Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #80

Dear Comic Booksters,

I'm in an art show that opens on Friday in Savannah, Georgia. The show features Jonny Negron, Lala Albert, Kris Mukai, and about a million other people. I'll be there taking photos and DJing the afterparty. Come by and check out the art. The Facebook event page is here.

I also drew this neat skateboard for Cerebral Ballzy, and Vision put it out. It's a tribute to the Psycho Stick deck. I am very proud of that. You can get it for 50 bucks here. I promise not to talk too much about my own art stuff in the future.

Look at this great Arthur Adama X-Men splash page.

CF has a show opening in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on January 31st.

I saw this old commercial for Malibu Comics' Ultraverse over on Comics Alliance. There's something unnatural about advertising comics on TV.

Did you ever see the Levis commercial that Spike Lee shot and Rob Liefeld stars in?

Here's a more recent video of Rob Liefeld talking about pouches, because he's always drawing pouches onto superhero costumes. People goof on it, but he gives good reasons for it.

Finally here's Rob Liefeld with Eazy-E. Are you surprised to learn that Rob Liefeld is the coolest guy in comics?

Also, there is a series of Studio Ghibli Zippo lighters now.

Alien Sticker
Lala Albert

I love Lala's spacey faces. Everybody does.

Look at her stuff here.

Greys 
O Schrauwen
Desert Island 

This is a comic that is presented as a true story about/by a German man who is abducted by grey, large headed aliens. They show him images of human destruction and jerk him off with a little iron maiden that fits over his dick. Pretty good comic over all!

New York Drawings
Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly

This big $30 book collects Adrian Tomine's last ten years of freelance illustration into one volume for you to own if you want to.

Adrian Tomine is a pretty well known alternative cartoonist, who is recognized for his comic, Optic Nerve. Optic Nerve is about round headed attractive and stylish people who have aspergers. His line work, colors, and compositions are all very sophisticated. The work that appears in this book is professional and some of it is beautiful, but most of it is just average spot illustrations.

Tomine's covers are often beautiful, but there are only so many of those. Drawings that were made to accompany movie reviews and things like that make up a lot of this book's content. When you're reading the New Yorker and you see a Tomine illustration, it's fun and jazzy, but a book of them out of context isn't that great. They weren't made to be presented this way and most of them just aren't interesting enough to merit appearing here.

I'd be very psyched if I got to do spot illustrations. And if someone offered to collect my drawings of movies and stuff in a fancy book, I would be flattered. But when it showed up, I would think, Who is going to buy this? People are idiots.

Brain Dump Amazing Facts & Beyond with Leon Beyond Vol. 4
Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch, Ron Weaver and Ted May

This thing is a collection of strips by four good cartoonists that appeared in a newspaper in Missouri. The theme of the series is delivering fake facts. It looks good, but I'm not really tickled by it. The art's nice, but the concept gets repetitive.

Economix: How Our Economy Works (And Doesn't Work)
Written by Michael Goodwin, Illustrated by Dan E. Burr.
Abramas Comicarts

Economix is a 300 page comic that attempts to explain the world's economy through the zazzy and modern medium of comics. Stylistically, it's a bad ripoff of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.The book starts with a cartoony version of the book's author, explaining why he decided to make this comic and he's even drawn in a lot of the same poses. I am certain that when working with the artist, he handed him Understanding Comics and said, "As close to this is as you can possibly make it."

Making a comic to explain the power of the comics medium is a natural thing to do. I don't care about economics and this book doesn't change the way I feel. While it's probably more interesting to look at than most economics text books, it's still the most boring comic I have ever seen. You'll open up the book and just be staring at a lot of text and graphs with interjecting drawings that are a lot like editorial cartoons. As far as visual inventiveness goes, it's poor. The image on the cover of a fat guy with a sack of money and a cigar walking up one of those squiggly line graphs that marks profits is one of the most tired illustration ideas ever used.

This might be the kind of book that is a godsend if you're an economics major who is stupid and can't focus on a real textbook, but I feel like this didn't need to be a comic at all. It could have just been a text book with graphs and it would have wasted less paper.

See you next week,
Nick Gazin

Previously - #79