Lent Comic Art Classification 2017 Edition online as free ebook

Now available at https://archive.org/details/lent-comic-art-classification-2017-edition-with-covers

I've been updating it and hopefully a 2nd edition will come out next year as this version is dated due to comic art evolving and changing. You can see newer additional headings in the 2023 Comics Research Bibliography at https://archive.org/details/crb-2023-ebook-edition-final-v.-1.0  2024 is in production.

Excerpts from the introduction by Dr. John A. Lent:

In 1986, in preparation for a conference presentation in India, I self-published a 156-page international bibliography on comic art, which I also sent to some libraries and researchers. That led to the compilation of ten volumes of comic art sources, broken down by regions, genres, functions, and other aspects, published by Greenwood Press between 1994 and 2006. As I assembled materials for these bibliographies, I developed categories into which to place sources. The classification system presented in this monograph is the result.

The classification system portrayed in these pages is meant to bring some order to filing, categorizing, and discussing comics and cartoons. Actually, the fullest section, on the United States, can be used with minor modifications to organize comic art studies about any country.

Lucca Comics & Games 2024 Festival Review: "The Butterfly Effect"

 reviewed by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary

Lucca Comics & Games 2024. Lucca, Italy. October 30 – November 3, 2024.

https://www.luccacomicsandgames.com/

 

The Butterfly Effect

Our biggest takeaway after visiting Lucca Comics & Games for the first time is that we failed as parents by not bringing our kid. This is a festival for today’s manga-anime-gaming obsessed generation. While it may not be comics enough for some, the total experience is breathtaking and well worth bracing the mind-boggling crowds. The 2024 edition of Lucca Comics & Games, the largest comic book festival in Europe and the second-largest (after Tokyo’s Comiket) in the world, took place from October 30 to November 3. The history of the Lucca Comics & Games is complex, tracing back to the Salone Internazionale del Comics in 1965, which was also held in Lucca. A new festival, Lucca Comics was created when the Salone moved to Rome in the mid-1990s, quickly growing larger and more prominent than the original event. In 2006 the two events reconciled, with the Salone returning to the walled city of Lucca. What began as a comics event is now more accurately described as a fan culture event with some comics elements tacked on. Indeed, the comics, despite their prominence in the name, can feel slightly residual.

The festival has grown exponentially since that the merger almost twenty years ago. Attracting about 50,000 attendees in the mid-2000s, it sold 275,182 tickets across its five days this year (down from the record high year in 2022). For a town of 89,000 people, this is quite the logistical challenge. School is cancelled during the week of the festival, with many locals abandoning the city and renting their homes to attendees, while thousands pour in every day on the train. If you go: Plan to take the train (book in advance) and pack light as taxis are barred from inside the walls and only local cars are allowed. Order your wristbands well in advance as well since they will sell out and staff scrupulously check outside every tent. This is not an event to be dropped in on at the spur of the moment.

The enormity of the crowds makes the festival a considerable challenge, with long queues for most of the popular tents. This year, we counted sixty-four distinct exhibition spaces across the entirety of the town. That does not include the expansive Japan Town outside the walls – although Japanese producers were strongly represented within the main site. The town was subsumed by tents, mostly controlled by single exhibitors: Lego, Nintendo, The Cartoon Network, Hasbro, Funko, Crunchyroll, and Samsung among many others. Some were targeted promotions – like Netflix dedicating a large tent just to promote the second season of Squid Game – and many offered festival exclusive merchandise. Lines stretched for hours (the J-Pop tent must have been at least a three hour wait) that could test the patience of even the most dedicated consumer. We queued for almost an hour to buy a limited-edition Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt as a gift for our son. Maybe we’re good parents after all.

The scope of the tents is encapsulated by the festival’s stated aims: “The community event is dedicated to comics, games, video games, fantasy books/fantasy novels, manga, anime, animated movies, tv series, and cosplay.” Cosplay is probably misplaced as last on that list given that a very significant percentage of the attendees were participating cosplayers representing a wild array of pop culture interests. Every afternoon in the square, in front of one of the many churches, a cosplay event unfolds celebrating a different fandom. We watched a parade of Harry Potter fans, ranging from very young children in store-bought wizard hats to adults with highly-detailed costumes evincing hundreds of hours of work. Everyone seems welcome.

While “comics” may lead the title of the event, it does not much feel that way on the ground, where video games and television seem to be the predominant interest. Several Italian publishers host their own booths at Lucca, including Panini, Bonelli, Tunué, and Star Comics. Of these, Panini and Bonelli had, by far, the largest and busiest booths. Panini is the Italian publisher of both Marvel and DC’s comics, offering much nicer editions of the works than either of those publishers sell in the United States. They also do a large business with Disney-related works for younger children and had long lines of autograph seekers stretching well outside the tent into the square.

Bonelli, the venerable Italian publisher of Dylan Dog, Tex Willer, Nathan Never and dozens of others, also offers a wide array of products, including deluxe editions of classic material. The Padiglione San Martino had a much larger tent housing more than two dozen smaller comic book publishers from across Italy, while the largest tent could be found at the Padiglione Napoleone, hosting about sixty exhibitors including Canicola, Coconino Press, Rizzoli Lizard, Humanoïdes Associés, and Fantagraphics. This was the primary centre of gravity for comic book sales across the festival and, since it is a tent erected in a town square, it revolves around a statue of Napoleon that overlooks the commercial chaos.

As with other European comics festivals, Lucca Comics & Games played host to a series of exhibitions. In general, these were much smaller than what can be found at Angoulême or Fumetto. Seven exhibitions took place in the Palazzo Ducale, each following essentially from one room to the next and hung in front of the permanent exhibitions of classical and renaissance Italian painting. The result was sometimes jarring but oftentimes provocative juxtapositions. While the Palazzo entrance was oddly difficult to find, especially as the street crowds grew larger and larger by the hour, the exhibitions were well worth it and generally did not have lines.

