Opus 198:

Opus 198 (Christmas 2006). Herewith, an antique anyule greeting, manufactured in my troubled youth, when both I and the rabbit were young and knew everything.

Casting a slight pall over the festivities of the holidays is news of the deaths of two of cartooning’s greats, the monumental Joe Barbera and the perennial Marty Nodell. We hope, though, that our affectionate tributes to them both will lend their passing a commemorative aura that is, in its own odd way, appropriate to the season. In the same spirit, this installment of Rants & Raves is being made available to all and sundry without requiring the usual entry by subscription. Non-subscribers visiting this website can sample our wares herewith in this single but complete dosage. Here’s what’s here, in order by department:

NOUS R US

At Hand, a Disney Retreat

More Danish Fall-out

A Drunken Conservative Hypocrite

Ugly Pixelated Art in a New Comic Strip

Spider-Man Gets the Batman Treatment

Fun Home Triumphs

Graphic Novel Challenges

AN ANIMATION COLOSSUS FALLS

Joe Barbera Dies at 95

BOOK MARQUEE

Bull of the Woods Reprints

Will Eisner Paperback Library Launched

DC’s Archival Spirit, Volume 20

New Biography of Walt Disney

FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE

Reviews of Darwyn Cooke’s First Spirit and Outer Orbit

LIGHTING THE LANTERN ONE MORE TIME

Marty Nodell Dies at 91: A Fond Remembrance

COMIC STRIP WATCH

Vintage Strip Characters in Gasoline Alley

Johnny Hart’s New B.C. Trouble

Ditto for F-Minus and Close to Home

Agnes’ Christmas Spirit

COMIC STRIP REPRINTS

Brevity Reviewed

Onward, the Spreading Punditry

The Bush League Oedipus Complication and Tribal Justice

And our customary reminder: don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just this lengthy installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu—

NOUS R US

All the News That Gives Us Fits

At Disney Studios, hand-wrought animation may be on its way back. The Mouse House dissolved its hand-drawn animation operation in 2004, but two staffers have been working to get the company to return to its roots. And it seems they’ve been successful. As of 2008, says Maira Oliveira at allheadlinenews.com, “Disney will reportedly no longer be part of the computer-animation industry.” But Pixar will continue in the high-tech rut it has worn for itself.

            The Scandinavian dairy group Arla Foods reports in irishexaminer.com that the boycott of its products in the Middle East in protest to the Danish Dozen has cost the company millions although sales have rebounded in recent months, approaching 60 percent of its previous revenue. ... In Beirut, where they have enough trouble, an advertising-media-marketing firm is taking the government to court for failing to provide full compensation for damages to its offices caused during last February’s riots over the Danish Dozen saith the Lebanon Daily Star. Hundreds of angry demonstrators set fire to the building in which the Danish Embassy was lodged, the same building where the media company had its offices. ... The fiberglass Garfield statue on the Riverwalk in Marion, Indiana, has been beheaded by unknown vandals, reports Whitney Ross in the Star Press. The $8,500 statue, unveiled in October at the climax of a four-year campaign to obtain statues in several Grant County communities, now stands hollow and headless, dressed in workout gear with its thumb raised in the traditional OK sign. ... Editor & Publisher notes that Mutts cartoonist Patrick McDonnell has received an “Award of Appreciation” from the Sierra Club “for making the public aware of environmental issues in his comic strip. ... In another note, E&P reports that Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library, founded in 1977 with the papers of Milton Caniff, now has over 250,000 original art cartoons in its collection, the largest such holding in the country. “Caniff’s work will be one focus of the Library’s ninth triennial Festival of Cartoon Art next fall, October 26-27, which will take place in the centennial year of Caniff’s 1907 birth.” The Festival will have a “Graphic Storytelling” theme. My massive biography of the famed cartoonist, encyclopedically entitled Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon: Meanwhile..., will be out in time for the festivities.

            Bruce Tinsley, who spews conservatively inspired anti-liberal hogwash in his notoriously unfunny Mallard Fillmore screed, was arrested for drunk driving recently, his second such experience. At ComicsCurmudgeon.com, blogger Joshua Fruhlinger was probably laughing an evil laugh when he pointed out that Tinsley has used his strip to take swipes at arch liberal Ted Kennedy for the senator’s past alcoholic achievements and so deserves all the unfavorable publicity he can garner. “The hypocrisy issue has come up,” said editoonist Ted Rall on his blog. But according to E&P, Rall goes on to say that Tinsley’s drunk driving arrest “could happen to anyone who knocks back three or four beers in an hour or two in a city without decent mass transit—i.e., most people reading this. Speculation that he’s an alcoholic is just that. If Tinsley has issues, he ought to be allowed the privacy to seek help without being ridiculed by a Standard Issue American Media Pile-on ... cut the dude some slack and let him figure out his life.” Nice thought, Ted; but it’s too late here at the Intergalactic Rancid Raves Wurlitzer: as you can see, we’re already celebrating with the sort of gloat we would have indulged over Mark Foley if that issue hadn’t waned too much before our posting date. Conservatives may be hypocrites, but hypocrisy is a decidedly American political tradition.

            United Media is launching Diesel Sweeties on January 8, and the new strip by Richard Stevens has already precipitated nasty remarks hither and yon. The “sweeties” are a robot named Clango Cycotron and his human girlfriend, but interspecies romance is not the cause of the criticism. It’s the drawing style—a pixelated construction at about 10dpi, which makes the lines look like conglomerations of tiny but visible squares. The inherent beauty of linework, in other words, is nowhere to be seen. This is doubtless the first fruits of the work of Ted Rall, who United Media hired a few months ago to help in acquisition and development. With Rall’s own blockhead drawing style as an indication of his artistic preferences, we should have expected something like this, but I was living in hope fostered by Rall’s otherwise admirably astute attitudes on cartooning generally and politics particularly. A vain hope, as it turns out: if you are looking for “modern, contemporary art” in comics, you are looking, it seems, for clunky primitivism. And here, we have it in all its computer-assisted glory. E&P published several of the comments about the strip generated at the dailycartoonist.com: “Can’t speak for the writing, but the artwork is another example of lowered expectations. ... Does ‘new’ or ‘edgy’ necessarily mean a demise of the ability to draw?” Stevens can draw, I have no doubt; but his choice of drawing instrument produces such ugly artwork that I have trouble getting to the speech balloons to see what, if anything, is going on, hilarious or not. Another commentator called it “an interesting experiment.” Another said the strip was “like nothing else out there.” Yet another called it “a quantum leap in the progression of newspaper comics. I can’t even remember a time when a comic strip so unique was added to the comics page.” So the “unusual” is sufficient qualification for artistic merit? Another enthusiast said: “You may not like the art, but it is creative, experimental, and, yes, innovative. The comic itself is an enjoyable read, and I think it can do fine. First off, instead of being turned off by the pixel art, it will catch the eye of readers, and they will try the strip. Chances are good it will get a following.” Alas, this writer is probably right: it will get a following, which proves only that we as a people have altogether lost the power of discernment in matters of visual artistry.

            Spider-Man is slated for Dark Knight treatment in a new series, Spider-Man: Reign. Written and illustrated by Kaare Andrews, the story has the Webslinger returning after a long absence to a lawless city “desperately in need,” says Gavin Ford in the Star-Gazette of Elmira. But Peter Parker hasn’t worn his blue and red costume in twenty years and he’s now an old man, like Bruce Wayne in Frank Miller’s watershed graphic novel series, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. ... At ICv2.com, it is reported that J. Boylston & Co. has acquired the companies owned by the late Byron Preiss—Milk & Cookies Press and Byron Preiss Visual Publications—out of bankruptcy. “Boylston plans to continue publishing new works of similar merit and will sustain the extensive backlist of science fiction, fantasy, history, popular culture and military non-fiction titles.” Good news. I sat next to Preiss at a comicon banquet a couple years ago without knowing who he was. We started talking about graphic novels, and I listed the recent ones I thought were the best. “Those are all mine,” he said and then introduced himself.

