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.

Bake Sale (First Second)

I really enjoyed the waves of cognitive dissonance I got from seeing Bake Sale’s star Cupcake, a cupcake, making cupcakes, and other such weirdness as an animated chicken leg walking its dog in the park, a bag of sugar excitedly ordering brownies and, perhaps most disturbingly, seeing Cupcake chopping up a carrot for his carrot cake…only to visit a restaurant a few pages later and placing an order with a carrot, named Carrot! (Also, there’s a panel where Cupcake learns his place in the band has been filled by a potato, and responds, “A potato?! Everyone knows potatoes have no rhythm!” Why is Cupcake so racist against potatoes? And I’m pretty sure he’s eating mashed potatoes with his meatloaf sandwich in that scene…)

Another difference between Bake Sale and Varon’s previous works? I was able to read it without bawling my eyes out (as I did with Robot Dreams) or even getting a little choked up (as with Chicken and Cat). Which isn’t to imply that her latest is lacking in emotional content—Varon’s cute, simple cartoon characters are remarkably communicative of complicated feelings, and her visual storytelling is masterful. There remains an almost elegiac quality to it.

The story involves baker, drummer and seemingly young New Yorker Cupcake learning a hard, gentle and common lesson about life, facing frustrations, internalizing disappointment and coping with his problems.

Despite the cute artwork and the child-like elements in the world Varon’s created, it’s a remarkably mature work. She’s increasingly proving to be a master at creating characters: From their design, to their deceptively deep emotional lives, to personalities that make them a pleasure just to hang out with.

Readers who enjoy baking should also appreciate the fact that Varon packs the book with many of the recipes Cupcake uses at his shop.

Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn and Quarterly) Man, this is the weirdest issue of Classics Illustrated ever…

If you like comics, chances are you’re already thoroughly familiar with the work of Kate Beaton, and have therefore already read all of the comic strips featuring historical and literary figures in her brilliantly cartooned gag strips.

And if you have already read them, then you’re probably going to want to read them again, which this 166-page hardcover collection reprinting the bulk of Beaton’s Hark! archives, with occasional annotations and commentary culled from her online discussion of some strips.

Of course, if these strips are all available for free online, why would you want to plunk down $20 for a hard copy? Well, it’s better for eyes, is free from the risk of laptop lap-burn and is easier to read in the bathtub (Watch out for paper cuts, though!)

The great benefit of this book’s existence, however, is that it gives all of the comics-concerned media in the world a chance to sing Beaton’s well-deserved praises.

Kinky & Cosy (NBM) Okay, this one actually came out a while back, but somehow ended up in my September pile, so, um, better late than never…?

It’s a hardcover collection of a typical, funnies page style gag strip about two irascible twin sisters in identical dresses—distinguishable by the fact that only one of them wears glasses. What separates it from what you might find in your own local newspaper’s funny pages is that it’s made by someone with only one name (“Nix”), the artwork is super-sharp in a way that shames the phoned-in nature of nine-tenths of what you’ll finding a newspaper in 2011 and the amount of jokes involving dildos.

Nix’s little rascals are bad kids in the Bart Simpson/Calvin/Shinchan mode, but the humor is more fearless, and they have a sort of Looney Tunes-like immortality which allows for something hterrible to happen for the sake of a joke (say, whole buildings downtown being destroyed), only for the status quo to be reset at the beginning of the next.

The book is a very nice package, with a shiny copper colored cover, carefully cut holes on the cover, and googly eyes on the first page, which allows the reader to rip off the girls faces to reveal their eyeball-filled skulls by simply opening the cover.

1-800-MICE (Picture Box) Like Twin Peaks, Matt Thurber’s epic is set in a small town with a peculiar character, one that’s populated almost exclusively with peculiar characters, and which is teeming with darkness underneath the surface, hurtling towards a sort of apocalyptic doom.

Actually, doom is hurtling towards the town, in the form of The Great Partaker, a Nosferatu-looking villainous banjo player who was banished to space, but is now returning in the form of a comet.

That town is Voclano Park, home to humans, evolved animals who resemble anthropomorphic cartoon animals, living trees and even weirder creatures with even weirder names, all of whom live in a delicate, easily upset balance, which several groups seem determined to upset, not understanding how easily it could all come crashing down.

