In Herne Hill, London, I had a long lunch at the Regent pub with my old pals Ed Hillyer (top, with Hayley campbell) and Woodrow Phoenix (below, with me).



Woodrow's book Rumble Strip, first published in June of last year by Myriad, is worth your attention. It is a very human story told without the depiction of a single human, and for what seems for most of its duration to be an essay about road rage, it all comes to a potent and moving conclusion. Phoenix uses nothing but the iconography of the road, but while this is a somewhat depersonalized graphic language, I like that i always see the touch of a human hand in the artwork. Brushed black infill sometimes does not come all the way up to the holding line. Sometimes it spills over. And even though Woods has made a computer font of his own lettering, I have seen it enough in its early stages (eg. he lettered volume 4 of Bacchus), and remain fondly familiar with it, to still imagine his hand making every letter, and his voice in every word. This book is hugely underrated. It's a good solid piece of work at 200 pages and very nicely produced in black and white.


I wrote about Ed's upcoming prose novel, also from Myriad, back here. Meanwhile he's illustrated one of the manga Shakespeare line published by Self Made Hero (I realize I'm a little out of touch with the British publishing scene), King Lear. Just to compound idioms further, the story has been shifted to 18th century North America among the Mohicans.


Ed was one of the first people i knew, back in the '80s, to pick up on what would become the huge manga trend. I never feel that a book like this is aimed at me, but every now and then I enjoy seeing Ed going for a striking atmospheric effect with the grey tones and I recall how we used to talk about stuff like that a long time ago.

For anyone who missed our 'conversation' at the ICA on Nov. 7, here are stand-up comic Arnold Brown and sit-down comic Eddie Campbell continuing it at dinner afterwards. Photos by Hayley Campbell.

A last note about our Italian trip. A big hello and a thanks to Marco Schiavone at EdizioniBD, our host, and publisher of Bacchus in Italy. The series is now complete in eight volumes. It's funny to think now, after having enjoyed the trip so much, that I was reluctant to go, having sworn off any more traveling for the near future. It was only that the wife of my bosom overheard the word 'Tuscany' and then there was no getting out of it.
From Italy we went to the UK for a week. Here's a photo of Melinda Gebbie, Alan Moore, who became a grandfather a few days before, me and Anne in Northampton.

Last night my favourite band played its last gig after ten years together. This was their annual run at the Brisbane Powerhouse, which I've mentioned here both in 2007 and 2008. Twenty-seven musicians were on stage. I can't find any of it on Youtube, so here's a snatch from two years ago, which could easily have been last night, though I thought the playing was more sharply orgnaised than ever before, perhaps for the benefit of a video recording as I saw a camera set-up. We always get seats at a table in the cabaret area at the front. Gerry Mapstone is on Guitar, Tom Raymond clarinet, guest singer Silvia Entcheva.

more at youtube

My fellow '80s small press cartoonist Ed Pinsent has a website. Good to see some new pieces from him, such as this cover of an imaginary comic:


He also has a gallery of approximately 180 old small press comics covers from all through the decade which, although far from complete, will give you a fairly clear idea of what Fast Fiction was all about. His site should be a useful research tool.


There is also a catalogue of the thirty issues of fast Fiction magazine (with only the rare first issue missing- a lot of these things had print runs of less than a hundred) (1982-1991) including publishing notes.




Middle cover is by Glenn Dakin, who has also recently started a blog. I meant to mention this before he wrote about ME, to head off the suspicion that we're just a cosy mutual admiration society.

I'm pleased with how much ground we covered in Italy. We made a day-trip on the Friday to Parma, tunnelling through the Appenines. It was surprisingly warm and summery in Lucca, for November, but suddenly, on the other side of the mountain range, it was winter. I made an appearance in a comics shop called the Pop Store. Attendance was small, but a brave fellow named Alfredo interviewed me in English on video for 45 minutes. When either a transcript or footage turn up I'll let you know. Otherwise, i have no photos of Parma, though in case you think me a philistine, I did visit the cathedral, with Correggio's celebrated ceiling,


and the wonderful old Gothic Baptistry. On the same day we went to Sarzana where I was interviewed in the very old town hall under the auspices of the local shop Comic House, with the translation by a lovely lady from Manchester named Catherine, and then was requested to do a big drawing at an easel. This didn't go too well due to the supplied materials not being up to the challenge due to me not having forwarded any instructions on same, but I may have saved the day by improvising it into a comedy. I have no photo of this event either, perhaps due to the wife of my bosom getting locked in the rest room with the camera. The only record I have of of my visit is this appealing poster I grabbed in passing from inside the window of Comic House:


Apparently this was an ambitious program for one day and it was past midnight when we got back to Lucca.

We were driven from Florence to Lucca at night. When we woke up we saw this view of rolling olive groves from our hotel window. I have another photo, quite striking, of Anne standing naked in the frame of the window in the morning glow. As she heard the click of the shutter she said, without turning, something to the effect that if it appeared on the blog I would be toast.


