The Relevant Panels

'11, pt 4

2011-12-22T23:14:00.003-05:00

Chimo by David Collier. All for the tone. (Reminds me why I like Dan Zettwoch too.) I also recommend this essay from The McGill Daily about the book's asymptotes: judgement, family life.

Cat dick

2011-12-13T20:38:00.001-05:00

Surely there must be an interesting way to engage with the work of Kim Deitch. I have not found this way. Skewing the Fleischer era is thin stuff. Anyway, this page from A Shroud for Waldo (1992) is pretty madcap and lands on a fine gag.

'11, pt 3

2011-12-11T17:39:00.001-05:00

Ganges #4 by Kevin H.: modest and cerebral. The Nicholson Baker of comics? That might mean something to someone somewhere.

ST OP!

2011-12-09T20:40:00.001-05:00

Artistically competent, mostly harmless, and occasionally insightful. I stayed away from these Paul books because of their titles: Paul Goes to the Store or whatever. But I was in the right mood for the one where he moves out.

'11, pt 2

2011-12-04T11:29:00.001-05:00

I won't mention that I keep stumbling upon this new genre of comics about teaching comics. Woof. But this Brunetti piece, "Mr. Peach," is one smart single page. Nothing like breaking up a New Yorker with colorful despair. You can use despair wisely instead of isolating it in foolproof packages.

Shoes wisely

2011-12-04T11:02:00.001-05:00

Mostly unfortunate that Bob Mankoff's perfect cartoon (by Chon Day) is about killing a wife. Poe lives on. I appreciate Mankoff's reading of the black shoes, but boy the shame.

'11, pt 1

2011-12-03T20:10:00.001-05:00

Slowly letting trickle out the year's neat list.

Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil. The book plays with iconography in fun ways, and precariously walks the line between parsimony and difficulty.

One thing follows

2011-11-30T00:20:00.005-05:00

Lovely preview page from C.F.'s Sediment at Picturebox.

So this is a Tumblr now.

A resurrection

2011-11-26T12:33:00.005-05:00

DC, AT, S.

Best of 2010: special mention

2010-12-22T19:20:00.019-05:00

Daytripper by Ba and Moon. To be honest, I could have used a lot more humor. That aside, it struck me as a sort of Little Nemo in Slumberland homage. McCay's single page structure is dilated over the course of an issue: a pattern of ever-increasing nearness (to a goal, a girl, a revelation) followed by spectacular/mundane catastrophe at the end (imagine if every Nemo or Rarebit Fiend strip ended with an obituary). The series plays out way more optimistically than McCay's haunted pattern. Above is only the first page of issue two and is the easiest formal echo of McCay: bottom right wake up, orders to go and find the dream girl.

For kicks, here's the bottom of a 1906 Nemo strip, which I got from the great Comic Strip Library. Mundane catastrophe and wake up. But, daddy, I wanna be the princess' new playmate!

Best of 2010: finds, part three

2010-12-19T11:12:00.021-05:00

From Pascal Doury's "Paul" from RAW volume 2 issue 1 from Rust Belt Books in Buffalo. Certainly the most hectic thing.

Best of 2010: finds, part two

2010-12-18T17:42:00.016-05:00

R. O. Blechman, more Blechman, his Book of Jonah.

Just before the whale.

Best of 2010: finds

2010-12-14T22:54:00.040-05:00

Ethyl Corporation ad from The Saturday Evening Post, May 22, 1944. O, "oceans of gasoline," you are lackadaisical poetry and environmental degradation rolled into one. You could learn a little something, CAPP ads.

Bought outside Humboldt University in Berlin this summer: U-Comix Sonderband 28 von Rick Geary from 1980. Looks like it's one of Geary's earliest collections of comics, reprinted and translated (I assume translated -- he's from Missouri). A forty page meditation called "Television" mixes ornate and grotesque studies of tv's architecture, attractiveness, culture, and solitude. Way better than Batman Forever's mid-nineties brain suction tv parody thing.

Best of 2010: misc

2010-12-12T16:17:00.016-05:00

Kate Beaton, "Great Gatsbys": rest of the series here.

Gabrielle Bell, "How I Make My Comics": full strip here.

Dan Zettwoch, "Gets Cute!" (among others).

Best of 2010

2010-12-12T15:34:00.030-05:00

Jim Woodring, Weathercraft: at last, comics free of bland words.

Brendan McCarthy, Spider-Man: Fever: could have been another Weathercraft.

Naoki Urasawa, Pluto volumes 1-8: the simple question of robot or human? robot or human or robot or human orobotorhumanorobotor...

James Sturm, Market Day: best two pages all year.

Grant Morrison, Batman & Robin 13-16, Return of Bruce Wayne 5-6, and Batman, Inc 1: Morrison as Descartes, breaking down all that's false and building up what's clear and distinct.

What's That?!

2010-08-16T00:34:00.009-04:00

(The Book of Mr. Natural. Crumb's.) Clearly I'm sabotaging this enterprise. One a month. But there is hope on the horizon. Unspecified hope!

The Cards

2010-07-21T22:42:00.006-04:00

R.I.P. (Art by Ty Templeton.)

My Enjoyment of the Beautiful P-worded On

2010-06-07T16:51:00.005-04:00

(From James Sturm's Market Day.)

