gimme a stiffy

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T.  - Ben Marra

1. Color

Comic after comic Benjamin Marra’s inkwork has becomes more and more restrained. He has continually been refining his line so that the inking in Night Business #1 barely looks like something produced by his hand anymore. While Marra’s work has always had an intentional stiffness to it, his inking has been there to counteract the effect a bit. When he outlines a character’s arms, face, or body they resemble that of an action figure, but Marra’s wavy and pulsating inkwork within the figure, detailing their muscles and veins, creates enough internal motion in each figure to make you believe in their existence. In the external world of a Marra comic everything is on a razors edge, but internally, through his inks, he is able to create a living organism.

With the introduction of color to Marra’s work though the flowy nature of his inking is no longer enough to counteract his stiffness. They no longer provide dimension and depth to his figures, but rather produces, and amplify, the sheen of plastic within them.

Color in mainstream comics over the past decade has taken on the role of being a second form of inking, providing definition and delineating objects from one another. Marra though rebutes the over emphasis on gradients and light sources by only using single shades of primary colors to color his work. A throwback to comics made before the 1980’s, but also a throwback to toys. By only using these single shades Marra’s inks become the only contrasting colors within each figure, transforming their previous roles as textures into accents to these colors.

This is most explicit in Marra’s choice to color Terror Assaulter's suit a deep and dark shade of blue. This shade of blue so closely matches his black inks that when he shades a series of ruffles onto Terror Assaulter's suite, showing his post-battle dishoveldness, they do not convey the thought of a dirty suit to the reader, but rather the shadows produced by a child's hand as it reaches to grab a figurine and temporarily blocks the streams of light emitting from a lamp overhead.

2. Dialogue

Marra’s dialogue, which was sparse already, has been cut down to a point where what little is left seems unnecessary. Each word spoken is as stiff as his linework. But while this is something that evokes the poor acting and writing of B-movies, which Marra is clearly infatuated with, it also draws to mind the only other comic artist out there who could be said to be more single mindedly focused on action as Marra, Yuichi Yokoyama. If you read a Yokoyama comic your first thought is that the translation is horrible. There is no humanity in his dialogue. But that is exactly what Yokoyama is attempting, he sucks the life out of every word until it exists as just pure description. His words are chosen so that they can thrive through the stripping process of google translate, not falter to it.

The dialogue in Terror Assaulter likewise has the feeling of a poor translation, but unlike Yokoyama Marra still has the emotional baggage of narrative to contend with. His words are forced to have the inclining of humanity in them, and while much of the dialogue in Terror Assaulter are simply descriptions, they are descriptions of actions and events rather than inanimate objects. The words spoken are boiled down to cliches, but they are about, and involve, humans. All this leaves Terror Assaulter with the feeling of a bad dub, but with enough life in each word to allow you not to walk away with a headache, but with a smile at the sheer lunacy of what you just witnessed.

You can purchase Terror Assaulter #1 at Colour Code.

grazing by gazinnn

Crash Trash - Olive Booger

I think this is called a chap book. I am not sure. Pulling it out of the Oily bundle package reminded me of Building Stories. While the mini-comics that defined Oily still remained the bulk of the bundle, two lengthier entries by Noah Van Sciver and Charles Forsman were presented at larger dimensions and this short piece, existing at barely a quarter of a page in height, rounded out the package.

my immediate response to looking at this work is how closely it reminds me of two other somewhat recently released works. works which similarly existed in extremely limited number of pages but conveyed a deeply rich society within them. first is Gary Panter recently collected Dal Tokyo. Not that work as a whole, but just the first few pages or so. after the tenth page of Dal it progresses into something that i am left marveling at but not fully able (or capable) to grasp. like all of Panter’s work i digest it. am impressed with it. and promise myself ill understand it more next time. (theres always next time). Olive Booger borrows heavily from Panters more primitive and jagged line, while not as rigid and geometric, it no doubt evoke the idea of Panter. Everything is dirty and grimey and looks like the New York of Death Wish.

Crash Trash uses a faux-documentary style that has become one of the mainstays of michael defoge, who was the other person i thought of when looking at this. This style allows the narrative to move far faster and with greater depth than a more standard narrative device would allow. Instead of expository dialogue we only hit the highlights. no fat all filler. the Story itself is pretty funny. a group of gutter punks get beat up by another group after it is revealed they don’t really know how to fight,and instead just look tuff. After their defeat they move into trash bins to avoid being beaten up by the gang that has taken over their territory and create a society over the course of the ensuing 20 years; becoming hermit crabs of sorts.

you can buy Crash Trash at the Oily Comics site.

