"Untitled (Brooklyn)"

You know you came to the right place when the second you step out of the cab for your first day the trees are raining white petals down on you, and you pull a comic out within the hour...




It really is beautiful here.

Leaving LA Links

I'm going away for a bit, and I can't say how soon I'll be able to get back to posting here. I hope it won't be too long. Pray my plane to Brooklyn does not crash. Pray I don't end up homeless. Pray my boyz out there still love me. Pray my girls out there still think I'm pretty. Today I leave the greatest city in the world, Los Angeles, and my internet connection, and you, dear reader. I leave you the below to ponder in my absence.

- Dope webcomics via an unexpected source: the Cold Cave tumblr website.



- Chris Mautner pulls back the curtain on some comics I want so bad it's like a physical sensation inside me: French artist Blutch's 1990s series Mitchum, which looks something like a Euro-inflected mix of Frank Santoro's Sirk and David Mazzucchelli's Rubber Blanket. Jesus, dude. Jesus. Look. At. These.

- Charles Brownstein tells you about what I came up in. What with the big Image Expo that went down a little bit ago in Oakland, I seem to see a few more people than usual talking about the San Francisco Bay Area as a vital and relevant nexus point for comics, which it totally is. My own East Bay scene loyalties aside, it's cool to see any scene beside Brooklyn and Portland getting play. Also: I've recently been shocked to discover that it's mostly only people who've lived in the Bay Area at some point who read Cometbus?!? Solve the problem, folks.

- This guy Moebius is pretty good.

- Jesus Christ dude, I cannot even tell you to extent to which Aidan Koch's The Blonde Woman is my new favorite webcomic. This is immediate, gorgeous, challenging work by one of comics' most talented young artists, and it pretty much blows everything else out there right now away. I fucking wish I was this good. Look!



- You can now read Ryan Cecil-Smith's fantastic horror-fusion comic Two Eyes Of The Beautiful for free on the internet at What Things Do. Which is big news, and unless you happen to have busted out the Little Nemo or something, clicking this link will assuredly take you to the best comic you've read all day.

- Every night before I go to bed I read some black and white Barry Windsor-Smith Conan reprints out of the Conan Chronicles magazine Marvel published in the '80s and '90s. Great comics. Here's Smith's finest moment, an unpublished "Kull" story drawn all in two-panel grids. Sometimes the only appropriate reaction is weeping.

- Matthias Wivel posits Kramers Ergot 8 as an aesthetic failure, in an excellently written article that I don't agree with at all but found fascinating nonetheless.

- Ben Marra talks to Brandon Soderberg. Required reading.

- My new favorite comics character is named "Butt Riley". Isn't yours?



- Ken Parille writes a dope article about how grody superhero costumes are, including some spot-on words about how instinctively Rob Liefeld understands his audience and milieu. But I'm sorry, "Daniel Clowes, the premier theorist of the superhero" -- are you kidding? could you possibly patronize the genre more? I'll give it to Stan Lee before I give it to a dude who's done one superhero comic in his life. Also: nobody ever talks about how power fantasies are portrayed as inherently sad and weaselly whenever superhero comics come up... but I think power fantasies can be pretty awesome. Name me one worthwhile person who doesn't have some sense of themselves as being somehow superior. There's some super funny stuff in that comments section, too.

- Black Ecstasy, via Wicca Pha$e $pring$ Eternal. Adam's musical direction continues to hold down the party scene in LA...

- This comic looks completely amazing

- I dunno what took so long, but Comics Of The Weak has finally taken its place among the Comics Journal's columns, and Tucker brought his fucking game face out.

- I proofread this Diego Gerlach page, and I proofread it like a boss.



- "I can not stand it when a figure is drawn with more than two lines or fewer that one billion lines. I’m Matt Seneca.” SIC. Another gauntlet thrown by sequential art's most exciting new online voice, Dash Dash Dash Dash Comix. The comic that post links to is completely jaw-dropping by the way.

- And, Frank Quitely remembers Moebius.

A Chris Ware Page You Haven't Seen Before

...and a beautiful one, at that! I wrote an article about it, which you can read by clicking here.

Comics Artists Drawing Album Covers

Just what it says. This is a long and storied tradition, with most of the artists featured here responsible for more than a few record sleeves or CD liners. The following examples are just a brief sampling of ones I particularly like.

Guido Crepax
Rinaldo Ebasta - Bonnie E Clyde 45 (I have this framed on my wall and you don't; draw your own conclusions. The song itself is undoubtedly a contender for worst of all time, you can listen to it here.)


