RESPEKT

A fascinating video report on Khikhus and company's wonderful RESPEKT project -- precisely the sort of komiks that will change minds about such things as racial/ethnic intolerance in Russia, but also, one hopes, about komiks themselves!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLXkGh8IA8&feature=related

Afisha article

Afisha just came out with a great round-up of Russian comics publishers - eight in all!:
http://www.afisha.ru/article/9841/ .

As for me, I'm hard at work writing on Elena Voronovich and Andrei "Drew" Tkalenko's graphic novel Sterva (based on concepts originated by the Strugatsky Bros.) for a collection of essays on adaptations of Russian classics. Enjoying the start of my sabbatical!

Journal of Folklore Research review of my book!

http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1091

Slavic Review review

Slavic Review, the membership journal of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and a leading publication in my field, has just published Karen Ryan's (University of Virginia) review of my book in their new issue (Vol. 70 No. 1, Spring 2011).

All in all Ryan gives me a thumbs up, with some minor complaints which I've heard from other reviewers. Some highlights:

Following the cultural turn recently taken in Slavic studies, José Alaniz makes a case that
Russian comics (komiks) should be regarded as a serious art form with a respectable provenance.
His book is the first major English-language study of komiks; it will be of interest,
not only to students and scholars of Russian culture, but also to comics aficionados in the
transnational sphere.

Alaniz’s accounts of the exhibitions, installations, and performances of Zhora
Litichevskii and Gosha Ostretsov, members of the ArtKomiks movement, are fresh and
perceptive; he writes with the enthusiasm of an active participant, which gives his scholarly
prose an unusually vivid quality.


A fascinating case study—both aesthetically and socioculturally—is
that of Nikolai Maslov, who published his autobiography in the form of comics in France.
The scandal that swirled around Siberia exposes the petty jealousies and factionalism that
have riven the comics industry in Russia.


This volume includes many illustrations of komiks, most black-and-white but some
reproduced in color in an attractive eight-page insert. Alas, almost all of the illustrations
are small, making it difficult to read the interpolated text and to see visual details. Quite
likely, producing larger reproductions of examples was prohibitively expensive; this critical
study thus suffers from the same sort of financial limitations that have hindered the
development of the komiks industry in Russia.

Although the author’s tone is usually neutral, he is clearly a devotee of and an advocate for komiks.
Those who do not share his enthusiasm
suffer from “comicsophobia” and persist in regarding comics as “disposable, contemptible,
possibly dangerous, ‘foreign’ trash” (112). I suspect that many Russians are less passionate
about comics than he implies; Alaniz interprets indifference as hostility, and his slightly
didactic tone can be off-putting. He prescribes a change of attitude; the stated goal of
his study is “to demonstrate that Russians might do better simply to accept, appreciate,
and enjoy komiks as a wayward part of their artistic patrimony, and welcome them home”
(141). Unfortunately, with a couple of notable exceptions (such as Maslov’s work), the
examples explicated in this book do not persuade us that the effort would be repaid at
this moment in time.

My thanks to Dr. Ryan and SR for the review!

Review and Interview in Portuguese

Pedro Moura, Portuguese stalwart of the Comics Scholars List, has just posted a review of my book at his blog, LerBD, along with his take on The Compendium of Romanian Comic Art and Swedish Comics History, at : http://lerbd.blogspot.com/2011/02/va-para-fora-ca-dentro-tres-livros.html . He also includes an e-mail interview with me!

2010: A Landmark Year for Russian Comics

Looking back on 2010, I think the year just past will go down as a landmark for Russian comics, comparable to 1956 (the debut of Ivan Semenov’s seminal journal Merry Pictures), 1988 (the founding of KOM, the first Russian comics studio), 1999 (the establishment of Andrei Ayoshin’s indispensable website Komiksolet, which brought the scene out of its 1990s funk) and 2002 (the first KomMissia festival).

2010 saw some major (we might say “earth-shaking”) komiks-related events, which in aggregate make it quite significant. Among these I would include the following.

At the 2010 KomMissia, Vladimir Morozov, director of Zangavar Press, presented the first volume of his large-format, lavishly-produced collection of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (a translation of Sunday Press’ 2006 So Many Splendid Sundays book), though its price keeps it out of reach for most Russian consumers. When I asked Morozov about this at the festival, he responded only that he considered the Russian market ready for his products, adding that he’s also at work on a translated Krazy Kat collection. This is good news, despite the price tag, because the Russian scene (artists, publishers, scholars, fans) have up 'til now had a dearth of translations of world classics, especially the older ones -- to say nothing of publishers willing to put out examples of their own classics. In other words, they have been working without a strong sense of comics' global history. Projects like Zangavar's are starting to change that.

As for contemporary classics, Dmitry Yakovlev’s Boomkniga Press in St. Petersburg published the collected Russian edition of Elena Voronovich and Andrei “Drew” Tkalenko’s The Bitch (Стерва), the most important graphic novel of the last ten years. This addresses a long-standing problem in the Russian comics non-market, whereby worthy longer-form works like this appear only in scattered fragments in festival catalogs or online, making it more difficult to appreciate them as coherent wholes. In The Bitch’s case, it had already appeared in Polish translation in 2009! We still await a Russian edition of Nikolai Maslov’s work, which has already appeared in English, Italian, French and Spanish translation – though at least Maslov got some deserved star treatment in 2009 from Sasha Kunin’s online journal Khroniki Chedrika (http://chedrik.ru/up2/content/view/89/18/).

In December, the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val unveiled “Merry Pictures: The First Russian Comics,” curated by Nina Divova; an exhibit devoted to this topic (here, on the occasion of the 55^th anniversary of Semenov’s journal) on such a scale and in such a major Moscow museum, makes me liken the import of this show to that of “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” at the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décorifs in 1967 (an event once mocked by the Soviet press as evidence of Western cultural decadence).

Another first: the respected press Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie released an anthology of critical articles, Russky komiks, edited by Yu. Alexandrov and A. Barzakh. A 1998 exhibit, “Comics in Russia” at St. Petersburg’s Borei Gallery, served as the impetus for the collection, so it took a while to get out. But this publication represents a consequential step towards academic acceptance of comics studies in Russia. Stay tuned for my review.

I humbly put forward my own book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (the first book-length study of the subject in any language, which came out in February) as another milestone.

Finally, possibly the most influential and widely-publicized event (and in any case the most mind-blowing), no less a personage than President Dmitry Medvedev noted in a mid-December speech at a conference on technology and modernization of the economy: “All too often, those seeking information encounter some rather dull websites … The idea of comics in this context appeals to me.”

Of course, the president went on to say, “I’m not sure, though, that I will turn my own site into a comics site. This would probably not be very proper.” The Russian press ridiculed the comments anyway, but you never know: in the current political climate, these sorts of pronouncements tend to make things happen. Could 2011 bring forth the long-awaited, full-fledged acceptance of komiks in the mainstream, albeit by government fiat?

Posmotrim!

Have a Veles New Year

To ring out 2010, here you have some covers from the mid-1990s Ekaterinburg anthology series "Veles," which in the book I note as the first publication of the popular contemporary artist Konstantin Komardin – and which I mistakenly described as "cancelled after one issue." As you can see here, it went through at least seven.

Merry Pictures

A nice link from Drew Tkalenko's Live Journal page on the recently-opened "Merry Pictures: The First Russian Comics" exhibit at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val. Devoted largely to the children's journal "Merry Pictures" (co-founded in 1956 by the great Ivan Semenov, it holds a very important place in the history of Russian comics), the exhibit also features works by the conceptualists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov .

http://drew-lenk.livejournal.com/173718.html

Gracias

The AP story on my comics donation (written by Martha Irvine) came out over the weekend -- read it here: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20101003/UPDATE/101003016 -- and has generated some very nice comments and good wishes from all over the country. My heartfelt thanks to all my fellow collectors and "closet sentimentalists."