Press Animae to Play featured a small selection of work by Yoshitaka Amano as a tease for a much larger Milan exhibition opening about two weeks after the festival. About two dozen works, including early anime cels and more recent covers for Sandman: The Dream Hunters filled a single room.

Contrappunti showcased the work of Carmine di Giandomenico, who has made a name for himself in the American comic book market with work for Marvel (Battlin’ Jack Murdock; Magneto) and DC (Flash).

A small show celebrating five decades of Les Humanoïdes Associés followed, with a tight focus on Métal Hurlant and an emphasis on its Italian contributors (Tanino Liberatore, Magnus, Cecilia Capuana, Brandoli and Queirolo, and, of course, Hugo Pratt) with a few pieces by well-known French cartoonists like Frank Margérin and Möebius.

Two rooms showcased twenty years of winners of the Lucca Project Contest for young authors, celebrating the more than 3,600 aspirants who have entered over the years.

Kalimatuna highlighted the work of three female cartoonists from Morocco: Takoua Ben Mohamed, Zainab Fasiki, and Deena Mohamed. Unapologetically feminist, the works on display emphasized the impact of gender-based violence on Moroccan women.

An exhibition of the work of Kazu Kibuishi followed, with most of its attention given appropriately to Amulet. Significantly here, Kibuishi’s framed pages (black line art on white pages) were displayed on backdrops of blown-up digital prints of the colour version of the final pages, drawing easy attention to the significant differences between the original page and the final project. We had never seen original comics art presented in this manner, and it was tremendously smart; particularly given that so much work in Amulet is accomplished by the colorists.

Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi (above and below)

Finally, the work of Francesca Ghermandi was found in Il Pianeta Intergalattico, including a range of her work across her lengthy career working for Frigidaire, Mondo Gomma, and Linus.

Across town, at the Chiesa dei Servi, the major exhibition of the show could be found: Gateway to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art. When we first learned that the major exhibition of the festival was related to games rather than comics we were, frankly, disappointed. That feeling disappeared immediately upon entering the space of the church.

The exhibition featured the first public unveiling of the collection of Matthew Koder, a Citibank executive who has extensively gathered D&D related artworks. It showcased more than one hundred works - mostly oil paintings - from the 1970s to today. The breadth of the collection is astonishing, including the oil paintings that were used for the original editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook, original art from the interiors of those and other early TSR publications, the covers of early issues of Dragon Magazine, various D&D modules and novels, and the Dungeonmaster game and television series. The show concluded with paintings for Magic: The Gathering cards in recognition of the ownership of the property by Wizards of the Coast. At the end of the church a small group wearing headsets broadcasting across the church played a campaign while attendees admired the work on the walls.

Broken into a series of eras, the Koder Collection represented the graphic style of every revision of the game and its rules. It was a truly magnificent exhibition, all the more remarkable that it is held in a single collection. With luck, this show will travel broadly as it would find an enthusiastic audience in many locations.

All of this, of course, is only to scratch the surface. Given the vast scope of the show there were entire sections that we never entered, from the LARPers gathered on the town’s walls practicing their swordplay to the children playing on the Cartoon Network’s elaborate adventure set (source of most of our parental guilt). Every conceivable geek fandom was represented, from the traditional collector’s tents selling vintage comic books and original art to the voluminous number of stalls peddling t-shirts and imported Japanese anime figurines.  

        We were warned beforehand that the weekend would be out of control, so we limited our visit from Wednesday to Friday evening, leaving early Saturday morning (wheeling suitcases through the crowds on the cobble-stone streets to the train station was quite the adventure). Even by Friday, we had to argue with pedestrian traffic controllers who implemented one-way thoroughfares, blocking the way to our apartment.  While we already felt overwhelmed by the experience, it is clear that even in the full five days a visitor could not take in everything that a show this size had to offer and still make time to enjoy an Aperol spritz every afternoon.

Exhibit review: Tove Jansson: Paradise

 reviewed by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary

Tove Jansson: Paradise. Heli Harni, curator. HAM Helsinki Art Museum, October 25, 2024 – April 6, 2025. https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/exhibitions/tove-jansson-paradise/

Photos are by the reviewers except for Bird Blue (detail) which is from the Museum's website.

It is all but impossible for visitors to Helsinki to avoid the influence of Tove Jansson. A Moomin shop occupies a prominent location in the airport, while two competing Moomin shops can be found in close proximity to the central train station. Moomin figures can be found in bakeries and candy shops and bookstores. The Moomins can be found peddling chocolate-filled peppermint candies, organic oat snacks, coffee mugs, cutting boards, can openers, stuffed toys, t-shirts, and wool socks. They are everywhere and they are on everything. Unsurprisingly, therefore, they were also in HAM Helsinki Art Museum.

From October 25, 2024 to April 6, 2025, the top two floors of Helsinki’s primary art space were given over to Tove Jansson: Paradise. Billed as an in-depth look at Jansson’s public paintings, the show included a large number of Jansson’s pre-Moomin paintings from the 1930s and 1940s while focusing extensively on her career as a muralist.

Jansson’s first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was originally published in 1945 to no great success. Prior to that time, Jansson, the daughter of a sculptor father and an illustrator mother, spent most of the 1930s in a succession of art schools in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she published illustrations in Garm, a Finnish-Swedish satirical magazine from 1929 to 1953 while, at the same time, exhibiting paintings in group shows. Jansson’s first solo painting exhibition took place in 1943, two years before the first Moomin book was published. Two years later, she painted her first mural at the Strömberg factory in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki. Tove Jansson: Paradise is interested in combining all of these aspects of her career: the paintings from her student period through her early professionalization, her career as a muralist working in public spaces, and the early years and then rapid success of the Moomin books and comics.

Jansson’s first two solo shows were arranged by Leonard Bäcksbacka at his Konstalongen gallery 1943. The successful first show provided a boost for the young artist, but the second solo exhibition in 1946 was not well received by either critics or art patrons. The first several galleries of the exhibitions are given over to a selection of her paintings as well as the contemporaneous illustration work for Garm. Jansson’s paintings of this period are not immediately recognizable as the work of the Moomin author but demonstrate a strong influence of mid-century European modernism with their thick brushstrokes and moody palette, while the illustration work – often topical and political – shows stronger traces of the material that will develop in her children’s books.

Following the display of her early easel paintings, the final room on the first floor of the exhibition hosts two large frescoes as well as studies for the same. Commissioned in 1947 by the restaurant in the basement of the Helsinki City Hall, the two painting are titled Party in the Countryside and Party in the City. These works begin to synthesize Jansson’s modernist and folklorist aesthetics, providing a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of an artist determined to become a critical and commercial success.

Party in the Countryside depicts eight figures frolicking in lush vegetation. The images are cartoony in their representational simplicity and subtle pastel colour scheme - an abrupt departure from the tone and style of her paintings following the unsuccessful second show. The city scene is no less luxurious, depicting couples in gowns and evening wear dancing on a flower strewn balcony.

The two works, the artist’s first attempts at frescoes, participated in the massive post-war reconstruction effort across Finland that provided unprecedented opportunities for young artists. Jansson, who came from a well-connected family of artists, benefitted tremendously (one might even leave thinking overtly) from this social and political network.

The only public commission known to have been awarded to Jansson on a competitive basis was the Aurora Hospital murals intended for the new children’s ward. Alone among the murals on display, these clearly capitalized on her growing fame from the Moomin series. Play, painted in 1956, presented a series of Moomin characters in the stairwell and the EEG room of the hospital. It was later recreated at the Helsinki University Central Hospital when the pediatric ward was relocated in 1997. At HAM, the mural was recreated once again on the central staircase leading visitors from the first floor of the exhibition to the second.

The second floor of the exhibition was much more impressive than the first. A vast open space with vaulted ceilings broken up by temporary dividers, this floor showcased the immensity of the murals. Display cases of her sketches and highly detailed notebooks invited viewers to contemplate the artist’s process. Jansson typically produced preliminary sketches on paper and then worked through colour schemes on cardboard before concluding with a 1:1 charcoal tracing that would be transferred to the wall. Examples of each of these stages were on full display here (most impressively the enormous cartoon of The Ten Virgins with its pinpricks for the charcoal transfer readily apparent).

Bird Blue, 1953 (detail).
© Tove Jansson Estate.
Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.

            Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, Jansson produced public art for restaurants, hotels, several schools, the Nordic Union Bank and an altar piece for the Teuva Church in Southern Ostrobothnia. She worked in fresco, fresco-secco (pigment applied to dry plaster), watercolour on glass, and oil on canvas. Over time, these works increasingly came to resemble work for which she is best known, and even to incorporate elements of the Moomin universe at the margins.

As Canadians of a certain generation most of the waves of Moomin-mania missed us, so we have no sentimental attachment to Jansson’s work. This turned out to be a benefit as the exhibition is not about the Moomins really but about the artist behind the phenomenon. There was no hiding Jansson’s sexuality, her sometimes craven ambition, and her canny working of her socially powerful contacts in both government and the art world. While Moomin die-hards might come away mildly disappointed, the casual visitor gained incredible insight into mid-twentieth-century Finland as it sought to distance itself from its complex wartime status into an independent nation with its own distinct visual culture. And, for those die-hards, there are Moomin mugs and mittens in the bookshop.

Sketch for the Bird Blue mural, 1953. Commision for the canteen at
Kila Swedish-language elementary school (today Karjaa co-educational school). 

Graphic Novel Review: Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.)

 reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.); translated by Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová. University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, 2024. 128 pages. $21.95. ISBN: 978-1-63779-080-9. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-080-9.html

Regarding the Czech comics domestic scene, as recently as 2020 scholar Pavel Kořínek could credibly opine: “[A]ny kind of subjective, personal recollection remains extremely rare. Czech comics seem — at least on their most superficial level — curiously de-personalized, de-subjectivized, with genre and fictional works predominant. For some reason, there have emerged very few overtly personal, autobiographical comics in the Czech tradition” (“Facets”: 91). 

    Such statements are less credible today, thanks to more recent publications such as veteran artist Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022) — a work as personalized, subjectivized and autobiographical as anyone could want.

In fact, the landscape was shifting even as Kořínek’s original assessment was seeing print. That same year Czech publisher Paseka released the groundbreaking graphic memoir Bez Vlasů (literally “Without Hair”) by writer Tereza Čechová[1] and artist Štěpánka Jislová.[2] It dealt in intimate detail with the memoirist’s life after a diagnosis, at 30, of alopecia, an autoimmune condition that leads to hair loss. No comics work like it (certainly not in long form) had appeared in the Czech lands before. It would later win the Czech industry’s highest award, the Muriel Prize, for Best Comics Work.

2024 saw the English translation of Bez Vlasů, here rendered as Bald, from Graphic Mundi Press. It is translated by Čechová and Martha Kuhlman, professor of Comparative Literature at Bryant University in Providence, RI and one of the leading US scholars of Czech comics.[3]

It makes sense that Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, would take up Čechová and Jislová’s prize-winning work, given its Graphic Medicine focus. Penn State is a major US node of the international Graphic Medicine movement, which centers graphic narrative representations of illness, disability and related medical themes.[4]

Bald certainly ventures deep into this territory; the heroine Tereza navigates — at times painfully — alopecia’s effect on her identity as a woman, love life, work relationships and even her pocketbook. I found these scenes on the day-to-day economics of her condition the most illuminating: she expounds on the cost of medication, therapists, wigs, head coverings of different sorts. We also get fascinating discussions on the hair of different races and ethnicities, as well as on the culture and mythology of hair (Samson and Rapunzel are just the tip of the iceberg).

