SUPERMEN!

The history of superhero comics has always, in the usual fable, seemed quite straight-forward. Jerry Siegel and his drawing partner Joe Shuster created Superman, which they finally got into print with the first issue of Action Comics, cover-dated June 1938. Nothing much happened right away until the next spring, when Bob Kane and Bill Finger concocted Batman in Detective Comics No. 27, cover-dated May 1939. Like Superman, Batman wore a costume and had a secret civilian identity, but Batman had no superpowers; his considerable physical and mental prowess he acquired through constant training. With the arrival of Batman, in the customary rehearsal of subsequent events, the floodgates opened, and a host of long underwear characters began cavorting across the four-color pages of comic book after comic book as other publishers sought financial benefits from the new recipe.

As I said in my book, The Art of the Comic Book, roughly in order of appearance came Fantom of the Fair, Masked Marvel, the Flame, Green Mask, Blue Beetle, Amazing Man, Cat Man, the Sandman, Hourman, the Human Torch, Submariner, Dollman, Captain Marvel, Flash, Hawkman, the Spectre, Ultra Man, Plastic Man, Green Lantern, and on and on.  Of the lot, perhaps the only distinctive creations were Quality's Plastic Man and Fawcett's Captain Marvel, about whom, more in a trice.

But shorthand history can be deceiving. The aforementioned caped and spandexed crime-fighting athletes came along after Superman, that’s true. What’s typically left out of the ritual recital are numerous others of the breed who came along after mild-mannered Clark Kent donned blue tights, and a few who arrived on the scene before this watershed wardrobe change. Greg Sadowski and Fantagraphics have corrected our erroneous impression with Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-41 (192 7x10-inch pages, all in color; paperback, $24.99) which reprints representative adventures some of the overlooked in the longjohn legions. Only one of the my list is on Sadowski’s — The Flame. Sadowski begins his muster with three heroes who debuted before the Man of Steel: Dr. Mystic, The Clock, and Dan Hastings.

The rest of Sadowski’s roll call commences after Superman’s June 1938 debut, starting with Bill Everett’s Dirk the Demon in November 1938 and proceeding through the Flame by Will Eisner and Lou Fine, Eisner’s Yarko the Great, Rex Dexter of Mars, Cosmic Carson by Jack Kirby, Stardust the Super Wizard by the incomparably wooden renderer Fletcher Hanks, the Shield, the Comet by Jack Cole, Eisner’s Flint Baker, Fero (Planet Detective), Fantomah by Hanks, Marvelo, the Face, Skyman (by Ogden Whitney, the cleanest line then in comics), the Claw and Silver Streak and Daredevil all by Cole, Spacehawk by Basil Wolverton, Everett’s Sub Zero, the Blue Bolt by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. An impressive line-up of names that echo only faintly today.

This is a valuable historical document and a superlative publishing achievement. The pages are shot directly from their first printed appearance in comic books, a practice that I’ve been touting for nearly thirty years, and DC has yet to take my advice with its Archive books. Shooting from the original published comic book pages preserves all the blemishes of that initial publication, but those, judging from the pages at hand, are remarkably few (and many of them have been removed when these pages were scanned), and the benefit is worth the cost: we see the artwork as it first appeared in public. And it’s better than we’ve been led to believe.

Comic books have always carried the stigma of being cheaply published on newsprint, a porous pulp paper, but the quality of the printing was actually remarkably high, belying the rotten reputation.

Jonathan Lethem’s Foreword is appropriately appreciative of the genre, but Sadowski’s notes at the end of the book are encyclopedic, a veritable capsule history of the early comic book. I also applaud his selection of material throughout. He’s included a few covers and some advertising from the interior pages of his sources, which enhances the value of the volume as history.

(I suppose I should confess that my celebrated objectivity as a reviewer may be compromised by Sadowski’s having quoted me in his notes and by his being associate editor and designer of the interior of my book, Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff. But now, having ’fessed up, I don’t feel any better, and you’re probably none the wiser however better informed you may be.) Sadowski hopes a second volume will be published, permitting him to visit superheroes he had to overlook this time.

 

ALAN MOORE EXAMINED

From the University Press of Mississippi (one of my publishers) comes Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (212 6x9-inch pages, b/w illos; paperback, $22; unjacketed cloth, $50), the Italy-based Annalisa DiLiddo argues, as the press release explains, “that Moore employs the comics form to dissect the literary canon, the tradition of comics, contemporary society, and our understanding of history. ... The book considers Moore’s narrative strategies and pinpoints the main thematic threads in his works: the subversion of genre and pulp fiction; the interrogation of superhero tropes; the manipulation of space and time; the uses of magic and mythology; the instability of gender and ethnic identity; and satire that is build on allusive, dense imagery that comments on politics and art history.” If you can fathom the meaning of such terms as “chronotopes,” a beribboned word encompassing comics’ capacity to use space as a way of pacing, or timing, events in a narrative, then you’ll doubtless enjoy revisiting such Moore classics as Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, Promethea, and Lost Girls as well as some of Moore’s lesser lights, Halo Jones, Skizz, and Big Numbers. DiLiddo quotes Moore about his preference for comics as a mode of expression: “What it comes down to in comics is that you have complete control both of the verbal track and the image track, which you don’t have in any other medium, including film. So a lot of effects are possible which simply cannot be achieved anywhere else.” And then she sets out to prove the accuracy of Moore’s self-assessment as a creative personality. I look forward to plunging in with the expectation that she will be able to demonstrate the narrative or thematic function of Moore’s allusive methods of storytelling. Why, for example, does including A.J. Raffles, the amateur cracksman of British fiction, in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen make the story somehow better?