While I'm normally loathe to put myself out there so nakedly (for lack of a better word, and since that's how it feels), I did it for one big reason: to get others to join me in this donation thing. Please consider donating, to whatever institution will give your beloved comics/objects a good home. There's no better thing than to ensure their "living on," no?

Plus, what a rush of fanboy pride to have Sal Buscema himself say thank you! No, thank YOU, sir!

THE BIG GIFT or, Confessions of a middle-aged Marvel Zombie

As visitors to this site have noticed, I have not yet managed, after publication of my book, to provide the updates, corrections and supplemental material to Komiks: Comic Art in Russia as planned. My apologies.

I did, however, want to take the opportunity afforded by a lull in my work schedule to blog about my recent comics donation to the University of Washington, Seattle Library’s Special Collections.

As some of you may have heard, this is a move I had contemplated for a number of years, but the proper constellation of factors finally converged only about a year ago: getting tenure at UW; wanting to streamline my possessions; not wanting to scatter my comics (which I’ve been collecting since about 1974) to the four winds, either by selling or trading them off piecemeal; and the willingness of Special Collections’ Sandra Kroupa to accept such a large donation of pop culture ephemera. The enthusiasm and support of the library’s Anne Davis (another stalwart for comics on campus and auditor of my 2009 course “Comics Cultures: Global Perspectives on Graphic Fiction”), as well as a chat with Carolyn Aamot from the library’s Gifts section in 2009, all played a role in my decision, as did accounts like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ZUcslkPMA . The comforting thought that I could drop by and visit “my” comics anytime, and that the collection would be cared for in perpetuity by experts long after I’m gone – and serve as an important resource for comics/popular culture studies in the Northwest, to boot – it all made the idea of parting go down easier.

The final impetus turned out to be a somewhat unanticipated move this summer. It forced me to consider whether I wanted to put my comics in a rented storage unit somewhere, since my new apartment would have no room for them. “Do I really want to move them all again?” I thought. Besides the hassle, what about the possible damage/loss? For that matter, how safe were they in basements and rental units from the elements, theft, harm?

For the last several years my comics had been sitting in long cardboard boxes, themselves protected inside long plastic bins. After my one teaching job this summer, I finally, then, buckled down for the last hurdle: I didn’t want to donate the collection without a proper inventory of what I had. I didn’t know, after all these years, the contents of my own comics boxes. Also, I knew I could use some of the books for a current writing project, once I found them. (Embarrassingly, for a while now I’ve simply bought copies of whatever comics I needed for conference presentations, articles or class, even though I knew I had them in my collection – somewhere.)

As you can see, I proceeded methodically, albeit in very lo-fi, analog fashion. A laptop would slow me down, so I used good ol’ pen and paper. Knowing I would never have the time to alphabetize the collection as a whole (with all A’s in one box, B – D in another box, etc.), I instead roughly alphabetized each box individually – the Special Collections staff could organize it all later as they saw fit.

I laid out each box’s contents on a long dinner table (my then-roommate Susan’s – thanks, Susan!), then on the floor, then on chairs, coffee tables, sofas, wherever I found space. It depended on the box: some, like the very first one, contained only about 20 different titles (including over 100 issues of Hulk), so it didn’t take long and didn’t require many different stacks to organize. I could get through a box like that, with time for logging, classifying, alphabetizing and, of course, reminiscing, in about three hours. Most boxes, though, took a lot longer: sometimes they might contain a single issue each of dozens and dozens of titles or even unique mini-comics/zines, each getting its own stack. Comics stacks sprouted all over my dining area/living room. Working pretty much non-stop, I got through the boxes at the rate of about two a day. (Some comics I paused over longer than others for nostalgia’s sake; in some cases, I reread whole issues or even story arcs!)

In the interest of archaefanboyology, here are some things I found:

* Duplicates: in some cases up to three of the same issue (these I set aside as gifts or separate donations).

