Click for embiggenment.

Tom Spurgeon has revealed his hidden genius. Compare to the Garden Weasel.

This last one is worth comment. I was very surprised to see the return (well… uh, now discontinued and reduced for quick sale, I guess) of the old Western Publishing model 3-pack at the toy store. This is at a Toys R Us in Knoxville, Tennessee. And yes, it is a classic Scorpio issue of the Defenders by David Anthony Craft (with help from Don McGregor) and Keith Giffen. This is the 1970s comic book equivalent of LSD, just waiting for some poor, unsuspecting soul to be warped forever. Good stuff.

Much like the situation that exists, whereby, when you were a kid and you saw another freak in the mall and they were with their parents too, you knew you were kindred spirits, and now, no number of piercings, tattoos and dark clothing means anything; so it is sadly true that, a ratty line, anarchic spirit of intent and appropriative content mangled to suit your tastes has little to do with your own similar work, beyond appearance. Yes.. it’s confusing. In those distant times when there was a certainty that the freaks were all flying the same freak flag; made at home, with what was at hand; there were many of us, that for reasons of culture and language that, sadly, do not live on in the discourse of the freaks of today… their progeny. Whether they know it and all that.

Booga and Gabe - Funny Picture 88 From Illustration no. 55 Dec. 1988

For very many, Raw #7 or Casual Casual were the entry points to King Terry and many others. Beyond that there wasn’t very far you could go (for at least a few more years) unless you had access to the Japanese book store Kinokuniya. Some things did occasionally show up even at the local Barnes and Noble. Like the 55th issue of the Japanese Illustration magazine in 1988, which for me was even more influential that Raw 7 (which I actually got later). It was a survey of the rattier (but, I gather, fairly commercial) cartoon illustrators of that time, like King Terry and Suzy Amakane.

Znoopy by Yosuke Kawamura 1988 From Illustration no. 55 Dec. 1988

I eventually got brave enough to actually go to Kinokuniya and dig around. Something called Weekly Comication soon became a favorite. I will not even begin to describe the varied content available therein… Each one I grabbed seemed to have the opening few (mostly color) pages dominated by this same anarchic crowd now familiar from Raw and that special issue of Illustration.

Comication Title Page May 11-19, 1989 - Credited to Delta Power

NOW… Unable to really tell the freaks from the squares, I get my weird beard Japanese art kicks from Cutest Character Magazine…

From Cutest Character Magazine 79, Aug./Sep. 2008 Copyright San-X Co.

UPDATE: The saga continues on Intergalactico: Yosuke Kawamura “Exotica” book 1981

Special Guest Stupid Page by Sam Henderson. Culled from the vast Wow Cool archives, this gag may be 20 years old or more. You should be aware that Sam has the eleventh issue of his series The Magic Whistle: Body Armor for Your Dignity from Alternative Comics available now-online or at your local comic book shop.

This was a lot funnier 10 years ago when Jim’s Journal was a bit better known.

Intergalactico is the creative/multidisciplinary studio founded by designer, artist and illustrator, Chris Capuozzo; and the website received its official launch today. You may know his stuff from his work with Funny Garbage or the last Paper Rodeo, or even some moldy old issues of Wow Cool’s Tuna Casserole anthology. Anyway. He’s a great artist and designer, and there is just tons of sweet eye candy content on his site. Dig it.

Zoo District #7 - Adventures in Excitement is a 28 page black and white digest with color covers by Marc Arsenault (that’s me) collecting various comics and drawings spanning several years. A few strips appeared previously in Brian Ralph’s Monster, Paper Rodeo, Roarin’ Rick (Veitch)’s Rare Bit Fiends and Tuna Casserole. The rest are previously unseen. Guest art by Brigham Martin, Jason Martin and Paul Komoda. It’s available to order online now from the Poopsheet Shop. If you’re in Brooklyn you can pick it up at Rocketship in Cobble Hill. If you are in Berkeley, then you should be able to get it from Comic Relief. More stores to be added as they have them. Inside art previews are on Poopsheet.

Go read: “I Beg You To Be A Little More Observant” in today’s Comics Reporter.

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.

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!

Click for normal Scary Go Round size view.

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.

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.

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

Hang in there Todd!
-Marc

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.

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!

…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

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.

Go Read It.

More Flora.

Railroad Town main page.

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.

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!

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.

Go read the interview

Visit the Simon Gane shop on Wow Cool

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.

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.