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Opus 166: Opus 166 (July 30, 2005). Featured this time are reviews of Paul Hornschemeier's Mother, Come Home, his
anthology of college material, Sequential,
and the 20th anniversary commemoration of Mother Goose and Grimm, plus a nearly unprecedented deviation in one
of the world's most popular comic strips, Blondie, and a long fond report on our reporter's recent visit to
England. In order, here's what's here (by department): NOUS R US -Trudeau's turd, the Spirit's new lease on life, the last
Cartoonist PROfiles, the fate
of Michigan J. Frog at WB, Jessica Alba loves the FF (I think), Superman
in Metropolis, Illinois, and Marvel at Niagara Falls; Ye Olde Merrie -earth-shattering events in the UK, lurid sex in the
famed tabloid press, British newspaper comics, the civilian body count
in Iraq, and a few stray thoughts about antiques;
Rowland B. Wilson's obit, Gene
Hazelton's cameo, review of Modern
Arf and a book of insightful essays on cartooning; 3 cartooners
who are "screwing up Bernard Goldberg's America," the evil
pointlessness of anonymous sources, Mike
Peters and Grimm, and Hornschemeier's
Mother. And once again, I see that I've
become carried away with my own prolixity, which makes our "Bathroom
Button" all the more essential: when you get to the Members' Section,
click on our useful "Bathroom Button" (also called the "print
friendly version") of this installment so you can print off a copy
of just this installment of Rancid Raves for reading later, at your
leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu-
NOUS R US Doonesbury for July 26 and 27 was pulled by 10-12 newspaper editors
because the strips employed a Presidential Nickname for Karl Rove. In
one of Garry Trudeau's talking
White House sequences, the unpictured personages (presumably GeeDubya
and an aide) are discussing the "Rove revelations" about leaking
Valerie Plame's CIA assignment, and the Presidential speech balloon
says, "Karl's sure been earnin' his nickname lately." Other
speaker: "Boy Genius? I'm not so sure, sir." The Presidential
balloon then calls out: "Hey, Turd Blossom! Get in here!"
A couple papers altered the language to eliminate the fecal reference,
and that raised Trudeau's ire. Said he: "Editors obviously have
a responsibility to determine what's appropriate for inclusion in their
papers. [We] accept that from time to time individual editors may object
to particular strips and decide to drop them. What's not acceptable
to us, however, is for editors to alter the content of a strip and represent
it as what I sent them. In most cases, changing the dialogue compromises
its meaning or rhythm or humor. Sometimes, the strip no longer even
makes sense. Who benefits from that? We'd prefer that an offending strip
be dropped altogether." The incident is heavily laden with satirical
irony of a nearly celestial sort. What the offended editors did was
to censor the President of the United States. "Turd Blossom"
is, after all, GeeDubya's official nickname for Rove. So for the first
time in a long time, the word of George W. ("Whopper") Bush
is not acceptable to newspaper editors. Delicious. At the Sandy Eggo Comicon (July 14-17),
DC Comics revealed two future projects that will employ Will Eisner's legendary Spirit character:
the first, in December, is a single-issue comic book in which the Spirit
meets Batman, written by Jeph
Loeb and drawn by Darwyn
Cooke; second, starting next year, is a new monthly title starring
the Spirit, written and drawn by Cooke. Both projects, according to
Newsarama.com, were in the works while Eisner was still alive. The idea
for the Spirit-Batman team-up, says Eisner biographer Bob Andelman,
reaches far back to the time Denny O'Neil discussed this "dream"
team with Eisner when Kitchen Sink Press was Eisner's publisher. O'Neil
saw both characters as typically serving as vehicles for stories about
the common man (or perhaps the abused human psyche), and he therefore
longed to see them paired in some grand and gritty reality adventure.
"It was one of those projects that everybody thinks is a good idea,
but there was no compelling reason to do it," O'Neil remembered.
Eisner breathed new life into the idea last winter before he died. Cooke,
who was starting to work out a creator-owned title of his own, was surprised
to be offered the assignment-but thrilled and excited by the prospect.
Said he: "I've been a Spirit fan since age fourteen, and I can
honestly say that he was the only licensed character in the industry
that could have got me to change course." In the monthly title,
Cooke plans to bring the Spirit into contemporary times rather than
dwell in the post-war world of Eisner's last work on the feature. The
up-dating will permit him to extent the realm that Eisner so delighted
in exploring- the urban milieu and the stories of the people who occupy
it. Cooke said he has two goals. The first is to preserve and, if possible,
enrich the essence of the Spirit tradition, tales of ordinary people
and their oft doomed aspirations. "Placing Denny Colt in the modern
world is an updating of sorts," Cooke said, "and there will
be a number of new femmes, criminals and loveable losers to go with
the incredible cast Will created. However, I don't see any need for
'tweaking' the concept. Will's genius has created a strip where I can
explore the human condition from virtually any conceivable angle. I
couldn't ask for more. The second goal," he continued, "is
to produce a work that reaffirms the Spirit as the strip for graphic
innovation that enhances storytelling." And Cooke, judging from
the variety and punch of his work in his issue of Solo, is just the man for the job. Denis Kitchen, acting for the Eisner estate,
will shepherd the project. "Denis, Will's longtime friend and associate,
will be with us every step of the way," said Cooke, "and so
far, we seem to be in concert regarding the direction we're heading
in." The last issue of Cartoonist PROfiles, the profession's longest
continuously published periodical, will come off the press in a week
or so. The June 2005 issue, No. 146, will end the quarterly's 36-year
run. Jud Hurd, the founder, publisher, editor and, for most of those
three-and-a-half decades, the chief (if not the only) writer, suffered
a stroke in early May. In his nineties, he'd been approaching every
issue for the last few years as if it might be his final issue. Enterprising
writers kept sending him articles, and he kept the magazine going to
print them. But the June issue, he was pretty sure, he told me, would
wind it up. He'd compiled much of the content before the stroke. His
wife Claudia, his partner and business manager, finished assembling
the material and shipped it off to the printer in Alabama, where it
has been printed for decades. At 156 pages, the June issue is the largest
PROfiles ever published. Another record.
Going out with a memorably big bang. For more about Jud and his magazine,
see Opus 131. Warner Bros cartoon network is abandoning
the mascot that has accompanied it since its launch ten years ago: Michigan
J. Frog, the miraculous singing amphibian, is being retired because,
it seems, he appeals to too young a demographic. Warner Bros is aiming
for the 12-34 bracket, and the Frog was hot mostly with teenagers, reinforcing
the idea that WB was "that teen network" while the network
hopes to grow a young adult audience. "The frog is dead and buried,"
said WB Chairman Garth Ancier, according to Lisa de Moraes at the Washington Post. "The frog was on life support for a long time,"
Ancier continued, "and then we got permission from a federal court
to disconnect the feeding tube." Ancier, said Moraes, has "always
had it in for Mr. Frog, according to well-placed sources who wished
to remain anonymous because it's a short hop from killing a frog to
knocking off a snitch." Free Comic Book Day in 2006 will be
May 6. ... According to John
Jackson Miller at the Comics
Buyer's Guide, "sales of comic books and trade paperbacks to
comics shops increased 9% in the first half of 2005 to $168.4 million."
My guess is that the graphic novel aspect of the calculation is the
biggest component in the increase, and Miller confirms this, saying
that "an ever increasing amount of business is being generated
by the thousands of backlist trade paperbacks." ... The most recent
CBG, cover-dated October,
is another of increasingly rare issues-one without a movie-based cover.
... One of my favorite Batman illustrators, Jim
Aparo, died in mid-July at the young age of 72; Mark Evanier does a nice obit at www.newsfromme.com
... Attentive subscriber Steve
Thompson tells me that I misspelled Pete
Seger's name last time, influenced, doubtless, by my lifelong admiration
for Popeye's creator, who spelled his name Segar. I'm deeply humiliated
and, forthwith, have acted to correct the error; thanks, Steve. Sorry,
Pete-but, again, happy birthday. ... The second volume of
Mike Allred's graphic novelization of the Book of Mormon, The Golden Plates, was released May 25 and is reported to be selling
well. Reporter Heidi Hatch said: "The comic is all new art, but
the characters are speaking straight from the Book of Mormon."
Some buyers, she reports, are not members of the church of the Latter
Day Saints: they're just fans of the cartoonist. Laborers in the literary vineyards
are increasingly cultivating comics. Jonathan
Lethem, whose novel Motherless
Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award, will be writing
a ten-issue comic book series about the enigmatic 1970s Marvel superhero,
Omega the Unknown. And Pulitzer-winner Michael
Chabon is doing the comic book version of the Escapist, the fictional
superhero in his otherwise normally populated novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Comments icv2: "Interestingly
enough the history and iconic mythology of comic book superheroes provided
key themes for the novels by both Chabon and Lethem, so their involvement
in the actual writing of comics should come as no surprise to the readers
of their fictional prose efforts." And this development, icv2 continues,
"speaks volumes about the comic book's newly acquired respectability."
Joss
Whedon, who brought tv's Buffy the Vampire Slayer to life for seven
seasons, is determined to revive DC's Wonder Woman, a character who,
against all indications to the contrary, has failed to light fires of
affection in fandom. Whedon's agreed to try a movie adaptation of the
character in the spangled hot pants. "I said 'yes,'" he explained,
"because in the process of trying to say no, I thought about her
character and fell in love with her." Jessica
Alba says about her experience portraying Invisible Woman in the
Fantastic Four movie: "Men run the business, and when you see Elektra
or Catwoman, it's clear they don't understand it's more than a hot girl
kicking [butt]. 'Fantastic Four' is about relationships, family, life.
Her abilities and the effects are separate. ... She's the strongest
of the four. She can manipulate everyone else's powers. She doesn't
need to walk around in a bikini to impress." FF director Tom Story
admits the temptation to put Alba's embonpoint into curve-hugging tights
at every opportunity was strong, but he also realized the difference
between male and female action heroes: it's motivation. "Males
go out and start shooting people," he said. "People understand
that. But with women, it's not that easy. You've got to put a real package
around them to explain why they are an action hero." USA Today's Susan Wloszczyna, discussing
cinematic action heroines, writes: "Back in the waning days of
women's lib, a shining symbol of feminine fortitude emerged. Sigourney
Weaver's capable and captivating Ripley in 1979's "Alien"
as well as its first sequel was on par, if not superior, to any man.
