San Diego Con Report

This happy conventioneer is filling in the gaps of his Huckleberry Hound collection(note checklist on right)


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SAN DIEGO CON REPORT


By the time I arrived for my first day ever at the 38th annual San Diego Comic Con, admission for all four days was completely sold out. This resulted in a separate open-air mini-convention just outside the convention hall: The San Diego Ticket Scalpers Con.

Imagine, if you will, the circumstance where people are willing to pay scalper’s prices to get into this event. Bear in mind, this is not an event like, say a basketball final or a Rolling Stones Farewell-For-Godsakes-Farewell-Already concert. No…this is an event in which the primary goal is to siphon off as much from your Visa card without the wife finding out. What, you though the “Con” in San Diego Comic Con stood for “Convention”? Ha!

How can I begin to give you a picture of the enormity of this event? Imagine the largest airport you can think of. Empty it (except for Security). Refill it with hundreds of tables piled with plastic things and lots of people touching them. At first, I was overwhelmed by table after table after table laden with action figures, DVDs, video games, and, what else? Let’s see…oh yeah, comics. This is a Comic-Con, right?

After a while, I became less traumatized by the shear volume of stuff being hawked. 99.9% of what I saw I was not interested in. To be more precise, 99.9% of the stuff I saw I simply could not understand since I lead a sheltered life in a thatch hut in the woods. Electricity? What's that? Once I began to treat all of this merchandise as an endless continuous fogbank, I found that I could begin to find my way to the places I really needed to go: the Starbucks kiosk and the bathroom.

Lots of folks were dressed for the occasion: superhero costumes, devil horns, capes, this season’s latest Jediwear, fake-fur codpieces, and bikinis. There were a lot of people who looked like zombies, and then there were a lot of people dressed up as zombies. You could tell the latter ‘cause they trailed toilet paper and smelled faintly of ketchup.

I had on a tie and felt grossly overdressed. However, here’s a tip from the ol’ seasoned pro who has attended approximately one San Diego Con: Wear a necktie. A nice unlimited edition silkish tie from J.C. Penny’s secured the VIP treatment wherever I went. This meant receiving a hint of a smile to go along with a firm, “No sir, this is not an exit. Turn your sorry ass around.”

For many con-goers, attending the San Diego Con means achieving one of the biggest thrills of a lifetime: standing in line. Wherever I went I saw lines. Lines for sneak previews of coming films and T. V. shows, lines of outtakes from old movies and T.V. shows. and lines for the bathroom.

Since I have already mentioned them a couple of times, a word about the bathrooms at the San Diego Comic Con. I know that dozens of volunteers were hired during the course of the weekend to help direct traffic. I spoke to several and hung out for a while in the Volunteers Briefing Room out of curiosity and free snacks. They had volunteers manning the doors, directing traffic, refereeing light-saber duels, but unfortunately not a single volunteer on bathroom duty.

You would have to pay someone cold, hard cash to grapple with those Convention Hall bathrooms. Remember, this is San Diego where every third restaurant is Tex-Mex and the official food of the city is the chili-dog. It has been proven statistically that the more comic books you read, the more chili-dogs you are liable to consume. The cost of a pretzel at the Convention Center is higher than a mint copy of “Playful Little Audrey #67”; so many conventioneers get fueled up on their way to festivities each morning. Hence, the very least the Comic Con organizers could have done was to station a volunteer at each bathroom door to issue gas masks and disposable plastic wading boots.

Across the hall from where I was scheduled to speak there was a line of several dozen people waiting for a Q and A session with a T and A starlet who once played the well-endowed three-breasted Venusian from the third season of Battlestar Protractica. I passed another line that had clearly been forming for hours judging by the fact that most of the waiters were sitting on the floor. When I asked why, I was told by a Kingon that this was a line to get a (I swear this is true) ticket that may or may not allow the ticket holder to get an autograph of Stan Lee. I moved quickly on when the nervous Klingon, sensing that I might be trying to butt in, stuck a phaser in my gut.

A surprise came when I arrived at the hall where I was to speak about the golden-age cartoonist, Fletcher Hanks (Who he? Go to: www.fletcherhanks.com and buy a t-shirt for God’s sake), only to find it ¾ filled with people waiting to hear about this dead guy whose strange work has little relation to the computer generated imagery I had been bathing in all day at the Con. There must have been about 100 people in the room and none of them were related to me! The lecture went very well. They laughed at the right times and nobody tried to lynch me at the end.

Given the fact that my lecture had nothing to do with any video game and not a single Hollywood starlet appeared semi-clad on stage with me (although, believe me, I tried to find one), I was very pleased with my turn out, until someone pointed out to me that if there are 2.5 million fans in attendance at this Con that meant that about .000025% of all attendees came to my show.

When “my pal” mentioned this I recalled that indeed there had been several guys simply using my lecture hall as a reading room, and against the side wall there was a group engaged in a game of Dungeons and Dragons or perhaps craps, and several audience members were clearly there only to get a good seat for the next lecture (the Wonder Woman Wet T-shirt Contest), and one fella had taken off his shoes and was stretched out across four chairs in the front row snoring pleasantly, a half-eaten chili dog resting on his heaving tummy.

So what did the 2007 San Diego Comic Con leave me with?
1. A deep appreciation for the modern technology it took to create the triple paned windows in my hotel room that masked out the sounds of the freeway and airport.
2. A well-read copy of “Playful Little Audrey” #67.
3. A reconfirmation that a terrorist group need look no further than the San Diego Comic Con to make their case against the gross appetite of this wasteful culture.
4. A blue-green bruise in my gut from that Klingon’s phaser.

Restaurant Review

Do you remember the animated cartoon character Astro Boy? He was a quasi-boy like Pinocchio except instead of being a puppet; Astro Boy was a robot with very peculiar feet. Sometimes they turned into rockets and sometimes when he walked they were kind of like suction cups or toilet plungers hitting the ground. They even made a sucking noise as he walked.

