Archive for the ‘R. Crumb’ Category

Crumb goes for a ride and three from NYCC – My October in Comics part 1: 10/3-10/9

October 25, 2010

This week: So behind, but I don’t want to blow three weeks of stuff on one triple-length column, so I’ll be putting up three columns this week and then try to get back on schedule for next week’s. Today: the different goals of Crumb and Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, three short thoughts on stories from NYCC and, of course, What I Read.

CRUMB: GENIUS, CRAZY PERSON

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since I’ve seen Crumb, at least ten years, and I’m not entirely certain I saw the whole thing back then in my early or mid teens. Picking up the new Criterion edition from the library, I was surprised by the details that had stuck with me—the sexual gratification Crumb gets from his own drawings—and by what I had forgotten—the near-overshadowing of Robert Crumb in the film by his brothers Charles and Maxon.

I realized only partway through that the scene I remembered most vividly—Crumb finishing an interview to jump onto the back of a waiting woman, who carries him away—is in fact from American Splendor, which explains why I remember it so well, as I’ve seen that film much more recently. Instead, Crumb treats viewers to the more disturbing scene of a pestering Crumb coercing an unwilling ex-girlfriend into giving him a similar ride at a museum exhibit of his work, climbing onto her as she tries to get away before reluctantly giving in, the camera crew following along.

That’s a fairly telling moment of this portrait of the artist. It’s not a film that is very interested in delving very deeply into comics or Crumb’s place in the field, which is likely a factor in its appeal outside of the comics world; it’s more a look at a very strange and talented artist and his even stranger (and perhaps more talented?) family. Which is not to say it completely ignores Crumb the artist—it quite successfully translated printed pages into moving-picture material without resorting to animating it, and some of the most transfixing moments are of Crumb drawing. Much like how people who saw Jack Kirby draw have described the sight, Crumb has that ability to just draw, with no underdrawing or no outlining, just filling in detail from one edge until a picture is complete.

Crumb the human being is harder to spend two hours with, but no less fascinating. There is no requirement that artists be moral paragons, but in Crumb’s case it is precisely his artistic accomplishments that allow him to get away with open misogyny and possible racism. At least one commentator says that Crumb unleashes his unfiltered id into his comics, and Crumb himself notes that he doesn’t think much about why he draws the things he draws. That lack of reflection is borne out when he is asked about how he draws black people, and rather than answer the question, he argues that only “white liberals” complain. I find that unlikely, but we next see a white woman object to and two white men defend Crumb’s portrayal of blacks. No black art critics are asked their opinion. It’s admirable that the film doesn’t shy from this element of Crumb’s art, but it is surprising, given that the film brings it up, that it doesn’t try very hard to confront it. Nevertheless, it is clear that what many of the interview subjects of the film respond to in Crumb’s work is a combination of its outre element (we are talking about Underground Comix here) and its unquestionable artistry—what message, if any, it actually has is secondary.

Crumb’s actual statements about the world aren’t particularly different from any other “hippy” (in quotes since Crumb notes that he was never actually able to fit in amongst hippy circles) artists out there, though we see enough of his general attitude that we can speculate many of his opinions come as much from his psychology as his politics. For instance, it’s hard to say if his complaints about logo T-shirts being “walking advertisements” are a political stance or a symptom of misanthropy. There’s an undeniable conservative streak at play in the notion that the world of decades ago, before his birth, were a better time.

The other subjects of the film are an interesting bunch as well. Aline Kominksy-Crumb comes across much more forceful, confident and louder than her husband, and he seems at times overwhelmed, a dynamic that reminded me of Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife, in Wild Man Blues. I found myself wondering if this type of relationship is something that quiet, neurotic artists are attracted to.

