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Opus 184:
Opus 184 (May 22, 2006). I’m saving the Really Big News until
the end of this introductory paragraph, kimo sabe, mentioning here at the onset
only that our feature this time is a review of the new comic strip reprint
tome, Candorville: Thank God for Culture
Clash, coupled to a short history of the strip and its creator, Darrin Bell, who first emerged on the
national stage as a real trouble-maker. We also take a look at Art Spiegelman’s examination of the
Danish Dozen in the June Harper’s and
review some comic books. Here’s what’s here in order: NOUS R US— A franchise of Dagwood Sandwich Shops is launched, but John Marshall, who draws the strip that
inspired the shops, remains anonymous; Playboy says good-bye to Eldon Dedini; MORE DANISH AGAIN— Spiegelman in Harper’s, Ted Rall in Global Journalist,
and no cartoons of Muhammad in the NCS Reuben program booklet; BOOK MARQUEE— High Hat online, Bob
Staake’s latest diatribe and a stunning book, which leads to: UGLY ART vs. BAD ART—A history of bad
art from Thurber to Trudeau and how it differs from ugly art; CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST— Da Vinci
debunked; REPRINT— Candorville and Darrin Bell’s controversial editoon in September 2001; FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE— Reviews of issues
of American Virgin, Next Wave, and Truth, Justin and the American Way and Liberality for All; BUSHWHACKING— Stephen Colbert’s assault
on GeeDubya’s sensitivities and a new Dr. Seuss ditty. The Really Big News is that I’ve finished Phase One of revising the
Milton Caniff biography that has been diverting me for the last year. It took
my five years to write the first version, which, at 900-plus pages in
typescript, was too long for most publishers to consider. Phase One involved
reducing the book by almost 40 percent, which phase is now, as of two weeks
ago, complete. Phase Two, a final edit for polishing and catching typos and for
selecting and captioning illustrations, is now underway; it’ll be completed by
the end of June, at which point, you can expect another celebration here. Hoist
one for the ol’ Harv. 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—
Hear Ye, Hare Ye
Subscribers Notice: A Pointless
Exercise
We
are updating the way we send the Rabbit Habit alert because spam catchers
filter us out. You should have received an e-mail asking you to confirm your
e-mail address. Responding to this will help us build our new list and provide
better, swifter service. Of course, if you’re reading this, you’ve already done
that. And if you haven’t done that, you aren’t likely to be reading this.
Pointless exercise, like I said. Sigh.
WE
ERRED
Correcting the Malfeasances of the Past
Now
would be the best time to re-visit Opus 183, our most recent, in order to make
some sense of my diatribe about Stephen
Pastis, Darby Conley, Pearls before
Swine, and Get Fuzzy. We used the wrong group of strips to
illustrate the rant, and so it probably didn’t make sense. Probably, I suppose,
no one noticed because so little of this picayune prose actually makes sense.
But for those who were puzzled by the Get
Fuzzy strips that seemed to have nothing to do with the accompanying
tirade, you were right. We’re corrected that: now, the strips that should have
been there, are there. So take another look.
Not content with the sin of
omission, I also committed one. Last time I said that I’d just received the
most recent issue of Inkspot, the
magazine of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, and I said something cute
about it’s being the “Autumn” issue, implying that their most “recent” issue
was, actually, ahead of the game somewhat. Ho, ho—the joke’s on me. The reason
it’s the “Autumn” issue is that, Down Under, the season is, at present, autumn;
when it’s autumn here, it’ll be spring there.
NOUS R US
All the news that gives us fits.
In
a passel of reviews of the animated film version of H.A. and Margret Rey’s Curious George, which some reviewers
dislike intensely because it tries to up-date the classic, Peter Hartlaub of
the San Francisco Chronicle, writes, with a perfectly straight face: “There
is no nudity in ‘Curious George.’” Presumably, he is reassuring concerned
parents, but I venture to guess, without having seen the movie, that George is
as naked in the movie as he is in the books. He’s a monkey. No clothing. Ergo,
naked.
From
an Editor & Publisher round-up:
Lynn Johnston and her comic strip dog, Farley in her strip, For Better or For Worse, received a
Special Award from the Purina Animal Hall of Fame for “chronicling the bond
between people and their pets.” ... The first in a chain of Dagwood Sandwich Shops will open in
June in Palm Harbor, Florida. An obvious marketing ploy whose time,
surprisingly, has taken a generation to arrive, the shops were conceived by
Dean Young, who, saith E&P,
produces Blondie with Denis LeBrun; but LeBrun retired from
the strip last summer, and since then, the only signature on the strip has been
Young’s, who, apparently, doesn’t deign to recognize the artwork done by John Marshall, who inherited LeBrun’s
chair. In fact, I have it on impeccable authority that Young specified in the
search for LeBrun’s replacement that whoever it was should not expect to get to
sign the strip. So the imposture continues, with Young pretending to be the
sole author of the classic strip he inherited from his father, Blondie’s creator. ... An animated short
by Pulitzer-winning editoonist Ann
Telnaes will be part of the forthcoming “Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures”
show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, May 25-August 13. The
Telnaes short will be shown June 18 & 19. ... According to the latest
statistically meaningless straw poll taken at Doonesbury.com, of 15,573
respondents, 79% said GeeDubya is the worst president ever; surprisingly, of
the 319 voters who said they love Georgie, 55% called him the worst president;
and of the 1,499 who said they can take him or leave him, 56% said he was the
worst.
In its June issue, Playboy takes a moment—a half-page in
the “After Hours” section—to “bid farewell to a master cartoonist,”Eldon Dedini, reprinting three of his
cartoons and a short prose remembrance: “The Playboy family has lost a beloved member ... who painted nearly
1,000 cartoons for this magazine. ... ‘Eldon’s world was one of light and
music,’ recalls Michelle Urry, Playboy’s Cartoon Editor. ‘He drew on
both in his work. His art was gentle and good-natured.’ His watercolors—images
of satyrs and nymphs, spoofs of Japanese pillow books and Sunday funnies—are
unmistakable and ubiquitous; Playboy has run a Dedini in almost every issue since 1960. His vision of a bucolic
paradise populated by sexually liberated mythological characters became a part
of the magazine’s identity. Eldon will be deeply missed.” That it took until
the June issue to eulogize Dedini’s achievement is an indication of the lead
time between the preparation and the publication of the magazine: Dedini died
in January. The June issue carries another Dedini cartoon inside, but the perpetual
Dedini has been missing from Playboy for at least two previous issues, April and May. I wonder how extensive their
inventory of unpublished Dedini cartoons is. Here’s hoping we find out—that
they publish them all, eventually.
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.
MORE DANISH AGAIN
Those
of the public prints with a long lag between events and the publication of
confabulation about them are now coming along like so many sanitation
engineers, picking up the offal strewn along the journalistic main street after
the hysterical parade of the Danish Dozen has long since passed. At least one
of them, Harper’s, in its June issue,
offers the best discussion I’ve seen yet—apart from those we committed here,
that is. It’s sober, reflective, and informative, as you might expect of a
periodical that’s had plenty of time to assemble facts and to ponder them. The
article, by cartooner Art Spiegelman,
covers the Danish Dozen and a host of related issues—freedom of speech and of
the press (“trumpeting its own obsolescence” by leading its readers to the
Internet to see the offending caricatures), the death of opinionated
journalism, the function of graven images, the hypocrisy of publishing photos
of Abu Ghraib but not the Muhammad caricatures, flag-draped coffins, the craven
self-serving cowering of the Bush League, and so on. The piece seems entirely
unrushed, but appearances are deceptive: to get into a June issue, presumably
Spiegelman was writing this exegesis sometime in April, not so long after the
frantic dashing about by the news gathering media in their often failed attempt
to get the facts and to get them right. It was Spiegelman who I quoted in Opus
179 at the end of February: “The notion that the images can just be described
leaves me firmly on the side of showing images. The banal quality of the
cartoons that gave insult is hard to believe until they are seen.” And it was
Amanda Bennett, editor of the Philadelphia
Inquirer, who probably agreed when she published at least one of the Danish
caricatures, citing a famous photograph taken during the Vietnam War: “Would
the words ‘a naked young girl burning with napalm’ have made us understand the
horrors of the Vietnam War as completely as Nick Ut’s iconic photo?” And so Harper’s publishes all twelve of the
pictures, at Spiegelman’s behest, no doubt, and Spiegelman annotates each
picture, explaining who is being caricatured and why. (Muhammad was not the
only person being ridiculed graphically in the series, and not all the bearded
turbaned figures in the cartoons are Muhammad.) The article includes a
reproduction of the page where the caricatures first appeared in the Danish
newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, which
shows how the cartoons were initially presented to the world at large,
clustered around an explanatory article, all under the heading “Muhammad’s
Face.” In other words, the caricatures, when first published, were put in
context by the accompanying prose; they weren’t just sprung on an unsuspecting
public without explanation. No other publication that I know of has done as
much to show us what the fuss has been about, and anyone who wants to maintain
a permanent file of the most disruptive cartoon episode of the last 100 years
is urged, herewith, to get a copy of the magazine.
