Author Archives: Bill Randall

I like big books and I cannot lie

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KramersIsBig

 
Here, with the other largest books I own, is it. Taken with a 16-35mm lens on the wider end of the zoom. KE7 is in the back; it’s bigger than it looks, due to the lens distortion.

For reference, that’s Chippendale’s mammoth Ninja on the right. Contemporary World Architecture on the left comes with a plastic briefcase so you can actually carry the thing. The only book I know bigger than KE7 is GOAT; it weighs 75 pounds, and the copy I saw covered an entire table. So KE7‘s smaller & cheaper; GOAT‘s like 4 grand.

I’ve paged through KE7 twice, but I don’t know how to read it. Maybe on a podium standing up. In the Parthenon. The best comics, I couldn’t get close enough to read at the words.

For the others, several disappoint me– Jaime Hernandez’s, for instance– for failing to address the scale. Others, like the Johnny Ryan page, disappoint for being boring cover versions of himself. (And including them over, say, Vanessa Davis, Renee French, Lauren Weinstein, and Geneviève Castrée’s a shame. And a chance to note that only four women artists are in the book, for whatever reason; I would have liked to see a Lynda Barry collage rather than coprophiliac doodles.) The exception that proves the rule for these is John Hankiewicz’s entry, with the same panel drawn over and over, wonderfully, unrelentingly claustrophobic.

The best works are quite stunning. And a fulfillment of the promise of KE4. They come from cartoonists active as painters and printmakers– like Leif Goldberg, whose comics I dislike but whose prints I collect. And Nilsen, Santoro, Furie, Boyle. Carol Tyler has a beautifully painted page; Kevin H. seems to sum up his career in just a few giant panels. Ben Katchor plays with scale first, then with newspaper format; Tom Gauld shows off why his art’s simplicity is deceptive. CF turns in a double-splash that looks as good as any of his silkscreen prints.

You could buy 50-60 frames, cut the spine, and open a gallery.

***

The two artists who best exemplify KE7 are Dan Zettwoch and Xavier Robel (half of Elvis Studio). Zettowch turns in an epic from the tailgate to the gridiron; Robel’s got some insane constructivism going on. One’s traditional, one experimental; both brilliantly pitch scale and color against the unique opportunity of these huge, huge pages.

Electric Anterview

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I hope everyone reads this interview with Frederik Schodt by the intrepid Electric Ant tribe (cf. Same Hat!). Topics covered: translating Tezuka with whiteout & typewriter; not realizing you couldn’t just waltz up to Tezuka Pro and ask to translate stuff; being terrified by protofandom; and not knowing citrus industry vocab (yuzu? mikan?). And comics industry stuff, like whether manga’s a bubble or not, shojo etc, but that’s just the drapes.

Either because the chat’s not related to a PR cycle, or because I’m just interested in why Westerners ended up in Japan in the 60s/70s, it seems like a rare interview where the speaker’s personality shines through.

(An aside: it’s interesting that Schodt first wound up in Japan through his father’s diplomatic work: so many of the Americans who settled there, like Donald Richie, Oliver Statler, and Donald Keene, went on military coattails; of course, Schodt’s younger than those guys. Either way, I can only imagine how much things have changed.)

Euroscraps

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A couple things turned up while researching a couple quick articles on Finnish cartoonists, nice to be reminded of if nothing else:

Some images by Stefano Ricci

Comicstills, rather than Rube Goldberg’s moon-running, offers images from a few dozen Euro alt-artists. It’s an illustration agency– that is, an chance to sample fine drawings by some top artists hard to find for 0 Euros. Stefano Ricci, Marko Turunen, Anke Feuchtenberger.

And Electrocomix, with a few dozen free PDF files by some fine cartoonists. Many of their offerings sample from anthologies like Canicola, featuring great new talents like Amanda Vähämäki and Michaelangelo Setola. From Glömp #9 there’s Olivier Schrauwen’s metal-barbarian rout “The Trap,” and three good stories by Hong Kong’s Chihoi. And Ulli Lust, so exuberant for the onset of spring, not safe for church, but please donate a Euro-fifty on your way out the döör.

A page by Chihoi

Two Hangings.

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Lately I’ve been thinking not of Noah, but an article of his in TCJ #291 on fine artists Ryan Christian and Neil Whitacre. Lazy executive summary: they cross-pollinate with comics– go look.

Two exhibits now at the Cincinnati Art Museum present two more artists ripe for cross-pollination. I’d love to see what kind of comics they’d do, or you’d do after seeing them.

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First, Ryan McGinness fills a room with blacklights and canvasses. Big in Japan, McGinness is well known to Giant Robot readers and design fans. Aesthetic Comfort overflows with his trademark icons– like the blue man of the restroom, except it’s a stormtrooper and a skater.

As if to put the lie to Damien Hirst’s spin paintings, McGinness turns in three large discs overflowing onto the wall. Each holds dozens of silkscreened images, repeated over and over. His fluorescent acrylic colors can’t be reproduced digitally, and each icon rests on layers of other icons, layers of paint. It certainly makes the notional rather tactile.

***

Upstairs, Ji?í Anderle has prints. Drypoint, mezzotint, etching. I bought the catalogue like a sinner, because the book’s printing loses all the glorious details of where paper met the plate. (And the pages aren’t three feet tall.)

