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.

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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.

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 ….

Dick Giordano

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.

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.

Funny ‘Bone’

Did you see what he did there? For his Bone series, Jeff Smith took Walt Kelly’s Pogo characters — see how much Fone Bone and his goofy cousin, Smiley Bone, look like shaved versions of Pogo and Albert the Alligator — and sent them off on adventures in a mysterious land. (On his home web site, Smith acknowledges The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as inspiration.)

Along the way, the Bones meet all sorts of magical and scary creatures, as well as a beautiful maid who lives in the woods with her grandmother, who in turn races cows as sport.

The books are silly and fun. When surrounded by nasty giant “rat creatures” in “Out From Boneville,” the grandmother’s plan is straight out of Doctor Who: “When I say run … you run! Got that?” “What?! That’s your plan? Run where?” Fone Bone shrieks in panic. Grandma’s smiling reply: “Ready? Here we go!” Crasssh! Crunch! Thud! Wak!

I remember seeing Smith’s characters in Ohio State University’s campus newspaper, before he began self-publishing them. Now they’re ranked number four on CBC Radio’s top 10 graphic novels list, along with Maus, Watchmen, Love & Rockets and Persepolis.

They’ve traveled a long way. Good for them.