PLAYBOY

Every writer dreams of having an impact upon the culture around him, so I must confess to an insidious sense of gratification brought on by the realization that my ranting recently about the declining number of cartoons in Playboy has had an impact: to make up for the neglect of the last several issues, the new management has put a cartoon character on the cover of the November issue. A first. Drawn by Julius Preite, Marge Simpson, the matriarch of the first family of Springfield, is on display — seated on a bunny-headed chair that coyly nearly obscures the fact that she’s sitting there unencumbered by any raiment whatsoever except the ever-present blue hair arising from her scalp in a cascading pile. (The pose and cover composition echo the October 1971 cover on which an African American pin-up sat on the same chair, her Afro hair-do being the most conspicuous of her attributes.) And Marge is inside the magazine, too, “gracing” (as they say there) the gatefold spread, encumbered by the usual Playmate bio and mock interview.  Although the advance publicity about the November issue said the gatefold wouldn’t “bare all” — the nudity, the magazine said, was only “implied” — not much of Marge is left to the imagination: she’s wearing a see-through nightie, and we can tell that she has nipples.

The attendant publicity failed to mention that the Marge cover is but one of two November covers: the other one, depicting lingerie model Alina Puscau in her underwear, is on the magazines sent to Playboy subscribers (which account for about 40 percent of the magazine’s circulation); Marge appears on the newsstand edition, seductively tagged “Collector’s Edition” in the expectation that it will be purchased by swarms of new, young, heavy-breathing readers.

The Marge stunt is "obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek," said Playboy Enterprises’ new CEO, Scott Flanders, interviewed by Sandra Guy at the Chicago Sun-Times. "It had never been done, and we thought it would be kind of hip, cool and unusual,” he continued, adding that the whole idea of the cartoon-covered issue is to attract readers in their 20s to a magazine whose average reader is now about 35 years old.

It’s this kind of so-called reasoning that sends shivers up my erstwhile spine. Flanders, who ran a newspaper chain until taking over for the retiring Christie Hefner last June, thinks Marge Simpson will pull in younger readers. What? On what planet is he living? He thinks young male Americans will line up faster to buy a magazine with a cartoon character on the cover than a magazine with a scantily clad woman on the cover? Don’t I wish. Where did this guy grow up? Red-blooded hormone-infected young American males always opt for barenekidwimmin. Always. And Marge’s blue hair doesn’t help: blue hair is the badge of the elderly femme. I don’t care how many nipples she displays: Marge is an old woman, a pin-up for senior citizens. Or, we must allow, cartoon fans.

But before we abandon Marge to her fate, here’s a new book, arriving just in time to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of Matt Groening’s creation: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is John Ortved’s round-up of witnesses, each telling their tales about how Groening and his crew created one of the most successful tv shows in the history of the medium. Reviewing it in Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker applauds this “gloriously windy oral history crammed with behind-the-scenes squabbles and power grabs” while also warning the reader against accepting too readily some of the negative stuff, “particularly when sources assert that Groening is little more than an affable frontman for the show.” Says Tucker about the victims of such back-stabbing: “These guys aren’t there to defend themselves [Groening and some other key players didn’t testify]. ... In most cases though, Ortved amasses quotes from many sources to establish such points so the negative stuff doesn’t seem gratuitous.”

           

ANOTHER WRINKLE IN RIVERDALE

Archie Andrews’ matrimonial adventure, a patently obvious publicity stunt from the get-go, has developed some much less obvious aspects than the initial blasts of publicity had us expecting. Archie proposes to Veronica in Archie No. 600 and marries her in No. 601, and the series has four more issues to run. What’s next? Plenty, as it turns out. Bigamy. Yup: next, Archie will marry girl-next-door Betty, who, until now, we’d thought had lost out to that sloe-eyed vixen, Veronica. To see how this is all possible, you’ll have to buy all the issues in the 6-issue series. Or you can consult the Usual Place, Opus 249.

The storytelling in this Archie series, except for the visual staging by Stan Goldberg, is vacuous enough, but writer Michael Uslan’s plot is commendably ingenious. Two issues of jejune comedy careening headlong, page after unrelenting page, was more than I can usually stomach, but Uslan managed a couple of turns that kept me from throwing up. No. 601, for instance, opens on the wedding day with Archie, Jug, Reggie, Moose and the rest of the groom’s gang donning tuxedos, and when Archie complains about his collar being too stiff, Reggie blurts out what seems a lame joke but is the issue’s best albeit entirely subversive gag: “From now on, we’re gonna call you ‘Starchie,’” he says, invoking the name of Mad’s Archie parody and, thereby, alluding to the infamous humorlessness of Archie Comics, which eventually succeeded in enjoining Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder from ever again publishing the most exasperating of their Archie spoofs, the Goodman Beaver story that was actually ribbing Hugh Hefner and Playboy, not Archie. In it, the “Archie” character was an unalloyed pill-popping dope-smoking hedonist — a circumstance casting so many aspersions on the Archie iconography that John Goldwater, the company’s last patriarch, couldn’t take it and resorted to the courts to stifle such malfeasance in all our futures forevermore. I’m surprised Uslan managed to sneak that joke through so straitlaced and rigid an editorial review, but he did, and I was delighted to encounter it. (The Comics Journal, daringly enough, reprinted the verboten story in No. 262.)

