Archive for the ‘comics’ Category

Creator of Robin and the Joker dies

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Comic book artist Jerry Robinson has died at the age of 89. He worked on the Batman team and created Robin and The Joker. The BBC reports.

Superman comic sells for $2.1 million

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

A copy of the first issue of Action Comics, which includes Superman’s first appearance, has sold for $2.16m (about £1.4m). There’s speculation that the seller is movie star Nicolas Cage, who is a Superman nut. The BBC has the story.

R. Crumb on His Rejected New Yorker Cover

Monday, November 14th, 2011

The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. CrumbLove him or hate him, R. Crumb (Robert Crumb) always makes a statement with his art – he doesn’t leave a lot to be ambivalent about.

Vice has a brief interview with Crumb about a strange, back-and-forth, can’t-seem-to-make-up-our-minds episode involving a commissioned piece Crumb did for The New Yorker, which had been intended as a cover piece. The work depicted a couple of indeterminate gender applying for a marriage license while a dubious-faced employee looks on. There is a sign on the wall reading “Gender Inspection”, with an arrow. The drawing was going to be on the cover of an issue about gay marriage. Crumb got paid for his work, but the New Yorker apparently went back and forth and hemmed and hawed, before returning Crumb’s art to him, unused,
without explanation.

While his art is not always to my aesthetic tastes, I do like to read him in interviews. I find his blunt candor pretty refreshing.

Did the rejection offend you?
I’m in a privileged position because I don’t need the money. When you go to the cover editor’s office, you notice that the walls are covered with rejected New Yorker covers. Sometimes there are two rejected covers for each issue. I don’t know what the usual policy is, but I was given no explanation from David Remnick, the editor in chief, who makes the final decisions.

Has the New Yorker attempted to commission work from you since this cover?
Yeah, Françoise [Mouly, the art editor] keeps mailing me these form letters, which they send to various artists they like to use. It says something like, “OK, so here are the topics for upcoming covers.” They send it out a couple of times a year or something. But it’s a form letter, not a personal letter.

Did you receive an apology?
An apology? I don’t expect an apology. But if I’m going to work for them I need to know the criteria for why they accept or reject work. The art I made, it only really works as a New Yorker cover. There’s really no other place for it. But they did pay me beforehand—decent money. I have no complaint there. I asked Françoise what was going on with it and she said, “Oh, Remnick hasn’t decided yet…” and he changed his mind several times about it. I asked why and she didn’t know. Several months passed. Then one day, I got the art back in the mail, no letter, no nothing.

Bil Keane, The Man Behind The Family Circus, Dies

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

The writer and illustrator behind the long-running comic strip The Family Circus passed away yesterday.

Love it or hate it, The Family Circus was well-known for its depiction of the hardworking, nuclear American family, with mom, dad, and kids Billy, Dolly, Jeffy and PJ, as well as assorted pets over the years. Some of the most famous recurring gags included the classic dotted-line representing a child’s path to humorously demonstrate why it takes kids forever to do anything, children mispronouncing words with hilarious effect, and a lot of kids saying the darndest things.

Running since 1960, and now in syndication, the strip was beloved by many, and was often seen in recent years as a beacon of innocence and purity in a world that had outgrown it. While the strip often invited parody and ridicule from more cynical types as being old-fashioned and outdated, legions of fans nevertheless adored it for its nostalgia and themes of traditional family values and simplicity.

Keane was good friends with (and predeceased by) fellow funny-writers Erma Bombeck and Charles M. Schulz. He was 89 when he died. If the Family Circus has taught me anything, it’s that in the afterlife, he’ll be floating invisibly above us all in a brown robe, watching over us.

MetaMaus celebrates 25 years of Maus

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman is published this week. It celebrates the 25th anniversary of his ground-breaking graphic novel, Maus, and tells the story of how the original book was put together (via Jacket Copy).

If you don’t know Maus, it’s a comic book description of World War II in which the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. MetaMaus includes a multimedia DVD.

‘Tired’ Asterix creator quits after 52 years

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, is retiring after 52 years of drawing the Gaul because he is “a bit tired,” reports The Guardian. He’s 84.

The 50 Funniest American Writers

Friday, August 12th, 2011

A man called Andy Borowitz has written a book called The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor From Mark Twain to The Onion. It comes out in October. USA Today seems to know who Borowitz is but I haven’t got a clue. It’s a shame Bill Hicks didn’t write a book because I can’t think of any American comedian who has come close to him since he died in 1994. Shouldn’t John Kennedy Toole be on the list?

