Comic Book Resources

SCAD Atlanta Comics Arts Forum Report

Murphy and Bernier

Back on October 23-25, the Sequential Art Department at the Atlanta campus of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD Atlanta) hosted a comics art forum with Sean Murphy (2003 SCAD Savannah graduate and artist on the upcoming Grant Morrison-written Joe the Barbarian for Vertigo) and Matthew Bernier (School of Visual Arts in Manhattan graduate and currently at work on a book for First Second). Since I'm a Georgia-based member of the Robot 6 crew, Chris Schweizer, a SCAD Atlanta professor and creator of Crogan's Vengeance, invited me to the forum.

According to Shawn Crystal, SCAD Professor (as well as one of the artists on last month's Deadpool 900 [Marvel]), SCAD's Comics Art Forum tradition started in Savannah years ago. Crystal selects the guests that are invited to the forum. "Every year, when I pick guests, I look to pick progressive/passionate artists. Artists who are doing new and exciting things, helping to move the medium forward," he said. "Our Atlanta Faculty throw names around until we settle on the best choice for that year."

Schweizer echoed Crystal's thinking. "When we arrange these events, we try hard to pick guests whose work (and approaches to their work) varies from ours, because it opens our eyes to new ideas, and it does the same for our students," he said.

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

Footnotes in Gaza

• Tom Spurgeon once again beats everyone to the punch with a review of Joe Sacco's new book, Footnotes in Gaza: The first good news to report ... is that the cartoonist is in top form throughout." He also has good things to say about Prison Pit.

• Christopher Allen offers 60 ways of looking at Watchmen.

• Critics critique critics -- Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: "This is a thought-provoking book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in comics-as-art."

• David Welsh gets schooled in college manga.

• Rob Clough calls MK Reed's new book, Cross Country "the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics."

• Perhaps if I link to Sean Collins' review of Refresh, Refresh, he'll forgive me for accidentally (I swear) stealing the title of his review feature.

• Nina Stone enjoyed the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love: "All the pieces of the story just started to fit together perfectly."

• Grant Goggans declares The Art of Osamu Tezuka "very highly recommended."

• Finally, Kristy Valenti looks at a 1999 graphic novel drawn by Mia Wolff and written by acclaimed sci-fi author Samuel Delany.

What Are You Reading?

Cat Burglar Black

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

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

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Robot reviews: Another manga round-up

Ooku Vol. 1

Ooku: The Inner Chambers
by Fumi Yoshinaga
Viz, $12.99.

As story hooks go, Ooku's got a great one: A strange plague during the Edo period of Japan kills off more than three-quarters of the country's male population. As a result, the culture and gender relations end up going all topsy-turvy, and succeeding generations find the women ruling the roost and men being protected and prized for their ability to produce offspring. This is especially in the Shogun's harem, or Inner Chambers, where the story takes place.

It helps that the story is by Fumi Yoshinaga, who, in books like Antique Bakery and Gerald and Jacques, has proven herself to be more interested in gender relations and identity issues than mere yaoi squickiness (although she certainly likes that too. Certainly the fact that Ooku won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in its home country has led to a certain amount of anticipation among some manga fans.

Unfortunately, while Yoshinaga remains an excellent and expressive artist, the series stumbles out of the gate. One of the main problems is the translator's decision (no doubt motivated by an attempt to approximate a certain Japanese dialect) to have everyone speak in a formal, Renaissance Faire-like manner, with lots of "thees" and "thous" and "didsts." It has the unintended effect of coming off as forced, and distancing the reader from the characters and the story.

Beyond that though, Yoshinaga doesn't really seem to do much with her idea, at least so far. She seems more interested in conveying the various back room politics and romances that take place in the inner chambers than giving thought as to what such a huge change in the population would do to a culture. Would the fashion still be identical to what it was in the real world, with men shaving their heads and women wearing long gowns? Wouldn't that change somewhat drastically? Would a female shogun really keep a male harem and if so, would it be so identical in structure to what the real Edo shoguns had? This may sound like nit-picking, but makes the story seem more than a bit facile, as though she just swapped everyone's sex and that alone would be interesting enough. It may well be that I'm not giving Yoshinaga enough credit and that she's actually considered these issues and will explore them in more depth in future volumes. But so far, I'm not encouraged.

Reviews of Red Snow, Pelu and more after the jump ...

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Thin wallet update: First Second to publish Yang's 'Baby'

Prime Baby

Gene Yang revealed on his blog earlier this week that First Second, which has thus far published Yang's American Born Chinese and The Eternal Smile (which he did with Derek Kirk Kim), will collect and release Prime Baby, a story originally serialized in the New York Times Sunday magazine section. The book is now available for pre-order on Amazon as well and will apparently come out in April of next year.

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

• David Welsh asks the people who know what sort of scary manga they'd recommend for Halloween reading. As expected, his panel comes up with a lot of good picks.

