SPX , LoM news and simply shameless self-promotion!

Hey Monster Fan! Ever since Kevin Mutch of Blurred Books and I started
pissing people off with our new blog of comics criticism , Next Issue! this past summer, I've been remiss in posting here on the personal side. My apologies! I got so caught up in Next Issue! - my own interests have sort of taken a back seat. But I'm back--with some news and updates--so without further ado:

ITEM! I will be appearing at SPX-still the original, premier small press comics convention on the East Coast-- Saturday, September 26 from 11AM to 7PM and Sunday, Sunday September 27 noon-6PM at The North Bethesda Marriott Convention Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

I'm excited because this year we've got a full table--and we'll be displaying a lot of wonderful stuff--and more importantly--we'll be running a big, big SALE on Look Out! Monsters- and all of our books! How big is big? How does this sound-"Look Out!Monsters"-$5.00! Nice Work--$5.00! Buy all four issues of Dr. Speck"-$5.00! Posters-$5.00!!!! So don't walk -- run for table-E11--It should be to the left as you walk in.

ITEM! I'm also hoping to draw some at the show-(If I've got enough maneuvering room) -and some of those drawings will feature the lead figure of my upcoming follow-up to "Look Out!Monsters" Hint: it ain't a monster book!

the drawings are likely to be in the manner of some of the material for the book--charcoal and pastel--large(18" x 24") and between $25.- $50. a pop. If you're looking for some original art-at an affordable price--look no further!

If you're looking for some originals at an unaffordable price-I should have some collages and masks with me too-if I can get together this make-shift display unit this weekend. But I make no promises!

ITEM! I have short piece in Andrei Molotiu's beautiful new book, ABSTRACT COMICS: the Anthology from Fantagraphics. This is the ground-breaking book that's creating so much buzz--and for good reason-there's a wealth of thought-provoking material between its covers.

ITEM! in addition to Abstract Comics, I also have a piece in the Silent Pictures exhibition organized around Art Spiegelman's collection of wordless comics, at the James Gallery at the CUNY Grad Center, 365 fifth avenue, NY. Curated by Andrei and Linda Norden, the show is up until October 11th.

Whew! shameless self-promotion is exhausting! How has the Man done it all these years?

The Barn: Studio #10

Last weekend was it-my wife Deb & I moved the last of my work out of my studio in Brooklyn and to our place in upstate NY. "We're getting too old for this" we said over and over as we carried load after load onto the passenger elevator, sweat staining our shirts. And as if to prove the point, as we were moving out a younger generation was moving in. As far as the art world goes, New York belongs to the young-with dreams still fresh and lives yet to be determined. The trials and tribulations of city life lie less heavily upon shoulders buoyed by enthusiasm and unburdened by disappointment.
So this is it--The Barn. Studio #10, by our count, in this vocation of mine.
And it feels great. Man it fits like a glove. Behind the house and next to the garden, the cow bell rings when she wants me to come in--or she just walks up the ramp to visit. I got the tunes cookin' and I play 'em loud--and there's no one to answer to, no one to complain. It feels like I've always been here-or that I've finally found the place I've been looking for. Age does have some benefits.
Before I moved in-I put up a wall-gotta have a working wall. And this is the initial configuration:
I'm going to add another piece of sheetrock on the right side-so the working wall will be twelve feet in length-which should be sufficient. And eventually I'll put up shelves and when I get the courage up I'll clean the batshit out of the loft.

and these are the first sketches--a few warm-ups, just to get a groove going, get the feel of the place. Pastel and charcoal-nothing too heavy--just for fun:

I did them on crumpled up newsprint that was used as packing material in a box UPS brought us. I love working on garbage.

Well we don't drink anymore, I've even given up carbonation! So we'll break a bottle of Aquafina or something on the bow, and christen thee "The Barn". Here's to hard work and lost time. Here's to inspiration and life yet lived. Here's to seeing her in the garden just below my window on a hot summer's day. Here's to the cow bell and barbecues and sunsets. Here's to Studio #10. Long may she reign.

Goodbye, Brooklyn.

George Sprott

I have been an intermittent reader of the Sunday funnies as printed in the NYTimes magazine, but not much of a fan. Leave it to the Times to take all of the lower east side ruff -n-tumble out of the comics and dress'em up and slick back their hair for presentation to society-folk uptown.

The Funnies weren't good enough for the Times, they had to wait until comics had been officially declared "Art" by the rest of the world before presenting them to mother. (And not on newsprint either-might soil your hands.)

That being said, of the many excellent cartoonists given audience in those pages in the last few years, none has fared better within the weekly format than Seth, whose contribution, "George Sprott", has just been collected in a beautiful package by Drawn & Quarterly.

I had been eagerly anticipating a "Sprott" collection, and somehow thinking it was to take the humble format of "Wimbeldon Green" , I was not prepared for the oversize book I finally held in my hands. To cut to the chase( for those who have lives), this is a terrific book, gorgeous to behold and far surpassing my expectations. It very well may be Seth's best work yet, it is certainly my favorite. Go buy it now.

