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Opus 162: Opus 162 (May 22, 2005). Our features this time include an introduction
to Kin Hubbard, the Hoosier
cartooner who invented Abe Martin, and a review of the career of Zeke Zekley and a speculation about why
he did not, against all expectation, inherit Bringing Up Father (Jiggs and Maggie) when its creator, George McManus, died. Other items, and
the order in which they appear, are as follows: Nous R Us -Calvin and Hobbes
originals, the Spirit movie, bashing The
Plot, Buzz Bunny re-styled, what a Blockbuster really is, Born Loser's 40th, a new triple threat strip from King,
getting married in a comic strip, and Andy Capp not statuesque; Abe Martin Explained -the story of Kin
Hubbard; Funnybook Fan Fare-
Reviews of Street Angel, City
of Tomorrow, Red Sonja, The Atheist, and
Kiss and Tell; Some Outstanding
Books, Cheap -the Quality Paperback Book Club cuts prices on some
important comics-related tomes; Zeke
Zekley, the man who wasn't there; a couple shots at civilization
as we know it, nudistry and religiosity, and a little Bush Whacking
with bloggers and the Right to conclude your day.
Finally, as always, our usual Solicitous Rejoinder: Remember,
when you get to the Members' Section, the useful "Bathroom Button"
(also called the "print friendly version") of this installment
that can be pushed for a copy that can be read later, at your leisure
while enthroned. Without further adieu-
NOUS R US Almost
all of the original art for Calvin
and Hobbes is archived ("on long term deposit") at the
Cartoon Research Library at the Ohio State University. Said Lucy S. Caswell, the curator: "Bill
Watterson is unusual among cartoonists since he kept virtually all
of his original comic strips. The collection he has placed here is unusually
complete." Under special collections use regulations, the artwork
can be studied. Scrutiny may reveal, if the only original I've seen
out of captivity is any indication (it's reproduced in my book, The Children of the Yellow Kid; more about the book here),
that the lettering is fading away: Watterson used a felt-tip pen, or
something similar, to letter many of the strips. The entire Calvin and Hobbes ouevre, remember, is being published in a three-volume
slip-cased set this fall by Andrews McMeel, not, I suspect, using original
art to shoot from but syndicate proofs, which are entirely serviceable,
I'm sure.
Jeph Loeb, supervising
producer for the tv show "Smallville," has already come up
with a story idea for a live-action movie about Will
Eisner's famed Spirit; the project seems poised for a "go."
... Disneyland is feting itself all year for its 50th anniversary;
the kick-off was on May 4. ... Las Vegas, meanwhile, is celebrating
its 100th anniversary: born as Clark's Las Vegas Townsite
in a railroad land auction on May 15, 1905, it has evolved in ways no
one could then have imagined -more than 130,000 hotel rooms, glittering
casinos everywhere you look, topless showgirls and big name entertainers,
and neon lights galore. The place is the epitome of 20th
century capitalism: the whole idea is to make as much profit from as
little investment as possible. And that's precisely what a slot machine
symbolizes. The full-page ad in a recent issue
of Previews for Top Cow's forthcoming Magdalena-Tomb Raider-Witchblade-Vampirella
team-up features the last-named trio, with Witchblade assuming a posture
that is anatomically impossible: the torso just doesn't bend sideways
that far no matter how desperately the artist wants to include a bum
shot with a boob view in the same pose. ... And while we're on the subject
of titillating pictures, here, in the Dark
Horse section, is a picture touting Super
Manga Blast No. 54 in which a seated fem offers the viewer a nearly
unimpeded view up her dress. The Japanese are nuts about women's underpants,
I realize, and I suppose that's explanation enough, but the attention
to detail in this drawing verges on obsessive. ... In the same issue,
an Image compilation of Jason Pearson's Body Bags books is announced,
Body Bags: Father's Day No.
1 (of 2 issues); this is a title (and a cartoonist) that should have
attracted more attention first time out, so don't miss this chance to
see some brilliant funnybook cartooning. Some stories translate better into
graphic novels than others, according to the Denver Post. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
translates pretty well; Black
Beauty and The Red Badge of
Courage, less so. Puffin Graphics, which provides the basis for
the comparison, stuck to the original story for Red
Badge, "conveying the substance if not the elegance of the
original." Okay, perhaps action translates better. But that doesn't
elminate the possibility of more subtle deployment of the medium's resources.
Have you seen City of Glass yet? Stunning. ... Reviewing
Will Eisner's The Plot in the Boston Phoenix, Douglas Wolk says we all suffer from the Ray Charles
syndrome: "when a beloved artist who repeatedly revolutionized
his form dies and leaves behind one final big project, there's a natural
tendency to see it as a last masterpiece, no matter how good it actually
is." Wolk bucks the tendency, though, calling The
Plot "one of the worst books Eisner ever wrote." Compared
to a work of fiction in which the storyline can be constructed to take
advantage of the form, Wolk is, in some measure, correct. But The Plot isn't a work of fiction: it's a polemic, Eisner proclaimed.
And it obeys somewhat different rules than the Spirit stories, which
Wolk calls "gems." The
Plot has faults, some of which I pointed out in my review (Opus
160), but most of those are the result of Eisner's attempting
something almost unprecedented in the form. He was bound to miss a few
times. The amazing thing is how successful he was. The Warner Bros' plan to subject Bugs Bunny and the Looney Toons to a make-over
in the new fall series of Saturday morning cartoons struck terror-well,
pretty active distaste anyhow-in the heart of 11-year-old Thomas Adams
of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The manga-style creations, intended to capitalize
on American youth's present fascination with action-adventure Japanese
anime, looked menacing and scarcely friendly to him. He protested. He
launched a website on February 28, inviting others who didn't like the
new Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to sign up on a petition to get Warner
Bros to create entirely new characters for the fall series instead of
"ruining" the old ones. Within a month, 25,000 signatures
had been accumulated; and after a CNN story aired, the site's tally
reached 80,000. Warner Bros caved. "We heard the outcry,"
said Scott Rowe, spokesman for Warner Bros Entertainment. "Buzz
Bunny" and the rest of the new cast (who do not displace the old
favorites but live in the year 2772) will still be manga-styled, but
the initial versions of the characters have now been "softened"
so they're not so scary. As for Adams, inspired by his success, he is
reportedly considering a new petition to protest school homework. Stan
Lee has a new title-"King of the Cameos"-says the Los Angeles Times, which notes that he'll
make his sixth "appearance" in a movie about Marvel characters
in this summer's Fantastic Four flick; Lee will appear, briefly, as
Willie Lumpkin, the mail man in the FF's Baxter Building. As we sidle up to the summer's usual
Blockbuster Season at the
box offices of America's movie houses, it might be blasphemous to note
that the box office "grosses" so systematically reported every
Sunday for the weekend's uproar are somewhat misleading. First, the
receipts for Sunday are only estimates because they haven't been actually
tallied yet. More significantly, though, the "gross" is a
result of two factors that have very little to do with the quality or
innate appeal of the movie-namely, the number of screens on which the
movie plays and the efficacy of the studio's marketing campaign. The
more screens, the bigger the "gross." I suspect it isn't until
a studio has evaluated the marketability of a movie that the number
of screens is determined. If a flick looks like it can be sold, enough
prints are manufactured to flood a host of screens; and then the promotional
machinery kicks in. No one thought "Sideways" would sell,
for instance; and it opened on only 30 screens, nation-wide. Clint Eastwood's
name and reputation, on the other hand, suggested that "Million
Dollar Baby" could be promoted; so it opened on 3,000 screens.
