Film Photography: Yoshitomo Nara's White Ghost on Park Avenue in NYC



I know a lot of comics fans enjoy Nara's work, so here's a post of his awesome White Ghost statue on Park Avenue. There are actually two of these, one on 71st and one on 67th. Pretty cool.

Yoshitomo Nara's White Ghost at Shawn Hoke Photography

PS, hope everyone had fun at SPX.

My Favorite SPX Report Look at all those mini-comics!

More pretty pictures and captions from J. Chris Campbell.

Fun stuff!

SPX Weekend is upon us!

Here's a short article from the Washington Post.

And here's a column I wrote this week about SPX and mini-comics over at Comic World News.

To everyone going - enjoy the show!

To those of you that can't go, maybe you can make it to the Gary Panter and Art Chandry exhibit in St. Louis. I'll be checking that out soon.

Life’s a Cakewalk Issues One and Two by Paulette Poullet






Cakewalk is a sketchbook diary mini-comic by Pittsburgh artist Paulette Poullet. I met her sitting next to Jim Rugg and Jasen Lex at SPX. She gave me two issues of Cakewalk (and a jam comic that had Captain America violating Iron Man against a brick wall, but we can't talk about that). Inside the front cover of Cakewalk issue one, she warns the reader that the quality of the art varies in the comic, and she’s right, it does. It’s a sketchbook experiment, so the art can be a little rough, but there are also several bright spots in each issue. Cakewalk works as an auto-biographical comic not only because of Poullet’s honesty, but also because her observations are easy to relate to for the reader. She’s outraged, cranky, angry, but also humorous, humble and challenging. In short, the reader can see some of their own nature in Cakewalk.

Each comic consists of one to two page stories or gags. Many of them are straightforward stacked panel pages, but some are much more imaginative. The nature of the sketchbook comic gives the artist some permission to be honest and it let’s them play around with different styles and perspective. There’s a lot of that here. If you don’t concentrate on some of the less polished pages, you’ll find a lot to enjoy.

Issue one covers February of 2005 and it begins with Poullet waiting for a bus. Three of the buses going the opposite way pass her by, and still her bus hasn’t arrived. When her bus finally arrives, she gets a good seat isolated from the other riders. Then a talkative guy gets on and sits right next to her annoying her for the rest of the trip. She mistakenly wears a red sweater on Valentine’s Day. She gets attacked by her cat, who is normally eleven pounds of pure fun. She’s annoyed by the people on her television. This is you. This is me. There’s nothing spectacular, but again, this is you. This is me. There’s a lot of us in this diary comic. So you keep reading. And as you read, you notice the neat little fonts that she makes up for her headings. There’s a page of nothing but heads of people she has been told she resembles – Kellie Osbourne, Peppermint Patty, the bumblebee girl from the Blind Melon video.

Issue two covers March 2005 and Poullet’s cat Monkey gets fixed! Good for her, even though Monkey laments his lost manhood. She’s got copies of Cakewalk number one back from the copy shop and realizes that it’s missing a page. This begins a downward spiral of whining and mopeyness that she questions until she realizes that a lot of cartoonists and musicians are whiny, mopey bastards. Right on the page is a checklist with Robert Crumb, Ivan Brunetti, Harvey Pekar, James Kochalka, Joe Matt, Jeffrey Brown. They each have a checkmark under the category “Whiny Bitch” with a crying smiley face beside it. Under “Super-Whiny Bitch,” you find The Smiths.

The inside back cover is an interview with Monkey the cat about art:
”I do what the critics call ‘Stink Art’ – but I don’t like to be pigeonholed. What I do is I eat a lot (I prefer ham and tuna) and then I poo and never cover it up in the box. The smell is terrible, it just permeates absolutely everything…”

For that one page alone, I love Cakewalk. It’s quirky, bitchy, and fun and there’s enough here to make me curious about what Poullet can do with a longer narrative. She has plans to do just that, so keep an eye out. In the meantime, you can get issues of the twenty-four page black and white Cakewalk from Poulette at pauly@comicore.com. Each issue contains a lot of story tucked under a bright blue or yellow cover for just $1.50 each.

