Laura Lee Gulledge has an interesting double life: She’s the creator of the graphic novel Page by Paige, which was published by Abrams earlier this year, but like many others in the field, she also has a day job. It’s a very unusual day job though: Gulledge is a scene painter for store window displays, and she worked on the holiday displays for several big New York department stores. She has posted some fascinatingly surreal videos and photos of the windows she worked on at her blog, It Needs More Glitter, and she told me that she painted all of the Saks windows herself, rather than working with a group, adding, “so you can recognize my inking style in the finished work.” Gulledge is working on a children’s picture book concept that is inspired by her Christmas-window work—a book that she would love to see as the starting point for a real store window, thus bringing the whole thing full circle. I was curious how she mingles her two careers in real life, so I e-mailed her a couple questions.

Robot 6: How do you integrate your graphic novel work with your store windows–do you have to set everything else aside when the holidays draw near?

Laura Lee Gulledge: Anyone in comics can tell you that there isn’t a lot of money in it, especially when you’re a new author building an audience. So working as a “holiday elf” for 4 months of the year has been a good way to supplement my income over the past couple years while working on my comic projects. Unfortunately, taking away time from a book when you already have a deadline (just so you can pay the bills) can be hard. With Page by Paige I gave myself only 7 months to draw it all out because I worked a season on Christmas windows, which was insane. For my next book I’m giving myself more time to draw it, so I might not be able to fit in another season of windows. It’s been a great learning opportunity to be a scenic artist, but ultimately I’d like to be drawing full time.

Robot 6: Are you working on a new graphic novel?

Gulledge: I’ve just started working on a new graphic novel called Will & Whit which features a new cast of characters in a summertime adventure, but with some similar underlying themes to Page by Paige. The main character’s shadows are “alive” so I’m especially looking forward to playing around with the whole visual style. Here’s the elevator-pitch-summary…”As lamp-building teen Willy begins another summer in her mountain town, she longs for unplugged adventures with her fellow creative friends Autumn, Noel, and Reese.  Little does she know that she will get her wish in the form of a whimsical arts carnival and a storm-induced blackout, which forces Willy to face her fear of darkness and the living shadows that shed light on her true self.”

Besides the graphic novel, I have lots of pots on the stove….I’m working on adapting Will & Whit as an interdisciplinary stage production with my friend Lauren Larken,  fleshing out a children’s picture book concept, and working on turning some of my artwork into a rug collection through a NY textile producer.

Founded by Emma Hayley, SelfMadeHero launched in 2007 with its much-publicized Manga Shakespeare line, which reinterprets the Bard’s plays, and Eye Classics, which adapts classic works like A Tale of Two Cities and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The publisher expanded in 2009, adding original fiction, Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and biographies (beginning with the well-reviewed Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, published in the U.S. by Abrams ComicArts).

Hayley will remain as managing director, but distribution in the U.K. and export markets will be handled by Abrams & Chronicle Books. In spring 2012 SelfMadeHero will launch a North American graphic novel list that includes Chico & Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, Kiki de Montparnasse by Catel & Bocquet, The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume I edited by Dan Lockwood, But I Really Wanted to Be an Anthropologist by Margaux Motin, and Best of Enemies: A History of U.S. and Middle East Relations by David B. and Jean-Pierre Filiu.

“Having long admired SelfMadeHero’s publishing program and Emma Hayley’s eye and taste for original and exciting graphic novels and material for both adults and children, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with her and her team to bring the books to even larger audiences,” Abrams President and CEO Michael Jacobs said in a statement. “We at Abrams have been looking to expand our reach in the still growing markets for comics and graphics and think that with SelfMadeHero we have found a perfect complement to our existing Abrams ComicArts publishing program.”

Abrams’ comics line includes Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Art of Jaime Hernandez, Nat Turner, Mom’s Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

Willie & Joe: Back Home

Willie & Joe: Back Home
by Bill Mauldin
Fantagraphics, 288 pages, $29.99

PS Magazine: The Best of Preventive Maintenance Monthly
by Will Eisner; Selected and with an overview by Eddie Campbell
Abrams, 272 pages, $21.95

There can arguably be no finer example of how to completely sabotage a successful career than what cartoonist Bill Mauldin did upon returning back to the United States at the close of World War II. The youngest person (he was 23) to win the Pulitzer Prize at that time, his gag cartoons, featuring dirty, worn-down, battle-hardened, embittered soldiers (most notably the pair known as Willie & Joe), which ran in Stars and Stripes and later in national newspapers, allowed soldiers to vicariously let off steam — someone out there knew what they were going through — and gave the citizens back home a look at the war that few media outlets at the time provided.

In 1945, Mauldin came home a celebrity and, as the new book, Willie & Joe: Back Home suggests (and the excellent introduction by Todd DePastino spells out), it was a role the contrarian Mauldin chafed at. Struggling to connect with a wife and child he barely know, disgusted at the way returning soldiers were treated by a public more happy about the end of rationing than interested in welcoming returning heroes, and inflamed by politicians and armchair generals who seemed more than happy to start another war, this time with Russia, Mauldin could barely hide his bile or confusion. The initial cartoons in this collection show Willie and Joe struggling to adjust to civilian life and usually failing, albeit not without letting out a sardonic quip. One cartoon, which seems to be drawn a bit too sharply from the artist’s life, shows Joe walking in on Willie as he’s lying on the floor, picture frame over his head and wife about to deliver the finishing blow with a lamp. “Come in, Joe,” Willie says, “I’m being rehabilitated.”

Eventually Willie and Joe faded into the background, however, as Mauldin started focusing more on other problems facing returning grunts — a housing shortage, trouble finding work — and then rather savagely (and rather bluntly) went after racists and right-wing extremists. This did not win him any new fans among a public that was increasingly growing more conservative and anti-communist, and many papers started dropping the strip or censoring it outright. Mauldin responded by doubling his attack, before ultimately retiring from cartooning altogether, at least for a little while.

The end result is a collection of cartoons that both read like the work of someone desperate to rage against perceived injustices as loudly as possible, but also seemingly desperate to demolish whatever status he has attained as quickly as possible. Few of the cartoons rank among Mauldin’s best work (although there certainly are gems), but it’s a fascinating book nevertheless.

PS Magazine

Like Mauldin, Will Eisner attempted to shine a light on everyday military life and bring aid to the common private. The central differences were Eisner was: a) at the time of this work a civilian, contracted to produce comics for the Army; and b) he was more concerned with helping the private undertand what was going on with his equipment than with his head or heart, or government for that matter.

From 1951 to 1971, Eisner produced PS Magazine, a (sort of) monthly magazine designed to help soldiers better understand how to take care of their equipment. Preventive Maintenance Monthly, as it was also know, used comics to show and explain detailed information about intricate military rules and gear, furthering Eisner’s belief in the educational potential of the medium. Most of the series can be found online, but Campbell and Abrams have here assembled a “best of” book, highlighting a largely overlooked period of Eisner’s bibliography, in between The Spirit and A Contract With God.

Unfortunately, most of the work is deadly dull. No doubt soldiers of the day found strips like “How to Start a Stalled Engine” or “How to Keep Your Hydra-Matic Happy” to be both useful and entertaining, but as a modern, civilian reader — and one who’s primary interest in an automobile is whether it will get me to the store or not — I struggled to get through dialogue like, “In cold climates, particularly on M48 and A1 tanks .. some use Arctic covers or spread canvas on the topdeck grillwork and run the engine with cooling air intakes partially blocked!” If you can make it through sentences like that without getting sleepy, then you’re a better and more attentive reader than I.

Then there’s the issue of repetition. Most of these stories follow the basic same plot, with the emphasis on the need for constant maintenance repeated ad nauseum. In virtually each tale, a confused, dumb or lazy soldier — usually the buck-toothed Joe Dope — fails to take proper care of their vehicle or weapons only to face a stern talking-to the vivacious Connie Rodd (love that name by the way) who then lectures the poor dope on the proper method. That’s if they’re luck, by the way, since poor maintenance frequently leads to death or injury or a just plain bummed out time as well.

To his credit, Eisner and his company of helpers vary the set-up as much as possible, parodying Dragnet, Mickey Spillane novels and even classic comic strips at one point. But despite these efforts, the PS stories remain dry and too tech-oriented and exposition heavy to entertain. And although he revels in cartoonish caricature whenever possible (a trait the Army brass apparently did not appreciate as it was toned down as the years passed) Eisner shows little of the visual aplomb and acuity he demonstrated in The Spirit and his later graphic novels. Again, I have little doubt to the soldier of 1958, reading PS was infinitely preferable to perusing the technical manual or any other Army-issue material. But I also don’t doubt that given the choice, they’d rather see what Willie & Joe were up to.

Star Wars art by JH Williams III

LucasFilm and Abrams Books have teamed up for Star Wars Art: Comics, a collection of artwork from “the entire history of Star Wars comics publishing,” from the first Star Wars adaptations published in 1977 by Marvel to the present day.

According to the press release, the artwork has been “hand-selected and curated” by George Lucas and will feature interior pages and fully painted covers from artists such as Al Williamson, Howard Chaykin, Adam Hughes, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Dorman, and many more. It will also feature newly commissioned art by 20 creators, including John Cassady, Sam Kieth, Mike Mignola, Paul Pope, Frank Quitely, Jim Steranko and, as seen above, J.H. Williams III.

“I wanted something that was a new character of my creation,” the artist wrote on his blog. “I had been told that George was a longtime comics fan. So I also wanted to go for this classic giant monster versus hero idea, like stuff you might see in old [Jack] Kirby comics, but here it needed to be a mechanical weapon that looked like a creature, giving a sense of story beyond fighting a giant monster. This gives more weight for the snippet of a bigger unseen plot idea. And the scene had to have a strong design sense to it, so it could have a signature look that could be identified with my sensibilities, but still felt like Star Wars when you look at it.”

This is the second book in Abrams’ Star Wars Art series; the first one, subtitled Visions, was released last year. Star Wars Art: Comics has an introduction by Virginia Mecklenburg, a foreword by Dennis O’Neil, and a preface by Douglas Wolk. It features a cover by Dave Dorman and is due in October.

Abrams joins the transmedia parade with two books about The Walking Dead, the Robert Kirkman zombie comic turned AMC television series.

The first book, called The Walking Dead Chronicles and due out in the fall to coincide with the opening of season two of the show, will cover both the comic and the making of the first season of the TV series and will contain lots of behind-the-scenes material, including interviews with Kirkman and someone almost as important, make-up artist Greg Nicotero, as well as comparisons of the comic and the show. No word yet on the second volume.

Abrams will, of course, be at Comic-Con and they will be promoting the book there, so stop by and have a look.

Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman

Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.

This month we’re looking at a man routinely regarded as one of the most significant creators in the history of the medium, and his central work one of the finest comics has ever produced. I’m speaking of Mr. George Herriman.

Why he’s important

Herriman and his most-famous strip, Krazy Kat, have received so many accolades and is so beloved and well-regarded (it routinely hits the No. 1 spot on many “best of” lists, including the Comics Journal’s Top 100 list), for many reading Krazy Kat can feel like a rite of passage, something they “ought” to do, like reading War and Peace or watching PBS.

Krazy Kat is far from a chore, however. Indeed, it is rarely anything less than a delight to read, although it can be a bit challenging for newcomers. The early strips are dense with wordplay, while the later strips take on the quality of near-abstract paintings at times. Then there’s Krazy’s off-kilter dialogue (“If only I could be  star or a moom or a komi or ivin a solo eeklip. But me, I’m nuttin”). Thus, whichever book you decide to dive into first, I’d recommend taking your time. Read (and reread) the strips slowly and don’t feel the need to rush through.

Where to start

I usually try to avoid recommending out-of-print books, especially for the  ”Where to Start” category, but I firmly believe the best place to begin is Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman by Patrick McDonnell (of Mutts fame), Karen O’Connell and Georgia Riley de Havenon. It’s got everything a newcomer would need: a well written biography about the man and his work and a healthy sampling of daily and Sunday strips taken from various decades. McDonnell and company did enough of a bang-up job here that it’s worth tracking down a copy, especially if you’re a neophyte.

From there you should read

Krazy & Ignatz

If you liked that initial offering and want to dig deeper, the next logical choice is Fantagraphics’ lovely collection of Sunday strips, dubbed Krazy & Ignatz. There are currently 12 volumes in print — Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut; A Kind Benevolent and Amiable Brick; There is a Heppy Lend Fur, Fur Away; Love Letters in Ancient Brick; A Mice, A Brick, A Lovely Night; A Kat a’Lilt With Song; Necromancy by the Blue Bean Bush; A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy; Shifting Sands Dusts its Cheecks in Powdered Beauty; A Brick Stuffed With Moon-Bims; A Ragout of Raspberries and He Nods in Quiescent Siesta — with the final (but actually third) volume, At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True, due in stores later this year. Each volume collects about two years worth of material, except for the first two and Drim, which collect three.

You don’t, by the way, need to read the volumes in any particular order, chronological or otherwise. Certainly it’s interesting to see how the strip developed and evolved over time, but it won’t hamper your appreciation of the material. Nor is there any particular volume I’d suggest you begin with — they’re all good. I’m partial to the later, color strips, and Chromatic (which is where the color strips begin) features a fantastic essay by Jeet Heer about Herriman’s racial roots and how it affected the strip, but beyond that you start with any volume.

If all those books seem like too much shopping for you, Fantagraphics has collected much of the same material in two hardcover volumes, with a presumed third one coming along the way sometime in the near future.

On the other hand, if you want to catch a glimpse of what the strip looked like when it originally ran in newspapers, consider shelling out some serious coin for Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays. This oversize volume, from Sunday Press Books, prints a collection of Sunday strips in their original 14 x 17″ printed size, along with samples of Herriman’s pre-Kat comics.

Further reading

The Kat Who Walked in Beauty

Fantagraphics has announced their intention to collect the daily Krazy Kat strips as well, but that’s down the line a bit. In the meantime, there are really only two ways to get a solid sampling of the daily strip, one of which is The Kat Who Walked in Beauty, an oversize tome that pairs together strips from the 1910s and 1920s, as well as some other Krazy-related ephemera.

The other book is Krazy & Ignatz in Tiger Tea, which collects the longest-running story Herriman ever attempted, concerning Krazy’s attempts to restore solvency to a bankrupt catnip baron by introducing a potent, energy-enfused drink known as “Tiger Tea.” The production values in this book are a bit questionable — I for one don’t care for the faux antique paper style that looks like it came straight from the bargain rack at Party City — but there’s no question its one of Herriman’s strongest and most memorable runs.

Can’t get enough Krazy Kat yet? Then why not sample Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration, edited by Craig Yoe? This coffe-table book, hot off the presses, includes a number of essays about the artists from folk like Douglas Wolk, E.E. Cummings, Richard Thompson, Bill Watterson as well as a much-cited 1924 piece by critic Gilbert Seldes. There’s also a plethora of original art, memorabilia, photographs and paintings. The only thing that prevents me from recommending the book as an introductory tome is the reliance on supplemental and specialty art versus the actual strips but for fans it’s got some nice surprises to share.

