Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-in #44

Hello You Sequential Art Lovers, This week I'm focusing my all-seeing eye on the recent releases by Brooklyn's own, Picturebox Books.

Picturebox is a company run by Emmy winning designer, Dan Nadel and probably some other people. The company straddles the world of "comics publisher" and "art catalogue maker" with the greatest of ease and minimal chafing. Sometimes their books have comic book insides and art book prices but the benefit of being a critic is that you can neatly get around the "paying for it" step in the equation that leads to ownership.

Kramers Ergot 8
Edited by Sammy Harkham
Picturebox

Man, Kramers is the best. CF, Ben Jones, all that shit. So good.

Some of it gets by on attitude more than heart but for the most part it's great. It starts off with this great cover and then some 2001-looking art inside. I'm noticing that as movies look worse and worse that I'm seeing more art that tries to replicate the glow of film or the grain of VHS or the slight blur of freeze frame.

Then there's an Ian Svenonious article on camp. Then there's a new Gary Panter comic about Jimbo. Jimbo and his friends are traveling through the desolate future, when they come to a giant hellish department store and go to a shack where wish-fulfilling party balls give them snacks as they get high and watch some sort of insane mishmash movie. This is immediately followed by a beautiful comic CF did about upper-class people and perversion and stuff. Gabrielle Bell did a comic that kind of blew my mind. Frank Santoro and Dash Shaw did a comic based on To Catch A Predator that sympathizes with the predator. There are some still-life photos. Johnny Ryan did an amazing comic about astronauts in a mining colony. It ends with monsters, demonic mutation, and severe scary horror. Johnny Ryan's comic is a lot like a comic he did for VICE a while back so I called him up and it went roughly like this.

VICE: Hi Johnny, can I ask you about your new Kramers comic?
Johnny Ryan: No, I like to let me comics speak for themselves.

Was it based on the comic about the astronaut miners you did for VICE?
Yeah, that was the germ for this comic. I did that one-page comic and thought it could be expanded upon.

Are they the same characters or am I thinking about it too literally?
Yeah. It's the same elements. There are space miners and something strange happens near a hole and one of them goes to check it out.

What are you wearing? I'm just in my underwear.
That's disgusting.

Is your wife around?
Yeah, you want me to get her?

Put her on.
[Johnny pretending to be Jenny]:Hello?

What are you wearing?
Everything I own. [Johnny reverts back to his own voice] Get away from the phone! I just pushed her out of the window. And we live on the 80th floor of the LA building.

Like in Die Hard?
What's that?

It's a great movie where Ben Affleck is a New York cop who goes to visit his wife at that building but she starts using her maiden name so at the end of the movie he drops her out of the window to teach her a lesson and joins a master terrorist.
I thought this was supposed to be about my Kramers comic.

-CLICK-

Chris Cilla made a comic about a guy taking a tour bus as a cheap means to get somewhere and ends up boning the tour guide in an ancient temple. Other things are happening too. Anya Davidson did a comic called Barbarian Bitch that I think kinda looks like Moscoso. Ben Jones did a comic about men with dog heads for torsos. Sammy Harkham did a wordless comic about a husband and also a wife and infidelity and muuuuuuurder. The book ends with about half of the collected Oh, Wicked Wanda! comics reprinted on glossy paper. That took me by surprise pretty hard and is the kind of thing Art Spiegelman used to do in Raw when he'd reprint old Boody Rogers or Fletcher Hanks comics.

I also interviewed Sammy Harkham, the editor. He's a talented dick.

VICE: Is there any sort of overarching theme to this issue or is it just good comics?
Sammy Harkham:If a theme emerged it was probably "Fuck everyone."

The biggest curveball in Kramers Ergot 8 is probably reprinting 40 pages’ worth of the out-of-print Oh, Wicked Wanda! collection. I've wanted that book for a while. Can you explain what Wicked Wanda was/is and how it ended up in Kramers?
Oh, Wicked Wanda! was a British comic strip that was published in Penthouse in the 1970s. I found out about them a couple years ago and was really taken with it for bunch of reasons. It was surprising they had been out of print for so long. The writer is still alive and PictureBox found him and he gave us the rights to run some pages in the new Kramers for a fee. That's it. It was hard to parse it down to 40 pages for Kramers—there was easily twice as many pages that were just as great. Someone really should do a proper book of that stuff.

How'd you get involved with Ian Svenonious?
When I realized the book needed a text piece to help contextualize things, the only person I considered was Svenonius. His book The Psychic Soviet is one of my favorites. It was Svenonius or no one.

What are you working on now? Are you thinking about Kramers Ergot 9 at all?
I am working on Crickets #4. it will be out this year. I'm totally thinking about Kramers Ergot 9.

1-800-MICE
Matthew Thurber
Picturebox

1-800-MICE is this confusing comic about a mouse named Groomfiend who works at a company called 1-800-MICE. They are like a mouse telegraph company. There are about a million characters and I have no idea what's going on ever. But that's OK. It's OK to be confused. The book is set in a weird city and there are odd moments. I mostly like to flip to different parts of this book and start reading, which is kind of how I listen to heavy metal records too.

Check out this video Matthew made to advertise his book.

I asked Matt Thurber some Qs for him to A.

VICE: Tell me about how you came up with the title 1-800-MICE.
Matthew Thurber:I got a text message from the Muse. I was on the subway and it just popped into my head. I get lots of combinations of words popping through my brain and some of them are dumb but this one was perfect. I started giggling to myself and then laughing to myself. At that point, this older lady must have thought I was insane or needed interruption because she said, "DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?"

We are friends now but we weren't always the best friends we now are. Tell me about our relationship from your point of view. 
Everything's fine in our relationship!!!! Just FINE!!!!! We have a symbiotic one. You are a comics reviewer and I am a comics creator.

Tell me about your video. How long did that take you to make? 
It took me about a week, maybe a little longer. I recorded the track on GarageBand with a keyboard and the vocals into the built-in mic on the computer after a couple takes. I was inspired by a tune by Prince Khonjo 99 that has samples of cats, dogs, and horses on the track. Then I animated to the audio using Flash. Originally I was going to make it more abstract and psychedelic but then the lyrics took it in a direct illustrational direction.

Golf Wang
Picturebox

Odd Future made a book. Are we living on the fucking Bizarro planet? Don't worry though, there's hardly any words except for a free-association intro by Tyler and some weirdness on the inner cover flaps.  It looks like it's all point-and-shoot film photos, mostly just hanging out and skating around LA. The recurring visual elements are skateboards, Supreme clothes, pizza, and the OF kids. Some of the shots make you wonder why they're in a fucking book. Others make more sense. I asked to interview Tyler about this book and Dan Nadel told me that VICE had already interviewed Tyler about it. So I asked Dan if I could interview him about it and he pawned off most of the questions onto the book's co-editor Nick Weidenfeld, except for the final one.

Vice: How's this book selling?
Nick Weidenfeld: According to our publisher, Dan Nadel, it’s selling really well. He’s very mild-mannered but he used all caps in his last email to us. That’s about as excited as I’ve ever seen him.

What was it like working with the Odd Future kids?
It’s the best even when they call you “gay” and “old.”  It’s always exciting to work with people that are passionate and excited about what they’re doing and I don’t think there is anyone more enthusiastic than Tyler and his friends. Anyone that has spent time with them, whether in-person or in the crowd at their shows, feels part of a larger movement. Hopefully that’s clear from the book. If not, we really fucked up.

What's your favorite Odd Future member and song?
I think “Radicals” from Goblin captures exactly what I like about Odd Future and everything they’re about. It’s serious in how emo it is. It’s a call-to-arms but it’s also funny and stupid and I love that people take them seriously when it’s clear to me and everyone I know that they’re just fucking around. But I probably listen to “Luper” by Earl Sweatshirt the most. My favorite member is Lionel Boyce who sometime works the merch booth. Fuck Taco.

How do you feel about the ever-present Supreme logos in this book? Did they kick in some money to produce the thing? 
Supreme actually wasn’t going to carry the book, although someone just told me they saw it at the NY store. But this book is a time capsule and Supreme, like Arizona Ice Tea and N.E.R.D., is part of it. These are the brands that identified them in 2010. Now that Tyler is making some money, maybe the next edition of the book will feature lots of Lamborghinis.

What is at the core of this book? What makes it important? Is it just like a memento for the fans of the group or does it get by on its own merits?
Dan Nadel: I feel strongly that the photography holds up on its own merits. And compiled as a book, I think Golf Wang at its core is a self-portrait by a group of extremely talented friends during a crucial point in their artistic lives. I've spent a lot of time documenting and publishing groups of artists—it's kind of a PictureBox specialty, almost—and I feel like the book captures this crew's sensibility, and, in a lot of ways, the sensibility of a generation of kids. So yeah, it has a wider import, to me, as document of artists making an impact on culture.