Woman Rebel review

And here’s a link to my review of Peter Bagge’s new book: http://thegazette.com/2013/10/13/in-woman-rebel-the-margaret-sanger-story-cartoonist-offers-take-on-birth-control-pioneer/

Peter Bagge interview

Here is a link to my interview with Peter Bagge, who will be in Iowa City this coming Friday to talk about his new book on Margaret Sanger. http://thegazette.com/2013/10/13/bagge-on-birth-control-in-sangers-life-graphic-novelist-saw-a-comic-book/
There’s also a review of his book at this site.

Neil Gaiman on NPR

In case you missed it, Neil Gaiman was on Talk of the Nation on NPR this afternoon. You can listen to it here.

Host Neal Conan, who recently interviewed Robert and Sophie Crumb, gave himself away. When one listener noted she went to the comic book store “every month,” Conan piped up with: “Every month? New comic books come out every Wednesday.”

Conan also confessed he enjoyed Gaiman’s Sandman series so much he couldn’t bear to finish the last couple issues.

Gaiman was on the show to promote The Best American Comics 2010, which he edited.

“R. Crumb’s The Bible Illuminated” Exhibit

You wouldn’t think just pasting up all the pages from R. Crumb’s book, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, would be that great of an art exhibit.

But there is a lot to be said for being able to stand a nose-length from those black-and-white drawings. You can study every stroke — how Crumb drew thinner bands of horizontal striations for his night sky, the “pockets” of hatchings within solid black to depict folds for all-black robes.

The exhibit, officially titled “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis,” also features a casement brimming with materials Crumb collected for reference — old comic books, children’s bibles and colorful display cards from cheesy Biblical and sword-and-sandals movies.

The show runs through Jan. 16, 2011, at the Columbus Museum of Art. (It probably travels on to some other place after that, I imagine.) I viewed it while back in town during the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University.

My posts on the OSU cartoon conference can be read here, here and even more here.

Next Monday, Nov. 15, the Columbus Museum will show the documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, with a discussion with the director, Andrew Cooke, and a chat with “Crumb” curator Lisa Dent.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 2

Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, wasn’t the only animal lover who spoke at the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art this past week. Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro showed a slide of him, cigar in mouth, proudly holding a rather large chicken.

He and his wife, he noted, are board members of an animal sanctuary that, along with the usual dogs and cats (and hopefully rabbits, too), also rescues chickens. Who would have guessed?

Other things I learned at the Ohio State University four-day event:

• Robert Harvey, speaking of his 952-page Milton Caniff bio, Meanwhile …, told me, “Believe it or not, what got printed was only 60 percent of what I wrote.”

• James Sturm, whose The Golem’s Mighty Swing was Time magazine’s best graphic novel in 2001, said: “Cartooning is a calling first, a career second.”

He talked a bit about the Center for Cartoon Studies, the cartooning school in White River Junction, Vt., for which he is director. Seth did the catalog cover.

• Dave Kellett, whose book, How to Make Webcomics, I picked up at the Wexner Center shop during the conference and have been reading (and could have used two years ago before I my own online strip, Slipped), contended newspapers and comics are parting ways. This is because, he said, “In the mind of the average consumer, the newspaper comic strip” — such a small percentage of the daily paper’s content — “has always been free.”

In fact, he continued, the medium of comics is dying, though the art form of comics is not

• Speaking of the topicality of editorial cartoons, Jen Sorensen, of the weekly alternative editorial cartoon Slowpoke, noted many readers are “ahistorical” — meaning they know little about history, not that they don’t exist within history, of course.

One more post on the conference to come, I think, plus a post on the Columbus Museum of Art’s astonishing R. Crumb exhibit, “The Bible Illuminated.”

See my earlier post on this conference here.

New ‘Crumb’ From Criterion

Crumb, the 1995 documentary on the genius that is Robert Crumb and his odd family, has been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the always classy Criterion Collection.

It features a new commentary track by director Terry Zwigoff, a booklet and deleted scenes.

The movie talks about Crumb’s working style and his influences. It also spends time on his siblings, one of whom devoted his days to moving a long string through his digestive system.

Umm …. Yeah, that’s a hard image to clear.

But, still, the documentary as a whole is fascinating, one every aspiring cartoonist and documentary maker should see. (There even was a debate at the time over whether Zwigoff, who later directed Ghost World, based on Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, should have cut the bit where his camera person stumbled and almost fell off a roof, if she hadn’t been grabbed by the cartoonist himself.)

The Quitter

Graphic novel and comic book writer Harvey Pekar died yesterday at the age of 70. His persona probably wouldn’t have allowed him to admit much of anything good ever happened to him.

The final panel of 2005’s The Quitter, illustrated by Dean Haspiel, shows the worried author, in tight closeup and looking directly at us: “I’ve always dreamed of being able to relax and feel trouble-free for long stretches of time. I’m 65 now. Will it ever happen?”

But good things did happen.

One the most fortuitous events would have to be his becoming friends with Robert Crumb, who encouraged Pekar’s comics writing and who lent his own mastery to illustrate some of the Clevelander’s work.

Pekar’s first collection, American Splendor, won the American Book Award in 1987. A few years later the book was made into a sad, charming and intelligent movie starring Paul Giamatti, as Pekar, and Hope Davis, as his wife Joyce Brabner.

