Portland-based writer, publisher, and bookseller Chloe Eudaly and renowned cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, will discuss comics and journalism in a casual and lively presentation on Sunday, August 1 at the Portland Art Museum. This program is offered in conjunction with the exhibition The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis, on view through September 19.
What: Joe Sacco and Chloe Eudaly in Conversation When: Sunday, August 1, 2 p.m. Where: Portland Art Museum, Whitsell Auditorium Ticketing: $5 Museum members, $12 non-members. Tickets available at portlandartmuseum.org or at the Museum's box office.
This shouldn't come as news to too many folks, but I don't recall seeing it flogged before, so what the hell: the latest issue of THE PARIS REVIEW includes a very long interview with R. Crumb. It's kind of a layman's interview, covering a lot of well trodden ground, but it's lengthy and satisfying. You need to buy the print version for the full read.
Lastly, the photo in this post is a detail I nabbed from Facebook friend John Heneghan's photos, taken of Crumb recently in the south of France. The man looks GOOD, right? John has quite a few amazing pics of playing music with Crumb and hanging out with him, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Armstrong. Lucky guy.
MEGAN KELSO CELEBRATES NEW GRAPHIC NOVEL AT THE THIRD PLACE BOOKS ON JULY 20
Suffering from Comicon separation anxiety? Fantagraphics Books and Seattle's Third Place Books are proud to present an evening with acclaimed graphic novelist Megan Kelso on Tuesday, July 20, talking about and signing her new graphic novel, ARTICHOKE TALES, which the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW recently hailed as "surprising and wonderful,” and about which STRANGER Books Editor Paul Constant declared, “[it] feels like a series of expansions. The characters and their world grow to envelop the reader in a singular, charming way.”
Kelso will be making a rare appearance in her hometown of Seattle, WA, giving a multimedia talk called "Big and Small": How do you construct a story that includes the big wide world, history, culture, sweeping events like war and political change, but that also includes personal, intimate character-driven things like friendship, family relationships, love, sex, babies and dying? How do you meld the two together into a believable whole? How do you humanize important historical players, kings, queens and presidents, and also show how the personal lives of ordinary people are affected by grand events that take place outside their doors? These are the essential questions that Kelso asked herself throughout the creation of Artichoke Tales, and she answers them through examples of her own work, as well as other artists who are engaged with similar issues, from Joe Sacco to Lynda Barry.
This lively talk will be followed by a question and answer session with the audience and book signing.
THIS is one of my most favorite things I've ever seen. Please click through and support this project. If Jim Woodring pulls this off, he will be the cock of the cartoonist block for all eternity, short of Charles Burns building a 2 story-tall Winsor Newton Series 7 and inking the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Watch the video. If anyone else outside of possibly Chris Ware proposed this, you would laugh at them. But in Jim's able hands, you can't help but BELIEVE. I am sold. Just listen to him. If you are a cartoonist, especially, I implore you: click the above and watch the video, you won't regret it. Then mobilize immediately amongst your cartooning corps. This MUST happen. If Jim were a preacher, I'd have joined his congregation already.
I spent a lot of time thinking about Harvey Pekar yesterday, especially after receiving a few media queries about him, and the more I did, the more I realize I might owe my life in comics to him. I had forgotten this, to be honest. So I thought I would write down a few things, if only to help myself remember and honor him a bit.
I realize I let Harvey the Celebrity overshadow Harvey the Writer for much of the last decade of his life.
At the start of the 1990s, Harvey Pekar was near the top of my list of comics obsessions, after maybe Dan Clowes, Chester Brown and Charles Burns. During high school in the 1980s, I slowly became aware of non-mainstream comics, and American Splendor was a revelation, a different way that one could speak through comics (you mean, Swamp Thing isn't as good as it gets?!). It was one of a few comics (Yummy Fur was the other earth-quaking force, followed within a year or so by Eightball) that really rekindled my interest in the medium when other adolescent concerns could have pushed me away, in which case I would likely be a crappy journalist, probably covering the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes of the High Desert League or something like that.
When I was in high school in the late-1980s, I dutifully recorded Pekar's Letterman appearances on my parents' VCR because I couldn't stay up late enough to watch them 'live', and would rush home to watch them after school the next day (insanely enough, I'm pretty sure I would learn about these appearances via the then-weekly newspaper, Comics Buyer's Guide). Pekar never disappointed on Letterman, he was like Toto ripping the curtain down on the Wizard of Television. He was punk rock.
To my increasingly cynical yet culture-starved mind, Pekar was as formative an influence as Burroughs, Bukowski, Salinger, the Velvet Underground or the Pixies have been to so many impressionable young men. He was infinitely sensible in the way he questioned and poked and called bullshit on the people and world around him. His attitude was justified. Once discovered, I quickly snatched up all the Splendors I could find by driving around to all the comic book shops in greater Orange County, CA. I can't remember the first issue I bought new but still have my complete set of the original magazine-sized series, even though I've collected the material in book form numerous times over.
Pekar made me appreciate R. Crumb. Up to that point, I'd found Crumb's work a bit impenetrable -- all I'd really seen was a few random ZAPs and miscellaneous undergrounds, and I found them way too hippy. I would learn. But in American Splendor, Crumb's work stood out for its craft, its clarity, it's passion, and the way he really made Pekar's voice SING. His style embodied Pekar's voice almost as well as his own. He turned Pekar's scripts into pure comics, into something that would have been inferior in any other medium. I'm not sure you can say that about most of Pekar's collaborations. It's no newsflash to say that none of Pekar's collaborators were as good as Crumb, but worth pointing out that almost as few were as good as Pekar. It must have been tough finding cartoonists who could keep up with him.
Despite what Crumb clearly brought to the table, the fact is that it took Pekar's writing to connect with me first, not the other way around, and I'm grateful for it. I think there are some jokes made in the Splendor film at Harvey's expense about how Crumb subverted his scripts, like in "American Splendor Assaults the Media" where he depicts Harvey as a semi-crazed, middle-aged shut-in ranting at the reader, panel after panel. But I think what makes all of their collaborations work so well is the fact that Crumb is as sympathetic a collaborator as Pekar ever had. It's not just the fact that Crumb draws better than everybody else, he knew what to draw. Just as Pekar knew what to write. Take any Mr. Boats strip. Their mutual understanding of each other helped me appreciate each as artists and voices and intertwines them in my memory; since I now think of Crumb as the greatest artist in the world, that's a big thing for me.
At a Comic-Con in 1991, two years before I started working at Fantagraphics, there was a special performance of a stage production of American Splendor that included a signing with Harvey and the cast (which was headlined by a then not-so-famous Dan Castellaneta, now best known as Homer Simpson). I made a point to get there early, and when I got to the front of the line to get autographs, for sale was a limited-edition Doubleday collection of the series that included a signed plate by Harvey and the entire cast. I bought the first copy, it was #2 of 50. The remaining 50 were gone in minutes. Score!
Around the same time, I had begun to submit samples to anthologies like Duplex Planet and Real Stuff. I dreamed of drawing a comic for Pekar. One day while re-reading an issue of Splendor I paused on a panel of somebody calling Harvey on the phone, looking at a note that had his number written on it. I thought, "no way" - there was no way it could actually be Harvey's real home phone number, but I was compelled to dial it, anyway. A woman I soon realized was Harvey's wife Joyce answered, and asked who I was and why I was calling. I couldn't believe it, but explained truthfully, it was kind of a lark but I really was a huge fan and would love to send Harvey some of my own comics.
She then told me that Harvey had recently been diagnosed with cancer and was very ill. My heart sunk - could I be a bigger asshole? But Joyce was very kind to not tell me to fuck off and suggested that even though Harvey couldn't talk on the phone, he really enjoyed hearing from his fans via letters and, especially, audio recordings. Within a few days I'd recorded Harvey a "letter" onto audiocassette - something I think I've otherwise only ever done in the throes of teenage romance - and sent him a package. I have absolutely no recollection of what I said. It took awhile for a very kind but semi-formal reply, but that was perfectly understandable, given his soon-to-be public bout with lymphatic cancer.
All of this is to say that, funnily enough, I never did get to know Harvey, and somewhere along the way I stopped minding. Oh, I met him a few times in later years, and talked to him on the phone a few times, but it was always discouraging. I knew him well enough through his comics. The few times I talked to him he was either too concerned with complaining about something Fantagraphics-related once he realized what I did for a living, or was simply dismissive. I never mentioned that I was that kid who sent that tape way back when; I can only imagine the volume of "get well soons" he received during those years. I am content knowing that I got chewed out on the phone by him once or twice in my capacity as editor for The Complete Crumb series, because he saw that series as actively diluting his own books and was pretty unhappy about them being included there. Yes, he was cranky. But it was still pretty cool.
As the years passed, after Our Cancer Year, I mostly lost touch with his work save for specific collaborators that I thought really understood how to tell Harvey's stories, like Joe Sacco or David Collier. As he began publishing with Dark Horse and Vertigo (?!?!), things became a bit too slick for comfort, and the collaborations felt less meaningful to me. It felt too much like "American Splendor" was trying to become a brand. Edited by Vertigo. I never held it against him, he was trying to make a buck and lord knows that isn't easy in this racket. The film opened up opportunities for him that are not easy to pass up. As a parent, especially, I can relate. But I wasn't crazy about the film, either, and all of these things led me to take the ubiquitousness of Pekar's celebrity and myriad new projects for granted, and overshadow the big presence he'd once been in my life, pre-celebrity. I honestly wish I had paid attention more now, because it took his passing yesterday to remind me of all of this. R.I.P., Harvey Pekar. The streets of Cleveland are for the worse. And thank you, Joyce, for taking my call.
Your guide to signings, panels, new books, freebies, sales and more!
JULY 13, SEATTLE, WA -- Comic-Con is upon us, and it is time to spill the beans on some major news. Fantagraphics Books is excited to announce that at this year's show we will have no celebrity tie-ins, no comic adaptations of summer blockbusters, no TV show spinoffs, no videogame companion books, and no major announcements regarding digital distribution.
We do, however, pledge to deliver more cartoonists, more classic comics collections, more original literary graphic novels, more high-quality foreign reprints of international cartooning, more graphic memoirs, more offbeat humor books, more envelope-pushing anthologies, and more and better books-about-comics and comics history than any other publisher on the floor.
Next week, Fantagraphics Books will close up shop in Seattle and relocate for one week to San Diego, CA for the 2010 Comic-Con International (to booth #1718, to be exact). With over 20 authors signing throughout the weekend - including the first-ever U.S. appearance by MOTO HAGIO, founder of Shojo Manga, as well as American comix legends CAROL TYLER, PETER BAGGE, TONY MILLIONAIRE ,THE HERNANDEZ BROTHERS and many others - as well as over a dozen new books debuting at the show, the weekend promises to be an exciting one for fans of comic books and graphic novels. Here is your guide to Fantagraphics Books' signings, book debuts, panels and much more!
AUTHOR APPEARANCES AND RELATED PANELS (see below to download printout):
Thursday:
12:00 - 1:00: Johnny Ryan & Esther Pearl Watson
1:00 - 2:00: Moto Hagio & Jeannie Schulz
2:00 - 4:00: Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
4:00 - 5:00: Carol Tyler
5:00 - 6:00: Blake Bell
Friday:
12:00 - 2:00: Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
2:00 - 4:00: Moto Hagio
3:00 - 4:00: Carol Tyler
4:00 - 5:00: Stephen DeStefano & Andrei Molotiu
5:00 - 6:00: Johnny Ryan & Esther Pearl Watson
6:00 - 7:00: Blake Bell, Wendy Everett (daughter of Bill Everett)
10:30AM: Spotlight on Moto Hagio, moderated by Matt Thorn (Rm. 5AB)
12:00PM: Spotlight on Carol Tyler, moderated by Gary Groth
2:00PM: Peanuts 60th Anniversary Panel with Jeannie Schulz
Saturday:
10:00 - 11:00: Mike Vosburg & Mitch Schauer 11:00 - 12:00: Ben Schwartz, Blake Bell and Andrei Molotiu 12:00 - 1:00: Tim Hensley & Carol Tyler 1:00 - 3:00: Peter Bagge, Dame Darcy and Tony Millionaire 3:00 - 5:00: Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez 5:00 - 7:00: Moto Hagio & Stephen DeStefano
12:00PM: Spotlight on Peter Bagge, moderated by Jason Miles (Rm. 3) 1:30PM: Comics Criticism panel with Ben Schwartz & co. (Rm. 4) 1:45PM: Cartoon Network panel with Stephen DeStefano & Co. 3:00PM: Comics Reprint Revolution with Gary Groth (Rm. 8)
3:30PM: International Graphic Novels panel with Moto Hagio (Rm. 4)
5:30PM: Bill Everett: From Sub-Mariner to Daredevil, with Blake Bell and Wendy Everett (Rm. 9)
Sunday:
10:00 - 12:00: Stephen DeStefano & Peter Bagge 12:00 - 1:00: Ted Stearn & Andrei Molotiu 1:00 - 2:00: Moto Hagio & Carol Tyler 2:00 - 4:00: Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
12:30PM: The Funny Stuff: Humor in Graphic Novels with Peter Bagge (Rm. 8)
NEW FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS DEBUTING AT COMIC-CON:
For more art and information regarding any of the below titles, click the title link.
LUCKY IN LOVE BOOK ONE by George Chieffet and Stephen DeStefano • This debut graphic memoir of one man's experiences in love and WWII is gorgeously drawn by fan favorite Stefan DeStefano, who will be signing copies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
THE COMPLETE PEANUTS 1977 to 1978 (Vol. 14) by Charles M. Schulz • Our 14th (!) volume, featuring an introduction by Alex Baldwin! Jeannie Schulz, widow of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and President of the Schulz Museum, will be onhand Thursday to sign copies.
THE COMPLETE PEANUTS 1975-1978 Boxed Set by Charles M. Schulz • Collecting the 13th and 14th volumes, this gift box set won't be in stores until October! Jeannie Schulz, widow of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and President of the Schulz Museum, will be onhand Thursday to sign copies.
A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES by Moto Hagio • Our long-awaited foray into the world of Manga, collecting the best work from legendary artist Moto Hagio's 30 year-plus career. Ms. Hagio will be an International Guest of Honor at this year's convention, making her first-ever trip to the States and signing all four days of the show.
FIRE AND WATER: BILL EVERETT, THE SUB-MARINER AND THE BIRTH OF MARVEL COMICS by Blake Bell • Part-biography of Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, part history of the early days of Marvel Comics, and part gorgeous art book, from acclaimed historian and critic Blake Bell, who will be signing copies on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Friday, Bell will be joined by Wendy Everett, daughter of Bill Everett, to answer questions and share anecdotes about her father.
TOO SOON? by Drew Friedman • Featuring an introduction by Jimmy Kimmel, this gorgeous coffee-table book features over 15 years of Freidman's skewering commercial art.
YOU'LL NEVER KNOW BOOK TWO: COLLATERAL DAMAGE by C. Tyler • The second book in Tyler's critically-acclaimed graphic memoir focusing on her father's experiences in WWII and how his experiences affected her family after the war. Tyler is a special guest of Comic-Con's, appearing all four days and participating in an author spoitlight with Gary Groth on Friday at noon.
LOVE & ROCKETS NEW STORIES #3 by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez • Another Comic-Con, another new Love & Rockets, and another weekend-long appearance from Fantagraphics' most towering creators, the great Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez. This issue will not disappoint, we promise you.
PRISON PIT 2 by Johnny Ryan • Last year's most talked-about book at Comic-Con is back with the eagerly-anticipated second volume, and Johnny Ryan will be as well to sign your copies and answer questions about his mental health.
RIP, M.D. by Mitch Schauer & Mike Vosburg • This all-ages graphic novel by comics veteran Mike Vosburg and animation heavyweight Mitch Schauer will delight parents and children, and the creators will be on hand Saturday morning (natch) to sign copies.
NORMAN PETTINGILL: BACKWOODS HUMORIST by Norman Pettingill • Sporting an introduction by R. Crumb, this deranged art book will surely appeal to fans of outsider art, and although Mr. Pettingill is no longer with us, co-editors Gary Groth and Johnny Ryan will be happy to sign copies and tell you all about this unique visionary.
And, our four new releases in the Ignatz imprint from Fantagraphics Books:
In addition to these exciting author events and new releases, there will be several other surprises for visitors, as well. We've put together a number of unique sales for the show that you'll have to come by to check out, and we've also raided our warehouse and gathered as many cool items as we could find to stuff into bags for everyone who makes a purchase at the booth, from rare postcard sets by Peter Bagge, long unavailable buttons featuring classic Fanta characters, free comic books, posters, and much more. We've put together about 500 of these goodie bags that will be available with every purchase, while supplies last.
We look forward to seeing you all there!
UPDATE: Here's a handy-dandy guide to our author apprearances and panels which you can download (PDF format), print out and bring with you! You can also pick one up at our booth (#1718 — jot that down on your printout) but this way you can come prepared!
This happened in my neighborhood this weekend. You'd really expect Captain Haddock to know better. Maybe he's a bit lightheaded from losing all that weight.
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This shouldn't come as news to too many folks, but I don't recall seeing it flogged before, so what the hell: the latest issue of THE PARIS REVIEW 
I spent a lot of time thinking about Harvey Pekar yesterday, especially after receiving a few media queries about him, and the more I did, the more I realize I might owe my life in comics to him. I had forgotten this, to be honest. So I thought I would write down a few things, if only to help myself remember and honor him a bit. 
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