Cover design by Robert Beatty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Page from "Barbarian Bitch" by Anya Davidson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harkham: Did you like the book?

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

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

Page from "Mining Colony X7170" by Johnny Ryan

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

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

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

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

Collins: These explorers searching for love—

Harkham: Looking for love, yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Page from "Epilogue" by Robert Beatty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collins: Yep, that was me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Page from "Warm Genetic House" by CF

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

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

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

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

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

Harkham: I’m still figuring it out myself.

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

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

Cover of Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Images courtesy the artists and PictureBox

Mouse Guard by Stan Sakai

Although the Mouse Guard series is David Petersen’s sandbox, he has been known to let others in to play with his toys. For instance, the first Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard series featured stories by Ted Naifeh, Gene Ha, Jeremy Bastian and many others.

We know that a second volume of the anthology series is in the works, and it looks like one of the contributors will be Stan Sakai, who shares one of his pages on his LiveJournal. Sakai of course has been doing Usagi Yojimbo for decades now, so it isn’t surprising to see him drawing anthropomorphic characters, but it is a rare treat to see his work in color (beyond the Usagi covers, of course, and the occasional graphic novel or anthology submission).

Nexus by Steve Rude

This year was not only a challenging one for artist Steve Rude, but it also marked the 30th anniversary of his and Mike Baron’s Nexus. So it’s great that it is ending with a bit of good news for the artist — Dark Horse Comics announced this week that the Eisner Award-winning duo will bring their popular creation back to comics next May in Dark Horse Presents #12.

“Nexus has never been a stranger to different publishers. Last seen under the Rude Dude banner in 2009, Nexus has stayed in limbo, never quite knowing when to return, or if he ever would return. Things come together in strange ways. With the backing of Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics, Nexus will return to comics,” Rude said in a press release. “We especially look forward to the response of Nexus’s devoted fans, and thank them for the wonderful support and encouragement they’ve given us since the book’s debut in 1981!”

Nexus was first published in 1981 by Capital Comics. Since then, it’s been published by First Comics, Dark Horse and Rude’s own Rude Dude Productions. Dark Horse has collected most of the material in several archive editions.

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes

Graeme McMillan

As we head into Christmas, I’m saving my pennies for last-minute presents. That said, if I had $15 to spend, I’d run towards Memorial #1 (IDW, $3.99), the debut of the new fantasy series by Chris Roberson and Rich Ellis. I admit to having sneaked a peak at this particular present, and I really enjoyed the tone, which is somewhere between Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who and some of Neil Gaiman’s work. I’d also grab Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes #1 (DC, $6.99), the collection of what was supposed to be the final issues of Grant Morrison’s run on the Batman, Inc. series before the relaunch; I’d enjoyed Batman Incorporated a lot, and am ready for more of the weird, retro-but-somehow-off series again, especially with lovely Cameron Stewart and Chris Burnham artwork.

If I had $30, I’d also grab Fantagraphics’ Jason Conquers America ($4.99), a collection of some of the cartoonist’s work that’s so far gone unseen in the US, along with pin-up tributes from fans like Mike Allred and Rich Tommaso. My nostalgia would then compel me to grab Defenders: Coming of the Defenders #1 (Marvel, $5.99), a reprint of the original stories that launched the fondly remembered (and just relaunched) non-team. Hulk groove on old comics.

Were I to ask Santa for something to splurge on, I might go completely left-field and ask for John Byrne’s much-maligned Spider-Man: Chapter One TP (Marvel, $34.99), which I’ve never actually read, but have a strange fascination with. Would that make me naughty or nice?

Jason Conquers America

Chris Mautner

If I had $15, I’d pick up the sixth and final issue of the Boys spin-off, Butcher Baker Candlestickmaker, and the Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes one-shot Graeme mentioned. I’m particularly interested in seeing how Morrison wraps up the Leviathan storyline, as up to the DC relaunch it was promising to be one of the better arcs in Morrision’s lengthy run with the caped crusader.

If I had $30: Following Graeme’s lead I’d pick up that Jason Conquers America book, as I’m trying to be as much of a Jason completist as possible. I’d also nab the latest issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Michael Kupperman’s ongoing, frequently hilarious comic. This one features a riff on Inception and Quincy. Lots and lots of Quincy.

Splurge: I don’t know if I’d actually buy it, but I’d at least peruse Blondie Vol. 2, the second collection of Chic Young’s seminal strip. The first volume was interesting because it was so different from what the strip turned into, what with Blondie being a ditzy flapper and Dagwood being a wealthy (if slightly goofy) man about town. By the time the second volume picks up, the pair have started to settle into middle-class domesticity, with lots of jokes about bad bosses, henpecked husbands and giant sandwiches. Those elements have becomes so ubiquitous that I fear even the early strips may seem trite and cliched, but, on the other hand, I said the same thing about the early Family Circus strips and I ended up really digging those.

Nelson

JK Parkin

If I had $15, I’d start with Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes #1 ($6.99), which finishes off the “first season” of the pre-New 52 Batman Incorporated. It’s sort of odd yet comforting to see the pre-relaunch Batman and gang again, and per Grant Morrison this will be the “last hurrah” of Stephanie Brown as Batgirl. I’d follow it up with something from the complete other end of the spectrum, the Jason Conquers America one-shot ($4.99), which features previously unpublished Jason strips and artwork, interviews and a tribute gallery by various artists. Finally, I’d finish off my shopping list with Daredevil #7 ($2.99). Because, you know, Daredevil.

If I had $30, I’d also get a couple of New 52 titles I’ve been enjoying — Wonder Woman #4 and DC Universe Presents #4 ($2.99 each), and two more Marvel books, New Mutants #35 and Fantastic Four #601 (also $2.99 each). Technically I only have $3 left, but ho-ho-hopefully Santa would lend me an extra 50 cents so I could grab the first issue of The Activity by Nathan Edmundson and Mitch Gerards ($3.50). Edmondson did some really nice stuff with Who Is Jake Ellis?, so I’m looking forward to checking this out.

There’s a lot of potential last-minute Christmas gifts coming out this Wednesday, which means there’s a lot to choose from for my splurge purchase. Image Comics is collecting Doug TenNapel’s Ratfist, ($19.99) which ran as a webcomic and they’re also releasing the first four issues of The Infinite as a $9.99 trade. The thing that probably intrigues me the most is the high-concept Nelson anthology ($24.99) by Blank Slate Books. Here’s the description from their site: “London, 1968. A daughter is born to Jim and Rita Baker. Her name is Nel. This is her story, told in yearly snapshots. Each chapter records the events of a single day, weaving one continuous ribbon of pictures and text that takes us on a 43- year journey from Nel Baker’s birth to 2011.” It features work by Roger Langridge, Paul Grist, Philip Bond, D’Israeli, Andi Watson and many, many more, and I really want it.

Dark Horse Presents #7

Chris Arrant

If I had $15, I’d grab up Dark Horse Presents #7 (Dark Horse, $.7.99). It’s carried on the tradition of its original series by showcasing new work by legends such as Mike Mignola, Howard Chaykin and Neal Adams, while also bringing in new blood like Andi Watson and long-lost favorites like Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles. The last issue was my favorite of the run so far, so #7 has a lot to live up to. Next up I’d get my two favorite Marvel ongoings: Daredevil #7 (Marvel, $2.99) and Uncanny X-Force #19 (Marvel, $3.99). Very different books, but using the same formula of A-List writer & A-List artist it’s easy to see why they’re succeeding.

If I had $30, I’d spent a good portion of it at Image with Invincible #86 (Image, $2.99) and Last Battle (Image, $7.99). Seeing Cory Walker reunite with Robert Kirkman is always invigorating, and I could honestly read a whole separate series chronicling the ongoing adventures of Allen the Alien. For Last Battle, it’s a book I’ve been waiting to get since it first came out in in 2005 – in Italy. Lastly, I’d next get the back-to-basics Wolverine & X-Men #3 (Marvel, $3.99), showing there’s new ways to use the old formula of school for superhumans.

If Jonah Claus were to allow me to splurge, I’d get the unique graphic novel Nelson (Blank Slate, $24.99). Robot 6 did a write-up earlier this year about the book, and like the aforementioned Dark Horse Presents it hits me right between the eyes with my love of anthologies.

Dark Shadows, Volume 3

Brigid Alverson

If I had $15, all but a nickel of it would go to vol. 2 of The Drops of God, the manga series about a wine rookie who has to prevail in a wine-tasting contest in order to gain his rightful inheritance. I love a good soap opera, and I love reading books that help me learn about a specialized subject, so this is a winner on both counts.

If I had $30, I’d add in Louis: Red Letter Day, the fantasy graphic novel by the team known as Metaphrog. I have seen some bits of their work before, and it looks gorgeous.

There’s a lot of splurge material on this week’s list. I’ll start with Nelson, which looks fantastic and brings together an impressive array of artists. Being a total pushover for old newspaper comics, I’m all in for Drawn and Quarterly’s Walt and Skeezix, even if it is volume 5, and the second volume of IDW’s Blondie collection–I loved the first book. And I am seriously lusting after vol. 3 of the Dark Shadows collection from Hermes Press. Finally, I can’t not mention Quality Companion, a look back at the Golden Age publisher that gave us Plastic Man. Big, fat, colorful books of old-time comics–that’s what I want to see this Christmas!

Strange Girl Omnibus

Michael May

If I had $15, it would all go to series that I’m already enjoying.  Supergirl #4 ($2.99) and Wonder Woman #4 ($2.99) continue two of my favorite New 52 books and I consistently like Birds of Prey ($2.99) more than I thought possible without Gail Simone’s writing it. I’m also digging Fear Itself: The Fearless, so #5 ($2.99) goes on the stack and finally, I’ve been checking out (and liking) New Mutants lately, so I’ll get #35 ($2.99) too.

If I had $30, I’d grab some more expensive comics like Planet of the Apes #9 ($3.99), the next issue in my favorite new series of the year. I’d give Justice League #4 ($3.99) a chance too, though the expense of that comic has it on the surface of a fragile bubble for me. I’d also try Memorial #1 ($3.99) if for no other reason than Graeme’s comparing it to Moffat and Gaiman. Lastly, I want to check out some of DC’s female-hero books that I’ve previously passed up. I’ll be writing more about this later for the blog, but Catwoman #4 ($2.99) comes out this week and I’d like to judge for myself whether it deserves the reputation it got with that first issue.

There’s lots to splurge on this week – and that Nelson anthology does sound awesome – but I’ll pick something that hasn’t been mentioned yet, Rick Remender and Eric Nguyen’s Strange Girl Omnibus ($59.99). I loved the early issues of that series, but decided to trade-wait it and was sadly distracted by the time the collected versions came out. This’ll be a perfect way to catch up.

And while we’re on the subject of big BCGF news, how’s this: Cartoonist and editor Zack Soto has announced the launch of Study Group Magazine, with a first issue slated to debut at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival on December 3rd. Spinning out of Soto’s long-running Studygroup12 anthology (the last issue of which debuted at last year’s BCGF) and co-edited by Soto and former Comics Journal editor Milo George, Study Group Magazine will include both comics and comics journalism. On the latter score, the first issue will feature an interview with Craig Thompson by George, an interview with cover artist Eleanor Davis by Soto, and a profile of Brecht Evens by Greice Schneider. As for the comics themselves, look for contributions from Soto, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, Trevor Alixopulos, David King, Aidan Koch, Daria Tressler, Chris Cilla, Malachi Ward, and Jennifer Parks. And be sure to visit Soto’s blog for some gorgeous purple-and-yellow two-tone preview art.

Mudman

Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on a “Splurge” item.

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Graeme McMillan

What’s that, you say? Paul Grist’s new Mudman series starts this week (#1, Image Comics, $3.50)? Well, that’s how I’m starting my $15 haul this week. While I’m at it, let’s add Avengers Origins: Luke Cage #1 (Marvel, $3.99) and Kirby Genesis: Captain Victory #1 (Dynamite, $3.99), before finishing up with the third issue of Wonder Woman (DC, $2.99) for a superheroic week that goes from the earth to the gods, with some blaxploitation and aliens thrown in the middle for flavor.

DC would dominate the other half of my budget if I had $30. I’d be grabbing the third issues of Green Lantern Corps, Justice League and Supergirl ($2.99 each, except Justice League for $3.99), but I’m surprising myself as much as anyone else by grabbing The Bionic Man #4 (Dynamite, $3.99) for my final pick – I read the first three issues in a bunch this weekend and really enjoyed the book to date much more than I’d been expecting.

If I were to splurge this week, my money would probably end up going to Dark Horse, because I’m kind of tempted by Drawing Down The Moon: The Art of Charles Vess ($29.99). I’ve liked Vess’ art ever since I first saw it, which was possibly in his Spider-Man graphic novel in the late 1980s…? Nonetheless, this is more than likely something I’ll end up loving the hell out of.

Chris Arrant

Wonder Woman #3

If I had $15, I’d grab (with both hands) Wonder Woman #3 (DC, $2.99). The only time I’ve bought three issues in a row of Wonder Woman was the Amazons Attack crossover Pete Woods drew years ago, but this team-up between Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang has been consistently amazing. Next up I’d go from amazons to vikings for Northlanders #46 (DC/Vertigo, $2.99); I’ve bought every issue of this in singles, but seeing artist Paul Azaceta’s arc on this re-invigorated my appreciation for the title. Getting my super-hero fix on, next I’d get Avengers #19 (Marvel, $3.99). I admit seeing Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers isn’t high on my list, but I’ve continually enjoyed what Bendis has done to varying degrees and seeing Daniel Acuna join the book is a big bonus in my book. Lastly, I’d be one of the zombie horde to buy Walking Dead #91 (Image, $2.99).

If I had $30, I’d thankfully double-back to get Greg Capullo’s ongoing return in Batman #3 (DC, $2.99) – seriously, I think Capullo is entrenching himself as a top artist in mainstream comics (again). Next up I’d get two Marvel joints – Thunderbolts #165 (Marvel, $2.99) and Venom #9 (Marvel, $2.99). After that, I’d get me weekly fix of Pilot Season with Seraph (Image/Top Cow, $3.99) then get Justice League #3 (DC, $3.99).

For splurging, there would be no question that I’d get the trade paperback edition of Drawing Down The Moon (Dark Horse, $29.99). I missed this when it came out in hardcover in 2009, so I’m glad to see it coming back into print. I seriously think Vess is one of the overlooked great in comics, but only because he hasn’t done a standard “run” on a title like seems to be needed to ingratiate yourself with the comic buying world at large. Regardless, Vess is a master and I’m glad to finally get my hands on this for a decent price.

Chris Mautner

Butcher Baker Candlestickmaker

If I had $15: It’s a quiet week for me for the most part, so I’d probably limit my initial purchases to the fifth issue of The Boys‘ spin-off Butcher Baker Candlestickmaker. For some reason I was under the delusion that it was a four-issue series and not six. Oh well.

If I had $30: A lot of people who’s opinions I respect really like the work of Golden Age artist Bob Powell, so I’d at least take a gander through Bob Powell’s Terror, a Craig Yoe-edited collection of ghoulish tales.

Splurge: That $150 one-volume anniversary edition of Bone would probably make a good Christmas present for somebody on my gift list. If I was splurging for myself though, I’d grab another Yoe-edited book, Felix the Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails, a collection of long-form stories done for Dell and Harvey back in the day by Otto Messmer, who did the original Felix comic strip as well.

Brigid Alverson

Saturn Apartments

If I had $15: I would end up leaving some of it on the table, because this is a good week for manga, and all the manga costs less than $15. Viz has three new volumes coming out this week, and my first choice among them is volume four of Saturn Apartments ($12.99), which I mentioned in What Are You Reading? this past weekend. It’s a lovely sci-fi story about a window washer in a space colony and the people he encounters. I’m hooked, and I’m ready for volume four.

If I had $30: I would add Tesoro, an anthology of short stories by Natsume Ono. Viz has been publishing a lot of Ono’s work lately, and it’s all beautiful. Her stories are more literary and romantic than your standard run of teenage manga, and she has a clean, linear style that is easy on the eyes. With the leftover money, I’d pick up Atomic Robo and the Ghost of Station X #3, just for something different–and because I find Atomic Robo irresistible.

Splurge: Let’s start with the third Viz release of the week, vol. 10 of Real. It’s a splurge for me because it’s a bit of a risk–I haven’t been keeping up with the series, and I don’t know anything about basketball, let alone wheelchair basketball. But volume 1 was amazing, and I’d like to see more. And if I’m really binging, I’d add the first volume of Fantagraphics’ Pogo collection ($39.99) and Drawn & Quarterly’s The Adventures of Herge ($19.95), a graphic biography of the creator of Tintin, drawn in his own ligne claire style.

Michael May

If I had #15, I’d spend most of it on DC. Eventually, I’m going to have to cut back on the number of series I’m buying from them, but not this week. I’m still enjoying Batman ($2.99), Birds of Prey ($2.99), Supergirl ($2.99), and Wonder Woman ($2.99) and want the third issues of each of them. Finishing off my budget, I’d grab Fear Itself: The Fearless #3 ($2.99). I caught up on it last night and even though I didn’t read Fear Itself, I’m going to enjoy Valkyrie’s globe-trotting adventures tracking down a bunch of MacGuffiny weapons and fighting vampires and Avengers along the way.

If I had $30, I’d quickly add Planet of the Apes #8 ($3.99), Bonnie Lass #3 ($2.99), and Atomic Robo and the Ghost of Station X #3 ($3.50). And like Graeme, I’d be sure to try out Paul Grist’s Mudman #1.

Splurge-wise, how unfair is the universe for making the color, one-volume Bone ($150.00) available on the same day as Fantagraphic’s Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, Volume 1 ($39.99)? And that’s on top of DC’s Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers collection ($49.99) and SLG’s Royal Historian of Oz ($14.95). Bone and Pogo are especially impossible to pick between, even with the massive price difference.

As a newspaper broadsheet it was always able to do so literally, but now the alternative comics anthology pood has folded in the unfortunately metaphorical sense. Writing on the pood blog, co-founder and co-editor Geoff Grogan says the publication’s fourth issue will be its last.

Through pood, editors Grogan, Kevin Mutch, and Alex Rader published a wide array of challenging, often unfashionable altcomix work, by creators ranging from Jim Rugg to Hans Rickheit to (in the anthology’s fourth and final issue) DC and Dick Tracy artist Joe Staton. But Grogan says that the project, always a labor of love, was a quixotic one in today’s marketplace: Its unconventional newsprint format, uncommercial contents, and budget-necessitated lack of a dedicated PR person made it impossible to generate enough revenue to continue the series.

That was the dream- to create a self-sustaining vehicle for continuous exploration and experimentation, a place for comics of all kinds and comic creators of all stripes–that would entertain as much as it played around with form. In many ways, like the Sunday funnies in the first few decades of the 20th century. But—in the 21st century—the vehicle wasn’t self-sustaining.

Whatever your take on the finished product, pood was a worthy idea, originating from an impulse akin to everything from DC’s Wednesday Comics to Kramers Ergot 7 to those massive Little Nemo collections. It thought big not just in terms of page size but what went on those pages, and it’s sad to see it go.

The Twelve

• Marvel has announced plans to finally release the last few issues of The Twelve, starting in January. “It’s taken a long while, but finally, FINALLY, the balance of The Twelve has been completed and we’re ready to ship it all to our long-suffering fans,” said Tom Brevoort, senior vice president and execuitve editor. “We appreciate everybody’s patience, and both hope and expect that the conclusion will live up to the wait. And for folks who missed out the first time, we’re making it easy to get back on board no matter how much or how little of the previous eight issues you may have already read, though the release of the softcover trade paperback of the first six issues, and a Marvel Must-Have containing #7 and #8. So you’ve got no excuse not to experience one of the best reviewed, best beloved and long-awaited series Marvel has ever produced as it reaches its ultimate climax.”

