Cover design by Robert Beatty

“You can tell I’m still making sense of it myself.” So says Sammy Harkham of the eighth volume of his landmark anthology series, Kramers Ergot, at one point during our lengthy conversation about the book. And indeed, Harkham’s side conversation is characterized by strategic pauses, halves of sentences that trail off and are abandoned as Harkham retreats, rethinks, and rearticulates. Despite his ebullient cadence – Harkham’s as great a talker as he is a tweeter – it’s quite clear that the amount of thought he put into this comparatively slim and quiet volume of his once-overflowing and raucous art-comics anthology is nearly overpowering.

So is the collection itself. Despite featuring a much smaller roster than previous volumes in the series, and despite a much less “noisy” visual aesthetic than that which has characterized the series since its phone book-sized fourth volume caused a sensation upon its release at the MoCCA Festival in 2003, Kramers Ergot 8 has an intensity that’s tough to shake. Contributors like C.F. (aka Christopher Forgues) and Chris Cilla craft uncomfortable but undeniably erotic sex scenes, which sit next to grim science-fiction parables from Gary Panter and Kevin Huizenga and gruesome horror tragedies by Johnny Ryan and Harkham himself. Fine artists Robert Beatty and Takeshi Murata contribute pieces as visually vibrant as the stories of crime and desire from Gabrielle Bell and the team of Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw are bleak. A cheekily provocative introductory essay from musician Ian Svenonius and a massive selection of racy reprinted Oh, Wicked Wanda! comics from the pages of Penthouse prove perplexing – but it’s a good perplexing, because it forces the reader to consider just how fingernails-on-a-chalkboard effective the rest of the volume is at discomfiting them.

With the book on its way to stores from PictureBox Inc. in a couple of weeks, Harkham took an hour before picking his two older kids up at school to talk about this very personal project. We started off talking about our respective babies; fitting, then, that by the end of the interview a fascinating picture emerged of what Harkham wanted Kramers 8 to be that proved every pause along the way was a pregnant one.

Page from "A Husband and a Wife" by Sammy Harkham

Sean T. Collins: Kramers Ergot 8 debuted at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in December, but your third baby debuted not long before that. That had to be a challenge.

Sammy Harkham: Knowing the baby’s coming, you work knowing that when that baby comes, things are gonna shut down. The book only got finished mid-September, and then the baby came. It was funny, because I drew my comic [for the anthology] when the book was done, basically. I thought, “I’ll do a simple issue of Kramers, I’ll do a story for it, and then I’ll get back to Crickets.” But editing, for me, is like working on my own book, as if it’s fully just me. I’m thinking about it day and night, and it’s hard for me to then think of a story within that if I don’t already have one that I’m working on. So at a certain point I decided I’m not going to be in the book. Then it was clear I needed to be in the book, because I wanted a very particular kind of story in it [laughs]. “I guess I’m gonna have to do it.” It was a flurry of activity August into September, then it was done, then the book was done, and then I was just…breathing, you know? But I felt like, “Oh man, I really should be working right now before the baby comes.” But since the baby came I’ve still been doing stuff. You know what it’s like: a lot of tricky hours, and getting used to weird working habits. You work for five minutes, but you try to make it a good five minutes. You try to break it up. And I try not to lose my temper. I get resentful of the people around me when they’re asking for my help and I’m in the middle of something. [Laughs] If I’m in the middle of writing or drawing something, I wanna finish the thought. So I’ve got to think of those Dalai Lama tweets I read earlier in the day. [Laughs] You’ve got to get into the headspace where you’re malleable in that way, you’re flexible.

But Kramers was late this year. Nadel wanted it in July, but I’ve never been able to deliver that book on time, never. This one was particularly hard because there were so few contributors, so I couldn’t lose anybody without it affecting the whole thing. Whereas in previous issues there are so many people that unless it’s a really big strip – it’s a shame to lose anything, you don’t want to lose anything, but you can. You can lose a one- or two-pager. But with this, if CF is running late, there’s nothing we can do. I told [PictureBox Publisher Dan] Nadel that up front: “I hope to get the book done on time, but if Panter’s not ready, if Christopher’s not ready, if any of these people aren’t ready, we can’t do anything.” [Laughs] We’re at the mercy of them, really.

Page from "Barbarian Bitch" by Anya Davidson

Collins: Was that something you factored in when you approached people?

Harkham: Not at all. Not at all. With this one, I was thinking of people who drew…I wanted a certain uptight energy, a certain rigidness to the work. That was a guiding principle. Then the people who don’t draw super-tight or super…I don’t know what the word is, but there’s a certain energy was going for, and the people who don’t necessarily conform to that, I thought, in a way define the book by what they aren’t. Leon Sadler, to me, almost defines the whole book by being so loose, because he really sticks out in sharp relief. Same with Anya [Davidson]. Those are the two people I think of as being kind of different stylistically, Anya and Leon.

I just wanted to get away from…I don’t know. [Pause] It’s a very hard book for me to discuss or to verbalize, because so much of it was intuitive. I wanted to do something that really felt different from what other Kramers were. It was really about thinking of a tone, and trying to think of who fits within that tone, and trying to create a vision of comics that maybe doesn’t exist, but to pretend that it does. Or to create it. Or to give the impression that it’s always there, but I really have to use spit and rubber bands to put together and give it that veneer.

Collins: The tone that emerged for me was a sad one. There was a melancholy to it. Maybe that what emerged for me from its spin on the sex and horror comics that are very much in the air right now. But beyond that, the strip I return to mentally is Kevin Huizenga’s cover version of a golden age sci-fi strip, which I found crushingly sad.

Harkham: It’s bizarre, right? It makes you really think about – tell me if you disagree, but you think of the guys who made the original strip, right? I mean, what is this? What is this strip? You’re right, I totally agree with you. It’s a really sad strip. It’s a very bizarre strip, and it’s a weird thing that someone did that comic knowing that the only people who were going to read it were children. It makes me think of Frank King working on Gasoline Alley, this idealized vision of what he wants his life to be, of him living with this son who in reality is very far away from him. Comics are often like that. Because of the nature of the work, it is often about escaping into a space and letting things live and breathe that in reality can’t exist. That’s often the impression on the last page of a Kim Deitch comic. [Laughs] I feel like he’s realizing that it’s over, and he’s like, “I kinda want to live with these pygmies forever in this miniature city that doesn’t exist.”

Collins: Now that you mention it, there’s a sense of loss to the book, too. Maybe it’s in the way the the sexy stuff sits against the horrific and angry and sad stuff, which spoils it or something. I think of Chris Cilla’s story, in which a sexual liaison is interrupted by a little kid who says, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody.” It felt like something had been ruined. I came away from the book feeling… [sighs]

Harkham: Did you like the book?

Collins: I did! Oh yeah, I did. There was stuff that I struggled with…

Harkham: I ask that honestly. I honestly have no idea what reception the book’s going to receive from people. I don’t know if they’re going to take to it. And I’m open to that, I’m fine with that. I ask that question with my eyes open, not in a defensive way.

Page from "Mining Colony X7170" by Johnny Ryan

Collins: A lot of the stuff is very much in my wheelhouse. I love the direction that Johnny Ryan continues to go in.

Harkham: That strip is beautiful. It’s an ode to commitment and love. It’s a really rich story. Including Johnny in a book like this, where I wanted things to have a certain amount of restraint and emotional coldness, not the usual flop sweat and a gag every second – with Johnny, it was all about talking to him about the slow burn. I know Johnny well enough to know he’s really well read and a really smart writer. We’ve talked a lot about story and literature. It was exciting to bring him into this, knowing that when I mentioned his name to the other contributors, they were like “Huh, he doesn’t necessarily sound like a great fit for this,” and he really delivered. That strip is amazing. He doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, he doesn’t tell you exactly what’s going on, but there’s enough ambiguity and enough focus. I think it’s a really beautiful comic.

