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Opus 155: Opus 155 (February 13, 2005). The rabbit feat this time celebrates
Black History Month with a short reprise of the career of one of the
great African-American cartoonists, E. Sims Campbell. That's towards
the end. The intervening topics and their order are as follows: Nous R Us -more comic book character movies, Disney's Uncle Remus
may make a come-back, The Simpsons book, Stan Lee and the "60 Minutes
Wednesday" gaff, and the Spirit movie; Funnybook Fan Fare -Shanna,
Concrete: The Human Dilemma, Gun Fu, The Wicked West, Wyatt Earp: Dodge
City, and Angeltown; Comic Strip Watch -Zippy's secret, Cathy's wedding, Ted Rall and Pat
Tillman again, Garry Trudeau and Honey (is she Peanuts' Marcia reincarnated?),
and Prickly City dropped at
the Chicago Trib; Civilization's Last Outpost -why models
walk that way and termite flatulence; and, after Black History Month,
a little punditry. Finally, our usual Friendly Reminder: Remember, when
you get to the Members' Section, the useful "Bathroom Button"
(also called the "print friendly version") of this installment
that can be pushed for a copy that can be read later, at your leisure
while enthroned. Without further adieu-
NOUS R US Comic
book heroes aren't doing as well at the motion picture box office as
it seemed they would in the first flush of financial excitement over
the X-men and Spider-Man movies. According to Andrew Smith at Captain Comics, "Electra" never got higher than fifth in
the top ten box office hits and dropped off the list altogether after
three weeks; and he goes on to note that "Catwoman" was a
financial as well as a critical flop, ditto "Daredevil" and
"The Punisher," and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"
"barely covered its all-star salaries." Moreover, "comic-book-like
movies such as 'Matrix Revolutions' and 'Van Helsing' imploded on impact."
John Lippman at the Wall Street Journal wonders if superheroines
will ever match superheroes in box office appeal. And Robert Weinberg,
a former Marvel writer, opines that "guys like girls dressed up
in sexy outfits, but when it comes to action, they still prefer the
men doing it." And Monohla Dargis in The
New York Times thinks there's something "disturbing, even disrupting,
about a woman who walks (or flies) alone." Nuts. "Alias"
on tv still reigns supreme; "Kill Bill" movies are doing all
right. Ditto the first Lara Croft movie. Discounting female action characters
because they're female is sexist tripe. I don't think Hollywood is finished
milking these cash cows yet, and here's Vincent P. Bzdek at the Washington Post to second the motion: No fewer than 18 big-budget movies
scheduled for release this year were inspired by comic books or superheroes,
including, this spring and summer, "Batman Begins," "Fantastic
Four," "Constantine," "Sin City," "Ultraviolet"
and "Sky High." The boom was already well underway last year.
Eight superhero movies made it to multiplexes in 2004, led by two of
the year's five biggest box-office draws, "Spider-Man 2" and
"The Incredibles." Together, "Spider-Man" (2002)
and "Spider-Man 2" have made more than $1.6 billion in the
United States, making them the sixth and eighth most popular movies
ever here. And the hero worship doesn't seem likely to stop any time
soon. "Superman Returns," under the direction of Bryan Singer
("X-Men," "X2"), is scheduled for release in 2006,
the first new Superman movie in 20 years. DC Comics hopes to release
films of "Wonder Woman," "The Flash" and "Shazam"
in the next couple of years. Its rival, Marvel Comics, has ambitious
plans to bring more of its wards to the big screen, too, including "Captain
America," "The Phantom," "Ghost Rider," and
sequels-or additional sequels-to "Hulk," "X-Men"
and "Spider-Man." Disney's famed (and infamous) "Song
of the South" may get released on DVD sometime in the near future.
The movie has been kept locked up for decades because of the "happy
darkie" portrayal of Uncle Remus, whose tales of Br'er Rabbit in
animated sequences spice up the otherwise live-action flick. I obtained
a bootleg copy of the film some years ago, but I'd love to have a copy
that isn't blurry: the animation sections are nifty. The rumor about
the possibility of the DVD, by the way, is promulgated at Mark Evanier's
www.povonline.com, one of
the Web's happiest and most informative sites; we recommend it unreservedly.
... "The Simpsons," as every fan of the show knows, is the
10th longest-running tv series ever. Chris Turner, one of
the fan-addicts in question, has authored an exhaustive tome about the
show, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation, which,
Louis Jacobson tells us in the Washington
City Paper, reveals that Turner believes the show "has embodied,
even driven, nearly every major cultural trend in the past decade and
a half," making it "by far the most important cultural institution
of its time"; it is, Turner allows, impossible to imagine contemporary
pop culture without it. ... Cracked,
the longest-lived of the Mad imitations,
is still alive, apparently; it was recently purchased by the Teshkeel
Media Group, a Kuwait company that develops original material for children
throughout the world, "with a focus on the Arab and Islamic markets."