Guess which one racked up the biggest "gross"? But the real
money in movie-making comes from the home entertainment realm. Ticket
sales used to account for 100 percent of a studio's revenue back in
1940; now, they add up to less than 20%. According to Edward Jay Epstein
at slate.com, "Theatrical releases now essentially serve as launching
platforms for videos, DVDs, network tv, pay tv, games, and a host of
other products" from which studios derive their profits.
Comic
Strip Watch. The Born Loser, an NEA comic strip about the hilarity of perpetual failure, celebrates
its 40th year this month. Created by Art Sansom, the strip
was inherited by his son Chip when Art died in 1991. By then, Chip had
been apprenticing with his father for 14 years, writing gags and drawing
the strip, which he continues to do in a graphic style somewhat more
simplified than his father's. As a tribute to his father, Chip includes
his name in signing the strip. Originally, the strip had no central
characters: its gags simply arose from losing situations encountered
by an assortment of anonymous personages. Gradually, however, one of
those persons, Brutus Thornapple, emerged as the star loser. These days,
he is plagued by his imperious boss, Rancid Veeblefester, his long-suffering
wife Gladys, his ferocious mother-in-law, Ramona Gargle, his son Wilberforce
and the neighborhood juvenile terror, Hurrican Hattie O'Hare. Among
my favorites is a bibulous panhandler named Gravesite. I can't remember
his first name-it may be Cyril or Clyde; who knows? -but he's a unqualified
hoot. The strip claims a circulation of 1,300 newspapers, making it
one of the top twenty strips; but only one reprint volume has ever appeared,
The Born Loser's Guide to Life
(Topper, 1990). Surely it's time for more. Guy
Endore-Kaiser is doing a new comic feature at United Feature called
Brevity. It's a one-panel affair that is
drawn by Rodd Perry to be
used either in strip format or single-panel gag cartoon format. The
two creators work together at the Ant Farm, a Hollywood motion picture
advertising agency. In one of their recent Brevitys,
Perry reproduces Brad Anderson's
colossal canine, Marmaduke, with great precision to accompany this
caption: "Suddenly, Marmaduke discovered that his whole life was
a joke -and not a very funny one either." The first part of the
sentence, ending with "joke," is funny; the rest converts
the gag into an insult. These guys haven't been around long, and I suspect
they have too many names to last. Here's an exhausting new strip from
King Features. Called Triple Take,
it offers not just a gag-a-day but three gags every day! I realize that
comic strips are in trouble at newspapers: the average 20-30 strip comics
page costs the hosting newspaper a small fortune every year (figure
a conservative $15/week for each strip), and newspapers persist in complaining
that they're in dire financial straits even though their profit margin
still hovers around 15-25%, higher than almost any other enterprise.
So the notion of giving readers three chuckles in a single strip must
have galvanizing appeal to fiscal-minded newspaper editors. The strip
is the brain child of King's editor-in-chief, Jay
Kennedy, who, I suspect, thinks he's marketing three for the price
of one. He also realizes that coming up with three gags for one setup
picture ain't easy. "It takes true talent," he said. And he's
right. John
Kovaleski says he likes "weaving selected moments from my life"
into his comic strip, Bo Nanas,
whose title character is a monkey. Last year, Kovaleski proposed
to his girlfriend via the strip. This year, Bo seemingly "attends"
the couple's actual wedding, which took place in a movie theater in
Rochester, New York. Bo goes into a movie theater in the strip but sees
a marriage ceremony taking place instead of a motion picture. And he
runs into a number of people who are cartoon versions of the real-life
friends of Kovaleski and Jocelyn Swigger, his bride. Said the cartoonist:
"Cartooning is such an important part of who I am that it only
feels natural to involve it in some way. Although, I must admit, having
your own fictional character show up at your real wedding is a bit kooky."
In England, the Hartlepool Borough
Council approved funding for a five-foot tall statue of Andy Capp, the celebrated drinking, gambling, womanizing comic strip
creation of Hartlepool native Reg
Smythe. But the plan was subsequently scuttled because ol' Andy
was suddenly deemed "inappropriate" for this sensitized day
and age. Too many citizens thought Andy wasn't the best image for the
city. So much for laughter. Hoffer's Hook Eric
Hoffer, a weathered longshoreman who turned philosopher in his dotage,
was once asked, by another Eric (Severied, then in his wise man role
at CBS), what he, Hoffer, thought a symbol of civilization was. "A
hook," said Hoffer, "-a hook on the wall where you can hang
a broom, the broom indicating that someone is interested in maintaining
the physical environment," keeping it clean and orderly and functional.
In other words, "maintenance" is the mark of civilization:
civilized people are interested in maintaining their situation, their
house, their village, their society. So what do we make of a so-called
civilization that manufactures goods that cannot be maintained? Small
household appliances, like coffee-makers, the working parts of which
are somehow sealed up inside in such a way that we cannot get at them
to repair them when they malfunction? Where's Hoffer's hook?
Abe Martin Explained Some
years ago, while browsing in my favorite used book store in Evanston,
Illinois (it's Bookman's Alley, if you want to know-and if you're ever
in the vicinity, it's worth a visit, not just for the treasures you
might find in its cavernous embrace but because it's virtually a museum
of odd artifacts, arranged to augment kindred subjects in the books
on the shelves), I chanced upon a small volume of pithy comments, decorated,
here and there, with cartoonish drawings of a funny-looking rural personage.
The book had two names on the cover-Abe Martin and Kin Hubbard-and for
a while, I didn't know which was the author. But I eventually, given
the generous passage of time, figured out that Hubbard had invented
Martin. And, as it turned out, I was right. If you want to know a good
deal about Kin Hubbard, you should visit this Indiana History site,
http://indianahistory.org/pop_hist/people/hubbard.html;
but if you don't want to take the time just now to peruse his whole
history, here's the short of it: "Kin" is not, as you might
suppose, hillbilly dialect for "Ken"; no, it's short for McKinney,
which is Frank Hubbard's middle name, taken hostage, we suppose, from
Hubbard's mother's family, which, we further suppose, was sur-named
McKinney. There, our suppositions end. Hubbard was born into the newspaper
business, his father being the editor of one (which, in those days,
meant he probably owned it, too). Kin drew from an early age and attained
considerable graphic proficiency in the old fashioned galoot-style of
cartooning. He was also no slouch as a caricaturist when it came to
depicting local politicians. Taking these attainments on the road, he
looked for a career as a newspaper artist, and after a false start or
two, he wound up in 1901 at the Indianapolis News, where he worked as a staff artist, illustrating
the news. This was before the half-tone process permitted reproduction
of photographs in newspapers, so staff artists were plentiful around
the country. In the fall of 1904, Hubbard was assigned
to report on the campaign swing being made through the southern part
of the state by John W. Kern, the Democratic candidate for governor.
In addition to portraying the gubernatorial candidate in various unguarded
moments, Hubbard observed the indigenous population around Nashville
in Brown County, making sketches and notes as he did. His coverage of
Kern's speechifyin' included a drawing of "a satisfied agriculturist
of Brown County," who, puffing a pipe, says: "Durned ef I
see any excuse fer a change ez long ez we are all doin' so well."
The drawing was published on or about October 1, 1904. When Hubbard
returned to Indy and the newspaper office, he had a good deal more material
in his sketchbook than the coverage of the campaign itself required.
