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Neptune de Ca et La

I went to my P.O. box today to see if there was anything and low and behold a package from France. What do you think is inside?

How easily my mood is influenced.

Colored end pages! Hardcover! And a font made from my own handwriting that looks better than my own handwriting. I couldn't be happier with this book.

Thank you Serge, Helene Duhamel, Celine Derouet, The Slovenian Printer and everyone at Ca et La!

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I experimented this weekend with this comic. I don't think I'll ever do that again. I drew this one twice as large as normal and used a traditional nib pen to ink it. In the end the lines are NOT the way I wanted them and it took me twice as long to draw. The goal of doing this strip was to produce as many as I could each week so I'll go back to drawing smaller and using the uniball pen I was using before. I may just re-draw this and edit the post at a later date.

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Correspondence

About a month ago I sent Pascal Girard a copy of Big Plans 5. Pascal Girard is the author of Bigfood, Reunion, and Nicholas, published by D&Q. I really like Pascal's work. He and I are both similar in age and I feel, probably influence by similar creators. Anyway this is what Pascal sent me in return. A gorgeous pamphlet comic called L'appartement Numero 3 published by the Belgian publishing collective
l’employé du Moi. I had fun translating the French with my wife who speaks the language.

I love the way Girard draws comics sans borders. This book is a little 24-hour comic Girard originally drew in 2009 and redrew in 2011 for this edition. He also included a tiny radiograph and watercolor comic on a small 3x3 inch square piece of bristol. This makes me think of his comics journal diary strip he did several months back. Thanks Pascal! And thanks for giving me a reason to keep my P.O. Box.

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Neptune at Angouleme

My French publisher just sent me this image of the new French hardcover version of Neptune. I'm afraid when I get my copies It'll be hard to get me to stop staring at them. Beautiful. Seriously. It'll be premiering at this year's Angouleme festival. I'd like to go there one day. It's supposed to be the size of comic-con, but only people actually go there to buy comics and not just dress up like idiots and buy toys. To each his own. I choose France.

More in news about me, Publisher's Weekly put The Super-Duper Dog Park as an honorable mention for this year's Best of Comics list. And Justin Giampaoli gave it a pretty awesome review, winning the approval of his 5 year old daughter. Comics are the best tool for early reading. I know. I'm a teacher. Click here if you'd like to preview the book. Now that I am far enough removed from it I really think this book is one of my best. The artwork is certainly my best. All for now. New Bozo comic soon.

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Justin Giampaoli reviews Big Plans 5!!! YES!

Read it right here folks. This review has given me life. After trying to get this book out there for months finally there is some recognition. Working on the new Bozo the Teacher comic has been fun but I just realized that I've been working on a several hundred page autobio graphic novel. I will have to work on both at the same time. comics!

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So I went to check my P.O. box last week expecting that there'd be nothing. I had a check. Yes. And two letters. Double Yes! So this is a big shout out to Ben Baker in Brooklyn, and James Kochalka. Thanks for the letter Ben! James, thanks for knowing I exist!

8 Favorite Comics of 2011

Hello everybody. I usually stray away from making a "best of" list but for some reason I'm not this year. Looking through my books to compile this list I realized how disappointed I was this year. There were some big titles from some of my favorite creators this year but when I look back in all honesty I didn't really enjoy them that much. Enjoyment is my #1 concern. Some books got me angry and some books got me thinking but overall that doesn't mean that the book was a success. They will just have to stay off this list and you'll just have to guess which books those are. Some of these books that I wanted to like more were collections of comics that just worked better as single issues. Or maybe I enjoyed them less because I'd already read them and spent so much time admiring them in their pamphlet infancy. One caveat to my list is that I didn't read every book put out this year of course. Jim Woodring's Congress of the Animals is one I, if I'd read it, would have added to this list. But there must be a reason why I didn't buy it. Another caveat is that some of these books that did make my list are collections from much older work that have been re-published or collected in 2011. Update: I just read John Porcellino's King Cat #72. That should have been on my list.

