Opus 132: Opus 132 (February 9, 2004). The features this time include
lengthy reviews of the graphic novels Like a River and The Bloody
Streets of Paris and a discussion of Janet Jackson's jug and
the subversive effects of the nipple on Western Civilization.
We also ponder the fate of Disney as Pixar departs and Michael
Eisner shuts down the time-honored hand-animation studios of
the Mouse House, the impending engagement of Cathy, the discovery
of Noah's ark (buried forty feet beneath one of Saddam's palaces
in Iraq, right where we knew all the time it would be), and,
betraying a healthy preoccupation with mammary news, Pamela
Anderson's bosom being nominated for National Landmark status,
and Pete Rose and George Will (champions of ethical reasoning).
And we survey the newscene and review some funnybooks-My Faith
in Frankie, the Azzarello-Risso Batman series, Vertical, Kyle
Baker Cartoonist, Two Step (the best new book around), and the
first issue of the newly reborn Desperate Times. FUNNYBOOK
FAN FARE. I finally
remembered where I'd seen Tom Strong before: as a blond, Captain
Tootsie. ... I didn't care much for Caper
when it first appeared, but in Nos. 2 and 3, Jacob's lover gets
killed (or commits suicide), and with that, at least one of
the Wiess brothers seems a trifle more human and my engagement
with the series grows in consequence. Farel
Dalrymple has difficulty drawing the same face recognizably
from different angles, but his style is otherwise pleasant to
watch. Our interest in the series, however, is fueled by morbid
curiosity about urban bloodshed in the lawless underworld. This
is the Jewish Sopranos in pulp. ... No. 1 of Drake of the 99 Dragons is too darkly colored
and otherwise pretty much of a sameness with other modern samurai
works. ... My Faith in
Frankie No. 1 presents a refreshingly novel concept-a young
heroine whose guardian angel (or "god") protects her
from everything, including, now that Frankie is into her adolescent
years and aspires to being a teenage love object, a sex life.
Crisp, cute, and witty art from Sonny
Liew and Marc Hempel
as Frankie shifts back and forth from the present to the
past, from young woman to kid, the latter appearing as a comic
strip "Frankie and Her Pals," the rendering of which
suggests, however perversely, a bent albeit rousingly amusing
Peanuts. And the god
herself embodies a cute visual concept. ... Lobo,
in "Unbound" and "The Authority vs.," is
beginning to look more like Hellboy
than the satiric mockery of superheroism that his over-the-top
vulgarity once created, and, to complete the transformation
from superior satire to mundane superheroicism, "frag"
has been replaced by the F-word, thus destroying the last vestige
of ridicule in the character's adventures. Too bad. ... It's
fun to see what Eduardo
Risso is doing with the Batman
series he and writer Brian Azzarello have embarked upon (No.
621 ff.), but this series, like so many before it, is yet another
re-imagining of Bruce Wayne's personal tragedy, a kid witnessing
the murder of his parents, configured again chiefly to bring
on stage the usual gang of villains that parade through the
history of the Caped Crusader. Young Wayne's terrible dilemma
is an archetypal invention, no doubt, but I no longer believe
we need to see its re-enactment every six months or so: I doubt
much more of any dramatic, narrative, or thematic value can
be wrung from this single facet of the Darknight's mythos. But
I'll play along to find out anyhow for the sheer sake of Risso's
chiaroscuro rendition if for no other reason. ... Trouble finally finished at No. 5; the
best thing about this tale of teenage sluttishness is the Dodson artwork, although their compulsive treatment of nostrils is
getting somewhat bizarre. Vertigo's
Vertical by Steven Seagle, Mike Allred, and Philip Bond is a vertical comic book: the panels go from top to bottom
in a booklet that is only one panel "wide," long and
skinny (3x10 inches) and bound on the short side, so we read
the story vertically, from top to bottom, along this extenuated
axis. This is actually a silly piece of business concocted entirely
to explore the idea of telling a story in which the format matches
the tale, in this case, a story about a love-deprived young
man who habitually falls from the tops of buildings and survives
(a Freudian metaphor for sexual excitation). Seagle gives this
trifling experiment in form and content a metaphysical significance
that it scarcely warrants. Most of the tale doesn't require
a vertical format for its meaning, so we are left perusing a
comic book that is too awkward to hold and to read, the panel
at the "top" of a spread is 19 inches away from the
panel at the bottom. The whole thing leaves me wondering how
many stories can be told in which a vertical format reinforces
the narrative, er, direction. Next thing you know, someone will
want to do a story that's horizontal. ... In
DC's Plastic Man No.
2, we have more storyboard comedy from the irrepressible Kyle
Baker, whose visual invention and sight gagging is often
matched by hilarious concepts: here, for instance, the idea
that Plastic Man, when he stretches himself into various guises,
squeaks like those balloon animals do as they're being twisted
into shape. Plas assumes the appearance of Scooby-doo and then
vintage Hollywood actor William Powell (as Nick Charles from
the old Thin Man movies). Fun stuff. ... But for amazing manic
hilarities, here's Baker's Kyle Baker Cartoonist, a square-bound $14.95
book brimming with visual zaniness and wit, all 128 pages, some
of it with political satire in evidence. Here's a toy manufacturer
on the telephone, saying, "About China-we don't use the
phrase, 'child labor'; we say, 'By Kids, For Kids.'" And
a picture of Dubya at his desk in the White House, snorting
coke and saying, "I still panic when I see those lights
flashing in the rear view, but then I remember-that's my motorcade."
And here's a dog at the computer, panting over a picture of
a man's legs, crossed at the knee with one foot, therefore,
elevated; the caption, "Doggie Porn." And an autumnal
scene of a tree in the forest saying to other trees, "I've
been thinking-how come when it gets cold, we have to get naked?"
