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NOUS R US
Shooter Returns to the Legion
Books for Teen Girls
Keith Knight Gets Harvey
The Beloved
Femlin on Display
Comics for Cell Phones
Iranians Get Top Honors at International Cartoon
Contest
What the FBI-Ellison Settlement Was
Lynn Johnston
on Her Hybrid FBOFW
Infamy at the Famous Palm Restaurant
Ku Klux Klan Komics
Who Is Asok?
Cartoonist PROfiles To Be Reincarnated
Zippy History
Cooke Quits
Spirit
THE PERVERSE
POWER OF THE CARTOON IMAGE
A Reprise of the Danish Dozen, This Time in Sweden
Other Insensitive Cartooning
Burying the Past in order to Deny it: Won’t Work
SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON WRAP-UP
EDITOONERY
Jobs Continue to Evaporate
The Froth
Estate
Murdoch Conquers the Street
LAND OF MY
YOUTH
Denver: A Two-Newspaper Town
And What’s in the Papers
Paris Hilton
Is a Comic Book Character—No Surprise!
JIM IVEY
No Crusader He: Just a Reporter, M’am
COMIC STRIP
WATCH
Zits, FBOFW, Lio and Peanuts, Beetle’s 57th,
Prickly City’s politics, Agnes, and more
BOOK MARQUEE
Ketcham’s Magazine Cartoons
Harvey’s Little Louie Loutermouth
Puff for Children
Voutch from Paris
Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe
FEINSTEIN’S
BOOK
The Ancient
Pursuit as a Sport
Phil Frank Dies
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Army @ War
Lobster Johnson
Batman Lobo
Shane Glines
Ra’s al Ghul Again
MORE UNDER
THE SPREADING PUNDITRY
More Than Anyone Can Reasonably Absorb at One Sitting
Truly Tedious
And don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by
clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just
this lengthy installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the News
That Gives Us Fits
For the past month, you’ve been living on canned
goods, articles and opuses I preserved in July for consumption in August whilst
I was trekking cross-country to Colorado, where, withal, I now reside. Safely
ensconced if not yet entirely unpacked (it takes more than a month to unpack
400-plus boxes of books, kimo sabe), I resume the Rancid Raves vigil,
monitoring the Vast Newsmongering Media for signs of cartooning life. We
“resume,” I say, without bothering to backtrack in order to regale you with
colorful bits we otherwise missed in August. What happened in August, stays in
August.
On
the eve of “Heroes” return for a second season on NBC channels, we learn from a
DC Comics press release that the funnybook factory will publish a hardcover
graphic novel based on the tv show, Heroes,
Inc. (240 pages; $29.99). With interior art by Tim Sale plus Michael
Turner, Phil Jimenez, Koi Turnbull, Marcus To and others, the volume will
feature alternate covers by Alex Ross and Jim Lee and an introduction by “Heroes”
star Masi Oka Hiro. ... The one-time editor-in-chief at Marvel, Jim Shooter, who began his comic book
career at the age of 14, writing stories for DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes in 1966, is returning to the title, starting
with No. 37. Shooter left DC in 1976, and he’s returning just in time to create
a story arc that will culminate in the 50th anniversary of the band
of young superheroes. Said Shooter: “I have always loved the concept of the
Legion—young heroes in a fantastic future. The characters have changed a
little, but not enough to spoil the party for me. These are the first comics
characters I ever wrote. They’re still very special to me. I’m having a ball,”
he added, “—I see no reason not to stick around for a long time.” ... Both DC
and Marvel are gearing up titles aimed at a new audience for comic books,
manga-nurtured teenage girls. Beginning with Plain Janes, DC launched a line of graphic novels under the banner
Minx, headed by Executive Editor Karen Berger, one of the chief architects of
DC’s Vertigo line, the most adventurous in comics. “We were looking at the
success of manga as a great sign that teenage girls were actually reading
comics again,” Berger told Matt Phillips at the Wall Street Journal, adding, in an interview with Sean Boyl at
comicbloc.com, “We haven’t had that specific readership since—what? romance
comics [in the 1950s], which were still on a very fringe basis.” Unlike manga,
which translate and reprint Japanese sources but reduce production costs by not
reformatting the books so they must be read from back to front, right to left,
as they are in the country of their origin, DC’s Minx books are manufactured
from scratch in the U.S.: they’re written in English and read from front to
back, left to right, in the usual English-language manner. Cecil Castellucci,
who wrote the first of the Plain Janes,
doesn’t aim specifically at girls when writing. “I just write stories,” she
told Liz Behler at comicbloc.com. “It just happens to be that mostly they tend
to lean towards girls, but I think a good story is a good story to be enjoyed
by all.” Jim Rugg, who drew the book, chimed in on the same note: “I wouldn’t
change the art for a male audience. My approach to the art was fairly realistic
and there wasn’t anything I did to cater to either gender.” Marvel’s approach
to the young female audience is somewhat different, according to Phillips:
“Instead of starting a separate line, the company has been hiring writers known
for their established female following.”
The
October issue of Vanity Fair, the one
with Nicole Kidman, lips parted, baring her bra on the cover, publishes an
excerpt from David Michaelis’ Schulz and
Peanuts: A Biography. Entitled “American Beagle,” the piece is about Snoopy and how he grew from a beagle to
a symbol of the triumph of imagination. (That part, the “symbol of the triumph
of imagination,” is me, not Michaelis; although it might be—I haven’t read this
part of the book yet.) Vanity Fair, which typically has female skin on its cover but hard-nosed reportage inside,
costs $4.50; for merely seven times that amount, you can get the whole Schulz book. But it won’t have bare
female flesh on the cover. ... The coveted Harvey Award (no relation) for best
syndicated comic went to Keith Knight for
his self-syndicated The K Chronicles.
Editor & Publisher reveals that Keef won over four other contenders: Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), Tony
Millionaire (Maakies), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts), and Antiques: The
Comic Strip by J.C. Vaughn, and Bredan and Frian Fraim. ... To mark the 60th anniversary of the
Air Force and its one-time unofficial spokesman, Steve Canyon, retired Air
Force Master Sgt. Russ Maheras has
produced a new Steve Canyon strip for Air Force Times, a civilian weekly
newspaper that covers that branch of the military. According to E&P, the color strip is “set in the
present and follows Brig. General Steve Canyon as he investigates Taliban
activity in a remote valley in the mountains of Afghanistan.” Canyon’s other
creator, Milton Caniff, would be
celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth this year. And if you
haven’t yet bought my book about Caniff, click here to visit a
description of it where you’ll be persuaded. ... Mikhaela Reid, a cartoonist, was married to Masheka Wood, a cartoonist, by Ted
Rall, another cartoonist. The last time this sort of thing happened, saith E&P, was in 2001, when Cindy Procious, editoonist for the Huntsville Times (Ala.) was married to Clay Bennett, editoonist for the Christian Science Monitor, by Dennis Draughton, then editoonist for
the Scranton Times (Pa.).
At
the Franklin Bowles Gallery in both San Francisco and New York City, “LeRoy Neiman’s Femlin: 50 Years of
Femlin,” original ink drawings from the pages of Playboy, will be on display through September. Neiman, 86, began
his association at Playboy with the
cuddly little elfin nude, attired in black stockings and arm-length gloves, in
1954, virtually at the launch of the magazine. “Let it be known,” he writes at
the Franklin Bowles website, “I love Femlin! Femlin is an emancipated attention-getter,
a quirky prankster, rambunctious, joyous, but vulnerable—an antidote against
boredom and the humdrum.” The Femlin, whose Rubenesque albeit somehow dainty
embonpoint can be seen regularly on the Playboy Party Jokes page, is one of the happiest visual conceptions of
the century. I’ve bought several of the Playboy Party Jokes books just to get
an inventory of Femlin images. Denis
Kitchen, at one time, was trying to get Playboy to allow him to produce a Femlin figurine, even had a prototype, which I
glimpsed in the back of the booth one time, lo these many years ago when the
Chicago Con had not yet been enchanted—when it convened at the Ramada Inn
instead of the Rosemont Convention Center. ... Bill Crouch, the Rancid Raves
operative who told me about the Femlin show, also reports that the Westport
Historical Society just opened “A Cartoon Legacy: Beetle Bailey - Hi and Lois -
Hagar the Horrible, The Walker-Browne
Family Collaboration,” an exhibition the title of which looks as if it was
compounded expressly to slap opponents of “legacy strips” in the face. Or,
perhaps, just to rub their noses in evidences of the kind of superior
achievement collaboration can produce even over generations. The show will be
on display until January 4, 2008. Visit westporthistory.org.
Comics in the Ether. Japan has blazed another
trail into the future for comics—comic books on mobile phones. The first comic
book to be released exclusively on cell phone in the U.S. is Thunder Road, “a post-apocalyptic
adventure” by Sean Demory, drawn by Steven Sanders, and offered initially just
a few weeks ago by uClick, the digital arm of Universal Press syndicate,
through its GoComics service (where, online, you can find excerpted squibs and
scraps of Rancid Raves, should you be so inclined). Reporting for the
Associated Press, David Twiddy notes: “For $4.49 a month on Verizon—or $3.99 a
month for AT&T and Sprint—subscribers can view nearly a dozen different
traditional comic books.” Current offerings include Bone, Teenage Ninja Turtles, and such new arrivals as “the crime
noirish Umbra and the Hindu-folklore
inspired Devi,” with new chapters or
issues for each title added weekly. GoComics displays one panel at a time,
reformatted from the print version with larger typefaces in word balloons.
Pushing the phone’s buttons advances the view from panel to successive panel,
and the reader can also scroll across the larger images. “Mobile comics have
been a cellular mainstay for years in manga-crazy Japan, where some titles
already begin life on cell phones before going to print,” said Twiddy. Although
just starting out in the U.S., Twiddy says uClick claims 55,000 subscribers a
month “in the first year of offering its GoComics service.” TokyoPop, which
supplies most of GoComics manga titles, is experimenting with animation and
“other cinematic touches,” including tie-ins with “manga-themed games, ring
tones, wallpaper and other content.” Wireless companies are still somewhat
uncommitted, though: “small screens and short battery lives make online reading
a chore.” But steadily advancing technology will doubtless erase such
reservations.
Sanders
admits the small screen presents challenges in devising the visuals, but the
new medium also offers opportunities for the cartoonist to control how the
reader peruses the story, one panel at a time without being able to skip ahead
to the last panel, where the surprises lay in wait. “I think the future of
comics itself lies in digital format,” Sanders said. He observes that with the
disappearance of the 10-cent comic book of yore, comics are no longer a cheap
form of entertainment. From this realization, Sanders draws a startling
insight: Comic books priced at $3-4 aren’t likely to attract purchasers other
than those who are already “heavily invested” in comics and used to reading
them—and buying them at today’s prices. The economics of the funnybook biz seem
poised to work against developing a future audience.
Elsewhere: Editor &
Publisher’s 2007 Syndicate Directory is out, listing all the features currently
distributed by syndicates. A tally of the comic strips on today’s horizon comes
to 206; it was 214 last year. But the panel cartoons have gained a little—150
as opposed to 147 last year. At a time when various pundits are predicting the
demise of newspaper comics, this nearly static status is encouraging. ... The Week magazine, which appeared as a
fresh face among the weekly newsmags a couple years ago, earned my applause by
using a painted cover that usually featured a caricature of the week’s big news-maker—a
cover political cartoon, in full color. The magazine also devoted a page or two
every issue to an array of the best editorial cartoons of the week, another
plus. And the cartoons were usually fairly tough-minded—not the Jay Leno sort
of editoon that Newsweek typically
publishes. Lately, alas, the cartoons have become more laugh-inducing than
thought-provoking. ... According to dutchnews.nl, the best read magazine in the
Netherlands is the Donald Duck comic
book. ... From Editor & Publisher,
we learn that Tom Toles, the
unflinching editoonist at the Washington
Post, ranked 48th in GQ’s list of
“The 50 Most Powerful People in D.C.” The Post’s executive editor Len Downie agreed with the magazine’s choice: “Whenever
people from the newsroom get together, Tom is there—no matter if it’s a local
subject, a national subject, an international subject. That’s not something you
normally expect from an editorial cartoonist.” ... At the first International
Cartoon Contest in Syria, 207 cartoonists representing 29 countries
participated, with 13 Iranian cartoonists collecting the top prizes. The event
honors Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, saith presstv.ir, “the most famous
political cartoonist in the Arab world,” who produced more than 40,000 drawings
and created a cartoon character, Handala, “who has bcome an icon of Palestinian
defiance.” Al-Ali was shot to death by “unknown persons” in London in 1987; the
next year, the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers posthumously
awarded him the Golden Pen of Freedom. ... Harlan
Ellison’s suit against Fantagraphics Books for defamation was resolved some
weeks ago, shrouded in legally imposed silence. But newly released court
records reported by Mark Rahner at the Seattle
Times reveal the gist of the agreement: “The two parties will stop messing
with each other,” and Fantagraphics is removing the two passages in its
history, Comics As Art, that provoked
Ellison’s suit. Moreover, in future editions of The Comics Journal Library Vol. 6: The Writers, Ellison’s name will
be expunged—as well as a 1980 interview with publisher Gary Groth that resulted
in another suit being brought this time against both Groth and Ellison by
Michael Fleisher, who alleged libel. Groth gets 30 days and 500 words on
Ellison’s website (www.harlanellison.com) to rebut Ellison’s
statements “that accuse Groth of embezzling funds in the Fleisher litigation
and soliciting contributions to the Fantagraphics Legal Defense Fund under
false pretenses” and other claims, most of which are doubtless further
instances of the famous Ellison tendency to extravagance in verbal appearances.
... HarperCollins is planning graphic novel adaptations of the works of J.R.R.
Tolkein, Agatha Christie and C.S. Lewis. ... The New Yorker has introduced a board game version of its back-page
cartoon caption-writing contest; the game went on sale in Target stores in
early August, and it had been on sale in Barnes & Noble and independent
book stores earlier in the year.
Lynn Johnston’s “hybrid” version of her
popular strip, For Better or For Worse, began September 3. As we’ve reported before, Johnston originally thought she’d
just end the strip this fall. She’s sixty, she said, and she wanted
deadline-free time to do other things that she’d always wanted to do. And she
has a health issue: she suffers from dystonia, a neurological condition that
makes her hands tremble. She controls it with medication, but it’s still there,
lurking. And she’d run through the storyteller’s cycle, as she told Chris
Mautner at the Patriot News: “A
husband and wife who have children, the children grow up and now they have
children. Michael has children who are the same age that he and Elizabeth were
when the strip began.” It seemed a good time to dismount from the cycle. I suspect
Johnston’s syndicate, Universal Press, wanted her to reconsider. Maybe not:
Universal is extraordinarily accommodating of its cartoonists’ wishes. Whatever
the case, Johnston had second thoughts about stopping, and then she had the
hybrid notion: re-run FBOFW strips
from its early years as if Michael is telling the family history to his
children.
This
was a happier solution, happier than stopping altogether, cold turkey. It would
cut down on the time needed to produce the strip, freeing Johnston to do those
other things she wanted to do; and the strip’s fans would still have the strip
to read. (And many of the fans had never seen the early years of FBOFW because it hadn’t been in all that
many papers when it started.) Moreover, the hybrid option assuaged the
storyteller. Ultimately, she told Mautner, she couldn’t stop in September: “The
characters sort of won’t let me.” There are loose ends, danging plot threads.
The hybrid permits her to tie them all up, slowly, over the next few years as
she mixes new material in with the re-running material. “I’m interested and
readers are interested to know what is going to happen with Anthony and
Elizabeth,” she said, referring to the divorced father whom Elizabeth dated
when they were both in high school. “That resolution can’t happen too fast,”
Johnston continued. “They’ve only just started to see each other again after a
long time apart. Both have had other relationships and now he has a child and
some baggage, and so does she. You just can’t wrap it up too quickly.” The
hybrid permits the storyteller to do what she’s always done—to examine her
characters, their personalities and motivations, why they do what they do. It
was to answer those sorts of questions that she began telling stories: FBOFW started as a gag-a-day strip about
a young family, but then Johnson began to wonder—why did Ellie do that? What
will happen next because of what she did? The same kind of curiosity drives her
now.
“A
lot of people didn’t like Anthony,” she said. “But you see, Anthony has never
really had an opportunity to be recognized and understood by everybody. He was
just a shadow figure. And all the reader has seen is little bits and pieces.
And so that’s another reason why the [run of] the strip has to be extended—so
that Anthony’s character can be more fully explored. And his [failed] marriage
discussed and his relationship as a single parent and his business sense and
the things he likes to do. He’s just not a complete character, and it’s hard to
accept that Elizabeth, who is a well-known character, should be lost to someone
that nobody knows.” Before the current hybrid started, Johnston had Elizabeth
explaining the failure of Anthony’s marriage to a friend. The process of
understanding Anthony has begun. It will continue, weaving in and out of the
story Michael is telling his children of his own childhood.
The Permanence of Infamy. The Palm was originally a
speakeasy in New York. Located on Second Avenue just around the corner from the
offices of King Features, the place became a hangout for cartoonists and
newspapermen in the 1920s and 1930s, and the cartoonists, falling,
occasionally, under the influence of the spirits of the place, decorated the
walls with pictures of their comic strip characters. The Palm eventually became
a legitimate restaurant and saloon and opened an overflow facility across the
street, dubbed Palm Too. Inspired by the second bistro’s success, the founders
opened yet another adjunct in Washington, D.C. Then in Dallas, Los Angeles,
Denver—even San Diego. All have cartoon murals, but the vintage work is in the
original joint in New York. The Washington Palm recently underwent renovation
and moved its entrance to the side. It also moved the caricatures from the old
entrance to the new one. Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin at the Washington Examiner wondered whether one
of those caricatures would mysteriously “disappear.” Would Mark Foley’s mug,
which has greeted guests at the old entrance, continue beaming on them in the
new entrance? Or would the now disgraced congressional sex fiend be consigned
to limbo? Probably, Foley will still be there. “What’s politics without a
little scandal?” asked a Palm spokesman. “You can be famous, infamous, or
forgotten—with few exceptions, once you’re on the wall, you’re on the wall.” Said
Dufour-Gavin: “That also answers the question about former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’
Cunningham’s visage on the restaurant’s back wall, as well. It’s here to stay.”
