The origin story of a fungal super hero —

In comic books, radiation exposure always leads to awesome superpowers. In reality, not so much. Except in the case of Cladosporium cladosporioides, a fungus exposed to high doses of radiation during the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Not only did C. cladosporioides survive it gained a superpower — the ability to "eat" radiation. — Maggie •

All of the following comics were purchased at the wonderful Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest. That’s the main thing they have in common, aside from all being comics and all being good. Also, all but one (The Collected John G. Miller) would fit nicely into most standard Christmas stockings, if you’re reading this, Santa. The outlier, meanwhile, would no doubt do fine beneath your standard indoor holiday pine tree.

Kicksville Confidential #1 by Avi Spivak

Anyone with a bias toward the world of wonderful things will almost certainly feel compelled to pay a visit to the Norton Records website, credit card in hand, upon finishing Kicksville Confidential. And there, you’ll be greeted with a devastating little video about the vintage label, which was slammed full force by Hurricane Sandy, doing a number on its catalog stock. Norton’s a beacon of raw cultural salvation in a river of pop ephemera and this is precisely the book it deserves, a sequential catalog of its history and the legendary and often hilarious quirks of its roster of artists.

Billy Miller (who founded the company with one-time Cramps drummer Miriam Linna) kicks off the book with a tale of the label’s founding, writing, “Norton’s got a six-and-a-half foot cyclops drag queen, a pair of singing siamese twins joined at the top of the head, an indian with one lung, at least three murders, the nation’s number one art thief” -- and it just sort goes on from there, setting the stage for the truly insane tales of hillbilly chicken enthusiast Hasil Adkins, label mascot Esquerita and lunatic rock guru Kim Fowley, amongst dozens of other rock ‘n roll inmates.

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This beautiful Frank Frazetta cover from Beware #10, July 1954 is featured in Zombies: The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics, a terrific collection of vintage zombie comics, edited by Craig Yoe and Steve Banes. As you'll see in the cover gallery below, the Walking Dead is no match for the work of those chain-smoking comic book draftsmen of the 40s and 50s, hunched over angled drawing tables in a midtown sweatshop, hoping to get their page quota completed in time to make it to the track or meet up with the dame who takes calls at the reception desk, even though she's dating the fat cheapskate publisher who's too goddamn coldhearted to advance a guy a sawbuck during the holidays.

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(Click to see larger image)

Harvey Kurtzman created MAD in 1952. It started out as a comic book, and the first issues mainly lampooned other comic books (Superman, Archie). It soon branched out to make fun of all cherised American institutions and I would argue that it was the beginning of modern humor that led to Saturday Night Live.

Kurtzman wrote every story for the first 23 issues of MAD, which were illustrated by the cream-of-the-cartoonist crop: Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, and Kurtzman himself.

In 1956 Kurtzman left MAD after publisher William M. Gaines refused to give him controlling ownership. Unfortunately, MAD marked the high point of Kurtzman's career, in financial terms. Even though Kurtzman continued to produce brilliant work, he never again experienced the same level of commercial success that he'd had with MAD.

In this introduction to a 1976 one-shot comic book called Kurtzman Komix (published by Kitchen Sink), Robert Crumb writes a bittersweet appreciation for one of America's great cultural treasures.

I have this comic around somewhere. I bought it when it first came out in 1976. But I can't find it (it's probably in a box at my parent's house) so I just bought a copy on eBay for $5. (As I recall, it's not his best work, but I want it anyway!)

(Via The Pictoral Arts)

I realized that I promised you some stocking stockers for December, but then it occurred to me: why not just approach the whole thing Tom Sawyer-style, and get a few tastemakers from around the industry to help paint this year end fence by picking their top five books for 2012. We've got a couple of dozen folks, including cartoonists, writers, critics, educators, publishers, librarians and podcasters singling out some of the best pieces of sequential art the past 12 months had to offer.

No surprise that Building Stories, the latest masterwork from Chris Ware rated at the top of the top of the list. Tied for second place are Brandon Graham's Prophet and two Fantagraphics titles, Barack Hussein Obama and Heads or Tails, by Steven Weissman and Lilli Carre, respectively. Directly below, you'll find a list of those titles that scored multiple picks and further down, reviews from the panel members themselves, featuring more than enough comics to help you survive the holidays in mostly one piece.

Eight votes:

Building Stories, by Chris Ware

Four votes:

Prophet, by Brandon Graham, et al.

Barack Hussein Obama, by Steven Weissman

Heads or Tails, by Lilli Carre

Three votes:

Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel

The Nao of Brown, by Glyn Dillon

Zegas #2, by Michel Fiffe

My Friend Dahmer, by Derf

By This Shall You Know Him, by Jesse Jacobs

The Hypo, by Noah Van Sciver

Two votes:

No Straight Lines, edited by Justin Hall

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: a Graphic Memoir by Ellen Forney

Suspect Device #2, edited by Josh Bayer

Batman by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo

Cleveland by Harvey Pekar, Joseph Remnant

The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell

Goliath by Tom Gauld

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Drew Friedman says:

This is the latest in my ongoing series of "portraits of the legends of comic books", the late artist John Severin (1921-2012), one of the original MAD/EC comics artists. I portrayed him at work in his studio circa the mid-seventies, putting finishing touches on his latest cover painting for Cracked, the MAD imitation magazine where he worked for 45 years and was their signature artist. My blog from earlier this year on John Severin's Cracked paperback covers.

Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Cracked:

Cracked was an American humor magazine. Founded in 1958, Cracked proved to be the most durable of the many publications to be launched in the wake of Mad magazine. In print, Cracked conspicuously copied Mad's layouts and style, and even featured a simpleminded, wide-cheeked mascot named Sylvester P. Smythe on its covers (see Alfred E. Neuman). The Smythe character was Cracked's "janitor." Unlike Neuman, who is mute and appears primarily on covers, Smythe sometimes spoke and was frequently seen inside the magazine, interacting with parody subjects and other regular characters. A 1998 reader contest led to Smythe finally getting a full middle name: "Phooey." An article on Cracked.com, the companion website, joked that the magazine was "created as a knock-off of Mad magazine just over 50 years ago", and it "spent nearly half a century with a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after Mad sold out."

Cracked's awesome motto was: "We're number two because we don't try as hard."

Portrait of John Severin

University of Kentucky chemistry professors John P. Selegue and F. James Holler are collecting comic book references to chemical elements. On their Periodic Table of Comic Books site, you can click through the standard periodic table to see pages from comic books that mention specific elements. The samples seem to be weighted pretty heavily to classic, Golden and Silver Age stuff — there's a lot of 1940s Wonder Woman and miscellaneous anthology series from the 1960s.

They don't have all the elements accounted for yet. In particular, the lanthanides and actinides — aka, those two rows at the bottom where everything ends in "ium" — are lacking comic book shout-outs. Maybe you can help!

Visit the Periodic Table of Comic Books

Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette!

Stocking stuffers? We thought about it, but in spite of what laundromat radio stations might lead you to believe, it IS too early to start thinking about the holidays. And besides, Chris Ware, for one, has clearly gone out of way to only produce work that could never in a million years be stuffed into anything resembling a stocking. So we guess you'll just have to keep these ones all to yourself. Don't say you've never done anything nice for you.

Building Stories by Chris Ware. Pantheon

Part way through the “14 distinctively discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets,” you wonder why you started reading, because you already knew that Chris Ware cuts like a knife deep into the heart of modern human isolation. And every few pages or so, like clockwork, something makes contact and utterly destroys you all over again. All that coupled with the knowledge that, try as you might, you’ll never be capable of producing something of this magnitude -- Ware is just one of those sorts of outliers who makes everyone else toiling away in a given medium feel that much worse about their own limited set of tools.

But as ever, it’s a beautiful journey, painstaking detailed and mind-numbingly crafted, without a single errant line, because we all know that a perfectionist like Ware would never be able to live with such an abhorrent thing. Thankfully, the cartoonist is fully capable of creating near perfect things, works of art that some how feel underpriced at $50 a pop.

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Bob Knetzger alerted me to a Comics Journal interview with Joost Swarte, who I mentioned last week because he has a new book called, Is That All There Is? Bob says: "Very interesting interview with Joost Swarte. Didn't know he studied industrial design and that he does lots more than comics… and that he coined the term clear line.'"

From David Peniston's introduction to the interview:

Where Le Corbusier is better known for his architecture than for his paintings, collages and drawings, Swarte has moved in the opposite direction, making a name for himself first as a cartoonist and illustrator and in more recent years branching into architectural work and stained-glass widows, even creating furniture and fonts. He has worked with architects on the design of the Toneelschuur Theater in Haarlem and is a major consultant and contributor to the design of the Herge Museum in Belgium. Swarte founded Stripdagen, a biennial international comics festival in Haarlem, in 1990 and has himself been the subject of many exhibitions, including the World Exposition of Joost Swarte, which has traveled throughout Europe. I had Swarte’s home phone number from my contact in Germany, a comics dealer named ebi wilke. So one Monday morning in February, I pick up the phone and place an international call to a number in the Netherlands — in Haarlem to be precise. I tell the woman who answers, “I’m looking for Joost Swarte,” and after a short pause, a low but confident, friendly, male voice, with a slight Dutch accent announces, “Joost Swarte.” (pronounced Yost Svarta). I come straight to the point: “Can I interview you? Would now be a good time?””

“You mean now, over the phone?“ he asks incredulously.

“Well, yes, I guess so …” So I get started. My first question stumps him and he doesn’t know what to say at first. He has to think about it for a while before he says anything and then he proceeds to answer my question in no less than 741 words. He is very articulate, well versed in art, architecture and the history of industrial design, as well as music and comics. And, I might add, he speaks fluent English.

The Joost Swarte Interview

I try not to let myself become overly attached to material things, but this Jimbo book by Gary Panter is something I've treasured for 30 years. I bought it in 1982 from a headshop in Boulder, Colorado, called the Pipefitter. I hadn't heard of Gary Panter before seeing the book. I was attracted to its large-format (14.5 inches x 11 inches) and especially the cardboard outer cover with the small black and red label glued onto it. (See more photos of the book here on my Flickr set).

Jimbo was published by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's (who also published RAW, a seminal underground comics anthology that showcased the early work of a great many talented artists, including Panter). At the time I thought $3 was a lot of money for a comic book! (Amazon has some used copies of Jimbo available. The cheapest is $30, which is well worth the price.)

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