For my exploration of how Uslan manages to get Archie married to two women without divorcing either, beam up to Opus 249 of the online magazine, Rants & Raves, where, until December 9, we have proclaimed “Open Sesame”: whenever you run into a Subscriber/Member wall, behave as if you are a member, then use Jingle as your ID, and Jangle as your Password. That will give you access to current and archived Rants & Raves, plus all of Harv’s Hindsights, the history and biography department. 

THE COMICS JOURNAL

The Comics Journal is changing. Again. It is always changing. It has never stood still for more than a year or so. Every change over the years aimed at meeting new circumstances in the evolving comics market place. A couple years ago, the magazine abandoned saddle-stitch binding in favor of a square-back spine and reduced its trim size to 6x9 inches — book-size — and, as we mentioned here soon thereafter, it put the magazine’s name and issue contents on a 3x4-inch sticker on the cover; the sticker could be peeled off, and you might then think you were holding a paperback book in your hands instead of a square-spine magazine. The object was to make The Comics Journal viable in bookstore settings: on the shelf, if you peeled off the sticker, it would look pretty much like a paperback book, not a magazine. And to some extent, the strategy worked: publisher Gary Groth reported that the magazine experienced in increase of a thousand or so issues every month.

And now the Journal is taking yet another step in the same direction. As soon as issue No. 300 is out (not long now), the “magazine” will shift to semi-annual publication in print while simultaneously ramping up the TCJ.com website. The print version of the Journal will be  variable in design, its shape and format changing to fit its content, which will continue to be interviews, essays, and “objets d’art” (vintage comics and cartoons), but the writing will be longer and meatier and aimed at archival permanence. Like a book, in other words. The digital Journal, on the other hand, will take advantage of the Web’s immediacy: online, the magazine will change daily, constantly up-dating itself with breaking news coverage, new and established bloggers, plus interviews, columns, and criticism in text and videos, slide shows, audio files, and galleries of original-art.

Summarizing the print plan during an interview, Groth said: “If we can assemble the magazine at a more leisurely pace — rather than the breakneck pace that we've worked at for 33 years (that's the royal we; i.e., mostly me and a succession of poor, burnt-out editors) — we'll put out a better magazine. I hesitate to call it a magazine, too: it'll be distributed to the book trade by W.W. Norton and will retail for a minimum of $20.” It’ll be a book.

When they told me and other regular contributors a few weeks ago of the impending change, I remarked that I thought it ironic in a mildly amusing way that a magazine that has established itself with criticism and commentary on a print medium, comic books, is now investing heavily in a non-print edition on the Web. Okay, everyone’s doing it. But that doesn’t make the maneuver any the less ironic. Ironic but, probably, ultimately, canny. And successful: I’ve been around the Journal through almost all of its changes over the years, and most of them, it seems to me, have worked to the magazine’s advantage. In any case, it’s been challenging and deeply gratifying to work for a periodical that has never been content to sit back on its laurels.

HB, JD

Amid all the excitement of the Town Hall Tumult in August you may have failed to notice that Jeremy Duncan, the ostensible star of Zits, a comic strip written by Jerry Scott and given visual life by Jim Borgman, turned 16 on August 14. "After freezing Jeremy at 15 for over a decade, it just felt like time to cut the kid a break and move on to a different set of challenges and frustrations," Borgman told Michael Cavna of ComicRiffs. The most visible evidence of Jeremy’s maturation is that he’ll get a driver’s license."I think it's going to give us new writing opportunities," Scott told Cavna. "We felt [ age 15] was the maximum frustration age. You think you can run the world and you can't even drive a car. ... There will be more strips that don't involve [Jeremy's] parents ... we're going to get inside his head a little more."

VOLUNTEERISM

In October a week of comic strips about volunteerism was instigated by the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) at the prompting of Luann’s Greg Evans, who afterwards wrote to thank everyone who participated, passing along the heartfelt thanks of Bill Hoogterp (a volunteerism honcho, I guess), who coordinated the effort and, afterwards, said: "Please, please, please pass on our tremendous thanks to the members of NCS. We have gotten so much positive response! Millions of people are talking about volunteering. NCS did the impossible, you made volunteering more cool! People are calling and signing up to make a difference at countless local agencies. All because of you guys. The world is a little better place today because the world’s greatest cartoonists gave of their talent and touched people in a way that only you can. And your gags were great! Just heard from J.J. Abrams also, who sends his regards and thanks as well!"

 

Then Evans appended a strange footnote: “I'd just like to add something here. I want to apologize to any of you who got the kind of irate email I got last week. It never occurred to me that this effort would be viewed with a political skew and that it would be perceived as ‘kowtowing to Big Government.’ I just thought we were doing a good thing, not being ‘commies.’ So sorry.”

Is there to be no end to the bellyaching being performed from sea to shining sea by the Gripy Old Pachyderm and its many malcontented minions? What next?

