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

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.

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.)

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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: ?????

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.)

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