hopefully that will lead into an even more productive 2013!

ELFWORLD #3 PREVIEW PAGES:

SG12.COM PREVIEW PAGES:

Throwing our lot in with “graphic novels” as the focus of the store years ago as opposed to “pop culture,” “superheroes” and associated merchandise seems to have been a winning strategy for this past decade. I don’t know if it was motivated by market insight so much as the fact I am passionate about comics as a medium but have limited personal interest in contemporary pop culture or toys, etc. With an e-book future ahead, I’m not sure if this will continue to pay off.

—Peter Birkemoe, owner of Toronto’s much-beloved comics shop The Beguiling (which is also a thriving original art dealership and co-sponsor of the Toronto Comic Art Festival), on the pros and cons of his store’s approach to the comics medium. I like the way Birkemoe frames his store’s business model as a matter of personal preference rather than a declaration that it’s the One True Path; I like the concise way he describes it, because when the decision was made it wasn’t so much brilliantly simple as riskily simple; and I’m a bit dismayed by his concerns about the digital future, which I’d never really considered as an obstacle for excellent stores like The Beguiling in quite that way before.

The quote comes from Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interview with Birkemoe, which is well worth your time in its entirety, even if only for the image of store manager and longtime blogosphere fixture Christopher Butcher being sent out into the world on various missions like the funnybook James Bond to Birkemoe’s M.

Trimming the tree, hanging the stockings, lighting the menorah, setting up the Nativity scene, watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Scrooged back to back: The holidays are all about tradition. And two of the best comics websites around have holiday traditions of their own.

First up is Inkstuds, the comics interview podcast and radio broadcast hosted by Robin McConnell, and its annual Best of 2011 Critics Roundtable. This year McConnnell is joined by The Comics Journal‘s Tim Hodler, Joe McCulloch (aka Jog the Blog), and Robot 6′s own Matt Seneca for a truly enjoyable and insightful discussion of such titles as Big Questions, Prison Pit, Thickness, Paying For It, and Kramers Ergot 8, among many others. Radio turns out to be a terrific format for each participant, so much so that I was compulsively using every spare moment to finish the podcast — I even opened up my laptop in the passenger seat of my car and played it on the way to the drugstore. Give it a listen.

Meanwhile, Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter has kicked off his much beloved by me Holiday Interview series. His inaugural interview with Art Spiegelman tackles his new book-cum-documentary MetaMaus, his stint as the Grand Prix winner of France’s massive Angoulême comic con, and his take on the legacy of the underground comix movement, while the series’ second interview examines the future of the small-press publisher Sparkplug after the death of its founder Dylan Williams with the company’s new triumvirate of Emily Nilsson, Virginia Paine, and Tom Neely. Spiegelman and Sparkplug are both vital institutions in their own ways, having put their money where their mouths are with respect to the kinds of comics they’d like to see in the world, and Spurgeon makes for a great interlocutor as they articulate their respective visions. Go and read.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene in Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (also known as DK2; Miller and Varley 2001-2002) is where Batman attacks the corporate leaders of the United States government, giving the word “terrorism” a new meaning. The Anarcho-terrorist superhero’s assault is directed against “the real monsters” (page 53, panel 1), the corrupt powers-that-be that rule behind a virtual president….In “late capitalism”, the virtual transactions of financial speculators determine the entire economy of countries, the “democratic” political system of their governments and, of course, the real life of their citizens. We should ask ourselves if the world we inhabit now is so different from the virtual United States ruled by the computer-generated president Miller imagined.

—The Comics Grid’s Pepo Pérez wonders if Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again was prophetic (in a way Miller himself probably wouldn’t approve of today). Personally, I think it’s a stretch to compare the real America to Batman’s America. I mean, one has a glossy, shiny surface built on human suffering, as citizens participate in a sham democracy treated like a sporting event by blathering talking-head news-media figures, while corporations engaged in criminal conspiracies for which they suffer no lasting legal consequences loot the world with impunity behind the scenes. The other has Batman in it.

