Jaime Hernandez Sketches

I like Jaime Hernandez drawings.

Some obscure Jaime art that I do not own. Many of it viewable at the comicartfans site. (Fans can also now read an interesting blog post by the genius art director who decided to hire Jaime to do the DVD cover for Divorce, Italian Style.)

Music from the Comic Strips

via Frames per Second magazine, a link to a Vancouver radio show about music inspired by classic cartoons and comic strips --available as an MP3 for the next few days.

more sheet music images

Readers Create Monsters!

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part 4

This time out, reader submissions to Space Family Robinson: Lost in Space published by Gold Key Comics. A fun reader participation gimmick, "Reader's Create Monsters" tied-in nicely with the comics' science fiction theme and gives a new meaning to "fan art". Two of the above submissions, the "Po-Go Champ Monster" and "The Thorn Bird", were created by Canadian readers. They appeared in issue # 25 of Space Family Robinson, published December 1967.


Where are they now?

Kenny Quercetti
North Burnaby
BC

Cathy Rawlings
Edmonton
Alberta

As well, the letters page of the same comic lists several letter writers whose letters were not published, including:

Wade Nott
Vancouver, BC

&

Matt Viceri
Montreal, Quebec

Felix the Cat

A friend of mine is selling some older Felix the Cat items ebay.

Cartoonist and animator Otto Messmer created Felix the Cat for Pat Sullivan's animation studio in 1919 and Felix first appeared in November 1919 in a short silent film called "Feline Follies". He was a big hit and some people say he inspired the creation of Mickey Mouse. A comic strip, drawn by Messmer, began in 1923 and ran for decades. he strip was meant to appeal to kids for the most part but it was beautifully drawn and had some great fantasy and slapstick touches. There was a great Sunday strip as well and other artists helped out over the years, augmenting Messmer's genius, including Joe Oriolo. Toys, books, and various household items inspired by the character began appearing shortly after the first animated cartoons --the start of a marketing bonanza that continues to this day. (I think that Jay Stephens was working on a Felix project recently.)

Some of the older Felix merchandise is quite weird --often off-model and frequently scary. I think many people confuse some Felix toys with the incredibly more scarce Krazy Kat toys. The two items up for auction are a jointed wooden figure and a stuffed toy Felix with an insane grimace. I've never seen the stuffed Felix before --he has a wire skeleton and you can stand him up in the classic Felix "walking" pose.

The Ides of March

From Classics Illustrated #68, "Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare. 1950/1969.
Most likely illustrated by H.C. Kiefer (?) a DC/Fawcett journeyman responsible for many classics.

Beware the ides of March.

I'm Short Measure

Cartoon alcohol is wonderful! Instructions to a box containing the Mr. Bartender bar set.

On the Trail of the Superman, Part 2

2) Lost Superman Comic Strip Gems

It's not exactly Fletcher Hanks, but the old Superman comics make for fun and often bizarre reading. I have a small Mystery Hoard of Superman Sunday pages from the Toronto Star that are precious to me and I've also recently discovered the treasures to be found in the old Superman dailies. These old strips have great early art by the likes of Shuster, Curt Swan, and the sublime Wayne Boring, not to mention interesting scripts from the proudly-Canadian Alvin Schwartz.

I've linked to Jared Bond's wonderful Speeding Bullet site before --he's collecting all of the Superman newspaper comic strips online and often finds very interesting things. The strip was occasionally used as a testing ground for ideas that were later used to better or more memorable effect in the comic book. The first bald Lex Luthor and the first telephone booth costume change, for example, happened in the comic strips. Most of these strips have never been reprinted (there are two nice book collections of daily and Sunday strips dating from 1939 up to 1943, but nothing later is currently available). Most of these events are not documented anywhere (including most standard fan histories, Overstreet, etc).

The latest at Speeding Bullet? As Bond notes on a Superman discussion forum, he has uncovered several new "firsts" from 1958:

1) Brainiac
In April 1958 a storyline began involving an alien named Romado, who is clearly a prototype for Brainiac, who would first appear in Action Comics #242 (July 1958). Romado has a computer-enhanced mind, and collects miniature cities in bottles from around the galaxy. He has the shrunken Kryptonian city of Dur-el-va, which he traps Superman in.

2) Bizarro
Bizarro appears in the strips in September of 1958. Though Superboy #68 (cover date of October 1958) hit the stands earlier, this story was actually written first. In this early version, Bizarro has a "B" on his chest. What is creepy is that Superman convinces Lois to betray Bizarro and trick him into getting exposed to his version of kryptonite, which "kills" him. (Though as Superman says, how can you kill a shadow...)

