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Opus 170: Opus 170 (October
12, 2005). As the butcher said when he backed into the meat slicer,
we've got a little behind in our work. Yes, we've been out. Out-of-touch,
actually. September was an entirely lost month, alas. We were struck
by lightning-that is, our digital electronic appliance was fried by
an electrical surge-and we took the opportunity afforded by the downtime
of repair and restoration to enlist in the DSL legions. That took time,
too. Another week, as it turned out. And then our webmaster partner
moved to Japan for a time, and getting hooked up on the far side of
the International Dateline took longer than either of us supposed it
would. So Opus 169 was late; ditto the present offering. But we'll make
it up to you by perpetrating our usual ration of news and features as
if nothing happened at all. And maybe, for the next few weeks, more
often than usual. First, we report, sadly, that the legendary Jud Hurd,
publisher of Cartoonist PROfiles, died on September
14 at the age of 92 of complications following a stroke he suffered
last May. We've reprised below portions of Opus 131 in our affectionate
farewell to this pioneer in cartooning whose contributions to the well-being
as well as the history of the medium are legion. As a regular contributor
to PROfiles, I call him my editor, and I am
privileged to believe he was also my friend-as I am sure I was his.
This installment also includes a long discussion of Bill Watterson's
artistry on Calvin and Hobbes (and a brief glimpse
of Watterson's life after the comic strip) and reviews of two graphic
novels which current offerings in the movie palaces evoke if they do
not, exactly, represent, plus reviews of some comic books and the usual
Bushwhacking. In order, here's what happens next: An Appreciation of Jud
Hurd; NOUS R US -New York Times' Funny Pages debuts and
lays an egg, Lindelof on the Hulk, Foolbert Sturgeon returns, graphic
novels in English classes, Outland
reruns, down under honors, and an increase in syndicate offerings, albeit
not in comics; EDITOONERY -Some monkey business from
editoonist Pat Bagley, and
Daryl Cagle's racist cartoon and the exploitation
of a dying breed; Funnybook Fan
Fare -reviews of some first issues, Justice,
Hero@Large, New Warriors, and Jim Lee and Frank Miller's Batman and Robin, plus AC's Greatest Comics No. 12; BOOK MARQUEES -Newly discovered copies
of my Murphy Anderson book, a fresh crop of reprints from Andrews McMeel,
and the fourth Compete Peanuts;
Civilization's Last Outpost -porn on cellphones,
the oldest U.S. corporate mascots, and human cockfighting; COMIC STRIP WATCH -What's happening in
9 Chickweed Lane and in Over the Hedge, where a little political
posturing transpires; GRAFIQUE
NOVILZ -A History of Violence and Capote in Kansas are reviewed; WATTERSON REDUX -the temporary return
of Calvin and Hobbes and the
colossal reprint tome, all three slip-cased volumes of it; and the usual
manifestations of anti-Bush League angst. And when you get to the Member/Subscriber
Section, don't forget to activate the "Bathroom Button" by
clicking on the "print friendly version" so you can print
off a copy of just this lengthy installment for reading later, at your
leisure while enthroned. 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.
Finally (one last plug), consider, as we approach the 100th
anniversary of the debut of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, celebrating
with a tiny tome of mine, The
Genius of Winsor McCay, which is described here.
Without further adieu- The Last Cartoonist Profile
Jud suffered a stroke in early May. He never fully recovered.
Initially, he lost the use of his right arm and leg; but as he regained
speech, his wife Claudia told me, it was clear that his mind was unimpaired.
But he couldn't take food by mouth and was fed intravenously. The last four months had been very hard for him, Claudia
said. Moved to a rehabilitation facility, he regained some of the use
of his right hand. But he kept getting pneumonia and was sent back to
the hospital on four occasions. Finally, on Wednesday, September 14,
Jud Hurd, my friend and editor, died. Claudia told me that she went to see him on Tuesday when
she got a copy of the last issue of PROfiles;
she took it with her to show him. He was lying in bed, she said, with
his eyes closed. She asked him to squeeze her hand so she'd know he
heard her, and he did. And she put the magazine into his hand. He'd
seen the proofs before, but she hoped he'd see the final issue. She
doesn't know if he did. When she left, his eyes were still closed, the
last issue of the magazine clutched in his hand. Jud would have been ninety-three on November 12. "I
think he was ready," she said. "He did what he wanted to do,"
she added, summarizing his life in her eyes. What he did-with great affection, high regard, and just
a little awe-was all about cartooning. Born in Cleveland, Jud discovered, at about the age of 12
or 13, that Charles N. Landon ran his celebrated correspondence course
in cartooning right there in town, so Jud went downtown, met Landon,
and enrolled in the course. He was hooked. He subsequently drew cartoons
for the campus publications at every educational institution he enrolled
in, junior high through college, and sold his first cartoon when he
was about twenty-two. He sold it to the Calgary
Eye-Opener, a humor magazine which, at the time, was published in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. It promulgated an assortment of jokes and cartoons
of the sort that, today, are so mildly risque as to be nearly inoffensive
if not completely boring. For 1934, however, the Eye-Opener
was a pretty spicy dish. Jud's cartoon depicted a honeymoon couple in a fancy hotel
on January 1, the newly minted husband saying, "Let's start the
New Year off with a bang." Jud was informed of the success of his assault on the bastions
of publication by a letter from the associate editor, who wrote: "Payment
will be three bucks on publication. Check will reach you in time to
buy a case of Christmas lager or whatever it is that $3 will buy in
Cleveland." The letter was signed Carl Barks, who would, somewhat later, make Donald Duck famous and
invent for Disney's webfooted waterfowl a miserly mutton-chopped relative
named Uncle Scrooge. Jud attended Adelbert College of Western Reserve University
(now Case-Western Reserve University), where he majored in economics
and became art editor of the campus humor magazine, the Red Cat. In that capacity, he wrote various cartooning dignitaries,
begging from them drawings of their characters to publish in the magazine.
It was a common ploy among campus humor magazine editors. By letter,
Jud met such steller 'tooners as E.C.
Segar, Frederick Burr Opper, Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman, and Rube Goldberg. After graduation, Jud spent a year at the Chicago Art Institute
and then lit out for California. In 1936, he was in Hollywood working
as an inbetweener at the Mintz Studio but aspiring, all the while, to
a career as a syndicated newspaper cartoonist. By 1937, he had achieved this goal, producing a thrice-weekly
comic strip called Just Hurd in
Hollywood (his actual given name being "Justin") with
"an all-star cast": each strip consisted of a photograph of
a movie star in the first panel followed by several other panels presenting
Jud's cartoon rendition of an anecdote taken from the star's life. Jud obtained the anecdotes by interviewing the stars, meeting
Joan Crawford, Joe E. Brown, Betty Grable, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Gary
Cooper, Lana Turner, and so on. While in Los Angeles, Jud also met cartooning
greats George McManus, George
Herriman, and Walt Disney.
The die was cast: Jud honed his interviewing skills and
followed his natural inclination to seek out other cartoonists to hobnob
with. But it would be a few more years before he fermented those ingredients
into a heady career publishing a magazine of interviews with cartoonists. Just Hurd in Hollywood
was cancelled soon after it was launched: newspapers were being
flooded with studio publicity material about movie stars, and a single
syndicated gossip column contained many more anecdotes about more stars
in the same space that Jud's six-column cartoon occupied. Jud went back to Cleveland and joined the art department
at Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), a feature syndicate. In those
days, many of the NEA cartoonists still lived in Cleveland and worked
in the NEA offices, so Jud met such luminaries as editorial cartooning
great Herblock and Clyde Lewis (Hold Everything),
George Scarbo (The Comic Zoo) and Harry Schlensker
(later Roy Crane's assistant
on Buz Sawyer) and Bela Zaboly (then doing Our Boarding House with Major Hoople following
Gene Ahern's departure for
King Features and ownership of his feature). Jud went to New York to seek more cartooning fortune in
1940, drew a baseball cartoon-type story called "Pie Cobb"
(a take-off on Ty Cobb) for Dell comic books, then returned to Cleveland,
where he learned typing (an invaluable skill for a magazine editor acting
as his own reporting and production staff) at the Spencerian Business
College and met Claudia, who would eventually become his wife and, later,
partner and business manager of the Cartoonist PROfiles Corporation.
While in New York, he met Peter Arno, Bud Fisher (who, in a somewhat alcoholic condition, offered
Jud a job-which never actually materialized), and H.T. Webster. Drafted into the Army in 1942 for the duration of World
War II, Jud, like many artists and cartoonists, wound up in the Signal
Corps, Intelligence Section, where he did a weekly cartoon about a dim-witted
soldier named Crypto Chris, later reincarnated as Stew Pid, a character
Jud created for American Steel and Wire Company while operating his
Industrial Cartoon Studio in Cleveland after the war. Like Will Eisner
in the postwar years, Jud produced cartoons and comic strips for
commercial clients who wanted comics to emphasize safety messages, to
enliven in-house newsletters and magazines, and to instruct employees
or sell products. In the 1950s, Jud tried, in vain, to sell a couple of comic
strips to syndicates; then in 1955, Children's
Playmate magazine hired him to produce a new "comic book section,"
for which Jud created Inspector
Hector, Socko & Jocko, and
Sandy & Dandy features. Finally, in 1959, Jud achieved national distribution by
syndicating himself with a business-oriented panel cartoon, Ticker Toons, in which, employing (at last)
his education in economics, he posed and answered questions about the
stock market. It debuted in November, and a year later, it was picked
up by the Chicago Sun-Times/Daily News Syndicate. By then, Jud was already at work devising another informational
cartoon panel, Health Capsules,
partnering with a physician, Michael Petti. It was distributed by United
Feature Syndicate, which, later, also took on Ticker Toons. Ticker Toons lasted 10-12 years; launched in February
1961, Health Capsules is still
going, although Jud gave it up a couple years ago, after over 40 years.
In 1952, Jud had joined the National Cartoonists Society
(just six years after its founding in New York by Rube Goldberg and
a half-dozen other cartoonists who had been convening occasionally during
WWII to visit area hospitals to entertain convalescing wounded soldiers),
and he occasionally made trips to New York on business, timing the trip
to coincide with NCS's monthly meetings. In 1964, shortly after he moved to Westport, Connecticut,
Bob Dunn (They'll Do It Every Time), then president of NCS, asked Jud if he
would take over the editing of the Society newsletter-"guessing,"
as Jud usually puts it, "that I could spell." The assignment appealed to all of Jud's instincts and employed
many of the skills he'd honed over the years, and he consequently poured
more of himself into each successive issue. By 1968, it was consuming too much of his time as a volunteer,
gratis employment. Jud offered to continue if NCS could find a way to
pay him something. Happily, the NCS Board of Governors proved to be
fiscally conservative (which, in those days, meant they didn't want
to spend any money, no longer a conservative posture), and Jud then
had the idea of continuing in much the same vein with a publication
of his own. Cartoonist PROfiles
was born with the winter issue in March of 1969. It and Jud's two
syndicated cartoons absorbed his energies ever since. Every day, he
went to work in the cozy building in back of his home, a studio about
30 yards from his back door. On December 13, 2003, at its anyule Christmas party held,
on this occasion, at the New York clubhouse of the Society of Illustrators,
NCS presented Jud with the award it gives to those who have performed
outstanding service to the Society and/or have made a significant contribution
to the profession, the Silver T-Square. The first Jud had decided last spring to end PROfiles with the June 2005 issue. He had been approaching every issue
of PROfiles for the last couple
years as if it might be his final issue. Enterprising writers kept sending
him articles, and he kept the magazine going in order to publish them.
