NOUS R US
Schulz Third Richest Dead Celebrity
The Voice
Rates New Yorker Cartoons
Disney’s “Enchanted” Revives the Studio’s Tradition
Marvel Goes Digital
Western
Comics in True West
Houston Post Cuts Back on Comics
Wonder Woman’s New Feminist Scribe
The 99 Extols Universal Values
Scott Adams Becomes a Boss
Satrapi Aspires to Smoking Championship
Anti-Semitic Cartoons in Arab Papers
MORE ABOUT
MANGA
Gay Comics
Picasso In Rome Where Male Nudity Is Paraded before
City Hall
GRAFICITY
Freefall Romance, A Gay Love Story
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Number Ones: Graveslinger, The Deadlander, Brawl,
Simon Dark
Green Arrow and Black Canary, Nos. 1 and 2
THE FROTH
ESTATE
Newspapers Are Aliver and Weller Than We’d Supposed
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Bottled Air
Kristallnacht in Heart
of the City
EDITOONERY
Public Official Drummed Out of Office by Crusading
Editoonist
(Or Not)
Nick Anderson Asks the Democrat Candidates a Profound
Question
Pat Bagley Just Gets Better and Better
Musical Chairs at Editoonist Desks
HOLY MOLEY
The Blasphemy
of Teddy Bears and Cartoons
CLOSER TO HOME: Wiley Could Be Next
PASSIN’
THROUGH
Australia’s James Kemsley, 1948-2007
NEW COMIC
STRIP: Signe
Wilkinson’s Family Tree
BOOK MARQUEE
Noel Sickles’ Scorchy Smith
Bush Leaguers: Catalog of Editorial Cartoon Exhibit
Last Summer
CALENDAR GIRLS: Olivia, Femlin, Silke’s Betty
SO MANY
SPLENDID SUNDAYS
Pete Maresca’s Walt and Skeezix, Sammy Sneeze, and
the Next Nemo
Plus: How Maresca Got Going On This Anyhow
Christmas
Lists
A Couple Suggestions
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
With $35 million, Charles M. Schulz ranks third on Forbes magazine’s annual list of “Top-earing Dead Celebrities,”
following Elvis Presley ($49 million) and ex-Beatles John Lennon ($44 million)
but ahead of George Harrison, another ex-Beatle ($44 million) and Albert
Einstein ($18 million). ... Scott Adams, said Editor & Publisher, ranked
21st in the list of “The Top 50 Thinkers” in the world of business
published by the Times of London. ...
Patrick McDonnell lost the dog that inspired Earl in his comic strip, Mutts; the real-life Earl died at the
age of 18. More at Muttscomics.com. ... The weekly newspaper supplement Parade magazine has, nearly forever,
offered its readers three cartoons a week in its “Laugh Parade” feature. For
several centuries, all three cartoons have been by Bill Hoest or, after his death, his wife Bunny and cartoonist John Reiner; one of the three has been
about a St. Bernard, Howard Huge. With the October 21 issue, Parade announced that it would be
“happy” to “welcome” new cartoonists to the department, at the rate of one per
issue, I assumed, judging from this issue in which Gary McCoy singles. But by
December 9, Hoest and Reiner and their boring St. Bernard had disappeared, and
the three cartoons were by McCoy, Dave
Coverly and the team of Carla
Ventresca and Henry Beckett. And
the feature is now called “Cartoon Parade.” ... Gary Panter won an American Book Award for his graphic novel Jimbo’s Inferno in which Panter’s
muscular buzz-cut adventurer “is a wary innocent traveling through the most
heinous atmosphere Panter can imagine—for Panter, ‘hell’ is just two letters
away from spelling ‘mall,’ a gigantic brain-numbing info-commerce center called
Focky Bocky” according to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics, publisher of Jimbo’s Inferno. Panter is the second
Fantagraphics-published cartoonist to get an ABA: Joe Sacco was the first in 1996, with his book of cartooning
reportage, Palestine. Another
Fantagraphics production, Don Phelps’ Reading
the Funnies, a book of essays, won several years ago.
The Village Voice on November 29 published
“The New Yorker Cartoon Standings:
Fall 2007" with which Brian Parks needles the magazine for the celebrated
obtuseness of some of its cartoons. Parks’ chart, which appears anon, ranks the
issues according to the “Humor Success Percentage”of the cartoons: the November
5 issue had 9 cartoons, 5 of which were “amusing,” so it was batting .556; the
October 8 issue, in which only 3 of its 18 cartoons were “amusing,” was batting
a miserable .167. The magazine’s annual “cartoon issue” hit merely .333, which,
it sez, “excludes” the comic strips in that issue. Of which there are a few,
including another of those terrible stomach-churning collaborations between Robert Crumb and his wife Aline, who
cannot draw. Presumably, the editors of the magazine publish the occasional
effusions of this couple because they think it’s such a nifty notion that Crumb
and Aline can jointly do a comic strip. The sheer togetherness of the
enterprise appeals, I suppose. But if it weren’t for Crumb’s appealingly fustian
drawings, the so-called strip would collapse of tedium. It almost does as it
is. The “cartoon issue” of The
New Yorker (November 26) published a cartoon by Lee Lorenz, former cartoon editor of the magazine, that looked
remarkably like something Gary Larson did in The Far Side in the 1980s,
according to ElfMagazine.com, reported by E&P. In Lorenz’s 3-panel cartoon, a woman on a park bench is feeding birds; she is
surrounded by more and more birds until, in the last panel, only her handbag
remains, implying that the birds have eaten her. In Larson’s cartoon, a man on
a park bench is surrounded by the birds he is feeding; they seemingly devour
him and leave only his winter coat on the bench. New Yorker cartoon editor Bob
Mankoff, while acknowledging the similarity of the cartoons, said Lorenz
“is not a guy who copies cartoons,” adding: “This is not plagiarism. Rather it
is the result of very creative people developing many ideas from a few
well-established, well-traveled cartoon settings.” Eggs-actly.
It’s
the 70th anniversary of the debut of Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the movie industry’s first
feature-length animated film, and the studio’s latest product, “Enchanted,”
seems to Alex Remington at news.yahoo.com to celebrate both the technical
achievement for which Disney is renowned and the studio’s return to hand-drawn
animation. “Disney’s exit from the field of full-length hand-drawn animated
movies betrayed a fundamental doubt about the company’s ability to make the
movies that defined it: gorgeously rendered, impeccably styled musicals for the
whole family, unabashedly saccharine and, for the modern age, almost
unthinkably unironic. Finally, with ‘Enchanted,’ Disney seems to have regained
their faith in and much of their skill at what they do best.” The new movie,
with both animated and live-action sequences, is “self-referential to previous
Disney movies,” making it “a fundamental defense of Disney movies, and the best
Disney movie in almost two decades.” ... Yadu, a Beijing-based maker of home
appliances and the world’s second largest maker of indoor air quality products,
has been authorized by Disney to
make some of its home appliances in the shape of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the
Pooh; the co-branding partnership will help Yadu sell its products and will
increase awareness in China of Disney characters that are nearly ubiquitous
everywhere else.
