Showing posts with label Chester Gould. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chester Gould. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Comics at the EMERGEncy Room

Robert Boyd

Tomorrow I will be opening a small exhibit of comics art from my personal collection at the EMERGEncy Room gallery at Rice University (it's on the fourth floor of Sewell Hall, one floor up from where the Rice Gallery is). I've hastily assembled a website for it--please excuse the typos and badly color-corrected images!

I will have a lot more to say in my talk at 7 pm, and the website I've assembled has a lot of information on individual artists. But briefly, I want to say that this is another small tap on the wall that surrounds the art world when it comes to recognizing comics art as a visual art worth considering--and collecting. It's why I curated the exhibit of Jim Woodring and Marc Bell art at Lawndale Art Center a few years back. It's why I occasionally write about comics for this blog. I invite all  readers of Pan will come by tomorrow evening for the opening, and if you can't make it, the show will remain up until April 11.

Here are a few pieces that are included in the exhibit:


Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, February 2, 1947


Gene Ahern, Room and Board, June 19, 1938


Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For “Boy Trouble,” March 4, 1999


Jaime Hernandez, Love & Rockets “Locas vs Locos” p. 6,  1986

This exhibit would not have been possible without Christopher Sperandio, assitant professor of painting and drawing at Rice University and himself a bona fide Kartoon King.

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Sunday, September 5, 2010

My Comic Art Collection

I am a collector of comics art in addition to collecting contemporary fine art. Collecting comics art is a lot easier than collecting contemporary fine art for one simple reason--original comics artwork is a lot cheaper. Why? I don't really understand it, to be honest. It seems like in the past decade especially, there has been a growing acceptance of the importance of comics as an artistic medium in this country. This has affected a lot of things--the format of comics (they are much more likely to be published in book format as opposed to the more disposable comic book format), the acceptance of certain comics in the literary world. and obviously (and somewhat regrettably) the embrace of comics by Hollywood.

James Kochalka
James Kochalka, Skull, acrylic on paper

But the art world lags behind. Comics art is not collected by museums (that I know of) and there are few art galleries that deal with it. The MFAH has a page where you can search their collection, which is mammoth. I put in the names "Herriman," "McCay," "Crumb," "Spiegelman," and "Chris Ware" and got bupkis. The CAMH had a show called "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Comics in Contemporary Art" in 2003. It featured the following artists: Laylah Ali, Candida Alvarez, Polly Apfelbaum, Ida Applebroog, John Bankston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dara Birnbaum, Roger Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Michael Ray Charles, George Condo, Cat Chow, Renee Cox, Henry Darger, Jason Dunda, Michael Galbincea, Kojo Griffin, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Keith Haring, Rachel Hecker, Arturo Herrera, Roy Lichtenstein, Liza Lou, Kara Maria, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Elizabeth Murray, Yoshimoto Nara, Raymond Pettibon, Sigmar Polke, Robert Pruitt, Mel Ramos, David Sandlin, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf, David Shrigley, Roger Shimomura, Andy Warhol, and Jennifer Zackin. In short, it had precisely zero comics artists. That is indicative of the lack of respect (if not outright condescension) comics art gets from art world institutions.


OK, enough griping. The point is, I think this is a cultural error. But this is how it is, and for me, one unexpectedly nice aspect of this is that comics art is relatively cheap, as I mentioned above. So I have bought a bunch of it over the past few years.


James Kochalka

James Kochalka, Worms, acrylic on paper

There is a website called Comic Art Fans where collectors post their collections. Now most of these collections are pretty mainstream--not what I personally would consider artistically interesting artwork. But there are a lot of adventurous, sensitive collectors who post there. For instance, Suat Tong Ng's collection, or Dries Dewulf's (you can deduce from the names that the collectors come from various points on the globe). 


James Kochalka
James Kochalka, Worms, acrylic on paper

I have put my own collection up there (there are still a couple of pieces I need to photograph, but this is most of the comics and comics-related art I have). Take a look. What's enjoyable about this site is that it becomes a database for the work you have collected, which means it becomes a database for everyone's work. I can easily find people who have similar interests as collectors as I do, and vice versa. So it is a small but perfectly focused social network. 


If I ever get my comics festival off the ground (unlikely given the resounding shrug of indifference the proposal has evoked in the readership of this blog), CAF will be a valuable resource. For example, if I were curating a show of Chester Gould Dick Tracy originals, focusing on his use of silhouette, I could look Gould up on CAF to see what collectors have examples and if there might be any I want to borrow for the exhibit.