3) Metallo
December 15, 1958 begins a new story of Professor Vale saving a patient from a horrible accident, and having to put in a mechanical heart, etc. to save him. He is powered by uranium pellets, with the possibility of some other rare mineral....I haven't read much of the story yet, as the year ends, but it is clearly the first Metallo story. This is winter 1958. In the comics, he first appears in Action Comics #252 (May 1959)

On the Trail of the Superman

1) Citations

It's always fun to come across early citations of now-common words. For instance, who knew that the earliest cited use of the noun superpower was in an issue of Supersnipe Comics from 1945? Several people, apparently.

I've always been interested in the history of the word superman. Some odd coincidences: Recently I was reading John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses which traces aspects of Nietzsche's thought up to the 1940s in part through an examination of the British modernists' disdain for popular culture. Many of the most famous (and famously elite) avant-garde writers of the early 20th Century dabbled in proto-fascist ideas --even those who at some point embraced aspects of socialism. Bernard Shaw is a case in point.

I think many dictionaries cite George Bernard Shaw as responsible for the coinage of superman in his 1903 play Man and Superman. Shaw took the word on loan from the German Ubermensch, first used by Nietzsche in 1883's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche's term is literally "overman". There are English versions that translate it as "superman" that predate Shaw.

A member of the non-revolutionary socialist Fabian Society, nevertheless Shaw "yielded to a craving for strong men in government and ignored the faults and praised what seemed to him the virtues of manifest villains, such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini," according to Robertson Davies.

Anyway, I discovered my favourite early superman citation recently in a work by one of Shaw's contemporaries, P.G. Wodehouse's Something Fresh, a novel first published in 1915. Wodehouse is described by Carey as a champion of lower middle class "clerk" culture; one of the writers who used vulgar slang and wrote for a mass audience. The quote describes George Emerson, a policeman, and is spoken by the object of his affection, Aline Peters:

"You are too overwhelming, too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of these Supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. I expect it's through having to be constantly moving people on out in Hong Kong, and all that sort of thing. Now Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want someone who would stand up to you."

___

On the Trail of the Superman, Part 2 

Super Penpals

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part Three

Where are they now?

Today's penpals are concerned with questions meta and multinational.

From "The Legion Outpost" --Adventure Comics #346, 1966:

Dear Editor: I really enjoy your letter column, but the Legion Outpost picture is out of date. Colossal Boy is shown wearing a red suit instead of a green one and Light Lass has the insignia she used when she was Light Lass.
David Ouellette
Essex, Ontario

From "Metropolis Mailbag" --Superman #128, 1959:

Dear Editor: If Perry White sent Clark Kent to a foreign country, such as Canada, on an assignment, how could Clark get a passport, inasmuch as he has no birth certificate, not having been born on this planet? I know he could fly across the border as Superman, but wouldn't that be too risky?
Edward Katz
Quebec

As well, the letters page of World's Finest #226, 1974 reveals several names "Boiled Down from the B & B Mailbag":

Alex Fedyk
Vancouver, B.C.

Roma Pohorecky
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Kevin Ferris
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Snow in the Comics, Part 2

Part 2 of 3
"We're Wolf" by Genevieve Castree
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Three
edited by Chris Oliveros
D&Q
95 pages
ISBN 1-896597-88-2
$19.95 Cdn/$14.95 US



It's snowing again today, which puts me in mind of snow in the comics (technically, since it hasn't really stopped snowing for several weeks, there should be many more of these entries, but I've been too busy shoveling).

Perhaps the most famous of all snow-themed comics is Herge's Tintin in Tibet, the classic, austere graphic novel that Herge identified as his favourite. Who could forget, after reading this story as a child, the epic journey of the indomitable boy reporter to find his long-lost friend Chang? During a troubled period of his life, Herge poured all his artistry into this simple tale of Tintin's adventure in the Himalayas, his encounter with the lonely Yeti, and the struggles of his companions to survive and reunite Tintin with Chang, his friend from an adventure drawn decades earlier. The only Tintin album without a villain, Tintin in Tibet is full of haunting cartoon images, emotion, and lots and lots of snow.

The iconic nature of this book, and the place it holds in the imagination of its readers, is one of the themes of Genevieve Castree's (she signs herself Genevieve Elverum here) contribution to the third volume of the Drawn and Quarterly Showcase anthology. "We're Wolf!" is a beautiful meditation on nostalgia, self, and lycanthropy that takes as its inspiration Tintin's snow-bound adventure --its pace, use of silence, and feeling. The story follows a young woman through two seasons, Summer and Winter, both highly suggestive of states of mind as well as stages of life and love, and with aspects of Herge's book used as outward emblems of an interior life.


The title page of Castree's story features a highly stylized version of the famous cover from Tintin in Tibet, grasped in a tiny hand --an elaborate play on words that refers to her title ("We're Wolf" or "Werewolf") and her subject, as well as to the character on her faux-Tintin cover.