Collins: It feels like an answer to the Huizenga strip, too.

Harkham: That’s interesting. [Pause] That’s really interesting. [Laughs] Oh my God, I hadn’t thought about that!

Collins: These explorers searching for love—

Harkham: Looking for love, yeah!

Collins: –and finding these nightmares they choose to embrace.

Harkham: Cool. My struggle with Kramers is always looking at it so intensely and never feeling like it’s good enough. You want things to be better and better. I’m really hung up on narrative, so I always want better stories, and it takes me a bit of time to stand back from it and come towards it a couple months or years later and go “Oh, that’s a good issue.”

Collins: Kramers 4 had such an atom-bomb impact, and I think what a lot of people took away from it was the non-narrative material – the Fort Thunder contributions, the collage material. But the series has had a parallel thread of full-fledged short stories all along. Were you expressly trying to point in that direction with this new format?

Harkham: I wanted each contributor to do a somewhat meaty amount of material. So when you think about that—I broke it with Leon, but again, that helps define the rest of the book by having his section be all kinds of little bits and pieces. But besides Leon, I wanted each person to do a substantial amount of pages, or if not a substantial amount of pages then something that felt substantial. Comics are funny like that: A two-page strip can live in your mind like a 500-page book. So it wasn’t necessarily page count—I just wanted it to be really strong material. And it’s always a struggle to get that out of people, but with this one it was more like seeing if people could make a serious commitment. Most of those strips are over eight pages. Gabrielle’s is shorter and Kevin’s is shorter, but they’re all around eight, and beyond that. It’s a lot to ask of people, especially these days, when all the people I was working with have other projects.

Collins: The other week I reviewed the final issue of Mome for The Comics Journal, and to open the review I listed a bunch of anthologies that had come out over the past couple years, off the top of my head. There were two dozen easy. It’s a much more heavily anthologized era right now than it was when Kramers started.

Harkham: I think there’s a real need for it.

Collins: Why? And was that something you were considering when you were putting #8 together?

Harkham: To answer the first part, there’s always a need. People need an outlet for their work, and online is one thing, but having it in print is another. Comics lend themselves to short form, so it makes sense that there are going to be a lot of anthologies. To me, doing another issue of Kramers was more about…When approaching any issue, it’s always like, “What do I want to see? What do I feel a lack of as a reader?” I do read a lot of comics. I feel like I’m so heavily engaged with comics—too much, sometimes! [Laughs] Probably to an unhealthy degree. It’s crazy. You’re a writer of comics, so you know. You’re deeply involved as well. So it comes out of [thinking of] what kind of book I’m excited to see. Sometimes I feel like “Oh, everyone’s doing the work that I want to see.” Then there’s times like this, where there’s a kind of comic I want to see and it doesn’t exist, so I’m going to make it: “I want to present people’s work in a certain way that I don’t see it presented in. I want a context that I don’t see out there.” And starting to build from there.

That’s why I wonder about how people are going to respond to it, because to me, it doesn’t feel like there are many books like it. When Kramers 4 came out, there was a lot of resistance from within comics to that! [Laughs] I was still posting on the TCJ.com message board at that time. I was 23 and commenting on that board all the time. When people started talking about that book I was really excited, until everyone started shitting on it. [Laughs] But then people started sticking up for it. I mean, I know now that that’s always a good thing, when people dislike something enough to want to talk about it. That means it’s connecting on some wavelength, and that’s important. But with this, I don’t know how people are going to take to it. They might think it’s pretentious or they might think it’s too dry or something.

Collins: I bought Kramers 4 at MoCCA when it debuted, and I was on the TCJ messboard then as well. I remember the argument was like, “Is this comics? This isn’t comics!” That book won that argument so completely that it’s not even an argument people have anymore, at least not among art comics readers.

Harkham: People are over it. At the time I didn’t think the book was that far out. I thought it was a very normal thing, coming out of all the [pioneering art-comics publisher] Highwater books at that time. Don’t forget, [Marc Bell’s] Shrimpy and Paul had already come out, and [Mat Brinkman’s] Teratoid Heights came out either around the same time or just after, but Brinkman was doing work. All those people were doing work that was available, so to do an anthology including all those people did not feel like I was necessarily bringing anything new to the table. I was just trying to make a good collection.

I never focus on showing people stuff they’ve never seen before, because I think that’s a really shallow approach. It won’t yield so much great work by focusing on what’s new, what’s hot, what are people going crazy about this month. Comics people are very fickle. You mentioned that whole thing about horror and sex right now. Ben Marra started doing his thing the last two years, Michael DeForge, obviously Jonny Negron—there’s a certain energy in the air where people are getting really into doing unironic genre-based work, and it feels fresh. But in a year from now, maybe the hot new thing will be like Peepshow. It’s not a fickleness, but because the alternative comics scene is so small, there’s a lot of turnover, a lot of moving forward about what’s exciting. I try to avoid thinking in those terms.

So to go back to what we were saying, Kramers 4 was to me a very normal anthology. It was a big anthology, but I didn’t think I was necessarily bringing that much to the table. With this one in some ways I feel the same. But just seeing the response to the last issue… When that book got announced, the way people took to it, the negative comments that people had about that book – [they were] saying things I would never have thought of if I hadn’t read someone saying these things online, about making a book that was elitist. I guess I’m used to people second-guessing Kramers and putting a lot of their own baggage and issues into the work. Which is normal. Art goes halfway, the reader goes the other half, always. So if people want to look at a book and take the most negative view of why certain decisions are made, then that’s their prerogative, and I’m comfortable with that. So with issue eight, I know I wanted this book to be a certain way, and people may not take to it, and I’m okay with that.

I listened to the roundtable conversation [about the best comics of 2011] on Inkstuds [featuring critics Robin McConnell, Tim Hodler, Joe McCulloch, and Matt Seneca] and I thought that was really interesting. I’m listening to them talk about the book…[Laughs] I respect all those writers, but at first I was like, “No, I disagree completely. That’s fine, whichever way they’re taking to the book is fine, but I don’t agree with what they’re saying.” But as I listened to it, I realized they were teaching me something about the book. In a way, I was learning about what I was thinking. I realized they’re kinda right about a lot of their opinions about the book.

Page from "Epilogue" by Robert Beatty

Collins: The reason I brought up the debate over #4 actually ties into what I got out of that roundtable myself. Looking at #8, I have no problem processing the art from Robert Beatty and Takeshi Murata. I’d compare the opening stuff from Beatty to the opening synthesizer instrumentals from 1984 by Van Halen or Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada – it’s really appropriate that it’s called “Overture.” And the Murata stuff, the way it has this beautiful sensual vibrant feeling but depicts these weird, slightly sinister items of pop- and trash-culture detritus…I get what that’s doing there among these comics. The stuff I really struggled with were the intro from Ian Svenonius [Harkham laughs] and the Oh, Wicked Wanda! material at the back of the book. The Oh, Wicked Wanda! stuff looked gorgeous on that lovely paper you selected for it, but I didn’t really like them as comics. And there was just so much of it!

Harkham: [Laughs] I had a hard time cutting it down!

Collins: And the Svenonius—I just wasn’t ready for an introduction to a Kramers Ergot that ended with “ZAP! BLAM! POW!”

Harkham: [Laughs] I know – I’m with you, man, I’m with you! Have you read any of his writing?

Collins: I feel like I have, although I couldn’t tell you what it was. I have enough friends who are deep into his various bands, Nation of Ulysses or Weird War or Chain and the Gang depending on the friend, that I feel as though these things have filtered into me secondhand, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how or why.