She remains the gold standard." But "a close second is Linda
Hamilton, "whose sculpted biceps far out-bulged her breasts [as
Sarah Connor] in 1991's 'Terminator 2.'" After seeing several unfavorable
reviews of the FF movie, I opted out of seeing it. (Besides, I was out
of the country at the time and wouldn't be able to review it on anything
like a timely basis.) But friends of mine who've seen the flick say
it's better than the Batman-enthralled reviewers said it is. In Metropolis, Illinois, a 15-foot bronze statue of Superman stands in
Superman Square at the center of town. But there's no organic connection
between this Ohio River town of 65,000 and America's most famous superhero.
Superman's co-creator Jerry Siegel named his comic book big city Metropolis
but probably never heard of the Illinois hamlet. The place is "more
Mayberry than Metropolis" according to Editor
& Publisher (June 27), but the locals have capitalized on the
Superman association ever since the Illinois Legislature decreed it
Superman's home town in a flurry of funnybook patriotism in the 1970s.
The local newspaper was called the
Metropolis News until 1972 when it was christened the Metropolis
Planet to echo the name of the newspaper Clark Kent works on. An
annual Superman celebration draws thousands to the town, and 50-year-old
Jim Hambrick glories in it all: he arrived from Hollywood 13 years ago,
and now operates a combination museum and souvenir store, boasting "the
largest Superman collection on the planet." And there's that storied
phone booth downtown, too. But it's just for show: there's no phone
inside. Not to be outdone, probably, by its
DC Comics rival, Marvel Comics has its own
Marvel Adventures City as part of the Canadian Niagara Group's Falls
Avenue Complex. Marvel City is a funhouse of the company's comic book
characters: Spider-Man Ultimate Ride, X-Men Bumper Cars, and the Incredible
Hulk Encounter vie with coin-operated machines and colorful cut-outs
of the usual spandex band. According to Joseph Szadkowski at the Washington
Times (June 25), the effort "comes off more as a co-op arcade
on steroids than a mini-theme park." The best of the rides, he
says, is the Spider-Man adventure, which "melds 3-D technology,
multimedia and target shooting." The Hulk Encounter, on the other
hand, is "a complete waste of money and space," a haunted
maze filled with loud sounds. The most amazing thing about the complex,
however, is that there aren't any real comic books for sale-just "a
smattering of graphic novels" in a glass case. Too bad. The House
of Ideas came up short here, apparently. James Doohan, who played the chief
engineer of the starship Enterprise
whose job it was, in the "Star Trek" tv series and subsequent
movies, to respond to Captain Kirk's command, "Beam
me up, Scotty," died on July 20 at the age of 85. I've been
invoking the Star Trek command in our bi-weekly Rabbit Habit Alert,
and you'd think, now, out of respect, I'd retire the expression. Nope:
out of respect, I plan to keep using it as a continuing reminder of
the glory days of yesteryear when nights were filled with revelry and
life was but a song.
SOJOURNING IN YE OLDE MERRIE There
are no bugs in England. Or maybe they're just better trained bugs. Or
smarter than their American c Yan. We were scheduled to leave on July 9 on a night flight
from O'Hare to Newark and thence to England. And on July 7, bombers
attacked London. Not to worry, I told my wife: we're flying into Birmingham,
not London. Safe. Well, not quite. On the flight from Newark to Birmingham,
we learned that Birmingham's central core, the nightclub and restaurant
area, was being evacuated, even as we winged our way eastward, because
of a bomb threat: 20,000-30,000 people were moved out of the city center,
driven from their dining tables in mid-meal and from pubs in mid-drink.
Turns out, it was a false alarm. And at the airport when we arrived
a few hours later, nothing was happening. No evidence of security or
constabulary. It was the tamest (not to say boring) arrival of all time.
No one even spoke. It was like walking through a mausoleum. A single
long line of passengers filed patiently, silently, through the customs
process. No security-related nonsense whatsoever. (Nor did we have any
of these shenanigans when we departed two weeks later. Didn't have to
take our shoes off; none of that silliness. Just walk through an x-ray;
send carry-ons likewise. Easy.) But when we arrived at Newark on the
return, we re-entered nightmare alley. With only an hour between flights,
we had to pick up our luggage, go through customs, and get to another
terminal for the connecting flight to Chicago. We made it, but the luggage
didn't. And we had to take our shoes off and go through security check
again, too. This charade is fully supported by a government intent on
keeping us forever diverted from noticing its abuses in every other
department of civic affairs. We are expected, it seems, to derive reassurance
about our safety from such pointless exercises as the confiscation of
fingernail clippers; or, alternatively, to be so frightened at the realization
that we are still in danger that we'll re-elect George W. ("Warlord")
Bush again because only he can protect us.
Phooey. Fact is, we are not
safer now, thanks to GeeDubya. Robert Pape, who's just published a book
about suicide bombing called Dying
to Win, made what I think is the most telling observation in this
arena during a radio interview several weeks ago. Said he: "Al
Qaida is stronger now by the only measure that counts-their ability
to kill us." Tyan. We were in England during some pretty eventful days,
all of which were happening right there, on the sceptered isle-or quite
nearby across the English Channel. And the English national tabloids
were full of it the whole time. For the first week, they abounded in
daily reports on police pursuit of the identity of the London bombers.
They did it pretty fast, seems to me: they'd nailed the names of the
four by Tuesday morning, less than a week later. Meanwhile, the G-8
conference in Scotland transpired, forgiving debts in Third World nations
but not able to convince George W. ("White Heat") Bush that
the planet is heating up. Then the 6th Harry Potter book came out, Jack
Nicklaus made a birdie at St. Andrew's on his last competitive golf
hole (and shed a tear and hugged his son), Tiger Woods won his second
British Open, Ted Heath died, Lance Armstrong made steady progress in
the Tour de France (eventually winning his seventh consecutive, two
more than his nearest competitor), Camilla unveiled her coat of arms
as Duchess of Cornwall, and the sports pages started raving on about
the approach of the cricket test matches between England's best and
Australia's, a rivalry that dates back to the mid-1880s. Tethera. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince went
on sale at 12:01 a.m. British Standard Time, and bookstores worldwide
stayed open through the wee hours to push those books into the hot little
hands of today's Youth. Once again demonstrating that, computer game
sales to the contrary notwithstanding, reading has not gone out of style
altogether among the Young, the book sold 10 million copies in the first
24 hours. At W.H. Smith's 390 stores in England, the book was selling
at the rate of 13 every second, breaking the previous record of 8/second
set by-the fifth Rowling opus, Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Work began immediately to translate
the book into the 62 languages it will soon be published in. The
Phoenix reached No. 1 on the bestseller lists in both France and
Germany, the only English-language book ever to achieve that pinnacle.
Methera. Camilla's coat of arms fittingly
features a royal lion (from her husband's heraldry) and a boar (from
her father's) but, strangely, no horsey regalia: coats of arms traditionally
incorporate symbols of the principal's preoccupations, but Camilla's
equestrian interests aren't trotted out here. Camilla and her spouse
are not very popular among the masses, it seems. Three years ago on
our visit to the United Kingdom, we'd purchased one of those ornate
cups commemorating the 50th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's
ascension to the British throne. This year, we tried to find a similar
piece of china that commemorates the wedding of Charles and Camilla.
Hard to find. Shopkeepers universally said that they hadn't stocked
many (or, even, any) of the crockery because Charles and Camilla are
so unpopular retailers feared getting stuck with an inventory of cups
they couldn't sell. Pimp. In the world of cricket, the
test matches between England and Australia are called "the Ashes."
The winner, ostensibly, gets the Ashes. But not really. It all started
in 1882 when England lost to Australia, and a distraught journalist,
Reginald Brooks (son of Shirley Brooks, whose death in 1874 ended a
four-year editorship of Punch, the culmination of a lifelong career
at the magazine), wrote in the Times:
"In Affectionate Remembrance of English Cricket, which died
at the Oval on 29th August 1882. Deeply lamented by a large
circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. RIP. NP. The body will
be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia." Subsequently, the
Aussies perpetuated the spoof and presented the English team with a
tiny urn that supposedly holds the Ashes of the recently deceased. The
urn is permanently on display in the cricket museum at Lord's, one of
the great English cricket pitches (another being the aforementioned
Oval); so the so-called contest for the Ashes is, as they
say, "a notion rather than a fact." But the competition is
nonetheless keen-particularly in England, which has not won as often
as Australia. Of the 306 "tests," Australia has won 125; England,
95-86, a draw. England hasn't won the Ashes since 1987. Sethera. As you can see, there was plenty of exciting news to follow in the heroically lurid English press. Not all British newspapers are screaming mongers of scandal and sensation. The Guardian of Manchester, for example, seems an exemplar of responsible journalism. But even the London Times, once a staid bulwark of the establishment, now appears in tabloid format with tinges of tabloid sensibility (a consequence, one supposes, of being owned by Rupert Murdock, the king of tabloid journalism); but it's still more text than picture and therefore still more respectable than the usual run of tabloid newspaper, whose front pages are, typically, circus posters of bellowing headlines and shocking pictures. I picked up and sampled most of the tabloids that are distributed nationally- Daily Mail, Sun, Daily Record, Daily Express, Daily Mirror. The most outrageous of these is clearly the Daily Sport, which out-sensationalizes the others by moving the famed Page Three Girl to the front page (albeit with her chest covered, mostly, rather than bare, the customary Page Three Girl pose). Sport's front page always features nearly barenekidwimmin, rotating poses systematically through chest, crotch, and butt shots.
The
newspaper's name is somewhat misleading-unless you think sex is a sport.
Only about four pages at the back are devoted to athletic competitions;
the rest of the paper seems a tireless advertisement for pornographic
movies. I read The Independent
every day, and it seems the least sensational of the traditional
tabloids: it's text and pictures are in a roughly even balance, and
the front page always has text as well as photographs. Lethera. To supplement sensation and
gossip, the papers often include enterprising feature material on obscure
topics. One day, for instance, the Independent
listed "the top ten films that British schoolchildren should
see by the age of 14," headlining it "The X-rated Films Every
Child Should See." The list included "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,"
"Toy Story," "The Wizard of Oz," and "Night
of the Hunter"-all of which seem to me strangely dubbed "x-rated."
