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Our bag of gifts for you at this time of year includes an assortment of ’tooner Christmas cards from yesteryear, taken from the December issue of Slice of Wry, the newsletter of the Southern California Cartoonists Society, ably edited by Terry Van Kirk, who assembled these specimens from who knows where.
Beyond that, our chief focus this time is on a Round-up of the
Events of the Cartooning Year—best books, best strips, best comics, etc. The
usual array of year-end topics, but this conglomeration includes reviews of
some books I haven’t even read yet, a feat of criticism nearly overwhelming in
its audacity. But we are nothing here if not audacious. The sensation of this
Opus is ex-Mormon editooner Steve Benson’s outing of Mitt Romney’s fraudulent
claim to political independence. We also include an entirely superfluous essay
on the pagan and Christian origins of Hallowe’en and Christmas, say a fond
appreciative farewell to Al Scaduto, and offer one more excerpt from Meanwhile, my biography of Milton Caniff
(to which I’ve shamelessly appended a review of the book by Allan Holtz and
several samplings of other reviews of the book, all, naturally, stupendously
enthusiastic). Here’s what’s here, in order, by department:
Corrections and Up-Dates
NOUS R US
Watterson Documentary?
Another Post-9/11 Graphic Novel by Jacobson and Colon
Marjane Satrapi Doesn’t Like “Graphic Novel”
Disney Religion
Dagwood Shoppes Lets HQ Staffers Go
Spider-Man’s Appeal
Wonder Woman’s Feminism?
THE TRUTH ABOUT ROMNEY’S MORMONISM
From Ex-Mormon Editoonist Steve Benson
Sundblom Was Santa Claus
HALLOWE’EN AND YULETIDE
An Essay on Origins both Pagan and Christian
ROUNDING UP 2007
Best Books of the Year
Reprint Landmarks
Comic News Events of the
Year
Best and Worst Comic Strips
The Worst Thing
Best Comic Books
Anniversaries
Deaths
PEEVES & PERSIFLAGE
Colorado Shooting and the Gun Lobby
Mallard Filmore and Hillary Clinton
AL SCADUTO: Saying Farewell
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Fear Agent, Killing Girl, Blackgass
Warren Ellis Speaks
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS
PROMOTION
Exerpt from Meanwhile—A
Biography of Milton Caniff
Review of Meanwhile by Allan Holtz
The “Best” of the Other Reviews of Meanwhile
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—
CORRECTIONS AND UP-DATES
Right Up C’here, In Front
Where You Can’t Miss It
Sorry, my mistake—Newsday is not, as I averred last time, without a full-time staff editoonist. Walt Handelsman, who won the Pulitzer
last year, is on staff there, all the time.
And
“the Girl of Qatif” who was sentenced by a Saudi Arabian court to prison and
200 lashes after being gang raped was pardoned last week by King Abdullah. Her
offense, you’ll recall from Opus 215, was being in a car with a man she was not
related to when seven men attacked and raped them both. Her sentence shocked
many in the West, including George WMD Bush, who said if the same thing
happened to one of his daughters, he would be “angry at those who committed the
crime. And I’d be angry at a state that didn’t support the victim.” Such strong
criticism coming from Saudi Arabia’s strongest ally may have induced the Saudi
monarch to (as he put it) “alleviate the suffering of his citizens” even
though, in this case, he was, he said, convinced that the initial verdict was
fair.
NOUS R US
All the News That Gives Us
Fits
Caricatures and animation can help catch criminals,
according to a study by Charlie Frowd reported at gadgetell.com by Colbert Low.
Recognition rates improve among eye witnesses to crimes when they see the
accused miscreant’s facial features exaggerated in caricature. ... On the
criminal side, at Rikers Island prison in New York, inmates who are enrolled in
art classes were recently assigned to design a comic book, said Carrie Melago
at the New York Daily News. One
prisoner came up with Hood Surfer, “a teen from Brooklyn who gets hit in the
head by a meteor, causing his skateboard to float.” Sound a little familiar?
According to his creator, Darius Welch, an 18-year-old facing burglary and
grand larceny charges, the Hood Surfer “decided to start saving the ‘hood.’”
... A film about Bill Watterson, the
reclusive creator of Calvin and Hobbes, may
be in the offing. Guest blogger Charles Brubaker said at DailyCartoonist.com
that cartoonist Keith Knight of The K Chronicles has been interviewed
for a Watterson documentary. I doubt that Watterson himself will show up for
it. ... The original art for a 1955 Peanuts strip depicting Charlie Brown and other baseball players in the rain went for
$113,525 at an auction held by the Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas, saith Editor & Publisher, adding that DailyCartoonist blogger Alan
Gardner attributed the high price partly to the controversial biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis. ... Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon will be back in August 2008 with a sequel to their 9/11 Report graphic novel. In the new
160 6x9-inch page book, entitled After
9/11: America’s War on Terrorism (2001 - ), they intend to portray “what we
knew and when, and how we ended up where we are—how America’s War on Terror
unfolded and unraveled.” My guess is that this book will do much better than
the last.
Back
at the Beloit Daily News, which
suspended Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur because a chicken in a KKK
hood seemed, to some, racist, editor William R. Barth announced on December 18
that the paper’s readers had spoken: Non
Sequitur would return to the funnies page. “The Daily News garnered a bit of national publicity over the chicken
affair,” Barth said in announcing the verdict, “—though not necessarily the
kind we’d want. There’s a big difference, of course, between suspending a
feature and canceling it. Non Sequitur,
like other features that run in the newspaper, is there by invitation. That
invitation can be withdrawn at any time, for any reason,” he finished,
menacingly. “That’s not censorship. That’s business.” Barth also complained,
good naturedly, about cartoonists “sticking together.” He cited the online and
syndicated strip The New Adventures of
Queen Victoria, which consists of a static succession of photos of ol’
Vicky puffing speech balloons of wisdom. (You can see it at GoComics.com.) In
this case, on December 15, three weeks after the Daily News suspended Non
Sequitur, we see her apparently picketing the Beloit Daily News, saying: “Don’t you see? By killing a cartoon
because it was against the KKK, you put your paper in the position of
supporting the KKK!” A voice from inside the newspaper office says: “That logic
escapes me.” To which Vicky retorts: “As does all logic. Good day, sir.”
Marjane Satrapi, who was approached by
Hollywood to turn her graphic novel, Persepolis, into a film almost as soon as the book came out, didn’t, at first, want to make
a film. “I thought it was the worst idea,” she told Jamin Brophy-Warren at the Wall Street Journal. “But they give you
enough money and you can have a studio—you have to be crazy to say no.” The
animated feature was hand-drawn in France rather than being computer-animated
in Asia because Satrapi isn’t computer literate. “I don’t know how to write
email,” she said. But she was the co-director of the film, and so it had to be
hand-drawn so that she would understand what was going on: “If you don’t
understand it, you can’t make changes,” she explained. She doesn’t like the
term “graphic novel,” by the way. “It’s a word that publishers created for the
bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of
narrating. It’s just a media type. Chris
Ware doesn’t like it either: he says it sounds like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
A
religious studies professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland will be teaching
the Disney religion in a course
called “Religion and Disney: Not Just Another Mickey Mouse Course” (RELS 3812),
a title nearly provocative enough to induce me to enroll long-distance.
Professor Jennifer Porter believes, quite sensibly, that “belief systems” are
implicit in all Walt Disney’s films. That’s scarcely a novel notion: any film
by any filmmaker, any work of art by any artist, embodies the maker’s beliefs.
In Disney’s case, however, the beliefs doubtless reflect Disney’s upbringing in
a conservative Christian home. Said Porter: “There’s a faith component embedded
in them all. ... [But] Disney movies seem to deliberately avoid direct
religious references and favor supernatural intervention rather than divine
intervention. We’ll study what went into his decision to avoid religious
references, to make religion generic, to have his characters sing songs instead
of offer prayers at crucial moments.” Disguising religion is an honored
Hollywood tradition: how else do you market movies to the largest number of
viewers?—a number likely to include the full range of American religious
convictions.
The
main attraction at Dagwood Sandwich
Shoppes is a 1 ½ -pound, double-decker, 24-ingredient behemoth called “The
Dagwood,” priced at $8.90. The plan for the restaurant chain, launched in May
2006, was similarly ambitious, reports Richard Mullins at the Tampa Tribune. Dean Young, manager of his father’s legacy, the comic strip Blondie, and restaurant executive Lamar
Berry planned to sell about 100 marketing territories in the U.S. for
$200,000-300,000 each. Those who bought them would, in turn, sell franchises at
$220,000 apiece. The company’s website lists 20 locations, including 13 built
and operating and the remainder under development. But apparently the plan is
not unfolding rapidly or remuneratively enough to support the corporate
headquarters, which has laid off most of its staff. Presumably, the
headquarters operation was mostly selling territories and franchises, for which
it once employed “probably fewer than 100 people” but now gets by with only
four. The Sandwich Shoppes are still open and building Dagwoods, and the
company has no immediate plans to do anything otherwise with them.
On
January 9, The Amazing Spider-Man will
begin shipping three times a month for the new story arc, “Brand New Day,” with
editor Steve Wacker holding the reins. In a Marvel Comics news release, Ben
Morse asked Wacker why Spider-Man “continues to endure as such a popular
character.” Said Wacker: “It all boils down to Peter Parker. He’s as
approachable and as likable a charger as you can find in literature. There are
Peter Parkers in everything we read and watch [today], so it’s probably easy to
forget how novel a character he was when Steve
Ditko and Stan Lee create him.”
Everywhere thereafter, heroes with problems popped up. “I think there’s a
certain amount of ‘watching a car wreck’ for a lot of readers,” Wacker
continued, “where we can’t wait to see what goes wrong for Pete. I also think
readers all have that same feeling that if we had these powers, we could find a
way to use them effectively to make a better life for ourselves. Peter Parker
on the other hand sees them as a curse and can’t seem to stop letting his
secret life screw up his private one.” In the new story arc, Wacker said,
“we’re going to take some time to really explore and expand the supporting cast
in a way that I don’t think has been done for a long time.”
Grady
Hendrix in the New York Sun notes
that Wonder Woman’s creator, William
Marston, “never intended Wonder Woman to be a feminist.” A psychologist who
lived with his wife and lover in a cozy menage a trois—“both women served as inspiration for Wonder Woman”— Marston
“felt that women were more honest and unfailing than men, and he championed
their ascent in society.” He also wrote stories in which bondage was a theme.
Wonder Woman’s newest writer, a former hairdresser named Gail Simone, says she has no agenda for her stories. “I just want
to give the reader as good a story as I can write,” she said. In the first
Simone story, Wonder Woman suddenly realizes that the gorilla [sic] gang she’s
fighting is not evil—just misguided. “She lets them move into her apartment but
only after their leader kneels and kisses her lasso.” Thus, Hendrix concludes,
“while the new Wonder Woman series portrays its heroine as strong and
compassionate, it also carries a whiff of slightly sexualized dominance.” In
other words, Wonder Woman is, again, “just the way her creator wanted her.” I
think, though, that Hendrix means “guerilla” not “gorilla.”
The
building that was built in Boca Raton, Florida, to house the International Museum of Cartoon Art has
been standing empty since Mort Walker moved the IMCA out several years ago, but next fall, an upscale, rodizio-style
steakhouse, ZED451, will open on the ground floor of the two-story building,
reports Alexandra Clough at the Palm
Beach Post. Another part of the building will be occupied by a bookstore.
The building is being renovated and transformed into a multi-use complex. A
cultural-arts center will move into the second floor, and another restaurant
will fill out the rest of the ground floor.
ROMNEY, MORMONISM, AND THE
TRUTH ACCORDING TO
CARTOONIST STEVE BENSON,
EX-MORMON
By Dave Astor
Published in Editor
& Publisher online: December 18, 2007; 3:50 pm
Steve Benson, editorial
cartoonist for the Arizona
Republic and a grandson of Ezra Taft
Benson, once Mormon church president, left the church in 1993, the same year he
won the Pulitzer. One of the reasons he left the church, he told Dave Astor at Editor
& Publisher, was because he was
disgusted by Mormon officials trying to fool church members and the general
public into believing that his 94-year-old grandfather was still capable of
leading the church. “He was not mentally or physically in a place where he
could make any meaningful decisions,” Benson said. “I know it because I saw his
condition with my own eyes.” Possessed of an acerbic and inventive wit, Benson,
for as long as I’ve known him, has never been bashful about expressing his
opinions—a valuable occupational hazard for political cartoonists. He has been
critical of George W. (“Warlord”) Bush, and he opposes the war in Iraq. After
Romney’s press conference on religion and politics in America, Astor contacted
Benson to get his take on Romney’s presentation. Benson was not impressed. In
fact, it would be fair to say he was aghast. He refers to his former religion
as a “cult,” and he is highly critical of Romney’s attempt to convince
Americans that his being a Mormon would not affect his behavior in the Oval
Office. Here’s Astor’s article, verbatim and entire except for the portions
I’ve already quoted in the foregoing.