            Time magazine, which, E&P reports, has published its first ever “Cartoons of the Year,” ten of them, at its website, also listed Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home first among its picks for the ten best books of the year, calling it “the unlikeliest literary success of 2006 ... a stunning memoir.” Fun Home also topped the first ever PW Comics Week critics poll for graphic novels. Runner-up was Jamie Hernandez’ Ghost of Hoppers, followed closely by Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, Kevin Huizenga’s Curses, Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness. And the Times of London said “the graphic book of the year is incontestably Alison Bechdel’s unflinching, multilayered memoir. ... A complex love-letter not only to her father but also to books and reading, Fun Home is luminescent with wit, lyrical prose, intelligence, honesty and emotional truth.” We reviewed it here last time (Op. 197). ... Fun Home was one of two graphic novels challenged at the Marshall Public Library in central Missouri recently. The other was Blankets by Craig Thompson, another of the most highly regarded of the genre. One patron said she wasn’t concerned about the “content” as much as the illustrations (as if the two were somehow separate), some of which depicted barenekkidwimmin and a nude couple embracing. The library board removed the books until it can develop a policy about acquisitions. Reporter David Twiddy at ca.news.yahoo.com says the American Library Association knows of at least 14 graphic novel “challenges” (the term for “attempt to censor and suppress”) in U.S. libraries over the past two or three years. A back-handed compliment: “They reflect the increasing popularity of the genre with libraries and patrons.” Reacting, the ALA has published recommendations for librarians who seek to start their own graphic novel collections but want to avoid controversy. “The recommendations largely explain how to deal with challenges, but also suggest shelving graphic novels in their own section or keeping graphic novels aimed at adults separate from those for youngsters.”

            The seemingly foreign language spoken by Borat in the movie of that name is not, as we all suppose, Kazakh or, even, gibberish. It’s Hebrew. Understandably, when the film is shown in Israel, the audience gets an extra laugh every time Borat bursts forth in his “native tongue.”

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

AN ANIMATION COLOSSUS FALLS

Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo, died of natural causes on Monday, December 18, at his home with his wife Sheila at his side, according to Gary Miereanu, a Warner Bros. spokesman. Barbera was 95. What follows is mostly the obituary written for the New York Times by Dave Itzkoff, supplemented by information and an occasional phrase culled from other obits on the Web (including Sue Manning’s Associated Press piece) and by consulting a couple reference works on my shelf.

            With his longtime partner Bill Hanna, Barbera first found success creating the highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons. The antics of the archetypal cat and mouse team eventually won seven Academy Awards, more than any other series with the same characters. The partners, who had first teamed up while working at MGM in the 1930s, then went on to a whole new realm of success in the 1950s with a witty series of animated tv comedies. On signature televisions shows like "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons," the two men developed a cartoon style that combined colorful, simply drawn characters (often based on other recognizable pop-culture personalities) with the narrative structures and joke-telling techniques of traditional live-action sitcoms. They were television's first animated comedy programs.

            "From the Stone Age to the Space Age and from primetime to Saturday mornings, syndication and cable, the characters he created with his late partner, William Hanna, are not only animated superstars, but also a very beloved part of American pop culture. While he will be

missed by his family and friends, Joe will live on through his work," Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Barry Meyer said.

            The Hanna-Barbera collaboration lasted more than 60 years, during which time, the partners were reputed never to have exchanged a word in anger. The critic Leonard Maltin, in

his book Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, described their enduring partnership this way: “Hanna and Barbera saw something in each other [during their early collaborations] and fused into a tremendous working team. Hanna’s background was [with the studio of] Harman and Ising: cuteness, warmth, and the like. Barbera’s forte was gag comedy. Hanna aspired to be a director and possessed a keen sense of timing [due, Hanna said, to his grounding in math as an engineer]. Barbera found his creative outlet in writing. They complemented each other perfectly.”

            "I was never a good artist," confessed Hanna, who died in 2001. But Barbera, he said, "has the ability to capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I've ever known." While Hanna took care of the technical side, it was Barbera who did the visualizing.

            Barbera was born on March 24, 1911, in the Little Italy section of Manhattan and grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His love of drawing began at his Catholic elementary school in New

York from which his mother withdrew him because he spent more time drawing pictures of Jesus than studying him. Despite his ambitions as an artist, he was persuaded to pursue a “proper” job, so at the age of 16, Barbera put his drawing aside and took a job as a bank clerk. He also tried his hand at playwriting and amateur boxing, but his sketching was an addiction. In his spare time, he continued to draw, earning extra money submitting cartoons to magazines. When he sold one to Collier’s, he was persuaded to pursue a career as a cartoonist. In search of employment in his chosen line, he wrote a letter to Walt Disney, then a rising star of California's animation industry; Disney apparently promised to look Barbera up on a subsequent visit to New York, but the proposed meeting never took place. So Barbera began his animation career on the East Coast.

            After a four-day stint with the animator Max Fleischer, he began writing gags and drawing cartoon cels for Van Beuren Studios in 1932. When the studio shut down in 1936, he found work at the Terrytoon Studios in New Rochelle, N.Y., but one year later he left for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's animation unit in Culver City, California. It was at MGM that Barbera met Hanna, then a veteran cartoon writer and musical composer and lyricist. After toiling on a short-lived series of animated Katzenjammer Kids shorts, the two men decided to produce their own material.

            Barbera recalled the moment in an interview with Michael Mallory for the book, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons:  "In desperation one time, we were sitting in a room waiting for the place to fold, and I said to Bill: 'Why don't we try a cartoon of our own?' "

            Their first such project for MGM, released in February 1940, was a theatrical short called "Puss Gets the Boot" that featured a relentless cat named Jasper, perpetually frustrated in his pursuit of a crafty nameless mouse eventually called Jinx. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Over the next 17 years, the occasionally sadistic antics that Barbera and Hanna devised for their anthropomorphic rivals—rechristened Tom and Jerry—would earn MGM another 13 Oscar nominations and seven statuettes.

            The most significant aspect of the Tom and Jerry history, however, is buried with Jasper and Jinx. No one at MGM was very keen about Hanna and Barbera’s plan to make an animated cat-and-mouse cartoon. Barbera recalled the reaction of the studio honchos: “How much variety can you milk out of such a hackneyed, shopworn idea? How many cat-and-mouse cartoons can you make?” Hanna and Barbera, in short, were given absolutely zero support in their project. They had to develop it all by themselves, and, said Barbera, to sell their idea, “we wanted to present something more than a storyboard but less, of course, than a finished cartoon.” What they produced that was more than a storyboard but less than a finished cartoon was what they eventually called “limited animation,” a stripped-down animation technique using less detail and movement, stock footage for backgrounds, and fewer drawings. A seven-minute cartoon fully-animated required 14,000 separate drawings; seven minutes of Hanna-Barbera limited animation needed fewer than 1,800—“but,” explained Barbera, “these were shot to length so that the film produced by means of limited animation ran as long as the final product, resulting in a [Jasper and Jinx] preview.” This benchmark experimental method of 1940 would become the bedrock of the Hanna-Barbera operation sixteen years later. During that sixteen-year interval, Hanna and Barbera used “limited animation” to create full-length trial runs of every cartoon they did.

            MGM put Barbera and Hanna in charge of its animation division in 1955, but the studio shut down the unit two years later. So the two turned to their side company, H-B Enterprises, which they had established to produce animated television commercials, and began working full time on television programs. For these, they resurrected the streamlined animation technique they’d developed with Jasper and Jinx and had perfected during the ensuing years. Limited animation was often criticized by animation purists, but the method enabled the Hanna-Barbera shop to animate thirty-minute stories on a weekly broadcast schedule. And they achieved almost instant success.

            “We went into limited animation because there was no money,” Barbera said in his autobiography. “And because of what we were doing, the entire [animation] business came back to work again.”

            The first Hanna-Barbera series, "The Ruff & Ready Show," had its debut on NBC in December 1957. That was followed in 1958 by "The Huckleberry Hound Show," about a powder-blue pooch who spoke and sung (badly) with a Southern drawl. That series later won an Emmy and yielded a spinoff show for one of its supporting characters, an Ed Norton-like bruin who showed up briefly in 1958 episode—Yogi Bear, self-proclaimed as “smarter than the average bear.” Yogi and his shy sidekick, Boo-Boo, debuted in their own show on January 30, 1961, accompanied by other Hanna-Barbera favorites, Snagglepuss, the calamity-stricken lion, forever announcing his departure with “Exit, stage left....,” and Yakky Doodle, a dwarf duckling.

            In 1960, Barbera and Hanna revisited the template of Jackie Gleason’s famed “The Honeymooners” to create their most popular series, "The Flintstones," a half-hour animated sitcom about two families living in the Stone Age suburb of Bedrock. Launched on ABC on September 30, it was the first prime-time animated program. Prefiguring “The Simpsons,” it consistently ranked within the top 20 shows. Despite its fanciful setting, "The Flintstones" hewed to sitcom conventions, using sight gags and one-liners that centered on the domestic squabbles of the prehistoric couple Fred and Wilma Flintstone and their next-door neighbors, the Rubbles. Propelled by a catchy, brassy theme song, "Meet the Flintstones" (introduced in the show's third season), and Fred's thunderous yell, "Yabba-dabba-doo!" "The Flintstones" ran for 166 episodes over six seasons.