USO CARTOONIST TOUR

Cartoonists’ good deeds are not confined to the funnies page. Recently, Stars & Stripes reported, some of America's best-known cartoonists took off on a USO tour of bases in Germany and the Middle East. According to a USO press release, the group included Jeff Bacon (Broadside and Greenside), editoonist Chip Bok (Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal), Bruce Higdon (Army Times, Army Magazine, Soldiers Magazine), Jeff Keane (The Family Circus), Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), editoonist Michael Ramirez (Investors Business Daily), caricaturist Tom Richmond (Mad), and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury). The tour evokes a National Cartoonists Society tradition that dates to World War II before the Society even existed; in fact, it was formed by cartoonists who, while performing before soldiers convalescing in military hospitals, discovered they enjoyed each other’s company and decided to prolong the camaraderie by establishing a club. "I'm so proud of our men and women in uniform," said Keane, NCS President. "They, much like my dad who served in the Army back in the mid-1940s, have worked so hard and sacrificed so much. I am honored to be part of this USO tour and I can't thank our troops enough."

Several of the cartoonists with blogs — Richmond and Pastis in particular — reported their adventures during the tour. Because of security concerns (remember: rampaging Islamic hoodlums have an unsatiated appetite for killing cartoonists), the bloggers could’t say where they were. But they could say what they were doing. Pastis, for instance, wrote: “Spent all day lying in the sun at the edge of the Persian Gulf. Was going to solve all of the Middle East’s problems, but decided to get a tan instead. Tomorrow I go to a new country. I’d like to name it, but I’m not allowed to identify it until I get back home. I’m like James Bond, but without the nice car. Or fancy clothes. Or hot women. Instead, I’m with a bunch of pudgy, middle-age cartoonists.” What a joker that Pastis.

For the Whole Story of how the cartooner club came into being, visit Harv’s Hindsight at the Usual Place and look for “Rube Goldberg and the NCS.”

REMEMBERING SHEL DORF

Friends of Shel Dorf knew for months that it was only a matter of time. Plagued by diabetes, he had been hospitalized for over a year, dialysis three times a week. Finally, at 1:15 p.m. on Tuesday, November 3, Shel died of kidney failure. He was 76.

The love affair of his life began early and lasted long. Born July 5, 1933, Shel Dorf said he was “born again” when he saw his first comic strips at about the age of six — a book of Katzenjammer Kids reprints. When he was seven, he bought his first comic book — Sure Fire, No. 1, cover-dated June 1940. Hooked, he spent his 25-cent weekly allowance on the four-color pulps — Superman, Action, Blue Beetle, Super Comics, Disney titles, Captain Marvel, Bullet Man, Doll Man, Batman — or on movies. By the time he was ten, he was clipping comic strips out of the newspapers in his hometown, Detroit, and pasting them in scrapbooks, a pastime that became a life-long hobby, resulting in more than 500 scrapbooks, all of which Shel later deposited at the Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

Shel went to the nation’s first comic-con, staged in downtown Detroit in April 1964, and sold some of his stash of comic books. The next year, Shel was “chairman” of the Detroit Triple Fan Fair (for “fantasy literature,” films, and comic art) held July 24-25, 1965, at the Embassy Hotel on Cadillac Square in downtown Detroit. He was active in the next four Fan Fairs, and then he moved to San Diego where his parents retired. And by the spring of 1970, he was coordinating the efforts of a bunch of teenage comics and sf fans to create the San Diego Golden State Comic-Con, which convened at the U.S. Grant Hotel, August 1-3, destined to become the nation’s largest comic book and popular culture convention.

As Entertainment Weekly’s cryptic 2009 history of the event notes: “In the last decade, Comic-Con has exploded into the most important pop culture event on Hollywood’s calendar — a frenzied marketing free-for-all where, each July, major studios and networks flaunt their coolest new projects, trying to woo an audience of 125,000 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fans.”

Shel watched it and wasn’t entirely thrilled: “Hollywood has kind of hijacked the Con,” he said, his voice a gentle rumble, and in his eye, the glimmer of a twinkle. By then, Shel was no longer actively involved in the Comic-Con. He had resigned as “president and founder” in 1984, uncomfortable with the Con’s moving away from comic books and newspaper comic strips.

The supreme irony of Shel’s last years is that what happened to him echoed the original sin in the comics industry. The industry’s continued prosperity has been built upon the four-color fantasies of do-gooders in brightly colored costumes, all inspired, at first, by the startling newsstand success of Superman, invented by two Cleveland teenagers, who subsequently sold their rights to the character for a 1938 page rate, $130 total. When Superman became a blockbuster movie in 1975, Superman’s publisher/owner, Warner/DC Comics, was shamed into creating an annual pension for the character’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who, at the time, were ill and impoverished, having enjoyed comparatively little financial reward from their creation.

Like Siegel and Shuster and scores of syndicated comic strip cartoonists (whose syndicates, until recently, owned their creations), Shel was not able to enjoy a reward commensurate with his creation. The Comic-Con had fostered the careers of scores of cartoonists, writers, movie producers and actors. But not Shel. Like Siegel and Shuster in the years before Warner granted them pensions, Shel was virtually penniless. And ill, suffering from diabetes. You’d think (wouldn’t you?) that Comic-Con officials, fans enough of the medium to know the shameful treatment that Siegel and Shuster endured before the pensions — you’d think those Comic-Con officials wouldn’t want to be guilty of the same original sin and would award the founder a pension. And, indeed, they tried. But Shel was a proud and stubborn man, and he resisted attempts to alleviate his situation.

At the end, though, he knew he was loved. One of Shel’s earliest cohorts, Mike Towry, who was publicity chairman for the first Cons while 15 and 16 years old, said when he heard Shel had died: “He was a completely generous person who was wholly devoted to furthering the comic arts, bringing the fans and the professionals together. He never made a dime off Comic-Con.” Mark Evanier, a comedy and comics writer who was involved in the Con variously from almost its beginning, saw the truth about the Comic-Con and its founder: “The guy just lived and breathed comics his whole life. The Con was built on his passion and his cheerleading.”

For the Whole Story of the founding of the Con and Shel Dorf’s life (with lots of pictures of the comic strip we worked on together), consult the Usual Place, www.RCHarvey.com, where, until December 9, we’re celebrating Open Access month. Whenever you run into a Subscriber/Member wall, behave as if you are a member, then use Jingle as your ID, and Jangle as your Password. That will give you access to current and archived Rants & Raves, plus all of Harv’s Hindsights, the history and biography department. 

GOD OF COMICS: OSAMU TEZUKA

Another production of the University Press of Mississippi (one of my publishers) that I look forward to perusing is God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (218 6x9-inch pages, some b/w illos; paperback, $25; unjacketed cloth, $50) in which Natsu Onoda Power, a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University, chronicles the life and work of the man who unquestionably created modern comics in Japan. In this, one of the first English-language studies of the famed cartoonist’s entire body of work, Power emphasizes Tezuka’s use of “intertextuality,” the practice of employing other cultural products (such as film, theater, opera and literature) to enrich a narrative. In “The Monster on the 38^th Parallel,” for example, Tezuka duplicates exactly the final scene of the Orson Welles-Joseph Cotton film, “The Third Man,” in which the hero’s presumed love interest walks by him without acknowledging him, thereby destroying his hopes for a future with her. By mimicking this scene (“a film quotation,” Power says), Tezuka presumably imparts to his story some of the emotion of the Welles film’s conclusion; but even if his readers have never seen the earlier live-action movie, that icy last sequence speaks volumes in  itself. Tezuka also enabled readers to develop “intimate relationships” with his world by the habitual use of stock characters and recurrent visual jokes that created “a coherent world that encompasses all of this works.” One chapter is provocatively entitled “Low Humor/High Drama: The Two Faces of Adult Comics.” Can’t wait to get into that.

By the way, but not at all incidentally, the FCC has recently ruled that bloggers must disclose any payola with which they are showered. Many of the books I review hereabouts, I purchase out of my own hard-earned lucre, but I frequently review books by various of my publishers (and I usually indicate that relationship, as I have here), and while no publisher is gifting me with new muscle cars or vacations in exotic lands — or outright money — many of the books I review have been sent to me as review copies, without charge. Payola, no doubt. In the spirit of the FCC ruling and in the interest of purity and simplicity, I think you should assume that all books I review were sent to me gratis, as review copies. There. Having confessed my taint, I am henceforth pure.

DOG DAYS AND BONE

  The fourth book in the Wimpy series, Dog Days, was released October 12 with a first printing of 4 million copies, up from the previously announced 3 million. I haven’t read any of these phenomena at any length yet. I’ve read a few pages, though, enough to know they aren’t comic books or graphic novels: they’re illustrated text stories, and to call them graphic novels is to insult graphic novelists like, f’instance, Jeff Smith. His Bone: Crown of Horns, the final volume in the Bone saga, stood at thirteenth on PW Comics Week’s list last May.

NEXUS: AS IT HAPPENED

Nexus: As It Happened, Volume One (206 6x9-inch pages, b/w; paperback, $9.99) begins reprinting an early phenomena of comics fandom and the ground-level fan press, Steve Rude and Mike Baron’s driven superhero, Nexus, whose inner demons make him judge, jury and executioner of vile criminals who appear in his dreams. A compelling concept beautifully executed in the original, here Rude’s finer visual points are lost, regrettably, on pages too small to showcase the art in these stories, from the first in 1981 through the seventh in 1983. Other reprint volumes are in the offing, I suppose; but they, if they adhere to the mold of the first in the series, will likewise disappoint.

THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS

In the watershed winter of 1967-68 in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Shelton witnessed two movies, one about the Marx Brothers and the other about the Three Stooges, playing a fated double-bill at the Vulcan Gas Company, a theater for which he drew posters. Stunned by the Marx-Stooges experience, Shelton decided that he, too, could make movies. Enlisting the help of a friend in the film department of the University of Texas, he produced a five-minute movie, “The Texas Hippies March on the Capitol.” Shelton had been, in the early sixties, editor of the Texas Ranger, the campus humor magazine at UT, wherein Shelton published, in the December 1961 issue, an early installment of Wonder Wart-Hog, a comic whose eponymous protagonist he’d been fooling around with since high school; but that’s another story for another time. This time, the winter of 1967-68, Shelton was a movie maker. And a cartoonist. As a cartoonist, Shelton decided the best way to promote his new film was to publish a flyer featuring a comic strip about three potheads. “Everyone liked the comic strip better than the film,” Shelton said, “so I abandoned my film-directing career and devoted my subsequent efforts to cartooning.”

For the next few decades, he produced more comic strips about the three potheads, denominated, for all time, “the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” a trio consisting of Phineas Freakears, Freewheelin’ Franklin, and Fat Freddy, who, eventually, had a cat. The Brothers made their comic book debut in Feds ’n’ Heads (wherein Wonder Wart-Hog also appears) in the spring of 1968, just about the time Robert Crumb produced Zap Comix No. 1. Underground comix were officially off and running. In order to sell some of the comic books, Shelton drove a carload of them to San Francisco, an already fabled hippie mecca; once there, he decided to stay and try to make a living drawing posters. He was soon joined by three other displaced Texans, Fred Todd, Dave Moriaty, and Jack Jackson (“Jaxon”), and they started Rip Off Press. Among their first productions was a collection of comic strips entitled The New Adventures of Jesus by Foolbert Sturgeon, aka Frank Stack, another fugitive Texan, then on the cusp of a career as a professor of art at the University of Missouri.

Some of this tale is rehearsed in a book of mine, The Art of the Comic Book, which is copiously described and simultaneously offered for sale at the Usual Place (see below). Shelton tells the same story in considerably more detail in the last (but one) three pages of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus, a 624-page compendium that purports to include all of the Freak Brothers oeuvre, including that very first movie flyer strip, which shows up herein on page 35. By reason of this tardy appearance, we may conclude that the Freak Brothers do not appear in the chronological order of their initial publication. Amid the 624 pages are two 112-page color sections, one of which reprints the famed three-part “Idiots Abroad” epic; the other, various posters and covers.

 All of the pages of this book are numbered, one number to each page, but I can’t imagine why: there’s no table of contents and the page numbers are never, otherwise, referred to. So why number them? Because, as any pothead knows, books have page numbers, and this production, kimo sabe, is a book, a fat stubby 7x10x1-inch door-stopper of a tome, which I bought (for $35 list price) so I’ll have a Freak Brothers source at hand, should I ever need one.  You may want it for the same purpose or to enjoy Shelton’s wicked satire, in both pictures and words, with assistance in the former by Dave Sheridan and, later, Paul Mavrides. Alas, although the book is fat enough to include all the Freak Brothers, the page size is not kind to the artwork, which, in some instances, is reduced too small to see very well. Earlier compendia, most of which use an 8x11-inch format, are better if you hope to admire the drawing.

HARVEY KURTZMAN: MAD GENIUS OF COMICS

A book I can’t wait to get into is The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle from Abrams Comicarts (254 giant 10.5x11-inch landscape pages, color where necessary; hardcover, $40). A biography of the stylistic wunderkind and protean comedic genius as well as a copious scrapbook sampling Kurtzman’s oeuvre from early to late — including much that has never seen publication before — this tome is the book I have probably been waiting for since 1952, when Mad first appeared in the magazine rack at the corner drugstore at 25^th and Sheridan in the holy city of Old Edgewater. No, I haven’t actually read any of the text in the book, but Kitchen is involved, and if we are to judge from his exhaustive and exact work in previous books (like Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny in two annotated volumes), we’ll find many treasures herein — such as, bless me, the hitherto unpublished three-page Little Annie Fanny origin story in which Our Heroine reminisces about her life, her recollections taking visual form in panels drawn in the manner of Al Capp, Harold Gray (if you can’t imagine him drawing a buxom Annie, you need this book for the evidence), Charles Schulz, Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, and Lee Falk’s Mandrake. In addition to samples of the usual array of Kurtzman productions — Mad, Trump, Help, Humbug (another treat, Fantagraphics’ reprinting of the entire run of this classic magazine) — we get glimpses of his advertising art, his army cartoons, the work of Louis Ferstadt, an artist and packager of comic book stories (the Ferstadt sample so rare that it wasn’t listed in Overstreet until the Price Guide’s 6^th edition — see what I mean about Kitchen’s vacuuming research?), John Severin’s picture of the chaos at the Charles William Harvey Commercial Art Studio, some of Kurtzman’s “serious” comic book art, his layouts for other EC artists to follow exactly in drawing stories for Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, and plenty of funny pages rendered in his best manic manner. A delection. I can’t wait.

UNDERGROUND COMIX

Here’s a fresh look at comix from Abrams ComicArts, Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix (9x12-inch pages, many in color; hardback, $29.95). At just 144 pages, the book is scarcely a comprehensive over-view published for its own sake; it is, rather, the catalogue for an exhibition of original underground comix art at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, this very spring. Surprisingly perhaps, only 90 of the book’s pages are devoted to displaying the art from the show — at one piece per page, an expansive display — and the selection includes most of the major figures in comix: Crumb, Shelton, Art Spiegelman, S. Clay Wilson, Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch, Denis Kitchen, Justin Green, Jack “Jaxon” Jackson (whose nickname, conferred by Shelton at the Texas Ranger, refers obliquely to JAX beer, a favorite Lone Star State beverage), Kim Deitch, Trina Robbins, to name some; and a few peripheral but seminal figures for the underground, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder and Will Eisner, for instance. The remaining three dozen pages are devoted to five essays about comix.

Jay Lynch, reviewing his own pioneering engagement with the movement, waxes nicely nostalgic, dwelling on the early history of the genre with a view from inside (but slipping momentarily to misstate the date of Zap Comix No. 1, citing 1967 instead of 1968). Trina Robbins does a similar inside job but with an emphasis on the struggle of women cartoonists to impinge upon what was then (and to a large extent still is) a male-dominated art form in which women, when depicted, are degraded and abused. Denis Kitchen teams with journalism professor James Danky, his co-editor for the book, reflecting on the license ug cartoonists enjoyed, expressing themselves and their unconventional attitudes in their art, as they developed a business acumen while the burgeoning comix phenomenon exploded around them. Patrick Rozenkranz, who has spent 40 years admiring underground comix and writing about them while earning his living in sundry film appreciation endeavors, is more analytical: he attempts to credit the iconoclastic impulses of underground comix for subsequent societal changes, but by telescoping history to create direct cause-and-effect links, he leaves out many contributing factors.

