The Mumpsimus

Before 1995, Howard Cruse was best known as an underground comix artist, first coming to prominence with Barefootz in the 1970s, with his editorship of Gay Comix in the early 1980s, and then hitting a real stride with the Wendel comics in The Advocate throughout the '80s. Wendel ended in 1989, though, and Cruse began a major new project, his first graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby , released by the DC Comics imprint Paradox Press . It gained notice and won awards, but never had the breakout success of something like Maus , Persepolis , or Fun Home , though I would argue that it is at least close to equal in merit. Stuck Rubber Baby is a true graphic novel — unlike many other books that get that label, it was not conceived in pieces or published serially; it was always intended to be a long, unified narrative. It tells the story of a man named Toland Polk, mostly through his memories of growing up in Alabama during the early 1960s as a white guy who doesn't really kno...

I remember when I spoke with Lynd Ward’s two daughters that both Nanda and Robin told me that they constantly asked their father what his wordless books meant and Lynd always replied with the same answer: "It means exactly what you think it means." And that is really the attraction of these books -- we bring so much of our own personal experiences to reading pictures because the language of pictures has, what I like to call, a "private declension" that only each of us can understand -- a secret smirk or a haunting remembrance from our private association to an image. --David A. Beronä The release of The Library of America's gorgeous two-volume collection of Lynd Ward's wordless novels has led to some fascinating and thoughtful reviews. I just noticed that Scott Esposito did a quick roundup , and so I thought I'd add to what he'd collected, since I find Ward's work endlessly fascinating. William T. Vollmann, Bookforum: What makes a Ward pict...

The Center for Cartoon Studies' Schulz Library has a great blog , which, if you're at all interested in comics or graphic novels, provides wonderful reading. Today, for instance, they posted a marvelous piece by S.R. Bissette about a new anthology of 1950s horror comics .  This is part one of what looks to be a three-part series. I also just discovered Bissette's own site , itself a marvel.  Don't miss his series of posts on LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Dutchman .

My latest "Sandman Meditations" column has now been posted at Gestalt Mash.  This particular column seems transitional to me, bringing myself as a reader to the foreground, because sometimes that feels necessary; the next installment goes in the opposite direction to some extent, and I expect as the experiment continues I'll be trying out different modes of narration, simply because doing all 75 or so of them in the same way would get rather tedious for all of us... Here's an excerpt: The third  Sandman  poses some problems for me, someone who has read almost no DC comics and has only the vaguest sense of their characters and history. The vagueness and sense share a source: popular culture in general. You’d have to live in some remote part of the world, away from billboards and newspapers and televisions and radios, to avoid all references to DC characters, given how many of them have metamorphosed into stars of movies and TV shows. I was going to write a sentenc...

My second Sandman Meditations column is now live at Gestalt Mash , this one looking at the second story, "Imperfect Hosts", and considering, among other things, the place of speech and thought balloons.

Jay Tomio has started a new website, mostly (but not only) devoted to comics, called Gestalt Mash , and he very kindly asked me to be a regular contributor. When he first asked, I thought he must have me confused with somebody else, because though I have some good friends who are comics experts, I'm only an occasional reader of them myself. The only comic I read regularly as a kid was G.I. Joe , and I didn't read my first graphic novel until I was well into my 20's. Jay asked if I'd write about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series , writing a short essay for every issue. I told him, with a bit of embarrassment, that I've never read Sandman ; indeed, I only know Neil Gaiman's work in prose (and like some of it quite a bit ). Jay said that would be the fun -- plenty of comics afficionados have written about Sandman ... but what happens when somebody who doesn't know much about comics does? Well, the first of my "Sandman Meditations" has now ...

Over at Colleen Lindsay's digs, The Swivet, I interview David Beronä , who wrote a marvelous book called Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels . One fun bit of trivia I forgot to mention in the intro to the interview -- before David and I had any knowledge of each other, we were both reviewers for Rain Taxi , and you should definitely check out his review there of one of the most recent wordless books to gain a lot of attention, Shaun Tan's The Arrival .