Category: Comic books & strips

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What It Is: 12/7/09

What I’m reading: I finished Up in the Air last week, and enjoyed the heck out of it. I’m still sifting through my impressions of the book as a time capsule of the end of the ’90’s. It was published in 2001, just a few months before 9/11. While that event’s obviously (to me) the defining moment of our decade, the book is also informed by views of data, privacy, and Invisible Webs that seem antiquated only 8 years later. I think I’m going to re-read this one in the next weeks and try to write a little more about it.

During a conversation we had on Sunday, Samuel R. Delany mentioned to me that the introduction to his essay collection Longer Views contains a neat discussion about how Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond connects to the rest of M.’s essays, so I gave that one a read. (For those of you who haven’t been following this blog religiously and for years, the Apology is a 180-page piece in the midst of Montaigne’s generaly much shorter essays, and is so dissimilar in theme and content to the others that I was left completely flummoxed by it. Here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of my ramblings on that one.) The writer of the introduction, Ken James, seems to think that M. changed his mind over that mammoth essay, but fro what I recall, the Apology was a commission, and it felt more like M. was stuck having to defend something he didn’t particularly believe. Why don’t you go give the Apology for Raymond Sebond a read and get back to me with your thoughts?

What I’m listening to: Dave Rawlings Machine’s A Friend of a Friend, a lot.

What I’m watching: Pootie Tang, which was far funnier than I expected. Still terrible, but pretty funny.

What I’m drinking: Desert Juniper & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Trying to fit together in the one-dog crate again. I had a Sunday appt. (cleaning a small section of Chip Delany’s apartment) and Amy had to work all weekend, so we had to delay Otis’ debut on the Sunday morning Wawayanda park greyhound hike for another week. Grr.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special.

What I’m happy about: Getting to see some old pals this weekend.

What I’m sad about: Missing the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this weekend, but my visa’s not up to date, so there’s no way I could’ve made it to Brooklyn.

What I’m worried about: Contracting hantavirus from trying to clean Delany’s apartment.

What I’m pondering: What book I’ll pick up next.

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What It Is: 11/30/09

What I’m reading: I took last week off so’s I could keep our new dog, Otis B. Driftwood, from getting into trouble. To that end, I spent a lot of time on the loveseat, trying to give affection to both doggies (I didn’t want Rufus to feel like he’s being ignored/replaced). So I had some reading time on my hands.

I read Stephen King’s On Writing this week. One of my author-acquaintances asked me, “Why would you read a book about writing by an author whose writing you’ve never read?” I’d heard the memoir section was good and, even if I have no other experience with his prose, I was curious as to what he’d offer about the practice of writing. So it was illuminating, although I don’t know when I’ll get around to reading his fiction.

I continued to slog through Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball, which has some good points but is poorly written in a way that the author would likely contend is its strength. He’d be wrong about that; huge swathes of it are just extended columns with overwritten jokes. He once described writing the book out of sequence and eventually figuring out the overall structure for it. After 250 pages, I can see the incoherence but not to emergent order.

And I read Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy. This is a collection of comics by Lemire about a small farm-town in western Ontario, and several families whose lives have intertwined over generations. While his artwork is expressionist, the stories themselves aren’t filled with any formal trickery, outside of extensive use of flashback in the second book (about a guy with Alzheimer’s, so hey). I enjoyed the collection overall. It’s no George Sprott, which continues to subtly blow my mind, but I thought it was a good, solid collection by a young cartoonist.

And I started Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air, after reading the sample chapter on my Kindle. I know I don’t really travel too much for work, but an awful lot of the narrator’s Airworld observations resonated with me. Apparently, the movie is All That. I’m kinda jarred by how so many of the airport scenes are pre-9/11.

What I’m listening to: Not a lot. I didn’t drive much this week, and the dogs & I mainly hung out in the living room, away from my iTunes liberry.

What I’m watching: Chandni Chowk to China, a Bollywood movie about a poor potato-slicer who gets mistaken as the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese warrior and has to go save a small village. I was aghast when our Netflix DVD showed up and the movie turned out to be 2 hours and 30 minutes long (!). But it’s actually pretty darn entertaining (we split it up into two viewings), even if the Indian lead looked like John Turturro’s handsomer brother. We also watched The Third Man, which I’d never seen before. Loved it, and returned the next day to Ron Rosenbaum’s essay on Kim Philby.

And there was Unforgiven, some NFL, and Role Models again, because I’m a mark for Paul Rudd and The State guys.

