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.

Paying off thirty years of continuity and character development. Delivering shocks, gasps, cheers, and tears in equal measure, seemingly at the author’s whim. Offering a master class in everything from laying out a double-page spread to drawing clothes. Telling a story about beloved characters so emotionally engaging that even their most ardent fans wouldn’t mind if this were the last one ever told. Any way you slice it, Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers” — his contribution to the recently released Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 and the conclusion to the already wildly acclaimed “The Love Bunglers”/”Browntown” suite from last year’s issue — is a hell of a comic. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Dan Nadel, editor of The Comics Journal, has posted his own appreciation, and invited cartoonists Frank Santoro (Storeyville) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) to do the same. (SPOILER WARNINGS in effect at those links, folks.) Nadel (like Jordan Crane on the first part of Jaime’s tale in issue #3 before him) minces no words: “This is not just Jaime’s finest work, but one of the best (at this moment I’d rank it in my top five of all time) works ever created in the medium.” Santoro calls Jaime “the greatest cartoonist of all time,” saying “No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me.” Tomine talks of picking the issue up at a signing event for Jaime and being so moved by a two-page spread he encountered while randomly flipping through that he actually had to leave.

I posted my review at the beginning of August, after the book had started circulating at cons but long before it hit stores, but weeks and even months later people would still post comments on the review, like they’d been hungrily seeking out anything anyone had written about this remarkable comic. I’ve got a feeling that as more and more critics read this comic, they’ll never go hungry again.

Tim O’Shea: Laura, how did you come to be involved with Womanthology?

Laura Morley: I’m an aspiring comics writer, and saw the original tweet Renae De Liz sent out in May, seeking women to contribute comics to an anthology for charity. I hadn’t actually crossed paths with Renae back then, and saw the message via someone else’s retweet – I wish I could remember whose, so I could thank them! It’s been an amazing experience for me. Then, since I’m one of those perverse people who gets a kick out of wrangling spreadsheets, I sent an email offering to help out with admin for the project – from that I wound up coordinating the admin effort, which has meant acting as a first point of contact for our contributors and our Kickstarter backers. You can also hear me sounding British on the Womanthology Kickstarter video.

O’Shea: Can you explain how it came to be that there is a hardback anthology and a sketchbook associated with Womanthology?

Morley: Publishing a hardcover volume was the plan from the beginning. The book is going to be pretty hefty – it’s over 300 pages long, on a 9×12 inch format, and we wanted to make something truly elegant that would serve as a good vehicle for the beautiful work inside. The sketchbook came about, I believe, as an opportunity to showcase some more of the work by our creators. Some contributors preferred to draw pinups than full stories, and some wanted to do both; some writers wanted to share samples from their scripts – we thought this would be a good way to get more of it out to the audience it deserves.

O’Shea: How did IDW come to be involved with Womanthology?

Morley: I believe Renae was in touch with some people there via books of hers they’ve published previously; she approached them once the project got under way. We were always keen to attach a major publisher, both to help us get the book distributed widely and to give readers some quality assurance, and we’re very grateful for IDW’s support for the project. Like the rest of us, they’re not making any money off it.

O’Shea: How are editorial duties being divided up on the project–what’s the timeline for the project?

Morley: We have four editors volunteering their time, each handling about 25 writer/artist teams. All scripts were completed and approved in July and pencils were finished last weekend; we have inking, colouring, and lettering work underway right now. We’ll then spend September collating the other material, including interviews and features, and laying out and setting the book. We’re aiming to wrap production at the start of October, so the book can be published in December. The sketchbook should be ready sooner, during the autumn.

O’Shea: This interview would be incomplete if we did not discuss the recent seeming backlash. Have you been surprised at the derision and increasing skepticism that the project has received in recent weeks? Admittedly most criticism acknowledges the planners’ intentions are well-meaning, while at the same time noting that the numbers seem unrealistic.

Morley: I don’t really think it has been derision and increasing skepticism: I think it’s been critical attention, and no, that’s not really a shock, or a bad thing. Of course, some of it’s been rather … full-bodied critical attention, but you’d have to be pretty new to the cut and thrust of the comics internet to be surprised by that. People are entitled to ask questions, and the vast majority have done so respectfully, and out of concerns that are completely laudable (and that, as someone starting out in making comics, I obviously share). I hope we’ve been able to give answers that reflect what we’ve said all along that we’re trying to do– and that underline the point that every single person on the project chose to join it as a volunteer, because we saw in it some reward other than pay. I would like to think that the early success we’ve had – and that’s gone so far beyond what we expected – makes that decision look more like a good one than a bad one.

O’Shea: When you see an analysis from a publisher like Dan Nadel have you considered contacting him to see what advice he might be able to offer? How about talking with Laurenn McCubbin?

Morley: Well, I think people are perfectly entitled to comment on the project without having us turn around and essentially demand “If you’re so smart, why don’t YOU tell us how to run it?” We’ll gladly answer questions, and we’re always happy to get offers of help, but cross-examining each of our critics on how they’d do things instead is probably not the best use of anyone’s time right now.

O’Shea: Editing an anthology is no easy task, has the challenge exceeded your initial expectations or was everyone prepared for the level of challenges inherent with a logistical challenge like this project?

Morley: The editorial and logistical challenges, we were pretty well prepared for: most of our editors also do this professionally, and knew what they were in for. That’s not to say it hasn’t been a huge pile of work – as you can imagine, we’re all pulling very long days to fit this around our paying jobs, and since we’re spread over several timezones it’s fair to say that Womanthology’s been a 24/7 juggernaut for the last few months. We’ve been lucky, though, to have such a dedicated group of contributors, who’ve made those tasks infinitely easier than they might have been. (For example, every single team hit their script and pencilling deadlines.)

Of course, the Kickstarter did far exceed our expectations, and came with more work than I think we’d ever dreamed we would hit. One of my best friends inconveniently got married on the second day of the Kickstarter campaign, and at three a.m. on the night of the wedding you could find me hunched over my netbook, clinging to a single bar of wireless signal on the Welsh coast where the wedding was being held, fielding emails from the over 500 backers we got that weekend. Which… no, that’s not how we’d have planned it!

O’Shea: What is organizers’ response to some folks’ concerns that trying to start an imprint makes the project transition more into a business as opposed to just a charity anthology?

Morley: So as we’ve said, whatever we do with the project, it’ll remain non-profit. Right from day one of the Kickstarter (and as described in the Kickstarter FAQs all along), we’d outlined broad plans for what we’d like to do with extra money if we happened to raise it, and that always included trying to launch more projects along similar lines if the money was available. Anything we are able to get off the ground will work along similar lines to what we’ve done on Womanthology.

O’Shea: Have you all been discouraged by the increased critical eye on the project, or did you expect it on some level, given the successful degree to which the Kickstarter effort raised funds beyond initial expectations?

Morley: No, it’s not discouraging at all: as you suggest, when the project took off so far beyond our expectations, it was inevitable that not all of the attention we got would be from people wanting to shower us with kittens and rainbows. That’s normal, and predictable, and has helped us all I think to get a little bit wiser about what working in comics is like.

O’Shea: As noted in this Portland Press Herald piece, while Renae de Liz is based in Portland, you are based in London. How instrumental has social media been in bringing folks together on this project?

Morley: Actually, I’m 50 miles north of London, in even-more-remote Cambridge! But yes, social media’s been instrumental in this. The whole project got started with a single tweet, which is how most of our creators found us. The efforts of the women running our Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Facebook accounts were vital to the success of the Kickstarter campaign, and Twitter in particular has been a major vector for people to find out about the project. It would’ve been totally impossible for this to happen so quickly, and on such a global scale, without these tools.

Related: Comic Book Resources talks with Renae De Liz about the rapid rise of Womanthology

Looks like the mother of all post-millennial art/alt-comix anthologies is about to get a makeover. Last Thursday, editor Sammy Harkham and publisher Dan Nadel of PictureBox Inc. announced the November 2011 release of Kramers Ergot 8, the latest installment in Harkham’s “this is why the word ‘seminal’ exists” anthology series. According to Harkham and Nadel, the new volume will mark a break from the four previous, sprawling, all but physically intimidating collections — a smaller, more focused effort, featuring longer 16-24-page stories from about a dozen creators, working with the same aesthetic end in mind instead of the potpourri of approaches evident in earlier volumes. The line-up includes Harkham, cover designer Robert Beatty, Gary Panter, Gabrielle Bell, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw, Anya Davidson, Ron Rege Jr., Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally.

Beginning with 2003′s volume four, Kramers bestrode the alternative comics landscape like a colossus. It’s widely credited, certainly by me, with “breaking” the artists and aesthetic of the Providence underground (Fort Thunder, Paper Rad, Paper Rodeo, etc.) with the altcomix audience at large, and with drawing non-traditional approaches to comics and image-making into the comics conversation. (It’s hard to remember now, but back in 2003 the inclusion of pages of non-narrative collage was a controversy that lit up the Comics Journal message board.) At the same time, however, and as would befit an artist of Harkham’s restraint, Kramers has always contained a second strain of rigorous storytelling, as evidenced in strips ranging from Harkham’s early standout “Poor Sailor” to the short stories from heavy hitters Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, and Daniel Clowes that appeared in the anthology’s last issue, the gigantic, expensive Little Nemo in Slumberland-sized #7 from now-defunct publisher Buenaventura Press. It ought to be fascinating to see where Volume Eight’s mission statement takes us.

For more information, watch Nadel’s interview with Harkham in the very Vestron Video-ish video embedded above.

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.

This Mat Brinkman monstrosity can be yours for 30% off

The taxman cometh, and that, says publisher Dan Nadel, is why boutique comics publisher PictureBox Inc. is having a 30% off sale for the rest of April. In addition to acclaimed comics like Renee French’s H Day, CF’s Powr Mastrs, and Brian Chippendale’s If n’ Oof and various art prints and music projects by their affiliated cartoonists, PictureBox also offers everything their book about the album art of legendary Pink Floyd/Led Zeppelin designers Hipgnosis to a vinyl statue of Beat icon Allen Ginsberg designed by Sof’Boy creator Archer Prewitt. If you can’t find something to buy, that’s on you, man.

The Comics Journal, a venerable, influential and controversial mainstay of comics journalism that had developed an air of the walking wounded in recent years, has radically revamped and relaunched its online presence. Its new editors are Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, best known as the minds behind Comics Comics magazine and, in Nadel’s case, the art-comics publisher PictureBox Inc.

The print version of the Journal will continue to be helmed by founding editor and Fantagraphics co-publisher Gary Groth, acting in a more hands-on capacity as of the forthcoming Issue #301 than he has in years, by the sound of it. Kristy Valenti serves as editorial coordinator. Contributors to the new TCJ.com include Frank Santoro, Jeet Heer, Joe “Jog” McCulloch, Ken Parille, Ryan Holmberg, Rob Clough, Richard Gehr, R.C. Harvey, R. Fiore, Vanessa Davis, Bob Levin, Patrick Rosenkranz, Nicole Rudick, Dash Shaw, Jason T. Miles, Andrew Leland, Naomi Fry, Jesse Pearson, Tom De Haven, Shaenon Garrity, Matt Seneca, Tucker Stone and Hillary Chute. On a Robot 6-related note, my colleague Chris Mautner and I will also be contributing.

