I moved to San Francisco and started volunteering at the Cartoon Art Museum when Nina Paley was still a regular at the museum’s monthly artist meetings.  Not long afterwards, she left the Bay Area and began the long journey that ultimately took her to New York City and Sita Sings the Blues.  I’ve been a fan of her comics and animation for ages, and the CAM show is long overdue.  Paley and I have differing ideas about intellectual property issues (we both use Creative Commons licenses rather than copyrights, but as someone who works for a manga publisher I can’t get on board with her idea that online piracy is a net good for artists, and as a webcartoonist I’m cynical about the entire Internet anyway), but Sita is a masterpiece and the museum show is cool as hell.

This is also a “process” show, so there’s a focus on depicting the creation of the comic from start to finish, with scripts, thumbnails, finished art, and samples of the final published form.  Most of the artists contributed notes explaining their process for the wall text.  I love it when the museum is able to go beyond just displaying the finished art and give visitors an idea of how comics are made.

“Storytime!” replaces “Batman: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” another exceptionally boss show.  I didn’t think anything could rightfully succeed the Batman show in the big gallery, but this one is really cool.

I stopped by the Cartoon Art Museum yesterday to find Andrew outlining a Bat-Signal on the wall with painter’s tape.  All his high-school experiences, it turns out, were training for his job as a curator.

The newest show up at the Cartoon Art Museum is Batman: Yesterday and Tomorrow, a retrospective of Batman’s many peculiar comic-book incarnations.  Included are the first Batman story (the art is a lightbox reproduction DC made at some point), a Neal Adams Christmas story, a sequence from The Dark Knight Returns, a bunch of production art from Pepe Moreno’s Batman: Digital Justice (remember that?  It even made it into Reinventing Comics), and, FedEx willing, pages from Paul Pope’s Batman: Year 100.  The Frank Miller art is sweet, and I have a dopey fondness for the Neal Adams story, which has been in the museum’s collection for years.  The heartwarming message is that Batman gets Christmas Eve off because the combination of Christmas spirit and Batman’s self-sacrifice the other 364 days of the year inspires potential criminals to refrain from crime.  Until the 26th, anyway.  I am a sucker for stories where a character inspires the masses to do good.  Do I cry at the scene in Spider-Man 2 where the subway passengers refuse to turn Spider-Man in?  Why, yes, I do, thank you for asking.

Also: Bat-Manga!  Chip Kidd loaned a story from the bizarre 1960s Batman manga by Jiro Kuwata.  In his recent TCJ review of Kidd’s Bat-Manga: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, Simon Abrams called the book “a catalog for an exhibit that never was.”  Well, now that exhibit exists, sort of.  I don’t get to see original manga art very often, so I was very curious about these pages.  They’re very clean and crisp.  Batman and Robin fight dinosaurs.  It’s really not as insane as, say, the 1970s Spider-Man manga by Ryoichi Ikegami, but it’s pleasantly nutty.

The first show Andrew curated for the Cartoon Art Museum was a Spider-Man retrospective.  Since then, this has been the Museum’s only show devoted to a single superhero character.  Such shows end up being, more than anything else, about the history of the industry that produced the work.  Batman is a particularly good character for this because he’s been through so many different, weird iterations.  There’s only so much variety in artists’ interpretations of Spider-Man (my favorite piece from the Spider-Man show was a Marie Severin-drawn house ad: Spidey cringing before a newsstand, crying, “Life has no meaning without my latest Marvels!”), but there’s a gulf of style and intent between Bill Finger and Frank Miller, Paul Pope and the Bat-Manga guy.

To be frank, this is the kind of show that attracts casual visitors and the press, because everybody loves Batman.  Even more than Superman, he never stops being popular.  Other people may not have fallen asleep every night staring at an electrical-tape Batman, but they all dig the guy.

I’ve been a volunteer at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco for–sheesh–ten years now, and I’m married to the curator.  In my world, there is no life without CAM.  I watch the shows go up, I work the front desk at the receptions, I watch Andrew paint the walls again.  Sometimes I write wall text.  The Cartoon Art Museum, like MoCCA in New York and the ToonSeum in Pittsburgh and the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State, is an invaluable resource for anyone with even a casual interest in comics.  The staff and board try to cover a wide swath of comic and cartoon art, with the hope that at any given time the galleries will have something for everyone.

So the newest exhibit is Drawing the Sword: Samurai in Manga and Anime, curated by Julian Bermudez.  More anime than manga, really, and the show also includes ukiyo-e prints, movie stills, and toys.  There’s some neat production art from Gundam, Bleach, Samurai Champloo (the fantastic art design in that series shows in the animation drawings), and Afro Samurai.  Afro Samurai has an odd history, incidentally.  It started as a doujinshi, or self-published manga, and then the anime attracted the attention of Samuel L. Jackson and became a Japanese-American co-production with a hip-hop soundtrack by that guy from the Wu-Tang Clan.  The Wu-Tang clan always reminds me of Jason Shiga’s early comic Bus Stop, in which the Asian-American protagonist is excited by the Wu-Tang Clan because he thinks they’re a Chinese rap group.  But I’m a giant comic nerd and I’m getting off track.

Lately the museum has been trying to organize more manga- and anime-themed shows, which can be tough because it usually means dealing with Japanese publishers and studios and shipping art overseas.  There’s at least one manga show in the very early stages of planning that will be very cool if it comes together.  I’m crossing my fingers.

Meanwhile, the museum’s latest Small Press Spotlight, featuring local artist Andy Ristaino, recently went up. Ristaino is a great draftsman with an arresting pop-art style, and he’s got a new book coming out from Slave Labor this year, so that’s all good. Also up on the walls: “Spain Rodriguez: Rebel in Ink,” the Cartoon Art Museum show with the most Screw covers (take that, SFMOMA!), and “Monsters of Webcomics,” hopefully the first in a series of webcomics spotlight shows.  And, for just a few days more, there are two dioramas from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox in the animation gallery.  Those things are huge and heavy, so yinz’d better appreciate them.