Open Up Your Murder Eyes: Part 2

Part One can be read here.

(5) on sequencing in regard to section (1)

Most people would attribute the act of sequencing to panel borders. Borders control the way in which the readers eye moves across the page, both  the speed at which you process the information on the page and how quickly your eye reads the page. Small and compact panels placed next to each other in quick succession force the eye to move faster, while double page spreads, showing one single moment, force you to take in the whole event at once. Additionally the eye has a natural tendency to read images from the top left of the page to the bottom right. Long vertical panels therefore force the eye to move up and down with little to no horizontal movement, while horizontal panels force them to move right to left with limited vertical motion.

Heather Benjamin does not use panels, although this does not stop her from controlling the readers eye. Dragging the eye left or right, up or down, not with borders but by the way she draws details, her backgrounds, how shocking she decides to make the image, what areas she chooses to leave empty and where she chose to implement language. All of these tools, played individually or in concert, allows her to move you across the image as she chooses.

(5.1) Sad Sex

The artwork in the first half of Sad Sex is rather simple, both in its line and backgrounds. There is not a lot for the eye to hold onto visually. This in many other cases would result in a rather fast read, as the eye recognizes the image and moves on quickly due to its simplicity. But the content of Sad Sex keeps this from happening. It is filled with alien imagery, things you are not used to seeing, literally sad sex. Viewing a sexual act where both parties are sobbing and clearly uncomfortable with the acts taking place is such a foreign concept in most of art that the long streams of tears flowing down each individual's faces holds your eyes in a way that the same image, devoid of these tears, would never.

The downfall of this though is that the rest of the image falls apart, the eye focuses on the points of carnage rather than the image as a whole. This is why in many of these early images there is no backgrounds at all, they wouldn’t be looked at even if they were present.

As Sad Sex goes on though Benjamin becomes a much more accomplished artists, and by the final third of the book her compositions are strong enough that she is capable of intentionally guiding the reader's eye to and from the more shocking content in each image.This is vital for the continued appreciation of her work, because as each image piles up the contents shock value begins to dissipate. As your eye focuses on the teary faces, they start to blend together, and by page forty they are just a part of everything else again.

The two page spread "You Make Me Feel Special" is a good example of Benjamin's leap in ability from the early pages of Sad Sex to the later.  

From the top right we see a series of hearts along with, momentarily, the woman on the lefts braided pony tail flowing alongside the words "You Make Me Feel" downwards and to the right, leading us to the next figure and the remaining part of the title "Special". This is in keeping with the natural flow of the eye. It is easy and happy. Non-complex.

But there are conflicts in this reading. This is only how you would read this image if you ignored the two women on either side of the page, and simply chose to focus on the cheery phrase "You Make Me Feel Special" and a trail of hearts. But these two women have their own agency, and so a contradiction is at play here. Like all good comics the text should not betray the picture by making its point to clear, and here it explicitly does not. The figures inside the composition are fighting against this flow. "You Make Me Feel" can be a good thing just as easily as it could be a bad thing. The same goes for "Special". These two women act out both of these dual scenarios, pulling and pushing away your eye, your gaze, to reflect their own feelings on their given phrases.

The woman on the left has her right arm fully extended, reaching out, begging for you to stay.

With her left hand, in a last ditch effort before your eye breaks the plane of the double page spread and moves onto the second page and the "other" figure, she is spreading her vaginal lips as wide as she can. Trying to catch your eye. This spreading is taking place just above the last few inches of braided hair which have balled up beneath her, creating a large black mass at the bottom of the page surrounded by flower petals. In her final gasp the figure even kicks her left leg over the page gutter and into the other figures space, almost touching the word "Special" but, almost poetically, she is a few centimeters short. Her foot and sock just can’t quite reach it.

This effort of course does not work. But not for lack of either figure trying.

As the woman on the left is actively trying to draw the readers eye towards her, a mirror image the woman on the right is actively attempting to push you away. She is covering up. But nature is working against her, both the nature of your eye and the nature of her surrounds.

