THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Alternative Comics Revisited

 
Everything old is new again!

Over at The Hooded Utiliarian this past week, hooded ones Noah Berlatsky, Robert Stanley Martin, Caroline (Caro) Small, Derik Badman, Ng Suat Tong, and Matthias Wivel have been engaged, along with me, in a spirited, not to say feisty, roundtable on my book Alternative Comics and the issues that it poses.

I thank Noah and the gang, and guests and commenters, for opening up this space to talk about my work--and for making me work so hard to consider, respond to, and joust with their various, by no means interchangeable, points of view! It's a dense discussion with a lot of byways and probably some misunderstandings en route, and some heated byplay in the comments section. All to the good.

Among the dividends, from my POV:

• Caro's illuminating essay on women's autobiographical self-representation, an important qualification and extension of, and alternative to, my work on comics autography
• Suat's thoughtful reconsideration of Gilbert Hernandez's Human Diastrophism
• Matthias's serious engagement with, again, the matter of autobiographic comics

For me, a big personal dividend has been the opportunity to reflect seriously on the changes in my work and in the comics field that Alternative Comics either anticipates or fails to anticipate. This whole process has me seeing alternative comics and comics studies in a new light. Interestingly, this all ties in, I think, to Craig's and my contributions to the online journal Transatlantica's newly published issue on comics studies.

If you're interested in questions like the future prospects (?) for alternative comics, the formalistic tensions that may define comic art, the problematic reception of Gilbert Hernandez's work (dare I say that this roundtable is something for Hernandez scholars to bookmark?), the ways in which theories of self-representation may need to be inflected by gender, or the promise and pitfalls of writing academically about comics to a mixed audience--if you're interested in any of these things, this roundtable will have something to say to you, I bet.

Gary Panter @ PCC (old news)

Way back on Monday night, March 15, I was fortunate to witness the opening lecture and reception for Gary Panter's residency at Pasadena City College (March 15-19), the twenty-fourth annual iteration of PCC's Artist-in-Residence Program. I took a bunch of notes with the hope of blogging the event here at TB, but, alas, no, my work schedule beat the stuffings out of me. I can't say much more than that I enjoyed the whole evening and Panter knocked my socks off with his work and his unfiltered, unpretentious, enthusiastic and humane POV.

Panter's talk, free-ranging, instructive and delightful, consisted of about an hour's worth of randomly-sorted autobiography, reflection, and highly personal art criticism. With a lot of visuals.

Free Comic Book Day @ Brave New World in Newhall, California

Brave New World, run by the formidable team of Portlyn and Atom! Freeman, is my local shop, and an Eisner winner to boot.

A few photos from FCBD at BNW last Saturday, May 1, before my camera batteries died (click these thumbnails to see bigger, better views):

What Am I Reading?

Thanks to Chris Mautner and the good people over at Robot 6, I'm the guest blabber in this week's What Are You Reading? column.

A great pleasure, and an opportunity for me to reflect on (a) all the good comics I need to catch up on, and (b) what my reading habits are really like. WAYR is a terrific column, and has something of a time-capsule quality to it too, so I'm proud to be there. (Craig was there a few weeks back too!)

Happy Belated Birthday, Chris, and thanks!

ICAF 2009 is just around the corner

The International Comic Art Forum has played a major part in my academic life, and Craig's too. Me, I can't imagine where I'd be today without it.

Now, I'm hardly unbiased in this matter, but I do believe ICAF is an important conference that represents a high standard in terms of intellectual rigor, depth of research, and diversity. ICAF has gone a long way toward encouraging a more global view of comics and cartooning among scholars in North America, and has hosted both some excellent scholarship and some fascinating artists over the years. The scholarship in many cases has since been published and debated, and the artists include some whose names have since become much, much better known among North American enthusiasts (I remember when Rutu Modan and her Actus colleagues made their US debut at ICAF 1998).

Anyway, it's time once again to sound the trumpets for an upcoming ICAF, in this case the 14th Annual ICAF, to be held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, October 15-17, 2009.

As usual, this conference is free, open to the public, and requires no preregistration. Come and see!

This year the conference lineup looks especially good and especially diverse, in terms of nationalities, disciplines, and subject matter. I'm delighted to report that Spanish artists Max and Pere Joan, collaborators on NSLM, will be at ICAF, co-sponsored by the Cervantes Institute of Chicago, for a special evening presentation on Oct. 15. Max was a guest of ICAF back in 1998, and the fact that he will once again be with us makes me feel either very old or very young, I'm not sure which. In addition, artists Guy Davis, Sara Varon, and John Miers will be giving presentations.

