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Post by eheitner on Aug 18, 2023 17:05:08 GMT
Which ones are your favorite? Any notably good or bad ones? Any thoughts about what it is like to read comics about cartoonists either as a cartoonist or as a non-cartoonist?
Obviously literally all autobiographical comix fall under this category, but which ones do an especially special job of depicting the life of a cartoonist and/or the craft of comics-making?
Just to kick off, I'm re-reading the never-finished Dylan Horrocks miniseries Atlas, which delves deeper into the life and world of Emil Kopen, fictional artist in the fictional country of Kornucopia, where comics are treated as a vital part of the national culture and identity. Kopen of course also appears in Hicksville, which is perhaps the ne plus ultra of great comics about cartoonists, and Horrocks of course of course also returns to the life of the cartoonist Sam Zabel in The Magic Pen.
I think Horrocks' work stands, alongside Igort's unfinished (at least in English) Baobab, as my favorites; they depart from I think the usual focus on the grind and the poverty and the ignominy and the silliness and just treat making comics as something beautiful.
What do YOU think?
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Post by evanhickscartoonist on Aug 18, 2023 18:37:34 GMT
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Post by robindh on Aug 18, 2023 20:52:40 GMT
Federico Del Barrio and Felipe Hernández Cava's El Artefacto Perverso (I am currently in the process of lettering my translation), Paco Roca's The Winter of The Cartoonist, Blutch's Dark Side of the Moon, Lewis Trondheim's At Loose Ends (Désoeuvré in French, serialised in English in Mome), and Michael Furler's Bark Bark Girl come to mind as favorites. I haven't read it but Art School Confidential surely deserves a mention.
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Post by mikesheawright on Aug 19, 2023 1:41:33 GMT
Carnet de Voyage is the only craig thompson book i have any affection for.
also the strip about the Picturebox stuff in that issue of But is it... Comic Aht is a hall of famer. i think it's issue 3?
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dominocorp
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Post by dominocorp on Aug 19, 2023 4:53:10 GMT
Not one I think is 'good' but Eisner's 'The Dreamer' is a fascinating book, because Eisner was a pretty cruel business man in the early days of comics, but The Dreamer is like the Disney version of the golden age...
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Post by bluebed on Aug 19, 2023 14:16:46 GMT
Jason's Left Bank Gang is great, casting Hemingway, Joyce, Pound & co as cartoonists. Reread it recently, probably still one of my favorites of his--the pop culture mash-ups and references aren't center stage as they are in the recent books, and there's so much between the panels. He also has a story in Athos in America, where he imagines himself as a belligerent Bukowski-style cartoonist.
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Post by eheitner on Aug 19, 2023 15:50:15 GMT
Lol that reminds me of the Sammy Harkham strip about Napoleon as a cartoonist which cracks me up a lot. I should check out that Jason book.
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Post by whitecomics on Aug 19, 2023 20:43:14 GMT
I love Horrocks, and I think both Hicksville and Atlas are unique among the works in this thread because they're about the comics medium, the history of comics, the act of reading comics, more than they're about cartoonists or making comics (though both works touch on cartooning and on the idea that reading and making are often related). That's an underdeveloped and compelling subject; I'm actually working about something vaguely about this myself, so it's been on my mind. Seth's It's a Good Life is the only other comic that comes to mind in this category.
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Post by manoopuesta on Aug 19, 2023 22:09:41 GMT
Federico Del Barrio and Felipe Hernández Cava's El Artefacto Perverso (I am currently in the process of lettering my translation), Paco Roca's The Winter of The Cartoonist, Blutch's Dark Side of the Moon, Lewis Trondheim's At Loose Ends (Désoeuvré in French, serialised in English in Mome), and Michael Furler's Bark Bark Girl come to mind as favorites. I haven't read it but Art School Confidential surely deserves a mention. Paco Roca's The Winter of The Cartoonist is such a great book, one of his best works I'd say. I will add to that one another book very close in topic (so close I believe it refers even to the same circle of cartoonists iirc, since both talk about the same big comics publisher) which is Carlos Giménez's Los Profesionales. This books is a good examination of the shitty working conditions at the big comics publisher of that time in Spain (Bruguera) but told with a very humorous tone in comparison to Roca, that covers a more sad part of that era. I think Giménez was also part of Bruguera's team of cartoonists for some time when he was starting out, so his story is sort of an inside view.
I also like Igort's Japanese Notebooks (well, I read only the first volume) in which he tells of his time trying to break into the Japanese manga market. Pretty amusing to read.
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Post by owaddled on Aug 21, 2023 1:26:16 GMT
Has anyone read Howard Chaykin's Hey Kids! Comics! There's not much narrative it mostly feels like a vehicle for him to tell stories of the industry with some plausible deniability that he's talking about anyone specific.
I haven't read it but Zoe Thorogood's It's Lonely At the Centre of the Earth got a lot of love from mainstream comics press and the art looks fun to me
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Post by robindh on Aug 21, 2023 15:39:47 GMT
Federico Del Barrio and Felipe Hernández Cava's El Artefacto Perverso (I am currently in the process of lettering my translation), Paco Roca's The Winter of The Cartoonist, Blutch's Dark Side of the Moon, Lewis Trondheim's At Loose Ends (Désoeuvré in French, serialised in English in Mome), and Michael Furler's Bark Bark Girl come to mind as favorites. I haven't read it but Art School Confidential surely deserves a mention. Paco Roca's The Winter of The Cartoonist is such a great book, one of his best works I'd say. I will add to that one another book very close in topic (so close I believe it refers even to the same circle of cartoonists iirc, since both talk about the same big comics publisher) which is Carlos Giménez's Los Profesionales. This books is a good examination of the shitty working conditions at the big comics publisher of that time in Spain (Bruguera) but told with a very humorous tone in comparison to Roca, that covers a more sad part of that era. I think Giménez was also part of Bruguera's team of cartoonists for some time when he was starting out, so his story is sort of an inside view.
I also like Igort's Japanese Notebooks (well, I read only the first volume) in which he tells of his time trying to break into the Japanese manga market. Pretty amusing to read.
I had no idea about that Giménez book, we really need more of him in English. We only got the first volume of Paracuellos, but I'm told it gets even better. |
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Post by manoopuesta on Aug 22, 2023 12:06:21 GMT
I had no idea about that Giménez book, we really need more of him in English. We only got the first volume of Paracuellos, but I'm told it gets even better.
I have read some volumes of Paracuellos. It is great but so so sad that I had to halt reading. I will have to resume reading it at some point, it is worthy.
edit: for context for others, Paracuellos is a series about the childhood memories of Carlos Giménez in a post-civil war orphanage (these orphanages were run by an organization affiliated to Franco's dictatorship). This comics series was at first better received in France, actually. So for anybody who reads french and is interested, there are quite a few volumes translated to french - maybe not all: fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracuellos |
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Post by robclough on Aug 23, 2023 2:47:23 GMT
A very odd one is the three-volume (!) Dick Ayers Story, done by Ayers when he was in his 80s. Basically, he talks at length about the gigs he got and then tallies up how much he made every year. It's a fascinating document of what it was like to work both in the golden age and silver age as a working cartoonist, and Ayers worked for a lot of people.
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