The 50 Funniest American Writers
Mark Twain
George Ade
O. Henry
Sinclair Lewis
Anita Loos
Ring Lardner
H. L. Mencken
James Thurber
Dorothy Parker
S. J. Perelman
Langston Hughes
Frank Sullivan
E. B. White
Peter De Vries
Terry Southern
Lenny Bruce
Tom Wolfe
Jean Shepherd
Hunter S. Thompson
Woody Allen
Bruce Jay Friedman
Philip Roth
Nora Ephron
Henry Beard
Michael O’Donoghue
George W. S. Trow
Fran Lebowitz
Charles Portis
Donald Barthelme
Veronica Geng
John Hughes
Mark O’Donnell
Garrison Keillor
Bruce McCall
Molly Ivins
Calvin Trillin
Dave Barry
The Onion
Susan Orlean
Roy Blount Jr.
George Carlin
Ian Frazier
David Rakoff
Bernie Mac
David Sedaris
Wanda Sykes
Jack Handey
David Owen
George Saunders
Jenny Allen
Sloane Crosley
Larry Wilmore

Video review: The Bedwetter vs Roseannearchy

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

My colleague Beth offers a double video review of books from American comedians – The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman and Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm by Roseanne Barr. (I had been wondering what Roseanne Barr had been doing for the past decade and now I know.)

A Visit to the Bookshelf of One Avid Reader

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

What are your bookshelves like? Are they many or few? Are they stuffed to the gills, messy, overlapping and stacked willy-nilly? Or are they tasteful and sparse, organized by color, genre, book size, publication date? Are your tastes narrow and clearly defined, or do they run the gamut from romance to rarities?

To those of us who love books and love reading, our bookshelves can be among the most prized and personal areas of our home. Now, you’re invited into the home of one of the AbeBooks staff to snoop at one of her bookshelves, see what she has, learn what she loves and perhaps find an idea for your next read.

(okay, it’s me – don’t mind my hat and wig collection in the background.)

Batman comic sells for $492,937

Friday, November 19th, 2010

A comic featuring the debut of Batman from 1939, that cost a gentleman called Robert Irwin 10 cents when he was a teenager, has sold for almost $500,000 at an auction in Dallas.

Walking Dead Trailer

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

walking-dead-vol-1-days-gone-bye-kirkmanI love Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead series of graphic novels. They came about when Kirkman was frustrated at how much he loved zombie movies, only to have them all end and not explore the continuing effect on society – the collapse, the adjustment, the rebuilding, the progression of events after the initial crisis. So, he decided to write it himself. With 13 volumes so far (I have ‘em all), the series is fresh and interesting. It ranges in tone from heartbreakingly hopeful to unthinkably horrific to occasionally even uneventful and dull, much as I imagine attempting to survive in the circumstances would. The story’s main character is Rick Grimes, a police officer who is shot in a standoff with a criminal, and wakes from coma in the hospital to find the world he knew, along with his wife and child, gone. Grimes sets out to look for his wife and son, to find what is left, to help where he can, and to survive. Other characters rotate in and sadly, often out, of the story.

If you’re a fan of zombie stories (it’s okay, everyone has to be a nerd about something), this series isn’t to be missed. The story is thoughtful, the art is fantastic, and I look forward to the rest to come.

And now, it’s going to be a television series, too! Please, please AMC – do it right. Don’t screw this up. From the trailer, I feel pretty optimistic that this could be good.

Cathy On the Way Out? ACK! Where’s my chocolate?

Friday, August 13th, 2010

abs-steel-buns-cinnamon-cathy-guisewiteI really loved the New Yorker blog Book Bench’s post this morning about the impending demise of the Cathy comic strip (finally). Many of the suggestions for how Cathy should end were hilarious, but mean-spirited. And it’s unsurprising, because Cathy, created by Cathy Guisewite, is an old-fashioned, innocent comic, out of its depth by today’s standards.

It’s funny that Meredith Blake, who wrote the post, should bring up The Family Circus, as well – I guess my mind isn’t the only one in which the two woefully outdated comics are intertwined. The Family Circus is downright eerie in some ways, with robed spectres of dead grandparents playfully haunting the children from time to time, and just too innocent to be funny in other ways. We get it, P.J. can’t pronouce “spaghetti”. It’s adorable. Pasketti. We get it.

Cathy just seems to have an enormous target on its (her?) back, in a world dominated by internet people trolling for their next victim of clever sarcasm. The simple formula of a woman trying to keep it together, constantly struggling with her weight, her diet, her (lack of, often) love life, her job, her budget and the like is nothing new to either reality or fictional media. But I think unlike the characters in Sex and the City, or Friends, who come off as lovable in their perfectly-polished quirks, Cathy often read as pathetic. She was often a sweaty mess in sweat pants, relying on the love of a cat and a tub of ice cream to comfort her when the hustle and bustle of the real world became too much. Constantly jamming the void in her soul and heart full of shoes, chocolate, sales at the mall and the like, it was hard not to wince and avert the eyes. Especially when it was intended as funny.

I think for some women, (not naming any names here, certainly not owning up to anything), the comic elicited cringes a lot more frequently than laughs. Partly, it just isn’t really funny, except in that Someone’s Got a Case of the Mondays kind of way, which has been done to death on mugs, calendars and novelty, mesh-backed hats for eons. Today’s edgy, blase audiences expect more, and sit stony-faced and yawning. Go ahead. make me laugh. Try.

But it also hits a little close to home. While Cathy is portrayed as cartoonishly bumbling, over-the-top sheepish and forever exasperated, she’s just an extreme caricature of what many of us struggle with – the battle between the desire to be comfortable but beautiful, relaxed but ambitious, honest but polished, successful, loved.