At
marvel.com/digitalcomics, Marvel “has taken thousands of classic issues of its
comics along with selected current titles and re-engineered them panel-by-panel
to make them into something akin to a sleek Internet slide show,” writes Geoff
Boucher at the Los Angeles Times. Boucher calls the venture “bold” but believes it is prompted “as much by
anxiety as ambition.” The cause of the anxiety? Despite the success of movies
and video-games built on superhero comics, “the printed comic book is fading
from the cultural consciousness of youngsters. Next year,” Boucher continues,
“the superhero comic book will celebrate its 70th year as a uniquely
American contribution to pop culture, but it’s now a foreign object to most
kids. The glut of slick magazines and the quirky business history of comics distribution
has made it hard for kids to stumble on a comic book if they aren’t looking for
one.” The only place you can be certain of finding a comic book for sale is in
a comic book store; a kid can no longer “happen” upon the four-color wonders at
the corner store. There aren’t any corner stores. Writer Jeff Loeb recognizes the predicament but keeps the faith: “Comics
are like chocolate chip cookies. If they’re not around, kids don’t know they
want them, but once they are exposed to them, they want them.” Boucher quotes
Dan Buckley, president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment: “We don’t have a
natural lifestyle intersection point for kids anymore.” But he hopes to find
one online. The Marvel website opened with 2,500 issues “and 20 more are added
each week.” You can sample 250 of them without charge; everything is available
for $9.95/month or, if you sign up for a year, the charge drops to $4.95/month.
Could be my machine, but the lettering in the speech balloons is too small to
read without zooming in on every page; the color is brilliant, but the lines
are too pixelated and seem raggedy. Could be my machine, as I said—or my own
ineptitude at digital exploits.
Both
Marvel and DC have sent notice to the BitTorrent site Z-Cult FM threatening
legal action of the site doesn’t “cease and desist” facilitating bit torrent
downloads of scans of Marvel and DC comic books. Z-Cult initially complied,
said icv2.com, but later came back, saying: “We are based outside of the U.S.
and are not therefore subject to U.S. legislation that was present on the legal
documents sent to us.” This legal skirmishing takes place just as both
publishers are increasing their own presence on the Web. I have no idea what
bit torrent downloads are (or what bit torrents are either), but I have a basic
grasp of what the Web is.
The
November-December 2007 issue of True West magazine offers several nuggets of comics treasure. Paul Hutton’s article,
“True Comics,” is a somewhat perfunctory albeit seemingly encyclopedic (if not
comprehensive) survey of Western comics. “Perfunctory” because it doesn’t give
the publication dates of most of the titles it lists and because his judgement
is debatable. He thinks Gilberton’s Classics Illustrated was “superbly done.”
And he refers to underground comix as “head comics,” which they were once
called, comix being sold in “head shops.” He doesn’t give the names of many of
the minions who labored illustrating in the Western vineyards, but he extols,
and rightly, the work of the late Jack
Jackson (Jaxon), who he calls “the finest American graphic historian.” He
also believes that some of the publications of Daim Press in Milano, Italy, are
“the highwater mark in graphic histories of the American West.” Jaxon and Daim
are in Hutton’s concluding section, “Best Western History Titles,” which
follows his over-all survey; in the latter, he recognizes that almost none of
the Western funnybooks were historically accurate—not even Fawcett’s Billy the Kid, who was, you’ll recall, a
goat, a billy goat. I assume, therefore, that the “Best” titles were ones that
were historically accurate, although I think sometimes that Hutton’s criteria
for these includes the quality of the artwork; seems to for Daim, for example.
Hutton’s piece is followed by an agonizingly brief article by Mark Boardman,
“Back to the Future,” about a publication called Texas History Movies. But it wasn’t about movies at all: it was
about Texas History, and the history was told in the manner of Ed Wheelan’s
famed Minute Movies—that is, in comic
strip form. There are two or three illustrations, too tiny to discern much but
large enough to justify an opinion that the rendering was entirely competent in
a style evocative of a slightly bolder Gene Ahern manner. The first book with
this title was a reprint of comic strips initially published in the Dallas Morning News, beginning in 1926.
They were, Boardman tells us, “pretty racist.” Jaxon undertook to revise the
series, eliminating the racism, and The
New Texas History Movies came out under the auspices of the Texas
Historical Association earlier this year, Jaxon’s last hurrah. This issue of True West also includes a fond
recollection of the contributions of the late California ’tooner Phil Frank, who started doing a cartoon
series, “Frank History,” for the humor page of the magazine, Last Stand. The editors publish here
their favorite Franks and some of the drawings with which Frank decorated his
correspondence to them; they also decided that “Frank History” so dignified
(or, to use their word, “anchored”) the Last
Stand page that they can’t continue it without Frank. There’s a great photo
of Frank, too, with a crow perched on his finger. In place of the Last Stand this time is a piece by Jimmy Palmiotti, co-writer of Jonah Hex, entitled “What History Has
Taught Me.” The comic book scribe “often finds inspiration for his Jonah Hex
tales in the pages of this magazine,” we’re told. And we learn that Jonah Hex
may be on the way to the silver screen. In sum, a whole lot of cartooning
information in a Western magazine.
The Houston Post, which, according to E&P, “had perhaps the largest daily
comics section of any U.S. print newspaper,” has reduced that section by a page
“to save money on newsprint costs and syndication fees.” The dropped comics are Arctic Circle, Buckles, Cathy, Cleats,
Crock, Dennis the Menace, Diesel Sweeties, The Dinette Set, Drabble, Gasoline
Alley (sob), Heathcliff, Judge Parker, The Lockhorns, Marmaduke, Mary Worth, Mr
Boffo, My Cage, Real Life Adventures, Rubes, Shoe, Spot the Frog, Sylvia and The Wizard of Id. Some of these
strips did poorly in reader surveys, some of the older ones are no longer being
done by their original creators, and some are too new to have developed a
following. ... And the Washington Post “has become the latest newspaper to shrink its comics offerings”—this time,
reports E&P, by condensing its
two Sunday sections into one, a transformation that is accomplished by reducing
the size of the strips. ... Alley Oop is
celebrating the centennial of Oklahoma’s becoming a state by sending the
eponymous protagonist back in time to 1907 where he meets Oklahoman Will Rogers
and the two face a crisis that could prevent statehood. The strip is drawn by Jack Bender and written by his wife,
Carole, who is a native Oklahoman; they both reside today in Tulsa. ... Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha comic strip just passed its fifth anniversary; it
appears, saith E&P, in 60
newspapers. Alcaraz, with a master’s degree in architecture from the U. of
California, Berkeley, has been producing editorial cartoons for the LA Weekly since 1992 and recently
received his fourth Southern California Journalism Award for Best Cartoon in
Weekly Papers. He also received the Los Angeles Hispanic Public Relations
Association’s Premio Award for Excellence in Communications, and the Center for
the Study of Political Graphics “Art as a Hammer” Award, according to a press
release from his syndicate, Universal Press.
