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Opus 183:
Opus 183 (May 8, 2006). This time, we feature the latest on
the Danish Dozen and why they won’t go away anytime soon, a review of what some
regard as the first graphic novel, a Swinish explanation of why cross-over
comic strips misfire, and a short but highly informative history of Islam.
Here’s what’s here in order: NOUS R US —Smigel’s Funhouse on SNL, Paul Gravett’s manga book censored, Michael Uslan
gives UI commencement speech, Warren Ellis on manga, MoCCA and the British
cartoon museums, the notorious queen of curves, Jim Scancarelli hits 20, DC
aims for greater obscurity, identities in the infamous sexual harassment (or is
it?) case; EDITOONERY— Derf gets
RFK; DANISH DOZEN AGAIN— the view
from Down Under, more at South Park, freedom of the press, and, yes, Hope for
us all, plus Bernard Shaw on Christianity; A
SHORT-CHANGED HISTORY OF ISLAM—How Muhammad spread the word; COMIC STRIP WATCH— Swinish Pearls gets
fuzzier and fuzzier; Agnes speaks for us all; Dolls and Such Like— The
latest zaftig figurines; BOOK MARQUEE—
Reviews of the new Victor Moscoso book and the latest Peanuts, plus prognostications of Sempe, Kelly, and
Batman’s holy terror: a face-off with Muhammad; THE FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL?— He
Done Her Wrong reviewed, and Gross corrected; then, in a stunning return,
Bushwah and the usual Punditry. And our customary reminder: 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. Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the News That Gives Us Fits
“Saturday
Night Live” on April 29 offered 90 tedious minutes of Robert Smigel’s Funhouse shorts, featuring such thrillingly
satirical creations as the costumed do-gooders dubbed “The Ambiguously Gay
Duo,” the satirical message of which apparently resides in tights that are too
tight and in the friendly pats on the fanny that they exchange in the spirit of
boyish camaraderie. The target for this satirical thrust (so to speak) is
doubtless the relationship between Batman and Robin—and, hence, between any
adult male and an adolescent male sidekick—which Fredric Wertham determined
over fifty years ago was homosexual. How is this satirical? How, even, is it
amusing? It is unabashedly audacious, and that’s all much “contemporary” humor
is: it’s no more than slightly inventive name-calling. No wit; just bad
manners, as much as you dare. Which, given our licentious times, leaves nothing
protected. Attack comedy. After about 20 minutes of this, I left. “Feet of
clay” humor distinguishes, you should pardon the expression, much of tv’s adult
animated cartoonery—“King of the Hill,” for instance, and “The Simpsons.” And
probably “South Park,” too. All these endeavors at comedy feature, at one time
or another, iconic figures making rude and uncharacteristic remarks that reveal
them to be less than they appear to be. In the Funhouse on April 29, we meet
Santa Claus, who is both gross and profane. And so a cultural icon is
destroyed. Well, that’s what satire is supposed to do, so it is probably
effective. It’s also predictable and boring. And the same thing can be said for
“Saturday Night Live” even when it is populated by actual human beings. It was
all hilarious when Mad started doing
it, but haven’t we, as a mature and adult population, outgrown that? Our
children haven’t, of course; so maybe SNL and the rest are aiming at them. Of
course: the Youth demographic, 18-35, who still laugh at so-called satirical
revelations of things the rest of us have known for decades. Okay, good enough:
watch and learn, I say.
Neil
Gaiman’s fantasy tale for kids, The
Wolves in the Walls, has been made into a musical that opened in Glasgow in
April. ... In case you missed it, a British judge ruled against the two authors
who sued Dan Brown, saying he stole ideas for The Da Vinci Code from their book, which is much like saying
Clarence Mulford stole the legends of the American West for his Hopalong
Cassidy tales. ... Robert E. Duffy, who has been with Universal Press Syndicate for 30 years, is stepping down as
president at the end of June; Duffy assumed the position in 2000 when John
McMeel, one of the company’s founders, bequeathed it to him. Lee Salem will
become president while continuing in his present role as editor of the
syndicate; Salem has been with the company for 32 years. ... In Turkey,
cartoonist Musa Kart, who was fined
$3,700 for depicting the Prime Minister as a cat, won an appeal when the
Supreme Court of Appeals overruled a lower court decision. ... Winners of the
Jewish Caricature Contest for the best anti-Semitic
cartoons can be found at http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,412390,00.html . First
prize went to Los Angelino Aron Katz. Jurors included the Israeli originator of the competition, Amitai Sandy, and Art Spiegelman, among others. Sandy was
inspired to launch the contest when the Iranian daily Hamshahri, responding to the outrage of the Danish cartoons of
Muhammad, announced an international cartoon contest focusing on the Holocaust.
Said Sandy: “We had to do something to fight the fire with humor.”
Paul
Gravett’s book, Manga: 60 Years of
Japanese Comics, has been removed from the shelves of all 13 branches of
the library system in the San Bernardino, California, after a parent complained
that some images in the tome depicted sexual activity (about three images,
actually). Initially, the parent’s complaint was lodged at the Victorville
branch, which responded that the book would not be removed. Selection of
reading matter “is the parents’ responsibility since the library does not act
as a parent,” said a library spokesman; “it is the library’s responsibility to
offer a broad spectrum of materials, not to exclude materials.” But the
outraged parent, acting on behalf of her 16-year-old son, was not deterred; she
apparently approached the county board, whose chairman subsequently ordered to
book removed. A local councilman allowed as how sexually graphic material does
not belong in a public library in the first place: “They don’t have any
educational value,” said Rick Roelle. A dubious assertion if ever there was.
One of the baffling aspects of the case is that the book was shelved in the
adult section with comics works. Since perusing Gravett’s Graphic Novels book, I’ve had a high opinion of his work, so I
bought a copy of this filthy thing, too. Alas, only two pages out of the 176
9x11-inch pages in the book ($24.95) have any pictures of a sexual nature on
them. Seems the library could have satisfied the hysterical woman and her
highly offended son (sixteen? And he’s offended by pictures of sex?) by slicing
out the two pages. Now, they say, only a public outcry could persuade the
library to reinstate the book.
Michael
Uslan was the commencement speaker May 6 at his alma mater, the University
of Indiana where he earned three degrees and taught the nation’s first
accredited course on comic books. He is now a Hollywood producer known mostly
as the “architect behind the superhero Batman’s renaissance on the silver
screen,” which reputedly “paved the way for subsequent hit movies based on
comic book creations.” We can speculate on his message to the impending
graduates by extrapolating from the reason he gave for Batman’s being his favorite
character: “Thematically, it’s about a guy who makes a commitment and believes
that one person can make a difference,” he said. Uslan’s own history would seem
to embody the same traits. Notable. But I can’t leave the building without
observing that among Uslan’s credits is reviving and writing the perverse
reincarnation of Milton Caniff’s Terry
and the Pirates in the mid-1990s with the Hildebrandt brothers
illustrating. In Uslan’s version, Big Stoop, Milton’s mute giant, speaks,
thereby destroying forever his profoundly symbolic function as retribution
incarnate. Ouch. Caniff attended the first chapter of Columbia’s “Terry” serial
in the late 1930s, and when he saw Big Stoop speaking, he ran screaming out of
the theater (that’s what he said) and never returned. (Yes, I’m pretty much
into Caniff material these days: as I mentioned, I’m revising—and shortening
somewhat—the 1,900-page biography I wrote, and I have less than 100 pages to
go, hurrah.)
The animated adventures of Astro Boy, the seminal cartoon creation
of Osamu Tezuka, who, inspired by
Betty Boop and Bambi, virtually created the Japanese animated cartoon industry
after World War II, thereby launching manga, are now available on DVD in an
Ultra Collector’s Edition. The eponymous young hero of the series is a
super-robot, and because the stories deal with the relationship between humans
and robots, saith Charles Solomon at the New
York Times, the series “has been widely interpreted by anime fans as a
metaphor for racial discrimination,” adding: “Fans have often compared Tezuka
to Walt Disney, but in some ways
[technically, I assume], he was closer to Hanna-Barbera.”