One can start to feel a little like a crazy person trying to summarize the plot, which involves cat-like hermaphrodite Peace Punk bumming around looking for Valhalla, the three warring members of The Banjo Shogunate who seek to defeat one another in order to gain immortality, an arranged marriage between a half-tree woman and human policeman, a double-undercover police detective who might have had a career in adult films, a gang of nihilistic drug-dealers and an evil dentist who advocates suicide for all health problems.

Yes, one can feel like a crazy person talking about 1-800-MICE, so imagine reading it. And once you start, it’s quite difficult to stop yourself from reading it, as Thurber’s huge cast and their twisty, intertwining plots are so full of silliness and suspense that it’s  perfectly propulsive.

Thurber’s art can at times look sketchbook rough and coloring-book simple, but it’s big, bold, expressive and perfectly suited to delivering the intricate plotting in a straightforward manner.

The title, by the way, comes from a service that exists in Thurber’s world. Despite the ubiquity of cell phones and the existence of “Mindbook,” a sort of mental Facebook, there are still some people who are hard to reach. 1-800-MICE allows you to send a message to anyone anywhere in the world, via a mouse. (By the way, did you guys see Chris Mautner’s interview with Thurber about the book a few days ago? If not, this link will take you back in time to see it.)

Stargazing Dog (NBM) I’ve gotta ask, Japan—what’s with you guys and the heardbreaking stories of the loyalty of dogs? Takashi Murakami’s Stargazing Dog might not destroy you the way certain tellings of the story of faithful dog Hachiko can, but it’s pretty strong sad stuff nonetheless.

NBM’s translation and collection includes two related stories. In the first, the dog Happie narrates in simple, child-like language about his early life and his long journey with Daddy, the patriarch of a family that disintegrated around the two of them.

Readers, being familiar with human behavior, will recognize signs that all is not well with Daddy and will understand what’s going on around the characters, but Happie’s dog’s-eye-view of the world is more limited, adding an extra layer of tragedy to the events. When bad things happen, Happie can’t really understand them, compounding tragedy with the dog’s own emotions.

The second story, entitled “Sunflowers,” stars a social worker who takes it upon himself to deal with the aftermath of the first story. He too has had a close, positive relationship with a dog—although that too ends pretty sadly—and dealt with very difficult losses in his life.

They’re both beautiful stories, which combine to tell a single beautiful story, with a pretty important lesson at the end, regarding how one should love a dog—or person. You may want to make sure you have a box of tissues handy when you read though. Just in case you, um, get something in your eye.

1-800-MICE

It can be hard to describe Matthew Thurber‘s comics. Certain phrases like surreal, absurd and dream-like get thrown around a lot and while they’re all true, it doesn’t accurately capture the free-form playfulness of his work or the way he manages to make his work both bizarre and accessible at the same time.

His latest book 1-800-MICE, now available in stores via Picturebox, is his longest narrative yet. An epic tale set in the imaginary town of Volcano Park, the book juggles a rather large cast of characters and their competing subplots as  various political and social groups strive for dominance in the town, not realizing that their actions may result in their own destruction. If that sounds rather grim, rest assured the book remains delightfully nonsensical and silly (in the best sense of the word), full of concepts like bagpipes that also serve as teleporters or rocket ships that run on urine. It’s off-kilter and disarming but never falls apart and is a surprisingly straightforward and easy-to-follow read. In short, it’s pretty great.

I talked to Thurber over the phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., about the new book and the challenges of doing a longer and more involved narrative:

Give me a bit of biographical background about yourself. Have you always been interested in making comics?

I was always interested in anything with a narrative. When I was a kid I made movies and comic books with my friends. My friends Tom and Jeff had this series called The Killer Pigs. It was a sci-fi story. This was when I 10. They were making comics and I imitated them but I was also interested in making more professional versions of the Killer Pigs. I’d put a little Marvel Comics symbol in the upper left hand corner. My background was being into Dungeons and Dragons and comics, making videos with my friends and reading all kinds of books.

As you grew older how did you make that transition into making comics professionally?

From 1-800-MICE

I guess by the time I was in high school I was already doing a little zine called the Glistening Earlobe Review. And then later it was called Knickerbocker. So I was interested in self-publishing already in high school. I moved to New York to go to art school and went down different paths and started doing animation and stuff. When I got out of school it just seemed like a very attainable, financially possible avenue.