Finally, there’s Krazy Kat in Song and Dance, an as-yet unreleased book from Fantagraphics and Marschall Books on the Kat’s appearance in other media, including a 1921 ballet and some early animated cartoons that Herriman apparently helped work on. Apparently it will include a DVD when it does get released.

Ancillary material

Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays

George Herriman did a lot of other strips prior to (and in some cases concurrent with) Krazy Kat. Sadly, most of them are unavailable in print. The Comics Journal #287, however, (i.e. featuring the Jeffrey Brown interview) contains a healthy sampling of strips like Stumble Inn, Gooseberry Sprig and Baron Mooch. In addition, Allan Holtz has also been posting a number of editorial cartoons Herriman did for the L.A. Examiner over on his Stripper’s Guide blog.

Herriman profusely illustrated a series of books by newspaper columnist and poet Don Marquis about a poetic cockroach and a cat that thinks it was Cleopatra in a previous life. The series of books were remain quite popular in certain literary circles, and collected versions of the Archy and Mehitabel stories are still available in various forms on Amazon and elsewhere on the Internet.

Avoid

Most of the Krazy Kat animated cartoons, especially the ones done in the 1920s for Columbia Studios, are subpar, with the titular Krazy bearing more of a resemblance to Mickey Mouse than Herriman’s creation. Don’t load up your YouTube browser expecting to find anything even close to the sort of magic Herriman worked on the page.

As far as books go, Eclipse Comics originally started collecting the strip back in the 1990s before the company went belly up. You can still find copies of the book in various places hither and yon, but since they duplicate the material found in the Fantagraphics books, they’re more than a bit redundant and not worth picking up at this juncture, nice as they are.

Next month: Jack Cole

Fantagraphics plans to have creators signing at their booth pretty much the whole time, with a roster that includes Kim Dietch, Peter Bagge, Dash Shaw, Michael Kupperman, Gahan Wilson, and others too numerous to mention—check out the full list at their blog. Their people are also going to be involved in a ton of panels, and with a four-table block (J1, J2, K1, K2), they should be hard to miss.

Abrams will have their usual crowd of A-list creators at their booth: Jerry Robinson, Michael Uslan, Chip Kidd, Al Jaffee, and Craig Yoe. Jaffee will receive the 2011 Klein Award for volunteer of the year, and Uslan and Robinson will be on the panel Batman, the Joker and Beyond on Sunday.

Top Shelf will be debuting two new books, Liar’s Kiss by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, and Night Animals, by Brecht Evens. Both Skillman and Evens will be there to show off their new books. Jess Fink will also be in attendance, although her Chester 5000 isn’t due out until May.

Evens will also be at the Drawn + Quarterly booth (B5, C5, C6) along with Joe Ollmann, Pascal Girard, Adrian Tomine, and Jillian Tamaki; check their blog for signing and panel times. They will be debuting three books at the show: Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, by Shigeru Mizuki; Reunion, by Pascal Girard; and The Klondike, by Zach Worton.

Fanfare UK will have advance copies of Farm 54 fresh from the printer—it’s not due out until May—so stop by booth K13 and take a look. Writer Galit Seliktar will be there on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to sign copies.

Creators at the First Second booth will include Nick Bertozzi (Lewis & Clark) and Nick Abadzis (Laika) on Saturday and Ben Hatke (Zita the Spacegirl) and Tracy White (How I Made It To Eighteen) on Sunday.

It doesn’t look like IDW will have a table of their own, but Craig Yoe will be there with his latest anthology, Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers, published by IDW under their Yoe Books imprint.

Savage Sword of Conan Vol. 1

Welcome to another round of What Are You Reading, where we all sit around the virtual coffeehouse and talk about the books we’re currently enjoying (or not as the case may be). Our guest this week is Wilfred Santiago, author of the soon to be released biography of Roberto Clemente, 21. Look for an interview with me and Santiago about his new book in the coming weeks. In the meantime, click on the link below to see what he and my fellow Robot 6ers are reading this week.

Turok #1

Michael May: Somehow Turok: Son of Stone #1 (the recent Dark Horse version) slipped down in my To Read pile and I just found it again. It boasts 48 pages on the front cover, but of course 10 of those are ads and another 16 are the reprint of the original Turok story from 1954. That still leaves 22 pages of original Turok story though and the whole package was only $3.50, so who’s complaining? Those 22 pages are packed with action as Turok and Andar not only meet, but run a tense, grueling race against pursuing Aztec warriors. And it’s fun to compare the modern version with the original and see what Jim Shooter has changed and what he’s kept the same.

In 1954, Turok and Andar are already hunting companions, but are in desperate need of water. An enormous, swirling colony of bats reveals a cave that Turok hopes has water in it, so they explore and discover an underground “land of the lost.” It’s no less tense than being chased by Aztecs, but not quite as thrilling. In 2010, a strange, possibly supernatural storm replaces the bat colony and appears to be responsible for sending both Turok’s group and the Aztecs back in time. What caused the storm is a mystery that I hope to see solved one day; almost as much as I want to read the resolution to the frying-pan-to-fire cliffhanger at the end of the issue. I’ll be looking forward to the collected edition.

Continuing to dig deeper into the To Read pile, I found a four-page mini-comic by Sigrid Ellis and Erika Moen (Bucko) called Plants vs. Zombies: Bedtime. The only thing I love more than the splash page of gourds, melons, flowers, and cattails defending a family from a zombie horde is that the Bedtime sub-title suggests the possibility of more like it. Also, there’s a great first page of a little boy’s room with toys scattered around (including a Millenium Falcon) and a poster on the wall for Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s Underground.

I also completed the first volume of Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea, mostly on the recommendations of Chris Mautner and Brigid. Like Chris, I feel a deep Miyazaki vibe, though I wouldn’t have been able to recognize it as that before re-reading his review. What I felt was the book’s ability to pull me into its world and make me feel like I was part of this seaside community and witnessing the strangeness there for myself. There’s one scene when the main character is floating in the ocean and looking down into the water below and you can actually feel how deep and endless the water is. It’s frightening and exhilarating at the same time. Just a wonderful book and I can’t wait to dig into volume two.

What else? I’m a big fan of James Baker’s Rocket Rabbit, so while I’m waiting for the collected edition of that, I’m enjoying some of his mini-comics work like Sephilina the Nauti Girl. From her tentacle-like hair, I thought at first that she might be a mermaid-like character, but in actuality she’s an alien in a charming and funny space pulp story. She’s a Squoid, a race of aliens so hideous that just looking at one puts intelligent beings into a coma. Fortunately for Sephilina, the Squoids are also shape-changers, so she’s able to transform into a cute space girl. Unfortunately, everyone knows what she is and avoids her like death in case she accidentally reverts to her true form. It’s a fun concept and Baker’s cartooning makes it pay off.

Justice League: Generation Lost #21

Tom Bondurant: Not that I am a great prognosticator, but I had a feeling that Justice League: Generation Lost #21 (written by Judd Winick, drawn by Aaron Lopresti) would turn out like it did. That feeling only grew stronger the deeper I went into the issue. You all know by now how much I’ve enjoyed JL:GL, and I thought this issue did a particularly good job of using character moments in conjunction with advancing the plot, and even building a little suspense.

I’ve also enjoyed Zatanna (written by Paul Dini), but issue #11 (drawn by Cliff Chiang) might be my favorite issue so far. Zatanna takes an especially bitter enemy back to the ol’ homestead in hopes of restoring him to his human form — an ineffectual human form, to be sure — but things don’t exactly go as planned, resulting in one of the creepiest cliffhangers I’ve seen in a while. In this regard Chang really sells the story, giving Zatanna’s ancestral home the appropriate airs of grandeur and mystery, making the magical battles exciting and unpredictable, and wrapping everything up with a sequence whose apparent banality makes it all the more horrifying. Can’t wait for issue #12.

Finally … well, last week I mentioned the Gen13 paperback, which reprints the introductory miniseries by Brandon Choi, Jim Lee, and J. Scott Campbell. I did not expect to have such a strong reaction to this book. I don’t have anything against the creators, and I’ve liked other things they’ve done. Regardless, I remember buying Gen13 out of curiosity lo, those many years ago, and it will be a long, long time before I take this book off the shelf again. Put simply, it hasn’t aged well. Campbell’s work isn’t as off-putting in its exaggerations as, say, Rob Liefeld’s, but it still takes some getting used to. The script reads like a laundry-list of teen-superhero tropes run through a military-conspiracy blender and distilled until only the most potent sugars remain. This book was garish, obvious, and overly familiar. I could practically feel the creators elbowing me in the ribs, daring me not to like it. Sorry, fellas — I’m sure Gen13 got better, and I know you all did – but I come from a land of well-made liquor; and this turned to vinegar long ago.

Empire State

Brigid Alverson: Jason Shiga’s Empire State is sweet, funny, and depressing all at once. It’s a sort-of love story that reminded me very much of what it was like to be in my 20s, and why I’m glad I’m not any more. It’s the story of a cigarette-smoking, wisecracking girl who moves to New York and a quiet, stay-at-home guy who follows her there. It doesn’t end up being the romance of the century, but there’s a lot to enjoy about this book, both Shiga’s sly humor and his dead-on portrayal of difficult emotional moments. His cartoony style helps keep the reader from getting too emotionally involved‹his characters are all rounded and slouching, and I wouldn’t have guessed that the male lead was Asian if it one of the characters hadn’t mentioned it. On the other hand, Shiga includes lots of details and gives his characters quirks and interests, which makes for a rich reading experience.

Page by Paige, by Laura Lee Gulledge is a YA graphic novel that walks a very fine line between preachy and surrealistic. It’s the story of a self-conscious, introverted high-school girl who has just moved from Virginia to New York. She confides her feelings to her sketchbook, and sometimes her internal monologue sounds like something out of a self-help book. What redeems it, though, are her surrealistic drawings of Paige’s states of mind‹a crowd reduced to bundles of paper dolls, a landscape scattered with banana peels, her family’s faces replaced by framed pictures. She has an uncanny knack for drawing what teenagers think. I do think the book would be better in color, though. Gulledge works in black and white with lots of toning and grays that get a bit lost on the page; color, even limited color, would really bring this book to life.

Captain America: The Korvac Saga #4

Tim O’Shea: Man, I was sad to recently read that Zatanna’s numbers continue to drop in sales. Plenty of books are dropping in numbers, but in my opinion Zatanna’s stories have improved over the months. Honestly I dropped the book a few months back, but because I like Paul Dini’s writing typically, I was willing to give it another go. And with this current arc featuring the art of Cliff Chiang, I’m over-the-moon happy with the book. Zatanna 10 ended with a plot twist that ensured me I’ll be back for issue 11. If you are not currently reading Zatanna, I’d loved to learn the reasons why not.

Ben McCool’s Captain America: The Korvac Saga overall was a tad uneven for my taste. That being said, with issue 4, McCool sets up a scenario where Cap has to make a choice that I would have never considered constructing in a Cap story. While I cannot recommend the miniseries to folks if it comes out in TPB, I do hope to see more writing for McCool down the road. I also hope artist Craig Rousseau gets more high profile work at Marvel in the near to long term.

Superboy 5: Jeff Lemire has surprised me by making Lori Luthor one of the most interesting cast members in Superboy. I expect she’ll eventually become the book’s villain, but for now I enjoy her presence in the book.

Hawkeye-Blindspot 2 (of 4): I never tire of Jim McCann’s encyclopedia-scale knowledge of Hawkeye history. And he jams this issue full of Hawkeye’s history, with Nick Dragotta & Brad Simpson delivering absolutely stellar flashback scenes.

Cinderella-Fables are Forever 2 (of 6): Artist Shawn McManus is known for drawing great monsters, but dang if his female characters are not equally exquisite. I doubt writer Chris Roberson and McManus would want the grind (and pressure) of an ongoing monthly, but damn if I would not read it. Roberson’s use of flashback (in this issue alone he takes us to 1943, 1983 and 1984 [in addition to present day action]) is another factor that pulls me into this miniseries. I never tire of this female Fable equivalent to James Bond.

Oishinbo

Wilfred Santiago: On my nightstand…

The complete TORPEDO volume one.
Good reprint by IDW. Not for everyone. Torpedo is a mean, slimy, nasty asshole. He is not too smart, he knows he is not and he has no scruples. In real life you don’t want to be near someone like Torpedo. If you don’t mind reading about this type of character then get this book now. In glorious black & white, Bernet has an amazing range with his brush and his synergy with Sanchez Abuli’s script is seamless, simply one of the best writer/artist teams. Alex Toth is an all-time favorite of mine and he did a couple of stories in this volume, but Bernet owns this series. You can smell the pee on the streets.

Dark Horse reprint- THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN volume 1
John Buscema’s* pencils are amazing. You could read one of his stories without word balloons and still get it. Simply put, his characters act. Interesting, the different but excellent interpretation of such strong line work through the inks of individual artist like Alfredo Alcala and Pablo Marco. This is so much more enjoyable if you block the narrator’s captions. No offense to who is ultimately responsible (Roy Thomas or Robert E. Howard?). Sometimes superfluous with redundant mood and scene descriptions, things that are clearly already rendered in the great art featured. Good stuff. (For more Buscema magic, check kids, Wolverine #1 – #16 (Vol.1)!)

MAD ABOUT THE MOVIES Mad Books
A collection of Mad Magazine movie parodies. I read these growing up; Mad was a staple of my reading diet ’till my late teens. Mort Drucker is an unequaled master at what he does, and the main reason for looking at this book. And don’t forget the deceiving simplicity of Sergio Aragones!

MY DEAREST FRIEND Letters of Abigail & John Adams Belknap Harvard
A fascinating book of correspondence between John Adams and his wife Abigail through the years. Revealing accounts of their relationship as intellectual equals, which it was at odds with the times. As its backdrop, a new nation is being built. Loving and sometimes heartbreaking. Great supplement if you enjoyed the HBO mini-series, John Adams.

OISHINBO: The Joy of Rice VIZ Media
Like food? Like manga? This is for you. Very rich, funny, engaging, serious at times. Delicious book all around.

