Cometbus #57: The New York Comics Scene

by Aaron Cometbus

Oh man, Aaron comes back at as with a deep dive into the New York comics scene. He discusses dating! He talks about the biz! Are you going to pass this one up?

Genres: Comics, Art

Unknown Binding

About the author

Aaron Elliott, better known as Aaron Cometbus, is a drummer, lyricist, self-described "punk anthropologist" and author of Cometbus, a seminal punk rock zine.

Reviews

[Caroline Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this at Molasses on a late night walk there lmao feeling very ++++clear and alive++++.

It felt satisfying to read interviews. This book became something I only wanted to read in bed away from everything else and calm; an interview right before I went to sleep and right when I woke up until it was done. Some things he did that stuck with me were: -saving the questions he was too nervous to ask people for someone he was really comfortable with in the end, even if they didn’t exactly fit with the last interviewee. Insights about comics: people don’t have to fight to have practice space, all you need is your room; you never have to have novel conclusion when you are doing strips because it theoretically never ends; . Ben katchor greeeatttt interviewwww. If anyone can find the punk #1 lou reed interview....

Good quotes:
“I always wanted to be in the New Yorker. But then I tried and tried and tried. I spent a lot of time trying to get my work to fit the aesthetic. It took me months and months. At some point I realized I was really distorting myself, and still I couldn’t get in. I realized I could spend my entire life trying to be in the New Yorker. I had to stop trying.” - Gabrielle Bell (she also talks about selling comics in the streets: “Summertime. I’d wear this big hat. I was mysterious under the hat.”)
Gary Panter: “people think it’s happening somewhere else. Like that scene was cooler. Oh, Darby Crash, he was cooler. Well, Darby was kind of confused and sad and gay. Though he was nice to me. People are always looking for it over the hill.”

Good term:
The salad years

Also I love a book without page numbers.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like comics but I'm not so into them that I want to read interviews with the creators...or so I thought until I delved into this gem. Credit to Aaron for being a deft interviewer and keeping it to the good bits. Really well done.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

#57 offers a refreshing dip back into curious intellect of Aaron Cometbus. This issue is a collection of interviews with cartoonists. The interviews with old-timers were particularly interesting. These are artists from another era—even the term cartoonist” is old-fashioned. They talk about hustling to make deadlines for their weeklies. It’s interesting to think about this medium of art and its relation to commerce. Even countercultural types like Al Jaffee of Mad Magazine, was a workaday artist putting in 40 hours to get his art done. These were art workers. The theme of being a hardworker and the theme of pursuing one’s own artistic vision often appear comfortably side-by-side. Even the younger cartoonists show tremendous drive for their craft.

It had been awhile since reading the last Cometbus. I was wondering what it would be to read another one—would I be tired of Aaron’s voice? Would his themes be tiresome? I really enjoyed this issue. And really, Aaron himself is an old-timer. Besides his self-embraced old-fashionedness and predilection to curmudgeonery, Aaron simply is an old zinester from a bygone zine era. Similar to cartoonists, he hails from the pre-Internet, still-flourishing print age. He comes from and was steeped in underground culture. He committed strongly to it, and pursued it with industriousness. He even (still) handwrites the zine, for chrissakes! This is the sort of punk I identified with early on: not the lazy nihilistic sort, but rather, the hardworking, ambitious community-building sort.

[Matte Resist · Rating 5 out of 5]

So yeah, I've been on a Cometbus kick lately. I just put in an order with Antiquated Future Distro because I kept seeing them post really interesting zines on IG, and ended up buying all the Cometbus issues I didn't have yet. I saved this one for last because it's about comic scene in New York. I don't have much interest in comics (and in fact have been a little put off by so much of current zine culture going that direction) and I'm not big on interviews either, and this entire zines is interviews with people who are a part of that scene. It's Cometbus though, so of course I had to read it... and I really enjoyed it and actually feel like I have a little better understanding of comic culture and am a little less judgmental about it.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of interviews here. I consume comics constantly with, generally, little interest about the behind-the-scenes world of their creators, and Cometbus’ DIY anthropology approach to the world was an awesome read.

