The Americans Andrei Molotiu and Derik Badman introduce abstraction into the pages, dissolving sense and appealing to the contemplation of the readers.

Also, more cryptically, Warren Craghead is mentioned:

Warren Craghead, another American, speaks to calligrams of Apollinaire: your designs “pop” the physical space of the readers.

Anyway, that’s kind of neat. Thanks to thaleslira for pointing it out.

[Edit: This post originally said it was a Brazilian article, turns out it's a Portugese newspaper.]

I’m happy to have just found out that my comic 20 Out of 30 Days was selected as one of the “Notable Comics” for the 2011 volume of Best American Comics. That basically means it was selected by general editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden but not by the yearly guest editor Alison Bechdel. More details (and the rest of the list) here.

I’m not sure I ever posted about it here, but my story “Flying Chief” from Abstract Comics: The Anthology was on last year’s notables list.

P.S. My post-Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival post is coming soon.

Not One For Knocking On #2 featuring:

Derik Badman
Malcy Duff
John Porcellino
Frank Santoro

Launch Friday 18th February 2011, 6pm-9pm
Book featuring all artists available free on opening night.
Exhibition continues: 19th February- 26th February (By appointment only: please email olivereast(at)hotmail(dot)com to arrange)

Rogue Artists’ Studios & Project Space
66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly
Manchester, United Kingdom, M1 2WH

I’ve got 5 pieces in the show, archival prints of work from the past year or so, including a one-sheet version of my minicomic “Spill”. Many thanks to Oliver East (he of Trains… Are Mint fame) for including me in the show with two artists (Porcellino and Santoro) who I am a huge fan of (and have written about quite a bit). (Apologies to Duff, whose work I am not familiar with.)

Hopefully there will be some photos I can share later.

Edit: Here are the photos.

This Friday at the Arlington Art Center, the exhibit “Party Crashers” is opening. I’ve got a few pieces in the show, some of my appropriations from last year’s “30 Days of Comics” and a couple of my Fragments of Photorealism. That’s my comic “Furies” on the postcard for the show.

Unfortunately I’m not making it down for the opening, but if you are in the area between now and January you should check it out, the participants include: Andrei Molotiu, Warren Craghead, Blaise Larmee, and Dash Shaw (among others).

On Phoenix 6: Nostalgia: “Nostalgia” starts out weird and crazy and ends up weird and cartoonishly absurd (yes, I do feel guilty using “cartoonish” in such a negative context). Some of this Tezuka seemed to be making up as he went along, some of it is being forced a little too much into a message, and some of it is just plan ridiculous. And through all this, the issue of “how to live life” is not addressed beyond a base survival instinct. Even pleasure does not enter the equation, as Romy’s whole live is consumed by survival and sad nostalgia. If I were on a distant planet like that, I’d just let the humans die out, me included.

On Lone Wolf and Cub: Rather, in reading the series, I’m seeing how much Koike is slowly unrolling his characters and the world they inhabit, through a seemingly endless series of variations on a fairly simple plot: Ogami Itto (Lone Wolf) is hired to assassinate someone; he succeeds.[1] Almost every story follows this plot, yet Koike is consistently finding variations and subtleties to show more of Itto’s character (and that of his son, Daigoro) and to offer another historical lesson on Japan of the times (17th century). I’m taking the history as history in this series, as I understand much research went into the background if not necessarily the primary plot.

On Phoenix 9: Strange Beings: This is half of a page showing a rare use of very small panels by Tezuka. It’s almost a consistent pattern of shrinking panels except for the one panel that is made to stand out in the center. This sequence is the end of a flashback, so the shrinking panels are the past fading back into the past before opening up again into the present.

I made a zine of comics criticism.

I finished up a series on Tezuka’s Phoenix.

