"The Complete Zap Comix: "is it possible for something to be too good?"

Got $500?  Here's a hefty 2014 collection from the Atomic Books site. You may have  to wait in line for a second edition, though -- the first run is already sold out. The Complete Zap Comix is designed by Victor Moscoso and edited by Eric Reynolds, and there are still copies available at the original price.

"Is it possible for something to be too good?  If so, this deluxe set of complete Zap Comix might just be it. This is the most important comics collection to be released in years - bringing together the complete run of the Robert Crumb-created underground comix version of MAD Magazine. It features comics by Crumb as well as S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin and so many others. This set is worth every penny of its price tag."

The Codex Seraphinianus: "the most mysterious book in the world."

"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

"The Composites:" Drawing a rogues' gallery of fictional characters

Humbert Humbert, as described by Nabokov in Lolita,sketched by Brian Joseph Davis

What does Emma Bovary really look like? Sam Spade? How about "that lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows"?

 

In the reader's imagination literary characters have a way of becoming real people, and film adaptations imprint a visual image that may be once- or twice-removed from the printed page. (It's difficult to imagine Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade without seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.)

 

Brian Joseph Davis curates a website called The Composites which interprets literary characters using police-artist techniques and composite sketch software, using descriptions from the books themselves. The straight-ahead interpretations feature wide eyes and expressionless faces, a rogues gallery of the fictionally famous and infamous.

 

Here are a few, with the authors' descriptions included:

Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

… Combed his light-brown hair neatly in front of the mirror, and set off for Radio City. He had always thought he had the world’s dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist’s face, he thought … Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose—or at least its general form—his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right … He wasn’t really worried. Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil—Dickie’s eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges—and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place … He might play up Tom a little more, he thought. He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner to contrast with Dickie’s tenseness.

Emma Bovary, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.

The results, as expected, can be a little spooky: the intent isn't a three-dimensional portrait, but an artist's sketch of characters rendered through the writer's words. "The program and process is quite manual and interpretive. We're not in CSI-territory yet,* Davis writes.

His renderings benefit from the ideas readers bring to the characters themselves -- these are all creations authors and readers have imagined as strong, willful, and even (as in the case of Emma Bovary) more than a little cautious of revealing too much. Davis invites suggestions, and asks those interested in submitting character ideas to include the novels' descriptive passages. Next up, according to Davis's recent note: Mrs. Dalloway, Kilgore Trout, Holden Caulfield.

The art of bookplates: disappearing beauty in a digital age

 

The bookplate is one of the unrecognized losses of the print empire (like a once-mighty imperial force, the artforms of type and the book are retreating before the digital demands of a new order). Where first-editions and beloved books in a personal library were at one time marked as belonging to an individual through bookplates, the internet no longer requires an Ex Libris stamp.

That leaves the collecting of antique bookplates -- a print adjunct dating back almost to the age of Gutenberg -- to a vigilant group of bibliophiles, who occasionally share their finds with the world at large -- if the contemporary world, at least, might see these miniatures as works of art.

 

Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates (Yale University Press), by Martin Hopkinson, presents 100 examples of the book-owner's pride, mostly from the early 1900s when printing and mass-distribution made the ownership of books affordable to many. The idea of a private library (once only a luxury) also reflected ideas of education and a growing amount of leisure time in the middle class.

The bookplate became a personal expression of the book-owner's interests and passions. In one, for the scientist experimenting with rats at the University of Rochester, the artist Stephen Gooden drew an owl proudly claiming his rodent prize. When Ethel Luce-Clausen saw the bookplate he had designed for her, Gooden explained simply, "the rat crept in when I wasn't looking."

Most bookplates are more sedate reflections of their owner's personality, although one from the 1970s included in a slideshow at the Guardian UK might give Aubrey Beardsley a start. The bookplate may be a diminished art but one that retains its small beauty in this digital age. It's good to have Hopkinson's collection (from the British Museum) to remind readers that there are advantages to print that the world of ones-and-zeroes can never replace.

"The Little King": Otto Soglow's cartoon monarch gets the royal treatment

The Little King, 1946

 

The Little King would be surprised at the size of the new book dedicated to his simple cartoon antics.

Cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was born in New York City. In his own words, his first art job was "painting forget-me-nots on baby rattles." He studied with John Sloane at the Art Students League, and sold his first drawings to pulp magazines. In the late 1920s, his social-realist drawings were appearing in such radical publications as The New Masses and The Liberator, as well as the Life and Collier's.

In 1931 he created The Little King while at The New Yorker, and three years later, the strip moved to the Sunday comics pages of King Features Syndicate. He illustrated about twenty-five books and continued drawing The Little King until his death.

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King features 432 pages of Soglow's The Little King, plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages, as well as copious examples of his other artwork. Here's more from the Library of American Comics site:

The Little King is a monarch who sits stiffly on the throne but bursts into life at the sight of a hotdog stand or at the approach of a rowdy mob. He is a man of the people who has somehow found himself on the wrong side of the palace steps, but he makes the most of it, trying to do right by his office and find what pleasures he can at the absurd outer reaches of his daily rituals.

It was often said that Otto Soglow resembled his creation, and he did nothing to disabuse people of that notion as he regularly performed in character throughout his career. As is explored in this volume, the resemblance was more than merely physical: like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street—and even the angry mob.

Above: Soglow in 1933, from an animated short.

Yet while he began his career as a radical artist publishing in The New Masses and The Liberator, a decade later he was working for William Randolph Hearst and creating advertisements for Pepsi Cola and oil companies. The Little King is born out of the tension between his political idealism and his professional ambitions.

... Much of the humor in The Little King is aimed at puncturing pomposity and, as Ivan Brunetti points out in his Foreword, Soglow accomplishes it with drawings that are tightly composed, exquisitely timed, carefully structured pieces of machinery. "His process of streamlining is at the root of why his cartoons have a timeless sophistication and elegance," writes Brunetti, "and continue to entice new readers and cartoonists." ....

 
The Little King art from (top) Independent Online Booksellers Association and (middle) The Ephemerist. Video clip from Mike Lynch Cartoons.

Complete ZAP Comix set published by Atomic Books

Complete ZAP Comix
by Victor Moscoso (designer) / Eric Reynolds (editor) 

Got $500?  Here's a hefty stocking stuffer from the Atomic Books site, link above. Santa himself is going to have to wait in line, though -- the first run is already sold out. 

"Is it possible for something to be too good?  If so, this deluxe set of complete Zap Comix might just be it. This is the most important comics collection to be released in years - bringing together the complete run of the Robert Crumb-created underground comix version of MAD Magazine. It features comics by Crumb as well as S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin and so many others. This set is worth every penny of its price tag." 

"MetaMaus" : a collection of Art Spiegelman's art from "Maus" [1992]

MetaMaus is Art Spiegelman's comprehensive book about the creation of Maus, A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of his father's experience in a Nazi prison camp. It's a great look-behind-the-scenes at the creation of Spiegelman's ground-breaking approach to visualizing non-fiction.

The book, which includes a DVD of the complete Maus hyper-linked with source materials, is structured around an extensive interview with Spiegelman.

In a 2011 interview with David D'Arcy at The Art Newspaper, Spiegelman revealed what he called his "ambivalence" about doing press junkets for this particular work -- in essence, interviews about the interview presented in the book:

“I feel it’s a bit absurd to be interviewed about an interview, but the book came out way better than expected, so I feel protective of it. I’m in my usual situation, which I think is called ambivalence. I know I have to do something with the press. I’m not going to J.D. Salinger this one out. On the other hand, I don’t relish being in a hall of mirrors, like MetaMetaMetaMaus.”

Here, from The Atlantic online, is a selection of Spiegelman's original sketches that eventually framed the story for Maus.

The 1970s mysterious "Codex Seraphinanus" gets a lavish new Rizzoli edition

"Luigi Serafini is an Italian graphic artist famous for his unusual and obscure works such as the Codex Seraphinianus. Born in Rome in 1949, Serafini began his career as an architect before creating the Codex Seraphinianus; he also authored the Pulcinellopedia Piccola. Serafini has also worked with the media of industrial design, film, and theater, and has also written stories for Italian magazines." (Luigi Serafini's Wikipedia entry, in full.)

