I spent a few minutes Googling the fragments of an address that appear in Tomine’s panels before giving up and checking the comments to see if anyone had figured it out (The address is that of The New Yorker’s Offices). An eagle-eyed reader of The Beat almost immediately identified that placing the four covers together creates a large image of New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley, but even knowing that the image is there, it’s very subtle.

I’ve rigged an image of Eustace Tilley to overlay the four covers whenever you mouseover the image below. Switching back and forth between the overlay and the covers reveals some of the finer details of the disguised image: I particularly like how the scattered papers in Ware’s cover become fingers.

All told, we get a nice double fake:

• An apparent break from the anniversary tradition of a reimagined Tilley illustration, instead offering an imagined ‘origin story’ for the first Tilley cover.
• The whole of the story itself ends up being the Tilley cover.

Ware wrote up a nice appreciation of Rea Irvin (Creator of the original Eustace Tilley image) here.

Update: I’ve created a higher res version with opacity capability here.

Below is an example of the Ware strips I’m referring to, taken from the cover to a recent Penguin edition of ‘Candide.’

There is a long history of Conan’s bumper art paying homage to disparate pieces of visual inspiration. Awhile back, there was a great website collecting all of these homage images here, but it looks like it’s fallen off the web. In a Metafilter discussion of that site, the name Kevin Frank is floated as the mastermind of all this, and following up on that lead brought me to his Flickr account, which has a gallery of all the bumpers with commentary. In case any are missing there, it looks like the content from the first site is also up here. The internet.

An homage to Ware’s work previously surfaced in the background to a piece of Conan’s bumper art in November of 2005. If you don’t see it, Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is the ‘Non-Conan’ drawing. Thanks to Ted Miller for originally pointing it out!

     Shortly thereafter, Mr. Barli sent me an email thanking me for the link. Since I think he’s doing something important, and I was working on a similar bit of coding for another project, I offered to throw together and host a quick, three template, database-driven site so he could showcase the results of his work, spread the word, and raise money to continue. Here ’tis: Digitalfunnies.com.

     ’Hello World’ turned out to be a tour de force in the relatively uncrowded field of interactive sequential narrative. In concept, it’s a bit like a combination of the obsessive block diagramming of software development and the traditional comic book narrative. Put simply, it’s an ambitious, illustrated “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, complete with a self-contained inventory system. The pages of the book itself are cut into two halves – the upper half contains the narrative, the lower half displays your current inventory.

     It’s a bit difficult to explain the function of the book without actually experiencing it or seeing it in action, so I’ve provided a short video clip below. It’s a must-see, if only to truly appreciate the complexity of the book Mr. Shiga has put together.

      Hello World thoroughly blew my mind – when you think about the planning that went into executing such an idea, it’s just insane. I’m not sure how understandable the video above is, so I’ve pasted the official description, from the Shigabooks site, below:

     ”Hello World has two tiers that work independently of each other, not unlike the mix-n-match monster books of your childhood. Memory is stored in the bottom tier while the story takes place in the upper tier. The panels of the story are connected by a network of tubes. These tubes constantly dip in and out of the memory tier to determine what happens next in the story.”

     Those familiar with my interests are by now realizing that this discovery — comic books that are NERDIER than NORMAL comic books?! — ranks pretty high on my list of best shit ever. Obviously, I had to find some of his other work. What follows are summaries of two of the other noteworthy books I eventually tracked down, as well as a ‘highlight reel’ of the new work that Jason recently added to his redesigned Shigabooks website. First though, some perspective on the guy behind these comics. Here’s the bio from his website:

     ”You could say that cartooning was in my blood. My father was an animator and worked on such shows as Obake no Q-taro and the legendary Bas Rankin Rudoph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas Special.”

     ”My parents have always been supportive of my interests. In highschool, I drew comic strips for the school newspaper and started to take up animation as well. In 1998, I graduated from Cal with a degree in… Pure Mathematics. Why? Well, ever since I was ten years old, I had always thought that math was the best subject because even if you’re locked in a room for 25 years with no books you can still study it.”

     ”Currently, I work at the Oakland Public Library as a Library Aide and do freelance cartooning for magazines.”

Meanwhile

     ’Meanwhile’ is another interactive comic book that is less work-intensive on the part of the reader, and generally a much more readable iteration of the same ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ concept — a reversal in balance of plot and principle when compared with ‘Hello World.’

     In ‘Meanwhile,’ the paths the reader can follow are linked by pipes that extend between pages. Transitions from page to page are coordinated via tabs that extend beyond the edge of the page. If the reader follows a path to a tab, the page is turned and the reader continues on the newly-revealed page, starting from the tab. Confusing? The best way to get a feel for it is to experience it yourself, which is now possible online, as Jason has put together a Javascript version of the book here.

