Melancholoy in the comics

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

 
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I’ve always been struck by how sad — intentionally, I’ve assumed — the comics of Chris Ware, Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman are. Or maybe it’s just me.

I remember not being able to finish Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” because the main character was so grieved and depressed. There’s a segment in which Jimmy makes a model horse that the instructor praises but, later, the other boys mock for its true, crude appearance. Corrigan, angry and feeling betrayed, flings the horse away — into a pile snow, if I recall correctly.

But then, in anguished remorse, he jumps into the snow to retrieve the tiny model, crying, “I’m sorry.”

It’s just heart-breaking.

Griffith’s new memoir, “Invisible Ink,” about his parents, also has an underlying tone of melancholy. And Spiegelman’s masterpiece, “Maus,” isn’t exactly a barrel of monkeys, either.

And yet … and yet I’ve seen Spiegelman speak three or four times now, and on each occasion he has appeared chipper and, frankly, pretty darned happy. There’s probably some deep meaning here.

•••

Meanwhile, speaking of snow, chapter 354 of “Slipped” finds some of our resourceful protagonists in the far north, deep into a new adventure. Their goal is to make contact with an as-yet-unidentified group that supposedly will aid them in defeating les Rongeur.

That’s assuming, of course, Delacroix told them the truth.

Take a look at this link.

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015 From Slipped chapter 351

Starting this Thursday in Columbus will the first (or the trial run, I’m no longer sure which) CXC Cartoons Crossroads Columbus (or maybe that’s Columbus Crossroads Cartoons) festival.
Among the speakers and panelists will be Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Kate Beaton, Jaime Hernandez and Jeff Smith.
Events for the four-day festival will be held all over the city — a town I lived in longer than I have anywhere else — and much of it in or near the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
I wrote one of the first magazine stories about the the library when it was getting started, and attended the first-ever conference held there on  Ohio State University campus way back when the library still was a tiny, young thing. And I’ve gone to a number of the cartoon conferences sponsored there over the years.
I mention these things not to brag but to convince you when I say that for those events, more cartoonists than the scheduled folk tend to show up.
So come along. Schmooze, network, pick up tips of the trade.

Meanwhile, back at “Slipped” … Delacroix begins to explain to Tyler, Mendacity, Cartier and Pip what he expects them to do. It is a complex web the creature is weaving.
And why should they do what he asks, Tyler demands to know. His answer will surprise you.
Take a look: Slipped chapter 351, right here — the three beauties and the beast.

Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics

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.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 1

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.

Breakdowns

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 ….

In the Studio, Part 3

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.

Stitches Nominated for Eisner

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

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?

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.

TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

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.

Sad Stories

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.

O, Nancy: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction

Oh, I get it now. After all this time, after reading how Robert Crumb claimed he had his daughter home-schooled in France with old Little Lulu comic books, and noting the frequent references by Bill Griffith and Patrick McDonnell to Nancy comic strips, I finally see what the attraction is, thanks to Ivan Brunetti’s book, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories.

I admit I never thought Nancy in particular was especially clever, even when I read them as a child. I mostly recall cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s drawings of “hippies” as wearing torn clothes and always possessing guitars with broken strings and lots of flies. He seemed to confuse free-spiritedness with sloth and dishonesty.

But in his anthology’s introduction, Brunetti uses a 1958 strip about Nancy dreaming she’s being boiled, steamed and baked to demonstrate “algebraically balanced composition,” rhythm and efficiency. The final panel shows the girl waking up in bed to discover she’s been buried under a mountain of winter coats and hats. Each garment is clearly distinguishable from the other, by checks, stripes or dots.

“… The graphic clarity of the pile of coats … in lesser hands could have been turned into a gray, undifferentiated mush. Clutter was never depicted so unclutteredly,” he writes.

See?

The anthology itself has a lot about Charles Schultz and nothing about Will Eisner, and with samples from Crumb, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez (but not Mario), Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Seth and Art Spiegelman, among the other usual suspects.

More later on this book.