Or, finally, in a jail cell an African-American con tells his
roommate, "I caught my wife eating crackers in bed, so
I killed them." No clue in advance about where that caption
is going until we get there. There's also a section in which
Baker stars with his family. This guy is so good he ought to
make a living as a cartoonist. The
200th issue of Wonder
Woman, marketed as an occasion for celebration, is a mixed
bag-partly by intention. It's a collection of tales by various
writers and artists. The opening story, the conclusion to the
"Down to Earth" story arc, is completely baffling
to someone (me, in this case) who hasn't been following the
tale, issue-by-issue. All the other stories are stand-alone
episodes, and it seems to me if the concluding chapter of an
on-going continuity is to be included in this package, there
ought to be enough explanation to amuse people like me, who
buy it more for the anniversary than for the character. In the
second story, Rick Burchett manages a nearly perfect
imitation of H.G. Peter's
eccentric graphic treatment of the original Wonder Woman,
and Linda Medley evokes the classic style but modernizes it nicely in
her effort. Ty Templeton's
interpretation, however, has a wooden aspect that I haven't
seen in his art heretofore. Nifty pin-ups by Eduardo
Risso and Brian Stelfreeze and Steve Rude are scattered among the narrative
pages, Stelfreeze alone is worth the book. ... Two Step by Warren Ellis as
visualized by Amanda
Conner and inked by Jimmy
Palmiotti is, at no. 2, still the best new comic book on
the stands. Liberally laced with sight gags and background laughs,
Conner (and, I assume, Ellis) exploit the medium's visual capacities
even in page layout, giving us a pictorial way of witnessing
two or three actions almost simultaneously. And there are numerous
instances of engaging comedy-when, for instance, our dubious
hero picks up our dubious heroine, tucks her under his arm,
and sets out to flee the danger zone, she, facing backwards,
sees the menace pursuing them more clearly than he, and so she
urges him to greater effort by slapping his rear end as if he
were a two-legged Seabiscuit. Nifty concept, adroitly managed.
Conner's style, under Palmiotti's deft inks, is a perfect for
the manic mode of Ellis's story-and, truth to tell, even if
it weren't perfect for the subject, I'd rave about it. She can
draw the same pretty female face twice or thrice, recognizable
each time, and make it funny as well as pretty. Not too many
of us can manage that. ... Mark
Millar's funny animal book, The
Unfunnies, is, judging from the first issue, aptly named:
'tain't funny, McGee. In this first episode, Moe the Crow is
jailed for pedophilia and his naive wife, Birdseed Betty, turns
into a sex worker to survive. Porn with feathers, perhaps; but
not funny. Some porn is funny, kimo sabe, but not this. In
Desperate Times no. 0 (a number, we take
it, that comes either before 1 or at the end of infinity), Chris Eliopoulos brings back his loser bachelors, Marty and Toad,
although both seem somewhat thinner, elongated actually, than
in their earlier incarnation. The comedy, however, proceeds
apace. Kennedy the drunken three-toed womanizing sloth is back
(thank goodness: he had the best lines before), but Marty announces,
on the very first page, that he's moving out, leaving Toad and
Kennedy to shift for themselves in their bachelor paradise.
Why? He's now married, we learn: he got married in Las Vegas
while he was drunk. Because he was more than usually impaired
for the occasion, he didn't know he was marrying a teetotaling
vegetarian until he woke up a few days later. Then he discovered
the only thing holding this marriage together was a mutual appreciation
of sex. By way of prolonging this unlikely union, Eliopoulos
takes them on their honeymoon-to Disneyworld. And there he leave
us, until next issue. Meanwhile, Toad tries picking up a woman
at the grocery store, but, as always, Kennedy has the best pick-up
line: "Hey, baby," he says to a likely-looking specimen,
"what say I treat you like dirt, walk all over you, and
use you for sex?" Says she: "Your place or mine?"
The book is not one of those "horizontal" experiments
I referred to, jokingly, when belittling Vertical
a few paragraphs ago, but it is horizontal-6x10 inches,
bound on the short side, printing what were once intended as
daily comic strips (like the Liberty Meadows book, also from Image),
two to a page. Also, Sunday strips. Eliopoulos has tried to
get this endeavor syndicated, alas, without much luck; the funnies
pages of the nation's newspapers would be enlivened with his
crisp, bold artwork and his divergent sense of humor. But since
that didn't work out, we're the beneficiaries of syndicate shortsightedness.
I suspect, however, that Kennedy's pick-up line probably wasn't
in the strips Eliopoulos offered to syndicates. Nor, probably,
was Marty's preoccupation with fornication. And for all of that,
we are grateful. NOUS R US.
On the morning of January 28, I received an e-communique
from the world headquarters and nerve center of Universal Press
Syndicate, the outfit that distributes Cathy
Guisewite's comic strip, Cathy.
Two messages actually. One was that on February 14th,
Valentine's Day, Cathy would be proposed to-presumably by her
long-time beau, Irving. The message went on to say that "Guisewite
isn't saying what Cathy's answer will be, but if Cathy does
say 'yes' ... it'll be a comic and societal milestone."
Guisewite, the missive concluded, would be releasing a statement
on Wednesday, February 11, "about how Cathy's status may
be changing-or not." The second message was at the top
of the page, addressed to the editors of newspapers carrying
the strip: "Even though as a Cathy client, you have the February 14
strip in hand today, Universal Press is asking that you not
let 'the Cathy out of the bag' until cartoonist Guisewite releases
her statement the Wednesday prior to Valentine's Day."
In these days of insatiable 24/7 news cycles? Fat chance. Within
a few minutes of receiving this message via the Internet, I
was watching CNN, which announced that Cathy would be getting
a proposal on Valentine's Day. And then along came the Associated
Press, almost immediately thereafter, with the same information,
also via the 'Net. Obviously, the journalistic profession's
so-called "news embargo" doesn't work with comic strip
news. And since "the Cathy is out of the bag," I have
no further compunction about blabbing it hither and yon myself.
I agree
that Cathy getting engaged is a major comic strip event. (Although
we don't know, yet-and won't until Guisewite lets loose on the
11th-whether Cathy will accept the proposal.) Maybe it's even
a "societal event," considering that Guisewite was
"one of the first female cartoonists to successfully break
into the comics pages in November 1976, cracking the glass ceiling
[of a lair] once occupied only by men." The first cartoonist
of a major feature, that is, since Dale
Messick in June 1940 with Brenda
Starr. After 26 years of fat thighs and swim suits that
don't fit, it's about time, I ween, that Cathy take off on a
slightly different tack. She won't get married, I suppose, for
many many months, so she'll still be the single-young-woman-in-the-workplace
icon that's she's always been, but getting engaged is a step-a
step away from the niche Cathy has so successfully enjoyed, virtually alone, for the entire
run of the strip. That niche has been invaded, recently, by
another strip about a single young working woman -Tina's
Grove by Rina Piccolo.
And I've see here and there that Tina
has elbowed Cathy
out of the line-up at several newspapers since Piccolo's strip
debuted a year or so ago. Could be, then, that Cathy's engagement
is a counter-maneuver aimed at reviving the passions of the
erstwhile dedicated minions who've been following her adventures
for over a quarter of a century. Guisewite tried a little political
commentary several years ago (I think it was during the Dukakis
challenge), but evidently decided that was not the right way
to go. She subsided into the familiar routines. But now, threatened
by Tina, she's fighting
back. If it turns out that Cathy accepts Irving's proposal,
the strip can veer off in an entirely new direction to explore
the "wedding preparation" rituals of this culture.
That could take years. Then there's the actual wedding with
all of its inherent complications and conflicts. Followed by
the honeymoon and getting setup in a joint domicile. Then, who
knows? Children? More pet animals? The mind boggles. This kind
of strategy has been worked before. In Blondie,
for example, the scatterbrain flapper marries the scion of railroad
baron, who disowns his son, thereby throwing the newly wed Bumsteads
out into the world on their own to survive. And survive they
did. They also had a couple children, a litter of dogs, and
other adventures along the way. And Beetle Bailey, you doubtless recall, began as a strip about a layabout
college student, who stumbles, one day, into an army recruiting
office. But Beetle started out as just another worthless professional
student. Change lurks in every corner, down ever alley. (But
that's enough of a hint.) In
my nearly endless raving about Bill
Holbrook's online comic strip, Kevin
& Kell, I mistakenly said Kevin's spouse was a fox.
And I even made a bad joke about it. She is, however, not a
fox; she's a she-wolf. ... Peter Kuper, who is among 39 cartoonists
whose nontraditional efforts are on display through March 14
at the Maryland Institute College of Art, observed: "For
most people, it's a toss-up between Dilbert, Garfield and Superman-that
is [their] broad perception of what comics are [today]. You're
constantly shaking off that stigma." According to Chris
Kaltenbach at the Baltimore
Sun, Kuper "has nothing against superheroes, funny
animals, and maligned office workers-except when that's all
people know about the comics." Today, however, as the exhibit,
"Comics on the Verge," demonstrates, "comics
are on the verge of crossing over into all the areas that are
open to explore," Kuper said. "There isn't anything
you can't do in creative comics. There is even top-level journalism
in comics as a medium." ... Head Press Publishing is going
to capitalize on Mel Gibson's "Passion" motion
picture with a comic book version of the same subject, out in
July. The book, Eye Witness, "uses the Passion story
as the core of a tale of mystery and intrigue," said Robert
Luedke, spokesman for Head Press. Set in present-day Jerusalem,
the comic "utilizes the very same criticisms that are being
leveled against 'Passion' (that a frank depiction of this story
will fuel new anti-Semitism) as part of the storyline."
Luedke says "Christian fiction" like this will help
retailers draw new customers into their stores. We'll see. Anti-Semitism,
in any manifestation these days, is hazardous to the intended
message. ... This year is a "Seussentennial year,"
according to Random House, the publisher of the books of Theodor
Seuss Geisel, the Cat-in-the-Hat guy, who was born in Springfield,
Massachusetts, on March 2, 1904. His books have several images
that recall his youth in the city: the red motorcycles of the
cops in Mulberry Street are Indian Motorcycles, a breed once built in Springfield;
the Deegel trout in McElligot's
Pool are named after the local hatchery run by the Deegel
family; and the factory in The
Lorax recalls the city's old gas works-with its unusual
number of smokestacks. Random House is staging a 40-plus-city
"Imagination Tour," which began January 3 in New York;
for more, see www.seussville.com.
The
big Burbank buzz is all about Pixar walking out after 10 months
of contract negotiations with Disney, the latest fracture in
the Mouse House foundation. Some weeks ago, Roy Disney, nephew
of the company's founder, resigned from the company's board
of directors, fulminating on his way out about how Michael Eisner,
the present high poobah at Disney, was eviscerating the company
by cutting back drastically on hand-wrought feature animation
in favor of CGI. The current Pixar-Disney contract, by which
Disney distributes the Pixar films for fifty-percent of the
take after it reimburses itself for distribution costs, will
expire in 2005; Pixar still has two films to produce under that
contract. In seeking a new arrangement, Pixar presumably sought
a somewhat more advantageous financial situation, an even split
of the profits, for instance, and greater control over its movies.
(Right now, Disney can make sequels apparently without Pixar's
editorial input.) Steve Jobs, Pixar's CEO, did not mince words
as he walked away: he called Disney's recent films "duds"
and the quality of Disney sequels, such as the follow-up to
the blockbuster "Lion King," "pretty embarrassing."
Comparing the huge successes of "Toy Story," "Monsters,
Inc.", and "Finding Nemo"flicks to Disney failures
like "Treasure Planet," Jobs felt justified in saying,
of Disney's vaunted marketing expertise, no amount of skillful
marketing can "turn a dud into a hit." He also cited
research that revealed that the Pixar brand is more powerful
and more trusted in animation than the Disney brand. Jobs said
at least four major Hollywood studios have approached him to
undertake distribution of Pixar films. He also said he enjoyed
working with Disney's Animation President Dick Cook and his
marketing team and he said he would miss "the original
spirit of Disney," an apparent nudge-wink about Roy Disney,
who is attempting a palace coup: he and Steve Gold, another
Disney board member who resigned in protest at Eisner's management
failures, have begun fomenting revolt by encouraging shareholders
to oust Eisner at the annual shareholders meeting in March. One
of the criticisms of Eisner is that he takes a bean-counter's
approach to the creative process. In a recent presentation to
investors, Eisner effectively confirmed that supposition, telling
his audience that the studio would seek "excellent entertainment"
but with "creative cost consciousness"-i.e., as cheaply
as possible. Some of the discontent in the creative corridors
of the company was hinted at recently by an animator named Sylvain
Chomet, who has produced the year's most unusual animated film,
the almost dialogue-less "The Triplets of Belleville,"
a wholly hand-made animated cartoon, in contention, at the moment,
for one of the finalist nominations for an Oscar. He worked
in the Disney shop for four months in 1997 and discovered "what
not to do on a feature film: they have this mentality they're
trying to do 'product.' They are not making films anymore; it's
like they do advertisements now. People are very talented but
there's no soul." And as a result, the films they animate
are cliched and formulaic. "Triplets," in contrast,
took five years to make. Already a hit in France and Britain,
it has some appeal for young people, Chomet says, but it has
a satiric edge that would appeal chiefly to adults. Oddly,
considering the layoffs and shuttings-down that have characterized
the Disney animation operation recently, the company's tv animation
division is scarcely on the verge of collapse. Producing films
for the Disney Channel, Toon Disney, and ABC, the tv division
has more than 30 series on the air seven days a week in over
80 countries. They have 5 series in production and nearly 50
projects in development. And in the feature animated film arena,
the recently released "Teacher's Pet," entirely hand-made,
drew kudos from Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: "This
marvelously quick-witted and gloriously goofy hand-drawn feature
shows there's still more than 21 grams of life left in the form,"
he wrote. And coming this summer, what may be the last hand-wrought
Mickey Mouse film about the three musketeers. Where there's
life, there's hope, saith the guru, and maybe Roy Disney will
successful overthrow the emperor and leave animation on the
throne, where it started out over 75 years ago, building a pace-setting
artistic enterprise. And
here, before we get too far afield, is Popeye's 75th
anniversary as celebrated in the strip last month. Popeye, as every comics scholar and casual peruser of
the funnies must, by now, know, wandered onto the stage of E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre
on January 17, 1929, one in a long parade of Segar's incidental
Dickensian supporting players. "Hey, are you a sailor?"