            In 1966, at the peak of the studio's popularity, with Hanna-Barbera cartoons attracting global audiences of more than 300 million, the two men sold their company to Taft Productions for a then staggering $25 million. But they continued their own involvement in the operation.

            In the succeeding years, Hanna-Barbera produced numerous prime-time, syndicated and Saturday-morning cartoon shows, from 1962's futuristic family comedy "The Jetsons" to the 1973 adventure series "Super Friends" to such 1980s-era toy tie-ins as "Shirt Tales" and "Challenge of the GoBots." The studio also produced eclectic projects like the 1978 television special starring the heavy-metal rock band KISS and a 1973 film adaptation of E. B. White's novel "Charlotte's Web." The partners’ final enduring success was a take-off on a popular tv comedy series about a couple of blundering cops, “Car 54, Where Are You?” Hanna-Barbera’s version starred a cowardly great Dane, Scooby-Doo, and his four teenage buddies—Freddy, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy—who tour the country in search of the supernatural under the series title, “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?” Starting September 13, 1969, “The Scooby-Doo Show,” under one name or another, has been regularly re-broadcast in syndication every few years ever since, becoming tv’s longest-running animated series.

            Barbera liked the freedom that syndication gave filmmakers because there was no meddling by network executives. “Today,” he once said, “Charlie Chaplin couldn’t get his material by a network.”

            In 1990, Hanna-Barbera was acquired by Turner Broadcasting (now part of Time Warner), where it continued to produce animated programming for syndication and for the Cartoon Network cable channel, including "Dexter's Laboratory" and "The Powerpuff Girls." In 1998, Hanna-Barbera's studios were moved to a Warner Brothers office building, and by 2001, the company had been absorbed by Warner Brothers' animation division.

            Barbera remained active in animation. He worked as an executive producer on such recent television series as "What's New, Scooby-Doo?" He was also a writer, director and storyboard artist on the 2005 cartoon "The Karate Guard," his first theatrical Tom and Jerry short in more than 45 years. Though he was often asked to explain the enduring popularity of his cartoons, Barbera was reluctant to subject his life's work to close analysis. "To me it makes little sense to talk about the cartoons we did," he wrote in a 1994 autobiography, My Life in 'Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century. "The way to appreciate them is to see them."

            In the length of his career alone, Barbera ranks as a legendary figure in the profession. And the characters and comic series he created, not to mention the innovations of “limited animation,” make the legend a colossus. Barbera’s influence can be found today in prime-time animated series like "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" and in cartoons that satirize the Hanna-Barbera style, including "The Venture Brothers" and "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law." His own work continues to be seen on the cable channel Boomerang, which broadcasts vintage Hanna-Barbera programming 24 hours a day. About computer-generated animation, the new rage in animation, Barbera wasn’t convinced. I saw a snippet of an interview on tv the day after he died in which he said he felt computer animation lacked heart. An animator working on his drawings by hand puts something into the art and the characterization that Barbera thought was missing in animation done by machine.

BOOK MARQUEE

The Bull of the Woods keeps on comin’ back. Algrove Publishing in Canada, the “classic comics” imprint of Lee Valley, otherwise a hardware supplier, continues bringing out volumes of J.R. Williams’ vintage single-panel cartoon, Out Our Way. In his cartoon, Williams celebrated the life he had lived as a cowboy, drifter, soldier (U.S. Cavalry), and machinist. Williams was born in Nova Scotia in 1888, but he grew up in Detroit, where his family moved before he entered school. He quit school at 15 and roamed the country, mostly Oklahoma, which is where he cowboy’d and cavalry’d. After he married, he took a full-time job with a crane company in Ohio. He didn’t start cartooning professionally until he was 34 years old; he kept doing Out Our Way until he died in 1957 at the age of 69. By then, his cartoon was among the most widely circulated in the world. Syndicated by NEA, which distributes its comics by packages to subscribing clients, Out Our Way was being sent to about 1,000 papers at its peak. Maybe not all of them actually published the cartoon, but Williams enjoyed the income from 1,000 subscribers whether they printed it or not. Algrove has published tidy panel-cartoon-sized (6x7) paperback collections of Williams’ cowboy and cavalry cartoons, and it’s now up to six volumes of “Bull of the Woods” books.

            Williams described this character this way: “The term ‘Bull of the Woods’ was borrowed from the lumber jacks. I used it to describe a gruff, poker-faced man prowling among hundreds of machine belts in a shop in Alliance, Ohio. Silhouetted against the hazy shop windows, they had a certain resemblance to a dense woods. The ‘Bull’ was hard-boiled, perhaps, but he was kind. He must have been, or I certainly should have been fired. He said to me one day with fine sarcasm, ‘Pardon my rudeness. You’ve been turning out two cartoons and one shaft a day on this machine. Couldn’t you make it two shafts and one cartoon a day? This is a machine shop.’ And now, when I have no shafts to do, I have a terrible time turning out one cartoon a day.” The Williams books (6 volumes of Bull of the Woods and 4 Cowboy Classics, $8.25 each) are available from Lee Valley, www.leevalley.com, or 1-800-871-8158.

            Meanwhile, at W.W. Norton, the first three volumes of the Will Eisner Paperback Library landed in bookstores on December 5: A Contract with God, Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue (uniform editions, 7x10-inch size; $16.95), all handsomely printed in exquisite reproduction of Eisner’s masterful black-on-white. Each book has a few new illustrations, and Contract comes with a fresh introduction as well as the introductions of the previous editions, beginning with a slightly revised version of Eisner’s opening remarks for the first, Baronet, edition in 1978. Faithful in both spirit and fact to the original, the latter paragraphs do not use the term “graphic novel,” a genre and a term that Eisner would make popular but which he did not, as is often erroneously claimed, invent.

            In the same mail that brought the Norton volumes came the latest DC Archival Spirit, Volume 20, with an introduction by John Benson. This period, January 1 - June 25, 1950, includes several Spirit stories that employed art initially intended for other uses, chief among them, the “John Law” material. A couple of the Spirit splash pages herein were supposed to be John Law splash pages; Eisner, as always pressed to meet his weekly deadline, simply re-tooled the artwork for the Spirit. Easy to do because although John Law has an eye patch, he otherwise looks much like the Spirit. I’ve always imagined that Eisner just whited-out the eye patch and inked in the Spirit’s mask, but that, it turns out, isn’t what he did. The splash page for the March 12 story here is one of the John Law make-overs, and the original Spirit story art appears on the wall in the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit. When I saw it, I was surprised to see that there was no whiting-out on the picture. John Law had been copied, but the mask wasn’t added by tinkering with the John Law art itself; the Spirit page had been completely re-drawn from the John Law composition. This volume also contains the story in which the IRS comes after the Spirit because he hasn’t paid any income tax. “I’ve never had to,” the Spirit says, blithely, “—you see, gentlemen, I’m officially dead.” Close but no cigar: the IRS guys say they’ve never seen a death notice for “the Spirit.” The Spirit’s only way out is to reveal that he’s Denny Colt. But he’s reluctant to do it. Will he? Or not? I’ll let you find out by reading the story.

            A new biography of Walt Disney earned a mostly favorable review from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker (December 11). (Now, why couldn’t this review have run in the so-called “cartoon issue” a few weeks ago to give that issue some text on cartooning, some informational substance that it otherwise lacked?) The book, by Neil Gabler, is Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, $35), which I haven’t yet read, but it promises much, if Lane is any guide. What Lane says about the book suggests Gabler’s view of Disney accords with my own (see Hindsight here). Moreover, I’ve liked Gabler’s other books, so the chances are good that I’ll like this one. Finally, Lane disdains as a “psychological horror story” Marc Eliot’s 1993 propaganda-laced enterprise, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, which I also scorned, so all the signs are propitious for me to enjoy and appreciate Gabler’s Disney biography: I like the author, and I like what the reviewer says.

