Berserker Magazine

• I finally saw Avengers Assemble yesterday and loved it, which is why I’ll be matching the price of my ticket with a donation to the Hero Initiative.  If you’re as horrified by Marvel’s treatment of the artists that brought them the success they have today as I am then I urge you to consider doing the same.  Here’s Tom Spurgeon with his reasons for donating, as well as some very rad Jack Kirby artwork.

• Speaking of Kirby, here’s a great piece by his son Neal on growing up with the king of comics.

• At the other end of the spectrum, here’s a hilarious piece on Kirby’s very brief stint making sex comics.

• Drawn & Quarterly’s photo round-up from this weekend’s Toronto Comics Art Festival is typically entertaining.  TCAF remains one of the very best comics festivals in the calendar.

• Hopefully, the upcoming, significantly more local East London Comics & Arts Festival will live up to its namesake. 

• The guys from Secret Acres air their very reasonable complaints about the way the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival is run on their blog, which makes particularly interesting reading coming on the heels of this extensive report on MoCCA’s first ten years of operation at The Comics Journal.

• The excellent Charles Foreman has put together a very welcome list of online stores that stock mini-comics, which he calls Muster List.

• Ng Suat Tong of The Hooded Utilitarian has put out a call for nominations for the best comics criticism of 2012.  The Hooded Utilitarian guys are famously (and welcomely) harsh critics, so I look forward to seeing the results of the survey at the end of the year.

• Speaking of which, the HU’s Noah Berlatsky justifiably rips apart Guy Deslile’s award-winning Jerusalem for Splice Today.

• R.C. Harvey has a great article about the legacy of Nancy cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller up at The Comics Journal.

• This extensive Katsuhiro Otomo exhibition in Tokyo looks incredible.

• It turns out Shia LaBeouf makes experimental comics and they’re actually pretty good.  Who knew?  Well, predictably enough, Sean T. Collins did so he interviewed LeBeouf for Rolling Stone and reviewed his minis at The Comics Journal.

• You can read the whole first issue of Michael DeForge’s Kid Mafia online for the practically non-existent price of 50¢, so you should go do that.

• This two-parter for Vice is possibly my favourite ever Jonny Negron strip, particularly the second half.

• The Centre for Cartoon Studies, in association with The National Cartoonists Society, have put together the very nicely designed newspaper comic, Comics Crier, which you can read for free here.  The theme is sadness, but the lineup of contributors is only makin’ me happy.

• Much like her own comics, Jillain Tamaki’s Archie in Fairyland mashups are hilarious, sad and creepy in equal measure.

• This should not be as cool to me as it is.

• and finally, the beloved illustrator, cartoonist and commentator Maurice Sendak has passed away at the age of 83.  You can read Philip Nel’s obituary as well as a number of tributes at The Comics Journal.

Aorta Burst is a new London-based film club dedicated to screening bizarre and wonderful movies from around the world that are less well known than your usual cult or alternative fare.

This Saturday, as our late-notice, prenatal, part #0 event, we’ll be showing William Peter Blatty’s incredible Ninth Configuration at the Roxy bar in Borough.  It’ll be absolutely free, so if you’re in the area and you give a fuck about film, you gotta come down.

See here for more information, or email us at editors@berserkermagazine.com

Simon & Tom

Andy Hope 1930 is a Berlin based artist who formerly operated under the name Andreas Hofer.  In 2010 he adopted the alias Andy Hope 1930 in tribute to “the rise of the comic book as a mass medium and the abandonment of suprematism and Russian constructivism.”  He works in a variety of media, from drawing and painting to collage and installation, using iconography sampled from classic literature, science fiction, superheroes and mythology.  In this second instalment in a series of interviews exploring the interface between comics and fine art, Kirk Lake spoke with Andy Hope 1930 on the eve of the launch of his Medley Tour London exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London.

BERSERKER  I’d like to ask a little about your introduction to comics.  Did you read them as a child?  Can you remember any that you particularly connected with?

ANDY HOPE 1930  I first came into contact with comics as a child when a friend of my mother gave me American comics like Superman and Batman.  At that time I couldn’t read them but I was immediately attracted to the images, especially to the movements of the figures, the distorted perspectives and the speed they evoked.

BERSERKER  There are recurrent superhero motifs within your work, whether they be appropriated images from comic books, hand-drawn superheroes, collage or even symbolic batwings on a wardrobe.  How does the superhero fit in with your art practice?  What is it representing?

ANDY HOPE 1930  My superhero-related work is not about superpower.  If you look at my superheroes, not so much in the collages but in the paintings, you will discover mostly figures that are deranged or broken, some of them even seem to fall apart or they blend with other characters.  For example in the series of paintings called  ‘Robin Dostoyevsky’ I created a queer character wearing a cape and an ancient dress mixing Robin, the helpful young fellow of Batman and often discussed as his secret gay friend, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose works represents the dangerous stream of dramatic feelings.  Another aspect I’m very much interested in is the role of the superhero as a medium of propaganda during the Second World War.   The Superheroes are an archetype, simple cultural icons, but they are indeed very complex characters which allow a wide range of readings and rewritings.  It’s really not about keeping the figure intact or fetishising them.

BERSERKER  Post-pop, the language of comics and the appropriation of comic book motifs require more than the simple reframing of a low-brow form into a gallery space.  Artists like Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Grayson Perry and others have engaged with the language of comics in a way that is far more intellectually vigorous than merely blowing up a panel of comic art to gallery size.  Do you feel any affinity to those or other artists?

ANDY HOPE 1930  I would add Raymond Pettibon, but then I have to mention William Blake first, because I actually knew Blake’s art long before Pettibon’s.  For me there was already Blake as a reference for how to integrate writing and drawing, and Blake had these figures that reminded me of superheroes or other comic strip heroes.  I am using figures from comic strips as characters that live in a media, in an imaginary or artificial world and I am also taking this specific ‘sound’ from these sources.  For example the colours or a certain artificial appearance that, I think, is the ‘flesh’ of these beings.  So it is not only about a certain set of figuration; it is also their look that has an influence on my way of using colours and matter.

BERSERKER  Are you still reading comics now?  Any particular favourites?

ANDY HOPE 1930  To be surrounded by comics is part of my life. But of course my interests shifted from reading them from beginning to end to a more ‘research’ way of reception.  I still try to get everything by Steve Ditko and Wally Wood but I also like Daniel Clowes very much, Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar.  I also got have some very interesting comic history collections like Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s-2000s and  From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books.  Other books I read recently include The Adventures of Unemployed Man, Ray Bradbury comics by Al Williamson, Kent Williams and Craig Russell, Phantom reprints, Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives and DC Elseworlds #1.

BERSERKER  As far as I’m aware from your work, you are yet to explore a sequential picture narrative although many of the paintings or drawings look like they could have been lifted from a longer story.  Do you have any interest in working on a longer form comics story?

ANDY HOPE 1930  I’m not so much interested in the narrative aspect of comics but more in the visual style, the writing, the title, the graphic design.  Also my work itself frequently develops as series of installative disposals, but not in a narrative sense.  I’ve done some sequential works though that oscillate between comics and storyboards, but they are rare exceptions.

BERSERKER  What can you tell me about your upcoming London show?

ANDY HOPE 1930  Medley Tour London is the second location of the Medley Tour which started in Hannover at the Kestnerg Gesellschaft at the end of February.  Simply speaking, the Medleys are iconographic appropriations, blendings and modifications of my visual vocabulary, which is of course in itself based on appropriations, blendings and modifications of already existing images.  In London I will show the ‘X-Medleys,’ a continuation of the Medleys in which I explicitly adopt works from modernism (Picabia, Klee, Rodtschenko), contemporary art and popular culture including abstract comic images by Steve Ditko and submit them through a process of revision, erosion and dislocation.  For me it’s about keeping the perspective on my earlier works as well as on the appropriated references as movable as possible.  Nothing is fixed.

Medley Tour London runs at Hauser & Wirth in West London until May 26th.

Kirk Lake

Until the 20th of May, the wonderful Belgian Comic Strip Centre in Brussels is hosting an exhibition entitled 77 Years of Romanian Comics.  Curated by cartoonist and street artist Alexandru Ciubotariu, the gallery provides a glimpse into the creative history of a country whose relationship to art has frequently been stymied by outside influence.

Beginning with a few examples of pre-World War II strips, a political cartoon and some simple American-influenced pages, it is soon apparent that much of the work from this period has, understandably, been lost.  Under Communist rule the production of comics was banned between 1948 and 1955, and even subsequently only tales for children and pre-approved classical texts were deemed suitable subject matter.  Mention is made in the exhibition literature that those who refused to conform to these standards were exiled, and special attention is paid to Livia Rusz who went so far as to travel by foot to neighbouring Hungary to escape the Communist government’s constraints.  The exhibition contains only one piece of Rusz’s work though, giving little insight into a woman who, in fact, had had a remarkable career.  It’s a pity that this disparity is mirrored throughout the exhibition as Ciubotariu has put together a show that greatly rewards deeper examination and further research.  It struck me that while passing through the exhibition the vast majority of people spent no longer than a few moments casting their eyes over the works on display, but for me, viewing a page from Radu Catanichiu’s ‘Taxi’ was akin to discovering a secret document from some rejected Eastern European offshoot of Heavy Metal; an affecting treasure I was thankful to have stopped to look at. 

The exhibition, partly due to the language barrier, partly the spatial allocation of the works and partly the sheer volume of artists involved, is a fascinatingly inaccessible affair.  This is not necessarily a criticism, but having traversed the extensively documented history of Belgian comics in the main part of the museum, (including the entirety of Andre Franquin’s career, about whom I knew nothing prior to the visit but now feel I could carry a conversation on), the startling thing about 77 Years of Romanian Comics is how little you are given to go on when it comes to post-Communist work.  No creator appears twice, their work framed seemingly at random with others within a narrow corridor or placed alone without context.  Perhaps this is just representative of the nature of the Romanian comics scene, but the lack of accompanying notes among these later artworks makes it impossible to tell, and the impression is given that, as with the artists themselves, it’s up to you to invest the effort in appraising these works.

The restrictions placed on Romanian cartoonists for so long have meant that after the revolution of 1989 there is no clear style or influence at work.   There are pages here from 1989 up to 2011, but much of it is impossible to date visually, displaying an unhinged creativity and showing that Romanian cartoonists have not only shed their shackles but also their clothes, and are dressing up in whatever they see fit regardless of established fashions.  What at first seems like a haphazard arrangement of random pages, by the end of the exhibition struck me as an inspiringly diverse collection of united creators relishing the opportunity to have their works shown to a new audience.  Ciubotariu, as well as Dodo Nita who heads up the Romanian Association of Comics Enthusiasts and published a book on the topic (sadly not in English), deserve a lot of credit for attempting to unify the Romanian comics scene under one banner with no financial upside.  This frequently puzzling exhibition imbued me with a powerful desire to further investigate the recesses of Romanian comics, but the real charm of this show is its chaotic creativity.  Brussels is a city with great pockets of independent spirit that rewards those who seek them out, and the art on show here was certainly worth my time.  I left brimming with a rogue spirit to produce work that would be its own reward. 

77 Years of Romanian Comics  runs until May 20^th at the Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussles.

Joe Mulleady