THE SPARROW PAPERS

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

2011-08-07T15:46:00.005-04:00

In one panel, Secret Agent X-9 holds a gun in his left hand, aiming out it of frame. In the very next panel, the gun is now in his steely right hand and his left hand is extended, like a tightrope walker, to balance the picture.

As with many sequences in this great 1934 newspaper comic strip, this makes no sense visually. But that’s OK because it all looks great.

Every panel, in fact, of the dapper X-9, the sultry Grace Powers, the feckless Evelyn or even the evil master criminal the Top looks as if plucked from an old posed, black-and-white movie poster. Even when X-9 leaps through a window, he looks pretty darned elegant.

No surprise as the art is by Alex Raymond, the painterly genius behind Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby. And the slam-bam, non-stop action plot? By Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man and The Continental Op. Speaking of dashing and elegant.

I was delighted to find this and a wealth of other incredibly cool stories in The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett.

I tend to avoid collections, figuring that for the few dynamic storylines or splendid images the book will be over-packed with contrivances and weak drawing.

So imagine my surprise to find in this one book not only Hammett and Raymond’s tremendous Secret Agent X-9, but also work by one of my favorite cartoonist storytellers, Jacques Tardi, illustrating a story by his wife, Dominique Grange.

If that weren’t enough, this fat, 2008 book also features noir-ish work by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, Charles Burns (starring his cigarette-smoking, overweight wrestler-detective El Borbah), Neil Gaiman, Jodi Bernet, Mickey Spillane (remember paperback detective Mike Hammer?), Alex Toth, Ed McBain, Max Allen Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree, and Bernie Krigstein, before his EC Comics’s art.

And on top of that, Will Eisner’s The Spirit makes an appearance.

Mix in with this impressive bunch a good number of cartoonists and writers I’d not seen before but wished I had.

A “mammoth” book it is.

Nursery Rhyme Comics

2011-07-31T17:09:00.003-04:00

First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, will release this coming October Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes From 50 Celebrated Cartoonists.

The value in this book for adults interested in sequential art can be found in the contributors. They include, among others, Tony Millionaire, Roz Chast, both Jaime and Gilberto Hernandez, Gahan Wilson, Richard Thompson and Craig Thompson, Jules Feiffer, Gene Luen Yang and even Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.

The cartoonists stuck to the oft-recited texts, for the most part, but their images swing to some delightful interpretations. Stephanie Vue’s “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” features a charmingly expressive mouse. Cyril Pedrosa’s lively “This Little Piggy” — predominantly pink and wiggly — looks as if it escaped from late-night MTV, except in a good way.

The drawback — as you might expect in a book that gathers a whopping 50 artists and from across a broad spectrum of genres — is that some of the entries are inspired, fun and mad, while some, well, aren’t.

But the real test for Nursery Rhyme Comics will come when I return the copy I read to the Accent editor at the newspaper where I work. She’ll read the comics to her young daughter.

Now that will be the true verdict.

Chicago Tribune cartoonists

2011-06-12T15:18:00.004-04:00

I want to be these guys — sit around in three-piece suits, smoking cigars and even on occasion wearing a fedora, while drawing famous cartoons.

Take a look at this 1931 documentary of Chicago Tribune cartoonists as they draw Little Orphan Annie, Moon Mullins,The Gumps and more. Very cool stuff.

Thanks to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists for featuring this in its latest members publication.

Action Agents in Exciting Adventures

2011-06-12T12:39:00.004-04:00

A couple posts back I proposed a list of the 10 best newspaper comic strips. But I only came up with nine.

I asked you what you thought. Among the suggestions to come in have been Thimble Theater/Popeye, The Gumps, For Better or for Worse and Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy.

But two of you — two — recommended a strip of which I’d never heard. So I did some research.

At first called Action Agents in Exciting Adventures and, later, just Action Agents, the adventure strip started in 1931, picked up steam and popularity just before WW II, then began to wane, limping to an obscure demise in the early 1950s.

The breathless tales centered on Carter Remo and Captain Kit Chen, who worked for … well, I’m not sure who they worked for. The OSS? The Pinkertons? The good guys, clearly.

In the samples I saw, it’s never stated — it’s as if the artist didn’t want to get bogged down with anything that might slow the narrative, such as explanation and sense.

They zipped around the globe, rescuing kidnapped heiresses, capturing miscreants who planned to blow up bridges, power plants and, on two separate occasions, a museum. A museum after hours. Who knows why.

Remo, with his pencil-thin mustache, was the more handsome and intended as the lead. Chen — get it, “Kit Chen”? — was a bit slower in the foot race, but he’s the hero who often figured out the evil-doers’ master plans.

The look was not unlike Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy — not exactly in the “big-foot” style, but certainly not with the grace of Prince Valiant.

For its first 13 years, Action Agents was written and drawn by Webb F.C. Klein, the strip’s creator, as best as I can figure. But after 1944, it passed through several hands, with ever-worsening artistic results — Todd “Doc” B. Dunstead, 1944 to 1946; Earle Parkerson, 1947-1948; then Lester “Ike” Pennington, 1948 to 1953.

Pennington’s drawings in particular were especially dreadful. Poor Remo and Chen.

Who knows — maybe Fantagraphics Books or Drawn & Quarterly will reprint some of the Action Agents strips, with crisp repackaging by Chris Ware or Seth. Or maybe not.

Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley

2011-06-12T12:27:00.005-04:00

The protagonist in Fantagraphics Books new Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley isn’t your father’s Mickey Mouse. It’s your grandfather’s.

This early newspaper strips, beginning in 1930, by Floyd Gottfredson — what, you thought Disney drew these? — show an character who seeks out adventure, gets in fights, jumps from speeding trains, steals a car and chases after bad guys out west.

This little Mickey has an inflated view of his own abilities — “Daniel in the lion’s den was a coward compared to me” is a typical proclamation, usually just before his great idea goes wackily wrong.

More amazing, with these strips from 1930, Mickey predates the debut of Terry and the Pirates, usually considered the granddaddy of adventure strips.

And as written and drawn by Gottfredson, this mouse is all action. When excited, his arms go straight up over his head, his big-footed feet shoot forward at 45 degrees and his tail goes heavenward.

Gottfredson’s drawings are just about perfect. Minnie, described as “a fickle, frivolous flapper,” dances and Mickey takes prat falls. The artist could capture both the excitement — marvel at that long, long train as it snakes through the mountains, down into Death Valley — and the wit — in the next day’s installment a goat foolishly beams with pride at having just ingested Minnie’s treasure map.

Reading these great strips, you can almost block out that insipid squeaky voice now forever associated with the Mouses, and the sight of some mute college student in an odd costume and a giant, wobbly polystyrene head loitering around amusement park midways.

The 10 Greatest Comic Strips?

2011-06-05T13:33:00.003-04:00

The National Cartoonists Society awards last week were like so many other big awards. Some made perfect sense — Richard Thompson’s accolade for Cul de Sac, for example — while others, such for Dustin, make you think, What? That? Seriously?

Which led me to this list below. What have been the greatest newspaper comic strips? “Greatest” as opposed to “favorite.” Best should imply some long-lasting appeal, something groundbreaking.

And with a touch a genius and maybe a little madness, too.

I admit even this list has some strips that were politically and socially reprehensible — you can admire the art even if you don’t want to live next door to the artist

Also, you’ll notice these are all American newspaper strips. The reasons are, a.) that’s pretty much what I’ve seen enough of to be able to judge intelligently, and b.) comic strips came into their own as an American art form, so it seems only fair.

So, in the order in which they occurred to me, here’s my initial stab at the 10 greatest newspaper comic strips. I tried not to make this into a listing of the obvious. But maybe that’s what I got, anyway, because, well, those are the best.

What do you think? Leave me a comment, email me at slippedcomic at gmail or Twitter @MichaelChevy1.

1. Terry and the Pirates

2. Little Orphan Annie

3. Dick Tracy

4. Calvin and Hobbes

5. Peanuts

6. Gasoline Alley

7. Mutts

8. Pogo

9. Krazy Kat

10. … well, hmmm. Should this last spot be for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (weak cartooning if clever ideas)? Tarzan (great art, but kind of weird)? Flash Gordon (ditto, and this did come after Buck Rogers)? Nancy (appreciated by cartoon purists but really not ever very funny)?

Ziggy at 40

2011-05-30T15:44:00.004-04:00

Set for release next week, on June 7, the hardbound 40th anniversary collection of Ziggy cartoons is a good-looking book. Block-like and solid, with each page displaying a single-panel cartoon; the few strips cover two-page spreads.

The book even comes with an outside band, similar to those on books by cerebral cartoonists such as Seth and Chris Ware.

A copy arrived unsolicited at the newspaper where I work. And as I looked through the cartoons — organized by decade — I recalled how I never really thought Ziggy was particularly funny.

Just a few examples, chosen at random: Ziggy, bald in the longtime tradition of comic strip characters dating back to the Yellow Kid and Henry, sits before his computer. A large calendar tell us it’s Jan. 1, 2001. The monitor intones: “Good morning, Dave …”

The joke, see, is the scary HAL computer that said “Good morning, Dave” was in the movie, 2001. Get it?

In another, Ziggy says to a doctor that “I hate to tell you this, but I’ve found three typos in your diploma!!”

Is the point that the doctor might be a quack? There’s nothing sinister in the physician’s appearance, beyond that he looks pretty bored. And who can blame him for that.

Ziggy started life, if I recall correctly, as a greeting-card character. He continues to this day to be drawn by the son of his creator, Tom Wilson.

And therein lies his charm, I guess … and he must hold an attraction, as the cartoon is carried by 500 daily and Sunday newspapers, according to the book’s accompanying publicity.

Ziggy’s jokes are simple and require little to no energy on the reader’s part. Sort of a round Bazooka Joe, without the gum.

For some cartoon readers, there’s a warm spot for that in their day.

Adrian Tomine Art for Earthquake Relief

2011-04-26T20:53:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow at high noon the sale begins for the limited edition — 50 only — prints by Adrian Tomine, author of Shortcomings and Scenes From an Impending Marriage.

The price will $250 in the United States, $260 in Canada. All proceeds will be donated to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.

The drawings were created as cover illustrations for the DVD release of the Yasujiro Ozu films The Only Son and There Was a Father. The images are melancholic and truly elegant.

“In addition to the two prints,” noted a statement released yesterday by Drawn & Quarterly, “all orders will include a small original sketch by Adrian Tomine, personalized to the name of the purchaser.”

You can find out more here.

Stumptown

2011-04-23T17:30:00.004-04:00

Greg Rucka has not always been well-served by his illustrators. During the long run of his great comic books series Queen & Country, some of the artists did excellent, powerful work. Others weren’t so successful.

In fact, I recall in the first issue of Queen & Country I picked up (a Free Comic Book Day special), I had no idea the main character was supposed to be a woman until I noticed, some pages in, that her name was Tara.

Rucka is an exciting, nuanced writer. (The paperback edition of third Q&C novel, The Last Run, will be released this coming Tuesday.) And he proves it again with the hardbound collection of the Eisner Award-nominated Stumptown, just out earlier this month.

Stumptown is Portland, Oregon. The main character is a rush-addicted, low-rent private eye named Dex — short for Dexedrine, so imagine what sort of childhood she had — Parios, who takes her knocks from all sorts of down-and-outers. She’s plies her trade in The Rockford Files world, as Matt Fraction (what’s with the names?) points out in his introduction.

Art is by Matthew Southworth, who’s done work for DC, Marvel and Image Comics. His style, for some, will be ideal for the gritty, dangerous and out-of-focus-around-the-edges milieu Dex Parios inhabits.

For my taste, some panels seem rushed, not fully realized. Others made me stop and look — the two-ages spread where Dex meets Isabel at Mount Tabor. The sun rises as they discuss a shaky truce.

See for yourself.

Adrian Tomine & Will Eisner

2011-01-26T13:39:00.006-05:00

Two quick items of note. (I’m still packing for our move to Iowa.)

First, this from a press release I just received from Drawn & Quarterly about Adrian Tomine’s appearance Feb. 09, 7 to 8 p.m., at my favorite bookstore, the Strand in Manhattan:

A loose, cartoony departure from Adrian Tomine’s previous work, Scenes From an Impending Marriage is a sweet-natured, laugh out-loud skewering of the modern marriage process, including hiring a D.J., location scouting, trips to the salon, suit fittings, dance lessons, registering for gifts and managing familial demands.

Leanne Shapton, author of The Native Trees of Canada and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, will join Adrian on the Strand stage.

You can read my posts on an earlier Tomine graphic novel, Shortcomings, here and here.

Also this from the Daily Cartoonist, about the people who bring you the wonderful Festival of Cartoon Art in Columbus ...:

The Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation has pledged $250,000 over five years to support the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum facility, part of the Sullivant Hall renovation at Ohio State University. In recognition of this gift, the library’s seminar room will be named in honor of Will Eisner. The Eisner Family Foundation gift will be matched dollar for dollar by Jean Schulz, widow of Peanuts’ creator Charles M. Schulz, giving it a $500,000 impact on the project. Ms. Schulz has promised to match donations to the new facility up to $2.5 million.

The Sullivant Hall renovation is estimated to cost $24.4 million and is scheduled to be completed in 2013, at which time Sullivant Hall will house the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum as well as The Ohio State University Department of Dance and the Department of Art Education. Upon completion of the Schulz Challenge, the Sullivant Hall renovation will be completely funded.

Read more here.

‘Battle Angel Alita’ and a Note

2011-01-16T14:58:00.003-05:00

While I prepare to move and start a new job, future posts for “The Sparrow Papers” might appear on a less-than-regular basis. We’ll see what happens after that.

In the meantime, volume 14 of Battle Angle Alita: Lost Order is now out. From what I’ve read so far, it appears Yukito Kishiro developed cameos for many of the long-unseen characters from his years-long tale. And that is playing to his strengths.

Brubaker, Morrison Interviewed

2011-01-10T17:05:00.004-05:00

Today’s USA Today has brief interviews with comic book writers Ed Brubaker, about Incognito: Bad Influences, featuring the return of Zack Overkill, and Grant Morrison, about the Batman Incorporated series.

