Archive Page 2
Punk Rock and Trailer Parks
By Derf
Slave Labor Graphics
There are some exceptions, to be sure—Gary Panter, Jamie Helwitt, and Ben Snakepit come immediately to mind—but on a whole, the lack of prominent punk comics seems a bit surprising given the similar and oft-overlapping nature of the two counter-cultures. Punk has surely had a large impact on the comics world, both in terms of aesthetic and the DIY ethos that has inspired the parallel worlds of the fanzine and mini-comic, but an outright embrace of the culture in the sequential medium has rarely been quite so forthright as one might expect.
For the record, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is not likely to usher in some sea change on this matter—nor is destined to be celebrated as the definitive chronicle of a cultural movement. Such grand ambitions, however, seem to be the furthest thing from Derf’s mind. The artist has seemingly no desire to pen the graphic novel equivalent to Suburbia or Rude Boy, and while the plot is ostensibly that of a coming-of-age story played out with the backdrop of punk’s first wave, Derf’s book lacks the manner of earnest drama and self-pity of the aforementioned examples. It’s this refusal to take itself too seriously that ultimately proves Punk Rock and Trailer Parks’ biggest selling point.
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Tags: Derf, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, Slave Labor Graphics
Interview: Sarah Oleksyk
A woman working at an all-night copy shop becomes emotionally involved with one of her customers and discovers he’s a heroin addict. Graveyard is Sarah Oleksyk’s comics narrative that made it into the hands of Lynda Barry. “It was very difficult for me to write,” she says. Sarah Oleksyk draws her stories into highly-structured pages that she meticulously renders with brush and ink. “And I wasn’t proud of the artwork,” Oleksyk confides. “But it’s the story that has gone the farthest, so I just have to learn to love it.”
Lynda Barry is a fan of the hard-to-love misfits, and Oleksyk loves her work. “She writes about the emotional realm.” Oleksyk agrees that her own work also centers on a character’s reaction to situations. “The books I get attached to are always character driven. I have to care about the character.”
Filed under: Interviews | 1 Comment
Tags: Ivy, Dark Horse, Sarah Oleksyk, Lynda Barry
At its best, Peur(s) du noir is arguably one of the scariest films you’ll have the opportunity to see in theaters this year. The film, a collection of black and white animated shorts brought together by French producers Valérie Schermann and Christophe Jankovic, doesn’t embrace the ultra-violence and gore of the vast majority of movies than come through your local Cineplex. Rather, like the most compelling horror films, the animated segments confront the psychological, revolving, in some form or another, around the titular fear.
The film is a perfect vehicle for Charles Burns’s art. It’s quietly creepy, exploring themes or youth and fear of the body, all while retaining the artist’s iconic aesthetic in a manner that likely would have proven nearly impossible with more traditional animation, all of which no doubt owes a good deal to the fact that Burns played the role of both writer and director of his piece.
Burns’s segment, however, while successful, gives rise to some familiar questions about film adaptations of graphic novels, specifically the upcoming film version of the artist’s magnum opus, Black Hole. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discuss the project for which Burns has largely opted to remain hands-off.
[Part One]
Filed under: Interviews | 3 Comments
Tags: Fantagraphics, Pantheon, Raw, Charles Burns, Fear(s) of the Dark, Peur(s) du Noir
The Avengers. The Justice League. Superman vs. Muhammad Ali—the comics world has never been a stranger to the team-up. In fact, if anything, the medium has long thrived upon it, offering an easy forum for the manner of fantasy crossovers and cameos that would prove otherwise impossible in nearly an other format.
For his part, American Splendor’s Harvey Pekar has based the better part of his career upon team-ups with some of the medium’s most prominent luminaries, from his early work with Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, and Frank Stack, to more contemporary piecea that have seen him penning scripts for the likes of Chester Brown, Gilbert Hernandez, and Dean Haspiel (a handful of whom can be found in the recently released University of Mississippi paperback, Harvey Pekar: Conversations).