... Meanwhile, Warren Ellis reported
on his blog that Urasawa’s PLUTO is, “on one level, Ultimate Astro Boy—a
massively expanded re-telling of a single 180-page Astro Boy/Tetsuwan Atom
manga story, ‘The Strongest Robot in the World.’” Then Ellis mentions Paul Gravett’s book on manga,
saying in passing that Gravett’s original subtitle for the tome was “comics as
air,” denoting, Ellis explains, “an artform pervasive in its country.” He then
elaborates, providing one of the most helpful insights into the genre I’ve
seen: The notion of comics as air “applies to the way the form works on the
page, too. Manga isn’t a string of postcards, a row of lights or a drum figure.
It’s a warm jet of air, a stream, to be experienced in motion. I’ve kind of
resisted the following definition because invoking the word ‘emotion’ in
narrative always sounds so clueless and fake: but one of the reasons manga
never broke in the comics-shop audience in America is that manga values
emotional and psychological content over plot, and comics-shop boys are just
frighteningly anal about plot. Manga,” he finishes, “are emotional comics. They
want nothing more than for you to breathe together with them. To conspire with
lives.” I’ve thought as much myself, but Ellis says it so much better. I
suspect, though, that this notion applies to chiefly to shojo-manga, the sub-genre aimed at young girls. Lone Wolf and Cub,
f’instance, doesn’t seem to fit as well.
In Japan according to Reuters,
Foreign Minister Taro Aso has proposed establishing a “Nobel Prize” for foreign
(non-Japanese) manga cartoonists.
The idea is to win hearts and minds internationally. “Pop culture,” Aso said,
“has the power to influence the public, so we want and need to have it on our
side,” adding that the U.S., once Japan’s enemy, won over Japanese hearts with
its pop culture, including the cartoon “Popeye,” which, Aso said, “planted in
the Japanese an image that Americans are nice and strong.”
The Art Festival of the Museum of
Comics and Cartoon Art, the fifth, will once again meet in the historic Puck
Building, this year, June 10-11. Gahan
Wilson is the Guest of Honor and will receive this year’s Festival Award in
recognition of his “special contribution to the comics medium.” Among the
events of the weekend is “Charles Burns in Conversation with Chip Kidd” in
addition to the customary showcase for independent comics, room after room of
display tables and milling throngs. And—another treat—I’ve written a short
essay on the state of the art for the program, which, in return, is plugging
Rancid Raves. So there. The MoCCA Gallery is undergoing renovation and will be
closed until May 20, when it will reopen with a new exhibit, “She Draws Comics:
100 Years of America’s Women Cartoonists,” curated by Trina Robbins. For more
information, visit www.MOCCANY.org.
Elsewhere—specifically, across the
Atlantic in an easterly direction—Clive
Collins of the Cartoonists Club of Great Britain reports (in the Australian
Cartoonists’ Association magazine, Inkspot):
“Back in the bunker with George Bush and things American, the British political
cartoonists had a field day recently when Tim Benson threw open the doors of
his Political Cartoon Gallery for a cartoon show entitled ‘Misunderstanding
Bush.’ This consisted of a brilliant spread of original cartoons depicting the
great leader in a light that he might have wanted to stay dimmed. ... As Steve Bell said in his speech to open
the event: ‘Nobody likes Bush; it’s just that, as cartoonists, we’d miss him if he
wasn’t there.’” By the way, that new cartoon museum in London that I mentioned
a time or two ago—it’s the Cartoon Art Trust Cartoon Museum with a collection
of 3,000 books and 1,200 images, including graphic novels, comics, and “some of
the most famous cartoons ever published.” It was officially opened February 22
by the Duke of Edinburgh at The Old Dairy, 35 Little Russell Street, near the
British Museum, in case you’re in the neighborhood.
The pin-up “Queen of Curves,” Bettie Page, the preoccupation of many
an adolescent wet dream in the 1950s, is back in the news, this time as the
subject of the affectionate bio-pic “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring
Gretchen Mol’s body. Most reviews I’ve seen treat the movie as the fluff it
probably is, but with a certain fondness. Some write-ups refer to Bettie’s
appearance in 1955 before Senator Estes Kefauver’s infamous committee
investigating crime, implying that she was unmercifully grilled and humiliated.
Kefauver was trying to establish that Irving Klaw, the New York City
photographer who made a living selling bondage photos of Bettie and others, was
promoting pornography. As nearly as I can tell, Bettie never testified before
the committee. She was kept in solitary in a small waiting room for 16 hours,
but nothing more. Various of Kefauver’s factotums quizzed her, but she told
them, “Irving Klaw never did any pornography at all, not even nudes, and I
would say that if they put me on the stand.” Klaw’s models, she said, “were
never naked, and there were never any men in the photographs. How could it be
pornography?” Klaw as so wary that he had models wear two pairs of underwear if
he thought they were too transparent. Said Bettie (in the biography by Karen
Essex and James L. Swanson): “You couldn’t even see any pubic hair or nipples
through any of the lingerie.” Sounds like good clean fun to me, and, judging
from the pictorial record, Bettie agreed.
Rufus and Joel, the maladroit
handymen in Gasoline Alley, are up to
their usual bumbling. As April came to a close, they were helping Skeezix, who
can’t drive his car home because a policeman discovered his, Skeezix’s,
driver’s license has expired. So Rufus and Joel, who come upon Skeezix,
stranded out in the country, offer to tow his car for him. Disaster, naturally,
ensues. Skeezix goes off, and Rufus and Joel take possession of his car. They
drive it, somehow, up onto the two-wheeled cart they are always astride, and
when last seen, they’d just demolished a covered bridge: the car on the cart is
too tall to get through the bridge under its roof, but Joel and Rufus forge
ahead, ripping the roof of the bridge off as they go. The bridge is no longer
covered. And the roof of the car has suffered cruelly. More havoc lurks, no
doubt. At just about the same time as all this destruction befell in the strip,
the author of it, Jim Scancarelli,
completed twenty years signing the strip. He’d assisted his predecessor, Dick Moores, for seven years before
inheriting the Alley, but he didn’t
start signing the strip until after Moores died, whereupon Jim took over the
operation and signed his work. Jim has been signing solo longer, now, than
Moores: Moores started his solo stint in 1969 and died, still working on the
strip, in 1986—17 years. But he’d been working with Frank King, the creator of Gasoline
Alley, since about 1956, and the strip bore a joint-signature for a while
until Moores assumed command by himself; so his tenure totaled about 30 years.
Jim’s been puttering around in the Alley for 27 years, so he’ll be besting Moore’s score before too long.
Free Comic Book Day just transpired
but mostly only at Diamond Distribution’s comics shop accounts, about 1,850 of
which bought at least $50 worth of the giveaway titles at 20 cents a copy,
saith PW Comics Week. In other words,
the books aren’t free to comics shops. But then, you knew that, eh? ... And
here’s something else I’d forgotten: the term “super hero” is jointly
trademarked by Marvel and DC, so anyone using the expression is subject to
suit. But I bet you can use superhero, one word, with impunity.
Elsewhere among the longjohn legions
and their lackeys, 22 of DC’s ongoing superhero comics jumped one year forward
in their so-called continuities last month, marking the launch of the One Year
Later project (OYL, as they say). Starting May 10, a weekly miniseries entitled 52 (a foxy title if ever there was
one) is going to explain what happened during the jumped year, week by week. It
all sounds a trifle precious to me, and it certainly will require a perverse
dedication among readers. The reason for the exercise, Douglas Wolk tells us at The Phoenix, is to enable writers to
“hit some sort of big reset button,” to bring the DC superhero universe “back
to first principles and core values.” Lately, it seems, “something has gone
terribly wrong with superhero comics: their heroes are grimly twisted or
ineffectual—or both; they’re no longer capable of being as exciting and
inspiring as they once were.” OYL will fix it. I say, however, that it will
only complicate a four-color world already so convoluted that it repels rather
than attracts new readers. Wolk seems to agree. The problem, he says, is “that
the comics business now thinks of its readership as a subculture—something with
its own private codes that mark its members as belonging, and everybody else as
not belonging.” And the OYL operation only compounds this obscurism: “You can’t
just buy an OYL comic book and enjoy it,” Wolk observes; “you have to buy into
that whole subculture.” And you have to purchase an encyclopedia of comics
character history, too, or you can’t begin so much as knocking on the door of
the subculture.