The most important source of info about the conference is the ICAF site, at http://www.internationalcomicartsforum.org (I should admit that I maintain it). I'd also like to include the following bare-bones press release, with apologies in advance for the shameless hype-tasm:

Heroes Con 2009: Qapla?

I start each year at Charlotte's Heroes Con the same way: I give money to "Warriors for Hospice," a North Carolina Star Trek club that spends its weekend collecting charitable donations. The same people staff the booth every year, including a quiet guy in a red Next Generation shirt and a woman dressed as a Klingon, bumpy forehead makeup and all. (That's her picture at the beginning of the post, from the Heroesonline Flickr stream.) When I plunk my money into their jar, the woman always says "Qapla!" (which, according to Wikipedia, means "success" in Klingon) and something like "You are a noble warrior, may your children be strong!" Maybe she recognizes me now, because this year we got more intimate: she grabbed my forearm and performed an official Klingon handshake with me, and then we talked for a while. When I asked her how much "Warriors for Hospice" raised last year, she told me $1800 (which is pretty damned impressive), but then she said, "I'm worried about this year...this might be an off year."

Economic doom-'n'-gloom is everywhere, but she might've been referring specifically to the state of Heroes Con 2009. Last year, several factors--the outpouring of support for Heroes in the wake of the Wizard World Atlanta scheduling fiasco, the attempt by con organizer Dustin Harbin to turn the Indie Island  section of the con into a mini-MoCCA--gave Heroes 2008 a nationwide publicity buzz. This buzz was absent from this year's event, however, as were alternative publishers like Buenaventura Press and PictureBox, whose low sales in 2008 didn't warrant a return to Indie Island. I was sorry that Heroes 2009 had less to offer indie snobs like me, and it did seem like attendance was down this year, but I still had a great time.

Sure, I spent away my children's college education (scroll down for the obligatory What-I-Bought list), but I also attended several interesting panels. On Friday, Dustin moderated a discussion between Bone superstar Jeff Smith and self-publisher Alec Longstreth that was a charming mutual admiration society. Longstreth told a hilarious story about buying the last issue of Bone, running to a nearby public library to read it, and breaking out in tears when he got to the last page. (Apparently a library security guard came over and asked Longstreth if he was OK.) Smith raved about Longstreth's comics, particularly the in-progress Basewood, and Longstreth promised to have the next chapter at SPX. Longstreth and Smith are BFF, and Smith was eager to be on a panel where he could recommend that Bone fans pick up Longstreth's Phase 7. I recommend Phase 7 myself.

Incidentally, there were Scarlet Witches and Green Lanterns walking the Heroes Con floor, but Longstreth wins the fashion award for 2009. He's refused to shave his facial hair until Basewood is finished, and currently his beard is almost down to the middle of his chest. He looks like he belongs on a Smith Brothers Cough Drop box. (Longstreth is refusing to shave so that people who don't understand how long it takes to create his graphic novel can see the effort measured out on his face.) He also continues to wear horn-rim glasses without any lenses. Why? No man can say.

On Saturday, I went to a lively, SRO panel on Charlton Comics in the 1950s and '60s, featuring Roy Thomas, Dick Giordano and Steve Skeates. Horror stories abounded. When asked about the mechanical lettering--usually credited to "A. Machine"--in many of the Charlton books, Giordano revealed that his wife was "A. Machine" (please, no blue jokes) and she would wind up the original art into a giant typewriter to hammer on the letters, a process that curled the art up into a cylinder. Giordano also talked about helping to clean up the Charlton facility after a terrible flood in 1955, until the uber-cheap management made it clear that they weren't going to pay anyone to put on waders and shovel reams of wet paper. (Giordano then stayed away for the next couple of months, until the clean-up was finished.) Roy Thomas recalled the three-and-a-half stories he wrote for Charlton, before his two-week employment at DC and years-long stint at Marvel; Roy was in the middle of a romance tale when he hit writer's block (Roy Thomas with writer's block?!?) and passed the script off to Denny O'Neil. I only wish Steve Skeates had spoken more; he was very quiet, even though his recent interview in Alter Ego proved that he has plenty of dishy stuff to say about both Charlton and DC.

Giordano and Thomas were also terrific on the Steve Ditko panel that Ben Towle and I hosted on Saturday afternoon, as was Chris Schweizer, who did a great close reading of the visual flow of a Spider-Man #10 page. Thanks to all these folks for their participation. I'll let others comment on the event, and I'll post my own presentation ("Nervous Hands: Ditko, Anxiety and Repression") on Thought Balloonists later this week.

