If you’ve never heard the name Frank Frazetta, that doesn’t mean you’ve never seen his work. In the latter 20th century, Frazetta was a prolific artist in the fields of fantasy, science fiction and comic art. As comfortable with swords, sorcery and unnaturally curvaceous space heroines as he was with caricature and parody, his work also made a splash in Mad Magazine.

Read more about Frazetta and see his work.

The Perogy Cat was born in 2003, which makes today his 10th birthday. If you want to be specific, it is the 10th anniversary of the first Perogy Cat drawing by Gareth Gaudin. If you just went: “what?” and enjoy comics, here’s a thing you might like to know about.

Gareth Gaudin arrives at his shop on a sunny Thursday morning to welcome us, and immediately finds that some drunken hooligan has presumably leapt in the air and smacked his wooden sign, which now hangs crookedly by one side only. He reaches to adjust it, then winces and tells us he has thrown his back out by obligingly tossing his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter in the air. Still, despite injury to both back and pride, Gaudin is good-humored, cheerful and game to go after ferreting out some acetaminophen from behind the counter.

The shop, which Gaudin runs with his co-owner Lloyd Chesley, is Legends Comics and Books, found at 633 Johnson Street in the heart of downtown Victoria, BC. The pair have been in business together since 2003 – Gaudin had been at Legends for a decade, was ready to buy, and went into partnership with Chesley.

Gaudin, a long-time Victoria resident and graduate of Oak Bay High School, also draws his own comic strip, The Magic Teeth Dailies, and is the mastermind behind…

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A Wrinkle in Time was one of my very favorite books as a child, and while some argue that adults who love the book are seeing through nostalgia-colored glasses, I think the book actually holds up quite well. The writing may not be entirely sophisticated, but even as a kid, I loved that it balanced simplicity with intelligence – I never like it had been dumbed down. And the heart of the book lies in relationships between characters, and human warmth and love – Meg for Charles Wallace, her mother, Calvin, Aunt Beast, and her father. It successfully explores complicated feelings (being very angry at, and feeling betrayed by, someone we love), all within the framework of a really excellent science fiction story full of adventure and evil school principals. I absolutely adored it, read it countless times (and its follow-up books A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet many times, too, though they were not quite as excellent, to me – I never made it as far as An Acceptable Time). I think the story would lend itself very well to accompanying art.

The woman behind the project is American illustrator Hope Larson, who has plenty of experience in the publication of graphic novels, most notably Chiggers. I’m hopeful this will be great. Due out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux next month – keep an eye out.

Art Spiegelman, who himself has straddled the boundary between childrens’ books and adults’ books with his graphic novel about the holocaust, Maus, (a must-read if you’re not familiar), wrote and drew an account of a visit he had with Maurice Sendak at his home in Connecticut, which you can see at Blown Covers. In its pages (which are beautifully illustrated, whether Spiegelman is convinced he can draw, or not), Sendak talks about children, and why he knows children should be given more credit than they are, with illustrative memories from his own childhood: “I remember my own childhood vividly…I knew terrible things, but I mustn’t let adults know I knew…it would scare them.”

I’ve also been very much enjoying looking at some of the original drawings by Maurice Sendak that we have on the site, including this inscription to a young fan named David, complete with original art by Maurice Sendak, from 1964. It looks like Sendak used to be much more cheerful. An exclamation point and everything!

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.

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 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.