•Â My friend, cartoonist Gregory Benton, lives in New York and recently participated in a fabulous gallery show (curated by cartoonist Jason Little) in the city called OPOLIS, at the Flux Factory, that essentially creates a miniature 3-D city, and also incorporates comics. This is a hugely ambitious show that i wish to god i could see in person.

•Â The site description reads:
OPOLIS presents Comix-Fluxture-as-city. Opolis is an imaginary city, located in the Flux Factory main space. Individual city blocks have been assigned to individual cartoonists and illustrators. These cartoonists have designed the buildings and environments that will fill the city blocks (an apartment building, a looming office skyscraper, a library, a public park…) with invented characters that are the citizens of Opolis.

OPOLIS is the third manifestation of Flux Factory’s annual “Comix Fluxture” exhibit. These exhibits have brought cartoonists and illustrators into the gallery to create comics narratives that also function as installation art. The ongoing objective of the series is to create works of art to be read intimately…as a comic strip…but also contribute to an overall installation spectacle.

• If you live in New York, get your ass on over there!

Following is an email and photos i received from Gregory, reprinted with his permission. The comic strip that Gregory himself created for his "building" (which you can see in these photos), we'll also reprint in its entirety in the next update of our comix section on this site.

• If Gregory's name sounds familiar, then you may have read some of his comics goodness here on our own comix section. or it's because of a wonderful comic he did for Slave Labor a long long time ago called Hummingbird. It's lusciously drawn and a real wild read. Since then, he's been doing more painting than anything else, though he has been doing some funky-cool historical comic strips that none of us will get to see. Some lucky students will though. His comics work these days is full-color bliss. Here's hoping that one day we'll all be blessed to see more.

•Â Meanwhile, i'm leaving for a long weekend down at my awesome mom-in-law's fabulous lake-house, down by the Oregon Sand Dunes on the coast.

• Gregory Benton writes:
Finished up the building & comix I had been working on. The opening was excellent. Good crowd, great reception. I was interviewed briefly by the NY Press, if anything comes of that, I'll forward it to you. Info on the show can be found at www.fluxfactory.org.

The building dimensions are 6' wide x 4'deep & 7.5' high. Medium: Styrofoam, acrylic enamel & Digography. As far as content, comix run on the two long sides (front & back) with paintings & sketches along the sides.

The entire family here at Casa de Warnock has been sick like dogs. A freaky virus that has every one of us exhibiting different symptoms, in addition to a few shared. Add to this our old house (with NO air conditioning) and 100º days, and it's the outright Portland Misery Festival right here. Whoo hoo!

That said, i have been working with Chris to wrap up the new edition of From Hell and get it to the printer. So not all is lost.

I did read a new(ish) comic a couple days ago, and it's a doozy. I'm talking of course of Kevin Huizenga's OR ELSE Vol. 4, published by the great Drawn & Quarterly. And it's yet another gem, from one of the most under-rated cartoonist working today. Kevin is (or was... maybe he's moved?) part of a thriving comics collective in St. Louis, which includes a number of stellar talents, including Dan Zettwoch and Ted May.

Where most reviewers focus on Huizenga's command of his formal skills, and how he applies them to the stories he tells, i'm actually more drawn into his work for his ability to capture small moments; his ability to convey a palpable mood and setting that feels like you've been transported right there. He's been doing this for years, going way back to his formative mini-comic, Supermonster.

In other news, i must say my inner geek is totally fired-up to find a postcard at MoCCA announcing the release of the long-awaited, previously defunct fantasy anthology edited by Jeffrey Brown, called Elfworld. The buzz around this book has been big for years, and knowing that it's coming out warms the cockles. It's being published by a newer outfit called Family Style.

Down two breezy games to none against the Mighty Mavericks, and down by 13 points in the third quarter in Game 3, the underdog Miami Heat, under the dominating will of Dwayne (the clear MVP) Wade, have won four in a freaking row to win the NBA Finals. And in Dallas no less.