Meanwhile, on the same day, the Daily
Mail listed "Fifty Films Your Child Should See by the Age of
14"-including Errol Flynn in "The Adventures of Robin Hood"
(1938), "Back to the Future" (1985), "King Kong"
(1933), "The Kid" (1921), "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"
(1937), "To Kill A Mockingbird" (1962) as well as the films
listed in the Independent. The lists are actually one
list compiled by the British Film Institute; the Independent chose to print only the top ten of the fifty. And here's
a piece about designer Roberto Cavalli's contract to re-interpret the
costume of the Playboy bunny. Another article provides thumbnail plot
summaries of all 37 Shakespeare plays by way of announcing the Royal
Shakespeare Company's intention of staging all of the Bard's plays in
a special festival. And here's a mother's account of her breast enlargement
surgery, which she undertook in order to "accompany" her daughter
through the same ordeal: "When we first took the bandages off a
few days later, we both burst out laughing because we were so swollen
and looked very funny. I was very happy once the swelling had gone down
and I saw my lovely breasts for the first time. I felt brilliant and
threw away all my padded bras." And, finally-in the same titillating
spirit-an article about the latest artwork of Brooklyn's Spencer Tunick,
a photographer who, on special assignment in Britain, recruited 1,700
people to pose naked at Gateshead in Newcastle for a work entitled "Naked
City." The article, accompanied by a double-page spread photograph
of a sea of nudity (everyone is lying down, side by side), noted that
Tunick had done similar exposes at the Saatchi Gallery and on the escalator
at Selfridges on Oxford Street in 2003 and in Barcelona, Melbourne,
and Montreal in previous years. The best of these pieces was in the
Daily Express, which sent
its own reporter, Sophie Tweedale, to join "the living landscape"
by "stripping off" (as they say). She begins by saying she's
no prude, but "put me on a topless beach in Spain, and I'm the
one sitting there clutching my bikini top." Her embarrassment on
this assignment, she confesses, was "fast overtaken by sheer cold."
Her verdict: "There was certainly something strangely bonding about
the whole experience of mass nudity." Hovera. None of the national tabloids
I looked into-and I sampled them all-had more than a few comic strips.
Most had a single page, which, at tabloid dimension, offered only 5
or 6 strips. Most of them were in color, but the reproduction was so
poor that they all appeared to have been pulled off a computer with
not very many working pixels. And strips from U.S. syndicates showed
up, too- Dilbert, Doonesbury, Hagar, Garfield, Peanuts, and the new panel from
the McCoy brothers, The Flying
McCoys. The Daily Record and
the Sun had 3-tier strips rendered almost photographically
in air
Political cartoonists are the masters of the medium in UK, judging from
the evidence. S Dovera. Otherwise-I must not be getting
out much because it seems to me that young women in England wear less
in public than young women in America. I could be wrong about that:
as I say, I don't get out much. My wife agrees with me; of course, she
doesn't get out much either. In any case, we saw lots of lithesome jiggling
young ladies whose tube tops were cut both low (at the top) and high
(at the bottom), which, in combination with those low-riding hip-hugger
pants, revealed a good deal of epidermis south of the belly button.
Meanwhile, the cleavage vicinity between the navel and the clavicle
was in constant motion, it seemed-altogether, a wholly refreshing bird-watching
experience. We also saw lots of tattoos, bra straps, scruffy-looking
males with hair carefully mussed (moused?) to look as if they'd slept
wrong in it, and T-shirts. Even at the best four-star hotels, T-shirts
were the universal attire. British decorum has long departed. But we
didn't see as many people walking around with cell phones at their ears
as we do on the average U.S. street. Dick.
ODDS & ADDENDA. In Saga magazine, in a review of Douglas Addams'
Hitchhiker books, I ran across this assertion of the enduring value
of affability: keep your head, watch your manners, and try to be pleasant,
it might yet all turn out for the best. The writer also espoused the
English conviction that a nice cup of tea will put it all right. Yan-A-Dick. At a sweet (candy) shop
in Keswick were several tiers of shelves lined with jars of candy, each
jar bearing a commercially issued label to identify the kind of candy
therein-jelly beans, tootsie rolls, gum drops, etc. But one jar had
a hand-wrought label that read: "Those pink and yellow round things
with black centers that you get in All Sorts Liquorice."
Tyan-A-Dick. Here's something your
ATM card issuer probably doesn't tell you: don't enter your PIN more
than twice. If the first try doesn't work and the machine asks for a
second attempt, go ahead; but if that fails to produce the desired result,
retrieve your card and go away. If you punch in the PIN a third time,
the machine will "retain" your card. But you won't get it
back: the bank will cut it up into little pieces. Tethera-A-Dick. Browsing the china
shops, I was delighted to see that Norman
Thelwell's fat ponies and their juvenile riders have finally been
translated into three dimensions. I've thought they were ideal candidates
for converting to figurines. But the translations I saw, while encouraging,
were not faithful enough to the original. The ponies weren't quite as
plump as Thelwell drew them; and the kids, not quite as cute. But there
are cups upon which his drawings have been copies exactly, and those
are better than the figurines. Quentin
Blake is another matter: his renderings of the characters in Roald
Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have been ingeniously duplicated
in figurine form, nearly perfect incarnations. Excellent. Alas, I saw
them on our last day in the country and didn't have time to stop and
decide which one to buy. (And they're too expensive to buy more than
one, kimo sabe.) Methera-A-Dick. This just-invoked term,
and the others with which I've cryptically ear-marked every preceding
paragraph in this recitation, are the English shepherd's antique tally
for counting sheep. Herein, we've gone, in order, from One to Fourteen.
Fifteen is "bumfit" and twenty is "giggot." More
than that, I dunno. But I suppose (because I so fondly wish it) that
British shepherds still employ this method when inventorying their flocks.
One more. On July 20, the front page of the Independent
was mostly numbers, beginning with a figure three inches high- 24,865,
the number of civilian dead in Iraq, a number no official agency in
either the U.S. or England seems to be keeping track of. I'd seen the
number slowly accumulating at www.iraqbodycount.com
over the months, so I wasn't surprised at its magnitude. Between March 2003 and March 2005, civilian
Iraqis were being killed at the rate of 34 every day; the total, so
far, is roughly ten percent of the country's population. Nearly ten
percent of the total were under the age of 18; 10% of the adult dead
were female. The statistics have been assembled from news media reports
and from official figures supplied by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and
Mortuaries. Anti-occupation forces have killed about 2,300; military
forces, about 9,000. One of the report's compilers said: "The ever-mounting
Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war
in Iraq. It remains a matter of the gravest concern that, nearly two
years and a half years on, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. governments
have begun to systematically measure the impact of their actions in
terms of human lives destroyed." Another added: "Iraq is descending
into anarchy and the U.S. presence is not helping. It has shown its
incapacity to create a peaceful state. Never again will intervening
states so greatly underestimate what is involved in invading and rebuilding
a country." However well-intentioned the Bush League power play,
it has gone far awry, effectively perverting everything Americans think
their country stands for. This may well be the saddest chapter in our
history.
ROWLAND B. WILSON, AGAIN Time noticed that Wilson is no longer among us and spent at least three sentences
on his life and career. I didn't do much better, I'm afraid (Opus
165), but now I know more, thanks to the Independent in England, which devoted a third of a page on July 14
to Wilson's obit. Maybe he rated something akin to that quantity in
some U.S. publication that I missed while playing hokey in England,
but on the chance he didn't, here's most of what Philip Hoare wrote
in the Independent (amplified, a little, by my [bracketed] remarks): Rowland B. Wilson's work will be immediately
and evocatively familiar to any young boy who has sneaked a peek in
his father's copy of Playboy.
Wilson, who drew cartoons for the magazine from 1967 until his death
two weeks ago [on June 28 in Encinitas, California], was the master
of subtle humour. "He was the tasteful guy at Playboy-
he didn't do the really rude ones," recalls his daughter Megan.
Wendy is sitting on Captain Hook's knee in a dark cave. Peter Pan runs
in, arms flailing, in an effort to save her, and she says, "Aw,
grow up!" Rowland Bragg Wilson was born in Dallas, Texas, on August
3, 1930, and would remain a Texan in tastes and opinions. As a child
of the Great Depression, he spent his Saturdays at the cinema, and would
come home, drawing Disney characters at the kitchen table. Having gained
a degree in fine arts at the University of Texas in Austin, he went
on to Columbia, New York, supporting himself in the meantime by sending
cartoons to such publications as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. His budding career was put on
hold when, in 1954, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving in Germany
and using his artistic talents to create classified charts. He complained
bitterly, "The army stole two years out of my career." Having been demobbed (demobilized in
Americanese), in 1957, Wilson joined a Madison Avenue advertising agency,
Young and Rubicam. He spent seven years there as an art director, creating
drawings for advertisements. In 1958, he became a regular contributor
to Esquire-Wilson was at that time sharing
an apartment on Third Avenue with the magazine's art direction, Robert
Benton- and throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, his work was
published in The New Yorker. In 1962 a collection of
his cartoons [mostly in black-and-white] was published under the title
The Whites of Their Eyes. "Ideas are
easy to come by," he wrote in the blurb. "It is the drawing
that takes a long time." In 1964, Wilson left New York for Weston,
Connecticut, and became a freelance advertising artist, but continued
to draw cartoons. He drew a comic strip, Noon
[it debuted March 6, 1967], which was widely syndicated [I'd say
not so widely: I don't think it lasted more than a year, if that.-RCH],
and began a long relationship with Playboy.
Wilson's work was highly regarded, both by his editors, and his readers:
his use of colour was superb, his draughtsmanship unmatched, and his
knowledge of historical detail immense. Megan Wilson also observes that
"movies informed his cartoons. His dramatic use of perspective
was influenced by the great cinematographers of his youth." [Wilson's
deployment of extravagantly different perspectives was most evident
in a series of advertisements he did for a life insurance company in
which he depicted, from a wildly divergent angle, some personage being
threatened by something he has not yet perceived-a giant wrecking ball,
say, swinging towards the window to which his back is turned-who says,
"My insurance company? New England Life, of course. Why do you
ask?"] From advertising, he moved into animation.
From 1973 to 1975, he worked in London for Richard Williams's animation
studio, where his love of cinema blossomed as his cartoons came alive.
He drew animated cartoons for Tic-Tac with a 1940s film noir look. Another television commercial for Williams, "The
Trans-Siberian Express," won first prize at the International Animation
Festival in New York. Wilson returned to Manhattan and drew an educational
animation tv series, "Schoolhouse Rock," which was a landmark
learning tool for children of that generation, in the late 1970s. He
won an Emmy award for the series. In the early eighties, Wilson moved
to California, where he worked for Disney. He did pre-production design
for "The Little Mermaid" (1989), "The Hunchback of Notre
Dame" (1996), "Hercules" (1997), "Tarzan" (1999),
"Atlantis" (2001) and "Treasure Planet" (2002).