More Elsewhere. The indefatigable Craig Yoe at his arflovers.com site has uncovered yet another
strange fragment of comics history—Ku Klux Klan Komics. Shocked and awed, Yoe
notes that in the strip, Our Ku Klux Klan by cartooner Al Zere, the “Klan is
kind of a cute, lovable Shmoo-like mob of aggressive masked do-gooders who you
call upon, kind of like Superman, to right life’s little wrongs—getting rid of
meddling mothers of girlfriends, putting snobby rich dudes in their place,
etc.” The strip ran in the New York
Evening Post in the early 1920s, demonstrating that the Klan had some sort of followership up north. In fact,
Indiana was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s. ... Asok, the weirdly
brilliant character in Dilbert, is a
native of the sub-continent India, named after an Indian colleague of Scott Adams, the strip’s creator. I
have wondered, occasionally, where the name came from; now I know. Asok arrived
in the strip in 1996 as a summer intern. Despite being “mentally superior to
most people on earth,” Asok was laid off when his job was outsourced to India,
so he joined the company to which his job was outsourced and now works by
“Indian Standard Time.” He was earlier denied permission to be a regular
employee, reports the Hindu in New
Delhi, even though he performed the functions of a senior engineer and was told
“as you gain experience, you’ll realize that all logical questions are
considered insubordination.” ... Baldo,
a comic strip about a teenage Latino and his family by Hector Cantu and drawn by Carlos
Castellanos, will pay tribute to Latino WWII veterans with a sequence
starting September 17, featuring Benny Ramirez, a fictional American Latino now
in his eighties who lost a leg during the War. Saith E&P: “Ramirez will share his stories and discuss how he felt
about serving in a military for a
Reincarnation of Cartoonist PROfiles On the Way. From Editor & Publisher: A quarterly cartooning publication titled Stay Tooned! is scheduled to premiere in
November. "I intend to combine the best parts of Cartoonist PROfiles— telling the stories of professional
cartoonists—and The Aspiring Cartoonist—information
and instruction for cartoonists," John Read, the periodical's founder,
told E&P. "My plan includes
marketing it to working cartoonists, aspiring cartoonists, fans of cartooning,
and people who buy cartoons." The first and subsequent issues of Read's
subscription magazine will also focus on non-newspaper cartooning and
cartoonists— including animators, comic book artists, greeting card creators,
children's book illustrators, etc.
He
said the first issue will have a southern-cartoonists theme, and feature people
such as Steve Kelley, editorial
cartoonist for the Times-Picayune of
New Orleans and Creators Syndicate; Marshall
Ramsey, editorial cartoonist for the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., and Copley News Service; Scott Stantis, the editorial cartoonist for the Birmingham (Ala.) News and Copley who also does the Prickly City strip for Universal Press Syndicate; and John Rose, who does editorial cartoons
out of the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News-Record as well as the Kids' Home Newspaper cartoon/activity
page for Copley and the Barney Google and
Snuffy Smith strip for King Features Syndicate. Also: comic creators Mark Pett (Lucky Cow/Universal), Marcus
Hamilton (Dennis the Menace/King), Jimmy Johnson (Arlo and Janis/United
Media), and Greg Cravens (The Buckets/United).
Read
is long-time cartooning fan who worked as an assistant director and locations
scout in the film- and TV-production industry for 20 years after graduating from
the University of Southern Mississippi. He then became a graphic designer for a
sign company in Jackson, Miss. Read has also done freelance cartoons and taught
kids how to draw cartoons. His magazine's Web site is still under construction,
but, in the meantime, Read can be reached at johnread3@hotmail.com.
A Short Zippy History. Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith’s incomprehensibly
hilarious comic strip star, was once almost a tv personality. By 1997, the time
of an interview Bob Andelman conducted with the cartoonist for Mr. Media,
Griffith and his wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin, had produced nine drafts of a
live-action movie script over the previous 12 years, but nothing came of any of
them. Then they wrote several scripts for a animated tv version of the
surrealistic character, famed for saying, among other things, “Are we having
fun yet?” The expression long ago passed into common parlance, much like R.
Crumb’s “Keep on truckin’,” and, like Crumb, Griffith realizes not a dime for
originating the by-word. “The only time it annoys me,” Giffith told Andelman,
“is when it’s another cartoon character saying it.” Like Garfield or Dennis the
Menace. “The worst of all was a Ziggy t-shirt,” Griffith added. “That rankled
for a few minutes.”
Griffith
created Zippy for an underground comix title in 1970 and had no expectation of
getting into national syndication. The comic featuring Zippy, he thought, was
“too hard-edged” for mainstream consumption. “What makes people like something
is if they reinvent it themselves,” Griffith said, “—they make the character
become who they think it should be. That’s why the blandest are usually the
most successful. The most successful strips in America tend to be the ones that
are the least challenging. Zippy is
challenging. That’s not what most people what to do when they casually read
through the comics. They just want to get through it.” And a classic criticism
of Zippy is that you have to read it
twice, sometimes even more, before you get it—and sometimes, you don’t get it
even then because there’s nothing, exactly, to “get.” What can you make of
another celebrated Zippy comment: “All life is a blur of Republicans and meat”?
Admirable, awe-inspiring, apt. But what does it mean, exactly?
Zippy got into King Feature’s syndicated
line-up almost by accident. Or maybe it was an insidious plot. When Will Hearst
III took over the San Francisco Examiner, he wanted something offbeat for his readers, and in 1985, he signed up Hunter
Thompson and Zippy, which, at the
time, Griffith was self-syndicating to alternative newspapers. A year later,
Hearst’s King Features wanted the strip. Griffith, taken aback and not quite
sure he wanted the daily grind of a syndicated strip, responded with a list of
non-negotiable demands—“things I would require in order to work for them,”
Griffith told me when I interviewed him in 1992. “I had thought of the list as
a way of not working for them: they would never agree to these things, I was
certain. I said I had to keep my copyright; I had to keep the larger format— I
actually draw the strip out of proportion: it’s taller than any other strip ...
so that it has more headroom [for speech balloons]. ... You can’t censor it;
you can’t edit it. You have to guarantee me a certain amount of money weekly
because I’d be giving up my exclusive deal with the Examiner. I felt like I was taking hostages. A sort of power play.
And this guy sat across from me [his name was Alan Priaulx] and said ‘Yes’
instantly to everything. About six months later, I found out a little more about
why he was so agreeable. ... Six months after Zippy started running with King, this guy quit. Which kind of
freaked me out a little: I thought maybe I was going to go with him. But
everybody assured me that they liked Zippy and that it was doing fine.” Then Griffith got a letter from Priaulx; he was
now in a completely different business, “and he said he just wanted to tell me
what had happened, how Zippy had come
to King Features. He said he’d wanted to leave the syndicate—he wasn’t happy;
it wasn’t the right job for him—but he wanted to leave with a bang. And he said
he felt that by hiring me and by adding Zippy to the King Features roster, he was leaving a ticking time bomb on their
doorstep as he left. He just wanted to shake up King Features. He just wanted
to give them the weirdest strip in America.” The bomb is still ticking; in
1997, the time of the Andelman interview, it was in about 200 newspapers—“185
papers more than I ever thought it would be in,” Griffith told Andelman.
COOKE QUITS
SPIRIT
Darwyn Cooke, whose interpretation of Will Eisner’s Spirit has been hailed
here and elsewhere for its excellence and faithfulness to the “spirit” of the
original, will leave the title after No. 12. Cooke’s inker, J. Bone, is moving into other projects,
and Cooke doesn’t want to handle the series without him. A new creative team
had not, by early August, been named. Speaking of the Spirit led Cooke to
comment in dailypop.wordpress.com on what he sees so far in Frank Miller’s work on the movie
version of the iconic character: “I think it will be a really fantastic crime
movie, and it’s probably going to be visually stunning, but I think his
interpretation seems just a little one-sided to me. From what his interviews
indicate, he seems to be concentrating on the sex and violence. I always
thought the strip had so much more depth to it than that. Those were elements
that helped drive many of the stories, but I don’t think they were what the
strip was about. And I think at the end of the day, as nasty as the business
was that the Spirit gets involved in, it’s a hopeful strip. It’s got optimism
at its heart, and humanity. I don’t know that the movie is going to reflect
that, but I think it’s probably going to be damn exciting.”
At
the San Diego Comic-Con, Cooke had other discouraging words for the medium and
its fans. “There is no room in the direct market for new ideas,” he remarked,
echoing what others, Grant Morrison among them, have said. Presumably, the major publishers are playing with a deck
of what they’re sure will produce winning hands—namely, all the tried-and-true
long-john legions. They don’t want to risk anything on something new and
different, untried— nothing that isn’t an obvious candidate for Hollywood
treatment. And all those blockbuster movies aren’t doing the comic book medium
any good, financially. Cooke thinks direct market comics “are on their way to
extinction. ... It doesn’t matter how much money the Spider-man movies make if
it doesn’t bring anyone in to buy the comics. This theory’s been floating for
twenty years now that these movies will bring people back to comics. It doesn’t
work that way. Ask any twelve-year-old kid on the street, he probably thinks
Spider-man was created for the movie—or for the [Saturday morning tv] cartoon.
He doesn’t know it’s a comic book.” And so he doesn’t go looking for the comic
book.
Moreover,
Cooke said, the monthly comic book itself is becoming “less and less
important.” Every publisher is gearing monthly comic book production towards
the subsequent compilations that are issued shortly after a given multi-issue
story arc ends. The money these days is in graphic novels, and collections of
monthly comic book story arcs pass for “graphic novels,” and so they sell,
better than their initial publication in monthly format. In my view, one of the
most vibrant developments in four-color fiction has been the limited
mini-series in which writers and artists focus on a single story arc and the
accompanying cast of characters. Storylines and characterizations are refined
and focused, yielding books that are inevitably better than the monthly
installments of a title that is designed, apparently, to plunge ahead forever,
whether the creators have an idea for a decent story or not. One intriguing
by-product of this imperative happened at Marvel in the early days of the
Second Coming of Comic Books when Stan Lee, unable to think of suitable endings
for the handful of stories he was simultaneously scripting in various titles
for his artists, simply continued stories from issue to issue, hoping something
would occur to him. Usually, something did, eventually, and one story arc would
end and another would begin. Cooke sees the evaporation of the monthly series
as fundamentally a good thing: “Ultimately, I think we’re going to see graphic
novels, manga, superhero books, and everything else in album form [hardcover
books in the graphic novel mode], and everything else in album form in
bookstore chains, and they’ll have to fight it out with all the other product
available, which is, I think, the way it should be.”
Cooke
is looking at the graphic novel format for his next projects, he says—rumored
to be a fairy tale for children and another that will have “sex, and violence
and swearing” and “involves a lot of paranoia and craziness. I think it’ll be a
fun read for the adults out there.”
Pithy Pronouncements
Memoir
of the Day: “I start things, but I never ...” —D. Stahl
Einstein
believed, he said, “in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony
of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the
doings of mankind.”
“I
eat cold eels and think distant thoughts.” —Jack Johnson, explaining the
attraction of black men to white women
MORE ON THE
PERVERSE POWER OF THE CARTOON IMAGE
Part I: Muslims Again
We don’t wish to insult Islam any more than we’ve
insulted Christianity or Judaism, but Muslims must eventually come to realize
that their feverish protests about cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad
are becoming cliche. Boring. And with boredom comes a rapid diminishing of the
sort of attentiveness among the public that the protests are intended to
provoke. The latest outbreak took place in Sweden in Oerebro, a town west of
Stockholm, where the local paper, Nerikes
Allehanda, published on August 18 or 19 (accounts differ) a drawing of a
dog with the head of a bearded man in a turban. The drawing, which can probably
be found somewhere on the Web, is quite sketchy—almost crude— so sketchily
vague, in fact, that if the artist and the newspaper that published the drawing
hadn’t identified the face as Muhammad’s, we couldn’t possibly know who it is
intended to be. How they know is another facet of the puzzle: since
visualizations of the Prophet are prohibited by Islam (lest they inspire idolatry),
no one can possibly know what Muhammad looked like. No one, therefore, can
“caricature” him. All of which, fascinating though it may be, is beside the
point. The point is that Swedish Muslims took offense at this desecration of
their religion’s holy founder, who is revered in Islam to an extent few other
religious figures are in any other religion. About 200 Muslims staged a local
protest, the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) condemned
the “cartoon,” and ambassadors and other governmental dignitaries of Islamic
countries soon chimed in, all equally outraged at this provocation. Arab News reported that OIC
Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu “strongly condemned the newspaper for
publishing the blasphemous caricature and said that this was an irresponsible
and despicable act with mala fide and
provocative intentions in the name of freedom of expression.” While he called
on the Swedish government “to take immediate punitive actions against the
artist and the publishers of the newspaper,” he also called upon Muslims “to
remain calm and to exercise restraint.” The Swedish prime minister, seeking to
avoid the mistake the Danish prime minister had made last year by refusing to
hold talks with Muslim ambassadors who had requested a meeting, invited
representatives of Muslim countries to meet and discuss the issues. At the same
time, he expressed regret that Muslims were offended but noted that politicians
in Sweden cannot “pass judgment on the free press.”
Despite
echoes of the Danish disturbance of last year, the drawing in Nerikes Allehanda was not, like those of
the Danish dozen, a cartoon. It was, however, a picture of Muhammad, according
to the man who drew it, Lars Vilks, who drew a series of pictures intended to
spark discussion of the principles of free expression. Another drawing shows a
giant hook-nosed pig, looming over hillside houses; its caption: “Modern Jew
sow, swollen by capitalism, on her way to tear apart some peaceful villages.”
Vilks hoped a discussion of freedom of speech would examine what limits, if
any, should be imposed. Interviewed by the news agency TT, he said he had
observed how Islam is treated with greater deference than other religions, and
yet, Vilks continued, “Muslims are able to have a go at Jews in the roughest
manner without any reaction because people are afraid to attack Muslims.” His
drawings were intended for display in an art gallery, but after several
galleries refused to display them, the issue was taken up by Nerikes Allehanda, which published one
of the drawings, the Muhammad drawing, to show what prompted the reluctance
among gallery managers.
In a
later report in Arab News, OIC’s
Ihsanoglu expressed concern that “this kind of irresponsible and provocative
incitement in the name of defending freedom of expression was leading the
international community toward more confrontation and division.” He said he
hoped a legal mechanism could be developed to prevent the recurrence of such
episodes. “Freedom of expression does not entail freedom to insult,” he said.
“There has to be a way to stop this. There are certain values that every
country abides by. There are red lines in all societies. We want them to know
that we don’t mind their criticism of our religion, but our Prophet is off
limits.” The exquisite irony in these sorts of dilemmas is that freedom is
freedom: if limits of any sort are imposed upon it, it ceases to be freedom.
While it is true that human rights is a value in Western societies and it is
equally true, as Ekrem Dumanli maintained in Todays Zaman (Cf. turkishweekly.net), that “respecting human rights
means respecting people’s identities and the sacred elements and sacraments
that form those identities,” if a society that espouses freedom of expression
begins to exempt certain subjects, whether religious or not, from examination
or comment in deference to the wishes of those who might be insulted, the slide
down the slippery slope has begun. If the Prophet is exempt, who’s next? Can’t
say anything untoward about Jesus? And then maybe George Washington? Lincoln?
Henry Ford? George W. Bush?
Many
Muslims, according to Siraj Wahab in Arab
News on September 13, believe that calls for dialogue between the Islamic
world and the West are meaningless “in the face of such extreme provocation.
They are a waste of time. Dialogue should not be two monologues in two
different directions. It will not and does not lead to any better
understanding; it does not lead to any change in positions.” Wahab added that
the lesson Muslims learned from the Danish turmoil is simple: “Boycott their
products, and then they get the message.” E-mails have started listing Swedish
products to boycott. Some Muslims, however, believe they should simply stop
responding to such provocations: “They are provoking us because they know we
can be provoked,” said one.
Meanwhile,
to complete the cliche, news.bbc.uk reports that the purported head of al-Qaeda
in Iraq has offered a $100,000 reward for the murder of Vilks—$150,000 if the
artist is “slaughtered like a lamb.”
Cliche
but tragic. Aren’t you glad you live in a secular society?
At
times like these, we will do well to remember something Doug Marlette said
(slightly paraphrased here to make it universally applicable): “Editorial
cartoons push the boundaries of free speech by the very qualities that endanger
them. Because cartoons can’t say ‘on the other hand,’ because they strain
reason and logic, and because they are hard to defend, they are the acid test
of the first Amendment, and that is why they must be preserved. As long as
cartoons exist, Americans can be assured that we still have the right and
privilege to express controversial opinions and offend powerful interests.”
