Rants & Raves

MUTT AND JEFF

NBM Publishing is poised to bring out the first volume of a projected multi-volume reprinting project with the deluxe, dust-jacketed 192 8x6-inch page hardcover of Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips: The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff ($24.95). Starting in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 15, 1907 (this is the centennial of its birth, kimo sabe), Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff was not only the first successful daily comic strip, it also established the horizontal “strip” format. Originally featuring just the tall half of the duo and bearing his name, A. Mutt, the strip aimed at an adult readership: a racetrack tout, Mutt bet money on a horse that would run later in the day, and readers had to buy tomorrow’s paper to find out if he won. Not the sort of comedy children would cherish or, even, understand. With the daily wager as its initial dynamic, the strip was a continuity feature from the start, and by the late winter of 1908, the continuity was political satire: Mutt stands trial for stealing money to bet with, and Fisher takes the occasion to poke fun at San Francisco politicians and municipal corruption. Mutt is judged insane and is sent to the local looney bin for a cure; there, he meets a diminutive nutcase who thinks he’s the prize fighter, Jim Jeffries, and the classic team was born. It was so popular a team that “Mutt and Jeff” was soon, and forever after, the phrase we use to refer to the pairing of a tall man and a short one. With this series, NBM is returning to its roots, in a manner of speaking: in 1984, it launched the 12-volume hardcover reprinting of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, one of the company’s first publishing endeavors and a historic achievement.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to ponder the puzzle Fisher left us with: What, exactly, is the relationship between Mutt and Jeff? From the beginning, Mutt had a wife and child, but over the years, we are prompted to wonder how Jeff fits into this relationship. Some of the daily gags involve Mutt and his wife or Mutt and his son, Cicero. But Jeff seems always to be present on the premises, too. Does he live with the Mutts? If so, does he ever talk to Mrs. Mutt? I can’t remember ever seeing them together in the strip. Sometimes, I have the impression that Mutt and Jeff are roommates in a rooming and boarding establishment. Other times, it seems that Jeff lives alone. But we can’t be sure. Maybe the NBM project will, at last, remove our doubts and settle the question. Whatever the duo’s living arrangements, they were doubtless established in the first year or so of the strip, and that, as I understand it, is the content of the inaugural NBM volume.

TOM TOLES

In September, Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post, went back to his former hometown, Buffalo, New York, where he gave a talk about censorship and was interviewed by Geoff Kelly of artvoice.com. Saying he often draws cartoons about censorship, Toles referred to one he did about “a revived threat” from the Attorney General to prosecute journalists for “receiving” classified information, an outrageous prospect. Said Toles: “I took that one step further and said that anyone reading a newspaper is receiving classified information.” He also lambasted the White House for paying journalists to write flattering stories. “It gets to the constellation of government control of information or manipulation of information,” said Toles. “While not strictly in the narrowest sense censorship, it’s a related danger.” Has he ever been censored? Yes, once, Toles confessed -- and it was while he was working at the Buffalo News. He intended to take to task a prominent local non-governmental person, and his editor felt it was an unfair criticism. Toles was, he said, “more-or-less outraged because more-or-less my agreement with the last three newspapers I worked for has been that I will not be edited for content grounds, but only [for] taste and libel.”

Generally speaking, American political cartoonists these days are pretty content with their situations, Toles believes. “If you polled them right now, you would find a very high degree of satisfaction in the amount of latitude that they are ordinarily given.” But they are still not quite as free to express themselves as Toles thinks he is. Working in the nation’s capital as opposed to Buffalo gives a cartoonist “a highly different sense of what’s going on,” he said. You also have “an audience that is eagerly attuned to all of this inside baseball. I’ve likened it to sitting in the front row of the movie theater. It’s good and bad in all the same ways: you can see the nostril hairs here much more clearly, but there is a certain distortion that comes with being so close.” And the social network adds another level of distortion. “So many people here know so many of the other people involved so well that sometimes, I think, objectivity suffers. There comes to be a language with which issues are spoken of. It’s a circumscribed language in that certain points of view just aren’t represented.”

MANGA

In his “Manga for the Mainstream” column in the latest Comics Buyer’s Guide, Bill Aguiar, apologist for the genre, rambles on for a couple pages about why manga aren’t in the comic book shops. At first, Aguiar says, several years ago at the beginning of the current tidal wave, manga publishers tried to interest the specialty stores in stocking their books, but the comics shops weren’t -- and aren’t still -- making much of an effort to sell these strange new comic books/graphic novels. So the manga publishers, quite naturally, turned to the grown-up bookstores, where, as we all know, they’ve taken over row upon row of bookracks. And now the presence of manga is so pronounced and so successful in this country that indigenous publishers are cranking out manga imitations, and comics creators are “incorporating manga influence into their comics.” But still, comics specialty shops seem indifferent to the genre.

“Sooner or later,” Aguiar says, a new kind of store will start cropping up on these shores -- “manga stores, comics shops that only stock manga and sell coffee or soda -- stores like that already exist in Asia.” Some enterprising entrepreneur will surely see the manga phenomenon as an opportunity to exploit. Such stores, unlike regular bookstores, will stock “a complete line of titles from every company,” and clerks will know the product so they can steer customers to titles that fit their interests. Aguiar fears that “the market will remain bifurcated” -- bookstores on the one hand, comics shops on the other -- and they’ll compete with each other when they should be complementing each other. If so, he says, it will be “another wasted opportunity in comics history.” Comic book shops should “reach out” and offer the kind of manga service that the Asian shops offer -- expertise, coffee and sodas -- in short, a salon for manga and manga lovers, who, Aguiar argues, will discover other comics there that they’ll like, and everyone will prosper.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

Captain America is dead. Again. This time, for a change, his death signals something other than the poverty of his writers’ imaginations. This time, the death of Captain America represents the death of American values and, hence, of America itself. With that, Marvel Comics has taken a  defiant political stand. And it’s about time someone did. Captain America’s death is a fitting ending to Marvel’s Civil War, an philosophical dispute in which superheroes chose up sides on the question of whether to register and reveal their secret identities or not. Captain America regarded the government’s new requirement as an erosion of his civil liberties and refused to register. But, as I understand it (yup: I’m commenting on this without having actually read the series; I have, however, read what various observers have said about it), Captain America eventually capitulated to Iron Man and the rest of the gang who supported the government’s dictate. In surrendering, Captain America gave up the American values he has always stood for. Without those values, America isn’t America anymore. And so the death of Captain America isn’t just the death of an individual: because he is an icon, when he died it meant that America is dead, too.

The comic book character won’t be dead for long, of course. His comic book is still on Marvel’s publishing schedule; and that movie is still lurking somewhere in the future. So Captain America will be back. As Marvel Entertainment’s president Dan Buckley said: “This is the end of Steve Rogers, the meat and potatoes guy from 1941. But Captain America is a costume [I’d say ‘uniform’], and there are other people who could take it over.” But if the thematic import of his death is to be sustained, no one should don the uniform until traditional American values have been restored -- until we no longer have a national policy of torturing helpless prisoners, eavesdropping on citizens, denying habeas corpus, and the rest. Then the old uniform can come out of mothballs. Incidentally, the episode -- death by a sniper’s bullet -- was an eerie echo of that November day in Dallas in 1963; coupling the two murders together in this fashion gave the death of Captain America an extra layer of emotional meaning. Neatly done, Marvel -- all around. Although the impending demise was a well-kept secret, we should have seen it coming: given all the parallels to the real world assault on American values, we should have guessed that someone had to die, and who better than the American icon?

The MSM, reporting this event, mostly missed the import of the story -- that is, they didn’t understand, or even know, the issues being explored in the Civil War series, and so they couldn’t interpret Captain America’s demise as a thematic, political, statement. Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, knew exactly what was at stake. Naturally, he favored Iron Man’s side in the dispute because, as he explained on the “Colbert Report,” Iron Man is really Tony Stark and Stark is a defense contractor, and all patriotic Americans support defense contractors. Captain America, Colbert explained, refused to give up “a few minor freedoms” so Americans could be safe. The lesson, he went on, is clear: those who fight to protect American freedoms are dangerous. Colbert realizes, of course, that Captain America will go on -- the uniform will be taken up and worn by some other patriot. And he nominated Alberto Gonzales, recommending that the red-white-and-blue color scheme of the time-honored threads be discarded in favor of the colors of the Emergency Alert System.