Seth is one of those few cartoonists whose visual style is so perfectly suited to his literary pre-occupations you might have thought he worked it up as some graduate thesis in post-modern aesthetics. But rather than some distant academic pursuit, total immersion in "style" is an absolute necessity of life for Seth, a compulsion thoroughly examined in "It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken", his first book.

That pre-occupation has something to do with style-not as fuel for nostalgic reverie, but as signifier of a futile quest-to come to terms with life's passing, and to grasp something solid from the sand that slips through the hourglass. There is no stopping time, but in the post-modern era, style is all that is left to us. Movie set designers have made careers out of reconstructing the look of the past in exacting detail-masterfully manipulating the cultural signifiers of memory and loss( was the world ever sepia-tone? Or black and white?) and we accept that manipulation as not only pre-requisite for a journey to an historical period , but as some kind of proof of authenticity-as if the "authentic past" were something tangible, something verifiable in experience.

In "George Sprott" , as well as in "Wimbeldon Green" , Seth's visual style presents as an apparent pastiche of some undefinable past manner of the cartoon-whether from the back pages or side bars of magazines from the '40's or '50's, or the gag cartoons of "The New Yorker" -we're never exactly sure. While at the same time, that style, both in surface and substance, is absolutely contemporary, impossible to conceive of in any other era. In Seth's visualizations the past is fuzzy and indistinct, yet it is right there- forever present and out-of reach.

And what is wonderful in "George Sprott"-and I think a grand achievement amidst Seth's body of work, is the application of this approach- with all of its contradictions- in the service of portraiture. For Sprott too, is right there; given to us in fits and starts, in broad, sweeping strokes-as detailed a portrait as any of us is ever likely to receive-and yet Sprott remains unknowable, an unresolved tangle of reminiscences.

Television has become one the major repositories of cultural memory, we judge entire eras by their television "look"-(as if all of the Sixties really looked like "The Mamas and the Papas" on the Ed Sullivan show, and the Seventies like "the Brady Bunch" and "Charlie's Angels") and Seth's lead character is aptly enough, a television personality of the 1960's. Fittingly, all of the tapes for his shows have been lost, and so, that particular past, which would necessarily dominate all other pasts competing to define George Sprott, is left to be filled in by the voices of the interviewees; the friends, colleagues and relatives who tell his story. What are we missing without these video tapes? The suggestion is-- that while the TV shows are a tantalizing missing piece of the puzzle --not much. The essence of a life, lies beyond television's capabilities-and well beyond that of any single memory. We think we know Ed Sullivan, Robert Young, George Reeves. But what do we know? An image, a phantom, splayed out upon a screen in endless repetition.

How many times have we watched dvds of some obscure television show from our childhood, in the vain, unspoken hope that via the flickering images on the screen we might touch, feel, smell -something of that we have lost? Like the character in Jack Finney's "Time and Again" we

think by laying out the artifacts of a period past we might construct a time machine--as if time were merely some intellectual construct, rather than biological necessity.

The narrator of Seth's masterwork speaks simply and eloquently of time, and in so doing sums up the cartoonist's ambition and achievement: "...Maybe it's like these funnies..."

Look Out! Monsters News

Item!

In February of this year I received a University grant to help me publish a follow-up to Look Out! Monsters - and by this time next year that book should be in available to the public. ( And that means MoCCA -- if it remains a June show). I don't want to say too much just yet--but I can tell you this: I'm a little guy, but I like a big sandbox to play in-so LoM #2 ( and that's only the working title)will again be a large format collage-comic. It will involve newsprint and it will be tactile! It will be artsy-farty! It will be inscrutable. You will again pick it up and ask yourself-" what the f#*k?"

The other details I'll keep close to the vest for now-except to say that certain movie monsters don't seem to be lurking about it's pages.

News will be delivered as it suits me! so check back!

excessive heat

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I'm afraid I just don't get all the fuss about Cold Heat, Frank Santoro and Ben Jones' trippy political thriller .I don't have the newest 48-page double issue which everyone is raving about, but I have read the the first four issues online-and well... ok. The story, which centers around a teenage girl named Castle and the near simultaneous deaths of a 90's rock icon and a politician's son, is entertaining enough, to be sure- in a Quentin Tarentino "I love trashy B-movies" kind of way. But Tarentino's manic-obsessive involvement with the mechanics of genre movie-making is what makes his best films so compelling, and from what I've read so far-Cold Heat doesn't rise to that level.