You might be accustomed to seeing the comics of Matt Furie and Lisa Hanawalt in avant-garde anthologies like Kramers Ergot and Thickness, or in their solo humor series from Pigeon Press Boy’s Club and I Want You, or in the stylishly sleazy pages of Vice magazine. But now you can share your love of these modern masters of anthropomorphic mayhem with your little ones!

Sandy Bilus of I Love Rob Liefeld notes that McSweeney’s, the literary magazine-slash-publisher with a very comics-friendly track record historically, has officially launched a subscription plan for its new children’s imprint McMullens with books by Furie and Hanawalt. Furie’s The Night Riders chronicles the bike-based adventures of a frog and mouse on a nocturnal journey, while Hanwalt’s Benny’s Brigade follows “the world’s smallest, chattiest, and most gentlemanly walrus” as he attempts to find his way home with the help of two little girls and three brave slugs. Presumably these books will be as beautifully drawn as any of Furie and Hanawalt’s comics, but with far fewer dirty jokes.

The books retail for $17.95 each, but are the launch titles for a McMullens subscription package that will get you eight books for $80 total, including shipping. Not a bad deal at all.

some of AdHouse/AdDistro's recent releases

A hearty and heartfelt congratulations to publisher Chris Pitzer on the ninth anniversary of the formation of his fine line of comics, AdHouse Books (and more recently its distribution wing, AdDistro). Pitzer is marking the occasion by telling the stories behind nine of the company’s releases, and the result is a mix insight into the kinds of challenges any small-press comics publisher must face, and the qualities that make this particular small-press comics publisher such a valuable one.

With an output ranging from high-end art books like Paul Pope’s Pulphope and James Jean’s Process Recess to thoughtful graphic novels like Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest and Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog, it’s tough to say exactly what “an AdHouse book” will be like, but with Pitzer’s attention to design and reproduction behind every one, you generally can count on it being gorgeous. And as the stories told by Pitzer about books like Pulpatoon Pilgrimage, Skyscrapers, Duncan and so on indicate, the chances are also good that he’s gone to bat for a largely unknown and unpublished talent. That’s an admirable thing for a publisher to do once, let alone over and over again for nearly a decade.

On Saturday, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il made like untold hundreds of thousands of people in the country he immiserated over the course of his 17-year reign and died. To most of the rest of the world, he was a simultaneously clownish and sinister figure who enriched himself as the apex of a pyramid of Orwellian oppression and deprivation. Yet the spectacle of many of his former subjects abasing themselves with public grief over his passing is already making the meme rounds.

For comics readers, nothing can explain this paradoxical phenomenon better than Guy Delisle’s masterful travelogue Pyongyang, an account of the cartoonist’s time working at a North Korean animation studio. Publisher Drawn and Quarterly has posted a passage from the book that gives a sense of just how pervasive and intrusive a presence the Dear Leader was in the lives of North Koreans, with his face, name, and mostly bogus backstory visible in some way nearly everywhere you looked. Check out the excerpt, then do yourself a favor and make Pyongyang a last-minute stocking stuffer for yourself: It filters the totalitarian politics of North Korea and the controversy surrounding how best to handle it through a uniquely personal lens, and as an introduction to how the country works it’s tough to top.

[KRISTY] VALENTI: I think there is a wolf cycle going on right now in indy comics; there was that werewolf anthology they put out at CCS.

[TOM] NEELY: I haven’t seen it.

VALENTI: I don’t know if it was the whole vampire-werewolf-zombie cycle or —

NEELY: I have no idea. I have specifically avoided reading most comics while working on The Wolf. Except for a few exceptions from friends, but I didn’t want to be influenced by anything contemporary or any external ideas. But I was very conscious of Twilight and all that stuff happening around me. And my mom was always like, “Oh, I think your book is gonna do really well, because everybody’s into werewolves and scary stuff.” And I’m like, “Mom …” And she’s like, “You should market this to the Twilight…” And I was like, “I’m not marketing my semi-pornographic book to teenage girls.”

[Valenti laughs.] That will get me arrested [chuckles].