PICKLES

Brian Crane’s Pickles, a strip about the senior members of a family surrounded by two generations of their offspring, has been hovering on the newspaper horizon since 1990, when, at the age of 40, Crane, a commercial artist in advertising, started thumbing through his sketchbook in search of characters for a comic strip. He was also pondering the milieu for a comic strip. “I didn’t see any senior citizens as the focus of comics and thought people could relate to that,” Crane said last fall in an interview with Jarid Shipley of the Nevada Appeal. “I see similarities with my family and neighbors. When I started, I didn’t think I’d get syndicated. When I did, I didn’t think it would be popular, so my expectations have always been pretty low.” His tactic has apparently paid off. Pickles was named Best Comic Strip of 2001 by the National Cartoonists Society, and the strip is now in more than 500 newspapers, nationwide—a more than healthy circulation.

The members of Crane’s cast include Earl and Opal Pickles, the elderly couple, and their daughter Sylvia and her husband Dan, and their son Nelson, plus a somewhat obtuse dog named Roscoe and a sly cat named Muffin. In recent years, the strip has focused more on Earl and Opal than on the rest of the ensemble. Earl, we quickly realize, has only one hobby—annoying his wife. And Opal, although a devoted wife, dotes on Muffin, so don’t ask her to choose between Earl and the cat. Nelson shows up fairly often, seeking wisdom at his grandfather’s knee.

Still Pickled after All These Years (128 8x9-inch pages; paperback, $10.95) is Andrew McMeel’s 2004 collection of the strip and the whole cast is on display herein. Sylvia, reacting to the news that her mother and father are going to visit Grand Canyon, says to Opal: “I’ve heard it’s breathtaking.” “Oh, yes,” says Opal, who is working at the ironing board. “It’s one of the three sights I want to see before I die. The others are the pyramids of Egypt and your father ironing his own pants.” On another occasion, Earl is out walking and runs into his friend Clyde. Earl is holding a dog leash and Clyde asks him why. “Good question,” says Earl. “I was just trying to figure that out myself. I must be having a senior moment,” he continues, holding the leash up for closer inspection, “ -- I can’t remember if I found a leash or lost a dog.” This compilation regales us with Opal’s pursuit of a writing career. She writes a children’s book and then gives it to Earl to read, saying: “So, tell me what do you think of my children’s book.” “I like it,” says Earl. “You do?” says Opal, nearly incredulous. “Yes,” insists Earl. “Oh, thank you,” Opal says, kissing Earl on the cheek. She goes away, and Earl looks down at Roscoe, who has observed this entire exchange. “Keep in mind,” Earl tells the dog, “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.” Another time, Opal tells Nelson that his grandfather is a very wise man. “And he likes to spread his wisdom like mayonnaise on a sandwich. Go head, Grandpa, “she says, “ -- spread some wisdom.” Says Earl: “Don’t throw a brick straight up.” Opal looks at Nelson and says: “Sometimes Grandpa scrapes the bottom of the mayo jar.” 

BRUSSELS

On March 1, everyone in Brussels could park free. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the birth of Gaston Lagaffe, a colossally lazy accident-prone comic strip character created by Andre Franquin, the mayor of the Belgium’s capital city turned off the parking meters. It was a supremely fitting tribute: one of the plagues in Gaston’s travesty-laden life involves his obsession with not paying for parking his dilapidated car. The December 15, 2006 issue of American Way devoted eight pages to a discussion of Brussels as “the international center of comic-strip art [known in those parts as the ninth art] and home to the world’s most important comic-strip museum, 25 comics stores, and 30 larger-than-life murals of favorite comics characters.” The museum’s holdings include 6,000 original drawings by 500 cartoonists, plus 40,000 comic books in 20 languages.

The museum may be the world’s “most important,” but its collection is not the world’s largest, a distinction probably befalling Mort Walker’s National Cartoon Museum, which claims over 200,000 pieces. The Library of Congress’s collection was more than doubled recently with the acquisition of Art Wood’s trove of 32,000 pieces by 3,000 cartoonists, so the LoC, while larger than the Brussels collection, isn’t as large as NCM. But the biggest collection of original cartoon art in the world is likely the Cartoon Research Library at the Ohio State University with 250,000 individual pieces. The CRL is not, strictly speaking, a museum, but it’s undoubtedly the largest pile of original cartoon art anywhere. No city I know of can equal Brussels’ claim of 25 comic shops or any comic character murals, which, in Brussels, can be found hither and yon on the sides of randomly chosen buildings throughout the city, if we are to judge from the photographs that accompany the American Way article. Near at hand, a few photos of the city’s landmarks and a picture of a single panel of an original Gaston.   

USAGI YOJIMBO NO. 100

In the Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo No. 100 from Dark Horse, Sakai and his roving rabbit are subjected to an honorific “roast” during which a chorus of footnotes repeatedly assert that this issue is actually the 160th, the other sixty having been published by companies other than Dark Horse. “When I started with Usagi,” Sakai said, “I was not thinking of it as a long-term project. I was just concerned with getting the next story finished before the deadline. I’m still working this way.” Asked what was his proudest achievement, he said: “It has to be Usagi Yojimbo Book 12: Grasscutter. It won an Eisner Award (Will even wrote the Introduction), and it also won a Spanish Haxtur and an American Library Association Award. And it was used as a textbook in Japanese history classes at the University of Portland. I did a lot of research for that, and it turned into a nifty little story.” The roast, he said, was “my editor Diana Schutz’s fault—er, brilliant idea. I was just going to make Usagi 100 another story, a continuation of the previous issue. She said we should do something a bit more than that. We’ve worked together for awhile, so she knows who my friends are in the industry, and she contacted a few of them to contribute pages for the roast. I don’t think anybody she contacted turned her down. I’m very flattered for that.” Alas, she didn’t ask me, Stan, but I would have delighted to have had my rabbit show up at the roast.

OF EDITOONISTS AND SHOT FEET

Wiley Miller, who did editorial cartoons before he syndicated his comic strip, Non Sequitur, dramatized the profession's dilemma in his release for Sunday, February 4. In the strip, visible at http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/, an assistant addresses a newspaper executive, saying: "There's a group of editorial cartoonists outside who are threatening to draw scathing cartoons in protest of the elimination of so many staff positions and to post them on the Internet to bring public pressure on you."

The executive replies: "Didn't they do that last year? What did they call it ... Big Stink Tuesday?"

"You mean Black Ink Monday?"

"Whatever. So how'd that work out for them?"

"Well ... there's even fewer of them now. I guess that's why they're still upset."

"I see ... But since a lot of those protesters have a staff position and are selling their work to me dirt cheap through syndication, what incentive is there for me to spend 500 times more in salary and benefits for the work of just one person?"

The assistant answers: "I'll go ask, sir." She subsequently reports back to say that the cartoonists "just mooned me, then ran off giggling to the nearest bar and started drawing on cocktail napkins."

To which the executive replies: "Well, let THAT be a lesson to me."

Black Ink Monday actually occurred in the fall of 2005, but that’s beside the point. Miller’s point is that editoonists who are syndicated are shooting themselves in both feet, if such a thing is possible: their cartoons are available to all newspapers for much less than the newspapers would have to pay a full-time staff editorial cartoonist, so what is the newspaper’s incentive to retain the services of a staff editoonist? Merely to do local issue cartoons? Those are the ones that inflame readers and inspire onslaughts of phone calls, the thing most feared by newspaper editors. Newspaper editors are creatures of the written word; they are uncomfortable encountering verbal confrontations in an audio mode. They’d rather not have them. And they can avoid them by directing their staff editoonist to refrain from doing local issue cartoons. And then, having eliminated local issues as grist for the cartoonist’s mill, there’s no reason to retain the cartoonist for national issues because syndicated cartoonists deal with those matters at much less cost to the newspaper. Ipso facto, no need for a staff editorial cartoonist.

An obvious escape from this predicament would be for editoonists to forego syndication. If editorial cartoons aren’t available through syndication, newspaper editors will have to retain staff editoonists if they want political cartoons to flag their editorial pages. Editors may not be all that keen to give space to the inky-fingered fraternity, but they can scarcely deny the effectiveness of editorial cartoons. As Paul Conrad said recently: “I have no idea what the readership is of written editorials, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the readership of editorial cartoons.” And after nearly sixty years of skewering pomposity and foolishness (not to mention outright stupidity) in visual terms, Conrad should know which is the more effective—words or pictures. “Those damn pictures,” as Boss Tweed is reported to have said when objecting to Nast’s cartoons. But he didn’t mention editorials; he didn’t fear them. (Conrad, by the way, has a new book out—an autobiography, I, Con, which he claims he hasn’t read. No, he isn’t being simply perverse in that Conradian way we’ve all come to know and love: the book’s text was “composed” from an interview Conrad gave for the purpose. One of the best interviews I’ve seen with Conrad was conducted recently by the cartoonist calling himself “Mr. Fish,” aka Dwayne Booth, at the Los Angles Weekly, http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/the-fine-art-of-drawing-pricks/15511/ ; worth a nice, long lingering look.)