The metaphor is stretched even further throughout the story as Castree's character, a young woman/cartoonist surrogate, in turn reads the comic, imagines herself inside it, hiking over snow-covered mountains, and finally giving birth to a brood of tiny Yeti-like werewolves. The narrative is quite dreamlike and Castree's art is a charming mix of ligne-clare cartooning and gorgeous colour with a very personal style. And of course there is quite a bit of snow. Ice-caves, mountain peaks, sleeping bags, pine-needles, vast expanses of white. The story is very evocative of childhood (I particulary like the idea of dealing with a Summer-time depression by curling up with your favourite kids comic --kind of like a snowball saved from winter in the freezer and unwrapped in the hottest day of the year) and it is wide open to interpretation.

How are these images connected? What does it all symbolize? I cannot say. I only know that it is beautiful and that the book (and Castree) is a treasure: the other selections include a nice coming-of-age story by Sammy Harkham ("Somersaulting") and a quirky postmodern pastiche of a 1930s pulp adventure by Matt Broersma ("The Mummy") that is someways reminiscent of early Herge. And yes, I know this book was published in 2005 --I've been saving it for a snowy day.




Next time: the forecast calls for more snow
Part 3
Part 1

R.I.P. Geneviève. Her husband wrote a song about their first meeting and reading comics.

Canadian Nerds

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part Two

Where are they now?


Beloin Chin
53 Stevens Ave
Marathon, Ontario
(Everything's Archie, Archie Giant #9, August 1970)

Belinda Goetz
Box 35
Stewart, B.C.
Age 13
(Laugh #233, Aug 1970)

Linda Billry
Box 87
Masset, B.C.
Age 15
(Laugh #233, Aug 1970)

Bonnie White
Talbotville Royal, Ontario
Age 10
(Laugh #233, Aug 1970)

Laurie Pahl
496 N. Court St
Port Arthur, Thunder Bay Ontario
Age 12
(Laugh #233, Aug 1970)

Marilyn Kusznier
185 Clarke St
Port Arthur Thunder Bay Ontario
Age 12
(Laugh #233, Aug 1970)

Roy Bishop
16 Welbouren Dr
Hamilton, Ontario
(Archie #191, June 1969)


top image: Fran the Fan from Mad House Glads #74, August 1970 (art by Dan DeCarlo)


New ad campaign for Toronto tourism: selling the plate the steak is on.




CityNews: Off Beat Ads Selling Toronto To Americans

Robo-Fest 2008

"Building a Better Robot World!"

Mystery Hoard Promotions presents:

ROBO-FEST 2008!



Canada's First Trade Show and Conference dedicated to Consumer Robotics

The event will bring together manufacturers, hobbyists, and researchers from the emerging field of robotics. Robo-Fest is an opportunity to showcase new developments in robot technology.

What you can expect at Robo-Fest:

• robot demonstrations and competitive events

• discussion of business and technical issues

• vendors from the personal, mobile and service robot industry

When:

Winter, 2008

Where:

Guelph, Ontario
--the center of Canada's technology triangle!

Contact:
contact us!

Classic Off-model Archie

Current habit: leafing through old Archie comics looking for unusual images. As we all know, Archie comics can take on a uniform look --all the girls, with the exception of Big Ethel, are drawn using the same basic body type. You hardly ever see the sort of zaftig-type Dan DeCarlo drew in his Humorama adult joke gags, or any other size or shape of woman for that matter. The adult women in most Archie comics have historically been either comic grotesques (Miss Grundy), slightly more adult variations on the teen girls (Josie, the art teacher), or slightly heavier hausfrau types (Archie's mom). These are a few exceptions recently discovered:


From "Reggie the Match Maker" --Archie's Pals & Gals Giant #18, 1961.
Reggie cons a kid into a date with his sister, only to wind up wrasslin with the wrong girl. Jumpin' Jaime Hernandez!


And speaking of Jaime Hernandez, "Fat Chance" (Betty and Veronica Spectacular Giant #145, 1967) gives us a peak at Veronica's unconscious anxieties as she morphs through a series of weight gains--sort of like Maggie in "The Race" from Penny Century #6.

Another habit: collecting names and addresses of Canadians who wrote to comic books in the 1950s and 60s.

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part One
If you are out there please contact me! From Betty and Veronica Summer Fun, 1967.

Eileen Boutcher
194 Pelham St
Lunenberg, Nova Scotia
age 11 & 1/2

David Zuckerman
2278 Noel St
Montreal 9, PO
age 12

Samuel Zagat

Look at him, how he sits there and reads baby stories.


Rooting around in the files...