Harkham: There’s a book that the record label Drag City released of his essays called Psychic Soviet that I really recommend. I’m only slightly aware of his music; I really know Svenonius as a writer. My only concern with including him was that for people who did know his music, it looked like we got some hip dude to write an intro – like getting a Morrissey to write an afterword, or Steve Albini or something. I was a little bit concerned just ‘cause it’s him. But as an aside, you should read his other essays.

Collins: Well, in that Inkstuds roundtable, Joe McCulloch made the argument that the Oh, Wicked Wanda! material at the end of the book was as if the Svenonius essay was saying “The prosecution rests!” The essay was about the way pop art nullifies and destroys art’s revolutionary potential, and here at the end of a book of underground comics you have this endlessly long, vaguely funny smut comic – choke on it. [Laughs] I wasn’t sure if I bought it, but he was able to contexualize them a lot better than I was.

Harkham: Yeah, me too. I think editing an anthology is not that different from making your own book, in that you gather bits and pieces that feel right and start making this overall thing. You don’t necessarily have a clear idea, you just know that you like these things next to each other. In the same way, when you’re writing a short story, you’re like, “Well, I’ve got this scene, and I don’t know what it means, but there’s something I’m really attracted to.” It resonates within you, something very simple – a guy barbecuing in the rain or something. [Laughs] You’re attracted to these little things and they all come together. I had some very clear ideas about why I wanted certain things, and then there are some things you’re unsure about. So listening to McCulloch talk about what he thought was very interesting. I don’t feel like it’s my place to say he’s 100% right, he’s 100% wrong – I just thought it was interesting. Once the book is done, it’s now owned as much by the readers as by me as far as what it means. I try to avoid getting in the way of that and saying “No, it’s here because of this.” I don’t necessarily want to effect how people read the book.

Page from "Oh! Wicked Wanda" by Ron Embelton and Frederic Mullally

Collins: I’ve heard that from artists; it’s really interesting to hear it from an editor.

Harkham: Well, you know, I have my own feelings and thoughts about Oh, Wicked Wanda!, and I don’t necessarily want to smother the reader with my take on it. I’d much rather they engage the work. If I wanted to, I’d run little paragraph intros before each strip to contextualize why I like them in my own editorial voice, but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily an exciting book to read. Every book, regardless of whether it’s an anthology or by a single author, should have a certain amount of ambiguity and mystery and tension. The only time those things should be lacking – and it’s debatable – is in a work of nonfiction. That’s debatable, because some of my favorite writers of nonfiction bring a lot to the table where they don’t have all the answers. To tie it into comics, Dan Raeburn’s Imp #4 about Mexican comics – he’s wrestling with stuff, and it’s interesting.

So Oh, Wicked Wanda!…It’s interesting, because I don’t think I thought it was gonna be hard for people to get through that stuff. I thought they’d have issues with it, but I didn’t think it would be hard, or intense in that way. You could make the argument that the book was almost meant to feel like you just sat through a grueling four-hour war movie, or some atonal music piece, and now here’s The Benny Hill Show as a respite. [Laughs] But it’s clear no one’s really taken it that way. Which is good, I guess.

Collins: Perhaps for this audience, the atonal stuff is our Benny Hill Show. Then you get to the T&A romp, and it’s like, “Aaaah! It’s Metal Machine Music!”

Harkham: But what is it? Is it seeing swastikas on girls’ asses? Is that a problem?

Collins: No, and that’s the thing. You said you thought people would have issues with it; I didn’t have any issues with it, I just thought it wasn’t that funny. Which is sort of the least critical criticism that anyone can ever levy at anything…

Harkham: I feel like that’s important, though. I can’t remember who wrote it – maybe you wrote it – but there was a [Comics] Journal review about the black humor anthology [Black Eye, edited by Ryan Standfest].

Collins: Yep, that was me.

Harkham: I only read one review of that book, and that was in the Journal, and you said you didn’t find it very good because it just wasn’t that funny. Remember? [Laughs] That, to me, is a very valid criticism. That’s something, as a reader, I’m curious about: How funny is a funny anthology? That’s important to me.

Collins: Okay, I feel a little better then. [Laughs]

Harkham: I know that for my own work, the most important thing is that it’s entertaining. That’s number one. Any deeper or richer intention should be behind that. The main thrust should always be “Is this scene funny? Is it good? Is it scary? Is it strong?” I want momentum, I want this thing to be moving. Any other concerns, like personal expression, honesty, truthfulness, whatever it is – all the stuff you really wrestle with when you’re in art school – should be in play in the background.

So I think jokes are important. Oh, Wicked Wanda! is a little bit trickier. It sounds like you still engaged with it, you didn’t shut down, but you didn’t find the jokes funny. I do think there are a couple other ways of reading it that make it kind of interesting. People who don’t even want to read it can just look at it and still like it without reading it. The first year I was looking at that stuff, I never read it. I was just looking at it page by page and thinking “My God, these are incredible-looking pages.”

Collins: Well, it sits so well on that paper stock that you can look at it along with the other airbrush art in the anthology literally on a surface level. You can look at the surface of the page and enjoy it.

Harkham: And I think that’s important. I do.

Page from "Warm Genetic House" by CF

Collins: You can also look at the Nazisploitation and S&M elements of the strip, and a few pages away you have CF’s strip, and you can get some resonance there. In fact, I feel as though the act of putting all the stuff that’s in here between two covers is almost like a game. I don’t mean that as a value judgment at all – or maybe I mean it as a positive one. The game is to try and puzzle out the context. “Okay, it’s a shorter, smaller volume; Sammy and Dan have said it’s the most focused one. So what is the focus? What am I not seeing?” Most of it I can make sense of, but the things that really stick out become a challenge. “What are they doing in here? What did he see?” That’s one of the pleasures of an anthology with a really strong editorial eye: trying to puzzle out the context the editor had in his mind when he put it together.

Harkham: Well, let’s see. Oh, Wicked Wanda! you had trouble with, and the Svenonius. [Long pause] Keeping in mind what we were talking about, about not wanting to smother readers with my goals or what I was trying to do…I definitely wanted to make something that got away from all the things that we take for granted when we think of anthologies, and when we think of comics, and when we think of comics within the context of the wider culture. When you pull it out of our little scene…One thing at play with Kramers 4 was that that book was, in some ways, a response to comics being embraced by the mainstream and by the wider book culture and art culture. 2003: Pantheon is releasing books, Fantagraphics and D&Q are now in bookstores, it’s becoming a regular thing, and comics are being presented more and more like literature in the way that they’re packaged, the way that the books are designed. [Kramers 4 was] my way of dealing with that, because I had no connection to that and didn’t grow up reading comics in that way. The Love and Rockets collections and the Jim Woodring collections were always 8 ½ x 11. They were just comics jammed together with covers in the back. [Laughs] They were just collections, really simple. Kramers 4, in some ways, was, “I want to get back to things being comics.” No context, no blurbs, just that energy of comics, throwing it all out there and leaving it to the reader to make sense of the work themselves.

When thinking about doing another issue of Kramers, I want to do something that’s gonna enter into that conversation of comics as literature and comics as fine art, but do it in a way that feels right where all those other books feel wrong to me. It’s a way of throwing out all the things we take as a given because that’s the way it’s done by Fanta and D&Q and First Second or whoever. You could make the argument that all previous Kramers have been about stripping context away, so let’s make one that’s all about context. So you think about having an essay to start the book. And you think about Takeshi Murata, who’s not a cartoonist, and I wouldn’t say those are comics in any form, but when you think of literary anthologies like Granta or McSweeney’s, often you’ll have somewhere in a book of prose a selection of sculptures or photography by a fine artist. Murata served that purpose. And you think about the size, and about trying to have meaty contributions and stories, and about a book you could buy at an airport bookstore and sit with for a couple days. That was really important to me.

