Tag Archives: Fantagraphics

August 30, 2026 · 11:30 am

Fantagraphics and the History of Comic Art (Part Two)

Love and Rockets propelled both the creators, Los Bros Hernandez, and the publisher, Fantagraphics.

Editor’s Note: This is a two-part look back at 50 years of the comics publisher, Fantagraphics. Part Two is by Henry Chamberlain.

Essay by Henry Chamberlain

No one cartoonist can fully represent the phenomenon that is the comics publisher Fantagraphics but each can speak to distinguishing traits, especially by drawing their own comics tribute or appearing on a panel at a comics convention. Even writers (myself included) for the comics publisher’s own separate magazine of comics criticism, The Comics Journal, will need to exercise special care in how they depict their boss. However, in the case of this publisher, being outspoken is part of the brand so there’s considerable leeway. Anyone at all familiar with this niche publisher will have their own ideas too. At the end of the day, there is much to be thankful and be grateful for regarding Fantagraphics as it marks its 50th anniversay. Huge inroads have been made in a greater appreciation of the comics medium and Fantagraphics remains a significant part of that process in the titles it publishes and in its own dissection and analysis of the art form.

16-year-old Gary Groth, circa 1970. Already contemplating a comics empire.

The story of the house that Gary Groth built is the stuff of legend. As a teenager, Groth was already leading the way at putting together comics conventions with the same zest and gusto as fellow kid entrepreneur Richard Alf on his path to leading the way to creating Comic-Con in San Diego. Gary Groth could have continued on a similar path but he was always more interested in publishing. Now, before we dig deeper, I must say that what Fantagraphics has gone on to accomplish, and continues to do so, is both breathtaking and staggering. It wasn’t just a one-off dumb luck success of snagging a comics talent at the right time. It was one success after another, year after year, bringing to the world precisely what Fantagraphics boasts as its tagline: “publisher of the world’s greatest cartoonists.”

I lived a great part of my life in Seattle, the headquarters for Fantagraphics, and I still live there in spirit. Anyway, I got to see firsthand what it was like for local cartoonists living in such close proximity to a legendary powerhouse in the world of independent comics publishing. I suppose that experience is what drives this essay. I think the feeling among cartoonists always runs the gamut from being some vague goal to get to network within the publisher inner circles to all-out battle plans to claw one’s way in and get work published. At Bumbershoot, for instance, the annual music (and arts) festival held at Seattle Center, cartoonists usually have more than one way to be part of some event that might allow them to draw attention to themselves and their work. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they will at least draw attention to themselves for some fleeting moments, such as dancing on stage as part of some comedy skit. So, that kind of frenetic energy is always brewing somewhere in the background, at all sorts of events in Seattle throughout the year, including Short Run, an annual comics festival, with related activities, which is one of the best comic arts festivals.

And the beat goes on with HATE by Peter Bagge.

Who might be fortunate enough to be chosen to join the ranks of the greatest cartoonists in the world? Well, the answer is complicated and no one can be sure how things will pan out, including Gary Groth. But, allowing for the process to work itself out, the right cartoonist at the right time may emerge. Dash Shaw walked right up to Gary Groth at a comics convention with a work-in-progress, Bottomless Belly Button. It worked for him. But it might not for you.

What has been impressed upon me over and over again is that sometimes a cartoonist may seem to be the last person you’d want to explain what comics are all about. Just like anyone else, they can overthink it and not even be sure how to be describe what a graphic novel is supposed to be. They’ll even think they haven’t read enough comics. But, once I’ve engaged with someone in an interview I’m hosting and we’ve managed to get past any misgivings, the guest does just fine. I’ve interviewed countless comic talent and that’s what I’ve discovered: some cartoonists are born conversationalists; while others prefer to let their comics speak for themselves. Is it any wonder then that when Fantagraphics set out to create a book to honor its 40th Anniversary, We Told You So: Comics As Art, it not only sought out comments from its roster of cartoonists but it also sought out comics from them. There was no need for cartoonists to worry if they’d read enough comics. They could just let their comics do a lot of the talking for them. Believe me, if you’ve ever created comics, which I have and still do, more than half the battle is won. Yes, you can consider yourself something of an expert on comics!

Noah Van Sciver pays tribute to Fantagraphics.

In fact, any comics reviewer who has never created comics will always be at a disadvantage. They will always come at the work as a consumer, not a participant. It makes it doubly hard to appreciate certain things, everything from why a comics creator might struggle with how to depict a scene to the motivations that compel the cartoonist to persevere. Not really knowing what it’s like to be a cartoonist does make one thing a lot easier: to dish out an over-the-top harsh review. It’s the ye ole savage critic school of comics criticism and that kind of criticism has been a hallmark at The Comics Journal. I think it’s great that we can all give ourselves some distance from that particular style of writing. I think the usual review from the new crop of writers at The Comics Journal is invested more in insight than controversy only for the sake of controversy. That’s not to say a reviewer needs to hold back but there’s something to be said for retracting one’s claws. All that said, if you’re writing about comics, you’re ahead of the game of those who only talk about comics. We’ve reached a glut in comics talking heads now that everyone has a podcast. Some are better than others, and the vast majority fade away. As for thinking and writing about comics, if you wisely use your skills, favor language and logic, anything is possible.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that there’s always been something gritty about Fantagraphics–or, more to the point, something grunge. We’re talking about Seattle, after all. When you get right down to it, the energy emitting from Fantagraphics was as much tied to the utter intensity that was grunge as anything else. Back in the early ’90s, it was a perfect storm of disaffected youth on a steady migration to the promised land of Seattle for those willing to take a leap of faith. Some had a plan (musicians, writers, painters and cartoonists) and others did not, being young was enough. All the creative people were interested in finding their tribe. It was at this critical time that The Center on Contemporary Art in collaboration with Fantagraphics, put on a show, “Misfit Lit,” a look at contemporary comic art (March 15 to May 4, 1991). The poster for the show echoed a self-conscious and overly self-deprecating vibe, a stance that dared the viewer to come closer and attracted more people than repelled. Not a perfect campaign to engage the general public but it got its fair share of notice. The rather staid Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in a Sunday supplement (June 1, 1992), summed up the mood with the headline: “In your face, Seattle; you’re becoming a capital of alternative comics.” And, even more than comics, it was the zeitgeist that supercharged everything.

Dan Clowes leading that pop culture wave.

When Geffen released Nirvana’s album Nevermind on September 24, 1991, it was a game changer. It would be on heavy rotation on the radio, in homes, cars, and Walkmans for months, even years, on KNDD, 107.7 FM, “The End.” On another musical note: The romantic comedy film Singles, featuring young people in love in Seattle, came out in theaters on September 18, 1992. The youthquake was happening in Seattle and everyone who loved Nirvana, and music from Sub Pop (which featured Dan Clowes art on album covers and in its ads), was into the new cool and edgy comics coming out of Fantagraphics (Hate, Eightball, Love and Rockets, Acme Novelty Library, Naughty Bits, Palestine, The Biological Show). Many people have fond memories of buying their music and comics from Tower Records in Seattle.

When it doubt, just return to what matters. For Fantagraphics, it’s been this stubborn persistence of vision. They simply did not want to succumb to the harsh realities that have wiped out other publishers in similar circumstances. These days are far more solid. Fantagraphics has fended off the threat of bankruptcy many times. And when its own distributor went belly up, they found a much better arrangement.

Cartoon in The Stranger on Fantagraphics financial woes, 2003, by Pat Moriarity.

Fantagraphics is now distributed to the book trade by W.W. Norton and to comics retailers by Lunar. It has been a uphill battle but the dark times have ushered in exciting new phases like the pioneering deluxe archival editions of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, E.C. Segar’s Popeye, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and neglected classics from the Marvel Comics archives.  Fantagraphics is running more smoothly than ever and, with any luck, will be ready for the next challenge when it inevitably comes.

Part of the new wave of Fantagraphics titles: Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap.

The biggest contribution that Fantagraphics has made, and continues to make, is leading the way in the distinction between mainstream superhero comics publishers and those publishers, creators and fans who prefer “alternative comics.” This is a term that I always stand by. I recall one academically-inclined friend not sure if the term had any gas in the tank. This was many years ago and I assured him it was the proper term and it was here to stay–and so it has. Some folks, looking here again at our more academically-inclined types, proclaim that comics are comics and that’s that. I don’t know what the motivation is in saying that unless one feels a great need not to offend this or that big publisher. But this is well beyond that. Alt-comics means something, if nothing more than an alternative to the Big Two superhero publishing empires we’ve all grown up with, Marvel and D.C. Comics. The superhero model is branded early on with some fans becoming instantly enthralled. The idea of having an alternative is more in step with seeing comics as an art form. Of course, anything is possible and the Big Two, from time to time, create masterful work that rises to the level of art. Overall, the superhero model is what it is, mostly a genre, which you can make of what you will. Alt-comics, as a rule, are striving to be offbeat, unconventional, experimental and appealing to more discerning adults. Fantagraphics has set out to publish the best alt-comics, year after year. For it to maintain that sense of purpose is its greatest accomplishment.

