OCCUPY GUY FAWKES

A persistent image oft seen among the Occupy milieu these days is a mask depicting a sallow, smirking, moustached alleged likeness of Guy Fawkes, a nearly legendary British failed revolutionary who plotted to blow up Parliament some four centuries ago. The mask was initially created by David Lloyd for Alan Moore’s 1982 graphic novel, V for Vendetta, whose protagonist seeks to destroy the government. Over the Guy Fawkes Day weekend — "Remember, remember, the Fifth of November: the gunpowder treason and plot" — Michael Cavna at ComicRiffs asked Lloyd for his thoughts on the mass appropriation of his mask:

"As far as that mask is concerned, well, I'm happy it's being used as a multi-purpose banner of protest. It's like [Alberto Korda's] Che Guevara image on t-shirts and such that was used so often in the past as a symbol of revolutionary spirit — the difference being that while Che represented a specific political movement, the mask of V does not: it's neutral. It just represents opposition to any perceived tyranny, which is why it fits easily into being Everyman's tool of protest against oppression rather than being a calling card for a particular group."

The man behind the mask said the Occupy Movement reminds him of [Paddy Chayevsky's 1976 satire] “Network,” in which the disillusioned newsman cries out: “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

As for Alan Moore, he was smitten; as he told Tom Lamont at the guardian.co.uk: "I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world — it's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

ANOTHER COMEBACK AGAIN: PART TWO

Stan Lee, still trading on a reputation for character creation that is founded (even stranded) in the 1960s, is at it again — this time, in India, where he’s engaged with Liquid Comics to invent India’s first comic book superhero. Lee will be working with local artists and writers on Chakra the Invincible, who originates in an Indian teenager, Raju Rai, a technology genius living in Mumbai, who is determined to use science to unlock the secrets of human potential. Raju develops a technically-enhanced suit that activates the mystical Chakras of the body, unleashing newfound abilities and powers.”

Lee, with characteristic bombast, describes the new “saga” as “thrill-a-minute” and Chakra “our daring and dangerous teenage hero.”

Sounds a bit like Iron Man wedded to Spidey, to me. But not, apparently, to Liquid Comics co-founder and CEO, Sharad Devarajan, who saith: "Stan Lee is one of the most prolific storytellers in the world today, having created iconic characters that have generated billions of dollars at the box office and are known by nearly every man, woman and child on earth. The opportunity to bring Stan's unparalleled experience of the superhero genre to India and enable him to collaborate with local talents to create a new Indian character is the culmination of a lifelong dream."

I don’t mean to belittle Stan Lee’s monumental achievements in revitalizing the American funnybook biz, but we’ve heard these trumpets sounding before over the last couple decades, and none of Lee’s “thrill-a-minute” creations of those years is still operating. No matter. My guess is that his creative work on Chakra is already done: having named and conceptualized the new superhero, the rest he’ll doubtless leave to those “local artists and writers.”

ANOTHER COMEBACK AGAIN, PART ONE

Stan Lee, 88, is at it again. Alex Dobuzinskis at Reuters reports that POW! Entertainment, Lee’s current company, is invading the Internet hoping to make money at it with a YouTube project called “Stan Lee’s World of Heroes,” which will feature short, live-action videos and animation. "The Internet is so much bigger,” Lee said in a phone interview, “and it's so all encompassing and everybody is involved in it. Years ago, it was just getting started. This is the perfect time for us to dive in with both feet."

Of the characters he is planning to unleash, Lee said, “there will be some with super power, and there will be some that are just good stories of people doing good things.” The time is ripe for superheroes on the Web, Lee thinks. "I am hoping everything we're doing at POW! will be as good or even better than what I did at Marvel because I'm more experienced now," he said. "I know more now than I knew then."

Us old and faithful fans recognize in such ringing assertions the Soap Box hype of yore. And most of us, including Dobuzinskis at Reuters, realize that “so far, none of the characters Lee has dreamed up at POW! have come close to achieving the worldwide fame of the heroes he helped create in over five decades at Marvel Comics.”

Most of the comic book creations he has launched in the last decade or so have expired after a few issues. No one can doubt that Stan Lee revitalized a moribund comic book industry five decades ago, but, sad to say, the concepts that worked so well for him then are not working these days.