            Among Lane’s remarks are these about Disney’s notoriously saccharine anthropomorphizing: “He is not humanizing animals,” Lane says; “he is decivilizing ordinary life, which is a far more subversive path to take, and sometimes he weeds out the human factor altogether,” mining the “brute behavior that lurks behind it” for laughs. Lane correctly sees the infamous strike at Disney Studio in 1941 as a watershed event: “Disney would never again enjoy the same bond of trust with his artists, or the same liberty to push animation to its limits.” Quality suffered as a result, Lane continues: “To compare ‘Pinocchio’ [a pre-strike production] with ‘Peter Pan,’ released in 1953, is to pass from the embrace of magic to the selling of a cute idea, from the densely detailed to the dismayingly flat. The bestowing of life upon a wooden child is a perfect symbol of the animator’s art, whereas the flying lesson that Peter gives to the Darlings has the air of a cocky stunt.” Lane’s slightly jaundiced view of Disney is, I think, a realistic and accurate one. But we, Disney’s audience, are as culpable as the legendary entrepreneur for the sins he is alleged to have committed in the name of entertainment—if, that is, blame is to be assigned, and I’m not sure it must be. Says Lane: “Disney once claimed that his films were not made for children. If so, that is both the most touching and the most frightening thing about him. He saw the child in us all, and treated us accordingly. He took charge of Neverland, and his chosen audience, orphaned by the rigors of adult life, was a billion Peter Pans.” But Disney is scarcely the ogre that he appears in so many portraits. Before the 1941 strike, Disney’s shop was “like a medieval guild,” Lane says. Employees, “according to Gabler, [were accorded] ‘three sick days in any given week with full pay before anyone investigated.’ Disney, Gabler continues, ‘was constantly on the lookout for any employee who he felt might be underpaid, and he would then instruct the payroll office to make a salary adjustment.’” Disney promised bonuses to everyone who worked on “Snow White,” and when the film appeared, he gave everyone “the equivalent of three months’ salary” to the tune of $750,000. Not a bad guy in those happy halcyon years.

            A dubious highlight of Lane’s review is his quoting from “Cartoon” in Robert Coover’s 1987 book, A Night at the Movies, a collection of short stories. In “Cartoon,” Coover constructs a scenario in which cartoon people interact with seemingly real people, infecting them with their animated characteristics. The quotation, Lane says, illustrates the hilarious range of flexibility animated cartoons offer. A cartoon woman comes upon the scene of a traffic accident involving a cartoon man and his car and a cartoon policeman, all paired with real personnel and vehicles. “The woman, winking at the real man, bares her breasts for the policeman. These breasts are nearly as large as the woman herself, and they have nipples on them that turn sequentially into pursed lips, dripping spigots, traffic lights, beckoning fingers, then lit-up pinball bumpers. The real policeman is not completely real, after all. He has cartoon eyes that stretch out of their sockets like paired erections, locking on the cartoon woman’s breasts with their fanciful nipples. She takes her breasts off and gives them to the real policeman, and he creeps furtively away, clutching the gift closely like a fearful secret, his eyes retracting deep into his skull as though to empty it of its own realness, what’s left of it.” An absolutely stupendous flight of fancy.

            Among Coover’s earlier works is the marvelous allegory about God and his savior son, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., in which Coover imagines a board game so convincingly that readers kept sending off for it.

CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST

One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.

A USA Today article about the computer-generated version of E.B. White’s famous book about a pig and a spider carried this beautifully bent headline: “Charlotte’s Web Gives a Rat Sass with a ‘So Real’ Presence.” Wish I’d said that.

            And in The New Yorker for December 18 is an article about the Bible publishing business by Daniel Radosh which includes this piece of amazement: “Research has found that ninety-one per cent of American households own at least one Bible—the average household owns four—which means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.” Well, religion always had the best marketing techniques.

FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE

The debut issue of Darwyn Cooke’s Spirit for DC Comics has, at last, appeared. For the last year, I’ve been laboring under the delusion that it was supposed to have been launched in January 2006. Clearly, I misread something somewhere. Visually, Cooke’s work is much different than Will Eisner’s: Cooke draws with a clean, crisp bold line and very little shading; Eisner deployed a less chiseled line and a lot of trap-shadow embellishment. I’m glad, however, that Cooke has retained his own style: I’ve always enjoyed his technique, and I’m not convinced that the best way to reincarnate the Spirit is to slavishly imitate the mannerisms of the character’s originator. So Cooke’s approach appeals to my own inclinations. Cooke manages to evoke the noir quality of Eisner’s Spirit with a liberal application of solid blacks, shadowing but not drenching the pictures. Nicely done. He also gets the spirit of the Spirit right, I’d say, in this first solo outing as the writer of the character’s escapades. It’s a kidnap caper in which a tv news personality, Ginger Coffee (ahhh, another Eisnerian touch in the name), is abducted by an unsavory appearing mound of diseased flesh named Amos Weinstock. The Spirit rescues the newswoman, but, as in many of Eisner’s Spirit tales, the focus is on another character—in this case, the woman—not on the Spirit; he functions as a savior, albeit a rather clumsy one (as usual), while she babbles on throughout in annoying tv newspeak. The vintage Eisner storytelling is again evoked with an overlay of comedy, much of it pointed in a satiric manner. Ebony White, Eisner’s much criticized African-American character, shows up in his traditional role as a cab driver, but this Ebony is a sharp young man, street-wise and obviously an intellectual—and not a racial caricature. The Spirit emerges as the hero in the piece, but the ending reveals he’s also something of a chump, as much a victim of his energetic lifestyle as its author. Again, a nearly perfect evocation of Eisner.

            Cooke’s storytelling style is reminiscent of Eisner’s but his own withal. He does a good number of nearly wordless sequences, but his characteristic maneuver is somewhat cinematic. In an action sequence, Cooke gives us just the shortest glimpses of the incident in progress: his camera shifts focus quickly from panel to panel, close-ups and long shots alternate, catching facets of the action rather than its continuing motion. This technique suggests with its almost frenetic fragmentation the rapidity of the action, and it also keeps us partially in the dark, where most noir events take place: while we know what’s going on, we don’t know all of what’s happening—not every blow, every movement. Eisner’s stories had the same kind of visual variety—long shots, close-ups—but not the same pacing. Cooke effectively evokes the master while, with the same strokes, takes off in a direction all his own. And with each glimpse of the action, we also get a quip from the Spirit or Ginger Coffee. All in all, Cooke’s inaugural effort is more about character and comedy than about crime, exactly in the spirit of Eisner.

            The lettering in the first issue of Outer Orbit is just enough off-beat to make reading a trifle difficult, not a desirable circumstance in an introductory issue. But the drawing is attractive in a crisp snappy way, and the story, though convoluted, is laced with witty dialogue, oddly attractive turns, and enough comedy to keep the pages turning. Written by Zach Howard, Sean Murphy and Reed Buccholz, with art by Howard and, on inks, Murphy, the story, such as it is, introduces us to Quinn, a blue-skinned alien humanoid of unspecified origin, and the heavily armored Krunk, a galactic cop (or former cop), and Neoki, a refreshingly uninhibited girl in short shorts on a space bike. I’m not sure what the object of all the machinations might be. We start out with Quinn and Krunk trying to get an ordinary coffee from an exotic Starbucks-like coffee shop and Krunk getting so annoyed at the endless number of choices he must make that he blows the place to smoking smithereens. Then they both go to join a poker game, where Quinn tells a story about now he met and copulated memorably with Neoki. As he narrates this tale, we shift to outer space where Neoki is zooming across the galaxy on her bike. Somehow, she encounters Quinn and, without much effort, seduces him into having earth-moving sex with her. Next, we realize, gradually or suddenly (it’s not clear), that someone has swiped the Idol from Neoki (or from Quinn), and it’s the only thing Quinn has to remember her by, so he wants to get it back. Whatever it is. The pleasures of reading this epic come from its breakneck pace, its sense of humor (both verbal and visual), and the crisp and masterful linear orchestrations of the art.

LIGHTING THE LANTERN ONE MORE TIME

Remembering Marty Nodell in Artists’ Alley

Martin Nodell, the creator of the Golden Age comic book hero Green Lantern, sits at his table in artists' alley during the 1994 San Diego Comic Convention, laying color into the background of a drawing of Green Lantern.  Rays of color radiate from behind the character, and Marty's hand moves swiftly, back and forth, a new burst of color at every stroke.  He pauses for the tiniest of microseconds at the beginning of each stroke—locating the point of the marker precisely at the edge of the figure drawing—then he draws the point away in a single sweeping motion.

            "They wanted lots of color," he says to a watching fan, explaining the garish colors of the old Green Lantern's costume.  When he created the first Green Lantern before World War II, the costume had been designed to capitalize on the colorful nature of the medium.  Green tights, red blouse, purple cape, crimson boots, yellow accents.  Lots of color.

THE TABLES OF THE TYPICAL ARTISTS' ALLEY are six feet long and are lined up together to form the sides of rectangles, four-five tables to a side.  The artists sit behind the tables, and in the hollow place in the middle of the rectangle, they stow their gear, which they cart in daily like so many pack mules.

            Some artists erect elaborate display units for showing off their wares—towering structures of pipe and foamcore.  Others bring sprawling portfolios of their work and open them up on the tables.  Still others just heap their original artwork on the table in front of them.  Some sell the comic books they've done, too, placing a short stack of them next to the artwork.

            As the con wears on, the hollow "storage area" in the middle of the rectangle of tables begins to fill up with debris.  On a second day, artists bring more stuff—tackle boxes of markers, brushes, inks.  Two or three portfolios.  Easels.  And the telltale evidence of their incarceration begins to appear:  unable (or unwilling) to leave their stations for long, artists bring their lunch and bags of snacks into the confines—crates of chickens and goats and other barnyard edibles on the hoof—and the litter slowly turns the hollow into a landfill.

            When I go to a comic convention, I usually hang my hat in artists' alley.  For two reasons.  First, by selling a few "art prints" and original sketches, I earn the money that I subsequently fritter away at the dealers' tables, buying comic books (Golden Age, mostly) and a few other remnants of my Lost and Vacuous Youth.  Secondly—in what will doubtless seem a contradiction of the first reason—by staying at my artists' alley station for most of the con, I reduce the number of hours and hence the amount of money I spend amongst the exhibits. 

            And an incidental benefit also prevails:  in artists' alley, I have a fellow cartoonist on either side of me, a circumstance that fosters conversation and shop talk.  In a profession as traditionally solitary as cartooning, discourse with other members of the inky-fingered fraternity is an activity to be savored.

            Not that the conversation is particularly brilliant or insightful.  Sometimes it is; mostly, not.  But it is fraternal, and that accounts for its great value.

            During setup hours before the con begins, we meet and introduce ourselves.  We find out who we are and what we've done.  We admire, briefly, each other's work.  Then we set up our displays.  After we establish boundaries, we make treaties: 

            "When you want to go to lunch, I'll watch your stuff for you." 

            "Hey, thanks—I'll do the same for you."

            I sat next to Marty Nodell (and his wife Carrie and son Spencer) in San Diego in 1994, and every time I went to the restroom, Marty magnanimously gave me permission, usually without my asking for it.

I’D MET MARTY AND CARRIE a few years before in the lobby of the San Diego hotel we were all staying in during the Con. They were waiting for the shuttle bus and so was I. Marty, without preamble, asked if I was going to the Con, and when I said I was, he and Carrie started telling me about their adventures attending comicons for the past several years. Somewhere in the ensuing conviviality, Marty said he’d created Green Lantern. But he didn’t dwell on this historic fact: he slipped it in amid a generous sprinkling of funny, quaintly satirical comments that, I would learn, always infected his conversation. Marty was a funny man, a genuine wit. He almost never spoke at any length longer than a sentence without saying something funny.

            He was born November 15, 1915 in Philadelphia and attended the Art Institute of Chicago when it was among the most influential in commercial art and illustration. When he moved to New York, he studied at another bell wether school, Pratt Institute. Late in the 1930s, he began freelancing for some of the jury-rigged comic book publishers that were cropping up in the wake of Superman’s debut in the summer of 1938. But these companies didn’t pay well or, some of them, at all. Marty told Mark Evanier that “he got tired of being stiffed by the smaller firms and decided to make an all-out effort to break into the majors.” That’s when he called at the offices of National Periodical Publications, now DC Comics, and invented the Green Lantern. He worked on DC titles until 1947 when he left to work for Timely, now Marvel, drawing Captain America, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. By 1950, the popularity of superheroes was waning, and Marty decided to go where the pastures looked greener. He went into advertising, which, Evanier said, “he found more satisfying, at least in terms of pay and stability.” By 1965, Marty was an art director at the Leo Burnett Agency in Chicago; when he retired, he and Carrie were in Florida, where he was doing advertising for the Palm Beach Post.

            Marty might have languished comfortably in the southern sun for the rest of his life except that he heard about comic book fans and their conventions. Gary Colabuono, a collector and dealer, recalls a day in 1978 when he received a phone call from a person he’d never met. “I was working at a suburban Chicago newspaper,” Colabuono said in a recent issue of Diamond’s online Scoop, “and the employee newsletter ran a short feature on me. It was one of those strange ‘ad salesman has weird hobby’ stories. A few days later, my phone rang and the voice said, ‘Hello, this is Marty Nodell. You may not be aware of this, and you may not even care, but back in 1940, I created the Green Lantern.’” Marty had been doing some illustrations for the paper Colabuono worked for and had seen the story about the collector. Said Colabuono: “The only thing I could say to him was, ‘Where have you been?’” Colabuono, like most comic book fans of the time, was eager to connect with whoever remained of the band of craftsmen who had created the Golden Age of Comics. “From that moment on, we became close friends,” Colabuono said, “and for the next 30 years or so, I watched in amazement as Marty—with the invaluable assistance of Carrie and their son Spence—created a third career for himself.”

            Marty Nodell became a comic convention celebrity. He made his first come-back appearance at the Moondog dealer booth at the Chicago comicon in 1980. “He and Carrie were very apprehensive about it,” Colabuono wrote, “but I’ll never forget the line that stretched out the door of the dealer’s room at the old Ramada O’Hare. Carrie was so funny. I remember her saying, ‘Gary—you were right: they do love him!’ And Marty loved fans,” Colabuono continued. “He never got tired of talking about his years in the comics business. He never got tired of doing sketches and signing autographs. He was easily the most accessible and approachable comic creator I’ve ever known.”

            The diminutive Marty and ample Carrie became fixtures on the convention circuit. At nearly every one during the year, as Tom Spurgeon said at his comicsreporter.com, Marty could be found “drawing for fans and charming attendees with kind overtures, smart conversation, and the affectionate interaction clearly on display between the artist and his beloved wife and constant companion, Carrie. The larger comics community was in a way very protective of the Nodells, coming to their aid if they weren’t treated well at a show.”

NEXT TO ME IN ARTISTS ALLEY, MARTY is hard at work.  Crouched gnome-like over his drawing board, he works steadily all day long, sketching the venerable Green Lantern in all manner of poses, coloring the pictures, signing autographs, taking orders for drawings, and talking with fans as he works.  He seems tireless.

            "You created Green Lantern?" a young man says, standing open-mouthed before Marty at the moment of realization.

            Yes, Marty says; he was inspired, he goes on, by seeing a switchman carrying a lantern through a subway tunnel.  Green for go; red for stop.

            Surely, there was more to it than that, I think.  And when the young fan wanders off, I ask Marty about it.  Was it was true, as so many accounts had recently maintained, that Aladdin's lamp figured in the story of the Green Lantern's creation?  (Disney's Aladdin had just been released and probably stirred up the creative juices of some reporters.)  No, Marty says; Aladdin's lamp had nothing to do with it.  And then he tells me the story. 

WHAT HAPPENED was that he had gone up to the offices of Max Gaines in early 1940 to inquire about getting some comic book work.  Gaines was then publishing a line of comic books under the imprint of All-American Comics.  Nodell had been in New York for some time at this point, and he'd drawn comic book stories for several publishers.  At Gaines' place, he talked to Shelly Mayer.  Mayer told him that they were interested in super heroes, and although they had nothing for him to do at the moment, if he could come up with a super hero concept, they'd be interested.

            Nodell left, musing that if Mayer had told him this, he must've told others—his friends, other cartoonists.  So he, Nodell, better come up with something fast.  He took the subway home to Brooklyn, where he lived with his brother and his mother.  (They'd come to New York from Chicago after his father died; Marty, now the family breadwinner, had theatrical ambitions and talent as well as graphic art ability, and he knew his chances for employment at these endeavors would be better in New York.)  In the subway station, he saw a switchman checking the track, carrying a lantern.  The lantern shone red—danger, stop.  After he'd checked the track and ascertained that it was in good order, he changed his lantern to green by adjusting a glass plate.  The "green lantern," then was the "good lantern":  it indicated safety.

            Marty pondered the green lantern idea.  At first, it seemed to him the name of a story.  As he rode homeward, he turned over in his mind various far-eastern myths, conjuring up the legend of the green lantern.  The lamp, fashioned by an old Indian in Singapore, was endowed with mysterious powers.  It had enjoyed several incarnations through the ages as one kind of lantern or another.  Marty thought of the story of Diogenes and his search for an honest man, bearing with him a lantern as he looked.  Marty's new hero would carry the green lantern.  No.  That was too cumbersome.  How could this costumed hero do any fighting while carrying a bulky lantern?

            As he continued to turn the matter over in his mind, still recalling the myths and legends he'd read about as a youth, Marty happened to think about the knightly heroes of Wagnerian opera.  And then it came to him.  The Ring Cycle.  Of course:  his hero could have a ring made from a portion of the green lantern, and that way, he could, in effect, carry the green lantern with him wherever he went.  And he could activate the powers of the lantern through an act of will.  The green lantern itself would function as a battery:  the hero would charge up his ring by exposing it to the green lantern.

