Moon Prince page 19: violence erupts!

The whole story (so far) is here.

pood Signing at Forbidden Planet in NYC

Moon Prince page 18: in which Kitiko first manifests himself.

The whole story (so far) is here.

Look Out!Monsters Sale!

It's a SALE! A big, oversize comic book basement clearing bonanza! That's right poodsters--It's time to put a new roof on the barn--and that means we need cash, cold hard cash gang! So--the first big Look Out!Monsters publishing-- blow-out the old stock- summer-steel roof and gutter sale is taking place over at www.lookoutmonsters.com- RIGHT NOW!--where you will find all kinds of groovy goodies at low,low prices! You heard it! Low LOW Prices! Prices have been slashed-SLASHED- to make room for new models and to help me buy some metal roofing! That's right-I'm practically giving this stuff away--cos I have boxes of my own AWARD-WINNING Comics--that's right-comics that have won an award--just waiting for some lucky investment conscious comics collector to abscond with! Think of it! A comic that has won an award-for your very own--all for $5. that's right-a comic book that has won an award--for five smackeroos! You don't get an award--just to make that clear--but you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you own a comic book that at one time won an award.
And then there are other NON-AWARD WINNING comic books for sale! Even better! Comics that have not won awards! So--put that in you pipe and smoke it! You can have non-award winning comics by this very artist at cheap, bargain basement prices
and they are going fast-FAST--over at www.lookoutmonsters.com! So hurry up! Don't let this momentous occasion pass you by! head on over to www.lookoutmonsters.com today! Tell em pood sent ya--and see what it gets you!

Moon Prince page 17: how much do the cops know?

The whole story (so far) is here.

pood mania!

check it out! the scene at comic shops this past Wednesday!

Comics fans! pood mania's breaking out all over as pood #1 hit the stores this Wednesday. The phones haven't stopped ringing here at poodquarters! We've heard stories of people storming the gates, climbing over one another, ripping comics out of other customers hands, pulling hair, mounting anger, violent behavior, cursing and screaming and then deliriously happy customer satisfaction ----all kinds of things about Superman #701 and that other quarterly comics anthology. We'd like to hear some of those things about pood!
So write us and let us hear your thoughts and comments. And thanks to all the retailers! Thanks to all the readers! We sincerely hope you get your entertainment dollar out of this little paper we've put together . We'd love to hear your thoughts and comments-so pass em along--so we can put your ideas to use and make pood #2 even better.
oops! I let it slip--that's right! you heard it! Pood #2 will hit the stores just in time for Turkey day--November 2010! And the same cast of indy-comics characters will be back with their wild wild comics on the giganticus scale-so look for pood #2 in the September issue of Diamond's "Previews" ! What could be better than pood #1? pood #2!
So-- watch this blog for more news and previews as we get closer to September!
And now-back to the pood-a-scope-to monitor the progress of our planetary takeover!
later poodsters!

FIRST POOD POST!

Hi there!

I just wanted to share my mug shot from last year's MoCCA signing. Good times!
I'm busy working on my graphic novel titled Little White Duck. It will be published next year! You can view the sample pages that just won a 3x3 Gold Metal Award here.

Looking forward to Pood Dos!

Face Time

“Believable” is a funny word, wavering on the needle’s eye of faith and verifiability. From the densely imagined audioplays of Rasputina to the pokerfaced tomes of John Hodgman, a whole industry has sprung up in our age of information-glut to burlesque an earlier time of self-assured speculation. The Victorian era obsessively catalogued and voluminously documented species, diseases, cultures and industries in an age of rigorous education but pervasive and now laughable third-hand communication and eugenic bias. Anything was believable at a time of emerging scientific wonders and opening borders that mostly mapped the vast volumes of what we still didn’t know, and artist Travis Louie’s lethal wit and welcoming eye trace a long and vivid parallel history of the superstition that can pass for certainty in any century.

