Stainless

Recently, one of my friends told me that Superman was an inch from becoming a dictator. It didn’t seem likely to me, but I didn’t have any arguments, just a sense that Superman wasn’t inclined toward world domination. Luckily enough, the public library system provided me with, The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman, a collection of essays edited by Glenn Yeffeth.

Continue reading "Stainless"...»

Screw-On Head and Hellboy, Unfairly Compared

Really, I am trying to be good, but I’m not sure I can help it. Last month, DVD’s for The Amazing Screw-On Head and Hellboy: Sword of Storms were released on the same day. That should have been the best day ever since they’re both based on Mike Mignola’s comics. Unfortunately, releasing both projects on the same day leads to unfair comparisons.

Continue reading "Screw-On Head and Hellboy, Unfairly Compared"...»

Frank Miller’s Hot Gates

A feeling’s been gnawing deep inside me for a while. A feeling that maybe Frank Miller’s hypermasculine antiheros and faceless, breast-thrusting women are exactly what they seem, not just sketchy parody. After reading 300, Miller’s 1998 account of the Spartans at Thermopylae, I don’t have any doubt: Miller means it. His aesthetic is fascist.

Continue reading "Frank Miller's Hot Gates"...»

Silent Growth

It seems like if I could just work on my own projects, everything would be just fine, but every time I sit down to work on my stuff, something afflicts me: paper cuts, my roommate editing an Ennio Morricone track for voicemail, new deadlines, the lack of clean underwear, other people’s problems, mysterious bruises that must be investigated, the temptation of movie marathons, the endless affliction of kitties (sitting on my work, fighting with each other, pukeaggeddon), recurring infections. Today, it’s viruses growing within. In short, I feel sick. Jhonen Vasquez sick.

Continue reading "Silent Growth"...»

Winter’s Gone

Sometimes you find something just in time for it to die and the best you can offer is a good death. Once my roommate found a pigeon with a broken neck and brought it home. It spent a night in our bathtub before we took it to wildlife rescue. They called us a couple hours later to say they had to put it down. It’s one of those unpleasant adult life lessons that I think people believe comics are supposed to distract us from. The problem is that often by the time I find something I like, it’s done

Continue reading "Winter's Gone"...»

13 Ways of Looking at a Bat

“Among twenty empty warehouses,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the Batman.”
—sorta Wallace Stevens

You should know right from the start that I’m a terrible geek—not extremely geeky, but bad at being a geek. Continuity in the sense of an overarching, epic and harmonized chronology just isn’t that important to me. What I really like about comics is the possibility of seeing different versions of the same character or even the same story. To me, comics are a mythic media using shared characters and stories.

Continue reading "13 Ways of Looking at a Bat"...»

Superheros de los Muertos

It’s the time of year when a young woman’s thoughts naturally turn to skeletons and zombies, death and dying. I like bats, boneyards, snappy girls from beyond, hideous mockeries of humanity fermented in swamps, creepy happenings and bones, bones, bones.

Continue reading "Superheros de los Muertos"...»

Going Brown

There’s a saying about the debut album by the Velvet Underground, the ‘67 Warhol/Eno/Reed concoction with the peeling-banana cover: that everyone who bought the record went on to start their own band. Silly, yes, but the lesson — that you don’t need gristle-free chops or a Conservatory degree to make solid, even transcendent, music — still strikes a chord.

Continue reading "Going Brown"...»

Moving Pictures

Summers in Toronto can be apocalyptic. If it isn’t the plague of aphids infesting our air supply, it’s the flood of crap at the multiplex.

Continue reading "Moving Pictures"...»

Stickhandlers

For many of us, the first thing we learned to draw was Homo Anorexia: the Stick Figure.

A circle, a few straight lines, and there it was: a shaky but recognizable approximation of the human body. The Stick waltzed into our games (hangman), the surreptitious notes we passed around in class (“Mr. Biderman eats monkey spooge!”) and, for a select few, the artwork we developed in adulthood. Many art schools still teach their students to begin with a Stick, to pose it like a skeletal Gumby before adding the flesh and fineries.

Continue reading "Stickhandlers"...»

