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.

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.