Wilson had many proteges, including the young Tim Burton, whom he dissuaded
from his ambition to become a
Playboy cartoonist. (Burton would go on to create "The Nightmare
before Christmas" and "Edward Scissorhands.") Wilson painted epic watercolours, in
which he would imagine what medieval Paris would look like when the
Hunchback was there. Or he would recreate a Victorian picnic in the
jungle. It all tied into the historical knowledge for which his Playboy
and New Yorker cartoons
were famous. His job at Disney was to create the look of the film-not
the characters, necessarily, but the backgrounds. His artistic talent
was inherited by his four daughters, all of whom are artists: Amanda,
a New York-based graphic designer; Reed, a fine artist and illustrator
in London; Kendra, magazine designer for The
Observer; and Megan, Associate Art Director fo Random House in New
York. Wilson's first wife, the interior designer Elaine Libman [whom
he married in 1952] divorced him in 1977. His second wife, Suzanne Lemieux
[married in 1980], is also an artist. On the day of his death, a sketch
for a new Playboy cartoon still lay on his drawing board. RCH again: Those young men who sneaked peeks into their fathers' Playboys and found Wilson there are indubitably the better for having experienced the pristine purity of the cartoonist's line and searing clarity of his compositions, not to mention the insightful glimpses into history that he invariably afforded. It's not surprising, either, that Wilson thought drawing was more work than conjuring up ideas: his ideas always involved period costumes and locales out of the distant past, which he not only had to research for authenticity but depict with a persuasive flair for accuracy. Tasteful his drawings and his humor always were, but he was not above limning barenekidwimmin with enthusiasm, and we're all the better for that, too.
I
hate to keep bringing this up (well, I don't mind, actually, but I don't
want to appear obsessed by the subject), but when I mentioned this last
time, I wrote: "Here's Pam
Anderson in the current issue of the laddie mag, FHM
(the one with her and her chest on the cover). During the interview,
she describes her outrage at seeing a photograph of herself in another
magazine in which her nipples, which were visibly protruding against
the confining fabric of the bodice of her shirt in the photograph until
it was printed, had been airbrushed out! Protrusions erased! Breasts
hideously de-nippled. Pam, who has made a career of her boobs and nipples,
was understandably miffed at this slur on her fame: 'My nipples can
cut glass,' she exalted in an apparent assault on the offending airbrusher.
Maybe, but I'm not sure that nipples that can cut glass are at all erotic.
I mean, think of what they'd do if you ...." While I was alarmed, then, about the
alleged superpowers of Pam's nipples, I found out while traipsing around
Ye Olde Merrie what she actually meant when she likened her nipples
to diamonds. The British edition of FHM
is somewhat more liberated than the American version (breasts are
unveiled in the British edition), and she is quoted at some length on
the subject only vaguely alluded to in the edition I saw over this way.
Said the mammorable Pam: "I can cut glass with my nipples. I remember
getting bugged about them in high school. They'd get harder and harder
as people talked about them. I was like, 'Stop talking about my nipples:
they'll just get worse.' My nipples show through anything, even when
my T-shirt isn't wet. They're always on call-a shot of espresso or tequila
goes straight to them." Okay, now I'm really worried: her super-powered
nipples get their powers from -caffeine? Or-what?-dead worms?
COMIC STRIP WATCH On
July 10, a historic event commenced in Blondie.
That date marks the launch of a two-month continuity in the strip, which
hasn't run anything approaching a continuing story since Dagwood went
on a hunger strike in 1933. This summer's storyline culminates on Sunday,
September 4, just on the cusp of the 75th anniversary of
the strip's debut in 1930. Blondie's traditional starting date has
been given as September 8 for decades; recently, Jeffrey Lindenblatt, who delves deeply into such matters, disputed
the tradition: he consulted all three Hearst papers in New York and
found that Chic Young's celebrated strip appeared
in nary a one of them on September 8; but the first Blondie appeared in one of them, the American, a week later on September 15. Blondie is syndicated by King Features, which is the Hearst syndicate,
so the strip's absence in Hearst's New York papers on its alleged starting
date is of more than casual concern to historians. It's possible, I
suppose, that Blondie began
elsewhere on the King circuit on September 8 and debuted in New York
the next week just because the New York papers didn't have room for
it on the 8th, but we won't be able to settle the matter
until someone somewhere finds Blondie in a 1930 newspaper on September
8. Until that fortuitous moment, we'll barge witlessly ahead, still
citing September 8 as the official beginning date. The strip began as a "flapper"
strip about a dizzy young blonde named, with unrelenting perspicacity,
Blondie. This was Chic Young's fourth pretty girl strip: in October
of 1921, he'd done The Affairs
of Jane at N.E.A. for six months until it faded, and then he'd come
to New York and done Beautiful
Babs for Bell Syndicate for four months before joining the King
Features art department in 1923 and creating Dumb
Dora. Dora proved popular enough to endure longer than its forerunners,
and when the 1929 stock market crash wiped out his savings, Young, thinking
he had leverage, lobbied for more money. But Joseph V. Connolly, King's
energetic and imaginative general manager, was not inclined in that
direction. Young threatened to quit; Connolly still resisted. So Young
packed himself and his wife off to the French Riviera to make his point.
When Connolly wired, pleading him to return, Young consented-but only
for a bigger piece of the action and his own comic strip. Connolly agreed,
provided Young could come up with an acceptable creation. Returning
to New York, Young spent the summer devising a new strip. It was yet
another pretty girl feature, and this one would reign as one of the
world's most widely circulated strips for longer than just about anybody. Blondie had numerous beaux in the early
years, but the one that kept coming back was the one who introduced
her to his tycoon father on the very first day-Dagwood Bumstead. "I
always feel so boo-boop-a-doop when I meet my boy friends' papas,"
Blondie giggles, "but I usually like them better than the sons.
Can't I call you 'Pop,' Mr. Bumstead? Tee hee!" When Dagwood decides
to marry Blondie, his snooty parents object, so Dagwood goes on a hunger
strike that lasts 28 days, starting January 3, 1933. His parents finally
consent to the marriage, but Dagwood's father disinherits his son, a
callous strategy perhaps, but one that opened the way for Blondie and
Dagwood to become The American Newlyweds, then The American Young Mother
and Father, and, ultimately, The American Family, a niche the strip
has enjoyed for most of its 75-year history as the pace-setter for the
domestic comedy genre of comic strip. Most of the drawing after the
1930s was done by other cartoonists under Young's supervision. First,
Jim Raymond (brother of Alex, the Flash Gordon/Rip Kirby conjurer); then
Mike Gersher followed by Stan Drake. Currently, it's Dennis LeBrun and Jeff Parker. This summer's storyline commemorating
the anniversary ostensibly aims at the couple's wedding anniversary,
but that ceremony occurred on February 17, 1933, not in September. In
seeming defiance of this fact, Dagwood and Blondie and their offspring,
Alexander and Cookie, will spend the next month continuing to plan an
anniversary party, a gala event. During the next weeks, other comic
strip characters will allude to the forthcoming festivities in their
own strips- Garfield, Zits, Mutts, Beetle Bailey, Hagar, For Better or For Worse,
Mother Goose and Grimm, B.C., Wizard of Id, The Family Circus, Marvin,
Dick Tracy, Gasoline alley, Curtis, and Bizarro.
And Dean Young, the creator's
son and current steward of Blondie,
will include these characters in his strip. GeeDubya and Laura are also
slated to appear. Then on September 4, they'll all come to the party.
But will it be a wedding anniversary? Blondie's been pretty coy about
it: on July 10, when the storyline began, she says to Dagwood: "I
can't believe you still haven't figured out which anniversary we have
coming up!" Dagwood is stumped, but Blondie finally tells him,
"It was when we began our lives together!" Blondie's right,
of course. But I suspect she's alluding not on their February 17 wedding
day but that fabled first day of the strip, when Dagwood introduces
her to his father-whether September 8 or September 15. That's when their
"lives together" began, after all. Dagwood, however, thinks
she's talking about their wedding anniversary. So I suspect the punchline
of the story will land on Dagwood on September 4 when he finds out it's
not their wedding anniversary that he's been planning a party for all
summer.
From Terry Van Kirk, editor of Slice
of Wry, the newsletter of the Southern California Cartoonists Society
(July 21, 2005)--- "Flintstones" Gene Hazelton
to Appear in Sunday Dennis the
Menace. Look for recently deceased Flintstones cartoonist Gene Hazelton in the lead panel of Dennis the Menace on Sunday, September
18. He'll be the elderly gent on his cell phone with the initials "GH"
on his jacket. "It's an in-house salute to a great cartoonist who
never received near the credit he deserved" said Gene's biographer
and long time friend John Province. "When John suggested the idea,
I was HONORED!" said Ron
Ferdinand, who draws the Sunday Dennis.
"Gene has been such a tremendous inspiration to me over the years,
it was the LEAST I could do!"
Ron
had corresponded and traded sketches with the Flintstones cartoonist
over the years and he immediately warmed to the idea as a tribute using
the medium Gene loved. Hailed as one of the finest character designers
in the business, Hazelton, an alumnus of the Disney, MGM and Hanna-Barbera
studios, passed away on April 3. He drew the syndicated Flintstones
and Yogi Bear from 1962
until 1984. After retirement Gene was selected to design and draw a
series of popular limited edition serigraphs subsequently signed by
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera for the collector market.
"Gene admired Ron's work on Dennis
very much and when I saw one of his drawings of Dennis displayed
on Gene's refrigerator, I knew Ron had made the grade," Province
said. "It was Gene's way of saying 'Great job!'"
Ferdinand has drawn the Dennis the Menace Sunday page since 1981
after being selected and mentored by creator Hank Ketcham. RCH again: Ferdinand's coloring of the
strip, which, he tells me, he performs "the old-fashioned way,"
producing a color guide with prismacolor markers, is stunning. He highlights
flesh tones by leaving patches of white, for example, and the Ketcham-inspired
silhouettes are often a solid color rather than stolid black, and night
scenes are monochromes of blue. The daily Dennis,
which appears as a single-panel
cartoon, is produced by Marcus
Hamilton, who just won the "division award" for newspaper
panel cartooning from the National Cartoonist Society. Appearing in
over 1000 newspapers internationally, Dennis the Menace has
inspired a syndicated TV program, several motion pictures, comic books,
an animated series and remains one of the most popular comic strip franchises
in cartoon history.
Quips
& Quotes I
don't do drugs anymore because I find I get the same effect just by
standing up really fast. Every time I walk into a singles bar,
I can hear Mom's wise words: "Don't pick that up: you don't know
where it's been." Snowmen
fall from Heaven unassembled.