All this is rendered in Jislová’s clean, almost schematic line that exudes a cartoony dynamism. The book uses a two-color scheme of black lines with light reds to produce numerous effects, like the “ghost hair” which Tereza has lost. (In this, Bald recalls Georgia Webber’s split-identity techniques in her 2018 memoir Dumb: Living Without a Voice.)

The author’s one-year journey as depicted makes for quite an emotional roller coaster: despair rubs elbows with enlightened self-acceptance. A storytelling workshop in Scotland proves cathartic. Tereza, like many people nowadays, seeks solace on the internet, only to find confusion and – who’da thunk? – misinformation. A brilliant page design reifies her anxieties and stresses into a fractured three-tier portrait as our narrator tries desperately to forestall the inevitable with useless pills and creams. Another rather chilling episode portrays her at her job, “dealing” with her hair loss by trying to ignore it with overwork. Over eight panels, she melts down in tears before her laptop, then resumes typing with a smile. Finally, another portrait, a splash, shows her weeping on an armchair as supportive comments roll in after her first posting online about her alopecia. This brief catalogue gives a sense, I hope, of Bald’s dizzying affective spectrum. Overall, it paints a powerful picture of physical difference and its mental health/social/cultural ramifications in late capitalism.   

As Čechová told Czech Radio, “I was really worried that the result would seem depressing, because the comic does describe something that is very difficult. But it also brings with it a lot of funny moments. We wanted to show that even if you go through something like this, the world doesn’t fall apart” (Jančíková, “Cesta”). Yet even the “funny moments” tend to have their edge. At one point, Tereza’s boyfriend tells her, “The hair is fine. But not having eyebrows is creepy.” Given that one of Tereza’s fears is living life alone due to her hair loss, that comment seems less than reassuring. 

Other moments I found borderline disturbing. Trying to make herself feel better about her condition at times leads to some dark corners, like this statement, which sounds lamentably eugenicist: “I often think we had it coming. Humans no longer need their hair. It’ll disappear in time. Evolution. Maybe I’m a member of a new … more perfected race. But let me tell you, it’s not easy being one of the first.” This textbox accompanies another portrait, of a half-naked Tereza crying in the mirror.

Something else which some may find rather distancing about Bald: what at times seems like a willful opacity. By that I mean the text proceeds with great economy, with an average of only about 20-25 words per page. It’s almost telegraphic. This puts more of a burden on the art to carry the narrative, which Jislová does more than capably. However, some choices have the effect of keeping the reader (this one, anyway) at arm’s length. Jislová’s figures do not have eyeballs, just black dots for eyes, and a puppet-like angularity to them (Tereza’s nose looks like a sort of stylized diamond or arrow point). This choice risks narrowing the expressive latitude of the characters, like watching a drama acted out with dolls. (Maybe Jiří Trnka dolls? Though a lot of them had eyeballs.) So that when Tereza has tears streaming down her cheeks it might look to some readers as simply grotesque, and be less likely to provoke empathy/understanding.

Furthermore, Čechová’s low word-count writing has a similar coldness and detached matter-of-factness, even when discussing depression, social anxiety, desire. The author seems to acknowledge this stance in a scene where she and her boyfriend are having trouble communicating. “How hard it is for me to talk to anyone about my feelings,” she says in a caption. Finally, I would have appreciated it if Bald had interrogated the class conditions underlying Tereza’s experiences; this is a very middle-class portrait of alopecia, despite the occasional nods to how people without Tereza’s privileges might fare very differently in contemporary Czech society.

These quibbles aside (which in any case might have more to do with my own tastes as a comics reader), Čechová and Jislová’s graphic memoir deserves its reputation for taking Czech comics where they had never ventured before – potently so. As Kořínek himself put it, in a quote highlighted on Paseka’s web page devoted to Bald: “Frankly authentic, light-hearted storytelling, in the context of Czech comics, feels a bit like an epiphany.” All this and cartoony anthropomorphic white blood cells too!

More than anything else, as a graphic memoir, Bald secures Czech comics’ further imbrication with global comics culture. Paseka itself leans into this facet on its web page, claiming the work “continues the rich tradition of autobiographical comics from around the world.” Transnational comics flows (analyzed so well by scholars like Daniel Stein and Kate Kelp-Stebbins) make such a work as Bald all but inevitable, it seems.

Its authors, both born in the post-communist 1990s, represent a younger generation much more closely tied to graphic narrative beyond Czechia’s borders, to say nothing of Central/Eastern Europe’s. Jislová told me she greatly admires Tillie Walden, Kate Beaton, Alison Bechdel and Ulli Lust, global stalwarts all. This makes Bald a work that is very self-aware about the non-Czech traditions that it’s tapping and incorporating. “We felt, as we were working on the book, that this is the first time we’re doing something like this in the Czech comics scene [on this scale],” she said (Jislová interview).

More than anything, the graphic memoir genre gave Čechová and Jislová a framework for a story that they felt had to be told this way. “I’m a big fan of autobiographical comics,” said Čechová, “because they can debunk (detabuizovat) many things and reveal that which we’re not used to talking about. That’s why I started to think that something could come from my experiences” (Jančíková, “Cesta”).

The genie is definitely out of the bottle now. Working on Bald led to Jislová first hitting on the idea of pursuing her own autographical work. The result was her own graphic memoir, Srdcovka (2023). The title is a hard-to-translate slang term that means basically something close to one’s heart and/or that inspires devotion/obsession. It deals with heartbreak, growing up as part of the first generation after communism, sexual abuse and artistic coming of age. Heartcore, the book’s English translation, is due to appear later this year (also from Graphic Mundi, with Kuhlman again translating).

