Fri - December 16, 2005

It's a Pixar World. We're Just Living in It. 

From the New York Times
 

"The Museum of Modern Art has mounted the largest, most object-oriented exhibition in its history devoted to film: a show about the runaway phenomenon of digital animation. Well, some digital animation. O.K., the digital animation of one hugely successful, pioneering company, the Pixar Animation Studios. Since its founding in 1986 by John Lasseter, who remains its creative chief, Pixar has brought forth such visually memorable if fluffy concoctions as "Toy Story" and its sequel, "Finding Nemo," "A Bug's Life," "The Incredibles" and "Monsters, Inc.," perhaps its masterpiece..." 

 

full article by ROBERTA SMITH here  

 

 

Posted at 06:53 PM    

Sun - December 4, 2005

Comics Going Postal 

From MediaBistro


 

Newsarama reports that the United States Postal Service will be issuing a set of commemorative DC Comics stamps sometime in the summer of 2006. The 20-stamp sheet will include portraits of ten superheroes, ranging from the Big Three (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) to slightly less iconic (but no less beloved among the true believers) heroes such as Plastic Man and Aquaman (left), followed by ten mini-replicas of covers of some of their most famous comics. Fanboys will now argue on message boards across the nation about why the Flash cover is for "Invasion of the Cloud Creatures" rather than "Flash of Two Worlds." 

The artwork for the protraits offers an excellent cross-section of superhero comics history, from Jack Kirby's Green Arrow through a Curt Swan Superman and Neal Adams Green Lantern up to a Batman by one of today's hottest artists, Jim Lee. 

Posted at 06:17 AM    

Tue - November 29, 2005

The missing link: Women Comic-Book Artists 

The current issue of Art News Online asks a relevant question: 

 

Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists? 
With a dual-venue exhibition in Los Angeles, comics by masters such as Winsor McCay, Chris Ware, and Charles Schulz have been elevated from pop culture to fine art. But as these artists receive their due, the show has sparked debate over the rightful place of women in the comic canon... 

 

"...The appeal of “male” comics to women—and of “women’s” comics to male readers—was limited until the genre began to evolve beyond such distinctions, becoming more narrative and more focused on recognizable realities and emotions than on fantasies about spaceships and superheroes. It is a nice irony that Crumb, whose pneumatic women and lascivious hippies have been called misogynistic, may have inspired more women to enter the field. The ranks of well-known comic artists now include such women as Lynda Barry (One Hundred Demons and other graphic novels), Gregory (“Naughty Bits”), Marisa Acocella (“Cancer Vixen”), Sue Coe (a former contributor to Spiegelman’s RAW) and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who coauthored, with her husband R. Crumb, Dirty Laundry, about the travails of modern cohabitation. 

There are so many women now in the field that the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in New York will mount an all-female exhibition called “She Draws Comics,” running from May through September 2006..." 



Roz Chast’s Five Minutes to Deadline, watercolor and pen on paper, 2002.
JULIE SAUL GALLERY, NEW YORK 

 

Posted at 08:04 PM    

Mon - August 1, 2005

Ottawa International animation festival

From my mailbox, NW Animation Newsletter, comes this image. Gary Panter designed the poster for this year's Ottawa International Animation Festival

I'm a former attendee and nominee at the Ottawa Festival, and a big fan of Gary's, so it's wonderful to see these two things combined. I gotta get my hands on one of these posters.
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OIAF 05 Festival Poster:
This year's poster is designed by American
illustrator, painter, and designer Gary Panter.
Panter is a three-time Emmy Award winner who
made his mark in the 1980s as head set
designer for the TV show Pee Wee's Playhouse.

Posted at 02:53 PM    

Mon - July 18, 2005

Blondie & Dagwood Milestone

Major Plans to Mark the 75th Anniversary of 'Blondie'
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Long before Homer Simpson became the American Man's proud symbol
of husbandly sloth, Dagwood ruled the sofa.
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Our role model celebrates 75 years of success
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By E&P Staff

Published: July 08, 2005 12:24 PM ET

NEW YORK The 75th anniversary of "Blondie" is Sept. 8, but the comic will begin marking the milestone this Sunday.