     Like ‘Hello World,’ my first reaction to ‘Meanwhile’ was to marvel at the fact that someone was able to wrestle it all into a cohesive structure. The slightly-less-maniacally-detailed approach allows the plot to develop much more freely than in ‘Hello World.’ There’s a Mad scientist, a Time Machine, Secret Passwords, and Ice cream. All the good stuff. Shiga has actually isolated each panel, twist and turn contained in ‘Meanwhile’ and constructed a single ‘posterized’ version of the book, which he has exhibited at comic shows in the past. The finished product measures 5 feet by 5 feet, and can be seen here.

Fleep

     ’Fleep’ isn’t an interactive comic, but it managed to capture my interest nonetheless. While it doesn’t turn sequential narrative on its ear in the same way many of Shiga’s other works attempt to, it does have elements of logic and puzzle-solving built into the relatively straight-forward narrative, which will appeal to many of the same readers that would be enthused by his other efforts. The story begins with the main character waking up locked in a windowless phone booth with no memory of the events landing him in said situation. The rest of the plot consists of this character trying to piece together the specifics of his predicament, based on clues in the phone booth, information obtained using the telephone, deduction, and math. Awesome.

     Fleep has been available online in its entirety for quite awhile, and made the rounds of notorious nerd-hives such as metafilter sometime last year (mefi discussion here).

     For those keeping score, the print version has the best production values of any of the books I’ve yet seen. Nice thick paper and better print quality than the interactive comics (Which I imagine are far more expensive to produce).

Further Online Works

     I started piecing this entry together shortly after I originally ordered these books in early 2004. Research at the time seemed to indicate that Mr. Shiga had disappeared from the face of the earth shortly after winning the Eisner award. I emailed him in early 2005, asking about his next project and the availability of additional copies of “Hello World.” Here’s what he had to say:

     ”I’m currently working on a new choose your own adventure type comic. The gimmick this time is that you get to choose from 7-20 branches at every node (by the way, you only get to make 3 choices before a crazed gunman shoots you in the stomach). This project should be finished within a couple months. I won’t make it in time for this APE but it should be available by the next one.”

     ”As for obtaining a copy of “Hello World”, you’re out of luck as usscatastrophe sold out recently. I’m not selling any copies on my site because I get killed on the shipping. I will be selling copies at APE so you should come down if you’re still in the area.

     About a month ago, Mr. Shiga emerged from e-exile and completely revamped his website, adding all sorts of new content and revealing that he’s been doing interactive comics for Nickelodeon Magazine in the interim (“I started working for Nickelodeon Magazine in 2003. It is an awesome responsibility knowing that my comics could potentially corrupt over a million children across the country. I do mostly double page interactive spreads which the kids seem to love.”). Some other highlights from the newly updated site, in relative order of recommendation, include:

• ‘Dead Lock‘ – An absolutely great autobiographical story, illustrated by a friend. A glimpse into how the mind that creates these works functions in the real world. The story comes from an entry on his circa-2003 livejournal. Awesome.
• ‘Bookhunter‘ a new longform strip about crime and libraries. Super good.
• Description of ‘Theater Eroika’, a scrapped project involving an interactive narrative with panels printed on 5 rotating paper ‘wheels.’
• ‘Every Dog Has His Day‘ – a comic strip with panels that are randomly ordered based on punchcard-like cuts.
• A few samples of his work for Nickelodeon are here.
• ‘Double Happiness,’ a book that won a Xeric award in 1999 is now also available online in its entirety.

     You can order copies of several works directly from Mr. Shiga via this order form.

     I love seeing the early work of cartoonists, as it adds the extra dimension of the craftsman’s learning curve to the narrative. A great example of what I’m poorly explaining can be found in the earliest volumes of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts, and less-familiarly in “‘Lil Folks” and “It’s Only a Game” – collections of Charles Schulz’ pre-Peanuts and parrallel-to-Peanuts work, respectively.

     Unfortunately, my communications with the staff at the Daily Texan never really went anywhere. One of the weird perks of writing about something on the internet, however, is that every so often, someone will read it and send you glimpses of exactly what you wanted to see in the first place. Such is the case with an anonymous gentleman who sent me the following scan of the original art for one of Mr. Ware’s Daily Texan strips.

     ”Here’s a scan of a strip Chris Ware did for the Daily Texan back in 1988. Sorry about the quality of the scan, but it was done through glass and in two parts. I’m not going to unmount it in order to scan it.”