asks Olive Oyl's brother Castor, who is hoping to put to sea
almost immediately. Staring at him through his one good eye,
a tattooed barnacle with a clay pipe clamped in his gums responds
belligerently: "Ja think I'm a cowboy?" And so did
we meet Popeye. Animated cartoons soon made him famous, and
he's gone through several cartooning custodians in the ensuing
decades. The daily strips are at present reprints (that's "classics"
to the non-cognoscenti), but the Sunday strips are produced
by Hi Eisman, a veteran
cartoonist with a list of credits as long as my leg. He did
comic books with Smokey
Stover, Nancy, Tom and Jerry, The Munsters, Little Lulu, Blondie,
Katy Keene, Archie, and Felix. He pencilled Kerry Drake Sunday and daily, 1957-60; Bringing Up Father dailies 1960-64; and finally got a byline drawing
Bob Dunn's Little Iodine,
1967-84. He's been writing and drawing Popeye
Sundays since 1994. And he has the distinction of also producing
the world's longest running comic strip, the Sunday
Katzenjammer Kids, which he's written and drawn since 1986.
(And, in case you want to pursue the history of Segar and his
Popeye at greater length, there's a whole chapter devoted to
this subject in a book of mine, The Art of the Funnies, which you can glimpse
a preview of by clicking here.) HYPOCRISY
RUN RAMPANT. In the
same week that John Kerry assumed a commanding lead in the race
for the Democrat nomination for President and Punxsutawney Phil
saw his shadow, the nation was treated to Janet Jackson making
a boob of herself on the most-watched tv show in the known universe.
The nation's editorial cartoonists did their best to deal with
all of these topics by combining at least two of them into single
visual commentaries. Howard Dean showed up to rip off Kerry's
shirt over his right breast, exposing the campaign contributions
he'd taken from special interests. Groundhogs proliferated and
instead of seeing their shadows, they saw Jackson's naked teta,
which, for Robert Ariail, meant "six more weeks of seeing
the Janet Jackson clip on CNN"; for Bill Schorr, "six
more weeks of Jackson Family scandals." Many cartoonists
played with the various meanings of the term "boob,"
obviously delighting in a news event that permitted them to
fling the word around on the most serious page in a family publication
by applying the term to stupidity or the television tube itself.
CBS was a "superboob" for permitting this catastrophe
(my favorite is John Sherffius' picture of Jackson with
a perfectly rounded CBS eye serving as her bared right bosom
over the caption "Superbowl Boobs Exposed"). And as
soon as the Emp-tv folks claimed the whole thing was a "wardrobe
malfunction," we had several naked Dubyas dealing with
the Emperor's New Fiscal Plan or with the failure of intelligence
agencies. The hypocrisy of the burgeoning brouhaha was sometimes
the subject: Signe Wilkinson depicted an NFL official expressing
his concern that Jackson's "tacky performance will tarnish
the entire NFL family" as he stood before a small familial
gathering of other NFL performers, including a generously endowed
cheerleader, a crotch-clutching rock singer, a beer-guzzling
fan, and a male personage wearing a T-shirt advertising Erectile
Dysfunction, Inc. The only thing missing was a horse fart. By
the end of the week-just five days after the horror was unveiled-on
Daryl Cagle's editorial cartoon website (cagle.slate.msn.com), Jackson's jug
was the subject of 50 or 60 cartoons, representing about half
the full-time editooning fraternity. And this development is
cause for celebration: clearly, "boob" has been outed
at last after centuries of Puritanical cover-ups. On
Ted Koppel's "Nightline" shortly after the scandal
broke (and it took almost 24 hours to break because the glimpse
of Jackson's headlight was so brief almost no one actually saw
it well enough to realize what, exactly, had happened), one
of his interviewees supplied the best response to all the excitement
by observing that the televised Superbowl is not the cathedral
of wholesome family entertainment everyone seems to think it
is, judging from the extravagance of their alarm over Jackson's
exposure. The Superbowl on tv is surrounded by jokey locker
room commercials and punctuated by cheerleaders who nearly fall
out of their decolletage, and its audience traditionally lays
in a year's supply of beer to be consumed during the game. The
event ain't high culture, kimo sabe. Even George Will, with
whom I seldom agree, would agree, here, with me. His saving
grace (perhaps the only gracenote in an otherwise savagely conservative
career) is his entirely accurate description of football as
senseless paramilitary violence punctuated by committee meetings
(which he contrasts with what he perceives to be the more "American"
sport of baseball, a pastoral game about community and the individual
striving to bring someone home). His descriptions are congruent
with traditional American mythology, no question; I suspect,
however, that Will has not realized that the government he so
admires these days no longer mirrors the mythology, that, in
fact, it embodies the "non-American" football description
to a breathtakingly exact degree. But that's beside the point.
The uncontested best line about Janet's chest came from David
Letterman, who announced he was getting tired, after only a
day, of all MTV folks pretending to apologize to all the viewers
who were pretending to be offended. The
colossal hypocrisy of the public outcry is more than evident
when we remember that our society supports a chain of restaurants
called Hooters. And every year about this time, large quantities
of us enthusiastically tune in to an entertainment industry
award show the name of which, Golden Globes, evokes more vivid
memories of the non-existent necklines of the Hollywood actresses
on exhibition than of the size or shape of the trophy itself.
