The Week

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people… Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society…

Huey P. Newton, 1970

The week in review

This week Obama finally put on the line his position of gay rights. Forget the spin, it was an important moment. One that will hopefully vindicate the despicable distraction the Bush government used to get elected in 2004. One for the books, even if it loses Obama the election, and it seems we can be pretty confident it won’t.

This week’s links:

  • Matt Taibi on Dodd Frank and the general lack of financial reform. Muck-raking as usual, and on point, as usual.
  • Kirby roundtable at The Comics Journal. OK, I’m late to the table, but if you missed or went tl;dr on it, it’s well worth the time for anybody even remotely interested in the great cartoonist Jack Kirby, superhero comics, or just great art. It also yielded a link to this fantastic examination of Kirby’s collage work.
  • Maurice Sendak. This week, one of the greatest cartoonists and children’s books illustrators alive isn’t anymore. Sad to see him go to where the Wild Things are. I found the New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox excellent, and not a little touching, as is this 2008 interview with him in the same paper. The obituary at The Comics Journal is good too, and check out this short 1987 interview.
  • The other notable — and sadly early — passing, of course, was that of Adam Yauch, aka. MCA of the Beastie Boys. I already wrote a little on his achievements, but just wanted to point anyone not already in the loop toward this:
  • Adam Yauch RIP


    As the stray reader might have noticed, the blog has been dormant for a while here, feeling the effects of pressure elsewhere. I can’t let the passing of Adam Yauch, aka. MCA of the Beastie Boys pass in complete silence, however.

    I refer you to the New York Times obituary for the lowdown on his remarkable career, and New York Magazine‘s oral history for a record of the auspicious beginnings of the Beastie Boys. Here, I’ll merely add that they were always the exception to the rule: three Jewish kids staking an entirely credible claim in hip hop that has never been challenged, communicating with a wide, predominantly white audience at a time when the genre had not yet become the commercial juggernaut we came to see through the nineties, and doing it without losing any cred with the hardcore audience. Part of their innovation, and surely instrumental to their success, is that they took the humor and irony of old school rap and gave it their own twist, maintaining and developing it over the years as the rest of hip hop largely forgot it.

    They may not ever been a the center of things in hip hop, but always retained their spot simply because they were doing their thing so convincingly. Something no other white act, not even 3rd Bass or Eminem, were able to achieve more than momentarily.


    With Paul’s Boutique they took things to the next level. This is abstract, at times entirely instrumental, hip hop before such a thing existed in any large measure. A record that expanded the very idea of sampling as a creative avenue in music in ways only few other artists — primarily The Bomb Squad — had been able to until then. Not only is it hard to imagine DJ Shadow, Company Flow, Anticon, or many other city-to-suburban hip hop pioneers of the late nineties and early naughts without the example of the Dust Brothers and the Beasties, they also anticipated developments in more true school experimental hip hop, from Native Tongues to Hieroglyphics, and more fundamentally they surely helped shape the evolution of electronic music in ways that remain to be examined.


    Besides grounding the group with his awesome bass playing, Yauch’s raspy basso was the foundation of the three-way exchange on the mic the trio developed over the years. Beyond that he was the straight guy to Mike D and Adrock’s clownery, crucially tempering their frivolity by dropping the odd bits of science around his own tomfoolery. The moral center to the group. Rest in peace.

    The Week

    The week in review

    Vacation and work have kept me away for a while, a will probably continue to do so for a little while yet. While in Boston, I checked back on one of the city’s premier cultural institutions.

    The new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is emblematic of museum branding today, all the more so because of the particular intractability of its foundational stipulations. In a cultural climate where having a great collection simply isn’t enough, institutional visibility has become closely tied to event culture. for a museum that can’t even rehang its collection, this is of course a problem, so what do you do? Raise $180 million and hire go-to starchitect Renzo Piano to facilitate all the things museums seem convinced they have to do to stay afloat these days: an new wing housing a concert hall, a gift shop, a restaurant, a children’s art room, an exhibition space for artists-in-residence, a greenery. All sustainable, geothermal and daylight-harvesting, of course.

    You do what you gotta do to survive, I suppose, but the absurdity of this trend for museum’s to go extra-curricular is particularly clear at the Gardner, whose intermittently great collection is forever trapped in a mediocre hang by the vanity of its founder, who insisted that everything be presented exactly as she left it at her death. This results in many important works being hung a low visibility and in often idiosyncratic and unenlightening juxtaposition, with the preciously empty frames of masterworks stolen in 1990 remaining on the walls as if to consecrate this “vision.” A new wing could have worked wonders for the presentation of the museum’s masterpieces, if only.

    Still, Boston has a new, reportedly great concert hall and I’m sure Piano’s elegant building will attract customers. It has the potential to become a strong cultural center, if it does not blow too many leaks and if the museum’s direction finds ways of breaking its somewhat stale reputation. A good thing, even if the overall tendency is troubling.

    A bunch of recent comics links:

  • The new Du9. One of the best critical sites about comics on the web, du9.org has just undergone a thorough, attractive redesign, led by editor-in-chief Xavier Guilbert’s extensive analysis of developments in the French-language comics market in the last year or so.
  • Neal Kirby on his Father Jack Kirby. Touching and informative reminiscence of growing up Kirby.
  • Shaenon Garrity on the fifty greatest pop songs about comics. Inventive, fun, insightful. And it mentions the Last Emperor’s amazing “Secret Wars.” I should add that the Philly MC does dead-ringing impressions of the rappers he casts in his epic comic book battle. Here’s hoping she will post part two soon.
  • Giraud/Moebius Remembered at Nummer9


    For the past three weeks, the Danish comics site has been remembering comics legend Jean Giraud/Moebius’ passing with articles, essays, reminiscences from a number of Danish creators, and — most interesting to a non-Danish reading audience: drawn homages. Go here for a panoply of drawings on “The Theme” by Denmark’s finest.

    Above is Jan Solheim, below Christian Højgaard reinterprets the last page of The Hermetic Garage.

    Kolor Klimax Press Pack

    Kolor Klimax cover illo by Aapo Rapi


    Hello and welcome to the Kolor Klimax press pack! Thanks for clicking in and for your interest in the book!

    Below you will find links to hi-res images from the book, ready for publication, as well as other resources that might be helpful. Please let us know if we can help you with anything else. And enjoy the book! Continue reading ‘Kolor Klimax Press Pack’

    Wivel’s Nordic Mixtape

    By Steffen Rayburn Maarup

    As mentioned in this space once or twice, Kolor Klimax — Nordic Comics Now, edited by this site’s owner Matthias Wivel, is now available in bookstores across North America, and thus the rest of the world. To mark the official release, I decided to ask him a few questions on the book, the project and the future.

    Why a Nordic comics anthology? Why the US? And why Fantagraphics?

    The idea came from the Finnish Comics Society. They’ve been running an international initiative called Nordicomics — which includes exhibitions and workshops — for a number of years now, and figured that publishing an anthology series in English would help their mission to promote Nordic comics internationally. The idea is that this is the first in a series of books with rotating editors, under the general helmsmanship of Kalle Hakkola of FCS, who is responsible for Nordicomics. The second book is already being planned and will be totally different from Kolor Klimax in concept as well as content. As I understand it, the idea is that every book will be a stand-alone work.

    As for Fantagraphics, I basically bit the idea from you. As I’m sure it did for your Danish anthology From Wonderland with Love, it just seemed the obvious choice — besides having been one of the best American comics publishers for decades, they’re consistently the most interested in supporting grass roots projects such as this one, as long as the quality is there. And co-publisher Kim Thompson is half Danish and knows about and is interested in Nordic comics already. Continue reading ‘Wivel’s Nordic Mixtape’

    KOLOR KLIMAX Available Worldwide!


    Kolor Klimax — Nordic Comics Now, the big fat anthology of contemporary Nordic comics that I’ve edited for the Finnish comics initiative Nordicomics is now available for order from its publisher Fantagraphics Books, as well as on bookshelves all over America and worldwide (theoretically, at least).

    Above is the publisher’s promotional video. See photos from and of it here, and check out its Facebook page here.

    The Week


    The week in review

    The passing of Jean Giraud is the passing of one of the great cartoonists and visual artists of his generation. It had become easy to take the enormously productive artist for granted, even to bore of him, what with him performing well below his own best a lot of the time in the last couple of decades, but it should not be forgotten that this was somebody who generously gave of his vision of the world, making it his through his drawing and storytelling, and ever-so-subtly affecting our common visual imaginary. His was a quiet ubiquity of a kind that only few artists could ever hope to reach. He shall be missed.

    The snap above was taken at the Angoulême train station on the Sunday of the festival in 2006, reading the already seminal Kramers Ergot 4. F-R-E-S-H.

    Here are some Giraud/Moebius links:

  • Kim Thompson’s 1987 interview with the artist for The Comics Journal. One of the best interviews I’ve read with the man.
  • Moebius Redux. Somewhat tacky, but still very good documentary on the artist, with some choice appearances by especially Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Druillet. The former is hilarious, the latter touchingly pathetic. Giraud himself is remarkably candid too, even if certain parts of his life — such as his cultism in Tahiti — are only hinted at.
  • Images from Giraud’s funeral. A veritable who’s who of French cartoonist gathered. The image of his long-time friend and partner Jean-Pierre Dionnet in itself speaks volumes.
  • My own writing on Giraud/Moebius include this week’s examination at Hooded Utilitarian of his last, great book Chasseur déprime, which connected to my 2009 essay for The Comics Journal on his greatest single creation, The Hermetic Garage. For the same magazine, I also reviewed the grand career retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2010. For Danish readers, I wrote at some length about his last, extraordinary Blueberry cycle back in 2005, plus I wrote this obit in Friday’s book section at Information.
  • Moebius at Hooded Utilitarian


    Earlier today I posted an appreciation of the late Moebius’ last great work, Le Chasseur déprime, over at Hooded Utilitarian. Reading that book in the light of his illness and death suddenly seemed to make a lot of sense. It is among his most profound, questioning works — a fitting artistic testament from somebody who changed our way of seeing. Go check it out.

    Fin de l’épisode

    The End of an Era

    From Beatty's overture

    By Thomas Thorhauge

    It was a surprise when Sammy Harkham and Picture Box publisher Dan Nadel announced their plans for Kramers Ergot 8 about a year ago. Some of us had assumed that the monumental Kramers Ergot 7 had been the decadent word in what has been by far the most groundbreaking comics anthology of the new century.

    Despite good intentions and hard work, Kramers Ergot 7 was a disappointment, but on the other hand it was a book with everything to lose and little to gain, and at any rate it marked a fitting finale to a great run.

    As an aesthetic project, Kramers Ergot has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations, and especially the breakthrough Kramers Ergot 4 remains the high point of helmsman Sammy Harkham’s anthology series. Continue reading ‘The End of an Era’

    The Week


    The week in review

    Whew! What a week. It seems the great things that have been brewing in Danish comics for the last few years are finally starting to make waves, what with a year of excellent and innovative homegrown comics, the resurrected Ping Awards, plans proceeding for an official educational track for comics makers at the fine Animation Workshop in Viborg, and the ambitious further development of the comics festival Komiks.dk, which has now changed its name to Copenhagen Comics and will once again be held in Øksnehallen, Copenhagen, in 2013 — bigger and better than ever, if the current signs are to be believed.

    It’s all still baby steps of course, and there’s a long way to go before we can talk about genuine consolidation in terms of financial security or cultural clout. As things are, much of all this is run on a volunteer basis and a shoestring budget and it remains hard to muster the support, public or private, for comics accorded to other art forms in the country.

    Still, the will seems to be there and good comics continue to be made. The photo above is from the release on Thursday of sometime Bunker denizen and my long-time collaborator (and Danish Comics Council chairman, and Ping director) Thomas Thorhauge’s latest comic, Det sidste ord (‘The Last Word’). The book compiles a series of strips done for the film section of the daily Politiken from 2009-2010, adding two longer, similar strips from elsewhere as well as a brand new one.

    The concept is one that harks back to “M”, his contribution to BLÆK, an anthology we edited together in 2006 — a comic reprinted in English in the Fantagraphics/Aben Maler production From Wonderland with Love. Thomas takes authentic quotes from figures of interest and illustrates them in comics form. In the case of the Politiken strips, the focus is a diverse range of personalities from cinema. (One, on Godard, is republished in English here).

    In the newspaper, they were primarily fun, satirical mini-portraits of the celebrities involved, but taken together they become much more than that — Thomas has been sensitive to certain types of quotes, dealing with issues of vanity, desire, aging, legacy, and death, and has crafted from them an acutely personal statement on life, all the while producing a very funny book. A direct jump from his last book’s youthful aspirations to something anticipating mid-life reflection. Give it a (second) look.

    Photo by Frederik Høyer-Christensen. The entire set is here.

    This week’s links:

  • Obama on Iran. The American President talks to Jeffrey Goldberg in anticipation of his meeting today with the Israeli Prime Minster and his address at AIPAC.
  • Carl Th. Dreyer on his métier. Recorded at the Copenhagen cinemathèque in 1968, Dreyer answers questions from film students a few weeks before his death. Fantastic, although sadly not subtitled in English (yet?). (Thanks @monggaard!)
  • Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax. A passionate examination of the comics of the Italian master. Replete with rather shaky assertions, but great on observation.
  • Danish Comics of the Year 2011


    This year, Danish comics culture is seeing the revival of the Ping Awards, an industry award last given back in the Nineties. Once a hall of fame prize, it is now awards cartoonists in five categories in the manner of the Angoulême Fauves. This year focuses on comics published in 2011, and five Danish comics have been selected in their particular category. Although I didn’t participate in the nomination process, I was involved in organizing the event, and was part of the jury that selected Rikke Bakman’s Glimt as Danish Comic of the Year. So I’m biased, but I can say immediately that it was very hard indeed to select a winner. Here are the five nominees — for my money not just the five best Danish comics of last year, but the strongest showing in Danish comics for a long time. Continue reading ‘Danish Comics of the Year 2011′

    Post-Ping


    The Ping Awards gala last night? A success, no doubt about it. Sold out, full house, crowded and fun! The young event team had pulled out all the stops and were almost entirely stress-free. Things just worked.

    Anyway, this was a major event in the small subculture that Danish comics, and one we hope will continue for many years. It was done on a shoestring budget and came off looking like, well, not like a million kroner, but really neat. And there was a real atmosphere of enthusiasm for comics, even from the media who have covered the event surprisingly soberly and smartly.

    As for the Danish prize winners, they were remarkable not only for their quality, but also for what they tell us about Danish comics right now. I’ve written at some length about each of the nominees for Best Danish Comic for Paul Gravett’s Best of 2011 rundown, and the general conclusion bears repeating here: this is perhaps the strongest showing in a single year of the last decade or more. A long time.

    Finally, it seems that Danish comics are shedding years of polished euro-mainstream fetishization of craft at the expense of ideas and expression. These comics have heart, they want to tell you something. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the majority of them are by women.

    With Danish comics culture having been male-dominated for way longer than those even of our closest neighbors in Sweden and Finland, it seems women understandably have stayed away. The great Nikoline Werdelin has been the main exception to the rule for years. But now women creators are making waves like never before with strong, original work.

    That’s just one factor of course, but perhaps the most spectacular one right now. More generally, however, a new generation of cartoonists less concerned with the trends of the past is emerging, and considering the fact that the two big and longstanding big publishers, Carlsen and Egmont fused and went on more or less to implode a few years back, a surprising number of excellent comics from around the world are still being translated and published in Danish.

    There’s still much room for improvement of course, and it remains a rather small fragile comics culture, but things are looking up!

    Here are this year’s Ping winners:

  • Best Danish Debut: Post-it monstre by John Kenn Mortensen
  • Best Comic for a Younger Audience: Ankomsten by Shaun Tan
  • Best International Comic in Danish: Speedy Ortiz dør by Jaime Hernandez
  • Best International Comics : Habibi by Craig Thompson
  • Best Danish Online Comic: Signe Parkins & Drawings by Signe Parkins
  • The Hall of Fame Award: Rolf Bülow and Søren Pedersen, founders of Fantask
  • Best Danish Comic: Glimt by Rikke Bakman
  • Photo above by Niels Larsen. Check his Flickr set from the night here.

    PING!

    Tonight is the night of the grand PING gala at Lille Vega in Copenhagen. The resurrected Danish comics award will be handed out in six categories for the first time!

    Who rocked the comics internet in Denmark? Who arrived on the scene with the biggest bang? Who spoke most convincingly to the youth? What’s going on abroad and how with it are we in Denmark? Who will enter the Danish Hall of Fame? And who blew up the spot on these shores?

    These questions and many more will be answered in Lille Vega tonight. Hosted by media personality Anders Lund Madsen and featuring guest appearances from several of his colleagues, the night will also feature a live drawing event, music, and free beer for the early birds! Doors at seven, show starts at eight.

    Get your tickets here.