Yirmi Pinkus
Yirmi Pinkus, untitled, pen and ink and watercolor, 1998

Sunday, April 25, 2010

New Acquisitions--Frank Robbins, Chester Gould and Skip Williamson

I have gotten a little behind on my "new acquisitions" posts. I always feel a little reluctant to do them because they feel vainglorious and make me look like the kind of person who brags about his stuff. Which is what I am doing, so I can't dodge that one. One thing I'm trying to do is discuss collecting in a non-rarified way. I am not a rich guy, but I am able to collect. If you like art, you can too.

So I'm going to have two "new acquisitions" posts today. This one will focus on comics art.

Chester Gould
Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, ink on bristol board, October 15, 1962

Chester Gould
Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, ink on bristol board, October 18, 1962

I was able to get both of these pretty cheap. I think the reason why is that neither of them showed Dick Tracy or any of his regular characters or his distinctive villains. But Chester Gould's drawing and storytelling are well-represented in these two pieces. We see his typical use of silhouette in the earlier strip. And the airplane sequence--especially with the successive downward sloping black areas--is fantastic. Two relatively minor examples from one of America's greatest artists.

This next one is from the same year, curiously enough. Frank Robbins is a far lesser artist than Gould, but still interesting as a guy who started off as a Caniff imitator and evolved his own unique variation on that style. It's looser than Caniff's, with a lot more crazy anatomy (which gives his characters an unexpected expressiveness).

Frank Robbins
Frank Robbins, Johnny Hazard, ink on bristol board, August 9, 1961

The last new piece in the collection is far more recent.

Skip Williamson
Skip Williamson, "Snappy Sammy Smoot, Death Merchant" page 2, ink, halftones, photo-typesetting on illustration board

Some of you may recognize this as a page from a story that I already own another page of. Bought from the same dealer, of course. Maybe I'll eventually get them all. Skip Williamson is an underground cartoonist, one of the originals from the 60s. This piece was done in the 1980s.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

The Best Comics of 2009

Robert Boyd

I was going to do the top 10 comics of 2009, but I just couldn't limit myself to 10. So here are my top 15. Some big caveats going in. First, there are comics that came out this year that look really good that I haven't read yet. (For example, the new Joe Sacco book.) There are also probably comics that came out this year that are really good that I just don't know about. And finally, this list is personal and idiosyncratic. It is the list of a guy who values art comics and alternative comics far more than mainstream comics. My tastes were formed in the 80s and 90s, and I think that shows. I am someone who loves the comic strip form, especially as practiced before World War II. Also, I have found over the past few years that I haven't been reading many comic books. So the only comic book on this list is Multiforce (and calling it a comic book is kind of a stretch).So with that in mind, here we go!

The Top 15


1) Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. See my review here. A beautiful, rigorously structured, funny and moving book.


2) You Are There by Jean-Claude Forest and Jacques Tardi. See my review here. This is, like so many things on my list, actually quite an old work. But this edition is the first published in English.


3) Jack Survives by Jack Moriarity. This powerful body of work was mostly published in RAW in the 80s. Moriarty approaches these comics as a life-long painter, and this edition reproduces them as paintings, not as high-contrast line drawings, which is how they were originally printed. The result is mesmerizing without detracting from the stories. The stories are kind of abstractions of early 50s manhood. A guy in a hat with his family and his house... Brilliant pieces of minimalism created with a neo-expressionist painter's brush.


4) The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb. Awe-inspiring. In a way, Crumb has been too faithful. Using a very literal translation of the Bible by Robert Alter as his starting point, he tries to keep interpretation to a minimum. One result is that the comic form is compromised in at least one obvious way. The Bible will have passages that read, "He said, Blah blah blah" In the Bible, there are no freestanding quotations of spoken words. So in a panel where Crumb is depicting someone speakings, there is always a little caption preceeding the word balloon that says something like, "And then Jacob said" This is really weird. What these captions are saying is being shown through the use of the visual device of the word balloon. This was just one of the awkward things that comes from including every word of a prose work in a different medium (comics). Of course, his artistry makes up for a lot of awkwardness. You can stare at this book forever. One aspect of Genesis that is really boring is the listing of names--the "begats." But Crumb, drawing all these hundreds of faces, turns that weakness of the text into an overwhelming strength--each face, so individual, implies a story, a life. It's a beautiful piece of work.


5) George Sprott (1894-1975) by Seth. This ran in the New York Times Magazine, and for this book, Seth has added some incidental art (spectacular, of course--it includes cardboard models of the buildings from the story) and two short recollections of Sprott's boyhood and youth. Seth uses a technique that I think really works better for him than telling a story as a straight narrative. Each page is its own little episode--set in its own time, focusing on a particular person. The sum of these episodes is George Sprott's awful life--an asshole whose career is an extended riff on one minor achievement of his young manhood. It is amazing how compelling this nasty character is!