The reason we fail to see the hypocrisy is that it isn't hypocritical
at all. The real sin in regard to golden globes is not their
visibility as spheres of femininity. The real sin is revealing
nipples. That's the sin that Janet Jackson committed. Her performance,
until the moment of revelation, was bracketed by other prancing
females whose abbreviated costumes left very little to the imagination
and whose gyrations flagrantly suggested sexual intercourse-all
much more wanton than her naked breast, exposed and lonely.
But she displayed her nipple, however briefly. That was the
unforgivable sin. As S.A. Bennett observed in reviewing Moon no. 1 in the Comics Buyer's
Guide long ago (over 18 months ago), when a man strips a
young woman, leaving her topless, "that's okay since she's
drawn sans nipples." That's the standard of decency in
America, aristotle; and now we all know. Janet Jackson, too. ARE THEY RIOTING
IN THE STREETS YET? One
of the things about at least a couple of the annual comicons
that never fails to amuse me is the management's attitude about
nipples. And not all nipples; just those on female chests. Ostensibly,
the management is opposed to displays of "nudity."
But actually, "nudity" is not the object of the crusade.
In fact, nudity is permissible under certain conditions. Humans
depicted from the rear, for instance, can be completely naked.
But neither male nor female genitals can be displayed. Ditto
female nipples. (Male nipples are okay.) Such nudities
as are prohibited must be "masked" or in some fashion
hidden from view. As a result of this policy, works of art in
which nude females appear are deliberately defaced by those
displaying them. Little snippets of masking tape are stuck onto
the nipples, covering them up. It's as if the sight of a woman's
nipple alone is enough to incite otherwise civilized males to
rapine and other wholesale ravishments. (With a little imagination,
of course, it's possible to envision a nipple where the masking
tape is; but let's not be logical, shall we? And who was it
who said "concealing is sexier than revealing"? Jean
Harlow? George Burns? Voltaire? Randolph Scott? That's right:
everyone--everyone knows it.) We all realize
the reason for such policies as this. It's to protect the children.
A laudable reason, surely. Children must be protected. (In homes
viewing the Superbowl, little children were probably out of
the room during the half-time show-or wouldn't understand what
they saw anyhow; and teenagers, if they were around to see,
weren't seeing anything they hadn't, in our culture, seen before.)
But little kids come to comic book conventions, and they walk
around looking at everything. And if we didn't mask nipples,
children would see them and--and what? Run riot in the streets?
Don't children
have mothers of the female persuasion? Well, yes, runs the reasoning:
but they don't know what nipples are for, and until they're
old enough to know, we need to prevent the matter from coming
up. Does this
make sense to you? What are nipples for anyhow? Don't children
know? If they don't, how did they spend their infancy? Well, bottle
babies don't know. And we have to protect bottle babies . .
. Geez, gang. You can tell
that I regard the so-called logic of this policy as hilarious.
So it should come as no surprise that some years ago I found
a newsstory about a trial in Lafayette, Louisiana, entertaining
as well as educational. A local ordinance applying to "gentlemen's
clubs" employs the same logic as some comicon managers:
nude female dancers, the law stipulates, cannot bare their nipples.
In 1993, a raid on one of the establishments where nude women
regularly cavort produced the arrest of seven of the cavorters
who were "dancing with their nipples exposed." This
was not a trivial matter: in Lafayette where they take nipples
as seriously as they do at comicons, exposing them is a felony
that could result in a prison term. The defense
lawyer, however, initiated a supremely satirical strategy. He
had the dancers tell the truth. And the truth, apparently, is
that the dancers had found a way around the law. The relevant
statute, while specifying that nipples must be covered up, does
not say what the covering should be. The dancers explained that
they had, indeed, complied with the letter of the law: they
covered their nipples by painting on a layer of latex, which
they allowed to dry and then applied foundation, powder and
a blush makeup to make the latex shield resemble a nipple. No, I'm not
making this up. To assist
the jury in comprehending the effects of this maneuver, the
defense lawyer presented several of the dancers in their prescribed,
er, costume. After eyeballing the real thing-or, rather, the
fake-the jury found all the women innocent. And so once
again, the appearance is more persuasive than the reality. Life is just
full of such lessons as this. Of course,
at comicons we've known this for years: it is the appearance
that is being censored, after all-not to mention the reality.
But a variety of appearance is dubbed "art," and when
it comes to art, we can tolerate almost any amount of nudity.
IF NUDE IS
ART, WHY IS NAKED PORN? "In Picasso's
work, everything is staked on sensation and desire. His aim
was not to argue coherence but to go for the strongest level
of feeling. . . . The most powerful element was sex. The female
nude was his obsessive subject. Everything in his pictorial
universe, especially after 1920, seemed related to the naked
bodies of women. Picasso imposed on them a load of feeling,
ranging from dreamy eroticism (as in some of his paintings of
his mistress Marie-Therese Walter in the '30s) to a sardonic
but frenzied hostility, that no Western artist had made them
carry before. He did this through metamorphosis, recomposing
the body as the shape of his fantasies of possession and of
his sexual terrors. Now the hidden and comparatively decorous
puns of Cubism (the sound holes of a mandolin, for instance,
becoming the mask of Pierrot) came out of their closet. 'To
displace,' as Picasso so described the process, 'to put eyes
between the legs, or sex organs on the face. To contradict.
Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My
painting is a series of cock-and-bull stories.'" So saith
art critic Robert Hughes. And here
is culture critic Susan Sontag on "the pornographic imagination":
Pornography's aim, she says, is to induce sexual excitement.
(And wasn't Picasso's aim somewhat the same?) The pornographer
includes nothing in his or her work that does not contribute
directly to the erotic stimulation that is his or her purpose.
