These are all current (as of about noon, July 12) bids on original comics art that will be sold in Heritage Auction's July 26-28 Vintage Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.
Showing posts with label E.C. Segar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label E.C. Segar. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Comics Art Market Is Just as Screwed Up as the Fine Art Market
Robert Boyd
These are all current (as of about noon, July 12) bids on original comics art that will be sold in Heritage Auction's July 26-28 Vintage Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.
These are all current (as of about noon, July 12) bids on original comics art that will be sold in Heritage Auction's July 26-28 Vintage Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Quantity not Quality Links
by Robert Boyd
Jacob Kassay, Xanax (detail), 2011. Photo: Mark Blower (ICA)
What is the correct metric for judging art? Greg.org expresses disgust (but not too much surprise) about an ArtForum review of a Jacob Kassay exhibit which asked whether or not his work justified his high auction results. This seems similar to a stock analyst issuing a buy, sell or hold opinion. But the problem is that if we judge art on the basis of "quality," well, we know that's subjective at the very least, and filled with unconscious biases. Price is at least an objective, empirical method. And it's the all-American way to judge things. However, if price seems too crass, may I suggest another objective measure? We should judge art by weight.
The world's best artists. Here are the top artists in the world from July 2010 to July 2011, based on the only aesthetic criterion that counts, auction results:
Locked out Sotheby's art handlers (Hyperallergic)
On the other end of the scale: Hyperallergic comes out with its annual "20 Most Powerless" people in the art world. Included are tha locked out Sotheby's art handlers (perhaps the perfect symbol of the 1% waging class war on the 99%), art writers (I'll go along with that--maybe I will instruct my unpaid colleague Dean Liscum to write a scathing editorial on the subject), and New York City public school art teachers (probably could be expanded to any public school art teachers). (Hyperallergic)
Michael Bise, Life on the List (excerpt), comic, 2011
Add sick artists to the above list: Like when Sasha Dela has to have a garage sale to pay for her medical bills. And can you imagine if an artist needs a heart transplant? Well, you don't have to--Michael Bise, excellent artist and awesome critic, has started a serialized graphic novel on the subject in Glasstire. For some reason they don't call it a graphic novel--they call it a "drawing project." And it turns out Bise is a great cartoonist as well! (Life on the List, Glasstire)
Statue of Popeye in Chester, Illinois
Let's end this on a happy note: Cartoonist John Porcellino has been ambling around the country forever (it seems). His most recent road-trip took him to Chester, Illinois, birthplace of E.C. Segar. You don't know E.C. Segar? He was one of America's great 20th century artists. He created Popeye, but even more important (in my opinion) is that he drew it for 10 years--and those years were magic. (All the Popeye comics drawn after Segar's death were pale reflections.) He was a genius of working-class absurdism. Porcellino (whose own minimalist poetic comics don't owe anything obvious to Segar) takes us through this small town which is extremely proud of its native son. The statue above is one of four Popeye-related statues in town. Way to go Chester! Why can't Houston honor its cultural heroes this way? Where are the statues of Lightnin' Hopkins and Donald Barthelme? (Maybe Blogging Will Help)
Jacob Kassay, Xanax (detail), 2011. Photo: Mark Blower (ICA)
What is the correct metric for judging art? Greg.org expresses disgust (but not too much surprise) about an ArtForum review of a Jacob Kassay exhibit which asked whether or not his work justified his high auction results. This seems similar to a stock analyst issuing a buy, sell or hold opinion. But the problem is that if we judge art on the basis of "quality," well, we know that's subjective at the very least, and filled with unconscious biases. Price is at least an objective, empirical method. And it's the all-American way to judge things. However, if price seems too crass, may I suggest another objective measure? We should judge art by weight.