But Lee is still riding high on his reputation of yesteryear, a deserved reputation but for accomplishments that have lost their pertinence in today’s popular culture. And despite his recent record, he seems oblivious of any prospect of failure.

“I don't feel I'm working,” he enthused to Dobuzinkskis. “I feel as though I'm playing. There are guys 100-years-old who can't wait to get to the golf course. I can't wait to get to the office."

More power to him, I say. If you enjoy it, keep right on playing. And he is.

ALI FERZAT

Renowned Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat vows to return to cartooning in Syria as soon as his fingers have healed and he has retrained them to draw again. On August 25, he was ambushed by security services, who beat him, focusing on his face and hands, intending to send a message that he should not draw the cartoons he’d been drawing. The cartooning custom in Syria was to use symbols to represent the powerful when attacking them. But since April 2011, Ferzat deployed recognizable caricatures of President Assad and other leaders.

Ironically, Ferzat had been encouraged to champion freedom and modernization by the same Assad before he became President. Thinking the heir apparent supported him, Ferzat started Al-Doman (the lamp igniter), an independent magazine.

“But the fun was soon over,” reported Jannie Schipper at Radio Netherlands Worldwide. "When the regime realized after a few months that Al-Domari was not afraid of publishing sharp criticism, the censorship got worse.” After two years, the magazine ceased publication.

Ferzat is convinced that the insurgents in Syria will win: "The response of repression and security that the regime has chosen, has failed. Now, people face the deadly weapons with bare chests."           

Once he has retrained his fingers, Ferzat, who is recovering in Kuwait, will return to Syria. That's not a choice, he says. "I don't own a supermarket that I can freely open and close. Drawing cartoons is my only profession. The art is a gift from God, and I must continue to bring my message."

HOLY TERROR

Holy Terror
By Frank Miller
120 12x9-inch landscape pages, b/w with touches of scarlet and emerald green; Legendary Comics hardcover, $29.99

Written soon after 9/11, this book started as an outing for DC’s Batman and Catwoman but wound up being about a previously unknown costumed do-gooder, the Fixer, who looks like he’s wearing a slightly modified Batsuit, and Natalie, cat burglar/love interest in leather bustier and fishnet hose (not unlike Miller’s version of the Catwoman), who become allies to fight the 9/11 terrorists who have attacked the U.S.

Miller says he realized as he worked on it that the story was not appropriate for Batman. Batman fights the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin — all somewhat circumscribed personages and therefore individually surmountable foes; al Qaeda, on the other hand, is not identifiable with an individual (Osama bin Laden to the contrary notwithstanding): it is a tidal wave and cannot be fought in the same way the Joker can be. And so, Miller said, he took Batman out of the story.

The tale begins as the two lovers/haters forego prolonging their rough coitus in the air over Empire City one dismal night in favor of saving the city from a deadly menace of terrorists. They have until dawn to run down an army of bloodthirsty zealots in order to stop a crime against humanity (as Amazon’s write-up puts it). And when they catch up to one of the terrorists, the Fixer arranges to torture him, saying: “So, Mohammed — pardon me for guessing your name, but you've got to admit the odds are pretty good it's Mohammad — what’s the plan?” After inflicting enough pain to extract the necessary information, the Fixer and Natalie detonate his explosive belt and blow him to smithereens.

It is a particularly unsavory sequence, ripe with raw hatred for terrorists (imagined, not without reason, as Muslims all named Moe). It’s the kind of action that takes place when we give in to hatred and play by terrorist rules. The book is obviously a cri de coeur, a wailing screed of grief and wrath bursting from the depths of Miller’s mind and heart. But its nasty attitude about

Muslims and Arabs—the book never differentiates — is seen by some as a “shameful,” a sign that Islamophobia has become mainstream.

No question — Holy Terror is extreme. But it is also a supreme achievement in comics artistry by a master of the medium. Whatever your opinion of the rage and hatred embodied in the book, it is technically a masterpiece.

Richard Kyle, who coined the term that describes the genre to which this volume belongs — graphic novel — once said “comics are not ‘illustrated stories.’ In comics, ideation, pictures, sound (including speech and sound effects), and indicators (such as motion lines and impact bursts) are all portrayed graphically [pictorially] in a single unified whole. Graphics do not ‘illustrate’ the story; they are the story. ... In the graphic story, all the universe and all the senses are portrayed graphically.”

Holy Terror is an epitome of this truism.

In the opening sequence, for instance, we focus on Natalie (“Catwoman”) as she flies through the air over Empire City. The drawing is stark in naked black-and-white with tiny accents of blood red (her shoe soles) and emerald green (her eyes), but delineation is deliberately obscured, the visual clarity of the pictures partially destroyed with white streaks (rain? snow?) and, later, smudges and smears. The art is raw; anger is raised to rampaging rage.

She encounters the Fixer, and the two attack each other in a frenzy of rough sex — grabbing, clawing, chewing — Miller’s pictures still a storm of high-contrast black-and-white marred by scars and smudges. The action is depicted nearly continuously, as in animation.

And then — an explosion! The scarred and disfigured page fills with a rain of nails. Then razor blades! Surreal visual representation of the attacks of 9/11.

In the midst of these abstracted impressionistic visuals, the Fixer growls vengeance: “The bastards,” he says, “ — how many of my neighbors have they murdered?”

Then comes a succession of pages in which Miller brilliantly exploits his medium. First, a page of individual mug shots, one in each small panel. The next page repeats the maneuver, but the pictures in the panels begin to fade, eventually graying out altogether. After that, more pages of mug-shot panels, but there are no faces in them. They are blank. But they multiply. The first pages has 36 blank panels; the second, 48; then, 160.

Miller’s device is clear: the panels are people, but there are so many of them we can no longer picture them individually. They become ciphers, blanks — numbers, more and more and more. All individuals destroyed by nails and razor blades.

In a rampage of hate and brutality, the Fixer destroys the terrorist cell — taking the rest of the book to do it — after which, “Catwoman” embraces the Fixer, helping the exhausted berserker to stand erect. On the last page in the book, she is lying on top of him, their faces close together, echoing an earlier image. But now, it’s different. The Fixer, who earlier wondered if he’s falling in love with “Catwoman” — adding, “I must never fall in love, never” — had since admitted, reluctantly, that he is in love with her.

Partly, then, the book is a love story, the emergence of a caring love in the survival of a savage lust affair. As originally conceived, this maneuver would enrich the tapestry of the Batman saga, giving the grim cowled crusader an emotional dimension with explicit confessions of affection and regard. Without Batman, the relationship between the Fixer and the “Catwoman” assumes a generic dimension. As lust becomes love, love is their salvation, the survival of humanity  in the midst of inhuman terrorism on both sides.

In its principal course, however, the book is awash in brutality. It revels in killing in ways as brutal as imaginable. Undeniably sickening, the book is still a stunningly vigorous display of Miller’s command of the medium. He exploits the comics form to create motifs that are mostly visual to tell his story. The variety and daring of his visual devices — his facility in exploiting the medium—is impressive and, ultimately, persuasive.

We may not enjoy or approve of the anti-Muslim attitudes in the book — not to mention a stomach-turning sadistic cruelty — but we cannot deny that Miller’s management of his resources is masterful.

RONALD SEARLE, R.I.P.

Best known for his bristly comic drawings depicting the outrageously ghoulish machinations of the St. Trinian’s girls, and for his illustrations of the Molesworth books, written by Geoffrey Willans, which, as any fule kno (sic), tells of life at the boys’ prep school St. Custard’s, cartoonist Ronald Searle died “peacefully in his sleep” Friday, December 30, in southern France’s Draguignan after a short illness — and just months after his second wife, Monica, for whom he scandalously left his first wife and family in the early 1960s, died in July. Searles was 91, the Guardian reported.

Michael Cavna at ComicRiffs.com writes: “Searle will surely be best remembered for his St. Trinian’s boarding-school girls gone bad; through their brazenly wicked behavior, the artist was sending up the ‘proper’ British school system. These dark-humored hellions debuted in the magazine
Lilliput the same year—1941—that Searle was captured by Japan and endured brutal conditions as a World War II POW (he drew with whatever he could find during this time, later publishing To the Kwai—and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945).”