If you look at the balance of data on each page, the densities of each figure and their backgrounds, you will notice the area surrounding the woman on the right is rather open compared to that of the woman on the left, whose entire upper torso area is surrounded by trails of hearts. The area surrounding the figure on the right though is much less dense, depicting only a small whirlpool (which surrounds her upper torso and head) and a mountain range. This largely empty space has the effect of drawing the readers eye along the horizontal axis towards it and  away from the more info dense area’s of the page. That this area is also inhabited by the figure who does not wish to be viewed is part of the tragedy of the piece.

(5.2) Exorcise

In Exorcise Benjamin made her intricate backgrounds a hallmark of her work, like a S.Clay Wilson image there is very little space left unstained by ink. Benjamin litters her backgrounds with data that the eye must compute instinctually for perceived meanings stars, UFO’s, constellations, various iconography and animals. These background images therefore have the role of creating the base speed for reading each image.  

With this base speed in place Benjamin is then allowed to shift the densities of the background data around her page to create her own form of panel borders. Leaving some areas blank while others almost black with ink, she is able to both draw and repulse the readers eye to any area she wishes.

In addition to densities there is also the use of language. Since so few words are used in Exorcise, when they do appear your eyes lock onto them immediately. That is why when you look at the earring saying “Shut Up” on the first page of the book yours eyes give it the same amount visual importance as the woman cutting her nipple off. Both are foreign, one from the book and the other from life. Or the above image, even as her hair takes over the entire image the heart tattoo with "Mom" inscribed within it becomes the images focal point.

(6.0) Image Symetry  

with apologies to frank santoro / i made this in ms paint so please pardon the hackishness of it.

In the image above we see a woman squatting. Her body is bleeding in symmetry with itself and its environment. The first thing your eye moves to is her right hand, which is making an "Okay" sign and bleeding in concert with her left hand that is dangling lazily downwards. Bellow, on the same vertical axle as her hands, you see that she is also bleeding from her knees. Upwards slightly and on a different vertical axis is her midsection, where both of her nipples are bleeding. Looking at the middle axis of the image we see the woman's face, which is characteristically bleeding, a third of the way down the page, and along the same vertical axis, we see the figures menstruating vagina.

While much of Benjamin's use of cosmological symbols are merely background details, her use of constellations in this image perfectly compliment the lines of symmetry for the figures bleeding. Two constellations are connected through an acute angle, which connect the hands, breasts and knees together. The five other constellations pictured are connected purely through straight lines, which creates the box with a line through it connecting the hands to the knees and face to the vagina as shown above.

The area's connected through these lines of symmetry share several characteristics that are repeated throughout the series, and while hands and knees have a certain non-reproductive sexual connotation, which are counteracted through the often repeated bleeding of the breast and its implications of motherhood, the most important is between the face and vagina.

These two area's become the focal points in the majority of the images found in this book, both independent of each other and, as in the image above, dependent on each other. Much of the "filler" imagery, the shoes, stockings, coats, backgrounds and especially the hair draws the eyes to these area's.

As i mentioned in section (3.1) hair above the shoulders plays an important part in drawing the readers eye towards the face. With its intricacies and detail the eyes lock onto it, follow it, and because of its proximity with the less detailed, but equally beautifully drawn, face the eye instinctually is held there as a resting spot. Similarly, and especially in the image above, the hair below the neck also draws the readers eye towards the vagina. As the eye recognizes each strand of hair on the figures legs, and above from the fur of the figures jacket, the white space of the inner thighs where hair is absent pulls the eye towards the  images second focal point, the vagina.

(7) Additional Info and tidbits

You can purchase various works from Heather Benjamin at her webstore. Additionally Benjamin has an eight page-broadsheet available from Floating World Comics titled Delinquent.

You can view her Tumblr here

Also if you enjoy interviews there is a very long and in depth one conducted by Sean T Collins at The Comics Journal

(7.1) image attribution

The header image is from the cover of the Hidden Fortress's anthology Monster.

All other images are from either Sad Sex or Exorcise.

my dead eyed muse

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Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945

Ernie Bushmiller

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Daniel Clowes introduction to Nancy is Happy is quite possibly the oddest introduction i’ve ever come across. I try not to read introductions until after finishing the book, because far more often than not they act more as postscripts than introductions. Peter Bagge spoils his own work in Buddy Does Jersey for christs sake. The exception to this rule is comic strips, especially pre-1960 strips, where historical contextualization and author biographies tend to enrich the reading experience by a significant degree. Finding out that Roy Crane road the rails in college only helps you appreciate Captain Easy constantly ending up in the back of a train car in a last moment narrow escape. Due to most strips of the times gag a day nature, along with the repetition of adventure strips, any reference to future events in the strips at most causes minor “spoilers” of little to no significance.