I heard this same sound, “Soook. Soook. Soook”, as I walked up the stairs in the restaurant, Mariola. This is due to the fact that Mariola’s is a very old restaurant and they are so busy making delicious things to eat that they cannot be bothered with time-consuming tasks such as washing the sticky stairs.

Also, a tip if you should choose to dine there: do not under any circumstances touch the handrail. You will need a pair of pliers and a beefy guy from the highway department to pry your fingers from the glue-like railing finger by finger.

Mariola is located in a small town called Jesi (pronounced Yay-see) where one of the campuses of the International School of Comics is located. Every week I taught in Jesi as well as two other branches of the school in Rome and Florence. I could never quite get a straight answer from anyone exactly why there was a branch of the school in Jesi, but I think it had something to do with the notion that they wanted to teach the students that professional cartooning is a struggle, so they located it in a town that was a struggle to get to.

The head of the school in Jesi is a buoyant woman named Graziella. Graziella knows details about each student’s life that even the students themselves do not know. Hence she is able to keep them in line much as a mother duck keeps her ducklings in line. They love her and she loves them but occasionally she needs to give them a sharp nudge with her bill.

There is little not to love about Graziella. She was born and raised in Jesi. Her mother was a professional cook who liked her profession so much that on a Sunday, her day off, she would ask little Graziella, “What shall we do today for fun? Something special together, eh? I know…let’s bake a half dozen pies!” As a result of this upbringing one of the many lovable things about Graziella is that she loves food. She says that the reason that she is so fond of the city of Naples is because you can buy fresh bread on Sunday. “Imagine! Fresh bread on Sunday,” she exclaimed to me, “Now that’s a city I could live in!”

This appreciation for food, cooking, and restaurants was very fortunate for me because every week she took me out to dine at one of Jesi’s fine restaurants. We ate well and in very nice, clean, modern restaurants.

But I was curious, “Garziella,” I asked innocently one day, “are there any restaurants in Jesi that are not very nice, clean, modern? Restaurants that are old and, y’know, rustic?”

In answer she looked over her glasses at me and smiled that smile that I had seen her give the students as she got them in line. “You want rustic? I’ll give you rustic.”

This is how we ended up at Mariola’s one fine afternoon along with her son, Elia, and my translator, Rafaella. The hand painted sign outside reads, “Da Mariola, Vino e Cucina”: “Mariola’s, Wine and Food”. Note the order.

The woman who runs the joint is named Maria . Mariola is a nickname of endearment. But nobody in Jesi calls the restaurant “Maria’s” or “Mariola’s”. It has always been known as “Maria Culo Bello”, or “Maria with the nice ass”.

How about that, huh? Not so odd, really. After all in the U.S. we have an entire restaurant chain named “Hooters”.

“Back in the day Maria’s nice ass was well known around town,” Graziella told me, “Maria herself used to proudly explain that it resulted from cooking day after day. All the exercise from mixing and bending over to put food into the oven and taking it out gives one a nice rear end.”

I even met an American on the train a few weeks later who had lived in Jesi for a while. As with most conversations I had in Italy, within minutes the subject invariably turned to food and restaurants and for a moment as we talked I could not remember the name of the restaurant, “Mariola”.

“I went to this really unique place,” I began to tell him, “It was called Maria’s…no…Marianna…no, that’s not it”

“You mean, Maria Culo Bello?” he snapped.

One enters the restaurant into a dark room with a bar. The dining room is on the second floor (known in Italy as the Prima Piano, or, logically, the First Floor) so we “soooked” up the stairs and entered, except for Elia who was still prying his left sneaker off the top step.



Several years ago my brother-in-law, Steve, took us to a little restaurant in the Tuscan hills referred to by the locals as, “Dracula’s Wife’s”. not because the owner was evil, but because there was no better way to explain his blood-sucking wife. When you entered that restaurant, Dracula’s wife, herself, would hand out the menus and take the orders. She would then proceed to bring to the table whatever happened to be ready in the kitchen or whatever she had too much of. Whether it resembled anything you ordered or not did not matter. What did matter was that you shut up and ate.

At Mariola’s the waitress simply skipped the pretext of handing out menus. She gave us our order. “There’s 3 portions of lasagna left, so that leaves one of you taking the rigatoni. Skewered meats sound good? Good. Water? Yes? Wine? Good?”

She left in a puff and we looked around the room. Three elderly men sat at one of each of the three other tables. They looked as though they had eaten lunch daily at Di Mariola for most of the 150 years that the place had been serving food. If they were curious as to who these strangers were, they did not let on, as they were far too involved in relishing the food before them.


(Graziella shoots Elia "the Look")

Light streamed in through two open windows gently lifting the lace curtains. Good thing, too. If any serious gust were to burst through, the delicate threads holding these ancient curtains together would disintegrate. The room was painted an off-white and decorated with a pattern: “Splatter-di-marinara”. A charming 8” aluminum air duct ran up the corner and diagonally across the ceiling. There was a small painting on one wall that could have been a landscape, or an expressionistic portrait of a pizza.


(Rafaella demonstrates the tensile strength of the so-called curtains)

This was not exactly the cozy wooden beamed trattoria that I had in mind when I said the word “rustic”. Did I mention that the dining room was lit with 3 and sometimes 4 flickering florescent tubes?

The lasagna showed up just as I was considering bolting for the stairs. It didn’t look like much. Just lasagna only flatter. Not the gargantuan constructions that I am used to in the States with bits of the kitchen sink sticking out here and there. Graziella shot me another one of those glances over her glasses as I took my first bite. As I chewed, she tilted her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. I swallowed and she smiled. Word exchange during ecstasy is not necessary.

We licked out plates clean and I had a crunchy nibble on the plate, itself, in hopes of divining a few extra morsels that might have seeped into the porcelain molecules, when the skewered meat arrived. In between each tidbit of chicken, sausage, and, well, let’s call it “other meat”, was a bay laurel leaf folded in half and skewered. This gave every bite a particular flavor as the bay interacted differently with each meat.


(At Mairola you can have some coffee with your sugar)

Coffee and a simple piece of torte were followed by the appearance of Maria Cullo Bello, herself coming to inspect the strangers. I must admit that I was a bit disappointed. In her housedress and apron it was difficult to tell if she had any culo at all, let alone whether it was bello. She stood at the end of the table and surveyed our work. Seeing the clean plates, she determined that we were worth speaking to and proceeded to give us the history of the restaurant most of which, I am sorry to say, I did not understand. The most important part I got: she had been cooking in that kitchen for 65 years. There are certain things that you learn after cooking professionally for 65 years, like, for instance, how to cook.


(Herself)

To top things off she pulled out a bottle of homemade after-dinner wine. We toasted her cooking, tossed it back. We toasted the town of Jesi for supporting this fine institution, and tossed back another round. We toasted a few more things as well, and tossed a few more back. At this point we, ourselves, were nicely toasted.

We soooked down the stairs and as I passed the kitchen and saw the dishwasher. She was older than Maria, herself. Could she be Maria’s mother? Possible. Certainly it explained the reason why I could spell my name on the greasy edge of my plate. I will say nothing about the bathroom.

“How does the town allow her to stay open?” I asked Graziella. “In the States, the Board of Health would have closed her down years ago.”

“Who do you think those three guys were who were dining when we came in? She has every official in town eating out of the palm of her hand. And…” Graziella shot me another one of those over-the rim-looks, “they all remember that bello culo.”

Rapallo Report

(A castle filled with comics)

I was invited to Rapallo by Luca Boschi who is a walking encyclopedia about 20th Century Italian Pop culture specifically comics and animation. He is also a cartoonist and journalist and a member of a society of comics fans who hold an annual feste di comics in Rapallo. He got me on the guest list and, without telling me, got me into a lot more.

Rapallo is a seaside town. Cafes and restaurants line the street fronting the beach. The boardwalk (actually, more of a brickwalk) rings the semicircular beach. A leisurely stroll from one end to the other might take 30 minutes although judging by the median age of most of the Rapallans I saw this walk might take as long as two days. At one end, jutting into the bay, is the regulation boat rental closed for the season. At the other end, jutting out into the bay. is the regulation castle. It is a small castle that got kicked off the hill overlooking Rapallo by the other bigger, meaner castles.

Inside the castle was an exhibit from two schools of comics. As you walk in you see work by students from the comics school of Milan. My gang, the Scuola di Comics Internazional, filled the galleries on the second floor, or what is known in Italy as the first floor. When I arrived with the head of the comics school in Florence, Marco Bianchini, and his sweet wife, Novella, the rest of the school clan (5 or 6 former students and the Assistant Director, Sara Sasi) had only just arrived. We walked to the castle along the water gasping at the stunning beauty of the El Greco sky, the sharp hills rising from the sparkling water, and a sailboat on the horizon thoughtfully placed there for our cameras.

The first person I was introduced to at the castle exhibit was Ivo Milazzo, one of the few mass market Italian cartoonists whose work I can actually identify and admire. The Italians have a penchant for the American Western and on and off for many years Milazzo has drawn a feature called Ken Parker. One of the reasons I like Milazzo’s work is ‘cause it is nice and loose and he is not stingy with the black ink. Another reason is that I can usually follow his stories while still retaining my shamefully minimal abilities to read the Italian language. He is a nice guy and I never met anyone named Ivo before so I said his name as much as possible. He kept his distance for the rest of the night.

Ken Parker is rivaled in popular sales only by another Western character called, of all things, Tex. Tex is the longest running non-humor series in Italy now being drawn by my boss, Marco, along with a rotating stable of 5 or 6 other cartoonists of the “realistic” school of comics.

“Realistic “ is an interesting choice to describe Tex. Of the 300 page story he is working on, Marco told me that he hands in about 20 pages at a time for approval. He got a call about one scene that he had drawn where Tex is beating down a door. Now you can imagine that beating down a door with one’s bare fists takes some exertion, even if you are a beefy chappy like Tex. So Marco drew his face in a grimace indicating masculine exertion. “Uh-uh,” said the editor, “Too much masculine exertion. Change the face.” Tex, it seems, is only allowed to show a minimum of masculine exertion. In fact, I am told, that Tex only has four facial expressions, well, actually five, if you count “affection”, but this is used so rarely that even Tex scholars keep it in the footnote category.

Tex has a sidekick, named, I kid you not, “Pard”, as in “Pardner”. I assume that this is the guy’s full name as he is never called anything other than, “Pard”. “Don’t forget to bring home a quart of milk after your 12:00 showdown with the Dalton gang, Pard,” Mrs. Pard calls from the screen door.

We went to a theatre where a presentation was being made about animation. As the speaker spoke about the process of making an animation the same 35 second loop of animation played behind him on a screen. I saw a guy’s head expand and burst 274 times.

Afterwards we stood around, sipped proseco, nibbled crackers and I caught up with the lives of my students who had graduated last year and whose work was being exhibited. A fellow who spoke English came up to me. He was German and had come to a lecture I had given last year in Erlangen. He is a huge comics enthusiast and had driven all day from Germany to come to Rapallo. Strange? As far as I could tell, the comics festival in Rapallo was not exactly a must-see event. It is organized by fans of comics for fans of comics. There are no tents with sellers booths, no people walking around in costumes. But take it from an insider, anything is possible when it comes to the mad passions of a fan boy. Still I felt that maybe I was missing something. He showed me his most prized possession: a sketchbook filled with sketches by famous artists. He trailed Robert Crumb for a full day finally cornering him coming out of a church in France somewhere. The sketch was very nice, but a little shaky.

