From Fantagraphics comes this welcome news:

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Presents “Misery Loves Comedy: New Works by Ivan Brunetti”
May 19 through June 20, 2007, with Artist Reception June 8
Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is pleased to debut the lively exhibition, “Misery Loves Comedy,” featuring new and recent work by Chicago-based artist Ivan Brunetti. The show opens on Saturday, May 19 and continues through June 20, 2007 at 1201 S. Vale St. in Seattle’s creative Georgetown arts community. The gallery hosts a festive reception for the artist on Friday, June 8 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
This exhibition commemorates the publication of Misery Loves Comedy by Fantagraphics Books, an anthology of the first three issues of
Brunetti’s “Schizo” comic book and other works. Brunetti’s self-deprecating comic stories portray his emotional battles with depression, divorce and high anxiety, employing compelling dark humor and visual acuity. His therapist actually provides the book’s introduction. “I’m not going to explain things to readers,” Brunetti comments in a recent edition of Publishers Weekly. “I don’t know if I can explain them to myself.”
In addition to Brunetti’s new collection, Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books has published four issues of “Schizo” and two volumes of his gag cartoons, “Hee!” and “Haw!” Brunetti recently organized “The Cartoonist’s Eye” exhibit at the A+D Gallery of Columbia College Chicago and edited the companion bestseller “An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories,” published by Yale University Press. He has drawn comics and illustrations for The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Spin, among many others.
“I enjoy watching Brunetti suffer.” —ART SPIEGELMAN

Continue reading →

If you’re anything like me (and you are—at least a little, little bit), you’re wondering what’s going on with that series of ads for Mass Mutual Financial Group in this week’s New Yorker, the ones in which a red-headed woman is overwhelmed by insurance. From iSpot‘s blog:

Jill Calder’s whimsical artwork takes over the April 16, 2007 issue of the New Yorker magazine with a narrative series of ads for Mass Mutual Financial Group. The New Yorker selected about 40 illustrators for Mass Mutual and their ad agency, Mullen, to choose from, which eventually whittled down to Jill; her job was to bring their concept to life.
…
[Jill Calder:] I started by creating a character, whom I named Stella (rather than “the Mass Mutual woman”!) – female, 30’s, capable, confident and busy, but sometimes too busy to tend to her insurance needs. I also created a colour palette which would keep the look of the ads consistent but give me flexibility and a generous range, as I love colour. The Mass Mutual corporate blue was one of the colours, which gave the ads a strong, if subliminal, branding…. I had to show Stella in all manner of situations, some quite surreal and others quite lifelike, that were basically “barriers” preventing Stella from getting her financial needs sorted out. The first full page image was of Stella surrounded by an extreme amount of paperwork, teetering piles of it, which described her misconception that applying for insurance would be complicated and involve too much paperwork. In the next image, Stella decides she has no spare time to deal with insurance – this again is illustrated in a dreamlike fashion: she appears in an hourglass, trapped but still moving forward. Cont’d.

From the most exciting press release I’ve seen in months, if not years:

FANTAGRAPHICS TO PUBLISH WALT KELLY’S POGO, DESIGNED BY JEFF SMITH
 
Fantagraphics Books is pleased to announce that it has acquired the rights to publish a comprehensive series comprising Walt Kelly’s classic POGO comic strip. The first volume of Fantagraphics’ POGO will appear in October, 2007, and the series will run approximately 12 volumes.
Each Pogo volume will be designed by Jeff Smith, the award-winning cartoonist and creator of the Bone graphic novel, and a lifelong admirer of Walt Kelly.
Walt Kelly (born Walter Crawford Kelly Jr.) was born in 1913 and started his career at age 13 in Connecticut as a cartoonist and reporter for the Bridgeport Post, his local newspaper. In 1935, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Walt Disney Studio, where he worked on classic animated films, including ‘Pinocchio,’ ‘Dumbo,’ and ‘Fantasia.’ In the mid 1930s, he drew his first comics work for the future DC Comics. Kelly left Disney in 1941 rather than take sides in their bitter labor strike. He moved back east and began drawing comic books for Western Publishing Company and the Dell line of comics.
It was during this time that Kelly created the character Pogo Possum. The character first appeared in Dell’s Animal Comics as a secondary player in the ‘Albert the Alligator’ feature. It didn’t take long until ‘Pogo’ became the comic’s leading character. After the Second World War, Kelly became artistic director at the New York Star, where he turned Pogo into a daily strip. When the Star folded in 1949, the Hall Syndicate took ‘Pogo’ into syndication, so that the strip soon appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Until his death in 1973, he produced a feature that has become widely cherished among casual readers and aficionados alike as a classic comic strip.
Kelly blended nonsense, poetry, and political and social satire in making POGO an essential contribution to American “intellectual” comics. As the strip progressed, it became a hilarious platform for Kelly’s scathing political views in which he skewered national boogeymen like Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon. Kelly was considered a sufficient threat that his phone was tapped and the US Government corresponded with a newspaper reporter who claimed that the eccentric patois Kelly created was a secret Russian code.) Pogo is well known for its elaborate and ornate lettering and for Kelly’s distinctive use of language and lush brushwork. It is one of the few comic strips that succeeded in blending humor and politics into an uncompromising and entertaining whole.
The consecutive run of Pogo has never before been systematically collected into book form. (Fantagraphics published a series of 11 softcover volumes reprinting five-and-a-half years of the strip in the ‘90s.) This will be the definitive series collecting all of his Pogo strips from 1949 to 1973. “Walt Kelly is unquestionably in the pantheon of great newspaper strip cartoonists,” said Gary Groth, President & Publisher of Fantagraphics Books. “Our Pogo books will present Kelly’s work the way it should be published — in a beautifully designed hardcover format, with careful attention paid to reproduction quality, and with knowledgeable introductory material.”
“I am very excited that Fantagraphics has chosen to publish Pogo in such wonderful books,” said Carolyn Kelly, Walt’s daughter. “For many years people have been telling me how much they want to own this series, and I am thrilled that Pogo will now be so carefully compiled and available to us. Ol’ Walt would be proud.”
“This collection has been a long time coming,” said Jeff Smith, “I’ve been waiting for it ever since I was nine. I’m very happy to be helping the Kelly family and Fantagraphics bring this comic strip masterpiece to a new audience.”

Hometown pride, in The Stranger‘s blog, for the creator of the striking photo that illustrates “Bravado,” the William Trevor story in the 1.15.07 issue:

How many expressive young men are sitting around Seattle dreaming of one day being in The New Yorker? Who can keep track… But here is one Seattle native, photographer Andrew Miksys, who has actually made the leap. His picture “Kissing Couple,” from 2001, accompanies William Trevor’s short story in the current issue of the magazine.
…
Here’s a cleaner version of the photograph. It’s from Miksys’s time in Lithuania, where he’s focused much of his attention on the Roma. Miksys will be at Seattle’s CoCA on Jan. 26, along with NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu, to present images from Miksys’s new book, BAXT.

If you go, ask him about this lady.