... Graphic novels got a three page fold-out spread in Time for February 7; the spotlight falls on Paul Hornschemeier, Marjane
Satrapi, David B., Rieko Saibara, and Joann Sfar, with an aside to Art
Spiegelman. ... "The Incredibles" collected top honors at
the 32nd Annie Awards, winning best animated feature, best
directing, and best voice acting. ...
Qkids, a new magazine of short stories, articles and comics (sounds
a bit like Pilote or Spirou) is published from Sweden but edited
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and sold throughout the Arab world. Its aim,
according to editor Fahd F. Al-Hajji, is "to wean Muslim children
away from satellite tv and expose them to Islamic views." Muslim
children, he noted, generally lack a reading habit: they are always
glued to tv, which is unhealthy. ... In Greece, the Austrian author
of The Life of Jesus, a comic book that portrays Jesus as a hippy, was
tried in an Athens court and found guilty of blasphemy; he was given
a suspended sentence of 18 months, but various writers' groups are protesting
because they fear this case will discourage other artists and publishers
working on similar books-"a serious blow to freedom of expression
in the country," they said. When a U.S. District Court ruled in
favor of Stan Lee and said
Marvel had to pay him 10 percent of the profits from Marvel Enterprises
film and tv productions, "60 Minutes Wednesday" pounced on
the event, regurgitated a Bob Simon interview of some months ago, and
added fresh material to it. Lee, obviously reluctant to go into much
detail, said he was "hurt" by the company's refusal to pay
him what his contract called for and brought his suit with reluctance.
Simon's questions and comments, clearly intended to heighten the drama
of this incident, kept referring to the characters Lee created and how
he was, in effect, being robbed by Marvel, who was going to the bank
with earnings gained from the sweat of his creative brow. Immediately
after the program aired, objections burst forth about the injustice
of Lee's taking all the credit for creating the characters that populate
the Marvel Universe. "It's amazing that he walks away with all
the credit and all the money for some of the creation of these characters,"
said Robert Katz, nephew of Jack
Kirby, who probably contributed at least as much to the ambiance
of the Marvel Universe as Lee. "The artists who did the lion's
share of the creation have walked away with absolutely nothing,"
he added. Lee, it looked like, was once again taking more than his legitimate
share of the credit-and this time, he was going to go to the bank, too.
All this holy ire springs from some vague suppositions, though; and
maybe Lee isn't the self-serving monster he seems. First, I've seen
recent interviews with him (by Larry King, for one) in which Lee studiously
avoids taking sole credit for Spider-Man and the like: he interrupted
King and expressly disavowed any solo creation, saying he was "co-creator"
with a succession of artists. So before jumping all over Lee for his
performance on "60 Minutes Wednesday," we might take a breath
and assume that the show's editors may have cut out any such disavowals
because they would tend to dilute the intensity of the injustice they
were promoting for the sake of the aforementioned scandalous high drama.
Secondly, without having actually seen the contract at issue, my assumption
is that it is based upon Lee's long service to the company as editor
and publisher, not, per se, for creating the characters. Kirby and Steve
Ditko and the others did not work as long or in as many capacities for
Marvel as Lee did; they are, in any just distribution of material gain,
entitled to much less. Finally, Lee's contract calls for a share in
the profits from the various
enterprises involving Marvel characters. The most conspicuous of these
are the movies, but, as almost all of us know, movies never make any
profit; their accounting systems see to that. In fact, Marvel has already
said that it has not realized any profit from the Spider-Man movies
or the rest. So when Simon asked Lee what he'd do with the tens of millions
he stands to receive and Lee said, jokingly, that he could always use
a new pair of sneakers, he was being more realistic than Simon or "60
Minutes Wednesday." In The New Yorker of January 17, Margaret Talbot writes about manga at
some length. I'm not a fan of a lot of the manga now littering the bookstore
shelves. There's something just too precious about the artwork, too
cute, too delicate and affected and, for much of the stuff now selling
in this country after the introduction of Lone
Wolf and Cub years ago, much much too saccharin. Lone
Wolf was okay; and some of the other manga mannerisms I like. But
the wispy lined, big-eyed concoctions-no, thanks. Talbot tells us that
"tens of thousands of Hello Kitty products-from pink vinyl coin
purses to packets of 'sweet squid chunks' bearing her wide-eyed likeness-is
a billion-dollar business." And, she goes on, "One reason
the Japanese are so good at this kind of thing is that many adults in
Japan are curiously attuned to cuteness. Even in a cosmopolitan city
like Tokyo, kawaii -or 'cute'
culture-is everywhere: road signs are adorned with adorable raccoons
and bunnies; stuffed animals sit on salarymen's desks' Hello Kitty charms
are offered for sale at Shinto shrines." I'm not opposed to "cute,"
mind you; in fact, some kinds of "cute" I like. But not, apparently,
the "cute" of the Far East. What's more, there's something
creepy about the manga books featuring big-breasted women with little
girl faces. Maybe Lolita was big in Japan. That Mike Uslan Spirit movie I alluded to last time-yes, he's apparently
working at it. In an interview last September with Chris Mason on superherotype.com,
Uslan admitting that he's talking to lots of people about the film and
that there's a "production team" that includes Deborah Del
Prete and Gigi Pritzker, Ben Melniker, Steve Maier, Linda McDonough
and F.J. DeSanto. By then, Uslan had also discussed the project with
Eisner. "To be true to Eisner," he said, "the film must
be highly stylized and crafted. ... The first time I saw 'Blood Simple,'
for example, I knew that the Coen Brothers could execute a great Spirit
film." ... "Will Eisner: The Spirit of An Artistic Pioneer"
is a documentary being directed by Andrew D. Cooke, brother of the co-producer
Jon B. Cooke, who is working
up an issue of his Comic Book
Artist devoted to Eisner, as is
Roy Thomas at Alter Ego,
No. 48, which was already in the works when Eisner died; the issue will
focus on Eisner's years at Quality Comics, with tributes from scores
of people. The Comics Journal is also coming out
with an Eisner issue, and Wizard's
March issue contains an Eisner profile. Strange how so much of this
was in the works before Eisner died, a measure of his emergence as a
graphic novelist, I reckon.