One Piece, Vol. 6

Publishing | The 60th volume of Eiichiro Oda’s popular pirate manga One Piece sold more than 2 million copies in its first four days of release. It’s the first book to move more than 2 million copies in its first week of sales since the Japanese market survey company Oricon began reporting its charts in 2008. As we reported last week, this volume’s 3.4 million-copy first printing set a record, and propelled the series past the 200 million-copy mark. [Anime News Network]

Editorial cartoons | Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Matt Davies has been laid off by the Gannett-owned Journal News in White Plains, N.Y. [Comic Riffs]

Publishing | Abrams has made three comics-related promotions: Susan Van Metre to senior vice president and publisher, overseeing all comic arts books as well as Abrams Books for Young Readers and Amulet Books; Charles Kochman to editorial director of Abrams ComicArts; and Chad W. Beckerman to creative director, overseeing design for all comic arts books as well as Abrams Books for Young Readers and Amulet Books. [Abrams]

Astro City

Publishing | Writer Kurt Busiek reveals that his long-running series Astro City, which had been published by the recently closed WildStorm imprint, will continue under the DC Comics banner. [Newsarama]

Publishing | Simona Stanzani talks about translating manga into Italian and English. [The Mainichi Daily News]

Conventions | The Smith College student newspaper reports on New England Webcomics Weekend. [The Smith College Sophian]

Publishing | Deb Aoki talks to Senior Editor Joel Enos about the January relaunch of Viz Media’s Shonen Jump Magazine. [About.com]

Creators | The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund pays tribute to Neil Gaiman on the writer’s 50th birthday. [CBLDF]

R. Crumb

Creators | Deborah Vankin chats with a “less angry” R. Crumb: “All I read anymore is investigative journalism. You name it. Scandalous political stuff, the pharmaceutical industry, all that crap. I’m fascinated by that stuff.” [Hero Complex]

Creators | Jim Shooter talks briefly about his lengthy career and the future of comics ahead of his appearance Sunday at the Pittsburgh Comic & Collectibles Show: “Someone told me recently that I’m the longest-tenured (though not the oldest!) active comic book writer, with 46 years of service. I think I keep getting gigs because I out-work, out-care and out-try the younger, gifted people for whom writing is easy, apparently. Someone also told me that I’m 59. Not inside my head, I’m not.” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Creators | Cameron Stewart and Karl Kerschl discuss their upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood miniseries, created for video-game publisher Ubisoft. “It’s quite an astonish­ingly rare job, where it’s a big commercial product by a big corporation, yet it feels to us very much like a personal creation,” Stweart says. “We figured we’d have to work around very strict rules with a brand as big as this, but it turned out to be the opposite. We had a whole lot of creative freedom.” [Montreal Mirror]

Creators | Sweets creator Kody Chamberlain is asked general questions by a reporter from his local newspaper, who notes “there is even a Wikipedia page about him.” [The Daily Advertiser]

This has to be the book title of the year: The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! The good folks at Abrams ComicArts have put together a pretty swell little trailer for this collection of pre-Comics Code horror and crime comics from the ’50s, edited and contextualized by Jim Trombetta with an introduction by Mr. Goosebumps himself, R.L. Stine. You can gather a couple of salient points from the video: 1) These things really were almost unbelievably lurid and gross, especially when you consider the relentlessly wholesome state of pop culture in general at the time; 2) Based on the video’s snippets from an anti-comic book TV report called Confidential File, which is included in its entirety on a DVD that comes with the book, men in suits took this stuff way too seriously back in the day.

Naturally, the Abrams folks will be at SDCC, holding down the fort at Booth #1216. Full schedule, including signings and panels, is below the cut, and if I were going, I’d make it a point to stop by.

Abrams ComicArts Signings
Booth #1216

Thursday, July 22
1-2:00 pm Ethen Beavers N.E.R.D.S. Book Two: M Is for Mama’s Boy
2-3:00 pm Chip Kidd Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal

Friday, July 23
11-12:00 noon Brian and Wendy Froud The Heart of Faerie Oracle
3-4:00 pm Jaime Hernandez and Todd Hignite The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death

Saturday, July 24
10-11:00 am Jaime Hernandez and Todd Hignite The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death
2:30-3:30 pm Lela Lee Angry Little Girls, Angry Little Girls in Love
4-5:00 pm Brian and Wendy Froud The Heart of Faerie Oracle

Sunday, July 25
2-3:00 pm Jason Shiga Meanwhile

Abrams ComicArts Panels

Friday, July 23
1:30-2:30 pm Spotlight on Jerry Robinson
Room 9
One of the true legends of comics, Comic-Con special guest Jerry Robinson is a writer, artist, historian, curator, and creator rights activist. Jerry discusses his seventy years in comics–from his contributions to the Batman mythos to the creation of the Joker and development of Robin, Alfred, Penguin, Scarecrow, and Two-Face. Jerry is interviewed by Michael Uslan, the executive producer of the Batman movies, comics historian, and author of upcoming Archie Marries… (Abrams ComicArts). In their discussion, Robinson and Uslan will take the audience from behind the scenes of the Golden Age of comics to the filming of The Dark Knight and Jerry’s latest book projects including the upcoming Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics (Abrams ComicArts).

4-5:00 pm Krazy Kat’s 100th Anniversary Celebration!
Room 4
An exclusive multimedia show of unpublished strips, drawings, and paintings presented by Craig Yoe, author of Krazy + Ignatz in Tiger Tea (IDW) and the upcoming Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration (Abrams ComicArts). The panel will explore a century of Krazy-ness, with Greg Goldstein (IDW), R. C. Harvey (The Art of the Funnies), Charles Kochman (executive editor, Abrams ComicArts), Douglas Wolk (Reading Comics), and Peter Maresca, (editor/publisher, Sunday Press Books). Plus a thrilling bonus: a never-before-seen home movie of Krazy’s creator, George Herriman.
Saturday, July 24

11:30-12:30 pm Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal
Room 9
Author/designer Chip Kidd (Mythology, Bat-Manga, Rough Justice), author/producer Michael Uslan (Archie Marries…), and Charles Kochman (executive editor, Abrams ComicArts) celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Big Red Cheese in this panel and slideshow discussion celebrating Kidd’s upcoming fall release from Abrams ComicArts, Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal.

Mad Archives Vol. 2

Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.

Today it’s time (long pat time actually) to take a look at one of the most influential and undisputed masters of the comics medium, Harvey Kurtzman.

Why he’s important

Quick. Off the top of your head, how many cartoonists do you know actively influenced popular culture. I’m not talking about starting a catchphrase or being popular enough to end up as a question in Trivial Pursuit. I’m talking about actually shaping and changing the way we regard our relationship with the entertainment we consume. The only one that comes to my mind is Kurtzman. As with Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and the other satirists of the 1950s and early 60s, Kurtzman made it OK to question what we saw on television, the music we heard on the radio and what we read in the newspaper. He made it acceptable — even fun — to poke fun at cherished symbols. The main differences between Kurtzman and the other comics from that period is a) Kurtzman never got his just share of the credit; b) because he worked in the relatively “underground” market of comic books, his influence was more widespread and, arguably, longer lasting.

Where to start

Mad Archives Vol. 1

Kurtzman’s run on Mad seems the logical and obvious place to begin. Those early issues — at least the first 23, when Mad was published in comic book fashion (when is someone going to collect Kurtzman’s initial run on those first couple of magazine issues?) — have been printed and reprinted in various formats, but the easiest and most accessible (relatively speaking) is probably The Mad Archives series, of which DC has published two volumes of so far. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any plans for a third volume on the horizon, which means you may have to scrounge around to find any issues past #12. (Thankfully, DC published magazine-sized reprints of the complete series, which you might be able to find in better comic book shops across the country).

From there you should read

Equally regarded in stature to Mad are the two war books Kurtzman edited for EC: Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. The two series, though not without their faults, are in the end justly acclaimed for their humanism and adept storytelling and offer a telling glimpse in Kurtzman’s ability to work outside of his usual humor “vein.” Gemstone published some nice, fancy-shmancy hardcover versions of these two series (though some may balk at the computerized coloring). Sadly, as with Mad, Gemstone never got to finish Two-Fisted, but these remain the best and most accessible versions of these stories today. If you’re an anal completist, you can try to located Gemstone’s initial, oversize, black and white volumes that were released in the 1980s, but expect to pay several hundred bucks for them.

Humbug

Kurtzman left Mad and EC for the greener pastures of Hugh Hefner, only to have his attempt at a slick humor magazine, Trump, fall flat on its face after two issues due to a variety of unlucky financial reasons. Kurtzman tried again with Humbug, a self-published endeavor that he attempted by pooling resources with fellow former EC artists Will Elder and Jack Davis (sorta), as well as relative newcomers like Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. The result was a little better than Trump, it lasted a full 11 issues before running aground, which Fantagraphics packaged together in a lovely two-volume slipcase that handsomely shows off the individual contributors talents as well as Kurtzman’s skills as an editor.

It was while working on his third magazine, Help! that Kurtzman and his longtime collaborator came up with Goodman Beaver, a Candide-ish goodfella that kept getting his noble values, intentions and efforts rubbed into his face, resulting in some of the pair’s best and sharpest satire. The late Kitchen Sink Press collected most of the Goodman tales in one softcover book, which is still pretty easy to find (just click on that last link) but sadly, the book is missing the excellent “Goodman versus Playboy,” due to a litigious (at the time) Archie Comics. You can download a .pdf version of that story right here though.

Further reading

Kurtzman had a lot of aborted projects after the failure of Humbug. One that actually made it through to the publication stage was Jungle Book, a paperback collection of four Mad-ish satirical tales he did in his loose, sketchy style. The book didn’t catch on, but it remains a rather funny skewering of movie and TV cliches nevertheless, and, like Goodman Beaver, can be found in hardbound volume (again, courtesy of Kitchen Sink) pretty easily.

Before he went to EC, Kurtzman did a series of very funny one-page gag strips under the title Hey Look. Their raucous slapstick and constant fourth-wall breaking remain delightful (and a good place for kids to be introduced to the cartoonist). Kitchen Sink collected the lot back in the early 1990s, but the book seems to be a bit hard to find now, as the used prices are rather high.

Ancillary material

Little Annie Fanny Vol. 1

After handling one failed project after another, Kurtzman, with Elder in tow, finally ended up back at Hefner and Playboy, where he did the ever so slightly saucy strip Little Annie Fanny from 1962 to 1988. It’s decidedly weak sauce compared to the above books, but worth checking out if  Dark Horse collected the comics in two paperback volumes, which you can grab in fancy hardcover form if you so desire.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle and Comics Journal Library Vol. 7: Harvey Kurtzman both offer nice backgrounds of the beleaguered cartoonist. The former is a coffee-table type book that provides a well-thought out (if somewhat problematic) biography of the artist along with lots of never-before seen art. The latter is a collection of interviews with Kurtzman as well as essays taken from the Journal, along with lots of rarely-before seen art.

Avoid

While the notion of pairing Kurtzman up with famous comics artists like William Stout, Sergio Aragones and Robert Crumb seems ingenious, Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures fails to make the grade. Done long after Kurtzman’s prime, the book feels like a rehash of the kind of satire he used to do a lot better decades earlier.

Similar problems plague From Aargh to Zap, Kurtzman’s attempt to chronicle the history of the comic book in America, the biggest of which is it’s too thin and covers well-trod upon ground without offering much in the way of Kurtzman’s own unique perspective.

Next month: Art Spiegelman

Art in Time

Having introduced the comics-reading public to such obscure or long-forgotten creators as Herbert Crowley, Fletcher Hanks and Walter Quermann in his seminal book Art Out of Time, editor and publisher Dan Nadel opted to try something a little different for his sequel, the recently published Art in Time.

While the new book, like its predecessor, does feature a number of barely-known or long-forgotten golden age and underground cartoonists (Sam Glanzman, John Thompson), it also offers a new look at some familiar and in some cases already well regarded figures, in the hopes of either giving scholars and fans a chance to reconsider their artistic abilities (as in the case of Mort Meskin and Pat Boyette) or re-examine their work in a new light via previously unregarded material (John Stanley, Archie artist Harry Lucey, Wonder Woman artist H.G. Peter)

I had the opportunity to talk with Nadel over email about the book and its rather specific goals recently. Though he was in the midst of celebrating all things Jack Kirbyish at the Fumetto Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, he was kind enough to take the time to offer some thoughtful, considered responses to my flailing questions, for which I am ever grateful.

How did Art in Time develop and did it change at all in conception as you worked on it?

The first idea was actually to take well known artists like Kirby, Ditko, Everett, et al and show their lesser known work. This became a little less interesting as the  reprint boom took hold. By less interesting I mean not necessary. I tend to think of books as being necessary or not necessary. And then, when necessary, as being well done and useful, or badly done and destructive. Anyhow, as an outgrowth of my publishing activities, and as a kind of strategy of moving away from any perceptions about Art Out of Time, I began to look at adventure comics a lot, particularly crime stuff like Pete Morisi and Harry Lucey. And then I thought of the underground stuff I like and realized (again — maybe I’d forgotten? I don’t know.) that what drives my “scholarly” (or whatever) interests was pretty much the same as what drives my publishing interest, i.e. in my head CF and Bill Everett are pretty much on the same playing field. So I latched onto the broad idea of “genre” comics and then went a little micro and focused on an idea of “adventure” that can include gumshoes and psychonauts and utopians. Then I really dug in and had some fun.

H. G. Peter, “Man O’Metal,” from Reg’lar Fellers Heroic Comics no. 13 (1942)

Did you first have the notion to do a sequel to Art Out of Time right upon finishing that book or did it come later on after much persuading?

Well, I started thinking about it about 6 months after AOOT came out. I hadn’t initially intended to do one, really, but somehow in 2006 it seemed like a cool idea. One motivation was that I hadn’t been able to include Jesse Marsh or Harry Lucey in AOOT and I wanted to do something about both artists. So no one was twisting my arm or anything, but AOOT seemed to be on its way to doing well enough to justify a sequal of sorts.

Can you talk a little about the differences between the two book and what made you try a different tack this time around?

Both books were guided by my own interests. I’m selfish that way. The big difference is that in 2004, when I began work on Art Out of Time, the stuff I was interested in (Boody Rogers, Fletcher Hanks and other recent “giants”) were nowhere to be found. They seemed to be written out of history. So AOOT was a recovery mission in part. And secondarily, as with the new one, I was looking for a way to understand and contextualize the work I was publishing and enjoying. It seemed (and still does seem) to me that comics history was very conservative, and that the many byways and blind alleys and etc. that existed had been kind of smudged out or something — I was looking to demonstrate that there were ton of different approaches possible and that the supposed “weirdness” of, say, Paper Rodeo, had precedents (though sometimes unknown to  the artists themselves) in  comics history.

So I did that, I guess. And then AIT is more about casting a smaller net to look for specific examples of artists who successfully navigated genres and came through with individual visions. Given that most of the comics I publish can broadly fall under the “adventure” category, you can see why I’d be intrigued. Plus, since AOOT came out in 2006 comics history has changed radically as my generation and my slightly older contemporaries basically define and invent our own artistic past. From Chris Ware’s brilliant work on Frank King to Frank Santoro’s championing of Thriller. Obviously these are different works qualitatively (yes, smart ass, I think King is in another league)  but the basic “act” is the same: An artist laying claim to an ignored part of comics and saying “see: this is where I come from. This is my history.” This is crucial. I didn’t feel like I needed to be quite as hardcore with Art in Time. I wanted to show some precedents, I wanted to bring certain artists (Marsh, Lucey, Boyette, Rudahl, Glanzman, for example) intro focus, and once again advocate for looking harder and longer at artists we’ve passed over and for looking hard at the connections between mainstream and underground comics. The commonalities of purpose.