One of the things that happens with the previous issues is that there’s a very off-handed way of giving the work: [in a singsongy voice] “Oh yeah, here’s Chris Ware, and here’s Martin Cendreda, and here’s CF…” I’m just tossing them out to the reader. With this, I wanted to present all this stuff with real respect and dignity. [Laughs] It gets a little bit tricky talking about this stuff, because I know that for everything I’m saying there’s a million arguments against it, and we could go into any one of these points and have a conversation. But I just wanted to make something that was really refined and clean and had a strong point of view. Someone mentioned that it’s an angry book, and I’m might agree with that. In a way I feel like I want to just throw everything out, and it’s a new start. [pause] Does that answer your question at all?

Collins: [Laughs] I think so! I don’t at all want to tease out of you some sort of revelation you’re not comfortable with because it proscribes reader reaction.

Harkham: I’m still figuring it out myself.

Collins: But the way you just described it makes me think that the fact that it’s a Kramers with a typewritten table of contents at the beginning is somehow the Rosetta stone of the entire project.

Harkham: Exactly. But dude, forget that. You don’t even need to go that far. Open the book, look at the endpapers: The endpapers are white. [Collins laughs] I’m serious! I am serious. Kramers has always covered every square inch of surface with content. It’s always been like “Just jam it in, as much stuff as possible, and if it’s not a good book, at least it’s a big book. [Laughs] One of these is bound to hit!” There’s a certain amount of insecurity when you’ve been working on an anthology for six months: “Fuck, I’ve got one month left. I’m gonna send out one last email to twenty people and be like ‘Who’s got something?’” With this, it was, “I’m gonna have a few people and I’m gonna give them space.” I told them all “I want your strip to start on the right-hand side, and I want it to be a certain number of pages, and I want it to be a certain kind of story.” I wanted to contextualize all this stuff, in a way that I never had before.

Cover of Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham

With my own work, with Crickets, it’s more like those old issues of Kramers. When it comes to how I present my own work, I like it to look like shit. I like it to look dashed off and simple and vulgar, so that when you read it, if there’s anything richer, it’s almost a surprise. I want to embrace all those exterior elements of a comic book so that it’s a little bit subversive in that way. Like, [Crickets #3’s lead story] “Blood of the Virgin” is called “Blood of the Virgin.” You know? And the cover of Crickets 3…I’m really proud of that issue, but there’s no signifiers when you hold that thing that it’s anything but a dirty, gross comic.

Collins: You went out of your way to trashify it.

Harkham: Exactly. [Laughs] I didn’t go out of my way to trashify it, but all my favorite writers, if there’s one thing in common, is that they write in a very direct way, with a certain clarity of thought, just saying things. I really respond to that. So Crickets 3 works for me [because] I wanted to make something that feels like a comic book, and all the things we think of as a comic book as comic readers. You get what I mean when I say that, because you’re engaging with the medium in that way. Crickets is very much a part of that conversation.

With Kramers 8, it doesn’t make sense to do that anymore. I’m 31, I’m not 23. It doesn’t make sense anymore to have everything be loud and crazy and messy. And anyway, everyone’s doing that for me. Everything kinda looks the way Kramers 4 looked.

Collins: BCGF looked like if Kramers 4 came to life.

Harkham: [Laughs] Well, that’s nice, I guess. I mean, I’m not gonna take credit for any of that sort of thing. But there’s a certain rough texture to everything, and that doesn’t really resonate for me anymore. If I look at the fine art I’m looking at, the books I’m reading, the fashion, the graphic design, all the things I’m interested in – it doesn’t look like that. So why do the comics I buy?

Let’s see if I can say this in a clear way so you don’t have to edit the hell out of it… [Pause] There are certain things, I don’t know what I should call them, but certain tropes of indie comics that are sort of a given. It’s a pretty incestuous community, the world of comics. I realized that if I stepped out of that a little bit and think of the wider context, there’s a way of approaching this book that feels really fresh, and yet feels like it’s connecting to the wider culture. Which I feel that comics have been doing anyway, for the last couple of years. Does that make sense?

Collins: Well, as we were just saying, it’s a Kramers with white endpapers, with a table of contents, with a prose introduction, with a cover that’s restrained even by the standards of #7. The package itself is making an argument.

Harkham: Yeah. It’s a difficult book for me to talk about because I feel like I’m still in it, even though I’ve been done with since September. I haven’t really been able to make sense of it. This is why I wanted to do this interview over the phone as opposed to me writing answers, because anything I would type, I don’t know how honest it would be. Over the phone, I can say I don’t have clear-cut answers or clear-cut reasons for making the book what it is, exactly.

But hopefully, with any piece of work, there’s multiple strands that are at play. Every time I would see your name come up in my email when we were communicating, I’d think of Game of Thrones, because I know you’re a big Martin fan. I’ve only just started that series, but he’s a good example of this. When you describe that book to someone, you can say, “It’s about this,” and it’s totally true, but you can also say “It’s also about this,” and that’s totally true as well. Not to say that Kramers is anywhere near a work like what George R.R. Martin’s doing [laughs], but you try to have multiple strands at play, multiple things that you’re working towards.

Page from "Childhood Predators" by Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw

With this new issue, there is that one strand: “Okay, I want to make a book that actually looks like a book, that can sit on a bookshelf with good prose and good graphic design and good records. I want it to be part of the wider culture.” All these cartoonists are doing very, very unique work, and if there’s one connector – I don’t know if this is true, but maybe – all that work feels like it’s a little bit outside comics. Despite being totally informed by the medium, there’s something about it that looks or reads like it’s not so incestuous. They’re not responses to other comics. It feels like they’re engaging the wider culture.

So there was that element of wanting to make something that’s pushing past comics, because comics as a medium is already going there. You already have comics in every bookstore. You have mainstream coverage of cartoonists. So it’s like, okay, if we want to finally engage with that instead of avoiding it…I can avoid it with my own work, but it’s not fair to do that when representing other artists and putting together collections of other people’s work. That was an exciting challenge, to try to do that.

The next thing was, what’s the point of view? That’s where Svenonius and Oh, Wicked Wanda! obviously add a lot. Maybe they throw a wrench in things, but maybe that’s good. Obviously I don’t want anyone to dislike any of the pieces. That’s always a problem when doing an anthology. Every review of an anthology, as a given, will say, “It’s great, but like any anthology it has its problems.” [Collins laughs] There’s always those strips you don’t care about, because every editor has their own definition of what’s good.

Collins: But as a reviewer, for example, I realized a few volumes into Mome that the fact that I disliked a few strips in each issue is a big part of why I enjoyed reading the series. It helped me understand, “Okay, why does a comic work? Why does a comic not work? What are these two comics that are only a few pages away doing so differently?” I found that really helpful. So even when there’s stuff that you struggle with or dislike – I understand that as an editor, the intention is not to put in stuff and say “Oh, no one’s gonna like this – let’s see what they make of that!” But as a reader, it’s an experience that a regular book can’t reproduce. “Advantage” is a weird word for it, but it is a unique advantage of anthologies that they present different works that you may have very different reactions to, all between two covers.

Harkham: I think it’s the job of the editor to make the right decisions so that all that work creates a bigger whole. If you think of each creator’s comic as a chapter of a novel, and each person is bringing a different idea to the table, and each one is working well off the other, then a bad anthology is when all that gets muddled. They’re just running whatever, or they’re just running stuff they like, and there’s no clear tone or feeling, and it becomes a muddled mess. You engage with it not as a book but as a bunch of different strips that happen to be bound together.

Like you said, there’s a lot of anthologies, so to do Kramers isn’t so much because I’m like, “Oh I have to publish this guy because nobody’s gonna see it otherwise. It’s more about going, “I want to see a certain kind of comic book, and I want to push the reader hard, and I want to break past their barriers, the perimeters of what they expect, and give them something fun, something different.” That sort of thinking goes into play when you’re making your own book – it just so happens that you’re working with all these different bits and pieces from other people, and you’re trying to build this Voltron robot out of all these pieces. [Laughs] You can tell I’m still making sense of it myself.

Collins: You’re saying so many things that sound like you’re talking about a comic you drew from beginning to end. [Harkham laughs] To me, that says a lot about what Kramers is.

Harkham: If you’re a cartoonist and you’re editing an anthology, it’s very much an excuse to live in the skin of other people, for sure. That’s definitely at play. “Man, I love this girl’s work, she’s amazing, and I wanna be involved! I wanna present this stuff my way.” You want to get your fingerprints on it. So that’s definitely there. I think it’d be easier to have a free-for-all and say, “Okay, I have this many pages, I just need to fill it.” If I did that, I could probably get an issue of Kramers out every year.

It was a good learning experience on this one, because with only having to deal with about twelve people, I thought it would be a much easier process, but it wasn’t. It’s a huge undertaking. It feels like a lot of work. I never know why afterwards. When I’m in it, I should write myself a letter and give myself notes, so that next time I’m like “I want to do another Kramers,” I can read it and remind myself. I always forget, and it’s always the same issues that come up. “Ohhh, right.”

You’re always at the whim of your contributors. I think I never get over that, and I think I always resent that. As a cartoonist, after a while you start resenting that you’re spending so much time on other people’s work and not enough on your own work. You just become this maniac by the end, where you want it to be done, but at the same time you’re like “Fuck, I spent so much time on this, I want it to be good. I really don’t want it to be a waste of six months. Or a year!” It’s always a struggle. It’s a lot of work. I’m always surprised that it’s so much work, but it is. I’m sure that Eric Reynolds [editor of Mome] would say the same. It’s a pain in the butt.

Collins: I feel good that I went through all 40 pages of Oh, Wicked Wanda!, then. I owed it to you!

Harkham: Well, hopefully, even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, you got something out of it, or it enriched something else, at least in the context of the book. I felt like it was important to run that stuff. I don’t feel beholden enough to anything that I have to run anything. I’m a harsh editor in that way: “Do I need any of this?” I don’t feel beholden to anybody in any way. With the Oh, Wicked Wanda! stuff, the only real question mark was how people were gonna respond to it. But maybe that’s always the way, when doing anything. You never know. You just gotta go off what you want as a reader. That’s how I approach my own work, that’s how I approach Kramers: Finding out what do I feel like looking at and reading, and then trying to make that thing.

Page from "Get Your Ass to Mars" by Takeshi Murata

Images courtesy the artists and PictureBox

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.

The main entrance to the Festival

Photo time once again! I had a marvelous time this past Saturday at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and thought I’d share some pictures I snapped of the proceedings during my brief time there. Click on the jump link to see the whole shebang.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church

For those who don’t know the bulk of the festival — the part that involves selling comics anyway — is held at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, in their gymnasium and basement, which gives the show a very off-the cuff, d.i.y., “let’s put on a show” atmosphere.

Here’s a look at the upstairs floor, where D&Q, Koyama, Small Acres and a number of other publishers were located. Last year a couple of publishers were ensconced on that small stage with the blue curtain. I think they missed a bet by not putting someone up there this year.

Here’s another view of the main floor. The show didn’t seem terribly crowded when I first walked in, but it definitely picked up by as the day progressed and it wasn’t long before I was clumsily bumping into people with my canvas bags of comics, as I am wont to do.

The Mighty Spurgeon

Really, I cannot express how great it was to see Tom Spurgeon at the show, especially since he was so seriously ill earlier this year. He’s lost a lot of weight though, and looked healthier than I think I’ve ever seen him. What’s more, he hasn’t lost a bit of his quick wit  and general good humor. Seriously, he looked fantastic; this photo does not really do him justice.

Zack Soto was selling copies of his new and rather spiffy Studygroup Magazine. I’d tell you more but I put down my copy to take this picture and left it at the table. Conclusion: I am a moron.

And here’s Ryan Sands (left) and Johnny Negron, selling copies of their anthologies, the X-rated Thickness and the slightly less X-rated Chameleon. Copies of these were being snapped up fast and I think the latest issue of Chameleon sold out by mid-afternoon. Is it just me or does Negron totally look like a character from his comics?

Here’s a wider view of the basement area. Last year the basement was where the programming was held, but they moved that to another location to make room for more exhibitors this time around.

From left: Frank Santoro, Picturebox publisher (and Comics Journal co-editor) Dan Nadel and Dash Shaw pose with a copy of Kramer’s Ergot 8, another hot item that I believe sold out rather quickly. That’s Gary Panter with the white hair and black shirt way in the background.

And here we see Benjamin Marra, right, with his ladyfriend, Madeleine Bliss, who had her own comic for sale, Scepter Gem, the first chapter of a rather intriguing-looking fantasy epic. Marra, meanwhile was selling copies of the latest issue of Night Business at a fair clip.

Tucker Stone regaled everyone with his sartorial splendor.

This was about as close as I could get to the NoBrow table which was packed with people the entire time (or at least it seemed that way). I really wanted to pick up a copy of Hilda and the Midnight Giant which looked lovely, but my budget wouldn’t allow it, at least for now.

Sarah Glidden acknowledges my presence while Julia Wertz pretends not to notice me. At least I think she was pretending.

Friends have whispered to me about Koch Comics’ warehouse sales and how they were filled with gems and treasures of all kinds. They had a table at the back of the room which allowed me to get a slight taste of their wonders. I picked up an interesting-looking Kitchen Sink anthology comic featuring R.O. Blechman and J.D. King for $1.

Leslie Stein looks a bit sheepish about the latest copy of her ongoing Eye of Majestic Creature, though she swears it’s her best work yet. Are you reading Ms. Stein’s work? Well, you should be.

Sam Henderson ladies and gentlemen!

And what have we here? Why, it’s fellow Robot 6 contributor Matt Seneca, who flew all the way from Los Angeles just to attend this convention. Crazy, man. Regular R6 blogger Sean T. Collins was also in attendance but the one photo I took of him didn’t come out so well (a common occurrence with me — Weegee I’m not).

Ann Koyama refused – steadfastly refused — to have her picture taken, so I nabbed a photo of these canvas bags Koyama Press was selling at the show instead. They had a lot of great looking books at the show, most notably Matthew Forsythe’s Comic Class and Maurice Vellkoop’s The Adventures of Gloria Badcock.

The programming events moved to Union Pool, a bar/concert/hangout space located a few blocks from the church.

Joe “Jog” McCulloch and I checked out Nicole Rudick’s Q&A with the legendary Phoebe Gloeckner, who talked at length about her ongoing project regarding killings down in Juarez, and her attempts to focus on one particular murder and the family it affected. I was fascinated by her difficulty in finding a way to depict this issue and the manner in which she’s gotten to know the victim’s mother and other family members. All in all, it was a great way to close out my time at the Festival.

From noon to 9 p.m. tomorrow the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (or BCGF as it’s more commonly known) will take place at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, 275 North 8th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show, curated by Picturebox, Desert Island and Bill Kartalopolous, has very quickly built up a reputation as being one of the “must-attend” indie shows on the East Coast, and this year promises to be the the most impressive and largest show yet with a murderer’s row of top-flight guests and expanded exhibitors list debuting some killer-looking books. Best of all, the show is free to attend, so

Click on the link below to read a run-down of who will be debuting what, when and where:

Kramer's Ergot 8

• How awesome is this year’s guest list? Awesome enough to not only include the one and only Jack Davis, of Mad and EC fame, but also Chip Kidd, Phoebe Gloeckner, David Mazzucchelli, CF, Brian Ralph, Lisa Hanawalt and John Porcellino.

