Sunday, January 31, 2010
Influencing Comics #8: Jeffrey Brown on Twelve Paintings From The Northern Renaissance
Like most artists I would say that my influences come from everywhere - as a cartoonist it's not just comics that have influenced me, but music and film and poetry. For a while I thought I would be a 'fine artist' in the traditional 'fine artist' sense, and that sensibility is still very much a part of my work, though I suppose it's not always readily apparent. For example, a big part of my education as an artist was studying the paintings the Northern Renaissance (mostly Dutch and Flemish). It'd be hard to point out any visible influence from those paintings in my comics, but they were hugely important in helping me understand what art could be. They still influence my thinking, I suppose, and I still go back to looking at them occasionally.
Friday, January 29, 2010
For the Love of Comics #8: Peace, Love, and Radio Shows
Words: Christopher Irving
I blame it all on The Shadow, on that boxed set of four cassette tapes of crackly old radio shows, the creepy melodrama of the invisible avenger, the pipe organs and the cackle, the “weed of crime” bearing bitter fruit, for hooking me on storytelling without pictures beyond the ones projected on my mind’s eye.
And I blame an old truck driver named Stan Silkowski.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Crime Scene: The Cleaners
Words: Miles Archer
After putting down the fourth issue of The Cleaners
, I did something I almost never do – I flipped to the back and read the letters to the editor. I just had to know what other readers had to say about this gruesome and twisted story of a crime scene clean-up crew operating in the greater Los Angeles area. But only a few paragraphs into editor Shawna Gore’s thank you note to the readers, I read something every bit as shocking and horrifying as the 120 pages of blood and guts that comprised the story itself –that Dark Horse has not planned any future issues. Q and A: David Goyer in 2000
Words: Christopher Irving
CHRISTOPHER IRVING: I understand JSA has been quite successful recently. How do you make it accessible to new readers with characters that date back sixty years?
DAVID GOYER: It’s a balance: we took the three original members, the old-timers, and then we took a number of second generation heroes, and then we created some new ones. The whole debate was “Are we only going to have old-timers, and only going to do stories that are retro, dealing with old baggage, or are we going to delve into new territory?”
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
GNYC's Seth Kushner's new (partially comic themed) music video
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jonas Deschain
email: booking@headsupdisplay.net
Heads Up Display Music Video Fuses Music, Comics and Muppets
Debuting Friday, February 12th, Brooklyn-based indie rock band Heads Up Display's FORMULA VS. PERFUME, the latest music video from the directing team Kushner + Molina of Culture Pop Productions (www.culturepopproductions.com). , features puppets designed and built by acclaimed cartoonist and graphic novelist Kevin Colden (Fishtown, I Rule the Night), and band frontman Josh Dillard (formerly of the Sesame Workshop). Co-director Seth Kushner is an award-winning photographer for such publications as The New York Times, Newsweek, L’Uomo Vogue and is also the co-author of the photo book, The Brooklynites.
Bergen Street Comics (www.bergenstreetcomics.com) is hosting a premiere party Friday, February 12th at 8PM. The band will perform a short acoustic set followed by a screening of the video.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Influencing Comics #7: Tim Hamilton's Top 5 Non-Comics Influences
#1-Comedy comedy, comedy.
Comedy was my constant companion during childhood, pre-teen and teenage years.
I’m not sure who or what was the biggest comedy influence, so under the category of “comedy” I will list the standouts in my mind. Sorry if that’s cheating.
“Carol Burnett”
Once I discovered the Carol Burnett Show as a child, I HAD to see it every Saturday night at 10:00. Yes, that’s the comedy show one watched on Saturday nights before the era of “Saturday Night Live.”
Once I discovered the Carol Burnett Show as a child, I HAD to see it every Saturday night at 10:00. Yes, that’s the comedy show one watched on Saturday nights before the era of “Saturday Night Live.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Crime Scene: G.I. Joe: Cobra
In the world of comics, like in fashion, everything old eventually becomes new again. Jonah Hex and the Justice Society of America both once again have ongoing titles, Spider-Man is single once more, Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd are back among the living, and Bruce Wayne will be soon as well. Whether any particular dead character or series should be revived is a matter for the fans to debate, but as long as publishers feel a market exists, they will continue to recycle old properties and try to make them relevant for contemporary audiences.
For the Love of Comics #08: Enjoy the Silence
Words: Seth Kushner
“The one thing that I remember best about you is that you had a letter published in an issue of G.I. Joe,” my long, lost friend said. “You complained about the silent issue.”
I had just exited the stage after our first Graphic NYC panel at King Con, Brooklyn, when a man approached me.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Swivel-Arm's for Amateurs: Checking Out the New G.I. Joe
Words: Christopher Irving . Pictures: Seth Kushner
The first G.I. Joe figure I ever got was Destro, the man with the chrome head and pimpin’ black outfit. He had something new called ‘Swivel-Arm Battle Grip,’ a joint above the elbow that made it easier to hold a rifle. That was back in 1983, when Joe was only “A Real American Hero”, and it was cool to be patriotic and fighting terrorists wasn’t considered safe for a kids’ toy line. Things have changed because of last year’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra popcorn movie, where they’re now a U.N. peacekeeping force decked out in black body armor.
Scary-Oke: Cobra-La Style!
GNYC's very own Jared Gniewek is more than just a savvy reviewer: he's also an underground monster cartoonist with his very own Scary-Oke blog, a blend of karoake with monsters and freaks. Jared's contribution to Joe week shows just what did happen to Cobra-La from G.I. Joe: The Movie.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Getting Over the '80s: Springfield on My Mind
Words: Zack Smith
Last night, I dreamed of Springfield.
It was not the Springfield of yellow-skinned Simpsons and three-eyed fish from the nuclear power plant; it was the other one, where I learned that city streets held dark secrets and your neighbors could be a menacing army of fleshy glop. It was where the themes of Patrick McGoohan, Franz Kafka and basic existentialism first took root in my head.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Larry Hama: All About Character
Words: Christopher Irving . Pictures: Seth Kushner
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Yo, Joe! Announcing G.I. Joe Week on Graphic NYC!
In 1982, there was a red, white, and blue revolution when G.I. Joe premiered in a line of action figures, cartoon series, and a comic book that ran for over a decade and introduced an entirely new generation of readers to comics.
Graphic NYC celebrates G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero with G.I. Joe week, starting January 18th.
“Like a lot of kids who grew up in the ‘80s, Joe was my gateway drug to the world of comics,” GNYC editor and writer Christopher Irving says. “When Larry Hama wrote a hundred plus issues over a decade, he did some pretty brilliant and ahead-of-their-time things, and I consider this week one huge homage to Hama and his work on this cult book.”
Seth Kushner adds, "I also started reading monthly comics because of G.I. Joe, and working on all of this week's great content, reminded me of why I loved Marvel's Joe book as a kid and has given me a new appreciation of it as an adult."
Monday kicks off with “The Swivel-Arm Battle Grip Revolution,” Irving’s essay on the history of the Joe comic and toy line, followed Tuesday with a GNYC profile on Hama himself, written by Irving and photographed as only Seth Kushner can. Wednesday sees a sneak preview of Zack Smith’s (of Newsarama fame) Getting Over the ‘80s, Zack’s witty and unique look at the world of ‘80s animated toy cartoons as it tackles the most terrifying episodes of G.I. Joe ever. Thursday sees Scary-oke’s and GNYC’s Jared Gniewek combines his trademark strip with the villains of COBRA, while Friday sees Seth’s For The Love of Comics on the G.I. Joe silent issue, and Miles Archer looks at IDW’s G.I. Joe: COBRA mini-series.
“And there’s one final surprise in store for that week,” Irving hints. “It comes from one of the current IDW Joe books’ best artists.”
Graphic NYC started in January, 2009 and delivers its trademark “New Comics Journalism” approach to profiling comics creators and their work.