He showed his sketches to his editor and said he hoped he could re-tool
some of them to use in some way, and his editor encourage him. As Hubbard
doodled with his material, he grew increasingly fond of his whiskery
"agriculturist" who he depicted wearing huge boots and plaid
pants. By December, the bumpkin from Brown County had a name, Abe Martin.
And on December 17, 1904, he made his inaugural appearance in the Indianapolis News. Hubbard drew Abe Martin
just a-standin' there, staring at a playbill featuring a somewhat (for
those times) scantily clad woman, a showgirl. And Abe is saying: "If
I thought that blamed troupe done everything it has pictures fer, I'd
stay over this evening and go home on the interurbin." (The last
term described a an interurban trolley that connected small towns in
much of Indiana and America for the first few decades of the century.)
The feature, as Hubbard put it years later, "caused some favorable
comment and it was decided to continue it." And so he did-nearly
every day for the next 26 years. Almost immediately, he gave Abe a habitat:
on February 3, 1905, the crusty rube announces that he's going to move
to Brown County; and on the next day, Hubbard shows Abe atop a towering
wagon-load of household goods, making his way into the rural setting
where he will spend the rest of his career, uttering faux wisdom and
country gossip of a vaguely amusing kind. Hubbard earns praise from his biographers (David S. Hawes and Fred C. Kelly) for a curious innovation: he usually accompanied his Abe Martin drawing with two rustic witticisms, not just one; and the two were usually completely unrelated. Our samples here, taken from the Almanacks, are encumbered with only one saying each, but that's not how they appeared initially in the newspapers. I suspect a good number of readers spent no little time trying to figure out how the two sayings were connected, contorting mentally in an existential exercise that no doubt divulged the music of the spheres if pursued avidly enough. It has led me nowhere, however, so I was delighted to discover that the essential unrelatedness of the utterances was deliberate and that they were never intended to be connected at all. Apart from appreciating Abe's insights, the other pleasure the feature affords is in the drawings. In defiance of the cartooning custom I've been extolling all these years as a measure of excellence, these drawings are as unrelated to the sayings, usually, as the two sayings are to each other. And at first blush, the pictures of Abe Martin seem distinguished by a monotony of pose that is breathtaking. Upon inspection, however, you'll discover, as I did, that the comedy transpires in the distance, in the tiny background details in front of which ol' Abe stands so sturdily, both booted feet firmly on the ground at almost all times. We see frolicking barnyard critters, cows and horses kicking up their heels in sheer animal exuberance, and all sorts of comically rendered farm machinery. Hence, our pleasure at perusing Abe Martin is three-fold: each of the two unrelated sayings affords its own delight, and the drawing offers yet another source of amusement. As I say, in defiance of cartooning custom. So much for the universality of that theory. There are other wrinkles in the Hubbard story, I suspect; and someday I plan to write more about him. Until then, though, I'll be running an Abe Martin "cartoon" here occasionally, just to keep the wit and Arcadian wisdom of his era before us in these trying times. Here, to close out this installment, are a couple more Abe Martin renditions-his debut on December 17, 1904, and his appearance on February 4, 1905, as he moved to Brown County.
Funnybook Fan Fare The
mini-series Street Angel,
written by Brian Maruca and drawn by Jim Rugg, has reached an interim concluding
issue with No. 5. Rugg says (at www.comicbookresources.com)
that he needs a break, but he hopes to return to the character and the
series after exploring creatively "some other things." Said
he: "I'm not taking a break because I don't like the character.
In the course of working on the book, I've grown to like this character
much more than I did in the beginning. But this is my first comic book
work. I have a lot of room for improvement, and that's part of what
I plan to do for now. I don't have any concrete plans, but Brian and
I have written a number of additional Street Angel stories already,
so we'll see what happens." I hope what happens is that they return
to the series. Street Angel is
one of those rarities in today's comics kingdom, over-populated with
new titles that rise and fall like so many roman candle rockets. The
books are not only well and wittily written, but they embody a visual
dexterity that proclaims Rugg a far more accomplished practitioner in
the medium than his own verdict implies. In the first issue of the series, we
meet Jesse Sanchez-"an orphan raised by the streets. In an unforgiving
world overrun with poverty, drug abuse, nepotism, and ninjas, Sanchez
fights for the poor, the forgotten, and whenever possible, for food."
It's a delicious display of sardonic humor: Maruca strings together
his series (poverty, drug abuse; then the poor, the forgotten) leading
up to non-sequitur conclusions in each series (in the first, nepotism
and ninjas; in the second, food) that ring the gong of comedy. Nepotism
and ninjas? How does that belong in the mean streets Maruca invokes?
It doesn't, of course; and that's the hilarity of his writing. Jesse,
we learn, is Street Angel, the nom de guerre by which she is known to
the criminals of her neighborhood. The arch-villain of the first issue,
however, is "the deadliest geologist of the last 1,000 years"
(geologist?), who tried, at the tender age of 19, to flatten the earth
"using proprietary semiconductor technology in conjunction with
the magnetic resonance of the North and South Poles." Gobbledegook
humor of the first water, no question. His current plan is to re-unite
the earth's continents. I'm not sure how that is a threat, in and of
itself, to all mankind, but I suppose moving all those continental masses
would wreak some sort of wholesale catastrophe. In any event, the mayor
of Angel City enlists Jesse to stop the crazed geologist; the interview
is distinguished by Jesse's insistence on using a bull-horn to speak
to the mayor. In the end, Jesse defeats a horde of ninjas (yes, ninjas)
in Rugg's spectacular 3-page wordless sequence. After wholesale slaughter
on every hand, she stands "triumphantly" amid the corpses
littering the floor of the warehouse and says (triumphantly, we suppose),
"Where's my shoe?" She then returns the mayor's kidnaped daughter
to him, and in the issue's last panel, she goes back to the warehouse,
the scene of her triumph, where "she turns her attention to finding
her shoe until the next time that danger comes calling for-Street Angel."
Jesse, on her knees, grubbing among the ninja body parts, says, "Stupid
shoe." Terrific stuff, kimo sabe. Rugg repeatedly deploys the resources
of the medium to dramatic effect. He draws well: we can recognize his
characters from one depiction to another, and all the props and locales
are rendered with panache. Every line is confidently laid in; not a
false move anywhere. No small achievement for a guy ostensibly a beginner
at the comic book game. Rugg produces several nearly silent sequences
of high action. Throughout, the pictures carry the narrative burden,
sometimes in ironic comment upon the verbiage. But the words serve a
large function, too: they are the wit in the story. Words and pictures
blend to give us a witty, dramatically enhanced tale of derring-do and
thumping action-comedy and adventure, not as united in purpose since
the days of Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs. A signal achievement. Each of the other four issues tells
a single, stand-alone tale. In No. 2, Jesse encounters time-traveling
pirates (who are prone to exclaim "Yar" in the best Robert
Newton manner, with little or no provocation), Inca gods, and an overweight
virgin. The pirates, whose motives seem somewhat hazy, hope, as they
scamper menacingly about the 21st century, to encounter "virgins
yearning to be free." Ah, Maruca-what a stunningly risible coupling
of errant expressions. In No. 3, Jesse takes on a batch of Satanists.
In the next issue, Maruca and Rugg deftly perform an impressive change-of-pace:
here, we meet Jesse as a homeless person, dumpster-diving for donuts
and survival. In No. 5, she befriends an aged former superhero, an African-American
who battled the forces of evil as "Afrodisiac." Now there's
a name for you. "Criminals feared me," he says, "women
... heh, heh ... women couldn't get enough of me." And Rugg, perfectly
aping the Marvel style of yore, gives us several sample pages of the
comic book in which the old guy starred as a young superhero. Jesse
rescues the old guy from an assault by some street punks, and the two
of them discuss the cannibalistic implications of the old man's "carnal
knowledge" of a woman one of the thugs claims was his mother. But
you have to be there. If you missed the series, don't fret: it's coming
out in a trade paperback in June, all five issues, plus new material.
