Phase 7 #13
by Alec Longstreth
Self-Published

There aren’t enough good things to say about Ignatz-winner Alec Longstreth and his comic series Phase 7. In some of the series’ latter issues, Longstreth writes about his personal history with comics and explains the story behind Phase 7. Arguably, his more personal stories have made those issues his best minis to date for the simple fact that people want to know more about how their favorite cartoonists operate.

It’s this personal touch that made Longstreth’s multi-authored mini The Dvorak Zine such a hit. When he draws himself looking right out at you from the page, concerned and familiar, it’s almost like a celebrity endorsement and suddenly you’re like, “Yah, Sally Struthers, I really do care about the hungry displaced African kids! I just needed reminding.” Or is it just impressionable little ol’ me? Well, personally I think Longstreth’s nonfiction comics make drab bits of information feel fresh and memorable.

Its with this same level of infectious enthusiasm that he approaches this latest issue of Phase 7. Even though this issue is just a recycled comic he wrote for a class back in college (more filler until he can finish Chapter 3 of “Basewood”), the topic is just as relevant today, because Issue #13 is all about art history! And when isn’t that worth knowing more about?

Something I love about Longstreth’s books is the way he organizes a page. In each cell, he makes space for language first, then in tandem he adds shapes that miraculously don’t compete with the bubbles. He does a great job of spotting the overall tone of a page, getting the grays and blacks just right, meticulously using crosshatching styles and textures that have a body of their own to fill out a page with beautiful shapes. It sounds almost like an elementary description of how everyone makes comics, but when you see it done right, like in Phase 7, it becomes clear that not everyone is making comics it this well. In the world of mini-comics, it feels like eating a 4-course made-from-scratch meal on Sunday at Grandma’s when you’re used to your parents just taking you to McDonald’s because they’re lazy and tired and sick of feeding you. Too much? Well, in summary, it makes for a really pleasant viewing experience.

In Issue #13, the author walks his reader through a brief history of art that illustrates everyday life from ancient Egypt to the autobiographical comics of today. The part I found most fascinating came at about the middle of the issue when the art history time line finally got to the invention of film cameras. I never before considered how much impact photography had on modern art, that most modern art movements were basically a reaction to the immediate accuracy of capturing real life on film and how it freed up artists to think conceptually, working with concepts and paint, rather than real life. So that was interesting. The book ends with a focus on the illustrious illustrative career of Norman Rockwell, which was also interesting.

Even though the comic had to follow a certain format dictated by Professor Stewart at Pratt Institute, it has a great flow. I didn’t even notice the comic moving towards the boxes it had to check off to meet the requirements of the assignment. Issue #13 has a good, natural thought progression that’s highlighted and emphasized by the art. It’s definitely a good example of how comics can contribute to academia. It’s probably just the issue you should show your teachers to convince them you too should be able to write comics instead of papers in school. NOTE TO OUR READERS: For a professor to okay this kind of diversion from a proper essay is highly unusual. Professors, in general, will not really let you do this. They won’t even accept a critical essay in poetic verse in place of a proper critical essay on an epic poem, according to a very cheesed off grad student I once met.

The latest issue of Phase 7 is available right now for $3 + shipping through the artist’s website. It is 24-pages long, black ink on white paper, legal digest size. If you like it, you can even order a subscription that will get you the next 4 installments of Phase 7. Whadda deal!

- Sarah Morean

While the recently released 852 page tome, Madman Gargantua is certainly an occasion to celebrate amongst Mike Allred’s many fans, it’s the new Image series, Madman Atomic Comics that presents some of the most exciting work from artist in recent years, finding Allred re-engaged with the beloved zombified titular quasi-hero, utilizing Frank Einstein as a springboard to explore exciting new territories in the outer reaches of the superhero comics universe.

In this second part of our discussion with the aritst, we discuss Allred’s love/hate relationship with the word of capes and tights, and how the death of a beloved blond leading lady lead him down the path to Madman.

[Part One.]

It’s interesting that you that bring up the Superman story, being that you’re more or less operating in the superhero genre. How much of your work is informed by a reaction against the genre’s clichés?

I think a lot. For instance, with the death of Joe, when I was a little kid, I had a huge crush on Spider-man’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and she got killed off. I was furious. Since then, I have a very open attitude toward my affection for what’s come before me, but also part of my brain is very cynical when I see that it’s not necessarily the creators and artists at work, but the coporate powers that add marketing strategies. The result of that is my real devotion is toward creator-driven work, so what that means is, over time, Batman, Superman, and Spider-man—these characters have become far less important to me. And they only really come back on my radar when a writer or artist takes those characters and does something special with them. All-Star Superman is one example. I have a Superman book that I just love to see, when it comes out now. Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison—wow, I love it. So that means something to me, and the second they’re off the book, I probably won’t get it anymore.

In regards to clichés, I might embrace a cliché, in order to see how silly it is, so I can elevate it, or twist it, or bury it. That’s fun for me. But at the heart of that, I’m doing this because I want to, because it’s mine, and nobody else can interfere with that. I’ve been really lucky when I’ve worked with mainstream publishers. I’ve been given a lot of room to breathe, specifically with the X-Men book we did—X-Force/X-Statix. I was crushingly disappointed when it did get interfered with. We were kind of spoiled in that way. Here we were able to create all-new mutant characters. Axel Alonso was our editor—he was a creative force himself. He was very much a collaborator on the book. That’s something that, when I look back on it now, I can’t believe I did that many issues. I thought I would only do a half-dozen or so.

How long was the run?

We did 20-some issues of X-Statix, and 30 or 40-some issues in total. I’m not good with numbers. Could that be right? It was more issues than I did with Madman—it’s probably around the same now. I was doing a monthly book for them. Madman has mostly been bi-monthly, though with Atomic, I’ve stuck to an almost monthly schedule. If you count Atomic, I’ve done more in the Madman universe. They’re on issue number nine of Madman Atomic Comics—I’m moving closer and closer to doing a monthly schedule. I’ve really been focusing on keeping that momentum going.

Was that initial hesitation, in terms of editorial interference, what drove you to start your own book, or was it more a matter of your having to break in somehow?

I had a real backwards way of coming into the business. I kind of abandoned comics after childhood. In fact, it might have been after the death of Gwen Stacy [laughs].

Wow, that really had a major effect on you.

It really did. I can’t overstate that. I got a paper route and starting making my own money, and mostly spent it on music. My artist interests were album cover graphics and posters. I was also aspiring to be a filmmaker, and met a guy who was a big movie nut, and we became friends and would go to the movies. He was also a big comic book fan. This was in the late 80s, and he just kind of dumped all of these comic books on me. In there was Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and also Matt Wagner’s work on Grendel and Mage. Right here I was seeing all of this spectacular talent working in the independent comic world. It surprised me that that even existed, because I was still under the impression that it was only Marvel and DC and old Archie, whatever. So I’m seeing books like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons doing Watchmen, where they were working for DC Comics, but were twisting these characters and are doing whatever they wante. It’s clearly being driven by the creators, and Frank Miller is clearly being given full-reign on Batman. It was bursting with this whole original energy. And then seeing what Matt Wagner was doing, and seeing Paul Chadwick’s Concrete and [Dave Sim’s] Cerebus. Where Matt Wagner injected himself into his own comics was with Mage, styling the main character after himself. And with Grendel, using that as a place to collaborate with other artists. That was really exciting.

