Funny Books

OK, I’m not Criswell (although my grandmother was an actual psychic) But I have a strong sense (hell, a tingling of a spider sense) that in the near future we will see comic book downloads on Apple’s iTunes. I have a strong feeling that DC Comics will be in the initial offering. You heard it here first. I swear, this is just my instinct and I have zero insider knowledge of this. My moving to Cupertino is also completely coincidental. I swear. Paul Levitz, if you have not already made this deal, but now know it to be your destiny, I am way teh jealous of you and that little voice in your head that is chanting ‘big money, big money’.

Oh, btw, the thing that set me off on this is, old DC animation is now available on iTunes, and at first I thought it was the comics. The exciting part for me is that the actual first season of Super Friends… Wendy, Marvin, Wonder Dog, Alex Toth, Ted freaking Knight!!! is now available for you to enjoy. You couldn’t even get those joints illegally (no torrents, no DVDs, no longer on Cartoon Central or even Boomerang, not even VHS… NOTHING!), now it’s all there in beautiful digital glory, Minimus and Maximus Mole and the trees and rocks that walk and steal air conditioners and all the rest of it. Oh, the lost weekend that awaits me.

Joshua Baker blows away the Fro’s Squire Strat riffage with some mean air guitar action. 28 more shots are up on flickr now.

Wow Cool will be in the back corner of Indy Island at II-621 (or AA-621, depending on where you look) at Heroes Con. So, that’s near the right hand art stage and the info booth. Look for the t-shirt tree and the spaceman and a big Wow Cool logo. See you there! - Marc Arsenault

Yup, we will have new shirts from Marc Arsenault and Simon Gane at HeroesCon this weekend. But, just to recap, first, there will also be: Ian Lynam’s Parallel Strokes, Marc Arsenault’s new Book “Adventures in Excitement”, new CDs from Offset Needle Radius and nickname: Rebel, lots of books by Simon Gane and Steven Cerio. So come look for the Wow Cool sign and the spaceman in Indie Island, where Marc will be drawing pictures and Joshua Baker will be making music.

OK, T-shirts. Each is available in sizes S, M, L, XL. They are on super high-quality 100% cotton shirts. They will be very reasonably priced. First up, brand new from Vertigo’s Vinyl Underground artist Simon Gane, is this super-stylish 2-sided promotional shirt for his book with Ian Lynam and Kim Fern: Sap.

And, even more confusing is this also stylish number from Marc Arsenault made especially for this event. Let them know you’ll never be retconned again!

And there will be much, much more at the show, free stickers, garage sale specials, costumed surprises, tigers, Brown Cuts Neighbors, The Doris book, a big box of “last copies” going back years… See you there!

It’s done! 28 pages of fun. (or 32 in the special edition, which also comes with a tape and other goodies). Go to Heroes Con next weekend to get yours!

OK. I went a little contest crazy in my spare time these last few months and did ridiculous things like a Radiohead Remix and even wrote and recorded a whole record in February. When I saw that my favorite web comic Scary Go Round was having a reader created comic contest called Feats of Strength, I couldn’t resist. However, trying to write, draw and color the whole thing in 3 nights right after 2 12+ hour drives between New York and Tennessee was very ill advised; and, it shows in the finished product and in my showing in the contest. Still, I’ll take 23 (my lucky number) in a field of 54. I think I was eventually more scared it would win, and people would see me at my worst. Well, here I am showing it anyway. So yeah… up ’til 3 am every night… arm in total agony… It was seriously an ‘I’ll fix it in the inking”… then ‘I’ll fix it in the coloring’ kind of rationalization going on. The bizarre and garish color choices don’t help. Not my best work. Still, I think it’s a pretty cute little strip. Enjoy!

Click for normal Scary Go Round size view.

Two weeks until Heroes Con! I am so not ready. But there is some great stuff starting to pile up for the show. There will be debuts of new T-Shirts by me (Marc Arsenault) and Simon Gane (Arnie, Paris, Vinyl Underground), Joshua Baker of Notes from the Lighthouse zine and God Hates Computers and many other bands will be helping out at the table. He’s planning a superhero day for us. So, uh, look out.

