Kibbles ‘n’ Bits, 4/28/09

Anyway, as I posted recently, some cheap copies popped up on Amazon, and we purchased one for the framing project. Our plan hasn’t quite worked out, however, as Emily has started reading the second copy, and has sort of adopted it. Not that I’m complaining. Seeing her pore over the book kills me. She’s been quoting some of the dialogue (“Well I’ll be jiggered”, being the line that cracks me up the most) and really enjoys reading the strips, especially the ones where Skeezix is a toddler. Emily has up until now had a strict policy of not enjoying comics that “have people in them” — she’s been reading Disney books (mostly Donald Duck), some old Disney film adaptations (mostly Dumbo), Molly and Emmett comics from Ladybug magazine (Molly is a girl but Emmett is a cat), Polo (two new volumes out soon), Johnny Boo (ghosts and a monster) and Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks comics in an old Whitman collection. She has been reading Julie and Grampa: Shark Hunters, actually, which has human protagonists, but there are a lot of talking animals in that as well. And there are monsters and creatures in Magic Trixie and Scary Godmother, which she’s nuts about. But Dennis the Menace was out, as were several other comics “with people in them”. But so far, the Walt and Skeezix Sunday strips have passed muster, perhaps because of the many dream sequences and strips based on Halloween and Christmas and whatnot. Who knows, I’m not going to press her on it, we let her enjoy what she likes and don’t shove anything down her throat if she’s not interested. For some reason she won’t read Hideshi Hino comics. Don’t ask me.

Some of your short stories and books contain a certain voyeuristic quality to them. Are you someone who likes to observe the actions and movements of others? Are there always parts of your works that are based on such experiences?

Inevitably. There’s an attractive aspect to art, that it is the interior universe of the creator. But, most of the time, for me that sole element seems insufficient. The other aspect that makes me feel attracted to the work of an artist is their personal form of seeing and interpreting the world, sentiments, society, human beings… the universe, to that extent. And that interpretation has to bear fruit, inescapably, to observations and reflection.

I’d say “yes,” that all my comics works are based, to a greater or lesser degree, on experiences.

I sometimes joke that my early experiments in webcomics put me in comics’ “lunatic fringe” but it’s nice to know that there are artists like Sutu out there that make my scribblings look tame by comparison. He tells me he may release a graphic novel follow-up including the first chapters on DVD, so I guess all the walls between print and web are tumbling down if a strange beast like Nawlz can cross the line.

“We are a group of fans that are staging a funeral for what is known as Wizard World Philadelphia,” he said over email. “The majority of us have been going for most of the years the con has been open. It has gotten to the point where convention coordinators who once asked us for feedback and what we would enjoy at WWP have been let go and new ones just don’t care. It is like the captain going down with the ship. Now with the new acquisition of Big Apple Con and it being in New York, we are to believe they wouldn’t want to use the time or the resources to stage two cons merely two hours apart.”

That’s because Frank Robbins has always been a polarizing figure in the annals of Marvel. People flat out either loved his style or despised it, and the proof is all over the letters pages of THE INVADERS, THE HUMAN FLY, GHOST RIDER, LUKE CAGE, CAPTAIN AMERICA and other titles he ran stints on. Given the two camps, I belonged to the former. I loved his anatomically incorrect, funky-posed superheroes and his Flash-paced action, the best combo being the two Franks: Robbins inked by Springer. Robbins was no prim and perfect Neal Adams, photo-realistically rendered and almost static at times…his work was high-octane, breakneck-speed fun and trashy, in the best, B-comic sense. You didn’t stick a Robbins comic in a mylar and mount it on your wall, you rolled it up in your back pocket and took it with you wherever you went. Yes, Frank Robbins had soul.