But this "purported aim or effect," Sontag writes, is not a
"defect." Other kinds of literature aim with similar obsessiveness
to excite the reader or observer. Pornography's "celebrated
intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species
of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims
to 'excite' in the same way that books which render an extreme
form of religious experience aim to 'convert.'" The problem
with pornography is a social one, not an artistic one. Says
Sontag: "There still remains a sizable minority of people who
object to or are repelled by pornography not because they think
it's dirty but because they know that pornography can be a crutch
for the psychologically deformed and a brutalization of the
morally innocent." Thus, their objection to pornography is rooted
in fear-very possibly, fear of seeing in pornographic works
a secret repressed version of their own psyche, something they've
been persuaded is unwholesome in their own natures. Attacking
pornography perpetuates that repression. What's really
at issue in the availability of pornography, Sontag writes,
is "a concern about the uses of knowledge itself. There's a
sense in which all knowledge is dangerous, the reason being
that not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential
knowers." It may be, she says, that certain kinds of knowledge
are bad for certain kinds of people-particularly those whose
life experiences have not properly prepared them for this new
knowledge, whatever it may be. And so we
come back to the children again. What should they know? And
when should they know it? The problem
with pornography is not that it is often lousy art or atrocious
writing. If it's bad, it's because genuinely talented artists
and writers have been persuaded not to try their hands at this
nasty stuff. No, the problem is that pornography is about sex.
And so are female nipples. To adults, female nipples suggest
sexual activity, not dinnertime. And we aren't prepared, yet,
to let children have much knowledge about sex. They're not ready.
They may be, in Freud's phrase, "polymorphously perverse" in
some sexual sense, but they aren't yet emotionally equipped
to enjoy sex the way adults do. So we want to keep it a secret
just a little longer. Like the fiction of Santa Claus. What
harm can that do? The artist,
like Picasso, must express himself. Why can't cartoonists do
the same? Nekkid wimmin in cartoons represent just another manifestation
of the artistic motive: the same passion that drove Rubens to
paint naked women moves a cartoonist to do the same. For the
visual artist, the impulse to explore his human surroundings
and to convert his impressions to overtly conscious understanding
of the world is the motive. The graphic
artist draws or paints in order to "visualize" the world around
him. The visualization involves a creative act that organizes
the riot of color and form that he sees before him. We all try
to organize the confusion of our sensing of the world around
us. Language is the most conspicuous evidence of this impulse:
merely by stringing words together in a meaningful sentence,
we bring stasis to flux, order to chaos, organization to confusion.
"Organization" is a species of "interpretation," and the artist's
effort is to interpret the world he sees for himself, essentially
for his own psychic benefit. As an incidental matter, other
witnesses to the work may grasp and agree with the interpretation.
Drawing women in the nude for a male artist is clearly an interpretive
exercise of sexual fantasy. The interpretation involves erotic
imagination as well as purely artistic motives. The existence
of two sexes will do that. That's nature taking one of the courses
open to it. The cartoonist
or comic book artist, as a species of graphic artist, draws
nekkid wimmin for precisely the same reasons. And when his effort
results in pictures that are vaguely humorous (or even uproariously
comedic), that merely reflects the lunatic interpretation a
comedian is likely to make of any aspect of the human condition.
The impulses being indulged, however, are the same for the cartoonist
as for the Grand Masters. Cartoonists and comic book artists
should therefore have the same rights as Rubens. Their works
should be permitted to hang in public places. Like museums.
Like exhibitions. Like conventions, even comic book conventions. And children
should be taught by their parents about how to view such works.
Parents who are timid about sex or reluctant to talk about it
should not be permitted to foist off on to the rest of civilization
their timidities, turning us all into agents of repression.
That way lies madness (as you may have noticed). GRAFIC NOVELZ.
Like a River (110 6x9-inch pages in paperback; black-and-white, $9.95
from Humanoids Publishing) achieves poetry by blending a terse
almost recalcitrant dialogue with distinctly pictorial narrative
mannerisms in a story by the Swiss cartoonist Pierre
Wazem. The tale focuses on a man named Vlad, who lives alone
in a shack on the edge of a river running through what might
be bayou country. He spends his nights drinking at a nearby
saloon and his days, after recovering from the inevitable hangover,
fishing in the river. He alternately rages at the fish and the
river or sulks in his booze, drinking himself into a nightly
stupor, his mind fogged with half-remembered incidents from
his happier early life. Vlad murmurs a name occasionally, Macha,
which, we learn, is the name of his deceased wife. Wazem launches
into his story cinematically, with half-a-dozen wordless pages
in which his "camera" explores the shack and, minutely,
its contents and surroundings. Pausing at each individual panel,
we are forced to inspect the pictorial contents, to try to understand
their significance. Much of the story is told visually without
verbal accompaniment, a maneuver that slows the narrative pace,
giving this enterprise its distinctively lonely languid aura.
The silences are, moreover, puzzling, even oppressive. And Vlad
is the victim as much as the instigator of a pervading sense
of loneliness that eventually overwhelms him. He takes out a
shotgun and is about to discharge it into his mouth when his
long-forgotten adult son shows up at the door of the shack.
"Are you going hunting, Dad?" he says. Vlad puts the
gun aside, offering no explanation for what his son knows he
was about to do. The youth, now eighteen years old, was taken
from his father seven years or so ago and placed in some sort
of foster care. He's now studying at an art institute. He is
appalled by his father's unkempt appearance and the squalor
of the shack. Wazem's loose, sketchy drawing style-sometimes
a fine penline, sometimes a slap-dash bold brush stroke, often
embellished with careless cross-hatching-creates a slatternly
atmosphere, perfectly suited to the sad, dysfunctional life
being portrayed in the book's pages. Father and
son spend a couple days together, repairing the roof of the
shack, walking in the woods, drinking. The son gives his father
a bath, the first he's had in weeks. And the father looks at
the drawings his son brought with him, pictures of his wife,
the mother of the youth. "She wasn't like that," he
tells his son; "she was much more beautiful." He tells
his son to try again, but the youth cannot produce a picture
that satisfies his father. Vlad takes
his son down to the river and tells him that his mother used
to say, "Life is like a river." It rushes along and
takes you with it. Sometimes you are thrown against rocks or
tree limbs; usually, you get free. Sometimes you don't. You
crash into a rock. "And you just get stuck there,"
he says, "in the stagnant water." He stands up to
his ankles in a shallow pool of water. Silence. They return
to the shack, and the father tells his son the macabre manner
of Macha's death. The son now understands how his father came
to be stuck in stagnant water and why he was removed from his
father's care, and when he returns to school, he is reconciled
to his father. After the son leaves, Vlad goes back to the river
with his fishing rod. "Come on, then," he says, addressing
his prey in the roiling torrent, "show me your big silver
belly. You belong to me-to Macha and me." The simple
tale of loss and reconciliation and rejuvenation gains its haunting
poetic timbre from Wazem's narrative breakdowns-the long silent
sequences-and from his blowzy, threadbare drawing mannerisms
as well as from the sad and grinding poignance of the story
itself. In contrast, we have a long who-dunit by Jacques Tardi, the celebrated French graphic
novelist. In The Bloody
Streets of Paris (190 9x12-inch pages in black-and-white
paperback; ibooks, $17.95), Tardi adapts a prose detective story
by French writer Leo Malet to the comics medium. The result is prose, not poetry, but
Tardi's pictorialization nonetheless adds the characteristic
visual dimensions to the tale. Bloody is one of several Malet socio-political
thrillers about the anarchistic private eye, Nestor Burma, that
Tardi has transformed into the visual-verbal medium. I don't
know about the others, but the denouement of this resonates
with the standard tell-tale mechanism of the vintage drawingroom
mystery: collecting all the suspects and principals in one room
at the end of the story, the clever sleuth makes them listen
to his explanation of the mystery, concluding by revealing the
identity of the murderer, who is always among the throng the
sleuth has summoned for the recital. In adapting this verbose
custom to comics, Tardi has little choice but to float speech
balloons laden with verbiage through the panels of page after
page of Burma's exposition. Tardi breaks up the prolixity, however,
by augmenting Burma's discourse with pictorial vignettes that
visually recall the key moments of the adventure as the detective
describes their significance. But Tardi deploys the visual aspects
of his art in other ways, too. The story
takes place in mid-1941, less than a year after the German occupation
of France began. We meet Nestor Burma, who had been a soldier
in the French army, in a German prison compound, where he and
countless others are being "repatriated," prepared
for a return to civilian life once it has been ascertained that
they will not be a threat to the Nazi regime. The story itself
is too long and convoluted to rehearse at length here. (Burma
takes 14 pages, almost 10% of the book, for his explanation
of the mystery.) Besides, if I tell the whole story, the mystery
will be revealed. Briefly and somewhat cryptically, then, the
puzzle Burma solves starts with a fellow prisoner who is suffering
from amnesia and is called, for want of an actual name, Globule.