     ”I’m pretty sure that “Bande” was the name of many of those Daily Texan strips, all of which featured the semi-circle head guy. Chris didn’t always put the word Bande as the title though. I have others with no title, and one that has the title “Komix”, but they all feature that same character.”

     Not as good as I wanted them to be.

     A huge thanks goes to David Pouchard for recording the program and sending me the tape (You can view David’s bibliography of Ware’s work in French publications here). I got the PAL videotape transferred to DVD (Expensive!), and am seeding a torrent of a small (but watchable) quicktime file containing the entire episode. Click here if you don’t know what a torrent is and follow the directions. Otherwise, you can grab the torrent file here. The show is mostly in English with french subtitles, so don’t worry too much about the language barrier!

     Also – why the hell don’t we have Art TV here in the US? I’d happily watch it in french if it were available to me.

UPDATE!

     You can download the whole file the old-fashioned way here (it’s being used in a college course, so take advantage of the educational institution-sized bandwidth!), or view it in three parts here, here, and here.

     More on ‘Bookworm’ here.

     Also of note:

     Cartoonist Chris Ware and ‘This American Life‘ Host Ira Glass have collaborated on a DVD which is only available to those who donate to public radio. The DVD contains the narrated slideshow that Glass and Ware were presenting at various speaking engagements during the past year. I’ve pasted some background on the story below, taken from the official website for the DVD.

     ”Ira Glass and cartoonist Chris Ware decided to co-report a story together. Ira does the sound. Chris does hundreds of drawings. The result is a 22-minute story, with sound and images, now on DVD for the first time.”

     ”This story has never been on the radio. It was presented in pieces – as it was completed – on This American Life’s May 2003 “Lost in America” tour, and at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. It’s the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960′s and 70′s when they were being torn down.”

     ”At one point, hearing that a favorite building at Clark and Adams is being demolished, a thirteen-year-old Tim demands to meet with the architect who’s designing the glass-and-steel building that’ll take its place: Mies van der Rohe, one of the most famous architects in the world. Tim finds van der Rohe’s office. The legendary architect meets with the teenager.”

     ”Much more happens. It’s a very sad story, drawn with beautiful pictures.”

     The DVD is only available in exchange for making a hefty pledge to your local public radio station. If you’re interested, but your local ‘This American Life’ station doesn’t appear to be offering the DVD, they can probably still get it for you.

     A bit more on the DVD and packaging:

     ”Audiences who saw the work presented onstage saw huge projections of Chris Ware’s drawings. The cartoon buildings were tall as buildings.”

     ”To accompany the DVD, Chris has designed a 96-page book, full of never-before-published photographs of Louis Sullivan buildings, in their glory and in various states of demolition. Also, there are DVD extras: audio outtakes, a look at Chris’s pencil sketches, a high-resolution version of the movie that plays on PCs and Macs. “

     ”As he worked on this, Chris said he wanted it to be the most beautiful thank you gift public radio has ever offered listeners. The whole package is this gorgeous little book, filled with photos, with the DVD tucked inside. It’s being released first and exclusively through public radio pledge drives, and not available anywhere else.”

     There’s a quicktime preview of the DVD available for viewing here.

     Challenge: Is the approximated cover design of the book being read by the two figures in this illustration based on any real book? Close-up below.

     This thread on the Fantagraphics message board has previews of Canadian cartoonist Seth‘s designs for volumes three and four of ‘The Complete Peanuts.’ Each volume of the hardcover series covers two years worth of strips and will feature a different Peanuts character on the cover. Volumes one and two, released this year, feature Charlie Brown and Lucy respectively. As you can see below, Pigpen and Snoopy have been chosen for next year’s volumes.

     Fantagraphics representative Kim Thompson adds:

     ”The final cover will have a different colored logo (like the first two, it will be a variant of the main background color but in a metallic ink, but those don’t show up real well on digital images so we’re sticking with the neutral/tan ones for now), a Snoopy image in the upper left hand corner instead of the repeated Charlie Brown (the upper left hand image repeats the main character), and of course the “INTRODUCTION BY —” copy. But it’s good enough as a spaceholder for Amazon.com.”

     There is a giant feature on Seth in the latest issue of Comic Art Magazine (AKA the best magazine in the world, ever), which includes some lengthy discussion of the Peanuts designs. I quote liberally from the Comic Art article below, in the hopes that your mind will be blown and you will immediately order a copy of your own.