The next thing I know we are headed to a restaurant that I had been told was very particular. “Particular” is one of those words Italians use that mean many things depending on how it is pronounced. I can’t begin to pretend that I really understand all of the word’s nuances but when Luca Boschi told me that this restaurant was “particular” he paused for a moment before saying “particular” and looked meaningfully off into the distance as if to see if there might be a better word, but nope “particular” it was, and is.

When we arrive I notice that comics characters had been brightly painted on the side of the restaurant. In fact, you cannot miss them. I was so amazed that while staring at an enormous The Phantom I walked smack into Dagwood and nearly broke my nose. But inside the restaurant the decorations were not merely gaudy wall paintings by a talented Rapallan art student. The walls were covered with framed hand drawn original comic art by…well, by just about everyone. They had to escort me to my seat.


On the way to my table I passed Herriman, Kelly, Gould, Opper, Segar, Caniff. Y’know the usual guys you see hanging around the walls of a restaurant in the middle of figgin’ nowhere. Then I sat down at my seat and my jaw, which I had just scraped off the floor hit my plate with a clank. There at my elbow, woven (not merely printed) into the rose colored linen tablecloth, were my pals Nancy and Sluggo.


Should you want to drop by some time for a plate of pasta with funghi or chicken braised with olives and white wine while admiring a full page Bushmiller Sunday from 1952, the name of this joint is U Giancu which was the name of the original owner and is also the name of the son who now runs it whose name is also Fausto. Confused? Don’t worry, everything at this place is a little askew and the tilt only got more pronounced as the evening fell into full swing and I met U Giancu/Fausto , himself.

He looks like Mr. Clean’s father-in-law. When we met, he knew who I was, poured me a gallon of wine and handed me a mound of pasta the size of Mount Rushmore. I was surprised to find out that many people seemed to know my name and came to shake my hand and pour me some more wine and before long I was having a very jolly time, indeed.

Fausto has a trademark. Every time he goes into the kitchen he comes out with plates of grub in his massive arms and a different knit watch cap on his bald head. How could I tell they were different? When I first met him he there was a miniature golf player on the cap. Every time Fausto moved his head the duffer swung his little plastic putter. Over the course of the evening I saw him in caps featuring a variety of animals, Spiderman, a glass rocket ship, and, I believe, a toilet.

After dinner, Fausto stood on a chair in front of the bar and got the room silent which took a few moments. I figured that something good and weird was about to occur so I snagged a front row seat. He called up an elderly gentleman named Carlos Chendi who has been writing stories for Disney Italia for 40 years and presented him with a box. Oh, great, an awards ceremony. I have sat through many an awards ceremony in Italy since I have been here. At best they are dull.

I am siting there trying to figure out how to sneak out of my seat and get a good look at that Dick Tracy strip across the way when something really weird does, in fact, happen.

Carlos calls my name and I am shoved up to the front and presented with this box containing a plaque with my name on it commemorating this night. I am stunned but now I realize why all these guys knew my name thanks to my pal, Luca Boschi, I am the surprise honored guest, but the surprise is on me. Fortunately, I do not make too big of a fool of myself and remember to say nice things about Italian hospitality and the high quality of the output of Fausto’s kitchen.

(Fausto, Carlos, Paul, Luca)

After they dispense with me they give out some serious awards to cartoonists who have really worked hard this year and deserve recognition. As the ceremony concludes more people shake my hand, but a couple of honest guys ask me, “Just who are you, anyway?” At this point I am able to pull out the brand spanking new copy of “Citta di Vetro” which had just been released as a deluxe newsstand edition that very day. When they see David Mazzucchelli’s name on it, they grin, shake my hand again, and pour me some more wine.


(Milazzo endulges a fan. Note Raymond and Caniff in background)

Soon it is time for dessert and I learn the true purpose of the evening and why that German guy drove all day to get here. Fausto sits me down and, asking me if I would mind drawing some pictures for a few fans, pours me a stiff grappa. I look around and see that these fans from the Society are all scurrying around from table to table to get sketches from all of the artists and the 10 watt bulb in my head flickers to light.

As I continue to draw a miracle occurs along the lines of the loaves and fishes; my grappa glass never appears to be empty and I know for sure that I was tossing those babies back. But that is about all of which I am certain. From that point on the evening gets a bit fuzzy.

When I come to it is the next morning and I am not sure how I got to the hotel. I crawl to the bathroom and look at my sorry face in the mirror. On my head is a knit cap on top of which is bouncing a bobble-headed Topo Gigio grinning ear to ear.

Lucca Report 2006

In most ways this years’ comics festival in Lucca was a huge improvement over the one I attended last year. By moving the festival inside the walls, which surround of the city, the business of comics festivals (the meetings, the networking, and the commerce) improved dramatically. Also improved was the fun of comics festivals (the collecting, the trading, and the hemorrhaging of the credit card). But many would agree that the biggest improvement of all was only having to walk one minute out of any of the dozen or so massive tents to find a great cappuccino.

In past years the festival has been held outside the city walls, inconveniently located in a run- down parking lot a good 30-minute walk to the center of cappuccino. Hence people were always running late for luncheon meetings, lectures, and staged reenactments of the battle of Zxon 5 from the 2nd volume of the “Worlds and Galaxies Untred Upon” trilogy: “Barf’s Revenge”. Hey, it’s hard to stage a faithful reenactment of a pivotal battle when your head Squatsch Sergeant is on the other side of town and he’s the guy with the enchanted crystal Burpon.

