Comix Classics for iPad is Live!

Our Comix Classics: Underground Comix app for iPad is now available in the Apple app store. iPhone and Android coming soon! "Mr. Cape" logo (above) and Cyclops desktop icon by Denis Kitchen.

New CAPE Web Site is Live!

I'm happy to announce the launch of Comic Art Productions & Exhibits' new web site, just in time for San Diego Comic-Con, ICv2 and the launch of our new underground comix app for iPhone, iPad and Android, Comix Classics (based on the book Underground Classics by Danky & Kitchen). The site features lots of exhibition photos and screen shots previewing the new app! http://www.cape-comicart.com/.

We have recently established new company pages on Facebook and Twitter (@km_cape). Come visit and let us know what you think!

Late May in New York!

We love New York! There’s just never enough time. We managed to squeeze in a couple nights of theatre, meals with friends, a comics convention and lots of art!

On our day in the Village, we met our good friend Tom Griscom (see his fab photos here), and saw the stunning Eisner show at MoCCA (through 8/14/11). It was great to see so many of Eisner’s drawings and paintings in real life, set in a context that really helped the viewer (me) to understand and appreciate his life and career. I was impressed anew by Eisner’s line work, sense of composition and his intuitive use of body language to lend an immediate sense of personality to his characters. Also included was a smaller show featuring tributes to Eisner by colleagues and disciples. Kudos to curators Danny Fingeroth and Denis Kitchen for assembling an excellent show (photos here).

The Broken Kilometer, photo by Thomas Kellein

We continued our gallery tour with visits to two long term installations by Walter de Maria, The New York Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer, both supported by the Dia Art Foundation. I can’t describe The Broken Kilometer better than Thomas Kellein did in Tate Magazine on the 30th anniversary of the installation: “'There’s a faint hint of incense. The calm that you sense on entering the gallery is only intensified by the creaking of old floorboards. Outside we have left behind us countless boutiques, passers-by and clamorous restaurants. As soon as we step inside, passing a low wall where there are brochures laid out, the magnificent work greets us. Five hundred gleaming gold-coloured rods, receding into the distance, laid out majestically in a five-sectioned plane. Our gaze roams to and fro, lingering on columns, a double-window on the left wall, a white rope in front of us at knee-height. Do not enter, just look. A devotional image with no figure of Mary, no Joseph and no Lord God. Just pure brass, illuminated by some other sun for our benefit alone, it seems.” We were astonished and sat with it for a while, almost meditating. The Earth Room was also amazing, I won’t spoil it with a description if you haven’t seen it. As we were leaving, Tom said “That’s one great thing about New York, amazing things like this are hidden away in old buildings all over the city, just waiting for someone to discover them.”

The Duchess of Guiche, 1784.
Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun

Also waiting was the Met and its incredible collection. I’ve been so many times, it’s like visiting old friends. Among its many treasures are quite a few works in pastel by Degas, a medium which I feel is greatly undervalued. Pastel is difficult to work with, but the texture and the richness of color can be deeply rewarding. I was pleased to see the special exhibit Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th Century Europe. Included among these was The Duchess of Guiche, 1784, a rare surviving pastel portrait by one of my favorite Neo-Classical artists, Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun. The detail in the eyes, hair, lace and ribbons is stunning, as well as the fact that this fragile painting has remained crisp and unsmeared over all this time.

Thor by Chris Giarrusso

Getting back to comics, we attended the NY Wizard World spring convention. It was held on two floors of the Penn Plaza Pavilion. It reminded us very much of WonderCon about ten years ago, back when it was still in the Marriott’s basement in Oakland.  We enjoyed chatting with Craig Yoe, who was very proud of his Archie history from IDW, and his show Comics Stripped which is still on view at the Museum of Sex over on 5th Avenue. We chatted with Jerry Robinson (The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art), and got this cute “Mini-Thor” sketch from Chris Giarrusso. I also picked up a copy of the graphic novel Aaron and Ahmed: A Love Story from James Romberger (and Jay Cantor with Jose Villarrubia) and a very interesting independent comic about life on Earth as seen through the eyes of Martians called Martian Debut by Antonio Romero. We had a good time, but the space was chaotic and stuffy. The autograph area downstairs was unbearable (no crowd control, tight space).

We rounded the visit out with Broadway debuts by two veteran actors: John Larroquette, who was very funny starring opposite Daniel Radcliffe in the classic How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Ellen Barkin as part of the tight ensemble cast of The Normal Heart. Both very much deserve their Tony nominations. Honestly, Succeed could have sucked if it came off feeling really dated, but Radcliffe had great energy and was perfectly cast, and we were blown away by the inventive retro design and choreography. Normal Heart, the 1985 AIDS drama by Larry Kramer, was touching, funny and grim all at once. Joe Mantello, Barkin and the rest of the cast all gave powerful performances.