            With that, the conventions of the comic book superhero mythos kicked in—secret identity and colorful costume.  Willard Mason would be the name of his hero.  He'd be a professor at Pueblo University. And he'd wear a colorful costume with cape and boots—no, leggings like the Greek heroes—whenever he charged up his ring and went in pursuit of evil-doers.  He'd be known as the Green Lantern.

            Nodell drew up a couple pages, pencils and a few inked images, to demonstrate his idea and took them to Mayer and left them together with some concept sheets and story ideas. A few days later, he phoned to see what had happened.  Mayer said he was considering the idea.  Within the week, he phoned Nodell and told him that Gaines wanted to see him.  Nodell had heard that Gaines was a kind man—“gruff, but kind," he told me.  He thought:  he's probably asking to see me in person in order to let me down easy.  When he got into Gaines' office, Gaines was sitting at his desk, thumbing the pages of the samples Nodell had brought in.

            After a long silence, he said:  "This is good."

            More silence as he continued turning the pages between his finger and thumb, flipping them sort of.  Then he spoke again:

            "Get to work."

            The go ahead.  The green light.

            Nodell was off and running.

WHEN THE GREEN LANTERN debuted in All-American Comics No. 16, cover-dated July 1940, his alter ego was Alan Scott, not Willard Mason. Scott was a civil engineer, not a college professor. And the lantern was made in ancient China from a fallen meteor. The changes had been introduced by Bill Finger, a now-celebrated but then mostly anonymous writer of comic book tales in the early dawn of the medium. Finger had created Batman from the fragments of Bob Kane’s imagination, and he did somewhat the same with the Green Lantern. Marty was an idea man and an artist, not a writer; and Shelly Mayer realized it and enlisted Finger’s help on Marty’s concept. The extent of Finger’s assistance in creating the character has been argued over for years—mostly, I suspect, because Finger’s role in the Batman saga had been so long suppressed. The assumption was that he had a larger role in the Green Lantern’s creation, too. But the allocation of credit for the creation of the Green Lantern was finally certified last spring when the original art for the first page of the first story was discovered in Marty’s home in West Palm Beach when Spence was packing up his father’s belongings for the move to Wisconsin (see Op. 190 for a bit more detail). “This shows that my dad was the sole creator of the Green Lantern,” said Spence, adding that the differences between the preliminary art and the published story also reveals the “significant contribution” made by Finger. Thus, in one of Fate’s more gratifying turns, Marty’s rightful role in the creative process had been established before he died.

            Marty’s health had been wavering for several years, particularly since Carrie’s death in 2004. We all noticed, as Colabuono said, that Marty “lost that special spark and twinkle in his eye when she passed away.” It was as if in his performances of life, Marty had been doing it mostly for an audience of one, his wife, who was always at his side. And when his audience was gone, his performance suffered. Spence didn’t want to leave his father alone in Florida as his health declined, so he moved him to Milwaukee where, for a time, he lived with his son and family. As his health continued to decline, however, Spence moved him to Tudor Oaks Health Care Center in Muskego. He died there on the morning of December 9; he was 91.

            “He would sit in our front lounge and draw,” said Hope French, spokesman for the Center. “He first started drawing the Green Lantern.” But he did other drawings, too, Spence told Amy Rabideau Silvers at journalsentinel.com.

            “He was still doing that until a week or two ago,” Spence said. He laughed. “He had the habits of an artist. He would get up late and go to sleep late. They got used to him at the Center. After a while, they knew Marty Nodell would get up at 11 o’clock in the morning and not at 7 [like everyone was supposed to].”

            Spence continued: “One of his proudest accomplishments was working on presentations for the Matador surface-to-surface missile in the 1950s. He had a little tie clip that they gave to everyone who worked on the project.” Marty was a member of the design team that did early work on the Pillsbury Doughboy. “Some people credit him with being the creator of the Pillsbury Doughboy,” Spence said, “but he wasn’t. He did some of the first drawings and artwork for it, but the Doughboy wasn’t his idea.”

MARTY NODELL IS THE LAST TO LEAVE artists' alley.  I'm packing up, stowing my stuff in a carrying satchel, and Marty is still sitting there, working on a drawing.  A fan is watching him, patiently, and finally asks the question:

            "So what do you think of what they're doing with the Green Lantern now?  Do you know what they're doing?"

            The character had been reincarnated in 1959 as a completely different entity, albeit with the same Golden Age name.

            Marty continues to draw, saying, "Well, I heard a little.  But you have to remember, the character belongs to them.  I don't have any say in what happens to him.  That's just the way it is."

            Carrie, always an active presence in Marty's Green Lantern enterprises, has the last word:  "And did you know," she tells the fan, "that they sold Green Lantern No. 1 for $32,000 at the last auction in New York?"

COMIC STRIP WATCH

Over at Gasoline Alley, Walt Wallet has gone missing again. Just wandered off. And no sooner had he disappeared than a government agent shows up to verify his existence. Walt’s 106 years old, and the government wants to know, for sure, that he’s still alive—that it’s actually Walter Weatherby Wallet who is cashing those monthly Social Security checks, not some bogus Walt posing as the real thing. Walt’s housekeeper is flustered because she can’t find the old man: she doesn’t know what we know—namely, that Walt went to the Retirement Home for Old Comics Characters to visit Mutt and Jeff. While watching Walt, we’ve seen cartoonist Jim Scancarelli’s stunning recreations of Jiggs, Moon Mullins, the Yellow Kid, Happy Hooligan, Barney Google, the Skipper of the Toonerville Trolley, Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, Old Doc Yak, Pogo, Paw Perkins, Andy Gump, Harold Teen, Spark Plug, Uncle Phil, Dixie Dugan, Knobby Walsh, Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover, Freckles, and Mutt and Jeff—to name a few (just showing off my Antique Comic Characters Identification Skills), the most recent being the Rinky-dink kids from Winnie Winkle. Mutt and Jeff, believing Walt is a fugitive, have successfully smuggled him out of the Home. Almost. When last seen, he was careening down the staircase on a gurney, headed right for the government investigator. Great fun, kimo sabe—and Scancarelli’s having as much fun as we are.

            Johnny Hart’s in trouble again. But this time, it’s not an evangelical message in his B.C. strip that’s raised editorial ire. This time, ombudsman Bob Richter tells us at mysanantonio.com, it was his release for December 7, known in various climes as “Pearl Harbor Day.” And apparently, Hart was in trouble only in San Antonio. In the strip, which is reproduced down the scroll a bit, one of Hart’s cavemen is consulting Wiley’s dictionary for the meaning of the word “infamy,” which, we learn, is “a word seldom used after Toyota sales topped 2 million.” Toyota, it seems, has a big operation in San Antonio, so rather than offend the company, the San Antonio Express-News pulled the B.C. strip so that none of its readers, whether they work for Toyota or not, would be reminded (a) that Franklin D. Roosevelt, in calling for war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, said December 7 is a date that would “live in infamy” and (b) that Toyota is a Japanese auto manufacturer. Hart’s message, a sharply satiric one, ridicules our short memory as a culture: economic well-being (particularly, it might be assumed in this case, that of a local employer of hundreds) will blast from recollection even the date of an act so sordid that it was once thought no one would ever forget the date it happened. Apparently, Hart thinks, we’ve forgotten. Given the evidence he’s cited, maybe he’s right. He’s right, at least, about how things change over time. How long should we go on carrying that grudge about the Japanese, few of whom today were alive then (and none of the present population responsible then)? The editors at the Express-News didn’t think we should forget about it: they published a touching piece about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on the front page of the same issue they pulled B.C. from. I guess the editors wanted their readers to remember Pearl Harbor and the date of infamy but didn’t want them to connect the event commemorated on that day to a local employer and advertiser. Scrambling all over themselves to explain this curious logic, the editors remembered other occasions when they’d scrubbed a comic strip for inappropriateness. Said Terry Bertling, the assistant managing editor: “We pulled a comic stip about a school bus being a mobile classroom in which we learn the facts of life. On its own, it was fine. But immediately after a fatal school bus wreck in Alabama killed several teens, it could have looked like a comment somehow related to the news.”  Right after 9/11, the paper pulled comic strips with twin tower skyscrapers in them or diving airplanes—“things that would have looked like they were making light of or ignoring the raw state of the nation at the time.” Well, sure. But that reasoning, perfectly sound in the situations described, scarcely applies to the B.C. strip, which was pulled, clearly, for fear of offending a big advertiser and local employer and maybe the people who work for Toyota. Nothing soaringly noble about that, I’m afraid. We all need skins just a little less thin.