• Meanwhile, Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu reviews Robert Crumb's adaptation of Genesis for the New York Times:

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

Over at Comics Comics, Dan Nadel calls BS on Hajdu's review: "One wonders why an author would persist in writing about a subject he clearly disdains and isn't interested in actually learning about, but I guess that's between Hajdu and his own idea of the sacred."

Go read the whole takedown; it's fun.

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

The Losers

• In case you missed it earlier this week: Vertigo will reprint two books that tie into two of their upcoming media properties. First up, they're collecting the first 12 issues of The Losers into one large paperback that'll come out in January, three months before the movie adaptation arrives in theaters. They're also collecting the Peter Milligan/Edvin Biukovic Human Target miniseries, along with the Milligan/Javier Pulido Human Target: The Final Cut original graphic novel into one volume, just in time for the premiere of the Human Target show on Fox in January.

• SLG Publishing is collecting a couple of Gene Yang's previous books, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks and Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order, into a single volume called Animal Crackers. It'll include a new 12-page story by Yang, which he previews here.

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Straight for the art | Brain Camp cover

Brain Camp

Zombies Calling creator Faith Erin Hicks shows us the cover to her next project, Brain Camp. The book comes out from First Second next year.

Faith Erin Hicks makes Friends with Boys

Friends With Boys

Faith Erin Hicks, creator of two graphic novels from SLG, Zombies Calling and The War at Ellsmere, and the artist on an upcoming book from First Second called Brain Camp, announced on her blog this week that she's writing and drawing on a new book called Friends with Boys:

It's the first time I've used my own life as a jumping off point for a comic, although I'd like to stress the book is not autobiographical, nor is the main character me. It's about a girl named Maggie, who has three brothers (as I do), who was home-schooled (as I was), and is now entering her first year of public high school (as I did). She also is stalked by a ghost (that has yet to happen to me). She gets mixed up in High School Drama, makes friends with the wrong people, and because the story is written by me, it will contain two things: 1) Zombies. And 2) Someone will, eventually, get punched in the face.

She's hoping the book will be out in 2011. Brain Camp comes out next year.

What Are You Reading?

Brave and the Bold #27

Sunday's here and that means it's time once more for What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is the incredibly talented cartoonist Rick Geary. Geary has two books out this fall, his latest entry in his ongoing XXth Century Murder series, Famous Players, and a biography of Leon Trotsky that should be coming out from Hill and Wang any day now.

Look for an interview with Mr. Geary appearing on this blog in the coming weeks. For now though, let's just see what he's currently reading ...

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What Are You Reading?

The Photographer

We have a very special edition of What Are You Reading this week, as our guests are none other than the legendary Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Spiegelman, you know, no doubt, as the author of such acclaimed books as Maus, Breakdowns and In the Shadow of No Towers, while his wife Mouly was co-creator and editor of Raw Magazine, art editor at the New Yorker and is spearheading the new Toon Books line of children's comics.

To see what's currently in their reading stack, just click on the link below ...

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What Are You Reading?

Ninja

Welcome to What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is Sean T. Collins, who should be no stranger to most of you as he's been guestblogging with us all week while JK Parkin was on vacation.

To find out what Sean and the rest of us have been reading this week, just click on the link below ...

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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

Borders Ink

Retailing | Borders Group reported an 18-percent drop in revenue for the second quarter amid an overhaul that finds the chain moving away from the sinking music and DVD categories and embracing the growing young-adult, graphic-novel and fantasy markets. [Wall Street Journal]

Retailing | Agents with the Kansas Department of Revenue and Alcohol Beverage Control last week closed Agents Comics & Games in Wichita and seized the assets of Doc Timm LLC, reportedly due to nearly $60,000 in unpaid retail sales taxes. Personal assets of owner Tim Warren also were seized because of unpaid income taxes. The assets will be sold at auction. [Wichita Business Journal, via Journalista]

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SDCC '09 | Buenaventura Press and First Second

Injury #3

Buenaventura Press will be debuting a grand total of four new comics at the show this weekend, including Aviatrix #1 by Eric Haven, Boy's Club #3 by Matt Furie, I Want You by Lisa Hanawalt and Injury #3 by Ted May and co.

Haven, Furie and Hanawalt will all be attending the show and signing copies at the Buenaventura booth (#1732).

In addition, copies of by Tom Gauld andThe Gigantic Robot The Complete Jack Survives by Jack Moriarty will also be available for purchase. Both books were available at the last MoCCA show, but they won't be available in comic book stores until August, so if you can't wait, this is your chance.

The company will also have a selection of minicomics and imported books from Sweden, Japan, Italy, France and the UK on hand.

Oh, and in case you were thinking of holding off on buying a copy of Kramer's Ergot 7 until after the show, publisher Alvin Buenaventura has some news:

This will be the last major signing event for Kramers Ergot 7 as many of the contributors including the editor Sammy Harkham will be with us. We're down to our last few hundred copies so if you've been holding out this is one of your last chances to get a copy and signed! We will not be reprinting this book.

Other artists who will be signing at the booth include Johnny Ryan, Xaime Hernandez, Seth, Tim Hensley and Leif Goldberg.

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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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