Yardley on Thurber

Today's Post has "James Thurber's Humorous Heart" by JONATHAN YARDLEY, Washington Post Saturday, May 12, 2007; C01. For us the key sentence is "One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose." Thus is cartooning dispatched although Yardley writes a good appreciation of Thurber's prose.

Right by Yardley, humorist (the word cartoonist may be verboten in Yardley's neighborhood) Richard Thompson has a good sendup of the Jamestown celebration madness.

In the letters to the editor section, a reader took a swipe at Ohio's Bok:

Bending Reid's Word
Washington Post (May 12, 2007)
The May 5 Drawing Board cartoon by Bok of the Akron Beacon Journal was a disgusting example of just how low the right-wing press will go in painting Democrats as troop haters. The cartoon shows Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) passing a U.S. soldier in an airport and yelling: "LOSER." I assume this cartoon was drawn because Reid recently said the war in Iraq was "lost." However, Reid never said the troops themselves were losers.

-- Eric Crossley

Tomorrow is an interview with a bunch of the women who do voices of Princesses in Shrek the Third. A preview ran in yesterday's Express and it should be a funny article.

May 12: Matt Diffee at American Art

Matt Diffee, New Yorker cartoonist and author of The Rejection Collection is speaking at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Saul Steinberg exhibit at 3 pm on Saturday, May 12th and signing his book afterwards. I saw him at Politics and Prose last year, and he's a fun speaker. The Museum's at Gallery Place at 8th and F Sts, NW.

Betty and Veronica go realistic

Archie's experimenting with a new, more realistic style for Betty and Veronica. Big Planet Comics in Bethesda is betting this will be popular and stocked a lot of copies of the new digest in case you'd care to meet that bet.

Clay Bennet wins RFK award to be presented in DC

"Clay Wins RFK" in AAEC Editorial Cartoon News May 8, 2007 reports

Clay Bennett of the Christian Science Monitor was named the 2007 winner of the RFK Journalism Award for Editorial Cartooning... Winners will be honored in a ceremony Wednesday, May 23rd from 6-8pm at the Jack Morton Auditorium at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Anybody want to confess to being a judge this year like Gene Weingarten did a few years ago?

Cartoonists exposed at Smithsonian American Art Museum

Haven't you always wondered what cartoonists really look like? Well, I'm here to help. I got a few candid shots in the Steinberg exhibit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum*

Left to right - that's Richard Thompson, Nick Galifianakis and Kevin Rechin.


And here I am.


*sorry about the typo last night crediting the National Portrait Gallery

May 10: Association of American Editorial Cartoonists online auction

The AAEC is auctioning off works including local cartoonists Tom Toles and Ann Telnaes to raise money for their Cartoons for the Classroom site and programs. Every two weeks, you can download an editorial cartoon and lesson plan - very neat.

Don't bid on everything so I can get something. I'd suggest leaving the Telnaes for me. I once stopped her husband from backing into a candle and lighting his suit on fire.

Free Comic Book Day at Big Monkey Comics, Washington DC

On FCBD, a neighbor and I loaded up his minivan with kids - my 9-year-old daughter, a friend of hers, and his 7 and 4-year old daughters. We cruised into the city on 14th St, and drove right past Big Monkey Comics' new home. They had formerly been in Georgetown, but moved in March to 1722-B 14th St, NW (202-333-8650). The store has a couple of signs, and a monkey on the 2nd floor window. After going up a narrow stairway, we got into the store which was fairly crowded with a twenty-something average customer. The free comics were set up in the back room where the new comics racks are - the kids (and adults) each got to pick 3 comics and they also were giving away sets of bagged back issues. The kids all went out into the small hallway and started reading their comics while I took a quick look around. I'd say the store has less stock than it did on Wisconsin Avenue, but it has a little more space, some of which was being used for a table for a Heroclix game. The staff was friendly, and all wore FCBD shirts that made them easily identifiable.

The kids continued reading in the van and we cruised over to Georgetown to visit Big Planet's Dumbarton Street store. Store owner Peter's known me for years, and let the kids pick up some more comics while not holding me to the store's limit of 10 freebies. However I dropped a hundred on sale books and toys, so I think he came out ahead. The store continues to have a good range of collections and indy material - perhaps the best selection of the three stores. There was a good crowd here too and Peter was happy with the turnout.

