Comics/Political Cartoons

Stop paying attention by Lucy Knisley

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

From the Land of big numbers by Simon Hunt

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

Kosher ghost by Sandy Pais

comics_sandy_pais_big

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

Jeffanox by Emily Sinks

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

Stone by Feras Kahagani

comics_feras_big1

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

Afternoon Flood by Lili Carre’

Comment on This!

April 24th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

A Graphic Response to Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of no Towers

By Russell Gottwaldt

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons · News · School

Michael Bonesteel is teaching a new course at SAIC devoted to the history of the comic book medium called “Comic Book: Golden Age to Graphic Novel.” After nearly a lifetime of being a closet aficionado of comic book art, I guess it’s only appropriate that I would now decide to “come out” at the School of the Art Institute. There is a strong second generation Chicago Imagist (Brown, Nutt, Paschke, Wirsum, etc.) tradition at SAIC of using the art of comics as a source and inspiration. Beyond the local tie-in, there are a number of other reasons why comic book art has now become more academically “acceptable.” Like photography in the first half, and Outsider Art in the latter half of the 20th century, the so-called “low” art form of the comic book is the latest popular culture expression to be given the kind of long overdue respect that it deserves.

Telling the comic story. At first, I thought the most straightforward way to teach the history of the comic book would be to approach the material chronologically. But going about it that way has some distinct drawbacks, the main one being that students in the predominant age group of 19 to 24 would be forced to spend weeks, perhaps months, on historic material before getting to the contemporary comics they may be more interested in. A better approach, to my way of thinking, is to divide the course up thematically and trace the chronology of the subject within each theme. That way, an entire theme can be explored each week, from its earliest antecedents to the latest manifestation.

For example, pictorial parody and satire have supplied a necessary restorative to cultural conformity from William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1755) up through Mad and the Underground comics with artists like Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Bill Griffith (Zippy) and Kim Deitch (The Boulevard of Broken Dreams ) still going strong. The funny animal genre extends from Herriman’s early 20th century Krazy Kat strips through Carl Bark’s Walt Disney menagerie to Tony Millionaire’s 21st century Sock Monkey. The superhero era began in 1938 with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation of Superman, soon followed by Bill Parker’s Captain Marvel, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Captain America and Bob Kane’s Batman. Superheroes went into decline in the 1950s, but were revived in the ’60s with Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, X-Men and Hulk, as well as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Horror comics have also had a long and creepy career, beginning in 1947 with the publication of Eerie Comics, up through the EC and Warren titles to the present with Charles Burns’ recently completed Black Hole saga. The presence of females in comic books has been a marginal yet constant one, from the romance and “Good Girl” comics primarily drawn by men to the work of contemporary feminist artists such as Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Debbie Dreschler, Aline Kominsky and Heather MacAdams. More recently, there has been a huge growth in specialized genres like autobiographical comics (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken , etc.).

A “Mad” love affair
I’ve loved comic books since I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s. Along with children’s book illustrations, comics were the first art I was introduced to. I read the late Golden Age hand-me-downs I traded for with other kids: old western and war comics, Classics Illustrated (usually the science fiction and horror titles), Little Lulu (which I loved), and Casper the Friendly Ghost. I never got into the superhero stuff. Mostly I collected the post-Code horror/sci-fi titles like Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish and House of Mystery .

The publication that ultimately changed my life was
Mad magazine. Through it, I discovered the paperback reprints of earlier EC Mad comic book parodies of TV shows and movies. In the very first Mad magazine I bought in 1958 was a comic strip called “Eccchh, Teen Age Son of Thing,” a Wally Wood parody of the reruns of the typically creaky and cheesy televised horror flick from the 1930s or ’40s. The subject of old horror movies updated to include cool subjects like rock’n'roll greasers appealed perfectly to me as I transitioned from adolescence to teenager. I forget about this until 40 years later, when I spotted a vintage copy of that 1958 issue of Mad magazine at a comics convention. I happily shelled out 60 bucks for the periodical that had initially cost me 25 cents.

I abandoned comics entirely during my high school and undergraduate college years. But while in grad school in 1970, I discovered Robert Crumb and the San Francisco Underground comics–along with other things psychedelic. A few years later, I came across the magazine-format Bronze Age Warren Publications of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella and became reacquainted with the latest incarnation of horror comics, but I was now old enough to feel a little embarrassed about it, so, again, abandoned the field.
In 1980, Art Spiegelman and his wife, Fran?oise Mouly, created Raw and began to revitalize the Underground/alternative comics genre for a new generation. In the mid-’80s, I saw some of Russ Cochrane’s oversize reproductions of such infamous Golden Age EC titles as Tales from the Crypt, Shock Suspense Stories, Crime Suspense Stories, Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science-Fantasy. I was hooked once again by a bygone era that had ended before I learned to read. It was in the pages of those EC reprints that I discovered previous work by Wally Wood, the orchestrator of my adolescent artistic epiphany, plus other EC greats such as Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels and others.

It’s a book!
The history of “sequential art” has evolved since at least the 18th century with the illustrations of William Hogarth, James Gillray and George Cruickshank, up through the creation of the newspaper comic strip in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay and George Herriman. Originally, the newspaper comic strip was actually aimed at both adults and children, much in the same way that the Alan Menken/Tim Rice series of Walt Disney animated cartoons (The Little Mermaid; Beauty and the Beast; Aladdin) were targeted toward both kids and their parents. However, the increasing variety of comic book subjects eventually produced work primarily directed either toward youngsters on the one hand, or adults on the other.

The actual birth of the comic book in 1929 was comprised of reprints of newspaper funnies, but soon publishers began soliciting original material for the new medium as it blossomed into what is referred to today as the Golden Age of comic book art from 1938 to 1949. Much of this work, marked by the first coming of superheroes and other adventure stories, was directed at children and teens. But there was a brief, magnificent period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s in which the comic book rose to a rich and glorious maturity that it never quite regained. During the pre-Code years before 1955, EC produced perhaps the greatest art and most controversial stories in the history of the medium. Favored with comic art masters such as Wally Wood and Harvey Kurtzman, EC publishers William Gaines and Al Feldstein issued such infamous titles as Tales from the Crypt, Crime Suspense Stories, Weird Science and their penultimate achievement: Mad . Because kids were also looking at this adult material that often pictured graphic violence and sexually titillating images, the Comic Book Code of 1955 put an abrupt and unfortunate end to this era. Adolescents and teens took back the comic book in late ’50s and early ’60s with the rise of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics superheroes.

Comics grow up
The comic book has grown up. Again. At various times throughout the history of comics, the medium has tried to appeal to adults with more or less success.
The most recent attempt occurred in 1987 and 1992 with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, two-volume graphic novel, Maus –an unprecedented interpretation of the Holocaust through the use of cartoon animal characters. Overnight and almost single-handedly, Maus changed the course of contemporary comic book history. I say almost single-handedly because Spiegelman could not have done it without standing on the shoulders of such renowned predecessors as comic artists like Will Eisner and Robert Crumb, to name just two. Both Eisner and Crumb took comic book art to new levels of sophistication. In fact, Crumb’s Zap Comix introduced the Underground comic book phenomenon in the late ’60s in a manner not unlike the way Spiegelman’s and Mouly’s avant-garde Raw comic publications brought attention to the growing movement of “alternative” comic book artists in the ’80s.

Over the past 25 years, that movement has produced some remarkably new and original voices in comic book art: Dan Clowes, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Joe Sacco, SAIC graduate Chris Ware, as well as the aforementioned Barry, Burns, Doucet, Dreschler and Seth, among others. Many of Spiegelman’s contemporaries were working independently at the time of Maus’s first appearance in Raw , but they might never have achieved the wider recognition they enjoy today without being bathed in the reflected light of Maus’s subsequent achievement. Regardless, alternative comics’ latest creators are producing intelligent stories populated by believable people.

Why comics? Why now?
In the dawning years of the new millennium, we seem to be in the midst of a comic book revival. Last summer in The New York Times Magazine, Charles McGrath wrote: “The heyday of Dickens and Tennyson…was the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list. Someday the novel, too, will go into decline — if it hasn’t already–and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won’t happen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be. It might be comic books. Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be–an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal–and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. Comics are also enjoying a renaissance and a newfound respectability right now. In fact, the fastest-growing section in your local bookstore these days is apt to be the one devoted to comics and so-called graphic novels.”

I’m not so sure about the comic book replacing the novel. I think film already did that in the 20th century. Maybe the comic book will replace film. Or perhaps animated film based on comic books will replace conventional cinema based upon novels. In any case, if the medium of comics can one day exert as much influence on contemporary Western art as manga and anime–the equivalents, respectively, of comics and animated film–do today in Japan, we may be well on our way to realizing Mr. McGrath’s prediction.

Michael Bonesteel is an Instructor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism
< Table of Contents
March 2005

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons · School

New Class for Comics

By Michael Bonesteel

For example, pictorial parody and satire have supplied a necessary restorative to cultural conformity from William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1755) up through Mad and the Underground comics with artists like Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Bill Griffith (Zippy) and Kim Deitch (The Boulevard of Broken Dreams ) still going strong. The funny animal genre extends from Herriman’s early 20th century Krazy Kat strips through Carl Bark’s Walt Disney menagerie to Tony Millionaire’s 21st century Sock Monkey. The superhero era began in 1938 with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation of Superman, soon followed by Bill Parker’s Captain Marvel, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Captain America and Bob Kane’s Batman. Superheroes went into decline in the 1950s, but were revived in the ’60s with Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, X-Men and Hulk, as well as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Horror comics have also had a long and creepy career, beginning in 1947 with the publication of Eerie Comics, up through the EC and Warren titles to the present with Charles Burns’ recently completed Black Hole saga. The presence of females in comic books has been a marginal yet constant one, from the romance and “Good Girl” comics primarily drawn by men to the work of contemporary feminist artists such as Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Debbie Dreschler, Aline Kominsky and Heather MacAdams. More recently, there has been a huge growth in specialized genres like autobiographical comics (Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Seth’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken , etc.).

A “Mad” love affair
I’ve loved comic books since I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s. Along with children’s book illustrations, comics were the first art I was introduced to. I read the late Golden Age hand-me-downs I traded for with other kids: old western and war comics, Classics Illustrated (usually the science fiction and horror titles), Little Lulu (which I loved), and Casper the Friendly Ghost. I never got into the superhero stuff. Mostly I collected the post-Code horror/sci-fi titles like Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish and House of Mystery .

The publication that ultimately changed my life was Mad magazine. Through it, I discovered the paperback reprints of earlier EC Mad comic book parodies of TV shows and movies. In the very first Mad magazine I bought in 1958 was a comic strip called “Eccchh, Teen Age Son of Thing,” a Wally Wood parody of the reruns of the typically creaky and cheesy televised horror flick from the 1930s or ’40s. The subject of old horror movies updated to include cool subjects like rock’n'roll greasers appealed perfectly to me as I transitioned from adolescence to teenager. I forget about this until 40 years later, when I spotted a vintage copy of that 1958 issue of Mad magazine at a comics convention. I happily shelled out 60 bucks for the periodical that had initially cost me 25 cents.

I abandoned comics entirely during my high school and undergraduate college years. But while in grad school in 1970, I discovered Robert Crumb and the San Francisco Underground comics–along with other things psychedelic. A few years later, I came across the magazine-format Bronze Age Warren Publications of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella and became reacquainted with the latest incarnation of horror comics, but I was now old enough to feel a little embarrassed about it, so, again, abandoned the field.
In 1980, Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, created Raw and began to revitalize the Underground/alternative comics genre for a new generation. In the mid-’80s, I saw some of Russ Cochrane’s oversize reproductions of such infamous Golden Age EC titles as Tales from the Crypt, Shock Suspense Stories, Crime Suspense Stories, Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science-Fantasy. I was hooked once again by a bygone era that had ended before I learned to read. It was in the pages of those EC reprints that I discovered previous work by Wally Wood, the orchestrator of my adolescent artistic epiphany, plus other EC greats such as Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels and others.

It’s a book!
The history of “sequential art” has evolved since at least the 18th century with the illustrations of William Hogarth, James Gillray and George Cruickshank, up through the creation of the newspaper comic strip in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay and George Herriman. Originally, the newspaper comic strip was actually aimed at both adults and children, much in the same way that the Alan Menken/Tim Rice series of Walt Disney animated cartoons (The Little Mermaid; Beauty and the Beast; Aladdin) were targeted toward both kids and their parents. However, the increasing variety of comic book subjects eventually produced work primarily directed either toward youngsters on the one hand, or adults on the other.

The actual birth of the comic book in 1929 was comprised of reprints of newspaper funnies, but soon publishers began soliciting original material for the new medium as it blossomed into what is referred to today as the Golden Age of comic book art from 1938 to 1949. Much of this work, marked by the first coming of superheroes and other adventure stories, was directed at children and teens. But there was a brief, magnificent period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s in which the comic book rose to a rich and glorious maturity that it never quite regained. During the pre-Code years before 1955, EC produced perhaps the greatest art and most controversial stories in the history of the medium. Favored with comic art masters such as Wally Wood and Harvey Kurtzman, EC publishers William Gaines and Al Feldstein issued such infamous titles as Tales from the Crypt, Crime Suspense Stories, Weird Science and their penultimate achievement: Mad . Because kids were also looking at this adult material that often pictured graphic violence and sexually titillating images, the Comic Book Code of 1955 put an abrupt and unfortunate end to this era. Adolescents and teens took back the comic book in late ’50s and early ’60s with the rise of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics superheroes.

Comics grow up
The comic book has grown up. Again. At various times throughout the history of comics, the medium has tried to appeal to adults with more or less success.
The most recent attempt occurred in 1987 and 1992 with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, two-volume graphic novel, Maus –an unprecedented interpretation of the Holocaust through the use of cartoon animal characters. Overnight and almost single-handedly, Maus changed the course of contemporary comic book history. I say almost single-handedly because Spiegelman could not have done it without standing on the shoulders of such renowned predecessors as comic artists like Will Eisner and Robert Crumb, to name just two. Both Eisner and Crumb took comic book art to new levels of sophistication. In fact, Crumb’s Zap Comix introduced the Underground comic book phenomenon in the late ’60s in a manner not unlike the way Spiegelman’s and Mouly’s avant-garde Raw comic publications brought attention to the growing movement of “alternative” comic book artists in the ’80s.

Over the past 25 years, that movement has produced some remarkably new and original voices in comic book art: Dan Clowes, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Joe Sacco, SAIC graduate Chris Ware, as well as the aforementioned Barry, Burns, Doucet, Dreschler and Seth, among others. Many of Spiegelman’s contemporaries were working independently at the time of Maus’s first appearance in Raw, but they might never have achieved the wider recognition they enjoy today without being bathed in the reflected light of Maus’s subsequent achievement. Regardless, alternative comics’ latest creators are producing intelligent stories populated by believable people.

Why comics? Why now?
In the dawning years of the new millennium, we seem to be in the midst of a comic book revival. Last summer in The New York Times Magazine, Charles McGrath wrote: “The heyday of Dickens and Tennyson…was the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list. Someday the novel, too, will go into decline — if it hasn’t already–and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won’t happen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be. It might be comic books. Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be–an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal–and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. Comics are also enjoying a renaissance and a newfound respectability right now. In fact, the fastest-growing section in your local bookstore these days is apt to be the one devoted to comics and so-called graphic novels.”

Michael Bonesteel is an Instructor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism

March 2005

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons · Interviews

Comic Artist Jim Woodring

By David McDaniel

Editor’s note: Even a comic art dummie can appreciate the surrealistic splendor of Jim Woodring’s art. Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Woodring describes his childhood as “made interesting by frequent hallucinations, apparitions, disembodied voices and other psychological malfunctions.” After stints as a garbage man and animator, Woodring capitalized on his childhood “malfunctions” in his “illustrated autojournal,” JIM, eventually published by Fantagraphic Books. Woodring’s work has been featured in publications as diverse as Kenyon Review, World Art Magazine, and Zoetrope journals to the well known Frank comics.

To learn more about Jim Woodring and his art, visit www.jimwoodring.com — mag

David: Do you like Ernst Haeckel? I’ve got a book of his that is mostly sea life, but it reminds me a lot of the kind of shapes you use in your comics and the kind of ornamentation you use.

Jim:I have the big Ernst Haeckel book and turn to it frequently for inspiration and solace. I borrow motifs from it all the time; sometimes transmuted, sometimes directly. I just finished a big picture called “The Holy Land” in which I directly copied a shape from Haeckel. It has always looked to me like a natural warning sign: danger, it seems to say, or keep out, or approach at own risk. That’s how I used it in the drawing. It’s a plaque on the side of a pedestal of an appalling artwork.

David: Other influences? Both in and out of comic world.

Jim: Oh, too many to mention. Almost everything.

David : I would like to hear a bit about your process. Especially about how you come up with your stories for Frank. Is it an as-you-go-along thing or do you plan them out? And what is your objective with there being no text, nor any fancy image-text concepts?

Jim:I write the stories out in prose form, one line at a time, checking each one as soon as it is written to see if it has that peculiar un-definable resonance that tells me that there is something hidden behind the ideas expressed therein. If that invisible glow is there, I continue. If not, I cross it out. I continue until thestory ends; then I draw it up and, if I’m lucky, discover the meaning of the story after it is completed. When the meaning becomes clear before it is drawn, the process of finishing it can be very tedious. Fancy image-text concepts? My, yes. The Frank stories are intended to be beyond specific time, place and culture. That’s why there are no spoken words.

David: What is your opinion on the future of the comic world? There has been a strong urge to take comic artists more seriously. I was thinking of the McSweeney’s all-comic issue and of gallery shows like the Comics on the Verge show. With comics being both drawings and writing (stories at least) and all, do you see comics moving more towards a gallery or mainstream publishing setting?

Jim: Comics as the world has known them are disappearing. “Graphic novels” are where the money and prestige are. Comics that retain the lighthearted goofiness that endeared them to sub-literates and intellectuals alike are being starved out, while the big self-consciously literary works are being lauded in the mainstream press. New cartoonists will, I think, strive to produce comics that are Serious, Serious Art About People, Not Cats. This means more gallery shows and more comic artists making the jump to the fine arts world. Comics will lose their distinction as they become just one more malleable form to be picked up, mangled and abandoned by restless creators searching for the right combination of surface effects appropriated from genuine innovators to forge into something they can call their own. In other words, it’s the beginning of the end.

David: And lastly, what advice would you have for aspiring comic artists (creatively, work ethic, publishing, etc.)?

Jim:Ten years ago I could have answered that question, but everything has changed since then and is continuing to change so rapidly that even if I could give cogent, informed advice about how to break into comics today, it would be hopelessly obsolete by the time the aspiring practitioner was able to act on it. Online comics, print on demand, books replacing pamphlets, cheap color printing, the recent acceptance of graphic novels by the NY Times Book Review… all these things have changed the field to something I barely recognize.

But if a cartoonist is serious about achieving something great, the time-honored advice to artists applies: keep your entanglements to a minimum, embrace the struggle, avoid greasy food, and work like hell.

March 2005

Illustrations by Jim Woodring

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Alumni · Comics/Political Cartoons

SAIC Comic Alumni: Scott Marshall, Ethan Persoff and Jessica Abel

In Their Own Words

Jessica Abel

Did you read comics as a kid?

From my earliest moments, I remember being interested in drawn images to the near-exclusion of photographic ones. When I was a little kid, my best friend Kristin’s family had a small boat that they kept at a marina in Michigan. I used to go up there with them occasionally to spend the weekend. The four-hour car ride was nearly interminable to my seven-year-old self, and, to keep us happy, Kristin’s mom would buy us each a three-pack of comics at a gas station near the beginning of the trip. They used to sell comics this way at gas stations: sealed-in-a-plastic-bag three packs of kids’ comics, like Richie Rich and Casper. Anyway, the only problem with this cushy arrangement is that I read them all in an hour or so, and then had to spend the rest of the trip wishing we had more and whining “are we there yet?!”

At the time, I thought it was pretty rebellious and “punk” to be a girl and yet reading comics. My interest grew and a gift from my dad of some Ms. Tree comics (a black-and-white mystery comic from First Comics) scripted by one of his clients helped me start to seek out more black-and-white titles and whatever seemed interesting. I was pretty lost in a comics store at that point, though, and didn’t have much of a clue what I liked. I also didn’t know anyone else who read comics, so didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Soon after I arrived at college in 1987, I stumbled across Love and Rockets #21 in a local record/comic store, and it made a huge impression on me. That comic was a new beginning.

Are your comics feminist?

I am an ardent and declared feminist, not afraid of the label, but I simply allow my view of the world to inform my writing, not dictate it. My comics are implicitly feminist (because I am), but not explicitly so (because that’s not what I’m interested in writing about). Why aren’t men asked this question?!

Is the comics world sexist? I can only speak for the “alternative” comics end of things, but my experience has been: implicitly perhaps, but not explicitly so. No one has ever told me that they aren’t interested in publishing/carrying/selling/buying my work because I’m female, but, then again, there are quite a few female comics artists I know or know of, and I don’t see their work represented as well as they ought to be, but, then again, I have no idea. Maybe there just aren’t enough of us. We do get asked stupid questions like this one, though. As to the “mainstream” comics world, yes, to my knowledge it is sexist, though it seems to be so mostly on the readership side, not the editorial side, but I don’t have that much to do with it, so don’t quote me on that.

Do you feel comics are a “fine art”?

Of course [comics are a "fine art"], but it’s a lot more akin to film and literature than to painting and sculpture, thus probably won’t be on the walls of museums much, but it doesn’t really belong there. You can’t really “get” comics without reading them, and that’s not an activity that is easier and more pleasant by squinting at a wall. Anyone who [thinks] that putting words and pictures together somehow makes them less expressive and less interesting, is really not thinking clearly. The suggestion that this might be the case is not only insulting, it’s nonsensical. I’ve heard it all my life, and every time I do, it sounds more reactionary and sillier.

Ethan Persoff

How did you get started in comics?

Born in 1974 and raised in Denver, I moved to Chicago when I was 18 to attend SAIC, then to Austin two or three years after graduating, where I still currently live and make work.

In middle school, I made my own comics and xeroxed them and sold them (to great thrill!) at a Mile High Comics franchise shop in a small strip mall by my parent’s house. I remember the dumbest one, called “AFTERDEATH,” which was a story about nuclear war survivors, which I drew during math class with my friend Tim, pretty much populating the whole thing with robots, explosions and a struggling inability to draw women’s breasts in any lifelike proportions. We sold 46 copies, they’re out there somewhere–haunting me.

What are you working on now?

My website, www.ep.tc , has been my longest creative project. I started it in 1993. The Internet was SO SLOW back then. As the web got quicker, I started adding stuff to it, including midi file versions of sound work, essays, reviews, etc. It became a zine to me, and the closest thing to a representation of myself to others. I just continued adding to it, and taking away from it, as time went on. The most notable item I have there right now is a completely unknown, incredibly elaborate comic from 1957 on the birth of Atomic Energy. I also have a comic posted on heroin addiction in New York, from 1966. Both were previously unheard of, I’m proud to say.

Can you tell us about your current projects?

As for stories I have on my website: TEDDY is about an unfixable love affair between two young people, based in Chicago ten years ago, told simultaneously with four comic characters of mine named Teddy, Girl, Clod and Clown. Actually, many people tell me this particular comic is very difficult to describe, so you should just read it yourself. I think it’s one of the best things I’ll ever make, though. It works for me like a photograph does for other people. I’m happy to say a lot of people seem to take value from it, too, which matters a lot to me. A DOG AND HIS ELEPHANT is more of an actual drama, scripted out like a play, self-contained in a single room where the camera angle on the characters never changes. Kind of like having a webcamera on someone and them not knowing it. It’s very difficult reading at points, dealing with an abusive trapped relationship.

Do you think comics are a “fine art”?

I think it’s an outdated myth that comics aren’t already considered a major and highly powerful means of art-making. It’s certainly capable of ripping film in half as the most powerful pop-cultural means of telling a story. As a means of self-expression, few acts of labor and design can beat drawing the damn things, too.

The larger issue isn’t the art world embracing comics as an art form, so much as the comics community embracing art as a concept. There’s a lot of antagonism, particularly with the readership. I’m much more familiar with comics-people having outright judgemental and hostile feelings towards the art world and viewing most art as bullshit than the art world viewing comics as marginal. I’m much more on the side of art here, and I feel a lot of comics makers are creative prudes, and their audience is a trainwreck, too. That’s changing, though, fortunately. There are a lot of comics right now that are absolute pieces of art, and are very much made my art-minded people, making the work because they need to and for no other reason.

Comics are cheap to make. They’re also extremely fun to do. The only gamble is they take a long time to get good at. But you’re given complete creative control of them and you work to make a reproduction. The art object is the reproduction, so people can own your work at their home and not have to visit somewhere (a gallery or a theatre) to experience and enjoy it. Also, the language and history of the medium is fascinating and rich–as old as vaudeville. Many people have noted that the only three American art forms are Jazz, Film and Comics.

Scott Marshall

How were you involved with the School of the Art Institute?

Born in Chicago, I spent my first 20 years in Skokie, Illinois. Ever since earliest childhood I always knew I wanted to devote my life to visual art and music. In 1992, I had an interview with an admissions counselor at SAIC. I discovered I had 60+ credits that would still be accepted from my laughable first attempt at college. I applied to SAIC, and to my amazement, I was accepted and given a small scholarship. The funny thing about SAIC was that I had gone there for representational painting, yet was pretty snubbed by the painting department which looked at me like an alien or a low-grade moron for wanting to paint narratively. I spent two years at “F [Newsmagazine],” the second year I was the Art Director of the paper.

What are you working on now?

I thank my old “F” comrade and friend Ethan Persoff for getting me involved in the recent Fantagraphics book about the evil scum in the Bush Junta. For these poltical cartoons, all I have to do is watch or read the news and get instantly outraged at the murderous lies, deceit, and fascist tactics of the Bush war criminals. [I'm working on] a new political cartoon and animated video project with Ethan Persoff, some new paintings, and a forthcoming short film with my regular collaborator, choreographer Scott Rink, for which I provided the soundscape and audio collage (a 20-minute dance narrative based on an early Ray Bradbury short story).

What advice do you have for prospective young comic artists?

If you want to be as unique as possible, do that one thing and do it ad nauseum. Then, just keep sending it around and promoting it whenever and wherever possible. Self-publish if you have to. For instance, I love Chris Ware’s stuff, and he’s a really nice guy too. He was a couple of years ahead of me at SAIC. One day in a printmaking class at SAIC, I was rummaging around in the scraps of small litho stones, and found a small stone buried in the back that still had a four-panel Ware cartoon drawn onto the surface. At that moment, I realized why he’s so darn good–because that’s pretty much all he’s ever done!

On the other hand, if a student wants to break into big-budget animation or publications, then they would do well to emulate an existing commercial style, do it to perfection, and then try to get an internship at a targeted studio.

