Comics Alliance: An AOL Comic Book Community

What started out being an oddity -- college classes and programs devoted to the study and creation of comics -- is quickly becoming a full-fledged trend, according to this interesting Associated Press feature picked up by USA Today.

Apart from places focused on nurturing the industry's next Will Eisner and Marie Severin -- think The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont or the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia -- a number of schools throughout the U.S. are dipping their collective toes in the water, like the University of Cincinnati that hired cartoonist Carol Tyler, nee of the recent Late Bloomer and the 1993 classic The Job Thing (both from Fantagraphics), to teach its first comics-related art class last year.

Why all the interest? Chain bookstores from Borders to Barnes & Noble devoting a growing amount of space to graphic novels -- specifically Manga -- along with libraries, to the chagrin of some who still believe comics are more aberration and obscenity than art.

Just as interesting as the feature is the comments section below it that rather perfectly illustrates the cultural divide among those who perceive comics as either illiterate trash -- another easy major for college athletes -- or treasure -- cultivating creativity or simply a love for reading in a world of pigeonholing and standardized testing.

If you enjoyed Fantagraphics' great art anthology Beasts!, you'll be very pleased to learn FBI art director Jacob Covey is working on a second volume and promises "many names that readers won't recognize, bringing a whole new audience to some artists who deserve more exposure." The first artist to turn in his "beast," however, was the legendary Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame.

Check out Jacob's Beasts! site often for updates and sneak peeks of monsters, both past and present...

Had nice conversations with Tony Millionaire, nee of Maakies, Sock Monkey and Billy Hazelnuts fame, and Dave Herman, voice actor extraordinaire whose animation credits include Futurama, American Dad, Bee Movie and the upcoming Drinky Crow Show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim next spring at a signing hosted last Saturday at nationally reknowned Austin Books and Comics.

If Dave's name doesn't ring a bell with you, no doubt you'll remember his unforgettable collaborations with the wicked funny Mike Judge on the Texas comedy of record, King of the Hill, and his film roles as the Secretary of State in Idiocracy and the non-musically inclined Michael Bolton in the classic Office Space. Catch up on Dave's post-Office Space career in this great interview with Lumino, just one of 11 done with all of the principal actors in this seminal office comedy for the ages.

And, Millionaire is just as warm and funny and normal in person (a doting dad to two little girls) as his Maakies strips are wonderful and depraved and hilarious.

Must 've been sleeping when the news broke that the fine folks at Cartoon Network's Adult Swim had aired a pilot based on Tony Millionaire's brilliant Maakies weekly strip, appearing in a fine alt-weekly newspaper near you (including the Austin Chronicle), earlier this year. Evidently, the Adult Swim folks liked the ratings of The Drinky Crow Show well enough -- Millionaire says they wanted the funniest but also the most depraved sort of stuff -- to take it to a series, debuting next February!

That's just one of the choice nuggets Millionaire shares in this short interview in this week's Austin Chronicle with Wayne Alan Brenner, a pre-game report in anticipation of today's signing and original art sale at Austin Books and Comics.

Over the past several weekends, we've been breaking up the mix of news, views, interviews and features by talking up the work of living, breathing cartoonists hiding in plain sight on the Web, meaning those with a pulse. This week's tribute casts a spotlight on a group of cartoonists whose best days have come and gone, but are never forgotten, thanks, in no small part to the ongoing efforts of indy comics publishers, like Fantagraphics, Checker, IDW and Drawn and Quarterly.

I urge you to make a special trip to the closest comic book store very soon to pick up a FREE copy of Comic Strip Masterpieces, a co-op ad project by the aforementioned indy publishers that underscores their collective commitment to bringing classic comic strips -- think Peanuts, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and Steve Canyon -- and the work of long gone luminaries like Elzie Crisler Segar, Windsor McCay, R.F. Foucault and George Herriman to new audiences. What's more you'll sample these four-color, full-size strips in an attractive tabloid format.

Knowing and appreciating that most of you live on the outer stretches of civilization, finding a comic store as cool as, let's say Chicago Comics, Jim Hanley's Universe, Lee's Comics, Big Planet Comics, Meltdown, Alternate Reality, Mile High Comics or Austin Books and Comics, that stocks quality freebies like Comic Strip Masterpieces may be tough.