Clowes’s introduction though does none of this. It doesn’t do 

much of anything really. It, in conjunction with the introduction that follows it by a “Fantagraphics Editor”, argues that Nancy is devoid of contextualization. That any knowledge of Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller as a human being outside of the fact that he drew Nancy for the period of time being covered in this book, is unnecessary and may, in some ways, be detrimental to the reading experience.The only thing that either introduction does is state that Nancy is a comic which can be read in hundreds of different ways and in each one still be funny. It can be read as a hacked out syndicate strip made up of gags pilfered from old joke books, just as easily as it can be read as a subversive comedy on American morals. Both arguments have equally merit, dozens of others also, even Clowes speaks briefly about going through multiple periods in which he enjoyed the strip for diametrically different reason (most gravitate between genuine enjoyment and ironic distancing), but at no point did he ever stop enjoying Nancy.

When I first read this introduction I was struck by how lazy it seemed, why not get Jeet Heer or R.C. Harvey to write an actual intro and move Clowes’s “essay” to the backmatter, so that they could still slap his name on the solicitation, while also having an “actual” intro in the front. But then I started to read Nancy and was left looking at a strip that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Nancy is funny, but it’s not funny in the same way as say Peanuts, which covers much of the same material (children and childhood). Peanuts has rules to it’s universe, it is clearly a story told by an adult about children; even if the parents never appear on panel.

Bushmiller though revels in the absurdism of childhood. Where Schultz (and later Bill Watterson) make allusions to great literature, famous symphonies, or have their child stand-ins wax poetically about the meaning of life, Bushmiller is more interested in creating farce.In Bushmiller’s most high minded and allusionary strips he places Nancy in the role of an attempted-Modernist painter. While other strip artists may want to speak of the various critical theories of the artistic movement, Bushmiller simply has Nancy view the art as a child would, looking at the pieces in the museum and in her mind believing she could create that. What follows are five days of silliness as Nancy attempts a series of get rich quick schemes across every art gallery in town.

Unlike most other old gag strips, where several basic set ups and concepts are repeated but spaced out sporadically, (like Charlie Browns neverending quest to kick the football) Bushmiller attacks each subject over the course of a weeks worth of strips. This seems to give a large amount of weight to the argument of Bushmiller gathered his gags out of a joke book, since the repetition of jokes reads more like a chapter out of a joke book than an exploration of an idea at first. But it is in this repetition,day after day, that Bushmiller is hammering home his concepts. Something that, if stretched out months in time, he could not have properly communicated. 

The most interesting, and often repeated, of these sets of strips deal with World War 2. Where strips of the time, like Roy Cranes Buz Sawyer, took great pains to show the homefront living in pre-war normalcy Nancy makes a point of showing the wars effects on the citizens living stateside. And while the premise of many of these gags seem trivial, Nancy and Aunt Fritz scrambling to find additional ration cards for stockings and shoes is an often repeated premise, the presence of that want underlies something that many strips of the era chose to overlook. It chips away at, however little, the veneer of normalcy perpetuated by the government at the time.

Nancy also takes great pains to explore the idea of wartime propaganda and its ability to instill fear in the populace. Like Joseph McCarthy saw communism on every corner during his red scare, Nancy sees Nazism everywhere. A cranky neighbor that refuses to buy war stamps is not simply an old crank, but rather, as only Nancy is able to discern, a Nazi. Nancy is able to surmise this not through anything as adult as evidence, but by the mans homes striking resemblance to the fuhrer. That many of these scenes take place immediately following Nancy and Sluggo reading posters put up by the war department is not a coincidence. The sincerity of childhood doesn’t allow Nancy to scoff at a poster declaring “Save Your Country’s Tires / Broken Glass Helps The Axis!” just as fear blinds many to the absurdity of propaganda; so that when Nancy sees a bottle shatter in the street after being thrown out of a window the pattern that the broken glass invariably leaves is that of a swastika.

