Mould Map 2

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

Organized by publisher PictureBox Inc., retailer Desert Island, and scholar Bill Kartalopoulos, this year’s BCGF will take place on Saturday, December 3 from noon to nine at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with programming hosted at the nearby Union Pool. If the last two years are any indication, it’s the alternative comics show to beat.

(via Tom Spurgeon)

Talk about a no-lose situation. CF (aka Christopher Forgues), the cartoonist behind PictureBox Inc.’s revisionist-fantasy masterpiece in the making Powr Mastrs, needs money to make some emergency house payments. To raise it, he’s selling nearly every page from the first three volumes for the pretty damn reasonable price of $200 for black-and-white pages and $300 for color pages. “Your purchases will enable him to save his home,” writes publisher Dan Nadel — it doesn’t get much more straightforward than that. If you’ve got the scratch and you want to hold CF’s delicately drawn decadence in your hands, you know what to do.

It’s easy to overlook just how incredible a thing sequence in comics can be.  It’s the language the form uses to construct itself, so of course it’s going to gain some transparency for the average reader, become as silent and reliable and forgotten as the shapes of the individual letters that make up this article.  Sequence is the most essential element of comics, and as such it’s taken for granted by many who engage the form.

But sequence is magic.  To me the most mind blowing, amazing aspect of the comics form is how it can juxtapose multiple images that have absolutely no continuity, no relationship between themselves, and still force readers to see them as connected, inextricable, bound up in one whole.  That might sound obvious or silly when they’re sitting right next to one another — comics panels do share the context of the pages they’re printed on, the books they reside in — but the same can be said for a Rembrandt hanging next to a Girodet in an art museum.  That shared context is a mysterious and powerful thing.  I’m not sure anybody can explain why it works, why we instinctively understand disconnected single-panel images as contributing parts of a whole.  It just does.  We just do.

That inherent ability to make completely separated parts interact and speak to one another gives comics an interesting potential for abstraction and poesy that isn’t really available in any other medium.  It isn’t something that’s explored all too often — mostly when two disconnected panels appear in sequence, a third will come along at some point and square the circle by placing them in a larger scene together, giving them a shared pictorial context.  And that’s fine, that works for telling stories and choreographing scenes and plenty of the other things comics do. This sequence from CF’s xeroxed City-Hunter zine, though, is cool because that doesn’t happen.  Image leads to image more intuitively, the substance of the pictures themselves, not the content, suggesting the form the next one takes.

We start with a complex, depictive panel.  Luminous, flashing bubble letters beam out at us, communicating brute-simple linguistic ideas as a high-tech, futuristic car zooms by, drawn with a bewitchingly decorative simplicity, lines full of flow and grace.  It’s the basic elements of comics — words and pictures — set free on the page, without story, without previously established context, not telling the reader anything discernible.  Just existing.

The page’s mode of operation is made clear in the second panel.  Comics necessarily track the progression of images, but this page’s progress isn’t a forward motion.  That car isn’t going anywhere.  What’s going on instead is a refinement, a paring down of the images in the first panel to their essence.  Despite the fact that the words in the first panel arch and loop over the page rather than running straight across it, that’s the motion our eyes move in to read them because of our familiarity with straight-set text.  The straight-across, line-above-line experience of reading words is what gets transmuted into the top half of the second panel, thick black squeegees of horizontal pencil markings that work like text without meaning, pulling the eye across and then dumping it onto the next one down below.  The black-to-white rhythm of the lines mirrors the black and white words in the panel above them.  The picture of the car is similarly pared down, the same parallel lines and diagonal orientation that took up the bottom half of the first panel taking up the bottom half of the second as well, this time without communicating any figurative meaning.  There is just as tangible a progression between these two panels as there is in any more straightforward sequence you care to name.  But rather than tracking concrete, fixed-form subjects through space, CF goes to work on evolving the subjects themselves, creating motion by changing the very substance of his forms.

The progression reaches its terminus in the final panel, where everything is stripped down to the absolute barest it can get.  The third frame departs from the second just as the second departed from the first: the evolution is no longer working on a car and some letters, but four thick black lines and the spiky abstract shapes below them.  The thick lines are reoriented to form panel borders.  The lines that form the strange shapes are stretched into regular parallels, echoing the organization of the thicker lines above, but also calling back to their previous form with their diagonal lean and their thin, clean quality.  This third panel is stripped of the first’s depictive content and even of the second’s pictorial conflict, every element pared down until it simply sits there as a solid unit.  CF uses comics to transform something into nothing, pulling total harmony from dissonance and abrasion, showing us each step along the way. Oftentimes sequence creates wonders.  Here it makes something disappear.  Like I said, this stuff is magic.

Batgirl #17

Welcome to a long holiday weekend (at least here in the United States) edition of What Are You Reading? Today our special guest is Doug Zawisza, who writes reviews and the occasional article for Comic Book Resources.

To see what Doug and the Robot 6 gang are reading, click below.

*****

Brigid Alverson

Pooches of Power!

I’m overwhelmed by cuteness right now! Capstone Press, which is a publisher I mainly associate with the library and school market, is launching a line of DC Super Pets chapter books, illustrated by Art Baltazar of Tiny Titans fame. I picked up Pooches of Power!, in which Ace the Bat-Hound and Krypto the Super-Dog team up to thwart a gang of sardine-stealing birds working under the aegis of The Penguin, and I have to say I enjoyed it. Despite being an early reader, it had a fairly complicated plot and plenty of interesting characters. I can see a lot of comics fans reading this story with their kids, but it’s also accessible enough that a child who had never heard of Batman before could enjoy it.