Spiegelman says that Jyllands-Posten has “a history of
anti-immigrant bias.” Understandable, I suppose, in a small county with a
burgeoning Muslim population that, presumably, seems vaguely threatening to the
natives. This factoid, which I’ve seen alluded to elsewhere in even the
frenetic coverage of February, adds an illuminating lamination to the reason
that the paper offered for conducting its Muhammad experiment—although, as I
said before, the announced rationale seemed reasonable on its face at the time,
regardless of whatever ulterior motives we can muster in the aftermath; see the
aforementioned Opus 179. Writing as a secular Jew, the son of Auschwitz
survivors, Spiegelman brings more than just a cartoonist’s sensibility to the
furor. But as a cartoonist, he is scarcely surprised at the reaction the Danish
Dozen provoked. “Caricature is by definition a charged and loaded image,” he writes.
And when the Jyllands-Posten editor
claimed to be exploring the implications of depicting Muhammad in book
illustration, his first mistake was to invite cartoonists to draw the Prophet.
“Cartoonists!” Spiegelman exclaims: “A breed of troublemakers by profession!”And
when discussing the quisling reaction of the American press, his prose drips
with scorn about the news outlets’ “professing a high-minded nod toward
political correctness that smelled of hypocrisy and fear” that is of-a-piece
with their now well-known reluctance to offend readers or advertisers with
anything approaching an opinionated political cartoon, a rank timidity that has
resulted in making editorial cartoonists “an endangered species, dying off even
quicker than the newspapers that host them.” He continues, a note of satiric
bitterness creeping in: “I hear beleaguered editors and infuriated Muslims
chanting in unison. Both groups, after all, are notoriously wary of images.”
Ahh, Art: I am destroyed with envy over your sharply honed barbs and the deadly
accuracy of your aim.
Of all the responses world-wide to
the Danish cartoons, none, Spiegelman says, were “more flabbergasting than
Iran’s announcement that it would host an international Holocaust cartoon
contest as payback, to ‘test’ the limits of Western tolerance of free speech.”
Whatever the Iranian so-called logic, it struck Spiegelman “as a little
unjust—even somewhat paranoid—to punish Jews for Danish sins.” The most
inspired reaction to the Iranian contest, he says, was that of the artists i Ted
Rall also chimes in on the Danish Disasters with an essay in the March Global Journalist on how he makes a
cartoon and what a cartoon of the political sort is supposed to accomplish.
“The strongest editorial cartoons question authority and conventional wisdom,”
he writes. But it’s a task fraught with risk: “It’s best to cause offense only
in the service of making an important point in order to elicit vibrant
discussion. Sometimes, however, a cartoonist’s faulty execution causes that
goal to be lost, leaving controversy and nothing else.” Which, by one reading,
is what the Danes did. By another reading, however, they accomplished precisely
what the editor was looking for when he commissioned the caricatures:
publishing them revealed how thin the fundamental Islamist skin is, and how
intimidating mobs of irate Muhammad’s followers can be. Rall’s essay is
accompanied by quotations on the issues culled from publications around the
world and by a timeline that traces some of the events that were initiated by
the September 2005 publication of the caricatures. The timeline, alas, leaves
out the crucial December meeting of the leaders of 57 Muslim countries after
which organized protest and street demonstrations began throughout the Muslim
world. Global Journalist looks like a
quarterly, and its cover says it intends to stay on newsstands until June 15,
but if you miss it, you can find Rall’s article at his website, www.tedrall.com : go to the Rallblog, then scroll down to April 10, where you’ll find a link to
the Global Journalist article.
Finally, the most depressing news of
all: The Reuben Journal, the
“program” for the annual Reuben Awards Weekend of the National Cartoonists
Society, May 26-28, declined to print a cartoon that depicted Muhammad. The
cartoon was submitted as one of the ads that are traditionally taken by
cartoonists in the Journal to help
finance its publication. The ad was produced by cartoonist Keith Robinson, whose self-syndicated Making It has been going steadily since 1985. At his website,
Robinson rehearsed the whole ugly tale; herewith—
Just a Cartoon...
"Nothing is mean if it’s funny
enough." —Eddie Haskell
Every
Memorial Day weekend the National Cartoonists Society throws a big whoop-de-do
centered on giving an award—the Reuben (named for Reuben "Rube"
Goldberg)—to the outstanding cartoonist of the year. The printed program—really
a magazine—for this event is called The
Reuben Journal. I, like many cartoonists, take out an ad most years in the Journal. Wednesday, I delivered the
artwork for my page.
Thursday I received a voice mail
from Mell Lazuraus. Mell does the
comic strip Momma. He is also, and
has been for longer than I’ve been an NCS member, the editor of The Reuben Journal. On the voice mail,
he told me how much he enjoyed my work. He was very positive, very
complimentary. At the end of the message, almost as if it were an afterthought,
he said, "Of course, we can’t run this ad. Call me."
"Of course"?
I dialed Mell and made my argument
as to why he could—and should—run my ad. As I rattled off each point, Mell
chuckled, like an indulgent parent listening to his child argue why he should
be allowed to stay up an hour past his bedtime to play Super Mario. Mell waited
until I was done, then said, "So, what have you got for an alternative?"
"Well," I said, "how
‘bout I run something that says, ‘The editor wouldn’t allow me to run the ad I
wanted to. Here’s the URL where you can find it on my web site’?"
"Yeah, I think that’d be okay,”
he said. So here is the ad that will run in the Journal, www.makingit.com/hell_no/ [as well as the
ad that won’t].
What points did I make to Mell as to
why he should run it?
First, newspapers are killing
cartoons. Comic strips have been reduced in size. New strips rarely get a
chance. Local editorial cartoonists are practically extinct. This lack of
support may make people think newspaper cartoons are irrelevant. But the
controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad reminds the world
that cartoons can be a powerful method of communication. We shouldn’t ignore
it.
Second, protestors are using the
threat of violence to keep cartoons from being printed. We shouldn’t give in.
Third, there is no historical
tradition that a drawing of Mohammad is in-and-of-itself offensive. While some
Muslims do not make or show images of Mohammad because of the biblical laws
against graven images, there is a long history of portraits of Muhammad in
Islamic art. His image appears in thousands of mosques and on pendants worn by
many Muslim men. There is even a carving of Mohammad on the wall of the United
States Supreme Court Building, along with other historic lawgivers.
Why don’t the media talk more about
this? Perhaps because not talking about it gives them a convenient
rationalization—religious tolerance—for not showing the offending Danish
cartoons. The real reason: fear. This ruse that any drawing of Mohammad is
offensive reminds me of David Letterman’s comment about the apology CBS issued
after Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl:
"Today, CBS pretended to apologize to the people who are pretending to be
offended." We shouldn’t go along.