The excitement in the comics
blogosphere lately has been whirling around the alleged sexual harassment that
a young beginning female comics artist suffered at the hands of a male
professional who occupied a position of power in the industry. On her Buzzscope
blog, “What a Girl Wants,” Friends of Lulu vice president Ronee Garcia, who, she tells us, was raped at the age of 15, raged
against the unnamed assailant and vowed to expose him and destroy him if
possible. It is likely that she’s succeeded. In the forthcoming 276th issue of The Comics Journal, Michael
Dean reveals that the woman is Taki Soma, a 30-year-old Minneapolis cartoonist,
and the man is Charles Brownstein, the 27-year-old “energetic” executive
director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Dean, as always a meticulous
reporter, details the case and his research in an advance posting of the
article at http://tcj.com/276/n_soma.html. You should read it
all yourself. I’m not going to rehearse it here: it’s too long and convoluted a
tale, and Dean has already done a terrific job with it.
EDITOONERY
Larry Wright, who has been with the Detroit News for thirty years, accepted a voluntary buyout package
from the newspaper, effective at the end of April. Wright is a past president
of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and one of only two people
on the News staff who knows the ins
and outs of the newspaper’s website. According to Editor & Publisher, he’ll continue as a consultant for the
website, and he’ll do three editoons a week on a freelance basis. He’s
reasonably sure, he says, “that the arrangement will last as long as I want it
to.” Meanwhile, he said, “I will no longer have to make the daily 60-mile
roundtrip into downtown Detroit.” Wright is the second of the Detroit News’ political cartoonists: Henry Payne, a devout conservative with
a distinctive style, is the other.
After only a couple years at the Tampa Tribune, editoonist Paul Combs is leaving and returning to
Ohio to resume a career as a firefighter. He’ll do cartoons for a firefighter
magazine and website and continue freelancing. “We never really adjusted to
Florida,” Combs explained. The Tampa
Tribune told E&P that it
intends to find a replacement for Combs.
John Backderf, who signs himself “Derf,” won the Robert F. Kennedy
Journalism Award for his cartoon, The
City, an off-beat satire on the conventions of our culture rendered in
turgid teratoidal disarray. The judges said: “Derf aggressively attacks the
institutions, ideologies and attitudes that create an environment for the
continuing oppression and exploitation of the powerless. His outrage is
directed not just at the cynicism and hypocrisy of the powerful but at the
complicity of all of us who remain docile and passive subjects.” As an
alternate newspaper cartooner whose work appears in the Village Voice and others of the ilk, Derf is an unusual choice for
the RFK Award which usually goes to a mainstream political cartoonist. The
reason, according to one of the judges, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post, is that so many of the
portfolios from editoonists “didn’t really fit the contest’s criteria” for
cartoons that “effectively highlight the plight of the powerless and
disenfranchised.” Why? Said Weingarten: “Editorialcartoonists tend to focus
their criticism and outrage on the political and emotional issues that define
their times. Alas, the plight of the
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
It
now costs more than a penny to mint a penny, according to the New York Times. The price of zinc, the
chief component of copper-plated pennies, has soared in recent times, raising
the cost of the metal in a penny to 0.8 cents. It costs another 0.6 cents to
mint the coins. So the U.S. Treasury loses 0.4 cents on every penny. But don’t
despair: we can all help out in this looming catastrophe. We can’t stop
Congress from spending the country into penury, but we can help the U.S.
Treasury. Simple: stop spending pennies. Particularly newly minted ones, the
expensive kind. Just take any bright and shinny penny you have and put it in a
piggy bank. Don’t spend it. For every penny you don’t spend, the U.S. Treasury
saves 0.4 cents.
DANISH DOZEN AGAIN
Monthly
and quarterly periodicals take a little longer to get to the news flashes of
the hour than such ethereal journalistic enterprises as This Corner of the Web. The Comics Journal No. 275 (April
2006) devoted several pages by Michael Dean (with an assist from yrs trly) to
the Danish Dozen—and published all twelve of the cartoons that prompted the
orchestrated outrage of January and February. Inkspot, the “official Hijab of the Australian Cartoonists’
Association,” took until the “Autumn 2006” issue, No. 48, which arrived in my
mailbox just a couple weeks ago in time for Spring 2006, to examine the issues.
ACA’s president, James Kemsley, who
does the fabled strip Ginger Meggs, conjured up a little ancient history for the sake of perspective. Cartoonists,
he averred, are always likely candidates for someone’s hit list. “Some of our
senior members,” he wrote, “might remember the Nazi hit list during World War
II, which included a number of cartoonists who were singled out for special
treatment had Germany won the war. Apparently Hitler, an artist himself, never
saw the funny or artistic side of David Low and company’s lampooning, which
included our own late Jim Russell with his Adolph, Hermann and Musso comic strip. I had a number of chats with Jimmy about being a designated Nazi
target, and it was something he wore like a medal: he was very proud his work
was considered so provocative, by Berlin anyway, but prouder still that it was
considered funny.”
Lest you tire of the Danish Dozen as
quickly as I have wearied of Paris Hilton (whose fascination for me, as a
cartoonist, lies entirely in her being a perfect caricature of the vapid
vacuity of female celebrity), let me counsel patience. We may not, in the
foreseeable future, hear the last of the Danish Dozen, for reasons that are
apparent in the following news report, clipped from the electronic ether, about
bin Laden’s latest pronouncement, via audiotape:
Al
Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has called for people who ridiculed the Prophet
Mohammad to be killed, weighing into the furor that erupted after a Danish
newspaper ran cartoons lampooning Islam's holy messenger. "Heretics and
atheists, who denigrate religion and transgress against God and His Prophet,
will not stop their enmity toward Islam except by being killed," the
Saudi-born militant said. Bin Laden's remarks were part of an audiotape which
Al Jazeera television aired excerpts from on Sunday, April 23. ... In the tape
bin Laden accused the West of waging a "Crusader-Zionist" war against
Islam, citing [in addition to the Danish cartoons] the isolation of the
Hamas-led Palestinian government and the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region as
examples. Anger over the cartoons, which a Danish newspaper first published
last year, outraged Muslims who consider drawings of the Prophet to be
blasphemous. The caricatures, which were reprinted in several Arab and European
newspapers, sparked violent protests in which more than 50 people were killed.
Consumers in Muslim countries have also boycotted Danish goods. Denmark's
government has refused to apologize for the cartoons, saying it cannot say
sorry on behalf of a free and independent media and that freedom of speech is sacred.
"The insistence of the Danish government to refrain from apologizing and
its refusal to punish the criminals and take action to prevent this crime from
being repeated ... shows that the notions of freedom of speech have no roots,
especially when it comes to Muslims," bin Laden said in the tape.
Bin Laden’s casual condemnation of
twelve cartoonists to a life of fear is breath-taking in its arrogant
intolerance and genuinely horrifying to anyone with the traditional secular
sensibility of Western nations that champion personal liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. Less significant but still annoying is the glimpse of the future
that this latest communique affords us. Now that the Grand High Mullah of
Mayhem has made the Danish Dozen part of his hate-laden anti-Western mantra, we
won’t likely hear the end of it for some time. And so we can expect to
encounter a steady stream of newsstories about Muhammad in cartoons and similar
mischief being perpetrated upon the unwitting publics of the world. Stacy Meichtry
of the Religion News Service, for example, reported last month that: “The
conservative Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei has apologized for the
publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad in hell in a magazine
operated by members of the group.” (Opus Dei—right: that’s the Evil Outfit in
Dan Brown’s DaVinci opus.)
And at tv’s Comedy Central, which
recently pulled a “South Park” episode lampooning Tom Cruise’s favorite
matinee-idol religion, Scientology, another episode earned network enmity.
Entitled “Cartoon Wars,” it addressed the violence that erupted over the Danish
Dozen, and network executives banned the use of an image of Muhammad, which,
“in the light of recent events,” seemed inflammatory. Lisa de Moraes at the Washington Post tells the tale: “South
Park residents gather to figure out how to save themselves from the wrath of
radical Muslims, [and] when a pundit suggests they all bury their heads in the
sand so the extremists will know they were not watching the episode, one citizen
dares speak out: ‘Freedom of speech is at stake here [he/she says], don’t you
all see? If anything, we should all make cartoons of Muhammad and show the
terrorists and the extremists that we are all united in the belief that every
person has a right to say what they want. Look, people, it’s been really easy
for us to stand up for free speech lately. For the past few decades, we haven’t
had to risk anything to defend it. One of those times is right now. And if we
aren’t willing to risk what we have now, then we just believe in free speech
but don’t defend it.’ [The episode’s fictional tv exec] decides to stand up for
free speech and show the [dubious] episode. But at the point at which ‘South
Park’ viewers should have seen Muhammad handing a football helmet to one of the
cartoon characters, the screen went black and on that was the message: ‘Comedy
Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network.’”
