Recently in Comics Category
Last night I finally got around to reading American Born Chinese, a 240-page color graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. This 2006 National Book Award Finalist is about a kid, born of Chinese parents, who must learn how to deal with being one of the few Asian students in a school attended mostly by caucasians who are either bullies or blithely rude and ignorant towards him.
What takes this interesting loss-of-innocence story and kicks it to a higher level is the way Yang intertwines two other stories into it. One is a mythical story of the Monkey King who aspires to be a god, and the other is a nightmarish sitcom about a extreme stereotype of a Chinese kid who torments his caucasian cousin with yearly disruptive visits. In the end, all three stories merge satisfyingly.
I'm a sucker for a clean line, and Yang's drawing style fits my predilection to a T. It's bold, economical, yet warm and very expressive. Link
Graphic designer and cartoon historian Leslie Cabarga, went to great pains to clean up the excellent artwork in this 480-page homage to Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I've always been a fan of a clean line in cartooning, and the Harvey artists who drew Casper were masters of this appealing style. I loved Casper comics as a child, and seeing them again with adult eyes, I can understand why. The presentation draws you in immediately. I prefer to the scratchy hyper-dynamic, border-busting work that's so prevalent in contemporary comics. Today's cartoonists could learn much from the Harvey style.
Casper the Friendly Ghost has a knowledgeable introduction by Cartoon Brew's terrific animation historian Jerry Beck.
Dark Horse, the publisher, also has been publishing a terrific multi-volume anthology of Little Lulu comic books, which I highly recommend.
Link (Thanks, George!)The below images are ads for martial arts courses that appeared in comic books of the late 50s through the early 80s. The ads were usually over the top in their promises to teach you how to smash bricks with your head, turn invisible, fight 12 attackers at one time, and kill a man with your pinky finger. Even including bodybuilding courses, hypno coins, and fake vomit in the equation, there was something especially strange about selling martial arts training through comic book ads. Unlike all those other products, it was unlikely anyone could get hurt or killed by mucking about with a sea monkey. Yet, in truth, all you really got for your 99 cents was a small pamphlet providing ass-backwards instruction in a few techniques, or, more often, a "taster" for the larger course. It's safe to say no one became a martial arts master through a comic book ad.
(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) This beautiful hardbound book from Fantagraphics (and what book by Fantagraphics isn't beautifully-produced, I ask you?) reprints the first 3 issues of Ivan Brunetti's misanthropic, black-humored, comic book, Schizo.
By all rights I should be depressed from reading Brunetti's comic strips, gag cartoons, parodies, and multi-page autobiographical stories, but his absurd sense of humor cuts through the bummer factor for me.
Not for kids! $16.47 on Amazon
This 200 page book contains 200 stunts presented in the form of one page comics. Sam Bartlett's prankish sense of whimsy is reminiscent of the best kind of street theater and performance art -- it's thought provoking, funny, and at times mildly annoying.
There's much useful information to be gleaned here: how to make it look as if you have a "rubber knee," how to draw on both sides of a piece of paper at the same time with one pen, how to flip a three-fingered bird (when a two-fingered bird just won't do), how to pop your knuckles for maximum effect; how to slice a banana before peeling it, how to open a beer bottle with your eye socket, and how to make scary looking teeth out of an orange peel.
If you have kids, they'll love you even more when you try out these stunts on them. Kids like to be teased much more than grownups. $20 at Elderly Instruments
Also of interest:
• Pranks
• Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic
• Be the Coolest Dad on the Block
$14.16 on AmazonThe seventh volume in this distinguished series focuses entirely on one of comics’ most esteemed and influential creators: artist, writer and, editor Harvey Kurtzman, whose complete Comics Journal interviews are collected in this oversized, lavishly illustrated full-color edition. Every stage of Kurtzman’s landmark career is represented, beginning with his entry into comics via superhero stories for Ace from 1943-46 (Mr. Risk, Lash Lightning), World War II-era Army cartoons, early humor work for Timely and Toby Press (Rusty, Pig Tales, Genius, and Hey Look!), his first collaborations with John Severin and Will Elder at Prize Comics Western, and, of course, his groundbreaking period at EC as editor of Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat and Mad. Kurtzman’s undeservedly lesser known post-Mad career at Trump, Humbug, and Help! is also given its due and examined in depth. What makes this volume particularly noteworthy is the obscurities unearthed from Kurtzman’s solo freelance career – from Children’s Digest, Pageant, U.S. Crime, Varsity and Why – most of which haven’t been seen since their original publication. All of which illustrate the most informative and compelling interviews with Kurtzman ever published.
