 |
||||||||
|
Opus 214 (November 28, 2007). As
the Season of Frenzied Giving approaches, we concentrate this time on books you
really oughta buy. Revews, in other words, galore. We also report on the 9th triennial Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University, trace the careers
of the recently departed Bob Bindig and Paul Norris, and ponder the doings of
some of the strips in the funnies. And more, much more. Here’s what’s here, in
order, by department:
NOUS R US
Gordon Lee Mistrial
More Conan
FESTIVAL OF CARTOON ART, 2007
With Visual Aids
PASSING THROUGH
The Careers and Good Works of Robert Bindig and Paul
Norris
EDITOONERY
Newsweek Cuts Back
BOOK MARQUEE
The Boondocks: All the Rage
Bumstead Family History
Complete Terry and the Pirates
Chester Gould biography
Stop Forgetting to Remember
The System of Comics
Supernatural Law Companion
Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings
Hemorrhoid Tomes
Naked Artist
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain
The Sandbox
Art Spiegelman Conversations
Christmas
List of Books to Buy
COMIC STRIP
WATCH
Frazz
Rhymes with Orange
Herman
Drabble
Dilbert
Sally Forth
Pajama Diaries
Monty
Get Fuzzy
Heart of the City
Pickles
Garfield
New Yorker Cartoon Issue
Annual Stock-taking and Bean Counting (Again)
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
The long delayed trial of comic book store owner
Gordon Lee, accused of giving youngsters pornographic comics (because in one of
them, painter Pablo Picasso was correctly depicted in the nude), ended, for the
time being, in a mistrial on November 5 because the prosecutor in his opening
statement referred to Lee’s previous run-in with the law despite having been instructed
by the judge not to do so. The case has been in a state of continual
prolongation for three years, costing the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
$80,000. Said CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein: “Every step of the
way, the prosecution has been adding further expense to Lee’s defense, first by
changing their facts, then by entering new indictment after new indictment, and
today by contaminating the jury. Nobody, especially a small retailer [like
Lee], can bear this kind of expense on their own. Today’s action is clear
evidence of why the Fund needs to be around to protect comics.” At this writing
(November 24), the next step is uncertain; the case could be dismissed—or go to
trial again. For details, visit www.cbldf.org
Last
summer, Marvel gave minor league baseball the superhero treatment, wrote Matt
Glynn in the Buffalo News, publishing
a give-away comic book, Triple-A Baseball
Heroes, in which some of the Marvel longjohn legion gets involved in a
triple-A game. ... Commemorating the sixty-ninth anniversary of Kristallnachkt
(“Night of Broken Glass”) during which Nazi Germany terrorized Jews by breaking
into their stores, homes, and places of worship, Mark Tatulli produced a week-long continuity in his comic strip, Heart of the City, in which an elderly
friend of Heart’s tells her the story of how he and his sister survived the
terror. ... J.K. Rowling is now
officially “the richest author in the history of the world” according to Ben
Shapiro in Townhall.com; Rowling recently revealed that the revered Harry
Potter character, Professor Albus Dumbledore, is gay. ... The voice of Uncle
Ruckus in Cartoon Network’s “The
Boondocks” is supplied by Gary Anthony Williams, who also plays
Clarence/Clarice on ABC’s “Boston Legal.” ... The comics in India’s Hindustan Times are published on page 2,
the page on the reverse of the newspaper’s front page. The paper is in English
as are all the comic strips: Calvin and
Hobbes, Wizard of Id, Ginger Meggs, Bringing Up Father, Tarzan, Bound and
Gagged, This Is Out Life, B.C., Heathcliff, Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, and The Born Loser.
“A
Life in Books” is a regular feature in Newsweek: authors or celebrities are asked to list a half-dozen books that were
important to them in their lives. In the November 26 issue, Kate DiCamillo,
author of Because of Winn-Dixie and
“the newly released picture book Great
Joy,” listed two books by cartoonists (Maus by Art Spiegelman and Doctor De Soto by William Steig) and another with classic illustrations by a cartoonist, Charlotte’s Web with pictures by Garth Williams.
Conan,
who has already had more lives than Sherlock Holmes, is poised for more
comebacks, beginning in video games. The Robert E. Howard (1906-36) character
who enjoyed his initial revival because of Frank
Frazetta’s spectacular cover paintings for a re-issued series of Howard’s
novels in the 1960s, moved into an entirely different phase in the 1970s with Roy Thomas’s stories in Marvel Comics,
as illustrated, first, by Barry
Windsor-Smith then by the man who was probably born to draw Conan, the late John Buscema. Conan may be said to
have reached his apogee in film when the present governor of California, who,
in those distant days, was a mere weight lifter and body builder from Austria,
found his way to fame and a politically connected wife by playing the Hyborean
adventurer, the perfect movie role for a muscular man who talks funny. As a
video game, Conan has another two lives: in “Conan,” published October 23 by
THQ for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3—rated “Mature” because of its gore, intense
violence and nudity; and “Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures,” due March 25,
2008, by Eidos for Windows Vista PCs, not rated yet but promising to be
“faithful” to Howard’s writings. And we’re not yet finished with the print
version of Conan: Dark Horse is bringing out two Conan books—Conan the Phenomenon, a 200-page
collection of images by Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and others, plus a history of
Conan and of Howard; and The Savage Sword
of Conan, 500-plus page reprintings (2 volumes out so far) of the Marvel
Comics incarnation (not to mention Dark Horse’s new monthly series that started
in 2004). Then there’s another movie, whose producer, says Mike Snider in USA Today, “wants to restore Conan to
Howard’s original noble savage, ‘a barbarian who is confronted with
civilization as his life progresses and who has a much stronger moral code than
the so-called civilized people.’”
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. Three other sites laden with
cartooning news and lore are Mark Evanier’s www.povonline.com,
Alan Gardner’s www.DailyCartoonist.com, and Tom Spurgeon’s www.comicsreporter.com. And then there’s Mike Rhode’s ComicsDC
blog, http://www.comicsdc.blogspot.com For delving into the history of our beloved
medium, you can’t go wrong by visiting Allan Holtz’s http://www.strippersguide.blogspot.com, where Allan regularly posts rare findings from his forays into the vast reaches
of newspaper microfilm files hither and yon.
Irks &
Crotchets
What’s the comic strip Overboard about? Why are we at sea? Are those pirates or hippies?
And what about the dog and the bear and other unlikely animals—why are they
aboard and talking?
I’m
lost in Funky Winkerbean. I know
they’re all ten years older, but I can’t tell who is who anymore. And Drabble. Which one is he?
Things
I would do differently: The father’s nose in Baby Blues is much too big; I’d make it smaller. Rob’s hair in Get Fuzzy is not just mussed up: there
are simply too many tiny, wispy hairs all over his head. I’d simplify.
Festival of
Cartoon Art
The triennial Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State
University never fails to warm the heart, stir the brain, and settle the
stomach: for a little more than two days, we’re in a bubble with other
cartoonists and their admirers, talking almost exclusively about cartooning and
related exploits. The sense of camaraderie and common purpose is pervasive and
oceanic. The Festival comes up once every three years, sponsored by the Cartoon
Research Library at OSU. This year’s Festival, October 26-27, was the 9th,
which means Lucy S. Caswell, CRL’s curator, has been marshaling the profession
every three years for twenty-seven years. It’s one of the best confabulations
of its kind: for two days, Friday and Saturday, cartoonists stand up and give
illustrated talks about their work, and at off moments, we stroll through
exhibitions of superior comic art. This year, both exhibits were devoted to
Milton Caniff. His donation of his papers to his alma mater, OSU, founded the
CRL, and this is the centennial of the year of his birth, so the theme of the
Festival was “storytelling” with Caniff as the totem. As Caniff’s biographer, I
made a presentation entitled “Milton Caniff and the Art of the Storytelling” on
Thursday afternoon during the “preconference” and was one of a panel of “friends”
of Caniff who reminisced about him on Friday morning.
The
preconference was an innovation this year: except for me, all of the
presenters, 14 of them, were academics. The topic was “Graphic Storytelling:
Academic Perspectives,” and under that rubric, scholars “presented papers” (as
they say in academe), which means they read them to us as fast as they could,
seldom looking up from the page to see if any of us were still in attendance.
After an hour or so of this, many of us were there in body only. Although
tedious in the extreme, this practice makes the most economical use of the time
at academic conferences of this sort. At such gatherings, each presenter is
customarily allotted, say, 15 minutes for his or her presentation; reading a
paper aloud guarantees (1) that the presenter will get to “say” everything he
or she intends to say (because it’s all written down, right there, and can be
tinkered with beforehand to make sure everything is “right there”) and (2) that
no one will go over his or her time limit. I was luckier: not only did I have
an entire hour to myself, but my presentation came at the end of the day, so
even if I’d exceeded my time limit, I wouldn’t have usurped someone else’s
time. Miraculously, I managed the whole presentation within the allotted time.
Presenters
during the Festival itself included Brian
Walker, who on Friday morning reviewed the history of the storytelling
comic strip as the kick-off speaker, P.
