The thinking behind “Slipped”

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

 In my comic strip, “Slipped,” I have tried to tell and depict the kind of adventure stories I would like to read. So while not PG, certainly within an R rating.

The tales aim to be exciting, the violence thrilling but not gruesome. Tyler is a cat burglar, but hardly anyone ever dies — or is seen to die. This isn’t “Terry and the Pirates,” as much as I admired that fantastic strip.

The art in “Slipped” itself remains cartoon-y, even as I want the protagonists to be cartoon-world attractive — Tyler is cute and pretty, Pip the dog is endearing, etc. At the same time, Tyler has matured over the course of the strip, since March 2008, from a plucky youngster to a young woman. So, yes, sometimes she dresses as an adult woman — keeping in mind the styles of the mid-1920s.

(More important, she tends to make it known if she doesn’t like the attire I’ve selected for her. She reminds me that she’s the star of “Slipped,” after all.)

And most of the time the stories themselves are within the bounds of reason — well, if you accept that time travel, singing dogs and giant, intelligent rats are credible, right?

The tone changes, though, as the adventures evolve. Sometimes our heroes are caught up in a basic chase story or maybe a fight scene, espionage or science fiction — remember, Tyler met Pip on the moon.

But underneath all of it is Tyler’s search for what became of her father, Arkady Wilson — the first Scarlet Sparrow. That is what convinced her, and her sister, Mendacity, to agree to their latest adventure.

Which brings us to chapter 361, where things are about to go wildly astray from how Tyler planned. Of course.

Take a look.

And thanks for reading …

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

A new monster in ”Slipped”

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

One of the great things about those 1930s and 1940s comic strips was you often didn’t know at first if new characters were friends or foes. Think of “Terry and the Pirates.”
You see a lot of that in Doctor Who, too — at least, back before it lost its way over the last season.
So in chapter 349 of “Slipped,”  the Scarlet Sparrow and her sister, Mendacity, are brought against their will by chrono-bounty hunter Cartier Tour to a creature who calls himself/itself Delacroix.
Tyler somehow identifies him as looking like her old nemesis Dargelos, whom she defeated a few years ago. Maybe during their last battle she got a look at how Dargelos really is — rather than how he usually appeared, as a handsome man similar in appearance to Marcello Mastroianni.
So take a gander at “Slipped.” Let me know what you think.

A New Adventure

Have you ever taken a look at the new Phantom Lady collections, from the mid-1940s and drawn by the excellent Matt Baker? There’s a little of that influence in “Slipped,” my own comic strip that’s been running online since early 2008.
“Slipped” is an adventure strip modeled on those fun 1930s and 1940s adventure newspaper comic strip. Which means I certainly looked to “Terry and the Pirates” — by Milton Caniff — and “Buzz Sawyer” and even a little “Little Orphan Annie.”
In this week’s chapter, Tyler Wilson — aka the Scarlet Sparrow — and her sister, Mendacity — who’s been masquerading as the Scarlet Sparrow — have trapped on a Paris rooftop, where it’s revealed that … well, take a look for yourself.
It’s a new enemy, in the person of Cartier Tour, and a whole new adventure.
Here’s a link — http://slippedcomic.blogspot.com/
And here is some sample art, to tempt you to try “Slipped.” Take a look!

Slipped @ Michael Chevy Castranova, 2015

Catch up with Slipped: The adventure comic strip

Take a look at the latest chapter in Slipped, my online-only 1930s-style adventure comic strip, by following the link below.
The comic strip/graphic novel — part Terry and the Pirates, part Corto Maltese and a little bit Star Crash — has been running for more than seven years, and if you’re just tuning in, here’s what’s happening:
After many daring adventures in time and even to the moon, Tyler Wilson, aka the Scarlet Sparrow, has returned to Paris in 1926 to confront her younger sister, Mendacity, who has assumed the Scarlet Sparrow guise as a cat burglar. After a brief rooftop struggle, which Tyler wins, Mendacity says she’s up to something far more complex than simple thefts.
So here is your chance to catch up with their battles with each other, the forces of fascism and even the devil himself ….

And if you want a recap of all seven-plus years, start here.

From chapter 344 of Slipped. Slipped is © Michael Chevy Castranova, 2015

Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates

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

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.

Milton Caniff, Part 2

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

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.

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 2

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.

In the Studio, Part 2

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.

OSU Festival of Cartoon Art

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.

Lineage

I’m reminded of that Albert Einstein quote that I think is often misapplied: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Ad agencies tout it as a corporate motto for being clever. But while it’s true imagination can be the spark that generates great ideas, without knowledge you’re just playing with soggy matches.