This one is not to miss. Visit www.streetanglecomics.com
for details, if you need 'em. Howard
Chaykin's latest, City of
Tomorrow, is, if the first issue is any guide, another of his dazzling
deployments of the medium's resources: he uses such devices as poster-ish
typography and voice-over transitioning from one scene to the next with
the same flair he developed in American
Flagg, decades ago. And his timing, as always, is fiendishly, cynically,
humorous. The story involves an array of beautiful people doing unpleasant
things-from depraved sex to casual homocide. The opening sequence juggles
four narratives-a bomber delivering a bomb inside the corpse of an infant,
Eli Foyle extolling the history and virtues of his synthetic metropolis,
the bomber getting a blow job just as an avenging factotum blows his
head off, and a voice-over explaining the backstory. Throughout the
book, we slip back and forth through three time frames-the past (for
the founding of Columbia, the "city of tomorrow"), the present
with Eli Foyle's son, Tucker, an agent of some sort, and the intervening
period when Tuck was a rebellious teenager. Tuck seems to have the hots
for another agent, Ryan-or vice versa-and their conversation is peppered
with sexual innuendo and sarcastic remarks about the alleged Weapons
of Mass Destruction they go looking for. Chaykin's work is always highly
polished adventure with a dollop of satirical social criticism about
the hypocrisy of status and sex, which, for Chaykin, is usually soulless
recreation. And this effort is firmly in the groove. We look forward
to the next episode and more mystification, more lust, more nasty talk. The first issue-No. 0-of Dynamite's
Red Sonja, as I said last time, opens with
a tight shot of the heroine's derriere, displaying here more cleavage
behind than the rest of the book does above. The titillation undercuts
the otherwise spooky mood as she walks through a rainstorm by a spectral
tree from which dangles a long-dead corpse. She strolls into a village
and a tavern there, where she has a tankard or two, gets drunk, and
then, recovering instantly when threatened, fights off a gang of goons
and sets fire to the tavern and the town, all of which burn to the ground.
It's nicely done pictorial narrative, mostly wordless, by Michael
Avon Oeming with Mike Carey
and art by Mel Rubi -brilliantly
colored by Caesar Rodriguez with Richard Isanove. Red Sonja's face is
a little too pretty for me-that is, too conventionally pretty. Frank
Thorne's scowling visage suits the concept of the character better,
I think. But I admire the storytelling here, even though we never find
out why the sniper archer in the opening sequence refrains from nailing
Sonja. Phil
Hester's The Atheist No.
1 is an intriguing tale grippingly told. The concept involves dead people
coming back to life for some purpose as yet undisclosed. Hester's manner,
visualized by John McCrea, doles out information piecemeal,
first assembling stray, seemingly unrelated scraps, then pulling them
all together by the end of the book, which concludes on a sufficiently
suspenseful note that we look forward to the next issue. The maneuver
is a satisfying one: while we are left in the dark about the major mystery,
we learn enough about the attendant ones to gratify our curiosity about
many of the minor issues the book raises. McCrea's treatment is as cryptic
as Hester's narrative style: the pictures are deeply shadowed, the drawings
sometimes elliptical, sometimes spare, sometimes as textured and feathered
as those Filipino masterworks of yore. As for the title character, Hester
explains that he is not really an atheist: he is merely dubbed that
by others who can't understand his "uncompromising brand of logic,"
a logic that, by the end of this issue, leads the Atheist (Antoine Sharpe)
to conclude that the supposed dead man he's interrogating is telling
the truth about his being dead. "I am not an atheist," Hester
continues. "I am the opposite. I believe in nearly everything,
many of those things demonstrably false. I am happily bewildered. ...
Most of the atheists I know, just like most of the religious folks,
are swell. ... This work is not meant to proselytize. Whatever gets
you through the night without bombing your neighbor is just fine by
me. What you hold in your hand is a horror story that hopes, in some
oblique manner, to address some questions about differing sources of
human morality. It is meant to be a thrilling adventure tale that portrays
a common point of understanding between reason and faith. It is this:
while we are here, we must be sweeter to one another." And he finishes
by quoting Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is lame;
religion without science is blind." Nicely done, Phil. I picked up three issues of Kiss and Tell last week, but the numbering
is somewhat eccentric: Nos. 1 and 2 are in "Volume 2," but
No. 8 isn't. Oddly, I read them in that order and don't seem to have
missed much. The story, by Jeff
Amano as pictured by Craig
Rousseau, introduces us to Sam Swede, a giant of a simple man who,
by the end of No. 8, is a modern Samson: betrayed by his wife, daughter
of the local mob chieftan, Sam is chained to pillars and brings down
the temple around him and his tormentors, all members of the lawless
mob that runs the city. The storytelling-breakdowns, panel composition,
pacing-is well done, often cinematic, and Rousseau's minimalist manner
is aesthetically pleasing as well as clear and informative, which is
what all pictures in a visual narrative must be. Giulia Brusco's coloring, mostly monochromatic,
varies the color from one scene to another, ostensibly suiting the mood
or time of day (nights are dark blue and purple).
Some Outstanding Books, Cheap The
Quality Paperback Book Club, run by the old Book of the Month Clubbers,
is currently having a sale that features several comics publications:
In the Shadow of No Towers, $9.39; Dr. Seuss Goes to War (his political cartoons
in the early 1940s, a classic piece of cartooning history), $5.29; Peanuts: A Golden Celebration (produced
to celebrate Schulz's 50th anniversary on the strip, it came
out just before he died), $9.19;
The New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons, $4.79; This
Is a Bad Time, a collection of Bruce Eric Kaplan's painfully static
New Yorker efforts, $5.99; and, just to
complete the New Yorker reading
list, Brendan Gill's engaging history of the magazine, Here at the New Yorker, $6.79. Also at QPBC: Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the
Birth of the Comic Book is offered at the regular QPBC price of
$15.99; ditto the new Crumb opus, The
R. Crumb Handbook, $15.99. And the collection of Sunday strips by
Berke Breathed, Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best, is $19.99.
All three of the last-named are also available at half-price when you
buy another QPBC book at full price; you'll be charged the regular price
for the most expensive of your selection, then half-price for the rest.
You can find out more about all this at the website, www.qpb.com.
George McManus's "Son" and Heir And How That Didn't Work Out Zeke Zekley is a name that has been routed out of comic strip history.
Literally. Back in the 1940s, engravers at King Features took routing
tools and erased his name from the plates of comic strips that he'd
signed. Zeke died on April 28, 2005, at the age of 90. And he may have
taken with him to his grave, as they say, the answer to one of the great
questions that, at one time, puzzled of the profession: Why didn't he,
after twenty years as George McManus's assistant, inherit McManus's
celebrated comic strip, Bringing Up Father, when McManus died
in 1954? Various rumors circulated at the time-and since-and not all
of them complimentary. As long as Zeke lived, the rumors were whispered.
