Tag Archives: Fantagraphics

August 12, 2024 · 6:36 pm

Hurricane Nancy Interview

Well, we finally got around to having an interview. It seems as if we’d already done that but now it’s official. I am beyond words in my deep respect for the artist Nancy Burton, aka Hurricane Nancy. It is a delight and an honor to know her and call her a friend. Fantagraphics has recently published HURRICANE NANCY, a monograph on the art career of one of the legendary underground cartoonists and you will want to seek it out.

Give Peace a Chance!

Over the years, it has been a point of distinction for this site, Comics Grinder, to showcase art by Hurricane Nancy. When Nancy told me about her upcoming book, I was as thrilled about it as if it were my own book coming out. We discussed my doing some coverage and it was great getting to review the book and now to attach this interview during the book’s promotional run. I can’t say enough good things about the book, about Nancy and about Fantagraphics. I know that Fantagraphics loves me too, as I’ve gotten to know various folks there over the years. Well, one thing is for sure, the years keep rolling along. So, you better make the most of it while you can. I firmly believe that is exactly what Nancy has done. If I had to sum up her art career, I’d say it’s been a wild, and steady, ride made up of an artist trusting herself and going for it with her art.

What Fantagraphics has done with the Hurricane Nancy monograph is create something special in the spirit of this most audacious publisher: a taking the bull by the horns, and let the chips fall where they may, attitude that, at the end of the day, is what life is all about. I encourage you to get a copy of the book and stick around and go to the interview at the Comics Grinder YouTube channel.

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June 4, 2024 · 8:20 pm

Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies book review

Stan Mack—wotta guy!

Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies. The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995.  Foreword by Jake Tapper. Afterword by Jeannette Walls. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 330pp, $50. (On sale date: June 11, 2024).

Guest review by Paul Buhle

Sometime in the last decades of the late nineteenth century, urban journalists sitting or strolling among the middle class masses coined the term “flaneur.” The relaxed, curious style of looking, almost randomly, at such things as which department store windows would be designed in ever more intense sales efforts or which open-air cafes flourished, would be taken up by American writers, painters and even monument-makers, by the 1910s.

Lots of interesting art epitomized by Ashcan styles (but not exhausted by them) found its origins here. Perhaps because the art schools began to flourish and young radicals (in every sense) began to see a life for themselves within the emerging culture.

How this art became more public than museums or art shows poses difficult and interesting questions. The illustrated Left-leaning or outright left-wing magazine or newspaper had appeared, a genre originally carrying only cartoons but gradually enabled by changing technology to offer decent half-toned prints. The Masses magazine (1911-17) hugely popularized the work of the Ashcan artists and of cartoonists as well—until it was suppressed for opposing US entry into the First World War. The Liberator and New Masses carried on with interesting art, intermittently, as did Der Hommer, in Yiddish, into the 1930s. Even when the art quality of the Left papers trailed off due to limited page space and to a vernacular Socialist Realism strangely similar to WPA post office fare, much of value remained.

Stan Mack. “Call it human ashcan art.”

The return of the sketch, an art form inherently given to popular use, offered artists yet another and very popular mode. Not that sketches in magazines had ever vanished, but they seemed to grow closer to life in the better and more interesting publications, including those leaning toward left-wing causes.

Jules Feiffer, drawing for the Village Voice starting in the middle 1950s, offered something as new as the Voice itself, at once bohemian, literate and truly popular. Feiffer looked at New Yorkers, especially but not only self-styled bohemians, with a jaundiced eye. He saw through their pretenses. But not without fondness. They were, in a sense, the Voice itself, the idealized reader. They wanted to live in a different way if not in a different society (it was as easy then as now to give up on reform causes). And they were silly.

Panel excerpt.

Stan Mack might object to being described as a successor to Feiffer, but a family resemblance cannot quite be missed. Mack took on the task of cinema verite plus more than a little sly humor, within the Voice of the middle 1970s and continued until the editor dropped the strip in 1995. It happens that this reviewer appeared in the same pages, or rather my book reviews did, during the 1980s mostly, and this personal detail kept me looking with special, probably egotisical, interest at the paper and at Mack’s entertaining strips. Like many future readers of this book, I have unknowingly kept memories of particular strips in my head. I liked them a lot.

Real Life Funnies deserves a full biographical essay and I wish I had written it (but the artist might possibly object). Here is a shorter version, which is not easy. Raised in Providence, RI, son of shoe store owners whose nearby Jewish relatives included a bookie or two, Stan attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He spent time in the Army, was mustered out, and became an art director at the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s. When the paper closed, he moved over to the New York Times. Perhaps most notably, at least for him, the task was to discover illustrators for the “new journalism” of the 1960s.  Here may well have been born the kernel of an idea.