In the July 10 strip, "Blondie" writer Dean Young will start a three-month continuous story line -- the longest in the strip's history. The sequence will center on Blondie and Dagwood planning a major wedding anniversary, according to King Features Syndicate, which distributes the comic to more than 2,300 newspapers.

Dean is the son of "Blondie" creator Chic Young (1901-1973).

Posted at 11:59 AM    

Wed - June 22, 2005

comic strips as a family business

Family business The bittersweet story of fathers, sons, and comics By Jeet Heer  |  June 12, 2005 Cartooning has been a family business in more ways than one for Mort Walker and the late Dik Browne. In 1954, after creating the strip "Beetle Bailey," Walker launched an equally successful follow up, "Hi and Lois." Cocreated with Browne, "Hi and Lois" steered away from the comic strip convention of bickering couples and offered a gentle and cozy take on suburban family life. Riding the baby boom wave, "Hi and Lois" became the model for many other family strips, including Browne's "Hagar the Horrible," featuring a domesticated Viking. The family arrangement prevailed not only in the funny pages but also in real life. Now age 81, Walker presides over a nest of strips worked on by his sons, as well as the sons of Dik Browne. It takes a complicated chart to trace this family tree, but, in a nutshell, "Hi and Lois" is now produced by Brian and Greg Walker and Chance Browne, "Beetle Bailey" by Mort Walker and Greg Walker, and "Hagar the Horrible" by Chris Browne. "Dik Browne used to call it his cottage industry," jokes Brian Walker, interviewed by phone from his studio in Wilton, Connecticut. Brian points out that the family business model of the Walkers and Brownes is typical of how things are done in the still predominantly male world of the comics page. Father-and-son teams produce many popular strips, including "Blondie" and "Ziggy" (which carries the signature "Tom Wilson and Tom II"). Meanwhile, cartoonists from Hank Ketchem ("Dennis the Menace") to Lynn Johnston ("For Better or for Worse") have taken bits of their family life and used them as fodder for strips that get read in family newspapers and stuck to family refrigerators all across America. Yet in the cartooning world, as in life, there's a more complicated side to father-son relationships. Many of today's most popular and accomplished graphic novelists, like their counterparts among conventional novelists, portray family life as a source of emotional pain and fathers as overbearing or absent. . . . For Brian Walker, being the son of a cartoonist meant having a closeness to his father's work that is denied to most children today. "One of the real perks of being a cartoonist is that you can basically work at home or close to home," Walker observes. "I'd come home from school, my father would be there. I'd feel sorry for other kids: ‘You mean your father is not around all the time like mine is?' " Looking over old Hi and Lois strips, Brian is often amazed at how much they resemble a diary of family life, with his boyhood love of stealing cookies and arguments about strict school dress codes immortalized in four colors. Now in his mid-50s and happily married, Brian Walker has replicated the lifestyle enjoyed by his father, working in a studio not far from home. "As a modern father, I feel that there is this expectation to do everything," Walker says. "To be involved in child rearing, change the diapers, give the kids rides, go to the baseball games. My father did all that stuff, because he was around. Most of the fathers of his generation didn't do that kind of stuff." Cullen Murphy, who collaborated for more than 25 years on the medieval adventure strip "Prince Valiant" with his late father, John Cullen Murphy, grew up in Cos Cob, Conn., amidst the same sort of suburban bohemianism as the Walkers and Brownes. "Like Brian Walker, we were all part of a fairly large cartoonist ghetto in Connecticut," Murphy remembers. "So this was in my own blood from childhood on." Murphy suggests that a significant number of strips have stayed in the family in part because the practice of cartooning is akin to a kind of medieval guild. "It's a kind of craftsmanship and sensibility that is picked up by being in close association with people who are doing it," he says. "If you are part of a cartoonist's family, you get caught up into that world." The younger Murphy, the longtime managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, gave up writing "Prince Valiant" last fall, shortly after his father's death. (Murphy's sister Meg also worked on the strip, doing the lettering and coloring. Today, the strip is being carried on by writer Gary Gianni and artist Mark Schultz.) "I realized after Dad died how much I was doing it really just to be working with him," he says. But not all cartoonists have used comics as a way to cozy up to the family hearth. For many of today's graphic novelists, they have just as often been a way to work through difficult relationships with their fathers. "This is something I found really fascinating when I met Chris Browne," says cartoonist