There were all of these different styles on this one character that was really driven by Matt. I got really excited about all of this diversity. And then what really put me over the top—in the meantime I stayed really involved in art. I always seemed to be that guy in class who just kind of wanted to do his own thing. A lot times I just ended up teaching myself stuff, and even in school, the art teacher let me create my own projects, because the school system pretty much had your old basic, boring stuff. “We’re going to make woodcuts today.” They let me do what I wanted to do, and I ended up teaching myself sculpting.

One thing I never excelled at was painting, because I have a color blindness. I can see and appreciate colors, I just have a tough time telling them apart—red, green, blue, purple. This is where I’ve been blessed to have Laura. She just has a natural color sense. It’s completely unique and special. But what really put me over the top was that I had a friend name Pete Siegel, who was the first comic pro I ever met. This was at the air force academy [where Allred taught]. He lived right in town, in Colorado Springs. We ran into him at a comic book store. We became friends, and between him and my movie going comic friend, Charlie, they exposed me to the Hernandez brothers, and that lit me up. Love and Rockets are what the Hernandez brothers are really know for, it’s so wonderfully unique and fresh and real. The character really drive those stories.

But their book, Mr. X became the book for me. The first four issues that the Hernandez brothers illustrated and wrote were designed in the same way that a music magazine would be designed, or a fancy record album. The graphics were incredible. At the same time, The Dark Knight Returns was this glossy square-bound comic and Mr. X was this glossy book and you’d open the cover and there’d be this double page spread. And it was like, “wow.” It blew me away. It was set in Radiant City, which was like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And all of the great looking characters and the pretty girls. And this wasn’t like a superhero. This was a guy in a trenchcoat, who would drop down into manholes and run around secret passageways through the city. I hadn’t seen anything like that, in a comic book—or anywhere. And it did have overtones of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but it also had this really colorful element of music to it. All of this happened at the same time. Lights went off and I recognized that here was a medium that was exploding into a potential that it hadn’t tapped into in 40 years! And it was being driven by individuals and not companies. That’s what my goal has been, ever since. Yes there are all of these clichéd elements, and corporate elements, and taking licensed characters and turning them into shampoo and toothpaste and what have you. And yes, I like that too. I love licensing, and I think marketing is an art form in and of itself, but when it’s the creator behind the stuff with an emotional involvement, it’s always the best stuff. I can cite example after example after example. It may not be in the top selling 100 books, but it is far superior to most work in the top-ten at any given time.

Every once in a while, something will break through, like All-Star Superman, which I mentioned before, that manages to be creatively juicy and also commercially successful. That’s a cause for celebration, when those wonderfully rare moments happen—The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen. Those are always the standards that everything is measured by. Now with Madman Atomic Comics, Eric Larsen was able to offer this format to me from Image Comics that I always wanted, this cover-to-cover full-color book, and I’m utilizing those double-page spreads, where I can have some fun design elements and break into the story, and that’s why I’ve been able to muster some innovation of my own, like the recap of the previous entire issue on one page. That came about because I wanted to start the story page after the double-page spread. I am now doing the book that I’ve always wanted to do. Everything that I’ve done before has brought me to where I am now. And I can honestly say that we’ve never been more excited about where we’ve been and where we’re going than where we are now.

[Continued in Part Three.]

–Brian Heater

We sat down with La Perdida artist, Jessica Abel, to talk about two forthcoming First Second releases, Life Sucks and Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. Thanks in large part to our extremely short attention span, this third and final installment almost immediately turns into a discussion about her now-infamous “Stinky Date” with Peter Bagge. Also: valuable career advice that may or may not have come from Daniel Clowes, Gary Groth’s short-term memory loss, and why there’s a good chance that Abel is not currently reading your diary strip.

[Interview Part One]
[Interview Part Two]

At what point did occur to you that comics might be something that you’d be interested in doing full-time?

I didn’t think about full-time until well after college. It didn’t seem plausible. We’re talking about the early-90s, here. In fact, the first time it even occurred to me when I got together with a group of cartoonists in Chicago. The core of the group was Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Gary Leib, and Archer Prewitt. I went to hang out with them, a couple of times. Dan and Gary were a bit older than me and it was a little intimidating, so I didn’t do it that often.

At one point, I brought my sketchbook and a few comics in, and I was talking to Dan, and he asked me if I was serious about this. Did I really want to be a cartoonist, was I going to keep going with this? And I said, “yeah, I really want to, but I know I can’t make a living at it,” and he just looked at me and said, “why not? I do” [laughs]. I’ve since told him the story, and he’s denied that he said that. He said there’s no way he would have said that. So, take it with a grain of salt, but I remember it very clearly.

Where does the Peter Bagge story fit in?

Well, I graduated from college in ’91, and I met Pete in the summer of ’92. I’d entered a “Stinky Date” contest. I won it, and he invited me to meet up with him at the Chicago Con, so he could draw me and put me in the comic. I brought issues of Artbabe to show to him, and as it turns out, Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds [of Fantagraphics] were there too—I think Kim [Thompson] was probably there, too, but I didn’t actually meet him that time, I gave it to all of those guys. Gary, of course, didn’t remember that I had ever met him or that he had ever seen me, until five years later.

Did readers assume that Artbabe was largely autobiographical?

Well, they assumed that the Artbabe character, who was on the cover, was me, which she isn’t. The stories, not so much, because often they don’t have a female protagonist. I didn’t get that as much. But I get that all the time with La Perdida—people think it’s autobiographical.

At least for the first-half. At one point it becomes pretty clear that it’s not autobiography.

Well, you’d be amazed. Matt [Madden, Abel's husband] and I were on tour in Leon, and a woman turned to me and said, “so…that guy, is he okay?” And I asked, “what guy?” and she said, “the guy in the book. Is he all right?” I said, “oh no. that was just a story” [laughs].

You guys were living in Mexico for a while—you must have drawn on some real-life inspiration.

Well, in that sense, sure. I was also drawing on real-life inspiration in Artbabe in that I was living in Chicago. But the story is completely fabricated. Seventy-nine-percentage of the locations are real, however.

You seem to be the exception to the rule in alternative comics, never having done an autobiographical work. Is there are reason that you’ve shied away from that?

I just don’t have an interest in it. I don’t need to tell anybody else about my life. I don’t have an interest in the diaristic element of autobio comic, and I don’t have a story to tell about me that would work by itself. I mean, I could probably figure something out—anybody has a memoir in them, if they try, but it’s just not interesting to me. Some of them are interesting to read, but it’s not something that I want to be doing. It’s a little disturbing to me that it’s what everybody assumes I do.

There’s just so much of it.

And it’s weird that everybody assumes that [La Perdida is] autobiographical. The girl in this book is just a dummy. I mean, I really like her, but she’s not really an attractive person in a lot of ways, and that was intentional. But now it’s like, “so what do you think of me? If you think she’s me, what does that say?” [laughs]. That’s a whole side issue, though.

Are you finding that a lot of kids coming up now are still drawn to that manner of storytelling?

