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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
