PictureBox: Fine Art Meets Comics

by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/22/2007

Dan Nadel's publishing company, PictureBox Inc., is one of the most adventurous comics imprints around right now—but comics are only part of what it does. Nadel, an occasional PW Comics Week contributor, has built his imprint at the intersection of the fine arts, comics and music worlds, and a lot of the artists and books he publishes straddle those domains, too. Ninja cartoonist and gallery artist Brian Chippendale is the drummer for freakout-rock duo Lightning Bolt; PictureBox just published a photo book by Ashod Simonian called Real Fun: Polaroids from the Independent Music Landscape. And the book that's helped to fund a lot of the company's projects was actually a rock book: 2004's art-plus-CD volume The Wilco Book, which he said sold 40,000 copies.

"As a publisher, I'm just one man—there's no overhead—so that's afforded me a fair amount of freedom," Nadel said. "I do what any small business would do, which is to not spend money you don't have. A lot of these books are difficult, but Ninja is being distributed to record stores, and so is [the work of art collective] Paper Rad [published by PictureBox]. I do a huge mail-order business—there's a whole other market out there of people who don't necessarily go to comic book stores or book stores. And for every couple of small books I do that break even, I'm trying to do a big book that's going to make money." He noted that the fine arts books PictureBox publishes are often funded partly or entirely by galleries. "I've also started to sell books at art fairs, since the same people coming through them are going to want to buy a book. I depend on a variety of outlets."

PictureBox's fall 2007 slate—five graphic novels and a photo book—is "a little lopsided," Nadel said. He's excited to introduce his favorite new Japanese artist to the American market: Yuichi Yokoyama, who he describes as "sort of Jack Kirby crossed with Chris Ware plus Mat Brinkman. I met him in Tokyo a few weeks ago. He doesn't like comics, he doesn't read comics—he said his favorite artists are Sol LeWitt and William Blake. He's got a clothing line, catalogues—he's a one-man industry." The first Yokoyama book PictureBox will be publishing is New Engineering; Yokoyama's work will also appear in the new issue of Nadel's cartooning-and-design-and-whatever-else-comes-to-mind periodical anthology The Ganzfeld. This issue is subtitled "Japanada," and it's divided between what Nadel describes as "the lineage of Japanese psychedelic artists" and Canadian artists—the latter group includes Marc Bell, Julie Doucet and Destroyer singer/songwriter Dan Bejar.

Also due in the fall are a new edition of Frank Santoro's Storyville, as an oversized hardcover with a new introduction by Chris Ware; Lauren Weinstein's graphic novel Goddess of War; and a 120-page black-and-white graphic novel drawn by the Kramers Ergot-associated artist who calls himself C.F. The longest-awaited book on PictureBox's docket, though, has to be Brian Chippendale's Maggots, originally scheduled to be released by the now-defunct Highwater Books some years ago, and drawn in 1995 on a very unusual medium: Chippendale covered every surface of a 360-page Japanese book catalogue with his frantic, scribbled comics narrative. "It's unbelievable," Nadel said. "It's bonkers. We're going to do a complete facsimile of it, as a softcover."

Comics stores haven't received some of PictureBox's projects as warmly as the art and music worlds; the company recently announced the end (after four issues) of Ben Jones and Frank Santoro's comic book Cold Heat, which had been intended to run 12 issues. Nadel is bugged that periodical comics are less viable than they once were for developing art cartoonists: "I love comic books as a format, and I think it's kind of a drag that you have to wait a year or two years to see new work by all these great artists. I love the 24-page comic as a storytelling unit, and I think it's important for an artist to develop an audience. I think there's a reason why so many graphic novelists publish books that bomb: nobody knows who they are."

PictureBox is still publishing Comics Comics, which Nadel calls "our retarded attempt at a magazine about comics"—the third issue, due imminently, includes an interview with Guy Davis by Sammy Harkham. And Nadel's already making plans for the company's 2008 releases, which will encompass photo books, artists' books, a box of artwork commissioned by Sonic Youth, several rock books "that I'm not allowed to announce, but good ones" and an ambitious comics/art project: a gigantic, two-volume Gary Panter retrospective due in March of next year, with corresponding museum and gallery shows. "I think it'll give people a much better understanding of what [Panter's] work is all about," Nadel says.