The Comics Reporter

March 16, 2010

Happy 49th Birthday, Todd McFarlane!

posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, Steve Lafler!

posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink

Happy 33rd Birthday, Sam Humphries!

posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink

Quick hits
Craft
Tim Seeley Designs
How Not To Write Comics
Sean Phillips Makes A Bookplate

Exhibits/Events
Go See Cameron Stewart
Are You Ready To Rumble?
Go See Kazu Kibuishi In Istanbul

History
Boobs
Great Simon And Kirby Ad
JJJ, Morgan Edge Drink-Up
I Hope Blastaar Made The List
Archie Wins The Maggie Award 1958
Dan Dreams Of Heavy Metal Days Past

Interviews/Profiles
CBR: Greg Pak
Pop: Paul Rivoche
TCJ: Tom Kaczynski
Newsarama: Tony Daniel
Big Shiny Robot: Mark Millar
Big Shiny Robot: John Romita
Talking Comics With Tim: Jimmy Palmiotti

Not Comics
More Random Japan
But The Berlin Wall Was Built In A Weekend

Publishing
Tom Brevoort On Omega
Mike Manley Begins On Judge Parker

Reviews
Paul O'Brien: Various
Rob Clough: Graylight
Sean T. Collins: Various
Rich Kreiner: Meanwhile...
KC Carlson: Avengers Forever
Katherine Dacey: Ristorante Paradisio
Johanna Draper Carlson: Lola: A Ghost Story
Greg McElhatton: Marvelous Land Of Oz #1-4
Johanna Draper Carlson: The Return Of Kind Doug

March 15, 2010

CR Review: Map Of My Heart: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the King Cat Zine

Creator: John Porcellino
Publishing Information: D&Q, softcover, 304 pages, October 2009, $24.95
Ordering Numbers: 9781897299937 (ISBN13), 1897299931 (ISBN10)

I'd put off reading Map Of My Heart for a long while, which makes no sense at all as I'm a fiend for John Porcellino's work. While I'm not the first person to suggest his importance within the art form, I'm happy to extol his virtues with as much force as anyone out there. Porcellino employs an unadorned art style that suggests a picture of our world with as much clarity as any highly-rendered chops-having traditional master of the comics form might muster. He has a fine, intuitive skill set when it comes to work with prose as well. His best comics provide graceful evocations of moments that only Porcellino might have thought worth exploring in the first place. Beyond the comics with its pages, a regular, self-published issue of King-Cat Comics and Stories is one of comics' perfect marriages of form and function. The surge of joy I feel when I come across a new one is hard to explain. I subliminally ascribe a specific color to the white of the copy paper Porcellino uses to make his minis, which is nuts. They make an impression on me above what seems physically possible.

I realized a couple of things plowing into this anniversary-themed collection. The first is that more than any other comics series I can't tie my consumption of King-Cat into any one way of buying it or even any one general kind of purchase. I've received the minis each and every way a comics fan might get their hands on a comic book: freebies, comic shops, convention sales, mail-order, trades, area bookstores -- which makes my relationship to the work feel a lot more like the ones I have with prose authors or even creative friends with whom I trade letters, phone calls and e-mails. The second is that my reading of Porcellino's work has been greatly shaped by the autobiographically-tinged works I first encountered when I started paying focused attention to his work. Some of those comics make up the early parts of this collection, but they don't dominate; that realization was a key to grasping this volume's unique value.

The great thing that Map Of My Heart does is shake the reader out of preconceptions shaped by Porcellino's long career -- for instance, in my case, that King-Cat is about sublimely well-observed autobiography more than it is about the work where Porcellino encounters nature more than it is about the Buddhist strips more than it is about the letters pages and single drawings. It may take time and effort for many to delve into this new book with all of that material re-presented. I fought an urge to put the book down for not getting to the essential stories quickly enough, and even tried skipping over the letters. If you manage to persevere, I think you'll find the work newly rewarding. Because it's a collection rather than a run of comics, Porcellino is able to provide a few lines long-after-the-fact text commentary in a way that pushes forward yet another way to see the work (his feelings about his marriages, for one, I thought touching and raw). The cumulative effect is remarkably different than the stand-alone. The autobiographical strips read much less like a confident artist holding forth than a man struggling with a certain kind of memory; the Buddhist strips have a yearning quality I didn't see before; the nature strips can be seen in part as a retreat by the artist from a modern world that causes him spiritual and, through an ear sensitivity, actual physical pain. You can even see all the component parts, buttressed by the occasional story moment where he talks about work on King-Cat, as signs of creative restlessness or even doubt. Without the months in-between new issues, Map Of My Heart may provide a greater appreciation for Porcellino as an artist not only reporting on his world but actively reshaping it in an equivalent manner to way he whispers through so many of his comics narrative. I'm grateful for that second look. I did not imagine one existed.