On Allan Haverholm’s comics: Haverholm makes remarkable use of negative space in his images. At first a kind of rhythmic placement of blank rectangular frames, then the placement of spaces to emphasize elements in the page: a table in negative space holds a rendered handgun, a large area of negative space separates a group of musicians from the table, now rendered, still holding the gun. The negative space works as a slow revealing act on the handgun. First by framing it, then by taking on the shape of the gun itself, as seem in this remarkable spread.

On Oishinbo: What matters is the food and the education, and Oishinbo shines in that respect, helped a lot by the art. Hanasaki mixes a number of shifts in representation into his work. The primary characters all have a classic manga look to them: caricatural and round with big eyes. The backgrounds have a more structured and geometric realism to them, again, a rather classic manga style. But the food, it is drawn in an almost photorealistic style, forcing the reader’s attention onto the real focus of the manga. Even wine and sake bottles are drawn with extremely detailed labels. Hanasaki also uses a photographic style for certain panels that show backgrounds or scenes important to the education aspect. When talking about sake production, panels show nearly photographic images of sake brewers at work. In a liquor store, discussing how sake and wine are stored, panels show the shelves of bottles in near photographic style.

I did a close reading of a Toth romance comic.

I translated something for du9 on Poison River and wrote pieces for them on scale Kramer’s Ergot 7 and Moriarty’s The Complete Jack Survives.

I feel in love with Aidan Koch’s comics once and then later again.

On the ending of Asterios Polyp: Is it tragedy? The Orpheus dream sequence might lead one in that direction, but Asterios’ death is not necessarily a tragic death. Consider the distance between the potential death at the beginning of the story–lightning strike or death in a fire–and the implied death at the end. At the beginning, Asterios is alone, seemingly depressed, and looking backwards, reliving(watching) the past. Death is avoided, temporarily, and in this reprieve he makes amends with Hana, he even finally builds something (a treehouse). The whole story is like a moment of grace, an opportunity for happiness for Asterios. Orpheus is granted this opportunity, but he loses his chance. Asterios’ Orpheus dream is what could have been but is not. He gets his love back, if only long enough for some peace before they both move onto rest in it.

I had a comic in the Abstract Comics anthology from Fantagraphics.

I wrote an article for Graphic Novel Review where I cooked some recipes out of Oishinbo.

I made a recipe comic for 24 Hour Comics Day.

I reviewed a novel, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Running Away, for Words Without Borders.

I finished up Things Change Book Four, put the series on (probably permanent hiatus), and made free pdf downloads of the whole series.

I made a comic for every day in November.

I wrote a lot of short reviews in December.

On a story in Map of My Heart: In some way, these views outside of the expected are a form of estrangement, making something strange so we must look at it anew. Towards the end of the story when John looks in the window of his own house at his cat sleeping on a chair, he is, in some way, estranging his own view of “home”, seeing it from a new perspective. This is further enhanced by the way he’s joined two panels together (see above), each showing a different image of Maisie (the cat) sleeping, yet connected together (note the lack of gutter). Are these two panels at all? Or are we simultaneously seeing John’s view and a second view of our (the reader’s) very own. The scalloped shape that bridges the two/one images is both bush (alongside the house) and thought balloon.

I fell in love with Okazaki’s two page spreads in Supply.

My best comics of 2009 list.

I discovered Pascal Matthey’s non-narrative scenic comics.

I had a long conversation with Craig Fischer about Abstract Comics.

I did not like Crumb’s Genesis.

I wrote about Thierry Groensteen’s comics user’s manual.

For much more, take a browse through the archives (tags or months) linked at the top of the page.

April 2010
32 p., 6″ x 9″
color cover
color interior, print-on-demand

A selection of short comics from my 30 Days of Comics 2009 project. Various experiments in abstraction, poetry comics, appopriation, micro-narratives, still life/description comics, etc. Printed in full color through the magic of Comixpress’ print-on-demand service. Rather than read them online, you could hold them in your hand and turn the pages.

