It's your Online Commentary & Diversions for the day:
• Review: "There is this old-fashioned comic feel that mixes so well with the overall theme and texture of this short. [In] Ganges #2... [Kevin] Huizenga's elegant neo-clear-line style brings a crispness and humor to these low-key slice-of-life stories, and the gray-blue duotone he has picked gives the art a new depth and complexity." - Hero Spy
• Plug: "I’m also trying Blazing Combat, the war comic collection from Fantagraphics. I don’t know much about the series, so this should expand my knowledge of a type of comic I’m not much familiar with." - Johanna Draper Carlson, Robot 6 "What Are You Reading?"
• Things to see: Fan Steve Mandich posts his Tony Millionaire sketch & signature from our Bookstore event a couple of weeks ago (with a link to some photos)
The jig might be up for the kids in this week's installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 51-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures....
OOPS, we forgot to update this week's Mon.-Fri. batch of Martin Kellerman's Rocky until today! We'll leave it up for some extra time to make sure that everyone who wants to catch it has a chance. This week you'll marvel at Kim Thompson's ability to translate hip-hop slang from Swedish, read the funniest description of childbirth you're ever likely to hear, and get an extra treat: a special extra-big Sunday-style 6-panel strip!
Your Online Commentary and Diversions for the day:
• Review: "It’s great to read comics that are fun, inventive, and delighting in the medium instead of dour, 'relevant,' and procedural. Supermen is a teasing look at a truly Golden Age." - Dave Lartigue, Dave Ex Machina
• Review: "Never before reprinted, Fantagraphics recently collected Humbug, complete with new essays, interviews, and annotations, in two handsome hardback volumes. [...] Jack Davis and Will Elder... elevated the comic-book parody beyond the standards of Mad and Trump. For Humbug, Davis produced some of the best work of his long career. Al Jaffee... tackled varied topics... all with equal skill and irreverence..." - Rick Klaw, San Antonio Current
• Review: "Blazing Combat... features a collection of some of the most beautiful black and white comic art you have ever seen... It also features interviews and some of the most beautiful printing I have seen. Honestly, put down those monthly comics for a week and buy something you will enjoy a lifetime. From cover to cover, this book is what keeps me in comics." - Jimmy Palmiotti, Newsarama
• Review: "Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 is the book I've been waiting for - a crazed whirlwind tour through the raw badlands of early superheroes, the best and the weirdest of the early days... Fantagraphics Books has assembled 20 of these quirky gems into a nicely designed, affordable full-color paperback. It's like a roadmap of alternative history, where you can imagine that a character like Stardust the Super Wizard became a star... It's one of the best comic collections of the year. Bring on a sequel!" - Nik Dirga, Blogcritics
• Plug: "Castle Waiting Vol. II #15: ...Linda Medley’s warm, winsome fantasy series continues at its relaxed pace." - Chris Mautner, Robot 6
• Profile: The University of Cincinnati describes how faculty member C. Tyler, inspired by her graphic memoir You'll Never Know, is teaming up her students with military veterans to tell the veterans' stories in comics format, in order to help veterans talk about their experiences and share them with the civilian public to increase awareness of veterans' issues
The kids' tense hideout continues in this week's installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 51-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures....
We begin the R. Kelly-inspired (not really) sequence in this week's installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 51-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures....
And in our current 5-day chunk of Martin Kellerman's Rocky, be sure to catch the last 2 pages of the "Intermission" story, and then we return to the daily strips. "Rocky all grown up"? Really?
Due to the somewhat obsessive nature of my link gathering, I had the idea to start calling these posts "Daily OCD: Online Commentary & Diversions." What do you think, readers? Too cutesy-poo? Offensive to sufferers of real OCD?
• List: The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon names "The Ten All-Time Best Long-Running Comics Series," with Love and Rockets Vol. I at #2 ("The best long-running and organic artistic achievement in serial comic book form... The Hernandez Brothers inspired and outworked a greatest generation of comics auteurs. Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are each among that handful of artists who must be given serious consideration when talking about the best cartoonists working. In Love & Rockets each created fictional worlds for the ages and used them as a vehicle for enormous artistic development, lapping the majority of their peer group. One so inclined could argue with seriousness a top 25 of American graphic novels where 1/3 of the titles listed came from this series") and Acme Novelty Library at #8 ("...a mind-bending achievement... ACME punched right in the scrotum the notion that every issue of a single comic book series had to look like the others... Its primary value is that it presented [Chris] Ware's giant talent to enough of an audience to bring him thousands of hardcore fans... Ware can dream up a single-page that if it were the only thing he ever published people might still know his name")
• List: The A.V. Club's Noel Murray offers commentary on Spurge's list ("There’s no one definitive L&R storyline; it’s just story after amazing story, accumulating over the past three decades like personal correspondence. [...] Ware... turn[ed] comic books into a kind of readable sculpture...") and lobbies for the inclusion of Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix
• Review: "Miss Lasko-Gross' self-caricature in her autobio stories [in A Mess of Everything] is an interesting mash-up of a typical teen with low self-esteem and that of an indignant outsider determined to make her increasingly confident voice heard -- and loudly. [...] Lasko-Gross' greatest strengths as an artist are her character design, gesture and use of body language. It's the way she stages her characters that makes looking at each page interesting... I love the touch of the exaggerated and the grotesque that she injects into her drawings, distorting faces and bodies to reflect emotional tumult." - Rob Clough
• Review: "I read Leah [Hayes]’s whole book, Funeral of the Heart [in one sitting]; I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a beautiful, engrossing book... Amazing." - Anika in London
• Review: "Formerly-suppressed, entirely classic, these stories [in Blazing Combat] are all solid examples of comic storytelling and craftsmanship... [T]he teams here make things look too easy. Not surprising since we’re talking about master artists like Toth, Frazetta, Severin, Crandall and others. The stories have all aged surprisingly well... Highly recommended..." - Matt Maxwell, Robot 6
• Reviewer: At that same Robot 6 link, Miss Lasko-Gross reviews books by Osamu Tezuka and Gabrielle Bell
• Events: Portland, your Free Comic Book Day cup runneth over, as Andrice Arp and the other contributors to the excellent free anthology comic Bird Hurdler will be appearing at various locations throughout town -- Andrice has the full itinerary and details on her blog
• Things to see: Ragged Claws Network presents a few of Jeffrey Jones's Jones Touch strips which can be found in the out-of-print collection of the same name from our Eros Comix imprint (NSFW)
The kids search for safe ground in this week's installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 51-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures....