Craig Russell, Ted Rall, Jessica Abel, Frank Stack, Ray Billingsley, Mike
Peters, Paul Pope, Nick Anderson, and Alison Bechdel. And there was a panel of publishers—Fantagraphics’ Gary Groth, Dark Horse’s Diana Schutz, and Mark Siegel from Scholastic, lately into the graphic novel racket
with Jeff Smith’s Bone. At this point, my reportage will
start limping badly. I’m hard of hearing (that is, half deaf, an expression I
like better despite the imprecision of its measure), and although I wear a
hearing aid, the mechanical augmentation is only marginally helpful. Hearing
aids are of little help in crowded, noisy restaurants and in conferences with
formal presentations made by speaking into microphones. The problem is
definition, not decibels: no matter how loudly someone speaks, if they run
their words together in the way people do when speaking normally, it’s
difficult for the hard-of-hearing to discern what’s being said. (You can
imagine how little I heard at the preconference of academics.) At the Festival
presentations, I sat in the first row, as close to the speakers as possible,
hoping to read lips a little. But proximity didn’t help all that much.
Fortunately, I was sitting next to cartoonist Jim Whiting and I’d nudge him
every once in a while for clarification of what the speaker was saying;
unfortunately, Jim also wears a hearing aid and didn’t hear the speaker any
better than I did. Fortunately, Jim’s wife Bernita sat next to Jim;
unfortunately, she also wears a hearing aid. Fortunately, her hearing loss is
not as much as Jim’s, so when I had difficulty making out what was said and
nudged Jim, he, having heard no better than I, turned to Bernita, and she
jotted the essence of the speaker’s message on a scrap of paper, which Jim,
after reading it himself, passed to me. I heard a few things, though, and some
speakers spoke more clearly than others. Herewith, then, reporting that is
sometimes first-hand, sometimes third-hand (passed along by the second hand).
Brian Walker, who read all of Editor & Publisher during the more
than six years he was researching for his two comic strip history volumes (Comics Since 1945 and Comics Before 1945), spoke briefly about
the rewards of research—the sense of discovery and surprise: “You don’t know
what you’re looking for until you find it.” Introducing the general topic for
the Festival, he reviewed the history of storytelling strips, beginning with
the Yellow Kid’s travelogue strips. “Travel was a big continuity theme,” Walker
said. He also noted that fellow comics historian Bill Blackbeard claims the first serious bloodletting was in The Gumps when young Chester goes to
Australia. For Blackbeard, the threat of death or its actual occurrence defines
the serious adventure strip genre.
The
panel of Friends of Milton Caniff included Mort
Walker, Peter Poplaski, and Arnold
Roth as well as yrs trly. Roth had the best line of the session, and it
wasn’t about Caniff. Brian Walker, who preceded this panel, finished well
within his allotted time, so we took to the platform ahead of schedule by ten
minutes, and Arnie wasn’t with us. Ten minutes later—precisely on time— he
sauntered into the room and took his seat at the head table. I ribbed him about
it, introducing him by saying he now had a chance to make up for being late by
saying something particularly insightful about Caniff. But Arnie was having
none of that. “In my centuries of freelancing,” he said, “the one thing I
learned was, never be early in meeting a deadline.” Fact is, he wasn’t late: as
I said, he was exactly on time, but we were all early.
P. Craig Russell (who was harder for me
to hear than most) showed pages from his Siegfried comics and explained the
symbolism. He talked about how his visuals were inspired by the music in
Wagner’s opera, and then, to conclude his presentation, he showed all the
visuals a second time, this time accompanied by Wagner’s music—an extraordinary tour de force. Ted Rall, political cartoonist turned graphic novelist, discussed
graphic journalism, reviewing the emergence of the genre, beginning with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s books about the Mideast, then on to War Fix and the recent books of travel
reportage about visits to North Korea and China. In his own graphic reportage—To Afghanistan and Back, the first book
about the 2001 U.S. invasion of that country, and his most recent, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New
Middle East?—Rall said he set himself to answer the question, What’s it
like there? What’s it feel like? He believes that the best
way to arrive at answers is by visual reportage as well as verbal, and both of
his books reflect this conviction. He also mentioned the difficulty of
marketing books like his: “If you put a cartoon on the cover, the book winds up
in the humor section, the ghetto of the bookstore.”
During
the publishers panel the next morning, among the questions moderator Lucy
Caswell asked was: Are we stuck with the term graphic novel? Gary Groth, as always straight-forward and common-sensical, opined that we were, admitting
at the same time that it’s essentially “a marketing term.” Neither
Fantagraphics nor Dark Horse has much of a marketing budget: they depend upon
word-of-mouth. Both preferred bookstores to shelf graphic novels in a “graphic
novel” section or in the appropriate subject category—biography, science
fiction, history, etc.—rather than in the “humor” section. The present deluge
of graphic novels cannot be explained by any single phenomenon, the panelists
felt. Our culture has become more and more visual, due, partly, to tv, and
graphic novels extend that tendency. Groth felt that enough graphic novels have
been published to reach “critical mass”: enough of them to attract attention
and therefore space in bookstores. I, on the other hand, think it’s due to the
“Jack Davis effect.” Davis once
explained his emergence as a popular cover artist for magazines like Time by saying that many of the art
directors at magazines and at advertising agencies had been readers of EC
Comics and admirers of his work; once they were in positions of power, they
commissioned their favorite artist. By the same token, readers of Silver Age
Marvel Comics are now in positions in our culture that permit them to nudge
comics to the fore, and graphic novels benefit from the company they keep.
Ray Billingsley, whose professional
career started when he was about fourteen, talked about his life and his comic
strip, Curtis, but without visual
aids. He said when he was about Curtis’ age, he had a “bale and a half” of an
Afro, but his grandfather, a barber, cut it off. Asked if Curtis had been reprinted anywhere, Billingsley professed mild amazement
that apparently none of the reprint houses were interested in his strip. Nick Anderson and Mike Peters showed their editorial cartoons, although Peters spent
most of his time hysterically relating some odd adventure he’d just survived
trying to find his way to the Festival. Paul
Pope talked about art rather than storytelling. Alison Bechdel showed pictures of pages from her Fun Home graphic novel. In her opening
remarks, she said she became a visual artist because lesbians were invisible
when she was growing up, and she wanted to see herself. And Frank Stack—ahhhh, Frank, the Carl
Sandburg of comix—looking vaguely like a well-dressed street derelict but
sprinkling profundities and satirical asides throughout his discourse, told us
he started drawing the alleged “first” underground comic, The Adventures of Jesus, because he had discovered that “by using
religion I could really get to people and piss ‘em off.” Even though I couldn’t
make out much of what he was saying, I was vastly entertained by watching the
contortions of his face as elbowed his way through the persiflage to get, at
last, to the punchline that invariably punctuated his sentences. He made it
seem that constructing an utterance as he went was a laborious feat if not a
painful project. A wholly unreconstructed hippie, Frank said, “My comics are
for people like me.” And many of us are people like him—or wish to be.
That’s about all I heard that I can remember. But here are some pictures of what I saw.
What’s That
Again?
Ohio State University’s $109 million athletics budget
provides an average of $110,000 for each of its 980 athletes, about triple what
the school spends to educate each student.—Wall
Street Journal, quoted in The Week, November
2
CIVILIZATION’S
LAST OUTPOST: Part One
One of a kind
beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.
In The Week for
November 21, we learn that only one of the 2 million American soldiers sent off
to World War I is still living: Frank Buckles, age 106. ... The same issue of
the magazine quotes from the London Daily
Telegraph in which Max Pemberton writes about the seeming medical discovery
that being a little fat, pleasantly plump or chubby—about 25 pounds overweight,
not obese—is healthier than being rail thin: Hardly a day goes by “when some
activity, foodstuff or other lifestyle choice isn’t linked to death and
disease,” Pemberton writes, and then, allowing a decent interval for us to
totally rearrange our lives, “research is published that completely contradicts
this advice.” We’re told to avoid the sun so as not to get skin cancer, but
then warned that we need it to produce vitamin D. And on and on into the night.
In The Week of October 19, we discover that
“photos and stories featuring Jennifer Aniston sell more magazines than those
of any other celebrity,” including the famous heir-head Paris Hilton.
In Time’s cover story on “America by the
Numbers,” we learn that “more than 90 percent [of Americans] own a Bible, but
only half can name a single Gospel, and 10 percent think Joan of Arc was Noah’s
wife.”
WE’RE ALL
BROTHERS, AND WE’RE ONLY PASSIN’ THROUGH
Sometimes
happy, sometimes blue,
But I’m so
glad I ran into you---
We’re all
brothers, and we’re only passin’ through.
Old Folk
Ballad Lustily Sung By Walt Conley in His Trademark Husky Rasp of a Voice at the Last Resort in Denver, Lo These Many Years Ago
Robert
Bindig, 1920-2007
My friend Bob Bindig died November 6 at Sisters
Hospital in Buffalo; he was 86. He had recently undergone surgery for
hydrocephalus and was recovering wonderfully; then an infection set in which
proved fatal. A cartoonist and commercial artist, Bob ran his own one-man
agency in Orchard Park, New York, from the mid-1950s until he retired in 1995.
His clients included Rich Products, Fisher-Price and National Gypsum, and for
ten years, beginning in 1985, he drew the Big Boy giveaway comic book. He
designed the Buffalo Bisons logo with “Buffalo Bison” at bat, and he did the
artwork for a board game commemorating the infamous “Blizzard of ’77.” He was
proud of his membership in the National Cartoonists Society, and in 1988, he
won the Society’s division award in advertising cartooning.
After
graduating from high school in 1939, Bob worked in the art department of a
local newspaper, and in 1941, he married Dorris M. Krull. He was drafted into
the army in 1943 and went into training to be a medic, but when his artistic
bent was discovered, he was put to work lettering “Trash” on the sides of
garbage cans. Later, stationed in the Philippines, he drew propaganda leaflets.