CF
Kites - Hallucination Guillotine/Final Worship (the mixed-media packaging for Kites albums makes them almost like mini-CF zines)


Bill Sienkewicz
RZA - Bobby Digital AND Kid Cudi - Man On The Moon (Sienkiewicz has done so much fantastic album art that I had to show two of his covers; his stylistic range on these things is also pretty impressive)



John Byrne
Joe Satriani - Surfing With The Alien (the kitsch factor on this bad boy iz off the charts)


Jonny Negron
Twin Sister tour 12"


Gary Panter
Frank Zappa - Studio Tan


Robert Crumb
Big Brother & the Holding Company - Cheap Thrills (this one is probably the most ubiquitous of all, but hey, classic cover for a reason)


Chris Bachalo
Wu Massacre: Meth, Ghost, & Rae


Al Columbia
Sebadoh/Azalia Snail split 7" (apparently this is the only published art to come out of Columbia's tenure on Alan Moore's Big Numbers, a story told in full here.)


Brian Chippendale
Black Pus - All Aboard The Magic Pus (Chippendale also does all the art for his other band, Lightning Bolt, but I figured people were less likely to have seen this one)


Feel free to drop links to images of your faves in comments -- I'll post 'em up if they aren't totally wack, and if I can find a good image, which is proving difficult. The first few are below, keep 'em coming.

Richard Corben
Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell


Jaime Hernandez
7 Year Bitch - Gato Negro


* Michael DeForge links me to this crazy comic-in-multiple covers by Mike Royer, which is more or less the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Jamie Hewlett
Gorillaz - G-Sides


Daniel Clowes
The Supersuckers - The Smoke Of Hell

Putting A Read On Hugo Pratt

I wrote a pretty in-depth analysis of this (amazing) Hugo Pratt Page over at Robot 6 the other day. You can read it here.



I've been reading a lot of Pratt lately, mostly as a strict craft study in how to ink more effectively with a brush, but like all good comics do, it's surprised me with how much more there is to be had from it than just that. I think a good point of comparison for Pratt is Moebius, and not just because they've both been on my mind lately. Both of them are European cartoonists who parlayed a rock-solid grounding in classical comics art into unique, highly stylized work that had a massive influence on comics around the globe. If anything, though, Pratt's been even more unavailable to English-speaking readers over the past few decades than the legendarily elusive Moebius has -- while you could always scrounge a ten-buck copy of some Moebius book or other if you actually cared, with Pratt there was just nothing. A reputation and a void. (There's a tangent to be gone into here about how Moebius's greater notoriety is due to his influence on both movies and the larger science fiction genre, while Pratt's impact stayed pretty squarely inside comics... but I don't care a ton about movies and I certainly don't care at all about science fiction, so nahhh.)

This week, at long last, Pratt's magnum opus, the early 20th-century seafaring adventure serial Corto Maltese, is being put back into print, though in a form that I know is severely compromised without even having seen the books in person yet. Here's an informal list of things I think are awesome about Pratt, some of which you'll find in the new colorized editions of his work by Universe Rizzoli, some of which has been sadly erased.



- Graphic Arts. Perhaps above all else, Pratt's comics are a master class in how to make black and white comics as visually engaging as color. You don't even have to unpack the figurative content of his drawings to marvel over their graphic strength. Every Pratt panel balances black and white space with meticulous precision, creating a back and forth, pulsating effect that's even pleasant to look at with your eyes completely unfocused. (Seriously, give it a try! Like right now!) That large amount of black space on the page, even in scenes with the brightest light sources, gives Pratt's figures a tangible sense of weight that makes his scenes of motion that much more impactful and flowing, but also somehow does work to flesh out the actual characters. You can't just write them off as one-dimensional cartoon icons when they stay bathed in shadow, parts of them always unseen. The chiaroscuro approach Pratt uses also works beautifully to integrate his figures with his backgrounds, a constant problem for action comics. When the same area of black space -- sometimes even the same mark -- indicates part of a figure and part of an environment at the same time, though, it makes the trouble most artists have at creating unified fields within their panels just seem silly.