The G.I. Joe week articles:
Swivel-Arm Battle Grip Revolution: The history of Marvel's G.I. Joe comic
Graphic NYC's Feature Profile on Larry Hama
Springfield on my Mind: Zack Smith's look at the G.I. Joe cartoon
Crime Scene: G.I. Joe: Cobra: Miles Archer reviews the IDW mini-series
Scary-oke: Jared Gniewek presents the COBRA sing-off
Swivel-Arm's for Amateurs: Christopher Irving reviews new G.I. Joe figures
Enjoy the Silence: Seth Kushner's memories of the G.I. Joe Silent Issue
The Swivel-Arm Battle Grip Revolution: Marvel's G.I. Joe Comic Book
Words: Christopher Irving
G.I. Joe recruited more children into the ranks of comic book readership than any other comic of the latter 20th century. While Star Wars ushered the comeback of the action figure (albeit, in a shrunken format of 3 3/4”) and pioneered a multi-media approach to merchandising in the late '70s, G.I. Joe went one step further and created a model for non-film properties to survive in other mediums.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
For the Love of Comics #7: George O'Connor's Olympians
Words: Christopher Irving
Q and A: Renee French in 1999
Words: Christopher Irving
CHRIS IRVING: First off, tell me about Corny's Fetish.
RENEE FRENCH: The book is actually 60 pages long, and I just finished it. It's about a lonely [and] nerdy man whose obsessed with the little woman across the way. He's very quiet, and he has a little dog, and it's just about...being obsessed about someone you don't know.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Graphically Speaking: Kabuki - The Alchemy
Words: Jared Gniewek
David Mack’s latest Kabuki Graphic Novel, The Alchemy, is not fun. It isn’t pleasant. It isn’t easy. It isn’t accessible. And it isn’t “kick ass.”
It also isn’t boring, trite, stupid, or lame.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Nathan Schreiber Powers Up with the Xeric Grant
Words: Christopher Irving . Pictures: Seth Kushner
“Well, yes, but you act a little differently around your girlfriend’s parents then you do around your buddies at the bar. You tell stories to them, and you change the way that you tell that story for the audience. Yes, you should definitely be writing stories that you find entertaining but, why the fuck would anyone write something they don’t find entertaining?”
Influencing Comics #6: Once Upon a Time in an American Graphic Novelist’s DVD Player By Neil Kleid
Blame my father; He made me watch it. Dad, you see, had a history of picking bad movies, and therefore I questioned his vehement recommendation. Every time our family descended on the local video store to grab choice films for Saturday night viewing fare, Dad inexplicably chose the one movie nobody wanted to see. And by “nobody” I refer to the great communal nobody of the entire suburb of Oak Park, Michigan, evident by the fact that all copies of said movie remained abandoned on the shelf, unloved, unwatched, unrented. Thursday, January 7, 2010
For the Love of Comics #07: Dan Goldman's Red Light Properties
Dan Goldman has been on the forefront of publishing comics on the internet. He was a founding member of the webcomics collective, ACT-I-VATE.com, where he published his strip, Kelly. He then serialized his web-to-print Eisner-nominated collaboration with writer Anthony Lappe,Shooting War on SMITHmag.net. Dan followed that with the book, 08: A Graphic Diary Of The Campaign Trail(with Michael Crowley). His new work, Red Light Properties just started appearing on Tor.com.
Graphically Speaking: Doctor Who Classics, Volume I
Words: Christopher Irving
Just last week David Tennant, the tenth actor to play The Doctor on England’s long-running science fiction time-travel show Doctor Who, took a tragic bow off the stage, leading his successor, Matt Smith, on.
Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek, or any magnum opus sci-fi/space opera series here in America, Doctor Who has gone pretty straight since its first broadcast (or, as our more proper cousins across the pond would say, transmission) in 1963. But before the string bean David Tennant became a cult figure who reinvigorated Doctor Who within the past few years, or even before his under rated predecessor Christopher Eccleston took the role of the oft-reincarnating Doctor (who, mysteriously, regenerates into a new body whenever the actor playing him is ready to go), the popular image of Doctor Who was a mop-topped gentleman with a beakish nose, weak chin, and impossibly long knit scarf.
Actor Tom Baker took the role in 1974 and held onto it for seven years, leaving in 1981. Because of his long and amazing run as the oafish/screwball/madcap/clever Doctor, as well as the overseas broadcast on PBS stations everywhere, Baker became the face most associated with Doctor Who.
Marvel UK printed a black and white Doctor Who strip in short increments in their Doctor Who Weekly, and they are all reprinted (with beautifully subtle coloring by Charlie Kirchoff, nonetheless) by IDW under the banner of Doctor Who Classics
. 
I have to admit: I’m not usually a huge fan of comics adaptations of TV or movie characters. They usually fall flat for me, static, and just plain boring and stiff (the likeness police have been known to ruin otherwise kinetic art with an imposed stiffness). But with art by Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, The Originals) and Paul Neary (The Ultimates), I knew any faults would be in the scripts by Pat Mills and John Wagner. The writing in Doctor Who Classics, Volume I are on par with the then-current television show in that they’re flat-out fun. Don’t expect the Citizen Kane of comics in these episodic sequences, but do expect a darn good read that captures the spirit of the zany Tom Baker Doctor Who adventures.
The initial story, "Doctor Who and the Iron Legion", follows the Doctor’s involvement in a parallel universe where Rome never fell, and became a military juggernaut run by harpy-like creatures and their robot armies. The high point of Legion, for me, is in the character Morris, a simpleton slave who is mauled in each escape attempt, and then patched up with bionic parts by his captors, creating a patchwork of metal and flesh, punctuated by a large zipper-like seam running down the bridge of his nose and top of his head. While it’s a clunky story with a dues ex machina or two, it’s more a warm-up for "City of the Damned", a ridiculously fun story where The Doctor lands on a dystopian and emotionless future that churns out pseudo-Orwellian themes fused with a bit of Logan’s Run.
The real meat of this volume, though, is in "Timeslip", written and drawn by Paul Neary. This simple and quick story features more photo-referenced work, kept from being too robotic by Neary’s fluid art style, where The Doctor is stuck living backwards, devolving into his prior three incarnations in reverse order until he figures a way out of a chronally-challenging space amoeba encapsulating his time-travelling ship the TARDIS. "Timeslip", in all honesty, is less of a story than the prior two, but more of a geek-out for Who fans interested in those earlier incarnations who mostly lived in black and white episodes.
The final story, "Doctor Who and the Star Beast", feels the most like an episode sequence of the old show, as the Doctor lands on Earth to save a fuzzy blue cat-like alien from its lobster-like alien captors. But, as in the best Doctor Who stories, it’s full of twists and turns and innate silliness (partly due to the inclusion of The Doctor’s robot dog, K-9).
Top notch stuff for Who fans.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Graphically Speaking: Woody Allen's Dread and Superficiality as a Comic Strip
, especially since I never realized there ever even was a daily comic strip based on Woody Allen.When I received the book, I skipped past the introduction and dove right into the strips. From the first one on, it read as through it were written by Woody Allen, which confused me since the strips are all credited to cartoonist Stuart Hample alone. Reading the intro later, Hample explains that he approached Woody with the idea of doing the strip and Woody granted him access to tons of his jokes, and gave his consent to cull from any of his films, books, plays, stand-up, etc. So, the words are often Woody’s, but adapted into strip form by Hample. It’s an interesting process, and one that works.
Hample, a former assistant to Al Capp, casts Woody Allen as a version of himself, moving between the office of his bored, passive aggressive therapist, visits to his annoyed and disappointed parents, flash-backs to his angst-ridden youth, and situations with tall, beautiful women who often reject him.
The Woody Allen found in these page is certainly familiar to fans of his films. Cartoon Woody is as insecure, pessimistic, self-deprecating, and flawed as Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer, or Isaac in Manhattan.
In a two-panel strip from 1979, Woody is seated across a table from a tall, leggy blonde. She’s looking at him and he rests his elbow on the table, with his hand supporting his head. His face has a defeated expression.
In the first panel she asks – “Do you find anything as boring as I do?”
He answers – “ Oh, no, I never feel bored.”
In the second panel, he continues – “I’m too busy feeling hostile, dejected, irritated, frustrated, self-pittying…”
The strip ran from 1976 to 1984 and while the writing seems to be consistent, Hample’s art grows from the early strips, becoming more fluid and confident. He uses his lines more sparingly and his characters seem to have more weight. His pacing and design act as a good example of how strips work. He doesn’t break ground like a Gary Larson or a Bill Watterson, but the strip doesn’t call for that type of innovation. Instead, it’s the subject matter and dialogue that feel ahead of their time.
In one three-panel strip, Woody is looking at a photo of an old girlfriend.
The first word balloon reads – “An old girl of mine.”
The second – “I don’t know if it was my fault or hers, but we had a terribly false relationship.”
The third – “It finally dawned on me when I realized every time she had an orgasm, her nose grew longer.”