Funnybook Fan Fare Frank
Cho's long-awaited Shanna for
Marvel has arrived, and it's a beaut. Touted as a pin-up lover's delight,
the actual product is much much more. Cho is a master of the medium,
and his storytelling here is fine-tuned for pace and suspense and emotional
impact. The opening sequence is highly cinematic, imagery progressing
from utter darkness to laboratory lumination in suspenseful stages.
(And the piece of pipe that opens the door shows up again six pages
later when Doc breaks the glass cage that keeps Shanna alive but in
suspended animation.) As for Shanna's epidermis, it's almost everything
we've been led to believe it would be. Yes, she's nekkid, but because
the Marvel moguls moved the book from Adult to PG-13, Cho had to re-visit
his artwork and cover up the nasty bits. It's a shame, kimo sabe. And
it's also something of a joke: Cho has "arranged" hunks of
the glass cage's two-inch-thick glass to cover Shanna's derierre, and
in his most spectacular nude shot, bubbles are artfully placed to provide
bikini coverage. Tiring of this coy pictorial maneuvering, he at last
simply wraps the zaftig jungle queen in an old horse blanket. The very
artificiality of the masking devices up to then serve to flip the bird
to Marvel's cringing editors. But the best joke of the first issue-Doc's
signal that he's okay under Shanna's unconscious nekkid body-survives.
In the second issue of Concrete: The Human Dilemma, the human
dilemma- propagation and population explosion as a consequence of sexual
love-moves more obviously into the spotlight. Larry, whose proposal
of marriage Astra has accepted, nearly comes unglued when she starts
talking about having a family right away. At the other end of the book,
Maureen offers the solution to the "dilemma": she loves Concrete
and he loves her, but he's without sexual apparatus and therefore incapable
of the loving recreation she has in mind, so she strips and caresses
herself while letting him watch. Potentially, it's a bad taste locker-room
joke of grossly raucous proportions-or an utter embarrassment-but Paul
Chadwick manages the entire sequence with great delicacy, humor,
and emotion. Surprised the next morning by a visit from Walter Sageman,
the population control guru, Maureen leaps up and runs into the bathroom.
In the book's last panel, she's wearing the shower curtain, a delicious
visual gag that finishes the issue off with a sly smile. Gun
Fu has been a visual firecracker from the first issue of the 4-issue
series, and the last issue maintains the pace. Joey Mason (pencils) and Howard
Shum (inks) manage the most severe manga style around, producing
highly abstracted visions of human anatomy and physiognomy, but they
also do some nifty storytelling, including mood sequences of considerable
effectiveness. The end of "The Lost City" series is bloody-and
sad, affecting. The 4-issue ride has been a joyful scamper. No. 4 concludes
with Shum interviewing photographer Glen Luchford followed by Shum's
own photographs of some Victoria's Secret models, accompanied by manga
pin-ups by Shum and Mason. Now this manga style I like. Bold lines and
square fingers distinguish it from the simpering style that turns me
off (in case you're keeping score). More of that style of manga-influenced
art undertakes a much more serious subject in The Wicked West, an 82-page graphic novel
about vampires and gunslingers in the old West and in the 1930s. Neil Vokes gives visual life to the tale
by Todd Livingston and Robert Tinnell, drenching most sequences
in deep black shadow against which his filagree line is attractively
contrasted. Vokes' lines aren't bold, but they're not wispy either,
and liberal use of solid black gives the enterprise a more sinewy appearance.