As an ex-Mormon, Arizona
Republic editorial cartoonist Steve
Benson has strong opinions about current Mormon Mitt Romney. He said the
Republican candidate's recent speech on religion should not be trusted by media
people and other Americans. In his talk, Romney said "I believe in my
Mormon faith" while also noting that the church's "teachings"
would not influence his decisions if elected president.
"Yeah,
right," responded Benson, adding that "Romney also believes in
misrepresenting what his Mormon Church actually espouses."
Benson
told E&P that, in his view, a
Mormon believer is required by church doctrine (as dictated by the church's
"living prophet") to "obey God's commands" over anything
else. He said "Romney, like all 'temple Mormons,' made his secret vows
using Masonic-derived handshakes, passwords, and symbolic death oaths that he
promised in the temple never to reveal to the outside world"—and that
Romney also secretly vowed to devote his "time, talents" and more
"to the building of the Mormon religion on earth."
So,
said Benson, the only way Romney could be truly independent of the church as
U.S. president would be to disavow Mormon doctrine. "He hasn't done
that," said the Creators Syndicate-distributed cartoonist.
"When
Mitt says he belongs to a church that doesn't tell him what to do, that's
false; it's a 24/7, do-what-you're-told-to-do church," asserted Benson.
Benson
said journalists have basically given Romney a free pass on the
"fundamental contradiction" between being an observant Mormon and a
U.S. president. "Most journalists don't know about actual Mormon teachings
and practices," noted the cartoonist, adding that they instead see the
religion as perhaps "strange" but "rather benign."
Romney
"needs to face an informed member of the media with 'cojones' who has a
working and perhaps personal experience with Mormonism," said Benson.
"It would be harder for Romney to do his well-practiced duck and
dodge."
Benson
himself drew a post-Romney speech cartoon that pictured John F. Kennedy saying
"Ask not what your country can do for you..." followed by Romney
saying "...do whatever it takes for me to win Iowa." (Many people
believe Romney gave what he hoped would be a JFK-like speech on religion
because he was losing support in Iowa.) But Benson said he hasn't heavily
focused on Romney's Mormonism in other cartoons. "Religious issues are
very touchy," he said. "I do what I can, but I pick my battles." Another
reason Benson distrusts the words in Romney's speech is because the candidate
has changed his public positions on issues such as abortion and gay rights to
woo conservative GOP voters in states like Iowa rather than the more liberal
voters he once courted to become governor of Massachusetts. "He flips and
flops like Jesus is coming tomorrow," said the cartoonist. "It's like
Romney is reading from the Mormon Church playbook."
Benson
explained his last comment by noting that the Mormon Church has also
"publicly flipped 180 degrees when it feels it's necessary for its image,
for its financial solvency, and for political expediency." He mentioned,
by way of example, that black Mormons weren't allowed into the priesthood until
1978. And while polygamy has been publicly disavowed by the Mormon Church,
Benson said "the church still holds that it will be practiced as a matter
of eternal doctrine in heaven. The church also currently performs polygamist
marriage 'sealings' in its temples around the world."
Benson
predicted that Romney will not win the Republican presidential nomination. If
Romney is nominated, added the cartoonist, he will not defeat his Democratic
opponent.
Voters,
said Benson, "are not ready for someone in the Oval Office who has
committed to absolute obedience to a religion they feel is extremely odd and
not in the American mainstream. I trust the rational U.S. electorate, not the
weird Mormon God."
Immediately upon publication of the preceding
article, Benson began to receive responses, by the bushel. Astor talked to him
again about the reactions and on December 20, wrote the following report for E&P Online (here, verbatim):
When editorial cartoonist Steve Benson criticized
Mormon Mitt Romney in an E&P story earlier this week, reaction was fast and furious. Many blog posters
backed Benson, but many others blasted the grandson of former Mormon Church
President Ezra Taft Benson. For instance, they asked why the Arizona Republic/Creators Syndicate
cartoonist didn't also criticize Mormon politicians such as Democrat Harry
Reid, and they said Benson's 1993 switch from Mormonism to ex-Mormonism made
him as much of a "flip-flopper" as he accused Republican presidential
candidate Romney of being.
E&P called Benson again today to get
his response.
Benson—who
contended in the earlier story that a devout, "temple-endowed" Mormon
U.S. president can't be truly independent of the Mormon Church—said he didn't
criticize Reid because the Senate Majority Leader "is not making an issue
of his Mormon devotion. He's not standing up in a carefully orchestrated stage
play and explaining his religion to the American people. Romney's speech was a
tactical move to woo fundamentalist Christians in the hotly contested Iowa
political caucus. He invited this scrutiny. And, unlike Romney, Reid's not
running for the most powerful position in the free world."
The
cartoonist continued: "Besides, it doesn't seem that Harry Reid's religion
is as strong an operating force in his life or decisions as it is for
Romney." Benson added with a laugh: "How could it be, given the
conservative politics of most Mormons. Hell, Reid's a Democrat!"
Responding
to the flip-flop charge, Benson said he left Mormonism because church leaders
were misrepresenting his aged grandfather's health and because of the
"sexist, racist, and homophobic" aspects he saw in the religion. But
Romney, said the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner, has jettisoned liberal positions
out of "political expediency" as the former Massachusetts governor
tries to convince conservative GOP voters to make him their presidential
candidate.
"I'm
not running for political office," said Benson. "I left Mormonism
with no pretense of remaining devout— and I didn't do the Romney act of staying
in while changing my spots faster than a leopard on steroids."
When
asked his reaction to the negative e-mails he has received and the critical
blog posts that have been written since the E&P story, Benson said he isn't surprised that Mormons are very defensive about his
comments.
"One
of my Mormon critics called me a 'turncoat,'" Benson e-mailed after
today's phone interview. "So I asked him to be a good Christian, do what Jesus
would do and give me his own coat. Haven't see the coat yet. Anyway, like the
old saying goes, 'hit pigeons flutter.'"
But
the cartoonist feels no one has disproved anything he said about Romney or the
nature of Mormonism's secret temple oaths and rituals. "The proof is in
the pudding," Benson said in the e-mail. "The trouble is, the Mormon
Church doesn't want anyone to go poking around in its pudding."
The
previous E&P article— which can
be seen here—links to the many negative and positive blog comments made about
Benson and Mormonism. It can be found at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003686826
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.
Xmas Factoids
In 2006, a British Reader’s Digest survey found that the “top white lie parents tell
their children” is about the existence of Santa Claus, reported Mike Pearson at
the Rocky Mountain News, “—followed
by the Tooth Fairy, the assertion that carrots give you good night vision and
that picking your nose causes your head to cave in and your nose to fall off.”
The
Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas has more than 1,000 members.
Haddon H. Sundblom unwittingly did more
to make the Santa Claus icon than he did to sell Coca Cola in the winter, and
he did plenty for Coke: winter is not an auspicious season for marketing cool
drinks, but Sundblom’s apple-cheeked Santa, sipping a Coke as he filled
stockings from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, convinced people that the soft
drink was a year-around beverage. According to James B. Twitchell in his Twenty Ads That Shook the World,
Sundblom’s first model was a salesman friend, Lou Prentis of Muskegon,
Michigan, but after Prentis died, “Sundblom went to the mirror and painted
himself. Haddon was a big man and a big drinker. Mrs. Claus was based on Mrs.
Sundblom.”
Famous
People Born on Christmas Day:
Sir Isaac Newton (1642), Humphrey Bogart (1899),
Alice Cooper (1945).
Famous
People Who Died on Christmas Day:
W.C. Fields (1946), Charlie Chaplin (1977), Dean
Martin (1995), James Brown (2006).
.
HALLOWE’EN AND YULETIDE
An Essay for the Occasion
Nothing terrifies the Righteous quite as much as a
secular holiday. Hallowe’en is suddenly vulnerable. It was, until recently, the
sixth most profitable American holiday—after, in order, Christmas, Mother’s
Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Father’s Day. Lately, I suspect, judging from
the amount of black and orange detritus on display in stores as early as Labor
Day, Hallowe’en has moved up on the list and may be second to Christmas. And
nothing proclaims secularity quite as persuasively as a bloated but satisfied
profit motive. But Hallowe’en terrifies the Righteous for another reason: all those
witches and goblins and ghosties roaming the neighborhood give the holiday a
Satanic nimbus. Letters protesting the worship of the Devil poured into the
local public prints this fall. They all objected to giving countenance to this
hell spawn festival that might also be of pagan origins. I had to smile:
Hallowe’en is no more a pagan holiday than Christmas.
The
clue to its origins is in the name, a contracted form of “hallow even,” the eve
(or evening, the day before) of All Hallows’ Day, now known as All Saints’ Day,
a Christian feast. Until 835 C.E., when Pope Gregory IV moved All Saints’ Day
from May 13 to November 1, Hallowe’en was, indeed, a pagan festival,
celebrating the end of the harvest season in Ireland and elsewhere. Moreover,
the ancient Gaels got extra mileage out of the event by believing that on
October 31, as Wikipedia puts it, “the boundaries between the worlds of the
living and the dead overlapped, and the deceased would come back to life” and
wander around, infesting the neighborhood with their hideous apparitions.
Later, during the Roman occupation of the Celtic country, various Latinate
traditions were incorporated into the festivities, among them, Feralia, a day
in late October that celebrated Pomona, the goddess of fruit, whose symbol was
the apple (from whence, we suppose, the present pastime of bobbing for apples
came). A venerable vegetable is also associated with Hallowe’en—the humble
pumpkin. In Ireland, where the practice of carving a vegetable originated, the
carving was performed on a turnip because, apparently, they had no pumpkins. In
the U.S., pumpkins were more readily available and were larger and easier to
carve. The carved pumpkin with its facial features illuminated from within
where a brain should be is often called a jack-o’-lantern after the Irish
legendary character, Stingy Jack, “a greedy, gambling, hard-drinking old farmer
who tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross
on the trunk of the tree; in revenge, the devil cursed Jack, dooming him to
forever wander the earth at night.” The Hallowe’en cover of The New Yorker reminds us that we have
our own Stingy Jack in Darth Cheney, who is parsimonious with news about
government operations, sneaking around to launch nefarious plots in secret and
tricking his countrymen up a tree, where we remain to this day, helpless and
nearly impoverished by Jack’s machinations. Gregory’s
choice of the date to move All Saints’ Day to is consistent with a common early
Christian practice of spreading its beliefs by superimposing on a pagan
festival a Christian holiday, thereby overlaying an ungodly event with a new
religious observance. This maneuver slipped the new religion in on the devotees
of the previous one that already had a religious significance for the native
population, so it was a simple matter to convince them to incorporate other
nuances of theology into their rituals. And since the local populace could
continue to celebrate its traditional pagan rites albeit under a different
name, they were easily “converted” to the new religion.
State
religions had followed this strategy for centuries. When the nomadic Greeks,
who worshiped a male god, Zeus, swept down the Greek peninsula and conquered a
succession of agricultural communities that revered goddesses, usually an Earth
Mother who guaranteed the fertility of the land, the invading Greeks invariably
arranged for Zeus to wed the goddess. The marriage assured the Greeks that the
conquered tribe would be obedient to their new masters just as the wife was
always obedient to her husband. As a simple historical matter, the Greeks’
repeated deployment of this tactic resulted in Zeus having several wives or
mistresses, all preserved in the mythology of the culture.
It
is doubtful, however, that the lamination of All Saints Day onto the pagan All
Hallows Day was another manifestation of the ancient Greek practice. We’re told
there seems to be no actual evidence that Gregory chose November 1 for this
reason. But there is ample evidence that late December was chosen as the time
of Jesus’ birth for precisely the Greek reason—to entice pagan Romans to
convert to Christianity without losing their winter festival, Saturnalia,
which, like similar events in other pagan cultures, celebrated the winter
solstice. In pre-Christian Britain, the winter solstice festival was called
“geol,” from which the present “yule” is derived. The New Testament doesn’t
give us a date for the birth of Christ, so early Christians made one up. It’s
not known, however, when or why December 25 was chosen. The most important gods
in the Mideastern pagan religions of Ishtar and Mithra were born on December
25, so maybe that date was elected to make it easier for adherents of these
religions to convert to Christianity. But December 25 was not popularized as
the date of Jesus’ birth until 221 C.E.; according to Wikipedia, that’s when
Sextus Julius Africanus wrote about it in his Chronographiai, a reference book for Christians.
