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Edited by Sammy Harkham
PictureboxMan, Kramers is the best. CF, Ben Jones, all that shit. So good.



Johnny Ryan: No, I like to let me comics speak for themselves.
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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-

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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.

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.
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Matthew Thurber
Picturebox1-800-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.

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.
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PictureboxOdd 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.

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.
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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.

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.