A
first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the inaugural novel in her celebrated series, sold at auction in England for a
record-breaking $40,350, due, chiefly, to scarcity: because of the immense
popularity of the first book, first editions of subsequent titles in the series
were published in vast quantities, effectively destroying the value of each of
those first editions. ... The original art for the cover of Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural No. 1 sold for $101,575 said
scoop.diamondgalleries.com. This is the first time that “a Crumb original or
any underground original by any artist, sold for $100,000.” ... In Manga: The Complete Guide, Jason Thompson, editor for many U.S.
editions of manga, “rates and reviews over a thousand manga series and
demystifies the wide world of Japanese comics,” according to Deb Aoki at
manga.about.com. ... The December issue of Shonen
Jump magazine will begin releasing “the manga voted number one of all time
in Japan, said Kai-Ming Cha and Heidi MacDonald at PW Comics Week. Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue is about “a comically arrogant high school student who
goes out for the basketball team to impress a girl.”
With Wonder Woman No. 14, Gail Simone, formerly a professional
hairdresser, will take over as full-time scripter of the “third-ranked” hero at
DC. According to George Gene Gustines at the New York Times, Simone’s writing career began with “Women in
Refrigerators”—“an online chronicle of the suffering experienced by female
comic book characters” at unheardtaunts.com, which lead to a barely-paid humor
column at comicbookresources.com, and then a writing gig at Bongo Comics,
followed by Killer Princesses for Oni
Press and, soon thereafter, Marvel’s Deadpool and DC’s Birds of Prey, which, being
an all-female ensemble, led to Wonder
Woman. Simone thinks she’s a good fit for the character because she grew up
in a family “where women’s rights were very important, and the guys didn’t tend
to stick around too long. Wonder Woman was an amazing role model.” Wonder Woman
hasn’t enjoyed anything like a consistently good run for years, it seems to me.
She’s DC’s most obvious candidate for a sexy superheroine, but she seemed
severely hampered by her early history in a star-spangled foundation garment:
girdles in those distant days were worn as much to inhibit the seductive
caresses of romantic men as to shape the body. Nothing sexy about that. But
when John Byrne redesigned her
costume some years ago, Wonder Woman acquired more than a soupcon of runway
appeal. Still, she was scarcely Anna Nicole Smith. When the current team of
artists, Terry and Rachel Dodson,
took up the title, matters improved again. I’m not convinced, though, that
Simone’s first story arc, which, Gustines tells us, “involves a previously
unmentioned attempt on Wonder Woman’s life on the day of her birth,” will
afford the Dodsons much opportunity to display the sort of pictures they’ve
become known for. Babies are cute, not sexy. But I’m probably misunderstanding
the publisher’s intent: feminism not sex appeal seems to be the object of their
present preoccupation.
A
new graphic novel lately released in India tears the veil of altruism from the
Mess o’Patomia enterprise: Iraq:
Operation Corporate Takeover, written by Sean Michael Wilson and drawn by Lee O’Conner, maintains that Western business interests are taking
advantage of Iraq’s weakened state to secure long term control of the country’s
oil reserves, the third-largest in the world. Looks eerily as if the plot could
have been ripped from the day’s headlines if the news media were at all
disposed to reporting the news instead of the dubious antics of too many
presidential candidates. Private security companies, whose forces number about
48,000 of the 160,000 contractors in Iraq, are singled out in the book for
pocketing huge profits while remaining complete unaccountable for human rights
abuses and the deaths of unarmed civilians. Rick Veitch’s Army@Love series from DC/Vertigo takes essentially the same view of the war as corporate
enterprise. In No. 7, a female character who is in bed (literally) with a
Cabinet member, a benefit he realizes as a result of his supplying her with
retail goods to sell on the blackmarket in Afbaghistan, says: “I hope the
military doesn’t do anything drastic—like winning the war.” To which the old
fart responds: “With corporate sponsorship skyrocketing, there’s little fear of
that.” In this remarkable satire, which takes place “a few years in the
future,” the war in this far-off country is conducted entirely as a
profit-making endeavor by a military-industrial complex (i.e., the government).
Only a couple of the cast could qualify as likable, and Colonel Healey isn’t
one of them. It is he who has re-invented the war thereby assuring a continuous
flow of new recruits into the ranks of the army. In Healey’s recruiting plan,
the war is advertised as an opportunity for guilt-free sex and heart-pounding
danger on the battlefield with the option of shooting bad guys—just the sort of
thing that motivates adolescent America to sign up for the harrowing fun of it
all. To catch up, try www.armyatlove.com
In
Cleveland at the Plain Dealer, some
plain talk from columnist Ted Diadium, who, noting that some readers complained
about the grimly serious storyline in Funky Winkerbean as Lisa Moore dies of cancer—“readers
objected to such a strong dose of reality being inflicted on them in a part of
the paper that is usually reserved for laughs”—countered with this advice: “I
usually recommend that people who object to a particular strip simply exercise
their right as a reader and ignore it, but one caller not long ago said that he
couldn’t do that because we put Funky right in between two of his favorite strips. No problem, I told him: we have
just discovered yet another use for duct tape.” ... Also from the Plain Dealer, a report about a comic
book store dealer who was astounded when a perfect stranger walked into his
store offering to sell him a near-mint
copy of Detective Comics No. 27,
in which Batman debuts, that he had found while cleaning out an attic. This
issue of this title is regarded by most collectors as the second most-valuable
comic book; the first is Action Comics No. 1, in which Superman first appears. ... Chris Browne, who produces his father’s legacy, Hagar the Horrible, has moved from
Sarasota, Florida, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, because of a parade, said Leslie
Rupiper at ksfy.com. Browne and his wife Carroll visited the city a while back
when he fulfilled an invitation to speak at Augustana College, and while in the
vicinity, they experienced the Vikings Day parade. Said Chris: “Carroll turned
to me with her Viking horns on and said, ‘I love this. I want to move here.’”
