Cartoon Dialectics Vol 1 – New Edition

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I’ve finally had a chance to put together a new edition of Cartoon Dialectics Vol 1. This new edition debuted at Stumptown a few weeks ago, but I didn’t manage to make enough copies to offer online… until now. The cover is brand new and was silkscreened by the talented Squad 19. This is a good time to mention a not-full-on review of the book that appeared quite some time ago on the excellent ComicsComics site. I don’t think I’ve linked it before, now I have. Get your copy here.

USS Catastrophe Resurfaces

lost at sea

This is another thing I should have posted a while ago. According to Dan and Kevin the USS Catastrophe Shop is open for business… The ship was thought to be sunk sometime ago, but it has resurfaced like the Flying Dutchman to briefly navigate the turbulent seas of hand-stapled pamphlets once again… for the last time. I think it’s the only place right now where you can still get copies of my Leisure mini. Go order a bunch of comics! It will be missed…

Post SPX 2007 Report

yuichi yokoyama tablecloth slice

SPX 2007 was one of the funnest comics shows I’ve ever attended. There are tons of SPX reports out there already, so I’ll refrain from going into to much detail. My favorite acquisitions:

Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering was easily the book I most anticipated. I’d been reading about it online for some time. Finally getting my hands on this book was very satisfying. The book’s mixture of absurd combat and surreal construction projects did not disappoint. I will have more to say about it in the near future.

Papercutter #6. This little anthology is getting better with each volume. This issue didn’t disappoint. Alec (Phase 7) Longstreth, who also edited it, delivers a solid story that could easily make this Phase 7 #12.5. Ken Dahl spews out a Gordon Smalls stream of consciousness rant. I kept thinking it was set in a parallel world where John Zerzan was not only a cartoonist but funny too. Julia Wertz and Laura Park collaborate on a sweet story of youthful sexual awakening… er… or something like that.

My favorite mini of the show was Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less. It’s dense, understated and well paced. Well worth whatever she was charging for it.

And last, but not least, Acorn Reindeer’s new mini The Karaoke Encryption combines a foul mouthed vegetable Tintin with Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.

Other highlights included being on my first comics ‘theory’ panel, signing copies of Mome with Mome-mate Eleanor Davis, talking J.G. Ballard with Andy Hartzell and many others too numerous to mention.

Covering Vague Cities

Vague Cities 1st edition Cover
Vague Cities 1st & 2nd Edition (roll over to see back cover)

I was never very happy with the covers for Vague Cities. I liked it conceptually, but the execution always left something to be desired. Not to mention the fact that visually it had little to do with the art between the covers. The cover of the third edition was created to address the shortcomings of the previous editions.

Vague Cities Collection 1st edition Cover
Vague Cities Collection 1st Edition (roll over to see back cover)

It was last minute design decision. Just days before the MOCCA festival, I decided I needed a new cover and that the previous ‘collected’ edition just wasn’t working (I’m ironing out the kinks out of new collection that will appear at SPX… although a ‘test’ edition ‘debuted’ at TCAF… more on this later). I went back to the original small book idea, but with a new cover. I had some leftover black cover stock that I’ve been meaning to use for some time, and a brand new tube of silver Gocco ink. It turned out ok.

Vague Cities 3rd edition Cover
Vague Cities 3rd Edition (roll over to see back cover)

This sort illustrates one of the great things about doing mini-comics. Print runs are generally low enough to allow multiple takes on the same book. Every time I sell through an edition, I like to think about the packaging again. I’m not always happy with the results, but it’s always a fun exercise. Why keep the same cover when you can change it? Oh and the new edition of Vague Cities is now available at the robot26.com store.

Proto Trans-Alaska

Trans-Alaska Cover 2
As I started to compile my notes on Trans-Siberia, I realized there was still a couple of things left unsaid about Trans-Alaksa. If you haven’t read the first batch of Trans-Alaska notes, you can catch up here.
Trans-Alaska was a very formless book. It was done without preparation and ‘straight to ink’, without any pencilled art. It’s title was a kind of last minute tribute to a series of dreams about Alaska that I had in the mid 90s. Those dreams inspired an attempt at a 24 hour comic. Instead of producing a 24 page comic in 24 hours, I made a 10 page comic in 6 hours.
That comic saw ‘publication’ in my last (semi) regular mini-comic Reduction #7. The story, titled ‘Slow’, was quickly forgotten. Recently, I re-read the story and I realized that ‘Slow’ was in effect the blueprint for the entire Trans series!
panel from slow
panel from Slow
For those of you interested, I’m posting the entire story here. Also, for those of you that still care about physical objects, a limited number of copies of Reduction #7 are available from me at robot26.com. It’s pretty embarassing stuff so don’t laugh! 😉
It’s pretty clear that a most of the ideas in the Trans books were already in ‘Slow,’ though in a very unformed fashion. It’s definitely stuff I was thinking about back then, but for one reason or another (working to pay the rent) I put that stuff on the back burner. Even some of the visuals are very similar. I guess I’m just a cheap copy of myself!
panel from Trans-Alaska
panel from Trans-Alaska

Trans-Alaska Notes

regurgitatation
One of the reasons I started this blog was to make it a sort of digital bibliography for the comic-books I create. This is especially relevant to these three books: Trans-Alaska, Trans-Siberia, and Trans-Atlantis. All of the books are out of print at the moment. I’ve started working on new editions and I wanted to expand the notes section that can be found in the back of each book. I’m planning on a series of entries that hopefully will help me do that.
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Trans-Alaska is the first book in the series. It was written and drawn over a period of about 2 weeks prior to the 2004 MoCCA Art Festival.
The notes section identified three main concepts that underpin Trans-Alaska. They are: Richard Florida’s Creative Class, Pat Kane’s Play Ethic and Momus’ Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative.
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Pat Kane’s Play Ethic is an attempt to create a new kind of philosophy of work in the 21st century. If the capitalist economic system has always relied on the Work Ethic as it’s engine, then in today’s (and tomorrow’s) post scarcity economies we will need something new: a Play Ethic. “If work doesn’t believe in you, why believe in work?” seems to be the general attitude. Kane is convinced that by embracing our inner homo ludens we can all become more creative, playful (responsibly so – hence the ethic) and happy. I sort of dismissed his ideas in the comic by pointing to the dangers of blurring the boundary between work and play in a capitalist context. At that time I hadn’t read Kane’s book The Play Ethic. I had only read his blog and some articles. The book is a much more nuanced examination of the possibility of a wider shift from work oriented culture to a ludic one. Although Kane suffers a bit from too much technophilia (for my taste) and is perhaps a little more over optimistic about the potential for play in a profit driven environment, nevertheless the book is a chock full of great ideas and concepts. I’m rooting for you Pat!
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Florida is more of an urbanist and his concept of the Creative Class is deeply connected to cities. He sees the Creative Class (artists, designers, programmers, etc.) as the real economic engine that drives the vitality of cities… and economies. In that he is not that far off from the late and great Jane Jacobs. Florida’s book hinges on his Creative Cities Index. These cities, according to him, are attracting the creative work force necessary for competitiveness in the global creative economy. The book is almost a how-to guide for cities on how to re-create themselves to attract the creatives and by extension the businesses that want to hire them. And business brings all the ‘benefits’ like higher real-estate prices, more tax revenue, etc. This focus on the intersection of money and urbanism is pretty much what turns me off from Florida’s ideas. Momus said it best here. The influx of capital (and consequent rising prices) into creative city centers (often low-rent and marginal neighborhoods) chases those very creatives away. Soho in NY is a good example. San Francisco (number one on Florida’s Creative Cities Index) during the 90’s internet boom is another.
trans-alaska-p4.jpg
Speaking of Momus, he is probably the primary the catalyst for my doing these little theoretical comic tracts. Specifically I was very impressed by his Metaphysical Masochism Of The Capitalist Creative essay. In the essay Momus is taken by the ability of creatives to create metaphysical value out of the capitalist cesspool of money and greed. The equivalent of alchemical transubstantiation of shit into gold. Any designer trying to squeeze a drop of quality out of a clueless client will know exactly what Momus is talking about.
The notes ended with a bunch of Name dropping: Karl Marx, George Orwell, Chip Kidd, Witold Gombrowicz and André Breton. Karl Marx is a pretty obvious choice given the generally critical approach to capitalism in the comic. More will be written on him later.
George Orwell came to mind only briefly in the perhaps over-the-top assertion that the Play Ethic may be in danger of becoming a kind of newspeak version of Work Ethic. Following the 1984 logic of WAR=PEACE I was presenting my own WORK=PLAY. Pat Kane’s book rounded out his theory for me and I don’t think he implies anything of the sort. However the danger for that kind of misinterpretation is still valid think. Orwell will become more significant in Trans-Atlantis where I take a look utopias and dystopias.
I had read Chipp Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys some time before I made Trans-Alaska. One of the characters, Winter Sorbeck, struck me a perfect Masochistic Capitalist Creative. That’s really the only connection here… though the novel did made it easier for me to think of design and it’s surrounding issues as a valid topic for a comic-book.
Gombrowicz is one of my favorite authors. Right around the time I was starting to work on the comic I was reading his novel Kosmos. The novel is this amazing study of nothing and everything. The main character from the most random occurrences, signs and coincidences, concocts multitudes of paranoid meanings. In some ways I see this novel as kind of template for the comics… a kind of archaeology of contemporary culture… digging up weird books and objects until they all start making some sort of sense.
André Breton. I probably should have said Surrealism. The influence of Surrealism has been with me for a long time. There are some obviously surreal moments in the comic (like the Giorgio de Chirico moment – see image above the Momus entry), but I won’t really get into the surreallity of capital until later books.
Well that’s it for now. More soon.
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Tunnel

tunnel cover
This comic-book is about 4 years old at this point, but I still like it ok. It’s my only attempt a dream comics. I tired to be really literal with it and the result is actually pretty close to the actual dream… well as much as I could manage.
I’m posting about it because Poopsheet just gave it a nice review. For those of you out there not as familiar with my comics I just wanted to start occasional posts that describe some of my comics and maybe post sample pages.
Anyway, Tunnel is available either from robot26.com or the Poopsheet Shop.

Vague Cities 2

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Thanks to everyone who came by my table at APE! For those that couldn’t make it to San Francisco, you can buy Vague Cities, my new mini-comic, on my other site, robot26.com. I also reprinted ‘Leisure’.