Louie creates widely reproduced and endlessly refreshed portraiture of the kinds of goat/man hybrids and dog-faced boys that could be imagined lurking in the nearest forest or seen working the local sideshow in times closer to our own than we tend to remember. Louie’s paintings of cyclopes, six-clopes and frog-headed gentlemen are rendered with an unassailable veracity at the opposite end of the photoshop era that fools us with technology just as the entirely hand-crafted artist fooled us with the authority of his or her “realism” before the camera took over. Seeing is believing, and the livelihood of many a ghosthunting reality-show crew to this day depends on what we think we saw.

One of Louie’s central jokes of course is that these portraits aren’t made to look like classic oil paintings but early photographs themselves, and he shows a hilarious fidelity not only to the particulars of how such Addams Familyesque individuals would actually look, but to the technical glitches and material shortcomings of the period medium. Many such antique shots have more of their mask-like retouching survive over 100 years than the actual photo components, a trait which Louie turns on its head (so to speak) with a crystal-clear technique that’s all fabricated, and a deliberate re-creation of all the imbalances of fledgling photography -- weird variations of fuzz and focus, hazes of over- and underexposure, not to mention musty gray expanses that could be brain-eating mold.

Tuned in on Louie’s cameo-framed magic mirrors, these alternative lifeforms and folklore fancies are being called back through the mist of faulty memory and the lost language of ancient tech. Especially sharp are the glassy eyes, flooded by primitive flashpots to look both taxidermied by time and immediately, piercingly (and personably) alive. These portrait heads are a natural history museum of perceptual roads not taken and evolutionary possibilities cut off, but also an honored family album of the freakish individuality we all feel inside.

In the days before scientific skepticism, cosmetic-surgery touch-ups and selective birth, many such human variants could be met up with, though usually kept at the distance of social exile and carnival display. Now, when we try to show some imagination and hope that every one of us is a different person, we can look at each other face to face. In the frames of Travis Louie’s fresh antiques, everything’s far away enough to be seen clearly.

[On view at Joshua Liner Gallery in NYC, with Sylvia Ji’s reliquary art-nouveau lucha goddesses, through August 7, and in Louie’s book Curiosities, from Baby Tattoo]

Congratulations Jim and Brian!

Hey poodiacs! In case you haven't already heard: two of our very own poodmeisters have been singled out for crafting one of the "outstanding books designed in 2009"--that's right! Our very own Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have received this acknowledgment from AIGA( the professional association for design) for their awesomely wonderful Afrodisiac !
Congrats to Jim and Brian for this well-deserved award!
(and if you don't have it yet--buy it quick, from what I hear the first edition has just about sold out!)

check out more info on the award here

Moon Prince page 16: she's drunk!

The whole story (so far) is here.

Soul Search Optimization

(Posted in “Silver Age sci-fi” and “Indie before you were”)

Two years ago, when DEVO were programmed for the oldies circuit, I kept yelling for the Dell ad to no avail; it didn’t show up on their new disk Something for Everybody either but that’s fine; “Watch Us Work It” stands unspoiled as a complete commercial venture (albeit available as an isolated iTune for some time now), whereas the much-cited selection of the new disk’s track-list, mixes and visuals by focus-group is something of a glorious ruse.

DEVO have always known the exact location of the popular jugular so taking the pulse was a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if they’re switched on every year or every twenty, DEVO upgrade themselves to each era’s signature sounds and psychic frequencies. Something for Everybody churns, buzzes, boogies and bleeps with the vital signs of the global karaoke calliope, flashing by like ringtones and feeling just as subliminally, emblematically personal.

Irresistible tic-funk like “What We Do” and “Don’t Shoot (I’m a Man)” yanks invisible strings beamed to dance-chips that infected your feet and ass with every CD free of charge; songs like “Human Rocket” (a scary vision of sacred joystick warriors) and “Sumthin’” (a driving jingle portraying Obama, al-Qaeda and the pundits in-between as pitchmen in a life-and-death market-share campaign) open a CNN window amidst the beats and blips so you can multitask.