In
any event, it’s clear from the histories of Hallowe’en and Christmas that both
have their origins in pagan customs. So if we are to eschew Hallowe’en for its
paganism, we must, perforce, abandon celebration of Christmas for the same
reason. And there would be nothing new in that.
Celebration
of Christ’s birthday was not, at first, encouraged. “In 245 C.E., the
theologian Origen denounced the idea of celebrating Jesus’ birthday ‘as if he
were a king pharaoh.’” In the Middle Ages, Epiphany was the event celebrated—the
“showing forth” of the Christ child to the visiting magi, which, by tradition,
took place on the Twelfth Day after Christmas, January 6 (hence, the storied
twelve days of Christmas). But Christmas Day gradually superceded Epiphany as a
public festival, and by the High Middle Ages, caroling—originally dancing as
well as singing—was popular. The custom, which probably continued the “unruly
traditions” of Saturnalia and Yule, was occasionally condemned as lewd, and
“misrule”—drunkenness, promiscuity, gambling—was an important aspect of the
festivities. After the English Civil War, Puritan rulers banned Christmas
celebrations in 1647, and they were outlawed here in Boston for 22 years, until
1681. Christmas festivities fell out of favor in the U.S. after the American
Revolution because they were considered an English tradition. By the 1820s,
“British writers began to worry that Christmas was dying out” and made efforts
to revive the holiday. Charles Dickens’ 1843 book, A Christmas Carol, “played a major role in reinventing Christmas as
a holiday emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion over communal
celebration and hedonistic excess.” In the U.S., stories by Washington Irving
in the 1820s and Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas performed the same service. So successful
were these efforts that it is today difficult to imagine a time when Christmas
was not a family festival with plentiful food and song and gifts galore.
Once
gift-giving hitched the celebration of Christmas to the capitalistic motive,
the holiday was well on its way in this country to being a thoroughly secular
occasion, represented not by the Nativity so much as by Moore’s jolly old elf
with a white beard. The secularization achieved its apogee in recent times with
efforts by various Concerned Citizens to guarantee the First Amendment’s
separation of church and state by prohibiting the use of public funds for
mounting Christmas displays that involved mangers and sheep and figurines of
infants in swaddling cloths. Last year in the Great Northwest (Seattle?
Portland?), a Concerned Citizen even got a Christmas tree removed from a public
place on the grounds that evergreens are somehow Christian and would therefore
offend non-Christian citizens who happened upon the display. With that, the
probity of Political Correctness reached the pinnacles of absurdity. By
government proclamation in 1870, Christmas was declared a federal holiday, like
the Fourth of July and Veterans’ Day. Because religion is officially excluded from
government by the Constitution (which, as we all know now, thanks to Mitt
Romney, prohibits any religious test as a prerequisite for public office),
declaring Christmas a federal holiday ipso facto makes it a secular occasion,
not a religious one. “Federal” is, by Constitutional definition, not
“religious.” It would be impossible, then, for a municipally funded Nativity
scene in the town square to be seen as a religious symbol. It is, rather, a
secular symbol of the folkways of the society. This convoluted twist of logic
escapes the notice of many citizens, however, who persist in quarreling about
Christmas displays violating the principle of the separation of church and
state—despite the issue having been settled in court several times. In 1984 and
twice in 1999, courts decided that “the establishment of Christmas Day as a
legal public holiday does not violate the Establishment Clause because it has a
valid secular purpose”—namely, I suppose, to sell as many consumer goods as
possible, thereby stimulating an always flagging economy. The U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the latter decision on December 19, 2000.
The
dual nature of Christmas as both secular and sacred inspired such public
spirited personages as Bill O’Reilly to protest loudly and often in recent years
against the secularization of the occasion, seeing in secularization the
vulgarization and co-option of a sacred observance by purely commercial
interests and calling for a return to “the true meaning of Christmas.” Putting
Christ back into Christmas was Reilly’s poignant cry as he tried to rally a
campaign to put religion back into the public square along with Nativity
scenes, sheep, and swaddling cloth. I confess that certain of the P.C. usages
that have cropped up lately—Holiday Tree instead of Christmas Tree, Season’s
Greetings instead of Merry Christmas—are a little cloying in their unctuous
propriety. One year I did a Christmas card (that is, a Holiday Greeting Card)
depicting carolers, and I was about to caption it “God Rest Ye Merrie Gentlemen,”
invoking the old carol, when I realized that “gentlemen” would offend
feminists. Similarly “God” would offend atheists. Removing the offending words,
I was left with “Rest Ye Merrie,” which doesn’t, now that I think about it,
have much connection to Christmas. I guess that was the point of the exercise.
But I’m not an O’Reilly fan, and I don’t want to put Christ back in Christmas:
I want to just leave it in there and not disturb it. We are not a Christian
society or a Judeo-Christian society so much as we are both—and all.
Pluralistic. So we ought to tolerate those who wish their non-Christian friends
“Merry Christmas” just as we tolerate Jewish friends wishing us “Happy
Chanukah” and rabble-rousing friends proclaiming “a Festivus for the rest of
us” during this “winterval.” So Merry Christmas to all of you pagans from all
of us pagans— and to all a good and silent night.
A Few Yaps from Yip
Yip Harburg was the great American lyricist who wrote
“Somewhere, Over the Rainbow,l” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, “April in
Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and Finian’s Rainbow. He also wrote his share
of verse, much of it, perhaps all of it, collected in the aptly entitled Rhymes for the Irreverent. Here are a
couple:
Before And After
I cannot for the life of me
Recall at all, at all
The life I led
Before I tread
This small terrestrial ball.
Why then should I ponder
On the mystery of my kind?
Why bother with my great beyond
Without my great behind?
The Welfare (Island) State
Our affluent society
Provides the poor with piety,
And also a variety
Of homes for many brave ...
The Hospital, the Prison
The Cathedral and the Grave.
Red, White and Blue Cross
you’re paid to stop a bullet,
It’s a soldier’s job, they say.
And so you stop the bullet,
And then they stop your pay.
ROUNDING UP THE YEAR 2007
Once again this year, being of weak will and
enfeebled faculties after weeks of resisting the blandishments of Holiday Sales
in nearby shopping malls, we surrender again to that temptation that insinuates
itself into every periodical at this season: yes, we’ll look back on the last
twelve-month to see what is worth remembering.
In
the late forties and early fifties, the final leafing of the golden autumn of
comic books before the chill of the Code winter, the newsstands overflowed with
scores of new comics every week. No one could have read them all. And nowhere
could we find graphic novels, cartoonist biographies, critical histories or
scholarly dissertations. Just comic books, too many to read regularly. By the time
I returned to the four-color fold in the early 1970s, the gold had faded, and
the quantity was greatly diminished. For a few years, it was possible to read
virtually every comic book regularly published. That changed. And now, we’re in
another golden age, and once again, we are afforded an impossible plentitude.
Comic books—the paginated cartoon strip pamphlets—alone are too many to read
regularly. And to that impossibility, we can add cartoonist biographies,
reprints of classic strips, graphic novels, manga, histories both chronological
and critical. Altogether, 500-600 separate titles every month. A wonderful
heaping up. But the best of the year? Who is equipped with time enough to read it
all and determine which are the best? Herewith, then, not “the best of the
year” but “the best of those I saw this year.” And in the benevolent spirit of
holiday abandon, I deliberately refrain from defining “best.”
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Meanwhile: A Biography of
Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, by me. If I don’t think it’s one of the
best of this year or any other, why did I do it?
Alexander
Raymond by Tom Roberts;
I’m not sure it’s out yet, but, having seen color proofs of its sumptuous
pages, it’ll be one of the best, however that’s defined.
Abandon
the Old in Tokyo by
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Brian
Fairrington and Daryl Cagle’s Best
Political Cartoons of the Year, 2008 Edition. Out just a couple weeks ago.
Cartoon
America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress, edited
and with intro by Harry Katz, formerly the graphic arts curator in LOC’s Prints
and Photographs Division; a wealth of often rare examples of the cartoonists
arts.
Killed
Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression, collected and annotated by David Wallis.
As the Islamic Hooligans gain control of Western Civilization, we need to be
reminded of what we’re losing.
And
a couple graphic novels. I haven’t read that many this year, but two seemed notable: The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar
and drawn by Emanuel Guibert; perfectly charming; and Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto about the horrors of her
encounter with breast cancer, a cartooning tour de force and a powerful subject
to boot.
Marchetto
has just joined MyBreastCancerNetwork.com “as an expert,” saith
sev.prnewswire.com. She’ll produce a weekly cartoon blog that chronicles her
life as a breast cancer survivor and activist. With typical iconoclastic verve,
the fashionista cartoonist says of this new enterprise: “I’m going to blast a
bright light on the dark details of this dreaded disease as I continue kicking
cancer’s bony ass in killer five-inch heels. We are not victims, we are Vixens.
I can’t wait to meet and connect with all you Vixens out there.”
REPRINT LANDMARKS
David Kunzle’s two Topffer tomes: Father of the Comic Strip: Rudolphe Topffer, and Rudolphe Topffer: The Complete
Comic Strips; both from University Press of Mississippi
Pete Maresca’s monumental Sundays with Walt & Skeenix and his Sammy Sneeze; both reviewed last time,
Opus 215.
Ulrich
Merkl’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (complete);
another of those giant life-size tomes.
IDW’s Complete Dick Tracy series
Jeff
Smith’s Bone, in color—from Scholastic
More
of J.R. Williams’ “Bull of the
Woods,” a subtitle of Williams’ long-running Out Our Way, in handy paperback from Lee Hardware. (Well, look it
up on the Web.)
Shel
Silvestein Around the World,
obviously intended to make me green with envy. Again.
Fantagraphics’
stunning The Kat Who Walked in Beauty, reprinting the “panoramic” daily strips of 1920, a variety of George Herriman’s cartoon artistry
almost overlooked in the usual fever to extol the wonders of his full-page
weekend extravaganzas. But these vintage Kat dailies are just as impressive, perhaps even more so because Herriman had to
work with a much narrower focus.
Promising Books That I Haven’t Read Yet
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 on-site recollections do not include much in detail about
the earliest years of the strip, but she’s mined the family archives for
illustrative materials for her father’s ten previous years in Chicago during
which he submitted 60 comic strip ideas to the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily
News’ honcho, Joseph Patterson, all rejected; the book includes examples of 8
of the 60. Even if she can’t testify out of on-the-spot 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 Syndicate
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.”
Stop
Forgetting to Remember (208
6x9-inch pages, often in two colors; hardback, $19.95), 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 GeeDubya 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 by
Thierry Groensteen, a 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 fairly bristles 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 ponderous going, I ween, and may take us nowhere that we haven’t been
before, Groensteen’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding. 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 obscurely;
but what do I know? 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 Mcabre 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
BOOKS I WANT TO REVIEW BUT
HAVEN’T YET
Arguing the Comics, embodying a brilliantly conceived notion
by Jeet Heer and Kent Worchester, who collect here over two dozen fugitive and
hard-to-find essays about comics written by otherwise sane and dignified
literary critics or popular culture mavens.
Crockett
Johnson’s newly
discovered Magic Beach in m/s; I’ve
read it and it promises to shed light on some of the Barnaby ethos, but I need time to work it out and combine it with a
massive appreciation of the said Barnaby.
A
flotilla of books by some of the legendary limners of the curvaceous gender—Bill Wenzel, Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ward, Jack
Cole—all from Fantagraphics; none published this year, as I recall, but
still, all deserving a long and lingering look.
COMICS NEWS EVENTS OF THE
YEAR
Schulz and Peanuts, the biography by David Michaelis, is
securing its hold on bestseller lists by advertising the Schulz family’s
disapproval of parts of it. Schulz’s story is a fascinating one, and Michaelis
tells as much of it as he can well, often lyrically. But while we come to
realize that Schulz the man was a chronic melancholic, we never meet the
cartoonist, and that’s too bad in a biography of the man who defined himself by
saying he was a cartoonist. My full review will appear in The Comics Journal sometime in February in a special “roundtable
discussion” of Michaelis’ book.
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse continues as a hybrid, some new, some
reruns.
FoxTrot ends daily releases; only
Sunday from now own; and Bill Amend gets the Reuben at the
annual convention of the National Cartoonists Society in May.
Jim Toomey’s fishy friends in Sherman’s Lagoon take on human form and walk on land for a week or
so.
“Masters
of American Comics” exhibit travels around the country and stirs up the
jawboning classes, who wonder why there are no women masters (or mistresses)
and where Walt Kelly ranks.
In January, Cartoon Network’s “Aqua Teen Hunger
Force” mounts a promotional stunt in Boston that so incites the security
minions that streets are closed and traffic diverted, creating confusion and
turmoil in the city—and raucous hilarity elsewhere.
Death
comes to the funnies again: in Rudy Park,
Uncle Mort expires on Jan 12; in Funky
Winkerbean, Lisa Moore dies of cancer, October 4; and in Dilbert, Asok the Indian genius died
December 7. But he subsequently came back as his own clone.
John Marshall is at last permitted to sign as the
artist on Blondie, Jan 7
Film version of Frank
Miller’s “300" hit theaters in February
Lost Girls by Alan
Moore and Mellinda Gebbie, the
year’s most inflammatory publishing “event.”
American
Born Chinese by Gene
Yang, got almost as much publicity as Lost
Girls because it was the “first graphic novel” to be nominated for National
Book Award; it didn’t win but garnered the NCS best comic book award instead.
(“Comic book”? No, it’s a graphic novel.)
Pulitzer goes to Walt
Handelsman at Newsday; half his
portfolio of 20 submissions included animated editoons; first time Pulitzer has
recognized animation.
International Comic-Con San Diego caps attendance,
setting maximum number for each day’s attendance
Death
of Captain America and, symbolically, of the American values of privacy and
personal liberty
Fantagraphics and Harlan Ellison settle, removing a
threat to the economic viability of FBI
Manga declines in sales in Japan!!
Comic books make it to mobile phones
Reincarnation
of Cartoonist PROfiles on the
dock: Stay ’Tooned!, edited by John Read, out early in 2008 (and I have a
column therein, culled from these very pixels).
Two
releases of Berk Breathed’s Opus dropped because they made
references to Islamic matters
THE WORST AND THE BEST COMIC
STRIPS
Worst new comic strip of the year, Diesel Sweeties, by Richard Stevens
Best Comic Strip of the Year, Brooke McEldowney’s 9
Chickweed Lane. Still.
My favorite R&R posting: “The Unforgettable Jane”
in Op. 202
ANNUAL FRAUD
The New Yorker’s “cartoon issue,” which, while running
more cartoons than usual, is otherwise almost devoid of extolling text, by
which neglect an excellent opportunity to champion the medium is forfeit. Alas.
THE WORST THING OF THE YEAR
Of all the things that happened during 2007, I liked
least the make-over of Betty and Veronica in Nos. 151-54 of Betty and Veronica’s Digest. Ick. The
gang at Archie supposed this treatment would bring in rafts of manga fans.
Dunno if it did. But if it did, get ready for a massive re-design of Bob Montana’s characters, whose
appearance was perfected by Dan DeCarlo. (And if you don’t know who Dan DeCarlo was, you can find out more with at least
two Fantagraphics books, aforementioned.)
BEST COMIC BOOKS
Army@Love by Rick
Veitch
Darwyn Cooke’s monthly Spirit books from DC
Casanova by Matt
Fraction with art by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon
Welcome to Tranquility by Gail
Simone with Neil Googe’s art
ANNIVERSARIES
Centennials for Mutt
and Jeff, Milton Caniff’s birth,
ditto Herge’s.
Andre Fanquin’s exquisite Gaston Lagaffe is 50; and so is the Association of American
Editorial Cartoonists and Dr. Seuss’s Cat
in the Hat
Creators Syndicate is 20
Wiley Miller’s Non
Sequitur, 15 as of February 16
Comic Press News was 16 in April
Stan Sakai’s Usagi
Yojimbo reached No. 100 at Dark Horse
PASSIN’ THROUGH
Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Blue, But We’ll Remember
You
Those Who Left Us in the
Last Twelve Months Or So
Since We Last Ran Up This
Sad Tally
Jerry Bails, creator of fandom
Paul Rigby, Australian editooner
Dave Cochran
Chris Glenn of CBS radio news, friend of my youth
Joe Barbera
Marty Nodell, creator of Green Lantern
Jack Burnley, creator of Starman
Joe Edwards,
co-inventor of Archie
Iwao Takamoto,
creator of Scooby-Doo
Jay Kennedy,
editor in chief at King Features
Marshall Rogers
Johnny Hart,
creator of B.C. and The Wizard of Id
Brant Parker, who
drew The Wizard of Id
Doug Marlette,
editoonist and stripper with Kudzu
Roger Armstrong
Buck Brown of Playboy’s libidinous Granny fame
Howie Schneider (Eek and Meek, Sunshine Club, Circus of P.J.
Bimbo)
J.B. Handelsman,
New Yorker ’toonist
Silas H. Rhodes,
founder of the Legendary School of Visual Arts
David Hilberman,
co-creator of UPA studio
Shirley Slesinger
Lasswell, widow of Fred (Snuffy Smith) Lasswell, last seen suing Disney for her share of their Pooh proceeds
Phil Frank of San
Francisco
Richard Goldwater
at Archie Comics
James Kemsley,
the Aussie who did Ginger Meggs
Bob Bindig
Paul Norris,
creator of Aquaman and longtime steward of Brick
Bradford
Al Scaduto (see
below)
*****
PEEVES & PERSIFLAGE
Cal Thomas is on
the cusp of wetting his pants with excitement over the recent shooting in a
megachurch in Colorado Springs just south of Denver. A crazed 24-year-old man
named Matthew Murray, brooding over how much the world owed him and how little
he was collecting in wealth or fame or friendships despite his having solicited
at local church institutions, spent a year arming himself with an assortment of
handguns and assault rifles and focusing his a vengeful discontent on
“Christians,” who, he said on the Internet, “are to blame for most of the
problems in the world,”and then on Sunday, December 9, he loaded up his arsenal
and stormed into a church-sponsored youth mission, shot and killed a couple
people, then drove to the sponsoring church, parked in the church parking lot
as the congregation was leaving the morning service, and shot and killed some
more people, two teenage girls and their father; he survived, they didn’t. Then
Murray entered the social hall of the church. There, he was confronted by a
former police woman, Jeanne Assam, who was serving as a security guard in the
church. She
drew her handgun
and shot him. She didn’t kill him, but her shots halted his progress, and he
thereupon turned one of his handguns on himself and committed suicide.
Several
curiosities attend this event. First, Assam was licensed to carry a concealed
weapon and was a trained law enforcement officer, and she was “on duty” at the
church, doing what she’d volunteered to do—provide security and protect the
population. Second, Murray obtained all of his arsenal legally, over a year’s
time, complying with all gun laws, none of which disqualified him from owning
weapons. Third, apparently a lot of churches now engage security guards to
protect their parishioners attending religious or recreational activities on
the premises. Fourth, Assam conducted herself in every way “by the
book”—identifying herself to Murray as a security guard and demanding that he
put down his weapons, and, when he continued shooting, she stood in the
hallway, oblivious to the danger, and fired at him. Fifth, Assam is a very
photogenic woman with long layered blonde hair, which, together with her
thoroughly professional demeanor and courage under fire, makes her an ideal
front-page totem for gun ownership. (Here she is, being thanked by a grateful
parishioner.) For
Cal Thomas, the incident validated the gun lobby’s contention that the right to
bear arms is the best insurance against lawless violence. “I’ve been waiting
for years for this to happen,” he crowed. “The unarmed (disarmed?) are easy
targets for crazed gunmen armed with grievances, weapons and ammunition. Now
someone has shot back, probably saving many lives. All the gun-control laws
that have been passed and are still being contemplated could not have had the
affect of one armed, trained and law-abiding citizen on the scene. ... The
point is that gun laws will not deter criminals with evil intent and police
can’t be everywhere they’re needed. But killers can be stopped by law-abiding
citizens with guns.”
Despite
my profound aversion to guns as toys or armament, it’s hard to argue with
Thomas’ conclusion. Here, the gun laws didn’t stop Murray from arming himself
to excess. Time and again recently, we’ve seen well-designed gun-control laws
rendered ineffective simply because those charged with enforcing them
overlooked something. With our human propensity for error, no network of laws
is likely to be leak-proof—particularly in a society as solicitous of privacy
and individual freedoms as ours. I’d feel a lot better if we weren’t such a
gun-totin’ bunch in this country. But we are. And as a result, I doubt that any
truly effective gun-control legislation can ever be enacted. Whether such laws
should be on the books or not is beside the point. The point, I suppose, is
that we are a society that has in its churches armed security guards who
believe God stands by their sides as they gun down rampaging intruders. That’s
what we’re living with.
Pat Bagley’s cartoon on the Colorado shooting has layers of meaning: he manages to depict the unyielding dedication of the gun lobby, giving it a frenzied religious tinge that echoes the motives of deranged Murray.
Pithy Pronouncements
Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like
bananas. —Gus Arriola
Give
me levity or give me death. —A Nony Mous
The
income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.—Will Rogers
The
sport of skiing consists of wearing $3,000-worth of clothes and equipment and
driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.
—P.J. O’Rourke
Mallard Is an Example of How
Women in Politics Are Treated
From Daily Record, www.kvnews.com; December 14, 2007
To the Editor:
Directly
after watching Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS Friday night, I picked up the Daily Record and turned to the editorial
page, and, though I seldom do so, read the political cartoon, Mallard Fillmore, which once again
attacked Hillary Clinton. The
irony did not escape me.
Bill
Moyers' guest had been Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who spoke on misogyny on the
Internet in particular, and sexist vilification of female political candidates
in the mainstream media in general.
Jamieson
suggests that there is a deep fear in America about women holding power; that
the assumption is that any woman in power will by necessity emasculate men.
Jamieson goes on to say that Americans have a long history of sexist attacks on
women in power, frequently using religion to reinforce patriarchal ideas.
On
the Internet, portraying Ms. Clinton with graphic sexual images and vulgar,
gross, profanity reduces her to a sexual stereotype, increasing the likelihood
that people won't vote for her based on what she can offer the country as a
candidate, but rather on perceptions of her as a female who somehow doesn't
exemplify the feminine ideal.
By
portraying Clinton as having no qualifications beyond being married to a former
president, Mallard Fillmore planted
the idea that she has value only in the traditional role of wife, disregarding
any other career qualifications she possesses.
Treating
a viable political candidate with nastiness and disdain because of sex, race,
or religious belief is not only injurious to women, but also harmful to the
humanity in all of us. Americans must move past their fear and distrust of
powerful women and find a candidate to support, rather than denouncing one
because of a campaign of hate and raw sexual violence.
Anna
C. Powell
BADINAGE AND BAGATELLES
At comicbloc.com,
Eric Moreno interviewed Greg Rucka,
asking him, among other things, if he remembered the first time he realized
there was a craft going on in the stories. Rucka said: “Daredevil: Born Again.
I remember going, ‘Holy shit! This is actually being written.’ And, ‘Holy Shit!
Look at this art! I’ve never seen anything like it!’ And, ‘Holy Shit! Look at
the way the point of view shifts. They’re using different first-person
narration!’ I went nuts. I blame Frank
Miller, as most of us do.”
John Romita, Jr., asked in 2001 by
Henrik Andreasen if his father influenced him, responded (as quoted in
Sequential Tart last month): “He affected me in my way of life because he is my
father, and that has translated into my art and storytelling, but the art is
different because we are different people. Growing up, his artistic influences
were mostly cinematic because he is big on films, and we would talk about the
same movie over and over.” Andreasen then observed that JRJR is “obviously
influenced by Kirby,” noting that JRJR made use of “Kirby’s ‘dynamic blockiness’”
in his run on Thor. Said Romita: “I
find the assessment to be true. Kirby’s influence is, among other things, due
to his work on his character Thor, and when I began to do Thor myself, my
influence by Jack Kirby became more
apparent because of his influence on me when I was younger. Just like John Buscema has influenced me—and, of
course, my father, as I mentioned before. One of the more important things my
father taught me was how to weight the illustrations—when to hold back, and
when to use a lot of power.”
Art
and Life and Tragedy. Holding up a mirror to reality in New Orleans’
Lower Ninth Ward one day in December, actors from New York stood among the
weeds in a blasted block of destroyed houses and dead trees and presented
Samuel Beckett’s bleak 1949 play, “Waiting for Godot.” Godot, you’ll remember,
never showed up.
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
Al Scaduto, 1928-2007
Al Scaduto, who
cartoonist Mike Lynch called “the last of the great bigfoot cartoonists,” died
December 7, Pearl Harbor Day; he was 79. Scaduto’s professional biography is
remarkably short: he spent his entire career doing the syndicated panel cartoon
feature, They’ll Do It Every Time, but in perpetuating this happy relic from another age, Scaduto performed a minor
miracle: visually, he gave it a modern up-to-date patina while preserving its
vintage aura.
Scaduto
was born July 12, 1928, in the Bronx, New York. He attended the School of
Industrial Arts, now called the School of Art and Design. SIA was founded, Scaduto
liked to report, by four young art teachers in 1936 who built desks from old
orange crates and plywood. At SIA, Scaduto met a trio of other students, all
destined for cartooning—Sy Barry, Joe
Giella, and Emilio Squeglio.
Scaduto also attended classes at the Art Students League, and he sold his first
cartoons while still in high school at SIA. Needing money to attend his senior
prom, he worked up two pages of comics and sold them to King Features for its Popeye comic book. When he graduated in
1946, he knocked again at the door of the syndicate. “I thought I would give it
a shot,” he told Dirk Perrefort at the Connecticut
Post last winter, “and they gave me a job as an office boy. I did that for
about eight months before they made me a corrections artist.” Two years later,
he was working on They’ll Do It Every
Time (“TDIET,”as it’s often abbreviated).
TDIET
takes a humorous look at human hypocrisy, ironically dramatizing the
inconsistencies and quirky twists of fate that plague us all. Its purpose, said
Martin Sheridan in his Comics and Their
Creators, is to “deflate the ego of chiselers, pests, fakers, office
loafers and bombastic bosses. The human failings depicted strike a responsive
chord because the incidents are true to life, sugar-coated with humor to bring
a good-natured laugh at the expense of a familiar figure in home, office or
country club.” In his Comic Art in
America, Stephen Becker elaborated: “Behind every assertion of the human
ego, there lurks a blatant hypocrisy. Behind every accident of bad timing,
there lurks a malignant fate.”
Essentially
a panel cartoon, TDIET often takes two panels to make its point. Here’s J.P.
Honcho, for instance, berating his secretary Lula for being a few minutes late
to work: “Nine o’clock means nine o’clock! I don’t care if your bus broke
down—no alibis, y’hear?!” But in the next panel, ol’ J.P. is dictating a letter
to the self-same Lula, making up excuses for being weeks late with a shipment:
“Dear Sirs—uh, er—due to conditions beyond our control—floods, strikes,
blizzards—y’know, Lula—stall ’em for a month or so—yas, yas. ...” Over Lula’s
head hovers a silent scream, labeled “The urge to ship him to the moon
posthaste.”
In
another recent TDIET, wife Annoya urges husband Arfo on to shovel the walks in the
dead of winter: “You can do it! It’ll only take you two hours or so. The
exercise will do you good!” But when, come summer, Arfo picks up his bag of
clubs to go golfing, Annoya sings another song: “Golf? No, no—lugging that
heavy golf bag can’t be good for you. You’ve got to take it easy, y’hear?” To
which Arfo responds with a thought balloon, invoking a comment that frequently
accompanies such reverses: “It’s enough to make a grown man cry, but good.”
The
feature was invented on February 5, 1929 by sports cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo at the old Call-Bulletin in San Francisco. Legend
has it that Hatlo conjured up the first one to take the place of a syndicated
cartoon that got lost in the mail, failing to arrive by press time. It
stimulated enough response from readers that Hatlo repeated it occasionally,
then regularly—prompted, usually, by readers who submitted examples of life’s
little hypocrisies from their own experience. In 1936, King Features picked it
up for national distribution, beginning May 4, and “They’ll do it every time”
was soon a catch phrase nationwide. Readers who sent in ideas that Hatlo used
he acknowledged “with thanx and a tip of the Hatlo hat,” giving their name and
home town with a drawing of a tiny comic character tipping his fedora in a
credit box at the bottom corner of the feature. By
the mid-1940s, Hatlo had acquired an assistant and stopped working full-time on
the feature. In 1948, the assistant, Bob
Dunn, needed help and turned to Scaduto. By then, one of the characters in
the panel had developed into her own Sunday strip, Little Iodine, which debuted July 4, 1943. She was the mischievous
pre-teen daughter of another continuing character in the panel, Henry
Tremblechin, who was forever bullied by a blustering bombastic boss named J.P.
Bigdome. The names are perfect for the personalities: Tremblechin, the
intimidated employee; Bigdome, the towering employer (who was originally named
Old Man Grudgeon); Iodine, the lovely little girl with a bratty sting. Hatlo
and Dunn loved Dickensian names for characters—Lushwell, the party boy; I.
Uriah Phootkiss, the unctuous underling; Octave Teargass, a songwriter—not to
mention a picturesque parade that included Twerpington, Wartley, Squatwell,
Culvert, Droolberry, Belfry, and my favorite for a fashionable young woman,
Aspidestra.
Scaduto
drew the Little Iodine strip and her
comic book, when it came along in 1950 (first issue, cover-dated March; last
issue, April 1962). According to Mark Evanier, Dunn did the writing and Scaduto
did most of the drawing; by the time Hatlo died in 1963, his presence had long
ago ceased being felt. Hy Eisman joined the production crew about this time, concentrating on Little Iodine until it ceased in 1986.
(Eisman currently does two other vintage strips, The Katzenjammer Kids and Popeye.) Dunn died in 1989, and Scaduto took over the entire production of
TDIET, writing as well as drawing it. The feature was named Best Newspaper
Panel by the National Cartoonists Society in 1979 and 1992.
To
Scaduto, TDIET was “not a joke strip but a satire on human behavior. It’s the
things that bug us in life. The object of the strip is for people to read it
and say, ‘Hey, that happened to me or someone I know.’ I think that’s why it’s
been so successful.”
Because
many of the situations in TDIET were inspired by reader suggestions, the
temptation is to think that the feature was written by the volunteers. But few
of those ideas are comic without the fine-tuning touch of the cartoonist.
Scaduto streamlined the verbiage, added a comedic verbal twist here and there,
and laminated it into a joke with pictures that turned frustration into
hilarity. In the first example posted here, volunteer Y. Parker may have
supplied the notion that people who place fussy orders for fancy frills with
their food in restaurants then spoil the concoction with condiments, but
Scaduto’s prose added a layer of sarcasm, and the frenzied action and assorted
audience in the setting of the second panel transformed mere sarcasm into
satiric comedy. Scaduto’s love of Dickensian names equaled that of his predecessors’—Judlow Lockjaw, Bula Patoot, Anson Pantz, Ragweed and his wife Nubbia, Drusella and Dragbutt, Bunson, Leadbutt, Naggia, and Wombo, and my favorite recurring name, Lugnut. But his singular achievement as a cartoonist was to modernize the Hatlo-Dunn visual style without destroying its essence. He did this chiefly by eliminating the “hay” that modeled forms in the vintage drawings, but he retained some linear shading for the sake of textural variety, preserving thereby the pictorial “feel” of the feature. He also replaced the Hatlo-Dunn button nose on male characters with a bulbous Parker House roll; and on female characters, in place of their pointy nose, Scaduto drew tiny pert turnips. These larger facial features made the drawings funny even though they were much smaller than the earlier TDIET artwork, and the humorous pictures gave the feature a prevailing vivacity. Instead of being an antique, Scaduto’s TDIET was as modern as the news and fads of the day. In the gallery of examples in this vicinity, the two cartoons on the top are Hatlo’s; those across the bottom are Scaduto’s—for the sake of comparison.
Emilio Squeglio, who had worked on
Fawcett’s Captain Marvel comic book
after graduating from the School of Industrial Art, called Scaduto “the
cartoonists’ cartoonist.” Said he: “Al is a rare breed because he’s original
and honest in his craft. He’s far above the level of an average cartoonist who
draws amusing pictures with funny little characters. He has the ability to
transform a story into a picture and make it amusing. He does that better than
anybody.”
“Even
as a child,” Scaduto said, “I always wanted to be a cartoonist. My parents were
very supportive. My father would always carry a cartoon I drew in his wallet so
he could show his friends. He said I had a real talent, and I should pursue it.
He was my greatest fan.” (Scaduto also once quipped that his father told him
he’d starve when he took the job at King Features.)
I
met Scaduto at an NCS Reubens Weekend in San Francisco several years ago. As
soon as I read his name tag, I pounced to tell him how much I enjoyed his
drawing. Then I noticed the name tag on the man standing next to him, Sy Barry, who, by then, had retired
from The Phantom, which he had
dignified with his artwork for years. So I told him how much I enjoyed his
drawing, too—even though his was much different than Scaduto’s. To cover my
confusion, I said they’d both done the impossible, but a different impossible:
Scaduto had made a vintage cartoon look contemporary, and Barry, one of
Scaduto’s SIA classmates, had rendered a costumed hero so realistically that he
was believable.
Scaduto
was a regular at meetings of the Berndt Toast Gang, the Long Island chapter of
the NCS (named after Walter Berndt,
creator of the comic strip Smitty), and with very little cajoling, he could be persuaded to stand up and sing a few
stanzas of his favorite opera in a fine tenor. Mike Lynch, chair of the chapter for five years, recalled at his
site, mickelynchcartoon. blogspot.com, that Scaduto’s other shtick at the meetings was to stand
up at the dinner table and announce that he has brought a guest. “This happens
every time,” Lynch wrote, “and every time, he introduces the fellow sitting at
the same table—‘Jumpin’ Joe Giella [another classmate from the School of Industrial Art]. Then Al tells a
disparaging joke at Joe’s expense. This is all forgivable since we all love Joe
and the joke is an old joke.” It was a tradition that was a running gag. “On
those rare occasions when Al can’t make it, we all worry that there will be no
one to introduce Joe.”
Scaduto
was predictable in one other way, Lynch reported. “When asked if he might be
able to do something for you, Al would invariably respond: ‘Shoes—whadya think?
Otherwise?’”
In
addition to TDIET, Scaduto illustrated children’s books, advertisements and
magazine articles and designed greeting cards, toys, games and packaging. But
in whatever he did, he was always a cartoonist.
“What
I like most about being a cartoonist,” Scaduto said, “is starting with a fresh
piece of paper and ending up with an idea. You’re the writer, the actor and the
director. I never thought about retiring. I enjoy what I do.”
And
he did it right up to the end.
QUIPS & CLIPS
The three stages
of a man’s life: 1) He believes in Santa Claus. 2) He doesn’t believe in Santa
Claus. 3) He is Santa Clause. —Anonymous
A
cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn’t any
Santa Claus, and he’s still upset.—James Gould Cozzens
Santa
Claus has the right idea: visit people once a year.—Victor Borge
Santa
is very jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live.—Dennis Miller
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Catching Up with Old Number Ones
I missed Rick Remender’s Fear Agent when it started, picking up No. 1 of a 4-issue story
arc, which was 12th in a series. So it scarcely qualifies as a
Number One, even when this issue first came out last spring. The protagonist is
Heathrow Huston, alien exterminator, and this issue flashes back to the time
that he loses his crusty old father and his son to monster alien invaders.
Stunning art by Tony Moore, inked by
the meticulous Andre Parks, and the
storytelling—pacing, camera angles and the like—trumpets their expertise. They
also rely on pictures to tell the tale. What else could we expect in a story
about the seemingly last days of an exploding Earth? Killing Girl No. 1, a more recent
manifestation (August 2007), is another impressive demonstration of Frank Espinosa’s unique illustrative
technique, first seen bursting forth in great energetic splashes in Rocketo. I don’t know how he does it.
Does he lay down the swashes of color first and then add delineating
lines—sparingly, only where absolutely necessary for clarity—and black shadows?
Or vice versa. No matter how he does it, he must retain the visual imagery in
his head, whole, as he splashes the page with just the essentials of the
images, often only the barest hints. Warren
Ellis Department. Blackgass2 No. 1 offers yet another
example of how skillfully and horrifyingly Warren Ellis launches a tale. We’re
at sea with a woman and a dead body in a boat; in the wild water, she sees
creatures—people?—and when the boat is wrecked, they come aboard and devour the
dead guy. She flees into the night and takes up with a one-time security guard,
who must shoot his partner in the face because his partner is infected by the
zombie hoard. If you’re bitten, black gas oozes out as saliva, and you turn
into one of “them.” Throughout, on every page, Max Fiumara draws bodies blowing apart and copiously splattering.
