Joe Sacco, Rock and Roll, and the Current Comics Publishing Landscape

Natalie Nichols' profile of the cartoonist Joe Sacco through his most recent collection But I Like It is smart and revealing. It looks into Sacco's days making comics on rock and roll and manages to contrast that work with his later work as a cartoon journalist but also dissects the rock comics in question on their own merits. Just getting the George Orwell comparison out of Sacco would have been worth a feature article, as far as I'm concerned.

The article and Sacco's book point to elements of the current publishing scene worth noting as well. With this Sacco book and the forthcoming Love & Rockets re-releases, Fantagraphics seems to be letting changes in the market influence how they repackage the work of various artists for new audiences, which seems a smart way to go and a far cry from the "let's publish it and see if anyone shows up" landscape of years ago. Also, the article notes that this collection features comics from when Sacco was doing his solo book Yahoo, a reminder of how important it was for a lot of the current creme of the art-comics crop to have solo books in which to try new approaches and follow various muses while at the same time producing a lot of pages.

Steven Grant notes the Crumb influences in his positive review of the same book.
 
posted 6:14 am PST | Permalink
 

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