            On the other hand, the F-Minus strip shown above was more in the category the Express-News editors were bandying about. As we learn from Todd Quinones at cbs3.com, One paper should have pulled the strip from the line-up. At the Philadelphia Inquirer it ran just a day after a 16-year-old youth killed himself at a local high school. In a terrifying coincidence, the boy’s name was Shane Halligan. The cartoonist, Tony Carillo, who lives in far-off Arizona, was naturally shocked at the macabre confluence of fact and fiction. He’d drawn the strip a month before it ran, he explained in a letter to the paper, and could not have anticipated the tragedy. “Neither I nor my distributor could possibly have had any knowledge of these local events,” Carillo wrote. “It is a regrettable occurrence, and I hope that those hurt by this incident can take solace in the knowledge that this coincidence is simply that—a coincidence and nothing more.” The Inquirer’s editors didn’t know about the suicide in advance either, but one of them, whoever is responsible for the comics page, should have caught the strip when it was scheduled to run on the day after the suicide, assuming the comics page is edited at all, as most editors claim it is (looking for bad grammar, insensitive remarks, crude language, etc.).

            John McPherson’s Close to Home panel for December 18 achieved the dubious distinction of angering one segment of the nursing population while pleasing another. The panel in question depicts an emergency medical technician telling a patient who’s being loaded into an ambulance: “You’ve got two options, bud. Mercy Hospital is 20 minutes closer, but the nurses at Saratoga Hospital are really hot.” To properly grasp the range of implications in this witticism, it is necessary to know that McPherson lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. According to Editor & Publisher, the executive director of the Center for Nursing Advocacy in Baltimore was upset because the cartoon fostered a harmful stereotype of nurses as sex objects. “This is not good for nursing,” she said, adding that nurses are constantly mocked, degraded and disrespected on tv shows and in ads. It’s not good for recruiting. One of the nurses at the Saratoga Hospital, on the other hand, agreed that she and her colleagues “are very hot. That is how we get our patients to come to Saratoga. We also provide great care.” McPherson is looking for more of the same, apparently. He said the idea for the cartoon originated in his own experiences at Saratoga Hospital. “I’m a single guy,” he said, “and I figured if I put this plug in, I might actually be contacted by some of the hot nurses at Saratoga Hospital.” The results aren’t yet in.

            Tony Cochran leapt unabashed into the anyule church-and-state fray in his strip Agnes, but Cochran isn’t coming out in favor of state-sponsored Christmas decorations. No, the diminutive blank-eyeballed Agnes is going one better. “I am going to come up with a winter holiday that all humans, even the Feds, can celebrate with no repercussions,” she said on December 18. “Everyone will have to shop and buy cards and have parties—everyone!” “Will it still be on December 25?” her pal asks. “Nah,” says Agnes, “—too many stores are closed.” Agnes’ “new winter holiday,” she asserts, has “almost no embarrassing religious overtones—Kaloopahana. It celebrates the wonder and majesty of Kaloopa, the bat-winged snow leopard. Long before there were wise men,” she continues, “long before there were shepherds, there was the fierce Kaloopa, queen of bat-winged snow leopards.”

            Agnes’ plan would alleviate the civic disorder brought on by the religious associations of Christmas, but we’d still have the day off on Christmas Day: it was declared a federal holiday in 1871, and now enjoys the same national status as the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, and Thanksgiving. Christmas Trees, by the way—as they have discovered, finally, in Seattle—are not religious symbols. They’re essentially the residue of pagan practices—like the date, December 25.

            Those of us who celebrate the season in a cartooning mode can rejoice in the “Night Before Christmas” parody on the Comics Curmudgeon blog. The re-written poem is laced with references to syndicated comics; for instance, this stanza:

            Mrs. Claus had been mixing Welbutrin with booze

            And gone shopping with Cathy for undersized shoes

            “It’s pathetic,” cried Santa, with quivering lip,

            “Like I’m stuck in some damn ‘Funky Winkerbean’ strip.”

COMIC STRIP REPRINTS

Brevity, like F-Minus, is a new comic strip that follows the Frank and Ernest format—a single, strip-wide panel. There the resemblance to that strip ends, but it continues in the fashion of Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur, a single-panel strip that, until recently, deliberately avoided a continuing cast of characters. Written, I assume (because his partner says he can’t draw so he must be writing the strip) by Guy Endore-Kaiser, who calls himself “Guy,” Brevity is drawn by Rodd Perry (or maybe he just smoothes over Guy’s childish scrawls; they don’t say), who calls himself “Rodd,” with two d’s, an affectation, surely, staged in competition with his partner’s hyphen. The strip has about it a Far Side aura. Here are two tin cans in the foreground, one saying, “You’re the greatest can I’ve ever met. I just know we’ll grow old together on this fence post.” In the distance, we see a cowboy loading his shotgun. And here’s a donut hole next to a donut, the donut saying, “... and then some giant machine punched a hole through my stomach, and that’s how you were born.”And then we have a psychiatrist taking notes as a dog on his couch is saying, “I can’t escape it, Doc—that feeling that I’m stuck in some lame New Yorker cartoon.” The lines are broken lines, almost dotted, in the manner of Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor at The New Yorker.  A nerdish-looking young couple are walking along a path, and the be-spectacled fellow is saying, “By the way, I usually sneeze in twos. So that’s another interesting thing about me.” In one picture, a medieval-looking king on his throne and his courtiers are hovering in the air, one of the latter gesturing to a man standing on the ground nearby and saying, “May I present Sir Isaac Newton. He claims to have discovered something big.” Two hikers come upon a river of lava flowing from the steaming volcano in the background; one hiker says, “What do you think it tastes like?” The other responds, “Sometimes, you have to find out the hard way.” As you doubtless realize from just this pitiful sampling, these cartoons are nearly perfect examples of the artform: neither words nor pictures make the same sense alone that they do together. In fact, the pictures by themselves without the words often don’t make any sense at all. You look at the picture and wonder: What’s going on here? Then you read the caption, and it all makes perfect, hilarious sense. Rodd’s drawing ability is adequate to this task. There is nothing wrong with his rendering style, if you want to call it that. It depicts recognizably the objects essential for understanding the cartoon. Rodd’s line is triumphantly uninteresting—serviceable but without any particular distinction. Boring, even. But wholly adequate, as I said. You can’t look at one of Rodd’s drawings and misunderstand what it depicts. The art, in this feature, is in the blending of word and picture for comedic effect, not in the drawing style. All of these wonders can be found in the first Andrews McMeel reprint of the feature, entitled, astonishingly, Brevity (128 8x9-inch pages in paperback; $10.95).

Onward, the Spreading Punditry

OEDIPUS BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE

On the eve of the appearance of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, George W. (“Warlord”) Bush was still digging that hole for himself deeper, thundering his deranged diatribe about not pulling the U.S. troops out of Iraq until we’re victorious. While this sounds determined and resolute (his favorite three-syllable word), it’s also rigid and stubborn, symptoms of dry alcoholism, and it has left GeeDubya very little wriggle room: given the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation that we bug out of Iraq after convening a meeting of Iranian and Syrian and Saudi diplomats to clean up the mess in Mess-o-potomia, how can he change course? Well, easy: just like ol’ George W. (“Waffle”) Bush has changed course in the past. Simply alter the meaning of the words. Unbeknownst to all of us, the definition of “victory” has doubtless changed, or is poised to change. It now verges on meaning whatever George W. (“Whopper”) Bush says it means. It could mean, for instance, whenever the temperature gets above 95 degrees. That’s when we’ll bug out of Iraq.

            James Baker, a shrewd operator, is the Bush Clan’s consiglieri. He and what Time (November 20) calls “the real A-team of Republican foreign policy establishment”—that is, the members of his study group—have stepped in and conducted “what amounts to a family intervention” to rescue GeeDubya from himself. “Dad’s former aides [have presented] the son with a plan for saving his presidency and, with it, some remnant of the family’s brand name.” Newsweek unearths a Baker bon mot from some time past: “He once described Bush 43's core principles as “God and exercise.”