It’s just a coincidence. It wasn’t any specific attempt to tap into that market, I was just off doing my own werewolf thing in my cave. And apparently there’s other stuff going on too — I didn’t even realize Jason did a werewolf story until somebody told me that the other day. So I haven’t really kept up with anybody [chuckles]. That’s what’s nice about finishing it, is now I’m getting to read all these books that I’ve avoided for the last five years. And someone else brought up that there’s a lot more sex in indy comics right now too. And I was unaware of that as well. Maybe there’s just something in the collective unconscious that’s leading us down that path. But it wasn’t any conscious attempt at being a part of that. I’m largely unaware; I guess there is a lot of it.

—Cartoonist and painter Tom Neely on pop culture and alternative comics’ mutual season of the wolf, in conversation with The Comics Journal‘s Kristy Valenti. He’s right — altcomix really are having a bit of a sexy time right now, and horror has gone hand in hand with that, for whatever reason. It’s interesting to think that even some of the artists responsible for this don’t realize it until they emerge from the trees enough to get a good look at the forest.

Valenti’s life- and career-spanning interview with Neely is a must-read, and not just because of insights like these into Neely’s wordless psycho-sexual-surreal-semiautobiographical graphic novel The Wolf, one of the year’s best comics. It paints a compelling portrait of how a restless and idiosyncratic artist can maintain a balance between pursuing his vision and the need to work with others — peers, publishers, day-job providers — to do so. His revelations about his failure to come to terms with Top Shelf for publishing his breakout book The Blot, the pros and cons of working as an animator for Disney, and his interaction with the alternative-comics scenes in Los Angeles and Portland all make for reading that’s both depressing and instructive. Check it out.

Because then I could have enjoyed two years’ worth of Eleanor Davis’ absurdly proficient “sketches,” comics, illustrations and more instead of having to catch up with them all at once.

Wait. “Having” to catch up with them all at once? Isn’t it more like getting to catch up with them all at once? When it’s someone with Davis’s level of chops we’re talking about, what the hell am I complaining for?

(hat tip: Zack Soto)

Mould Map 2

Missed out on the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival? Want to check out new comics, zines, and prints from some of the show’s buzziest attendees and exhibitors? BCGF co-organizer PictureBox Inc. has you covered. Dan Nadel’s brainchild has stocked its online store with new books and art from a who’s who of folks at the show, including Frank Santoro, Anya Davidson, Matthew Thurber, CF, Sammy Harkham, and Leif Goldberg, and the anthologies Mould Map 2 (edited by Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler) and Weird (edited by Noel Freibert) from Landfill Editions and Closed Caption Comics respectively. Stuff your stockings, artcomics fans.

Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, and Dash Shaw with the book of the hour, Kramers Ergot 8

I bought many, many books at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this past Saturday; I won’t be showing them to you in this report. This is because I’m actually, actively embarrassed by just how big my haul really was. I spent so much money at this show that I’m ashamed to even obliquely reveal it. Eighteen years from now, when I’m complaining about the cost of sending my daughter to college, the last thing I need is for her to dig through the Robot 6 archives, find my BCGF 2011 haul, and say “Oh really?”

But whatever it means for my finances, the surfeit of compelling new comics at BCGF can only mean great things for the show. As I told nearly everyone I encountered there — and I encountered more friendly critics and creators here than at any other show I can think of, often in marathon back-to-back-to-back meet-and-greet encounters that would slowly choke off an aisle as more and more people stopped to say hello — BCGF is my favorite comics show, hands down. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the best comics show, in fact, in that its relentless, carefully curated focus on the cutting edge gives it a sense of cohesion, purpose, and excitement that’s all but unmatched.

This differentiates it from the other, mostly alternative-comics conventions with which I’m familiar. Bethesda’s Small Press Expo is always a blast, but that’s due in large part to its indie-comics sleepaway-camp vibe. Its hotel setting, extensive and wide-ranging programming slate, and Ignatz Awards ceremony produce a communal feeling that can compensate for shortcomings on the creative end. This year, for example, I keenly felt the absence of a vibrant minicomics scene at the show, while the big debuts were all from relatively large publishers from whom review copies could be secured or with whom pre-orders could be placed. Its strengths as a community-builder, or just a fun place to hang out, really shouldn’t be dismissed — though I had to leave early, I’d imagine that the show was better situated to help its attendees get each other through the news of Sparkplug publisher Dylan Williams’s death than any other. But on a book-to-book, table-to-table basis, it has good years and less good years.

