Comix Reading List #90: Canon #4

90. CANON 4 (Colin Blanchette)

So glad for the arrival of a new issue of CANON!

DISCLAIMER: I have two contributions to this issue. My first ever interview, with Brooklyn artist Speed Paste Robot AKA Steven Solomon (a big public Thank You to Steven!). And, a news piece on a flurry of alternative comics events in NYC earlier this year. My impressions on the rest of the issue follow:

I was most looking forward to Terence Fuller's interview with Sean Scoffield who he had mentioned in several of his videos (and even shown some of Scoffield's incredible original art, if memory serves). Sean Scoffield does not disappoint. I love all the information about The Beguiling and the early business of stocking and selling alternative comics. His comments on his comics career are full of new-to-me information, and this great matter-of-fact self-appraisal:

"Well, I went to art school. I was always into comics. Comics got me drawing. I was very good at it. I drew some comics, but, you know, nothing really ever happened. Drawing a comic takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. When you're not getting paid..." Then Scoffield spends the rest of the interview on his wide-ranging art career, fascinating stuff.

Every issue has a surprise contribution I didn’t see coming. Ryan Carey's examination of a long forgotten Steve Gerber 90s Marvel series certainly fits that category. I've been a fan of Gerber's since being permanently scarred by an early issue of HOWARD THE DUCK in elementary school in the late 70s. This entry in Gerber's bibliography is both incredible and inevitable, with another of his not necessarily nuanced, but complex, dissertations on the culture of violence.

I swear I'm not being paid to say this, but editor Colin Blanchette is really coming into his own as an interviewer. His specialty, in my view, is giving new, little-known, or just plain forgotten cartoonists their chance to tell their story in their own voice (also see his feature-length interview with Beth Hetland in this issue). I immediately recognized Andrew Zaben's name on the cover, at a certain time his books were ubiquitous in Fantagraphics catalogs. So much so, I always wrongly believed Fantagraphics published Zaben's books! This quote on how he came to create his graphic novels is priceless in it's logic:

The cover to DREAM BIG DREAMS...

all three covers from GCD

MYSTERY OF THE FIRST FOOTNOTE: Due to space considerations our first question and answer were edited out of the Steven Solomon interview leaving a dangling footnote. Below is also a favorite Neal Adams page from Steven Solomon...

I have to ask, where did you study sculpture and how did you come to apply that to "create[...] a series of cartoon-influenced figurative work through the early 2000s"?

I started my journey wanting, like every red-blooded comics fanboy of my era, to BE NEAL ADAMS. (audience laughter, some cheering.)

This led me on many farcical rabbit trails which ended up with my enrolling in a very academic sculpture program… But it also resulted in my then wanting to BE ALBERTO GIACOMETTI. (more audience laughter, some heckling.)[1]

Once I worked slowly and painfully through this drawn out student period cartoony figuration tendencies, which always persisted in my sketchbooks and side projects, emerged in painting.

The line between “painting” meaning an exploration of a single image where the interaction between materials and ostensible subject matter and “comics” where the panels equal a certain time frame and have a storytelling thread (however that story is being told) is a blurry boundary sometimes.