Other Frenchmen had found him dragging himself across a road,
his face bloody and his feet too badly burned to walk. After
a time in the camp, Globule dies-in Burma's arms, his last words,
"Tell Helene -120 Rue de la Gare." For the next 170
pages, Burma tries to discover the significance of this deathbed
supplication. And he eventually does, discovering along the
way the explanation for Globule's burned and bloody appearance
as well as the identity of those who tortured him. Tardi's drawing
style employs a simple bold outline and profusely spotted solid
blacks, all embellished with two tones of gray throughout. His
visualization of his characters is cartoony rather than illustrative
(For Better or For Worse rather than Mary Worth or Judge Parker),
but in rendering the environs through which they move, Tardi
resorts to a linear realism that is nearly photographic. (In
fact, some scenes look very much as if they'd been traced from
a photograph.) Thanks to Malet, the course of Burma's peregrinations
is long and full of twists and turns. But at nearly ever juncture,
he finds a new fragment of information, which, eventually, he
combines with other fragments to piece together the whole story.
As in every good detective story, the pieces begin to come together
about three-quarters of the way through (the identity of Globule
is revealed on page 123), and at that point, the narrative gathers
momentum and moves somewhat inexorably to the drama of the drawingroom
exposition. But even in the early stages of his search, Burma's
tiny discoveries alternate with enough big ones to keep our
interest from flagging. The mannerisms
of Tardi's cartoony style make his cast members instantly recognizable
on every appearance, and he has an unusually large number of
principals. (Many of whom, Burma included, smoke pipes almost
constantly.) The contribution to the tale made by the pictorial
method is chiefly in timing, in pacing, the narrative, occasionally
for dramatic impact. But Tardi's sense of place, his ability
to imbue the story with palpable locale, is masterful, as cartoonist
Art Spiegelman notes in a brief foreword. Tardi's work is not poetry, like Wazem's, but it is
surpassingly accomplished prose. Like prose, Tardi's adaptation
is clear and evocative, with the emphasis on the former. In
short, the book is an absorbing mystery novel, enhanced by Tardi's
graphic skills. CIVILIZATION'S
LAST OUTPOST. If
I happen to be caught in a longer-than-usual line at check-out
at the supermarket, I pick up and read the tabloids that are
usually arrayed in profusion near the cash register. I figure
that management has placed them there to provide reading matter
for customers in lines. It's a simple courtesy, I feel. But
it's also a strategy: by giving us something to read, we don't
notice how long we're standing in line, and so we'll come back
again some day. Occasionally, I buy one of the tabloids. Usually,
when I do, it's Weekly World News. This one is more outrageous than just about any
publication on the planet. The first
one I bought, many years ago, had two front-page headlines that
were absolutely irresistible. One screamed out that a man's
head had been blown off with an exploding cigar. The other proclaimed
that a quadriplegic had saved his father's life by rolling four
miles to obtain help when his father's tractor had rolled over
on the old man. Alas, I lost this one, a genuine classic. Later,
I bought one with a photograph of the Loch Ness monster on the
cover. Well, I bethought myself, at least that mystery is solved:
with photographic evidence before us, how can we doubt the existence
of Nessie? A few months ago, the WWN ran a front-page story about the hairless
monkey that Saddam and Osama bin Laden had adopted. Last week,
I bought another one. This one's largest headline announced
"Noah's Ark Found in Iraq." Well, anyone can say that,
of course, but they had a photograph of it. That's persuasive.
Apparently, Saddam has kept the Ark hidden forty feet under
one of his palaces. The "gopher-wood ship" was discovered
to be littered with the bones of at least 60 extinct species,
including winged horses and unicorns. And they also found five
more Commandments that were apparently never transmitted to
Moses with the other ten. The new Commandments warn against:
cloning and stem-cell research, one-world government controlled
by multinational corporations, discriminating against people
because of their sexual preferences, accumulating riches at
the expense of others, and leaving this planet in search of
another world. This issue
(dated January 6, 2004) is freighted with fascinating stuff.
Here's a Texas girl auctioning her virginity to pay off her
credit card bill. And in Peru, they've found 16th
century wreckage of a UFO. (Most of these things-including the
quadriplegic kid and the exploding cigar stories-happen in the
remote jungles of far-off South American countries beyond the
reach of investigative reporters of mainstream journalism.)