Self-P, part eight

2010-05-25T19:02:00.001-04:00

Self-P, part seven

2010-05-25T09:49:00.026-04:00

Black hole: artistperson uses two mirrors to see herself. Artistperson blocks herself (the black -- well, black to us -- back of the hand mirror) and triangulates herself (panel three -- but also in panel five when the hand mirror is put down and artistperson's friend Marci is the third -- but, wait a second, artistBurns is also there...). Artistperson has to spread herself thin to get at herself: "It was too much. Everything was suddenly too much."

Self-P, part six

2010-05-24T12:43:00.008-04:00

Charles Burns. Black Hole. Charles Burns.

Powr

2010-05-21T02:36:00.006-04:00

CF's Powr Mastrs Vol 1 reads like nothing else. High praise.

Print

2010-05-20T21:39:00.003-04:00

More on the year 1988 soon. (Image from Arlen Schumer.)

Self-P, part five

2010-05-17T19:20:00.013-04:00

Plump ironies: John Stanley's Judy Junior bosses herself into a self-portrait after she fails to compose a self-portrait of Jimmy Fuzzi.

Relevant Page

2010-05-12T10:12:00.025-04:00

Can't believe I'm stooping to this intro. In a tweet from April 3, I wrote, "Unbelievable: reading a comic that doesn't have sex, tits, drugs, swears, ennui, violence, or superheroes. No, wait, there's a fuck."

I was kidding about the disruptive fuck; that's just a punchline fuck.

My archival tweet refers to my elated discovery of Dan Zettwoch's "Spirit Duplicator" comics in The Best American Comics 2009. Simply by virtue of his choice of subject matter -- fictional church bulletins across decades -- Zettwoch ensures that the precious and predictable litany of North American comic virtues goes untouched.

Thank God.

Relevant Panels

2010-05-10T08:13:00.006-04:00

The Best American Comics 2009: Tim Hensley, Gary Panter, Kevin Huizenga, Kaz.

Self-P, part four

2010-05-03T21:40:00.055-04:00

Case in point: Dan Clowes' self-portrait is the second-to-last component of his new book Wilson. Meta-Clowes writes, "He finds it uncomfortable to hand-letter information about himself in the third person but feels the need to fill this space with a block of text for design purposes." Exactly: need and design.

Douglas Wolk notes, "Paul Gravett observed that 'Wilson' is a partial anagram of Daniel Clowes (like 'Enid Coleslaw' from Ghost World)--maybe this is some kind of nastily refracted self-portrait, and in fact the final images we see of Wilson are very close to Clowes' actual self-portrait a few pages later" (via Techland). The image above teases loose continuity with the comic vignettes (he's like his character) and subsequently teases loose correspondence with real life Clowes (his character's like him).

This publishing necessity, however, makes me wary of both because the bio becomes a new focal point for sabotaging sincerity. Even though it's jokey, it does exactly what it needs to do: dates, location, family, works, this work. The midsection of humor attests to the fact that we the audience love Clowes' sensibility, that we will follow Clowes anywhere, and more importantly that peevish Wilson, however Clowesian he may be, is but a temporary manifestation of our beloved clown Clowes. Long live the string-puller, no matter how short-lived the pulled was.

Self-P, part three

2010-04-15T10:59:00.061-04:00

From the copy to Omar Calabrese's Artists' Self-Portraits:

"At first a self-portrait was hidden in a narrative painting: an artist would paint his image as part of a crowd scene, for example, or as a mythological figure. On the other extreme, once the genre was accepted, it was practiced by some artists—Rembrandt, van Gogh, Munch, and Dali, for instance—as almost an obsession."
--
For these comic book book jackets, hiding is not an option. These artists, no matter what measure of control they assert in their portraits, are winners in the publishing world: a-mythological, unflayed, nowhere near a crowd. The book precedes the self-portrait; the self-portrait is the book's penultimate manifestation. Joe Schmoe gets no. Zinesters give only the ghostly fingers of their email addresses. Drawing obsessive autobiography is perhaps the compromise, the build-up, but the surrogate self as a narrative subject opposes the typical self-portrait. Crumb and Spiegelman have the obsession, and have achieved both surrogate and self. Joe Sacco's obsession, however, netted him a real life photo to bolster his real life reporter credentials.
--Ho ho: Norman Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait (from Autoritratti).

Self-P, part two

2010-04-08T20:33:00.019-04:00

-artist with tools (David B. at drawing table)

-artist with accoutrements (Lynda Barry with some animals and her own creation Beat Poodle Fred Milton; Lynda Barry in Eden)

-artist descriptive, r-e-a-l-i-s-t-i-c, non-ironic (Crumb); yet, also artist iconic (older Crumb still recognizably Crumb)

-artist styled as character, brought into characterworld (doglike Jason and Renaissance Sikoryak, but also Barry and B.)

-artist all of the above (Spiegelman on the Maus flap)

Self-Portrait in a Comicvex Mirror

2010-04-05T11:25:00.008-04:00

Author self-portraits from Epileptic, The Greatest of Marlys, The Book of Genesis, I Killed Adolf Hitler, and Masterpiece Comics, respectively.