     ”These are the covers from the Schulz reprint proposal that I presented to Jeannie Schulz. Basically, Gary [Groth] went through all the dealings and then after they’d got things fairly concrete, where it looked like it was going to happen, they brought me down so I could talk to Jeannie and show her what I wanted to do with the book. I went there with a small talk planned, basically to tell her that I felt Schulz’s work was so wonderfully sophisticated and that it had been, I felt, undersold in the last 30 years-pushed as kids’ books, really Pop-y, and that I wanted to try to put together a package of some sort that had some quality of understatement to it. So, here is the production art that I brought down to sell the idea. These fake covers I put together are pretty rough, really. I outlined how the books would fit together and what the design system was…originally. I was planning on one book per year and I wanted to do 50 covers with Charlie Brown’s face on each one. His face would have been taken from the specific year and then you could chart his changes over 50 years. Basically, everybody but me felt that was too much, that we should vary the characters, which is what will happen. This original idea was to demonstrate how much variety there really was just in the Charlie Brown face itself. Conceptually I like it, but I didn’t really expect them to go for that. So, we’ll have 25 books with all the characters appearing once on the covers-one face per book-although Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy (maybe Linus too) will reappear-Charlie Brown will defmitely be on the first and the last books. Not all the characters can get the cover-but everyone will make the spine. I’ll start the early volumes with the minor characters, like Shermy. Each cover-featured character will dominate that specific volume’s design.”

     ”In many ways, the design has stayed almost exactly the same as I originally conceived it. The endpapers for each are completely assembled from Schulz’s background imagery, which I’ve reworked. I’m keeping the same endpapers for each decade. so it’ll change once we hit the ’60s, and what’s interesting is that by the time we hit the ’90s. there are almost no backgrounds: it’ll become very minimalist. with just a bit of grass, or some detail to build around. When you open the book, I want the reader to move into Schulz’s work in a quiet way, so they start with the environment-then you cross a double-page splash of just grass that will lead you into the book. The grass will be updated every 10 years as well, which no one will even notice but me. That will lead into a series of spreads that go throughout the book before you enter into the strips. Each book will feature one of the iconic places – 25 iconic backgrounds I can work with (Snoopy’s doghouse for example). It’s a pretty straightforward design system, in that with each volume I don’t have a huge amount of elements to change, just certain spreads. I have to replace elements here and there with new imagery from that volume’s years, of course. Things slowly evolve over the whole series. but in a very subtle way, which from book to book really isn’t noticeable, but by the time you get to the last book the changes in the strip and the characters will be very clear.”

     ”In the design, what I’m going for-I hope to create a package around the work that shows it in a slightly different context than it’s been presented in for years. I don’t want the reader to think much about it at all, but when they come to it, I hope they’re led in and out of Schulz’s work in a way that puts them in the right mood to read it again as the subtle work that it is, not as the product that has been pushed for so many years by merchandising and TV specials. But, we’ll see. Jeannie Schulz was very receptive and easy-going about things. I was somewhat prepared that if there was any sort of conflict and I felt myself being pulled down the road having to do the same old boring Peanuts books that everyone’s done, I would probably back out of the project. I was happy that she was so open, and what’s great about Jeannie Schulz is that you could really see when talking with her that she thought of Charles Schulz as a genius. You know, when someone’s been married for 30 years (or however long it was), it would be very easy to imagine the widow feeling the exact opposite: sick to death of that irritating husband who spent all his time in the studio complaining about being a sad multi-millionaire. But she didn’t have that quality at all.”

     Now that we’ve got some insight into the theory behind the design, why not take a look at the plan from a marketing standpoint? One of the posters on the Fantagraphics webforum posted the following question:

     ”Any indication of how the sales of Complete Peanuts 2 compare to the first? I would imagine this volume will be a better indicator of what the long term sales will be, minus the media frenzy and testing how many people will want to buy a $30 book every six months. I notice that it’s at 178 on Amazon, with the boxed set in the top 500 as well.”

Fantagraphics font of knowledge Kim Thompson responds:

     ”It’s hard to do a one-to-one comparison because of the box set. If you count initial sales of Book 2 as an individual title vs. initial sales of Book 1, Book 1 wins. If you count initial sales of Book 2 in all configurations (within or without the box set) Book 2 comes out ahead.”

     ”I expect Book 3, which won’t have holiday sales or a box set (and the least popular main Peanut, Pigpen), will dip a bit. Book 4, on the other hand, will have a triple whammy: holiday sales, a box set (most likely), and Snoopy, by far the most popular character, on the cover — as well as being probably the first book where the characters really look entirely like themselves.”

     ”Long term, who knows? Volumes 6 through 10 might slow down a bit, but on the other hand the ’60s are the peak period.”

