Cartoonisiada August 20th - October 2nd, 2004

Opening reception: Fri, August 20th, 4-6pm
Open daily thereafter, Monday through Saturday 12:00 noon to 5:30pm. Closed Sundays.

Jack Kirby, David Wojnarowicz, Kim Deitch, Danny Hellman, Leslie Sternbergh, Seth Tobocman, Anton Van Dalen, Calvin Reid, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, Ivan Brandon Miles Gunter andÊAndy MacDonald

Curated by Joseph Fumetti

The rough and crowded neighborhoods of Manhattan's East Village and Lower East Side, referred to in Spanish as Loisiada, have given rise to many of the most important movements and innovative individuals in every discipline of American culture; the range of immigrant cultures in the neighborhood provide anyone who experiences living there a microcosm of the entire world and a wealth of real human drama and interaction from which to gather inspiration. Any history of the creative dynamism of the EV/LES would not be complete without noting the contributions of generations of comic book and strip artists that have lived and worked there since Wm. Randolph Hearst facilitated the newspaper strip form in the early years of the 20th Century.

Comics are a medium of graphic storytelling. The art is at the service of the story and vice-versa. It can be a collaborative effort, but also is frequently the most solitary of endeavors. It takes an incredible amount of dedication to produce even one complete work of any quality.

Jack Kirby is foremost among all American comic artists, the fierce vitality and visionary sci-fi invention of his art became the model for heroic comic art, and remains so to this day. He invented a profusion of enduring comics concepts, and pioneered such comics genres as romance. His prolific production for nearly every comics publisher is legendary; his page count at Marvel Comics alone was 10,000. ÊÊ Throughout his 50 year career Kirby was in thrall to publishers and work-for-hire contracts. The huge volume of characters and books he invented are owned by conglomerates, with very few instances of royalty considerations. Today, the X-Men and Hulk movies have earned millions of dollars; yet although Kirby conceived these characters and many more in feature development, his family receives no income from these films. His last years were consumed with a battle to regain his original artwork from the company he to a large part made, Marvel Comics, but his fights for creator's rights eventually led directly to fundamental changes in the way comics companies treat their talent.

Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg in a tenement at 76 Suffolk Street in 1917, and attended school at PS 160, the home of Artist's Alliance. Although his mastery of explosive, muscular action was surely a result of his experience as an infantry scout for Patton's Army in World War 2, his childhood in the Lower East Side informed his work from the beginning, and is overtly visible in the pieces included in this show, some of his last works in comics before his death in 1993.

Kirby's drawing of Delancey Street from "Street Code" a short autobiographical story commissioned by Richard Kyle for Argosy Vol. 2, has the weight and power of all his drawings, but reaches deeper to communicate his memory directly to the viewer.

The page from "The Hunger Dogs" is simultaneously indicative of the best and worst business, editorial and production aspects of commercial comics.

Kirby created his New Gods trilogy of titles for DC Comics in the early Ô70s, but all were canceled within two years. DC owned these characters outright according to the standard contracts of that time. In 1980, as a gesture to Kirby's importance DC offered him an unprecedented deal in which he redesigned his New Gods characters for use in film and merchandizing, and then was given a portion of the royalties generated by these properties. DC reprinted his original series, and for the last issue Kirby was asked to complete his complicated epic---in twenty four pages. Unfortunately, his original climactic story "On the Road to Armagetto", inked by Kirby's favorite finisher of his pencil drawings, Mike Royer, was rejected by DC editors. Most of the pages were eventually altered and incorporated into a graphic novel, "The Hunger Dogs", with new pages inked by D. Bruce Berry. Editorial snafus resulted in badly resized pages which Kirby then had to add borders to, these were inked by Berry; then Greg Theakston was given the entire package to color, but also reinked passages on many pages.

The art in this show from the original story is yet unpublished in that form. It depicts the moment when the long-oppressed Lowlies of Armagetto on the hellish planet Apokolips finally erupt with rage in a scene prescient of the riots and demos revolving around Tompkins Square Park and it's homeless population in the 1990s.

In the 1960s artists began to break from the commercial system to create more personal, uncensored expressions, with a wider range of subject matter, albeit in black and white because of limited funding.

Kim Deitch was in the first wave of underground cartoonists and has proved to be an influential force to succeeding generations of alternative cartoonists. Living on Avenue A in 1968 he drew the page in this show, which was published in the East Village Other. He succeeded Vaughn Bode an editor of the legendary comic tabloid Gothic Blimp Works. Deitch's graphic novel "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" is a metaphysical examination of the animation industry, starring his ubiquitous, disturbing cat Waldo. Deitch convincingly builds a world of emotionally charged anthropomorphic cartoon characters, ever more obsessively rendered and transgressive panel structures, and surreal, deconstructive plot twists; in a masterpiece of comic art.

The quality of painstaking illumination and personal effort is a thread that starts at the dawn of newspaper comics and leads through comic book artists like Kirby, to Deitch, Robert Crumb, Jaxon and Art Speigelman, and to today's alternative comics movement.

Leslie Sternbergh is a celebrity of the downtown art scene and a beloved figure in the NYC comics scene. She encouraged much-needed networking among artists with her East Village comics parties in the 1980s. ÊÊ Sternbergh invests her incredibly detailed, dense and miasmic comics with an underpinning of realism, and has been featured in many alternative and commercial publications such as Mad Magazine, Vogue, and the collection "Dori Stories" which documents the life and work of her friend, the late cartoonist Dori Seda.

Danny Hellman is an incisive draftsman of a bizarre, distorted humour, and a ringleader of filth and ferment in the NYC comics community. "Dirty Danny's" lawsuit battles with adversary cartoonist Ted Rall made national news, spawning Hellman's two "Legal Action Comics" tomes, a virtual pantheon of alternative talent; and he has for years organized his annual, inclusive comics show; at Max Fish, more recently CBGBs. Hellman has chosen to represent himself here with his work for Screw magazine, which has the distinction of being, for all it's faults in taste, the first home and final refuge of a preponderance of budding and ebbing cartoonists.

Seth Tobocman's work is synonymous with NYC's leftist activism. Tobocman, with Christof Kohlhofer and Peter Kuper, was a founder of World War 3 Illustrated, a LES/EV-based collective political comics magazine published since 1979. His opus "War In The Neighborhood" recounts with graphic and storytelling ingenuity his travails in the local squatter and homeless rights movements. The ABC referred to on the page in this show was the ABC Center, the city-owned, abandoned, shooting-gallery for junkies old PS building on East 4th Street which had been taken by Tompkins Square Park's homeless Tent City organization as one of several practical if symbolic alternatives to the dismal NYC shelter system. The building was retaken by force, by the city government of that time after a series of tragically absurd confrontations.

James Romberger's comics work fuses gritty cinematics with expressive realism. Marguerite Van Cook's writing shows her semiotic authority, and her innovative coloring pushes the edges of psychologically saturated modernism. Romberger and Van Cook began their semi-autobiographical sci-fi serial strip "Ground Zero" in the East Village Eye in 1983, and have contributed to Marvel, DC, Image, and many alternative titles, in addition to producing their critical journal Comic Art Forum. They collaborated with East Village renaissance man and AIDS activist the late David Wojnarowicz on the critically acclaimed graphic novel "Seven Miles a Second". "The Forgotten Ones" is from an aborted project about the Daniel Rakowitz case written by Van Cook, penciled by Romberger, and inked by Amelia Faulkner.

Writers Ivan Brandon and Miles Gunter, and artist Andy MacDonald produce a monthly comic published by Image Comics. "NYC Mech" is slices of noir life in a Manhattan populated by unselfconscious robots, often set against the backdrop of the LES/EV. Brandon, Gunter and MacDonald represent a new generation of commercial comics talent who have ownership and creative control of their concepts; and also are able to utilize the new technologies available in color printing.

Calvin Reid incorporates some motifs and surface characteristics from comics into large ink drawings which seethe with a profusion of multiple encoded graphic and language layers. His works can be "read" in a sense, there is an interaction of word and image. A longtime LES resident, and fervent advocate of the graphic storytelling medium; in his capacity as an editor of Publisher's Weekly Reid has been a vital force in the assimilation of comics into bookstores.

Anton Van Dalen is a revered LES artist and a former associate of Saul Steinberg who has guided countless young cartoonists as a teacher at NYC's School of Visual Arts. Van Dalen's elegant linear icons of Loisiada graced early issues of World War 3, and his more recent gallery openings are narrative performances in which he interacts with his drawings and constructions.

Apart from both men's LES/EV and comics community ties, Reid and Van Dalen's inclusion in the context of this exhibition is offered as clues to the potential evolution of comic art and storytelling aspects into gallery formats.

These artists who have been shaped by this neighborhood represent the best qualities of a truly American art; the spirit of dedication, collaboration, and community striving that is also a hallmark of our part of New York City.

NYC 2004

Joseph Fumetti is a screenwriter, art critic and comics afficianado who writes for Comic Art Forum and splits his time between the LES/EV and Brussels, Belgium.