And the final point? I think it’s
funny. And if I start second-guessing and softening my cartoons because I’m
afraid someone will get mad —or even violent—then I don’t deserve to ask for
your time to read them.
At their best, cartoons can be
touching, thought provoking, and hilarious all at the same time. That’s what
the Reuben Award celebrates. That’s what I aspire to. Even though I can’t (of
course) run my ad in The Reuben Journal,
I can at least post it on my website. I just may have someone else start my car
for a while.
Footnit
by RCH: NCS is notoriously genteel. As an organization, it
will go to almost any lengths to avoid controversy, particularly controversy
within its ranks. It exists solely to foster good fellowship among cartoonists.
Lazarus’s gentle almost whimsical refusal to run Robinson’s ad is not
surprising. But it is a little disconcerting for a cartoonists’ organization to
decline to get its fingers inky.
BOOK MARQUEE
Checker
Books’ seventh volume of Winsor McCay:
Early Works is out; it was scheduled to appear in August but waited nine
months, the usual period of gestation. ... Alison
Bechdel’s autobio graphic novel, Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic, is to be released June 8 by Houghton Mifflin.
“The book,” Editor & Publisher says, “recounts the cartoonist’s childhood living with a closeted gay father
who taught English and ran a funeral parlor.” When not producing an autobiography,
Bechdel does a comic strip, Dykes to
Watch Out For.
Wandering lonely as a cloud through
the electronic ether the other day, I chanced upon an online magazine called High Hat, www.thehighhat.com , which turns out to be a repository of intelligent writing about cartooning
and comics. Issue No. 6 is presently up and running; the five previous issues
are also in the vicinity (Nos. 1 and 2, 2003; Nos. 3 and 4, 2004; No. 5, 2005).
No. 6 includes essays on Powers, Ty Templeton, Carol Lay, and Carol Tyler (“wife to Binky Brown
creator Justin Green, working
mother, and maybe the greatest little-known cartoonist in this country, or the
least well-known great cartoonist, or some damn thing”), a long interview with
Rancid Raves fave Keith Knight, and
an appreciation of Abner Dean, a
cartooning star of the 1940s and 1950s who almost no one is aware of anymore.
But we should be: his work, in such tomes as It’s a Long Way to Heaven, “looks like gag cartoons,” as Chris
Lanier says, “—there’s a funny drawing, and then a caption that might provide a
laugh—but on closer examination they reveal themselves to be a different
animal.” Dean’s people in his books are all naked (but without genitalia so
they would not offend even the “values” conscious citizen of our present day),
and the comedy they enact is the human comedy, a bleak vision of life on earth
that Dean represents symbolically in picture after picture, so stark and grim
that we must, for self-preservation, laugh at it.
Bob
Staake’s blog for May 9 is entitled “If Cartoonists Only Knew How To Draw,”
a provocation if ever there wuz. “The cartoonist,” Staake begins, “communicates
to his reader ... through the use of a visual vocabulary—a wiggle here and a
line there and a blotch of ink in between. ... The basic nobility of that cause
innoculates (for the most part) cartooning against the accusations that it is a
vocation filled with practitioners (98% white and male) who couldn’t draw their
way out of a paper bag if their life (or their profession) counted on it.
Imagine turning on the Olympics and seeing 78% of the figure skaters fall on
their asses. Imagine if 70% of all domestic flights crashed on take-off.” Not
only is professional cartooning often marred by ineptitude, Staake continues, but
“it fails to recognize why it isn’t better respected as an industry.”
Cartooning isn’t viewed as a legitimate art form, he says. “Individual
cartoonists deserve respect, but just because they earn it doesn’t mean a
positive residue should trickle down upon anyone who puts nib to paper. ...”
Staake attributes the lack of respect paid the profession to more than mere
incompetence: too many cartooners, he says, “fail to push any aesthetic
envelope or embrace even a modicum of visual experimentation,” a posture, he
continues, “as audacious as it is self-delusional. ... The American comic strip
in particular is mired in pop cultural predictability, most syndicated
cartoonists falling back on a well-established vocabulary of visuals and a less
than venturesome imparting of concepts, ideas, humor and characters.” If
cartooning ever achieves legitimacy as an art form, he says, “it will only
occur when cartoonists en masse make the conscious effort to approach their
work with a commitment to fresh self-expression both visually and conceptually
rather than regurgitating its contextual traditions, relying on establish forms
and a resignation to stagnation over experimentation.”
Staake, we hasten to add, practices
what he preaches. You can sample his work at his website, www.bobstaake.com,
or in a book he illustrated that’s just been published by Fantagraphics Books,
Inc.: dubbed “the world’s most nightmarish children’s book,” Struwwelpeter (36 10x10-inch pages;
$14.95) offers ten short poetic tales written in 1844 by German physician
Heinrich Hoffman. Staake has adapted Hoffman faithfully, “all
inappropriateness, Teutonic didacticism and political incorrectness firmly
intact.” In “Slovenly Peter,” we meet a thoroughly unwashed and unkempt kid,
whose “stink exceeds a lethal dose. Don’t believe me? Take a whiff, puke or
poop’s a better sniff!” Cruel Frederick’s abused dog finally turns on his
master, and Pauline, who plays with matches, successfully burns herself up.
That sort of inappropriateness. And Staak
UGLY ART VS. BAD ART
Of
the several blots on the escutcheon of our culture that get my wattles in an
uproar every once in a while, the uppermost one in cartooning is the medium’s
propensity to foster bad art and ugly art. As a visual artform, cartooning
should, perforce, nurture craft and skill at visualization. Instead, it often
tolerates and thereby encourages incompetence and carelessness. Newspaper
cartooning is the only place in our culture that a bad artist can achieve
professional or, at least, commercial status. A bad actor cannot find work; a
bad salesman starves. A bad artist finds employment as a cartoonist doing a
syndicated newspaper comic strip. Or a self-published comic book. Drawing comic
books these days, especially the superhero stripe rolled out by major
publishers, requires a level of proficiency at drawing than bad artists cannot
attain. Not just competence but skill, panache—in style if not in anatomical
accuracy. Self-published comic books, on the other hand, require only
investment capital. And many of them display little else. Fortunately for the artform,
these specimens soon sink in the sea of mediocrity that spawned them: they
surface long enough to satisfy the would-be artist’s ego, then capsize when
they can’t produce enough revenue to satisfy the misguided investor who
financed the project.
Newspaper comics, however, are
different. Garry Trudeau has often
said that in his Doonesbury he made
the newspaper comics safe for bad art. And that is doubtless true. But
cartooning had become a refuge for bad art long before, thanks to James Thurber. Thurber was a writer who
had the good sense to know he couldn’t draw for beans. At the fated moment in
the late 1920s when he was persuaded otherwise, he was sharing office space
with E.B. "Andy" White. The two of them were working for The New Yorker, Harold Ross’s magazine
then in its infancy. Thurber and White were slowly finding their way to a prose
style for the magazine that would distinguish its text in the same way the
cartoonists then working for it distinguished its illustrations. Ross believed
that the best things in the early issues were the cartoons, saying that if he
could somehow elevate the rest of the magazine—chiefly its prose—to the same
level of sophisticated urbanity, he would, at last, have the magazine of his
dreams. In addition to writing "casuals," the short prose paragraphs
for the front section of the magazine, Thurber and White were charged with
polishing the captions of cartoons when the cartoons seemed almost perfect but
not quite. Sometimes the "polishing" turned into complete re-writes.
Over the years, re-captioning cartoons became so customary a practice at The New Yorker that it was widely
acknowledged that the cartoonists themselves were not entirely responsible for
the hilarities their drawings perpetrated. George
Price, for example, apparently only once did a cartoon of which he was the
author of both drawing and caption. (And it was, in fact, not a captioned
cartoon but a funny drawing that celebrated the Yuletide by depicting several
department store Santas riding the subway in costume; it was used on the
cover.) In recent decades, however, the magazine abandoned this whorey
practice: nowadays, with one exception, the cartoons are the concoctions solely
of the cartoonists, who devise both picture and caption. The exception debuted
a few months ago—the cartoon captioning contest on the last page that invites
readers to supply captions for an incongruous tableau supplied by one or
another of the magazine’s contract cartooners. Here, for example, is a drawing
depicting several naked people seated on stage under a banner, “Welcome
Stockholders,” and one of the naked folks, a man, is standing at the podium,
saying—something. Another: a couple of adults walking down the hallway of a
school, children walking on the walls and the ceiling overhead.