So I like it. Vokes is good with mood but not so good with action. In
the opening sequence, he jams too much activity into one panel as he
depicts his protagonist kicking a table, drawing his guns, and shooting
at the bad guys. All this action in a single panel robs the incident
of visual drama. But it winds up with a great tagline: after the gunslinger
kills his would-be assassins, he looks into the wallet of one of them
and concludes that it isn't his lucky day after all-"They didn't
pay you in advance," he says. I'm not a big fan of vampire tales,
but this one adopts a storytelling device that elevates the narrative
above mere spookiness. In 1932 a grandfather and his grandson go to
a movie about an old time sheriff, a schoolmarm and a vampire. The movie's
story is rendered in pencil, splashed with gray tones and light blue;
the other story is inked and colored. The book's narrative flashes back
and forth from the 1932 movie to the old West in 1870, where the gunfighter
of the opening sequence becomes the school teacher in the town and must
kill a few of the local vampires, led by one of his students, a girl
who tries to seduce him. The two narratives run parallel, ending separately
with their protagonists driving stakes through the hearts of the undead.
The interplay between the two stories makes for both contrast and emphasis,
one narrative culminating in a moment that sets the emotional stage
for the resumption of the other narrative on the next page. And on the
last page, we find out who the grandfather is, an identity that binds
the two tales together as a fable of the rites of passage from youth
to manhood. In Wyatt Earp: Dodge City No. 1, we get some nice black-and-white (with
gray tone accents) illustration in shadowy chiaroscuro from Enrique Villagran. His crisp, bold lines
handle the action and staging with aplomb, and he can draw horses with
panache, a vital but often neglected talent with artists attempting
to draw the American West in the 19th Century. He gets the
right ambiance with his pictures of characters and of interior scenes
although some of his exterior sequences take place in front of buildings
that look entirely too brand spanking new for the sun-baked old West,
but he is a superb artist and shows, page after page, that he can draw
anything with convincing confidence. The story has the famed shootist
Wyatt Earp coming into Dodge City to assume the marshal's job (nice
treatment of a rainy opening sequence); Doc Holliday also shows up.
Writer Chuck Dixon's characterization
of Holliday is about right: the man was all gambler and psychopath.
Earp, however, is given a lawman's nobility that the actual gunslinger
never had. The actual Earp also made a living as a gambler: he acquired
a badge in whatever town he was in purely as a way to facilitate profits
at the gaming table. He has emerged in Western lore as a heroic figure,
but most of that heroism is the result of Earp's own diligent burnishing
of his autobiography. But who comes to comics for authentic history
and biography? Dixon and Villagran give us an engrossing tale, expertly
rendered; and that's what we came here for. I went back for another look when Angeltown No. 4 (of 5 issues) arrived. Shawn Martinbrough's storytelling and
visual technique are still the most impressive thing about the series:
crisp and as almost as heavily shadowed as Eduardo Risso's work in 100
Bullets, the pictures move the story forward with emphasis and eye appeal.
But Gary Phillips' story is as tangled a web
as any of Raymond Chandler's, and plunging into the fourth issue without
seeing the second and the third is a thoroughly disorienting experience.
And I doubt that had I visited the second and third issues I'd be any
the wiser. The tangle is simply too thick. This is a story whose individual
chapters could profit enormously from plot summaries at the beginning
of each installment. But it's still fun to look at. Comic Strip Watch In
the last week or so, Bill Griffith's
Zippy has come close to revealing the secret
of the strip's peculiar sense of humor-the seemingly meaningless juxtaposition
that animates the strip occurs when Zippy, who "lives" in
the audio-visual world of tv commercials, attempts to apply the principles
of that life to the life he encounters in the real world. I was hoping
to quote something here by way of demonstration, but I discovered that,
suddenly-overnight-the Houston
Chronicle's online comics page won't print out strips anymore, and
without the actual strip in front of me, I can't quote it. You can find
it, though, by going to the King Features website (www.kingfeatures.com)
and look for strips that ran the week of, say, January 31. Cathy's wedding was achieved in the
same kind of outlandish spirit that has prevailed in the strip all along,
a signal accomplishment, I thought. Cathy and Irving said their vows
on Saturday, February 5, but the ceremony began on Monday, January 31,
with typical Cathy comedy: the bridesmaids debate the
order in which they'll go down the aisle, and at first, they all want
to go last; then, when it is explained that the order is dictated by
the "sacred wedding tradition" of "best friend"
going first, "best rear" going last, none of them wants to
go last. Cartooner Cathy Guisewite also raised $18,000 for
the pet sanctuary where she volunteers by getting Cathy and Irving's
well-wishers to make donations through an online "registry"
for Electra and Vivian, the couple's pampered pet dogs. Ted
Rall's at it again. Apparently not in the news with scandal and
sensation enough lately, he's dug up Pat Tillman again. In the original
outrage of last April, Rall offended vast regions of the land by suggesting
that the football player turned Army ranger was not exactly the selfless
American patriot he was made out to be: according to Rall, Tillman satisfied
his aggressive nature as much as his patriotic impulse by giving up
the gridiron brawl for the desert fire fights in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So he was scarcely a hero; he was, actually, a dupe of the Bush League's
propaganda. Since then, we discovered that Tillman was killed by friendly
fire, the result of battlefield stupidity as much as individual derring-do.