What else are you interested in?

I’m not happy unless I am working on one of my creative projects (drawings, paintings, music, audio collage, etc.) Otherwise, I’m a bit of a recluse (much to my wife’s annoyance) and keep in touch with all my far-flung friends with lots of e-mail. I also am a big fan of cinema and watch a lot of movies.

Do you think comics are “fine art”?

If there is one lesson that was learned (often the hard way) from the paradigm-shift between Modernism and Postmodernism it is that A_N_Y_T_H_I_N_G can be considered “fine” art. And I’m not talking about numbskull poseurs like Damien Hirst or Jean-Michel Basquiat (the former a true postmodern charlatan, the latter a drug-addled Nouvelle Retard). When I think of the comic form raised to High Art, with a capital “A,” I think of Peter Saul or Oyvind Fahlstrom or late Phillip Guston. And then why stop there? You can also include Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Sue Coe, and Ralph Steadman. The list goes on and on. Hell, you can say that even some anonymous Roman-era wall-fresco cartoons or 18th-century Hogarth illustrations, or, certainly, Goya’s “Los Caprichos” should be included as well. Short answer: yes; as it always has been, so shall it always be.

March 2005

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Comics/Political Cartoons

Let’s call it a day (in comics) by Russell Gottwaldt & Lili Carré

centerspread_title

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Arts & Culture · Comics/Political Cartoons

Comic Art?

How seriously can you take comics?

A student poll

Born from the back pages of newspapers, comics as we know them today were designed to be a novelty to supplement ‘real’ articles. Since then, the ‘comic book’ and the ‘graphic novel’ have taken shape, and many comic artists claim that this form of pictorial literature deserve serious attention. Are comics an art form worthy of either the Pulitzer Prize or a place at the Whitney Biennial?

Here are some of your responses …..

If the audience that you are trying to reach with your art is an audience that will never step foot into a gallery, than the comic book is an ideal format–more ideal than what is on display at the Whitney.

–Angee Lennard

Of course they are important, you squirming pile of Art Krummian flesh! They will take over the world, you filthy, filthy, humans!

–Chris Sullivan, FVNM

Funny to come home to this question after buying comics at Graham Crackers today. Comics are very important. Without a doubt it is an art form, one that unites words and illustrations thus bringing life to the page they are printed on. Why original comic art doesn’t dawn the halls of the Whitney I don’t know (but I’m sure there is some stashed in the basement). For me it’s always been the art. The covers, the panels, but the story was lame, so what, didn’t matter because there’s the one panel that has the guy getting his head blown off. You just can’t find that in your mother’s Whitney.
A lot of independent press today is brilliantly done, and I think this is part of what’s bringing comics to rise. Independent comics have been around, but I think they have built up quite an audience over the years. The stories and ideas seem to be focused on more than the art, so in some cases you get some amazing-looking art work, in other cases it’s crap, but so what, doesn’t matter because there’s that one panel where you discover what’s bugging the squiggly line. The artist is usually behind the whole project, the writing, design, and illustrations. This way the reader is connected to the artist, and how could that not be interesting? How could it not be art?
The same usually goes for newspaper comics, but due to how short they are, they become more disposable. OK, here’s your gag, or fraction of a story for today, tune in tomorrow. Take a look at the recently published collectives of the Peanuts strips. When you read them all in a row you pick up on what Charles Schulz had in mind that week, or the entire month. You connect with him and his emotions (mainly through Charley Brown), and you figure out what he experienced in life. I’d like to think he didn’t think much of what he was doing, or how many people were reading, then half way through his career looked back, realized he did a few hundred thousand strips, said a quick “My god!” sat for a minute, shrugged, then started on the next hundred thousand. Comics are important, and it doesn’t take the Whitney to make it art, it takes places like Graham Crackers, newspapers, and the readers to do that job.

–Matt Taylor

I have always considered comics a serious form of art making and expression. I think that the comic book has had difficulty establishing itself as valid and important form of art (or literature). It is interesting because at the same time, this stigma has been key in the evolution of the comic book and has actually been pivotal in re-defining of the modern graphic novel.

Comic book artwork, story line, character development, as well as the audience of this genre has become significantly much more sophisticated over the past fifteen years. Labels such as Dark Horse, IDW, Vertigo, as well as many other independent comic publishers specialize in heavy, content-driven subject matter and powerful, highly expressive imagery. Even in your mainstream lines such as DC or Marvel, it is not uncommon for super-powered archetypes in capes and spandex to be addressing such topics as terrorism, drug-abuse, or racism, and that is usually just the first five pages.

If you just look around, our society is up to its eyeballs in comic book iconography and influenced media from both the East and West. I think that comics are an art form unto themselves, and placing such items into the context of a gallery might kill the intention. Comics are intimate devices that trigger genuine reaction about the human condition. They provide a unique and strangely tactile arena of metaphor to project oneself, as well as examine the collective notions and desires that we all share. I selfishly hope that those rumors about interdisciplinary studies in sequential art become a reality at SAIC.

I strongly recommend the following: 1.) Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, 2.) Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkewiecz, 3.) Plastic Forks by Ted McKeever, and 4.) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (vol. 1 + 2) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.

–Scott Ramon, Director of Undergraduate Admissions

Of course comics are important. From Winsor McCay to Stan Lee to Garth Ennis, those who write and produce comics have done more than their part to shape pop culture, and that’s no easy task. The effort that goes into writing, drawing and publishing a comic is incredible. In my opinion, the comic (both strip and book) are highly underrated and overlooked forms of art. It may be a lot of work standing in front of an easel mixing just the right shade of green, but writing, drawing, inking, coloring and laying out 24 pages is a herculean effort in comparison.

–Brian Bolles

Art by Shellie Fiocca

March 2005

Comment on This!

March 25th, 2005

Arts & Culture · Comics/Political Cartoons · Review

Holy Shit I Made A Comic Book

Phenomenon Comics Editor in Cheif, Jonathan Helland

By Emily Anderson

When my friend Jonathan Helland was seventeen, he used to pour Zippo fluid into his cupped palm, spark it, and use his flaming hand to light his cigarettes. So I wasn’t surprised when he dropped out of college, moved from Minneapolis to New York, and started a comic book publishing company with his best friend Ben Wood. Three years and $30,000 later, Phenomenon Comics is self-distributing the first 5,000 copies of their new title, Blackpool. Somewhere in between, Jonathan wound up in Decorah, Iowa, a town where there’s no comic book store at all. A lot of stories start this way: a kid with a dream moves to the big city, works hard, and succeeds, big time. Or fails, more quietly. It’s hard not to think in terms of success versus failure. Sometimes, the more interesting story falls somewhere in between–maybe even somewhere in Iowa.

I interviewed Jonathan about his business, and his love–writing. He paraphrased his idol, Ray Bradbury, to describe his creative process. Writing is his business, but it’s also about “falling in love and staying in love.” Somehow this process, at its best, manages to evade simple ideas of success and failure. When he left Minnesota in August of 2002, Jonathan was spending $50 a week reading comics like Hellblazer, Preacher and The Invisibles as well as old issues of Sandman. He was also writing a serialized Victorian thriller for his college newspaper. “I really, really liked doing serialized fiction,” he says, “and when I dropped out of college, I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do. So I called Ben and he said, ‘Why don’t you move out to New York with me? We can start a comic book publishing company.”

So Jonathan moved into Ben’s apartment in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. They ignored a gaping hole in the kitchen floor and set to work. Or tried to. Both Jonathan and Ben are writers, so their main problems initially were finding artists to draw their comics and interesting investors in a nonexistent product in order to pay the artists. In this scenario, chickens quickly became eggs. Jonathan and Ben scoured the city simultaneously seeking artists and investors, and quickly discovered the difficulty in finding one without the other. They hired a message service to answer their calls while they worked their day jobs, and took the subway around New York, taping flyers at every art school and comic book store in the city. They received about 60 submissions of artwork, though only “one of them was any good….it’s more than being able to draw, [comic artists] need to have narrative story-telling skills… need to know a lot about sequential art, which a lot of people don’t.”

When they found their artist, they couldn’t pay him at a discounted rate of $50 a page, let alone the going rate of $100 a page. While writing a business plan can be a pain in the ass–a “colossal waste of time” even, it’s easier to write one than to find someone willing to stake $200,000 to start up a comic book company. Jonathan and Ben dreamed of having someone to help finance and manage the business aspects of their company, so they could focus on their creative work.

They decided to offer a share in their company (originally called Inwood Comics after their Manhattan neighborhood) to a business manager, who could handle the financial aspects of the company and find them investors. Thanks to the economic downturn, Jonathan and Ben were able to interview a series of MBAs and “professional types” for this position. They held the interviews at a sandwich shop, because they couldn’t afford an office and didn’t want to take interviewees to their squalid apartment, where both the sink and ceiling were beginning to drip.

At first, they thought they were in luck. They hired a man who had been laid off from Marvel Comics and claimed to know people in a position to invest in a new comic book company. “But he didn’t do anything, and so we fired him,” Jonathan said. How strange to be twenty-three, broke, scruffy, and fire an MBA. “We were pretty passive aggressive about it…we just stopped scheduling meetings with him and stopped telling him jobs to do…eventually he called us and said he’d gotten [another] job.” So Jonathan and Ben had to tackle the business tasks by themselves. Jonathan learned Excel to produce spreadsheets and convinced his dad to invest $25,000 in the company. Not as much as the business plan called for, but it was a start. They divided their job responsibilities: Jonathan became President, and Ben Editor-in-Chief, and started work on their first title, State Secrets, a 1930s spy comic pitting a secret international organization against Nazi occultists. Handling the writing, editing, and managerial concerns for their company took a lot of time, which took its toll on two overworked friends sharing a tiny apartment. Beers and burgers became business meetings. Living with a best friend became “living with [a] boss.” It didn’t take too many internal disputes for Jonathan and Ben to switch jobs one day while waiting for the subway: “[Ben] just had to call me out because I was an awful president…I’m not an initiator; I’m not a self-starter, I’m not a planner, I’m not organized–he’s all of those things. So, yeah… now I’m the Editor-in-Chief. It’s weird to not want to get a phone call from your best friend because it means you probably have a bunch of work to do.”

Writing became not just something Jonathan did when he “felt like it, or had a really good idea,” but something he did to pay back his investor. “You can’t say, ‘OK, I’m going to put this one off for later until I feel like working on it again.’ Or, ‘I guess this one isn’t so good after all when you’ve invested not only a bunch of your money and a shitload of your father’s money and a year and half of your time into it, it’s something you need to finish…so that makes it feel more like a job. And nobody likes a job. They say ‘do what you love,’ but if you do what you love as a job, it’s not as fun as if you do what you love because it’s how you like spending time. There was a large chunk of time when we just forgot why we were doing what we were doing…we weren’t thinking about, ‘Wow, we’ve created art and we’re putting it out into the world,’ or on a more basic level, ‘I have this story to tell and so I’m working on telling it.’”