For some reason, all our friends craved Italian on this trip, and we enjoyed meals at Angelo's on 57th, Emporio and Il Corallo Trattoria in the Village, and our personal favorite, Bond 45 in the theatre district. All these places were different as night & day, but all good.

Wolverine Sings!

Hugh Jackman in SF.
Photo by Joan Marcus

Hugh Jackman in Performance, May 3-15 at the Curran Theatre, San Francisco.

This was a fun show! Jackman charmed and joked with his adorning audience from beginning to end, gleefully poking fun at the dichotomy of his action hero Hollywood persona and his life-long love of musical theatre. Throughout this entertaining song & dance show, stories and references to Wolverine kept coming up, most humorously a video bit that juxtaposed Wolverine and Peter Allen, and a continuing joke with his “personal trainer” insisting that the studio needed Jackman to bulk up.

While Jackman is a talented performer, the heart of this show seems to found in his interaction with the audience and his personal stories. He laughed and joked and wandered through the first three rows of the audience, cheering on audience members who brought glow sticks, flowers and feather boas. He answered people that called out to him, and remembered people’s names if he had heard them. It was one of the most intimately engaging nights I’ve spent in the theatre for a long time.  There was an excellent band, 2 female back-up singers, the “trainer,” and a couple of Australian performers. He even brought the Curran’s stage manager out on stage for a bow.

The show itself mostly worked, the few rough spots were quickly forgotten in the energetic pace of the evening.  Jackman has a quick wit and a strong voice; he’s the perfect musical theatre leading man.  The show opened, as Oklahoma does, with Jackman off-stage singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning (“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…”) and it was easy to visualize him starring in Trevor Nunn’s production of the show. He followed this with some high energy show tunes, and a very funny version of Fever that got a great audience response. There was a movie songs medley that mostly worked, Staying Alive was hysterical and I’ve Had the Time of My Life was great. Then it sort of took a bad turn, as my husband commented, it’s really hard for a man to successfully perform Lady Marmalade. Things picked right back up with a series of Peter Allen numbers and a very funny story about his early role as Salesman #8 in The Music Man (he sang all the parts in the rapid fire opening number of the show himself). Luck be a Lady Tonight was a natural fit. I hope someday to hear him try some Sondheim.

My favorite parts were two ballads Billy Bigelow’s Soliloquy from Carousel (nailed it!) and Peter Allen’s Tenterfield Saddler and a hearfelt tribute to the Australian outback and the aboriginal people that included him singing Israel "IZ" Ka'ano'iKamakawiwo'ole's version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and hope to catch him again on Broadway in the future.

Pulp Fashion at the Legion

Eleanor of Toledo, 2006 by Isabelle de Borchgrave

I love the Legion of Honor. I’ve been going there for so long that many of the masterworks in their collection seem like old friends.  The current special exhibition Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave (February 5, 2011 - June 12, 2011) was amazing. I was mesmerized by her highly detailed, life size costumes created out of paper.  The high-light of it, for me at least, was a gallery featuring costumes based on fashions worn by the Medici family.  It was as if all those endless slides I viewed in art history classes came to life.  I highly recommend it.

PCA/ACA San Antonio

San Antonio River Walk

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's national conference, in conjunction with the Southwest Texas regional chapter, was held in San Antonio a couple of weeks ago. Hundreds of scholars converged on the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter for this always amazing convention, with presentations on everything from Tarot Cards and Medieval Literature to Buffy and Twilight (and every imaginable topic in between, the program looks like a phone book!). Comics scholars come out in force at this convention, and between the national conference, and the the fact that the SWTX-PCA has an active comics contingent on their own, there were around a hundred papers on comics and related subjects presented.

panel from Captain
America #125,
May 1970

I was honored to chair a session with a group of excellent presentations. Kerry Soper's Doonesbury Goes to War discussed Trudeau's treatment of BD's war injury, and the way that war and wounded servicepeople are depicted in comics. Brannon Costello's presentation Fascism and Mass Culture in Howard Chaykin's 'Blackhawk' focused on Chaykin's use of motifs and layouts from propaganda posters and advertising. Laura Perna talked about the eerrie nature of Charles Burns' comics in her presentation There Was Something Screwy Going On: Viewing Charles Burns' Comics through the Lens of the Uncanny.  My own paper, Censorship and Super Bodies: the Creative Odyssey of Margaret Harrison, concerned my on-going research on the British artist Margaret Harrison and her life long relationship with the Marvel Comics character Captain America, as a foundation for inquiries about world politics and gender (previous posts).