Sam J. Glanzman, “Cave of Mutations,” from Kona no. 3 (1962)

While you were putting the book together, were there any last minute “discoveries” that you felt you had to include? How aware were you of these particular artists before you started the book and did you learn anything new while putting AiT together?

There was nothing super last minute, no. There were latecomers, like Sam Glanzman, but not last minute crams. When I started the book I was aware of about 75% of the artists. The ones I wasn’t, like Glanzman, Peter, Rudahl, and Fox, were suggestions by trusted peers. I learned a bunch new-ish things while putting AIT together. I learned that I have an endless appetite for comic book drama: for the emotional hysteria of Glanzman’s Kona, for example. I learned that Bill Everett is a far better, far more interesting artist than I ever knew, both personally and professionally. In terms of elegant, visceral drawings in the traditional of Alex Raymond, he’s unequaled. And I would take him over Raymond any day. His drawings comprised a unique world, even when drawing “naturally”. I learned that, as far as I can tell, it’s mostly only other artists can understand how an artist like McMillan might flow naturally from Everett, or how Thompson is related to H.G. Peter.

Can you talk a little bit about the research involved in finding these old stories and, in some cases, locating the still alive creators and their families? I would imagine, for example, that it took a bit of work to locate John Thompson or Willy Mendes.

Best case scenario: Finding the stories was a matter of deciding on the artists, the cross checking what had been written about them, then gathering samples from various places, then checking those against various interviews, etc., to find what either the artist or his peers considered his finest work. Then choosing my favorite from that pool. Worst case: Deciding on the artist: Gathering everything they did. Then making my own choice from that pool. I worked in both modes. Of the still-living artists I suppose Mendes and Thompson were in fact the trickiest. Rudahl, McMillan, and Glanzman were, I think, in the phone book. Thompson I found via some old correspondence he’d had with a collector friend of mine and Mendes through a variety of different google searches. Persistence, basically.

You cover a wide swath of time in the book and include a lot of  visually different authors with different artistic styles and goals. What, do you think, connects them together, apart from what you said earlier about “adventure” stories.

I would think that the common goal of all is to tell the story that’s in their head. Different sub-goals spring from there like: get paid; buy groceries; get laid; exorcise a demon; etc. I’m going to be kind of a dick about this and say: Why do we even have to ask what connects them? They’re arists; they worked in genres with defined boundaries; they each had a unique voice that pierced those boundaries. And, frankly, they all have me in common. I’m not out in front like an asshole, and I’m not about “owning” it, but let’s be honest: It’s me. I am confident and maniacal enough about my sensibility that I  am willing to demonstrate it and thrust it on people, backed up by good writing and good art direction. That’s what it is.

Pat Boyette, “Children of Doom,” Charlton Premiere no. 2 (1967)

Along those same lines, what is it specifically about the “adventure” genre (at least as it’s represented here) that you find so fascinating, as opposed to the humor or superhero comics of the same period?

Superhero comics are very interesting and the best were done by Kirby, Ditko, Colan, Everett and others for mainstream companies. That stuff has been well covered elsewhere. I would love to put together a book on that stuff, but publishing realities are what they are. That said, to me adventure seemed to have less baggage, offered artists a little more freedom in the sense that they could be auteurs a bit more easily, as there was perhaps less riding on it? Superhero comics are bound by certain rules as well (uh, except when Kirby was involved) while the others are a bit more free to go to psychologically  and physically more complex places.

The release of Art Out of Time preceded a slew of reprint projects, many of them based off of artists that appeared in that book and the book was seen by many online pundits as being one of the more influential books about comics in recent years. Do you agree with that assessment or do you think you were just on the crest of an already forming wave (if you don’t mind my making a horrible analogy)? Were you surprised by the book’s reception and the critical success it endured?

I tentatively and humbly agree with that assessment. For the record: Paul Karasik was hard at work on his Fletcher Hanks book at exactly the same time as I was working on AOOT. But, and this is a big “but”, I would never take credit or assert ownership over the stuff. I think more than anything AOOT simply made it clear that (a) there was a lot of open territory out there (b) there was an appetite for the exploration (i.e. purchase) of said territory and (c) the “canon”, such as it was, was kinda irrelevant. But sure, I was/am surprised by the amount of books that have come after it. I had no idea that people were interested.

As a historian I’m thrilled when they’re done well (see any of Jeet Heer’s books and the announcement of an upcoming Greg Sadowski/John Benson team up) and disappointed when they’re done badly. And I’m disappointed when they’re done badly not because I have any proprietary interest in the stuff — even if there was money involved, which, FYI, there isn’t  — but because (a) comics history is young and we need ethical and thorough scholarship to make it grow and (b) there is a small market for books on even popular cartoonists, let alone obscure ones, and one bad book on a cartoonist makes it very difficult for another publisher to wish to release a good one. To think otherwise is naive. Quality does not trump market share. No way. I wish we lived in a world where comics scholarship was not attached to the market, but it most certainly is.

One of the things you talk about in your introduction is how you wanted people to be able to take a fresh look at artists people already thought they “knew,” and certainly I was taken aback by how fresh and airy H.G. Peter’s work was when shorn of Marston’s prose. And I was stunned by John Stanley’s “Crazy Quilt,” not just because he was doing horror, but that he did it all as a one-person monologue, whereas EC or a more traditional horror comic would have inserted a clumsy flashback. Can you talk a little bit more about how important it was for you to present these artists in a new light and what, if anything, it means to our general perception of comics and its history to have these long-forgotten tales brought into the light? (beyond just having a new appreciation for H.G. Peters I mean)

Well, iconic characters like Wonder Woman and Little Lulu often obscure the actual auteur behind the work. It’s a natural thing: You’re looking at the icon, not the linework. So I think it’s important to look at people who work on such familiar properties — to allow non-obsessives to see the quality in their work without the confusion of the character. Even I prefer, for example, looking at Jack Kirby’s work on non-Marvel stuff. It’s easier for me to appreciate without having to see past the baggage.

You stop just shy of the (for want of a better word) modern era in both books, as I recall because you felt that everything past 1970 was pretty well covered by fans and historians and the opportunity to find a book’s worth of “undiscovered” artists was pretty slim. Are there cartoonists from the bronze age and beyond that you feel have been ignored to the point where you could justify including them in a book of this nature? And if so, who and why?

A few years back I would have probably shrugged, but these days I gotta answer strongly “yes”. But it’s an entirely different kind of book. With AOOT I stopped in 1969 because to me that was the year of the paradigm shift: When would-be Fletcher Hanks simply did underground comics rather than corporate stuff — when the idea of cartoonist-as-auteur was revived and enacted in North America in a sophisticated way. This one stops in 1980 because I was less focused on people operating outside the mainstream and instead stopped before the real burst of 80s publishing.

So … another anthology would have a lot of explaining to do. For one thing, the cultural context is much less clear, as we don’t have the benefit of real hindsight yet. For another, we’re talking about primarily a couple generations of cartoonists who came into the medium as fans, reading fanzines, with a certain amount of knowledge about what they were entering into. It’s a more insular sensibility. To me, what Frank Santoro does at MoCCA and SPX, etc., is kind of like the third volume: He’s hocking Slash Maraud and Thriller and Barry Blair comics next to a Mazzucchelli Marvel Fanfare issue next to a Brendan McCarthy comic. I think if there was another volume (and I don’t think there will be) it would need to include a bunch of funky stuff that DC and Marvel published in the confused 1980s, various Marshall Rogers comics, Real Deal, etc. In other words, it’s a very difficult book to pull off on a purely logistical level. On the other hand, a totally amazing all indy “black and white glut” anthology assembled by Frank himself would be relatively easy and mind-blowing. Publishers: Call Frank Santoro. He is a great American resource. Also, the dismissal of so much of the above work indicates to me that there’s stuff to be mined there — but would have to be well framed and understood for what it was — not dissimilar to the 1940s comic book glut: accidental masterpieces and beautiful turds amid the acknowledged classics.

How is Picturebox doing these days? You talked a little bit at MoCCA about Brian Chippendale’s new book and what you have planned for the future. Can you talk a little bit on the record about what you’ve got lined up?

PictureBox is good these days. I’ve just co-published with FAMILY our first prose book, I Was Looking for a Street, by Charles Willeford. It’s a memoir by the great crime writer. We’re redesigning the web site as well, in order to offer you, the consumer, yet more stuff.

Let’s see…

In a few weeks I’ll have a new and very limited edition book by Yuichi Yokoyama for sale only online. It’s a $100, signed, and, well, you’ll see…

Curating an exhibition at Portugal Arte 10 in July.

Chippendale and CF’s books are both (finally, I know!) coming out in September.

They will be joined by:

-A 216-page graphic novel by Renee French called “H Day”.
-A collaborative book and DVD by Julie Doucet and Michel Gondry called “My New New York Diary”.
-A new 96-page book by Ben Jones entitled “Men’s Group/Black Math”.

It’s nice working with geniuses.

You might ask why I’m not just publishing history books myself? I like to keep things separate and let my brain be somewhere else when doing the history thing. Need to keep things vaguely clean. Or at least somewhat tidy. Etc.

There are some other things coming down the pike but I’ll keep a lid on those for now.

FYI, Dan is doing a couple of Art in Time-related events and signings. Below is a short listing of his upcoming schedule

Friday, May 21st at 7PM
Talk/Signing at Desert Island
540 metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Sunday, May 30th at 5PM
Afternoon of book signings and conversations with notable cartoonists and filmmakers
Cinefamily
611 N. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Sunday, June 26th at 6PM
Talk/Signing
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008

The Swedish are coming!

MoCCA is just around the corner—tomorrow, actually—and the cards and letters are still rolling in from folks who plan to be there. Top Shelf is kicking things off tonight with a Swedish Invasion party, and they will be debuting their new lineup of Swedish graphic novels as well as James Kochalka’s SuperF*ckers, Matt Kindt’s Super Spy (vol. 2): The Lost Dossiers, Jeffrey Brown’s Undeleted Scenes, and Dodgem Logic, edited by Alan Moore. Guests will include Alex Robinson and Kevin Cannon.

George O'Connor's Athena

First Second will be featuring their recent releases, with signings by Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan, and Pascal Dizi, the team behind City of Spies; James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost, the creators of Adventures in Cartooning; Mike Cavallaro, the artist of Foiled; and George O’Connor, who is getting acclaim for the first two volumes of his adaptations of Greek myths, Zeus: King of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess.

Reinhard Kleist's Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness

Stop by the Abrams ComicArts table for signings by Reinhard Kleist, Dan Nadel, Jaime Hernandez, and Todd Hignite, and watch out for their folks on several panels as well. They will have signed copies of Al Jaffee’s Tall Tales, Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, David A. Beronä’s Wordless Books, and Craig Yoe’s Secret Identity for sale as well.

Art in Time

Art book publisher Abrams jumped into the comics world with both feet last year with their new ComicsArts imprint. What do they have lined up for 2010? Poking around their Web site, I was able to figure out their plans, both via the imprint and their children’s line. They’ve slowed down their output a little but still have a rather impressive array of titles coming out. Fer instance:

March

Meanwhile by Jason Shiga. Shiga’s quirky, “choose-your-own-adventure” mini-comic from a couple of years ago gets an updated, full-color treatment courtesy of Abrams’ children’s imprint, Amulet. It looks like they’re pushing this book pretty hard. Good for Shiga. He deserves the break. 80 pages, $15.95.

Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis

April

The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis, edited by Bill Morrison. Introduction by Matt Groening. Originally published in pamphlet form (sorry, floppy form) via Bongo, this 208-page book collects the epic saga involving two of Groening’s cartoon projects that do not involve one-eared rabbits meeting up and getting into trouble. Should sell like hotcakes. $24.95.

Wacky Packages: New, New, New by the Topps Company. Edited by Jay Lynch. A sequel to the 2008 homage to those satirical stickers of yesteryear, this book collects some of the rare and hard to find collections from the 70s, with art by folks like Kim Deitch and Bill Griffith. 224 pages, $19.95.

The Art of Jaime Hernandez by Todd Hignite. Introduction by Alison Bechdel. Originally planned for 2009 I believe, this ode to the Locas creator features a treasure trove of sketches, illustrations and previously unseen work. 224 pages, $40.

May

Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures 1940-1980 by Dan Nadel. Is there a more hotly anticipated book than Mssr. Nadel’s sequel to his groundbreaking Art Out of Time collection? Well, possibly, but this is still a pretty exciting release nevertheless. H.G Peter, Harry Lucey, John Stanley, Jesse Marsh and Bill Everett are just a few of the golden and silver age artists feted in this chunky, 304-page book. $40.

Continuing our countdown of (in our opinion, obviously) the most important and influential comics of the past ten years, here’s the second half of our list, from #15-1. If you missed it, you can read part one over here, with an explanation of how we put the list together and the (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) ranking. Can you guess what made number one? (hint: it’s not one of the books sampled in the collage above.) Read on to find out!