• Perhaps the most notable debut book this year comes from Picturebox, which will have early copies of Kramer’s Ergot 8. Editor Sammy Harkham will be on hand to sign copies, as will contributors Gary Panter, CF, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, Anya Davidson and Gabrielle Bell. They’ll also have a number of prints for sale, including two rare ones by Rory Hayes, of all people.

• Fantagraphics will be attending the festival for the first time, and have brand spanking new copies of Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture, 500 Portraits by Tony Millionaire, Action! Mystery! Thrills! Great Comic Book Covers 1936-1945 edited by Greg Sadowski and Jason Conquers America by Jason. Signing at their table will be Josh Simmons, Kim Deitch, Dash Shaw, Jack Davis, Michael Kupperman and Al Columbia.

• Drawn & Quarterly won’t be debuting any books, but they will have Brian Ralph, Adrian Tomine, R. Sikoryak, Jillian Tamaki, John Porcellino, Matt Forsythe and Gabrielle Bell (who apparently will be doing a lot of table-hopping).

• Bell will also have a new $1 mini-comic debuting over at the Uncivilized Books table, which you can get for free if you sign up for their mailing list. UB will also have a new issue of True Swamp by Jon Lewis and Bell will be selling portraits for $5 a pop.

• Koyama Press will debut a number of comics at the show, including Comics Class, Rivers Forgotten and The World of Gloria Badcock. Artists on hand include Michael DeForge, Julia Wertz, Maurice Vellekoop, Matt Forsythe, Jeremy Kai and Jordan Crane.

• DeForge also wants you to know that he’ll have two mini-comics at the show, King Trash and Open Country, and that the new issue of the Smoke Signal anthology will feature a collaboration with him and Benjamin Marra. I’d strongly recommend buying anything DeForge has for sale. Marra’s no slouch either, and he’ll have the new, fourth issue of Night Business for sale at his Traditional Comics table.

• DeForge is also one of the contributors to Zack Soto’s Studygroup Magazine anthology, which Soto will be debuting at the show. It looks pretty swell.

• New books at the Domino Books table include Face Man, Spider Monkey, Violence Valley, Here I Am and The Archer. Secret Acres will have a new issue of John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet. AdHouse will have new Ferzan mini by Lamar Abrams. Ryan Cecil Smith will be debuting something called SF Supplementary File, which looks intriguing. Conundrum Press will have a brand-new book from David Collier, Colliers Popular Press. La Mano Press will apparently have early copies of Zak Sally’s Sammy the Mouse book. Sam Henderson will have a spiffy looking new book of gag cartoons. Oh and so much more. See a full list of exhibitors here.

• Programming will be held nearby at Union Pool, 484 Union Avenue #A. If you can only attend one panel I’d probably shoot for either the Q&A with Jack Davis or the talk with Phoebe Gloeckner. There will also be a number of satellite events held in various locations in the surrounding area, which is nice if you can afford to stay longer than a day.

• A number of comics bloggers will also be in attendance, including yours truly. I’ll actually have a mini-comic of my own — the prologue to a lengthy fantasy epic my 10-year-old daughter is working on — that I’ll be handing out for free to a few friends and curious parties. Supplies will be limited, but if you see me at the show feel free to ask for a copy.

Studygroup Magazine

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

(via Tom Spurgeon)

Okay, not exactly — they’ll be shipped from Pittsburgh’s Copacetic Comics. But still, the source of this secret stash of Frank Santoro’s long-out-of-print newspaper-format comic about a young man’s journey through the down-and-out America of the early 20th century was a long-forgotten box found in his dad’s house.

“All the others were destroyed in the fire at my mom’s house. No joke,” Santoro writes of the discovery.

So once this box is gone, so too is your opportunity to read a pretty stunning comic in its original format. Santoro’s visual shifts between realism and impressionism, and what they say about his protagonist Will’s tormented mental state, are a master class in establishing and controlling tone in comics. Order now, but if you miss out, don’t worry — you can always spring for the hardcover edition from PictureBox.

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).

The Body of Work

I suppose on a certain level running through all the loot you nabbed at this or that convention seems a bit like bragging, even if the intention is merely to say, “Hey, here’s some cool comics you should check out.” That being said, it seems like a while since anyone’s done one of those “here’s the stuff I bought” posts, so I thought I’d run down some of the more interesting-looking books I nabbed at SPX this past weekend. Forgive me.

The Body of Work by Kevin Huizenga. In addition to promoting the release of Ganges #4, Huizenga had a couple of mini-comics for sale as well. This one features some of the comics he’s been posting online like Postcard from Fielder.

Color Engineering

Danger Country by Levon Jihanian. This is the first chapter of what feels like a rather ambitious fantasy series about warring factions, done in a spartan, but nicely detailed line. This was nominated for outstanding comic and oustanding mini comic this year, and chapter two is supposed to be released in October. File this under “promising.”

Lizzie’s Tail by Darryl Ayo. Ayo won the Promising New Talent Ignatz Award at the show, and reading this mini-comic, a surreal little jaunt about a woman who goes questing for a necklace, it’s not too hard to see why.

Color Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama. The other big debut book at the Picturebox table. Yokoyama’s Garden has been my favorite book of 2011 so far, so there was no way I was going to pass the chance to nab this collection of color work, most of which seems to have even more of a pop art sensibility than his black and white work. Picturebox also had limited copies of this book available, which looked pretty sweet.

The Naked Heroes by Benjamin Marra. A light goof from Marra, apparently done as a favor for some musician friends, it concerns a tough-as-nails couple that enter an otherwordly bar and end up taking on a two-bodied demon monster and its hellspawn. Lots of blood and violence, as one would expect. At the show, Marra let it be known that he was working on the second issue of Gangsta Rap Posse, the plot of which sounded almost too awesome to be believed.

A Lion in Winter by Jiro Taniguchi. I always try to pick up at least one book at the Fanfare/Ponent Mon table, if only because tracking down their books in stores can be such a tricky proposition (although I should note it has gotten considerably better). This is their latest book, another entry from their top star Taniguichi, although this one, about a young man who attempts to start a career in manga, is apparently his most autobiographical work to date.

Forming

Pope Hats #2 by Ethan Rilly. My comics collection is in complete disarray right now so I can’t look at the first issue for comparision’s sake, but it seems like Rilly’s art has taken a huge leap forward, becoming looser, more assured and more detailed. A nice eurocomics vibe throughout. Look for a more thoughtful, official review to show up sometime in the near future.

Forming by Jesse Moynihan. Another fantasy-style graphic novel, though this tends to lean more towards the mythology side of things, as it deals with a bunch of Biblical/Greek/etc. godlike beings fighting and speaking in a modern idiom. I haven’t had a chance to do more than browse through this, but it certainly seems promising. NoBrow Press did a really nice job with the production here, and I think it’s fair to say it was one of the better looking books at the show. AdHouse had copies of these but they sold out rather quickly on Saturday.

Theories of Everything by Roz Chast. One of the things I like about SPX is how cartoonists outside the traditional indie comics community like Roz Chast and Ann Telnaes  can fit in and be welcomed so easily. As I mentioned in my photo round-up, I’m a rather big Chast fan — honestly, I think she’s the best thing in the magazine these days; certainly the most idiosyncratic — so picking up this chunky “best of” collection of cartoons was kind of a no-brainer.

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.