We just received a big box of Ian Lynam’s amazing Parallel Strokes book and will have those at the show. I’m frantically working on getting a Brown Cuts Neighbors sampler DVD and my new comic collection “Adventures In Excitement” ready. As before. Wish me luck! More updates coming soon, and hopefully more blogging here, been too busy just fixing bits of the thing that went wobbly after an upgrade.

I am completely not kidding. You must get The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus right now! I seriously woke up one day last year with the realization that this book must happen! I wrote Fred, and he told me it was going to happen. I was sworn to secrecy for many months. Then the official announcement was made. Now it exists!

Find out more about this awesome book and learn how to get a hyper-customized edition direct from Fred Hembeck here.

This is David Lynch’s more eloquent response… you know, on my behalf… to the fucking idiot the other day who said he would pay a few dollars for a download version of the only story he was interested in in the new Kramers Ergot. (As opposed to my more juvenile response today on the Beat… sorry Uncle Heidi. So much for satire) Hey folks? Guess what? If you just want to read it and not spend any money… It’s called a fucking library. Get off the damn computer and out of your house.

I think now that it’s been a little while since Rory passed I’m experiencing that stage of grief know as liberation that is supposedly so familiar to those who have already lost their parents. Sorry about the headline lift, Tom. I feel your pain brother.

Thank you so much Rory, for all your patience and help over the years. I’ll miss our conversations on the future of comics (OK I missed those already, it’s been awhile), also missed are the ridiculous recall of knowledge you had on any subject for every dumb question I had and the time you took to answer them. I still am no closer to understanding pogs or Babylon 5, but that’s OK. Thanks for the job. Thanks for the rides (to San Diego several times). Thanks for loaning me the van (sorry it got broken into). Thank you for having the faith in me and Josh to help make Wow Cool a (sort of) successful distributor in the 90s. Thanks for being our best landlord… and customer. Thank you for having the vision to hire a knowledgeable staff of specialized buyers for your store and making it one of the best resources of that kind. Thanks, also, for having a nice looking store with a friendly and helpful staff. There aren’t too many places (if any others) I used to work at that I could say that it was nice to return for a visit. I think you’d appreciate that, so I’ll just leave this here.

Full news on the Comics Reporter
Comic Relief home page with tribute to Rory

Hang in there Todd!
-Marc

Yes, the man who killed Captain America, rendered in ink, back in 1992 when he was just an (alleged) ex-petty criminal and aspiring cartoonist. Just one day after I seem to have subconsciously channeled him into some doodles (see previous entry), I find Ed staring out at me from some 15-year-old sketchbooks while looking for drawings for a totally unrelated project. What does it all mean?

Been trying to find the style for a new draw on an old old script for a promotional mini that I’m doing as a split release with Poopsheet. discovered that my old pad of bristol was a bit too old and had sucked up some moisture or something as ink is bleeding on it more than I like. So, blew through those last 3 sheets with some style sketches… that were more doodle than anything thought out. This one had a great logo in outline that got pretty thoroughly ruined by filling it. Looking at the drawing today, I think it is supposed to be Ed Brubaker.

See some choice Simon Gane art on Arthur Conan Doyle story in the Graphic Classics Free Comic Book Day special, available Friday, May 3rd, 2008 at finer comic book shops everywhere. Simon previews his story here. Read a review of it on Newsarama, where they say that “Simon Gane has a wonderfully busy, angular style that’s perfect for the Victorian story. He’s also remarkably adept with faces and body language, so the characters’ shifts in mood and personality throughout the tale are utterly convincing.” There are many other fine books available that day; get all the details on the Free Comic Book Day site. You should also visit our Simon Gane shop on Wow Cool and read the Vertigo title that Simon pencils - Vinyl Underground - for more wonderful Gane magic.

You can now proudly walk into your newsagent’s and demand the new GQ without shame as there are 3 delightful full-colour pages of burlesque goodness by Paul Pope to be found within. And, unlike most of this issue’s content, they are not on the website. GQ is also worth a look if you are in the art, culture, design, what-have-you trade, because, it is, well, surprisingly well done. I was genuinely surprised at the freshness of the work. Really. Give a look. (It still smells bad, and the content is beyond questionable, but no shock there)

Among the witless speculation and fantasy being trolled out on what I imagine might still be called comics fandom concerning what the recent decision regarding ownership of Superman might mean in the long run, one shining beacon of reason drops the science on corporate comicbook publishing in spectacular fashion. Be very grateful that Tom Spurgeon is with us.

