 |
|||
|
Opus 169: Opus 169 (September 18, 2005). This time, we have what might
laughingly be called an abbreviated Rancid
Raves -that is, shorter. But we're posting at this very same instant
a long biography and appreciation of V.T.
Hamlin at Harv's Hindsights, so you'll
have reading matter this fortnight of the usual dimension. In addition
to the Hamlin piece, here we have a review of Peter Maresca's spectacular
new book of Little Nemo strips,
a report on Blondie's 75th
anniversary (and a list of the cartoonists who've drawn the strip over
the years), and a smattering of news about the National Cartoon Museum,
Bloom County, a re-vamped website of editoonery, and the advent of
comics (sort of) to the New York
Times. And when you get to the Member/Subscriber Section, you may
wish to activate the "Bathroom Button" by clicking on the
"print friendly version" so you can print off a copy of just
this installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
And don't forget: we've revised our
list of Bargain Books for sale, adding to the left-overs from April's
sale some recent acquisitions. To get to the list, click here.
Without further adieu- NOUS R US Bloom County's run at MyComicsPage.com is over. For the past couple
of years, Berke Breathed's strip
has been re-run at this website at the rate of a week's strips every
day, and now the whole decade's worth has appeared, and August 6, 1989,
has disappeared over the horizon once more as Opus shuffles sadly off
the fading Sunday page grid. ... On September 5, Calvin
and Hobbes started a four-month re-run in many newspapers. I've
been following the adventures of the hyper-imaginative kid and his stuffed
toy on MyComicsPage for years, but the present print reprise is intended
to remind readers of Bill Watterson's cartooning genius by way of promoting sales of the
3-volume, slip-cased Complete
Calvin and Hobbes, which goes on sale October 4. The hardcover collection
will include every one of the 3,160 strips that appeared
A Hundred Cheers for Little Nemo's Anniversary:
A Big New Book I
want to say a few ecstatic words about one of the most spectacular publishing
projects to come to fruition in recent years, namely Peter Maresca's stunning new hardcover book, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland: Splendid Sundays, 1905-1910.
The first of the book's numerous virtues is its size: measuring
16x21 inches, it reprints Little
Nemo at a size that approaches if it does not, in fact, duplicate
exactly the size McCay's legendary strip originally appeared at. The
second stunner is that the strips are reproduced in the manner that
I have always favored: the book's pages were shot from the newspaper
pages that printed the strip. While there was some minor tinkering with
certain kinds of flaws to remove them (tears in the original newsprint
paper, for example), for the most part, what we see here is what we
would see if we were reading Little
Nemo in our Sunday paper in 1905-1910. This is how vintage comics
should be reprinted. Not re-jiggered and touched up and imposed upon
a slippery white paper. Not reconstructed. Reconstructed artwork invariably
is muddied and botched, no matter how very careful and expert the re-toucher
may be. Reconstructed artwork is different artwork. Better to use what
the cartoonist left us-the strip as published during his lifetime. And
the artwork should be reproduced on paper that approaches the pulpy
state of the newsprint the pages were first printed on. Even the most
exacting reproduction that can be achieved in re-coloring the original
and publishing it on slick paper is but a poor glimpse of the glory
that once was. Maresca, in short, has done everything right here. The book is huge: 110 of those giant
pages, and the pages themselves are heavy-duty paper. This is a limited
first edition of 5,000 copies (it sez here), and it includes not all
of McCay's Nemo but all of Maresca's favorites, which
are, for the most part, the favorites of most of McCay's most passionate
fans. In leaving out some strips (in order to include more favorite
pages than would otherwise be possible), Maresca was careful not to
discard pages that carried essential story elements. The Little
Nemo story is entact. There are five sections of in the book: the
first, the longest, offers 34 of the original 41 strips published between
October 1905 and July 1906, including one of the two January 7, 1906,
strips-the one least familiar to most readers and fans. The second section
prints 13 pages originally published between July and November 1906;
the third section, 25 pages from August 1907 to March 1908 (including
the famed Befuddle Hall sequence, phantasmagorical draftsmanship); the
fourth section, 15 pages from March 1908 to March 1909; and the last
section, 22 pages from January 1910 to August 1910. Each section begins
with a text page of introduction by Maresca, plus excerpts from the
works and utterances of others who've extolled Little Nemo from time to time. (Including
a few paragraphs by yrs trly.) The color's not perfect: it is a little
dimmed occasionally by being reproduced from actual pages that have
themselves grown a little dull with time. And although some visual flaws
have been removed, some remain. But most of the criticism (if any) about
this production will arise from Maresca's refusal to use slick paper.