And no one that I ever heard about ever approached him directly about
them. I didn't know Zeke well, but I knew him well enough to believe
that had anyone confronted him with any of these scurrilous tales, he
would have promptly and vehemently denied them. He would have been astonished
that such stories were being told and deeply hurt that anyone could
believe them. And that, Zeke's imagined reaction, may be, in the last
analysis, the proof that the stories were false: no one who knew him
could believe the rumors, and no one who knew him would be so unkind
as to make him aware of the slurs on his character that the stories
made. Zeke was one of the most pleasant people
I ever met. On every one of the few occasions we talked, he seemed cheerful,
unpretentious, and kind. Mark
Evanier, who knew him longer and better than I, wrote in an obituary:
"He was a great guy, generous with his time and talents. He employed
a great many cartoonists but was not above sitting down at the board
and drawing or lettering pages himself." As a journalist, I appreciated
Zeke's candor and willingness to talk: he never dodged a question, and,
in pursuit of the solution to the mystery I just alluded to, I asked
some questions that might have made him pause-particularly if the rumors
were true; but he never paused. I met him in the summer of 1998 in his
apartment in Beverly Hills. Ed McGeean took me there, and we all went
to the Friars' Club for lunch. Afterwards, we returned to the apartment,
and we talked for a while, and I looked at some original strips Zeke
still had on hand. And he showed me how he and McManus did some of the
curlicue decoration in the strip, intricate embellishments that were
the envy of anyone who produces artwork on a daily deadline basis. The
following winter, I phoned him a couple times and conducted an interview,
parts of which appear here. Born in Chicago in 1915, Zeke grew
up in Detroit, where, at the age of 18, he found his first cartooning
job-with the Detroit Mirror,
which promptly went out of business. Zeke freelanced briefly, but the
Depression had hit Motor City hard, and Zeke and an artist friend, Lenny
Benkoe, figured they stood a better chance of finding employment at
their craft in New York or Hollywood. They flipped a coin, Zeke said,
and it came up Hollywood, so they went West in the spring of 1935, ferrying
a couple new cars to California for transportation. In Los Angeles,
Zeke and Lenny were taken on at Disney on a trial basis, but after a
few weeks, the studio cut back for the summer, laying off Zeke and Lenny.
"They told me to come back in
the fall," Zeke told me, "and they'd try me in the Story Department." Meanwhile, he had no work. Lenny had
made an arrangement with a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, Bob Perry's
Brass Rail: Lenny would table-hop around the place, doing quick portrait
sketches for tips. "So one night," Zeke continued,
"I was in there while he was doing the drawings. And I'm seated
over at a table, having a cup of coffee, and one of the waiters comes
over to me, and he says, 'You're a cartoonist, aren't you? Your friend
there, this guy doing the drawing, says you're a cartoonist.' And I
said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Well, you see that fellow in the back there
in that booth? That's Charlie McManus. He's the brother of George McManus.'
So I said, 'Gee, that's wonderful.' But I was very depressed at the
moment because first of all, it was mixed emotions. George McManus had
been an idol of mine. A lot of my schoolbooks, in the margins, had sketches
where I'd copied Jiggs or did some of the characters from his strip.
But I was getting letters from back east, from my friends, telling me
who's taking out my girl," Zeke chucked, "and they're all
out at the lakes over the summer, and they're all having a hell of a
lot of fun, and all that. And here I am, I'm dead broke at this point
and I'm trying to figure out, all right, I had a ride out here. How
am I going to get back to Detroit? "So I'm sitting here, and I'm
having my coffee, I'm doodling with a pencil on the tablecloth. And
while I'm thinking of getting back to Detroit, I'm doodling with this
thing about McManus, and I'm drawing a picture of Jiggs," he laughed,
"and I'm doing an imitation of his signature, you know, and things
like that. And finally, I just waved to Lenny and said, 'I'll wait for
you outside.' You know, until he's finished. And I went out to watch
the traffic going by, and so forth. And a few minutes later, the waiter
comes with the tablecloth, and he said, 'Did you do this?' And-oh, my
God-I figured, here I am, broke, and now I'm going to have to pay for
a tablecloth," Zeke laughed again. "And I was too nervous
to lie, so I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Well, I took this, your tablecloth,
over to Charlie McManus and he liked what he saw, and he asked would
you come over to his table?'" Zeke chucked again. "And he
said his brother might be interested in hiring me. So Charlie arranged
a meeting, and a couple of days later, I met George, and he sat me down
to a table. He was going out to take his mother out for a ride. She
was pretty ill, but he was taking her out for this ride, and he just
told me to try some lettering, and maybe rule out some panels for him,
and so forth, and then left me in his apartment. I was a total stranger." I said, "Pretty remarkable!" Zeke continued: "And off he went.
And when he got back, he said, 'Let me think on this and come back tomorrow.'
So I did. And I got the job the next day. And we had a good twenty years
together-from starting out with ruling the panels, and doing the lettering,
and filling in the blacks; and here and there, a lamp, or a set of drapes,
or a window, I would draw all these little things that he'd left open
when pencilled, and I would finish them up. Or he would suggest what
goes there and I would finish them up. Well, that went along for a year
or so, and more and more, I started to do some more things, and even
suggest gags and stories." Then in 1937, Zeke told me, McManus
went off on a cruise to Rio de Janeiro, leaving behind a pile of strips
roughed out and telling Zeke to do the lettering. McManus would finish
the drawings when he got back. Then McManus was delayed and he telegraphed
Zeke to ink some parts of the strips. Then Zeke, who'd returned to Detroit
for a visit, doing lettering and some inking on the road, got stranded
by a flood in Arizona. Unable to reach either McManus or the syndicate,
he manufactured a drawing board by taking out the drawer out of a chest
of drawers in the motel and did some strips on his own. "That was the first time I substituted
some of my work for his," Zeke said, "and I shot them back
to New York. George was very happy with it when he got back," he
added, chuckling. "And from that point on, I took on more of the
work. I started to do more and more of the Sunday topper, Rosie's
Beau. Later on, we changed it from Rosie's
Beau to Snookums, Snookums
being a character that he had from a previous strip that he had before
Bringing Up Father. It was called Their Only Child, and it was based on The Newlyweds and their baby, which he
did for Pulitzer when he was with the New
York World and Pulitzer had him, and then Hearst enticed him away
with double what he was making with Pulitzer. "We went on from that," Zeke
continued, "and over the years, I was doing the Snookums thing on top, and I was kicking around ideas with him, and
more and more, it became a collaborative effort. Mostly him, but lesser
with me. But nevertheless, I would make a suggestion, and, the guiding
hand of the pro, he would polish it up. And when I saw it, I knew I
had a germ of an idea, but I never knew it could come off the way he
did it." Physically in the studio, the two had drawing
tables in line, Zeke's just in front of McManus's. They'd pass work
back and forth. Sometimes McManus would start something and give it
to Zeke to finish while he started something else. Sometimes Zeke would
suggest a gag or an idea, and McManus would mull it over and polish
it. "It went back and forth,"
Zeke said. "You get an idea, a germ of an idea, and we'd start
a Sunday page. The Sunday pages were cut in half so they'd be easy to
manipulate on a drawing board without having to reach too far. The top
three tiers included the topper, Snookums,
and the first three panels of Jiggs, which was continued with the
remaining three tiers of panels on the bottom half of the artboard.