And so they did.
The 99, the world’s first comic book of
Muslim superheroes, has been a big hit in the Middle East, Mariam Mahmood tells
us at voanews.com, and the title has now debuted in the U.S. “The title refers
to the 99 attributes of God, which Muslims believe—when existent in one
being—deify that being, and only Allah possesses all 99 attributes.” Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of the new
title, says the attributes include generosity, strength, wisdom, mercy,
foresight and “dozens of others that are not used today to describe Islam in
the media.” In the series, each of the heroes embodies one of the 99
attributes, and each of them must work with two others as a team to solve a
problem. Each character originates from a different country, and there is an
equal number of male and female characters, with nine of the latter wearing
traditional headscarves in nine different ways, according to their cultures.
Al-Mutawa adds: “The 99 series is not
a religious book; it is as religious as Spider-Man, so it’s based on values.
When Uncle Ben teaches Spider-Man—or Peter Parker—that with great power comes
great responsibility, is that a Christian message? Is it Jewish? Is it
Buddhist? Is it Muslim? It’s human. It’s global.”
Scott Adams, who made his first fortune
by ridiculing bosses, has become a boss, reports Susan Young at
contracostatimes.com. It’s the latest change in a series of recent alterations
in his once-cubicle-confined life. In July 2006, he married for the first time
and became a “bonus dad” to his wife’s two children. For the last couple years,
he’s been struggling with a debilitating disease, spasmodic dysphonia, “a vocal
disorder that can also affect other parts of the body with tremors.” He can
talk on the phone and to an audience, but in one-on-one conversation, he chokes
on his words. His hand shakes when he puts pen to paper but doesn’t if he uses
a stylus and draws on his computer. Ten years ago, he partnered with a waitress
at his favorite beanery to open a hip retro restaurant named after his partner,
Stacey’s. Then they opened another restaurant, and Stacey was overwhelmed
running two. So Adams stepped in to run one of them. Not so far-fetched, it
turns out: Adams won the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award while in high school.
Turns out, too, that as a boss, Adams is the “anti-pointy-haired boss”: at
least one employee says he’s the best boss he ever had. Adams spends much of
the day at the restaurant, it seems; he produces Dilbert and writes his blog in the mornings, starting, usually, at
6 a.m. But he’ll be spending less time on the blog, according to Editor & Publisher. Adams started
the blog for four reasons: to collect advertising dollars, to compile the best
posts for a book, to expand the audience for Dilbert, and to express himself verbally. But blog readers have
figured out how to bypass the ads to get to the content, he said: “So there’s
no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn. It
topped out at ‘trivial’ even while the audience grew to substantial.” None of
the other three reasons worked out quite the way he wanted either—although, if
pressed, he might admit that he got a book out of it and that writing a blog
was artistically satisfying. He’ll continue to blog, he said, but not as often,
which was daily.
The
animated version of Marjane Satrapi’s two-part
so-called autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, which she co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud, who had just a little bit
more experience in animation that her nada,
took a Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Planned for a December
25 opening, the film, claims Rachel Abramowitz at the Los Angeles Times, “is a delightful—yet poignant—child’s-eye view
on the winnowing of personal freedoms under the harsh regime of the ayatollahs
[in Iran after the revolution in 1979]. The film evokes young Satrapi’s quest
for contraband punk rock, the perennial irritation of keeping one’s headscarf
correct, and how to conduct romance in a country where unmarried men and women
should not be seen in public together.” In French with Catherine Deneuve doing
some of the voicing, the film, Satrapi said, “is based on real life, but from
the second you make a script, it becomes fictional,” and so she and Paronnaud,
aiming “to make the movie universal,” changed some of the story so it would
come alive. “I ended up looking at the main character as the main character,”
she said, “not myself.” She had received numerous offers to turn her story into
a live-action movie, but she refused them all. “Either I had to do it myself,
or it shouldn’t be done at all.” When asked by Euan Kerr at Michigan Public
Radio what she wants to do next, Satrapi said she wants to rest, play some
ping-pong, write more comics, make more films, paint again—and “become the
world champion of smokers.” Her addiction to cigarettes is fast becoming as
legendary as Art Spiegelman’s.
MODERATE ARAB
PAPERS SHOWCASE ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOONS AHEAD OF THE SUMMIT
Up-dated on
November 28 from the previous day’s story by Haviv Rettig, here, verbatim, from
jpost.com:
While Arab leaders trekked to Annapolis for the
summit, Arab newspapers, many of them government-funded, have been running
cartoons depicting Israel as violent and untrustworthy, according to a survey of
Arab media conducted by the Anti-Defamation League. The cartoons often use
anti-Semitic themes, such as depictions of ugly, greedy Jews in religious garb,
to convey their messages. While some of the cartoons come from places with
declared belligerent policies toward Israel, such as Syria and the Hamas-run
Gaza Strip, others come from what the American government has called
"moderate" states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,
Oman and Qatar, and even government-funded newspapers in Jordan and Egypt.
One
cartoon, published in late October in Egypt's government-funded
mass-circulation daily Al-Ahram,
shows an Israeli hand extended in peace, but with missiles in place of fingers
and on the olive branch it holds. A November 8 cartoon from Jordan's Ad-Dustur shows a Jew, identified by a
skullcap and a Star of David on his briefcase, sporting an evil grin and
wearing a suit covered with images of fighter jets and tanks. An example of
classical anti-Semitic depictions came from Oman's Al-Watanpaper, which published a November 16 cartoon showing a
religiously-attired Jew standing behind a gagged and seated Uncle Sam and
speaking in his stead to a crowd of Arab listeners. Qatar's Ash-Sharq newspaper ran a late-October
cartoon depicting Ehud Olmert as a snake wrapping himself around the Islamic
shrine of the Dome of the Rock, while the country's Ar-Raya newspaper depicted Olmert as a fox holding an olive branch,
suggesting he had just eaten the dove of peace.
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.
Persiflage
and Badinage
“The e-mail of the species is deadlier than the
mail.” —Stephen Fry
“Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.”
—Lester B. Pearson
“The
poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always
objected to being governed at all.” —G.K. Chesterton
“Trying
to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying
to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” —Ben Hecht
“Never
give a party if you will be the most interesting person there.” —Mickey Friedman,
novelist
More and More
about Manga.
