Welcome to the webbed and wired edition of R&R, aristotle. We’ll be doing the same sort of song and dance here as we do in print: reviewing the latest comics and cartoon-related books and ranting about trends and abuses and unfathomable foolishnesses. Each topic will stay here for about four weeks, with a new topic coming in just about every other week or so. So here we go with Opuses 62 and 63 (and a reprise of Opuses 60 and 61, which are still with us):

Opus 62: Name Dropping and Tale Bearing—Late-breaking News (June 6, 2001)

Opus 63: Remembering Hank Ketcham, 1920-2001 (June 6, 2001)

Opus 61: Jack Davis Wins Reuben (May 29, 2001)

Opus 60: Tittles and Jots: A Quick Look at What’s Still on the Stands and Some Cartoonist Reportage (May 23, 2001).

Opus 63: Remembering Hank Ketcham, 1920-2001 (June 6, 2001). A good place to begin is at the end—which was in a museum. The drawings of Hank Ketcham have every credential and entitlement to a place on the wall in any art museum in the world. His drawings are indisputably Art with a capital ‘A,’ a grace note in black-and-white pen-and-ink.

The museum I have in mind at the moment, however, is the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, where Brian Walker had curated a superb show of Ketcham’s art to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dennis the Menace. The mischievous tow-headed freckle-faced eponymous kid with a prominent cowlick is perpetually "five-ana-half," but the cartoon that bears his name was 50 on March 12, 2001. The show in Boca Raton was to open on Saturday, May 26, but I and several hundred other cartoonists were in the Museum the evening before for a special pre-opening reception, the kick-off of the annual Reuben Awards weekend of the National Cartoonists Society.

Ketcham was not there. At the age of 81, he was in California at his Monterey studio, his body worn with age and ailments. He had been battling one kind of cancer or another for almost 18 years. He had lost his bladder to the disease and no longer strayed far from home.

A week to the day after the NCS reception, Hank Ketcham died. Quietly, in his sleep, early in the morning on June 1. He had been in and out of the hospital the day before with an erratic heart beat. Survivors include his third wife, Rolande, and their children, Scott and Dania, as well as the original Dennis. Private memorial services were on Wednesday, June 6 (today); Ketcham asked to be cremated.

The cartoon Dennis will go on: Ketcham had seen to that. He had turned the cartoon and its merchandising into a team effort years ago. Ron Ferdinand has done the Sunday strip since the mid-1980s. But Ketcham orchestrated the daily symphony in black-and-white himself until the mid-1990s, when he passed the baton to Marcus Hamilton.

The Boca Raton exhibit consisted mostly of Ketcham’s daily panel cartoons—scores of originals, many framed and matted in groupings of two or four with similar narrative or visual themes. Here was Dennis with a babysitter; Dennis with his next-door neighbor, the eternally persecuted Mister Wilson. Here were four scenes of Dennis in the rain; and here, four more, all snow scenes. There were also Sundays, mostly Ferdinand’s work.

I was standing at a showcase that contained preliminary pencil sketches and final art Ketcham had done for a poster. I was standing next to Marcus Hamilton, whom I had met soon after he started with Dennis. I was marveling, aloud, about the artistic invention on display—the lightness of touch in the pencils, the swirling curlicue lines of a pen that skated effortlessly across the smooth surface of the paper, the spectacular spotting of solid blacks and the seemingly infinite array of pattern and texture that Ketcham deployed to give graphic variety (and, hence, visual interest) to his art.

"I asked him once how he came up with his compositions," Marcus said. "I was looking over his shoulder as he sat at the drawingboard, and I said, ‘How do you decide what you’re going to draw and how you’ll arrange it? Do you have something in mind when you start drawing?’ And he said that he just picked up a pencil and started sort of doodling, and pretty soon, something would come to him—the scene would take shape in his mind, or he would start to see the action from a different perspective—and then he’d start to focus in on it, blocking the figures in the panel and so on."

I knew what he was talking about. Ideas about drawing come from actually drawing. And Ketcham had the kind of graphic imagination that seemed inexhaustible in the variety of its imagery. He could take essentially the same set of basic situations and, day after day, present them in a visually different fashion, virtually every time. This is an artist’s sensibility. It is an artist’s gift.

Ketcham’s artwork made Dennis a monument to stylistic achievement. His drawings are decorative in design, masterfully a blend of contrasting patterns and textures, fat lines and thin ones, mass and shape, meaty solid blacks, and stark white. At this sort of thing, Ketcham had no equal.

And Ketcham scarcely gave up the feature when he turned it over to Hamilton and Ferdinand. Ketcham’s influence was constant, they told me. Both Hamilton and Ferdinand submitted rough sketches to Ketcham for approval before inking. And Ketcham was an exacting (not to say exasperating) task master, demanding changes and alterations so that even when the actual drawing was done by someone else, the resulting picture would fit his vision as nearly as possible. Even inked art was approved by the master, who often wanted changes even at this final stage.

"It eased up quite a bit when Hank took up painting," Ron told me. But then when Ketcham’s health began failing him a couple years ago, and he could no longer stand up for long periods to paint, he turned again to Dennis, and the critiques began with renewed passion.

They continued until the last possible moment.

Just before the Reuben weekend, both Marcus and Ron wanted to get ahead of their deadlines enough to be able to go to Boca Raton. In consideration, Ketcham relaxed his routine.

"I’ll give you until Memorial Day," he told Ron. The Reubens weekend would end the day before.

Ron sent faxed his Sunday strip rough to Ketcham on the preceding Thursday. It came back immediately with a note from Ketcham: "I said ‘until Memorial Day.’" He hadn’t made a single comment on the sketch.

But when Ron returned to his studio on Monday, Memorial Day, there was a fax from Ketcham—the Sunday strip sketch, liberally marked-up with Ketcham’s directions for changes. And on the day before he died, Ketcham faxed Ron more notes on the next Sunday strip.