The world's best artists. Here are the top artists in the world from July 2010 to July 2011, based on the only aesthetic criterion that counts, auction results:
1 BASQUIAT, Jean-Michel (1960-1988), USA, €54,709,532That big number after each artist is their auction turnover, as calculated by ArtPrice. As far as I could tell, no Houston-based artist made the top 500 of the list (the cut-off auction turnover was €141,998). (Art Market Monitor)
2 ZENG, Fanzhi (1964), CN, €39,246,785
3 KOONS, Jeff (1955), USA, €30,189,587
4 ZHANG, Xiaogang (1958), CN, €30,062,860
5 CHEN, Yifei (1946-2005), CN, €28,353,024
6 PRINCE, Richard (1949), USA, €18,324,243
7 WANG, Yidong (1955), CN, €16,231,154
8 MURAKAMI, Takashi (1962), JAP, €15,784,849
9 HIRST, Damien (1965), GB, €14,807,602
10 ZHOU, Chunya (1955), CN, €14,552,336
Locked out Sotheby's art handlers (Hyperallergic)
On the other end of the scale: Hyperallergic comes out with its annual "20 Most Powerless" people in the art world. Included are tha locked out Sotheby's art handlers (perhaps the perfect symbol of the 1% waging class war on the 99%), art writers (I'll go along with that--maybe I will instruct my unpaid colleague Dean Liscum to write a scathing editorial on the subject), and New York City public school art teachers (probably could be expanded to any public school art teachers). (Hyperallergic)
Michael Bise, Life on the List (excerpt), comic, 2011
Add sick artists to the above list: Like when Sasha Dela has to have a garage sale to pay for her medical bills. And can you imagine if an artist needs a heart transplant? Well, you don't have to--Michael Bise, excellent artist and awesome critic, has started a serialized graphic novel on the subject in Glasstire. For some reason they don't call it a graphic novel--they call it a "drawing project." And it turns out Bise is a great cartoonist as well! (Life on the List, Glasstire)
Statue of Popeye in Chester, Illinois
Let's end this on a happy note: Cartoonist John Porcellino has been ambling around the country forever (it seems). His most recent road-trip took him to Chester, Illinois, birthplace of E.C. Segar. You don't know E.C. Segar? He was one of America's great 20th century artists. He created Popeye, but even more important (in my opinion) is that he drew it for 10 years--and those years were magic. (All the Popeye comics drawn after Segar's death were pale reflections.) He was a genius of working-class absurdism. Porcellino (whose own minimalist poetic comics don't owe anything obvious to Segar) takes us through this small town which is extremely proud of its native son. The statue above is one of four Popeye-related statues in town. Way to go Chester! Why can't Houston honor its cultural heroes this way? Where are the statues of Lightnin' Hopkins and Donald Barthelme? (Maybe Blogging Will Help)
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The Year in Pan
There is one more day in the year, so I thought I'd look back at how this blog did in 2010. Over the course of 2010, I got a little more than 46,000 page views. Considering that there are blogs that get that many page views every day (and more), it's not too exciting. That works out to about 126 page views per day.
As you might expect, however, this hasn't been constant. From January to August, I got about 2570 page views a month. Then I discovered Reddit. I started posting my posts in appropriate Reddit forums, and my page views show up. After September, my average page views per month were about 6360 per month. Now this may be as good as it gets. After, my two main subjects, contemporary art in Houston and art comics, are not hugely popular. There's a reason Gawker covers celebrity gossip instead of contemporary art.
Reddit surprised me in another way--the posts people liked the most weren't necessarily what I would have guessed (although in retrospect, their popularity makes sense). Here are the ten most popular posts from 2010, based on page views.
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
1.The Woodmans: This post was about a film about the late photographer Francesca Woodman and her family. When I posted it up on Reddit, the number of people visiting Pan exploded.
Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960
2. Where Does a Work of Art Get Its Value? This post was from September 2009, but when I posted a link to Reddit, it took off. That said, it is a post that readers often manage to find--the issues surrounding what makes a given piece of artwork valuable are always interesting.
Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007
3. Lady Art at McClain. This is another one from last year (December 24, 2009). It's about an ill-conceived group show at the McClain Gallery, which is about the bluest of blue-chip galleries in Houston. Why is it popular? I don't know--I can't credit Reddit for this one. I will say one thing about it, though. I was really snarky--it's one of the few bad reviews I've written. And given the way people liked it, maybe I should write some more!
Norman Lindsay, Visitors from the Moon, watercolor
4. Two Books by Norman Lindsay. This post was a review of a novel and a memoir by the eccentric Australian erotic artist, Norman Lindsay, with whom I became somewhat fascinated by over the course of 2010. Why is this post so popular? Well, I suppose it's that sex sells!
5. Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say that it is my writerly brilliance that brings readers to Pan, but this popular post demonstrates otherwise. It is essentially a repost of a video from New York Magazine.
Michael Crowder, Du musée Sauvignons detail, glass, 2009
6. L'heure bleue d'Michael Crowder. This is another post from 2009 that somehow has remained popular throughout 2010. The gallery linked back to the review, which I presume drove some of the views. But really, I don't understand why this post--a review of a nice show by a Houston-area artist--should have been so much more popular than many other similar posts.
E.C. Segar, Popeye daily strips
7. "I Yam What I Yam" On the other hand, I know exactly why this post is so popular. It's a post about how frequently E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, put Popeye in drag--and how comfortable Popeye seemed to be cross-dressing. It was a response to a post by Jeet Heer on his excellent blog Sans Everything. He mentioned my post on his blog, which sent some readers over. Apparently, someone at the popular liberal blog Alas! A Blog saw Heer's post and posted a link. Which was very nice. That said, I don't think that posting about cross-dressing comic strip characters would, in general, increase my readership. (This post appeared exactly one year ago today.)
Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage cover, 1974
8. The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. This one was from November, 2009. It, like many others, was given a new lease on life when I uploaded a link to Reddit. On the face of it, it seems strange that an avant garde graphic novel published in a small print run in 1975 should be of any interest to readers today. But it has a kind of mystique attached to it, and many contemporary readers and creators of art comics are extremely curious about it. It's an amazing work, and one that should be reprinted.
Laurel Nakadate, Stay The Same Never Change film still
9. What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change. I saw this Laurel Nakadate film during FotoFest. I hated it. I wrote a highly negative review and quoted some hilarious things Nakadate said about the film. Perhaps this is a signal that I should continue to write negative reviews. Or perhaps it just means that Nakadate remains a popular search engine subject (maybe for artsy people who like to see naked ladies--which would help explain the popularity of the Francesca Woodman post as well).
still from Boogie Woogie
10. I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To. This post is sort of a review of this movie set in the art world. And it is pretty negative, which strongly suggests a trend. BUT! It also has nudity--boobs to be precise--so that's another trend. That's what you people like--snarky negative reviews with naked boobs.
So that's it--the most viewed pages of the past year. Expect to see more crossdressing cartoon characters, more boobs, more bad reviews, more movie reviews, and more reposting of popular posts from other blogs. Happy New Year!
As you might expect, however, this hasn't been constant. From January to August, I got about 2570 page views a month. Then I discovered Reddit. I started posting my posts in appropriate Reddit forums, and my page views show up. After September, my average page views per month were about 6360 per month. Now this may be as good as it gets. After, my two main subjects, contemporary art in Houston and art comics, are not hugely popular. There's a reason Gawker covers celebrity gossip instead of contemporary art.
Reddit surprised me in another way--the posts people liked the most weren't necessarily what I would have guessed (although in retrospect, their popularity makes sense). Here are the ten most popular posts from 2010, based on page views.
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
1.The Woodmans: This post was about a film about the late photographer Francesca Woodman and her family. When I posted it up on Reddit, the number of people visiting Pan exploded.
Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960
2. Where Does a Work of Art Get Its Value? This post was from September 2009, but when I posted a link to Reddit, it took off. That said, it is a post that readers often manage to find--the issues surrounding what makes a given piece of artwork valuable are always interesting.
Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007
3. Lady Art at McClain. This is another one from last year (December 24, 2009). It's about an ill-conceived group show at the McClain Gallery, which is about the bluest of blue-chip galleries in Houston. Why is it popular? I don't know--I can't credit Reddit for this one. I will say one thing about it, though. I was really snarky--it's one of the few bad reviews I've written. And given the way people liked it, maybe I should write some more!
Norman Lindsay, Visitors from the Moon, watercolor
4. Two Books by Norman Lindsay. This post was a review of a novel and a memoir by the eccentric Australian erotic artist, Norman Lindsay, with whom I became somewhat fascinated by over the course of 2010. Why is this post so popular? Well, I suppose it's that sex sells!
5. Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say that it is my writerly brilliance that brings readers to Pan, but this popular post demonstrates otherwise. It is essentially a repost of a video from New York Magazine.
Michael Crowder, Du musée Sauvignons detail, glass, 2009
6. L'heure bleue d'Michael Crowder. This is another post from 2009 that somehow has remained popular throughout 2010. The gallery linked back to the review, which I presume drove some of the views. But really, I don't understand why this post--a review of a nice show by a Houston-area artist--should have been so much more popular than many other similar posts.
E.C. Segar, Popeye daily strips
7. "I Yam What I Yam" On the other hand, I know exactly why this post is so popular. It's a post about how frequently E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, put Popeye in drag--and how comfortable Popeye seemed to be cross-dressing. It was a response to a post by Jeet Heer on his excellent blog Sans Everything. He mentioned my post on his blog, which sent some readers over. Apparently, someone at the popular liberal blog Alas! A Blog saw Heer's post and posted a link. Which was very nice. That said, I don't think that posting about cross-dressing comic strip characters would, in general, increase my readership. (This post appeared exactly one year ago today.)
Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage cover, 1974
8. The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. This one was from November, 2009. It, like many others, was given a new lease on life when I uploaded a link to Reddit. On the face of it, it seems strange that an avant garde graphic novel published in a small print run in 1975 should be of any interest to readers today. But it has a kind of mystique attached to it, and many contemporary readers and creators of art comics are extremely curious about it. It's an amazing work, and one that should be reprinted.