Selected as one of the “Notable Comics” for the 2011 volume of Best American Comics.

“There’s definitely some interesting ideas to ponder over here. Not the type of stuff that everybody can go and start utilizing in the next issues of whatever Marvel and DC books they’re working on, certainly, but the type that you have rolling around in the back of your head for a long while.” -Sean Kleefeld

“Many of these stories were wistful or desolate, but others zeroed in on the joys of an image in time and how it can linger. Badman tried to depict the way a smell, sight or visceral feeling can evoke a powerful memory, even (and sometimes especially) when that encounter was a fleeting one. Stacking story after story of textual or color experiments gives the book a weight greater than the sum of its parts.” -Rob Clough (TCJ.com)

Until my copies run out you can get them direct from me. After that I’ll make them available through Comixpress’ store.

$4 plus postage.

The Armory (which just as we were about to leave my wife notice the display that informed this was THE ARMORY, as in “The Armory Show” that is so prominent in art history) is an improved location over the Puck Building. It’s big and open, all the tables fit in one room with a bit more walking space. I thought it was cooler than the other building, though maybe it was just a nicer day.

Having learned from Matt Madden on Twitter that Pantheon had limited copies of Asterios Polyp (David Mazzuchelli’s forthcoming book) I made a bee line for their table and bought a copy. While I did end up dragging the rather heavy book around all weekend, I was glad for the early purchase the on Sunday when Pantheon was sold-out.

With the lateness we caught Charles’ talk, primarily an excerpt from his in-process book on Jack Kirby. The chapter was on the “technological sublime” in Kirby, the sense of awe and fear that accompanies a certain view of technology. Charles had a number of slides, primarily from the Fantastic Four (a few of those collage panels) and the issue where Johnny Storm heads out into space to get some weapon to defeat Galactus. I failed to take notes, so I’m not clearly explaining this, but suffice to say it was an interesting talk, for me, who is not really a fan of Kirby but has read that part of the Fantastic Four, and even for my wife, who knows of him but has never read any of it. The talk was followed-up with some talk between Charles and Issac Cates, which got a little too Kirby-knowledgeable for me (I can’t follow the references to specific characters, scenes, etc.). Briefly met Gene Kannenberg and started handing out my criticism zine (I gave one out to most everyone I talked to during the two days).

After the talk we walked around the show for a couple hours, only managing to hit the outer perimeter of the show before heading off to check-in to our hotel. Got a bunch of mini-comics from different sources, and said brief hellos to Tom Devlin at the D+Q booth (Ron Rege was signing, but I didn’t have anything to get signed (and I already had the work on sale)), Dylan Williams and Austin English at the Sparkplug table, and talked to one of the CCS students about the Schulz Library (we donated a few boxes of books to them a few years ago).

One of the highlights of the show, personally, was getting to Fantagraphics’ table and getting a chance to page through a display copy of the Abstract Comics anthology. I found my piece in it, looks great! The whole book looks fabulous and Jacob Covey did a beautiful job with the design. This book is going to get some attention, I think. The line-up of artists is fantastic, many artists whose work I’m a fan of (Andrei Molotiu (the editor), Warren Craghead, Jason Overby, Richard Hahn, Elijah Brubaker, Grant Thomas, Blaise Larmee, and more). Even if I weren’t in it, I’d be excited about it.

There was a long line of tables of Scandinavians (I know there were at least Finns, Norwegians, and Danes). Many had a made English translations of their books which they printed out and folded into the front of the book. I ended up going back the next day a grabbing a copy of the Norwegian Rui Tenreiro’s Hoytiden which looks fabulous.

After he uncovered his name tag, I realized, at one point, I was standing in front of Allan Haverholm, whom I follow on Twitter. We chatted a bit and he sold me a bunch of his works, including a “single” was his in process comics “album” and a mix-tape comic in a plastic tape case.