These sets of strips although do have a problematic aspect. The final strip in each series has a tendency to involve Nancy & Sluggo actively advocating for the destruction of Japan. While the military aspects of the war in Europe are largely ignored, Bushmiller repeatedly makes allusions towards the destruction of Japan. These range from Sluggo blowing the island nation off of the globe with a firecracker to Nancy excitedly spraying poison gas on the Japanese Beetles that inhabit her garden.(Nancy has, in lieu of notches, etchings of the Japanesse flag on her poison sprayer for each insect killed). This particular ire towards Japan is not unique to Nancy, racial caricatures of the Japanese and a sense of vendetta runs throughout countless strips of the time, but it stands out so pointedly in Nancy because it comes out of seemingly nowhere. In a strip that is so critical of propaganda it turns a particularly uncritical and blemished eye towards Japan and Asia at large.  

This racial problem is also compounded by Foy Foy, Nancy's friend of Asian ancestry. With Foy Foy, as with Japan, you see Bushmiller's hand creeping into the world of Nancy. And this incursion is not for the better of the work, as Bushmiller infuses his own prejudices onto a world that seems unwanting of them. Of the five strips that Foy Foy appears in two have punchlines centered around slanted eyes, two more are given over to mocking his language and the fifth shows him exterminating Japanese Beatles with Nancy. 

Nancy is quite clearly Bushmiller, but while for the majority of the collection she feels like her own separate entity it is in these twenty or so strips that you are reminded that this little girl is the creation of a middle aged man.

CAB, CAB, CAB.

This is a complete list of exhibitors attending CAB. At least to my knowledge. Underneath some exhibitors I highlighted new books of theirs that i think would be worth at least skimming through if you come across them at the show

I'll likely be adding onto this list over the course of the week as i come across new stuff. Recommendations are welcome, since i have a tendency to miss out on at least two or three major books each show out of sheer ignorance.

Media Consumed In The Month Of October

Comics

Beauty - Kerascoet & Hubert

Slow Graffiti - Noah Van Sciver

Blonde Copra - Jonny Negron

The Mysterious Underground Men - Osamu Tezuka

My Name Is Martin Shears - Andrew White

The Adventures of Venus - Gilbert Hernandez

Spacehawk - Basil Wolverton

Schizo #4 - Ivan Brunetti

Misery Loves Comedy - Ivan Brunetti

Dominic Fortune: MAX - Howard Chaykin

Caliban - Garth Ennis / Facundo Percio

Escapo - Paul Pope

Weapons of Mass Diplomacy - Abel Lanzac / Christophe Blain

Tokyo Zombie - Yusaku Hanakuma

Dogs and Water - Anders Nilsen

Blacksad: Amarillo

Girl - Peter Milligan / Duncan Fegredo

Movies

Scream 2

Boardwalk Empire Seasons: 3,4,& 5

Harmontown

Crash

The House of the Devil

Vivre Sa Vie

Brooklyn

New Girl Season: 3

Listen Up Phillip

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

Halloween: Resurrection

Scary Movie 2

Hellraiser: Hellworld

The Purge: Anarchy

What If

Snowpiercer

Books

Wolf in White Van 

{Scattershot 6}

Webcomics

Don’t Leave Me Alone and Semi-Vivi by GG along with Gloria Rivera’s White Hot

where my big takeaways from the Comics Workbook competition this year. I am glad both artists won. You can view all the other winners, along with the special mentions, here.

Chris Ware is up to page six (seven if you count the prologue) on his weekly webcomic The Last Saturday. It feels very Rust Brown to me right now, which i take to mean it feels like a Chris Ware comic.

Julia Gfrorer teams up with Sean T. Collins again, this time in an exploration of what lies under the sea. You can read Why We Fear The Ocean here.

Andrew White posted his new comic Waylaid  on Tumbler. White’s has been making massive strides between comics recently. White also posted a link to where you can read all of his comics, which includes several hundreds of pages worth of free material.

Emily Carroll has a new webcomic up. Based on her previous work I assume it is scary.

Angie Wang post a one page comic that she did for Cicada Magazine that is simply gorgeous.

Interviews

Chris Mautner conducted a career spanning interview with Michel Fiffe. I really enjoy reading Fiffe talk about old comics.

Katie Skelly posted a transcript of the panel she moderated at SPX Sex, Humor and the Grotesque which included Eleanor Davis, Julia Gfrorer and Meghan Turbitt. (The second half of that talk, where Skelly moved away from individual artists talking about their work and into a general discussion was particularly interesting.)