The girls continued reading in the car. My daughter's friend was most taken with Fantagraphics' Peanuts - she reads the comics in the newspaper when she can. My daughter gets comics regularly so was a bit more jaded, and I'm not sure what the neighbors daughters were reading, although the 4-year-old passed out on the ride anyway. Both stores carried the DC Conspiracy's mini-comic as well and I picked up one for Michigan State University's Comic Art Collection which I'd encourage all 17 of my readers to donate to.

Some things stay mysteries

I couldn't add this to my collection, but it was parked on Walter Reed Army Medical Center today. Must be owned by a real Powerpuff Girls fan, I guess. Oddly enough, those are German license plates.

Kevin Rechin, local freelance cartoonist

I had the good fortune to meet some cartoonists this weekend at the Saul Steinberg exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. ComicsDC regular Richard Thompson, the Washington Post's advice cartoonist Nick Galifianakis and his artist dad Peter, and Kevin Rechin. I wasn't familiar with Kevin's work, but a google search tossed up this site and later Kevin sent me his agent's site. Kevin's totally a freelance cartoonist, and I'm glad to make his acquaintance and discover his enjoyable good-natured cartoons. Hopefully we can suckeXXXX encourage Kevin to post a bit on his work and where to find it.

That's a happy bio-fuel farmer! Kevin makes it all look so appealing.

I'm continually amazed at the rich comic art resources in the DC area.

Adding to ye olde comic art collection

One of my scouts (thanks Liz!) picked up the following items for me this weekend at some kind of sheep festival (no, I don't know why either). Anyone recognize them?

They're a dead technology - printing blocks from when type, and everything else being printed, was carved in wood or metal. These are two cartoons recreated in metal and attached to wood block for printing. Unfortunately I can only read the signature on the Hal Money one which has lost its caption.

These must have been wildly common at one point, but I've only seen one other example - a Yellow Kid ad at Geppi's Entertainment Museum (which I still plan a post on. Great place).

Free Comic Book Day at Big Planet Comics, Bethesda

Reports from the field are coming in:

FCBD '07 was a rousing success. We saw over 400 people, and no one got fewer than 10 comics apiece. In previous years, we always had plenty of comics left over for the Taste of Bethesda, but this year, we were out by 4 PM. The 501st Battalion volunteered to chaperon us, and attracted the attentions of shoppers at the nearby farmer's market. We made a lot of folks happy sharing the joy of comics, and our sales increased by 15% for the best non-sale day in our history.

--Joel
--

Joel Pollack
-=--=-=--=--
BIG PLANET COMICS
4908 Fairmont Ave. Bethesda, MD 20814
301-654-6856

Also affiliated with:
BIG PLANET COMICS
3145 Dumbarton St. NW
Washington, DC 20007

BIG PLANET COMICS
426 Maple Ave. East
Vienna, VA 22180

cIndyCenter podcasts

Since we last checked in, cIndyCenter's added seven new cartoonist interviews - see the link over there on the right in the permanent bit or http://www.cindycenter.com/

Chris, how about hitting up some local cartoonists like Toles, Thompson, Galifianakis, Garner, or Fluggennock for interviews? And let us know when new interviews are up!

Washington Times reviews Steinberg exhibit

"Illuminating images, words, wit and genius" By Joanna Shaw-Eagle, Washington Times May 5, 2007. There's also an amusing article on Spider-Man 3 tchotkes -
"Spider-Man battles foes on many toy land fronts" By Joseph Szadkowski, Washington Times May 5, 2007. I've got my Spider-Spud!

You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown play

Montgomery Playhouse puts on the Peanuts musical on the weekends this month. The Post says it's updated with more dialogue and more musical numbers.

Gaithersburg Art Barn
311 Kent Square Road
301-258-6394.

$16, or $14 for Gaithersburg residents. 8 pm on Friday and Saturday, 2 pm on Sunday until May 20th.

Today's comics weren't all comic

Richard Thompson has a hilarious sendup of Free Comic Book Day that about 37 readers of the Post will get and appreciate. In their continuing effort to combat e-piracy, the Post hasn't put it online yet, although you can see last week's panel.

Meanwhile a few other strips in the Post are worth noting today (that's the May 5th strips).

Bud Grace goes for a dose of reality in the Piranha Club.

Bill Griffith's History of the washing machine in Zippy was just lovely.

Pearls before Swine breaks the 4th wall in a graphically-amusing way.