I would have liked to have seen either team win (since the Suns weren't there), but in the end, the better team won. Miami stepped up their defense like were amped on crank, causing the normally in-control Mavs to scramble, lose their rhythm, and miss shots.

This has been the best Finals i've seen in years. (Though my favorite playoff series in the Modern Era was the Western Conference Finals a few years back between the Lakers and The Sacramento Kings.)

I loves me some hoops, but i'm breathing a heaping inhaler blast of relief right about now, knowing that i won't have to watch any more sports for at least a few more months. (Well, except for the World Cup.... and maybe Grand Slam Tennis.)

And moving onto some comics news, i must say what a surprise it was to take my weekly trip to one of my favorites comics websites, Ninth Art, only to read that this was to be their last issue. Andrew Wheeler was the guy i knew personally involved with the effort (though i did meet Antony Johnston at SPX a few years ago), but there were a lot of people who made this site what it was.

This last ish includes an interview with the quite talented Ed Piskor, whose comics grace the comix section on our own site, in collaboration with Underground legend Jay Lynch.

Also in this volume, their annual Lighthouse Awards, with the Publisher of the Year category going to the well-deserved Oni Press. (Two words. Scott. Pilgrim.)

What i loved about Ninth Art was that it had interesting, well-considered (if not stubbornly opinionated) content, excellent interviews and reviews, and most importantly, a Unique Voice. It had super simple design, but was more than effective. I HIGHLY recommend that readers traipse on over and check this out.

Kudos on a great run, folks. I'm truly going to miss ya. I hope that you're able to leave the site up for archival purposes, as did my last favorite, now-defunct comics weekly site, Savant. Best of luck with the next gig, for all of you.

Shoot... so hard getting back on the horse when i've been away. To recap the last ten days.

MoCCA. good. Sales were down a little from last year, but hey … the crowd was steady, the vibe was groovy, and we were in New York, so that's o.k.

Good times at the Top Shelf booth. We had Alex Robinson, Tony Consiglio (whose 110Per¢ debuted), Lilli Carre (Tales of Woodsman Pete debut), Rob Venditti, Andy Runton, Jeremy Tinder, Chris Duffy (from Nickelodeon) pimping Grampa & Julie, the aforementioned Liz Prine and Aaron Renier, and of course, Papa Chris.

Publisher's Weekly wrote:
"...Lilli Carré was in Top Shelf's booth to sign the biggest debut of the show, Tales of Woodsman Pete…and they sold 125 copies of it over the weekend." (Subscription required, i think.)

Saw lot's of friends, partied pretty hard (the Barcade party by Sparkplug fucked me right up), played foosball at the Fantagraphics party, ate some lame and some great grub. Walked a lot. Rode the subway more times than i can count.

Stayed two nights at Aaron Renier's pad in Brooklyn (as did Liz Prince, in from Boston), and my last night at Gregory Benton's beautiful place on the Upper West Side.

I visited a plethora of bitchin' comics shops (Rocketship, Forbidden Planet and Jim Hanley's) and bookstores (The Strand and Virgin Megastore), and amazingly only spent $30!! I'm shocked and amazed. (The big ticket item, volume 2 of The Times of Botchan manga reprint, by Jiro Taniguchi [author of The Walking Man] and published by Potent/Fanfare.)

Meanwhile, once again my amigo Gary Butler asked me a couple geeky questions recently, and i thought the communique worthy yet again some bloggity fun.

***********************************************

On Jun 16, 2006, at 11:25 AM, Gary Butler wrote:
I am not a fan of Grell's writing at all. I enjoyed LONGBOW HUNTERS at the time that he did it, and felt that it evinced a (dare I say) maturation in his style. But I can't say that it aged well at all. (Still own it, mind.)

Brett responds:
As i mentioned in an earlier email, when i was 15 i was a HUGE fan of Warlord, but i just never liked his superhero stuff. In fact, i hated it. I'd totally lost it for him with Sable (The assassin who moonlights as a children's book author? What the fu.?), and never even picked up on Longbow Hunters when it came out. (Although i bought it a few years ago after i'd read a seemingly enlightened review of it, on how much deeper it runs than it's credited for. Bullshit. I sat down to read this thing and literally couldn't get past the first 10 or 15 pages. Just horrible stuff.)

Gary Butler wrote:
You a CONAN fan at all? Me, not so much. Never read the Howard. Hated the Arnold movies. Never got into the Marvel stuff. I have the entire Dark Horse run and have read maybe a third of it; it's clearly top-notch stuff, but consistently fails to make me want to immerse myself, so I have to figure that Conan's just not m'man...

Brett responds:
HUGE Conan fan, starting with the paperbacks with the Frazetta (and a few Boris) covers when i was but a wee lad. Those were great, especially the visceral writing of Howard himself. Hated the Conan movie... yeah, like this wimpy kid was forced into slave labor pushing this wheel around for ten years, and now he's a freakishly buff fighting machine... god that's so lame.

Anyway, i LOVED the long Marvel run by Roy Thomas and John Busceme (inked by Ernie Chan). Really beautifully drawn and well written fantasy. In fact, it's some of the tiny amount of fantasy i have in my library at all. The Dark Horse reprints of these are awesome, and well worth picking up. All the way through the first ten volumes. (And up until they reach issue #100, after which the magic flame burned out and quality plummeted.)

If you try any more Conan ever, go straight to the source and read the originals by Robert E. Howard.

Gary Butler wrote:
Now, early Cerebus, *there's* a charcter...

Brett responds:
Waaaay late on this bandwagon, and at about the time i was about to dive in, he launched his screed against womankind (i think it was called Reads?), and now i have no desire to ever read Cerebus.

***********************************************

New incredible work by Martin Tom Dieck in Strapazin. If you don't know this guy's work, i highly recommend seeking it out. Strapazin is a comics anthology /review magazine out of Germany and/or Switzerland. (I think they have offices in both, but i'm not exactly sure where the World Headquarters are.) The focus being what we call Lit Comics... sort of a polar opposite of our own Wizard magazine (which my inner fanboy loves quite enough, thanks).

Very happy with Jeffrey's cover painting for I Am Going to be Small.

Off to New York. Thanks for the ride, Steve Lafler!!

two fabulous links.

Melinda Gebbie in the house at Suicide Girls. Interview by Daniel Robert Epstein.

Review of Jeffrey Brown's coda to the Girlfriend Trilogy, Every Girl is the End of the World for Me.

Cartoonist and long-time friend Garret Izumi and myself drove two hours hours south yesterday to the University of Oregon in Eugene, to see a lecture by Scott McCloud. Apparently it's only the third or fourth time he's done this particular talk, although as tight and perfectly executed as it was, i almost find this hard to believe.

The lecture was broken down into three parts. The first, a brief overview of his forthcoming third academic book, Making Comics, was prefaced by a fast-paced and delightfully funny author biography. McCloud's deft use of Powerpoint as a storytelling medium in itself is unparalleled.

He then talked briefly about a formal comics theory he calls The Four Tribes, representing different schools of thought and emphasis about the medium (if i recall, essentially Craft, Story, Formalism, and The Auteur), and how these various schools can and do overlap. This part of the talk blew my mind. I can only hope that he makes a book collecting these ideas one day. (And offered to publish said book if he ever needed to find a publisher for it.)

Lastly, he talked of course about his love of web comics … a topic which he discussed at length over the second half of his last book, Reinventing Comics. In Reinventing Comics the tone McCloud used seemed at least in part to intimate that web comics were THE future of comics, and print comics merely a sadly dying breed. He now seems to have tweaked this view, acknowledging the limits of web comics (mostly technical limitations), while at the same time admitting merits of comics as printed matter. No more "either/or" proposition.

Where Scott DID sell me on the merits of comics viewed through the new web-based format, is on the idea of the internet as primarily just a new tool in the toolbox for telling stories with words and images. He's clearly given this a great deal of thought, and no matter where one might stand on this debate, McCloud's ideas are absolutely a critical part of the discussion.

Truly a brilliant mind. This was a thoroughly riveting Powerpoint chalk-talk. Thanks, Scott. Kudos also to my old prof Ken O'Connell, for his continuing mission to infuse his enthusiasm for comics into the curriculum at U of O; and especially to the head of the Comp Lit program, Lisa Freinkel, for bring comics into the literary fold.

It's kind of an unexpected, though not unreasonable twist in finding a college market for comics. We've been trying to quietly sneak comics in through the Art School for so long (and all this time to their utter disdain), who would have imagined that in the end, it would be the Lit Department who've opened the door. If Lisa and Ken keep this up, Eugene might just become a thriving Sister City to the Comics Mecca that is Portland.

• Meanwhile, here's a delightful illustration by German cartoonist Mawil (creator of our own Beach Safari), for the wedding invitation of Sebastian Oehler, who works for the German comics publisher Reprodukt.

Congrats! Sebastian, your wedding gift from the U.S. is in sending fellow Deutschlander Dirk Nowitzski and the Dallas Mavericks to the NBA FInals for the first time in their history.

•Â Yes, that's right... the table has been set. The run & gun Phoenix Suns ran out of gas, and without the shot-blocking presence of Amare Stoudemire and Kurt Thomas they just couldn't keep up the pace. For the Title, we'll be watching the Dallas Mavericks vs. the Miami Heat (also in their first trip to the NBA Finals). Even though i'm sad to see the Suns fall, it'll be nice to see some fresh faces in the Finals. My call … Dallas in seven games. Shaq is playing quite inspired, and Dwayne Wade is a future Hall-of-Famer, but i think they'll eventually go down to the mighty Mavs.

• The freaking Phoenix Suns, who had a kick-ass third quarter tonight, led by the hot shooting of Tim Thomas, caved and lost to Dallas in this Game 5 of the seven game series. Dirk Nowitski had 50 points! Shit! I'm amazed the Suns weren't quicker to double-team this one-man wrecking ball. This time of the year i get so fired up with hoops fever, that by the time the Finals are over, i'm exhausted, and glad for the season to be over. (But not so much as my wife.)

•Â International Comics Ambassador John Weeks has uploaded yet another fine installment of his wonderful Comics Lifestyle. A former staffer at both Dark Horse and (maybe?) Fantagraphics, and a stalwart in the Australian and New Zealand scene from years ago, John has spent the last few years working in Cambodia, and is, on the side, feverishly attempting to document the comics scene there. Boy, the world could use a few more good men like this.

• Took some books in the other day for trade at Powell's City of Books (one of the most glorious bookstores in the universe), and picked up a luscious coffee-table art book called Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, edited by Dan (Ganzfeld) Nadel. Essentially, this entire volume provides stellar samples of work by cartoonists who toiled in the trenches like their more well-known comrades, but just never received the same attention. It's a really fabulous book, and most importantly, Nadel chose to showcase entire story strips, so that the reader isn't limited to just bits & pieces. The only flaw in the whole book was the weird inclusion of underground legend Rory Hayes. Not that Hayes' work isn't worthy (even though i feel it's the weakest work in the whole, and just not to my taste), but more that it sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the work in the book. Still, this Abrams release is well worth every penny. I can only hope that it does well, and that we'll see more archival books like this in the future. Well done, Dan.