And he provides a handy basis for comparison: at www.sundaypressbooks.com,
you can order, in addition to the book, a 15-month calendar of Nemo
Sundays, October 2005 - December 2006 ($22.95). Three of the pages are
unique to the calendar, but the rest repeat pages in the book. And the
calendar is on glossy 13x20-inch paper, virtually the same size as the
book. So you can, if you are perverted enough, compare, page for page,
to see whether the slick paper gives you better pictures. The pictures
seem sharper on the glossy paper of the calendar, but that is an illusion:
the lines are no clearer, and the color appears brighter only because
the dull newsprinty paper of the book mutes the effect. But the sheen
of the glossy paper reflects ambient light on its surface, and that
often obscures portions of the pictures. You wind up squinting and turning
the book this way and that (no easy task at its dimensions). The old
vintage newsprinty sort of paper is far better.
But if you can't stand that sort of thing, buy the calendar,
which, despite the slick paper, is pretty nifty in itself. The project began, I gather, when Pete
discovered in 1970 a bunch of Sunday funnies that included pages of
Little Nemo. He realized at once that "the
majesty of McCay's work is only hinted at through reduced reproductions,"
which were, then, the only kind of Little Nemo you could find. His own experience, reading the strip
in the Sunday pages as it originally appeared, "was the ideal introduction
to this historic masterpiece," he decided, "-the way its creator
intended." And he began to dream of this book, which initially,
in his mind's eye, had only 100 pages, a page for every year since the
debut of Little Nemo. Said Pete: "The need
to see the artwork in this form is perhaps more essential with Little Nemo than any other comic strip."
Other comic strips of the time appeared in the full broadsheet format,
but "only Nemo took full
advantage of it, evoking a feeling of grandeur through size and McCay's
attention to minute detail." Whatever the imperfections and arguments,
they all fall away in the face of the sheer size of these pages with
McCay's magnificent coloring. Unless you've seen Nemo at this dimension-at just about the size the pages originally
ran-you have not experienced McCay's graphic genius. The best way to
do that is the old way, the way we did it when we were kids: put the
book on the floor and get down on your knees or stretch out on your
stomach, as you did once-upon-a-time, and then, engulfed-swallowed up-in
McCay's riot of color and visual detail, you'll see and understand why
Little Nemo had to be reprinted in just the way it is here. Merely
$120. And if you want a more detailed guide
to Winsor McCay-to his political cartooning career as well as to Nemo-let me plug, forthwith, my own, much
smaller, book, The Genius of Winsor
McCay, which doesn't have nearly the number of pictures that Maresca's
book does. But it's a good price, kimo sabe; for more about it, click
here. COMIC STRIP WATCH One
of cartooning's historic moments has come and gone. On Sunday, September
4, almost four dozen characters from as many different comic strips
convened in Blondie for an anniversary party celebrating
Blondie's 75th
year in the funnies. Long-time Blondie
limner Dennis Lebrun did
all the art, a mob scene that includes, in addition to the visitors
from other strips, the Bumstead family and six or seven other cast members,
boosting the teeming throng scene to about fifty characters. Lebrun's
mastery of mimicry runs a gamut from the simplicity of Ziggy and Dilbert
to the more elaborately rendered Herman and, even, Flash Gordon. A stunning
performance, and Lebrun's last on Blondie. But no signatures appear on this
installment- probably because there are so many cartoonists represented
by the picture. A grace note. There are three gags in the celebration-one about comic strip aging, one about Beetle's dress uniform, and, a delicious sight gag, the anniversary "cake" is actually a Dagwood Sandwich with candles on it. Nice touch.
It's undeniably an epochal occasion:
I can't think of any other time in comics history when so many comic
strip characters from different strips appeared together in a single
release. In the early 1900s, Happy Hooligan sometimes wandered into
other strips and vice versa. Nothing on the scale we have here. But
was it, as everyone supposes, a wedding anniversary? Blondie herself
has 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 she's
being deliberately ambiguous. She's alluding not to their wedding day,
which was February 17, 1933, but to the fabled first day of the strip,
when Dagwood introduces her to his father-officially September 8, 1930
(but possibly September 15; see Opus 166).
That's when their "lives together" began, after all. Dagwood,
however, thinks she's talking about their wedding anniversary. So when
I first heard of this stunt, I suspected that the punchline of the story
would hit Dagwood on September 4 when he'd find out it's not their wedding
anniversary that he's been planning a party for all summer. To turn
that circumstance into a joke would require "breaking the fourth
wall," of course, but that happened in various installments during
the last two weeks prior to the party so it wouldn't do unprecedented
violence to the fiction of the strip. Dean
Young, who produces the strip that his father, Chic, invented 75
years ago, is perfectly aware that the entire storyline conflates the
wedding anniversary and the strip's debut, but he chose not to acknowledge
in the strip the dual nature of the celebration. And then the guest
appearance notion probably took over and swept all other nuances aside.
Said Young: "It started when I was trying to decide what exactly
I wanted to do for Blondie and Dagwood's anniversary party. Then the
idea came to me that I wanted them to celebrate with the rest of their
friends from the comics pages. When I realized that all these comic
characters would be with the Bumsteads at their big anniversary party,
the idea occurred to me that it would be a lot of fun if those characters
showed up unexpectedly at the Bumsteads' house two weeks early. ...
And then it got more legs right away when I started speaking to my fellow
cartoonists, and all of a sudden we're into my colleagues in the industry
doing references to the Bumsteads' big party in their strips." Unusual-even unprecedented-as the event
is, it didn't feel all that odd to Young. "It doesn't feel strange
at all," he said during an online chat with fans. "They're
all neighbors of the Bumsteads, a couple inches to the left or right,
or a little up or down, so it's like the whole wacky, zany community
that they live in. That's their world, so it actually feels real."
Some of the other cartoonists let Young in on what they were doing in
their strips-and when they did, Young got his drawing partners to "tweak
our characters, being the sticklers we are"-but Young was just
as often kept in the dark and happily surprised by what he saw in other
strips. Besides the anniversary party, Young
achieved a couple other historic moments in the strip. When Mother Goose's
Grimm shows up on August 25, he invades the bathroom to drink from his
usual appliance: we've seen the Bumstead bathroom thousands of times-Dagwood
soaking in the tub or shaving at the sink-but this is the first time
the toilet has been depicted. And on Sunday, August 28, GeeDubya
and Laura make an appearance. The caricatures of these two notables
seem to me deftly done, better, in fact, that we have a right to expect
in the usual non-political milieu of a syndicated comic strip. In this
case, however, the cartoonist has had practice on political personages:
Jeff Parker, who, until the end of July, was one of the cartoonists
producing Blondie, is also
the editorial cartoonist on Florida
Today. Parker also drew Grimmy with great elan, I thought. No surprise:
his other moonlighting gig is on Mother
Goose and Grimm. Parker is obviously expert at aping the graphic
mannerisms of others: he also drew all the characters from other strips
who collected on the Bumstead lawn on August 21. I exchanged a few e-mails with him,
and he mentioned other visual oddities in the strip. "There's an
eye issue," he said: "Dag's two big elipses are like no other
character's eyes in the strip (apart from his clone, Alexander). Did
they just morph out of the small ovals that he originally had? They
always look very out of place to me since no one else in the strip sports
big ovals for eyes." My guess is that Dagwood's eyes just
morphed-like his hair and that big button on his shirt front (see Opus
168). Parker also noted the strange whimsy that the Bumsteads'
neighbor, Herb Woodley, and the mailman, Mr. Beasley, look alike, "the
only distinctions being that Herb has a cleft chin and Beasley has a
solid round chin-also, harder to notice since the mailman is always
wearing a hat, but Beasley has less hair than Herb." Chic Young undoubtedly created one
of the medium's masterpieces. But he had expert help for most of Blondie's run. Ray McGill and Jim Raymond
were assisting him in the 1940s. Raymond's stint on the strip began
in tragedy. Young's first-born son, Wayne, died of jaundice in 1937
in the midst of the popularity of Blondie and Dagwood's first-born,
Alexander, known, then, as "Baby Dumpling." Unable to face
doing gags about a toddler, Young and his wife took a sabbatical to
Europe, leaving the strip in Raymond's care. And Raymond was the chief
artisan on the feature until he died in 1981. Alexander, incidentally,
was named for Raymond's brother, who had assisted on Blondie for a time in 1933 (he drew much
of the wedding scene, for instance) but gained considerable more fame
as the creator of Flash Gordon,
Secret Agent X-9, Jungle Jim, and
Rip Kirby. Jim Raymond's assistant, Mike Gersher, took over after Raymond's
death, and when Gersher left the strip, he was followed by Stan Drake, who was assisted by Lebrun, who, in his turn, took over
when Drake died and has been assisted by Parker for the last nine years.
Parker left when Lebrun did, and the strip is now being drawn by John Marshall, who inked many of the sequences in the anniversary
summer storyline. Parker's last strips ran September 5-10; Lebrun's
last strip was the anniversary blast, as I said. Marshall did all of
the week just before the party, August 29-September 3, and everything
after September 10. Lebrun's departure from the strip is
signaled by the disappearance of his signature, which, until September
5, was joined to Young's. Starting on Monday, September 5 (beginning
Parker's last week), the signature reads simply "Dean Young."
Parker never did get his signature on the strips he drew, but he was
merely assisting the signatory artist. Presumably, Marshall's signature
will appear beginning September 11 or 12; it didn't appear when he was
officially but an "assistant." When being interviewed, Dean Young,
who ostensibly writes the strip and oversees every detail of its production,
permits those who are talking with him to assume that he draws the strip,
too. Asked during the online chat why Daisy's five pups never show up
anymore, Young said, "I imagine they are somewhere in the neighborhood,
but, in my tenure, I found that drawing five little puppies in each
panel was more than I can bear." He doesn't say, precisely, that he's
drawing
the strip-that is, "drawing" in this context could
be taken to mean "pictures of five little puppies in each panel
was more than I can bear." Usually, however, he refers to the art
chores as something that "we" perform, nicely ambiguous. We can scarcely fault Young for this
coyness: comic strip cartoonists are notorious for keeping the names
of their assistants under wraps (and, in many cases, even pretending
that they have no assistants). Young mentioned none of his drawing partners
in the online chat I've quoted from, but he revealed that he has been
assisted by his daughter Dana for the last 16 years. Said Young: "She's
been working in a creative capacity, and I hope she'll be able to take
it for the next 75 years." Reading the transcript of the chat,
we would suppose that the "we" Young occasionally invokes
is only he and his daughter. But we know better here, eh? Meanwhile, the anniversary celebration
in Blondie goes on apace with
the Bumsteads on a "second honeymoon (?)" in Hawaii. Blondie
in a bikini. Whoop! Here are a few more of the strips from the weeks
immediately before the anniversary party (including Marshall's charming
picture of Blondie in her bath) and the first "Dean Young"
strip.
