Ding Dong Daddy From Dingburg
Written & Illustrated by Bill Griffith
Published by Fantagraphics

The latest collection of Bill Griffith’s newspaper strip Zippy the Pinhead, Ding Dong Daddy From Dingburg is also my first exposure to the long-running once-underground icon.  Griffith created Zippy in 1971.  After a long life in independent comics and magazines, Zippy became a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features, in 1986.  Ding Dong Daddy collects the daily and Sunday strips from September 2008 through June 2010.

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The Bloom County Library v.1
Written & Illustrated by Berkeley Breathed
Published by The Library of American Comics/IDW

An admission: Prior to six or seven years ago, I’d never even heard of Bloom County.  I mention is because reading this volume got me thinking about how sometimes, for whatever reason (in my case, the strip’s ending when I was still fairly young and, in any event, its lack of inclusion in my local newspaper probably had quite a bit to do with my ignorance) sometimes we all overlook things that really deserve our attention.  Now obviously every reader out there can’t read every comic that might possibly appeal to them, but this book served as a notice to me to keep an open mind – just because you or I haven’t heard of a particular comic (or musician or film, etc.) doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly influential and/or very, very good.

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If you’re not familiar with Anthony Clark and the Nedroid Picture Diary, I recommend you do so.

That being said, this past week on his twitter, Clark had posted some rather interesting spins on everyone’s favorite teenage reptiles and supporting cast. The Krang one above especially tickled me.

There’s a few more after the jump.

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Rip Kirby v.2
Written and Illustrated by Alex Raymond
Written and Edited by Ward Greene
Published by IDW

Alex Raymond, abetted by editor and co-writer Ward Greene, continued to refine Rip Kirby during the years 1948-1951.  Raymond, the co-creator of Flash Gordon, created a new daily strip in the mid-1940s, following his return from military service, and the resultant Rip Kirby was as far from Flash’s romantic swashbuckling adventure as imaginable.  A procedural detective drama, set in a world specifically as real as that outside contemporary readers’ windows, Rip Kirby follows a dapper, upper-crust private detective as he untangles a variety of mysteries.

Firstly, credit to IDW and The Library of American Comics for their impeccable reproduction of these sixty-plus year-old newspaper strips, as well as for their elegantly designed, hardbound collection of the material.  A true classic strip created by on the field’s most acclaimed legends, Rip Kirby deserves a grand treatment, and IDW/The Library of American Comics have created a package that suits the bill.

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Wednesday Comics
Edited by Mark Chiarello with Chris Conroy
Published by DC Comics

One of DC Comics’ most interesting publishing projects in recent memory remains Wednesday Comics.  The concept was part throwback, part attempt to find alternative publishing models.  Each week, they published a broadsheet, folded in half and in half again.  When readers sprawled the sheets out to their fullest dimensions, 14” x 20”, they were treated to a humongous canvas, allowing the selected artists to showcase their ability on a larger scale than anything since the heyday of the Sunday newspaper strips (a format Wednesday Comics consciously emulated, with its newsprint production).  Now available in a collected hardcover edition, on much sturdier and shinier paper, Wednesday Comics remains an interesting project, though not nearly as interesting as in its original format.

Simply put, as it ran only twelve weeks, each story has only twelve pages of real estate to make its point.  Comics writers have been crafting some very engaging and witty short stories for decades upon decades, but there are still certain limitations on what you can do in twelve pages and many of the scripts here run up against those boundaries.  Few are outright poor, but even fewer are actually memorable in any way.  Much of the art is, fortunately, quite good, and the large size and quality paper does provide an effective showcase for the illustrators, making Wednesday Comics, ultimately, a project more suited to art-admirers than story-readers.

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Werewolves of Montpellier
Written & Illustrated by Jason
Translated by Kim Thompson
Published by Fantagraphics

Ostensibly about a jewel thief who dresses as a werewolf running afoul of real werewolves, Jason’s Werewolves of Montpellier stands out as yet another genre-mashing, hilarious send-up from the superb one-named cartoonist.  In truth, while the werewolves’ presence is noteworthy, most of the book is given over to the wry and awkward social interactions of Jason’s protagonist.