Part II: The Contagion Takes
To extend the cliche: the terrorists are winning. Two
successive installments (August 26 and September 2) of Berkeley Breathed’s Sunday strip, Opus, were killed by cautious editors at about 25 of the 200 or so
newspapers carrying the feature because they feared the strips might be
offensive to Muslims. Or because of a mildly suggestive joke. Or both. In the
dubious strips, Steve Dallas, Breathed’s caricature of shallow male chauvinism,
confronts his blonde bimbo girlfriend’s equally shallow pursuit of fads. Lola
Granola dons a hijab one week and announces that she’s rejecting “decadent
Western crud,” which is okay by Steve because if she gives up the American Idol
notions of gender equality, he thinks he’ll be the sexual beneficiary of her
more submissive attitudes. The next week, Steve commands Lola to doff the burqa
she’s donned in favor of a “smokin’ hot yellow polka-dot bikini” for their day
at the beach. But when Lola returns, she’s covered head-to-toe in a “burqini,”
and she makes a joke about Steve not “getting it,” alluding, on the one hand,
to Steve’s inability to perceive the value of Muslim-inspired female modesty
and, on the other—we may assume—to the likelihood that she’ll be denying him
her sexual favors. The Washington Post,
the flagship paper for the Washington Post Writers Group syndicate that
distributes Opus, was one of the
papers declining to publish the strips. Several commentators, Eugene Volokh at
huffingtonpost.com among them, voiced alarm at the tendency they perceive in
such “censorship.” Said Volokh: “It looks like certain media outlets are
establishing or reinforcing a social norm that immunizes Islam and Muslims from
a certain kind of commentary. And we as readers and writers should try to fight
such a social norm, by criticizing those who are acting on it.” It’s fairly
clear that it’s the Muslim content of the strips—or, indeed, any
“Muslim-related humor”—that gave editors pause. The week before the first Lola
strip, Opus ridiculed Jerry Falwell, and none of the client papers dropped the
strip. Other religions clearly do not enjoy the immunity that Islam in U.S.
newspapers enjoys. Newspapers have regularly published editorial cartoons
poking fun at the inherent hypocrisies of the Catholic Church as revealed by
the sexual depredations of its priests; and few complain about it. But editors
are obviously intimidated by the violent reactions of radical Islamists. Since
the object of terrorism is to strike fear into the hearts of the populace, we
must conclude that the terrorists are winning. Even in a so-called secular
society. Among newspaper editors anyhow.
On
September 16, the butt of the joke (so to speak) in Opus was a fat lady. I’m waiting to see if that inspires protest
from obese America. It apparently didn’t intimidate any newspaper editors.
Part III: The Contagion Spreads
The success of Islamic protest against cartoons that
are alleged to be offensive has given encouragement to newspaper readers
everywhere, each of whom—every one of the millions—can find something offensive
to them in something the newspaper publishes. Most often, it seems, in an editorial
cartoon. In Cleveland, a 12-year-old girl was accidentally killed when she was
hit by a stray bullet from a gunfight in the street. The city’s mayor, reported
the Associated Press, “devoted special attention to the case, attending a news
conference at the crime scene and hugging the child’s mother, who is a friend
of his daughter.” At the Plain Dealer,
editoonist Jeff Darcy sought to
point out that a mayor’s time and effort might be better spent: a mayor ought
to be concerned about all of his city’s citizens—and all of the victims of
street violence—whether they are friends of his daughter or not. Commendable
though the mayor’s sentiment in this instance might be, it smacks, vaguely, of
a narrow focus of concern, akin to cronyism. Darcy drew a cartoon of a little
girl on the street wearing a shirt that reads: “Don’t shoot—I’m a friend of a
friend of a friend of the mayor’s daughter.” The paper’s editor subsequently
apologized to the dead girl’s parents who had complained that the cartoon was
insensitive. Of course it was. Most cartoons, as Doug Marlette has so helpfully
pointed out (above), are insensitive. Perhaps there is another way that Darcy
could have made his point. In fact, there is certainly another way. But that
way, perhaps, might have been offensive to someone else.
College
campus newspapers are particularly vulnerable: their cartoonists are often not
too expert, and their shots sometimes go astray as a result. At the University
of Virginia’s student paper, the Cavalier
Daily, cartoonist Grant Woolard wanted
to heighten awareness on campus of the terrible famine in Ethiopia. He drew a
cartoon that showed several nearly naked black men fighting each other with
sticks, stools, boots, shoes and other artifacts. The cartoon was captioned:
“Ethiopian Food Fight.” The night after the cartoon was published, 200 students
held a sit-in to protest what they saw as a racist cartoon, demanding that
Woolard, who is white, be fired. One letter to the paper’s editor the next day
said: “I see two interpretations of the cartoon: 1) Any fight between cannibals
is a food fight; 2) Ethiopians are so poor that they eat things like sticks,
chairs, or boots and are in fact fighting with their food. Either way, the
cartoon is not funny. More importantly, it is blatantly racist.” Woolard’s
motive is commendable, but, as the letter-writer demonstrates, the cartoonist
woefully underestimated the awareness of his readership. Or maybe he was dead
right. The letter-writer, at least, wasn’t even vaguely aware of the famine in
Ethiopia, and so, lacking that knowledge, he or she focused on the imagery—the
fighting naked black men—and thought that, a visualization of jungle violence,
was the cartoonist’s message.
Woolard,
appalled at what his cartoon provoked, explained: “I was not trying to
trivialize famine. When you have a food fight, you fight with food. This
cartoon [was supposed to bring] you to the realization that there’s a famine.”
There is no food, so if you’re going to have a food fight, you have to use
something else. Sticks, furniture, shoes. “In general,” Woolard continued in
his interview with the Washington Post,
“people give very little thought to starving people in other countries. But I
will admit that I really lacked the foresight in anticipating the reaction. I
should have thought that they were going to think I was portraying Africans as
savages.” Woolard’s editor, Herb Ladley, didn’t realize the implications of the
cartoon either. “This one came in late at night,” he said, “and my initial
reaction was, ‘This is offensive.’ But we print a lot of offensive things.” He
cited an earlier Woolard cartoon that depicted the Virgin Mary and indicted
that she had a sexually transmitted disease. He realized the Ethiopian cartoon
was a mistake “the instant the public raised a question about it,” he said. A
day or so later, Woolard was forced to resign, and he’s irked about it. Two of
the paper’s editors approved the cartoon for publication, and both are still on
the staff. “Editors should take equal blame,” Woolard told Barney Breen-Portnoy
at the Daily Progress in
Charlottesville: “This is not just about me. This is also about standing up for
the First Amendment.” Certainly is.
Part IV: ... and On and On into Even Our Own
Benighted Past
So sensitive have we become—hypersensitive—that we
seek to deny history rather than to risk offending anyone. When Herge’s 1930-31 version of Tintin in the Congo was reprinted again
in July, it inspired a good deal of hand-wringing about the patronizing
colonial attitude it embodied, the stereotypical caricatures of Africans, and
their portrayal as lazy and childlike. At the heart of the matter was the undeniable fact that the book is
intended for young readers. Borders in Britain and the U.S. reacted to protests
by moving the book from the children’s section to the adult section. One list
commentator scoffed astutely enough about “this over-sensitive culture and the
implicit insistence that children are more important than adults (whom,
incidentally, are treated as children).” But when he insisted, quoting Stanley
Kubrick, that “no work of art has ever done social harm though a great deal of
social harm has been done by those who have sought to protect society against
works of art which they regarded as dangerous,” he drew a scornful response
from another lister, who, citing Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” averred that art
most certainly does have an effect. Perhaps “no single [work] is going to
singlehandedly transform society or move an individual to violence, but that
does not mean that they have no effect.” Those who maintain that works of art
are essentially harmless are saying, at the same time, that works of art have
no effect, an assertion that flies in the face of Mein Kampf, for example, not to mention reams of anti-Semitic
material, the virulence of which in schools in Palestine fuels the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Still, it seems a little extreme in the case of Tintin in the Congo to ban the book, which is what a Congolese
student studying in Brussels sought with a law suit; ditto a Swede of Congolese
origin, who admitted, when his case was dismissed, that “the important thing
was to draw attention to the racist character of this book which no longer has
a place in 21st century society.” That, indeed, is the important
thing: call a spade a spade, if you will—call racist material racist—and we’ll
learn from it. Jonathan Zapiro, an
outspoken and courageous South African political cartoonist and no stranger to
censorship attempts (see Opus 208), commented: “Herge was ashamed in later
years and had stipulated in his will that Tintin
in the Congo not be published in English. But censorship is not a good
thing. Do you censor Alan Paton’s patronizing early works, or Salman Rushdie?
Publish with a disclaimer but don’t stop people publishing.”
Last
summer, just before the Tintin story broke, a minor hubbub occurred on one of
the comics lists I frequent when someone complained that Winsor McCay’s work reflected “a gratuitous racism.” In Nemo, the
juvenile hero is accompanied on his dream adventures by a green-skinned Flip
and a dark-skinned “Imp,” a refugee from McCay’s earlier work, Tales of the Jungle Imp, in which South
Sea Islanders or Africans scamper about. Racist, yes, but McCay was no more
racist than anyone else at his time. What we call racism today was the coin of
the realm in McCay's day. The people who weren't what we'd call racists then
were the exceptions, not the rule. Moreover, many cartoonists of that time were
not so much racists as humorists: they thought anyone who looked
"different" looked funny. So African Americans, the Irish, Jews—all
looked "different" and hence looked funny. They drew them that way
because they thought they'd get laughs. And they did.
We
live still in a racist society, and it was racist then, only, perhaps, more so.
McCay was simply channeling the prejudices of his time. When I say that
cartoonists of that day were not so much racist as humorist, I don’t mean that
they weren't racist; they were. But I think they were humorists first, racists
second. That is, they were both. But as cartoonists, it was the "different
appearance" of racially different persons that appeared to them to be
"funny," and for that reason, we have a carload lot or more of cartoons
of the late 19th and early 20th century that depict racial and ethnic
stereotypes—African Americans, Irishmen, Jews, American Indians, etc.
Cartoonists thought they looked funny; that's undoubtedly a racist attitude,
and the humor agenda does not excuse it. But cartoonists were no more (and no
less) racist than their social milieu.
Herge
explicitly acknowledged the influence of his time and place upon his portrait
of the Congo: “The fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois
society in which I moved. ... It was 1930. I only knew things about these
countries that people said at the time: ‘Africans were great big children ...
Thank goodness for them that we were there!’ And I portrayed these Africans
according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed
then in Belgium.”
Cartoonists
almost always channel the prejudices of their time. How else would they appeal
to a general readership? It is a mistake to judge other times and places by the
standards of our own supposedly enlightened time. Well, that's not quite the
case: we can judge them, of course, and we can find them reprehensible,
but we can scarcely condemn other people in other times and places for holding
opinions typical of their time and place. Such opinions constitute "a
problem"? Well, yes; but what of it? Was Christian persecution of the Jews
in the Middle Ages a problem? Was Roman persecution of Christians a problem?
Problems imply the need for a solution, and I daresay that whatever solution we
offer today for the "problems" of the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire
is meaningless. We can't fix things back then; they've happened. We can,
presumably, fix our own derelictions, but we aren't likely to if we go around
patting ourselves on the back for our superior liberal enlightenments (compared
to the benighted McCay, say)—particularly since we are not superior or liberal
or enlightened all that much.
To
expect McCay and/or Herge to reflect our ideas of racial equality is expecting
a good deal too much; both were creatures of their times, as most cartoonists,
if successful, must be. A successful cartoonist appealing to a mass audience
had to reflect that audience’s attitudes or fail.
Fascinating Footnote. Much of the news retailed
in the foregoing segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics. Three other sites laden with cartooning news and
lore are Mark Evanier’s www.povonline.com, Alan Gardner’s www.DailyCartoonist.com, and Tom Spurgeon’s www.comicsreporter.com.
And then there’s Mike Rhode’s ComicsDC blog, http://www.comicsdc.blogspot.com
SANDY EGGO
The last word on attendance at this year’s comics
extravaganza was more of a whimper than a bang. The Comic-Con International at
San Diego has grown steadily for 37 of its 38 years, attendance spiraling into
the stratosphere, year by year. But not this year. Despite recording three
“sold out” days this year (only one, for the first time ever, last year),
attendance seems to have leveled off at around 125,000, just about where it
stood last year. I’d been guessing 140,000-160,000 for this year, assuming,
with history as a guide, that attendance would increase by the usual
leap-frogging increments of the past. But this year, the show’s management
imposed artificial “caps” on attendance each day. “Once those caps were met, we
basically shut down,” said David Glanzer, Sandy Eggo’s pr guru, in an interview
with Tom Spurgeon at comicsreporter.com. Safety and crowd comfort were the
guiding principles. Glanzer estimated that around 50,000 people were milling
around on-site each day, and with that, the show has reached its limit at the
massive San Diego Convention Center, so it’s not likely to grow any for the
next five years, through 2012, the last year it’s booked in the facility. So
far. I don’t know whether management will seek another venue or not; not many
facilities in that part of the country are larger than the San Diego Center.
Otherwise, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Sandy Eggo is not likely to
try to get around its space limitation by adding a day to the show: that’s too
expensive—for everyone, exhibitors and attendees and the show itself. But,
Glanzer said, they’re considering other strategies, such as adding off-site
programming. Another rumor Glanzer shot down: Artists Alley was not smaller
this year than last. Although it was smaller in the planning stages, at the
last minute, said Glanzer, “We were able to move the Art Auction upstairs to
the Sails Pavilion so we didn’t lose any tables. ... In fact, I believe we
increased space by about 25 tables over 2006.”
Glanzer
also attempted to unhorse persistent complaints that “we’ve left our roots” in
comics for the allure of Hollywood. He was less persuasive here. Yes, from the
beginning, as he said, the Con has included science fiction and movies. Shel
Dorf, who inspired a knot of teenagers to found the Con in 1969, came West from
Detroit, where, in July 1965, he’d been among the founders of the Detroit
Triple Fan Fair, a two-day meeting for fans of fantasy literature, movies, and
comics. But over the years, one leg of this three-legged stool upon which the
Con rests has grown more than the others, creating a wholly lopsided
contraption, Hollywood’s big budgets crowding out all other considerations.
Spurgeon said he’d talked to several “medium-sized” exhibitors of comics who
said they were seriously considering not returning next year. Floor space
devoted to comics in the cavernous exhibit hall has remained about the same
year after year, but the acreage devoted to movies, tv, games, and toys has
steadily increased, and for the last several years, comics have been dwarfed by
these other aspects of the show.
When
Dorf was still active in the management of the Con, newspaper cartoonists were
always a highly visible presence at the Con. Not any longer. For most of the
past several years, only one newspaper cartoonist got Guest billing. This year, Morrie Turner of the celebrated
inter-racial strip Wee Pals and
political cartoonist Daryl Cagle served their turns. And the iconoclastic Aaron
McGruder had a session on the program, as did several cartoonists
representing the National Cartoonists Society. But newspaper cartooning usually
gets short shrift at Sandy Eggo. I admit that I felt not a little miffed this
year by the lack of attention accorded Milton
Caniff (chiefly, I confess, as it affected his official biographer). Caniff
was one of the Con’s “themes”: the 100th anniversary of his birth
was ostensibly being celebrated. It seemed an appropriate gesture: Caniff’s
influence on cartooning was immense. As Caniff’s biographer, I offered to do a
session on the art of storytelling in comics as he had refined and improved it,
relying upon my just published “definitive biography” (Caniff’s term) of
Caniff. Of course, I was flogging the book—just as Hollywood producers flog
their movies and everyone else on the program at the Con is selling their
product. That’s what program events do at the Comic-Con. But my offer to do a
session was declined. I was on the program once with a panel about the current
enthusiasm for reprinting vintage comic strips (Dick Tracy, Pogo, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Gasoline Alley, even Terry and the Pirates) and a second
time for a session about the “Steve Canyon” tv show of the late 1950s, where
the producers of a DVD collecting all the shows flogged their product. Neither
of this events spoke to Caniff’s cartooning genius, the only reason for
celebrating him at a comics convention. Nothing on Terry, Caniff’s pace-setting masterpiece.
I
was miffed, as I say, until I noticed that there wasn’t a single session on Herge, the creator of Tintin, who was
also a “theme” of the Con (the 100th anniversary of Herge’s birth,
too). But there were six sessions on “Star Wars” (Friday was “Star Wars Day”).
Single sessions commemorated other “themes”—Robert Heinlein, Grendel, Groo (his
25th), the Rocketeer (ditto), and for the 25th of Love and Rockets, two sessions, one for
each of the Bros Hernandez. Roy Thomas, a pace-setter in comics and an enduring
presence, was featured at two sessions. (I was delighted to learn, in a
subsequent conversation with Roy, that my suspicions about the Spider-Man newspaper strip were correct:
Stan Lee doesn’t write it. Roy Thomas does. Or, as he puts it, he “helps” Stan
Lee. He assured me that Lee approves in detail everything he, Roy, does with
the strip and sometimes makes adjustments or changes.) Surprisingly, given its
emergence in recent years, there wasn’t much on the graphic novel; nor was
there a depressing amount of programming given to manga. Lots on toys. Specialties I never imagined: the Ball-jointed
Doll Collectors had a meeting. And porn star Jenna Jameson was in attendance.
She
was there to promote her comic book. Here’s Scott Huver’s take at nypost.com:
“Showing up at the San Diego Comic-Con in a cleavage-friendly and belly-baring
ensemble that threatened to cause heart failure among hefty comic book guys
whose primary idea of a sexy night in bed is reading a yellowed copy of Josie and the Pussycats, the world’s
most famous porn star unveiled her latest entrepreneurial effort, the comic
book Shadow Hunter, a five-issue
mini-series due in 2008 that casts her as a sultry, supernatural enchantress
who uses a wicked sword—and possibly the occasional Reverse Cowgirl—to battle
the forces of evil. Published by Richard Branson and Gotham Chopra’s
celebrity-centric Virgin Comics line (insert obligatory ‘Jenna Jameson’ and
‘virgin’ joke here, and then insert second joke about the use of the word
‘insert’), Shadow Hunter is a dream
project for Jameson, who loves the idea of mixing demonic duels and double-Ds.”
The book’s creative team has not been named yet, but Jenna is enthused about
the book, which, she said, won’t shy away from her hardcore history.
To
hear her tell it, Jameson has always been aware of a “crossover” appeal linking
comic book readers and porn movie fans. Said she: “It’s all a matter of the
fact that as human beings we love fantasy ... whether it’s fighting legions of
zombies or being sexual, it’s the same sort of thing.” Well, not quite. She
might have referred to those “hefty comic book guys” reading Josie and the Pussycats for sexual
excitement, but, no—she’s trying to move into the mainstream. She doesn’t do
movies anymore; instead, she’s capitalizing on her celebrity as many other
celebrities, from Martha Stewart to Cindy Crawford, do, launching a series of
products in her name—a fragrance, a clothing line (called “Hello Jenna”), and a
lingerie company. She’s also in pre-production for a movie based upon her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,
which will be called “Heartbreaker” and may star Scarlett Johansson as Jenna.
Negotiations are still in progress. Jenna’s big on “sensitivity” these days and
likes Johansson for the part because she can “bring some depth and she’s kind
of dark.”
Jenna
wants the movie to be an authentic treatment of the porn movie business, not a
“complete fabrication” like “Boogie Nights.” Jenna’s movie, she says, will be
“one hundred percent reality”—even explicit. “It has to be. Not because we want
to draw male fans [but] because I want to tell the true story.” The true story,
according to Jenna, is that “I turned something that was an industry that was
completely unaccepted by America into something that is widely accepted now.
And I think that writing my books changed things for a lot of women to accept
their sexuality and be more powerful in a way.” Apparently, she doesn’t think
that the Internet with its proclivity for delivering porn in the privacy of
one’s home had anything to do with the current boom in porn. Moreover, “because
even though I’m a porn star, I think that ... I’ve been so successful because
people can relate to me and then can see themselves dating me or being my
friend.” She is, indeed, a fantasist. She expects to star in whatever movie
results from the comic book Shadow
Hunter, and she’s looking forward to the chance to show off her athletic
talent: “I’m so athletic,” she said. “I can’t wait to do the whole—I’m a
gymnast, so I can kind of show off all my talents, finally.” All her talents.
Show them off.
Yes,
movies and Hollywood and popular culture generally have been a traditional part
of the Comic-Con mix, but not to the virtual exclusion of comics and
cartoonists, which, alas, is the quo of the present status.
Son of Pithy Pronouncements
“My
life is a performance for which I was nver given any chance to rehearse.”
—Ashleigh Brilliant in Pot-Shots
“One
of the very nicest things about life is the wayk we must regularly stop
whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” —Luciano
Pavarotti
“About
the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.” —Chef Gloria Pitzer
EDITOONERY
Afflicting
the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted
Heads continue to roll out of the nation’s newspaper
editorial offices. Craig Terry, who
for 18 years was the editorial cartoonist and graphics editor at the Northwest Florida Daily News, was
relieved of his position on August 24. It was a cost-cutting maneuver, and it
involved several other staffers, mostly from advertising. Adding insult to
injury, Terry and the others were given no notice in advance but, when told of
the decision, were immediately escorted from the building like so many
criminals. A perp walk for an editooner. Terry had to get his former assistant
to retrieve from his computer his freelance contacts and family photos, music,
and other personal data. ... On the other coast, Mike Shelton was fired last October at the Orange County Register after 24 years; he continued doing cartoons
for distribution by his syndicate, King Features, until recently, when he
stopped editooning altogether to concentrate on Internet animations. ... The San Antonio Express, which was one of
the few papers in the country with two editorial cartoonists, one liberal and
the other conservative, fired Leo Garza,
the conservative, in August; John Branch stays on. While budgetary considerations may have been a cause, the newspaper’s
management offered no reason for choosing to fire the conservative. Matthew
Sheffield at newsbusters.org wrote the paper, asking for an explanation, and
received a bland, fact-devoid response, blathering about “the numbers” and
asserting that it was “a judgment call.” (“Judgment calls,” by the way, used to
refer to a decision reached in an emergency situation where the decider had no
time to deliberate; now, at the San
Antonio Express and everywhere else, it means, simply, “it is our
opinion.”) Sheffield was outraged and wrote back: “A ‘judgment call?’ ‘About
the numbers’? What does that mean? You provide no specifics which gives you no
credibility. Don’t you find it the least bit hypocritical that you are refusing
to disclose your decision-making process when you routinely publish editorials
demanding that government and other businesses do just that? How are you doing
anything but using the ‘unfettered power’ (your phrase for the Bush White
House) you have over your editorial page without having the respect for the
public opinion to explain yourself. You owe it to the public to explain your actions
with more than peremptory phrases and dismissive language, especially as a
member of our self-appointed ‘fourth estate.’” What, indeed, about the
“public’s right to know,” which is so often invoked to support a journalist’s
mission? No response from the Express yet.
Finally,
to commemorate Fred Thompson’s entry into the Presidential Stakes, here’s Holbert at the Boston Herald, picturing the “Law and Order” D.A. making his
announcement on tv, saying: “I’m running for President ... well, to be honest,
I’m walking briskly for President. Some might even say ‘sauntering’ for
President. A pleasant stroll ... meandering ...”
THE FROTH
ESTATE
The Alleged
News Institution
Just when we thought the practice of journalism could
get no more trivial, Rupert Murdoch, notable right-winger and the last of the press barons, successfully bullied his
way into sacrosanct precincts of the Wall
Street Journal by throwing his money around and buying the paper. This
aroused consternation in the Froth Estate, most of whom still, despite the
tabloid myopia of their own journalistic efforts, respect what they perceive as
the superlative reportage going on at the WSJ.
While it’s true that the Journal was,
and may still be for all I know, a model of thorough-going objective journalism,
some commentators saw little to wring hands over: the Journal, they averred, had long ago abandoned journalistic
excellence in favor of improving its bottom line. And Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair even found something to be
happy about in the Murdoch acquisition. Say what you will about Murdoch’s
penchant for sensational news and topless bimbos on page three of his
papers—not to mention his desecration of the London Times (which, he assured the newspapering fraternity when he
bought it, he would not corrupt—then proceeded directly to corruption)—Murdoch,
Wolff said, “is the only media conglomerator who has any interest whatsoever in
print.” Moreover, “the unique thing about Murdoch as a newspaperman is that he
is, truly, the only one of his kind to understand that, to survive, he had to
get beyond newspapers—way beyond.” And so he has done exactly that. But, said
Eric Alterman in The Nation: “Examine
any Murdoch newspaper—or book publishing or network news operation for that
matter—and you will find any number of clear, inarguable abrogations of
journalistic principles in the service of the immediate interests of Murdoch’s
corporate empire. ... Whatever actual news the media properties report is
almost beside the point. When news values and business interests clash,
business wins. ... Business always wins.” And sometimes in the interest of his
businesses, his news vehicles support even left-leaning politicians. “It’s not
that Murdoch is open-minded,” Alterman says, “—it’s that he’s single-minded.”
Given Murdoch’s complete disregard for ethics of any sort, journalistic or
whatever, I worry about how he will bend the WSJ to work his will in China, where he has extensive interests.
Or, rather, how he will subvert the legendary WSJ objectivity in order to improve his investment posture in
China. That, I’m sure, is his objective in buying the paper.
LAND OF MY
YOUTH
Denver, land of my youth and now the precinct of my
dotage, was, until not too long ago, one of the last two-fisted two-newspaper
towns in America. The so-called cross-town rivalry (the papers’ offices were
actually just a few blocks apart downtown) took shape as a sometimes frenzied
contest for circulation, the Rocky
Mountain News and the Denver Post each striving mightily to drive the other out of business. This robust symptom
of journalistic enterprise disappeared a few years ago with the inauguration of
a Joint Operating Agreement that now joins the two papers at the hip. In
theory, they are still rivals, still scrapping for each other’s readership.
That, after all, is the objective of the legislation that created JOAs—to
preserve newspaper competition, and hence the quest for Truth, in cities where
more than one newspaper have survived the modern age. JOAs re-arrange two
newspaper operations to reduce the expense so that both newspapers can persist.
The papers use the same presses and printers, hence cutting production cost,
and they share in advertising revenues according to some fantastic and
ingenious formula, but they maintain separate and independent editorial and
newsroom staffs, thereby preserving the illusion that a competitive edge still
exists. In Denver, the Post and the News (which calls itself “Rocky”) even
occupy, now, the same building, a brand new edifice in downtown Denver, overlooking
the historic City Center Park.
Despite
the good, even commendable, intentions that inspired JOAs, few successful ones
remain. Without researching the matter at all, I know of only three—in Denver,
in Seattle, and in Detroit. The editorial cartoonists I know in these cities
usually shrug and grimace when I ask them how their JOA is doing. In Seattle,
at last report, one of the partners to arrangement is suing to escape it,
alleging that the other partner is the greater financial beneficiary. Or some such.
Back
in the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up in the city, the News was a morning paper; the Post, an evening paper. Now they both
appear in the morning. The chief manifestations of the JOA are that the
classified sections of the two papers are identical and the weekend editions of
the papers appear as a single publication. On Saturday, the front page is
flagged Rocky Mountain News, with Denver Post in smaller type; on Sunday,
the reverse. Whatever the grievances harbored by staff members of the two
papers, comic strip readers can have no complaints: both the Saturday and the
Sunday editions publish nearly all of both newspaper’s comic strips. On
Saturday, the combined line-ups consume four consecutive broadsheet pages, a
veritable orgy of comics. The Sunday funnies are not quite as glorious: the
strips are jammed onto the pages, as many as 6-7 to a page and only eight pages
in all, four for each paper’s comics content. As is usual with a paper’s Sunday
edition, some of the daily strips are not carried on Sunday. The News doesn’t publish the Sunday Over the Hedge, for instance, or Drabble or Candorville; the Post leaves out Agnes, Dog Eat Doug, and
the Elderberries. The News runs some strips on Sunday that
don’t appear on weekdays: Piranha Club,
Frank and Ernest, and Opus (which
is a Sunday-only strip).
My
family subscribed to the Post, probably
laboring under the assumption that a broadsheet paper was a more serious news
vehicle than a screaming tabloid like the News.
The Post’s comics roster in those
days included several stellar strips—Terry
and the Pirates and then, in addition, Steve
Canyon, plus Gordo, Red Ryder, Mutt
and Jeff, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Brenda Starr, The Gumps, to name
a few—but I always lusted after the News’ line-up: Pogo, Peanuts (which, when
it started in the fall of 1950, was in the Post; I’d like to know why they let it go), Li’l
Abner, Captain Easy, Alley Oop, and on Sundays, Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan and Russell Patterson’s Mamie. Today, too, the News seems to carry better strips—and
more. Its roster totals 41 strips compared to the Post’s 29. The News’ strips include 9 of the 18 most widely circulated strips (those in 1,000 or
more newspapers); the Post publishes
only 5 of the top 18. But the Post gives better display to its daily strips—24 strips and 5 panel cartoons on
one-and-a-quarter broadsheet pages; the News, while filling four tabloid pages, runs some of its 29 strips and 11 panels at a
minuscule dimension and sometimes distorts the art in strips with the infamous
“shrink” lens to get strips squeezed into the available slots. Oddly, in
seeming violation of the territorial exclusivity clauses in syndicate
contracts, both papers carry Dilbert. The Post runs the current manifestation;
the News, “classic Dilbert,” re-runs, under the heading The Dilbert Zone. Explained Mary Ann
Grimes of Dilbert’s United Media
Syndicate: “Dilbert is too popular to be left out of any newspaper when we can
accommodate both papers, which we could in this situation.” With very little of
that kind of prompting, we can imagine similar situations with “classic” reruns
in newspapers all around the nation where the current versions appear in a
rival paper, thereby eviscerating the old exclusivity clauses. But this
circumstance is mostly wholly imaginary: as I said before, almost no cities in
this country support more than one daily newspaper, so “territorial
exclusivity” is defacto nonexistent wherever comics are published.
Another
strange escape from the logic of competition took place in September in the Post, where Stephan Pastis’ Pearls before
Swine appears. For about a week, Pastis committed one of his cross-over
sequences in which he ridicules Bil
Keane’s Family Circus. This sort
of internecine tomfoolery is amusing to the cartoonists and those of their
readers who are attuned to the game, but it seems mostly an instance of the
poverty of Pastis’ comedic imagination since he is relying on another cartoon
for his jokes. And in cities where the only newspaper in town runs Pearls but not Circus, the in-group joke may well be entirely lost on those
readers who don’t know what Family Circus is. How would they know if the only paper in town doesn’t run it? In Denver,
however, there’s no danger of that: Family
Circus runs in the other half of the JOA, the Rocky Mountain News. So we have the unlikely situation of a comic
strip in one newspaper giving publicity to a strip in the competition. Odd but
not without precedent in Denver. Al Capp regularly spoofed Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy with Fearless Fosdick in his Li’l Abner, and Dick Tracy ran in the Post while Li’l Abner ran in the News. Gould didn’t object to the
ribbing: he always said he was grateful for the free publicity Capp was giving
him. Maybe Bil Keane feels the same way about Pastis’ effort; dunno. During
this sequence, Keane appears in Pearls, a passable caricature by Pastis, which proves, despite the usual artwork in his
strip, that he can draw: he simply refuses to do so on a regular basis as a way
of thumbing his nose at his colleagues. Pastis’ stick-figure Rat and Pig seem
to be saying to other cartoonists: “See? Pastis can assemble a more-than
respectable list of subscribing newspapers without doing any drawing at all,
and you spend hours slaving over your drawingboards in the mistaken belief that
the quality of artwork makes a difference to newspaper editors. Ha! Fat chance.
And here’s the proof.”
In
the political arena, the News runs Doonesbury and Candorville, countering both with Prickly City, a strip of conservative bent by editoonist Scott Stantis, who, despite his bedrock right-wingery, gives us a pair of
protagonists, a little girl and a coyote, who represent conservative and
liberal points of view, respectively. The News also publishes Zippy, whatever
politics you can discern in that. In the Post, we find no obvious political points of view in the comics section, but on
the editorial page, where it doubtless balances an otherwise prevailing liberal
caste, we find Mallard Fillmore, Bruce Tinsley’s liberal-bashing screed
masking as a comic strip. In August, a spate of letters to the editor in the Post lambasted the paper for publishing
such a “one-note” unbalanced comic strip, inspiring a more rational response
from other readers, who wondered “since when did political satire require
‘balance.’” A more accurate criticism of Fillmore is that name-calling isn’t inherently humorous—or satirical. Tinsley’s venom
often overwhelms his comedic sense. Doonesbury, in sharp contrast, is a character-driven strip, the satire of which is embedded
in the personalities of the cast, some of whom—Zonker, most conspicuously—seem
to have no political axe to grind at all. Tinsley’s duck, on the other hand, is
simply a satirical quack, a genuine faker.
The News also has one of the last—maybe THE
last—full-time sports cartoonists, Drew
Litton, who treats sports like an political cartoonist treats politics,
eschewing the time-honored mannerisms of the great Willard Mullin and those he inspired, all of whom drew portraits of
athletes surrounded by smaller antic figures which Mullin dubbed “goomies” that
illustrated what was essentially reportage on a sporting event. (Click here to visit our appreciation of Mullin in Harv’s
Hindsight.) In contrast, Litton lays into jocks and teams and their
managers for whatever f On
the editorial pages, both the News and the Post achieve distinction with
their own full-time staff political cartoonists at a time when many daily
newspapers have no staff editoonist at all. At the Post, Mike Keefe wields
a rapier-edged line. Here are a couple examples of his work. One of them,
captioned “Double Take,” reprints a 1980 cartoon on immigration that is still
relevant in today’s milieu, proving, as the caption implies, that we have made
little progress on the matter in the last 27 years.
One of a kind
beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.
Paris Hilton, whose vacuous visage is the very
personification of “celebrity”—the meaninglessness of being famous for being
famous—is the tabloid media’s love child, no doubt about it. By way of
demonstrating just how rich a vein of newsiness the heiress represents, here’s
Cindy Adams’ story in the New York Post (August 20), so tantalizing an array of puns and wordplay that I can’t ruin it
by excerpting; here’s the whole uncontaminated piece:
PARIS HILTON MAY BE A CARTOON (FOR REAL)
Let’s don't anybody say Paris Hilton is a flash in
the pen. Let's don't even mutter about this Feline Felon flaming out. The child
is only beginning. Stan Lee, who
brought you Spider-Man, who brought us X-Men, who brought mankind The
Incredible Hulk, who brought himself millions, who is now bringing
"Superhero" to the Sci-Fi Network at 9 p.m. on Thursdays, is poised
to bring us Miss Paris Hilton Herself.
"I
have a first-look deal with Disney," Stan told me. "That means I
don't know who'll be behind this until I at least show them the finished
product and see how they feel. But the plan is to make an animated cartoon show
with her on TV. A hip comedy in the superhero comedy- adventure genre. We get
on very well. This is a charming, very likable person. Sophisticated. Great
comedic sense. A fine voice. And seriously hard-working. Totally unlike
whatever the public is led to believe. And she has input. She attends every
meeting. What we plan to do is truly tasteful. I'm doing a few of these kinds
of shows. I'm working with Ringo Starr for a similar idea. I've told him I'll
make him famous."
Stan
Lee had the good sense to wait for the laugh. Then: "And I'm planning
another with Hugh Hefner. Actually, he's not a sybarite. In my hands, he'll
come off as America's greatest secret agent."
The
laugh might have been shorter, but Stan Lee's credit line has definitely grown
longer.
Anyway,
"Who Wants To Be a Superhero" did six episodes last season. It has a
Go for eight this season. And that's even before Paris starts burning.
RCH again: That’s the story. Too good to be true, eh?
The Arizona Republic adds that in the “Party Girl’s origin,”
she’s “bitten by a radioactive club monkey.” Surely that’s fiction.
FOOTNIT TO
HISTORY
Retired editooner Jim Ivey, reflecting on his adventure in 1959, comparing European
and American political cartooning—to the detriment of the latter—adds a
footnote or more to my report (Opus 208). He has always squirmed in discomfort
at the title Newsweek gave its
September 14, 1959 article, “A One-Man Crusade.” He didn’t see himself as a
crusader at the time or his report as any kind of a campaign. Said Jim:
“Actually, after the Newsweek piece
and Editor & Publisher’s 8-page
condensed version of my report, I didn’t write continuously (‘crusading’) on
the subject.” He wrote only two articles, he told me, both at the invitation of Freedom & Union: one discussed
European cartoonists “as seen by Jim Ivey”; the other compared American and
European cartoonists, “a generalized over-all view of the two groups, how they
worked, and so on. And except for the San
Francisco Examiner [his employer] sending me to interview visiting
cartoonists, that was it! In fact, I groaned when the subject came up
after 1962—enough already!” he concluded, adding: “It’s all ancient
history now!” In Jim’s view, he was simply making a report, not picketing the
profession. But his report, especially when seen in the warm glow of hindsight,
was perceptive and accurate, and over the years, the profession has, in effect,
reformed itself pretty much along the lines his report suggested.
Jim,
uncomfortable with my having unearthed the “ancient history,” finally wrote “to
attempt a summation of my European Fellowship controversy, for once and for
all.” To wit: “Criticism of U.S. editorial cartooning was widespread in the
late 1950s. The little one saw of European cartooning was so fresh, exciting
and modern. My concept was to visit those cartoonists and see what was there,
their opinions and their working philosophies and methods. My [resulting]
report was run in Newsweek’s ‘Press
Section’ (as ‘One-Man Crusade’—a phrase I dislike; I consider ‘reporting’ as
accurate). Newsweek backgrounded me
for three hours in New York City before I left the U.S. Editor & Publisher ran an 8-page condensed version of my
report. The president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
[AAEC], Charles Werner, naturally felt obliged to defend U.S. editorial
cartoonists with letters [to editors]. So I feel, since everything I mentioned
is now part of today’s U.S. editorial cartooning, that I deserve at least a
modicum of credit for that change for the better.” Right. But Jim goes on: “One
aspect that I’ve avoided mentioning is that after the controversial Fellowship
report, I was on-the-spot and had to deliver. The miracle is that, overall, I
seemed to have passed the test.” Right again.
COMIC STRIP
WATCH
Ever notice that there are no backgrounds in the
daily Zits? Well, occasionally a sofa
crops up or a doorway, but usually, no background details. Just white space
against which Jim Borgman’s expertly
drawn characters cavort. He manipulates the medium masterfully, and he draws
with great and admirable skill. But not many backgrounds. Okay by me. Just
sayin’. ... Here’s
a rarity: a three-quarters view of Snoopy’s doghouse. I suppose it’s happened
more than once, but I’d not seen it before. ... And Mark Tatulli, without the usual professional courtesy of footnoting
his strip with “apologies” to Charles Schulz, appropriated the Peanuts characters and the classic Lucy
deception for a gag in the pantomimic Lio.
Lio, now in about 275 papers it sez here, is Tatulli’s second strip; his
first, Heart of the City, is about a
“normal” kid, not a preternatural one. ... Beetle
Bailey passed its 57th birthday in September, which creator Mort Walker and his son Greg celebrated with a mere footnit in
the September 4 release—that and a funny picture of Sarge greeting a cake.
Whatever else cartooning may be, Walker insists, it’s still also about making
funny pictures. ... And it’s sometimes self-referential, as it was in Kevin Fagan’s Drabble on September 5, where the human sapiens are typically
rendered somewhat more than funny—and somewhat less; they’re grotesque, is what
they are. ... In
Tony Cochran’s Agnes, the diminutive
heroine’s verbal extravagance is the comedy. In August, Agnes attempted and
failed to dive off the diving board at the swimming pool. She is ultimately
overwhelmed by her own imagination. Standing on the diving board, she says:
“This could result in many number of tragic tragedies. One, I have many
fracturable aspects. Two, I could die and stuff. There could be contusions,
abrasions, lacerations, sprains, strains, dislocations, a very wicked reddening
of the skin...” To which her buddy responds: “Hey! I’ve got one—your eyeballs
could pop clean out of your head!”—inspiring a sarcastic reply from Agnes:
“You’re the morning sun on my dark night of woe,” she intones. A couple days
later, Agnes invites her friend to mock her for her failure to dive—to make
“mean-spirited jokes” at her expense, to indulge in “nasty finger-pointing and
eye-rolling” when her back is turned. But her cohort refrains from mocking:
“We’re friends,” she says, “—I won’t do any of that.” Agnes is shocked:
“Ohmygosh,” she says, then drips with sarcasm: “Did I jump and die? Is this the
afterlife? Are you my spirit guide?” “Knock it off, pencil-neck,” her pal says.
Hilary B. Price delivers what ought to
be a classic in her Rhymes with Orange on
September 14: a psychiatrist tells his patient, “You have kleptomania.” And the
patient says, “Can I take something for it?” ... Jef Mallett in Frazz, a
strip about a elementary school janitor and his relationship with precocious
pupils in the student body, is often philosophical. Here’s a thoughtful little
girl on the football field, saying: “You know that net by the goalpost that
keeps footballs from going into the stands?” She pauses and looks at Frazz, and
then continues: “How many footballs could you buy for what those cost?” Says
Frazz: “You’re looking for logic in a sport where the players have meetings.”
Beautiful. Mallett, by the way, is an avid swimmer/runner/cyclist (like Frazz),
and early in September, he was one of several athletes making a five-mile swim
across the straits that connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the Mackinac Bridge and raise money for Mentor
Michigan, an organization for youth mentoring. ... In Frank and Ernest, the eponymous pals ponder politics. “A
presidential candidate unveiled his energy plan,” says one, “—he wants to fuel
all of the people all of the time.” After that sinks in, he continues: “And
another candidate dropped out of the race—they say it’s because of lack of
funds.” Which inspires this reaction: “That’s just as well. Anybody who won’t
spend money he doesn’t have shouldn’t be in the White House anyway.” Ouch—too
true.
Read and Relish
Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi
tells this one: “Two decades ago, journalist Michael Kinsley performed a
non-scientific experiment. He slipped dozens of self-addressed cards into
best-selling titles of the day in various Washington, D.C. bookstores. If you
found the note, which would have meant you’d read at least half the book, you
would collect a $5 reward. After five months, no one had claimed their prize.”
BOOK MARQUEE
When we think of Hank Ketcham, we think, perforce, of Dennis the Menace, the syndicated newspaper cartoon that Ketcham produced for fifty years until his death in June 2001. But for almost ten years before Dennis was born in March 1951, Ketcham was a freelance cartoonist, drawing gag cartoons for magazines and, like most of his confreres, illustrating ads and articles in those same magazines. Fantagraphics Books, which is reprinting all of the Dennis cartoons in tidy tomes, two years per volume, now performs a similar service in publishing a collection of Ketcham’s otherwise lost forever work for magazines, assembled and introduced by Shane Glines and Alex Chun, Where’s Dennis? The Magazine Cartoon Art of Hank Ketcham (173 7.5x6-inch pages, bound on the short side, some in color; $19.95), with introductions by Ron Ferdinand and Marcus Hamilton, who are the present proprietors of Dennis, Sunday and daily respectively (producing impressive Ketcham-like drawings). It’s a treat to see in the volume at hand Ketcham’s languorous line limning adults, including several of the pin-up or chorus girl persuasion. Among the specimens are a few featuring a variety of tow-headed kids, paired, on the next page, to a Dennis panel in which Ketcham repeated the gag verbatim. Also herein, on page 143, the cartoon Ketcham cites in his autobiography as an example of how an additional visual prop or two can give a scene a persuasive reality—here, the lantern hanging on the back of the wagon—a trick he picked up from a New Yorker cartoonist (Perry Barlow, if memory serves; I can’t check my memory, though: my reference library has yet to be unpacked—sorry).
This may be the only opportunity I’ll have this season to confess that I was, in 1954-55, so inspired by Ketcham’s Dennis that I attempted a version of my own in my highschool newspaper. (I had virtually no difficulty in getting the thing published because the editor of the paper was conveniently located: he had the same address I did. Same name, too.) I tried to ape Ketcham’s graphic mannerisms but realized, almost at once, that I hadn’t the skill orexperience. I did a little better in capturing Dennis’ personality, though, imagininghim as a teenager, the enfant terrible slightly aged. My class in highschool was populated with a generous delegation of juvenile delinquents to serve as models, and I also appropriated the signature hair style of the day, the “duck-tail,” in my teenage version of Dennis, whom I named Little Louie Loutermouth. He was featured in a panel cartoon I called I Hate Skool, borrowing, this time, a little from a book just hitting the bookstores, which Ronald Searle illustrated for his friend Geoffrey Willans, Down with Skool!, about a fanatical schoolboy-chauvinist pig named Nigel Molesworth. Here are a few.
Peter
Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) says he’s 69 years old and doesn’t want to
waste time on projects without real meaning for him. Producing a children’s
book from the lyrics of “Puff the Magic
Dragon” is such a project. Yarrow has been pursued, he said, for fifteen years
by a friend who wanted him to do a series of books illustrating his songs. Now
we have the first. As Jennifer Miller says in reviewing the book for the Rocky Mountain News: “Never before has
the renowned folk trio allowed the lyrics to their beloved classic to be put
into pictures in a children’s book. And the debut is magical. French
illustrator Eric Puybaret’s soft-edged paintings capture all the misty
enchantment of this story about a dragon who befriends a boy, Jackie Paper,
only to endure great sadness when the boy grows up and has to leave.” Many of
those who have sung along with Peter, Paul and Mary over the decades have
supposed that Puff dies when Jackie grows up and leaves the land of Honalee,
but the pictures in this book reveal that he doesn’t: he’s kept alive by
Jackie’s daughter, who comes to visit him. Yarrow had no hesitancy in supplying
an ending to the Puff legend: “Whenever you make a creative choice, you either
trust your instincts or you don’t. I was dead set on not doing it unless it was
going to be done with the kind of sensitivity I thought was honoring Puff.” At
the end of the I don’t know if Andrews McMeel has published books of cartoons by Europeans before, but they have now—with This Is As Bad As it Gets (128 8x11-inch pages in full color; paperback, $16.95), a healthy dose of the sardonic wit of the Parisian cartoonist Voutch. Voutch, who supplies no other name, first or last, spent fifteen years as art director of a publicity agency then, in 1995, began cartooning. He also says he’s co-champion of the world in boomerang throwing, a dubious claim. His cartoons, painted in gouache, a version of watercolor, are visually more locale than personnel: he typically renders the human sapiens as pencil-thin physiques with very large noses, and their conversations take place in settings that dwarf them—poolside at a massive pool, on a terrace overlooking a valley in the distance rendered in panoramic scope, under a giant tree on an expansive plain. Even indoors, Voutch’s characters seem overpowered by their surroundings—rooms with 20-foot ceilings and garishly colorful wallpapers. His sense of humor is similarly unique. The book’s front cover flap explains it nicely—“a cartoon cocktail of cynicism and absurdity,” in which “Voutch takes on newfangled technologies [lots of clone jokes], communication overload, snide doctors, unreasonable bosses, and dysfunctional relationships.” Here are a few: A waiter in a restaurant with an ornate stone wall says to a couple who’ve asked about an item on the menu: “The ‘Succulent Wild Boar Corsican Style’? It’s a pork chop with noodles and a little ketchup.” Here’s a mother eagle, sitting on a nest with her four offspring, who spies her husband, approaching over a distant mountain range with something in his claws; she says, “Well, here comes your father the idiot, late with the child support again.” A doctor and his assistant confront a patient, saying: “ We’ve managed to isolate your selfishness gene. It’s huge.” Several psychiatrist jokes. One says to his patient on the couch: “But of course, you’re absolutely right: your mother was never a showgirl in a seedy bar in Buenos Aires. I confused your file with Mr. Dos Santos’s.” Another: “As far as I am concerned, your psychoanalysis is over. I’m opening a pizzeria.” With captions like these coupled to pictures of visually insignificant people, Voutch has done everything a cartoonist can to make his fellow beings seem trivial and meaningless—just the sort of antidote we need in the Age of GeeDubya, who has made everything seem so massively threatening.
Khalil Bendib has a new book of
political cartoons out from Olive Branch Press, Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America’s Most Wanted Political
Cartoonist. Born in North Africa under the French colonial regime, Bendib
offers what is probably the nation’s only non-Eurocentric perspective on
current events. His cartoons often view the Mess-o-patomia in the Middle East
from the Arab or Palestinian perspective, for instance. As his website puts it:
“His hard-hitting, myth-shattering, platitude-mocking cartoons rarely shy away
from the truth, as they seek to expose the crude racial stereotypes,
‘diss-information’ and info-tainment pablum offered as gospel by our mass
media.”
Lisa
Moore, Tom Batiuk’s doomed character in Funky
Winkerbean, will die October 4 of breast cancer. Lisa had survived much in
the strip: as a teenager in the 1980s, she had a child out of wedlock and gave
it (him) away; then she and Lester Moore got married, and in 1999, she
discovered she had breast cancer. After a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was
cancer free. Batiuk transformed her ordeal into an uplifting continuity, and
the strips were reprinted in book form, Lisa’s
Story, for which Batiuk was honored by the American Cancer Society for his
sympathetic portrayal of those afflicted with cancer. Lisa finished her law degree, opened a practice, and she and Les
had a baby daughter. Then in the spring of 2006, the cancer returned and
metastasized. She dies, but hers is not a death without hope. Said Batiuk: “For
me, there is a miracle in Lisa’s story. It’s not that much of a downer. It’s a
hopeful story because it shows how a loving couple treats each other under all
circumstances.” I agree: it’s a sad story, but full of heart. And, even, humor.
The final chapter in Lisa’s life has been combined with her earlier cancer
episode in a volume titled Lisa’s Story:
The Other Shoe (258 6x9-inch pages in black-and-white; paperback from Kent
State University Press, $18.95). You will probably weep a little as Lisa and
Les reach the end of their life together—I did; but in the courageous manner of
their meeting that end, you’ll find satisfaction, knowing that people can be
like this. They are fictions, but they seem real, a triumph of the
storyteller’s art. The book also contains resource material on breast cancer
and information about support systems and health care. Incidentally, the strips
all carry month and day dates, so we can determine from the sequence the years,
making the volume historically important as well as spiritually uplifting.
THE SON OF
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind
beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.
The famed weekly supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News, founded 28 years ago
by National Enquirer owner, Generoso
Pope, who’d just installed color presses for the Enquirer and launched WWN because
he couldn’t bear to think of the old black-ink presses standing idle, ceased
publication with its August 27 issue. At first, the WWN stories were mostly true, albeit incorporating “facts” that no
one bothered to check. “If a guy phoned and said Bigfoot ran away with his
wife,” said “reporter” Sal Ivone, “we wrote it as straight as an Associated
Press story.” The stories, at first, were “85 percent true,” according to one
of the WWN minions; but, as the Washington Post’s Peter Carlson writes,
they soon learned that “too many facts can ruin a good yarn, so Pope and his
editor encouraged their reporters to embellish a bit. ... Gradually, true
stories became half-true stories, then quarter-true stories, then. ...” WWN was, Carlson alleges, “the most
creative newspaper in American history; it broke the story that Elvis faked his
death and was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It also broke the story that the
lost continent of Atlantis was found near Buffalo.” The Onion, another wholly fictional newspaper, was much influenced
by WWN. Said Joe Garden, Onion features editor: “They really knew
how to take hold of a premise and go as far as humanly possible with it. It was
beautiful.” These fantastic tales were introduced with headlines so memorable
as to become legends. “Twelve U.S. Senators Are Space Aliens!” “Plane Missing
Since 1939 Lands with Skeleton at the Controls.” “Florida Man Screams from the
Grave, My Brain Is Missing.” (This one was based upon an actual newspaper story
about a Florida undertaker who was arrested for selling the body parts of his
clients to research scientists.) I used to buy the paper occasionally to revel
in its extravagances. One of my favorite stories was about the exploding cigar
that blew a man’s head off. It appeared in the same issue that reported an
8-year-old quadriplegic’s rolling 5 miles to get help for his father, who’d
become pinned beneath an overturned tractor. But the part of Carlson’s eulogy
for WWN that I liked most is this:
“In their quest to make fake news seem real, WWN’s writers found an unexpected ally— reality. The real news
reported in real newspapers in those days frequently rivaled anything that WWN writers could concoct. For instance:
Americans elected a president who’d once co-starred in a move with a
chimpanzee. Rich women hired ‘surrogate mothers’ to bear their children. The
Soviet Union suddenly dropped dead. Scientists invented a magic pill that gave
men erections. California cultists committed suicide, believing that the
Hale-Bopp comet would carry them to Heaven. Lurid details of a president’s sex
life were released in an official government document. Religious fanatics hijacked
airplanes and flew them into buildings. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected
governor of California. Scientists studying DNA revealed that humans were 98.6
percent genetically identical to chimpanzees.” No wonder WWN’s circulation
dwindled to badly that the paper was axed. Who, today, needs its sleazy
fantasies?
FEINSTEIN’S
BOOK
That He
Produced with Borus
“When are you going to review my book?” asked Andrew Feinstein on the early evening
of July 26. We were walking along the Seaport Village waterfront in San Diego
on the way to the Southern California Cartoonists Society’s annual Comic-Con
kick-off party. Feinstein and his sideburns towered over me as we lurched
along. “Soon,” I said, remembering, though, that when he sent me a copy of the
book, he’d expressed the “hope” that I’d “enjoy it enough to review it,”
implying that if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t mention it. And I confess that
the artwork, which Feinstein perpetrates, hurts my eyes. But the book, Opening Lines, Pinky Probes, and L-Bombs:
The Girls & Sports Dating and Relationships Playbook (144 8x10-inch
pages in full color; Santa Monica Press; $14.95), is like no other comic strip
reprint book you’ve ever seen. Neither is the strip.
Girls & Sports is a male chauvinist
enterprise about girls, dating, the bar scene, parties, and, occasionally,
sports. It was born in Denmark in the spring of 1997 while Feinstein and his
cohort Justin Borus were touring the country as juniors in a college
international business program. “As part of the program,” Feinstein remembered
for Dave Astor at Editor & Publisher,
“they took us on long bus rides to visit different businesses—the LEGO factory,
Carlsberg beer. ...” Between visitations, Feinstein and Borus amused themselves
on the bus by discussing their favorite topics, which they belabored so often
and at such length that a female student in the seat in front of them finally
turned around and blurted: “Would you please shut up? All you talk about are
girls and sports!” The two would-be jockstrap Lotharios were stunned into a
spasm of creativity and invented their comic strip on the spot, entitling it,
in another spasm of inspiration, Girls
& Sports. They did the strip for
their campus newspapers at their respective colleges, Feinstein’s Emory
University in Atlanta and Borus’ William College in Massachusetts. When the
strip was picked up by other campus newspapers, the collaborators—Borus on
writing, Feinstein on pictures—began pitching it to other college newspapers,
and by 2004, they had a client list of more than 70 papers. Then they turned to
civilian newspapers and, against all odds, sold the strip to more than 100 of
them—“an astounding total for an independent [self-syndicated] strip,” said
Astor. Then Creators Syndicate picked it up, and its circulation has grown
since. Its success, Feinstein believes, is easily explained: “We’re targeting a
demographic that has been mostly ignored by mainstream newspapers. Many comics
are about babies, families, married couples, or retired people. There wasn’t a
strip that discussed the things young guys talk about.” And young women are
also readers of the strip. “For them,” Feinstein said, “it’s like reading the
opposing team’s playbook. We get as many e-mails from women as we do from
men—and a lot of our clients are female editors.”