“The people who grew up reading comic books are now in charge of pop cuture,” Brubaker says. Which is the same contention made by and about Doctor Who fans who, now adult writers, actors, directors, producers, special-effects folk, marketers, et al., took over the BBC and re-launched the longest running — and best — sci-fi TV show. (The next season airs on BBC and BBC America this coming April.)

You can read my earlier post on Brubaker here, and see the USA Today stories here and here.

Neil Gaiman on NPR

2010-12-09T16:52:00.002-05:00

In case you missed it, Neil Gaiman was on Talk of the Nation on NPR this afternoon. You can listen to it here.

Host Neal Conan, who recently interviewed Robert and Sophie Crumb, gave himself away. When one listener noted she went to the comic book store “every month,” Conan piped up with: “Every month? New comic books come out every Wednesday.”

Conan also confessed he enjoyed Gaiman’s Sandman series so much he couldn’t bear to finish the last couple issues.

Gaiman was on the show to promote The Best American Comics 2010, which he edited.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order 14

2010-12-09T10:43:00.006-05:00

It’s more like “Lost Order.” Volume 13 of this series came out way back in June.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Viz seriously tampers with the patience and, frankly, loyalty of fans of Yukito Kishiro’s epic tale. With seven months between English-language editions, we’ll never see the conclusion … or by then, we won’t have the mental faculties to comprehend what’s going on.

Sigh.

In any case, volume 14 of Alita’s/Gally’s/Yoko’s excellent adventure — it really is one long tale, filled with honor, horror, bravery, humor, fantasy and grit — is set to be published Jan. 11. I love this story and I strongly recommend it.

See some earlier posts on this series here and here, which have links to even earlier posts. (I also suggest reading that first post of mine before starting “Battle Angel,” as it fills in a lot of the back story.)

Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics

2010-11-17T13:43:00.005-05:00

In Michael Schumacher’s lively 2010 biography of Spirit creator Will Eisner, Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, he tells of Eisner’s first visit to a comic book convention, in New York in 1971.

Eisner wanted to see what underground comix were all about and to meet some of those cartoonists. Imagine his shock when the 54-year-old child of the Great Depression happened to pick up a copy of Zap that featured an S. Clay Wilson story involving a character whose penis is cut off and eaten.

Kitchen Sink Press publisher Denis Kitchen tried to assure the visibly upset Eisner this wasn’t a typical underground story. But also present was a young cartoonist named Art Spiegelman, who decided to speak up in defense of Wilson’s work.

Eisner left and did not return, Schumacher writes.

Come forward 39 years, to this past month’s Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University — a conference that over the years has brought many established and up-and-coming cartoonists (including Eisner himself in its early years).

Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro entertained the audience during his afternoon presentation with what easily could pass for a stand-up comedy routine. At one point, he told about his flight to Columbus from New York City, during which a male passenger some rows ahead got up while the seatbelt sign was still lit.

A flight attendant turned on the public-address system and ordered the passenger to sit down, which he reluctantly did, muttering something to the effect of, “All right, all right already.” The attendant then stormed over to the passenger’s seat and continued to berate him, according to Piraro.

After the attendant left, the indignant passenger, a la Rodney Dangerfield, looked around to the rest of passengers as if to say, “Did you see how she treated me?”

And that’s when Piraro realized, “Holy ****, that’s Art Spiegelman!”

Some things don’t change, apparently.

Spiegelman, who was in one of the front rows at the conference when Piraro told this anecdote, denied none of it.

See my earlier posts on the conference here, here, here and here. And on one of Eisner’s graphic novels, A Contract With God, here.

“R. Crumb’s The Bible Illuminated” Exhibit

2010-11-08T15:27:00.004-05:00

You wouldn’t think just pasting up all the pages from R. Crumb’s book, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, would be that great of an art exhibit.

But there is a lot to be said for being able to stand a nose-length from those black-and-white drawings. You can study every stroke — how Crumb drew thinner bands of horizontal striations for his night sky, the “pockets” of hatchings within solid black to depict folds for all-black robes.

The exhibit, officially titled “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis,” also features a casement brimming with materials Crumb collected for reference — old comic books, children’s bibles and colorful display cards from cheesy Biblical and sword-and-sandals movies.

The show runs through Jan. 16, 2011, at the Columbus Museum of Art. (It probably travels on to some other place after that, I imagine.) I viewed it while back in town during the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University.

My posts on the OSU cartoon conference can be read here, here and even more here.

Next Monday, Nov. 15, the Columbus Museum will show the documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, with a discussion with the director, Andrew Cooke, and a chat with “Crumb” curator Lisa Dent.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 3

2010-10-31T16:37:00.006-04:00

I’d be remiss not to mention how … well, nice everyone was at this year’s Festival of Cartoon Art.

Lynn Johnston on the spot did a marvelous sketch for me to give to a friend who’s been cutting my hair for a year now in exchange for only occasional payoffs in home-baked cookies. (I won’t mention his name, as others who’ve been paying in more than cookies don’t feel abused.) He was delighted.

Gene Luen Yang also did a clever sketch of the Monkey King for my wife. Yang’s American Born Chinese is one of the few graphic novels she’s ever read without my coercion. (Maus is another.)

And curator and emcee Lucy Shelton Caswell remained cheerful throughout. I interviewed her way back when the cartoon library started, I think — and before it was officially called the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. That was for Ohio Magazine (several owners ago). I spoke with her again a few years later for another story I assigned when I was editor at Acclaim magazine, also in Columbus, on the Caniff collection and cartoons in general.

On that second occasion, she allowed us to use some Terry and the Pirates art to go with the magazine feature. (We also managed to get Bill Watterson to speak for the story about the reduction of cartoon panel size in daily newspapers.) Then as now, Lucy was generous with her time and knowledge.

See my earlier posts on the conference here and here. One more post to come, on the Columbus Museum of Art’s astonishing R. Crumb exhibit, “The Bible Illuminated” and its Nov. 15 showing of the documentary, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 2

2010-10-23T19:02:00.003-04:00

Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts, wasn’t the only animal lover who spoke at the 10th Festival of Cartoon Art this past week. Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro showed a slide of him, cigar in mouth, proudly holding a rather large chicken.

He and his wife, he noted, are board members of an animal sanctuary that, along with the usual dogs and cats (and hopefully rabbits, too), also rescues chickens. Who would have guessed?

Other things I learned at the Ohio State University four-day event:

• Robert Harvey, speaking of his 952-page Milton Caniff bio, Meanwhile …, told me, “Believe it or not, what got printed was only 60 percent of what I wrote.”

• James Sturm, whose The Golem’s Mighty Swing was Time magazine’s best graphic novel in 2001, said: “Cartooning is a calling first, a career second.”

He talked a bit about the Center for Cartoon Studies, the cartooning school in White River Junction, Vt., for which he is director. Seth did the catalog cover.

• Dave Kellett, whose book, How to Make Webcomics, I picked up at the Wexner Center shop during the conference and have been reading (and could have used two years ago before I my own online strip, Slipped), contended newspapers and comics are parting ways. This is because, he said, “In the mind of the average consumer, the newspaper comic strip” — such a small percentage of the daily paper’s content — “has always been free.”

In fact, he continued, the medium of comics is dying, though the art form of comics is not

• Speaking of the topicality of editorial cartoons, Jen Sorensen, of the weekly alternative editorial cartoon Slowpoke, noted many readers are “ahistorical” — meaning they know little about history, not that they don’t exist within history, of course.

One more post on the conference to come, I think, plus a post on the Columbus Museum of Art’s astonishing R. Crumb exhibit, “The Bible Illuminated.”

See my earlier post on this conference here.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 1

2010-10-20T14:33:00.004-04:00

This year’s sold-out Ohio State University event was very much as I recall the very first Festivals of Cartoon Art — lots of speakers and panelists covering comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, editorial cartoons and animation (plus, this year, much talk about online comics), as well as professionals who weren’t presenters but came anyway.

So along with the presenters such as Art Spiegelman (Maus), Matt Groening (Life in Hell and The Simpsons), Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke), Dan Piraro (Bizarro) and Bill Griffith (Zippy), also milling around between sessions was Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Jeff Smith (Bone), editorial cartoonist J.P. Trostle, New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly and Jeff Keane (The Family Circus). And those are just the ones I happened to spot.

Here are some bits of wisdom I picked up during and between sessions:

• Comics, declared James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing), are not a combination of writing and drawing, but of poetry and graphic design. Nicely put, right? Read that again.

• Jan Eliot (Stone Soup) draws how people “feel, not how they look.” She added it’s hard to come up with kids-outdoors ideas — in the woods, playing in snow — not already done by Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes).

• Roz Chast, one of The New Yorker’s 20 staff cartoonists, submits five cartoons a week for consideration.

She noted an idea evolves as she draws it. She confessed to resubmitting rejected ideas, months later and after “some reworking.” “Everybody does it,” she added.

• Gene Luen Yang, discussing his American-Born Chinese graphic novel, recalled his mother told him not to draw the Monkey King barefooted. The centuries-old character always wore shoes, she claimed, because he didn’t want “people to know he’s a monkey.” Which, of course, dovetails beautifully with Yang’s primary theme of cultural ambivalence.

• Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon and one of the authors of the book How to Make Webcomics, discussed the benefits of disintermediation — how, for online comics, there is the artist and audience, and all the people in the middle of the traditional food chain are gone.

More to come on this year’s very worthwhile event ….

A link to the Festival’s site is here.

Feiffer on Diane Rehm radio show

2010-10-11T15:02:00.003-04:00

On this morning’s broadcast of The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer was asked by a call-in listener whom he would cite as being as inspirational among today’s cartoonists as Will Eisner had been for him.

Feiffer, on air to promote his book from this past spring, Backing Into Forward, immediately claimed G.B. Trudeau was still at the top of his game with Doonesbury.

But newspaper strips, he added, were an endangered species, with graphic novels being where one can see excellent examples of sequential art today.

Feiffer noted the usual suspects — Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. But he also lauded David Small and his Stitches and Craig Thompson for his Blankets. Which is interesting as the two look somewhat similar, with their soft brush strokes, and both are memoirs of less-than-cheery childhoods.

But both books are well worth reading and admiring.

Doonesbury at 40

2010-09-25T15:28:00.005-04:00

Like ice cream flavors, superstar newspaper comics strips have their day. Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Garfield — they all highlighted refrigerator doors and office cubicles. Doonesbury was like that.

At one Cartoon Festival at Ohio State University in the early 1980s, a professional cartoonist in the audience asked a panelist who represented G.B. Trudeau’s syndicate why the Doonesbury artist was allowed to have a shorter lead time. He must, the questioner insisted despite repeated denials — how else could he be so timely?

And while it might be the political jibes many longtime readers recall, the human touches were what made the strip not only better than most, but a story we looked for each day.

You can’t deny what got you wasn’t as much seeing D.B.’s missing limb, lost in the Iraq war, but the character, for the first time, without a helmet. Or when Lacey died, just fading out of the frame.

Moreover, when he wasn’t telling truth to power, Trudeau was very, very funny. Often, he still is.

Now comes 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective. In the tradition of those enormous Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, the very funny Doonesbury has its day again.

Release date will be Oct. 26. The book will weigh in with 1,800 strips and 18 essays by Trudeau.

You can read an excerpt in The Atlantic here.

Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates

2010-09-18T17:01:00.004-04:00

Mark Twain once said — at least I recall it was Mark Twain, rather than Ben Franklin, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker or Groucho Marx — most writers really would prefer you read what they wrote instead of reading biographies about them.

Finding out how artists came by their inspirations and how they developed their crafts sometimes can be as fascinating as their actual work. Certainly Robert C. Harvey’s Meanwhile …., his book on Milton Caniff, is extensive and well worth the effort, with a good many samples of the cartoonist’s drawings. (You can read my posts on the biography here, here and here.)

But keep in mind IDW has been publishing handsome editions of the Ohioan’s masterwork, Terry and the Pirates. In black-and-white and color from 1934 on, you follow the adventures of Terry Lee, Pat Ryan and Connie — the “three modern musketeers,” Caniff called them — and their assorted friends — Burma, Normandie Drake, Big Stoop — and enemies — Judas, the Dragon Lady, bandits, Chinese pirates and, eventually, the whole of the Axis military.

Terry may not have been the original adventure newspaper comic strip, but certainly the most sustained and sophisticated.

Hotsy doodle.

Milton Caniff, Part 3

2010-09-14T10:23:00.003-04:00

While I’ve noted Robert C. Harvey’s 952-page tribute to cartoonist Milton Caniff is far too hefty for casual reading — trying holding it upright while lying in bed at night — I don’t want to suggest it’s not worthy.

Meanwhile … is exhaustive, and that’s part of its virtue, too. Points in the text are aptly supported with examples from Caniff’s work, as well as from contemporaries and pals Al Capp, Noel “Bud” Sickles and others. And it boasts a good number of photos, including even a couple shots of the walls of the Palm, the 1930s speakeasy where New York City-based cartoonists hung out and drank, when not scribbling their work on the vertical surfaces.

Yes, Harvey and Fantagraphics could have broken this into two volumes or, gee, maybe left out a few details. (While waxing about Caniff’s first arrival in Manhattan to work for Associated Press, Harvey names all the theaters Caniff could have spied while standing at 42nd Street and Broadway … and the names of what shows were playing there and who was starring in them.)

But if you want to know just about everything about how the oft-called Rembrandt of the Comics rose and rose even more in his chosen profession — from early days in Ohio to chatting with U.S. presidents — this is the golden source. Nary a negative word is said about its subject, but I can’t imagine finding a more thorough and entertaining trove of information.

Read my earlier posts on this book here and here.

‘9 Chickweed Lane’ saga still going

2010-09-12T10:55:00.004-04:00

My second guess was correct. Brooke McEldowney’s nine-month-long newspaper-strip tale of parted WWII lovers didn’t end this past month but took yet another lap as Juliette and her daughter, Edda, discover Peter Kiesl — recently revealed to be Juliette’s biological father — alive in Vienna.