Garden
by Yuichi Yokoyama
Picturebox, 320 pages, $24.95.

It might seem odd at first glance to describe Yuichi Yokoyama’s work as dynamic, given his minimalist, antiseptic style that edges ever so closely to outright abstraction without ever crossing the line. Yet a close inspection of his work, particularly his latest book, Garden, shows what an utterly apt adjective it is. Nothing of significance ever happens in Yokoyama’s world, at least not in the sense we think of it when talking about narrative. There’s precious little plot per se, no threats or crisis, and no character development to speak of. Yet everything is in constant motion, in constant flux, if not already transforming then ready to be transformed into something else or at least be moved about. No one stands still in Garden, and their actions are depicting in tight close ups, off-kilter worm’s-eye-views or panoramic vistas. He’s Jack Kirby without the bombast or violence.

Garden starts out simply enough: a large group of people (or what passes for people in Yokoyama’s world) find a break in a wall in what is described as a “very good” garden and walk in and start to explore it.

And that’s about it. The build-up comes from the increasingly surreal and complex creations the group stumbles upon. Rivers made of rubber balls and tree planters made out of cars give way to rooms filled with soap bubbles, libraires that contain books that are ten feet tall or a mile wide, and a town set entirely on casters. Who made these objects and what, if any, functional purpose they serve is unimportant. Destinations and revelations are unimportant in Yokoyama’s work and honestly would only spoil the mystery. The discoveries made along the journey is all that matters.

As with Yokoyama’s previous works, New Engineering and Travel, Garden explores Yokoyama’s fascination with not only motion but architecture and landscape, and, more significantly, how mankind and technology can often blend the two in strange and unexpected ways.

Yokoyama also has an obsession with depicting things at odd angles or through strange viewpoints. In Travel it was exemplified by a lengthy sequence that showed the way rain water moved down a window and was reflected on a passenger’s face. In Garden, there are breathtaking sequences involving photos of the cast being projected on giant walls and water surfaces, a seemingly endless hall of mirrors and watching shapes twist and distort as their images are filtered through the afore-mentioned soap bubbles.

Another idiosyncratic aspect of Yokoyama’s comics is that he seems unable or at the very least unwilling to let his characters resemble normal humans. They normally feature instead some sort of bizarre or elaborate headgear. One character has a baseball for a head. Another’s head consists of the nose of an airplane. Still anothers’ seems to be a honeycomb and so on. Throughout the book, there’s a character who constantly takes pictures of the surroundings (an act which does aid have some muted significance at the end), but at about the halfway point I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t really taking picctures, but that his head design was simply that of a guy taking pictures if you see what I mean. Such are the directions your thought processes take when reading a book of this nature.

This is the longest of Yokoyama’s works that’s been translated in English so far and also the one with the most amount of dialogue (only a few stories from New Engineering had any dialogue). It’s purely functional, however, as the characters merely comment to each other about the objects they encounter, uttering statements like “What is this place?” and “Let’s go in here.” But remember: the characters are not there to show personality or depth or growth. They are there to explore, observe and report.

It’s become a cliche to describe a cartoonist as original, but Yokoyama truly stands apart from his peers, both here and in his native country of Japan. At first glance Garden may seem foreboding, stand-offish or perhaps even downright dull. It’s anything but however. In fact, I wish mainstream comics had a tenth of the imagination and energy Yokoyama exhibits here. Despite it’s placid appearance, Garden is a one heck of a thrilling book.

Disclaimer: Picturebox publisher Dan Nadel also happens to be one of the editors at the new Comics Journal website, where I am an occasional contributor.

Boom: a page from Puke Force by Brian Chippendale

I hope my illustrious colleague Brigid Alverson doesn’t mind me elbowing my way into her regular webcomics spotlight, but with the announcement the other day that Brian Chippendale is placing his eye-popping, rib-tickling webcomic Puke Force on hiatus for a few months, I simply had to point everyone in the strip’s direction.

Chippendale, the cartoonist behind last year’s acclaimed doorstop of an action-buddy-scifi comedy If ‘n Oof, is a co-founder of the influential Providence art/comics/printmaking/music/etc. collective Fort Thunder and the drummer for the band Lightning Bolt (which if you’re not familiar with it is sort of like if noise violation citations from your local law enforcement authority had an elemental, like how plants have Swamp Thing). His comics are famous/infamous for their “snake-style” layout: You read each page one row at a time, first from left to right, and then from right to left, and so on, zigzagging back and forth like a snake and allowing him to draw you through his complex physical environments with ease and choreograph action and slapstick alike with precision timing. Chippendale’s art is rough-edged and hyperdense, his characters look like little mutant and monster refugees from your favorite forgotten action-figure line, and his wild-and-wooly sci-fi stories may seem simply crazy or goofy at first glance, but in truth deal with the political, emotional, and philosophical ramifications of urban life today with sophistication and laugh-out-loud wit. Puke Force is no exception: In its installments you’ll find sardonically hilarious takes on everything from Twitter to terrorism. Best of all, you can catch up on all six months’ worth of material on the PictureBox site and be ready for Chippendale’s triumphant return in late summer/early fall. I know the visuals and layouts can be challenging, if not headache-inducing, at first, but stick with it and you’ll experience a truly singular comics sensation.

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 plot of Garden is pure simplicity: A crowd of would-be sightseers (all wearing costumes and headgear that make them look like a lost Kinnikuman toyline) sneak into a sprawling “garden” filled with inexplicable, incredible sights and structures, from a river of rubber balls and a forest filled with disassembled cars to mountains made of glass and a massive hallway filled with floating bubbles. The endlessly chatty characters slowly walk, climb, swing, float, and otherwise make their way through the environments and obstacles, constantly narrating as they go. (“Now what could this be?” “It’s a field of boulders.” “All the boulders have ladders on them.” “Let’s climb it.”) By explaining exactly what’s happening at all times, the little explorers make following Yokoyama’s often kaleidoscopic art a breeze, freeing you to simply marvel at the sheer scale and scope of his imagination (and chuckle at the the crazy stuff the characters encounter). The overall effect is like being strapped in for a ride through some Bizarro Disney World where every single attraction is as colossal and otherworldly as the big Spaceship Earth golfball, as fast as Space Mountain, and as dizzying as the Mad Tea Party.

Courtesy of PictureBox, Robot 6 is pleased to present this exclusive eight-page preview of Garden, and an interview with Yokoyama about the book, in which the cartoonist gives us some fascinating answers — about his love for the collision between the natural and artificial, his goal in including all that dialogue, and why size matters — and raises just as many compelling questions.

(Special thanks to Dan Nadel and Yu Marooka for their help in facilitating and translating this interview respectively.)

Sean T. Collins: The biggest change in Garden from your previous books is the constant dialogue. The characters narrate their experiences in the garden, telling us exactly what they’re seeing and doing. To me, this created a sense of extreme focus: It forced me to concentrate fully on what was happening in each panel, rather than requiring me to interpret events my own way. Was that your goal in using all this dialogue?

Yuichi Yokoyama: During the events of Garden, that’s the only thing that characters can do — moving around it, taking photos, expressing their view, delivering their opinion. In Garden, I would like to draw scenes where the humor comes from how the characters talk and express their own view. Of course, such dialogue by the characters helps readers understand the story easier.

That’s true! I found it much easier to follow what was happening, thanks to the characters’ explanations; this made reading the comic much less stressful and much more enjoyable. I felt like I was going along for the ride with them. Did you have the readers’ understanding in mind when you wrote the dialogue?

In my recent stories, I always try to make dialogue and explanation as simple as possible, so that readers can understand easily. Although I am not sure if my plan is successful or not.