An industry where the caretakers of properties make far more money off of creations than the creators themselves due to legal circumstance and standard practices that greatly favor corporate ownership should be an intolerable one to every single person who has even a half-measure of interest in the comics they read beyond the initial thrill of looking at the ink on paper.

Read on, true believer!

Superman spotted hiding out in the Research Triangle In a BT box at a Hampton Inn in Cary, NC.

I’ve just started uploading and making notes on pictures I’ve taken of artist studios. The first batch, taken for Kitchen Sink Press’ Michael Kaluta Sketchbook, is up on flickr now.

Revelations abound and much sample art is to be had in this least likely of all artist interviews at Marvel.com with Gary Panter on his contribution to the 7th issue of Jonathan Letham’s Omega. We get some clues that Gary is releasing some music, and yes is still drawing for Riddim. A few other tidbits are also worth noting.

1. This awesome analysis of Jack Kirby

The kind of changes he went through graphically in his life were really interesting. His stuff starts out kind of blobby, like everything’s made out of wet mud. Then by the ’60s, it is like wax and less blobby and he starts really getting the gravity and antigravity going. And then in the ’70s he has figured out how to sculpt the space with the line and shapes and attach the planes in space like they are clipped together and the whole thing bulges and explodes. And then he kept at it like the warrior intellect he was.

2. Marvel has a healthy respect for its fans

Marvel.com: So, Gary, tell the Marvel zombies out there a bit about yourself and your career.

3. If you’d read Gary’s blog entry about visiting Marvel, then this is damn funny

Everyone was nice at Marvel and I had fun doing the comic

4. Marvel doesn’t mind it’s competition advertising on its site

Screen grab of the Marvel page with video ad for the new Justice League: The New Frontier DVD

5. I spend about a quarter of my working year writing interview or ad copy and I cannot imagine writing such awful question lines as are in this interview. How this thing was constructed is beyond me. It’s a very un-natural flow. It feels very dumbed down in a an awkward way. I’m not convinced that Sean T. Collins had much to do with this final piece, but I’m very glad to see that all Gary’s bits of stuff and links made it in there. It’s worth noting that it was updated the day after it was originally posted.

Omega the Unknown from Marvel Comics is on stands April 2, 2008

UPDATE - I can’t help but feel a little cheated for getting something free.. That interview has ALL the art by Panter in the Omega comic. I would have been nice to have experienced it all in the book. Aaarghhh. never look. never look. Keep the spoilers from my heeart!

The other day, there was a link in the Random News Round Up section of Tom Spurgeon’s always great The Comics Reporter to an essay in the New Yorker by art spiegelman on revered EC Comics artist Bernard Krigstein. I came to a total stop in my light reading of it at this sentence…

…Krigstein was a true intellectual. He would have had more in common with the staff of Partisan Review or Commentary than he did with his colleagues on Nyoka the Jungle Girl, Space Patrol, and Strange Tales of the Unusual.

No, not because I’m not familiar with the Partisan Review (uh, I’m not…); it was the list of then contemporary comicbooks. The last one in particular. Strange Tales of the Unusual! You’ve got to be putting me on. art snuck that in there in a mischievous fit after too many slices at Ben’s Pizza. No freaking way. That’s like having a comic called Exciting Stories of The Spectacular… except much, much more dull. It might have well have been called Interesting Anecdotes of the Peculiar.

OK. Sure enough, after a little searching I find out that “Strange Tales of the Unusual” had a dozen or so issues from one of Martin Goodman’s 50s comicbook imprints. You can see the covers on The TIMELY-ATLAS Cover Gallery : Blake Bell’s Visual Tour Of Marvel’s “Horror” Books. Here’s the first one:

At first they’re kinda funny in that lame ironic sort of way. Many of the covers repeat these type of not very interesting teases, with such snoozer titles as “Man Afraid!”, “Those Who Plan!”, and “The Long Wait!”… always with the quotes and exclamation point. I’d guess they’re tales of people driven to such heights of paranoia by the cold war that the slightest irregularity in the daily routine would drive them to the brink of madness, sort of like the situation of the housewives in countless infomercials who shake their heads in disgust that performing the most common of household tasks invariably causes embarrassing and messy accidents.