The reprint collection perpetuates the ambiance of the strip. The strips aren’t dated, and they don’t run in the order of their original published appearances. Instead, they are grouped in chapters that organize the gamut of singles’ preoccupations as if they constitute a game, a board game perhaps. (Bored game? No; too much word play.) Dating and the search for an ideal mate or a night’s conquest are seen as a sports events, but the chapters are titled like a course in dating: Getting the Night Started, Scouting the Prospects, First Date, Going All the Way, The Serious Relationship, Getting Out of the Game, etc. For page layout, the book imitates the prevailing men’s magazine style, breaking the page into 4-6 individual units—boxed paragraphs, strips, marginal illustration—on the assumption that the purchasers of this volume will be fugitives from laddie magazines, all of which are designed for readers with an attention span shorter than the life cycle of the fruit fly.
And
here’s the whole story on “The Pinky Probe”: “Your first date has gone fairly
well, but it’s coming to an end. You’ve had great conversations, and she’s
still interested in what you have to say. You’re pretty sure it’s time to move
in for ‘The First Kiss,’ but will she reciprocate? Since the last thing you
want is the ‘turn away’ or a slap in the face, the recommended strategy to
confirm that she’s indeed ready and willing to kiss you is the Pinky Probe.
Step 1: To properly execute the Pinky Probe, gently extend your pinky and
mentally prepare it for battle. Your pinky is about to go on a kamikaze mission
and will need all your loyalty and support. Step 2: Innocently poke your
extended pinky against the hand of the girl. Just as a kitten will grab a piece
of string that is dangled in front of its paw, a girl will grab your pinky
immediately if she welcomes the intimate contact. If she’s not interested, your
pinky will gently bounce off her hand and, in the unlikely event she notices,
you can play it off as your average everyday muscle spasm. Step 3: If the
conversation is going as well as you think, the girl will likely grab your
pinky and, before you know it, you will be holding hands. Once you are holding
hands, you have an open invitation to move in for a kiss.”
In
another department, our guides take up a knotty problem: “Before having sex
with you, a girl might ask: ‘How many girls have you slept with?’ Never
answer this question truthfully. Girls just want to have their cake and
eat it, too. They want a guy who hasn’t slept around and yet they also want a
guy who is good in bed. Unfortunately, as any guy knows, you can’t be good in
bed without a lot of experience.” On the same page, we confront another
imponderable: “How long do girls expect guys to last in bed? We’re not the
Hanukkah candle! I can’t figure out why girls complain when a guy can’t last
more than 30 seconds. If I were a girl, I’d be insulted if a guy lasted longer
than 30 seconds.” And that’s because: “... the only shot we have at lasting
longer than 30 seconds is if the girl is really unattractive.”
Borus
and Feinstein also examine infidelity. “Note to girls: ‘Is my boyfriend
cheating on me?’ Of course your boyfriend is cheating on you! That’s what guys
do. But look on the bright side. It means that your boyfriend is cool enough
that other girls are actually interested in him. The only reason why some guys
don’t cheat on their girlfriends is because they can’t get another girl to hook
up with them. Remember, there’s a difference between not cheating and not being
able to hook up with someone else.” Elsewhere, our authors list unanswerable
questions that girls use to start fights: How come you’ve been going out so
much with your friends lately? Would you love me if I gained 30 pounds? Could
you possible love another girl as much as you love me? Why don’t you get
dressed up for me anymore? Have you noticed that your friends aren’t as nice to
me as before we started dating? Do you miss being single? You can guard against
the disaster that such questions precipitate by “building up credit for a rainy
day”: cook dinner once a month, give gifts on “non-sanctioned occasions,” pay
for all meals, go shopping with girlfriend without complaining. The best
defense, however, is “the nuclear option”: just say, “Okay, fine—let’s break
up.” “While this may seem harsh, your girlfriend will quickly learn not to
fight with you for fear you’ll drop the big one on the relationship.”
This
is all fun stuff if you don’t take it too seriously. If you think it’s serious,
you will quickly come to the conclusion that men—single or married—if on the
hunt, are shallow and self-centered. Women in pursuit, likewise.
In
preparing strips to be reprinted in this tome, Feinstein told me that he
re-drew many of the early strips because he felt his earliest art wasn’t very
good. “And a lot of people still think that,” he said with a self-deprecating
grin. I’m one of them. It’s not that all of his characters look alike. They
don’t. They all have the same bug-eyed look, true, but Feinstein runs an
exhausting gamut of visual gimmicks to give each pop-eyed visage a distinctive
variation. Some characters have round noses ; some, pointy noses; some pointy
noses point up; others, down. And hair styles are endlessly varied: Feinstein
has undoubtedly become the world’s foremost expert in discovering how many
different ways hair can be simply drawn yet individualized. But probably the
most ingenious mark of distinction is that one of his male characters,
Marshall, has square ears. Only a man who knows—with celestial certainty—that
his drawing ability is excerable will resort to drawing square ears as a way of
individualizing his cast. Feinstein is clearly such a man, but he is also a
dedicated cartoonist, whose vaulting ambition is matched by his tireless
endeavor to do better. And better and better. We have to admire him for that,
despite his awful artwork.
PHIL FRANK
DIES JUST DAYS AFTER FORMALLY RETIRING
Phil Frank, who for 32 years produced a comic strip
about his own alter ego, a disheveled newspaper reporter and sometime park
ranger named Farley, died September 12 after a long illness brought on by a
brain tumor. Farley was unique: for
the last 20 years of its run, it appeared only in the San Francisco Chronicle. Frank, a long time resident of the Bay
Area who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito for many years, died at a friend’s
house in Bolinas at 9:30 p.m. with his wife and daughter at his bedside. He was
64.
Just
days before, Frank had announced that he was laying down his drawing pen: his
illness made it impossible for him to draw either Farley, his picaresque San Francisco refuge of feral cats,
vociferous ravens, clueless park rangers, gurus, wild pigs and political
figures, or his syndicated strip, Elderberries. His final Farley strip, the last
in the “classics” that have been re-running for almost a year, appeared on
September 7. The characters in the Elderberries—crotchety
old ladies and gents who live in a retirement home—will live on, but under new
management. Here’s Carl Nolte, staff
writer at the Chronicle, who wrote
what follows on September 9 when Frank retired his pen; I’ve adjusted verb
tenses occasionally and added a few amplifying facts from other sources,
including Marianne Costantinou’s 2005 piece for the Chronicle.
Frank,
an amiable man with a shock of unruly hair and a rakish mustache, closely
resembled the character he created. Sometimes, Frank even talked like Farley,
with wry remarks and keen observations on the passing scene. The fictional Farley,
who lives in a San Francisco apartment with Bruce, a wisecracking raven, was a
familiar character to Chronicle readers
for decades.
Being
a cartoonist isn't all fun and jokes, said Rod Gilchrist, executive director of
the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. "It's a lonely and difficult
thing," he said. "You are in your studio, slugging it out. You have
to produce something every single day."
It's
tough to be amusing every single day, but Frank did it. He drew more than 9,300
comic strips, almost never missing a day.
"He
is a cartoonist's cartoonist," said Joe Troise, Frank's writing partner on
the Elderberries strip. "That
means other cartoonists admired his work. Phil also loved cartooning as an art
form. He is like a musician who loves music."
Frank
likes to quote a man who came up to him after a talk and told him how lucky he
was to have found a career that he enjoyed that also brought enjoyment to other
people. "It is a simple thing," Frank said, "but it's something
I still think about."
The Farley strip, running only in the Chronicle, gave Frank an opportunity to
offer his own view on the local scene, including political developments. It was
always much more than a comic strip— Frank called it "really a horizontal
[personal] column, documenting the life and times of the characters in the Bay
Area." Drawing the strip for just one paper gave Frank shorter lagtime
between drawing a strip and its publication, which meant he could draw cartoons
based on local events while they were still in the news. Politicians could
announce policies early in the week to see them carried out in the comic strip
in only a day or two. The characters in the strip, including a band of feral
cats living in Golden Gate Park, always acted faster than civil servants. Elderberries, which Frank launched with
Troise in late 2004, is about life in a low-rent retirement home and is
syndicated by Universal Press to 50-75 newspapers. Installments of Frank and
Troise's version of the strip stopped running daily when Frank became ill about
a year ago. The current cartoonist, Corey
Pandolph, is a resident of Portland, Maine. A new book of Frank’s Elderberry strips will be published this
year.
One
of the secrets of Frank's success as a cartoonist, Gilchrist said, was his
ability to use multiple story lines that followed the doings and deliberations
of different characters. Set in the Bay Area, Farley was populated with an antic array of characters, ranging
from Bruce D. Raven, Irene the meter maid and a hapless San Francisco cop named
Inspector Tuslo to Orwell T. Catt, one of those feral felines in Golden Gate
Park. Frank also featured other animals, including wild pigs and an assortment
of bears who run a restaurant called the Fog City Dumpster, spend summers in Yosemite
National Park, and hibernate at the end of baseball season. When Farley's
characters went on vacation, they visited either Asphalt State Park or
Yosemite, where the determined Velma Melmac, a tattooed chain smoker from
Manteca, spent her time trying to make nature resemble her suburban home,
hanging No Pest Strips around campsites and vacuuming the nature trails.
"He
created all these imaginary little worlds," Troise said, each of them with
separate stories. Troise thinks Frank's animals, particularly Bruce D. Raven,
the feral cats and the Fog City Dumpster bears, are all versions of Frank
himself. "They are all intelligent and mischievous," he said,
"—like Phil himself. I like that about him."
Frank
also drew what passes for the real world, and his favorite targets were local
politicians, especially San Francisco's mayors from Dianne Feinstein to Gavin
Newsom. In Farley's world, mayors
were seen measuring public opinion by consulting talking mirrors and gurus like
Baba, one of his cartoon inventions. In the comics, mayors treated city
bureaucrats as if they were royal retainers, ready to carry out the mayor's
every whim. When Mayor Frank Jordan was unwise enough to appoint a lowly
politician to high office, Frank's cartoon mayor appointed a feral cat to run
the municipal aquarium.
Frank's
all-time favorite mayor was Willie Brown, [as picturesque as any cartoon
character]. His Honor appeared in the strip as an emperor surrounded by
spear-carrying flunkies. When city officials displeased the mayor, Frank had
their heads lopped off. Brown loved it. He once appeared at a San Francisco
event in a crown and regal robes. It was a joke, but the mayor was only half
kidding. Frank's cartoons on the Brown regime appeared in a book of his work
called "Don't Parade on My Reign." Brown himself snapped up copies of
the book and gave them away as Christmas gifts. "I gave autographed copies
to everybody," Brown said. "I gave one to Bill Clinton, to Hillary
and to Arnold Schwarzenegger."
"Did
I like it? Are you kidding?" Brown said. "Phil made me
famous."
It
was a rare case of cartoon symbiosis. "Willie," Frank once said,
"was a gift from the cartoon gods."
Frank
himself had a keen eye for politics and history. He was particularly interested
in southern Marin County, and had a home in Sausalito and a retreat in Bolinas.
He was a serious historian and for many years was president of the Sausalito
Historical Society. In July, the society named a research center in City Hall
for Frank. He was a leading citizen of the town and was grand marshal of
Sausalito's Fourth of July parade in 2006. But this year, he was too ill to go
to the parade, so the Cal Alumni Band, the only marching band in the parade,
left the main route to serenade Frank at his house several blocks away.
Frank
had made a point of knowing every nook and cranny in Sausalito, and worked hard
to preserve its history. "If Phil doesn't know about it," said Tom
Mondgren, one of his neighbors, "it isn't known."
Like
a lot of Californians, Frank was a transplant from another area. He was born in
Pittsburgh in 1943, and went to Michigan State University, hoping to be a
commercial artist. He saw an ad in the State
News, the college paper, offering $5 a cartoon to someone who would produce
a daily political cartoon for the paper. Frank signed up. His cartoons
commented on the war in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle, and campus,
local and national politics. He drew five days a week for four years; his
cartoons were such a hit they were syndicated in other college papers. After
graduation, he worked for Hallmark cards in Kansas City, but he left the
Midwest to come to California in the 1970s.
On
June 16, 1975, he started producing a comic strip called Travels With Farley. Syndicated to 50 newspapers, it introduced the
Farley persona, a younger version of Phil Frank, with more hair and a wilder
mustache, who worked, when he worked, for a dying afternoon newspaper with the
perfect name for today’s print news media, the Daily Demise. In this stage of his life, Farley traveled the
country meeting people and observing life. Farley later became a park ranger
(in charge of picnic tables and bear management). He had a dog named Bob, who
later was the star of another Frank strip, a short-lived one called Miles to Go.
Travels With Farley was converted to the
local San Francisco Farley strip in
1985, going from a syndicated strip in several papers to a strip that appeared
just in the Chronicle. Frank said
he'd grown tired of Farley as what he called "a naive traveler," so
he gave him a home, in San Francisco, surrounded him with a cast of Bay Area
characters, and gave him a job at the Daily
Requirement, a thinly veiled version of the Chronicle with offices at the corner of Myth and Fission (Fifth and
Mission, for anyone not well versed in San Francisco topography).
But
Troise saw Farley’s conversion
differently. "I think Phil wanted to become a bigger fish in a smaller
pond," he said.
In
any case, the new Farley strip was
for many years the only purely local comic strip in the country. [Jeff MacNelly eventually did one for
the Chicago Tribune, where he was
also the staff political cartoonist; and Ed
Stein, editoonist at the Rocky
Mountain News, continues the tradition with his strip, Denver Square.]
Frank
had several other cartoon irons in the fire—a strip in Car and Driver magazine, several commercial accounts, and some
cartoons in other magazines. He was also an incurable romantic. He lived in a
Sausalito houseboat for 13 years before moving ashore to an old house in
Sausalito, where he delighted in telling visitors that Baby Face Nelson, the
noted gangster, once hid out just down the street. Frank loved old stories, old
cars, his wife, Susan, his two children, and history.
At sfgate.com/podcasts, hear a roundtable discussion
on Phil Frank's career with Bad Reporter creator Don Asmussen and editorial
cartoonists George Russell and Tom Meyer, moderated by Cartoon Art
Museum director Rod Gilchrist. At sfgate.com/philfrank, watch Phil Frank
playing TV travel guide in excerpts from a Sausalito walking-tour history video
presentation.
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Rick Veitch is one of the most inventive comic book
makers of the day. He seems never willing to sit and rest on previous laurels:
he’s forever, it seems, examining some new comics storytelling mode or a new
aspect of an otherwise old subject. Some years ago, he impressed me with a
series of comic books in which he regaled us his visualizations of dreams he
was having. Recently, he produced a graphic novel, Can’t Get No, in which he juxtaposes words and pictures in a novel
manner: the story is told in pantomime but every picture is accompanied by
boxed text, which runs a prose poem parallel to the picture story,
complimenting it in a subtle way but not referring directly to any of the
events being pictured. Even if the language sometimes soars to pretentiousness,
the narrative tension between the verbal and the visual is exquisitely
maintained, yielding an unusual reader engagement in the work. Now, Veitch
comes along with a rollicking tale of modern U.S. warfare, Army @ Love (Nos. 1-6, so far), in which sexual licentiousness and
heavy doses of nudity almost overwhelm the satire. Veitch puts his soldiers in
the fictitious but wholly recognizable Afbaghistan, where the objectives of the
military operation are entirely obscured by two overwhelming motivations: sex
and money. In the first issue, we meet Switzer, a girl soldier, who, in a free
fire zone with a male combatant named Flabbergast, proposes, during a lull in
the shooting, that they get naked and “do the dirty,” which, she alleges, will
initiate him into the Hot Zone Club, an organization, it turns out, that she
has invented solely to get Flabbergast to screw her while under fire—because
that makes it all more exciting. Flabbergast eagerly takes her up on her
proposition, and they both strip and have at each other. It’s an appropriately
lewd introduction to the series, which is unabashed about sex, engaging its
cast members in endless couplings, none of which obey the usual monogamous
imperatives. Switzer is married to Loman, a bagman for the mob back home in the
States; Flabbergast is single but quickly falls in lust with Switzer. The other
principal couple introduces Colonel Healey who is married to Allie, who, back
home, tries to cure her loneliness by getting it on with Loman. Healey, head
and founder of “Momo” (the Motivation and Morale initiative), is a former
marketing manager who ingratiated himself to the military moguls by devising a
way to increase recruiting for the Army while at the same time keeping morale
high—the Retreat.
Held
periodically but frequently, Retreats are all-out sexual orgies, and they
created the perfect match-up for recruiting for a war that was going on
forever, rotating troops back and forth, eventually exhausting human resources.
As Healey explains it: “How do I motivate a modern American kid to give up his
life of privilege, submit to the military and go to a foreign land to kill
people? And the answer is I offer them something they can’t get online or in
the movies—something we call ‘peak life experience.’ ... Turns out that the
steady diet of movies and video games [among American youth] has addicted them
to small amounts of adrenaline, and combat is an adrenaline junkie’s dream.”