While I was in school I was seeing more interesting comics like Chris Ware or Tony Millionaire. I was also Dame Darcy’s intern during my sophomore year. I got school credit for going to her house and dropping off her public access VHS tapes and answering your mail. She had a nervous breakdown when I was there once about losing her mail key, which I can understand. I need to check my mailbox frequently.

It’s not like I got brainwashed and rejected comics. I was still interested in them as an art form. I had seen Raw in high school and that really rearranged my brain in thinking about the medium. And right after college it seemed like there was a lot of drawing related action in the art world. In 2000 I saw Paper Rodeo and then there was the Royal Art Lodge with Marcel Zama. They were a Canadian collective. There were a lot of collectives doing graphic or comic-related art as well as music and animation and video. Comics had always been one wing of a lot of different practices [for me].

Is 1-800-MICE your first attempt at a lengthy narrative?

It’s definitely the lengthiest, cohesive work that I’ve done.

Was that a conscious decision on your part to try a longer narrative?

From 1-800-MICE

I was always interested in serialization and serialized stories. I thought that I could create a comic series that would go on infinitely. But then, after a couple of issues, it seemed like it could actually be contained if that makes sense. Like, refer to infinite narratives but be a mini-series. And then I remembered when I was a kid I was absolutely obsessed with the mini-series that would come on TV, and be an event. One of them was Shogun. Do you remember that?

Yeah, and the Thorn Birds.

For some reason when Shogun came on I had to tape the whole series. It came on at night past my bedtime. I don’t know why I had tapes of it. Maybe it was just something about samurai. But then I started thinking about this comic as being a mini-series instead of Cerebus or something.

And that appealed to you more, the idea of closure?

Well that definitely wasn’t something I had much experience with. I’m always starting issue one of some conceptual comic series and not following up. This the first time I’ve [done] something with length.

Did you come across challenges you didn’t expect due to the length of the story?

I tried to tie all the ends together. I wanted there to be sort of a metaphorical reasoning for the events. I wanted it to be like a Rube Goldberg machine that the trees being cut down affected the activity of the volcano and the reason the trees were cut down were to make a stage for the banjo contest, and the reason the banjo contest was happening was because tree characters from the town were trying to prove their superiority. I just wanted everything to be like a little domino game. None of these clauses necessarily make a lot of sense, but I wanted them to all affect each other. I spent a lot of time just revising the plot.

Did you did a lot of preparation beforehand? To what extent did you allow for improvisation?

From 1-800-MICE

I didn’t do any research. My working method always allows for improvisation. Even the moment before I begin inking it I’ll still mess with the dialogue to fine-tune it. I feel like that is part of what helped the comic feel really lively. That’s another reason why I like the medium, it’s always in flux. That balance between improvisation and plot and the idea of intertwining plots would create an interesting friction. So that was intentional.

Was that tricky for you? It seems like you have this balance between wanting to make sure there’s a consistent narrative but also making sure you don’t lose the fantastical absurdist element, which I would imagine could break down the story and world you’re trying to build. Was that a difficult balance for you to maintain when you were working on the book?

I guess I just try to think of the location as being a real place and I’m like a journalist describing little subplots occurring in the town, so that it would naturally hold together. There’s a lot of visual noise or gibberish related to the setting but then also I didn’t want to get bogged down in subplots. There was a temptation to just keep introducing more and more characters. That would be a perfectly acceptable project for me. I could totally read something like that and really enjoy it — every page a new character — but I felt some obligation to have the characters play an actual role in the story. So I would introduce a character at random and later figure out their meaning in the story.

Were there any characters that surprised you as you were working on them?

Well, lemme see. Groomfiend doesn’t really change throughout the book. Peace Punk has more of a radical shift in his personality when he gets a job. I was having fun with his reluctant metamorphosis. I don’t know. I was worried that with so many characters they would all start to sound the same. I tried to work on keeping their voices distinct but also a lot of it is intentionally confusing. Like with the story of the cop who’s inhabited by another cop.

From 1-800-MICE

It does seem like there are points where the narrative seem in danger of toppling over. I was wondering if that was deliberate on your part or just the way the story naturally moved.

I’m just inspired by confusion, like watching a foreign film where everybody is dressed exactly the same and you can’t tell the characters apart. Or turning on a soap opera that’s being going on for 30 years and you’re completely dislocated. I find that inspiring somehow.