Eventually it had to dawn on me the climate of the times, and I realized just how sad this all was. The strange and unusual situation of trying to make a horror comic without any horror. The seal of the Comics Code Authority was in effect, and zombies, decapitation and injury to the eye motifs were a thing of the past. After a time the creators of these tepid thrillers realized that they could go a long way with the weird and monstrous, and some innovation was forced to occur. At EC they were lucky to have Krigstein, who produced his comics masterpiece ‘Master Race’ under the code.

Given much of our current cultural climate it seems timely that we now have a more detailed record of those times and the factors that led to comicbooks coming under the scrutiny of the US Congress, David Hajdu’s new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure it’s pretty good!

Wow Cool will be at the Heroes Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 20-22, 2008. There will be a few new debuts, lots of stuff by Simon Gane, Steve Cerio and myself, music, comics, shirts, etc. I’m hoping to spend most of my time drawing sketches of 70s Marvel monsters for the kids (or, failing that, for Frank Santoro). Updates to come in this space. You can look for the new shop and some other fun web stuff to go up well before then (hey, the Interweb is hard). Thanks.
–Marc Arsenault

OK, after that pun, I’ve forfeited my right to some sort of future privilege in this world and all possible others. This magazine has been on the rack on the local Kroger’s for the past 2 months, and I do a double take every time I see it. Maybe I haven’t gotten used to seeing him without the shades. Yes, it is the author Neil Gaiman on the cover of a watch and luxury lifestyle magazine. Hi Neil.

Strangely I never saw any mention of this notably odd thing in the usual comic and pop culture bloggy sources. So here’s the camera phone pic I took a month ago. There’s a tiny bit about it on a Gaiman message board, and the actual hr:Watches site hasn’t been updated in months. Still the oddest thing on the newsstand.

Johnny Flatline returns, in a typical adventure… all fantasies, lies, imagination, backstory and wasted rationalizations. Realized here in an adult form not seen before. He returns in 2009 in Quarter a tale of Pinball, deceit and Lust. This was drawn tonight for Jeremy Adolphson’s 4×6-Art project, where he gets artists to create original works on 4×6 note cards. He has well over 500 now… I promised to do one about 18 months ago… not too bad.

There a great story on the fine printing folks at Yee Haw Industries restoring and printing a long lost woodcut by the late, great Jim Flora in the latest issue of Knoxville, Tennessee’s free weekly Metro Pulse.

Go Read It.

More Flora.

Railroad Town main page.

I wasn’t really going to do one of these, but basically had done most of the pieces elsewhere, so I’ve compiled it all here.

Five Comics or Comics-Related Publications You Enjoyed Reading This Year (originally on The Comics Reporter)
* Scott Pilgrim, Vol 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together - Bryan Lee O’Malley
* Daybreak Vol. 2 - Brian Ralph
* The Escapists by Brian K Vaughan & company
* UnInked edited by Chris Ware (Scroll way the heck down the page)
* The Comics Journal 285 - the Darwyn Cooke Interview

Best LPs of 2007
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Unkle - War Stories
Cold War Kids - Robbers & Cowards
The Go! Team - Proof of Youth
Hot Fuzz OST (UK Version)

Top five tracks that came out in 2007 after I’d already done my Festive Fifty List (Artist links are home pages, song links are videos)
Friendly Fires - Paris
Malcolm Middleton - We’re All Gonna Die
The Octopus Project - Ghost Moves
Ebony Bones - We Know All About You
Black Kids - I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You

Web Comics I Actually read every day (originally on BKV.tv… updated)
Scary Go Round by John Allison - updated 5 days a week - full 5 year archive online!
American Elf by James Kochalka - usually updated daily
Daybreak by Brian Ralph - more or less bi-weekly (search the archives)
Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson (I think this is an actual comic strip)
And I just started reading We The Robots… pretty good so far.

OK… that’s it. There was also favorite TV, food, moments, etc. this last year, but those are a bit more easy to come by, especially as top 5 categories go, and I am here primarily to promote music and comics… so there you go.

