To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its most infamous product, Topps is busting out the stops with an all-new Mars Attack trading cards series (coming out this October), and I'm happy to report that the art is excellent! Last month I posted this cool painting by the 88-year-old pulp magazine legend Earl Norem, and a representative from Topps contacted me and asked if I'd like to run an exclusive sneak preview of the card art on Boing Boing. "Of course!" I said. Moments later, he sent me the following images, which include Norem's stunning concept sketches. Enjoy!

Riding the momentum of the 50th Anniversary of their best-selling franchise, Topps is proud to announce the first all-new MARS ATTACKS story-based trading cards in more than half a century! While paying homage to the infamous card set that first shocked parents and delighted children in 1962, Mars Attacks: Invasion will be a bold revival, and will take the property into exciting new territory.

"Last year's Heritage re-issue was a smash hit with fans,” says Topps' Adam Levine, who has overseen the recent resurgence of MARS ATTACKS, “and this brand-new series is what we’ve been building to. It will be a fresh re-imagining of the original series and will stay faithful to MARS ATTACKS' pulpy, classic sci-fi roots. This means all-new, traditionally hand-painted cards illustrated by a group of artists carefully selected to carry forward creator Norm Saunders' legacy."

The set will boast an impressive roster of talent, from living legend Earl Norem and master illustrator Joe Jusko, to renowned painters Ed Repka, Glen Orbik, Gregory Staples and more to be announced.  Artists contributing to the 63-card story-based portion of the set will each illustrate multiple cards, with the set being divided into themed subsets that combine to tell the story of an alien apocalypse unlike any other.

"Topps hasn't done a set like this in more than twenty years,” says series editor David Waldeck. “It's a return to the days when trading cards hooked audiences with incredible imagery and imaginative storytelling. We've loaded the set with everything fans know and love about MARS ATTACKS: giant insects, flying saucers, ray guns, robots, damsels and death rays!"

Topps will also provide fans with the opportunity to find original 1962 MARS ATTACKS trading cards randomly inserted into packs! These vintage trading cards from the most valuable non-sport trading card set in history have been certified by Topps in 2013 and will be available as rare chase cards in Mars Attacks: Invasion!

Additional chase subsets and valuable collector-driven inserts will be detailed in the coming months. Filled with high levels of sci-fi action and excessive amounts of bone-chilling gore, this all-new series will surely thrill long-time fans and legions of new ones in equal measure.

Mars Attacks: Invasion is scheduled for release in October 2013.vFor more information on MARS ATTACKS, follow on Facebook. Read the continuing adventures of the new Mars Attacks comic book series, published monthly by IDW.

In this episode of Gweek, I talked to the terrific crime writer Duane Swierczynski. Duane has a new book out today, called Point & Shoot. It's the third and final novel in his Charlie Hardie series (see my review here). Next week, Dark Horse is releasing X #1, written by Duane. We talked about his novels, non-fiction work, and comic book writing (See my review of his comic book series, Bloodshot). We also geeked out on our favorite crime writers, and I added several authors to my list of books I want to read before I die.

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What we talked about in this episode:

Fun & Games

Hell & Gone

Point & Shoot

The Wheel Man

The Blonde

Frauds, Scams, and Cons

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

Dean Putney and I interviewed Lucy Knisley, one of my favorite cartoonists. From her website:

Lucy is an illustrator, comic artist and author. Occasionally she is a puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer. She likes books, sewing, bicycles, food you can eat with a spoon, ornery cats, art you can climb on, manatees, nice pens, costumes, baking, television, cheese and Oscar Wilde.

Her first published book, French Milk, is a drawn journal about living (and eating) in Paris with her mother. (From Touchstone Publishing from Simon and Schuster), August of 2008.

Her newest book, Relish, from First Second Books, is about growing up in the food industry. (First Second Books, April 2013.)

Beginning with a love for Archie comics, Tintin and Calvin and Hobbes, she has been making comics in some form or another since she could hold a pencil.

RSS | On iTunes | Download Episode | Listen on Stitcher

What we talked about in this episode:

Mailbox

Primates

Pretty Girls Ugly Faces

Record!!

Moves

Candy Crush Saga

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
By Lucy Knisley
First Second

If you find a more delightful book than Relish this year, please let me know. I’ll say right now that the odds are pretty slim. Lucy Knisley shuffled together a memoir and a cookbook into a cohesive collection of short stories that illustrate her life in food, the product of two parents who seared food obsessions into her DNA. The highlight has to be the tale of adolescent rebellion colored with pink hair and Lucky Charms -- a processed food defiance against epicurean parents. Can’t say I actually went so far as cooking any of the recipes contained here -- after five years in this apartment, I’m not entirely sure my pre-war oven even works -- but the tale of traveling to Mexico with a best friend who’s forced to leave a $200 stash of adult magazines behind a airport toilet, that stuff’s universal.

My Dirty Dumb Eyes
By Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn & Quarterly

I don’t know whether it’s Lisa or her publishers who deserve a dressing down for not running with the suggested title What We Draw About When We Draw About Sex Bugs, but after reading that in the hilarious fine print of the book’s penultimate page, I just can’t say I’m so into My Dirty Dumb Eyes as a name. But that’s really my chief complaint here. Hanawalt’s one of the funniest people going in comics these days, and just about every story in this collection is a testament to that fact. Heck, she’s even managed to tame the boiling hatred for lists that this post-McSweeney’s internet world has instilled in me. And I’m not sure what the standalone painting of Superman and Wolverine holding hands is doing in here, but it’s seriously making me consider getting a first tattoo.

Side note: I mentioned to someone at D&Q that I was planning on taking the book with me on a trip as sub-10,000 feet reading, and was helpfully discouraged from reading it around small children, so I figure I’d pass that life lesson along. Whatever you do, don’t let this thing with 100 yards of a school -- unless you’re eager to teach some impressionable young minds where dick lizards really come from.