- Tiers Over Grids. More and more lately, I've been thinking that if you want to create a story in comics that people will actually read, you need some kind of anchoring motif in your layouts that repeats on every page. Otherwise, people who are there for the story will have to take an instant (consciously felt or not) to reorient themselves to the new layout between pages, and craft heads like myself will take themselves out of the story entirely to examine what the new layout's achieving that the old one wasn't before going back into it. All this being said, though, comics where every page uses the same exact grid with the same exact size and shape of panels throughout feel like a slog a lot of the time, and often run into pacing problems because every moment, no matter how important or unimportant, takes up the same amount of space on the page. What's the solution? Myself, I like a tiered approach, where every page is split up into equally sized horizontal sections which themselves can be divided any different number of ways. Pratt sticks to a four-tier page, which is pretty standard for European comics. Herge used a four-tier too. (American comics are printed at a smaller size, which explains the higher incidence of three-tier pages over here.) Pratt's four-tier gives him just enough space to compose pictures that satisfy on an individual level -- detailed full figures and iconic close-ups -- but also allow him to get in full plot beats on a single page. And the long, low panel shapes the tiers produce are perfect for Pratt's full-speed, physical approach to action.

- Pamphleteering. I'm not sure what form the Corto stories were originally published in in Europe, but the complete stories almost always take up 20 pages, beginning to end. That, of course, is the same length as the classic American comic book pamphlet. It's a fantastic format to tell comics stories in, allowing novelistic plots to unspool without forgiving any wasted space. It's interesting to see how Pratt's use of his 20-page chunks corresponds to the way great American cartoonists -- Kirby, Miller, Ditko -- used it. Pratt's pamphlet-length stories, like his drawings, are impressionistic and bold. He'll spend a few whole pages establishing tone in a particularly evocative landscape or use an entire tier on a trivial point simply because he can get a great drawing out of it, and then rush into a fight scene or a plot reversal without any setup. An occasional sequence of dense exposition is the price Pratt has to pay for this approach, but by and large Corto Maltese is a more thrilling, absorbing blueprint for the 20-page comic than its measured, carefully paced American cousins were able to manage.



- Mark Making. There's not much I can say here, honestly. Pratt's marks speak in a voice stronger and more persuasive than the written word. As far as expresssions of strength and surety on the comic book page go, Pratt's bold, slashed stripes of ink are second to none, blotting out massive areas of space whose contents are still communicated more eloquently than any amount of fussier detailed drawing could do. It's a testament to Pratt's compositional skill that such markmaking works at all: his drawings are carefully balanced to accommodate those pounding gestural explosions. Every one of them has a counterbalance in the sparse pen rendering Pratt pairs them with. The result is imagery that works both as figurative content and almost Abstract Expressionist hymns to the glory of medium on surface.



- Elegant/Absurd. Pratt's action sequences are highly unusual, drawn with a more or less unique acme that simply never caught on anywhere else. Where just about every action comic will look toward capturing the fluidity and erratic wildness of the human body in motion, Pratt goes stiff and posed, formalized. Even in the most desperate, chaotic brawls, Pratt's characters always seem to be fighting within the Japanese samurai tradition, following pre-learned "forms". The poses are expressive, but also always somehow constructed by the characters for the audience's benefit; always shot in full figure from beginning to end, like pictures of statues fighting. It sells the bone-juddering impact of landed blows more than the motions that drive them, the fact that none of the characters involved in a fight can do anything but hit each other until a conclusion has been reached. The closest comparison is perhaps Kirby, whose posing could reach a similar state of stiffened demonstrativity, but really Pratt is alone in his approach, which somehow worked beautifully despite violating most of the standard rules of action comics.

Like I said, a lot of this is literally covered up by the color in the new editions, but what remains is Pratt's fantastic drafting ability and his way with a gripping yarn. These are comics worth reading in any form, so if you don't care enough to track down the real stuff in the old black and white NBM books, you're better off with the new reprints than just about anything else you could pull off the comic shop shelves. Happy hunting...

///and so we return and begin again///

///COMING SOON///

Permanent Drawings

Apparently I also design tattoos now. It's all cartooning of some kind or another, I suppose, and I definitely think that if you really believe in your art you should put it on your body and make it a part of your physical self (should you be inclined to go beneath the needle at all). I just got one of something I drew, and I also designed one for my best friend, the actor Collin McShane. Here's the process....

1///ZAKOPANE///ADAPTATION



The blueprint



My drawing, design simplified for black ink



As inked.

2///9LIVES///CREATION



Design brainstorm; chosen drawing circled



Refinement process; again, final pick circled



As inked.

So um, if you're of a mind to commission me to draw you a tattoo, that's something that can definitely happen. And I probably won't even charge you for it.

