Category Archives: Comics

Comics for People Who Hate Comics

Masters of American ComicsThis past weekend I went to The Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to see two companion art exhibits: “Masters of American Comics,” and “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.”

The latter is a survey of the early development of the super-hero as popular mythological figure, and focuses on no single comics creator. It’s a pleasant enough show, but in essence it’s a ghetto to its neighbor in the next gallery. “Masters” follows the ‘godheads’ theory of group retrospectives, rounding up a dozen or so indispensible comics creators from the past seventy years or so and going on at great length about how totally awesome they are.

It’s as serious and significant an art show as any the medium has ever seen. In fact, what’s showing at The Jewish Museum is just one half of two parts, with the second half showing concurrently at The Museum of Newark in New Jersey. If you don’t know the geography of New York City, suffice it to say that some people make it to Los Angeles more often than they make it across the Hudson River to our closest neighboring state, so I’m unlikely to see that second exhibit any time soon.

Continue Reading …

+

Round-up Time!

I’ve been fighting what’s apparently a twenty-four hour bug since midday yesterday. Shivers and aches pained me all through the day and into night, and I didn’t even know if I could make it through a whole day of work today. But I underwent sustained, Cold-Eeze-powered counter-attack, and I feel loads better tonight, remarkably. Zinc is the magical cure for all my threatening colds, I’m finding.

Actually, I’m not back completely at one hundred percent. I’m still tired, and bound to my couch for the most part. But, at the very least, I have my senses about me enough to want to clear out some blogging items that have been hanging around for a while. So this is going to be another round-up style post. Get ready for random.

Continue Reading …

+

Super-Heroes Are People Too

Comic-Con Attendee Dressed as SupermanWhat I did on my summer vacation: I indulged my inner nerd at the annual Comic-Con International festival in San Diego, California. With a friend, I flew into town late on Thursday evening and spent two days among a teeming population of comic book, fantasy and science fiction devotees, wandering the crazy and enormous exhibit hall and attending some of the dozens and dozens of panel discussions and film events.

Though I have a special place in my heart for comics, I don’t buy or read them regularly, not since I was a teenager. My continued fascination lies mostly in the idea of them as outsized vehicles for adolescent imagination, as an imperfect, parallel reality to which my adult self might retreat in order to recover the comforts of childhood.

It’s an abstract notion, and not one I regularly take action on. To be sure, New York and the East Coast see their share of comic book conventions, but none of them have ever interested me much. What I wanted to do was to see the world’s biggest comic book convention, the apotheosis of adolescent fantasy. So, in planning a trip to see family in Southern California, I scheduled a slight detour to San Diego for a few days and caught the mother of all nerd festivals.

Continue Reading …

+

Illustrate Me for May

Max RiffnerIt took me a little while to get this together, but I’ve just uploaded the May 2006 entry in my ongoing “Illustrate Me” project, which I debuted last month. As a refresher: at the end of each month I’m inviting one illustrator to create artwork to illustrate at least three of the posts I wrote in that month. The only stipulations are that the piece must be black and white, and it must feature the title and dates of the posts it’s representing.

Continue Reading …

+

Pictures for Clothes

Adrian Tomine for Perry EllisI’m going to make it a two-fer week for comics fans here: I never got around to writing about the Adrian Tomine-illustrated advertising campaign for Perry Ellis that kicked off earlier in the year, so following on my post about Seth’s wonderful “Wimbeldon Green,” I thought I would. It’s a fairly striking creative strategy for a fashion label that completely eschews photography for hand-drawn illustrations from the author and artist of the indie comic book “Optic Nerve.” Tomine uses his self-consciously mild drawing style to recount quiet moments of modest poignancy in the lives of apparently attractive, Perry Ellis-garbed young singles. He tells three short stories in comic strip form with the same attention to detail and deft draughtsmanship that you’ll find in his normal comic work. None of them are of any particular consequence, but reading each of them at PerryEllis.com, they come off as reasonably successful impressions for the brand.

Continue Reading …

+

Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

Continue Reading …

+

Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

Continue Reading …

+

Back to the Batcave

Batman BeginsAlready, I’ve seen “Batman Begins” twice, which gives you some indication of how I feel about the movie. I wanted to write a long review of it, but time simply won’t permit it — and there’s no dearth of glowing reviews available elsewhere — so I thought instead I might comment on the context in which this new interpretation has debuted.

Watch the very end of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of “Batman” and you’ll see just one of many, many examples of why I found very little of redeeming value in the last major hurrah for this franchise. The scene provides that movie’s resolution: Jack Nicholson’s miscast and misplayed Joker has been vanquished (after a ridiculous showdown in which he shot down the titular hero’s plane with a handgun!). Gotham City’s mayor, district attorney and police chief are addressing a crowd on the steps of an overwrought City Hall set, publicly reassuring the citizenry that the danger has passed.

Continue Reading …

+

New Logo for an Old Favorite

It’s going to take me a little while to really come to grips with the fact that DC Comics has changed its logo, obsolescing the long-standing, Milton Glaser-designed icon for something, well, different. The new mark includes forward-leaning “D.C.” initials against a swooshy, Saturn-like ring in a dimensional rendering, with a hint of Adobe Illustrator-style gradient along its edge. A curiously Captain America-like star, drawn in perspective, punctuates the whole thing.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t find it particularly attractive or probably as utilitarian as Glaser’s original triumph of compactness and visual exclamation. To the designers’ credit, it does attempt to rescue what’s good about its predecessor from the short-sighted imperatives of DC Comics’ current marketing strategy, but in doing so, it completely misinterprets the old mark’s substance for rather shallow style.

Old vs. New DC Comics Logos

The classic, Milton Glaser-designed logo, at left, and the new form, at right.

Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To

Maybe this is just nostalgia, because I was an avid reader of DC Comics when I was a kid, and I still feel invested in their canon of heroes and pop mythology. As a function of my childhood, the old logo really represents something constant and reliable, even when the tonality of the comic books changed drastically. Just to get pretentious for a bit: the nature of the art and writing and even the economic reach of comic books has metamorphosed in a kind of parallel to my advancement from kickball games on blacktops to PowerPoint presentations in front of corporate officers, but that logo has been always the same, at least until now. It’s my sense of vanity and obstinacy speaking when I say that the new logo just isn’t worthy of the old logo’s legacy, but I really do mean it.

Continue Reading …

+

The Escapist

Men of TomorrowIt’s fuckin’ gloomy around here. Everyone’s pissed off or depressed or angry or sulking. To get a little respite, I’m retreating to the fantasia of the comic book world with Gerard Jones’ “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” I picked it up over the weekend while browsing the aisles at my local bookstore, stocking up on fodder for my culturally elitist reading list (my duty, as a citizen of a blue state). I’ve never really left behind the familiar comfort of comic books, in part because they almost bring me back to the less prickly reality of childhood, but these days I think I enjoy the idea of them more than anything; I’d rather read about comic books than actually read them.

Continue Reading …

+