6) The Complete Little Orphan Annie, vol. 3 by Harold Gray. See my review here. An unusually powerful melodrama from the depths of the Depression.


7) Popeye, vol. 4 by E.C. Segar. This is the volume with the great "Plunder Island" sequence, which introduced many of us to the genius of Segar when it was reproduced in the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics. But the whole of this book is top-notch, Segar at his greatest. Includes a lengthy and hilarious sequence of Popeye in drag, romancing a baddie.


8) Journey, vol 2 by William Messner-Loebs. An underappreciated classic from the 80s, published in the first great flush of "independent comics" that brought us classics like Love & Rockets and Yummy Fur. MacAlistaire and the failed poet Elmer Alyn Craft (who was introduced in the first volume) are stranded in the barely there settlement of New Hope for a winter. This village is claustrophobic and full of horrible secrets. Craft is obsessed with finding them--MacAlistaire is interested only insofar as it will help him survive the winter. Messner-Loebs' drawing has lost what little polish it exhibited in the first volume. It becomes ragged and urgent here, fitting the psychologically intense and unsettling story.


9) Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, vol. 8. This is a particularly rich volume. Gould made a decision to not send Dick Tracy to war, but the war pops up. Pruneface is an enemy agent that Tracy must shut down. His most terrifying villain in this volume, however, is Mrs. Pruneface, a hulking skullfaced woman seeking revenge for her man's death. And of Tracy's iconic villains, Flattop rounds out this volume (and we meet Vitamin Flintheart, who will be a recurring character). The art is, as always, excellent.


10) Multiforce by Mat Brinkman. I've read a lot of these strips here and there, and only now realize that they all sort of fit together.This oversized, saddle-stitched book brings the whole saga together. And "saga" is the right word. Multiforce is simultaneously the kind of epic a ten-year-old boy would conceive of and at the same time the kind of art that a sophisticated product of elite art education might create. The work slithers between these two poles trickily. And Brinkman never fails to be amusing. This may remind some people of Trondheim and Sfarr's Dungeon books, which are clever and funny, but frankly feel contrived next to Multiforce. Great, weird art and storytelling.


11) Cecil and Jordon in New York by Gabrielle Bell. Very good--Bell's art is outstanding in a non-showy, matter-of-fact way. In some stories, she never shows you someone's face in a close-up, and in some of her autobiographical stories, almost ever figure is drawn full-figure--in other words you see their feet and heads in every panel they are in. The distance from the observer and the characters is pretty large. It's a weird way to tell an autobiographical story--its as if the author was pretending not to know what was going through the mind of the character. It creates an interesting contradiction, as if Bell were alienated from her earlier self. That feeling carries through in her fiction stories too. The characters seem to feel disconnected from their lives, even as they have what (on the surface) seem like pretty engaging experiences. Her characters never get happy, which can be kind of a downer. The title story even features a character who would be happier as a chair--she'd feel useful that way, and not have to struggle the way she did when she was a full-time girl.


12) Everyone Is Stupid Except For Me by Peter Bagge. This collection has been a long time coming. Peter Bagge has been doing these reportorial strips for Reason for years, and before that he did similar strips for the late, lamented web magazine Suck. His reporting is infused with his own style of humor, which will resonate with fans of Hate (like me). But what is different is that he is actually reporting here--going out, covering events, talking to participants, doing research, etc. Satirical reporting may have been around forever, but in modern times, Spy was the first big practitioner of it. Spy spawned a host of mostly online followers--Suck, of course, and nowadays websites like Gawker and Wonkette. But those sites are mostly picking up news and adding their own snarky spin. Like the writers for Spy, Bagge is going out and doing the digging himself, and like the great magazine reporters of the '60s and '70s, he puts himself in the stories. Most of this work is in service of Bagge's (and Reason's) libertarian beliefs. Don't expect him to be "fair"--he has a point of view and he is going to hammer it home. But he is a humorist first, so he is constantly mocking his own side (if they are mockable) as well as the protagonists of his stories. But if you are not a libertarian, you'll find yourself muttering "That's outrageous!" at many of Bagge's broader caricatures of liberals or conservatives. Get past that! These strips are very, very funny, and if they force you to work harder to defend your point of view against Bagge's arguments, is that bad?



