Long-lost astronauts, homicidal bloggers, baseball legends and wayward skaters all find a home in John Pham’s captivating comic series Sublife (published by the always on-point Fantagraphics Books). With only two issues on the street, Sublife has already established an achingly familiar universe in all of its disparate ongoing narratives. Deftly juggling the melancholy of Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve with some Cormac McCarthy-inspired apocalyptic action and plenty of skillfully subdued deadpan humor, Pham proves himself a master of multifarious emotions and artist stylings.
Giant Robot 2 is hosting a solo show of Pham’s gorgeously vibrant gouache paintings this weekend, entitled Living Space. Go check it out, and do yourself the favor of picking up a copy of Sublife.
Oh hey look, we have a new favorite artist of all time.
Johnny Ryan is the pen-wielding psycho genius behind Angry Youth Comix and a man who lists his interests as eating Teddy Grahams in Garfield slippers whilst watching Trading Spaces. His series Angry Youth Comix is a hard-to-describe chronicle of characters named Loady McGee, Sinus O’Gynus, Blecky Yuckerella, Boobs Pooter, and Sherlock McRape (among others) practicing various forms of juvenile pranksterism. “Raunchy” doesn’t quite go far enough in describing the content of Ryan’s comic oeuvre, but it will have to do here. (Hide it from the kids?)
Ryan’s bio notes that “As a child, he had a Prince Valiant hairdo, orthopedic shoes, and was occasionally chased with BB guns by neighborhood bullies.” If this isn’t the biography of a genius, we don’t know what is!
Let us conjure memories of watching bizarre horror films on VHS, the rapturous enticement of strolling down the “Horror” section of the video store, and the awe of preteen terror derived from demonic animatronic faces oozing with gore.
In Dead of the Living Night, a show curated by Jonathan Cammisa and Jonah Birns for Philadelphia’s always-rad Space 1026, we’re given a unique opportunity to revisit those dark Hollywood dreams of yore. What they’ve created is an interactive experience of amplified pre-DVD unease, like a Disneyland simulation of the all too recent past. Waxing nostalgic about a generation raised on the fabric of VHS, Cammisa and Birns explain that the project began with “a like-minded fascination-turned-obsession with childhood fantasies and fears; the inability to look away when you now you should, combined with the desire to stay up all night fantasizing about the greatest adventures and abilities only imaginable.”
Original VHS tapes line the walls in the dark, cramped hallway, a single bulb hanging overhead. In the adjoining room an interactive “magic beast” ride allows people the fantasy of flying on the back of a giant, movable creature. You are taken through the clouds into space and then the beyond. Outside, an old television set sits atop a stack of life-sized monster corpses, playing a video where high-speed editing and tongue-in-cheek cuts splice together gore and terror, assaulting you to the point of absurdity.
If you find yourself in the tri-state area before the show closes on November 27th, don’t miss out on Dead of the Living Night. And for extra credit points in VHS Nostalgia 101, check out Fantagraphics‘ beautifully designed ode to video box aesthetics: Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box.
No one is safe in Al Columbia’s world. Not the kittens (they get decapitated) nor the children (they get baked into pies) nor the bunnies (they carry scythes). Correspondingly, no one is innocent. Grandmothers are evil, grandfathers are greedy, and trees grow baby heads instead of apples and oranges. What a wonderful world it is.
That’s not an entirely ironic evaluation of Pim & Francie, a collection of sketches, strips, stills and other valuable ephemera from the mind of Columbia (creator of the 1990s cult classic Biologic Show). The twisted narratives and characters are presented so deftly––with such humor and visual panache–that their wrongness becomes right; and thus is the singular charm of Al Columbia.
Paul Karasik summed it up well: “Pim & Franciemay appear to be a book of random jottings, but don’t let that fool you. Treat this barbed landmine like a book and you will be richly rewarded. Treat it like a sketchbook and end up with your hands lopped off and your mind empty. You have been warned.”
An abstract comic? What the hell is that? And more importantly, what’s the point of a comic if it doesn’t tell a story?