Laurel Nakadate, Stay The Same Never Change film still
9. What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change. I saw this Laurel Nakadate film during FotoFest. I hated it. I wrote a highly negative review and quoted some hilarious things Nakadate said about the film. Perhaps this is a signal that I should continue to write negative reviews. Or perhaps it just means that Nakadate remains a popular search engine subject (maybe for artsy people who like to see naked ladies--which would help explain the popularity of the Francesca Woodman post as well).
still from Boogie Woogie
10. I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To. This post is sort of a review of this movie set in the art world. And it is pretty negative, which strongly suggests a trend. BUT! It also has nudity--boobs to be precise--so that's another trend. That's what you people like--snarky negative reviews with naked boobs.
So that's it--the most viewed pages of the past year. Expect to see more crossdressing cartoon characters, more boobs, more bad reviews, more movie reviews, and more reposting of popular posts from other blogs. Happy New Year!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
"I Yam What I Yam"
Robert Boyd
Jeet Heer, in a recent post on Sans Everything, pointed out that gay people have long been portrayed in comics, but usually negatively. It almost seems ridiculous to comment on--of course they would be portrayed negatively. When was the first positive (or neutral) portrayal of a gay person in popular culture?
The first example I found is from June, 1932.
Which is followed by:
Popeye isn't reveling in his female attire (he reasserts his manhood in the second strip), but he clearly is not one bit uncomfortable with wearing a dress or even being mistaken for a woman.
Then in January, 1934, Popeye finds a homeless woman and her baby. He gives the baby clothes that he has purchased for Sweetpea, then trades his own clothes for her ragged dress.
What is interesting here is that Popeye seems to enjoy his women's clothes. It's done is a jokey way, natch--he and the now rather butch woman in Popeye's sailor outfit have a good laugh together.
It is later that year that Popeye spends an extended period in drag. He dresses up in fancy women's clothes to disguise himself for the purpose of infiltrating a gang of criminals.
Surprisingly, the men of the gang are totally smitten.
Popeye then changes into a tutu in order to get a job as a dancing girl at the local saloon. The leader of the gang falls in love with Popeye.
Popeye uses his hold of the love-struck villain to find out his secret, a drug that turns men mean.
As they are about to get married, Popeye reveals that he is actually a man. he says "I yam amphibious. I wears both women's an man's clothes-arf! Arf!"
I don't want to make too much of these comics. Obviously Segar is playing on the hilarious notion that someone as crude and macho as Popeye would be so comfortable in drag, or that dressed so, he would be attractive to other men. Still, it is an example where behavior associated with gay men was presented in early comics without the negative judgment implied in many of Jeet Heer's examples.
Jeet Heer, in a recent post on Sans Everything, pointed out that gay people have long been portrayed in comics, but usually negatively. It almost seems ridiculous to comment on--of course they would be portrayed negatively. When was the first positive (or neutral) portrayal of a gay person in popular culture?
There are enough of these gay characters that one could easily do an anthology called “The Gay Image In Comics before Stonewall.” The general point to make about these characters is that they are all homophobic stereotypes, although the tone of the representation varies greatly. Sometimes the cartoonists were mildly satirical (as swishy she-men), sometimes melodramatically hostile (as vile seducers of children).But as I was reading Popeye vol. 4: Plunder Island (reprinting strips from December 1933 to July 1935), I came across something weird. Cartoonist E.C. Segar repeatedly has Popeye wearing women's clothes--and liking it.
The first example I found is from June, 1932.
Which is followed by:
Popeye isn't reveling in his female attire (he reasserts his manhood in the second strip), but he clearly is not one bit uncomfortable with wearing a dress or even being mistaken for a woman.
Then in January, 1934, Popeye finds a homeless woman and her baby. He gives the baby clothes that he has purchased for Sweetpea, then trades his own clothes for her ragged dress.
What is interesting here is that Popeye seems to enjoy his women's clothes. It's done is a jokey way, natch--he and the now rather butch woman in Popeye's sailor outfit have a good laugh together.
It is later that year that Popeye spends an extended period in drag. He dresses up in fancy women's clothes to disguise himself for the purpose of infiltrating a gang of criminals.
Surprisingly, the men of the gang are totally smitten.
Popeye then changes into a tutu in order to get a job as a dancing girl at the local saloon. The leader of the gang falls in love with Popeye.
Popeye uses his hold of the love-struck villain to find out his secret, a drug that turns men mean.
As they are about to get married, Popeye reveals that he is actually a man. he says "I yam amphibious. I wears both women's an man's clothes-arf! Arf!"
I don't want to make too much of these comics. Obviously Segar is playing on the hilarious notion that someone as crude and macho as Popeye would be so comfortable in drag, or that dressed so, he would be attractive to other men. Still, it is an example where behavior associated with gay men was presented in early comics without the negative judgment implied in many of Jeet Heer's examples.
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.
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
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.
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
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