The Quiet Part Loud and the Loud Part Quiet

2010-03-23T20:34:00.006-04:00

Head over to Comics Comics to read Joe McCulloch's fine piece about captions, thought balloons, and the inchoate nature of Thought Itself! It begins quite innocently with a riff on a Stephen King interview...

(Above: The Problem of Nothing by Michael Morris, which I got here.)

A Little Splash

2010-03-23T00:20:00.000-04:00

Walks Amongst Us

2010-03-21T10:47:00.007-04:00

Another Roz Chast that's also about Google. March 22nd issue.

Zut!!

2010-03-20T15:51:00.007-04:00

Postcard of Shanghai Manhua, 1936.

Ack!

2010-03-19T12:47:00.003-04:00

Found on the Abstract Comics blog: this wicked set by Michael Crowe.

That Feeling

2010-03-12T11:17:00.002-05:00

By Christoffer Zieler in From Wonderland With Love: Danish Comics in the Third Millennium.

Poor Leonidas

2010-03-11T22:44:00.006-05:00

From Sparta, USA #1 by David Lapham and Johnny Timmons. For the hilariously thick black outline of poor Leonidas there.

Read Up

2010-03-10T12:32:00.015-05:00

Can I do this? Can I read up from the bottom of this panel to the top? Look at the actions described in the caption: flung, laughed, saying. Read and digest the caption as you would any old caption. Then read the image from the bottom up: there's Abraham on the ground, the white aura is his laughter, and then comes the thought balloon -- just as the caption ordered. I am uncertain about the aura as laughter equation simply because Crumb is so promiscuous with his auras in The Book of Genesis. Could be a run of the mill aura. You never know.

Poor/Broke Richard

2010-03-08T21:47:00.010-05:00

Bright almanac: from The Many Lives of Benjamin Franklin by Aliki.

Sad catalogue: Ruben Bolling in Harper's June 2009.

E Pluribus Unum

2010-03-08T20:32:00.013-05:00

One should really check out "A Dream To Have In Heaven" (Tengoku De Miru Yume – 天国でみる夢) by Maki Sasaki, Eggbert by Laf, and "The Rise of the Corporate-American" by Tom Tomorrow.

Blechman 4

2010-03-04T09:53:00.010-05:00

My final R.O.Blechman-speaks-for-R.O.Blechman post. Blechman calls this Kafka spoof "an experiment combining my drawings with collage elements." I like the soft inclusion of these elements into Blechman's quivering white world. Inconspicuous mixed media.

Note: the left up there cuts off the word "Kafka."
Note 2: everything's been taken from Talking Lines.

Blechman 3

2010-03-03T09:02:00.002-05:00

Blechman 2

2010-03-02T10:15:00.003-05:00

Blechman

2010-03-01T09:42:00.001-05:00

The Gunk

2010-02-19T14:57:00.003-05:00

Grocer v. Barber chapter five page one.

Time Travel

2010-02-14T20:52:00.178-05:00

Back to Starman #81: James Robinson filters a general history through an elder guard's memory so that it smacks of spontaneous recall as well as passed-down wisdom. We quickly follow iconic Opal City heroes through time to find out "what the hell happened to them."

I am reminded of Lynda Barry's formulation in What It Is that a memory is "an image which travels through time." Let's look at time travel. Here's Jeff Lemire in Tales from the Farm:

The 3rd panel is the time-traveling image, the boy-is-this-ever-going-to-stay-with-you image. In the 4th panel, however, the memory-image emerges into layered, expansive space by extending the scope of the (briefly self-contained) 3rd panel: Ken's in there now. The flashback's his to occupy.

As a daffier example of a hero tossed back to the past, here's Kyle Baker in Plastic Man socking it to Bats:

These green-and-orange images travel through time because every new bloody artist who takes on Batman is forced to draw the traumatic moment. DC Comics makes sure this image travels through time. The joke on the next page ("Batman? Stay with us, buddy.") is a good one, but the memory-image of the killer lodged into Batman's forehead might be better. I've often thought of a Bruce Wayne with a misshapen head, which was warped by death in Crime Alley, and would be easy as hell for a phrenologist to read.

The Same Page

2010-02-12T18:38:00.069-05:00

Blackest Night -- whatever that is -- has slyly resurrected dead comics too. James Robinson resumes Starman and he must, by virtue of a long absence, spend time getting his readers up to speed. He walks through Opal City happenings by literally walking through a museum. History is doled out into (false) even-spaced panels, is proper, only to get jumbled, the two guards crowding together, layering over their previous selves and undoing the linearity of a tour back in time. To get us on the same page, Robinson takes two pages. This bleeding over the page and bunching up is, perhaps, a more elegant way of drawing a zombie. This bleeding is quieter than the inevitable blood on the next page.

(Art by Fernando Dagnino and Bill Sienkiewicz. Those veiny foot shadows are too sweet.)

Dimension

2010-02-10T13:06:00.034-05:00

(From Urasawa's Pluto Vol. 1.) Reading right to left, of course, we see ears behind the panel's frame. We skip panels with an ear still under and confront an amazing nose that comes close to breaking the frame. Ear and nose relative to the same y-intercept! Gesicht's nose approaches the asymptote of the frame. From now on I need to think about the coordinates of separate characters.