But Healey’s scheme offered something more—“the secret sauce.” By putting women
into combat and inventing the Retreat as a way to break into the danger and
monotony, Healey united in one package deal all that young people hunger
for—“Danger! Power! Drugs! High tech! Sex!” It’s an adolescent’s dream come
true—“spring break on steroids!” No wonder everyone lines up to join. As Veitch
put it in No. 1: “My new series ... imagines how surreal the current war might
get in five years, focusing especially on how the miliary might have to market
it to a new generation of recruits.”
Despite
the prevalence of nudity and copulation, a second satirical strand permeates
the series. Noticing that much of the war effort in Iraq has been contracted
out to private agencies, Veitch imagines what might happen if the war is almost
entirely outsourced. In Veitch’s war, the country is bankrupt, so the
government goes in search of corporate sponsorship for the military. Suddenly,
patriotism goes out the window, replaced by corporate greed. Sex and the profit
motive animate all the action in Army @
War, and, issue by issue, Veitch finds new ways to twist his satirical
knife in the side of modern corporate war-making. Ingenious. And it would be
funnier if it weren’t so true. Veitch’s pictures are copiously detailed; inked
by Gary Erskine, they haven’t much visual flair, but Veitch is expert at it,
and he fills some panels with background action that occasionally functions as
a sight gag. It’s clear he’s having a great time, and so are we, watching him
at work—and at play.
Lobster
Johnson is one of the great names in fiction. (One of the others occurs in Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google in the 1920s—a detective named Hello Swifty. If you
can conjure up a name like that, your fortune is made.) In the first number of
a 5-issue series bearing the name of his crustacean hero, Mike Mignola surrounds him minions of varying skills, evoking Doc
Savage, another bygone hero of pulp fiction. The story is set in 1937, and,
sure enough, there are fiendish Germans afoot throughout. We meet an American
first, Jim Sacks, a failed baseball player who has found employment testing a
power suit for its inventor, Kyriakos Gallaragas, and his daughter. The Germans
kidnap the inventor and torture him to obtain the secrets of the suit, and when
he won’t talk, they threaten his daughter. That’s where the book ends. Lobster
Johnson, while all this is going on, careers around trying to find out where
the kidnapers have taken the scientist. Jason
Armstrong drew the story in a manner reminiscent of Jodi Bernet but somewhat more shadowy—not yet Mignola’s solid
bathtub blacks, but black enough. Throughout, visual sleights seep into the
story—breakdown and layout tricks, not just acrobatics of composition. They
delight the eye and the heart and lend atmosphere to the tale. The entrance of
a wraith-like woman is heralded when the smoke from candles all suddenly blows
the same way, away from an open window. I look forward to more.
Batman Lobo: Deadly Serious is the first
of two by Sam Kieth. Kieth is good
on a certain kind of picture at a certain scale, but his work reveals its
essential grotesque cartoonishness when he draws his characters at a distance
from the camera. And his visual invention flags when it comes time to portray
outlandish monsters, which Kieth presents here as sort of large-mouth blobs,
intricately cross-hatched and shaded. Kieth does the story here, too, and it,
alas, isn’t much better. Lots of atmosphere but no articulation. Batman is summoned
psychically to discover what is possessing the women in a certain area—a
disease? a plague?—where he runs into Lobo and they have a confrontation that
comes to naught. While they struggle meaninglessly, a schoolgirl is possessed
and wanders off. Kieth follows her, probably so he can try a variety of ways of
getting her wardrobe reduced to undies, ending, finally, in a two-page spread
where she covers herself with nothing but a sheet. Not much makes sense in
this, the opening issue of a two-issue run. Not even the characters understand
much of what happens. That’s part of the plot, I understand, but when Lobo
says, “Where’d that ship come from? Oh, who cares!” he infects us with his
disinterest. I liked Lobo when he first loomed up on the DC landscape: his raw
brutality turned funnybook violence into over-the-top comedy. A match-up with
Batman may have seemed like a pairing of equals to someone, but it’s not coming
off here, and the contrast between Batman’s restraint in murderous matters and
Lobo’s eager inclination to chop his foes into mince has the effect of
unmanning Lobo and robbing him of his only redeeming feature—his complete and
absolute single-minded ruthlessness. Too bad. What will happen in the
concluding issue? Don’t know. And don’t want to find out.
The
fourth Sparrow art book is Shane Glines’ and it brims with his Batman-animation style babes whose anatomy is abstracted
into pure design, juxtaposed color and shape, often without linear assistance.
Glines is working on a biography of long-lost cartooner Roy Nelson, and his renderings reflect his admiration for
Nelson—reflect without imitation, a homage to a worthy pioneer. You might find
more at CartoonRetro.com, although I tried and was told my machinery couldn’t
turn up that page. A momentary glitch, surely.
Ra’s al Ghul, described as “the
immortal madman,” is one of the more fascinating villainous geniuses in comics.
Standing athwart Batman’s world, Ra’s was once reputed to be 450-500 years old,
having discovered, in the Lazarus Pits, a secret to immortality. His particular
madness, apparently—if we are to judge from Wikipedia, not always a reliable
source— is prompted by a compulsion to create a world in perfect environmental
balance, which, he believes, can best be achieved by eliminating most of the
pollutants, namely, human sapiens. That’s why he wants to kill everyone. But
he, at the present, is presumed dead himself. A Lazarus Pit supposedly
misfired. Batman Annual No. 26, Head of
the Demon: The Origin of Ra’s al Ghul, takes matters up at this point. But
you wouldn’t know it from the book itself: written by Peter Milligan, the story, such as it is, presumes that the reader
has a much more intimate knowledge of Ra’s long and convoluted biography than
the average reader is likely to have and leaves a half-dozen plot elements
dangling, unexplained and unaccounted for. In one strand of the plot, Ra’s
daughter Talia is persuaded by the White Ghost to educate her son, Damian
(presumably the result of an affair she had with Batman years ago), about the
history of his grandfather. Unbeknownst to her, the White Ghost plans to use
her son as the corporal vehicle by which Ra’s will be brought back into this
world from whichever Lazarus Pit he’s in. In rehearsing Ra’s centuries of
history, Talia touches on various aspects of his life, including his having
saved the Duke of Wellington from certain defeat at Waterloo, turning the
tables instead on Napoleon, whom, Ra’s mutters ominously, he desires to topple
for “a personal reason.” We never find out what that reason might be. Nor do we
learn how his first and most beloved wife, Sora, was brutally murdered, but
Talia mentions it. The interlude at Waterloo seems altogether pointless unless
it is simply an excuse for penciller David
Lopez to draw Napoleonic military uniforms—or, perhaps, to show us how
ruthless a swordsman Ra’s is. Dunno which. Or if. Meanwhile, Batman is roaming
the hinterlands, looking for two ecologists who have disappeared while pursuing
the mysteriously long-lived Methuselah moth. Perhaps the moths were
contaminated by contact with the Lazarus Pit? Dunno. At one point, Batman
encounters three assassins, but he keeps referring to their number as “four.”
Dunno why. Never more than three pictured. Batman later runs into a demented
old man who supposedly knows where the ecologists are. He does, and he leads
Batman to them, repeatedly asking, as he does, about some apples, the
significance of which we never learn. The ecologists are dead, brutally
murdered. Batman eventually gets to the cave where the White Ghost is hanging
out, they fight, and WG loses his balance and falls into the Lazarus Pit that
he had intended to put Damian in. So will Ra’s come back as the White Ghost? So
we are left to assume. Posing as a self-contained one-shot book, the Annual reads more as if it is intended
to launch a storyline. Presumably, if Wikipedia is correct, that will commence
with Batman No. 670. But there’s
nothing in Annual No. 26 to advise us
of this possibility. We are left, instead, with an unexplained “personal
reason,” a pointless Waterloo, Methuselah moths, two dead ecologists, and those
apples, about which the old man keeps saying, “I’ve told you about the apples,
haven’t I?” “Several times,” says the grim Caped Crusader. As always, he knows
more than we do. Inker Alvaro Lopez works with a clean and unencumbered line, attractively free of noodling and
other forms of embellishment; the art in the book is a pleasure to behold, even
if that full-page picture of a Batjet taking off in the desert is a waste of
narrative space. Hardware ain’t inherently interesting.
ONWARD, THE
SPREADING PUNDITRY
The Great Ebb and Flo of Things
We cover politics here at the Rancid Raves
Intergalactic Wurlitzer because politics is the closest thing we have to a
national comic strip. August, as it happens, was a laugh riot. At the national
comedy club—sometimes called, with a knowing chuckle, the country’s
capital—politicians, as usual, took the month off and went back home, where
they pretended to discover what their constituents wanted them to do. Now
they’re all back in Washington, doing what they always do—holding meetings to
divvy up the taxes we pay, spending the money on Projects back home that will
earn them the undying gratitude of voters who will then, perforce, re-elect
them and send them back, again, to Washington for more divvying up. While
pondering the shenanigans of our nation’s leading comedians, we must always
remember that in the American Heritage
Dictionary, the fifth definition of “congress” is “sexual intercourse.”
Under the golden dome of the capitol, the fifth definition becomes the first
order of business: screwing all us citizens is the name of the game.
As
soon as our laugh riot leaders got back from vacation, the fog of politics
resumed. Thanks to George WMD Bush and a compliant news media, we’re all pretty
aware of the fog of war—the confusion that exists on the battlefield in the
midst of combat when perception is skewed and reason bombarded. The fog of war
is accidental. The fog of politics is deliberate: politicians aim to confuse,
and they do it through purposeful obfuscation. A tightly knit group of them
have been doing it for months, now, as they parade before us in what Hendrik
Hertzberg in The New Yorker calls
“the Long Campaign.”At this “preposterously early date,” he writes, “the
political arena, ideally a marketplace of ideas, [is] in our country, more
often than not, all marketplace and no ideas.” The “demand for news of
political conflict,” he goes on, results in candidates and the news media
“making political mountains out of policy molehills.” The early commencement of
the 2008 Presidential Race does not, alas, mean that we’ll get rid of GeeDubya
any sooner. No, all it means is that the Sunday morning gasbags and political
pundits of all stripes will have something to talk about, endlessly. The Long
Campaign is their creation: they need it because it can be reduced to horse
race analysis, and the punditariat is not capable of analyzing anything more
complicated than a horse race. And so they conspire with the politicians to
keep us as amused albeit as ignorant as possible: to properly appreciate
American politics, one cannot be one without the other. No candidate for
President these days wants to talk about the urgent matters looming on the horizon—the
steady and life-threatening deterioration of the infrastructure in American
cities, the fiscal crisis spawned by runaway health care costs, the colossal
inefficiency of the federal bureaucracy (of which FEMA and the tragedy of
Katrina in New Orleans is a shrieking example). Nobody wants to talk about it
except Fred Thompson, now that he’s entered the lists. Fred Thompson is an
actor who is best when he’s looking serious. When he has his serious face on,
he looks like a sage and a statesman. When he grins, he looks like an old man
with bags under his eyes and a wife too young for him. Unfortunately, running
for political office in this country requires that the candidate spend a lot of
time grinning. And that’s too bad because Thompson wants to talk about real
issues in government, not phoney issues, the champion of which is the
Mess-o-patomia as Jon Stewart calls the Iraq fiasco and the disaster in
Palestine.
Our
savior in these areas, General David Petraeus, came to Washington to deliver
his so-called analysis of the Situation in Iraq. He said things were not as
good there as we might have wished, but that we shouldn’t give up yet because
we were making good progress. Not particularly noticeable progress, but steady
progress. Good progress. Did anyone have any doubts about what he would say?
Petraeus is a soldier, a thorough-going professional. His business is making
war and winning. Soldiers in the American tradition do as they ordered to do.
They don’t quibble. They get their orders and they follow them. Not so long
ago, we had a thundering demonstration of just how dedicated military people
can be to following orders. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center was, in some of
its operations, a shambles, lacking proper equipment, facilities, and personnel
to adequately care for soldiers wounded in Irag and Afghanistan. But the
hospital staff was military: they didn’t complain about their material
deprivations. Their training, the training of any American military person,
urges them on to perform their mission with whatever personnel and equipment is
at hand. Don’t fuss: just do it. And so at Walter Reed, that’s what they did.
They were subsequently criticized for their silence, for not asking for more
equipment, more personnel, better facilities; but they did what their training
expected them to do—their mission, without complaint. Petraeus, likewise, is
trained to do the job, not to quibble about it. The military job in Iraq is to
pacify the countryside. What American soldier would issue a report about his
mission saying, in effect, it cannot be accomplished? Not any self-respecting
military person. Not Petraeus. And so, no surprise, he told Congress that the
mission in Iraq is not going as well as we might hope, but that it can, given
enough time and resources, be accomplished. A good soldier’s report. What else
could we expect?
Petraeus
has been accused of being a Bush League shill, ginning up data to support
GeeDubya’s persistence in staying the course in Iraq. But that’s scarcely the
case as a tell-tale exchange during the General’s Senate testimony reveals.
Senator John Warner, an erstwhile loyal Bushite who has defected so far as to
call for GeeDubya to begin troop withdrawals in December at the latest, asked
Petraeus whether the surge was working, and Petraeus insisted there were signs
of progress. But Warner persisted in pursuing the issue to the heart of the
matter, to the oft-stated reasons for our being in Iraq, asking, “Does that
make America safer?” To which the good soldier responded: “Sir, I don’t know
actually. I have not sat down and sorted it out in my own mind.” That tells us
all we need to know. First, it tells us that Petraeus concerned himself solely
with the military mission in Iraq—pacify the countryside. Second, it tells us
that he’s not in GeeDubya’s pocket: if he were, he’d have reassured Warner and
all of us that we were safer today because of our “success” (limited though it
is) in Iraq. And putting it all into relevant context is Mike Littwin in the Rocky Mountain News: “If Petraeus isn’t
ready to say that the war in Iraq is making us safer, I wonder who is?” And if
no one is, then why are we there? Warner and Petraeus together successfully
destroyed the Bush League rationale for the American military presence in Iraq.
This explosion, however, wasn’t much noticed in the news media or among the
Presidential hopefuls, scampering blithely around the countryside.
But
the data in Petraeus’ report on Iraq and his presentation of it to
congressional committees was thoroughly examined in the news and opinion
columns and on the airways. And so were two other reports, one by NIE the other
by GAO, neither of which, unhappily, were vastly supportive of the Petraeus
version of events. The NIE report, for instance, alluded to the factional fracture
of the Iraqi government, ancient tribal rivalries and sectarian loyalties
conspiring to render the government incapable of acting. The national police
force is riddled with corruption and sectarian tensions, and the army—well, the
army, while better than it was a year ago, isn’t yet quite ready. Why not? How
long does it take to train soldiers? The American military was virtually
nonexistent when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but a year
later, we were landing an invading force in North Africa. In somewhat less than
a year, we had created a huge army, fit for combat. These days, basic training
takes 6-8 weeks. In that time, the American military trains raw recruits and
makes operational combat-ready soldiers out of them. And the Iraqi Army has
been training how long? A year? Two? The Iraqi Army isn’t combat ready because
Iraqis join the army for one reason and one reason only: to earn money. It’s
the best paying job around. So young Iraqis join up and stay in training long
enough to collect a couple paychecks; then, when they have enough to sustain
themselves and their families for a few months while they look for employment
at something more satisfying than shooting their fellow citizens, they desert.
The Iraqi Army is a sieve through which the male population of Iraq trickles,
in and out, for purposes that have nothing to do with national defense or
security. Is it any wonder that the Iraqi Army isn’t ready yet? As a civic
institution, it may have been training would-be soldiers for years, but the
soldiers being trained today aren’t the same guys who were being trained
yesterday. The learning curve, under this haphazard process, is not only steep,
it’s precipitous and littered with speed bumps and potholes. The Iraqi Army is
not ready because the training is, in effect, hit and miss, mostly misses. The
Iraqi Army also lacks sufficient equipment and weaponry, no small matter.
But
the hilarities of August persist. Everyone talks about withdrawing American
troops from Iraq as if that were an actual choice. It isn’t. Not anymore. The
decision has already been made. We’re pulling out, starting in December with
about 5,700 troops and continuing in the spring until we’ve pulled out 30,000
of the 167,000 American soldiers in Iraq. It was a decision that was made over
a year ago although, to hear George W. (“Warlord”) Bush talk about it, you’d
think he just made it. In the wake of Petraeus’ optimistic assessment of the
military situation in Iraq, GeeDubya addressed the nation, telling us that our
military “success” in Iraq has enabled him, as Commander in Chief, to order a
reduction in the number of soldiers stationed in Iraq. George W.
(“Wishfulthinking”) Bush has been referring to the “success” in Iraq for some
weeks now: he keeps repeating the word—sometimes as if it describes an existing
circumstance, sometimes as if it refers to something just about to transpire.
The strategy here is the same as the Bush League, tutored by Karl Rove, has
practiced all along: by alleging something, they create a new reality. As Lenin
is supposed to have said, “A falsehood repeated often enough becomes a truth.”
Or maybe it was Karl Rove who said it. Or Joseph Goebbels. Whoever said it,
it’s true, and for the proof of that truth, we have only to cast an eye back over
the Bush League’s short history.
Or
we could remember GeeDubya visiting Anbar province in Iraq on Labor Day and
declaring victory: “The level of violence is down, local governments are
meeting again, police are in control of the city streets, and normal life is
returning.” Oh, yes—and Afghanistan isn’t the world’s major producer of opium.
GeeDubya’s statement is brimming with half-truths and innuendo—that is, his
usual mode of utterance. He implies that it’s the infamous “surge” that’s
changed life in Anbar, leaving out, for the nonce, the tribal chieftains who
have turned on the local insurgents, thereby establishing a new regime in the
neighborhood. As usual, GeeDubya was setting us up. Claiming that the violence
is down prepared the way for troop withdrawal: he can pull the troops out,
asserting that we have re-established security and safety throughout Iraq.
Mission accomplished. Well, sure: he lied to get us into Iraq, why shouldn’t he
lie to get us out? It worked the first time, why wouldn’t it work again?