At the time Thurber became a
cartoonist, however, he and White were writing most of the captions for the
magazine’s cartoons. Thurber also doodled. A "doodle" is a highly
technical term in the cartooner trade: as the venerable historian and cartoonist Coulton Waugh put it, "a doodle
is a simple basic shape, a form one works out idly while thinking of something
else." As Thurber was thinking of verbal witticisms, he apparently made
crude sketches of his favorite subjects—or, perhaps, of the things he feared
most. Women and dogs. He realized that his drawings were incompetent
excrescences; he habitually crumpled the scraps of paper upon which he’d
doodled and threw them into the wastebasket. We don’t know what prompted White
to retrieve one of these ineptitudes the first time he did it, but he did. And
he then gave it a caption. According to legend, he repeated this exercise
several times over a few days or weeks and, subsequently, showed the captioned
doodles to Ross, offering them as serious candidates for publication as
cartoons. Ross looked at these miserably maladroit scrawls and, cognizant of
Thurber’s penchant for practical joking, thought White was in league with
Thurber, that both of them were pulling his leg. He refused to consider publishing
any of them. Then, to the everlasting detriment of cartooning, Ross saw reviews
of the book White and Thurber did together in 1929, Is Sex Necessary? The reviewers praised Thurber’s drawings, and
Ross, startled no doubt, relented and began publishing Thurber’s
"cartoons." The first appeared in the January 31, 1931 issue of The New Yorker and ushered in the Age
of Incompentent Art, giving bad art a home in American cartooning.
For a long time, Thurber was the
only practitioner of this peculiar performance that purported to raise
oafishness to art—or, at least, to commercial viability. Then Trudeau came
along, trying, with only occasional success, to imitate Jules Feiffer. By the late 1960s when Trudeau’s admiration was
transforming itself into the sincerest form of flattery, Feiffer had made a
career of his acerbic analysis of artsy avant garde pretension in cartoons that
he labored to make look as offhand as The
New Yorker’s prose casuals. The angular style of his earliest efforts for
the Village Voice in the fall of 1956
evoked the UPA style of animated cartooning, which, by the mid-1950s, had
infected much commercial magazine art, illustrations for advertisements as well
as articles. Almost immediately, however, Feiffer evolved his own style, a
loose-limbed sketchy manner that seemed dashed off, the epitome of casualness.
In later years, he was known to draw the individual figures that made up his
cartoon many times, over and over, until he produced several that were, in his
eyes, acceptably loose looking. These he would clip out and paste into the
usual montage of his cartoon. The objective was to preserve the air of
spontaneity that prevailed in the sketches, a goal Feiffer successfully
attained with every one of his published efforts—good art, all of them. Not a
bad drawing in the lot. When Trudeau tried aping Feiffer, he achieved only the
sketchiness but none of the elan that a Feiffer drawing then evinced.
Trudeau’s success, which was
achieved more by the audacity of his wit than the polish of his pictures,
opened the way for others, many of whom could not display an artistic skill
even remotely akin to Trudeau’s. (Trudeau, who majored in graphic design at
Yale, is actually a competent artist—as his strip since his sabbatical in
1983-84 amply demonstrates.)
And so a doodle that escaped the
captivity of a wastebasket in the late 1920s has matured into a host of
varieties of bad or ugly art. Bad art is incompetent; ugly art is competent but
has no eye appeal. It is unattractive because its compositions lack symmetry or
balance or its linear treatment is too tentative or monotonous. Bad art
reflects no confidence in line or composition; ugly art offers no variety in
texture or line. Cathy is bad because
the cartoonist can barely draw. Dilbert and Pearls before Swine, a recent
phenomenon that has captured the so-called imagination of editors everywhere,
are ugly. They are ugly because they are visually uninteresting; they are, in
short, dull. Brevity, a new arrival
on the pages of the News-Gazette, is
another of the same ilk. Agnes, on
the other hand, is neither bad nor ugly. Although it seems to be merely
squiggles on paper, cartooner Tony
Cochran displays a knowledge of anatomy and an ability to depict it; his
characters are recognizably the same personages every time he draws them; he
spots blacks and supplies shading, which gives his squiggles eye appeal. But
too many of the medium’s recent manifestations are either bad or ugly, alas.
At this rate, we’ll eventually reach
the point at which comic strips will be described as a medium in the same way
television is: it’s a medium because it is neither well done nor rare.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
According
to Entertainment Weekly, a Christian
anti-porn ministry called XXXchurch has published a New Testament with a cover
proclaiming “Jesus Loves Porn Stars.” The plan is to distribute the books at
erotica conventions starting in June. Says founder and pastor Craig Gross:
“Whether you’re in the porn industry or addicted to it, we, the church, are
here to help.” He’ll learn, of course, that “on your knees” means something
different in porn.
Halliburton, the notorious
government contractor and honeypot for Darth Cheney, has just been awarded a
$385 million grant to build a network of detention centers across the country.
Each of them will be capable, according to report, of detaining up to 5,000
people. What Bush League plans do you suppose this hints at? They say the
contract is merely a contingency maneuver; the centers probably won’t ever be
built. But what contingency prompted the preparedness? The multi-million dollar
grant, meanwhile, will doubtless be spent on a coast-to-coast search for
possible sites among the military installations that have been shut down.
There’s not enough money for much more than that.
Finally, there’s this: in Opus 179,
I quoted Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles
Times, who compared the Danish Dozen to the forthcoming movie, “The Da
Vinci Code,” wondering if the news media, with their newly discovered
sensitivity to the religious convictions of their audience, would be as
circumspect with the movie as they were being with the pictures of Muhammad.
Said Rutten: “The novel’s plot is a vicious little stew of bad history,
fanciful theology and various slanders directed at the Vatican and Opus Dei, an
organization to which thousands of Catholic people around the world belong. In
this vile fantasy, the Catholic hierarchy is corrupt and manipulative and Opus
Dei is a violent, murderous cult. The late Pope John Paul II is accused of
subverting the canonization process by pushing sainthood for Josemaría Escrivá,
Opus’ founder, as a payoff for the organization’s purported ‘rescue’ of the
Vatican bank. The plot’s principal villain is a masochistic albino Opus Dei
‘monk’ for whom murder is just one of many sadistic crimes. (It probably won’t
do any good to point out that, while it’s unclear whether Opus Dei has any
albino members, there definitely are no monks.) ... Neither it nor its members
are corrupt or murderous. It is a moral—though thankfully not legal—libel to
suggest otherwise. Further, it is deeply offensive to allege—even
fictionally—that the Roman Catholic Church would tolerate Opus Dei, or any
organization, if it were any of those things. So how will the American news
media respond to the release of this film? Certainly, there should be reviews
since this is a news event, though it would be a surprise if any of them had
something substantive to say about these issues. But what about publishing
feature stories, interviews or photographs? Isn’t that offensive, since they
promote the film? More to the point, should newspapers and television networks
refuse to accept advertising for this film since plainly that would be
promoting hate speech? Will our editors and executives declare their revulsion
at the very thought of profiting from bigotry?”
Rutten concluded that the media
would barge right on with stories about the movie, effectively promoting box
office receipts and, incidentally, several monstrous canards about the Catholic
Church. And he was almost right. But many of the stories—most of those in the
major weekly newsmagazines—debunked the so-called “history” of Brown’s novel.
They did, in other words, have “something substantive to say about the issues,”
the part I boldfaced in Rutten’s remarks. But otherwise, a plethora of photos
and sidebars, all of which will prod attendance at the movie. If the movie had
been about Muhammad .........