Copacetic Comics Mini-Comic Stock
I just noticed this, but Copacetic Comics has an excellent page where you can order mini-comics from SPX 2005. I’ve only ordered from them once, but they delivered a copy of Kramer’s Ergot #5 to me in a flash.

Their SPX page has a lot of comics from the show in case you weren’t able to make it this year. As I scroll through the page, it’s really kind of alarming how much stuff they have available. They’ve got comics from Global Hobo, Partyka, Just Mad Books, Sparkplug, PictureBox, Dongery Publications, The Catastrophe Shop, and Little House Comics. There’s more too, including Jaime Tanner’s new books.

Go give it a look.

Guest Post the Second by Kate Nyland Meow, by Jesse Reklaw, is a treasure. The cover is a delightful scrap of wallpaper with the title and a picture of a cat silk-screened onto it. Although it set me back $5, it is worth every penny. Each of the sixteen technicolor paintings of cats is a little work of art. “Cat Women,” the final picture, consists of three motley women and a little cat, all in dominatrix gear. Two pages adjacent to each other each have three cats in similar poses, but it took looking at their titles (listed on a page at the end of the mini) to really get the difference between the two. On the left, we have “Good Cats,” looking dapper as they clean themselves, sleep, and lounge about. In contrast, on the right you’ll find “Bad Cats.” They have shifty gazes and ragged ears. Most cat-owning readers will probably identify more with the latter than the former. Below are two paintings, “Pile of Cats” and “Space Cat,” to show the more whimsical side of this mini.
I appreciate The Probe by Damien Jay because although it includes no dialogue, it is visually packed. Smaller than a deck of cards, with a silk-screened cover, this mini has nine panels on almost every page. In the beginning, a rabbit wakes up and is overcome with boredom. Since the mini ends with the rabbit in a near-identical state of tedium, one wonders if the rabbit simply imagined what transpired in between. The action occurs when an alien tries to lure the rabbit out of his den, using a carrot, in order to study him.
Jamie Tanner’s Barry Pago: Crime Scene Photographer violates the mandate I always give Shawn before he passes along anything comic-related to me: no sad stories about animals. I still haven’t forgiven him for Goodbye, Chunky Rice. I picked this mini up on my own at SPX and was immediately awed by the art. There is so much texture on every page. Even the most inanimate of objects (rugs, tables, bathtubs) come to life when drawn with Tanner’s pen. The tale is equally as nuanced. The title character, an anthropomorphic penguin, has brought his son, Walt, along on a job – several gruesome murders need to be documented. Pago likes to, ahem, engage with the victims to the detriment of his son, who wants to follow in the footsteps of his dad and take a picture. The disregard of Walt by Pago leads to chilling consequences, although Pago’s callousness remains untouched up through the last page.
General Thoughts I would imagine something that prevents many people from becoming comic lovers is the feeling of not getting enough bang for your buck. I spent $30 on minis and felt as though many of them lacked substance. Had I spent that money on a good novel, I would have had hours of entertainment. More than several of the minis left me empty. They weren’t horrible, they weren’t stellar, they were just eh – barely blips on the radar. A few times, I exclaimed incredulously to Shawn something along the lines of, “$3.50 for this?!?” Some were trite; others had the uncomfortable air of an adolescent boy trying to show off how crude he could be. I really enjoyed the minis I reviewed and would have paid more for them than I did. Couch Tag by Jesse Reklaw, which Shawn snagged first but I would have undoubtedly picked up had he not, was what I wish more minis were like. Dense, thought-provoking, and memorable, it was just as fulfilling as a chapter out of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

One of Shawn’s quirks is that he does not like short stories. If his favorite author publishes a book of them, he isn’t tempted to buy it. Even compilations including many of his favorite authors get ignored at the bookstore! He feels that maybe a few of the pieces would be fantastic, but the rest don’t have enough development for him to bother. This, ultimately, is how I feel about minis-comics. I understand there is blood, sweat, and tears poured in to the making of every mini. Shawn and I made our own once and can attest to that. As much as I want to love minis to the same extent Shawn does, I don’t. I appreciate the work that it takes to make them, and will continue to read the outstanding ones Shawn passes my way, but I’d rather read a novel - or a book of short stories.