The contagion is spreading. At the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the Cavalier Daily was lately criticized for publishing a cartoon that
many students saw as offensive to Hindus. Well, of course: if we can’t offend
Muslims, we shouldn’t offend Hindus. Or Buddhists. Or any other religion at
all, including Scientology. And whither The
Da Vinci Code? Surely it is offending devout Catholics everywhere. Boycott
the movie and Tom Hanks’ hair-do. Fortunately for the academic weal at the U.
of Virginia, Daniel Colbert, a columnist on the campus paper, saw the issue
clearly and wrote about it. Excerpts: “The comic itself may have been
offensive,” he wrote. “That is not the issue. Offensive content is a staple of Cavalier Daily cartoons. ... The pattern
of offensive comic followed by outrage from a minority group has been constant
this year.” He continued (I’ve added boldface to sentences I think are
particularly acute): “In light of these episodes, the Managing Board of the Cavalier Daily felt the need to explain
the process of approving a questionable comic in the lead editorial this past
Monday. The policy that they expounded was both responsible and just.
Naturally, the paper will not publish anything false, nor will it publish
direct attacks at a specific group for anything other than their opinions or
actions. Since the comic is a work of fiction, the first criterion does not
apply. Religion, the editorial correctly argued, is an opinion and is open to
both criticism and ridicule. This policy rightly errs on the side of
freedom, a goal for which the press should strive.
“Critics of ... offensive comics
often claim that the cartoons are not even funny. It is as if many believe that
an offensive comic is less offensive if it is also funny. It is safe to say,
however, that if the Cavalier Daily only printed funny comics, the Comics page would consist most days of a Jumble,
crossword puzzle and Sudoku. As Monday's lead editorial stated, the comic
artists' sense of humor ‘will always be a mystery.’ Perhaps, following the lead
of television shows like ‘South Park’and ‘Family Guy’ the artists have decided
that offensiveness is inherently funny.
“A point central to most of the
criticisms is that religious beliefs must be respected. The claim is tied into
the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion. However, the
Constitution does not insist on respect for any religion. It states
that the government may not impose religion on its citizens, but it also allows
citizens to say whatever they want about the religions of others, including
what may be considered heresy. It was intended to allow citizens to
question
religious authority without fear, but it reserves no special treatment for
minority groups, which is what some are implicitly demanding.
“That the First Amendment guarantees
freedom of speech does not mean that the Cavalier
Daily was required to print the offensive comics, of course, but the paper
should not censor their artists or writers based on possible offensiveness. In
his letter to the editor printed on April 19 (‘A heretical comic’), Aadit
Bimbhet argued that ‘a line must be drawn somewhere.’ Freedom of speech, however, means
that no lines are drawn. It is too easy to imagine true political
expression being stifled in the name of political correctness to allow for any
censorship on those grounds. The Opinion, Life and Comics sections of the Cavalier Daily exist in part to give
students something to talk about. If an offensive comic or column serves to
spark debate, it can only be viewed as a good thing.”
Here at the Keyboard of the Rancid
Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer, we have a word for this sort of intellectual
shenanigan: Bravo. Would that other so-called professional journalists were as
professional.
On the other equally reasonable and
also admirably pragmatic hand, we have Mahir
Ali, an Australian cartoonist writing for Dawn in Pakistan, quoted in Inkspot: “European papers contend that re-publican of the cartoons was necessary in
order to show their readers what the fuss was all about. But would they have
been quite so eager to go down that road had the story—and illustrations—in
question related to, say, graphic child pornography or pedophilia? Most
probably not. Why? Obviously, in the interests of good taste, and in order not
to offend public sensibilities. Does this mean Muslim sensitivities somehow
matter less than those of other sections of the public?” The implied
answer—Yes—tells us why Muslims were so irate about the Danish Dozen.
Also in Inkspot, Rod Emmerson, political tooner on the New Zealand
Herald in Auckland, said: “When I first saw the story some five months ago,
it was blatantly obvious that the Danish paper was indulging in some poorly
conceived mischief making. ... Papers that jumped onto the Freedom Bus months
after the event and published the work looked somewhat ‘hairy-chested’ for no
real purpose. No one in this day and age doubts the Freedom of the Press. We
cartoonists (from all faiths) tiptoe all over people’s beliefs and
sensitivities every day of the week and not everyone laughs, so we go about our
work with great skill. But the Danish sortie into this minefield has done
untold damage to journalism, and, unfortunately, has proved to be a handle for
extremists on both sides to fan the flames.”
To which we may add the remarks of Peter Lewis, editoonist at the Newcastle Herald in New South Wales: “So
what’s to be learnt from this latest clash of cultures? Is our cherished ideal
of press freedom at an end? Well, to be honest, there’s no such thing as press
freedom. Every day editors wrestle with a long list of ‘Thou Shalt Nots’ when
putting a publication together. A single defamatory slip can cost millions in
legal fees and fines. Then there are matters of taste: you can say one thing
but not another; you can use one swear word but not another. It’s all very
nebulous trying to figure out what is acceptable, what is funny, and what is
offensive. But looking back over my two decades of cartooning, the hot
topic—the topic that’s almost certainly going to get you into trouble—is
religion. It’s where angels fear to tread. Fortunately, most western believers
have grown a thicker skin. My cartoon of the Pope in a panzer tank didn’t
produce a single complaint. Other religions aren’t so complacent. Criticize L.
Ron Hubbard, and you’ll get a writ from a Scientology lawyer. Islam is a faith
that takes itself very seriously. Even being good humored cuts no ice. The
fatwa against Salman Rashdie in 1989 was just a warning shot, one that [the
Danish newspaper] Jyllands-Posten ignored to its peril. I have mixed feelings about this mess. On the one hand, I
see it as a lost battle for satirists, another retreat from what can be said.
On the other hand, I think the Danes involved are idiots. I mean—duh! Newsmen
who spend hours each day sorting the usable wheat from the defamatory chaff of
newsprint should have seen this coming, and, let’s face it, if a large group of
people regard something as rude, then shouldn’t their views be respected?
Newspapers can’t print swear words because of the possibility of giving
offence, so what’s the difference here? Everybody knew Muhammad was a no-go.
The big worry is where the world goes to from here. I like to think of
cartoonists as being canaries in the coal mine of freedom. While we twitter and
make rude noises, then all is well; but when we fall silent. ...”
Perhaps a little grim. But no less
pertinent. So, however, is another remark from Inkspot, this from Peter
Nieuwendijk, secretary general of the Federation of Cartoonists
Organizations: “Of course Allah and God have a sense of humor: otherwise, He
would never have created men.”
In the seemingly endless pondering
and repondering of these matters, I wonder: if the issue is “understanding”
between East and West—if the noblest objective is to foster our understanding
in the West of Muslims in the East—then reprinting the Danish Dozen will
demonstrate to us just how super-sensitive Muslims are about their religion
because the cartoons are so inferior, so insipid, so badly drawn. Juxtaposing
the cartoons against the Islamic reaction highlights Islam’s sectarian
intolerance, and once we in the West are aware of this kind of sensitivity,
won’t we be better prepared to co-exist?
As for the Muslim view of the West
and its licentiousness and their supposed mutual incompatibility, there’s hope.