Yeah, a lot are. I think you have to draw a sharp line between kids who are interested in comics from an alternative/literary direction, and everybody else. There are many more of the “everybody else” than the artsy crowd, but that said, yeah, there are still a lot kids into autobio. That’s sort of the default that people go into, and I don’t get why. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it, but I don’t get why the first thing you’d think to do is write something about yourself.

Would you dissuade a student who was interested in doing that?

If they’re boring. And I don’t mean if they’re boring personally—I mean if they’re telling boring stories. I tell people that all the time. I don’t tell people not to do autobio, but I tell them that, if they’re going to tell a story, there still has to be a point to it. There still has to be structure. It’s still fiction—it seems like it’s non-fiction, but if it’s done well, it’s still fiction. You’re picking and choosing elements, you’re orchestrating the story. You’re in control. If you’re not in control, it’s going to be dull. “I woke up today, had breakfast, had phone calls to make, a guy had to fix the dishwasher, took my baby out for a walk. Yep.” [laughs]. You know, that’s the nature of a lot of autobio. I’m sure I could come up with a really poignant thing to say about the day, if I really tried, but you have to really try—you don’t just put the first thing that comes into your head.

Has teaching affected your work?

Sure, yeah. Again, I’d be hard-pressed to define how, because it all happened at the same time, but the amount of intellectual work that I’ve done in trying to understand how stories work and trying to put my stories together in a way that’s accessible to other people—all of those things are really valuable in understanding my own work.

–Brian Heater

A rich remembrance of Stumptown 2008 as presented by Shannon O’Leary.

I left New York later than most of the other cartoonists traveling to the Stumptown Comics Convention in Portland. I had to toil for the man at my cruelly underpaid temp job right up until 5:00 PM on Friday afternoon. Luckily I’ve been temping right by Grand Central Station and was able to catch a shuttle bus to JFK in a traveling commuter ju-jitsu style move that this seven month old New Yorker was proud to pull off.

Relax, I told myself – I’m going to Portland!! I’m getting out of the rat race for a weekend and a day! Who wouldn’t want to travel to a magical forest land where comic books grow on trees and none of the creative creatures who inhabit said forest land appear to work more than 30 hours a week at a day job if they work at all? In my commuting flurry of defending myself against disgruntled bus drivers and my pushy fellow public transit riders, I had forgotten I was actually taking a vacation till I plopped my ass down in Seat #22B for my Jet Blue 7:00 PM direct flight to PDX.

After all, it’s not like I was going to be behind a table in Portland with new comics. I could just enjoy the convention for comic’s sake without worrying about cramming all the pimpage I could in two days time, while my own comics remained in various developmental stages at home and I could, mercilessly, forget about them and everything else for a few days. Enjoy, I told myself. EN-FUCKING-JOY!

I didn’t begin to truly relax however until the flight took off. Jet Blue’s enforced television programming treated me to a VH1 Classic presentation of Heavy: The Story of Metal. It was then that I truly noticed rowmates. Not that I didn’t take note of them prior to take off. How could you not notice two huge bespectacled, tattooed dudes (clearly identifiable as Portlanders by their fleece outerwear)? But when we all started head-banging in unison and nodding approvingly at one another without even knowing each other’s names, I felt it. They felt it too. We were on our way to the magical netherworld of the Pacific Northwest!

Unfortunately, the late arrival time on Friday night meant missing out on all the pre-convention gatherings of Thursday and Friday night. I managed to get the scoop however from folks in attendance at functions on both nights. Thursday night the festivities kicked off with what sounds like a sparsely attended but lively reading at the Main Branch of the Multnomah Public Library hosted by Sparkplug Comics with cartoonists Aron Nels Steinke, Jason Shiga, and Elijah Brubaker giving readings of their work. It was the first public reading of Brubaker’s widely buzzed about Wilhelm Reich series and Shiga’s first library reading of Bookhunter in front of a largely librarian audience who, by all accounts, cracked up knowingly at all the librarian in-jokes in his graphic novel about a crack library forensic team trying to recover a stolen book from the Oakland Public Library. (panel from Elijah Brubaker’s Reich Series [Sparkplug Comics])

That event kicked off a larger, fancy affair at the Ogle Gallery - The Librarian’s “Get” Graphic party, hosted by Baker’s Mark Literary Agency and Bowler Hat Comics. Both events aimed to promote literacy through comics and facilitate relationships between comics creators and publishers and librarians. Local Portland cartoonist celebrities in attendance included Derek Kirk Kim and Craig Thompson and numerous local publishers came out to support the event (including Dark Horse, Top Shelf, Oni and Sparkplug) along with representatives from Friends of the Library and various branches of the Multnomah County Library System. Speeches were also given by noted comics thinker and critic, Douglas Wolk, and doer of comics good, Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, who discussed the current happenings in comics from a literary, societal, and legal perspective. It sounds like it was a slightly buttoned up affair for comics but also representative of the widening acceptance and influence of comics in literary circles. All in all, such a night reveals what’s happening in comics right now on an educational and cultural level that there were two prominent events targeting getting comics into libraries happening in conjunction with a comics convention.

Friday night, on the other hand, sounded like it was a good old fashioned indie comics bro down of the hightest and lowest order at the very welcoming and intimate setting of Guapo Comics and Coffee. The show was organized by Tim Goodyear of Teenage Dinasour and Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comics and featured readings by young up and coming comics rock stars Liz Baille, Austin English, Sarah Glidden, Julia Wertz, Minty Lewis, Trevor Alixopulos, Rina Ayuyang, and, for the second night in a row, a tireless Jason Shiga. According to numerous sources, Ayuyang. absolutely killed it with a story she describes as a work in progress called “THIS is the day!” Ayuyang’s story was by all accounts an incredibly inspiring and well crafted piece about the inspiration that comes from making art because you have to and want to express something. It will appear in the next issue of Rina’s mini, Namby Pamby #5, which will be out for either Mocca or APE this year.

But the true star of the night was Sarah Glidden who won a well deserved Masie Kukoc award for excellence in mini-comics. Below is a picture of a totally hott Ms. Glidden giving her acceptance speech.

Sarah Glidden receiving her Masie Kukoc award at Guapo Comics and Coffee. (photo by Greg Means)

Seriously. Doesn’t she look super hott in those skinny pants? And she makes comics that, according to Jeremy Tiedeman, co-proprietor of Guapo Comics, are compulsively readable and culturally enlightening. For those that don’t know, the Masie Kukoc award for mini-comics excellence rewards a self-publisher of mini-comics on the basis of merit and financial need and for being awesome. Nominees are chosen by a distinguished panel of cartoonists, educators, journalists, publishers, and retailers and must be at least partially hand-made by the cartoonist. The Prize money for 2008 amounted to a whopping $400 and was generously donated by The Center for Cartoon Studies, Sparkplug Comic Books, and several anonymous donors. The award is coordinated by Jesse Reklaw and I ripped this copy almost directly from his website with minor edits. Thanks, Jesse!! And congratulations, Sarah!

Around about the exact moment that Sarah was celebrating her win, my cousin and my cousin in-law were picking me up at PDX, a familial obligation they, lucky for me, felt compelled to oblige. After sleeping the sleep of the nearly comatose on their couch, we woke up and had a cup of coffee on the porch and I marveled at the stark contrast in lifestyle between Portland and New York. The day before I couldn’t even recall having seen a tree and here there was nothing but trees, trees, trees as far as the eye could see.