Ellis is lucky in getting exceedingly skilled artists to illustrate his
stories, but they’re his choices: he told Bart Croonenborghs at
brokenfrontier.com that Avatar “just sends me out samples and I choose what I
like. None of these guys even speak English,” he concluded.
Asked
if he felt his Avatar books were overly violent in the usual Avatar mode, Ellis
said the question wasn’t “valid”: “I do violent stuff everywhere like I did on
Hellblazer for Vertigo. ... I just did an issue of Thunderbolts [speaking in
August 2007] where a guy gets his arm bitten off. I did issues for the
Authority where Jack Hawksmoor punches someone in the face and you can see
their entire jaw detached and his teeth jump out.” His Black Summer series delves into political themes and motives, but
for Ellis, such things are not so much political as they are provocative story
springboards: “It’s just a set of political questions,” he said, “I’m not
interested in giving answers. The book just poses questions and people should
make an answer in their own way.” Black
Summer, in which a superhero assassinates the U.S. president, is seemingly
a superhero book, which Ellis isn’t usually interested in: “It’s not a genre
I’m particularly fond of. But it’s interesting to me to find ways to write
superhero stories that I actually want to read. ... Black Summer contains within it just one of the last questions to
be asked of the genre, which is: Where do you draw the line in pursuit of
justice?” Ellis said he’d been “trying for six months to come up with this
because of a bet [Avatar’s editor-in-chief/publisher] William Christensen” made
with Ellis. “I’ve never been a high concept writer,” Ellis continued, “—I can’t
yank those one-line concepts out of my ass the way Alan Moore can. It drives me fucking insane. [Brits say “fucking” a
lot; it’s a dialect thing.] I just stopped calling the guy because he always
goes ‘I got this idea, Warren,’ and it’s brilliant and it’s one sentence, and I
spend the next thirty minutes going ‘FUCK!’” [See what I mean?]
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS PROMOTION
We’ve located
This Department at the very end of our Christmas package to permit you to skip
the whole thing if Shameless Promotion nauseates you. On the other hand, there
are some purely fascinating scraps of writing herein, to wit:
Excerpt
about the birth of Terry and the Pirates from my Caniff biography
Extensive
review of the Caniff tome by Allan Holtz,
who reveals what he sees as the flaws in the book as well as its virtues (the
latter outnumbering the former by quite a lot, otherwise why would I include
the whole thing here?).
Favorable
cullings from other reviews here and there
Concluding with our Usual Plea to Buy the Book Here. You can find it cheaper elsewhere (on
Amazon, f’instance, where used copies are now appearing), but only through Rancid Raves can you obtain a copy
signed and inscribed by the author.
The Birth of Terry
CELEBRATING THE END OF THE ANNIVERSARY YEAR WITH
ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM MEANWHILE: A BIOGRAPHY OF MILTON
CANIFF
The year we’re
just winding up, 2007, is fraught with anniversaries. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band began to play just 40 years ago “today,” and that was the year
of the fabled “Summer of Love” in San Francisco. Charles Lindbergh flew solo
across the Atlantic 80 years ago, and 50 years ago, Jack Kerouac’s rambling
novel, On the Road, came out. Kerouac
typed the book on 12-foot-long strips of paper, which he then taped together to
make a continuous scroll. After three weeks of continuous typing, he had 120
feet of typescript, which, with subsequent revisions, was published by Viking
Press.
Kerouac’s
method seemed so absolutely logical, so linearly wedded to its purpose, that I
adopted it for producing term papers during my so-called college career: using
rolls of teletype paper, I typed quotations from source books until I turned
out 12 feet of scroll, then pulled it out of the typewriter, cut the scroll up
into individual quoted passages, pasted them together in some sort of narrative
sequence, and re-typed it all with connecting prose between quotations. A
12-foot scroll usually yielded a 15-page paper, just the prescribed length.
That
summer in 1957, a piano-player friend of mine named Lee Underwood devoured
Kerouac’s book at a single sitting, reading all night long, and the next day,
he packed a suitcase and hit the road. We never saw him again.
I
recently attended a lecture by John Leland, who talked about his book, Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the
Road (They’re Not What You Think). Although all of us might think On the Road is about the reckless
freedom of being footloose and irresponsible in the world, Leland contends that
deep down, Kerouac’s book expresses the author’s longing for a stable,
middle-class life with wife, family, and picket-fenced house in the suburbs.
That might be true, but it doesn’t explain the essential romantic hypnotic
appeal of the book. In short, it doesn’t explain why Lee Underwood did what he
did.
Academic
criticism can steer us off the track with its profundity. Another professorial
speaker at the same event opined that since On
the Road was the second draft, a refinement, of Kerouac’s scroll—which,
itself, had been anticipated by yet another earlier narrative about life on the
road—all of Kerouac’s ouevre can be
considered a single work, a gigantic “On the Road.” Well, sure. Works of
literature tend to reflect the authors’ personalities, so each work can be
viewed as a further extension and elaboration of everything the author has
written before. And if we accept this as a commonplace of criticism, then all
of Shakespeare can be considered an elaboration of, say, “Love’s Labor Lost.”
If all of Kerouac is On the Road, then all of Shakespeare is “The Comedy of Errors.”
But
I divaricate. Back to cartooning.
One
hundred years ago this year, two of the world’s most celebrated cartoonists
were born: Georges Remi in Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels, and Milton Caniff
in Hillsboro, Ohio. Although both became famous world-wide, Caniff’s cartooning
career was outdoubtedly the more strenuous. Beginning in 1933, he produced a
comic strip every weekday for over 55 years, a feat that stood without equal
for a generation after Caniff’s death in 1988. Remi, on the other hand,
confected a pen-name by reversing his initials and pronouncing them aloud,
Herge, and produced just 23 book-length stories about a pie-faced young
reporter, who was too resourceful to be entirely realistic but was engaging
regardless.
To
commemorate Caniff’s birth, Lucy S. Caswell, curator of the Cartoon Research
Library, which had been founded at the Ohio State University when Caniff
deposited his papers there, prompted me to revise and reduce my massive
biography of Caniff so that it could be published this year, and by
underwriting some of the cost of production, she convinced Gary Groth at
Fantagraphics to publish the consequences of my abbreviation. The result, a
950-page tome, came out in July, just in time to debut at Comic Con
International at San Diego.
By
way of concluding the year with an anniversarial festivity, we herewith begin
another excerpt from that tome, Meanwhile:
A Biography of Milton Caniff, taking up the narrative in the fall of 1934
when Caniff was at the Associated Press, producing Dickie Dare, a daily strip about a kid who, when the strip
commenced in July 1933, dreamt himself into adventures with the heroes of his
favorite books—Robin Hood, Captain Kidd, Robinson Crusoe.
The
dream formula wore thin pretty fast because readers knew how the stories ended,
so in the spring of 1934, Caniff gave up on dreams and introduced a real-life
two-fisted journalist, Dynamite Dan Flynn, who, with Dickie’s parents’
permission, took the boy on a trip around the world. They never finished the
trip: five months into it, Caniff got a phone call from Mollie Slott, a
factotum at the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate who worked
directly with Captain Joseph Patterson, publisher of the Daily News and head of the syndicate. She asked him if he’d come
over to the Daily News building to talk about doing a comic strip.
Herewith,
the exerpt:
When
Caniff put down the phone that day in early October, he knew he was on the
verge of something big. Mollie Slott sat at the right hand of one of the gods
of newspaper cartooning. What kind of strip could she—or Patterson himself—have
in mind? No matter: whatever it was, it would fall under the nurturing eye of
Captain Patterson, who knew more about making comic strips successful than
anyone. Whatever Caniff did for the News was likely to give him a larger audience than he had with the AP and Dickie Dare. A strip for the Daily News would also be syndicated to
the Chicago Tribune, thereby
appearing in two of the nation’s largest papers. And the Tribune-News Syndicate
was a gateway to many more.
It
didn’t take Caniff long to get to Mollie Slott’s office in the News building on
42nd Street just two-and-a-half blocks away from his
apartment/studio in Tudor City. To his surprise, he didn’t spend much time in
her office. She took him immediately in to see Patterson. And there was The
Presence himself: in an office rather plainly furnished, the Captain sat behind
an enormous uncluttered desk. At one end, a huge wastebasket ostentatiously
reached to the lip of the polished desk top—as if designed to permit Patterson
the imperial gesture of sweeping papers that offered bad ideas out of his sight
with a wave of his hand. Motioning Caniff to a chair, Patterson scarcely looked
his royal role. He stood tall and straight as a ramrod, but he was in his
shirtsleeves, collar and tie undone at the throat, and he seemed, over-all, a
little rumpled. Patterson was formal but cordial, and Caniff was encouraged.
Astonishingly, there were no preliminaries: Patterson began as if it were
already settled that Caniff would do a new strip.
“Here’s
the idea,” Patterson said in his incongruously high-pitched voice. “I want an
adventure strip—young boy’s adventure—but with universal appeal—the kid hero
for young readers but plenty of pretty girls, too—for the kids’ fathers.”
Heinie
Rieker’s dictum at the Columbus Dispatch blinked on in Milton’s mind—“always show a little skin above the stockings as a
bonus.” Patterson piped on, barking out specifications in his customary clipped
locutions:
“For
women readers—give the kid a side-kick—an older guy—rugged, handsome—he’s the
muscle—he can handle the rough stuff.”
Had
Milton been less intent on absorbing what the publisher was saying, Patterson’s
synopsis might have rung a bell. As it was, Caniff told me, he thought only
that Patterson was making good sense. Later he recognized that in its basic
elements, the Captain’s description fit Dickie
Dare precisely—except for the pretty girls.
“You
know,” Patterson was saying, shifting around in his chair as he warmed to his
subject, “you can’t have a kid busting the bad guys on the nose—all the time.
It might work once—once in awhile. Remember Jim Hawkins? Treasure Island? He
never does anything violent—except when he’s trapped—that time at the top of
the mast—and one of Long John Silver’s men comes up after him with a knife in
his teeth. The kid’s got a gun—the pirate doesn’t think he’ll use it. But he
does. It’s the only time Jim Hawkins ever took violent action. Great for
suspense that one time—nobody could know for sure he’d do it—but for strong arm
stuff on a regular basis, you need an older guy. Put lots of action in the
strip—let him handle most of it.
“He
can romance the girls, too—put in some sex appeal—but don’t let the guy get
married. No adventures happen to a guy at the fireside—pipe and slippers and
all that. Ever read Wuthering Heights? No?
Well, you might look into it. But keep the heart throbs in the daily strips—do
the Sunday color page for the kids.”
“Yes,
sir,” Caniff said, conversationally. But Captain Patterson wasn’t making
conversation: he was issuing orders.
Patterson
leaned back in his chair, arms raised, hands clasped behind his head, one foot
propped on an opened desk drawer. “As for setting—put the action in China,” he
went on. “Adventure can still happen out there—you can get away with
anything—any plot—any shenanigans—no one knows what’s there—pirates—off the
China coast there are plenty of pirates. There’s a book you should read— Vampires of the China Coast —it’ll give
you the idea.”
“Yes,
sir,” Caniff said again.
Patterson
straightened up and leaned forward with his arms on the desk. “I’m looking for
real excitement in this strip,” he said. “Lots of blood and thunder—keep the
readers in suspense—but give ’em a laugh, too. Action and humor—that’ll do it.
I want the continuity to run straight through—seven days a week—dailies and
Sundays telling the same story. I want your strip to fill a hole in the Sunday
edition—right away—so start with the Sunday pages. They’re due ten weeks before
publication—dailies are due about four weeks ahead—but we can push them into
print faster if we need to—Sunday color takes longer. Your dailies will
probably be published before the Sundays—you might have to run separate
storylines for awhile—but I’d like them to converge as soon as possible. Can
you show me something by next Thursday?”
“Thursday?
Yes, sir,” said Caniff.
Patterson
stood up, signaling the end of the interview. Caniff bowed his way out.
Thursday.
Today was Friday. Caniff had his work cut out for him. He knew he could do the
strip, but he knew next to nothing about China. He hot-footed the four-and-a-half blocks across town
to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and checked out the books
Patterson had mentioned—and everything else about China he could quickly think
of. Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, a
couple by Somerset Maugham, another by Noel Coward, and a few others.
In Wuthering Heights, Caniff found fully
developed the theme of passionate but unconsummated and thwarted love.
Patterson was right: this was the perfect way to deal with a footloose romantic
lead who was to encounter an endless parade of toothsome ladies, becoming
involved with each of them but entangled by none. And the frustration in an
unrealized love affair would grip readers. Good stuff, Milton reflected—sad,
tender, complex, suspenseful. Caniff always credited Patterson with introducing
him to this potent plotting stratagem. Certainly the Bronte book crystalized
the notion for him, but he had already embraced this theme with Dan Flynn and
Kim Sheridan in Dickie Dare. In books
by people who had traveled the Orient, Caniff found authentic speech patterns,
atmosphere and Far Eastern lore. In Vampires
of the China Coast, he found a lurid vision of piracy on the China Sea and
the germ of a unique inspiration.
Vampires takes the form of a novel, but
the publisher’s disclaimer says it is based in fact: “The terrific episodes of
this narrative actually, and recently, happened in China where the author
lives. The characters, only, are fictitious. ... But their piratical exploits
along the shipping routes from Shanghai and Hongkong—as told in this story—are
often spoken of in the China seaports of today.” The author, identified only as
Bok, is as obscure as his book; alone, the publisher’s testimony asserts the
book’s authenticity. That and a handful of photographs in the book that depict
a condemned pirate, the summary execution of a pirate by revolver, the deck and
bridge of a looted and burned ship, and before-and-after pictures of a pirate
who suffered ling chee (Death by a
Thousand Cuts).
Set
in the late twenties, shortly after Chiang Kai-shek assumed leadership of Sun
Yat-sen’s visionary Kuomintang Party and launched the Nationalist Rebellion,
the tale traces the career of a young woman called Moon Shadow (whose name is
Tsin Gum, “A Thousand Pieces of Gold”), who falls in love with a fellow
Communist revolutionary named Chan. Chan joins a band of pirates and soon
becomes their leader. After he dies in a raid, Moon Shadow assumes leadership
of the pirates, and they build a stronghold on a deserted island from which
they attack foreign shipping. Taking advantage of a local superstition about
vampires inhabiting their island, the pirates don skull masks, bat wings, and
flowing cloaks whenever they sally forth. Bok offers a species of Robin Hood
ethic as moral justification for these escapades: the pirates prey almost
exclusively upon the “foreign dogs” and the corrupt elements of the government
and the military. But this excuse seems pretty frail in the closing chapters of
the book, which dwell with gruesome, repugnant detail on the tortures inflicted
on hapless captives and hostages for ransom. Despite its thematic weakness, the
book supplies a trove of information about Chinese tradition as well as vivid
insight into the lives and practices of Chinese coastal pirates—much of which
(less the more grisly parts) Caniff could use as grist for his new mill.
Caniff
worked days and nights. The coffee pot was always on, the ashtrays filled with
stubbed out cigarettes, and the air in the studio was blue with stale smoke.
Reference materials—picture books and magazines—littered the floor and every
horizontal surface within easy reach of his drawing board. He catnapped
whenever he could no longer keep his eyes open, and days blurred into nights
and then into days again, but the regimen was no major departure from his usual
practice on more than one occasion. And Milton was invigorated by the new kind
of pressure—to create a strip Patterson would like and on a subject he was
almost wholly ignorant of and to do it in less than a week.
Researching
the new strip was of the utmost importance, and Caniff still kept up with Dickie Dare and The Gay Thirties, a daily panel cartoon he was doing for the AP:
he couldn’t risk his AP job until he was sure Patterson would take the new
strip. He hadn’t time for the kind of exhaustive study he would later put into
the strip, but developing the lead characters was relatively easy. Since
Patterson had all but specified another version of Dickie Dare, Caniff simply made a few cosmetic changes in his
heroes. The new young protagonist was Dickie with blond hair; his guardian, Dan
Flynn with dark hair. Naming the duo, Caniff extended the parallels, giving the
youngster the same kind of alliterative name, faintly reminiscent of the
nursery—Tommy Tucker. Tommy’s protector bore another Irish monicker, Pat Ryan.
Physically, Ryan was patterned after movie actor Fred McMurray, whose
mannerisms in his role in “The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” felt right to
Caniff for an adventurer. To hint at a source of income for his hero, Caniff
again repeated himself: Ryan would be a vagabond author, a freelance writer
like Dan Flynn, free to move around at will. And Tommy would tag along for the
fun of it—just like Dickie was doing with Flynn.
Neither
of his principals was a major departure from what Caniff had been doing, but
for the villain in their first adventure, he surpassed anything he (or anyone
else up to then) had done. He created a character who, upon repeated
appearances in the strip, would become one of the most famous femme fatales in
modern literature. But when Caniff began plotting and drawing the first Sunday
page, the moment of her creation was still in the future—just a page away.
As
he penciled and inked the first pages of his new strip, Milton’s imagination
was working, giving his characters personalities and histories, spinning out
their fates. Before his mind’s eye, these phantoms of his invention postured
and paraded, they took boat trips up obscure Chinese rivers, they explored
ancient temples and picturesque gardens fallen into ruin, they lounged on
verandas at the clubs of colonial outposts, they fought pitched battles in
hand-to-hand combat with bandits and pirates. In his mind’s ear, he heard them
speak—delivering speeches both long and short, exchanging idle banter during
moments of repose, trumpeting calls to arms in the heat of a fight. This nearly
involuntary idling of the creative engine enabled the cartoonist to flesh out
his characters mentally while at the same time absorbing their
personalities—both operations essential to the storyteller’s art. As his people
assumed physical dimensions in black and white on the drawing paper before him,
their personalities became equally palpable in his mind. He constructed pasts
for them—and futures. Tommy, Caniff mused, would slowly grow up and eventually
take Ryan’s place as the strip’s strong-arm lead. Ryan might finally get
married, but in the meantime, he would run a gamut of beauteous damsels—falling
hopelessly in love with one, who would prove unattainable. She’d move in and
out of his life, and every time she showed up, those frustrated passions would
flame up. Heathcliff and Catherine all over again.
At
the beginning, though, on the drawing board in front of Caniff, Ryan is still a
romantically unencumbered adventurer, a freelance writer, and he and his young
charge take passage on a tramp steamer plying the China coast so that Ryan can
collect “local color” for a story. The steamer is attacked by pirates, and
although the two resist capture, they are finally overpowered. As they stand
helpless, the pirate chief appears.
“So!
It is the Amelican gentleman who resists so brashly,” says the svelte Oriental
beauty, clad in kimono and with a holstered pistol for jewelry. “I am not
su’plised.”
“Luvva
Pete!” Tommy exclaims. “We’re captured by a woman!”
Pat’s
heard of her—“the most notorious woman pirate in China,” he says.
The
Dragon Lady made her first appearance in the last panel of the second Sunday
page, published on December 16, 1934. Her creation, Caniff told me, seemed to
him entirely fortuitous. “It was really as accidental as—there was going to be
a bad guy coming over the side of the boat, and I thought, why not a woman?”
Recalling
the moment of conception in a magazine article he wrote three years after the
fact, Caniff explained at greater length: “One thing we hadn’t talked about in
the editorial conference was villains. Heroism cannot thrive without rascality.
Slinky, oily Malayans and sundry other Eastern types had been standard for
years. Why not twist it a bit and make the Number One menace a woman? One who
combines all the best features of past mustache twirlers with the lure of a
handsome wench. There was a woman pirate along the China coast at one time, so
it wasn’t beyond reality. She’s fabulously wealthy. Lai Choi San means
‘Mountain of Wealth.’ That’s too much for readers to remember. Call her that
once to establish the atmosphere, but the Occidentals have nicknamed her The
Dragon Lady.”
Interestingly,
Lai Choi San’s celebrated nom de guerre is
introduced very informally, with none of the dramatic fan-fare we might expect
for so apt an appellation for an Oriental villainess. On the Sunday page for
January 6, 1935, Pat refers to her as “the dragon lady” in much the same way as
he might say “the pirate lady”—or, in a subsequent reference, “Homicide
Hattie.” Despite this off-handedness, the Dragon Lady’s crew members are
calling her “the Dragon Lady” immediately after Pat mentions the name. But he’s
the first to use it—and so casually as to suggest that Caniff hadn’t invented
her Occidental nick-name until he penned the strip’s dialogue and realized at
once its potent appropriateness.
The
pirate queen’s Chinese name, on the other hand, may have been supplied by
Patterson, directly or indirectly. On July 27, 1931, the Chicago Tribune had published a book review by Edith Weigle, who
reports on Aleko E. Lilius’ I Sailed with
Chinese Pirates. In that book, Weigle says, is a “famous women pirate”
named Lai Choi San, “her name means ‘Mountains of Wealth.’” Patterson could
have clipped the article and filed it and let Caniff borrow the file while he
was inventing the strip. Or maybe he simply suggested the name to the young
cartoonist as being suitable for a woman pirate. Or Caniff, rummaging the New
York Public Library for books on the Orient on that memorable weekend, could
have turned up Lilius’ book. Caniff, when I asked him about it, had the
impression that he’d found the name in Bok’s book, so perhaps the last of the
alternatives is what happened. If Caniff found the name in Lilius’ book, he
could also have found the book in the Library without Patterson’s help. The
clue—Patterson’s nudge in the direction of coastal pirates by means of Bok’s
novel—would have steered Caniff onto similar titles. Logical. And it explains
why Caniff had no memory of Patterson’s suggesting the name. Moreover, it
explains why he does remember reading the name in a book—not Bok’s but Lilius’.
Whatever the case, despite Caniff’s recollections, it’s clear that the idea of
a woman pirate came from Patterson, if not directly at least through the
recommendation of Bok’s book—and, perhaps, Lilius’ as well.
The
Dragon Lady was hardly Bok’s Moon Shadow. Not even on her maiden voyage—and
certainly not as she eventually matured under Caniff’s guidance. Moon Shadow,
as portrayed by Bok, was a bungled character. Ostensibly a doctrinaire
Communist, she drops the party line without a shrug once Chan puts his arms
around her. As long as Chan is alive, she functions as a thoroughly traditional
female stereotype from romantic fiction: she melts into his embraces, murmurs
endearments to the “Lord of her Life,” and quivers with foolish feminine fears
every time he leaves on a raid. Bok tells us that she became the pirate chief
“owing to her clear, calm way of surmounting difficulties” and, of course,
because she is the widow of their leader. But what we see, mostly, is a
somewhat fluttery Victorian female. Moon Shadow is scarcely the Dragon Lady,
but she was a woman pirate along the China coast, and that resonated with
Caniff. Bok had left his pirate queen’s leadership qualities entirely to his
reader’s imagination; Caniff imagined those qualities and gave them memorable
form in creating his most celebrated and enduring character. Caniff
said the Dragon Lady was modeled after Joan Crawford: “I saw her in a movie in
which she played some sort of siren. She had her hair parted in the middle and
wore a high-collared cape.” The Dragon Lady had these accouterments, but
physically, she looks more like Hedy Lamar. By the fourth Sunday page, she has
lost her phony Chinese accent, and by then, Tommy and Pat are her prisoners,
and she, like almost every other female who will come into the strip, exhibits
an immediate romantic interest in Ryan. It is one of the strip’s persistent
cliches that Pat is irresistible to women. However sexist, this useful plot
device is scarcely as far-fetched as its simplicity suggests. Ryan is ruggedly
handsome, and he also proves to be intelligent, charming, witty, and
gallant—not to mention courageous and resourceful. To all of these attributes
clings the mystery of a man who has knocked around the world a bit. And he is
single. To most women—and certainly to those adventurous enough to be in the
Orient—Ryan stands as a clear and present challenge of the most time-honored
sort. If, as Jane Austen once wrote, “it is a truth universally acknowledged
that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,”
then Pat Ryan, without a fortune but determinedly single, is a ringing call to
arms (so to speak).
How
Pat reacted to amorous assaults during his “pre-strip life” we must perforce
imagine: he meets his Catherine fairly soon in Caniff’s saga, and that changes
his behavior. Judging from his conduct throughout the strip’s run, we can
suppose that Pat was able to turn a luke-warm cheek to most spontaneous
feminine advances. Not that he would have ignored the women who threw
themselves at him: his was doubtless the thoroughly good humored dalliance of
the all-around sportsman and gentleman rover. Such love affairs, we suppose,
were virtually one-sided until an heiress named Normandie Drake comes along and
captures the Irishman’s heart. With the advent of Miss Drake, Caniff rang in a
clear echo of the Wuthering Heights theme.
Pat’s coolness with other women is ever after explained by his having lost his
heart elsewhere.
But
Normandie Drake is still far in the future that fall in 1934 when Caniff
arranged the first encounter between his footloose hero and the Dragon Lady.
Once Ryan is aboard her junk, she invites him to her cabin, where she awaits in
her slinkiest gown, reclining on a couch, cigarette glowing at the end of a
long holder.