A 38-year-old Egyptian named Amr Khaled has emerged as the Islamic world’s most
popular preacher. Like American televangelists, his pulpit is tv. Starting as a
complete unknown in 1997, Khaled has built a veritable empire. His website
received 26 million hits last year, more than Oprah’s, according to Samantha
Shapiro in the New York Times Magazine for
April 30. Khaled is a devout Muslim, holding conservative beliefs, but he
dresses in stylish European suits or jaunty sweaters and polo shirts. Says
Shapiro: “Khaled’s unique blend of conservative Islamic belief and Western
style has become popular at a moment when governments and scholars from
Washington to Cairo are wrestling with the question of whether religious Islam
is compatible with democracy and Western culture.” Khaled thinks it is. Like
fundamentalists, he believes traditional Islam should play a bigger role in
people’s lives. His self-imposed mission in the Arab world: improve the
physical conditions in which people live—teach illiterate Arabs to read, fix
potholes in the streets—“anything and everything that will help create an Arab
revival.” His message to Muslims in Europe concerns the importance of
co-existence with the cultures in which they find themselves. Khaled does not
deny the importance of other religions. Says he: “If God wanted, he could have
created all mankind as one religion. He created many different ways so we will
cooperate.” In the wake of the cartoon riots, many Europeans are looking for a
point of communication with Muslims, “and a few are beginning to come to the
conclusion that they have found it in Amr Khaled,” says Shapiro. But Khaled,
she says, “found it more difficult than usual to find a place to stand between
the West and the Muslim world.” At first, he condemned both the cartoons and
the violent reaction to them. Later, he urged conversation between the West and
the Muslim world, and he organized a conference in Copenhagen to bring young
Muslims and Danes together to discuss Islam, press freedom, and religious
tolerance. The conference inspired a certain amount of controversy among
Muslims, who thought Khaled should not have gone to Denmark until the Danes
issued a formal apology. As for Khaled, he regards the controversy over the
cartoons as merely the beginning. “It is a practical test for Arab countries: a
clash between my ideology of dialogue and the ideology of a clash of
civilizations,” he told Shapiro. She concludes: “Khaled seemed certain that
trying to hold the middle ground would grow only more treacherous.” But he is
apparently determined to hold it. We need more like Amr Khaled and Daniel
Colbert.
Elsewhere, Christianity is not
immune in the U.S. from the cartoonist’s attentions. Here, direct from Daryl
Cagle’s blog at www.cagle.msn.com is the Easter cartoon from “Mr. Fish” (aka Dwayne Booth). Y’ gotta love a guy like Shaw.
FOOTNIT. Fareed Zakaria in his column in Newsweek for May 8 finds comforting words in bin Laden’s latest
tirade. “Most revealingly, bin Laden makes a parochial appeal for foreign aid
to help those Qaeda supporters in Waziristan who have been rendered homeless by
Pakistani Army attacks. That suggests,” Zakaria continues, “that bin Laden and
his friends are having a rough time.” They’ve run out of bin Laden’s fortune?
“Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden’s audiotape is the sign of a
seriously weakened man.” He concludes: “The U.S. has a long history of seeing
the enemy as 10 feet tall—think of Soviet Russian and Saddam Hussein. But as we
paint al Qaeda in those lofty terms, let’s please remember last week when Osama
bin Laden appealed on a crackling audiotape for a little money to build a few
huts in Waziristan.”
Under
the Spreading Punditry
AN ABBREVIATED SHORT-CHANGED HISTORY OF
ISLAM
While Caricatures of the Prophet Still
Hover in the Background
Islam
seems to some among us to be particularly corrupted at the moment. In
Afghanistan, they were going to execute some poor misguided wight because he
converted to Christianity. We forget, sometimes, that Islam spread by military
conquest. Christianity did, too, eventually; but for the first 300 years, it
was a pacifist religion. It was only after it was adopted as the state religion
of Rome that it became bellicose. (Which, you would think, is a good reason—a
sound religious reason—for keeping church and state separate: religion is
corrupted by national ambitions.) Islam was warlike almost from the start. For
the first few years, Muhammad won converts among his neighbors in Mecca by
preaching (or “testifying”), but as his followers became more numerous, the
merchant class of Mecca became wary of his campaign, thinking it might threaten
their commercial well-being, and began menacing gestures; and so Muhammad left
Mecca in about 622 and went to Medina, taking all his followers with him.
Medina didn’t have the resources to support this influx of population, so
Muhammad did what his desert-dwelling forebears had done: he led raids on
passing caravans for sustenance. And since those caravans were bound for the
merchants in Mecca, the merchants got angry, raised an army, and came after
Muhammad. Muhammad mustered his followers, assumed command, and met the
merchantile army in the desert with an army of his own. He defeated the
merchant horde. And the very fact of his victory persuaded some of the Mecca merchants
to adopt Islam: if Muhammad could be this successful on the battlefield,
clearly Allah was on his side, and they wanted some of the same sort of divine
assistance. That was the beginning. All of Muhammad’s successors were similarly
warlike. And Islam spread through the Middle East, across Northern Africa, and
into Spain. By the sword.
Is it any wonder that today’s
fundamentalist Muslims, those who want most passionately a revival of Islam as
it was during the Prophet’s life, seem so ready to resort to violence to
achieve their ends? The history of their religion is steeped in precisely that
behavior. “The religion of peace”? Where? I realize I’ve slipped into racial
profiling (or is it religious profiling?), but we can’t—can we?—ignore history.
In the last analysis, Christianity is no better than Islam with respect to
internal contradictions and external intolerance, and its occupation of the
West means it is essentially an agent of capitalism and a profiteer of it, too.
I’m not sure where the morality of that is. The best thing about Christianity
is Christmas. Focusing on a newborn child as an act of religious devotion is
somehow uplifting: all of us, beholding a baby—any baby—think warm thoughts
about the seemingly limitless promise of the future, and what might be done to
see that the child, as it grows, will enjoy the best of things that life has to
offer. Hope and the prospect of happiness suffuse the occasion. That seems
wonderfully benign, perhaps even religious.
Muhammad was, himself, a stunningly
remarkable fellow. Here’s what historian Will Durant wrote about him, way back
in 1950, before we were obliged to manifest sensitivity to all things Islam:
“If we judge greatness by influence, Muhammad was one of the giants of history.
He undertook to raise the spiritual and moral level of a people harassed into
barbarism by heat and foodless wastes, and he succeeded more completely than
any other reformer; seldom has any man so fully realized his dream. [And
certainly no one on anything like a similar scale.—RCH] He accomplished his
purpose through religion not only because he himself was religious, but because
no other medium could have moved the Arabs of his time; he appealed to their
imagination, their fears and hopes, and spoke in terms that they could
understand.” The terms, I hasten to elaborate, were those of a tribal culture
in which tribal chieftans demanded absolute obedience and perfect subjugation
of the individual to the welfare of the tribe as a whole. Individuals mattered
little; the honor and survival of the tribe was what counted most. Muhammad
spoke of Allah’s wishes as if Allah were the supreme tribal chieftan. Durant
continues: “When he began Arabia was a desert flotsam of idolatrous tribes;
when he died, it was a nation. He restrained fanaticism and superstition, but
he used them.” He dipped into the legends of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and other
religions of the time and place, as well as his native creed, and “he build a
religion simple and clear and strong, and a morality of ruthless courage and
racial pride, which in a generation marched to a hundred victories, in a
century to empire, and remains to this day a virile force through half the
world.”
The Koran is the written record of
Muhammad’s visions wherein he received instruction from Allah. It is, in
effect, a book of sayings that govern all aspects of life, daily household
duties as well as religious ones. Muhammad was not above having an occasional
self-serving vision. He said Allah would tolerate men having no more than four wives,
but, by special dispensation, Muhammad had several more. And when his favorite
spouse was accused of adultery, which would have required her to be whipped one
hundred lashes, Muhammad, Durant tells us, “had a trance and issued a
revelation requiring four witnesses to prove adultery; moreover, ‘those who
accuse honorable women, but bring not four witnesses, shall be scourged with
eighty lashes, and their testimony shall never again be accepted.’ Accusations
of adultery were thereafter rare.” Durant, clearly, is a man with a sense of
humor and of proportion, too. (He once wrote that the legend of the prostitute
with a heart of gold is a “hoary myth.” I had to smile. Still do.)
Meanwhile, just in case any of us
feel smug about how superior Christianity is to Islam, it is advisable to
realize that the intolerance of fundamental Islamists is a mere foretaste of
the intolerance we’d confront in this country if—or when—the government falls
any further into the clutches of fundamental Christian evangelicals.
Quips
& Quotes
Three
may keep a secret if two of them are dead. —Benjamin Franklin
Suppose you were an idiot and
suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. —Mark Twain
All you need to grow fine, vigorous
grass is a crack in your sidewalk. —Will Rogers
The best way to win an argument is
to begin by being right. —Jill Ruckelshaus
One of the symptoms of an
approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly
important. —Bertrand Russell
Having a good wife and rich cabbage
soup, seek not other things. —Russian Proverb
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Judge
Parker, white streak still a beacon in his hair-do, showed up in the comic
strip named after him on or about April 15, the first time he’s been in the
strip for I dunno how long. But he disappeared again after a day or so. ... And
in The Phantom on Sundays, the Ghost
Who Walks is taking his wife on a holiday to visit a picturesque volcano called
Fire Peak, and en route, they speculate upon the dangers of global warming.
Whenever Stephan Pastis, who does Pearls Before Swine, starts using other comic strip characters in his strip, the maneuver reveals the scorn that animates his career as a syndicated cartoonist. At first blush, perusing Pastis’ characters, you’d think he simply can’t draw anything but stick figures. But that’s not true. And when he draws other cartooner’s characters in his strip, he draws them passably well. So he can draw. Why, then, does he persist in using stick figures? I think it’s his way of saying to his inky-fingered brethren: You work hard to draw recognizable pictures, but see—I can get away with just stick figures as a syndicated cartoonist, so the more fool you! But the other thing that is mildly off-putting in Pastis’ frequent importation of other strips into his strip is the sheer self-indulgence of the maneuver. Who, besides Pastis and the cartoonist whose characters he’s dragooned into temporary duty, gets the jokes in these outings? Only those readers who are familiar with both strips. And what are the chances of Pearls readers being familiar with all the strips Pastis evokes? Not good unless he uses characters from widely circulated strips. If he has characters from Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse, a strip with one of the top circulations worldwide, most Pearls readers will probably recognize the characters. Ditto personages from Cathy and Family Circus and Dilbert. But not, probably, Satchel and Bucky from Get Fuzzy. So when Pastis and Fuzzy’s Darby Conley conspired to do a cross-over pastiche in mid-April, who got the jokes? Only readers whose papers subscribe to both strips. Here’s the whole sequence, which, after you glance at it, I’ll try to decode.
In the first strip, Get
Fuzzy, we see a syndicate official talking to Conley on the phone, telling
him that he was inadvertently sent a FedEx package with a week’s worth of Pearls in it. He tells Conley to destroy
the Pearls strips, and then he
reminds Conley that he’s late with his Fuzzy strips. Conley, who is wholly absorbed in a computer game, eyes the FedEx
package in the penultimate panel. The rest of the week, we see what he’s done
to catch up on his deadlines. The second strip here is Pearls for April 18; immediately beneath is Fuzzy for the same date. If your paper published both of these, you
could, if you weren’t just breezing briskly through the comics that day, see
that the Fuzzy’s genial Satchel has
been drawn, or pasted, over the Zebra and crocodiles in the same day’s Pearls. Tell-tale bits of the Pearls strip still show, and Conley has
apparently used all of the Pearls speech balloons without changing anything in them. What a hoot, eh? Funny
stuff, right? For the rest of the week, Fuzzy characters are superimposed on Pearls strips, making absolutely no stand-alone sense. If you didn’t know what Conley
was supposedly doing, none of the Fuzzy strips
are at all sensible—even though, given the personalities of Satchel and Bucky,
there’s a little mild humor of the purely nonsensical sort. When, on Wednesday,
Pastis phones Conley and wonders why Fuzzy seems similar to Pearls, day by day,
we have the only hint all week long of what is transpiring—a hint that makes
sense only to readers who know which cartoonist does which comic strip, by
name, a likelihood not by any means guaranteed. Then at the end of the week, we
have another telephone exchange that shows just how crass and unscrupulous
Conley is. Big boffo here, right? Pastis and Conley no doubt had a hoot doing
the sequence, but who else besides fanaddicts like me grasped enough of the
implications to see the supposed comedy? Given all this complexity, I’m not
sure the gag sequence is that good—good enough to risk being completely over
the heads of some readers who don’t see both strips. The proceedings are simply
too in-groupy and, thereby, too self-indulgent. Or maybe self-destructive.
The first week in May, Pastis
returned to his usual dodge, guest appearances. But this time, the “guest” is
there by name only. When Pig introduces his new friend, Stromoski “the frog who
has trouble meeting women,” few, if any, of Pearls readers are likely to know
that Rick Stromoski is the current
president of the National Cartoonists Society. What a joke, eh? Big laughs, a
real thigh-slapper.
Meanwhile, in Tony Cochran’s Agnes, the
pint-sized eponymous protagonist is upset that her newspaper has dropped her
favorite comic strip and visits the editor to complain. “How dare you cancel my
favorite comic strip!” she screams. “Do you have some kind of personal vendetta
against hilarity?” “Sorry,” the editor says, “it wasn’t popular in the polls.”
Agnes: “So?! I’m not popular! Am I supposed to drop off the face of
the earth too? Would that tidy it all up for you? Hmmm?
If popular meant good,” she continues, “the Vatican would be full of Thomas
Kinkade cottage paintings.” Editor: “Oooo—I have one of his light houses.”
Well, that seems to sum up handily the business of comic strip selection by
newspaper editors.
The
Froth Estate: The News according to Television News Media
It’s a Medium because it’s Neither Well
Done nor Rare
How
were we to know, except by reading the daily newspaper, that George W.
(“Wrongheaded”) Bush and the rest of his legions of followers who are upset
about a Spanish language national anthem that they’re about 90 years too late.
The wire service at Knight Ridder assures us that “the government already gave
its blessing when the U.S. Bureau of Education prepared a Spanish version of
the “Star Spangled Banner” in 1919, and that translation has been available on
the Library of Congress’ website for the past two years without so much as a
sniff of disapproval.” Not to mention the National Anthem Project, which,
besides boasting First Lady Laura Bush as honorary chairwoman, will happily
furnish for your rendition of the “Banner” anything from strolling mariachis or
a steel drum band. Sacrilege abounds.
DOLLS AND SUCH LIKE
I’m
a sucker for certain kinds of statuettes or figurines (we don’t call them
“dolls” here), so when Craig Yoe started producing classic comic characters in
three dimensions for Dark Horse, I sat up and paid attention. I also paid good
money and bought a few of them. Not all. Just certain ones, the ones that spoke
to me. Over the years, lots of li’l figurines have whispered sweet nothings in
my ear, not all of them comic characters either, and the bookshelves in my
studio are festooned with tiny statues. Recently, I acquired a somewhat larger
statue. Brandy from Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows. And she’s a delight. I
realize that she’s a little too buxom for some, but not for me. Expertly,
faithfully, sculpted by Clayburn Moore of the C.S. Moore Studio (www.csmoorestudio.com), she’s exactly
as you’d remember her from the famously short-lived strip which is now, just as
famously, being reprinted in library-sized tomes at a breath-taking rate.
Brandy the statue is strolling through the woods in a yellow dress the bodice
of which is somewhat unbuttoned (by two), but she’s oblivious: her attention is
focused on a butterfly that has perched on her hand. Just as delightful as
Cho’s zaftig lady are Truman the duckling and the pet “weiner dog,” who are
accompanying Brandy on her stroll through the mushrooms and other undergrowth
of the woods. In fact, I like Truman almost as much as I like Brandy, and he’s
not at all buxom. More characters from Liberty
Meadows will ensue. Ralph the Bear, f’instance, is “coming soon.” And Moore
has crafted a nearly naked all-green She Dragon from Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon
Comic, a real Playboy pin-up this
time. If you don’t like Brandy, you won’t like the She Dragon, no matter how
green she is. But in these parts, they’re both dolls.
BOOK MARQUEE
I
first ran into Victor Moscoso in an
early issue of Zap Comix—a surreal
vignette in which Disneyesque figures evoking Mickey Mouse and Bucky Bug
mutated into sexual apparatus before my eyes, a soaring, bending, twisting
ballet that transformed a static artform into prurient plastic. The imagination
on display was extraordinary. And it’s on display once again in Sex, Rock and Optical Illusions (144
9x12-inch pages in color and b/w; hardcover, $34.95 from Fantagraphics), an
elegant production with full-color dust jacket and embossed cover and short
introductory essays by Milton Glaser and Steven Heller. Many of Moscoso’s
mid-1960s psychedelic posters for San Francisco’s storied rock halls are here
as well as some of his later work, all vivid testimony to the accuracy of
Glaser’s assessment that “Victor is an extraordinary visionary artist and a
superb draftsman.” The electrifying images of the posters shriek in primary
colors, oscillating reds and blues and greens and screaming yellows, sucking
you in until you get lost in them, a surrender of self as oceanic as being
overwhelmed by the deafening roar of rock itself. Moscoso, Heller tells us, had
seven years of college, learning all the rules of design. Then he simply
“reversed everything he had learned in school: The rule that a poster should
transmit a message simply and quickly became how long can you engage the viewer
in reading the poster? Five, ten, twenty minutes. Don’t use vibrating colors
became use them whenever you can and irritate the eyes as much as you can. ...