For the underinformed, the official title of this festival is “Lucca Comics and Games”. The Games part is big. All the major video game designers are present hawking their wares along with all of the fantasy card games, board games, and action figure games. I even saw a few guys squatting in semi-hiding behind one of the tents playing a craps game. I suppose they were embarrassed ‘cause their game is so old fashioned and has only two moving parts.

Along with the games territory comes the opportunity to get oneself dressed up as a favorite game character, especially if oneself is a girl between the ages of 15 and 20. There is even an entire area of the pavilion devoted to this activity called CosPlay, a clever and catchy combination of the words Costume and Platypus.

As I understand this (and remember I am a 50 year old American male, not exactly the informed audience for this particular activity), in CosPlay you and your buddies get dressed up in your favorites fantasy figures and put on small skits. I saw some robots and Stormtroopers go at it with black painted papertowel rolls.

But in many CosPlay plays the play is merely a vamp. Mostly I saw adolescent girls dressed in skimpy outfits posing with each other, pausing in tableaux, and then changing poses and pausing again. As far as I could tell the poses were not slides in an ongoing storyline, but just cool poses. It seemed merely odd to me until I looked around and saw a bunch of old guys drooling with cameras waiting for the next tableaux. I got the hell out of there, pronto.

A woman explained to me that CosPlay is actually a very creative activity for girls because a lot of them make their own costumes and write their own skits. It was described as a healthy alternative to the kinds of mischief many teenagers get mixed up in. Maybe so, but as far as I could tell the Vampirella and baby doll outfits that these girls poured themselves into outnumbered the Amazons, Valkeries and Presidents of Germany as role models by 10 to 1.

Not all costumed festival-goers indulge in the regimen of formal CosPlay. They simply get dressed up and wander around. Mostly it is long black robes and painted faces, but I noted an interesting fad: The Big Object trend. Lots of Big Swords and I mean BIG. Big Guns, Big Lightning Bolts, Big Shields, and Big Carpet Tubes Painted Black also known as Big Things. Why the Big Objects? Well, holding your symbolic icon lets others know immediately who you are just like those ancient frescoes of the Saints that pepper the interiors of Italian churches. So, on the very same day in Lucca, I saw two guys with Big Keys. One was peeling on the church wall: St. Peter. The other was peeing on the alley wall: Sargon the Magnificent.

In the States I do not think that you would get very far from the parking lot without someone making a big stink if you came dressed up as a girl in a black bikini scrambling around on all fours attached to a leash held by your black-faced boyfriend wearing black paper mache ram’s horns. I later learned that the boyfriend was one of my cartooning students from the Scuola di Comics in Florence. I am going to look at his work a bit differently from now on.

I guess the weirdest costume, though, was the guy in torn jeans and a tee-shirt who had a large metallic pyramid for a head. When I mockingly described this to my students they looked at me like an idiot and solemnly explained that he was dressed as a magic talisman from a game that everyone knows about a duh.

The antics of these dolts prancing around are all so silly and ridiculous. Look, I generally let my fellow man live his or her own life. I am tolerant if someone wants to spend their time and money participating in events like Nascar racing or Pet Shows. But Gaming?! I just don’t get it. Why don’t they devote themselves to something really important like, say Comics?

There were several huge white tents filled with comics vendors. I sat in the Coconino Press table because I am lucky enough to have my book, City of Glass (co-created by the great David Mazucchelli), printed by an outfit called Coconino Press. Coconino Press is an oasis of decent comics in Italy (meaning: they print stuff I like). The best thing that can be said about most Italian comics is that they are called ‘Fumetti’, or “little puffs of smoke” based on the design of word balloons, I suppose, but maybe it was someone’s idea that they should all be burned. (Hmmm…I think I may lose some friends, here.) Anyhow, let’s just say that of all of the 9 or 10 editions of ‘City of Glass’ the best and most beautiful by far is the one published by Coconino Press. (Oops, there go a few more friends). Plus I get to say the word “Coconino” a lot and it’s a fun word to say.

The Coconino boys sold a hell of a lot of books at Lucca. Foremost among these books was one that debuted at Lucca called “S” by the cartoonist, Gipi. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, two of Gipi’s short books are available in English from Fantagraphics )http://www.fantagraphics.com/ignatz/ignatz.html) and I won’t invite you to my birthday party if you do not buy these books right now and read them. I wondered why the seat next to Gipi was always vacant whenever I came back to the booth from my regular cappuccino breaks but after a while I realized how demoralizing a location it was for another author. It was not merely that everyone on the planet seemed to want this book (while I had to bribe several students to even come by to even say hello to me). No, the painful part was watching him, out of the corner of my eye, dash off one beautiful watercolor illustration after another with such ease. If I didn’t love this guy so much I would hate him.

Coconino invited another American, R. Kikuo Johnson to Lucca to sign copies of his swell debut book, “The Night Fisher”. Kikuo is a smart and good-humored fella who also draws well. We snuck out at sunset to climb one of the two towers remaining inside the city to look at the other tower. People in the other tower were doing the same. It felt like one of those surreal wordless French gag cartoons from the 60’s. Kikuo likes the Jack Kirby of the Big Ant era while I prefer Jack Kirby of the late Captain Victory era, and if you know what that means God have mercy on your sorry soul.

On the train headed back to Florence I was getting ready for a very important nap (what the Italians call a ‘pizzolino’, another word I love to say), an activity that Italian train seats are ergonomically designed to discourage, when a couple got into the seats across from me still buzzing from their thrilling day at the festival and anxious to talk to someone about it, even if that someone only understood about 12% of the Italian they were speaking.