Did any other daily, syndicated strip ever mention orgasms in 1979? I’m pretty sure the mom and the dad in The Family Circus never discussed such things.
The actual book is a beautifully designed package. Charles Kochman and the good folks at Abrams ComicArts have succeeded again in showcasing comics work in a respectful, creative and intelligent manner. They don’t simply recreate the art as the black and white line art as it originally appeared; instead it’s all been lovingly re-photographed, to show the artist’s handwritten notes, corrections, paste-ups and the ageing and wear of the pages. What was once thought of as a disposable medium is now presented as fine art.
If you’re a fan of Woody Allen, or self-deprecating, intellectual humor in general, then Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip is for you.
Kim Deitch: A Novel Approach
“The secret of my work routine is that I think I’ve cultivated a relationship with my subconscious mind, so I figured out that it’s a different part of your brain. For instance, there’s the part of your brain that does interviews or other things in your life. One way I get at it is that I take my work to bed with me, especially when I’m creating it. Last night I did it; I take a look at what I did in the day and troubleshoot where it’s weak and needs improvement. By doing that before I go to sleep, my brain works on it while I’m sleeping. I wake up in the morning and I get working on it as soon as I get a cup of coffee into myself. It’s amazing how the little problems start to solve themselves, because even though you don’t think your working on it, something back here is.”
The soft-spoken Deitch wears jeans and a white t-shirt, given off a relaxed aura like an old hippie, or a Zen Buddhist. Emerging from the Underground Comix scene of the 1960s, Deitch evolved from a capable cartoonist to a unique voice in comics, his work blending a love of the pop culture now gone with a romantic fondness that never devolves into sappy nostalgia. Maybe it’s because all of his characters are too busy haunted by their own demons, or from Deitch’s flag character, a 1930s cartoon cat named Waldo who is actually a demon incarnate.
“I’m very much inspired by R. Crumb,” Kim admits of his infamous contemporary. “I’d say he’s my biggest idol in comics. He was one of my hugest inspirations for getting more involved in all this. While I’d already been involved, he just raised the bar and made the whole level of commitment that much higher.
“I’d like to think that I’m not that much different, in terms of level of commitment, than someone like him. I’m not as good an artist as him, but I don’t know who is. I just try to tell good solid stories. I try to make them real enough so that I’m believing them dramatically when I write them. It’s a big deal in my life. I’ve been doing this in forty-odd years, and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I like to draw. I’ve trained myself up to the point where I do like to draw and have trained myself up to reasonably good work habits. I’d be lost without it; it’s what I do.”
“One thing I had going, which is why I feel sorry for kids today, is that it was a lot easier to be a hippy or beatnik and live on the cheap (or virtually next to nothing) while trying to figure things out. That’s next to impossible today. I like talking to young kids, and in fact I do a lot of it when teaching and lecturing. I’m very careful when I talk to them and say ‘Okay, you’re hearing what I did. You can get some ideas from it, but don’t try to do exactly what I did because it’s not going to work today. You’re going to have to figure out a lot of the details yourself.’”
Despite Crumb’s influence, a larger influence is undoubtedly in someone near and dear to Kim – his father – animator Gene Deitch. Gene’s career started in Los Angeles, working as an animator for UPA; he then worked his way to Detroit, working at Jam Handy (“[They] made just about all the industrial films you ever saw up to a point,” Kim points out); and ended up running the New York office of UPA. UPA is best known for animating two stalwart characters of the 1940s through ‘60s, the comically sightless Mr. Magoo, as well as Gerald McBoing Boing, as well as the TerryToons theatrical shorts (which boasted Mighty Mouse amongst its ranks).
“Some of the stuff he taught me was real basic, like always finish what you start,” Kim said. “He also said ‘Kim, one thing you’ve got to remember is that most of anything is lousy,’ which I took for a long time as totally cynical but, then over time, I realized ‘It’s a valid remark, because we’re not trying to be like everything, we’re trying to be like the gold inside the quartz that isn’t lousy.’
“The other thing he told me was ‘Always try to give your customers just a little more than they’re expecting.’ I try to take that a little further and give the customer a lot more than they’re expecting. I got a lot of good stuff from him along those lines.
“Also, he was keeping me on my toes, and was quick to inform me that I wasn’t such a great artist and that when he was my age, he could draw circles around me. Like ‘Maybe you want to take a look at writing instead. That might be more up your alley.’ He’s a good guy, and I had a tremendous childhood with him.”
Encapsulated in one single volume is a rare 1955 comic strip, Terr’ble Thompson, a little boy with a red, white, and blue t-shirt and folded paper hat. Operating out of his clubhouse, Terr’ble makes history as he saves Cleopatra and her father from a dreaded tree virus, restores Santa’s faith in Christmas, and helps Christopher Columbus discover America – all while foiling plans of arch-nemesis Mean Morgan. Thompson’s brilliant in its word-butchering kiddy dialect, loose animated style, and straightforward make-believe sense of “and then he, and then…”. Gene Deitch’s single comic strip made an impact on young Kim.
“That was a huge influence, because I was old enough to watch him do those comic strips when I was a kid,” Kim recalls. “When you’re doing comics, there are times you’ve got to be by yourself, and there are other times where you’re inking and doing a whole lot of busy work that you’re happy to have some company. I think my father and I got a lot closer during the period when he was doing that strip.”
“I’m more of a wild and wooly character than he ever was,” reflects Deitch as Roscoe the cat eats a trail of cat treats off the coffee table in machine-gun like succession. “I was more of a roughneck than he ever was. It was good for me to get away from him at a certain point; animation loves nepotism, and I certainly would’ve ended up in animation like so many other children of people in the business. I think it was good that I didn’t and that I found my own way. It was very circuitous and could’ve been disastrous, because I got into all sorts of weird situations growing up. Somehow, weirdly, I think I was in the right place at the right time, which was when underground comics got off the ground, which way my big break.”
Waldo the Cat started as Kim’s exercise in cartooning: an anthromorphic character that could repeatedly be drawn from his developing skills as a beginning cartoonist. Waldo, eventually, took on a life of his own, and became a figure of torment for various Deitch characters (including Deitch himself), a cross between a trickster god and Felix the Cat. Waldo serves as the catalyst for Deitch’s 2002 graphic novel, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (a collaboration with his brother, Simon), which is heavily based on the history of American animation in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Winsor McKay was more than the pioneering cartoonist of Little Nemo in Slumberland; by the nineteen-teens, he was producing ground-breaking animated shorts like Gertie the Dinosaur, taking the cartoons on a vaudeville tour, often “interacting” with the characters to the amusement of the audience. By 1927, he was being usurped by the new breed, like Max Fleischer and his studio. It was at a dinner for McKay, held by Fleischer, that the frustrated McKay snapped at his audience of drunken animators that they were taking his art and turning it to shit and stormed off.
Boulevard opens with Deitch’s thinly veiled Windsor Newton snapping at Fleischer cipher Fred Fontaine. Only in Deitch’s world, Newton had an apprentice, Ted Mishkin, who would try to carry on Newton’s legacy in spite of a black-furred demon named Waldo. The graphic novel is a direct line through the Deitch lineage, as Boulevard of Broken Dreams is heavily based off of the lives of the animators Gene supervised back at UPA. Kim starts the graphic novel with an anecdote about first meeting an elderly Ted, passed out with his drunken nephew, and works backwards from there, cementing the feeling of stories passed on verbally and polished over time, to the point where they blur into legend.
Waldo, Ted Mishkin’s initial muse, becomes the monkey on his back, pushing the mild-mannered animator to mental asylums and to alcohol periodically, enduring the Disney-fication of animation all the way to the crass commercialism of today. The tragedy behind Boulevard of Broken Dreams lies in the harsh realities dealt the “dreamers” themselves, as they try to survive a field that goes downhill before their very eyes,
The basis in history lapsed into Kim’s next Waldo project, Alias the Cat
. With Kim himself as narrator and main character, the reader goes on a historical investigation “supported” by documents dug up by Kim in his quest for the truth behind Waldo the cartoon cat. What he finds is a string of influence concocted by the evil Waldo, his three-fingered gloved hands in everything from old movie serials to derelict midget towns. One chapter features an “interview” with one of the story’s characters, told in thirteen pages of prose with corresponding spot illustrations.“One book that was a huge influence on me, (and it’s not that I loved it, but I did like it),” Kim reveals. “Was Phoebe Gloeckner’s book Diary of a Teenage Girl, alternating chapters of illustrated fiction with chapters of comics. I think that a lot of people have thought of doing it, but she was the first person to actually do it. My immediate response to that was to put in Alias the Cat a thirteen-page sequence where this woman was putting a spoken history on tape. So, just for that sequence, I did illustrated fiction, and I think I succeeded in getting a little more deeply into her head.”