Wow Cool was launched 20 years ago this month by Sam Henderson, Tom Hart and Marc Arsenault in New York. Tonight, a few of those characters and more are gathering in Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York for a memorial pub crawl. If you are in the neighborhood, stop by Alex Cox’s excellent Rocketship shop around 7pm. Otherwise you’ll have to catch up with the traveling show at one of the usual spots on Smith Street.

It seems that Wow Cool has been around long enough now (20 years this coming January) that it has attained some sort of historical signifigance, or at least our old friend Rick Bradford of the Poopsheet Foundation thinks so. I guess I need to get it in gear to get him much more art and info for this ambitious project. Original post from Midnight Fiction follows.

Poopsheet Foundation Website Revamp
Rick Bradford has just completed a major revamp of the Poopsheet Foundation website. Besides offering the web’s best selection of collector’s mini-comics for sale, Bradford has added a section on mini-comics history and a cover gallery. As Bradford explains, "I’ve felt for a long time that both the history and evolution of the mini-comic need to be more aggressively documented and easily accessible. Over the years I’ve been greatly inspired by the research of folks such as Bruce Chrislip, Gary Usher, Dale Luciano, Jay Kennedy and Mal Burns (not to mention Clay Geerdes and anybody else who has contributed to the documentation of the scene past or present) and I want to do my part."

Poopsheet’s new history section includes bibliographies for Mike Cody, David Miller, John Porcellino, and Souther Salazar, plus a biography on Michael Roden. Bradford’s also republished several articles by Tom Spurgeon; a 1991 letter from Jay Kennedy in which he describes his plans for the second edition of his Official Underground and Newave Price Guide; and publisher’s indexes for Wow Cool, Comix World, and Starhead Comix.

The new Gallery section provides over 700 mini-comics covers from Anthrax Press, Bruce Chrislip, Comix World, Dada Gumbo Press, Everyman Studios, No Way Comix, Ozone, Phantasy Press, Slice o’ Life Press, Starhead Comix, Wow Cool, and XEX Graphix! Bradford adds, "My intention for the new Poopsheet site is to collect as much relevant information as possible and make it available to all interested parties (collectors, fans, researchers). To that end, I’m certainly open to submissions and suggestions, corrections and additions to the existing content, as well as any cover scans missing from the gallery."

When asked about the site’s registration option, Bradford explains, "Although the new site was built on the Ning social network platform and signing up with Ning is an option, registration is not required. The Poopsheet site itself may be freely enjoyed without signing up." The new Poopsheet site is a great resource and archive on the history of mini-comics, and Bradford’s blog entries on the home page also provide news of current projects being developed and published by today’s mini-comics cartoonists.

Perhaps the best news about the revamped Poopsheet Foundation website is that it’s just getting started. Bradford has lots more planned, so if you’re into minis, underground, self-published, and alternative comics, start making it a regular visit!

If you occasionally check this thing out solely for the comic book related content, and could give a crap about the rest, all that noise has now been stuffed into it’s own category, named Funny Books. I would have just done this quietly, but I also wanted to share this little quote from Dan Nadel (from the first issue of the always inspiring Comics Comics), that I think nicely sums up my own feelings on the topic. [the emphasis on the last bit is my own]

This comic-book collection of Bill Griffith’s classic syndicated newspaper strip [Griffith Observatory] reminds me that comics can actually be intelligent and sophisticated. I know we’re already supposed to believe that by now, but have you ever read Persepolis? If so, you see the problem. Point is, people should be taking a cue from Griffith: He’s smart but not smug, clever but not pretentious, funny but not mean. And he’s never turned into a prick. Plus, he actually has things on his mind that exist outside of his own brain. He has articulate, interesting thoughts to express—an exceedingly rare trait in comics.

Having worked on the Zippy collections for Fantagraphics, I can confirm that all of this is true, and also that Bill Griffith is one of the nicest and sharpest people working in comics. And he’s been doing it for a very long time at a very high and consistent standard of writing that few, if any, have ever matched. So, welcome to the Funny Pages on Wow Cool, where we never forgot the fun.

Simon is the subject in the third in this years series of holiday interview by Tom Spurgeon at his Excellent The Comics Reporter site. Tom talks to Simon about everything from his early anarcho-minicomics to his current success with Paris and Vinyl Underground.