For them, it was the best festival, ever in the universe. And I think they really meant it, too. You see, he was Kaloo from Kabu (or Kabu from Kaloo, I never quite got which) and she was his mortal enemy, Cassandra, from Plowman’s Planet. They were usually mortal enemies, but they had buried the hatchet for the Lucca Festival to demonstrate that interplanetary brotherhood was possible. After a while they gave up trying to talk to me and cuddled shamelessly. She caressed his spiked tail as he whispered sweet nothings into one of her six ears.

Where’s that guy with the Big Key? Lock me up, Scotty.


Who watches the Watchmen? R. Kikuo and me, that's who.

Barcelona Blog

It is Sunday afternoon and I am sitting in the Barcelona airport taking a little time to think and write about the past two days. Actually, I am taking plenty of time to do this due to my ongoing inability to tell the difference between 14:00 and 16:00.

I arrived in Barcelona two days ago and the first thing that raised my curiosity about this town were the directional signs in the airport. The arrow icons were in Spanish, Catalan, French and English. Rather that saying the usual, “EXIT”, the sign in English read, “WAY OUT”.

I have been here as a guest of Kosmopolis, what the promoters dub a “literary feast”. Well, it was literary, I’ll give ‘em that, but the feast amounted to an all-you-can eat supply of warm water, bottled juice, bad coffee and a bowl of tiny graham crackers in the guests’ lounge. To be honest, they also fed us a fine lunch that I skipped out on ‘cause I was afraid someone would ask me exactly what I thought I was doing there, a question that I would be hard put to answer. Kosmopolis, which roughly translates from Catalan as “Cosmic Metropolis”, is an annual contemporary arts exposition heavily funded by the City of Barcelona and the Cosmos. It includes things like speakers (me), workshop leaders (also, me), live music, installations, performance artists, technogeeks, and major gallery shows (all not me). I saw some super-cool stuff, and some fairly weird shit.

Let’s dispense with the super-cool stuff since it is less fun to write and read about. There were two monster exhibits. Bamako is the annual collection of the best photography from Africa. The other show was a bone chilling visual history of the Chernobyl disaster. Both great.

As to the weird shit; I sat in on a lecture about the future of computer game programming which sounded to me like a strategy session for alienating future generations from the bothersome and smelly business of human contact. Another workshop was about the future of high-speed information sharing where the information was shared slowly and, to me, largely incomprehensibly. A poetry slam in Catalan consisted of two heavy amplified bald guys yelling nouns at each other.

I suppose that my talk would fall somewhere in between “super-cool stuff” and “weird shit” depending on which side of the stage one sat. I spoke and showed slides describing the process of co-adapting (with David Mazzucchelli) Paul Auster’s novel, ‘City of Glass’ into a comic. I did this in English while two people sat in a booth to the right of the orchestra seats and tried to translate my comments into Catalan via little earsets worn by the audience. This was a bit disconcerting at first as I am used to having my speech translated simultaneously in class by the amazingly effective Italian translator, Vanessa Petrucci. Unfamiliar with both comics and my vague attempts at humor, the two translators struggled in the booth to make me sound coherent to the audience of Barcelonans. The windows of the booth began to fog up after about 15 minutes.

It might have seemed like weird shit to the audience of 500, but to me it was super-cool. From my viewpoint on stage I watched the audience stare at me blankfaced, turn their heads to the translation booth, then turn back to me with further mystification. Like watching people watch a tennis match.

Many events occurred simultaneously because Kosmopolis is housed in an enormous four-sided building with an open courtyard that was once the Barcelona orphanage. The building was in poor condition when the city gave it to the Cultural Council who proceeded to completely rebuild the interior and give it a 21st Century sheen. One of the four sides was a hopeless mess when bequeathed, so they just tore down that side and replaced it with chrome and glass and escalators.

Most of the other guests were high-minded literary types or future-thinkers. There seemed to be about a dozen Russian writers who traveled in a group with a fog of gray smoke resting on their shoulders. This was all good, ‘cause I didn’t have anyone to talk to and could come and go as I please.

I did a lot of walking around Barcelona. I walked to the Gaudi gardens, the Gaudi museum, and the Gaudi cathedral. I saw a lot of Gaudi. I strolled around in the old part of town, which is very easy to discern as all of the streets in the new part of town are built on a grid. The old town is a snarl of teeny streets opening onto courtyards. One snaking road led me to the Saturday morning market. It is a lot like the Centro Market in Florence except that in Barcelona they gaily display their dead rabbits hung by the feet with their appetizing fur still on.

The tiny streets, designed for pedestrian and horses but not SUV’s, reminded me of Florence, where I am now living and teaching, but with a few significant differences. Although Barcelonans talk on their cellphones plenty, it is not with the same fanaticism, as do the Italians. In Florence people look at you funny if you are walking down the street not talking on your cellphone. In Barcelona I saw many people walking down the street talking to each other as well as people walking down the street >gasp< silently.

I also deduced in my fact-finding in-depth tour of exactly three churches that Jesus and Mary appear to have switched roles from their Italian counterparts. In Italy Jesus is generally seen either peacefully alive or peacefully dead. Mary is generally seen suffering. In Barcelona every Jesus I ran into was twisted in agony while Mary had just returned from the hairdressers. In fact I went into one church and saw a local good churchlady up on the pedestal fixing the hem of Mary’s dress. It would take a better sociologist than I (like, say, a real sociologist, or perhaps my sister, Judy) to divine the divine meaning here, but in the U.S. we have both the peaceful Jesus and the peaceful Mary and look at the mess we are in.

The best part of my visit to Barcelona was not the stroll through the charming old streets, or the Gaudi, or the poetry slam. No the best thing by far was my hotel room. The apartment on Via San Gallo in Florence where I have been staying is clean and modern but it is also teeny. To take a shower I have to rotate in-place in the coffin-like shower stall and strategize my ablutions so that I do not run out of the four minutes of allotted hot water. In the modern and spacious hotel room in Barcelona I took the kind of shower I have been yelling at my daughters for years not to take and what is referred to in my house as a Hollywood shower. I meditated in the rain forest.