Art Spiegelman of one of Dik Browne's sons. "It's so different from anything I experienced. It was the first time I had ever met a son who had only good things to say about his father." Growing up in an immigrant household, Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel "Maus," received little encouragement to be an artist. "I became a cartoonist because my father couldn't read comics," he remembers. "It was not to please a father, but to run away from one. In a sense I let myself . nd Mad Magazine as my American parent. It was a way of understanding my country that wasn't available to me in the household." Which isn't to say that Spiegelman and his father weren't collaborators of a kind. "Maus" recounts the troubled history of his parents, who were both Holocaust survivors. (The first volume, "A Survivor's Tale" (1986), is subtitled "My Father Bleeds History.") His mother committed suicide in 1968 when Art was 20 years old, while his father kept sane and alive by developing a hard shell of irascibility. As Spiegelman points out, Maus is about "the oedipal mystery of how the hell I got born with two parents who were supposed to be dead." In telling his father's story, Spiegelman healed some of the wounds of estrangement between him and his father, who saw some of the early chapters before his death in 1982. "Certainly just by drawing my father and having to inhabit him, there was a way of trying to understand him and trying to come to terms with him," he says. Many other younger cartoonists have followed in Spiegelman's footsteps in using comics to explore the darker side of the father- son relationship. Chris Ware, raised by his mother, met his father for the first time while he was working on "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" (2000), a semi-autobiographical account of a hapless soul whose father abandoned the family when he was young. Dan Clowes's "David Boring" (2000) features another young man who turns to an old superhero comic book to discover clues to his missing father. And working in collaboration with his father, John Gallant, the Canadian cartoonist Seth has created an illustrated picture book, called "Bannock, Beans and Black Tea" (2004), in which Gallant recalls a harrowing childhood at the hands of an abusive father on rural Prince Edward Island during the Depression. "I sometimes think about sending Art a Father's Day card," jokes Ware, a reference both to Spiegelman's influence, as well as his role in nurturing young cartoonists as an editor. In a more serious vein, Ware points out that for many young boys, cartooning can be a substitute for parental attention. "When I was a kid, I would spend hours filling up my sketchbook with muscle-bound superheroes," he says. "It seems obvious to me that characters like Superman and Batman are father-figures." . . . As he grew up, he also looked for cartooning fathers in such early masters as Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo"), George Herriman ("Krazy Kat"), and Frank King ("Gasoline Alley"), whose understated mastery he discovered in the 1977 Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Reading through yellowing clippings of the old daily strip of "Gasoline Alley," Ware says, he found a deep affinity with an artist who "tried to capture the texture and feeling of life as it slowly, inextricably, and hopelessly passed by." Recently, Ware and I (along with Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros) undertook a project to bring King's "Gasoline Alley" back into print in its entirety. As we researched the project, we began to see a persistent theme of father-son love (and its absence) in both the strip and King's life. In 1916, after suffering the stillbirth of one child, King and his wife gave birth to a son, Robert, who appeared five years later in "Gasoline Alley" as an impish young boy named Skeezix, the cherished adopted son of his "Uncle Walt." But a year later, even as Skeezix played with his adoring father, Robert was sent away to boarding school and saw his parents only in the summer. According to his daughter Drewanna, the adult Robert never talked about the strip that represented an idealized version of his own boyhood. One "Gasoline Alley" Sunday page from 1930 offers a typically bittersweet moment. As father and son take a walk in the fall, Skeezix asks Uncle Walt why the leaves change color. (King was the first cartoonist to forgo the convention of comic strip time and let his characters age.) The answers that Walt provides are less important than the tone and texture of the scene, a leisurely communion between parent and child marked by an undercurrent of sadness, the feeling that even when the idealized world of comics brings fathers and sons together, they will not be together forever. Jeet Heer is a frequent contributor to Ideas. "Walt & Skeezix" -- the first volume of his complete edition of Frank King's "Gasoline Alley," created in collaboration with Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros -- has just been published by Drawn & Quarterly.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 