A look at the new site reveals a multifaceted approach, with reviews, columns, interviews, lengthy features and essays (the current lead feature is a look at the legacy of, and turmoil surrounding, Frank Frazetta by writer Bob Levin), an events calendar, selected highlights from the magazine’s archives, and more. The biggest news, perhaps, is that Hodler and Nadel plan to have literally the entire 300-issue Comics Journal archive scanned and posted online by the end of this year and made available in its entirety to the print magazine’s subscribers. Click here for Hodler and Nadel’s welcome letter, in which they explain some of the changes and reveal a bit of what’s ahead. (And click here for their farewell letter to Comics Comics.)

Since I’m writing for the thing, I may not be in the best position to comment about it, but quite aside from my own minor role in the proceedings, the move is a welcome and long-overdue one. The Journal is the most important publication of comics news and criticism in the medium’s history — it all but singlehandedly made the case that comics can and should be capital-A Art for years, an argument that at this point it can be said to have won handily. It also pushed hard (belligerently, some might say) to hold the medium to higher aesthetic standards, and the industry to higher ethical ones. But its online presence has always been comparatively rudderless and ad-hoc. For years, Dirk Deppey’s Journalista linkblog was the magazine’s primary voice online; since I think none of those years corresponded with Deppey’s tenure atop the Journal‘s print incarnation, the two outlet’s editorial voices never quite jibed. In the absence of a strong vision like what Groth’s was for years in the print version, off-brand aspects of the magazine’s website — its Mos Eisley-esque message board; Noah Berlatsky’s pugnacious Hooded Utilitarian group blog — filled the void, to the dismay of many readers and creators, and even to the dismay of the people involved in those aspects of the site themselves. The problem was compounded when the Journal radically reduced its print output (it is currently an annual), leaving a relaunched website plagued by unwieldy design, hazy editorial focus, and sporadic posting by its contributors to pick up the slack. With the recent shutdown of Journalista, HU, and the relatively new group blog The Panelists, it was clear some kind of major change, likely one devoted to streamlining and focusing the magazine’s editorial output online, was in the offing. Handing the Journal‘s website to an experienced print/web editorial team with a clear vision of comics and how to talk about them, one that moreover has been on the leading edge of comics criticism for some years now, is a major step in the right direction.

It’s funny: I think that since about 2007 or so I’ve been saying in “how do you solve a problem like the Journal” conversations that if I were God-Emperor of Comics, I’d just hand the thing to Hodler and Nadel. For nearly that long, I’ve been saying that its website should basically be Pitchfork for comics: an easy-to-navigate, accessible-to-newcomers, unafraid-to-ruffle-some-feathers, go-to site for people interested in a certain form of artistic expression. And lo, that’s basically what has come to pass.

For much more on the move, see Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel. As a former editor of TCJ himself, Tom’s able to work the unique contours of the matter better than most. And as Spurge also points out, this means The Comics Journal message board is dead. Here’s how Tom reacts:

I’m happy to see the message board gone. I feel much more responsible for the dark side of comics culture that festered there than I do any sense of community it may have fostered, more than I do whatever exposure to little-known works it may have facilitated. It was a place that had some virtues but mostly, I think, it was a place where unhappy people went to be even less happy. Its time has more than passed, and like many of the people that once gave entire working afternoons to stringing along five or six life-and-death rage-sessions at a time, I don’t think I’d been there more than a half-dozen times in the last three years. It may be the thing in life I spent the most time doing from which I keep the least amount of positive memories. I wish the board could have been a whole lot better. It always made me feel like we had done something horribly wrong in putting it up in the first place. Its departure is a load off my mind.

If you’ve never been there, I can hear you asking already: Was it really that bad? In a word, yes. Actually, in another word: worse. The fact that I’m saying this despite the formative role that board played in getting me thinking and writing seriously about comics, and despite the lasting friendships I formed there (Spurge included), should tell you something. The sheer volume of nastiness and trollery was unrivaled, and all the more disconcerting given that this wasn’t some battle board where Thor and Superman fans were duking it out for supremacy and where you’d therefore expect some smackdowns, but a place that could otherwise have been utilized for intelligent discussion of The ACME Novelty Library and what have you. There came a time that I realized that every visit to that godforsaken board made me enjoy comics less. What a terrible thing to be able to say about the reader-interaction forum for the greatest magazine about comics ever. The new regime’s messboard mercy-killing is a major mitzvah in and of itself. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they can do.

Sean's comically huge comics haul from BCGF 2010

I tweeted it after I got back home the night of the show and I stand by it now: Book for book and creator for creator, the second annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival was the best comic convention I’ve ever attended. I’m not sure I can articulate exactly why — certainly not in a comprehensive fashion, as I was in and out of the day-long show within three hours and didn’t even attend any of the programming (though I could see it was pretty much standing room only from my vantage point by the hot dog stand that provided grub for the attendees). I’m sure people who stayed longer, participated more, and took advantage of all the show’s ancillary events could paint you a bigger and better picture. But from my admittedly narrow perspective, it came down to a sense of…well, of giddiness — that’s the best way I can put it. Pretty much everyone I saw or spoke with at the show seemed head-over-heels happy, not because of proximity to cool parties or big-money media extravaganzas, but because of proximity to comics — tons and tons of unusual, gutsy, great comics.

For that, credit must be given to the show’s organizers: Brooklyn retailer Gabe Fowler of Desert Island, PictureBox publisher and Comics Comics editor Dan Nadel, and veteran comics scholar/editor/programming director Bill Kartalopoulos. Running a curated con, where exhibitors are vetted before being awarded a table rather than getting them on a strictly first-come-first-served scenario, wasn’t exactly a no-brainer given the prevalence of the more traditional model even among other small-press shows. I don’t know how much actual curating was involved, in terms of creating an environment for a certain kind of comics on the front end versus turning people away on the back end — I recall hearing that the latter was minimal — but whatever the case, the end result was the most uniformly high-quality line-up of exhibitors I’ve ever seen. Wandering around the room, I don’t recall seeing a single table that didn’t house something I’d be interested in buying if I had the scratch. Seriously. And that’s basically unheard of — again, even compared to other small-press shows, where crude photocopies, middle-of-the-road niche-fillers, and mildly depressing attempts to create the next big action-adventure franchise often crowd out your eyespace. Everyone at BCGF, from upstart publishers like Gaze Books to institutions like The Jack Kirby Museum, was there because they actually give a damn about comics as art. It’s an infectious mentality.

Credit must also go to a disparate community of creators and publishers who seemed intent on deluging congoers with the strongest line-up of show debuts I can remember since the Blankets/Kramers Ergot 4/The Frank Book year at MoCCA. Drawn & Quarterly‘s debuts included a new book from Adrian Tomine and the final issue of Anders Nilsen’s decade-plus-in-the-making Big Questions. West Coasters Jordan Crane and Sammy Harkham were on hand to unveil the latest issues of their throwback one-man anthology comic-book series Uptight and Crickets, from Fantagraphics and PictureBox respectively (correction: Crickets #3 is self-published, but it was being sold at the PictureBox table) — two series that many fans weren’t counting on ever seeing again. Portland’s Studygroup12 and Baltimore’s Closed Caption Comics released their most ambitious anthologies to date. Benjamin Marra debuted The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd, which has been setting the mainstream and political media on fire, while Joshua W. Cotter debuted his limited-edition Barbra in the Sky with Neil Diamonds collection from AdHouse after surviving a literal fire himself. And that doesn’t even come close to the full list of recent and brand-new books that BCGF attendees had to choose from. Put it this way: This was the first time I’ve ever literally run out of cash at a comic convention. (Sorry, Ben Catmull!)

In what is probably a related point, I was struck by the number of long-distance attendees making it to the show this time: Crane, Harkham, and Johnny Ryan from Los Angeles; Gaze and Zack Soto from Portland; Koyama Press and Inkstuds‘ Robin McConnell (on behalf of Conundrum Press) from up North; AdHouse Books and Dustin Harbin from down South; even Landfill Editions from London; and that’s to say nothing of official guests of the show like Lynda Barry and Renée French. Meanwhile, AdHouse joined a list of key small-press publishers that already included Sparkplug, D&Q, and PictureBox. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the likes of Fantagraphics and Top Shelf join in with official presences next year, especially given how good word of mouth seems to be, and how the increased Hollywood presence at the San Diego Comic Con — not in an “eww, movies!” sense, but in a “hey, a lot of the tickets are being gobbled up by studio personnel who are perfectly nice people but who don’t have much interest in picking up the latest issue of Uptight” sense — is apparently causing even some close-by West Coasters to reevaluate how they spend their convention money, time, and energy.

Then there’s the logistics of the show itself. The gymnasium at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church turned out to be a much airier, brighter, and more high-ceilinged venue than last year’s church-basement setting, though to be fair, the weather cooperated this year as well, and sogginess was at a minimum. No matter how crowded the show floor got — and it got pretty damn crowded, especially up on that stage where showrunners PictureBox and Desert Island were ensconced — there was ample room in the lobby and basement to hang out, grab a vegetarian hot dog, check out Scott Eder‘s astonishing original art (my jaw dropped on three separate occasions (Kirby, Beto, and Jaime)), flip through their loot, take in the programming, and generally decompress. Most importantly, I think, exhibitor fees were cheap and admission was totally free, leaving no one feeling nickel-and-dimed and creating a zero-risk atmosphere for Williamsburg residents — perhaps the most natural constituency for alternative comics on God’s gray earth — to come on in and check things out. And hey, more money for comics!

The thing that made me happiest about having attended BCGF as I drove home was that I’d just spent three hours in the company of a room full of people — organizers, publishers, artists, readers, curious passers-by — who value comics as comics, and who aren’t afraid to articulate, through their work as creators and consumers of comics, exactly what it is they find so valuable about them. I left feeling better about the medium than I have in a very long time. And that’s a bargain at any cost, let alone for free.

Check out the full schedule in the BCGF press release after the jump.

BROOKLYN COMICS AND GRAPHICS FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival announces a full slate of programming events featuring comics luminaries including Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Anders Nilsen, Brian Chippendale, Mark Alan Stamaty, Renée French, and many more as part of the one day Festival taking place on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (full schedule below). The Festival is especially pleased to announce New Yorker Art Editor, RAW co-editor, and TOON Books Editorial Director Françoise Mouly as a special guest, who will join Kramers Ergot Editor Sammy Harkham for a conversation about the art of editing. Festival programming is curated and principally moderated by Programming Director Bill Kartalopoulos.

In addition to the day’s programming, the Festival is pleased to announce a suite of satellite events taking place over five days, including a very special program of rare comics-related film curated by Mark Newgarden screening on Sunday, December 5 at the Knitting Factory and exhibit openings at Secret Project Robot on Friday, December 3 and the Adam Baumgold Gallery on Tuesday, December 7.

Admission to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and all associated events is free and open to the public.

BROOKLYN COMICS AND GRAPHICS FESTIVAL PROGRAMMING EVENTS

Downstairs at Our Lady of Mount Carmel | 275 North 8th Street, Brooklyn

All panels moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos unless otherwise indicated

1:00 | LYNDA BARRY AND CHARLES BURNS IN CONVERSATION

Lynda Barry drew the syndicated weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek for more than two decades, and has authored books including Cruddy, One Hundred Demons, What It Is, and this year’s Picture This. Charles Burns is the author of acclaimed graphic novel Black Hole and the recent full color book X’ed Out. Join us for this conversation between two extraordinary artists who also share a personal history as former classmates.