Searle “created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan’s Britain”, said his publisher Simon Winder, quoted in the Guardian. “He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily skeptical about all forms of authority [and] there’s something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St. Trinian’s— that’s why they have appealed to so many generations.”

Searle enjoyed a spectacular career as an illustrator and a member of the legendary Punch table when he returned to Britain after the war. We’ll have a longer and more appreciative obit in the usual place by the end of the month (it’ll be in Opus 289).

WIMPY KID PART TWO: FAILED CARTOONIST BANKS MILLIONS

The sixth book in Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series, Cabin Fever, was published November 15 with a first printing of more than 6 million copies, making it the biggest release of the year in both kids' and adult books, according to Publishers Weekly. Kinney has been named one of Time magazine's 100 "most influential people in the world," and two movies based on his books have grossed millions of dollars. “Kinney is one of the best-selling authors in America,” reports Karen MacPherson at Scripps Howard News Service. More than 50 million copies of his Wimpy Kid diaries are in print in the United States and Canada. The series has been translated into 35 languages.

Despite all the ballyhoo and jingling cash registers, Kinney still considers himself a "failed cartoonist."

"I'm an author whose strength is in gag-writing," Kinney said. "I recently went to speak at the National Cartoonists Society, and I think the line is clearly drawn between what they do and what I do."

At the University of Maryland, Kinney created a comic strip called Igdoof that he hoped would catapult him into cartooning stardom; “he even changed his major from computer science to criminal justice because he thought he would have more time to draw,” MacPherson said.

But when his efforts to sell Igdoof failed magnificently, Kinney turned away from his drawingboard to his computer screen and became a well-regarded website developer. “Among his creations is the popular website Poptropica.com, which was named one of Time magazines' 50 best websites.”

Kinney told MacPherson that he expects to write 7-10 Wimpy books, so there is at least one more brewing somewhere in Kinney’s stick-figured mind. Maybe more than one.

THE WIMPY KID PART ONE: IN COURT

The Wimpy Kid isn't all that wimpy in his corporate identity (namely, Jeff Kinney). As reported by Tim Kenneally via reuters.com, “Wimpy Kid, Inc., the copyright holders of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, on December 20 filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against comic-book publisher Antarctic Press, claiming that Antarctic has violated Wimpy Kid's intellectual property with its book Diary of a Zombie Kid. According to the suit, Zombie Kid, published last August, is "substantially similar" to the Wimpy Kid book line, and ‘obviously intended to confuse the public into believing that defendant's books are addition to such series.’

“In addition to depicting a backpack-carrying protagonist, the suit alleges, the Zombie Kid cover artwork bears a startling similarity to the Wimpy Kid series, including ‘distinctive striping along the spine, the hand-drawn pictures of the main character on the front and back covers, both illustrated so as to appear to be taped at each corner of the cover, and the miniature illustration of a male child's head located on the side of the book.’ The lettering is also confusingly similar to that of the Wimpy Kid series, according to the suit, with letters stylized so as to look brush-painted.”

In addition to punitive damages, Wimpy Kid seeks destruciton of all Diary of a Zombie Kid books and any other infringing materials. A few days after the suit was brought, Antarctic Press agreed to cease and desist.

There is at least one other Wimpy clone out there, something about a Dorky Kid, but it’s drawn in the manga manner so it has probably evaded Kinney’s eagle eye. Or perhaps the manganese renders the effort dissimilar enough to escape prosecution.

BLACK-JACKED AND PISTOL-WHIPPED: A CRIME DOES NOT PAY PRIMER

Original Series of Comic Books Edited (and Often Drawn) by Charles Biro and Bob Wood
This Collection Edited by Denis Kitchen of Kitchen, Lind and Associates
224 page, 6.5 x 10, color, Dark Horse, paperback with stylish flaps, $19.99

Although mostly a reprint of selected stories from the infamous landmark Golden Age comic book Crime Does Not Pay, the most intriguing aspect of this book is advertised on the Biro-style cover (ingeniously contrived by Pete Poplaski) which, apart from depicting a man attacking a woman by smashing her face with an electric iron, trumpets: The True Story of Bob Wood, The Killer Cartoonist. And we learn subsequently by reading Kitchen’s profusely illustrated essay at the beginning that the lurid cover actually pictures the murder for which cartoonist Wood was convicted in 1958.