The book has some strong political overtones, especially in the various groups conspiring against each other. Were you trying to draw allusions to modern politics with that? Do you welcome that sort of connection?

I’m definitely interested in political readings of the book although I think that the only real message it might have is an ecological one. It’s lot to do with the health of an ecosystem versus the desire to control or dominate the environment.

There’s that one group that doesn’t seem to understand the effects of their actions, which seems to have allusions to global warming.

It’s therapeutic. It’s something I think about in New York all day long where the population density is insane and the place is covered with concrete and cars. I’m not trying to hit anybody over the head with it but maybe to address some issues in an amusing way.

I thought the terrorist group was interesting because they seemed more concerned with sowing chaos than having a political agenda.

The Creosote gang are deluded and a parody of nihilism or something.

They seemed like a parody of extremism to me.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. I don’t believe there’s any justifications for injuring other people in the name of your belief system. That group don’t even make sense. They take a drug that makes them have visions of mutilation of the environment. They’re also being manipulated by this dentist character, who for some reason that’s not really explained _ he’s probably most extremist character in that he has a scientific rationale for cutting the population down. (laughs) I don’t know, he’s sort of like a scientist that’s lost touch with reality, like Dr. Strangelove.

One of the other themes I got was the issue of sexual identity, most prominent with Peace Punk but also with the one cop, Nabb. They’re both characters struggling with their identity. Are issues of identity and gender things that interest you as a storyteller?

Ambiguity is really interesting to me. The confusion about definition of self and the way you might delude yourself. That’s an element of the Peace Punk character both in confusion about his punk identity and also his physical alluded-to hermaphrodite self. In the story of Nabb and Tom Chief, he is a cop, which is a very interesting social role to me. I was really influenced by the movie Serpico before starting to write this, which is the story of a police officer that goes undercover and in doing so starts to sympathize with the people he’s undercover with to the point where he alienates his fellow policemen and they set him up. I found that really interesting. I’m interested in the idea of what the self is. On the one hand I think Oh, I’m an individualist, but on the other hand I don’t know if there is a self.

Why does ambiguity attract you?

From 1-800-MICE

There’s a lot of traps by which you can hopefully identify yourself in our culture, a lot of ways in which your existence is at a disadvantage because you can be marketed to or pigeonholed. There’s a lot of group political activity that I think is very positive but in my personal experience it’s been hard to fit in. Say in a music scene or a comics scene or the art world, the workforce, a baseball game, there’s all these situations in which people feel like they have to adapt their personalities. I think people who either transgress that or can’t cope with that are really fascinating. People who masquerade as another gender for their whole life, or someone who pretends to be an Indian and is received in an English court. I want to make another comic about identity post-Internet. The confusion of trying to create an identity at this time. Or the independence of your internet existence that you keep separate from your actual life.

I wanted to ask you about some of the issues you were discussing at the surrealism panel at SPX. How important is absurdity and surrealism in your work?

It’s not necessarily important for me to be in that category or in that lineage, but it’s a really inspiring strain of literature and visual art for me. I can’t think of too many other movements — maybe the underground comics period was similarly inspiring to find out about — I guess it’s the feeling you can have absolute freedom in your drawing and writing. You don’t have to be funny. There doesn’t have to be a resolution or a structure that is familiar. Comics are so new that I feel like a lot of experimental there are already traditions but there’s no reason anyone has to accept those. They’re only very new. I feel like long-form comics doesn’t have a burden of thousands of years of examples. I’ve been thinking a lot about humor and the absurd.

Well that was one of the things I wanted to talk about because while the book has a very dark ending, there’s a lot of humor in the book, drawn out of these characters bumping into each other, which keeps the book from getting too dark, despite the drama.

From 1-800-MICE

Yeah, I think that’s a necessary approach. I think about having to be funny every time I draw a comic. I was worried this comic would start funny and then realize it was becoming a bit “Graphic Novel” and dreadfully serious. The end being serious is kind of absurd too. It was kind of a joke on Watchmen.

So humor is pretty important to you.

Oh yeah. The surrealists were the most humorless people in some ways. Andre Breton was a dictator. On the one hand they believed in convulsive humor, and on the other hand they were so serious. I think that comics are just inherently the best thing about them is they’re funny. My favorite cartoonists are funny, like Ben Katchor and Gary Panter. I think those guys are hilarious. I feel that humor is my favorite way to bridge serious stuff.