Aside from hearing many interesting presentations, I enjoyed having some "face time" with my fellow comics scholars, many of whom were previously just names on the Comics Scholars listserve. I enjoyed Randy Duncan's progress report on his research into the Superman: Grounded storyline, Yuri Shakouchi's presention on Beat Culture and Beatniks in MAD Magazine, and Russell Johnson's analysis of fan culture's response to Grant Morrison's Hypercrisis. There was a tea sponsored by the SWTX-PCA that celebrated Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, authors of the Comics Studies Reader and recipients of the Peter C. Rollins Award.  The special session of the Institute for Korvac Studies was a fun and mystical experience. The PCA national conference always has a good exhibit hall, and as usual I have additions to my already groaning bookshelves. They also have an excellent tradition called "the paper table" where everyone brings 10 copies of their paper, and the papers are sold for a dollar to sponsor student travel to the conference. I always end up with lots of papers, because it's a great way to dip into other areas, and to get more detail on papers of interest (presentations are only 15 minutes).

I had mixed feelings about San Antonio itself, although I probably didn't have enough time there to do justice to such a large city.  The hotel was right next to the Alamo (it's the 175th anniversary) and the River Walk area. I admit, coming from California with our wealth of great Mexican restaurants, I wasn't very impressed with that part, but there's a big variety to be had, and I enjoyed my meals at the Zuni restaurant and the comics section dinner at Luciano's. I did feel a little sorry for people I'd talk with at the hotel that were looking for Vegetarian or Vegan meals, as it seems that San Antonio, at least in a touristy area like the River Walk, isn't real accommodating that way. I did really enjoy the conference though and the staff at the Marriott was unfailingly nice and helpful.  Next year, Boston!

Saturday at WonderCon 2011

View of the exhibit floor above the DC Booth.

WonderCon has grown up. My husband Marc and I started going around 10 years ago when it was in the basement of the Downtown Oakland Marriott, now it truly looks like San Diego Comic Con junior. For the last two years I’ve had a conflict with other conference that I attend regularly and had only been in & out on Sunday afternoons, so the crowd on the exhibit floor Saturday really took me by surprise. Although I have no real statistics on the matter, I saw a lot of bodies around the booths and money changing hands, so I hope all the exhibitors did well this year. Here are some notes on sessions I attended on Saturday:

Over at the Aspen Comics spotlight session, I felt that the company as a whole recovered fairly well from the tragic loss of Michael Turner. Soulfire continues to be one of my favorite fantasy series. One thing I’ve always liked about their books, and hadn’t realized was an conscious company policy, is that they don’t do many crossover books. They feel, rightly I think, that each of their specific books is set in its own world, and there aren’t many ways to bring those worlds together that aren’t really contrived and illogical. Personally, I’ve been suffering from Brightest/Siege/Crisis burn-out, and I wish some other companies thought this way. They also said that they have finally got a solid team working on Fathom, another really interesting and unique title.

Following the Aspen panel was the spotlight session on the legendary writer Marv Wolfman. I thought it was interesting to hear his war stories about projects like Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I really liked hearing him speak about his writing process, how he maintained interest in a book focused on an unsympathetic villain for the long run of Tomb of Dracula, within all the limitations he faced on that series; how he built the “family” relationships between the characters of the New Teen Titans and of the Legion of Superheroes by thinking of them in complimentary and conflicting triangles; the complications of researching his latest non-comics work, Homeland: the Illustrated History of the State of Israel (with Mario Ruiz & William J. Rubin). I thought it was odd that he seemed to talk about everything but Blade, but then, maybe it’s a topic he feels has been discussed enough. It cracked me up when he told us that Marvel hired him because they thought it would be funny to have someone named Wolfman writing horror titles.

As a big animation fan, I really enjoyed the Marvel animation session. Geoff Johns started with a tease of the upcoming Ultimate Spiderman series, which looked really good and continued with a full episode of The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (trailer here), which featured the birth of Ultron. It rocked, the audience loved it. Next we saw clips from the anime series Marvel is rolling out starting this July on the G4 Network, starting with Iron Man and Wolverine (trailer here, in Japanese), with the X-Men and Blade in the works. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these. Iron Man and Wolverine seemed like a natural fit with the anime style of drawing and editing, especially Wolverine, who has had so many epic story arcs set in Japan.

Godzilla #1, WonderCon Exclusive

I’m really excited about IDW’s relaunch of Godzilla. I was always disappointed that the Godzilla series published by Dark Horse a few years ago never seemed to find an audience (I own several pieces of original art from that series). It sounds like IDW has established a good relationship with Toho, and has been able to license a dozen of the major monsters in the Godzilla universe (Mothra, Rodan, etc). The art, by Phil Hester, Victor Santos and others really captured the scale, mystery, and kookiness of Godzilla.

Otherwise, we bought lots of books. I was happy to find one of current favorite artists, Marko Djurdjevic, sketching completely unnoticed at the Marvel booth. Marc was happy to catch up with Darick Roberson at the Comic Outpost booth and get an original Witchblade cover drawing from him. I’m sorry to miss the Sunday panel organized by Trina Robbins and Jennifer K. Stuller, A Brief Herstory of Gum Shoe Gals, Spy-Fi Sheroes, and Private Dick Chicks, as it grew in response to the somewhat uneven Action Chicks panel at SDCC last year. I hope it went well, and they repeat it in SDCC this summer.