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Tag: fantagraphics

Love and Rockets: The Story Behind the Great American Comic

A documentary on the Hernandez Brother’s groundbreaking alternative comic Love & Rockets will launch the new season of KCET’s art and culture series Artbound, streaming on the PBS app October 5, 2022.

Love & Rockets turns 40 this year, and if you have $400 USD burning a hole in your pocket, Fantagraphics are collecting together bound facsimiles of the original fifty issues in a special eight-volume boxed set. (Although I would settle for a slightly more affordable Love and Rockets #24 t-shirt myself!)

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Grown Men Reading Nancy

Writing for the New York Review Books, Dash Shaw reviews How To Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden: 

Today, comics are studied in colleges and reviewed in prominent magazines, but they are often discussed either as vessels for urgent, personal stories or as objects filled with beautiful, unusual graphics. They are rarely discussed or reviewed for their “cartooning,” the particular panel-to-panel magic, the arrangement of elements that mysteriously combines reading and looking, and distinguishes why a comic like Nancy is masterful and others are not. Beautiful cartooning affects a comic the way a well-chosen word, arriving at the right time in a sentence, makes for good writing, or the way a room composed with the right combination of things in the exact right places is good interior design.

I don’t think it’s any secret that I love Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. It is, as the review points out, a beautifully constructed comic strip. But it is more than that. It’s also genuinely warm, funny, and relatable. I see a bit of my kids in Nancy and Sluggo, I see a bit of myself too.

I that think Steven Heller kind of gets to it in this interview with co-author Paul Karasik: 

Nancy reminded me of someone close to me. In fact, she reminded me of me in a deeply existential way that cannot be explained properly in this brief column… In any case, whenever a collection of strips emerged, I’d scarf them up. They were gags but poignant. They were comic but deep. And Sluggo. How can you not love Sluggo? This was the world of comics where kids were the wise ones, the keepers of wisdom and truth. 

If you haven’t read any of the Nancy comic strips don’t start with How to Read Nancy (with all due respect to Karasik and Newgarden!), start with Nancy is Happy, the first volume of daily strips republished by Fantagraphics.  

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Chris Ware on George Herriman and Krazy Kat

The New York Review of Books has an essay by cartoonist Chris Ware on George Herriman the creator Krazy Kat, one of the most beautiful, poetic and inventive comic strips ever created:    

Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range  of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.

But imagine knowing something about yourself that’s considered so damning, so dire, so disgusting, that you must, at all cost, never tell anyone. Imagine leaving behind a life to which you cannot claim allegiance or affection. Imagine suddenly gaining advantages and opportunity while you see others like you, who have not followed in the footsteps of your deception, suffering. Herriman, once he was considered white, didn’t even have a way of voicing this identity. Until he started drawing Krazy Kat.

Krazy, the new biography of Herriman by Michael Tisserand that Chris Ware mentions, was also recently reviewed for New York Times Book Review by Nelson George: 

Though Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip was admired in his lifetime, it wasn’t until years after his death in 1944 that his vast influence received widespread critical respect. Herriman’s depiction of the tangled relationships among the black cat Krazy, his white mouse tormentor and sometime love interest Ignatz and the bulldog Officer Pupp, set against a desert backdrop in fictional Coconino County (taken from a real area of Arizona), inspired several generations of cartoonists. Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” Ralph Bakshi’s “Fritz the Cat” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” all owe a debt to Herriman’s draftsmanship and poetic sense.

Schulz got turned on to “Krazy Kat” right after World War II, he said, and it “did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children.” Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), whose animal characters strongly resemble Herriman’s, told a biographer, “At its best, the comic strip is an art form of such terrific wumpf! that I’d much rather spend any evening of any week rereading the beautifully insane sanities of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat than to sit myself down in some opera house to hear some smiling Irish tenor murdering Pagliacci.” The iconoclastic Robert Crumb called Herriman the “Leonardo da Vinci of comics,” while the ambitious Spiegelman argued that “Krazy Kat” “crossed all kinds of boundaries, between high and low, between vulgar and genteel.” All this alone would have made Herriman worth serious study.

But then in the early 1970s, a quarter-century after his death, a birth certificate was found stating that Herriman was born “colored” to Creole parents in that 19th-century hotbed of miscegenation, New Orleans. Clearly his work had to be re-examined. Not to question its genius, but to see how much of it dealt with hiding a huge part of himself in plain sight.

If you haven’t read any Krazy Kat, seek it out. The strange language, the small, inky art, and the repetitiousness of the strips — collected together into numerous, beautifully designed, paperbacks by Fantagraphics — can seem a little intimidating at first, but it really pays off if you stick with it. 

From “Krazy Kat,” April 16, 1922.

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The Making of Daniel Clowes

Photograph by Ian Allen
Photograph by Ian Allen

Roberto Ito profiles cartoonist Daniel Clowes, whose new graphic novel Patience is published by Fantagraphics in April, for The California Sunday Magazine, :

At the heart of Patience are questions posed within every time-travel story: If I could go back in time and change the past, would I? What would I try to fix? And how badly would I muck things up? Clowes has had a lot of opportunities to think about those questions of late. For a 2012 retrospective of his work at the Oakland Museum of California, he revisited a lifetime of rough sketches and comics. And the publication of The Complete Eightball prompted him to look at work he did more than two decades ago, back when “we were assholes,” as one artist friend recalls. “Rereading them, it feels like every little thing that’s happened to me in my life, every little thought that’s ever popped into my head, has made it into my comics,” Clowes says, laughing…

…“Even after you achieve a certain level of success, you still are that guy that was toiling in obscurity in your un-air-conditioned apartment in Chicago,” says Eric Reynolds, a longtime friend of Clowes’s and a Fantagraphics editor. In a strip Clowes did for The New Yorker in 2001, a Clowes doppelgänger identifies himself as a screenwriter at a cocktail party. “I dare not tell anyone I’m really a cartoonist,” he thinks to himself. With each new project, Clowes is still plagued by doubts. That’s why he doesn’t show anyone his work until it’s done, he says. “Half of the time I’m like, Well, this is really fun,” he says. “But the other half I’m thinking, I could always just not publish this. I make sure I just do the book before I even try to get any money for it. So I always feel like, worst-case scenario, I could publish ten copies and sell it as a limited edition to my friends.”

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Emory Liu on Design at Fantagraphics

cannon-wallace-wood-design-emory-liu

At Sequart, designer Emory Liu talks about working at Seattle comics publisher Fantagraphics:

My first start in the design world came through designing / screen printing posters, and doing album artwork for bands. I played in a bunch of bands, and starting out, we just ended up having to do a lot of the work ourselves, art included.  I also took design classes at School of Visual Concepts, eventually graduating with an Interdisciplinary Visual Arts degree from University of Washington in 2005. I feel very fortunate to be hired by Fantagraphics, as I had no previous experience designing full books, but just came from a job that heavily depended on InDesign. I think I just had enough experience to pass, and a DIY aesthetic that fit with the other designers… [It’s] interesting, because most of the time we have a ton of creative control. Editorial is usually hands off, and we’re working from scratch, keeping in mind not to overstep the comic artist themselves. A lot of the work is old work being re-released, and just the repackaging of the product with new covers can do wonders, give the book new life. At the same time we’ll get a few titles where we get very little input. Some artists demand complete control, and I’d take the role of facilitator more than designer. As fast as I’d like to get through those, they always end up taking the longest.

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We Were Not Made For This World

We-Were-Not-Made-For-This-World-poster

Directed by Colin West McDonald, We Were Not Made For This World is a short science fiction film based on the comic strip of the same name by cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier about a robot searching for his creator:

we_were_not_made

‘We Were Not Made for This World’ was first published in Project Telstar by AdHouse and later collected in Let Us Be Perfectly Clear by Fantagraphics.

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Jacob Covey: Pirates in the Heartland

pirates-in-the-heartland

Designer Jacob Covey recently posted a short essay on his personal Facebook page about his cover design for Pirates in the Heartland, the first volume of Patrick Rosenkranz’s biography of underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson. I asked Jacob if I could repost it in its entirety here, but the book’s publisher Fantagraphics had beaten me to it. While you can read the whole piece on their blog, here’s a short excerpt:

In publishing, one has to approach a cover with the information of an expert and the ignorance of a browser. In biographies, a photo of the subject is generally employed for good reason: The viewer immediately knows this is a book about a person. (Hence the trend in fiction of generally cropping off the heads of models or having them looking away — this is not about THEM.) But Wilson is recognizable only by his artwork, so a photo alone isn’t enough information. Ultimately, my solution is a kind of psychedelia but a practical one: Pirate art (a favorite theme of Wilson) overlaying a mythic portrait of young Wilson. Creation and creator in color overlays that force your eye to try to unhook one from the other.

I generally consider it a failure when cover design requires a band of color upon which to set the type. In this case, it allowed for the art to be the primary feature, to be a bit uncontrolled, while the type treatment is an anchor that harkens classic album design. This kind of visual messaging is trying to align Wilson with rebels and rockstars without making false promises. The trickiest part was simply finding Wilson art that had ANY white space so his portrait could connect with the viewer. The dual function of his artwork blowing the brains out, simultaneously, of Wilson and another of Wilson’s creation was too wonderful to pass up but I’m going to leave the symbology of such things to the viewer.

 

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Remembering Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, passed away on June 19th at the age of 56. Even though I briefly worked with the folks from Fantagraphics 5 or 6 years ago, I am sad to say that I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. I’m sure I would have learned a lot.

I recently linked to Seattle Weekly article about the future of Fantagraphics after Kim’s death, and so I also wanted to link to Robert Boyd‘s remembrances of Thompson in The Stranger:

I realize that readers might not understand why Kim Thompson was an important person—not just to me, but to art… [Fantagraphics] published Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Ivan Brunetti, Carol Tyler, and so many other great cartoonists, and are still doing it today. When you compare the publishing achievements of the underground comics generation (a brief brilliant flame) to Fantagraphics (and its peers, like Drawn & Quarterly), it’s hardly a contest. Fantagraphics is one of the greatest publishers of comics in any language of all time and one of the strongest promulgators of the art of comics in existence. And Kim Thompson was crucial to that 30-plus years of artistic success.

Sometime ago, the indefatigable Tom Spurgeon posted a long and comprehensive obituary of Thompson at The Comics Reporter that also serves as a potted history of Fantagraphics if you are interested in this particular corner of comics culture. There is a somewhat shorter obituary at The Comics Journal.


Ben Schwartz also posted about Thompson and the importance of The Comics Journal at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Kim Thompson was born in 1956 to American citizens living abroad in Denmark, and arrived here in the US in 1977. That same year, Kim joined Gary Groth to help put out The Comics Journal, begun in 1976. The Comics Journal was the first forum for nothing but discussion, criticism, and journalism about comics to rise above the level of the zine (not to discount those incredibly vital fan networks). There would be no comics section here at the Los Angeles Review of Books, or anywhere else, without The Comics Journal. They were not the only comics-oriented publication, but they were the only one with actual journalistic standards that hired writers of depth and knowledge… Critical magazines have a way of stimulating creativity. From the heated, hyper-talkative culture of the 1940s and 50s Partisan Review, a Saul Bellow emerged to embody its aesthetic. From Cahiers du Cinema and its attempt to create a new critical language for film, the French New Wave filmmakers appeared. In a similar way, from the Comics Journal intelligentsia, a literary comics… movement began.

Finally, Tom Spurgeon posted (re-posted?) this 2008 interview with Thompson, again at The Comics Reporter. It is striking how much he still believed there was to be done:

“The industry has changed far more radically, and for the better, than I ever could have imagined, in terms of the respect accorded to comics, the level of work being produced, comics’ place in the market, the whole ball of wax. (You have to bear in mind that when we started cartoonists were literally wondering whether Americans would ever be willing to read comic books that ran beyond the length of an issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four.)

The weird thing is that the idea of “graphic novels” and comics for adults has had so very little penetration into the general literate populace. Most regular people are, in my experience, still utterly stunned and confused at the very idea, New York Times Book Review reviews notwithstanding. There is a weird disconnect between the press’s enthusiastic embrace and promotion of the medium and its effect on actual “mainstream” readers… It remains an uphill battle, and if I’d known how much of an uphill battle it would continue to be, even with all of these victories, I might have become an advertising copywriter circa 1979″

He will surely be missed.

(pictured above: a portrait of Kim Thompson by Jim Blanchard; Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, and Kim Thompson by Daniel Clowes commissioned for the (as yet) unpublished Comics As Art)

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Forward, Fantagraphics!


Seattle Weekly profiles local independent publisher Fantagraphics:

Fantagraphics was founded in 1976 to launch The Comics Journal, a very opinionated annal of the trade that made Groth and Thompson high-profile critics of their industry. As both editors and writers for the Journal, the two young men had an outsize impact on a moribund business, often disrespecting their elders and picking up many enemies along the way.

Then in 1981, Fantagraphics joined the industry it so often criticized. The gadflies became insiders. How did that happen? “It was partly happenstance, partly a logical progression,” says Groth. “The Comics Journal was championing a vague but real aesthetic direction for comics, and we slowly realized we could put those theories into practice. The Hernandez brothers’ self-published Love & Rockets was a revelation because it suggested what I had envisioned, in my mind’s eye, the kind of comics I wanted to see. Little did I know that they would mature and in short order create work that was almost the embodiment of what I had hoped to see.”

(The cover is by local artist and Fantagraphics stalwart Peter Bagge of course)

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Nancy and the Messy Shelves

Who doesn’t like tidy shelves?

I do have a strange and peculiar love of Ernie Bushmiller’s ‘Nancy’ comic strips, especially when odd panels are taken out of context, but Fantagraphics are doing a great job of collecting them properly into books (designed by Jacob Covey). Two volumes — Nancy is Happy and Nancy Likes Christmas — are currently available, with surely more to come (?).

(via Nancy Is Happy)

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Hooray for Christmas

Happy holidays!

Nancy Likes Christmas has just been published by Fantagraphics.

(via the awesome Nancy is Happy).

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Midweek Miscellany

Krazy Kriticism — Sarah Boxer on George Herriman’s long-running newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat, at the LA Review of Books:

[E]ven 95 years ago the truth was as loud and clear as a pair of clapping mitten rocks rising up out of the mesa encantada: Krazy Kat is perfect and Herriman is a genius — linguistically, graphically, poetically, onomatopoetically, every which way. Confronted with such perfection, most of Herriman’s critics, once they finish reciting plot, affecting accents, and making comparisons to classics, have always thrown up their hands and said, “Behold!” But does it have to be that way? The genius label, after all, has never kept Shakespeare or Picasso scholars from finding something to say.

A Natural End — An interview with Tom Gauld at The Comics Journal:

I never draw things big. Even if something needs to be big, I’d still draw it small and scale it up. I like to draw small (my drawings are not much bigger than the finished, printed comics) as it reigns in perfectionism, and I get a bit of natural wobble and error into the drawings. One problem with digital is that you can zoom in and in forever: but with a pen, the width of the line gives a natural end.

Canaries — Nick Harkaway, author of The Blind Giant, talks about books on the digital age at The Browser:

Our environment seems to be constantly filled with moral panics. When you open the newspaper, there’s always a piece about how the digital environment is making us stupid or paranoid, but so little of it has any basis. There was a piece in The Guardian the other day about how behaviour on Facebook was linked to socially aggressive narcissism. You had to go six paragraphs into the story to find out that the link wasn’t causal. It was just as possible that Facebook was the canary in our coal mine, telling us that our society was aggressively narcissistic in general – which I don’t find terribly difficult to believe.

And finally…

Little Glories —  Sam Taylor, who translated HHhH by Laurent Binet, on the art (and perils) of translation, at the Financial Times:

There is… something else slightly troubling about the relationship between authors and translators. It can, I suppose, be reduced almost to a hierarchical relationship: the author is primary, the translator secondary. We notice when a translation is bad, but when it is good we forget that what we are reading is a trans­lation at all. However, while there is little glory in translation, and although I began doing it only for financial reasons, I wouldn’t want to give it up now – even were I able to make a living from writing novels.

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