I think it worked perfectly. To talk about your older work for a moment, in New Engineering, you showed us man-made versions of nature — giant machines building mountains and fields and rivers and so on. You did this in Garden as well, but you also showed us the reverse: Man-made objects becoming integrated into nature, like the cars buried in the forest, or household items floating down a river. Those features of the garden seem like a different approach to the tension between the natural world and humanity’s desire to exercise control over it than, for example, the fake mountain ranges and lakes…

As you say, I can say that Garden is the story in which I showed my desire for the natural world. I enjoy seeing the natural world mixed with artificial things made by humans much more than just seeing the natural world itself.

When in your life did you first realize this? For me, seeing big treehouses for children was the moment when I realized how fascinating the mix of natural and artificial could be.

I can’t identify when, but I was impressed by seeing dams and construction sites when I was younger.

At times, Garden reminded me of going to a theme park and playing around on rides and exhibits. For example, when the characters ride up the mountain on a moving block of stone, or climb up trees and slide down poles to get from place to place, it made me think of Disney World, almost. And Disney World itself is a Garden-like environment, where people created a vast artificial playground in what was otherwise wilderness. Were amusement parks or theme parks on your mind when you created Garden?

No, I never had such idea or images when I created Garden.

In addition to the kinds of natural and artificial features we’re accustomed to seeing in large scale — mountains and bodies of water, buildings and walls — Garden also featured photographs, books, and household furniture used in such quantities that they became massive features of the landscape themselves. Why did you choose to make these intimate objects so monumental and intimidating?

I didn’t intend to choose to make them so monumental and intimidating, but I would like to enjoy such common and familiar objects by giving them other different meanings of existence. Also, I always yearn for large scales, massive spaces, and huge objects.

I can tell! Actually, the sheer size of all the places explored by the characters left me wondering who or what could possibly have constructed them all. Do you ever give any thought to the architects and builders who create these spaces within the story, or do they simply exist?

They simply exist. I don’t have any background on who created them.

Finally, I noticed that the characters ask many questions that remain unanswered. They never find out why the objects they encounter were built the way they were. They never find out about the mysterious person who seems to have arrived at some of these locations before they did. They never find out what lies along the paths they don’t take. Are there answers to these mysteries?

There never are answers to these mysteries, so I would like readers enjoy imagining by him(her)self. These objects and events seem to be artificial, but they aren’t made for human use. There are no intellectual explanations for them.

I think it’s in our nature to seek explanations in fiction, but so much of your work seems designed to be beyond explanation. What are you trying to accomplish by denying readers these answers?

I believe that it’s more natural that everything doesn’t have explanations,
and I think it’s unnatural to give readers rational explanations for everything.

—

Garden
Release Date: 5/4/2011
Writer : Yuichi Yokoyama
Artist : Yuichi Yokoyama
Manufacturer / Publisher : Picturebox
Diamond code : MAR111221
ISBN : 9780982632710

A group of friends attempts to enter a garden just beyond a wall. When they succeed, the garden they finally enter is no Eden, but rather a massive landscape of machines, geometric forms, and all manner of nonorganic objects. In Japanese comic-book artist Yuichi Yokoyama’s newest and longest work, his characters become enmeshed in a fantastic wonderland of distorted mirrors, photographic equipment, massive libraries and complex pathways, thus yielding a reflection on the myriad ways human interact with the complex mechanical world we have created.

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.

Batgirl #17

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

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

*****

Brigid Alverson

Pooches of Power!

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

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

Sean T. Collins

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

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

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

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

Mould Map #1

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

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

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

Carla Hoffman

Daredevil: Reborn #1, by Jock

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

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

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

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

Chris Mautner

Networked

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

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

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

Tim O’Shea

Superman #707

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

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

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

Doug Zawisza

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

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

Secret Zoo

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

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

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

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

Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals

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

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

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

The Man Who Grew His Beard

Like you, I’m all a-twitter about the release of those Carl Barks books from Fantagraphics later this year. (you are a-twitter, aren’t you?) Not to mention Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy, Chester Brown’s Paying for It and that Grant Morrison Multiversity mini-series. And, hey, maybe we’ll even see the first volume of Pogo! Yep, by any yardstick, it seems like 2011 promises to be another year of really great releases.

But, even beyond the big-name titles and huge company crossovers, there are a number of comics and graphic novels arriving in stores this year that warrant further attention. They may have not have garnered much of your notice, since they’re not attached to a well-known creator or license or come from overseas. Here then, are six such books, all due this year, all of which I’m willing to bet good money aren’t on your radar, but should be. As usual, be sure to note any books you’re excited about but haven’t generated much buzz yet in the comments section.

1) The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics). If you’ve had the lucky opportunity to read Schrauwen’s My Boy, or perused his work in the anthology Mome, then you’ll know this Belgian artist is the real deal — a true, utterly unique and frequently inspired cartoonist who draws upon century-old cartooning styles (McCay, Outcault) to create something contemporary and frequently bizarre. This is the first American collection of Schrauwen’s work and I’m really excited to see him reach a potentially wider audience. Actually, I’m just excited to read more of an artist I’ve only been able to catch in dribs and drabs.

Psychiatric Tales

2) The Adventures of Herge written by Jose-Louis Bocquet and Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Stanislas Barthélémy (Drawn and Quarterly). Not to be confused with the biography by Michael Farr, this is a somewhat fictionalized, truncated account of the Tintin creator’s life, ably illustrated in the ligne claire style by Stanislas (as he’s usually known). It was originally translated for one of the final volumes of the late, lamented Drawn & Quarterly anthology and, as a big Tintin fan, it’s nice to see it be collected into a book. I don’t know if there’s more material to the book than what D&Q initially released several years ago, but even if that’s not the case, I’m more than happy to become familiar with this book once again.

3) Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham (Bloomsbury). I’ve really enjoyed reading Cunningham’s thoughtful look at different types of mental illnesses and his experiences working in a psychiatric ward and am very happy to see them collected in book form and released on these shores. I expect this to make a lot of “best of” lists come December.

4) Lychee Light Club by Usamaru Furuya (Vertical). North America hasn’t seen much of Furuya’s work translated in English, apart from the release of Short Cuts a number of years back. That drought seems to finally be ending. Viz released the first volume of Genkaku Picasso last year, and now Vertical plans to bring the one-volume Light Club to our shores. The book is about a group of nerdy boys who create a powerful machine to help them find the most beautiful women in the world, only to have everything go wrong. It all sounds delightfully subversive and strange, which is how I like it.

Lucille

5) Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme (Top Shelf). If you follow the Eurocomics scene at all (and no points against you if you don’t), this title may have caught your eye, as it won the René Goscinny Prize and the Angoulême Essential Award back in 2006 or so. It’s about two psychologically damaged people who bond and run away across Europe together. Eurocomics expert Bart Beaty wasn’t too crazy about it, but I’m intrigued enough by the concept and small samples I’ve found online to want to check the book out when it arrives in stores in April.

6) Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama (Picturebox). Yokoyama’s no stranger to American readers. His 2008 book Travel won a good deal of acclaim and interest among a certain segment of alt-comix and alt-manga fans. Still, I was completely unaware that PictureBox was going to release his latest 328-page masterpiece until publisher Dan Nadel mentioned it in our year-end round-up. Do I have any idea what this book is about? Not a clue. Am I still going to get it anyway the day it hits stores? Oh yeah.

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.

from Powr Mastrs 3 by CF

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

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

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

And here he is on If ‘n Oof:

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

And it succeeds, emphatically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much of it was drawn at that tiny size?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first thing I thought there was Yuichi Yokoyama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughs]

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

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

Right! Cheesy not in a bad way.

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

from Ninja

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

[Laughs]

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

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

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

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

Yeah. The everyman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Ware freaks me out! [Laughs]

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

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

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

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

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