April/May 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest
Guardians of the Louvre by Jirō Taniguchi
Hello, everyone! We only had a handful of people show up this month, but it was a lively and engaging discussion. Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to have been any fallout like last time. I don’t even have any symptoms of anything! Lol
There are few critiques more complimentary than wishing something was longer, but that was the general consensus. This book was shorter than expected but gave lovely snapshots of different historical periods and personalities. The chapter that focused on hiding artwork from the Nazis was praised for its suspense in several parts. Comics Book Club members who have been to the Louvre said Taniguchi perfectly captured the scale of the place and the crowds. Alain, the owner of local bookstore Howling Pages, was kind enough to bring other examples of Taniguchi’s work and other volumes in The Louvre Collection series of graphic novels. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, May 17 to discuss They Called Us Enemy.
What We're Reading
May 17 - They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker
June 20 - Special Pride Month Comics Panel
July 19 - The Backstagers, Volume 1: Rebels Without Applause by James Tynion IV and Rian Sygh
August 16 - The Good Asian, Volume 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alex Tefenkgi
September 20 - Heartstopper, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman
October 18 - Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook
November 15 - Unnamed Marvel Book
December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch
January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
Please note for next month that hoopla has two different versions of They Called Us Enemy, the regular version and the Expanded Edition, which has 20 extra pages. The library only has physical copies of the regular version, so we’ll focus on that one. I may get both for comparison purposes.
Thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey for what to read next. I’d especially like to thank the one person who expressed interest in Check, Please! Lol I appreciate you.
I said I had a special announcement for June, and here it is: I’ll be moderating a special Pride Month panel discussion of LGBTQ+ Comic Creators for the Chicago Public Library! I know it wasn’t too long ago that I expressed doubt such a panel needed to exist, but that’s mainly because they tend to present a monolith of cis white gay guys. I promise I will be the only such person present at this panel.
I forgot about our tradition of having a horror comic for October and, in honor of the release of The Marvels, we’ll be having our second requisite Marvel book of the year in November. I’ll have an informal poll for Comics Book Club members leading up to that. We managed to plan out the rest of the year! Woohoo!!
Shameless Self-Promotion
It has been another busy month! C2E2 was a huge success. I met a lot of great people, including artists and creators I’ve respected and admired for several years. It was also nice to meet a couple of “online friends” in person for the first time, even if I didn’t meet up with as many friends as I had planned. I gave out a lot of “proof of concept” mini comics I made up specifically for the weekend and got a ton of great comics. I met a few potential collaborators and I’m in the process of scripting two different 22-page one-shot comics. I can’t say much more about either of them, but hopefully there will be updates soon!
I've also submitted to two more anthologies and got the layout back on a one-page comic that I've commissioned. I would like to give special thanks to comics writer/editor Brian Hawkins for help with those projects. Thanks again, Brian! Please check out his newsletter at
.NEWS
The creator of this month’s selection, Jirō Taniguchi, passed away in 2017. You can read more about The Louvre Collection, which incorporates a wide variety of styles and stories, here, though it doesn’t include every volume. Cats of the Louvre was a volume that we mentioned at our meeting and its creator, Taiyō Matsumoto, was recently the subject of a thorough retrospective at SOLRAD. Finally, here’s John Oliver talking about how museums are temples to colonialism and here’s a brief video from Vox on why the Mona Lisa is so overrated. Enjoy!
SOLRAD also reported on this year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair, where comics were the fastest-growing sector, having exploded in scope and popularity.
I've shared Marvel editor Tom Brevoort's
newsletter to Comics Book Club members before and this past month has provided some especially interesting information and anecdotes, from how pagination is determined in monthly floppies to the story of a would-be comics writer who paid famous Superman and X-Men illustrator John Byrne (who sucks) $1,000 a page for a first issue in an attempt to break into the industry to some truly bizarre mail the Marvel office has received over the years.Speaking of Marvel, Disney finally let go of infamous Chairman Ike Perlmutter. Initially reported as part of a number of layoffs, Perlmutter later claimed he was fired for criticizing Marvel movies. Either way, you won’t find many people willing to defend him. I personally have heard anecdotes about him fishing paper clips out of the trash for reuse and removing coffeepots from break rooms. And all that’s before you get to the allegations of harassment and what he did to the VA during the Trump administration. Good riddance.
A new comic company, DSTLRY, was started by the two men behind Comixology Originals (before Amazon gutted it). There’s certainly no way to argue with the murderers’ row of talent they have lined up as their Founding Creators, but their business model of “limited supply” and a focus on digital publishing does little to allay the concerns about the use of blockchain technology and NFTs that many feel are forthcoming, despite their numerous reassurances.
Yesterday, IDW Publishing removed itself from the New York Stock Exchange and laid off a whopping 39% of its workforce, including the entire marketing department and a full half of its editorial staff. This is really awful news and I hope everyone who lost their jobs ends up back on their feet soon.
Normally I reserve boosting crowdfunding campaigns for my social media feed, but comics Hall of Famer Trina Robbins has launched an anthology on Zoop. It’s fully funded, but the proceeds will go entirely to Planned Parenthood. The Won’t Back Down anthology will feature several great creators and only has three days left at the time of writing.
I know sometimes it feels like all I write about in this section are various awards, but the first half of the GLAAD Media Awards were held on March 30 and the winners included Poison Ivy for Outstanding Comic Book and Young Men in Love for Outstanding Graphic Novel/Anthology.
Sadly, this news section has to end as it began. Noted Mad Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee died on April 10 at the age of 102. On April 7, Rachel Pollack passed away. To say she was a trailblazer hardly does her justice, and she will be sorely missed. I linked to this interview of hers back when it was originally published. It’s also provided in the obituary, but it’s worth revisiting for how much of her creativity, philosophy, and humanity are on display.
Some Thoughts on Art Theft
I decided to go in a different direction this month, and I hope you’ll all bear with me. Instead of something personal, I thought I’d write about the subject that my mind always wanders to when the Louvre comes up. I’m a sucker for a good heist movie and I love watching a plan come together or fall apart. I’m a huge fan of the original Arsène Lupin stories and the excellent Netflix series Lupin is a worthy successor to them.
That series includes a jewelry theft at the Louvre in its opening that’s as thrilling as it is impossible. But who cares? One of the best things about some heist stories is how implausible they are; sometimes, the more outlandish they are, the better. In my earliest serious attempts at writing, I focused on crime fiction. I wrote a novel and several short stories about a family of thieves (all unpublished to this day—Lol).
I did a lot of research on art theft for those stories. (I especially recommend The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick and the podcast Last Seen, if you’re curious.) Two things have always stood out to me:
It’d be really easy to steal from the Louvre.
Nobody steals a painting for the reasons we imagine.
Dolnick in particular points out how the Louvre is so vast, it’s impossible to secure the whole thing. The average person conceivably could grab something off the wall and be out the door before the nearest security guard gets to them.
I always thought a neat heist story would be to have a dozen or so desperate people try to perform several “smash and grab” operations in the Louvre at once, and they’re all reconciled to at least five of them going to jail or something, but I could never get it to work. The crowd, the law of averages, and the point of the whole enterprise always presented too many plot holes.
Even if a security guard is the equivalent of three city blocks away, the mob of people in the Louvre will try to stop a person running off with a painting. And if they don’t, how does that person know the nearest security guard is three city blocks away and not around the corner? Finally, even if they successfully steal some random work of a Renaissance master off the wall of the Louvre, what do they do with it?
That last point ties back into point number 2 from before. The reasons pop culture and literary fiction give for art theft are usually way more urbane and sophisticated than the real reasons people steal paintings. Because, seriously, what do you do with them?
Stolen jewels or money or somebody’s watch can at least be laundered and made to look like they come from somewhere else. But Edvard Munch’s The Scream? People are going to recognize that! In fact, the average fencer of stolen goods is more likely to turn an art thief in for the reward, which will definitely be way more money than they get from trying to sell a stolen painting.
The idea that a Bond villain or some crafty billionaire would want a secret, stolen masterpiece kind of falls apart under scrutiny. Why have something that you can’t show off? Why steal something when you can buy a work of art at auction? The real reason for most art theft is so the art can be used as a bargaining chip for a plea deal by career criminals.
That’s why so much of the early episodes of Last Seen focus on the mafia. (Spoiler, I guess?) The art isn’t seen as a treasure worth preserving privately. It’s held for ransom by someone facing a long jail sentence on the chance of getting a slightly shorter jail sentence. But watching some mob lackey rip a painting of a wall to shave ten years off a racketeering charge is not very romantic or exciting, so we have The Thomas Crown Affair, Entrapment, and To Fool a Thief (all of which I think are great, for the record).
Anyway, I hope this wasn’t too didactic and was at least entertaining to read. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you in a month for They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker!