Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #73

Hi everyone, this week's post is dominated by Johnnys. We have interviews with Johnny Ryan and Jonny Negron, plus an old Jade Stevens 'Jonny Quest' cover with a curvy, sexy lady that gives me a boner.

by Nick Gazin

October 3, 2012, 8:00pm

Hi Everyone,

Next week I'll review the things I got at the NY Art Book fair, but this week it's business as usual.

Look at these neat old Batman walkie talkies.

Look at this foreign movie poster for

. Who could ever forget when the Freddy Snake ate Patricia Arquette? It might be one of the strongest visuals of any Freddy Krueger movie.

Look at this weird Woody Woodpecker necklace from when he was a more deranged character.

Look at this super sexy Dave Stevens cover from

. Goddamn, Dave Stevens drew the sexiest women. Even when drawing a comic about 10-year-old boys he shoves a sexy lady in there. Why aren't those kids staring at her adult body in awe?

The Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog posted

these beautiful illustrations by Sidney Sime. They were for a book called Time and the Gods by Lord Dunsany, which was published in 1922.

Look at this image by Makoto Aida. If you don't know his grotesque art then

take a look.

Michael Kupperman did a hilarious comic for HuffPo about Star Wars and then this hilarious image of someone lighting C-3PO's cigarette on the set of the first movie showed up recently. This leads me to believe that all of the other claims he made in his comic were also true.

Negron
Jonny Negron
Picturebox Jonny Negron is one of my favorite current guys in comics or drawing or fine art right now. He's done several comics for VICE and there are more coming up. Picturebox just released a book that serves as an introduction to his work and it's already selling like crazy. I don't know how much I have to explain about Jonny Negron's work. He's best known for drawing fashionable thick women loosely based on ladies he observes in real life. He also does comics, but his thick chicks are what he's getting heat for at the moment. This is a great book and basically an announcement of his arrival for people who weren't Tumblr-savvy. There are almost definitely going to be a lot more Negron books coming out in the future. I just did a really long interview with him, but for now just look at these images and read this short Q and A I did with him.

Your new book looks good. How much of it is new material?
I'd say about half is from 2011, the other half is from this year. I notice that there is no written description of you, yet there is a massive photo of you on the back of the book. Do you not want to reveal too much about yourself because the internet makes everyone so knowable?
I work with images and symbols, and I often find words unnecessary. I think people share too much of themselves on the internet. I choose not to talk about my personal life simply because I don't think it's that interesting.

Tell me about women. Do women ask to pose for you or bug you to draw them? What are the strongest reactions to your portrayal of women that you've received?
Women don't ask for portraits of themselves or offer to pose for me too often. It happens once in a while though.

Buy it here.

Prison Pit Volume 4
Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics

Describing the plot of this book is pointless but fun. Cannibal Fuckface awakens in a crystalline prison that he can't escape from. His right arm is gone and in its place is a monster parasite, which is also a weapon. It holds his severed right arm in its mouth. Somehow the monster arm creates a new monster slave from CF's severed arm, which frees CF. Then they kill a bunch of people with hexagonal geometric helmets and then they fight some other creatures and then the slave monster is compromised and then the spaceship they're in crashes. Then CF kills some more creatures and then blah, blah, blah. There's no point in trying to explain Prison Pit. You can only experience it to understand it. Start buy buying all of them at once if you haven't yet. If you have the rest then buy this one too. It wears its intentional stupidness and violence on its sleeve while also showing off Johnny Ryan's sophisticated sense of composition and black and white ink prettiness. I love Johnny Ryan a lot. I've interviewed Johnny at least ten times now so this time I interviewed him through text message.

Below is a jam comic I tried to get Johnny to draw with me the last time I was in LA, but he just drew the panel with Homer jerking off Bart. His wife liked that I drew Cannibal Fuckface smiling and laughing.