maria_sputnik

Mugwhump the Great continues today, with more funting funtery from Aleister P. Yorick, behaving like a total funt as usual.



Read today's episode here... get up to speed with the current chapter here... or start again from the very beginning here.

• 06:34 @eskaar awesome! 恭喜恭喜and all that. #
• 16:18 Spent my day running reports and listening to Puscifer. Maynard's attempts at humor are more creepy than funny, but in an awesome way. #
• 16:31 Also, I love that @kcna_dprk has apparently been phished. I thought Alejandro Cao de Benos worked in IT. #
• 16:57 My cuntry boner...it won't go down. #
• 17:20 FFS, since when is spending on education a bad thing? #jasonlewisjasonlewisjasonlewis #

http://www.gabbysplayhouse.com/?p=312

A light mantle of snow is scheduled to descend tomorrow upon the ragged terrain of my frozen northern place of residence. Luckily, I’m getting on a train south at 11am! I’m going down to New York for a short bit, and will be there for the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this coming weekend, where I’ll be sitting at the Secret Acres table with plenty of copies of Monsters.

My god, how many of you can even endure this level of self-promotion? I mean, I know that’s what I’m supposed to do on my own website for my own book, but if I were completely honest here, I have to admit that when someone else on the internet is endlessly going on about their comic/book/band I’m just like, alright, I get it, can we talk about something else now??

Which is why I’m happy to have another BRIDGE UPDATE:

They’ve set to installing stays for what I can only assume is one of the pedestrian walkways on the bridge spanning the Connecticut River between Vermont and New Hampshire. This looks like the final step before the unveiling. I’m really horrified at the possibility that I might be out of town for the temporary bridge’s official opening — but at least there’s still the excitement of getting to watch the REAL bridge get rebuilt to look forward to.

Or, who knows, maybe I’ll just move back to New York for real. It’s a nasty, dirty acreage, but at least it’s a little warmer than Vermont — a detail that has been slowly climbing up the top-10 list on my favorite things about a city lately. See, the logarithm I’ve been working on works out to something like:

(1 year lived) + winter(latitude degrees above 40°) = actual years in physiological deteriation

As you can see, every degree in latitude above 40° takes an additional year off of your life. White River Junction is at approximately 43°. Do the math — I’m getting too old for this shit!

http://thedailycrosshatch.com/2009/11/30/interview-jerry-moriarty-pt-4-of-4/

http://thedailycrosshatch.com/?p=5294

We wrap up our interview with the Jack Survives author by discussing the Sears-inspired art of his formative years, the transition from collector to creator, and the importance of pornography.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

My real transition into comics came when the collector became the creator, as a little kid, wanting to become the art kid in the classroom. Somebody else was the art kid, and he discouraged everybody else. And they’re the art kid because they could copy Spider-man. The problem there is that art is about copying, which is not my position. And other kids get discouraged and they give up.

I came across the art kid and I wanted to become the art kid. So I traced like crazy, but then the line crossed, and I was in some closer proximity to Superman, because I could drawn Superman. You see how that works? It’s a very logical progression. Once you cross from reality to fantasy in a very real way, meaning, you’re making it, that’s an interesting transition. Because now you can see that that’s a real physical place. That’s where the comics came in. that’s the earliest art I saw. There was no art on our walls, except for something from Sears, or a print of some dumb thing that doesn’t inspire you.

A bowl of fruit.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It was a bowl of flowers, actually. It had a little tiny mirror frame that was nicer than the picture. But nevertheless. It’s not coming from being grown in this precious pot. It’s coming out of growing up in this lower middle class background out of Binghamton, New York. Back then it was industrial. There was no art around outside of comic books and great magazines like Saturday Post, which was full of illustrations. And men’s adventure magazines, like True, before it became a little more risqué. I illustrated for girly magazines in the 60s.

All of those early comic artists seem to be from a working class background. It doesn’t come much more working class than the Kurtzmans and the Jaffees and the Kirbys.

Ditko, too. He lived out in Wisconsin, somewhere. I’m just fresh on that book. And the irony is, I read this book, The Ten Cent Plague, and there’s a picture of comic burning in Binghamton, New York, at the age I would been reading comics. I never heard anything about that. I think he sort of pushed that further with all of the horror—“don’t read this.” That didn’t happen that much I was there, three blocks away from St. Patrick’s, where the burning was.

They used to let you sit on the floor of supermarkets and read comics. You didn’t have to buy them. Is that repressive? I don’t think so. The shopkeeper looks over, and there are little kids sitting on the floor, not buying them, just reading them.

But the Code did have an effect, right? A lot of the EC stuff did go away.

Yeah. But that was the whole McCarthy crap and the whole over-the-top religion stuff, which is always—it’s still around.

It comes back in waves.

Yeah. That’s why I love pornography. It’s the freest form of all. It’s a guilty pleasure—just like comics become, at a certain point.

But now, like comics, it’s become mainstream in a way.

Yeah, so I have to reinvent it across the line. With my scanner, I’m making new books all the time. But the whole point is, it immediately is on other side of the oppression. It’s dehumanizing, in a lot of ways. Okay, I’ll give you a little bit of that—but I don’t know how much. That’s the whole feminist thing. I don’t know how far you can go with that. But the fact is, my whole art beginning was in girly magazines. I’m talking about the wannabe Playboys—Escapade, Swank, Nugget.

They had these forward-looking art directors, younger people who wanted to get into bigger magazines, and they would hire the farthest out illustrators, because they wanted to have really good portfolios to go the next magazine. and there was no censorship. So all of these people had a chance to have a vaudeville act and try it out before they went on the road with it. And I’m an ex-Catholic from the Latin mass days, the spooky stuff. But the idea is, once the underground started, is art is supposed to be free—“art” meaning, anyone making pictures about their insides, that’s art all the way.

They seemed to push it so hard, so fast. The Crumb stuff just sort of went all the way, as quickly as possible.

Yeah, right. I mean, I was particularly amazed, because I had been away from comics for ten years, and I had a student that was a dealer at a comic convention. He brought in a Frontline Combat. And I was thinking that I was going to pretend to like it, because I’m a teacher. I thought it would be sad. I took it home and I fell on the floor. Not only was it better than I remembered, it was inspiring. I thought, ‘how many other things since that period have I not seen?’ so I started going to comic cons, and that’s where the collector in me started to awaken.

And then the collector became the artist.

Yeah, the crossover was always at that flashpoint. I always start as a collector and then the flashpoint happens. I started collecting these things a couple of years ago [gestures to his brightly colored shirt] now it’s all in my paintings. Really, I love that. I didn’t plan that. Ninety-nine percent of everything sucks. One-percent is good, and that one-percent is different.

That one-percent is not homogeneous.

That’s right, that’s right. And that’s the way it should be. There should be passion for that one-percent. But in the hierarchy of art, it’s always been that painting knew that, but they would say that it was the 99-percent that matter, not the one-percent, meaning that painting was superior. Ninety-nine percent of illustration—which I was in at the time—sucked. But it was the 99-percent that was the definition of illustration, not the one percent. Same thing with comics, because the illustrators were shitting on the comic people, saying they were superior.

But there are a lot of really great comics. It feels like a relatively high percentage.

Yeah, but if you really look at the mass of it, you find out that the sliver is still there. It’s the same way with music, movies—there’s brilliance in that one-percent.

–Brian Heater

http://meathaus.com/2009/11/30/a-journey-round-my-skull/

http://meathaus.com/?p=2991

Expert book fetishism unveils stacks of delightful illustrations and design that would have otherwise likely not traveled across your eyelobes. In blog and flickr forms. A selection above from the Bizarre Kid’s Books set.

http://meathaus.com/2009/11/30/new-esao-andrews-prints/

http://meathaus.com/?p=2985

Esao is releasing some new prints today at high noon eastern USA time so you can check those bad boys out in his store on his website over here. Esao of course has some super-dense, intense sketchbook pages in Meathaus’s new sketchbook anthology available now, GO FOR THE GOLD! 3.