Eightball #23: The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes

So, I keep thinking about those aspiring cartoonists dancing on a stage hoping to get noticed one way or another. Well, to each and every one of these dreamers, I say enjoy the comics art form and let Fantagraphics lead the way. It is Fantagraphics that introduced Los Bro Hernandez to a wider audience. Along with so many other amazing talents like Dan Clowes, Chris Ware and Charles Burns. It is Fantagraphics that has set loose upon a reading public all manner of comics mayhem and majesty. It is all rooted in a genuine love for the comics medium. While it may seem to some readers that comics has had a rough time of it in gaining any sort of  legitimacy, I think it comes down to individual points of view.

Jim Woodring, one of the greatest cartoonists in world, demonstrates his giant pen.

For those in the know, the comics medium continues to evolve and prove itself time and time again, even if most people do not take great notice. The vast majority of readers are not going to appreciate comics in the same way as someone who regularly reads comics, let alone anyone who actually studies comics. And that brings us back to what is so special and remarkable about an independent publisher of the statue of Fantagraphics. Gary Groth and Michael Carton, a couple of comics experts to be sure, founded Fantagraphics in 1976. At that point, the term “graphic novel” did not even exist. Other comics connoisseurs would soon join the team: Eric Reynolds and Kim Thompson. And it was this expertise that would guide this upstart endeavor of a publishing house focused on comics with an independent voice. It was fine to review and comment about mainstream superhero comics but to go toe to toe with the Big Two comics giants by creating its own similar superheroes was never part of the vision. The vision was a work-in-progress and it had everything to do, and still does, with comics that are more offbeat, experimental and artful. So keep dancing, my wonderful dreamers, as there is plenty to dance about!

Henry Chamberlain

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August 23, 2026 · 4:45 pm

Fantagraphics and the History of Comic Art (Part One)

An early sign of the future: Gary Groth’s Fantastic Adzine, 1971.

Editor’s Note: This is a two-part look back at 50 years of the comics publisher, Fantagraphics. Part One is by Paul Buhle. Next week, we’ll have Part Two by Henry Chamberlain.

Essay by Paul Buhle

2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the comics publisher, Fantagraphics, and that deserves more public attention, within the comics world and beyond. I would argue a larger point: when it comes to the scholarship of art, from art history to contemporary criticism, comics remain both recent and suspect.

The history of comics is, of course, full of interesting and sometimes depressing contradictions. Newspaper pages aside (not a topic here), comics as in comic books always seemed very much part of the larger pulp magazine world, at the low end where publications actually bought by kids would be found.  As such, they were suspect from almost the first moment of publication, during the later 1930s. Trouble was always on the way, and dire warnings began to emerge in popular magazines already in the early 1940s, warning against the corruption of young minds.

The Comics Code (1954-2011)

The anti-comics crusade, or rather anti-comic book crusade of the early 1950s surely did not rise to the level of Hitler’s burning of modern art in 1930s Germany.  For that matter, the spread of television broadcasting across the country by the middle 1950s would have marked the eclipse of comics’ Golden Age in sales and volume, in any event. That said,  the enactment and industry-wide acceptance of the Comics Code brought the end of the most creative and artistic comic projects. Soon enough, the attacks on  comics’ purported threats to culture and the young mind in particular would pass on to television (“chewing gum for the mind”) as a danger.

We can now look back on all this from some distance, and look back with scholarship on hand. Never considered an art, perhaps even by editors and artists themselves—even screenwriting was seen by the writers as a craft—it would not be treated as such almost until the close of the twentieth century and a bit beyond. We seem to be a lot further now, or are we?

