APE Stuff

I brought home a bunch of stuff from APE last weekend and I am starting to read through it. Here's the good stuff so far:

LOSE by Michael Deforge
This is a crazy comic with funny JLA satire strips, famous comic characters who are in hell, and great single-panel dog comics. The drawing is also very beautiful. It looks like this guy also did the cover for the issue #4 of Diamond Comics that was also new at APE, but I haven't read it yet. I think this dude will be as famous as Chris Ware.

STAY AWAY FROM OTHER PEOPLE by Lisa Hanawalt
I got this mini-comic and Lisa's other new regular comic but have only read the mini. There are some real solid laughs in here and good drawings. I guess it won a Ignatz award? That's pretty good. The dude at the table I bought it from told me I could get Lisa Hanawalt to sign it for me, but she was talking to some other people and I am shy around everyone and really unpleasant in general, so I just left. I predict she will be as famous as Chris Ware, too, if it's possible for three people be that famous at the same time.

DOOKIE-BALL JONES by Al Frank
Tim Goodyear gave me this thing and it's pretty good. But it's also extremely dirty and mean. There is poop-eating and Craigslist "encounters" and racism and pedophilia, but it's all in good fun/satire. Tim said people give it back to him after they buy it and don't even want their money back. Rated X for eXtraordinary, and because it's very disgusting and offensive--AND IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK.

HENRY & GLENN FOREVER #1 & #2 by Igloo Tornado
I actually got these from Tom Neely at San Diego Comic-Con Int'l this summer and I think they were new two years ago, but still funny. Issue one posits that Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig are best buds/lovers/roomies and milks that situation for what it's worth. Number two is more of the same, but now they live next door to Hall & Oates.

That's it for now.

Henry Boltinoff

Henry Boltinoff from Adventure Comics #330, 1964

Comic-Con is Finally Over

Take a gander at my Flickr set of con pics and our comic-con blog, Funny Town Humor Pump.

San Diego Comic-Con Int'l

Beginning this Wednesday night through Sunday evening I will be at San Diego's Comic-Con International. In addition to the continued availablility of the Danny Dutch Comic Book, I have this brand new comic ready to go, The Shortest Interval. I'll be working the crowds at the Sparkplug Comics Books booth (1531) with my pals Dylan Williams, Tom Neely, Chris Cilla, Julia Wertz, Tim Goodyear, Austin English, Damien Jay, Ben Catmull, Minty Lewis, Andrew Smith and maybe more!

Sparkplug's got two other new books, too: Sausage Hand by Andrew Smith and Neptune by Aaron Nels Steinke. All three new books will also be for sale at the Sparkplug table at the Portland Zine Symposium this selfsame weekend!!?! Get the lowdown on the books and shows here. All the new comics should also be for sale on the Sparkplug website sometime soon.

Oh, one more thing: a few of us are going to try to post exciting blog entries during the San Diego show at the highly experimental Funny Town Humor Pump blog. Add it to your feed reader and find out how we're feeling this very second.

I will see you there!

Claptrap #2 by Onsmith

Old pal Onsmith sent me a copy of his new mini-comic, Claptrap #2, got it on Friday. If you can get your hands on one you will be impressed. People just don't make mini-comics like this anymore, or if they attempt it they fail in comparison. Production value is off the chart with a nice two color silkscreen cover (I already got a spot of coffee or something on mine, unfortunately--goodbye collectible value), and he must've found the cleanest photocopier drum in town to do the guts of the comic; nice dense black, hi-res scans.

The quality of the cartooning in here is the usual grade of wonderful. Dirty gags, confounding doodles, comments on the miserable human condition--all in all a load of laffs. Also a color centerfold, and mine has an original small drawing taped in the back cover. Try to find a copy if you're near Chicago.

Anyhow, he's a good buddy of mine from way back, and it was real nice of him to send me one of these. It's nice to know I have such friends out there.

Henry Boltinoff

Here's a few strips by Henry Boltinoff! They're dumb, but the guy can cartoon astonishingly. I get old comics now and then, I'll try to post these here and on Flickr as I come across them. Boltinoff did comics to fill space in DC magazines for 150 years.

