It must be said, I have no real desire to read Alan Moore’s output these days, but the impact and power of his earlier work, particularly the Warrior-published twin giants ‘Marvelman’ and ‘V for Vendetta’ and his 2000AD work, especially 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', in the UK and his ground-breaking work on DC’s Swamp Thing in the USA is undeniable. The black and white 'Marvelman' strips with Garry Leach’s ‘court artist’ photo-realist style and Bissette and Totleben’s scritchy, scratchy, surface-irritant work on Swamp Thing blew me away at the time and maintain their power whereas their contemporary and fellow standard bearer for the 'Comics Aren't Just For Kids' campaign 'The Dark Knight Returns' doesn’t.
This 1988 interview is from Newcastle-based music and youth culture show, The Tube, and features Moore talking about, amongst other things, 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', his never-completed future-world tale of the unemployed.
I've been wanting to post about some of my favourite comic artists for a while, but I wanted to do it in a way which added something beyond just pretty pictures, so here are some pretty pictures which move and make noise. In the pipeline, and amongst other things, are Mark Beyer and Drew Friedman clips from Liquid Television, Alan Moore being interviewed by a twelve-year old on The Tube and (when I eventually find it) an animatic from Peter Bagge's uncommissioned Buddy Bradley cartoon.
I was prompted to find, and use, this particular interview by a post on the Lost In Manchester blog, which discussed 'ghost adverts', almost wiped away or preserved by accident (they were usually covered up by something which protected them from the ravages of man and time) painted advertisements on the sides and fronts of shops and other commercial properties. There are several around Manchester, periodically revealing themselves to those who look above the pavement, then disappearing forever or being shrouded again, waiting for the next festival or accidental revelation. Ben Katchor's art works in that domain - the deliberate illumination of hidden worlds which were once the mainstream but now lurk, moribund, above and behind the city's walls, streets and shop-fronts.
You can find his website here: http://www.katchor.com/ Those $25 signed posters look like good value for money.
About Ben Katchor, from Wikipedia.
Ben Katchor (born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American cartoonist. His comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer paints an evocative picture of a slightly surreal, historical New York City with a decidedly Jewish sensibility. Julius Knipl has been published in several book collections including Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay and The Beauty Supply District. Other serialized comics by Katchor include The Jew Of New York (collected and published as a graphic novel in 1998), The Cardboard Valise and Hotel & Farm. He regularly contributes comics and drawings to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Metropolis magazine. He was a contributor to RAW and published and edited two issues of Picture Story magazine, which featured his own work along with illustrated articles and stories by Peter Blegvad and Jerry Moriarty. He wrote and illustrated a "weeklong electronic journal" for Slate in 1997 and contributed articles to the now-defunct Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress. His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese. He currently draws a weekly strip, Shoehorn Technique, for The Forward.
In 1993 Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in the The New Yorker.[1] He won an Obie Award for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a "comic book opera" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject of Pleasures of Urban Decay, a documentary by the San Francisco filmmaker Samuel Ball. In Michael Chabon's collected essays,Maps and Legends, (McSweeney's Books, 2008, San Francisco), he somewhat idiosyncratically describes Katchor as "the "creator of the last great American comic strip."
The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Katchor has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
Katchor has written several works of musical theater, including The Rosenbach Company (a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century) and The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island. Both feature music by Mark Mulcahy.
Katchor also gives "illustrated lectures" at colleges and museums accompanied by slide projections of his work.
Partial Bibliography
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (Penguin, 1991)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (Little, Brown & Co., 1996)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon Books, 2000)
The Jew of New York (Pantheon Books, 1998)
Picture Story Magazine (editor and contributor) (Two issues, self-published, 1986)
His work also features in the CD booklet for R.E.M.'s 1991 release, Out of Time.
A new book, The Dairy Restaurant, is due later this year.
So, the second edition of Belle Vue finally rolls into town. I intended to review the sold-out first issue back when I finally managed to get my hands on one, but felt that it wasn’t fresh enough to cover as by then most of the print-run had sold out. The cynic in me also decided it was better to wait and see if they had the staying power to produce another issue. Which they have. Obviously. Good for them.
This time round, the cover features a view under the Castlefield railway arches, lovingly rendered by Neil Dimelow, who also provided the ‘view from Cornerhouse’ drawing on the front of the first issue. His finely rendered work looks like something produced by a slightly dope-addled Chris Ware. The magazine contains mostly illustrations, and one photograph. These work fine, but it’s not clear if there was any collaboration between the writers of the pieces and the illustrators.
The writers of this magazine consist of some people who I’ve known for a long-time, some people who I’ve known for a relatively short time, some total strangers, some people whose work I admire, some people whose work I dislike, and some people whose work just fails to engage me on any level. In the main, it’s well-written, and contains some interesting information and reminiscence, but there’s a huge problem with it. And it’s something that editor Joe addresses directly in his opening editorial; (so directly, in fact, that it’s as if his future-self wrote it as a warning message to an earlier incarnation, but past-self went and ignored it anyway), there’s too much nostalgia contained within.
Now, I’m as guilty as the next man for yanking the nostalgia chain. This blog contains several examples of it. But in this case, it is relentless, and it makes me wonder how the magazine would be received by an audience for whom the little details pored over in here are either exotica (I once put on a musician from Columbus, Ohio, who was thrilled to be driven through Prestwich, regarding it as some sort of northern Memphis, Tennessee) or just navel-gazing.
The real challenge for Belle Vue issue Three is not to come up with another dazzling cover, nor to maintain the already high-level quality of writing, it is to harness the talent evident in that writing and force it to look beyond the local history society and over-30s bar-room banter.
I’m already looking forward to it.
Belle Vue issue Two is available from Piccadilly Records on Oldham Street and Cornerhouse bookshop on the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street West. Edit. I saw it on sale in The Britons' Protection this afternoon, so it may be available in other 'appropriate' hostelries.
I've generally fought shy of posting Visual Arts related stuff here due to the nature of my job, but I've hit upon a compromise. From this point on I will only blog visual arts material which is, in some way, about birds. Might as well combine the two.
This piece is from a group drawing show at Bluecoat in Liverpool, entitled End of the Line: attitudes in drawing. Due to a prior commitment and my lazy nature I'd not managed to get up the stairs to this particular element of the show (having seen the rest of it earlier) until this past Friday. This was a shame, as this playful installation by Garrett Phelan, 'Battle for the Birds.' , 2008, takes the idea of an Avian Liberation Front and runs with it as a pre-Digital, wing-crafted, homage to Old School protest movements. There's also something of the uneasy glamour of vintage British war comics, with hand-drawn portraits of the various corvid military personnel central to The Struggle.
The show finishes in The Bluecoat on July 19th, but is touring to The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh later in the year.
I've generally not used this blog for promoting or pushing things as it's too easy to offend people by accidentally missing them out, particularly when you are as forgetful as I am. I'm going to make an exception for Jeremy Deller's Procession though, as it's such a wonderfully daft idea.
So, tomorrow, July 5th, 2pm, Deansgate, Manchester, there's going to be a Procession in the name of art. There are going to be ramblers, Happy Mondays fans, football mascots (here's hoping they all fall into the large holes currently dotting Deansgate while the gas mains are done up), and unrepentant smokers amongst other things. All ten boroughs of the thing they call Greater Manchester will be represented in some form or another, get down there and cheer on your favourites.
More information at http://www.manchesterprocession.com/
There will then be an exhibition documenting the process, and no doubt giving you some insight into previous processions, marches and parades around town (and beyond).
Also, while we're not plugging stuff, why not truck up to the newly-built 'Chips' building in Ancoats for the opening of Trade City, a cross-city launch event for Contemporary Art Manchester featuring some of the city's smaller-scale artists, curators, galleries and associated buccaneers.
That kicks off at 3pm and continues until July 19th.