Very Casual
By Michael DeForge
Koyama Press

Speaking of exercises in public health, here’s a thing that probably shouldn’t be read by anyone -- or at least not those prone to nausea and dramatic fainting. Michael DeForge’s work exists in a universe where the creative overlap between William Burroughs and David Cronenberg is the biological fabric of the universe. You know the drill, parasitic worm deer, psychedelic snowman meat slices. It’s a world where amorphous monster blob indie rock bands are the norm. Also, Aunt May and Dr. Octopus are deeply in love, much to Spider-man’s chagrin. Very Casual is always fascinating, mostly grotesque and in the case of the biker gang with cartoon character helmets, actually pretty touch in the end.

Everything Together
By Sammy Harkham
Picturebox

I find myself looking for big takeaways here, but Sammy Harkham seems to find most of his stories -- and humor -- in the void. Like Poor Sailor, about halfway through the book, which closes on a panel of a one-armed man building a house next to the grave of a wife he abandoned for adventures at sea. Okay, well, maybe the takeaway there is “don’t abandon your wife for adventures at sea.” But still, the cartoonist is far more interested in meditations than resolution -- but even devoid of greater surface meaning, Everything Together is chock full of poignance and uncomfortable hilarity. And bonus: there’s also cartoons about Frank Santoro’s father and Dan Clowes’ dog eating Kevin Huizenga’s hand. Where else are you gonna get that?

From "Everything Together"

Real Stuff is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I have some good news to share. Boing Boing is going to run the amazing stories from the pages of Real Stuff, once a week (Read the first one here). I’m immensely excited that a new audience is going to be able to read Real Stuff on Boing Boing, free of charge. I hope you’ll enjoy reading, or re-reading them.

Later this month PictureBox is releasing Blutch's So Long, Silver Screen, "a series of interlocking short comics that combine scholarly movie history with ribald romanticism, and feature a motley cast of actors and characters, including Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Luc Godard, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Michel Piccoli, Tarzan and Luchino Visconti."

As much visual essay as graphic novel, a daydream and fantastic meditation on the other art of telling stories with images, So Long, Silver Screen is the finest work yet from an uncontested master of contemporary cartooning, as well as his first full-length work to be published in English. It is designed by famed cartoonist David Mazzucchelli.

Blutch has published over a dozen books since debuting in 1988 in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial: among his books are Mitchum, Peplum and Le Petit Christian, and his illustrations regularly appear in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération and The New Yorker.

Thank you, Blutch, for the honor to participate in this interview. Your work has tremendously inspired myself and an endless line of cartoonists, humbled by the virtuosity of your lush brushwork. It’s long overdue for your books to be translated into English, and I’m grateful to PictureBox for actualizing it.

There’s a line in So Long, Silver Screen: “All I knew about life came out from a box of comics and a few movies.” Is this true of you? What were those early life lessons and their sources?

Actually, I wasn’t alluding to a specific moment in my life. This line is a form of poetic license… How can I… No, I cannot mention any specific source. But yes, this is true of me. I live in the land of Great Literature but I was influenced by pictures. Moving pictures and static ones. It is not easy to comment on what I wrote in this book without paraphrasing it…

If comics and film were your first loves, what made you devote your career to the former?

Because, as far as I can remember, back to my haziest childhood memories, nothing has ever felt more fulfilling than drawing, that’s as simple as that. I crave for drawing, for its practice. This solitary pleasure. This unique way of visualizing ideas. Anybody can make a film but drawing is hard… it’s almost impossible. You may pretend you can make a film but you cannot pretend you can draw. Although… (he laughs)

France loves comics. Did this culturally affect your experience of growing up an artist? In the United States, young cartoonists are generally persecuted, socially inept nerds that retreat to their pencils and drawing paper for solace. Unfortunately that neurosis persists in “successful” adult life as shyness and insecurity. French cartoonists seem to have more confidence and bravado, giving me the impression– perhaps incorrect - that artistic children in France are socially validated rather than beaten up at recess. Is this true?

As far as I am concerned, I was never oppressed. I was actually encouraged because the adults surrounding me were totally afraid that I could not do anything else. Hardly good enough as a student and school left me indifferent anyway. I avoided team and individual sports. In desperation, my parents encouraged me in this way because when I sat at the dining table and started doodling, I gave them the illusion of being gifted.

What was your upbringing like? You were raised in Strasbourg, and the Alsace region seems to have a distinct flavor from the rest of France. Can you describe that? Did you have artistic nourishment?

Alsace is apart from the rest of France because of the language. French is my second language, I first learned Alsatian and when I started school, I didn’t speak a single word of French. I had to learn French at the age of 4. My grandparents on my father’s side didn’t speak a word of French, my grandparents on my mother’s side had a very poor French, my parents have a thick Germanic accent and their French is, well, not that orthodox… Such an environment was naturally determining in making me who I am. When you live on the border, you live on the edge. We lived next to Germany and we naturally absorbed a number of German habits. So yes, when you speak two different languages and grow up at the crossroads between Switzerland, Germany and France, it is quite inevitable that it will influence you both as an individual and an artist.

You describe in So Long, Silver Screen a child’s natural defiance to the mundane, impotent existences or our fathers and their office jobs. What did your father do for a living?

My father started out building frames then he became a carpenter and I can remember him drawing house plans on a fantastic drawing table, set in the garage. But at school when I had to fill the blank for my father’s occupation, I wrote down “building technician” and I never really understood what it meant… My mother brought us up, my brother and I, she was an assembly line worker in a chocolate factory.

You seem fluent in English. Did you learn it from films, or grow up with it in your household? Many of your books hold a dialogue with American culture, like Lettre Ameicaine and Total Jazz. Can you expound on this?

Facts are quite simple. Before 1917, French men had long moustaches. Then the smooth-faced Americans came and we started shaving. In 1944, the same Americans started a race against the Russians. They knew that if they did not rush to meet the Russians ahead, they would reach the Atlantic coast in no time. The junction happened far East from the Atlantic in Berlin. On the conquered land, the winners built military bases and started giving out gums and showing films with tremendous sex appeal. So I had no other choice than starting to speak English, just like the Gauls had to speak Latin, because here in Western Europe we are Gallo-Americans.

Are these sensibilities transposed to the medium of comics? The French drawing style seems more loose and expressive. How do you compare that to the North American cartooning ethic?