But the June issue-he was pretty sure, he told me-would wind it up.
He'd finished preparing all the camera-ready pages for the last issue
before his stroke, Claudia told me. So she had very little to do to
prepare the material for the printer in Birmingham, 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-square spine and slick-paper cover.
This issue includes a couple pages from syndicates, friends and colleagues
who commemorate Jud's achievement. And there's a "love
letter to the editor" from Claudia, who tells subscribers this
is the last issue and summarizes her husband's career. She was moved,
she writes, by the tributes inspired by his decision to retire the magazine.
"One word recurs in all of them," she says. "Gentleman.
That has always been true, my dear. You are a gentle man. You are kind
and loving and have included me into your world of talented, fascinating
men and women. When cartoonists get together, I have often thought how
dark would be the world without them. You have my admiration and my
love." There was a brief grave-side service at the interment on
Monday, September 19. Nothing special, Claudia said. Later, after everyone
feels better, she said, there might be a memorial service of some sort. Every issue of Cartoonist
PROfiles reflected Jud's intensity as a reporter, his passionate
curiosity about cartooning, his compulsive desire to understand everything
about it and about those who made their living at it. He was perfect
for the job, and it created him just as he created it. In the process,
Jud emerged as a genuine pioneer in cartooning, a legend in his own
right whose contributions to the well-being as well as the history of
the medium are legion and lasting. For all of its run, PROfiles
served as inspiration and edification for hundreds of young aspiring
cartoonists who yearn to make their livings at the craft. By this time,
a couple generations of them have learned much about the profession
by reading PROfiles. The interviews with cartoonists
that gave the magazine its heft also recorded the history of the medium,
year by year, and that record is now an integral (if, alas, sometimes
fugitive) part of the history of cartooning in America. But the magazine
was also a visit with colleagues once every three months, a sort of
shop talk marathon. In a profession whose practitioners labor, mostly,
in solitude, the talk has been invigorating as well as gratifying. Good
for the soul of cartooning. So, Jud-Big THANQUES for the conversation.
I've treasured the hours. And I'll miss them and you. For a little more about Jud, go to Opus
131. Or you can buy the career-spanning book published last
year by Andrews McMeel, Cartoon Success Secrets: A Tribute to 35 Years
of Cartoonist PROfiles, which includes, in addition to almost three
dozen classic articles from the magazine, a brief summary of Jud's other
careers. NOUS R US As I said in an earlier
apparition of this department, we not encyclopedic here: we don't publish
all the news that fits; we tend, rather, to disseminate only the news
that gives us fits. And during the last three weeks of my Internet hiatus,
I became more conscious of the quantity of comics news we don't report.
Letting my sources languish for more than the usual fortnight resulted
in a long list of articles I hadn't yet digested, a longer list, in
fact, than I plan to peruse at this late date. So the flow of news at
the Rancid Riverside tends to be intermittent rather than continuous,
in utter defiance of the nature of rivers-and of news. But if we aren't
comprehensive, we're at least selective. Very selective. Only the very
best news and the juiciest gossip and the longest lost lore. If we were to be encyclopedic, we'd be rivaling the staid
old New York Times, the nation's
acclaimed "newspaper of record." We have no such ambition. We wish,
merely, to entertain and inform and enhance appreciation of our favorite
medium, the comics. We don't wish to be the New
York Times. Today, in fact, we'd rather not be the Times. It's fallen in our estimation recently. The Funny Pages, the Times'
artfully mistitled addition to its Sunday magazine, is a big fat
dud. No comic strips to speak of except Chris
Ware's single page "comic," which, in the inaugural issue on September
18, consisted of a lone full-page drawing of a building with speech
balloons and captions. Hardly a comic "strip." We should have known.
After all, the expression "The Funny Pages" does not, appearances to
the contrary notwithstanding, mean "the funny papers" or "the funnies."
Except in some newspapers in some parts of the country. Not at the Times,
though, where the term only hints, slyly, at "the funnies." But a hint
is all we get. The September 18 issue's introductory editorial on the subject
invokes the history of newspaper comic strips by conjuring up memories
of William Randolph Hearst's Sunday supplement, launched in the fall
of 1896 and dubbed The American
Weekly in the NYT Magazine.
Hearst's supplement contained "risque pictures of half-dressed showgirls
and lurid tales of murder and the occult," according to this Times
writer (unnamed, presumably the editor, Gerald Marzorati). But in the
1920s and 1930s, he goes blithely on, "the prose elements of Sunday
supplements were overtaken by color comics like Krazy
Kat and Gasoline Alley."
Marzorati is obviously alluding to the newspaper comic strip as well
as the pictorial and fiction departments of the Sunday supplements.
But this is a history of "the funnies" that I've not heard before. In
the first place, Marzorati has ambiguously sandwiched into one publication,
"the Sunday supplement," all such weekend phenomena. Hearst's Sunday
parade in the fall of 1896, for example, included three full-color supplements:
a 16-page Sunday American Magazine, an 8-page Women's Home Journal, and the American
Humorist, which offered comics and humorous paragraphs and verses.
I don't know when the American
Weekly came on the scene, but it wasn't in the fall of 1896. And
the comics had emerged in sections exclusively their own long before
the 1920s and 1930s. Marzorati is pretty clearly evoking the American
Humorist when he suggests that comic strips eventually displaced
the "prose elements," but he's also trying very hard to subsume comics
under a broader, more respectable heading-"Sunday supplement"-in a subversive
attempt to slip over on an unsuspecting public the Times
Magazine's new "department," which, with the paper's traditional
aversion to comic strips, makes only the tiniest of nods in the direction
of recognizing comics. The "Sunday supplements" of yore included humorous
prose, we are told, as well as pictures of undressed showgirls. Well,
harrumps Marzorati, "our Funny Pages will go easy on the showgirls."
Ah, yes, and it also goes easy on the comic strips: in these
austere regions, comic strips will go by the name "graphic novel" in
order to avoid offending any of the august Times
readership to whom "comic strips" are anathema (or, perhaps, pornographic,
meaning "comical disrobing"). Invoking his faux history, Marzorati goes
on to say that their new department will continue the Sunday supplement
tradition by publishing "three entertainments that reflect the tastes
of a new century"-namely, "genre fiction" and "the humorous first-person
essay" and (oh, yes, by the way) the "graphic novel." It's all a little
too coy for me, kimo sabe. By naming the new section "The Funny Pages"
(which name, by the way, does not suggest "genre fiction" at all), the
Times satraps are clearly
trying to hitch their wagon to the popular "funnies" even though they
then labor mightily and bring forth something that bears almost no resemblance
to "the funnies" as commonly understood. Cute. But if the Times were not, here, committing a misrepresentation
of the classic Madison Avenue sort and sullying the paper's reputation
in consequence, we could rejoice that the Old Gray Lady has at last
recognized the importance to newspapers of the comics: even if the Times takes great pains to avoid the comics,
the despised offspring of American newspapers are conjured up here in
an obvious ploy to attract readers. (In committing the folly of its
phony history, the Times,
admittedly, hadn't my resources at hand when tracing the history of
the Sunday supplement: Marzorati says he consulted a 1921 reference
book; he should have picked up David Nasaw's The
Chief, a biography of Hearst-or any good history of American newspapering.
Geez-a 1921 reference book?) Finally, although touted as a "ten-page"
section, the section's actual number of pages is somewhat less due to
four pages of advertising. Ah, the Times-they aint' wot they uster be, atall
atall. Damon Lindelof,
celebrated for co-creating tv's "Lost," is now working on a six-issue
comic book mini-series for Marvel, "Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk," which
starts in December. Said Lindelof in a Marvel press release: "I actually
owned Hulk No. 181 when I was a kid. Then my
mom threw it away. I can't believe how lucky I am to have the opportunity
to re-introduce these two iconic characters to each other in the no-holds-barred
world of the Ultimate Universe. I am truly honored to get a chance to
fulfill my life-long dream of writing for Marvel."... Comix pioneer
Frank Stack ("Foobert Sturgeon" of the
underground, most notably The
Adventures of Jesus) has launched a website, www.frankstackart.com,
a gallery of his exquisite paintings and prints, a feast for the eye
and heart. Elsewhere, FS's Jesus is poised for a return next fall, from
Fantagraphics; keep an eye out. ... The September issue of the Council Chronicle, the newspaper of the National Council of Teachers
of English, contains two articles advocating teaching the graphic novel
in the classroom, one of them by Your
Rancid Raver His Ownself, entitled "In Graphic Novels, the Pictures
Are the Story." ... Berke Breathed's
Sunday-only Outland is
now being re-run, one a day, at MyComics.com. ... The down-under equivalent
of our National Cartoonists Society, the Australian
Cartoonists Association, will be holding its annual conclave, the
21st, the weekend of November 5. In addition to presenting Stanley
Awards to 'tooners in various categories of endeavor (among them,
"cartoonist of the year"), ACA will host the presentation of the Lindsay
Cartoon Awards by the Norman Lindsay Gallery. The Stanley is named for
Stan Cross, who created the country's
longest-running comic strip, The
Potts (first entitled You
and Me), a beloved and prodigious cartooner who died in 1977 at
the age of 89. The Lindsay is named after the celebrated author and
illustrator of the epic children's tale about food, The
Magic Pudding, who also served as the main cartoonist of the Bulletin
for over 50 years. David Astor, who reports on syndicate news at Editor & Publisher, tells us that Lisa
Klem Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of United Media,
believes that comics continue to have more potential than columns to
become breakout hits. Says she: "In the old days, people like Jack Anderson,
Erma Bombeck and Ann Landers had hundreds and hundreds of newspapers."
These days, a client list of that length is harder for a columnist to
achieve. But syndicates have, nonetheless, increased the number of features
they offer: tallying those of the five largest syndicates, Astor says
since 2000 the number of features has grown from 624 to 746. Creators
Syndicate President Rick Newcombe thinks part of the reason for the
increase is that syndicates are selling more these days to foreign and
online outlets. If syndicated features are good enough, he explained,
they'll find all sorts of markets, not just America's general interest
daily newspapers. The top five syndicates offer a total of 207 comic
strips according to the latest E&P
Syndicate Directory. I once tallied 200-240 comics features, so
the present number is about "normal," I'd say-that is, about the same
as it's been for years. Syndicates receive 3,000-5,000 submissions of
comic strip candidates every year; most syndicates decide to launch
only one or two. Someone recently opined that the only "breakout" hit
comic strips recently are Boondocks, Get Fuzzy, and Pearls before Swine. At least two of them
are drawn; Pearls, however,
is a diagram. Last month, Birmingham, Alabama, lost one of its two newspapers,
the five-afternoons-a-week Post-Herald,
which, until now, had a joint operating agreement with the Birmingham News. And so the nation is poorer
by one more of the few multiple-newspaper towns left. The more newspapers
in a town, the more competitive the news environment, and the more competitive
the news environment, the better served are the city's citizens. So
our sadness is tempered by a real sense of patriotic discouragement
as the journalistic horizon contracts yet again. Moreover, every loss
of a competitive newspaper situation is another nail hovering over the
coffin of comic strips, which existed, originally, to attract readers
to one newspaper over its rival in town. With no rivals, whither newspaper
comic strips? EDITOONERY Here comes Clueless George Goes to War, a tidy CuriousGeorge-sized
tome (326x8-inch pages in paperback, $7.95) in which the Salt Lake City Tribune's political cartoonist,
Pat Bagley, takes a leaf
from the children's book series by H.A. and Margret Rey and gives us
"the war-monkey president" whose penchant for mischief, like that of
the original Curious George, just causes trouble for us all. Bagley
has deftly evoked the mood and manner of the Rey classic to demonstrate
how misguided the Bush League has been since 9/11. GeeDubya himself
provides the inspirational ammunition: he is as childish in his eagerness
to dress up (as a jet pilot for "Mission Accomplished") as Curious George,
and in his facial physiognomy, he bears an uncanny resemblance to a
monkey. Bagley takes full advantage of such "clues" to create a scathing
satire with Cheney in the roll of the Man (in the Yellow Hat), who,
at the book's end, puts George to bed and tells him not to worry. A
gleefully fiendish read, all the more remarkable for its origins in
Utah, Orin Hatch's home state, which gave George W. ("WiltingPolls")
Bush his biggest victory margin in the 2004 Election. Bagley, who has
been at the Tribune since 1979, is one of the first
editoonists I visited and interviewed for Jud Hurd's Cartoonist PROfiles. That was in 1991, and Bagley is still there,
wielding a potent pen in the name of truth and justice. He wasn't syndicated
back then and has apparently resisted the temptation to join the nationally
distributed throngs until recently, when he showed up at Daryl Cagle's online Professional Cartoonists Index, much to my delight.
