Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Jim Rugg has been making his rounds in the industry for a number of years, producing books for the likes of Dark Horse, Image, SLG, and DC’s short lived YA imprint, Minx. It’s Rugg’s latest book, Afrodiasiac, co-written with Brian Maruca for Adhouse, however, that truly finds the artist coming into his own.
The book explores the rich fictional history of the titular character first seen in Rugg’s five-part Street Angel series. The book is a lovingly rendered homage to a seemingly endless parade of pop culture touchstones from the 1970s, most notably the eras Marvel books and blacksploitation titles.
It’s a scrapbook devoted to appearances of an imaginary hero from a series that never existed. It faithful captures the decade’s diverse aesthetics with the manner of chameleon-like draughtsmanship rarely seen outside of an issue of Eightball or Schizo.
And while Rugg and Maruca certainly play fast and loose with the form, the work rarely enters the realm of parody. It’s clear that the people who created the book are fans, first and foremost.
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Arriving in spring of this year, Market Day marks James Sturm’s first major solo work since founding the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. Though set in a turn-of-the-century Eastern European market, it doesn’t take too much digging to surmise that the book is as much a comment on life as an artist in modern America as anything that might have affected the lives of artisans 100 years ago and half a world away.
Sturm, now a father of two, clearly invested much of his own life into the story of a rug weaver forced to make a choice between his art and his growing family. Happily, however, the author seems to have largely avoided such forced choices. In 2001, Sturm moved his young family to Vermont. Three years later, CCS was opened in an abandoned department store in downtown White River.
All the while, Sturm has been steadily releasing titles, including 2007’s children’s book, Saitchel Page: Striking Out Jim Crow, and last year’s Adventures in Cartooning, a how-to book co-authored by two CCS students.
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“With the Alec book,” Eddie Campbell tells me in the fourth and final part of our interview, “I’ve made something very elastic. At the end of the book, you still believe it’s me, even though I’ve thrown some outrageous curve balls.”
Campbell’s masterwork, Alec, not only helped define the comics diary strip, it helped explore the genre’s elasticity. Alec is largely autobiography, sure, based on Campbell’s life as an artist, but it’s also a work that flirts with plenty of fictional devices, as the author utilizes anything he can pull from his bag of tricks to present the story the best way he knows how.
It’s something that Campbell says he still struggles with to some degree, working with real life stories that test the boundaries of the comics medium.
[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]
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What does one do when he wants to extend his portfolio beyond “pursuit and revenge fantasies?” If that person is Eddie Campbell, the answer is simple: draw inspiration from real life. In Alec, that inspiration comes from a very personal place–largely from Campbell’s own life. Though even in that largely autobiographical work, seeds can be found in outside sources, be it in the lives of friends, family, or colleagues.
[Part One][Part Two]
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In this final part of our conversation with the Storeyville artist, we discuss the downside of being a cartoonist/critic, pen pals, and whether blogs are the new mini-comics.
[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]
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More about this “truth” nonsense in part two of our interview with Eddie Campbell. It’s fitting, I suppose, being that the big T-word does, in fact, play a big role in the recently released Alec omnibus–though, perhaps, not precisely the role one might assume. After all, while the book is rather thinly-veiled with regards to its autobiography, the artist has a rather more abstract notion of “truth” than something that strictly pertains to historical “fact.”
The whole matter is helped along by the fact that the artist slips into a third-person explanation of his own choices a couple of times during this section of the conversation. “If there’s anything interesting about ‘Graffiti Kitchen’ at all,” he tells me, “it’s the way that Campbell has mythologized his own life.”
Campbell chalks the temporary illeism up to a book he’s currently working on, though I’d like to think of it as further blurring of the sometimes artificial line between fact and fiction.
[Part One]
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In the third part of our interview with the Cold Heat artist, we delve a bit deeper into Frank Santoro’s work as a comics critic, an aspect of the industry he’s been operating in since the launch of Comics Comics with Dan Nadel and T. Hodler, back in 2006. Santoro discusses the pluses and minuses that being a artistic bring that side of his work, and the role that those infamous longboxes play in his attempts to educate the comics reading community.
[Part One][Part Two]
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“I think films should be truthful at the expense of drama,” Eddie Campbell explains. It early on a Saturday, in his side of the world, on this, the second day of the year. An hour-long phone conversation serves a nice reprieve from painting a room of his house.
Somehow the interview has shifted away from a conversation about the layouts of the world’s major cities to a frank discussion about truth. In retrospect it seems fitting, of course. Campbell, after all is in the middle of a big push for The Years Have Pants, a stunning–if slightly unwieldy–omnibus of his much beloved autobiographical, Alec.
Fitting too, is Campbell’s own abstract definition of “truth,” which, like his strip, isn’t confined to notions of strict historical accuracy.
His opinion on films, naturally, extends to comics. And while Campbell insists, tongue firmly in cheek, that “comics are awful,” he certainly has a solid grasp of what he believes constitutes a good one.
“I’m not saying that comics should be about history and the real world,” Campbell tells me. “It might be telling me something about the human spirit that I didn’t already know. But I’ve been around too long for a comic book to tell me something that I didn’t already know. I don’t think I’m going to get that from a comic book.”
And while the artist has, apparently, given up any hope in learning something new from a comic book, he is, thankfully, more than eager to share what he knows with the rest of us.
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In this second part of our conversation with the Cold Heat artist, we discuss the art of teaching comics to the indie crowd, form versus function, and indoctrinating Brooklyn teenagers into the world of comics.
[Part One]
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We discuss Carol Tyler’s early artistic life in San Francisco, the question of legitimacy, and why the artist doesn’t consider herself part of the underground in this final part of our interview.
[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]
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Interviews | bheater February 10, 2010 | 
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