More Boltinoff
My Previous Boltinoff Post

Free Comic Book Day: Bird Hurdler

HOTT cover by Andrice Arp

Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow! My publisher and pals have produced a a nice looking free comic for the event:

Teenage Dinosaur, Tugboat Press and Sparkplug present the release of Bird Hurdler by Andrice Arp, Theo Ellsworth, Farel Dalrymple, Zack Soto, Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg [doesn't have a website ??] & Julia Gfrörer and printed at Brown Printing.

Follow the link to see the list of participating comic shops where you can score a copy. My guess is that Bird Hurdler will also be offered at convention appearances until all the copies have been given away (with purchase ???). That's what happened with last year's now-classic Nerd Burglar, anyhow

Gluyas Williams Stuff

I noticed this when I was looking around in Google's newspaper search for more Gluyas Williams stuff:

Times sure have changed.

Gluyas Williams Stuff

There's been a little bit of activity regarding Gluyas Williams lately on the internet: First, a batch of dailies on Ger Apeldoorn's The Fabuleous Fifties blog; Second, on Allan Holtz's Strippers Guide, a 1949 Editor & Publisher write-up about cartoonist Francis Dahl with a quote from Gluyas Williams.

There's unfortunately not been any new activity on gluyaswilliams.com, but maybe I'll do some scanning when I'm too lazy to draw.

Also a H/T to Mike Lynch who beat me to the punch on these same links the other day.

The two drawings here are illustrations from the 1932 book Cut Off My Head by Jasper Whiting.

Gluyaswilliams.com Update

Tonight I added fifteen daily strips from 1929 to gluyaswilliams.com. How did you spend your Friday night??

This batch of scans was kind of a slapdash affair, as I was just plowing through my huge backlog of unscanned strips. While I uploaded fifteen strips tonight, I still have around 50 more from 1929, and a big stack I just bought from '45/'46, and still more from '24, '31, '27 and who knows what else.

Now and then I'll get a nice email from somebody who just discovered the site.

Links: Henry Boltinoff

I saw this post at Pappy's Golden Age and was reminded of how nice Henry Boltinoff's cartooning is. I don't have any scans of my own to show or anything, but here's a LINK ROUND UP: Gorilla Daze: some one- and half-pagers from DC Comics Dial B for Blog: A selection of Super-Turtles Stripper's Guide: Woody Forest Toonopedia: Boltinoff bio Mania Dos Quadradinhos: Info and Woody Forest(Google Translation) DC Indexes: Mother Lode of Boltinoff DC Filler Strips

I really like this smarmy "publicity man" from Alan Ladd #8.

X-9 by Mel Graff

click for larger version

I discovered today that I like the look of Mel Graff's 40's-50's cartooning, so I tracked down some strips at Heritage Auctions. I turned them into line art and put them into one page as a fun comic strip continuity project! Thrill to the adventures of Corrigan (aka X-9), Corrigan's double, Joe Otterfoot, and the handling of illegal venison. Strips are from 1944, 1949 and 1955.

Also make note of Graff's special lettering for the caption boxes--good stuff!

Graff promo art and bio at Joakim Gunnarsson's blog

Secret Agent X-9 wikipedia entry

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Chinese Comics: Peng Di (aka 朋弟), A Molin 2

Here's another batch of strips scanned from a book I brought back from China in 2004. This stuff is by cartoonist 朋弟 (aka Peng Di, Feng Di, Peer Di), and I'd say these examples are from the 30's/40's, but I can't say for sure. The title seems to be A Molin 2, which, according this this guy is a funny tranlation:

"I found a better dictionary and noticed that the word 阿木林 can mean someone who is easily decieved or a fool. I think that is what the name 阿摩林 should be translated as. Perhaps this is a way to say the same thing in Shanghai. From now on Ah Molin will be known as Suckah."

Maybe "A. Dupe" would be a good name.

Anyway, this is from a series of reprints published in 2003; I bought three different ones, but gave the other two to friends. This book is all four-panel strips, while the others I saw looked like longer stories. The strips from this book deal with class struggle, the male/female dynamic, and hygiene, I guess.

Title Translations:
pg 1: Eat Well
pg 2: The Suction Kiss
pg 3: Standard Table Lamp.

That's about all I can figure out. I found these on the Google-translated page here. I'll make up unfunny but jokey fake titles from here on.

Thus,

pg 11: Now He Has One Leg!

pg 19: Sharing Hooker's Bed Bugs
pg 31: Popeye Contest
pg 39: Baby Collector ???
pg 46: Fickle Lady

pg 52: Ass Licker
pg 57: Rickshaw and Severed Head

LINK ROUNDUP

Peng-Di Wikipedia entry, Google translation

Peng Di series on Amazon.cn

Translated Peng-Di Comics on wobumingbai.typepad.com:
The Real Shanghai, introductory post,
The Real Shanghai, subsequent pages
Make Your Fortune and Return Home

Ther was some controversy over characters in the seemingly pretty profitable Old Master Q series being plagiarized from Peng Di's comics (and they are obvious rip-offs). More info on this:
Old Master Q Wikipedia Entry
People.com.cn Article, Google Translation

That's it, have fun!

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Gluyaswilliams.com Update

I added a batch of ten gags/illustrations done for Rand McNally to gluyaswilliams.com. These were made from scans I found on an ebay auction ages ago, I did my best to fix them up. The one I've posted here was too far gone, so I didn't post it to gw.com, but nothing is too shitty looking to put on a blog.

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Penny by Haenigsen

This is a collection of Penny strips by Harry Haenigsen. Haenigsen's a great stylist, his drawing's really something, in spite of all the turned-up Frankenstein noses. I've collected some jpgs of other stuff by him that I'll try to post one of these days, though I have a feeling it's not for everyone. But I think we can all appreciate the beauty of this plain-jane early 50's cover design! RIGHT?

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Gluyaswilliams.com Update

I added three daily strips from 1924 to gluyaswilliams.com. In an effort to get more strips up faster, I didn't go to any trouble cleaning these up, or making black-line versions. They look good either way. With luck there'll be more to come!

For more info on Gluyas Williams don't hesitate to checkout the latest issue of Comic Art Magazine, which includes a nice article by Jeet Heer and published by the estimable Buenaventura Press. This issue also features a cover by pal Tim Hensley and a additional book by other pal Ivan Brunetti. It's been on the stands for over a year, so you've probably bought one already.

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Little Lulu

From deep in the annals of memory.loc.gov

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Shopping, Prints, BFFs

I took a look in the Family store this past Saturday in L.A. I saw that they have a couple of the litho prints (titled Stamina) that John Hankiewicz made to commemorate our SPX '06 experience. John, Onsmith, Ivan Brunetti and I each did a little drawing and John did the prints, it came out nice!

Up above is the drawing that I contributed, scanned from my sketchbook. The four of us also made a mini-comic for the show that we were handing out free. I'm not sure where you might be able to find one of them now; I don't know if I even have one. But they were neat! Four new drawings apiece, very small size.

Anyway, the print was priced at $20 at Family. They also had more of John's prints for sale, and dozens of other things. Check it out and tell them I sent you. And then tell me that I sent you.

And don't forget to bookmark Hankiewicz's and Onsmith's blogs for a heaping helping of their naive artwork. Hankiewicz is in the new Mome #10; Onsmith is in the new Hotwire Comics #2. If you need help finding Ivan Brunetti comics, you're stupid.

1906 Atlantic Monthly on Comics

Thanks to Boingboing.net I learned that The Atlantic Monthly now has its archive freely viewable. I just started looking at it and already found this great quote about Sunday comics from 1906:

"Ten or a dozen years ago,—the exact date is here immaterial,—an enterprising newspaper publisher conceived the idea of appealing to what is known as the American "sense of humor" by printing a so-called comic supplement in colors. He chose Sunday as of all days the most lacking in popular amusements, carefully restricted himself to pictures without humor and color without beauty, and presently inaugurated a new era in American journalism. The colored supplement became an institution. No Sunday is complete without it,—not because its pages invariably delight, but because, like flies in suummer, there is no screen that will altogether exclude them."

also, this one's good--these are both in the opener of the story!:

"One and all they unite vigorously, as if driven by a perverse and cynical intention, to prove the American sense of humor a national shame and degredation. Fortunately the public has so little to say about its reading matter that one may fairly suspend judgment."

The author here is Ralph Bergengren, and this article is his indictment of comics, specifcally color comics (apparently the color printing of 1906 wasn't to his liking, as he says the black and white versions look "twice as attractive"), and the simple, cheap humor they dealt in. I'm actually still not sure it isn't satirical, but I'm assuming he's in earnest.