In the fall of 2003, Jonathan and Ben were concentrating more on just getting by than on “making art.” Problems with their negligent landlord were escalating, as the holes in the floor and ceiling were growing. Out of spite at their neighborhood, they changed their name from Inwood Comics to Phenomenon Comics and juggled day jobs, writing and administrative work, and appointments with tenants’ rights lawyers. Additionally, they were preparing to meet an important deadline they’d set for themselves: they were going to submit their work to Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. New comic companies submit mock-ups of their work for review to Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. (DCD), which “pretty much has a monopoly” on the comics industry. Once DCD approves a comic book, they offer it to retailers all over the country via quarterly catalogs. DCD then orders from comic book companies based on retailer interest. Comic book companies do not receive commissions from sales, but, since they’re paid in advance from DCD, they don’t have to eat the printing costs of copies that don’t sell. The downside is that DCD makes it hard for companies to distribute their own work, and their standards determine what comic books appear on store shelves: “Almost everybody goes through DCD. We didn’t even think about going through anyone else.”

Before Jonathan and Ben could finish work on State Secrets, their legal issues with their landlord were finally resolved: “We were evicted–or rather, when we won our settlement against [the landlord] we had to move as part of the agreement.” Simultaneously, Jonathan was fired from his office job, for sneaking into the office to use their printers for Phenomenon Comics business. Oops. No money and no place to go in New York City is no fun. It was a dark time. Jonathan and Ben decided to cultivate some Plan Bs. Jonathan decided to leave New York and go back to finish school. Ben decided to stay in New York. Jonathan’s move to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, can be interpreted not as a defeat–the failed bumpkin leaves the Big Apple and goes back to the farm–but as a strategic retreat: after investing nearly $25,000 to pay artist and administrative costs for the first three issues of State Secrets, there was no going back. There was no farm. There was nothing to do but soldier on, telecommuting from Iowa, hoping against hope that DCD would approve State Secrets and that it would sell–maybe even enough to pay back the investors and get them out of this rough, disheartening business once and for all.

It was a relief when they finished the full mock-up of the first issue of State Secrets and submitted it to DCD. A relief that they’d met their deadline and that it was now out of their hands. If their comic were accepted, State Secrets would be distributed nationally within three months. All Jonathan and Ben had to do was wait. Waiting is rarely portrayed as a heroic quality. It’s not part of the kid-with-a-dream story, it’s not included in the movie-montage of success, but it’s a very brave thing to do: to put a year’s effort out there and hope that it meets someone else’s standards, hope that no one will be able to tell you that you’ve wasted your time.

Unfortunately, DCD did not approve State Secrets for national distribution. They felt the artwork was “amateurish.” Amateurish. Ouch. After all the work of finding the best artist they could, of getting Jonathan’s dad to invest money, paying the artists, the colorer, the letterer, rejection came as a terrible blow. And, if it weren’t for the fact of having some serious financial stakes on the table, it would’ve been easy for Phenomenon Comics to disband, to try something else. And, in their own ways, Jonathan and Ben already were trying other things: Ben got a role in a Coke commercial, Jonathan started a physical anthropology major in college. But they didn’t give up. They couldn’t. They found a new artist, Terrell Bobbett, and started working on a new title, Blackpool , a horror comic “in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, set in a fictional college town in Vermont and starring a punk-rock bartender and a freshman girl who has a questionable gift of experiencing people’s deaths in her dreams as they’re happening. They sort of always end up over their heads as the people in town conspire to harness the thing that lives in Blackpool lake.”

Even though Jonathan and Ben must have sometimes felt that they, like their Blackpool characters, had ended up over their heads–or were even being conspired against by landlords, bosses, and comic distributors. They kept their chins up and divided their energies and resources between working on Blackpool and promoting themselves, so that they could have a better shot at being chosen for DCD distribution. They printed business cards, flyers, and posters, and flew themselves and their artists to San Diego to attend ComiCon, the largest comics convention in the world. At ComiCon, they made sure to “dress the part” of a start-up comics company in a kind of good-cop, bad-cop routine. Ben tidied himself up and wore a suit to project a professional image; Jonathan didn’t shave and wore a Che Guevara T-shirt to project a punk-rock, DIY attitude. They attracted some notice, too–or, at least, their artist Terrell did. Terrell’s work was immediately recognized by representatives from Marvel Comics, who offered him a job on the spot.

This fall, Phenomenon Comics will print and independently distribute 5,000 comics of the first issue of Blackpool , several months in advance of DCD’s distribution deadline. Things seem to be looking up, despite Jonathan’s understandable anxieties: “I’m constantly terrified that we’re never going to accomplish anything and that I just dug a giant hole in my father’s bank account that I’ll be years paying off. And theoretically, if Blackpool gets rejected [from DCD], I’m in a lot of trouble, but there’s a very real possibility that I’ll have a comic book in stores by the end of the month. I’m excited now to see [my] script come back as a colored, lettered comic book, because at no point in the process up till then does it look like a comic book. Once you have those word bubbles in and it’s suddenly telling a story, it’s like, oh, so this is what I’ve been making for the past few months! Holy shit, I made a comic book!”

If you’re still thinking about starting a comic book company, Jonathan has some words of advice: find an artist who will work for free for the same reasons that you’re doing it. Or be an artist. That’d be a great plan. Be able to draw. And have one title until that title gets published. Don’t try and think too big. Don’t try and plan too far ahead. Make a comic book. Make a full comic book before you even think about starting a business. The business will come when you have a product to sell.