I liked this section from Gfrorer:

“Well, first, of the staining thing, a lot of my work is preoccupied with residue, evidence of non-physical experiences and how it kind of erupts through to become manifest. I suppose the one-sidedness of it… there’s definitely always an examination of different types of power dynamics. Partly I think because I’m not writing about it for fun. I’m not writing about sex for it to be fun, like, “Hey guys, did you know sex is really fun? Surprise!” That’s not productive, to me. I want to find the thing that is challenging. And something like this, where it’s erotic, it could be read as porn, but to use this awful word, “problematic” … it’s problematic. And I don’t want there to be a comfortable place where you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to know how you feel about it, because I hate that.”

Blaise Larmee was interviewed by Nicole Reber. From interviews and talks i’ve seen done with Larmee he has a very calculated mischievous side, which you can see sparks of here, but luckily it is reigned in enough to still be fully readable. (Larmee has a tendincey to deliberately tank interviews, which while enjoyable on some level aren't always the funnest thing to read.)

Anne Ishii interviews Jillian Tamaki on various things including her newest book This One Summer.

“AI:  What’s the color psychology there? You just said that the purple harkens back to vintage manga.

JT: Not in any symbolic way. I mean, Rose reads manga and she is a manga fan because she’s like… 12. But I just thought it made the book feel a little warmer. Plus it looked different and unusual. Just on a formal level, it adds something undefinable—something nostalgic and a little bit warm.”

Vice interviews Breakdown Press, which seems to be stepping into the void left by Picturebox. At least with there continuation of Ryan Holmberg’s vintage manga line. (The only reason i’ve yet to read their output is shipping costs, hopefully CAB resolves this problem.)

Cynthia Rose profiles Nine Antico, who i have never heard of before this but based on the artwork shown I should immediately become acquainted with.

John Porcellino interviewed by TJC.

Essays

Ryan Holmberg produced another giant essay on early manga, this time on Matsumoto Masahiko and his role in the creation of Komaga (“panel pictures”) which was the basis (or as Holmerg make the case for, ripped off version of) Gekiga. After the first page it turns into a biography and critical evaluation of Masahiko and his place in manga history.

This old Frank Santoro piece on Comics Comics where he talks about Chester Brown (in particular Yummy Fur #19, #20 & #21) shift from the six panel grid to something more organic was really interesting.

Blaise Larmee and his thoughts on the artists role in art.

Jeet Heer reviews a new book on the origins of Wonder Woman. Those early Marston comics (or as the book make clear Marston/Holloway/Byrne comics) always seemed like the most interesting things to come out of the golden age of comics. At least when it comes to gender and sexuality.

Misc.

Every Chris Ware New Yorker cover. Most of what i’ve read concerning Moley’s editorial process surrounding New Yorker covers, and why i assume so many comic artists seem to draw them, is that each cover has to tell a complete story on its own. What is interesting with Ware’s covers are that while each of them tell their own story, when they are groped like this they begin to tell a greater narrative between them. Shifting in and out of generational perspectives and the role technology place within each. A few of these comprised Acme Novelty 18.5 so i assume Ware thought so to.

CAB is Pre-Selling tickets for their sunday panel schedules. Tickets are free so i assume this has more to do with making everything orderly, along with them not having a big enough venue for some of the talks.

Issue Six of Comics Workbook Magazine was announced as debuting at CAB. I’m glad that i’ve yet to see one of those issues where i’ve heard of more than half of the titles or artists being discussed.

Bleeding Cool ran a piece on how Zero #11 was rejected from Apples comics service presumably because of the opening sex scene. Which is stupid. What is also stupid is that Bleeding Cool picked the one panel in that opening sequence without any genetalia in it (the image they chose had a reaction shot covering Zero’s dicks while it was going into Siobhan’s mouth, which seemed oddly joke-y to me in the comic let alone in a article about its cencorship). Comics Alliance does this also, even post-AOL, where they discuss Apples prudishness towards sex while also displaying their own sites prudishness towards sex. Bleeding Cool being run by Avatar Comics makes the whole thing even more confusing. I’m not sure where this is going, i think i’d just like to see more dicks in comics.

In more dicks in comics related news though Fantagraphics put up a 16-page preview of Massive there anthology of “gay erotic manga”. Like its spiritual predecessor The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame there seems to be a heavy amount of scholarly and biographical information being included about each contributor, which was one of the strongest parts of the Tagame book.