REPRINT
When Darrin Bell’s Candorville began in October 2003, it was apparently about the
multi-ethnic, multi-racial urban milieu. Lemont Brown, the lead character, is
African-American, and his best friend, Sus Homeless persons showed up once a
week in the early months of the strip, snoozing in boxes in the alleyways. Says
one homeless man to another: “The hours are good, but the pay stinks.”
Susan
and Lemont spend many leisure hours on the rooftop of their apartment building,
musing about the world around them. “I think Reverend Wilfred’s gone off the
deep end,” Lemont says. “He told us how Jesus preached peace ... and then said
the U.S. should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.”
Later
in the week, Lemont confronts Reverend Wilfred with this seemingly
contradictory message, but the Reverend explains: “If Jesus were here, he’d
agree with me that we should send ninja assassins with nuclear machetes to
murder Venezuela’s President.” Lemont is aghast: “Jesus would what?” Wilfred:
“Oh, not in so many words, of course, but his meaning would be quite clear.”
Reverend
Wilfred also encourages his flock to vote Republican after he is given $50,000
in tax-payer funds from the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
Most
of the comedy and satire is entirely verbal, arising in conversational
exchanges among the characters. But Bell also deploys a unique verbal-visual
device: a strip of two panels, one of which explains, often by satiric
contradiction, the other. Here, in the first panel labeled 2001, Lemont, in the
dredlock fashion of the day, is watching tv as the on-camera reporter says: “In
other news, energy company executives are meeting with Dick Cheney to craft
American’s energy policy.” The second panel, dated 2005, shows Lemont with a
crop cut, still watching tv, from which the following issues forth: “In other
news, nobody seems to know why energy prices are so high or why energy
companies are enjoying the highest profits in history.”
In
another two-panel strip, each panel labeled November 2005, Lemont is again
watching his tv, which says: “This just in—President Bush said today it was
absurd for anyone to think America tortures its war prisoners.” In the next
panel, the reporter is saying: “In other news, Vice President Cheney is
lobbying Congress to allow the CIA to torture war prisoners.” Political satire
doesn’t get any more pointed than that.
Lemont
asks a friend: “Dude, what’s it to you whether I say ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Merry
Christmas’?” Replies the friend: “Well, my belief system is so fragile that if
I don’t hear ‘Merry Christmas’ everywhere I go this time of year, I’ll stop
believing in God altogether. I’ll become a pervert, I’ll abandon my wife and
kids and take to a life of crime.” Lemont, smirking slightly: “Well, as long a
you have a rational explanation.” The friend: “Fox News is right: you liberals
hate my children.”
Bell’s
style deploys a simple bold line, no feathering or texture, and uncluttered
panels shaded in tones of gray. He also frequently resorts to a close-up of a
character’s nose in a small panel, a labor-saving device that frees him up
enough to draw another strip, Rudy Park,
which is written by the heretofore mysterious “Theron Heir,” lately revealed to be a journalistic personage named
Matt Richtel. Rudy Park had one of
the most unfortunate launches in comic strip history: it burst on the newspaper
world in early September 2001, not a month that anyone was thinking much about
comic strips or comedy. The strip has, subsequently, recovered.
As
might be evident from this, the 31-year-old Bell has a longer history in
cartooning than the short syndicated history of Candorville suggests. He has been drawing the strip in one or
another of its pre-syndication guises for thirteen years. In its first
incarnation in 1992 as a project for Bell’s highschool AP English, it was
called Lemont Brown. “Candorville,
the name of the city where Lemont lives, was rarely mentioned,” Bell said
during one of the Washington Post’s online
interviews. “That changed when I realized Candorville would appear much higher
on any alphabetized list than Lemont.”
While
attending the University of California at Berkeley in 1995, Bell took up
editorial cartooning. He continued Lemont
Brown as a daily strip in the campus paper, the Daily Californian, but it was his political cartooning that first
thrust him into a national spotlight. On Septemb The
next morning, the Daily Californian reported
that more than 100 students clogged the paper’s lobby to protest what they saw
as the “racist” message of the cartoon which portrayed Muslims as rather
simple-minded fanatics. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, xenophobia peaked,
and anyone in the U.S. who “looked Middle Eastern” was at risk, and the
stereotypical images of Bell’s cartoon were seen as fueling the growing
prejudice. The protesters demanded an apology from the paper, but the Daily Cal wouldn’t back down. Quoted in
the San Francisco Chronicle, Editor
Janny Hu said: “We maintain that the editorial cartoon fell within the realm of
fair comment and the First Amendment.” The paper subsequently published letters
on both sides of the issue, but that wasn’t good enough for the more determined
of the protesters, who took the matter to the Student Senate in the form of a
bill that condemned the editorial cartoon and called for the paper to publish a
front-page apology and to subject its staff to “mandatory” (later changed to
“voluntary”) diversity training. Finally, in a maneuver that looked startlingly
like extortion, the bill recommended that the newspaper’s rent be raised for
the offices it occupied in a campus building. The irony was very nearly
overwhelming: Berkeley, remember, was the bastion of the Free Speech Movement
of 1960s.
The
pending legislation drew letters blistering with outrage from several political
cartoonists, including two Pulitzer winners and past presidents of the
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, David Horsey of the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, and Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic. Said Benson:
“I was under the impression that only in totalitarian regimes are such blatant
efforts to choke off free expression allowed. Those in the Student Senate who
are trying to gag individual views which they deem unacceptable have completely
misread the cartoon. Bell was focusing his fire at the Islamic fundamentalists
responsible for the terror attacks against the World Trade Center, not at
Muslims in general.” The effort to extort an apology from the paper by bringing
financial pressure to bear was, Benson said, “completely antithetical to the
American tradition of unfettered free speech.” Horsey, referring to his own
experience with protesters, said he was quite familiar with “interest groups
who purposely misread and find unintended meanings in cartoons primarily to
forward their own political agendas. ... A fair reading of [Bell’s cartoon],”
he continued, “would make it clear the intent of the cartoonist was to
criticize terrorism, not Islam or Islamic people in general. ... It is
outrageous that the senators are giving any thought to a measure which would
seek to stifle freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This is an action
worthy of some authoritarian regime, not a student government centered in a
great university which is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas. ...
Threatening sanctions of a free press—even a student-run press—stinks of
McCarthyism.”
The
bill was, to the best of my knowledge, never passed. The final irony of the
episode is that Bell, accused of racism, is somewhat a racial minority himself.
With a white Jewish mother and a Black father, Bell is the very definition of
biracial. He defiantly chooses neither: “I’m both,” he says, “—not half, but
both is the way I look at it. ... Most biracial people know they have feet in
two cultures, and they’re okay with that. It’s the rest of the world that wants
them to choose.” Some of his Candorville strips have provoked a certain amount of flak, he admits, “primarily from White
critics who feel it’s their duty to tell me I’m being offensive to Black
people.” Anyone who thinks he’s white is “half wrong,” Bell says.
While
at UC Berkeley, Bell showed his editorial cartoons to the Los Angeles Times, which published them as freelance submissions.
The paper also ran some Lemont Brown strips.
“I sent them Lemont Brown every day
for a year,” Bell laughed as he talked to Mike Peters at the Dallas Morning News in 2004, “and
finally they agreed to run it once a week ‘and then we’ll see.’”
About
then, Bell met Richtel, a journalist at the Oakland
Tribune who was developing the Rudy
Park comic strip. Bell continued freelancing editorial cartoons for a year
or so after Rudy Park debuted, but
once Candorville started, he gave up
editooning.
Candorville, which now appears in about
300 newspapers, is “semi-autobiographical,” Bell said. “A lot of me is in
Lemont, especially his anxieties. Only difference is my ‘Susan’ is actually my
wife, not a platonic friend. I’m much, much luckier than Lemont.” Bell told
Mike Peters that his wife, Laura, is a big fan of Susan, and Susan even looks a
bit like her. “They have some common personality traits,” he said, “but they
are different enough that if I do something not particularly flattering, Laura
knows it’s not her.”
