Dear Comic Bookies,
The biggest comic news this week is that Frank Miller said some pretty harsh shit about the Occupy Wall Street movement. You can read it here at his site if you haven’t already. I’ve never been able to tell from reading his comics if he was really right or left wing, but he always seemed like a pretty angry guy so I’m not all that surprised by him saying crazy, angry things that can only serve to alienate him from a lot of his audience.
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Here’s this great series of edited Frank Miller strips over at Comics Alliance that are hilarious.
Also, there’s a good forum discussing Dan Clowes’s Death-Ray over at the Comics Journal’s website. Can’t stop talking about that damn comic.
Amazing Everything: The Art of Scott C.
Scott C
Insight
I really loved Scott C.’s comics when he was in the Hickee anthology comics and I was a big fan of the Psychonauts video game that he did the visual design for. I also loved everything else, also this book.
Scott makes images that incorporate cute things and pop culture references. I can imagine you rolling your eyes and thinking,”Yeah, like everyone else on the internet.” But you had better shut up because this guy is a couple hundred cuts above that other shit.
Before I go ahead I should point out that we’ve interviewed Scott, he’s done a comic for us, and did an insane “fold-er-all” illustration for us in the magazine last June. We are just bragging.
Much of Scott’s best-liked work is all up in this book. The image of E.T. jumping a creek in the General Lee is in here. The Old West Paperboy image is in here. All the cutaway views of odd domiciles and vehicles is in here. The drawing of all the David Bowies making a birdhouse is in here. This stuff doesn’t really need an explanation. You look at it and you know it’s good. Talking about it can only detract from its goodness.
Star Wars Comics
Abrams
Whoa, this book is awesome. I love Star Wars and I love comics, but I don’t care about most Star Wars comic books. I do, however, like this book, which has collected the best pages, panels, cover art and drawings of Star Wars stuff. So many good artists in here: Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell, Art Adams, John Romita Sr., Jim Steranko, Bill Sienkewicz, Jeff Smith, Al Williamson, Paul Pope, Frank Quitely, Adam Hughes…the list goes on.
The only thing I’m not crazy about is the cover choice. Dave Dorman is rad and the cover painting is a fine image—it’s just so generic. A guy in a featureless mask fighting a horde of other guys in masks. I think the book looks about ten times better without the dust jacket. The scanned original black-and-white Dave Cockrum art with its visible pencil lines and smudges is wayyyyyyyyyy stronger as a book cover. It’s iconic, bold, and stands out on a bookshelf.
So once you’re inside the book it’s a chronological “best of” the art that Star Wars comics have had to offer, starting with the Marvel comics and daily strips. In almost every case they got the original art and then reproduced it super big so that you can get in there and study the technique of the artists. There’s a few things that I’m less crazy about, like a few of the more recent Star Wars comics, which just aren’t as impressive, but for the most part it is awesome. There’s privately commissioned work from Sam Kieth and David Lapham in here that I’d never seen before, and a lot of other rad shit.
The only obvious mistakes I see with this book besides the dust jacket are that the book should have started with the Howard Chaykin poster art made for the San Diego Comic Con before the movie was released (which he later re-drew for the cover to the first issue of the Marvel comics series). My other note is that there’s a piece by J.W Rinzler, the official Star Wars documenter these days, that’s at the back and should be at the front of the book. Besides those three things, it’s pretty much a perfect book for the guys who are into this.
The Adventures of Herge
Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Stanislas Barthelemy
Drawn & Quarterly
This pretty little book tells the life story of Herge, creator of Tin Tin, through a series of three- or four-page sequences. It’s drawn, colored, and packaged to look almost identical to a Tin Tin book too. The thing is, there aren’t any Tin Tin books that attempt to tell Tin Tin’s life story, and this is because telling the story of someone’s life in 60 pages is hard to do. I guess they attempted something ambitious, but the book feels more like a collection of moments than a story. It feels like a list of events are being rattled off instead of an experience you’re sharing with the main character. There’ll be four pages in 1956 and then suddenly it’s three years in the future.
Also, Herge comes off as being kind of a clueless douchebag. There are plenty of references to Tin Tin comics and some stuff about the real Chang that the character from the Tin Tin comics was based on, but they tried to cram too much into 60 pages. They should have done like Herge and limited it to just one adventure, or maybe even stretched it out over two volumes. So that’s what I think. It looks good and it’s a nice object but Herge isn’t terribly likable or admirable in it, and the story is so rushed that it’s hard to feel anything for the characters or events.
The Book of Skulls
Faye Dowling
Lawrence King
This is a nicely laid-out book with an interesting binding, but the ideals it serves are corny to me. It’s a fun and mindless little tour through the world of skull imagery in popular culture but skull imagery in popular culture isn’t necessarily a good thing. The press release refers to the skull as a symbol of anarchy and rebellion. It’s funny that a skull could become a symbol of anarchy and rebellion since absolutely every human being has one inside them and absolutely everyone is going to die. If anything, the skull represents the least individualistic thing that humans do, which is die.
When you look at a skull, the immediate message that is zapped into your brain is “Someday I am going to die. That image of a skull I am looking at is very similar to the one inside my skin right now and in some way or another my flesh will decay and what is now me will be that thing.” To wear the image of a skull on your shirt is a pretty offensive thing to do. Imagine wearing an image of a rotting corpse, or a pile of dead bodies from a concentration camp on your shirt. It seems like the repetition of skulls within popular culture have removed their obvious meaning. Now people think of rock ‘n’ roll and anarchy. You look at the Crimson Ghost and you might think of death, but you also think of an Alfred E. Neuman impishness.
The Grateful Dead and the Misfits are probably the bands that strongest incorporated skull imagery into rock ‘n’ roll’s visual vocabulary. But back when the Misfits were first making the rounds, Danzig was making his own skull shirts and wearing Halloween costumes and stuff. He was shoving the imagery of horror films into rock. It made sense, as the Misfits were a scary band of guys and people got the shit knocked out of them at their shows. In between the late 70s, when the original Misfits roamed the Earth, and now, the skull’s replaced the smiley face as the symbol of our young people. Now the skull is just as meaningless an image as that insipid smiling thing.
A couple of years ago I had metalhead friends who went to Cambodia to interview survivors of Pol Pot’s genocide and they were callously wandering around a country where a fifth of the population had been killed a few decades ago. They clearly didn’t get the similarities that the people of Cambodia might see between the genocidal holocausts and depictions of corpses on their metal shirts to the tragedy that Cambodia had known.
If you know my illustration/art work then you probably know that I’ve drawn skulls onto clothing as well. I drew the Cerebral Ballzy shirt art, a few Black Dahlia Murder shirts, a Golden Triangle shirt, and a bunch of other shit with living corpses on them. My only defense is that when I draw skulls that it is a conscious “Fuck you, die.” to the viewer. My skeletons are also often flipping the bird and doing amoral stuff. It’s okay to say fuck you to someone but it’s important that we be aware that we’re saying it. If you’re a hateful animal that is angry at the world that’s cool. Being angry and hating everyone is the main part of what being a punk is, to me.
I prefer the image of a skull to the image of a smiley face but the repetition has taken away it’s teeth. There’s that Ralph Lauren Rugby line where they make tennis skirts for little girls with pink skulls on them. What the fuck is that? The little girl shouldn’t be wearing that unless she really hates the people around her and wants them to die, which are totally fine feelings if they’re real. Saying fuck you and telling people to die is a big part of being a teenager or an artist. Every new art movement is usually some sort of fuck you to the last one, and you want the old guys to die off so you can have your chance at affecting people. The problem here is people not thinking, simply doing things because they think that they’re “cool,”–or even worse, “badass”–and acting diseingenuinely.
I’m aware that talking about the popularity of skull imagery is nothing new, and I owe a lot of it to things that Momus has said about fashion goth.
The Misanthrope’s Guide to Life (Go Away!)
Meghan Rowland & Chris Rowland
AdamsMedia
Every time one of these fake guidebooks comes in I pick it up hoping I’ll like it and I never do. I’m pretty sure that the Preppy Handbook was the first fake guide like this. Then there was that zombie escape handguide and now it seems like there’s all kinds of fake books floating around. The only one that actually succeeds at being funny is Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life. Oh, and all the books that Vice made with titles that start “The Vice Guide To–“.
