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.

SUPERMAN: CORRECTING MYTHS

The current issue of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego fanzine, No. 88, publishes several interviews with the surviving relatives of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the founder of the comic book company that eventually became DC Comics. Citing letters and other documentation, Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson, son of the Major, has corrected one of the myths about the debut of Superman in Action Comics No. 1, cover-dated June 1938. The myth is that Superman showed up at the last minute just as Action Comics was poised to go to the printer except for the lack of a lead feature. Shelly Mayer, working for Max Gaines at McClure newspaper syndicate, was enthralled with the submission from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and showed it to Action editor Vince Sullivan, who opined that the kids would love it and then published it in Action’s inaugural issue.

Not so, said Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson. The fact, he says, is that his father, who had been publishing other stories by Siegel and Shuster (Slam Bradley, named by the Major, was one of them), saw the Superman creation in the spring or summer or early fall of 1937 and created Action Comics as the vehicle for showcasing the character. So Superman’s appearance in Action Comics No. 1 was no happy accident: it had been planned for months. Another revelation: Siegel and Shuster signed their Superman contract in December 1937 with Harry Donenfeld, not with Wheeler-Nicholson, because Donenfeld, who was already in mid-plot to take over Wheeler-Nicholson’s company, persuaded the two youths that Wheeler-Nicholson was on his way out. This issue of Alter Ego is brimming with new scraps of information about Wheeler-Nicholson and Superman, including nine never before published daily comic strips introducing Superman, written by Siegel but drawn by Russell Keaton, who, we lately learned, Siegel approached to draw the strip when Shuster began to lose heart in the project after so many failed attempts to sell it.

GEORGE SPROTT: 1894-1975

George Sprott: 1894-1975, A Picture Novella by the Cartoonist Seth (96 giant-sized 12x14-inch pages, in various duotones; hardback, $24.95) is a faux biography, like others of Seth’s oeuvre, this one answering the question: Who was George Sprott? — Arctic explorer, tv host, raconteur, beloved uncle? Or opportunist, philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore? Sprott lays the foundation for his tv career by exploring the Canadian Arctic and filming his trips. After which he mostly bores people by telling and re-telling his adventures. Instead of exploiting the vast dimension of the book’s pages, Seth, who also sometimes answers to the name Gregory Gallant, fills the expanses with uniform grids of minuscule panels, sometimes as many as 42 per page, many depicting talking heads in close-up. Throughout, Seth tells his tale as much by book design as by the traditional means inherent in sequential visual storytelling. With this tome as exemplar, Publishers Weekly dubs Seth “one of the form’s masters,” and I agree. Sean Howe in Entertainment Weekly (July 17) says, “It’s hard to believe that [the character] Sprott never actually existed.” But whatever happened to the rest of Seth’s Clyde Fans?

BRINGING FATHER BACK UP

 A press release from NBM Publishing alerts us to the arrival in stores of the third and latest in the Forever Nuts series of classic screwball strips, namely George McManus’ Bringing up Father (192 11x8-inch landscape pages, b/w; hardcover, $24.95). The century’s second longest running daily strip (Mutt and Jeff is first, I ween), “Jiggs,” as the strip is sometimes called (whenever not being denominated “Jiggs and Maggie”), contains some of the finest art deco drawing of the age, here, meticulously restored. And this edition carries an introduction by Yrs Trly, a foreword by comics curator Bill Blackbeard, and notes by comics historian Allen Holtz.

And just on the horizon, another Jiggs reprint — this one from IDW; subtitled “From Sea to Shining Sea” (272 11x10-inch pages in color; hardcover, $49.99), it recycles a classic McManus sequence that lasted for more than a year during  which he took his characters all around the country, painstakingly rendering the familiar locales of notable American cities in recognizable detail. For an exacting appreciation of McManus’ art and Jiggs’ place in the history of the medium, visit the Usual Place and consult Harv’s Hindsights for the happy month of October 2009.

SUPERHERO SATIRE

Caped, a new title from Boom by writers Josh Lobis and Darin Moiselle and artist Yair Herrera, may be the freshest take on the longjohn lunacies since John Kovalick’s Blink. At first, the book seems to be about “Capital City’s Nocturnal Soldier,” a caped and cowled night-time prowler who bears an intentional resemblance to a certain Dark Knight. Named Edge, he arrives too late to save a supposedly innocent bystander in the first issue’s opening pages, a tardiness some observers believe indicates that the Nocturnal Knight is slipping in his old age. The focus, however, quickly shifts to a young would-be newspaper reporter named Jimmy Lohman, who, because he can’t find other journalistic employment, accepts a job as “assistant” to Grant Godfried, a super reporter who has gone through 27 assistants in the last four months.

Turns out — surprise! — Godfried is secretly Edge, and so young Jimmy becomes “assistant” to a costumed crime fighter. Edge shows him his subterranean “EdgeCave” and then takes him to another catacomb underneath an abandoned football stadium, which Edge calls a “superhero precinct” because it is a shelter or workshop for a few dozen superheroes and their assistants, one of whom takes Jimmy under his wing to show him the ropes.

“Stay away from the action,” the guy warns Jimmy, “ — we don’t get health insurance, one of the many ways we assistants get ‘caped,’ superhero lingo for ‘screwed.’” With that, the issue’s episode is virtually completed: we know, now, that we’re in a tongue-in-cheek title, confirming an earlier suspicion fostered when Jimmy asks Edge if he acquired his powers by falling into a vat of chemicals and Edge says, “Why does everyone always assume it’s chemicals” — but doesn’t explain what did endow him with superpowers. Maybe later. The concept of superheroic action, sometimes fumbled, experienced from an assistant’s perspective is tantalizing enough to get me to buy the next issue. This is not a slapstick take on superheroing as is Sidekick; this is an attempt at seeing superheroing at the elbow of a superhero but somewhat more realistically than Sidekick. It’s not satire; it’s human interest.

SPIDERMAN ON BROADWAY

In the forthcoming Broadway show, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the rock version of the Webslinger will not be the friendly neighborhood Wall-crawler we’ve grown accustomed to in funnybooks and on the glossy Big Screen. Quoted by Gina Salamone in the New York Daily News, U2's frontman, Bono, explained to a British radio station that "our Peter Parker is much more ...  not Kurt Cobain, but a kind of slacker, a more kind of shy sort of guy.” And: “We've got a new villain. It's a girl. It's a very extraordinary role. We've taken it to a much more dizzy place than you'd expect. We've got big tunes. We're very proud of it." Despite having encountered “an unexpected cash-flow problem” that has halted progress on the production, Hello Entertainment, the show’s producer, says the musical will still begin previews in February as planned.

EDITOON NEWS: THE NEARLY BAD AND THE BAD

For a week or so in early August, it looked as if the number of full-time staff editorial cartooners would drop to an all-time low of 79 (from 101 in May 2008, if you’re pegging these things). Matt Davies, the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist at the Journal News in White Plains, NY, was, briefly, among the 50 employees of the paper whose staff positions were scheduled to be eliminated effective August 28.  Then all of a sudden, the management had second thoughts — or realized what they were about to do — and said, Oh, no, not Matt Davies. And he was back among the living.

Davies, interviewed by Alan Gardner at DailyCartoonist.com, said, somewhat jocularly: “My paper looked down the cold and terrible barrel of not having an editorial cartoonist on staff and just couldn’t do it.” Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple, Davies explained in a less jesting manner: “The paper’s readers owe a big thanks to my editor Henry Freeman who quietly worked to ensure that my position was revived and ultimately kept alive during a particularly bruising round of downsizing in our newsroom. The clear message is that no matter how small a newspaper payroll needs to be in order for a paper to turn a profit, a decent staff cartoonist who connects with the audience is a smart part of that profit strategy. While I am of course personally relieved, my thoughts are with my talented and venerated colleagues who didn’t survive the cuts this week.”

Meanwhile, Gary Markstein took a buyout at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he’d lost his editooning gig several years ago but continued on staff doing illustration and page design. His editoons will continue in syndication, as before, and he also has another job: he draws the comic strip Daddy’s Home, written by Tony Rubino and syndicated by Creators. So Markstein is, in a manner of speaking, employed, even though he isn’t likely to get rich as a syndicated editooner or by splitting the revenue of a third tier circulation comic strip with a co-creator and the syndicate. Since Marstein wasn’t on the May 2008 list of 101 full-time staff editoonists that we’re using to keep score, his departure doesn’t reduce the total; and since Davies is back among the living, the total number of full-time staff editorial cartoonists stands at 80.

ROSTER

Editor & Publisher’s Directory of Syndicate Services, the 84^th, is out, a much reduced version of the annual publication. Previously, the Directory was a square-spine catalog of 150 or so pages, many of them extravagant fold-in/fold-out multi-page advertisements for individual syndicates, which listed and pictured their columnists and cartoon features on slick stock heavier than the directory pages. It was a cumbersome thing to thumb through, but you emerged with a good idea of each major syndicate’s offerings. This year’s incarnation lacks all syndicate advertising. Not a one has a section boasting its products. And the Directory is now a saddle-stitched magazine of 62 pages, about half its size in yesteryear. In one section of those pages, we find a list of syndicated comic strips — 204 of them; in another section, 149 panel cartoons. Despite the gloom and doom infecting newspaper staffs these days. those numbers haven’t changed much. Every year, a few new strips and panel cartoons are syndicated; presumably, a few die off. Births and deaths apparently have achieved an eternal balance. Last year, there were 208 strips; in 2007, 206. There were 143 panel cartoons in last year’s roster; in 2007, 150.

PLAYBOY: FEWER TOONS

Playboy, one of the last two refuges of high quality magazine cartooning — The New Yorker is the other one — is steadily slipping off its pedestal. In the September issue only 5 full-page color cartoons laminate the magazine’s pages. The previous issue, July-August’s slyly contrived “double issue” (a cost-cutting maneuver, eliminating printing and postage expense for a month), had only 7 full-pagers in its 166 pages; that’s 1 cartoon every 24 pages. Last February, with 122 pages, the ratio of full-pagers to page count was 1/20. In the current issue with only 130 pages, that ratio is perversely climbing back up: 1/26. The desirable ratio is the lowest, indicating the frequency at which the reader encounters a cartoon. The ratios for the smaller cartoons (roughly quarter-pagers) are no better: February is best at 1/17; July-August, 1/24; September, 1/22. Playboy is desperately imitating the laddie magazines in layout and format, differing only in its insistence on photographs of barenekkidwimmin rather than movie and TV starlets whose epidermises are just nearly bare.

But if the cartoon content is declining, the magazine is also jumping on the graphic novel roller coaster: last issue, it published 5 pages of the graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451; this issue offers 6 pages of the graphic novel incarnation of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” with R.M. Guera’s visualizations of Brad Pitt and the rest. A noble try by a publisher who remains a frustrated cartoonist, but I’m afraid the Web’s porn has forever displaced Hugh Hefner’s once watershed publishing enterprise in the hearts and sweaty palms of the nation’s hormone-ravaged young men.

But the best part of the magazine these days is Dean Yeager’s cartoon: his cuties are every issue.