The closest he came to combat, he once said, was when the War ended. “Guys were
out in the streets firing their carbines into the air to celebrate,” Bob said,
“and there were bullets flying all over the place.”
After
the War, he was sent to Korea, which had been under Japanese control. Stationed
in Seoul, his unit put out a newspaper, and Bob drew a comic strip, The Mischievous Twin Bears, aimed at
Korean youngsters who chanced upon the newspaper. “The strip lasted only eight
weeks,” he told me, “because I became eligible for discharge. They wanted me to
re-enlist to be in charge of the art department. They offered me the rank of
Master Sergeant with a three-month furlough. I only had to work nine months but
got a full year’s pay. But I said, No. I wanted to see my family. I wanted out.
So I went home, arriving on my wife’s birthday, April 1, 1946.”
Everywhere he went while in uniform, he regularly wrote to Dorris, and he usually decorated the envelope with a cartoon of himself, engaged in some military shenanigan or another. Last year, the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to collect and preserve the stories of veterans of all wars, asked Bob to contribute his envelope art to its “Art of War” project on the Web (www.loc.gov/warstories).
Bob
and I achieved a second-hand acquaintance during the several years in the
mid-1970s when we both wrote columns for the Menomonee Falls Gazette. Bob was a passionate fan of cartooning in
all its forms, and he had clipped and saved comic strips from a very early age.
These he carefully pasted into scrapbooks, adding magazine and newspaper articles
about cartoonists. Some years ago, I bought his scrapbook of Alley Oop strips; most of his scrapbooks
he donated to the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University—huge tomes,
2x3 feet, bound by hand.
Bob participated in more than one comics fan publication. He joined editor Carl Horak as associate editor of Strip Scene, a periodical devoted to illustrated essays about vintage comic strips; and the two perpetuated their working relationship on Caniffites, a newsletter devoted to the work of Milton Caniff. In recent years, he produced for The Funny Paper an exhaustive re-telling of the Gasoline Alley saga, pasting strips in chronological order with short paragraphs of connecting prose narrative by way of abbreviating the generations-long tale. He often contributed cover art for these publications, the only readily available sample of his work I have. He drew with a bold and fluid line, producing crisp and immaculate pictures—as you can see.
We
finally met in person at OSU during the festivities surrounding the 75th birthday of Milton Caniff shortly after Caniff invited me to write his
biography. Bob was a life-long fan of Caniff’s, and he had a complete run of Terry and the Pirates—every strip
published since 1934, clipped out of newspapers and filed carefully in
chronological order—and he let me borrow it long enough to make copies of my
own, thereby providing me with a resource indispensable to writing the
biography. Later, he gave me a copy of his complete run of Caniff’s Dickie Dare. Bob’s devotion to the art
of the comic strip—and his enthusiasm, curiosity, and knowledge about it and
about Caniff’s work in particular—provided me with a kind of yardstick by which
I mentally measured what I was doing as I wrote the book. Bob had expectations
for the book—sometimes exactly expressed, sometimes only vaguely voiced—and
those expectations lurked in the back of my mind as a soundingboard against
which I imagined the published work finally striking. It was my hope that the
book would ring true—and with all the right feelings and enough fugitive facts
to slake a true Caniffan’s thirst for at least as long as it takes to read it.
And Bob was, in my mind, that true Caniffan. Dorris told me Bob didn’t finish
reading the Caniff biography, “but I will,” she said.
Bob
and I ran into each other often after Caniff’s birthday party—usually at NCS
gatherings or at OSU’s Festival of Cartoon Art. We roomed together at the 2000
Reuben Weekend in New York, sharing the room with Jim Whiting. Bob was a gentle
man with a quick wit. Puns gave him a particular delight, and his conversation
was always liberally laced with them. I’ll miss the puns. And the gentle
sometimes diffident but always firmly committed demeanor. And his passion for
the profession.
Paul Norris,
1914-2007
On November 5, we lost the last of the great living
connections to the creations of the Golden Age of comics. Paul Norris, who
co-created Aquaman in 1941, died of heart failure at Tri-City Medical Center
near his home in Oceanside, California; he was 93. Although Norris’ stint in
the four-color fictions of the longjohn legions inspires reverence among
funnybook fans, his career as a cartoonist and his niche in the history of
cartooning are in newspaper comics: he produced Brick Bradford for 35 years, writing the strip as well as drawing
it.
Born
in Greenville, Ohio, about 20 miles northwest of Dayton, Norris, he said later,
drew pictures from the moment he could hold a pencil. Graduating from high
school in the depth of the Great Depression, he entered Midland Lutheran
College in Freemont, Nebraska, in 1934. He enjoyed college and was active on
campus, working on both the yearbook and the newspaper and performing in plays.
But he left MLC after just a year and a half.
“Few
people know why I left Midland,” he said when interviewed by the MLC Magazine last year. “It was to
pursue the publication of a comic strip, Hobo
Cupboard.” A friend had written a script for Hobo Cupboard, and Norris drew the strip. It was sold to a
syndicate in Ohio. “As was the custom, the syndicate wanted six weeks of the
strip in advance. I couldn’t get that much work done and keep up the chores and
studies I had at Midland,” Norris continued. “So I returned to Greenville to
get the strip ready for publication. Well, before I finished the six weeks of
artwork, the syndicated folded. I was out of college and out of work—life can
be devious that way.”
Norris
then enrolled at the Dayton School of Art, where he met his future wife, Ann.
After completing his studies, he joined the art department of the Dayton Daily News, where, in addition to
performing various illustration assignments, he concocted a comic strip about a
cameraman, Scoop Lens, which Norris
later identified as his favorite creation. Norris married Ann in 1939 and soon
left Dayton for New York where he found work in the infant comic book industry.
“No
one, not even Paul, was ever certain what his first job was in that medium,”
wrote Mark Evanier at his website, newsfromme.com, “but by 1940, he was drawing
for Prize Publications,” creating several of their “star strips”—Yank and
Doodle, Power Nelson and Futureman.
By
1941, Norris was at DC Comics, then National Periodical Publications, where he
created Aquaman with one of the editors, Mort Weisinger. Intended as DC’s
answer to Marvel’s Submariner, the character debuted in More Fun No. 73, November 1941. Norris worked with other DC
characters, including Sandman, for whom he designed a spandex costume: until
Norris got to him, Sandman had worn an ordinary business suit and snap-brim
fedora, covering his face with a gas mask. When Norris left the feature,
Sandman fell into the capable hands of Joe
Simon and Jack Kirby.
While
working on DC characters, Norris inherited a newspaper comic strip. An
adventure strip, Vic Jordan debuted
December 1, 1941, written by Kermit Jaediker and Charles Zerner “under the name
Paine, a nod to Tom Paine,” said historian Ron Goulart in his The Funnies. The strip was drawn by Elmer Wexler, who also drew “such
second-string comic book superheroes as the Black Terror and Fighting Yank.”
But Wexler left the strip in the spring of 1942 to join the Marines, and Norris
took over, drawing in the lushly shadowed manner of the Sickles-Caniff
chiaroscuro style. The strip lasted until April 30, 1945, but Norris gave it up
in 1943, drafted into the Army.
Early
in his military career, Norris drew a “little strip” for his unit newspaper.
That brought him to the attention of the strategic brass, and he was quickly
transferred to military intelligence where he went to work producing propaganda
leaflets that were dropped on Japanese encampments on Pacific islands,
encouraging soldiers to surrender. “I worked with a prisoner of war,” Norris
told the MLC Magazine. “We wanted the
translations to be authentic. They used them on Okinawa. The Japanese came in
with these things in their hands and wanted to surrender.”
After
the War, Norris went to work at King Features as a general assignment artist—“a
kind of troubleshooter,” Evanier said: “Whenever one of their adventure strips
was behind or in need of a temporary artist, they’d have Paul Norris draw some
weeks of it.” In this capacity, Norris worked on Flash Gordon, Secret Agent X-9, and Tarzan. In 1948, he succeeded Austin Briggs on Alex Raymond’s
Sunday strip, Jungle Jim, producing
it until it ceased in 1954. In drawing these features, Norris was able to
skillfully approximate the style of the artist of record, producing a
recognizable imitation with just a touch of his own artistic sensibility. But
Norris’ life’s work began in the fall of 1952, when he started working on Brick Bradford with the October 1
release.
According
to Jay Maeder, writing in Ron Goulart’s Encyclopedia
of American Comics, Brick Bradford was
“customarily grouped with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers as the third of the
1930s’ leading science fiction strips,” but “Brick Bradford more correctly belonged to the Sinbad school of
heroic high adventure—a romance of sky gods and flaming chariots, mad dragons
and wrathful queens, howling storms and ruined empires. The feature’s creator,
a Cleveland newsman of encyclopedic knowledge named William Ritt, was a devotee
of the period’s pulp genres as well as of classical mythology and anthropology,
and Brick Bradford was successively an aviator, explorer, soldier, costumed
avenger, confidante of physicists, gentleman sleuth, and sometimes even a
cowboy. He was also a space knight who spent some of his time many thousands of
years in the intergalactic future, and eventually the strip acquired an
enduring hallmark motif—time travel.”
Brick Bradford started August 21, 1934,
“more literate” than other strips of its ilk, said Maeder, and “attractively
drawn” by Clarence Gray, whose “stately formalism was at the time unknown in
comics outside of Harold Foster’s Tarzan.”
