Many thanks to Gerry for pointing out the work of Dan Perjovschi — a Romanian cartoonist who draws on walls for his huge installations. He just had a show at MOMA that has website with all kinds of goodies, including videos of him creating. You can read Gerry’s interview with Dan and his wife, here.

I’ve been doing some research lately into visiting Romania — especially the town of Alba Julia in Transylvania, where my ancestors are from. (Here is a gorgeous Flickr set of Transylvania by a man named Daniel Wellman.)

Anyways, if anyone knows of some good books on Romanian art, history, travel, etc., I’m all ears.

I got this cool e-mail from Liza Cowan, a Vermont artist, director of the Pine Street Art Works gallery in Burlington, and regular blog reader:

I’ve been reading your blackout poems avidly, and trying and trying to find a postcard I made in 1981. It was kind of a blackout poem except that instead of showing all the black areas, i just took the words or word fragments and re-typed them, using a font as close to the original as I could find. Mind you, this was before personal computers. My rule was that the words or fragments had to be in the same order as the original. I probably have a copy of the original catalogue but I’m not sure where. I do remember that “She” came from “Sherwin Williams” I think it is the only word fragment.

I did the card as a part of Jerri Allen’s Apron Project. My text source was a Sherwin Williams Paint catalogue from 1939. That was also the image source. I processed the image with a Mita 900D copier, which I happened to own at the time, because I lived an hour’s drive from the nearest public copy machine (I kid you not!) Then I added a quote from Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. I published the card under my own imprint, White Mare, Inc.

It’s all on the back of the postcard.

Good Grief, I had to look everywhere to find this one scrap of paper. Thank goodness I found the one remaining copy!

I mentioned how impressed I was by Liza’s elaborate pre-Photoshop method, and she said, “Not only was it before photoshop, it was before any design program. I had the words typeset, and used letraset film for the background. And did cut and paste for the composition. It all seemed very modern then.”

Today the Independent ran a story listing the best illustrators in Britain, and two of my favorite artists, Stanley Donwood and Tom Gauld, were right at the top. Funny enough, I don’t really consider either of them illustrators…

Stanley Donwood

More of a fine artist than illustrator, Stanley Donwood, 38, created the artwork for Radiohead’s album sleeves. The man himself is not one naturally drawn to the limelight. For years, the only way to contact him was to fax his local pub in Bath, from whence any communication would be forwarded to him. Much of Donwood’s work delights in rediscovering antiquated processes. A recent series of images, London Views, created a panorama of the capital out of 14 pieces of hand-cut linoleum, printed on a Victorian printing press. His latest work, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now (recently shown at the Lazarides Gallery in London’s Soho), comprises a series of darkly compelling etchings that used the century-old photogravure technique.

Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is a 30-year-old illustrator and comic book artist who lives and works in London. With Simone Lia, whom he met while studying at the Royal College of Art, Gauld publishes a series of delightful, poignant comics under the imprint Cabanon Press. His subject matter is a long way from the superhero deeds that many associate with the genre, retaining a very British reserve that grounds the extraordinary in the everyday. Just check out his treatment for the cover of a special Penguin edition of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (pictured above). His commissioned illustrations have appeared in The Guardian, Time Out, New Scientist and Prospect.

Has anyone read Cathy Malkasian’s Percy Gloom? New York Magazine ran an excerpt, and I am intrigued:

Also, Chris Oliveros at D+Q posted another page of Lynda Barry’s upcoming “What It Is”:

Beautiful stuff!

Just in case anyone else is interested in my other favorite female cartoonists: Renee French, Julie Doucet, Hope Larson, Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, Lilli Carré, and Jessica Abel. I probably left a ton out, but those are the ones I can think of.

Who are your favorites?

A lot of people are pointing to the excellent Ron Rege’s recent adaptation of Kenneth Patchen’s “The Snow is Deep on the Ground” over at PoetryFoundation.org.

What they’re not pointing to are Kenneth Patchen’s own “picture-poems,” many of which are painted and silk-screened in wild colors. Dig them:

During the (still-in-progress) move, I came across these doodles that Lynda sent me as part of a letter. Everything she does inspires me to create, so I thought I’d share these.