So, to bring my blood sugar levels down a bit, I read the first volume of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Yes, I know it’s been around forever, but I hate zombies so I never felt the urge to pick it up. Of course, I quickly realized what everyone else already knew, that this is far more than a zombie story; it’s one of those comics in which, in the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” In some ways, it’s a very familiar and typically American story — people thrust out of normal society (and away from the government) and forced to live by their wits, supplemented with plenty of guns. Kirkman makes it interesting even to zombie-haters like me with a varied cast of characters and some interesting interpersonal dynamics. By the end of the first volume, I knew I would be signing up for the duration.

Sean T. Collins

I’ll tell you what — if you ever wanna feel good about comics, spend a few days cramming with nearly every title you heard positive things about at the end of the year. Click the links for full reviews!

The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd: A Work of Satire and Fiction by Benjamin Marra (Traditional Comics): In addition to being Marra what he does best — sex and violence in ’80s-trash fashion — this is a killer satire of one of America’s most satirizable pundits.

Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham (self-published): As rock-solid a showcase of alternative comics as you’re likely to find, centered on a story about life as a low-level hack in Roger Corman’s ’60s/’70s movie factory.

Powr Mastrs Vol. 3 by CF (PictureBox): Kinky, funny, focused alt-SF/F. The artist also known as Christopher Forgues is doing something special in this series.

Mould Map #1

Mould Map #1 by various artists, edited by Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler (Landfill Editions): Each artist in this giant-sized artcomix anthology gets one page to tell a sci-fi story; in many cases this leads to stuff that’s more sci-fi tone poem than actual tale, and the material’s the better for it. It’s a British import, but American readers will recognize and welcome work from CF, Aidan Koch, and Matthew Thurber.

Bodyworld by Dash Shaw (Pantheon): Given the hubbub about how the webcomic version of this near-future sci-fi comedy was pushing that medium’s envelope, I was surprised by just how straightforward and focused it was. Strong character work, too, in an indie-comedy vein.

Map of My Heart by John Porcellino (Drawn & Quarterly): This collection of strips and prose from Porcellino’s seminal King-Cat Comics and Stories minicomic series is pulled mostly from around the turn of the millennium and tracks an ever more impressive refinement of the artist’s minimalist style and frequently melancholy subject matter.

Carla Hoffman

Daredevil: Reborn #1, by Jock

Okay, WAYR, you’re part of my New Year’s Resolutions too, so let’s get to it! I read Daredevil Reborn #1 because I am supposed to. Daredevil is a popular character and if you don’t know where he’s going, you can’t relate that info to customers looking to see where ‘that guy Ben Affleck played that one time’ is. After Shadowland, I was personally just done with Matt Murdock and whatever terrible thing he was going to do to himself this time, but I’m happy to report that Daredevil Reborn #1 is really good. This is exactly what Daredevil needs as far as character tune-up and this exactly feels like what Andy Diggle wanted to write about. The artwork has a hard line, empty feeling to it, where characters look rough and in the middle of nowhere, the perfect canvas for this little expedition to find himself. I’ll admit that I wasn’t surprised by Daredevil stopping at a mean, middle-of-nowhere locale for trouble he whines about not wanting in an internal monologue, but I love the pacing, the artwork and the art in the storytelling and -most importantly- I believe this is all going somewhere. Diggle isn’t just going to give us this same sad Daredevil story we’ve been reading for years, he’s going for change and I can believe that after this issue.

I also read Incredible Hulks #620 in an act of masochism. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well written, it’s just not what I want to read. Me and the Hulk books have had a strained relationship since I want them to be a man’s internal struggle with the monster inside, and they want to be a team book of heavy hitters with some inference to previous stories. I know, women always want to change the men we love, and I want the Hulk books to be more like when we met. I don’t like their new haircut and hip attitude that’s making them all popular. It’s worse too, because this issue mentions the Devil Hulk and boy howdy, I love the Devil Hulk from Paul Jenkin’s run on the book. It has Jarella too, plus Glan Talbot, Marlo Jones, two Abominations, Doctor Strange, Skaar and Korg and Hiroim and possibly the kitchen sink in a background cameo. Like I said, the story was good, but it doesn’t feel like the Hulk I fell in love with.

Man I relate to Betty Banner more and more each day….

Last but not least I read Infinite Vacation #1 (Resolution #3!) because the cover looked interesting and a quick flip through looked weird enough for me. Other people will describe what happens inside the book better than I will, but suffice it to say that buying time to live your alter-selves’ lives in parallel universes with an app on your phone is rad. They don’t hold your hand through the idea, they just jump you right in with David Mackian artwork and smart and clever narratives. Do you like Cory Doctorow? Sure, we all do! Do you miss ‘hard sci-fi’ set in the real world and the idea that New Media could sell us on anything? How about a book that you’ll have to read a couple times to really understand? Infinite Vacation #1 is all of these and more. I think this is what all the cool indie kids will be talking about this week.

Chris Mautner

Networked

Networked: Carabella on the Run by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger — This is a unnecessarily convoluted story about a blue-skinned girl from another dimension who comes to our universe only to have the totalitarian regime from her world attempt to follow over to take over the Earth. The real purpose of the book is to warn everyone about the dangers of social networking and how the government can use stuff like Facebook and Twitter to monitor everything you do, etc. Considering the real dangers involved in sites like those — i.e. stalking, harassment, bullying, sexting — making grandiose arguments about how THE MAN is going to use FourSquare to create a one-world Orwellian state seems not only far-fetched, but a trifle irresponsible. Still, it’s always nice to see Mark Badger’s art.