On February 3, Rall stages an interview in his strip with the ghost
of the NFL soldier. "Still dead, eh?" it begins. "Uh-huh,"
says Tillman, "and they still make me wear this uniform-'stop loss'
has gone too far." In the last panel, Rall tells Tillman that "the
media has already forgotten you," to which Tillman bristles, saying,
"No way, man. Republicans control all three major religions."
Tillman, in other words, is wholly unrepentant. Rall's cartoon here
conducts a more effective rhetoric than his first attempt on the Tillman
subject; but no outrage, no publicity, no appearances on right-wing
tv talk shows. Just Rall, saying, "I told you so." At theWashington Post's online "Chatological Humor" by Gene
Weingarten, Garry Trudeau was
asked (on or about February 2) if the character Honey, the reprobate
Duke's, er, retainer, might be based on Marcie in Peanuts.
Said Trudeau: "Honey was based on a translator I met when I
was traveling with the press corps during President Ford's trip to China.
It was clear to us that she and her colleagues were improvising in order
to put the best face on everything, so that was my departure point.
There was a kind of deadpan, opaque quality I was going for, which is
why I hid her eyes behind glasses. I was trying to come up with an earnest
foil for the impulsive, volatile Duke, who had just been appointed ambassador
to China. That being said, there is a definite similarity in tone and
appearance to Marcie, and readers have remarked on it over the years.
As an avid Peanuts reader, I'm sure her influence was buried in my brain somewhere,
but had I been intentionally channeling the character, I like to think
I would have done a much better job of disguising it!" The Chicago Tribune dropped Scott Stantis' conservative-leaning strip
Prickly City on February 7, saying the
strip attributed to Senator Ted Kenney something he did not say. The
dialogue in the strip between the little girl Carmen and her coyote
friend starts with Carmen saying, "Did you hear what Ted Kennedy
said during the Condoleeezza Rice confirmation? 'They lied and people
died.'" To this, Winslow the coyote pup says, "Wow! Ted Kennedy
said that? Was he driving?" Winslow's allusion is to the Chappaquiddick
incident in 1969 in which a girl working on Kennedy's campaign died
when the car Kennedy was driving ran off a bridge into the water; Kennedy
escaped but the girl drowned, and Kennedy's explanation was slow in
coming and tortured when it came. The intended irony is that Kennedy
is a fine one to talk about lying and causing death. Geoff Brown, the
Trib's feature editor, said
they killed the strip because it attributed to Kennedy something he
didn't actually say. "This episode," he said, "is strictly
about the words put in Kennedy's mouth. Had the strip arrived at its
punch line without asserting that Kennedy made such a statement at the
Rice hearing, then we would have run it and laughed along with everyone
else." For his part, Stantis, in effect, agreed. In the strip he
sent to his syndicate, Universal Press, the words attributed to Kennedy
did not appear within quotation marks; UP's editors added the quotes,
thereby converting the remark to a direct quotation. Stantis knew those
weren't Kennedy's exact words; he was paraphrasing the gist of the Senator's
remarks and didn't put them in quotation marks. Prickly City, it sez here, appears in about 100 newspapers; none of
the others, as far as Stantis knows, dropped the February 7 release.
Civilization's Last Outpost Termites,
we understand, are difficult to detect until they've done their damage.
A California pest control magnet has found a way to discover them. Turns
out termites are extraordinarily flatulent. "They eat a huge amount
of roughage," said the exterminator, Terry Clark. In fact, according
to the New York Times, termites produce so much
methane gas that a 1982 report in Science
magazine estimated that 30 percent of the methane in Earth's atmosphere
comes from the insects. So Clark devised a way to discover termite flatulence
as an early-warning system, indicating they might be about to pounce
on someone's house. Ah, the march of science-what a gas. On Slate.com, staff writers tried to
find out why models walk the way they walk-you know, that vigorous stride,
swinging hips and shoulders in undulating rhythm like Jennifer Garner
in "Alias." Some models have to take lessons in walking. "It
depends on where they're from," according to Andrew Weir, a New
York casting director. "If they're from Brazil or South America,
the walk is innate. The other girls have to watch the Brazilians for
a season or two until they catch up." The walk I've just described
is the "Versace walk." Another locomotion, Weir explained,
is just "street walk"-no swish. Most shows deploy models walking
"street" with a little extra, a nearly natural stride with
no hands on hips or posing. "But the walk," says Slate, "is
still slightly exaggerated: some extra swagger makes skirts swish dramatically
and gives tailored looks a bit of extra power." Yup, that's what
I say whenever Sydney Bristow comes striding into the camera on "Alias." A Famous Unknown Cartoonist for Black
History Month All
around the tiny room in the rear flat on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem
were stacks and stacks of drawing paper with pictures on them, tottering
stalagmites of wispy pencil sketches, muscular charcoal renderings,
and delicately hued watercolors. The linear quality in the drawings
had a nervous, searching aspect: outlines were made with several strokes
of the pencil as the artist sought exactly the right placement, then
the final delineation was made with single firm, dark stroke. Texture
and modeling were added with grease crayon or charcoal or simply repeated
strokes of a snub-nosed pencil, dashing diagonal lines back and forth
across the surface of the picture to produce gray tones from dark to
light. In the watercolor pictures, the lines were simpler, bolder-single
strokes outlining figures and features-with color added in broad daubs
and easy splashes. In the midst of the room's litter, a twenty-five-year-old
man of an even dark cinnamon complexion sat at a drawingboard propped
against the edge of a dresser. His visitor, a white man perhaps only
four or five years older than the artist, stared at the stacks of drawings,
his eyes bulging slightly as disbelief surrendered to comprehension.
He saw gag lines written below many of the pictures, and he knew, then-beyond
any hesitancy or doubt-that he had discovered a treasure trove of cartoons,
a bonanza of bonhomie as yet untapped by the publishing world. "I wanted to yell Eureka,"
the man said later, "-because I saw at a glance that my troubles
were over." What Arnold Gingrich called his "troubles"
early that fall of 1933 any other magazine editor would have dubbed
a blessing: his publisher in Chicago had just phoned him in New York
to tell him that the number of color pages in the maiden issue of their
new magazine had been increased from twenty-four to thirty-six. This
unanticipated bonus was troublesome only because Gingrich had been hustling
to fill twenty-four pages with color illustrations; with the allotment
suddenly increased by a third, his quest had turned into a desperate
scramble. They had always planned on devoting
plenty of pages in the magazine to full-page cartoons, and now, with
the windfall color pages, cartoons in color seemed the easiest solution
to Gingrich's problem. All he needed was twelve good cartoons in color.
He had journeyed to New York to secure for the magazine the work of
the cartoonist whose renditions of the curvaceous gender would be perfect,
he knew, for a men's magazine such as Esquire
planned to be. Russell Patterson was, Gingrich said, his "beau
ideal of the kind of cartoonist" they wanted: the "Patterson
Girl," a regular fixture on the covers of Sunday supplements and
humor magazines, was as well known as the Ziegfeld Girl. But Gingrich
was on a budget, and when he met Patterson in his studio and offered
him a hundred dollars each for Patterson Girl cartoons, Patterson had
laughed. Just laughed. "I don't think any well-known
illustrator would be interested in doing work for your magazine at that
rate," Patterson said. "But I know a young fellow who might
serve your purpose-if you don't draw the color line." Gingrich said he had no use for the
color line-certainly not at present, desperate as he was. "Besides,"
he added, "-what the hell, magazines weren't wired for sound, so
drawings would not carry any trace of any kind of accent." So Patterson told him about "a
fantastically talented colored kid," a graduate of the Art Institute
of Chicago, who produced reams of wonderful drawings that he was unable
to sell because, as a black man, he couldn't get past the receptionist
to show his wares to any editor in New York. He gave Gingrich an address where the
artist was living with his aunt, and Gingrich went to Harlem. "I
had to step over squads of kids on the outside stairway to get to the
room where he worked," Gingrich said. And that's how he met Elmer
Campbell, who would become rich and famous as "E. Sims Campbell,"
Esquire cartoonist par excellence. Gingrich, his ears ringing and his
breathing more and more constricted, pawed excitedly through Campbell's
stacks of cartoons. "I saw that they were all beautifully executed,"
he said, "whether as roughs or as finishes. My impulse was simply
to poke a finger in toward the point midway down of each pile and say,
'How much down to here?'" He took armloads of the cartoons away
with him, leaving his check for a hundred dollars as a "down payment"
against future publication, which, Gingrich assured the young cartoonist,
would be extensive. For the next 38 years, beginning with three cartoons
in the very first issue dated Autumn 1933, Campbell's cartoons and illustrations
appeared in Esquire with such
regularity that Gingrich believed he was in every issue. (And he almost
was.) Campbell collected pay for his own drawings and for supplying
gags that other cartoonists illustrated. Said Gingrich: "It was Campbell's
roughs and our using them to inspire other cartoonists that had the
most immediate bearing on the magazine's success. Without a doubt, it
was the full-page cartoons in color, an ingredient that we hadn't even
thought of in the first place, that catapulted the magazine's circulation
from the start." Campbell's impact did not end with
cartoons. He also contributed the image of the magazine's familiar mascot,
the pop-eyed moustachio'd old roue called Esky. Arnold had been trying
to come up with a satisfactory image for the purpose for weeks without
luck. He noticed several sketches of an impish little man among the
drawings stacked in Campbell's room and, with the artist's permission,
added the pictures to the stack of cartoons he carted off. A short time
later, sculptor Sam Berman in New York transformed the Campbell character
into a three-dimensional ceramic figurine, which was henceforth photographed
for cover appearances with every issue of the magazine. Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Campbell
had displayed artistic talent at an early age and resolved on a career
in commercial art despite occasional admonitions from his elders that
any "Negro" with such ambitions would be wasting his time
pursuing them. He learned the fundamentals of art from his mother, a
painter, and the value of education from his father, a high school principal.
While a teenager, he left St. Louis for Chicago, eventually enrolling
in the University of Chicago as well as the Art Institute. Later, in
New York, he attended the Art Students League. He had freelanced in
both cities but didn't sell much until Arnold discovered him for Esquire.
Shortly after his debut in the magazine, Campbell was getting commissions
from around the world. But it was in Esquire
that he achieved the apotheosis of his art. George Douglas, writing about Esquire in his history, The Smart Magazines, said: "The Esquire connection meant the most to him,
no doubt, because in essence he, as much as anyone else, established
the magazine's visual style. His work was highly finished and polished,
of course, and he could render a wide variety of curvaceous females-chorus
girls, innocents, vamps, supercharged office secretaries-in moods ranging
from the voluptuous to the risible. His touch, in any case, fit Esquire to perfection. It was slick, jaunty, tongue-in-cheek, stylishly
erotic, playfully adult. So apt was the material that it was used eventually
in all manner of drawings, not only cartoons-fashion drawings, covers,
illustrations for stories and articles, fillers of all sorts." Living up to his burgeoning income,
Campbell moved into the Dunbar Apartments on Seventh Avenue, the most
glamorous apartment building that African-Americans had in New York.
And there, the cartoonist met Cab Calloway, jazz musician, band leader,
and the instigator of Minnie the Moocher, whose scat "hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho"
enlivened the evenings at the Cotton Club whenever Duke Ellington had
gigs out-of-town. The jazz man and the cartoonist became fast friends
and frequent habitues of Harlem nights. Calloway loved Harlem. "Harlem
in the 1930s was the hottest place in the country," he wrote in
his autobiography, Minnie the
Moocher and Me. "All the music and dancing you could want.
And all the high-life people were there. It was the place for a Negro to be. ... No
matter how poor, you could walk down Seventh Avenue or across 125th
Street on a Sunday afternoon after church and check out the women in
their fine clothes and the young dudes all decked out in their spats
and gloves and tweeds and Homburgs. People knew how to dress, the streets
were clean and tree-lined, and there were so few cars that they were
no problem. Trolleys ran down Lenox Avenue to Central Park. People would
go for picnics on a Sunday afternoon, and the young couples would head
for the private places between the rocks to spoon and make eyes at each
other. I'm not being romantic. Harlem was like that-a warm, clean, lovely
place where thousands of black folks, poor and rich, lived together
and enjoyed the life." Harlem was also the destination for
much of New York's night club population, white as well as black. And
Calloway and Campbell joined in. "By the time I met him,"
Calloway said, "Campbell was a well-established cartoonist. He
was also, like me, a hard worker, a hard drinker, and a high liver.
I used to think that I worked hard. Cotton Club shows six or seven nights
a week, matinees at the theaters a couple of afternoons, theater gigs
sometimes in between the Cotton Club shows, and benefits on the weekends.
But Campbell outdid me. He drew a carton a day, not little line drawings,
but full watercolor cartoons. And he played as hard as he worked. He
loved to drink. When we got to know each other, we would go out at night
to the Harlem after-hours joints like the Rhythm Club and just drink
and talk and laugh and raise hell until the sun came up. Somebody would
get us home and pour us into bed, and we'd be back at it again the next
night. "One of my favorite cartoons by
Sims," Calloway continued, "shows a boys' choir in a big church.
All the choirboys are white except for one big-eyed Negro. The choir
master is getting ready for the Sunday service, and he's looking at
this Negro kid with a reprimand in his eyes. The caption reads: 'And
none of that hi-de-ho stuff.' Elmer did that cartoon in 1934, and it
was published in Esquire in October of that year. He and I were tight friends by then.
Jesus, I loved that man. He was one of the straightest, most natural
men I'd ever met. Unaffected, you know, just honest and open; loud and
noisy when he got drunk, and ornery as hell when anybody disturbed him
while he was working. ... Over the years, we stayed close to each other.
Many a night, he and I would hang out together screwing around, drinking
bad gin straight in after-hours joints. I would complain to him about
my wife, and he would complain to me about his. We were personal with
each other, and we could holler at each other about our problems while
we laughed at them. ... We joked and laughed and shared things, man
to man. There are few men I've had that kind of friendship with." In 1936, Campbell moved to fashionable
Westchester County where he built a flagstone mansion on a large piece
of land, about which Gingrich exclaimed: "It was many years before
it was anything but earthshaking to have a home of that kind [in that
neighborhood] occupied by a Negro." While Campbell drew cartoons about
life among the fun-loving classes and wrote articles about the nightlife
in Harlem, he was celebrated for drawing pretty girls, and he gained
renown for the harem cartoons he rendered in lovingly luminous flesh
tones. The girls in Campbell's cartoons looked white, but according
to the cartoonist, "If they came to life, they'd be colored. Colored
girls have better breasts and more sun and warmth," he is reported
to have said; "I like a fine backside, and they have it!" In 1942, Campbell's leggy ladies began
appearing in pen-and-ink black and white in a daily newspaper cartoon
called Cuties from King Features Syndicate. The color bar began to be lifted somewhat
in the 1950s, but Campbell had, perhaps, had enough, and by then, he
was able to do something about it. In 1957, he left his baronial mansion
in White Plains and moved to Switzerland, where he lived until 1971,
mailing his work to stateside clients. In the early 1960s or thereabouts
as Esquire underwent format changes, Campbell's
harem girl cartoons appeared in Playboy
as well as their birthplace. He returned to the U.S. in the fall of
1971 and soon thereafter learned that he had cancer. He died in January
1972. Calloway was heartbroken. "I have lost many relatives and
friends in my years," Calloway wrote, "but other than the
death of my mother, none has struck me as Elmer Campbell's did. It was
because the man was so full of life that his death hit me so hard."
At the funeral home, Calloway was overcome. "I was angry that he'd
left me," he said. "The feeling came upon me so suddenly that
I had no control of myself. This goddamn man who I had known for so
long and spent so many drunken and sober, joyful and serious hours with
had left me." He began beating his fists on the coffin and hollering.
His wife and friends pulled him away. Said Calloway: "I've known
and worked with people like Duke Ellington, Pearl Bailey, Lena Horne,
Dizzy Gillespie, Jonah Jones, and Bill Robinson-to name just a few-but
if you want to know the name of a guy I loved, remember E. Simms Campbell.
My friend." Campbell was, as far as I'm able to
determine, the first African-American cartoonist to make it big in the
world outside the black community. Although his race was a secret for
much of his career, his mark on the history of American cartooning is
indelible. ************** Footnotes: Gingrich believed that Campbell had a cartoon or illustration
in every issue of the magazine until the cartoonist died. He had discovered
this phenomenon when assembling a collection of cartoons for Esquire's 25th anniversary.
For the entire quarter century, Gingrich wrote, "the common denominator
was that not one issue had ever gone to press without a cartoon by Campbell."
Thereafter, "it became a point of pride with the editors and the
makeup people to see to it that nothing should be allowed to let him
spoil that perfect record; and although there were times when it was
necessary to dig up a rough sketch out of the files and run it in its
really unfinished state, for failure to receive a fully rendered drawing
on time to make a given issue's press date, none had, until some months
after his death, ever actually gone to press without a Campbell cartoon."
However fondly and passionately Gingrich believed this, I, alas, have
at least three issues of Esquire (January and September 1946, January
1947) without Campbell cartoons. But the myth is, notwithstanding, a
measure of the esteem in which Campbell is held. Cuties
has been collected in at least four paperbacks: Cuties In Arms (1942), More
Cuties in Arms (1943)-both with the World War II military market
in mind; and Cuties (1945)
and Chorus of Cuties (1952), from which the
pen-and-ink cartoons near here are poached. Campbell also illustrated
a children's book, Popo and Fifina
(1932) by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and a collection of
Haitian poetry, We Who Die & Other Poems, by Binga
Dismond. Gingrich tells his story in Nothing
but People, an autobiography. For more about African-American cartoonists,
visit Tim Jackson's site, www.clstoons.com,
the single most comprehensive source of information on the subject. Under the Spreading Punditry Remember
the election of 1967 in South Vietnam? U.S. officials were "heartened,"
the New York Times said, "at
the size of turnout in [the] presidential election despite a Vietcong
terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting." According to reports,
83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots.
"The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong
to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary
assessment of the national election." We hope this is no harbinger
of things to come in Iraq, where we are encountering so many other similarities
to Vietnam. The recent election in Iraq was a genuine triumph of the
spirit of citizenry, and I can easily imagine that civic pride will
become the engine by which the insurgents are defeated. So let's hope. The Bush League budget for the coming
fiscal year boosts spending in warfare categories and cuts in many domestic
programs, including Environmental Protection Agency funds (6 percent,
the biggest hunk from the clean-air fund) and a program to help people
pay their heating bills (8 percent). But "financing for the apprehension
of Army deserters would double." I guess they expect a lot of activity
in that area. GeeDubya reportedly doesn't understand
why people 55 and older are objecting so strenuously to his Social Security
proposals: after all, they won't be affected at all, he says. His obtuseness
highlights the difference between George W. ("Wooden-hearted")
Bush and most of humanity. People over 55, particularly those over 65
or so who are already drawing Social Security benefits, know, for an
absolute fact, the tremendous value of the existing Social Security
system. And they want to make sure their children and grandchildren
will enjoy the same sort of relatively carefree twilight years. GeeDubya,
apparently, could care less about people not of his generation and therefore
doesn't understand anyone who does. Sad. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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