Meanwhile...

Posting has been a bit lighter than I would normally like here on EDILW, but I've got a decent excuse—I've been writing a bunch of stuff for publication elsewhere over the past week or so.

First up, I reviewed Scott McCloud's excellent graphic novel The Sculptor for Las Vegas Weekly. You've likely been seeing reviews of it and interviews with McCloud pretty much every where, and with good reason. The Sculptor is the book of 2015...or at least the first two months of 2015. You can read that review here.

I also (kinda) reviewed Peter Bagge and company's Sweatshop for Robot 6. That was a brief, likely semi-forgotten six-issue "ongoing" monthly that DC Comics put out in 2003. I discuss this in the piece itself a bit, but in Bagge's afterword he explains that the book grew out of editor Joey Cavalieri's apparent repeated attempts to get "alternative" cartoonists working for DC Comics. Cavalieri edited the Bagge-written, Gilbert Hernandez-drawn Yeah! as well as the Bizarro Comics anthology. That last one I thought of particular interest since one of the many unbelievable artists who helped Bagge out on Sweatshop was Stephen DeStefano, who drew the framing story for Bizarro Comics. I loved that story; I think DeStefano drew not only my favorite Mr. Mxyzptlk in that story, but also the definitive Bizarro. Whenever I think of Bizarro, it's DeStefano's design I see in my head (And that story? Totally in continuity; Big Barda, Steel and other members of the Morrison/Porter JLA team totally show up at the climax).

Anyway, you can read me talking about Sweatshop here.

Finally, I have a pair of reviews that were posted at Good Comics For Kids this week, one of Beware The Batman (the trade paperback collecting the DC Comic based on the TV show based on DC comics) and another of Peanuts #25, Boom's ongoing effort to produce original Peanuts material for the comic book market. You can read those pieces here and here, respectively.

Peter Bagge should totally draw Donald Duck comics.

The above is a panel from a 2001 strip entitled "Latin Laissez-faire"that Bagge did for Reason magazine, one of the many collected in Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations (You can read the whole strip here).

As you can see, Bagge has a rather idiosyncratic way with Disney's most popular cartoon duck, the huge bill/mouth, head and eyes making the often psychotically angry duck look super-psychotically angry. Bagge's trademark, arcing semi-circle limbs give Donald a kind of purposeful aspect to his anger, too. And that's just a quick, tiny sketch of Donald as a tiny part of a panel dealing with something else entirely. Imagine a whole comic focusing on Donald.

Boom, Bagge...let's make it happen, huh?

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Hey, fellow Columbusites! Remember in 2004, when the Wexner Center for the Arts hosted the exhibit Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art? Remember, they had it in the Belmont Building, one of the Wex's satellite sites, as the center itself was being remodeled at the time? And in a smaller gallery space next to the Splat Boom Pow! exhibit was the Tea and Coffee Towers exhibit, featuring tea and coffee sets designed by 20 of the world's top architects?

Well Bagge apparently went to it, as it's mentioned in a panel of one of his Reason strips:
That panel is from the 2004 strip "'Real' 'Art'" (Or "Mr. Grumpy Goes to an Art Museum and Comes out Belaboring the Obvious") (You can read that strip online here).

Bagge probably took in the tea set show while in town for a panel he participated in with Gary Panter and Jessica Abel that was one of the events that was held in conjunction with Splat Boom Pow!

Neat, huh?

I'm sure big city comics readers in cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle, Gotham City and Metropolis are used to hearing their hometowns referenced in comics constantly, but it's still always a bit of a surprise to see Columbus pop up in a comic I'm reading like this.