So I just came back from the SCAD Mini-Comics Expo (where I dropped off a few flyers for TRO) and thought I’d share what I found.

My budget was pretty limited but I still got some great stuff.

The first is Another Stupid Cat Comic by Alyssa Ciaccio (lisserbliss.blogspot.com). It’s actually a little handmade flipbook with an adorably animated cat and some scatological humor.

Though it must be reprinted, it still somehow looked like it was drawn with pencil right in the book.

The second book, Boogers #1 by Kevin Burkhalter (kevinsjournalcomic.com) was a bit of unexpected high fantasy with low.. well, high in the nostril… er, characters. I made sure to get #1, since you guys know what a continuity freak I am. Don’t want to accidentally read Boogers out of order.

I liked how the pages counted with little boogers in this one.

The last one there is Inkdick #5, where I felt ok getting out of order since I also read the comic online. Pranas T. Naujokaitis (ghostcarpress.com/inkdick/) has been doing his journal comic for a long time and it was kind of weird getting this one, which contains a bit about the Obama election, and realizing it’s the happiest thing in the book.

Such a feeling of hope, something it doesn’t seem has stuck with us. In any case, I always enjoy Pranas’ work because his honest depictions of down times help keep me from feeling really alone when I’m sad.

Finally, I also picked up a bitchin’ shirt from Nate Marsh (www.obscureanimals.com), who also had some awesome books that were a little out of my price range… well, if I wanted the shirt that is.

I always love these kinds of things and I always feel bad that I don’t plan ahead to bring more to support the indie peeps. There was a lot of other interesting looking stuff there, but I ran out of the cash in my pocket quick.

I like that I came home with little books featuring three different binding techniques. There was even more ingenuity on display at the tables. It just goes to show – if you wanna make comics, you’re gonna make comics. No reason to let anything stand in your way.

Like many artists, I highly doubt any of these guys are breaking even on the printed stuff shown at the actual expo, but I hope they do well through their websites.

So check em out, show em some love!

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Matt Seneca, who is fast becoming one of my favorite writers on Sequential Art and Visual Culture, posted an essay on Eisner’s Ebony White character over at his blog, Death To The Universe.

Here’s an excerpt:

Racism was a part of the world once upon a time, and as such it was a part of comics. And it’s hardly left the world, let alone America, let alone American comics — but at least there are certain things you can’t do in public anymore, and this is most definitely one of them.

Ebony White will always ensure that The Spirit isn’t presented in the grand fashion the work’s aesthetic value merits. In a way that’s poetic justice, a casual racism that no doubt endeared Eisner’s work to a populist audience in its day now preventing it from getting over to the world at large in ours. And there the story would end, if Ebony White wasn’t such a good character.

In full here.

It’s an excellent read and ties well into our discussion in the comments of the Milestone Comics feature posted earlier this month.

I’ll be getting into The Spirit in the reviews soon after we resume our daily review schedule with DC’s Golden Age. Until then, Seneca’s essay will give you a little to think about.

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I was recently contacted by Corey Michael Blake (President of Writers of the Round Table) about a series of comics his company is publishing.

Collected under the new imprint SmarterComics, they’re mostly self help and business related publications. The promotion for these comics is definitely something different, with claims like “Guaranteed to make you smarter in 14 days, or your money back.”

Now, this is something that up until this point, I’d never considered purchasing myself.

However, as a fan of the sequential medium, the idea seems to work well – such topics could benefit from fun and easy to read introductions (or, if the kind of self help book I hate, could benefit from being trimmed down from a drawn out idea designed to make a full book out of a simple concept.)

I hadn’t read any of the original books these comics were based on, so I told him to send them on over. They came in today.

I was originally going to do a round up look on this relatively small sub-genre of comics. After flipping through the first one in the stack, I’ve decided they deserve a little more attention.

So I’ll be reviewing a few of them individually, mixed in with our other ongoing reviews.

In a way, I’m thankful – I come from a fine arts/academia background and could probably use some advice from the business world. Hopefully these books are as good as they claim!

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I just found this while doing a little Spidey research. Matt Kuhns over at Modern Ideas created cool little visual timeline for the various Spider-Man publications over the ages.

Kuhns posted “Spider-Man’s Tangled Publication-History Web” along with a bunch of fun (very nerdy) commentary, way back in October 2010. Not sure why it took me so long to see it, but it’s a nice little chart.

Exactly what I hope for from the internet! Check it out!

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Four Color Process has posted a fantastic essay/manifesto titled In Defense of Dots: The Lost Art of Comic Books which contains the images I used to make the above animated gif.

It’s a great article and should be of interest to many of you collectors. There is definitely an aesthetic draw to printing, paper stock, even manufacturing errors.

As an artist that’s done his own printmaking and matrix creation, selections in those factors can do a LOT to increase the aesthetic appeal of a piece. As a reviewer of collected editions, it’s often hard to make a call on a particular volume.

It’s amazing, but understandable, how divided the comics community is on the subject of how to treat reprints. There are so many factors that come into play.

The artist’s original desires, historical value, the original presentation. The fact that some artists worked assuming said original presentation but that they may have changed it if they could have.

Even aging artists’ questionable aesthetic sensibility concerning their past material (Neal Adams, etc.)

I find these images to be very illustrative of the challenges inherent in approaching this media. They’re from Fantastic Four 49 and the Omnibus Vol. 2 reprint, I think. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

Jack Kirby, along with an unknown original colorist (possibly Kirby himself or cover artist Joe Sinnot), created the first image as they created most of their work.

Quickly, powerfully, and with the intention of reaching as many young readers as possible.

Their long term archival intentions were probably negligible.

But I think it would be wrong to suggest that Kirby, at least, didn’t think about the printing when he worked on the original art.

His bold lines were obviously designed to make the action as clear as possible in a media that often gave way to smudged and muddy pages.

It’s too bad that our historical colorist isn’t clearly credited. I’d love to know more about how they thought.

Personally, I think he may have used the colors the way some use watercolors (or how I used to use certain inks in the printmaking labs.) Knowing that they would bleed, the colors seem arranged to flow into each other, using the white space as a mingling area.

That first image features aesthetically pleasing gradients between green and yellow on the hands to the right of the panel, for example. The color shift in the white also feels like that area is more a part of the figure.

These subtleties are completely lost in the reproduction.

Of course, the reproduction is clearer, perhaps easier to read.

There’s no “right” answer here. It’s art and will always be subjective.

In an ideal world, every page would consist of smart paper, where at a touch we could flip between pencils, inked linework, original colors and restored colors.

Perhaps that’s what the future holds for collected editions.

But for now, we’re lucky to have bound reprints along with excellent curated blogs like Four Color Process, where you can see those ancient panel details you or your grandfather may have overlooked in the rush to find out what happens next.

Head on over there to read their essay and view more of those wonderful little dots.

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