Speaking of graphic, what's the deal with yesterday's Baldo? First his aunt walks in on him naked in the bathroom and seems to suggest a Red Hot Chili Peppers fashion, and then we get this strip. Am I reading too much into this or is there a "size of his dick" joke here? For Better or For Worse had a PMS joke today, and Brewster Rockit had a fart joke with spiderwebs coming out of a character's ass (a Spider-Man 3 tip of the hat).

Finally on Monday, two diametrically-opposed cartoonists ran similar strips on the Virginia Tech murders right next to each other: Prickly City vs Candorville.

Saturday May 5 - Free Comic Book Day

Ok, there's 28 comics in all - see http://www.freecomicbookday.com and good luck.

Things to look out for in my opinion - Gumby, the new Eddie Campbell from 01:02, Image's Wolfman, the Unseen Peanuts from Fantagraphics, Lynda Barry from D&Q; Oni's Whiteout and especially Top Shelf's Owly and Korgi.

Big Planet, at least in Bethesda, is giving out a nice prepared package of kid's comics.

Big Planet in Vienna is rumored to be visited by storm troopers.

TwoMorrows is not local, but they are uploading some of their excellent magazines for free:

Who says you can't get something for nothing? On Free Comic Book Day (this Saturday, May 5), stop in your local comic book shop and ask for a free copy of Comics 101, our new primer created just for the event. If they don't have any, then order yours at our webstore (http://www.twomorrows.com) by Sunday, and it'll only cost you enough to cover our printing and postage costs. After Sunday, we're going to start charging more for it, to help recoup our expenses (but it'll still be a bargain!).Also, this weekend only, you can download FREE PDF COMPLETE ISSUES of the following mags, just by logging in and putting them in your shopping cart:
Alter Ego #65
Back Issue #21
Jack Kirby Collector #47
Write Now #14
Draw #12
Rough Stuff #3
Because of contractual obligations, we can only give these away this Saturday and Sunday, and then we've got to take them down. So if you're never sampled all of our mags, here's your chance to try an ENTIRE ISSUE, absolutely FREE! Go get 'em, and
enjoy!

Best regards,
John Morrow
TwoMorrows
10407 Bedfordtown Dr.
Raleigh, NC
27614919-449-0344
fax 919-449-0327

Cartoonists in Washington, DC area newspapers as of May 2007

Cartoonists in Washington, DC area newspapers as of May 2007
compiled by Mike Rhode

Washington Post
Tom Toles - editorial cartoonist (semi-daily)
Richard Thompson - Richard’s Poor Almanac (Saturdays); Cul de Sac strip (Sunday’s Magazine), illustrations for Joel Achenbach’s Rough Draft column (Sunday’s Magazine)
Rob Shepperson, Tim Grajek - illustrations for Sunday's Business section
Nick Galifianakis - cartoons for ex-wife Carolyn Hax's Tell Me About It advice column.
Bob Staake - cartoons for Style Invitational contest (Sunday)
Patrick M. Reynolds - Flashback comic strip; unique Washington version (Sunday comics)
Eric Shansby - illustrations for Gene Weingarten’s Below the Beltway column (Sunday’s Magazine)
Christopher Gash; Christopher Neimen - spot illos especially on Sunday
Michael Cavna - editorial cartoons in Arts section, extremely irregularly
Julie Zhu - Montgomery Blair High School student cartoonist for Extra Credit column in local Extra sections
Saturday box of syndicated editorial cartoons
Turkish cartoonist Selcuk Demirel illustrations in Book World, semi-regularly

Washington Times
Garner - editorial cartoonist
Joseph Szadkowski - Zadzooks column on comic books (Saturday)
Large array of editorial cartoons and illustrations every day.

Washington Examiner (daily, except Sundays)
Nate Beeler - editorial cartoonist (semi-daily); alternates with syndicated cartoonists

Washington City Paper (Friday-only paper)
Shawn Belschwender - News of the Weird column illustrator, unique to WCP
Ben Claasen III - Dirtfarm comic strip, unique to WCP; advertising illustrations
Joe Sayers - thingpart comic strip, started in 2006, unique to WCP?
Slug Signorino - The Straight Dope column illustrator
Robert Ullman - Savage Love column illustrator, unique to WCP
Max Kornell, Josh Neufeld - article illustrations
Syndicated comic strips - The City by Derf, Red Meat by Max Cannon, Ernie Pook’s Comeek by Lynda Barry, and Lulu Eightball by Emily Flake. (Ted Rall was dropped earlier this year).

Express
Eric Reece - illustration for Baggage Check advice column (Tuesday)

Washington Blade
No regular cartoonist - runs one syndicated editorial cartoon and six syndicated strips - Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, Jane’s World by Paige Braddock (2002 strips), Chelsea Boys by Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth (still running?), Troy by Michael Derry, Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast by Greg Fox and Adam & Andy by James Asal

The Hill
Weyant - editorial cartoonist for “Weyant’s World”

The Politico
Matt Wuerker - editorial cartoons, column-heading caricatures, maps

The Onion (national, not local content)
Kelly - editorial cartoonist
Syndicated strips - Postage Stamp Funnies by Shannon Wheeler, The Leftersons by Colin T. Hayes, Wondermark by David Maiki, The Spats, Cathy by Cathy Guisewhite (in Spanish) and Red Meat by Max Cannon.

Additions, corrections and comments welcome.

An editorial

The Purity of Vision vs The Rich Tapestry of History

There’s long been a significant school of thought in comic book criticism that a single author, or perhaps a collaboration between a writer or artist on a single title or character for a set period of time, produces the only stories worth reading. Fine examples of this abound such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Jeff Smith’s Bone or Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man. These men made up their main characters and told their stories, and the stories stand alone and hold up well for years. Some critics like my friend Bart Beaty will even go so far as to say that these are the only stories that matter and anything else that comes later doesn’t count. I’m not as extreme as Bart, but this is generally an approach I hold with, and I still speak fondly of Starlin’s original run on Warlock. The fact that I can even use a shorthand phrase such as Segar’s Popeye and have that understood to be the early years of the strip and not Bobby London’s 1990s work shows how intertwined the author and character are.

But Spider-Man 3's debut crystallized a few questions with this approach that I have had. Certainly this “auteur” approach is a recent one. Oral storytelling meant that stories were changed and embroidered every time they were passed along. The long, tangled story of King Arthur and Camelot is a good example. Even in other art forms, Rembrandt didn’t differentiate between work that his pupils assisted on and probably charged the buyer the same, but now today a School of Rembrandt painting is worth considerably less.

So would Spider-Man somehow be a better story, if one can even say that, if the comic book ceased after Ditko left? The new Spider-Man movie would have no material at all in it, except for Sandman, whom promo stills show looking very close to Ditko’s vision. Gwen Stacy came into her own as a character after Ditko’s departure, and her death, a defining moment in later Spider-Man comic books, was much later. Similarly, Venom is a creation of the 1980s when Jim Shooter gave Spider-Man a live costume in the excesses of the Secret Wars miniseries, and then later writers turned it into a vengeful, rejected suitor. Sam Raimi has wholeheartedly reinterpreted the Spider-Man mythos, moving characters in time, and changing storylines, but I think he’s stayed remarkably true to the essential nature of both the character of those first Lee-Ditko books as well as the accretions of forty years of stories. On reflection, some of the best cartoonists have done similar work - from the 1970s reinterpretation of Green Arrow and Green Lantern as relevant heroes by writer Denny O’Neill and artist Neal Adams, and Jim Starlin’s reworking of Adam Warlock as a self-reflective wanderer in the stars to Frank Miller’s recreation of both Daredevil (essentially as a ninja) and Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. Even Alan Moore, one of the best writers of comics rarely invents out of whole cloth. His Swamp Thing took the existing elements of the story and recombined them wonderfully as did his Superman story ending the Silver Age, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Even Watchman, his book most likely to be cited by fans as a story to give to non-comic book readers is a reworking of Charleton’s minor heroes like Blue Beetle and Captain Atom, and is a richer read with an awareness of the earlier characters. A revisionist interpretation needs something to revise against after all.

So while I prefer stories that stand on their own, I appreciate the rich elements that new creators can pull from forty years of Spider-Man’s tales.

Post on Argentine book fair mentions comics

In "At Annual Fete, A Nocturnal Tribute To the Printed Word" By Monte Reel, Washington Post Foreign Service, Wednesday, May 2, 2007; A10, he notes "There are publishers of Arabic books, medical texts, legal tracts, military manuals and comic books." But "Those who like to read Japanese manga graphic novels don't get enough sleep, which must explain why they get so testy when gently questioned by reporters." I can't really see Washington hosting an overnight book fair.

The State of Editorial Cartooning

Washington's American Political Science Association (APSA) has put online the April issue of PS: Political Science and Politics containing "The State of the Editorial Cartoon April 2007 PS Symposium" edited by Kent Worcester.