Every page presents new alarms. Here's a story about a witch
doctor threatening to turn Camila Parker-Bowles, Prince Charles'
paramour, into a man-with a photograph showing how she'd look
with a beard. Not much different, actually. Another story "blows
the lid off 500-year-old cover-up," announcing that the
Earth is flat. Among the proofs offered, the New Testament's
Book of Matthew which tells how Satan took Jesus "to a
very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world
in their glory"-which, the expert saith, would not be possible
unless the Earth were flat. You can't see all the kingdoms of
the Earth if the Earth is round. Pretty convincing. A couple
pages further on, it is announced that Canada is going to move
Niagra Falls to "an undisclosed location" because
it's too close to the U.S. They'll use giant cranes to effect
the move, loading "the massive foundation stones"
on to rail cars to be transported to the new location. If the
new location is "undisclosed," it'll sure play havoc
with the tourist trade; but, no matter. There are
also numerous stories about terribly overweight people (with
photos) and a story about Pamela Anderson's breasts, which the
American Association of Breast Aficionados has proposed to the
Interior Department be declared a national landmark, joining
such other protrubences as Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, and
the Alamo. "Ms. Anderson's magnificent bosom has as much
cultural significance as the Brooklyn Bridge," said Bob
Genorwitz, communications director of the AABA. The White House,
"surprisingly," has not "flatly rejected"
the proposal. ("Flatly." Ha. These WWN writers-what playful wags they are.)
According to an unnamed White House official, "a landmark
doesn't necessarily have to be a building; it can be anything
that the Secretary of the Interior determines is of 'exceptional
value' in representing an important theme in our nation."
Well, Pamela's boobs certainly qualify, then. But the idea has
met with some objection. A Hispanic group insists that Pam's
jugs shouldn't get landmark status until Jennifer Lopez's tush
gets similar recognition. Others object because Pamela has had
implants. Or did at one time. And maybe does again. "That's
another reason why [the landmark] designation is so important,
Genorwitz asserts. "Once a building or other object is
declared a national landmark, it can't be altered or tampered
with, even by a private owner." So Pam couldn't tinker
with the size of her hooters again "without permission
from the federal government." One congressman cautioned
against taking all this too lightly: "After all,"
he said, "her bosom is as American as hot dogs and apple
pie." All of which-the
Ark, the Loch Ness monster, moving Niagra Falls-makes you wonder.
Do people actually believe all this highly fantasized "news"?
Are Americans really that gullible? Sadly-yes, they are. George
W. ("Whopper") Bush and the Bush League found that
out long ago and continue to exploit it. They know that anyone
who believes the Earth is flat will also believe that Dubya's
clean air act will make the air actually cleaner, that adding
millions to the cost of Medicare will somehow ensure the survival
of a program that already faces bankruptcy in a few years, that
Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction, and that Dubya
is such a good and decent man that he'd never lie to us. But Pete Rose did. And he's finally confessed.
Charlie Hustle's admission, however, scarcely ended the controversy
that has stalked him since 1989, when reports of his betting
on baseball forced him to accept banishment from the game. Sportswriters
and commentators of all stripes are now blathering about how
Rose's confession might stimulate sales of his newest autobiography,
thus enabling him to "profit handsomely." Oh, yes.
And no other professional athlete profits handsomely from whatever
misrepresentation is the current fashion? Steroids, anyone?
That anyone connected with professional sports would complain
about obscene profits is ludicrous. That anyone would complain
about the moral and ethical standards in the same arena is likewise
highly laughable. But then we have George Will, the man whose very facial
expression is frozen in permanent disapproval of everything,
taking Rose to task for lying for fourteen years-an ethical
lapse of such stupendous proportions that he should never, ever,
be allowed to enter baseball's Hall of Fame-even as a common
tourist. This is the same stalwart pundit who attacked Jesse
Jackson in 1988 with a series of questions designed to demonstrate
that Jackson wasn't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to
be President-a qualification that Will was apparently capable
of overlooking in 2000, when he defended the intellectual shortcomings
of George W. ("War Lord") Bush by opining that "the
wise leader should strive to have intellectuals on tap and not
be one himself." Quite apart from such instances of blatant
hypocrisy are Will's journalistic ethics. He was among those
who coached Ronald Reagan for his debate with Jimmy Carter in
1980, but he was able to praise Reagan's "thoroughbred
performance" when he appeared later on "Nightline,"
without disclosing that he was one of the stage directors of
the performance. He never told us, either, that his second wife
was on Robert Dole's campaign staff in 1996 while he, the dispassionate
man of reason, was applauding Dole's superior credentials for
the Presidency. He's lately been caught praising entities whose
success increases his income. His response: "My business
is my business." And so, I ask, who is he to question Rose's
ethics? In fact, most critics of Rose seem to forget that professional
athletes are celebrated for their physical prowess and cunning
rather than for the sort of intellectual and moral sophistication
that would enable them to avoid career-threatening disasters
off the playing field when suddenly confronted by them. And
we've been forgiving them all for decades for being less than
moral giants. Why pick on Rose all of a sudden? By the way,
speaking of George WMD Bush, the latest (as of January 11) tally
of U.S. military dead and casualties in Iraq has reached 3,482,
of which only 633 are deaths (from hostile fire as well as accidents).
The "wounded" include, I suspect, an unusually high
number of persons who've lost limbs because the undersides of
hummers and other vehicles are not sufficiently armored to protect
their occupants from bombs that explode while they're driving
over them. Oh, and while
we're on the subject of conservative commentators, here's what
a mock-loyal listener wrote recently in a letter to Rush the
Limbaugh: "When you do the arithmetic, that works out to
at least 11 hits of opiate-based analgesics a day-enough to
put any lily-livered liberal in the emergency room, yet it didn't
even slow you down! ... Most of us never suspected that you
were ripped to the gills. You always made perfect sense to us." You'll notice
that the liberal press has shown remarkable restraint in its
treatment of ol' Rush-beau. Very few ya-de-ya-de-ya-ya columns.
In fact, none that I've seen. And while editoonists lambasted
him for his ESPN faux pax (mostly commonly by depicting him
with his foot in his mouth), virtually none of them drew cartoons
about Rush's substance abuse. Imagine what Rush would have done
had Al Franken been hauled off for drug addiction. Liberal commentators
are just so much more civilized that the conservatives. (Or
maybe they're just so thoroughly intimidated by the conservative
press lords, who, in turn, are cowed by the Bush League, that
they dare not utter a single anti-Rush syllable.) To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
|
send e-mail to R.C. Harvey Art of the Comic Book - Art of the Funnies - Accidental Ambassador Gordo - reviews - order form - Harv's Hindsights - main page |