What I’m drinking: Desert Juniper gin and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Ru is just taking things as they come. He and Otis are getting along fine in the house. Otis, however, is still pretty hyper when we go for walks. He doesn’t bark, but he pulls pretty powerfully when he gets his prey-drive on.

Where I’m going: Nowhere. (Well, maybe a dinner or two in NYC next weekend.)

What I’m happy about: Having a nice Thanksgiving meal at the home of my neighbors across the street.

What I’m sad about: Being too on-the-verge-of-sick to make it to my 20-year reunion in Philadelphia over the weekend. And discovering that our water heater was leaking and needs replacing, an hour before I was supposed to get together with old friends in NYC on Sunday.

What I’m worried about: Not a lot. I mean, I’m a little burned out on my low-level anxiety of trying to train Otis to walk without going after everything he perceives as prey (squirrels, chipmunks, other dogs, deer, crows, etc.). I guess the draining aspect of this is that I have to exert power in a way that I can’t just “explain” to the dog. It’s tough on me, Having to be the Big Boss and pull him along when he starts going into his statue mode. So I guess there’s a worrisome aspect to that: my discomfort at the exercise of force. Boy, this has been one long What It Is post, huh?

What I’m pondering: The eschatological significance of my father’s decision to shave his beard, which he’s been sporting since before I was born.

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What It Is: 10/26/09

What I’m reading: When The Shooting Stops . . . The Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, by Ralph Rosenblum. It’s a book about the art of film editing, with a ton of awesome anecdotes. I also bought a bunch of books off my Amazon wish list last week: Jamilti & Other Stories (Rutu Modan), Mister i (Lewis Trondheim), Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome (Lewis Trondheim), Collected Essex County (Jeff Lemire), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and Your Movie Sucks (Roger Ebert).

What I’m listening to: Boxer (The National), Dear Science (TV on the Radio), Chimera (Delerium), Oblivion with Bells (Underworld), In Our Nature (Jose Gonzalez) and Bill Simmons’ two-part podcast with Chuck Klosterman. I had a bunch of driving to do last week.

What I’m watching: Bored To Death, South Park, not a lot else. Oh, and Glee because, hey, Jane Lynch.

What I’m drinking: Silverado cabernet sauvignon 2005, during my Peter Luger dindin on Thursday. First time I drank in 2+ weeks.

What Rufus is up to: A fun trip to the Ridgewood dog park on Thursday, but no Sunday hike, on account of parental laziness. We got in at 1 a.m. from dinner in NYC on Saturday night; sue us.

Where I’m going: Maybe to Chillerfest next Saturday, if only so Amy can help Patrick Stewart pay for his divorce settlement.

What I’m happy about: The Years Have Pants, Eddie Campbell’s massive anthology of his Alec comics, comes out this week!

What I’m sad about: I discovered a few days ago that Robert Caro gave a lecture on biogrphy in NYC last month. Two upsides:

  1. I found there’s an audio recording of his speech online
  2. On Saturday, walking through Columbus Circle, Amy & I passed a shoe repair shop that included Mr. Caro on its customer “wall of fame” in the window:

IMG_1620

What I’m worried about: I won’t have a meal as amazing as last Saturday’s dinner at Marea for a long time. And, yes, this description of the ricci by the NYTimes reviewer was apt:

The very first item on the menu at Marea is ricci, a piece of warm toast slathered with sea urchin roe, blanketed in a thin sheet of lardo, and dotted with sea salt. It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body. Not bad at $14 a throw — and there are two on each plate.

What I’m pondering: What it’ll take me for me to get on the wall of fame at a shoe repair store.

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Licensing Expo of the Weird!

Back in 1996, I was the associate editor of a magazine called Juvenile Merchandising.

(It was double-duty; I was also associate editor of Auto Laundry News, the car wash industry trade magazine. People always laugh when I tell them that. “There’s a trade magazine for the car wash industry?” they ask, and I tell them, “Actually, there were three trade magazines for the car wash industry.” See, the immutable law of trade magazines is that once a journal manages to make a dime in any industry, at least two more publishers will try to chisel in. Stick around for more valuable lessons from the working world.)

That June, one of my assignments at the magazine was to cover the Licensing Expo in New York City. The exhibitors at the expo were license-holders, that is, the companies that owned the rights to various characters and properties, like Godzilla and Winnie-the-Pooh. The attendees were people who wanted to license characters for pens, videogames, bags, and, well, a bazillion other pieces of merchandise.

I had interviews set up with a number of major exhibitors like Sony and Paramount, mainly to talk about how their various characters were being used for different kid’s products, but also to try to get some of their neat giveaways, like Simpsons T-shirts from the Fox pavilion. Those companies had giant exhibit-space to show off their properties, but I also made time to wander among the smaller exhibitors and their lesser-known characters.

On the afternoon of my first day at the show, I was walking down one aisle of minor exhibitors when I saw a small booth displaying Pee-wee Herman dolls and toys, as well as some hyper-grotesque cartoons of Jimbo Comics on the counter. I was floored to discover that one of my favorite cartoonists had a stand at the expo, and I blurted out, “Holy shit! Gary Panter!”

The gentleman behind the counter started with fright. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“No, but I love your comics!” I told him. Gary smiled, relieved. I was 25, and I don’t think I’d ever met a published cartoonist. Plenty of campus comics geeks, sure, and That Guy Who Tried To Draw Like Frank Frazetta, but no one who had made an actual career out of comics.

We talked. About comics. For hours. I cleared out of his booth whenever attendees stopped by. Gary had designed the sets for Pee-Wee Herman’s old stage act, as well as the set of the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse TV show, but I don’t remember what he was trying to license. I guess since he was Brooklyn-based and the exhibit space didn’t cost too much, he gave it a shot.

I was elated both that a great cartoonist would make the time to shoot the breeze with me, and that a great cartoonist was so personable and easy-going. He was the first guy who really impressed upon me the economics of making comics while raising a family. Now that I’m middle-aged and have seen most of my idols take time to do better-paying non-comics work, I think back on that part of our conversation quite a bit.

At one point, I noted how few “mainstream” comics I was reading. “Really,” I said, “the only Marvel books I bought this decade were those monster and horror reprints they did a couple of years ago.”

“The what now?” he asked, a little surprised.

I told him that around 1994, Marvel had reprinted a bunch of old monster comics from the ’50’s in a pair of 4-issue series called Curse of the Weird and Monster Menace. “They’re great! All these old strips by Kirby and Ditko and Heath and even some Wolverton.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! I’ll bring ’em in for you tomorrow, if you want to see!”

And I did (along with my copy of Jimbo, so he could draw a sketch for me). He looked over the comics and asked, “Can I hold onto these?”

“Sure!”

He thanked me, then said, “One thing: you may not get them back for a little while. I, um, have a pathological thing about the post office.”

“. . . Sure . . .”

And then we went back to another 3-hour conversation about comics, Matt Groening, married life, Brooklyn, and whatever else a 25-year-old indie comics geek and a 46-year-old punk-rock cartooning icon have to talk about.

Months and months passed, and I forgot about the comics. Then, one January day, I opened my mailbox and blurted out, “Holy shit! It’s Gary Panter’s envelope!”

(okay, maybe not)

He had decorated just about every inch of the envelope with pastiches of panels from the comics. His style was more suited for the Kirby drawings, but he threw in some good Ditko ones, too. I guess it was a fun, throwaway thing for him, but of course I’ve held onto it for a dozen years.

So that’s my story about meeting Gary Panter. I met him again in 2005 at the Comic-Con in San Diego, but I don’t think he remembered me. I should’ve mentioned the monster comics.

For more conversations and other encounters with cartoonists, writers and artists, visit The Virtual Memories Show podcast!

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Classic Comics Criticism: Langridge Barrier

In honor of the trade paperback release of the most entertaining all-ages comic I’ve read in forever, The Muppet Show: Meet the Muppets (as well as the 2nd ish of The Muppet Show: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson), this week’s Classic Comics Criticism celebrates Muppets writer/artist Roger Langridge!

This is a review I’m kinda proud of. As I mentioned in a few weeks back, I actually got a message from one of the Langridges (Roger, as I recall) about how happy they were to find out that someone actually “got it”. I think this led to my receiving a bunch of Rogers’ mini-comics (like this one) later on, which I’m sure survived my last move in 2003.

If you’re trying to get kids into comics and you were a fan of The Muppet Show, you’ll do just fine by starting ’em off with Roger’s Muppet book. Zoot Suite? Wait till they’re a little older.

* * *

Zoot! Suite • Roger and Andrew Langridge • Fantagraphics Books

Is there something perverse about waiting for the conclusion of a story based on Zeno’s Paradox? If so, then label me a pervert. The story in question, “The Journey Halfway,” from the Langridge Brothers’ Zoot!, began as a relatively light jab at the Kafkaesque workings of the DMV. Over the course of six issues, as Zoot! grew increasingly bizarre (and, one presumes, unsaleable), the story evolved into a traipse through Beckett’s theater, then launched into a near-death experience culled out of Finnegans Wake. And then Zoot! was canceled.