AAEC’s president Rob Rogers, staff editoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was contacted by E&P’s David Astor for comment on Miller’s effusion, and he said: “I understand Wiley's point. But it isn't as simple as asking all editorial cartoonists to give up syndication. That's like saying a person doesn't really care about the environment until they give up their car. I am sure Wiley cares about the environment AND still drives a car. Our 'Black Ink Monday' protest was the equivalent of driving a hybrid car. It certainly wasn't going to solve the problem but it was a small way we could do our part for the cause. We don't have any collective bargaining power. There is no editorial cartoonists union. The AAEC is a professional organization that holds annual conventions to talk about the industry and, yes, to gather in bars to draw on napkins (that part he had right). ... Even if we asked everyone in our group to give up syndication, there would still be enough non-AAEC cartoonists out there to fill the editorial pages. The point of our protest was to emphasize the importance of having a local cartoonist covering local issues, something no syndicate can provide."

True. But it may also be something no newspaper editor really wants very much—inflammatory comment on local issues that provokes phone calls that consume his valuable time. Incidentally, the Post-Gazette, until recently, had two editorial cartoonists. The other one, Tim Menees, who concentrated almost entirely on local issues and wasn’t syndicated (until, maybe, the last few years; but he’d been at the paper for 30 years), was fired in early February 2006.

While Miller’s cartoon highlights the cause of the problem—editoonists who are syndicated sabotage the profession by making staff editoonists superfluous—he is not suggesting that everyone should withdraw from syndication. “That’s utter nonsense,” he said when I asked him about it, “and doesn't deal with reality. Syndication isn't going away and the problem isn't syndication, per se. It's cheap syndication of cartoonists who have a staff job that's the cause of the problem. What needs to happen is to remove the profitability of laying off a staff cartoonist and replacing their work with an abundance of cartoons for just a few bucks a week.” Editors can buy packages of editorial cartoons for $15-25 a week and have a choice among several cartoonists every day. Miller suggests that if syndicate rates were increased, the editors’ temptation to use syndicated work instead of hiring staff cartoonists would be lessened. “The rates need to increased dramatically,” he said, “—more than 100%—to make it less of an option to replace a staff cartoonist.” And if the rates were higher, making a living solely as a syndicated editoonist would be a viable possibility for cartoonists who wanted national circulation. Said Miller: “My belief is, if an editorial cartoonist wants his or her work to be in syndication, then they should go the route Pat Oliphant, Ann Telnaes and Ted Rall have done.” None of these three cartoonists have a home paper; they hold no staff position. They are, in effect, freelancers who peddle their product entirely through syndication. But the income isn’t much. If syndicate rates were higher, the lot of the syndicated freelancer would improve greatly. But this idea, too, threatens to undermine an institutional bulwark—job security, chiefly. Still, I don’t expect Miller to give up on his crusade. He’s accustomed to suiting his actions to his words, and if he were an editorial cartoonist, he might well give up being syndicated.

Like all of us, Miller is a principled person; unlike most of us, he has acted upon his principles several times to his apparent disadvantage. He had been doing editorial cartoons at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat since 1978, but when he sold a comic strip, Fenton, into syndication in 1982, he gave up doing editorial cartoons. Fenton folded after a few years, and Miller went back to editooning in 1986 at the San Francisco Examiner. But when he sold Non Sequitur into syndication in 1992, he again gave up his editorial cartooning gig. Several, not just a few, editorial cartoonists have expanded their vistas by simultaneously doing a syndicated daily comic strip. But not Miller. As a matter of principle, he wouldn’t do both. “I’ve had a long-standing feeling about this,” he told me when we talked soon after Non Sequitur started, “and I’ve taken a stance on it a long time ago that a full-time editorial cartoonist should not be doing a daily comic strip. The reasons are, first of all—both jobs are full-time jobs. When you try to do two full-time jobs in any profession, the quality of your work will go down in both areas; you cannot maintain it. Comic strips and editorial cartoons are two completely different trains of thought, two completely different kinds of approaches, two different deadlines. What usually suffers first is the editorial cartoon: because it’s on a daily deadline, what usually happens is that the cartoonist will knock out the editorial cartoon as quickly as possible, get that out of the way, to get back to the comic strip, which is a more incessant thing—you’ve gotta do it every damn day; you’ve gotta keep working to keep it going.”