He knew that he wanted to do something different. He went to well known designer/illustrator/editor Milton Glaser, then working for the Voice, and pitched an idea based on his newspaper background. Glaser liked that, and encouraged him. Here Mack found his voice, so to speak. He became an oral historian without degree or evident training. He roamed the city, listening to New Yorkers, adventuring to places outside his comfort zone. He would take notes, go back to his studio, and draw furiously, seeking to capture their sensibility.

Panel excerpt.

The result is like nothing else in popular or for that matter, scholarly (as in oral history-scholarly) literature. It is miles away from what Feiffer had done, although old-time Voice readers will surely see a kind of relation. Mack is more than adequate as an artist, but he does not rely upon the motions of the protagonists to tell the story. Far from it. This is, properly understood, illustrated oral history.

What he has in mind (this reviewer admits to having been a much-traveled oral history fieldworker, archivist and prof-coach) is the intimacy of the personal revelation. Not the kind of revelation that could be considered scandalous (these happen, if rarely) but the more-or-less unconscious bursting out of personality.

That is, the inescapably unique personalities, however anonymous, of New Yorkers during the 1970s-1980s and early 1990s. He offers them up for the reader, showing himself to be variously ironic, open-minded, detached and empathetic or perhaps not so empathetic.The psychic crises of the materially comfortable middle classes wishing for more satisfying or less stressful experiences prompt mostly now-forgotten cures, like “Rolfing,” or some sexual version of psychic restoration. By the 1980s, as the gaps between social classes grew wider, the squatters are more often seen more in evidence along with druggies, new immigrants, nonwhites and….yuppies.

Many of Mack’s subjects happen to think of themselves somehow as artists, would-be movie makers with hand-held camera, seeking street personalities or a convenient woodsy park where a porn scene can be managed. This is not unnatural: New York is a creative center in every sense, with more successful (and mostly unsuccessful) artists, actors, directors and every other category imaginable, per square mile, than anywhere else including Los Angeles. For a lot of these working people, at any level of fame, obscurity, high life or low life, “entertainment” is a job. Mack offers us more varied glimpses than any novelist has provided. Call it human ashcan art.

I am inordinately fond of seeing the craven businessmen, who Mack delightfully skewers for their arrogance and blatant criminality. But equally hard to miss are  the try-anything avante-gardists, the fashion-craving and silly-looking people of every variety, the sex workers, the gender-benders and the simply confused.

The variety is so great in these pages that further description fails. Sometimes, Stan, who drew himself as diminutive and with a brush-like mustache (most readers thought he actually looked like that), makes an appearance. His chapter introductions provide some overviews of how things change and yet remain remarkably almost the same, with all the passage of decades and fashions.

Panel excerpt.

It is definitely not a love letter to New York. And yet, somehow, it is. Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies calls to memory those 1920s-40s hits, from Broadway or not, that made Manhattan a unique place, a centralizing place for shared experiences. A thousand films and some memorable television dramas of the 1950s, before TV moved to Los Angeles, carried the same sense.

No, no, I am making things sound “nice,” when Stan Mack does not mean that at all. There’s so much human potential on hand, but people who should know better go around ruining it with their insecurities, their egos and their cravings.

And I realize that I want to say something more about Stan’s art work. It pushes out of the page toward the reader. His characters are in the reader’s collective face, and the reader has chosen Stan’s strip by choice. Accept it! His friend Harvey Kurtzman, founder of Mad, described himself not as a humorist but a truth-teller.  That’s Stan, too.

Paul Buhle

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May 21, 2024 · 7:41 am

Mark Twain’s War Prayer, Illustrated by Seymour Chwast book review

Mark Twain’s War Prayer, Illustrated by Seymour Chwast. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2024. 96pp, $22.99.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

The literary-political Establishment fairly well managed, for three or four generations, to hide or to minimize Mark Twain’s later-life antiwar devotions. The beloved writer, considered by readers and critics alike as the creator of the singular US classic, Huckleberry Finn, devoted much of his prose energy in later years to denouncing wars in general and the vastly murderous American assault on the Philippines in particular.

It was no doubt the Vietnam War, with the vast military assault and chemical warfare sidebars against large parts of Southeast Asia, that brought to light Twain’s writings previously considered marginal, old age ramblings. Twain knew what he was writing about, and he knew how to say it in painfully funny ways.

“The War Prayer,” actually written in 1905 but unpublished, remained in family archives after his death in 1910 as dangerous for his literary reputation. It reached readers rather obscurely in 1916, tacked onto another Twain essay, and took on a new relevance when narrated for PBS viewers in 1981. It has emerged repeatedly in short films since then, but most notably as an animated short in 2007, narrated by actor-activist Peter Coyote and starring no one less than the Beat poet and bohemian antiwar champion Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as the war-mongering parson.

Chwast is a fascinating and formidable artist to take on the task of illustration, in what must be regarded as an act of devotion to Twain. A mainstream illustrator publishing in the “slicks” while still in his teens, Chwast did work for the New York Times and Esquire among other places, also creating a plethora of commercial designs from packaging to magazine covers to Broadway show posters. He and a sometime workmate at Esquire, Edward Sorel (himself later a Nation magazine regular) started their own operation, Push Pin Studios, in 1957 along with rising stars Milton Glaser and Robert Ruffins. It would be too much to say that Push Pin transformed exhibit advertising, but not too much to say that together with other artists, this team moved commercial art into new zones, more playful, more interesting than before.

Ever on the progressive side, Chwast took on the present task without adding a single comment of his own. All Twain Text and not so much of that. After an excerpt from the famous caustic essay “The Lowest Animal” (a date of the essay might have been helpful but might artistically intrusive,  and anyway remains uncertain even to scholars), we have a hundred pages of quotes running from a few words to a short paragraph.

Chwast has evidently thrown himself into the work with abandon. Early pages look like circus posters, announcing wars proudly like the American war posters of old, with wordless, cartoony facing pages. Later, he passes heavily into pastels, the voice of the prophet (seen bearded) in suggesting what the “voice of the prophet” means for those who pray for military victory.

What follows, for almost the rest of the book, is Chwast’s drawings of war and destruction, predominantly in stark blacks and whites. Then more color pages of war’s victims looking to the heavens, “imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord. Blast their hopes, blight their lives…” (pp.72-77) and so onward.

This is Twain’s explanation or exploration of religion as basically a cheat, especially Judeo-Christian religion for the reason that he knew it best. A cheat in many things, but above all in the praises of war, the warriors, humanity in war, and so on. We could add, into the endlessly terrifying night of our present world, as a particular kind of Jewish artist might see the misuses of religion now.

This is something new for Twain-illustrated books, despite the many earlier illustrations of his works. We see again, in Twain’s spare prose that no better American writer has ever emerged. A novelist who still makes  vaunted modernists like Saul Bellow read like amateurs, and whose caustic attack on falsities finds an equal only in the best moments of Kurt Vonnegut.

Chwast has a past dossier of recaptured and reworked images from a thousand sources that have crossed his eyes. Never has his political energy been on display so clearly and with so much concentrated energy. Mark Twain’s War Prayer is a book horribly relevant, horribly significant in its art and for today’s world.

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November 29, 2023 · 1:40 pm

MONICA by Daniel Clowes graphic novel review

Monica. By Daniel Clowes. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2023. 106pp, $30.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

This has been quite a year for determinedly offbeat comic artist Dan Clowes. An interview in the New Yorker followed by a strong review beginning on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, not to mention an NPR interview, nailed down the point: Clowes has hit the big time.

Is this as far as “alt-comics,” somewhere beyond the comic strip and the comic book, can go in becoming “mainstream”? It’s a good question, first raised properly by the reception of the comic art of R. Crumb, then of Art Spiegelman (whose looming presence remains above the scenery somehow), of Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco and others. The work of Ben Katchor, who is now designing comic-like images for Paris Metro lines stretching into the villages of the countryside, might remind us that in France, comics can be art. Back in the US and despite the rising prestige (and commercial success) of some artists, their work remains….comic art! If, admittedly, viewed very differently from the comic art of old: fewer readers but more prestige, as cynics would say.

Clowes, part of the alternative comics that followed the collapse of the 1960s-70s underground comix, saw Ghost World, his creation, become the basis for a film about teenage angst, with himself as one of the scriptwriters. It was a first for comic scriptwriters, even if comic characters themselves had appeared in dozens of older Hollywood films, with several series of low-production films dedicated to the sagas of Blondie, Joe Palooka and even Captain Marvel (a kids’ serial).

These three series actually happened to have been scripted by Lefties who would go on the blacklist (except for the Captain Marvel series, whose writer became an affable Friendly Witness testifying against his former comrades), and lose their careers. The films themselves, now totally obscure,  even have a curious, populistic social content, leaving one to wonder. What gives? Never mind. These ancient memories of comics adaptations are also buried beneath the tons of animated films from comics, seen especially at holiday times on television or via DVDs.

We are reminded, in an astute Comics Quarterly essay on Monica, that real-life artist Clowes was abandoned by his mother, and that “loneliness” is a continuing theme with a continuing expression in his aesthetics and a basis in personal life. Monica, the fictional subject of the comic is, to put it mildly, a troubled person. But Clowes is not telling anything so straightforward as autobiography. We experience the novel through her wavering consciousness, sometimes beyond her consciousness, which may be the most helpful of all hints.

“Foxhole,” the first of eight semi-discrete and separate chapters or episodes, goes back to the Vietnam War. A disillusioned GI from a poor background reflects on his disillusionment to his battlefield/jungle setting mate, who is from America’s wealthy classes, while they wait to kill or be killed. The trauma in these three pages is not going away. Indeed, the sense of apocalypse described is revisited, precisely, on the final panel of the book.