Beyond the Pale: Michael DeForge's Incinerator

Saying there's a new Michael DeForge comic out is a bit like saying the sun rose this morning -- it's undeniably important, but it's also such a reliable occurrence that it's easy to take for granted just how nice a thing it is. Well, there's a new Michael DeForge comic out, folks, and it just might be his best yet. Incinerator, a beautifully produced new minicomic, is a boldly drawn, disturbingly surrealistic bit of body horror about a human-beagle hybrid and what happens to his humanity once his animal side is forcibly removed. It's completely absurd stuff, so utterly bizarre that the reader forgets to find the strangeness amusing and gets taken over by the cold chills DeForge's increasingly stark, unsettling images call up. Cartooned so simply that it regularly approaches the breaking point of abstraction, the pages of Incinerator toy mercilessly with their hapless protagonist, too pathetic to even be likable, producing a a comic with a grimmer sense of humor than anything we've seen in a long time. It's a fantastic piece of work, and I was thrilled to be able to chat with its creator about the process and ideas behind its creation.



MATT SENECA: You've been sticking harder and harder to the six-panel grid lately, with this zine and Open Country. Can you talk a little bit about why? What does that particular layout offer a comics artist?

MICHAEL DEFORGE: 6-panel grids seem very efficient. You can put a beat on every second panel, and there's that zig-zag shape propelling the reader along. Panel to panel, it's a very even meter and it's fast for me to pace out sequences that way.

Also, I need my panels to have more room to breathe when working on anything "zine sized" (5.5x8.5) like Incinerator, so two panels per row works out well. Adding a center column at that width makes things too dense for the way I draw backgrounds. I generally alternate between having very busy, cluttered backgrounds to really sparse, minimal ones, so I want a wider space to lay out either.



SENECA: The most obvious influence on Incinerator is definitely Charles Schulz, who seems to be showing up more visibly in a lot of noteworthy alt-comics these days -- I'm thinking of Dan Clowes, Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez. How has Schulz influenced your work, what about his comics is special to you?

DEFORGE: My parents had collections of Peanuts, Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes lying around as a kid, so those were the strips I grew up with and the ones that got me interested in drawing. I think I learned to read with them. Of those three, Peanuts is the only one I've consistently gone back to for every part of my life. Not that I don't revisit the other two, but I don't think I've ever actually stopped reading Peanuts.

Schulz has affected the way I approach comics as much as (probably even more than) the way I draw comics. Growing up, he was like my ideal -- this guy who poured his entire life into his work.

SENECA: Was anybody else's work a specific influence on Incinerator? I noticed that the half-dog, half-man design of the main character is super similar to something Ben Jones was doing in the latest Kramers Ergot, and after his surgical intervention he looks a lot like Cool George Herc from Powr Mastrs. Is any of this conscious? Who were you looking at while you were drawing this stuff?

DEFORGE: The character design was basically an accident. I was trying to draw that image of Snoopy and Charlie Brown from behind and wasn't really nailing it. I doodled a head and a set of legs on one of the Snoopy drawings, and thought it looked funny enough to keep drawing.



SENECA: I thought this was by far the scariest, most disturbing comic you've ever done; did you set out wanting it to be that way? Are there any strategies you use to create scary material specifically, or do you just draw ideas and hope they hit with people?

DEFORGE: In general, the horror elements in my work come from things I personally find unsettling or upsetting. I don't know if I have any specific strategies. Incinerator was mostly improvised, though. Everything just sort of worked out. I started the comic thinking it would mostly be gag-driven, but the tone would change as I drew it.

I actually thought it was one of my more lighthearted comics while I was drawing it - like, this fun, goofy thing. But then the finished product reads a bit differently, maybe? That happens, though.

SENECA: In your more recent work -- maybe your past two or three comics -- I feel like you've been turning away from more heavily detailed, illustrative drawing and toward a more broadly cartooned, simplified look. Am I right about that, and if so, what's the thinking behind it?



DEFORGE: You're right -- on Incinerator and Kid Mafia in particular, I'm trying to simplify my style a bit. There are a few reasons behind it.

My day job is doing prop designs on Adventure Time, and the show's house style is more minimal than how I was drawing before. I work under Andy Ristaino, and he sends me notes and corrections on all the drawings I give him. The note I get the most is that I have to simplify my designs. I'm usually hiding something I'm not confident drawing with some extra lines or needlessly complicated shapes. Andy is an amazing cartoonist and one of those dudes who can just draw circles around everybody, so seeing some of his corrections makes me realize just how vague and inelegant my drawing can be - so those are things I'm trying to work on (and hopefully slowly improving on.)

The other thing is, I just get sick of drawing one way all the time, so I purposely try to alternate styles between projects. I'm working on pages for a story for Lose #4 where my inking has to be denser, and I'm rendering a lot of tiny details on each page. I would do pages for Incinerator between those ones, where my drawings could be simpler and looser. Switching like that stops me from burning out too hard on any one comic.

SENECA: Finally, I wanted to ask how you feel about drawing the human figure. You mentioned something on twitter a while ago about not being particularly enamored of your figure drawing ability, but in Open Country I thought you were doing really fantastic stuff with it. Here, though, there's almost no figure drawing -- even the normal human bodies are either obscured or simplified to an enormous degree. Do you like figure drawing? Do you get much out of doing it?

DEFORGE: I don't think I'm very good at drawing the human figure, but I do enjoy doing it. But yeah, it rarely shows up in my comics. I think Open Country was the first comic of mine where it's actually a part of the story. Even there, I'm giving most of my characters the same default design characteristics I draw on everybody - oversized heads, skinny noodle arms, boxy shoulders. It's factoring more into some porn comics I'm drawing for some time this year, but who knows. It's something I want to keep working at.

"Romeo + Juliet"

I really struggled with this comic, and I'm not particularly enamored of the final product, but there's just enough drawing that I like in there for me to post it. In looking beyond Affected to the next comic I'm going to do, I've been trying to figure out a good place of balance between the "finished" and the "unfinished" page. I always like my pages best when they're in a certain stage of partial completion -- say, lettered and half-inked, with one of a few different colors layered in. I want to do a whole comic like that once I finish this long book, so this one was kind of a way to figure out what might be a happy medium. I don't think I really found the right place, probably because I was working too far from how I usually do, with no word balloons, a sparse layout, and multiple color tones. Oh well. The background of the first panel is loosely based on the Winsor McCay panel below.



This was my other inspiration: in the middle of his otherwise truly wretched and reprehensible book Supergods, Grant Morrison makes an interesting observation about Alan Moore's mid-'80s masterwork Miracleman, noting that next to the sprawl of less sophisticated superhero comics, it reminded him of electronic dance music's place in the rock-dominated mid-'80s music landscape. Miracleman doesn't feel very electro to me, except for the cover below (my vote for best comic book cover of the 1980s), but it's a fun idea. Where are the electro comics? I want to make some! That's the thought that started me on the content of the page you just read: some kind of new wave Romeo shooting heroin and listening to sad dance music, a shiny and completely vacant surface.



Coincidentally, the comic I happened to be reading these past few days vibes a lot better with the Cybotron and Inner City records I've been playing than Miracleman, or a lot of other titles for that matter. After reading Cliff Chiang sing its praises and remembering hearing Michel Fiffe do much the same thing, I went and tracked down the back issues of Marvel's mid-1980s action soap opera Dakota North, which features the art of Tony Salmons. What a bizarre fucking comic book. It's not great material by any means, but it really sticks in the head: a mainstream action comic book that makes a point of style over substance, placing Salmons' brushy, kinetic art up front and just kinda flailing around in pretty clothes when it comes to the plot. Salmons is an awesome artist, no doubt -- every page he draws has something unusual going on -- but there's no truly visionary work in here, nothing to really blow contemporary readers away. The main draw is seeing how Salmons slowly takes the Marvel house style of the era into a new, impressionistic and minimal territory over five issues. The drawing's almost too diffuse by the end, but midway through issue 4 there's a scene in Venice where the fusion between convention and innovation hits a perfect balance. This stuff is beautiful.



The other thing that really jumped out at me reading these comics is the page below, which spotlights what has got to be the most painstakingly staged ass shot in comics history. I've drawn vectors on it to show how Salmons creates a perfect V shaped page composition that uses his main character's ass as its central axis, pushing the eye toward it with a nearly gravitational urgency. (Tipped hats to Frank Santoro's more, ahem, academically diagrammed pages here.) That two-panel layout on the bottom tier gets your eye moving up and down the page along the center line I've drawn, as does the way all the information on the page points you toward the last word balloon at the bottom center. Looking at the page as a whole, the eye travels up its center looking for the information in the middle of the V, and POW, POW: there it is.



Hilarious, but on further consideration I think I'll stick to making electro comics that sound like Prurient, if you don't mind.