Apart from the authors, the US press and translator deserve praise for bringing this work to an English-speaking readership. We on these shores are chronically, disgracefully bereft of translations of the world’s many vibrant comics cultures, especially those with less common languages like Czech. Thank you.

Kuhlman told me that she and Graphic Mundi had decided on Bald (instead of, say, “Hairless”) for the translated title in part because the English word resonated with “bold.” That adjective, though not at all implied in the original Czech, nonetheless applies to this book – in more ways than one.  

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2. 

CORRECTION Feb 1, 2025:  "Pavel Koržínek" has been corrected to "Pavel Kořínek."

Bibliography

Jančíková, Šárka. “Cesta hrdinky. Autobiografický komiks Bez vlasů o zkušenostech s alopecií se nebojí těžkých témat ani humoru.” Český rozhlas (November 2, 2020). https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/cesta-hrdinky-autobiograficky-komiks-bez-vlasu-o-zkusenostech-s-alopecii-se-8352800.   

Kořínek, Pavel. “Facets of Nostalgia: Text-Centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels by Pavel Čech.”  Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Eds. Martha Kuhlman & José Alaniz. University of Leuven Press, 2020:

Interview with Štěpánka Jislová. Prague. June, 2024.

Paseka web page devoted to Bez Vlasů. https://www.paseka.cz/produkt/bez-vlasu/

 ------------------------

[1] Tereza Čechová (née Drahoňovská) (b. 1990) studied journalism and media sciences at Charles University in Prague. She and Jislová established the Prague branch of Laydeez Do Comics, a British women-led comics organization which advances the work of female comics-makers.

[2] Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) is a graduate of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň. She has published in several Czech and international comics collections. She also contributed to the monumental history comics series The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016) and illustrated the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020), written by Zdeněk Ležák. Her more recent work includes the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdine na dluh, 2023).

[3] Full disclosure: Kuhlman is a friend; we co-edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Bald for review.  

[4] Penn State published my 2019 co-edited study, with Scott T. Smith, Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Sunday, by Olivier Schrauwen

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

Olivier Schrauwen, Sunday. Fantagraphics, 2024. US $39.99. ISBN: 9781683969679. https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/sunday

Highly regarded Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen is known for producing both short- and long-form comics that combine moments of absurdity and surrealism with in-depth characterisation that often depict the inner lives of men living in isolation. He brings a new level of depth to this type of character study in Sunday, a 472-page graphic novel from Fantagraphics.

Sunday is regarded by many cultures as a day of rest, relaxation, and contemplation. In his eponymously-named graphic novel, Schrauwen depicts a fictionalised account of the life of his cousin, Thibault, a thoroughly ordinary man, on a largely uneventful Sunday. By offering a nearly minute-by-minute account of Thibault’s physical experiences and mental processes between 8:15am, when he awakens, and midnight, Schrauwen invites the reader to inhabit the world, and consciousness, of his protagonist. In this way, his approach is reminiscent of early Modernist novels, including Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses, both of which were set in a single location on a single day, and are particularly remarkable for their use of interiority, which creates a level of intimacy and identification with their lead characters. According to notes provided by Schrauwen in his introduction, he was attracted to the project because it would give him the opportunity to use the comics medium to create something ‘beautiful’ from what his cousin Thibault described as a ‘wasted day’. Such days are those filled with ‘procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which [Thibault] failed to do anything edifying’.

In trying to find a way to describe how Schrauwen achieves this feat, it might be most appropriate to look at music. Certainly, music features in the graphic novel explicitly. Thibault wakes up with the song ‘Sex Machine’ in his head, an ironic theme song to the first two hours of his day given what can only be described as his ambivalent relationship to actual sex with his girlfriend, Migali, a visual artist who is on her way home after weeks spent engaged in collaborative art in an unnamed African village. While she has been immersed in African culture in reality, the closest Thibault gets is playing West African music on his turntable while imagining the band surrounding him in his unremarkable apartment. Another live music performance is featured when Nora, a previous love interest of Thibault’s, and Thibault’s cousin Rik, are depicted attending a piano concert, while – much later – a parallel is drawn between a mole on Nora’s face and the symbol for a pause in musical annotation.

However, the graphic novel’s musical connection runs deeper than these explicit references to artists, bands, and musical notation. Like a conductor on a stage, Schrauwen has utilised words, images, and the spatial elements of the page control the reader’s perception and experience. Indeed, Schrauwen is ever-present within the text. In the introduction, he provides ‘reading instructions’, along with a self-portrait, and later appears as an illustrated version of himself, to offer a brief commentary on his cousin’s character. Schrauwen’s illustration style is equal parts impressionistic and realistic, like a rough and slightly naïve rotoscope. Spatially, while he has chosen to depict the world of the text largely from eye-level in a series of close-ups, mid-shots and wide shots of the type familiar to filmgoers, there are instances of more dynamic representation, as the camera floats above our protagonist and even tours the galaxy, the latter a product of Thibault’s fantastical imaginings.

Reinforcing the link between layout and Thibault’s subjective experience, when he smokes marijuana, the panels depicting the experiences of the secondary characters whose experience he is not privy to, become far less linear. Some panels snake around the page, while the frames of others melt and merge together. At the same time, the page numbers become unmoored from their usual place at the bottom of the page, rearranging themselves almost randomly before disappearing altogether. Thibault’s thoughts are similarly jumbled, with some of his words appearing enlarged, making them impossible to read, while others run in circles and even backwards. It is in these moments that Sunday’s most outstanding – and most musical – feature can be seen clearly. This is what Daniel Albright has referred to as Modernist music’s ‘testing of the limits of aesthetic construction’. 

In these ways, this graphic novel defies categorisation. It is a depiction of banality that is anything but banal, and an exploration of the life of an unremarkable man that is nevertheless remarkable. In this way, it’s a book about all of us … whether we’d like to admit it or not. Thibault (or perhaps it is Olivier Schrauwen, speaking through Thibault) says as much when he suggests, ‘I’m holding up a mirror … so you can recognize your flawed selves.’ Sunday shows how, when viewed from the right perspective, what might otherwise be dismissed as a ‘wasted day’ can have value and – yes – even beauty.

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2.

 

An Evening with Jules Feiffer at the Cosmos Club in 2007

 The great cartoonist Jules Feiffer has passed away. IJOCA ran this interview in print in Fall 2008. 

An Evening with Jules Feiffer

By Alan Fern

 

The late Dr. John P. McGovern established an award program at the Cosmos Club Foundation in Washington, D.C., to recognize people of achievement in science, literature, and the arts. Each recipient is asked to speak about his or her work and career. Past recipients have included Mstislav Rostropovich, Carlos Fuentes, Joyce Carol Oates, Edward O. Wilson, Maya Lin, Saul Bellow, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, J. Craig Venter, Derek Jacobi, Michael Frayn, and Wole Soyinka, among many others. Jules Feiffer received theaward on April 30, 2007, at the Cosmos Club in Washington. Feiffer gave a slide presentation on his work and read sections from his autobiography-in-progress. The following is a transcript of the third part of the evening, an interview with Foundation trustee Alan Fern and Feiffer’s responses to questions from the audience.

 Alan Fern: I’m going to start with a couple of questions I was thinking about, just to get Jules rolling and then we’ll ask you [in the audience] to think about what you’d like to ask. One subject we haven’t talked about very much tonight was really the beginning of your cartoon career with Will Eisner. We mentioned that in this little biographical statement [in the award program], but someone named Michael Rhode who is a cartoon specialist, contacted me and said, “By the way, [DC Comics is] just reprinting an issue [of The Spirit] which, supposedly under Eisner’s signature, in 1947, but really drawn by Feiffer, shows Eisner getting killed…

 Jules Feiffer: Yes… I killed him.

 AF: …so the apprentice could take over the strip. You killed him. So tell me about it. What kind of a way is that to repay your mentor?

 JF: I forget how that happened. First of all, Eisner was my hero as a kid, when I was ten, eleven, and twelve. The three cartoonists I was crazy about were Roy Crane, who did Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Milton Caniff, who did Terry and the Pirates, and Eisner. In particular, Eisner and Caniff I loved most because they combined words and pictures, they told stories, they created characters that were infinitely more grounded, nuanced and sophisticated than anyone else. It was quite remarkable what they did. Caniff in daily and Sunday strips and Eisner in the comics, particularly with the Spirit which ran as a supplement, a comic book supplement, first sixteen pages and then eight pages, in Sunday newspapers. In 1946, just out of high school, I took my samples and looked up Eisner in the phone book, and there he was – 37 Wall Street – and I went down there, terrified, but it was easier for me to walk in than call him up on the phone. I could never have done that. He was there in the outer office, where you’d think a secretary would be. He was there in his dark room just working on the Spirit. I was very excited. He couldn’t have been more friendly and and he asked to see my samples. In a very friendly way, he looked at them, and in a very friendly way, he said I had no talent at all…

 [audience laughs]

 …and that the stuff was awful. Which really troubled me because I hated to hear the truth in those years. But I had long ago established a habit of responding to unpleasant truths by not hearing them, or changing the subject, and I sure as hell was not going to walk out of this meeting with Will Eisner, my hero, with my tail between my legs, being told I had no talent. This was not the way this was going to end, so I started improvising and the only thing I could think of talking about was him and his work. Now here was a guy who had revolutionized comic book art and he had three highly crafted professionals in the other room who didn’t give a damn about his work. Who thought he was kind of out of date, and didn’t know anything about his career, and then he met me and I had a whole dossier. I knew everything he ever had done. I could talk about it not just as a little boy, but as a knowledgeable fan. He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie.

 [audience laughs]

 AF: So then you kill him off?!

 JF: Well after two or three years, even as a groupie, he’s your boss. You get pissed off at him. [laughs] Because I couldn’t do anything around the office that was any good, he just tried me out on writing the Spirit stories and it turned out I could write a lot better than I could draw those things. So I became the writer. As I said at the time, I was the Spirit’s ghost.

 AF: That leads to in fact another question. I have long wondered… I have known you for a good many years, and admired you enormously – all aspects of your work. You’ve often said in your public utterances that you always wanted to be a cartoonist. And yet so much of your work, besides cartooning, displays this great gift for narrative and dialogue. Of course, your prose writing is very lucid and good. Did you know as a young man that you were talented as a writer and did you just keep it quiet because you didn’t think you could convince your mother that it would be ok to be a writer?

 JF: Good question. I had a sister four years older, my Communist sister. She was the writer in the family.

 AF: Ahhh…

 JF: Those roles were so pre-assigned, and she was the first female editor of our high school newspaper. She had a great high school career. And like so many people who are great in high school, and then disappear afterwards, she was one of those. But I was thoroughly intimidated by her as a writer and never tried writing. I would scribble out some stories, never finish them, and they weren’t very good. I always wanted to write my own cartoons. To my thinking, the great cartoonists were the ones who wrote their own stuff. To the extent I thought about writing, I thought about it as an illustrator about my comic strips…

 AF: But how does that relate to the movies?

 JF: …only when I started watching ‘50s television drama… there was a period in the early ‘50s, on Sunday nights – live television, Philco Playhouse – and there was Paddy Chayefsky whoever the hell he was and Tad Mosel whoever the hell he was and Horton Foote whoever the hell he was … these brilliant writers emerging and writing one hour television dramas and they were accessible and they were brilliantly written and they connected to me as a member of the audience far more than most theater I was seeing at the time, and I went to a lot of theater. And I thought maybe I could do that, because it wasn’t a play. It wasn’t on Broadway. It wasn’t on the stage. I thought, “It’s only television, maybe I could do it.” Because it’s like a comic strip, it seemed somewhat lower in esteem, I thought, “Well, I’m low esteem enough to do this low esteem writing” and for the first time started fooling around theatrically. Prior to that I never had any ambition and those attempts at writing good television were aborted too. I never finished anything. The way I got into theater was… my joke about the Paris Review crowd telling me that I was really a playwright, not a cartoonist, is only a slight exaggeration. Second City in Chicago opened a theater next door – this is shortly after they had been running successfully and changing the face of comedy along with Nichols and May – and the theater they were opening next door was not going to be improvisation. It was going to be called Playwrights at Second City and they asked me if I would do an adaptation of my cartoons. So the first thing I wrote theatrically was taking my comic strips from the [Village] Voice and breaking them down into a two-act form. And then Paul Sills the director came to the surprising stunning conclusion for him, that none of these things ran more thirty or forty seconds. “It’s too short. We need something longer. Can you write something longer?” So I wrote something longer, and then he wanted something even longer and then I wrote a one-act play. Which he hated. [laughs] But when I wrote the one-act play, I thought, “I can do this. I know how to do this.” I mean I didn’t know that I knew how to do this. When we later took that show which was the first thing Mike Nichols was going to direct, and took it out on the road in summer stock in New Jersey, Mike took that play that Paul Sills didn’t like at all and did a wonderful production of it. So that’s when I realized that I could do this. I had my own way of working…

 AF: That leads me to another question that I’ve been thinking of. Here you just demonstrated that one director can do something with your work much better than another director might. When you’ve written plays or movies, have you had specific actors in mind, or specific directors to do it, or have you just done it and then let the thing fall where it might?

 JF: Well every time I had a specific actor… when I wrote Little Murders, the actor I had in mind was Walter Matthau and he didn’t understand a word of it. Every time I’ve ever had an actor in mind… when I sent Mike Nichols the script of Little Murders when I first wrote the play, I never heard back from him. Not a response. And we were friends and we had worked together. It just infuriated me. I thought I’d cut him cold when I saw him. We didn’t speak to each other for two years. When The Graduate was about to open I went to a screening hoping it would be a big flop, just wishing him very very poorly – disaster. I’m sitting in this audience -- this film hasn’t opened yet and it hasn’t been reviewed – there’s no advance word on it. This is a PR audience … these are people that work in the business … they haven’t been told how to react. So they sat through the movie without a peep, without a laugh, without anything, because they hadn’t been told that it was great. And I sat there inhaling this thing from the very first shot in the film where Dustin Hoffman is riding this subway as his plane lands at LAX, and I couldn’t believe what I was watching – it was so brilliant. All of my anger at Mike disappeared because I was seeing what he and Elaine had done and what I had been trying to do in my work just put on a whole different level – an extraordinary new level – and I wrote him a fan letter and sent it to him. I heard back the next day by messenger so we were back on again as friends, and when I wrote Carnal Knowledge I sent it to him and he called me back twenty-four hours later and said, “I don’t think it’s a play, I think it’s a movie. Let me do it as a movie.” And I said, “What about the language?” He said, “We won’t have any problem.” So we did it as a movie. And it was the best working experience I’ve ever had in film.

 AF: Before we open for questions from everyone, I have one question been dying to ask you about the movies. Both in Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders at several places there’s a completely black screen and a lot of stuff happens behind the black screen and then finally it emerges. In Carnal Knowledge is also a white screen and suddenly you get actors emerging. Now, was that your idea or the director’s idea?

 JF: In both cases, it was the director’s idea.

 AF: Was it.

 JF: Yes, yes.

 AF: Two different directors?

 JF: Actually Nichols wanted to open, and did open Carnal Knowledge with Jack and Artie talking under the credits and then slowly the room fades in and you see that, but that wasn’t my concept. And the ice skater who’s the transitional figure that one sees in white is not in the script. Mike came up with that as a symbol of…

 AF: So Arkin was imitating Mike…

 JF: Uhhh, no actually that was before. The film of Little Murders came before Carnal Knowledge.

 AF: Anyway, let’s see what you [in the audience] would like to ask Jules.

 Audience Member: Am I the only one who sees Giacometti in your work?

 JF: Well, you know, I don’t see Giacometti in my work, but I can see where you might. He learned a lot from me, Giacometti. [audience laughs] But there was a brilliant illustrator and artist of the 1930s and 40s who lived in London. He was Polish. Named Feliks Topolski. And he put out on butcher paper something Topolski’s Weekly or Topolski’s Journal and he just drew scenes around London with this loose charcoal pencil line. I thought this is how I … I mean I could never come near his skill, but that’s what I wanted my drawing to look like. And it’s also in the tradition of those Daumier sketches that are wildly loose and free. Being loose and free, that has always been what interested me about drawing. Not to do a tightly rendered sketch, but just to make it happen … like a Fred Astaire dance actually. I mean it’s dancing on paper.

 AM: Jules, with newspapers becoming kind of a dinosaur, what would a Jules Feiffer in 2007 choose as a vehicle.

 JF: There can’t be a Jules Feiffer in 2007 because all of us are creatures of the time we are brought up in and come to maturity and you’re basically controlled by the influences around you. I mean Art Spiegelman works almost solely on a computer now, doing his drawings that way. But Art is, I don’t know, twenty years younger than I am, and knows how to do this. I can’t even turn on a computer. It changes with each generation. The smarter ones are the ones who can go back and be informed by earlier work, but what they do is very much of their time and of their keeping. My style could not have evolved if there had not been a host of people like William Steig before me and Saul Steinberg and Andre Francois and Walt Kelly… I mean all of these went into the making of what I ended up doing… Robert Osborne… I mean there’s just a whole bunch of them.