So he could be working on one part, and I could be working on the other,
and we'd pass them back and forth. And little things would arise. He'd
say, 'You know, you've got a cigar in his mouth here, and you've got
it also in his fingers.' And I'd say, 'I didn't do it.' He said, 'Well, I didn't do it,'" Zeke laughed. "Or he'd say, 'You've
got spats on him in the first scene and you got him in stocking feet
in the second scene.' And these kind of little, silly arguments would
go back and forth." I said, "So ultimately, once you
really got into the swing of things there, sometimes you were penciling,
sometimes you were inking, and vice versa, right? "Well, yes," Zeke said, "Mostly
inking and on certain things, I'd just go ahead and pencil things, and
run it past him. And if he thought it needed correction, he would lend
his hand and give it back to me." I said, "So if you put a cigar
in Jiggs' hand and one in his mouth, it was something you were doing
as you were inking?" "Yes," he said; "you're
focused in on one piece for so long that you did some things almost
automatically. You see his mouth-all right, put a cigar in it. And you're
not immediately aware that he has his hand on a table-you're not looking
at the hand-and there's a cigar already between his fingers," he
finished, laughing. "We got along famously,"
he went on. "It was a lot of fun. We'd go out for dinners together
and breakfasts almost all the time. Sometimes we'd start the day at
the studio; sometimes, I'd phone him and say, 'Do you want to ride with
me?' And he'd say, 'Yeah,' so I'd just pick him up and we'd go to the
studio. Other times, I'd just meet him at the studio. Usually, we got
there nine, nine-fifteen, after breakfast. George didn't go out for
lunch. I did; he'd take a nap. Once in a while, I'd bring back a sandwich
for him. Sometimes, he'd say, 'No sandwiches for me. No, nothing.' But
when I'd go out, I'd say, 'I'll bring you back a ham and egg,' or whatever.
But I'd break for lunch. Sometimes, I'd go home because we lived near
the studio and it took only about five minutes each way. And it was
good, it was good. We had a hell of a lot of fun. I think he had a stillborn
son, and I could sense that what he had missed in life was having that
father-son relationship. And I sense that I sort of filled a niche there.
He was godfather to both my children, and I can't say enough for him.
You know, like a father." I interrupted: "His wife was an
invalid, if I remember." "Yes," Zeke said. "He
had a separate home for her with servants and nurses. And she lived
out in Santa Monica." At its peak, Bringing Up Father was renowned for its worldwide distribution, perhaps
the first American comic strip to achieve international fame. Zeke told
me that the syndicate official in charge of foreign sales said the strip
was translated into twenty-seven languages and appeared in 850 newspapers
worldwide. "George was very generous with
me," Zeke went on. "Financially, I was very well-rewarded
because he recognized that I was able to be syndicated somewhere else.
And frankly, I knew that I made more money than a lot of guys who had
their own strip. But for a long time, Joe Connolly, who was the head
of King Features, was absolutely adamant that we should never admit
that anybody worked with George. The idea was that George did all his
own work. And for a while, I said, 'My God, I want to tell my mother
what I do.' She might think I'm selling dope, you know?" he laughed.
"But George would give me credit when the gag was mine. He'd tell
me to co-sign a strip, put my name just below his. And here and there,
both signatures appeared. Usually, however, Joe Connolly had it routed
it out at the engravers. And my name disappeared.
Here and there, something got through, but it was quite a thing."
(One of Zeke's signatures shows up on a daily strip that I put into
that book of mine, The Children
of the Yellow Kid, which gave me the excuse to give Zeke the credit
that he deserved in a history of the medium.) Zeke was not an official part of McManus's
contract with King Features: he was McManus's employee, not the syndicate's.
But McManus didn't like bookkeeping, and because he was so important
to the syndicate, the syndicate arranged to deposit Zeke's pay in a
bank account so McManus wouldn't have the bother. Our interviews were liberally spiced
with Zeke's anecdotes about various adventures he shared with McManus.
And with a generous dollop of lore. How Jiggs acquired his wealth, for
instance. In most histories and newspaper accounts over the years, it
is said that Jiggs, who had worked as a common laborer, got rich by
winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Not according to McManus. Partly in jest,
McManus revealed the secret. When Jiggs was working as a hod-carrier,
his employer was another Irishman named Ryan. Ryan liked Jiggs. He liked
him so much that he gave Jiggs a dime every time he, Ryan, made a thousand
dollars. Ryan, obviously, got very very rich. And so did Jiggs. About the origin of Jiggs's name, however,
McManus was silent. Zeke assumed it had something to do with the dance,
the Irish jig. Then there was the time Zeke went to
San Simeon, the moutaintop castle Hearst maintained overlooking the
ocean just south of the Big Sur. McManus was invited up to discuss a
forthcoming development in the strip, and he asked Zeke if he'd like
to come along. "I said, 'Boy, would I!'"
Zeke said. "So I got to go to Hearst's castle and was up there
for several days, and got to play tennis with Gloria Vanderbilt, who
was about fifteen years old at that time," he chuckled. "I
was, what, about twenty-two or three? I slept in the bed that Cardinal
Richelieu had died in. As you know, the place was filled with all these
great antiques imported from all over the world. In the bathroom, there
was a Goya painting. And the priceless works of art and antiques, unbelievable.
And would you believe that I sat next to Marion Davies every night,
at every lunch. Breakfast, it was buffet breakfast there and the Old
Man [Hearst] didn't come down for breakfast, but you had to be there
at, like, 11:30 for lunch, and he would come down with Marion, and we'd
sit at this long table. Now, this room, this huge cavern actually, was
like a cathedral that he had moved, stone by stone, from Spain, or somewhere,
and removed all the pews. And this was his dining hall. The table went
from where you are to Chicago. Fantastic antique chairs and tapestries,
and silver, orbs, and swords, and armor, and what have you, all around
the place. And I sat opposite W.R. Hearst. It boggles my mind to this
day that I was in such high company." McManus had been summoned to consult
about having Jiggs' daughter get married to an Englishman who'd wandered
into the strip. They decided to acquaint the Englishman with the United
States by taking him on a tour of the country in the strip. It was a
great publicity stunt because they deliberately stopped in all the major
cities where papers carried the strip. Zeke did extensive research,
finding distinctive landmarks in every city that could be depicted in
the strip. One of the storied sites was Times Square in New York-rendered
on a Sunday page that demanded the inclusion of hundreds of telling
visual details. "It was a huge panoramic scene,"
Zeke remembered. "Broadway north of 42nd Street. And
it took forever to complete. We'd work on it a little at a time, doing
bits and pieces on it for several weeks, referring all time to photographs.
Well, when we sent that one in, we thought we'd hear something. And
the only thing we heard was that the Claridge Hotel had been torn down-"
he laughed "-and I'd put it in. I didn't identify it as the Claridge,
but people wrote in to say the Claridge Hotel had been torn down. That
was the only thing we heard." George McManus died on October 22,
1954. He'd been ill, so Zeke had been doing the strip (assisted by Bernie
Lansky) for some time. But the syndicate gave it to Vernon Green, who,
Zeke supposed, had been training to do it in the King Features bullpen
for some weeks. Zeke was shut out overnight. He received no further
paychecks. Syndicates normally pay "on publication," and Zeke
was ten weeks ahead with completed Sunday strips and four weeks with
dailies. He felt he had some claim to payment for the work as it was
published. But the syndicate took the position that as McManus's assistant,
he was paid a weekly wage for assisting his boss-not for the strips-and
since his boss was dead, he could no longer be assisting. No more checks.
But the cruelest thing, Zeke told me, was that they immediately came
out and changed the locks on the studio. "Out the window went a
twenty-year relationship. It counted for nothing with them." It wasn't the first time King had pulled
the rug out from under an heir apparent. When E.C. Segar died in 1938,
his assistant on Popeye, Bud
Sagendorf, was passed over-perhaps because the syndicate thought he
was too young at the time: he was 23 years old, but he'd been working
with Segar for several years. Eventually, in 1958, Sagendorf came back,
and to this day, the daily strips he produced are being reprinted all
over the world. Only the Sunday Popeye,
done by Hy Eisman, is fresh material.