RIP MOEBIUS

The wee hours of this morning brought the sad news that legendary French cartoonist Jean Giraud, better known by his pen name Moebius, has died. He was 73.



Before today, Moebius was one of perhaps five individuals with a legitimate claim to the title of "greatest living cartoonist". Now he passes into the pantheon of all-time greats. Moebius's influence on genre comics over the past few decades was second to none, and the imprint his work has left on the medium as a whole is rivaled only by names of similarly immortal stature: Kirby, Herge, Tezuka, McCay. His death is sad news, to be sure, but the note of triumph it carries should not be overlooked. So many of comics' great artists die penniless, uncared for, forgotten, ruined physically or spiritually or both by having given so much of themselves to an ultimately uncaring public. Moebius was that most important and valuable of rarities: the recognized great cartoonist. His books sold millions of copies, providing him with a comfortable lifestyle and the luxury to put out work when and how he wanted as he grew into old age. He died shortly after a massive exhibition of his work at the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in Paris, which devoted vast stretches of museum space to his art. Moebius was treated as great artists should be, and the outpouring of emotion that has already begun to greet the news of his passing is a fitting capstone to a career that touched so many so profoundly.



He was a visionary in the true sense of the word, privy to glimpses into a world that was his alone, but so unique and so virtuosically communicated that it became a vast spectrum of comics readers' favorite destination. In his best work, Moebius took the blueprint for French cartooning established by Alain Sain-Ogan and Herge, and as Jack Kirby did with American comics, brought it to a place only he could see that it needed to go. Moebius was a master of illustrative detail: his unweighted, hatched and stippled pen marks created images so strikingly clear that pictures on similar themes in other comics seem muddy and vague by comparison. But detail never bogged down a Moebius drawing: his way with texture was matched by a crisp simplicity of form and light, airy compositions that created an open, habitable space that was constant in everything he drew. His color sense, as refined and bold as that of anyone to have drawn comics, birthed brightly shining, massively tangible vistas, so real and yet so far from what we see out our own windows that the immediate impression upon opening a Moebius comic is that the smell of the air has changed; the paper underneath one's fingertips has grown softer. The background of any given Moebius drawing is at least as interesting as its story content -- the interplay between his highly saturated hues and the stray marks indicating the expanse of a world beyond calls to the imagination in a way that few artists have ever been able to.



Moebius's stories share his drawings' untranslatable quality: rarely aware of themselves as narratives, even more rarely creating fully satisfying arcs, they function above all as vehicles for their author's drawings and expressions of his philosophy of mental, physical, and spiritual purity. Characters strive for goals that frequently remain unattained, settings flicker in and out with little explanation, dialogue is dissertive rather than conversational, and nothing much reaches a satisfying conclusion. At his best, Moebius the writer reads like a truer chronicler of real life's meanderings than the rules of good storytelling can provide us with; other times, his ideas remain frustratingly veiled, clearly visible to the man who originated them but not quite communicated to readers in a way that can be deciphered. Moebius is not as good to read as he is simply to look at, but somehow this takes nothing away from his work. There is an element of eternal mystery to his comics, something they could never quite say to us. Moebius will forever remain a partially closed circuit, a private dialogue between creator and creation. Always the visionary, he never explained. He simply said it like he felt it.



However, the biggest mystery about Moebius isn't contained in his work, but his audience's rapturous reaction to it. Doubtless, he created some of the most impressive comics of all time, but the lust, the hunger for more, that touches seemingly everyone who's seen a Moebius picture, can't be explained by that alone. Others, few though they are, have reached Moebius's level of achievement. But I have stood behind the comic shop counters in this country's three biggest cities of art and culture, and the question far and away most likely to be asked by people in off the street, who've never visited the place before and have no interest in anything else the medium has to offer them, is "You got any Moebius?" Not a specific book, or a period in his career, or a character he worked on: anything his pen ever touched will do.

Moebius is more than his stories, more even than the specifics of what his images depict. Those colors, those marks, those rounded and expressive forms, touch something very deep in people. I've thought it through for the better part of a decade, and my best guess is this. Moebius fused all the hallmarks of genre comics -- intricate spaceships, ancient monoliths, monstrous creatures, superpowered demigods, beautiful maidens, unexplored landscapes -- to lines that made every surface look a bit aged, a bit used, long since gone over by multitudes of human hands or feet, and to colors so bright and crystalline that every panel seems ripe to be reached into and touched. He presented the worlds of fantasy and escape that comics readers across the globe have lived their whole lives in, not as we've seen them elsewhere, but as we imagine them -- scuffed up and worn around the edges from the time we've spent inside them, but still forever shining with the promise of new wonders yet to come.