But the morning was getting late, so I cast Emersonian contemplations aside to get to the convention with the cousin and cousin-in-law in tow, grateful that, for once, I didn’t have to hurriedly schlep books to get to a dark hall by the ass crack of mid morning. The convention was held in a large well lit room at the Lloyd Center Double Tree. It was a nice day and the sun was shining in through the windows, environmental conditions which set an all around cheerful atmosphere for the show. Additionally, the place was packed – literally wall to wall with convention-goers - and sales, at first glance, appeared to be brisk. We decided to stroll around and see what the larger indie publishers had to offer first. Both Oni Press and Fantagraphics had nothing new to offer, having debuted their major Spring books the week before at New York Comic-con (a new Thomas Ott book from Fantagraphics looks particularly interesting). Top Shelf, however, was a different story. Brett Warnock greeted us warmly, pressing a cornucopia of minis and perfect bound books in my hands (one of which, 24 X 2 by David Chelsea was INCREDIBLE).

We then perused the isles of the show in a leisurely fashion, seeking out the best in show. At the front of the hall, MariNaomi (Estrus), Sarah Glidden (Israel in 30 Days or Less) and Julia Wertz (Fart Party, n’est pas) were getting a lot of traffic due, in large part, to Glidden’s win the night before and the Fart Party’s unwaveringly loyal following but also to the solid collection of rad comics by rad girls.

One aisle over we ran into Justin Hall who gave us a copy of his new mini, Glamazonia: The Uncanny Super Tranny. That hilarious book is the result of Hall’s Queer Press Grant from Prism Comics. Justin, also had copies of Hard to Swallow, his gay porn comics that apparently had already resulted in the unwanted attentions of married closet case who, while attempting to cruise Justin as he simultaneously examined his gay porn, was interrupted by a phone call from his wife. All that before 2:30 PM on a Saturday! The big sweet tranny in the sky only knows where he wound up in the wee hours but Justin assured us it was not with him. We’re pretty sure we trust him. Pretty sure.

At 3:00 PM, I had to get to the Running a Small Business in Comics panel with noted small business in comics people – me, Dylan Williams, Tim Goodyear, Jeremy Tiedman, Julia Wertz, and Francois Vigneault talking about…taxes and spreadsheets and taking advantage of the copier at your office job for print runs. It was a little disorganized but we had fun and hopefully disseminated some somewhat valuable information to someone without seeming too drunk.

Then it was back to the convention where we put our ears to the ground to find the buzz books. I was able to single out four books that people were talking about, which by my stringent definition of a buzz book meant that 2 or more people had mentioned it. First on that list was Hot Breath of War by Trevor Alixopulos, a perfect bound book by Sparkplug Comics featuring a series of vignettes about lovers in war time that explores the entwined themes of sex and war and the seduction of war. My cousin looked at it and said he liked it! In addition to the family approval stamp, casual conversations with both creators and fans indicated that both were looking forward to cracking it open and a cursory perusal heralded good things.

Convention-goers, particularly other creators, were also talking about Minty Lewis’s PS Comics #4. Lewis’s book is coming out in early 2009 from new indie publisher, Secret Acres. PS Comics #4 consists of a longer story than usual for Lewis, although, as usual, it’s funny, wry and oddly sweet, just like her shorter stories. But the book everyone was looking for but no one seemed to have a copy of was Welcome to the Dahlhouse by Ken Dahl (Microcosm). The Microcosm table sold out of copies early on Saturday but you can order a copy directly from them here.

Last on the list was an insanely ambitious and well executed hand made book called the Ancient Ploughman by a San Francisco outfit called Two Fine Chaps (Tom Biby and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm). That book was recommended to me by both Indigo Kelleigh (one of the show’s organizers) and Ryan Alexander Tanner (a 2007 Xeric Grant recipient). The production, layout and design of the book was amazing but it was priced at a cost prohibitive 20 bucks. If you’ve got it to spend, I suggest getting a copy, for the unique and beautiful production quality alone, which you can do here at their website.

After having dinner on the money I saved from not buying their book (tough times and crappy temp jobs call for tough choices), I headed over to the Cosmic Monkey Stumptown Afterparty which is largely a blur to me. Not because of anything like bad sushi from dinner or bad comics or too much or too little of anything bad really, but mainly due to reaching my own personal quota of bright fluorescent lights. The evening featured a fun but nearly incomprehensible awards ceremony that was nonetheless, gallantly and democratically organized by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man infamy. Wheeler’s imaginative awards ceremony basically consists of creators who nominate themselves with a $5 entry fee (to discourage entering multiple categories). They need to be exhibitors and they have to come to the award ceremony, then attendees to the show vote, and Wheeler and posse tally the votes at the end of the day on Saturday, a tradition that apparently started last year. They hand out “personalized” recycled trophies to the winners on Saturday night. The list of the winners is here.

Cosmic Monkey Party and Trophy Awards Ceremony. (photo by Shannon Wheeler)

We, however, spent the majority of the evening talking to Ryan Alexander Tanner about a story we did with him for an anthology called The Bridge Project which aims to team Portland cartoonists with SF cartoonists, which I’m convinced will never see the light of the day. Get it together, Matt Leunig! If we don’t see something by APE you’re totally fired! There’s a lot of interesting artist teams on deck and it’s a great idea but you have to FINISH IT already. This is serious tough love time!! You’ll thank me in the morning.

We also talked to Vanessa Davis about her eagerly anticipated collection of stories from D&Q, due out sometime in the very soon near future, we hope. Although our conversation is largely censored due to its emphasis on boys, I was lucky enough to be able to check out her sketch book which is looking totally amazing and which teased us just enough to be super f-ing excited about the aforementioned book she’s doing for D&Q.

Then we had an enjoyable conversation with Robin McConnell about some upcoming stuff he set up at the convention for InkStuds (be sure to bookmark his page inkstuds.com and check it regularly as he has a lot of great interviews coming up this Summer). We then paid attention long enough to watch our roommate and buddy, Julia Wertz win an award for something and hand the trophy off to us to take back to Brooklyn proper while she does some Girls Gone Wild drive across country odyssey with party girls Austin English and Sarah Glidden. But again, this not paying attention thing was no fault of Shannon Wheeler, really. It was probably more the fault of jet lag dwarves who had crawled out of the Portland forest to taunt this Shannon with their heckles of you’re so fucking tired just go to sleep already.

I did. Eventually. But it was in the very wee hours of the morning and I awoke shortly after to head back to the convention where I finally managed to catch up with the main man behind Stumptown, a very busy Indigo Kelleigh, and one of the show’s co-producers, Kip Manley, about why they moved the show to April and I was, well… moved by my conversation with them! When I first heard that Kelleigh and crew were picking up the slack left by APE changing their usual April date to a November one, I was inspired by the undying spirit of the never say die - just say DIY - indie comics community. The show really did come together well - there was a ton of foot traffic, and while a lot of exhibitors complained of ho hum sales, just as many sold out. The show featured large contingents of cartoonists who had traveled far and wide from all over the country due to the very friendly welcome mat of the Portland comics community’s home base and Indigo and crew’s last minute, exceptional organizational skills.