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The Boston Globe has an unusual article about comic strips as a family business. Many of our oldest newspaper comic strips have been carried on from father to son. I've always wondered about this process, writer Jeet Heer does an interesting job of exploring it. Read the whole thing, it's a rare article about fathers, sons, and comics.

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"...a significant number of strips have stayed in the family in part because the practice of cartooning is akin to a kind of medieval guild. "It's a kind of craftsmanship and sensibility that is picked up by being in close association with people who are doing it," he says. "If you are part of a cartoonist's family, you get caught up into that world."

Posted at 07:39 AM    

Thu - February 10, 2005

Profile: Bob Newman

Nice profile of one of our designer pals back east. Is there a Robert Newman look? I always thought there was. The "sublimates his ego" is an interesting turn of phrase, and may be misleading. Classic case of countersignaling. It could mean that Newman harbors larger ambitions than you'd see at first glance, that he's just looking at the bigger picture.

The article mentions Bob's roots in Seattle, and The Rocket magazine (minor correction: it wasn't an alt-weekly, it was a music monthly) which spawned more than its share of talented designers during its best years, many of them having moved on to conquer New York. I'll add only this: from first-hand observation--and anyone who knows him personally or professionally would agree--Bob has WAY more style than he's being giving credit for here.

But we'll let Bob explain all that...read it, you'll dig it.

See the whole thing here.

Design Spotlight: Bob Newman

Fortune's design director talks about sublimating his ego, hop-scotching the print landscape, and the interchangability of art directors and editors.

By Greg Lindsay – February 3, 2005




THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a "Robert Newman Look." Unlike other designers—or, to be more specific, unlike Roger Black—Newman hasn't carried with him any stylistic flourishes or quirks (like Black's love of serif fonts and Oxford rules) when he's hop-scotched from magazine to magazine. Newman's method is more along the lines of total immersion. Whether it was the elegant minimalism of Real Simple, the Rat Pack-throwback look of mid-'90s Details, or the just-the-facts spareness of his current gig at Fortune, Newman was determined to mind-meld with the editorial vision rather than subvert it with his personal tastes. It didn't matter if that was the vision of Inside, Vibe, New York magazine, Entertainment Weekly, the Village Voice, and even the grunge heyday of Seattle's alt-weekly The Rocket.

Posted at 10:03 AM    

Wed - January 5, 2005

Tue - January 4, 2005

Comics Salon in the Attic

Drawn together by a common bond: comic books

Sunday, December 26, 2004
By Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Since August, they've gathered every Wednesday in the narrow aisles of Phantom of the Attic in Oakland.

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette

A salon for comic book creators has developed at Phantom of the Attic in Oakland. Regulars include, from left: Ed Piskor of Munhall, Jim Rugg of Aspinwall, Mark Zingarelli of Irwin, Pat Lewis of Shadyside, Farel Dalrymple of Tulsa, Okla., and Jasen Lex of O'Hara.
Click photo for larger image.

Related article

The comics corps

On the day new comics hit the shelves, a group of young men carrying sketch books and portfolios bulging with freshly drawn pages huddle in a corner of the store, flipping through a handful of alternative comics that are more to their liking.

As a group, they aren't attracted to the caped crusaders, hyper-augmented women and sinister megalomaniacs that grace the covers of most mainstream comic books. They can muster only the most cursory of glances at titles that rivet the majority of Phantom's customers. It's not that they're disdainful of "The Astonishing X-Men." They're merely indifferent to characters that look as if they've hung out with Barry Bonds' personal trainer for too many seasons.

Ed Piskor is usually the first to arrive. At 22, he's the youngest of an ambitious fraternity of cartoonists who spend most of their time -- discretionary or otherwise -- hunched over drawing tables. Every week, Piskor hops two buses from his home in Munhall to make the meetings. It takes a lot to dislodge him from his basement studio, but the Wednesday evening gatherings have quickly become necessary for the proper maintenance of his soul.

With his shock of unruly black hair and angular face, Piskor looks every inch the intense young cartoonist. His only other concession to a non-punk sensibility is a pair of square glasses Ben Franklin would've adored. When he talks, Piskor sounds like a throwback to an era when everyone talked like characters in a Martin Scorsese film. His drawings reflect his personality: bold, brooding and jarringly old school.

"I'm a 60-year-old curmudgeon trapped in a 22-year-old curmudgeon's body," Piskor said recently. There was a faint echo of "American Splendor" author Harvey Pekar in his voice, a comparison Piskor did nothing to discourage. After all, Pekar is the closest thing Piskor has to a mentor in the comic-book industry. They've been collaborators on several projects for major publishers for a year now, the happy culmination of skillful lobbying on Piskor's part.

Piskor's entrance at Phantom is usually followed by Pat Lewis, 29, a Murrysville native transplanted to Shadyside. Like Piskor, Lewis knew from a very young age that he was fated to be a cartoonist, but he always envisioned himself writing and drawing a daily newspaper strip.

Several years ago, Lewis was paid by a syndicate to develop several weeks' worth of daily strips he had pitched called "Matt's Rabbit." He thought they were close to a deal when the syndicate was suddenly swallowed by another, bringing every ounce of accrued good will and momentum to a halt. After pitching the strip to another round of syndicate bosses, Lewis got the picture: Breaking into daily newspaper strips is as difficult as breaking into Fort Knox.

Two years ago, Lewis stumbled on an article in Pittsburgh's City Paper about a cartoonist who wrote, drew and distributed a series of mini-comics through local comic shops. Missy Kulik, who has since moved to Georgia, impressed Lewis with her indifference to syndicates and large publishers. Her do-it-yourself attitude dovetailed nicely with Lewis' own disillusionment with the stranglehold syndicates exercise over the comic strip universe.

Intrigued by her chutzpah, Lewis studied Kulik's mini-comics, reverse-engineered them and was soon doing his own for roughly a buck each in production costs. Liberated from the tyranny of appealing to the lowest common denominator, Lewis cranked out a series of hilarious and provocative mini-comics that either mocked superhero conventions or avoided them altogether in favor of more idiosyncratic fare like human-monster romances and office politics.

Most alternative comic books are published through small imprints and have limited distribution in specialty shops. Some of these artists, such as Lewis and Jasen Lex, self-publish their works. They earn their salaries in many different ways: freelance, illustrating for small presses or hawking their comics at conventions.

"I've been doing stuff I would like to read," Lewis said of the disparate subjects he's tackled in the two years that his Lunch Break Comics imprint has been up and running. Lewis already has begun carving a niche as a perceptive social critic, mining his life for those humiliations with universal appeal.

Though his vaguely autobiographical "Thankless Job" mini-comic was nominated for a prestigious Ignatz Award at the Small Press Expo, the former office temp turned graphic designer isn't ready to quit his day job yet. He has adjusted his expectation of future sales upward, though.

"This group is helping me take it to the next level," Lewis said. "At some point, you have to invest in something better [than mini-comics]. Comics should have color covers and ISBN numbers. I want to expand readership to triple digits," he said wryly.

After Piskor and Lewis have drifted to a corner of the shop, their colleagues Jim Rugg and Lex usually arrive at Phantom together. Rugg and Lex have known each other since they were students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where they studied graphic design. It was their idea to put together a league of extraordinary local cartoonists to chew the fat, exchange work and serve as a mutual buffer against discouragement.

Rugg, 27, a Connellsville native with the all-American good looks of a superhero's alter ego, would strenuously resist being referred to as the group's "leader." It's a designation with a host of undemocratic intentions that the independent spirits who meet at Phantom every week wouldn't sit for.