Anyone who is a fan of Tony Millionaire's gruesomely funny comic strip Maakies will love this anthology of his early work. Millionaire's take on the hard facts of life and the absurdity of humanity is simultaneously uplifting and depressing -- it's the heroin and cocaine speedball of the comic book world. It also has the greatest width-to-height ratio of any book I've ever come across. $16.47 on Amazon
The first time I saw Basil Wolverton's grotesque and absurd drawings in a reprint of Mad magazine it gave me hope, because I realized that you can be an adult and still have a sense of playfulness.
Wolverton was billed as a "producer of preposterous pictures of peculiar people." His characters have giant, throbbing warts, unchecked tumorous growths, dilated pores oozing with viscous sebum, tongues with luxuriant coats of hair, organs growing on the outside, and ears inhabited by creatures that are even uglier than their host. But instead of being repellent, they're funny and lovable.
I stand in awe of this genius, an artist whose work can stand proudly next to Dali or any other surrealist. $37.71 and up on Amazon
Palookaville creator Seth is one of the best
comic book artists alive. His thick brushed line, masterful use of
limited color, and superb sense of composition are matched only by his
ability to tell a story with a wit and economy that are deeply
satisfying. I've never been disappointed with anything Seth has done,
and Wimbledon Green is no exception. This satirical look at the comics
industry, and the people who collect comics is packaged in a gorgeous
hardbound volume with gold print.
The surprising thing is that Seth never really intended to publish this comic -- he drew it as a series of vignettes in the pages of his sketchbooks. Ironically, it might be Seth's best work to date! $12.95 on Amazon
Charles Burns' incredibly precise style of illustration, with heavy use of black, is perfect for this 352-page graphic novel about a sexually-transmitted virus that causes grotesque and unpredictable symptoms in the teenagers who contract it. Some people have complained that the plot is weak, but I was fascinated by the characters and their relationships. Truth be told, I'd like this book even if it didn't have a creepy face-mutating virus in it, because the rebellious teenagers provided plenty of amusement. The spookiness and dream quality of most of the scenes don't really have much to do with the virus. They're about the weirdness of adolescence, and Burns captures it wonderfully. $15.72 on Amazon
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The only reason I ever looked at old romance-themed comics as a kid was to see the pretty girls. The stories were usually awful. Recently, Marvel comics began re-issuing its vast library of romance comics with a delightful twist -- the scripts have been rewritten as biting satire. One of my favorite writers, Paul Di Filippo, wrote a great script in the August 2006 issue called "Love Me, Love My Clones."
Maybe Marvel can do the same thing with its old western and monster comics next! Link
I don't draw as much as I'd like to, but I still love getting a new copy of Draw! in the mail. The self described "professional 'how-to' magazine on comics and cartooning" is a fun mix of how to's (the Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials are excellent) and interviews with well-known pros. If you find you like it, you can order all the back issues, too. Amazon sells the Best of Draw for $14.97 Subscribe here: $24 for four quarterly issues.
Dan DeCarlo was best known for his sexy renditions of Betty and Veronica from Archie comics, but he also had a full career as a pinup and gag cartoonist. This giant-sized, lovingly designed homage to DeCarlo has gorgeous reproductions from every phase of DeCarlo's career, including great watercolors that he painted on envelopes while he was stationed overseas. One of the most imitated cartoonists in the world, it's a treat to see all this previously hidden material from the real McCoy.
$22.02 on Amazon. (More DeCarlo on Mad Professor here.)
Comic Art is a beautifully designed, infrequently published magazine about great comic book artists. Volume 7 has a fascinating article about Harvey Kurtzman (founding editor of Mad magazine) and his relationship with Playboy's Hugh Hefner.