After talking to Indigo, we lured Minty Lewis away from her table to accompany us to what turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining and lively panel discussion/bro-man love down between Derek Kirk Kim and Jason Shiga. Kim and Shiga have been friends since both started making mini comics about ten years ago. Kim was a great interviewer and it was interesting to listen to a fellow creator and friend of a creator ask his dear, longtime friend questions about his work. The talk, surprisingly, did not center much around Bookhunter for which Shiga was just nominated for a new category of Eisner – Best Graphic Album of 2008. The discussion largely focused on Meanwhile – the world’s 2nd largest interactive comic ever made (5′x5′) and the labor intensive process Shiga endures to put together the book copies which are standard paperback size with mostly tabbed pages. Shiga valiantly continues to put them together – that is, when he’s not too busy auditioning for reality television shows like, Beauty and the Geek, which he and Kim also discussed in great detail. Apparently his audition for the show included having to answer some high level math nerd question about the number Pi and having to bust some dance moves on the spot. (photo by Glenn Peters)

The show ended shortly after that and then we had a dilemma. Should we go see Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay with Kim and Shiga? Or should we go to the Pony Club Stumptown Afterparty? When Shiga and Kim equivocated on movie times we bailed out on what seemed to be a beautiful, but largely unplanned and potentially impossible to realize dream, and left for the greener pastures of the Pony Club. The Pony Club did NOT disappoint. It was the closing night of a “magic” themed art show curated by Pony Club proprietor Zack Soto and pretty much every piece in the show was great. The show mostly featured works by comics artists (like Josh Simmons and Soto himself) and every single piece of art was good. Attendance was such that, if a bomb had gone off at the Pony Club that night, the indie comics community would have needed a FEMA grant just to continue. The show was great and great fun and I wish I could link to their website so you could see some of it but their myspace page almost crashed my computer.

The next day I tooled around Portland in a haze till evening time. Then I returned to my cousin’s house who, like the total champion of the world cousin he is, took me all the way back to the airport at the witching hour of 11 PM. I was on the same flight as New Yawk cartoonists Robin Enrico, Liz Baille, MK Reed, and Alec Longstreth but crashed out shortly after the flight took off and didn’t really communicate with any of them beyond some early morning cryptic but understood hand gestures made to MK in a plea to indefinitely borrow her generously lent hoodie in what turned out to be a rudely inclement New York Tuesday morning.

I was back. Back to the grit, steel and grind of the rat race and way far off the steps of my cousin’s front porch. All in all, though, even though I marveled at the magical woodland of Portland and the pleasant lives my friends and family have there, I have to say that this city mouse would go crazy there and I’m happy to be back. I returned MK’s hoodie to her yesterday night as we had a nice evening walk and a cup of tea in the East Village together. Then, this morning, two days back in the hood, I shoved my way through my early morning rush hour commute with a bag full of great new minis to read on the subway.

- Shannon O’Leary

[Above, a fresh batch mini-comics from the Lutefisk series. Below, the dispatch du jour.]

• Be ready at the door with this list of Free Comic Book Day offerings.
• How’s the weather in Minnesota? Good day to see a show featuring 50 cartoonists packed into a Bento box?
• Cartoonist takes advice on how not to draw like Daniel Clowes.
• Anders Nilsen gives us the monologuist.
• Hope Larson enters the NSFW zone. (via The Beat)
• Johnny Ryan Font = Hours of Fun. (via Flog)
• Gary Panter talks about how he put together his latest book.
• Comics Reporter makes it easy to live vicariously through this year’s Stumptown attendees.

-Elizabeth Chou

[Something that speaks both the French language and the language of Math. I am utterly lost to each.]

A well-liked man of many talents, Kevin Cannon will be the featured artist at this Friday’s Lutefisk Sushi Volume C release party. Much of his artwork will be on display, including comic pages from Far Arden as well as the kind of fancy pants paintings he went to school to learn how to make. I think we’ll all be dazzled.

Each Lutefisk Sushi box set contains 150 of Minnesota’s best mini comics packaged in a silk-screened box of Cannon’s design. You can buy one and sit around to read, or you can be cool and drink beers with me. There will also be artwork from other Minnesota cartoonists on display. Be there if you can, since this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day, you know? The event will run from 7-10 pm at Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis.

How do you intend to promote Far Arden?

I’m about the worst promoter. I’ll probably do a blog post about it. Send an email out to people. That’s about it.

I’ve read most of your work up to this point and it seems to me that Far Arden is about the opus of your career. I’ve read the collected Johnny Cavalier comics from back when you were in college and it looks like these characters in Far Arden were developing even then. So I guess my question is, where do you go from here?

That’s a good question. It’s something I’m not really struggling with right now but I’m certainly thinking about. I’d love to see this Far Arden character Armitage Shanks continue on in a series. I’d love to have 10 Shanks graphic novels in a couple of years or decades. Then again, with running a business I’ve really realized how limited time is. At this point I don’t have a family so I can imagine my time constraints then. I’ve been thinking about doing something else, like maybe a Sloth Force Seven graphic novel or something sci-fi, anything that will be completely different than Shanks.

Oh, that’s too bad.

Why?

I love Shanks. He’s great.

I haven’t given him up, it’s just a question of what’s the sophomore attempt going to be? If it’s another Shanks novel, then I’ve set up a precedent that everything else will be another Shanks novel.

I really love your hand-lettering, especially the serif font. How did you develop it? It seems to me unusual that a person would come up with that kind of comics lettering style since it takes so much time to add the serifs and fill in the letter forms.

I don’t know where it came from. Mostly I borrowed from what was available at the time. Some computers I used had a very limited number of fonts, so if you wanted something unique it had to be created. Nowadays you could choose from thousands of fonts at the click of a button and have a really great-looking font, but I ended up making my own. I remember printing out the standard serif font, Times New Roman or whatever it was, and basically copying the font to learn where to put the thick lines and serifs. I used it in Shanks a lot because I wanted sort of an old-fashioned feel. I think serifs help that out a lot, so I just kind of stuck with that.

I really like your comics, obviously, but it really bothers me that you don’t promote them and that nobody else is reading them except for, of course, the very small band of people who seem very devoted to giving you positive feedback through the Big Time Attic blog.

That’s actually really fulfilling. I’d almost rather have a group of really devoted people than know that thousands of anonymous people are reading it.

Hm.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I like what I’ve got right now, which is maybe why I’m not desperately trying to find a wider audience.

Is that because you’re afraid of fame, Kevin? And what it does to people?

I think that’s it. I don’t want to use heroine just yet. [laughter] No, what is it? I don’t know. I think I’m at a point in my life where I’m still developing a style and characters. I feel like everything is apt change. Even looking at the beginning of Far Arden to the end of Far Arden, the difference in style is huge. To me, at least.

Well, that’s probably because you were doing one page an hour, right?

Yah, that’s true. I don’t know if you looked at the Johnny Cavalier book from the first page to the last page, but the stylistic differences were huge. I feel like I’m in that sort of state still. Less so now, maybe, but I guess it’s not a fear of fans so much as getting big for a style I’ll outgrow. But, then again, I guess I don’t want to get to a point where I’m stuck in one style so I’d always like to always be growing or developing a different style.