At the Lucca comics festival. 'lospaziobianco' filmed me doing a sketch. As you can see, I realised I'd drawn Gull's arm too long and tried to fix it by stretching the legs. Once after drawing my pal White, he complained that I'd made him look fat. I told him I'd fix it by making his head bigger. These are the, ahem, secrets of the trade.



Three more photos from Lucca, including me and local boy Giacomo Puccini:

The wife of my bosom and I got home Tuesday and I'm taking stock of all the stuff that's come out of our suitcases. We flew into Rome and were met and driven by a charming bloke and fellow artist named Marco Farinelli to Florence, where we slept and stayed most of the next day. Florence, city of countless artistic marvels, which I appear to have recorded in two photos. First, this great shot of our Monty vomiting out of the side of the Cathedral:


Second, a view from the roof garden of the Scuola Intenazionale di Comics, where I gave a stand up talk for about three hours to a roomful of great students who laughed in all the right places thanks to Vanessa, my translator for the day. She came up here for a smoke break, and we comic book artists never miss an opportunity to make a photograph of foreign rooftops. You never know when you might need it.

This very old photo at black and wtf has been drawn to my attention by Nick Dimmock of Northampton via Hayley Campbell of London.


It sure does look like the Snooter, last seen in costume for the short film we made last year.


The Snooter is a humanoid version of an actual bug that flew in our kitchen as told in After the Snooter, contained within Alec: The Years have Pants, of which we had air-shipped signing copies in London last weekend but will not be seen by the world at large until the sea-shipped print-run arrives in maybe three more weeks.

Note the colonial/tropical setting in the top picture, lending credence to my claim that this bug actually exists, and that's the wife of my bosom in her nightie in the second picture.

Just announced at COMICA's site. I'm going to be "in Conversation" with Arnold Brown. he's a very funny fellow.



Tickets: £6 / £5 Concessions / £4 ICA Members
Where: Nash Room, ICA, The Mall, London
When: Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 7pm to 9pm

A tale of two murals. (Links via Bob Morales.)

Florida City bans new murals in downtown after confusing an arm rest with a male sex organ

The mural was retouched to take the armrest out. But that was not enough, ity commissioners voted 4-1 Monday to essentially ban new outdoor paintings from historic downtown.

UPDATE: meeting tonight to discuss possible destruction of boxer girl mural

tonight's bloomingdale civic association meeting will include discussion about the boxer girl mural. there seems to be a lot of pressure on the city to destroy the mural and the mayor's office is considering it.

Nothing accomplished. Pretty poorly run meeting and it didn't ask for community input. DCCAH said they've changed their policy but there's no mechanism to reverse what's done. Someone had actually asked police to see if it caused an increase in crime. They said there has been a 55% decrease.

The time for leaving the house is again upon me. It happens once a year. This time, on Monday, I'm off to Italy for the Lucca festival to coincide with the release of the final volume of Bacchus in Italian from Edizioni BD. Here's a page in English. It's the one where the acolyte, cast in the likeness of my pal Mick Evans, meets his sticky end, as told in the video I posted here a few days ago. (click to enlarge)


Where to find me:
Thursday, 29 th: Lucca Comics and Games: signing session 11:00 - 12:30 and 15:00 - 17:00
Friday, 30 th: Pop Store, via Nino Bixio 51 from 16:00 to 18:00
Saturday 31 th: Lucca Comics and Games: signing session 11:00 - 12:30 and 15:00 - 17:00
Sunday, 1st: Lucca Comics and Games: signing session 11:00 - 12:00

From Italy I go to the UK. where I"ll surface the following weekend, and so hopefully will The Years Have Pants.
Saturday 7th November- two events
One: - Signing at Gosh! Comics from 2pm-4pm
Two: Comica Festival, interview
Nash Room, ICA, The Mall, London- at 7pm to 9pm (se link for details on getting in)

Here is a page from the book that just happens to involve pants: (click to enlarge)

How come I didn't know about this? There is a town in County Donegal named Muff


and it has a diving club, The Muff Diving Club, founded in 1981 one night in the Sqealing Pig pub. It had its first AGM in 1981 and membership now stands at 80.
(photo from the club site, link from Hayley Campbell)

Making a work of long-form comics has become something of a test to show that a comic strip artist is of the modern age. Robert Crumb achieved fame in earlier age, that very brief one of the 'underground' comics in the 1960s, whose artists specialized in the spontaneous, the self-indulgent, the iconoclastic and merry taboo-breaking. We would not expect one of them to have the discipline to disappear for four years and come back with a 224 page intensely detailed and faithful illustration of the oldest and most venerated book in the world. The very idea of it is brilliant and the job is one that cannot fail to attract attention, though so far I can't find a bad word about it anywhere.