The other aspect of my Florence apartment that really has me looking for another place is the fact that I cannot seem to get a completely solid night of sleep without being woken up. And the cause is always some different. In the past three weeks I have been roused from slumber by: the baker across the street loading and unloading baked goods from his little truck, the mysterious guy down the block who comes and goes throughout the night, but instead of having a door he has one of those roll-up and roll-down metal store-front protectors that he loudly rolls-up and slams-down whenever he enters or leaves his place which is quite often throughout the night, people throwing stuff into the dumpster directly below my window (a favorite thing to throw out in the middle of the night appears to be brittle plastic objects), and let’s not forget (will I ever?) the guy who I thought had been stabbed but turned out only to have stomach problems that he wanted the entire block to know about as he vomited virtually non-stop for 20 minutes, pausing briefly from time to time to gasp for air and to curse the city of Florence, in front of the dumpster and then laid down right there.

I had not realized how starved I was for uninterrupted sleep until my first night in my three star Barcelona flat in a large bed with crisp sheets and triple-glazed, modern, sound-proof windows so that no intruding noise from the street below could wake me up. That was the first night.

The second night I stayed out late and staggered home in anticipation of Little Paulo In Slumberland. I laid me down to sleep and those triple-glazed windows did their magic. Unfortunately I did not have a triple-glazed door at around 3 AM. Bone rattling raw mega-decibels sawed through the wood. Evidently the British couple next door was having a bit of a tiff. I could not get the salient details, even though I stood shamelessly in my underwear in the dark with the water glass from the bathroom pressed against the door as I have seen in the movies. The gist of the spat appeared to have had something to do with her walking into the room while he was having sexual intercourse with another woman. “You said you fookin’ loved me, you fook!!!”

He landed out in the hall while she yelled, no, really screamed at him. He tried to pretend that everyone else up and down the hall was not also listening with their water glasses pressed to their doors. Almost shyly he repeatedly asked her to: “C’mon, the door.”. Eventually he gave up that nice-guy tactic in favor of, “Open the fookin’ door you fookin’ fook!!!”

Eventually she let him back in. This turn of events was shortly followed by the sound of scuffling, thrown objects hitting the wall and breaking, and what I think was the sound of spraying water. The management let this go on for a half hour or until they were certain that nobody was actually being murdered and that every other guest in the joint was awake (Management has principles, after all) and eventually some guys came in and pulled them apart. I wish I could give you a detailed account of the dénouement and describe the black eyes and torn clothing, but a hard-hitting crackerjack crime reporter I ain’t. I cowered behind my door and creeped back into bed to try to make up for lost zzz’s. But I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I don’t think that I have every heard such a fight in my sheltered life. When my parents fought it was with multi-syllabic words through clenched teeth over strategy for enacting public policy for the disabled. When my wife and I fight we generally choose stone cold silence (although I am prone to mutter what is really on my mind under my breathe like a steam valve on a pressure cooker). I tell you, I was rattled.

In the morning at the remarkably taste-free free breakfast (how do they do that?) I scanned the couples to see if I could detect the guilty, but everyone else was doing the same. The place was filled with more fake ear-to-ear grinning than ever witnessed before in the dining hall of the Gran Ronda Hotel, Barcelona. It was WAY OUT.


Former orphanage


Thoughtfully placed signs everywhere in case I lost myself.


Saints and Sinners for sale.


3 Wise Men and 3 Wise Guys for sale, too.

UPDATE!

This just in from one of my sharp-eyed students, Corrado, from the Scuola di Comics Internazionale in Roma. More Sacred and Profane combinations viewed through a plate glass window. Mussolini, Che, and the Pope. Anyone else have a contribution?

Luzern Report

I advise you to go to the Comics Festival held annually in Luzern if you want to see some very interesting contemporary comic art without a lot of commercial hawking, or if you feel like getting away from it all and, just for the hell of it, spend a lot of money. I could go on and on about how expensive things are in Luzern and come to think of it, gosh darn it, I think I will.

Sometimes I get hungry and when this happens I like to eat. I went to a restaurant. Not some fancy place with a curtain over the front window to ward off those pesky customers, but a dumpy place with a lot of young people inside smoking and drinking beer. I found out why they were not also eating when I was served a pile of potato slivers covered with melted cheese and served in a tub of crème di cholesterol. The sum total of ingredients came to about $0.37, the sum total of the bill came to about $27.50, and I came to on the floor with nice people pouring beer in my face.

The local people I came in contact were seemed very “nice”. Everyone smiled a lot. When I went into a store to buy an English newspaper the storeowners smiled a lot. I tried to speak in French/German to ask for directions, they still smiled a lot. As each painful syllable dribbled down my chin and landed with a thud they continued to smile a lot, but I could see the wife impatiently tapping her foot while the husband eyed my wallet with suspicion. The smile muscles on their necks throbbed.

The festival that these folks put on really is exciting. Here’s how it works: sprinkled throughout the small city are a dozen or so exhibits, installations, really, featuring an international array of comic artists. You are given a booklet with a list and a map and set off to fend for yourself. This is probably not a problem for most European festivalgoers, but it seems that when I am dropped into a new foreign town with twisting streets inherited from the Bronze Age I suddenly have the sense of direction of a toothbrush.

Nevertheless, I stumbled across some very fine exhibitions.

There are a bunch of guys from Hong Kong who call themselves,”Springrollll”. They created a fascinating exhibit of drawings, comics, and dolls that had something to do with the history of Hong Kong, or maybe not, but it was very cool.

Jonathon Rosen was one of the few Americans exhibiting and he ate up a few walls with a few massive paintings while visitors in the adjoining room were hypnotized by his mesmerizing and inventive film in which something may have happened.

