Comics Comics 1
Comics Comics issue 1, edited by Timothy Hodler and Dan Nadel. Lime/Picturebox, 2006. Free ($5 for paper, free from the website). 16 p., color.
The debut issue of Comics Comics the new comics periodical offers great promise for the future. It’s probably easiest for me to just go through it in order, rather than try to sum it up somehow.
The cover is a colorfully bright image from Jessica Ciocci (of Paper Rad). The image makes the magazine stand-out though the logo blends in with the rest of the image, mostly due to the identical colors and line weight between it and the picture.
Nadel and Hodler offer a brief introducation/mission statement which says: “This magazine aims to document contemporary and past comics from a pluralistic, affectionate, and critical standpoint.” An admirable statement that does see fruition in the pages that follow.
Page 3 has a text piece by Paper Rad called “Art Comics vs. Terrorism” that I think is supposed to be funny, but really just… well, it’s pretty stupid. Is it a call for experimentation in comics? A critique of the non-experimental alt-comics world? Satire? I’m not completely sure.
The bottom of the page has three gag panels by Mark Newgarden. They feel like filler to me.
The next four pages contain two articles on artists published by Picturebox (they don’t hide the fact that this is an “and friends” kind of publication). Each piece is one page of text inset with a couple small images and then a full page image(s). The first is a bio-essay on Jessica Ciocci; the second is an interview with Matthew Thurber. Both offer some insight into the artist and the art. It wasn’t enough to make me want to read Ciocci’s work, mostly because the visuals don’t appeal to me, but I am curious enough to want to read Thurber’s Carrot for Girls which he discusses as: “about myths: punk myths, Hindu myths, time traveling.”
Next, Nadel writes a page and a half on “Ogden Whitney, Wally Wood, and the Frozen Moments School of Comics.” This kind of brief essay (with a few images) is not unlike something one might see on a blog, but less so in a magazine (something like The Comics Journal offers less by way of essays and more by way of reviews/interviews). The enthusiasm for the work that was evident in Nadel’s talk at MOCCA is here also evident (handily, Whitney’s work is in Art Out of Time).
Hodler writes a page and half on The Dick Ayers Story Volume 1-3, an autobiography by comics artist Ayers (who is probably most famous for having inked Jack Kirby’s work). The review both attracts and repels me from reading the comic, a testament to Hodler’s review as the images are probably the biggest part to repel me.
A sidebar has a list of Gary Panter’s favorite comics. It has the appearance of an ongoing feature: artists list their favorites, which would be a good place to find recommendations (that’s generally how I find new novels to read, based on what authors I like read).
The issue rounds out with ten brief (usually about a third of a page) reviews from the a fairly wide range of comics (new, old, out of print, pamphlets, graphic novels, collected serials, anthologies). The review of Love and Rockets V.2 #15 is particularly worth a read, as it discusses the weight of continuity and the past in the series and how Jaime draws on the reader’s emotions related to such.
All in all a worthy little read. What I don’t get is that it is labelled as “Free” and apparently so in person, but on the Picturebox site you can order the issue for $5! For those of us who probably won’t be anywhere near a place that will have the magazine, $5 is a steep price to pay. For the short length of all these articles, they could be easily put online with little trouble at all, and considering the already interesting blog by the editors, I hope they will consider posting the magazine’s contents. This is good, but it’s not 16 pages for $5 good.
(Edit: 9/7/06: It’s now downloadable for free as a pdf.)
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