Another new book from Bagley is 101
Ways to Survive Four More Years of George W. Bush. Both books are
available from White Horse Books, 1347 S. Glenmare Street, Salt Lake
City, UT 84105; 801-556-4615. Cagle's website, http://cagle.msnbc.com,
displays a vast array of the political cartoons, and Cagle up-dates
it daily. Cagle also draws editoons himself, and in the wake of Katrina,
he drew one of a bunch of looters deliriously scampering through ankle-deep
muddy water with armloads of appliances and clothing. The cartoon was
captioned: "Natural Disaster: The Second Wave." And almost as soon as
it was out there in the digital ether, the criticism blew into Cagle's
blog with a vengeance. James Jordon captured their gist: "Why are the
people in the looting cartoon all white? I saw not one person who is
white looting in the news videos. In fact, they were all Black. Are
you afraid to portray the real criminals for what they are because of
race?"Cagle is a master of restraint: he almost never comments on matters
in which he is at issue himself, and he didn't Cagle launched his Professional Cartoonists Index website
about ten years ago, coaxing fellow editoonists to let him post their
work daily online. The ensuing traffic from a web-browsing public won
him a place in Slate; and when Microsoft sold Slate a year ago, Cagle
shifted to MSNBC, where he now holds forth. In talking recently to Janine
Kahn of ojr.org, Cagle claims that he "raises the bar" for political
cartoonists, "challenging the quality of their work" by means of the
"Yahtzee." Said Cagle: "When a bunch of cartoonists all draw [the same
visual metaphor] about the same thing at the same time, I call it a
Yahtzee and put all their cartoons up together. And that embarrasses
them and makes them think they should not draw the first thing that
comes to mind. That's done a little bit of good. The cartoonists live
in fear of Yahtzees now." Allegedly, a nation of quaking cartoonists
is thereby induced to reflect more and turn out better, more creative
cartoons. Cagle's site operates somewhat like a marketplace: editors
and publishers can browse there and pick cartoons they'd like to use
themselves, paying Cagle a usage fee. The cartoonists may realize a
modest share. The amount of their portion is not widely known, it being
entirely their business and Cagle's, not ours; and Daryl, being an appropriately
discrete businessman, quite rightly regards such information as confidential,
leaving us to speculate, based upon rumor and idle gossip, rather than
to report. In any event, the individual cartoonist's financial reward
apparently varies from one tooner to another. At one time, nearer the
site's launch date, Cagle reportedly recruited his list of cartoonists
by telling them the exposure would be good for them and would enhance
their income. At this time, he presumably shared with them whatever
revenue the exposure generated. Eventually, as his site increased its
traffic, he paid cartoonists a flat fee monthly, distributing their
cartoons to a list of 800 prospective paying users. Cagle kept whatever
revenue was generated through sales. At the time, this deal, for participating
cartoonists, was at least as good and, for some, maybe better than the
traditional syndicate arrangement. As time unraveled, Cagle negotiated
other deals, some of them with traditional syndicates, some of whom
may now supply him with their tooner lists without fee, buying the argument
that online exposure would eventually translate into greater income
for cartoonists and syndicate alike. So a given cartoonist's income
from the Cagle site probably depends upon when he or she joined the
club-and whether he or she joined via a syndicate or solo. There isn't
much revenue for editoonists in syndication generally- unless they happen
to be Pat Oliphant. Cagle's sales maneuvers convinced him to start his own syndicate,
homeported at his website. He now represents about 44 cartoonists and
distributes to about 800 newspapers-"more than anybody else in editorial
cartoons," Cagle said. That's undoubtedly true. But it's also true that
syndication has had a deleterious effect on editorial cartooning. As
I've said here before, syndication conspires to permit newspaper editors
to do two things they very much like doing. First, by subscribing to
several syndicate services for fees much less than they'd pay a staff
editoonist, editors get a wide range of cartoons to choose from every
day and save mucho dinero at the same time; second, by using syndicated
editoons, they stick to national topics, thereby avoiding cartoons on
local issues that would inflame readers on one side of the debate or
the other. So editors get far fewer time-consuming irate phone calls
from readers. The effect is that the number of papers hiring staff editoonists
is steadily decreasing, and editorial cartoonists have become an endangered
species. And in this context, Cagle, himself an editorial cartoonist,
is helping to deplete their ranks. He's undeniably a good businessman.
His site enhances the visibility of editooning, and it is also the showcase
for his own syndicate, and since he mixes his cartoonists' work in with
the work of all others, he effectively uses nationally known cartoonists
as lost leaders: their prominence helps attract browsers who then happen
upon Cagle's somewhat lesser-known 'tooners as they browse. Nothing
wrong with that. No one can fault Cagle for trying to make a living,
for himself as well as those he advertises. And he, after all, had the
imagination to start an editorial cartoon website, which he was then
able to translate into income for himself and others. It's just too
bad the newspaper world works the way it does because operating in it
the way Cagle does, he's helping to dig the grave for the profession
he practices and, presumably, loves. (Every syndicated editoonist is
doing the same, incidentally, but on an individual scale not en masse as a canny entrepreneur.) Until recently, almost all editorial
cartoonists who were syndicated were also on the staffs of newspapers;
their income from syndication, never much, was, in effect, beer money.
But as the number of staff editoonists dwindles, the only hope for the
profession is syndication. Sadly, it isn't likely that syndication for
most editoonists will yield a living. The fees that trickle down through
syndicates to the cartoonists are minuscule. And very few tooners have
a national reputation that would make them the commodity Oliphant is.
Cagle's site may help improve the quality of editorial cartooning by
raising the spectre of the Yahtzee; but it is also contributing to the
dilemma by encouraging national syndication, which, in turn, discourages
the hiring of staff editoonists. To the extent that Cagle's site increases
the visibility of editorial cartooning as a species of cartooning, it
may enhance the social and political and journalistic status of editooning.
That status, alas, is not likely to translate into staff jobs at newspapers.
It may secure a place for political cartooning on the web, but no one
is predicting this outcome is capable of securing a living for any cartoonist
any time soon. FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE Short Notes during a Long Weekend with Some New Comics DC's Justice No. 1 is elegantly rendered by painter Alex Ross, but this
inaugural issue is all prologue: there's no crisis or climax-in short,
no drama. And you can't have a story without drama. Admittedly, there's
more a-comin' down the pike, but even an orientation first issue should
have some over excitement. ... Speakeasy Comics' first issue of Hero @ Large gives us the pitiful Major Alpha, whose contract with
Justice Five is dropped, leaving the poor masked man without a function
in life. Down and out, he helps a wayward mother and child, and she
makes him a new costume. It's played for laughs, I think, but there
are very few of them. The drawing by Jeremy
Treece is attractive albeit derivative. He adopts the clunky manga
mannerisms, simple bold lines and angular anatomy, which I sometimes
find more attractive than at other times. This is one of the in-between
times. The colors, by Sean "Cheeks" Galloway, are broodingly
dark, so dark that they usually mask the lack of visual detail (backgrounds,
settings, etc.). But without the color and its variegated hues and modeling
shades the visuals would be pretty unimpressive. Skottie Young's rendering
of Marvel's New Warriors is
manga-style more to my liking. His linework is more complex, for one
thing-there are more lines, which makes for greater visual interest
in the art. But his lines are all of the fine filagree kind, and my
favorite linear techniques involve both thin and thick lines. (Young's
pencils, often non-photo blue, are rougher and bolder; I almost bought
an original pencil when I saw them at his table in Artists Alley during
Wizard World Chicago.) The title seems to be about the off- and on-camera
adventures of a television team of superheroes, and it's mildly amusing.
But why-oh why?-are portions of the pictures deliberately blurred? They're
imitating actual photographic effects, I gather, in which parts of a
scene that are out of the focal plane are not clear. But why do this
in a drawn book? In America's Greatest
Comics No. 12 from AC we have a whole lot of black-and-white reprints
of Jack Kirby from the 1950s:
Davy Crockett (Western Tales, No. 32), The 3 Rocketeers (Blast Off, No. 1),
"Sitting Duck" (Battle, No.
68), "After I'm Gone" (Black Magic,
Vol. 3, No. 6), and "Angel of Death" (Black
Magic, No. 9). It's fascinating to see how Kirby's art changes under
the inks of other cartoonists. The patented trap-shadow technique with
chips of black for modeling is best executed by Kirby's nominal partner, Joe Simon. Al Williamson inked the Rocketeer
story-crisp linear work, no chips of black. And Frank Giacoia does much more delicate feathering in "Sitting Duck"
than Kirby or Simon did. The book comes with several pages of text by
Bill Black, who digs into his collection for illustrative material in
tracing Kirby's career in the fifties. And Black is finally supplying
complete bibliographic information for his reprinted stories-comic book
titles, issue numbers, and year, helpful to the historian, always, but
even to the casual reader who might be interested in the chronology
of a given artist's work. I picked up the first two issues of Batman & Robin: The Boy Wonder because Frank Miller is writing it, and I've usually admired his work. And
Jim Lee, another whose work I admire,
is drawing the title. Miller's ear for colloquial lingo is, as always,
flawless, and the voice-over technique of carrying one scene into the
next, a completely different one, is deftly done. But the first issue
was, I thought, something of a let-down. It is, admittedly, a re-telling
of Robin's "origin," beginning with the senseless killing of his trapeze
artist parents, so there's inherently nothing new in it, but Miller's
achievements elsewhere suggested there would be something more. There
is the suggestion of a corrupt and even sexually perverted police force,
the sort of twisted tantalizing vision Miller has lately indulged. But
otherwise, we have pretty much the usual story, told, often here, through
the eyes of cheesecake Vicki Vale, who has the hots for Bruce Wayne
so bad that the narrative cloys immediately. There's something inherently
unappealing about a tough-talking dame whose fawning all over a square-jawed
millionaire displays nothing more than a panting libido. But with the
second issue, Vicki disappears, and Miller's unique take on the Batman-Robin
relationship begins to surface. This is more like it: Batman urging
Dick Grayson not to give in to his grief ("grief is the enemy," he intones
to himself, "grief turns into acceptance, forgiveness. Grief forgives
what can never be forgiven"), training him to join him in a battle against
crime. "The boy has entered my world," Wayne mutters to himself when
he sees Grayson's parents shot down. We may well wonder if Miller will
make Robin as nutso as he's made Batman. Lee's art, while marvelously
adept, put me off in the first issue. His feathering and shadowing seem
awkwardly done, and Vicki Vale's anatomy is sometimes completely askew.