“Come
here, handsome one,” she purrs, sounding more and more like the latter-day
Dragon Lady. And then: “Why are you so cool to me? I’ve been told I am not
without charm! But you ignore me.”
This
scene offers the first clear signal that Caniff’s new strip would be markedly
different from Dickie Dare. Dickie was
obviously a strip for the youngsters—and the young at heart. With his new
enterprise, Caniff aimed straight for adult readers with mature motifs
underlying even his most extravagant adventure stories.
Here
endeth the excerpt.
Patterson,
as we all know, bought the strip based upon what he saw in the Sunday samples
Caniff showed him on that storied Thursday in October 1934. But the Captain
didn’t like the name “Tommy Tucker,” so he asked Caniff to come up with a list
of other possibilities. And when the young cartoonist gave him a list a few
days later, Patterson circled “Terry” and added “and the Pirates.” A classic
was born.
There’s
more to the story of the Dragon Lady’s birth than is recounted here, and you’ll
find it in the book. Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t give away everything
in this corner.
Caniff’s
conversation with Patterson as reported above is, like all such conversations
in this book, manufactured, but it conforms to the facts of the occasion—as recalled
by Caniff in interviews with me and as reported in various published accounts
of the meeting.
When
Caniff read this section of the book, he told me, “You have Patterson down just
right.” Not surprising: when Caniff recalled the meeting for me, he imitated
Patterson’s manner of speaking.
Now, here’s Allan Holtz, who
runs his own website, http://www.strippersguide.blogspot.com, where he regularly posts rare findings from his forays into the vast reaches of
newspaper microfilm files hither and yon.
MEANWHILE ... A BIOGRAPHY OF
MILTON CANIFF
Review by Allan
Holtz, Stripper’s Guide
As cartoonist
biographies go I daresay that there has never been, and will likely never be,
another of the length and depth of R.C. Harvey's Meanwhile. Coming in just shy of a four digit page count it could
scarcely be otherwise. Even more so when you consider that the impressive heft
of the tome is not substantially padded with photos and art. To be sure the
book is indeed well illustrated, but only with visual aids directly related to
the narrative— there are no long reprints of Caniff's strips here or lengthy
portfolios of miscellaneous art.
It
is the nature of any successful cartoonist that they spend the bulk of their
life hunched over a drawing board, endlessly skritch-skratching away. This is
not the sort of lifestyle that would seem to lend itself to a lengthy
biography. When we consider that there are plenty of well-rounded biographies
of political figures, film stars, activists, people whose lives are filled day
by day with the fodder of the biographer, that manage to tell their stories in
a shorter page count, we have to wonder just what in the world Harvey is on
about in a page count that rivals the King James Bible.
I
for one certainly approached the book with trepidation. I've been a fan of
Harvey's work for years, but my enjoyment of his work is tempered with the
caveat that he is on occasion guilty of going over the top. When he goes into
critical analysis mode he is always perceptive and thoughtful, but he can also
beat a horse within an inch of its life. I was concerned that here Harvey would
be shooting the works, analyzing Terry,
Steve and their creator ad nauseam.
That
fear, I'm happy to say, was completely groundless. Despite the enormous page
count this book is, wonder of wonders, a tightly written narrative. In the
tradition of classic biography, what critical analysis there is is grounded in
the opinions that Caniff himself discussed with Harvey and others in
interviews. Given that Harvey says the book in its original form was some 700
pages longer (!) than the final revision, I'm guessing that any extended
author's analysis fell victim to the editor's red pen. If so, the book is
better for it.
So
what exactly does lurk between the distantly separated covers of this volume?
Well, Harvey was lucky enough to be tapped by Caniff himself as his official
biographer in the early 80s. This afforded the author with ample opportunity to
question his subject at great length. While Caniff was, as Harvey relates, not
a particularly forthcoming interview subject, by dint of persistence the author
eventually ended up with a treasure trove of Caniffiana. The book is, as we
might expect given the size, an impressively complete chronicle of Caniff's life
and the times in which he lived. However, completeness doesn't necessarily
translate to interest-sustaining or entertaining, and that's where Harvey's
book truly amazes. I've read plenty of long form biographies where it got to
the point that I was rooting for the subject to kick the bucket to cut the
narrative short. That's not the case here. While I couldn't say that every
single page is riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading, Harvey does an expert job of
keeping the reader involved and interested all the way through. Any reader who
is at least moderately interested in comic strips, even those not particularly
fans of Caniff, will undoubtedly find the book fascinating.
Speaking
of being a fan of Caniff, I should admit that I am not numbered in that legion.
Of course I recognize Caniff's importance in the history of comic strips and
the artistry of the two strips for which he is most famous. However, I think
Caniff's writing is far too precious, heavily laden with hokey slang and
tortured vernacular that I find grating and distracting. His subject matter,
primarily military adventure, is just not my cup of tea. His cartooning, after
a relatively short but glorious period in the early 40s when he was first
influenced by Sickles' innovation of chiaroscuro comic strip illustration,
later takes things too far for my taste, turning the strip into a series of
ink-blots (not entirely Caniff's fault, of course— the comic strip was
shrinking more rapidly than he could adjust his art style to suit, finally
ending up so small that no one, not even Caniff, could possibly do a
realistically rendered adventure strip).
The
point is that you don't need to be a Caniff fanatic to thoroughly enjoy the
book. I recommend it not only to the ardent Terry or Canyon fan, but anyone with more
than a passing interest in the art and business of the comic strip in America.
Caniff's story is, after all, the history of the adventure comic strip in
particular, and the newspaper comic strip in general. Harvey does a superb job
of weaving all the various aspects of the story of American comic strips into
the narrative. We see Caniff marketing his comic strips (and find out just how
tireless a promoter he was), we see him coping with the miniaturization of his
daily and Sunday spaces, we gain a deep understanding of the relationship
between the creator and syndicate. We learn one cartoonist's reaction to the
unforgiving daily deadline pressure, and how assistants and ghosts can become
indispensable in the process of producing a strip that doesn't have the luxury
of relying on simplistic art and daily gags. We learn the intricacies of
producing an integrated daily and Sunday storyline, a balancing act that is one
of greatest tests of skill that any writer could ever face. We see one
cartoonist's bold reaction to the demonization of his art form when accused of
being, bizarrely, a cause of juvenile delinquency. We see how a cartoonist
deals with the use, and misuse, of his creations in other media like movies and
television.
I
have only a few minor criticisms of the book, most worth mentioning if only so
that this review doesn't seem utterly slavish in its support. First, the book
is divided into just nine epic length chapters. It would have been more
reader-friendly had it been broken up into more manageable chunks that could be
read at one sitting. And although there are illustrations throughout the book,
usually well-placed to coincide with the related narrative, each chapter ends
with a gallery of additional illustrations. These sections would have been
better broken up and dispersed throughout the text, if only to relieve the long
stretches of type-dense pages.
The
narrative flow drags a bit for a hundred pages or so near the end of the book.
By this time Caniff was constantly being lured away from his drawing board by
an endless procession of accolades and honors from every organization under the
sun. Harvey unwisely devotes a considerable amount of space to the details.
This section, while it does have occasional interesting points, could have been
shortened. If the purpose was to show that Caniff was revered by his peers and
his fans, well, that wasn't much of a secret anyway.
Finally
I have to question Harvey's use of invented conversations. In the first half of
the book the author occasionally uses a device where he stages a conversation,
usually set in Caniff's favorite watering-hole, in which we eavesdrop on a
group of cartoonists shooting the bull. Harvey uses the device to impart some
information in a presumably more entertaining method than dry prose. The device
falls flat, though, because the conversations are stilted and too obviously
staged for our benefit. And although Harvey makes no secret that the
conversations are his own inventions, in a scrupulously researched work
otherwise factual throughout I found these passages somehow discomforting from
the standpoint of journalistic ethics. Call me a stick in the mud.
These
are all picayune little quibbles, though. Harvey's work is, quite simply, a
masterpiece of biography. He has set the platinum standard by which all future
cartoonist biographies will be judged. Most, likely all, will be found wanting
in comparison. It is one thing to produce a thick book, and not necessarily a
good thing at that. It is an entirely different thing that Harvey has achieved
here. He has produced a work of lasting merit, eminently readable, brimming
with meticulous research, a work that must be atop the required reading list of
every cartooning fan and cartoonist.
****
From Dennis Drabelle the Washington
Post:
The Fantagraphics
folks have interlarded this strapping biography with generous reproductions
from both of Caniff’s brainchildren, and Harvey, who knew and interviewed the
cartoonist before his death in 1988, writes with gusto.
From Ken Tucker at EW.com:
By simply dipping
in and out of this beautifully designed, obsessively researched book, I know
it’s going to be a constant pleasure throughout the rest of the summer. ...
Veteran comics historian Harvey manages to make the behind-the-scenes stuff
(the book doubles as a history of newspaper syndication practices, for
instance) as exciting as Terry fending off the advances of the pin-uppable
Dragon Lady.
From Chris Mautner at Patriot-News and panelsand pixels.blogspot.com:
If Harvey is a
bit too inclusive in chronicling Caniff’s life, he does a superb job of
explaining why he’s important. He goes to great lengths, drawing out examples,
providing background and detailing individual strips to show how and why Caniff
dominated the comic strip world during the middle of the 20th century. ... reading Terry today,
despite its dated references and cultural attitudes, it’s hard not to be awed
by Caniff’s abilities as a storyteller and artist. He was that good.
From Peter Sanderson at PW
Comics Week:
As demonstrated in
his past books and articles, one of Harvey’s great strengths is his skill at
analyzing comics storytelling. In Meanwhile, Harvey insightfully explains what made Caniff’s work, as both writer and
artist, so revolutionary. ... Caniff brought a multidimensional approach to
characterization that was brand new to American comic strips, and Harvey is
especially good at exploring the psyches of Caniff’s femme fatales, like the
Dragon Lady. Harvey superbly analyzes the initial week of Steve Canyon strips, illuminating Caniff’s master of building
suspense. ...
From Mark Evanier at
newsfromme.com:
Is it too long?
Maybe the title is but the book sure isn’t. Caniff’s incredible career demanded
that kind of detail, and I found myself wishing Harvey had written more, not
less, about some aspects of the man’s life. Of particular interest is how Bob
nails down the life of a working strip artist—the relentless schedule, the
dealings with editors and syndicates, etc. ... The portrait of the gentleman
himself—as smart and determined as any of his heroes—is fascinating and, from
what I can tell, quite accurate.
From Eddie Campbell at
eddiecampbell.blospot.com:
It’s one of those
classic, grand biographies that give us the subject from cradle to grave,
complete. I have vicariously lived Caniff’s 81 years condensed into a short
span of time, in this case a couple of weeks, starting on my flight back from
San Diego where I picked it up. I had waited too long for this book not to
start it right away. ... And finishing it yesterday morning, in tears
inevitably, I had to write off the rest of the day and go and have lunchtime
beers with those pals of mine, none of whom have read a single page of the
cartoonist I often cite as the single most important influence on my career.
From Amazon’s Customer
Reviews, M. Kreffel:
Very few books
fulfill the promise of their covers; Meanwhile does just that, and more. ... Harvey has done the magical—fleshing out the
biography of an icon of the golden era of comic strips and not simply
chronicling Caniff’s life but also taking us behind the scenes and into Milt’s
mind. It’s all here: how Milt worked, what inspired him, the real people who
were the models for his characters, the real world of syndicated comic strips.
Folks, this is as close to the excitement of time travel as you’ll ever get.
... the book contains treasure. ...
... The Comics Maven:
I have to admit
that after it arrived, I was a little intimidated by it. It is, after all, a
massive door stopper of a book, and I left it sitting on my desk for a week
before I finally cracked it open and began reading it in earnest. Despite its
considerable length, the pages flew by and I was soon at the end with a
distinct feeling of disappointment at the prospect that it was over.
... Mark (James Axler)
Ellis:
R.C. Harvey, one
of the most well-respected authorities on the history of the newspaper comic
strip, has written the definitive, even monumental, study of Milton Caniff and
his work. ... Meanwhile is a great
book. It’s one of the few that I have read in the last few years that I have
referred back to within days of finishing it.
RCH, his head several hat
sizes larger than when he started pulling out only the most extravagant
sentences from this assortment of reviews, has only this to add: Boy, is my hat
size larger.
And this: You’ve dawdled too long. It’s now too late for your spouse to order it for you for Christmas, but not too late for you to get one for yourself using the money your mother-in-law put in your stocking. For more about the book (as if you need any more, ooffta) and access to an order form, click here.
To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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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 |
