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My beautiful sister

August Lipp

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mini sketchbook brush pen drawings with some wally wood studies

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August Lipp

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DO you have any copies remaining of But is it Comics Aht 1 r 2 available?

I do! Email me if you want to purchase(you can find my address on my website)

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notes

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Neutrogena: a graphic history

August Lipp

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Essay from But is it Comic Aht #4 available from Domino Books here: http://dominobooks.org/comicaht4.html

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A Moral Lesson

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John Stanley's biographer Bill Schelly says Stanley did the finished cover art on Lulu all through the 1950s. Tripp drew the interiors based on his layouts. The covers from this period are also attributed to Stanley in the latest D+Q reprints. https://www.tcj.com/bill-schelly-on-john-stanley-giving-life-to-little-lulu/

Marge's Little Lulu #27, 39, 51, 63, 75

(September 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954)

Dell, 1948 Series

John Stanley and Irving Tripp. Covers by Tripp.

23.09

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August Lipp

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Trepanangels

August Lipp

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I'm grateful to have contributed to this set of moving remembrances

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--I wrote this remembrance for tcj.com and it should be going up soon but want to share it here too with some images--

Joe Matt and I were introduced via a mutual friend whom we both had briefly dated. He used to take his Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie books into a shop in Silverlake where she worked to be library wrapped. As someone with a passion for indie comics and oddballs, she had recognized him from his comics and the two of them dated for about a week before it dissolved into a friendship. This same friend knew of my interest in comics and suggested we meet. I hadn’t even read his comics yet but I was at an age where it seemed like such a rare interest and was feverish to spend time with literally anyone who knew something about them. I had no idea I’d be meeting someone that was such a staple of a world of art I would become obsessed with being a part of. One Wednesday we drove out to a coffeeshop near Meltdown Comics to meet him.

After the introduction we traded numbers and over the next several years I would call him up to chat and catch up and whenever I was back home from college we’d arrange to meet at a coffee shop or bookstore, sometimes with others like Brian, his girlfriend Victoria, Ben or Kent and sometimes just the two of us. Joe was so enthusiastic about talking comics, seasons of Ozzie and Harriet on DVD, Soupy Sales, looking at sketchbooks and making jam strips but also just as interested talking about our lives. He would bring books or ties and attempt to sell them to his friends and me. It was like the character in his comics had leapt off the page. Watering down cheap orange juice, imparting lessons in frugality, talking about relationships at length with no filter. I’m struck now thinking about how available he made himself. Around this time I was between 18-23 and he always seemed happy to get together and see what I was up to. He really didn’t talk down to me(although he did sometimes refer to me as “Young August’ after a frequent caller on Scharpling’s Best Show :,) ). I felt treated as a friend despite our age difference. Hopefully I wasn’t insane for thinking so, but he always answered when I called. Looking at the books he gave as gifts to friends with lavish paintings in them or his interactions with fans of his work on Facebook, it seemed like he craved this sort of interaction and loved talking to people. Talking could be exhausting and sometimes his strongly held opinions on things would be disagreeable or an expressed preference would be in poor taste but his openness and specificity and depth of thought was very admirable and familiar. Because the art school I was in had no teachers invested in comics, I highly valued whatever feedback he gave on work that I had been doing. He directed my attention towards comic strips that I came to love and also towards particular elements of craft that at the time were invisible to me. Things as simple as spacing around text in balloons and panel interaction or the staging of characters in our jam comics were very important. He was critical—you could tell these imperfections nagged at him—but also highly laudatory of things that worked and it was instructive to see what kinds of considerations lead to his effortlessly readable work. It seems so basic but getting to observe in person the degree to which these small details mattered to him was one of the most instructive things to see as a developing artist.

I’d look through the pages of his sketchbook and see jams with Aimee Mann, Seth, Chester Brown, Kent Osborne, Jason… endless collaborators. I found it especially hilarious when he showed me jams with Johnny Ryan and would sweat over and anxiously complain that Ryan had been fighting him throughout like a game of tug of war. He would point out his panel here and how Ryan would try to drag the strip in a completely filthy direction and the next panel he’d be struggling to wrest it back towards decency only to be undermined again. In spite of his famous and much criticized lack of productivity, his artistic energy was not diminished and was instead being channeled into other compulsive activities. Notably a funny, eccentric habit of biking around to a mapped out set of garbage cans around LA that he knew had tons of second chance lotto tickets in them and spending an afternoon or evening at the library entering them into the website to see if anything hit. When my dad moved out of LA in 2014 it became difficult for me to visit and as a result our relationship dwindled. I’d still call him occasionally but it was hard to sustain. The news of his death on Sunday night was shocking and made me wish we had spoken more recently. Most of all I wish for his own sake he had had more time and that it wasn’t so expensive to go see a doctor. I hope we get to see whatever unpublished books he was working on, in complete or partial form. He was such a special person.

-August Lipp

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Seth, Chester Brown & Joe Matt (1992)

et vice versa...

RIP Joe Matt (1963-2023)

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monks

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