UNDER THE SPREADING PUNDITRY
New Orleans is a major American seaport.
After 9/11, sites like this-particularly sites like this-are supposed
to be ready for any sort of disaster. We've spent billions to make the
country "safer." That means, making seaports safer. Part of
insuring that safety is providing protection against infiltrating foes.
But part of that insurance is, surely, creating the mechanisms that
will guarantee survival after an attack (or a natural disaster, something
of the same dimension and impact). Do you suppose that if terrorists
had blown up the levees in New Orleans and flooded the city that the
governmental agencies would have responded any better than they did
for a hurricane? Not likely. The hurricane simply revealed how absolutely
abject has been the failure of the federal government to use the millions
of dollars appropriated for it to review and construct response mechanisms
for disasters that may befall cities in our country, whether man-made
or not. All those millions, the spending of which has supposedly made
us all more secure in our homeland, have obviously been wasted. New
Orleans is one of the nation's two or three MAJOR SEAPORTS-an obvious
target for terrorists. But no governmental agency was apparently able
to deal with a disaster there with anything approaching the alacrity
required to save lives and maintain civilization. There are surely thousands
of explanations for what happened-and what didn't happen; but the central
fact remains: so far, the billions we've spent have, it appears, made
us safer only from exploding shoes and nail clippers. That's it. If
this is what smaller government means, then only God can save us all.
If this weren't so tragic, it would be the biggest joke of all time. Time
magazine asserted, without equivocation, that Katrina "shattered
a hope that four years after the greatest man-made disaster in our history,
we had got smarter about catastrophe, more nimble and visionary in our
ability to respond. Is it really possible, after so many commissions
and commitments, bureaucracies scrambled and rewired, emergency supplies
stockpiled and prepositioned, that when a disaster strikes, the whole
newfangled system just seizes up and can't move?" The failure here
is widespread, from city to state to nation-from a flakey mayor to a
feeble governor to a fatally insouciant president, who, in believing
his role is that of CEO, neglects the traditional function as inspirational
leader. But GeeDubya must bear most of the blame. The tendency among
his avid supporters to excuse him from responsibility in this blatant
display of governmental incompetence simply ignores the relentless truth
of Truman's famous "the buck stops here" statement. If FEMA
and the rest of the Federal apparatus had responded with stunning efficiency,
GeeDubya would be given credit for the achievement; it is only right,
therefore, that when it blunders on such a massive scale that he take
the blame. It happened on his watch; and that's how it works. This time,
for once, the usual Bush League tactic, government by appearances-by
public relations-fell short: the inefficiency, the hollow promise of
competence, stands revealed before the entire world. There's no longer
a hiding place in the White House. Not that the p.r. machinery has been
motionless; quite the reverse. The legendary Bush League spin cycle
has already been set in motion. To every question about where the fault
lies in this notorious bungle, the executive branch responds by saying
that it's too early to "play the blame game." With the urgency
of need along the Gulf Coast, they say (now they say it), we don't want
to waste time and energy "finger-pointing." If those are the
only alternatives-rescuing and rebuilding on the one hand and finger-pointing
on the other-yes, it is inappropriate to misdirect our energies. But
can't our colossal government do more than one thing at a time? The
"spin" here, however, is in the terminology-"blame game,"
"finger-pointing." These expressions belittle the seriousness
of the disaster and the urgency of the need to know what went wrong.
How can we be secure in the homeland if we don't know how it all went
so tragically awry along the Gulf Coast? And by saying such analysis
is mere finger-pointing, it makes the proposed investigation seem trivial,
childish, unimportant-when, in fact, such an inquiry is vital to protect
and preserve the country. Metaphors be with you. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
|||
send e-mail to R.C. Harvey Art of the Comic Book - Art of the Funnies - Accidental Ambassador Gordo - reviews - order form - Harv's Hindsights - main page |