On Sunday, I saw the world premiere of the documentary The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. The screening was introduced by Smith, who stayed for the screening--which, as he mentioned, was awkward for him, since the film is a hagiography full of talking heads that compare Smith to Degas. (Jim Kammerud, who co-founded the Character Builders animation studio with Smith, spoke so earnestly about Bone, and with such pregnant pauses, that my wife and I waited for him to start crying, just like Longstreth in the library.) I found the film itself professional, but about a half-hour too long; quotes from interviews with Paul Pope and Lucy Caswell, for instance, are repeated twice, and I would edit out this repetition. Also, the story told is that of a plucky self-publisher who worked hard to make good--which is true, but which isn't the whole truth. The Cartoonist is too polite: events such as Smith's disastrous attempt to make a Bone movie with Nickelodeon Films and his falling-out with Dave Sim are left out. The film would be considerably livened up by an interview with Dave Sim...

When I wasn't attending panels, I was buying goodies like this:

A batch of beautiful self-pubs from students at the Center for Cartoon Studies, including Sean Ford's Only Skin #1, Chuck Forsman's Snake Oil #1 (2008), Joe Lambert's I Will Bite You! (2008) and Untitled (Caveman Story, see above), and Melissa Mendes' Freddy.  

Three comics my buddy Jordan Mooney fished out of a 10-cent (!) longbox for me: two issues of Treasure Chest from 1967, and the first issue of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's Manhattan Guardian Seven Soldiers series;

Popeye and Marketing and Distribution Careers, a must-read for anyone trying to succeed in the current economic climate, and apparently part of a series on "Popeye and Careers" (another of which, Popeye and Personal Service Careers, is included in Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury's Holy Sh*t! The World's Weirdest Comic Books;

Comics that fill in my Kirby-in-the-'70s gaps: Kamandi #31, Eternals Annual #1, 2001: A Space Odyssey #7 and Machine Man #5;

Crogan's Vengeance, complete with a beautiful book sketch by Chris Schweizer (thank you, Chris!);

The Ultimate Spider-Man Ultimate Collection, a big lump of the first thirteen issues, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley, and a steal--and a perfect gift for a kid in my life--at five bucks;

Peculia by Richard Sala (another great 5-buck book);

A walk down Shady Lane with Steve Ditko's Shade the Changing Man #1 and 2;  

Traffic and Weather, a mini-comics collection of newspaper comics by Rob Ullman;

Finder: Dream Sequence by Carla Speed McNeil--Finder is a series I've been meaning to read for a while now, and Derik Badman's raves for the series cinched the sale; and

The Gemstone EC Archives: Two-Fisted Tales Volume 1, which I found for the obscenely low price of $10.

So was Heroes Con 2009 an off year, as the Klingon priestess prophesized? Not for me. I bought a load of great books, went to cool panels and, most importantly, hung out with friends like Jordan, Ben, Roger Langridge and Tim O'Shea at the show and the bar of the Westin Hotel on Saturday night. (Prime him with a few beers, and Roger reveals that he knows that Frank Springer and Vince Colletta drew the early issues of Dazzler.) On Sunday, I visited Jim Ottaviani's table and slapped down money to buy T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, the excellent new book by Jim, Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, but Jim didn't hand me my book right away. Instead, he opened to a page and began scribbling with a blue coloring pencil. He explained that his publisher, Simon and Schuster, wouldn't pay for the color that he wanted on a few pages of the book, so he was adding color by hand to a picture of the moon on a splash page near the end of T-Minus. Jim's blue moon is beautiful. Moments like these keep me coming back to Heroes Con year after year.

MoCCA Festival 2009, or, what I did over last weekend

Raymond Sohn, Frank Santoro, and Gary Panter discuss fine art vis-a-vis the comics. Bayoneting cannot faze Gary Panter. (Go to the Comics Comics blog for audio of this panel and relevant images.)

David Mazzucchelli signs the new Asterios Polyp.

What a trip. I'm back in L.A. now but still absorbing my NYC-based MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Festival experience. Balloonist regulars have probably already dipped into the massive MoCCA debriefing that has been taking place online this past week; there are some wonderful, full reports out there, and batches of photos. I can't add much except from a personal perspective:

This was my first MoCCA and the first small-press comics show I've been to since SPX 2006 (which I was able to attend for only a few hours). In fact this was the first weekend I've spent immersed in alternative and small-press comics in several years, and it felt great. Ironically, I was there to present a chapter from my forthcoming book about Jack Kirby, with a raft of examples drawn from Marvel and DC Comics. But I found an appreciative audience, who gave me thoughtful and very useful feedback that will inform my work as I bring the book's manuscript across the finish line this summer. I want to send out special thanks to my friend Isaac Cates for giving me such a warm introduction, such helpful editorial feedback, and such effective moderating (check out Isaac's post-MoCCA doodle haul):

Isaac Cates and yours truly hold forth about matters Kirby. Isaac too is bayonet-proof.