Kiesl follows them back to New Hampshire to show up at Edna’s (Juliette’s mother and his lover in New York City) front yard.

Will he stay? Will he go? The story, it seems, continues ….

Read my earlier post on this here.

Milton Caniff, Part 2

2010-09-01T13:27:00.003-04:00

In a post way back in April, on In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists, I noted Chris Ware’s comment about how comics could have evolved using single-scene tableaus, rather than imitating motion picture camera techniques.

“This is the course comics should’ve taken before they got sidetracked and transformed by the language of cinema in the 1930s,” Ware said, speaking appreciatively of the work of Japanese cartoonist Suiho Tagawa.

If anyone is to blame — if blame is the right word — for comics’ path of movie-like perspectives, that would be Milton Caniff. His Terry and the Pirates — as with his pal Noel Sickles’s Scorchy Smith — for the first time employed close-ups, overhead angles and other dramatic viewpoints not seen before in the newspaper strips of the 1930s.

In Meanwhile …: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Robert C. Harvey tells how Caniff developed this camera-lens eye. As a child in California, where he spent part of youth when not in Ohio, he hung around the fledgling movie industry, out in the dusty California desert. Often he was picked as an extra in the seat-of-their-pants productions.

That's what first gave him a taste for the cinematic.

You can read my first post on this book here.

Milton Caniff, Part 1

2010-08-24T11:08:00.004-04:00

In Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Henry Holt and Co., 2006), Charles J. Shields takes fewer than a handful of paragraphs to discuss rumors Truman Capote wrote part or all of Pultizer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. (He didn’t, apparently.)

But in Meanwhile …: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Robert C. Harvey consumes an entire 10-page appendix to ruminate on “How (Noel) Sickles Inspired Caniff But Didn’t Draw for Him.” Ten pages.

No question, at 952 pages in total, Meanwhile … is a doorstop of a biography, loaded with illustrations from Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon and other Caniff works, samples from other cartoonists, explanations of those illustrations and more post cards and letters sent to and from Caniff than you can image. Plus insights and recollections from the man himself.

Heavy stuff.

Stan Lee

2010-08-22T14:56:00.004-04:00

In a glossary at the back of his It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth defines Marvel Comics this way:

“Back in the 1960s it was a wonderfully fun line of comics books — especially the Kirby and Ditko stuff. Now, it’s a hateful media conglomerate that popularizes bad drawing.”

By “hateful” I’m not sure if Seth specifically means the big-budget movies, the “bad drawing” or how Marvel has treated illustrators and creators — or all of the above. But to get some detail on the years-long battle involving Marvel, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jim Shooter and lots of lawyers over the rights to ideas, characters and art work, take a look at Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book.

Authors Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon try to be even-handed and give all sides equal space to air their recollections of who promised what to whom when. Chapter 19, “Step Right Up!,” details Kirby’s struggle to reclaim the 8,000 pages of art he did for Marvel and what Lee did — or did not do — to help his former colleague.

As a bonus, the rarely heard-from Steve Ditko pops up as a Greek chorus, pretty much to keep everyone else more or less honest. Which isn’t easy as, all things considered, it wasn’t pretty.

Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman

2010-08-19T18:43:00.003-04:00

When last we saw our heroes, Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster of Cleveland, Ohio, were still fuming as they came to realize how much they’d lost by signing away the rights, for a relative pittance, to their creation who could leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time — and on this occasion hold onto it — illustrator Shuster, a fan of Danny Kaye, came up with the idea of Funnyman, a character who looked very much like the movie comedian and was, well, funny. Siegel, returning from service in World War II, recast Funnyman as a crime fighter. And the two were off again in hopes of fame and comics glory.

Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon tell the tale of Funnyman’s short life, and include samples of the comic book and the newspaper strips that appeared from 1948 to 1949, in Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero, From the Creators of Superman. The book, published in paperback just this past month, also dwells on the character’s origins — as well as that of Krypton’s most famous son — in Jewish culture and humor, as the book’s subtitle suggests.

As for the character himself and the comics world he inhabited, the humor is dated — oversized clown shoes with springs, baggy polka-dot pants, goofy gadgets, ludicrous villains and countless prat falls.

That said, based on the evidence of this book there’s no denying Funnyman, for all its shtick, was silly and entertaining. “Aw,” its hero would reply if he were still around, “it was nuttin’.”

New ‘Crumb’ From Criterion

2010-08-14T15:11:00.004-04:00

Crumb, the 1995 documentary on the genius that is Robert Crumb and his odd family, has been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the always classy Criterion Collection.

It features a new commentary track by director Terry Zwigoff, a booklet and deleted scenes.

The movie talks about Crumb’s working style and his influences. It also spends time on his siblings, one of whom devoted his days to moving a long string through his digestive system.

Umm …. Yeah, that’s a hard image to clear.

But, still, the documentary as a whole is fascinating, one every aspiring cartoonist and documentary maker should see. (There even was a debate at the time over whether Zwigoff, who later directed Ghost World, based on Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, should have cut the bit where his camera person stumbled and almost fell off a roof, if she hadn’t been grabbed by the cartoonist himself.)

‘Cathy’ to Cease

2010-08-14T15:04:00.004-04:00

I once saw Cathy Guisewite on a panel in Columbus at one of Ohio State University’s early Festivals of Cartoon Art, oh, back in the 1980s. She was on stage with Tom Batiuk, creator of Funky Winkerbean; Irwin Hasen, whose name topped the Dondi newspaper strip; and Fred Lasswell, whose name ran with the Snuffy Smith strip.

One highlight of the discussion came after an audience member asked how much time was required to produce a daily and Sunday strip. Hasen and Lasswell, who confessed to using an unspecified number of assistants, claimed they only spent a couple hours a day, at most.

Guisewite, pop-eyed and open-mouthed, looked at the audience in comic disbelief. She then banged her forehead repeatedly on the table, much to the amusement of all in attendance … except maybe for Hasen and Lasswell.

She and Batiuk, who each produced their strips solo in those days (and maybe still do), both said their work consumed every waking moment.

The distinction between the old and new guard couldn’t have been clearer.

Guisewite, now 60, has announced she’ll stop her strip, Cathy, Oct. 3 — she wants to spend more time with her family, she said. While over time Cathy has become formulaic — panel 1: statement; panel 2: build on statement; panel 3: increase absurdity of statement; panel 4: Cathy makes a wry observation … or “Aack!” — in its late-1970s heyday it broke ground. The strip addressed everyday silliness of office work and the single life for women. Greeting cards followed.

And Cathy — the cartoon character and the cartoonist — could be very funny.

‘9 Chickweed Lane’ Ends WWII Tale?

2010-08-09T09:27:00.003-04:00

It appears Brooke McEldowney might be coming to conclusion of his eight-month-long storyline in 9 Chickweed Lane of grandmother Edna’s flashback about her days as a USO singer and spy during World War II.

Or maybe he’s just getting his second wind. After all, the tale ends — if this is the end — with Edna confessing to her daughter, Juliette, that Austrian opera singer Peter Kiesl, whom she met when he was a prisoner of war in England, is Juliette’s father — not Edna’s husband, American war hero (and her handler as a spy) Bill O’Malley.

Surely there’ll need to be long, agonizing talks with granddaughter Edda and just about everyone else in the strip. Not one of these characters seems to be able to keep a secret.

But it was an intriguing story and never flagged. Bravo.

Read my post on the start, more or less, of this storyline here.

2010 Eisner Awards

2010-08-05T12:49:00.007-04:00

Winners of 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards of note — well, to me, at least, and readers of this blog — presented at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego include:

• Best Adaptation from Another Work:
Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter, adapted by Darwyn Cooke (IDW)

• Best Comics-Related Book:
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle (Abrams ComicArts)

• And Vault of Midnight comic book store — I’ve followed it in its various locations around Ann Arbor, Michigan, over the years, and I stop in every time I’m in town — won the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award.

The Hunter

2010-08-02T11:30:00.004-04:00

Darwyn Cooke, who revived Will Eisner’s The Spirit a few years back, perfectly captures the tone of early 1960s Camelot, with its cocktails and cigarettes, hour-glass-shaped willing women and Space Age hotel exteriors — at least, that world of fictional tough-guy detectives — in his adaptation of crime writer Donald E. Westlake’s The Hunter.

In smoky, moody blues and deep blacks, the protagonist Parker, eyebrows perpetually cocked, pounds the urban pavement as well as his urbane enemies, leaving gorgeous “dames” panting after him — assuming they’re still breathing at all when he leaves them. Listen and you can hear the Miles Davis soundtrack.

The story certainly isn’t populated with Salvation Army types. But these characters grab us (hopefully not by the throat) and stick with us.

“I just got rid of the woman with the bag. I haven’t killed any of these jokers yet, but the next one I will. And if the money doesn’t show, you’re next.” Krak! Bam! Hunf!

Clyde Fans Book 1

2010-07-27T12:36:00.003-04:00

I’ve just finished Seth’s Clyde Fans Book 1 — collected from issues 10-15 of his comic book, Palookaville — and I suppose, all things considered, it’d be too much to hope for a happy ending at the conclustion of Book 2 ….

As with other stories of his, Seth’s pacing is the genius of his work.

Part 1 of this book consists of Abe Marchcard, in 1997, wandering through the offices, the residence above and the basement below of family-owned Clyde Fans, now out of business. He putters, picks things up, puts them down somewhere else, straightens a picture, takes a bath, lights a cigar, prepares supper, goes outside and comes back in, turns on a radio and moves on, for 68 pages — all the while telling us about the company’s history, salesmanship in general and his brother, Simon, in particular.

Part 2 shows Simon attempting to make cold calls in 1957, in the town of Dominion (a regular stopping-off point for Seth characters in others stories). He’s anxious, lacking in self-confidence and sales skill — he’s clearly is not suited to this affable, self-driven line of work. He’s sweating in winter.

Seth punctuates Simon’s movements around town with panels of Abe, testily puffing his cigar — “Are you listening to me, Simon?” “Selling isn’t a game.” “I don’t think you’re up for this.” — to reinforce Simon’s own awareness of his failing. The memories keep intruding.

At one point during his miserable day, Simon stops in a diner and he’s surrounded — in the eatery and on the page — by other patrons talking, talking, talking about their lives, aspirations, opinions and gossip. Simon is desperately trying — belatedly — to create a life. They are living theirs.

Slipped

2010-07-23T14:15:00.008-04:00

I started adding chapter titles in my own adventure comic strip, Slipped, when I arrived at chapter 100 this past April. I was inspired by the titles I saw above the daily strips in an out-of-print copy of Arf: The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie 1935-1945 that I’d recently tracked down.

Chapter 114 is titled “Recollection or Confabulation?” In one panel the protagonist, Tyler Wilson, aka adventurer and thief the Scarlet Sparrow, says she writes for a football (soccer) newspaper in Paris. (It seemed, to me, like a good occupation for her.)

The problem is I tried to draw her eyes looking up and to her left, as they do when you’re trying to remember something. (She’s been time-traveling, so she needs to think for a moment to separate what’s occurred from what’s to come.)

But I saw in fact I’d drawn them going to her right — which is what happens when you’re lying.

I erased them and redrew, with her eyes now looking to the left. But the picture just didn’t look quite … right. And it occurred to me: For whatever reason, she’s lying.

So I did her eyes yet again, as you see them, up and to her right. She is intentionally misleading her listeners — and you and me. She isn’t a football writer, apparently. Or maybe she doesn’t remember what she did for a living before becoming the Scarlet Sparrow, so she’s improvising. As the psychology term indicates, Tyler’s confabulating.

This was not the first time my characters have dictated what happens in the strip.

Award-winning short-story writer David Means (author of the just-released The Spot, among other collections), in an interview I conducted with him a couple weeks ago for a freelance story I wrote for the Kalamazoo Gazette newspaper, admitted his characters often surprise him.

“They do things you don’t expect,” he agreed. But they don’t take over storylines, as some writers (me included — see this earlier post) have suggested. “It’s not magic. It’s controlled magic.”

Hmmm. Maybe. Let me just check with my Slipped characters to find what they have to say about this ….

The Ultimates

2010-07-20T12:22:00.007-04:00

Giant Man to Son of Satan: “Are you really Satan’s son?”

The reply: “Are you on crack?”

I was delighted to find my stack of The Ultimates, series 1 and 2, just last week. While it’s true that after you move three times in 18 months you’re happy to relocate anything recognizable, I discovered these stories still packed their initial power.

Marvel Comics broke ground in its early days by setting its superheroes in the real world. What if people with super powers didn’t really get along? What if Spider-Man had to earn a living? Who covered the rent at the Baxter Building? What writer Mark Millar and illustrator Bryan Hitch did next, first with The Authority, then with The Ultimates, was take that notion and color it post-9/11.

Before, the Fantastic Four fought giant monsters in deserted districts of Manhattan (if there even ever were such areas). In The Ultimates, whole chunks of that heavily populated city — as well as LA, Chicago, Phoenix and the nation’s capitol — could be decimated.

Along with these grim times, and the pages’ black borders, anyone could be betrayed, maimed, tortured or killed in this Avengers updating. Giant Man a wife-beater? The Black Widow a traitor? Thor a deluded paranoid only imagines he’s the god of thunder? Yet Millar and Hitch (who also did the redesign of the TARDIS for the re-launch of Doctor Who, in 2005) pulled it all off with great panache and wit.

A bound Bruce Banner being thrown out of an airborne SHIELD helicopter so he’ll turn into the Hulk. Super-marksman Hawkeye dispatching armed villains with only his bloody, ripped-off fingernails as deadly projectiles. The Scarlet Witch taunting Loki by “increasing the odds of someone showing up to kick your ass” — then a cascade of lightning heralding the appearance of the god of mischief’s half-brother, Thor: “Looking for trouble, Loki?”

And, in the final panel of issue 13, at the end of series 2, a flashback to 1942: Sunny Steve Rogers, before he ships off for the Super Soldier project that turns him into dreary Captain America, gathers his girlfriend, Gail, into his arms and kisses her. A close-enough re-imagining of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life Magazine photo taken on V-E Day in Times Square.

Wonderful stuff.