Samuel Zagat (1890-1964) was a cartoonist and photographer, part of a small group of left-wing Jewish artists who flourished in the socialist press in the early part of the 20th Century. I had never heard of him before I found this cartoon in a disintegrating book about the New York Jewish immigrant experience a few years ago.

Zagat drew a strip called "Gimple Beinish" (1912-19) for the Yiddish daily Warheit /Varhayt in New York. He was also an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Forward. A book of his drawings was published in 1972.

The strip here, featuring Hanne Pessl, was originally in Yiddish and reads right to left.

Twilight of the Superheroes

Deborah Eisenberg, the U.S. Alice Munro, was on the CBC last week talking about her latest collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. The title story is about a cartoonist who lives through 9/11 and it has some interesting things to say about the idea of superheroes as a metaphor for Empire. Eisenberg states her case plainly in a Bookninja interview from last summer, where she discusses the Superman movie:

"It's both heart-rending and nauseating that the national impulse would be to seek solace and reinforcement at this moment, in, for instance, Superman as a representation of moral action. I can't claim to be an expert on the cast of Marvel Comics, or, in fact, to know much of anything about any of them, but nonetheless, they're present even in my inhospitable consciousness. So it seems that they must perfectly express something about our culture.

And I suppose that what it is they so perfectly express is our desire to understand our disproportionate power as power that's unambiguously and inevitably used for the benefit of humanity. Even in regard to the Unites States of the Second World War, this view might have merited a raised eyebrow or two, but now it's shockingly self-deceiving at the least, and pretty brutal. It seems to me that not only is there an enormous longing for what we imagine to have been a time of innocence in our recent history, but that there's also a sort of willful childishness, or, to put it another way, a self-congratulatory coyness in the way imagination is collecting around these figures now. Even the nostalgia doesn't seem quite authentic. It's as if there were something endearing, something loveable, about trying to maintain this view of ourselves as childishly innocent and good even though we know very well that it's not accurate – something gallant and charming. This is a form of bullying, in my opinion; a demonstration that we can afford (temporarily, anyhow) to hold on to these consoling charades of power-with-integrity, however degraded, even laughable,we understand them to be.

Born in 1945, Eisenberg probably missed out on the first wave of superhero comics and was not quite 10 when "Superduperman" appeared in MAD. She was graduating from college when Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were repopulating New York with superheroes and was well into her adult life when Batmania and Wonder Warthog were stirring up the kids, so she can be forgiven for mixing up her publishers. In any case, everyone knows that outside of a few arrested adolescents like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, serious writers don't read superhero comic books. Nevertheless, Eisenberg still makes a few interesting points. Even if mainstream kids comics can't be expected to engage with adult themes and political issues, what about Hollywood? I've seen enough of the current crop of superhero movies to know that they are trafficking mainly in the same thing the comics have got by on for generations --escapism, power fantasies, and nostalgia. I'm less familiar with the current superhero comics world since the heavyhanded Watchmen metaphors of the 1980s --the world of The Authority and Identity Crisis. Outside of Dan Clowes' "The Death Ray" (or for that matter, David Boring), are there any contemporary superhero iterations that deal with their own limitations as a genre in ways that are not just pat or satirical? Is it even really possible or necessary? Are superheroes bad for us? Adorno said "After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry." Should we say, after 9/11 it is barbaric to draw superheroes?

I leave the final word to that other great philosopher, Sergio Aragones:

"It's the super-hero syndrome, exactly. [...] It's out of our power to solve. It's defeatism --you can do nothing about it. It's like "I surrender." The only way I can solve my problem is with a super-hero, or an astronaut, or somebody from outer space, or God helping me. And this is like throwing your gloves on the floor. When you have to fight, then you think you have a solution, but when you don't want to fight any more, that's when you go to total despair and then you go looking for some super-heroes to solve your problems. Which is very bad. I don't think those movies give any good messages. That the only love you find is with mermaids or with things from outer space. No! No! No! Reality is what can save you."

THE_ARTS_TONIGHT

CHESTER BROWN ORIGINAL ART auction

Another fundraiser for the Wright Awards.

This time around, it's Chester Brown's original pencils for the Wonder Woman page he donated for the previous auction last summer. It's a fascinating view of his working methods. The difference between these loosely assembled drawings and the finished art sold earlier is striking (Chester's pencils are pretty tight but I think he still edits when he inks --Wonder Woman's ass looks rounder in one of his pencils).

Chester uses many smaller pencil drawings to compose a page. He draws each panel --and sometimes each figure in each panel-- separately. He does the same thing for all of his lettering and word balloons. He then lays all of the separate pages into the order they are supposed to read in, places a piece of paper on top, and traces over them onto his final art with a brush. He documented this process in his short story "Showing Helder" in an early issue of his comic book series Yummy Fur.

Anyway, the Wonder Woman drawings are now being auctioned off on ebay:

The organizers of The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning are delighted to announce their third fundraising auction: a one-of-a-kind piece of original art by groundbreaking Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown.

Considered a pioneer of the 1980s alternative comic renaissance, and undeniably one of the form’s most original and refreshing talents, Toronto's Chester Brown agreed to lend his distinctive style to the superhero genre as a gesture of support to the Wright Awards. The result was a stunning interpretation of the comics' first female superhero: the Amazonian princess known as Wonder Woman. Inspired by a page from one of Wonder Woman's earliest appearances, these drawing are the Original Pencils used in the creation of the artwork from our last auction. These pencils provide a rare glimpse into Chester's creative process. By looking at these pencil drawings, you can follow Chester as he composes a page of original art, from rough sketches to word balloons. There are over thirty individual drawings included in this auction, each averaging approx 6" x 4"!

This artwork marks the Montreal-born artist’s first-ever piece of superhero art ever - a fact that makes it both historically significant, and a guaranteed collector’s item.

The Wright Awards were established in 2005 to recognize and spotlight the wide array of talented cartoonists working across Canada. The premiere award event recognizing the art of graphic novels and comics, The Wrights are named in honour of Doug Wright (1917-1983) whose humourous strip Doug Wright's Family graced newspapers and magazines across Canada for nearly 35 years.

Chester Brown is one of the pioneers of the 1980s comic renaissance and one of the art form’s most acclaimed talents. He began self-publishing his critically regarded comic-book series Yummy Fur in 1983. In it, Brown serialized his first four graphic novels: Ed the Happy Clown (1989), The Playboy (1992), I Never Liked You (1994), and The Little Man (1998). His Louis Riel was published as a graphic novel in 2003 and was the first graphic novel to make it to the Canadian national bestseller list as well as bestseller lists worldwide

All proceeds will benefit the 2007 edition of The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, which will be handed out next year in Toronto.

Snow in the Comics

Part 1 of 3

by BK Munn

It's snowing again this morning, putting me in mind of snow in the comics. Trying to remember my experience of snow in the comics, the first thing that comes to mind is Peanuts which always was very seasonal in its rhythms. Although other daily strip cartoonists did winter-themed gags and even created snowy adventure storylines (I think the final episode of Caniff's Terry and the Pirates took place on a snow-filled runway), Peanuts is really the winter strip par excellence, a position that was ratified with the animated Christmas special back in the 1960s. Outside of the strips, U.S. kids comics creators like John Stanley, Carl Barks, and the Archie gang always published season-specific issues. As well, I'm sure I read the occasional superhero comic as a kid featuring a chilly, John Romita Spider-Man brawling over snowy New York City rooftops. But the first time I think I really noticed snow as an actual presence and plot device in a graphic novel context was Cerebus.


At some point in the early 1980s, Dave Sim seemed to decide to make snow a major character in his High Society graphic novel. I'm sure there was snow in earlier issues since much of the series was a parody of the Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics and I'm pretty sure there was at least one issue of Conan that featured barbarians fighting frost giants in the wilds of Hyperboria, or wherever it was that Conan was from, but Sim's use of snow in these later Cerebus issues really struck a chord with my 13-year-old self.

The first snow-themed issue I remember is Cerebus #44, "The Deciding Vote". Fans (or maybe just Sim) later called this the "wuffa-wuffa" issue, after the sound the lead character made when walking with snowshoes. The plot of the issue, Cerebus following an old farmer around in order to solicit the geezer's vote for Prime Minister, took a backseat to the slapstick images of Cerebus trying to navigate his way through snowdrifts and the drunken antics of Sim's superhero parody character The Roach. Y'see, Sim the artist was telling us, Cerebus's attempt to transform himself from barabarian to politician is an uphill battle and even the elements are against him.

Things only got worse for the character as the book progressed: Cerebus' time in office seemed to take place over the course of one long winter, which meant that the snow hung around. Sim seemed to take great delight in drawing the characters in the midst of blizzards or contrasting the heated conversations of his characters with the serenity and quiet of the outdoors. The story, and Cerebus' political career, culminated with an invasion of the city by barbarians. Sim told the story in a series of long panels, ending with his now-isolated character walking off into the distance into a sea of white.

Snow popped up in the next few graphic novels as well. In Church and State, Cerebus becomes Pope, gets thrown off the side of a snow-covered mountain, and has to spend many pages climbing back up. Meanwhile, other characters stand around in the snow, looking pensive and plotting schemes of vast socio-political importance. During this time, Sim's assistant Gerhard really started to make his presence felt in the series, drawing highly-detailed walls, cityscapes, gargoyles, etc, all blanketed in layers of snow.

I think that, in part, Sim was initially sort of stuck with the northern fantasy world he had inherited from his pastiche of the world of Robert E. Howard. However, he eventually realized that he could incorporate aspects of this universe into the tale to his advantage, using the weather as a major storytelling tool (and in a black-and-white book, snow makes a nice contrast). As well, the world he was creating was starting to take on more aspects of the real world that he was interested in. I used to imagine that his fictional city state of Iest was a brilliant amalgamation of Kitchener, Ottawa, 1917 St. Petersburg, medieval Europe, Carl Bark's Duckburg, and Conan's D&D fantasyland. At the same time, I sometimes resented the enormous use of white space in Cerebus, an indication I thought of a certain amount of cartoonist laziness. And after awhile, the device takes on a strained air (not unlike the device of using a cartoon aardvark barbarian as the lead character in a 3000 page graphic novel about religion, politics, and gender relations). The depictions of falling snow still are very affecting, as long as one of Sim's gross caricatures is not in the panel, maybe because falling snow is still evocative of a certain sense of nostalgia (childhood, holidays, etc). Overall, and despite the general failings of Sim's project as a whole, I can still appreciate these early Cerebus stories for their modest attempts at depicting the Canadian landscape in graphic novel form. Really, a very sophisticated and sustained, at times subtle use of nature for such a young artform.

Next time: the forecast calls for more snow
Part 2
Part 3

Amazing Heroes Top 100

a propos of nothing:

In a truly horrible old issue of the Fantagraphics fanzine Amazing Heroes (cover feature on the 1980s post-Kirby Eternals comic book for god's sake), we find this truly horrible top 100 list of comic book sales from January 1985. The most interesting thing to me today is that Superman (#92) sold less than Cerebus (#85) and that World's Finest (#99) sold less than Muppet Babies (#98). This in the same month that issue #2 of the original Crisis on Infinite Earth miniseries was on sale (#3) leading up to the death of Supergirl and the John Byrne revamp of Superman:




Those were the 80s!

Graphic Novel Review: Gilded Lilies

Gilded Lilies: Comics & Drawings
by Jillian Tamaki
Conundrum Press
124 pages
ISBN 1-894994-19-1
$20 Cdn/$17 US

I find it a source of daily amazement that beautifully packaged collections of comics are being published with such regular frequency. The latest exhibit is this little squarebond trade from Conundrum Press collecting some early comics narratives and drawings from cartoonist and illustrator Jillian Tamaki. The restraint and tastefulness of the book design, including the subdued blues and oranges of the cover, is really very pretty and makes me wish that everything on my bookshelves could look this good.

Tamaki is a Canadian cartoonist currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her illustration work has appeared in prestige U.S. magazines as well as in places like The Walrus here in Canada. Along with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, she won an Honourary Mention from last year's Wright Awards jury for the comic book Skim, which is currently being expanded into a full graphic novel for House of Anansi Press.

Gilded Lilies features two longer solo strips by Jillian. The first is a 21-page rumination on post-Wayne Gretzky Edmonton called City of Champions. The second is the 76-page silent and dreamlike The Tape Mines. City of Champions is made up of a series of vignettes: quotidian scenes of Edmonton residents and their environment in the wake of Gretzky's departure from the Edmonton Oilers hockey franchise for the glamour and big money of Los Angeles in 1988. At first glance the Gretzky trade is a slightly weird premise for an artistic investigation into the character of a city but the short history that Tamaki sketches in the first few pages of the strip is deft and stikes just the right note of loss tinged with humour. A montage documenting the trade and its immediate real-world effects (Edmonton Oilers' owner Peter Pocklington being burned in effigy, newspaper headlines, crying children) is contrasted with a short text piece:

"Canadians are cautious optimists. We are suspicious when things seem too good to be true. There's stuff we percieve to be sacred --untouchable-- of course, nothing is. However, resigned cynicism is prt of our charm. And probably, just as Canadian anyway. Or whatever."

This is followed by scenes of ordinary people going about their daily routines, either with determined resignation or total obliviousness to the world of sports titans, politicians, and millionaires. It's hard to say, really. What is evident is Tamaki's ability to capture ambiguity and the feeling of urban space --street people, kids at play-- in a few strokes of her pen, conveying her own experience as a student in Alberta through tiny sketches.

The Tape Mines is a more complex narrative that charts the journey of a pair of youngsters through a surrealist, Alice-in-Wonderland-style series of adventures. Told entirely without words, the tale unscrolls organically, mostly without benefit of panel borders or any indication of time of place. The two young protagonists begin the story working as child labour, manually rewinding cassette tapes in an eerie forest "factory", but a series of increasingly bizarre events and transformations soon elevates their adventure into a modern Grimm's fairy tale. Tamaki's drawing style, utilizing slanting sloping figures akin to handwriting, propels the narrative forward without being too showy. A self-confessed student of George Grosz, Tamaki's sometimes grotesque figures, rendered in brush and pen with large areas of black and grey washes, have a generalized sadness about them that is compelling as well as spooky.