Goodnight, maître, and be well.

///////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

(More on Moebius here, here, here.)

Comics Journal Review: Joost Swarte's Is That All There Is?

Read it here!

You Can Go Anywhere You Want But You're Here

Welcome to Matt Seneca Comix; if you've been before you know the score, if you've never come here lend an ear. If you just don't know at all, I'm a comic book artist and critic. For the past two years and change I've been making comics, blogging at Death to the Universe, and contributing writing to various and sundry other fine websites. Over the past year I've been using this site as a dedicated home for my comics work, mainly because my original blog wasn't formatted in a way that accommodated much more visual content than a panel at a time.

As my critical writing grew more and more popular during 2010 (still not a phenomenon I entirely understand), it started to feel like posting my own comics at Death to the Universe was an imposition on readers who weren't there for me specifically, but any old discussion of the comics I happened to be writing about. That was fine for a while, but after my first year of blogging I started to get bone tired of continually holding my thoughts on the comics medium to some kind of critical/academic standard. More pressingly, I found that creating my own comics was a great deal more important to me than writing about other people's, and the time and energy I spent on writing took a sharp dip as I started spending every free second at the drawing table. The casual audience for my critical writing mostly went away, and the people who stayed seemed at least unopposed to checking out links to my comics work here and at the site for my continuing graphic novel, Affected. But I still felt like a cartoonist in writer's clothing, tied to a brief period of past internet notoriety for doing something that wasn't my main interest anymore.

So long story short, I've upped sticks, and here you are: the newly integrated, pretty-lookin' home for both my comics work and whatever criticism, theory, notes, or "dude, this comic is crazy" talk I'll be cooking up in the forseeable future. The complete Death to the Universe archive has been imported to this site (check the index at the bottom of the page), and I'll be linking here to all the more serious critical work I do for The Comics Journal, Robot 6, and Comics Alliance, which are my main hangouts when I decide to change back into more writerly drag for a bit. I'll also continue to direct your eyes toward Affected, which is my main comics-type pursuit these days. Actually, why equivocate, it's my main pursuit in life. Ouch. That being said, though, I want to take this opportunity to change the way I blog about comics -- to get rid of the critical facade that's started to feel so cumbersome and talk about comics as a cartoonist first, which is how I'm interacting with them. Less reviews and proselytizing, more fun and genuine appreciation, basically.



The book that's currently obsessing me is... well, I think it's just called "R"? That's the only English on the cover, anyway, besides the name of its artist, Kaneko Atsushi. As you can probably tell from the cover image above, it's a Japanese import, literally too cool for the comic shop -- if ever there was a serendipitous record store find, this would be it, tucked in with the Frank Kozik gig poster books, with which it shares at least as much spirit as, say, Jack Kirby. It was wrapped in heavy-duty plastic when I found it, but that cover is fucking baller, and I recognized Atsushi's name from somewhere. I figured it out once I took the gamble and brought the thing home: he was one of my favorites from Taschen's functionally useless but also kind of awesome Japanese-comics art book, unexpectedly titled Manga. (Functionally useless because the clearly translated-into-English text reads like the drunken ramblings of a crazed manga fan with little understanding of what makes comics unique, and the emphasis is placed on covers and pin-up style drawings; kind of awesome because there's still no better guide to who's-who in the world of Japanese comics. The scope of the book goes well beyond artists who've made it to English translation, but the information given and work excerpted is so maddeningly uncommunicative that it's almost impossible to tell who's actually good and who's just popular or historically important. A classic case of a noble goal stymied by poor execution. But I digress.)

The comics in R -- yeah, I'm just gonna call it that -- are taken from Barfout, which nearly 45 seconds of exhaustive internet research tells me is a Japanese magazine that features photography, fashion layouts, et cetera, in addition to comics. It's a milieu that makes sense: the manga in this book is a lot more Flaunt than Flight, featuring people who look either awesome or seedy (or awesomely seedy) hanging around looking bored, absently chatting, and having casual sex with each other before the inevitable sickening violence cuts in. It's all very pop, the kind of thing Paul Pope spent a good decade trying to achieve over here before it became all too clear that the last thing the American comics audience wants to acknowledge is the existence of actual cool people who enjoy their lives. Maybe the words are on some Michel Houellebecq level of ironic comment about modern life, but I highly doubt it: Tarantino seems more like Atsushi's wavelength, right down to the way even nasal amputations and frozen bodies stuffed into refrigerators are framed with a fetishistic glamor usually reserved for celebrities.