Nevertheless, Rugg has been the group's primary recruiter -- reaching out to every cartoonist he thinks would fit their profile. His pitch is simple: Come down to Phantom on Wednesday evening and check us out. We'll wander down the street for coffee and a round of ink-stained fellowship and conversation about what does and doesn't work in comics. We're serious people, so don't come clowning or talking about how much you can't wait for the next issue of "The Avengers."

Rugg is uniquely poised to make the pitch. As the artist and co-writer of the acclaimed "Street Angel" series published by Slave Labor Graphics out of San Jose, Calif., Rugg has a four-issue track record of sustained quality. Rugg is also the only member of the group's inner core of cartoonists who is married, a feat that fills several of his colleagues with wonder.

"I don't see how he does it," Piskor said of Rugg's juggling of domestic and artistic priorities. "He holds down a 9-to-5 job, finds time early in the morning to draw before he goes to work and sketches every spare moment of the day. Then he gets together with us on Wednesdays. He has to balance all of that and the expectations of marriage."

Lex's surreal world

The group's consigliore, if he could be called that, is Lex, 27, the only member of the group who was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Bespectacled, bearded and as tall and thin as Piskor, everyone calls him "Lex." Like his colleagues, Lex is a published comic book author-illustrator, but he does the least conventional work in the group.

His "The Gypsy Lounge: Lunchtime Variety Criminals" on the Aweful Books imprint he and Rugg formed after their stint at IUP is a nearly 200-page graphic novel full of surreal twists and visual delights. Lex writes and draws the kind of self-consciously brainy fare that mainstream comic book publishers are committed to thinning from the ranks. Lex's approach to storytelling is tech-heavy and purposely obscure. Craftily superimposing drawings over photo backdrops, Lex uses a Photoshop graphic manipulation program as his primary tool for storytelling. The result was a mixed-media grab bag that amounts to a virtual walking (and flying) tour of Pittsburgh. It is a three-year labor of love.

"In mainstream comics, everything is handed to you," Lex said, massaging the red fish tattoo just below his left wrist. "The kind I want to do will be different."

Though just as prolific as his colleagues when it comes to drawing, Lex is most at ease with technology's potential as a tool for sequential art and narrative.

"I'm comfortable working this way," he said. "It's easier for me to work with photographs. If I had to draw a building, I'd be uncomfortable."

Lex's sketch book is full of evidence that he could easily draw a building, but his point is an important one: Why draw a building if there is a more efficient way to represent it? Lex believes an author's attention should be focused on the story, not the background. Still, it would be impossible to consider the constantly shifting photographic background in "The Gypsy Lounge" as secondary to the story.

Lex's primary characters are represented in a stylized fashion somewhat reminiscent of the work of the late underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode and look relatively static posed over the background. Though distinct, the elements complement each other.

Meeting of minds

Jeff Yandora, the owner of Phantom of the Attic, has been watching the group since it began meeting in his shop. "They were interested in attracting a think tank of artists and writers in the comics, fantasy and sci-fi genres," he said.

"If I find customers I think will fit in and benefit, I try to direct them to the group. Some people are shy and don't want to come. There's a lot of talent in the Pittsburgh area. Most of these folks are younger, but they're up-and-coming superstars nonetheless," Yandora said.

Wayne Wise, an assistant manager at Phantom and an award-winning independent comics creator, taught classes in comic book storytelling at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in the early '90s, and Piskor was one of his students.

"It all seemed to happen very naturally," Wise said of the young creators. "It's a support group if nothing else. Every week they come together to share information and war stories. What's nice is that they're all getting their work out without going the traditional superhero route. None of them is aiming at drawing Superman or Spider-Man."

"It's still a novelty having this many people meet to talk about comics," Lex said. On a Wednesday evening in mid-November, Lex, Rugg, Piskor and Lewis rendezvoused with cartoonists Farel Dalrymple and Mark Zingarelli at Phantom before going to the Kiva Han down the street for coffee and conversation.

