Happy 60th Birthday Charles Burns!

Charles Burns, born September 27, 1955, has been amazing us with his work for over 35 years!

The artist as a young punk rocker. 

Burns got his start in the pages of Art Spiegelman's Raw Magazine. His first important work for RAW would be the cover of RAW #4, which featured a die-cut cover. 

This is Burn's ingenious cover for Raw Magazine #4. The first picture is the outside cover. The second picture is the inside cover. Di cut holes were cut in the cover where the color inside cover would show through. 

Burns characters live in a wacky world turned on it's head. One of Burns early works was El Borba, a giant luchador detective, serialized in the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine. Here we see his story from Heavy Metal Magazine, Aug 1983, titled Dead Meat. 

Charles Burns' Marriage Made In Hell from RAW Magazine #6,

Charles Burns has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for his Black Hole and his Xed Out trilogy but before he did these great works he was twisting pop culture on it's head with works like...

Happy 67th Birthday Art Spiegelman!

In the early 80's Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly decided to put out a very new and experimental magazine that would contain all of the awesome new comics that they were discovering over seas in Mouly's homeland of France as well as all the great new comic artists Spiegelman was meeting while teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts. They would call this new magazine RAW Magazine and among the new and experimental works that they would publish in it was Art's own story of his dad and his struggles surviving German concentration camps of WWII, a work that he would call Maus. 

 Happy Birthday 

Art Spiegelman!

(born February 15, 1948)

Gary Panter's Jimbo

What do you get when you combine Jack Kirby, with Pablo Picasso?  You get Gary Panter's Jimbo. It’s one part Kamandi and one part Guernica. Jimbo is a fun adventure story as well as a statement on art and esthetics of our time.

Jimbo is from RAW Magazine #8: "The Graphic Aspirin for War Fever"  (September 1986)

Jimbo is a young punk who finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world of rotting ghost horses running down the street of demolished cities. In an odd way his work reflects our own world and media with it’s grotesque news stories of war and oil spills and man-made disasters. Gary Panter’s work reflects this in a fascinating, grotesquely beautiful way. It's abrasive, shocking, senseless and yet totally compelling.

Kim Deitch' "Hell to Pay" featuring Waldo the Cat NSFW

"I bring greetings from an admirer of yours, down below."
"You mean?"
"That's right pal, old Nicky himself."

Kim Deitch has been a part of the comics scene for a long time. He got his start in the late 60's as a part of the underground comics movement contributing to the East Village Other.

RAW Comix vol. 2 #2, Required reading for the post literate

 A cornucopia of graphic eye candy!

cover by Joost Swarte, a Dutch artist who often deconstructs the comics format as in this illustration where the depicted pictures interact with each other. 

I read these when they first came out. I loved volume 1 with it’s large size format that emphasized the graphic qualities of the comics inside. In contrast volume 2 is a digest size (6’ x 8 ¾’) which is better suited for narrative driven stories and the diverse art styles that illustrate the stories in here really shows off the wide range of ways that great stories can be told.

Mark Beyer's "Agony" and our ecstasy!

In the 80's I grew up loving RAW Magazine and anything to do with it. One of their regular artists was Mark Beyer. He was a naive artist who took perverse pleasure in satirizing the hardships of life.

Art Spiegelman's "Two-Fisted Painters"

Art Spiegelman is not only the creator of the  Pulitzer Prize winning graphic Novel Maus, he, along with his partner Françoise Mouly, were the creators of Raw Magazine where Maus first appeared. I was a huge fan of Raw Magazine back in the 80's. Reading it had a way of altering your view of what comics were. I would read something like Art Spiegelman's Two-Fisted Painters and I would start to see color breakdowns in all comics that I read afterward. I remember studying all the nuances of the book. I would look at the color break-downs and compare them to the finished pages, and study the pages with the 'wrong' color separation on them.

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