ACTUAL BOOKS Modern Arf (120 giant-size 9x12-inch pages in paperback, $19.95)
is an antic dissertation on the scandalous courtship of art and cartooning
with numerous instructive examples of the propagation that ensued, including
short biographies of both celebrated (Jack
Kirby, Milt Gross, Salvador Dali) and relatively unknown (Hy Mayer, Jimmy Hatlo, Antonio Rubino) geniuses who perpetrated the
ribald romance. Collected and edited by my friend, the master of manic
manias, Craig Yoe, the book traces, in the looney
manner of zany cartoonists everywhere, the relationship between upper-case
Art and lower-case cartoonery by displaying instances of Art in cartooning
and vice versa. In the former category is a section on Patrick McDonnell, who begins his Sunday
Mutts strips with a splash
panel evoking various works of art, both fine and popular; the McDonnell
section of this book, however, offers, instead, samples of his even
more fanciful illustration work and some previously unpublished college
strips. "The comics I drew in college," says McDonnell, "were
minimalist and improvisational. I thought they were Zen." In the
vice versa department is a section of storyboards that Dali made for
a movie, "Surrealist Mysteries of New York," that was, alas,
never made; the storyboards, however, make good comics. Some of Yoe's
examples merely depict characters encountering modern art in comics- Fred Schwab's Lady Luck, for instance, from the "Spirit Section"
dated August 18, 1946. And here's Jack Kirby's story from Amazing
Tales No. 1 (1958), "The Fourth Dimension Is a Many Splattered
Thing," in which the King gets as abstract as any of the moderns
on museum walls (printed from original art in Yoe's personal collection).
Most of the pages of this volume are devoted to displaying extremely
rare comic artifacts: Hy Mayer's series of "worm's eye"
views of various activities (that is, people seen from below; "the
original up-skirt artist," Yoe calls Mayer, but nothing untoward
is on view herein); an array of old postcards depicting Alfred E. Newman before he became Mad's maniac mascot; Italian cartoonist Antonio Rubino's stunning visual inventions in comics form; and Jimmy Hatlo's highly satirical Sunday
feature, The Hatlo Inferno,
a vision of hell in which Hatlo tortures people with whatever it was
that they did in life that annoyed people (roasting over a spite, for
instance, is a group of waiter-baiters "who always complain that
their meat isn't cooked just so"). The book also includes 7 pages
of Yoe graphic goofiness, a somewhat Seussian interpretation of a 1940
critique of comic books that appeared in the Chicago Daily News, which claimed comics
were "a national disgrace ... The effect of these pulp paper nightmares
is that of a violent stimulant. ... their hypodermic injection of sex
and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories."
To which Yoe responds: "I couldn't agree more," and then goes
on to illustrate his agreement with seven pages of floating eyeballs
and other body parts, gamboling animals of no known species, and dancing
vegetation of various sorts, all liberally injected with pictures of
statuesque nudes of the curvaceous gender. In short, cartooning artistry
of the highest order. The page layouts reflect a similarly waggish sensibility
albeit tastefully, elegantly, deployed. (In the same carefree spirit,
the Table of Contents does not appear until page 31, and although the
pages numbers of the volume's various sections are given hereon, none
of the book's pages actually carry numbers, so you can't find anything
you might be looking for by using the Table of Contents. Another of
Yoe's pranks, no doubt.) Each of the ten sections is introduced with
a short text piece, usually regaling us with fragments of history and/or
biography that has been too long lost in the mists of time. I was delighted
to see a rehearsal of Hatlo's career, for example; his skill at flinging
satirical barbs is too seldom appreciated and applauded in histories
of the medium, perhaps because he drew in a manner that has become "old
fashioned," and we all stampede to be cool and up-to-date these
days. The pages before the Table of Contents are devoted to a series
of cartoons and strips about artists and their models, followed by biographical
vignettes for each of the cartoonists represented. Here again, Yoe performs
a valuable service for scholars and fans alike, stumbling, as far as
I can tell, only once: Rudolph Dirks didn't lose the title of his strip,
The Katzenjammer Kids, during
a 1897 visit to Europe. I suspect Yoe suffered a momentary diversion
of attention while writing this entry and inadvertently substituted
the year of the strip's debut for the year of the celebrated legal action
that prevented Dirks from using the title of his first-born on a subsequent
reprise he concocted for a rival paper. These things happen; they happen
to me all the time. The history of the world has been rewritten in sundry
places due to some lapse or another that I committed while writing about
cartoonists. (By the way, Dirks' trip took place in 1913; the legal
action, the next year.) As for the rest of Yoe's scholarship, try as
I might, I found no other lapses or sins of ignorance. The book is a
treat from front to back, a feast of the kind of rare and wonderful
cartooning we almost never see anywhere anymore. From
Michael Dooley: I'd like to let the others know about a new book
I co-edited [with Steven Heller]: The
Education of a Comics Artist: Visual Narrative in Cartoons, Graphic
Novels, and Beyond. Briefly, it's an anthology of essays and interviews
on teaching, and learning about, the various genres of comics art. It's
now available at book stores and online sellers such as Amazon.
Here's the contributor lineup: Jessica Abel, Ho Che Anderson,
Tony Auth, Bart Beaty, Monte Beauchamp, Colin Berry, Nicholas Blechman,
Peter Blegvad, Steve Brodner, Paul Buhle, Kim Deitch, Will Eisner, Robert
Fiore, Rick Geary, Bill Griffith, R.C. Harvey, David Heatley, Todd Hignite,
Nicole Hollander, Dan James, Chip Kidd, Paul Krassner, Tim Kreider,
Rich Kreiner, Joe Kubert, Peter Kuper, Heidi MacDonald, David Mack,
Stan Mack, Matt Madden, Bob Mankoff, Barbara McClintock, Scott McCloud,
Dave McKean, Rick Meyerowitz, Dan Nadel, Mark Newgarden, Dennis O'Neil,
Gary Panter, Joel Priddy, Bill Randall, David Rees, Eric Reynolds, Leonard
Rifas, Trina Robbins, Roger Sabin, David Sandlin, Ben Sargent, Marjane
Satrapi, Arlen Schumer, Bill Sienkiewicz, Elwood Smith, Art Spiegelman,
Tom Spurgeon, Mark Alan Stamaty, Ted Stearn, Jim Steranko, Barron Storey,
James Sturm, Ward Sutton, Gunnar Swanson, Teal Triggs, Robert Williams,
Chris Ware, and Craig Yoe. RCH: Dooley is being a bit too cryptic.
And the book's title is a trifle misleading: all writing about specific
subjects, any and all subjects, is "educational," and this
book is "educational" in that broadest of senses as well as
in some much more specific senses. In other words, it's much much more
than a "how to" book: it's more of a historical adjunct. It's
great virtue-and it is a considerable one-is in the array of contributors
(all print cartooning fields are represented) and the brevity of their
contributions. Many of the essays are only a couple pages long: you
can pick the book up and read an entire article on the way to the front
door. I've got a piece in it, and I've been paid a modest honorarium
for it. (It's about gag cartooning in the olden days-just to give you
an idea of the scope of this tome.) But I won't be paid anything based
upon book sales. Some of the pieces are interviews rather than essays.
Many brim with autobiographical insights about career paths and the
like. There is a wealth of anecdotal information. Paul
Krassner, founder of the thoroughly irreverent Realist in 1958,
regales us with stories about the cartoons he published that were so
offensive they couldn't be published anywhere else. He did a piece for
Mad, based upon the premise"What
if comic strip characters answered those little ads in the back of the
magazines?" In the service of this scheme, Wally
Wood depicts Orphan Annie getting Maybelline to give her eyes pupils
and Dick Tracy being sent for a nose job. "Alley Oop got rid of
his superfluous hair, only to reveal that he had no ears." But
William Gaines wouldn't let Krassner's
take on Olive Oyl go in: Krassner wanted the flat-chested Olive to send
for falsies. As Krassner ends the story:
Gaines explained, "My mother would object to that."
"Yeah," I complained, "but she's not a typical
subscriber."
"No," he replied, "but she's a typical mother." In the interview with Jim Steranko, I learn that Joe Kavalier
in Michael Chabon's novel
Kavalier and Clay is
based upon Steranko, who, I'd forgotten, is an accomplished escape artist.
I should have tumbled to the Steranko-Kavalier relationship long ago;
drat. "Chabon," says Steranko, "ended up with a Pulitzer
Prize. And I have a stack of comics." The book is crammed with
fascinating tidbits like this-a genuine education; 288 6x9-inch pages
in paperback, some illustration; $19.95. From Rob Weiner: I just wanted to "plug" the book Gospel According to Superheroes. It is a book of collected essays looking at
positive aspects of Superhero comics. It is not a hard-core Christian
book. I have an essay looking at Captain America Young Allies, Invaders
and the JSA during WW 2. I'd
be curious to see any reviews and to know the opinions of people on
the list after viewing it. Stan Lee wrote the preface. And-No, I did not get paid for the article
nor do I receive any money. I just want people to read it.
Forthcoming. Did I mention that Fantagraphics is bringing out Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace?
Following the pattern established by the Peanuts
project, this effort will consist of several volumes, the first 642-page
installment due in September. It will include a Foreword by Patrick
"Mutts" McDonnell and an Introduction by Brian "Hi and
Lois" Walker. Fantagraphics is also publishing a new paperback
edition of Ketcham's autobiography, The
Merchant of Dennis. ... Peter Maresca at Sunday Press Books is bringing
out a giant Little Nemo book in celebration of the 100th
anniversary of Winsor McCay's famed feature this year.
I've seen a mock-up of this tome, Little
Nemo in Slumberland Splendid Sundays, and it is stupendous. At 17x23-inch
page size, it comes close to the actual size of Nemo when it was first published. Watch ordering information at www.sundaypressbook.com
... And while I'm at it, remember my own celebration of Nemo's century,
The Genius of Winsor McCay, a much more modest effort than Maresca's
monumental work of art but, withal, worth the highly reasonable price
of admission; more here. We're experiencing
a little difficulty with the credit-card paying mechanism, alas; so
if it hasn't been fixed by the time you try it and if you don't want
to use PayPal, try printing off the order form and sending the thing
directly to me with your check for $11.
CIVILIZATION'S LAST OUTPOST: Part I 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
(and Al Franken Is #37) is
another fulminating effusion from the rank conservative pen of Bernard
Goldberg, whose early book, Bias,
is about how the mass media in this country is more liberal than
conservative. The tome at hand is the next installment in the campaign.
The Number One Person Screwing Up America is Michael Moore-just to give
you an inkling of what Goldberg is up to. Three cartoonists made the
list: Aaron McGruder is No.
88, Jeff Danziger is No.
35, and Ted Rall is No. 15.
McGruder screws America by being unrelentingly iconoclastic, leaving
no one's sacred cow unscathed. Danziger, the only outright political
tooner of the three, made the list because he once drew Condoleezza
Rice as a plantation-style mammy (Butterfly McQueen in "Gone With
the Wind" was his inspiration). And Rall is there chiefly for ridiculing
the blind patriotism of Pat Tillman (or maybe it was Tillman's unthinking
bellicosity). The lowest ranking person on the list is almost Paris
Hilton, but Goldberg names her parents instead at No. 100. "Paris
Hilton," he writes, "has an excuse. She's a moron. But her
parents can't be let off so easily." While I agree that Paris Hilton
is by far the most outrageous instance of mindless sexuality achieving
celebrity status (her face, frozen forever in a botox grimace of uncomprehending
and therefore meaningless complaisance; her body, apart from its all-over
tan, wholly unexceptional), I don't think her vacuous existence threatens
the welfare of the nation. The news and entertainment media's complicity
in promoting this empty icon is another matter: that, indeed, threatens
the state of the nation. But I divaricate: This Colyum offers unflagging
congratulations to McGruder, Danziger, and Rall for making the list.
Keep it up, gang. By the time George Santayana reached his eighties in the 1940s, the world-famous
philosopher was living on charity in a convent in Europe, thin but well,
albeit plagued by a failing memory. Every day, he walked to a nearby
park where he sat on a bench and read eight pages of a book that he'd
torn out and brought with him; when he finished reading the eight pages,
he threw them away. There's a lesson in there somewhere, for those of
us who can't let go of any printed matter that comes into our hands.
The once ubiquitous jockstrap is fading
from the cultural landscape. Daniel Akst at Slate got curious about
the "athletic supporter" or yore and inquired into it. Yup:
it's true. A spokesman for Bike Athletic, the inventor and manufacturer
of this once-essential piece of sporting equipage, confirmed Akst's
suspicions: "Kids today are not wearing jockstraps." In my
misspent youth, all male participants in competitive sports were urged-nay,
commanded- to wear jockstraps. We were encouraged to think that this
strap of elastic with a pouch for the genitalia would somehow prevent
our balls from being irreparably damaged in the careless rough-and-tumble
of athletic endeavor. It was, we thought, a kind of armor. That was
never the case, however. Jockstraps offer no such protection. And when
Akst asked William O. Roberts, a past president of the American College
of Sports Medicine, Roberts said: "The best I can tell you is that
jockstraps kind of keep the genitalia from flopping around." They
also provide a "holder" for a plastic "cup" that
would, indeed, offer some measure of protection. Akst can't understand
why more athletes don't wear cups: "Kids these days have helmets
for practically everything-I wouldn't be surprised to see my sons wearing
them for violin practice. But surprisingly few wear cups for sports.
... They consider cups annoying ... which explains why many eschew them
even in situations that would seem to call for Kevlar." Not to
be deprived of generations of revenue, Bike is now manufacturing a garment
called "compression shorts," which function as a somewhat
more binding version of jockey shorts. They "provide support and
'steady, uniform pressure' to hold the groin, hamstring, abdomen, and
quadriceps muscles in place during 'the twisting, stretching and pivoting
action of a game or strenuous exercise.' They're also supposed to 'fight
fatigue by helping prevent vascular pooling.'" Vascular pooling?
Holy moly: another phantom disorder that can topple civilization as
we know it.
THE NEWSIES AND THEIR ANONYMOUS SOURCES For
some years, I've been suspicious of the "anonymous source"
device of modern journalism. As a trained journalist, I'm highly apprehensive
about this maneuver. There's far too much of it, too many so-called
"newsstories" in which the source of the information wishes
to remain anonymous. This practice leaves wide open the possibility
that the reporter is simply fabricating his story. Even if he isn't
making it all up, it looks as if he could be. The recent resolution
of the Miller-Cooper case in which a New York Times reporter and a Time magazine reporter were not permitted
to invoke the "confidentiality" of their relationship with
a source to avoid testifying before a Grand Jury seems to me a move
in the right direction. The most that a journalist should be able to
promise a source is that his name won't be used in the story the journalist
is going to publish-not that the source's identity will be forever "our
secret." In other words, no guarantee of "confidentiality"
in perpetuity. The confidentiality that is presumed to exist between
a doctor and a patient or a lawyer and a client does not apply to a
reporter and his source. Not the same thing at all. The professional
relationships doctors and lawyers have with their patients or clients
are "personal" relationships -that is, the matter at issue
is personal with the patient or client; it involves their well being
as private individuals. The health or legal status of the newsman's
source is not what occasions their exchange: the business at hand is
not the personal, private well being of the source. The journalistic use of confidentiality
in recent times has doubtless been abused almost as often as its been
engaged. My guess is that many sources who demand that a reporter keep
their names secret are in no great danger if their names were divulged.
It's just easier for them to blab if their jobs aren't on the line.
But if what they have to say is as important and vital to the well-being
of the nation as they claim, then they would probably say what they
have to say without the promise of confidentiality. Not because they're
patriots. No-because they're blabber-mouths. They love knowing something
that no one else knows, and they love being able to prove their possession
of secret knowledge by divulging it. Sam Gejdenson, once a Democrat
congressman from Connecticut, confirmed my guess. Quoted by Jeffrey
Goldberg in The New Yorker (July
4), Gejdenson said: "The No. 1 game in Washington is making people
talking to you feel like you're an insider, that you've got information
no one else has." Every time a journalist cites an anonymous source,
he's playing into the hands of these would-be political mafiosos. Once
again, the press is duped into being a tool of the politicians. And
it's unnecessary: eventually-given enough provocation -these know-it-alls
would tell what they know without the promise of confidentiality in
perpetuity. Just to prove they have the power of knowledge. They'd say:
"Just don't mention my name in the story, okay? For now."
And a reporter can do that without undermining the legal foundations
of the Republic. All the blather by journalists about "mutual trust"
and the fate of the nation hanging, Watergate-like, in the balance is
simply so much hooey. As Goldberg hinted, the press is all worked up
over the Miller-Cooper episode because its outcome threatens to shut
off leaks, the chief source of news for the Washington press corps.
Their livelihoods are at risk, not the nation's welfare. Meanwhile, Time and Newsweek have become
hyper-circumspect about citing anonymous sources. They still cite them,
but now they explain why the source is anonymous. Here, for instance,
is a source "who requested anonymity because the FBI asked participants
not to comment publicly." Here's one who wanted anonymity "because
of the confidential material involved." Yet another, in a wholly
speculative (and therefore non-factual) story about whether GeeDubya
is "mulling" an autobiography, "declined to be named
about a subject that the White House has not discussed in public."
If it hasn't been discussed and is only being "mulled," why
do a story on it at all? Isn't this "story" little more than
pure gossip of the most trivial sort? In a terror-ridden world, who
cares whether ol' Texas Two-step is thinking of getting his life story
ghost-written? Later in the same story, the reporter quotes a publisher
"who didn't want to be named for fear of being excluded from the
selling process." Sure. And then in a Karl Rove article there are
"two lawyers who asked not to be identified because they are representing
witnesses sympathetic to the White House." In fourteen column inches
of one story, Newsweek devoted almost an inch-7% of the
story- to explaining why sources wanted their names kept out of it.
It's a colossal waste of type and space, and an affront to the so-called
intelligence of the magazine's readers. The magazine could simply carry
a disclaimer in its front matter, saying: "All anonymous sources
cited in this issue wanted anonymity either because they were afraid
they'd be fired for violating a confidence or being disloyal or for
breaking a law." That, it seems to me, would be sufficient "explanation"
for the whole enchilada. Besides, how anonymous are the "two lawyers
representing witnesses sympathetic to the White House" now? There
are presumably lots of witnesses in that category with lots of lawyers.
But the magazine's citation narrows the field considerably-and makes
every lawyer in the designated category suspect. I think Newsweek,
at least, is getting wise to the pointlessness of this dumb show.
In a recent article on Tim Russert's testimony to the special prosecutor
about the Karl Rove fiasco, the magazine side-stepped the issue by employing
such hoary journalistic devices as "reportedly" and "has
been said." If we are ready to accept the laborious explanation
for the anonymity of a source, then surely our trust in the magazine
is sufficient for us to accept shorthand for that explanation: "...
statements by White House aides-reportedly including Libby- ..." Would it increase the validation
of the truth of the article if we were told that the person or people
who told the reporter that one of the aides in question was Vice President
Cheney's chief of staff "requested anonymity because if it were
known they'd blabbed, they might lose their job"? Probably not.
We either trust journalists or we don't.
Right now, as a nation of readers, we tend not to trust them very much-probably
because they rely too heavily upon anonymous sources and publish a lot
of gossip as if it were ascertainable fact. Or as if it mattered. Probably
because journalists seem more interested in getting sensational headlines
than in reporting the complexities of solutions to public problems.
Once the news media start devoting some energy to serious reporting
on serious matters, journalism will start to rise again on the horizon
of public admiration. And once that happens, reporters can say "reportedly"
with impunity, and we'll believe them. A couple of footnits. First, as David
Broder took some pains to remind us, the Miller incarceration is not
without an irony of epic proportions. Judith Miller is the reporter
"who, in a series of influential articles before the [Iraq invasion],
vividly portrayed the threat that Hussein's weapons supposedly posed.
Only afterward was it learned that many of her 'scoops' came from Ahmed
Chalabi," the Iraqi exile whose motives were inspired by his desire
to ascend to Saddam's throne himself. Concluded Broder: "Her use
of an unnamed source in that case was a distinct disservice to the country;
had we known his name and motivation, much less credibility would have
been attached to her reports." As for Rove and his alleged innocence
of political motive in leaking the CIA status of political foe Joseph
Wilson's wife, I think the press has permitted itself to be distracted,
once again, by minutiae-in this case, the legal letter of the law. The
law in question is vague, and therefore whether Rove violated its letter
or not is even vaguer. Frank Rich, a New
York Times writer renowned for his animosity to the Bush League,
is probably right about Rove. "Of course," Rich says, Rove
deliberately trashed Wilson by making him seem the tool of a high-placed
wife. "We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail but
also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and
bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent
people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina
primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict
(and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994
Texas governor's race, [incumbent] Ann Richards [against whom GeeDubya
was running] found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication
that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife
for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered
on Rove political adversaries. The difference this time is that Mr.
Rove got caught." Gadfly 'tooner Ted Rall also has it right: "We don't
need a law to tell us that unmasking a CIA agent, particularly during
wartime [the Bush League's favorite justification for every action,
remember], is treasonous. Every patriotic American-liberal, conservative,
or otherwise-knows that." So does GeeDubya, which is why he changed
his tune and is now saying he will fire the leaker at the White House
only if the leaker broke the law. A fine, equivocating distinction.
GRIM AND GOOSEY I
read Mother Goose and Grimm everyday
in the local newspaper, but I didn't realize how funny it is until I
started dipped into the new, 20th anniversary collection
from Andrews McMeel, The Ultimate
Mother Goose and Grimm (224 9x12-inch pages in paperback, Sundays
in color; $16.95). The reason the strip seems funnier in the book than
it does in the newspaper is that the book is a compilation of the best
strips from two decades, a skimming of the cream of the crop, a selection
from a vast quantity of candidates. The daily newspaper, on the other
hand, isn't particularly selective: by contract with the supplying syndicate,
it must publish virtually everything that cartoonist Mike
Peters produces under the heading Mother
Goose and Grimm. Those're the rules of the syndicate game. And Peters,
for all his comedic gifts, can scarcely be expected to generate six
of his all-time funniest comic strips every week. That's the law of
averages. The "average," after all, is arrived at by considering
both the pinnacle and the nadir of a category. Some are better than
the average; some are worse. If there weren't, in any enterprise, some
manifestations that are better than others and some that are worse,
you wouldn't have an "average." Instead, you'd have "everything"-everything
would be the same. And in comedy as in shucking corn, everything is
never the same. Even if you are Superman. And Peters has had a turn
or two at being Superman. The anniversary book begins with a note from
Peters' mother, a one-time local tv personality in St. Louis, who tells
about the time she made a Superman costume for her son: "He wore
it to school under his clothes until the nuns chased him off the playground
for stripping and running around in blue longjohns. Superman was finally
sent home by the principal for getting caught in the boys' room, leaping
off a urinal at an unsuspecting janitor." Things haven't changed
much for Peters since. He's never quite outgrown the Superman costume.
On more than one occasion, Peters, who loves to tell stories about his
assorted hysterical adventures, regaled us all with an account of the
time when, as the editorial cartoonist at the Dayton
Daily News, he took his Superman costume to work, changed into it
in the men's room, then sneaked into the paper's austere board room
on the building's second or third floor, opened the window, went out
onto the ledge outside, stood there until the editorial board assembled
inside, then sprang in through the window on them, yelling (probably),
"Truth, Justice, and the American Way." Or some such. It may
not have been the board room; When I say that the strips in the book
seem funnier than the ones in the newspaper, that doesn't mean the ones
in the newspaper are not funny. They are. Peters is invariably funny.
Sometimes he's funnier than other times, and the book reprints what
he thinks are his funniest offerings. Peters was recently interviewed
by Mike Peters of the Dallas Morning News, who is often required
to explain that he is not Mike Peters. Not the real Mike Peters. When
Mike Peters told Mike Peters about these frequent mistaken identities
in his journalistic life, the cartoonist said: "You know what?
I tell people I'm not the real Mike Peters, too. I say that's the lead
singer for the band Alarm." The cartooning Mike Peters' criteria
for what's funny is pretty simple, he told the reporting Mike Peters:
"I don't know whether people are going to laugh or not. The only
gauge I have is whether I laugh. If I don't giggle, I can't really expect
you to giggle at my joke or my drawing. You have to trust your own reaction,
which is easy if you're doing what you love." And it's pretty clear that Peters is
doing what he loves. Today's Mother
Goose and Grimm is mostly about Grimm, Mother Goose's pet dog, but,
as we can see in the compilation at hand, originally the fairy-tale
insinuation of the "Mother Goose" part of the title served
to warn us that the jokes were going to be more than a little fanciful.
Here's the Tin-man with no arms, standing on one leg in front of an
airport metal detector; the security guard, holding two of the Tin-man's
arms and his other leg, says, "Okay-now try it again." Or
Snow White standing there, looking at the seven dwarfs, one of whom
has his coat open, flashing her; she says, "And you must be Sleazy."
The strip's concept permits Peters to wander wherever his sense
of the ridiculous takes him. To Frankenstein and his Bride, for instance,
looking at a baby's cradle as the Bride marvels, "Isn't Junior
cute dear? He's got your nose and my ears." Frankenstein has a
bandage over where his nose would be; and his Bride has bandages where
her ears should be. One of my favorites depicts Grimm standing at the
end of a line of husky dogs hitched to a sled; says Grimm, "If
you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes." There's a
vivid lesson in that for anyone working in corporate hierarchies. Grimm, if we are to judge from the
entries in this book, was a presence from the very beginning, but he
looked more like a dog then. By page 20 of this tome, however, he's
assumed his classic proportions, basketball body and a nose of equal
size. He's more cuddly and his antics therefore more uproarious whether
wagging that tiny sprout of a tail, drinking out of the toilet or foraging
for food in neighborhood trash cans. Coming upon a half-dozen trash
cans lined up in an alley, Grimm says, "I love these handy six-packs,"
lifting the lid of the first in line. Although he shares billing with
Mother Goose, Grimm is the actor in most of the jokes for most of the
strip's history. That's because the strip pretty soon became autobiographical.
As Grimm became less dog-like in appearance, he became more and more
like Mike Peters (or maybe it was vice versa)-in behavior, not appearance.
Peters once explained how this came
about. "I have this thing about Fritos-corn chips. If someone is
eating Fritos in the same vicinity I'm in, I find myself going over
to them and wolfing down any stray bits they may have left. But some
years ago, in order to avoid killing myself with all the grease and
salt, I devised a new scheme. I go to the vending machine at the newspaper
office, buy one of those bags of Fritos, take a mouthful of the chips,
crumple up the bag with most of the chips still in it, and throw it
away in the trash can so I can't retrieve it. One day, I tried that
at home. And after I threw away the bag, I had an irresistible craving,
and I started rummaging through the trash can to find the bag I'd thrown
in. My wife, Marian, caught me in the act and said, 'My gosh-that's
the dog. You're Grimm!'" Peters was startled to realize that she
was exactly right. "It was then that the character started coming
together for me," Peters said. "I stopped doing just dog things
and stared doing Michael things, my fears, my desires, whatever. I projected
these onto the dog. That has made it a lot easier for me to do Grimm
because now I understand him." So here's Grimm, sitting sadly outside
his doghouse and saying, "I wish I could be like that little round-headed
kid in the other strip." The caption explains it all: "Peanuts
envy." Peters loves a good pun. At Christmas, Grimm is under the
Christmas tree, furiously scratching himself and humming "Fleas
Navidad." But there are occasional philosophical moments, too.
One Sunday Grimm follows Mother Goose around the house as she performs
her daily chores. "That's woman's work," Grimm mutters, "I'm
a guy-guys don't do dishes." They don't make beds, either, he says.
Nor do they sweep up. "God didn't intend for guys to do woman's
work," he growls. "Oh, yeah?" says Mother Goose, "-then
why do guys have nipples." This reposit freezes Grimm where he
stands; baffled beyond understanding, he is still standing there at
night when the moon comes out. Mother Goose has evolved over the strip's
life. "She's gotten more mellow and mom-like," Peters told
Peters. Originally, she was a crankier sort. "But she's evolved
more into a foil for the dog. And that's okay-she makes the dog work,
and that's the point, really." A lot of Grimm's earliest adventures
involved fire hydrants and trees and the like. Just the sort of comedy
that will get a cartoonist into trouble. Peters told of a time when
the strip was cancelled in Pittsburgh. Peters was surprised: he thought
the strip had an enthusiastic following in that city, so he phoned the
editor to find out what caused the cancellation. The editor explained
that they'd cancelled Grimm because of the protests of a particularly vociferous group of
concerned readers. (Groups of this sort are always "concerned.")
Peters wondered what their specific objection had been, but the editor
didn't know, exactly, so he gave the cartoonist the phone number of
the woman who was the apparent leader of the mob. Peters phoned her.
What was the problem? he asked. After voicing some generalities about
taste and morality, the woman finally explained that the chief objection
to the strip was that Grimm was often depicted drinking out of the toilet.
All dogs do that, Peters said. Well, the woman said, that may be so,
but I have a little dog, and so far, he doesn't drink out of the toilet,
but if he should see Grimm drinking out of the toilet -. With that for insight into the mind
of America's concerned population-which, as we all know, continues to
flourish unabated, these days often enabled by flaming religious righteousness-we
can appreciate another of Peters' gifts as a cartoonist: he draws funny.
Grimm is all comical nose and fluttering tail. Men are almost all lumpish
mounds with heads affixed to the shoulders without benefit of necks;
they all have big noses and yapping wide mouths (except when they're
smoking, and then their mouths pucker and protrude like spigots on the
front of their faces). Women, too, are largish and lumpish, their hair
inevitably a bundle of frazzle. All Peters creatures, whether humanoid
or not, have very little anatomy: they're all facial expression. Exaggeration
is Peters' forte. Just looking at his drawings arouses the risibilities. The book prints Sunday strips in full
color, about one every third page. But none of the strips carry the
date of their original publication. Unhappily for cartooning historians,
history in this tome is, as it is in most such compilations, a yawning
vacuum. Too bad. Pat Brady in his collections of Rose Is Rose strips rearranges them in
a succession of thematic arrays, condemning historians to blithering
frustration. But the books read better that way, he says. And when you
consider that most reprint volumes are intended to be ready by ordinary
human sapiens, not historians, you must agree. Peters, who also does editorial cartoons for the Dayton Daily News that are syndicated nationally, is among the most decorated of cartoonists. He won the Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1981, and then the Editorial Cartoon Division Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1982 and 1983. NCS gave him the Elzie Segar Award in 1987 for "unique nd outstanding conributions to the profession of cartooning" and in 1991, he garnered the NCS Reuben Award as "cartoonist of the year." But the main thing is: he draws funny.
MORE WIERDNESS Just In Case You're Always Wanted To Know I
wouldn't have brought it up if Mike Peters hadn't, but-men have nipples
for the same reason that women have orgasms. This is a little convoluted,
but here goes: Males have orgasms because ejaculation is necessary to
bring sperm into contact with eggs; hence, male orgasm is necessary
for the survival of the species. Not so female orgasm: women can become
impregnated without having an orgasm. Scientists, we are assured by
The Week magazine (June 3),
have been befuddled by female orgasm ever since Kinsey discovered it.