Quicksilver to his sister, the Scarlet Witch: “Wanda, were you just flirting with that machine?”

Low Moon, Part 2

2010-07-16T11:00:00.002-04:00

Jason uses pacing, and very little dialog, to convey his stories’, and his characters’, mood. One example: In the “Low Moon” story from which this collection takes its title, bad guy Bill McGill, newly arrived back in town, goes up the hotel stairs. In the next panel, he knocks on a door. In the third panel we see a woman standing in the open doorway. In the fourth, she says, “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Another example: In the upper-left panel, the sheriff leaves his office. In panel two, he’s walking along the street. The third panel has him going through a doorway, his back to us. The fourth panel shows him standing still, arms at his side, silently facing a chess set — his inescapable destiny in his upcoming confrontation with Bill McGill.

For a faster-moving narrative, the artist could have used only panels two and four in both these examples. We’d still understand what’s going on, filling in the blanks with our imaginations. But Jason’s tight control of that speed tells us he’s building to something.

Read my earlier post on this book here.

The Quitter

2010-07-13T17:29:00.006-04:00

Graphic novel and comic book writer Harvey Pekar died yesterday at the age of 70. His persona probably wouldn’t have allowed him to admit much of anything good ever happened to him.

The final panel of 2005’s The Quitter, illustrated by Dean Haspiel, shows the worried author, in tight closeup and looking directly at us: “I’ve always dreamed of being able to relax and feel trouble-free for long stretches of time. I’m 65 now. Will it ever happen?”

But good things did happen.

One the most fortuitous events would have to be his becoming friends with Robert Crumb, who encouraged Pekar’s comics writing and who lent his own mastery to illustrate some of the Clevelander’s work.

Pekar’s first collection, American Splendor, won the American Book Award in 1987. A few years later the book was made into a sad, charming and intelligent movie starring Paul Giamatti, as Pekar, and Hope Davis, as his wife Joyce Brabner.

His graphic novel, Our Cancer Year, won the Harvey Award in 1994.

Add to that the large number of readers, fans and would-be comics writers he inspired.

Low Moon, Part 1

2010-07-10T15:18:00.003-04:00

While Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s stories are unremittingly downbeat, he certainly manages to evoke sympathy with his blank-eyed (think Little Orphan Annie), stringbean-like dog and duck characters.

In Low Moon, two of his stories come straight from the movies, tales of men with their backs to the wall. “Low Moon” retells High Noon, except with a chess showdown instead of gunfire, and “Proto Film Noir,” though it starts out with cavemen … or cave-dogs, I guess … becomes The Postman Always Rings Twice — except in this case the postman rings seven times.

(Yes, I know. I’ve intentionally misunderstood the meaning of the title of James M. Cain’s novel. I did it for the joke.)

But he leavens his tales with smart asides. In the title story, a deputy and a bartender — coffee drinks only, no alcohol — pass the time by naming the stars of The Magnificent Seven. (They get stuck and the sheriff has to supply the last name, Horst Buchholz.)

More in next post ….

Shortcomings, Part 2

2010-07-08T10:57:00.005-04:00

Adrian Tomine’s black-and-white illustrations in Shortcomings at times seem static … and I think that’s to a purpose.

Look at the protagonist’s girlfriend, Miko Hayaski, on page 19, after she and Ben have had another in what likely has been a series of low-grade disappointments (not quite at the energy level of an argument) throughout their relationship. She leans against the wall, in her underwear, and asks Ben if he wants to go to bed. The space behind her — presumably their bedroom — is in complete darkness.

He replies he’s not tired. She smiles, and says, “Well, we don’t have to go to sleep right away.” She looks soft and vulnerable, but willing. Her meaning is abundantly clear.

Still Ben declines, contending weakly he has some newly arrived DVDs to watch.

The next panel shows Miko, dark hair, white T-shirt, against a blank white wall. She’s frowning, shoulders now slumped, defeated, and we can’t really tell if she’s looking at Ben or at the floor. Not that it matters now.

In the next panel, she’s turned away, walking back into the bedroom, alone. Back into the darkness.

Read my first post on this book here.

Shortcomings, Part 1

2010-07-06T13:39:00.003-04:00

I got so caught up in the angst of Ben Tanaka, the cranky protagonist of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings, a collection of 2004-2007 stories from his comic book, Optic Nerve, I missed the big clue — even though Ben himself didn’t.

He sees a series of artsy photos of his girlfriend, who’s allegedly been on an internship in New York City for the past few months. He doesn’t announce he knows the pictures were taken back in California — that is to say, before Miko arrived in New York, and therefore her relationship with the photographer began then, too — until the book’s climax.

And I thought, wait, how did he figure that …? Then he tells her, and us. So I flipped back a couple chapters. Then another. And I saw it, too.

Then I realized the clue also is all over the book’s cover, front and back.

Very clever.

Neil Gaiman

2010-07-04T18:11:00.005-04:00

An amazing confluence: Neil Gaiman announced he’s completed his Doctor Who TV script — an award-winning comic-book, short-story and children’s-book writer (top prizes from both this country and Britain) penning a story for my all-time favorite TV show.

You can see Gaiman talk about The Graveyard Book, his love for the horror in the comic books he read as a child, and how he doesn’t worry about about being taken seriously as a writer here, on the BBC site.

George Sprott 1894-1975

2010-06-30T09:59:00.005-04:00

I'll make certain to keep this blog from turning into a Seth fan page. But his evocative stuff continues to amaze me.

For example, toward the end of his 2009 book, George Sprott 1894-1975, the biography of an Ontario television personality, amateur Arctic explorer, lecturer and overall heel, parts of which ran in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the narrator speculates on Sprott’s afterlife. Is he now a ghost hovering near the woods where he played as a child? Out on the tundra having more adventures? By the bar, in the now-defunct Melody Grill, where he drank his dinner for years?

In the 25 tight panels containing the text for this one-page chapter, the artist shows us angles of downtown buildings at night — office windows, a large clock, awnings, a streetlamp, a full moon. But as we pull back and view the page as a whole, we realize they’re not separate images. The two dozen-plus squares form one scene, one image, of the city bathed in moonlight and adorned with a clear night’s stars.

We need to see the big picture. Just as the artist is telling us we must view George Sprott’s life, not in snippets, but as a complete story.

This also might be Sprott’s view from his own office, the white lines holding the panels representing his window panes, and where he sits alone in the dark, late at night.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 13, Part 3

2010-06-25T21:13:00.005-04:00

Though Viz Media has been releasing the Battle Angel Alita and the Battle Angel Alita: Last Order series in a tiny format, Yukito Kishiro has managed to cram true art into those small boxes.

In fact, his art work can be magnificent. I always think of that drawing of Alita on top a Space Needle-like building, overlooking the Scrapyard below — an image writer-director James Cameron copied for his “Dark Angel” TV program.

In the most recent edition of Last Order, Kishiro lays out one of his most shocking scenes. In the first chapter of volume 13, we are shown the bestial Homme du Feu, as he tries to sort out his feelings for the gorgeous Olympe, his combat instructor and the only creature who’s ever shown him kindness. As the panels progress, and he recounts “a desire that was my torment,” the boxes themselves become angular, the type grows larger.

… Then a two-page tableau of surprising horror. I’ve been reading Kishiro for years, and I did not see this coming:

The giant crushing paw anchoring the right foreground, the small piercing white pupil-less eyes in the upper left, the dagger teeth and the destruction brought down on Olympe.

And then things get even worse.

Kishiro can turn scenes of mad violence into beauty. And does, often. It’s a rare and powerful skill.

See my earlier posts on volume 13 here and here.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 13, Part 2

2010-06-22T10:18:00.005-04:00

I noted in part 1 of my posts on Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 13 that the main character, Alita, doesn’t turn up until near the end of this book, and then merely for a few panels. She’s only an observer here.

But Yukito Kishiro’s years-long series often takes side trips, exploring some incidental character’s at first seemingly minor backstory. As we follow these offshoots, we see how they affect the main plot, or enrich our understanding of why the people in Kishiro’s morality tales act as they do. In all cases, they enhance our appreciation for the cartoonist’s skills as storyteller and artist … and of humanity itself.

In the “Last Order” series, he’s told of an angry teen who became a killer; of a one-time space hero, worshipped by many, who becomes a dictator; of a nursery school and its sponsorship of a team of karate warriors; of a vampire who fought to save the human race and support King Arthur … and later do battle with Alita.

Indeed, the whole “Last Order” storyline is a branch from Kishiro’s original Battle Angel Alita series. He completed that series, moved on to another, light-hearted title, Aqua Knight. But then he returned to Battle Angel Angel. Starting from approximately four-fifths of the way along in that original story, he began a whole new track. (Which means, yes, he’s changed the happy, hopeful ending in the initial Battle Angel Alita storyline. Things have turned darker, for now. I imagine, though, James Cameron will come up with his own Alita story.)

My next post will rave once again about Kishiro’s art. See my earlier post here, which has links to previous columns about these books.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 13, Part 1

2010-06-19T18:10:00.006-04:00

I’m just going to say this up front and be done with it: After Viz Media made us wait eight months for this latest installment of Yukito Kishiro’s Gunnm series — a decade after its publication in Japan, according to the copyright page — the main character appears in only a handful of panels. And then only to be seen munching on a fish. (Yes, yes, the title of this edition is “Sans Angel,” so that’s a large clue she’s not going to be making much of an appearance. But still.)

But even without her, there’s still Kishiro’s skill as a storyteller (and of course as an artist). He’s told of other star-crossed lovers — notably Gally, as the series’ protagonist is known in the rest of the world, and Hugo (Yugo). But he pulls it off again, with a fatal, too-passionate-for-life twist. It’s giving little away to mention “Sans Angel’s” key actor, Homme du Feu, a genetically engineered warrior-werewolf monster directed by the military industrial complex of Kishiro’s dense worlds, is unsure if he wants to eat his Farrah Fawcett-like combat instructor or make love to her.

As with so many of the great Battle Angel Alita love stories, this one is heart-breakingly sad, absurdly funny, repulsive, tragic and ultimately noble.

More on this book. See my earlier posts on this series here (the story of volume 12), here (the art of volume 12) and here (on Viz’s agonizing release schedule).
My first post on the Battle Angel Alita: Last Order/Gunnm books can be seen here: Reading this will help explain a lot in Kirshiro’s superb, dense, unparalleled series.

Troublemaker

2010-06-16T16:18:00.006-04:00

Today’s edition of USA Today gives a full-page plug to the graphic novel Troublemaker, to be released July 20 and written by Janet Evanovich and her daughter, Alex. Some three-quarters of the page is taken up with a reproduction of a page from the book.

The illustrator, Joelle Jones, gets a one-sentence mention, about halfway into the story.

Jones’s is known for her exemplary art work on Spell Checkers, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her and You Have Killed Me, among other graphic novels. To be associated with Evanovich’s big-selling Alex Barnaby series, which include Metro Girl and Motor Mouth, is not a bad thing.

But, geez, one sentence?

Toward the end of the USA Today story, Alex Evanovich says, “I don’t think the medium (graphic novels) gets nearly as much credit as it deserves. It’s not an easy job.”

Yeah. And maybe she praised Jones’s work on Troublemaker until the cats came home, and it just didn’t make the final story. We’d like to think she would encourage the national media to spread credit when the opportunity arises.

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Part 2

2010-06-13T12:47:00.007-04:00

The way Seth works his magic is with silence. It’s how he controls pacing. Here’s an example, from pages 123 through 128 of the paperback edition of his first book, It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken:

As Seth and his friend Chet walk along a Toronto street, he bemoans his most recent breakup with a girlfriend, Ruthie. Seth and Chet stop at a tall building, which Seth notes looks “pretty … against the night sky.” In the next panel, we see the building, set against the stars.

“There’s something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative sadness for the vanished past,” Seth says, and proceeds to ruminate on the value of lost things, on the quality of old things well made. He speculates his continuing search to track down a one-hit-wonder New Yorker cartoonist, Kalo, might be in vain and pointless.

We’re shown the building again. In the next panel, we see stars in an otherwise barren sky. Then a wider panel of other city buildings.

Next, with no fanfare, a flashback, across a two-page spread: Seth breaking up with Ruthie, and not doing it well. “You’ll regret this later,” she promises, unsmiling. “Trust me.”

Then, present day, as Seth sits in his apartment petting his cat. We see his rotary-dial telephone next to an opened phone book. Then he dials, and waits. He asks for the number of real estate office in Strathroy, another step in his quest to find Kalo.

Then a wide panel across the bottom of the page, showing that building again, and with the other buildings around it, at night.

This reminds me of what movie director Michelangelo Antonioni did in his famous trilogy from the early 1960s. Watch Jeanne Moreau walking around near the beginning of La Notte — the scene continues for long minutes, without dialog, as she and the camera look up at buildings, along empty streets, the heels of her shoes echoing. Silence and thought.

Later, on page 134’s final two panels, Seth tells us, “… It was crazy to think I could find Kalo. Only now, after studying tons of old magazines, can I see that there are literally hundreds of obscure cartoonists — any of whom could have sold, through a stroke of luck, a lone gag to The New Yorker.” (He does keep searching.)

Those panels show us a long shot of small, dark houses, few lights on in their tiny windows, peeked at through tree branches and illuminated only by moonlight. Silence and thought.

See my earlier post on this book here.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order Vol. 13

2010-06-11T11:12:00.009-04:00

Viz Media finally — finally — has released the next installment in the Battle Angel Alita: Last Order series (known as Gunnm in the rest of the world). The last English-language edition, volume 12, came out in October 2009; volume 13 won’t be published until January 2011.

The delays on this book are outrageous. There’s such a lengthy gap between editions of this continuing storyline I frankly can’t recall what the heck is going on. And that’s sad as Yukito Kishiro’s years-long tale of cyborgs, sports, class struggle and outer-space mayhem has been pretty great. The art, in addition, is superb. (See my very first post on Gunnm here.)

When I asked a Viz representative at the American Library Association conference in Chicago last summer about these massive release gaps, he hesitated, then offered that Viz was current with publication of the story’s serialization in Japan.

I really think he was guessing.

See my posts here on volume 12’s story and here on the art. To come: a review of volume 13 — after I go back to reread volumes 11 and 12. Grrr ….

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 3

2010-06-09T11:44:00.005-04:00

If there’s a drawback to Fantagraphic Books’s remarkable volume one of Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, containing strips from 1933 through 1935, it would have to be Crane’s attitude toward what his characters invariably deem “savages.”

As with the Tintin books, read today we wince at the many superstitious, easily fooled and easily frightened island and jungle natives depicted in Captain Easy.

What also strikes me as equally as troubling is the wholesale slaughter of animals. Lots of animals. Pigs, cows, small dogs, horses and donkeys, fish, tigers and elephants are speared, shot and mutilated in almost every installment. Particularly pigs, for some reason. I don’t know what Crane had against pigs.

It’s especially problematic, it seems to me, because Crane also populates his strip with an abundance of smiling, cute creatures. More often than not, if we see a cow, donkey or a dog, it’s looking amused by the goings-on or sticking out its tongue in contentment.

But not for long ….

See my earlier, highly laudatory posts on this otherwise valuable book here, here and here. And you can get your hands on a copy by clicking on the cover’s image at the upper left of this post.

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Part 1

2010-06-07T18:15:00.006-04:00

It’s that comma in the title, don’t you see? It’s grammatically unnecessary, but it’s inclusion seems to hearken to an older, by-gone time. Which is a key theme in Seth’s marvelous It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, a collection of stories from his Palookaville comic books.

Much of this semi-autobiographical tale follows the always-melancholic cartoonist as he visits his mother (to whom the title is attributed, as an often-spoken comment) and brother, rides trains, wonders about past girl friends, borrows money, walks a lot thinking deep thoughts about old cartoons and Canada, and, mostly, tries to track down information about a deceased cartoonist who worked in the 1940s and ’50s under the name of Kalo.

The great conceit about the book is Kalo is fictional — even though Seth has included not only samples of the cartoonist’s work culled from during his supposed rise and fall, from magazines as varied as The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and Gee-Whiz, as well as an actual 1940s-era photo of the artist leaning against a building somewhere in Manhattan.

All of which gives Seth, as a working cartoonist himself, much to contemplate: How do we know when we’re at our peak? And how to we handle what comes later?

More to come.

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 2

2010-06-05T15:49:00.006-04:00

I don’t know for a fact that the great Hugo Pratt ever saw Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs or Captain Easy from the 1930s and early ’40s, let alone do I have any idea what he might have thought of those newspaper strips.

Pratt did greatly admire, and even outright emulate, Milton Caniff’s trend-setting Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, particularly in the use of chiaroscuro. (The two corresponded with each other, their careers overlapping.)

But looking over Fantagraphic Books’s wonderful new book, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, volume one, I have to say Pratt’s mature work for his own adventure strips looks a lot more like Easy and less like Terry.

For one thing, both Crane’s Easy and Pratt’s Corto Maltese were self-proclaimed “soldiers of fortune” — though Easy, a pilot, seemed always to place his hunt for loot ahead of his occasional heart of gold, while with Corto, a sailor, it was the other way around. That could be a sign of their times: Corto, whose tales were written from 1967 and into the late ’80s, was a child of the ’60s, and Easy a product of the Great Depression.

In terms of their art, Crane and Pratt could draw anything, and tapped their own real-life experiences for their exotic locales. But Crane’s characters as well as Pratt’s in his later work (from, say, 1980 on, becoming especially noticeable in The Golden House of Samarkand) had a cartoony style.

That look kept the adventures less grim and more … well, adventurous, as Easy and Corto fought desperate villains and powerful warlords around the world.

Oh, and the women? Always alluring. Real “bons bons,” as Wash Tubbs, Easy’s pal, often remarked. They sulked, they vamped, they carried guns. Even the ones with hearts of stone.

More to come. See my earlier posts on this book here and here.

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 1

2010-06-02T18:41:00.006-04:00

Roy Crane invented the adventure comic strip with Wash Tubbs. With Wash’s buddy, Captain Easy, he perfected it.

Volume one of Fantagraphic Books’s new collection, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, covers 1933-1935, and, wow, is Easy busy.

In the April 8, 1934, strip for example — the image area in the colorful Fantagraphics book is nine and a half by 12 and three-quarters inches, to replicate the original Sunday page — our hero hurls his out-of-ammo machine gun at a boat of blood-thirsty pirates, knocking them all overboard; sword fights with another boat full of angry pirates; falls into the sea; swims under a third boat and tips it over; then scrambles back on shore to do battle with yet another pirate, who’s captured the winsome Rose Petal — all in one day’s installment.

“Ha-ya,” Easy yells as he does battle. “Look! Look! Take that, you buzzards!”

Make no mistake. This is great stuff. (Volume two is expected in November.)

More to come.

In the Floyd Archives

2010-05-29T15:29:00.005-04:00

In a college lit class a number of years ago, I got into a semi-serious debate with the instructor as to whether T.S. Eliot’s footnotes for The Waste Land should count as part of the poem. I contended as the notes were published with the work, by Eliot, they should stand as belonging to the poem.

I recalled that argument when reading New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer’s In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary. Her notes at the end of the book not only explain much of her characters’ dialog, their conversations make little sense without these explanations.

Boxer’s Thurber-like-roughly-sketched rabbit, wolf and rat each consult a bird psychiatrist, who doesn’t seem to understand when they speak plain English.

“I’m being chased by a wolf,” a frightened Rabbitman tells Dr. Floyd.

“So,” replies the bird, “you think you’re being ‘chased’?” After Rabbitman leaves Floyd’s office, a wolf comes in. And so on. Much of the story seems to be a series Freudian in-jokes.

The real question is whether reading the notes, too, actually makes In the Floyd Archives any more enjoyable.

Maybe that just would be wish fulfillment.

Breakdowns

2010-05-25T08:40:00.005-04:00

Here’s a potential lesson for those of us who become discouraged after we find what we thought was a great inspiration is really not so great: Art Spiegelman in Breadowns, a reprinting of his partially autobiographical 1978 collection, tells how he got excited about a story of blacks in America depicted as mice and the Ku Klux Klan as cats. He was going to call it “Ku Klux Kats.”

He quickly realized he knew “bupkis about being black in America. Bupkis.”

Spiegelman of course later adapted the idea to Jews and Nazis, for his Pulitzer-Prize-winning work of genius, Maus.

But you have to admit, Ku Klux Kats is funny, though maybe not in the way he intended ….

Mark Crilley

2010-05-23T12:49:00.007-04:00

Just as with studying art, when hunting for story ideas it’s best to go to the Masters, advised Mark Crilley, author of the popular graphic novel series for young people, Miki Falls and Akiko.

When he wanted to create his first book, he thought about The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — all tales of young people escaping into a fantasy land, he pointed out during his presentation this past Thursday at the Kalamazoo Public Library in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

A graduate of Kalamazoo College and a student of Caldecott winner and National Book Award and Eisner Award finalist David Small (Stitches), Crilley also emphasized “thinking long and hard about the personalities” of your characters. For Spuckler in the Akiko series, for example, he came up with four points: wild, tough, friendly and “not too smart.” To reinforce that personality, he developed a specific voice for each character — “Then you’ll know what your character will and won’t say.”

Readers, he contended, can hear that voice — and therefore the personality — in the words the characters use.

During the Q&A, Crilley discussed color (“I’m a fan of a limited color palette”), layout (“Let the story lead you”) and scale — he draws his originals only slightly larger than how they’ll appear when printed. “I want to see it as it’ll look once it’s published. (Besides), I save paper that way,” he smiled.

As for which type of paper or drawing tool to use — pencil, Micron pen, pastels, acrylic paint — Crilley advised, “It’s not the paper, it’s not the pen …. It’s your eyes.”

Good-bye to ‘Little Orphan Annie’: From Great Depression to Great Recession

2010-05-19T12:38:00.003-04:00

“Daddy” and Asp slain! Cut down in a vicious battle!

But the mysterious giant, Punjab, finds their bodies, rescues them! He brings them back to life!

Though surely the local newspaper we received when I was a child carried Little Orphan Annie, I don’t remember it. (And I read every strip, from the top of the newspaper page to the bottom.)

What I do recall was reading Annie’s adventures from the 1940s, collected in a battered Big Little Book I discovered at grandparents’ house. (How they came by it I only can guess: My grandfather read racy crime novels, and my grandmother wrote what we’d now call romance fiction.)

The stories in that tiny book — with text on the left page and Harold Gray’s art on the facing page — certainly were more interesting than Annie’s goings-on by the 1960s, what I would have seen in the local paper. They definitely were scarier, and I don’t just mean Gray’s bleak, sinister drawings packed with deep shadows and malevolent, gloating bad guys.

Take a look through the reprinted Annie collections from the 1930s and ’40s. In one story, from 1937, the Asp throws an obviously terrified baby pig into the open jaws of an immense alligator … just to make a point to Annie to be careful. And many, many times abandoned, slip-of-a-girl Annie is separated from her dog and “Daddy” Warbucks, and is smacked and hit, tied up and trapped. The only reason people today must recall Annie as optimistic is because they’re confused with that musical. (“The sun’ll come out ta-marraw,” etc.)

Sure, Annie the protagonist hoped for the best. But as a strip from March 1936 reminds us, “she walks alone.” And “it’s just as well to keep an eye on ‘smart’ men” as our valuable possessions tend to go missing when they’re around (August 1939). And “Success is only for the few who can ignore the jeers of the mass (sic)” (April 1936).

And then there was Sandy, with the body of a wolf and the leering skull of a person. Creepy.

Doesn’t sound all that cheery, does it? But Gray was a master, in story and art, of atmosphere (even if his anti-New Deal sentiments could be jarring). Jay Maeder and Ted Slampyak’s current colorful version of Annie has tried to carry on, but the era of the adventure strip apparently has passed. Today’s newspaper readers, the few that remain, only have the attention span for a quick, faint joke, then are gone.

Or so we’re told by the newspaper editors who make the selections.

As someone who grew up in love with those adventure strips, I say that’s too bad for all of us.

Eisner/Miller, Part 3

2010-05-17T12:56:00.005-04:00

In Eisner/Miller, Charles Brownstein’s joint interviews with Will Eisner and Frank Miller, the cartoonists note that many of their predecessors considered themselves entertainers. It wasn’t until the current generation that comic book writers and illustrators — Miller, Chris Ware, Seth, the Hernandez Brothers, et al. — started to think of themselves as artists.

As the form began to be contemplated as art, I guess, that made the practitioners artists.

Early on in the book, Eisner talks about how he did his own lettering for Contract With God — all of it — and Miller suggests that “was really a departure.”

“I was more mature” by then, Eisner replies, “and I had something to say.”

“You got to us. We started regarding ourselves as novelists. It’s as if you said ‘These’ll be permanent.’”

And thus was born the graphic novel and graphic novelists. Let there be light.

See my earlier posts on Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview here and here.

Eisner/Miller, Part 2

2010-05-13T16:32:00.006-04:00

Eisner/Miller is a lot like Francois Truffaut’s famous 1967 book, Hitchcock, in which the two brilliant directors discuss everything from acting to camera angles. (Cameron Crowe tried to imitate that remarkable conversation in his 2001 book of interviews with Billy Wilder called, of all things, Conversations With Wilder.)

In Charles Brownstein’s insightful interviews, the two successful writer-illustrators range freely over the comic book landscape:

“To me, inking is sexy,” Will Eisner muses. “… It’s like downhill skiing.”

“Especially brush (sic),” Frank Miller adds. “… The brush is the most erotic tool you could work with. … It’s like alchemy.”

But, speaking of sexy, they never get around to what I’ve long wondered about: How the heck are you supposed to pronounce the name of P’Gell, the Spirit’s famous femme fatale? Pah-Gell? Pig-El? Pah-Jill? Or maybe like Place Pigalle in Paris, where late-19th century artists trolled for models? Je ne sais pas.

More to come: Eisner and Miller talk about the invention by you-know-who of the graphic novel. Find your way to my earlier post on this book by clicking here.

Eisner/Miller, Part 1

2010-05-11T18:51:00.009-04:00

Last week CBS re-ran the Big Bang Theory episode featuring the gang meeting Stan Lee. The Marvel exec has a cameo toward the end of the story.

But the best touch, I think, occurred when one of the protagonists had to appear in traffic court, rather than going to the comic book store where Lee was signing books. The camera lingered on the judge’s nameplate long enough for us to get the point — his name was “Judge J. Kirby.”

I remembered this in-joke when I was reading Charles Brownstein’s Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview. Amidst the discussions of problematic dialog balloons and color headaches, Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit and the graphic novel itself, among other things, notes in the section called “Talking Out of School” that he’s “delighted to see at long last that (Steve) Ditko’s getting credit …” for co-creating Spider-Man.

Frank Miller, author and artist of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, points out Lee wrote a New York Times article that finally gave tribute to the reclusive Ditko. Miller adds that Jack Kirby, too, was never “as exposed as Stan Lee was.”

The reason? Miller suggests “writers are often the ones who talk history the best. People who draw for a living tend to have less free time … and artists tend to be less articulate.”

Excelsior.

More on this book to come.

Fred the Clown

2010-05-08T13:13:00.004-04:00

Several of the chapters in Roger Langridge’s “10 Steps to Happiness,” in his 2004 Fred the Clown book, are hysterical — particularly “Alphabet,” going from Fred the Amorous to Fred the Zoophyte (Langridge loves his word play); “Where the Smart Things Ain’t,” his play on Where the Wild Things Are with giant Pogo characters in pursuit of the protagonist; and especially “The Shoulders of Giants,” with its nod to Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd, et al.

This last story in particular has a plot and a message rather than just another custard pie and a good gag.

Also attesting to Langridge’s talent are his variations on Peanuts, Garfield, Family Circus, The Phantom, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, the Yellow Kid, Krazy Kat, Blondie, the Hulk … and even Shakespeare. His brilliant essay on the Fred the Clown comic strip, by comics historian “Helvetica Darwin,” demonstrates his knowledge of newspaper strip legacy. (And it carries a laugh-out-loud final punchline.)

And I was delighted to see his inside reference to Doctor Who.

On the other hand, there’s a wide streak of truly unfunny incontinence jokes — no pun intended — that’s hard to ignore.

But maybe not all the stories are intended to play well with others. They bring a laugh, a pie in the face … and occasionally some really dumb, infantile jokes. Just like the socially troubled Fred himself.

Splat.

Mouse Guard

2010-05-05T14:55:00.006-04:00

Also handed out on Free Comic Book Day this past Saturday was a sampling from David Petersen’s Mouse Guard Spring 1153, featuring the artist’s usual stunning and cute — yes, both stunning and cute at the same time — depiction of medieval warrior mice, rabbits and other woodland creatures.

The publication carried a promo for two upcoming Mouse Guard books — Mouse Guard: The Black Axe (starting with a September date) and Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard (beginning in May). For the latter, it noted “Mouse Guard creator David Petersen handpicks a who’s who of artists and writers to come and play in his world, including Jeremy Bastian, Alex Sheikman, Ted Naifeh, Gene Ha, Sean Rubin, Guy Davis, Terry Moore and Mark Smylie!”

Which means Legends won’t have any of that stunning/cute art of Petersen’s. Maybe this was to give Petersen time to work on Black Axe.

But in any case, and no disrespect to the other guest illustrators, is that a good thing?

Magnus, Robot Fighter

2010-05-03T11:11:00.005-04:00

Among the samples given out on Free Comic Book Day this past Saturday was a preview combination edition of Magnus, Robot Fighter and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, with release dates of Aug. 04 and July 14 respectively.

The connection between the two comics, aside from both using commas in their titles, is they initially were owned by Gold Key Comics. The relaunches are from Dark Horse Comics, and the previews were written by Jim Shooter.

I recall adoring the art of the original 1960s Magnus, by Russ Manning. (I wasn’t the only admirer, of course, as there’s a Russ Manning Most-Promising Newcomer Award given out as part of the Will Eisner Awards.) His characters posed with the handsome grace of Grecian gods; when they moved — to run or to punch or karate-chop evil robots — he drew them as if they were statues, carved in the act of their heroic deeds (not dissimilar to Greg Land’s technique, though Land’s characters appear as if they’re cheerily posing for Rolling Stone covers).

Russ Manning’s Magnus, Robot Fighter is available in collected editions.

The Magnus preview given out on Free Comic Book Day was illustrated by Bill Reinhold. His robot fighters aren’t from the same polished school as Manning’s. But they do seem to move around a lot more.

Paris Under Water

2010-04-30T11:57:00.007-04:00

OK, maybe this falls under the heading of shameless promotion, but here goes anyway.

Details for some of the background for the current storyline in my online comic strip, Slipped, came from two books — a little from Andrew Hussey’s highly entertaining 2006 book, Paris: A Secret History (Bloomsbury USA), which I’ve been reading on and off since it came out, but even more from Jeffrey H. Jackson’s new book, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).

Jackson’s book includes almost a score of entrancing photos taken during the flood, as well as a timeline that stretches from the “higher than usual” rainfall noted in the summer of 1909; through the explosion of a vinegar factory in the Ivry suburb on Jan. 25, 1910, after invading water sloshed together volatile chemicals; to the Seine’s receding to normal levels by March.

The author also provides insight into Prefect of Police Louis Lépine — the hero of the hour.

But here comes my confession: I introduced the character of Lépine in Slipped before I was able to get my hands on a copy of Paris Under Water. I’d read a bit about him in a New York Times review of the book, enough to admire Lépine’s efforts to save his city — and about his ever-present bowler.

What I didn’t learn until I started to read the actual book this week was how: a.) I got his personality pretty dead-on — a successful leader in such a crisis almost certainly would have to be unyielding, fierce (Jackson’s words) and tough; and b.) I got his looks exactly wrong (except for the hat, of course).

“Lépine was a small, wiry man, with a large forehead, steely eyes and stern gaze. A thick mustache and goatee framed his pursed lips,” Jackson writes. My Lépine is tall, possesses not much of a forehead to speak of and wears a bristled mustache, a la Mutt and Jeff. Maybe I’ll have him grow a beard as the story develops.

Now, my excuse for not waiting for more details concerning Monsieur Lépine is this. My characters hijacked control of the Slipped storyline about two months after I started the comic strip in 2008, and when we got to the Paris flood a few weeks ago, they were in a hurry.

As the Scarlet Sparrow and her traveling companions arrive in 1910 — actually their out-of-control giant spider-like tank drops them into the Seine — in Chapter 97, panel 4, a small boat can be seen on the horizon. As it paddles closer in succeeding panels and chapters, and unbeknownst to me, it’s revealed that boat carries Lépine and his (fictitious) assistant, Inspector Pomme de Terre.

And, by golly, that is what this Lépine looks like — a bowler, yes, but no goatee.

Comic-Con Tug of War

2010-04-29T13:58:00.007-04:00

In response to Los Angeles’s and Anaheim’s attempts to lure Comic-Com International away from San Diego, that city’s officials are proposing it’ll offer $500,000 in hotel tax revenue to help defray convention organizers’ costs.

You can read about it here on Michael Cavna’s Comic Riffs blog on the Washington Post site, or here at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Who would have thought this day would come, when big municipalities would squabble over some event about comic books — those evil things our parents tried to get us to stop wasting our time and eyesight reading?

Yes, I know the annual four-day event is about more than comic books. It’s about promotion for the host city, tourism, movie and TV show publicity, hotel-room occupancy, restaurants, taxis and buses …. That is to say, money.

P.S. The San Diego newspaper reports single-day and four-day tickets for this summer’s event are already sold out.

In the Studio, Part 3

2010-04-28T09:25:00.007-04:00

Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists puts me in mind of Ron Goulart’s valuable 1975 book, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. As Hignite picks the creative brains of today’s cartoonists at the top of their game — Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns and Gary Panter — Goulart tracked down writers and artists who launched a new approach to newspaper strips.

Goulart talked to — or found professionals who had worked with those who’d since died or vanished into obscurity — Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), John Dille and Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers), Hal Foster (Tarzan), Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka), Will Eisner (The Spirit) and many more. It’s chockablock with discussion of technique, inspiration and opinion, and you still can find copies in hardback and paperback.

The Adventurous Decade, in turn, makes me think of — hold on, this isn’t too much of a stretch — Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Born in 1511, Vasari studied painting under, and became friends with, Michelangelo in Florence. The Michelangelo.

As time went on, he gathered notes on other Florentine artists, which he published, in two editions, in 1550 and 1568, to much acclaim. (Influential ArtNews magazine has long called its briefs section “Vasari’s Diary.”)

Vasari’s subjects included, along with his pal Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Fra Filippo Lippi, among others.

All three books serve as receptacles of great artists musing on great work — theirs, their contemporaries and their predecessors.

Read my earlier posts on In the Studio here and here.

In the Studio, Part 2

2010-04-26T14:41:00.006-04:00

I hadn’t thought of that before.

In his interview in Todd Hignite’s fascinating In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists, Chris Ware shows the work of Japanese cartoonist Suiho Tagawa, “my fourth-favorite cartoonist who’s no longer alive.” Tagawa in the 1930s produced big, wide-open-vista colorful pictures that depicted multiple characters in myriad scenarios — all in one image.

“This,” Ware contends, “is the course comics should’ve taken before they got sidetracked and transformed by the language of cinema in the 1930s.

“As near as I can tell, the Japanese understanding of art is almost a sort of simultaneous reading and seeing, where ours is purely seeing ….”

I hadn’t considered the notion of cartoons having been hijacked at some stage by a movie-form — i.e., a sequential form, with dramatic camera-like angles — of storytelling. (My guess is Ware would name as the chief culprit Milton Caniff, who made the most of a cinematic look with his popular Terry and the Pirates.)

And I hadn’t ever thought about that being wrong.

See my earlier post on this book here.

And you can see Ware display his Gasoline Alley collection in a video interview by Chicago NPR radio station WBEZ here. (I always meant to try to finagle a visit to Ware’s house when I also lived in Oak Park, but it never happened.)

More on In the Studio to come.

In the Studio, Part 1

2010-04-22T15:12:00.008-04:00

One of the best things about In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is how the likes of R. Crumb, Jaime Hernandez and Seth tell you what and who their influences were and what struck them about those earlier works, then — bam — you can see a sample of that inspiration juxtaposed with the work of the artist.

Crumb, for example, waxes on about the strong crosshatching used by 19th century newspaper illustrator Thomas Nast (the guy who drew the image of how we’ve come to see Santa Claus, among other achievements), and there’s a sample of a Nast 1879 Harper’s Weekly magazine cover on page 19. On page 20 are two black-and-white pieces by Crumb, and we can see for our own eyes how Crumb took the cue.

Hernandez mentions a 1952 cover for the comic book Canteen Kate he especially liked, drawn by Matt Baker. It’s reproduced on page 142, showing a closeup of smiling, plucky Kate herself, hair tussled. On the previous page is Hernandez’s own 1986 Love and Rockets number 15 cover, depicting an equally close image of Rena, one his characters. She, too, is joyful and her hair is even more mussed.

Seth cites illustrator Doug Wright — in particular Wright’s choice of “beautifully evocative” color — who worked from 1948 to 1980. Chris Ware acclaims Frank King’s “masterpiece” Gasoline Alley, deeming that newspaper strip “a 50-year-long comic strip novel that captures and distills the ineffable passage of time through the regular touch of an artist’s pen to paper.” Everyone familiar with Ware’s own books knows of his consuming interest in measuring that “passage of time.”

More to come ….

Stitches Nominated for Eisner

2010-04-20T14:41:00.008-04:00

David Small’s Stitches has been nominated for a 2010 Will Eisner Award, for best reality-based work.

You can see the list of nominees here, on the Graphic Novel Reporter site. My post on Small’s presentation in Michigan last autumn can be read here.

Other 2010 Eisner Award nominees on whom I’ve written recent posts include:

• The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, in the best publication for children category and in the best archival collection/project-comic books category

• Bill Willingham’s Fables in the best-continuing series category and Willingham himself for best writer

• Incognito, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, in the best limited series or story arc category.

Essential Guide to World Comics

2010-04-14T15:10:00.009-04:00

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks’s The Essential Guide to World Comics is a colorful, entertaining book into which to dip, packed with both facts and gossipy tidbits. And even though their introduction specifies this is “a guide and not a definitive encyclopedia of every title, every publisher and everyone who has ever worked on comics,” they still pretty much check off all the big names from around the globe — Osamu Tezuka of Japan (Tetsuwan-Atom), Hergé of Belgium, Hugo Pratt from Italy and bunches of other places, Jack Kirby from America, Dez Skinn the English editor and publisher, Jacques Tardi, Moebius and André Franquin (the Marsupilami, among others) of France, Jason of Norway ….

Also, decent time is spent on parts of the world whose comics many of us know little about, including India, Egypt, South Korea and the Philippines.

I do have a few minor concerns with this Essential Guide, though. Surely Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez deserve more than a one-sentence reference, given their influence.

And this simply seems odd: In the U.S. chapter, the authors write about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; then Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb and other underground cartoonists; then Joe Sacco; then about Dark Horse Comics, followed by Neil Gaiman; then Dave Sim and Cerebus the Aardvark; then Spiegelman again and RAW; then Todd McFarlane and that gang; then Harvey Kurtzman, creator of MAD magazine; and ending with Will Eisner. What sort of order this? It doesn’t present a thematic progression, and it certainly is not chronological …. If you figure out what it is, leave a comment or send me an e-mail, please, because I don’t get it.

Of course, the one thing we really want from a reference guide, even if isn’t “an encyclopedia,” is accuracy. When mentioning Casterman Publishing’s marvelous À Suivre magazine, Pilcher and Brooks state it ran for 25 years, from 1978 to 1987. (À Suivre folded in 1997.)

Now, this could be the only error — surely a typo — in the entire book. But how do we know?

Dick Giordano

2010-04-12T14:09:00.003-04:00

Dick Giordano, longtime comic book editor and inker, died March 27 at age 77 from leukemia complications. If you don’t know the name, you should. He was one of the major forces behind the so-called Silver Age of comics.

Here are a few reasons why he should be remembered:

• As an editor at DC Comics, he oversaw the Watchmen (characters who first saw life as the Blue Beetle, the Question, the Peacemaker, et al., under his guidance when he was editor at Charlton Comics) and The Dark Knight Returns — two of the big three comics (along with Maus) celebrated for bringing comics into a postmodern world and influencing countless comic book writers and illustrators working today.

• He edited and inked the Crisis on Infinite Earths series.

• He inked more DC pages than anyone, DC President and Publisher Paul Levitz told The New York Times for Giordano’s obit. That could be why it seems he worked with just about everyone in the industry at one time or another — either he worked for or helped launch them.

• He started the now standard policy of listing writers’ and artists’ names on covers.

If you want to see the type of work Giordano influenced during the Silver Age, take a look at The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, by Arlen Schumer.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

2010-04-06T12:15:00.006-04:00

The movie version of Jacques Tardi’s long-running bande dessinée series about journalist and Belle Epoque adventuress Adèle Blanc-Sec will open in Europe April 14. More exciting, as it was written, produced and directed by internationally known Luc Besson — he did the highly influential action pictures La Femme Nikita and Léon (The Professional), among other hits — there’s an excellent chance it’ll turn up on this side of the ocean, certainly at least in New York, LA and Toronto.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, as best as I can tell from the fast-moving trailer — another good sign is an English-translation version is available on YouTube and elsewhere — takes bits from several Adèle stories: Adèle and the Beast (a pterodactyl, actually), The Demon of the Eiffel Tower and Mummies in Madness. (Yes, English versions are available. Try American Book Exchange/AbeBooks.com.)

As I noted back in my earlier post on Tardi, Adèle’s sometimes-hallucinatory adventures have entangled her and her pals with the aforementioned demon in the Eiffel Tower, rampaging mummies and multi-tentacled sea monsters rising from the Seine to snatch cooing infants out of their strollers. Wild, fun stuff.

You can see the movie’s cool web site (en francais) here. Très excitant.

Backing Into Forward

2010-04-05T12:09:00.003-04:00

In his new memoir, Backing Into Forward, cartoonist, author and playwright Jules Feiffer recalls how he landed a job, without pay for the longest time, right out of high school in the legendary Will Eisner’s studio. But, Feiffer says, while he remained a great admirer of his hero’s work, “… by mid-1947, (The Spirit comic strip) wasn’t what it had been. I found myself increasingly let down by Will’s story writing.”

Knowing no fear, Feiffer, now all of 18, mentioned this drop-off in quality to his boss. To his surprise, Eisner replied, “‘If you think you can do better, why don’t you try your hand at one?’”

So, channeling Eisner, he blended in other influences — his own Bronx childhood as well as then-popular radio dramas such as The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective. Eisner perused Feiffer’s first eight-page layout, with its “crude sketches and dialogue,” then said, “‘This is good, we’re going to use this. Write more.’”

“And I wrote more.” Young Feiffer was off to the races.

Bill Willingham’s Fables

2010-03-30T13:38:00.006-04:00

I like Bill Willingham’s writing. But I like it more when he’s also illustrating his own stories.

That’s what’s missing from his Fables books. The tales are clever and surprising — Willingham is a great storyteller — and the dozen or so artists I’ve seen drawing the comic books and graphic novels convincingly convey a fairy tale feel.

But I miss Willingham’s own wise-guy touch. I adored his Elementals comic book series from Comico in the late 1980s, and was sorely grieved when someone else took the reins (and before we ever got a resolution to the Oblivion War storyline). And I felt like a victim of a bait-and-switch scheme when he drew fewer than a handful of his Shadowpact series a few years back.

Willingham’s characters can be by turns sexy, self-conscious, ornery and goofy.

In his new autobiography (which I plan to write about in a couple days), Backing Into Forward, Jules Feiffer says of the cartoonists who took over the Superman comic strip after co-creator Joe Shuster was forced out that they “drew better but felt less.” That sentiment can be applied here, too, I think: Bill Willingham might not be the most crafted illustrator to draw Bill Willingham stories, but he “feels more” than they do.

Crumb’s Genesis, Part 2

2010-03-28T10:20:00.009-04:00

Having said all this, even if only fans — all 300,000 million of them — buy The Book of Genesis Illustrated, they’ll be well rewarded. As Jessica Abel, co-author of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and writer-illustrator of La Perdida, noted when she was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this past November, Robert Crumb is a genius with every art medium he touches. Genesis Illustrated, which Crumb contends took five painful years to complete, is packed with his distinctive lettering, perfect composition of image as well as panels to the page, and, of course, his magnificent drawings themselves.

The characters are wild-eyed, lusty and rough. But they’d have to be, wouldn’t they, given the adventures and travails they undergo in these stories?

And if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t Eve look a lot like Crumb’s wife Aline? Crumb’s made no secret of his interests in strong women ….

You can listen to Crumb interviewed on the book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation here.

Crumb’s Genesis, Part 1

2010-03-26T09:13:00.007-04:00

You have to wonder, who is the target audience for R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated?

His fans, I think, and maybe a few others. While marketing suggests it expected a wider audience, as well an onslaught from offended Bible true believers, I’m not sure either occurred.

In his introduction, Crumb raises his shield, noting, “I approached this as a straight illustration job. … That said, I know you can’t please everybody.” Well, it wasn’t truly a “straight illustration job,” as we have to assume Crumb came up with idea himself, or certainly agreed to it. I doubt anyone forces him to take on any work he doesn’t want.

It does seem like a great, Hollywood-style high-concept moment, though, doesn’t it? “I know,” says some publicist, “let’s get that bad-boy Robert Crumb to illustrate the Bible! That’ll shock people! And we’ll sell ’em by the truckload.”

Except I’m dubious as to how shocking any of this could be to those already familiar with the tent. Crumb’s illustrations — depicting Creation and up through the funeral procession of Joseph, at the age of 110 — show the Old Testament populace as angry, embittered, in despair, laughing, lusting, sweating, dancing, wild-eyed … just as it says in the book itself.

For folk who are shocked, it can only mean they’re really not that knowledgeable with the source material. As it warns on the cover of Genesis Illustrated, “Nothing left out!” “All 50 chapters!” and “Adult supervision recommended for minors.”

It’s powerful stuff, Crumb himself admits.

More to come on this.

OSU Festival of Cartoon Art

2010-03-24T09:16:00.010-04:00

Speakers have been announced for the 10th triennial Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University. They will include Art Spiegelman (Maus), whom I saw give a lively albeit smoky lecture when he was in Michigan a few years ago touting In the Shadow of No Towers; Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead); Patrick McDonnell (Mutts); Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Life in Hell); Roz Chast (lots of cartoons in The New Yorker and elsewhere); and Dan Piraro (Bizarro), among others.

Registration opens June 1, with events running Oct. 14 through 17 in Columbus. Attendance allegedly will be limited to 275.

Two additional highlights: an exhibit for the 100th birthday of Krazy Kat and a retrospective of Billy Ireland’s work. (Ireland was the editorial cartoonist at the Columbus Dispatch who mentored two of sequential art’s most influential cartoonists, Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, and Noel Sickles, who wrote and drew Scorchy Smith.)

I attended a few of the early Festivals and found them phenomenally informative and entertaining, and cock full of surprises. At one of the forums, an attendee in the audience got up during a Q&A session to ask the panel an involved question about contracts. A wave of amusement rolled through the auditorium as we realized the questioner was Berke Breathed, creator of the then-popular Bloom County, who wasn’t even on the agenda, if I recall correctly.

Captain Easy Delayed. Again

2010-03-16T18:30:00.003-04:00

Release of Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune has been held back once more.

Though Amazon.com lists a release date of today, the publisher, Fantagraphics Books, e-mailed me that “Amazon takes dates that we project at the first press release we have about an item. They have no way of knowing if an item has been delayed or canceled.”

Fantagraphics now projects a May publication date for the Roy Crane collection. The March 16 date was announced after a January date flew by.

No idea what’s causing the repeated delays. Maybe Fantagraphics will be more forthcoming.

Wimbledon Green, Part 3

2010-03-15T19:48:00.004-04:00

OK, these may be my final thoughts on Seth’s wonderful Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World.

I wonder if the author considered titling it, The Mystery of Wimbledon Green. It has an abundance of clues, blind alleys, tempting hints and unresolved questions about the main character. Who is he really? Where did he come from? Why did he disappear?

One character early on even contends Green’s handlebar moustache is fake.

In a later chapter narrated by Roofings Hatch, Green’s valet and personal assistant — “though never his confidante” — Hatch relates how every afternoon Green labored over a manuscript. “Just what he was writing was never clear to me and as soon as he stopped writing, it went back in the safe,” Hatch recalls, a la one of the interviewees in Citizen Kane. “The manuscript was enormous and always growing larger. Perhaps it was an autobiography.”

He also mentions how Green often could be observed staring “pensively out the window. He seemed to be watching for something. Afraid.”

We’re never told what was in the manuscript, or what Green feared … though we can guess, from information elsewhere in the book.

But the most touching mystery, I think, comes from Hatch (and the author), as the valet tells how Green would spend an hour each day “answering letters, sorting new acquisitions and writing cheques ….” In that panel, Seth has drawn our hero reading a letter, and a single tear runs down cheek and onto that big white moustache.

Why is he crying? Who sent the letter? What does it say?

As with so many things in real life, we never find out.

Read my earlier posts on Wimbledon Green here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Jules Feiffer

2010-03-12T13:27:00.003-05:00

Backing Into Forward, a memoir by cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, comes out next Tuesday.

You know him. Pulitzer Prize-winner Feiffer is the author of the razor-tongued play Little Murders and the ground-breaking 1971 movie Carnal Knowledge (with Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret and Art Garfunkel) and creator of all those cynical-but-silly Playboy and Village Voice “Ode to spring” cartoons. He’s also written a wheelbarrow-full of children’s books as well as the excellent reference touchstone, The Great Comic Book Heroes, a copy of which I’ve treasured for decades.

And, of course, he apprenticed to Will Eisner.

In a perfect world, we’ll learn much about this incredibly influential artist — what he thinks, how he works — as we did about Charles Schultz from reading David Michaelis’s 2007 biography, Schultz and Peanuts. We can hope.

Read my post on Will Eisner’s The Contract With God here.

Wimbledon Green, Part 2

2010-03-04T14:28:00.010-05:00

In Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World, Seth drops in selections from the Golden Age library of said “greatest comic book collector.” Here are a few of those wacky titles, with author’s descriptions:

• Mighty Orbit #9 — “Sputnik inspired. Popular robot comic.”
• Alimony Comics #3 — “I’m taking every cent,” declares the woman on its cover.
• Patty Pigtails #1 — “Irritating girls’ comic.”
• The Wubbs, no # — (Inspired by The Gumps maybe?)
• Gee #48 — Featuring “the death of Capt. Well-Being.”
• Keen Funnies #12 — “One of those perfect Saturday afternoon comics.”

And at the end of Wimbledon Green, the protagonist bids us, “Good night, dear friends.” Melancholy, perplexing at times and quite charming. The book itself, like the made-up Keen Funnies, is nearly perfect.

See Part 1 of my rave on Wimbledon Green here.

Wilmbledon Green, Part 1

2010-03-01T10:34:00.004-05:00

In his introduction to Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World, Seth trashes his own work:

“The drawing is poor, the lettering shoddy, the page compositions and storytelling perfunctory,” he writes by way of apology to his loyal readers. “The whole thing was drawn in the spirit of ‘good enough.’ …Even I find some of the characters ugly.”

Is he kidding? Wimbledon Green is wonderful stuff. A great, heartfelt story combined with charming art.

A series of stories, actually. Billed as “from the sketchbook” of Canadian cartoonist Seth (aka Gregory Gallant), the series are told from various perspectives — not of all of which are trustworthy — of comic book dealers, longtime collectors, a valet and one private detective about the life of Wimbledon Green, an eccentric “force of nature” with a mysterious past (and future) who could deduce the publication year of a comic book merely by examining the staples or smelling the ink.

Seth also lovingly creates artists and characters from this fictional world’s Golden Age of comic books — Lester Moore and Hal Drake, the Green Ghost, hobos Fine and Dandy, Mr. Meteor and Sally Saturn, among others — and some are discussed in depth. He does this so fully, I wouldn’t mind tracking down a copy of Fine and Dandy myself, after reading Wimbledon’s “short talk” about them.

We should all be able to turn out such “shoddy” work as Seth’s Wimbledon Green. I strongly recommend this book.

More on Wimbledon Green next time.

The Escapists, Part 2

2010-02-25T16:33:00.010-05:00

The first time I read it, the story of The Escapists continually surprised me, and the art’s marvelous style represents different time periods and moods is at turns cartoony and goofy, sexy and exciting, or scratchy and dark where appropriate.

And then there’s that truly clever introduction to the book by Michael Chabon himself, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, relating the one, brief sweet meeting between fictional Sam Clay, now old and lost in the hallways while attending a comic book convention, and the young and very real Brian K. Vaughan (writer of The Escapists), in the same hotel for a youth baseball recognition banquet.

Another great thing about The Escapists is its approach to the blood,sweat and tears of putting together a comic book. The illustrator talks about how her hand doesn’t cramp because drawing is the only time she feels free. The letterer loves the control of creating precise, tiny letters in precise, tiny boxes.

The Escapists is many things, all of them good. One of those things is being a love letter to those who made and continue to make comic books. It’s a wonderful life.

One of the illustrators is Eduardo Barreto, who draws Judge Parker. See my post on that comic strip here as well as a post on his leaving that strip here.

More Judge Parker

2010-02-24T16:38:00.007-05:00

Gosh, I must be psychic. Last week in this blog I wondered why Edward Barreto’s art on the Judge Parker comic strip these days didn’t appear to be up to his usual high standard.

In his blog for yesterday (which I just read today), illustrator Michael Manley announced he’s taking over illustration duties on Judge Parker when Barreto retires next month. Manley cites health concerns as Barreto’s reason for leaving the strip. Which is great for Manley, but I’ll be sorry to see Barreto go. His art has been wonderful.

See Manley’s post here, in which he claims to be a “fan of the classic comic strip.”

You can read my post extolling Barreto’s talents on The Escapists in the second part of my post on that book, which will be up tomorrow, Feb. 25.

The Escapists, Part 1

2010-02-23T14:07:00.008-05:00

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

Before reading The Escapists, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by bunches of people, it might help to have read Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. But, as with the irrelevant reading order of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, don’t let that hold you back.

The story-within-a-story carries the conceit that a young man named Max Roth buys the publishing rights to a World War II-era comic book character named the Escapist, created by Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, with the intent of reviving the series.

Except we know Kavalier and Clay are the fictional protagonists in Michael Chabon’s book. And there’s the added touch that The Escapists takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, birth place of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, creators of Superman.

With that faux and real-life heritage laid before us, The Escapists weaves its story in and out of Max and his friends’ efforts to publish their new comic book series, the adventures of their new Escapist hero in the comic book … and in between, with the costumed crime fighter’s plights overlapping Max’s troubles.

And there’s even an early nod to Huck Finn — the letterer has been transcribing the novel to perfect his craft ….

More to come on this excellent series in Part 2.

Zot!, Part 2

2010-02-21T15:30:00.006-05:00

The most intriguing section of Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection, by Scott McCloud, comes in the middle with “The Ghost in the Machine.”

The plot involves the attempted assassination of the president and his family, and a truly sinister bad guy called, oddly enough, 9-Jack-9, who appears as a sort of electric avatar.

In his notes, McCloud, now probably better known as the author of Understanding Comics, concedes this is probably his darkest Zot! story.

“Every major villain I created for the series represented a different potential future, and level of credibility I assigned to that future determined the gravity of the character,” McCloud writes. “9-Jack-9 represented the most credible of all those futures — the very real possibility that technology, for all its benefits, would eventually do us all in.”

The story may be dark, but in this black-and-white collection that bit of weight makes for deeper reading.

Read my earlier post on Zot! here.

Zot!, Part 1

2010-02-19T13:20:00.004-05:00

I considered giving up about a quarter of the way in to Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection, by Scott McCloud, who’s become better known as the author of Understanding Comics.

The characters just weren’t that interesting, and the super hero storyline seemed like a send-up — “Lies! Balderdash! You never would have survived my first assault without your infernal gun!” bellows villain Doctor Ignatius Rumbault Bellows.

But in his notes between sections, McCloud discusses his thoughts on comics and how Zot! changed over time, to be less about super hero adventuring and more about human interaction. So I skipped ahead.

In “Ring in the New,” some three-quarters of the way in, one of Zot’s friends is arrested for operating his parents’ car with only a learner’s permit. “Dad won’t pay for driving lessons and he just won’t take the time to teach me,” Digger moans.

“Look, do you want me to talk to him, Digger? He always listened to me,” friend Vic volunteers.

“Would you really do that, Vic? I sure would appreciate it ….”

“C’mon, let’s go.”

Oh, my. I’m not certain which is more unrealistic — that dialogue or the notion of a father who’ll take counsel from his teen-aged son’s teen-aged pal.

But there are some good bits in Zot!, mostly with a bad guy called 9-Jack-9 ….

More to come.

Scott McCloud interviewed Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, on the DVD The Cartoonist. See my post here.

Judge Parker

2010-02-17T17:19:00.007-05:00

Wait, is that still Eduardo Barreto drawing Judge Parker? Maybe the artist has been rushed lately, or he’s on vacation. But the strips the past few days look like someone’s trying to imitate Barreto.

That would be a shame if he’s moved on. It was only about a year ago when both Judge Parker and Rex Morgan M.D. — both written by Woody Wilson — debuted a new look straight out of Milton Caniff’s World War II pin-up days.

The women in those two strips all became — well, there’s no other way to say this — hot.

Judge Parker in the past year has introduced one femme fatale after another, each dangerous and wearing very little in the way of clothing.

In Rex Morgan, as drawn by Graham Nolan, once-demur nurse June Gale herself has taken to dressing like a Victoria’s Secret model. In a storyline last May, to cite one memorable example, while she, Rex and their daughter were on an ocean cruise, June paraded about the ship in a bikini so revealing other passengers stopped to stare. And more than one panel showed her striking poses to lure her physician-husband into a closer examination of their suite’s mattress.

Voyeurism aside, this new-old look brings an accompanying attention to overall detail in all the panels — in the slit of the woman’s skirt, the snap of the man’s tux and the lines of his sports car, the olive in her martini glass …. It’s better art across the board, and that’s a good thing.

But in case you haven’t noticed, such well-rendered characters — and fine drawing — in contemporary popular daily comics is unusual. As I say, you’d have to go back almost to the 1950s to find similarly stylized women and men. Unless of course you count the Girls in Apartment 3G (later to be demoted to just Apartment 3G). Tommie, Margo and what’s her name up until relatively recently were rendered with an eye toward attracting the men folk.

Then, with a change in illustrators, the sex appeal — and the better art itself — moved from the third floor to the basement. We lost the view.

Corto Clothes

2010-02-12T15:21:00.003-05:00

Attention, Corto shoppers. A company in Italy is now selling Corto Maltese sailor jackets, in short and long styles. For the true fans, I guess.

You’ll find the store directly here. No, I can’t read Italian, either, so here’s a description — in roughly translated English — at the Hugo Pratt-Corto Maltese site. (Note the reference to a “voluntarily aged’ version of the pea coat.) Just click on the jacket photo.

Oh, and if you want to read my posts about the books themselves, go here.

Red Eye, Black Eye

2010-02-10T14:08:00.005-05:00

K. Thor Jensen’s book Red Eye, Black Eye reminds me of some of the episodes you’d hear on This American Life. The difference is I’m not sure the protagonist of this book learns anything by the end, one of the requirements for inclusion on the Chicago Public Radio show.

Jensen’s book relates his two-month, cross-country Greyhound bus trip, staying with folk most of whom he’s met only through the Internet. His hosts are a mixed bunch, as you might expect, and none live a luxurious life.

Jensen’s drawings here are intentionally spare, and the characters don’t say much as the panels are small. But each host is given space to tell Thor an allegedly true story — brief and invariably weird. The funniest is Jeff’s, about a Boston neighborhood kid who’d demand people repeat odd phrases, all of which began with “smeeny knucklehead,” such as, “Say smeeny knucklehead Batman’s better then Superman.” Jeff ends his tale with “I heard rumors that he later wound up in juvie for something, but I dunno what.” The picture shows the boy, slightly older, behind bars and shouting, “Guard! Hey, guard! Say smeeny knucklehead ….”

Thor early on declares one of his goals on his “hobo trip” is to get a black eye. Given how he behaves, particularly in a Columbus, Ohio, bar, I’m surprised he doesn’t end up with one, and a fat lip, too.

Must be hobo luck, as Thor might say.

Beto, Part 2

2010-02-07T18:34:00.002-05:00

Gilbert Hernandez always seems to have two things, at least, going on at once.

His best stories are funny, but they also display an incredibly deep river of sadness. His characters are wacky and good-looking, they speak continually of love and lust, but they abandon their children with the blink of an eye.

And while his characters tell us one thing, his drawings sometimes show us something else.

In a 1993 four-page story called “Pipo,” included in his Human Diastrophism book, one of the Palomar collections, the title character reflects how her fashion business did so well “I had to fire my old seamstresses and hire faster, young ones. Yeah, I know; but that’s another story.”

Her comment refers to earlier remarks by other characters about the lovely Pipo’s employment practices. But more prominent is the image Hernandez shows us. As Pipo talks, we see smoke billowing behind her on the horizon.

Just how does she mean she “fired” those older seamstresses?

Read my earlier post on Gilbert Hernandez here. And on his brother and co-creator of Love & Rockets, Jaime Hernandez, here.

Beto

2010-02-02T17:03:00.005-05:00

Gilbert Hernandez is a genius.

I’ve been rereading his Love & Rockets Palomar stories and I’m impressed once more with his brilliance. His characters are funny, sad, kind, cruel, smart and stupid, they dance, they cry, they lust and love, and they murder: The brilliance is they behave very much as real people. And like one of Dickens’s massive novels — Bleakhouse or Little Dorrit come to mind — Hernandez’s stories support dozens of characters, each one finely detailed, and over long stretches of their individual lives.

In Human Diastrophism, for example, we see how a “ghost tree” mentioned in an introductory short, short story reveals the fate of one misbegotten character near the tale’s end. And a few panels after a citizen of Palomar praises the work of Van Gogh, Beto (as he signs his work) turns the town’s daytime sky into a starry night.

The beauty of Hernandez’s skill is not only in his epic sweep but also in the details. Gosh.

More to come.

You can read my post on Gilbert’s brother Jaime Hernandez here.

The Goon

2010-01-30T13:59:00.004-05:00

I’m just not sure what to make of Eric Powell’s The Goon. The books at one point can make me laugh out loud, and at another I think, well, that just ain’t right ….

My Murderous Childhood (And Other Grievous Yarns) has more than its share of hilarity. “Goon, some weird guy with a big robot wants a word with you outside,” one character informs the protagonist. “Aw, fer Christ! If it ain’t one thing it’s another,” the Goon replies, as if this is an almost-everyday occurrence.

True, the Goon and his pals don’t live in Munchkin Land. Their violent, grim town is filled with zombies, mad scientists, carnival lowlifes, mobsters and giant derby-wearing spiders who’ve skipped out on their alimony payments.

Mayhem often builds to absurdity, and there are many references to “migrating orangutans that mysteriously burst into flames.” And isn’t that Bob Dylan as the King Hobo?

Powell’s visceral art surely reveres the old Vault of Horror/Tales From the Crypt comics, except with more punch.

And I guess that may be Powell’s point. This is a 1940s-era boy’s idea of a tough guy’s adventure book — where disagreements are settled with a clomp on the head with a grave-digger’s shovel, and humor is found in poisoning rival pie-eating contestants and a “moron” smearing his feces on a living room wall ….

After all, it’s the Goon himself who proclaims, “There ain’t nothin’ more self rewardin’ than tauntin’ the mentally handicapped!”

I’d suggest you could take what you like and leave the rest, but suspect the Goon wouldn’t approve of such “sissy” sentiment.

The Cartoonist

2010-01-12T16:13:00.008-05:00

The documentary The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone and Changing Face of Comics tells a story many of us would like to believe could be true for everyone: Hard work and talent win out.

Now out on DVD — I received a copy as a Christmas gift (thanks again, Carole) — The Cartoonist relives Columbus-native Smith’s rise from creator of a handsome Ohio State University campus newspaper comic strip; to his work as an animator; to producing and distributing his own comic book (at least until he convinced his wife to take over as business manager); to Scholastic Books, publisher of Harry Potter, picking up Bone and giving it new life in vivid color. (Read my earlier post on Bone here.)

Talking heads along with Smith himself include Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar (who lives in Cleveland, Ohio, remember), Ohio State Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell (gosh, I haven’t seen her in years), Paul Pope and Terry Moore. (See my post on Moore’s Strangers in Paradise here.)

While the documentary is always chatty and entertaining —Smith tells of living in a cabin while filling orders and packing boxes to send sometimes fewer than a handful of comic books to stores — I would have liked a bit more discussion of technique and process. Smith’s work appears deceptively simple — think Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz. It’d be great to hear him talk about that. But probably the producers, Columbus production house Mills James Productions, was aiming for a more general audience.

Maybe next time. Otherwise, this is highly recommended viewing.

TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

2010-01-06T13:08:00.009-05:00

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s new anthology, The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, contains exactly what the title boasts — a smorgasbord of comics from 1945 through 1958 that includes Uncle Wiggily, Droopy, Supermouse, Little Lulu, Dennis the Menace and Sugar and Spike, among other wily children and wacky animals.

I have to admit these were before my time. I did read Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike — the mischievous toddlers whose “baby talk” could be understood only by each other — so that must have lasted into the 1960s or been reprinted. Certainly I recall Dennis and Walt Kelly’s wonderful Pogo as black-and-white newspaper strips, and Uncle Wiggily as a board game. But the rest exist as legend.

And that’s probably the key to appreciating these brightly colored samplings for those of us too young to wax nostalgic. Today we can admire the formidable art of Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, Jules Feiffer’s Clifford, Dr. Seuss’s Gerald McBoing Boing ….

There also are other great cartoonists represented here who went on to fame, such as those future MAD magazine geniuses Harvey Kurtzman, Jim Davis and Dave Berg. (See my post on Kurtzman here.) Plus, this collection contains Pogo and his pals before they became politicized.

Another reason to treasure this treasury is to remember a time when comics came with a message, if not necessarily the one parents expected. One Dennis book ends with his mother comforting him with the adage that “Nothing (sad) matters as long you have at least one good friend.” With that, Dennis perks up and rushes off to share his “samwich” with his one good friend, his dog Ruff.

Captain Easy Update

2010-01-04T17:35:00.006-05:00

Amazon.com is now showing Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune won’t be released until March 13, not in January as Fantagraphics earlier had stated.

I couldn’t make head nor tails of Fantagraphics’s web site, so I don’t know if there actually has been a delay with the publisher. (Typing “Captain Easy” in the search box got me nowhere.)

More news as it develops ….

Sad Stories

2010-01-02T09:52:00.005-05:00

I can’t move on from Ivan Brunetti’s worthy Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories (see my Dec. 22, 2009, post here) without cautioning that a lot of these stories are really, really depressing. It seems lots of contemporary sequential-art collections are.

I don’t specifically mean Art Spiegelman’s holocaust memoir masterpiece, Maus, which is excerpted in this book, but so many of the other stories that are sad at every turn of day-to-day life — Tony Millionaire’s dead birds, Debbie Drechsler’s sexually abused girls, Charles Burns’s domestic violence, the lonely childhood of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan …. My goodness.

I’m not saying some of these aren’t good art, either, with topics worth exploring. Jaime Hernandez’s “Flies on the Ceiling,” charting how Isabel, one his long-running characters, slowly loses her mind, is brilliant, for example. (And I realize I’m not the first to point this out.)

But, gosh, a little more joy in this collection would’ve added something closer to a balance of light and dark.

More on Journey Into Mohawk Country

2009-12-30T13:18:00.005-05:00

Last Sunday’s New York Times carried a story about Charles T. Gehring, who for 35 years has been translating 17 century court records, letters and other documents from New Netherland (New York) from the original Dutch. Imagine my surprise to come across a reference to George O’Connor’s graphic novel, Journey Into Mohawk Country. (See my post on that book here.)

For his book, O’Connor used Gehring’s translations of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert’s journal, which detailed the barber-surgeon’s travels through Mohawk Valley in 1634.

The NYT story tells more about van den Bogaert’s life after the adventures of Journey Into Mohawk Country. He became commander of Fort Orange (in what is now Albany), but tried to escape into native American country after colonists learned he was gay. The Dutch colonists, apparently not particularly open-minded on this issue in those days, dragged him back. But he escaped again “when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort,” the NYT reports, only to drown in the Hudson River.

Oh, and van den Bogaert likely was an ancestor of actor Humphrey Bogart. Here’s looking at you, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert.

Criminally Good

2009-12-27T17:49:00.004-05:00

Issue number three of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s “The Sinners” just came out, part of their Criminal series. If you’re old enough to see over the steering wheel of your old man’s car, you ought to go grab a copy, as one of the characters might say.

As with their six-part Incognito series (about a witness-protection program for super villains), Criminal (about, well, criminals) offers a perfect blend of narration and art: Brubaker’s hard-boiled Mickey Spillane-ish text — “Her sadness … her loneliness … they got to a place deep inside him. Much as he hated to admit it.” — and Phillips’s anguished, scarred and scared characters — faces half in shadows, tormented eyes averted — move the story along at dangerous speed. You’re almost afraid everyone’s going to crash and burn before the murder mystery is resolved.
Take a look at Criminal. Then dip back for Incognito, now available in a collected edition, or the earlier run of the Criminal series, also now collected in one book.