Friday Morning Notes from a KOCHALKAHOLIC!

It's been a relatively quiet week here, and I suppose that's unavoidable when the focus is on a single creator. An interview I had hoped to post this week with one of the publishers of James Kochalka's comics has taken longer than I thought, so, hopefully I'll have that for you here next week.

Remember that the opening of The Center for Cartoon Studies is this weekend in White River Junction, Vermont. The school is headed up by cartoonist James Sturm, and James Kochalka and other noteworthy creators are on the faculty. I'm not yet certain if I'll be able to attend the opening, but I definitely want too. If I can manage to make it, I'll certainly post something about it here.

Please do sign the Evil Wings Petition if you'd like to hear the new CD from James Kochalka Superstar. We're over 100 signatures now, and that is good news, but many more are needed if the record company is to be convinced that there's an immediate need to release the CD.

I'm still interested in posting more reciprocal links with other sites and blogs, so if you're linking to KOCHALKAHOLIC!, please let me know.

Finally, if you've been reading KOCHALKAHOLIC! and there's a particular interview or feature you'd like to see here, feel free to e-mail me and I'll try to make it happen.

That's it for this Friday morning, more coming soon.

Washington Examiner Writer Confounded by JKS

It's beyond me why this Washington Examiner feature on James Kochalka was even printed, but in the interest of completeness, I thought I'd mention it.

In addition to confessing to being confounded by the simple surreality of "Frog on Top of a Skyscraper," (one of the better and more memorable songs on the great album Don't Trust Whitey), the writer runs down Kochalka's summer releases without much critical evaluation. A simple checklist might have sufficed, although again, one wonders what the editor's motivation was in even soliciting the piece.

At least there actually is a checklist that includes some of Kochalka's best comics work at the end, as well as the sadly internet-standard text of a URL with no effort being made to turn the text into an actual hyperlink (in this case, to American Elf). I wish only bad newspaper sites were guilty of this, but I saw it the other day on a comics blog too. Not to get all preachy about issues of internet standards, but if you're too lazy to post an actual link or too blisfully ignorant to learn how to do it, why bother, really?

Kochalka Posts New Painting

Over on the American Elf message board, James Kochalka has posted an extremely cool-looking new painting, apparently called "Dudey." It'll even be on public display this weekend in Vermont, so click on over and have a look.

The creation of the painting is also the subject of today's strip at American Elf.

Snap Judgments on THE CUTE MANIFESTO

"Kochalka isn't really examining comics in a meta context but instead using the comics medium to explore questions of life and art." Read the rest of Randy Lander's new review at The Fourth Rail.

Rare Kochalka Strip Posted by Jason X-12

A discussion I started on uncollected Kochalka stories has led to Jason Cooley posting a strip I've never seen before...Happy Hamburger.

The release of THE CUTE MANIFESTO really has me eager to see a collection of other little-seen strips. Hopefully Alternative Comics or Top Shelf or maybe some other publisher (AdHouse strikes me as a good fir with Kochalka's stuff) will step up and get this stuff back into print.

Evil Wings Petition Update

I see we're closing in on 100 signatures on the petition asking Rykodisc to release Spread Your Evil Wings and Fly, the long-finished and extremely rockin' new album by James Kochalka Superstar.

If you haven't signed yet, please click on over and do so, and help get this great CD out there. It's well worth it for "Wash Your Ass" alone.

New Reviews for The Cute Manifesto

Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason points to a bunch of new reviews of The Cute Manifesto.

Jeff keeps a pretty comprehensive list of Kochalka reviews, although my Cute Manifesto review seems to be missing from the list...