Gray took over the writing of the strip in October 1948 (the Sunday in June
1949), but throat cancer forced Gray to give up the daily strip in October
1952; the Sunday in January 1957. Thereupon, as Maeder said, “Paul Norris
proceeded to make the feature his own, successfully maintaining a readable
storyline” until the strip ended in 1987. The Sunday strip of May 10 was the
last published, but the last one Norris drew was the daily, April 25, which we
reproduce here. Said
Norris: “For 35 years, I wrote and drew Brick
Bradford, and for the life of me, I cannot tell you where the ideas for the
stories came from. If you’ve ever written fiction—fiction grows on its own, and
characters seem to develop themselves” (MLC Magazine).
While
producing Brick Bradford, Norris
continued accepting comic book assignments from Western Publishing Company,
where he had moonlighted since about 1947. At first, “he did comic books based
upon the newspaper strips he was ghosting,” said Evanier. “Eventually, he became a mainstay of
Western’s Los Angeles office, drawing westerns and tv-based comics. Many fans
recalled his work in the sixties and seventies on Tarzan of the Apes and Magnus,
Robot Fighter, as well as a short-lived book he drew called The Jungle Twins. He also occasionally
dabbled in funny animals such as Woodsy
Owl and illustrated books for the firm.”
Norris
moved with his family to Oceanside in 1967, and in 1986, he joined with Jim
Whiting, Brad Anderson, Sherm Goodrich and writer Lyle Swigert to organize a
club for cartoonists. The Southern California Cartoonists Society continues
meeting at least monthly today.
Evanier
recalled working with Norris in the 1970s on a comic book version of the
Hanna-Barbera feature, Dynomutt: “He
was a lovely man who worked very hard on his art but always managed to have it
in on time. He usually delivered the work by mail but once or twice, when he
was worried the work might not be early, he drove up to Los Angeles with it
from his home near San Diego—three hours each way. Please note that he was not
afraid of the word being late: he was afraid of it not being early.”
Norris
is also credited with another comic strip, Geriatrix, which he apparently produced from 1978 to 1985; but I don’t know anything about
it except that its title suggests it might be about the elderly. It is with Brick Bradford, though, that Norris
secured his place in the pantheon of cartooning masters. As for Aquaman, the
hero he helped create almost seventy years ago, Norris wasn’t too sure about
the current treatment of the character. While he was interviewed by the MLC Magazine, he held up a copy of a
recent comic book with Aquaman on the cover. “Did you notice?” Norris said,
“he’s beating the daylights out of Superman! That bothers me a little. I’m
afraid it’s too brutal.”
I
met Norris only once, and I was impressed by his poise and manner. Those who
knew him best said it best. Charlie Roberts, writing in the SCCS newsletter for
November, said: “I can’t recall him ever saying an unkind word about anyone.
The phrase ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ surely applied with Paul. A true class act
with a smile and a gentle laugh, Paul was easy to be friends with and he will
be greatly missed.”
QUIPS &
QUOTES
“Don’t be a pal to your son. Be his father. What
child needs a 40-year-old for a friend?”—Al Capp
“Democracy
is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” —H.L.
Mencken
“You
will never ‘find’ time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”
—Charles Buxton
“Difficulty
is the excuse history never accepts.” —Edward R. Murrow
THE FROTH ESTATE
The Alleged News
Institution
Journalists,
usually a self-effacing lot, have taken recently, every now and then, to
reporting on the mounting death toll among their fraternity in Iraq. Since
March 2003, 118 journalists have been killed in Iraq. Despite the implication
inherent in these reports, not all of them are from the U.S. In fact, only 2
American journalists have been killed. Most of those who died, 96, have been
Iraqis. And they were doubtless marked for death because they were
“cooperating” with the invaders. As well they might: translating and guiding
journalists around the landscape is one of the few paying jobs around.
According to USA Today (October
19-21), European journalists account for 13 deaths; 3 are from other Arab
countries, and another 5 from elsewhere.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats
everything. —Dennis Miller adv.
“Panties
for Peace” is a campaign to overthrow the dictatorship in Myanmar, The Week reports. “By mailing packets
of women’s underwear to Myanmar’s embassies around the world, activists hope to
defeat the ruling junta by exploiting its superstitious belief that contact
with ladies personal garments will sap a man’s strength.”
Onward, the Spreading
Punditry
The Great Ebb and Flo of
Things
As
I said before, the current Presidential Campaign is a creature of pundits and
Sunday morning gasbags who are, as a group, much too lazy to come up with
anything to say on any subject other than politics, which is all opinion and no
fact. Certainly voters don’t need a Presidential Campaign that’s two years
long. Into this miasma of tedium lately has come Stephen Colbert, who has
announced that he’s running for the White House. Observed D. Parvaz in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: By
positioning himself as what he calls the “white, male, middle-aged,
Jesus-trumpeting alternative,” Colbert only makes the panderings of Romney,
Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson seem that much more painful. David Carr in the New York Times noted that Colbert’s
gift is his uncanny ability to “mimic and amplify the tics of political
convention,” thus exposing the empty pomposity of White House correspondents,
political pundits, and Sunday talk-show hosts. The Week of November 2 continues: “In an “eerie’ interview last
week, Tim Russert of NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ tried to show he’s in on the joke
by interviewing Colbert about his presidential run. But as a deadpan Colbert
parried and evaded Russert’s mock-serious questions, it seemed no less a game
than the interviews Russert conducts with the real candidates. ‘Everybody is
asking, Is this real?’ Colbert said, with a meaningful glint in his eye. ‘And
to which I would say to everybody, This is not a Dream. You’re not going to
wake up from this.’” Ouch, but True.
More Truth: The Transportation
Security Administration routinely tests the effectiveness of its draconian
measures at airports and recently reported that security screeners at two major
U.S. airports failed to detect fake bombs carried by undercover agents more
than 60 percent of the time. Feel any safer, now that you’ve taken off your
shoes and given up your nail clippers?
EDITOONERY
Afflicting the Comfortable
and Comforting the Afflicted
Among
editoonists, getting a cartoon reprinted in Newsweek’s “Perspectives” page was, and continues to be, a mixed if not embarrassing
blessing. The recognition enhances a cartoonist’s visibility and perhaps his or
her reputation; but the magazine habitually reprints cartoons of the “Jay Leno”
comedy variety, not hard-hitting political statements, so in getting the Newsweek nod, a cartoonist sacrificed
professional standing for raw publicity. But the risk is now somewhat reduced: Newsweek used to publish three political
cartoons every week; now, just two. The reduced visibility for the profession
is not good; but, considering that the kind of cartoon Newsweek reprinted was mostly toothless joking, editorial
cartooning may be better off.
Onward, the Spreading
Punditry: Phase Two
The Great Ebb and Flo of
Things
From
my perpetual source, that expert condensation of the week’s news, The Week: Issued earlier this year from
the office of GeeDubya, National Security Presidential Directive 51 aims to
ensure continuity of government in the event of what it calls, vaguely,
“catastrophic emergency”—terrorist attack or nasty hurricane. “The directive,
issued without any review by Congress or the Supreme Court, gives the president
authority to decide when an emergency has occurred, and to do whatever he deems
necessary to ensure continuity of government, whether it’s to cancel upcoming
elections, suspend the Constitution or launch a nuclear attack on the enemy.
... Believe it or not, NSPLD-51 even has two secret clauses that the
administration won’t disclose to anyone, including congressional oversight
committees. Think the Bush League has gone too far yet?
Peeves & Pratfall
“Always get married early in the
morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.”
—Mickey Rooney
“The first time I see a jogger
smiling, I’ll consider it.” —Joan Rivers
“Great people talk about ideas,
average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.” —Fran
Lebowitz
“If you make people think they’re
thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate
you.” —Don Marquis
“When you go into court, you are
putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to
get out of jury duty.” —Norm Crosby
BOOK MARQUEE
Aaron McGruder is too young for a swan
song, but his nefarious comic strip, The
Boondocks, no longer exists in its print form, so this latest reprint
collection is doubtless the last we’ll see of this verison of McGruder’s
creation—for a while, perhaps forever. All
the Rage (278 8x10-inch pages, paperback; Three Rivers Press, $16.95) is
arranged in three sections: The Strips, The Media, and The Controversy. The
first section continues the recycling of the strip, picking up, more or less,
where the preceding reprint volume, Public
Enemy #2, ended; it begins with December 2004 and ends with December 2005 and includes the sequence with
Katrina victims moving in with Huey and Riley Freeman and their grandad. And
all the strips are dated, a boon to historians. The next two sections are
probably intended as The Boondocks Monument. The Media section reprints several
articles about and interviews with McGruder, including The Nation cover story of January 28, 2002, and my own article and
interview from The Comics Journal, September 2003. This section establishes McGruder as an unflinching critic of
his society and his times. In 50 pages, The Controversy reprints many of his
most controversial sequences and strips. Included are the “lightsaber” sequence
in which two young girls are whacked upside the head with a plastic lightsaber
and Riley expresses disappointment that they are still alive. “See??!!” he
exclaims, “—this thing is worthless!” Published in the immediate aftermath of
the Columbine killings, the sequence prompted reader outrage on all sides.
Ironically, the lightsaber sequence was substituted for a sequence McGruder’s
editors thought was more incendiary—in which Huey Freeman starts an armed
neighborhood Klan watch. And when that sequence ran a few weeks later, it
caused no disturbances at all. Also included: the BET booty strip, the
post-9/11 Flagee and Ribbon series, the boys’ effort to get Condoleezza Rice a
boyfriend, and several –word sequences, among them, the infamous take-off on
tv’s “The Apprentice,” which McGruder translated into “Can a N***a Get a Job?”