By now, though, Hamilton and Ferdinand are ready to go solo. More than ready.

And they expect to continue their present assignments, working for Ketcham Enterprises, which owns Dennis. King Features will continue the feature’s world-wide distribution.

After fifty years, Dennis appears in over 1,000 papers in 48 countries and 19 languages.

The enduring success of the feature is undoubtedly due to the universality of its star’s personality. An appealing if aggravating combination of impishness and innocence, Dennis is the kid everyone recognizes as his or her own children.

Dennis inspired scores of reprint books, a stage musical, a television series (1959-1963), a 1993 motion picture (with Walter Matthau—"a four-alarm fire" of a success, Ketcham called it), and a playground in Monterey.

And "Dennis the Musical" seems Broadway bound. Variety columnist Army Archerd reported today (June 6) that Ernie Chambers, who wrote the tv movie Dennis the Menace and executive produced the Matthau movie, has cranked up new music for the stage version he launched in 1987 (playing in Minneapolis, Washington D.C., and Kansas City). Chambers believes that the success of "The Producers" and all family entertainment makes this a good time to bring Dennis to Broadway.

As for the real Dennis—Ketcham’s first son, who, at the age of four, inspired the cartoon creation—it is widely known that he and his father were estranged for years. Ketcham usually acknowledged the invasion of his son’s life that the cartoon feature committed. "He was brought in unwillingly and unknowingly," he said, "and it confused him."

But there’s more to the story. Young Dennis suffered from severe learning disabilities, and, by the age of eight, he was attending a private school. His mother, meanwhile, could no longer cope; she died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1959.

Shortly thereafter, Ketcham re-married, went to the Soviet Union in 1959 on a goodwill mission, and wound up living in Geneva, Switzerland for nearly eighteen years. He took young Dennis with him, but the boy did not acclimate to European life and was returned to the U.S. to attend a boarding school. They spent little time together afterwards.

Dennis married, became a father, did a ten-month stint in Vietnam, and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was now estranged from his daughter as well as his father.

Acknowledging that it was all sad and regrettable, Ketcham also realized that it was now beyond any influence he could exercise. By this time, he had other children with his third wife. And he had the responsibility—without let-up—of producing a daily cartoon feature and operating a business upon which several people depended for a livelihood. He kept at it.

At the drawingboard, producing his cartoon, Ketcham had an enduring motto: It should look as if you’re having fun, he said of the effect he aimed at when drawing Dennis.

For a time, after relinquishing the production task to Hamilton and Ferdinand, Ketcham sought his fun at an easel instead of a drawingboard. He painted in oil and watercolor.

According to Ketcham, Dennis wasn’t for posterity. "People look at it for 30 seconds," he said, "then it gets used to wrap fish. Now, my paintings, that’s something else. My bid for posterity is my paintings."

The commemorative show in Boca Raton included samples of this undertaking—portraits of famous cartoonists and pictures of jazz musicians. Ketcham was a passionate jazz buff. And his music-themed watercolors—with titles like "Dark Town Strutters Ball" and "Sophisticated Lady"—give visual expression to his love of the syncopated sounds. Combining lively line and splashes of brilliant color, they are stunning.

They look like he was having fun doing them.

For a complete biographical account and appreciation of Ketcham’s life and work, click here to be transported to the lengthy treatment in the R&R Hindsight department.

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Opus 62: Name Dropping and Tale Bearing (June 6, 2001). More discouraging news in the realm of editorial cartooning. In the last few weeks, four more full-time editorial cartoonists have been laid off due to budget cuts. Or have been fired outright. Scuttlebutt in the inky-fingered fraternity is that none of these staff positions are likely to be restored when the economy inevitably improves. Once elminated, these positions will be gone forever.

The three cartoonists who were laid off are: Bill Schorr (at the New York Daily News), Dick Wright (Columbus Dispatch), and Daryl Cagle (Honolulu Advertiser). All three are syndicated (Cagle through his website and perhaps elsewhere, I dunno for sure), and Schorr also produces a syndicated comic strip, The Grizzwells; so none of them are likely to be starving in the streets. Ditto Steve Kelley, who was fired after twenty years on staff at the San Diego Union-Tribune. In addition to being syndicated by Copley News Service (the chain that owns the U-T), Kelley enjoys a modest moonlighting income as a stand-up comedian.

The ostensible cause of Kelley’s dismissal was an altercation with an editor over a cartoon, which, the editor alleged, Kelley tried to "sneak" into publication after the editor had rejected it. The cartoon depicted from behind two teenage boys wearing their pants in the low-rider position currently in fashion. Butt cracks showed, and one of two observing adults says, "Say what you want about today’s teenagers, they’ll have no shortage of plumbers."

Scarcely a revolutionary assault on the social or political mores of the nation, but Kelley’s editor, Robert Kittle, found it offensive. (One wonders what he thought of Dennis the Menace in its early days—not to mention Calvin in Watterson’s late lamented strip; butt cracks are scarcely in short supply in comics.) Kelley offered to revise the artwork and did. When he came back to turn in the final version, Kittle was no longer around, so Kelley left the cartoon with a page designer.

Subsequently, Kittle discovered the cartoon and yanked it while it was in the final production stage, saying that it had never been approved for publication. Subsequently, Bill Osborne, Kelley’s senior editor, approached Kelley, accusing the cartoonist of trying to slip the cartoon by without approval. When Kelley denied it, Osborne intimated that he was lying, and that lead Kelley to employ what he later described as "indelicate" language.

Kelley felt justified: "I don’t think anybody has the right to call into question the integrity of a 20-year employee who has never even taken a sick day," he said. "What I said to my senior editor was not something that was unheard of in our office suite. We have angry debates up there all the time, and words are used that you wouldn’t use in the corporate boardroom at IBM."

Still he said he wished he had been able to overlook the insult. "A better person might have been able to turn and walk out without responding," he said, "but I believe that my response to him was understandable."

He was suspended on April 9, presumably the day of the disputation. After several weeks of legal wrangling, Kelley was fired on May 25. He was offered six-months severance pay if he would not talk about the firing, but Kelley refused to take the money. On May 29, he was interviewed on local radio and tv news programs, and the dismissal and its cause became public.

Newspaper readers immediately protested. Many were angry with the Union-Tribune for keeping the story under wraps: it was, after all, exposed by broadcast news, not the newspaper itself. The U-T’s Reader Representative, Gina Lubrano, admitted that the paper had dropped the ball. "When it comes to covering themselves, newspapers inevitably do a terrible job," she wrote. "Instead of reporting it like any other story involving a high-profile figure, the paper said nothing."

After an attempt at wriggling the newspaper free of any culpability by arguing that as Kelley’s employer, the paper had a certain responsibility and was bound by legal considerations, Lubrano admitted (as gently and unobtrusively as possible) that the editors "failed to do their journalistic duty."

David Horsey, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, found the U-T’s response baffling: "You’d think a newspaper would say, There’s been a dispute and bad words said between an editor and a cartoonist. But how is it that the end result is that the newspaper throws away this talent, when newspapers these days need all the talent they can get?"

Kelley has received offers from other newspapers and syndicates but has made no decision about his future.

"For the record," he said on the AAEC List on the Internet, "six weeks before the firing episode, I received an excellent performance appraisal and a decent raise. I just want the paper to admit that I had no subversive motive in handing my cartoon to a third editor in our office suite. No supervisor is entitled to question an employee’s integrity without cause. By the way, Herb Klein, editor in chief of the Copley Newspapers and a friend of mine for twenty years, tells me that he knows I was not trying to ‘sneak’ my cartoon into the paper. He went to bat for me with the big cheeses but lost."

Kelley went on to say that he’ll miss his 20-year relationship with the readership of the U-T and the newspaper staff. "But I can’t say I’ll miss the management with the exception of Herb Klein."

The offending cartoon, meanwhile, went out on the Copley syndicate circuit to its 400 subscribing newspapers, many of whom printed it without demurer.

Clearly, Kelley’s situation at the U-T and his relationship with his editors involved more than this single cartoon. He had produced his share of controversial cartoons and was a public figure in San Diego.

But the tragedy in this circumstance for the editorial cartooning fraternity is that it indicates, one more time, how fragile is the editorial cartoonist’s hold on a staff position anywhere. Kelley, Schoor, Wright, and Cagle—all part of a discernible trend towards editorial cartooning through syndication alone. This leaves the nation’s newspapers with no cartoon voice to address local issues because all nationally syndicated editorial cartoons must, perforce, deal only with national topics. Sad but increasingly true.

I interviewed Kelley in 1993, and we talked quite a bit about the relationship between stand-up comedy and cartooning. The interview appears in Cartoonist PROfiles No. 108 (December 1995); back issues are available for $10 plus $4 s&h from Cartoonist PROfiles, P.O. Box 13, Plainville, CT 06062-0013; or via the Internet, at jjenkins@snet.net

And now on to OTHER NEWS.

An all-new Peanuts television special will debut next February with a Valentine's Day theme. Based upon Charles Schulz’s comic strip material about the holiday, this is the first freshly minted programming from Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez in eight years. The new special, and all the stalwart standbys, will be aired on ABC beginning next fall, not CBS.

In other Peanuts news: on Thursday, June 7, the Congressional Gold Medal will be presented to Schulz’s family in an afternoon ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol.

From the New York Post (Richard Johnson): The New York Times fired its only cartoonist in April after a big advertiser complained. Marisa Acocella, whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker, had been drawing a comic strip every other week in the Sunday Styles section. But her April 1 strip satirizing the cultish obsession over Chanel bags was her last. Insiders say the head of Chanel U.S.A., Arie Kopelman, complained to higher-ups at the Times. "The Chanel people weren't asking for her head," said one source. "The Times overreacted. This is real craven, spineless bootlicking." A Times spokeswoman said: "The Times has never made editorial decisions based on advertising concerns." Acocella was dropped, she said, for "strictly journalistic reasons." Chanel did not return calls. Acocella would say nothing except, "I loved working at The Times."

Jack Kamen, who drew primly beauteous damsels and their square-jawed handsome beaux in horrific contretemps for the old EC Comics line, has a son who’s an inventor. In fact, young Kamen is the inventor of the much touted "Ginger," an invention that we don’t know much about but are assured that it will revolutionize human society as we know it. Dunno whether that means a cure for cancer or the common cold, a trip to the moon or a shortcut through cyberspace. But that’s the story.

Kamen Fils was interviewed in his office by CNN recently, and we could see on the wall among the photographs of his idol (A. Einstein) and his favorite invention (helicopters, which he builds himself) framed copies of his father’s EC work. Then in the background, sitting in a chair, was a huge stuffed animal—a brown bear wearing a necktie. Asked about the bear, young Kamen explained: "They told me that to be in business you need a partner and a tie, so I bought a partner," he gestured at the stuffed bear, "and gave him the tie to wear."

The Comics Buyer’s Guide announced its annual Fan Awards in mid-May. The odd thing is this: DC Comics pretty consistently cops the top of the lists of things associated with a publisher—Favorite Publisher, Favorite Character (Batman), Favorite Writer (Alan Moore whose America’s Best Comics is now an imprint of DC in second remove), Favorite Comic Book (Starman), Favorite Graphic Novel (Shazam: Power of Hope), Favorite Reprint of a Graphic Novel (Will Eisner’s the Archival Spirit). Marvel garnered only the Favorite Editor (Joe Quesada) and Favorite Limited Series (Punisher). Virtually all of the Favorite Stories (11 out of the 13 named) were in DC Comics. And yet—despite all this seeming preference for DC product, Marvel titles are consistently reported in Diamond’s Previews as the best selling comic books. Month after month, the top ten is mostly Marvel. I suppose that means that the CBG Fan Awards tell us more about who is voting than the products they vote on. And probably not that many regular buyers of comic books vote.