As
for the rest of the strip’s cast, “it’s a balancing act of fiction and real
life,” Bell said. “I’ve taken all my friends and squeezed them into three
characters. They are amalgamations of what’s going on in my life, not a diary.
I can think of situations and throw them at the characters, and the way they
react is from my life.”
Clyde,
the aspiring rapper and would-be thug, is Lemont’s childhood friend, but,
unlike Lemont, he has never stopped being angry at the world. Said Peters:
“Nothing is ever his fault. Nobody matters but Clyde. Since life’s unfair, the
only way to win is to cheat your way through it.”
Clyde
is a fairly overt stereotype and a negative one at that. To which Bell
responded during his online interview: “Unfortunately, the fact that something
may be a stereotype doesn’t mean there’s no truth in it. There are many, many people like Clyde. I think most of them hang out on my corner in
Oakland. I try my best to get at the heart of why he behaves the way he does
because I don’t think ignoring people who make all the wrong choices will ever
help them make the right ones. I want people who might see a lot of themselves
in Clyde to see him make mistakes, to see why he’s wrong, to laugh at that part
of themselves, and, hopefully, to think twice the next time they have an urge
to act like Clyde. I balance Clyde against Lemont, the protagonist of the strip,
for that purpose. Where Clyde goes wrong, Lemont goes right and puts things
into perspective.”
Bell
tries to avoid being preachy, he told Peters. “Being preachy is easy. But I
won’t deal with any heavy issue unless I can find either a joke in it—that doesn’t
belittle the issue—or find a truth in it that will make people laugh,
especially if they haven’t thought of it before. Making people laugh is
essential.” If he can’t find a comedy in a situation, “I put it on the back
burner until the right angle comes to me,” he said.
“I
want to make people laugh and think at the same time,” Bell said during the
online session. “I think you can’t poke fun at the important ironies of life—or
even the frivolous ones—without being an activist in someone’s eyes. Candorville’s social activism is an
expression of my naive belief that people should never be afraid to ask
questions, even if those questions are unpopular. I don’t pretend to have any
answers, but I do have an awful lot of questions. ... Whether I make people laugh
or I make them angry, or I make them shake their head in disbelief, or I just
make them yawn, I realize how fortunate I am every day that I get to wake up
and create something that other people will read. I get to do that, and I get
to draw funny pictures. I get to do that for a living. It won’t make me rich,
but it makes me happy and fulfilled, and I’m thankful for every day I get to do
it.”
FUNNYBOOK
FAN FARE
The second issue of American Virgin delivers on the promise of the first issue. The
smarmy religious virginity of its protagonist is increasingly assaulted by the
increasing misfortunes of his life: his finance killed in Africa, Adam goes
there to retrieve her body, accompanied by his potty-mouthed sister. En route,
Adam loses his holier-than-thou cool more than once. He comes upon
bare-breasted native women and little boys diddling themselves, offenses to his
evangelical sensibilities. Rude stuff. This series will either end with his
re-instatement as a fanatic or with his complete disillusionment.
Loveless No. 6 is a beautifully
rendered, done-in-one tale of African-American life before and after the
supposed emancipation of the Civil War. Drawn by Danijel Zezelj, the entire
issue takes place around a night-time campfire in the woods, and the surroundings—the
trees like silent judging sentinels—are exquisitely evoked in fading light and
deepening shadow.
The
fourth issue of The Exterminators continues
as one of the medium’s most disgustingly intriguing enterprises. But the
enormous fat lady on the couch, where she’s been sitting, unable to rise, since
1992, is a bit much; and her complaint is that a rat is biting her on the ass
from underneath. ... Alan Moore’s last
issue of Tom Strong, No. 36, is one
of his sf bafflers, moving in realms I cannot recognize. Chris Sprouse’s art, as always, entertains. But the story, which
eases us up to the “end of the world” signaling the end of the comic book and
(?) of Tom Strong? Is he dying? Being transported to another plane of
existence? Well, it’s probably excellent, but not my cup of tea, except for the
last page, where all the Strongs stand on a balcony, waving farewell to all of
us.
Next Wave, now up to No. 4, continues to
be one of the best superhero romps in the funnybooks—mordantly witty with snappy
patter among the characters and a smart-alecky narrator. Warren Ellis clearly has his tongue in his cheek, but the
adventures, despite the light-hearted patois, are threatening enough and his
heroes ingenious enough in extracting themselves. In No. 2, they dispose of the
giant dragon in the purple shorts; in Nos. 3 and 4, a grizzled cop is infected
by a life form that turns him into a giant robot, but the heroic ensemble
manages to eradicate the disease, restoring the cop to life as he knew it,
albeit a little the worse for wear. Ellis produces tracts of action without
much dialogue, and it’s fun to follow it. And Stuart Immonen’s art is crisp and clear, boldly outlined with
fineline trim. I’m reminded of Mike
Mignola but without shadows and so many solid blacks. Beautiful. And
thoroughly expressive of whatever the plot needs. The simplicity of the artwork
is suitably enhanced by Dave McCaig’s colors,
which give nuance as well as substance to simple shapes and outline figures. A
final big plus: the opening page in each issue introduces us to the characters
and their various idiosyncracies and powers. Nicely done, Ellis.
Continuing
the parade of excellence but this time with a genuine, full-bore slapstick
send-up of superheroics, we have Truth,
Justin and the American Way, written by Aaron Williams and Scott
Kurtz and drawn—ah, illuminated, levitated—by Guiseppe Ferrario. In bare
outline, the story is simple enough. We meet Justin Cannel, a nerdy stockroom
boy, who, on the eve of his wedding to the toothsome Bailey, is going to his
bachelor party. His friends have sent him a box with a costume to wear for the
occasion, but, unbeknownst to them or to Justin, an alien spy, fleeing the
authorities with a super-endowed costume in a box under his arm, has switched
packages, leaving the powered longjohns on the front seat of Justin’s car.
Justin gets home and puts the suit on, and it turns out to have a mind of its
own but one commanded by whatever Justin says that the suit interprets as a
directive. So when Justin, after donning the garment, says, “This thing doesn’t
fit!” the suit promptly shrinks in every extremity until it fits him perfectly.
The suit endows him with super strength, too. Wearing it, Justin goes to his
bachelor party, which is being held in a room in a swank downtown hotel. And it
has just been raided by an operative of the FBI, looking for the suit. When
Justin won’t give up the suit fast enough, the guy—or, Baxter McGee, to invoke
what he offers as a name—waves his pistol around, discharges it accidentally
and shoots Justin, whose costume, naturally, makes him impervious to bullets.
Justin, in an uncharacteristic retaliatory fit, punches McGee and sends him
flying across the room. When McGee gets up and shoves his gun under Justin’s
nose, the costume causes Justin to disassemble the piece. McGee then pulls out
a grenade, arms it, and tosses it to Justin. Justin wants to throw it out the
window, but his friends warn him that there are people down below. “What do you
want me to do?” Justin blurts out, “—fly away with it?” The suit interprets
that as a command and promptly activates its flying mechanism, sending Justin
upward, smashing through the ceilings of successive floors of the hotel until
he reaches the rooftop swimming pool. When the grenade goes off, Justin is
dislodged from the floor of the pool and plummets down through the holes he
made going up until he’s back in the room where it all began. Then, seconds
later, the pool drains through the holes Justin made, descending through the
hotel in a cataract. Justin and his friends leave the hotel (and the damage
they’ve inflicted on it), pretending to be dissatisfied with the hotel’s
service; they continue the party at Bailey’s apartment. She comes home and is
understandably distressed to see her place trashed by the adolescent behavior
of Justin’s beer-guzzling buddies. That brings us to the end of No. 2 with only
another 2-3 issues promised in this limited series.
