Scott McCloud on the art of Making Comics [via LHB] // Ware vs. Kramer: Art Comics Title Bout. TalkAboutComics on the “growing aesthetic divide between those who champion ‘art comics’ and those who support ‘comics as art'” [via Journalista] // The Daily Cross Hatch reviews “The Unholy Marriage of Art + Comics”, Craig Yoe’s Arf Forum: Like the other great art forms of the twentieth century–jazz, motion pictures, rock and roll–comics are meant to be lived, rather than place on a pedestal, behind layers of bullet proof glass. They’re meant to be handled with dirty fingers, rolled up and placed in a backpocket, traded amongst friends. They’re an art form, to be sure, but an art form of the unwashed masses. From the subtitle of the latest Arf Forum book, it’s clear that Craig Yoe has a fairly firm grasp on this concept. If comic books are an art form, then, perhaps, they are an accidental one. While Yoe’s book makes a strong case for comics as an art, it does so with all of the irreverence that could only be afforded to such a ridiculous argument, beginning pages of goofy vintage advertisings centering around the medium, and shots of mid-century celebrities like Rock Hudson (in his boxers—ladies, if only you knew) and Elvis captivated by their four-color reading material (the Sunday funnies and Archie, respectively).”
Also in The Daily Cross Hatch, 2/3 of a K. Thor Jensen interview and part two of Craig Thompson: “I worked these really bad jobs, like working at the grocery store or the department store, out here—I’d get up at five in the morning, and stock hardware store shelves. On the walk there, the buses weren’t working yet, so I just kept saying to myself, “I’m a cartoonist, I’m a cartoonist.” That’s what I did through every job, even as I got closer—when I was doing illustration. I was working as a graphic designer—I wasn’t quite working in comics, but I’d tell myself I was. It was never about necessarily making a career of it. It was just about doing it, in spite of everything else.” // The poem as a comic # 3: Jeffrey Brown does Russell Edson’s ‘Of Memory and Distance’ [via Newsarama] // Zak Sally urges you to read John Porcellino [don’t forget to check out John’s Top 5 tunes on 3:AM] // What Bryan Lee O’Malley did before Scott Pilgrim [via The Beat] // The Addams Family, the musical. // Peter Bagge’s Let’s All Give Money to the Rich Man!.
An interview with Tokyopop’s Lillian Diaz-Przybyl [via Journalista] // A Japanese ‘Nobel Prize’ for non-Japanese manga [via The Beat] // BoingBoing on Asiaddict: A Cartoon Travelogue by Mats!?. // Looks like the graphic novel adaptation of Will Christopher Baer’s Phineas Poe is now off. // A peek at Dave Lasky’s sketchbook [via Comics Reporter] // Tom Spurgeon’s Welcome to Nerd Vegas, a guide to San Diego’s Comic-Con International. // Bryan Talbot was a recent guest on Resonance FM’s I’m ready for my close-up, available as a podcast [via Bugpowder] // Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: the wedding pics [via Eddie Campbell] // Check out Eddie Campbell’s Nick Cave cover for Punk Planet.
Finally, a blog I wrote for The Guardian—Are comic books neglecting comedy?—in which I bemoaned that fact that comics aren’t funny anymore, provoked a strong response from cartoonist and illustrator Rod McKie who made some good points. Not least:
No wonder our best cartoonists and comic writers send their work overseas where it is taken seriously. Can you imagine this discussion taking place in Japan, or France, or Italy, or the US? You know, I think the problem is that over here, in the UK, cartooning is a third rate job done as a hobby by people with little or no training or education, whereas in those other countries the cartoonists choose to leave university, art school, cartooning school even, or in some cases a career in Law (Stephan Pastis who draws the syndicated strip Pearls before Swine was a lawyer) to take up what is regarded in their countries as a profession.
[..]
I have made my feelings about this paper’s approach to cartooning abundantly clear, The Guardian would much rather print a five-page article lauding a work by a cartoonist than actually run any strips or stories that are relevent or new, so this attitude doesn’t really surprise me. You better suck it up though, graphic novels about ‘serious’ subjects, indeed about any subject, are growing in popularity and look like being the ‘in-thing’ for some time to come.
