If you yearn for epic weirdness, dangerous hilarity, acerbic psychedelia, and simply genius storytelling, 1-800-Mice is for you. Matthew Thurber’s serialized comic book is a fantastical journey through a world where messenger mice engage in corporate espionage, hapless zinemakers may or may not hold the key to Valhalla, and sinister sentries seek answers that only open more questions. Think Thomas Pynchon by way of L. Frank Baum, with a dash of Lynchian wit. By means of what wizardry we’ll never know, Thurber conducts the symphony of this exponentially complex tale with astonishing grace. Each unexpected fold in the narrative reveals a brief glimpse of the mutant origami Thurber seems to be constructing.
The scattered scenes in the “trailer” above (which bear no relation to the actual content of 1-800-Mice), offer a brief taste of the comic’s kombucha and embalming fluid-soaked bewilderment. For the whole experience, pick up a copy of 1-800-Mice #4 from your local weird comic book shop– or Thurber’s web store– and seek out the back issues for more clues to the epic mystery!
The greatest trick the internet ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t exist. Just kidding. The greatest trick the internet actually pulled was turning itself into a machine for fine-grained aggregating. If the word “curate” wasn’t already abused to death, we’d say that the internet facilitates the kind of link-curating that allows us to absorb the best news/music/fashion/whatever just by clicking around to a few faithful aggregators.
Among these is an ambitious project collapsing, which assembles images from around the net that have only their visual peculiarity and resonance in common. Among the works on view: Joan Crawford in a sweater that her husband doodled on, crepe paper masks, LPs from West Africa, old photographs of immigrants and hobo whittlers, needlepoint pillows, sinister puppets, chairs, backpacks, and what looks like an image from a family photo circa 1984.
Wow! Over the weekend we received e-mails from more than 350 We Love You So readers across the globe, from Colombia to Bosnia and small towns in Missouri. Your e-mails were so overwhelmingly filled with an outpouring of love for Where the Wild Things Are, Spike, and the blog that it was terribly hard to choose just three winners. We wish we could give copies of the DVD to each and every one of you! But since we can’t, here are the three lucky fans who we chose:
While it is a little tough to know that so much land lies between that little hub of creative energy and my lonely mountain perch near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is encouraging to know that scenes like the one that has developed around Family and The Smell are happening contemporarily. It is easy to get discouraged about the present state of the creative movement when looking at the cliques and happening spots that one missed witnessing first hand by decades (punk rock’s first squalid notes, the abstract expressionists redefining New York, the Algonquin roundtable, the Bauhaus etc.)
However, fetishizing the past is easily kept in check when there are ample reminders that art and culture are kept alive / re-imagined in new and unexpected ways by individuals striking out on their own or in packs. The We Love You So blog has provided ample encouragement that beautiful things are always being made and that one only needs boot straps and elbow grease to step up into the ranks of those pushing culture forward.
We like your attitude, Paul! And apparently ardent reader Danny H. appreciates our attitude. He kindly complimented us on the overall “voice” of the blog:
…hands-down my favorite thing has been the way reading the blog has always seemed like an excited friend telling you about this great new _______ that they just discovered. You’ve never sounded like taste-makers or scenesters or critics….it’s just been one more person whose opinion I look forward to hearing. Thanks!
That made us feel warm and fuzzy inside, but what sealed the deal for Danny was this cute post-it doodle he sent our way:
Finally, 14-year-old Mia R. from Los Angeles told us that when she’s not writing Star Wars-inspired sonnets, she checks We Love You So on the computers in her school library:
I love everything about We Love You So, but some of my favorite things are the knit wolf suit sweater (once I finish knitting some cupcakes, I’m going to start this sweater), Coco Cake Boutique’s Wild Things cake (I started reading the Coco Cake blog after I saw that and all of the other adorable cupcakes- I also became obsessed with cupcakes then too), Pogo, and Happy Socks. But my favorite is probably all of the lovely forts people made!!!!
