heavy

holy cow...

"Winsor McCay spoke the saddest and greatest last words of any cartoonist. (Number two is Osamu Tezuka: “I’m begging you, let me work!”) McCay lived to draw; his greatest fear, he often said, was of losing that ability. On a July evening in 1934, the 65-year-old cartoonist called downstairs to his wife, “It’s gone, Mother! Gone, gone, gone!” He had just suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a second stroke, from which he never recovered."


from the hooded utilitarian poll of greatest comics ever

beautiful and haunting last words on both accounts. beautiful in the sense that these guys loved their work with all their hearts, haunting in the sense that death meant the end of their joy in creation. i sort of wish i had that kind of dedication to a craft, but i am also thankful that my brain is not that obsessive.

i've been thinking of starting a tumblr. should i do that?

a.n.

"In a way, I wonder, why should I bother to invent new characters and situations when I can just steal from the masters and get 2500 years of history and gravity thrown in for nothing? And the thing is, I’m as likely as not to be stealing from them accidentally anyway, so why not just surrender and accept my fate?"

great, substantial interview with anders nilsen over at the nashville review.  looking forward to grabbing my copy of the collected big questions. 

buenaventura press closes...

just read the sad news that buenaventura press had to shut down due to inclement financial conditions (i suppose that's always the case).

buenaventura was one of the most ambitious and promising publishing ventures in the comics industry. they've released some remarkable work in their few working years, certainly some of the best comics of the past decade. though one cannot expect that any publisher will share alvin's precise curatorial vision, perhaps current or new publishers will step up to the plate and keep releasing exciting work that exists along the same lines.

more here.

ke7...what am i going to do with you...

so, i've pretty much finished reading Kramers Ergot 7 and...

hmm.

i want to like it a lot more than i do. this is probably largely due to the fact that a great deal of money was spent to attain a copy. but i really was expecting nearly cover-to-cover amazing work. i feel like i was owed that. i can accept some missteps, that's fine.

but this is mostly missteps.

well, not mostly missteps. a number of missteps, and a number of...botched opportunities.

bill randall makes a number of good observations that i agree with. for example...

some artists simply fail to utilize the scale that they are allowed. dan clowes, jaime hernandez and seth in particular. three well-established artists that sammy harkham invited to contribute to the book because they had never had the opportunity to work at such a scale (ok, fine) and they absolutely blow it. their pieces are dull as dishwater. i can't blame sammy for pitching a very expensive endeavor to a wider audience by including well known names (matt groening has a piece, for god's sake), but the colleciton suffers for it. these milquetoast offerings fly directly in the face of what made Kramers thrilling in the first place.

i'm not much of a fan of johnny ryan and here he is in traditional form with a piece spoofing david heatley's sex history comic from Kramers 5. this and heatley's own awkward, uncomfortably bordering-on-weirdly-racist contribution seem a total waste of valuable space.

again i agree with randall that more female artists should have been included. i would have loved to have seen genviève castrée, vanessa davis, or allison cole working at this size. instead we have more of the rote comic genres of crude sex drawings or, in other pieces (see: matt thurber, jacob ciocci) psyched-out drug-hazed nonsensical...crap.

there is also the problem that while some pieces do take advantage of the page size, many of the works are strident and doggedly set on being very, very ugly. some are filled with incomprehensible content (as previously noted) or are exceedingly dark. i mean, really dark.

content aside, some of the most visually successful pieces are the ones that have a tastefully unified color pallette, like in frank santoro's spacious spread and work from blexbolex, john pham, and dan zettwoch.

then there are the pieces in which the artist effectively fills the vast pages allotted to them, and the work really has a sense of logic to it. chris ware impresses with his strip that circulates around a life-size rendering of a baby. shoboshobo made what is certainly the most epic, difficult-to-read table of contents ever. tom gauld's comic does the story of noah's ark justice by imbueing it with an appropriate sense of scale and giving minor biblical figures relatable, realistic humanity. gauld's piece is probably my favorite out of the whole book.

i could go on and on, talking about the positives and negatives of each individual piece, but i'd exhaust myself. maegan said that she thinks that i have more discerning tastes than some when it comes to comics, and i think that's true. i'm not a guy who can have any sort of indie comic fall into his lap and think "wow, this is amazing!" and so i can't just swallow this book whole.

i suppose it's like pretty much every other edition of Kramers. some work is stunning, some of it is, again, so...so ugly, and some of it is just...ok. there's no denying that it's a beautiful object, and in spite of inconsistent content, a considerable amount of care was put into completing the project. it could be that some of the artists involved just didn't know how to handle a task so huge, and they wound up beefing it. understandable. with the comics field as wide as it is today it truly is exciting that Kramers 7 can make its way into the world now, warts and all.

"oh, i don't really like those..."

so maegan and i went to chicago for the kramers ergot signing. i get so excited for stuff like this, and at the same time so nervous i'm going to be a buffoon or piss someone off that it ends up being altogether exhausting. pretty much everyone was really nice despite my inability to make much conversation with most of the guys.

in addition to drawings inside the book and on the fancy letterpress print that came with the book (all of which are wonderful), i asked some of the artists if they would be willing to do pee-wee herman related sketches in a pad i had brought along. earlier in the evening some were willing to do this, some thought about it and then seemed to forget / get distracted, and later on, when the line was more crowded, they thought for the sake of time and flow it would be better to pass (i can't blame them for this). too bad because kevin huizenga seemed keen on the idea. even so, i managed to collect some boss sketches, and i plan on maintaining this theme sketchbook for the next time i get to a convention or signing event of some kind.

ivan brunetti depicts himself as pee-wee

john hankiewicz provides a rather dour yet creative take on the iconic red bow-tie.

dan zettwoch (left) and sammy harkham (right) doodle in an attempt to figure out how to draw chairy. here's how they stack up to the real thing:

and dan zettwoch offers a great rendering of a scene from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. this had maegan and i giggling the whole time he was drawing.

it would have been nice to have sammy, souther, kevin, anders, chris, and ron provide their takes, but you can't have it all, especially when there is a line of at least fifteen other people behind you, all of them lugging enormous heavy books.