May 8 @ WORD: Gladstone & Neufeld Explain Everything

Next Tuesday, May 8, Brooke Gladstone and I will be debuting The Influencing Machine‘s paperback edition at Greenpoint’s independent bookstore WORD. Titled “Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld Explain Everything,” Brooke and I will “dish” on the state of modern media, the process of creating the book, and more with a multimedia presentation, Q&A, and signing. Plus, WORD will be raffling a free, signed copy of the book!

Here’s the Facebook event, where you are encouraged to RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/events/402451176440183/

Details:
Tuesday, May 8, 7 p.m.
WORD, 126 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Nearest subway: G train (Greenpoint Ave.)

Nick Flynn’s BEING FLYNN… the back story

I first met Nick Flynn back in the fall of 1999, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I had accompanied Sari there for her Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, a residency which would keep us in P-town through the winter and into the following spring. Nick was a second-year fellow, and Sari and I were immediately drawn to his charm, intelligence, and good humor.

Nick was a natural storyteller, and had some amazing stories to tell, about a life filled with drama, heartbreak, debauchery—all that good stuff. By trade, he was a poet—a good one—and over the years he and I did some collaborations, basically me adapting his poems into comics. One of the pieces, “Father Outside,” had to do with the time Nick was working in a homeless shelter and his long-estranged father arrived as a new client. Another piece, “Bag of Mice,” dealt with Nick’s mother’s suicide. In all, we did three collaborations, all of which were published in literary journals (and later published my me in The Vagabonds #2). The original art from our first piece, “Cartoon Physics, Part One,” even traveled as part of a multi-city comics art exhibition.

In 2004, Nick published a memoir, memorably titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. (That was a favorite phrase of his father’s.) Nick hoped to collaborate again with me on the cover of the book (which was being published by W.W. Norton, much later to be my publisher for The Influencing Machine.) So we worked together on some sketches. Long story short, Norton declined to use my art for the cover (though it was eventually published as a frontspiece in the British Faber & Faber edition). And I have to admit that the art they used instead, by Hon-Sum Cheng, is far superior.

So, fast forward eight years, and Nick’s book has been made into a feature film. Now called Being Flynn (you can see why they didn’t use the other title), it stars Paul Dano as Nick and the legendary Robert DeNiro as Nick’s father. Julianne Moore makes an appearance as Nick’s mom—not a bad cast! The film opened last week, so to commemorate it, I’m sharing the book’s rejected cover art.

Lila Quintero Weaver’s DARKROOM

Last fall I was sent a manuscript copy of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White, a graphic novel memoir by newcomer Lila Quintero Weaver. In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were first-hand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement. But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation’s race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.

Darkroom is an impressive debut work. A memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Weaver’s mesmerizing tale is matched by her accomplished drawing and design skills. Darkroom is the story of a childhood, of a Latino immigrant family, of the struggle for justice in the Deep South. Weaver’s appealing pencil renderings perfectly capture the book’s themes of being caught in the middle, witness to (and participant in) one of the most turbulent periods in American history.

Darkroom is out now from the University of Alabama Press. Here’s a link to buying a copy.

Tomorrow: GB Tran’s VIETNAMERICA book release party

Tomorrow is the debut of GB Tran‘s remarkable new book, Vietnamerica. He’ll be celebrating the release tomorrow night at MoCCA, from 7-9 pm and you should go!

Vietnamerica is both autobiography and memoir, of many generations of the GB’s family, both in Vietnam and here in the States. It tells of GB’s awakening to the importance of his heritage, his own visits to Vietnam, and stories of family members’ life under successive foreign-controlled regimes, the country’s mid-1970s independence, and their emigration to America. Quoting from the book copy, "In this family saga played out in the shadow of history, GB uncovers the root of his father’s remoteness and why his mother had remained in an often fractious marriage; why his grandfather had abandoned his own family to fight for the Viet Cong; why his grandmother had had an affair with a French soldier. GB learns that his parents had taken harrowing flight from Saigon during the final hours of the war not because they thought America was better but because they were afraid of what would happen if they stayed. They entered America — a foreign land they couldn’t even imagine — where family connections dissolved and shared history was lost within a span of a single generation."

I’ve had the good fortune to read the book already and I was really just blown away, not only with GB’s art, which is exceptional — full of beautiful colors, sweeping vistas, thrilling action, and also wonderful intimate moments — but the story itself, which is so complex and multi-layered. It seems at times BG channells Will Eisner, other times Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, but always making it uniquely himself. Like David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, Vietnamerica asks a lot from the reader, but to me that exemplifies what comics at their best can achieve.

I grew up with a fascination with the Vietnam war, mostly due to all the 1970s and ’80s movies on the topic. For a long time, I thought about doing a book about my obsession, but I never really could frame it correctly. Well, Vietnamerica has put that goal forever out of my mind: this is the book I could only dream of ever doing.

Many, many congratulations to GB on Vietnamerica. I already consider it my top book of 2011 — I can’t imagine anything else topping it this year.

Details:

Price: Free Admission
Date: January 27
Time: 7 to 9 PM
Place: 594 Broadway Suite 401 NYC

Belle Yang’s FORGET SORROW

Chinese-American writer/illustrator Belle Yang has just released her first graphic novel, Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, a memoir of her own life and that of her father and his family during and after the Chinese Communist revolution. I was asked to read and comment on an advance copy of the book. The book has been released to warm reviews, and is available for sale right now. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Forget Sorrow is intimate and yet grand in scope. Through Belle Yang’s expert weaving of personal memoir and family history, we emerge with new understanding of pre-Communist China, ancestral lore — and father-daughter reconciliation. Yang’s drawings — and her heartfelt dialogue — make these long-ago stories feel both present and personal. A compelling addition to the comics memoir form.

The book’s been getting some really nice reviews, and there’s an interview with Yang on the SMITH website. Recommended!

My ten favorite comics/graphic novels of the decade

As things wind down, prompted by the Daily Cross Hatch, here are my picks of the 00s, in no particular order…

• Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
• Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes
• Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
• Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson
• The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi
• Identity Crisis, by Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Bair
• All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
• Y, the Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan and (mostly) Pia Guerra

My picks for best graphic novels of ’09

The website The Daily Cross Hatch has just posted its year-end popularity list, "The Best Damned Comics of 2009 Chosen by the Artists." Here are my picks (in no particular order):

• Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak — I’ve loved Sikoryak’s comics for years, and this beautiful volume collects all his “mash-ups” of high and low, merging the look of classic strips and comics with stories from the Western literary canon. Bob Kane’s Batman vs. Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment! Blondie & Dagwood vs Adam & Eve! Siegel & Shuster’s Superman vs. Camus’ The Stranger! Hilarious, clever, and yet designed to make you think…
• The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb — A formidable work, filled with respect for the material yet still pulsing with the earthy, pungent humanity that Crumb defines. And the man has lost nothing in the cross-hatching department
• Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli — Maybe the best fusion of art & words yet produced, the pinnacle of what defines comics. A true work of literature by one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. If only we didn’t have to wait a decade for each new book of his!
• ACT-I-VATE Primer — Beautifully produced anthology featuring some of my favorite cartoonists: Dean Haspiel, Michel Fiffe, Mike Dawson, Nick Bertozzi, Tim Hamilton, Leland Purvis, Joe Infurnari, and Simon Fraser, just to name a few. Cleverly, each of the stories in the book is a print-only example of the ongoing free stories on the ACT-I-VATE website.
• Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, edited by Brendan Burford — I know, I shouldn’t be allowed to nominate this because I’m a contributor, but my piece is entirely forgettable, while the rest of this anthology is top-notch. Syncopated features 16 nonfiction stories ranging from from the history of vintage postcards to the glory days of old Coney Island, from the secret world of graffiti artists to the chess champs of Greenwich Village, from the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Contributors include editor Burford, Nick Bertozzi, Alex Holden, Greg Cook, Jim Campbell, and Paul Karasik.