Go read the interview

Visit the Simon Gane shop on Wow Cool

It was long past time I found a new place to buy books when in San Francisco…

My local crappy shop in Brooklyn closed up a couple years ago and I finally sucked it up to ride the F out to visit Alex at his excellent Rocketship, and now I’ve found a similar friend at my (third) home in the bay. Isotope - the Comic Book Lounge, worried me at first… I just Googled “San Francisco” and “Comic Book”, and there they were at the top. But why had I never heard of them? Unlike Rocketship I’d swear they don’t come up in the usual comic blogs of artist tours and the like. And the site contents weren’t all that convincing. “Who are these guys?” But we went and they were so super friendly and helpful (James and Kirsten). Clean store, good selection, lots of lounge space, and really cool artist decorated toilet seats.

My first bay area comic shop love has to always be my old employer Comic Relief (I was the zine buyer in the mid-90’s there… in between the renowned tenures of Josh Petrin and Janelle Hessig), but when in San Francisco, I’ve often found myself on Divisidero at Comix Experience… something I’ve come to dread. I still go up there for the excellent cheese shop and the cool antiques store… but going in to Comix Experience takes some effort.

I thought I would give it one more try, but, no, the same insufferable asshole is still behind the counter, and now I’ll probably never go again. Try Googling Asshole and “Comix Experience”, read down the links a little bit and you’ll find this ain’t just me talking. I have no idea who this jerk that Brian hired is, but he is a fucking retail nightmare. He is completely unhelpful, spends endless amounts of time on the phone, is ridiculously loud and belligerent, blathers on about his stupid opinions in a way that only Kevin Smith (barely) gets away with (as in, every other word is ‘fucking’… and I’ve witnessed this going on with little kids in the store), and if you have the nerve to whisper to someone on your cell phone in the store he asks you to leave. So yeah… this time, I just said, “you stupid ass”, and walked out. Never to return. Mr. Brian Hibbs, sir. Fire this stupid fucking asshole. I don’t care if he’s your brother or what, but you’re hurting more than just your own sales with this jerk.

I gleefully tracked the poetry of spam this past summer (or spoetry) in a couple of posts (Thing 1 | Thing 2). Now, Yale School of Art MFA candidate Tom Manning has gone one better and turned them into cartoons. See the results on the excellent (if far too infrequently updated) Design Observer.

Swimming in the great idea pool of the collective unconscious, it can be funny the things that will float by you on the way to the top. I was more that a little confused and surprised this weekend to come across a comic strip called Truckhead in the latest Nickelodeon Magazine at my local Kroger’s. The cartoonist, Nate Neal, seams pretty talented, and it was a cute and funny strip. It only subliminally registered on my flip through, but I totally did a double take in the magazine aisle and said aloud, “did I just see what I thought I saw”, and grabbed it for a second look.

Truckhead, to me, is a song. One that is pretty much hardwired into my system after playing it many times with Brown Cuts Neighbors. It first appeared on our cassingle Two Heads Are Better Than Yours, and was re-recorded as the lead track on our debut 7″ record Broken Down Like a Bean; both in 1990. The cover of the cassette has a cartoon drawing I did of a Truckhead character… pretty obvious, truck cab in place of a head… normal human body…

So, yeah… it was one of those, “I would have copyrighted and trademarked every dumb idea we ever had, if we weren’t so broke we could barely buy enough equipment to play shows” moments. The truth is, we never would have guessed that Truckhead could have had, or needed, any useful or profitable life beyond that song (It was strange enough when 1000 Young covered it on their first record). We certainly had no big plans for Truckhead, or for the man with a tire wrapped around his waist to hide his genitalia, for that matter. Nor did we question Jason’s grasp of human anatomy.

The first real inkling that a human with a truck cab for a head had any creative currency past our song first emerged many years ago, anyway, in Max Andersson’s Wreck-Boy and Car-Boy comics.

To somewhat close the circle here, I first encountered Max’s automobile headed urchins as the art director on Fantagraphics’ Zero Zero, where they first appeared in english, back in the mid ’90’s.

Wherever this weird idea came from, I’m just glad to see it foisted on so many kids, and it makes me happy in the same way that hearing kids playing on the swings in Niskayuna, New York singing “You’re Supposed To Be The Patient” after seeing us at the local town fair did. It’s a shame Nate Neal’s The A, B, C’s of Truckhead comic book is out of print. I want a copy, dammit!

OK. At long last I have converted the cluttered old mess of Stickies on my Mac (I had over 20) into something else. I’ve tried several other notes/thought organizer type apps and none of them, well… stuck. The recently released SketchBox freeware from omz:software did. It very simply solved all my problems. It also opened up all sorts of new possibilities.

It only took me messing with a couple of notes to decide to switch. If you have had the same problem of a crazy mess of notes all over your desktop, with many collapsed windows… and just too much pale yellow, then I think you may find the same joy. The big selling feature for me was the scalable SketchBox grid view of your notes. One great advantage of this is it eliminates the Stickies clutter when using Exposé. You also have the ability to attach notes to the desktop, which allows you to quickly get to very important notes - like To Do lists - with Exposé.

OK, if you’re checking the engineroom for it’s comic content, I hope you read this far, because the app can function as a super useful layout tool, and the drawing tools (you’ll have to check out the SketchBox site, or try the program to really get how the text and drawing layers work) has full support for your Wacom tablet.

This software is pretty new, so there are still a few features that it could use; but it’s in a pretty rapid development phase, so I’m sure we’ll see those, and more. On the obvious side, it could use some drag-and-drop import, export, and deleting of notes. Contextual menus would also be nice. The ability to create separate groups of notes in ‘pages’ would be essential if you want to get seriously into using it for developing sequential narratives; but, if you want it to help impose some simplicity and order to your notestream, then you’ll like the restriction of the one window (hey, you can always make the notes real tiny and scroll through as many as you care to make…). Did I mention the alarm clock? It’s pretty damn cool.

Of course, in just a few days we’ll have Spaces and Quick Look to play with in Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) so, yeah… we’ll see. In the meanwhile, I really like my SketchBox and will be happy to see it grow.

I guess it’s not good to go on first impressions in a review, but rarely have I seen such a gloomy and uninviting book as The Best American Comics 2007. The cover, when seen in person, is a ghastly thing, and a casual flip through revealed a grey world that seemed to wallow in self-indulgence, self-loathing and despair. Comics is one hell of a misnomer here. I don’t want this book, I would never read this book. It completely gives me the creeps. This collection looks like it’d make an extra-downbeat episode of BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths - with tales of keeping a stiff-upper-lip in the face of severed limbs, deformed children, and flesh eating diseases arriving after a meteorite had destroyed your cottage - seem like a holiday in the Balearics. And, yes, that is probably completely unfair, as, as I have said, not, nor do I intend to ever, read it. I have read (and even enjoyed) works by nearly all the artists represented (and, in the interests of full disclosure, worked with many of them). All I can say, really, is, where is the fun?

I have to agree with Uncle Heidi, who goes on about this at much more length in The Beat, that the middle (between the self-flagellating auto-bio crowd and the cape crew) is under-represented in a big way, and that really is a shame.

I won’t quibble here about the many artists who I think created some of the best works of 2007 (hello, a year that could not have been even half over when this volume was created) and were not included. Ugghh. Just Ugghh. Ok… Yuck.

10 years ago at SPX, me and Jason cornered King Cat creator John Porcellino and made him come clean about what makes him tick. With less than a week to go before this year’s Small Press Expo, we present to you an in depth interview with this master of small press comic art.

Steven Cerio has an art show going up this week at David Leonardis gallery in Chicago. The opening will be this Friday the 5th from 6pm to midnight. Steve will be there in person, so swing by and say hi!

David Leonardis Gallery
River North
217 West Huron St. #5
Chicago IL
312 863 9045
Map

Steven Cerio’s
Happy Homeland

Steven Cerio comics
from Wow Cool.

Yes, it is the true! Vertigo (Part of DC Comics’ Adult Group, whatever that is) has seen the light and given Vinyl Underground to the world. You need to add this to your sub, or pull or whatever they call it at your local funny book emporium. Si Spencer, Simon Gane, Cameron Stewart and crew have busted the serious business, and it is in shops today! Cover by Sean Phillips. Check out the preview. If you need more Simon Gane, we invite you to get it here. Paris, Simon’s series with Andi Watson, has now been added to the shop as well as the full line of timeless classics like Arnie and Sap. So get it while it’s hot! (OK That’s all the hype I’ve got in me for about a month…)

The Comics Journal #285 - front cover by Darwyn Cooke, originally uploaded by fantagraphics.

You may find yourself actually buying the Comics Journal again. Although it has become virtually impossible to find (I have not seen it in a bookstore or newsstand for several years… and I’ve looked) they are still plugging on. My local comic shop actually had a few, and the owner told me that a few people who never buy it picked it up this time. Why? Well, with Power Girl’s greatest power cleverly covered, it was probably the fact that there are over 40 pages of words and art from Darwyn Cooke, the man who gave us Absolute DC: The New Frontier. Why? From my point of view… The New Frontier is probably the one super hero comic book I want to hold on to for my kids to have and keep. That’s pretty damn big. He did it right and so very, very well. I’m still working through the interview. Pretty interesting stuff. A different perspective from what you may be used to. As is usual with the Journal, the copy editing is a sad joke… thus, Toronto is a province of Ontario… and this in the very first column. There’s a few (but not nearly enough) pieces of rare and sketchbook art. It seems like this interview was done at the 2007 Comicon in San Diego, so no mention of Mr. Cooke’s tale of his Eisner Awards experience. Anyway.

Also of note is an interview with Keith Knight, a compadre from back in the day. This was a little bit like the Journal back in the form it had a decade ago… oh yeah, the design on this is just about the best they’ve ever had. Sorry for the rambling review… just wanted to share for those who would really want to read this but might not stumble across it…

The preview is up on Newsarama for the brilliant new Vertigo series Vinyl Underground, illustrated by our friend Simon Gane. Written by Si Spencer (Books of Magick: Life During Wartime); Art by Simon Gane and Cameron Stewart; Cover by Sean Phillips; Coloring by Guy Major. More info and images are up on Simon’s Blog. This looks like pretty exciting stuff, and will be a strange new ride for fans of Simon. His more recent abstracted deep chiarscuro style has reached a new level. Very nice… and the ink and color team does a great job with it. Curious to check out what this Si Spencer is like with words as his credits include Judge Dredd, Eastenders and a Torchwood script.

If you live in North America your best source for Simon’s other work is right here on Wow Cool. We have just about all his classic books… Arnie, Punk Strips, Sap, Paris (it’ll be up there soon) and more. Check out the Simon Gane Page on Wow Cool.

Look for Vinyl Underground in your local funny book outlet from October 3, 2007.

Vertigo’s VU #1 page.

Reposted from the Reading Frenzy Ledger. Help Chloe out!

Please donate your used books, comics and zines for an upcoming fundraiser for Ye Olde Reading Frenzy! We’ll be having a used zine smorgasbord during the Portland Zine Symposium (August 11th-12th), and a big book sale as part of our 13th Anniversary celebrations on September 1st. If you’re an author, editor and/or publisher and would like to pitch in a few new items (or hurts or overstocks), that’s great too! Xtra-Fancy stuff will go up for auction. This is a small, relatively painless way, for a lot of folks to make a cumulatively big contribution towards keeping our good thing going.

You can drop off your donations, any time during business hours (Mon-Sat: 11-7, Sun 12-6) or ship them to: Reading Frenzy, 921 SW Oak Street, Portland, OR 97205. If you’re bringing in more than a couple grocery bags full of printed matter, please call in advance to make arrangements — we don’t have much storage space! We will find good homes for all the materials donated that we are not able to sell — lending libraries, schools, charity shops, etc. We will be accepting donations through August 31st, but would especially appreciate your zines and mini-comics donations prior to August 11th.

If you have any questions, please contact - info [at] readingfrenzy dot com. Please spread the word! Thanks in advance for your support!

We are looking for:

Books, all subjects
Children’s books
Comics and graphic novels
Zines, pamphlets, broadsides
Magazines, alternative/independent, vintage
Paper ephemera, posters, prints, mail art materials, rubber stamps
Reading accoutrements: magnifying glasses, reading glasses, book ends, book stands, bookmarks, pipes, slippers, footstools, small lamps
Blank journals
We are not looking for:

Outdated textbooks (unless they are vintage and illustrated)
Old encyclopedia sets (unless they are vintage, illustrated kid’s sets)
Adult series westerns or romances
Most mainstream glossy magazines
Most newspapers and freebies
Original software users manuals