* Indicia issues: the publishers, especially Marvel, could be quite craven about changing series titles for the sake of making a dime, then returning to the old series numbering later, without fanfare. This led to ridiculous things like two issues of the Hulk of the same volume and the same numbering, but three decades apart. (I dutifully noted this in my catalog notes.) And don’t get me started on West Coast Avengers/Avengers West Coast …

* “Heroes Reborn”: I didn’t need reminding, but the only thing I hated more than the concept was the pathetic execution.

* Some surprising things with ads: I had no recollection that the venerable Charles Atlas body-building ad – the real thing, not a parody – was still running in some books as late as 1998, when scores of other such ads had long since vanished from comics pages.

* The 90s: Something else I remembered well, though wish I didn’t: the decade’s speculator-driven mania for enhanced covers, holograms, revampings and in, general, crappy stories.

* Delightful Oddities: like the Amalgam series (Challengers of the Fantastic!, Timber Wolf by Night, heh, heh), Flashback, Stan Lee Meets …, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating …, any book that guest-starred the Marvel Bullpen and one of my all-time favs, the Marvel No-Prize Book. Also, I found this 1984 gem pretty remarkable: http://www.politedissent.com/archives/982 . Bold story; I’d totally forgotten about that. Plus, I loved those special, rare occasions when I found a comic book with two covers, the result of a printing error. For the record, the first one of these I ever stumbled on was a copy of Iron Man #116 (1978).

Other parts of this project were real revelations. I knew I had bought plenty of The Trouble With Girls in the 80s/90s, but I did not recall getting this much Alpha Flight, so much Namor (the Byrne-initiated series), so many Marvel Premieres. I had a complete set of Too Much Coffee Man, ferchrissake! It was also sweet sorrow to rediscover sentimental favorites like Woodgod, Jack of Hearts, Hellcat, the White Tiger, Modok, the Wrecking Crew, Henry Gyrich, Nuklo, Satana, Father Darklyte …

And, of course, there were all those individual issues and stories I loved as a kid (or adult) and still treasure. (Man, what Alan Moore could do with the living water fountains of Rann …) To cite just one example, I have a particular soft spot for Steve Gerber Defenders, especially the Headmen saga of the mid-1970s – some of the most bizarre, gonzo, wonderful work ever done in the genre. Oh, and just one more: Steve Englehart’s run on West Coast Avengers in the 80s, Englehart’s run on Fantastic Four in the same decade … It was poignant and pleasurable to have those books pass through my hands one last time, as mine.

I discovered something else about myself: I’m not ready to part with my nearest and dearest. I retained about 10 comics purely out of emotional attachment, mostly stuff from deep in my childhood, which in ways that still surprise me, remain part of my DNA and probably always will. Uh, can I get buried with some of these? (Others I kept for ongoing or near-future writing projects).

So, in the end, I put together 12 comics boxes and one small box of magazine-format series (like Bizarre Adventures, Savage Sword of Conan and my beloved 70s Doc Savage) for the library’s Mike to pick up in his truck on August 4. This was not quite the entirety of my collection in Seattle (I have a couple more boxes in my university office, and I made it my policy to not donate anything less than two years old). Besides these, I also have about another five boxes in Texas, which I plan to bring over to the library little by little. And then there’s my Russian comics material still overflowing my office shelves, which I too intend to give to the library eventually.

But this, by far the most elaborate and thorough cataloging of my single-issue collection in over 16 years, and the subsequent gifting of my comics, was quite a memory-laden, wistful and emotional journey. A labor of love.

Book cover

Here's what the cover looks like, by the way. The book came out February 1, 2010. Stay tuned for news on readings/reviews, and let me know what you think!

Review of book by Santiago Garcia

Here's a friendly review of the book by Santiago Garcia, a Spanish comics writer, translator and blogger whom I met at the 2008 KomMissia in Moscow. It's, uh, in Spanish!

http://santiagogarciablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/komiks-el-comic-ruso.html

first entry

You have arrived at the future home of Mad Radioactive Mutant, the site devoted to all things Russian comics!

I plan to use this space for, among other things, updates, corrections and supplemental illustrations for my book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, out in February 2010 from University Press of Mississippi !