The subsequent development of comic art has inspired a new and sometimes impressive scholarship. Two recent issues of scholarly journals, The American Book Review (Winter 2025, #46:4) and the Radical History Review (May, 2026, #155 ) offer serious, ongoing studies, mirroring the spread of scholarly efforts in several specialty journals in the US and abroad. Graduate students in a handful of fields, mainly English and Communications (under a variety of names like “Media and Communication”) work on college degrees, even advanced degrees, some doubtless hoping for jobs, teaching the subject.

Let us leave aside the glum prospect that the jobs may not ever come into existence in any real numbers. Undergraduates by the thousands nevertheless continue to take comics-study courses even as the liberal arts suffer assaults from within the academy and outside. Do conservative Christian academies teach conservative Christian comics? We do not know.

Comics history viewed clearly, a groundwork set for understanding what it means, might well start with Fantagraphics and its anniversary.

EC Fan-Addict Club

When I interviewed Harvey Kurtzman for the Oral History of the American Left archive (at New York University) in 1981, he kidded me about the use of the word “fan.” The word could only, he insisted, be a contraction of “fanatic.” True baseball fans, the category that I knew best and shared most in childhood, were clearly fanatics. And when EC comics launched its “Fan-Addict Club” in 1950, it pinpointed the most fanatical section of comics readers anywhere. Perhaps because Mad artists and editors met in person with fans, mostly in Greater New York, it was also a Jewish, cerebral thing, no matter how many members were geographically distant. The Letters Page in EC comics seemed to feature devotees from afar, including soldiers and sailors stationed anywhere in the Cold War world, doubtless probably seeking fellowship with fellow fanatics.

The Comics Journal, #58, 1980.

Here, then, we can jump ahead to the far-sighted founding of Fantagraphics in 1976. It could be seen as the successor to the  EC Fan-Addict Club, for the good reason that the founders greatly admired a handful of the artists of the old EC days. But it was, in this light, also a successor of a different kind. It would itself publish comics. And it would encourage the study of comic art through the pages of The Comics Journal (TCJ), launched the same year.

The Nostalgia Journal, Number 22, 1974.

Founded by Gary Groth and Michael Catron in College Park, MD,  TCJ moved several times before settling in Seattle in 1989. Groth himself had been a publisher, beginning as a teenager with a superhero fan magazine. There may be a deeply curious significance to the  actual launching of The Comics Journal by way of taking over an “adzine,” The Nostalgia Journal. But Groth had already been organizing comics festivals in the early 1970s.

The Comics Journal, Number 35, 1977.

There, in the festivals, is surely the hidden source of much else. We might trace the festival mode to the amateur writers (including sci-fi writers) creating and sending out their own fanzines—not yet called that—as far back as the 1920s. Were they lonely adolescent boys or older insular types nervous with people close up and eager to befriend at a safe distance? At any rate, fandom received a huge boost during the 1960s with new, mostly xeroxed sci-fi zines—replacing used Gestettners and ink— and, above all, fan gatherings.

The presence of fan sci-fi events in areas small or larger, in big cities or smallish towns, setting up their tables (and paying some fee to the venue) for other fan-publishers and just plain fans to look at, flip through, perhaps purchase or exchange for their own creations established a pattern. And the value of celebrity, alongside costumes among other curious behavior.

Groth was building upon this past, applied from sci-fi to comics, the two genres that shared a pulpy reputation with some “big names” that ordinary Americans would not likely recognize. The two genres also shared an avant-garde element previously unknown or at least little understood. Underground comix and their anti-establishment or avant-garde qualities could be viewed as counterparts to daring or rakish sci-fi novelists, Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin among others. The 1960s, the popular anti-Establishment sentiment and the apparent collapse of censorship had opened the doors and young people in particular were eager to rush in, find new friends (or lovers) and dig into a kind of cultural examination.

Cultural Correspondence, Number 5, 1978.

My own small magazine, Cultural Correspondence (“the first cultural publication whose readers watched television without guilt”), 1975-82, largely the work of a group of history graduate students, set out the proposition that popular culture contained the possibilities of liberation, if we looked closely enough. To be theoretical: we were seeking to turn upside down Theodore Adorno’s insistence on the corrupting nature of popular culture, and if anyone remembered, Irving Howe’s curse at comics (in a 1949 issue of Politics magazine) as inherently degraded and degrading. It was a natural thing to interview Crumb, Bill Griiffith, Justin Green and assorted others, including women artists, of the underground.