Bill Kartalopoulos at PRINT gives the best formal analysis

Crumb invests this cast of thousands with cultivated observation of both physiognomy and character, and his characters, even when only briefly glimpsed, resonate authentically as flawed strugglers. More august Biblical figures project recognizable human motivations, even in the book’s most heightened circumstances. Crumb’s aged Abraham, submerging grief into duty, is rigidly stoic as he prepares to sacrifice his only son.

Paul Buhle in The Jewish Daily Forward makes a good observation:

More striking for anyone but the seasoned Crumb fan: unlike previous Biblical comic adaptations, including some published and drawn by Jews, Crumb’s characters actually look Jewish, the women even more than the men. The contrast to the classic work, EC Comics’ “Picture Stories from the Bible” (1945) in that respect is most illuminating. But more recent works like the best-selling “Manga Bible” (2000) are not much different (nor was the “The Wolverton Bible” by one of the strangest of comic artists Basil Wolverton). Close readers will see Crumb’s wife Aline Kominsky, to whom the book is dedicated, again and again, in various guises; perhaps only Chagall drew his beloved wife so often and with such varied imagination.

Crumb's restraint and subtlety are to be applauded, and I often feel that he is catching the moments that all other artists miss, for instance this one in which the males of the household of Abraham have just been informed that they have to be circumcised:


Update: Robert Alter, whose translation Crumb used, writes at length in the New Republic.

Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness. He is keenly aware that many bizarre things happen in these stories, first in the primeval history because of its legendary character and then in the patriarchal narrative because of the writers’ deep interest in what is odd, paradoxical, and surprising in human behavior and in divine intervention. It is fun to follow Crumb’s images. In some instances, the fun is a direct visual translation of what is conveyed in the narrative report. More often, it derives from Crumb’s play with the biblical text.

In Exit Wounds Rutu Modan gives me something that's getting harder to find in my 'graphic novel' reading. That is, she's telling me something I don't already know. It's set in an actual place I've never been to, and the characters are involved in plausible actions that are outside of my experience. They are investigating whether the father of one of them has been the victim of a terrorist bombing, and whether he is the 'John Doe' in a hastily dug grave at the cemetery. While they're there, an unrelated body is being exhumed with, much family ceremony further along the line, due to a similar discovery.

The impressive thing about Exit Wounds is that there is a keen organizing intelligence at work at every single level of it, from top to bottom, and I'd like to run my eye down them.

First, the thematic material. The softcover of Exit Wounds that I'm looking at here was released last December, a year after the hard cover, and includes a very thorough eight page interview with the author at the back of the book, from which we glean a few insights into her method. 'Life has no subtext, and a story without subtext is a soap opera... journalism has a different duty. I'm talking about fiction.' There is then a suggestion that the matter-of-factness of death is her principal interest in the book, the thought that nobody might give it a thought. A real news event forms the seed of the story, a victim who could not be identified. Second, on to the nuts and bolts of plot construction: 'the problem with reality is that it is too chaotic.' Her story does indeed have an orderly way of unfolding, everything noted in its turn and in its place. A personal experience contributes to the plot, things that happened to other people, then inventions and connections are added and the whole thing is logically worked out until the joins are invisible.

Third, the setting, which is Tel Aviv. Reference photos would have to have been used for buildings and cars, but Modan subsumes everything into a 'Ligne clair' style, all the way down to dots for eyes. The underlying draughtsmanship is so tight that she loosens things up a bit on the surface by eschewing rulers and straight lines. Fourth, the people- there's a studied ordinariness about them that becomes an attraction because they're so engagingly observed. Using Photos for figures is too complicated for a long form comic strip. That kind of thing was right for old style painted magazine illustration where the artist could spend several days on a single composition. With comics there is too much ground to be covered. The artist most of the time must rely on mentally internalized figure studies, so that they can be convincingly produced when needed. He or she must be looking and mentally recording, all the time, even when they're not supposed to be. There's a marvelous six page sequence of perfectly observed love-making in which clothes get in the way, pants come off as inelegantly as real pants come off.

Fifth, the color has me mystified. It's obviously done on computer, but there are inconsistencies and textural suggestions under the hues, perhaps some roughage has been scanned for a base layer. Here's a zoom on a head, with uneven yellow across the flesh and what looks like the merest suggestion of purple veins around the man's temple. There's life in these colours


Sixth, the lettering shows the same degree of thinking too. It obeys all the rules I wrote about in an earlier post. The words form a shape within the larger shape of the balloon and there's plenty of air between the two. She also solves another problem which I've written about before. which is that white word balloon tends to look like a hole in the picture through to the white of the page, suggesting in most comics that the sound is happening in a separate dimension somewhere else. A technique to unify the words and picture into a single audio-visual space is necessary. Modan solves the problem by colouring the balloons a very pale yellow. I've picked a detail in which the figures and balloons are isolated against the white of the page, then I've blown it up and darkened it to underline the point. The most casual of readers may not have even noticed that this method runs all through the book.


Seventh and finally I'm looking even at the white spaces between the panels. They are a little wider than most artists would have them, but rigorously consistent. The casual reader, once again, probably never thinks about it, but every artist has to make important decisions about this at the outset. As an example, I recall that I once had a theory, though I have to go all the way back to the King Canute Crowd just now to find it in use, that the vertical spaces between panels should be narrower than the horizontal spaces between tiers. In other books, as in The Order of Beasts, I've left it to my whims on the day.

It's a real treat to see everything working toward a unified purpose like this, and worth analyzing because we don't see it often enough.

Chris Staros, master of ceremonies at Top Shelf Productions, tells me he's seen early bound test copies of both the hard and soft covers of the new book, that they look great and everything is on course, if somewhat late. I've been doing a bunch of interviews recently and they're all being sat on until the books come out. I'm sure I've repeated myself all over the place. I remember watching an old Hollywood songwriter, when his memoir was published, doing the rounds of the UK talk shows, giving the same spiel every time, not realising that the UK is so small that it would be the same audience watching every show. The internet's like that, when you break it down into communities. But anyway, somebody asked me what's my favourite out of all my stories, and I probably said a parent can never pick favourites from among his children, or some blather like that. But what I really meant to say was that it is this byzantine half hour anecdote I told last year in Chicago, and which I'm reposting here for anyone who missed it when it first appeared at Bookslut last October. I was supposed to be doing a 'reading,' but this story crisscrosses a handful of unrelated books and doesn't exist in a tangible form except here.

The video: In which I mimic a horse, try to figure out what's inside a dog's head, and perform other unseemly acts...



Eddie Campbell Reading -Chicago, July 2008 from Host: Jessa Crispin, Bookslut. Filmed by Brown Finch Films, who marked a spot on the floor where I was supposed to stand.
(and whose documentary Proceed and be bold I reviewed in June)

This one took me a while to get hold of for some reason. I didn't want to show up on the tv without having read what is likely to be the 'graphic novel' of the year. I tried ordering it from my local comics shop and after five weeks sought another source. My favourite fine books outlet couldn't get hold of one quickly either. Kinokuniya books in Sydney came though with an overnight delivery. I Checked out the store while I was down there on Tuesday. It moved to central Sydney as recently as 2002 and is now the biggest outlet for new books in Australia I believe. (The international success story of this Japanese enterprise is worth reading). The thing that always impressed me about David Mazzucchelli back when he was doing the regular comic book stuff, was his sense of place. No other artist came near him in this. He gave you all the details that make one street different from every other street:




The atmospheric qualities that make an exterior different from an interior:


Andd each room different from every other room. I'm just going with what I can round up on the internet, but handily, here's a picture in which he manages to get the whole room into the frame except only for the ceiling.


I was pleased to see this interest is still with him in his new work, the masterly Asterios Polyp, particularly in the way this set piece undergoes a number of variations and transformations through the book.


Just about everything else that needs to be said about this much lauded masterpiece has been said elsewhere. (here are 7,208 words of annotations for after you've read the book)

Another whisky ad. this one's a great piece of Irish blarney.


(link from Bob Morales, supplier to the blogging elite)

Firm seeks Glaswegian interpreter

A translation company is looking to recruit Glaswegian interpreters to help business clients who are baffled by the local dialect. Today Translations placed an advert in The Herald newspaper on Tuesday seeking speakers of "Glaswegian English". Successful candidates, who could earn up to £140 a day, must understand "vocabulary, accent and nuances".
The firm said, so far, 30 people had applied for the positions - some of them in Glaswegian.

(thanks to dr jon for the link)

Yesterday's televisual event went as well as can be expected (as Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit would say). However, when you're trying to make the case for there being no reason why the significant stories of our times cannot be told using the simple elements of the strip cartoon, citing as examples a memoir of being a child during the Islamic revolution, and a personal account of  9-11 and its aftermath, and then the superheroes are entered into evidence, at that point you're going to have to plead guilty.

It happened while my mind had momentarily wandered. The same thing happened last week while we were negotiating the travel agency fiasco with a person in a position to effect a solution. A detail in the awful narrative gave me a story insight. I suddenly realized that I had dropped out for a few seconds and the wife of my bosom was now doing the negotiating. I brought it up later and she said, 'oh, everybody knows when you've left the building."

The show is The First Tuesday Book Club which airs the first Tuesday of every month on ABC tv here in Australia. They shot fifty minutes and have to cut it down to thirty. My fellow panelists were  Nicki Greenberg, Bruce Mutard and Sophie Cunningham, editor of Meanjin Quarterly. It should air in a few months, and there may be a longer version online

Nicki had her wee baby girl with her. here is Campbell easing the little one off into noddyland. You will find him surprisingly good at this sort of thing.


*************

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

(link thanks to Bob Morales)

Comics Scholarship—Mississippi Style

If the last century saw the state of Mississippi as the cradle of the blues, this century may see the region’s University Press of Mississippi set the course for modern comics scholarship. Although there is a lot of academic and critical interest from journals such as Comic Art, The Comics Journal and comics-centered blogs, the concept of comics scholarship is still frequently seen as an oxymoron.

One or two of the four parts of Persepolis (2000-2003) have been around the house before, when Hayley Campbell still lived at home, and I dipped into them while rushing from one thing to the next. They were full of very attractive little cartoon strip anecdotes from a faraway place and Marjane Satrapi is also a formidable personality. I really should have stopped and paid more attention, because reading the whole work now in one thick volume I realize that I have not properly praised this masterpiece in any of my blatherings. The Random House/VINTAGE paperback (2007) collects it neatly in one compact bundle, though at this size the lettering can be a challenge to eyeballs that have been rolling around for as long as mine. This book makes me think how well the cartoon strip is the perfect mode of communication between cultures and languages. I know when my own stuff appears in translation, I don't worry too much about the words since the pictures are there to anchor things to my intended message. The meaning may indeed go adrift but the next panel is always there to pull it back. In other words, the meaning in good comics is not carried by the words or image separately. Nevertheless in scouting around on the subject of the book under discussion, I couldn't help noticing one or two disagreements occurring before we even get to translation:
(from the Wikipedia page on the Book)-

"University of Tehran literature professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi points out that in Persepolis representation is regularly interwoven with other aims and projections, which militate against accuracy. He states that the book and movie are the works of one who has 'Westernized' her outlook. He goes on to say that Satrapi, like Azar Nafisi, constantly confirms what orientalist representations have regularly claimed: the backwardness and inferiority of Muslims and Islam."

One of the reader reviews on the Amazon.co.uk page:

recommended but don't take it seriously
Most of the events are from the eye of a Marxist which makes the narrative biased. In other words seeking iranian revolution history from this book is like learning WW2 history from the film U-571!

It would be a terminally vague person who'd think they could get history out of a cartoon strip or a Hollywood movie, though in a case of suppression of all other sources of information I would privilege the former. The real pleasure of Persepolis, and of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, and Fun Home and all other strip cartoon memoirs, is exactly that they are personal. This review from the same amazon page, by somebody who has arrived late to all the 'graphic novel' hoopla, gets it:

"for the unawares, the narrative in this book is made up of artwork, its like a comic book, which makes it utterly adorable

In the fourth quarter of Persepolis with Satrapi now in her twenties, she tells us of a cruel thing she did. I found myself somewhat shocked, and uneager to proceed until some penance was negotiated. It reminded me of something the British critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote in 1984 when faced with Spiegelman's Prisoner of the Hell Planet, that the cartoon strip finds itself the perfect vehicle for the personal, with the reader required to "perform the function of the Catholic priest in the confessional."

news item from Sept 15: 'Persepolis' is One Book, One Philadelphia winner

"The work I have tried to do with Persepolis is to change the ethnic point of view that so many people have about Iran," she said.
"My role as an artist is not to supply answers" to political and ethnic questions, she said, "but to inspire people on both sides of the East-West divide to question their assumptions."
This summer's pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran, she said, have helped Americans to see Iran in a new light.
And they've given her hope about the future.
"I have always thought that I wanted to die in Iran, because it's my home," she said. "Now I'm hopeful that some day I can live there."

ADDENDUM
Between writing the above and posting it, two things just collided in my head. First, I'm sure I quoted it once before on this blog but my search can't unearth it, which may be a spelling issue, here is the complete quotation from Waldemar Januszczak, from The Guardian, July 24 1984. I have long regarded this paragraph as an insightful key to understanding a great deal about the comics of our times. He was reviewing a London Mayfair art gallery exhibition, the theme of which was Comics/Fine Art, and the writer was talking first about Spiegelman's Prisoner of The Hell Planet. (The opening pages of Alec were also included in this exhibition, though were invisible to the reviewer).
Heading: 'A DIET OF BUBBLE AND SHRIEK- Strip cartoons have stepped off the page into the galleries. Waldemar Januszczak reports on two exhibitions which give them the trappings of fine art-'

"WHEN THE neurotics appropriated the strip cartoon we witnessed the ideal marriage of form and content. They subverted its innocence and filled its thought balloons with their wretched, guilt-sodden solilioquies. The strip cartoon turned out to be a splendid medium for confessions. And we, the audience, found ourselves called upon to perform the duties of the Catholic priest.
Art Spiegelman confesses to being A prisoner of the Hell Planet..."

It's just occurred to me after all these years, due to the proximity of the words 'neurotic' and 'Catholic,' that Waldemar must be familiar with Justin Green, whom I mentioned in passing here yesterday:

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a 1972 comic book by Justin Green. It was the first long autobiographical work to appear in underground comics, and was extremely personal, detailing Green's childhood struggle with a disorder which in Catholicism is referred to as scrupulosity and was later diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This comic book influenced many other cartoonists of Green's generation to explore their own personal histories; Art Spiegelman said it made his novel Maus possible.
Green: ""You may deem my material as being too indulgent, morbid, and obscene. I dare say many of you aspiring revolutionaries will conclude that instead of focussing on topics which would lend themselves to social issues, I have zeroed in on the petty conflict in my crotch! My justification for undertaking this task is that many others are slaves to their neuroses. Maybe if they read about one neurotic's dilemma in easy-to-understand comic-book format these tormented folks will no longer see themselves as mere food-tubes living in isolation."

Scouting around to make sure I'm up to date on the idea of 'the graphic novel,' the subject of a tv program I've been enlisted to appear on this week, I picked up a handful of books on Friday, items that have been on my shopping list for some time. I'll record some thoughts over the next few days. Firstly, Life in Pictures by Will Eisner. I have the larger part of this volume already, but I was mainly interested in getting a sense of how Eisner stood at the end of his career, with his books organized into three large compendiums. I've noted in a couple of places recently that the form has arrived at a stage where there is now enough material in existence for us to see this happening with those authors who have been practicing a long while (the Hernandez brothers also spring to mind, and my own big Alec set).

Eisner took all his 'graphic novels' from DC comics over to Norton Books in Dec 2004. I've always understood this to imply that he saw a significant difference between these and The Spirit 'comic books' that he was more than happy for DC to keep in their catalogue. He more or less thought of the two as separate media, and In fact he has made it clear on more than one occasion, as in this Publisher's Weekly article from Nov 28 2006.

He proposed that Norton purchase the rights to the Will Eisner library from DC Comics in 2004 while working with Norton executive editor Robert Weil on The Plot, while making it clear his groundbreaking comic The Spirit should remain at DC. In an interview with PW Comics Week, Weil stressed that Eisner "loved DC and had great relations with them to the end. What he did was separate The Spirit from his literary works—he wanted a separation of the two, to get his books into bookstores. He wanted his novels with a literary house."

In this excerpt from Mark Asquith's 2004 interview with Eisner, quoted, if memory serves, in the Eisner obituary issue of the Comics Journal in 2005, Eisner emphasizes that he considers it essentially the content that differentiates 'The graphic novel':

"The reason graphic novels have become recognized by the cultural elite, so to speak, is because at long last the content has finally arrived at a level that is attracting serious readers. Up until 1970 the content of comics, which are the forerunners of graphic novels, consisted of stories that were built on adventure, they were designed for entertainment. Comics are really emerging from a history of being a vehicle for jokes. The superheroes came along, and what they were providing were stories of pursuit and vengeance, which is mainly the main theme of most of the comic book stories. In order for comics to emerge from that area they had to change the content and address adults, which is why I started A Contract with God in 1978. I reasoned that the readers who had grown up on comic magazines or comic books were now thirty-five and forty years old, and would no longer be satisfied with the simplistic stories that were being told at that time. And so I thought, let's try to address them on a serious subject such as man's relationship to God."

