Comics Category

Reaching the Youth -- With Comics!

I was looking through the picture books in the back of a bookstore where I sometimes work, when a woman came over with her son and slid out one I had snorted at earlier, Pete Sanders’ What Do You Know About Bullying? With Illustrated Storylines.  And she said something I knew someone would, “Oh, it’s a comic!  Isn’t that cool?

No, It's not cool.

Posthuman Throwdown: Zombies vs. Robots

Humanity has long been interested in both zombies and robots, in looking at zombies and robots, and in seeing zombies and robots fight. Writer Chris Ryall and artist Ashley Wood know these basic truths to be self-evident. So am I being pandered to with their Zombies vs. Robots hardcover, collecting the 2007 IDW miniseries with some additional origin material?

Sanctuary

It's a dream every geek, freak, dork, spazz, nerdy girl, artsy fartsy dilettante, re-enactor, socially challenged misfit and misanthrope has had: Sanctuary. A place where you're left alone. A place where embarrassing quirks, interests and personal oddities aren't just tolerated, but embraced. And many have tried to build their own sanctuaries from pillow forts to teenage rooms to basements to dorms to studios, each with its freak flag flying.

Elvis After Life

It's funny. I knew today was the anniversary of Elvis' death. I didn't realize it was the 30th anniversary of Elvis' long black limousine sliding into the beyond. A good hunk of his afterlife has been in comics. Let us take a moment of silence for the man from Tupelo.

The Tick vs. Madman vs. Me

Letting go can be hard. I was reminded of that reading The Tick's 20th Anniversary Special Edition with the first 3 issues of Mike Allred's new Madman Atomic Comics. The Tick's 20th Anniversary Special Edition reminded me how much I loved Ben Edlund's first 12 issues of The Tick and how relieved I am that Mike Allred kept Madman for himself.

Superheros on a Slant

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! brings back fond memories of the passionate works of maniacal genius I've occasionally scored at book fairs and zine shows—tracts with titles like "Thousands of Degrees Hot!" and minicomics like "Linda Saves Detroit" or "The Brain Parasites." Fletcher Hanks' comics are crazier and more inspired than I can convey.

Tired of Saving You

There's a panel in Secret Agent X-9 that fascinates me. In it, X-9 tells a woman and her father, "I'm tired of saving your lives." The panel appears in the second half of Dashiell Hammett's first Secret Agent X-9 storyline, "You're the Top!" That's right—Dashiell Hammett scripted a daily comic. Alex Raymond, whose Flash Gordon was launched the same month, drew all 7 storylines collected in Kitchen Sink Press' 1990 Secret Agent X-9. King Features Syndicate made a pretty good match with Hammett and Raymond, too bad they couldn't leave them be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Catwoman: Silicon-Injected

In 2001, Catwoman was everything I ever wanted in a comic. I admit I was a sucker for her new look. A woman's stompy black boots are her pride and Catwoman's boots were stompy, black and flat after years of thigh high Pretty Woman stilettos. Not to mention that zippers with rings, black leather, kitty ears and experimental night vision goggles are just cool, way cooler than purple latex. The art by Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart and Mike Allred was loose, expressive and playful. Ed Brubaker's writing was hardboiled, but took after Raymond Chandler's fragile and battered humanism rather than Dashiell Hammett's breezy amorality.

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.

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.

Reading Between the Lines

Jason Lives

Getting Riel with Chester Brown

A Show of Hands

Fame & Neil Gaiman

McLuhan's Cool Comics

Eiland in the Sky

Comic Chameleon

Van Comics

A Real 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?

Crumb's Curves

-- R. Crumb, Art & Beauty Magazine, issue two Continue reading...

Supercilious Heroes

The Semantics of Sound

X-Treme Measures

It's a trend Marvel Comics means to change.

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."

In the Shadow of Maus

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...

Some Nerve

Trans Action

Among these glimmering bulbs, however, will be one whose life resembles the fantasies that earn them their keep.

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.

Rapid Progress

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.

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.

Off the Wall

Straight to Helvetia

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.