In his essay, the longest in the book, Paul Buhle, a senior lecturer in history at Brown University with thirty books on his vitae, argues that comix are art and belong in art history. Their “dissident themes alone would have placed the undergrounds within the key rebellious artistic traditions of the American twentieth century. Underground comix deftly united the most vernacular of all arts, the comic book, with political rebellion and a reflective critique of American culture.”  And in trying often to realize a psychedelic LSD vision, comix contributed innovative visuals to match their revolutionary content. Buhle’s ringing conclusion is only slightly marred by his mistaken belief in the worn-out tradition that Mad adopted a magazine format in order to escape censorship. In the last analysis, Buhle concludes roundly, comix “were the artistic outpourings of a lost generation, able to achieve only a portion of what the comix revolution of 1969 had promised and would have delivered, in other circumstances, on talent alone. There were so many large losses in those years — the receding waves of social transformation, the transfer of ‘sexual freedom’ into license, the vogue of LSD into cocaine, the reconsolidation of corporate prestige in Ronald Reagan and the restart of the Cold War — that a tragedy in the vernacular art world (or any art world) cannot be taken too seriously.” But for those who pored over these artifacts “with enthusiasm and an adult awareness that the vernacular was reaching up toward a reconciliation of the artists’ hand and the intellectuals’ vision,” the loss “was a blow not to be underestimated.” But there’s hope: “Just now — beyond midlife, thirty years on, with the Web at full cruising speed and the promise of a new graphic novel art on the horizon — we may be recovering.”

THE FAMILY IN DOONESBURY

For the first two weeks in August, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury focused on the deliberations of an assortment of unknown white males gathered at the clubhouse of “the Family” on C Street in Washington, D.C. What is “the Family” I wondered. And how does this fit into Trudeau’s typical political schtick? From the strips, I could conclude that members of the Family are religiously fanatic politicians who believe they are divinely chosen to lead and who are stunningly tolerant of the adulterous peccadilloes of their members. Surely, I thought, Trudeau is making this stuff up. Alas, not so. The Family is real. And its members are, as Trudeau alleges, religious fanatics, powerful men who believe that their being powerful means they have God’s favor.

Founded in 1935 by an itinerant immigrant preacher named Abraham Vereide, the Family has grown into a “veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government,” I learned from the helpful explanation published in The Week magazine, July 31, which reached me on the eve of the Family’s appearance in Doonesbury.(but I didn’t get around to reading it until after puzzling over Trudeau’s take on it). “The Washington-based group counts many prominent politicians, mostly conservative Republicans, among its flock, and several members of Congress pay $600 a month to rent rooms in the group’s townhouse. ... The Family tries to maintain a low profile, but was thrust into the headlines in recent weeks when it emerged that three politicians embroiled in sex scandals — South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, and former Mississippi Representative Chip Pickering — are longtime members. Pickering, in fact, last week was accused in court papers of having trysts with his mistress in the C Street house.”

The existence of the Family, it seems, explains a lot. The tenets of the religion the members of this bizarre cabal appear to embrace are “vague, elastic, and focused on power.” While the Family doesn’t exactly “excuse” adultery and other sins, “it considers the powerful to be accountable only to God and their peers, not to their constituents or to the Constitution.” The presence of such a power-mad, self-delusional bunch of fanatics at the heart of American government is terrifying. Jeff Sharlet, who wrote a book about these crazies, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, considers their “disregard for conventional morality ‘potentially very dangerous’ because it ‘leads you away from accountability to the public.’”

In my Rancid Raves online magazine, Opus 247, I’ve posted the entire horrifying article from The Week just next to the Doonesbury strips, which leap from the Family’s condoning adultery to its sponsorship of birther legislation, a sure sign of the secret society’s dementia.

LOST CALVIN AND HOBBES?

The Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes strip below, we’re told at platypuscomix.net, has never been published. It’s not in the compendious Complete Calvin and Hobbes; it was never distributed by Watterson’s syndicate, Universal Uclick (nee Universal Press). I can’t vouch for that claim, but if you’d like to try to prove platypuscomix wrong, you might try looking for “11/28” (the date that appears in the last panel) in the first years of the strip as reprinted in Complete. And let me know if you find it. Below the strip, one of Watterson’s charming self-caricatures, at which he was adept. He had to be, because he rarely permitted himself to be photographed. Only two such accomplishments have ever been published (that I know of).

Below Watterson’s self-caricature, my recollection of my favorite Watterson self-impression. The original from Watterson’s hand was hanging on a wall at the Universal Press offices when I visited there a dozen or more years ago: a self-satirical effort, it depicts Watterson evading a camera. Isn’t that exactly how you’d expect to see him? His drawing is better than mine, but mine is a pretty accurate recollection (wouldn’t you say, Lee?)

