Say it ain’t so, Yoe!
By:
March 10, 2009
Craig Yoe’s most recent Arf book (published by Fantagraphics) may be his last.
In a March 6 email to those of us who’ve reviewed previous installments of his brilliant series of attractive and engaging books exploring (with a scholar’s thoroughness and a fanboy’s passion) “the unholy marriage of [highbrow] art and [lowbrow] comics,” Yoe writes:
The latest, and probably last, Arf, titled Comic Arf, came out. I teamed up R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Patrick McDonnell, Al Jaffee, Gary Panter, Johnny Ryan, Bil Keane, Jules Feiffer, Jaime Hernandez, Mike Mignola, Mark Beyer, Denis Kitchen, Ivan Brunetti, R.O. Blechman, Matt Groening, Bill Griffith, Sergio Aragones, Kaz, Hunt Emerson, Jooste Swarte, Mark Newgarden, R. Sikoryak, Richard Sala, Sam Henderson, Seymour Chwast, Charles Barsotti, Mort Walker, Mark Beyer, Johnny Ryan and Kim Deitch with the genius cartoonist Milt Gross. Comic Arf was my best Arf attempt yet. It was ignored…. I have no plans to do more Arfs — who needs the aggravation?
Say it ain’t so, Yoe!The world needs more Arf.
Support Yoe’s hilobrow cultural archaeology by purchasing the following recent titles: COMIC ARF | BOODY | SECRET IDENTITY: THE FETISH ART OF SUPERMAN’S CO-CREATOR JOE SHUSTER
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The following item was published in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section (as part of the weekly “Examined Life” feature), on July 10, 2005.
POP ARTISTS Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein weren’t the first painters to appreciate the visual style of comics: It seems that Salvador Dali tried his hand at drawing comics as early as 1916, when he was 12. Dali’s comics are just one of the revelations in Modern Arf: Artists and Models (Fantagraphics), the first installment in a planned series of books, edited by cartoonist and designer Craig Yoe, that will explore the myriad ways in which high art and lowbrow comic books and strips have overlapped so far. The ”Artists and Models” number, for example, treats us to a wide selection of one-panel gags about artists’ models, including a 1954 Picasso sketch of a monkey painting a nude; an eye-popping mini-monograph on the influence of Cubism on Jack Kirby (The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Captain America); and a history of the gap-toothed, red-headed ”What, Me Worry?” kid who, though made famous in the ’50s as Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of Mad, had appeared on novelty postcards since 1890.
”I hate to tell this to The Boston Globe, but ‘The Kid’ probably started as a cartoonist’s stereotype of an Irish idiot boy,” Yoe, an obsessive collector of comics ephemera, says via e-mail from his home in Peekskill, N.Y. And why did he decide to do these books? ”I’ve always appreciated the sensibilities of taboo-breaking and irreverence that modernist artists bring to their medium,” Yoe explains. ”I appreciate it when cartoonists have that kind of attitude, too.”