            The father-son relationship that underpins GeeDubya’s so-called “administration” has been lurking in the background all along. In the October 9-15 issue of the Washington Post National Weekly, Richard Cohen summarized much of it in speculating about why GeeDubya ran for president in the first place: “He wanted to best his father but also even the score for him. This score was a twofold thing. George W. Bush wanted, in effect, to win the second term that George H.W. Bush had lost (to Bill Clinton), and he also wanted to finish the job his father had started with Saddam Hussein. If there is a better explanation for why Bush—not necessarily the neocons around him—so fervently wanted war, I cannot come up with it.” Father-son relationships are complicated, Cohen continues. They are “fraught with competition, a sort of canine sniffing that is suffused with both an edgy rivalry and an immense love. ... If I say that George W. Bush was out to both vanquish and redeem his father, many a man will know what I mean.” Then he quotes Brent Scowcroft, long-time national security advisor to the elder Bush, as quoted by Bob Woodward in his State of Denial: “In his younger years, George W. couldn’t decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he has tried at the game, and it was a disaster.” Everything he’s read, Cohen goes on, convinces him “that Bush had no reason to run for the presidency other than to satisfy some psychological compulsion—and had no accomplishment to his name that did not stem from primogeniture. Especially in foreign policy, he was an ignoramus who smugly thought that his instincts trumped experience and knowledge. What’s even more appalling is that over and over in Woodward’s book, Bush sticks to his losing hand, refusing to challenge his own assumptions—or, it seems, his steadfast belief that his is a divine mission. ... Given the nature of the problem, maybe it would be best if the father shed his reluctance and offered his son some sharp advice. After all, it is now clear that the finest service one president can provide another—not to mention his country—is to reassert a parental role. The kid’s in way over his head.” And he’s taken us with him. Even more alarming, we let him!

            While we waited, in eager frustration, the Baker Study Group report, we were amused almost daily by a continuing debate over whether the armed struggle among Iraqis is Civil War or not. I hadn’t realized it before, being a neophyte in anything but typing, but apparently calling it a Civil War will permit the U.S. to withdraw its army. The logic is a little shaky, it seems to me, but those who debate such matters apparently agree. Maybe it’s some sort of international protocol.  As long as the conflict is an “insurgency” or “sectarian strife,” the occupying forces have responsibility to bring it under control; but when the struggle is a Civil War, then no occupying force has any responsibility. Then it’s okay to retire from the field and leave the warring factions to their war. Since GeeDubya is wedded to “winning” in Iraq, he doesn’t want to withdraw U.S. forces; so he won’t call it a Civil War.

            I don’t know what to call it. A “civil war,” in my imagination, requires opposing forces to face each other in armed conflict. I’m not sure any of those armed thugs in Baghdad are facing any of the other armed thugs: instead, each of the opposing bands of thugs sneaks around killing off unarmed civilians who, the thugs allege, have some allegiance to their foes. In other words, the “war” isn’t between armed forces facing each other. The thugs seldom, if ever—and I haven’t heard of any instances of it—face each other while pointing weapons. The struggle is not a rebellion either because no one is in charge of the government, so there’s no one to rebel against. It’s a guerilla war, a particularly nasty one in which the citizenry seems bent on exterminating itself. It’s “civil” only in the sense that the combatants are all citizens of the same society or state. Does that make it a “guerilla civil war”? It certainly isn’t a civil guerilla war. And if the former, does that, according to the quaint customs of international decorum, permit us to leave?

            The standard definition of a civil war among academics has the purity of simplicity: groups from the same country fighting for political control with a death toll of at least 1,000. While Iraq’s disturbance surely qualifies under this rubric, the sheer simplicity masks the actualities. The New York Times recently decided to let its reporters use the term “civil war,” but executive editor Bill Keller issued a cautionary statement: “The main shortcoming of ‘civil war’ is that, like other labels, it fails to capture the complexity of what is happening on the ground. The war in Iraq is, in addition to being a civil war, an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, a scene of criminal gangsterism and a cycle of vengeance. We believe ‘civil war’ should not become reductionist shorthand for a war that is colossally complicated.” And it won’t end easily. As Ted Rall, our omnipresence this outing, pointed out recently in his column about Afghanistan, in a tribal society “each fallen fighter leaves behind dozens of friends, relatives and neighbors eager to avenge them and carry on the struggle. ‘Recruitment is not a problem for them—not a problem at all,’ says Pakistani security analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.”

            We made the mess in Iraq, so common decency would suggest we ought to stay to put things right. But common courtesy suggests that we be assisted in this endeavor by whatever indigenous government there is, and I don’t think there’s much of that going on. My conviction is that the so-called “government” in Iraq consists largely of power brokers, either tribal warlords or their toadies, each grabbing as much wealth as possible under cover of governmental policy. It’s not much different from the way the U.S. Congress operates except that our system hasn’t yet learned to tolerate armed looting in public. Looting in public is okay, it’s the armed part that is, for the time being, frowned upon in polite political circles.

            In Iraq, I suspect that they also use government sanction as an cover for wreaking vengeance on rival tribes for old or imagined slights and insults. These power brokers want the U.S. troops around as a smoke screen behind which they can conduct these nefarious operations, acquiring wealth by siphoning off government funds and acquiring power by killing off the competition. If the U.S. withdraws, the semblance of civic order will evaporate in days, and the power brokers will either have to take to the field at the head of their armed forces and do battle in the open, or they’ll have to take their money and run. They’ll do the latter in any case, but they’d like the U.S. to hang around a little longer so they can squeeze a little more from the national treasury. To keep the U.S. around, the chieftains and toadies will continue to pretend to be conducting government, having debates and voting every once in a while on some new law. Behind the scenes, however, the looting and revenge-taking continue unabated.

            If this sounds cynical, it probably is. But that doesn’t mean I think Iraqis are less than capable human beings. They are capable. But their capability expresses itself differently than we express ours. Theirs is an ancient tribal society, and their capabilities express themselves in tribal terms. We have difficulty understanding that. In a tribal society—one that consists of several tribes—if a member of one tribe injures a member of another, for example, it’s the injured person’s tribe that has the grievance, not so much the injured party’s immediate family, as we might expect, and the tribe expects compensation. Otherwise, war—or assassination—will ensue. The tribe’s honor has been impugned, and it must avenge itself, tit for tat, upon the injuring tribe, possibly initiating a cycle of revenge-taking. Or not. Sometimes the injuring tribe simply accepts its “punishment”: after the murder of one of its own satisfies the honor of the other tribe, both crimes are forgotten and peace between the tribes is restored. Sometimes a simple commercial transaction restores the honor of the injured tribe. If the injuring tribe pays the injured tribe enough—in money or property or deference—the injured tribe declares the hostilities over, and tribal tranquility returns. That, as I understand it, is tribal justice. (My understanding, I must point out, is somewhat elementary. I could be dead wrong in the details, but I am reasonably sure that I’m right in general.)

            Some readily recognizable semblance of this ancient cultural practice still lurks in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. In our tradition, if someone is killed, murdered, we expect the killer, the murderer, to pay with his life or liberty for the offense against public order. Tribal justice, however, doesn’t necessarily exact that sort of punishment. Recompense not retribution is often the measure of justice. Tribal honor governs the proceedings: honor must be preserved, or re-established, at all cost. We think in terms of the individual and the individual offender; tribal societies think in terms of tribes. In such societies, the health and welfare—the honor—of the tribe as a whole supersedes the well being of individual members of the tribe. The individual does not exist as an individual; he exists only as a member of the larger entity. As long as the tribe prospers and its honor survives, all is well.

            Since we don’t understand these machinations very well, we don’t understand how the so-called government of Iraq can persist as a nearly non-functioning entity. But it can because in a tribal society, “appearance” is often more important than “reality.” Moreover, in a tribal society the “real government” consists largely in portioning out the boodle among the tribes according to their standing in the power structure. The Iraqi government is doing that, I believe; and that’s about all it’s doing. But that’s all that Iraqi society expects of it. Individually, citizens want security, peace, prosperity and all the rest of the things GeeDubya is forever extolling. But buried deep in the psyche of the citizenry is the tribal tradition that individuals don’t count as much as the tribe as a whole.

            Are Iraqis capable of democracy? Intellectually, yes; psychologically, not yet. One of the first things we learned in college freshman political science courses is that societies must reach a certain stage in their “maturing” process before they can successfully undertake democracy. By “maturing” here, I mean no particular value judgment: the notion, probably fairly elementary, is that societies “mature” as they progress from clans and tribes to nations and states, from chieftains and kings to elected governors. If you impose democracy on a society not yet mature enough, it fails: citizens demand services of their government that an infant democratic government perhaps cannot deliver as fast as citizens expect. So the citizenry rises up and overthrows the government for being inefficient. A dictatorship quickly emerges, and to the extent that a dictator can supply certain minimal public services, he survives. Iraq is scarcely a primitive society: their technology alone is too sophisticated for that. But the tribal tradition is strong. Whatever brand of democracy Iraq may eventually adopt, it must embody the tribal tradition within. I’m not sure that’s ready to happen yet.

            Meanwhile, Happy Kaloopahana, Festivus for the rest of us—or, better yet, Merry Christmas, the federal holiday, which, by Constitutional fiat, is necessarily a secular not a religious occasion.

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