Also reprinted is Bill Amend’s FoxTrot sequence in which Jason undertakes to draw The
Boondocks while McGruder is on sabbatical in 2006.
*****
The Bumstead Family History (192 9x11-inch pages, most
in color; Thomas Nelson, hardback, $29.99) is a luxurious if fraudulent book.
Purportedly by Dean Young and Melena Ryzik—he, selecting the strips; she,
writing the text—the book is not a “history” except in the most flagrant
misappropriation of the term. You’d think, from the title, that you’d find the
actual “history” of the strip here—how it came to be, then the principal events
of its 75-plus years in the papers. And, indeed, we do find a short appendage
at the end that traces the biography of the strip’s creator, Dean Young’s
father Chic, and the formulation of the strip, his fourth about a pretty girl;
and there is a section devoted to Dagwood’s famous 1933 hunger strike, staged
in order to secure his parents’ permission to marry Blondie, who, in her
premarital state as a party-girl flapper, is a good deal more dingy than she
eventually became—scarcely an appropriate match, according to the snooty
billionaire Bumsteads. After 28 days, 7 hours, 8 minutes and 22 seconds of
their son’s starving himself, they gave in. But Dagwood’s father disinherits
him, which forces Dagwood and Blondie to enter married life and live it on much
the same terms as the rest of us—a circumstance that is the chief reason the
strip became immensely popular and stayed that way. The other reason—the
arrival on April 15, 1934, of their first-born, Alexander (named after Alex
Raymond, who assisted on the strip before creating Flash Gordon), dubbed Baby Dumpling—is only hinted at herein.
Dagwood’s perpetual misunderstanding of how babies “work” is the basis of much
of the strip’s humor during this period, but that is nowhere in evidence in
this volume.
In defiance of its title, the book
reprints mostly Young’s favorite strips from the last 15 years or so,
concentrating on the last seven. It is divided into chapters, each devoted to
one of Chic Young’s celebrated focii for the strip, the main activities of
life—working, eating, doing chores, and sleeping—which topics rotate regularly
through the week to depict Dagwood encountering his boss, Julius Dithers,
making his famous sandwich, lunching at Lou’s diner, performing rudimentary
home repairs, and taking naps on the couch or baths in the tub (singing).
Another chapter is devoted to Blondie’s catering business, upon which she
embarked on Labor Day, 1991, after Dean Young decided that he “didn’t want the
strip to be an anachronism”—he wanted to bring it up-to-date, which meant
violating the afore-mentioned tenets that his father had established and
followed faithfully to secure Blondie’s everlasting success.
The cartoonist most represented in
this volume is Denis LeBrun, another affront to “history”: the cartoonist who
drew the strip the longest was Jim Raymond, brother of Alex, who was the
principal illustrator of Blondie from
about 1937 until his death in 1989. Stan Drake is also mentioned, and the book
reprints a couple dozen of the strips he drew. Others who worked on the strip
but whose work is not much in evidence include Ray McGill, who was working with
Raymond in the 1940s, Mike Gersher, Jeff Parker (LeBrun’s assistant), and the
current artist, John Marshall. Probably there are others whose names have
evaporated in the mists of history.
A final chapter revisits the strip’s
ingenious 75th anniversary, which Dean Young convinced syndicated
strip cartoonists to help celebrate by mentioning the event in their own
strips. The McGuffin was an invitation to the Bumstead’s anniversary party that
they sent to all their “friends” in other strips: in those strips, the
characters were depicted reacting to the news and planning to attend the party.
A few of these are reprinted herein but not nearly enough. GeeDubya and Laura’s
Sunday cameo (August 28, 2005) is included, for instance, but the memorable
visit of Mother Goose’s dog Grimm is, alas, missing. Grimm showed up on August
25, invading the Bumstead bathroom to drink from his usual appliance: we've
seen the Bumstead bathroom thousands of times—Dagwood soaking in the tub or
shaving at the sink—but this is the first time the commode has been depicted.
The actual “anniversary strip,” Sunday, September 4, 2005, appears, an
unprecedented display of characters from other strips—about 50, more-or-less.
The sequence, which took about two months (including the Bumstead’s “second
honeymoon” trip to Hawaii in September), is undeniably historic: not since the
1933 hunger strike has the strip offered a continuity of any length.
Incidentally, in browsing through my files, preparing these remarks, I came
across a 1948 clipping from Editor &
Publisher in which it is noted that Blondie was, then, “the only one of the major strips operated without a continuity.”
Times change, kimo sabe. But Blondie as been a “major strip” for longer than
any other. The anniversary festivities and other aspects of the strip’s history
are covered elsewhere in our archives—Opus 166 (announcing the plan),
Opus 169 (rehearsing its achievement), and Opus 168 (which
contradicts Dean Young’s explanation of Dagwood’s hair and the big, single
button on his shirt front). The
Bumstead Family History, although scattering a few dates through its pages,
skims the strip’s history too blithely to count as an authentic historic
document. Apart from its copious compilation of strips from the last 10-15
years, its chief historical value is in the smattering of 75th anniversary strips. It also fails as history by citing the dubious debut date
Septe
*****
The
first (of four) volumes of The Complete
Terry and the Pirates is out from IDW (370 8.5x11-inch pages, Sundays in
color, hardback; $49.95), reprinting the legendary strip from its beginning in
the fall of 1934 through 1936, slightly more than two years’ worth. A lavish
reincarnation of Milton Caniff’s famed adventure strip, it drew from the stash of daily strips at the Cartoon Research
Library at Ohio State University, in better condition than the source material
years ago in NBM’s watershed reprinting of the strip, and took Sundays from
editor Dean Mullaney’s own collection, which results, for the first time since
it ceased in August 1935, in the appearance of the “topper” title panel where a
small vignette picture added a nuance to the day’s tale. Reproduction is
excellent—color in color, black-and-white in exquisite fidelity—and Mullaney’s
design is stunning. Quite apart from the attractiveness of the opening pages
(the only pages that permit much design variety, the others all deploying three
daily strips across the page) is the helpfulness of the remaining pages, each
of which notes the dates of the initial publication of the strips thereon.
Howard
Chaykin’s Introduction is sufficiently appreciative: he rehearses his
initiation into the ranks of Caniff admirers as a youth and pinpoints moments
in the evolving early Terry that
marked Caniff’s growing skill as a storyteller. Bruce Canwell’s prefatory essay
traces Caniff’s life and career briefly, deploying several rare bits of early
Caniff art and photographs. He rather hesitantly covers some aspects of the
birth of Terry, suggesting that he
doubts their veracity—Caniff’s initial titling the strip Tommy Tucker and syndicate chief Joseph Patterson’s recommending Wuthering Heights as a book Caniff
should read (for the record, both, according to Caniff’s own testimony,
happened). In treating the Dragon Lady’s origins, Canwell manages to conflate
two sources into one: Aleko E. Lilius’ I
Sailed with Chinese Pirates, which he says is a novel but is nonfiction,
and a novel whose author and title he is apparently not aware of—Vampires of the China Coast by Bok. And
it was Bok, not Lilius, who attempted to shake down Patterson, claiming the
Dragon Lady was based upon his creation (all of which is rehearsed in tedious
detail in my biography of Caniff, which is described here, in case you
had forgotten).
But these are minor quibbles in an essay
otherwise notable for being concise and accurate. Elsewhere, in explaining the
reasons that the Sunday strips for the first several months present a different
story from the daily strips, the guess is that the separation was deliberate,
designed to enable readers whose papers published only the Sunday strips to
enjoy a coherent stand-alone story. Well, yes and no. Caniff ultimately fused
the Sunday and the daily continuity, telling a single story, and part of his
task was to create Sunday strips that would carry a coherent story from Sunday
to Sunday for subscribing papers who took only the Sunday strips. But the
reason the Sundays and the dailies told different stories at first is that
Patterson was in a hurry to get the feature into print, and Caniff concocted
the Sunday story first. That was the “sample” that convinced Patterson to go
with Caniff; after approving it, Patterson directed the young cartoonist to go
home and develop the daily continuity. The dailies, because they didn’t require
making color plates and matts, got into print first, beginning October 22,
1934; the Sunday “samples,” however, didn’t show up in the paper until December
9, seven weeks after the debut in the daily papers. Given the circumstances, it
would have been impossible for Caniff to produce an integrated seven-day
continuity. But that’s what Patterson wanted and kept urging Caniff to produce.
The publisher knew the circulation of Sunday papers was higher than that of the
weekday editions; if a comic strip on Sunday ended in a cliffhanger that would
persuade readers to buy Monday’s paper, the over-all circulation of the paper
would improve. And that was, after all, the purpose that the funnies served in
newspapering. Finally, by August 1936, midway through the strip’s second year,
Caniff found the daily story ending at about the same time as the separate
Sunday story, and he was able, with minimal stalling (as evidenced in the
August Sundays in this volume), to integrate the two. Incidentally, I expect to
be involved in this project by the end of the series, so be wary of
self-serving fustian in these remarks.
