Good News in Comics Academia

comics and cartooning, journal

beaty_unpop.jpgSome interesting stuff has come our way from a variety of comics scholars recently, with more to come. Firstly, there is Bart Beaty’s long-awaited book, Unpopular Culture – Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, on the new wave of auteur comics that helped transform the French-language comics market through the 90s , and which today stands as a major development in Western comics. It has yet to fall within my reach, but as a long-time reader of Beaty’s writings on comics in The Comics Journal and on Comics Reporter, I am definitely looking forward to reading it.

Beaty here laments the problems of writing about artists who are still working – especially if they are as prolific as Lewis Trondheim – but on the bright side, his book is the first comprehensive study of this important phase in the development of the medium. (By the way, the book is on special offer through comicsresearch.org).

Kulturkamp: Stegelmann og Thorhauge om ‘Verdens 25 bedste tegneserier’

comics and cartooning, debate

Som Metabunkerens læsere vil erindre, fik det hæderkronede danske tidsskrift STRIP! for nylig et eller to borgerlige ord med på vejen, udbasuneret på den velkendte vulgære og ufølsomme facon, af denne skribent. I omtalen blev Thomas Bergers anmeldelse af Jakob Stegelmanns bog Verdens 25 bedste tegneserier undtagelsesvist rost, og det fik Stegelmann til tasterne. Hermed følger korrespondancen mellem undertegnede og Jakob Stegelmann, Danmarks vel nok vigtigste formidler af tegneserier og andre populær-kulturelle medier gennem tiden:

Kære Thorhauge,
Jeg finder det sært, at min lille bog med mine yndlingstegneserier er problematisk, som du skriver i din ros af Bergers anmeldelse. Det er jo ikke en kanon, men kun en gammel tegneserielæser/anmelder/formidlers kommenterede liste over personlige favoritter, en slags klassikerliste med personlige begrundelser. Jeg kunne da sagtens have medtaget mængder af serier, der lige nu imponerer og fornyer (hvad forordet for øvrigt også opsummerer) – men det er jo mere end svært at pege på, hvilke af de aktuelle ting, der også holder og hvilke, man som læser har glemt om kort tid. Filmfolk afviser jo heller ikke Welles og Hitchcock, bare fordi Tarantino imponerer. Det bør de ihvertfald ikke, synes jeg.

“We are not magic, We are real!” – an interview with Muñoz & Sampayo

comics and cartooning, interviews

munoz_sampayo_portrait.jpg

When Argentinian cartoonist José Muñoz received this year’s Grand Prix at the comics festival in Angoulême, he stated that he considered it as much a recognition of his friend, countryman and collaborator Carlos Sampayo, as of himself. It would indeed be hard to imagine one without the other. Though they have both worked independently of each other, in comics as well as other media, it is in the comics they have created together one finds the soul of their art, an art carried by a clear authorial voice and a stark but ultimately strongly humanist sensibility. The best of their work rates amongst the finest explorations of human emotion and behaviour in comics.

This interview was conducted by myself and my compadre T. Thorhauge back in the late summer of 2001 at the Berliner ComicFestival. They were invited as guests of the festival at a time when they had just started working together again, after a long hiatus due to Sampayo having been seriously ill for a number of years.

The Saved

articles and essays, history, letters

ng_st_petermartyr.jpgI recently read two very moving books, both classics of World War II-literature. One was Italian chemist Primo Levi’s relentlessly frank first-person account of life in the camps, If This Is A Man (aka. Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), the other was the collected letters and diary entries of young Danish seaman and resistance fighter Kim Malthe-Bruun, Kim (1945). Read together, they chart different parts to survival and salvation and suggest why the two should not be confounded.

“I like Warhol better, so sue me”

comics and cartooning, debate, pictorial arts

Responding to the recent post about Lichtenstein, Metabunker-denizen Andreas Gregersen writes:

“Cambell is right (no?):

But yes, a lot of the anonymous stuff is probably more skilful.

