Jim Vance and Dan Burr’s ON THE ROPES!

Do you remember Jim Vance & Dan Burr’s 1988 graphic novel Kings in Disguise, at the time published in a six-issue limited series by Kitchen Sink Press (and winner of both the Eisner and Harvey Awards for best new series)? I had heard about it over the years, but had never gotten the chance to read the book until last fall. Influencing Machine editor Tom Mayer was editing Kings‘ long-awaited sequel, and he asked me if I’d be willing to write a blurb for it. In addition to sending me the galleys of the new book, I received a present of the original as well—which I thought was wonderful.

Well, On The Ropes is in many ways superior to Kings in Disguise. Freddie Bloch, the young protagonist of the original book, is a bit older now, and still navigating his way through the hardships of the 1930s. Freddie is pushed to the edge, as he falls in with Communists, carneys, and criminals. Vance’s complex, heartfelt writing and Burr’s earnest, detailed drawings humanize the plight of all those caught in the ravages of the Great Depression.

On The Ropes is a refreshing take on the turmoil and politics of the era—and a gripping, dramatic, and frightening tale. It comes out today—please go out and buy it.

MSU Comics Forum this Saturday, March 2

This Saturday I’ll be up in East Lansing (Go Green!) at the MSU Comics Forum, an “event that brings together scholars, creators, and fans in order to explore & celebrate the medium of comics, graphic storytelling, and sequential art.” I’ll be participating in two panels, the “Artist Spotlight” at 1:30, and “Comics and Journalism: Practice, Publish, Innovate” at 2:45. I’ll also be hanging out in Artist’s Alley at other times throughout the day.

The “Artist Spotlight” panel also includes my good buddy and MSU Comics Forum keynote speaker Nick Bertozzi, as well as cartoonist and teaching artist Jerzy Drozd.

The comics journalism panel also includes Darryl Holliday, writer and co-founder of the Illustrated Press; and Joyce Rice, creative director of Symbolia Magazine.

Details:
MSU Comics Forum
Michigan State University
Snyder/Phillips Hall, 2nd floor
East Lansing, MI

Friday, March 1: Keynote Address with Nick Bertozzi – 7:00-8:30pm
Saturday, March 2: Artist Alley and Panel Discussions – 11:00am-5:00pm

Get your BIG FEMINIST BUT original art right here—cheap!

Cartoonists/Editrixes Joan Reilly and Shannon O’Leary are the geniuses behind the upcoming anthology The Big Feminist But, recently funded on KickStarter. (Woo-hoo!) The collection of feminist comics features contributors like Hope Larson, Jeffrey Brown, Vanessa Davis, Emily Flake, Shaenon Garrity, Justin Hall, Ron Rege, Lauren Weinstein, Liz Baillie, Abby Denson, Jesse Reklaw, Kat Roberts, and Dylan Williams. It also includes a brand-new collaboration of mine and Sari’s (she wrote it and I drew it) loosely based on her experiences as a fact-checker for Playboy Magazine. It’s a nice piece, if I do say. But, anyway, one of the Kickstarter pledge levels features an original page from the story (previewed at right)! Here’s the full pitch:

Pledge $125 or more
ADDITIONAL ART COLLECTOR AWARD! A piece of original comics art from Sari Wilson and Josh Neufeld’s story, “Playmate and Me,” plus a special bookplate edition of The Big Feminist BUT signed personally to you from the editors, a sketched-in copy of Pet Noir, a PDF of the book, and your name in the Acknowledgements.

All for the measly price of $125! So even though the project is fully funded (again: Woo-hoo!) you can still buy the original page and all the other goodies mentioned above.

But (excuse the pun!)—there are only five days left. So act now, and don’t risk regretting your inaction for the rest of your life!

Plug: Little White Duck, by Andres Vera Martinez and Na Liu

The all-ages publisher Graphic Universe (a division of Lerner Publishing Group) invited me to contribute a quote to their new title, Little White Duck: A Childhood in China, and this is what I wrote:

A graceful marriage of words and images, Little White Duck is Andrés Vera Martinez’s loving evocation of his wife Na Liu’s childhood in China during the Cultural Revolution. Ancient fables mix with the hard realities of rapid industrialization, and Martinez’s colorful, accessible artwork perfectly captures the look and feel of that time and place. It’s a gem of a book.

Harvey Pekar & JT Waldman’s NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME

The late great Harvey Pekar left behind an amazing legacy of work. He had so many books in the pipeline when he passed away in July 2010 that there are still new books coming out today (including the wonderful Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, illustrated by Joseph Remnant). Another new book of Harvey’s, illustrated by JT Waldman, was sent to me in galley form by his publisher, who asked for a blurb. I was happy to oblige, and here it is:

Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me is a fascinating history of the so-called Promised Land—as seen through the eyes of an estranged Jew from Cleveland. Brimming with classic Pekar asides and details, the book sheds light on a subject usually obscured by heat. JT Waldman’s evocative artwork combines down-to-earth American Splendor-style illustrations with motifs inspired by everything from mythology to Islamic Art to illuminated manuscripts to Chagall. In cleverly reminding us of its collaborative nature, the book evokes the uneasy conversations Jews often have amongst themselves about Israel. Personally, I never got to say goodbye to Harvey, a man I had known and worked with for over fifteen years. Reading this book was like having a final, wide-ranging conversation with him.

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!