Zingarelli, white-haired and firmly ensconced in middle-age, was delighted to meet younger artists who consider him a role model because of his two-decade experience in alternative comics. Zingarelli was part of a similar group of artists who got together in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of whom were eventually published by Fantagraphics, the leading publisher of cutting-edge underground and alternative comics.

"I've been meaning to get down here for a while to meet these guys," the Irwin resident said. "I've been a big fan of Eddie's work in 'American Splendor.' Harvey Pekar thinks the world of this kid, and so do I. All of these guys inspire me more than I could possibly inspire them."

Dalrymple, the acclaimed graphic-novel artist/writer of "Pop Gun War," had been hanging out with Lex and Rugg fairly consistently, but the self-described "drifter" was already planning to pick up stakes and head for Tulsa, Okla., to take care of unspecified business.

Though he made his mark at Dark Horse Comics, Dalrymple has also worked for mainstream publisher D.C., so his insights into the industry have been particularly helpful to the other cartoonists. As soon as Dalrymple sat down, he began sketching. Piskor and Lex joined him in a round of furious scribbling.

Meanwhile, conversation around the table moved from an appreciation of the old Classics Illustrated comics to the pros and cons of Japanese Manga to the medium's potential to convey an author's vision in a novelistic way. There is plenty of spirited agreement and respectful disagreement, with everyone at the table taking part in the discussion.

"Have you ever come across a comic book that moves you to the point of weeping?" Zingarelli asked. The question was provocative enough to momentarily startle his companions. There was some murmured assent and equal amounts of head shaking.

"I cry more from movies," the mysterious Dalrymple said.

"I've been moved to tears by one of Chris Ware's comics," Lewis said.

Piskor shook his head. Rugg took the question to heart, pondering his answer carefully before saying anything. Zingarelli smiled and talked about a Mark Helpern collection of stories that had recently moved him to tears.

Gone fishin'

It was a remarkable evening of conversation, one that is repeated every Wednesday with a different set of artists. In recent weeks, the artist Joseph Urban and his collaborator Brandon Knowlden have joined the Phantom crew to compare notes, as has the award-winning Thomas Scioli, a cartoonist whose work evokes middle-period Jack Kirby. Scioli is currently finishing a project for Image Comics and can't get out as often as he'd like. There are other artists and writers who've indicated they'd like to check the group out in the coming weeks. Zingarelli vows to spend more time with them after the holidays.

"Jim is always fishing for new people to join the group," Lex said. "Ironically, he's the more antisocial of the two of us. I'm the one who didn't like the idea at first, but I quickly warmed to it."

Lex believes the Pittsburgh scene is moving toward some kind of critical mass in the comics industry. "This year things started to catch on," he said. "As soon as Jim got the contract with Slave Labor, things started moving."

"Ed doing 'American Splendor' is huge, too," Lewis said. "I've seen 'Street Angel' on a lot of best of 2004 year-end lists. Jim and Ed are phenomenal artists."

For all their cleverness, the group has yet to come up with a snappy tag for itself. Though no one has ever proposed a nickname that captures the spirit of their association, the notion that it is already doomed to be half as catchy as "the Lost Generation," "the Inklings" or "the Futurians" is out there, so why bother?

Just don't call them something as obvious as "the Phantoms of the Attic."

(Staff writer Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.)

Mark Zingarelli sent me this article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a group of cartoonists who've begun meeting regularly at Phantom of the Attic in Oakland. Great idea, I'd attend, too, if I lived nearby. How dangerous is it when cartoonists get together like this? Isn't there some kind of law? Contact Homeland Security. These boys might be hatching a secret plot to takeover the publishing world.

Posted at 09:43 AM    

Sun - December 19, 2004

Mon - November 22, 2004

Sun - November 7, 2004

Thu - October 28, 2004

Sun - October 17, 2004

Sun - October 10, 2004

strange fruit

No caption. I just like the photo. From CNN's Weird and wacky pictures

Posted at 09:25 AM