Crumb’s brothers Charles and Maxon play a large role, and the brotherly dynamic between the three is presented as a formative influence on Crumb’s art. In the bits of childhood artwork we see, Charles is at least as good as Robert, and already stranger. At the time of the filming (he killed himself shortly after), Charles was living with their mother, completely divorced from the outside world, and it’s almost a picture of what Crumb could be imagined to have become had his own art not become so wildly popular and allowed him to enter the outside world without ever really adjusting to it, parts of it instead reshaping around him, as in his museum piggyback ride. We see less of Maxon, but he also seems lost, talking about getting in trouble for molesting women and seeming most at home on his mat of nails (he didn’t have enough wood to make a bed of nails).

All in all, Crumb is an amazing character study of a truly bizarre family and the one member of it who went on to become one of the most influential comics artists of all time. How he became that isn’t really touched on, but what his life was like in the 1990s once he had achieved that is expertly and surreally captured.

Later in the same week, I decided it would make an interesting contrast to watch Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, several copies of which had been floating around the Dark Horse offices after being given away at this year’s Eisner Awards. And the contrast is indeed stark. While Crumb focuses on personality over comics history, Portrait of a Sequential Artist is much more about the comics tradition Eisner arose from and his influence on the comics field. While the majority of commentators in Crumb were art critics, most of Portrait of a Sequential Artist’s are cartoonists (Trina Robbins is the only person interviewed in both films). Portrait of a Sequential Artist is clearly the product of great admiration for Eisner, but it is not particularly personal, and there are no revelations to be had about Eisner’s life or work. It’s a perfectly workmanlike piece of filmmaking, and will no doubt be useful to students of comics history, but it is not itself a work of art as is Crumb. It’s difficult to imagine Portrait of a Sequential Artist gaining an audience outside of the comics world. Which might be fine; as a comics devotee, I found it quite enjoyable, if not uniquely so.

THREE QUICK THOUGHTS ON THREE NYCC ITEMS

NOT A LOT actually jumped out at me from my 3,000-mile vantage on NYCC, but here are three brief items that played to some of my specific obsessions:

As a buyer of comics, I can’t help but be pleased. What I find more interesting, though, is something I’ve been wondering for a while in light of all the online discussion of pricing: do many regular comics shoppers pay full cover price or close to it? I’m in a fairly privileged position right now, in that the price increase from $2.99 to $3.99 was largely counteracted by the employee discount I get for working at DH changed from 20% to 33% at roughly the same time (meaning my cost per comic only went up $0.28). However, I’ve often gotten discounts between 15% and 25% for maintaining a pull list at different stores, and I assume this to be the case with most fans who follow comics closely enough to comment frequently on the Internet, but I feel like I don’t hear it mentioned often (incidentally, long before I followed the business side of comics, the first time that the policies of a major publisher affected my budget was when my local store dropped its discount from 25% to 20% thanks to Marvel’s Heroes World self-distribution debacle). When commentators do the math, it always seems to use $3 and $4 as the only numbers in play. The average cover price of comics is well covered, but I’m curious what the average price-per-comic a reader with a pull list actually pays.

On a related note, I’m sure Marvel was probably planning their announcement before hearing DC’s (how could approval for reducing prices on several titles be received within an hour?), but it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to learn otherwise after their performance in the wake of DC being the first company to announce a digital royalties program: “We had one first! We just didn’t tell anyone. Including the talent receiving the royalties.” [Ed. note: whether Marvel’s announcement was a reaction to DC’s or not, the recent release of January solicitations makes one thing about it clear: it was not true.]

Does this mean Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca have to give back their Best New Series Eisners?

Bendis is a consummate pitchman and given to hyperbole, so I’ll wait until its released to see if it really turns on concepts no one has ever thought of before (Bendis is currently making the same claim about the upcoming year of Ultimate Spider-Man), but his style of dialogue and Oeming’s art style seem ideal for a kids’ book, and I like the idea of Marvel trying some kids’ superhero comics not based on existing characters. I’m looking forward to this.

