"From Comix to Critique" is the slogan of Real Comet Press, which is the current retrospective show at the Fantagraphics Store and Gallery in Georgetown, featuring original art, graphics novels, and design work from artists such as Lynda Barry, Michael Dougan, Art Chantry, and Ruth Hayes. This Saturday, March 24 {at the same location} author Susan E. Kirtley discusses her book on Lynda Barry, subtitled Girlhood Through The Looking Glass. She will be interviewed by Cathy Hillenbrand, and an informal reception and signing will follow the live discussion. 

Kirtley is associate professor of English at Portland State University, and it's excellent she chose Barry as her subject -- she was the original "emotionally-socially tortured adolescent gal comics" star, her shattered, visually shivering odes to insecurity, anxiety, and the absurd abuses of the universe as charming and real-life ring true as any work by (colleagues) Matt Groening and Harvey Pekar. Regular readers of her cartoon in rock tabloid The Rocket were hooked for all time to her nervous, under-the-skin style of confession and observation. Kirtley's book is part of the University Press of Mississippi’s Great Comics Artists Series, which also includes works on Chris Ware, Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Jack Kirby, Garry Trudeau, and Walt Kelly.

So, just to recap: it's all going on this Saturday, March 24, 6:00 PM, at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery on 1201 S. Vale Street (at Airport Way S).

Also, don't forget that the Emerald City Comic Convention is coming up the weekend after this one -- and Fantagraphics will be there too, along with Seatte's own Jake Stratton hosting a nerd family feud gala event, some geek rock music, mook nihilsts testing out their military gaming skills, and maybe the same gaggle of fully decked Stormship Troopers and fully pierced Suicide Girls who collided into each other on the dealer's floor when I was there a couple of years ago (ah, good times). 

Here's a FBI press release lot of what I'm going for (and please note the further Lynda Barry tie-in at the bottom):

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In the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to put together a list of some things I've been reading (and coveting) lately - as well as things on my own wish list - that would make great literary gifts for friends and family this year. 

I heartily recommend you head to the local book store near you (may I suggest Queen Anne Books, Elliot Bay, or the UW Book store? Cinema Books on Roosevelt is also an excellent store for movie books - and a "dig through the stacks and explore" kind of place) to pick up a few of these: 

MOVIES!

Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly
Our own Chris Estey wrote about how awesome this is earlier this year, and omfg. It IS. Every single movie with any appearance by a punk rocker is detailed within. This book is one of my greatest treasures…and I haven't even gotten past the first 20 pages. Its completeness is amazing, and the reviews/descriptions of the movies are hilarious. I LOVE IT. And I have some half-assed notion of renting all the movies in it that I haven't seen - who wants to dare me? 

Deep Focus Books - Heathers, They Live, and Lethal Weapon 
When Soft Skull press announced Deep Focus last year I was SO EXCITED. These books are like the movie version of the 33 and 1/3 series. I currently have They Live and Heathers in my collection, and am excited to add more. In addition to the ones listed above, they also have The Sting, Death Wish, and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (WHAT) available. 

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TIG readers won't be surprised there are two adorable new books out from Seattle-snared, world-shaking Fantagraphics. As the world's foremost glossy-n-generous "boutique label" of classic comics reprints (Peanuts, Dennis The Menace, Krazy Kat), and the publishing patron of local and international graphic novel geniuses like Jim Woodring, Megan Kelso, the Hernandez Brothers (Love & Rockets), and many others, we're all up on it. Even those not much into "sequential art" love to hype out along with all the fine arts, middlebrow marauders, and indie rock stars enrolled in their various ranks of production and promoting the product itself (galleries, album covers, et al).

Meanwhile, beyond just knowing the importance of the imprint, where would a good place for a DIY-loving potential fan-person start to read something more like an illustrated 'zine or chapbook, less like a 3-D blockbuster? Well, Leslie Stein is a young lady out of Brooklyn, NY who has been crafting literary/illustrative dub versions of her tastes and trials and laying them out in meticulously crafted yet still oodles-of-eye-fun anecdotes and tall tales. Fanta has collected them all into Eye Of The Majestic, a big-sized anthology of her work, with color covers and B&W insides and a whole lot of heart reproduced superbly for proper long-term keeping.

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Touch and Go is a long-running, incredible indie label that -- like Sub Pop! -- started off as a punk-inspired fanzine. Tonight, Friday, April 8, the original cult artist leader behind the small press publication, Tesco Vee, will be having a meet and greet reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore on Cap Hill with his OG hardcore outfit, The Meatmen.

That veteran band of foul-minded scamps will be playing later that night at El Corazon. But for those zine-freaks who like me drooled over the near-600 page republication of the actual inside of T&G issues, Touch And Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-83, the early evening celebration will be a must-attend. The glorious historical tome was put out by Bazillion Points Books last summer, and I hyped it hard over at the KEXP Blog at the end of the year.

As their Facebook tour promo puts it: "For the entire month of April 2011, Tesco will be terrorizing West Coast book and record stores by day, telling the tales of Rollins, MacKaye, Danzig, and the dawn of the hardcore punk; and by night showing grimy punk dives how it’s done with full-color four-dimensional performances by Detroit daddies The Meatmen."

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This is last minute notice, but for original punk rock fans the Experience Music Project tonight is hosting the reading of three really great writers from that musical genre in their JBL Theater (starts at 7pm and it's free!).

Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys will be reading from one of my favorite books of last year, A Dead Boy's Tale From The Front Lines of Punk Rock. Chrome was a reckless renegade on the emergent margins of the Ohio-into-NYC first wave punk scene back in the 70s, and it was against all odds that he would come up with one of the most readable, empathetic, and clever summations of the period and lifestyle.