VRE E N

2010-02-09T10:25:00.011-05:00

Two marvelous sound effects from Urasawa's Pluto Vol. 1. The top: scribbly and disconnected. The bottom: a surfboard of motion. Elevators get the praise they deserve.

Gags

2010-02-08T11:41:00.008-05:00

From Kyle Baker's Plastic Man: On the Lam!: a gag per panel. Something to aspire to.

Cliffhanger

2010-02-07T11:03:00.010-05:00

Prince Valiant is bewitchingly understated at times. Once again: brutality deflates.

Centre

2010-02-06T21:28:00.073-05:00

Conjecture: the middle fold of a newspaper creates a top and a bottom. I sense that below the fold Foster attempts to reorient his story using the bottom's centre. Foster uses the bottom's centre only a handful of times in the first 2 years of Valiant. Although it's not a typical tactic, it does self-consciously and momentarily challenge the virtues of his medieval adventure strip.

Two examples of below the fold.

1, up) Val, so youthful, so handsome, is singled out in the centre and then laughed at. (I have cropped the panel to the left of Val.) We hear nothing from Val, though us loyal readers already know the grand story, and so the finger in the centre demands something more from him. The row below these 2 out of 3 panels shows Val getting violent; this moment of judgment, therefore, has been incorrectly answered. Foster denies Val his story to foreshadow his failure.

2, down) There's no lower row to these big panels, but once again I have cropped a third panel (this time on the right). The knave's face is so strong, so desperate, that we need to be reminded of Val's valiance or the knave will cease to be a knave. Foster gives this knave so much life at his moment of death. His wild and detailed face obscures young Val, obscures the capture of Sir Gawain, and obscures the grand story of Valiant. And so, Val must take centre stage again, swift and surefooted.

Continued...

Captions

2010-01-23T16:54:00.086-05:00

Let the blur stand for your peripheral vision. The far edge of panel 2 is there and not there. What I've noticed while reading the first two years of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is how Foster experiments with caption placement to emphasize silence and the image, like in the swamp above, or to drown out a caption with comedic motion set in a deliberately larger panel, like with the horse below. Below, panels 3 and 4 are text-heavy to the point where the horse in panel 5 could very well be assaulting the glut of captions, driving the words along with Val into the ground. The fact that Foster's captions are the same size in every panel is manipulated by the sheer immensity of panel 5, which reorients prominence and subservience.

Bad scan I know. The horse is bucking after all.

Continued...

5 O'Clock Shadowface

2010-01-19T13:53:00.030-05:00

Ahhh my normal degradation in a day.

Dino Buzzati's recently restored Poem Strip (1969) is full of: rock songs that do not rock; nipples; pin-ups that want to be three-dimensional; images like verbs (melting, creeping); all the ripe twentieth-century malaises (bureaucratic, existential, masculine, sexual, urban); and a really wicked talking jacket, guardian demon of the underworld.

I Went Looking for a Writer

2010-01-14T19:24:00.078-05:00

I thought, Novelist! Novelist's gotta make it work, right, and latched onto Ian Rankin's John Constantine ditty Dark Entries for the new Vertigo Crime imprint. Already there's the benefit of its title, deliberate and mysterious. If you can buy into the loose spirituo-supernatural guff, the story's readably perverse and cute (Constantine's stoicism is reliably cute and so is the premise of Constantine as a reality show contestant). Right from the get-go, Rankin's words: "No news inside, just synapse-numbing junk." Good, I'll take it.

However, I went looking for a writer and found an artist. Manga-inspired at times, Scott McDaniel-y at others, Werther Dell'Edera has to invent new ways of laying out the many interrogation scenes. The central question: how are these reality show contestants connected? Below, the second panel shows Tom hiding his eyes, while the third panel shows Dell'Edera hiding Tom's face; the artist comes off as a sympathetic cameraperson to the reality show's all-consuming eye.

Have another drink, John.

Low Soup Clouds

2010-01-10T13:21:00.035-05:00

(From Leela Corman's Queen's Day.)

Don't expect a hands tag. Unmoved by hands. (Not that I had much to say about faces.) These roiling broth clouds remind me of low-hanging mountain clouds in BC.

Corman is curious because she devotes space to blank space: in her panels, there's a lot of wall to take in, so much couch. Her stories are one-on-one meetings threatened by expanding voids: meeting the Baba Yaga and her ethereal soup, meeting a grandparent and your memory of death.

Couch. Wall. Jonathan.

Early Edition

2010-01-07T11:31:00.005-05:00

Sneak peek grocer cover. Fourth issue, fourth estate.

That a Usagi Yojimbo Hand?

2010-01-06T14:30:00.022-05:00

The last time I posted on Kevin Huizenga I chose a sequence less inventive and more subdued than his many comic frolics. I have done it again. From the paranoid romp of Ganges #3.

My Hand Outstretched

2010-01-03T12:06:00.013-05:00

(From Michael Allred's Madman Atomic Comics #14. You may enlarge.) I guess I simply appreciate the space devoted to this encounter between freaky man and spooked deer. Where else do you see something like this?

2000s

2009-12-21T17:55:00.190-05:00

I have also elected my best of the decade, best of the naughts, best of the oohs, best of the ahhs. Trimmed to five, this list is neither shocking nor necessary. Call it an excuse to put up images on a sinking comics blog.

1. Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison and many fine artists (2005-6).Thirty issues born to the world in an odd order made me feel the full happy weight of the floppy. Above, J. H. Williams III gives me a face I'll never forget from issue zero.

2. 100% by Paul Pope (2002-3).

Pope's story of Gastro -- exotic dancing for the lovers of digestion -- has many pulsating and moving moments like the one above. See-through pocket, new gun, clenching fist, clenching fist.

3. Eightball #23 by Dan Clowes (2004).

Archaic pop American ennui. Tights. Andy the Death-Ray is our hero. He pops a squirrel. He very majestically cannot sleep.

4. Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell (2008).

I have spent good time with Bell's collection. The scale of all these smart stories still wows me; the cage above lets you witness an illusion of magnitude.

5. The Fixer by Joe Sacco (2003).

The dizzy story of Neven and Joe, storysellers of Sarajevo. Read it for weird intimacy, for clear-as-mud conflict.

My Herzogian Shoe Feast

2009-12-19T13:29:00.111-05:00

Goddamn it. I was ready to whiten my flag and wash up alone on the comfortable shore of Outcaultlandia. Turn my attention backwards like a good Spiegelman in a time of crisis.

BUT

Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know, Book One: A Good and Decent Man descended from the reshelving corral of fate onto the recent arrivals rack of my soul. This book revitalizes the buried-dark-and-deep father's-WWII-history story with ornamentation. Not stripped down, not allegorized, but a storm of genres and accessories on Carol Tyler's part to counter the global warming of father Chuck Tyler's slowly-heating-up life details. You'll Never Know is tempest-tost. Tyler's a MAD clutterer, a Comeek sketchbooker, a Buckinghamian bannerer, an Eisnerian choreographer -- ehhh comparisons blah.

Enjoy the head of the chair poking out of the rush in the third panel.

AND

For you to feel the movement:
Notice that "How's that" is outside the panel proper.
---
Next: the best of the decade. (I know.)

Two Funnies

2009-12-17T21:53:00.026-05:00

Two cartoons this evening. The first is an historical scrap from the life of fictional explorer Chance Oxblood by Grant Reynolds from his Comic Diorama: Collected Comics. The second is by best-of-the-bunch Roz Chast from the 30 November 2009 issue of The New Yorker. I've tagged "faces" so pay deep attention to those. Enlarge both for the reading.

Define.
---
Coming soon: an eating-my-shoe post and a rare color image.

Now, End-Product-of-Laughter "Stitches" I Can Get Behind

2009-12-10T12:58:00.145-05:00

My favorite sequence from David Small's Stitches (2009).

One of the reasons why I was underwhelmed by this book is that it feels like a series of painted cartoons instead of a comic. The last two panels on the page above are art school exercises: draw a curious and youthful eye (good!) and then a scary eye (good!). They are oddly free-floating illustrations, as if from a sketchbook, and it doesn't seem worthwhile to add them up. Add to the mix many pretty scenic double splash pages and there's almost too much independence.

As for the story, even though it's Small the small child who gets caught between Small the artist's tug-of-war between extreme innocence and extreme cruelty, my arms were hurt.

I am very close to declaring 2009 the Year of Trite Acclaimed Comics. Formal sophistication meets flat sentiment and thought. A thrilling style can't convincingly offset or reignite sitcom writing.

The following spring to mind:
1. George Sprott by Seth.
2. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli.
3. Greg Rucka's unbearable Detective Comics dialogue.
4. AD: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld.
5. The Nobody by Jeff Lemire.

You can still use words, you know.

My comic of the year? Citizen Rex for its immense difficulty and absurd final issue "message"? Maybe. Gaiman and Allred's "Metamorpho" from Wednesday Comics? Maybe. The ever-reliable Joe Sacco's Footnotes From Gaza, which I haven't yet seen and may not even be out? I'll go with Sacco any day.

Sorry, The Graphic Novel, I'm wanted elsewhere.

Cultivar

2009-12-02T19:39:00.022-05:00

(From Jules Feiffer's Ronald Reagan in Movie America. Enlarge.)

Norm MacDonald roasts Bob Saget: "Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower -- yeah, cauliflower. No offense, but...your face...looks...like a cauliflower." Reagan's Feiffer-made face looks like the Grinch made out of broccoli. So it's plainly obvious why I have quoted Norm MacDonald on Bob Saget.

Pot-o-gold

2009-11-30T11:16:00.011-05:00

This plum wonder's from a Gary Panter sketchbook in RAW Vol.2 No.3. The page break of the notebook officiates the surprise of page two. Bottom left to right and then up up up. Those leaky eyes!

Okay, I'm on a faces kick.

The Woodwork

2009-11-26T10:10:00.034-05:00

Citizen Rex -- so far so fun -- moves at quite a clip. Gutters and closures and the opposite of decompression oh my. Panel to panel, I get lost. Intra-panel, baby, I get lost. Look at panel one up top: abruptly flying garments! The caption "Outside:" is just as abrupt: where'd the inside go? Are they under a bridge? Look at the moon shift! This is some Coconino County bullshit. I second suddenly-there Flying Squirrel Girl's question mark.

(From Citizen Rex #1 by Mario and Gilbert Hernandez.)

Shaw Could Use a Lish

2009-11-24T19:50:00.021-05:00

Scan a 700+ page monster and you get the blurs.

Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button is a cushiony comic. Place it behind your head and its brickiness will soften. I mostly mean that it's a huge hug, a pat pat on the back. No hard feelings. Barely any hardness at all. Precociousness heals all wounds.

His faces, though, on the other hand, however. Strange to think that nuance enters the picture during moments of highly overt wretchedness, but that's what I think.

Someone pioneer comics physiognomy right now. Add Sean Phillips' work on Criminal. Who else for faces? Lynda Barry's bulgers and frighteners. Basil Wolverton. John Cassaday. Charles Burns.

And now for something grocery related (also from Shaw):
BzzzzileyCyruzzzz.

Yard Sale Wilmer

2009-11-08T17:31:00.000-05:00

Drew this in BC two years back. Knew then and there that it would be downhill from there. Witness my apex.

The Creeps

2009-10-30T11:32:00.003-04:00

(From Hellblazer #25 by Morrison and Lloyd.) Note the thickness of each nested mask's outline. This is for tomorrow.

Hockey Hauser, Eh

2009-10-22T19:40:00.001-04:00

In Kaspar Diane Obomsawin does the story of the 19th century foundling with many many placid effects like above's scissored starburst and below's delightful locomotion.

Who Am I? Ware Am I?

2009-10-18T10:39:00.001-04:00

Though I'm still working my way through Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #19 (stupid small words), I wanted to halt and appreciate this wheezy sequence from the volume's lead story, a Rusty Brown-penned tale of woe on Mars.

Outward-facing flashlight demands judgment.

Sneak Peek: Victor Cutwell

2009-10-16T11:29:00.001-04:00

Page 3 of a 4-page prologue to an in-the-works Charles Grocery comic.

More Like Dull-uge

2009-10-16T08:52:00.000-04:00

My title's unfair but I wish more pages in Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge were like the one above: distorted, detached, outside-looking-in. The book is generally concerned with one-note in-the-thick experiences of good will and survival. It's too earnest, its criticisms of Bush too tranquil, and its color-coded mood shifts arbitrary. But Neufeld manipulates panel size to great effect: scenes often lead up to dramatic and sometimes grim two-page spreads.

Fumbling Loggerheads

2009-10-15T17:44:00.002-04:00

I regret that I've seen so little of Tony Millionaire's work save for this, a Sock Monkey story, and his recent piece about Iron Man battling criminal cold cuts in Marvel's Strange Tales #2. This is "The Bat-Man" written by Chip Kidd in DC's Bizarro Comics.

I could inhabit those nostrils.

Gotham Ain't Venice, Son

2009-10-09T23:15:00.000-04:00

Look at that sewer steam, goddammit! Good to see Kelley Jones do Batman again, especially since I missed out on Gotham After Midnight. I'll commit to 5 issues (well, maybe), not 12. Doug Moench's script for Batman Unseen #1 is herky-jerky at best, but I'll always have a soft spot for Moench and Jones' spooky run on Batman (#515-552, minus a few) when I was a youth.

Enjoy my meat puns.

Okay, There's Talking Now

2009-10-07T18:13:00.000-04:00

Under the watchful eyes of these two pages from Sammy Harkham's Poor Sailor and as a kind of summary of comics silence, I offer the following:

-Inwardness, isolation
-Suggestion
-The end of communication/interaction
-Body language, the tip of the hat to imagery
-Disorder, scramble
-Anticipation of communication/interaction
-Suspense
-Tranquility
-Effort, work, process
-Emptiness, minimalism (certainly silence is opposed to the splash page. Silence, I think, depends on panel size; a two-page spread transgresses silence by being loud even if silent)

The scene in Poor Sailor: a husband contemplates going to sea with his brother, which would result in abandoning his wife and their unfinished home.

I'll finish with Chester Brown's Louis Riel. This typical-for-Brown four-panel sequence dramatizes at least a few of the modes I've entertained above.

Sexless Doom Disco

2009-09-29T18:44:00.001-04:00

$0.12 got me The Beezer Book 1979. Forgot how much I love neurophysiology.

Grocery vs Warhol

2009-09-26T12:06:00.000-04:00

First real attempt at penciling inking erasing rulering. A gift for a friend named Canning. Soon: the Charles Grocery graphic novel Grocers in Space. Think Flesh Gordon with more perishable goods.

The Spitting Image

2009-09-13T22:55:00.000-04:00

From a 1978 parody of Hamlet in Cinemastock Tome 1 par Gotlib et Alexis. I was red-cheeked in front of stacks and stacks of BDs in Old Quebec. Bought this to help change my life. I don't speak French but I think this joke is un joli coup.

Yo Teach Time

2009-09-09T17:35:00.000-04:00

... help here, guys, I can't very well do this on my own. Anyone? Thoughts on the Wife of Bath? Know anyone like her hahaha? No? No. Tiffany, did I see your hand raised? No? No.

(From "Bizarre Wars" by Duffy and DeStefano in Bizarro Comics.)