And in our current 5-day chunk of Martin Kellerman's Rocky, we take a break from the daily strips to present a story running 4 full pages, starting yesterday and continuing through Tuesday of next week. Be sure to come back Tuesday to catch the full story before it disappears!
• Review: "...[T]he primitive funnybooks rescued from obscurity by Greg Sadowski in Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 contain within their awesomely naïve and rudimentarily brilliant pages all the seeds of the postmodern graphic novel... Compounded equally from pulp fiction, movies, newspaper strips, and sheer desperate commercial-deadline-brainstorm lunacy, these early superhero tales created their own fresh synthetic mythology and compositional tools on the fly." - Paul DiFilippo, The Barnes & Noble Review
• Review: "[Bottomless Belly Button] reads almost like a John Updike novel... [Dash Shaw] really utilizes the medium to its fullest capacity..." - Benn Ray (Atomic Books) on WYPR (Baltimore public radio - streaming audio)
• Review: "[The Wolverton Bible] is fascinating read; it's a fascinating document by one of the most important illustrators of the 20th century." - Benn Ray (Atomic Books) on WYPR (Baltimore public radio - streaming audio - same link as above)
• Review: "Fantagraphics’ collection of the four issues of Blazing Combat blew me away from the start. The size and heft of the hardback reminded me of my textbooks from my school days. And once I cracked open the book, I found myself getting a hell of an education with this one."- Tim O'Shea, Robot 6, "What Are You Reading?"
• Review: "If nothing else, Supermen! puts Fletcher Hanks’ career in perspective... These are comics designed to make you tear your hair out waiting for the next issue, just to see if these guys could top themselves. Great fun all around." - Tom Bondurant, Robot 6, "What Are You Reading?" (same link as above)
• Review: "Jason is an expert at expressing a complex idea with simple visuals and dialogue. Most of his works contain little to no dialogue, actually -- entire stories can be read in facial expressions, twitches, color changes and movements. The entirety of Tell Me Something contains 7 lines of dialogue. It tells the story of 2 lovers and the trials they go through to be together, using dual layered story arcs differentiated simply by the panel borders to convey depth and reshape the story into an intriguing form." - The Inside Flap [Ed. note: Tell Me Something is out of print, but will be collected along with other Jason stories in a forthcoming hardcover]
• List: For Robot 6, Chris Mautner names "Six ‘retired' artists we'd like to see return to comics," including Brian Biggs ("...Frederick and Eloise [brings] a whimsical, storybook approach that never seem[s] overly twee or sweet. Indeed, [it is] often grounded by some dark undercurrents, not to mention backed by some serious artistic chops"), Dave Cooper ("Surreal, mind-warping books like Suckle, Ripple and his ongoing series Weasel, which chronicled a number of sweaty, paunchy, disturbingly neurotic and oversexed characters, had Cooper earning acclaim equal to the likes of Clowes and Ware"), and Mary Fleener ("...[S]he remains one of the most original voices in comics, with an art style that’s completely her own (no one draws a sex scene like her)." [Note to Mautner: Mary Fleener had a new comics story titled "Niacin" in Hotwire Comics Vol. 2, which we put out last year])
• Interview: At Robot 6, Tim O'Shea talks to Esther Pearl Watson about Unlovable Vol. 1. Choice quote: "I was a lot like Tammy and still am. It’s everything I fear."
That unknown menace is still menacing in this week's installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 50-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures....
And more mismanaged girlfriends, hangovers and snark in our current 5-day chunk of Martin Kellerman's hilarious Swedish smash-hit Rocky, updated Monday-Friday!
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm told that this week's New Yorker features a David Sedaris story all about his ex-boyfriend "Johnny Ryan." I know what I'll be reading this weekend!
