Frank Young on Frank King

When Frank and I decided on the visual look of "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song", the classic comic strip "Gasoline Alley" by Frank King was a major visual touchstone for us.

Frank has recently reviewed a lavish new book of Frank King's early work, pre-Gasoline-Alley. You can read the review here.

To Laugh That We May Not Weep

Frank Young's newest book, co-authored with Glenn Bray, is a gorgeous coffee table art book on illustrator and cartoonist Art Young (no relation), who produced many, many cartoons in the early 20th century, political and non-political, but has remained largely unknown in our time. Until now.

Michael Tisserand (who wrote the definitive biography of Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman) has reviewed the book, "To Laugh That We May Not Weep", for the Chicago Tribune. Read the review here, then go out and purchase the book as a gift for the cartoon lover in your life (or for yourself)!

"Fools Like Me:" Frank Young's novel of country music and forbidden love

Frank M. Young, who is in recovery from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, has used his time of enforced rest to bring into publication a country music-themed novel he wrote in the 1990s, with some later editing.

Fools Like Me tells the story of two high-school graduates living in a small town in Georgia who try to break into the country-western field, but find intense personal complications instead.

You can browse amazon.com's "Look Inside this Book" feature by clicking on the book title above, which takes you right to the website's page for this title.

Portions of this book are definitely on the adult side, so reader discretion is advised. If you're interested in seeing some of Young's prose, this is one of three novels he has out at present. Peruse his author profile to see the other titles. Thanks for your consideration!

Awards In Retrospect

Well, as you kind folks may know, David and I won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Project, back in July. We didn't get beyond nomination stage at the Harvey Awards, but a nomination is still a great thing, and a strong recognition that we achieved something worthy in our years of hard work on the Carter Family graphic novel.

David has recently become a comics goodwill ambassador to Eastern Europe. He's got lots of photos and stories from his trips to Belgrade and Russia, and I'm sure he'd be happy to share some of all-of-the-above here, if you kind folks are interested.

Here's a photo of the Eisner Award that I won (David got one just like it):

Bezango Speaks to Frank and Jim!

Click on the picture above to see a brief excerpt from a two-hour interview done with Ron Austin and Louise Amandes. The discussion touched on The Carter Family GN, and on colorful aspects of Northwest comics life.

Here, Jim and Frank discuss the importance of the ZAPP (Zine Archive and Publishing Project) library at Seattle's wonderful Richard Hugo House.

Hear David and Frank Talk About "Don't Forget This Song" with Fretboard Journal's Michael John Simmons!

You've read several interviews about our graphic novel on the Carter Family... now you can hear we two chat with Fretboard Journal's delightful Michael John Simmons about Don't Forget This Song.

Just click on the graphic below and you'll go to the webpage pictured! If you're a guitar or stringed instrument enthusiast, FJ's website (and their print magazine) are a must!

NW Book Tour: Portland, Bellingham, Seattle!

If you live in Portland, OR, you might check out The Projects this weekend (sadly, I can't be there).  But save some energy for Thursday, Oct. 25, when Frank and I will be reading and signing our book at (one of my favorite stores in the world) Reading Frenzy!

The following day, Friday, Oct. 26, we'll be signing at one of the NW's great bookstores: Village Books, in Bellingham, WA! 

Our NW Book Tour ends with a bang at the Fantagraphics Bookstore in Seattle, Nov. 2 -- just before the spectacular Short Run small press show (where I will have a table)!  Frank and I will both be signing copies at Fantagraphics, along with cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, and the Fantagraphics Bookstore Gallery will be displaying a selection of Carter Family (and Noah Van Sciver) original art.  (And I am told there will be music by Dennis Driscoll!)

David and Frank see DON'T FORGET THIS SONG the book for the first time! Video by James Gill

Frank & David see book for the first time from James Gill on Vimeo.

Just what it sez above... we held off on looking at the advance copy of our graphic novel (not in stores 'til at least September, folks...) until we could meet up and see it together. Jim Gill captured the moment, which occurred in his siren-rific apartment in Seattle's medical district. 

It's Here! It's Here! The Carter Family Graphic Novel! It's a Real Thing!Wowee!

IT'S HERE!!!!!!!

David and I each got one advance copy of our book today from New York! Woo hoo! It's really real, folks!

The printers did a super-duper job on it, and, of course, Abrams' Charles Kochman, Sara Corbett and Neal Egan (among many others) did so much to make this book a reality.

Later this weekend I'll post a video shot by our friend Jim Gill of David and I seeing the book for the first time. We waited 'til we could meet up and see it together. The temptation to rip the envelope open was enormous, but I figured... we've waited five years for this moment; what's a few more hours?

It won't be too much longer 'til this book is out in the world. It's a dreamlike experience to page through this book. It has a nice heft to it; it's printed on high-quality paper; the enclosed CD is really nicely sequenced, and offers a side of the Carter Family's performances that some folks might not know about.

More stuff very soon on this literally amazing (a word I seldom use) event in our lives and careers! 

Don't Forget This Song is on pre-order status at Amazon!

Our book was once listed on amazon.com, but due to the various hurdles David and I had to jump to get this baby done, that listing was soon a pipe-dream.

This time it's for real!


Click HERE to see the real thing!

As David said, "This is yet another marker for me that the book is a REAL thing, and will really be in print soon..." I second that emotion! 


If the book isn't physically being printed, as I write this, it's either on the printer's queue (or, perhaps, already run off) in China. The street date is October 1st, but copies may surface before then, depending on when the book is printed and how long it takes copies to arrive, via the proverbial slow boat from China, to our consumer shores.


It's exciting news for us, and we're glad to share it here with you!

How I Discovered The Carter Family

Many people who know the work of my collaborator, David Lasky, may not recognize my name. It doesn't help that I have a rather common monicker. There are a lot of Frank Youngs in this world.

This particular Frank Young is proud to be the co-creator of this graphic novel. I have been an admirer of the Carter Family's music since the year 1984.

Along the way, I've been the editor of The Comics Journal, had hundreds of articles published in newspapers, magazines and literary journals; I've edited for newspapers and magazines as well.

More recently, I wrote several installments of Justin Green's late, lamented "Musical Legends" strip, from the equally moribund Pulse! magazine. (They're collected in the Last Gasp trade paperback that gathers Green's first-rate work on the strip.)

I have also been a writer and editor for Dana Countryman's Cool 'n' Strange Music! magazine (where I interviewed guitar wiz Les Paul), and I've sold gags to Topps Chewing Gum's iconic "Wacky Packages" trading cards.

As well, I've written several kids' non-fiction books, been in an instrumental band called the New Albanian Riots (check out our MySpace page!), and written a couple of yet-unpublished novels and some yet-unproduced screenplays.

Like David, I live in Seattle, Washington. I moved here to work for Fantagraphics in July, 1991. I must like it here; I haven't moved since.

Back in '84, I lived in Tallahassee, Florida. I wrote full-time for a long-gone "alternative" weekday paper called The Florida Flambeau. That paper was my training ground as a writer. I probably got most of the bad writing out of my system in the 11 years I worked for the "Flam." I was 17 when I first wrote for the paper, in 1980.

In 1984, my friend Michael Ogden first brought the Carter Family's music to my attention. I was on the verge of a discovery of country music, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. Prior listening obsessions--Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, in my high-school years--had prepared my ears to travel a bit further back in time.

Mike Ogden had a cassette of a German RCA International collection of Carter Family music. Imaginatively titled 20 of the Best (Catalog #:NL 89369), this album, in cassette form, made a huge impression on me.

The "Bristol Sessions" recordings were avoided. Otherwise, this LP hit the high spots of the Carters' 1928-1934 Victor recordings. Injudicious "room tone" fake reverb had been added to the original recordings. Otherwise, they had no overdubs; nor were they abhorrently remixed in fake "stereo" (the fluorescent light of recorded sound).

This music, at first, struck me as even rougher than Bob Dylan's first recordings. (Dylan's 1961 debut disc was my prior standard-bearer of rustic-type music.) It was something of a shock at first. I couldn't believe that a recording as raw and rural as "Little Darling Pal Of Mine" could have ever existed. (I had, obviously, not yet heard the music of Charlie Patton.)

The songs hooked me first. "John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man" reminded me of Woody Guthrie's "Tom Joad" (for obvious reasons; Guthrie helped himself to "Hardy"'s melody for his Steinbeck-influenced epic). "Lonesome Pine Special," "I Never Will Marry," "Lonesome Valley," "The Church in the Wildwood," "Lulu Walls," "Kitty Waltz," "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy" and "Wildwood Flower" also grabbed me.

In time, the performances began to break through, as I acclimated to them. Sara Carter's voice, with its harsh regional pronounciations, revealed itself to be a vessel of passion and intensity. The quavering tones of A.P. Carter fascinated me. It reminded me of the quirks of character actors from the early talkie movies.

Maybelle's guitar playing sealed the deal. I had just begun play the guitar at that time. I was capable of no more than rudimentary chordal strums. Maybelle's conflation of lead and rhythm guitar parts fascinated me, as it has many other young musicians.

After several years of bedroom woodshedding, I was finally able to decode and learn a few Maybelle guitar lines. To this day, I still can play a mean "Wildwood Flower," "Cannonball," "John Hardy" and "Jimmy Brown."

In 1986, I finally found a vinyl copy of the 20 of the Best LP. Vinyl Fever, the local record store of choice, had a copy that a Flambeau music critic had special-ordered but neglected. I spotted it behind the counter and asked if it were for sale. The clerk was disgusted enough with the writer, and his massive "hold pile," that he gladly sold it to me.

Soon, I dug up some of the handful of other Carter Family LPs that were available. There wasn't much on the market then. Some of it was cassette-only. Some of that, in turn, had been murdalized by fake-stereo conversion.

I wanted it all. A pair of LPs from the ACM (Anthology of Country Music) label introduced me to some of the Carters' superb Depression-era discs. As of yet, I knew almost nothing about the Carters. Songs such as "Lonesome For You," "March Winds Gonna Blow My Blues Away" and "One Little Word" only added to my fascination with their music.

"One Little Word" struck a frisson of childhood memory. My grandmother often sang that song to me in my very early years.

She was born in Louisiana in 1901, and worked as a schoolteacher in the Appalachian region in the late 1920s. Of course, she would have heard this music. I also recall her singing "Keep On The Sunny Side."

Through "One Little Word," I felt an immediate connection to the Carters and their region. It really struck me that this song had lingered in my grandmother's memory, and that she had sung it to me as a kind of lullaby. A curious choice for a soothing song--yet it worked.

That I lived in the Deep South--in an area that still retained strong traces of the 1920s and '30s--helped me acclimate to the Carter Family's music. It seemed to come out of the architecture, out of the woods and the sky and the old roads.

As I got to know it better, the Carters' music became a kind of map to the old South, to the last traces of it that remained. Those final lingering strands are all gone now. I'm glad I became aware of them while they could still be glimpsed.

As David and I begin our hard work on Don't Forget This Song, the richness and vibrance of the Carter Family's music continues to inspire me. I hope we can do their story justice. The narrative of their lives and career is as fascinating as their best music. I am honored to be a part of bringing this story to the medium of the graphic novel.