2:00 | THE ART OF EDITING

In 1980, Françoise Mouly co-founded, with Art Spiegelman, the ground-breaking comics anthology RAW. She is also the Art Editor of The New Yorker and the Editorial Director of the TOON Books line of children’s comics. Sammy Harkham is the editor of the Kramers Ergot series, which has articulated a new aesthetic for comics – and comics anthologies – with each monumental volume. Harkham and Mouly will discuss the pleasures and problems of editing.

3:00 | TAKING INVENTORY: THE STORY OF THINGS

In their most conventionally narrative form, comics develop a storyboard-like continuity from panel to panel. But how isolated can a panel be? Renée French, James McShane, Jungyeon Roh and Leanne Shapton will discuss the ways in which they construct or suggest narratives by assembling images of objects and moments that retain their individual integrity.

4:00 | IRWIN HASEN: WHEN COMIC BOOKS WERE NEW

Comic books came into their own with the success of Superman’s 1938 debut. By 1940, Irwin Hasen was working in this new field, drawing early comics featuring Green Lantern and Wildcat before co-creating the comic strip Dondi and, recently, the 2009 graphic novel Loverboy. Evan Dorkin and Paul Pope will join moderator Dan Nadel for a special conversation with an artist who has been working in comics for seventy years.

5:00 | ANDERS NILSEN Q+A

Anders Nilsen’s fine line, radical graphic experimentation, and humane philosophical investigations distinguish him as one of the most notable cartoonists of his generation. This winter sees the conclusion of his series Big Questions, an epic epistemological adventure featuring several cartoon birds (some of them dead) and one disoriented fighter pilot. Anders will discuss his art and career in this spotlight conversation.

6:00 | HOW NANCY IS: THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GAG

Ernie Bushmiller’s iconic comic strip Nancy has been described as “a mini-algebra equation masquerading as a comic strip” drawn by “a moron on an acid trip.” Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), Mark Newgarden (How To Read Nancy), and Johnny Ryan (Angry Youth Comix) will discuss the unshakeable appeal of Nancy and the essence of gag humor in their comics.

7:00 | CHAOS AND PATTERN

Artwork that is dense with compositional detail, line, pattern and texture encourages a lingering, wandering eye. How does this kind of drawing work in comics? Brian Chippendale, Jordan Crane, Keith Jones and Mark Alan Stamaty will consider the relationship between densely made drawing and the propulsive concerns of visual narrative.

SATELLITE EVENTS AND EXHIBITS

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3

“Nazi Knife” Exhibit Opening

Location: Secret Project Robot | 210 Kent Ave, Brooklyn

Time: 8:00 – 10:00 pm

A collection of images curated by the French collective Nazi Knife, whose eponymous anthology has become a post-millennial clearing house for the psyche-grotesque and other non-narrative drawing in the transgressive post-punk French tradition. Artists include: C.F., Mat Brinkman, Hendrik Hegray, Jonas Delaborde, Andy Bolus, Leon Sadler, Massimiliano Bomba, Stephane Prigent.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival presents:

Cartoonists and Comics On Camera, 1916-1962

Location: The Knitting Factory | 361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn

Time: 3:00 – 5:00 pm

A once-in-a-lifetime presentation of rare footage featuring 20th century comics greats and some unusual animated adaptations of their work, curated by Mark Newgarden. See Rube Goldberg, Otto Soglow, Chester Gould, Frank King, Harold Grey, Hal Foster (and many more) at the drawing board! See Jefferson “Gags And Gals” Machamer act! See a drawing lesson from Fred C. Cooper! Plus Krazy Kat, Al Capp, Jacky’s Diary and many more surprises! And join us afterwards for drinks at the Knitting Factory’s front-room bar.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7

“Renée French: Drawings” Exhibit Opening

Location: Adam Baumgold Gallery | 60 East 66th Street, NY, NY

Time: 7:00 pm

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents a selection of Renée French’s exquisite graphite-on-paper drawings from 2007 to the present. Included here are sequences from her acclaimed new graphic novel, H Day, as well as a series of metaphorical “portraits” — uncanny visages made up of microscopic details.

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival is an ongoing project by Desert Island, PictureBox and Bill Kartalopoulos. More information about the Festival is available online at www.comicsandgraphicsfest.com.

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]

Color Anthony Hopkins Badd!

Did you see that first still of Thor, Odin, and Loki from Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming Thor movie and think it needed more Kirby Krackle or Walt Simonson Psychedelia? You’re not alone. Dan Nadel, head of the art/comics publisher PictureBox and editor of their house mag Comics Comics, lamented what he perceived to be the costumes’ conservative superhero-movie style, as opposed to Kirby’s “mind-bendingly intricate mythological armor and sets with a nearly psychedelic color palette.” And dammit, he’s gonna do something about it!

Nadel will award the first-ever “Know Prize” to the person who best recolors the image. If you wield Photoshop like Mjolnir, give the Asgardian Royal Family a Rainbow Bridge makeover and send the results to knowprize (at) comicscomicsmag (dot) com (72dpi RGB jpegs only, please) by midnight tomorrow, Wednesday, July 21. The winner will receive a Thor comic hand-selected from the infamous collection of cartoonist Frank Santoro, plus the satisfaction of knowing that he/she be worthy. That deadline’s approaching faster than Ragnarok, so get ye cracking!

Cold Heat print by Jim Rugg

Want to exchange your money for rad things? Jim Rugg, Dash Shaw, Johnny Ryan and Frank Santoro are but a few of the cartoonists who are willing to take you up on that offer right now on behalf of a fundraiser for Comics Comics, the fine magazine-cum-blog of comics and criticism. Edited by Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro and published by Nadel’s PictureBox Inc., the mag’s in the red, and it needs your help.

