Monthly Archive: October 2007

The work of two of America’s most significant cartoonists, Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer, will be the subject of a major exhibit at Chicago’s Jean Albano Gallery.

Feiffer is the former weekly editorial cartoonist for the Village Voice and Universal Press Syndicate. One-time writer of Will Eisner’s Spirit (and Eisner’s long-time assistant), Feiffer’s cartoons appeared in Playboy magazine and The New Republic. A noted playright and movie scribe Carnal Knowledge, Popeye, Oh! Calcutta!, and my favorite, Little Murders), his most recent novel is A Room With A Zoo, published by Hyperion. His earlier work is being reprinted by Fantagraphics.

The late Bill Mauldin was the long-time nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist headquartered at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Sun-Times. Perhaps best known for his World War II panels featuring Willie and Joe (to be reprinted in their entirety by Fantagraphics early next year), Mauldin also had a career as an actor, appearing in the movie The Red Badge of Courage, among others.

The exhibit, History Revealed: Jules Feiffer and Bill Mauldin, will run at the Jean Albano Gallery, 215 W. Superior in Chicago from October 26, 2007 to January 6, 2007.

With two years of The Best American Comics down now, it’s clear just how much the individual editor can influence the choice of comics. Last year, Harvey Pekar leaned towards autobiographical comics and towards long, complete works. For this second year, Chris Ware similarly goes where we’d expect him to go and picks a lot of formalist stories — but also a lot of autobiography, particularly the overly-serious type. It’s dangerous to compare annuals in any case, especially when they change editors, but I have to admit that I thought 2006 was a stronger book than 2007; this year’s edition contains a batch of “experimental” comics that I found pointless and a pure waste of space.

And there’s also the meta-question of what are the “best comics,” since even the “100 Distinguished Comics” list in the back matter — from series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore, and which also apparently served as the first cut of stories from which Ware built this anthology — lists only a tiny handful of stories from the major comics publishers. So this series is essentially for the best American independent comics — not superheroes, or adventure stories of any type from the big companies. Perhaps future volumes will challenge that idea, but, for now, there’s no sign that Best American is open to anything more fantastic or adventurous than Charles Burns’s great horror comic Black Hole.

(more…)