Kim’s knack for generating real world interviews and documents comes from a brief stint as a comic book reporter for fellow cartoonist Art Spiegelman:
“Something very specific inspired me to take the interview approach, which was about ten years ago, before there was reality TV there were reality comics. Art Spiegelman started dishing out these true reporter jobs for Details magazine. I walked into a really good one, where I went down to Virginia and interviewed this guy on Death Row, witnessed his execution, and went back to the scene of the crime, and talked to people involved with it. I had tremendous beginner’s luck with that story, and it seemed that everything was going my way. After a while, I started to feel like I was Jimmy Olsen. I was thinking ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve been missing my calling! I’ve been in an ivory tower all these years, making up stories out of whole cloth, but I could be talking to people. This could be the way to go.’
“On the buzz from that, I did subsequent stories. My beginner’s luck didn’t hold: I didn’t get such juicy stories anymore, and things were going crazy over at Details. They went through three editors-in-chief there, and that’s a whole story unto itself. At a certain point, I was like ‘That seems to be over,’ and in a way I was glad, because it was starting to get out of hand. On the other hand, I was getting so used to interviewing people, like in Alias the Cat, I’m still interviewing people, but it’s just people that I’ve made up. I don’t think there would have been Alias the Cat in that format if I hadn’t been doing those reporting stories.”
“If you’re calling long comic strips graphic novels (and I’m okay with that), maybe it’s okay to start fooling around with the format and making comics a little more novel-friendly,” Kim states. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. If I never do it again, Pictorama
just seems like a natural progression in my work towards doing a proper novel. That is, in fact, what I’m doing right now is a proper novel. There are pictures on every page and, in fact, there’s more of a comic book format in it than there was in Deitch’s Pictorama, but it is trying to be more of a hybrid medium. At the end of the day, it is a novel that would almost stand by itself without the pictures, though I think it’ll be terrific with the pictures.”Originally intended to define comic book stories done published as a complete story in one volume, the term “graphic novel” has since been hijacked into a commercial buzz word that applies to everything from trade paperbacks to comic strip reprints. Why not lean more towards the “novel” aspect as opposed to only the “graphic”? Hence Deitch’s Pictorama, a novel by Kim and brothers Simon and Seth that happens to have several graphics.
“It seems like comics are a great delivery system for dishing out words and pictures, but there are times when certain subjective ideas are better expressed in a novel,” notes Kim. “So wouldn’t it be great if I could get that working better in comics so it wouldn’t be so laughable, for instance, if comics get in over their head?
“I think of the Classic Comics version of Hamlet, which I have and love on a certain level. You see him standing there, and there’s a big balloon, with the whole ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy being one large balloon. It’s a novel thing to see but it isn’t really working dramatically. Maybe, tooling around, things can be made better.”
Kim is following Pictorama up with The Search for Smilin’ Ed, returning to older work for Kim’s investigation into the life of a late game show host from his childhood. After that, he continues his unique graphic novel approach with a project spun out of Pictorama’s main story.
“’The Sunshine Girl’ is a story told by this girl Eleanor Whaley about an adventure she and her brother had when they were kids in the ‘90s,” Kim says of the lead Pictorama story. “I really got to like that character so much by the time I was done that I didn’t want to let go of her. Following another rule I have, which is starting the next project before finishing another project, because you’ve got a head full of steam and keep going. Once you stop, it’s hard to get going again.
“This novel I’m doing is a spin-off of the story ‘The Sunshine Girl’. It’s not about the girl so much; in ‘The Sunshine Girl’, she was married to a guy who was fighting in Iraq and, in this story, she finds out he’s been killed in a roadside bombing and it shakes her entire belief system. She retreats back to this land that she’d inherited from her Aunt in upstate New York, and while she’s there she finds a manuscript that’s the life story of her Aunt, which is done as a long letter to her. So, with this new book, it’s going to be called The Amazing Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Kathryn Whaley. It’s the life story of this woman growing up in upstate New York and the strange adventures she had.”