Well, I guess the story isn’t as simple to outline as I thought it was. But the idea is: a nerdy teenager gets to wear a self-actuating super suit that interprets the kid’s every wish as a command, and trouble ensues. Also comedy, most of which is due to the superb rendering by Ferrario, a 36-year-old Italian who, for the last twelve years, has been working in animation. I learned all that by visiting Kurtz’s website, www.pvponline.com , but as I watched the action unfold in the comic book, I was pretty confident that the artist was an animator: it has all the tell-tale earmarks—no linear loose-ends so the linework supplies leak-proof color-holds throughout, for one thing, masterful comedic pacing for another, plus visual hilarities galore, manic exaggerated expressiveness in the actions and reactions of the characters—but more than that, the artwork displays an absolute command of the medium. Narrative breakdowns, panel composition, timing—all executed flawlessly with an eye towards creating humor at every possible turn. Ferrario’s line flexes from bold to fine and back again, a thing of beauty in itself, and he also did the coloring, I believe (no one is credited with it), and his colors add nuance and emphasis, not to mention background detail, on every page. The story, mildly amusing in itself, is turned into a major comedic achievement solely by Ferrario’s interpretation, his refinements and sight gags, including incidental caricatures of notable personages. The joy in reading this book derives entirely from the pictures. Here are a couple pages.
In the first, we see Justin
stopping at the liquor store to pick up a keg of beer for his bachelor party.
Notice from the 1970s tv series “Sanford and Son,” Red Foxx and Demond Wilson
in the foreground of the top panel. The perspective in this panel, by the way,
is that of a security camera. What a hoot! The kegs that Justin lifts at the
bottom are not empty: he thinks they are because the suit has given him,
without telling him, super strength so a full keg feels to him like its empty.
One panel might make the point with the aid, say, of a caption; but two panels
do the job visually with no verbal accompaniment. (Subsequently, the liquor
store clerk tries to lift one of the “empties” and we find out, for sure, it’s
not empty.) On the other page in this vicinity, we see Baxter McGee in the
first panel; he’s contemplating Justin’s super-powered flight upwards through
several floors of the hotel, clutching the grenade. (McGee thinks Justin is a
communist operative.) The panel composition makes sure we see the hole in the
ceiling above McGee so we’re ready for Justin to drop out of it in the next
panel. Then panels 3 and 4 prepare us for the deluge of the descending swimming
pool, which arrives in panel 5. The change in perspective in panel 4 emphasizes
the characters’ dawning realization of impending dampness and thereby heightens
suspense for a moment before the liquid catastrophe is upon them; nice touch,
nicely dramatic—and cinematic. In a final risible fillip, Ferrario next shows
us the waterfall as it completes its descent and spews through and out of the
hotel into the street outside. The action creates the comedy, and it does so in
the continuous manner of an animated cartoon, one thing leading to another in
hilarious succession.
In
recent years, fans have accepted great variation in drawing styles for comic
books, making possible cartoony mannerisms like Ferrario’s as well as the
detailed realism of, say, Howard
Chaykin, the stark expressionism of Phil
Hester and Ande Parks, and the
linear precision of Eduardo Risso.
We are lightyears away from the days when everyone was expected to draw like
Neal Adams. And so we’ve seen plenty of “animation style” renderings in the
last few years, many of which are as cartoony—as Warner Brothers-ish—as
Ferarrio’s. You might be tempted to think Justin is just another in that style. You’d be wrong. Ferarrio works in that
style, but he elevates it to high comedic art. Don’t miss this one.
And Then There’s Liberality For All. We may safely assume, I think, that Mike Mackey and Donny Lin, the writer and artist who perpetrated the so-called
comic book Liberality for All, expect
the more liberally inclined of their readers, like me, to foam at the mouth
when untangling the tripe of their book’s first issue. The concept of Liberality, after all, is to debunk a
history that is imagined to fit what these authors believe the liberal vision
is. We should be irate, then, at what they suppose is a liberal administration
of government. In Mackey’s heavy-handed reconstruction of recent history, Al
Gore won the 2000 election, precipitating a couple generations of liberal
presidencies. Gore’s response to 9/11 was to “negotiate” with the terrorists,
resulting, by 2021, the time of the tale rehearsed here, in Osama bin Laden
becoming the Afghanistan ambassador to the United Nations. We see bin Laden,
plotting with his cohorts and saying, “The American government poses no threat
now. We will negotiate with the infidels until our daggers are the sharpest.”
And, addressing the U.N., he thanks U.S. President Chelsea Clinton and Vice
President Michael Moore—“If it were not for American leaders like them, I would
not be here today,” he says and then continues to “apologize” for the “misunderstanding of September 11th,
2001.” After this orientation, we follow the exploits of Sean Hannity,
part-time radio talk-show host, who now has a mechanical arm and moonlights on
a heroic mission—to protect America from an atomic attack in the form of
briefcase bomb and, eventually, to restore a conservative government. He is
assisted, in this installment, by a mustached bald-headed guy named Liddy, who
regrets the disbanding of the NRA (“so many cold, dead hands,” he murmurs) and
says he hates “all the electronic gun control junk” he finds on his weapon.
“The best gun control,” he says, is achieved “by using two hands.” Throughout
the adventure, Mackey slips political grenades into his tale: the briefcase
bomb is, we learn, “Iraqi-designed,” a sly assertion that rejuvenates the
mythical partnership between bin Laden and Saddam.
Despite
the ham-fisted political message, the book is adroitly constructed in the best
comic book manner. As we turn the pages, we are tugged along by three
storylines: one in pictures, another in captions, and a third in staticky
speech balloons that represent radio broadcasts. The latter are divided into
two “voices”—right and left. In effect, then, as we watch the action unfold
before us, we are treated to three “voice over” strands. Here’s a portion of
one of the radio strands: “I will never forget what the liberal left has done
to our country ... our nation’s once mighty military conscripted into U.N.
troops! God taken off of our money and out of the Pledge of Allegiance, not
that anyone should swear allegiance to what the ‘new’ American flag represents!
And now Iraq, Iran and the Unified Republic of Korea all have nukes!”
In
captions, we have another voice in a melancholy drone: “That which is given and
not earned is seldom appreciated,” implying that the left-leaning generation in
power has done nothing to earn their freedoms (but that the out-of-power
right-wing has, in some unspecified way, earned theirs, the same freedoms).
“Like spoiled children, we [the hapless citizenry under the Clinton-Moore
regime] squandered our fortune of freedom and liberty and were shocked when it
was gone. Now that generation of fools stands on the shoulders of giants and,
with outstretched arms laden with wanton bowls of entitlement, unashamedly
asks, ‘Please, sir, I want some more!’ Those who fought for our rights etched,
then eroded, a path of destiny for this country to flow. The turbulent current
that boldly swept this country through time has been diverted by poor
leadership. Our nation’s course, which was once like a forceful torrent, has
become an insignificant stream, taking the path of least resistance ... the
flow of freedom that welled forth from our nation’s capitol has stagnated into
the dank swamp of its geologically historic roots. Many liberties have been
lost there, pulled down to the dark murky depths.” This funereal dirge is also
a call to arms: by denigrating the present state of affairs, revolution is
encouraged, leading, we must suppose, to the restoration of right-thinking good
guys to governing power.
Hannity
and Liddy survive their first encounter with the law enforcement agencies of
the present regime, but they still must capture the briefcase bomb. Lin’s
artwork is thoroughly competent, distinguished by a rickety but appealingly bold
line without much feathering, and his coloring participates in the propaganda:
the early sequences featuring Hannity are in red while the panels focused on
his opponents are blue. Cute.
While
I appreciate the cunning manipulation of the medium despite the purple prose of
the captioned voice-over, the best part of the book is its revelation of the
alleged “thought processes” of the Right. How do these guys think? And why do
they think that way? In Mackey’s drone, we find the answer. Their opposition to
the Left is, if we are to judge from what we see here, based upon the
conviction that any deviation from the Received Wisdom of the Right leads, as
naturally as water flows downhill, to the deterioration of society and, by
extension, of the quality of human life itself. There’s an inexorability about
this nightmare: give an inch, and the whole fabric of society as we know it
will be torn asunder. The only way to deal with bin Laden is to stomp him into
the ground. That’s it. Anything less than that will inevitably lead to his
assuming power in the U.N. And in the next issue of Liberality, it seems he’ll become President of the U.S. So we must hold the line against any
corruption of the purity of Right thinking. No compromise is possible. (So a
democratic form of government, in which compromise is the essence, is out of
the question.)
I
can understand now, better, the opinion of a right-wing-nut friend of mine who
has no objection to gays’ sexual orientation and practices but will not endorse
the idea of gay marriage because it would lead, inevitably, to old men marrying
young boys and, hence, pedophilia would be legalized and run rampant. Marriage
would be corrupted beyond redemption. When I pointed out that condoning
marriage between a man and a woman did not, ipso facto, devolve into the
marriage of old men and pre-pubescent girls—there are laws prohibiting
under-age marriage without parental consent—it made no difference. Not that it
matters much. Marriage is already hopelessly corrupted. When, centuries ago,
societies slowly gave up the practice of arranging marriages as if they were
real estate—in which women were regarded as the property of the male
population— “love” became the basis for marriage. And if “love” can be the
reason for marrying, the absence of “love” is sufficient reason for divorce;
hence, the divorce rate soared until it almost matches the marriage rate.
Marriage—i.e., family life as we used to know it—has been completely destroyed
by the insinuation into the otherwise perfectly reasonable property “contract”
the notion of “love.” So why worry about the effects of gay marriage upon this
decayed and disgraced institution?
BUSHWHACKING (continued as a permanent perpetuation)
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, a sometimes
right-tilting weekly newsmagazine, concludes the May 22 issue with an editorial
saying: “For Republicans to even try to present themselves to voters [this
fall] as fiscal conservatives after five years of reckless budget-busting, is
not just absurd. It is insulting.” It is, he correctly asserts, “hypocrisy on
stilts.” That’s good: hypcrisy on stilts.
In
his column for May 16, Ted Rall, eternal
gadfly and art-wiz, takes up the “secret” (no more) government eavesdropping
effort, asking: “If losing our privacy can prevent another 9/11, isn’t it worth
it?” His answer: “No. Hell no. First and foremost, domestic spying is not an
anti-terrorism program. It is terrorism.” And he reminds us of how absurd the
idea of electronic eavesdropping is to begin with: surely, if bin Laden and his
operatives were shrewd enough to engineer the airplanes-as-missiles scheme,
they’d be smart enough to know that telephone communication, whether by corner
pay phone or cell, is not a good way to stay in touch with each other. Surely
they know their phones, whatever devices they may use, are being tapped. And
then Rall wonders why we are so peeved over the NSA data-mining and domestic
surveillance efforts. In the 1990s, he reminds us, a NSA factotum “freely
admitted to the French magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur that its Echelon keyword and voice-recognition software system
sought to intercept ‘every communication in the world.’” So why are we shocked, shocked, these days, a decade later, to find out the guy knew what he was talking
about? It’s been going on for years. And we ostensibly knew about it.
In
another recent column, Rall discusses GeeDubya’s messianic vision of himself as
savior of the world. “Despite the man’s wacky religiosity,” Rall writes, “I
have been giving Bush the benefit of a small amount of remaining doubt after
five years of the most disastrous rule this nation has ever suffered. I
believed that he was breathtakingly bigoted, stupid, and ignorant. But I didn’t
think he was out of his mind. Until now.” What happened that changed Rall’s
mind is that George WMD Bush denied Seymour Hersh’s contention in The New Yorker that the Bush League was
contemplating nuking Iran, but in denying it, GeeDubya also said that he
reserves the right to wage preemptive war—and that he hasn’t taken the military
option, including nukes, off the table. “Bushspeak analysis shows that it’s no
denial at all,” Rall says, and he goes on: “Many people have asked me during
the last year whether I thought Bush would attack Iran. I said no, because he’s
out of troops, out of cash and out of political capital. He couldn’t, so he
wouldn’t.” Now Rall isn’t so sure: “You don’t need troops, money or the support
of the American people when God talks to you. And when you’re insane.”
All
the buzz in early May was about Stephen
Colbert’s “blistering tribute” to George W. (“Warlord”) Bush at the White
House Correspondents Dinner. GeeDubya, it sez here in the Editor & Publisher report, “was not amused.” It was a brilliant
bit of satire, though—no question. The eerie thing about it was how silent the
room was as Colbert’s purpose began to emerge, enlarge, and then explode. All
those hard-nosed correspondents evidently were too intimidated by the Bush
League to actually laugh at some pretty funny remarks. For example, Colbert, in
his persona as a witless but dedicated conservative Bushite, criticizes the
press for it’s negative attitude about GeeDubya. About the recent personnel
changes at the White House, Colbert says, “you write, ‘Oh, they’re just rearranging
the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ First of all, that is a terrible metaphor,”
Colbert continues. “This administration is not sinking. This administration is
soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!”
(a reference to an aerial disaster equal in tragedy if not body count to the
sinking of the Titanic). The press corps sat there, frozen in terror at what
GeeDubya might say or do. Would he leave the head table, where he was seated,
just 15 feet from Colbert? Would he just sit there and continue sulking? Or
would he send for the Secret Service hit squad to rub out the offending
comedian? No one knew for sure. You can find the complete transcript at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002461887 . (If this URL isn’t all on one line, copy it and paste it into your browser.)
And if you Google for Stephen Colbert, you eventually will find a videotape of
his presentation, which adds the dimension of the silence of the room. Colbert’s
chutzpah in continuing his gutsy routine without much encouragement from the
audience—and certainly nothing but sullen silence from his target—is
astonishing, a ringing, albeit silent, endorsement of his show business
dedication.
With
the so-called Iranian crisis, the Bush League is up to its usual trick, foreign
policy by foot-stamping. GeeDubya stamps his foot and demands that some other
country do as he says. He won’t talk to them until they do as he tells them to.
Unfortunately, if they do exactly what he tells them to, there won’t be
anything to talk about when they start talking.
Finally,
I can’t resist quoting the following in its entirety.
I’m the Decider
by Roddy McCorley
Well, it
took me awhile, but I finally realized what "I’m the decider" reminds
me of. It sounds like something a
character in a Dr Seuss book might say. So with apologies to the late Mr.
Geisel, here is some idle speculation as to what else such a character might
say:
I’m the decider.
I pick and I choose.
I pick among whats.
And choose among whos.
And as I decide
Each particular day,
The things I decide on
All turn out that way.
I decided on Freedom for all of Iraq.
And now that we have it,
I’m not looking back.
I decided on tax cuts
That just help the wealthy.
And Medicare changes
That aren’t really healthy.
And parklands and wetlands—
Who needs all that stuff?
I decided that none
Would be more than enough!
I decided that schools,
All in all, are the best.
The less that they teach
And the more that they test.
I decided those wages
You need to get by,
Are much better spent
On some CEO guy.
I decided your Wade
Which was versing your Roe,
Is terribly awful
And just has to go.
I decided that levees
Are not really needed.
Now when hurricanes come,
They can come unimpeded.
That old Constitution?
Well, I have decided—
As "just goddam paper,"
It should be derided.
I’ve decided gay marriage
Is icky and weird.
Above all other things,
It’s the one to be feared.
And Cheney and Rummy
And Condi all know
That I’m the Decider—
They tell me it’s so.
I’m the Decider
So watch what you say,
Or I may decide
To have you whisked away.
Or I’ll tap your phones.
Your e-mail I’ll read.
’Cause I’m the Decider—
Like Jesus decreed.
Yes, I’m the Decider!
The finest alive!
And I’m nuking Iran;
Now watch this drive!
Now that I
think about it, Dr. Seuss anticipated this administration pretty well when he
wrote Yertle the Turtle.
Me, too. —RCH
Thanks, Roy.
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