Just as important, however, is the second reason Miller won’t do both a strip and an editoon: doing both takes two niches in the profession, one of which some young cartoonist could occupy if the older cartoonist weren’t occupying two places. “This is an extremely difficult profession to break into,” Miller said, “—it’s easier to become a pro ball player than to become a professional cartoonist. Just look at the numbers. There are about a hundred working editorial cartoonists, and right now [1992], there are 173 comic strips in production [a number that has changed only slightly since 1992; there are now about 200]. Out of a national population of 250 million [now 300 million]. That’s rather tough odds. And if some of the 173 strips involve one guy doing two features [an editorial cartoon as well the strip], that makes it just that much more difficult for young talent to break in, to be given a break somewhere. We got our break, somehow. Make room for the new guys.”

Miller’s position on the matter has changed in recent years. “I’m not as strident as I was 15 or 20 years ago,” he told me last week. “I was adamant years ago about editorial cartoonist doing a comic strip because that meant they were taking up two full-time slots, making it that much more difficult for young cartoonists to break in. But as the job market for editorial cartoonists worsened, I softened that stance. Given the situation today, I think editorial cartoonists need to have a back-up plan, another way to make a living at cartooning, and developing a comic strip is a way out. But once they create a comic strip and get it going for a year or two, I still think they need to decide one way or the other which way to go.”

A FEW MORE WORDS ABOUT DILBERT, THE EVERLASTING

Dilbert (how could anyone forget?) is a mouthless, knobby-headed engineer who works in a sterile cubicle in the office of a nameless corporation. Dilbert has frequent encounters with his fellow workers, all of whom are either overlooked geniuses or underperforming layabouts. Here’s Dilbert and his pointy-haired boss, who is reviewing some project Dilbert has submitted for his approval. “What does MFU2 mean on your timeline?” asks the boss. Dilbert: “That’s Management Foul-Up Number Two. It usually happens around the third week.” Boss: “We don’t anticipate any management mistakes.” Dilbert: “That’s MFU1.” This revealing exchange happens in the latest compilation of Dilbert strips, Try Rebooting Yourself (128 8x9-inch b/w pages; paperback, $10.95), the 28th such collection, which opens, helpfully, to a page that lists all the preceding 27 titles. The book comes equipped with “Eight Fantastic Cubicle Stickers” designed to improve the environs of your cubicle, should you work in one, with colorful depictions of some of the Dilbert characters. The drawing skill on display in this volume is, alas, no more advanced than in the previous ones. But that is not unexpected. Scott Adams, the so-called cartoonist, majored in economics. “If you take enough classes in economics,” he has said, “you’ll become a cartoonist. Not immediately,” he adds, “but eventually.” Well, yes and no.

Eventually, Adams started playing a cartoonist in the funnies. Adams resorted to cartooning when he found that advancement in the monolithic phone company he worked for was not forthcoming fast enough. “The day you realize that your efforts and your rewards are not related,” he explained, “it really frees up your schedule.” With his increased free time, according to a report in dmnews.com by Mickey Alam Khan, Adams doodled sarcastic cartoons about management failures in the phone company office. Instead of firing him for gross disrespect, management just gave him the worst possible assignments, convinced that he would soon quit of his own volition. It worked, but not right away. “When you’re a cartoonist,” Adams said, “there’s not such a thing as bad work because the more ridiculous the workday, the better my cartoons became.” That’s what he says. And apparently others, including United Media syndicate, agreed. Soon thereafter, the comic strip Dilbert was born.

None of the foregoing, except the MFU2 thing, is in the book at hand. In the book, we meet a character with a face like a cat who is introduced as “our new sourpuss.” We also renew acquaintance with Dogbert, the evil human relations director, and Dilbert’s co-workers, Wally, Tina, Asok, Carol, Bob the giant lizard, and Alice with the hair-do like a huge tent, who is sitting quietly in her cubicle one day when the pointy-haired boss shows up with a new employee at his elbow and says: “Alice, can you show the new guy how to do a project status report?” To which Alice responds by addressing the new guy: “He doesn’t read them, so we all use a random phrase generator. I’ll e-mail it to you,” she says. The new guy is amazed: “You said that in front of him,” he says, gesturing at the pointy-haired boss at his side. Alice explains: “He listens only when he’s talking.” Looking at Dilbert will, eventually, give you a headache it’s so badly drawn; but the cynical insightful laughs it provokes will drive the headache away.