For everyone else, you can pick up a copy of the Where the Wild Things Are Blu-Ray or DVD online or in stores now!
The only thing better than enthusiasm is enthusaiasm + talent. Katherine Roy is an exemplar of both— a cartooning machine whose Caterpillar Tales celebrates the adventures and struggles of its namesake hero. Roy is a natural storyteller (she released her first childrens’, A Kid’s Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail last year) and a zippy cartoonist. She also maintains a nice little blog cataloging her art experiments and assorted daily thoughts. Just delightful.
Graphic novel and memoir are two genres that, if fused right, can harmonize as beautifully as Brian and Carl Wilson. Marjane Satrapi, Harvey Pekar, Joe Sacco, Phoebe Gloeckner…the list of successes goes on. There’s something about combining the expressiveness of words, images, and narrative that can tell the story of a life like nothing else.
A recent addition to the canon is David Small’s memoir Stitches (W.W. Norton), which tells the story of the author’s youth in images as lucid as they are dreamlike. We begin with the author as a young boy, often sick, living with a distant, unhappy radiologist father and a depressed, pathologically stingy mother. When a possibly-cancerous cyst is discovered on David’s neck, he undergoes an operation leaves him literally unable to speak for nearly a decade.
What follows is a dark chronicle of the family’s dissolution rendered in images that can only be described as lovely. Lovely? It’s hard to explain how a young man’s notions of invisibility and rage can resonate so deeply when portrayed as Small portrays them, but that’s the mystery of the medium.
The melding of memoir and graphic novel is one of those alchemical developments which we can point to, gratefully, as a recent beacon of hope for the printed word. Paging through Stitches, a reader is certain that there is no other way that Small’s story might have been told.
Where the Wild Things Are isn’t the only rad movie hitting shelves tomorrow! Spike and Lance Bangs’ fascinating documentary delving deep into the personal world of Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want, is getting a deluxe DVD release, thanks to those loving cinephiles at Oscilloscope Laboratories. The handsomely packaged disc is loaded with bonus features including an exclusive essay by Sendak’s good friend, Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner, and a Sendakian birthday tribute with Meryl Streep, James Gandolfini and Catherine Keener.
To celebrate the release, the dynamic directorial duo are making an in-store appearance at Barnes & Nobles’ Union Square store for a conversation with McSweeney’s contributor and ineffable witticist John Hodgman.
The discussion will go down Tuesday, March 2nd at 7:00 PM. After the Q&A, Spike and Lance will sign copies of Tell Them Anything You Want and John Hodgman will sign copies of his own books. Barnes & Noble Union Square is located at 33 East 17th Street.
Joshua of Basic Paper Airplane (and numerous other projects) has a broad scope, as behooves a zine-writer. We’ll take it one step further. Joshua is sort of like the small-press world equivalent of a Renaissance Man.
Formerly the head of a tiny publishing house called SSO Press which released artist’s books, broadsides, zines and chabooks, Joshua now focuses on working with arts collective Use Your Words, running a zine distro and publishing Basic Paper Airplane. His zines have covered everything from genealogy to film to simplicity to cops to the media to the ghosts of Snohomish county to Kindles to the Postal System (deep breath)…and beyond. It’s amazing. It’s inspiring.
Penny Davenport cites as inspiration the poetry of Ted Hughes, traditional animation and medieval images of animals. We also see whiffs of Edgar Allen Poe (sensibility-wise) and Edward Gorey (cross-hatching wise) in her fanciful illustrations.
Make no mistake: Davenport’s originality is not under dispute. Her images have the uncommon quality of being both highly specific and adaptable to seemingly any genre. Gazing at the warped birds, half-zebras, grasping frogs and still-eyed humans, you can easily imagine the images framed on a gallery wall, illustrating a fairy tale, animating a short film or hidden away in an attic. Any way you call it, they are treasures.
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