Dump

Current investigation: Italian smut cartoonist Paolo Serpieri

I never do this... but guess what? I'm gonna do this. Working on two epic comics-blogging projects right now, both of which should be along shortly... so for now you get links and ephemera. Original content? What's that?

- I'm not sure I know what it is, but Blaise Larmee is a dude who wrote a book where everybody was like "original content doesn't exist". He's also a notoriously difficult interview, so I was quite surprised and pleased to see how much my boy Adam McIlwee got out of him in this critical profile piece. Ten songs! Feed your ipod now, that Nite Jewel track is pretty much unfuckwithable.

- Speaking of whom (kinda), Aidan Koch's redesign of Larmee and friends' Comets Comets site is the prettiest thing I've seen on the web in forever. It takes a while to load, but go now, because they redesign that site as often as some comics fans wash their hair.

- Gary Panter has a new book out but I don't guess you'll see it in stores: it's published by French publisher UDA, and American distributor Picturebox can't even give out review copies, so wholesale to retailers is probably also out. You better get your copy here fast: it's a beautiful book, and the mix of paintings, comics, and sketchbook stuff gives a remarkably clear look at the many facets of Panter's creativity. Just thought I'd let ya know about that one.

- I read this Geoff Johns interview. It's pretty good/funny/weird... if you have any interest in reading an interview with that guy, whether completely sincere or completely ironic, this thing's got you covered.

- You guys all read the Shit Comics tumblr, right? Well whatever, it's time to get acquainted.

- Tucker Stone's top 10 comics.

- Finally, I got a few sweet back issues of Heavy Metal the other day: the one in question had shorts by Guido Crepax, Francois Schuiten, Liberatore, and Joost Swarte all in the same issue. There's also an excellent interview with Liberatore, the artist behind the ultraviolent, technicolor Ranxerox (reproduced below). Nobody ever talks about Heavy Metal interviews, I'd guess mainly because they were doing the notable ones during the same time that Gary Groth was dropping novel-length talks with people like Gil Kane and Burne Hogarth -- but within the parameters of the breezy short-form interview, that magazine published some pretty interesting conversations with some fascinating artists. The Journal was never going to talk with that generation of exploitation-comics artists anyway, but in retrospect the Heavy Metal garde was an enthralling group of cartoonists who never got half the play they deserved from the English-language comics press. I'd hope the current crop of comics critics can get good career-spanning interviews out of at least Moebius and Corben before it's too late: those guys are a lost chapter of comics history, and it would be a shame if the best talks with them available were a few pages in random expensive magazine back issues.

Anyway, I really like this interview: there's a kind of jocular frankness that all the Heavy Metal artists share in common (could be the translator?), and it's really interesting to hear a legitimately great cartoonist like Liberatore profess his relative disinterest in comics as opposed to painting and illustration. Dig in: