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NOUS R US
Schulz Third Richest Dead Celebrity
The Voice
Rates New Yorker Cartoons
Disney’s “Enchanted” Revives the Studio’s Tradition
Marvel Goes Digital
Western
Comics in True West
Houston Post Cuts Back on Comics
Wonder Woman’s New Feminist Scribe
The 99 Extols Universal Values
Scott Adams Becomes a Boss
Satrapi Aspires to Smoking Championship
Anti-Semitic Cartoons in Arab Papers
MORE ABOUT
MANGA
Gay Comics
Picasso In Rome Where Male Nudity Is Paraded before
City Hall
GRAFICITY
Freefall Romance, A Gay Love Story
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Number Ones: Graveslinger, The Deadlander, Brawl,
Simon Dark
Green Arrow and Black Canary, Nos. 1 and 2
THE FROTH
ESTATE
Newspapers Are Aliver and Weller Than We’d Supposed
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Bottled Air
Kristallnacht in Heart
of the City
EDITOONERY
Public Official Drummed Out of Office by Crusading
Editoonist
(Or Not)
Nick Anderson Asks the Democrat Candidates a Profound
Question
Pat Bagley Just Gets Better and Better
Musical Chairs at Editoonist Desks
HOLY MOLEY
The Blasphemy
of Teddy Bears and Cartoons
CLOSER TO HOME: Wiley Could Be Next
PASSIN’
THROUGH
Australia’s James Kemsley, 1948-2007
NEW COMIC
STRIP: Signe
Wilkinson’s Family Tree
BOOK MARQUEE
Noel Sickles’ Scorchy Smith
Bush Leaguers: Catalog of Editorial Cartoon Exhibit
Last Summer
CALENDAR GIRLS: Olivia, Femlin, Silke’s Betty
SO MANY
SPLENDID SUNDAYS
Pete Maresca’s Walt and Skeezix, Sammy Sneeze, and
the Next Nemo
Plus: How Maresca Got Going On This Anyhow
Christmas
Lists
A Couple Suggestions
And our customary reminder: 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
With $35 million, Charles M. Schulz ranks third on Forbes magazine’s annual list of “Top-earing Dead Celebrities,”
following Elvis Presley ($49 million) and ex-Beatles John Lennon ($44 million)
but ahead of George Harrison, another ex-Beatle ($44 million) and Albert
Einstein ($18 million). ... Scott Adams, said Editor & Publisher, ranked
21st in the list of “The Top 50 Thinkers” in the world of business
published by the Times of London. ...
Patrick McDonnell lost the dog that inspired Earl in his comic strip, Mutts; the real-life Earl died at the
age of 18. More at Muttscomics.com. ... The weekly newspaper supplement Parade magazine has, nearly forever,
offered its readers three cartoons a week in its “Laugh Parade” feature. For
several centuries, all three cartoons have been by Bill Hoest or, after his death, his wife Bunny and cartoonist John Reiner; one of the three has been
about a St. Bernard, Howard Huge. With the October 21 issue, Parade announced that it would be
“happy” to “welcome” new cartoonists to the department, at the rate of one per
issue, I assumed, judging from this issue in which Gary McCoy singles. But by
December 9, Hoest and Reiner and their boring St. Bernard had disappeared, and
the three cartoons were by McCoy, Dave
Coverly and the team of Carla
Ventresca and Henry Beckett. And
the feature is now called “Cartoon Parade.” ... Gary Panter won an American Book Award for his graphic novel Jimbo’s Inferno in which Panter’s
muscular buzz-cut adventurer “is a wary innocent traveling through the most
heinous atmosphere Panter can imagine—for Panter, ‘hell’ is just two letters
away from spelling ‘mall,’ a gigantic brain-numbing info-commerce center called
Focky Bocky” according to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics, publisher of Jimbo’s Inferno. Panter is the second
Fantagraphics-published cartoonist to get an ABA: Joe Sacco was the first in 1996, with his book of cartooning
reportage, Palestine. Another
Fantagraphics production, Don Phelps’ Reading
the Funnies, a book of essays, won several years ago.
The Village Voice on November 29 published
“The New Yorker Cartoon Standings:
Fall 2007" with which Brian Parks needles the magazine for the celebrated
obtuseness of some of its cartoons. Parks’ chart, which appears anon, ranks the
issues according to the “Humor Success Percentage”of the cartoons: the November
5 issue had 9 cartoons, 5 of which were “amusing,” so it was batting .556; the
October 8 issue, in which only 3 of its 18 cartoons were “amusing,” was batting
a miserable .167. The magazine’s annual “cartoon issue” hit merely .333, which,
it sez, “excludes” the comic strips in that issue. Of which there are a few,
including another of those terrible stomach-churning collaborations between Robert Crumb and his wife Aline, who
cannot draw. Presumably, the editors of the magazine publish the occasional
effusions of this couple because they think it’s such a nifty notion that Crumb
and Aline can jointly do a comic strip. The sheer togetherness of the
enterprise appeals, I suppose. But if it weren’t for Crumb’s appealingly fustian
drawings, the so-called strip would collapse of tedium. It almost does as it
is. It’s
the 70th anniversary of the debut of Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the movie industry’s first
feature-length animated film, and the studio’s latest product, “Enchanted,”
seems to Alex Remington at news.yahoo.com to celebrate both the technical
achievement for which Disney is renowned and the studio’s return to hand-drawn
animation. “Disney’s exit from the field of full-length hand-drawn animated
movies betrayed a fundamental doubt about the company’s ability to make the
movies that defined it: gorgeously rendered, impeccably styled musicals for the
whole family, unabashedly saccharine and, for the modern age, almost
unthinkably unironic. Finally, with ‘Enchanted,’ Disney seems to have regained
their faith in and much of their skill at what they do best.” The new movie,
with both animated and live-action sequences, is “self-referential to previous
Disney movies,” making it “a fundamental defense of Disney movies, and the best
Disney movie in almost two decades.” ... Yadu, a Beijing-based maker of home
appliances and the world’s second largest maker of indoor air quality products,
has been authorized by Disney to
make some of its home appliances in the shape of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the
Pooh; the co-branding partnership will help Yadu sell its products and will
increase awareness in China of Disney characters that are nearly ubiquitous
everywhere else.
At
marvel.com/digitalcomics, Marvel “has taken thousands of classic issues of its
comics along with selected current titles and re-engineered them panel-by-panel
to make them into something akin to a sleek Internet slide show,” writes Geoff
Boucher at the Los Angeles Times. Boucher calls the venture “bold” but believes it is prompted “as much by
anxiety as ambition.” The cause of the anxiety? Despite the success of movies
and video-games built on superhero comics, “the printed comic book is fading
from the cultural consciousness of youngsters. Next year,” Boucher continues,
“the superhero comic book will celebrate its 70th year as a uniquely
American contribution to pop culture, but it’s now a foreign object to most
kids. The glut of slick magazines and the quirky business history of comics distribution
has made it hard for kids to stumble on a comic book if they aren’t looking for
one.” The only place you can be certain of finding a comic book for sale is in
a comic book store; a kid can no longer “happen” upon the four-color wonders at
the corner store. There aren’t any corner stores. Writer Jeff Loeb recognizes the predicament but keeps the faith: “Comics
are like chocolate chip cookies. If they’re not around, kids don’t know they
want them, but once they are exposed to them, they want them.” Boucher quotes
Dan Buckley, president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment: “We don’t have a
natural lifestyle intersection point for kids anymore.” But he hopes to find
one online. The Marvel website opened with 2,500 issues “and 20 more are added
each week.” You can sample 250 of them without charge; everything is available
for $9.95/month or, if you sign up for a year, the charge drops to $4.95/month.
Could be my machine, but the lettering in the speech balloons is too small to
read without zooming in on every page; the color is brilliant, but the lines
are too pixelated and seem raggedy. Could be my machine, as I said—or my own
ineptitude at digital exploits.
Both
Marvel and DC have sent notice to the BitTorrent site Z-Cult FM threatening
legal action of the site doesn’t “cease and desist” facilitating bit torrent
downloads of scans of Marvel and DC comic books. Z-Cult initially complied,
said icv2.com, but later came back, saying: “We are based outside of the U.S.
and are not therefore subject to U.S. legislation that was present on the legal
documents sent to us.” This legal skirmishing takes place just as both
publishers are increasing their own presence on the Web. I have no idea what
bit torrent downloads are (or what bit torrents are either), but I have a basic
grasp of what the Web is.
The
November-December 2007 issue of True West magazine offers several nuggets of comics treasure. Paul Hutton’s article,
“True Comics,” is a somewhat perfunctory albeit seemingly encyclopedic (if not
comprehensive) survey of Western comics. “Perfunctory” because it doesn’t give
the publication dates of most of the titles it lists and because his judgement
is debatable. He thinks Gilberton’s Classics Illustrated was “superbly done.”
And he refers to underground comix as “head comics,” which they were once
called, comix being sold in “head shops.” He doesn’t give the names of many of
the minions who labored illustrating in the Western vineyards, but he extols,
and rightly, the work of the late Jack
Jackson (Jaxon), who he calls “the finest American graphic historian.” He
also believes that some of the publications of Daim Press in Milano, Italy, are
“the highwater mark in graphic histories of the American West.” Jaxon and Daim
are in Hutton’s concluding section, “Best Western History Titles,” which
follows his over-all survey; in the latter, he recognizes that almost none of
the Western funnybooks were historically accurate—not even Fawcett’s Billy the Kid, who was, you’ll recall, a
goat, a billy goat. I assume, therefore, that the “Best” titles were ones that
were historically accurate, although I think sometimes that Hutton’s criteria
for these includes the quality of the artwork; seems to for Daim, for example.
Hutton’s piece is followed by an agonizingly brief article by Mark Boardman,
“Back to the Future,” about a publication called Texas History Movies. But it wasn’t about movies at all: it was
about Texas History, and the history was told in the manner of Ed Wheelan’s
famed Minute Movies—that is, in comic
strip form. There are two or three illustrations, too tiny to discern much but
large enough to justify an opinion that the rendering was entirely competent in
a style evocative of a slightly bolder Gene Ahern manner. The first book with
this title was a reprint of comic strips initially published in the Dallas Morning News, beginning in 1926.
They were, Boardman tells us, “pretty racist.” Jaxon undertook to revise the
series, eliminating the racism, and The
New Texas History Movies came out under the auspices of the Texas
Historical Association earlier this year, Jaxon’s last hurrah. This issue of True West also includes a fond
recollection of the contributions of the late California ’tooner Phil Frank, who started doing a cartoon
series, “Frank History,” for the humor page of the magazine, Last Stand. The editors publish here
their favorite Franks and some of the drawings with which Frank decorated his
correspondence to them; they also decided that “Frank History” so dignified
(or, to use their word, “anchored”) the Last
Stand page that they can’t continue it without Frank. There’s a great photo
of Frank, too, with a crow perched on his finger. In place of the Last Stand this time is a piece by Jimmy Palmiotti, co-writer of Jonah Hex, entitled “What History Has
Taught Me.” The comic book scribe “often finds inspiration for his Jonah Hex
tales in the pages of this magazine,” we’re told. And we learn that Jonah Hex
may be on the way to the silver screen. In sum, a whole lot of cartooning
information in a Western magazine.
The Houston Post, which, according to E&P, “had perhaps the largest daily
comics section of any U.S. print newspaper,” has reduced that section by a page
“to save money on newsprint costs and syndication fees.” The dropped comics are Arctic Circle, Buckles, Cathy, Cleats,
Crock, Dennis the Menace, Diesel Sweeties, The Dinette Set, Drabble, Gasoline
Alley (sob), Heathcliff, Judge Parker, The Lockhorns, Marmaduke, Mary Worth, Mr
Boffo, My Cage, Real Life Adventures, Rubes, Shoe, Spot the Frog, Sylvia and The Wizard of Id. Some of these
strips did poorly in reader surveys, some of the older ones are no longer being
done by their original creators, and some are too new to have developed a
following. ... And the Washington Post “has become the latest newspaper to shrink its comics offerings”—this time,
reports E&P, by condensing its
two Sunday sections into one, a transformation that is accomplished by reducing
the size of the strips. ... Alley Oop is
celebrating the centennial of Oklahoma’s becoming a state by sending the
eponymous protagonist back in time to 1907 where he meets Oklahoman Will Rogers
and the two face a crisis that could prevent statehood. The strip is drawn by Jack Bender and written by his wife,
Carole, who is a native Oklahoman; they both reside today in Tulsa. ... Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha comic strip just passed its fifth anniversary; it
appears, saith E&P, in 60
newspapers. Alcaraz, with a master’s degree in architecture from the U. of
California, Berkeley, has been producing editorial cartoons for the LA Weekly since 1992 and recently
received his fourth Southern California Journalism Award for Best Cartoon in
Weekly Papers. He also received the Los Angeles Hispanic Public Relations
Association’s Premio Award for Excellence in Communications, and the Center for
the Study of Political Graphics “Art as a Hammer” Award, according to a press
release from his syndicate, Universal Press.
A
first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the inaugural novel in her celebrated series, sold at auction in England for a
record-breaking $40,350, due, chiefly, to scarcity: because of the immense
popularity of the first book, first editions of subsequent titles in the series
were published in vast quantities, effectively destroying the value of each of
those first editions. ... The original art for the cover of Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural No. 1 sold for $101,575 said
scoop.diamondgalleries.com. This is the first time that “a Crumb original or
any underground original by any artist, sold for $100,000.” ... In Manga: The Complete Guide, Jason Thompson, editor for many U.S.
editions of manga, “rates and reviews over a thousand manga series and
demystifies the wide world of Japanese comics,” according to Deb Aoki at
manga.about.com. ... The December issue of Shonen
Jump magazine will begin releasing “the manga voted number one of all time
in Japan, said Kai-Ming Cha and Heidi MacDonald at PW Comics Week. Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue is about “a comically arrogant high school student who
goes out for the basketball team to impress a girl.”
With Wonder Woman No. 14, Gail Simone, formerly a professional
hairdresser, will take over as full-time scripter of the “third-ranked” hero at
DC. According to George Gene Gustines at the New York Times, Simone’s writing career began with “Women in
Refrigerators”—“an online chronicle of the suffering experienced by female
comic book characters” at unheardtaunts.com, which lead to a barely-paid humor
column at comicbookresources.com, and then a writing gig at Bongo Comics,
followed by Killer Princesses for Oni
Press and, soon thereafter, Marvel’s Deadpool and DC’s Birds of Prey, which, being
an all-female ensemble, led to Wonder
Woman. Simone thinks she’s a good fit for the character because she grew up
in a family “where women’s rights were very important, and the guys didn’t tend
to stick around too long. Wonder Woman was an amazing role model.” Wonder Woman
hasn’t enjoyed anything like a consistently good run for years, it seems to me.
She’s DC’s most obvious candidate for a sexy superheroine, but she seemed
severely hampered by her early history in a star-spangled foundation garment:
girdles in those distant days were worn as much to inhibit the seductive
caresses of romantic men as to shape the body. Nothing sexy about that. But
when John Byrne redesigned her
costume some years ago, Wonder Woman acquired more than a soupcon of runway
appeal. Still, she was scarcely Anna Nicole Smith. When the current team of
artists, Terry and Rachel Dodson,
took up the title, matters improved again. I’m not convinced, though, that
Simone’s first story arc, which, Gustines tells us, “involves a previously
unmentioned attempt on Wonder Woman’s life on the day of her birth,” will
afford the Dodsons much opportunity to display the sort of pictures they’ve
become known for. Babies are cute, not sexy. But I’m probably misunderstanding
the publisher’s intent: feminism not sex appeal seems to be the object of their
present preoccupation.
A
new graphic novel lately released in India tears the veil of altruism from the
Mess o’Patomia enterprise: Iraq:
Operation Corporate Takeover, written by Sean Michael Wilson and drawn by Lee O’Conner, maintains that Western business interests are taking
advantage of Iraq’s weakened state to secure long term control of the country’s
oil reserves, the third-largest in the world. Looks eerily as if the plot could
have been ripped from the day’s headlines if the news media were at all
disposed to reporting the news instead of the dubious antics of too many
presidential candidates. Private security companies, whose forces number about
48,000 of the 160,000 contractors in Iraq, are singled out in the book for
pocketing huge profits while remaining complete unaccountable for human rights
abuses and the deaths of unarmed civilians. Rick Veitch’s Army@Love series from DC/Vertigo takes essentially the same view of the war as corporate
enterprise. In No. 7, a female character who is in bed (literally) with a
Cabinet member, a benefit he realizes as a result of his supplying her with
retail goods to sell on the blackmarket in Afbaghistan, says: “I hope the
military doesn’t do anything drastic—like winning the war.” To which the old
fart responds: “With corporate sponsorship skyrocketing, there’s little fear of
that.” In this remarkable satire, which takes place “a few years in the
future,” the war in this far-off country is conducted entirely as a
profit-making endeavor by a military-industrial complex (i.e., the government).
Only a couple of the cast could qualify as likable, and Colonel Healey isn’t
one of them. It is he who has re-invented the war thereby assuring a continuous
flow of new recruits into the ranks of the army. In Healey’s recruiting plan,
the war is advertised as an opportunity for guilt-free sex and heart-pounding
danger on the battlefield with the option of shooting bad guys—just the sort of
thing that motivates adolescent America to sign up for the harrowing fun of it
all. To catch up, try www.armyatlove.com
In
Cleveland at the Plain Dealer, some
plain talk from columnist Ted Diadium, who, noting that some readers complained
about the grimly serious storyline in Funky Winkerbean as Lisa Moore dies of cancer—“readers
objected to such a strong dose of reality being inflicted on them in a part of
the paper that is usually reserved for laughs”—countered with this advice: “I
usually recommend that people who object to a particular strip simply exercise
their right as a reader and ignore it, but one caller not long ago said that he
couldn’t do that because we put Funky right in between two of his favorite strips. No problem, I told him: we have
just discovered yet another use for duct tape.” ... Also from the Plain Dealer, a report about a comic
book store dealer who was astounded when a perfect stranger walked into his
store offering to sell him a near-mint
copy of Detective Comics No. 27,
in which Batman debuts, that he had found while cleaning out an attic. This
issue of this title is regarded by most collectors as the second most-valuable
comic book; the first is Action Comics No. 1, in which Superman first appears. ... Chris Browne, who produces his father’s legacy, Hagar the Horrible, has moved from
Sarasota, Florida, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, because of a parade, said Leslie
Rupiper at ksfy.com. Browne and his wife Carroll visited the city a while back
when he fulfilled an invitation to speak at Augustana College, and while in the
vicinity, they experienced the Vikings Day parade. Said Chris: “Carroll turned
to me with her Viking horns on and said, ‘I love this. I want to move here.’”
And so they did.
The 99, the world’s first comic book of
Muslim superheroes, has been a big hit in the Middle East, Mariam Mahmood tells
us at voanews.com, and the title has now debuted in the U.S. “The title refers
to the 99 attributes of God, which Muslims believe—when existent in one
being—deify that being, and only Allah possesses all 99 attributes.” Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of the new
title, says the attributes include generosity, strength, wisdom, mercy,
foresight and “dozens of others that are not used today to describe Islam in
the media.” In the series, each of the heroes embodies one of the 99
attributes, and each of them must work with two others as a team to solve a
problem. Each character originates from a different country, and there is an
equal number of male and female characters, with nine of the latter wearing
traditional headscarves in nine different ways, according to their cultures.
Al-Mutawa adds: “The 99 series is not
a religious book; it is as religious as Spider-Man, so it’s based on values.
When Uncle Ben teaches Spider-Man—or Peter Parker—that with great power comes
great responsibility, is that a Christian message? Is it Jewish? Is it
Buddhist? Is it Muslim? It’s human. It’s global.”
Scott Adams, who made his first fortune
by ridiculing bosses, has become a boss, reports Susan Young at
contracostatimes.com. It’s the latest change in a series of recent alterations
in his once-cubicle-confined life. In July 2006, he married for the first time
and became a “bonus dad” to his wife’s two children. For the last couple years,
he’s been struggling with a debilitating disease, spasmodic dysphonia, “a vocal
disorder that can also affect other parts of the body with tremors.” He can
talk on the phone and to an audience, but in one-on-one conversation, he chokes
on his words. His hand shakes when he puts pen to paper but doesn’t if he uses
a stylus and draws on his computer. Ten years ago, he partnered with a waitress
at his favorite beanery to open a hip retro restaurant named after his partner,
Stacey’s. Then they opened another restaurant, and Stacey was overwhelmed
running two. So Adams stepped in to run one of them. Not so far-fetched, it
turns out: Adams won the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award while in high school.
Turns out, too, that as a boss, Adams is the “anti-pointy-haired boss”: at
least one employee says he’s the best boss he ever had. Adams spends much of
the day at the restaurant, it seems; he produces Dilbert and writes his blog in the mornings, starting, usually, at
6 a.m. But he’ll be spending less time on the blog, according to Editor & Publisher. Adams started
the blog for four reasons: to collect advertising dollars, to compile the best
posts for a book, to expand the audience for Dilbert, and to express himself verbally. But blog readers have
figured out how to bypass the ads to get to the content, he said: “So there’s
no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn. It
topped out at ‘trivial’ even while the audience grew to substantial.” None of
the other three reasons worked out quite the way he wanted either—although, if
pressed, he might admit that he got a book out of it and that writing a blog
was artistically satisfying. He’ll continue to blog, he said, but not as often,
which was daily.
The
animated version of Marjane Satrapi’s two-part
so-called autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, which she co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, who had just a little bit
more experience in animation that her nada,
took a Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Planned for a December
25 opening, the film, claims Rachel Abramowitz at the Los Angeles Times, “is a delightful—yet poignant—child’s-eye view
on the winnowing of personal freedoms under the harsh regime of the ayatollahs
[in Iran after the revolution in 1979]. The film evokes young Satrapi’s quest
for contraband punk rock, the perennial irritation of keeping one’s headscarf
correct, and how to conduct romance in a country where unmarried men and women
should not be seen in public together.” In French with Catherine Deneuve doing
some of the voicing, the film, Satrapi said, “is based on real life, but from
the second you make a script, it becomes fictional,” and so she and Paronnaud,
aiming “to make the movie universal,” changed some of the story so it would
come alive. “I ended up looking at the main character as the main character,”
she said, “not myself.” She had received numerous offers to turn her story into
a live-action movie, but she refused them all. “Either I had to do it myself,
or it shouldn’t be done at all.” When asked by Euan Kerr at Michigan Public
Radio what she wants to do next, Satrapi said she wants to rest, play some
ping-pong, write more comics, make more films, paint again—and “become the
world champion of smokers.” Her addiction to cigarettes is fast becoming as
legendary as Art Spiegelman’s.
MODERATE ARAB
PAPERS SHOWCASE ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOONS AHEAD OF THE SUMMIT
Up-dated on
November 28 from the previous day’s story by Haviv Rettig, here, verbatim, from
jpost.com:
While Arab leaders trekked to Annapolis for the
summit, Arab newspapers, many of them government-funded, have been running
cartoons depicting Israel as violent and untrustworthy, according to a survey of
Arab media conducted by the Anti-Defamation League. The cartoons often use
anti-Semitic themes, such as depictions of ugly, greedy Jews in religious garb,
to convey their messages. While some of the cartoons come from places with
declared belligerent policies toward Israel, such as Syria and the Hamas-run
Gaza Strip, others come from what the American government has called
"moderate" states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,
Oman and Qatar, and even government-funded newspapers in Jordan and Egypt.
One
cartoon, published in late October in Egypt's government-funded
mass-circulation daily Al-Ahram,
shows an Israeli hand extended in peace, but with missiles in place of fingers
and on the olive branch it holds. A November 8 cartoon from Jordan's Ad-Dustur shows a Jew, identified by a
skullcap and a Star of David on his briefcase, sporting an evil grin and
wearing a suit covered with images of fighter jets and tanks. An example of
classical anti-Semitic depictions came from Oman's Al-Watanpaper, which published a November 16 cartoon showing a
religiously-attired Jew standing behind a gagged and seated Uncle Sam and
speaking in his stead to a crowd of Arab listeners. Qatar's Ash-Sharq newspaper ran a late-October
cartoon depicting Ehud Olmert as a snake wrapping himself around the Islamic
shrine of the Dome of the Rock, while the country's Ar-Raya newspaper depicted Olmert as a fox holding an olive branch,
suggesting he had just eaten the dove of peace.
Fascinating Footnote. Much of the news retailed
in this 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 For delving into the history of our beloved
medium, you can’t go wrong by visiting Allan Holtz’s http://www.strippersguide.blogspot.com, where Allan regularly posts rare findings from his forays into the vast reaches
of newspaper microfilm files hither and yon.
Persiflage
and Badinage
“The e-mail of the species is deadlier than the
mail.” —Stephen Fry
“Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.”
—Lester B. Pearson
“The
poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always
objected to being governed at all.” —G.K. Chesterton
“Trying
to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying
to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” —Ben Hecht
“Never
give a party if you will be the most interesting person there.” —Mickey Friedman,
novelist
More and More
about Manga.
The market for print manga in Japan
is shrinking. Or, at least, changing drastically. According to USA Today (October 19), sales of manga
magazines fell 4 % last year, the latest year in a steadily dropping trend from
a peak in 1995 of 1.34 billion copies to only 745 million last year. “Manga’s
decline may be due primarily to the habits of young Japanese, who, analysts
say, are: obsessed with cellphones, the Internet and video phones, all of which
provide manga-style entertainment; tired of reading in the traditional way;
bored with plots and characters, which, in manga, have become increasingly
repetitive; disappearing—the traditional pool of manga readers is smaller today
as birthrates in Japan shrivel.” As the Japanese market shrinks, so, I would
suppose, will the output to meet a decreasing demand. And with that, the source
of manga for American markets will, likewise, diminish, compounding a dilemma
already lurking on the horizon: American publishers of manga have already
started muttering about exhausting the supply—hence, Korean comics, the latest
source of manga books in chain bookstores. Manga publishers in the U.S. have
also started to explore yet another vein of material in Japan—shonen-ai/yaoi. Sonen-ai means “boy’s love,” and in this country, it usually refers
to manga that focus mostly on emotions and relationships rather than sex; yaoi, on the other hand, focus on sex
between men.
The
last three or four issues of Previews,
Diamond Distribution’s monthly catalog of freshly minted comics and graphic
novels and related products, have seen the arrival of Digital Manga Publishing,
which has taken at least six full pages to advertise its current crop of comics
about the romantic adventures of gay men—young, attractive (in that svelte
pointy-chinned effeminate manner of manga) homosexuals. In the November issue,
for example, we have Body Language, “Less Talk ... More Sex,” which offers this synopsis: “Kanae is a university
student whose ‘cold beauty’ has led people to spread nasty rumors about his
promiscuity. In truth, Kanae is a virgin. He is also secretly in love with the
Don Juan of the campus, Yuuichi. Poor Kanae would do anything to be with
Yuuichi, even if it meant a merely sexual relationship with no feelings
involved. But when the opportunity arises, can he settle for anything less than
love?” Or this about I’ll Be Your Slave: “Moriya is in charge of finding a model. For a new product commercial for a big
jewelry brand; but, nobody matches the ideal of perfection he has in mind—that
is, until he meets Itsuki Ouno. Itsuki is not just perfection incarnate, he’s
like royalty, and incredibly spoiled. And he may well be the one person destiny
put in Moriya’s way to fulfill his need to adore and serve.” With teasers like
that, I had to find out just how these tales are accomplished; my review of one
of them, Freefall Romance, appears in Graficity below. I’m a little
surprised, though, to find this genre so openly touted in Previews, given my understanding of Diamond’s owner’s reputation
for wobbling in the somewhat conservative not to say righteous direction. I
suppose Steve Geppi has decided, like any good capitalist, to let the market
place work its will. By the way but not at all incidentally, the Williams Institute
at the UCLA School of Law reports that the number of same-sex couples in the
U.S. has been steadily rising—from 145,130 in 1990 to 594,391 in 2000 to
779,867 last year. This doesn’t mean the number of gays is increasing: it
means, rather, that general acceptance of homosexuals has increased enough over
the years to permit the public acknowledgment of same-sex unions and to keep
records about them. Still, for the comic book business, flaunting homosexuality
is risky: American parents are notorious for their protectiveness of their
children, and since graphic novels are seen as “long form” comic books and
comic books are seen as children’s junk literature, anyone distributing yaoi is almost certain to be accused of
corrupting the Young, which invariably precipitates a firestorm of alarm. We’ve
seen precisely this kind of hysteria in action in Rome, Georgia, where Gordon
Lee was infamously arrested and charged with distributing to children “obscene
material” that was “harmful to minors.”
The
“obscene material” in this case was a comic book in which the painter Pablo
Picasso is portrayed working in the nude in his studio, historically and
biographically an accurate depiction of the painter’s working habit. When Lee’s
case finally came to trial early in November, the judge was forced to declare a
mistrial because the prosecutor, in his opening remarks, referred to Lee’s
previous run-in with the law on a similar charge. While I reported this last
time, Opus 214, I neglected to mention that the charge in the previous
instance stemmed from Lee’s having sold an adult (“pornographic”) comic book to
an adult, a circumstance that the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune, found “hilarious” because another store nearby,
Entice, sold adult material to adults without being harassed in any way. But
then, it wasn’t in the comic book business, and, as everyone will tell you,
comic books are for children. Lee was apparently convicted but I can’t tell
from my source (the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) whether the
conviction stuck or not. The News-Tribune notes that “police seized hundreds of allegedly ‘obscene’ comic books [in this
earlier encounter] but had to give them all back, plus the city and district
attorney’s office had to pay a $18,000 judgment after the store owner sued them
and won.” And Lee himself is quoted as saying he “beat” the rap that time. The
current case, however, stems from a Hallowe’en event during which Lee’s store
gave out 2,200 comic books as “treats” to children. Apparently, the News-Tribune says in its editorial
reviewing the case, “only one” comic book of questionable content, the one with
the Picasso story, “was mistakenly handed to a child by an employee. There
would seem little evidence of a massive conspiracy to degrade public morality
or pervert children in that. Nor was the comic in question actually ‘porn’ of
any kind but appears to fall under the legal definition of ‘art.’ Indeed,” the
editorial continues, “the setting in which all this is taking place turns it
into a comic farce. A couple blocks from where this courtroom ‘drama’ goes on
endlessly, and right in front of City Hall in full public view, stands a statue
of a fully anatomically endowed [naked] Romulus and Remus [the mythological
founders of Rome, Italy] being suckled by the famed Capitoline wolf. They don’t
show a thing that the Picasso picture didn’t also show. Photos of that statue
adorn untold amounts of official brochures, are found on the city websites and
so forth. Indeed, along with the Clock Tower, those undressed little male
humans are considered to be the ‘symbol’ of Rome. So, a question: If a child
sees that statue, or such a brochure, or bumps into it on a website, should all
local officials be prosecuted for distributing harmful materials to minors? ...
The defense rests ... or would, if it weren’t doubled over in the aisles,
laughing.” (A link to the entire editorial can be found at www.cbldf.com or the whole thing at http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/680/public/news856929.html ; Rome’s website is www.romega.us but I didn’t see Romulus or
Remus there.) None of Fijiyama’s pictures in Freefall Romance show his heroes full-frontal naked, so presumably
the book could be sold in even Rome, Georgia without sensation. But one never
knows these days when Righteous ire will be aroused—or by what.
GRAFICITY
Hyouta Fujiyama’s Freefall Romance is yaoi, a genre of manga about romance between young men. In this tale, Youichi Nanase is concerned about his younger brother, who is attending an all boys school that is rumored to have a 90% gay student population. Youichi finds a sympathetic listener in a co-worker, Renji Tsutsumi, to whom he confides his worry about his brother. Renji, unbeknownst to Youich— and to himself— is gay and, to complicate matters, is attracted to Youichi: “He has sex appeal, and he’s pretty good-looking,” Renji muses, “—if only he was a girl, I would have done her by now.” Meanwhile, Youichi discovers his brother, far from being the innocent prey at school, is the predator, and then, during one of the evenings he spends drinking and talking with Renji, Renji reaches out and touches him on the cheek. “Why did I do that?” he wonders later: “Well, that’s kinda obvious ... I just got this sudden urge to touch him.” Once he’s started thinking this way, the subject of the conversations between the two changes: instead of talking about Youichi’s brother, they talk about their own at first ambiguous situation, why they are attracted to each other and what they should do about it. The talk is pretty soon accompanied by exploratory groping: after 30 of the novel’s 200-plus pages, they’re kissing. But the talk continues, nearly interminably in the usual manga manner—pages devoted to the utterance of a few syllables, each illuminated by slightly varying facial expressions—as the two struggle to decide whether they are gay and if so what to do about it.
Between conversations, they agree to explore a physical relationship, little by
little—first touching, then kissing, then embracing, then mutual masturbation,
then .... Finally, by the end of the book, they’re having anal sex. “This is
it!” “Thrust” exclaims a caption. “Are you okay?” “Yeah”—followed by lots of
moaning and fairly explicit drawings: no genitalia but body language and poses
leave nothing to the imagination. Despite the explicitness, Fujiyama’s pictures
are models of discretion: erotic without being pornographic, they adequately
convey the emotional heat of the increasingly physical relationship. Deploying
a slender yet flexing line, Fujiyama’s clarity is simple yet realistic. The
faces of the characters, however, are templates of handsome youth: all the boys
look alike except for hair color. And they are monotonously serious: only once
or twice in the book does anyone smile. Sex in these pages is not, apparently,
a joyful activity. Fujiyama displays great restraint in advancing the story:
nothing is presented in any sensational way; events unfold in a quite natural,
human and humane manner; and everything that happens is accompanied by reams of
quiet introspection and compassion. Given the step-by-step style of manga—its
idiosyncratic tendency to prolong an activity by depicting every single motion
much in the manner of “in-betweening” key moves in animation—and the
exploratory nature of the encounter between these two youths, Freefall Romance could be seen as a gay
sex primer. It isn’t, of course, but if it falls into the wrong—that is
Right—hands, it would lend graphic support to a contentious and sensational
scandal. All the more reason for my surprise that Steve Geppi’s Diamond
Distribution Company has undertaken to market DMP’s yaoi books.
LET THE
READERS CHOOSE
Thad Ogburn reports the varying responses of comics
readers at the News & Observer where they are about to launch a formal Readership Poll (as if they need the
formality to get the funnies fans to speak up); verbatim:
Candorville, Darrin Bell's edgy, urban comic strip, is "stinking
garbage," according to one reader who wrote us during the strip's trial
run earlier this year. But another reader e-mailed that Candorville is "a thinking man's strip with something to say
in a funny way." Meanwhile, Mallard
Fillmore, Bruce Tinsley's take-no-prisoners strip, was called "the best guest comic" we tried.
It also was termed "simplistic opinion ... with no wit or fun
anywhere."
