{product_snapshot:id=1586,true,false,true,right} This book began by looking for something. More precisely, it began by sorting through flat file drawers filled with artwork, in an attempt to determine what pieces I should select for my first proper gallery show. I stacked the work in piles: these are probably good candidates, those are good, but don’t seem to fit the general feel of the show. I was looking for only thirty or so pieces of artwork. I was removing hundreds of pieces of Bristol board from the drawers. It slowly dawned on me that the “good but doesn’t fit” pile was quite massive….
The Wolverton Bible – Introduction: “Wolverton and Armstrong” by Monte Wolverton
{mosimage}{product_snapshot:id=1552,true,false,true,right} asil Wolverton, my father (who I will respectfully refer to as Wolverton throughout this book), was a unique cartoonist and illustrator, known for his extreme, otherworldly creatures, spaghetti-like hair, smoothly sculpted faces and figures and insanely detailed pen-and-ink work. Born in Oregon in 1909, Wolverton pitched his first comic strip to a syndicate at the age of 16. But it was 13 years later before he would sell his first comic features to the new media of comic books. “Disk-Eyes the Detective” and “Spacehawks” were published in 1938 in Circus Comics. in 1940, “Spacehawk” (a different and improved feature)…
The Portable Frank by Jim Woodring – Introduction: “So Says Justin Green”
{product_snapshot:id=1486,true,false,true,left} A TREE STUMP REVEALS the exact number of years it was alive by its woodrings. But when you look closely at a Jim Woodring cartoon, you are lost in the eternal present. In Frank, he has melded the Olden Days horrific with the modern innocuous. He consistently does this with a seamless line, tracing a parallel universe which keeps unfolding in new visual allegories, as perplexing as they are down-to-earth. Like a woodring, his pen line is always concrete and simple. It circumscribes objects and landscapes with a Spartan clarity that reveals a deep appreciation of the natural environment….
Deitch’s Pictorama – Introduction by Gene Deitch
{product_snapshot:id=1500,true,false,true,left}{mosimage} OK, comics are in our blood. I grew up in the golden age of the American newspaper comic strip. My parents subscribed to Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. The right-wing politics meant nothing to an 8-year-old kid; what meant everything was that it had the best King Features comics, an entire page of dailies and a huge Sunday color section with the mysterious name, “Puck.” From 1932 onward, I devoured the comics, and carefully copied the characters on my drawing pads. I loved to draw, and was good at it, so naturally I dreamed of one day drawing my own…
Pocket Full of Rain by Jason – Introduction by James Sturm
{product_snapshot:id=1484,true,false,true,left} MY FIRST INTRODUCTION to the work of the Norwegian cartoonist known only as Jason was a four-page story he drew for Comix 2000, an international collection of pantomime comics. Out of all of the works in this massive anthology (the title was also its page count and year of publication) it was Jason’s four pages that proved most memorable. The story begins with a bird/human hobo coming upon a bed in the woods. Though a bit surprised, the hobo nevertheless stops to sleep. As he slumbers, two death-faced humanoid birds construct a proper bedroom around the slumbering hobo then…
Strange and Stranger – Introduction by Blake Bell
{product_snapshot:id=1474,true,false,true,left}By the 1950s, the superhero genre had been reduced to a minor piece of the comic-book mosaic. Patriots like Captain America — designed to boost the country’s morale and soothe wartime angst — ran aground of purpose with the end of World War II. The majority of heroes had been retired by the late ’40s, including the entire Timely Comics line, featuring Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch. The industry’s postwar output splintered into several distinct themes — crime, teen, funny animals, Western, war, and romance. Yet in the popular imagination the defining 1950s comics genre was horror. It…
Rebel Visions – Introduction by Patrick Rosenkranz
{product_snapshot:id=1456,true,false,true,left} Foreword I was a student at Columbia University when I started reading the East Village Other in 1966. It was full of outrageous and libelous stories, bawdy language, wild accusations, and doctored photographs. Best of all, it had totally crazy comics, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Every week I’d pick up a new issue at a Village newsstand, along with a slightly larger New York Post, and, unsure of how my fellow Gothamites might react to its lurid covers, I would read EVO camouflaged on the subway ride uptown to Morningside Heights. {mosimage} Like many of…
Most Outrageous – Introduction by Bob Levin
{product_snapshot:id=1469,true,false,true,left} I had no idea what to do next. For fifteen years, while practicing law in Berkeley, I had been writing about cartoonists for The Comics Journal. It had become apparent early on that the more off-beat the cartoonist was in his life or art, the more I would be drawn to him. Once my bias had become clear, someone at the Journal would have another cartoonist for me: a schizophrenic and an alcoholic and a speed freak and a suicide and a misanthrope and one fellow whose career off-tracked when he became a woman. Their work was often grotesquely…