The market for print manga in Japan
is shrinking. Or, at least, changing drastically. According to USA Today (October 19), sales of manga
magazines fell 4 % last year, the latest year in a steadily dropping trend from
a peak in 1995 of 1.34 billion copies to only 745 million last year. “Manga’s
decline may be due primarily to the habits of young Japanese, who, analysts
say, are: obsessed with cellphones, the Internet and video phones, all of which
provide manga-style entertainment; tired of reading in the traditional way;
bored with plots and characters, which, in manga, have become increasingly
repetitive; disappearing—the traditional pool of manga readers is smaller today
as birthrates in Japan shrivel.” As the Japanese market shrinks, so, I would
suppose, will the output to meet a decreasing demand. And with that, the source
of manga for American markets will, likewise, diminish, compounding a dilemma
already lurking on the horizon: American publishers of manga have already
started muttering about exhausting the supply—hence, Korean comics, the latest
source of manga books in chain bookstores. Manga publishers in the U.S. have
also started to explore yet another vein of material in Japan—shonen-ai/yaoi. Sonen-ai means “boy’s love,” and in this country, it usually refers
to manga that focus mostly on emotions and relationships rather than sex; yaoi, on the other hand, focus on sex
between men.
The
last three or four issues of Previews,
Diamond Distribution’s monthly catalog of freshly minted comics and graphic
novels and related products, have seen the arrival of Digital Manga Publishing,
which has taken at least six full pages to advertise its current crop of comics
about the romantic adventures of gay men—young, attractive (in that svelte
pointy-chinned effeminate manner of manga) homosexuals. In the November issue,
for example, we have Body Language, “Less Talk ... More Sex,” which offers this synopsis: “Kanae is a university
student whose ‘cold beauty’ has led people to spread nasty rumors about his
promiscuity. In truth, Kanae is a virgin. He is also secretly in love with the
Don Juan of the campus, Yuuichi. Poor Kanae would do anything to be with
Yuuichi, even if it meant a merely sexual relationship with no feelings
involved. But when the opportunity arises, can he settle for anything less than
love?” Or this about I’ll Be Your Slave: “Moriya is in charge of finding a model. For a new product commercial for a big
jewelry brand; but, nobody matches the ideal of perfection he has in mind—that
is, until he meets Itsuki Ouno. Itsuki is not just perfection incarnate, he’s
like royalty, and incredibly spoiled. And he may well be the one person destiny
put in Moriya’s way to fulfill his need to adore and serve.” With teasers like
that, I had to find out just how these tales are accomplished; my review of one
of them, Freefall Romance, appears in Graficity below. I’m a little
surprised, though, to find this genre so openly touted in Previews, given my understanding of Diamond’s owner’s reputation
for wobbling in the somewhat conservative not to say righteous direction. I
suppose Steve Geppi has decided, like any good capitalist, to let the market
place work its will. By the way but not at all incidentally, the Williams Institute
at the UCLA School of Law reports that the number of same-sex couples in the
U.S. has been steadily rising—from 145,130 in 1990 to 594,391 in 2000 to
779,867 last year. This doesn’t mean the number of gays is increasing: it
means, rather, that general acceptance of homosexuals has increased enough over
the years to permit the public acknowledgment of same-sex unions and to keep
records about them. Still, for the comic book business, flaunting homosexuality
is risky: American parents are notorious for their protectiveness of their
children, and since graphic novels are seen as “long form” comic books and
comic books are seen as children’s junk literature, anyone distributing yaoi is almost certain to be accused of
corrupting the Young, which invariably precipitates a firestorm of alarm. We’ve
seen precisely this kind of hysteria in action in Rome, Georgia, where Gordon
Lee was infamously arrested and charged with distributing to children “obscene
material” that was “harmful to minors.”
The
“obscene material” in this case was a comic book in which the painter Pablo
Picasso is portrayed working in the nude in his studio, historically and
biographically an accurate depiction of the painter’s working habit. When Lee’s
case finally came to trial early in November, the judge was forced to declare a
mistrial because the prosecutor, in his opening remarks, referred to Lee’s
previous run-in with the law on a similar charge. While I reported this last
time, Opus 214, I neglected to mention that the charge in the previous
instance stemmed from Lee’s having sold an adult (“pornographic”) comic book to
an adult, a circumstance that the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune, found “hilarious” because another store nearby,
Entice, sold adult material to adults without being harassed in any way. But
then, it wasn’t in the comic book business, and, as everyone will tell you,
comic books are for children. Lee was apparently convicted but I can’t tell
from my source (the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) whether the
conviction stuck or not. The News-Tribune notes that “police seized hundreds of allegedly ‘obscene’ comic books [in this
earlier encounter] but had to give them all back, plus the city and district
attorney’s office had to pay a $18,000 judgment after the store owner sued them
and won.” And Lee himself is quoted as saying he “beat” the rap that time. The
current case, however, stems from a Hallowe’en event during which Lee’s store
gave out 2,200 comic books as “treats” to children. Apparently, the News-Tribune says in its editorial
reviewing the case, “only one” comic book of questionable content, the one with
the Picasso story, “was mistakenly handed to a child by an employee. There
would seem little evidence of a massive conspiracy to degrade public morality
or pervert children in that. Nor was the comic in question actually ‘porn’ of
any kind but appears to fall under the legal definition of ‘art.’ Indeed,” the
editorial continues, “the setting in which all this is taking place turns it
into a comic farce. A couple blocks from where this courtroom ‘drama’ goes on
endlessly, and right in front of City Hall in full public view, stands a statue
of a fully anatomically endowed [naked] Romulus and Remus [the mythological
founders of Rome, Italy] being suckled by the famed Capitoline wolf. They don’t
show a thing that the Picasso picture didn’t also show. Photos of that statue
adorn untold amounts of official brochures, are found on the city websites and
so forth. Indeed, along with the Clock Tower, those undressed little male
humans are considered to be the ‘symbol’ of Rome. So, a question: If a child
sees that statue, or such a brochure, or bumps into it on a website, should all
local officials be prosecuted for distributing harmful materials to minors? ...
The defense rests ... or would, if it weren’t doubled over in the aisles,
laughing.” (A link to the entire editorial can be found at www.cbldf.com or the whole thing at http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/680/public/news856929.html ; Rome’s website is www.romega.us but I didn’t see Romulus or
Remus there.) None of Fijiyama’s pictures in Freefall Romance show his heroes full-frontal naked, so presumably
the book could be sold in even Rome, Georgia without sensation. But one never
knows these days when Righteous ire will be aroused—or by what.
