Comic Con India videos: Robert Crumb, Gary Groth, and Chris Oliveros

More from Comic Con India, the videos for presentations given by cartoonist Robert Crumb, Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth, and Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros have been uploaded.

(Hat tip to Mike Lynch, who featured the first Crumb video at his blog.)


Robert Crumb in conversation with Gary Groth, February 19, 2012 (4 parts):











Comic Con India Special Session with Gary Groth: Co-Founder, Fantagraphics, February 18, 2012 (3 parts):









Comic Con India Special Session With Chris Oliveros, Founder, Drawn & Quarterly, February 17, 2012 (2 parts):

Mattotti illustrates Lou Reed's "The Raven"

An edition of Lou Reed's The Raven (based on his 2003 record) illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti has been recently released in Europe. And it seems an English-language edition will be available from Fantagraphics next year.

The story behind the book: in an article published in publico.es, Mattotti tells how Lou Reed phoned him a couple of years ago, telling him he loved his Jekyll and Hyde book and that he wanted him to illustrate Reed's book. It seems Reed and Art Spiegelman share the same literary agent, and that Spiegelman pointed Reed in Mattotti's direction.

All of the above came to my attention when I stumbled upon a news account about Reed having fallen asleep during a presentation of the book (while Mattotti was speaking). Here's hoping the book comes out at the scheduled date, despite the .. er ... skepticism of some regarding the publisher's publication dates.

A PDF preview of the Spanish-language edition can be downloaded here.

Missing "Our Gang" page found

Some years ago, I reviewed the second of Walt Kelly's Our Gang volumes published by Fantagraphics. Back then I'd noticed something strange in the second story reprinted in that book:

There's a strange transition between pages 44 and 45 of this edition: in the last panel of page 44 one sees the soldiers preparing to escape from their hideout, without knowing that they are being watched by the kids's friend, Captain Dan, who's holding a rifle. [...]

In the next page, we're in a completely different scene, with Froggy telling the other kids: "So I showed the cap'n how to aim it an' told him the exact pusychological [sic] time to fire an' -". The implication is clear (the Captain shot the Japanese while they were trying to escape), but the transition is a bit too sudden. The episode as reprinted in this volume is only 11 pages long, while the two previous episodes and the very next episode have 12 pages each. My first thought was that Fantagraphics may have accidentally skipped a page, but a likelier explanation could be that Kelly's editors decided to drop the page in which we see the Japanese soldiers being shot, figuring that such a thing might have been too strong for a children's comic, war or no war.

As it turns out, the simplest explanation was the correct one: this edition is missing a page that was included in the story's original appearance in Our Gang Comics #11. Since this issue was scanned some months ago, I'm able to include the original page (scanned from microfiche, so the quality isn't that good) here:





So there you have it, the original page in its uncensored glory. Hopefully this will be included in future printings of Fantagraphics's series.