I am quite indifferent to these issues. I never think about them. Carl Barks opened the doors of American comics for me. And ever since this wonderful day, I have come across a lot of American cartoonists, either through their work or in the flesh. And it is not untrue to say that Carl Barks and I come from the same place…

Drawing for discipline, drawing for pleasure; are those impulses in conflict? Because it seems like you’ve been able to merge them. How are you able to infuse your work with such sensuality?

This is the difficulty of the game I play: trying to express life within the restraining and narrow frame of small drawings trapped into sequential panels.

Do you see the sexuality in So Long, Silver Screen veering into territory of fetish and perversion? If cinephilia is a form of masturbation, what is art-making in general?

The solitary practice of art is an advanced form of onanism.

Nakedness is a theme of your book. Naked as in a dream – vulnerable and out-of-place. Is seeing one’s work in print an experience of public nakedness?

(He pauses and thinks) No, not at all. No, no… Because one of the pleasures of literature is that you can remain masked. It is not a visual work, here, it is literary, so the answer is no.

Your persona in the book labels today as “the civilization of porn”. Does the image have less value now that we have unlimited access to it? In the internet age, is the urgency/impulse to create images diminished?

Absolutely not. The world has a constant, hysterical and definitive relation to all types of visual representations… No, really. And my persona actually claims that today is the civilization of sex, not porn… which is different. I borrowed the line from Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou”.

This book, by its nature, draws from reference: film stills, photographs, interviews, poetry… Your figure drawing is always perfect. Do you work with live models? Photos?

To achieve my aims, I draw everything that comes to my hand. Everything that comes to my eyes, really… all things live or lifeless.

Not only is comics the art of images in sequence, but of images in juxtaposition. You do this with such ingenuity in So Long, Silver Screen – making graceful transitions from Manet’s Olympia to Kazan’s Baby Doll. Your new work is an education – a rich overview of film history. Do you wish for your readers to seek out the films of Luchino Visconti or the poetry of André Hardellet to fully engage and unlock So Long, Silver Screen?

No, I did this… well I thought, and maybe that was ingenuous of me, that readers did not need these references to understand the book or find any interest in it. I don’t think it is necessary to go and get a bunch of Visconti’s DVDs or André Hardellet’s books… I took these references out of their context to tell something else and used what they meant as such. But I know that references can be intimidating, some people even take them personally, sometimes like an aggression. This is an essay and an essay feeds on references, it is not fiction, it is almost a work of scientific research. So I have to put notes and references…

While your surface lines gush with spontaneity, I have a feeling the skeleton of the compositions are labored over. So Long, Silver Screen brims with intellectual agonizing. Is there a distinction for you between the writing and drawing process? What was it like to create a book like La Beauté that was entirely visual?

Yes, this is totally different. I did La Beauté because I wanted to make it without words and not using words for a cartoonist totally changes his relation to narration. I had a very different approach for each book. For So Long, Silver Screen, most of the time, the written idea preceded the picture and the picture illustrated the word, the idea, I think. Whereas in La Beauté, I was literally drawing the idea.

I visited you at your home studio in Toulouse in 2004, and I was struck by how you vacillated between two working postures – half the day hunched over a cluttered desk and a tiny comics page, the other half standing at a large easel with vibrant pastels. Do you feel this is necessary for your physical health as well as your creative performance?

Well, for both reasons, it’s not healthy to remain seated for too long. You need to stand. Up and straight. Drawing in a seated position is very different from drawing in a standing position. And as I like my drawings to be alive, changing physical positions while drawing gives me a new perspective, a new point of view, a new way of representing things.

In So Long, Silver Screen, your persona converses with a nubile dancer, while you draw lines (tracing her movements?) with a mop-like brush. She is the conscience and counterpoint to your curmudgeon. What is the correlation between dancing and drawing?

First, I have to say that this specific sequence was inspired by abstract expressionism which used large brooms to paint on large surfaces. The initial idea was that the character was in such a dark mood that he felt the urge to fill the page with black, put it everywhere. But yes, for me, drawing and moving have always been related. There is something in cartooning that I find unique, the fact that it is an approach of rhythm. Like ballet, somehow, I have the impression that there is not much of a difference between a stage performance and a drawing performance, well I believe so… whatever! This is all very instinctive.

You seem to work with great flexibility regarding tools – from brush pens to cheap ballpoint pens to oil pastels, often drawing straight to paper. What is your favorite? What’s your take on the generation of cartoonists drawing on digital tablets? Is there a correlation to innovations in film like CGI, Motion Capture, 3D that may interfere with the art?

I am a cartoonist of the twentieth century… That is what this entire book on cinema is about: “I come from the twentieth century and unfortunately I’ll always remain from the twentieth century.” Even if I were to die in 2067, I’d remain a man from the twentieth century. Of course, the choice of tools changes the art, we’ve seen it with music, with music instruments. But I’d say that my favourite tool is now the brush. This whole book about cinema is about the brush. But it will change, it changes all the time. A while ago, I’d have picked the pen.

There’s a trend now of cartoonists directing films: Marjane Satrapi (Chicken with Plums), Joann Sfar (Gainsbourg), Frank Miller (The Spirit...); Are you tempted to dabble in film-making yourself? You have worked on an animated film, correct? What did you gather from that experience?

Animation did not turn not out as a fulfilling experience. But I am not really into animated films so… I took part in the project because other contributors, like Richard McGuire, convinced me to do so, but you need so much faith… it took so much time and these people, I heard them talking about money for months and months, and I am not used to it. And well, artistically speaking, it is not worth it, not like making a good book. Animation is not my cup of tea.

What about films?

If there is something to say, why not? If there is nothing to say, or if it’s just a way of shining in society or looking for success, or satisfying a certain social vanity, it’s not worth it… So… if it has a meaning, why not…

Are there other mediums you envy?

Yes, yes, of course… I would have loved to be a painter, I would have loved to be a playwright, an actor… Yes, there are lots of things that I would have loved to be. But not a dog groomer, that I couldn’t. Nor a jockey.

What theories of cinema are best applied to comics? What filmic techniques have compromised comics?