GRAFICITY
Hyouta Fujiyama’s Freefall Romance is yaoi, a genre of manga about romance between young men. In this tale, Youichi Nanase is concerned about his younger brother, who is attending an all boys school that is rumored to have a 90% gay student population. Youichi finds a sympathetic listener in a co-worker, Renji Tsutsumi, to whom he confides his worry about his brother. Renji, unbeknownst to Youich— and to himself— is gay and, to complicate matters, is attracted to Youichi: “He has sex appeal, and he’s pretty good-looking,” Renji muses, “—if only he was a girl, I would have done her by now.” Meanwhile, Youichi discovers his brother, far from being the innocent prey at school, is the predator, and then, during one of the evenings he spends drinking and talking with Renji, Renji reaches out and touches him on the cheek. “Why did I do that?” he wonders later: “Well, that’s kinda obvious ... I just got this sudden urge to touch him.” Once he’s started thinking this way, the subject of the conversations between the two changes: instead of talking about Youichi’s brother, they talk about their own at first ambiguous situation, why they are attracted to each other and what they should do about it. The talk is pretty soon accompanied by exploratory groping: after 30 of the novel’s 200-plus pages, they’re kissing. But the talk continues, nearly interminably in the usual manga manner—pages devoted to the utterance of a few syllables, each illuminated by slightly varying facial expressions—as the two struggle to decide whether they are gay and if so what to do about it. Between conversations, they agree to explore a physical relationship, little by
little—first touching, then kissing, then embracing, then mutual masturbation,
then .... Finally, by the end of the book, they’re having anal sex. “This is
it!” “Thrust” exclaims a caption. “Are you okay?” “Yeah”—followed by lots of
moaning and fairly explicit drawings: no genitalia but body language and poses
leave nothing to the imagination. Despite the explicitness, Fujiyama’s pictures
are models of discretion: erotic without being pornographic, they adequately
convey the emotional heat of the increasingly physical relationship. Deploying
a slender yet flexing line, Fujiyama’s clarity is simple yet realistic. The
faces of the characters, however, are templates of handsome youth: all the boys
look alike except for hair color. And they are monotonously serious: only once
or twice in the book does anyone smile. Sex in these pages is not, apparently,
a joyful activity. Fujiyama displays great restraint in advancing the story:
nothing is presented in any sensational way; events unfold in a quite natural,
human and humane manner; and everything that happens is accompanied by reams of
quiet introspection and compassion. Given the step-by-step style of manga—its
idiosyncratic tendency to prolong an activity by depicting every single motion
much in the manner of “in-betweening” key moves in animation—and the
exploratory nature of the encounter between these two youths, Freefall Romance could be seen as a gay
sex primer. It isn’t, of course, but if it falls into the wrong—that is
Right—hands, it would lend graphic support to a contentious and sensational
scandal. All the more reason for my surprise that Steve Geppi’s Diamond
Distribution Company has undertaken to market DMP’s yaoi books.
LET THE
READERS CHOOSE
Thad Ogburn reports the varying responses of comics
readers at the News & Observer where they are about to launch a formal Readership Poll (as if they need the
formality to get the funnies fans to speak up); verbatim:
Candorville, Darrin Bell's edgy, urban comic strip, is "stinking
garbage," according to one reader who wrote us during the strip's trial
run earlier this year. But another reader e-mailed that Candorville is "a thinking man's strip with something to say
in a funny way." Meanwhile, Mallard
Fillmore, Bruce Tinsley's take-no-prisoners strip, was called "the best guest comic" we tried.
It also was termed "simplistic opinion ... with no wit or fun
anywhere."
Think
it's only the political comics that draw such wildly divergent opinions? Oh,
no. The little girl known as Agnes in Tony Cochran's cartoon was "one
funny young lady" to some readers, "stupid" to others. Tony Carillo's F-Minus strip? "Great! ... love the irony!" versus
"The sorriest excuse for a cartoon I've ever seen."
Suffice
it to say, we're never going to get full agreement on any comic strip. Humor is
just too subjective.
RCH: Wouldn’t you know? Opinions range from one end
of the spectrum to the other. No wonder it’s difficult for feature editors to
pick strips for their comics section.
FUNNYBOOK FAN
FARE
Four-color
Frolics
Almost all of the first issues I picked up this time
have protagonists who are probably dead. How zombies, not to mention vampires,
became culture heroes is something of a puzzle. Until you think about it. They
are comic book heroes for about the same reason that so many newspaper comic
strip protagonists are animals: these creations, the dead and the four-legged,
do not belong to any interest groups that can protest against their
representation in the comics. So the creators of these series can have their
characters do or say whatever they want without fear that some rabid protest
group will materialize to object.
In Graveslinger No. 1, John Cboins does his best to obscure Shannon Eric Denton and Jeff
Mariotte’s limping storyline with pictures that are so idiosyncratically
rendered that we can’t tell from one panel to the next which character is “on.”
The Graveslinger, named Frank Timmons I think, is made recognizable chiefly
through his clothing and a gigantic drooping moustache that vaguely resembles a
kielbasa sausage. But he’s about the only character who is recognizable enough
to separate him from the rest of the bunch. He has apprehended two bad guys by
blowing them to bits on the opening three pages of this issue, and then he runs
into Will Saylor, a rancher, who, when he learns that Timmons is tracking some
escapees from Gila Flats Territorial Prison and which direction the fugitives
are going, becomes alarmed: they’re apparently headed to his ranch where his
wife and daughters abide, helplessly. He and Timmons race to the rescue,
arriving in time to convince the bad guys to leave and, en route, to release
the women. Or so the wiley Bart Bevard says, fully intent on something else
altogether. Bart and his men, it seems, are zombies of one breed or another,
and their objective with the women is not sexual but gustatorial. They want to
eat not rape them. Timmons manages to shoot enough of them to scare the rest
off momentarily, and with that, the issue concludes. The action in at least two
places isn’t very clear. Is Timmons following Saylor to his ranch? And when did
he decide to do that? And how, exactly do Timmons and Saylor get from the top
of that distant dune to the zombie guard, close enough for Timmons to slit his
already-dead neck? It all happens whilst we’re turning a page, I suppose. The
maneuver may work in movies, but it limps badly here. There are a couple of
nice loud gunplay sequences and one or two witty bits of faux Western lingo.
But Cboins’ art is so extremely stylized, bristling with masses of twiggy,
purposeless lines, that we’re lost in astonishment at the visual eccentricities
instead of being transfixed by the story. And he can’t draw men on horseback
convincingly, a decided drawback in a story set in the Old West.