Ah, nothing like lecturing in that glorious, mural-wrapped bunker of a presentation room...

(The mural dates to 1936: WPA funded, maybe? Wish I'd photographed the muralist's signature.)

Actually, I was having Kirby-centric conversations all weekend, and my talk enabled me to meet not only Rand Hoppe of the Kirby Museum but also several other delightful people. In addition, being at MoCCA allowed me to buy a boatload of odd comics, dip into minicomix and boutique comix publishing in ways I haven't been able to do in a long time, sample cool comics from outside as well as inside the U.S., talk to many artists -- some I was already acquainted with, some not -- and make some new friends. I also got to see, to ogle for a couple of hours, the current MoCCA exhibition of comics work by David (Asterios Polyp) Mazzucchelli, smartly curated by Dan Nadel and a joy to experience. I got to see other people experience it too, and make conversation, in that full-to-bursting gallery space:

The David Mazzucchelli reception at MoCCA, Saturday night, 6 June.

It's a good weekend when you get to converse with people like Stephen Betts, Kevin Cannon, Robyn Chapman, Gina Gagliano, Tom Gauld, Jonathan Gray, Dean Haspiel, Rand Hoppe, Paul Karasik, Ellen Linder, Matt Madden and his students, Adam McGovern, Andrei Molotiu, Jim Ottaviani, Frank Santoro, Paul Socolow, Lauren Weinstein...

Lauren (Goddess of War) Weinstein and yers truly at the Mazz reception (thanks, Gene, for the pic!)

...and others, probably many, that I just cannot remember right now. Wish I'd gotten more time to speak to Jessica Abel, Derik Badman, Tom Devlin, Karen Green, Geoff Grogan, Martha Kuhlman, Calvin Reid... (sigh).

To top it all off, I got to stay with my friends and colleagues Gene Kannenberg and Kent Worcester, which was a delight to me.

Gene K. listens on as the 69th Regiment returns (actually, he's listening to Tom Kaczynski).

Gene and I go back a long way, in fact to grad school and the early mid-90s upsurge in comics studies, but I hadn't spent time with him for so long (though we did meet up, briefly, at CCS last August). Kent and I had met and spoken a couple of times before, I think, and corresponded, and of course I've admired his research and writing for some time, but I had never visited his home turf, so to speak, until now.

Props to Kent:

Kent Worcester (as if you couldn't read what the Award says)

Kent at the Mazz exhibit (another pic by Gene K.)

Besides being the Festival's Panels and Programming Director (and MoCCA's 2009 Volunteer of the Year!), Kent was my host for the weekend, and the one who made my whole trip possible. Kent, from the bottom of my neart and my bookbag, or from the yawning emptiness in my wallet, I thank you. :)

You've probably heard the complaints: yes, it was hot and sweaty at the Festival, to the point of hazard; yes, the Armory is an imposing, impersonal, disconcertingly huge space, with all the pizzazz of an airplane hanger; yes, the Festival appeared to be adjusting to its new setting in a muddled, disorganized, desperately last-minute fashion (my own talk, he said selfishly, was delayed by more than an hour, though I hardly cared once we got going). But, hey, this was my first MoCCA -- I made a lightning pilgrimage, L.A. to NYC, Friday night to early Monday morning, just to get there -- and I had the good fortune not to be left waiting in line outside the Armory. I got the best of it, and, since I had no prior MoCCA experience to compare it to, I thought the best was very, very good indeed.

I'm not qualified to speak to the Festival's logistical troubles. To me it's ironic, sitting here in L.A. reading the various postmortem reports, because I recall vividly how the MoCCA was touted, some years ago, as being a great new show, a gathering of the tribe, the best, etc., having stolen the thunder of SPX as far as East Coast small-press shows were concerned. By the time I get to MoCCA, wouldn't you know it, there are rattlings of discontent and TCAF has become the new show of choice, etc. (I better start saving money for that one). Huh. So, okay, had I been a veteran MoCCA attendee, with not so far to travel and not so much to cram into that weekend and on not such a desperate adrenalin high, I might have walked away with a different, less ecstatic view. But I gotta tell you, to me it was worth flying nearly 3000 miles for. Easily.