Meanwhile, Manhattan’s MoCCA benefited for years from basically being SPX NYC. Believe it or not, the comics capital of North America had never had an alternative-comics convention to call its own — at the time it barely had any comics convention — and the thrill for so many comics creators and readers of having a vibrant show right where they lived and worked was palpable. And I don’t think you can overestimate the impact of the year where both Craig Thompson’s Blankets and the Sammy Harkham-edited Kramers Ergot 4, two of the most important and influential (and at the time, physically biggest) comics of the 2000s, debuted at the show. But rising exhibitor and admissions prices, organizational and logistical problems, a venue change that let some attendees down aesthetically and in one memorably rotten year left everyone sweating for lack of adequate ventilation, and a sense that MoCCA the mostly alternative comics festival is incidental to the concerns of its more mainstream museum namesake have slowed the show’s momentum in recent years. This is a gap that BCGF — a free show, in the borough where I’d guess the bulk of NYC’s alternative cartoonists actually live, run not as a fundraiser for some other entity but for its own sake, curated to keep the focus away from the sort of genre-comic tryout efforts that can weigh down MoCCA’s aisles — is uniquely situated to fill.

For East Coasters, that leaves Toronto’s TCAF. Like BCGF, it’s organized in part by a respected retailer: The Brooklyn show has co-organizer Gabe Fowler of Desert Island, Toronto has the Beguiling’s Chris Butcher. Also like BCGF, it’s a curated show, its attendees selected by the organizers rather than simply buying their way in. And like BCGF, it’s free to the public, a true festival. Though I haven’t attended (yet!), I’ve heard nothing but great things about it. The sense that I get, though, is that its aims and BCGF’s are really quite different despite their similarities. TCAF seems to be a much more ecumenical affair, an outreach program to comics-interested civilians, one that puts comics’ best foot forward in terms of high-quality, accessible material. For all of comics’ pop-culture currency, even a massive phenomenon like San Diego relies on a vision of comics dominated by superheroes, which these days are just as likely to be associated in the public eye with movies and video games, and are often in their least accessible, most impenetrable form in their medium of origin. TCAF strikes me as designed to present a vision of North American comics more akin to the way the art form works in Japan or France: There’s something good for everyone. Certainly its sizable children’s-comics component fits that bill, as does its co-sponsorship by that most mainstream of literary/arts entities, the local public library.

BCGF is different. Its setting in one of America’s counterculture capitals means that it too draws in attendees who aren’t a part of comics culture in terms of regular visits to the shop or daily participation on the Internet. But the wares aren’t gateway books or jumping-on points. If you’re gonna buy something at BCGF, chances are you’re buying something that goes whole hog as an “artcomic,” one in which plot is secondary to or expressed primarily through the power and tone of the images. A willingness on the part of the audience to engage with challenging material is presupposed. And the rewards, if you’re up for that sort of thing, are subsequently greater.

It’s a noisy aesthetic, to be sure. It favors bold marks, bright colors, and — seemingly more so with each passing month — strong, even explicit, content. As such it can alienate not just readers with more mainstream tastes but also those with a differing set of preferences or priorities when it comes to alternative comics themselves.

But for me? Comics heaven on earth. For example, I’ve spent all year on my own blog linking to almost every new page from the young cartoonists Jonny Negron and Michael DeForge; Negron had new work in fully four anthologies debuting at the show (the latest issues of Chameleon, Mould Map, Smoke Signals and Study Group), while I actively lost track of the number DeForge popped up in in addition to the two minicomics he debuted (Open Country and Kid Mafia). And they were just two of the creators you could find who had tremendous 2011s you could follow via their websites, from Gabby Schulz to Gabrielle Bell to Lisa Hanawalt to L. Nichols.

