Here's our own cartoonist Ed Piskor being interviewed at Columbus Museum of Art by Jared Gardner on March 24, 2013. It's great to hear him talk about his influences and interests in this hour long conversation.
Ed Piskor is the recipient of the Columbus Museum of Art and Thurber House 2013 Graphic Novelist Residency. He has drawn stories for underground comics legend Harvey Pekar, and published the book Wizzywig about the history of hacking. His current comic, Hip Hop Family Tree, is serialized at Boingboing.net. The first volume of Hip Hop Family Tree will be published this year by Fantagraphics.
It was fun to see the faces behind some of my favorite web comics in this brief PBS documentary.
The internet has given birth to yet another new medium: web comics. Moving beyond the restrictions of print, web comic artists interact directly with audiences who share their own unique worldview, and create stories that are often embedded in innovative formats only possible online. Sometimes funny, sometimes personal, and almost always weird, web comic creators have taken the comic strip form to new, mature, and artistic heights.
More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain.
Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg -- leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country.
With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.
Thom Buchanan of The Pictorial Arts says of this mind-boggling Wally Wood illustration:
This piece by Wally Wood, which I don't think was for EC [the comic book company that published MAD, Weird Science, and Tales from the Crypt], is genius for its organized complexity—seemingly effortless in its execution. Zoom in on the figures and see how fully realized they are! I cannot overuse the word when it comes to EC guys—they were geniuses!
A gaggle of devastatingly handsome cartoonists pose for a group portrait in a Toronto restaurant. Left to right: Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Seth, Chester Brown, Anouk Ricard, Peter Birkemoe, Adrian Tomine. (photo: Nathalie Atkinson)
I love R. Crumb's sketchbooks. I have three of them, which are facsimile editions of his sketchbooks from the 60s and 70s. I paid about $100 per volume. This six volume set for Taschen is $1000. It looks great, but I don't think I'm going to plunk down that much cash.
This six-book boxed set is the first collection of Robert Crumb sketches to be printed from the original art since the hard-bound, slipcased, seven volume series issued by the German publisher Zweitausendeins between 1981 and 1997. Unlike the Zweitausendeins edition, which included every doodle ever made by the preeminent underground artist, our best-of edition has been personally edited by the notoriously picky artist to include only what he considers his finest work, including hundreds of late period drawings not published in previous sketchbook collections. Robert Crumb requested that the books representing the second half of his career be published first due to fan demand for new Crumb material (Volumes 7-12 cover the period 1982-2011, and the forthcoming Volumes 1-6 will cover the period 1964-1981).
In the last 20 years Crumb's artistic output has slowed considerably, making new works more rare and highly prized. This collection of over 600 unseen drawings created between 1982 and 2011 makes this a must-have collectible for every Crumb fan.
Ed Piskor is the recipient of the Columbus Museum of Art and Thurber House 2013 Graphic Novelist Residency. He has drawn stories for underground comics legend Harvey Pekar, and published the book Wizzywig about the history of hacking. His current comic, Hip Hop Family Tree, is serialized at Boingboing.net. The first volume of Hip Hop Family Tree will be published this year by Fantagraphics.