• Fantagraphics has released their publishing catalog for Spring/Summer 2012, which includes their first two EC Comics collections, Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo, more manga from Shimura Takako and Moto Hagio, and new volumes of Peanuts, Mickey Mouse, Carl Barks, Captain Easy, among others. The full catalog is available as a PDF.

• Antony Johnston and Oni Press plan to get the ongoing series Wasteland back on track, starting with issue #33. The issue will cost a $1 and will be the first by new artist Justin Greenwood.

• Dark Horse has announced several stories that will run in future issues of their anthology series Dark Horse Presents. In addition to Brandon Graham’s “The Speaker” in issue #7, they’ve also got Steve Horton and Michael Dialynas’ “Amala’s Blade” in issue #9 and and “Buddy Cops” by Nate Cosby, Evan Shaner and Rus Wooton also in #9. And Fabio Moon reminds us he has a story in this month’s issue, #6.

Fox Head Stew

• Weird Fishes creator Jamaica Dyer shares preview artwork for her upcoming graphic novel Fox Head Stew.

• Both writer Jamie S. Rich and artist Dan Christensen tease a new project they’re working on for Oni Press.

• Artist Joe Infurnari says that the graphic novel he’s been working on with Boaz Yakin, Marathon, is now complete. It’s due from First Second in June 2012 and tells the story of the first Greco-Persian war at Marathon.

• In pointing out that the last issue of Dogs of Mars is out on comiXology, Paul Maybury notes that he is “currently remastering the colors and redrawing a lot of panels in preparation for the collected version which will see print next year.”

• Speaking of Maybury, he also shares the exclusive variant cover he did for Unite and Take Over: Stories Inspired by the Songs of the Smiths. Meanwhile, Jennifer de Guzman says that she has been asked to contribute to a second volume of the anthology.

Rub the Blood

One of the more interesting projects to pop up on Kickstarter lately is Rub the Blood, “an Art Comix tabloid that explores the lasting influence (for better or worse) of the Early 90′s Collector Boom comics of Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, etc. on today’s most fringe underground cartoonists.”

Co-edited by Pat Aulisio and Ian Harker, the project fittingly draws its name from a 1990s cover gimmick and features contributions from a variety of art comix pros. In addition to Aulisio and Harker, contributors include Josh Bayer, William Cardini, Victor Cayro, PB Kain, Keenan Marshall Keller, Peter Lazarski, Benjamin Marra, Jim Rugg, Thomas Toye and Mickey Z. Rub the Blood will debut at the 2011 Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest.

Aulisio and Harker were kind enough to share a few thoughts and details about the project and its inspiration with me; my thanks for their time.

JK: Where did the idea originate to put this anthology together?

Ian: It’s been something we’ve kicked around in various shapes and forms for a few years now. The joke was that one day Rob Liefeld will be just as adored among the art comix crowd as Fletcher Hanks is now.

Rub the Blood

Pat: Pretty much what Ian said, although I would add we were shooting around various ideas of some sort of tribute book involving “an art comic take on _____” and the idea of doing a tribute to the original Image Seven, and each person in the anthology would take on characters from each creator. It eventually ended up being just about Rob Liefeld and Extreme Studios mainly.

JK: Your Kickstarter page describes the project as “an Art Comix tabloid that explores the lasting influence (for better or worse) of the Early 90′s Collector Boom comics.” In your opinion, what are some of the “better” and “worse” elements of this particular era of comics?

Ian: Well, the collector’s boom thing inspired a lot of young artists from my generation. I was probably 12 years old when I saw the 501 Blues commercial with Rob Liefeld. The idea that a 16-year-old kid could draw comics professionally made the whole thing seem real. It was in a way the first dose of do-it-yourself ethos I ever had. These guys were all semi-naive artists creating their own characters; before that you only had the characters that were around for decades. I felt like I could be a part of it. Looking back, though, I think the boom was a net-negative for comics. It essentially killed the newsstand pipeline that brought new readers to comics and drove away a lot of skilled cartoonists who could actually tell a clear visual story. You don’t really get to choose what comics you come up on, though; I think those comics stay with you in one shape or form for the rest of your life. The first generation of underground cartoonists came up on EC and you can always see that influence in those guys. That’s what Rub the Blood is about, letting the demons run wild.

by Thomas Toye

Pat: Well, I was still in grade school at the time, and I vividly remember the X-Men Swimsuit Special, in particular the image of Psylocke with dinosaurs in the background done by Jim Lee, and me and my friends talking about having sex with all the women from X-Men in the 90s even though we had no idea how to have sex. So I guess you can say the oversexualization is a “worse” aspect of the collectors boom, but it’s true I can say those comics helped me discover sexuality and learn about the female anatomy (albeit incorrect) at a young age.

Another thing around the collector’s boom was trading cards. I collected the shit out of Marvel’s various card series of pin-ups of your favorite heroes, and learning about their history and stats on the back. I loved those and still have them all in a box rubberbanded together by series. You would get a trading card in the first issues of X-Force by Rob Liefeld and X-Men by Jim Lee.

And Wizard Magazine came out of the collector’s boom. Now they’re just a company of shitty comic conventions and no actual magazine. That’s where the infamous “Captain America with boobs” image Rob Liefeld drew was printed.

Rob Liefeld had a clothing line of oversized T-shirts with giant images of his comic covers.

Variant covers were also crazy then, too. I remember an issue of Gen13 had 13 variant covers, and the sad thing is you know there were people out there that bought 13 copies of the same comic because they thought it would be worth a ton of money in the future.

Stuff like this happened:

That original VHS was sold for like $29.95.

Swimsuit specials, trading cards, magazines based around comics, clothing lines, special edition variant covers, VHS specials … basically none of that shit would happen nowadays, which in the end is actually probably for the worst. I would take on any of those projects (we actually did make a VHS special, too!)

JK: And for those who don’t know, what’s the significance of the title, “Rub the Blood”?

Ian: It was the tagline on the cover of Bloodstrike #1. It was a gimmick cover that featured a dried-blood effect. I remember obsessing over this when I was a kid; I never really understood the damn thing.

Pat: Ian told me about this, and when we were just deciding to try to organize this, I was shopping for comics at a thrift store and found an unopened copy of it for 25 cents. The blood effect still worked! That’s when I knew we had to do this book for sure.

JK: How did you go about recruiting the creators who are working on the anthology?

Ian: Me and Pat have a lot of like-minded attitudes about comics. Pat’s philosophy on life is “Yeah Dude.” Rub the Blood is about the spirit of sitting at your mom’s kitchen table when you are 13 and drawing anatomy that you don’t understand. Like I said, there is a DIY ethos to that, and I think there is a spiritual kinship with the attitude of art-brut comix. Brian Chippendale has said in interviews that he never intended to draw like Gary Panter, he always wanted to draw like Jim Lee (I’m paraphrasing.)

Pat: Me and Ian have worked together on a variety of different things for a while now, and to have a curated anthology we do together was just a obvious step in our comic relationship. We have the same taste, and together we know enough awesome cartoonists. We came up with a dream list of people to get involved. For the most part, everyone that’s in the book we had some sort of pre-existing relationship with before. Except for Bald Eagles, I think Ian met him once, but we were both just big fans of his work and the insanity that he isn’t published more. We contacted him and since then, he’s been one of the most entertainingly insane cartoonists to work with and talk to. Love that guy!

JK: Have you guys already seen some of the contributions? If so, what can fans expect?

Ian: A lot of gnarly drawings and comics. Big boobs, pouches, big guns, shoulder pads. They just don’t look the way you’d expect.

Pat: Your new favorite comic ever.

Pat Aulisio and Josh Bayer's Conon

JK: Besides through Kickstarter, where else can folks buy the book?

Ian: People will have to wait and see. We’re kind of just working it on the convention circuit and seeing where it goes from there. If you really want one the best thing to do is pledge for a copy on Kickstarter. This thing is intended to be a one-off weirdo artifact more than anything else.

Pat: Each contributor will get a decent amount of copies, so you’ll have a variety of different artists to buy it from either on their websites or at art shows, conventions, etc. It’s almost better without wide distribution. It’s one of those things you have to go through an effort to get. But if you want to distribute our book go ahead and contact me! We can work something out!

JK: You’ve already hit your fundraising target on Kickstarter. What do you plan to do with any extra money above and beyond it?

Ian: We could go a few ways with it, but it’s definitely all going into the book itself. That could mean more copies, more pages, better format, maybe all of the above. 50 percent of our print run is going to the contributors either way. They did an awesome job.

Pat: It’s all going into making the book BETTER.

JK: What else have you been working on lately, or have planned to release over the next few months?

Bowman

Ian: Me and Pat will be co-editing the next issue of our newspaper-comic Secret Prison for the first quarter of 2012, and I’m also working in the embryonic stages of an even more preposterous project with Box Brown for late 2012 based on the groundbreaking manga Garo.

Pat: My new three-issue comic series-turn-graphic-novel, Bowman. The first issue is out in November from Retrofit Comics. I already started inking issue #2. It’s an epic life-spanning adventure of lost astronaut David Bowman. I’m also doing a long-form, snail-mail jam comic based around Conan the Barbarian and a talking duck with a Spider-Man mask with Josh Bayer titled The Unforgiving Blade of Conon. That is coming out the same time as Rub the Blood. Me and josh are doing a signing Friday, Dec. 2 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Jim Hanley’s Universe in Manhattan. I also got a Xeric Grant comic I’m applying for to try to get the last of that opportunity. It’s a 32-page collection of various anthology work I’ve done the last year and a half.

The Speaker

Here’s a nice Christmas present — Brandon Graham is doing a new story in Dark Horse Presents #7, which arrives in shops Dec. 21. I didn’t realize until Dark Horse called it out that Graham has a story in that issue, titled “The Speaker.”

“A man loses his voice—his voice goes off to see the world,” Graham said about the story. “Years later the man dies and the voice that walks like a man hears the news and returns home. The Voice has to deal with all the personifications of the man’s doubts, secrets and ideas that are left behind. It’s got doubts using tuning forks like guns and ideas that smash the light bulbs over their heads like they were bottles in a bar fight.”

In addition to “The Speaker,” Dark Horse Presents #7 also features new Age of Reptiles and Skeleton Key material, as well as a “Hellboy in Mexico” story by Mike Mignola.

from Attract Mode

The fourth issue of the humor anthology The Devastator arrives Nov. 9, and the theme for this issue is video games, It includes contributions from James Kochalka, Danny Hellman, Corey Lewis and many more. Above is a brief taste of Kochalka’s contribution; if you’d like to see the whole thing, you can find a preview of a few pages from the book on their site. And hey, if you pre-order it before Nov. 9, you’ll get a mystery prize!

A trailer for the book is available after the jump.

Brigid Alverson: First of all, tell me about Paige M. Gutenborg—what is it and what can it do?

Ryan Mita: Paige M. Gutenborg is a book machine and fantastic opportunity for artists to custom print their works. Books must be over 40 pages long, there is no minimum print run and artists can design the book anyway they like.

In addition to custom printing, Paige can print nearly five million titles, including Google Books in the public domain, and later this fall, HarperCollins will make 5,000 backlist titles available.

We’re excited about the future of bookselling and Paige keeps Harvard Book Store a step ahead.


Alverson: What gave you the idea of creating a comics anthology for Paige to print?

Mita: 
Originally, I pitched a one-page comic history of Harvard Book Store illustrated by a local comics artist to my boss and she liked it. But my boss asked for something bigger. So I thought about that and realized there’s rich comic talent in the area and there’s a printing press at my place of work. The idea felt natural, so I decided to give it a try and my boss was on board right away.


Alverson: How did you find the creators?

Mita: For six weeks this summer, Harvard Book Store held a comics contest, and we received almost 100 submissions! We put posters in local comic shops, cafes and announced it in our email newsletter (a cartoonist from Serbia found the contest that way). The grand prize winner, Robert Sergel, was in the store on August 19th and submitted his story before the 5pm deadline.


Alverson: Who decided what comics would make it into the book?

Mita: I had a number of conversations with my colleagues on the Minimum Paige editorial staff. Smart, savvy people who experience comics by writing at CBR and working at Fantagraphics. We decided which comics to include in the anthology.


Alverson: As the editor, what part did you play in all this?


Mita: My responsibility was managing Minimum Paige to be printed on time and treating my artists and colleagues with total respect. To be more precise, I was responsible for running the contest and establishing deadlines, I communicated with the marketing department and throughout Harvard Book Store, I liaised with artists and coordinated with local comic groups to contribute to the release party.

And I also brought back iced coffees and treats from the local café, because my talented colleagues were making my idea better.


Alverson: What was the biggest challenge when you were putting this book together, and what surprised you the most?

Mita: I think the biggest surprise was how professional all the artists were. Not a single submission came in after deadline. Not one. I remember having visions of artists calling at 5:01 asking for extensions, but it was silent, so I played with fonts instead.

As I put the book block together, I asked a few artists to correct punctuation and misspelled words. I received perfect pages within a day, which was a huge relief with the publication date so close.

I think the biggest challenge was the small time window. We went from closing the contest to printing a 96 page anthology in one month! I constantly reminded myself: “I’d love to do it this way, but I only have this much time left.”



Alverson: It’s unusual for a bookstore to create a book from scratch like this. Why do you think this is an important role for the Harvard Book Store to play?


Mita: Harvard Book Store has always been active in the local community. In September we hosted a writer’s workshop with Grub Street, and Amnesty International recently celebrated their 50th anniversary in-store, plus we lead book clubs and philosophy discussions that are open to all.