A comics page by Joe Lambert

Joe Lambert is a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies. I’ve been following Joe’s blog for a while, partly because he’s a great cartoonist, partly because he does such a great job of documenting his life as a student at the school. (I’ve found student blogs to be a fabulous resource for determining whether a program would be right for me. Dig also, Dan Saffer’s blog about his time at Carnegie Mellon’s Design school)

Joe recently did a long interview with CCS faculty member Steve Bissette. I was impressed by Joe’s knowledge, but also by his honesty:

“I love so many things about comics, but at the same time I get really tired of reading something that I don’t like and getting this nagging feeling in the back of my head telling me that I should like it because it is done well. I think this is part of the complacency we sometimes fall into when creating things: thinking that it’s okay to be passive about what we’re doing or what we’re reading. I don’t want to get into value judgments, because everything is great all of the time, right? But I get tired of liking things just because they’re not bad. I really want to hate everything that isn’t amazing. I don’t think too many comics are doing everything that comics can be doing. “

I also really dig Joe’s list of cartoonists he’s looking to for inspiration these days:

Lately I’ve been looking closely at guys like David B. and Lewis Trondheim. Both create pages that are visually appealing, often with consideration to the way a page reads – the flow, I guess. But they’re both great at symbolizing ideas and doing so in a way that doesn’t interrupt the reading….I like the way Craig Thompson effortlessly guides my eyes across pages. I like the way Chester Brown’s thin, delicate line makes me uncomfortable; or the way Chris Ware evokes the passage of time and establishes rhythm using any number of panels; the way Lilli Carre packs so much into her characters’ expressions; I’m excited by Jordan Crane’s audacity to leap from moment to moment without holding the reader’s hand too tightly. Kevin Huizenga takes his comics very seriously, but still is still playful too.

Yes, yes, yes. Go say hello to Joe.

I count Peter Kuper’s comics as a huge influence. In 2006, Kuper moved with his wife and daughter to Oaxaca City, Mexico for a year’s stay. You can see some of his wonderful Oaxaca sketcbook work online.

Look out in July for his new semi-autobiographical comic book, Stop Forgetting to Remember.

(And of course he’s coming to Mac’s Backs in Cleveland THE DAY WE’RE MOVING TO TEXAS. July 31st. Arrgh!)

Matt Madden was kind enough to clue me in to the existence of Jochen Gerner’s TNT En Amerique — a blackout comic that takes Herge’s Tintin In America and reduces the speech bubbles to phrases and the colors to graphic symbols. The project came about through Gerner’s experience with OuBaPo — the comics equivalent of the group exploring writing with constraints, OuLiPo.

Here’s a look at one of the pages:

Gerner says of his work (obviously a translation from French):

The main interest for me of the comic strip is the infinite possible links between text and image: a system of representation continually confronting, in a kind of alchemy, text and picture….The idea “TNT en Amérique” sprang from…OuBaPo, from exercises, experiments. I try to find new reading perspectives. I dismantle a given material to make something else of it…. I bought…old copies of “Tintin en Amérique”. [I] worked directly on the printed editions by cutting the pages one by one and covering them thickly with black ink….I did not see this book as a “technical feat” but as the discovery of a secret passage , of a dark track followed to the end.

I can’t get a close enough look at the pages to really tell exactly what’s going on, but it’s got something to do with violence and America: Gerner goes on about how the page became “night” with unblackened color emerging like neon signs from American life. Here’s a few page spreads from the publisher’s site:

James Kochalka has said of this kind of thing, “remixes destroy the original comic art, but create something new and wonderful from it. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, destruction equals creation.” I dig it.

I’d write more about OuBaPo and OuLiPo, but we’re trying to pack up for our big Austin apartment-hunting trip. For more on my thoughts about writing and restraints, see these past posts: “Mathematical Storytelling,” “A Humument,” and my “Newspaper Blackout Poems.”

Big thanks to Matt for the tip! Be sure to check out his really cool book, 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercise In Style, and his blog.

Blessings on Tom Devlin’s head for posting these previews of Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS on the Drawn and Quarterly blog. I’ve only seen about 15 pages worth of it from the “graphic issue” of Tin House. The (official!) cover:

A fantastic excerpt which resembles part of a talk Lynda gave at Oberlin:

And finally, the cover for the sneak-preview D+Q is releasing for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY:

I really hope I can get my hands on this next Saturday.

My other rambles about how wonderful Lynda is, here.