Comic Book Resources

What Are You Reading?

Preventative Maintenance

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

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

Click on the link below to continue reading.

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Straight for the art | The Groovy Age of Horror's epic Flickr gallery

Curt Purcell's paperback gallery

Does your love of trash put Oscar the Grouch to shame? Then feast your eyes, glut your soul on the (extravagantly NSFW) Flickr account of Curt Purcell, the blogger behind equally unworksafe horror-blogosphere cornerstone The Groovy Age of Horror. Curt's been sharing his extensive collection of pulp paperbacks and X-rated Italian horror comics for years now, and he's recently scanned in hundreds of their covers, helpfully divided into Fumetti, Horror Paperbacks, and the aptly named Sleaze Paperbacks for your browsing pleasure. For fans of the seedy side of Eurocomics or the lurid illustration styles of yesteryear, it's tough to top.

Also worth checking out: Curt's series of posts on Blackest Night (with an extensive detour into the classic Levitz/Giffen Legion storyline The Great Darkness Saga). A lapsed comics reader, Curt has been drawn back in by this year's big DC event's horror overtones, and his outsider/insider perspective regarding the evolution of "event comics" is quite fresh and eye-opening.

Thin wallets, fat bookshelves: A publishing news round-up

Hate Annual

• Fantagraphics reveals that Peter Bagge has a new Hate Annual lined up to come out next year and shares the cover image. I thought Bagge had completely given up on these, so this is very good news indeed. More Buddy Bradley! Whoo!

• While we're talking about Fanta, it's worth noting that Joseph Lambert of Turtle, Keep It Steady fame will be joining the Mome family. In related news, Derek van Gleason posts some teaser images of his ongoing story in that anthology.

• Alan David Doane has published an e-book of his interviews with various cartoonists and comics industry folk, including Charles Burns, Chester Brown, Seth, Dave Sim, Howard Chaykin, Mark Millar and more. You can download a copy of the book here.

• Cinebook, which translates and publishes a number of French comics for the U.S., such as Lucky Luke, has acquired the rights to the XIII series and will start releasing volumes in May of next year, with a book coming out every two months.

• Jeffrey Brown is working on a sequel to his Cat Getting Out of a Bag book. This one will be tentatively called Cat Walks.The first book was also apparently popular enough to warrant a series of tie-in postcards and journals.

• Secret Asian Man cartoonist Tak Toyoshima is moving his strip from a daily to a weekly strip, which was its original incarnation.

• Via Spurgeon: Paul E. Fitzgerald has a book out exploring Will Eisner's time on PS Magazine.

Straight for the art | Thierry Martin's Spirit

Thierry Martin's Spirit

Check out this great cover Thierry Martin did for a French Spirit magazine that's coming out in 2010. (via the Ephemerist. Yes, again)

Collect This Now! | Pop. 666 by Francesca Ghermandi & Massimo Semerano

Occasionally an editor hangs on to samples that artists send him, afraid they may never see this material again. Somewhere in my files, I have little gems sent to me by sometimes famous artists, sometimes soon-to-be-famous artists, and somewhere, I may still have some that never became either, young hopefuls that never carried through or people who I failed to find a place for.

Francesca Ghermandi is one of the people whose packages I cherished when they used to come to me. I think she wrote me twice, and as a result, I have copies of Helter Skelter and Hiawata Pete, both in Italian, both absolutely brimming with amazing cartooning. These would be great candidates for that Robot 6 column where they demand books get translated, and boy, I'd sure love to read them someday. For now, I just look at the pictures.

In with these is a plastic comb notebook with a clear cover and photocopied pages of the first several chapters of Pop. 666, then called Suburbia. It only had one chapter in English, the one published by David Mazzuchelli in Rubber Blanket, the rest was not translated. Like the hardbound cartoon books Francesca had sent me, however, the strange and grotesquely beautiful world she drew sucked me in. I really wanted to publish this stuff in Dark Horse Presents. I don't know why it didn't come to pass, maybe I couldn't get anyone else to see what I saw. There is no date on the letter, Francesca could have sent the same packet to Fantagraphics right about then. The timing makes sense. They started serializing the story off and on in their anthology Zero Zero beginning with the 19th issue in the summer of 1997. They eventually printed all 90 pages, but unlike some of the other strips from the magazine, Pop. 666 has never gotten its own collected edition.

I'm not sure who came up with the title Pop. 666, but it calls to mind the title of Jim Thompson's western novel Pop. 1280. Thompson is one of the best of the hardboiled school, having written classic genre pieces like After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, inspiring many a modern crime writer and filmmaker. Thompson's book is about a sheriff at odds with his town, the kind of squalid community where all life is a give-and-take proposition. These people are damned by their own evil deeds, they are the future populace of hell. Pop. 666.

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Straight for the art: T.O.T.T.

Ott cartoon

The deliciously macabre German cartoonist Thomas Ott has a new Web site up with lotsa art and other cool stuff.  (via Flog)

Translate this now! La Revolte d'Hop-Frog

La Revolte d'Hop-Frog

Every so often I like to use this column to focus not just on the various American comics that have languished in uncollected obscurity for far too long, but to also examine great works found in other comics-loving countries like France and Japan that for reasons both frustrating and inscrutable have yet to arrive on our shores.