Reading Between the Lines

Like the singer/songwriter — a lank-haired warbler in patchouli-stained flannel — the artist/writer in comics is a very peculiar bird. Our logographer resembles a forked tongue, licking in two directions: to the left, where Staedtler crumbs and ink spills lie, and the right, to a boundless thicket of synonyms. Continue reading "Reading Between the Lines"...»

Jason Lives

“Jason,” the cartoonist’s bio begins, “was born 38 years ago in Norway. For the moment he lives in Oslo. He still doesn’t know how to drive a car.”

Continue reading "Jason Lives"...»

Getting Riel with Chester Brown

When I visited him in 2003, he was living in a posh, modern mid-rise, its lobby ablaze in polished surfaces that gleamed like gold teeth. A waxed baby grand languished near the concierge’s desk. His apartment on the 10th floor seemed an affront to the cool gloss below: homey, dishevelled, hot as an incubator. And books, everywhere, sprouting like mushrooms in a greenhouse, pullulating on shelves, in shoots that teetered at navel height like cubist stalagmites. Continue reading "Getting Riel with Chester Brown"...»

A Show of Hands

The eyes may be windows to the soul (or at least the back door to a neurosis or two) but in the pages of your favourite comic book, it’s often the hands that futz with the lock and drag you inside.

Continue reading "A Show of Hands"...»

Fame & Neil Gaiman

For Neil Gaiman’s new book Anansi Boys, his publisher took out a full-page colour ad in the New York Times. “The wait is over,” the copy crowed. “The master storyteller and New York Times best-selling author of American Gods is back.” Tucked below the columnar type was a black and white photo of Gaiman, his hair dishevelled, gazing forlornly behind a half-smile.

Continue reading "Fame & Neil Gaiman"...»

McLuhan’s Cool Comics

Most people know Marshall McLuhan for a handful of catchphrases. Slogans like “the medium is the message” still tumble from the lips of zealous freshmen, even if they’re not quite sure what it means. Yet there’s more to his legacy than a few choice sound bites and a cameo in Annie Hall.

Continue reading "McLuhan's Cool Comics"...»

Eiland in the Sky

The avant-garde is no place for a squeamish cartoonist — let alone two. They need unshakable faith in their medium, supreme confidence in their skill and it helps to be from Amsterdam, where razing the norm is a national pastime.

Continue reading "Eiland in the Sky"...»

Comic Chameleon

In February ‘04, when Jim Munroe and I were interviewed for an eye story on this website, Toronto cartoonist Marc Ngui caricatured us for the cover. He made Jim a spot-on reproduction of a video-game skin. Me, he drew in a nimble cross-hatching, a Crumb-style likeness so effective it stopped my own brother in his tracks.

Continue reading "Comic Chameleon"...»

Van Comics

I was in Vancouver a few weeks back, mostly for kicks but also to sample the local comics scene. There’s more to it than Marc Bell, whose playfully obtuse strips and illustrations get most of the attention. Nicknamed Vansterdam for its tolerance of all things herbal, Vancouver has long mined its health-conscious hippiedom for excellent cartooning.

Continue reading "Van Comics"...»

A Real Conundrum

If you’ve seen the movie Sideways, you may remember Paul Giamatti’s character discussing his imminent book deal with a certain small-press publisher named Conundrum.

“Conundrum?!” I thought between fistfuls of popcorn. “No, it can’t be.” How did Andy Brown — the mensch behind Montreal indie publisher Conundrum Press — get his peculiar brand into a major Hollywood release? Continue reading "A Real Conundrum"...»

Crumb’s Curves

“‘No matter where you point your toes while squatting, your quads are always worked the same,’ quoth this cheerful, self-confident young bodybuilder. And what an inspiring vision to the artist.”

— R. Crumb, Art & Beauty Magazine, issue two Continue reading "Crumb's Curves"...»

Supercilious Heroes

Not long ago, you’d have been escorted out with a stifled laugh had you come to the Toronto Reference Library looking for comic books. Today you’re led into a hushed chamber, softly lit, where comics are spread lasciviously in glass cases and their artists’ original drawings are hung on the walls like rare insects.

Continue reading "Supercilious Heroes"...»