An odd criticism, I wont, considering that Lee is noted for limning
the curvaceous gender. And the first issue clearly hopes to capitalize
on this ability, the third page devoted entirely to a full-length picture
of Vicki in her pink scanties. The effect, however, is undermined at
once by faulty perspective: she seems "shot" from floor level, which
ought to result in her chin being seen from below, but it doesn't. Moreover,
her breasts are completely out-of-kilter: one is seen from below, the
other from straight on. And rest of the 5-page sequence, obviously intended
to titillate, is ruined with clunky body shadowing; Lee is much better
when he sticks to unembellished line work. In No. 2, close-ups dominate
the visuals, and here, Lee is a virtuoso; Miller's current drawing style
could not manage the variety of facial expressions with Lee's aplomb.
Quips and Quotes "If I had asked people
what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -Henry Ford "God could not be everywhere,
and therefore he made mothers." -Rudyard Kipling "They keep talking
about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them
ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for
over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore." -George Carlin "Not all who wander
are lost." -J.R.R. Tolkien BOOK MARQUEES TwoMorrows reports
that it has acquired, through returns, a modest stock of the erstwhile
sold-out title, The Life and Art of Murphy Anderson, which
I mention here because I wrote the book for Murphy and therefore realize
a modest income from sales thereof. Visit the TwoMorrows website, www.twomorrows.com
. ... Andrews McMeel has just issued four new reprint collections: The Big Book of Zonker from Doonesbury; Never Wink at a Worried Woman from For Better or For Worse; and two first
collections- Prickly City from
the strip of the same name, and Bo
Nanas: Monkey Meets the World from Bonanas.
More later when I see 'em. And I have even more waiting here in
the bullpen, already reviewed for the next installment of Rancid Raves. The fourth and latest of the Fantagraphics Peanuts reprint project, covering the years
1957 and 1958, arrived last week, another tidy package tastefully designed
by Seth, 335 6x8-inch pages in hardback, just $28.95. Snoopy is the
cover decoration of this one, following Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Pigpen
to eminence, and herein, we see the beagle making more enthusiastic
forays into being something other than or more than a mere canine. In
the preceding volume, Snoopy starts dancing on his hind legs and imitating
other creatures and thinking in thought balloons so we can tell what's
passing through his mind. Here, the process continues apace and includes
Snoopy's nefarious imitation of a vulture, not to mention his attacks
on Linus' security blanket. The book concludes with a tell-tale index
that lists the various themes alphabetically ("vulture" under "imitations"
under "Snoopy") and the full-page version of the Sunday Peanuts
for May 31, 1953, which the editors had been unable to unearth before
publishing the volume for that year; this makes it all complete. The
Introduction this time is by Jonathan Franzen, who performs a huge service
for Schulzian scholarship: he successfully unhorses the pernicious armchair
psychology perpetrated by Rheta Grimsley Johnson in her biography of
Schulz, Good Grief, wherein she attempts to link the cartoonist's creative
impulses to damage done him by the so-called soul-shattering setbacks
of his childhood and young manhood-his unpopularity in school, the death
of his mother as he was being inducted into the Army, and rejection
by the red-haired girl he proposed to. Schulz, I suspect, encouraged
this delusional analysis because it contributed to the legend; but it
ain't necessarily so. Says Franzen: "Schulz wasn't an artist because
he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist." Exactly. His artistic
temperament made him more than normally susceptible to the slings and
arrows of juvenile life. Franzen continues: "To keep choosing art over
the comforts of normal life-to grind out a strip every day for fifty
years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this-is the opposite
of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and
sanity can make. The reason that Schulz's early sorrows look like 'sources'
of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to
find humor in them." At last, a sensible interpretation of the relationship
between Schulz's life and his art. CIVILIZATION'S LAST OUTPOST Barging through a 1933
issue of the Literary Digest
(which, I was surprised to discover, was not at all literary but newsy-a
prototype of the magazines that eventually rivaled it, Time
and Newsweek), we came
across the following: "Emperor Hirohito of Japan, 123rd Son
of Heaven [who was sitting on the throne for the attack on Pearl Harbor
and the ensuing World War II], the first Mikado to give an audience
to an American journalist (Roy Howard), has other 'firsts' famous in
the flowery land to his credit. [He] broke with precedent when he chose
his Empress without the assistance of court officials. He was the first
Japanese Prince to travel in Europe, the first to appear in public places
on occasions other than ceremonial, the first to shake hands, the first
to enjoy competitive sports, such as tennis and golf, and the first
to permit the telling of jokes in his presence." I particularly like
the part about the jokes. Maybe he even read the comics in Japanese
newspapers. And if he did, he may have encountered a pirated Terry and the Pirates, which ran in Japan through World War II even
though Terry and Flip Corkin and the Dragon Lady were all battling the
Japanese at the time. Now that cellphones can deliver to their users full-motion
video from the Internet, the porn industry is moving to take advantage
of this promising new venue. ... France's iconic cigarette, Gauloise,
the kind smoked by Gallic movie stars and philosophers, is no longer
French: the factory has moved to the Spanish coastal town of Alicante.
... The U.S.'s oldest corporate mascot, the Quaker Oats Pilgrim, appeared
in 1877; the next oldest, Aunt Jemima, in 1893 and the Morton Salt Umbrella
Girl in 1911 and Mr. Peanut in 1916. ... The number of journalists killed
in Vietnam between 1955 and 1975 is 63; in Iraq since March 2003, 65
have been killed. The percentage of Republicans who think the press
is overly critical of the U.S. is 67; the same percent of Democrats
think the media are more interested in increasing their audience than
in informing the public. Speaking of sex, a new report from the National Center for
Health Statistics (Time, September
26) revealed that more than half of all teenagers surveyed have engaged
in oral sex, about the same number of boys as girls. As any of the teenagers
can tell you, by way of explanation, oral sex is not real sex, so the
participants manage thereby to preserve their virginity and avoid the
threat of venereal disease. Bill Clinton is doubtless the most famous
advocate of the belief that oral sex is not real sex, but this study
suggests that he is scarcely alone in that belief. It is, in fact, so
popular a notion as to be nearly a universally accepted truth. As for
the safety of oral sex, highly dubious: one can contract syphilis, gonorrhea
and herpes as well as popilloma virus (leading to cervical cancer).
Sonette Ehlers, a one-time medical technician in South Africa,
which has the worst sexual assault rate in the world, has invented an
anti-rape female condom. Inserted and worn all day like a regular condom,
the device, trademarked Rapex, will sink hooks into an attacker's penis,
disabling him immediately. Deflating him, actually, I should think.
And here's one for superheroics fans everywhere: something
called "ultimate fighting" is "heading for mainstream entertainment,"
according to Time (September
26). Dubbed "human cockfighting," the so-called "sport" combines wrestling,
kick-boxing, boxing-almost anything you can think of-under the heading
of "mixed martial arts," a "no-holds-barred, pound-to-pulp violence"
in the ring. Spike tv offered a second season of "The Ultimate Fighter,"
a reality series, as its "Trojan horse," slipping the broadcast onto
basic cable to blaze the way for more of the same; "most episodes ended
with a vicious fight to eliminate a contestant." New rules have displaced
"the old chop suey of contending martial-arts schools": no head butting,
for example, a doctor is stationed ringside "to discourage death," and
the referee will break up dangerous holds. One of the up-and-comers,
Forrest Griffin, 26, admires the lack of pretense in ultimate fighting:
"Fighting strips away everything," he says; "two guys on a mat going
at each other. There is a purity to it." Says New York Post sports writer Phil Mushnick: "Violence for the sake
of violence. I understand that not everything necessarily has to have
a redeeming social value. It can have no value. But this kind of stuff
has negative value." Notice how all the storied sports arenas of the country
are getting new names? The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis is now called
the RCA Dome; famed Candlestick Park in San Francisco is now 3 Com Park;
historic Kaminsky Field in Chicago is now U.S. Cellular. The venues
are named for the corporate entities that paid for construction. The
Chicago Bulls play in the United Center because United Airlines paid
for it. And in Denver, the ringingly christened Mile High Stadium is
now Invesco Field (to which is appended, thanks chiefly to local outcry,
"at Mile High Stadium"). So isn't it time we start calling
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the Halliburton House? COMIC STRIP
WATCH In Brooke McEldowney's
9 Chickweed Lane, Edda's
homosexual roommate Seth finally announces, in no uncertain terms, his
orientation: "I'm gay," he says on September 2. We all knew
he was gay before, basing our opinions on the evidence of his lifestyle
and his boyfriend; but readers could still glide by these matters and
assume he was just Edda's roomie and friend. Now, no one can escape
knowing. Will there be a deluge of consequences? We'll see. Nothing
yet, though. Over the Hedge, the engaging and sometimes satirically edgy anthropomorphic
animal strip by Michael Fry and
T. Lewis, spent the last
week of August pondering Cindy Sheehan's protest on the road to GeeDubya's
farm in Crawford, Texas. Vern, the box turtle, reports that the President
met with the Mom several months ago, calling her "Mom" and referring
to her dead soldier son as "loved one." Says Vern: "A lot of soldiers
have died. I guess it must be hard to remember all their..." RJ the
raccoon interrupts: "No, it's not." The two speculate about what will
happen if GeeDubya goes back to the White House without meeting the
Mom. She'll follow him there, Vern says. And when GRAFIQUE NOVILZ The graphic novels Ghost World and Road to Perdition
were reincarnated as motion pictures a couple years ago, proving
that the static medium offers more than the superheroic longjohn legions
as fodder for Hollywood's voracious maw. The latest to be devoured in
this manner is A History of Violence
(294 5.5x8-inch pages in paperback, $9.99), a story by John Wagner as drawn by Vince
Locke. But the movie is almost nothing like the graphic novel, says
director David Cronenberg. "In fact," he says, "I didn't
know that Josh Olson's script was based on a graphic novel until we
had been working on it for some time. Weird as it sounds, no one had
mentioned it to me, and the credit didn't appear on the script I was
sent. By the time I read the graphic novel, we were so far away from
it that it could be made into another movie. Maybe it will." The
graphic novel opens with a brutal random roadside killing by two psychopaths,
who then go into the small town down the road where they try to rob
a diner late at night. But the diner's owner, Tom McKenna, foils their
attempt, killing one hoodlum and wounding the other. Suddenly, McKenna
is an Everyman hero, and the news media pounce, invading his life. The
national exposure brings more than notoriety: a sinister visitor believes
McKenna to be someone else, someone with whom he has a score to settle.
The movie makers were piqued by how this intrusive happenstance affects
the man's relationships with his wife and children and fellow townsmen,
and they devote their movie to an exploration of these matters. Wagner
and Locke pause to consider these aspects of the dilemma they've constructed,
but their story is more complicated. And more violent. In their graphic
novel, McKenna is not mistaken for someone else: he is who the sinister
visitor takes him for, although it takes a while for us to realize it.