 AM: I wanted to ask you about another one – Abner Dean.

 JF: I loved him! He was a friend of mine.

 AM: Abner Dean is much more gloomy than you are, but he has a kind of wit…

 JF: But his people were naked! It was disgusting. [laughs]. Abner Dean did these full page New Yorker cartoons of neurotics in situations, but his drawing didn’t influence me because he drew very tightly. He was very tight and he did washes. He was a wonderful, very sweet man and he was very very kind to me when I was starting out. I liked him enormously.

 Michael Rhode: I picked up Feiffer on Nixon over the weekend, and I was struck at how if you just changed the faces, over 90% would still be applicable.  I was wondering if you could address that and how much you miss having a forum where you could do political strips again?

 JF: Oh, I don’t really miss doing the political strips. I did them for so many years, and my god, I had the best. I had Richard Nixon working for me. Then I had Ronald Reagan, who actually meant what he said, which was so amazing… because it was all wrong… and changed the country. I mean, he got rid of the New Deal all by himself practically. I had LBJ who gave us the credibility gap. There was a story that reporters talked about when LBJ was president. “How do you know when the President is telling the truth and when he’s lying?” “When he looks at you straight in the eye, he’s telling the truth. When he leans back in his chair, he’s telling the truth. When he puts his hands behind his neck, he’s telling the truth. When he scratches his nose, he’s telling the truth. When he opens his mouth, he’s lying.” [audience laughs]

 AM: It’s hard to follow that. Can you just describe the creative process that you go through when you come up with an idea? Is it the drawing first and then the idea? Does it ever happen that way? Or is it the concept first in your mind?

 JF: It has happened first, but mostly it’s the other way. Usually when it’s the drawing first, it’s because I can’t think of an opening line, I can’t think of anything, but usually I script it on a sheet of yellow paper or whatever there is around. It’s very much like cabaret, or comic improv as I saw at Second City or Nichols and May or others… [such as] The Committee [Theater] in San Francisco. When you give an actor an opening line and he or she has to run with it, and it may involve another character, essentially that’s what I still do on paper. I start writing something and I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t want to know where it’s going. I deliberately don’t want to second-guess myself. I don’t want to use my brain in this at all. I just want my hand to control, because everything I do is in longhand, I want my hand to control what it is that’s coming out. And often, if it’s going to be any good, I’m quite surprised at what comes out on paper. I find, as in writing the memoir or writing a play, the work is not very good until I lose control of it. When the characters or the story I’m telling takes over and I’m not in charge of it, then it’s going to be good. I have a good chance of making it work.

 AF: I know half a dozen of you still have questions to ask, but I’m going to put an end to the formal question and answer period. I’m going to remind you that upstairs we will have ample opportunity to chat with Jules, ask more questions, learn more about his work. The ideal McGovern evening it seems to me is one in which a creative person lets us see a bit about what his work has been and how he does it and I think that Jules has done both of those things admirably and we’re very much in his debt. It’s been a wonderful evening.

 

Transcribed by Michael Rhode, from a tape provided by the Cosmos Club.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Woman & Man+

 reviewed by C.T. Lim

Craig Yoe. Woman & Man+. Clover Press, 2024. https://cloverpress.us/products/woman-man

Craig Yoe is best known as an editor and publisher of archival comic book compilations (usually those that have fallen out of copyright) that he put together under his own imprint Yoe Books and for other publishers like Abrams, Fantagraphics, IDW and Dark Horse. He has not drawn a comic book for decades, but since moving to Bagio City in the Philippines recently, he has come out with Woman & Man+. 

The backmatter of the book encourages an autobiographical reading: "A wildly surreal autobiographical story of Yoe losing his love, his country, and some say - his sanity - and his struggle to reinvent himself." Yoe himself proclaimed, "This humble underground comix / pretentious-art book is a psychedelic telling of my fleeing the U.S. to hook up with the underground comix comrades in Berlin, then booted out of Germany to find solace - then devastating heartbreak - in the Canary Islands. Finally the Philippines have granted me asylum... and hope." In his introduction, Yoe explains he was mentally and emotionally in a bad place where he had no choice but to draw Woman & Man+ to survive and to find hope. Thus, this book is art therapy. 

One would be hard-pressed to see the above-described journey of NY-Berlin-Canary Island-the Philippines in the art and story. As described in the backmatter, it is a surrealistic landscape of Dali and Hieronymus Bose mixed with Robert Crumb. Animation Magazine described this book, "like Dr Seuss on acid!" It is pop art by way of 1970s underground comix (the period when Craig started doing comics) as we have Minnie Mouse, Batman (Adam West), Nancy, Snoopy, Korky the Cat and even Mr Monopoly made their guest appearances. The art is reminiscent of Keiichi Tanaami, but without the vibrant colors. It is closer to what the late Rick Griffin (an old friend of Craig's back in the day) or S. Clay Wilson may have done if they were still alive, and working with the heavy black and whites. In a way, Craig is the link between the 1970s underground comix and the 2000s alternative comics of Dave Cooper. Craig's position has always been that comics are not meant to be taken too seriously. They are not high art but rather, in this book, it is “Yoe-brow.”

The bottom line: the way to appreciate Woman & Man+ is to let its stream of consciousness sweep over you and go with the flow. Is it about the eternal struggle between the passions of men and women? Maybe. Some might want a stronger narrative structure like the wordless comics of Phil Yeh (another artist of Craig's generation), but we should take Woman & Man+ as it is. Craig is approaching his mid-70s soon. It will be a pity if he does not write and draw more at this late stage of his career. Maybe the cool air of Bagio City will do him some good and we will see more of his art. 

In his 70s, Craig Yoe continues to be on the road.

( photo by CT Lim)