It was really hard limiting my list to just five books, so here are five more 2009 GNs which merit an "Honorable Mention":

• A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Tim Hamilton
• Some New Kind of Slaughter: Lost in The Flood (and How We Found Home Again) by A. David Lewis And mpMann
• Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
• The Imposter’s Daughter: A True Memoir by Laurie Sandell
• ‘08: A Graphic Diary Of the Campaign Trail by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman

Some New Kind of Slaughter

Some New Kind of Slaughter: Lost in the Flood (and How We Found Home Again): Diluvian Myths from Around The World, from Archaia Studios Press, is now out. Given my connection to a certain diluvian story, creators A. David Lewis & mpMann asked me to write the foreword to the book, which I did. Here it is:

For me, it all began with the 2004 Asian tsunami. Horrified by the huge loss of life, I was also fascinated by the imagery, by the idea that life-giving water could bring such epic death and destruction. I remember trolling the Internet for video from the tsunami, watching YouTube clips over and over again. What was most mesmerizing about what I saw was not that the water came in crashing waves, but rather that it seemed to surge from below, to inexorably grow deeper and deeper, like some nightmare from which you couldn’t wake. And that was exactly it — the tsunami, the flooding, the very themes of water and drowning, were like dreams, a nightmare millions of helpless people shared that late-December night in 2004.

Less than a year later, when Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast, I experienced the same morbid fascination with the storm surge and the flooding of New Orleans. This time, however, I was moved to action. For whatever reason, I woke from my waterlogged reverie and volunteered with the Red Cross. Almost before I knew it, I was in the Gulf Coast, providing emergency relief to those left behind. Walking through the rubble of Biloxi, Mississippi, and listening to the clients’ survival stories made the experience all too real, but the rising waters still haunted my dreams. Perhaps they always will.

So for me at least, mpMann and A. David Lewis’s Some New Kind of Slaughter is especially resonant. Mainly through the visions of the ancient Sumerian king Ziusudra, adrift on his great ark, Mann and Lewis take the reader on a dreamlike tour through the world’s great flood myths. From Babylonia to the Nile Delta, from the Chinese tales of Da Yu to the Native American Menomines, and from modern-day eco-warriors to the Old Testament, we see how these disparate creation and destruction myths share themes of divine punishment, visionary pariahs, and… turtles? Even the familiar story of Noah comes to life in unexpected ways.

Humor leavens the tales. The ancient stories, cultures, and names go down easy via Lewis’s characters’ naturalistic, witty dialogue. And Mann’s beautiful, painterly art completely meshes with the story. The expert weaving of word and image is augmented by the landscape-style alignment of the pages, a device that would seem gimmicky in other contexts, but here reinforces the hallucinatory narrative.

Reading this book reminded me of my youthful backpacking days. Traveling through Southeast Asia and Central Europe, I read author Gore Vidal’s series of historical novels tracing the exploits of one family through American history. Completely captivated by Vidal’s unique vision and his gleeful assault on our cultural myths, when I returned home I sought out the primary sources, reading up on events I hadn’t thought about since high school. I thoroughly enjoyed that journey, and will always be grateful to Vidal for his expert use of the art of fiction to teach fact. Some New Kind of Slaughter does the exact same thing.

The human instinct to tell stories — to make sense of the senseless, to impose order on what seems like the capricious whims of nature — is timeless. What began with poems around a fire, or ancient symbols on cracked parchment, comes to us now in the form of viral video and the pages of the graphic novel. Like a dream shared across cultures and history, Some New Kind of Slaughter ties our modern present to the ancient and/or biblical past. It is a triumphant demonstration that the graphic novel may be the future’s best teaching tool.

“Father Figures” in SYNCOPATED

Just out this week is cartoonist/editor Brendan Burford’s Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, published by Villard. A slightly revised version of my two-page piece, "Father Figures," (originally posted on ACT-I-VATE) is part of the book.

I’m really proud to be part of this collection, which features 16 nonfiction stories (memoir, history, journalism, and biography) ranging from from the history of vintage postcards to the glory days of old Coney Island, from the secret world of graffiti artists to the chess champs of Greenwich Village, from the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

Other contributors include Burford himself (a very accomplished cartoonist), Alex Holden, Greg Cook, Jim Campbell, Paul Karasik, and our old buddy ! Nick’s piece is a fascinating window into a part of his life I knew nothing about, when he was a farm boy (no joke!).

Look for Syncopated at your local retailer, or buy it on Amazon.

“Katrina, Texas”

A friend tipped me to “Katrina, Texas,” a four-page comic book story about a real-life New Orleans Hurricane Katrina survivor. Sound familiar? :->

This is the story of Eartherine Odem and her escape from the flooded 6th Ward to the Convention Center and then Austin, Texas. It’s told to Yaphet Smith, with terrific illustrations by Frank Stockton and Mike Neumann. Check it out here.