Guest Post on SPX by Kate Nyland
Although Shawn and I have only been married for a few months, we have lived together for years and thus I’ve been subjected to his obsession with comics for quite some time. I grumbled under my breath about how his long white boxes detracted from the atmosphere of our college apartment. Last summer, when he ebayed most of his collection, I was pretty disgruntled at being the post office envoy by default (as a teacher, I had a few months off). Now, my spirits perk up when I see a package in the mail (a near-daily occurrence) – perhaps it’s a forgotten-about lipstick I had ordered or a care package from Mom - only to discover it’s a parcel of comics. Lest you think I negatively dwell on Shawn’s hobby, note that I took a course (The History of Comic Art) in college that was fascinating, and I sometimes incorporated graphic novels into my lesson plans as a social studies teacher. I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Hell, I came up with both of Shawn’s column titles. However, I’m not a full-fledged comic fan and can’t imagine I ever will be. I’m ambivalent about comics due to a lot of the issues Shawn often rants about in Past the Front Racks – the gaming tournaments in the back of the store, the costumes, the objectification of women on too many covers, the comic lovers who spend thousands of dollars a year collecting statues…I will address other (less superficial) reasons for my conflicting feelings about comics in a future post.

Our idea for my guest posts this week was this: take an outsider (me) to SPX with $30 to burn and see what I think about the expo and the mini-comics I picked up. Are my musings indicative of what the general public thinks of comics? No. Do they represent what women think of this art form? Of course not. They are my personal observations and should not be extrapolated. I picked up twenty-one minis in all, but in each post I am only going to review a few of the ones I found to be extraordinary.

First of all, SPX itself. I was impressed that most of the attendees looked and acted liked regulars from our local Punk Rock Night, not The Simpson’s Comic Book Guy. Although it was crowded, I was pleasantly surprised that, unlike my other comic con experience, I wasn’t “accidentally” felt up. It was difficult to visit a table without feeling (mostly self-induced) pressure to buy something, so as Shawn instructed, if the offerings of a table looked dubious, I didn’t make eye contact and just kept on walking. (If I didn’t visit a stall it may very well have been because Shawn had told me he already had everything from it and there was no need for me to buy it again.)

I picked up JP Coovert’s Blind because of the attractive packaging (100% recycled, acid-free paper in earth tones that complemented the story) and I enjoyed the short, sparse The Giving Tree-esque tale of a guy who loved a tree and the man responsible for its demise. The beauty of this mini lies in its simplicity.
the monkeynauts by Sarah Becan is also an attractively-produced mini. Bombo the Monkey relays the true accounts of simians who were employed by the US government to test space flight. The art is a breathtaking mix of Xeroxed silkscreen images and real pictures. Anyone who loves animals (not the “oh, I love cute cuddly puppies!” variety but the “how could these wonderful creatures be used for food/clothing/entertainment” kind of animal lover) would be moved by this mini, especially when reading the chilling last page. After reading this on Saturday, I’ve thought about it a lot since. It has stayed with me, a good test for any art form.
Kevin Huizenga’s Or Else is technically not a mini, but is so genius that I wanted to mention it here. Of the little vignettes, I particularly liked “I Stand Up For Zen” and “Al and Gertrude,” stories that really resonated with me. In the latter tale, Huizenga works in an understated manner to tell a very sad and human story. In the former, the author, at the time a graphic designer for a wholesale distributor, grappled with whether or not to help advertise “Power Bead” bracelets. The example below shows the creativity Huizenga uses with page layout in this comic.
In my next post I will review a few more minis and then give some general (nameless, title-less) thoughts on the minis I wasn’t as keen on.

SPX 2005 Report
This one will be centered on mini-comics as this is SIZE MATTERS. I’ll have a more publisher-oriented report tomorrow at Comic World News.
This year’s version of SPX was even more fun than last year’s show. At a show that seems to manufacture crazy amounts of positive energy, the smiles and hearty handshakes were off the chart. Friday afternoon seemed a bit slow as far as foot traffic, and almost everyone I talked to lamented poor sales. But the crowd on Saturday was often two or three deep at the more popular tables and there were bottlenecks at some well-attended corners.

