The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

I mentioned back in September that I was going to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. I went, had fun, took photos. I also got a lot of books and comics, and I'll be writing about them in the coming month. But this post will be about the experience--and I'm writing it mostly as an excuse to inflict my terrible photos on you all. (If you want to see much better photos of the event, read this.) Now Pan readers who come here for the art coverage might find their eyes glazing over. But this festival is relevant to art lovers--it was put on and attended by a bunch of people who view comics as art, and among them are many who cross-over to the gallery world, whether in their own practice or just as people interested in art. I still think there is a distance between these two worlds that doesn't need to be there, but the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival certainly represents to largest overlap of comics and the fine arts world. (Many in the comics world would cringe at this. But I guess what I want, and what I think this show represents in a way, is a comics world that is engaged with serious culture as opposed to one that is only engaged with the kitsch of the world, which is what you would mostly find at the San Diego ComicCon, for example.)


Gary Panter, Matt Groening, Bill Griffith and a bunch of other people

The people who were there were amazing--guests, exhibitors, and attendees. This is a young person's show, but the organizers made certain that a lot of people of my generation and of older generations were present. The show was put together (I think) by Dan Nadel of Picture Box, Gabe Fowler from Desert Island, and comics scholar Bill Kartalopoulos. Nadel is one of many people involved in comics who has been working on creating a new history of comics. By this, I mean trying to imagine a different canon. He has work in this regard in his two books Art Out of Time and Art In Time and to a certain extent in what he publishes in Picture Box. This kind of project is appealing to me. People are always reclaiming history (aesthetic or otherwise) to understand the present. See for example art critic Rapheal Rubenstein's The Silo.

Why this is relevant is that this show featured older guests--an attempt, maybe, to school the young hipster guests. Hence guests like Mark Alan Stamaty, who is not someone who is well-remembered in comics despite the fact that he produced a number of brilliant books over the years, especially the great MacDoodle Street.



Mark Alan Stamaty

He shared a panel with Jordan Crane, Brian Chippendale and Keith Jones, mostly on the subject of horror vacuii. 



Mark Alan Stamaty, Jordan Crane, Keith Jones and Brian Chippendale

The panels were quite nice. Lynda Barry and Charles Burns were great--Barry is hilarious in person. While Sammy Harkham (editor and publisher of Kramer's Ergot) and Francoise Mouly (co-editor of Raw and current art editor of The New Yorker) tended to ramble, they were entertaining.



Sammy Harkham and Francoise Mouly



Kim Deitch

So this revised history puts underground cartoonists like Kim Deitch in a pantheon.



Charles Burns and adoring fans

And creates a situation where a cartoonist like Charles Burns gets mobbed.


For me, it was great to see old friends like Jordan Crane...

 
Jon Lewis and Sam Henderson...


Doug Allen...



Jessica Abel and Matt Madden...


And Jason Little...



Little was debuting his new book, The Motel Art Improvement Service. I'll definitely be reviewing it later, but one thing that is really interesting about this book and the preceding volume, Shutterbug Follies, is Little's familiarity with contemporary fine art. Here he was dressed, as he always does for conventions, in an extravagant outfit. He used to include a straw boater or top hat with costumes, but he told me that when he would wear a top hat, he would end up getting bothered by steampunk fans, thinking that they had found one of their own. (Fiction fans may be interested to know that Little is married to novelist Myla Goldberg. The main character in his graphic novels is named Bee, which can't be a coincidence, can it?)

The space was packed with humanity. Despite temperatures outside in the 30s, it got really toasty in the church hall where the festival was held. Little asked me to spot his table so he could go to the restroom and shed his longjohns. This is what his table looked like from the driver's seat perspective.





Pat Ausilio

I think this is Pat Ausilio, who did a comic called Abstracted Comics. I liked this because despite the fact that it was 80-something degrees in the building, he kept his toque on. That is hipsterism above and beyond the call of duty.



Johnny Ryan

This is Johnny Ryan, the lowbrow cartoonist embraced by highbrow comics lovers.



Bob Sikoryak

This guy was so hardcore that he worked on a comic while attending a panel. Tight deadline, I guess. Update: This is apparently Bob Sikoryak.


Chris Pitzer and Josh Cotter

This is Chris Pitzer (proprietor of AdHouse) and one of the artists he publishes, the excellent cartoonist Josh Cotter.


Ben Catmull

Ben Catmull had a space right next to Jason Little's.



Gabrielle Bell and Tomasz Kaczynski

This is Gabrielle Bell and (I think) Tomasz Kaczinski. Bell was selling her original art, which is literally the smallest original art I have ever seen except maybe for Drew Friedman. In addition to selling individual pages, she was also selling individual panels. As I understood it, these were panels she completed but decided not to use. I bought one of those-- 2.75" square.

One final photo. I stayed in a hotel two blocks from the festival. And just around the corner was Desert Island, which I have to say is my ideal comic shop.



It is filled 100% with art comics and pretty much nothing else.