The
novel puts McKenna's heroism in the context of his life and expands
the plot implications that can be inferred from an ordinary man having
the capability to violently frustrate two ruthless armed robbers intent
on taking his money and, presumably, his life. Wagner, in imagining
his story, was fascinated by a narrative circumstance "of claustrophobic
terror, of powerful, sinister, unstoppable forces closing in, crushing"-a
circumstance over which an ordinary man has very little control but
tries, nonetheless, to escape from and survive. In the graphic novel,
McKenna, it turns out, has a past with connections to the mob, and although
he shuns the publicity surrounding his act of small town heroism, he
is not entirely successful. He attracts the attention of the mobsters
of his past, and they, in the form of that sinister visitor, return
to haunt him. The book flashes back to McKenna's youth and the act that
incited the mobsters ire; and then, it tells the rest of the story-how
McKenna dealt with this threat to his life and the lives of his wife
and children. He meets violence with violence. Violence
as an element of drama is essentially visual, hence the need for pictures,
either in the form of movies or of graphic novels (comic books), in
narratives the plots of which are hinged to violence. Locke's visualization
of Wagner's story is virtually a storyboard for a motion picture. The
breakdowns (the division of action into individual pictures or panels)
and panel compositions are cinematic. The sequences of violent action
are nearly staging instructions for a cameraman. Locke's drawing style,
while appropriate for depicting rapid action, is very sketchy, a mannerism
that makes it sometimes difficult to recognize individual characters:
Locke's treatment of their physiognomies is not precise enough to capture
identifying physical characteristics. In
the final denouement, we encounter violence so sickening that it could
finally do what Clint Eastwood thought he was doing in "Unforgiven"
-invalidate violence as a thematic device. But while Eastwood's movie
revealed violence as thematically contradictory of the motives that
inspire it in the traditional Western, the Wagner-Locke novel's conclusion
goes further: here, violence is so brutal, so repellant, that it nearly
ceases to function as a dramatic device and becomes, instead, a object
of morbid infatuation so enthralling as to unseat our grasp of the thematic
implications of violence in both personal and societal life. Here, we
are thankful that Locke's rendering style is sketchy: a more precise
way of drawing would take us beyond the needs of narrative into realms
of psychic disorder too ghoulish to contemplate with the sort of satisfaction
that usually accompanies the end of a tale. In
Capote in Kansas, which the authors dub
"a drawn novel," we have the other end of violence-or, rather,
a meditation on a contemplative post-mortem on a senseless act of violence.
Capote in Kansas is also being accompanied
by a motion picture, but the movie is not about the book although it
is about the same subject. In their book (126 6x9-inch pages paperback,
$11.95), Ande Parks and his
artist partner Chris Samnee imagine
author Truman Capote on his fact-finding mission to Garden City and
Holcomb, Kansas, where he talked to the friends and neighbors of the
Clutter family who had all been brutally killed at their farmhouse one
night in 1959 by two complete strangers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock,
who apparently murdered all four of the family for no particular reason.
Capote wrote what he called a "non-fiction novel" about the
case, In Cold Blood, which doubtless achieved its sales records by exploiting
our ghoulish fascination with death by grisly murder. Today, thanks
to supermarket tabloids galore, the material is all too familiar fodder.
In 1965 when Capote's book was published, it was immediately celebrated
as a literary landmark, a form almost without precedent. Turns out,
it was as much about the personalities of the killers and Capote's relationship
to them, Smith particularly, as it was about the gory details of the
murder. In 1967, Capote's book was made into a movie with Robert Blake
playing one of the two murderers. Another movie, "Capote," is looming
on the cinematic landscape this fall, with yet another, "Have You Heard?"
due next year. Parks' graphic novel, however, is a coincidental achievement:
he told me that he was a third of the way through its formulation when
he heard about the two films. He is just a little annoyed by this happenstance
because he knows someone is bound to accuse him of ripping off the movie
when he could not, patently, have seen it before doing the novel. Parks,
whose first graphic novel, Union
Station, reconstructed the events of the 1930s gangland massacre
in Kansas City that inspired the FBI's crusade against the mob, wanted
to "break free" of the restraints imposed by historical reportage.
In Capote in Kansas, the events that prompt his work are actual-the murder,
Capote's research on the scene in Kansas, his resulting book-but Parks'
exploration of Capote's struggle to reconstruct the crime and to discover
its motive is an act of imagination. Here, Parks is interested in the
creative process-how Capote did his work and how that affected him.
In Parks' book, Capote's initial problem was his flamboyant New York
writer persona that at first so alienated the Kansans that they would
not cooperate with him. Prompted by his friend and fellow author Harper
Lee (who had not yet published To Kill a Mocking Bird), Capote discards
his theatrical mannerisms and is thereby accepted by the Kansans; he
also becomes human enough to listen sympathetically to the their stories-and
the stories of Smith and Hickock. Parks' treatment of this transformation
seems, at first blush, too pat: Capote appears to achieve acceptance
when he adopts a subdued wardrobe appropriate to the smalltown Kansas
milieu. But raiment is merely the outward and visible sign of Capote's
transformation. Inside, much more is going on, and Parks represents
that evolution with much greater subtlety. Alone in his hotel room,
for instance, Capote is sometimes visited by the ghost of Nancy Clutter,
the slaughtered teenage daughter. Through her, Parks suggests, Capote's
book achieves the measure of poignance that comes from realizing the
tragic disappointment of a life not lived. Samnee's
contribution in visualizing Parks' story is profound: although this
is apparently the first work of this scope he has done, his stark black-and-white
pictures, many in long wordless sequences, expertly create the story's
brooding atmosphere. Samnee takes the chiaroscuro rendering technique
to a startling extreme. Many of his pictures are drenched in black on
the "shadow side" of shapes, all detail lost in solid black. He goes
even further on the "lighted side" of forms: here, visual details seem
burned away by the bright intensity of the light source. He frequently
eschews lines altogether, letting nicks and solids of black etch the
forms. Much of the tale is told entirely by pictures-no captions, no
speeches. But while Samnee's skill is beyond question, he is clearly
acting at Parks' direction. Parks let me read several pages of his script
for certain segments that I thought were particularly effective. At
the onset of any scene or sequence, the script is often discursive,
musing almost, as Parks indicates the mood he is after as well as the
kind of pictures he thinks will produce that mood. After setting the
tone, so to speak, Parks proceeds, panel by panel, describing the visual
and quoting the verbal content. Samnee sometimes deviates from the letter
of Parks' script but never from its spirit, which seems to me apt because
the result is a genuine melding of both authors' talents. For example,
on several of the pages for which I saw the scripts, Samnee didn't produce
the number of panels that Parks indicated, and he sometimes overlooked
certain visual details, but he created the effect Parks was after. A graphic
artist himself (Parks often inks the work of his longtime collaborator, Phil Hester, most recently on DC's Green Arrow), Parks displays in his scripts
a highly visual imagination, and the great visual effects in the book
are his in concept while Samnee's in execution. In saying this, I don't
intend to take away from either of them: they each have an equal share
of credit in the picture that resulted. By way of example, here's one
of Parks' instructions that seemed to me nearly impossible to execute.
He describes a full-page illustration that is to show Truman Capote
outside the now-deserted Clutter farmhouse, looking up at the window
of Nancy's room. It's night, and the picture is mostly black. It's Capote's
first encounter with the girl's ghost. "We can't see Nancy," Parks writes,
"but we do see her shadow. The light from the window makes a white rectangle
on the ground below, with Truman centered in the light. ... Nancy casts
her shadow down into the area where Truman stands, so we have a light
area with darkness around Truman. Don't cast him entirely into darkness,
though-we need to see his expression. He looks with awe up at the light
coming from the house where no one should be. Nancy's shadow should
make it clear to the reader that there is a young woman or girl in the
room. They may not know that we're dealing with Nancy's ghost, but I
think that's cool. Some will get it right away, and some may not, but
it'll be clear soon enough." Got that? Capote is standing in a rectangle
of light cast onto the solid black of night surrounding him. The rectangle
must suggest the window above. In the white rectangle, we are to see
a shadow of the girl in the window-and enough of Capote to realize his
expression is one of awe. A colossal assignment. Astoundingly, Samnee
brings it off with panache. It's one of the most stunning pictures in
the book, a virtuoso performance by Samnee in pe Watterson
Redux The Hilarious
Philosophies of John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes Today's funnies page often seems a living testament
to the demise of the medium. Between the ugliness of strips with "contemporary
looks" and the cobbled-up contraptions of market research we have
vapid verbal humor that undermines the function of pictures in the artform,
all signaling that comic strips are an endangered species. Then in September,
the nation's comics sections got a reprieve: Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes returned to the funnies.
But, alas, only until the end of the year. And
only in re-run. Watterson,
who famously retired his strip on December 31, 1995, at the peak of
his prowess and the strip's popularity, is not making a come-back. His
syndicate, Universal Press in Kansas City, is offering this 4-mounth
reprise as a way of whetting the appetites of Calvin's fans for the
October 4 debut of the 3-volume, slip-cased Complete
Calvin and Hobbes. The hardcover compilation includes every one
of the 3,160 strips that appeared in newspapers during the strip's original
10-year run. The 1,400-plus-page collection weighs 23 pounds and has
a suggested retail price of $150. Some
comic strips are more popular than others. Dilbert
is popular. Baby Blues is
popular. Get Fuzzy is up-and-coming popular. FoxTrot is popular. Blondie has been popular for three generations of readers. Only a
few of the most popular are also beloved. Calvin
and Hobbes is one of that rare breed. From
the start, it was a notable strip: drawn from panel to panel instead
of being a parade of photocopied pictures, its every panel was different.
Even more astonishing-and gratifying beyond expression-the cartoonist
doing this new comic strip could draw. He could draw his characters
in more than one position and with more than one expression. And he
could draw a lot of things-not just his characters but also houses,
animals, landscapes, street scenes. Anything. And he wasn't doing the
strip by demographic prescription. "I just draw for myself,"
Watterson said. For
himself and for millions of readers who took Calvin and Hobbes to their hearts in record time. And Watterson's
profession did the same: before the strip was two years old, Watterson
had won the National Cartoonists Society's coveted Reuben Award, the
accolade of his peers as best cartoonist of the year. He won it again
two years later. Unprecedented. Watterson wasn't even a member of the
Society. And he didn't show up at the annual ceremony to accept the
award. Even
before the first Reuben, though, it was clear to Watterson and his syndicate,
Universal Press, that he had a hit strip on his hands. And at that point,
Watterson once again indulged a maverick tendency. When the merchandising
hustlers began to pester him about licensing his creation for T-shirts,
greeting cards, toys of all sorts, jewelry, coloring books, TV appearances-all
that stuff that earned fortunes for Schulz and Davis-when they came
knocking on Watterson's door, he kept the door closed. He
explained his reasons in one of the few interviews he's given. "I'm
convinced," he said, "that licensing [the characters] would
sell out the soul of Calvin and
Hobbes." He sees his strip as more than a gag strip; it does
more than tell a joke: "The humor is situational, and often episodic.
It relies on conversation, and the development of personalities and
relationships. These aren't concerns you can wrap up neatly in a clever
little saying for people to send each other or to hang up on their walls." The
idea of a Hobbes doll, for example, is "especially noxious."
Such a product would "take the character out of the world for which
he was intended. If you stick thirty Hobbes dolls on a drugstore shelf,
you're no longer talking about a character I created. At that point,
you've transformed him into just another overpriced knickknack."