We
should also recollect that when GeeDubya first proposed the notorious surge, he
said it was in the nature of a “surge” to be short: he envisioned a surge—that
influx of 30,000 more troops—to last only a year. And—lo and behold—that’s
exactly what he’s just announced. Again. That 30,000-troop surge will end next
spring, a year after it commenced, and by summer, we’ll be back to 137,000
troops on the ground in Iraq. Nothing new in that, but GeeDubya and all the
little Indians on the Campaign Trail talk about the 30,000 troop reduction as
if it involves a decision-making process just set in motion by Petraeus’
report. Even if the surge itself weren’t planned for just a year’s duration,
the Pentagon’s troop rotation plan would dictate a draw-down in troop strength
next spring. The mandated rotation calls for troops to stay on active combat
duty for 15 months, then be sent home for a year before being called up to
combat duty again. Combat duty is staggered by unit so that X-number of units
are always on duty in Iraq while another X-number are home, resting up to be
sent back again. Over time, straight math governs decisions. By next spring,
straight math will dictate that the troop level in Iraq must stand at about
130,000. I may have the number of months wrong here, but that’s immaterial to
the point: the point is that by next spring, the rotation pattern will reach a
tipping point, the point at which thre are no more units whose rotation pattern
permits keeping over-all troop strength at greater than 130,000.
Everyone
in government has known about the rotation pattern for months, years. All those
Presidential wannabes debating the merits or lack thereof in reducing troop
strength in Iraq—they’ve all known about the April 2008 “go bust” point.
They’ve all known that the American military presence in Iraq would be reduced
in the spring of 2008. Either that or start drafting civilians into the Army, a
political no-no. Since they’ve all known about it, what’s the debate about? Why
debate a fait accompli? So all that
high decibel huffing and puffing over troop strength in Iraq was a political
charade, an elaborate game to be played out before us voting spectators. Just
another example of how phoney issues dominate political activity and the news
thereof in this happy land.
In a
rare spasm of truth-telling, GeeDubya in his post-Petraeus speech to the nation
alluded, for the first time, to the legacy he’ll be leaving his successor in
the White House. The American presence in Iraq, he admitted, will continue beyond
his time as President. It’s nice that he’d admit it; many of us hapless
citizens, however, have realized the inevitable for months if not years. And
some of us even realize that “troop withdrawal” doesn’t means that all the U.S. military personnel will be home again. Nope: sorry. Not so. We’ll be
leaving 50,000-100,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq forever—like the troops in Korea—
staffing those gigantic military bases we’ve built to guard the oil companies’
investments. But no one is mentioning that. That’s not part of the debate. The
debate focuses on phantoms and phantasmagorias, not facts. The reality that our
political leaders want us to face is a fiction they concoct solely to give
themselves something simple-minded to talk about while stumping the hustings
for votes.
The
fact is that we should not—can not—leave Iraq precipitously. We must do
something to bring some measure of security and political stability to the
country. It is our moral obligation: we came in there, stomped around and
created ample opportunities for chaos, which, sure enough, then ensued. We made
a mess, and we ought to try, more diligently than we have, to clean it up. I
think it was a mistake of gargantuan proportions to have invaded Iraq: we
should have stayed in Afghanistan until it achieved some measure of stability
as a society and as a government. Moreover, we ought to conduct the War on
Terror in the same manner we conducted the Cold War. Democracies are
notoriously bad imperial powers: their populations tire quickly of the sort of
military adventures with which empires are founded. But democracies are awfully
good as object examples. If our foreign policy is to foster democracies and
free societies worldwide, we should do it in the most effective way we can: by
minding our own business (mostly, although not, perhaps, so exclusively as to
be completely isolationist). Our own business, properly attended to, would
serve as the beacon it always has, lighting the way for other peoples to freer
societies and self-governance. We’d achieve our objective without firing a
shot—just as we accomplished the collapse of the Soviet Union. Need more proof
of the error of the Bush League’s ways? How many wars have we won in the last
five? Only one—World War II. The Korean War is still going on; we enjoying the
temporary reprieve of a truce, but it’s been in place now for over fifty years,
no victory in sight. We lost Vietnam. And we haven’t won in Afghanistan or
Iraq. So we should stop thinking of ourselves as the most powerful military
force on the planet. That conviction, however technically accurate it may be,
hasn’t won any wars for us recently.
Having
made the mistake of invading Iraq with guns and tanks, we then compounded the
error by letting the Bush League run the invasion their way, all the best
advice in government to the contrary notwithstanding. The Bush League is a
reprehensible mob of zealots and liars, no question; but by letting them do
what they would, we assume responsibility for their actions, however
wrongheaded and duplicitous. George W. (“Whopper”) Bush’s deceptively cheery
analysis of the Situation in Iraq should not blind us to the accuracy of some
of the Bushites’ other observations: Iraq is a keystone in the Middle East, and
we cannot afford to let it deteriorate into a haven for terrorists or to become
an adjunct Iran. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, if we can do something
to repair the damage we’ve done in Iraq, we will have gone a long way toward
reviving the trust and esteem we once enjoyed around the world. At present,
most of the planet’s other nations have a pretty good idea that America’s word
isn’t worth much. We said we were going to save Southeast Asia from communism,
but we got tired of the effort after a few years and bugged out, leaving the
southern half of the country to be taken over by the northern half, the
communist half. In 1956, we told the Hungarians, who were rebelling against
their Soviet satraps, that they could count on us to help rescue them from
communist slavery. But we did nothing as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. In
1991, GeeDubya’s revered father urged urged Iraqis to rebel against Saddam,
implying that we’d support them in this effort. We didn’t. And several thousand
of the rebels died. “Most of us,” as Ed Quillen said recently in the Denver Post, “would like to live in a
republic that kept its word and protected those who took its side. But if this
ever was such a nation, it was a long time ago.” Before we broke treaties with
Native Americans, before Hungary, before Vietnam. Let’s not add Iraq to this
repulsive litany. Let us not do what GeeDubya is setting us up to do—declare
victory and bug out, creating another myth in our wake.
It
is possible, always, that everything is not quite what it seems. In fact,
disillusionment crops up often enough to destroy one’s faith in his own
eyesight, which, in my case, to begin with, hasn’t been 20/20 since grade
school. Pat Tillman, the former NFL star who gave up a lucrative $3.6 million
contract to join the Army Rangers and fight the bad guys in Afghanistan,
becoming, thereby, George W. (“Wrongheaded”) Bush’s bullnecked, square-jawed
unflinching steely-eyed posterboy for bellicose patriotism, died, it now
appears, under very strange circumstances. At first, the Bush League put it out
that he was killed by the enemy in a battle with the Taliban; Tillman was, in
short, the very incarnation of battlefield heroicism. Then it emerged that, no,
he was killed by his own uniformed countrymen who accidentally fired in his
direction. And then, last month, the Associated Press revealed that he died as
a result of being shot three times in the head at close range. “The Army says
the case is now closed,” reported The
Week, “but Tillman’s family says it believes the government is still
concealing information about the incident. A House committee this week opened
hearings into Tillman’s death.” Incidentally, it developed a couple months ago
that Tillman was scarcely the Bush League’s ideal warrior-patriot: far from
being a God-fearing Christian exemplar, Tillman was an atheist from a
skeptical, left-leaning family, thought the war in Iraq was “illegal,” and
planned to vote for John Kerry in 2004. His favorite author was far-left
theorist Noam Chomsky.
Myths
persist, however, aided and abetted, usually, by most of the mainstream
so-called “news” media. Most of the excitement over Barry Bonds’ breaking the
homerun record ignored what Roger Angell told us in The New Yorker on August 20: baseball’s “most hallowed record,” as
it is dubbed, is “hallowed but hollow, perhaps,” Angell writes, “since homerun
totals are determined not just by the batters but by different pitchers, in
very different eras, and, most of all, by the outer dimensions of the
major-league parks, which have always varied widely and have been deliberately
reconfigured in the sixteen ballparks built since 1992, thus satisfying the
owners’ financial interest in more and still more home runs. Bonds has been
called a cheater, but the word should hardly come up in a sport whose
proprietors, if they were in charge of the classic Olympic hundred-metre dash,
would stage it variously at a hundred and six metres, ninety-four, a hundred
and three, and so forth, and engrave the resulting times on a tablet.” Angell
is a famously enthusiastic baseball fan and can’t be ignored.
Another
popular myth is that the Iraqi government can’t enact an oil law the objective
of which is to share oil wealth fairly among the three principal ethnicities of
the nation—the Shiites and the Kurds, whose spheres of influence embrace oil
fields, and the Sunnis, who are oil-impoverished. The Bush League wants us to
believe that the intensity and bitterness of these historic ethnic rivalries
has stalemated the legislative process. It’s those ever-recalcitrant Iraqis who
are to blame for failing to reach this crucial benchmark. Nowhere, until
recently, have I encountered any alternative explanation for this seemingly
irrational Iraqi behavior. Then a week or so ago, Jim Hightower, a typically
irresponsible liberal and therefore wholly reliable source, offered an
explanation: “Major media outlets ... have swallowed Bush’s line whole,
frequently and unquestioningly reporting that, for some reason, those
quarrelsome Iraqis can’t even agree on something as basic as sharing oil
revenues. ... Truth is, this is not about sharing profits but about a cynical
power grab by multinational oil giants. Big Oil got the Bushites to write a
provision into the proposed law that would open two thirds of Iraq’s oil fields
to ownership by foreign corporations—unlike Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran,
which all control their oil drilling and extraction.” And we all know how
troublesome Venezuela and Iran have become as a result of their national
ownership of oil production; don’t want that to happen in Iraq. “In short,”
Hightower continues, “the law would force Iraq to surrender sovereignty over
its most valuable economic resource—and that’s why it is not passing. One thing
the nation’s politicians all can see is just how vehement public opposition to
Big Oil’s law is. So when you see stories about Bush, Cheney and others
imploring Iraq’s Parliament to pass this law—remember, they’re not promoting
national reconciliation; they’re promoting a shameful oil scam.” Soon after
running across this blatant expose, I saw veiled references in the Washington Post National Weekly Edition to Big Oil’s attempt to control Iraqi oil.
Both
the Post and Hightower may be wrong
about Big Oil’s designs upon Iraqi oil. But it rings true even if it isn’t,
which is a measure of how thoroughly we have come to believe that the Bush
League is infected with an essential duplicity: we know they lie and that their
chief interest in any undertaking is the enhancement of corporate wealth,
particularly if the undertaking has something to do with oil. By the same
token, we’d probably believe that the Bush League has made conversion to
Christianity a fundamental requirement for citizenship in Iraq so blatantly
have the Bushites advocated the Sublime Truth of Evangelical Christianity.
Which brings me to an apostrophe about church and state. I’ve been uneasy about
the intimacy that the Bush League advocates between religion and government but
couldn’t put my finger on just why I was uneasy. Then I encountered an article
in the September 3 issue of Newsweek by Lisa Miller, who is reviewing a book, God’s
Harvard, about Patrick Henry College in Purcelllville, Virginia, the stated
goal of which is to “prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation
and shape our culture.” In the course of the review, Miller acknowledges what
liberal intellectuals “fear most about evangelical Christians” but goes on to
say that fear is well-founded in the case of Patrick Henry College: “The
students at Patrick Henry do want to take over the world and
they do think that anyone without a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is going to
hell.” Miller’s question— “Does Patrick Henry College actually pose a threat to
American values of pluralism, equality and democracy?”—encapsulates the source
of my uneasiness. If these “culture warriors” have their way, pluralism,
equality and democracy will cease to exist in America. Only those with “a
personal relationship with Jesus Christ” will rule. Beware of zealots, whether
political or religious.
Another
thing we’re not being adequately informed about by the ever-vigilant Froth
Estate is global warming. Time and Newsweek and other national news
orifices have done numerous cover stories on the issue, but not until Robert J.
Samuelson, a Newsweek columnist,
attacked his own magazine have I been convinced that anyone is approaching the
problem with anything like an objective grasp of the realities. Virtually all
the coverage of global warming is advocacy reportage, supporting one side of
the argument over the other. Samuelson manages to take both sides at once,
undermining his own magazine platform but suggesting a more sensible path to
follow. “We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades,” he began in
the issue dated August 20-27. “Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately,
self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s Newsweek cover story on global warming
is a sobering reminder. It’s an object lesson of how viewing the world as ‘good
guys vs. bad guys’ can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story.
Global warming has clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it.
... The global-warming debate’s great unmentionable is this,” he continues: “we
lack the technology to get from here to there. Just because Arnold Schwarzenegger
wants to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 doesn’t mean it can
happen.” Citing a 2006 study from the International Energy Agency, Samuelson
points out that carbon-dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) emissions will likely
double by 2050, and “developing countries would account for almost 70 percent
of the increase.” Most of those countries are not likely to do anything about
greenhouse gases. Countries, say, like China, where the number of
carbon-dioxide-emitting automobiles is expected to go from 26 million to 120
million by 2020.
Under
most of the scenarios Samuelson discusses, the best we can hope for—even we
adopt the most stringent measures—is to curb emissions growth, not eliminate it
or, even, to reverse the trend to restore some earlier, less harmful, level of
emission. Newsweek’s cover story was
“contrived,” Samuelson says; for dramatic impact, I say, in agreement.
Samuelson allows that some of the many measures proposed ought to be
implemented. He urges more research and development, cutting oil imports in the
U.S., and drilling for domestic natural gas (“a low-emission fuel”). But the
essential problem remains: we don’t have a realistic solution to the problem of
global warming, and calling those who question the gravity of the issue fools
or cranks or oil industry stooges avoids coming to grips with what to do. In
his book, Cool It: The Skeptical
Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Bjorn Lomborg reportedly says
global warming isn’t as bad as the media and Al Gore would have us believe. And
rather than pursue the phantoms of eliminating or drastically reducing
emissions—both nearly impossible—Lomborg suggests we’d spend our time and
energies more effectively if we started now devising ways to live in a warmer
climate. At last, rank realism.
What
of the other hilarities that were perpetrated over the summer? What of the
departure of the insidious cynic Karl Rove and of the incompetent master of
mendacity Alberto Gonzales? Of both, good riddance, I say. Rove, whatever his
other ideologies, attempted to politicize government as no one ever did:
everyone in government, if he’d succeeded in his plot, would have towed the
Bush League line. He succeeded in bullying scientific agencies into re-writing
reports to make them conform to the party line instead of to verifiable fact, a
shameful enough achievement. But he failed to keep the Christian Right on
board. Said Lou Dubose in The Washington
Spectator: “Harnessing the Christians was an electoral strategy not a
governing strategy.” Quoting Tom DeLay, DuBose said that Rove could get “the
wackos” to vote every two years, but he couldn’t entirely placate them between
elections. “Again and again, the Bush administration foundered, and its support
flagged, as it attempted to accommodate Christian extremists whom Rove was
struggling to keep in harness with the economic conservatives who for decades
had dominated the Republican Party.” And so, ultimately, Rove left Washington
having failed to achieve the One Great Thing he hoped to accomplish—creating
the Republican Party as a permanent majority. An editorial in the Washington Post National Weekly Edition summed up Rove’s time in office: “If the manufactured polarization of the
Bush-Rove years did not even serve its ostensible purpose, then what was the
good of it?”
Gonzales?
A sad case, that the son of an immigrant worker in a despised ethnicity should
rise so high and fall so short. But he supplies an object lesson in the
futility of cronyism in government.
And
then we have the clueless Larry Craig, caught with his pants down in the mens’
restroom of the Minneapolis airport. His ordeal dominated the news for a week,
another example of journalistic irresponsibility running amuck. As always, Garry Trudeau got it right. Uncle Duke,
had he been in charge of Craig’s fate, would have “made a fake video of him
soliciting female sex.” Duke’s son realized the truth of the situation at once:
“Craig’s strategic error was soliciting gay sex instead of straight sex.”
Craig’s
dilemma provided some commentators with an opportunity to skewer Rudy Giuliani,
saying “a man who shamelessly flaunted his adulterous affairs [is] more
reprehensible than someone who tried desperately to hide his failure to live up
to [the cultural conservative] moral code” even while believing in it. Apart
from whatever else he proved, Craig demonstrated the tragic error of trying to
live a life you don’t believe in—or of believing in something you cannot live
with. Craig’s fate, undeserved on its face, was nonetheless the perfect salute
to the departing Karl Rove, who specialized in sleazy sex rumors about
political candidates: with Craig, a sleazy sex fact torpedoed a Republican
stalwart, who, otherwise, Rove would champion. Pat Bagley, who editoons for the Salt Lake City Tribune, is another cartoonist who got it
right. Here’s his take on the Craig
episode. A masterpiece of multiple implications, it perfectly captures the
ludicrousness of the GOP position on Craig and gaiety and the essential
hypocrisy we’ve come to expect from moral zealots. And,
speaking of Rove and the sensationalism of all this sexual, Mitt Romney’s
Mormonism has not yet surfaced in all its unfamiliar aspects. So far, following
the pattern Rove established, we’ve heard only about the sex part: just vague
albeit overheated rumblings about the practice of polygamy that was once a
pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. It was abandoned
when Utah became an official U.S. governmental entity. As Rove well knew, we’re
happily titillated by sex. But not by racism. The Mormon religion was also
blatantly racist: until 1978, African Americans were regarded as such inferior
creatures that they were not permitted to assume any of the priestly positions
in the church hierarchy. But we haven’t heard much about that. Romney was
presumably raised in that benighted tradition, but he is also smart enough to
realize how benighted that notion is. Still, in this day of high road political
tactics, I’m surprised someone hasn’t come forward to nail him to the wall
about the beliefs of his forebears. We haven’t heard much about the Mormon conviction
that human sapiens will eventually become gods either. But since that is the
ambition of every Presidential candidate, we can scarcely fault Romney for it.
Of all the distracting irrelevancies laying in wait for the Romney campaign,
we’ve heard mostly only about the sex part. Rove taught his minions—and his
opponents—well.
We
haven’t heard much about Condi Rice either these past few months. What’s with
this fashion plate and one-time potential Republican candidate for Prexy? If
Fred Thompson can jump in even at this late date, surely she can.
Metaphors
be with you.
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