Fantagraphics Blog

Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: Library Journal's Martha Cornog names You'll Never Know, Book 1: A Good and Decent Man by C. Tyler as one of "12 Graphic Novels for Father's Day": "A newly single parent trying to understand her middle-aged self, Carol Tyler sets out to find the real human being and the real soldier behind her World War II veteran dad's familiar and taciturn persona. Her colorful, historically detailed art re-creates the wartime period expressively, and this first in a trilogy inspires curiosity and empathy for those who serve but don't talk about it much. Everything is…

  JIM WOODRING'S WEATHERCRAFT TOUR   Jim Woodring's WEATHERCRAFT tour kicks into high-gear this week with two events in the California Bay Area on Wednesday and Thursday. At each event, Jim will entertain audiences a fantastic slide show and discussion of the hidden meanings behind every mysterious idea and totem in WEATHERCRAFT. And in Brooklyn, on June 18, New Yorkers will have the opportunity to view all of the original artwork from the book, as well as many preliminary pieces that went into making it. 06/09/10 | 7:30PM • Berkeley CA •  PEGASUS & PENDRAGON BOOKSTORE 06/10/10 | 7:30PM • San Francisco CA • THE BOOKSMITH…

  This is a somewhat cheesy post, but hey, I'm desperate. I'm selling 300 Gasoline Alley Sunday newspaper tearsheets by Frank King from 1935-1950 on eBay and you should bid on them! I'm also selling a copy of COMIX 2000 from L'Association and a Crumb portfolio. Baby needs a new pair of shoes!  

Catching up with Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Over the last few decades, Jim Wood­ring has been drawing a series of wordless, blissfully cruel slapstick fables, set in a world of grotesque entities and psychedelic minarets: half unshakable nightmare, half Chuck Jones cartoon filtered through the Bhagavad Gita. Weathercraft… flows so smoothly and delightfully from each image to the next that it’s easy to ignore that it has its own idea of sense, which may not jibe with anybody else’s." – Douglas Wolk, The New York Times • Review: "For those who find the work involving enough, Weathercraft will…

  Via The Comics Journal: On May 27, 2010, editor Ben Schwartz and contributors R. Fiore (The Comics Journal, tcj.com), Brian Doherty (Reason), Sammy Harkham (Kramers Ergot) and Joe Matt (Spent) discussed the book The Best American Comics Criticism. This recording is courtesy of Skylight Books.

Back from a short vacation with this week's strips, normally posted on Fridays: Blecky is traumatized in this week's Blecky Yuckerella strip by Johnny Ryan… …and Joe gets a manicure in this week's Barack Hussein Obama by Steven Weissman.

I'm back from taking a couple of days off and catching up on things that I missed during that time, including the arrival of new comics in stores last Thursday (a day late due to the U.S. holiday), including: Tales Designed to Thrizzle #6 by Michael Kupperman 32-page full-color 6.75" x 9.5" comic book • $4.95ISBN: 978-1-60699-422-1 "The best alternative comic book series right now? It's certainly some of the funniest comics going, even if I have little to say other than apparently spout broad, positive clichés on its behalf," said Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter last week. Hopefully…

C. Tyler has a couple of great public appearances coming up in Cincinnati and environs over the next couple of weeks. First she'll be reading from her book You’ll Never Know Book 1: A Good and Decent Man at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Sunday, June 13 at 12:30, with a book signing to follow. Then, she'll be presenting a comics workshop for teens called "Rated G for Graphic" at the Clermont County Public Library's Ameila & Williamsburg branches on Monday & Tuesday, June 21-22. Space is limited — you can pre-register at the library website.

This interview was conducted via telephone and transcribed by Comics Journal editorial intern Ian Burns and proofread by TCJ's Kristy Valenti and myself. Thanks to all! –Ed.