Think
it's only the political comics that draw such wildly divergent opinions? Oh,
no. The little girl known as Agnes in Tony Cochran's cartoon was "one
funny young lady" to some readers, "stupid" to others. Tony Carillo's F-Minus strip? "Great! ... love the irony!" versus
"The sorriest excuse for a cartoon I've ever seen."
Suffice
it to say, we're never going to get full agreement on any comic strip. Humor is
just too subjective.
RCH: Wouldn’t you know? Opinions range from one end
of the spectrum to the other. No wonder it’s difficult for feature editors to
pick strips for their comics section.
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Four-color
Frolics
Almost all of the first issues I picked up this time
have protagonists who are probably dead. How zombies, not to mention vampires,
became culture heroes is something of a puzzle. Until you think about it. They
are comic book heroes for about the same reason that so many newspaper comic
strip protagonists are animals: these creations, the dead and the four-legged,
do not belong to any interest groups that can protest against their
representation in the comics. So the creators of these series can have their
characters do or say whatever they want without fear that some rabid protest
group will materialize to object.
In Graveslinger No. 1, John Cboins does his best to obscure Shannon Eric Denton and Jeff
Mariotte’s limping storyline with pictures that are so idiosyncratically
rendered that we can’t tell from one panel to the next which character is “on.”
The Graveslinger, named Frank Timmons I think, is made recognizable chiefly
through his clothing and a gigantic drooping moustache that vaguely resembles a
kielbasa sausage. But he’s about the only character who is recognizable enough
to separate him from the rest of the bunch. He has apprehended two bad guys by
blowing them to bits on the opening three pages of this issue, and then he runs
into Will Saylor, a rancher, who, when he learns that Timmons is tracking some
escapees from Gila Flats Territorial Prison and which direction the fugitives
are going, becomes alarmed: they’re apparently headed to his ranch where his
wife and daughters abide, helplessly. He and Timmons race to the rescue,
arriving in time to convince the bad guys to leave and, en route, to release
the women. Or so the wiley Bart Bevard says, fully intent on something else
altogether. Bart and his men, it seems, are zombies of one breed or another,
and their objective with the women is not sexual but gustatorial. They want to
eat not rape them. Timmons manages to shoot enough of them to scare the rest
off momentarily, and with that, the issue concludes. The action in at Billy Dogma returns in Brawl No. 1, and Dean Haspiel’s bold two-fisted lines once again capture the brute power of his hero, who, in this outing, pounds his way out of one extremity into another, finally facing a giant monster, and that’s where Haspiel leaves us. Haspiel is pretty chintzy with dialogue, so his story barges along more-or-less silently with Billy blurting nearly mindless comments like “Give a crippled crab a crutch” when the monster grabs him and then “Shit. Fuck. Piss. Karate.” Not that this tactic isn’t amusing in its strange and cryptic way; it is. It all seems of-a-piece with the visuals, power action that lurches from one odd angle to the next, implying more than it shows. The second part of the book is devoted to “Panorama featuring Augustus,” a young man who spends most of his pages deteriorating before us, body parts festooning and falling off for no apparent reason. Lots of nauseating visuals as our hero coughs up and vomits his guts literally and not much talk until Augustus, in need of alimentary relief, takes a crap in a young woman’s apartment and then, having messed in his pants, begs some underwear from her. Michel Fiffe is doing the damage here, deploying a spidery line everywhere we look; and I have no idea where he’s going with it. Both stories are continued in the next issue, which will be the second of three, three too many for me.
The Deadlander No. 1 is distinguished by
the artwork of Kevin Ferrara, who
writes as well as draws the book. He would appear to have been smitten at an
early age with the work of Graham Engels at EC and Bernie Wrightson everywhere
else, and he carries on in that fashion with great panache. The page layouts
all take place within an ornate border, which takes enough space that the
pictures in the panels are often exquisitely tiny. The
eponymous protagonist of Simon Dark No.
1 is a shadowy figure with a sewn-on face, perhaps another of the zombies who
seem, with increasing frequency, to populate the funnybooks these days, whose
job, he tells us, is to “protect my neighborhood.” In this issue, he performs
his duty by interrupting a ritual murder in a ruined church, garroting the
would-be killer and then, apparently, killing the destined victim. Or maybe the
victim was already dead before Simon saved him. We might be in the midst of a
dream. Or a trance. Later, at the crime scene, we meet Beth Granger, the
medical examiner, and the investigating officer, who is trying, The
first two issues of DC’s Green Arrow and
Black Canary are in, and the story is gripping enough to bring me back for
more. I missed the death of Green Arrow on his wedding (to Black Canary) night,
but the episode is rehearsed here: he apparently drew a dagger and seemed about
to kill his bride, so she grabbed a nearby arrow and stabbed him in the neck,
killing him. Subsequently, in issue No. 1 of this title, she behaves in a
extreme manner while apprehending the bad guys, almost beating one of them to
death. When Connor Hawke, GA’s son, and Green Lantern question her about it,
she claims she’s upset because she knows the man she killed on their wedding
night was not Oliver Queen, the Green Lantern. Batman believes her, and
later, he and Dr. Mid-nite dissect the exhumed remains and confirm their
hypothesis: the dead guy is not GA. In No. 2, we find that the real Green
Lantern has been kidnaped by the Amazonian tribe on the Isle of Themyscira
THE FROTH
ESTATE
The Alleged
News Institution Upon Which Comic Strips Depend
Maybe print journalism is not so bad off as we so
often hear it is. “Everyone is talking about the ‘death of print,’ and the
funny thing is you see more newspapers than before,” said Richard Karpel,
executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, quoted in Editor & Publisher (August 2007,
belatedly reported herein). The newspapers Karpel refers to are those free
daily tabloids being produced by mainstream dailies in deliberate imitation of
the alternative weeklies that, for the last 40 years, have been spreading
across the urban landscape, catering to every conceivable niche interest: here’s
an apartment vacancy booklet, an arts and entertainment guide, The Onion for sarcastic laughs, and
other specialty publications not to mention overt news coverage in what we
might call the “traditional” alternate weekly where edgy reporting and writing
eventually supplanted “underground” political screeds—all lined up in rows of
those distribution rack-boxes on street corners. Desperate to attract the young
reader, big metropolitan newspapers began, a few years ago, to ape the alties
that they saw young readers gobbling up.
The
business plan, sofar as there is one, is rank simplicity: it’s advertising
revenue that makes newspapers financially viable. The newsstand price of a
newspaper generates so comparatively little of the paper’s income that it pays
for little more than the ink on the presses, as one wag put it. Newsstand
sales—and home delivery—are important only because circulation tells
advertisers how many people are likely to read their ads. Recognition of this
cold hard fact in print journalism yielded the formulation that infuses
alternative weeklies: if you give away the paper, circulation will increase,
and the increase will enable the paper to charge more for advertising.
Metropolitan daily newspapers have gone a step further: instead of producing
free weekly papers, they crank them out every day. Metro freebies tend to aim
for younger audiences than alties, which, increasingly, find their readership
growing older. In Chicago, the Chicago
Tribune launched Redeye, a
youth-skewed quick-read daily, in 2002, and distribution has now reached
150,000 with a free home-delivery weekend edition added last spring. People
read it on the L (the “elevated” commuter train system in the Windy City) and
toss it in the trash can when they disembark at their destination. But Redeye is designed for quick
consumption—short articles and lots of pictures—and it is reaching young
readers, giving the city’s older youth-oriented weekly, Chicago Reader, respectable competition. The altie-weekly Washington City Paper recently
determined that its average reader spends 79 minutes with the paper vs. 20
minutes for the average metro freebie. In big cities like Chicago, alties have
been successful enough that they worry as much about the loss of readership to
the Internet as the mainstream papers do. Meanwhile, the free offspring of the
metro dailies cut into altie circulation. In mid-size cities, however,
alternative papers still do well. According to E&P, “overall altie-paper revenue in 2006 was up 3.6% over
2005— a time when, according to the Newspaper Association of America, overall
daily newspaper revenue was down 0.3%.” Among the metro dailies, the hope is
that their free quick-read tabloids will nurture future readers for the regular
daily; as freebie readers establish families and buy homes, they’ll want
something more—maybe the Saturday and/or Sunday paid daily newspaper. Again,
the point is: there are more newspapers now than 30 years ago; even though the
big metros claim to be ‘in trouble’ financially, that trouble is with
stockholders, not banks.
Meanwhile,
as the altie-audience grows older, the papers are being bought up by chains. Village Voice consolidated with New Times; Creative Loaf just bought The Chicago Reader. As the alties get
“chained,” will they be less spunky? Will the piss and vinegar drain out of
their columns? Consolidation achieves economies of scale and opens the door to
national advertising, all of which undercuts the once-essential local nature of
the enterprise. Once more, the point is that money is still being made in the
newspaper business, in all its dimensions, reports of the death of print
journalism to the contrary notwithstanding.
Now
if only all those alties and metro free tabloids would start publishing comic
strips....
A FEW WORDS
FOR BOOK LOVERS
“Outside
of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
—Groucho Marx
“The
biggest seller is a cookbooks and the second is diet books—how not to eat what
you’ve just learned how to cook.” —Andy Rooney
“Never
judge a book by its movie.” —J.W. Eagan
“If
you read a lot of books, you are considered well-read. But if you watch a lot
of tv, you’re not considered well viewed.” —Lili Tomlin
COMIC STRIP
WATCH
I wondered when it would happen: inspired by the
success of selling tap water in plastic bottles for several times the price of
an equivalent amount of gasoline, Garry
Trudeau introduced us in Doonesbury for December 2 to entrepreneur Chad Severnson, who has launched a new product
into the eagerly mindless consumer market—Alpin-Daz, air bottled in
Switzerland. And we richly deserve the ridicule. ... Berkeley Breathed may have strained the license he is allowed as a
satirist when, on December 2 in Opus, he started the rumor that Garfield is gay. The ostensible targets of this
thrust are those who salivate with morbid interest over every rumor and report
of alleged homosexuality in celebrities and politicians and their household
pets. While Berk’s thrust ridicules such ravening unreason, the springboard for
the laughter is an implicit acceptance of the notion that homosexuality is
anathema.
The
week of November 12, Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City reran a 2002 series of
strips that commemorated the anniversary of Kristallnacht, “the night of broken
glass”—namely, the night of November 9-10, 1938, when Nazis in Hitler’s Germany
rampaged through the streets of towns and villages, destroying Jewish homes,
businesses and synagogues. Many Jews were beaten to death. Tatulli revised and
up-dated dialogue for the rerunning. Heart and her friend Dean, interviewing
older people for a school project, meet Leo Nussbaum, who, as E&P reports, “tells them the story
of his youth in 1938 Austria and his harrowing escape from Nazi oppression.”
(Dunno about your computer screen, but on mine, a lot of imagery accompanying
this apostrophe isn’t very clear; it’ll clear up, though, if you print out this
illustration.) I
asked Tatulli how the series was received, and he said: “I got a lot of
response to that story. Mostly people
thanking me for keeping the ‘never forget’ idea alive, especially in the comics
pages that kids will read. A lot of
rabbi's, and I actually heard from a survivor of Kristallnacht. A lot of people ask me where I got the story,
and I'm almost embarrassed to say I made it up because certainly there are so
many real stories floating around, why make one up? But how would you chose which tale to tell? How could I do a real story justice? After all, it is the comics pages— I don't
have the full sweep of a movie screen, say. So I made up a story that I felt conveyed the horror and uncertainty of
those days, and from a child's perspective, that fit the format of comic strip
storytelling.
“I
am a bit of a history buff, and I have read a good deal about the Holocaust,
mostly because it was sort of glossed-over in my school years. What I became especially intrigued by was the
tons and tons of personal stories, the survival of children against a huge,
state-run killing machine. It boggles
the mind to read some of these personal tales.
“I
wanted to write something about Kristallnacht when I first read about those
awful days, something I had not heard of before. During my exploration of Vienna's history, I
came across the Gunderman Plant (a strong plant native to Vienna), which has a
great survival rate and the ability to last for years and years. It seemed like an appropriate allegory for
the struggle of the Viennese Jews and a good place to start my story. And the story just built from there. Mostly Heart and Dean represented my
ignorance of the Holocaust (all through school) and I wanted them to become
informed on a very personal level. And
what better way than a comic strip? It
doesn't come close to telling the real story, but my goal was to possibly make
kids inquisitive and prompt open discussion with parents and teachers. Simply that.
“It
was a very personal story for me to tell, and I wanted to do it justice because
of the serious and emotional subject matter, and I'm always touched to hear
from readers who are moved by my little drawings. It is a feeling I cannot effectively
describe.”
EDITOONERY
Afflicting
the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted
It is the holy dream of every political cartoonist to
unmask the hypocrite, to puncture pomposity and to reveal the everlasting
chicanery of politicians and other polluters of the public weal and thereby to
drum the scalawags out of town. It is a dream that is almost always frustrated
by the very target of the cartoonist’s crusade, who, invariably, phones the
hapless ’tooner to ask for the original art of the supposedly insulting
cartoon. Deflated by this flattering appreciative gesture, the cartoonist goes
back to the drawingboard, still to dream on, hoping against hope, that the next
time he skewers a mountebank posing as a public official, the offending
factotum will get his just deserts. So we should be gratified, somewhat, to
report that George Russell at the San Francisco Chronicle scored the
á<Çæ‘.ÚŒ½ÕJeìÔÝO9Ó<'§©¡@ÏU Ÿ$÷ØBQ<Á
´‹‰\Sw°LûûPx‡$”F ¦²Ä½¬¦83A•ÆÙMYÛ%ü¿¨(…v
JÊ-R¸ufMŸ}HðÛÂÐtà «®€Êh,²= Since
conjuring up the foregoing paragraph, I googled Gregg Fortner and found more
than one complimentary reference to his Sisyphusian labors in the SFHA. Despite
steadily decreasing funding, he soldiered on for seven years, becoming the
longest-serving public housing chief in the city in 20 years. According to the Chronicle a year ago, “Fortner is widely
credited with cleaning up the culture of the San Francisco Housing Authority
and steering the tremendously popular redevelopment of housing developments in
North Beach and the Mission.” Like Newsom, Fortner dreamed of revamping one of
the public housing areas “so that someday the poor, crime-ridden neighborhood
is listed in San Francisco tourist guides along with North Beach and Nob Hill”
(perhaps the source of Russell’s tour metaphor). But Fortner’s diminishing
budget and consequently shrinking staff can scarcely keep up with the
maintenance of the housing it is responsible for. A third of the 6,400 units
his agency cares for are ancient—built in the 1940s and 1950s—and in need of
constant repair. Although he lost 28 maintenance workers to budget cutbacks,
the SFHA completed 7,100 work orders a year or so ago for 6,000 units. Said
Fortner: “That’s like one work order per month, per unit.” Still, residents
complain, justifiably it appears, of wayward sewage and other dangerous and
unhealthy conditions. “City leaders mostly back Fortner and say he has one of
the toughest jobs in local government,” reported the Chronicle in 2006. Indeed, he seems a model public official: “His
sparsely decorated office sports a few Dilbert cartoons pinned to the walls—and little else. His company car is a used gray
Ford Taurus he says his agency bought for $12,000. He gives visitors bottled
water he pays for out of his own pocket—and offers to show the canceled checks
as proof.”
But
more pertinent to our present errand, Fortner started out, graduating as an
English major from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, to be a stand-up
comic like Richard Pryor and George Carlin. He took a job in the Los Angeles
Housing Authority because, he explained, “I like to eat. Comedy was a career,”
he said, “and housing was a job. And somehow, they changed around.” He
graduated from one housing authority job to another, finally getting to San
Francisco. But he still performs six times a year as a host at the Pasadena Ice
House Comedy Club’s “All Star Variety Night,” a Sunday evening amateur show.
And he does plenty of political humor, including this joke: “George Bush’s
library burned down, and it was a real tragedy because he lost both books—and
one of them hadn’t even been colored in yet.” Geez: you’d think he could take a
joke, even a political cartoon joke.
*****
Nick
Anderson, the
Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist at the Houston Chronicle, launched a provocative question at the
Republican candidates during the CNN/YouTube “debate” on November 28, but
Anderson put his question in the mouth of his animated caricature of Darth
Cheney, who fixes his perpetual scowling sneer at the candidates and asks if
they would grant as much power to their vice president as GeeDubya has given
Cheney. And then “Cheney” waves a finger at them and says menacingly: “I’m
watching you.” None of the candidates answered the question very directly;
instead, they talked about the theoretical role of the vice president, and a
few felt the vice president should have a substantial role in any
administration, depending upon his or her expertise. One or two even allowed as
how they might even pick their running mate based upon such expertise. Fred Thompson got the best audience response
by saying, right after Anderson’s Cheney faded from the screen: “For a second
there, I thought that was me.”
Steve Breen of the San Diego Union Tribune won the Berryman Award this year. ... Jim Borgman, editoonist at the Cincinnati Enquirer since 1976 and the
drawing half of writer Jerry Scott’s Zits, was named one of 40 people who
“shaped” the city of Cincinnati according to Cincinnati magazine as reported by E&P.
*****
Pat Bagley, editoonist for the Salt Lake Tribune, has become
increasingly visible in national publications since joining the Cagle syndicate
a year or so ago. His cartoons are among the hardest hitting in the profession.
Bagley
is fairly obviously not a fan of George W. (“Warlord”) Bush, seemingly an
oddity in a rampantly Republican state. But maybe not. A couple years ago, I
asked him how he could survive in a community so red. He wrote back: “Most of
the readers of the Salt Like Tribune take the paper because it is one of the few institutions in the state that is
not solidly Mormon and Republican. After 30 years of not endorsing candidates,
our new publisher, who is not from around here, thought it would be a good idea
to revive the practice. He also thought that, being such a heavily red state,
it made sense to endorse Bush. Over 7,000 people cancelled their subscriptions.
The cartoon that appeared next to the endorsing editorial was one of my best.
It was a cartoon of Bush at his goofiest with the line ‘The Choice Is Simple.’
Most people got it; some still don’t.” It took me a moment to realize that
Bagley’s picture gave the word “simple” a second meaning.
In a
week or so, we’ll post that 1991 interview in our Hindsight Department and add
a more recent article from the Salt Lake
Weekly.
ONE SHORT OF
THE REQUISITE. Clay Bennett, the
Pulitzer-winning editoonist at the Christian
Science Monitor for the last ten years, is leaving for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in
Tennessee, effective January 1. Bennett also left his syndicate, the CSM News
Service, for the Washington Post Writers Group. Said Amy Lago, WPWG’s Comics
Editor: “When we heard Clay might be available, we jumped at the chance to be
his syndicate. He’s one of the most inventive, creative, and thoughtful
cartoonists out there.” WPWG Editorial Director Alan Shearer agreed: “I’ve
heard people in our business say editorial cartooning is in decline as
newspapers slash and burn, and they are right to a degree. But creatively,
editorial cartooning is as strong as ever, and Clay is one of the brightest
lights.”
The
opening at the Chattanooga Times Free
Press occurred because its long-time editoonist, Bruce Plante, left the paper to join the Tulsa World in Oklahoma. His predecessor at the Tulsa World was Doug Marlette, who was killed last year in an auto accident.
But
this round of musical chairs still leaves one paper standing: the Chicago Tribune hasn’t yet replaced its
staff cartoonist, Jeff MacNelly, who
died seven years ago. It’s entirely possible that the Trib will never again have a staff editoonist. The strategy of the
newspaper with regard to comic strips is telling: whenever it drops a comic
strip, it tells complaining readers that they’re only experimenting and that
the strip may return in a few weeks (or months). But the paper does nothing
about that strip; it never returns. After two or three months, most of the
protesting readers have forgotten their erstwhile favorite and have moved on to
other comic strips (so to speak). Over the years, the Trib has said repeatedly that it is “still looking” for a
replacement for MacNelly. But it’s never found anyone. Several cartoonists,
said Michael Minor in Chicago Reader,
“have thought they were within an inch of the job, and all were wrong.” Minor
was writing mostly about Scott Stantis,
who has been editooning at the Birmingham
News in Alabama for the last eleven years. Stantis, a conservative
politically, also produces a daily comic strip, Prickly City, which stars both a conservative (a little girl) and a
liberal (a coyote), and Stantis has been known to take shots both ways in the
strip (which is set in a desert, a perhaps revealing fact). He also produces
one cartoon a week for USA Today. And
he does an occasional cartoon for the Chicago
Tribune—whenever he thinks the paper might need a cartoon on a local,
Chicago, issue. The Trib’s editorial
page editor, Bruce Dodd, has encouraged Stantis to continue. But no job offer
has come forth. Said Minor: “[Stantis] would like the job and would happily
come to Chicago for it. He’s done a lot of cartoons for the Tribune already, and he believes that he
and the Tribune are on the same
wavelength politically. ... Ideally, Stantis said, when something big happens in
Chicago, the story won’t be complete until the city finds out in the morning
what Stantis had to say about it. MacNelly didn’t play that role—he lived in
Virginia and stuck to national issues. And in fact, nobody’s played that role
in Chicago media since Mike Royko, and it could be that nobody will ever play
it again. That show might be over.” If so, too bad. Lessee now, how many major
U.S. daily newspapers are without a staff editorial cartoonist: Chicago Tribune, New York Times (since
1950), Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, Newsday, and San Jose Mercury News to name
just the biggest of the lot, which now numbers, all told, well over two dozen.
CIVILIZATION’S
LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind
beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.
Reese Witherspoon commands the highest salary of any
movie actress—$20 million per picture. Next is Angelina Jolie with about $18
million; then Cameron Diaz, $15 mil; Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Julia
Roberts and Sandra Bullock, $10-15 mil; Drew Barrymore and Jodie Foster get
$10-12 mil, and at the bottom of the top ten, Halle Berry with $10 million.
According
to The Week, 34% of Americans believe
in ghosts, and 23% say they’ve personally seen a ghost or felt its presence;
14% say they’ve seen a UFO.
In all
the excitement about Mitt Romney’s speech during which he discussed at great
length the role of religion in American life and politics in order to avoid any
discussion of the tenets of his own Mormon faith—which is what most of us
really wanted to know—many papers listed all the candidates, Repubs and Dems,
and their religions—Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Southern Baptist, and
Episcopal. Barack Obama is all by himself, though, as a “Christian.” What is it
with some of these so-called “Christian” faiths? Their adherents get to call
themselves “Christian” as a way of distinguishing themselves from Roman
Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and Episcopalians? What are these faiths then?
Pagan? Infidel? Chopped liver? What arrogance.
HOLY MOLEY
Islamic Hooligans
Strike Again
First Cartoons, Now Teddy Bears Are Blasphemous
In that model Muslim country of Sudan, a 54-year-old
British school teacher was sentenced to 15 days in prison for allowing her
second grade students to name a class teddy bear mascot Muhammad, which was
forthwith deemed an insult to the Prophet (PBUH). After serving her sentence,
the Associated Press reported, Gillian Gibbons will be deported—banished from
the holy state of Sudan. Alas. But she’s lucky: she could have received 40 lashes
for her offense plus a fine and six months in prison. The day after her day in
so-called court, the streets of Khartoum filled with Muslim hooligans, waving
swords and fists over their heads and screaming their outrage at the leniency
of her punishment. “Kill her!” they shrieked, “Kill her by firing squad!”
Protesters dismissed Gibbons’ claim that she intended no insult to the Prophet
(PBUH). “What she did requires that a life be taken,” said one of the mob. More
rampaging ensued.
While
at the bottom of these disturbances is a misguided conviction that Western
nations have little or no respect for Islam, a belief that certain political
agitators and would-be revolutionaries and world-dominators are quick to
exploit at every opportunity, it has apparently not occurred to any Muslim at
any extremity that the mob-in-the-street behavior, which, now, is as
predictable as rain in the monsoon season, is likely to produce in Westerners
precisely the opinion of Islam that the protesters decry. Rioting in the streets
is not a political tactic of a mature society. It is, rather, infantile, a
tantrum not a protest. And if they’re going to behave like ill-tempered
children, they’ll be treated like ill-tempered children. Eventually. And I
suspect Western societies are edging closer to that posture.
The
East is East and the West is West and the twain may never aggregate, as Kipling
famously said. But we’d likely get closer if the more radical Muslims could
modify their stance a little. Their attitude towards such abuses as we in the
West have committed should be: “The poor misguided infidels will doubtless rot
in hell for their blasphemy, but that’s Allah’s business and not mine. Mine is
to get along with my neighbors, regardless of their idiotic beliefs.” In
return, we in the West would promise never to name anything Muhammad. Most
Muslims, of course, have precisely the attitude I’ve just recommended; and most
Westerners don’t name anything Muhammad.
Chip Bok at the Akron Beacon Journal did the best cartoon on this incident: in
front of a bunch of teddy bears “on sale,” he drew a parade of Teddy Roosevelt
look-a-likes, raising their hands in rage and chanting, “Death to the insulters
of Theodore Roosevelt.” The caption: “The Madness Spreads.”
But
“where are the Muslim moderates?” asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of
the Dutch Parliament and Muslim-persecuted author if Infidel. Writing on the New
York Times op-ed page, she reviews three recent incidents, including the
Gibbons persecution, which ought to have riled Muslim moderates but didn’t. One
was the case of the 20-year old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, who was
abducted by several men and repeatedly raped; she was found guilty of
“mingling” (being in public with a man not related to her by blood or marriage)
and sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane. “Two
hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man,” Ali writes. “Women usually
receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks, the
“girl from Qatif” will dread her next session with Islamic justice.” Her third
instance involves Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who, for
the offense of championing women’s rights in the Muslim world, has been forced
to flee her native country to India; and even there, some groups want her
expelled, one offering 500,000 rupees for her head. She keeps on the move to
avoid accidents. “The organizations that lined up to protest the [Danish Dozen]
are quiet now,” said Ali. She quotes the Koran’s command to flog adulterous
persons and show “no compassion,” continuing: “more compelling even than the
order to flog is the command that the believer show no compassion. ... If
moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from
Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?”
Gibbons,
we should add, didn’t name the teddy bear herself in a spasm of autocratic
authority. She was teaching her 7-year-old students democracy: she had them
vote on a name. And the children were doubtless imitating their elders, who
have named more of their male offspring Muhammad than any other name in Islamic
countries. Of course, none of these male offspring were stuffed animals;
perhaps that was the offense. In any event, at one swell foop, the Islamic
hooligans demonstrated the seeming illogic of their religious convictions and
their inability to tolerate democracy as well as their rampant immaturity. And
what, pray, is the best way of dealing with a bunch like that?
Thanks
to the intercession of a couple of Muslim members of the British Parliament,
the Sudanese President pardoned Gibbons after she’d served 8 days of her 15-day
sentence. And she went home to England where she was welcomed by her son and
daughter and some British Muslims who brought around a bouquet with a message:
“Welcome back, Gillian.” Said Dr. Abdul Hamid: “It was outrageous. She
shouldn’t have been treated that way. She’s been the victim of something
ridiculous. We’re glad she’s back and her ordeal is over.”
As
for Gibbons, she said: “I’m just an ordinary middle-aged primary school
teacher. I went out there to have an adventure, and got a bit more than I
bargained for.” Her plans? She’s looking forward to spending Christmas with her
family, and then she’ll start seriously to look for employment.
Leonard
Pitts, a syndicated columnist at the Miami
Herald and one of the nation’s few clear-headed commentators on any
subject, a veritable jewel in the crown of journalism, did an excellent column
on the subject, observing that “Islam is not the problem: fundamentalism,
however, is. And that, as we should know from our own experience, is a mindset
that is not confined to one faith. To the contrary, every faith has
[fundamentalists], those rigid doctrinaires who would sacrifice their very
humanity for the fool’s gold of theological purity, these people so eager to
live the literal law of their holy books that they miss the point of those holy
books, shedding compassion, kindness and plain common sense along the way.
Worse, they are always literal about the wrong things, always literal about
passages in holy writ that they feel empower them to punish, judge, ostracize
and condemn. Never literal about the passages that require them to give,
forgive, serve and stand humble. ... What a pious, holy nation. Their God is
offended by a teddy bear. If anything, God is offended by them.” You can find
Pitts regularly at miamiherald.com
But
infidels like us are not the only offenders who enrage Islamic hooligans. They
took to the streets of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in late September,
setting fires and wrecking property and calling for the blood of a cartoonist
because of a cartoon they felt mocked Muhammad. Shortly thereafter, the
cartoonist, Arifur Rahman, began a
month-long jail term. The offending cartoon appeared in a popular weekly
magazine where it poked fun at the Muslim community’s penchant for naming their
male children after the Prophet (PBUH), depicting a boy referring to his cat as
“Muhammad Biral [cat].” (One of the finer edges of irony in this case is that
Rahman’s full name is, apparently, Muhammad Arifur Rahman.) Rahman was arrested
under one of the country’s emergency laws for dealing with threats to national
security. The law, Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code, authorizes police
“to make arrests without orders from a magistrate and without a warrant,”
reported Animesh Roul at energypublisher.com. “Rahman also has no right to
legal represenation.” (If this sounds fearfully like something we recently
acquired closer to home, blame the Bush League.) In sentencing Rahman, the
government maintained that his cartoon was “part of a conspiracy to throw the
country into chaos.” As of October 31, the date of Roul’s story, Rahman was
still in prison, where he had been for more than a month, and his fate “remains
unclear though there have been rumors that he could be freed at anytime. ...
Ironically, the cartoonist had recently been given an award from the government
for a sketch depicting Bangladesh’s anti-corruption drive.” The local press,
Roul said, is virtually silent about Rahman’s predicament, fearing a government
crackdown in the country’s present climate of political instability.
International groups, however, have protested the apparent collapse of a free
press and the imprisonment of a cartoonist. But I’ve found no further word
about Rahman since October 31. Has he been disappeared?
CLOSER TO
HOME
In a recent Non
Sequitur strip, Wiley Miller is
up to his old schtick—pissing people off. In this case, it involved the release
for Saturday, November 24 (which can be viewed at GoComics.com). Here we see a
couple of rural types with baskets in their hands, presumably gathering eggs
from the chickens in the coop before them. One of the chickens is attired,
absurdly enough, in a white hood of the sort associated with the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the rural types says: “It only lays egg whites.” At several newspapers,
the strip provoked reader wrath. Most of the anger arose because a reader
mistakenly thought Wiley was endorsing the KKK, coming out in favor of white
supremacy, and therefore attacking any non-white person. The strip, to them,
was racist. At the Beloit Daily News, despite having published the offending strip, editors subsequently dropped Non Sequitur from the comics line-up to
see how readers would react. Most of the readers quoted by the News’ William R. Barth failed to see how
anyone could interpret the strip as supporting the KKK, although one said he
realized how “incendiary it would be if misinterpreted.” Many, however,
disapproved of Non Sequitur because
it seemed occasionally anti-Catholic or anti-Christian. (Wiley is Catholic, by
the way, and his target in the allegedly anti-religion strips is usually
institutional—the priesthood, say—rather than religious belief.)
At
the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ted
Diadium, the paper’s “reader representative,” quoted a couple letter-writers,
one of whom demanded an apology from the obtuse editors who published the
strip, and the other who asked, "When did the KKK become comical?"
Diadium continued: “Most of the people who objected did so on the grounds that
the strip was racist, and I don't see that. If anything, the message poked fun
at the racist Klan. Obviously, the thing that got everyone going was the image
of the Klan hood. There are some things that just cannot and should not be used
as humor, and you can count me in the group that would include the KKK in that
category. Especially among people of a certain age, the horror and cruelty that
the hood represents overwhelms any attempt to be funny. But there's a
difference between bad taste and racism, and I'd say this strip is the former.”
Then
Diadium shifted his ground. “I realize that as a white man, I'm in no position
to be lecturing about what black people should or shouldn't be offended by, though,
so I asked several black colleagues what they thought of the strip. They had
varying reactions, but all had three things in common. They didn't laugh. They
didn't think the strip was racist. And they didn't think
it should have been censored. But the most
interesting reaction was from someone outside the
newsroom— Stan Miller, executive director of the
Cleveland branch of the NAACP. He said he had gotten some questions about the
strip also, and called trying to reach the syndicated artist. But he said his
own reaction to the strip was different from some of his callers. ‘I saw it as
a shot at the Klan,’ he said. ‘It indicated that here we are in 2007, and the
Klan is still doing knuckle-headed things, and the rest of society's looking
on, shaking its head.’ Reasonable people can disagree, but I think he's right,”
Diadium concluded.
So
Diadium seems to think the strip was in bad taste but that it was poking fun at
a deserving target, the knuckle-headed Klan. A typical have-it-both-ways
wishy-washy approach to problem solving. Or so it would seem—until we get to
the end of Diadium’s diatribe.
At
least, he points out, the Plain Dealer didn’t
pull the strip. “Some newspapers routinely pull strips when they address a
controversial topic or have some humor that their editors worry will offend
some readers,” Diadium went on. “Over the years, papers have pulled Doonesbury, B.C., and others. But that
has rarely been the Plain Dealer's approach, and I applaud that. A newspaper buys the artist's creativity and continuity,
and should run with it— even at times when that creativity makes us cringe a
bit. If the time comes when the artist's work becomes truly egregious, then
it's appropriate to question his or her judgment and drop the strip. But
editors shouldn't try to micro-edit the edge out of it. ... In the end,” he
finishes, “I think we should pick the syndicated comics that do the best job of
appealing to the wide range of ways people laugh at the world, and then let the
artists do their jobs.”
Commendable.
We must be grateful that occasionally the Froth Estate displays a modicum of
gumption amid the wishy-wash. As for Wiley, he thinks “this country is in
desperate need of a chain of clinics for the satirically challenged.” Here’s
how the gag came out, he told me: “It was nothing more than a simple sight gag.
My wife has been on this diet of eating egg whites for breakfast, where she
boils the eggs then scoops out the yolk. I got to thinking what kind of chicken could be developed that
would lay only egg whites and the image just popped into my head, and made me
laugh. That was it. I figured the only ones who could be ‘offended’ by this
cartoon would be white supremacists, so who cares. What continues to
baffle me are the number of people who have deemed
this cartoon as being ‘racist.’ Huh? A cartoon that mocks white supremacists is
racist?”
We’re
all lucky we’re not living in the Sudan or Bangladesh, to name two venues that
probably wouldn’t tolerate Non Sequitur, whether
jabbing the KKK or the Catholic church. We’re safe within the embrace of our
Constitutional rights. Or are we? The Military Commissions Act (MCA) signed
into law by George WMD Bush on October 17, 2006, permits the institution of a
military alternative to the usual system of justice for “any person” deemed an
“enemy of the state” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively
does away with habeas corpus rights for anyone—and therefore, everyone. The
decision about who might be deemed an “enemy of the state” is solely the
President’s. Arifur Rahman might feel right at home here.
WE’RE ALL
BROTHERS, AND WE’RE ONLY PASSIN’ THROUGH
Sometimes
happy, sometimes blue,
But I’m so
glad I ran into you---
We’re all
brothers, and we’re only passin’ through.
Old Folk
Ballad Lustily Sung By Walt Conley in His Trademark Husky Rasp of a Voice at the Last Resort in Denver, Lo These Many Years Ago
James Kemsley, 1948-2007
James Kemsley, who spent the last 23 years producing
Australia’s legendary Ginger Meggs comic
strip, died December 3 of a motor neuron disease; he was 59. “He was working on
the strip that morning,” said his friend, cartoonist Peter Broelman, president of the Australian Cartoonists’
Association. “He couldn’t draw as such, but he was certainly writing ideas and
involved in the production,” Broelman added.
Motor
neuron diseases slowly destroy brain cells that control muscle activity, and
Kemsley had been battling the disease for two years. In the last stages of its
ravages, he had lost his voice. But he could still use a computer and was able
to continue working on the strip. Two months ago, according to
goldcoast.com.au, he and his wife went to India for “a last-ditch shot at stem
cell therapy, but he contracted pneumonia and was forced to return home” to
Bowral, in New South Wales, about 80 miles southwest of Sydney.
Broelman,
reported the Sydney Morning Herald, was inundated with messages from Kemsley’s friends and colleagues abound the
world. “He was one of those affable guys,” Broelman said, “—just a friendly
bloke who was quite happy to travel around the world just to meet other
cartoonists.” He traveled to San Francisco in 2003 for the National Cartoonists
Society’s annual Reubens Weekend, and that’s where I met “Kems,” as his friends
called him. He was open and out-going friendly from the first instant: from his
demeanor, you’d think we had known each other for years. A year or so ago, I
learned he’d stepped down as president of ACA, alluding to a health problem. I
asked him then about his health, but he dodged the question and said he was
fine.
Although
Kemsley probably drew all his life—he did cartoons for the Traralgon Journal as early as 1967 when he was still in school—he
launched himself into the world of work as an actor. While studying acting at
the Independent Theatre of Dramatic Art (1969-72) and playwriting at the
Playwright Forum at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (1973), he was also
acting in children’s tv, playing Skeeter the Paperboy in “The Super Flying Fun
Show.”
He also hosted an afternoon program “Skeeter’s
Cartoon Corner,” a mix of U.S. originated animated cartoons and viewer
competitions, and he was involved in producing a tv variety show for kids,
“Junior Cabaret.” He wrote three successful children’s plays: “The Land of
Coloured Dreams,” “Once Upon A Time ... And All That,” and “The Magical
Adventures of Puck.” In 1979, he went to England and studied at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts
In
the early 1980s, Kemsley helped Flight Centre founder Graham “Screw” Turner set
up Top Deck Travel, and while touring the world as a Top Deck hand with
periodic stopovers at London, he freelanced as a journalist and as a
cartoonist; and for Top Deck’s passenger magazine, he created his first comic
strip, Frogin’. Kemsley was recruited
to work on a Ginger Meggs movie, scheduled to be released at a time that the
comic strip’s popularity was flagging; it came out in 1982. While helping with
the movie, presumably, Kems met and became friends with the daughter of Jimmy Bancks, the creator of the famed
comic strip character. Then in 1983 at the death of cartoonist Lloyd Piper, the second of Bancks’
successors, Kemsley was asked to take over the strip. His first Ginger Meggs was published March 18,
1984.
Ginger Meggs is the third
longest-running comic strip in the world (after The Katzenjammer Kids at 110 and Gasoline Alley at 89). Often called Australia’s most loved comic
character, “Ginge,” as the character is affectionately known, first appeared on
November 13, 1921 in a Bancks strip entitled Us Fellers. Ginge was, at first, just a bit player, but as the
irrepressible schoolboy, he soon assumed the lead role in the strip, which, in
1939, surrendered to the inevitable and became Ginger Meggs. In John Ryan’s history of Australian comics, Panel by Panel, Ryan writes: “Drawing on
his own boyhood, Bancks was able to capture all the character, warmth and charm
of a typical Australian boy. Ginge’s homespun philosophy and observations on
life were a delight and represented an aspect of the strip that was never
duplicated by his many imitators. For Ginge, life was meant for playing sport,
going to the pictures, attending birthday parties or picnics, and for gobbling
down ice cream, cakes and fruit. He viewed school homework and helping around
the house as diabolical plots intended to deprive him of the real pleasures of
life.”
In
Australia, comic strips are associated with newspapers rather than with
syndicates, and when Bancks moved his strip to another paper, 80,000 readers
followed him, Kemsley said, and the paper he left went into bankruptcy.
Kemsley
is the fourth cartoonist to bring Ginger
Meggs to life. Each of his predecessors died at the age of 63. Bancks died
after 30 years on the strip; Ron Vivian,
after 20 years; Lloyd Piper, after
10. “So when I was offered the job in 1984,” Kemsley quipped, “they gave me a
5-year contract.”
He’s
been at it ever since, working harder than those who went before: he
inaugurated the daily Ginger Meggs several years ago, and the popularity of the strip surged. Visually, the daily
strip is open and unencumbered by much background detail: mostly, we see Ginge
and his friends or mother, standing against a plain white background, talking.
Kemsley’s treatment of the Sunday strip was imaginative: he varied layouts with
great skill, rearranging panels to give his Sundays visual excitement. Under
Kemsley’s entrepreneurial management, Ginger
Meggs immigrated to other countries: it is now the most syndicated of
Australia’s comic strips, appearing in more than 120 newspapers in 30 countries
around the world. Ginge’s latest homes in this hemisphere include the Washington Post online (one of several
U.S. papers publishing him) and on the Web at www.Gocomics.com.
Kems’
passion for cricket resulted in a unique feature of Ginger Meggs. Tipped sideways in a panel in virtually every daily
release is a hand-lettered aphorism, f’instance: “Never miss a good chance to
shut up.” Or: “The only exercise some people get is pushing their luck.” These
utterances have nothing to do with the day’s joke. They’re simply extras,
tossed in bonuses of axiomatic humor. But the first of them wasn’t witty at
all: Kemsley knew he wouldn’t be able to make it the next day to a cricket game
in which he was scheduled to play, so he told his team mates by lettering a cryptic
explanatory apology into that day’s strip. (In those days before extensive
syndication, Ginger Meggs appeared in
its home newspaper the day after it was drawn.) The note, incomprehensible to
anyone not on Kems’ team, inspired a certain amount of response from readers,
curiosity mostly, and that was enough to keep Kems going at it ever since. Kemsley
has been frequently honored by his peers. He was accorded the ACA’s highest
honor in 2001 when he received the “Stanley” (the Aussie equivalent of the
Reuben) as Cartoonist of the Year. In 1990 his strip was named the Best Comic
Strip and Kemsley received the Jim Russell Award for Contribution to Australian
cartooning; Ginger Meggs was again named
Best Comic Strip in 2004. Kemsley is a life member of ACA and served as its
president in 2005. He married Helen in 1982, and she and their three sons
survive him.
Ginger Meggs has been reprinted in
numerous collections (see Wikipedia for a list) while Kemsley produced the
strip. Ginge will be continued by
award-winning cartoonist Jason Chatfield.
NEW COMIC
STRIP
The Philadelphia
Daily News’ Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist of 22 years, Signe Wilkinson, is joining the ranks
of editoonists who also produce a daily comic strip. The strip, Family Tree, which is about a family
named Tree, will launch January 7 with United Media. Doing the strip will more
than double her workload: she will continue to do 5-6 editorial cartoons every
week and co-produce occasional political animations, but since her daughters
are now both adults, she figures she has the time. “I don’t have to pick up
anyone from sports practice any more,” she joked with Dave Astor at Editor & Publisher. One of the
reasons she decided to do a strip is for job security: with staff political
cartoonists evaporating nation-wide, doing a comic strip seemed a likely way to
remain a cartoonist even though her situation at the Daily News is not, at the moment, endangered. “She also wanted to
create characters, not just draw people such as George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney,” Astor wrote, “and she wanted to be topical without being overly
political.” Said Wilkinson: “Family Tree is not a political strip in the Democrat or Republican sense. It’s sort of how
politics filters down to the family level.” The strip will deal with
environmental matters, long a concern of Wilkinson’s, and such current issues
as standardized testing and health care. In making a decision to take on a
daily strip, Wilkinson was also influenced by a desire to increase the number
of female voices on newspaper comics pages. There are more women cartoonists in
the funnies these days than ever before, but, said Astor, the comics “remain a
mostly male-cartoonist bastion.” Wilkinson believes she can deal with “beauty,
clothes, social pressures, mother-daughter relationships, and other issues in a
way that will ring true to other mothers and other daughters.” Family Tree is Wilkinson’s third comic
strip. She developed a strip called The Garden
of Edith early in the 2000s but abandoned it after a few syndicate
rejections; and for a short time about five years ago, she did a political
strip, Shrubbery, that starred a
leafy GeeDubya among other characters who looked strangely familiar to anyone
scanning the political landscape. Notice how all of these efforts seem to have
something to do with the environment—gardens, shrubs, trees. Yes, Wilkinson is
a vocal advocate for the environment.
BOOK MARQUEE
IDW Publishing, which is bringing Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates to us in its first
complete reincarnation, announced that it is also going to reprint all of Noel Sickles’ Scorchy Smith. It was while doing that AP strip that Sickles,
always experimenting with rendering styles, developed the chiaroscuro style of
drawing—with shadows rather than lines defining shapes—that Caniff soon adopted
for drawing Terry. Scorchy Smith and the
Art of Noel Sickles will cover Sickles’ debut on the strip in 1933 until he
left it in 1936.
Bush Leaguers: Cartoonists Take on the White
House is the catalog from the exhibit last summer held at the American
University Museum in Washington, D.C. to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Containing
the work of more than 80 editoonists and the usual gang of idiots—Darth Cheney,
Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice and George W. (“Whopper”) Bush—the
volume is available for $15, including p&h, from the AAEC website, www.editorialcartoonists.com And you can order The Best
Editorial Cartoons of the Year (2007), dubbed the 2008 Edition, from Daryl Cagle’s website, www.cagle.msnbc.com It is foreworded this year by political humorist Will Durst.
CALENDAR
GIRLS
Every year at this time in the Olden Days various
nefarious publishers brought forth their calendars for the coming year. Esquire brought out the Petty pin-ups
annually in calendar form until Petty deserted; then came the Vargas girl
calendar. Then Vargas ran off, and the Esquire calendar for a few years was illustrated by other artists whose damsels were
just as winsome and, increasingly as the years trolled by, attired in less and
less until it was almost always nearly nothing. Playboy destroyed the genre: Playboy calendars were photographs of barenekkidwimmn. The male Youth of America were
suddenly, alas, more captivated by the authenticity of photographic images than
by the poetry of the painter’s brush. These days, we have the Sports Illustrated and Maxim and others of the laddy brand
flooding the stands with calendars. More photographs. In recent years, we’ve
managed to revive the painterly tradition by reprinting the rosy
pulchritudinousnesses of Elvgren and others of his generation and persuasion.
Welcome as such effervescences are, they are nostalgic flights not present
fancies. So it is with something akin to relief as well as unbridled joy that
we encounter the 2008 Olivia calendar, which, this year, is rendered in a
manner that evokes the immortal Petty: the girls’ costumes are skin-tight and
virtually transparent.
In
the same playful spirit, we have LeRoy Neiman: Femlin 50th Anniversary Collection in which Neiman
recalls the 1957 birth of this spritely sex elf (he created the image;
publisher Hugh Hefner named it), accompanied by numerous formative sketches,
followed by sections reproducing the pixie pictures of the Party Joke page,
organized around such themes as sports, music, art, cocktails. Neiman’s
introductory essay also treats of the inauguration of the femlin’s pubic hair,
which created, he says, a perplexing design problem (he can explain) that he
was able to solve once he thought of a minuscule solid black triangle.