What I don’t like as a reader is when a comic book looks like a storyboard. I find it frustrating. It restrains the reach of the work, what you can do in cartooning. There is a more elliptic side to narration in a comic book, it’s more mysterious, more poetic, larger maybe, richer. And what would be the common features between films and comics? I don’t know… The obvious thing is maybe the close-up technique. Flashbacks and many other things.

Your bibliography is quite prolific. I wish for all of them to see English translation. Were there any gaps in your productivity? Bouts of creative block?

Yes, but never for too long. Life is too short.

My vote for a follow-up project of yours to see translation is Le Petit Christian (in two volumes), which I’ve publicly acknowledged as deeply influencing Blankets. Can you describe Le Petit Christian, at least to the degree it correlates to So Long, Silver Screen?

Both are about… Going beyond the anecdotic recreation of memories, going beyond that, beyond the personal anecdotes, to approach universal issues, that are common to all of us. Le Petit Christian is not an autobiography. Neither is Le Petit Christian. As an author, I use my personal experience as a starting point to reach people, the universal, the public… yeah…

When I visited you in Toulouse in 2004, we discussed the merits of working in autobio versus fiction. You said, “There is nothing real, but everything is exact. Just the juice of reality.” Le Petit Christian seems to feature a self-deprecating stand-in. How is this persona on the page related to you?

As I deal with actors a lot in this book, I thought that it’d be only fair if I too played a part in it, if I gave of myself… So I play a part but that does not mean that my persona says exactly as I think…For instance, in the sequence mentioned above, the dancer expresses what I feel as much as my persona. To make it simpler, the guy with my features is not me. And that’s what wonderful in cartooning, it allows this kind of ambiguity, just like literature. This book about cinema is much influenced by Philip Roth, or Romain Gary, authors that place themselves in the eye of the storm, at the centre of the adventure. In an ambiguous fashion. A kind of artistic transposition… In his novels, Philip Roth may write that a character is named Philip Roth but he is not him. In my comic books, what I can do is representing myself.

Also during that visit, we discussed the “purity” of drawing in black & white. I love how the restrained way you’ve used color in So Long, Silver Screen. Can you describe this decision? What did you learn working on full-color projects like Vitesse Moderne?

For So Long, Silver Screen, I had kind of an aesthetic shock when I saw an exhibition of original plates by Fred for Philémon. Some of them had blue wash applied on. I found it beautiful, visually speaking. And also Forest, I copied the principle from one of his books, Barbarella, which has a different colour of wash for each chapter. So I was influenced by Fred and Forest.

The most potent moment I remember from visiting you was perusing your volumes of unpublished drawings. I couldn’t fathom that such renderings of masterful beauty hadn’t seen print. Were these exercises, preparatory sketches, documentations of day-to-day? You said: “Drawings are my private life.” – a statement in stark contrast to the public lives of actors and performers.

I’ve always been drawing and I hope that I’ll be doing it for a long time, with no specific goal, no idea really, no ulterior motive, it’s important that you can draw without telling yourself that it’ll be used or recycled. I have tried to escape from the rule of efficiency ever since I was a kid. I like it that my books are read but I don’t have a pathologic need to be seen. I like it when a book of mine is released but I don’t feel like I’m dead when I remain in the shade for a while…

If So Long, Silver Screen is not a eulogy to cinema, it’s certainly a meditation on mortality. You say: “All their lives, artists of the silver screen give the world the spectacle of their slow decay.” On actors: “…we die in public.”

Is the same true for a visual artist when the performance is the line on the paper?

Absolutely not. We don’t have the same relation to time, time as it goes. I am hidden in my studio. Far from people’s eyes. The anonymity and solitude involved in my work is what protects me, as a cartoonist. In the book, I say that this is what makes the grandeur and specificity of an actor’s work, that is, “displaying the meat”. For all eyes to see.

Thank you, Blutch, for taking the time for these questions. We’ve barely gleaned the surface of your profound work, which I’m excited for English readers to discover for the first time .

As soon as Gilbert sent us his list of images for his MARBLE SEASON tour slide show, it took EVERYTHING in us to not immediately blog or tweet to tease all the great comics. And since Gilbert is half way done with his tour, and I got to see him do the slide show last night, I'll tease you this Little Archie page. Why? Because Gilbert made the astute point that "old ladies were running it in those days, and where are the old ladies now [in pop culture]?" And he remarked, can you imagine a kids comics with two old ladies on the same page? As someone who will admit to worrying about how comics will treat her when she is an old lady, I loved it.

Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season tour schedule

Marble Season is the semiautobiographical novel by the acclaimed cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, author of the epic masterpiece Palomar and cocreator, with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, of the groundbreaking Love and Rockets comic book series. Marble Season is his first book with Drawn & Quarterly, and one of the most anticipated books of 2013. It tells the untold stories from the early years of these American comics legends, but also portrays the reality of life in a large family in suburban 1960s California. Pop-culture references—TV shows, comic books, and music—saturate this evocative story of a young family navigating cultural and neighborhood norms set against the golden age of the American dream and the silver age of comics.

Middle child Huey stages Captain America plays and treasures his older brother’s comic book collection almost as much as his approval. Marble Season subtly and deftly details how the innocent, joyfully creative play that children engage in (shooting marbles, backyard performances, and organizing treasure hunts) changes as they grow older and encounter name-calling naysayers, abusive bullies, and the value judgments of other kids. An all-ages story, Marble Season masterfully explores the redemptive and timeless power of storytelling and role play in childhood, making it a coming-of-age story that is as resonant with the children of today as with the children of the sixties.

Marble Season

Jim Ottaviani returns with an action-packed account of the three greatest primatologists of the last century: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. These three ground-breaking researchers were all students of the great Louis Leakey, and each made profound contributions to primatology — and to our own understanding of ourselves.

Tackling Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas in turn, and covering the highlights of their respective careers, Primates is an accessible, entertaining, and informative look at the field of primatology and at the lives of three of the most remarkable women scientists of the twentieth century. Thanks to the charming and inviting illustrations by Maris Wicks, this is a nonfiction graphic novel with broad appeal.