For a mini-comic fan, SPX is almost overwhelming. Just the USS Catastrophe, Bodega Distribution, Sparkplug Comics and Global Hobo tables would be enough to make you dizzy, but everywhere you turn there’s another table full of mini-comics.

I started out by grabbing a copy of Couch Tag by Jesse Reklaw. Couch Tag is the story of Jesse’s thirteen cats that he had growing up and when I asked him if it would make me cry, he said probably. I haven’t read it yet.

Sparkplug and Global Hobo were right next to each other and between those tables I picked up about a dozen mini-comics, including the second issue of Reklaw’s Slow Wave, The Secret Voice by Zack Soto, the latest Service Industry by T. Edward Bak, and Stefan Gruber’s tiny Handy & Army. At the Sparkplug table I talked to Austin English about his beautiful Christina & Charles book. He showed me a stack of pages from another color book that he’s working on.

I met Jamie Tanner finally and he gave me copies of his two latest mini-comics, Diamonds and Always in Love & Other Stories of Death and Dismemberment. The latter is over fifty pages of Tannery goodness. I’ll probably try to hold off on reading these. I also learned a very valuable lesson Saturday. Jamie had about a dozen small watercolors for sale at the ridiculously cheap price of $20. One of them was an adorable little wooden bird resting on top of a street corner gas lamp. I didn’t buy it on Friday, because my bag was already overstuffed with goodies. On Saturday, it had been sold. Oh, the humanity!

John Mejias (Paping) was sharing a table with the Partyka crew and I grabbed issues twelve and thirteen of Paping. Issue twelve is constructed of one long piece of paper folded into a box with a lid and issue thirteen is printed in two colors on a NYC subway map. I met the very nice and talented Shawn Cheng for the first time, so now I’ve met all four of the Partyka people. I also bought a collection of “Daily Drawings” from the table. It was the only thing that I didn’t already have.

At the Little House table I picked up a copy of Drew Weing’s new Blar mini-comic. It’s early and I haven’t even looked at half of the minis that I brought home, but so far this is my favorite mini from the show. Drew and Eleanor were both so kind and personable. Their table was one of the most visually inventive ones at the show. Right next to them I met Joey Weiser. Like everyone I spoke with Joey was a super nice person. He gave me his two latest minis, including Tales of Unusual Circumstance number two that features another adventure of “The Unremarkable Tree Frog.” Awesome.

At the Buenaventura Press table I bought an issue of Julie Doucet’s mini-comic Sophie Punt. I think I paid twenty-five dollars for it, but I didn’t care. It’s Julie Doucet. I also took the plunge and bought a Sammy Harkham print. Alvin Buenaventura is a great guy and he’s got perfect taste in comics. There was a galley print of the book Elvis Road by Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel. That’s going to be exquisite. As I was paying I spied Tom Gauld’s comics and added Three Very Small Comics Volume Two.

Dan Zettwoch and Ted May were manning the USS Catastrophe table and Dan had a new mini-comic called Schematic Comics. This comic has some strips that were published in Arthur. Now I don’t have to find Arthur to read them, but maybe I should. There are some damn good cartoonists to be found in there.

At Jordan Crane’s table I found a mini-comic that I didn’t have called The Life Unlucky. I somehow found the strength to resist the deluxe version of The Clouds Above, but after flipping through a gorgeous copy of Non issue five, I bought the Non. I couldn't believe Jordan remembered an order I had placed almost two years ago. His table was one of the most colorful on the floor and SPX cover artist Brian Ralph was sharing it with copies of his books and a cool t-shirt that I'm sorry I didn't buy.

At the Cantab Publishing table I ran into Alex Lukas and purchased his new mini-comic Fire. This one has a section of black pages sandwiched between your standard white pages. The black pages show the firefighter being menaced by the black face of fire and smoke. Also at the Cantab table, I met the face behind the excellent magazine The Drama, Joel Speasmaker.

I spent a ridiculous amount of money at The Ganzfield/PaperRad table. After somehow managing to resist the $30 Ben Jones book (now I’m kicking myself), I bought the The Ganzfield 4-Pac Fun Pack! that includes the best Batman stories that I’ve seen in years. I also grabbed a copy of Fuckable Comics number six and a mini called Gif Papel. Between Ben Jones strips there are colorful collages of images from old comics circa 1980; this is a really neat comic.

I ran into Matthew Thurber when Kate was with me. Kate and I lamented over our failed plans to move to NYC, but Matthew gave us some hope. He also gave me a copy of the new Paper Rodeo, which I hadn't even seen yet.

Somehow I ended up with three copies of Bleep the Peeper. Two regular versions and the silk-screened cover version from Chris Pitzer. J. Chris Campbell blessed me with his Fat Pack, which isn’t a s kinky as it sounds. It’s a manila envelope full of his tiny mini-comics.

I met Matt Dembicki and grabbed the fifth issue of Mr. Big. the new baddie was just what I expected! Matt was a super nice guy and he told me that there will be a Mr Big trade collecting issues one through seven. It looks like issues one and two are all gone.

I met Mark McMurray and he had a Dumb Jersy White Boy 2.5 in color. He was also very nice and looked just like he does in his comics. I met Marcos Perez and Justin Fox. Marcos had three new Carl is the Awesome mini-comics and Justin had an issue of Lincoln isn’t the Awesome. Poor Lincoln is a hedgehog. Next to mini-comic funnyman Pat Lewis, I met Ed Piskor. I’ve got a few of his Deviant Funniesmini-comics that look great.

Look, there are piles of mini-comics that I haven’t even opened yet and many names that I haven’t mentioned. Starting tomorrow, there will be SPX reviews mixed in with review minis sent in over the past month. Also, I took Kate to the show with me for about an hour. She purchased twenty mini-comics with thirty dollars and she’ll be doing a few guest posts this week reviewing the comics she bought and giving her general impressions from the show as an “outsider.”

Also tomorrow, I’ll post my publisher-oriented SPX review at Comic World News. Here's another shot of the SPX haul. Had to stand on the couch to get this one. Hope everyone had a great time at the show!

Link to Pictures from SPX 2005
Rather than loading the photos into Blogger and using up precious space, I've posted a Flickr badge on an old website. Go here to check them out.

SPX was great. Details later.

Live from Gaithersburg: A Short SPX Update

I took a bunch of photos today, but this one was the only one that didn't need cropped or anything. It's a picture of the Paping and Partyka table (that's John Mejias and Sara Edward-Corbett) and it captures what I love about SPX - a table groaning under the weight of stacks of mini-comics.

Today was a bit overwhelming, and I kept forgetting that I could go slowly and come back tomorrow. I met several people for the first time after talking to them through email. It was really neat to meet Jaime Tanner, Joey Weiser, Drew and Eleanor from Little House, Alvin Bueneventura, Jordan Crane, Shawn Cheng, Matt Deimbecki, and Austin English for the first time. Damn, I know I'm forgetting other people I met. It was also great to reconnect with people I already knew.

I had one HUGE problem. My bag filled up way too quickly and I only bought one book, Non #5. Everything else was a mini-comic, print or shirt. I rewarded myself with a Sammy Harkham print of the character Iris on her roof from his latest story in the Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. Alvin of Bueneventura Press was kind enough to hold it for me and did his best to try and find something suitable to carry it in.

Tomorrow, I'm going back bright and early with Kate in tow. I thought it would be neat to let her go around and pick up some mini-comics and review them with an outsider's perspective for the site.

Brian Ralph Cover to 2005 SPX Anthology

Anyone excited yet about SPX? I'm pretty psyched and if Ed calls me the day of this year with a sob story, I'm grabbing David and Eliot and we'll drive to Pennsylvania and drag his ass to Bethesda.

Don't be alarmed, but there's a monster on top of your bugglegum machine.



As if you needed another reason to go to SPX this September... Over at the Little House news section they've posted pictures of their mini-comic display for SPX. It's the gumball machine from last year's show - with a twsit. I'll let Eleanor explain:

Hey Folks! If any of you were at SPX or Fluke last year you might have seen the gumball machine filled with minicomics that our gang had going on. Well, this year we'll have newer, better, and more comics by more folks! Contributers to the machine should include me, Drew, David, Joey, and Chris, and maybe Nate, Adam, Michele and Hunter. Here's the new revamped machine, complete with it's own little guardian monster displaying th' wares for all to see.



Tiny comics for fifty cents. Irresistable.