Joe Sacco Talks About His Latest Book

Award winning journalist and cartoonist, Joe Sacco, talks about his latest book, Footnotes in Gaza.

Joe Sacco - Footnotes in Gaza, Jan. 12, 2010 from pdxjustice Media Productions on Vimeo.

The Hooded Utilitarian

Dear Readers:

I'm at The Hooded Utilitarian, now (I write a monthly column there titled Monthly Stumblings):

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/tag/monthly-stumblings/

I will continue to write at the ol' Crib though! More soon, I hope!...

Fanta's It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

It's always great when a publisher (Kim Thompson) agrees with me and publishes a book that is in my canon:

How Jacques Tardi does it:

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(Note: this post is in Portuguese because it mostly concerns my Portuguese readers - all six of them.)

Duas notícias: uma excelente, outra nem tanto...

Diz-me textulmente Breixo Harguindey: "Uma empresa de produção editorial de Barcelona encarregou-me elaborar um projecto de colecção sobre BD Bélica e política para o jornal português I (http://www.ionline.pt/conteudos/home.html)". A lista de títulos que Breixo escolheu dificilmente poderia ser melhor:

- Watchmen - Moore e Gibbons;

- Maus - Art Spiegelman;

- Safe Area Gorazde - Joe Sacco;

- To the Heart of the Storm - Will Eisner;

- Selecção de Two Fisted Tales incluindo "Corpse on the Imjin": http://www.beaucoupkevin.com/imjin/index.html - Kurtzman et al;

- Poison River - Beto Hernández;

- Berlin - Jason Lutes;

- Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi;

- Les mauvaises gens - Étienne Davodeau

- Le cri du peuple/Varlot soldat - Jacques Tardi;

- Partie de chasse/Les phalanges de l'ordre noir - Christin e Bilal;

- Deogratias - Stassen

- MW - Osamu Tezuka;

- Hitler - Shigeru Mizuki (ou Operation mort)

- I Saw It - Keiji Nakazawa

- Perramus/El Eternauta/El Che - Sasturain, Oesterheld, Breccia - Ernie Pike - Oesterheld e Hugo Pratt;

- Paracuellos (I e II) - Carlos Giménez;

- El arte de volar - Antonio Atarriba e Kim;

- Las memorias de Amorós - Hernández Cava e Del Barrio;

- Salazar - Cotrim e Rocha;

- Estórias Gerais - Srbek e Colin.

Infelizmente a dita empresa não chegou a acordo com Breixo, mas, ao que parece, a colecção sempre vai p'rá frente. Aguardemos, pois, novos desenvolvimentos...

Se se confirmar a edição de El Eternauta estamos perante um grande acontecimento editorial!...

Imagem:

Cartaz da exposição "50/30: 50 años con El Eternauta... 30 años sin Oesterheld" (50 anos com o Eternauta... 30 anos sem Oesterheld), Francisco Solano Lopez, Hernán Cabrera, Pablo Maiztegui, 2007.

PS ...Back to English: a couple of people (or was it just one buyer?) spent one mil and one mil + dollars on two superhero comic books. My question is: who's an elitist now?

Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6 - Coda

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1., 2., 3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10., 11., 12.,13. Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6 by Roberto Altmann in its entirety as published in Signos [mag] # 3 (Consejo Nacional de Cultura [of Cuba], 1970). Comics, as mixed media, is a perfect vehicle to practice hypergraphics. Roberto Altmann's drawing style is not far from psychedelia.

Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6

"At one time Roberto Altmann was a famous artist. Who remembers Roberto Altmann now?" asks another Roberto (Bolaño) in the book Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2006 [Anagrama: 1997, 2001]: 173; translation by Chris Andrews). If you thought, reading this post's title, that the name is a typo exclaiming something like: "-Hum, Robert Altman did comics?! Who knew?", I must inform you that Roberto Altmann is a Cuban artist who adhered to the Lettrist (or Letterist) aesthetic movement in Paris. (To muddy the waters a bit more "Roberto Altmann" is also an Italian painter.) Altmann did comics inspired by the Lettrist idea of hypergraphics.

