City Pages Comix Issue 2012 • Cover by Kevin Cannon

The Good Life in Minnesota: What's your interpretation?  

The best entries will be selected to appear in print. 

Last year, City Pages featured 15 comics in the print edition and added dozens more to the online presentation. This year's submissions should be created as true sequential art -- a full story unto itself. Cartoonists are encouraged to be creative within the confines of the required dimensions. There are no restrictions on the number of panels or how you arrange them. Give us your take on this theme! 

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You may know Bobcat Goldthwait from his recent films, the cult sensation World's Greatest Dad and the forthcoming God Bless America. Or, if you've been paying less attention, you might recall his role as the squeaky-voiced gang leader Zed from the Police Academy movies. But Goldthwait was a standup comic first and foremost.

Goldthwait started performing when he was still in his teens, though his career eventually took a bit of a digression. But whether he's working in film or standup format, Goldthwait's a master storyteller and his act is a careful balance of self-deprecation and absurdity. Despite his seemingly cavalier attitude towards the craft, his influence on modern comedy remains immeasurable today.

City Pages recently caught up with the comedic veteran to talk about doing standup again, filmmaking, and the pleasures and perils of reality television. He'll be in town for the next three days at Acme Comedy Co.

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This week has been a good one for Twin Cities standup comedians. On Tuesday, Cy Amundson appeared on Conan, Conan O'Brien's late-night show. Tonight, Acme Comedy Co. host, open mic participant, and City Pages proofreader Bryan Miller is set to perform on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

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​John Hodgman is not a PC, but he played one on television for many years. He's also been a resident expert on The Daily Show for quite a while and is a frequent contributor to This American Life. In anticipation of the end of the world, he recently completed That Is All, a book that is part of a 964-page trilogy of complete world knowledge.  He'll be in town at the Varsity Theater this Thursday to talk about it, along with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax fame (where they invented "team mustache dad"). They'll be touring together through the Midwest over the next few weeks.

Before coming to town, John Hodgman took the time to chat with us about mustaches, PC versus Mac, and the pending apocalypse.

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The opening panel of King of the Pill

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Minneapolis artist William Hessian can always find time for art. The St. Louis Park native has toured the country, taught during an annual residency in Jamestown, North Dakota, and masochistically spent two full days crouched inside a 4x4 box during extreme humidity at the Red Hot Art Festival. Somewhere in between these projects he has found the time for King of the Pill, a daily PG web comic that will run through 2012.

The comic is set in a whimsical world of anthropomorphic creatures, each of whom seems to have different attributes that distinguish their role in the community. Thus far Jasper, the hero, has mysteriously grown six extra hands out of his face. His quest: to figure out why Sandbeck gave him the magical pill that caused his transformation.

City Pages took a minute to chat with Hessian on how he's keeping on track with the 366-day project, which is 38 days in.

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Image courtesy Jason Neulander Productions

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Photo by Tiffany Rodgers

​This weekend marks the second-annual Minneapolis Indie Xpo (MIX), a two-day comic fest at the Soap Factory. With its low cost to table for artists and free admission for guests, it's the best convention to shoot the shit with independent, small-press, and web-comic creators. Some of the seminars held at the event include Book Design for Self Publishers by the Center for Cartoon Studies, DIY Perfect-Bound Books by the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and New Tools for the Indie Artist by Wet Paint Art Materials. To gear up for MIX, City Pages caught up with Nicole Lorenz, illustrator of Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace: a body-positive coloring book, who will be tabling at the event.
 
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​From icons like Charles Schulz, to current superstar creators including Bill Willingham (Fables) and Doug Mahnke (Green Lantern), to its recent rise as an alt-comix hub thanks to the MIX festival, Minnesota -- the Twin Cities in particular -- has long been a hotbed of comic-book culture appreciated on a national level. So it should come as no surprise that more and more kids here are chasing their four-color dreams either locally or in established comic hot spots like New York, Los Angeles, and Portland.

Take Sam Humphries, for example. An up-and-coming writer and local boy done good, his latest graphic novel, Our Love is Real, has quickly become the indie comic of the summer thanks to glowing reviews from the genre press, and the fact that the book's first printing sold out moments after it hit stores.

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​Cowboys and Aliens. Thor. The Green Hornet. Ya hear that, folks? That's the sound of the comic-book movie barrel being scraped dry. Look, when the options are between reheating well-known properties like Spider-Man and X-Men, or banking on a B-list character like Green Lantern (feel free to bring the hate, fanboys, but he's the very definition of B-list to mainstream audiences), then maybe it's time to take a little break from the genre, huh?

Yet despite a clear case of over-saturation, big budget flicks based on the cape 'n' tights set aren't going anywhere so long as there's still millions to be made, so get ready for more CGI-heavy films based on characters you kinda-sorta remember from Saturday morning cartoons in the coming years.

That being said, there are still plenty of comic-book characters and premises that are so unbelievably lame that an army of Joss Whedons and Christopher Nolans couldn't even come close to making them cool to even the most devout comic believers. So should there be any Hollywood big wigs out there reading this who are considering green-lighting any of these characters and concepts, allow us to be the first to say: No. Just, no...

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