You’ve been selected among all the cartoonists in Minnesota to design the bento box for the upcoming Lutefisk Sushi show (Volume C). [Lutefisk Sushi is a box set of hand-made mini comics and its release is accompanied by a gallery show where the box designer’s artwork is basically the main event.]

Yah, I’m really excited about that. I’ve been working furiously on the design of the box and it’s posted on the blog. Shad and his buddies at PUNY are going to be printing it up, which is great because I know nothing about screen printing. I’m working on the postcards right now with Jamie from Altered Esthetics and working on the website. As far as the actual mini comic I’m going to do, I’m keeping my fingers crossed and I’m not sure this is going to work out, but I’ve got a friend who I collaborated with on the first Lutefisk Sushi and his name is Sam Thumb. He’s a lieutenant in the Navy, he’s actually in Iraq right now, so I’m trying to get him to write a slice-of-life type story that I would then illustrate.

You and Zander both are very talented writers and I love reading the Big Time Attic blog. I know you went to school for art and mainly painting, but how do you keep your writing skills sharp?

Actually, Metro just named us the best Twin Cities comics blog.

Ha! Do you get prizes for that?

Just kind of the emotional equivalent of a pat on the back.

Nice. So you studied art in school?

Yah, I studied painting.

Did you study writing at all?

I used to write a ton of short stories in high school, but none in college and none since then. Prose and poetry in high school, and then I moved onto the weekly strip at Grinnell, and that moved onto today.

How did you get to do the weekly strip as a Freshman?

I actually went to the paper the first week of school and asked if they needed any illustrators, not thinking about comics at all. They said we don’t use illustrators because we prefer photographers, but the guy who did our comic strip just graduated so would I be interested.

Wow, so had you even thought about comics up to that point?

No.

Wow! That’s exciting.

Yah. In high school I did all the school flyers and tshirts and things like that, so it was all comic art but illustrative.

You went to Breck, right?

Yes. That was really great. Breck is a really small school and I was the only person who did that kind of thing. I wasn’t friends with everyone in my class, but I loved the institution and all that kind of stuff. Zander and I are always talking about different graphic novels that we’re going to do, not for other people, but for ourselves. And one of these ideas is to explore a kind of private school type of soap opera comic.

Since this interview was conducted a month ago, Kevin Cannon has begun work on his next Shanks graphic novel.

Another bonus! Read all about Twin Cities rock stars in the Rock Atlas Cannon created for the City Pages (the free paper Juno’s Diablo Cody used to edit). I’m sure you’ll find it interesting because you obviously love Prince and Lifter Puller (Craig Finn’s band pre-Hold Steady).

Part 1: CAN BE READ HERE

-Sarah Morean

I’ve finally achieved one of my New Years resolutions: not being hung over on a Monday. While this meant I crammed a weekend’s worth of binge drinking into Friday night, it paid off, as I’m now in ship-shape and Bristol fashion, looking forward to a field trip to OK Comics in Leeds.

Due to a taste in attractive, but impractical kitchen fittings, and cats that insist on being fed, I’m a bit skint at the moment. This means I can afford neither a Leeds A-to-Z or the printer ink needed to print off from Google Maps. The thought of writing the directions down off of the Internet only occurs to me while waiting for my train. Why are the pretty ones always so dim? I’m now hoping for two things: a. that Leeds has tourist information with free maps and b. that my chosen Dictaphone has a good range on it as I forgot to pack my deodorant in my gym bag this morning.

My visit isn’t solely for The Hatch (my expenses account remains barren [god only knows where Oliver squandered his massive comics blogging paycheck-Ed.]), so I’m taking a batch of my own efforts over. I’m encouraged, having spoken to Jared, OK’s manager, on the phone that he said he takes 30-percent. This is the best I’ve heard of, with most other shops taking as much as 50-percent. The difference might not seem much, but any money earned can go back into making more comics, which is what we’re all here for.

On the train over I read an ‘hourly’ comic by Mark Ellerby, which is perfectly enjoyable for what it is. I think I’m softening my approach to autobiographical stuff as I near my 30th (three weeks, birthday card fans). Same goes for folk music. I’m just getting soft. Shit, maybe it’s the hangovers! No hangovers, no bite, no bile, no intolerance for anyone’s comics but mine. It’s like Samson and his magic hair!

Arriving at Leeds, I procure a free map, dodge the Scientologists on route, and in no time I’m stammering my way through my first interview. You think you don’t like the sound of your own voice. You know n,n,n,n,nothing.

Looks like you’ve got a load of small press stuff in–looks mint. In Manchester we’ve got Traveling Man and they’ve got a small amount of space, but it’s right in the front of the shop. Apart from that, we don’t really have anywhere in Manchester that’s got that good a reputation for taking this kind of stuff.

Jared: Does Magma [art and design book shop in Manchester] do just art books?

They stocked Trains Are…Mint for a while but they’re kind of picky and they take 45 to 50-percent, depending what kind of mood they’re in.

That’s pretty steep.

They don’t just do comics, though. They do art books and books about design and fashion and that, and you’ve got to send a copy off to their London branch and they’ll get back to you in about two months.

That’s a pretty commercial, mass-market way to deal with books really.

Saying that, though, out of all the shops I’ve had the book in, I’ve sold more through Magma than anyone else.

Yeah it might be a ball ache, but it’s worth doing.

People go in there when they wouldn’t go in a comic shop. Fifty-percent is still tight ,though.

You’ve just got to make sure you’re making your money back.

It’s never going to be a money-making exercise anyway, is it? I was pretty chuffed and surprised when you said you take 30-percent actually.

It’s really 33-percent.

Still, pretty nice.

That’s the mark-up we have on all the other comics, so there’s no reason why it should be any different. We don’t stock small press stuff to make money. I mean, I don’t run a comic shop to be a millionaire!

You’ve got, what, three or four shelves dedicated to self-publishers?

What’s there could easily be spaced out better and take up more shelves, but we just can’t afford the space. We sell more Modern Toss stuff because it’s on TV every bloody week.

[Spotting Sturgeon White Moss] That’s the first time I’ve seen that about.

The lass that sort of curates it is sort of a friend of a friend and I got in touch with her. I thought it was an American thing and I was getting it from Last Gasp in San Francisco, but then I found out it’s actually published in London, so I started getting it direct from her. It’s doing all right; I’m looking forward to another issue. It’s been a while.

Have you got any favourites in there that I should know about? I’m going to have to buy something and there are certain creators who stock up every shop available, but there’s others, like myself, who can’t get their arse into gear and only really stock up their home town shops.

Reet comes out really regularly, I really like that

Is Reet a Yorkshire reference? [In the US, you might say, “How are you doing today”? In Yorkshire, biggest county in the UK, you’d say; “reet?"]

Yeah. There’s No Time Like The Present–there’s a new issue of that coming out soon, that’s really good. For me, I think he’s [Paul Rainey] gonna get a proper book deal soon. He’s really good.

I’m going to have to put my hands in my pockets aren’t I? Is there an upstairs as well?

Yeah, come on.

Walking up the stairs, a number of frames show off the result you get when you cover pub tables with brown paper and then hand a load a pens to some drunken monkeys. These are the fruit of various drink and draw events in Leeds.