Kim Deitch has no illusions, and feels his experimental format may not be for everyone.
“One thing with Pictorama is that, I don’t think a lot of people know what to do with it. I don’t think it’s exactly setting the world on fire. I think I stuck my neck out doing it and that I’m sticking my neck way outdoing the next one. It’s all experimental, and I hope that people like what I’m doing, but that isn’t my bottom line. My bottom line is that I’ve just got stories that I have to do. Right now, the economy stinks, and I’ve been saving my money and can live next year not making one red cent if I have to. It’ll take more than next year to do what I have to do. I’m naturally careful that way.”
Learn more about Kim Deitch.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Influencing Comics #5: George O'Connor's Top 5 Non Comics Influences
It was both harder and easier than one might expect to compile this list of my top five non-comics influences. The easy part was in recognizing them—every thing on this list has played a vital part in shaping what I do today. The hard part was in paring the list down—there are many, many more influences than these. I feel that I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t mention the enormous influence my parents had on me, first and foremost. Their unwavering support of me and my pursuit of an artistic career can not be underestimated. Now, onto the other top 5….
Raiders of the Lost Ark- In college, as I stayed up late nights drawing comics, I would play this movie incessantly in the background. Even with the sound turned off, there’s an incredible clarity to the storytelling. The opening sequence, from the Paramount/mountain intro, as you follow Indy and his companions through the jungle and into a deserted temple, is pure perfection. The way that for, like, five whole minutes you never even see Indy’s face—best character intro ever. Instant mythic. I searched high and low on the web to find that clip to no avail, but really, the whole movie is pure win. This movie probably influenced my sense of pacing and storytelling more than any other single influence, comics or otherwise. 
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak- The whole thing is only ten sentences long , 338 words. This is the book that made me want to do picture books for a living. Absolutely perfect, not a wasted line in the whole book. My own picture book Sally and the Some-Thing is in particular an homage to my love for this book.
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths- Like so, so many people, this book served as my introduction to the world of Greek mythology. Some of the pictures are pretty goofy, to say the least, but, damn, Ingri and Edgar D’auliare caught lightning in a bottle when they made this book. When I pitched Olympians to my editor, I referred to this book as the bible of Greek Mythology, and I think I couldn’t be more right than that. Just a glimpse of that bright orange–and-yellow cover still makes me smile.
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman- The rest of my influences on this list I first encountered in my childhood—however, I didn’t discover the His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, and The Amber Spyglass until after college. Hell, the first volume wasn’t even published until 1995. Initially set on an alternate earth where every person has his or her own personal daemon (an external manifestation of their soul in animal form) it eventually becomes a heart-breaking, universe-spanning exploration of the nature of god, sentience and heaven. Every character rings so true, their voices so clear. A few years back, for my own amusement, I did some painted comic adaptations of a few key scenes of the series. I have to dig those out and post them somewhere, Beautiful, beautiful books.
Jim Henson- It wasn’t until I sat down to write this list that I fully comprehended the magnitude of the effect the works of Jim Henson have had on me. My love of language and reading comes in no small part from Sesame Street. So much of my sense of humor has been influenced by his work on The Mupper Show<. Even films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (with design work by Brian Froud, another huge childhood influence), as flawed as they may be, had a profound effect on me growing up. Jim Henson remains for me a prime example of a man who followed his muse, a non-conformist who did it his way and profoundly altered the culture.
George O'Connor's first graphic novel, Journey Into Mohawk Country, used as its sole text the actual historical journal of the seventeenth-century Dutch trader Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, and told the true story of how New York almost wasn’t. He followed that up with Ball Peen Hammer, the first graphic novel written by playwright Adam Rapp, a dark dystopian view of a society’s collapse as intimately viewed by four lost souls. Now he has brought his attention to Olympians, an ongoing series retelling the classic Greek myths in comics form. In addition to his graphic novel career, he has published several children’s picture books, including the New York Times best-selling Kapow, Sally and the Some-Thing, and Uncle Bigfoot. Mr. O'Connor is over 300 feet tall, and anyone who makes his acquaintance reports a feeling of near-overwhelming euphoria. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
The first book on George's Olympians series, Zeus: King of the Gods will be available January 5th.
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