Complete Peanuts, Vol. 10

15. The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics)
If you believe, as I do, that we are living in the Golden Age of Reprints, chances are The Complete Peanuts is your Exhibit A. Now that we’re some six years and twelve volumes into it, it can be difficult to remember just how controversial the project was. A publisher best known for its co-founder Gary Groth’s shot-to-the-kidney critiques in The Comics Journal and a roster of edgy alternative and underground talents from Crumb to Clowes, republishing 50 years of history’s most acclaimed, beloved, and lucrative daily comic strip, in order, in a series of 25 hardcover volumes, designed in understated fashion by cartoonist/nostalgist Seth, to be released over the course of twelve years? You can count me among the skeptics … to my shame. The series set the standard for how such strip reprints are done — if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, reprint projects from Dick Tracy to Hagar the Horrible should make Groth, Seth, and the Schulzes feel flattered as hell. It also put prime Peanuts back in the public eye just as both the series and the life of its creator came to a much lamented-end, vindicated Seth’s iconic design choices, and not incidentally saved the financial bacon of arguably the most important comics publisher of the last 30 years. Good ol’ Charlie Brown! — Sean T. Collins

Kramers Ergot Vol. 4

14. Kramers Ergot, edited by Sammy Harkham (Buenaventura Press)
Like Blankets, the fourth volume of Sammy Harkham’s avant-garde anthology Kramers Ergot was a big fat powder-blue brick of a book that debuted at the 2003 MoCCA Art Festival in New York City. And like Blankets, it was something many in the comics industry had simply never seen before. From its Mat Brinkman-illustrated cover, a textless piece featuring two massive monsters clashing on a crudely drawn rainbow bridge, to its dizzyingly drawn contents, featuring a cream-of-the-crop collection of young alternative-comics talents spearheaded by members and associates of Providence, Rhode Island’s Fort Thunder underground art, comics, and music collective, Kramers was arguably the boldest, most influential, and most clearly generation-defining comics anthology since Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly’s RAW. The presence of collage, fine art, and non-narrative comics gave Kramers a reputation for privileging joyous, anarchic markmaking over storytelling. To a certain extent, that rep is both deserved and something to be celebrated, as it injected renewed attention to visually driven work into an altcomix scene then dominated by the literary comics of Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly stalwarts like Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, and Adrian Tomine. But Kramers has always been about more than eye-melting art — some of the decade’s most memorable alternative-comics stories, from Kevin Huizenga’s “Jeepers Jacobs” to David Heatley’s “My Sex History” to Harkham’s own “Poor Sailor,” appeared in its pages. By the time the gigantic, Little Nemo-inspired seventh volume hit the stands (and made waves on the Internet for its price tag), readers who’d really been paying attention weren’t surprised to see such stalwarts as Ware, Clowes, Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, and Matt Groening right alongside the underground enfants terribles who’d been there from the start. — Sean T. Collins

Art Out of Time

13. Art Out of Time, edited by Dan Nadel (Abrams)
The book that launched a thousand other books! (Granted, many of them were independently in the works, as their editors will no doubt point out, but still.) Prior to the release of this Abrams-published hardcover anthology, most comics’ readers impressions of the medium’s past divided it between the enjoyable but creatively anonymous work of a legion of journeymen and the stand-out breakthroughs of a small of legends. But beyond the established canon of Kurtzmans and Kirbys and Crumbs, Segars and Schulzes and Spiegelmans, there flowered a fertile field of forgotten talents from throughout comics history, cartoonists who’d carved out comics whose artistic ambitions and personal touches were overlooked at the time but were unmistakable to observers today. Ogden Whitney, Rory Hayes, Boody Rogers, Milt Gross, Gene Deitch, Fletcher Hanks: The authors included here read like a murderers’ row of weird, wild, “where the heck did that come from?” comics collections that would emerge in its wake. And they’re joined by many more besides, represented by astutely curated, frequently breathtaking work selected by Nadel. He would go on to produce other riches via his art-comics company, PictureBox, but his place in comics would already be cemented by this great act of reclamation of our lost history. — Sean T. Collins

Daredevil

12. Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev (Marvel)
The breakthrough book for the decade’s biggest and most influential superhero-comics writer. Yes, Brian Michael Bendis made his Marvel debut with 2000′s Ultimate Spider-Man, a “scrap it all and start over from scratch” effort conceived by Marvel’s then-President Bill Jemas that proved influential not just in terms of the decade’s many fresh-continuity reimaginings (we wouldn’t have the MAX, All Star, and Earth One lines without it) but also by giving Bendis and his Ultimate cohort Mark Millar the hit-making power they’d eventually use to commandeer the Marvel Universe proper. And yes, he also combined superheroes and crime in his creator-owned series Powers. But Daredevil, along with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, was the definitive book of the “Nu-Marvel” era, in which Jemas and Joe Quesada okayed a range of series in which talented creators from the edgier reaches of the Direct Market comics industry — your Vertigos and WildStorms and Onis and Images and Calibers — swapped out the traditional, and by that point poorly selling, Marvel Comics feel for as personal a batch work as giant corporate icons are likely to produce. In the case of Bendis and Daredevil, this meant a series in which he was free to explore his creative obsessions: his passion for observing and reproducing contemporary society’s staccato speech, his love of crime fiction, his portrayal of superpowers and costumes as the outward manifestation of deeply personal traumas and life choices.

It also meant he could totally upset the apple cart, unceremoniously deposing the Kingpin and outing Matt Murdock in the tabloids. Yet all the while the book remained of a piece with the storied runs of such creators as Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Ann Nocenti, and the still-fresh Kevin Smith, seeming to be a continuation of Daredevil’s story as well as a holy-crap upending of it. Meanwhile, Maleev’s memorable art — a sort of naturalist noir that was dark but never murky, realistic but never stiffly beholden to photoref — became, in a slightly cartoonier form promulgated by everyone from Steve Epting and Mike Perkins to Michael Lark and David Aja, a whole new Marvel house style. And in much the same way, Bendis’s conflation of superheroics and supervillainy with urban crime, and, later, black-ops espionage, would soon become the default setting for the entire Marvel Universe, and beyond. — Sean T. Collins

Blankets

11. Blankets, by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf)
Blankets dropped like a bomb upon 2003′s MoCCA Art Festival in New York City — the sort of smash debut you might use to illustrate the “book of the show” entry in a comics-convention dictionary. And for good reason: Clocking in at just over 580 pages, none of which had ever been serialized anywhere, it was the largest original graphic novel North American comics had ever seen. But while the novelty of its size might have made the first impression, what was found in its pages made the lasting one. An unabashedly emotional memoir, Blankets told Thompson’s own story of first love and fundamentalism, romance and religion, as both discovered and lost by him while a teenager in the snowy northern Midwest. Drawn in a sweeping, inviting style, its sheer loveliness attracted readers from beyond comics’ traditional audience, while the universality of its subject matter and the specificity of Thompson’s experience of it kept them turning the pages. More than any other book this decade (excepting, perhaps, Jimmy Corrigan), it cemented the thick “graphic novel” format as the publishing method of choice for artistically ambitious literary comics, proving that forgoing the more immediate critical and financial rewards of serialization could lead to unprecedented success. Fun Home, Persepolis, Stitches — more so even than Maus, Blankets paved the way for the crossover success of the mainstream-friendly comics memoir. — Sean T. Collins

Fruits Basket, Vol. 22

10. Fruits Basket, by Natsuki Takaya (Tokyopop)
Sailor Moon got the phenomenon started, but Fruits Basket was the most popular shoujo manga of the 00. The graphic novel market quadrupled between 2001 and 2007, and that growth was driven in large part by girls who were getting comics of their own for the first time. Fruits Basket is a good twist on a classic setup—the lone girl in a houseful of boys—but it brought in girl-friendly themes—emotional truth, the importance of friendship, and of course, a love triangle with two very different, but equally hot, guys at the outer corners. — Brigid Alverson

9. Penny Arcade, by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (self-published)
Penny Arcade started in 1998, but its influence spread far and wide in the 00s, thanks to the attention Holkins and Krahulik paid to turning their audience into a community. The daily strip runs on a combination of in-jokes and topical humor, although many gags are comprehensible to the non-gamer. In addition to making their living from it, Holkins and Krahulik have created the Childs Play charity, which provides toys to children’s hospitals, and the annual Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX. They have also been known for their biting commentary on events within the comics and gaming world, making Penny Arcade not just a comic but an opinion leader as well. — Brigid Alverson

Watchmen

8. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC)
We at Robot 6 have little doubt that eyebrows will rise at our designation of Watchmen as one of the past decade’s most important comics. Indeed, various collected editions of Watchmen have been popular virtually since their first printings twenty-odd years ago. However, the fact that Watchmen sales not only increased, but practically snowballed, through the worst economic climate the world has seen in several decades — arguably since the birth of the superhero itself — is a testament to the book’s staying power. Most comics publishers hope that a movie adaptation will produce a modest bump in sales, but the Watchmen movie’s trailer inspired DC to order an additional 900,000 copies into print. When the movie itself premiered, Watchmen was No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list — not just for comics and graphic novels, but overall. Because it garnered so many new readers, no doubt including some new or returning to comics, we honor Watchmen accordingly. — Tom Bondurant

Fun Home

7. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)
I’m not sure anyone expected the sort of acclaim and attention that greeted Fun Home, least of all Bechdel herself. Riding on a populist wave of interest in both memoirs and graphic novels (not to mention a growing interest in gay rights), Fun Home swooped in and quickly became the “must-read” book of 2007. Somehow this story of the author’s awkward relationship with her troubled (to put it mildly) father garnered the sort of mainstream attention that creators and publishers have been yearning for years to attain (the fact that a big house like Houghton Mifflin was behind it might have helped matters — in itself a notable feat). Perhaps most notably of all, it was named the Book of the Year by Time Magazine. Not “Best Graphic Novel” or “Best Memoir.” Best. Book. Whether or not you think it deserved that title, I remained stunned to this day that this comic — or any comic mind you managed to attain such a lofty award from an otherwise staid and deliberately average magazine. Fun Home is an important reminder of just how much the times have changed. — Chris Mautner

Identity Crisis

6. Identity Crisis (2004) by Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales and Michael Bair (DC)
Written by suspense novelist Brad Meltzer and drawn by Rags Morales and Michael Bair, this seven (double-sized-) issue miniseries was billed as the other kind of crossover hit — namely, the one which would bring normal folks into the comics shop. Looking back in late 2005, Meltzer told CBR “it was supposed to be a small, emotional story.” Nevertheless, when Dan DiDio and Geoff Johns saw what Meltzer was doing, elements of IdC’s plot were spun out into their own storylines, including other DC events like Infinite Crisis, 52, and Countdown. Thus, DC kicked off a cycle of line-wide Big Events which stretch arguably through Blackest Night. Marvel similarly used the contemporaneous “Avengers Disassembled” arc to cultivate its current string of events, and the result has been an ever-escalating battle over the top spot in the sales charts.

On its own, though, Identity Crisis came to symbolize a new, and not entirely welcome, revisionist approach to fictional superhero history: explaining the old goofiness by retroactively inserting “realistic” elements. Ironically, today’s event comics may well be charged with restoring a calmer, more gentle status quo — one which might not demand the sort of fix Identity Crisis provided. — Tom Bondurant

Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth

5. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon)
And here is the straw that broke the proverbial noncomics-reading public’s back. Maus and Watchmen had sung their siren songs on the rocks and managed to entice the occasional wayward sailor back in the ’80s — someone who had perhaps heard they were doing interesting things with them thar funnybooks — but by and large the great unwashed — or more accurately, the cultural elite and the media at large — remained unimpressed. These were flukes; comics were still the stuff of children and maladjusted nerds. It took Ware’s masterpiece, which he spent years serializing in the pages of Acme Novelty Library throughout the 1990s, to show critics that yes, comics could be just as elegant, knotty, rich, satisfying and emotionally devastating as your prose novel.

Praise was quick to follow. The book won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, the American Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, the first comic ever to do so, a move that was met with some mild astonishment in the U.K. The book threw Ware to the forefront of the art-comix movement (much to his chagrin no doubt). Now he was no longer simply Chris Ware, but now CHRIS WARE, GREATEST CARTOONIST ON EARTH, and has had to deal with all the resulting backlash that unwanted title has come with. That’s not to mention the wealth of imitators, disciples and kids who studied Corrigan like the Bible, hoping to gleam some insight from its pages. Corrigan showed its readers new ways to make comics, new ways to think about comics (flowcharts! timelines! awkward silences!) and the ensuing years saw a rash of inspired cartoonists wearing Ware on their sleeve like a Led Zepplin patch on a jean jacket. In the end though, Corrigan proved without a shadow of a doubt that comics could be literary. The flood gates were let loose and it was anybody’s game from here on in. — Chris Mautner

Naruto Vol. 1

4. Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto (Viz)
Naruto is the alpha comic; it is the top-selling manga in the U.S. (both in terms of individual volumes and the franchise as a whole) and it outsells most graphic novels as well. Because they were so confident of its popularity, publisher Viz made a radical move in 2007 and again in 2009: They sped up the release schedule, churning out three volumes a month for several months. The flood of Naruto volumes had a noticeable effect, squeezing the sales of other manga but also bringing the U.S. edition closer to the Japanese releases — a strategy that is likely to become more common among manga publishers in the decade to come. — Brigid Alverson

3. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)
What is it about Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood during the Iranian revolution that earns it such a high place on our list, above arguably more groundbreaking books like Jimmy Corrigan and Blankets? Well, certainly the subject matter plays a role.

Persepolis

The book was introduced to North America at a time when an interest in the Muslim world was at an all-time high due to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror. For many it’s offered a glimpse and insight into a world that heretofore has seemed alien and mysterious to many. On a much more important and political level, however, Persepolis has served as an inspiration for Iranians living abroad and in their home country, as the recent mash-up created by dissidents about the recent election shows.

But Perspolis’ success — indeed, it’s continued success — in a large part is due to Satrapi’s simplistic, bare bones style and direct, unfussed storytelling. The very elements that turn off some, more experienced comics critics are the very things that make it perfect for the unwashed masses. It’s simply a very easy book to engage, about a subject that interests a great many of us. Perhaps I can best sum it up this way: Very few of my non-comics reading friends — family members, co-workers, etc. — ask to borrow my comics. They don’t want to read Watchmen (even if they’ve seen the movie), they don’t ask about Captain America getting shot or even express an interest in Maus. Everyone asks if they can borrow Persepolis. — Chris Mautner

Sailor Moon

2. Sailor Moon, by Naoko Takeuchi (Mixx/Tokyopop)
Naruto is a bigger seller, and it certainly commands respect, but Sailor Moon changed people’s lives. I have seen a lot of women talking online about how it was the first comic they could relate to. Having grown up knowing that girls’ comics existed in other countries (Britain) but that there were none for me in the U.S., I know exactly how powerful that discovery can be. Until Sailor Moon came along (first the cartoon, then the comics), it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that girls might like comics written specifically for them. After the initial success of the anime on American television, Tokyopop (then Mixx) started publishing the graphic novels, and a genre was born. Although the series was first published in 1997, new volumes continued to come out in the early years of the 00s and the manga spread virally among fans, creating one of the earliest fan communities based around shoujo manga; in 2004, according to Wikipedia, there were over 3 million websites devoted to Sailor Moon. Despite its popularity, Sailor Moon was out of print in the U.S. by 2005.

Sailor Moon affected the way people thought, both inside and outside the industry. This whole trajectory I’m on now was launched when I found some of the books at a garage sale and picked them up for my kids, still not really sure what they were — but what the heck, they were 5 for a dollar. That’s the most expensive bargain I ever got, because it set the girls rocketing off into manga-land — they quickly discovered Kodocha, Tokyo Mew Mew, Fruits Basket, even Megatokyo. Suddenly my house was filled with these really foreign, sort of sketchy-looking books. So I started reading them, and next thing I knew, I was writing about manga on the internet. For me, as well as a number of other women and young girls, Sailor Moon was a paradigm shift. — Brigid Alverson

The Muhammad cartoons

1. The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons
Here’s the thing about all the other comics on this list: They didn’t cause anyone’s death. No one got severely injured because they read them. None of their creators were persecuted or received death threats. No one rioted over Fun Home.