Sagendorf had told Zeke he didn't think what happened to him
would happen to Zeke. But it did. Why? Through the years, the rumors accumulated.
One of them suggested that various well-known cartoonists insinuated
their opinions into the selection process, conveying to King officials
their opinion that Zekley was a gold-digging opportunist who was attempting
to get himself declared McManus's heir-not only on the strip but in
the dead man's bank accounts, too. Zekley should not, they insisted,
be permitted to succeed in this underhanded scheme. In another story,
equally-in my view-scurrilous, Zeke was accused of forging a letter
from McManus that designated him the official custodian of Jiggs and
Maggie. Zeke was completely baffled, he told me. He thought perhaps
he was resented by King officials. And there was a letter. In these
circumstances, I suspect, are the seeds of both rumors. McManus and Zeke had discussed his
situation on the strip more than once. McManus had urged his assistant
to seek a separate contract with King to cover his future. And the last
time McManus's contract was renewed, he let Zeke go to New York to do
much of the negotiating. Some of the resentment that Zeke thought existed
may have arisen as a result of this negotiation. What follows now is
mostly my speculation, hemmed in, occasionally, by a stray fact or two.
One fact is that the usual 50-50 split of income on a comic strip is
an arrangement that exists only between the originator of the strip
and the syndicate. Once the originator is no longer on the scene, the
syndicate, which traditionally owns the strip outright, is free to negotiate
a different sort of deal with the originator's successor. Usually, the
successor is hired at a specified salary-so much a month. The originator
had split the net income 50-50 with the syndicate, and the net income
was determined by the number of papers that subscribed. In the usual
arrangement for continuation of a strip, the circulation of the strip
doesn't count: the successor gets a salary, and the syndicate keeps
all the rest. Zeke, as I've already noted, was being generously compensated
by McManus. My guess is that when he came to negotiate the last contract,
Zeke tried to get some sort of guarantee that, first, he would inherit
the strip; and, second, that he would be paid in an amount commensurate
with the salary McManus was then paying him. But that would be much
in excess of what King Features might pay a successor on the strip.
Zeke had some inkling about the financial basis of the decision. "The accountants got in on it,"
he told me. "There was this big figure of McManus's salary, which
stopped when George died. And there was a good amount of salary that
I was drawing. They could stop paying that, too. They could pay someone
else a lot less and have lots of money left over. That's all I can think
of: it became a bottom line thing." The resentment Zeke felt directed at
him resulted in part from his attempt, while negotiating McManus's last
contract, to secure a just compensation for himself-a compensation roughly
equivalent to what McManus had been paying him. He doubtless seemed
grasping and greedy-which gives rise to the rumor that he was an opportunist
seeking to become McManus's beneficiary in every way. And if he referred,
as he was likely to, to the special "father-son" relationship
he had with McManus, he would appear to have filial expectations as
well as professional ones. But the official resentment had roots that
went back earlier, Zeke thought. He imagined some of the King people
were jealous of his having been invited to San Simeon. Some of them
actually spoke to him about it. "We've never even met Mister Hearst,"
they'd say, "-let alone been to San Simeon." And then there was the telephone fiasco,
apparently often repeated. The studio phone was behind McManus and Zeke. "The phone would ring, and he'd
point to me to answer it," Zeke explained. "And if he didn't
want to take the call, he'd signal me, and I'd say he wasn't there.
Then George would cough or sneeze or something. And they caught me in
a lie. So they had it in for me." The mysterious letter was from Ward
Green, then head of the syndicate. During the negotiation, Green explained
that they couldn't agree on a financial arrangement for the future.
"I remember the basis of this letter," Zeke
told me. "It was, 'Zeke, we can't even begin to talk about what
money we would pay you because there may be inflation, there may be
deflation. In one case, the syndicate would score a hit
on you, or you would score a hit on the syndicate. So I don't think we can sign a contract with you based on George's
passing away. So to be fair to both of us, we'd have to approach that
when the time comes. But you
have my word that you will be the first to take over.'" And then, stubborn irony, Green died
two weeks after McManus did. Zeke could never find the all-important
letter, and his only witness, the letter's author, wasn't around anymore.
"To
this day," Zeke said, "I'm looking for that letter."
So there was, indeed, a crucial letter.
Did Zeke try to forge it to establish his right to the strip? Or did
he just attempt to reproduce its contents from memory, as he had in
conversation with me? We'll never know, of course. But based upon what
I know of Zeke Zekley, I can't see him trying to forge anything. If
he mailed to the syndicate a letter that repeated what he remembered
in Green's letter, however, it could easily be the factual basis for
the rumor about forgery. And I suspect that's what happened. So why
didn't Zeke get the strip? I suspect it was the rumor about his grasping
opportunism, fostered at the time of the last contract negotiation,
that persuaded influential members of the inky-fingered fraternity to
lean on King Features to deprive Zeke of what most people would have
thought his just due-rather than the forged letter accusation, which
would have followed the selection of McManus' successor and could not
therefore have influenced the decision. In any case, Zeke was probably
slandered out of his inheritance. All the King Features officials who
were there at the time and might know the truth of the matter are gone.
None of the current King staff were around then. Out of work and with a wife and two
children to support, Zeke started his own strip, Dud Dudley, a Blondie knock-off,
drawn in McManus's style (also, by then, Zeke's). It lasted only eight
or nine months, then the syndicate, McNaught, pulled the plug because
they weren't making enough on the strip's subscriptions to pay Zeke's
guaranteed salary. (He'd insisted on a guaranteed salary as a way of
spurring the sales force to do its job.) Zeke eventually launched a
couple of other comic features- Peachy
Keen and a panel, Popsie,
neither successful -but he devoted most of his energies to the operation
of a company he'd started in 1950, before McManus died-Sponsored Comics,
which produced comics for various commercial enterprises. Under that
umbrella, he generated numerous projects, including a stint doing the
Army's P.S. magazine after Will Eisner When I saw Zeke last, it was over lunch during a San Diego Comicon: he'd driven down from Los Angeles to visit Bernie Lansky. And he brought me an original of one of the Bringing Up Father dailies that McManus had him sign. A year ago, he phoned to thank me for the Christmas card. A forger? A grasping opportunist? Not likely, not likely by a long shot. Zeke was a gentleman, and gentlemen don't do those things.
Civilization's Last Outpost A
lesson in the power of a mass medium: since the opening of the movie
"Sideways," sales of merlot, which the movie's character famously
dislikes, declined 2 percent in the three months following the film's
release while sales of pinot noir, which is extolled in the movie, jumped
14 percent. ... Nudity is a bigger business than I'd supposed: those
primitive nudist camps of yore have been displaced by nudist resorts,
up-scale operations in luxury venues like Desert Shadows Inn Resort
& Villas in Palm Springs, California, where rooms go for $200 a
night. According to USA Today, "Besides concierge service and the like, Desert Shadows
offers [such] amenities [as] nude hot-air ballooning, in-the-buff moonlit
hikes and naked drive-bys (via tour bus) of the homes of Palm Springs'
rich and famous." Nude recreation, it sez here, "grew tremendously
in the 1990s and is now a $400 million industry." H'mmm-"nude
recreation," eh? That's a new term for it, I suspect. But I suppose
it was inevitable that nudistry become more widely practiced once Playboy superceded Sunbathing
Quarterly. The private contractor security forces
in Iraq consist largely of the sort of macho mercenaries you might expect.