Moscoso called this ‘a world turned upside down.’ By pursuing these ideas and
breaking the rules, he created a body of work that altered the language of a
generation.” Undoubtedly. But my favorite Moscoso inventions are his comics,
his shape-shifting images rendered with that juicy, spikey line. Here we find a
delicious homage to Herriman’s Krazy Kat, some Zap covers, and the spectacular K.S.A.N. comics, about which
Moscoso Speaking of Fantagraphics, the fifth
volume of the massive and magnificent Complete
Peanuts reprinting project is now out, the years 1959 and 1960 (340
6x8-inch pages in hardcover; $28.95). Creator Charles Schulz is now at his fully
fledged maturity, and the identities of the characters are by this time so well
established that their quirks create the comedy. Fuss-budget Lucy gives her
genius brother Linus a list of all his faults. “Faults?” shouts Linus. “You call these faults? These aren’t faults—these are character traits!” The
familiar features of previous volumes are here, the exhaustive index, Seth’s
engaging design, an introduction by a Famous Person, in this case, Whoopi
Goldberg, not someone I’d immediately think of when contemplating comics, but
she makes up for her incongruous presence with the length of the interview with
Gary Groth that is dragooned into service here as the Foreword. Judging from
her remarks, she experienced Peanuts first
in its tv incarnation, which, she says, “spoke” to her. Groth wonders about
that, saying the two creative personalities seem “almost polar opposites.”
Goldberg is loud, “in your face”; Schulz is gentler. Well, she seems to say,
they were born in different times, and maybe if Schulz had been her age, he
would have been louder. “But maybe not!” she declares with sudden insight. “I
really like Peppermint Patty,” she says. And I could have guessed it. Says
Goldberg: “I think she knew that she was going to be different from everybody
else. And she was. She looked different and sounded different.” Whoopi thinks
Patty is probably gay. Pigpen is “my other guy,” she says. “Is he just a dust
cloud? Where did h e come from? Where does he live? Is his house a pigpen? Who
can say?” Who, indeed.
The works of French cartoonist
Jean-Jacques Sempe, known in these
parts chiefly for his New Yorker covers,
will soon be available in this country. Phaidon is planning to publish,
beginning in September, five volumes of Sempe’s cartoons, four in hardcover,
all in English, each priced at $24.99. Phaidon has plenty to draw upon: more
than 20 volumes of Sempe have been published in France. And Steve Thompson, president-for-life of
the Pogo Fan Club, announced in the latest Fort
Mudge Most, the Club’s official magazine (sometimes quarterly), that he’s
signed a contract with the University Press of Mississippi (my old publisher)
for a biography of Walt Kelly. Entitled Walt
Kelly: Fairy Tales for Grownups, part of the Geniuses of Comic Art series,
the book may achieve publication by late 2007, just about in time to compete
for your budget buck with my own timeless tome, Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon: Meanwhile ..., another biography of another cartooning genius. Subscriptions to the Fort Mudge Most are $25 for 6 issues,
payable to the publisher, Spring Hollow Books, 6908 Wentworth, Richfield, MN
55423; or at www.pogo-fan-club.org. More Pogo at www.pogopossum.com.
Elsewhere, we are happy to report
that George W. (“Warlord”) Bush, who has been noticeably unsuccessful in
capturing Darth bin Laden (or in “bringing him to justice”—i.e., killing him
and having him then disemboweled and beheaded), has clearly turned the effort
over to DC Comics, which has Frank
Miller working on it. His successful campaign will be recorded in a
forthcoming tome, Holly Terror, Batman, about which, Clive Collins of the
Cartoonists Club of Great Britain, quoted in Inkspot, says: “This news ... means that our caped crusader—who,
you may recall, has no more super powers than you or I: he just dresses ...
differently, and runs around with a younger man in tights—is scheduled to go
head-to-head with the sheeted one, either later this year or early next. It’s
an appropriate match, I guess, since Osama also tends to spend a large amount
of his free time in a cave, though he doesn’t seem to have the whizzo hardware
that our Gotham City spelunker packs. Osama is ready to strike first—verbally
at least—with his weighty tome Messages
to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a title that doesn’t
exactly have the zing of Miller’s, but for which we all wait with breath not so
much baited as yawned. Frank Miller, of course, is the man who remolded the
Dark Knight, and it’s to be hoped that he’s wise enough not to portray Batters
going head-to-head at any time with an actual portrayal of Muhammad, bearing in
mind recent events in Denmark.”
THE FIRST GRAFIC NOVEL?
Once
upon a time, not so long ago—last week, in fact—we posted in our Hindsight
Department a biography of Milt Gross (click here), which we used to herald the publication by Fantagraphics
of Gross’s classic 1930 opus entitled He
Done Her Wrong. The book may not be, as some claim, the first graphic
novel, but it is certainly the most memorable of the early manifestations, and
we pause here to take a somewhat longer look at this cartooning benchmark, a
handsomely wrought reprint of 200-plus 7x8-inch pages in paperback ($16.95)
with an Introduction by cartoonist Craig Yoe and an Appreciation by appreciator
Paul Karasik. In his method, as we observed, Gross was perhaps inspired by the
recent work of a wood engraver named Lynd Ward, who, in 1929, had published God’s Man, a wordless novel-length
cautionary tale. For his subject, however, Gross relied upon his experiences in
the film colony where he had worked briefly with Charlie Chaplin on “The
Circus” (released in 1928): the novel risibly mocks the grand passions and
stock situations of Hollywood adventure films and the stage melodramas of the
1890s with its numerous superhuman feats, frenzied action, and clanking
coincidence, not to mention its dastardly moustached villain, brave strong
hero, and pure beauteous heroine.
The plot is the very soul of
pot-boiler machination. Our Hero (unnamed; no words in this book, remember?) is
a coonskin-cap wearing trapper in the Klondike who saves a dancehall chanteuse
from a roughneck’s unwanted attentions, whereupon the singer and the trapper
fall in love forthwith. Into this blissful tableau intrudes the moustache-twirling
Dastard who cheats Our Hero out of his cache of valuable pelts and takes off
with Our Heroine, after convincing her Our Hero, her beloved, is dead. They go
to the Big City and marry, but the Dastard loses all his money and all his
wife’s valuables, not to mention her affections. Meanwhile, Our Hero follows
them to the Big City, where he runs into the Dastard as he is about to marry
again (without having divorced Our Heroine). Our Hero breaks up the wedding,
and after several violent encounters with the Dastardly One, he winds up in the
hospital, where he is found by Our Heroine, who has become a nurse in order to
survive. Through a classic misunderstanding, she believes him Promised To
Another, and she leaves, returning to the frozen vastness of the Klondike. When
Our Hero recovers, he follows her, dragging the Dastard with him all the way,
down bumpy roads, through underbrush in the woods, up jagged peaks, until he
reaches his familiar stomping ground Up North. Our Hero and Heroine are
reconciled, he proves to be heir to a fabulous fortune, and they live happily
ever after. The Dastard, revealed to be a bigamist, is condemned to living
simultaneously with all of his wives for whom he performs a ceaseless round of
household chores.
The fun in this hilariously
hackneyed tale is supplied in generous doses by Gross’s visual merriment and
relentless ridiculing of life as we know it. Our Hero’s jubilance at arriving,
finally, in the Big City, is mercilessly destroyed by the accouterments of
civilization: he is stomped on by a horse, spun around by the rush of
automobile traffic, cracked in the head by a turn signal, and kicked off the
street by a cop. “Welcome to our fair city,” as Karasik says. He continues:
“The most inventive sequences are those where Gross takes advantage of the
lengthy novel form to stretch out a gag for maximum effect.” Job-hunting, Our
Heroine, deserted by her Dastard husband and penniless, applies for a job in a
department store. “She explains her sad plight to the first clerk she meets,”
Karasik continues. “We see her describing in pantomime her pathetic life story.
This same pantomime routine is repeated five times as she works her way up the
hierarchy of the store’s supervisors. After a dozen or so executives have heard
her tale, they retire to the board room in consultation. The entire sequence
takes 27 pages at the end of which, she gets a job: the privileged opportunity
of spending forty hours a week on her knees, scrubbing the department store
floors.”