READ THIS WEEK:

  • Action Comics #893 by Paul Cornell, Sean Chen & Wayne Faucher and Nick Spencer & R.B. Silva
  • The Authority: The Lost Year #12 by (Grant Morrison,) Keith Giffen, Jerry Ordway & Kevin Nowlan
    So this series was pretty much a train wreck, which disappoints me to say, as I like Keith Giffen (I’m currently enjoying Doom Patrol, where Giffen is having better luck reconfiguring Morrison concepts). I bought the first Giffen issue, but have picked the rest out of the DC comps that a few higher-ups at Dark Horse receive and are kind enough to share, and wouldn’t have continued with the series if I hadn’t been able to do so for free. It’s pretty much a test case in why there’s no point in continuing a creator-centered series without that creator. When the Morrison/Ha Authority relaunch began, it was a big deal, and when it collapsed that was unfortunate. Wildstorm’s subsequent decision to revisit the series later and retrofit it into a “lost year” between the old Authority and the new, post-apocalyptic one is mystifying, and while the storyline, which has seen the Authority adrift in the multiverse, visiting a series of alternate versions of itself, has a vaguely Morrisonian flavor to it, Giffen doesn’t seem to have had either enough information about Morrison’s original plan nor room to go off on his own, and the series has just lain there as a result. This final issue is composed entirely of denouement, with some of the better art the series has seen post-Ha, but there’s not much for Ordway and Nowlan to draw, as the issue is more concerned with explaining the theme of the series than in depicting its fallout, and its necessarily anticlimactic, as we already know what will happen next.
  • Batman Beyond #3 by Adam Beechen, Ryan Benjamin & John Stanisci
  • Booster Gold #35 by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Chris Batista, Pat Olliffe & Rich Perrotta
  • Fantastic Four vol. 1 HC by Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo, Karl Kesel, et al.
    Read this after my recent survey of the last of the Old Marvel Fantastic Four issues, and it is certainly a fresh start. The first issue features an oblique look at the origin and a new P.R. firm (never seen again) for F.F. Inc., in response to the in-story lack of interest in and loss of sales by the company. It’s a clear reference to the state of the franchise itself, and Waid and Wieringo set out to modernize and reinvigorate the series, and it works for the most part. Wieringo shows a great feel for the characters, giving each a unique personality through body language, and he has no trouble drawing a multitude of strange settings and creatures Waid picks up the characters pretty quickly, too, although it takes most of the book for it to look like he’s not trying too hard, and the family stuff never entirely gets away from saccharine. There are plenty of good ideas, like Johnny being made CFO of F.F. Inc, as well as some facile ones like Reed defeating a more occult-powered Doom by admitting he doesn’t understand magic (a variation on “You can’t copy the Justice League’s powers; we just disbanded the Justice League”). All in all, it’s high-energy, light stuff, which was exactly what the franchise needed after the absurdly complex and continuity-heavy run that preceded it, though the result is that ten years on it doesn’t seem as special as it once did.
  • Fantastic Four in… ¡Ataque del M.O.D.O.K.! by Tom Beland & Juan Doe
    I don’t really know why I found this less satisfying than Beland and Doe’s first take on the FF (I somehow missed the second). Doe’s art and coloring have improved, and the stark red flashbacks of the new hero character are a highlight. The story feels a little too comfortable, maybe, Reed and Sue enjoying themselves in Puerto Rico, the appearance by M.O.D.O.K. seemingly an afterthought. It’s also more overtly in Beland’s romance vein than the other issue, with a flashback to Sue and Reed’s early courtship and a new origin for Mr. Fantastic’s name, neither of which I bought. Similarly, Beland’s shout-out to his independent series True Story Swear to God was too cute. Still, with a story that’s light as air and for looking so good, I can’t say the issue was a bad time, and I’ll still be tracking down the middle story that I missed.
  • Love and Rockets New Stories #3 by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
    What to say that others haven’t? I’m not steeped enough in Jaime’s work to say that his contribution to this volume was his best ever, but it was very, very strong work, and the reveal at the end so surprised me that I immediately reread the story. Gilbert’s main story is a rush and actually pretty funny in a sick way. The “Killer” story was the first in which I realized her relationship to Fritz, though perhaps this is again because of my lack of close reading. I’ve been enjoying the way that Gilbert’s stories and stories-within-stories have interacted, though without being entirely sure why. This volume also led me to wonder to what degree the brothers are aware of what the other is up to, since the stories seemed to strangely reflect each other in ways that previous volumes haven’t. Reading this also made me realize that, while I am caught up on Gilbert’s Love and Rockets vol. II material, I’ve fallen behind on Jaime’s, so look for me to correct that in the next few columns.
  • Neonomicon #2 by Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows
    I can honestly say I have no idea what will happen next. Well, I have a pretty good idea of what happens immediately next, but considering there’s still half of the series to go, I have no idea where it’s going. Having read this issue before hearing any Internet buzz, I was pretty surprised by how quickly the situation deteriorates into serious horror and found the sexual violence within much more disturbing than mainstream comics generally accomplishes, for whatever that’s worth.
  • The Purple Smurfs by Yvan Delporte & Peyo
    Basically Blackest Night with smurfs. Notes in the book say this was even originally called “The Black Smurfs,” but was changed in America for fear of sounding racist. The highlight of this collection is the very funny “The Flying Smurf,” with a member of the village deciding that he will create wings to fly with and the problems he causes for everyone else in the process.
  • Scarlet #2 by Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev
    Still holding my complete attention, in spite of a few plot points that stretch credulity somewhat, as noted in the letters column. Issue two reveals the series to be the inverse of Warren Ellis’s Reload from a few years back. In that miniseries, a former spy (I think; going from memory) assassinates the President of the United States and goes after several other U.S. leaders, under the theory that the country is being run by organized crime and that someone needs to exterminate those criminals at the top. By contrast, Scarlet takes a bottom-up approach, reacting to street-level injustice and following it up the chain as the titular character learns that the crooked police officer she has targeted is tied to greater corruption. There’s long been a debate as to whether lasting change is instituted by top-down leadership or grassroots movements—this was one of the key ideological disputes between the presidential campaigns of Hilary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008—and Scarlet’s repeated references to something that she has to ask readers to do for her seem to represent some sort of grassroots movement in the making, leading to what Bendis has promised will be a story of a new American Revolution.

    The character is appealing as well, as we don’t yet know a lot about her, but from spending nearly every page with her, we have a good sense of what she is like. Alex Maleev’s portrait of Portland is impressive in its mix of specificity—I recognize most of the locations—with a unique artistic approach setting it apart from either a more idiosyncratic look like Matthew Southworth’s in Stumptown (interesting that there are two recent series making such extensive use of Portland as a location; though considering how much of the comics scene is based here, maybe it’s more surprising that there aren’t more) or a strictly fumetti look. There’s a connection between this depiction and Maleev’s depiction of New York in Daredevil, and while both are heavily photo-referenced, they are also both identifiable as the work of the same artist.

  • Sweet Tooth #14 by Jeff Lemire
  • Tiny Titans #31 by Art Baltazar & Franco
  • Twin Spica vol. 3 by Kou Yaginuma
    I like that Japanese cartoonists have no qualms about mixing sci-fi with magical realism, approaches that seem at odds, but which can heighten each other through their incongruity. This series continues to charm me, and I admire the structure of each volume, balancing the continuation of the ongoing story with a few short backup stories that fill in characters’ pasts.
  • Weird War Tales by Darwyn Cooke, Ivan Brandon, Nic Klein, Jan Strnad, Gabriel Hardman & Steve Pugh
    Cooke’s story, in which dead soldiers from all across history gather periodically to reminisce and reenact war games, glories in war as noble, heroic and fun a bit too much for my taste, but its such an absurd notion that serious moral concerns roll right off it. It’s also great to look at, and the only story in the anthology that is genuinely weird or memorable. Steve Pugh’s contribution is sadly limited to a single pinup, though as a darker complement to Cooke’s story, it’s a haunting piece.