That Pekar should eventually cross paths with Alison Bechdel seems like a no-brainer. Author of the long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home was quickly recognized as one of the finest examples of the auto-bio comic–a genre which, while not invented by Pekar, was arguably perfected in the pages of American Splendor. Critics were quick to shower Bechdel’s brutally honest memoir with all manner of praise, awarding the book a Eisner, placing it amongst the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and naming it Time Magazine’s book of the year.
Earlier this year, Bechdel and Pekar embarked on a reading tour—”Titans of the Graphic Novel.” A slightly tongue-in-cheek name, perhaps, but certainly one with strains of the medium’s most celebrated costumed team-ups.
As any red blooded comics fan can tell you, no great team-up is complete without an equally compelling origin story. In the lead up to their national tour, Bechdel and Pekar collaborated on a strip that explained genesis of the somewhat absurd moniker that graced the posters advertising their upcoming joint appearances. The one-pager was used to help the artists book appearances for the tour.
Thankfully, Bechdel and Pekar have both kindly agreed to let us reprint the strip on The Daily Cross Hatch. Check out “Twilight of the Titans” in all of its glory after the jump.
–BH
Continue reading ‘Guest Strip: Harvey Pekar and Alison Bechdel’
Filed under: Guest Strip | 5 Comments
Tags: Alison Bechdel, American Splendor, Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home, Harvey Pekar
Hey all, I’ve extremely excited to announce that we’ve been tapped by our pals at the People’s Improv Theater to curate Comic Book Club. Next Tuesday I’ll be joining the show’s hosts, Alex, Pete and Justin, alongside Cross Hatch favorites Tom Hart, Sarah Glidden, and John Kerschbaum.
Continue reading ‘The Daily Cross Hatch Presents: Comic Book Club 11/18/08′
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Tags: Tom Hart, Sarah Glidden, John Kerschbaum, Comic Book Club
Interview: Farel Dalrymple
“We’re sold out of Pop Gun War,” the comics retailer told me. “They’re teaching it at Portland State University.”
“Teaching it?”
”They’re using it in a graphic novel class.”
I went to the fourth floor of Neuberger Hall and stepped into the English department office. The guy at the desk and a middle-aged woman were laughing about Moby Dick. My presence must have signaled back-to-work because she stepped out and the guy looked up brightly and supplied all the information about contacting Michael Ward, the teacher who had chosen Farel Dalrymple’s book, Pop Gun War.
Filed under: Interviews | 2 Comments
Tags: Farel Dalrymple, First Second, Pop Gun War
Your Disease Spreads Quick & Brilliantly Ham-Fisted
By Tom Neely
With The Blot, Tom Neely created one of the best graphic novels of 2007. It was weird and wonderful—surrealist and terrifying and strangely hopeful, all at the same time. Neely’s artwork ably straddled the line between the comfortably familiar and the compellingly new, with a largely wordless story that managed to draw readers in while leaving nearly everyone who read it with vastly varying interpretations of the author’s intentions.
Neely, thankfully, has seen fit to waste little time after the release of The Blot, crafting two minis—both aesthetically pleasing books that maintain the author’s careful attention to quality packaging. Of course, referring to either or both as Neely’s follow up to The Blot would, perhaps, be overstating their importance. They are instead well-made convention sales fodder for the artist and a much-welcomed stop-gap for those of us eagerly awaiting Neely’s next major release.
Created in conjuction with the recently released Melvins box set, (a) Senile Animal, Your Disease Spreads Quick is inspired—at best—very loosely by the sludge metal band, which is to say that, like the best pieces of art, it borrows from the group only enough to create a jumping off point for its own independent statement, one that, if The Blot was indeed a proper indication, is undeinably Neely.
Continue reading ‘Your Disease Spreads Quick & Brilliantly Ham-Fisted by Tom Neely’
Filed under: Reviews | 1 Comment
Tags: Brilliantly Ham-Fisted, The Blot, The Melvins, Tom Neely, Your Disease Spreads Quick
When it was finally collected by Pantheon in 2005, after a decade’s worth of serialization, Black Hole confirmed Charles Burns’s place as the master of indie horror comics. Where many of his fellow graduates of Art Spiegelman’s RAW had long sinced forsaken the teachings of the tattered EC books on which they were weaned, there was something in the youthful psychological terrors which Burns could not abandon—or perhaps more accurately, would not abandon him.
The persistent existentialist horrors of Burns’s work are, if anything, only compounded by the artist’s brush work, which has long since become one of the most familiar styles in all of contemporary sequential art, instantly recognizable, the moment it pops up in some anthology or on the frontcover of McSweeney’s The Believer–its stark, shadow-heavy black and white an ever-present homage to the subtle terror of the earliest of horror movies.
That Burns should attempt one day to make his own horror film should come as a surprise to no one. The artist happily signed on to direct a segment for Peur(s) du Noir—Fear(s) of the Dark. The Guillermo Del Toro-approved collection of dark animated shorts has been making its way around the festival circuit over the past year. The film is subtly frightening in a manner that most contemporary horror films forgo, too often embracing the shock of overt gore—a method that never seems to translate sufficiently in the world of sequential art.
Burns’s segment is the clear centerpiece of the film, and thanks to the subtle form of computer animation employed, which retains his style in a manner which would like be lost on more traditional animation methods, from the moment a character appears on the screen, there’s no doubt who’s behind the piece.
Burns, who has been traveling a bit to promote the film took time during a recent New York appearance to talk to us about Fear(s) of the Dark.
Filed under: Interviews | 6 Comments
Tags: Charles Burns, Fantagraphics, Fear(s) of the Dark, Pantheon, Peur(s) du Noir, Raw
In which members of the rock community tearfully reveal their geeky comic obsessions, beneath their hardened irony-based exoskeleton.
“Modern art,” Eddie Argos proclaims unapologetically in the song of the same name, “makes me want to rock out.” The lead-singer (well, the lead talk-singer) of Art Brut naturally goes on to rattle off a number of side effects of said artistic period on his temperament, culminating with the head butting of a Matisse in Paris’s Pompidou.
The song is standard Art Brut—raucous, hilarious, and catchy as all get out. And naturally, anyone who has picked up the band’s self-titled debut on which the track appears, has little question about the frontman’s opinions on the world of fine art.
Most of us, however, didn’t catch wind about Argos’s sequential art obsessions until recently, when it was announced that the singer would be penning a column of comic criticism for St. Louis-based entertainment publication, PLAYBACK:stl. Argos, a self-proclaimed DC Comics junkie devoted the first installment of his
“Pow! To the People” column to superhero, Booster Gold. He’s subsequently tackled the world of Angel and Captain America.
After a too-long hiatus, we’re extremely excited to welcome The Daily Rock Hatch with a very special geeking out by Eddie Argos. Continue reading ‘The Daily Rock Hatch: Eddie Argos’
Filed under: The Daily Rock Hatch | 1 Comment
Tags: Art Brut, Brian K. Vaughan, DC Comics, Eddie Argos, Essex County, Jeff Lemire, Michael Chabon, Top Shelf
And How by Gregory Corso
And How
by Gregory Corso
Powderfinger Books
The common definition of insanity, as I’ve heard it, is to expect different results from predictable courses. For instance, if you have a preferred route to work, and each day it takes you to the same office, that’s predictable. If you think that by following the same route, you will reach a volcano, that’s insane. By extension, if Steve Urkel thinks that hounding Laura Winslow will somehow get him a date when she says no every time, that’s also insane. Something else must occur to evoke change; he must partake of the Cool Juice and become Stefan Urquelle. You see?
Without directly addressing the subject of insanity, And How is a perfect and eerie portrayal of it. Through use of repetitive imagery and blithe, empty expressions, Gregory Corso builds a weird and fascinating story about a boy’s search for peace, a woman’s search for unity, and a man’s search for Bigfoot.
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Tags: and how, bigfoot, gregory corso, insanity, xeric grant
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