Here's the fourth issue of the hand crafted comic book anthology, Cram!

Edited by Andrew Alexander, this issue features 50 pages of risograph comics each of which takes its own approach to storytelling comics making and color (including two contributors who eschew it all together), all enclosed by a frenetically detailed wraparound cover by Max Burlingame.

The drawing on hand here ranges from clean line to rat line, the layouts from 30-panel pages to the full page splashes, all in the service of highly imaginative comics.

Artists featured this issue are:  Kim Deitch, Gabriel Mason Howell, David King, Katie Lane, Paul Peng, Jake Terrell, Marc Torices & Beatrix Urkowitz.  

 And don't forget:  handmade = limited quantity; the first two issues of Cram are already out of print, and the third won't last much longer...

 

 

Want to read some great comics?  Look no further!  This full color, 384 page, 8” x 11” hardcover is packed with them.  Marc Torices knows his comics – and how to make them.

 

Cornelius is a self-conscious, cowardly bumbler and deluded procrastinator who functions as an anti-superman everyman.  These characteristics work to impede over-identification on th part of the reader, performing double-duty as a destanciation device to reinforce the readers' focus on the formal experimentation with representational strategies, which are the real story here.   

 

 

Torices takes a Warholian approach to visual variations on a theme that incorporates a wide variety of artistic disciplines from commerical design to graffiti and applies it to an approach to comics making that is in part derived from Chris Ware's work, especially his insights into classic Sunday page comics, and incorporates an all-star slate of historical styles from Floyd Gottfredson through Hergé to Michael DeForge, along with drawing in a host of styles that are extraneous to comics... and then uses all of that to inform his own specific goals of exploring the modes of signification and representation with the aim of deconstructing the cartooned anthropomorphization of animals – most notably dogs, and also cats, but plenty more besides (including an obvious nod to Matt Furie's Pepe the Frog).  The comics are then followed by a detailed, 20-page, addendum which takes the form of a satirically ironic history of Cornelius that is beyond apocryphal, situating Cornelius in such a way that the character can be construed as a calculated construction of a cartooned corporate brand.

Here's what a couple of copacetic comics makers have to add:

“It seems that Cornelius, like an archetype or a myth, has always existed. This is a comic beyond time in the eternity of dogs, where Italo Calvino rides through Gasoline Alley, in a trolley car. Torices cartoon magically as a shape shifter.” – Matthew Thurber

“Using the breadth of comic strip history, Marc Torices builds a monument of irrationality by way of his stooge, Cornelius the Dog.  Like many of us, he can’t help but gnaw off his own leg time and time again in the face of life's perplexities.  Thankfully – for us and Cornelius – the world still turns.” – Charles Forsman.

 

D & Q sez:

Exquisitely drawn, Cornelius’s kaleidoscope of styles pays homage to the comics medium, an unabashed love letter to the form itself. Translated from the Spanish by Eisner Award-winner Andrea Rosenberg, Marc Torices’s critically acclaimed and award-winning Cornelius is mesmerizing in its originality

Rarely does a book so delightfully defy categorization. Cornelius is an experience: a farcical collage that reads like a drug-fueled fever dream, an intense emotional pendulum oscillating between psychological horror and slapstick comedy—a real roller coaster. And truthfully, Cornelius is all this and more: a brand, a phenomenon, a way of life. From the singular mind of Marc Torices comes a surreal, carefully curated universe, complete with its own icons, mythology, and metanarratives.

Cornelius is a fumbling loser, the butt of everyone’s jokes. When his friend Alspacka is kidnapped, the subsequent criminal investigation turns into a dramatic and emotional ordeal, upending Cornelius’s life. Torn between his desire to be a writer and his immense guilt over his cowardly role in Alspacka’s abduction, Cornelius is a classic Faustian figure: an aspiring artist so hungry for success that he will pay any price.

D & Q has posted a hi-rez PDF preview HERE.  Check it out!