To all the panels we've pattered before, that have walked in and out our door, we dedicate this song...
** All-Ages or Small-Ages #17 (Phineas and Ferb by Jim Bernstein, Scott Peterson, John Green and Eric Jones) (Mark D.)
** Catch Comics Fire with the First Elements Anthology (Rob M.)
** All-Ages or Small-Ages #18 (Miraculous: Tales of Lady Bug and Cat Noir #1 by Thomas Astruc, Nicole D'Andria, Fred Lenoir and Cheryl Black) (Mark D.)
** The Story Never Ends-- a review of Jeff Smith'sBone: Coda (Scott C.)
** Kill or Be Killed #1 (James K.)
** Glorious Wrestling Alliance #1 (Mark D.)
** Rob Kirby's Review Roundup: August 2016 Edition (Rob K.)
** The Black Monday Murders #1 (James K.)
** How did you spend International Marlys day last Tuesday? I spent a portion of the day writing about Drawn & Quarterly's new Lynda Barry collection The Greatest of Marlys! Perhaps a bit sad, this was my first real exposure to Barry's comics. I've seen some of them before but I never spent a lot of time (it took me most of last weekend to read the whole book.)
As Barry’s characters experience things like love and disappointment for the first time, her comic books give us a reopened window into our own childhood. Some things in The Greatest of Marlys! are trapped to a particular point in the 20th century (who ever thought that candy cigarettes were a good thing to sell kids?), but the day-to-day experiences of these kids, the scary uncertainties and unbridled joys, take you back to the days when you probably didn’t have the needed experiences to be able to mentally or emotionally frame them. Everyday was something new and something important. But tomorrow is going to be new and important too and Barry’s comics capture that unending pursuit of discovery and continuing synthesis of experience with knowledge. And sometimes it gets all a bit jumbled, and Barry perfectly depicts that in the strips where Marlys’ imagination sometimes gets in the way of what really is.One of the things I really didn't have the space to go into is the longer stories that Barry tells with these characters but on Tuesday, Cory Doctorow wrote about Barry and included an excerpt from the story of Marlys' brother Freddie and his encounter with a young arsonist Jim Jimmy Jim, which is probably the point in the book where Barry just had me wrapped around her storytelling finger.
from The Greatest of Marlys! by Lynda Barry
** 2016 Ignatz Nominees announced (The Beat)-- At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald has the list of this year's nominees for The Ignatz awards. SPX will be the weekend of September 17th & 18th.
** CARTOONIST DOGAN GÜZEL AMONG JOURNALISTS ARRESTED IN TURKEY PRESS PURGE (Cartoonists Rights Network International)-- CRNI has news about the arrest of a Turkish cartoonist in a press purge. Reuters has more details on the shut down and arrests at the pro-Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Gundem.
Turkish police have detained at least 24 people working for a pro-Kurdish newspaper since it was banned this week on suspicion of supporting Kurdish militants, the newspaper said.** Here are some more preview pages and panels for The Shirley Jackson Project (Rob Kirby's tumblr)-- Rob Kirby shares some pages from an upcoming anthology he's editing about Shirley Jackson.
The detentions bring the number of imprisoned Turkish media workers to 99, based on figures from the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) media watchdog, making Turkey the world's biggest jailer of journalists.
Anya Davison's Band for Life
**A NEW AGE OF STONER COMICS IS SMOKING OUT THE UNDERGROUND CLASSICS (The Kind)-- In this age of listicles and top 10s, I don't know if I've seen anyone else do this top 10 but then again, I may just be hanging out on the wrong websites.
In the first wave of modern drug culture, underground comic books such as Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix and Gilbert Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers arrived like loaded Trojan Horses: Their psychedelic magic was worked through a medium traditionally meant to beguile children with flying musclemen and funny animals. Marijuana was essential to this fresh form of comics, for artists and audiences alike.
from Sheriff of Babylon #1, art by Mitch Gerards
** The Spy Who Came Into the Comic Book Store (The Ringer)-- The Ringer profiles one of the the most interesting writers working at DC and Marvel today, Tom King.
“[Writing Sheriff] was not how I wanted to spend my days, being back in those memories,” he said. “PTSD is a weird thing where it can do two things to you and do it simultaneously. They always show one side of it on TV. You know, ‘I’m so ashamed of what I did,’ or, ‘Something bad happened to me. It brings back these memories of fear.’ But PTSD also does this other thing where it’s, like, when I was there and I was in danger, but I was also happy because I had a simple goal. Now I’m back here and I’m with my family and I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad. I feel bad and guilty at the same time, like I want to be there and I don’t want to be there.”**Comics Criticism: Seven Hot Takes for Summer 2016 (The Comics Journal)-- TCJ's Ken Parille takes his shots at today's comic criticism.
4. “I’m not that relevant, and I’m kind of ok about it . . .
If you ask a comics critic who/what is the most important element in the world of “comics,” don’t be surprised if the answer is . . . The Comics Critic! But who really advances The Cause in meaningful ways? Here’s a list, loosely arranged from most important on down.
Good Cartoonists.
Publishers and Editors who identify and support good cartoonists.
Educators from kindergarten to college teachers who discuss comics in their classes.
Librarians who order, display, and recommend comics. (Like teachers, librarians help to create a new generation of comics readers.)
Editors of and Reviewers for important and widely-read publications.
Publishers’ Publicity People (who help good work find its audience).
Readers who seek out “the good stuff.”
Everybody else.
** Preview: Johnny Appleseed by Paul Buhle & Noah Van Sciver (Study Group)-- The Study Group website has a preview of the upcoming Johnny Appleseed book coming from Alternative Comics in October.
The story of John Chapman operates as a kind of counter-narrative to the glorification of violence, conquest, “winning of the West” in the story of Westward movement, and points up many of the half-myths of Johnny Appleseed’s own life and work. His apples, for instance, were prized for many reasons but mainly the making of hard cider, portable alcohol. His method of operation was a form of land speculation, purchasing potentially fertile (such as “bottom land”) acres on contract, planting saplings, and reselling the land, then moving onward.