IAN BURNS: One of the new features [in The Search for Smilin’ Ed] is this huge fold-out here, and I was wondering, now that there’s over one hundred characters in your own personal universe, does having it that large affect how you create new stories at all? 

KIM DEITCH: Well, it certainly gives me a lot of advantage in terms of I’ve got all these characters and I can use them in stories, but I’ll tell you, bein’ a character of mine isn’t all that great [Burns laughs]. If I haven’t got a good idea for ‘em, forget about it. A character’s only as good as he is contributing to the storyline that I want to tell. The only one that’s really lasted all this time is Waldo, and even him I’ll lay him off for years at a time if I don’t feel I’ve got a good story.  

That’s why I think those stories are pretty good is because I never tried to force one. I never got up in the morning and go [adopts southern drawl]: “Hmm, I’m gonna make me a Waldo story!” [Burns laughs]. I don’t do that: to me, the play’s the thing, and it’s got to be a good yarn. 

BURNS: In the middle of creating a story, do you think: “I could see the story from a different angle.” In the TCJ #296 interview, Gary [Groth] cited the Rashômon Effect. 

DEITCH: God knows that’s a gimmick that’s gotten plenty of mileage. 

I will say this: in “The Sunshine Girl,” the long story in Deitch's Pictorama, that character Eleanor — I got to like her so much that I’d say the story I’m working on now was suggested by the fact that by the time I was nearing the end of that story, I got to like that character so much I hated to give her up. But ironically, now that I’m doing the story she doesn’t really have that much to do with it [Burns laughs]. At the beginning, discovering this manuscript, and then there’s an epilogue at the end and this woman occasionally mentions her by name as she’s describing something she did, so….Well, you just have to see where things go, you know? I had it in my mind that I’d like to do another story with her and maybe I will but, oddly, I didn’t really do that at all. I just used it as a jumping-off point for another story with a new character. 

BURNS: Great. Back on the fold-out: Did you go through any in-depth laying-out process for all these characters, or…? 

DEITCH: When I submitted the idea to Kim that we do The Search for Smilin’ Ed, the reason I did it is I figured this one I’m working on now is going to take me so long, I’d like to have something come out in the meantime, so people don’t forget about me. But, he said, “OK, I think this will make a good book, but you know what, I’d like to have an article in there talking about ‘The Kim Deitch Universe.’” 

Now, I didn’t make that term up. But you know the Marvel Universe: it just means the interconnectedness of all my characters. And when he said that, I immediately, feeling cocky [Burns laughs], said: “Well, hell, if you guys are going to have an article about The Kim Deitch Universe, the least I can do is draw it!” [Burns laughs.]  

Having said this, then I’m going, “Oh my God what have I said? How the hell am I gonna draw that?” [Laughter.] But, in a way that worked out, because I even spun off my own uncertainty: I was proud of the thing I worked up, it’s almost like a story but it isn’t a story. It leads you into it. Along the way I got the high concept: “let’s have it all happening inside my head.” 

BURNS: Right, that’s what I was just going to say: it’s all centered around that image. 

DEITCH: Yeah, and once that happened, then I really started catching fire. I did several elaborate sketches of it, and it wasn’t exactly pure fun, but it was happening. I knew I was onto something good and it came out pretty good, I think. It was hell: I had two computers cave in under me because that was a huge file. I had to get Paul Baresh to cut it in half. If you look at the Universe ones that they printed separately, you look really careful in the middle you can see where there’s a slight differentiation, ‘cause we were doing it in two hunks. Pretty much the biggest file I ever worked on. “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ roll” for Kramers [Ergot]; those were bigger, but they didn’t give me the trouble that this one did. “Kim Deitch Universe” was really blood, sweat and tears. But not the concept, so much, once I got going on that.  

But the real bitch was colorin’ it, which usually is sort of fun for me. But I never had such a big busy thing. Like I said, first I started on my wife’s computer and it crashed, and then I went over to the other computer…it was giving me all kinds of trouble till I cut it in half.