Those tracks make the sound of cultures fracturing, but meme-fests like the catchphrasey “Step Up” serve as a kind of divine search-optimization presence making it all rhyme like when we find common denominators -- and maybe even common purpose. You know to be worried when acoustic piano shows up in DEVO’s frozen case of keyboard effects, and “No Place Like Home” even gives way from its introductory plunks to the sonic tab of a monotone song-signal promising and disclaiming “a song of truth and beauty for you” -- but it’s a genuinely moving epitaph for a world without humans to grace or befoul the Earth, and focus-group or not, the disk builds in social consciousness and soaring synthony to this penultimate track and the closing wartime anthem of ignored futility, “March On.”

DEVO are pop hyperprocessors who know every wrong note to hit to get noticed and keep you awake, but that means they also know how to strike the most stirring and syncopated chords for the forces of good. Something for Everybody is a pulsing, swirling mash of the tech and bling our grand values and simple pleasures have gotten lost in -- and a schematic to where they can be found.

Commentary Track

Wilson is Daniel Clowes’ most formally sedate work -- none of the jostle of comic-strip conventions overloading and subverting each other and transcending the whole -- but its one-style-per-page program brilliantly conveys the book’s same-shit-different-day theme while not drawing attention to Clowes’ technical mastery the way it could. Wilson is also the author’s most emotionally cool work, though it quickly mounts up to make Ennis & Conner’s The Pro seem cheery and redemptive. Clowes hits the narrative pinnacle and natural nadir of everyman memoir comics, from Charles Schultz to Chris Ware, with his middle-aged ne’er-do-well main character’s monologues of menopausal self-delusion. Though Clowes’ first graphic novel not previewed or serialized in his long-running Eightball publication, Wilson is nonetheless hacked into Sunday-strip-style individual pages throughout, each ending on some gallows-hilarious outrage or symphonic thud of futility and signifying the stifled momentum of the myopic hero’s existence -- Wilson has about six panels to figure it out, and then the whole damn things starts over again. There is “story” aplenty, including some high crimes that still reflect Wilson’s low achievement, but the center is always the inert soliloquies at Wilson’s hypercritical yet unseeing eye of the storm. The star of this book is too clueless to be quietly desperate, but Wilson is a classic of noisy, eerie calm.

Fantastic Fourth

Spent our nation’s birthday with the GF on a long-overdue pilgrimage to the Valley Forge and Gettysburg of fanciful geekdom, Coney Island. Took in a talk by degreed antiquarian and gourmet flimflam man Trav S.D. on the more impressively numbered birthday hitting that holiday weekend, P.T. Barnum’s 200th on July Fifth. In between patriotic tap-dance and ukulele rousers timewarped in by Lorinne Lampert with a swing-for-the-bleachers smile belting ’em out so they can hear it in 1910, Trav gave an illuminating oration on the hucksterism that got us where we are today and the honesty we’re only just catching up with.

Filled out the day putting born-sucker theory into delirious practice on the undying midway and in the edifying dime reliquaries. It’s a sacred, seedy battleground swept by crashing waves of working-class revelers and marauding developers, pristine sands and the ash of long-gone plaster fantasy castles, sideshow troopers hoisting new freak flags and happy huddled masses who keep the ghosts chased away. Came out with two plastic spider rings and at least one poem:

Right This Way (Coney Island, NY)

It was America’s first skyline, sketched in with pure light

A spark that sent the whole thing up

Giving way to the cinders of tall cities

Concrete altars cast up by long shadows across the land

Have a wonderful time,

Adam

new work: fandancer

*Ok-if you happened to tune into this page last Sunday around mid-afternoon NY time, you mighta caught this image with a different logo and different title. Suffice to say-a benevolent follower of the pood blog warned me off the first title for my new project so that I might avoid any conflicts with large corporations of the possessive kind. thanks follower!
& so goes the process of creation! Herein then--let me introduce the cover of my new book as it shall ever henceforth and forwith be known: "fandancer" (which I think is a cooler and more appropriate title anyway!)--going to print before the month is done--and available sometime, somewhere this summer.
I'll tell ya more about it later--for now, let's just say it's my super-heroine mystic weirdness romance comic. So dwell on that for a while and as the summer (and the book) progresses I'll keep you informed and post a few more samples.

Moon Prince page 15: what's up with that nun?

Big version here.