I held out a minor hope that there would be a wrap-up of some kind, a final installment of the Langridge Bros.’ criminally underappreciated comic. That idle optimism faded just around the time the brothers’ work began appearing in various comics from DC. I wrote off Zoot! and “The Journey Halfway” as another casualty of the comics marketplace, buried in the graveyard with Puma Blues and Big Numbers.

Coming across Zoot! Suite, then, was like Hanukkah in March for me. This 80-page collection includes several short humor strips from Zoot! and a previously unpublished coda of sorts, but its main attraction is the “conclusion” to “The Journey Halfway.” After four long years, would Mr. Bodkin at last find out what had become of his impounded and possibly demolished car? Would the meaning of his unnamed friend’s Joycean trip to the afterlife be made clear/ Would the actor playing the lead in Waiting for Godot ever show up at the theater?

Ultimately, of course, no questions are answered. Though Bodkin and his friend seek a shortcut home (through a graveyard, naturally), they never get more than halfway. Despite this pre-set limitation — Bodkin’s friend describes the paradox on the second page of the story — Andrew Langridge (the writer) manages to make this odd story work remarkably well by playing off the absurdity of the premise. The brothers’ work in Art D’Ecco achieved the same trick, beginning with absurdist humor and somehow bringing on authentic, if existential, human feeling.

This is a difficult feat, not only given the logical premises of the story, but also because of Roger Langridge’s strange artwork. It would seem that his cartoonish, at times Muppet-like figures would be suited for the collection’s gag strips but not its 50-page serial. Somehow, Roger manages a full range of expression with these seemingly limited figures, while managing to play up their physical appearance for several sight-gags. Further, with its mixture of tones and ross-hatchings, Zoot! Suite‘s artwork gives its ludicrous figures weight, bringing them into a more arresting visual context.

Besides concluding “The Journey Halfway,” Zoot! Suite also has another previously unpublished work by the Langridges. “I Dreamt I Was In Heaven,” which closes out the book, is a double treat, albeit a befuddling one. Visually, it ties together each of the strange (and, one presumes, unsaleable) cover illustrations for Zoot!. A “roving eye” carries the reader from one absurd setting to the next. For someone who bought the whole run off the shelf, it’s a nice, asbsurdist form of nostalgia, but it would be completely baffling for the (ha-ha) new reader who decides to give this strange comic a shot. Forget I wrote that.

The written story doesn’t pertain in the slightest to the visual one. Instead, it relates the narrator’s dream about an “entrance exam” to get into heaven. The prose is quite graceful and the overall story, in its meandering way, is a delight. In all, the collection showcases bizarre humor (“A Dictionary of Oubliettes” is one of the strangest joke ideas in history) and apparent existential dread via cartooning that would make E.C. Segar proud. While several other strips from Zoot! should have been included (“The Answer,” and “Short Story,” to name a pair), Zoot! Suite comprises a fine survey of a fantastically inventive comic that no one ever read.

Now if they could just get to work wrapping up “The Derek Seals Story” . . .

–Gil Roth, originally published in The Comics Journal #204, May, 1998

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What It Is: 8/24/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick and The Jew of New York.

What I’m listening to: The Lexicon of Love, by ABC, and Give Up, by The Postal Service.

What I’m watching: Inglourious Basterds at a 1:30 p.m. matinee on opening day. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it really wasn’t about the Basterds and the baseball-bat-to-the-head marketing of it. I don’t really get the spelling thing, but “Variations on Interrogations” probably wasn’t commercial enough. And, yeah, Christoph Waltz’s performance is fantastic.

What I’m drinking: Cascade Mountain Gin & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting his cousins in New England! (pictures to come)

Where I’m going: Up to Wappingers Falls next weekend for my friends’ 10th anniversary bash. Rufus will have to deal with another longish car ride (as in, over an hour).

What I’m happy about: Having dinner with an old pal from grad school, getting to see my cousins in CT, and seeing an old college friend, all in the span of 65 (or so) hours.

What I’m sad about: That the position at which I lie on my loveseat in order to rub Rufus’ belly and still read from my laptop is wreaking havoc on my neck/shoulders.

What I’m worried about: That realism isn’t realism.

What I’m pondering: What it means that the only book I’m interested in from either of these previews (1, 2) of next season’s releases is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.