A group of students from der Ecole d’Arts Applique aus Genf created an installation on the walls in 3D where you were handed a pair of those 3D glasses as you entered. I think that it was a wrap around cityscape, or Martian landscape, but it might have been the inside of a Salvatore Dali’s refrigerator. They were also doing some very sophisticated screen printing on sight under the watchful eye of their printmaker/teacher Christian Humbert-Droz, whom I spoke to in the courtyard outside the exhibit while two of his most accomplished students gave a third student an art installation hair cut that spelled out the name of their favorite band.

Anke Fruchtenburger makes really nice drawings and her exhibit in which large frames from a comics story wrapped around four interior gallery walls was stunning. It was about a girl who had a problem, I think.

Finally, under the train station there was an exhibit that I really did understand. It included works by about eight artists who all work in some kind of comics/illustration reportage. The work was very linear and concrete because it was all based on reporting about real places and events. On artist named (Yves) Noyau particularly stood out for me even though here he was only represented by some open sketchbooks:





Also in this exhibit was the work of my pal, Ulli Lust, whom I met at the Napoli Comicon. Ulli’s work in this show was a report about the town of Luzern itself. She is considering dropping her last name when she travels out of town because of the eyebrows and expectations that it raises. She has a cool website:

http://www.ullilust.de/

Ulli invited me and fellow American cartoonist, Peter Blegvad, to tag along to a dinner she had been invited to by some Finnish cartooning students. Free meal? At this point the numbers on my credit card had been worn down to nothing so I gladly assented.

Turns out that these students were staying in the house of some chums who were out of town for the weekend. Eventually we thought that we had found the house. But it looked so run-down that it was hard to tell. There was a good reason that it looked abandoned: it was! These kids were squatters and the place is set for demolition sometime soon. Sad and filthy stuffed animals stuck to the windows looked down on us as we tossed gravel at the second floor windows to get someone’s attention. One of the young women came down and welcomed us in explaining that, if for any reason we had to leave, the only way to reenter was to slide one’s tiny European hand through the mail slot and reach around to the functioning doorknob on the inside of the door. Looking down at my size 12 American mitt I entertained the idea of staying outside. Climbing the dark twisting staircase I was overcome by the strong suspicion that several male cats may possibly be in residence.

The flat brought back to mind an apartment I had visited a few times in Washington, D.C. back in the early-70’s that had been decorated in the same kaleidoscopic fashion one might call “Louis the 14th Hippie”. One of the hallmarks of such décor is that virtually every vertical surface is decorated with something…anything, and all of the horizontal surfaces are decorated with stuff that people left there sometime in the past.

The students could not have been more delightful, however, nobody was exactly certain what to do about dinner. I shooed them out of the kitchen, since I love to cook, and since, judging by the state of the kitchen I figured that I wanted to know exactly which of the available ingredients were going into my dinner. There was no refrigerator and maybe that was a good thing because when stuff is rotting out in the open it is more likely to get thrown away. I made a nice, simple pasta. It does not take too much to make a nice, simple pasta and here is the secret. Cook the pasta correctly (lots of water, lots of salt in the water, don’t overcook) and make sure that whatever else you put on top of it, you put in something peppery and something sweet. If you have nothing else but olive oil, black pepper, a little honey and salt you will be fine. Especially if, prior to serving, the diners have already plowed their way through several bottles of wine.

A group of about eight of us had a jolly time. If you ever need a good dinner guest to enliven a table I suggest that you call Peter Blegvad. He tells great stories, asks interesting questions and pays attention to the answers.

About an hour after dinner we all decided that we needed more to drink and after going through all of the empties on the table as well as those scattered about on the floor we concluded that to do this we needed to actually get up from the table and navigate through the semi-functioning door. Rather than heading back into the nauseatingly quaint and pricey town center we took a left and after walking a block or two we actually encountered people who did not have the same color skin as ours and bars that did not require a second mortgage to purchase a beer.



When I came to in my room at the I-Kid-You-Not “Hotel Tourist”, it was the next morning and I spent my last few hours in Luzern receiving resuscitation from the magnificent collection of Paul Klees drawings and paintings at the Rosengart collection. If you ever need a cure for a hangover, three solid rooms of Paul Klee will do the trick.

Rule 17

Judge a Book by it's Cover

I have not stepped foot in any of these Florentine hotels. They might all be swell. These are my own highly scientific empirical observations based on walking by them or looking at their names in the Yellow Pages:

The River Hotel: It is not very close to the River.

The Pitti Palace Hotel: Fewer and smaller rooms than the namesake. Also less art on walls.

The Golf Hotel: The closest golf course is Luigi’s mini-golf in Prato.

Hotel Michelangelo: Michelangelo designed some of the greatest bits of architecture in the city. Critics laud his staircase to the Medici Library with its bizarre half staircase that leads magnificently into the rest of the staircase. Needless to say he did not have a hand in the design of the Hotel Michelangelo.

Mona Lisa Hotel: There may be a reproduction of Leonardo’s painting in the lobby.

Hotel Souvenir: It’s a hotel and a t-shirt!

Canada Hotel, Arizona Hotel, and the Boston Hotel: Good choices if you are out late drinking and the only thing you can remember is where you were born.

The Real Hotel: It is.

The Jolly Hotel: It is not.

The Grand Majestic Hotel: It is neither.

Hotel Tina: Only people named Tina are allowed to register.

Dante Hotel: Seven rings of rooms each hotter than the last.

Real Hotel: Hope so. They paid good euros to be listed in the phone book.

Rex Hotel: Only for guys and their moms.

Hotel Airport: Owners couldn’t make up their minds. Is this a hotel or an airport?

California Hotel: Such a lonely place, such lonely place.

Residenza dei Pucci: Dogs welcomed.