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Tag: joe kubert

Published January 17, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

A great post on designer Josef Müller-Brockmann at I Love Typography:

A student from the back of the room shouted out a wish to see JMB’s business card. As JMB casually pulled the business card out of his coat pocket, there was a frenzy like fish at a pond when the morsels are tossed in. He was taken aback as we scurried around to take a peak at the card revealed; novice typographers eager to see his miniature piece of art. I still remember the card clearly. It was on light gray paper stock printed with a solitary color of cool gray ink. All content was in a singular sans serif face, all lowercase, and no punctuation to speak of other than the umlaut and hyphen in his distinguished name. No commas, no periods, no colons. All the elements on the card were restricted to the purest of necessary elements. In that small space he proved the mastery of minimalism; communication clearly achieved without the use of a period or a comma.

Thumbnails — An interview with book cover designer Isaac Tobin at the University of Chicago Magazine:

His approach to cover designs… hasn’t changed even as Kindles have sparked an ink and paper bonfire. Book covers always have had to work at reduced size, to be appealing from afar on a bookshelf or to make attractive catalog displays. “Things like color and shape,” Tobin says, “can do a lot to work from a distance or in a thumbnail.”

My 2009 interview with Isaac is here.

Tom Waits and Anton Corbijn are going to publish a limited edition book of their photographs.

And finally…

Holy Offset Press, Batman! — My favourite thing on the internet this week so far…  Marvel and DC superheroes printing comics (with art by Joe Kubert):

 

(thx Jacob!)

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Published August 15, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drawing for a Living — A 1994 interview with the late, great Joe Kubert, who died earlier this week aged 85, at The Comics Journal:

Doing comics was usually not a matter of choice, for most artists. I guess they felt the real brunt of the Depression a lot more than I did. The Depression hit in ’32 and we were slowly climbing out of it through the ’30s and into the early ’40s. It was actually World War II in ’41 that generated work and jobs. Especially when everyone else was starting to be drafted. Most working cartoonists came from extensive art backgrounds… It was a way to make some money, that’s all: pure and simple. Nobody considered it an art form. Nobody was proud of being a comic-book artist. Matter of fact, it was a couple of steps below digging ditches. Syndication was recognized success. If you could get to do a syndicated strip, my God, that was the answer. But comic books were considered for many, many years to be a shameful occupation. Most of the guys in the business, if you asked them what they did, would never admit that they were comic-book artists. “I do commercial artwork,” or “I just draw for a living.”

See also: Obituaries at TCJ, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Penis Rays and Self-Loathing — Kim O’Connor on the truth or otherwise of autobiographical cartoonists, at The Awl:

[The] one place where fact and fiction fraternize… freely is in the graphic novels section, which is located, in most bookstores, between sci-fi and fantasy in what champion of popular fiction Michael Chabon has called the genre slums. In libraries, too, most graphic novels are grouped together regardless of content, so that autobiographical and semi-autobiographical comics share the shelf with fiction that ranges from one-dimensional superhero stuff to literary stories like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. The line between fantasy and reality—and high and low culture—is blurred in a way that makes everything that exists within this milieu more rich and resonant.

And finally…

Tim Parks asks “Does Copyright Matter?” at the NYRB blog:

Officially the idea is that the writer, artist, or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish. It is perfectly possible that the quality of work of these two writers is very similar. The same book may have a quite different fate in different countries. Any notion of justice in the incomes of artists is naive.

What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control.

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