     You may or may not remember that due to the sad state of our nation’s newspaper archives, there were still several ‘missing’ strips from the years covered by the second volume. Fantagraphics representative Kim Thompson keeps us updated on this matter in this thread:

     ”[At press time] The only thing missing was a top strip (title panel and first, “breakaway” panel) for one Sunday, and Seth did a minimalist faux one to keep the format consistent. (This is all acknowledged and detailed in the back of the book.) Should the full Sunday ever materialize, subsequent reprintings will include the “real” top strip.”

     ”Oddly, 1955-1956 (Vol. 3) has THREE Sunday strips with missing top strips. Well, we have about four months to try to find them.”

     ”Very few papers printed the strips at the time, even fewer have decent copies available, and of those that do all the ones we’ve found ran just the bottom 2/3rds. I’ll post the dates here just in case, but trust me, even obsessive PEANUTS collectors have come up snake eyes on ‘em so far.”

     Fans of Seth’s work should also check out the August 23rd issue of the New Yorker – he did the cover.

     I just found out via this messageboard posting that it was Baker’s collection that enabled Fantagraphics Books to assemble the strips necessary for producing their Complete Peanuts series. The first volume was released this spring, with the second (of 25 total) coming in the fall.

     Despite Baker’s best preservation efforts, however, there are several strips that may well be lost to the sands of time:

     ”With PEANUTS 1953-1954 going to press next month, we’re setting our sights on PEANUTS 1955-1956. So far we’ve got all the strips gathered except for three very pesky missing Sundays, which we have only in truncated form (from the Nicholson Baker/Duke collection). If anyone by chance has any of these, let us know.

…

     These are REALLY obscure. I know PEANUTS completists/experts who apparently haven’t even been able to track down a microfiche version.

     The good thing is that the truncated ones we have were black and white, so they’re cleaner than color ones would be.”

     Those disappointed by Baker’s last novel ‘A Box of Matches’ (Me) can look forward to ‘Checkpoint‘ which is published on August 10th. The premise: Two men discuss an attempted assassination of George W. Bush. Oh man, call O’Reilly! This is gonna be a SHITSTORM of overreaction. His publisher (Knopf) has already released the following:

     ”Checkpoint is a work of fiction by acclaimed author Nicholson Baker, a novella that explores the peculiar angst many Americans are feeling right now about their country and their president. The book is set up as a conversation between two old high school buddies. One of them, in despair about the direction the country is going, is convinced he must kill the president; the other tries to talk him out of it.

     Baker wrote Checkpoint in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war. “How do you react to something that you think is so hideously wrong?” asks Baker. “How do you keep it from driving you nuts? What do you do with your life while this wrong is being carried out? What are the thoughts – the secret thoughts, the unpublishable thoughts, so to speak – that go through your head?”

     Some people have rational responses. Others do not. Baker’s book does not suggest violence is ever an appropriate response. But in order to understand the reasons why a violent act is always a mistake, one must first look at the contemplation of such an act.

The dialogue in Checkpoint is angry, funny, pointed and absurd. All of it has relevance to our world. And it is through the conversation in this novel that Baker hopes to raise important questions about how we react to violence – both individually and as a nation.”

     The rest of the strip is fairly unremarkable. I just thought that was interesting.

     My favorite part of the magazine is a regular feature called ‘In the Studio,’ in which comics artists select several pages worth of artifacts from within their personal studios for reproduction. The selections usually include the artist’s originals, favorite bits of random printed matter, and selections from their own collections of original art, each captioned with a description of the item and its importance by the artists. Past installments have covered Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby the Mouse), Charles Burns (Skin Deep, Black Hole, The Believer), and in the current issue, Art Spiegelman (Maus, The New Yorker). Clicking each name in the previous sentance will open a two page preview of the article.

     In addition to these pieces on contemporary comics artists, each issue has featured several articles on comic art of days gone by – including great essays on Charles Schulz’ pre-peanuts work, Disney artist Carl Barks’ unique panel layout (Cool Dude alert!), and the myth that ‘The Yellow Kid’ was the first newspaper comic strip.

     The current issue features an Art Spiegelman cover that was rejected by the New Yorker. From the Spiegelman ‘In the Studio’ article:

     ”It was originally presented as a cover for the New Yorker’s “Money Issue” last year, but at that point, [Editor] David Remnick’s repsonse was “This is about oil. It’s a money issue.” (Laughter)….”

     There’s a bit on the circumstances of Spiegelman leaving the New Yorker here, for you comic book gossip hounds.

     The current issue also features an extensive article on ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ creator Crockett Johnson’s comic work. The quarterly magazine is 80 pages in full color, with minimal advertising (Even the ads are good, mostly teasers from auction houses selling original artwork). It’s $9 ppd, and the issues have all been selling out, so act fast. You can see the tables of contents of the first 4 issues here.