In 1956 Kurtzman left Mad in a struggle for ownership with publisher William M. Gaines. He thought it was a safe move, because Hefner had promised Kurtzman his own humor magazine. And Hef lived up to his promise by giving Kurtzman a lavish production budget to create a magazine called Trump. After two issues, Playboy was having money problems, and Hefner killed Trump. Kurtzman tried his hand at publishing his own magazine, Humbug, but it folded in 1958.
Now, Kurtzman, one of the greatest satirists of the century, was out of money and out of work. As a freelancer, he started pitching ideas to Playboy. Denis Kitchen, author of the lead article in Comic Art Vol. 7, had access to Kurtzman's archives, which contained most of the correspondence between Kurtzman and Hefner. The letters show Hefner to be an extremely hands-on and thoughtful editor. One of his responses to a Kurtzman pitch was typed single-space on eight sheets of paper!
The pitches and rejections are engrossing and voyeuristically thrilling. I felt sorry for Kurtzman; the guy was desperate and scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas, but the ideas just weren't clicking. Hef and his top editors were trying to be nice to him in their rejection letters, but they'd slip in remarks like "all we are asking for is the first rate Kurtzman of yore." How hard this must have been for Kurtzman, who was struggling to pay the bills.
The other articles in this issue are excellent, including a piece by Patrick Rosenkranz on early Dutch underground comics. Link
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) In 1998 I got this 4-CD set containing every issue of Mad magazine published between 1952-1998. All 376 monthly issues, 133 special issues and 12 Worst of Mad issues are included on this out of print set.
The scan quality is only fair, and the application includes a lot of sound effects, movies, radio spots and other dancing baloney I don't care for, but I treasure this out-of-print set, and when I recently bought a Windows machine, it was the first thing I loaded onto it. (The furshlugginer thing doesn't work on Macs!)
My favorite issues are from the 1950s. The Kurtzman-edited issues are, of course, amazing, but so are the earlier Al Feldstein issues, full of insanely detailed Will Elder illustrations. One day, someone -- either Warner Bros (which owns Mad), or some kind souls on the P2P networks, will make the complete run available as high-definition PDFs (My bet is on the latter). Until then, this is the next best thing. $134.95 to $379.95 on Amazon
If you enjoy the art of Stanislav Szukalski, Ernst Haeckel, and Boris Artzybasheff, then you'll like this book of surreal charcoal drawings (plus a color section) by comic book artist Jim Woodring.
Woodring fishes in the deep waters of his subconscious to pull up bizarre creatures, some malevolent, some benign, and others who seem to vacillate between good and evil depending on how you look at them. My kids are as intrigued as I am about his work. My three-year-old likes to have conversations with the characters, and I supply the voice. $11.02 on Amazon.com
In Dan Clowes' comic book, Eightball #7 (1991, Fantagraphics), there'a a four-page story called "Art School Confidential." In it, Clowes described his experiences in art school as the "biggest scam of the century," where the art teachers were useless, the students a bunch of no-talent posers, and craftsmanship was looked down on with snide disgust.
Fifteen years later, Art School Confidential is a movie (I haven't seen it yet) and Clowes wrote the screenplay (He also co-wrote the excellent screenplay to a much longer story that appeared in several issues of Eightball called Ghost World).
Clowes' screenplay for Art School Confidential takes the ideas touched upon in the four-page story, and expands on them, wrapping them around a lively and very funny coming-of-age story, with a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. If you enjoy Clowes' unique brand of misanthropic humor found in his comics (and I love it), you'll enjoy Art School Confidential.
The four-page comic book story is reprinted in this book, in case you missed it the first time around.
As much as I love Clowe's comics, his screenplay has me hoping he'll write a novel one day. $9.72 on Amazon (More Clowes on Mad Professor here)
The premise of The Left Bank Gang sounds wacky, but Jason pulls it off with wonderful believability. The story takes place in 1920s Paris, and the main characters -- Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Sartre -- are all cartoonists and in this world, comic books, not regular books, are the major form of fiction. In addition, the characters are all anthropomorphic animals.