Environment

2009-09-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

I'm impressed with Hope Larson's specifically female-young-adult-tailored comics. I feel a little intrusive reading her work but that can't be bad right?
(From Gray Horses.) A silent sequence in the service of making visible the environment. The 3rd panel reveals that the black background bridge is in fact the shadow of an overpass from which Noemie emerges into the refreshment of sunlight. I like this modest surprise and brief reorientation. And how refreshing for me to read comics not published by D&Q, DC, or F!
(From Salamander Dream.) Really cool 2 pages. The freefall. The underbelly of clouds. The descent as story into the mouth of Salamander through a hole in the heart. Before the story ends it's in first-person, arms reaching up.

Gern Blanston

2009-08-20T10:34:00.002-04:00

(From Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven. Enlarge!)

Both justifications and mock-justifications for comics are by now de rigueur, pro forma, old hat, a dime a dozen. They go hand-in-hand with comics creation like parsley and sage. It's good to see Clowes take a piss out of the old thing. And on the next page is the name he settles on:

Paid The Cost To Be The Boss

2009-08-17T09:46:00.000-04:00

(From that Twain book. Art by Daniel Carter Beard.)

The step-like bottom tempts me to read this illustration from left to right (or southeasterly): from sky effect to explosion to audience reaction to caption.

Stretch your comic imagination.

Thought

2009-08-14T20:34:00.000-04:00

(From Ex Machina #6 by Vaughan and Harris.)

Mayor Hundred can't envision old New York's cause for alarm over the issue of gay marriage: "So?" This full page takes place before that response and bizarrely repeats the same image in each panel, albeit with digital modifications: zooms, crops, the third panel's de-centering. Since Harris is not drawing discernible facial shifts and bodily tics, we're not reading Hundred for any new signs of thought beyond what he's already given us: locked hands, narrowed eyes, slightly furrowed brow. Nothing changes on his face during the sequence; zero physical closure is required. The modifications in the other panels corroborate our perceptions of iconography: yup, he's biting his lip he's so deep in thought. The duplication is for drama: to simulate the attention on Hundred and the tension he's causing. (We have to flip the page to get his answer.) But the sequence also gives us the illusion that time is passing and that Hundred is taking this time to formulate a response, to wonder why he has to deal with smallmindedness, etc. Mental closure could take us ages.

The wheels are turning. The wheels are not turning. (Apologies to Samuel Beckett.)

Suspense

2009-08-11T19:08:00.001-04:00

(From Kevin Huizenga's Curses. Click to.)

Suspense is a well duh for silence. Drop talk, drop music. Body language time. A creeping pace. Observation meets motion. Close inspection prompts revelation of the thing. I get a laugh at the whimsical aspects of all this darkness: the petite question mark in panel one, the jumping hat in panel two, and the only thing that could be said to be revealed (on this page anyways) is the reverend's single eye!

Ooga.

Herpes Not So Simplex

2009-08-09T19:57:00.002-04:00

(From Matt Groening's Love is Hell.) Most of Groening's strips are lists spread across panels going for the ever-reliable cumulative effect. In this single panel -- this cartoon -- you'll probably read the "mmm nice" last. It's less of a restriction than the others but still banal as hell. There's just no hope.

Poor Kordax

2009-08-09T19:16:00.001-04:00

(From Aquaman #25 by Peter David and Marty Egeland.)

File under: woof.

You Said It

2009-08-06T19:22:00.001-04:00

(From Seth's George Sprott, 1894-1975: A Picture Novella.)

I prefer this one:

It's the wry expression staggered over two panels. It's the withdrawal from George in panel two. It's the shut door that either confirms the silence or confirms our distance. It's the smudge on the glass of backwards lettering. It's the cigarette doing the speaking. It's the act of smoking. It's the satisfied loneliness.

Process

2009-08-06T18:39:00.000-04:00

(From Northlanders #3 by Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice.)

Sven searches, strikes! He fishes. Water splashes. The loosed water has pretty layers and colors. There is a look on Sven's face. Two looks because there are two Svens: hovering Sven and jabbing Sven. Sven performs a task over the course of both panels, not simply in one. Fishing is the sum of actions.

August Hobbyhorses

2009-08-02T21:19:00.000-04:00

I think a good portion of this month's posts will be about Comedy or Silence. Already begun the first, after a fashion, but would like to look at: lightheartedness, bait and switch, Mutt and Jeff. We'll also see if I can avoid resorting to Michael Kupperman. And silence: the no-words type and others.

Let's start with both.

(Attributed to Rolf Pielke from The World on Sunday collection.)

Mad Science

2009-07-31T23:41:00.000-04:00

The "abstract" comic in my previous post was actually the British town of Thursdyke getting wiped off the map. Yikes. And for fear of devastation by big bombs we can thank J. Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project. In the latest and all-comics issue of Taddle Creek Michael Cho tells Oppenheimer's tale.

When content precedes and dictates form . . . well, I'll just return to "yikes." The writing is anti-complex and nothing you haven't heard before: "In that cloud was contained all of our aspirations and achievements, both good and bad." It conveys information and adds pictures. The trickiest compositions are of the "one panel broken up" kind (I do like the above sequence's hanging time).

A lot of biographical comics are cropping up these days. They're labors of love or homages or corporate commissions. They're useful: we can educate with these comics. They lend respectability to a lowly medium. They reveal to us real and weighty subjects: Nelson Mandela, the Beats, and even the Space Race. No bloody thanks.

Back to the cheap moral ambiguity of the Oppenheimer comic: if the moral is this, then let it be this and be done with it.
(Thank you, Warren Ellis and this week's Ignition City #4. Art by Gianluca Pagliarani.)

Abstract Comic

2009-07-28T23:31:00.000-04:00

The generous and regular people at Abstract Comics: The Blog are counting down the release of their book Abstract Comics by snooping around for possible and eclectic examples of "non-representational" or "non-narrative" (my empty shorthand, yes) sequential art. I just finished reading Grant Morrison's two Hellblazer issues from 1990 and thought that this page from #26 out of context could qualify.(Art by David Lloyd.)

Just Because

2009-07-28T12:04:00.000-04:00

(From The Goon #32 by Eric Powell.)

Choreography, Part 2

2009-07-26T20:35:00.001-04:00

(Also from Desolation Jones #4.) Jones is prone to hallucination. I won't say much about this page except that it's not as if the grid structure is merely smoked over. It's damn near eradicated at points and replaced by pale orange and distortion ghosts. The 3x3 grid structure itself: the first row is 1 panel divided in 3; the second row bleeds horizontally (4 and 5) and vertically (5 and 8); panels 6 and 7 are anyone's guess; and Jones's marvelous hand cutting through in panel 9 is what makes it!

Coming soon: some Hellblazer, some J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Choreography, Part 1

2009-07-26T00:06:00.000-04:00

(From Desolation Jones #4 by Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III. Click to.) Williams is quite at home creating stylistic battle scenes and his sole issue (so far) on Batwoman in Detective Comics has upped the ante and added red lipstick. Flee here for a preview of next week's hyperhyped second issue.

In 2005 Williams co-created with Ellis the haunted Michael Jones: for one year his eyes were pried open and he endured the wealth of our televised horrors. He is then a desensitized wreck, a hardburned detective.

Here's the bottom half, just over the crease, of a two-page spread. Jones on the floor waits and listens. Williams gives us a moment of pause: the silhouette of the crowbar is raised and looks like an image found in an instruction manual for how to use a crowbar. "Step 3) Swing downwards." The pause is scientific: the crowbar in space is matter and there are sound waves or molecular vibrations swerving away from the space the crowbar occupies. The pause is for emphasis: everything depends on when and where this weapon will strike.

Downwards and THWANK.

Baseball

2009-07-21T23:40:00.000-04:00

(From Boody by Boody Rogers and edited by Craig Yoe.) Always-smoking Jim Teapot travels to Possum Holler to recruit smoking-hot girl pitcher Babe Boone and is really red-hot impressed with what he sees.

Sometimes a cigar.

Why have I been reading more than a little about baseball this summer? In The Great American Novel, Philip Roth creates and quashes the Patriot League, a third big league, by pitting its desperado players against ruthless HUAC in the forties.

The not-a-biography-but-kinda-historical comic Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Strum and Rich Tommaso is about official white baseball's erosion by unsanctioned black skill. Paige brings out the crowds but since he's an entertainer he's counterfeit, so the poor reasoning goes. The tale is told in Seth-like throw-back images but breaks away nicely to capture the idiosyncratic movements of Paige's pitching. See left: the silent zoomed-in panels give us his deliberation and poise, the detail and process.

All three see doppelgangers of baseball as intrinsic to baseball: Boody's local bumpkin Babe, Roth's misfit Patriot League, and Strum and Tommaso's exploration of the Negro League. Who dares storm this Bastille of American sport?

Heart of America

2009-07-20T18:06:00.001-04:00

I made this after my jaunt through customs on the bus ride back from a trip to New York. In blue Bic Soft Feel ink. Click to enlarge but beware the formless bag in the third panel.

Balloons, Part 4

2009-07-19T12:56:00.001-04:00

(From The Man of Steel #4 by John Byrne and Dick Giordano. Click to enlarge.) This panel's not the most representative of Byrne's Superman work but typical of Byrne's style. The caterpillar word balloon at the top of the panel creeps to the right, walking forward for Lois because she's drawn in mid-step. The balloons act as her eyes, each sitting above and taking in a different section of Clark's bachelor pad. The connective white line just before "Very nice" is her pure, silent gaze.

Also, I love the suggestion that one of Clark's superpowers is superspellcheck.

Balloons, Part 3

2009-07-17T18:12:00.001-04:00

(From Paul Pope's Comics from Mars #1. Click to enlarge.)

What looks like Goofy the dog's absurd brother dog short circuits atop an elaborate tricycle. Unseemly tiny repairmen emerge down below. Pope makes fine use of white space in the fifth panel for a sense of scale. The cracked words of the robot keep repeating in the top left corner of panels three through six, moving in and out of clarity. In sequence and in story, we descend to the level of gremlins and remain aware of the skipping record high above.

Paul Pope's Adam Strange is without a doubt one of the best Wednesday Comics comics. Paul Pope is without a doubt.

Up next: maybe John Byrne Superman? Desolation Jones? Gawrsh.

Toronto

2009-07-12T23:39:00.001-04:00

(From Kieffer #2 by Toronto comics maker Jason Kieffer.) I've stuck with this guy ever since I picked up a grim and schematic comic of his called Downtown Toronto. Tomorrow I'm off to this city for a few hot days. Enjoy the double-tailed word balloon. Enjoy the two thick speed lines of surprise. Enjoy the Sloan.