Recently Read Comics

It's been a while since I did one of these. Here are a few graphic novels that I have read lately.


Tiger Tea by George Herriman
Krazy Kat wasn't strictly a "continuity strip"; i.e. , there wasn't an ongoing story that went on from day to day. The "Tiger Tea" sequence was one long exception to this rule. Krazy decides to help Mr. Meeyowl, the catnip dealer, after his business collapses. She goes on a mission to retrieve an extra-strong variety of catnip called Tiger Tea, that turns her, when she drinks it, from this sweet passive being into an aggressive, pugnacious, powerful figure. And, as they say, hijinks ensue. This is a really classic sequence. I first read it when it was reprinted in an issue of RAW. The new book suffers from being overdesigned, but well worth getting. A great introduction to this classic strip.


Other Lives by Peter Bagge
This new graphic novel by Peter Bagge really deserves a longer review than the few lines I am going to give it here. As far as I know, this is Bagge's first graphic novel that didn't appear serialized in comics first. But really, I think we can reasonably say that Bagge has been writing graphic novels for a long time. Hate was, in effect, two long graphic novels about one character, Buddy Bradley. His earlier narratives were by format and, I think, by authorial inclination very episodic. What kind of thrills me about Other Lives is how unepisodic it is. Everything happens fairly quickly, and the plot threads are so intertwined that it couldn't be split into chapters particularly easily. But the best thing about Other Lives is how deftly Bagge deals with a theme that is both extremely topical and ancient, that of constructed identity.


The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Tony Moore
I thought I'd try this out since it has gotten a ton of good press, and now is going to be a TV series. I won't say it sucked, but I don't understand why people think it's so great. It seems similar, but not superior, to other "zombie" stories; The Walking Dead is, at best, a competently done pastiche. (Maybe subsequent volumes get better.)


Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tails by Paper Rad
I'll get my "hipster" union card revoked for saying this, but I thought this was boring and pretty bad. Visually, it did nothing for me. I've seen Paper Rad videos that were awesome, and Ben Jones' solo art is really cool. But this little color comic was a chore to read and not that great to look at.


The Playwright, written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell
Campbell doesn't usually collaborate with other writers, but this was a good pairing. Instead of an ordinary comic, there is a barebones written narrative that tracks Campbell's watercolors. It is a comic in the sense that both the drawings and text need each other, but it reads differently than what you might be used to. The narrative is full of nameless characters, identified by their profession. The main character is the Playwright. He comes across as completely self-absorbed and isolated, lacking any empathy. Yet his plays are highly successful. Over the course of the book, though, the Playwright opens up a bit. We start to see deeper into him. The Playwright reminded me, in some ways, of certain stories by English writers like Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and William Boyd, but it's hard to put my finger on how.


Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata
Publisher Drawn and Quarterly has embarked on a mission to publish important early manga in the U.S., particularly those classified as "gekiga" or dramatic manga. One can see the influence of Yoshiharu Tsuge here. The drawing is really good. But the stories didn't grab me as much as those by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Still, they were pretty good and a refreshing alternative to most manga published in the U.S.


The Search for Smilin' Ed by Kim Deitch
So much of Kim Deitch's work hinges on demons (Waldo, the cat with a "1" on his belly is a minor sort) and aliens. But they also are intertwined with his real life, the real lives of various obscure showbiz figures, and the history of American popular culture. Do they fit together? Until reading this volume, I would have said no. But this story is one where Deitch tries to tie the various unruly strands of his many stories together. In a way, I almost prefer that these overlapping, nesting, and sometimes contradictory stories never really congeal, but The Search for Smilin' Ed is, like all of Deitch's work, a compelling and highly personal piece of work.


Beasts of Burden, written by Evan Dorkin and drawn by Jill Thompson
The idea of several dogs (and one cat) getting together to solve supernatural crimes is, well, pretty out there. It's not a concept that can sustain a lot of use. This book starts strong and gets harder to accept the further along you go. That said, there is a lot appealing here. Jill Thompson's art is fantastic and perfectly suited for this. The book is a pleasure to look at. My problem is, even though I was able to suspend my disbelief at first, it got harder and harder as it went along. But another problem is that the supernatural threats seemed very human. What might have worked better is if there were a world which only dogs could perceive that we humans were oblivious. And in fact, this is the case--a dog's sensorium is drastically different from a human's. That should have been played up more. The very first story in the book does this to an extent.


Catland Empire by Keith Jones
Great art, but the story seems just silly.


Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Only of historical interest. Tatsumi was one of the early "gekiga" artists, and this is one of the early gekiga stories. It dates from 1956, and the story is nothing special--a crime melodrama with a transparent "twist". But I guess stuff like this hadn't been seen in manga before. Apparently it broke ground. The art looks really rushed, and it was. The entire graphic novel (127 pages) was drawn in 20 days--no assistants. But as astonishing as that accomplishment is, it would be more meaningful if the book was any good.

More recently read comics are reviewed here.