Elephant Man by Greg Houston — Fitfully amusing superhero parody that dares to say what if Jon Merrick fought crime. A lot of the problems that plagued Houston’s last book — Vatican Hustle — plague this book: It’s a bit too wordy, it’s a bit too self-aware and a bit too in love with how “zany” it is. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh several times and the plot is a lot tighter than Hustle‘s. For those who don’t get easily offended and don’t mind yet another collection of smart-ass jokes about superheroes, Elephant Man will suit you fine.

Rat Catcher by Andy Diggle and Victor Ibanez — This is the latest book in Vertigo’s Crime imprint, about a double-agent in the FBI who goes around killing mob informants and another agent who attempts to go after him. The book plays around with the two characters’ identities to keep you guessing as to who’s who, but it’s pretty obvious from the outset. More to the point, the book’s very plot-heavy, to the point where there’s really no room for characterization. It moves speedily enough that fans of the genre probably won’t mind too much, but it comes up short when compared to more notable recent crime comics like Criminal or 100 Bullets.

Tim O’Shea

Superman #707

Used to be I believed the closest I would get to Mark Waid writing Superman was Waid on Irredeemable. But if Chris Roberson remains as strong as he is on this first issue of his Superman run ([#707]/part five of this JMS-initiated Grounded storyline), this is the closest we can get to Waid. I’m often nervous when a writer shares that he’s been a fan of a character since childhood (as Roberson has said of Superman), but I was pleasantly surprised to see Roberson’s healthy knowledge of Superman is something that he wields in a reasonable, while engaging fashion.

So, this week the final Thor: The Mighty Avenger came out and was as strong as the other seven issues. And I’m still waiting to hear from Marvel when writer Roger Langridge and artist Chris Samnee have their next ongoing or limited series is scheduled. Those two need to work together again on more than just Free Comic Book Day material.

Bryan Miller concocts the finest Damian Wayne scene to date in Batgirl #17, as he is forced to go undercover as a grade school student on a field trip.

Doug Zawisza

For the past half-decade I start every year with the same resolutions: lose weight, eat better, read more. Every year, I fail at all three. I decided to bring those resolutions back again this year, and I’m trying, I really am, to knock them down this year. I’m sure most of you are familiar with similar resolutions, but the read more resolution is one that I try to apply to things outside of comics.

I’m the father of three very bright girls, all of whom love reading. My wife is a kindergarten teacher, so there’s never really a shortage of reading material in our house. As a matter of fact, there’s usually too much. Everyone’s reading two or three things, here, there, or wherever. I’ve always had multiple reading options open at all times, and right now is no different.

Secret Zoo

The Secret Zoo by Bryan Chick is a book that I happened across while researching an idea that’s been baking in my brain for longer than I care to think about. As a father of three voracious readers, I’m always trying to help them find new worlds. This is one world I’m glad we’ve found. My oldest and youngest haven’t had a chance at this book yet, but my ten-year-old and I have been enjoying it immensely. It’s the story about a boy who is looking for his missing sister, Megan. Noah Nowicki finds clues that tie his sister’s, disappearance to the Clarksville City Zoo. Most of those clues come to Noah via the animals AT the zoo. Chick delivers a story that is filled with adventure, child-like enthusiasm, and unbridled hope.

Chick has stated that he has a target audience of 9-12-years-old, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. It’s a smart read that holds a great deal of potential beyond this book. Chick has planned the series to run over ten volumes, with the second set to be released on Feb. 1.

Skippyjon Jones came home with my wife. As I’ve already mentioned, she’s a kindergarten teacher and has her students bring in their favorite books to share. How my children made it past kindergarten without partaking in the free-wheeling, madcap imagination of Skippyjon is beyond me. Judy Schachner delivers the story of this creative young kitty who imagines himself as a Chihuahua and dreams up adventures for his “pack” of Chihuahuas (who are really stuffed animals in his closet). It’s zany fun that even my 13-year-old gets a good laugh at.

After the kids go to bed and when the wife tunes in to her shows, I find myself with some spare time to flip some pages, so I do. This week the highlight of my comic stack was Batgirl, a book I’ve been enjoying since issue #1. Issue #17 features a team-up between current Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) and Robin (Damian Wayne) in a story that Bryan Q. Miller delivers with equal parts humor, adventure and character. The team-up is driven by Batgirl’s first official Batman Inc. assignment. It’s definitely the lightest of the Bat-books, but strong enough to leave you wanting to read more in a hurry.

Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals

I’m also making my way through the anecdote-laden Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals book by Britt Aamodt. Published by the Minnesota Historical Society, this book covers Minnesota’s Contemporary Cartoonists. It doesn’t limit itself to just mainstream comic books (and thereby the work of luminaries such as Dan Jurgens, Peter Gross, Doug Mahnke, and Pat Gleason) it also looks at the comic strip artists that call the North Star State home. Aamodt does a nice job of letting each artist – mainstream, independent, or comic strip – have a few pages of glory, including more than one sample from most of the artists. It’s a black-and-white book, but the art reprinted here translates well to grayscale life. The book itself has the heft of one of TwoMorrows’ Companion books, and the quality of the material within is pretty darn close to TwoMorrows’ standards.

The last thing I’m reading is on my iPod touch. I haven’t committed to a Kindle, iPad or other such reader device yet, but I have decided to experiment with the apps and my Touch. I’m reading The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer. The book just hit the stands (digital and deadwood) on Tuesday past, but I’ve been able to bust out the iPod Touch while waiting for kids at dance or swim, or heating up my lunch at work. This has given me the chance to pack an extra seven chapters of reading into a week that wouldn’t normally allow such an extracurricular activity. The book is standard-fare from Meltzer, playing close to his Decoded show while investigating the National Archives in more detail. Beecher White is an archivist who happens upon a secret that may or may not be tied to the President of the United States of America. From there, assumptions are made, conclusions are jumped to, and adventure busts forth. As he has done in previous prose works, Meltzer peppers the story with comic book-related winks and nods. It’s a page-turner at this point, and I’ve found myself unlocking the Touch to read one more page quite frequently.

As for what’s waiting for me next, well, I just checked out Ed Brubaker’s Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire from the library. I haven’t done much X-Men reading in the past few years, so I’m looking forward to an interstellar adventure with Nightcrawler, Havok, Polaris, Marvel Girl and Warpath. That will be waiting nicely over to the side as I finish one of these other books.

from Powr Mastrs 3 by CF

Over on the CBR mothership, Tim Callahan takes a close look at two books sure to be shortlisted for Best of 2010 honors in another month or two: CF’s Powr Mastrs 3 and Brian Chippendale’s If ‘n Oof, both from PictureBox Inc. Tim argues that the two books’ combination of sci-fi/fantasy trappings with the oblique storytelling techniques and challenging visuals of art-comics create the same sense of wonder and discovery that comics held for him as a kid. Here he is on Power Mastrs:

…that shocking sense of uncertainty and even anxiety – what do these characters want, exactly, and why are they doing what they’re doing – creates a distinct sense of wonder.

I don’t mean that as a joke, in the sense that we wonder what the heck is going on, although that is partially true, but in the sense that the world of New China, mapped out by C. F. obliquely in the opening pages of the volume, is a bizarre and unfamiliar place, even though it feels familiar because of the archetypal characters and cleanly-designed pages. For me, it resonates because it recalls the very thing that drew me to comics as a young reader, that sense that within a given issue you can only see a corner of a much larger fictional world, and all of the character interactions are strange because the years (or decades) of history only hinted at.

And here he is on If ‘n Oof:

It’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy quest story, half Jack Kirby, half Disney/Pixar, but with an art scene edge. Yet, like “Powr Mastrs,” it doesn’t seem to be doing any of this ironically, saying, “Ha, look at how cool we are to make fun of these comics and stories that we liked as kids.” It pulls its influences into itself and tries to tell a genuine story within that artistic shell.

And it succeeds, emphatically.

Like my discussion of “Powr Mastrs,” I won’t bother summarizing the plot of “If n’ Oof,” even though it would be a much simpler task in this case. I will say that it’s basically a buddy story, with a few dream-like yet sci-fi twists and with an adventure in a strange landscape. I referenced Kirby, and, like the work of Gary Panter, it’s Kirby’s primal physicality filtered through a punk aesthetic. It’s “Kamandi” with less attempt at making sense out of a futuristic world, but with no less of a sense of adventure into weirdness.

Both books may be off the beaten path for the average Robot 6 reader, but I think it’s a detour worth taking. Read Tim’s whole column and see if you agree.

Like the characters he chronicles in If ‘n Oof, his new book from PictureBox Inc., Brian Chippendale is prone to wandering. He just returned to his home base of Providence last week following a tour with his acclaimed two-man music group Lightning Bolt, whose sound can be best described as “What if Thor’s hammer and Loki’s helmet formed a band?” He’s also gearing up to hit the road again in another couple of weeks for a brief cross-country book tour with fellow PictureBox cartoonist CF.

But it’s Chippendale’s artistic travels that interest me the most. Each new Chippendale book feels like an experience miles removed from its predecessor. Maggots is a tiny softcover with incredibly dense pages, drawn on top of a Japanese book catalog so that even the white spaces are filled with visual noise. Ninja is a gigantic hardcover with a smoother approach to Chippendale’s trademark “snake-style” layout — you read the first row of panels on a page from left to right, then hop down to the next row and read that one from left to right, then down another level from right to left, and so on back and forth — and a healthy dose of comics he drew as a kid thrown in. If ‘n Oof is a doorstop-sized softcover in manga dimensions in which every page is a splash page or part of a spread. And while all three share Chippendale’s unmistakable rough-hewn line and love of sci-fi, fantasy, and action — an approach forged in the hallowed halls of the late great Fort Thunder collective, alongside artists like Mat Brinkman and Brian Ralph — If ‘n Oof‘s buddy-movie storyline of two lovable creatures battling their way through a wasteland in search of home (and snacks) is the artist’s most accessible work to date. Robot 6 managed to get Chippendale to settle down long enough to talk to us about the new book, how it stacks up against his new webcomic Puke Force, and the tantalizing possibility that as far as If and Oof’s world is concerned, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

All of your big books have looked and felt so different, on a physical level. When you start a new long project, do you think to yourself, “I want this to be different than what I’ve done before,” or has it just worked out that way?

It’s just worked out that way. If ‘n Oof, on a simple level, is basically just if you took a single Ninja panel and blew it up to its own page. I was just fucking around in Kinko’s with these mini If ‘n Oofs, five or six of these tiny comics that were the size of a Ninja panel — you had 16 panels per 8 ½ by 11 page. I was making these little books in a size and format that I’d lifted off Mat Brinkman; he’d made these little mini books in the ’90s. At some point I just blew it up double-sized, messing around in Kinkos, and I was like, “Whoa! These drawings look cool blown up to 200%.” The standard panel size in most of If ‘n Oof is kind of like a Ninja panel blown up to 200%. Suddenly I was like, “What is this stuff like if you stretch it out, so that instead of having it on one big sheet, you stretch it out longways?”

With any of these things, I don’t really set out to do anything. It sorta lands in my lap, and then certain things take hold. If ‘n Oof just suddenly ballooned. I started out working on the sixth or seventh chapter of what would be these little mini-books I made. That’s why the chapter breaks in If ‘n Oof don’t say “Chapter 1″ or “Chapter 2,” they say “If ‘n Oof Giant 1″ or “If ‘n Oof Giant 2.” I think that first I made the cover for “If ‘n Oof Giant 6″ — 1 through 5 were minis, and I was going to do one special 24-page issue that was double-sized, and that was gonna be issue #6. It was just a thing that got out of control. There was no planning — it just sorta got bloated.

How much of it was drawn at that tiny size?

It’s sort of all over the place. Again, bad planning on my part. The first stuff I drew, I think, was chapters 5 and 6, basically the middle of the book. You can kinda tell — the drawings get crude in the middle. He meets these boys, they pull a gun him, there’s an ice cream cart…those are the first drawings. Then I started working backwards, so the drawings in the beginning of the book are better. They’re more refined — I don’t know if they’re better. The wrestling match with me was, “I don’t know, is refined better, or is crude better?” I ended up keeping everything. The stuff in the middle of the book is drawn small and blown up 200%. Most of it is drawn smaller, actually. Most of the stuff in here is blown up a little bit. Some of the big splashes are shrunk somewhat. There are a few big drawings I shrunk down. A lot of the stuff is maybe blown up 125%. But you can kind of tell, if you look: The stuff in the middle is cruder and scratchier and weirder, and that’s the stuff that was drawn smaller.

I never noticed that on an explicit level, maybe because it sort of fits with the story at that point. They’re in a wasteland…

Yeah. Well, that’s good! I mean, I tried to explain it away with this stupid little thing where If and Oof get hit in the head, and suddenly everything looks shitty after that. He actually says at one point, “Do things look weird to you? We got hit really hard!” [Laughs] I was just trying to make this really arbitrary segueway into the cruder drawing style by them getting hit in the head.

I spotted a lot of flashes of different drawing styles here and there throughout the book, some of which reminded me of different artists. There’s a spread of a house that If and Oof are leaving where the blacks remind me of Brian Ralph, and there’s a sequence with those weird shaggy barbarian Benjo-Men guys that was sorta like “When Mat Brinkman Comics Attack!”

I thought the Mat Brinkman stuff was the cave scenes — those were the Brinkman one for me. I didn’t picture the Benjo-Men that way, but that’s interesting too. That makes sense. I guess he does have some barbarians in his stuff, yeah.

Maybe what reminded me of him there was that one of the Benjo-Men takes a dump on another slain Benjo-Man. I remember that one Brinkman comic from Teratoid Heights where this big brute spends all this time breaking into a castle only to knock the king off his throne and poop on it.

Mat’s actually here in my house. He’s been here for a couple of weeks visiting and stuff. He pointed out to me that If ‘n Oof is like Oaf, his old comic [from Teratoid Heights]. Then he was like, “Oh yeah, Puke Force is like [Brinkman's earlier comic] Multiforce. C’mon, Chippendale, you’ve been ripping me off left and right!” [Laughs] We’re actually supposed to draw a little minicomic together called If Oof ‘n Oaf, but we’ll see if that happens. He’s definitely in there, for sure. There’s a little Paper Rad in there, too, I think. In the first chapter there are these robots and clean-lined white hallways. Those simple lines are kind of Paper Rad-y.

The first thing I thought there was Yuichi Yokoyama.

I feel like I’ve barely looked at Yokoyama, but that would make sense too.

Now that you mention it, there were several points throughout the book where I thought, “Oh, wow, look at that smooth line!” Certain images looked very different from your usual choppy line.

This whole book, for me — each chapter has its own texture in a way. It was just this weird learning experience. I would attack each chapter as its own thing. I’d finish a chapter, and then a month or two later I’d come back. I’d start drawing the drawings bigger — most of the time they got bigger as I went. Halfway through I started scripting things out, some of the chapters I was laying stuff out…I wasn’t, like, thoroughly in control or something the whole time. It was funny to see how things turned out. It was an experiment, for sure. I’d draw stuff and be like, “Yeah…is this how I draw?” ‘Cause I kind of draw a certain way, like Puke Force or Ninja. I mean, Ninja is probably my default drawing now. Trying to draw bigger and communicate in this one page/one panel thing was stretching me. I wasn’t necessarily comfortable the whole time. For better or for worse — I can’t even tell.

How did switching away from your snake-style layout to the one-panel-per-page format change the pacing for you? It has to change it almost completely, right?

Well, it does and it doesn’t. The thing about the panels…in a weird way, it can almost be viewed as being the same. I’m a drummer, and there’s a beat to a lot of the panel things I set up in Ninja. From panel to panel, you’re spending the same amount of time on each, you just march through. The reason there’s a snake pattern is so there’s no gap — the beat isn’t interrupted as you go down the page, in a way. As this book went…I mean, part of the reason it’s 800 pages is that I was trying to keep that kind of rhythm, but instead of panel to panel, it’s page to page. For the most part, you’re supposed to spend the same amount of time on each page. I actually almost think of it as the same thing, in a way. It’s still controlling the rhythm.

If anything, I think this gives you even more control. When you have multiple images on a page, no matter what you do with the layout, people are just going to vary how they attack that. But there’s almost a limit to what you can do as a reader when it’s just one new image with every new page. I mean, obviously you can linger on an image, but there’s something about the physical incentive of turning a page to see the next image that keeps it even steadier than the snake layouts.

Yeah, maybe so. I’ve watched a couple people read it and seen them get into a rhythm. I don’t know, I’ve probably only read it in this form twice now. But there was definitely a conscious effort for rhythm, and it was a similar conscious effort I put into the snake-panel stuff — like, “This has to feel like it’s flowing.” That’s why it’s an 800-page book where there’s not necessarily 800 pages worth of stuff in it. Like, they’re just walking for a while. I think in a lot of my comics, even way back to Maggots, I’ve always been interested in getting into this groove. I hope that’s recognizable.

The other thing I thought was interesting in terms of the pacing is that there are sequences in which you recreate the way action and comics are staged not even in comics but in film. There’s a pivotal sequence near the end of the book that’s straight out of Die Hard, and I was struck by how the one-image-per-page layout gave you the ability to nail that dynamic, engaging, suspenseful pacing that good action films use.

[Laughs] That last chapter has been in my head for a year and a half, and I was so terrified about trying to make that work, that whole grand fight scene. There was actually a whole ‘nother chapter, a second scenario where they end up running up into a tower and all this stuff, but [laughs] I didn’t quite get there. But anyway, that scene was in my head, and I got so nervous about it, but it kind of…somehow…worked! I think penciled it out and read over it…I don’t know, it’s all new to me, this kind of writing to get a desired effect versus just sorta wingin’ it and seeing what happens. Which is generally how Ninja was: I would draw some stuff and sit back and go “How did this turn out? Oh, cool! I wasn’t expecting that, but that’s what happened.” But this time I had this desire, I wanted this suspenseful ending, and it kinda worked. And it kinda worked because of this format, where you can’t see what’s coming.

That’s something Jordan Crane used to talk a lot about when he started making more horror-oriented minicomics. Having one image per page gives you much more control over what people see and when they see it, and enables you to do suspense in a way that comics with several panels per page don’t enable you to do, because you can see it coming.

Yeah, they just can’t do it. I guess it’s the same at Marvel when they have certain splash pages. It’s a celebrated technique. When it works, it works. It’s pretty fun. This format was fun for me. I really wanna start working on another one. [Laughs] When I laid out this damn If ‘n Oof book, I had this one day where I did this ridiculous outline for all these adventures they were gonna have, and I’ve chipped away at about one sixth of the outline. There’s this huge bigger story, and now of course even since when I did that there’s all these other little stories I want to do, just stuff that was coming up randomly in the book. I referenced some stuff I want to go deeper into.

It has a sort of Dark Tower feel, where you get these weird little glimpses of things. You don’t know the context, but you feel as if they’re the fabric of something bigger. That’s what I got from If ‘n Oof when you’d hear about, say, the Sixteen Assassins, but you’d only see four of them. “There’s Number 13, and there’s Number 4, but where’s the rest of them?”

Right. But you do pick that up — you see the numbers on certain characters’ shirts or whatever.

Exactly. So I found myself flipping back through the book to find out who else had a number. It’s not anything that pays off in the sense that at the end they fight their way through all sixteen assassins — that doesn’t happen. But that’s what’s cool about it — that doesn’t happen. You’re just catching this one little glimpse into a larger world.

Yeah. There’s this big thing I’ve got. I don’t quite have a grip on it, but there’s all kinds of stuff. I feel like the first chapter sets up some stuff — there’s this scientist guy and he’s in a satellite and he’s doing something or other — and to me it was a little bit of a bummer because I suggest all this stuff in the first chapter and then I go on, and the story changes entirely and never really revisits that stuff.

I thought that was fun too, though, because I sat there trying to puzzle out what this guy’s relationship was to everything else that was going on.

Right. Moreso than Stephen King, who I haven’t read that much of, Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite authors. He wrote this one series called The Book of the New Sun or something — a four-book series he wrote in the ’80s about a torturer who gets banished from his guild because he showed someone mercy, so he walks the earth and gains more power as he goes. Anyway, he’s written a shitload of stuff, and his newer books I don’t love — his newest one is called The Sorcerer’s House — but he just always introduces all this shit and it doesn’t ever quite do anything. There’s one series of three books he wrote with this character who can’t remember anything, so every chapter is a letter to himself, and you sometimes get the idea that Gene Wolfe can’t remember what’s in his books. [Laughs] Like, they kind of don’t correspond, you think it’s going to do this and it does that, and there’s literally no payoff. It’s almost like…if you read the thing at the end that tells you the background, it’s the most interesting stuff. There’s little bits of this really rich world, but there’ll be this weird mundane story in it. I think that was a big influence: suggesting something grand but telling something mundane. On one level, I could have gotten a little more grand with the actual story. I think that was part of my learning curve. But I like the idea that there’s all this stuff out there but you’re getting one little corner of it.

It’s a way to have your epic and eat it too.

Basically. Or have your epic and finish it too. [Laughs] Actually get the damn thing done!

I think that with many quote-unquote artcomics, there’s a temptation to ignore the emotional content of the work, and just focus on the visual aspects, or the more obvious elements of pastiche of more traditional genre work. But in the climax of If ‘n Oof, I was genuinely excited and thrilled, and I actually cheered, “Yay!”

[Laughs]

But then at the very very end, when I realized where things were going, I gasped and said “Oh, no!” I was moved by the book, and I think it’s important to mention that, and not just look at the cool art and the neat action/sci-fi stuff.

It’s a gin-you-wine, cheesy little love story between these guys.

Right! Cheesy not in a bad way.

That’s what I wanted. That’s really all it is. Again, I feel like I could have gone further. I do tend towards artcomics. I do tend towards cold, sterile, “Wow, this looks crazy and cool,” kind of, but forgetting about, “Oh God, these characters should be more than one-dimensional. They’re not just symbols of something.”

from Ninja

I don’t know that you’re giving yourself enough credit. I know that what I took away from Ninja, for example, wasn’t that it’s a really cool looking giant hardcover. It was the message about community and living in a city and, almost, civic responsibility, and beyond that, a message about your ability to and desire to have fun and not be an asshole.

[Laughs]

Clearly, things don’t work out perfectly in that book, but it’s still important to hang on to those parts of yourself. That’s what I took out of it more than “Oh, it’s this crazy rad thing from Brian Chippendale!”

Right. Well, that’s good. I think most of the people who actually read that did pull out that stuff, but I also think a lot of people don’t get past the denseness of it. But yeah, I’m into stories. I like relationships and the dramatic stuff that goes on between characters. Even in If ‘n Oof, I really like the ending, and there are a few moments where they have interactions where I really do get the feeling that there’s this real pull between the two characters.

But it was a struggle, too. The struggle for me in this book was If. I couldn’t quite find a voice for him, I didn’t quite know who the hell he was. I knew who Oof was! [Laughs] Oof came really easy. I feel like Oof is super consistent, I guess because he doesn’t say anything. He’s just full Oof. I knew what he would do. If was a challenge to pinpoint, and I don’t necessarily feel like I did. So it was weird to have these two care for each other, because I didn’t quite know one of them.

They’re archetypes, obviously. They’re part of a long tradition of comic duos.

Yeah. The everyman.

Right. And it could be Laurel and Hardy, or it could be Waiting for Godot. But nonetheless, they have a specific relationship in the way it manifests itself throughout the story, particularly at the end. I still feel like I understand their specific plight and situation and relationship and what they mean to each other.

Yeah. Although I’m still not sure what exactly is their…I haven’t decided if Oof is like a…I’m not even sure yet. Hopefully something will be revealed in the next one or something! [Laughs] For me, a lot of storytelling is just you throw yourself off a cliff and then you scramble to get back up. I was just trying to make sense out of some of the shit I’d done before. [Laughs] I knew different backstories. It’s so fun. You start doing these things and you’re like, “Oh my God!” I’m a fan of Lost . I loved Lost for the same reason: It suggested all this greater stuff. Until it utterly failed. [Laughs] When I was finishing my story, I didn’t want to just reveal stuff and leave. Even in the last scene, I wanted to pull the camera back a bit and throw out a few more things that are happening around. I love stories that become unhinged and stay that way. [Laughs]

The ending of if ‘n Oof struck me as pessimistic, particularly compared to Ninja, which I found really uplifting. It doesn’t end on a note of freedom and companionship, it ends on a note of separation and confinement.

I wanted it to end sinister. There are three scenes that take place in this other realm — it started out there, and I needed to finish it there. That place is sort of scary and weird and pessimistic. I dunno…it’s definitely no Ninja. It’s its own beast. I feel like with all my comics I’m so barely in control, and this was just another one. I had so many plans for this book and I got through maybe a quarter of them.
Is it a nice change to be doing a gag strip instead now?

Yeah, it is, it really is. I can do exactly what I’m thinking about that day. With If ‘n Oof, I didn’t want to drag politics into it, I didn’t want to drag what was happening to me that day into it, I didn’t want to drag anything into it. I’d come up with this world it takes place in, and I was trying to make things make sense within that world. I was a little stuck — but I was also thrilled by it, because it was fun to be making this thing that was actually a graphic novel, versus a compilation of short strips, which is what Ninja was to some extent, and which is what Puke Force is. Both Ninja and Puke Force, which I feel is like the sequel to Ninja, are novels in the sense that they do take place in the world and that world will move forward over the course of those short strips. It’s not like Garfield, where things are always the same. Things will definitely change and move forward. But they’re not novels. If ‘n Oof was the first time I could literally go 700 pages back and change one word in a word bubble because I’d restructured something and I had to go back and make it relate. It was weird, it was challenging — the first long thing I’ve ever really done. And now I feel like I know how to do it! [Laughs] I’m excited to do another one, because suddenly I know how to write a novel. Although I’m not exactly thrilled to sit down for another two years. [Laughs] That’s kind of what I did. I mean, aside from going on a bunch of tours and doing a bunch of other stuff, when I wasn’t doing that, I was wrapped up with this stupid book. [Laughs] I’m not even sure…is it enjoyable? [Laughs]

Absolutely! I loved it. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear!

No, I could tell. You’re literally the first person I’ve talked to about it. [Laughs] Nobody will talk to me about it! It’s so funny.

What about Dan [Nadel, PictureBox's publisher and editor]?

Oh, Dan is just like, “Yeah, it’s great!” [Laughs] I was having a crisis a year ago where I was like “Dan, I fucked up.” I had this whole chapter that was one of my favorite chapters, it was 60 to 80 pages, and I just couldn’t use it. It’s sitting here unused. It’s basically in the middle of the book and it disconnected the ending from the beginning. I said “Dan, I just fucked up, I did this chapter, and now I can’t use three of the chapters in the second half, and I have to do five new chapters, and it’s going to be two books now, and they’re both going to be 700 pages long…” That was the only time he stepped in and was like [lower, Dan Nadel-esque voice], “Brian, don’t…don’t use that chapter. You have to get rid of the work you just did. You can’t expand this into a 1400-page thing.” That was the only time he really stepped in. I would mail him chapters as I finished them and he’d kind of just be like, “Great! Keep workin’.” When it was done, he was like, “It’s great!” It’s like, “Uh, okay…thanks…” [Laughs] But what do you expect? Dan’s a busy man. And I wasn’t looking for a critique from Dan or something. When something’s in process, it’s hard to know what you should think, because you don’t want to burst somebody’s bubble. When you’re struggling just to get through a damn thing, the last thing you need is for someone to knock you off the rails. [Laughs] I kept saying to Dan, “I know it seems weird, but it’s gonna make sense. When it’s all done, it’s gonna make sense!” [Laughs] I think he was keeping away from it a little bit anyway because it didn’t make sense for a long time.

I think it’s really smart of Dan and PictureBox to position If ‘n Oof as the “gateway” Brian Chippendale comic because of the one-panel-per-page layout. Those snake layouts of yours can be challenging simply because a lot of people have a hard time with anything that isn’t the traditional top-to-bottom left-to-right layout. I’ve seen manga freak people out, I’ve seen Chris Ware freak people out —

Chris Ware freaks me out! [Laughs]

So just having one panel per page opens it up to a whole new readership.

Yeah. If people can’t read this book by me, then forget it. For me, at least. If you can’t read this book, you just can’t read comics. But Christopher [Forgues, aka Powr Mastrs cartoonist C.F.] read it, and I kept being like, “Christopher, it’s just the most simple thing in the world,” and he was like, “Uhhh…I don’t know if it’s simple…” [Laughs] I guess it is still a little tricky, but as far as readability goes, it’s goddamn readable.

And like I said before, some of the pacing and the subject matter will be familiar to people who are into more traditional action-adventure comics or movies, but there’s stuff going on beneath the surface as well — which is the hallmark of a good action-adventure story, after all.

Yeah. If people can get to that last chapter, if they can make it …[Laughs] That last chapter clinches it a little bit, like, “Oh, it is an action-adventure story. Okay.” You just gotta get there.

Beyond anything I’ve ever done, If ‘n Oof has definitely got me a little nervous. I’m just like, “I don’t know, I don’t know! I worked on it for two years and you can read it in a half hour. I don’t know how I feel about that!” [Laughs] Ninja is so off-putting that it takes a long time because it’s just so dense, and Puke Force has been so instantly fun for me. It delivers and it’s fun. So this thing where it’s not that political, and it’s not even that funny, and it’s just a story…it’s just so weird. But I’m thrilled by it. I just got a few boxes in, so I have stacks of them, which I love having stacks of the same book. I love it, but I don’t know what it is! [Laughs]

PictureBox Inc.

It’s not exactly Mickey Mouse buying Spider-Man, but it’s fascinating news nonetheless: Indie publisher PictureBox Inc. will be selling digital versions of its comics and graphic novels through the iPhone comics app Panelfly. Available titles include C.F.’s Powr Mastrs Vols. 1 & 2, Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, Lauren Weinstein’s The Goddess of War #1, and Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. Panelfly‘s other publishers include indie outfits NBM and SLG.

That even PictureBox — the artiest of the artcomix publishers, known for envelope-pushing material, extremely high production values, and a publishing line that straddles the comics and fine-art worlds — is going digital says a whole lot about the industry’s perceived need to get a foot in that particular door, not to mention about PictureBox’s willingness to seek out an audience outside of the traditional art/alt/underground comics venues.

©2009 Bongo Entertainment, Inc. The Simpsons © & ™Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

I somehow missed this in Tucker Stone’s report from MoCCA last week, but luckily Heidi over at the Beat caught it — Stone spoke with John Kerschbaum about his future projects, and the creator revealed that he’s working on this year’s Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror book for Bongo Comics.

Kerschbaum isn’t the only one working on the book, though; as you can see below in the solicitation copy that Bongo was kind enough to send us, they’ve recruited a Murderer’s Row of creators, including Jeffrey Brown, Kevin Huizenga, Matthew Thurber and many more, and it’s edited by Sammy Harkham of Kramers Ergot fame:

Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror #15
Edited by Sammy Harkham
$4.99
48 pages/standard format/color/humor
UPC: 01511 (7-98342-02851-5)

Guest edited by Sammy Harkham, the award-winning creator of the popular Kramers Ergot anthology, this year’s issue is a jam-packed with some of the most idiosyncratic (and weirdest) takes on “The Simpsons” universe ever. Among Halloween-inspired short strips by such visionary cartoonists as Jordan Crane (Uptight), C.F. (Powr Mastrs), Will Sweeney (Tales from Greenfuzz), Tim Hensley (MOME), and John Kerschbaum (Petey & Pussy), are four featured tales of inspired Simpsons lunacy: heralded artists Kevin Huizenga (Ganges, Or Else) and Matthew Thurber (1-800 Mice, Kramers Ergot) collaborate on a weird and wild story equal parts Lovecraftian eco-horror and Philip K. Dick identity comedy. Jeffrey Brown (Incredible Change-Bots, Clumsy) does a creepy and suitably pathetic story featuring Milhouse in a “Bad Ronald”-inspired tale of murder and crawl space living. Harkham and Ted May (INJURY) pull out all the stops for a tragic monster tale of unrequited love, bad karaoke, and body snatching at Moe’s Bar. Ben Jones (Paper Rad) does the comic of his life with an epic tale of how bootleg candy being sold at the Kwik-E-Mart rapidly spirals out of control into an Invasion of The Body Snatchers-like nightmare of a Springfield filled with cheap bootleg versions of familiar characters. And nobody does squishy, sweaty, and gross like up and coming cartoonist Jon Vermilyea (MOME), who outdoes himself with “C.H.U.M.M.,” a C.H.U.D.-inspired parody featuring everybody’s favorite senior citizen, Hans Moleman!

With a cover by Dan Zettwoch, Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror #15 is like nothing you’ve ever seen, and is sure to be one of the most talked about comics of the year by alternative comic readers and Simpsons fans of all ages!

This goes on my “must buy” list.