They aren't in it so much because they're patriots: these guys thrive
on danger. "I like being some place where stupidity can be fatal,"
one said recently in a Washington
Post National Weekly report, "-because here you work with people
who think about their actions." He and his cohorts, it sez here,
scorn the soft, pampered lives their fellow Americans lead back home
in a society that "puts warnings on coffee cups." Pretty much
sums it all up, if you ask me. The unofficial launch of the Western
Civilization's jihad was probably thirteen years ago when Vice President
Dan Quayle attacked the producers of "Murphy Brown" for letting
the lead character have a child out of wedlock. It's taken a while for
the culture war to reach a fever pitch, but surely we're there now-with
"marriage" being championed, but only between heterosexual
couples. The religious right wants our society to return to the 19th
century with its "traditional values" just as certainly as
the Muslim extremists want to go back to the 7th century
where their tradition has its roots-back to a time when marriage was
a stable social institution. It is no longer stable, as Stephanie Coontz
points out in the Washington Post National Weekly. "The origins of modern marital
instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to
be marriage's traditional role," she writes, "-providing love,
intimacy, fidelity and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries,
marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide
such benefits." Marriage was pretty much, until the 1790s, a property
arrangement. Then "love" entered into the equation. The conservatives
of the day immediately predicted the death of marriage. And eventually,
in some sense, that's what happened. Says Coontz: "For the next
150 years, the destabilizing effects of the love revolution were held
in check by women's economic dependence on men, the unreliability of
birth control and the harsh legal treatment of children born out of
wedlock-as well as the social ostracism of their mothers." But
love's victory negated most of these inhibitions, and various social
changes (women in the work force, capable of supporting themselves)
completed the conversion; as a result, the stability of marriage deteriorated.
The personal as distinct from the societal values of relationships,
however, emerged in a grand and glowing light. We can't really go back,
either, says Coontz. We've gone too far afield in human and social relations.
Meanwhile, it's fascinating to note that in the U.S., the red state
Bible Belt has the highest divorce rate in the nation.
Under the Spreading Punditry Rightwingnut
bloggers, who became famous by nattering on until Dan Rather was defrocked,
attempted another swift truth campaign during the Teri Schiavo episode.
When it was reported a Republican memo called the case "a great
political issue" that would energize the "pro-life base"
of the GOP, the blogging multitudes claimed the memo was a hoax perpetrated
by the nasty Democrats. The memo "doesn't sound like something
written by a conservative," sniffed Power Line. "It sounds
like a liberal fantasy of how conservatives talk." Alas, an aide
to Senator Mel Martinez owned up, saying he'd written the nefarious
memo. So-did the bloggers do as they've repeated demanded Rather and
other left-leaning sinners do-apologize? Nope. In fact, according to
Eric Boehlert on Salon.com, they still insist that the incriminating
memo revealed nothing at all about Republican motives. Sure, guys. And
you're just honest media critics, interested only in fairness and truth.
Bloggers, contrary to a conviction
common in rightwing circles, do not have a monopoly on the truth. Or
accuracy in reportage. A startling example involves Marcia
Cross, one of the stars of ABC's hysterically popular (even in red
states) "Desperate Housewives." On February 1, a blogger,
who appears as Your Friendly Spy at ABC, posted an item on an infamously
gossipy message board, DataLounge.com, asserting that Cross was a lesbian
and would be "coming out" in a future issue of The
Advocate, a magazine featuring gay and lesbian news and life-styles.
The news flashed through the Internet and finally reached the mainstream
press, where it proved so persistent that Cross herself had to call
a news conference to deny the assertion. Then
The Advocate felt obliged, understandably (and to its everlasting
credit), to render the truth of the matter and devoted its March 15
cover story to the whole sordid business. In his story, reporter Adam
B. Vary notes that rumors of celebrity homosexuality run rampant-all
the time. "To be famous and gay remains the culture's last titillating
taboo," Vary writes, "making it the juiciest way to jump-start
ratings and newsstand sales." Or, among the more virulent of conservatives,
to destroy opponents. Calling Cross gay looks suspiciously like a rightwing
attempt to discredit the tv show-chiefly because rightwing activists
often accuse their foes and other objects of their detestation of being
homosexual. And there's little question that "Desperate Housewives"
represents life-styles that most rightwingers detest (but nonetheless
dote on sufficiently to make the show the Number One tv hit of the season). All the fuss over Newsweek's alleged error in asserting that
American interrogators flushed the Koran down the toilet is mostly another
of the Bush League's smoke-screens, an excuse to attack the press. The
Koran-flushing tactic had been reported before, so Newsweek was scarcely the first to tell the tale. And the violent
demonstrations in Muslim countries that claimed to have been prompted
by the magazine's report were hardly so inspired: the protesters were
demonstrating against the U.S., which they'd seize any excuse to do-
Newsweek just happened along at the right moment. Meanwhile-just a
friendly reminder-remember that some (but, no, not all) Koran-inspired
Muslims kill their wives for committing adultery. Stoning is the usual
method. They dig a hole and put the woman in it up to her waist, pinioning
her arms. Then a bunch of the village elders stand around and pelt her
with stones until she's dead. A report (in the
Washington Post National Weekly) revealed that a recent stoning
took two hours to kill the sinner. Sort of turns your stomach, eh? A
lot like watching a book get flushed down the toilet. But we're hardly without fault in the
arena of religiosity. A couple weeks ago, a particularly fervent pastor
in Waynesville, NC, asserted that he would expect his flock to adhere
to a political agenda inspired by his (and their) faith. It began last
October when the Rev. Chandler told his congregation that those who
vote for John Kerry needed to repent or resign from the church. Said
he: "You have been holding back God's church way too long."
His sermons frequently attacked abortion and the "gay agenda."
There the matter rested until May 2, when Chandler called a meeting
and told everyone the church was going to be political and anyone not
liking it should resign. It would cleanse the church, he asserted. Nine
people left, and they were subsequently voted off the church rolls.
The subsequent excitement in the news media finally led Chandler to
resign himself. The incident, however, demonstrates that extreme fundamental
religious beliefs in the service of political agendas are not peculiar
to the Muslim world. As the religious right flexes its political
muscle more and more, its fundamental hypocrisy is increasingly evident.
A coalition called Focus on the Family, for instance, is doing anything
but that. It has come to the fore in the Senate scrap over filibustering
because, it is asserted, the liberal objection to GeeDubya's judicial
appointments represents an assault on "people of faith." But
in this self-appointed task, Focus on the Family is focusing on politicians,
not families. And in so doing, they are, in effect, abdicating parents'
rights to raise their children as they see fit: the Focus agenda seems
perfectly willing to have the federal government determine standards
of decency and morality instead of letting parents do it. This is another
chapter in a long-running story that began when families could not survive
financially without both parents entering the wage-earning work force.
As homes were increasingly deserted by parents, the rearing of their
children was increasingly assigned to public schools. Only a week or
so ago, a report on a network news program explained that schools now
had to teach kids such fundamental manners as how to eat at a dinner
table, which, we always thought, was taught in the home. No more: parents
are so often away from home at dinner time, it appears, that most kids
eat meals in front of the television set, using their fingers mostly
to stuff their mouths. Sad. And it seems to me that Focus on the Family
and its ilk is taking us even further in that direction. Metaphors be with you. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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