The Semantics of Sound

“What does an eraser sound like?” The question was floated at a comic jam not long ago by a cartoonist who’d been slipped a panel to complete. It showed an artist rubbing himself out. Sidestepping the picture’s metaphor, the cartoonist instead was racking himself for a sound effect to amplify the action. The other cartoonists sat at tables throughout the room, their noses burrowed in unfinished pages. “I know!” someone at the back shouted. “Squinch!” The cartoonist nodded. “Squinch. Perfect. Thanks.”

Continue reading "The Semantics of Sound"...»

X-Treme Measures

Some readers may flinch at the very scent of a superhero comicbook. Decades of flat artwork, turgid prose and hypertrophied subplots have frightened off all but a handful of masochists from the world of capes and glutes.

It’s a trend Marvel Comics means to change.

Continue reading "X-Treme Measures"...»

Another Shot at Immortality

It’s Enki Bilal’s first visit to Toronto, and he’s looking a little weary. It’s been a full day of interviews promoting a new film he’s written and directed, an FX-bloated fantasy called The Immortal. Now here he sits, pressed against a wall of books on The Beguiling’s crowded first floor. Solemn fans, some draped in the neo-punk raiment of Bilal’s most famous comics, shuffle toward him, clutching their hard-bound albums and waiting reverently for him to inscribe them. Continue reading "Another Shot at Immortality"...»

Eye-cons

“A good salesperson has to be a psychologist,” Mel Rapp says, sitting at the back of his College Street optical shop, legs crossed alertly, riding a tangent in his distant, foggy voice. “I use all my experiences to try to inform the attitudes and feelings — the psychology — behind the frames people wear.”

Continue reading "Eye-cons"...»

In the Shadow of Maus

Art Spiegelman has a lot to live up to. He founded Raw magazine in the early 1980s, an anthology of independent comics assembled well before the masses cottoned on to the concept. Through it, he brought sunlight to some of the medium’s best practitioners, Dan Clowes and Charles Burns among them. He’s also a cartoonist, a formal innovator with a restless streak. His stint at The Topps Company spawned the Wacky Packages sticker series (and the Garbage Pail Kids on its heels).

Then there’s Maus. The story of his intrepid father’s survival of the Holocaust outgrew its origins in Raw to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel. It officially inflamed the GN revolution currently weaning new readers off their anti-comics prejudice, and put Spiegelman — and alt comics — on a pedestal. Continue reading "In the Shadow of Maus"...»

Some Nerve

Adrian Tomine in one word? Clean. His unofficial uniform is pressed khakis and an oxford shirt, hair fastidiously parted, black-framed glasses polished to a glow. Clean, too, is his top-selling comic series, Optic Nerve. Not that he doesn’t curse; his comic is full of four-letter invectives and frank sex-talk. But filtered by the machine-washed colour palette, the careful rulering, the pinpoint line, it’s more like incidental punctuation spilling from his cast of beautiful young alt-beatniks.
Continue reading "Some Nerve"...»

Trans Action

To the converted, the guest list at this weekend’s Canadian National Comic Book Expo is stupendous. The star attraction: the famously ovular Patrick Stewart — though the Star Trek skipper only slightly outshines the comics brethren sidling in his corona, like Asiophile David Mack and Marvel Ed-in-Chief Joe Quesada.

Among these glimmering bulbs, however, will be one whose life resembles the fantasies that earn them their keep. Continue reading "Trans Action"...»

Return of the Trigan Empire

If you’re duly devoted to the search, you may find a copy buried in your library’s delete bin, under shaggy tomes on potato slicing or the history of the Cleveland Browns. At least it’ll be easy to spot: even with its black hardcover peeling at the spine, the book is a thrilling object. On its cover, a pale blue spaceship sails through the cosmos, while the comic’s title smoulders just below:The Trigan Empire. It opens on a stunning watercolour panorama, a white-bearded man instructing two blonde warriors on a hillside overlooking a vast, ancient Roman city. Crouching in the bottom right corner, an afterthought, is the artist’s signature, the only reference to either artist or writer in the entire book, as though the work had simply willed itself into being. “Don Lawrence,” it says.

Continue reading "Return of the Trigan Empire"...»

The Object Is

From the earliest issues of his oversized comic book, Acme Novelty Library, Chris Ware’s work has smouldered with a love for the object. Each new volume betrays his fetish further, is printed on thicker stock in more opulent colours and is bound by hard covers impossibly dense with eye-quaking detail. His books are tactile articles to be coddled and venerated. With the current issue of McSweeney’s, which Ware edits, his obsession reaches another apex.

McSweeney’s is the New York imprint, founded by one-time cartoonist Dave Eggers, that has become the knowing voice of young, urban sophisticates. In the publisher’s tradition of exposing nascent literary movements, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13 (US$23) is an all-comix issue, though in place of McS’s standard irreverence is an awe of the comics form that borders on the unseemly.

Continue reading "The Object Is"...»

Rapid Progress

Take a moment to pore over a panel in Tony Millionaire’s stylish comicMaakies. Ignore, for now, the charming antiquities — the florid prose and oppressive minutiae, the eyes empty of pupils — and pay close attention to the line itself. See how Drinky Crow’s bottle of hooch is sculpted with stiff strokes, a thick, languorous line for the shape and a jittery, thin one for the shadow. And how the whole drawing practically reeks of some codger’s smoking jacket, a pipey aroma rolled in from the 19th century. That, in full bloom, is the signature scent of a single pen: the rapidograph.
Continue reading "Rapid Progress"...»

Comicon Uncovered

The Comicon’s back in town, a pilgrimage comicdom’s most devoted undertake each year to the steaming barrens of the Exhibition grounds, to kvetch and cavort with the rabble and ogle the overpriced relics. Last year’s event shivered gamely in the middle of November, which makes the inevitable lineup, snaking around the Queen Elizabeth Building before the doors swing open, more tolerable this time. Of course, there’ll be lineups inside the QEB too; hordes waiting rigidly for the tag-team attraction of Dave Sim — mercurial creator of the lately completed aardvark opus Cerebus (see Books page 52) — and proto-cartoonist (and yarn spinner) 87-year-old Will Eisner.
Continue reading "Comicon Uncovered"...»

Johnny on the Spot

A few weeks ago, Guelph cartoonist Seth was giving a scripted talk on the art of comics to a worshipful crowd at the Rivoli. He accompanied himself with slides projected onto a screen behind him, ringing a bell between each slide like a performance-art concierge. Once, he rang the bell and up slid the apple-red cover of Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix — a profoundly crass (and profoundly hilarious) series by one of comicdom’s greatest slingers of smut. Beside Ryan’s typical excretions — a detective story called “Sherlock McRape,” another about aliens whose words for ice cream and its toppings are heinous epithets — this particular issue (No. 6) included a scalding parody of Seth and fellow anachronist Jason Little, trying to “out old-timey” each other in increasingly bizarre acts of desperation. Seth admitted that his publisher, which also publishes Ryan, had sent him a copy, but that he’d been too afraid to read it.
Continue reading "Johnny on the Spot"...»

School of Toons

Sheldon Cohen is in his element. It’s half an hour after the last bell at St. Joseph’s Elementary School in Montreal has sent the kids home to eat Pizza Pops in front of the tube. But two dozen of them are sticking around, cramming the school’s slipshod art room and watching Sheldon like kittens watching a can opener.

Continue reading "School of Toons"...»

Good Grief

The following Q&A first appeared, in condensed form, in my column The Panelist for Toronto’s Eye Weekly. Here’s a special, extended version of the conversation.

Collecting every Peanuts strip Charles Schulz ever drew, The Complete Peanuts will take a whopping 25 volumes and more than 12 years to complete. With the first installment (1950-1952) due in stores in May, its designer — Guelph cartoonist Seth — reflects on the gang’s legacy, and the grief at its core.

Continue reading "Good Grief"...»

Off the Wall

The atmosphere is unmistakable. The scratchy scrivening of a dozen people hunched over drawing boards. The acrid fumes of Staedtler nibs rubbed raw, of wet ink, sweat and concentration. A comic jam is in progress.

Continue reading "Off the Wall"...»

Straight to Helvetia

Swiss cheese. Swiss watch. Swiss bank account. Swiss army knife. Swiss comics.

No less than any of these venerable archetypes, comics from Helvetia are the purple elite, pulsing beacons for cartoonists to navigate by. With its nekkid liberalism and Franco-German effulgence, Switzerland should by rights have a trail of fine comics leading to its doors. And it does; one that’s traceable, in fact, to the artform’s very beginnings. Continue reading "Straight to Helvetia"...»