Images of Criterion Edition of Crumb © Criterion Collection. Images of Iron Man © Marvel Characters, Inc. Images of Takio © Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming. Images of Twin Spica © Kou Yaginuma

Posted in Brian Michael Bendis, Comic-Con, My Week in Comics, NYCC, R. Crumb | Leave a Comment »

DC’s rosy view of the past and R. Crumb’s Genesis – My Week in Comics July 4–10

July 12, 2010

This week: Crime goes up in the DC Universe while it goes down in ours . . . A report on the R. Crumb Genesis Exhibit . . . What I read, with notes on some . . . The best digital comics format gets pushed to Next Week.

DC COMICS’ CULTURE OF FEAR

STILL READING STARMAN. This week was volume four of the current Omnibus reprints, and it got me thinking about superhero comics’ approach to the past: essentially that the decades associated with the beginning of the genre—the ’30s through the ’50s—were a better and simpler time. Sure, everyone remembers the time that they came up in through rose-tinted glasses, but superhero comics cling especially fervently to a “kinder, gentler” fantasy. The ways in which Starman both upholds and subverts this trope got me thinking about the broader implications of looking at the past this way.

To begin with, building identity around the past is endemic to superhero comics, which still takes their cues from a time when teenagers and people barely past their teens auto-didactically created the superhero genre, generally working with more raw, primitivist enthusiasm than genuine writing or drawing skills. Even genre progenitors Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster don’t seem to have been entirely sure what they’d created in Superman or how they’d done it, if their subsequent creation Funnyman is any indication (which is not to diminish the fact that they did create Superman and deserved much better treatment for it than they got). In retrospect, many of the writers and artists of this era are important for creating things that later writers and artists built on, but the time is remembered as the Golden Age.

These stories were also created in a time of much greater censorship, the era of the Motion Production Code, which forbade such perversities as suggestive dancing, lustful kissing, childbirth and miscegenation. Before the Code, American films were actually fairly bawdy, more so than they would be again until the MPAA rating system replaced the code in the late ’60s. It took until the EC Comics of the ’50 for comics to become risqué enough for a similar code to be enacted.

So superhero stories of the day would revolve around bank robberies and bloodless efforts to conquer the world, realistic depictions of crime a rarity. Today’s more lenient restrictions allow comics supervillains to engage in all kinds of explicit violence, but the demands of continuity have made it a given that it was not always so. Occasionally heroes will lament that homicidal maniacs have replaced the purse-snatchers of yesteryear. In reality no such increase in violence has occurred, but DC’s approach to crime mirrors the popular perception that crime is up. As Barry Glassner noted in The Culture of Fear, the reportage of crime and fear of crime have increased as crime itself has gone down. (There are a lot of reasons for this, and this isn’t the place to go into it, but one thing that sticks with me is an article in the Willamette Week from five years ago in which the news director of Portland’s Fox affiliate defends his stations all crime-news local broadcast by saying, “I’m competing against CSI and other prime-time shows.”)

That’s right, in addition to creating boring “Old Man Comics,” the integration of older stories into modern continuity also contributes to the false notion that crime is up, when statistically the opposite is the truth. Organized crime and corruption were just as bad in the first half of the twentieth century as they are now, and when’s the last time a mob hit was described as a massacre? Seriously, holding up the days of WWII as a more innocent time has always struck me as weird (while later wars have been more complicated in terms of our involvement, few have been as horrific. We seem to gauge our innocence only in terms of our own feelings, not the overall effects of history.)

A more recent approach has been to inject darkness into the old stories, but this still has a tired feel to my mind. Starman works better for me by creating new stories set in an earlier era to work greater crime and intrigue into, rather than pulling contortions like heroes mind-wiping violent offenders to make them into non-violent offenders (really, how does that make sense? If you can change their personalities like that, how about just making them, I don’t know, not criminals?). Grant Morrison’s Batman run (will I ever go a week without mentioning it? I don’t know) takes an interesting, experimental approach by incorporating every previous Batman story, but couches it in the stages of life of a single man and investigating how the events of the stories change him, and surrounding him with bizarre pathologies like the Joker, who is in a constant state of transformation. But it’s still not uncommon to stumble on a DC comic, even those written by Morrison or other continuity archeologists like Geof Johns, in which a character says something along the lines of, “I miss the crazy costumes and loony schemes to rob Fort Knox.”

(Oddly enough, this is less an issue in Marvel comics, which make less use of legacy heroes and have a more explicit sliding scale timeline policy—it’s been a long time since WWII was a part of Reed Richards and Ben Grimm’s history. Marvel notes they’ve never had a Crisis, and the result is that they are much happier to simply chuck out their history rather than integrate it. I still sometimes get a “past was better” vibe from some of their stories, though.)

When the tedious argument as to whether superhero comics are liberal or conservative comes up from time to time, the focus is generally on whether the actions of the heroes is fascist or not, but I think the obsession with a mythical past is just as telling, and it’s unfortunate that DC has chosen to contribute to this ahistorical fantasy of a more innocent time.

R. CRUMB’S GENESIS AT THE PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

SPENT THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY on vacation in glamorous Portland, OR, seeing the sights and enjoying the culture. Technically, I spend the vast majority of my time in Portland, since I live and work here, but the annual Waterfront Blues Festival seemed the perfect event to build a vacation around, and while I was taking the time off I decided to treat the time like I was from out of town, seeing sights like the Grotto (they have one of only twelve bronze copies of Michelangelo’s Pietà) and eating at different restaurants and breweries than normal.

One thing I’d have taped a “Kick Me” sign to my own back if I visited Portland and didn’t see was the exhibit of R. Crumb’s original artwork from his recent adaptation of the Book of Genesis, which is showing through September at the Portland Art Museum. As it happens, I went the same day as I visited the Grotto, making July 6 the most religion-infused day I’ve had since, well, maybe ever.

The first thing that struck me was how much smaller the pages were than I expected, not a lot bigger than they were reproduced in the book. I would have assumed they were drawn two up considering how detailed they are, but Crumb actually just drew this book that tightly. In fact, it seemed that he’d drawn too tight in some places, as I found that some panels lose detail in the book, particularly in the case of the most intricate crosshatching, which has closed up somewhat. That’s somewhat surprising from such a seasoned cartoonist, but it could be the reproduction itself that’s to blame for all I know.

I also found myself surprised by how much whiteout there is, as I thought I’d heard someone say there was very little. Since comics come to us with all of their mistakes hidden by reproduction and digital manipulation, I’m always fascinated by the errors and corrections revealed in a viewing of original artwork. Here props and characters were sometimes completely reconstructed after being whited out, corrections were made to the lettering, which is inked directly on the art (early on, God’s creation of the universe is accompanied by corrections to each of the numbers of the days—“On the Third Day,” etc.—did Crumb write in the wrong numbers or decide after the fact to give First, Second, Third, etc. a different font from the surrounding words?), and in at least one case, Crumb has done the painstaking work or reinstating small white dots in a small section of a crosshatched background that had closed up. Talk about attention to detail!

I’m a novice when it comes to Crumb’s work outside of his collaborations with the late Harvey Pekar, and the Underground period in general is one of the biggest gaps in my comics reading, so while I have seen Crumb’s artwork and could easily pick it from a selection of styles, this was the first time I’d ever spent a lot of time looking at it in detail. The nervous texture that I expected is there, as are the thick-legged women, but I had no idea what a master of composition and depth Crumb is. Most panels are layered, with foreground, middleground and background, and characters have a three-dimensionality and weight to them. The storytelling rarely draws attention to itself, as Crumb sticks with functional page layouts simple rectangles for panels, but there are occasional tricks added in to heighten the effect of a scene. The result of Crumb’s labor is not only beautiful, but also a much more engrossing version of the stories contained in Genesis than I have ever encountered.