When we initially opened, we just had one floor. This were the storeroom and it was a right mess–just using it as a bin really. Then we got to a point where we had more graphic novels than we had room for, so I kitted this out and opened up here.

I’ve seen that you’ve had some signings in the past, like Jeffrey Brown and that. How was he?

Quiet. Really timid and quiet. He stayed at our house and we had breakfast together and had a right good natter. He’s a really sound guy. He was on his tour at the time. I think he’d done the Traveling Men, and Page 45, and maybe Gosh as well.

I met him at an expo once but he looked proper stressed, so I just left him to it. Poor guy.

Well, if you’re gonna be a media star…

So do you do any of the comic expos yourself, as the shop?

“Nah, not really. The shops been here for five years now, before that I worked at Forbidden Planet and I had about six months from leaving FP to deciding what I wanted to do with rest of my life, so just to make a bit of money I started to sell my own collection on eBay. But I was still getting requests from old customers asking to get stuff in for them, I think because they weren’t getting the service that I gave them at FP. Because I got on with quite a lot of the customers there I gave them quite a personal service, they wanted me to still be selling them comics. So I opened an account with Diamond, just the bare minimum, and I set up a little website.

From there I moved all my eBay customers over to that and started getting standing orders, doing mail orders; all working from my mum’s dining room table. Did that for a few months and built up enough stock, which became difficult to manage at home, so me and a mate went, “let’s just open a shop.” So we opened up in a low rent area of town and within a year we’d out grown that, so we started looking round and found this perfect location.

What’s the rent like? I don’t really know Leeds, is this a posh bit?

Yeah, if you look around it’s all posh clothes shops, but that’s part of the point really.

I don’t want to get too personal or anything but how do you see yourself doing in the future? Are you going to struggle?

I wouldn’t have thought so. If we were going to struggle it would have been earlier on, but our sales are up and up and up all the time. More people are finding us and that’s because of the location. You can open a comic shop anywhere and comic fans will find you. As long as you advertise in right places, people who want to read a Batman book will come and find your shop.

I’m still kind of learning about comics, but everyone I speak to who knows anything about English comics always says, “you’ve got to go to OK Comics in Leeds.”

Really?

Oh aye, there’s a trilogy of OK, Page 45, and Gosh.

Well, that’s nice to know ‘cos I like both those shops, I know the guys that run them and we get on.

You’ve got to encourage the independents haven’t you?

I think so. When we opened, there were two comics shops in Leeds, both parts of big chains, so it’s good that we can open up in a climate like that and hold our own. I think if I hadn’t worked at FP for so many years, it would have been really hard, just the fact that most people who bought comics in Leeds knew my face [pronounced "fierce" in a Yorkshire accent]. That were a big help. But if I’d have just been a total stranger who opened a shop, people would have been like, “who’s this chump?”

I was a big comics fan as a kid [I pull out my New Mutants 87 story, which you don’t need to hear again], but when I discovered cigarettes and girls I kind of forgot about them. Couldn’t afford fags and comics. I’m trying to pick my way back in now.

Marvel and DC both do some non-superhero stuff.

Really?

Like Punisher…

I used to love The Punisher! War Journal and all that!”

Punisher is absolutely awesome at the moment, adults only. It’s absolutely brutal, a horrible crime series.

I don’t want to sound like a boring old fart but I just can’t get past that computer drawn art. I’m not used to it. It all came in my hiatus. The first time I made a conscious effort to get back into caped crusader stuff was with Civil War, but I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t know who anyone was. [Later on Jared will slip copies of Criminal and Scalped into my bag to help ease me back in.] Is there enough of a self-publishing scene around here to keep you stocked up?

Yeah, we used to stock little bits and then I did a talk at Caption [Expo in Oxford] to small press creators about how to get your comics into comic shops; how to make it easy for the retailers to stock your stuff. After that we just got bombarded. I did a couple of interviews while I was down there, for small-press magazines read by anyone who makes small -ress stuff, and then we were just bombarded from all over the country. That really set us up.

How do you, as a creator, make it easy for retailers? The first time I got in touch with Gosh, they said they don’t accept small-press items in the post. I thought that would make it really easy. I suppose they’ve got to cover their ass so they don’t get stuck with a load of crap comics, but if I said that I don’t mind if they want to throw them out if they’re not moving, because I just want them in their store and that’s a risk I’d have to take.

Tell them that you will do all the chasing up, you’ll keep all the paper work. I mean, if I had to keep on top of all the receipts and invoice for just the small-press things, I’d need a bloody secretary. I just say send us five copies and if they sell send us another five. So we’re always in units of five, keeps it easy.

Back downstairs, I’m on my hands and knees, picking my way through a stuffed shelf of self-published comics, ignoring things I could find in Manchester, which still leaves me with a lot to choose from. This is fun.

I’m hoping to use this column to find out more about local comics and that, because as much as I love self-publishers, I can’t say I’ve seen many I could say were brilliant, in the true sense. I’ve found myself defending comics to art friends of mine and when they ask, “all right then, so what’s a good comic?” I always find myself leaning towards the States.

That’s just like saying what’s a good TV program though isn’t it? Depends what you’re into. There’s such a range of stuff.

I’m finding them though. I’m loving finding out.

The important thing about here is that we’re just trying to get more and more people into it. Not just small-press, but all comics. To take the pressure off of comic-looking.

…

It’s the personal touches that make independents so warm and cuddly. Jared shows me where he keeps comics aside for his regulars. Each has their name alongside a bunch of comics waiting to be picked up and loved, all stuffed into boxes under the stairs. There are a lot of names. A number of names that will have played no small part in seeing OK Comics through to their fifth birthday, in three days’ time. Jared’s got a keg on order so he can make a bar of the counter and he’s busy filling balloons, and professing admiration for New Think Books [“he’ll make a brilliant book one day”], previously mentioned here, while he fields half-baked questions from this amateur inquisitor. Apparently OK is so popular amongst self-publishers, creators have been known to add there wares to the ever-bulging shelves without the clerks’ knowledge. The first Jared sees of them is when someone brings it to the counter wanting to buy it. That’s a sign that OK’s a good place to be seen and be bought.

My hopes of finding stuff I couldn’t find in Manchester are more than met, and while I leave with a mixed bag in terms of quality, having scanned half of it on the train back, I’ve seen one, Surrender By Force by Leon Sadler, which I’d consider very good, sort of a cross between Andries Neilsen and Brian Chippendale. I also found a meaty comics interview magazine, self-published, called Colouring Outside The Lines, which looks a good read. Reviews to come of the lot, but it was train fare well spent and I won’t mind not drinking this weekend having found the finds I found at my new favourite comics shop.

–Oliver East

The Rabbi’s Cat 2
By Joann Sfar
Pantheon

Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat series is comprised of the kinds of books beloved by many comics-inclined adults: packaged like children’s books, they read as if they were written for grown-ups. Beyond making great reading material for the subway (so that you can watch other people secretly watching you), these books mingle simplicity with profundity, spicing up easy-to-follow plot with sophisticated twists, and boast art that is both fun and innovative.

Sfar posited the stories of the rabbi’s cat firmly in this category with the first book, which came out in 2005. The second in the series, the simply titled The Rabbi’s Cat 2, lives up to the high standards set by its predecessor with more clear, clever writing and lively art.

Like the original book, this sequel is narrated by the talking cat of an Algerian rabbi and split into two parts. The first tells the tale of the rabbi’s cousin, Malka of the Lions, and the second that of a Russian Jewish painter who accidentally ends up in the rabbi’s village. Sfar imparts both tales with subtle wit, mixing up ordinary circumstances with imaginative premises. His unwieldy tales of desert wanderings, lost cities, and overzealous religious leaders, juxtaposed with the humanity and imperfection of his main characters, allow him to use stories that are anything but ordinary to make astute observations about issues that are closer to home for the reader, such as the challenges of maintaining religious faith and the difficulties of marriage.

Happily, these observations never come across as pedantic or forceful—only wise and appropriate. In large part, this stems from the fact that the reader is experiencing the world through the eyes of a cat, which gives the book the feeling of a fable. The talking cat causes us to willingly suspend our disbelief from the very beginning, and we exchange reality for stories with occasional morals and lessons.

All this, and the language still manages to remain simple. Sfar adheres to the premise that, although the protagonist is quite an intelligent cat, he is just a cat and probably shouldn’t be using very complex language. The unaffected writing also links the book back to the its packaging, which, as a hardcover with a large trim size, makes it look like children’s literature.

Like the language, the art is also deceptively simple. Sfar maintains the format of six same-sized panels per page with narration text at the top of each frame, and the perspective is fairly straightforward and head-on. Through the use of dramatic shading and brilliant color, however, the drawings start to feel energetic to the point of motion. The art comes alive and almost seems animated.

Sfar adds to this effect through his distinctive characters, which all have unique features, whether a round face, a sharply pointed nose, or almond-shaped eyes. When multiple people are combined in one frame, the resulting juxtaposition creates a cartoonish energy. And as everyone’s features clash, so too do their personalities.

Having found The Rabbi’s Cat series in the Young Adult section of the New York Public Library, I assume that’s where it is housed in most libraries. But don’t pass it up thinking you’re too old for it. It has a lot to tell you.

–Jillian Steinhauer

[Above, How to Understand Israel in two panels. Below, getting to know your Dispatch.]

• Sarah Glidden wins the Kukoc Award! The award was given away last Friday at the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, OR. You can check out Sarah’s now award-winning work at her website.
• Also, news out of Stumptown: Dark Horse is reprinting Larry Marder’s Beanworld.
• The new Ditko book is debuting at MoCCA. Stranger and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by author Blake Bell, will debut at the event June 7th. This is the first critical retrospective of the famed creator.
• On April 25th, Sioux Falls held an artists exhibition reception at Michelle’s. The Dispatch’s own Sarah Morean was a participant. Congrats, Sarah!

–Jason Owen

By the end of my conversation with Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, the two cartoonists are on the sort of roll that requires little guidance from their interviewer, a fact that seemingly reflects both their decades of brilliant work in the field and the fact that they have worked so closely together, for so long. Speaking with them, one can easily imagine that they partake in this manner of conversation with one another on a regular basis, engaging in poignant analysis of their own work and the work of their much celebrated peers like David B. and Marjane Satrapi.

Whether or not that is indeed the case, it’s a pleasure sitting back and listening [(and hopefully read, as well) as they use the form as something of a launching pad for art in general, touching on the works of artists ranging from Matisse to Philip K. Dick.

[Part One]
[Part Two]
[Part Three]

When you go back and read your work a few years after it’s completed, do you find that your impression of it has changed greatly?

Charles Berberian: I’ll probably read Haunted much more than any of our [co-authored] books. And I would really like to have an English copy of Haunted, because when Drawn & Quarterly published Get a Life and Maybe Later, I really enjoyed reading them, because it was like reading someone else’s book. That was probably the first time I was really excited about reading our own book.

But beyond just a translation, I imagine that reading something with a good deal of time between you and its writing, the piece probably means something fairly different to you than when you initially wrote it.

CB: Yeah. The only book we re-inked was Petit Peintre, a book that was first published in ’84, and it was quite an experience, because it was like talking to us, 20 years ago. It’s not really comfortable. It’s not a comfortable situation. We’re lucky though, that we can still be connected with the people we were, 20 years ago—we’re physically connected, because drawing is very physical. But it’s uncomfortable, because you really get a notion of time that that has faded away.

Philippe Dupuy: Yeah, but it’s okay for me when I read the our old work, because it’s still me—us. And I can discover something new, reading it, ten years after. I see the evolution, and I don’t want to do the same things again. I don’t want to do the same things now. I read Maybe Later again, in the period before I was writing Haunted. And when I decided to draw and write Haunted, I didn’t want to do an autobiographical book like that, with me on each page. But I’m in the book, anyway, and I know that the next time I do something personal or autobiographical, the idea is to not draw myself—talking about myself without representing me directly, but a friend told me that this is maturity, when you are doing that, when you’re talking about yourself, but not saying, “I, I, I.”

CB: I’m not sure about that, because first of all, I think that there are different ways of talking about ourselves, and that using “I” is a very courageous way to write and draw stories, but it has to be worth it. Especially when you’re implicating people from your entourage, like David B. is doing, when he’s doing Epileptic, or what Marjane [Satrapi] is doing when she’s drawing Persepolis.

PD: I think that in different work, when you say “I,” It’s just a different way to talk about things.

CB: The best books I’ve read were written with the “I.” Some were written by older people.

PD: When I said “maturity,” I was talking maybe just about mine. I suppose it’s not the same for other people.

CB: No, because I think—you like Picasso and Matisse very much, and when these guys are older, they’re drawing like they did when they were kids, but with the maturity of an old man, but their strength—what makes them really precious is that they’re old, but they still can connected with the kids they were, and this is part of the electricity, when you can connect with those two sides of one story. This is the electricity of what you can communicate. The fact that we’re using the “I” perspective.

I’m like Philippe, I don’t want to do this, all of the time, and the book that we’re publishing in May, there’s no way you can connect us to the characters, because there’s no Monsieur Jean there, but I tend to think that there’s somehow one of us in there. And the projection is something that’s very suitable, when you’re writing a story. You project yourself into a character, and as a reader, that’s what I do. I project myself into characters, and the implication, I think, is very important for the writer and the reader, and maybe some writers have used the “I” perspective, without any implication, and some have used science-fiction, say Philip K. Dick, with a lot of implication.

I realized, after reading an autobiography of Philip K. Dick, that one of my favorite books by him was about him in the late 60s. I think that when you’re writing and there is this implication and there is this certain way of dealing with things that you’re writing about that is very direct and the fact that you are or are not using “I,” that’s not very important. But when you’re using “I,” and you’re implicating people from your entourage, like your own family, it’s very difficult, demanding, and dangerous. You have to have a very important subject, otherwise you can use an mask, and there’s not problem with that.

David B. had problems with his family, after publishing Epileptic, and I asked him why he’d didn’t use another name. He said, “no, it wouldn’t have been the same. I had to implicate my family, otherwise the book wasn’t worth drawing.” So, I don’t know much about maturity. I’m probably the last guy who can talk about that, but as a reader, I’m sure about what I’m saying. As a writer, I don’t know.

–Brian Heater