You can check out their eBay listings for original art from Rugg, Shaw, Santoro, and even Gasoline Alley‘s Frank King, or drop them a line and commission a portrait of yourself being “erotically violated” by Johnny Ryan. (The portrait’s by Johnny Ryan, not the erotic violation. Not necessarily, I mean.)

And if you’ve never checked out Comics Comics before, you can’t go wrong with the $10 three-issue Comics Comics Fun Pack. Where else can you find serious, stimulating writing on topics like Steve Gerber, Paper Rad, Guy Davis, Dick Ayers, Berserk and the Masters of American Comics exhibit, by everyone from top-notch critics like Tim Hodler, Joe McCulloch, and Jeet Heer to cartoonist-critics like Santoro and Shaw to guest stars like Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, Brian Chippendale, and Mark Newgarden?

You can also purchase a hand-selected pack of five books from Santoro’s infamous back-issue bin, featuring some of the best indie and mainstream hidden gems of the ’80s, or snag a pair of deluxe art books from Led Zeppelin/Pink Floyd album artists Hipgnosis and the ’70s-tastic West Coast airbrush art scene for $25 total. I’m telling you, it’s tough to go wrong here. But act quickly, because a lot of these offers end within hours!

Art in Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s see…

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

Curating an exhibition at Portugal Arte 10 in July.

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

They will be joined by:

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

It’s nice working with geniuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

pages from Kamandi #6

Because no nation may remain neutral where the King of Comics is concerned! PictureBox publisher Dan Nadel has posted a mouth-watering assortment of pictures from the Jack Kirby art show he and British critic Paul Gravett have curated for the Fumetto comics festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. The show occupies three (count ‘em!) floors and consists of 150 pages of Kirby art, including the complete Kamandi< #6 and almost the entirety of Fantastic Four #54. You can find out more about the exhibition at Fumetto’s website, and much much more from Gravett’s lengthy essay on Kirby in general and the exhibit in particular. Can some of North America’s convention organizations start thinking along these lines, please oh please?

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (photo courtesy of Sam Walker and Rickey Purdin)

* Organized by Desert Island‘s Gabe Fowler and PictureBox‘s Dan Nadel, the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival made its debut on Saturday, and I’m awfully glad I was able to make it. (I didn’t think I’d be able to, but my wife and mother-in-law gave me a reprieve from going to see New Moon for the third time. Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!) I live on Long Island, so having an artcomix convention on my very own land mass is a cause for celebration. And provided you’re willing to brave a dreadful mile or so on the BQE and the Kosciuszko Bridge, it’s not even that much of a hassle to get there — parking in Brooklyn is a snap.

* Less easy was dealing with the weather, which was awful. Freezing rain and, eventually, snow. I figured this would do a real number on attendance levels …

* … but when I entered the tiny church basement where the show was held, it was so packed I could barely move. Maybe the weather drove people inside? Admittance was free, so it was the perfect place for soggy Brooklynites to pop in and soak up some art risk-free. I talked to a couple of publishers who were glad the weather was so rotten, since a balmy day might have driven the crowd to unsustainable, NYCC/Big Apple-style shut-down levels. Most of the publishers and exhibitors I spoke with seemed ecstatic with their sales, too.

* The crowd itself was … ugh, I hate the H-word, but it was a young, stylishly disheveled, Brooklyn-based crowd, I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture. The smell of vegan hot dogs and wet neckbeard, my own included, was all-enveloping. But this also means that it’s not a celeb-seeking crowd or a collector crowd, it’s a reader crowd, an art-appreciation crowd, and a heavily co-ed crowd to boot. It’s the kind of crowd that I imagine comics veterans can hardly believe finally exists.

* The talent-to-square-footage ratio was as lopsided as you’ll ever see in North America. As I made my first circuit of the room, Ben Katchor and Gary Panter were cheerfully signing books helpfully provided for sale by the con. Jessica Campbell of “Big Two” altcomix publisher Drawn & Quarterly told me of the chaotic scene at D&Q’s table when Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine’s signing ended as Gabrielle Bell and R. Sikoryak’s began. I myself was lured to the show in large part by an ultra-rare con appearance by Fort Thunder alumnus Mat Brinkman, over whom I gushed like a Browncoat on Nathan Fillion’s autograph line at San Diego.

* Yet as packed as it was with talent and attendees alike, it was, as Heidi MacDonald and Rickey Purdin both report, a show with a really personal, intimate feel. It was the kind of show where I could have a quiet chat with Katchor about how depicting space is his primary interest in comics, and where Tunde Adebimpe — lead singer of big-deal alt-rock outfit TV on the Radio — could spend 40 minutes or so contributing to Ben Herman’s Beautiful Dreamer sketchbook. The one-day-only set-up and festive holiday decorations — it was held in a church basement, after all — helped contribute to a sense that this was a fun day out rather than a weekend-long expedition. (This went double for me as I really was there instead of going to the movies and the mall; for that reason I skipped out on the panels and the post-show festivities, both held at nearby venues.)

* Falling as it did at the ass-end of the year, and announced as it was after the small-press show circuit had drawn to a close, this wasn’t really a con for major book-of-the-show-type debuts. It was more of an opportunity to pick up new minicomics by folks you like — PictureBox was offering a Jimbo mini by Gary Panter, for example — or snag books you’d missed elsewhere.

* My own haul was small but felt substantial: Tunde Adebimpe’s glossy, painted fight comic Plague Hero, his table-neighbor Domitille Collardey‘s sinuously drawn one-woman anthology comic What Had Happened Was…, C.F.’s new minicomic/fetish-pinup showcase City-Hunter Magazine #1 courtesy of PictureBox, Lane Milburn & Noel Freibert’s flipbook My Best Pet/Feeble-Minded Funnies from Closed Caption Comics and Drawn & Quarterly’s last copy of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions #13.

* The emphasis was at least as much on the “graphics” end of the equation as it was on “comics,” so provided you had the scratch and the rainproofing abilities required, you really could have cleaned up on gorgeous silkscreened prints, handcrafted fold-out art books, and a killer selection of prints from Desert Island, including a gorgeous $30 poster for the show itself. With an eye on my holiday budget I couldn’t dip into this arena very much, but I left with many a business card and a lust in my heart for Panyiotis Terzis’s Jack Kirby-meets-House of Style photocollage and L. Nichols’s He-Man and She-Ra block prints.

* Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a big West Coast contingent, so you had the strange-for-an-indie-show spectacle of D&Q without Fantagraphics, and PictureBox and Bodega without Buenaventura. AdHouse didn’t trip up from the Dirty South and bicoastal Top Shelf were missing as well, but Secret Acres and Sparkplug represented, as did collectives like Closed Caption Comics, Partyka, and the House of Twelve. Indeed, as a curated show rather than a first-come-first-serve free-for-all, the quality level was uniformly high. And (here comes the Con Wars angle) the enthusiasm I saw from publishers, exhibitors, and attendees alike could easily be seen as a shot across the bow of MoCCA following their disorganized and divisive showing this summer. To be sure, the approach of BCGF is different even from MoCCA’s best years, and I assume publishers will have their preferences. But if there’s any city in America with room enough for two major alternative-comics conventions, it’s gotta be New York. I’ll certainly be back to both.

Sean's BCGF haul

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.

July 17

Multiple cities | Watchmen returns to theaters with additional footage for a limited run in Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas and Minneapolis. Details can be found here.

July 18

Baltimore | Geppi’s Entertainment Museum hosts Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology editor Keith Chow, art director Jerry Ma, artist Alex Tarampi and writer Larry Hama from noon to 4p.m. for a presentation, discussion and signing.

Portland | Cosmic Monkey Comics hosts a 24-hour zine challenge beginning at 10 a.m. and ending, naturally, at 10 a.m. the next day.

Jeffrey Brown's Hulk

Puyallup, Wash. | Comic Evolution will host a March of Dimes benefit that includes a silent auction and several artists doing sketches for donations, including Paul Gulacy, Clayton Crain and many more.

San Francisco | Isotope Comics hosts a signing and party for Geoff Johns, writer of Blackest Night, Green Lantern and various other titles. They’ll have free buttons and a selection of Lantern Corps. cocktails. The signing begins at 4 p.m. and the 21+ party begins at 7 p.m.

July 19

San Francisco | Comix Experience hosts Neil Gaiman for a signing, Q&A and reading. This is a ticketed event.

July 21

New York | The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art hosts a Scarlett Takes Manhattan book release event with Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, starting at 7 p.m.

July 22

New York | Celebrating the 600th issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Dan Slott signs at Jim Hanley’s Universe, 4 West 33rd St. starting at 6 p.m.

San Francisco | The Comic Outpost hosts a Spider-Man #600 exhibit where they will display all 600 issues of the title. They’ll also host a raffle that benefits the Hero Initiative.

July 23

Brooklyn, N.Y. | Paul Karasik and Dan Nadel will be at Desert Island from 7 to 9 p.m.for the book launch of You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!

San Diego | The Chuck Jones Gallery at 232 Fifth Avenue will kick off a Jim Lee art exhibit with a visit from Lee from 7 to 9 p.m. RSVP required.

July 22-26

San Diego | The sold out 2009 Comic-Con International returns to the San Diego Convention Center. Keep an eye out on Robot 6 and CBR for coverage of the con.

More in July

July 28 | Stuart Moore at the Comic Book Club in New York

More in August

Aug. 1 | WASFEn Con 3 in Wausau, Wisconsin

Aug. 8 | Jeff Smith in Toronto

***

If you’d like to submit an event for inclusion, please email them directly to JK Parkin. Please include the venue, city and state, start time, event details and any related websites where we can send folks for more information. Virtual events, like online creator chats, are also welcome. The next ComicsLive will likely be delayed a few days due to the San Diego Comic Con, but it will run … so please send in your submission!

The 2009 MoCCA Festival poster, illustrated by Molly Crabapple

While I did not attend Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Art Festival 2009, held back on June 6-7, I was struck at the amount of constructive feedback that came out of people’s reports after the festival. It goes without saying that almost everyone thought the new venue (the 69th Regiment Armory) needed air conditioning and many folks were understandably dismayed with the logistical challenges and delays that occurred at the festival’s start. While reading a great deal of reactions from attendees and exhibitors, I was curious to get a lessons learned perspective from the organizers. Fortunately, Karl Erickson, MoCCA Director, was willing to take my email questions. In his answers, Erickson seemingly made it clear he was open to constructive feedback. While my questions aimed to cover a great deal of various concerns, I welcome folks to chime in with additional thoughts in the comments section. My thanks to Erickson for his time.

Tim O’Shea: The first question has to be–did you explore the possibility of air conditioning this year? Was it deemed just too cost prohibitive? If you’re staying at the Armory, do you intend to have air conditioning in 2010?

Karl Erickson: We did explore air conditioning for the Armory, but, yes, it was just too expensive. As far as staying at the Armory we are looking at dates earlier in the spring to help alleviate the heat.

O’Shea: Can you speak to what happened to cause the hour-long delay on Saturday and logistical challenges (like delayed book deliveries, only one trashcan on the show floor [by some reports], names missing from the guide book)–and are you establishing measures to try to minimize these situations next year?