The exhibit arranges all of the pages from the entire in book in order, sometimes left to right and sometimes right to left, depending on the needs of the maze-like exhibit gallery. I was conscious the entire time of how difficult it can be to soak in the art from consecutive comics pages without getting wrapped up in the text. We are so used to experiencing comics as mechanical reproductions and bound together in sequence that it can be difficult to know exactly how to interact with framed, isolated original in a museum setting. The Genesis art is extraordinary, and I wanted to study it without being too distracted by the narrative, outside of general context. To that end I found it useful to go through some sections of pages backwards so that I always knew what I was looking at, but was always focused on the art first.

Perhaps I did too good a job of drinking in each page, as after what felt like about half an hour, I was informed that I had been there nearly two hours and the museum was about to close. I was a little more than halfway through the pages, and had to rush through the second half, including two small cases of research and sketches, the only context provided outside of the art itself.

I do wish more contextual material had been included, since there must have been so many notes and sketches and more that could have enriched the experience. An exhibit like this one is a step in the right direction for the public study and appreciation of comics, but most other exhibits I’ve visited provide more than just art. I learned a lot from studying the pages, but for the most part I’ve developed a sense of what to look for in comics. For museum patrons with a more casual interest in comics, I can’t imagine just the pages themselves saying as much as they said to me.

Still, an amazing experience. I hope to make it for the museum’s free day at the end of the month to soak up the second half of the exhibit. I may even have actually read the book, which I’ve had for months, by then. And I look forward to seeing more exhibits like this make it to traditional art museums. Seeing original comics art is large quantities is still a rare privilege, and I hope that museums take a greater interest in it in the future, rather than so much of it being locked up in private collections.

READ THIS WEEK:

  • Batman and Robin #13 by Grant Morrison & Frazier Irving
  • Casanova (Icon version) #1 by Matt Fraction & Gabriel Bá
    I was planning to buy this reprint series just to help ensure it survives long enough to get to the new material, but having seen the new colors and lettering, I’m happy to experience this alternate-universe version of the Casanova I remember—appropriate since alternate universes are such a big part of the series. Also made it to the release party for this and got to chat with Fraction and tell him how much I enjoy the series.

  • Doom Patrol #12 by Keith Giffen, Matthew Clark, Ron Randall & John Livesay
  • King City #10 by Brandon Graham
  • Mr. A by Steve Ditko
    The day after I read this I saw a movie that is the anti-it, Please Give, which is entirely about the grey areas Mr. A abhors. It’s all about what it means to be a good person and what it feels like to think you’re falling short. Its also very funny, and I recommend it to anyone in a city where it’s playing. As for Mr. A, it actually surprised me in acknowledging that most people do both good and bad all the time. However, Mr. A is pretty strict about demanding people ultimately pick one and stick with it, and they pretty much have to do it at a time of his choosing rather than any standard timeframe. Gotta admit, he sounds perfectly reasonable when Ditko gets to write the bad guys expressing his talking points for him. Great art and storytelling, though.

  • New Avengers (2010) #1 by Brian Michael Bendis, Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger & Laura Martin
  • Punisher Max (oversized HCs) vols. 3 & 4 by Garth Ennis, Leandro Fernandez, Goran Parlov & Lan Medina
  • Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark by Ryan Ottley & Jason Howard
    They got mixed up.

  • Starman Omnibus vol. 4 by James Robinson, Tony Harris, Mike Mignola, et al.
    I was amused that producer Don Murphy concludes his introduction by stating how proud he is of the universally panned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie and exhorting fans of Starman to seek it out.

  • Sweet Tooth #11 by Jeff Lemire
  • The Trials of Roderick Spode “The Human Ant” by David Mamet
    In which the acclaimed filmmaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist brings the silly fun.

  • Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason

Images of Superman © DC Comics. Images of R. Crumb’s Genesis © R. Crumb. Images of The Trials of Roderick Spode © David Mament

Posted in DC, My Week in Comics, R. Crumb | 2 Comments »

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