Taken as a whole, Gilded Lilies is a beautiful introduction to Tamaki's art, including early work and reflections on childhood, providing insight into the world of a self-possessed cartoonist that we can expect great things from.


More:

-Tamaki interview at Illustration Friday, including a photo of the artist at work on a comic

Hallowe'en Haiku

Back in the day
they made fun comics.
Nostalgia for ghosts and monsters.

(top to bottom: John Stanley's Melvin Monster, Curt Swan's Superman, and Steve Ditko's Captain Atom featuring The Ghost, 13, and Faustus the magical cat from the future)

Class, Dismissed

More about the idea of class in mainstream superhero comics, this time from The Absorbascon, a blog that seems to have a thing for the 1980s Hispanic superhero Vibe:

But, somehow, somewhen, the world changed. NASCAR became a "sport"; poker became a spectator event on television; Las Vegas became acceptable; Target & Wal-Mart supplanted Saks & Bloomingdales. Men stopped wearing hats in the streets and started wearing them in restaurants. Women turned in their high heels for sneakers. Ties were replaced by bluetooths and gowns by jeans. People no longer aspire to higher class, but struggle to maintain a lower- class facade, no matter what their finances.

Back in the day, Carter Hall was an archeologically-oriented sophisticate; Ted Grant was a medical student, then a wealthy celebrity. Nowadays, Carter is some sort of barely restrained savage and Ted Grant is some beer-swilling Wolverine-lite, and a reader can only assume that criminals can literally smell either one of them from a block away.

The post tends to conflate the economic realities of class with the trappings of culture, style and attitude that we clothe ourselves in, and often equates education with class, but it sparks off an interesting line of thought and the comments section has some great discussion.

As well, The Legion Abstract has assembled a nice list of recent discussions on this topic here.


(above: College student The Atom contemplates the power of the proletariat, art by Jon Chester Kozlak, All Star Comics #33, 1947)

(not quite a) Graphic Novel Review: Nog a Dod

Nog a Dod: Prehistoric Canadian Psychedoolia
Edited by Marc Bell
Conundrum Press
288 pages
ISBN 1-894994-16-7
$25

review by BK Munn

1. "A renovated sandwich takes your eyebrows to tuba practice."

Nog a Dog is something of an artistic manifesto for a group of friends who have been sharing their art back-and-forth in zine form over the past decade or so. According to editor and contributor Marc Bell, the book is a "filtering down" of work created "by a loosely affiliated group of Canadian artists." It's quite a work of conservation, since many of the booklets collected in this squarebound trade paperback were originally printed in very small quantities and were often disassembled and recombined by their intended audience.

2. "S/he turned up to fight crime with washroom keys."


Reading the book --a bewildering array of photo-montage, piggy-back art, doodles, word games, anti-narrative comics and paintings-- I get the feeling that I'm eavesdropping on a cultish jam-session whose members share a secret surrealist language of in-jokes and myths. But far from being the proverbial turn-off , the good-natured lame-ass clubbiness of the work serves as something of a doorway to a particular way of seeing.

3. "I'll dump these dirty umbrellas in T.O."

The book collects large chunks of material from over 40 zines --some in full colour but many in black and white. Having all of these books crammed together, living under one roof as it were, is something of a godsend --accumulating something that I would never otherwise see until some museum retrospective is published 20 years from now and all the energy of this art has dissipated. Even back when I was regularly ordering things through the pages of the old Factsheet 5 or Broken Pencil I often shied away from tiny drawing zines and artist's books in favour of comics. After all, I reasoned, 10 pages of stapled-together drawings is a poor substitute for ten pages of stapled together narrative. Now that the lines between comics and the gallery seem more blurred to me, I'm just overwhelmed and intimidated by the volume of work out there and fear it's impossible to keep track of these artists without some kind of guide. Luckily Bell has stepped in to try to organize a bit of the exuberance and put faces to names (or names to drawings). Many of the contributors will be familiar to readers of contemporary art comics: Marc Bell and frequent collaborators Jason McLean & Peter Thompson, Keith Jones, etc. Most I was unfamiliar with before this volume. Among the revelations for me were the dark dreamscapes of Jonathen Petersen whose drawing style here is sort of like Mark Beyer meets Yellow Submarine. As well, the chubby sketches of Amy Lockhart, who also provides the book's gorgeous cover, are comforting and disturbing at the same time.

4. "Personal obsession is the crowning glory of life."