Not so here. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, whether to simply provoke or to engage in a discussion about censorship and religion, published a collection of 12 editorial cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Not all of the depictions were irreverent or nasty, some were respectful, but that hardly mattered to most Muslims since any visual depiction of the prophet, respectful or otherwise, is considered a sacrilege.

Things quickly went downhill from there. Danish embassies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran were set on fire. Some protests resulted in riots and violence, with police firing into crowds and more than 100 total deaths worldwide. Death threats were issued to the people involved.. The whole affair became Exhibit A in the ever-deteriorating relationship between the Western world and the Middle East. And its after-effects continue to plague us today, as the recent attempt on the life of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard proves.

There are many, many lessons (or at least discussion topics) we can draw from the Muhammad cartoons — about the power of images to provoke, issue of religion and free speech, and so forth. — but I think most importantly they should serve as a reminder for the bulk of us, who live comfortably in North America and elsewhere that the price we pay for making and reading comics is only a few dollars and not our lives. — Chris Mautner

The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics

The holidays are a time for family, food, fun and, of course, the spirit of giving. I thought I’d check in with the members of the Robot 6 crew to see what comic-related gifts they received this year, along with any they gave as presents. Feel free to share anything comic-related you gave or got this year as well.

Tom Bondurant: I got The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics (Abrams Comicarts), selected and edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. A good bit of Carl Barks Duck work, from what I can tell. My parents gave it to me.

Absolute Death

Michael May: Some friends of mine gave me the Absolute Death. They’ve been giving me the Absolute Sandman volumes for Christmas and my birthday for the last couple of years, so this was a perfect way to cap off that tradition.

I was much cheaper in my comics giving. My nephew is a fan of Coheed & Cambria, so I got him the second volume of The Amory Wars. My youngest brother doesn’t follow any monthly comics, but he does love Superman, so it was All-Star Superman Vol. 1 for him.

Brigid Alverson: My brother went to Ireland this year and he brought me back the modern incarnations of my childhood favorites, Beano and Dandy: Dandy Extreme, which is an amped-up version of the old Dandy, and an anthology of “classics” from a variety of DC Thompson comics. The anthology is interesting because it’s a weekly, which suggests there is a demand for this sort of thing, but of course it’s always a shock to see something from your childhood being presented as if it’s a museum piece.

Sam's Strip

Chris Mautner: We focused largely on the kids this year, so I only received two presents from the missus, one of which was Sam’s Strip, a complete collection of the self-referential daily comic strip Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas did back in the early 1960s. It’s full of references to older strips — Happy Hooligan keeps stopping by, as does Krazy Kat and various other classic characters. What’s more the two (and only) main characters are always breaking the fourth wall — directly addressing the readers, getting “cartoon props” out of their storage closet, stuff like that. They don’t go quite as far with the concept as they could, but you can sense the two of them having fun with the possibilities.

My daughter, however, made out like a bandit, comics-wise, scoring the fourth issue of the first Muppet Show mini-series (she already had the other three), a Little Lulu volume, the fifth Bone volume (the Scholastic color version) and the latest Babymouse book.

Thor: Ages of Thunder

JK Parkin: My sister-in-law gave me the Thor:Ages of Thunder hardcover, which collects several Thor stories by Matt Fraction. She also gave me the recent Neil Gaiman novella, Odd and the Frost Giants, which come to find out is a different take on one of the old Norse legends that Fraction adapted in Age of Thunder. Which was an interesting bit of symmetry.

My wife, meanwhile, gave me the Locke and Key collection by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez.

Giftwise, I gave each of my brothers a copy of Parker the Hunter this year, and I also gave my younger brother the first Unknown Soldier collection from Vertigo. And my older brother’s girlfriend has been into Jonathan Lethem recently, so I gave her a copy of the Omega the Unknown collection he wrote for Marvel.

Criminal: The Sinners #2

Here at What Are You Reading, we don’t let a little thing like a holiday weekend keep us from our comics, no sir. Nor do we stop blogging about them.

Our guest this week is David Brothers, who can be found saying interesting things about comics at 4th Letter. Want to find out what he’s reading this week? Me too!

Dominic Fortune

Matt Maxwell: DOMINIC FORTUNE
Howard Chaykin is a very bad man. Very bad indeed. I don’t unequivocally love everything he does, but I sure love this. The eponymous hero romps through the seedier side of the 30s, from Hollywood to the Berlin Olympics and back, lovingly trashing cherished notions about treasured history the entire time. The set-up? Fortune is asked to babysit three iconic actors who may have refined reputations, but the truth is they’re all party lunatics that make Bluto Blutarsky look like Gallant. And they’re going to the Berlin Olympics at a time of Nazi Germany’s ascent, when people openly asked if perhaps we shouldn’t be supporting the Germans after all. This is a great read by one of the living masters of the comic craft.

BPRD: THE BLACK GODDESS
I’d stopped reading this awhile ago, waiting to switch over to the trades. And I’d really missed it when I was away, though I hadn’t known how much until I read through this. Mignola/Arcudi and Davis have all hit a teriffic sweet spot between military fiction, occult conspiracies and pulp action. Instead of paranormal investigators tiptoeing around and avoiding the government, we get the two working hand in hand (mostly), which means you get to read splash pages of titanic monsters from before humanity’s birth wrecking armored columns outside mythical cities, US troops backed up by yeti and Kalashnikov-armed warrior monks. I’m enjoying this much, much more than I’m enjoying the current HELLBOY (have actually stopped reading those altogether, though I can’t entirely explain why other than I don’t dig ‘em anymore). But this? This stuff is great. Great ensemble cast, art by one of my favorite artists (and more imaginative monsters than you’re going to see anywhere).

Mighty Avengers: Earth's Mightiest

Michael May: I bought Mighty Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest partly because Hercules and Amadeus Cho are in it; partly because I knew some of the Young Avengers would be joining. But it’s not my favorite Young Avengers and Hercules isn’t nearly as fun as he is when Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente are writing him. I would totally dig the Hank Pym as Doctor Who concept except that all the characters in the book keep talking about what an untrustworthy loser he is. I don’t really want to read about a superhero team led by an untrustworthy loser. I’d love to let that part of Pym’s history go and move on to concentrate on his being a half-mad genius, but Slott’s not letting me. I doubt I’ll be buying any more of this series.

Tom Bondurant: This week I bought a truckload — or at least it rhymes with “truckload” — of comics at the LCS. Fortunately, most were quite good. Detective Comics #859 was excellent as always, especially with the Huntress helping to enliven the “Question” co-feature. I also enjoyed the Amazonian intrigue in Wonder Woman #38 and the who’s-haunting-Betty-Draper storyline in Madame Xanadu #17. The conclusion of the current Unknown Soldier two-parter makes me want to re-read the whole series, because everything seemed to come to an emotional head and it’s a little hard to grasp month-to-month. I liked the shocking twist at the end of Blackest Night #5, and I thought Gary Frank (intentionally or otherwise) depicted the hard-luck Daily Planet staffers of Superman: Secret Origin as appropriately haggard. However, I’m still trying to figure out if I missed an important plot element in Justice League: Cry For Justice #5, or whether (gasp!) someone on the team really did do those horrible things to a colleague. Either way, CFJ just got a whole lot more maudlin.

Detective Comics #859

As for the old stuff, obviously I’ve been reading selected JLA/JSA team-ups, and decided to take in the three-part Earth-S saga from 1976. These issues were Justice League of America #s 135-37 (October-December 1976), plotted by E. Nelson Bridwell and scripted by Marty Pasko, pencilled by Dick Dillin, and inked by Frank McLaughlin. In fact, JLA #137 was probably the first Justice League comic I ever read … not that I am susceptible to anything like nostalgia, you understand. As it turns out, though, the crossover doesn’t really come together until #137, when (SPOILER!) Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt provides the spark which restores the Marvel Family’s powers. The two issues prior are basically vignettes featuring various mixed-Earth teams, each fighting similarly-mixed villains. (Earth-2′s Joker meets Earth-S’s Weeper, and Dr. Light teams up with the Shade, that kind of thing.) It’s all rather light-hearted, which isn’t bad — but it seems like a lot of meandering up until #137. The main event that issue finds the two Flashes and the god Mercury, along with the two Green Lanterns and Earth-S’s Ibis, trying to stop the combined forces of Brainiac and Mr. Atom from destroying an Earth-1 “city of the future.” Now that’s a set piece I can get behind! After that comes a brief mop-up at the Rock of Eternity, where the just-gassed-up Captain Marvel takes on a Red-Kryptonite-angered Superman. That fight’s kind of anticlimactic too, but the rest of #137 makes up for it.

I went back to the LCS on Friday for a 20%-off sale and picked up (among other things) a Manhunter action figure and a copy of Secret Origins #40 (May 1989). I was a little disappointed that the Manhunter figure didn’t include his broom-handled Mauser, and when you pose him with the Bandi knives he might look like he’s fighting with crutches. Still, how could I have resisted that Secret Origins issue? It has all of the requirements for a successful DC comic-book cover, including apes, dinosaurs, a motorcycle, tears, a question, and the color purple!

The Big Kahn

Brigid Alverson: This week I treated myself to The Big Kahn, written by Neil Kleid and illustrated by Nicholas Cinquegrani. The story starts at the funeral of a rabbi, when the grieving is interrupted by an uninvited visitor — the rabbi’s brother, who announces that the deceased not only was not really a rabbi, he wasn’t even Jewish. That’s a great start, because so many questions flow from it, and Kleid does a nice job of showing not only how such a thing could happen but how it affects the family and the congregation as a whole. The strength of this book lies in its complex characters and the unexpected ways the rabbi’s death, and the truth about him, changes their lives.

With some time on my hands this long weekend, I re-read an older manga, the first volume of Mushishi. It’s an odd little series about mushi, semi-supernatural creatures that affect our lives in strange ways. It’s a very Japanese concept, akin to the germs in Moyasimon and the yokai in a million other manga, but unique unto itself. In five self-contained stories, a mushishi, or mushi master, helps someone who is afflicted by the mushi. The setting is vaguely pre-modern, and everything happens in rural villages, so there is a lot of nature imagery. The art is moody and the stories are all a little sad, as most of them deal with illness and death. This makes me want to read more of the series, though, to see how the concept and the characters evolve.

I just started reading a new webcomic, and while it’s a bit uneven, it definitely has potential. Cross Hare, by Matt Gorball, is a noir-ish detective story in which the PI is a rabbit. Or maybe a hare. It’s a cute concept and some of the gags are quite funny, so while the story is still a little wobbly, I’m adding it to my RSS feed.

Batman: Year One

Tim O’Shea: I am out of town for the holiday and not eager to find a local comic book store. So my reading for this installment is a wealth of TPBs from the local library or used book store.

I read the original single issues of the Batman: Year One arc by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli as they were released. Rereading it many years later, a few things stick in my mind:
– Just how well Mazzucchelli’s art holds up–after 20 some odd years.
– How solid an editor Denny O’Neil was on this project
– Why is this the first time I’ve ever noticed or appreciated
– Richmond Lewis’ coloring on the story (hat tip to Jeet Heer for more insight on Lewis). Question to the WAYR audience, does anyone know if she is currently involved with comics or graphic novels in any form or has she moved on to other creative pursuits?

A great many people online seem to love bashing Jeff Loeb — and after reading the first trade hardback collecting his first six issues of the relaunched Hulk series (2007-2008), I think in this instance heightened derision of his work is unfounded for the most part. I understand there may be some continuity gaffes in play here (I’ll admit I’m befuddled by the growth of Leonard Sampson’s hair between
issue 1 and 6)–and I could do without Rick Jones incessantly calling himself A-Bomb (clearly Jones listens to NY Yankees announced John Sterling too much and his “A-Bomb from A-Rod” call…). But overall, the story held my interest and was fairly straightforward. Plus, it’s hard not to enjoy the absurdity of seeing a Watcher punched in the middle of his “I am here merely to observe” speech.

I was an early fan of Matt Fraction’s Marvel work (and long for a day he is able to revisit his independent project Casanova, if his art team ever becomes available again). But I could never get into his Iron Man series. I bought the first few issues and bailed because I found it too bogged down and boring. It continues to garner strong sales and critical praise, so I scooped up the first two TPBs from his run to read. Alas I was still bored — and I was flummoxed by the decision that Pepper Potts iron costume had to be fashioned to emulate the shape of her breasts. This means that Pepper even has to tell guys her eye slits are “up here” when she’s in the midst of a fight. I just continue to fail to see what all the fuss is about on this project.

On the other hand, Fraction’s Secret Invasion Thor TPB released earlier this year was pleasure to read (as opposed to the Secret Invasion itself, which I tried my best to avoid, when possible). In the new Thor ongoing, the town of Broxton and its interaction with its “neighbor” Asgard has been a great dynamic for the series — an element that the writer taps into with this mini. Add to that the return of Beta Ray Bill and I really enjoyed Fraction’s approach on the miniseries.

Finally I snagged a used copy of The Essential Iron Man Volume 1 (Tales of Suspense 39-72), which features a variety of artists on the art chores, including a few appearances by Kirby, at least one Ditko and a majority of Don Heck (inked by a variety of Marvel vets, but one issue inked by Wally Wood [TOS 71). One highlight is the first appearance of Hawkeye (TOS 57) and another is the classic sound effect
of FOOM (TOS 71). For every great story moment that Stan Lee constructed in Marvel history, he stumbled into some duds. In this set, it is TOS 58, which features Iron Man battling the Chameleon -- a
mistaken identity (he poses as Cap, but Shellhead is convinced the real Cap is the fake ... wackiness ensues. It's serviceable enough as story goes, but then out of nowhere Stan tries to add poignancy by
claiming to quote then President Johnson's motto (no, not "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President."), but rather "Let us reason together! For a man's brain is
still his most potent weapon." Here's a few aspects that really makes this scene grimace-inducing: 1) I can find no evidence that LBJ ever said it [only evidence of it is a 1968 government report on the
prevention of violence that quotes the comic book.]

Not to go off here, but really check this text out, as I love a point in history where Congressman Hale Boggs is connected to a report with gems like this: “One of the newest series is Brother Power, The Geek, whose leading character is a tailor’s dummy which has been given life and superpower by a bolt of lightning and who both protects the hippies of San Francisco and exhorts them to be productive contributors to society. Issue number 2 projects an exceedingly ambivalent picture of the hippies in what appears to be an attempt to use the hippie image to attract young readers in order to preach against the general hippie ethos.”

Anyway, back to the absurdity of the last panel with the supposed LBJ motto (which is at least partially from the bible…). Heck has him crouching side profile in the Rodin’s Thinker pose — while sitting on
nothing. If anybody can get the scoop on if this was really an LBJ motto or something Stan threw in as LBJ, I would love to know the backstory.

Boilerplate

Chris Mautner: I actually spent most of the week (and the month really) reading two non-comics-type books. The first is Boilerplate by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett. The book is one of those “alternative history” type stories about the first robot or “mechanical marvel,” invented at the end of the 19th century. The book follows him and his inventor around on a variety of Forrest Gump-like adventures, where he meets lots of famous people from that era and beyond, like Theodore Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia and gets to participate in several significant historical events, like the Spanish-American War. And, of course, along the way, the reader gets to learn a bit of American history that may not have been taught in school (I didn’t know anything about how Hawaii became a territory for example) It’s all very clever, and I appreciated the time and effort the authors clearly took, not only with the text but with the forged pictures and Edwardian-styled illustrations, but Boilerplate, pardon the analogy, never came to life for me. He might as well have been one of those garden gnomes that show up on those travel commercials for all the personality he (and his inventor for that matter) showed.

I’m also reading Conversations With Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies and Moviemaking by Eric Lax. Lax is Allen’s official biographer, and this is a collection of interviews he had with his subject over a span of several decades, from his directorial debut with Take the Money and Run, to 2006 and Cassandra’s Dream. The book’s been on my shelf for awhile, I’m not sure what suddenly possessed me to take it down — I haven’t seen one of Allen’s movies in years, though I used to be quite enamored with his work. It’s a pretty engaging, interesting read overall, especially if you’re at all interested in filmmaking or Allen’s movies; his rather critical assessment of his own abilities is rather bracing and at times refreshing.

Vizbig Vagabond Vol. 1

David Brothers: My interest in the major comics from the Big Two has waned over the past year or so. Dark Reign, Blackest Night, and Flash: Rebirth are all pretty much lost on me, so I’ve become pretty choosy about my comics. I’m still reading Amazing Spider-Man, of course. The thrice-monthly pace does a great job of keeping my interest even when the stories sometimes lack. The Gauntlet, though? That’s shaping up to be good stuff. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: The Sinners #2 was a delight, with my only complaint being that it doesn’t come out every single day of the week.

What’s really taken up all my reading time, though, is Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a retelling of the life of Miyamoto Musashi. Viz Media is re-publishing it in their VIZBIG format, and I can’t think of a better way to read manga. Volume 1 is a 700 page monster, chock full of realistic and beautiful samurai action. Inoue uses a variety of styles, ranging from painterly to hyper-detailed to blunt and harsh brush strokes, while telling the story of a boy becoming a man becoming one of the greatest swordsmen who ever lived. It’s touching, violent, and really very good. And like most good books, it has reignited my interest in Musashi and samurai stories, something I’d let lapse over the past few years. I’ve picked three of these volumes over the past week alone, and it’s just a matter of weeks days hours minutes time before I break down and pick up the rest.

There are a few older books that I’m looking forward to enjoying this week, too. I picked up John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew Volume 1 mostly because Ron Richards of iFanboy is a firm believer in peer pressure and supporting good books. One Piece: East Blue 1-2-3 is a collection of the first three volumes of One Piece. I remain convinced that One Piece is the best adventure comic on the stands, and a 600 page brick of OP is a good way to start the Christmas season. And Marvel’s Masterworks: Deathlok is the most tempting Masterworks volume in ages.

Cat Burglar Black

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is scholar and critic par excellance Craig Fischer, whose musings on comics can be regularly read on Thought Balloonists, the blog he shares with  Charles Hatfield.

To see what Craig and everyone else is currently reading, click on the link. And don’t forget to let us know what you’re reading this week as well.

Stumptown #1

Michael May: I enjoyed Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown #1 this week. It feels familiar in a couple of ways, but familiar can be good. Rucka is obviously fond of strong, but broken, women detectives and Dex certainly fits that description here. But I’m also fond of reading about that kind of character. It’s one of the reasons I like Rucka’s stuff.

But he hasn’t exactly just renamed Renee Montoya or Carrie Stetko for this story. Stumptown doesn’t feel as weighty and serious as those comics do. It’s got a fun, Rockford Files/Magnum PI vibe to it that I didn’t realize I’d been missing. Even down to Dex’s relative whom she obviously loves, but is also exasperated by.

Reading it, I also realized that a well-drawn comic is my preferred way to take in a mystery story. Unlike books, where only the important details are described, or movies, where pictures move too fast for me to look for my own clues, comics allow me to explore the crime scene with the detective, pausing to stare at whatever I want; finding all sorts of things that may or may not be vital to the solution. I haven’t had this much fun with a mystery story since the first arc of Fables.

Omega the Unknown

Matt Maxwell: OMEGA THE UNKNOWN: CLASSIC
Yes, I started reading this after buying it at SDCC. No, I didn’t finish it. Got sidetracked. Picked it up again and marveled at how this book actually got published. ‘Cause even for Bronze Age Marvel, this stuff is pretty out there. Gerber/Skyrene’s caped superhero lives in Hell’s Kitchen (long before Daredevil found it fashionable to do so) in a tenement storefront, occasionally crossing paths with villains like Electro (who’s defused by a handicapped child) and El Gato (witch-man of the barrio), fighting for no reason other than to fight and generally questioning a lot of the assumptions that you have about superheroes. Oh, and there’s a kid that Omega may or may not be. A kid raised by robots. The story here doesn’t end so much as it concludes, written in another book by another writer altogether (though Steven Grant might’ve been working from notes/conversations with Steve Gerber, not sure on that) in an unsatisfactory manner, given the time that things had taken to get started. Still, for fans of Steve Gerber (and those who might want to get an inside glimpse into Gerber’s HARD TIME, which had some relation to OMEGA, if not only obliquely), worth a read, though perhaps not the twenty five dollar cover price.

Also read BOB DYLAN REVISITED for the purposes of review. I’ll just say there’s a lot of very pretty and engaging art and leave it at that here. Finishing my re-reading of the remastered REBEL by Pepe Moreno. Some of the script revisions jump right out (but that’s always the case when an older work is ‘updated’), and I’m not in love with the remastered color, as part of the original’s charm for me was the hyper-garish coloring, making the look unique (at least in comparison.)

Moyasimon

Brigid Alverson: Sometimes, it is good to be a comics journalist.

For instance, this week I am holding in my hot little hands an advance copy of the first volume of Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, which will be released later this month. The premise is at once familiar and original: A young man has the power to see bacteria and other microorganisms. Happily, he has decided to go to agricultural school with his friend, who is the son of a brewer. The two of them quickly hook up with an eccentric professor who is probably up to no good, his hard-edged female assistant, and a pair of sophomores who start a rogue sake brewery that ends badly early into the story. Sawaki, the main character, uses his powers to figure out all kinds of things, and there’s a lot of talk of fermentation and rot in this book, which is educational in an icky-science sort of way. Also, it’s a little more hyperactive than most manga because the editors left in creator Masayuki Ishakawa’s marginalia and doodles.

I’m also reading Garen Ewing’s The Rainbow Orchid, a Tintinesque adventure comic drawn in the ligne claire style. This one is set in the 1920s and has the lead character, an adventurous young man named Julius Chancer, heading off to find a rare orchid in the company of a movie star, in order to preserve her family estate. It’s cheerily old-fashioned stuff, and the story moves along nicely with lots of complications. Ewing’s style is a touch more realistic than Herge’s and appears stiff in places, but his palette is spot-on, and he really creates a sense of place. You can read a large chunk of the comic online, but it’s only being published in the UK; happily, when I expressed interest, Ewing sent me a copy. The book is beautifully produced, with rich color tones, and worth seeking out if you’re a fan of period adventures.

Stuffed arrived with a set of almost random review copies, and I read it in one sitting. It’s like Driving Mr. Albert meets Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The main character, Tim, is an ordinary suburban guy who has put an unhappy childhood behind him, until his father dies and leaves him a homemade museum of curiosities. One of the objects on display is a stuffed African warrior, and Tim has to figure out how to deal with that, both physically and mentally. It’s an interesting exploration of family dynamics and racial attitudes on both sides of the color line, as Tim negotiates his situation with both his aging-hippie brother and an African-American anthropologist. Happily, the outlandishness of the story keeps it from being too heavy, and the characters all ring true.

Captain America Reborn #4

Tim O’Shea: First off, I’ll start with Paul Cornell’s Black Widow. Why? Because I wished I had read it this week, but forgot to pick it up at the store. Saw it on the shelf, got distracted, did not snag it. I would love to hear if anyone read it among our readers? Should I be running out to get my copy?

There is a panel toward the end of Captain America Reborn 4 that I could have sworn Gene Colan stepped in do to a Cap facial reaction shot. I never notice that about Bryan Hitch or Butch Guice before. Maybe a little bit in Guice — either way the art is the real asset to this story. I grow tire of Brubaker usig Sharon Carter merely as a prop to be bandied about in this story. Given how critical she is to the story’s outcome, her perpetual victimhood undermines the appeal of the character and the strength of the story for me.

John Ostrander writing an issue of Secret Six? Interested. Story set in Gotham? More interested. The return of a great Ostrander character — Father/Reverend (read the story it makes sense) Richard Craemer? Sold.

Assault on New Olympus One-shot with Hercules and Spider-Man is a fun story to me. I enjoy Van Lente’s use of Spider-Man here — and most notably the comedic homage to the Ditko/Spidey heavy machinery lifting scene of years ago.

Stumptown had me damn curious when I heard the Rockford Files comparison. And it is an apt one. I love reading Greg Rucka when he’s unrestricted from corporate continuity. Dex lives in a rougher world than Rockford did, though–and fortunately she’s smart enough to survive. Comics can always use more strong female leads and I’m grateful to Rucka for creating the character.

Secret Six

Tom Bondurant: One of my not-so-secret shames as a DC fan is that I’m woefully unfamiliar with the details of John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. I read a few issues here and there, but it was never a mainstay for me, and I didn’t read his Deadshot miniseries from several years back. Therefore, I liked Secret Six #15 (drawn by Jim Calafiiore) for its standalone value: Deadshot’s an antihero who used to be a Batman villain, and while he might not seem to care whether he murders everyone in a room, on the inside it’s a constant struggle not to. (That reminds me — I always think of Catman as the Secret Sixer who wants to be “good,” but as this issue shows, Deadshot’s actually had a taste of superherodom.) Given the people in his life, spotlighted herein, I can understand why he has these control issues. The Secret Sixers are each pretty fascinating on their own, and this issue shows why. Calafiore’s art isn’t a perfect match — his faces and figures are sometimes a bit too stylized — but it’s helped mightily by Gregory Wright’s colors. Still, if I weren’t already reading the book, this issue would hook me pretty effectively.

Justiniano comes in as guest penciller of Doom Patrol #4, the Blackest Night tie-in (written by Keith Giffen and inked by Livesay), and I think he does a decent job. The book doesn’t look terribly different, so I’d say Livesay and colorist Guy Major have a lot to do with that. The story is clever too: in what I thought was a darkly funny inversion of the DP’s history, the “New Doom Patrol” of the ’70s and ’80s are all dead, and the formerly-martyred original DPers have to fight the new Black Lanterns. There’s also a very clever Black Lantern who I really didn’t see coming, so nicely done, Mr. Giffen. (When did Val Vostok die, though? I thought she was part of Checkmate.) It has a good capsule history of both teams, and the stars of the book react to Blackest Night with their by-now-
familiar jaded attitude. As always, the “Metal Men” co-feature is a joy, and I hope Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire hold those Old Navy mannequins in the same amount of contempt I do.

As with the Thanagarian “menace” of the past couple of issues, Superman: World Of New Krypton #9 (written by Greg Rucka and James Robinson, drawn by Pete Woods and Ron Randall) seems to promise a huge throwdown between the Kryptonians and the Saturnians — including a couple of Faceless Hunters From Saturn (TM) — but then Superman has to step in and be all diplomatic. However, there’s more intrigue on Krypton and a locked-room mystery to boot, so it’s not like the issue is dull. I can’t tell, though, what the division of labor is with regard to the art. There didn’t seem to be too many solo-Randall pages … or maybe my eye’s just not that discriminating. (“You got Woods in my Randall!” “You got Randall in my Woods!”)

Finally, I’ve been enjoying the Let’s Be Friends Again collection, which is basically fifty-odd pages of annotated strips and over a dozen pages of sketches, bonus material, and tributes from other cartoonists. Buy it just so you can have a print version of Kim Jong-Il in a Luthor battlesuit.

Zero Zero #2

Chris Mautner: Working on that big Collect This Now column on Al Columbia the other week had me rummaging through my back issues of Fantagraphics’ late, lamented Zero Zero anthology. That in turn had me running to the company’s Web site, where, lo and behold, the entire series was on sale for .99 cents an issue! I snatched up as many issues I was missing as I could and am only just now starting to delve into them. Re-reading this stuff, it really startles me just how good and how ignored this series was and continues to be. I mean, the level of talent in these pages is staggering. Kim Deitch’s Search for Smilin’ Ed! Dave Cooper’s Crumple! Richard Sala’s The Chuckling Whatsit! Joe Sacco’s Christmas with Karadsic! Not to mention Max Andersson, Skip Williamson, Mack White, Sam Henderson, Michael Kupperman, David Mazzuchelli and so many more. This really was the best anthology of the 90s, bar none.

Children’s author Michael Rosen pretty much gets a pass from me no matter what he does, having writing one of the most agonizing, astonishing and bittersweet picture books, Michael Rosen’s Sad Book. His latest, Red Ted and the Lost Things, is nowhere near as impressive, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t amusing. Illustrated by Joel Stewart, it’s a cute tale of a lost teddy bear who tries to find his owner again and succeeds, thanks to the help of a cat and a stuffed alligator. It’s an amusing kids’ comic; one I think small children will like. It’s no Sad Book, but then I’m not sure any writer is capable of something like that twice in a lifetime.

The Summit of the Gods

Craig Fischer: So what am I reading?

Last night I finished Richard Sala’s Cat Burglar Black (First Second). For the past week, I’d been limiting myself to only a few pages of Cat at bedtime, trying to stretch it out into serial-like installments. Which is only appropriate: Sala’s story — his signature mélange of creepy houses, suspicious characters, narrative double-crosses and cute girls (a cadre dressed in black, the cat burglars of the title) — reads like it should’ve been produced as a zero-budget serial by a Poverty Row studio like Republic or PRC in the mid-’40s. Great fun, and Sala’s art looks lurid and purple in the paperback-sized, full-color First Second format.

As soon as I polished off Cat Burglar Black, I started the first volume of Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi’s The Summit of the Gods (Fanfare/Ponent Mon). I’m still in the early pages of the book (Fukamachi just bought the camera), and again I’m forcing myself to read slowly; I want to properly savor Taniguchi’s flabbergastingly detailed depictions of mountain vistas and Kathmandu streets.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve also read and enjoyed a few floppies: Astro City Astra Special #2 (Homage/Image), Citizen Rex #4 (Dark Horse), The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior (Image) and Strange Tales #3 (Marvel). And I’m not even counting the comics I bought for my kids, Simpsons Comics #158 (Bongo) and Archie #602 (Archie, duh). Did you know that Archie and Veronica have twins named Lil Archie and Lil Veronica?