Other reviewers seem to run away from this particular as anything like central to the plot, and it makes sense. What we see through most of Monica is the results of the 1960s social breakdowns, the impossibility of a thriving counterculture measured in the broken homes and broken lives, crazed cults and children confused or, rather, disoriented for life. Cynical commentators have always viewed this human tragedy as a loss of traditional morals, socially enforced wage slavery, the dangers of drugs, etc. Clowes knows better, although he will not say so.

Our embittered GI returning, he thinks, to a quiet and happy life, is not. He’s the  fiancee  of our protagonist’s mother, but never her husband. His foxhole mate, a serious painter who has returned to the US first, turns out to be the actual biological father, or perhaps not. Monica’s mother Penny,  a counterculture burnout, stumbles along through life, although she actually launches a business that, much later, her daughter can revive and expand successfully, something that brings no pleasure. The book’s sometime narrator, a friend to Penny, relates and reflects on  a not-so-unusual confused single mom experience.  And Monica emerges,  episode after episode, not only damaged but keenly aware of being damaged. She a modern person, a modern woman, who does not accept fatalism, although to do so might have been a better strategy.

In the following vignette, the seemingly more fortunate one of the two GIs returns to his hometown, years later, and quickly realizes that crucial matters including his extended family and their small capitalist empire, have totally fallen apart. In this odd little world, Monica-the-comic becomes a perfectly recreated EC-comic horror story from the early 1950s, updated and upgraded artistically. And then the drugstore supernaturalism ends or perhaps drifts around, looking for a spot to land.

Monica the protagonist reemerges, alone in the world. Reviewers have found something special and intriguing, or at least narratively clear, in her listening to a radio left behind in a family cabin. The radio broadcasts, unbelievably but believably to her, feature the voice of her dead grandfather and allow her to have unsatisfied conversations with him. Although years dead, he is still an anti-Semite.

A few more vignettes and more than twenty years pass. Monica becomes a successful entrepreneur, but success only exposes the emptiness of her life. Her last-gasp effort finds her in a remote cult that manages to somehow be utterly boring, one more sixties offshoot full of conspiracy theories and compulsory collectivity. Successfully tracking down her mother is a total downer, as we might have expected.

That we find ourselves back in EC horror comics at the end is either the fulfillment of the prologue, one Vietnam vet to another predicting utter horror, or it is a general commentary about the average American life in the twenty first century. The consumer society drags on. Dreams of something different are apparently worse than confused. And we face the cosmos, on the cover of the book, searching for a meaning that is not there (on the back cover, more EC, but leaning toward the famed sci-fi series that borrowed heavily from Ray Bradbury.

The Vietnam War explanation to the book’s mysteries, to the mysteries in Daniel Clowes’s mind. Extraordinary crimes were done in our collective name, and someone must be punished. Then again, as mentioned elsewhere, the aesthetics, such as the darker tinting of pages treating trauma,  may work just as well.

Paul Buhle is an editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.

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August 7, 2023 · 12:00 pm

ALISON by Lizzy Stewart graphic novel review

Alison. By Lizzy Stewart. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 168pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This quite wonderful comic is a match for Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carringon (also published this year, by SelfMadeHero). Both books are by British artists/scriptwriters. They belong together for at least one intriguing reason: the young women artists in question find their fate, at least in the first phase of creative effort, by hooking up with famous middle-aged fellows who take them as lovers/mistresses but also urge them to practice their developing craft.  In the end, the women need to make their own way.

Armed With Madness is a real-life story, with rich-girl Leonora Carrington both aided and exploited by the famous surrealist painter Max Ernst, during the 1930s.  Carrington leaves England for Spain, suffers multiple breakdowns as the Spanish Civil War explodes around her, and ends up in Mexico, an elderly lady re-discovered by new generations. Alison offers us a fictional version two or three generations later. A young woman growing up in Devon takes and then abandons a husband, at the invitation of a visiting, also romantic and famous, middle-aged painter. She goes on, with his sponsorship, to her artist’s life in London.

Lizzy Stewart, a professional illustrator of children’s books, would not have been considered a comic artist a few decades ago. Walls have broken down since then, obviously, and the use of sequential panels to convey a story easily makes the grade as comic art. Actually, the result here looks more than a little like the drawings of Jules Feiffer in various recent works by the veteran artist. But I digress.

The story is drawn and told quite wonderfully, with the occasional, stunning color page or pages set off from the grey wash of most of the book. It is easy to be convinced that this young woman is flattered to be asked to sit for a portrait, first clothed, then other portraits unclothed, as a relationship develops. It is equally easy to be convinced that she is one of a considerable line of young women falling into the waiting arms of an academic painter at the peak of his BBC-level respectability. He had promised to guide her development as an artist, and for all his drawbacks, he remains determined to do so. He also pays her rent.

