Happy Holidays from the Guv!

more late night pood #2 talk

 

The king of late night talk gets deep into pood with everyone's favorite ex-Alaskan Governor!

Pood Rules the Air -- Come See Us Sept. 14!

On Tuesday, September 14, the brains of the pood operation -- publishers Geoff Grogan, Kevin Much and Alex Rader -- and some other part of pood’s anatomy, contributor Adam McGovern, will be the guests on the popular Comic Book Club: Live podcast! It’s also an in-person talkshow so you can pay a mere 5 bucks and be part of the studio audience. Hosts/comedians/in-some-cases-comicbook-writers Alex Zalben, Justin Tyler and Pete LePage put the funny in funnybooks and we’ll bring the paper! Details, details:

The Peoples Improv Theater
154 West 29th Street, 2nd Fl.
(Between 6th and 7th Aves.)
New York, NY

Directions:

http://thepit-nyc.com/about.html

...the best blog (they say it’s moved, but this is the

more up-to-date site):

http://www.popcultureshock.com/cbclub/

…and the best schedule for CBC shows:

http://alexzalben.com/?page_id=55

Let’s Talk About Genre

The shelf-space between cops & robbers and dungeons & dragons and political refugees & depressed hipsters in comic shops’ supply and fans’ affections is getting more and more narrow, and two of my faves from the last few weeks staple the art and genre sides together closer than most through overlapping creators and witty, observant concerns.

The Guild is definitely the funniest, and perhaps the wisest comic I’ve read yet this year (or, for those who know the project from having followed it as a popular web series, TGIDTF,APTWCIRYTY). Felicia Day’s script avoids cliché and taps conversational genius by focusing on the human comedy of running rather than the handy melodrama of “escape,” in the story of an incurable nerdgirl who finds that hell is other people you have to actually deal with and heaven can be a multiple-player computer game with no one you have to meet. The dual universes of post-slacker squalor and painted-paperback-cover dreamworld are handled with typical vision by pood’s own Jim Rugg, making me all the happier I can now get this thing to load on paper. A “comment” on its culture and a “critique” of its media maybe, but from a hilarious and humane perspective where there is no outside.

One of my useless rules for existence is that, for some reason, the funky satellite narratives of Marvel’s event series are often full fun to read and the pro-forma main miniseries are totally missable, while at DC your branded, six-issue Final Crises and First Waves are all that’s worth reading and the intrusions into 15 other books are dependably unbearable. Still, like Charlie Brown and his football or Democratic voters, I resolved to give the superb, neo-noir First Wave’s spinoff titles one chance each. I never knew why DC is so anxious to keep the Doc Savage franchise when they have the real Tom Strong :-), and though Doc is handled well in the central First Wave mini his own book was a snoozy action-procedural. I girded for the same from The Spirit, a franchise in freefall since Darwyn Cooke’s historic run ended, but this one does indie patron saint Will Eisner proud. Writer Mark Schultz and artist Moritat’s Central City is like a Valhalla for mid-20^th century toughguys, an atmospheric Bermuda Triangle of modern cars and creaky el trains, compromised cops, steely gangstas and PIs, street urchins and hardbitten civic reformers. The theme of social mistakes made eternally and sense of an urban purgatory strangely comforting in its texture and character are pure Eisner in their attitude, and diverge from him significantly in style the way he would’ve encouraged; the original standard-bearer of hit but not-mainstream comics is back in letter and spirit.

Back Where We Don’t Belong

Pood joins the thronging masses in the repopulation of paper! As the miniature monoliths of electronic com accessories glitter in the distance, we squat in the abandoned forests of converted pulp!

It’s zeitgeist o’clock; the advertising circulars of old are replaced by the Desert Island comic-shoppe’s Smoke Signal paper, full of diverse crazy comic pioneering (www.desertislandbrooklyn.com). It’s like the comic section took over the whole paper, and the proprietor told me their printer was thankful for the salvation of the comic millennium as the newspapers they used to produce suffer a spot of extinction.

McSweeney’s bid for re-evolution, The San Francisco Panorama (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/SFPanoramaPR.html), had a great funnypaper filling, with a surprising volume of spaceman & superhero flavoring from unusual suspects like Tomine and Clowes and some character-breaking futility from a hilarious indie-fied Erik Larsen.

The New York Times Magazine has lost its comics section again, but one snuck into the new lit journal Cousin Corinne’s Reminder (http://www.bookcourt.org/cousincorinne/), from the back of the truck straight to the Mocca Fest where pood débyood. A high-culture colony tellingly stocked by inhabitants of the leading webcomics outpost ACT-I-VATE (http://www.act-i-vate.com/), reclaiming print with a great pop-noir cover by Mike Cavallaro, post-Eisner coloring-book memoir and anonymous portraiture by Jonathan Lethem & Dean Haspiel, global-suburb slapstick by Tim Hall & Jennifer Hayden, a quiet odyssey of learning how to let things not fit by Michel Fiffe, a microbial romance comic by Kat Roberts and a post-New Yorker Easter Bunny candid back-cover from Jen Ferguson.

And there’s always pood, blanketing the earth’s parkbench and listening for the trees falling in the woods. Start the presses and full speed aft!

The New York Review of pood

Spontaneously generated expression begets self-executing appreciation. Who would be stronger, Jack Kirby or Francis Bacon? Kevin Mutch’s “Super Love People” gets to the brutal simplicity and throbbing inner layers of primal pop battle and classical grotesquery, a distant narrative glimmering like doves of hope tolling inside dark iron shells. The encoded storyline and tactile communication of body memory and evolutionary amnesia course through Henrik Rehr’s bacteriological mural and Hans Rickheit’s visceral catacombs. Not just sequential but simultaneous narrative flashes understanding through every act and quadrant of Bishakh Som’s glacial glass houses and mid-topian family drama and Tobias Tak’s lifecycling world-treehouse. Childhood regained, in its awkwardness and anxieties, that is, offsets a reverse image of comics past’s mischief and innocence in Fintan Taite’s and Lance Hanson’s respective broadsides, the Frank McCourt and David Lynch of the cartoon page; while the farce of history replays itself in the luminous dinge of Geoff Grogan’s “Café Oopzoo”. Who knew there’d be two Westerns on the indie fringe frontier? Andres Vera Martinez and Connor Willumsen, spilling blood-feud epics joined in progress and running forever. Joe Infurnari’s hobos weather the death of America’s religion of limitlessness on weathered newsprint parchment; Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca’s special-op ape goes down shooting with America’s mythic honor in blazing Saturday-animation gels. Paolo Leandri wanders the gray-noir sideroads of a collective memory contracted out to the camera eye, though I can’t comment on his taste in collaborators. Mark Sunshine and Chris Capuozzo, graffiti on the tumbling barriers of pop properness; Sara Edward-Corbett, a calligraphy of comicstrips’ genetic fiber. You can quote me.

Off the Grid

Greetings from the halfway there -- the blank spaces that hold the
pictures in place. The plotted grooves between which the scenes are
planted. A net of new roads reaching from idea to image, the terrain
taking shape as its destinations demand. Pathways forming to fit new
thoughts and dreamed experience. Paolo’s and my story in the first
imprint of pood is a roadmap to a phantom landscape, its shapes and
spaces the runes of a lost lexicon of permanence and place. A mirage
itself, materializing in the electronic space between Europe and
America, and the psychic gulf between the misfit frontier and the pop
familiar. This is what eternally matters, as matter dissolves and
reforms -- the borders between the boxes, the white space of permanent
possibility. We’ll see you on the path from edge to edge.

pood toon