Lettrism was created in Paris by Romanian émigré Isidore Goldstein (aka Isidore Isou) in 1946 (his Manifesto was published in 1942, when he was still in Romania though). "Lettrism" played an important role as one of the first neo avant-garde aesthetic movements. "Lettrisme" comes from the word "letter" (or "lettre" in French). Isou defended a poetry in which the visual aspect of signs and sounds were more important than conventional meaning. You may hear some of his poems, here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/isou.html. Lettrists wanted to create a revolution in all the arts, they didn't want to confine themselves to literature. Isidore Isou, for instance, did avant-garde films starting in 1951 with Traité de bave et d'eternité (Venom and Eternity).
As Craig J. Saper put it: "Maurice Lemaître coined the term hypergraphics to describe the puzzlelike works, including his "Memory aid" [his crib sheet] [...]. These works drew on comics and a pop art tradition in their effort to produce a new language system. They mark the emergence of a tradition of producing a language from signs without phonetic equivalent." (Networked Art, University of Minnesotta: 101). Stephen C. Foster defined hypergraphics as "communicating through the union of various forms of communication, as an "ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the conscienceness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and partial practices (phonetic alphabets, algebra, geometry, painting, music, and so forth)." (Lettrism: Into the Present, Visible Language, 1983: 7).

This is, briefly, the creative context of Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6.

Images and Sounds:

Self-portrait by Isidore Isou published in the original cover of Amos ou Introduction à la métagraphologie (Amos or introduction to the metagraphology - Arcanes, 1953 -, "métagraphology" is "hipergraphics"' first name); trailer of Isou's first film Venom and Eternity in which Daniel (Isou) discusses his ideas about cinema.

David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp - Coda

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1. Couples by Saul Steinberg with men and women drawn differently to match their respective selfs (or, as I said below, the viewer's perception of their personalities; my reading - from left to right-: formless, insipid; childish; rational, stiff, imposing; creative, a little affected - Ursula Major? -; blunt, imposing; undistinctive, feeble, but not deprived of rational thought; airy, gaseous; brainy, but unimposing; The Passport, Harper & Brothers, 1954); men are more imposing and rational than woman; a cliché or a relic of the fifties?

2. this particular drawing (ditto, above) is a perfect example to describe the relationship between Hana and Asterios: David Mazzucchelli used a spotlight shifting from Hana to focus on Asterios as a metaphor of the latter's egotism and the former's wishy-washiness; here, Steinberg (besides attributing rationality, etc... to the man) drew the woman on the verge of being pushed out from the page;

3. Hana and Asterios are separated after a quarrel; they're radically different now; the blending is over...; the void space conveys Hana's loneliness;
4. Ignazio's theory: our self seriously constrains our worldmaking, our perception of the world; (and vice-versa, I would add?);

5. the "blockhead" nose (Scott Bukatman) in Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf, 2003);

6. New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg (March, 29, 1976): it's a satire of New Yorkers' parochialism...;

7. in David Mazzucchelli's version time substituted space, memory is "a recreation, not a flashback" (Asterios Polyp); the latter is also highly selective, of course...;

8. David Mazzucchelli extended Saul Steinberg's expressive technique to the lettering (typography) and the balloons' shapes; here we can see both linked to three characters: Kalvin Kohoutek (a musician), whose speech balloons and lettering vaguely remind a musical notation; Asterios Polyp (an architect) whose lettering and square speech balloons underline geometry and rationality (modernism); Willy Ilium (a theatrical producer and director) whose fluid forms are an allusion to post-modernism; another fine touch in this particular page is Hana's face in panels one and two, looking left and right, conveying her disorientation among such competitive and egotistical male egos (this fact is underlined by her quasi-wordless participation in the sequence: if one inflated male ego - Asterios Polyp - is more than enough, what's there to say if her problem is multiplied by three?);

9. harmony arrives again at the end, but, this time, David Mazzucchelli didn't use the blending of her form and his structure (he did blend what they're saying - meaning that they've talked at the same time - and the speech balloons' shapes): he also used the same color for their faces (yellow; see below); plus: Asterios approached Hana by being yellow; Hana approached Asterios by becoming blue; the three primary colors are also a sign of a unified situation.