These are the questions a book like Abstract Comics raises right off the bat. Thankfully, it also answers them. The anthology, edited by Andrei Molotiu, covers the time period of 1967-2009 and is in all respects a Serious (capital S) volume. The cover is hefty, the pages are thick, the introduction is lengthy and–inhale deeply– there are footnotes.
In his intro, Molotiu offers the definition of abstract comics are “sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery”. So far so good. The definition expands from here on to include “comics that contain some representational elements, as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative.” Also good. R. Crumb is mentioned, as is de Kooning and Lichtenstein; abstract comics are compared to abstract film, and from there on out, it’s best to just flip through the book for examples of what Molotiu is talking about.
And there are some fine examples to discover. Damien Jay, Bill Boichel, Warren Craighead III and a host of other contributors are represented in a volume dedicated to a niche that most of us haven’t even conceived of. Worth a look, for sure, and maybe more.
Everyone loves a buddy comedy. The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book is a graphic novel by Joe Daly containing two stories, “The Leaking Cello Case” and “John Wesley Harding”, both set in Cape Town, South Africa. Each story takes the form of a rambling odyssey shared by best buds Dave and Paul, both laid-back and intermittently brilliant and willing to track capybaras, vaporize enemies, chill with Ozimandias and squeeze every last drop of animus out of the sponge, whatever that means, throughout the course of their escapades.
Daly is fond of sunbaked colors and intensely-detailed frames. His characters look funny, which is appropriate because they are funny. The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book makes for pleasant midday reading, maybe perched somewhere outdoors in the sun with a glass of ginger ale at your side. Read it in a lazy mood, identify with the slacker characters, and speculate on whether you could solve demented mysteries as well as they could. (Answer: probably not.)
Have you bought a comic book in the past few years? Not a graphic novel or some fancy anthology—I’m talking about those olde thyme flimsy, staple-bound periodicals filled with illustrated narratives and costing less than a bag of movie theater popcorn. It wouldn’t be a shock if you said no, and cartoonist Jordan Crane wouldn’t blame you– but he’s not giving up on the medium without a fight.
After years of creating resplendent illustrations, designing floral wallpaper for our favorite bookstore, and intermittently revealing his narrative brilliance through one-off comics, Crane has recently focused his creative talents on an Ignatz-winning (that’s geek-speak for “good”) comic series called Uptight. Presenting melancholy tales of workaday worries and broken relationships right alongside whimsical, child-friendly fare, Uptight provides a fascinating peek inside Crane’s constantly shifting thoughts, and never fails to entertain.
Read on to discover this venerable artist’s love for Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear, the challenges of cartooning for kids, and his call to revolution for a post-superhero world.
The brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez grew up in sunny Oxnard, California, with three other brothers, one sister, and a mom who seriously dug comic books and rock n’ roll. (The eldest brother, Mario, snuck R. Crumb’s dirty Zap comics into the house and introduced his younger siblings to naughtiness of the artiest degree––guess they had to find some way to rebel in an otherwise rad household.) At any rate, the kids all developed rapt interests in comics and music, thanks to the influence of the family matriarch, and these early influences would go on to shape the world of the Hernandez Brothers as they produced their legendary comics.
To quote Gilbert, “[Punk] made me cocky enough to believe that I could do a comic book, and it was good and it was all right, as opposed to being intimidated by the Marvel guys… I took that musical anarchy to comics.” Published in 1982, the brothers’ Love and Rockets #1 is considered to mark a creative resurgence in comics, and for good reason. From the beginning the Bros. produced work that was subversive and masterfully crafted, combining the punk ethos with their own crisp intelligence.
Among other Hernandez Bros. volumes, Fantagraphics recently released Love and Rockets No.1 : New Stories, with 100 pages of new material in a nice big graphic-novel format that showcases the unpredictable, silly, clever and gorgeously drawn work of the brothers, whom the Boston Phoenix called “the Lennon and McCartney of comics”.
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