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Der STRUWWELMAAKIES by Tony Millionaire
96-pages B&W 12” x 5” • $19.95; more in Canada • ISBN 1-56097-654-3
Tony Millionaire’s Maakies is one of the best and most popular weekly comic strips in America, running in over a dozen of the largest U.S. weekly newspapers including the Village Voice, L.A Weekly and Seattle’s The Stranger. Maakies features the comical adventures of a drunken crow
on the high seas, blending vaudeville-style humor and a breathtaking line that harkens back to the glory days of the American comic strip. Designed by publishing’s foremost graphic designer, Chip Kidd, Der Struwwelmaakies is our third hardcover collection and features over two
years’ worth of Maakies in a beautiful, deluxe, landscape hardcover format that complements the strip’s elegant and classical style. This book collects the latest two years of Tony Millionaire’s weekly strips, wherein Drinky Crow, as always, steals the show.
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CINEMA PANOPTICUM by Thomas Ott
80-page B&W hardcover graphic novel 6 1/4” x 10” • $16.95; more in Canada • ISBN 1-56097-649-7
T. Ott plunges into the darkness with five new graphic horror novelettes: “The Prophet,” “The Wonder Pill,” “La Lucha,” “The Hotel,”
and the title story, each executed in his hallucinatory and
hyper-detailed scratchboard style and running between 16 to 20 pages. The first story in the book introduces the other four: A little girl visits an amusement park. She looks fascinated, but finds everything too expensive. Finally, behind the rollercoaster she eyeballs a small
booth with “CINEMA PANOPTICUM” written on it. Inside there are boxes with screens. Every box contains a movie. Ott’s O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, or modern efforts like M. Night Shamalayan’s films; his artwork will haunt you long after you’ve put the book down.
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THE PIN-UP ART OF BILL WENZEL by Alex Chun & Jacob Covey
220-pp. 2-color 5 3/4” x 7 3/4” softcover • $18.95; more in Canada • ISBN 1-56097-658-6
No other pin-up cartoon artist over a 30-year period was as prolific or as omnipresent as Bill Wenzel. Virtually every humor and men’s magazine, ranging from Judge in the mid-’40s to Sex to Sexy in the ’60s and ’70s, boasted two, if not a dozen, of Wenzel’s pin-up cartoons. Quick with pen and ink, Wenzel was equally adept with the brush, and
nowhere was this more evident than in his work for the Humorama line of girlie digests. The digests, which sported titles like Gaze, Joker, Jest, Comedy and Stare, were crammed full of marginally risqué single panel pin-up cartoons and cheesecake photos featuring the likes of
Bettie Page, Irish McCalla, and even Sophia Loren, and as a long-time contributor to the Humorama digests, Wenzel was part of an artistic fraternity that included the likes of Bill Ward, Playboy’s Jack Cole, and Archie’s Dan DeCarlo. Though wasp-waisted long-legged women were derigueur in the digests, Wenzel set himself apart from the rest of the
best with his decidedly more Rubenesque rendering of the female form. Whether they were aloof secretaries biding their time waiting for their bosses to ditch their wives or smoldering vixens preparing for a night on the town, Wenzel’s women carried their weight well, the better to
hold up their ample chests. Without a doubt, Wenzel is the most overlooked of all the pin-up cartoon artists of his era, but with this volume, which features a selection of his sexiest and most sensual ink-wash images, Wenzel takes his rightful place among Humorama’s top artists.
NEW COMICS AND MAGAZINES:
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MINESHAFT by various artists
56-page B&W comic • $5.00; more in Canada • MATURE READERS
Mineshaft has been manfully filling the counter-cultural magazine niche since 1999 when counter cultural magazines were supposed to no longer exist. Mineshaft is devoted mostly to comics but occasionally branches off into other alternative arts and cultural nooks and crannies.
Fantagraphics is distributing the magazine beginning with this, its 15th issue, which features an "Amazon Women" cover by none other than R. Crumb, who also contributes his "Curse of the Fetish Obsession" sketchbook drawings inside. Regular contributor Kim Deitch illustrates
a letters section on "Fabulous Literary trash" and Simon Deitch draws strange pulp comic book covers from his dreams. Robert Armstrong and Frank Stack make their first appearances in Mineshaft with a centerfold and "The Ersatz Adventures of the Planty" and a new "Jesus" strip respectively. Ace Backwords delivers an explosive Charles Bukowski interview on War. Plus more hot stuff from around the globe.
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BÊTE NOIRE #1 by various artists, edited by Chris Polkki
88-page black and white and color comic • $9.95; $15.95 in Canada •
MATURE READERS
BETE NOIRE showcases a wide range of international artists from North American and abroad, including such European collectives as Cornelius, Les Requins Marteaux and Le Dernier Cri, as well as five of the very best art-manga creators in Japan today. Contributors include Renee
French (USA); MS Bastian (Switzerland); F© + Witko, Frédéric Coché, Ludovic Debeurme, Lucie Durbiano, Quentin Faucompré, Morgan Navarro, and Caroline Sury (France); Anke Feuchtenberger (Germany); Ichiba Daisuke, Junko Mizuno, Suzy Amakane, Takeshi Nemoto, and Yuichi Yokoyama (Japan); Reijo Karkkainen (Finland); Peter Köhler (Sweden); Olaf Ladousse (Spain); Helge Reumann and Nadia Raviscioni
(Switzerland); Fabio Viscogliosi (Italy) and Valiu
(Canada). Also, Kevin Scalzo (USA) contributes a new Sugar Booger story in full color, and the spectacular cover is by David Heatley (USA).
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THE COMICS JOURNAL #269
200 page magazine with 56 pp. in color • $9.95; $15.95 in Canada
“Girls don’t like comics.” It was one of the hoariest clichés of the last 15 years in the American comics industry, but in the last three years, Japanese manga has exposed it for the lie it always was. Shoujomanga, women’s comics, have become the engine driving the Asian comics invasion, and have amassed a large and enthusiastic female
following. The Comics Journal#269 is devoted to exploring
and explaining the phenomenon. Our cover interviewspotlights pioneering shoujocartoonist Moto Hagio, often called “the Osamu Tezuka of women’s manga,” who is renowned both for her psychologically challenging stories and as the originator of the shounen-ai(Boy Love) subgenre. Hagio was one of the ringleaders of the Magnificent Forty-Niners, a loose confederation of female manga creators who challenged the then-male-dominated shoujoindustry in the early 1970s and left it utterly transformed. Scholar and translator Matt Thorn sits
down for a long and fascinating conversation with Hagio (her first full-length interview ever), and also contributes an essay explaining who the Forty-Niners were and why their influence is still felt today.
As if that weren’t enough, we also present the first-ever
English translation of Hagio’s seminal short story “Hanshin,” which has been studied by Japanese scholars and even adapted into a Japanese theater production! Also: Journalist Kai-Ming Cha traces the rise of shoujoas a market force in Asia and the United States; cartoonist Lea Hernandez explains how shoujoshaped her view of comics as an art form; cartoonist and historian Trina Robbins examines all-ages manga for girls; TCJ Managing Editor Dirk Deppey offers a theory as to why such boys’ manga titles as Chobitsand Love Hinahave developed such strong followings among female readers; Kristy Valenti looks at the growing popularity of yaoiand Boy’s Love comics; and our critics review a wide array of shoujotitles for your edification. If you’re a Marvel
executive trying to figure out how to break into the market, a retailer trying to make sense of the new paradigm in comics, or a reader wondering what all the fuss is about, you dare not miss this issue of America’s most respected magazine of comics news and criticism: The
Comics Journal!
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