Funny, after a MoCCA weekend I'm totally stoked about comics but cannot drum up any enthusiasm for periodical "mainstream" comic books. Truth is, I try to keep a hand in periodical floppies, and there are some I still enjoy, but the effect of a show like MoCCA or SPX is to cause my pendulum to swing way out in the "other" direction. Right now, outside of Kirby and other academic work, I'm reading Guibert, Lefèvre, and Lemercier's The Photographer, writing my review of Asterios Polyp, and waiting for a box of goodies to come from Kent. :)

I had hoped to keep a more extensive MoCCA diary, but, nah, I was too busy experiencing the show (and then teaching immediately upon my return to L.A.) to document it thoroughly. Check out my Flickr photo-set if you're interested. It's a subset of the pix I took over the weekend.

(Apologies in advance for the red-eye. Clearly I haven't learned how to use our camera yet.)

Hype: Heroes Con Ditko Panel

Last year, my buddy Ben Towle and I hosted a Heroes Con panel on Harvey Kurtzman, Mad, and Al Feldstein. For Heroes Con 2009, however, Ben and I are tackling a different subject...

Click to enlarge.

Here's the (ahem) official press release (with the same text as the above image):

A is A+: A Steve Ditko Celebration!

Midnight Sun cartoonist Ben Towle and Thought Balloonist blogger Craig Fischer host an extensive tribute to one of the most creative and enigmatic figures in comics: Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko! The first hour will be a screening of Jonathan Ross's provocative BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (2007), featuring interviews with John Romita, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and other high-profile Ditko fans. Following the documentary, two comics legends who worked extensively with Ditko--writer/editor Roy Thomas and artist/editor Dick Giordano--will share their memories of the man and his art. The tribute ends with Ben, Craig and cartoonist/educator Chris Schweizer analyzing their favorite Ditko pages and dissecting Ditko's contributions to comics history. 

At Heroes Con 2009! Saturday, June 20, 3pm, Room 213BCD 

Should be provocative and fun. If you're planning to be at Heroes Con, join us, and join the discussion about this gifted and idiosyncratic artist. (And thanks to Adam Hayes at Hot Sauce Productions for permission to show In Search of Steve Ditko as part of our tribute.)

The Unexamined Comic is Not Worth Mylar-Bagging

The May/June 2009 Issue of Philosophy Now features a collection of articles about comics, several of which are available free at the magazine's website. I'll probably opt to buy a print version, if only to read the interview with veteran cartoonist Frank McLaughlin conducted by a presumably unrelated Jeff McLaughlin. (It's a bit sad that I can never have enough information--More! More!--about Charlton Comics in the 1960s.)

Full disclosure: my pal Tim Madigan is on the Philosophy Now editorial board, and I guest-star in his article about Harvey Pekar. Specifically, Tim recalls that I introduced him to American Splendor (I think I loaned him issue #8 first), and Tim also mentions the road trips we took from Buffalo to Cleveland to visit Harvey and Joyce Brabner in the mid-1980s. Misty water-colored memories, nostalgia for an age yet to come, etc. I expect that our other youthful adventures--Hey Tim, remember when we duct-taped a pentagram on the floor and chanted Fungi from Yuggoth to our college Literary Arts Club?--will be chronicled in future issues of Philosophy Now.  

Hype: MoCCA Festival 2009

I'm thrilled to be going to this weekend's MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street in New York City. This will be my first MoCCA Fest -- I've been eager to go for years -- and the first time in at least a couple of years that I've been able to attend a dedicated small-press comics show.

The programming sounds terrific, so I expect to spend a lot of time witnessing panels. Once I give my own talk, that is.

It's an ego-booster for me that I get to be the first speaker out the gate: I'll be presenting an abridged chapter from my forthcoming book, The Burning Hand: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Jack Kirby, on Saturday from 11:00 to 11:50am, with the help of my friend and respondent Isaac Cates (of the University of Vermont and Satisfactory Comics fame). Isaac has already given me some inspiring editorial feedback that I'll be thinking about as I bring my book manuscript across the finish line this summer.

The chapter I'll be presenting will focus on Kirby's use of the technological sublime in his comics of the nineteen-sixties and seventies (hence the above panel blowup). I'm looking forward to presenting and discussing it. Hopefully, if you're at the MoCCA Fest on Saturday, you'll drop in for a dose of ecstatic Kirbyana!

(Look out for The Burning Hand from the University Press of Mississippi, academia's leading publisher of comics scholarship, in 2010.)

To top it all off, I'm pleased that I'll be able to hang out at the Fest with friends and colleagues Gene Kannenberg and Kent Worcester, and, who knows?, maybe some other folks too. Expect a TB report next week!

Hey, pay a visit to the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center table while you're there!