8. Papercutter #17. Edited and published by Greg Means of Tugboat press, this issue is probably one of my favorite issues of this anthology. Unusual for this anthology, one writer, Jason martin, provided all the stories. seven cartoonists: Jesse Reklaw, Corinne Mucha, Francois Vigneault, Calvin Wong, Sarah oleksyk, Hellen Jo, and Vanessa Davis were employed to turn those stories into comics.  Jason Martin's stories provide a nice framework for the artists in a way that allows easy comparison to Pekar's American Splendor. 

7. Blammo #7. Noah Van Sciver continues to make good comics. Each issue has several stories and I'm often pleasantly surprised by the way Noah Van Sciver ends a story. Usually, punctuated in a way that makes you feel uneasy and with more questions than answers. Looking forward to his book, The Hypo, about a young Abraham Lincoln.

6.  The Incal. Written by Alexandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Moebius, this is a collection of the classic comic that the duo created in the early to mid eighties. It took me a while to read this book I must admit. The font is very tiny and hard to read. That combined with stiff dialogue and a sprawling science fiction tale continued to make this book less enjoyable to me. It was fun to pick out ideas in this book that influenced a range of films and books but often it seemed as if Jodorowsky and Moebius was being influenced by obvious sources as well. All in all, Moebius's artwork and his colorists' coloring is the reason to pick up this book. Gorgeous to say the least.

5. Mister Wonderul. Daniel Clowes was certainly my gateway into comics as an adult. First, with the film Ghost World and then with back issues of Eightball. Mister Wonderful is a nice expanded collection of comics Clowes drew for the New York Times Magazine. I enjoyed the story and the characters much more than Clowes' other recent book, Wilson, and I'm not interested in the new slick version of The Death Ray. I already own the $7.00 over-sized pamphlet. That printing is a work of art.

4. Americus. Another book edited by Greg Means, Americus' first chapter debuted in an earlier issue of Papercutter. Written by MK Reed and illustrated by Jonathan Hill, Americus is a solid book. The storytelling is well structured and compelling enough that I read it in one morning straight through after several months of not being ready to read it. It's a very good book for a middle schooler or someone in high school.

3. Garden. Yuichi yokoyama has been a favorite of mine for some time. I like to call his work, "Future Comics." As compared to some of his previous books, Garden begins to employ dialogue as characters comment on the many amazing and absurd situations they bare witness to. At the beginning, when they are told the garden is closed, hundreds of these people sneak into this garden/theme park and pass by grass mazes, ball-waterfalls, rock cars, and many many strange physical features and odd phenomena as they try not to get caught by security personnel. I'm not interested in his newest, Color Engineering. I prefer his comics to his paintings.

2. Approximate Continuum Comics. This book collects several issues of Lewis Trondheim's autobio comic The Nimrod. Trondheim has been a huge influence on me, just as the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, for drawing animal comics. I love Trondheim's humor and what I love too about this book is Trondheim working his family, business (co-running La Association), and his comics aspirations. I don't care for Trondheim's more recent diary strips, Little Nothings, because they amount to little more than a laundry-list of superficial anecdotes. This book, however, provides a much more in-depth look at a person and I really enjoy the partying and inner-fighting at La Asso., which is now legend.

1. A Zoo In Winter. Jiro Taniguchi has made a handfull of books. Half of them I love, and half of them bore me out of my mind. Walking Man, A Distant Neighborhood vol. 1 and 2 and this is one are the ones I like. This book reads as a memoir of the young cartoonist, similar to the recently published, A Drifting Life by Tatsumi. Being a cartoonist, nothing is more thrilling to read then how great cartoonists broke into their field, especially the Japanese masters with their furious work ethic. It is thrilling to read as Taniguchi, almost unaware, falls into the position of assisting one of the manga stars during the late 1960s. I have a feeling that this book was overlooked more than a little. I loved it.