Billy Dogma returns in Brawl No. 1, and Dean Haspiel’s bold two-fisted lines once again capture the brute power of his hero, who, in this outing, pounds his way out of one extremity into another, finally facing a giant monster, and that’s where Haspiel leaves us. Haspiel is pretty chintzy with dialogue, so his story barges along more-or-less silently with Billy blurting nearly mindless comments like “Give a crippled crab a crutch” when the monster grabs him and then “Shit. Fuck. Piss. Karate.” Not that this tactic isn’t amusing in its strange and cryptic way; it is. It all seems of-a-piece with the visuals, power action that lurches from one odd angle to the next, implying more than it shows. The second part of the book is devoted to “Panorama featuring Augustus,” a young man who spends most of his pages deteriorating before us, body parts festooning and falling off for no apparent reason. Lots of nauseating visuals as our hero coughs up and vomits his guts literally and not much talk until Augustus, in need of alimentary relief, takes a crap in a young woman’s apartment and then, having messed in his pants, begs some underwear from her. Michel Fiffe is doing the damage here, deploying a spidery line everywhere we look; and I have no idea where he’s going with it. Both stories are continued in the next issue, which will be the second of three, three too many for me. The Deadlander No. 1 is distinguished by the artwork of Kevin Ferrara, who writes as well as draws the book. He would appear to have been smitten at an early age with the work of Graham Engels at EC and Bernie Wrightson everywhere else, and he carries on in that fashion with great panache. The page layouts all take place within an ornate border, which takes enough space that the pictures in the panels are often exquisitely tiny. Despite which, Ferrara supplies copious detail in nearly every panel. The story gives us only a couple glimpses of the zombie Deadlander; mostly, we follow in the acrid gunsmoked wake of the Cobra, who is bent on finding the Deadlander. So determined is he that he shoots and kills almost everyone he encounters. I’m not sure that gets him any closer to the Deadlander, but it surely shows him to be one bad-tempered hombre. By the end of this issue, we still don’t know why he’s after the Deadlander, but Ferrara’s drawings are worth the trip. So minutely detailed are they that I have a feeling we’ll never see No. 2: he can’t possibly meet a production schedule and do bravura work like this on every page—can he? We’ll see. I hope. The eponymous protagonist of Simon Dark No. 1 is a shadowy figure with a sewn-on face, perhaps another of the zombies who seem, with increasing frequency, to populate the funnybooks these days, whose job, he tells us, is to “protect my neighborhood.” In this issue, he performs his duty by interrupting a ritual murder in a ruined church, garroting the would-be killer and then, apparently, killing the destined victim. Or maybe the victim was already dead before Simon saved him. We might be in the midst of a dream. Or a trance. Later, at the crime scene, we meet Beth Granger, the medical examiner, and the investigating officer, who is trying, unsuccessfully, to get a date with her. “I don’t date at work,” she says. We also meet a young couple who are just moving into the neighborhood, and we witness a meeting of the brotherhood that sponsors ritual murders—“offerings.” One of their number, the presumed leader of the job Simon Dark interrupted, begs the opportunity to make up for flubbing the night’s sacrifice by arranging the next one—“something big, something the media will not ignore, something public and tragic.” The newly arrived couple maybe? Not counting the mystery of Simon Dark himself, writer Steve Niles has, by the end of this issue, dangled at least three story threads, each of which seems tantalizing enough to bring us back. And Scott Hampton’s expert rendering lends the tale both atmosphere and narrative clarity. The first two issues of DC’s Green Arrow and Black Canary are in, and the story is gripping enough to bring me back for more. I missed the death of Green Arrow on his wedding (to Black Canary) night, but the episode is rehearsed here: he apparently drew a dagger and seemed about to kill his bride, so she grabbed a nearby arrow and stabbed him in the neck, killing him. Subsequently, in issue No. 1 of this title, she behaves in a extreme manner while apprehending the bad guys, almost beating one of them to death. When Connor Hawke, GA’s son, and Green Lantern question her about it, she claims she’s upset because she knows the man she killed on their wedding night was not Oliver Queen, the Green Lantern. Batman believes her, and later, he and Dr. Mid-nite dissect the exhumed remains and confirm their hypothesis: the dead guy is not GA. In No. 2, we find that the real Green Lantern has been kidnaped by the Amazonian tribe on the Isle of Themyscira for reasons not yet clear. Black Canary and Speedy go to the island to rescue GA; and so does Connor Hawke, who successfully breaks his father out of a cage whereupon they are apprehended by a flock of spear-chucking Amazons. Judd Winick’s plotting is straightforward and purposeful, and his dialogue is both witty and colloquial. Cliff Chiang’s drawings are exquisite. He affects what I call an Art Nouveau mannerism—outlining in a heavy bold line but applying plenty of fineline detail within the outline—but which doubtless has some manga origin, interpreted here with a pristine clarity of line and detail. His rendering of faces, particularly beautiful feminine ones, is delicious, even if, given the refinement of his treatment, they all look an awful lot alike. We don’t notice, however, because he can vary facial expression without compromising the beauty of his subjects. Fascinating.
THE FROTH
ESTATE
The Alleged
News Institution Upon Which Comic Strips Depend
Maybe print journalism is not so bad off as we so
often hear it is. “Everyone is talking about the ‘death of print,’ and the
funny thing is you see more newspapers than before,” said Richard Karpel,
executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, quoted in Editor & Publisher (August 2007,
belatedly reported herein). The newspapers Karpel refers to are those free
daily tabloids being produced by mainstream dailies in deliberate imitation of
the alternative weeklies that, for the last 40 years, have been spreading
across the urban landscape, catering to every conceivable niche interest: here’s
an apartment vacancy booklet, an arts and entertainment guide, The Onion for sarcastic laughs, and
other specialty publications not to mention overt news coverage in what we
might call the “traditional” alternate weekly where edgy reporting and writing
eventually supplanted “underground” political screeds—all lined up in rows of
those distribution rack-boxes on street corners. Desperate to attract the young
reader, big metropolitan newspapers began, a few years ago, to ape the alties
that they saw young readers gobbling up.
The
business plan, sofar as there is one, is rank simplicity: it’s advertising
revenue that makes newspapers financially viable. The newsstand price of a
newspaper generates so comparatively little of the paper’s income that it pays
for little more than the ink on the presses, as one wag put it. Newsstand
sales—and home delivery—are important only because circulation tells
advertisers how many people are likely to read their ads. Recognition of this
cold hard fact in print journalism yielded the formulation that infuses
alternative weeklies: if you give away the paper, circulation will increase,
and the increase will enable the paper to charge more for advertising.