There are comic strip-type stories here, notably by Keith Jones and Mark Connery, but I'm not sure I prefer these more orderly sequential drawings to the anarchy that the majority of the book represents. There's something else that is harder to pin down going on here, something that the wonderful world of sequential art in all its glory is not sufficient to express. Although in turns beautiful and baffling, repeated journeys through the book reveal a sort of meta-narrative at work, documenting the process better than Bell's sometimes confusing attempt at collation. The collection tells the story of how these artists have interacted, developing weird tropes, recurrent characters, and their own drawing chops over the course of this "project." Above all, the book says "Don't just sit there, draw something! Transform the raw materials of your world's monoculture --restaurant reviews, newscasters, JFK, Stephen Harper, The Lord of the Rings-- into something representing your own worldview."


More:
conundrum press

Sabrina Mania

Jay Stephens sings the praises of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and her creators George Gladir and the late great Dan DeCarlo over at his Monsterama Blog. Nowadays she is a tv star and her comic is drawn in a manga style but Jay remembers her back in the day. Also included is a look at Archie's Madhouse and the usual assortment of creepy comics and pop culture artifacts.

For myself, I've always felt there's something missing from the classic Sabrina comics stories --her fit in the Archie world has never been perfect, maybe because so much of her cast is so comic-book ugly (not that Archie and Jughead are any great prizes). The dynamic that enervates the other Archie teenage romantic rivalry series just isn't there. Maybe because the series has never been a priority for the publisher, even when it has been a cartoon show and live-action sitcom and Archie and the gang have languished.

Hallowe'en is coming!

Sacked!

It's a Sad Sack world, we're all just living in it.

Graphic Novel Review: Mendacity

Mendacity: One Woman's Ordeal
Art by Sophie Cossette
Written by Tamara Faith Berger
Kiss Machine
$4.00

What if Little Annie Fannie was a Moldovan Existentialist?

Mendacity is the latest in Kiss Machine's new line of "graphic novellas." A previous volume, last year's Skim, won an honourable mention from the Wright Awards jury for its smart writing and razor-sharp draughtmanship, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this new offering on the magazine rack of my local bookstore.

The comic tells the story of Inna Rosca, a bored young woman from Moldova who answers a classified ad for foreign workers in order to escape her abusive home life and the general political malaise of her homeland. Perhaps naively, she signs up with an outfit that turns out to be a criminal gang and she soon finds herself with a group of other women, without a passport and in the hands of a human trafficking ring.

What follows is a grim tale of life in an Israeli brothel where Inna is kept as a sex-slave, at the service of an endless stream of johns. Curiously, she maintains a sort of bored composure throughout, whether being gang-raped, listening to the elaborate philosophical rationalizations of her pimp, or engaging in more passionate sex with her lover and errant "rescuer," a married john named Hersh. Her constant companion and only solace is a book, "On the Heights of Despair" by the Romanian-born existentialist philosopher E.M. Cioran.

I almost don't know what to make of all this depressing story besides "life is bleak, especially if you are a Romanian prostitute in an Israeli brothel." I suspect the ideas of Cioran (at least his non-Fascist ideas) are meant to serve as a sort of philosophical underpinning to the narrative, his philosophy of the absurdity of life and human degradation a back-beat or counterpoint to the relentlessly depressing ordeal endured by Inna. The overt, resigned sexuality of the protagonist and her existential leanings remind me of Ana, the titular heroine of a graphic novel by the Argentine F. Solano Lopez. The Candide-like journey of Ana is equally as depressing as Inna's but Ana at least has the benefit of actually discussing philosophy with her mentor, Simone de Beauvoir, whereas Inna must make do with the cold comfort of the printed word and the murmured endearments and banalities of her lover.

The artwork is quite dark, with lots of solid blacks and awkwardly posed, angular figures that impart a slightly claustophobic, disoriented feeling to the narrative. At times I found the cartooning a little unclear --a tiny panel showing Inna being beaten by her new pimp almost looks like a disembodied hand is slapping the pimp, for instance. Unfortunate, not least because so much of what is said in Mendacity is either hypocritical or ironic, meaning character actions and other graphic aspects of the book have to carry quite a bit of the story. After all, it is in this way, through visual symbols, that Inna seems to find a way to assert some control over her life and body. Although her passport and letters home are intercepted, the talisman of her existentialist book and the various tatoos she inscribes on herself (rising sun, Star of David) manage to say much more about her personality and worldview than any words or even sexual act (and there is a quite a bit of sex in this comic). Ultimately, although we last see a tearful Inna having sex in a garbage-strewn alley, we can only assume that she has made some sort of peace with her situation, as she notes: "You have to have nerves of steel to do this kind of work."

Preview Mendacity at Kiss Machine