Fueled by Jason’s staccato panels (eight panel-grids on every page, without variation) and dry, humdrum-of-life pacing, Werewolves of Montpellier revels in examining the routines of Sven, the book’s erstwhile hero.  Whether it’s debating with a friend what parts of women to stare at or engaging in awkward dates with girls who realize he’s in love with another woman, Sven’s interactions are clumsy and forced, but intentionally and entertainingly so.

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In those halcyon days of the early ’90s, in Brooklyn’s hipsterdom of Williamsburg, amid the Doctor Seuss hats and pierced nipples, there once stood a towering figure of a man ever ready for a stiff drink and a chance to see his art take yet undreamt of form. In that era, Millionaire came across as one of those guys with a streak of mad genius who could draw you anything for a little beer money. I knew a guy like that. You did too. But these guys never saw their ships come in. Millionaire did. And, no, he wasn’t just a lucky bastard. He made his ship come in by creating it himself, drawing every intricate detail of that vessel from stem to stern. And it would be populated by the most glorious creatures: Uncle Gabby, a deranged ape patterned after a dear alcoholic genius; the navy of alligators, suggested by a violent friend in New Orleans; and Drinky Crow, standing in for all of humanity, drunkard or otherwise.

“The Art of Tony Millionaire,” published by Dark Horse, is a serious, yet irreverent, mid-career retrospective of one of the best known and beloved cartoonists around. Read his comic strip, “Maakies,” in your local alt weekly and feel the rush of anarchy take hold. Read this book, full of honest recollections from the artist, and feel like you know the man. “Maakies,” by the way, goes back to when Millionaire drew a comic strip called, “Batty,” for a sports zine. The guy who put it together, Spike Vrusho, loved to yell out, “Maakies!” whenever he caught sight of the tugboats with the big M’s on their stacks coming into New York harbor.

Like any good coffee table book, along with a marvelous selection of comics and illustrations, this book is full of wonderful anecdotes you can enjoy flipping to in order or at random. There’s stories, for instance, about bumming around Europe as a young man. In Rome, he created one really good drawing of the Roman Forum, made a hundred prints, and proceeded to sell each of them to tourists who thought they’d just caught him as he was drawing the original. For good measure, full of youthful rage, he pissed in every famous Roman fountain he could find. With security tight for the two Vatican fountains, he had to piss in a cup and discretely pour it in during the day. Then there’s Berlin, where he may have stirred an international incident.

Before any of this, there was Gloucester, Massachusetts. Unsuited for college, and even less for a job as a dishwasher, young Tony hit upon selling drawings of his rich neighbor’s houses. “I always knew it was my bread and butter,” he writes. We can imagine him reassuring himself of this with each sale. “I always knew it was my bread and butter.” He also had his family for moral support. His father was an illustrator and his mother and grandparents were painters. When you learn that, to round out his income, he would go down to the wharves to draw schooners just as beautiful as the ones his grandfather drew, it might bring a tear to your eye.

It is the curse and blessing of the young turk to push and pull against society and hope to live to see another day. That was the Millionaire way of life. By the time he was forty, he decided it was time to cut back a bit on the rage. A bunch of his friends had hailed a cab. There were five of them and the driver would only take four. Tony crawled on the top of the cab, screaming through the windshield. The cab took off with him on top and he was forced to jump. Luckily, there were no broken bones. He could afford to bring things down a notch. He was now a featured artist in the “New York Press” and his life as an artist was tangible. He could probably sense the upswing in his life. “I always knew it was my bread and butter.”

The success that followed would flow from “Maakies” and evolve to full length works of exquisite complexity like “Sock Monkey” and “Billy Hazelnuts.” Like Crumb, he followed his own muse from a bygone era and imbued his art with a timeless grace.

You can’t rush anything worthwhile. That certainly holds true for comics. You can’t rush creating anything of lasting value and you can’t rush reading it either. That’s the tradition comics come from. It is what makes “Maakies” so darn good. The eye is teased to linger on some nautical detail or some arcane turn of phrase or some unusual use of body parts. It is a modern day miracle of comics is what it is.

“The Art Of Tony Millionaire,” 200 pages, hardcover, 9″x12″, $39.95, published by Dark Horse Comics

In the spirit of a topic I brought up a few weeks ago, your friends here at Super Articulate wanted to remind the fine folks at DC Direct that there’s an A-list character they’ve lagged on for far too long. Don’t get me wrong, The Flash has gotten attention in the last year alone. But for a hero who has an array of villains surpassed in the DC Universe by Batman alone, I’m not alone in being astounded at all the missed opportunities over the years. Though DC Direct can no longer ignore the viability of the Rogues Gallery and supporting cast of the Fastest Man Alive, not when the DC editorial and creative hierarchy has placed Barry Allen at such a premium. So it is with that sentiment that we offer up a solid THREE rounds of Flash-based heroes and villains who need to find their way to our shelves faster than… well, the Flash.
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Greetings, Blog@teers — have we got some news for you!

For the past six months, a webcomic has been featured by Ain’t It Cool News and CNN, celebrated for its action, characterization, and respect for the blaxploitation films that inspired it. As its creator notes, it’s Super Fly meets The Equalizer, the step-child of Shaft and Rip Kirby, a love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s. For some, it’s street justice like you’ve never seen — and for those on the run, well, all that’s coming their way is a WORLD OF HURT.

And in keeping with our mission to deliver the best and the brightest to you, our readers, we are proud to announce that WORLD OF HURT will be making its second home at Blog@Newsarama, as the latest in our weekly webcomics series. We sat down with writer/artists Jay Potts about the comic, his blaxploitation inspirations, and what the future holds for Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Newsarama: Jay, just to start out with, can you tell new readers a little bit about what World of Hurt is about?

Jay Potts: WORLD OF HURT is a weekly, black & white serial adventure webcomic that is my personal love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s and the Golden Age of newspaper adventure strips.  It is set in the early1970s in the city of Pointe Blanc, a fictional version of San Francisco and Oakland, and follows the exploits of a Black troubleshooter named Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Nrama: In terms of getting to know you a little bit — what’s your background been in terms of comics? Is World of Hurt your first one, or have you been building up this?

Potts: I’ve been drawing since the age of four and have been a comic book fan for just as long.  However, it wasn’t until I entered the graduate program in Sequential Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA in 1997, that I received any formal instruction.  What I learned there about storytelling and composition, and the exposure to an incredible range of talent, was truly eye-opening.

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I have to say I sort of miss the days when Brian Wood did his own DMZ covers, but there was something about JP Leon’s cover to #45 that really struck me. I’m the furthest thing from an art critic, but there’s something oddly intense about the shadowy back here, the broad shoulders–funny how I never pictured Matty Roth looking threatening, menacing, but suddenly he does here, and it’s not just the gun.

I’m sure Hawkman and Hawkgirl would beg to differ!

Courtesy of Player vs. Player, August 10, 2009.

I took a little twitter poll today (you’re following us, right? If not, click on that link and follow us. Go on, we’ll wait), asking what people wanted to see more. Well, to prove that we’ll actually listen when we ask for these kinds of suggestions, here’s our first article born directly via comments on Twitter.

Let’s Be Friends Again is a webcomic about, well, I’ve read through their entire archive, and to give you an accurate list, the rest of this post would just be topics. Let’s just say if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve had a conversation not unlike Curt and Chris’s that they so generously share with the world here. It’s also a safe bet that if you read any one, 10, or 90 of their comics, you’ll be laughing out loud repeatedly.

Be warned, much of this is NSFW (EDIT: As readers have pointed out, your milage may vary on the label “NSFW.” Just know, it includes lots of swearing and the occasional bloody mess) content. Like this MKvsDCU sendup from last December, for example. The mixture of slice-of-life conversations, one-off topic strips, and some really solid comedic writing and art make this a great example of what webcomics can and should be. This is a continuation of the kind of storytelling comic strips in newspapers used to have, aged for readers who used to read them and are now adults. It’s webcomics for, frankly, people who are most likely to actually read webcomics. It doesn’t try to be too high brow, but is still intelligent, it doesn’t try to hard to be funny, but it makes you laugh.

This was one of the best suggestions I’ve ever received of a new webcomic to read. It now has a permanent place in my bookmarks, and I highly recommend you all go check it out as well.

So as print media and especially print newspapers are dying, DC comics decides to put out a print comic that mimics newspaper funny pages. Is this brilliant, or ridiculous?

In this case, it’s brilliant. The comics are high kitsch, pure throwbacks to the heyday of newspaper comics. Highlights for me include the hilarious double entendre-a-line Metamorpho scripted by Neil Gaiman, Superman with Lee Bermejo’s utterly stunning art, and Ben Caldwell’s hallucinatory Wonder Woman. Really, though, there’s not a miss in here–and this is coming from a girl who is lukewarm at best on superheroes and has little to no healthy nostalgia for the days of yore.

But the media theorist in me wants to take this a step further. Wednesday Comics seems like an epitaph for newspapers in general and newspaper comics in particular, a tribute especially pulled together for a dying medium. The very fact that DC puts out something like this, on newsprint, is as loud a signal as any I’ve seen that we probably won’t be seeing comics in newspapers much longer. If we still had a vibrant newspaper culture, no one would find it deliciously different to buy comics printed this way.

I regret the death of the broadsheet print newspaper as a cultural artifact more than I do as a personal choice–I’ve never liked getting ink on my fingers and have never really been able to read a paper cover to cover. By the time I started jonesing for news, we already had the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet. But like most people, I remember reading the funny pages as a kid (Garfield was always my favorite).

Superhero comics carry that same kind of reassuring nostalgia for most of their audience. People grow up with Superman–life might change, fall apart, but there will always be Superman. The characters chosen for Wednesday Comics are those same classic characters, and the writers and artists are some of the biggest names in the business. The message of the whole project seems to be: Newspapers might be dead, kids, but Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman? They aren’t going to leave you.

It’s a well-done project, though, and the pure joy and love for the medium shines through and tosses some residual afterglow onto the newsprinted page. It won’t slow the shift to digital media, but it will certainly be an artifact worth keeping.

I’ve written about Persepolis and Marjane Satrapi in the context of the current protests in Iran, but someone took it a step further and rebooted (remixed?) Persepolis to reflect the current situation.

I have no idea if Satrapi is involved in this project, but I do find it interesting that a completely new story can be made by moving some panels around and changing the captions. Aside from my interest in it as a political document–and the way comics can carry a message more potently than a simple news story–it is also an exercise in figuring out the weight of the message carried in the images vs. in the text of a comic.

Look out, Dark Avengers, Hulk, and Secret Invasion: Wednesday Comics just jumped to the top of the pile.

DC Comics announced today that John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo’s Wednesday Comics feature starring Superman will be serialized in USA Today. The initial strip will appear in the July 8th print edition of the paper, with the following installments appearing online at USAToday.com.

For those of you not keeping score, this is the highest selling newspaper in America, with a circulation of 2.11 million, even narrowly beating out the Wall Street Journal. These strips will come out each week on USA Today’s site the same date as Wednesday Comics hits the stores, and the online strips will be promoted in the print edition.

“It just makes sense, no?” wrote Alex Segura in DC’s blog, the Source. “A weekly series created to remind readers of the joys of standalone comics and the newspaper strips many of us grew up on debuting in the pages of one of the most well-known and widely-read newspapers ever.”

The Mothership reported today about the latest news regarding the official summer release date of Green Lantern: First Flight on blu-ray and DVD.

Yahoo! Movies now has the first trailer for the animated film, I think it bodes well for the 2010 live-action film.

UPDATE:

Our home base at Newsarama has since added the First Flight trailer.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Fox will be pursuing a big-screen adaptation of Marmaduke.

While it’s too early to tell if the film will be live-action or animation, the studio is hoping it’ll cash in on similar revenues as Marley and Me and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The gluttonous dog has also appeared on episodes of the Heathcliff and Garfield cartoons.

You may have experienced this in your neck of the woods, I know all of the sudden our local outlets are a little lighter. The Chicago Reader this week has addressed one particular medium in the dwindling newspaper industry that’s taken a huge hit, alternative weeklies.

While Matt Groening is set for the next several generations, thanks to The Simpsons, most creators of comic strips found in free weekly newspapers are finding less and less places to call home.

Readers, have you felt the hit in YOUR favorite local weekly?

Edit: The above comic is courtesy of Ben Claassen III. Thanks, Eden!

Washington City Paper Drops Syndicated Comics. All of them. This is the alt-weekly, which one would hope would be maintaining its interest in alternative and creative viewpoints like those brought by comics.

I hate to brag, but one of my local alt-weeklies here in Philly has a cover story about comics this week, and it’s a good one, gorgeously illustrated with art from Duane Swierczynski’s run on The Punisher. Swierczynski himself was the former editor of the other Philly alt-weekly, the City Paper, and the article is excellent even if, like me, you’re not a regular Punisher reader.

Swierczynski is as big as a Budweiser Clydesdale but not quite as pretty. And while he could crush your skull like an eggshell with his mighty fists, he almost certainly won’t. He lives with his wife, 6-year-old-son and 5-year-old daughter in a perfectly normal house in a perfectly respectable part of Northeast Philadelphia. His first job every morning is to make his kids breakfast (Coco Puffs, Special K and/or yogurt and frozen pancakes).

Finally, in case you thought I was just stuck on alt-weeklies, my friend just showed me this trailer and it kind of made my mind explode. So of course I had to post it here for you.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a local bar to play Quizzo with a friend. One of the questions referred to an actor whose name none of us could remember. My friend said, “I know his face! Just not his name.”

We joked, “Draw him.”

But my friend, who is white, said, “I feel like when I draw black people it looks racist.”

Artist Ron Wimberly had someone tell him that he’d thought Wimberly’s art was racist, before meeting him and realizing that Wimberly is black.

Wimberly noted that perhaps it’s just that black features don’t look strange or exaggerated to him.

This story was passed on to me recently (h/t), wherein Washington Post comics blogger Michael Cavna points out:

An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

You read that right. Barack has the mouth that soared to the top of many cartoonists’ fixations. Just what in the name of Jimmy Carter caricatures is going on here?

If you don’t believe me, scan dozens of current political cartoons. For every Steve Benson or Mike Luckovich who is zeroing in on a swell, spot-on Obama, there seems to be a cartoonist who invokes “caricature” in the most grotesque sense of the word. Obama’s lips have been rendered in such unnatural tints, and at such dimensions, that somewhere, even R. Crumb would blush.

And of course, this physical area of caricature — unlike, say, Obama’s ears — comes freighted with a legacy of ugly racism and cruel, blackface-era mockery.

Daryl Cagle writes:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently on drawing Obama; people want to know about racial stereotypes and whether cartoonists are being pressured to draw him a certain way. When I was working as an illustrator I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with small noses and thin lips. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features.

It’s an interesting, and tough question. After seeing the Obama Spider-Man comic, and observing that the Obama in the pages looked almost nothing like the actual president, I wondered what gave. This is 2009, we have our first African-American president, are we still dealing with the “all black people look the same” mentality? Or was the artist worried about playing into racist stereotypes and ended up with a generic dark-skinned character (hell, even the skin tone was wrong).

A while back, there was a controversy about the New Yorker’s cover, depicting Obama and his wife in stereotyped ways. I weighed in back on my own blog, and there were thoughtful comments on both sides. But I wonder if the debate over the propriety of that image has contributed to the thoughts of cartoonists depicting Obama now.

Cagle’s point, that he was taught to draw African-Americans with Caucasian features, dovetails nicely into this post, from Girls Read Comics, and this one, from Seeking Avalon, on Vixen being portrayed as, well, white. And then I think of my friend’s comment, and Wimberly’s comment, and…

I don’t have easy answers here. I don’t think any of the artists mentioned above or linked in any of these places meant to be racist. I also think that sometimes, whether you like it or not, racism creeps in. This shouldn’t be taken as a sign that white people shouldn’t be drawing people of color, or that caricaturing the President of the United States is off-limits now because said President is black.

This is only the first month of Obama’s presidency; I have no doubt that this won’t be the last time we have this conversation. I guess about the only thing I can hope for is that we can discuss it like adults, and move forward from here.