I thought the Minimum Paige was an opportunity to showcase the abundant local talent and directly reach out to a new group of artists. We’re doing vibrant things at Harvard Book Store.


Alverson:How many copies of Minimum Paige have you printed so far?

Mita: 
90 copies have been printed, and it’s been a best seller in the bookstore since day one!

Alverson: 
How can people get their own copy?

Mita: Visit Harvard.com or call (617) 661-1515 and a friendly bookseller will take care of the rest.



Alverson: Will there be a volume 2?

Mita: Yes, I’d like that.

From Scott C's 'Pop Goes the Weasel'

All this week at Robot 6 we’re interviewing some of the many contributors to First Second’s new anthology, Nursery Rhyme Comics. In today’s final installment, Chris Mautner talks to cartoonist Scott C.

If anyone in this new anthology seemed like a “must-get,” it surely was the cartoonist known as Scott C., a.k.a. Scott Campbell. His charming, anthropomorphic — and frequently sardonic — work, whether found in video games made by Double Fine Studios, in comics like Hickee and the Flight anthologies, or in his new book, Amazing Everything: The Art of Scott C. seems perfectly suited to the off-kilter, frequently surreal world that nursery rhymes frequently seem to inhabit. The fact that he chose one of the most manic rhymes of the bunch — “Pop Goes the Weasel” — seems equally fitting.

How did you get involved in this particular project and what led to you selecting this particular nursery rhyme?

I’ve known Chris Duffy for awhile through Nickelodeon magazine. When he asked me to take part in the project, there were not many rhymes left. I chose Pop! Goes The Weasel because it is the most nonsensical of any of the rhymes and I thought it would be fun to pick apart.

If memory serves me well, there’s a couple different versions (or at least verses) of Pop Goes the Weasel. What led you to pick these particular verses and did you have to do any research per se?

Oh, man. I researched this rhyme like crazy. Even after Chris had tried to convince me that such a thing was futile when it came to nursery rhymes. I guess I feel that even if there are a million versions of a rhyme and no real origins, there may be some inkling something that could spur an idea. This particular rhyme had an interesting common aspect to it in which Pop! Goes The Weasel was a popular dance back in the 1700s. I think. And the variety of wacky lyrics were merely roundabout ways to get to that awesome dance. So I incorporated that into the comic a bit and chose the version that I remembered from my childhood.

Did the fact that it was such a short comic — two pages — present any challenges for you?

Well, not for pop goes the weasel. It’s a short high energy rhyme, so two pages is perfect. It would be a funny thing to see stretched to a graphic novel length though. Really explore the popping of the weasel

What led to the decision to use circle panels with this comic?

The circle panels felt like pops. Like bubbles. And the rolling around energy that the story had. If you can call it a story.

Your comics in general seem to have a fondness for anthropomorphism. Did this particular nursery rhyme seem like a good fit for you for that reason?

I use cute little faces on things all the time. In this poem, it worked nicer than other times. It matched the nonsense of the poem.

So what’s going on with that weasel anyway? Is he jumping? Having a fit? Passing gas? He seems so placid about the whole affair.

He is bursting onto the scene and pop locking, I think. He loves hiding in there, waiting for the perfect moment to knock everyone’s socks off with his moves the least everyone expects it.

All this week at Robot 6 we’re interviewing some of the many contributors to First Second’s new anthology, Nursery Rhyme Comics. Today, Michael May talks to cartoonist Aaron Renier.

Aaron Renier first came to comics fans’ attention with his childlike, but suspenseful Spiral-Bound, a Top Shelf graphic novel that earned him the Eisner for Talent Deserving Wider Recognition in 2006. Last year, he gained some of that recognition with his adventurous and spooky The Unsinkable Walker Bean from First Second. This year finds him still with First Second illustrating one of the more obscure (to me, anyway; Lewis Carroll fans will undoubtedly recognize it) nursery rhymes in their collection.

Michael May: For those who aren’t familiar with “The Lion and Unicorn,” can you explain the history behind it?

Aaron Renier: Sure. The history behind it is that in the early 17th Century, England and Scotland became unified and they needed a new coat of arms. So they took one of the two lions from the English coat of arms and one of the two unicorns from the Scottish coat of arms. One lion and one unicorn to symbolize the unity for the new British coat of arms. But when I read the poem I saw it as something much stranger, and colorful. So I tried to ignore that knowledge.

May: Did you get to pick the poem or was it assigned?

Renier: I picked it. I did because I had no interest in merely illustrating a nursery rhyme I was already familiar with. Almost all of the fun of being an illustrator is being able to add your own two cents. If I had done something I grew up with I’d have felt pretty bad derailing the meaning and visuals too much. It was something new to me and that left me able to imagine it as something fresh. If you read the poem literally, it’s immediately strange. Why give [the animals] bread? Why give them cake? It has a happy bit of nonsense I loved. It was also a very nice challenge to make a poem most people would be unfamiliar with into something relevant and new and special.

May: What hook did you find that made it fun to adapt?

Renier: The hook for me was that I was allowed to make the lion and the unicorn the steed of two evil men. It was impossible for me to villainize two animals. I love animals, and animals are animals. Imagine villainizing a unicorn or a lion. It’s impossible. Such fantastic creatures. It’s men who would care to battle over something as silly as a crown.

May: Do the riders represent anyone in particular?

Renier: The riders represent the hearts of people that would fight for the power of a crown. They are greed and corruption! Careless, cold-hearted hunger for the crown! It’s really a pity they have such beautiful beasts of burden. I feel bad for the lion and the unicorn.

May: Did you have to do any research for the story?

Renier: I did one image search online for the poem and discovered an alarming amount of images with the two animals “putting up their dukes” and often with boxing gloves on. I remember closing that search window thinking how boring that interpretation was. I never read the poem and saw them standing in the middle of town punching each other, and I realized then that I needed to quickly sketch it out as I saw it. So that’s how it came to be. As I said, I looked up the poems origin, but the poem’s background didn’t seem important to me. I didn’t want to turn a wonderful bit of nonsense into a history lesson. The poem needed to take new form, and become relevant to me.

May: Though the poem has the animals being “drummed out of town,” you depict them as being led out; almost tricked. Is that an intentional bit of subversion on your part?

Renier: I hope it comes across that way. Yes, I think the world is run by people who want power for the sake of being powerful, not caring if they ruin a few fruit markets along the way. The good thing is they get drummed out of town (animals love cake and bread!) and the crown can be used for something useful. The children at the end can use that piece of metal for make believe and a good ol’ game of “kick the crown” if they want. The future of that town is with the children. I pictured the men eventually sitting on a distant hill in some long forgotten valley, hungry and trying to get the baked goods away from the animals. Ha!

Thanks so much to Aaron for answering my questions.

TOMORROW: Brigid Alverson talks to anthology editor Chris Duffy.