And this would do serious violence to the very heart of the strip: "The
whole intrigue of Hobbes is that he may or may not be a real tiger.
The strip deliberately sets up two versions of reality without committing
itself to either one. If I'm not going to answer the question of
who or what Hobbes is, I'm certainly not going to let Dakin answer it.
It makes no sense to allow someone to make Hobbes into a stuffed toy
for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic." In
the last analysis, Watterson fears that merchandising the strip would
destroy the relationship that must exist between a creator and his creation
if the work is to have a life of its own. "I'm happy that people
enjoy the strip and have become devoted to it," he said. "But
it seems that with a lot of the marketing stuff, the incentive is just
to cash in. [The merchandised gimmicks] are not trying to do the job
of the comic strip; they not giving jokes or developing characters....
Calvin and Hobbes will not exist intact if I do not exist intact; and
I will not exist intact if I have to put up with all this stuff." Watterson
believes that books reprinting the strip are the only legitimate by-product
of his work. But he won't flog the books. When the publisher of the
first collection of reprints, Calvin
and Hobbes, asked Watterson to embark upon a national public appearance
tour to promote sales of the book, he said no. Watterson
had heard "no" a lot until 1985. After graduating from Kenyon
College in Ohio in 1980, he found a job as the political cartoonist
for the Cincinnati Post. But it didn't work out.
Watterson's comic sensibilities were not suited to political cartooning;
he was fired after a few months. And then he spent the next five years
trying to sell one comic strip idea after another to an assortment of
syndicates. After six failures, he hit upon a seventh that eventually
resulted in Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin
first appeared in another of Watterson's strip concepts-as the little
brother of the strip's protagonist. Hobbes was there, too, as a stuffed
animal that comes to life in the little kid's imagination. Said Watterson:
"One of the syndicates suggested that these two characters were the
strongest and why didn't I develop a strip around them? I had thought
they were the funniest characters myself, but I was unsure as to whether
they could hold their own strip. But I tried it, and almost immediately
it clicked in my mind; it became much easier to write material. Their
personalities expanded easily, and that takes a good 75 percent of the
work out of it. If you have the personalities down, you understand them
and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have
a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond." Oddly,
the syndicate that gave Watterson the inspirational suggestion-United
Feature-declined the strip that resulted when the cartoonist followed
their suggestion. When
the strip began November 18, 1985, it seemed built on the premise that
the relationship between an imaginative young kid (a six-year-old, to
be precise) and his favorite stuffed animal will produce situations
to tickle the risibilities of readers. Indicative of the kid's imaginative
prowess is the strip's visual gimmick: when the kid Calvin is alone
with his toy tiger, Hobbes appears as a real albeit anthropomorphic
tiger; but whenever adults are around, the tiger is depicted as a stuffed
animal. Once
the strip was thoroughly launched, Hobbes appears almost always as the
"live" creature of Calvin's imagination, not as the stuffed
toy. And
that is just as it should be because the strip is really about Calvin. Calvin
is the personification of kid-dom. He's entirely self-centered, devoted
wholly to his own self-gratification. In pursuit of this completely
understandable childhood goal, Calvin acknowledges no obstacle, no restraint.
His desire and its satisfaction are all that matter to him. Playing
in his bath, Calvin cannonballs into the tub, effectively emptying its
contents onto the bathroom floor. He
is childhood unbound. But
Watterson has given his portrait of childhood a special twist. Calvin
doesn't talk like a little kid. He talks like an adult. Or, perhaps,
like a true child of the television generation-a kid who has watched
too much prime-time TV. Discovering
that his library book is two days overdue, Calvin panics: "What
will they do?" he asks his mother frantically. "Are they going
to interrogate me and beat me up? Are they going to break my knees?
Will I have to sign some confession?" His
mother assures him that he'll just have to pay the fine. Calvin
is considerably calmed by the news. "The way some of those librarians
look at you," he says, "I naturally assumed the consequences
would be more dire." Charles
Schulz gave us little kids with adult vocabularies, too, but Calvin
is not a character in Peanuts.
Charlie Brown and Lucy and the other Schulz kids are motivated by adult
concerns, or so it seemed. Calvin, on the other hand, is motivated entirely
by his childhood fantasies and desires. He's
a kind of superkid. He does what we imagine a kid would want to do,
but he does it by using adult language and intelligence. He is therefore
empowered to an extent that an average kid is not. Calvin
wants to take Hobbes with him on a trip to the store, but his mother
initially says no. Calvin roars at the top of his lungs: "But I
want him to come with us!" The bold black lettering fills the panel.
His mother relents. In an aside, Calvin explains: "If you can't
win by reason, go for volume." In
short, Calvin is a terror. In
a sense, of course, he's not really a kid at all. He's Watterson being
a kid-or, rather, Watterson imagining himself a kid but with his adult
abilities intact so that he can not only achieve his wildest juvenile
imaginings but enhance those imaginings with the empowering energy of
mature creativity. When
Calvin and Hobbes put the loose end of the roll of toilet paper into
the toilet and flush, delighting hysterically in the frantic revolutions
of the roll of tissue as it unrolls, its entire length pulled inexorably
in the maelstrom by the cascading water, they are implementing a highly
sophisticated scheme. It's not a kid's prank; it's an adult's. But
Calvin can be an ordinary kid, too, motivated by a wholly juvenile mentality-when,
for instance, he holds his nose while sneezing because he's trying to
blow his shoes off. An
annoying kid, perhaps, but also vaguely endearing. He complains that
his bath water is too cold. His mother adds some hot water. Now it's
too hot, Calvin says. She adds cold water. "Now it's too deep,"
he says, deadpan. In
obeying every impulse that flits into his consciousness, Calvin is Id,
animated solely by his desire to gratify his every wish. As Watterson
himself says, "He has no sense of restraint; he doesn't have the
experience yet to know the things that you shouldn't do." And
to some extent, Hobbes is Superego. "Hobbes," Watterson goes
on, "has a little bit of that sense of consequence that Calvin lacks
entirely." Calvin
holds a filled water balloon as he comes up to Hobbes. "You see,"
he explains, "I have a water balloon, and you don't. I therefore
have offensive superiority, so you have to do what I say. What do you
think of that?" Hobbes
says: "I think I'll take this stick and poke your balloon." The
last panel closes in on a drenched Calvin, who says: "That's the
trouble with weapons technology: it becomes obsolete so quickly." As
Pat Oliphant observes (in the introduction to Something Under the Bed Is Drooling, the second volume of Calvin and Hobbes reprints), Hobbes "leavens"
Calvin's brashness "with a wry, endearing wisdom." Most
of the time, Hobbes is-appropriately-the passive companion, innocently
going along with whatever scheme Calvin has hatched. Sometimes Hobbes
acts as a sort of counselor, giving useful advice. Sometimes he's a
rival, a competitor at their childish games. Always, though, he's Calvin's
best friend. The
original Calvin and Hobbes, however, were not at all acquainted. John
Calvin was a celebrated Protestant reformer of the 16th century and
Thomas Hobbes, a social philosopher of the 17th century. A political
science major in college, Watterson was more than a little cryptic in
explaining his coupling of this duo, saying simply: "It's an inside
joke for poli-sci majors." But he doesn't explain the joke. No
professional humorist explains his jokes. I,
on the other hand-lacking professional standing-am scarcely daunted
by such trifles. John Calvin, you'll remember, advocated predestination
and election: at the dawn of time, God determined who would be damned
and who would be saved (the so-called "Elect"). No one can
know which he is, and good works don't affect the outcome. Oddly,
instead of fostering massive discouragement among his followers, this
notion fired zealous undertakings. The righteous deluded themselves
into believing they were among the Elect, not the damned. Thus, they
didn't see themselves as helpless before an arbitrary God; they see
themselves as his instruments. In the grip of such conviction, men who
had inherited Calvin's tradition conquered a continent and raised a
democratic form of government. If
a single term could describe John Calvin, it would be certainty. He was certain of his theology, of himself-and of his being
among the Elect. Thomas
Hobbes theorized that humankind in a hypothetical state of nature was
constantly at war, each man fearful of all others. Primitive life, before
social organization, was lawless, violent, and fearful; in Hobbes' most
famous phrase, it was "nasty, brutish, and short." Watterson's
tiger is doubtless a symbol of the state of nature. He is a jungle creature,
a brute but, as Watterson conceived him, scarcely brutish. In fact,
he is more civilized than his young owner: as Superego, Hobbes is the
unconscious product of social organization. Calvin, on the other hand,
is nasty, brutish, and short. Well, nasty and short anyhow. But
there isn't a perfect reversal in Watterson's allusions. Calvin is clearly
among the Elect. He is certain of his rightness, so he can misbehave
without fearing the consequences: he is already saved; his deeds cannot
affect his fate. So
much for in-group poli-sci jokes. It's hard to know where to laugh. But
nobody reads a comic strip for its allusions. Most of us read the comics
for entertainment, pure and simple. In a visual artform, much of the
entertainment arises from the pictures. Watterson's action sequences
particularly are comically imaginative and inventive. Hobbes
loves to ambush Calvin when the latter arrives home from school, and
when he lunges from concealment at the boy, the tiger is a striped rocket
streaking across a panel. On
a memorable Sunday page, Hobbes flits from place to place in the house,
seeking the perfect spot to hide-once flitting so rapidly that he leaves
his stripes behind him in mid-air. But
in Calvin and Hobbes, the
humor usually emerges from a blend of words and pictures: neither alone,
without the other, is quite as funny. Their synergy creates the comedy.
Chasing
through the house after each other in a game of cops and robbers, Calvin
and Hobbes leave the place a shambles, upsetting furniture right and
left as they tear through the rooms. But they stop in terrified anxiety,
eyes like saucers, fists frozen at the apogee of their swings, when
Calvin's mother screams, "Calvin!"-a clarion call for order.
Childhood fear of parental reprisal was never so perfectly captured
in pen and ink, in word and picture.. Another
time, Calvin plays at being a monster, grimacing horribly, one eyeball
large and round, the other squinted shut and tiny, his mouth a gaping
maw. His mother tells him to be careful or his face will freeze like
that. Calvin stops in his tracks. "Wow," he says to himself,
the appeal of the proposition nearly overwhelming. Watterson
is well aware of the way his medium functions. And it's more than words
and pictures: it's also characterization. He
once lamented that too many of today's strips are merely illustrated
verbal jokes. Moreover, the jokes are divorced from personality: often
the gag is the same regardless of the characters used in the situation.