Erickson: The delay was due to a few different factors, the major being a severe miscommunication with the trucking company that was to deliver not only many of our exhibitor’s books, but all of our supplies for the festival, not least being our cash registers and other check-in essentials. Of the problems that we did have, having one trashcan for the entire show floor was not one of them. We definitely had many trashcans.

We are certainly taking steps to contain and minimize the mistakes of this year, the most important of which is getting a much earlier jump in the planning and execution of the Festival. This includes a lengthy review of the 2009 Festival with practical solutions suggested. These include moving the Festival earlier in the spring (as this is not the first year we have had heat problems, AC or no), starting on every aspect of the Festival earlier, and creating a new MoCCA website that will deliver information much more effectively to exhibitors and attendees.

O’Shea: Every show has snags, I know, but I was curious if there were scenarios that you know now how to avoid going forward–what are some of the lessons learned?

Erickson: Certainly, and I think I went over a lot of them above. Of course, one of the main lessons is to be in touch with our exhibitors earlier and more regularly.

O’Shea: Am I correct in thinking the dates have not been announced for next year? With that in mind (and please correct me if I’m wrong) how realistic is it to ask exhibitors to make a commitment and pay a $50 nonrefundable deposit for table reservations without knowing MoCCA’s 2010 dates?

Erickson: We are still researching dates for 2010. The Armory isn’t able to commit dates until later in July, the beginning of New York State’s fiscal year, so that is part of the delay in announcing dates. Also, as mentioned, we are also researching dates earlier in the spring.

Nearly 50% of our 2009 exhibitors renewed their tables for the 2010 Festival, which is pretty close to par. As far as the $50 non-refundable deposit: if an exhibitor reserved their table at the 2009 Festival and aren’t able to attend once we announce the date, we are happy to completely refund their money within 30 days of the date announcement.

O’Shea: How much of a priority is it to improve promotions/communications for the MoCCA festival overall and gain a stronger web presence?

Erickson: We feel that promotions for the Festival in 2009 were fairly strong: we had active presences on the Onion, Village Voice, and Time Out NY, as well as strong chatter over blogs and other internet sites. With over 4,000 attendees (our most yet!), we are pleased with the number of people coming to the Festival, though we always want more. As mentioned above, we plan on being more in touch with our exhibitors and other stakeholders earlier in the planning stages, especially through our soon to be launched new website.

We also sent out a steady stream of press releases leading up to the festival, and we look forward to partnering with others to strengthen our press relations. Except for a few key personal, this years festival was put on by a new team at MoCCA, starting nearly from scratch, including having to rebuild our press lists.

And yes, we are in the process of re-designing our website into a much more user-friendly experience, which we expect to have up soon.

O’Shea: While there have been a great deal of complaints about the festival and concerns about the MoCCA Art Festival going forward, it was almost always in the context of “there’s so much I love about MoCCA, but …”. Did you take solace that while people were making negative comments it was frequently in the context of accompanying praise?

Erickson: Yes, we do take to heart all of the positive comments people have made both publicly and privately, as well as the criticisms. We also realize that people are very vocal about their negative reactions because they care very much for the MoCCA Festival. It should also be said that the quality and variety of comics, books, and other great items on view this year were just great.

O’Shea: Enough about the festival’s challenges this year–what were some of the highlights/successes of MoCCA 2009?

Erickson: Well, of course, the brightest highlights are all of the fantastic comics, cartoons and graphic novels! It would take up to much space to list individual favorites and delights! For me, being able to give the Klein Award to Jerry Robinson was pretty special, having Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth on stage was great, comics from Derek Van Gieson, The Moth and the Flame by Joshua Ray Stevens, Sugar Booger, Sara Edward-Corbett, Becky Cloonan, the entire Scandanavian contingent, Hard Comics from Romania, and just everything else was a highlight. Another major positive factor is the dedicated volunteer core that puts the Festival together. The panels were incredible, and very well attended. And the Festival was a successful fundraiser for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.

O’Shea: In terms of exhibitors how many did you have in 2009, compared to years past? And how much growth did the festival experience in terms of international exhibitors?

Erickson: We had over 250 exhibitor tables, with more than 750 individual artists, publishers and creators exhibiting. We had 43 artists and creators from Scandanavia, and Ireland, England, Romania, and Japan were all represented. We keep getting more and more from around the world. It is great and a vital part of our Festival to have the international comics community represented.

O’Shea: What were the biggest benefits gained by moving to the Armory (as compared to years past at the Puck Building)?

Erickson: The biggest benefit to moving to the Armory is having all of the exhibitors in one area, no one was hidden away are stashed around a corner. Plus, we were able to have all of our programming on site, which greatly benefit the excellent talks and lectures MoCCA hosted. We understand how attractive the character of Puck Building is to people, however, it is just not available to us, given their rising fees and space redesign. Plus the Armory has a significant bit of history itself, for those into modern art.

O’Shea: What’s on the horizon at the museum this year? I know the Conversation with David Mazzucchelli and Dan Nadel is set for July 16, but are there other events you are busy arranging for in 2009?

Erickson: Immediately upcoming we have the Mazzucchelli/Nadel conversation, we have Molly Crabapple talking about her new book on July 21st. By the time this sees print, we have had an evening with TYPHON and Carousel with Danny Hellman and R. Sikoryak. Upcoming we have shows planned with Archie Comics, romance and love in comics and cartoons, and a whole host of youth workshops. We have on view “Meanwhile… at 594 Broadway: The Art of MoCCA’s Volunteers” as well as the Mazzucchelli show.

O’Shea: Any final thoughts you want to share?

Erickson:  MoCCA would like all of our exhibitors, attendees and press to know that we value them very highly and we are working diligently on making the 2010 Festival the best yet.

We would also like to thank all of the volunteers that make MoCCA and the Festival possible. Neither would exist without their dedication and efforts.