Excerpt from Sala's "Three Blind Mice"

All this week at Robot 6 we’re interviewing some of the many contributors to First Second’s new anthology, Nursery Rhyme Comics. Today, J. Caleb Mozzocco talks to cartoonist Richard Sala.

Richard Sala is a prolific comics artist and illustrator often compared to Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, given his interest in visually compelling, somewhat spooky subject matter and deadpan gothic humor. He’s responsible for creating several plucky heroines who confront various mysteries and horrors, like foul-mouthed girl detective Judy Drood from Mad Night and The Grave Robber’s Daughter, monster magnet Peculia from Sala’s signature series Evil Eye and K. Westree of Cat Burglar Black.

The artist’s most recent work is last month’s original graphic novel The Hidden from Fantagraphics, about a group of people stuck in a diner during what may be the end of the world. Well, that and “Three Blind Mice” for First Second’s Nursery Rhyme Comics.

J. Caleb Mozzocco: Do you think nursery rhymes played any particularly powerful role in your childhood or development as a storyteller?

Richard Sala: My mom had old books of illustrated nursery rhymes and fairy tales from her childhood (which were old even when she was young) when I was very little and they certainly had an impact on me. Years later I found copies of some of those books and was amazed to find the roots of some of my weird fears and obsessions!

Mozzocco: Given how short your piece is—two pages, five panels—do you think creating it was more akin to the illustration work you’ve done, or to a comic?

Sala: Definitely a comic. Because I had to “fill in the blanks” that aren’t really spelled out in the rhyme. Like, why in the world would three mice (who happen to be blind!) run after the farmer’s wife? So, I decided to draw them sniffing the sweet smell of a cake she had just made, and running towards that.

I also decided that to match the simplicity and repetition of the rhyme, the strip should have the same qualities. I wanted it to work as a whole—and not look like I was trying to overpower the little rhyme with my art.

Mozzocco: I noticed your bio in the back of the book refers to your usual subject matter as unusual or spooky…do you think this falls into that unusual/spooky area, involving mice and knife-play as it does, or is this a more atypical piece from you?

Sala: Well, a lot of nursery rhymes seem to have a somewhat creepy quality—like old Victorian dolls. At least for me. But for this particular piece, since it was for kids, I made an effort to reign in some of my natural tendencies toward doing some scarier stuff.

A friend and I did joke about the fact that the strip had the potential for some really nightmarish and bloody images and we tossed around some ideas that were truly revolting! But [editor Chris Duffy] had said that the book was for kids, so those ideas stayed in my notebook.

Mozzocco: You’ve created comics and graphic novels for several seemingly distinct audiences in the past. In general, how conscious are you of audience when making a work? That is, do you think, “This comic is for a grown-up. This comic is for a young adult/teenage audience,” or do you just make books for yourself? I’m just curious if you approached this as a comic for little kids specifically.

Sala: Ideally, I am always making the things for myself. That’s why I chose to work more in comics and less in illustration to begin with.

I did a comic strip for Nickelodeon magazine ages ago that ran about eight or ten episodes. That was aimed at kids but I totally did it to please a specific part of my own brain. I mean, I always think of the individual reader, more so than a particular audience. I want my work to be able to communicate and entertain the reader—that’s my goal—but beyond that, I’m doing them for myself, in that I’m doing things that I personally want to see.

Mozzocco: Did drawing this little comic whet your appetite for illustrating nursery rhymes or adapting or illustrating public domain/shared cultural material like this in the future?

Sala: It’s actually something I’ve always been interested in. Somewhere in my piles of old notebooks there are several plans to do books of nursery rhymes and similar things. Maybe someday I’ll actually get around to it! In the meantime, I’m always very happy to be invited to be a part of cool book projects like this one.

TOMORROW: Michael May talks to Aaron Renier

Rubber Ring

I love that Shawn Demumbrum discovered The Smiths the same way I did: through the Pretty in Pink soundtrack. But more than that, I love that he’s put together a group of storytellers with a similar affection for the band who want to make an anthology based on its songs. There’s a Kickstarter campaign of course, but it’s already reached more than double its initial goal of $3000.

The plan is to have 13 stories answer this question about 13 songs: “What story plays in your head when you listen to your favorite Smiths song?”  According to the Kickstarter page, each creative team will make a 4-8 page story inspired by their favorites. Demumbrum writes that “The song acts as an inspiration, jumping off point, theme or mood for the story” and that “Each story varies in style and genre.”

The set list is:

“Death at One’s Elbow” by Glen Curren and Madame M
“Shoplifters of the World Unite” by Shawn Demumbrum and Matt Goodall
“Rubber Ring” by Dennmann
“Girlfriend in a Coma” by JP Manzanares
“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” by Henry Barajas and Christian Vilaire
“Cemetry Gates” by Libbi Rich and Eric Schock
“That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” by Emily Rich and Jenn Fuguet
“How Soon is Now?” by Foo! and Sam Lagreen
“Pretty Girls Make Graves” by Thomas Healy and Justin Miller
“Panic” by Matthew Burke and Joshua Green
“What Difference Does It Make?” by Michael Kessler and Jeff Pina
“Handsome Devil” by Shelby Robertson
“Suffer Little Children” by John Chihak

Demumbrum hopes to debut the book at Tucson Comic-Con in November.

Update: Sterling Gates tweets that he’s also contributing a story to the book based on “William, It Was Really Nothing.”

“Our end-of-the-year project takes the form of an anthology book featuring adventures of the 21st Century descendants of Sherlock and Watson, under the title Holmes Incorporated, and the work this year is shockingly good for a group of rookies trying to get their foot in the door—they deserve a little love and attention. And to sweeten the deal we wrapped our issue up in a cover by X-Men/JSA/Supergirl artist and nice guy, Leonard Kirk — who is also an instructor at our school, so it was a matter of cornering Len in the lunch room,” Templeton said. “This year we’re making the new issue (and last year’s) available as a FREE download for anyone’s e-reader, computer, phone, iPad, etc. Between the two issues it’s 140 FREE pages of the remarkably skilled comics work of some eager and talented newcomers looking to prove themselves, and all they ask is the time it takes to look at the pages.”

After the jump you can take a look at an embedded preview, courtesy of Graphicly.

*****

Womanthology, the charity anthology of comics by female creators that’s using Kickstarter to raise money for publishing expenses, crossed the finish line just 18-and-a-half hours into their fundraising efforts. The crew behind the anthology raised $25,000 in less than a day, and as of this morning they’re raised more than double that — currently their total is at $51,844, but I’m sure it’ll go up even more before I post this.

“WOW! I am amazed, grateful, shocked, awed, astounded, baffled, flabbergasted and a whole fistful of other emotions!” wrote Renae De Liz, who organized the project, in an update on Kickstarter. “I mean, I had high hopes that we would make our goal, I had confidence in our book & all of our contributors and their abilities to help make this happen, but this completely blew me away at how it seemed the whole world came together to help! A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!”