On some points I agree with him, on others he's crazy. His descriptions of the immoral activities of the color supplement sound better than any turn of the century comic i've ever seen, more lurid, lunatic and wily--he should have been making comics. On the other hand, he makes the point that all the "types" created by the cartoonists dilutes the variety that humor generally has to offer that maybe partly true.

The writing overall here is a lot of fun to read, even though the author is a stuffy traditionalist. If you're interested in old-time comics, take a look here. He cites Winsor McKay as one of the good ones, while rival versions of the Yellow Kid (I think? not specifically named) both stink.

To me, reading this a hundred years later, all he proves is that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I think that's what happens anytime you read a hundred year old magazine article of any kind. Strangely, I'd really feel good about making a comic composed of "pictures without humor and color without beauty."

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Supertrash: Venus In Furs Poster Redo

I did this for the Supertrash Film Fest / Art Show that's upcoming on February 1-3 in Portland, Ore. I'm not sure if they automatically accept whatever's sent in or if it's juried somehow, but we'll see. Pals Tom Neely, Chris Cilla, Alex Holden and Jim Rugg have also done one, probably others I don't know about.

Anyway, I did Venus in Furs, a terrible movie from the late 60's about a horny jazz musician and a hot naked ghost(?) lady, and a hot jazz singer lady who never gets naked and three murderous jerks. Don't bother watching it.

This is also my excuse for not having a new weekly strip for today. Not the real reason, but it's good enough. I may have a strip for tomorrow. Sorry!

Ralph Barton

I nabbed this Ralph Barton gag from the Library of Congress' site. I doctored it a little to make a print-ready black & white file from it. See the unadulterated scan here.

The Library of Congress site has tons of material if you're willing to dig a little. I've found that they don't always give you easy access to the highest quality images, you instead have to go to the root directory and navigate to the bigger file (like this one, for instance). Happy hunting.

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Things I Have Bought Lately

I bought the following books yesterday at Bargain Books in Van Nuys, CA. There was a copy of VIP's Bottle Fatigue there for $3, but I left it behind since I already have a paperback copy. If you want it, get a move on!

OK, check 'em out:

This is New Letters and Lettering (1943) by Paul Carlyle and Guy Oring. It includes instruction for the professional letterer and sample typefaces. It's wire-o bound so you can drag it on the job with you and it won't fall apart. Some great letters in here, I'll post some one of these days.

Here's Ever Since Adam and Eve (1957) edited, with contributions, by Alfred Andriola and Mel Casson. Lots of battle-of-the-sexes themed gags in here, with some rarities by strip artists like Schulz, Capp and Frank King and some international people like Searle, Taizo Yokoyama, Andre Francois. It claims to have 86 different cartoonists; I didn't count but there's a huge variety.

As I said the store had this, Virgil Partch's Man the Beast (1953), and a copy of Bottle Fatigue in the same format. Inside the cover it lists those two along with Here We Go Again and The Wild Wild Women, presumably as a matching set. Man the Beast is described thus:

"Vip depicts Man as the always eager predator, usually his own worst enemy. Especially at sea, in bars and offices, on desert islands, etc."

Sounds funny, huh??

F.G. Cooper Lettering from 1916

Men in the Street

I got this issue of The Dude at Comicon this past July because it included the following article about comedy team, Men in the Street, that is, Don Knotts and two other guys. There are also some gag cartoons and lots of pictures of naked girls.

Below are two gags from the magazine by Reamer Keller and Lou Myers.

Keeping Women In Line

Here's more of those gag book covers, continued from here. One of these days I might post some of the gags themselves, if the books don't turn to dust first.

Titles are: More There Oughta Be a Law! by Al Fagaly and Harry Shorten; Grin and Bear It by George Lichty; Keeping Women In Line by Mischa Richter.

For more of what may or may not be Al Fagaly's cartooning, see my Super Duck post.

Copy Center

Here's some drawings I've done lately, three of which are trying to emulate the style of Milt Gross, and the fourth is a John Held-ish face. That green guy ended up looking a little like Jon Waters.

See more Milt Gross at animationarchive.org's gallery of Gross Sunday pages.

Gluyaswilliams.com Update

I added a nice write-up/interview from the February 1976 issue of Yankee Magazine to gluyaswilliams.com. The site's really shaping up into a first-class high school research project.

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Food: Don't Waste It!

Here's a poster by typography and cartooning master F.G. Cooper, made during the war to inspire people to save food. He did a couple like this for the U.S. Food Administration.

I saw somebody selling a couple copies of this poster on ebay today and started fooling around with thier scans. I doctored them up and made a nice hi-res two color version that I could print out for myself sometime.

Stephen DeStefano at Channel Frederator

Check out this interview with Stephen DeStefano. A very amazing cartoonist, and the interview has beautiful gigantic images to look at while you're reading...

Also visit DeStefano's blog

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F.G. Cooper

Click for a strip from F.G. Cooper that orignally appeared in Life magazine. This is scanned from another page in The Complete Guide to Professional Cartooning.

Gluyaswilliams.com Update

Today I added a little bit of new stuff to gluyaswilliams.com, and put most of the illustrations section back online. There's a new image for the main page, too, that looks kind of snazzy.

Anyhow, this is the first site I've made that uses CSS, so if it doesn't look the same on your browser as it does in the image up above, let me know...

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From Filboid Studge: Gluyas Williams at Life

An excellent group of Gluyas Williams images from his early days at Life magazine are up now on Filboid Studge's blog!

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Virgil Partch "VIP" Paperback Covers

From Swapatorium: Eddie and Louise

Some great old amateur cartooning was posted on Swapatorium. Beautiful stuff!

Redesign of gluyaswilliams.com

I've redesigned gluyaswilliams.com. I'm not quite done moving all the stuff over from the old site, but there are a couple new articles added on. Tell me what you think!

Gluyaswilliams.com - New Stuff

I added ten illustrations from the poetry book Translations from the Chinese by Christopher Morley. They're all done with graywashes, which I haven't seen a lot of from Gluyas Williams. CHECK THEM OUT! (in the "illustrations" section)

I also added three strips from 1929. On two of them I left the newsprint color instead of bleaching it out; I know some people like to see them that way.

Moomin

I haven't read any of this stuff, but the drawings are really great. There's several pieces of Moomin artwork posted on Musselsoppans Vänner; there's also a new reprint book from Drawn & Quarterly.

Russell Patterson

Click for full version

From Ballyhoo, January 1933

Don Herold

Click for larger version

From Life Magazine, 9/14/22

T.S. Sullivant

Click for larger version

From Life Magazine, 9/14/1922

Jimmy Swinnerton

Here's a guy due for revival--Jimmy Swinnerton. There's some nice stuff of his up at Coconino World. His strip, Little Jimmy, is another of those variations-on-a-theme strips--every week Little Jimmy gets sidetracked from his task!

RIP Alex Toth

click image to see full page from The Black Hood #2

More from The Comics Reporter

Your Favorite Cartoonist: Al Wiseman

This is exactly the shit I was talking about two days ago!: Alwiseman.com

Via boingboing.net

Your Favorite Cartoonist

If you're reading this, and you're the type with a favorite cartoonist that nobody else seems to know about, and you've been hoarding stuff by your favorite cartoonist that you haven't shown anyone else, and you know HTML, then you owe it to yourself and all of us to make a website about YOUR FAVORITE CARTOONIST. A domain name costs ten bucks a year. A webhost is free (well, mostly: doteasy.com charges you a one-time $35 domain transfer fee, and after that it's free. Or you could just use a blog, which is entirely free). You probably already have a scanner. There you have it!

Check these grassroots cartoonist sites:
Alex Toth
Mort Meskin
K. Huizenga's Misc. stuff

If you have a good one send me the link, because I can't think of any more, but there's gotta be some.

I'm mentioning this because I've done it, and the product is www.gluyaswilliams.com. There's not a ton of material there at the moment, but I'll add more over time. I've got the stuff, so I might as well share it.

F.G. Cooper

Click the picture to see the whole strip

How Much of Me is Me?

On the Comics Journal messbo today Chris Lanier posted a link to his article on Abner Dean, and the folowing cartoon has had me thinking over things ever since I saw it at 3:30 this afternoon. Anf if you're reading this, check out the article, which is REAL NICE

Bob Oksner Girls

It Shouldn't Happen to a Dog