The real meat is in Atsushi's drawing, presented in eye-popping brightly colored tones that blow away the monotony of single-hue comics art. It's the same effect all the cool alt-comics kids in America are using risograph printing to achieve, but where riso is low-fi this book is all gloss, lavishly printed on high-quality paper. It's the perfect mode of presentation for Atsushi's slick, flashy artwork, which foregoes most of manga's common stylistic mannerisms for a style that fuses Japanese blocking with a very American-comics approach to figuration and a European clarity of line. Atsushi can flat out draw -- everything in here is inked with a brush, and while the rougher edges of the tool never surface, every line is still charged with an asymmetrical, hyperactive energy. Nothing stays in one place for long. Imagine a softer, more fluid Shaky Kane or a Seth Fisher who swapped out meticulousness for grace. From the package on in, this is comics as legitimate pop art, the thing everyone in America seems to be looking for fruitlessly. Of course, Atsushi's lucky that comics are already a part of the cultural conversation in Japan, but it's not like everything with word balloons gets to be cool over there: even in its wildest moments, this is material that always keeps some level of focus on maintaining a dialogue with popular tastes. Which, sure, we don't want all of ours like that, but maybe one? or even two? Could be worth a try, guys, all I'm saying.

This book also contains stickers. I just had to throw that in.



Roy Crane is the other big name in my head right now, which isn't necessarily anything new. I've gone to the plate for his work plenty of times before, but my appreciation for it was always somewhat reserved, an intellectual thing. It gave me plenty of pleasure to read and look at Crane, sure, but more because I could see how elegant his artistic strategies were, how much new ground he was covering, where his influence would become important, than because of any grand passion. All this despite the fact that Frank Santoro and Paul Pope, two of my most heavily respected old heads, have just about gone into transports when I mentioned his name. Well, I finally got it. Maybe it's a little weird that this is the panel that woke me up to Crane's genius?



I guess (I hope!) it doesn't matter how you get there as long as you eventually make it. The secret with Crane, for me at least, is taking the panels out of context as you read them -- sure, you can keep the story boiling in the back of your head, but every Crane panel is a unique act of drawing that stands on its own and tells a story all by itself. Brandon Soderberg recently mentioned how every drawing by Raymond Pettibon looks like a panel out of the greatest comic of all time, which is the deal with Crane; of course, he's actually making comics, but the stories aren't as transcendent as just looking at the art and thinking about its milieu is. The real story is seeing a great artist navigating the world Crane did his best work in, one where institutionalized racism and sexism were so wedded to the routine of daily life that the populist action comic strip millions started their day with could feature the hero telling a romantic interest, and I quote, "you're about the cutest little trick I've seen in a coon's age" without skipping a beat.

Crane's drawings are vigorously cartooned but also deeply subtle and considered, every element of every drawing there to achieve a distinct purpose, sanded down and blurred out by the grit of the cheap ink and newsprint that bore them forth. They speak of something far deeper than the blood-and-thunder content they propel. And his cartooning is more than a foundation stone for American superhero comics, it's a Platonic ideal of comic book artwork. There's Herge before Herge in Crane's bouncy brushwork and the line his character designs walk between goofy and strapping, Tezuka before Tezuka in the way he simplifies eyes and hands, raises the roof in action scenes, and his minimal, achingly elegant use of black and white spaces. But it's also distinctly American, and I don't just mean in its brand of racism: that spanking panel plays into a very real sense of cartooning as unmonitored artistic territory, where you can do whatever you want as long as it sells and nobody complains. The newsprint grit, the off-model faces, the demonic look in the eye; that picture feels like it was beamed in from somewhere intense and wild, which makes it way crazier that it's really from the mainstream culture of seventy years ago. I had to sneak Crane's hero Buz Sawyer and his Navy commander Pops Smith into my own comic, I've been so obsessed with this stuff:



And to wrap up, I'll leave you with the art of George Barbier, who for my money beats the pants off Aubrey Beardsley at Art Nouveau, and cartoons more expressively to boot. Tasty. You can still get one of those great old Dover paperback collections of his work pretty cheap if you look around. All this is hand colored, by the way, at an original size only a little bigger than it appears here. Amazing stuff, get those desktop backgrounds changin'.