•Â Recently wrapped up the run of Ed Brubaker and (in this last three issue story arc) Greg Rucka's unbelievably good comic Gotham Central. Wow. What a damn cool series this was... easily the best cop drama that i've ever read in comics. The conceit … how does the Major Crimes Unit operate in a grimy city littered with super-types … is a no-brainer, which i can't believe took this long to come along. "The Brube" and Greg Rucka (who either traded story arcs or collaborated on them together) were really in their element with this series, and the early issues drawn by Michael Lark are nothing short of world-class. That said, while he started out a little shaky, regular replacement artist Kano, along with the sturdy inks of Stephano Guadiano, really developed an excellent style that lended itself perfectly to the book. I hope DC has the wherewithal to finish collecting the entire run into trade paperbacks.

•Â Another sweet "pop single" (a perfect term coined by Warren Ellis for one-shot gem) is the Oni Press Free Comic Book Day effort this year, called Free Scott Pilgrim. This comic shouldn't be as good as it is, given that the narrative is fractured, and the reader is dropped into the story willy-nilly (both qualities also shared in the graphic novel series) … but in a similar manner of cartoonists like Paul Pope, the sheer blistering energy in this comic negates any story inconsistencies. Bryan O'Malley's art too is a fluid blend of contemporaries in the lush Craig Thompson school, fused with a healthy dose of manga influence. Great stuff, and very highly recommended.

•Â Reader Ron Swintek wrote in:

"I've been enjoying your Hey Bartender blog for a few weeks now, and since you were just lamenting the lack of topics, and I've been meaning to make a request anyway...
 
"Awhile back, you alluded to the problems you guys have had bringing From Hell back into print, and wondered aloud if anyone really cared. I keep my ear pretty low to the ground on all things From Hell, and haven't really heard the deal with not having this book out during Alan's most popular time here on Planet Earth. I, for one, would love to hear the whole, sordid tale.
  
"Keep up the good work on the blog … yet another X-Men Omnibus convert, here, thanks to your comments!"

Thanks for writing, Ron.

O.k. Here's the dilly. Eddie Campbell had been self-publishing From Hell through his imprint Eddie Campbell Comics, up until two years ago when Top Shelf took it over. Up until then, we were just handling distribution. When Top Shelf picked it up i did a little tweaking to the design and added flaps to the cover. It looked great, and sold through pretty quickly. Then the fuckery started.

The printer that Eddie had been using for the life of the book theretofore, Prenney Litho, had just received a $20,000 advance from ourselves and co-publishers Knockabout from England for another printing, when they informed us that they were filing for bankruptcy. Oh joy. (Flashbacks of Black Tuesday and the Twelve Hour Miracle popped in my head.) Unfortunately, they also had the only extent film for the book, and when the owner told us that he was planning on restructuring, and to hold on until then, we really had no choice but to sit back, cross our fingers, and hope that this would happen. Months came and went, and still we heard the same sad song.

Clearly, we were in a bind. Finally something happened which forced our hand. Prenney up and disappeared entirely. No phone, no email, no website, no 20K, and no book. Zippo. And so it was at this point, that Eddie Campbell had to dig out the master photocopies that he had made (having long since sold off the original art for the book) and began scanning. How long this took, i'm not sure, but it must have been a long long while. After ten years, i've done my share of scanning, and i can tell you firsthand, there are few things more mind-numbing than this.

Move ahead, eight or ten discs containing the scanned art arrive here for me to work with, and as i began the (also) long and grueling process of cleaning up Eddies scans (a necessary process, erasing defects like stray pencil marks, gobbed-up white-out, hairs, dust, and what have you) i discover yet another problem. It seems that as Eddie was burning discs for me, his computer was in the process of dying. The result of which, at least a third of the files were corrupted. (Most often manifested by weird lines running arbitrarily through the pages, making them unprintable.) AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! Make it stop!

So finally, after all of this, i'm just days away from sending this to our own trustworthy printer, Lebonfon (formerly a subsidiary of the behemoth Quebecor), hopefully in time to make San Diego.

The end.