Dilbert’s Scott Adams has released his latest book, God’s Debris, on the Internet exclusively as an e-book. Priced at only $4.95, it’s previewed at Dilbert.com but it’s not a Dilbert book: it’s "a thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story," Adams said. "It’s designed to make your brain spin around inside your head." Dense with ideas and philosophical notions, the book has been called a combination of My Dinner with Andre and The Celestine Prophecy. The story, such as it is, "is told from the perspective of a delivery man who brings a package and leaves with every idea he’s ever had shaken to the core" (USA Today). If this works out, perhaps Adams will abandon comic strips in favor of the thing he does best—writing, not drawing.

In the wake of the controversy over Johnny Hart’s Easter Sunday B.C. (which depicted a menorah being extinguished candle-by-candle until only a charred cross remained), only five of the strip’s 1,300 client newspapers have cancelled the feature; but at least five new papers have signed on, according to Creators Syndicate. The North Jersey Media Group (consisting of two newspapers) dumped the entire April 15 Sunday comics section to avoid publishing Hart’s strip and offending readers. At a cost of $30,000, NJMG printed a new funnies section without B.C.

On May 8, United Media’s Comics.com website launched Jane’s World, a strip starring a gay character by Paige Braddock, senior vice president and creative director for Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates. "Mine is a PG gay strip," Braddock quipped; she’s been doing the strip for alternative publications since 1994, but this is the first mass-audience exposure. "It’s like the ‘Ellen’ of the comics pages," she continued, referring to tv’s defunct program with Ellen DeGeneres; "but it will hopefully have a longer run." United hopes so too. Although offering the feature via a general consumer site seems daring, syndicate officials think of Braddock’s strip as just another good comic. "Our general point of view is to put good comics online," said Toby Sanders, general manager/web.

I said here recently that I hadn’t read the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. If I had read it, I would have discovered what to me is a staggering fact: I am actually mentioned in the book—by name, kimo sabe! In Chapter 11 of Part VI, page 545. The entire text of my Pulitzer-wining appearance is: "Her scripts [that is, the scripts of Rose Saxon, "the Queen of Romance Comics"] were a tightly numbered series of master shots, the shooting scripts for ten-cent epics that, in their sparse elegance of design, elongated perspective, and deep focus, somewhat resemble, as Robert C. Harvey has pointed out*, the films of Douglas Sirk." The asterisk directs the reader to a footnote: "In his excellent The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History."

Among scholarly types, to " get a footnote" in this fashion is a signal event. And to be footnoted in a Pulitzer winning work—well, the mind boggles. While I’m only borderline scholarly, it’s still astounding to see my name there.

And it would be altogether too thrilling for words were it not for a disturbing fact intimately associated with the aforementioned staggering one: the book is mine, all right, but I have not ever written anything in it or anywhere else about Rose Saxon, a wholly fictional personage as nearly as I can tell, nor about the films of Douglas Sirk, another made-up fella.

So there you have it. A dubious distinction. My book is footnoted by actual title in a Pulitzer Prize winning novel but the reference is to non-existent material. The effect of the footnote, therefore, is to consign my entire book to the limbo of make-believe: by implication, the book has no more existence than the referenced material about Saxon and Sirk. Ha. Good joke on me.

I’d say Chabon is mocking the theoretical angst that usually infects my analytical prose from stem to stern were it not for yet another fact: he lists my book in his concluding "Author’s Note" among some two dozen or more other tomes that he found "helpful or indispensable." At least he didn’t find it negligible.

Chabon, incidentally, is a regular attendee at the San Diego ComiCon. He started reading comic books around 1970 when he was seven. The Kirby era at Marvel was just coming to a close. And the first comic book that blew his mind was Kirby’s Mister Miracle for DC: "Especially the issue where the eponymous hero fights a big-pink-lump-of-gum-man in the realm of his own unconscious—there was this incredible two-page splash of the Female Furies in full bondage-armor—jeez."

By the way (although not at all incidentally this time), what I actually say in The Art of the Comic Book is copiously hinted at elsewhere on this Website; just click here to be whisked off to the appropriate place.

Speaking of books I haven’t read, here’s another, fresh from the printer: Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by Bradford W. Wright. This is not fiction but actual history coupled to analysis. It "fluently animates the artistic, economic, and social history of comic books from Superman as ’30s hero of the downtrodden to debates over kids’ consumption of violent imagery to fan culture." I’m afraid Wright actually tries to prove that comic books shaped the fate of the nation, but I’ll wait to see.

And (one more) here’s Comics and Ideology, a collection of scholarly essays edited by Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, Jr., and Ian Gordon. I haven’t read this one either, but its cover blurb indicates that the essays explore the ways that images and narratives portray social groups and issues. For instance, Dilbert as a workplace revolutionary; the women’s suffragist movement as seen in the cartoons of the old Life (humor) magazine; etc. This might well be fascinating, but a cynical reviewer is perhaps entitled to believe that this is but another in various recent attempts in academe to give enough social significance to comics to justify the professorial interest in the medium. This effort is, of course, natural to the ivied environment: after all, intellectual pursuits lead, inevitably, to examining virtually every aspect of our lives. Moreover, I share the view that the unexamined life is probably not worth living. (Actually, I veer off in Bernard Shaw’s direction—to wit, if you don’t think about and examine the life you’re leading, you are in danger of living your life but not knowing it; or words to that effect.) Still, I can’t help thinking that assigning to an entertainment medium any great social revolutionary or (even) reactionary role has the effect of inflating the function of that medium beyond its actual, likely effect. I also realize that this is an argument I can never win: those who disagree tend to take the view that, generally speaking, everything has some effect on everything else. That’s true, too. But then, it’s all true, isn’t it?