Anthologies in particular made a tremendous showing. Led by the unofficial flagship publication of the entire show, and hell, the entire scene, the PictureBox-published Kramers Ergot 8, they included not just the quartet listed above (Mould Map #2′s vibrant neon colors were an especial standout), but also everything from Image Comics tributes (Rub the Blood) to porn (Thickness). The Closed Caption Comics collective, featuring the increasingly popular Ryan Cecil Smith and young artcomics stalwarts like Noel Freibert, Lane Milburn, Molly O’Connell, and Conor Stechschulte, had so much new stuff to sell that their self-titled anthology’s latest “issue” was just a cardboard box they stuffed with comics. You could grab exciting new comics from probably over a hundred creators simply by snapping up collections of this sort.

And for the first time, major literary comics publishers Top Shelf and Fantagraphics joined returning champs Drawn and Quarterly with official presences at the show. Thanks to them, you could meet high-alt luminary Adrian Tomine or MAD vet Jack Davis, or network with indefatigable publicists Leigh Walton and Peggy Burns, to say nothing of the full panoply of titles they made available from their extensive libraries. The mid-range arthouse publishers — AdHouse, Secret Acres, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, co-organizer PictureBox, and most inspiringly Sparkplug — were also on hand, as were up-and-comers like Koyama, NoBrow, Uncivilized, Press Gang, and Retrofit. The small-press component could enable you to have an SPX-style show within the show.

Plus, for every attendee or cartoonist who complained about the prevailing rough-and-tumble aesthetic, there was likely another who was thrilled. I received an email from one prominent cartoonist who couldn’t have been happier with all the smut and gore — given that person’s work over the years, it had to feel like vindication. What I like about it is that the genre work and genre pastiche on hand felt neither safe nor slick, hiding behind the safety net of retro or “coolness.” It felt raw, a little ugly, a little exhibitionistic, even a little unpleasant. The closest comparison I can think of is the early short stories of Clive Barker: impressionistic, sexualized stuff that re-awoke the horror in horror. To dismiss it all as shock tactics is to make a pretty big mistake, I think.

My only regret is that I didn’t get the chance to experiment with unknown quantities. I really don’t think that’s the fault of the show, mind you. For one thing, I’ve been reading and writing about this kind of stuff long enough for there to be fewer and fewer unknown quantities for me to begin with. But mostly, I spent so much on books and creators I knew about and was looking forward to seeing in advance that I simply had nothing left over to splurge on impulse buys or treasure-hunting. And as the fella says, that’s one o’ them good problems, for both the show and for me. There are many cons I enjoy going to, from SPX to SDCC. As of this past weekend, I’d say there’s only one I can’t not go to.

* Hyperbole! But once the phrase got stuck in my head, I knew it wasn’t going anywhere until it headlined this report. And…well, to me, it’s as close to being true as any show could get.

Hark! A Vagrant cartoonist Kate Beaton’s no stranger to superheroes, and her salty take on Wonder Woman really brings out the best in both women, real and imaginary. This time around, Beaton’s Wondy receives advice on how to be more awesome from Superman, Batman, some DC honchos, admiring fans, angry detractors, and more. Needless to say, she’s having none of it. Go read, but be careful not to touch that tiara. It looks dangerous!

Webcomics wunderkind Emily Carroll is taking her deliciously dark comics to dead tree. According to Publishers Weekly, Simon & Schuster’s Margaret K. McElderry Books will be publishing His Face All Red and Other Stories, a book-length collection from the celebrated (mostly) horror-comic creator. The book will also be released in the UK through Faber & Faber and in Italy through Stile Libro.

As a big fan of Carroll’s vibrant colors, exquisite pacing, and genuinely creepy, genuinely bleak stories of murder and monstrousness, I’m really looking forward to this one. I’m doubly curious to see how her existing stories, which frequently make use of the “infinite canvas” of the web in terms of layout, translate to the printed page.

Carroll, might I remind you, had never drawn a comic prior to May 2010. So, y’know, holy smokes.

Remember that unpublished cover Geof Darrow drew for J. Michael Straczynski’s “Grounded” arc on Superman that we posted the other day? Remember Darrow saying to Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell that it never ran as a cover and that “it’ll never see the light of day” despite his “really nice guy” editor’s assurances to the contrary? Good news, Darrow fans: Both Darrow and DC confirm that the finished cover will appear in Superman: Grounded Vol. 2, on sale this Wednesday, Dec. 7. The crazy cat lady will get her time in the sun at last!