*****
Promising
Books That I Haven’t Read Yet (but Here’s a Tantalizing Glimpse)
Chester Gould: A Daughter’s
Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy by Jean Gould O’Connell (125 7x10-inch pages,
hardback; $45 from www.mcfarlandpub.com ; or 800-253-2187). The
author was about four years old when her father’s classic gumshoe strip was
launched in the fall of 1931, so her personal recollections do not include much
in detail about the earliest years of the strip, but she’s mined the family
archives for illustrative materials of her father’s ten previous years in
Chicago during which he submitted 60 comic strip ideas to Tribune-News
Syndicate’s Joseph Patterson, all rejected; the book includes examples of 8 of
the 60. Even if she can’t testify out of personal experience about much that
happened before, say, 1937, when she’d have been about ten, O’Connell, an only
child, was curious about her father’s work and obviously talked to him a good
deal about it. She regales us with numerous anecdotes that were clearly told to
her by her father—like the story of how Smith Davis, an agent for newspaper
publishers, tried to get Gould to leave the Tribune-News for Marshall Field’s
embryonic enterprise, the Chicago Sun, to which he had just seduced Milton Caniff in 1944. Field, through Davis,
offered Gould the same guarantee he’d given Caniff: $100,000 a year. Gould’s
answer: “I’m not going to leave the Tribune.
... You give Mr. Field a big thank you, and tell him I’m working for the outfit
that gave me the only break I’ve ever had in my life, and a million dollars
wouldn’t get me away.” For more detail about Gould’s relationship to Patterson,
you can refer to a book of mine, The Art
of the Funnies, which is described here.
Stop Forgetting to Remember, an “autobiography” of a
fictional cartooner, Walter Kurtz, by Peter
Kuper, 48, who is actually telling his own life story, or, at least,
significant pieces of it. “I moved my point-of-view over just a bit in part
because most autobiographies diverge from truth all the time, and I was
interested in it as A Story rather just My Story,” he told Gilbert A.
Bouchard at the Edmonton Journal. “This shift also allows me to keep this project focused.” Continued Bouchard:
“The use of an alter-ego allowed him to work different kinds of comic-art
writing into the book—travel stories, journalism, fantasy, dreams and a wicked
parody of Richie Rich (a comic Kuper worked on in the early 1980s) that slams
George W. Bush and his administration—while still keeping a fairly linear story
readers can easily follow.” I like the Dedication, which begins: “Dedicated to
the girls who let me get past first base and to my wife, who got me home.”
*****
The System of Comics is by Thierry Groensteen,
an internationally known comics scholar born in Brussels, Belgium. This volume
(198 6x9-inch pages, hardback; $40), from the University Press of Mississippi
(one of my publishers), is the first English translation of the original 1999
work and bristles throughout with learned argot. Chapter titles alone are
daunting albeit provocative: The Spatio-Topical System; Restrained Arthrology:
The Sequence; and General Arthrology: The Network. “Arthrology” is, I gather,
“the linear semantic relations that govern the breakdown.” It is taken,
Groensteen tells us, from the Greek arthron, “articulation.” By arthrological gyrations, the cartoonist determines the
spatio-topia of his creation—that is, the distribution of spaces and the
occupation of places. Early in his argument, Groensteen writes: “The precedence
[that Groensteen accords] to the order of spatial and topological relations
goes against most widespread opinion, which holds that, in comics, spatial
organization will be totally pledged to the narrative strategies, and commanded
by them. The story will create or dictate, relative to its development, the
number, the dimension, and the disposition of panels. I believe on the contrary
that, from the instant that an author begins the comics story that he
undertakes, he thinks of this story, and his work still to be born, within a
given mental form with which he must negotiate.” This is pretty heavy going, I
admit, and Groensteen is audacious enough to believe he is flying in the face
of received opinion (or conventional wisdom) about how comics are made. But,
judging—admittedly prematurely—from the evidence of the quoted sentence, I
disagree.
Groensteen seems to be saying that a
cartoonist begins with a preconceived notion of the form his story will
take—that is, I assume, a “form” of images in panels sequenced for narrative
clarity. Can’t quarrel with that. But having decided to tell a story through
the medium of comics, the “author” then must do precisely what Groensteen seems
to say he isn’t going to do—that is, adopt “narrative strategies” that will
determine the spatial and topological (amount of space and placement within it
of images, I suppose) relations within the form he has decided to exploit. How
else, after all, could a cartoonist tell a story? Probably Groensteen will tell
us as the tome reveals its secrets, but I’m already disposed to thinking that
the whole enterprise will turn out to be an exercise in draping high-fallutin’
lingo around the ordinary, traditional and wholly commonsensical operations of
the cartoonist: once committed to comics as a narrative form, the cartoonist
breaks his tale into units of imagery, panels, and fills the panels with
pictures and speech balloons in an order that will clearly advance his story by
providing the essential information, manipulating, throughout, the size of the
images and the frequency of panels in order to sustain suspense and enhance the
drama of the incidents in the story. Or, as Groensteen puts it, the
cartoonist’s “system constitutes an organic totality that associates a complex
combination of elements, parameters, and multiple procedures.” I thought that’s
what I just said, only somewhat less laboriously. Still, the headings under
which Groensteen will do all this are sometimes delicious—“The Pregnancy of the
Panel,” for instance.
*****
The Supernatural Law
Companion: A Readers Guide to Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre,
Their Practice, Clientele, and Private Lives, by Jackie Estrada and Batton Lash. At last—a “way in” to one
of the medium’s most tantalizing and deftly executed comic book series,
featuring a team of lawyers, Wolff and Byrd, who represent supernatural
beings—zombies, werewolves, etc. Lash, the cartooner whose creation Wolf & Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre is, provides the Introduction, tracing the history of his brain-child from its
1979 birth as a comic strip in The
Brooklyn Paper, a free weekly that was distributed in the immediate
neighborhood of courthouses and law offices in downtown Brooklyn, through its
1983 reincarnation in The National Law
Journal, where it lasted for fourteen years, overlapping the eventual
emergence in 1992 of the spook-bedeviled law firm in comic book form, soon
after Lash married Estrada. The bulk of the volume is devoted to issue-by-issue
synopses of the stories in the comic books, with “annotations” by page number
that explain the often (now) obscure references with which Lash imbues his
tales. The book concludes with a list of characters and a gallery of pictures showing
how the appearances of Wolff and Byrd have evolved over the years (almost
thirty!). And Lash reminds us of his first promotion, which includes the
brilliant tagline: “Beware of the Creatures of the Night: They Have Lawyers!”
Just $10 for 90 6x9-inch pages, black-and-white; www.exhibitapress.com
For the sheer joy of sex, we have Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings in
which the incorrigible Craig Yoe has
assembled furtive works by such otherwise respectable cartooners as Cliff Sterrett, Carl Barks, Paul Murray,
Harry G. Peter, Martin Branner, and Stan and Jan Berenstain (to name a
few)—all of whom are revealed as secretly lusting after the curvaceous gender,
the nuder the better. Each display is accompanied by a short and informed
biography of the cartoonist. Among the pictures are such rarities as Joe Shuster’s scantily clad ladies
doing unspeakable things and a surprisingly chaste Wesley Morse. Not so rare, a handful of Virgil Partch’s cavorting nudes. Some other cavorting by VIP nudes
was accomplished on the cover of the first issue of Playboy, announcing the publisher’s proclivity for cartoon sex.
Other indecencies in the book include a Billy
DeBeck rendering of Snuffy Smith pissing in the snow and some suspiciously
Ditko-esque bondage bimbos usually associated with fetish artist Eric Stanton, with whom Steve Ditko shared a studio during much
of his New York period, roughly 1958-1966. The two were classmates in the
Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later, the School of Visual Arts), and it
has long been a fragment of cartooning legend that Ditko drew some of the
pictures attributed to Stanton. The notoriously close-mouthed Ditko has never
admitted doing any of this brand of porn, but my guess is that he did a
little—at least on occasion, perhaps when Stanton was having difficulty meeting
a deadline. Perhaps even more often than occasionally. Renowned these days for
his stand-offishness, Ditko came under the spell of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy
of Objectivism is founded in unabashed selfishness. It’s a persuasive theory:
even acts of altruism spring from one’s inner need to perform them—hence,
altruism is a manifestation of self-hood, of one’s desire to feel good. The
Objectivist embraces his selfishness defiantly, becoming, in effect, a personality
wholly independent of his society’s mores and morals. A pornographer is also
“outside” his society even while serving its needs. To such an outsider,
Objectivism might have a magnetic appeal: it would justify philosophically his
a-social stance. It would, in fact, elevate that stance to heroic posture.
Following this tortured train of thought, then—approaching the question of
Ditko’s alleged pornographic work from his avowed Objectivist posture, the
latter would seem to establish the former.
By the way, although not at all
incidentally, the theory than pornography is a catalyst for sexual violence is,
apparently, wrong. Studies have recently discovered that “as raunch has waxed,
rape has waned,” saith Steve Chapman in the Chicago
Tribune, and he musters statistics to support his contention. Finally, we
note that Fantagraphics will publish a career retrospective, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve
Ditko, next June. Written by Blake Bell, “the book promises to explode many
of the myths surrounding key moments in Ditko’s career,” perhaps discovering
what he did when he disappeared for a year or so in about 1955.
Snuffy Smith’s intemperate act
reminds me of a famous tale of the Ozarks. Two hillbillies, Zeke and Ezra, were
walking home late one wintry afternoon, discussing their children. Zeke’s son
was keeping company with Ezra’s daughter. Suddenly, they came upon a snow bank
upon which Zeke’s son’s name had been written by the same means that Snuffy was
employing. Ezra was at once outraged and began ranting about the licentiousness
of youth, vowing that he would keep his daughter away from Zeke’s son at all
costs. Zeke tried to calm him down, saying, “Well, Ezra—boys will be boys, and
boys have always written their names when pissing in the snow.” “I don’t mind
kids’ writing their names in the snow that way,” Ezra exclaimed, “but not this
time: it’s my daughter’s handwriting.”