Also on board tonight is The Pagans' own Mike Hudson, whose Diary Of A Punk is also one of the very best North American punk memoirs I've read, and I regret I've never been able to do a more extensive write up on it. The Pagans are one of those truly underground rock bands your raw power heroes have plenty of vinyl classics from, even if you may not have heard them yet. Like Chrome's autobiography, Diary doesn't flinch from the crime, grime, gashes, grit, and spit of the daily life of OG punk rockers setting a bonfire out in the heartland. Trust me, you'd much rather hear their (vividly told) tales than another spoken word performance/comedy set/political harangue by Henry Rollins or Jello Biafra (no offense, but this is truly a special night).

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Guest Editor Ann Powers opens the book with a powerful introduction that (forgive the pun) strikes a chord in the reader and emphasizes the fact that although the world of criticism and analysis is often thought of as exclusive, music is still an inclusive, uniting force:

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Christopher Knowles is the author of the recently published book The Secret History of Rock 'N' Roll, which ties the rock-era music scene back to mystery cults formed "since the Stone Age." Christmastime is a festive season when we party hard, glory vicariously in exciting fables, and when some of us even shove our mystified beliefs in others' faces in the broader culture. So chatting with the award-winning writer of this elucidating tome on tropes behind our rock idols seemed like a great way to chop up myth, music, and magic just at the right moment in 2010.

Knowles has been a writer and editor for some time, and his Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes is also an excellent analysis of how ancient archetypes become cheap everyday thrills. But it was his tenaciously intense engagement with a certain UK punk-into-pop band in Clash City Showdown: The Music, Meaning, and Legacy of The Clash that got me into his work. I admire his passion and fierce intelligence at dissecting culture we enjoy and use to transcend our lives habitually. Below is our chat with Mr. Knowles about all these things.

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Seattle-based, world-slobbered, excellent comics and dazzling-arts publisher Fantagraphics is really going all out for their 4th Anniversary Party this Saturday, December 11, 2010. It will be thrown at their awesome store in Georgetown, and promises "the season’s most festive party featuring amazing music, comix, art, and more!"

Coinciding with the Georgetown Art Attack, and featuring a probably incredible (and very rare) turntable set from famed Fall Out Records founder DJ Russ Fallout, the evening includes performances by cherished troubadour and Low founder Zak Sally, who has comics published by Fantagraphics as well as from his own exquisitely hand-made La Mano imprint; also on board is Pacific NW legend and firebrand Mark Pickerel.

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Deep Focus is a new line of small but richly rewarding studies, the first one about a favorite film by a great writer, Christopher Sorrentino. They're cheap and hot little books perfect for reading at the bus stop, before a movie or concert, and especially along with a DVD of the flick being playfully examined. It's an exciting new attempt at film studies. And the fact that the first two authors are superb essayists and worth reading over and over, and the films are the kind you have to own and watch again and again, means Deep Focus has scored with the perfect $13.95 each gift this season for film and modern literature fans.

Jonathan Lethem's They Live is the first volume in the series, and the media-massaged author of novels The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City scribes a scene by scene, anarchist polemic via extended hobo punch out, delineation of the Reagan-era, rabble-rousing science fiction/horror classic by John Carpenter. (Carpenter is a dependable guy for shockingly intelligent genre films, from the original Assault on Precinct 13 to Escape from New York and Los Angeles to Vampires.) While dismissed by some as over-the-top B-movie shrill political paranoia, very few people who have seen it have ever gotten over the scene where wrestling star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper first discovers the ugliness of the alien race attempting holding us in submission to consumerism and resigned to the 9 to 5 world. It's everywhere and in everything, even makes the homeless bow to it, dispossessing all of us on a gratingly precise regularity, and like most great SF They Live is a timeless explanation for how the future is shaping the present. Like how the pernicious and opnely known but accepted MK-ULTRA program tried to create disassociation in people by the CIA back in the 1960s, so that mind control kills off the host in the personality of those they've experimented on, our created "core" values of greed and fear are against us. They Live is extremely (and to some, comically) blunt about how we are more programmed than we'll ever know, unless we dream something new in a very direct and violent way (symbolized by one of the most awesome one-on-one brawls in an alleyway in They Live than you'll ever find in another movie).

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Sometimes you've just got to say "Respect" for a couple of folks perusing a crazy dream to completion. The launch of the book Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film is one of those cases. It's a comprehensive guide to every appearance of a punk onscreen in the 20th century, and a standout example of the true DIY spirit of punk.

Sure, I've seen/loved Repo Man and Surburbia, along with many of the other films they viewed as their inspiration for the concept - but watching thousands upon thousands of movies to compile a guide of movies where a punk character pops onscreen (not to mention reviews) would have never have occurred to me.  The end result is the ultimate movie coffee table book - filled with writing and art that is going to make you want to pick it up just for fun, and as a serious research tool to boot.

These hometown boys made good are swinging through town on a national tour.  On Friday, November 12, they'll be signing books at Scarecrow Video, who collaborated in the sense of both making garbage bags full of videos available for the project and contributing content. The signing starts at 5pm and then they'll be hosting a quadruple feature of classic examples of punks on screen including Valley Girl, Get Crazy, Class of 1984 and Urgh!: A Music War at the Grand Illusion theater beginning at 8:30pm.  A great value at $12 for the whole shebang (for Grand Illusion members - $20 general admission, $17 students, $15 seniors).

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