 

 

BONE TALL TALES

 Jeff Smith will be producing new Bone stories, Bone Tall Tales, which Scholastic will bring out next summer according to a press release from the publishing house. Then that  fall, Scholastic will begin publication of the highly anticipated expansion of the Bone World, the Quest for the Spark trilogy. Written by Tom Sniegoski (under Smith’s supervision) and illustrated by Smith, the trilogy represents the first time Smith has continued the adventures set in the “valley” since the publication of Rose, the prequel to the Bone series, which Scholastic is releasing under its Graphix imprint next month. Book Two of the new series will be out in the spring of  2011; Book Three, in summer that year. Scholastic reports that it has shipped 4.5 million copies of the Bone graphic novels since its Graphix imprint published the first in the series in 2005.

Those attending last summer’s San Diego Comic Con could see a screening of a feature-length documentary about Smith’s life and work. From the press release about the film: “The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone and the Changing Face of Comics” tells the inspiring story of Jeff Smith’s creation of the epic comic book, Bone, hailed by critics as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time. The film follows Smith from his beginnings as a budding five-year-old artist drawing on his livingroom floor through his difficult start-up as a self-published cartoonist and  the 13-year journey to complete the book that he describes as “Bugs Bunny meets the Lord of the Rings.” In addition to discussing Jeff’s early years, influences and philosophies, the film provides a rare inside look at both the art and the business of comics, a field that has gained new respect as a “gateway to literacy” for youngsters and adults who are “reluctant readers.” Other cartoonists — Scott McCloud, Colleen Doran, Paul Pope, Terry Moore and Harvey Pekar, as well as friends, associates, experts and Jeff himself — share their stories of the worldwide Bone phenomenon that began in small comics shops and is now found in bookstores, schools, libraries and the homes of millions of adults and children in 25 countries. The video is now available throughout the media-saturated void.

ETHEL HAYS

Below you'll see one of Ethel Hays’ typically sweet line drawings of a wonderfully svelte young woman done in 1935 for Everyweek Magazine, a newspaper supplement produced by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) feature syndicate; a tiny hand-lettered date reads “8-25-35.” Hays’ drawings were usually rendered with a clean, uncluttered line — the supple line itself, as here, performing all the work. In contrast, another great woman cartoonist of the period, Nell Brinkley, drew equally attractive young women but with a line that was endlessly fussy, encumbered with feathering and hachering of all sorts. We’ll meet Brinkley a few weeks hence when we review a new Trina Robbins’ book from Fantagraphics, The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons from 1913-1940 (136 9x13-inch pages, color; hardcover $29.99), so I’ll dwell here instead on Hays.

Not much has been written about Hays in the usual cartooning histories — the most I know of appeared in the 2005 edition of Hogan’s Alley, No. 13, in a piece by one of comics best historians, Allan Holtz. Hays was born in 1892 in Billings, Montana, a town that had been established only ten years before but grew miraculously due the Northern Pacific Railroad’s tracks through the place. (Among other cartoonists/artists who passed through the town, cowboy artist/author Will James, The Lone Cowboy et al, and strip cartoonist/novelist Stan Lynde, Rick O’Shay and Latigo strips.) After graduating from high school, Hays persuaded her parents to send her to the Los Angeles School of Art and Design where she studied to become an illustrator, skillfully aping the drawing mannerisms of James Montgomery Flagg and others of the most popular illustrators of the day. She won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York and, in due course, another scholarship to the Julian Academy in Paris. But World War I broke out all over Europe, so her Parisian plans fizzled.

Instead, she began teaching art in army hospitals to amuse and engage the wounded during their convalescence. When one class of soldiers professed an interest in learning how to become cartoonists, Hays confessed she didn’t know the first thing about it, but she subsequently enrolled in the Charles N. Landon correspondence course in cartooning and, staying a lesson ahead of her students, taught them cartooning.

When Landon saw her work, he exulted and promptly touted her talent to the editor of the Cleveland Press, where Landon had worked as art director until about 1912. Suddenly, Hays was a staff illustrator and cartoonist at a daily newspaper. Her first assignment was illustrating the gossipy first-person narratives of a flapper’s adventures written by Victoria Benham; Vic and Ethel debuted December 5, 1923, and Hays was now drawing in the simpler style of John Held, Jr. When Benham left to get married, Hays continued solo, now just Ethel, and her drawings soon shed the Held influence, characters becoming sleek and spritely with solid blacks spotted as skillfully and as effectively as those by Gluyas Williams, another master of the unadorned line.

Coincidence and happy happenstance continued to dog Hays’ steps: the Cleveland Press was one of the Scripps chain, and Scripps also ran the NEA syndicate. Editors at NEA noticed Hays’ work in the Press right away, and she was syndicated by early 1925, her thrice weekly Ethel supplemented by a one-column daily cartoon, Flapper Fanny. Hays married at the end of the year, and by 1930, she was the mother of two and reduced her workload by one feature; Fanny was picked up by another promising woman cartooner, Gladys Parker. Hays and Parker appeared together in tandem until Hays gave it up in 1934, only to come back the next year with a weekly comic strip, Marianne, for Everyweek. That lasted only until 1938, and soon thereafter, Hays devoted her time solely to illustrating children’s books, a vocation she assumed in the late 1930s. Hays died in 1989 at the age of 97. Holtz’s Hogan’s Alley article is nicely illustrated, and you might find even more samples at hoganmag.com or, at least, subscription and back-issue information.

And if you enjoy cavorting through comics history like this, you’ll probably enjoy a department at www.RCHarvey.com, namely Harv’s Hindsights, which is fraught with stuff like the foregoing.