All Snuffy wrote was “Twenty-one.”
Who knows why.
Hemorrhoid Tomes
Among
the books in the afore-headlined “Books I Haven’t Read Yet” category are
several that are perfectly suited for reading whilst enthroned in the biffy.
Many minions, I’ve discovered, enjoy reading during visitations to what the
British used to call “the water closet” (or “loo,” Angelicanized French for water, l’eau). Makes sense to me, I must say:
if you don’t take reading matter with you, you’re wasting several precious
minutes that you might better employ by improving your mind while your
alimentary canal is taking care of itself, no particular help from you. The
down-side of this pleasant preoccupation is that if the reading matter is
sufficiently engrossing, you wind up perched on the porcelain for much longer
than it otherwise takes to perform the ostensible errand. While this, too,
contributes to the enjoyment of the interlude, it can be dangerous. I read not
so long ago that those who make a lifelong practice of sitting there for any
length of time risk developing hemorrhoids. Hence the heading above. But
whatever the danger (life, the so-called news media are forever informing us,
is full of dangers, lurking, ready to pounce), the books I discuss under this
heading are admirably constituted for throne-room perusal: they are each
composed of short chapters or brief anecdotes which can be read easily at one,
er, sitting; so we can dip into any of them and read and enjoy without any
concern about what comes before or after the part we’ve read.
Bryan
Talbot’s The Naked Artist: Comic Book
Legends (124 6x9-inch pages in paperback; Moonstone, $11.95) is an apt
example. Under various meaningless headings (“Beer! Sauna! Naked Men!” “The
Damned,” and “The Good, the Bad, the Frequently Inebriated”), Talbot, creator
of Luther Arkwright and other titles,
regales us with amusing and sometimes even hilarious anecdotes about comic book
artists and writers, their lives, their work, their loves, their convention
adventures. Some of these tales seen more urban legends than authentic events,
but many might even be true: most sound as if they were collected at watering holes
near comic conventions, but occasionally Talbot swears he was actually a
witness to the outlandishness he tells about. Talbot being, essentially,
British, most, but not all, of the stories are about Brits—f’instance, Hunt
Emerson, whose superbly antic pictures illustrate many of Talbot’s anecdotes.
One year at the French comics festival, Angouleme, Emerson was drawing quick
pix in sketchbooks for fans, but one fan, a teenage girl, had no sketchbook.
She lifted up her t-shirt and pointed to her right breast, saying: “Draw on
here.” Emerson drew his scatalogical cat, Firkin, on her hooter with an
indelible marker, “employing her nipple as Firkin’s nose.” Simon Bisley also
experienced a mammarable moment when, en route to Dick’s Last Resort for a beer
at the end of San Diego con day, he spied a particularly spectacular pair on a
passing woman. He offered her fifty dollar bill to unveil them briefly, and she
complied, pulling up her shirt front for a moment, and then she took his money.
Then Biz offered her another fifty if she’d let him put his face between them
and go “Brrrrrk.” She did, and he did.
But not all Talbot’s stories are
about anatomical wonders. In a section about people who miss deadlines
chronically, he retails several of the excuses the delinquents offer—getting
mugged on the subway while en route to deliver the artwork, for example. Neal
Adams, Talbot says, regularly employed this dodge until his subterfuge was
revealed when he claimed to have been robbed of the artwork before he’d even
accepted the assignment in question. Reminds me of a story not in Talbot’s
book: George McManus, the imaginative creator of Jiggs and Maggie, lived in
California and his syndicate, King, was in New York, which once enabled McManus
to claim that his artwork was late because it had been on an airplane that had
crashed on its transcontinental flight. It worked well enough that McManus used
the excuse again—but this time, alas, the plane crash he referred to involved a
plane flying from east to west. My favorite of this breed in Talbot’s book
concerns Leo Baxendale, creator of the Bash Street Kids, who, up against a
deadline without enough time to complete the art, mailed his publisher a pair
of trousers. When the astonished editor phoned to ask what Baxendale intended
by sending him his pants, Baxendale exclaimed: “Oh, my God—I must have posted
the artwork to the dry cleaners!” Which reminds me of a favorite tale of mine,
not in Talbot’s keeping, about a magazine cartoonist who always came home
staggering drunk on Wednesdays. That was the day cartoonists took their wares
around to magazine cartoon editors in New York, and this fellow habitually met
with some of his ilk in a friendly saloon at the end of the day. His wife had
endured as much as she could and threatened to leave him if he came home drunk
next Wednesday. He swore he’d come right home, no saloon stops. But he
weakened, and before he knew it, he was sloshed again. He remembered enough
about his conversation with his wife that he realized he shouldn’t go home. So
he checked into a hotel. When he awoke the next morning, although slightly
hung-over, he remembered all of his conversation with his wife—particularly the
part about her leaving him. He quickly telephoned her, and when she answered,
he blurted out: “Honey—don’t pay the ransom: I escaped!”
Talbot’s stories involve a number of
not-so-well-known-on-this-side-of-the-Atlantic personages, like Baxendale, but
he also retails stories about Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, and the
like.
Another book offering many short
entertaining passages is Scott Adams’ Stick
to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain (370 6x9-inch pages in paperback;
Portfolio, $24.95), wherein Adams ignores the advice of the title and recycles
his agog blog, which touches upon many subjects, including his misadventures
trying to dance with his bride on their wedding day: he and she had practiced
beforehand, but “we’d never practiced the dance while she was wearing a huge
puffy dress. This is a bit like being a Superbowl quarterback and, just before
game time, the ref tells you, ‘We’ve replaced the football with a couch. You
won’t even notice.’” Said Adams: “If you wonder what my sense of humor is like
in person, this book is the frightening answer. Most of the book is irreverent
humor, but my niche is what I call the ‘dancing monkey’style of writing. I ask
humorously provocative questions that are designed to make your dogmatic
friends go nuts. You can use the questions in the book to turn a dull social
gathering into an entertaining (for you) showcase of dancing monkeys who insist
they are open minded when in reality—not so much. It’s evil, but it’s fun. I
call it philosotainment.” This kind of comedy is just the thing for bathroom
reading. There are only a few Dilbert strips in this book, all of them exemplifying the absurdities of syndicate
choices about what to approve and what to disapprove. (The word censorship is not applicable in this
context.) Adams admits to deliberately pushing the envelope in such matters and
seems particularly eager to get jokes about asses—that is, buttocks—into print.
He gives us both versions of such strips—the original and the subsequently
revised and approved version. Maybe it isn’t so much Adams’ desire to get
derriere gags into the paper as it is the syndicate officials’ desire to keep
them out. Whatever the case, many of the strips that weren’t approved involve
this part of the anatomy. Butt cracks are especially baffling to Adams: through
experience, he learned that he could portray a naked butt from the side but not
from a three-quarters angle because that would show a butt crack; on the other
hand, if the character were wearing underpants, the line indicating the
separation of the buttocks, the butt crack, could be there, no offense given.
Adams is a deft wordsmith, finding delight in manipulating language and in
creating outlandish puns. Take Uranus. “I don’t think Pluto should be the
funniest planet,” Adams writes, “—or even the funniest non-planet. That
distinction belongs to another. Uranus, seventh celestial body from the sun, is
part miracle of gravity and part bung hole. It has earned its status as the
funny man of the cosmos.” This statement is followed by a Dilbert strip in which the pointed-haired boss and Alice, the
pyramid-haired employee, have this exchange: “Company police says that space
heaters are not allowed in cubicles,” says the boss. To which Alice responds:
“My heater doesn’t heat space. It heats the air in my cubicle. That’s okay,
right?” “Why would anyone heat space?” the boss wonders aloud. “It keeps Uranus
warm,” says Alice. I don’t know whether that’s true in both the interplanetary
as well as the biological sense, but I hope it is.
Finally, we have Doonesbury.com’s The Sandbox: Dispatches
from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (327 6x9-inch pages, paperback; Andrews
McMeel, $16.95), a collection of short pieces that, like the Adams book, began
life at a website, in this case, Garry
Trudeau’s. Launched just a year ago, The
Sandbox is a “military blog,” an internet mechanism for soldiers on active
duty in those far-flung places to tell their stories, stories about life in the
military in a land where death lurks along every roadside, stories about the
people the soldiers encounter. The stories are not essentially political, but
they are often loaded, like this one from First Lt. Adam Tiffen that begins the
book: “She is handsome, rather than beautiful. Her black dress covers her from
head to toe, with only her face showing under a black head scarf. Still, her
open expressive face is attractive in a motherly way, as she smiles and looks
down at her curly-haired baby, the child’s fist crammed firmly into his mouth.
Sitting on the woven carpets in the bare room are her other children. ...
Children’s books and white notepads filled with children’s drawings are
scattered on the carpets that line the floor of the room. We have come to raid
their house.”
The soldiers who participate in this
blog are writers; they are not just soldiers writing. And the results are often
exquisitely tender or stoically heartbreaking. The blog posts are “lightly
edited” by David Stanford, who describes himself as “duty officer, Doonesbury
Town Hall”; he also selects and edits fragments of Rants & Raves for GoComics. (But the only way to get the Whole
Rancid Raves is to subscribe to it via www.RCHarvey.com, as you have done;
congratulations—and thanques.) There are no Doonesbury strips in this book, although the end papers reprint a couple of the Sundays
that announce the launch of The Sandbox.
The latest in the University Press
of Mississippi’s interview series with cartoonists is Art Spiegelman Conversations (340 6x9-inch pages, paperback; $20)
collected and edited by Joseph Witek, a director of graduate studies in English
at Stetson University, whose previous work delved into the same underground
venue—Comic Books as History: The
Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (also from
Mississippi). While this volume is not quite in the same hemorrhoidal category
as the others we’ve been looking at, it is still a compilation of fragments and
therefore can be, er, productively read at several, uhm, sittings. The first of
the 22 interviews takes place in 1979;
the last, in 2006, a span that embraces Spiegelman’s publication with his wife,
Francoise Mouly, of the experimental magazine of comix, RAW, and the cartoonist’s Pulitzer-winning work, Maus, and his post-9/11 opus, In the Shadow of No Towers. Compared to
syndicated cartoonists like, say, Charles Schulz or Mort Walker, or comic book
artists like John Buscema or John Romita Jr., Spiegelman has produced very
little. But what Spiegelman lacks in quantity he makes up for in quality. The
quality, however, is of an idiosyncratic sort: Spiegelman is profoundly a
comics formalist: when he is producing comics, he is vitally engaged in the
formal aspects of the art, how they work to achieve particular ends, and after
he has completed a project, Spiegelman is happy to discuss its formal facets,
becoming an exactingly articulate explicator of his own endeavors. In fact,
parts of some of his efforts are nearly invisible without Spiegelman’s
explication. The quality of his work, then, comprises both the actual work and
the formal insights Spiegelman provides for it; he becomes, in effect, both a
spokesman for the artform and an exemplar of it. As a thinking and speaking
cartoonist, his influence on the present generation of cartoonists is much more
profound than the tidy sum of his published comics implies it would be. Hence,
the value of this collection of interviews, a couple of which have never been
published. He talks about all of his principal works, their forms and their
politics, but his discourse—a bubbling stew of allusions and asides, best
captured in this volume in the 1987 interview with Graham Smith—is scarcely
limited to his own works or, even, just to cartooning. The illustrative
material here is minimal—a page of this and a page of that—but it is sufficient
to its purpose. Art Spiegelman is a walking talking seminar on popular culture
with an emphasis on cartooning, and it’s all in this book.
Peeves & Pratfalls
“Insane people are always sure that
they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they
are crazy.” —Nora Ephron
“I love mankind; it’s people I can’t
stand.” —Charles M. Shultz [I’m not sure about the source here: is it “Schultz”
with a “t” or not? Besides, it was Jonathan Swift who said it.]
CHRISTMAS LISTS
It’s
that time of year. And if you’re momentarily stymied about what to suggest to
your spouse or Significant Other as a gift to give you, consider, perhaps, any
of my books, all listed on the front page of this website. Or, speaking of the
University Press of Mississippi, visit its website, www.upress.state.ms.us where, under “Comics and Popular Culture,” you can find more about comics and
cartooning than you probably expect. The University Press (one of my
publishers) has developed an impressive backlist of books on our favorite
subject—more impressive, I’d say, than any other academic publisher. Among the
goodies, the “Conversations” series just alluded to above with Spiegelman.
Others in that line include conversations with Milton Caniff, Charles Schlulz,
Carl Barks, Chuck Jones, Mort Walker, Robert Crumb, Walt Disney, and, just out,
Stan Lee. Moreover, there are the two monumental Topffer volumes, genuine
rarities made available for the first time to English-reading audiences, and
numerous collections of essays, often of a very erudite nature: The Philosophy of Comics, The Language of
Comics, Film and Comic Books, Arguing Comics (an excellent compilation of
essays on the subject spanning the last century—about which I’ll someday have a
more complete review; I’m workin’ on it), Alternative
Comics: An Emerging Literature, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book, Fredric
Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, and the aforementioned System of Comics.
And if, by chance, you’re a fan of
the works of Stan Lynde, drop into www.oldmontana.com, where you
can find books reprinting his classic strip, Rick O’Shay, and the entire run of his later opus, Latigo, plus Lynde’s own story and
several of his novels. If Old Montana doesn’t work, try www.mountain-press.com
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Although
the art of cartooning is to blend word and picture into an entity that has a
meaning neither words nor pictures by themselves have, sometimes word play is
the joke. In Jef Mallett’s Frazz, one of the school kids and Frazz
ponder the word “knickknack,” which, the kid says perceptively, contains
letters a third of which “just take up space and serve no real purpose at all.”
To which Frazz, with even greater perception, says: “Much like knickknacks
themselves.” ... In Rhymes with Orange, Hilary Price shows two men fencing.
One hits the other with his foil and says, “Touche.” To which his opponent
says, “Ouche.” ...In Jim Unger’s Herman, Herman, or some equally faceless
occupant of the panel, says: “In ten years, she changed from a ballerina to a
sports arena.” ... In Scott Adams’ strip, Dilbert approaches the pointy-haired
boss to ask for a $1,600 handheld bar code scanner to finish his lab tests. The
boss says: “Okay. Apply for a capital budget variance, prepare an RFP, get
three bids, form a team to evaluate the bids, then prepare a purchase order.”
“Never mind,” says Dilbert, “I’ll just learn how to read bar codes by sight.”
Says the boss: “Quitter.” Word play isn’t operative in this one: just absurdity
at its apogee. ... In Kevin Fagan’s Drabble, Ralph’s mother (or wife?) nags
him about repairing the leaky roof, and he, sitting under the leak while
watching tv, says he’ll fix it come the weekend. To which she says: “He puts
the ‘pro’ in procrastinator.” Which one of these glyphs is Drabble, by the way?
Who is Drabble? Who is Norman? Who is Ralph? A few days before, a few of these
“doodle-faced” creatures are watching another presidential debate on tv, and
one of the viewers wonders why he doesn’t recognize any of the candidates. The
debate, he’s told, “is for the 2012 election.” “Boy,” says the first speaker,
“the campaigns really are starting earlier and earlier.” Truth from whoever’s
mouth.
Self-referential humor: In Francesco Marciuliano’s Sally Forth, Sally and her mother have
been trying all week to patch things up between them, and Sally confesses that
she thought they’d resolve their differences by “today”—i.e., Saturday. “Why’s
that?” asks her mother. Says Sally: “Not sure. Visual Aids Department. And here are
some strips we must look at to properly appreciate. Speaking of The New Yorker brings us, as it almost always does when discussing
this magazine, back to the founder, Harold Ross, who, when asked why he didn’t
publish cartoons in color, famously said, “What’s funny about red?” To prove
him wrong, several New Yorker cartoonists have concocted cartoons in which the
color red is the operative risibility. See them here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/11/26/slideshow_071126_red?slide=1&run=true&start=5#showHeader Or you can buy the current issue, November 26—the one with the venerable desert
island joke on the cover—the magazine’s annual “cartoon issue,” where all five
of the “funny red” cartoons are published. Apart from the usual portfolio
section of cartoons, the rest of the magazine is pretty much what it always
is—instead, that is, of publishing insightful articles on cartooning and
cartoonists. In short, an annual disappointment.
FOOTNIT
Annual
Stock-taking and Bean Counting
For
the record, here’s where I repeat the Essential Information from this month’s
earlier Rabbit Habit Alert wherein we (1) announced the epic Hindsight essay on Mutt and Jeff et al
and (2) reported the year’s production here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic
Wurlitzer. I’m repeating it here, this time, just so I can find it next fall
when I start looking up the production records of previous years. In our fourth
year, from November 2006 through October 2007, we produced a total of 597 pages
of Rancid Raves (averaging 50 pages a
month), plus 104 pages of Hindsight (an average of 8.6 pages a month). What other magazine generates nearly 60
pages of comics-related (mostly) news and reviews every month for a mere $1.32
a month?
We (Jeremy Lambros, my webmaster and
I) produced 19 opuses of Rants &
Raves in the last twelve months and posted 13 Hindsight (“historical”) articles. Our contract specifies
approximately bi-weekly issues, and we did somewhat better than that: we
occasionally missed on the frequency, but we posted something for you at least
twice a month and, in many months, three times, sometimes even four times.
By the way, we call it an online magazine, not a blog. Blogs, as I understand them, are like diaries or
journals; a magazine, like Rants &
Raves, offers discrete articles on different subjects. And that’s what we
do. We divide the articles into departments (News [“Nous R Us”], Book Reviews
(“Book Marquee”), Comic Strip Watch, Graficity [Graphic Novels], and Funnybook
Fan Fare, all directly engaged in comics, plus a few trimmings like favorite
quotations and reports on the oddest doings around (Civilization’s Last
Outpost), but they’re still articles, not journal musings. Among the graphic
novels we reviewed in the last twelve-month: Abandon the Old in Tokyo, The Professor’s Daughter, Cancer Vixen, and Fun Home. And in the Hindsight department, our long-form
section, last year we did profiles of Bill Amend (FoxTrot), Irwin Caplan, Clay
Geerdes, John Held Jr., and Buck Brown, and we examined Wertham’s book, Wonder
Woman, the birth of comix, Danish Dozen and Free Speech, the Top 100
comic/cartoon creations of the 20th Century, and how Jews created
the comics, and we also presented an exhaustive essay on the difference between
a “review” and a “critique.” Surely, that’s enough plugging for this year.
Despite the flip tone herewith,
we’re not bragging: we’re merely hoping to demonstrate having provided the
value you bargained for when you subscribed. The quantity anyhow; about the
quality, you must be the judge. Thus endeth our 214th foray into the
digital ether.
To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
||||||||
send e-mail to R.C. Harvey Art of the Comic Book - Art of the Funnies - Accidental Ambassador Gordo - reviews - order form - Harv's Hindsights - main page |
