May 23, 1994. My wife (now ex) came home to find me wailing like a wounded animal. Seeing this started her crying also, convinced yet another tragedy had taken yet another member of my family. She was right. Lots Of Years Earlier… That was my first day on my first job and I was looking…
Being a kid is hard. You don’t know who you are exactly, but it’s really important that you find out where you fit in. So, we imagine it was especially hard for Liz Prince when she was growing up because she wasn’t a girly girl who wanted to play dolls and wear dresses and yet…
When I was around six, I was asked what kind of haircut I wanted. This was big deal because up until then I had no say over anything in my life. This was my very first grown up decision and I had to weigh it carefully. Even at six I knew this was a life…
On November 7th, TwoMorrows Publishing will release Lou Scheimer: Creating The Filmation Generation. Scheimer and Filmation were responsible for many pulp animated projects, including The Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and more. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New autobiography of Lou Scheimer, co-founder of Filmation Studios, debuts November 7. (RALEIGH, NC) On November 7, TwoMorrows Publishing releases…
Tomorrow (as I write this) is the big day, a day as important as my birthday and for a similar reason, and yet I don’t know how to celebrate it. I don’t even know what to call it. “Lazarus Day?” That’s certainly appropriate, but it carries some lumpy baggage. “Resurrection Day?” Same problem: “resurrection” has…
Picking up the thread… College a no-go. Work a disaster. Israel a bust. Spending a lonely night sitting in the terminal at Lod Airport (now David Ben Gurion Airport) waiting for my 5 A.M. flight to New York. Trying to ignore leering men. Struggling to stay awake. Not knowing where to go or what to…
The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few…
The legendary Irwin Hasen, co-creator of DC’s original Wildcat who is best known for his work on the classic newspaper comic strip Dondi, has written and drawn a 128-page graphic novel. Not bad for a guy 91 years old. Loverboy, which purports to be something of a dramatized autobiography, will be released by Vanguard Publishing…
The Photographer By Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel Guibert, and Frederic Lemercier First Second, May 2009, $29.95 Lefèvre was a French photojournalist – he died, unexpectedly and too young, in 2007 – and this book is an unusual combination of drawn comics and [[[fumetti]], telling the true story of part of his life. In 1986, Lefèvre took…
Stop Forgetting to Remember By Peter Kuper Crown Publishing, July 2007, $19.95 [[[Stop Forgetting to Remember]]] is the autobiography of “Walter Kurtz,” a fortysomething cartoonist born in Cleveland and resident in New York City, who worked on a strip about two color-coded spy-types for a satirical magazine popular with teen boys, and who otherwise has…
A Mess of Everything By Miss Lasko-Gross Fantagraphics Books, April 2009, $19.99 According to page 119, the heroine of this story writes comics as “Miss Lasko-Gross,” but her legal name (at least at this point, when she’s in high school) is “Melissa Anne Lasko Gross,” and the two last names are from both her mother…
One of the really interesting aspects about the growth in graphic novels is that more and more people are using the form for memoirs and autobiographical works. Will Eisner explored growing up in the tenements, kicking things off, and since then we have had utterly fascinating works that detail romance, aging, life on the streets…