[Christopher L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid interview issue of cometbus. Led me to buy a few new graphic novel books. But otherwise didn’t get much out of it. Not really my scene!

[EC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird. The second best. Anything that you can do, I can do it better. I'm the toughest.

[nervousyoungsam · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun read even though I know nothing about comics!

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aaron is as thoughtful and informed an interviewer as he is an essayist. Great short conversations with some key comic folk.

[Ryan Durfee · Rating 5 out of 5]

per usual with all cometbus i devoured it in a couple of hours. his writing becomes better & more incisive with each issue. one of the greatest of my generation.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m surprised to find this on Goodreads, since it is an issue of a zine, not a book, and I had thought that such serials were pretty well banned by the goodreads t.o.s. Since it’s here, however, and since I read it, I’ll go ahead and write a quick review. I’ve met Aaron Cometbus several times over the years, no doubt first around the time I was hanging around the Bay Area punk scene in 1989-90. Considering how brief and intermittent our meetings, he’s always had a remarkable memory of who I am, which I think speaks to why he is so good at what he does – he is always looking for interesting people and stories, and even when he meets boring people like me, he files the information away in case someday there’s something usable there. Here, he interviews a dozen or two very interesting people he met in the New York comics scene, and does a great job of pulling out their most interesting stories. Worth it to me especially for some of the old timers like Al Jaffee and Gary Panter, but I was also surprisingly taken with Gabrielle Bell and Karen Green. Even if you have no interest in comics per se, there’s a lot of underground New York history here, some of it quite surprising and obscure.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great issue (Aaron's been on a hot streak since at least #50). As Aaron writes in the introduction, he approaches these interviews as an outsider, which allows him to avoid the more routine questions we've come to expect from comics interviews. The results are refreshing, not just because Aaron's an outsider, but because you can tell he's genuinely curious about this world, and excited to learn more about it.

My one nitpicky complaint is that three of these interviews were done by other people besides Aaron (two by Charles Browenstein, one by Zak Sally). This only bugged me because it's not made clear until you get to the fine print on the last page of the issue -- Browenstein and Sally's questions are even written in Aaron's iconic handwriting, which adds to the confusion. Just a public service announcement to those who haven't picked up the issue yet: check out the last page first to see who interviewed who. That said, this one is definitely worth picking up.

[J.T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm admittedly very late to the game in that the only other Cometbus I've read was issue #55 (bought it because an artist I love, Jordan Crane, made a very clever cover for it). Upon reading that issue, I immediately understood the draw of Cometbus' writing. Much like Steinbeck, his writing oozes with empathy and keen observation of other humans and their interactions.

I'm a NY cartoonist myself, so this issue piqued my interest (especially since I know many of those featured). Again I was blown away with the writing. Granted, interviews are a very different format than memoir, but Cometbus was able to draw out compelling stories from his subjects with unexpected questions.

I should've listened to my pals back in my twenties and got on the Cometbus wagon, but I suppose it's never too late (assuming I can track down the out-of-print stuff)!

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forever the anthropologist, punk rock person Aaron Cometbus returns to give us the down and dirty on the New York Comics scene.

Oral history, that's what this is, fashioned in the furnace of concern. Aaron doesn't know much about comics, but he can ask questions of Kim Deitch, Gary Panter, Adrian Tomine, and AL JAFFE along with a host of behind-the-scenesters. He crafts an insider's view.

It's great stuff, up there with the best of Cometbus. Why don't they give Aaron Cometbus the Genius Grant? He deserves it.

[David Macpherson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interviews conducted with New York based comic artists. SOrt of. Some of them really don't live in New York. The interviews are lively and smart, the story that comes out is the difficutly of making any art in such an expensive place to live. The final interview, with Al Jaffee, was not great for me. There, Cometbus asked Jaffee questions that were specifically related to things said by the other interviews. It was a piece of dissonance that some might really love, but it just soured me a little.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite issues in a while. I dig that it explores, however briefly, lots of different aspects of comics from a variety of perspective. Great interviewing that manages to weave a healthy dose of narrative and continuity into the talks that run throughout the issue.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only know a handful of these artists and their work, and was worried this would drag. It doesn't. There's a lot of wisdom in here, very little of it specific to comic readers.