R. Crumb has dropped out of Sydney’s Graphic Arts Festival because a paper called him a “self-confessed sex pervert” and cancelled over “anxiety about having to confront some angry sexual assault crisis group.”
Check out Marko Manev’s simplified superheroes, here to geek out old timers into pre-blockbuster, pre-Broadway, untainted comic book nostalgia and to remind us of the greatest super power of them all… branding. We’ve been on a minimalist pop culture kick since mini-muppets and have resisted too long. Oh look, pictogram movie poster maker Viktor Hertz made Eminem’s “Drug Ballad” minimal too! Ahhh. Must. Stop. Can’t. Stop. Hammertime.
The fate of a Soviet space pup is a sad one: strays kidnapped from the streets, “trained” and emotionally toyed with by astronauts and shot off into space, confused and terrified. They return to get taxidermied and put on display. Laika — the first animal to orbit Earth — never did. Nick Abadzis’s essential docu-comicbook Laika ends with the truth — the astro-doggie is trapped forever in an orbiting space vessel. He’s gotten so many whining letters about the “sad ending,” he finally made these four alternate ones. Read more »
Just as President Obama firmly established his American citizenship, Superman is renouncing his. The Man of Steel said he’s sick of the world perceiving him solely as an instrument of the U.S. and so he decided to distance himself to the utter dismay of Fox News. But according the DC Comics co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio, the superhero is no traitor. “Superman announces his intention to put a global focus on his never ending battle, but he remains, as always, committed to his adopted home and his roots as a Kansas farm boy from Smallville,” explained the pair in a statement.
Heritage Auctions is selling production proofs from a 1939, first-ever Batman comic book. Pages 2-6 will go for $1,000+ each. Such swell “luck” that someone found them in the trash in 1975! Well, not in the trash… in a trunk full of DC stuff. It was left by some random guy on the curb for trash pick-up, by a building in Rego Parks, Queens… Well, maybe not a completely random guy, since Bob Kane lived in that building at some point. No, it’s not suspicious at all.
A dirty comics retrospective at the Museum of Sex spans from ballooning vintage damsels to R. Crumbs’s charming, drooling misogyny to Marge in Playboy (aaack!!) and all up in the history of sex in cartoons. It’s cute how some previews don’t even try to get into Hentai. “Comics Stripped,” Starts Jan 13, Museum of Sex, NYC
Fantagraphics announces: A long-lost comic strip by the transgressive literary antihero William S. Burroughs and British artist Malcolm McNeill will be unleashed on society. Burroughs’ only, the Ah Pook Is Here comic strip was first published as a 120-page “word/picture” foldout book in Cyclops mag and was far ahead of its time. Read more »
Harvey Pekar, the anxious, depressed, cancerous, asthmatic file clerk and comic book writer, planned to stop writing his autobiographical American Splendor series when he died. He was found dead between his bed and dresser early this morning. He was 70. Read more »
For an epic misanthrope whose comics bring out the funny in all sorts of fucked up things, Ivan Brunetti sure made a cuddly New Yorker cover.
Fortune magazine rejected this cover by comic book genius Chris Ware, presumably because of the Fortune 500 folks dancing and singing all over our financial wreckage. The best part is that mockups aren’t free, so Fortune essentially paid the artist to tell them to go fuck themselves. The handy map to America’s industrialized death includes an auto trash pile, a 401K cemetery, submerged NOLA homes, Tea Party and doomsday cults, sweatshops, foreclosures and money dump trucks going from every disaster to the Capitol. This could make a nice mural somewhere.
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