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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.
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’ve finally had a [minor] breakthrough on setting up the new Wow Cool online shop [7 months in the making!] So I feel a little more confident to do this announcement thing. Wow Cool is moving back to California and regular operation after nearly a decade of slagging off in New York and Tennessee. By August, 2008, there will be a new Wow Cool office somewhere in Santa Clara County, the web shop will be gloriously relaunched, and hopefully I can make a preliminary announcement about new releases [music, books, video] that will be rolling out. Stay tuned, dear reader. Buy me a drink at the Hilton bar during Heroes Con if you want more dirt. Or just stop by the table.
Thank you everyone,
–Marc Arsenault
ps. I am actively seeking an intern. Other employment opportunities may follow.
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.
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.
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
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
A review of the Jason Martin Stupid Pages strips (about a year before we decided on that as a name to package them in)
The two comics I’ve only seen at Fantagraphics that are memorable are “Albequerque Ben,” by Richard P. Butler, which is amazing, and a few Xeroxes of nonsense strips Al Columbia got from Marc Arsenault featuring some guy’s strip with titles like “Cassette Bird” and “I’m Gonna Pop Your Cheddar Legs.” I think both artists have socializations problems, let’s say, but the comics are amazing.
–Tom Spurgeon
The San Diego Comicon Panel transcript in which it appears
Tom Spurgeon - The Comics Reporter
Thanks Tom! Jason is clearly better at it (I like to think I’m better at getting a good gut laugh). Jason was also responsible for the slogan of the month in the Comics Journal once. Can’t quite remember what or when on that.
by Jason Martin 1991
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.
On flickr
Buy Marc's Strongman DVD