De Liz says she will use the extra money to fund a larger print run for the current book and fund a second book that “that will include both men and women, and promote more opportunities for people to be published and work with their favorite creators.”

You can still donate to the project and qualify for some of the rewards; head over to Kickstarter to check it out.

While “Flight” continues to be very successful for an anthology, it doesn’t sell enough copies to be considered a hit in the mainstream book publishing world, and our sales numbers were not rising. My goal with the project was to reach new readers and bring them into comics, but I was seeing that we weren’t doing a good enough job of it. I think much of the blame can be placed on the size and price of the books. It’s just a bit much to ask someone who has never read the other “Flight” books to spend $27 on a paperback. So I realized that the time spent on the series could be better spent helping the artists begin working on their own books. We’ll revisit the project again, but it will probably show up in a different form.

As comics shift more and more into a graphic novel model, Kibuishi’s words are worth thinking about. Book publishers and comics publishers have different ways of doing things, and apparently the Flight books, as great as they are, didn’t fit neatly into either category. On the other hand, they launched a lot of artists who did go on to make successful graphic novels.

And there’s a bit of good news in the article: Flight 8 is the last volume of the numbered series, but Kibuishi is also working with editor Sheila Keenan on one more volume of the all-ages Flight Explorer anthology, and he will be applying the lessons learned to this new book.

Malinky Robot

Since a Xeric Foundation grant back in 2002 first allowed him to self-publish, comics creator Sonny Liew has created a series of stories starring Atari and Oliver, two street urchins who steal bicycles, watch giant robot movies and get into trouble in a futuristic city filled with robots. The stories have appeared in various comics and anthologies over the years, and this August Image Comics will collect them into one volume titled Malinky Robot.

Liew, whose body of work includes the Vertigo series My Faith in Frankie and Minx book Re-Gifters with writer Mike Carey, Marvel’s Sense and Sensibility adaptation with writer Nancy Butler, and SLG’s Wonderland with writer Tommy Kovac, shared some details on the new collection with me via the magic of email. Based in Singapore, Liew is also working on a few new projects, as he shares below.

JK: What stories are included in the new collection and where did they originally appear?

Sonny: The collection begins with “Stinky Fish Blues,” which was first conceived in David Mazzucchelli’s Graphic Storytelling class at the Rhode Island School of Design. Xeroxed copies of the story ended up in a couple of comic stores in the Boston area, before a Xeric grant allowed to me to try my hand at self-publishing. Later on a colored version appeared in Liquid City vol 1. “Bicycle” was originally released as a one-shot from SLG Comics, and the other stories, “Dead Soul’s Day Out,” “New Year’s Day” and “Karakuri” appeared in various editions of the Flight anthologies edited by Kazu Kibuishi.

JK: Tell me a little more about your time at the Rhode Island School of Design. What did you learn from David Mazzucchelli?

Sonny: RISD was the first time I went to school with a sense of belonging; it was almost odd that homework consisted of drawing and painting, things I’d associated with fun rather than school. Lots of great teachers and fellow students there, David aside I got to take classes with folks like Nick Jainschigg, Bob Selby and Tony Janello. Jon Foster dropped by once too, this was just before his career really took off.

David… well, I think he’s one of the few creators out there who forged a successful career both in mainstream and alternative comics, so he was an amazing source of inspiration and information. Growing up in Singapore, where the comics industry was (and still is) very nascent, I never had a clear idea how someone went about becoming a comics creator — so David’s advice on practical things like portfolios and going to conventions was really helpful. The class itself also opened my eyes to the uniqueness of comics as a storytelling  language; everything from the rhythm of panels to the wider structural elements. He was working on Asterios Polyp at the time I think, so it was exciting when the book came out a bunch of years later, having heard intimations of what it would be about.

JK: The Flight anthologies always have a wonderful line-up of cartoonists and creators. How did you get involved with them, and what was it like working with Kazu Kibuishi?

Sonny: I think Kazu sent me an email after he saw a copy of the self-published Malinky Robot : Stinky Fish Blues. The experience with Flight has been great — watching all the incredible artists post their works in progress on the Flight Forums, meeting the folks at San Diego; it was also the inspiration behind Liquid City, though both Kazu and Ivan Brandon (who was editor for 24Seven) did warn me how much work would be involved in editing an anthology  :p It’s been an honor to have been part of the series, I think it’ll be a bittersweet thing when it ends its run with volume 8.

JK: Tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind “New Year’s Day.”

Sonny: It’s a story inspired mainly by my trip to South Korea for the Bucheon Comics Festival last year. There’s something about walking around in an unfamiliar city,  just exploring side streets and getting a little lost – you feel as though there are possibilities everywhere, just around the corner. I think I hoped to capture a little of that feeling, almost a kind of new adolescence. The great manga artist Jiro Taniguchi was also at the festival, and I also paid homage to his “Walking Man” series in the story. One panel in particular, but you’d have to spot it for yourself.

JK: You’ve got some great talent contributing pin-ups. How did you recruit the folks who are contributing?

Sonny: Well I’ve had the privilege of meeting a lot of incredibly talented creators along the way; at school, through projects, at conventions… and sometimes just via the internet. :p Roger Langridge I worked with on a Spider-Man story, Mike Allred I semi-stalked at SDCC a couple of years back; Skottie Young I know through the net and Aaron McConnell and I were in David Mazzucchelli’s class together at RISD… so it was just a matter of getting in touch with everyone and seeing if their schedules allowed for them to do a piece. Dustin Nguyen owes me big time! :p

JK: Congrats on Liquid City‘s Eisner Award nomination. Are you planning a third volume?

Sonny: Thanks! I’ll be talking to the Image folks at the upcoming SDCC to see what their thoughts are, but there are definitely plans for a volume 3 if all goes well.

JK: What else are you currently working on right now?

Sonny: On the comic side, I’m working on a story with Gene Yang, to be published by First Second books. Its superhero related with an Asian-American twist. There’s also a longer Malinky Robot graphic novel (sketches for which are found in the upcoming Image release), plus something in the works with Mike Carey. Outside of comics, working on a few paintings for some upcoming shows

JK: Speaking of shows, where can folks see you over the next few months? Will you be in San Diego for the Eisners?

Sonny: I’ll be at SDCC, but mostly as a fan–the book’s not out until August, so July’s just a bit too early. That aside… a little tricky to attend any of the other cons, given the sheer distance from Singapore to the States. Still, who knows what will turn up? There’s a convention here in Singapore in August though — the Singapore Toys Games and Comic Con (quite a mouthful even with the shortened STGCC) where I’ll be at — it’s organised by Reed, the same folks who run NYCC.