Throughout, and this is certainly the feminist angle, Alison is seeking—fumbling and stumbling along the way—to realize herself in every sense. That she had been a hopelessly bored (and childless) housewife in Devon, became a frustrated if developing artist in Bloomsbury and a woman making her own way step by step, is all wonderfully conveyed. Born in 1959 and gone to London in the early 1980s, she finds herself in the midst of radical politics, anti-war, anti-nuke and anti-racist movements, not long before Margaret Thatcher comes to power, ruthlessly crushing all opposition. Worse, Thatcher so successfully converts the political system that even future, corrupted Labour Party leaders accept “privatization” and the practical eclipse of the caring social state as a finality. What can art mean here?

The brevity of the young artist’s wider, militant political commitment may offer insight into the artist-in-progress. Or perhaps we see Lizzy Stewart’s own observation of changing radical politics at a certain moment of time. Serious commitments to art, including the teaching of art to younger generations, merge into the critical concerns in the era of AIDS. She watches as disease and death march through her new milieu. A desperate politics of caring emerges as a considerable portion of the London art world literally finds community through the  struggle for life.

It should not give away too much about Alison to reveal that she finds her own companion in a same-sex relationship that is also interracial and global in its connections. Perhaps our protagonist was going in that direction all the time, without realizing her own path. All this is conveyed by Lizzy Stewart with such painstaking care that we find ourselves flowing along, discovering and rediscovering the narrative as the artist discovers her talent and herself. Near the end, she is the learner who has become the renowned teacher.

Alison’s return in something like middle age to her own Dorset is wonderfully visualized and narrated here. Temperamentally a million miles from London, she experiences a return to the natural beauty that she now appreciates afresh, within her own sense of art in the world and in her world.

There is a great deal more to be said here about the young artist’s path. We learn at one point that her older lover, for instance, had the upper-class background to have his talent recognized in childhood, to be trained in formal terms all the way along. By contrast, Alison must undertake a crash course and find another path to realize her talents. Perhaps this detail offers us the secret of Lizzy Stewart herself, a children’s book illustrator, using comics for story telling. Like others today, she is struggling to create something fresh through a merger of forms that become recognizable through the work of the new generations of artists and comics.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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August 6, 2023 · 10:50 am

BUILDINGS ARE BARKING: Diane Noomin Remembered in Comics Tribute by Bill Griffith

The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin, in Memoriam. By Bill Griffith.

Seattle: F.U. Press, Fantagraphics,  2023. 23pp, $7.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

We are nearly a year now since the passing of Diane Newman, who took on the comics moniker “Diane Noomin” as she began to publish her work in the Bay Area-centered world of Underground Comix in the 1970s. This is, then, a tribute booklet, but singular, in the way no one except her husband Bill Griffith could conceive and draw. As far as I can recall, no homage from a comics spouse has ever achieved this conceptual depth or intensity. It is a remarkable miniature, with a surprising depth that will please but fail to surprise the regular readers of Griffith, a master of the self-reflection that is also mass-culture-reflection.

The Buildings Are Barking might be compared, if comparisons are possible, to the many pages of Robert Crumb’s Biblical-adaptation Genesis in which Aline Kominsky Crumb’s physical self appears and reappears as the women of ancient Hebrew lore. Real-life Aline had a couple of decades ahead.

Within the last year or so, the artists of Underground Comix lore have been disappearing in haste: Justin Green, Jay Lynch, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, to name only the most widely known. Spain Rodriguez and Harvey Pekar (not artist but writer/editor and self-publisher) passed a decade earlier, signalling how easily even the memories of a unique and vital development in comic art might slip away.

Griffith has seized the moment,  rather taken his time to seize the moment, perhaps as a yohrtseit (symbolic Jewish commemoration on an anniversary) to Diane and her ambiguously and also unambiguously Jewish identity. Urged on by Ko-Ko the Clown—Max Fleischer’s magical animated creation of the 1920s—Griffith gets around within a few pages to telling us about Diane Newman’s alter-ego, Didi Glitz, the soul of her comix or comics work. A teenage inhabitant of Canarsie of the 1950s, Didi had all the appealing/repellent qualities of adolescence seizing onto popular culture as a means of identity. Bouffant hairdos, garish clothes, garish crushes on boys (sometimes goys), clique-obsessions among girlfriends, above all a need for expression, no matter how embarrassing to the objective viewer.

Griffith (let’s call him Griffy here, as Diane did) enjoys his rumination on life in San Francisco of the 1970s-80s, perhaps not really the “idyllic city…before the Dotcom boom,” but idyllic for them and for many artists. Always badly overpriced, losing its architectural beauty decade by decade, their San Francisco was still arguably (with New Orleans) the most beautiful of American urbanscapes. Here, at any rate, Griffith and Newman moved past earlier long-term relationships to grasp each other, marrying in 1980. From there on, and no doubt connected to their mutual grasp of the varied icons of popular culture seen as “history” (her poodle pin collection, his vintage diner photos), they sunk or rose into each other.

Bill Griffith has famously been producing the near-daily strip Zippy the Pinhead since the middle of those San Francisco days, while Diane became part of a subset of women comics artists who ruthlessly delved into their lives and psyches. She aspired to draw a comic about her parents’ secret (and very Jewish) connections with the Communist Party in the McCarthy Era, but she didn’t live long enough. Griffith has found his own way to produce real history-based comic works as Zippy stumbles through time and space. In other words, and laughs aside, they were both serious artists.

The Buildings Are Barking is deeply personal in ways that this reviewer cannot describe adequately, and to which the reader is advised to proceed intuitively, that is, following Griffith’s own shifting moods of consciousness. At the end, we are with  Ko-Ko the Clown again. Ko-Ko always expressed a grimness behind the jaunty exterior: there is a bit of a Grim Reaper about him.

What any serious artist (or writer) leaves behind is the effort at expression, brilliant or less than brilliant but a striving with purpose. Griffith has captured Diane Noomin aka Newman, and thereby captured himself as well.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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July 19, 2023 · 10:30 am

Nudism Comes to Connecticut comics review

Unashamed Comic Nudes!

Nudism Comes to Connecticut. By Susan Chade and Jon Buller. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 175pp, $30.

Nudism (many prefer “naturism”) is more familiar than most Americans can now imagine. The omnipresent rural skinny-dipping probably did not draw much upon a rich and varied European (or other) nudist traditions among the respectable classes as well as others. Communitarian groups in the US developed a nudist ideology of sorts, as far back as the 1890s, but memories of Walt Whitman and even Benjamin Franklin “air bathing” had likely been forgotten by the time the Greenwich Village fashionable set disrobed in Cape Cod summers of the 1910s.

Nudism Comes to Connecticut, written and drawn by a veteran children’s book team, offers a convincing historical experience of free thinking Yankees during the 1930s. They make creative use of a real text, Frances and Mason Merrill’s Nudism Come to America (1932), a volume itself no doubt reflecting the free-spirited, short-skirted 1920s Flapper Era.

Somewhere around Lyme, Connecticut, not far from Manhattan by train,  a Hungarian immigrant hatches a plan for rural land use. A few years earlier,  an American diplomat unhappy at his job in Budapest shared with a friend some of the current German magazines extolling nudism’s many healthful benefits. Back home in the US in 1915, the American and his wife, a native Estonian, take over a defunct hotel in a pleasant landscape, near an underused lake.

Here, somewhat embroidered fiction really does more or less coincide with fact. The idea of “cooperative colonies,” guests and residents doing most of the maintenance and in turn owning shares in the property, was very much alive in the European middle classes of the pre-fascism days, and even philanthropically extended, for periods of the summer, to groups of urban slum dwellers. Before Stalin’s rise to power, a nudist culture of Russian “Proletcult” also seemed to take hold: it was considered especially good for workers to get naked in the countryside, when possible. By the later 1920s, these experiences even gained a pedigree of American scholarly interest.

No surprise, then, that out in the Connecticut woods, not far from a lake, a “cabin colony” sprung up, built on loans and the wishful thinking that it might pay for itself. Takers seem to enjoy themselves thoroughly, even with husbands and wives understandably nervous about their own mates in the buff. As in real life nudism, nude  versions of barely competitive games like volleyball seem to be the mandatory accompaniment to swimming. The comic portrayals of nudes here are tasteful and charming, if not quite realistic to sagging flesh.

The community thrives for a while, never quite overcoming the resentment and hostility of some neighbors, and then runs into the economic collapse of the economy in the Depression. The quasi-utopian adventure ends. As the author/artist team concludes, “most of this actually happened.” (p.173).

It is a footnote, perhaps not so far from this realistic comic, that by the 1960s, bohemian-minded American readers of Bertold Brecht, Georg Luckacs and Wilhelm Reich would draw the conclusion that nudism had to be, was indeed inevitably, political. The bohemian-radical tradition had already been revived after the Second World War in other parts of the world including both Germanies. Although this detail has been largely forgotten, the East Germans, the most proportionally nudist population in the world, actually resisted Russian edicts and took pleasure where they could under a repressive regime. Just as amazing, the bureaucratic class joined them.

Spending their summers on the Cape, American veterans of antiracist and antiwar activism staged dramatic nude-ins at the National Seashore during the middle 1970s. This political action would lead to decades of lobbying politicians for more “free beaches,” an idea that has come, gone and perhaps come again in parts of the US. Today’s nudists should enjoy the innocence of Nudism Comes to Connecticut, so deftly defying the hostility of religious conservatives and  lawmakers right up to the present. “Naturism” seems to have escaped comic art otherwise, save for a few brief, wry commentaries in underground comix. Perhaps the subject has only been waiting for its comic art re-creation.

Paul Buhle

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February 23, 2023 · 9:00 am

Indie Bookstores and Comic Book Shops Unite!

Comics and Books Do Mix!