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

Spring-loaded reading: waiting for the first read-on-the-porch weekend

These previously-reviewed titles at Bellemeade Books are a good reason to enjoy spring's imminent approach: from a rediscovered story by William Burroughs getting the graphic-novel treatment, to the photography of North Carolina photographer Joe Webb. There are still plenty of ways to be entertained in hopes of that first sit-on-the-porch-and-read weekend afternoon.

Above: Everyone's favorite cranky Uncle Bill, William S. Burroughs, continues to battle the forces of Control years after his death. The author gave name to heavy metal, provided inspiration to underground writers everywhere, and pissed off an entire generation of academic critics. Now his forty-year old "bedtime story" Ah Pook Is Here is re-published in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics Books: "Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely."

The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

The University of Texas at Austin offered a rare opportunity to see an image considered to be "the world's first photograph." Taken in 1826, the shadowy, indistinct image is almost invisible to the eye, but it is the centerpiece of a grand collection of 35,000 photographs, nearly 200 of which were displayed at the Harry Ransom Center on the Austin campus. The University of Texas Press is publishing a companion volume with 125 plates selected from the Gernsheim collection. From the book's preface: "The collection’s clearest strength remains its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, including hundreds of images by such masters as David Hill and Robert Adamson, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Henry Peach Robinson. The Gernsheims carried their passion for the medium into the twentieth century by also collecting significant works by modern photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Albert Renger-Patsch, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books. While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or (more rightly) kitsch's complete lack of one. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.Some of the academic essays have not aged well -- the book was originally published in 1968 -- even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks,"writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

Edward Gorey, born February 22, 1925

FrivolIty, at the edge of a Moral Swamp,

hears Hymn-Singing in the distance

and dons the Galoshes of Remorse.

"Vernacular Typography": preserving the ghost signs of the city

One of the ironies of the mass-information internet age is the rise of handcraft. From craft beer to paper-making, from the use of a certain color tint known as "folk-art blue" (even by self-taught outsider artists) to labor-intensive textile creation, the increasing amount of handcrafting is a response to the ubiquity of corporate branding and, even more so, the easy availability of "how-to" information.

What's ironic about the rush to make the old new again is the abandonment of the art that often surrounds us. This is especially true in cities, where hand-made signs and advertising are fast disappearing in the rush to demolish and replace.

This displacement is no longer just in New York City and other major areas known for the swing of the wrecking ball. Yet the vanishing act is more pronounced and noticeable in urban areas: history slowly disappears day by day, without notice or record, especially when it comes to a city's signs and signage. At Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, curator Jerimiah Moss interviewed Molly Woodward about her ongoing project, Vernacular Typography, which documents the city's daily attrition and is now expanding to cities around the globe.

Currently, Vernacular Typography contains over 5,000 images of found typography from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Website materials emphasize that contributions to the Vernacular Typography effort will allow the project to expand to new cities and incorporate new elements into the project (printed matter, interactive maps, video shorts, interviews with signmakers, etc) that are vital to the preservation of visual communication in the built environment.

The NYC typography record includes numbers, ghost signs, hand-painted signage, grammatical errors and fading fallout shelter signs -- reminders of the atomic age. The larger global project hopes to encompass much more. In her own description Woodward hopes to create "a collaborative effort with local typographers and sign-makers to document, map, and preserve these fragile remaining examples of a representative cultural art form that is being swept away by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition in large and small urban areas: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Kowloon, Melbourne, and Sydney, and in smaller, fringe communities, like Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Alice Springs."

Here's an excerpt of the interview with Molly Woodward at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, by curator Jeriemiah Moss.

Q: How are you defining "Vernacular Typography"?

A: I guess it should technically be Vernacular "Lettering," but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn't have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it's just any visual representation of language. ...

Q: What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A: A sense of the city's history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don't see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

Q: What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

A: I think there's less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there's less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation, and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

Vernacular Typography can be accessed here. (Images from the Vernacular Typography website.)

"International Grafik" (1969-1980): graphic art, unafraid, behind the Iron Curtain

“If you have talent and a need to express yourself, you live unafraid.”

(a Czech citizen who lived in Prague during the Communist Era.)

This is one of those holiday season weeks where I let the shoppers rush home with their treasures -- and without me in their crush. It was a cold morning, and the bright afternoon sun is deceptively cheery: tonight the cloudless skies will drop the temperature into the 20s.

I spend a lazy day, talking to family and friends, writing Christmas cards (seasonal duty shall not be overlooked), listening to Cistercian monks chanting "music for contemplation" on the hi-fi, and following my muse's nose into some internet links previously unknown to me. These are (admittedly) legion, but then free time and a liberal arts education has its benefits.

Here, for example, is a 2010 offering from Bohemian Ink, a site that offers a look at eastern European art and graphics. Its tagline, Budapest, Burbank and beyond, indicates the blog's broad look at the original Bohemian culture as curated by Jessica Taylor Tudzin, an American writer now living in Budapest, Hungary.

In the Bohemian Ink entry Tudzin writes: "Neil Philip, a British-based writer who also runs the online original print gallery Idbury Prints ... has graciously given Bohemian Ink permission to reprint his fascinating post on Czech graphics of the 1970s. I can only just imagine the times these featured artists endured as they bravely created their art."

Included in the post is a selection of reproductions from International Grafik magazine and its thirty issues dating from 1969; the final press run was in 1980, and was devoted entirely to works by Miraslav Matous. Read the entire post here. An excerpt:

In the 1970s I remember a great deal of interest in the West in writers behind the Iron Curtain, but almost none in artists. It was just assumed that all artists in the Eastern Bloc were producing soulless socialist realism or figurative kitsch. So it has been fascinating for me to acquire work by what seems a representative sample of Czech printmakers from that decade, all published in the Danish art revue International Grafik, edited between 1969 and 1980 by Helmer Fogedgaard and Klaus Rödel.International Grafik was an altruistic labour of love.

It published almost exclusively woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, printed from the original blocks or plates, in a numbered edition of 1000 copies. No doubt many important artists are unrepresented in its pages, especially those who specialized in etching and engraving, but there are enough artists here to at least get a flavour of the currents of Czech art at this time. All of the Czech artists contributing to International Grafik were doing so from inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

The first surprise is that in the decade after the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Czech artists were not retreating into safe figurative images on socialist themes, but were instead diving headfirst into experiment and abstraction. These are not cowed voices, but confident and progressive ones.

Maybe in the period of “normalization” that followed the overthrow of Alexander Dubček’s reformist government there were too many other people to police, and the graphic artists somehow operated under the radar of government surveillance. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone with memories of the cultural atmosphere of this time.

(Jaroslav Vodrázka, 1973)

Graphic artist Jaroslav Vodrázka was born in Prague in 1894. He studied at the School of Applied Art, and then at the Academy of Visual Arts under Max Svabinsky. Jaroslav Vodrázka himself became a professor of graphics. He produced wood engravings, linocuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, and was always interested in exploring new printmaking techniques, using materials such as plastic and plexiglass. Although he lived until 1984, Vodrázka remained rooted in figurative art, creating images of peasants, landscapes, and religious scenes.

(Joseph Weiser, 1971)

... The graphic artist, art teacher, and art theorist Josef Weiser was born in Switzerland in 1914, but moved with his parents to Moravia during WWI. In 1933 he became a teacher, and from 1950-1958 was a professor of art education in the teacher training college in Olomouc. Subsequently he became head of art teaching at the institute of advanced education for teachers in Olomouc. Besides his original graphics, Josef Weiser is also known for his bookplates. Weiser, too, remained a figurative artist; in the linocuts published by International Grafik, the predominant motif is that of a rather idealised young woman. He died in 1994.

(Miroslav Matous, 1980)

... Lastly, Miroslav Matous was born in Zdárky in eastern Bohemia in 1920. Known as painter, printmaker, tapestry designer and architect, Miroslav Matous attended the Mánes School for painting, studying under Vladimír Sychra. As a printmaker, Miroslav Matous is known for lithographs, drypoints, etchings, linocuts, and woodcuts. From the evidence of these prints, the 1960s had definitely arrived in Czechoslovakia by 1980!

Tudzin adds this note: Among Neil Philip’s books are Mythology (with Philip Wilkinson), English Folktales, The Cinderella Story, Victorian Village Life, and The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. He has also published two collections of original poetry, Holding the World Together and The Cardinal Directions. All text and photographs on this post are copyright © Neil Philip. Copyright in the artworks remains with the artists or their estates. Read more from Neil Philip on his blog, Adventures in the Print Trade.