And
having strayed this far, momentarily, from a strictly comics path, let me
mention Jim Silke’s Bettie Page Rules, in which Silke
examines the cheesecake heroines of 1950s photography by assembling a plethora
of photos and pairing many of them with his own illustrations of such reigning
queens as Bettie Page, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Sophia Loren, and so on.
Luscious as Silke’s illustrations are, his prose is no less engaging.
F’instance: “First, let me make something clear: throughout the fifties, naked
did not mean nude, not in films, not in the pin-up magazines, not even in the
adult men’s magazines. It meant bare backs and bottoms, a lot of cleavage, and
sometimes a partially exposed breast with an occasional nipple showing. And, as
the public reaction to Jane Russell demonstrated, a large bosom was enough to
incite imaginary nudity. As I’ve pointed out, we were romantics and for some of
us size gave us hope.” Hope springs eternal, as they say.
SO MANY
SPLENDID SUNDAYS
Adventures in
the Glorious Days of Yesteryear When the Funnies Were Fabulous
I’ve mentioned Pete
Maresca’s latest, Sundays with Walt
and Skeezix, saying it, like its immediate predecessor from Maresca’s
Sunday Press, reprints a comic strip classic—this time, Frank King’s Sunday Gasoline
Alley pages at the size of their initial publication, roughly 16x21 inches
(96 of these giant pages; hardback, $95, a decided bargain). But that brief
description, while illuminating, is scarcely adequate to the objet d’art before us. The 80 page-size
strips are culled from a 10-year period, beginning with the first Sunday in
1921 and continuing to about 1931 or so, the time that Skeezix was growing from
a toddler to the cusp of adolescence, and many of the strips give vivid
four-color life to the kind of fantasies that a kid might have during those
times of his life. King’s visual invention was flourishing during these years,
and at their full size, these strips draw us into the fantasies. We are right
there. This was the glory that was once the Sunday funnies. As before with the Little Nemo volume, Maresca reproduces
the Sunday strips from their newsprint incarnation, digitally removing
blemishes but not “recoloring” (a desecration, in my view). These are the
strips the way we would have seen them when they were first published. But
Maresca’s packaging does more than bring back that Sunday morning engagement.
Sixteen of the book’s pages are devoted to photographs of King’s adventures
with his friends outside the comics and to other illustrative materials
(examples of the merchandise Gasoline
Alley inspired), plus text pieces by Jeet Heer, Don Phelps, and Tim
Samuelson, a cultural historian for Chicago. But that’s not all. The book comes
with a Skeezix Cut-out Toy: printed on stout paper, you can cut it out and play
with it if you are so disposed. And there’s more. The piece de resistance is a faithful copy of the black-and-white
original art for November 30, 1930, the Sunday rendered in woodblock style. To
find it, take off the book’s dust jacket: it’s printed on the inside. And so
are two dailies. And if you order your copy online (www.sundaypressbooks.com),
you’ll get a 20x27-inch facsimile poster of the original but hand-colored art
for August 19, 1934, the strip in which Skeezix “swims” through a pond’s
reflection of the sky above. Pete: you’re too much; you’ve given the buyer more
than he can reasonably expect.
And
Maresca’s continued in this generous mode with his most recent production,
another of Winsor McCay’s marvels, Little Sammy Sneeze: The Complete Color
Sunday Comics, 1904-1905, which arrived last month. Sammy never approached full-page size; it ran a third page, roughly
10x15 inches, and that’s the size of this volume’s 96 pages (hardback; $55).
Among the bonuses: whatever strip appeared on the reverse of Sammy in the funnies appears here, too,
on the reverse of the page. Mostly that’s another McCay venture, Hungry Henrietta, whose exploits are all
about the excesses of eating just as Sammy’s adventures are about the disasters
that attend his explosive sneezes. But before Henrietta started, two other fantasy strips backed Sammy: The Woozlebeasts and Gustave Verbeek’s Upside-Downs. They’re there. And we have an essay by Dan Nadel to
help understand them. Other introductory matter by John Canemaker, McCay’s
biographer, and Thierry Smolderen, Jeet Heer, and Gene Kanneberg Jr complete
the overture. Quite apart from the fascination of the Sammy strips as inventive cartooning, Sammy occupies a vital link in the skein of McCay’s artistic
development as well as “a milestone in the evolution of comic art,” as Maresca
says. He continues: “There is more here than the single repetitive gag of the
destructive sneeze. Each strip offers a vignette of the American middle-class
life a century ago, with greater variety and insight than most offerings of the
day. The cinematic elements of Sammy Sneeze create a novel link between the two art forms and display McCay’s emerging
interest in storytelling and animation.” And the book comes with a comedic
treat, too: a tissue box holder die-cut for Kleenex (I’d say) and decorated
with pictures of Sammy, sneezing.
Sunday
Press publications, said Beth Davies-Stofka at brokenfrontier.com a few days
ago, “are like the Grand Canyons of comic books.” A stunningly apt description.
She interviewed Maresca about the origins of his publishing business and its
subsequent growth. It began with Maresca’s passion for classic comics but it
was vastly enabled when Maresca bought from an aged farmer a run of 50 years of
comic strips from New York newspapers, 1920-1970. “It was about 90% complete,”
Maresca said. In the hoard, he encountered Little
Nemo for the first time and was so impressed he resolved to get the strips
reprinted at their original publication size and in their original colors, as
published on newsprint, so others could see the strips as they were intended to
be seen, in all their visual glories. He approached several publishers, all of
whom said the project as Maresca wanted to do it would make the final volume
too expensive and too difficult to distribute. “Art Spiegelman said I should
publish it myself,” Maresca said, “and so I did. Since I did all the work
myself, it was affordable, since my ideal is to pay all the bills for producing
it and pay myself ten dollars an hour.” He printed as many of the first book,
the Little Nemo volume, as he could
afford “without taking out a mortgage.” Pete showed me an early sample of the
book at the Reubens Weekend of the National Cartoonists Society several years
ago: it was gorgeous and I applauded, but I couldn’t help thinking he was
building himself a white elephant. He realized an element of improbability in
his project: he planned to have the Nemo books on hand in inventory for “several years—but it turned out to be a
surprise success.” The New York Times gave the book generous play on the anniversary of Nemo in 2005. Said Maresca: “That sold out the first run. They were
gone in two months. Now it’s in its second printing.” The Nemo book prompted other fans of the medium to suggest other strips
for similar treatment. And Maresca was ready, although he didn’t quite know it
at first. “I didn’t set out to be a publisher—[just] to make sure that a nice
book about Nemo was made.” But when
he was in the final stages of producing Nemo,
he learned he had to have an ISBN. He was able to obtain one via the Internet.
“But I had to buy a block of ten. So [my] designer said, ‘Now it looks like
you’re going to be a publisher since you have nine more ISBNs.’” He financed Walt and Skeezix with the proceeds from
the Nemo book. The third ISBN went to Sammy; the fourth will go to the next
volume of Nemo (to which I expect to
contribute a short text piece, as I did for the first volume). “The fifth,”
Maresca said, “will go to the first volume of an approximately 7-volume
anthology that reprints the best comics from 1896 to 1914"—compiling “the
best of children’s fantasy and adventure.” The concluding year, 1914, “is a
good break-off point because that’s the year that the whole new world of comics
syndication began.”
Maresca
also had some advice in response to an odd but frequent reservation people
voice about his books: they’re so big they don’t fit anywhere in anyone’s
library. “People always tell me they don’t know where to put this. I tell them
to slide the book under the sofa, and slide it out to read on Sunday morning. I
do my best to give people a complete experience of reading the Sunday comics.”
Wonderful.
CHRISTMAS
LISTS
Recommended by Boston Herald tv critic Mark A.
Perigard: the Captain America Omnibus,
the 25 issues written by Ed Brubaker, includes the assassination of the star-spangled superhero; $74.99. ... The Completely MAD Don Martin “collects every scrap” of Martin art in the
cartoonist’s 30-year career in a two-volume hardcover set at $150. ... In
January, Denis Kitchen Publishing will release Capital Hell, a
collection of 24 postcards depicting some contemporary political animals from
both sides of the zoo ($11.95) as seen by storyboard artist Pete Von Sholly, who invests his
caricatures with ersatz horror movie residue: the sitting Veep, for instance,
appears as Dickula (“who administers a fatal ‘Colinoscopy’ using the former
Secretary of State); and Hillary Clinton, continues icv.2.com, appears in “The
Attack of the Fifty-Something Woman.”
And
then, lest we forget, there are my own books, which are listed here;
click on any cover, and you’ll be transported to a lucid description of the
volume, designed to get you to convince your spouse to put a copy under your
tree this Christmas.
ONWARD, THE
SPREADING PUNDITRY
The Great Ebb
and Flo of Things
The ever-salivating political junkies and huff-’–puff
Sunday morning gassbags are writhing in ecstasy and all but wetting their pants
with excitement as the Iowa caucuses approach. If we are to judge from the
cascade of over-heated pronouncements about the January 3 show-down, the
Presidential Election will be over the next morning: whoever wins in Iowa will
be the next Prez of the U.S. And then what’ll the salivating class do? More of
the same, I’m sure. In moments of high political exuberance like these, it’s
comforting, in a perverse way, to remember just how unimportant the Iowa
caucuses used to be. It wasn’t until Jimmy Carter announced, in early 1976,
that he’d won the Iowa caucuses that we even knew where Iowa was or what
caucuses were. But with Carter’s subsequent success (he made it to the White
House, remember), Iowa displaced New Hampshire as the most significant
political bell wether in a Presidential Election year. I suspect, however, that
the significance arises almost entirely from the attention given the event by
the so-called news media. The caucuses themselves are not particularly
representative of either national preference or Iowa sentiment. Very few of
Iowa’s voting citizens actually participate in the caucuses. They are
fundamentally a political party drill, and if you aren’t active in a political
party—which describes most of the citizens of this happy land—you probably
don’t go to a caucus in Iowa or anywhere else. And yet, the Iowa caucuses have
become a make-or-break event for wannabe U.S. Presidents. Sad.
There
is, however, reason for rejoicing. Just as Oprah Winfrey announced her
endorsement of Barack Obama and Barbra Streisand of Hillary Clinton, Chuck
Norris announced his endorsement of Mike Huckabee. Norris’s standing with young
men as a tough guy will doubtless bolster Huckabee’s reputation: “Mr.
Huckabee,” said the Wall Street Journal,
reporting this event, “has drawn criticism from his Republican opponents that
he isn’t tough enough.” Norris’ endorsement will laminate the nice guy image
with a patina of toughness thereby demonstrating, beyond question, Huckabee’s
fitness for the Presidency. In a tv commercial filmmed shortly after Norris
made his announcement, Huckabee “warned viewers that ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t
endorse. He tells American how it’s gonna be.’” What a relief. Now we can all
go to bed tonight secure in the knowledge that the Iowa caucuses are wholly
irrelevant.
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The “cartoon issue” of The
New Yorker (November 26) published a cartoon by Lee Lorenz, former cartoon editor of the magazine, that looked
remarkably like something Gary Larson did in The Far Side in the 1980s,
according to ElfMagazine.com, reported by E&P. In Lorenz’s 3-panel cartoon, a woman on a park bench is feeding birds; she is
surrounded by more and more birds until, in the last panel, only her handbag
remains, implying that the birds have eaten her. In Larson’s cartoon, a man on
a park bench is surrounded by the birds he is feeding; they seemingly devour
him and leave only his winter coat on the bench. New Yorker cartoon editor Bob
Mankoff, while acknowledging the similarity of the cartoons, said Lorenz
“is not a guy who copies cartoons,” adding: “This is not plagiarism. Rather it
is the result of very creative people developing many ideas from a few
well-established, well-traveled cartoon settings.” Eggs-actly.