NCS NEWS. In early May, the Ethics Committee of the National Cartoonists Society issued its report on the Chip Beck Episode of last fall. In case you missed the excitement, here, in brief, is what happened then:

Beck, who was serving a second term as Treasurer, was voted off the Board by the other officers. Beck promptly went public with this news, posting his objection and his contentions to the website bulletinboards of both NCS and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC). This maneuver quickly escalated into a heated exchange between other officers and Beck. Beck had contested several of Cagle’s decisions over the past year, and it would appear that the other officers decided that it would be easier to remove him from office than to continue to contend with him. Beck’s position was that since he’d been elected by the membership, he could be removed only "for cause" or by a vote of the membership.

The "cause" that might justify removing an officer is, usually, evidence of some sort of malfeasance. There was never any indication that Beck committed any illegal or unethical acts. So he was, as he claimed, removed "without cause," and that, he believed, was not permitted by the NCS constitution.

The furor was stilled by turning the matter over to the Ethics Committee, which was charged with investigating the situation. In May, the Ethics Committee (consisting of NCS past presidents, chaired, in this case, by Frank Springer) issued its report. They upheld the ouster of Beck, finding "no reason to reverse the Board’s decision." They also reported finding no evidence of misappropriation of funds or other unlawful or unethical acts by either Beck or Cagle or anyone else.

Beck, while recognizing that the decision was aimed at "not upsetting any apple carts," was disappointed that the constitutional issue was not addressed: "I was removed ‘without cause,’" he told David Astor at E&P, "which, according to NCS bylaws, is illegal."

To-date, no one has said why, exactly, Beck was ousted. My guess is that a conflict of personalities is at the core of the problem. And that, it seems to me, is not sufficient cause to remove an elected officer. But then, I don’t know all the particulars. And those who do aren’t talking.

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Opus 61: Jack Davis Gets the Reuben (May 29, 2001). The legendary Jack Davis--stalwart of EC Comics and Mad, caricaturist, and cover artist extraordinaire--was named "cartoonist of the year" for the year 2000 by the National Cartoonists Society at the annual awards dinner on May 26 at Boca Raton Resort in Florida.

For a combination of reasons, Boca Raton would seem the most auspicious place for a cartoonists' gathering. "Boca" means "mouth" in Spanish; and "raton" means "rat"--or, perhaps, "mouse." Given that Disney World is just up the road a piece (about half the length of Florida, actually), one might suppose that Boca Raton invokes one of the world's most recognized cartoon characters.

Or not.

The origins of the place name are somewhat obscure, but it probably had nothing to do with Mickey Mouse. The "mouth" in question is the mouth of a river, an inlet leading into the ocean. "Raton" can also mean "dragging or hauling." Or "thief." And so maybe "boca raton" refers to the place at the mouth of the river where small boats were dragged upon onto the beach.

More likely, the name originated with "thief." At an early missionary colony hereabouts, the good monks complained about the Indians stealing everything not nailed down. So Boca Raton actually means "thieves' inlet."

But for Memorial Day weekend, Boca Raton meant "host"--host to the NCS.

The Society's token of esteem for the "cartoonist of the year" is a blunt object, a statuette made of some sort of heavy metal that has been formed into a pyramid of comically acrobatic naked figures (all male, hence the comedy). This trophy is dubbed the Reuben in honor of the Society's first president, Rube Goldberg, who, after a long career as strip cartoonist, magazine writer, humorist, editorial cartoonist and all-round celebrity, turned sculptor in his dotage. One of his objets d'arte was a lamp consisting of a pile of hilariously cavorting nude men; this lamp became the prototype of the Reuben trophy.

In accepting the Reuben, Davis said, with a characteristic modesty that is as legendary as his skill, that he wanted to thank "all of you who came up to me this weekend to say you like my work--I appreciate it."

Davis started his national career in DC comic books in 1951 but soon was working exclusively for Bill Gaines' EC Comics, where his bold linework and fustian cross-hatchery produced distinctive but realistic pictures in tales of the old West, war, and horror (which he never liked much). Regarded through most of his career as an extraordinarily fast worker, Davis explained that he learned to work fast because of Gaines' payment policy: EC artists were paid immediately when they delivered the artwork. And then Gaines would give them the next script. At most comic book publishers of the day, artists waited for days or weeks for payment. Because of Gaines' pay-on-delivery practice, the more frequently Davis turned in work, the more money he collected because he collected often. Speed paid.

He displayed a flair for visual hilarity when Mad was launched in 1952, and once he'd added caricature to his repertoire, he was much in demand for advertising art and album and magazine covers (notably, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, and Time). He has worked in every venue open to a cartoonist, even doing character design for animation. But he never achieved the one thing he'd set out for despite several attempts--a syndicated comic strip. He received NCS's Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and when the subject of his candidacy for the Reuben came up at a panel discussion last year, Davis allowed (in his soft, rolling Georgian drawl) that the Lifetime Achievement Award was enough for him. But it apparently wasn't enough for his colleagues in the Society.

At an afternoon presentation, Davis said he doesn't work as hard as he used to, preferring to spend time boating near his home on St. Simeon Island off the Georgia coast. He showed a slide that pictured him at the wheel of his boat with a beer can in hand. "That's paradise," he said.

Even being nominated for the Reuben is a distinct honor. Reuben nominees are selected by the NCS membership at large. In the initial voting, members submit ballots listing five candidates. There's no prefabricated slate of nominees from which members pick candidates; the ballots aren't multiple-choice listings. Instead, members must come up with the candidate names themselves, without prompting (so to speak). The three names mentioned most often become the finalists, and they are listed on the final ballot which is submitted for vote to the membership. The other two finalists this year were Pat Brady for his strip, Rose Is Rose, and Matt Groening for The Simpsons and the rest of the Groening empire.