The Dastard’s loss of his wealth is
another attack on civilization, this time, in the form of a coin-operated gum
dispenser that the Dastard tries to get a stick of gum from. “The bit,” as
Karasik says, “goes like this: The gum dispenser doesn’t deliver. The Dastard
pops in another coin. It still doesn’t deliver. In hysterical frenzy, coin
after coin is crammed into the machine without payoff. The Dastard ends up in a
fit of total exasperation (one of Gross’s specialities), sacrificing everything
he owns to feed the street corner no-armed bandit.” Everything he owns, plus
his bride’s belongings. In depicting the Dastard beating up on the gum machine,
Gross is taking vengeance, no doubt, on coin-operated gum dispensers that have
robbed him in the past—earning our sympathy in the process: who has not been
robbed by such greedy, souless machines? By strenuous implication, the
cartoonist is also assaulting the edifice of modern technology, heartless
machines everywhere. And that’s not all that Gross accomplishes with this
seemingly simple episode. Says Karasik: “From this sequence we learn that the
Villain is an addictive sort of louse and so it comes as no surprise when his
actions leave the Girl destitute.”
To see what cartooning was like in
the golden age of the late 1920s, do not miss this tome. Oh, and while we’re
still contemplating Gross, I must report that Allan Holtz, who is compiling the world’s most comprehensive
compendium of dates and data about comic strips, tells me that my
aforementioned Gross biography errs in about three ways. First, Gross’s first
comic strip was not, as reported, Henry
Peck: while still in the Hearst bullpen at the Journal American, Gross did Jack
Bull, which started in November 1912. Second, the correct spelling of Count
Screwloose’s place of origin is, according to Gross, “Tooloose.” Finally, while Banana Oil ceased at the end of
September 1930, it was replaced by Babbling
Brooks, apparently a reincarnation of Gross’s earlier effort with the same
name; and Count Screwloose continued
until May 31, 1931, when it was picked up for syndication by King Features. By
this time, the famed New York World newspaper
for which Gross was working at the time had been merged with another fabled
sheet to become the World-Telegram. Dunno if the World had syndicated the
Count, but I suspect it had. In any event, that World ceased at the end of February 1931.
AND ANOTHER GRAPHIC NOVEL
The Nameless: The Director’s Cut by Joe Pruett as rendered by Phil Hester begins
with an assortment of street urchins, some of whom are being killed in a
gruesome sacrificial manner. A couple of them are saved by a mystery man who,
it turns out, is himself a sacrifice who lived—dismembered, disemboweled,
disfigured and skinned alive as a victim of an ancient Aztec rite. He takes the
teenagers he saves to a shelter being run by a woman; later, he must confront
the mysterious Aztec gods who demand more and more sacrifice. All wondrous, no
doubt. But the best part of this book is Hester’s artwork, steeped in solid
black shadows; you can’t get more expressive in line and shape than this.
BUSHWAH
As
I see GeeDubya flitting around the country, making speeches before carefully
screened and therefore friendly crowds to “sell” one or another of his schemes,
I keep remembering that the only thing he was ever successful at was
cheerleading in college. So I guess you can take the fella out of cheerleading
but you can never take the cheerleading out of the fella. He’s still at it. Rah
rah for Iraqi freedom. It was his cheerleading that got us into this Mess-of-patomia,
remember: he had no facts to support his intentions—just rousing cheers. Rah
rah de-boom-de-ray on Saddam.
At this unhappy juncture, it’s
possible to discern the Bush League exit strategy for Iraq. It begins with the
Big Lie. They keep on saying that Iraq is getting better. They say it over and
over despite evidence to the contrary. The contradictory evidence, they say, is
due to the news media’s preoccupation with bad news instead of good news. The
news media should be reporting American successes in Iraq—building schools and
roads. So they go on telling the lie: Iraq is getting better—better at
self-governing, better at maintaining their own security. The psychology of the
Big Lie is to repeat it over and over again. Pretty soon people will believe
it. And once we have enough gullible red state people believing it, we can then
pull our troops out of Iraq “with honor,” saying the mission has been
accomplished. Iraq is a democracy, self-sufficient and self-securing. No need
for us to remain there. So we’ll pull out. The country will still be a mess,
chaos on every hand. But we’ll be outa there, thank goodness. And Gee Dubya,
Grand Master of the Magnified Mendacity, will be able to say we fixed it.
Vietnamization all over again. When will it happen? Before the Presidential
Election of 2008.
UNDER THE SPREADING PUNDITRY
The
May 4 issue of Rolling Stone has an
unkind caricature of GeeDubya (wearing a dunce cap) on the cover while the
adjacent headline bellows: “The Worst President in History?” In the ensuing
article, Sean Wilentz, a “leading historian,” answers the question in the
affirmative. “Only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low
as Bush’s in his second term—Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his
resignation.” As if popularity were the sole criteria for greatness. Or ignomy.
Wilentz goes on to detail the reasons for his negative judgement, but he begins
by summarizing the criteria: “Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous
difficulties—James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and now Bush—have
divided the nation, governed erratically, and left the nation worse off. In
each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic
policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct,
crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities
in presidential history: he has not only stumbled badly in every one of these
key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential
failures—an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures
deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to
changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in
each major area of presidential performance.” Popularity polls, in the last
analysis, are not a factor. Wilentz then discusses “the credibility gap,” the
war, domestic policy, and presidential misconduct (usurpation of power not
granted by the Constitution).
Last fall in the September 26 issue
of Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria wrote:
“The U.S. Congress is a national embarrassment, except that no one is
embarrassed. ... Today’s Republicans believe in pork, but they don’t believe in
government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak
and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or
campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special
interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on
‘Homeland Security’ to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming, and
Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. ... We denounce
sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of
ideological purity. ... Hurricane Katrina [less than three weeks in the past
then] is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. ... Wall-Mart and Federal
Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the U.S. For that and for
much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get
our money’s worth?” Alas, this plea obviously fell on deaf ears and continues
to go unheeded.
I may be misremembering on this, but
I recall hearing recently an interview on NPR with a purported spokesman for
illegal immigrants who said these folks don’t want U.S. citizenship. They want
to work here, earning higher wages than they can in their native land, then,
eventually, they want to return to that country. Is that right? Have we ever
asked ’em? If it’s true, why not make it possible? Just increase the number of
work permits so all those 11-12 million illegals can stay here and work. Under
this proviso, seems to me, they’d be paying taxes like all of us—including
Social Security tax, which they’d never collect on because they’d be out of
here by the time they were eligible. And they’d be “documented”: we’d know who
they were and where they resided, just like regular citizens. They’d be
contributing to the labor force, as they are now albeit illegally, so the
corporate entities who champion immigrant labor “doing jobs no American wants
to do” would be fine with it. Incidentally—news to me—according to Time, “The majority of immigrants pay
taxes, even the undocumented (via fake Social Security and taxpayer IDs).
Through 2002, illegals paid an estimated $463 billion into Social Security.
Their take-out: almost nothing.”
At the Pump. Even at $3-plus a
gallon, we pay less for a gallon of gasoline than we do for a gallon of soda
pop. Just another example of our skewed social and economic arrangements—like
salaries for baseball players as opposed to salaries for teachers, policemen,
and firemen. The U.S. has been getting cheap gasoline for decades; other
countries pay through the hose—er, nose. It’s about time we got our comeuppance.
But that doesn’t stop us from wishing. I wish there were a way to keep gasoline
at the pump high priced (to inhibit consumption and thereby to foster
conservation) but lower it for other uses—air transportation, for instance; and
the trucking industry, in short, all those functions with profound ripple
effects. And then, too, I wish we could get at the oil company CEOs whose
so-called “salaries” are so obscenely massive. If we could do both of those
things, then I’d say leave gasoline at the pump alone and let the price soar.
But since we can’t make any dents in either of the other two arenas, then we
must do what we can do get those prices back down where they don’t belong but
where we like ’em.
We agonize about the looming
shortage of gasoline as a propellant; what about oil as a lubricant? We’ll be
out of that at the same time, and that, seems to me, is much more critical. How
will we grease the wheels of mechanized civilization if we’re out of oil? Use
linseed oil? Well, maybe.
Metaphors be with you.
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