So, if you're unable to find this tabloid reprint masterpiece, download it via this link from the Fantagraphics' blog Flog. And, be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page after hitting the link!

Very intentionally, I've stayed away from the latest tale of woe involving the forced resignation of a young high school teacher in Guilford, Ct., who very mistakenly assigned Eightball #22 as make-up homework. I did so largely, because other comic spots on the Net (most prominently, THE BEAT) had done a good job of debating the issue pretty fairly and I had nothing new to add to the conversation about censorship, especially after following the Marshall Public Library story earlier this year.

That is, until something caught my eye....

First, it was The Huffington Post picking up on Tom Tomorrow's lengthy post about said Guilford news story that touched on an important detail about the case of which I wasn't aware that may become a growing trend in this country: Getting the police involved in the censorship battle when the so-called "injured" parties want more than a pound of flesh, and don't get it from school administrators.

The punchline of Tomorrow's story: "The teacher whose career has most likely been destroyed by a perfect storm of overzealous parents and cowardly school administrators will not be criminally prosecuted." Sounds like a scenario straight out of 1984, and one that could never happen where you live.

But you'd be wrong too.

Commuting home from by day job, the local talk show guy shared the AP story about an English teacher and assistant football coach in the small town of Tuscola, near Abilene in north central Texas who was suspended with pay by his local school district and was under investigation by local police because his latest reading list included Child of God, written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy. And, this was after the book had been selected among many by teachers at Jim Ned High School (yep, that's the real name) for a pre-AP class.

In this case, the parents of a high school freshman took their complaint about the 1974 book, based on a Tennessee murder case involving necrophilia and animal abuse, to the local sheriff after meetings with the teacher and school principal obviously didn't go as planned.

For those of you, like me, who may have dismissed the Eightball tempest in a "Noreaster" teapot that cost a young teacher his job and, perhaps, reputation, as a fluke, read the AP's account about legislating morailty in small town Texas.

This ain't specifically about comics, but I'll keep you posted about this one...

P.S. That Connecticut school district also had a reading list that included works by McCarthy, D.H. Lawrence and Charles Bukowski. The road to "respectability" for comics as an art form is a rocky one indeed.

If you read the comic books, you know what happens on the Wednesday. Bow down before the power of the Wednesday!




COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1
Soooo.... we're already counting down to FINAL CRISIS with COUNTDOWN, but now we have to count down to adventure as well?! Just give me my adventure up front! Actually, this is a comic about the space-faring characters from 52 with a back-up story featuring newcomer Forerunner. Forerunner?! DC is all about the anticipation.









MICE TEMPLAR #1
A lot of people are unfairly comparing this book to MOUSE GUARD. They're all, like, "Oooh! It's about mice with swords! I'm so cool and I know everything!", but really it's...oh...wait. I'm hearing from my team of blogging assistants that it IS about mice with swords. But I'm seeing a bow and arrow as well. Completely different! Oh well, at least it's not COUNTDOWN TO MICE WITH SWORDS. Plus, it still looks pretty awesome.






MEAN GN
Steven Weissman is rad. His comic, YIKES, is a crazy look at youth as lived by little monster people. The new collection, MEAN, collects some of the early comics which have been compared favorably to the likes of PEANUTS and LITTLE LULU. WITNESS! Pull Apart Boy pull himself apart! BEHOLD! as Lil' Bloody kills time. SEE! Chubby Cheek...in general. Poor "Sweet" Chubby Cheeks. All he wants is a butter and jelly sandwich.



Man, a butter and jelly sandwich sounds pretty good. But first! Click on more to see the rest of the stuff coming out this week.

Press Release

Small Press Expo (SPX), the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comic books, graphic novels and alternative political cartoons, is proud to announce Bill Griffith, Gilbert Hernandez and Rutu Modan as the first slate of guests for SPX 2007. This years SPX will be held October 12 and October 13 at The North Bethesda Marriott Convention Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Bill Griffith is known world wide for his syndicated strip, Zippy The Pinhead, which runs daily in The Washington Post. He has a new Zippy collection out from Fantagraphics entitled "Zippy: Walk A Mile In MY Muu-Muu". SPX is proud to have him make one of his rare convention appearances at this years show.

Gilbert Hernandez, whose Love and Rockets is considered one of the groundbreaking works in the history of comics, will be at SPX to promote his first graphic novel in four years, "Chance in Hell" from Fantagraphics.