A lamentable state of affairs. In
Calvin and Hobbes, the jokes usually arise
from the personalities of the principals. Take
that hysterical sequence of a week or so in which Calvin slicked his
hair-usually spiky in disarray-into sleek horns in order to make his
school picture "interesting." The humor resides in our knowledge of
Calvin's character. And
there's an evocative piece of business Watterson did every so often
with a wagon or a sled. Calvin at the helm, Hobbes a sometimes terrified
passenger, the wagon plunges downhill like a guided missile. On one
such episode, Calvin philosophizes idly as they hurtle on: "Do
you believe in Fate?" he asks Hobbes. "You
mean, that our lives are predestined?" says Hobbes. "Yeah-that
the things we do are inevitable." And
at this critical moment, the wagon with its passengers reaches the end
of a dock or the edge of a bluff and soars off into space, a tiny speck
in the panel. "What a scary thought," murmurs the tiger as
they slip loose the surly bonds of earth. Calvin
and his tiger are each perfectly "in character," like the superb actors
they are. The
picture plays its role, too: it convinces us that such a voyage as theirs
could really happen. We can scarcely deny the evidence of our eyes. And
we enjoy the ride. We always do in comic strips that are so skillfully
drawn as to make the journey a feast for the eyes as well as the risibilities. Watterson's
passion for drawing eventually provoked a nearly unprecedented development:
he demanded that subscribing newspapers publish the Sunday installment
in a "half-page format," a tamper-free block of space that would permit
him to explore the great visual potential of the medium. In
the late winter of 1991, Watterson, worn out by "a long and emotionally
exhausting fight to prevent Calvin
and Hobbes from being merchandised," took a nine-month sabbatical
(from May through the following January). During this hiatus (while
the strip went into re-runs), he started thinking about ways to "rekindle"
his enthusiasm for his work. A fan of classic comic strips through the
history of the medium, he marveled at the inventive ways cartoonists
in the 1930s used their Sunday pages. In those days, "a Sunday strip
could fill an entire page," Watterson said, "and I was amazed by the
long-forgotten possibilities out there." For years he had been frustrated
by the restrictive Sunday format. Sunday strips had to be drawn in three
tiers of equal height, and there was "one unmovable panel division within
each row." This standard format permitted newspaper editors to reconfigure
strips to suit space needs. "The same strip could be run in several
shapes [at different papers] by restacking the panels." The top row
of panels were often removed by editors in order to make space for more
strips on the page, which meant, Watterson observed, "a third of the
strip had to be wasted on 'throwaway panels' that many readers would
never see." Moreover, "the fixed panel divisions were annoying because
they limited my ability to compose the strip to best suit the idea.
For example, they often forced a small panel where I needed more space
for words." Watterson
longed for a spatial allotment that would allow him to play with the
visual possibilities of the medium as the cartoonists of yore had done.
He wanted to dispense with throwaway panels and fixed divisions. When
he approached his syndicate, Universal Press, with a redesigned Sunday
format, his editors agreed to market the strip as an "unbreakable half-page."
Newspapers could run the strip smaller than a half-page, but the layout,
the format, must remain intact. Papers that did not accept these terms
could not publish the strip. This requirement was nearly unprecedented.
Garry Trudeau had returned
from his 1984 sabbatical with a similar contractual dictum: the daily
Doonesbury had a minimum size
demand, and papers that ran it smaller were cut from the subscription
list. (Doonesbury is also
distributed by Universal Press strip.) When
Calvin and Hobbes returned
in early 1992 with this demand, newspaper editors across the nation
howled. "I don't think it's a good idea to have these artists dictate
standards to us," huffed Leonard Gregory of the Chieftan
in Pueblo, Colorado. But his was an empty bluster: Calvin and Hobbes was running in about 1,800 newspapers at the time.
Only Peanuts, Garfield and
Blondie were more widely distributed. Fans
of Calvin and Hobbes, who
had been living with rerun strips for nine months, would be outraged
if their papers dropped the strip. At the Tribune
in Albuquerque, editor Tim Gallagher was realistic: "We had two
choices," he said. "We could either keep Calvin
[running it in the required format] or take out more fire insurance."
Most of the strip's 1,800 subscribers kept Calvin
and Hobbes and their existing fire insurance. And Watterson got
a license to exploit his medium. "Comics
are a visual medium," he wrote. "A strip with a lot of drawing can be
exciting and add some variety. The new format opened up new ways to
tell stories, and I drew different kinds of strips as a result. Laying
out the panels became a job in itself: now that I was no longer confined
to horizontal rows, I could place boxes anywhere and any size, but the
reader's eye needs to flow naturally to the proper panels without confusion,
and big panels need to be designed in such a way that they don't divert
attention and spoil surprises. The graphic needs of each panel must
be accommodated and the panels themselves should form a pleasing arrangement
so the entire page is attractive, balanced, and unified as well. Here
again, I looked for guidance in the gorgeous Sunday pages of George
Herriman's Krazy Kat." Only
a few cartoonists in recent years have clout akin to Watterson's: Gary Larson with The Far Side (who retired at the same time as Watterson), Scott Adams with Dilbert, and Lynn Johnston
with For Better or For Worse
come to mind at once-perhaps Jerry
Scott and Jim Borgman with Zits and Scott and Rick Kirkman
with Baby Blues. Possibly
one or two others. Several other strips have comparable circulation,
but they don't inspire the passion in fans that the ones I've just named
do, and hence, they haven't the kind of puissance that would permit
their creators to demand, and get, more space. The last to try it was
Berke Breathed when he brought back his lovable penguin in Opus: Breathed demanded a half-page in
the Sunday funnies. And he promised, in return, that Opus would be available only in newspapers (not, in other words, on
the Web). Breathed also promised breath-takingly beautiful artwork,
but he hasn't delivered anything approaching Watterson's inventive layouts
and antic designs. Still, Breathed proved, if it needed proving, that
a cartoonist with reputation enough can make waves that roll in his
direction. Watterson's
Sundays were stunning, but after three years, he said he'd had enough.
When Watterson retired, he said he was quitting because "I've done what
I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels."
The strenuous implication was that he had done all he could do, a highly
suspicious assertion. Watterson, after all, was a satirist of the human
condition, and a good satirist knows that he's never finished. The world
goes on, willy-nilly, day-by-day, and every day, some brand new sparkling
human idiocy bobs up to the surface, some annoying inanity richly deserving
of the satirist's jab. No,
the real reasons for Watterson's retirement had more to do with fatigue
and finance than lifelong satirical missions. Fatigue and finance and
those tiny, tiny panels. For
most of the strip's run, he fought against merchandising his characters.
He also fought for better treatment of the artform. And in both battles,
he was more successful than he could have imagined he would be when
he started. His syndicate respected his wishes about merchandising and
didn't flood the universe with plush Hobbes toys. But the struggle to
retain what he regarded as the integrity of his creation was surely
a wearying endeavor. Watterson was clearly pretty drained and frustrated
by it. And he probably realized, eventually, that he didn't need to
continue to do it. He had money enough in the bank. Considering
that the art he produced was brutalized by the medium that distributed
it-the newspapers that run comic strips so small that any real artistry
is smudged away-and that he didn't need the money, it's no wonder that
Watterson gave it up. No one goes on beating himself over the head any
longer than necessary. Watterson
no longer does any cartooning. Since retiring, he has been teaching
himself to paint, he says, and he's learning about music.
He
"returned," in a manner of speaking, only briefly, in the fall of 2001,
for an exhibition of selected Sunday strips at the Cartoon Research
Library at Ohio State University. For the exhibition, Watterson had
selected 36 strips, and for the show's catalogue, he provided an introduction
and annotations on each of the strips. The handsome full-color 96-page
book, Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995, is an almost unique undertaking.
Each Sunday strip appears twice, on facing pages. The left-hand page
presents a strip in black-and-white; the right-hand page, the same strip
as it was published in newspapers in color. Watterson's annotations
run beneath the artwork. The
left-hand art is not, actually, "black-and-white." The artwork was photographed
in "color," and it is published that way, so we see black lines against
a sort of cream-colored background. The object of this maneuver is to
show Watterson's drawings in the book exactly as they appeared on the
exhibition walls-with shadowy pencil lines behind the inking, occasional
blotches of white-out, the uneven coats of black ink wherever solid
black appears, and so on. Available through Andrews McMeel (96 9x12-inch
pages; $12.95), Sunday Pages is a delectable repast with a master chef of the medium
setting the table. In
the introduction, the reclusive Watterson discusses his working methods,
his inspirations, and his frustrations with the limitations and politics
of syndicated newspaper cartooning. He also speaks with great affection
of the form: "It's been five years since the end of Calvin and Hobbes," he writes, "the longest time I can remember in
which I haven't drawn cartoons. Calvin
and Hobbes was a wonderful experience, but it was an all-consuming
career. When I quit the strip, I put my cartoons in boxes, and jumped
into other interests. I haven't really considered the strip since...."
But
he has apparently kept an eye on the funnies. He gently alludes, for
instance, to a device that he employed with great effect which other
cartoonists now use so routinely as to undermine its impact. At the
beginning of Calvin and Hobbes, we sometimes saw Hobbes
as Calvin's parents saw him-as a stuffed toy. But mostly, we saw Hobbes
as Calvin saw him-as a real tiger. Similarly, Watterson depicted Spaceman
Spiff as Calvin imagined himself to be, rocketing through the chilly
void of space, making a rough landing on the rocky surface of an uninhabited
planet. "I
did this," Watterson explains, "simply as a way to put the reader in
Calvin's head and to reveal his imaginative personality. Now these juxtapositions
are a visual game for many comic strips, and after all these years,
I suspect readers know where this sort of joke is headed as soon as
they see it. The novelty cannot be recaptured." When
Watterson unpacked storage boxes of his original strips to pick pieces
for the exhibit, he discovered anew his passion. Said he: "I no longer
take quite so much for granted the versatility of comics and their ability
to depict complex ideas in a beautiful, accessible, and entertaining
form. For all their seeming simplicity, the expressive possibilities
of comics rival those of any other art form. Five years after Calvin
and Hobbes, I love the comics as much as ever." Very
few people have actually seen Bill Watterson. Or, even, photographs
of him. Once Calvin and Hobbes
got going, the cartoonist shunned publicity with the dedication and
passion of a Trappist monk. And he continues a recluse in retirement.
Just before he retired, Watterson and his artist wife Melissa moved
back to their hometown, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. They bought a three-bedroom
house, where Watterson has been painting ever since. This news comes
to us through the enterprise of a newspaper reporter named John C. Kuehner,
who actually summoned the temerity to approach the absentee cartoonist
in his lair. "The
40-year old Watterson declined a formal interview," Kuehner reported,
"but in a conversation at his door, where he would not allow any notes
to be taken, Watterson stressed that he does not want to live, nor should
he have to live, in a fish bowl or have to deal with intrusions into
his life by the curious." Nothing
daunted, Kuehner looked up Watterson's parents, who still live in Chagrin
Falls. The cartoonist's mother, Kathryn, said, "He definitely wants
to disappear." Watterson
pere agreed, adding that when
the two Watterson couples dine out together at a local restaurant, the
populace understands that they are to be left strictly alone. "They
might wonder, Gee-was that your son with you?" he said, "but they are
polite and don't ask." Everyone
in Chagrin Falls, apparently, is in on the charade and pretends that
one of the world's most admired cartoonists doesn't live anywhere around.
And even if he does, no one ever sees him. And even if they see him,
they don't recognize him. And even if they recognize him, they don't.
This
is admirable community spirit. This is the sort of spirit that built
the Panama Canal and put a man on the moon. Real togetherness of a highly
refined, dedicated, sort. You have to admire that. Still, in a wild
moment of utterly mindless speculation (I'm always losing my head while
those about me are keeping theirs), I had to wonder if maybe Watterson's
desire for anonymity isn't just a trifle on the extreme edge. I have
always applauded his determination to thwart the ever-prying press in
its unrelenting drive to make every citizen's most private thoughts
a matter of public record from coast to coast. I've thought for years
that this kind of merciless pursuit of a "story" is a much distorted
exercise of First Amendment obligations. I'm not sure how much The Public
actually has "a right to know." So
I've usually rubbed my hands in fiendish glee whenever I read of Watterson's
frustrating the press once again. But I begin to wonder, now, if maybe
his passion for privacy hasn't turned perverse. Remember millionaire
Howard Hughes? He dropped out of the public spotlight years before he
died. And the report is that he didn't trim his fingernails or toenails
for years. The
Watterson family should be on the look-out for similar evidences of
derangement in their cartooning celebrity-untrimmed fingernails, unkempt
beard, unruly nostril hair. I'm
still in favor of Watterson doing what he wants to do-and keeping the
press completely in the dark about it. But I miss Watterson's strip.
And I worry about his grip on reality. Oh-what
does Watterson look like? He looks a lot like Calvin's father. Much of the
foregoing is excerpted (then up-dated) from the Calvin and Hobbes section
of my book, The Art of the Funnies,
which retails dozens of analytical gems such as this; for a preview,
click here. UNDER THE
SPREADING PUNDITRY Mark Zepezauer, editor of the Santa Cruz Comic News (a dandy monthly compilation of editorial cartoons
available through www.santacruzcomicnews.com)
observed in the latest issue that "prominent conservatives have publicly
admitted the absurdity" of the claim that the media are liberal. He
quotes conservative guru Bill Kristol: "I admit it: the whole idea of
the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for
conservative failures." And this: "Most recently, liar/plagiarist/harpy
Ann Coulter let it slip out in the friendly confines of a Fox News studio
that 'we have the media now.'" Finally: "Studies have shown that the
news media rely disproportionately on lavishly-subsidized right-wing
think tanks for quotations and free op-eds and that the guest lists
on news and chat programs skew overwhelmingly white, male, and Republican.
Eight of the top ten syndicated columnists are conservatives, and all
of the top ten syndicated radio hosts are. The majority of newspaper
publishers have endorsed the GOP presidential candidate in all but two
elections since 1932." Other
developments overlooked by a hurricane-and-runaway-bride-infected news
media: in Iraq, we're building four massive military bases so is it
any wonder no one in the Middle East believes us when we say we'll be
leaving the country as soon as the Iraqis can guarantee their own security?
And in Massachusetts where a state court authorized same-sex marriage
a year ago and state legislators vowed to pass a constitutional amendment
banning same-sex marriage, the amendment was introduced in the legislature
in mid-September and soundly defeated, 157 to 39. Meanwhile, in Boston's
Public Gardens, it was revealed that the city's beloved pair of swans,
named Romeo and Juliet, are actually a same-sex couple. Martha
Mendoza of the Associated Press did a story at the end of September
about the New Orleans refugees and the homeless generally. (Yes, I say
"refugees" because it seems to me that shames the Bush League more accurately
than calling these displaced persons "evacuees," which is just Bushwah,
putting a positive spin on disgraceful performance by the government.)
She found her homeless sleeping in the pews of St. Boniface, a 103-year-old
church in San Francisco that apparently keeps its doors open for those
forgotten people with nowhere to sleep. The pews, Mendoza notes, are
full of recumbent bodies, which, in turn, fill the benevolent church
with "the smell of their sour acrid clothes" and the gentle sound of
their snores. Among these persons, Mendoza finds an African-American
man who gives his name as J.R. "Let me tell you about abandoned people,"
he tells her. "Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans, they
were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were. This is
a capitalist society," he continues. "Capitalism means some people get
richer and some people get poorer. In order for this system to work,
for there to be really wealthy folks, you've got to have me at the bottom.
This abandoning, it was planned from the beginning." J.R.'s articulate
perception is surprising in such a man and breath-taking in its profoundly
disheartening verdict. We don't like to think he's right, but, alas,
I fear he is. BUSHWHACKING Tom DeLay, under indictment (at last!) for questionable
political shenanigans, claims, in a loud voice, that he's being victimized
by the Democrat prosecutor in Austin, a "partisan fanatic." So lemme
see if I've got this right: DeLay thinks partisan fanaticism is bad?
Who knew? ... In the October 10 issue of Newsweek,
Jonathan Alter writes about "Tom DeLay's House of Shame," establishing
that the Republican Majority Leader kept a list of lobbyists who were
not contributors to his power base and these he never let in the door
of his office, a practice that inaugurated "the single most corrupt
decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives.
... Never before has the leadership of the House been hijacked by a
small band of extremists bent on building a ruthless shakedown machine,
lining the pockets of their richest constituents and rolling back popular
protections for ordinary people. ... The 21st century Radical
Republican agenda is to enact the wish list of the tobacco and gun lobbies,
repeal health and safety regulations and spend billions on shameless
pork-barrel projects to keep the GOP at the trough." As for Roy Blunt,
DeLay's temporary successor as Majority Leader, Alter notes that "Blunt
is respected by Republican members in part because he has 'strong ties
to the Washington lobbying community.' That's a qualification for office?"
I guess so-among Republicans anyhow. Shame indeed. And where has Alter
been for the ten years of DeLay's reign? The
Republicans have the majority in the Senate, but those 51 senators represent
only 17 percent of the nation's population (sez George Will, a rampant
conservative himself): most of the GOP senators come from the least
populous states, whereas the 49 Democrats come from the most populous
states, so when the so-called "minority" in the Senate objects to something,
they're representing 83 percent of the citizenry. The
huge fuss made over abortion in the national news overlooks entirely
the situation in the states, where the abortion battle continues apace,
albeit quietly, virtually unnoticed. While senators and congressmen
fulminated and gesticulated in the nation's capital, in the state capitals,
the abortion forces inched forward, chipping away at the freedoms seemingly
guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. More than 500 bills insinuating inhibitions
to abortion were introduced in the last year. There are now 35 states
requiring some sort of parental involvement by an underage woman seeking
an abortion-either notification or permission from one or both parents
(tough to get, probably, in the case of incest-induced pregnancy), a
grandparent or adult sibling. In Arkansas, Georgia and Minnesota, women
applying for an abortion must be told that the fetus might feel pain.
Scientific evidence supporting this contention is incomplete. Other
restrictive measures in other states include funding for organizations
that offer alternatives to abortion coupled to laws requiring counseling
that provides lists of such organizations to women seeking abortions.
In
his appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, GeeDubya has
managed, at last, to demonstrate a quality that his Democrat opponents
have been too timorous to accuse him of: he has revealed an incompetence
that goes beyond sheer ineptitude into the realm of gawfaws, and he
now stands before us in his real costume, as a political clown, a complete
dingbat of the first order. Already reeling in the polls because of
the FEMA fumbling that his cronyism fostered, he now appoints another
crony to the biggest bench in the country. This guy can't learn: his
head is too solid. George W. ("Whoopee Cushion") Bush is a joke. And
when he advocates confirming Miers, his strongest recommendation is:
Trust me-I know she'll be a good judge. (He means to say "justice,"
which is the title accorded to all Supreme Court "judges"; but never
mind.) The sorts of intellectual skills required of Supreme Court justices
are born of "years of practice sustained by intense interest,"according
to conservative guru George Will. Using the antique adage, "It takes
one to know one," then what possible grounds do we have for "trusting"
GeeDubya? What intellectual skills has he ever demonstrated? And what
intellectual skill does he demonstrate in appointing this Texas crony
to the highest court in the land? Editorial cartoonists are having a
field day with this one. Even such rampant conservatives as Henry
Payne at the Detroit News, who drew a picture of GeeDubya
at the podium announcing his nominee, who stands next to him; says the
Prez: "My fellow Americans, I've learned a lesson not to appoint cronies
to run FEMA. From now on, I nominate cronies to the Supreme Court."
At
the White House, the Bush League is coming apart at the seams. Presidential
spokesmen are trying to appease conservative critics of the Miers nomination
by loudly whispering that she's a member of an extremely conservative
evangelic church, one that has been opposed to abortion for eons. Queried
about this tact, GeeDubya explains that they're only trying to give
us "background" on the nominee. "People ... want to know as much as
they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers'
life is her religion," saith GeeDubya, echoed forthwith by his minions.
A month ago when Concerned Citizens wanted to explore John Roberts'
religious persuasion, they were told by White House spokesmen that a
person's religious beliefs shouldn't be any part of a consideration
of that person's fitness for the Supreme Bench. Okay, I give up: which
is it? Like I said, they're comin' apart before our very eyes-as anything
built of whirling dervishes and mirrors should. Miers'
qualifications appear, to Marjorie Cohn at www.truthout.org,
to consist chiefly of her long affiliation with her hometown church
wherein abortion is rabidly opposed, a fact that ought to make the Bush
Base ecstatic (but apparently, unaccountably, doesn't, not enough anyhow).
Most of her legal experience derives from representing a string of corporations.
So she'll doubtless support the corporate side of any issue involving
big business, and she'll frown disapprovingly on anything involving
a woman's right to choose. Says Cohn: When Bush nominated Miers, he
proclaimed, "She has devoted her life to the rule of law and the causes
of justice." On the contrary, Cohn goes on, it appears that Miers has
devoted her life to the interests of big corporations and George W.
Bush. When
it finally occurs to GeeDubya that, as President of the U.S., he ought
to look like he cares about the citizens who live in New Orleans and
the rest of the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast, what does this trained chimpanzee
do? His keepers send him down to New Orleans to make a face-rescuing
nationally televised speech from Jackson Square in the French Quarter.
Look: here he is, right there in New Orleans amid the death and destruction.
Boy, does this guy care! Or does he. He makes his speech at night when
artificial lighting is essential. The city has no electrical power,
but that's no problem: the Commander in Chief just gets powerful generators
down to New Orleans to crank up enough electricity to run floodlights
and the microphone and the tv cameras. Then he goes away and takes his
generators with him. The flooded city won't get electricity again for
weeks. Does he have any idea of what bad P.R. it is to demonstrate so
vividly what the have-nots don't have in the Crescent City? I doubt
it. As I said, his head's too solid. The joke would be funny if it weren't
for the tragedies that the policies of George W. ("Witless") Bush have
wrought on every hand. MORE BULL
The Bush League foreign policy is of the bull-in-a-china-shop
kind: we can barge in and knock over furniture, but we seem incapable
of picking up the pieces; we can create chaos but not civilization.
This behavior coupled to the gunslinger personality of GeeDubya reinforces
the European view of America as a cowboy nation: we shoot 'em up a lot,
but when we are invited indoors, we tend put our feet up on the dinner
table-and we still have cow dung on our boots. We have plenty of muscle
but too little organizational skill in other departments of national
behavior. We can intimidate but can't create order. Even
our power to intimidate has been severely compromised by the Bush League.
The Bush League invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have effectively destroyed
the image of America the Invincible. We have a powerful military, but
it is capable only of conquest in the broadest sense. In both countries,
a substantial insurgency keeps the struggle alive, denying the victory
that the most powerful military force in the world ought to be able
to claim by now. Clearly-as demonstrated for the entire world to see-we're
not all that powerful. We can thank Rumsfeld's operation of the Pentagon
for that. Used to be, we could rattle a sabre, and people would quake;
now, they are likely to laugh. (Nervously, I admit: they know, now,
that we can't conquer them entirely, but we can sure make a big and
bloody mess.) The Bush League response to Katrina completes the shredding
of our national reputation: not only can we not foster civilization
abroad, but we cannot support it at home. At home, it's every man for
himself; we're back in the jungle. America's reputation is left in tatters
after the Bush League occupation of the White House. (Oops. Sorry: I
meant to say, "the Halliburton White House.") Metaphors
be with you. Sigh. |
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