Primates

(Via Meine Kleine Fabrik)

The Williamson collection also includes a short comic story by Frank Frazetta, called “Squeeze Play.” Sample below. (The Fantagraphics book is in black and white and the art is much cleaner than this sample.)

50 Girls 50 and Other Stories Illustrated by Al Williamson

'Tain't the Meat...It's the Humanity! and other Stories Illustrated by Jack Davis

Other Stuff By Peter Bagge. Fantagraphics

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this one -- well before Fantagraphics ever announced the thing, and certainly Other Stuff doesn’t disappoint. In fact, the mere bringing together of Bagge’s Murry Wilson strips is worth the price of entrance alone. In fact, Peter and assorted Fantagraphics employees, if you’re reading this (as I suspect some of you are), I will be the first in line to buy a graphic novel-length biography of the Wilson family patriarch and self-appointed musical genius drawn in Bagge’s signature style. Ditto for the assorted liberty taking rock and roll tales of folks like Sinatra and Sly Stone.

And then there are the collaborations with R. Crumb, Alan Moore, Dan Clowes and the like, many of which I already own in some form or other, though my self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder thanks Bagge’s publishers for collecting them all into on handy volume. It’s great to see all of this stuff together, particular those Hate b-stories that fell through the cracks of Fanta’s excellent “Buddy Does...” collections. Like we really needed another testament to Peter Bagge’s greatness.

Letting It Go By Miriam Katin. Drawn & Quarterly

I had the strange experience of running into Art Spiegelman on the streets of Cologne, Germany over the summer. Strange because we were there for very different reasons, and I’d had no idea what brought the cartoonist to the outdoor mini-mall built around a centuries old church that is Cologne. Stranger still was the experience of seeing him speak at a local museum upon his invitation, monitoring how the audience reacted to the artist’s “holocaust denial” cartoons. And while I’d certainly never dream of equating experience as a Jew born in America toward the end of the 20th century to those of Katin, an artist born in Hungary during the second World War, I’ve some small sense of appreciation for the baggage we bring to our own concepts of modern Germany.

As its name poetically implies, Letting Go is an attempt to release some of that, an act she understandably flatly refuses on hearing her sons decision to move to Berlin. Katin illustrates life after that decision in color pencil sketches, telling the tale of daily minutia, reflection and the occasional flashback, all well aware that, for better and worse, lifelong opinions rarely change overnight.

Reich #9 By Elijah Brubaker. Sparkplug

I’m sad to say that I fell off a bit with Reich. While I commend Brubaker’s commitment to the floppy (and Sparkplug’s commitment to issuing his efforts), the publication schedule hasn’t made it particularly easy to keep up. It’s worth the effort, of course. The cartoonist has taken on the life of one of the most interesting figures in psychoanalysis, holding little back in the process. This ninth issue finds the Freud protege entering the final decade of his life, at odds with peer, journalists and the government thanks to radical, metaphysical beliefs.

Brubaker has no interest in catching you up, though a quick visit to Wikipedia should do the trick, though, really, it would be silly not to just start from the beginning -- the cartoonist’s vaguely cubist style does some wonderful things with Reich’s mad science fashion sense. And while I’ve been hassling both the artist and his publisher to put out a collection for a few years now (I suspect the last 10 years of the analyst’s comics life will have to play out first), let’s embrace the dying art of the paper serial while it’s still with us.

The Frantastic Four By Sam Spina. Kilgore

I pulled this (if memory serves) of the shelf of the wonderful Needles and Pens on a recentish trip to San Francisco, not at all expecting the tale of alien encounters to climax with a break dancing competition. Needless to say, it was a pleasant surprise. The art has a sketchily cartoony, Graham Annable-esque feel to it, and the story would fit nicely in amongst that new brand of quirky Cartoon Network daytime programming that always seems to be on when I check into hotels these days. Needless to say, I hope it’s not the last we’ll be seeing of the celery monster and his ilk.

Bloodshot is the code name of a man who has billions of self-repairing/self-replicating nanoscale robots inhabiting his body. Bloodshot is part of a secret government defense project. The nanobots coursing through his system give him enormous strength and the ability to survive being shot, stabbed, or bombed, because they detect and repair damage. All they ask in return is that their host eats plenty of protein to keep them fueled. (That means cattle that happen to be grazing in a field should be afraid when Bloodshot is near.)

In issues one through four (which make up this anthology) Bloodshot struggles to figure out his true identity. That's because the government scientists who designed Bloodshot have implanted in his brain a bunch of different identities, each with fabricated memories of wife and children, which the scientists can switch on like a TV channel to persuade Bloodshot to participate on a mission.

In these issues of the comic, Bloodshot's already bizarre life gets even stranger. For one thing, the nanobots in his body had become intelligent and are communicating with him in the form of gold-colored apparitions of his imaginary wife and kids. For another thing, the scientist who created Bloodshot has gone rogue and is trying to use Bloodshot against his former colleagues.

With shades of Greg Bear's Blood Music and Philip K Dick's novels, I had a blast reading Bloodshot and I'm eager to read volume 2, which comes out in July.

(I should also mention that the art, by Manuel Garcia and Arturo Lozzi is excellent.)

Bloodshot

(Via Suddenly)

Resident Alien Volume 1: Welcome to Earth! is about an alien who crash lands his spacecraft on Earth and must interact with human beings in a small mountain town. The alien can uses his formidable mental powers to block his appearance so that the townsfolk see him as a human (with one interesting exception). But as readers, we see him as a purple skinned, bug-eyed, pointy-eared spaceman.

In the afterword to the anthology, writer Peter Hogan explains how he came up with the idea for the series:

I blame Elvis Presley. Many years ago, I edited a book about the man, and got fascinated by Alfred Wertheimer's photos from the early days of his career. He showed Presley in everyday settings like diners and hotels, traveling on trains and hanging around in stations –- and the truly remarkable thing about them was the fact that all the other people in those photographs were completely ignoring Elvis, despite the fact that he looked nothing like anyone else in the room (or on the planet, for that matter). It was like there was a Martian in town, and they just couldn't see him.

The alien is friendly. He is fascinated by human behavior, and when the town doctor is murdered, the mayor asks him to step in as a temporary replacement until they can find a permanent doctor. He agrees, somewhat reluctantly, because he is still unaccustomed to the ways of humans, but his curiosity wins out. The story develops into a good old fashioned murder mystery, with the twist that an alien disguised as a doctor is involved. Steve Parkhouse's art is excellent, and I'm looking forward to the next volume, which will be called "The Suicide Blonde."

Resident Alien Volume 1: Welcome to Earth!

(Via X-Ray Delta One)

(Images: Seduction of the Innocent website)

For anyone studying comics, Wertham is a difficult figure to avoid. A New York City-based forensic psychiatrist and pioneering mental health advocate, Wertham also was a prolific cultural critic, who decried the potential effects on readers and viewers of violent images and racial stereotypes in the mass media. Between 1948 and 1955, this German-born doctor was also among the most vocal opponents of the nascent comics industry. He was certainly not alone: teachers, librarians, parents, police officers, religious leaders, and other adults lent their voices to the anti-comics movement. But Wertham was different from many of the others in that he had a scientific / medical background and could enrich his arguments with examples from case studies of children.

In his book Seduction of the Innocent published to coincide with the 1954 Senate hearings on comics and juvenile delinquency, Wertham's thesis - stripped of all its rhetorical flourishes - was simple: crime comics corrupt children. Although he was against outright censorship, Wertham advocated that the government restrict the ability of younger readers to purchase crime comics. His definition of crime comics extended beyond the lurid and racy titles such as Crimes by Women and Crime SuspenStories to include more pedestrian fare like Superman and Classics Illustrated. If, in its pages, cartoon animals bopped each other on their heads or a woman shoplifted a necklace or a cowboy bled from a fight then that comic was a crime comic. Almost none of the more than 600 comic books regularly published in the US then could be excluded from Wertham's condemnation.

You read that right: more than 600 comic books were on the market in the early 1950s. Not only that but more than 95% of elementary-school aged kids - girls and boys, black, white, yellow, and brown, rich and poor -- counted as regular comics readers, sometimes reading dozens of titles each week. Teens and adults read comics too. At a time when there were fewer than a 200 million people living in the US, sales of new comics neared 1 billion issues annually. (For those of you keeping score, the combined January 2013 sales of the top 300 comics issues was less than 7 million copies according to The Comics Chronicles website.) Simply put, comics were big business and they were the defining cultural element of most young people's lives. Wertham wanted the comics industry to go away.

I've been reading comics for forty years, teaching people about them for fifteen, and studying them in earnest for ten. My first trip to the Library of Congress to view Wertham's extensive manuscript collection was in October 2010. For nearly thirty years his collection of more than two hundred boxes had been closed to nearly all researchers. I was among the first group of researchers to dig into the hoard of scrawled notes, transcribed cases, newspaper clippings, and correspondence carbons. I thought that the three days I had allotted for my visit would be more than enough to sift through these items and find the letters that Wertham's writings indicated he had received from librarians. You see, I wasn't even really that interested in Fredric Wertham as a subject (he's been vilified, discredited, mocked, and even re-habilitated in part). No, as a scholar, I'm more interested in the intersection of libraries, reading, kids, and comics, so the Wertham papers were a means to an end.

(Right: photo of Carol Tilley by L. Brian Stauffer) By the end of my first day using Wertham's collection, I realized that there might be a different story than the one I wanted to tell. Looking at the sources Wertham used in putting together Seduction of the Innocent, I saw inconsistencies. The more I looked, the more I found. Some evidence was unadulterated, but some was. I collected examples and made several more trips to use the collection. I never did find the abundance of letters from librarians that I thought I would find, but I continued to find changes, especially in quotations from young patients, that I found troubling. For many hard-to-articulate reasons, I didn't want to write the scholarly paper on Wertham and the problems I found in his evidence, but not to write it seemed a disservice to the young people whose words and experiences Wertham distorted to help make his case against comics. That many of these young people were socially and culturally marginalized - living in poverty, abused, of color, learning disabled, and the like - makes it more important to correct the record.

Wertham managed to snare his white whale, the comics industry, although he was neither solely responsible nor entirely satisfied with the result. Although there have long been critics of Wertham's methods and reasoning in Seduction of the Innocent, I am a reluctant witness to his reputation's final descent. There are still more stories for me to tell.

BAM! WAP! KA-POW! Library prof bops doc who K.O.'d comic book industry

Previously:

US government opens Fredric "Seduction of the Innocent" Wertham's files

Comics Code Authority is dead

Seduction of the Innocent: detective novel set during anti-comic book hysteria of the 1950s

Brain Rot: My First EC Comic

Lurid cover art from 1950s comic, Witches Tales]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/04/comic-books-real-life-superv.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/25/tell-me-something-i-dont-kno-2.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/25/tell-me-something-i-dont-kno-2.html#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:54:49 +0000 Ed Piskor http://boingboing.net/?p=215110

Boing Boing has a new podcast! It's called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, and it's an interview podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the reality/business side of how they do what they do.

In episode #2, Jim, Jasen, and Ed interview Faith Erin Hicks (Tumblr), who writes and draws comic books for a living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her comics include Demonology 101, The War at Ellsmere, Brain Camp, and Friends With Boys.

She is the co-writer and artist for Dark Horse Comics and Naughty Dog Games' comic book, The Last of Us. A print edition of her web comic, The Adventures of Superhero Girl, was recently released by Dark Horse Comics. And her forthcoming graphic novel (with Prudence Shen), Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, is currently being serialized online. The print edition will be released by First Second in May 2013.

TMSIDK is produced and hosted by three talented cartoonists and illustrators:

Jim Rugg, a Pittsburgh-based comic book artist, graphic designer, zinemaker, and writer best known for Afrodisiac, The Plain Janes, and Street Angel.

Jasen Lex is a designer and illustrator from Pittsburgh. He is currently working on a graphic novel called Washington Unbound. All of his art and comics can be found at jasenlex.com.

Ed Piskor is the cartoonist who drew the comic, Wizzywig, and draws the Brain Rot/ Hip Hop Family Tree comic strip at this very site, soon to be collected by Fantagraphics Books.

Subscribe to Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast | iTunes | Listen to previous episodes | Twitter on Twitter

“I think Harvey’s MAD was more important than pot and LSD in shaping the generation that protested the Vietnam War. . . . Kurtzman was the single most significant influence on a couple of generations of comics artists.” — Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus

“In many ways Harvey was one of the godparents of Monty Python… [he] was one of the great idols of my generation of cartoonists.” — Terry Gilliam, director

“The covers of MAD #11 and Humbug #2 changed the way I saw the world forever!. . . Even though I’ve made a name in my own right, I still feel like a worshipful fanboy.” — R. Crumb

“After MAD, drugs were nothing!” —Patti Smith

“Had he not existed, I’d be a dull, humorless lout working in a muffler shop somewhere, and so would practically everyone I know. I shudder to think how horrible the world would be today without that which Harvey Kurtzman begat!” —Dan Clowes, creator of Ghostworld

My friends Monte Beauchamp and Denis Kitchen have curated a 120-piece exhibition showcasing the work of MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman. It opens March 8, 2013 at the Society of Illustrators in New York. It looks incredible.

The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators is proud to present "The Art of Harvey Kurtzman," a diverse exhibition spanning the career of the man who created MAD and who had a broad and profound influence on American popular culture. This eight-week exhibit showcasing over 120 works will be on display March 6th through May 11th in the museum’s two-floor gallery in New York City’s Upper East Side.

Co-curators Monte Beauchamp (founder, editor, and designer of the comic art/illustration anthologies Blab! and Blab World), and publisher/cartoonist Denis Kitchen (co-author of The Art of Harvey Kurtzman and representative of the estate) have assembled the most comprehensive assemblage of Kurtzman art to date, culled from select private and family collections. Highlights include: Kurtzman life drawings from 1941; rarely-seen late '40s strips done for the New York Herald-Tribune as well as for Marvel's Stan Lee; key covers, strips and full stories Kurtzman created for MAD, Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales, Humbug and Help!, sometimes in collaboration with fellow comics geniuses Will Elder and Jack Davis. In addition, "Kurtzmania," numerous rare artifacts and ancillary publications seldom seen by the public, will be on display.

Classic Kurtzman cover art to Frontline Combat #7 (1952)

Cartoonist, writer, and editor Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was the founding editor and creator of the most important comics satire magazine in twentieth century America — MAD. He later founded the satire publications TRUMP, HUMBUG, and HELP!, and created "Little Annie Fanny" for PLAYBOY, considered the most lavish comic strip ever assembled. The New York Times called Kurtzman “one of the most important figures in postwar America.”

Splash page to Kurtzman's "Corpse on the Imjin" (Two-Fisted Tales #25, 1952).
Kurtzman's thoughtful, more realistic and human depictions of war were in stark contrast with the competing gung-ho war comics of the day that glorified war.

In MAD, starting in 1952, and later in other platforms, Kurtzman vigorously and fearlessly lampooned such American institutions as advertising, comic strips, government, movies, radio, and television — a medium then in its infancy. He was responsible for MAD’s moronic gap-toothed mascot Alfred E. Neuman, who became a national icon. Kurtzman created the magazine’s distinctive logo, drew many of the early covers, and wrote and laid out nearly all of the material for the historic first 28 issues, then he left abruptly in a bitter dispute over equity with E.C. publisher William M. Gaines in 1956.

Little Annie Fanny (cover to first collection, 1966).
In the pages of Playboy, editor Hugh Hefner enabled Kurtzman (with artist and key collaborator Will Elder) to lavish Little Annie Fanny with lush, hand-painted color on slick paper. The work was so time-consuming barely a half-dozen, three-five page Annie adventures appeared each year.

During his tenure at EC, Kurtzman also wrote and edited two ground-breaking war comics that refused to glorify war — Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Following MAD and the short-lived Trump (published by Hugh Hefner), Kurtzman started Humbug in 1957, an experimental publication with Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Harry Chester. Humbug was the first creator-owned publication of its kind, but the naive partners lost their shirts on the ill-fated venture.

Cover to Trump #1 (January, 1957).
With Mad co-horts Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and Al Jaffee, Kurtzman created a first-class, full-color humor magazine, the likes of which had never been seen before. Backed by Playboy's Hugh Hefner, the series was short-lived. After only two issues, cash flow problems at Playboy put this venture to rest.

In his last magazine HELP! (1960-1965), Kurtzman gave national exposure to such fledgling cartoonists as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Joel Beck, Jay Lynch, and Skip Williamson who would soon pioneer the Underground Comix movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. Kurtzman's first editorial assistant at HELP!, Gloria Steinem, would later become the founder of Ms. magazine and a feminist icon. Steinem’s replacement was an equally unknown college drop-out Terry Gilliam.

Cover to Humbug #1 (August 1957).
The former Trump artists rebounded and set forth to self-published their own humor magazine Humbug. The two-color series, printed on cheap newsprint, exhausted Kurtzman financially and after eleven issues, the title was abandoned.

Kurtzman spent the last quarter century of his career laboring with Will Elder over "Little Annie Fanny," a topical and sexy satiric strip for Playboy. He received both his highest visibility and harshest criticism for this feature. Fans who hated the sexist and formulaic nature of "Annie" urged him to create a contemporary variant of MAD, but four high stress magazines were enough for Kurtzman. His career was cut short by illnesses in the 1980s. When he died in 1993 glowing obituaries appeared in prominent publications throughout America and Europe, including a four-page tribute in The New Yorker.

EVENT: The Art of Harvey Kurtzman
OPENING NIGHT RECEPTION: Friday, March 8th, 2013, 7-11 PM
WHERE: Society of Illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street, NYC

The loss of Gwen marked nothing less than an end to the carefree fun and offbeat innocence of the Silver Age era. Spider-Man and the Marvel Age of Heroes were never quite so merry after this story.