So this week I'm looking across the Atlantic to a 1997 graphic novel written by David B and drawn by Chris Blain, both French. Both names should at least ring a bell with the discerning indie reader, David B. having won well-deserved plaudits for his extraordinarily haunting memoir Epileptic, while Blain found his name on a number of top ten lists last year with First Second's release of his revisionist Western Gus and His Gang.

La Revolte d'Hop-Frog is a Western as well, though it bears little resemblance to Gus, however, or to any Western I've ever seen or read. It's more like The X-Files set in 19th Century Texas. Oh, it has plenty of gunfights for sure. And cowboys. And tons of Indians. The central plot, however, revolves around a number of talking teapots, guns, lamps,stoves and other inanimate objects gaining sentience and declaring all-out war on their previous owners.

Panel from 'Hop-Frog'

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What Are You Reading?

Asterios Polyp

Welcome to What Are You Reading, where we don't let a little thing like national holidays and fireworks prevent us from talking about our current reading exploits. Our guest this week is cartoonist (you can see his work in the new anthology Syncopated) and editor Paul Karasik, whose latest book is the highly accclaimed You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! the second collection of comics by the late Golden Age artist Fletcher Hanks.

To discover what Paul and the rest of us are reading, simply click on the link below ...

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Straight for the art | Olivier Schrauwen's art blog

Olivier Schrauwen illustration

The My Boy author and Mome contributor Olivier Schrauwen has some pretty nifty illustrations up on his blog.

What are you reading?

The Hunter

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our special guest for this week is Chris Butcher, blogger and manager of The Beguiling in Toronto, generally acknowledged as one of the finest comics shops in North America.

Chris is heading off to Japan and taking quite a lot of books with him. What to know what he's packing? Of course you do. Click on the link to find out ...

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Boody Rogers

• Let's begin by directing your attention to the comments section of this post on the Comics Comics blog regarding my recent interview with Dan Nadel. It devolves into a conversation over Nadel's earlier comments about Fantagraphics' recent Boody Rogers book, edited by Craig Yoe. Nadel disliked the book for a number of reasons, which Tom Spurgeon had felt was inappropriate for him to discuss in public, since Nadel had written and edited a book that featured Rogers' art, Art Out of Time, and thus, was suffered from a conflict of interest of sorts.

Anyway, Nadel, Rob Clough, Tim Hodler, Jeet Heer, Spurgeon and even Gary Groth (!) hash the whole matter out here, though little is resolved by the end. I haven't read the Rogers collection yet, so it's hard for me to gauge the accuracy of Nadel's comments. Spurgeon makes some good points, but I'm not 100 percent convinced they are that germane to Nadel's original post. Still, it's an interesting discussion nevertheless.

• Speaking of that Boody Rogers book, John Mitchell didn't care much for the book either, though for different reasons, labeling it a "patience tester."

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

G.I. Joe

* Tucker Stone ruminates on the wonder that is G.I. Joe: "This is pretty solid comics--it's aggressive, it's far more cynical and hard boiled than I'd imagine a comic based off a toy empire to be, and as long as I'm not having to listen to him screech, Cobra Commander is a great heavy."

* If that's not enough Tucker Stone for you today, there's also the second episode of this.

* Also over at Comixology, Valerie D'Ozario debuts her new column, Comics-Op, which promises to talk about comic-book related news from a "semi-insider" perspective.

* Staying on the Comixology vibe, Kristy Valenti scrutinizes two anthologies about, ahem, doin' it.

* After staying silent for awhile, the Savage Critics site roars back to life, as Jog looks at the Eurocomic classic Perramus, while Graeme McMillan plays catch up on a few ongoing titles.

* Sean T. Collins reviews the latest issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle: "I think what Kupperman's doing--with his long, digressive "stories," with his riffs on old-fashioned comic-book covers, and so on--is using the stuff of comics itself as a locus of the comedy."

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Your French film/comics news for the day

One of Sfar's concept sketches

Cartoonist Joann Sfar (The Rabbi's Cat, The Little Vampire) is apparently directing a film about the famed French singer Serge Gainsbourg, titled Je t'Aime Moi Non Plus:

The film ... will be more of a fantasy than a biopic and will feature animated creatures, crafted by the "Pan's Labyrinth" designers, which will symbolize the spirit and imagination of Gainsbourg.

The World of Kane has more details and some concept sketches. The movie will be released in January of next year. Sadly, one of the stars of the upcoming film, Lucy Gordon, who played Gainsbourg's lover Jane Birkin in the film, was recently found dead of an apparent suicide.

Straight for the art | Strange Turkish comic

Pavement Myth

Over on his LiveJournal, Johnny Ryan shares some pages from Pavement Myth, a comic about ... well, I'll let Ryan describe it:

A friend of mine sent me these comics from Turkey. It's a six volume comic autobiography of this Turkish actor Masist Gul, aka The Pavement Wolf (1947-2003). The first volume is about how a witch finds him in a toilet when he is a baby, then for the next several years proceeds to horribly beat, torture and starve him. The 2nd volume deals with his brutal revenge.

What Are You Reading?

Thunderbolts

Welcome to What Are You Reading! Our special guest this week is Kirk Warren, the brains behind the great blog known as The Weekly Crisis and all-around nice guy.

Remember, we want to know what you've been reading this week as well, so feel free to let us know what comics, strips, graphic novels and other assorted sequential art you've been perusing in the comments section.

To find out what Kirk and the rest of the Robot 6 crew are currently reading, meanwhile, click on the link below:

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