Anderle, one of the few in the Czech avant-garde who occasionally got out of the country under Communism, draws half Old Master, half avant-garde. Since this blog’s on comics, I can point to Barron Storey and his lineage, like Bill Sienkiewicz and Dave McKean. The media are different, and Storey et al. draw from punk rock as much as Klimt. But they all share radical experimentation based on a classical foundation. (And Anderle’s 1980s series of Commedia dell’arte images have a grotesque king presaging Metalzoic-era Kevin O’Neill, the only artist whose style itself got rejected by the Comics Code). But while comics (and its printing processes) treat each image as a commodity for the narrative, Anderle’s reward deeper looking.

I want to write more on Anderle. On his minute steps through space and time, punning on the states of an etching. But I need a few more hours with the prints. Fortunately, Illusion and Reality runs until January 4 and costs nothing.
***

And while I would like to see both these artists do a comic or two, Anderle’s contemporary Jan Krej?í did at least a page:

Alt-manga on the way

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Very good news for readers of my column, tipped by the gents at Same Hat! Same Hat!:

Top Shelf has a big anthology of manga from the avant-garde magazine AX on the way. Scottish expat/comics writer Sean Michael Wilson is joining series editor Mitsuhiro ASAKAWA for the 400-page volume.

As to the lineup they mention, I like Maruo & Furuya’s works about as far as I can throw them, but on some of the others:

  • Akino Kondoh I quite like, as I wrote about her in TCJ #289
  • Shinichi Abe too; he was one of three Garo artists (along with the guy who founded the comics store Mandarake and Suzuki OUJI) who define the magazine in the 70s; I bet they include his counterculture short “Yasashii Hito”
  • Nishioka Kyodai (or “Brosis” as they’re sometimes called) are a brother-sister duo who do creepy tales in delicate lines that recall Renee French
  • Yoshihiro Tatsumi? Really? What has D&Q missed?
  • Kataoka Toyo does grotty slice-of-life, and fires surface-to-air missiles from the nose (site in Japanese only, but you can poke around & find images)
  • Naoto Yamakawa does an odd-looking comic called “One More Coffee” that I’ve never read in a cartoony style that wouldn’t have looked out of place in pre-Kramers USA alt-comics
  • Toshio Saeki does finely-bound (cough) volumes of erotica (I guess, I haven’t read them either, but that’s what they looked like in the bookstore before the grannies walked by and made me too self-conscious to pick them up)

That’s a solid lineup, but there should be much more. As that the three previous English-language anthologies of alt-manga barely contained one good volume of work among them, this news makes me both hopeful and cautious.

I hope our guides choose quality over representative works. Too many of the latter just aren’t that good. (And I’d add that some of the most-praised artists, like Nemoto, who has a PictureBox book coming out, I find wanting).

But we should see Kotobuki Shiriagari & Imiri Sakabashira, two greats, and many more. I haven’t picked up AX in a couple of years, so I hope I’ll be surprised. With this book, some scanlations here & there, and the “Nouvelle Manga” works Frédéric Boilet has been promoting, you can get a very good idea of the most interesting new manga without torturing yourself by learning kanji.

(Also, the new AX has Hideo Azuma on the cover; Noah’s carnivorous review of his Disappearance Diary in the new TCJ had me howling & scowling.)

~~~

Update: For clarity’s sake, this is NOT a list of who’ll be in the book, just Ryan’s list of various artists in AX. Though I’ll be surprised if many of these aren’t, and will comment again whenever the full list is available.

Also: this is a test: ?????

Article 1.75

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Noah has invited me to join him and Tom at this blog; I’m chuffed. But I have some real life stuff to take care of. My other blog is on hiatus until December.

Hmmm.

Well, since that one’s mostly an archive, here I’ll just join the conversation. (I won’t be a Heavy Hitter for a few months at least, but I’ll do my best.)

Figure 1. The Heavy Hitter.

So. Censorship. Here’s a take:

The last supercomic I followed, Sandman finishing up (gothy cloaks are capes– do people still read it?), had Neil Gaiman, who’s joined Frank Miller et al. all the time for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. They say they fight censorship. But I think, aesthetically, censorship’s usually a good thing. Constraints spur invention. An OuLiPian/OuBaPian idea, sure, but I think it plays out.

Manga, for one, benefited from strict obscenity laws. Especially in the 70s, these comics screamed sex & violence, but had to bend over backwards, usually with ropes, to skirt the law. Baroque visual codes sprouted for all manner of filth. Low Symbolism for the gutterminded, more interesting by half.

Those manga (barely) support a political reading. The obscenity law, from the 1907 Criminal Code, was part of Japan’s dash to fit in the Western world. Before that, popular woodblock prints teemed with smut. And political censorship often fosters great art: Czech film before ’68 and early 5th Generation Chinese film come to mind. So too samizdat’s energies, and ever and always poetry (save John Wilmot).

But the Comics Code episode strikes me as simple capitulation. A weak industry got whipped. No one in comics had much to say, anyway (“I cut off her head,” oh, please). In the other American example, Hollwood and the Hays Code from ’34 on, an industry self-censored for commercial purposes. Filmmakers still pushed the boundaries, with elaborate codes and subtexts. Comics creators, not so much. The Hays Code was dropped in ’68; the Comics Code wasn’t revised until ’71, and again in ’89.

Now, in a post-Crumb, anything-goes American industry, censorship’s still the cause celebre. The CBLDF’s a one-issue fund. It does good in the world, but mainly for unwitting red-state retailers carrying comics showing First Amendment genitals. Again, these are industry (read: industrial) issues, about keeping markets open. I can’t think of a single case in which the CBLDF helped a creator fight editor & publisher for self-expression’s sake.

Meanwhile, I can think of dozens whose intellectual property rights have been trampled. That issue seems more important in comics than censorship. Of course, too few people ever talk about that with movie deals on the line.

Update from Noah: This post is in part a response to this one