The stories in the book sample the content of Crime Does Not Pay from 1942 (beginning with a story from its second issue drawn by Bob Montana) through 1948; why we get no stories from the book’s last years (it died with the June 1955 issue as a result of the Comics Code Authority) is a mystery, but it doesn’t matter. As a glimpse of the kind of comic book that inspired Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-funnybook crusade in Seduction of the Innocent, what we have here is more than adequate.

The early stories were clumsily drawn, but after a year or so, we started getting a few notables on the art — artists who would make names for themselves elsewhere: Carmine Infantino, Dan Barry, George Tuska, and Fred Guardineer, even Montana, as noted, and Dick Briefer. Lots of gruesome firearm violence, which grows gruesomer as the years flick by, but not much sex, surprisingly, given Wertham’s preoccupation with how pneumatic portraits of the fairer sex in comic books corrupted American youth.

Reproduction is startlingly uneven: the simple clean linear work of Infantino and Briefer (drawing in a nearly bigfoot manner) reproduces okay, but the more realistic highly feathered and noodled-over efforts of other artists are marred by blotched clusters of fine lines or lines that drop out altogether.

Again, no matter. Informative as the reprinted stories are, the prefatory history of Lev Gleason Publications and of the roles played by Biro and Wood is a solid secondary reason to own this volume. Their stories are available elsewhere in various guises but here, it’s all together.

Among the happier tidbits Kitchen discloses: Biro (like one of his characters, Crimebuster) had a pet monkey that sat on his shoulder as he worked, “and the way the monkey behaved was said to be a clue to Biro’s mood that day.” And Harvey Kurtzman’s acclaimed war stories for EC were influenced by the unemotional realism of Biro’s crime stories, which Biro may, or may not, have written all that many of. Kitchen alludes to David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, in which Hajdu (who has not yet impressed me with the acumen of his observations) claims the principle writer of Crime was Virginia Hubbell.

FROM RAIL-SPLITTER TO ICON: LINCOLN'S IMAGE IN ILLUSTRATED PERIODICALS, 1860-1865

by Gary L. Bunker, 398 pages, 8 x 101/2 , b/w, Kent State University Press, hardcover, $45

Culling from a dozen or so mid-19^th Century periodicals — comic weeklies and illustrated news magazines, British as well as American — Bunker offers over 200 caricatures and drawings of Abraham Lincoln, and he supplements the pictures with an extensive text that rehearses the history of attitudes about Lincoln’s presidency and Lincoln himself as well as the history of many of the periodicals plus short biographies of some of the cartoonists. Pictures and text reveal the evolution of public opinion about Lincoln and “the complex dynamics of the Civil War, popular art and culture, the media, political caricature, and presidential politics.” While Bunker’s focus is on the development of Lincoln’s graphic image, he also resorts to “relevant magazine content from editorial essays, satire, doggerel, and news articles,” weaving it all together “to help the reader better understand the substance of Lincoln’s changing public profile.”

As an example of scholarship the book is impressive, but it is flawed. Captions for every picture identify it by title and cite the source, giving the name of the magazine and date of publication. But the cartoonist is not identified. Often he is mentioned in the text, but the usefulness of the book as a ready reference would be greatly enhanced if we didn’t have to plow through paragraphs of gray matter to find out who drew the pictures.

Surprisingly in a book in which the images are the raison d’etre, the pictures are badly reproduced: all are half-toned, which converts white background to gray and reduces even the sturdiest linework to a pattern of tiny dots.
The result is some loss of detail and an over-all grayed-out appearance.

But the most disappointing of the book’s shortcomings is that it includes none of the images that appeared after Lincoln’s assassination. Lincoln’s eminently caricaturable visage was turned into a derisive portrait, mocking the 16^th President all during his public life, from his campaigns through his administration, but his image in the press after his death, Bunker says,  was almost universally respectful, doing homage to the man and honor to his achievements. That this image of Lincoln should be missing in a book purporting to record his evolution from “rail-splitter” to “icon” seems an oversight of more than casual dimensions.