It’s interesting you name those two guys because they’re not the first two people that might come to mind when thinking of funny cartoonists.

It’s very dry.

It’s very dry and very subtle. It’s there but you have to spend time to see it.

Maybe it’s a tradition of dry humor that goes back to Hogarth or somebody drawing fine drawings. I don’t know what I”m talking about. I’ve been rereading some Milt Gross stuff and just the way he’ll draw someone with crossed eyes will make me laugh out loud.

Do you want to produce the same results with your own work? Certainly your characters have that look to them.

Chracter design is such a great place to find humor. It’s hard to make humor without making fun of people. I’ve been puzzling about that. You don’t want to draw a stereotype but you want to draw a funny character, so what’s funny? There’s a lot of characters with pinched noses in the book. I don’t know if that’s funny. Part of it is just how people move, their hand gestures or how they float around can be inherently funny. If you try to express something serious through these inherently funny characters, it can be really dumb or really, really interesting.

Well it can make the messages more palatable to the reader.

I think it’s easier to dilute ideas through making a mixture. Cartooning is like the special potent juice you’re’ mixing up your ideas with.

You mentioned the idea of working in the universe. do you see the possibility of a sequel or at least a story taking place in the same world.

I don’t think I’d do a sequel, but unfortunately the way my brain works in trying to figure out a new series I’m essentially doing the same thing over again. I feel like it will be I’m not terribly attached to the characters. In a way they’re like the characters in a play that don’t have too much personality. Maybe that’s something to work on in the future. Even so, Shakespeare didn’t make hamlet 2.

Well maybe if I get letters like L. Frank Baum did from crying little girls. “Please bring back Groomfiend!” Then of course I’d have to do that.  (laughter).

SPX, or the Small Press Expo, returns to the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Bethesda, Md. this weekend.

The show’s special guests include Roz Chast, Jim Woodring, Diane Noomin, Jim Rugg, Ann Telnaes, Chester Brown, Johnny Ryan, Craig Thompson and Matthew Thurber, and fans who attend will also have the opportunity to meet and/or hear from Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, Jessica Abel, Sarah Glidden, Alex Robinson, Brian Ralph, Mike Dawson, Meredith Gran, Roger Langridge and Julia Wertz, just to name a few. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that our own Chris Mautner will be attending and conducting a Q&A with Johnny Ryan on Saturday, so be sure to tell him hi for us.

In addition to a lot of great talent, SPX also offers a full schedule of programming and the yearly Ignatz Awards. And a whole lot of new books and cool things will be available at the show:

• Drawn + Quarterly will have a ton of new books at the show, as detailed here, like Brain Ralph’s Daybreak collection, the Death-Ray hardcover and Big Questions, among many others.

• As we noted yesterday, AdHouse and Tom Scioli will have an American Barbarian print at the show. They’ll also have guests like Jim Rugg, Lamar Abrams, Ethan Rilly and Sterling Hundley at their table.

• Jennifer Hayden’s Underwire, from Top Shelf, makes its debut:

Underwire

• Roger Langridge’s The Show Must Go On! collection from BOOM! Town will debut there, and Langridge will also have a Snarked! print:

Snarked!

• Kevin Huizenga will have some new stuff at the show, not the least of which is a new Ganges book from Fantagraphics.

• NBM will debut Stargazing Dog and Ernie Colon’s Inner Sanctum at the show.

• The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will host the first Jeff Alexander Memorial Benefit Auction, named for a cartoonist and an organizer of SPX and the Ignatz Awards. He passed away earlier this year. The auction includes pieces from Alexander ’s collection that he donated to the CBLDF, including original art by Charles Vess and Jeff Smith, Tony Millionaire, and Roger Langridge. The auction also includes contributions from Keith Knight, Raina Telgemeier, Jeffrey Brown and many more.

• A signed and numbered edition of Craig Thompson’s Habibi will be available from the CBLDF during the show. And Sara Varon will be at their table on Saturday signing Bake Sale.

• The SPX has a whole bunch more listed on their site, including Mike Dawson’s Troop 142, Pope Hats #2 by Ethan Rilly, Old-Time Hockey Tales by Robert Ullman and Jeffrey Brown, Monster Isle: Big Monster Stuff by Joey Weiser and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This goes on my “must buy” list.