His graphic novel, Our Cancer Year, won the Harvey Award in 1994.

Add to that the large number of readers, fans and would-be comics writers he inspired.

In the Studio, Part 1

One of the best things about In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is how the likes of R. Crumb, Jaime Hernandez and Seth tell you what and who their influences were and what struck them about those earlier works, then — bam — you can see a sample of that inspiration juxtaposed with the work of the artist.

Crumb, for example, waxes on about the strong crosshatching used by 19th century newspaper illustrator Thomas Nast (the guy who drew the image of how we’ve come to see Santa Claus, among other achievements), and there’s a sample of a Nast 1879 Harper’s Weekly magazine cover on page 19. On page 20 are two black-and-white pieces by Crumb, and we can see for our own eyes how Crumb took the cue.

Hernandez mentions a 1952 cover for the comic book Canteen Kate he especially liked, drawn by Matt Baker. It’s reproduced on page 142, showing a closeup of smiling, plucky Kate herself, hair tussled. On the previous page is Hernandez’s own 1986 Love and Rockets number 15 cover, depicting an equally close image of Rena, one his characters. She, too, is joyful and her hair is even more mussed.

Seth cites illustrator Doug Wright — in particular Wright’s choice of “beautifully evocative” color — who worked from 1948 to 1980. Chris Ware acclaims Frank King’s “masterpiece” Gasoline Alley, deeming that newspaper strip “a 50-year-long comic strip novel that captures and distills the ineffable passage of time through the regular touch of an artist’s pen to paper.” Everyone familiar with Ware’s own books knows of his consuming interest in measuring that “passage of time.”

More to come ….

Crumb’s Genesis, Part 2

Having said all this, even if only fans — all 300,000 million of them — buy The Book of Genesis Illustrated, they’ll be well rewarded. As Jessica Abel, co-author of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and writer-illustrator of La Perdida, noted when she was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this past November, Robert Crumb is a genius with every art medium he touches. Genesis Illustrated, which Crumb contends took five painful years to complete, is packed with his distinctive lettering, perfect composition of image as well as panels to the page, and, of course, his magnificent drawings themselves.

The characters are wild-eyed, lusty and rough. But they’d have to be, wouldn’t they, given the adventures and travails they undergo in these stories?

And if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t Eve look a lot like Crumb’s wife Aline? Crumb’s made no secret of his interests in strong women ….

You can listen to Crumb interviewed on the book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation here.

Crumb’s Genesis, Part 1

You have to wonder, who is the target audience for R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated?

His fans, I think, and maybe a few others. While marketing suggests it expected a wider audience, as well an onslaught from offended Bible true believers, I’m not sure either occurred.

In his introduction, Crumb raises his shield, noting, “I approached this as a straight illustration job. … That said, I know you can’t please everybody.” Well, it wasn’t truly a “straight illustration job,” as we have to assume Crumb came up with idea himself, or certainly agreed to it. I doubt anyone forces him to take on any work he doesn’t want.

It does seem like a great, Hollywood-style high-concept moment, though, doesn’t it? “I know,” says some publicist, “let’s get that bad-boy Robert Crumb to illustrate the Bible! That’ll shock people! And we’ll sell ’em by the truckload.”

Except I’m dubious as to how shocking any of this could be to those already familiar with the tent. Crumb’s illustrations — depicting Creation and up through the funeral procession of Joseph, at the age of 110 — show the Old Testament populace as angry, embittered, in despair, laughing, lusting, sweating, dancing, wild-eyed … just as it says in the book itself.

For folk who are shocked, it can only mean they’re really not that knowledgeable with the source material. As it warns on the cover of Genesis Illustrated, “Nothing left out!” “All 50 chapters!” and “Adult supervision recommended for minors.”

It’s powerful stuff, Crumb himself admits.

More to come on this.

O, Nancy: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction

Oh, I get it now. After all this time, after reading how Robert Crumb claimed he had his daughter home-schooled in France with old Little Lulu comic books, and noting the frequent references by Bill Griffith and Patrick McDonnell to Nancy comic strips, I finally see what the attraction is, thanks to Ivan Brunetti’s book, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories.

I admit I never thought Nancy in particular was especially clever, even when I read them as a child. I mostly recall cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s drawings of “hippies” as wearing torn clothes and always possessing guitars with broken strings and lots of flies. He seemed to confuse free-spiritedness with sloth and dishonesty.

But in his anthology’s introduction, Brunetti uses a 1958 strip about Nancy dreaming she’s being boiled, steamed and baked to demonstrate “algebraically balanced composition,” rhythm and efficiency. The final panel shows the girl waking up in bed to discover she’s been buried under a mountain of winter coats and hats. Each garment is clearly distinguishable from the other, by checks, stripes or dots.

“… The graphic clarity of the pile of coats … in lesser hands could have been turned into a gray, undifferentiated mush. Clutter was never depicted so unclutteredly,” he writes.

See?

The anthology itself has a lot about Charles Schultz and nothing about Will Eisner, and with samples from Crumb, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez (but not Mario), Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Seth and Art Spiegelman, among the other usual suspects.

More later on this book.