We scholarly-minded comics devotees at large were all, in a way, following film studies’ rise during the 1950s-70s, from the mostly campus Film Clubs to scholarly endeavors. But with some of the same limitations: those who wanted to study the work and its creators constituted only a small portion of those who enjoyed films and comics.  And also: film studies had rapidly developed a down side of aestheticism, scholars who competed with each other and argued about details but especially pointed the finger at fan-amateurs. What else would university-level specializations mean?

Fantagraphics, for its part, managed somehow to avoid the obstacles and unleash the popular imagination about comics. The Hernandez Brothers, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and Charles Burns would pretty soon reach best-seller status, along with reprints from Peanuts, Donald Duck and many others.

Meanwhile, in the pages TCJ, later to be called, grandiosely, the “New York Times/Wall Street Journal of comics”— as a measure of value and sales—Harvey Pekar still had the space to curse Art Spiegelman and Maus. Even if any reader knew that Harvey, still making a living by working at the VA in Cleveland, was actually envious of Spiegelman’s critical and financial success. Even getting on Letterman repeatedly did not make Harvey any happier: he still had a 9 to 5 job and a mortgage.

By the mid-1980s, Fantagraphics had already launched the Jack Kirby Award for artistic achievement,  a crucial step toward the award system and the giant Comic-Cons of later decades. The role of fairly early staffer Eric Reynolds became notable, first as news editor for TCJ and then as the small and financially uncertain company’s needed marketing expert. Reynolds helped the company past the cyclical downturn of comics (among others, Denis Kitchen’s firm did not survive) with a brighter future in promise.

The Comics Journal, #177, 1995.

The distribution deal with WW Norton in 2001 fairly reflected the rise of “comic art” prompted, arguably, by Maus, a global market hit, and by Raw Magazine, an aesthetic bombshell. Comics had come of age, and global comic art took off spectacularly as well, even more on the web than the printed page.

Not to make too much of a name, the “Graphic Novel” had been born. Marjane Sartrapi, among those who did not enjoy this term, considered it to be an attempt to win the respect of the gentility in every sense, by promoting comics as “novels.” A fair charge. Seen more narrowly, the “GN” soon came to function as the coffee table book of the new century, or at least a large handful of the more vaunted comics did.

Some of those active in comics with serious artistic and/or educational aims would say that after comics became the Next New Thing (the business section of the New York Times eager to report on adapted comics superheroes hitting big numbers in Hollywood), the interest in comics faded somewhat. The intermittent interest nevertheless has seem to have remained, up to the present day, in the Obituaries. That is,  for fallen heroes and heroines of the field. Feature obits have always been a serious matter for the Times, artists as well as film-makers, advertising executives and scientists.

Today, over at Fantagraphics, Donald Duck’s further family adventures coexist with lesbian adventurers of another dimension or another century. More non-sequential comic art books seem to be emerging, further advancing the idea that comics and art, or for that matter comics and contemporary social drama (Joe Sacco’s real life depictions of troubled and doomed populations), have won a lasting place. Congratulations, Fantagraphics.

Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.

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June 17, 2026 · 12:00 pm

Katie Skelly Interview: On Comics and HEAVEN

Katie Skelly, an award-winning cartoonist and simply one of the best comic artists today, has a new graphic novel, Heaven, published by Fantagraphics. We chat about her new book, the inner workings of it all: influences, storytelling observations, fun stuff and serious stuff. Basically, an all-around great conversation. The timing on this spotlight is good too as Katie presents Bad Girl Tarot, a beautiful tarot card deck she has created, all her drawings and design work, currently on a Kickstarter campaign that runs through July 15, 2026.

Katie Skelly

Heaven is, at its core, a good old-fashioned ghost story, with a group of high school girls, and a haunted mansion on a hill. Well, not so much a mansion in this case as a super weird strip club that goes in and out of existence. For more details, just read my review. And I highly recommend that you get your copy so you can see for yourself. There are endless inventive details to savor, starting with those giant upside-down neon heels lighting up the desert night skies.

I like to focus on the creative process and that’s why it’s great to call attention to both Heaven and Bad Girl Tarot. For me, it’s all part of something bigger. In this interview, I ask Katie to share about what she’s thinking about as she creates work. Everyone will answer in a different way. Katie has some very specific passions she can draw inspiration from as well as a very curious mind open to whatever random element that might cross her path. A couple of deep wells of inspiration are horror genre films and manga. If you’d like some insight into the mind of one of our great comic artists, then I invite you to check out our conversation.