Metropolitan daily newspapers have gone a step further: instead of producing
free weekly papers, they crank them out every day. Metro freebies tend to aim
for younger audiences than alties, which, increasingly, find their readership
growing older. In Chicago, the Chicago
Tribune launched Redeye, a
youth-skewed quick-read daily, in 2002, and distribution has now reached
150,000 with a free home-delivery weekend edition added last spring. People
read it on the L (the “elevated” commuter train system in the Windy City) and
toss it in the trash can when they disembark at their destination. But Redeye is designed for quick
consumption—short articles and lots of pictures—and it is reaching young
readers, giving the city’s older youth-oriented weekly, Chicago Reader, respectable competition. The altie-weekly Washington City Paper recently
determined that its average reader spends 79 minutes with the paper vs. 20
minutes for the average metro freebie. In big cities like Chicago, alties have
been successful enough that they worry as much about the loss of readership to
the Internet as the mainstream papers do. Meanwhile, the free offspring of the
metro dailies cut into altie circulation. In mid-size cities, however,
alternative papers still do well. According to E&P, “overall altie-paper revenue in 2006 was up 3.6% over
2005— a time when, according to the Newspaper Association of America, overall
daily newspaper revenue was down 0.3%.” Among the metro dailies, the hope is
that their free quick-read tabloids will nurture future readers for the regular
daily; as freebie readers establish families and buy homes, they’ll want
something more—maybe the Saturday and/or Sunday paid daily newspaper. Again,
the point is: there are more newspapers now than 30 years ago; even though the
big metros claim to be ‘in trouble’ financially, that trouble is with
stockholders, not banks.
Meanwhile,
as the altie-audience grows older, the papers are being bought up by chains. Village Voice consolidated with New Times; Creative Loaf just bought The Chicago Reader. As the alties get
“chained,” will they be less spunky? Will the piss and vinegar drain out of
their columns? Consolidation achieves economies of scale and opens the door to
national advertising, all of which undercuts the once-essential local nature of
the enterprise. Once more, the point is that money is still being made in the
newspaper business, in all its dimensions, reports of the death of print
journalism to the contrary notwithstanding.
Now
if only all those alties and metro free tabloids would start publishing comic
strips....
A FEW WORDS
FOR BOOK LOVERS
“Outside
of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
—Groucho Marx
“The
biggest seller is a cookbooks and the second is diet books—how not to eat what
you’ve just learned how to cook.” —Andy Rooney
“Never
judge a book by its movie.” —J.W. Eagan
“If
you read a lot of books, you are considered well-read. But if you watch a lot
of tv, you’re not considered well viewed.” —Lili Tomlin
COMIC STRIP
WATCH
I wondered when it would happen: inspired by the
success of selling tap water in plastic bottles for several times the price of
an equivalent amount of gasoline, Garry
Trudeau introduced us in Doonesbury for December 2 to entrepreneur Chad Severnson, who has launched a new product
into the eagerly mindless consumer market—Alpin-Daz, air bottled in
Switzerland. And we richly deserve the ridicule. ... Berkeley Breathed may have strained the license he is allowed as a
satirist when, on December 2 in Opus, he started the rumor that Garfield is gay. The ostensible targets of this
thrust are those who salivate with morbid interest over every rumor and report
of alleged homosexuality in celebrities and politicians and their household
pets. While Berk’s thrust ridicules such ravening unreason, the springboard for
the laughter is an implicit acceptance of the notion that homosexuality is
anathema.
The week of November 12, Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City reran a 2002 series of strips that commemorated the anniversary of Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass”—namely, the night of November 9-10, 1938, when Nazis in Hitler’s Germany rampaged through the streets of towns and villages, destroying Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. Many Jews were beaten to death. Tatulli revised and up-dated dialogue for the rerunning. Heart and her friend Dean, interviewing older people for a school project, meet Leo Nussbaum, who, as E&P reports, “tells them the story of his youth in 1938 Austria and his harrowing escape from Nazi oppression.” (Dunno about your computer screen, but on mine, a lot of imagery accompanying this apostrophe isn’t very clear; it’ll clear up, though, if you print out this illustration.) I
asked Tatulli how the series was received, and he said: “I got a lot of
response to that story. Mostly people
thanking me for keeping the ‘never forget’ idea alive, especially in the comics
pages that kids will read. A lot of
rabbi's, and I actually heard from a survivor of Kristallnacht. A lot of people ask me where I got the story,
and I'm almost embarrassed to say I made it up because certainly there are so
many real stories floating around, why make one up? But how would you chose which tale to tell? How could I do a real story justice? After all, it is the comics pages— I don't
have the full sweep of a movie screen, say. So I made up a story that I felt conveyed the horror and uncertainty of
those days, and from a child's perspective, that fit the format of comic strip
storytelling.
“I
am a bit of a history buff, and I have read a good deal about the Holocaust,
mostly because it was sort of glossed-over in my school years. What I became especially intrigued by was the
tons and tons of personal stories, the survival of children against a huge,
state-run killing machine. It boggles
the mind to read some of these personal tales.
“I
wanted to write something about Kristallnacht when I first read about those
awful days, something I had not heard of before. During my exploration of Vienna's history, I
came across the Gunderman Plant (a strong plant native to Vienna), which has a
great survival rate and the ability to last for years and years. It seemed like an appropriate allegory for
the struggle of the Viennese Jews and a good place to start my story. And the story just built from there. Mostly Heart and Dean represented my
ignorance of the Holocaust (all through school) and I wanted them to become
informed on a very personal level. And
what better way than a comic strip? It
doesn't come close to telling the real story, but my goal was to possibly make
kids inquisitive and prompt open discussion with parents and teachers. Simply that.
“It
was a very personal story for me to tell, and I wanted to do it justice because
of the serious and emotional subject matter, and I'm always touched to hear
from readers who are moved by my little drawings. It is a feeling I cannot effectively
describe.”
EDITOONERY
Afflicting
the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted
It is the holy dream of every political cartoonist to
unmask the hypocrite, to puncture pomposity and to reveal the everlasting
chicanery of politicians and other polluters of the public weal and thereby to
drum the scalawags out of town. It is a dream that is almost always frustrated
by the very target of the cartoonist’s crusade, who, invariably, phones the
hapless ’tooner to ask for the original art of the supposedly insulting
cartoon. Deflated by this flattering appreciative gesture, the cartoonist goes
back to the drawingboard, still to dream on, hoping against hope, that the next
time he skewers a mountebank posing as a public official, the offending
factotum will get his just deserts. So we should be gratified, somewhat, to
report that George Russell at the San Francisco Chronicle scored the
á<Çæ‘.ÚŒ½ÕJeìÔÝO9Ó<'§©¡@ÏUŸ$÷ØBQ<Á
´‹‰\Sw°LûûPx‡$”F¦²Ä½¬¦83A•ÆÙMYÛ%ü¿¨(…v
JÊ-R¸ufMŸ}HðÛÂÐtà«®€Êh,²= |