Rutu Modan, one of the founders of the Actus Tragicus comics collective, will be at SPX with her first full length graphic novel, the critically acclaimed "Exit Wounds", from Drawn & Quarterly.

Additional guests will be added over the next few weeks, please stay tuned for those announcements.

SPX, a non-profit organization, brings together more than 300 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers and distributors each year. Graphic novels, political cartoon books and alternative comics will all be on display and for sale by their authors and illustrators. A series of panel discussions will also be held of interest to readers, academicians and creators of graphic novels and political cartoons.

SPX will be open to the public from 2 pm - 8 pm, Friday, October 12 and 10am - 7 pm Saturday, October 13. Admission is $8 for a single day and $15 for both
days.

SPX culminates with the presentation of the 11th Annual Ignatz Awards for outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning. The Ignatz is the first Festival Prize in the US comic book industry, with winners chosen by balloting during the SPX.

Imagine my surprise leafing through Saturday's edition of the Wall Street Journal to discover a short feature lauding the work of a trio of 2007 Eisner Award nominees in their Pursuits section. Sounds like no big deal, until you dig deeper into the details.

The three Eisner-nominated books cited in Jamin Brophy-Warren's piece were among a record 24 that went to female cartoonists, ranging from a 10-year-old girl (and the daughter of former indy publisher Denis Kitchen) to the just-now celebrated creator of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic working up to now on the periphery of the comics industry to the late Tove Jansson, a Finnish creator who died six years ago at age 86.

Unfortunately, the WSJ piece doesn't come with links, so I strongly advise you to take a look at these other beautiful Eisner Award nominees. FYI, none of them features a superhero either...

1. Renee French competing in the Best Writer/Artist category for her second book from Top Shelf Productions, The Ticking.

2. Ellen Forney's hysterical cartoons collected in I Love Led Zeppelin from Fantagraphics Books.

3. A rare self-published book, A Late Freeze, vying for best single issue of the year honors, beautifully written and illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff, a designer for First Second.

OK, I love my job. How can you not like working at a place where you get to spend your Saturday visiting comic book shops? I mean, does it really get any better than that? Well, I guess it might if they bought my comics for me, but that is a post for another day.

I started off my day waiting in line at Starbucks. I needed my caffeine if I was gonna spend the day driving between comic shops. One Venti White Chocolate Mocha later I was caffeinated and ready for that long trek across the street. My first stop was the brand new Phoenix Comics and Toys location in Lansdowne, Virginia. I was there just after they opened at 10 a.m. and was very happy to see a crowd in the store already. The minute you walked in the door there were tables on either side packed with free comics. I saw everything from the Archie line and several all-ages books on one table to Wolfman #1 (Image) and the less kid-friendly titles on the other table. Don't worry, the employees were there to make sure that the younger shoppers didn't take home any books that would not be appropriate. As you picked up your comics they made sure to let you know to go register for various prizes at a table near the back of the store. (Great way to get people all the way into the store guys.) The traffic in the store was steady while I was there and there was a constant influx of new faces every few minutes.

I could have stayed at Phoenix and taken pictures there all afternoon but I had to leave after about 45 minutes to get to my next stop on time. Leaving early made me miss Darth Vader and a legion of Stormtroopers that were supposed to visit around lunch.

Press Release

The 2007 Eisner Award nominations announced last week are old news here in the blog-o-blob by now [for a complete list of nominees, go here: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2007/04/20/2007-eisner-award-nominees-announced/, but we want to pass on our hearty congratulations to all the nominees. We are chuffed to be the publisher representing the most nominees, and to celebrate we are having a special sale on all of our nominees - now through April 30, get 20% off everything on our special Nominees page, from Adam Grano's design work on Castle Waiting to Zeppelin, I Love Led by Ellen Forney. Hit the link for the full list and all the details:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/recent/eisners2007.html

The awards will be given out this July at Comic-Con international -- plenty of time to get that tuxedo pressed.

Press Release

On Sunday, May 13, The Cartoon Network's popular Adult Swim animation showcase will premiere the long-awaited pilot of The Drinky Crow Show, based on cartoonist Tony Millionaire's long-running Maakies comic strip. The show's comedy is brutal, existential, and hilarious. As with animated shows like The Simpsons or Futurama, The Drinky Crow show is a fast-paced, plot-twisting laff-riot combining adventure, romance, debauchery and graphic violence - offering something for everybody!

The 11-minute pilot, titled "Mermaid," finds Drinky Crow encountering a mermaid following a broken-hearted suicide attempt on the high seas. Drinky immediately dedicates his life to meeting her again. At the moment he gives up his quest he sees his friend Uncle Gabby in the process of being eatend by a shark and thinks Gabby is his beloved mermaid. In a whirlwind of head-chopping violence, Drinky Crow rescues his friend and the good ship MAAKIES from the clutches of ferocious Napoleonic French alligators.

The Drinky Crow Show is the creation of Tony Millionaire and Eric Kaplan. Millionaire was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Millionaire's mentor/grandfather was an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and various adventure books and magazines and passed on to his grandson a knack for drawing ships and ocean scenes. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Believer, and Fantagraphics has published six Maakies collections as well as the graphic novels Billy Hazelnuts and Mighty Mite, the Ear Mite. He is a multi Harvey and Eisner Award-winner and has also created several beloved Sock Monkey books for children (from Dark Horse Comics). He lives in Pasadena, California.

Eric Kaplan grew up in Brooklyn New York. He has been a writer for Spy Magazine, The Late Show with David Letterman, Futurama, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Malcolm in the Middle and the HBO series Flight of the Conchords. He is the President of the animation studio Mirari Films, and created the internet series Zombie College which The New York Times has called "relentless and irresistible".

The May 13 pilot of The Drinky Crow Show is directed by the award-winning animation director Igor Kovalyov (co-director of The Rugrats Movie and several acclaimed international shorts) and will, ratings-willing, be the first of an ongoing Drinky Crow Show series. Future episodes will take the cast from freezing Antarctic waters (where Drinky and Uncle Gabby catch small-pox and inadvertently spread it throughout the world), to Gay Paree (where Drinky falls in love with a French princess and contracts a new strain of syphilis, which falls in love with his old strain of syphilis), to Japan (in an episode that looks like a Hiroshige print come to life), and even to Brooklyn (where Drinky and Gabby create Tony Millionaire in a fit of delirium tremens).

Millionaire's Maakies has been one of America's most popular weekly comic strips since debuting in The New York Press in 1994 (it currently runs in The Village Voice and many other papers nationwide). Simpsons creator Matt Groening says "Millionaire is so good he should be named Tony Billionaire." Novelist Dave Eggers says, "I believe Tony Millionaire can do only important things."

The theme song for The Drinky Crow Show was written and performed by They Might Be Giants, who consider the work amongst "their finest to date." The show is animated in Transylvania in GLORIOUS MAAKI-MATION: a never-before-seen hybrid of old Sunday comics, 3D animation and 2D animation.

The Drinky Crow Show stars Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby. Drinky Crow is a desperate, depressed, tormented romantic who seeks escape from the horror of being alive through killing his brain-cells with alcohol and/or bullets. Uncle Gabby is an overweight, drunken monkey sailor who devotes his life to the simple pleasures of sleep, eating, drinking, defecation, and mindless coupling. Other cast members featured in The Drinky Crow Show include: Captain Maak, the brutal, lash-weilding boss; the flirtatious, sadistic, Captain's Daughter; Phoebe Crow, Drinky's long-suffering sober girlfriend; Aunt Gabby, Gabby's equally crass monkey wife; Young Master Wentworth, an awful, five year-old rich snob who travels on the ship; Blind Pew, a blind sailor with colon cancer who always looks on the bright side of things, and Cynthia, a plucky, self-reliant fly who never stops smiling as she struggles to find love while raising a family of kids inside Uncle Gabby.

Well, this just made my day. I don't know how I missed it when the story broke last week, but since it's possible that I'm not the only one who was wandering lost in the wilderness and unaware of the existence of a fresh dose of the genius that is Chris Ware (and animated at that!), here's the deal:

Last Thursday, Showtime premiered a weekly TV version of Ira Glass's This American Life radio show. I know, I know, you're probably thinking, "why are you boring me with talk of NPR programming on a comics blog?" Well, check it: One of the early episodes (it's unclear which exactly) will feature an entire segment that's animated by none other than Chris Ware. What this amounts to is four minutes, twelve seconds of animated Chris Ware goodness for your viewing pleasure.

But why listen to me blather on about it when you can watch it yourself?