There are so many wonderful independent bookstores and comic book shops and, with your support, they will survive and thrive. I have had some of my best memories in bookstores and in comic book shops. So, can we include both of these outlets in the same discussion? Do comics and books mix? Well, I should hope so after all these years. A bookstore and a comic book shop are two very different scenes with a good amount of common ground. It’s even possible to blur the distinctions. Any opportunity to work together is a good thing: the promotion of literacy; crossover business; nurturing community.

Kramers in Washington, D.C.

The market demands that all retail business adapt or die. The internet taught us that long ago and Covid has brought home the point in ways that we’re still dealing with. But, no doubt, business is picking up with in-person activity having made a resounding comeback. Over the years, bookstores and comic book shops have borrowed from each other in order to remain attractive and relevant to customers and that just needs to continue. Even full-on cooperation is possible! For instance, it’s not totally uncommon for one shop owner to refer a customer to a competitor, be it bookstore or comics shop, when a shop owner does not carry a title but knows of some other place that could. And conversations between local business are always a good idea.

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in Seattle

Let’s break this down a bit. I can better describe to you what is going on with a prime example of how you can combine it in one venue, the boutique comics bookstore! We can compare two Seattle landmarks here. First, let’s look at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. Fantagraphics Books has been a publisher of alternative comics, zines, books, and graphic novels since 1976. In 2006 they opened their first retail space, Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in the heart of Georgetown. Stop in and pick up the latest offerings from comic heroes like Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware and peruse their impressive collection of old, new, weird, rare and out-of-print publications. This retail space takes it all to a high level of excellence with a very tidy and inviting atmosphere, truly a world-class selection, and consistently high caliber art shows. Any indie bookstore would love to try to emulate this amazing store. Yes, it is a comics shop but it’s just as much a bookstore. What you won’t find here is your latest issues of comics singles as you would in a traditional comics shop. Nor will you find a big stash of vintage comic books. At least not what your typical comic book collector is hunting for. As I say, this is a boutique comics bookstore–and one of the best!

Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle

The other great Seattle landmark is Elliott Bay Book Company, which is more of a big deal sort of thing you include when strolling along on an urban jaunt. This is a wondrous bookstore experience. From this bookstore, we could compare it to Powell’s Books in Portland or The Strand in New York City, or Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi–well, we could go on and on. These type of bookstores tend to be extreme in scale, either tiny and esoteric or monumental and gregarious–more often the latter. I’ll focus back to Elliott Bay as I have a long history with them as a customer and admirer going back to their days in the heart of Pioneer Square. One thing that they’ve always been great about, among so much, is a dedication to the comics medium. This store made it a top priority to be an expert on as many subjects as possible. Early on, before the book industry as a whole created a “graphic novel” category, Elliott Bay was hip to it. Fast forward to the present, at their new location on Capitol Hill, this bookstore can easily lay claim to being a prime location for readers to get in on the best in graphic novels at close to the same level of a dedicated boutique comics shop. Add to that a first-rate lecture space in the basement level with some of the best readings you will find in the city.

Local Heroes in Norfolk, Virginia

Finally, we can consider what it all means. Consider Local Heroes, in Norfolk, Virginia. Here is a shop that has many of the qualities of a higher end boutique comics shop while also very much a traditional shop with an impressive line-up of the latest single issues and its finger on the pulse of what is most current across a broad spectrum of options: everything from manga to superheroes to more niche graphic novels. It’s not easy to get this right and Local Heroes is, by far, one of the best examples of this you will find. From here, we could venture off to other exceptional venues, amazing spots like Isotope in San Francisco or Million Year Picnic off of Harvard Square or Quimby’s in Chicago. Back to focusing on Local Heroes, I can tell you that the staff are truly exceptional with their customer service and knowledge. It’s a pleasure to browse the finely-curated shelves. Nestled within the hip Ghent neighborhood, this comics shop offers something for everyone, mindful of a wide variety of potential readers. This is a store that appreciates the endless possibilities that comics and graphic novels have to offer. This is a store engaged with the reader, no matter who it is or what the subject or genre. Because, in the end, a good story can come from anywhere. That’s definitely something any bookstore or comic book shop can take to heart. No doubt about it, comics and books do mix–there is really no other way for the continued survival of independent bookstores and comic book shops. Go visit one today!

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December 23, 2022 · 3:00 pm

Hurricane Nancy: Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

We are ringing in a new year and coasting along a bit during the holidays, getting our bearings as we contemplate doing it all over again. What a treat to have Hurricane Nancy with us to share more of her work. This is what Nancy says about the above artwork: “If only life was this simple. I could dress up and be whatever I want for any occasion. Not get sick or worry about our future. Just dress up and decide to make a great holiday and bright future!”

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December 23, 2022 · 2:27 pm

MAVERIX AND LUNATIX book review by Paul Buhle

Artists of the Underground, Yet Again

Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of the Underground Comix. By Drew Friedman. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2022. $34.95.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

Art Spiegelman

Some of the “Underground comix” artists themselves,  along with older generation savants including Harvey Kurtzman, predicted that the new, stunning and challenging genre of comic art of the late 1960s-70s would likely have a limited shelf life. They had a point. The UG comic was totally rebellious against existing standards, its sales depended significantly on “head shops” selling soft drug paraphernalia, and upon publicity generated by the ephemeral “underground” newspaper circuit. Artists, a few dozen of them, leaped into the breach because they  urgently wanted to express themselves without censorship or limits, and to have a copyright on their own creations. Such a phenomenon could no more likely survive a decade or so than  the $75/month apartment rents or $10 nickel bags of dope.

Aline Kominsky

And it didn’t. By the middle 1980s, a more modest version, “alternative comics,” seemed to mirror the pale version of the UG press, the local “alternative weeklies.” The Revolution had come and gone and left its artists largely stranded. A few made large names for themselves in new venues, Art Spiegelman by far the most famous and accomplished, along with Robert Crumb, who could be described as entering a slow fade. Others struggled to go onward. Among the artists still at it, Bill Griffith and a few others have continued to shine. In the end, the Undergrounds had sacrificed themselves, so to speak, for the birth of a large and diverse comic art.

R. Crumb

Galleries, scholars,museums and even collectors might have tried harder to document the UG phenomenon. From the beginning of the genre until the end of the century and somewhat beyond, any serious attention remained scarce for what had been accomplished in the burst of energy, and by whom. The advance of  something called “Comic Art” powered by the recognition of RAW magazine and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, seemed, perhaps not surprisingly, to leave the past behind. The handful of artists who managed in the following years to get recognition in the New York Times and elsewhere were mostly of younger generations, and if graphic novels blossomed as a genre for the under-30 reader, anything like official appreciation lagged when it did not reach the surface of recognition.

Nancy Burton

And yet . . . a dramatically fresh art for its time: millions of readers (if we count the readership of the underground press), a lot of talent, all this leaves a record, somehow. The many collections published by Fantagraphics and others, reach readers seriously interested. Actual journals (mostly on-line) help to bring forward young scholars and help situate them in academic programs. Selected library collections consolidate holdings and provide guides. Beyond all that, there is an uncertain, informal but very real  record of the evolution of comic art at large, with the Underground Movement increasingly recognized as a legitimate and important art form in its time and place.

S. Clay Wilson

Drew Friedman is a self-described fan or even Fan Boy of Crumb and others in the day, drawn to them and their stories personally, and for that matter, helped along the way of his own career by Crumb among others.  Best seen, Maverix and Lunatix is an homage in the best way that Friedman can provide. And what an homage it is!

Richard Grass Green

He draws over, or redraws, photos taken from some past period in an artist’s life,  unpredictably from early in their careers or later on. Crucially, he has done the research to provide useful details (including birth and death dates) for nearly a hundred artists. More than a handful of them appeared with such brevity in the UG comix, remained so obscure, that Friedman’s’ work offers revelations of an unseen subculture. Other artists, who made quite a name for themselves in some brief moment before turning to other art forms, lifestyles, or simply collapsing into early deaths, find their stories helpfully here as well. Surprisingly, then, this is, in some limited but important way, a scholarly text.

Spain Rodriguez

Most readers will, naturally perhaps, direct their eyes to the drawings, which range from the spectacular to the plainly weird (well in keeping to the genre), then look across the page to the mini-biographies. Here, and perhaps also in the drawings, there is a lot of personal tragedy. Roger Brand among others succumbed to alcoholism, others died in road accidents in the US or abroad, some just turned up dead in apartments with no further accounting.

Denis Kitchen

Others, plenty of others, simply turned from comic or comix into sturdy careers in every corner of graphic design, or painting, teaching art, or even web design. What nearly all have in common is a hole in the personal saga: their life in comics was essentially over. Perhaps that life had been too brief, too early in most of their lives, for its eclipse to remain a bitter disappointment. But I wonder.

Evert Geradts

It is slightly amazing to me that so many, with wild and carefree (not drug free) lifestyles, lived so long and are in many cases, still alive! In their seventies. Not all, even of those depicted as alive in the book: we now seem to be losing the UG artists by the month if not the week,  Diane Nooman (aka Newman) and Aline Kominsky within the last six months, Justin Green passing just early enough for his death to be recorded here.

Harvey Pekar

For this reviewer, at least, the faces depicted by Friedman look out at us with an aura of innocence, even for those with the kinds of personal habits that would not come close to the usual description of innocence. They were on hand at the creation, they took part in one of the great, still unacknowledged leaps of comic art, and they watched it collapse, even if it did not collapse most of them. This is something that can be appreciated only by looking at the art and reading the capsule biographies, not once but repeatedly. Thanks, Drew.

Paul Buhle, publisher of Radical America Komiks (1969), has been an essayist in several of the volumes exploring the history of the undergrounds including Underground Classics, the exhibit book for a traveling exhibit of the art.

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