posted 4:00 pm PST | Permalink

The Other Kirby Rights Shoe Drops

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Brazilian Cartoonist Glauco And His Son Killed During Friday Home Invasion

The popular cartoonist Glauco Villas Boas, who worked under the single name Glauco, was killed early on Friday in his Osasco, Brazil home by an unknown pair of assailant. Although rumors are flying and the story is developing in ways that could render this sentence obsolete upon my typing it, the shooting of the esteemed Brazilian cartoonist and illustrator was at least initially investigated as a home invasion with robbery and potentially kidnapping as a potential outcome. Glauco's 25-year-old son Raoni Boas, visiting from college, was also killed. Glauco was shot four times at close range. Both men died in a local hospital. A family lawyer told the press that the crime happened after midnight and describe Glauco's widow as being in shock.

Glauco has been a fixture in Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de Sao Paulo, since the late 1970s.

Rob Tornoe had the first write-up in English that I've seen. Church services and a twin burial are among plans. A proper obituary should follow in the next couple of days, at which point there will hopefully be more news on the story itself.

posted 11:35 am PST | Permalink

Your 2010 Schulz Award Winner

Christopher Sharron of Kent State's Daily Kent Stater has won the Charles M. Schulz Award given to the year's best college cartoonist as part of the Scripps Howard Journalism Awards. he will received $10,000. Finalists were Bill Richard of the University of Georgia and Jake Thompson of the University of Illinois. According to the award citation, Sharron's submission was filled with a variety of different cartoons. This mini-biography of Sharron shows he's already well-ensconced in some traditional editorial cartooning circles and awards cycles. Past winners include Barry Deutsch and Frank Cho.

posted 11:05 am PST | Permalink

Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

* if someone out there isn't typing a screenplay right now about dueling soccer moms turned competitive jihadists, I'll eat my hat. This matter of blond Americans teasing with movements that are seeking out artists like Lars Wilks is only tangentially related to the original Danish Cartoons Controversy, but boy is it odd.

* speaking of Wilks, the newspapers that reprinted his cartoon as news of an assassination plot was revealed are circling the wagons. The thought that they would print the cartoons but not run them on-line is interesting.

* the reaction to Terry Mosher's latest cartoon shows just how strangulated the controversy has made just about any cartoon expression of an issue regarding Muslim culture, no matter what you think of this one.

posted 11:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Fistaszki

posted 10:30 am PST | Permalink

Your 2010 Scripps Howard Winner

According to a report in industry bible Editor & Publisher, Alex Hunter of The Washington Times's "Hunter's Big Picture" feature won the $10,000 prize and trophy going to a Scripps Howard Journalism Award winner, for the editorial cartooning category. Awards powerhouse Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the Finalist in the category. The cash awards will go out to the winners at an April 23 dinner in Tampa hosted by the EW Scripps Company.

Alex Hunter is a previous Finalist for the award, and his features for the Times combine text, illustration, sequential cartooning and straight-up single-image editorial cartooning. You can access Hunter's work through this link -- I tried going at it from the feature name, but I got lost. I'm not seeing any "Hunter's Big Picture" offerings after the end of last year, but that site isn't exactly ease-of-use, either. Can anyone out there confirm that it's ongoing?

posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: 1970s Kenner Comics Ads

posted 9:30 am PST | Permalink

Your We Could And Then We Couldn't Buy Huge Books On-Line Super-Cheap For A Few Days Update

* one thing that occurs throughout this period of inordinate attention paid to Amazon.com's inability to process code from Diamond and the cheap books that were offered and then not-offered is that there's probably a place for a Ben's Bargains-type site related to comics or, more generally, to geek stuff. I would add such a site to my RSS feed, and I don't buy a lot of stuff.

* publishers Chris Pitzer (AdHouse) and Dan Vado (SLG) offer up responses to the stripping of buy buttons while Amazon sees to everything being fixed. What's interesting is that between the two of them you get a full range of reactions or at least pretty close to one.

* this article at the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com suggests that the comeback in terms of fully functioning listings may take a bit longer than initially expected, and that the full impact of the temporary sales rush has yet to be fully figured out. Fair enough.

posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Comic Book Conspiracy

posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink

These Are The Days Of Our Lives

E&P has a summary of the latest major report on the state of the newspaper, long-time host to the comic strip expression of the comics art form and, if you've been paying attention to the mass firings and dire news spinning off of that industry on an almost daily basis, a crumbling American institution.