The funniest book I’ve read recently is Alan Aldridge’s The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (Abrams). Aldridge is an artist and graphic designer who began his career with book covers for Penguin UK — I own a copy of J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1961) with an Aldridge cover illustration of psychedelically undulating ocean waves and bending buildings. Then Aldridge helmed several landmark hippie-era projects: he snapped the picture of the band in silver suits for Cream’s Goodbye record sleeve (1968), he drew album covers for The Who (A Quick One, 1966) and Elton John (Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 1975), and (maybe of greatest interest to Robot 6 readers) co-edited The Penguin Book of Comics (1967) with George Perry. Kaleidoscope Eyes is primarily a showcase for Aldridge’s art, but it also features Aldridge’s rambling, episodic, eccentric autobiography in prose between the pictures. He knew everyone, and has hilarious tales to tell. Maybe someday I’ll meet Aldridge in a dive pub in Wales, where I’ll ply him with Jameson and persuade him to give me more details about his inadvertently embarrassing interview with Paul McCartney and his drawing duel with Dalí.

Heeding the recommendations of Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke, I’ve been plowing through Donald Westlake’s novels, most recently Cops and Robbers (1972, though I read the Mysterious Press paperback from 1993). The blurb on the cover of Cops hypes Westlake as the king of “comic mystery novelists,” but I didn’t find the book funny at all. Rather, it’s a satisfyingly dour study of two NYC police detectives who turn to crime because they’re fed up with their boring domestic lives and the carnage they see in their jobs. Here’s a representative passage, told from the first-person POV of one of the detectives, Joe:

For a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull. Getting married, for instance. Having kids. Moving out of the apartment out to Long Island. Those are like the mountains, and the valley is your dull everyday life.

It had been a long time between mountains.

Holy cow, is this a book for guys in mid-life crises … which explains why I enjoyed it so much.

Finally, like everybody else, I have batters-up in a stack by my bedside table. Prose on deck includes Lucas Powe Jr.’s The Supreme Court and the American Elite and Stephen Prince’s Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. The new book on graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister (Made You Look by Peter Hall) looks insanely lavish. And my forthcoming GNs? The Brendan Burford-edited Syncopated collection, and Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brülighty. Of the making of books there is no end…

Preventative Maintenance

Welcome to What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is none other than the highly esteemed Eddie Campbell, author of the autobiographical Alec series, as well as the mythological Bacchus and co-conspirator with Alan Moore on the acclaimed From Hell.

I had originally interviewed Mr. Campbell about a month ago in anticipation of the release of his whopping big Alec omnibus collection, The Years Have Pants, so this is more of a What Were You Reading than a What Are You Reading, but I nevertheless think you’ll be intrigued by his selection. Look for the rest of my interview with Campbell to show up here at Robot 6 either later this week or next.

Click on the link below to continue reading.

Brave and Bold #28

Tom Bondurant: After what seems like months of Essential Avengers (and assorted color reprints), I have reached a stopping point, having finished the Serpent Crown paperback last night. The next Essential volume was just solicited for January, so I’m glad for the break. “Serpent Crown” is probably as good a title as any for George Perez’s introductory arc, although it doesn’t much feature the Serpent Crown itself except as a plot device pitting the Avengers against the Squadron Supreme. In hindsight, of course, it’s hard not to chuckle at Perez starting his Avengers run with an arc featuring more than one Earth and a good bit of time-travel. Really, though, I think he grew as an artist with each issue. After reading “Celestial Madonna” last weekend (also written by Steve Englehart, of course), I appreciated “Serpent Crown’s” relative lack of complexity, not to mention its lack of reliance on arcane Marvel history. Speaking of which, while “Serpent Crown” does seem a little too proud of its many DC references, Englehart does a good job incorporating other books’ characters into the Avengers. Moondragon, the Beast, Two-Gun Kid, and Hellcat play off the regular Assemblers quite well.

Another thing about the Avengers: having read both “Celestial Madonna” and “Serpent Crown” apart from their respective places in Avengers history (and out of order to boot), I think these big Avengers arcs work much better in context. Avengers — at least in the late ’60s to mid-’70s — seems so invested in its various subplots (the Hawkeye/Thor/Moondragon subplot in “SC” comes out of left field if you haven’t been following along) that the big-event arcs exist almost as an afterthought. Quite different from the Justice League story formula, so naturally one of the Squadron Supreme makes a comment about it.

According to writer J. Michael Straczynski, this week’s The Brave and the Bold #28 (as opposed to that other B&B #28) apparently commemorates December’s 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. That’s fine, but I don’t quite see much else justifying this story’s existence. It’s not a bad standalone issue — the Flash is thrown back to wartime Belgium, but he breaks his leg in the process and spends several weeks fighting Nazis alongside the Blackhawks. The main point of the story is that while “the Flash” can’t kill or carry a gun, Barry Allen can, and does, when he sees what’s at stake. That’s fine too. However, it takes away the main characters’ signature moves. (At no point within the story do the Blackhawks ever fly their planes, because they too have chosen to help the infantry.) JMS could have substituted Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, the Losers, or the Boy Commandos for the Blackhawks without missing a beat, and honestly that might have been an improvement. Likewise, Barry didn’t have to be thrown back in time — it could have been any number of DC characters. I know it’s only two issues into JMS’s run, but he seems to be deliberately avoiding ostensibly “wacky” match-ups (like Batman using the H-Dial) in favor of examining serious issues. I like serious stuff as much as the next guy, but if I get a Blackhawk comic, I’d like a “Hawkaaa!” or at least see some planes. Anyway, Jesus Saiz is turning out to be a good fit for this title, since his unassuming style works well for a variety of characters and situations.

Finally, James Robinson, Mark Bagley, and Rob Hunter take over as the new Justice League of America creative team with this week’s #38, and I have to say, I hope Blue Jay isn’t dead. (And if he is, I hope it doesn’t stick.) I’d like to think DC is finally turning a corner on the whole “kill off a nobody just to show we’re hardcore” thing. Also, I’m not particularly attached to Plastic Man, but he too suffers mightily for the sake of gritty realism. Other than that, I thought Robinson, Bagley, and Hunter turned in a decent issue, equal parts talk and action, which set up appropriate questions about the future of the JLA (which, of course, we know) without just marking time until Blackest Night and Cry For Justice had ended. The characters sound more natural here than they do in CFJ, and Bagley’s work also seems more lively here than it did in Trinity. His Despero in particular looks more dangerous, especially with Rob Hunter’s scratchier inks. I remain cautiously optimistic about this book, and this issue did nothing to change that.

Dread & Superficiality

Brigid Alverson: I’m all over the place this week with a couple of really offbeat comics. Dread & Superficiality is a collection of the comic strip of that name that ran from 1976 to 1984 in newspapers all over the country. It’s about Woody Allen. Somehow I managed to live through that entire era and never notice this comic. The book is a real labor of love, with an essay by the creator of the strips, Stuart Hample, an introduction in comics and text by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the strips themselves, many shot from the original art, complete with yellowed paper, blue-pencil marks, bits of tape in the margins, and scribbled notes. This makes the book seem more like a history book than a comic book; it’s as close as you can get to a primary source. Hample’s account of dreaming up the strip, pitching it to Allen, and mediating questions of taste and tone makes for interesting reading, and the strips hold up pretty well.

Speaking of history, Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel is a very convincing imitation of one of those pictorial-history books you can pick up on the bargain racks at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Only this history is fake: Guinan and Bennett have inserted their own creation, a robot named Boilerplate, into the great events of history, Forrest-Gump style. Everything in the book is either completely accurate or completely false, and they make no distinction between the two, which makes it an interesting and puzzling read. Boilerplate himself is a bit of a tragic figure, a robot designed to replace human soldiers and thus end the violence of war. Instead of achieving this noble aim, he and his creator, Archibald Campion, fell into obscurity until they were “discovered” by Guinan and Bennett. Boilerplate first appeared in one of their graphic novels and is the star of his own Web site, which is apparently convincing enough that a third of the visitors don’t realize it is a hoax.

And now for something completely ridiculous: Largo Winch in The Hour of the Tiger. This book was first published in France in the 1990s, but it has a super 70s vibe: globetrotting playboy millionaire, scantily clad women, big hair, bright colors. It’s a rescue adventure tale: Largo’s best friend, a dissolute Swiss photographer, is arrested in Burma on trumped-up charges and sentenced to hang. Largo has to get him out, which he does, using a combination of skill, quick thinking, helicopters, guerilla freedom fighters, and killer monks. This is the
fourth volume, but it stands pretty well on its own. Excellent escapist entertainment.

Beasts of Burden #2

Tim O’Shea: I was more disappointed in Brave and Bold 28 than Tom. The cover has the Blackhawks in planes. I genuinely bought the book based on the dynamic nature of the cover … not knowing that they never flew a plane in the entire story. So much of the book made next to no sense. How exactly did Flash break his leg — getting it caught in a snow drift? Um, OK. Dialogue has the Blackhawks acknowledging they had dealt with Golden Age heroes, who last I checked weren’t really gung-ho on killing people. And yet, they expect this Flash from the future to become a killing machine. And how about that rift that just sits around in the forest, that only Flash can enter at superspeed … once his leg heals … but fortunately it’s a rift that can patiently wait. I admire JMS’s desire to observe the 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, but the story he structured around the event seems really forced and clunky.

Underground 2 takes some interesting turns with the bad guys playing against the expectations that Jeff Parker tricked me into assuming (damn he’s tricky…) Steve Lieber’s use of silhouette on the story’s last page (And on the cover for that matter) is quite effective.

Beasts of Burden 2 has some hilarious dialogue (it is Evan Dorkin) counter-balanced with some damn creepy horror (perfect for late October).

Nick Bertozzi’s “To Catch a WATCHER!!” (imagine a Uatu as a stalker…) opens the latest issue of Strange Tales 2 (of 3) and is the quite possibly my favorite Watcher story ever. Perverse and goofy? Sure. But still enjoyable. But the highlight of the issue for me is diagram happy Matt Kindt’s Black Widow tale. Sweet Jesus, I can’t wait to see Kindt do more Marvel work. Just a snippet of the Black Widow’s narration while on a mission: “Every mission is a learning experience. Every scar is a mental note…Mental notes saying: ‘do not do that again.’”

Batman Confidential 35 is the final installment in The Bat and the Beast storyline. I don’t know if Peter Milligan has any ideas to explore the Beast character further, but I get the impression he might.

In non-comics reading, something I recently ran across (wish I could remember where) motivated me to track down a copy of Roger Kahn’s 2006 memoir Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life. Kahn has written many great books, which he discusses in the book. But the most effective part of the memoir for me was when Kahn wrote about his late son, Roger, who committed suicide at the age of 23. Kahn noted in the intro that a friend advised him “such personal matters would be difficult to write; it turned out also to be joyous. For when I wrote about Roger throwing passes, scoring hockey goals, or just being a kid, he was alive again and at my side.”

Music Box #1

Chris Mautner: In this week’s Can’t Wait for Wednesday, I talked about the new one-shot Angel comic from John Byrne and how, even though it’s not really my cuppa tea, it shows an understanding of basic storytelling and downright readability that most comic book tie-ins can’t seem to muster.

A number of similar titles from IDW serve to underscore that point. G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes, for example, is a dull, tepid affair, that speeds along so quickly to it’s cliffhanger ending that it doesn’t stop to question the plausibility of it’s characters, or whether we know or care to know the characters at all. It doesn’t help that the artist’s “Japanese village” looks about as Asian as southcentral Pennsylvania. If this comic were any more nondescript, you could use it as wallpaper.

That Snake Eyes comic was at least partly written by actor Ray Park, one of the latest in the ongoing “celebrity who deigns to dabble in comics” type of nonsense we’ve been prey to lately. Another example of that is Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Music Box, which while not so awful as to work me into a rage, it nevertheless fails to engage on any sort of level, even as a dumb, “fun” read. Its creators (and I doubt Hewitt did more than OK her name stamp on this) are seemingly more interested in its premise than is characters. And considering its premise is a reheated Twilight Zone plot, that’s not a good thing.

And please, no dirty jokes about the comic’s title.

Even worse is Clive Barker’s Seduth, which is kind of surprising since Barker has written comics before and you think he’d know better. The thing is basically an excuse to throw a lot of trippy 3-D images at the reader, and yeah, the 3-D stuff looks nice, but I kind of was expecting some sort of story and serviceable art to go along with my red and blue glasses, not this incomprehensible, ill-thought-out Lovecraftian gibberish. This thing is a complete mess.

Grandville

Matt Maxwell: GRANDVILLE by Brian Talbot
A most curious book indeed. Minus the anthropomorphic characters and the steampunk setting, it’d be a fairly typical revenge/thriller with the lone detective Doing It His Way as he takes down the aristocratic villains who are manipulating politics and even history itself to enrich and empower themselves. Played out against a familiar backdrop (airships crashing into buildings, being blamed on terrorists/anarchists in an effort to foment war and fear) everything else is intriguing. There’s some sharp observations by Mr. Talbot, but to my reading, there’s a lot of somewhat obvious plotting (unless of course by transplanting 9/11 conspiracy theories into an utterly alien setting, Mr. Talbot is making a point about the universality of conspiracies themselves). After the astonishing ALICE IN SUNDERLAND, GRANDVILLE comes off as a lesser work. Mind you, it’s still plenty entertaining and might earn him some new fans in the steampunk cognoscenti, but it’s not the heart-stopping, inventive and engaging ALICE. However, that’s a pretty unfair comparison, given that ALICE is really in a class by itself. I’ll note that the packaging itself is beautiful and certainly attractive for the price point.

Working through the JH Williams/Greg Rucka DETECTIVE issues as well. Mr. Williams makes every script he draws look so very smart. The way he attacks a page is an absolute joy to read. Can’t comment on the story itself, as I haven’t quite gotten through it yet, but man, are these some beautiful pages to look at.

Preventative Maintenance

Eddie Campbell: The thing I’m reading right at this minute is Will Eisner’s PS The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, which was the army technical magazine he published for 20 years. It’s just been put online in its entirety by Somebody at Virginia University Libraries.

I’m even reading all the technical articles about firing pins and how to keep your jeep’s engine heads from freezing in winter. I’m still working out why exactly it is taking over my brain. The feeling has always been that Eisner abandoned creative work to drop out of the public view and do this “commercial” and client work, but I think PS mag contributed something useful and practical to the daily life of the soldier, and I’m surprised at how it is transporting me to another time and place. It’s made me seriously think about my own career. Have I wasted my life creating comic book stories? Is any of it of any use to the world? I feel a serious crisis of the soul descending upon me. Obviously if everybody loves Pants I will conclude that it does all amount to something after all.