But now, biologist Elizabeth Lloyd in the New York Times explains it all. In the
first three months of human fetal existence, male and female embryos
are indistinguishable. In the fourth month, the embryo develops its
sexual identity-but, whether male or female, it will have the same basic
neural "wiring" that was developed in the preceding three
months. So women have orgasms. And men have nipples. Both are "artifacts
of fetal development." "That makes the female orgasm a gift
from nature since it's not necessary for the survival of the species.
'It's for fun,' Lloyd explains." Male nipples, of course, are not
as much fun. But they are at least as otherwise purposeless.
CIVILIZATION'S LAST OUTPOST: Part II Ted
Rall is always worth a look-not only his cartoon but his syndicated
column of iconoclastic commentary. Recently, he so acutely echoed my
sentiments about the widely touted "ease" of transacting one's
affairs on the Web that I must quote him verbatim; herewith: Millions
of Americans, especially young adults, prefer to pay their bills with
a debit card or via the Internet. "It's
much easier to be able to point and click to make a payment," says
Larry Lyons, a student. I don't know what he's talking about. I have
broadband, a fully-loaded computer and I'm a former computer programmer-certainly
no Luddite. Yet, for me, paying bills online compares unfavorably with
a visit to the dentist. First you fill out your name, address, credit
card information on a long form. Don't forget the four-digit security
code on your card. No, not the one on the front. The one on the back.
OK. Now wait a few moments while we process your payment. What, you
don't have "cookies" activated on your browser? Go reset your
preferences Bravo, Ted: I couldn't have put it
better myself. Modern technological life isn't always what it's touted
to be. If it ever was. In another recent column-more in his
usual vein-Rall makes a good case for Osama bin Laden being in Kashmir,
not in the border mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Bush
League doubtless knows this, and from that, Rall safely concludes that
GeeDubya and his minions haven't captured bin Laden because they don't
want to. Probably never did.
Graphic Novels In
the Washington Examiner's May
16 review of Will Eisner's The Plot, Mark Molesky, a professor of
history, observes, correctly, that Eisner's subject does not lend itself
readily to the kind of visual treatments that the graphic novel excels
at. I agree, but I think Eisner is more successful in The Plot than Molesky does (see Opus 161).
Molesky goes on to say: "While the comics have consistently proven
themselves more than able to contend with subjects of depth and gravity,
these subjects must have demonstrable physical component to them in
order to be successfully rendered. The life of Sir Francis Drake: Yes.
The life of Emily Dickinson: No." In other words, comics-and graphic
novels, "long form comics"-should confine themselves to subjects
that are essentially action narratives. That's the "demonstrable
physical component" that Molesky misses. For Molesky, graphic novels
will always be about superheroics and swashbuckling adventure, the outer,
visible, life, and never about emotions and thought, the inner life.
Here, I disagree. Not only is Molesky shortchanging the medium, he is
betraying an anti-comics bias of a tradition-locked professorial virulence.
Not too long ago, it would be difficult
to find any significant number of works in the medium that could refute
Molesky. No longer. In Mother,
Comic Home, for example, Paul
Hornschemeier depicts the oppressive despondency that afflicts a
father and his son at the death of his wife (130 6x9-inch full-color
paperback pages, $14.95). The narrative assumes the son's point-of-view,
mostly, and is, seemingly, a straightforward progression, beginning
shortly after his mother has died and recording the increasingly disconsolate
behavior of the father, who seeks psychological help in an asylum but
eventually leaves and takes his own life. Hornschemeier complicates this apparently
simple narrative in several ways. It is soon clear that the son is no
longer seven years old, as he was at the time of his mother's death,
but is a grown man, looking back upon this time of grief and revealing
the mechanisms of denial by which he and his father initially survived.
As a seven-year-old, the son imagines himself the custodian of his mother's
garden and her room (the father moves out of it and sleeps in the attic)
and her grave and the woods between. But even the adult narrator seems
puzzled by the events of his now-distant past, incapable of explaining
what happened except in the terms of his seven-year-old grasp of events. The boy tries to keep his father's
deteriorating condition secret but "makes a mistake," and
his uncle finds out and encourages the father to seek professional help.
The uncle and his wife take custody of the boy while the father is in
therapy. Then the boy "rescues" his father, and the two escape
into the woods where the father jumps off a cliff. The strict chronology of the narrative
is modified and given emotional context with several visual devices.
The most haunting of these occurs in the opening section of the book,
which shows the father floating in the air like a dirigible, searching
for his deceased wife. It isn't until the end of the book that we realize
why the "floating" image is deployed: it evokes the manner
of his death. And the mother's garden, despite the son's attentions,
fails to flourish in quite the way it had during her lifetime: it becomes
just a patch of mud. The grass on her grave, however, grows thick and
hardy, suggesting the permanence of the grave. Another of the symbolic elements is
the lion's mask that the boy often dons. It was given to him by his
mother, who, he tells us, "loved to give presents." At the
end of the book, he resolves not to wear the mask anymore. We may assume
that as he puts aside the mask, he abandons denial and accepts the death
of his mother. The design of the book itself functions
symbolically. Episodes are clearly delineated by chapter headings, but
the headings take us in an unexpected direction-not to the end but,
perhaps, to the beginning? Hornschemeier's storytelling manner
is halting, the narrative punctuated frequently by wordless pictures
that focus our attention, momentarily, upon this character or this activity,
thereby giving emblematic weight to the pictured element. The loneliness
of the father's inconsolable grief is symbolized when panels depict
only him even when he is in the room with other people. In his simple
but precisely descriptive renderings of the pictorial elements, the
cartoonist gives ordinary events an almost clinical emphasis. The pictorial
focus on trivial sometimes unrelated elements suggests the meaninglessness
of all aspects of daily living in the mournful context of the mother's
death, which has robbed life of its joy and meaning. The pace throughout
languishes, imparting a mood of sustained grieving and heartsick desolation. In the last analysis, Mother, Come Home is more about feelings-moods-than
about thought although Hornschemeier's existential point of view emerges
in the book's final moments. In any case, it is more Emily Dickinson
than Sir Francis Drake, demonstrating that the symbolic character of
a visual artform can convey complex emotional content as well as action
-packed adventure. Hornschemeier, one of a half-dozen
graphic novelists singled out by Time
in its February 7 issue, is fascinated by "the subjective world"
he told Rolling Stone's Steven
Russell. Said Hornschemeier: "I'm interested in the deterioration
of memory and the nature of first-person accounts." My guess is
that this existential preoccupation grows out of his engagement with
the medium itself, with its form and how that form works. His earliest
publish efforts were in comic book form. Entitled Sequential,
the publication ran to seven issues, and they have been collected and
reprinted under the original title (256 6x9-inch pages; hardcover, $25).
The contents are mostly short stories or vignettes, often playing with
the form itself. In a 4-panel strip, a boy walking with his mother comes
upon a scrap of paper and says, "Mother-oh, Mother! Is this it?
The punchline?" She says: "Foolish boy! Have I not told you
that you must wait? In the next panel ..." Playing with the sequential
nature of the form, in the next panel, Hornschemeier shows us that the
boy is now an old man who says to another old man, "... I am older!
Now may I have the punchline?" The other man laughs and says: "Hah
hah! How sad! There is no punchline, my boy. Your hair grows thin and
your bones weak! Nothing more!" And he falls backwards off his
chair laughing. Many of the Sequential
strips are exercises in arbitrary cruelty. In "Seizure,"
we watch, in the imaginatively designed introductory two-page spread,
as a young man suffers a seizure. On ensuing pages, his girlfriend begs
passersby for help, and when one finally pauses, seeming to render aid,
we learn on the following page that all he's done is to give the victim
a cigarette. For Hornschemeier, the joke, the punchline,
is often disappointment or death or dismemberment, offered, in effect,
as a conclusion to what seem to be philosophical musings. It's as if
he can find no other "answers," no other explanations for
the contradictions of the human condition. Without
conclusions (other than death), he offers no explanations for
his being, who or what he is. He is, in effect, unable to ascertain
his identity. In such existential ponderings, irony is dramatically
preferable to angst every time, and Hornschemeier's work is certainly
superior to any number of other adolescent philosophizings that have
infected the medium (Belly Button Comics, for example). But I can't help wondering if these
laborious episodes represent an actual intellectual quest or are merely
what a cartoonist does when he wants to draw but has nothing to say.
And then, having set the pattern, Hornschemeier adheres to it diligently
thereafter-creating metaphysical puzzles that he can't solve except
by invoking one kind of cruel disappointment after another. One of the longer sequences in Sequential is "The Devil's Lonely
Day." In this tale, a naked portly devil awakens, wanders around,
encounters a dead bird and a sort of doppelganger, and -it ends. Close
inspection reveals that there are pages missing from the narrative:
all the pages are numbered, but some numbers are missing. Some of the
missing pages turn up later in the book. This is the second of three
parts, we're told. "The idea," Hornschemeier explains, "is
to essentially create three distinct, understandable narratives (devil
runs, devil trips, devil falls, etc.); a discernible chain of events
that hopefully develop a situation and characters. But then, and this
is the fun (and hard) part, to have those three stories create one story."
We may suppose that the cartoonist created one story then dismembered
it and published the pieces in separate, baffling installments; but,
no, that's not what he says he did. He wrote nothing in advance and
drew one page at a time, he tells us. We assume, nonetheless, that once
we have all three parts, we can integrate them, following the sequence
determined by the page numbers, and get a Master Work, a final revelation.
Alas, no-again. We're doomed to disappointment. The second part appears
in this book, but the third part doesn't. The third part was to be published
in No. 8; but Hornschemeier never published an eighth issue of the magazine.
Perhaps he never intended to. The two sequences he did publish make
no more sense when we read the pages in the sequence that the page numbers
suggest than they do as "separate" installments. The final
irony, then-the existential lesson-is that the puzzle is never completed.
Or explained. As I said, I'm not convinced that Hornschemeier
isn't just doodling around intellectually in order to give himself something
to draw, indulging the impulse to draw rather than obeying the imperative
to think. Metaphysical musings often tend in the direction of imponderable
meaninglessness. But his work, however intended, seems serious, and
it is certainly more of an interior adventure than a physical one, proving,
as if it needs proving, that the medium can grapple with such ethereal
questions. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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