Once they had secured the rights to the Eisner library in December 2004, Norton moved quickly to release the works. The hardcover A Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue, which collected A Contract with God, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue, appeared in November 2005. In Oct 2006, the company published a hardcover compilation of four classic Eisner works under the title Will Eisner's New York, which includes the classic works Life in the Big City; New York, the Building, City People Notebook; and Invisible People. And in Oct 2007 there was the volume under discussion. Autobiography is made to be the connecting theme of this volume, which is stretching things a bit, and I'm having trouble imagining Will would have been happy with the label. Three of the five pieces certainly fit the bill, The Dreamer, To the Heart of the Storm, and a little four pager titled The Day I Became a Professional, which first appeared in an anthology titled Autobiographix.
In his introduction, editor Dennis Kitchen writes about how Eisner was tempted into a more personal vein after contact with the work of underground cartoonists Justin Green and Robert Crumb. Crumb's personal work can be best experienced in the huge Crumb Coffee Table Art Book that Kitchen Sink Press put out in the mid '90s. The personal and intimate were always rife in Crumb's sketchbooks, and in many short published works from the early '70s on through Weirdo magazine and beyond. Spiegelman too mined the autobigraphical vein, as you can see in his 1977 Breakdowns, recently republished, which reprints stuff from the mid-'70s Arcade magazine. Harvey Pekar made autobiography his single mode beginning in 1976. Malaysian Cartoonist Lat must be counted here too, his great works Kampung Boy ('78) and Town Boy ('81) recently released in American editions by First Second. Since then a great number of artists have given us a backward looking memoir in long-form comic strip, including Raymond Briggs, Alison Bechdel, Craig Thompson, Marjane Satrapi, Seth, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Jeffrey Brown, or presented their ongoing daily observation of their life as has James Kochalka, and not to forget the exemplary work of Joe Sacco, who puts himself firmly in the panels of his journalistic accounts of dodgy places such as Bosnia. The three Eisner works certainly stand alongside these and others in justifying the personal statement as one of comics' most valuable contributions to the culture of our times.
The other two pieces in the current volume are A Sunset in Sunshine City (1985), a neatly constructed little drama in 28 pages about a man whose daughters persuade him to leave New York for Florida, and The Name of the Game (2001), a full length saga (176 pages) about the members of wealthy old-money Jewish families vying for social position. I find myself reading these two for the first time and they are both worthy contributions to Eisner's oeuvre, but the personal element in both is but a starting point. Eisner did move to Florida, and perhaps the background of his wife's family inspired the latter work, but beyond that, these are both in Eisner's other modes. The family dynasty model reminds us of Dropsie Avenue: the Neighbourhood, and Sunset is not unlike the shorter works in Contract With God or Invisble People.
A couple of points. Sex in these stories always seems to symbolize a descent of sorts, the sin that condemns a character, or the resignation that sets them on a fateful course. In Eisner, only the unresolved sexual frisson created by characters like Connie Rodd ever seem to leave with us with a cheerful feeling. In fact, oddly, Connie seems more like a person you could actually meet. The cynical element does not amount to a personal expression or world view, however. What Eisner is giving us in Name of the Game is another rendition of the kind of era-spanning family dynasty story that used to be the staple of the tv mini-series of the '70s/'80s, with its relentless air of tragedy. For this reason in particular, it sits uncomfortably with the genuine memoir of The Dreamer and To the Heart of the Storm, his reminiscences of his youth and early adulthood. It tends to emphasize a feeling of loss that Eisner never returned to the more personal account of these latter works. Seeing them next to each other in this volume invites us to see them as interlocking parts. The entire 48 pages of Dreamer fits into Heart just before its last 15 page segment, and together at around 250 pages they make up the larger part of the collection. The other thing that sticks with me is that the later drawn Name of the Game has overall a much lighter and more advanced quality to the drawings. The figure work is some of the best observed of Eisner's career, with none of the grotesqueries that lumbered through his early pages, even as late as The Super in A Contract with God, and he would have been 83 when Name was first published. I also notice that the greys have been added in photoshop and a certain dotting in the hatching, due to the resolution of the scanning. It may have been his first work reproduced this way, with the older pieces in the book probably scanned at a very high resolution specially for this collection (I welcome any observations).

A few years ago I was listening to a group of people discuss hypothetically what they would do upon discovering that they only have six months to live. Their imaginative plans involved spending their hard earned cash on all the things that they would always have liked to have done, and other stuff besides, just because the clock was now ticking. Most of it involved travel to exotic places, like the great wall of China. I can't make sense of that at all. It's not like you'd be able to keep a memory of it. Me, I'd walk the dog, and spend longer doing it. And sit around in company in the evenings drinking tea and making sure that whatever wisdom I possess gets passed along.

The thing I would absolutely NOT do is waste a single minute sitting on a plane.

When I mentioned anxiety on Thursday (thanks by the way to those who suggested ointments and whatnot), I wasn't fretting about having to appear in a very public forum. The program is to take place in another city and involves a flight. It's the travel that gives me anguish. I woke up this morning with a memory of being stuck endlessly in an airport. I worked upon the images in my head trying to recall which airport I was remembering, till it came to me that it was Manchester, and only a year ago. My plane was leaving first thing in the morning, and rather than face a nervous and hectic early morning rush, i went to the airport the night before and did my best to fall asleep in the big empty departure lounge.


I travel abroad every year, often more that once a year. In 2002 I made five trips. The one that sticks in my head from that year is Florida. A couple of hours out of Denver one of the two engines conked out and the plane had to come down carefully in Memphis. Everybody else from that flight got an alternative connection except me. It was late and I had to book into a nearby hotel, knowing that I would need to be out of there by five in the morning to make the start of the Will Eisner 'Graphic Novel' Symposium in Gainesville at which I was a guest. This was after coming all the way from Australia. I was the walking dead already and was hardly likely to nod off knowing I needed to be alert again so soon. But I had to give it a try. A few days later I was stuck in motionless traffic for two hours between Gainesville and Orlando, horribly uncomfortably asleep sitting in the front passenger seat of a car.

Before October is over I have yet another flight to dread. I'm off to Italy and there has already been a hiccup with this one. It was all booked and paid for in July, but now I get a phone call to inform me that the manager at the travel agency, who has been dealing efficiently with all my travel for the last ten years, has embezzled a quarter of a million bucks and the place has had to close down. The payment I made, 4,600 bucks, did not go where it was supposed to go and I'll need to pay again to secure the flights while things are done to see about repaying the original deposit from the insurance fund to which the agency subscribed. The wife of my bosom has already told everyone we're going to Tuscany. Momentarily she pictures us sitting at home for two weeks with the lights off and the windows closed.