Was RL a greater “recontextualist” (cf. “the essence of the exercise” noted in Campbell’s piece) than Johns, Rauschenberg and/or Warhol? And: When the critics talk about the craft of RL’s work, they almost always focus om his ability to twist a composition, but I think Barsalou’s swipe file more than suggests that there are (rather) too many instances where both line and composition are copied directly and not really appropriated. Granted, “Girl with Ball” is smart, but it seems to me increasingly like a lucky Picasso-punch…

And, yeah, I like Warhol better, so sue me”

Transformations in Pop

comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism, pictorial arts

image_duplicator.jpgEddie Campbell is totally on point in a couple of posts (here and here) concerning Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comics imagery in his paintings, and does his best to rub out the old bugbear, fueled by the inferiority complex comics fans often habour on the behalf of their preferred medium, that Lichtenstein was a plagiarist. Though Campbell has pretty much sorted it out, I have a few remarks I would like to add.

The accusation of plagiarism is, of course, absurd. Anyone familiar with sample-based music will be well aware of that. Lichtenstein, however, is less a sampler and more of a transformer. Importantly, his appropriations are from one medium to another. While his superb sense of design is widely acknowledged, a lot of people neglect the painterly qualities of his work. His images are not photostats, or even silk screens, of comics panels, but bona fide paintings with a wholly different set of aesthetic qualities. He transforms the off-register Ben-Day of mass printing into a sui generis form, achieving something that is emphatically not cartooning, but painting. This of course means the concomitant transformation of often rather mundane sequential art to the icons of 20th-Century popular culture some of these images quickly became.

Patologier

comics and cartooning, hype & linkage

samler.jpgJeg synes lige jeg ville benytte chancen til at plugge det eneste læseværdige indslag på Comic Zo… øhm, Seriejournalen i øjeblikket (særligt nu, hvor Simon P. poster sjældnere og sjældnere): Bertis Blog for Supersamlere! At manden selv er gal, er vi en del der længe har været bevidste om, men det vilde er, at hans venner og kolleger er endnu mere vanvittige! Berti udforsker medaljens bagside, tegneserieelskernes beskidte bug: de ægte samlere!

Bertis kække afleveringer passer perfekt til denne serie, hvor noget af tegneserieverdens særeste fauna udforskes. Alle der har lidt af en samler i sig, vil kunne empatisere med disse svære tilfælde af samlermani og lade sig imponere af deres iver og engagement.

Skål til samlerne! Og til Berti!

“I couldn’t depend on gangsters!”

comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism, journal

eternals_10-cvr.jpgYesterday, it was 13 years ago that Jack Kirby died. Always stirring to be reminded of an oeuvre as unique as his. I just read his swan song, The Eternals, in its entirety and though it is widely considered to be a flawed effort, it is simply astonishing work. The first half a dozen issues or so is Kirby running at full bore. Crafted at a time when it is my impression that Kirby : primarily through fan response to his work : had become more aware of the depth of the well he had been tapping for decades, it is perhaps his most contrived attempt at mythological discourse. This is not a problem however; besides his always awe-inspiring graphic inventiveness, it is the sincerity with which he serves up concepts such as the Fourth Host, the Uni-Mind and Arishem the judge of Mankind, that : in the end : makes Kirby’s art soar.

Dokumentation: Den Verbale Ni-Millimeter fra Nøvørk

comics and cartooning, debate

rehr_portraet.jpgBalladen der ikke vil dø fortsætter, ansporet af hhv. T. Thorhauges spritnye kritik af Strip! og tegneserietegner Henrik Rehrs reaktion på den. Jeg vil ikke gå i detaljer om Strip!-kritikken, men Rehr bringer som forsvar mod den en gammel bussemand på banen:

“Pudsigt som han [Thorhauge] også har slemt travlt med et prøve at tryne mig i det han skriver, min kritik af Blæks pengemæssige fordeling fra sidste år og mine bemærkning om “Sjuske-Dorte” i forbindelse med Blæks indholdsfortegnelse, spøger åbenbart stadig i hans baghoved. Når man stikker en verbal lussing, er det altid rart at se at den går rent ind, og jeg må tilstå en vis skadefryd ved at se vredestårerne i hans øjenkroge et helt år efter, men samtidig føler jeg også et anstrøg af dårlig samvittighed.”