Talked a bit with Matt Madden who gave me a copy of his new mini and who was soliciting submissions for the next Best American Comics anthology. Found Frank Santoro at the Picturebox table and talked a bit with him and picked up the latest Cold Heat Special before we left for the day.

My wife had a wonderful dinner at Gobo (8th and Broadway), an all vegan restaurant. Really great New England Rolls, which were almost like egg rolls, but way better. Sweet and sour soy protein. Avocado tartare. Seitan skewers. Some nice sake too. Then we headed up to the theater district and saw the revival of Guys & Dolls, which featured Lauren Graham (from Gilmore Girls) and Oliver Platt (he was the chief counsel of The West Wing), my first Broadway musical. The musical was great (I still remember a lot of songs from seeing it as a kid at my high school and from the movie version with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando).

Sunday we started off at the MoMA. Some highlights included a wonderful blackboard and chalk diptych by Tacita Dean (that image does not do it justice, there are small words written on to the board also), finding the small stair landing that included Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (which I don’t recall ever seeing in person, and it is much more interesting than I expected (lots of detail that is hard to see in the reproductions)), large canvasses by Henri Rousseau (he has such a wonderful density and depth of composition despite the flatness of his paint), Matisse’ Red Studio (which always attracts me for the way he has the furniture painted almost schematically), and a piece by Cy Twombly I’ve not seen before that looked like it had floating pieces of paper drawn on it (can’t find an image of it). Sadly Twombly’s Four Seasons, which was on display last time we were at the MoMA was no longer up.

After the MoMA we headed downtown to the MoCCA museum to see the David Mazzuchelli show that is up. One detriment, I imagine, of the new festival location is a lot less people probably took the time to visit the museum. Mazzuchelli’s work was worth the extra trip. The show featured original pages from all his work (or almost all, at least all the ones I know and some I didn’t), including two short stories I had never seen before (post Rubber Blanket work). The highlight was seeing the hand drawn color separations from “Discovering America.” A two-page spread of black ink that was later printed as blue and then acetate (mylar?) pages with black ink on them that were printed in orange over top of the blue. Turns out Mazzuchelli got into printmaking at that time, which is what inspired that way of working.

There were numerous pages, sketches, and notes from the new book Asterios Polyp. One page featured the same bits of dialogue written over and over again, seemingly in an attempt to best arrange the words into lines of text. Another page showed a bunch of Dick Tracy villains that seemed to serve as an inspiration for one of the characters. Comparisons of the original pages to the printed work also showed that he is clearly using computers to manipulate the images.

I only got a chance to read the first 20 pages or so of the new book, but I can safely say this is one of the (if not THE) comics of the year.

Back at the festival on Sunday, we stopped in at First Second, so my wife could get Sara Varon to sign her copy of Sweaterweather. Sara drew one of her dog characters into the book. Then stood in line to get Mazzuchelli to sign his book (this is where I learned they sold out of copies). I gave him a copy of my crit zine, as it had the piece I wrote on one of his pages from Rubber Blanket in it, which it turns out he had read already. He thought it was a little overboard, but to me that was kind of the point of writing a whole article about a single panel/page.

Walked around more, in a bit of a hurry by this point, as I didn’t want to miss the Gary Panter/Frank Santoro panel. I found Andrei Molotiu and talked to him a bit, looking at the Abstract Comics anthology more. Andrei also drew me a pear inside my copy of his new book Nautilus. Andrei also convinced me to read some Ditko Spider-man issues (he discusses a page in the introduction to the anthology). Met Mike Getsiv (Edit: spelling corrected. Sorry, Mike!), who’s also in the anthology, and he showed me some lovely pages by Blaise Larmee (whose work I love, I bought the latest Sundays anthology just because I knew Blaise was in it) from an anthology Mike’s been editing . Also met Kevin Mutch from Blurred Books who gave me a few review copies of their work.

Further along I said hi to another Twitter friend Leigh Walton at the Top Shelf booth, and then found Geoff Grogan (also in the anthology) to get a copy of his Look Out Monsters.

Finally we went to the Panter/Santoro panel, which was primarily Panter talking about fine artists who have some comics connection or relation. Frank stressed his sense of always feeling between two camps of comics and fine arts, and how Gary was one person he met who seemed to be equally knowledgeable/interested in both areas. Panter was an amusing speaker and I jotted down some unfamiliar names to look up later. A few quotes (potentially not exact quotes, I did my best):

Panter: “If you are an artist you know you can’t compete with nature, children, or crazy people.”
Santoro: “Comics is so craft oriented it turns off fine art people.”
Panter called Duchamp the Abraham Lincoln of art.
Panter: “If you rip off 100 people no one’s going to know” (as opposed to just copying one person.)
Panter: (In connection to “Photoshop guys”) “You don’t need 5000 colors on a page, you just need two good colors.” (amen)

And that was the festival. I missed a few people I would have liked to say hi to, alas, but that’s always hard with people you only know online. If they aren’t behind a table with a name tag their hard to pick out. Overall, it was fun and I picked up what I hope are so great comics.

Here’s the full list of what I picked up (with links where possible):

• Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon.
• Blurred Books anthology 1-4.
• Mutch, Kevin. Fantastic Life 1+2 (which I already read online), Captain Adam, Revenge of the Lesbian Folk Singer. Blurred Books.
• Tenreiro, Rui. Hoytiden. Jippi Forlag. (Here’s some info (in English) from the author’s site.)
• Hitchcock, John and Alex Toth. Dear John: The Alex Toth Doodle Book. Octopus Press.
• Stevens, Karl. Guilty. (You can get it from Alternative Comics.)
• Rehr, Henrik. Reykjavik. Fahrenheit. (Don’t see it on the publishers site, but here are some samples.)
• Molotiu, Andrei. Nautilus. Fahrenheit. (Some details and samples at Andrei’s blog.)
• Madden, Matt. Minnesota and other sketchbooks comics.
• Longstreth, Alec. Phase 7 #13 and #14.
• Haverholm, Allan. Black Sabbath (Intro), Astoria: The Doomed to Fail demo. (Site for the project.) Also his “Mix Tape” (in an actual tape case) and “Resistansen.”
• Santoro, Frank and Lane Milburn. Cold Heat Special #9. Picturebox. (I don’t see this on the site.)
• Sobel, Marc. The Red Stiletto.
• Volozova, Olga and Juliacks. Rock that Never Sleeps: Two Stories of Lost Memories. Sparkplug.
• English, Austin. Windy Corner #3. Sparkplug.
• Chad, Jon. Shortstack: The Journal Comic Card Game (it really is a deck of cards), Leo Geo Acquires Ancient Knowledge.
• Wong, Ken. Schrodinger’s Cat. (This one is folded up like a “cootie catcher”.)
• Sundays 3. (Three small books.)
• Coovert, J.P. Simple Routines 9,10,11.
• Palmer, Evan. Cooking with Food volume one. (Recipe comics!)
• Brinkman, Mat. Multiforce. Picturebox.
• Grogan, Geoff. Look Out Monsters.

More shots here.

For those who may wonder (one person did), the page in the middle of that last picture is a page that was cut from my comic which will be appearing in the forthcoming Andrei Molotiu edited Abstract Comics: The Anthology.

I talked a bit about the work to attendees and had a realization that I had unwittingly selected two excerpts from Things Change that take place in grocery stores. I wonder if the use of grocery stores relates back to the fact that my grandparents used to own and run a grocery store.

Over at Robot 6, Chris Mautner just posted my submission to his Shelf Porn feature. See the glory of my comics (and some non-comics) shelves! Try to pick out the titles by reading blurry, tiny spines! Or if you really want to know what’s there, you could just check out my LibraryThing account (which should include everything except the pamphlets and the minis).