At a crossroads.

Heaven is the fourth, and latest, graphic novel by Katie Skelly, published by Fantagraphics. It is only now, with hindsight, viewing all four books together, that we have the luxury of saying they all fit in so well with each other. I suggest as much to Katie. And she agrees. She states: “Well, sure, My Pretty Vampire and Maids find their way into Heaven. And The Agency finds it way into all of them, one way or another.” And thus we begin our chat. It’s important to realize that each book is its own world of hard work and countless problem-solving, years in the making. So, yes, it’s a super big deal to have all of this work look so cool, a beautiful seemingly seamless result.

And with that, I set you lose to enjoy the above video, or audio at various platforms. The video will go up first and is ready as I write this. The audio will load up shortly, after I make a few more tweaks. Anyway, feel free to comment, like and subscribe. Every bit of engagement from you helps.

And just a few more words . . .

A few more things to say about the Bad Girl Tarot campaign at Kickstarter, thru July 15, 2026:

Bad Girl Tarot II is a complete 78-card tarot deck with guidebook created and designed by me, cartoonist Katie Skelly. The goal of this Kickstarter is to raise funds for the first printing of the deck, working towards fulfillment in October 2026. I’m excited to offer backers a special price on Bad Girl Tarot II, plus rewards like original art, stickers, and more as thanks for supporting the project.

The Team:

Katie Skelly: that’s me! I am an award-winning comic book artist with four graphic novels from Fantagraphics, plus the creator of the original Bad Girl Tarot and Bad Girl Oracle. Find more of my work on my website and on Instagram.

Chelsey Caswell: a professional tarot reader with both regular private clients and popular sessions at spots like NYC’s Soho House. Find more about her on her website.

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June 16, 2026 · 1:02 pm

HEAVEN by Katie Skelly graphic novel review

Heaven. Katie Skelly. Fantagraphics. 2026. 100pp. $19.99. (On Sale July 7th, Pre-order now.)

Katie Skelly’s new graphic novel features a cast of cool girls down a foreboding path. These girls are still in high school and, while full of attitude, are short on experience. They can’t help themselves; can’t resist being attracted to something sinister, which seems just out of reach and yet beckons them to draw closer. Skelly once again delivers a work of comics that is an intoxicating blend of sex-positive content and horror genre.

The kids are alright but restless.

This is the fourth Skelly graphic novel published by Fantagraphics: My Pretty Vampire (2017), The Agency (2018), Maids (2020), and now, Heaven. Each title is different from the next in refreshing ways and each shares a spirited sense of experimentation. Skelly draws from various sources, looking for imagery that stands out in terms of style and energy. The idea is to have an image act as a jumping off point, work its magic and keep the narrative moving forward. A lot of that vibe will come from art house films and assorted high-end comics. A comics artist like Skelly picks and chooses this or that image, processes it and makes it her own, like a favorite panel from a comic by Milo Manara or a certain moment from a Dario Argento film.

The not-so-glamorous life of a stripper.

The female characters in a Katie Skelly comic appear to know what they want and are determined to get it, prone to leaving mayhem in their wake. They are femme fatales, one way or another. In this new book, they are a clique of cool high school girls. Dolly, at eighteen, the eldest by a few months, sort of leads the pack. When the girls stumble upon Heaven, an urban legend strip club that seems to have a very tenuous hold on existing in the real world, they jump at the chance to find it. Dolly, sent as the trailblazing explorer, walks right up to the front door, and ends up being invited to audition as a dancer. She is in way over her head but that won’t stop her. What’s so appealing about being a showgirl? Well, Dolly, is instantly hooked.

At a crossroads.

Will Dolly regret ever knocking at the door to Heaven? That seems to be a hard yes. Skelly reels in the reader, just like a masterful director of artful horror and as the seasoned cartoonist she is. The artwork is spot on as usual. With just the right amount of linework, Skelly suggests a whole world, inside and out, always daring and inventive. The male gaze is stared down, allowed to co-exist under a well-placed heel to the throat. Sex-positive work is for everyone to enjoy. That said, this work eludes easy categorization and leads the way among contemporary alt-comics. For a wild ride, filled with chills, thrills and dripping with style, you can’t go wrong with Katie Skelly’s latest deep dive into strange realms. Seek this out!

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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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