One can picture Cathy as a real woman, though possibly named Barb or Sue or Linda, easing her high heels off her swollen feet under her desk and trying to wedge the hole in her pantyhose between two of her toes. She sneaks a bit of diet, sugar-free chocolate from her desk drawer (sure, it upsets her stomach, but who can afford the calories? And we all need our little getaways during the day) and sighs contentedly. A coworker passes by her desk, and inquires what the good word might be. She replies with something about TGIF, or How goes the battle, or working hard or hardly working?, and their empty exchange is quickly forgotten. Her bright lipstick has faded throughout the day, leaving only a few coral flakes drying at the corners of her mouth, and her hairspray has given up the ghost, leaving her coiffure to sag in a slumped shadow of its earlier glory. Her smile is bright, but we see her, sitting beneath a poster of a cat dangling from a tree branch, with the words “Hang in there!”, and while her smile falters for a moment, we hope she does, and we think she will, and that is the way I want Cathy to end. With her hanging in there, and things looking up.

…in other news, how did I just end up writing a largely heartfelt (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) post about Cathy?! Need coffee…or chocolate… ACK!

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet, More Expensive Than Most Houses – Superman!

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel (1942)

The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel (1942)

A copy of the very first comic book in which Superman appeared fetched $1,000,000.00 at auction on February 22. You read that right – a million dollars.

The comic in question was Action Comics #1, which originally cost a dime when it was first released in 1938. The comic is credited by some with generating the initial interest in the idea of superheroes and saviors in comics. It is believed that fewer than 100 intact copies of Action Comics #1 still exist today. The copy sold on Monday was in unusually good condition – rated an unrestored 8 out of 10 – which accounts for the record-breaking price. The previous auction record for an issue of Action Comics 1 was less than half of that amount.

For those of us who are spending our spare millions on other things, but would still love to own a piece of collectible comic history, these might fit the bill a little better.

SUPERMAN: The Action Comics Archives - Volume 1. Bob Kahan (editor)

SUPERMAN: The Action Comics Archives - Volume 1. Bob Kahan (editor)

[caption id="attachment_9494" align="alignright" width="140" caption="Superman From The Thirties To The Eighties by E. Nelson Bridwell"]Superman From The Thirties To The Eighties by E. Nelson Bridwell[/caption]

Interview with Calvin & Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson

Monday, February 1st, 2010

something-under-bed-drooling-bill-wattersonCount me among the legions of fans who grieved, mourned and even lamented when it was announced back in 1995 that Bill Watterson was calling it quits, and his remarkable comic strip Calvin & Hobbes would be no more. I loved that strip. Wholly and unabashedly, I really did. I looked forward to it. It made me cry – the one where Calvin finds a sick baby raccoon and tries to nurse it back to health, only to have it die, comes to mind – and crack up laughing (way too many to even attempt to mention), and I eagerly followed the adventures of Spaceman Spiff, the transmogrifier, Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man, and the nefarious she-girl, Susie Derkins.

When Watterson announced the strip’s retirement, even while I was heartbroken and prayed it wasn’t true, it was fitting, and part of me was pleased. Like Gary Larson‘s The Far Side, which Larson had retired one year prior, the strip was still fresh, clever, original and creative, and Watterson left us wanting more. I really think that was the only way to do justice to Calvin & Hobbes. I loved Garfield as a child, delighting in the fat orange meatball of a cat and the dynamic between him, Odie, Jon, Nermal and the rest, but by the 1990s, Garfield had grown so tired, so repetitive, so unfunny and stale that I stopped reading it because it made me cringe. As I understand it, Jim Davis is still churning out the strips, albeit with help from others, too. Which would be all well and good if it were what he loved, if he still had more to say, if there was still anything left that was new. But to my eyes, it’s been a very long time since that could be accurately said.

Bill Watterson checked out at the right time. He was never the guy to put out action figures or t-shirts or….really much of any Calvin & Hobbes merchandise besides books, as far as I know. I know the first time I saw one of those godawful decals of Calvin urinating plastered on the side of a truck, I winced and prayed Watterson would never see one.

He checked out when he felt he’d told the story enough, and said all there was to say, and when we could imagine Calvin & Hobbes running off into the woods together for the rest of their adventures, rather than watching them grow unfunnier and more stale, losing the uniqueness and freshness that made them so beautiful.

And according to this interview, Watterson doesn’t regret a thing.

“I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.”

magical-world-calvin-hobbes-bill-watterson

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight – the Graphic Novel

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

twilight-graphic-novel

Exciting news for fans of Stephenie Meyer’s teen-heartthrob vampire saga Twilight. According to Entertainment Weekly’s blog Shelf Life, Meyer has approved a graphic novel adaptation of the series.

The artist is an illustrator with a fine arts background named Young Kim, and the first volume is scheduled to be released by Yen Press on March 16th, with a first print run of 350,000 copies. I suspect this will do very well. Preliminary looks at the art make it look like Sailor Moon meets The Hills meets Interview with the Vampire.