Jason, the artist and writer of The Left Bank Gang, appears destined to join my pantheon of comic book artist gods, which include Jack Kirby, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Seth, Joe Matt, and Jim Woodring. Pre-order on Amazon for $9.97
When I interviewed Love and Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez, he told me that he loved Hank Ketcham's work. He blurbed this insanely fat book of Dennis the Menace single panel gag strips (every one from 1953 and 1954, a prime period) by saying, "I've learned more from a single panel of Dennis the Menace than a six month art course."
The art is a joy to behold, but the comics are also laugh-out-loud funny. Ketcham was really good at summoning his inner fiver-year-old. $16.47 on Amazon
Born in 1895 in the Bronx, Milt Gross was a cartoonist during the first half of the 20th Century. He's not well-known today, but among today's top cartoonists, he is considered one of the masters of the field. This 256 graphic novel was created by Gross in 1930, and like the movies of the era, is "silent" in that it has no words in it. It's no coincidence that Gross collaborated with Charlie Chaplin in the 1928 movie, The Circus.
When I first came across Milt Gross, I suddenly realized where Mad magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman got his inspiration. I think it is safe to say that if there was no Milt Gross, there'd be no Mad magazine.
Here's what Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi said about Gross:
John K: "The greatest guy even in that style is Milt Gross -- the greatest comic strip artist of all time and he does a style that's very similar to Gerald McBoingBoing except it's funny. It's funny and it's human. He'd draw a crowd scene and every character looks completely different, and you can tell instantly by looking at the character what kind of a person it is. He is amazing. And he has great drawing principles behind his work. A lot of people will look at his work, a lot of accomplished artists today and they would say he draws primitively. He doesn't at all. He has fantastic composition; the best composition of any cartoonist I've ever seen in my life." $11.53 on Amazon
These inexpensive anthologies of 1960s Jack Kirby comics contain the finest stories Marvel comics ever published. As far as superheroes go, nothing can compare with these. I haven't read them in a long time, and I expected the passing of time, as well as the jadedness that comes with age, to diminish my enjoyment of this work. But they're fresh and exciting. Kirby really is king.
Vol 3 Vol 4 (More Kirby: Kamandi, Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four)
Taking the opposite tack of Charles Addams or Edward Gorey, Charles Burns draws his goulish characters with creepy precision, using lots of rich black areas and careful brush strokes. The effect is stunning, and instantly recognizable. Interestingly, I read an interview with Burns where he said his lettering skills were poor, and that his wife does all the lettering in his comics. (Fortunately for him, his wife lettering is as good as it gets.)
El Borbah is an oversize, 96-page black and white book that collects several stories starring one of Burns' most memorable characters, a morbidly obese private detective who wears a Mexican wrestling costume on the job. It sounds silly, but the stories are anything but -- they are excellent noir fiction with suspense and twists along the entire ride. Burns would make a hell of a novelist, but I'm glad he's sticking to comics. $11.53 on Amazon
I'm very happy with this Green Lantern anthology, which contains the complete run of Green Lantern stories from Showcase 22-24 and Green Lantern 1-17, from 1959 to 1963. Gil Kane is a great example of a Silver Age DC comic book artist. He doesn't hold a candle to the master, Jack Kirby, but there's a commendable, quiet elegance to his work that's pleasing and makes the story easy to follow. Like many comics of the era, the stories are exceedingly weird, which is great. Comic book writers were trying to break out of the staid superhero genre by tying the plots to current events, and by placing the characters in bizarre situations that feel almost like Stanley Milgram experiments.
This 526-page black and white anthology costs just $10, a fantastic bargain. The only reason I started collecting comics in the first place was because I liked to read them. With anthologies like these, there's no reason to waste money buying the originals. I wish DC and Marvel would do this for all the good silver age comics they published. Link
Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library is probably one of the most inventive comic book series ever. His art, inspired by ragtime-era Chicago, is painstakingly flawless, and his stories, inspired by an absent father, hover over the border between black humor and utter hopelessness.
Volume #16 is an astonishingly gorgeous hardcover book that tells the story of the hapless Rusty Brown, a shy, bullied schoolkid who lives in a fantasy world populated by superheroes. His father, who looks like a 43-year old version of his son, is a teacher at the school, and he too, lives mainly in a what-if world of his own creation.
This book hammers home my belief that Ware will be remembered as one of the literary giants of the 21st century. Link
1. MAKE: Technology on Your Time Volume 04
2. The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
3. Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek
5. Life's Little Annoyances : True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore
6. Strange Angel : The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons
7. Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3)
8. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian : Mobile Phones in Japanese Life
10. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
11. The Week
12. One Two Three . . . Infinity : Facts and Speculations of Science
13. The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight : Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution
Thanks for visiting Mad Professor. BB has over 300,000 daily visitors, and MP has about 3,000, so I consider you all the cream of the crop. *:)
When I was really little, I enjoyed Harvey comics (Little Lotta, Little Dot, Richie Rich), but I never was interested in the superhero titles. That's because I hadn't discovered the world's greatest comic book artist and writer, Jack Kirby.
I was introduced to Kirby through Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, a comic Kirby started for DC in the early 1970s. The theme was loosely borrowed from Planet of the Apes: a 12 or 13 year old boy who was thrown into a post-disaster world in which apes, tigers, dogs and other animals had become intelligent enough to form civilizations of sorts. Kamandi was the only human who had a vocabulary level richer than the Incredible Hulk.
Kamandi represents some of Kirby's best work in a very long career (He invented Captain America, The Fantastic Hour, The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, and many other characters who are nearly household names.) This collection anthologizes the first 10 issues of Kamandi's 40-or-so issue run.
As a rule, I still don't like superhero comics, with the exception of those written and drawn by Kirby.
Link
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Illustrator Rob Ullman occasionally self-publishes small books with his editorial illustrations and sketches. I've always loved his art: cute girls, nerdy guys, bizarre situations, and his work keeps getting better. Atom Bomb Bikini #4 is limited to 300 copies, and this time comes with some beautiful color pages. It costs $6. You can buy it directly from his website, www.lurid.com. Link
Jim Woodring's comic books have fascinated me for over a decade. I never tire of reading his (often wordless) stories about inscrutable amphibians and perplexed, frustrated mammals trying to survive in a world in which every object has the possibility of coming to life and either devouring you, cursing you, or presenting you with an unusual gift. His latest book, Seeing Things, consists mainly of surreal charcoal drawings that remind me a lot of the work of Boris Artzybasheff (an illustrator from decades past who drew amazing and disturbing covers for Time magazine).
After exposure to Woodring, I look at the world differently. I see plants and patterns in nature that scream "Woodring" to me now. He opened up a secret world that had been right in front of me all along. Link
(click thumbnail for enlargement) One of the best things about old comic books are the ads in them. Most of them were designed to fool children into forking over money for deceptively-advertised products, or else trick them into becoming unpaid door-to-door salesmen for seeds or newspapers. (Has anyone ever seen a copy of Grit, "America's favorite newspaper?" Not me.)
Hey Skinny!: Great Advertisements from the Golden Age of Comic Books, brought back a flood of memories. My favorite ad is the one promising a monkey so tiny that it could fit into a teacup. The monkey was your reward for handing out 29 "get acquainted coupons" for a photo retouching service. It would be great to have a poster of this!
Other ads include: baldness cures, zit popping gizmos, glowing skulls, girdles, BB guns, fake diamond wedding rings (for cheapskate groooms), art instruction by mail, spaceman guns and helmets, wrist mounted sundials, fireworks, chewing gum to lose weight, a kit to turn lamps into Christmas trees, real gas masks, magic kits, irresistible aphrodisiac perfumes, a guide for getting into the movies, telescopes, a musical instrument called the Gahoon, a glowing necktie that says "Will you kiss me in the dark baby?," inflatable dinosaurs, Hitler stamps, and pills to stop bed wetting. Link
My three favorite comic book artists of all time are Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, and Carl Barks.
Barks was the writer and illustrator of countless Donald Duck comic books. He also created one of my favorite fictional characters ever, Scrooge McDuck. All of his stories are adventures that take Scrooge, Donald, and his nephews around the world -- and the settings of exotic locales are a joy to behold.
Barks is a master of human nature, emotions, and relationships, and his comics hold up 60 years after they were first published.
I read Barks' comics to my daughter at least once a week. We both love them.
Link