May nothing occur. (as the say in Leotard)

(Marco, It's all right. We'll be there. Image from The Fate of the Artist)

Some reading:

First clown in space hosts show to save Earth's water

Guy Laliberte's two-hour performance event called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water" linked the International Space Station with singers, dancers and celebrity campaigners in 14 world cities in what organizers called the first event of its kind to be hosted from space.
"I see stars, I see darkness and emptiness. But planet Earth looks so great, and also so fragile," Laliberte said from the International Space Station, where he has spent the past week after paying $35 million to fly on a Russian spacecraft and become the world's seventh space tourist.

Marge Simpson makes cover of Playboy LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – "D'oh!" doesn't even start to cover it. Marge Simpson -- the blue beehived matriarch of America's most loved dysfunctional family - is Playboy magazine's November cover, the magazine said on Friday.
Simpson, tastefully concealing her assets behind a signature Playboy Bunny chair, is the first cartoon character ever to front the glossy adult magazine, joining the ranks of sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford...

Warren Ellis writes about Gil Kane's isolated publications of 1968 and 1971. He says something that reflects on a stupid argument that I occasionally find myself in. That's the argument that the 'graphic novel' is widely said to be a 'format,' for example as in this passage I mocked:
"One of the most common mistakes made in our medium is the confusion of Comic Books with Graphic Novels. This is sort of like referring to a Magazine as a Newspaper; while they may contain similar information, they are entirely different formats."
Some of you folk are more likely to pay attention to what Warren Ellis says than what I say:

"this is happening in 1968 and 1971. A crime graphic novel in magazine format, featuring a protagonist appearing not unlike Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK. (Remember that brilliant trailer for POINT BLANK? “Walker is an emotional and primitive man.”) A fantasy graphic novel in mass-market paperback format, to go on the bookshelf next to those CONAN fix-ups by Lin Carter and L Sprague De Camp"

Note that in his perfectly sensible concept of it, the 'graphic novel' is separate from the format in which it appears (two different in the above), which is interesting because there are a lot of otherwise intelligent people in the 'graphic novel' business who can't separate the two. In the literary world a novel may exist simultaneously in a number of different formats, as in this passage from the Wordsworth Classics introduction to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Joyce threw the manuscript of the novel into the fire. Although rescued by the author's sister Eileen, this was not the end of the troubles for the novel; initially serialised in the London journal the Egoist, the book form of the novel was rejected by a number of publishers before being brought out by the American publisher B W Huebsch in 1916." Note that it was still a novel when it was variously a) an unpublished manuscript, b) a serial published in a magazine, c) a published book. If, generally speaking, the people who read comic books had ever read anything else besides, they would already know this.

Apologies to all who are already sick to the stomach of the boneheadedly endless dissertation on the meaning of a term, but I have once again been invited onto the television to spout forth on a half hour chat program devoted to the subject. This time I have taken care to make sure that the groundwork is impeccably correct and that the participants are of unimpeachable artistic character. I am hopeful that it will work out well. More on this after it is prerecorded next Tuesday.

Hmmm... the cold sore on my lip is just starting on cue, as it always does when a certain agitation comes over me. By Tuesday it is certain to be a hanging scab that cannot be removed without opening my lip... good grief!

Understanding the Anxious Mind- NY Times Magazine, sept 29.
These psychologists have put the assumptions about innate temperament on firmer footing, and they have also demonstrated that some of us, like Baby 19, are born anxious — or, more accurately, born predisposed to be anxious...
“I was flesh bereft of spirit,” wrote the journalist Patricia Pearson in “A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine),” in a pitch-perfect description of this emotional morass, “a friable self, grotesque... I got an AIDS test. I had my moles checked. I grew suspicious of pains in my back. If I was nauseous, I worried about cancer and started reading up obsessively on symptoms. I lay in bed whenever I could, trying to shut up the clamor of terror with sleep.”

right, that's me off back to bed.

What were they thinking?

I don't know what else to say.
'Jackson Jive' apologises for racist Hey Hey skit

THE frontman of a controversial black-face skit on Hey Hey It's Saturday has apologised, saying it is ironic he has been called racist, given his Indian background.
Following international outcry, Dr Anand Deva, a prominent Sydney-based plastic surgeon, went public and said the Jackson Jive act on the show's popular Red Faces segment last night was not meant to cause offence, but he admitted he would not have performed it in the US.
"Clearly, all of us want to apologise. I mean we have offended some people no doubt, particularly Harry Connick Jr," he said.

If you must look, somebody has already Youtubed it (found by our pal Bob Morales)