Yes -Cold Heat offers an array of neo-geo Paper Rad-style psychedelia all mixed up with a Nancy Drew-on-acid thriller--and that's amusing and entertaining as far as it goes. But too often the art (at least in the issues offered on-line) just doesn't live up to its ambition--or hype. After some scrutiny it seems clear that the artists have apparently developed some kind of algebraic equation, i.e.-the lack of detail and/or precision in execution in any given scenario is in inverse proportion to the amount of passion felt by the artist and thereby communicated to the reader, wherein passion = truth and truth = self-expression, or pi, or whatever. Thus detail is an obstacle to passion, proportion and volume are impediments to veracity, control is a barrier to expression.
I might be swayed by the argument if the art practiced what it preached with any kind of consistency--but Santoro's art is wildly erratic, and not in a way that always serves the story. Though there are occassional images of imagination and expressive power, the linework offers little variation, a sameness that lies flat on the surface. And then there are moments when one feels Santoro has a situation he simply does not have the patience or skills to address adequately. (He speaks to matters of temperament and sensibility in a revealing interview at Inkstuds)

In his best moments Santoro applies a delicate, lyrical, almost impressionistic approach to landscape-and after looking at his grand-opus "Storeyville" and "Cold Heat" one imagines that he may actually be quite a fine landscape painter. But these are qualities that are utterly lacking from his figurative work. And what passes for figurative work is just so inconsistent from one page to the next that it is impossible not to be "thrown out" of the story and into critical mode. (early on in the series, the characters are so difficult to recognize from panel to panel that the letterer has resorted to giving them identifying labels.)







The overlay of psychedelia may provide the narrative with a visual key to Castle's drug induced perceptions, but there's no escaping the nagging suspicion that the obsessive patterning is covering up for shortfalls in the illustrations.And I'm not advocating any sort of DC/Marvel mainstream photo-referenced approach to drawing in comics. I'm not into that. But I am questioning the apparent equivalence drawn between a particular manner of execution and its expressive capability, prevalent in a growing body of "art-comics" these days.

One of those professor's statements from art-school that has remained with me over the years : "don't think that just because you're feeling something that it translates into good painting."

He went on to say that over-the-top passion, the kind that young art-students tend to equate with some kind of truth, rarely results in great art( more often than not it makes for a big mess). Good painting, drawing, comics, is the result of a deliberative process, and some kind of balance between vision, temperament and skill. Pollock, De Kooning, Kline; Van Gogh, Matisse, Munch; Redon, Picasso, Schiele; Kirby, Herriman, Segar, Wilson, -all of these artists are expressionists of one kind or another-and all were disciplined and skilled in their approach to painting and drawing. Spontaneity and improvisation were hard-won attributes, skills developed over years of study-and it's evident in the quality of their work. Take a look at the most casual of Matisse's drawings or collages and you will see linework that is rich and full, that sounds a whole host of notes, not simply one key of the piano repeated over and over.











One of the best texts on drawing I know, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting reveals that the most fleeting and spontaneous of Chinese Bamboo drawings, is the result of deliberation, patience and skill. The spirit of "chih" is arrived at through the artist's immersion in these qualities, revealed in the moment they place brush to paper. And brush is not placed to paper until the artist has achieved a moment of quiet, allowing for mind and body to act in unison. It's a text that offers good lessons-lessons that quickly dispell any romantic notions one might have about the relationship of passion to execution.








How much is the quality of a comic determined by its visualization?
There's no denying that Santoro's work offers an argument for a particular approach to visualizing comics. (listen to him discuss Chris Ware's work in the Inkstuds interview and you'll see what I mean ). He obviously believes in what he's doing, and to a number of folks he's made a compelling case.
His work displays a connection to 19th-century romantic-expressionist belief systems, and shows a strong connection the prints of Edvard Munch.


But the power of Munch's vision is his alone, and Munch's formal attributes are altogether more finely honed than those Santoro displays in Cold Heat. And I have yet to be swayed that a gestural approach to graphics in the tradition of the late 19th-early 20th century makes for better comics, unless, of course, one is in fact a late 19th- early 20thc. master. (or Sue Coe. or David Sandlin. or Eddie Campbell. or...)

Santoro speaks to this in the aforementioned Inkstuds interview when he mentions Chris Ware's conception of the symbol in comics--and it's a discussion well worth engaging. At this point I think Ware's approach is aesthetically more tenable.

I find the story of Cold Heat entertaining although not mind-blowing. But its visualizations more or less ruin it for me. Others disagree--but for me, I think it starts with the art --and if I don't dig it, then I don't buy it. And at $20. a pop, I'm not engaged enough to find out if Cold Heat 5-6 is more to my liking.

"The Making of Look Out! Monsters at Comicmonsters.com

If you're one of the millions, billions who've purchased "Look Out!Monsters" only to ask-"what the?"--then fret no more! "The Making of Look Out! Monsters" is now a feature article at THE premier Horror Comics site-Comicmonsters.com! So what are you waiting for--

hit the link and resolve all those questions that have kept you awake so many, many nights!

The Making of Look Out!Monsters!

Nice Work updates on Fridays!

1961! Kennedy! the Mob! Castro! in The Wild, Wild West with Johnny Cat, Sinatra-stand-in supreme! Every Friday at Modern Tales and Webcomicsnation! Here's a taste: