It looks like there’s some of the ol’ SPX organizational weirdness afoot according to the Camel City Cartoonists’ Guild and Social Club’s blog, The Three Cent Pup. I’m one of the folks whose table space is part of the application packet mentioned in the post–so here’s hoping this gets cleared up–I loves me the SPX! (For anyone following along, though, this would seem to fall squarely into item 7 from this essay of mine from a couple of years ago, although hopefully this is just some weird snafu and we won’t have a problem getting table space.)

This actually prompted me to go seeking an SPX banner to place up top on my page, below the Indie Island banner, but all the ones on the site still say “2006.” So, for now, SPX pimpin’ here will have to wait for new banners… and hopefully confirmation of actually having a table.

For years aficionados of the comics art form have bemoaned its apparent lack of respectability with the mainstream public and wondered when comics would, finally, gain the cultural cache they deserve. An oft-discussed scenario in these ruminations is the prospect of reading comics in public places–as if the true harbinger of comics’ cultural “arrival” would be when one could, without self-consciousness, open a comic book or graphic novel and read it comfortably in the local coffee shop, or on the train.

Personally, I’ve never had any real problem reading comics in public places; I really don’t care if the “unwashed masses” think I’m an imbecile.

Ironically, though, what I have had a problem reading in public places lately is The Comics Journal. My attempts to read the previous issue while working out in the cardio room of the YMCA (one of the few times I have these days for casual reading) was stymied, as I found it too troublesome, amidst a packed room of folks, to try to discretely wade through the issue, whilst avoiding the numerous Frank Thorne drawings of 45 DDD women in chain mail getting humped five ways to Friday by groups of demons and whatnot. (I gave up and read a three year-old issue of Entertainment Weekly. Apparently there’s a movie being made of Spongebob Squarepants–whoda thunk it?)

With this incident squarely behind me, I’d been holding out on reading the newest issue, the “Best of 2006” issue, until just today, since I’d be traveling most of the day en route to Ft. Lauderdale, and figured I’d make use of otherwise dead time in the plane and airport to take in this issue. But, alas, the issue is so festooned throughout with Melinda Gebbie’s technicolor drawings of genitalia in action, that it looks like I’ll wind up passing on it as well, at least when packed in sardine-style next to some random stranger on a plane.

I’m no prude, but there’s something sort of tragic about the fact that I would probably be less likely to be cast a disparaging glance (or worse) reading the latest issue of Maxim than recent issues of The Comics Journal. I mean, I can pick up a magazine on artsy film stuff that features an interview with Akira Kurosawa without having his “package” depicted on the cover James Sturm-style.

Just a thought…

For those you not as ancient as I, that post title is a reference to some TV ads from the 1970s for a brokerage firm. The gag in the ads was that entire rooms of people would stop whatever they were doing, and turn around to listen, whenever they realized a client of the brokerage firm in question was nearby and was about to discuss some advice he had received. It’s not too far from what’s been going on the last few days as Dan Vado, head honcho of SLG (publishers of yours truly) has once again been the cause of much consternation and debate on the internets.

Here’re Dan’s original remarks via Newsarama. If you’re so interested you can get a good wrap-up of the ensuing maelstrom via Dan’s Livejournal page. These are of course Dan’s replies to other people’s reactions, but you can easily track back to the original commentary if you so desire.

I’ve got no burning interest in joining the extended debate going on–a debate which seems frankly to be a classic online “tempest in a teacup.” In fact, I have to admit that, when I first read Dan’s remarks via the Newsarama story, I really didn’t take much note of it; discussion of the financially problematic nature of the creator-owned business model had already been making the rounds of late, and what were obviously some off-the-cuff remarks to a highly hypothetical question didn’t strike me as anything either particularly novel or inflamatory. Given, though, that the internets are alive with the sounds of Vado, I’ll just mention two things this jump out at me:

First, there seems to be a group of folks who have decided that Dan has now revealed himself to be some sort of mustache-twirling money-grubbing soul-stealing corporate comics robber baron. To that, I can say only that I know from personal empirical experience that this is demonstrably false. I’ve had two projects published by SLG. The first, Farewell, Georgia, made a modest profit; the second, Midnight Sun, has yet to make money. And yet, SLG continues to publish my work. My point isn’t that SLG is some sort of charity, (they’re not–they want to turn a profit, as does every business) but rather that clearly the company’s goals have not been (nor would I wager they’re changing to overnight, as a result of a Q&A at Wondercon) the short-term creative rape and pillage suggested.

Secondly, just an observation: over at The Beat, cartoonist James Kochalka comments on his recent, and apparently quite creator-friendly, book deal with publishing giant Random House. James seems like a nice guy (we’ve run into each other once or twice at cons, at CCS, etc.), but I think that–aside even from the obvious “apples and oranges” comparison going on–in this case his comment actually buttresses, rather than disproves, Dan’s point. Although not mentioned by either James or Dan (curiously), James Kochalka is in fact one of the many cartoonists who did early work that was published by Slave Labor Graphics–Little Mister Man and Magic Boy and Robot Elf are both SLG books if I’m getting my facts straight. The fact that now, years later, James could–hypothetically–take characters from those SLG-published books to someone like Random House, and that he’d be in a position to do so as an established creator in some part because of being published initially by SLG, and yet be able to do so without SLG really seeing anything from it, is precisely what Dan seems to be addressing as potentially problematic.

I was rooting through some old archived CDs of some of my assignments from art school looking for a comp to send a potential client and I stumbled on the following interview I did with cartoonist Art Spiegelman for the school paper. I hadn’t thought about the interview in a long time, but after reading it over I thought it’d be a good thing to post it here and get it out there on the internets.

Things that occur to me now, upon reading this interview for the first time in six years:

• This interview was conducted about the time that the first Little Lit book came out and I remember Spiegelman getting somewhat defensive when I started giving him the “what for” about whether this book was truly suitable for children–or even intended as such.
• If the “date modified” listing on the Word document is to be believed, the interview was conducted in April of 2001, a few months before 9/11/2001 and consequently before Spiegelman went full-tilt into his Shadow of No Towers phase, yet you can already see the vitriolic anti-Bush sentiment in place and ready to catalyze in his remarks toward the end of the interview.
• And finally, I recall that the careers office at SCAD (where I was at school and where Spiegelman was speaking) getting really up in arms about his “burger flipping” comment in the interview; they even had a letter published in the next issue of the paper about SCAD’s “no starving artists” goal/program.

Enjoy:

BT: For years comic book artists and fans have begrudged the fine art community for ignoring comic book art. But lately comics are less and less likely to fly under the critical radar. Academia is taking an interest in the medium, an example being SCAD which offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Sequential Art, [cartoonist] Ben Katchor recently won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” and you have curated a number of museum exhibitions of comics art. What do you think the long term effects are going to be of this “institutionalization” of comics?

SPIEGELMAN: It’s a dance with the devil. On the other hand, it’s the only dance available if you don’t want to be a wallflower. I think that it allows for there to be a future for comics outside that of strictly for commerce, and maybe that’s a good thing. There are people who find themselves nourished by poetry, and, except for Rob McEwan, there are very few poets who make a living as poets per se. They either buy a guitar and pretend to be a country singer, or find another route through, and one of those routes through does have to do with the fact that [poetry] has a kind of academic safety net around it which allows it to find its voice and to find its way though.

And that’s certainly part of what has to happen to comics even if the flipside [is that] artists that have been attracted to [comics] primarily because it flies below critical radar will probably resist it with every fiber of their being. It would probably be good to have both of those forces tugging at each other and I just want to make sure that the force field stays in place.

BT: An issue somewhat tangential to that is that in the popular press we are starting to see comics getting recognized as well, with Time magazine reviewing comics, and Chris Ware’s book [Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth] being named Rolling Stone’s best book of the year. Members of the Sequential Art department here at SCAD, as well as comics fans in general, are excited and greatly encouraged by this, but it is also the case that a similar thing occurred in the media in the late 1980’s, about the time Maus came out and it just fizzled out; there was no appreciable change either in the quality of comics that were produced afterwards or the general public’s perception of the comics medium.

SPIEGELMAN: The problem that happened surrounding Maus is that there wasn’t enough good work to follow in its wake. Maus forced the issue, to the point that chain book stores set up a section, maybe unfortunately, called “Graphic Novels” and then had nothing to put in this section. So all of a sudden you have repackaged Spider-Man comics in hardcover to go on the shelves next to these other works.

What’s interesting to me is Maus, the two books together, took thirteen years of work; I was doing other things to earn a living. Chris Ware’s book represents about eight years of work. It doesn’t take eight years or thirteen years to read them, but it takes a long time to actually build something that’s airtight enough to not sink us once it gets launched. As I said earlier, comics are more of a calling than a career. You have to find someone who’s really nuts to devote eight to thirteen years to something that will make you less money than flipping hamburgers, and it has to be because it’s something you need to do this way. As more work worthy of attention comes out, it’s now been made clear that there’s a world willing to pay attention.

BT: Your recent project, Little Lit, was ostensibly a collection of comics for children, aimed at the children’s book market. While there has been nothing but glowing praise of this work from the comics press and from adult comics fans, the reviews from the general press have been somewhat mixed. They have expressed some doubts as to whether this is actually a work that could actually be read and appreciated by children. Do you consider Little Lit to be a success in this regard, and do you honestly feel that comics are still a viable children’s’ entertainment medium in the modern Playstation era?

SPIEGELMAN: Absolutely to the latter. As to the former, the only review I saw that was mixed was in the Associated Press by this woman who was horrified by [Little Lit cartoonist] Charles Burns.

BT: I’m horrified by Charles Burns.

SPIEGELMAN: I’m horrified by him. The children are horrified by him.

BT: That Chris Ware board game that’s in Little Lit, for example, is brilliant, but no child could comprehend it.

SPIEGELMAN: That’s not true. First of all, it got really glowing reviews as children’s’ literature in the Times both daily and Sunday. Those weren’t in any way mitigated, saying that [the book] wasn’t for children. I really care about this because I want this project to succeed. We had starred reviews in Publishers’ Weekly touting it as a work for kids, and then we got to see kids with the book; they read it and liked it.

What happens is I get followed around, for better of for worse, with a certain reputation, and that reputation is definitely of doing stuff for grown-ups and doing stuff on the edgy side. As a result there’s a kind of wariness, like, “what’s he trying to put over?” Definitely I ran into this with the Associated Press journalist, and also with the Horn Book reviewer who wrote a review to explain that he was at least as hip, or hipper, than I am.

The book got on the best seller list over the Christmas season and it was getting there at least as much through the adult part of the book store as the kid’s part of the book store. A lot of times I’ve had to talk to [Little Lit publisher] Harper Collins to figure out how we can just get this book to be where it’s supposed to be, which is the kid’s section, because what I saw is that there’s a preconception that this is too complex for kids.

Children don’t have problems with things that they immediately can’t understand. There’s a mix in [the book]. Some stuff will be a little bit below their capacity; some stuff will be a little bit above their capacity. Some stuff, like the Chris Ware game is way above my capacity. This is what happens to kids with everything they’re confronted with. A lot of them are able to blindly move through things that they are watching and only understand like 40% of it, but 40% is fine. What we wanted to do was something that was G rated, which could be enjoyed by the whole family, but didn’t have anything to do with condescension.

BT: Sort of like the old Warner Brothers cartoons?

SPIEGELMAN: Exactly like that. The Chris Ware thing was my Waterloo. It was so good that we couldn’t not use it. But, for example, the instructions on how to play the game were all set in six point type, and told in turn of the last century’s prose style. And so I figured, this isn’t exactly what I thought we were going to do, and so what we did was we just suggested to him that he leave those instructions exactly as they are, and on top say, “Instructions for children.” But could you please add, in eighteen point type, a simple paragraph that says “Instructions for grown-ups?” Something that tells you in just simple monosyllables how to play the game.

We did that, and the thing is that, although it looks so peculiarly complex and ornate, the fact of the matter is that it’s very easy to understand to principles of how to play the game. It is eminently playable; it’s like adding Mad Libs to a board game. And it works.

What was unfortunate in way was, because it was an endpaper, it’s the first thing you see when you lift up the cover, and it undid a lot of the labor I put into making sure this [book] felt “user friendly.” Like the cover was a choice that was trying to make something about as non-threatening as possible in terms of it’s being about comics. And ultimately the first story I did was trying to find something where I could hit a note where you would absolutely know that there were no major curve balls being thrown. And I would say that 85 to 90 percent of the book is on that level.

Unfortunately, the very first thing you see is this madman’s intense board game. [In the game] there’s, you know, the “Heisenberg Principle” square that says, “If you land here, throw the board in the air and start again.” And, then similarly, this back page [of the game] got very complex. So we tried to make it more accessible, adding a back to the endpaper, opening up the beginning of the book further to separate it from the book. What it was was that it was too damn good to not use, but it was definitely coming from somewhere else than the heart of the project, and that could have set up part of the problem that got us the problematic reviews from Horn Book and the Associated Press, because it looked like all of a sudden we were trying to pass as kid literature.

But having left this [book] with kids and watched them go at it, it’s very inviting, and when I see what’s happening on an ongoing basis in Europe with comics in general, Comics are definitely able to hold their own against Nintendo games and Playstations. What’s interesting is you can go to a newsstand in France and they have about 30 children’s’ magazines arranged [for all age groups]. All of those magazines include comics, and there’s still a rather vital comics industry for kids. All of those things are available in book stores as well as magazine stores and the result is it’s part of how French kids become literate. Based on the fact that we’ve now got an administration that keeps me awake at night, that almost 50 percent of the country voted for George W. Bush, I’m convinced that it’s important that people in this country learn how to read well so that this never happens again.

BT: What do you think lies ahead for comics artists of the future?

SPIEGELMAN: A lot of burger flipping.