Although the report comes with the incredibly goofy-sounding name "Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2010," the message is clear: advertising is collapsing, and newspapers aren't really in a place to make up that advertising revenue loss either via the pursuit of new media opportunities or by making a stand based on the quality of individual publications. I haven't really seen any article state it as plainly as this one, but having just spent a weekend where the only TV commercials seem to star the UPS Cartoonist-Guy, Ellen Page or two children deciding not to cheat on their pregnant teacher, I can't imagine how things have constricted in the newspaper field. Just the thought of a wounded American auto industry seems to me to have obviously grim consequences for newsprint advertising.

As for the human cost, newsrooms have shrunk by 27 percent in the last few years, the report said. I've long said I don't think newsrooms were as lean and productive as they could be, particularly considering the changes in technology available to journalists, but even I'm not grumpy enough to suggest they were 1/3 over-staffed.

How all of this might have an effect on content providers like the strip syndicates seems pretty straight-forward: it definitely might. It's worth noting I haven't heard about a 27 percent shrink in the comics offerings over that same time period, although as stated in the recent past I think strip comics could start to feel it this year a bit more dramatically as things settle down at papers and cuts are still necessary somewhere in the overall package. The details, I imagine, of how thing develop from this point will drive a lot of what happens to specific sectors like comics.

posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Berni Wrightson Miscellanea

posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink

Collective Memory: ECCC 2010

*****
*****

posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink

Batwoman Run In Detective Comics Wins GLAAD Media Award Against Limited Competition

Greg Rucka and JH Williams III are formidable comics creators and their run of Batwoman adventures in the comic book Detective Comics demands to be taken seriously. Moreover, having a character with the word "Bat" in it and making that character gay has brought with it a lot of a certain kind of attention that simply wouldn't be there for a new character in some translated manga or an indy-alt comic of note. That said, that run of comics winning a GLAAD Media Award gets cut into a bit by the fact that those awards seem to by default define comics expression as mainstream genre books that work against some sort of pop-culture expectations, expectations that may be more shameful for their existence than the publication of countervailing examples is brave.

posted 6:45 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: World In A Bottle

posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dick Tracy #131-132

posted 4:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Hit Comics #41

posted 4:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Wonderworld Comics #6

posted 4:00 am PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Ralph Mayo Story

posted 4:00 am PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* is it my imagination or did Wizard finally finish this product-focused site re-launch?

* Neilalien is in search of comic books' first true interracial kiss, and rounds up a bunch of candidates. I don't know why he punks on the Killraven one; maybe it's because the post-apocalyptic setting softens the political/cultural ramifications? The Killraven one was memorable to many Marvel fans of that era not so much because of the kissing but because it was one of only a dozen or so Don McGregor panels from the 1970s that didn't have at least 300 words in it. (I kid because I love.) Also, minus ten nerd points if you thought in terms of Howard The Duck and Beverly Switzer, even for three seconds, during any part of this paragraph or Neilalien's post.

* Ted Rall's newsletter reminded me that his Kickstarter effort to have various readers and supporters (and, perhaps, enemies) send him back to Afghanistan has raised (as of Sunday evening at 9:00 PM ET) $11,005 of the $25,000 necessary. I don't plan on writing about a whole of kickstarter projects with a comics hook, but I wrote about that one before I decided it wasn't always going to be appropriate, and it's one of the more interesting projects attempting to be funded that way.

* someone told me this eruption of nerd outrage over Hulk wielding Thor's hammer is highly amusing. I haven't read it yet. I guess another way to look at this kind of thing is that it's a failure of the editor, for whom some believe the partial job description is to maintain continuity issues for long-time fans and the health of the franchise. I like to think if I were writing comics I'd be trying to do wacky stuff all the time that probably would need to be voted down by a team of editors flying around in a UFO like the Superman Revenge Squad. Like could Henry Pym combine all of his various potions and gasses and do battle against something like Krakoa as a giant, raging half-man half-ant? Because that would be cool.

* I like this Scott Kurtz print he prepared for the Emerald City Con. It's funny to me that the Dick's signage tends to come in just behind the Space Needle as a recognizably iconic Seattle landmark for designs like this one. As the convention calendar settles down and as professional kind of settle into a routine concerning these shows, the ability they'll have to do specialty items and the like should increase.

* David sued Marvel?

* not comics: I will never in 100 years understand the costume impulse. On the other hand, "dude in a dress" was a fixture of the Thursday art walks for the last three years I lived there, so I guess this sort of makes sense.

* finally, the writer and comics historian Mark Evanier talks Violet Barclay, and gets into the gossip aspects of her legacy, notable because so little such gossip of that kind has ever made the rounds and those stories definitely made the rounds.

posted 3:00 am PST | Permalink

Happy 73rd Birthday, Dan Adkins!

posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink

Daily Blog Archives
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009

Full Archives