John Romita Sr. Amazing Spider-Man #121 "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"

(Via CBR)

Previously:
Batman drawing sells for $448,125

Previously: DC Comics hires anti-gay author Orson Scott Card to write Superman

If you've ever read a silver age comic book in your life, chances are you've seen the ad for World Wide Diamond Co., once located in windy wacky Chicago IL. And if you sent away for one of their smallish, 48-page, newsprint mail order catalogs then you absolutely uncovered a world of REAL hidden treasure! For buried there among all the other pages of cheap, gaudy jewelry and marked down wristwatches are the NOVELTY gift and gag pages, crammed packed with a jaw-dropping assortment of magic tricks, prank gadgets, monster masks, 'bop' style glasses, toys and other various instruments of endless enchantment and far-out fun! Man, there's seriously so much good stuff to share from this guide that it'll take two entire posts to deliver it all-- ENJOY!!

I wonder how many people bought the tiny donkey tie clip, which emits a loud fart when the wearer squeezes a rubber bulb?

WWD Co., Novelty Catalog (PT. 1) | WWD Co., Novelty Catalog (PT. 2)

Bagge also created two long-running comic book series for Fantagraphics: Neat Stuff, a grab-bag of comic stories featuring a cast of recurring characters, and Hate, a comic that depicted the self-destruction of the Bradleys, a Seattle family (where Bagge lives). I eagerly snapped up each issue as it appeared on the rack.

Bagge also writes funny, curmudgeonly comics for Reason magazine, which are collected in Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me: And Other Astute Observations.

Bagge's latest comic book is a four-issue mini science fiction series called Reset, published by Dark Horse and now collected in a single volume. Reset begins in an enforced DUI education classroom. One of the people in the class is a has-been actor named Guy Krause. He's grumpy, bitter, and broke, so when he meets a woman in the class who offers to pay him to be a human guinea pig in a virtual reality experiment that will cause him to re-experience his life from early adulthood up to his current middle age, he accepts the offer without question. Through the experiment Guy is given a second chance to make decisions that could possibly lead him to a better place (or an imaginary better place).

As the story progresses, we begin to see clues that there are Truman Show-like elements at play -- where does reality and virtual reality begin and end? Who is behind the curtains? And does Krause really have a say in what is happening to him?

It's great to see Bagge mining new territory, and at the same time retaining his sharp sense of humor.

Reset

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow by Anders Nilsen (with Cheryl Weaver). Drawn & Quarterly

I usually know more about these titles from bigger name cartoonists going into them. I can't say whether the element of surprise was a good thing for Anders Nilsen's latest. A swift change from the epic mini Big Questions, which was loving compiled into a massive volume by D&Q roughly a year and a half back. Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a swift emotional kick the the chest, that will make you bawl your eyes out to the point of dehydration or immediately phone up a loved one who hasn't received the sort of attention they deserve. Or, more probably both.

There are photographs here and love notes and sketches and comics contained herein. It's a hard thing to read, a great deal of whose difficulty comes, ultimately, in knowing just how impossible it must have been to write.

Eat More Bikes by Nathan Bulmer. Koyama Press

This might be the perfect comic for the internet age -- one-liners built into six-panel strips, crafted with sketchy artwork. Like 140 character Twitter jokes understood to be scripts for full-page comics. Sure, 30 seconds more attention span required for consumption, but, you know, pictures. On occasion, Nathan Bulmer even has the audacity to ask us to sit through a full two page spread, but don't worry too much, he'll, more often than not, spend the final panel tearing it all down, as is perhaps demonstrated with one of the best single issue comics openings in recent memory, The Noseless Great Moral Cats, a false start intended to trick parents into buying this sick funny stuff, a page after a crown of thorn-wearing Jesus is busily bleeding on a baby lamb.

Ticket Stub by Tim Hensley. Yam Books

I'd by lying if I said I didn't have to do a bit of online research, to make sure this was the same Tim Hensely -- you know, the one who gave us the Archie-in-depted adventures of umpteen millionaire teenage playboy Wally Gropius. Same guy, it turns out (and not the Blue Chair Records Americana recording artists with slightly better SEO). Ticket Stub culls the nine issue run of Hensley's 90s mini of the same, drawn during the cartoonist's time as a close-captioned writer. The pages are filled with drawn stills from a diverse array of films, sketched as stories in their own right and retaining all the strangeness of a truly odd job indeed.

Sell Your Boobs by Lisa Hanawalt

If it weren't for people like Johnny Ryan, Ivan Brunetti and Ken Dahl, I might not know what a truly, truly terrible person I am. Lisa Hanawalt is in that rare company -- cartoonist who can make me laugh out loud uncomfortable on a crowded train. Sure she's all fancy now, hanging out at those fancy New York Times illustrator parties, but she still throws us horrible human beings some bones, like the mini Sell Your Boobs, a little yellow-paged sketchbook full of gags I'd genuinely feel bad about myself describing to you here.

There are no animals wearing typewriter hats, but plenty of the lists we've grown to love and some earnest, but contextually hilarious life drawing, as well as a few pages that wonderfully appear to have been drawn using a crayon with the wrong hand. And, of course, the obligatory page of horse drawings. Sell Your Boobs is a small and light thing, but it's a helpful assurance that all those fancy pants newspaper parties haven't robbed her of her ability to make the rest of us feel bad for guffawing around small children.

Elle, unconscious in a hospital bed, is somewhat aware of what's happening. Her disembodied, amnesiac mind inhabits a kind of spirit world with other coma patients. With the aid of a psychologist (also in a coma and in a hospital bed right next to her) and a British coma patient, Elle attempts to figure out who she is and how she ended up this way.

Meanwhile back on Earth, clues of a complicated plot concerning Elle reveal themselves in odd places -- in a hospital staff doctor who purges Elle's records, in hoodie-wearing nogoodniks skulking in doorways and whispering urgently in their cellphones about contingency plans, in office explosions, and in double-crosses.

Mind the Gap: Intimate Strangers collects the first five issues of Jim McCain (writer) and Rodin Esquejo's (artist) Hitchcock-esque comic book series of the same name. The art is superb and the story is a masterfully-paced, intriguing thriller.

Warning: this is an ongoing series so when you get to the end of this graphic novel, you'll want to find out what happens next. Fortunately Mind the Gap #6 is out. I'm going to wait for Volume 2 of the anthology series, myself.

Mind the Gap: Intimate Strangers