13) You’ll Never Know book 1: A Good and Decent Man by Carol Tyler. Great but somewhat confused biography/memoir. Carol Tyler is attempting to tell the story of her dad in World War II. She is faced with a problem, though. Tyler's dad doesn't want to talk about a certain part of it--his time in Italy. We are given hint that he saw a literal "river of blood," and the trauma has kept him silent for decades. Even his wife doesn't know. Tyler herself is going through her own stuff--an absent husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, life. Tyler is better at short pieces, where she can focus. This is a glorious mess, but a moving and beautiful one. The format is unusual too. Tyler uses the horizontal format of a scrapbook. Also, for some reason, the whole thing is not being told in one volume. I suppose I will wait long frustrating months (and years?) for the next volume.


14) Map of My Heart by John Porcellino. I think this could have been better edited. As it is, they just reprinted whole issues of King Kat, including letters to Porcellino. This approach, however, feels consistent with the basic vibe of King Cat. The stories are slight, filled with simple joy or being alive or with small regrets. In between the stories, there are journal entries and annotations where Porcellino tells us about the arc of his marriage, his sense of failure at getting divorced, his mysterious chronic illness. etc. These are almost never the subjects of his comics. At least not directly. His work is oblique that way, but never obscure. On the contrary, emotion is right on the surface. Lots of very moving stories here.

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0006/3622/products/lo89_1_medium.jpg?1260568888
15) Nine Ways to Disappear by Lilly Carre. This is a collection of witty little stories. Some have the flavor of modern fairy tales ("The Pearl"), and all of them have an other-worldly quality. She uses a primitive panel progression--one panel per page, like the old woodcut guys (Lynd Ward, Franz Masereel). To emphasize the separateness of each panel, each one has a decorative border (recalling Lynda Barry, perhaps). But the stories flow perfectly well, and doing it this way made me linger a bit over each panel. Which is nice, because they are lovely. My favorite story is "Wide Eyes", the story of a man who falls in love with a woman with widely-spaced eyes, but feeling oppressed by them, finds he can hide from her by standing very close to her face, between her eyes and apparently outside her field of vision. My favorite character is the only recurring one, a lonely storm grate.

(A little side note--of the top 15 books, four were published by Fantagraphics, three by Drawn & Quarterly, three by IDW, and one each by Norton, Buenaventura Press, Pantheon, Little Otsu, and Picturebox.)

Honorable mention
Here are some other 2009 comics I liked.
The Best American Comics 2009 edited by Charles Burns
The Cartoon History of the Modern World vol. 2 by Larry Gonick
The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, vol. 7
The Complete Little Orphan Annie, vol. 2 by Harold Gray
A Drifiting Life by Yoshiharu Tatsumi
Ho! by Ivan Brunetti
Humbug by Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Will Elder, etc.
Key Moments from the History of Comics by François Ayroles
Low Moon by Jason
Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak
A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch
Pim & Francie by Al Columbia
Stitches by David Small
Terry and the Pirates, vol.6 by Milton Caniff
West Coast Blues by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi

Art Books
I also want to acknowledge a few great books that came out in 2009 that are more "art books" than comics, but which contain comics and/or have a strong relationship to comics. All of these books are really beautiful and quite worth investing in a big new coffee table on which to display them.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics
The Art of Tony Millionaire
Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell
Wayne White: Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Where Does a Work of Art Get It's Value?


Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960

This is one of the earliest pop art pictures Andy Warhol painted. After he saw Roy Lichtenstein's comics-based pieces, he gave up on using comics as a source for his own work.

The actual Chester Gould comic strip that this painting was derived from evidently dates from 1951. You can buy that original for $175,000.



So what does an original Chester Gould Dick Tracy strip usually go for? From this dealer, who sells a lot of comic strip art, your can spend between $495 and $1000 for a Dick Tracy original. That's about what I've seen from other dealers as well.

Now personally, I think Chester Gould is a great American artist, and that his original art should be worth a lot more. And while I think the multi-million dollar prices some Warhol pieces have gotten at auction are pretty ridiculous ($71 million?!), I have no problem with the idea that his art is and should be valuable.

What seems bizarre is that a piece of Chester Gould art should be worth 175 times what it might usually be worth in the market because Andy Warhol happened to have copied from it. Admittedly, it hasn't sold--$175,000 is the asking price. But this seems like a perfect example of Warhol's brand being used to enhance the value of something else. Don Thompson talks about this effect at length in The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark, but usually in terms of individual artworks getting a boost from their association with branded collectors, dealers, auction houses or museums. For example, a painting at auction that came from the collection of David Rockefeller will sell for more than a similar painting by the same artist that came from Joe Shmoe's collection. In this case, a non-Warhol piece of artwork is worth more because Warhol is associated with it.