More information at http://www.contemporaryartmanchester.org
I posted this picture and two others from outside The Black Lion hotel back in January. Cycling past today I saw it was boarded up with corrugated iron. I used to go in there a few years ago, playing pool and boozing at dinner time with a friend who used to work in the tax office round the corner. Last time I was in there was during In The City, to see The Raveonettes. They were shite, and I was drunk, so I heckled. If I had been them I would have shown me my arse, but they let me be. The room upstairs was good, though. Round, with a high ceiling. Now, it may never see light again. Two years ago it would have been redeveloped into flats, without a doubt, but now? Who knows?
I'd passed this fella a few times as I headed down Back King Street in town, on my way to work, and finally decided to get a picture of him. He's not a blatant rip-off in the way the previous posts of comic art have been, but I like him on a Roy 'Trailer Trash' Tompkins or Kaz level, particularly the attention to detail on his shirt.
Closer scrutiny of the text below reveals a quote from Jubilee by Derek Jarman which, once placed into the giant cardfile known as Google, takes you to Kingdom of Muin . Which appears to be the site of a particularly active set of Glasgow-focussed artschool wackoes.
So the Great White Hope of British children’s comics has finally come a cropper. As of issue 43 (only three more issues to come after tomorrow’s issue 40 hits the doormat) The DFC is no more. According to a post on the Paw Quality Comics blog, Random House can no longer fund it, presumably because the experimental method of selling it by subscription-only has failed to attract sufficient interest.
This will, sadly, leave several serialised stories up in the air, including Philip Pullman’s John Blake, Mo-Bot High, and the newly-returning Crab Lane Crew. Realistically, it is difficult to see where the strips currently and recently running in The DFC could find a place within the moribund world of British Kids’ comics. John Blake could, conceivably, be completed and issued as a graphic novel on the back of Pullman’s name (even though it is not particularly good), but would there be a market for the amazing Mezolith, the cute and compelling Vern and Lettuce, or the consistently-funny Little Cutie?
It’s early days, so the individuals involved in the strips listed above, along with several others of quality, may arrange some alternative vehicle, may issue the strips themselves, or may just leave them hanging. Either way, having spent several years only picking up US material, such as the odd issue of Angry Youth Comics or Hate Annual, it was good to see that there was intelligent life outside the knowingly-ironic world of the American Underground, and that it was in a format I could buy for and share with my kids.
So, cheers, David Fickling, it was worth it for me. I hope it was for you.
Sting, the bloke who did the theme tune for The Equalizer, and The Other One, immortalised in paint. Kendal Town FC clubhouse, 21 Feb 2009. There's something of the Mort Drucker's about this drawing...
Continuing the theme of 'cover versions' of comic artists, here's Dik Browne's Hagar The Horrible advertising the appropriately horrible Skol lager, and Reg Smythe's incorrigible Andy Capp. I'm cheating with Andy, though, as this is a representation of an Avon bubble-bath container from the 70s rather than a straight interpretation of Smythe's line work.
You can see both of these in Jim Medway's charming installation 'The New Inn' at Common in Manchester until May 18th of this year. More information on how to get there and get reduced price food and drink here: http://www.aplacecalledcommon.co.uk/
Last week, as the kids were away, we went to The Royal Exchange Theatre to see 'Antigone' by Sophocles. It's not the sort of thing we would do normally, but it's not beyond the pail. We had tickets on the banquettes (that's a hard 'a', by the way. Bank, not Bonk. I asked The Ticket Guy) which cost £8.50 on the day, and are basically benches distributed around the perimeter of the stage (R.Ex is 'in the round'). It was the first time I'd ever seen the dramatisation of a Greek tragedy and it was, in the main, pretty entertaining. There was the almost obligatory updating of the costumes and vernacular (the last time I was at R.Ex it was to see a production of Macbeth set in a concentration camp. Nice), which made it difficult to see if the source material stood up (although the alternative of seeing it in the original Greek would have had me running from the theatre). The Banquette seats were great value for money - there was so much spit coming from some of the actors it was like being at a punk gig in '77. The play itself? Good. Some confusing and potentially pointless linking material between scenes, a patronising and irritating 'northern' messenger, and a weakly-cast Antigone were rescued by strong ensemble acting and a charismatic Creon.
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