In sequential art, we can see a direct line of informed artists building upon the work of their predecessors, to which they blend in their own imagination. See what I mean: Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese is his internationally known protagonist) acknowledged his debt to comic-strip predecessors Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon). As Jaime Hernandez moved from very detailed illustrations to more impressionistic work in Love & Rockets, his heavy inks began to resemble Pratt’s — which of course in turn evoked the chiaroscuro of Caniff. And when Jessica Abel (La Perdida) visited Kalamazoo, Michigan, last week, she cited Hernandez as an early inspiration for her work.

So we can draw a link from Sickles and Caniff (starting in the 1930s) through Pratt (1970s to 1990s) to Hernandez (1980s up to today) to Abel (2000 and still going), to name just a few practitioners.

Another would be Frank Miller. (Now there’s a man who loves chiaroscuro — look at Sin City.) In his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Miller writes that the notion to make his version of Robin a girl came from Love & Rockets.

And as readers of that dark, grim series also will recall, political and military tension mounts between the United States and the Soviet Union over the island of Corto Maltese ….

Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese, Part 1

About two-thirds of the way into Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese in Siberia is a picture of the protagonist racing across the top of a speeding train, hopping from one gun-mounted turret to another, arms out for balance, pistol in one hand and scarf straining in the wind … all the while his white sailor’s cap handsomely affixed. And the first time I saw it, about 10 years ago in a store in Paris, thumbing through one of those lovely, tall bande dessinées, I thought, this is pretty cool.

The story concerns the attempts of Corto, the gentleman-of-fortune captain without a ship, and his occasional ally Rasputin to capture an armored train carrying 160 tons of the Czar’s gold across Asia in 1919. Corto is working on behalf of an all-female Chinese secret society called the Red Lantern; Rasputin, as always, is working for himself. Along the way they must do battle with assorted villains including real-life crazy Baron von Ungern-Sternberg and a dead-ringer for Marlene Dietrich — this, in part, is Pratt’s version of the movie Shanghai Express. (Whether Rasputin is supposed to be the real Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who captivated Tsar Nicholas II and his family, is not clear; the character himself is never cozy with the truth.)

The exciting, intelligent tale is filled with dreams — as many of Pratt’s stories are — smart-aleck humor, poetry, philosophy and much derring-do, including a battle at sea and a train hijacking, an airplane crash, lots of gun fights and exotic locales, betrayals and heroics, and even Santa Claus and his reindeer.

And then there is the art itself — moody and stylish, in a Milton Caniff-infleunced chiaroscuro vein, with dashing characters determined to change destiny to suit their overwhelming desires.

Corto Maltese in Siberia is probably my favorite of the dozen Corto adventures (there’s also an animated movie, Corto Maltese: La Cour Secrete des Arcanes, but I’ve only found the DVD in French), but I love all of Hugo Pratt’s books. They certainly improved my French comprehension as I read all the Corto Maltese bande dessinées I could find.

The good news is English-language copies be found at reasonable prices if you haunt the used bookstores. Track them down and take a look. Pratt’s stories are unequalled.

English language version: Corto Maltese in Siberia (Corto Maltese)

(More on Pratt, Corto, their separate adventures and Pratt’s art in future posts.)

It Started With Scorchy

When Hugo Pratt set about to design the logo for his mythic adventure hero Corto Maltese, he consciously imitated Milton Caniff’s famous Terry and the Pirates lettering — dynamic and fun, bold and spunky.

Except that Caniff didn’t draw that famous logo. It was created by his longtime friend, drinking buddy and fellow cartoonist, Noel Sickles. If you want to really know about sequential art, you need to look at Sickles.

As pointed out in Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles, when Sickles inherited the adventure strip of airplane ace Scorchy in 1933, he tried to copy the dodgy art work of his predecessor. But, it seems, he just couldn’t do it for long. Sickles was too good. The transformation was like Dorothy opening that door after her house crash-landed in Oz.

This is a giant book, which is good as it contains every Scorchy Smith strip Sickles wrote and drew, three years worth, plus a few before he took it over and a few after he left to pursue magazine illustration (and there are plenty of samples of that, too, along with his biography). Sickles’s comic strip illustrations are, in a word, splendid. His colorful heroes bristle and his femme fatales slink as well as anyone’s — including his pal Caniff’s.

Even better, the detail Sickles managed to squeeze into those tiny daily panels — of air battles and of trains run amok, of cowboy ranches and jungle villages, sun-baked seaports and snow-covered hideouts, of open fields and the coming dusk — are enough to cause any cartoonist tears of envy. As Sickles himself boasted, he could draw anything.

And, by golly, he really could.

(You can read more about the work of Sickles and Caniff, together and separately, in Ron Goulart’s 1975 book, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. I hope to devote a post to that book soon.)