This was Brady's fourth consecutive time as a nominee for the Reuben. Last year's Reuben winner, Pat McDonnell (Mutts), won on his fourth time. Rose Is Rose was launched April 16, 1984. Four reprint volumes are available through Andrews McMeel, and a fifth, Sunday strips, Rose Is Rose in Loving Color, from Rutlege Hill Press.

It was Groening's first nomination. He started humbly enough in 1977 with a weekly strip for alternative newspapers. Called Life Is Hell, it is based upon Groening's experiences in Los Angeles and appeared to star two rabbits named Binky and Sheba, one of whom has only one ear, and/or gay twins in fezes named Akbar and Jeff. It was a big success and still is, reportedly appearing in 250 papers. Then came The Simpsons. On September 8, 1986, this dysfunctional but somehow loving family debuted as a two-minute sketch on the Tracey Ullman Show. It was Groening's first experience with animation, and the characters (based, somewhat, upon Groening's own family--his father is named Homer) immediately attracted an audience. The Simpsons got its own prime-time tv show on the Fox Network in 1990 and has won an Emmy and gone on to become the longest-running prime-time animated series on tv. But Groening wasn't finished yet: in 1993, he founded a comic book publishing company and began producing Bongo Comics, which at present publishes four regularly appearing titles--Simpsons Comics, Radioacive Man, Bartman, and Itchy and Scratchy Somics. Groening's fortune was made.

In addition to presenting the Reuben, NCS names the "best" cartoonist in thirteen categories or "divisions," whose winners receive a placque. In contrast to the nomination process for the Reuben, nominees for the "division" awards are chosen by various NCS chapters. A chapter is assigned a particular category, and members who wish to be considsered in that category submit sample materials to that chapter. Cartoonists need not submit themselves; others may submit work for them. But the selection process here begins, in effect, with self-nomination. The chapters participating in the nominating process then choose three from the submissions, and those three become the finalists; then members of the nominating chapter vote and pick one of the three as the winner in that category.

This year's nominees in each of the categories are listed below with this year's winner in each case identified with an asterisk (*) preceding the name:

Newspaper Comic Strip: *Bud Blake (Tiger), Frank Cho (Liberty Meadows), Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm)

Newspaper Panel Cartoon: Dave Coverly (Speed Bump), Dave Whamond (Reality Check), *Dan Piraro (Bizarro), who won in this division last year (and who, like everyone, thanked others for contributing to his good fortune--including, he said, his girlfriend "who controls my sex life").

Editorial Cartoon: Frank Cammuso (Syracuse Herald-Journal), *Jerry Holbert (Boston Herald, NEA), Jeff Parker (Florida Today), Mike Peters (Dayton Daily News; Tribune Media Services)

Newspaper Illustration: *Drew Friedman, Bob Staake, Lori Triefeldt

Magazine Illustration: Mark Brewer, *Peter deSeve, Drew Friedman

Magazine Gag Cartoons: Pat Byrnes, Benita Epstein, *Kim Warp

Comic Book: *Dan DeCarlo (Betty and Veronica), Kevin O'Neill (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Jeff Smith (Bone)

Advertising and Illustration: Pat Byrnes, Steve McGarry, *Craig McKay, who won in this division last year

Greeting Cards: *Bill Brewer, Benita Epstein, Anne Gibbons

New Media (a new category this year for computer animation): Jerry Craft, Mark Fiore, *Bill Hinds

Book Illustration: Doug Cushman, *Mike Lester, Bob Staake

Feature Animation: Thom Enriaquez, *Eric Goldberg (for the "Rhapsody in Blue" segment of the new Fantasia with character designs by Al Hirschfeld), Nick Park and Peter Lord

Television Animation: *Gary Baseman, Rick Kirkman, Matther Nostuk

Arnold Roth, who received the Society's Gold Key "Hall of Fame" Award at the awards dinner that evening, was emcee and presided with his usual sardonic wit. After Jack Davis sat down, Roth said that he thought it wasn't nice of Jack to make fun of the way Southern people talk.

And in concluding the evening's festivities, Roth thanked the audience for its "patience, which qualifies you all for sainthood," he said, "which you will receive as soon as the word can be passed along by Johnny Hart."

Also during the weekend, the question of the survival of the financially strapped International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton came up, prompted by an aborted auction on May 19 at which the storyboards for Mickey Mouse’s first movie, Plane Crazy, failed to sell.

At the NCS opening reception held at the Museum, the IMCA founder Mort Walker and Joe D'Angelo of the Hearst Corporation (a major donor to the Museum) both spoke briefly about the auction in New York. And the next day's Baton Raton News carried a story about the it.

"We are not moving, not closing, not filing for bankruptcy," Walker said. According to the report, the Mickey auction was "halted" when a computer glitch made it impossible to verify certain bids. A new auction (or a resumed one) is scheduled for June 8.

Walker said there are several options they'll explore to meet the July $200,000 payment--including getting donations from NCS members here this weekend. D'Angelo, who was honcho of King Syndicate until being promoted, said he was sure the Museum would survive in Boca Raton in the location it now occupies. A city councilman is quoted in the story as being eager to work with Walker to keep the Museum in Boca Raton: it would be "unthinkable," he said, for it to close or leave.

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Opus 60: Tittles and Jots: A Quick Look at What’s Still on the Stands (May 23, 2001). Bazooka Jules No. 1 comes to us all the way from London. Neil Googe’s art partakes somewhat of the present manga fad but also evokes the nouveau art techniques of Winsor McCay with its delicate delineations outlined in bold strokes. As the story unfolds, Googe alternates pages and panels to show us parallel events involving his heroine, a normally proportioned sixteen-year-old school girl, and Eddy Daytona, a super-powered cat burglar (who is the more intriguing of his creations, forsooth). By the end of the book, Jules’ school has been invaded by a squad of extraterrestrials whose ray gun bombardment gives her a basketball chest. Jules is now equipped to deal with the bad guys in true bad girl fashion, which, presumably, she’ll do in the next issue, entitled "Puberty." I’m a little weary of the toothy grins and grimaces of this style of drawing, not to mention the blocky anatomy, but for the sake of what Eddy Daytona might do, I’ll opt for No. 2 when it surfaces.

One of Codename Knockout No. 0's chief virtues is the cover by Joe Chiodo, but Louis Small (pencils) and George Freeman (inks) aren’t slouches at female anatomy either. Angela St. Grace is the distaff version of James Bond, who, like Modesty Blaise and her "nailer," uses her spectacular figure to foil her foes: lowering the bodice of her jump suit, she immobilizes her male opponents, who stand gaping in appreciation just long enough for her either to escape or to kick them unconscious. Her comrade in all this is a horny gay named Go-Go Fiasco (great name), who is the more interesting of the duo. When we meet him, he’s bound to a chair in a chamber which the villains are slowly filling with water in the expectation that to save himself he will divulge the location of the microfilm they want that he’s filched. (He’s hidden it in a bodily orifice which he’s pretty sure they won’t search, he says, "given my reputation." Well, I said he was horny.) Angela rescues him but he’s not altogether satisfied: "Aren’t secret agents supposed to get laid?" he asks, as he follows her up the ladder to the hovering helicopter. Robert Rodi, who writes this scintillating stuff, explains his delight in his creation: "The more I mired our creation in the era that hung like a hammock between The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Charlie’s Angels, the more truly I felt like I was working on a revival than on a debut. Everything fell into place with uncanny ease. The ridiculous division of the world into moral opposites (good old western authority versus wicked old Bolshie anarchy), the millions of pounds of impracticable ordnance you could summon with a toot on a whistle, the silly names of the conflicting forces, the pitched battles in stiletto heels—these all now occupy a fortress-like place on our cultural map. We’ve set up shop there, and we’re building like crazy." To witness prose gyrations of this ilk, I’ll be back when No. 1 comes out. And I’ll be looking for more of the "I.Q. with T. & A." promised on this issue’s cover. Promised and delivered—at least, in a quirky comedic manner.

Okay, in Green Arrow No. 3, we find out that Oliver Queen has lost his memory. Now what? Still brilliantly drawn by Phil Hester and Ande Parks in their best drenched-in-shadow manner.

The first four issues of Paul Grist’s Kane are again available in a single volume for $11.95. I bought this compilation (entitled Greetings from New Eden) without realizing I had purchased its first incarnation a few years ago. So I read it again. In this tale of modern-day police work, Kane, returned to duty after some suspected malfeasance or another, gets a new partner, Kate Felix, and they’re off and running to solve crime. But it’s not so much the story as the storytelling that is remarkable here. Grist makes unique use of the comic book page as a unit—both as a designed layout and as a narrative phrase. He deploys this device effectively to flash back and forth between now and then, here and there. And his stunning minimalist rendering style is, as always, dramatic and engaging in stark white and solid black.

In Desperadoes No. 1, John Severin returns to the Western. The language of the narrator strikes me as a little too literate (even for his presumed Eastern dude status), but the artwork reeks authenticity. In the first of a five-issue series, we meet the four desperadoes, lolling in a cantina on the Mexican border—Gideon Brood, Jerome Alexander, Abby DeGrazia, and Race Kennedy, the chronicler. Gideon the gunslinger is called out by the usual reputation-seeking kid, whom he kills in self-defense. The kid’s father and brother get set to come looking for revenge, but before that happens (next issue perhaps), Gideon and the corpse disappear. There are at least two love stories salted in for good measure—Jerome (an African-American) and a Mexican bar girl, and Abby and Race and Gideon (Race lusts after Abby and she after Gideon, an irreconcilable triangle, to be sure). But the real treat is to see Severin in action once again.

In the second issue of David Hahn’s Private Beach, the men in black approach Trudy Honeyvan, the heroine, and offer her a job (I think) at a night club called Heaven’s Rift. Sounds spooky to me. Hahn’s work here is oddly compelling. His black-and-white drawings are stiff, but not bad stiff; no, somewhat in the style of Judge Parker as rendered, these days, by Harold Le Doux, but a little less wooden perhaps. Hahn’s storytelling style is more visual than verbal: it’s a slice-of-life genre with much of the action taking place without accompanying verbiage. This mannerism gives the enterprise a mysterious aura (because we suspect these sequences have significance, but they don’t, really, except as depictions of the events of the heroine’s day, so to speak). The mysteriousness endures. And Hahn adds genuine mystery to the aura. Who are the men in black? What threat do they hold for Trudy? Where is this all going anyhow? Good question. Answers are in subsequent issues. (Although Hahn, judging from the desultory pace of events so far, won’t be in any big hurry to issue explanations.)

The first issue of Randy O’Donnell Is the Man is also the first issue of Mr. Right, both by Tom DeFalco in his new guise (assisted by penciller Ron Lim on the first, Ron Frenz on the second). In Randy, a teenage geek becomes the savior of another planet, whose chief wizard teleports him from Earth. Randy immediately undertakes to behave as his comic book and tv game heroes do and is marginally successful, although he doesn’t impress the toothsome Tesca that much. Robert Jones’ inking reminds me somewhat of John Byrne’s linework—a fluid, flexing line with a certain fussiness of modeling detail. Thoroughly contemporary, in other words. But most of the visualizations—faces, figures, costumes—are of the cookie-cutter kind: they can be found in virtually any other Image title. Mr. Right, on the other hand, comes directly out of the Marvel bullpen (and is even inked by Sal Buscema). He’s somehow the incarnation of a tv game activated by "Player One," a teenager named Jeffrey Lopez, whose mother is a cop. He gets only five pages in this debut issue, so we don’t learn much, but it’s nicely drawn in the best traditional superhero manner—which is a pleasant relief to watch.

Both these creations put me in mind of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, another four-color superhero conjured up by a teenager, Bill Batson. And so it was with a certain relish that I picked up and read the next funnybook on this week’s heap, Tom Strong No. 13, in which Alan Moore does his homage to the Otto Binder-C.C. Beck creation of the 1940s. It’s a four-chapter story (exactly the sort of thing Fawcett did so often in Captain Marvel and The Marvel Family), with a different member of the Strong family in the spotlight in each chapter. It’s also a time travel saga, and one of the Strong family is Tom as a youth. Another is Moore’s version of Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, aptly named Warren (a warren is where rabbits congregate to propagate). Splash page layouts and caption style ape the Fawcett manner, too, and Chris Sprouse, the regular artist, is joined for this issue by Kyle Baker (who handles the Warren chapter), Russ Heath, and Peter Poplaski (who mimics the Beck manner expertly). Alas, Captain Tootsie makes no appearance here, cameo or otherwise, but the time trek is gnarled with the sort of sf twists we’ve come to look for in Moore’s work. Great fun, cover to cover.

Mike Mignola is back with the first chapter of the next Hellboy adventure, Conqueror Worm. And Mignola’s exquisite command of solid blacks continues to enthrall: it’s fascinating to contemplate what he leaves out and what he obscures with shadow.

Harley Quinn No. 8 finds the penciling and inking team of Terry and Rachel Dodson on vacation with Pete Woods and Mark Lipka guesting the chores respectively. The guests do very well, too, although the Dodson’s anatomy and page layouts are more acrobatic, and Rachel’s line bolder and more flexible than Lipka’s. Karl Kesel’s story, as always, sparkles with verbal wit and twisted plot.

And here’s Esteban Maroto’s Urania, a collection of his drawings of the curvaceous gender in a variety of scanty attire (Norma Editorial, S.A., Barcelona, Spain; 64 9x12" pages for $11.95, available through Bud Plant). The distinctive aspect of Maroto’s work is not just the pleasing rendition of the nearly nude feminine form but the endless embellishment he contributes to each of these full-page pictures with decorative jewelry and other costume detail in tiny precision. Delicious.

CARTOONIST REPORTAGE. A couple of years ago, Art Spiegelman told me that he thought the future of comics lies in reportage, or "comics journalism." Cartoonists as reporters. Since then, we’ve had a healthy dose or two of what he means. Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation was in the March 12 issue of Time in which Joe Sacco produced a four-page comic strip about life in Hebron, a town on the West Bank in Israel the population of which is divided between Israelis and Palestinians.

Sacco’s effort is a good piece of reporting. He presents both sides of the contentious Middle East population sympathetically. He gives each side a human face by presenting the arguments through the testimony of persons who, we assume, are actual residents of the town. Sadly—tragically—the predicament in which these people find themselves seems wholly incapable of resolution.

Powerful and informative as the piece is, it is not very good cartooning. Oh, it’s drawn well enough in Sacco’s usual, meticulously labored fashion (albeit because he leaves his art open for the addition of color, there’s none of the relentless crosshatching that distinguishes his black-and-white work). But the pages are text-heavy, freighted with long captions or long speeches. And the pictures contribute little other than to identify the speakers and, sometimes, to show us the things that the speakers talk about (sandbags in the windows of a Jewish settler’s home, bullet-riddled storefronts). The medium is capable of much more powerful, dramatic, statements than these.

I don’t mean to belittle Sacco’s achievement here. He’s done a better job of reporting on the Mideast dilemma than many reporters. And he does it effectively in fewer words. That, perhaps, is the signal virtue of a visual medium in reportage. But television could do the same.

Sacco’s longer works (two-volume Palestine, for instance) seem more successful. Sacco’s best pages in these books, the ones most intrinsic to cartooning, are those that present detailed pictures of the environs—the muddy streets, the marketplaces, the milling throngs. These passages, although just pictures like those we might see on tv, last longer than the flickering images on the tube. We can study the grinding misery they depict; we can take these pictures to heart because we have time to memorize them—to let them burn into our minds.

Moreover, in these book-length works, Sacco has the space to dramatize events in ways that are likely to produce an emotional response in his readers. He lets pictures emphasize the meaningless of one prisoner’s incarceration by letting the man, when released, wander off into the crowds and get lost from sight—just vanishing into the mob scene as Sacco’s camera pulls back and back and back. In the same long sequence, the man’s imprisonment and torture is made more vivid by the pictures that show us what is happening to him and how he fares. All of the sequence is based upon what Sacco was told by the man himself, but Sacco pictures his ordeal, panel-by-panel, page-by-page, and the cumulative effect is emotionally wrenching. Not something tv could do: no tv documentary is likely to be filmed in an Israeli prison.

For the shorter enterprises in magazines like Time, I think he’d make better use of the medium by concentrating on a single, revealing event—something that illustrates the legitimacy of both sides’ contentions—rather than attempt a somewhat encyclopedic effort. Admittedly, I suppose Sacco thought he was encapsulating the whole Mideast crisis by concentrating on the single town of Hebron. But even that wasn’t small enough a compass to permit him to build an emotion-fraught situation to a revealing climax in just four pages. But he made an admirable try. And as a cartoonist reporter, he’s blazing a new trail as he shows both how and how not to do it.

Sacco’s Palestine books ($16.95 each) are available from Fantagraphics, www.fantagraphics.com, or phone tollfree 800-657-1100.

And my books are all available from me. For a preview of each of them, click here to go back to the Main Page and an overview of all four titles.

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