ANN TELNAES

Ann Telnaes has joined the ranks of editoonists who are animating their cartoons. For Telnaes, it is a return to her roots: she specialized in character animation while getting her BFA at the California Institute of the Arts and worked for several years as a designer for Disney, Warner Bros. and others. Her animation can be witnessed at www.anntelnaes.com. Telnaes is not attached to a newspaper but is syndicated by Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate/New York Times Syndicate, and her cartoons, which make dramatic use of color, are always posted at her website.

Editor & Publisher lists other political cartoonists who do animated political commentary at their newspaper websites: Nick Anderson (Houston Chronicle), Mike Thompson (Detroit Free Press), Walt Handelsman (Newsday/TMS), Matt Davies (The Journal News, White Plains, NY/TMS), and the Orange County Register team, Mike Shelton and Jocelyne Leger. Mark Fiore, once, briefly, at the San Jose Mercury News, self-syndicates his animations.

IWAO TAKAMOTO

Iwao Takamoto, the Japanese-American cartoonist who created the lovable mystery-solving but fearfully brave Great Dane, Scooby-Doo, for Hanna-Barbera, died January 8 of a heart attack; he was 81. During World War II, Takamoto and his family were sent to the Manzanar Internment Camp in California, where Takamoto, then about 16, learned sketching techniques from two internees who had been art directors at film studios. After the War, he went to Disney Studios, where he worked until 1961, when he moved to Hanna-Barbera, which had been founded only a few years before. And there, in about 1969, he applied his pencil to Scooby-Doo. “Without Takamoto,” said Michael Mallory, author of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, “it would have been a little Airedale, and the show would have lasted one season.” The big dog’s distinctive physiognomy, reported Susan Stewart at The New York Times, was Takamoto’s contribution to the feature. She quotes Takamoto: “There was a lady that bred Great Danes” at H-B, and “she showed me some pictures and talked about the important points of a Great Dane—like a straight back, straight legs, small chin and such. I decided to go the opposite and give him a hump back, bowed legs, big chin and so on. Even his coloring is wrong.” Takamoto was known in the profession as a fixer. “Iwao’s hand wasn’t always the first hand that touched a character,” said Scott Awley, who worked with Takamoto in the 1990 incarnation of the Scooby-Doo toons, but his was almost always the last hand.

PARENTAL COMPLAINTS

In Marshall, Missouri, where the Public Library, reacting to parental complaints, recently withdrew from circulation two graphic novels (Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) until a new acquisitions policy could be developed, the library board held a public reading on February 7 of the proposed new selection criteria. If the new formulation is adopted on March 14, future acquisitions must meet at least one of the following: constraints of budget; contemporary/social significance; critical acclaim; format and durability of material suitable for library use; local interest; patron requests; popular demand; reputation and significance of author, illustrator, editor, artist, performer, etc.; reputation/authority of author; scarcity of material on the subject and availability elsewhere; and/or timeliness and/or permanence or subject matter. Two citizens addressed the board. One, wearing a button saying “I Read Banned Books,” had no objection to either of the two books or to the proposed selection criteria; the other, presumably representing the censoring element of the population, felt that both graphic novels met at least one of the new criteria. Saying that both books seem timely because of the current gay/lesbian movement, he allowed that “you would find these types of trash along I-70.”

MORRIE TURNER

Morrie Turner, the first African-American creator of a nationally syndicated comic strip, Wee Pals, is recovering from a mild heart attack. He is still producing Wee Pals, which he launched 42 years ago, inspired by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Turner, 83, told Dave Newhouse at the Oroville Mercury Register that when he was “around 60,” he stopped thinking of himself as getting older. “I feel wonderful,” he said, “except I can’t walk all the time. Two hip surgeries. I’m about five feet from getting well,” he continued. “There’s no alarm. Not at all. It didn’t even feel like a heart attack.” He had a triple bypass ten years ago, but he’s not worried. “I’ve gotten new medication,” he said. “I’m not going to give you a different finish to the story.” And he’ll go right on doing Wee Pals. “I’m still trying to get it right,” he said of his craft. “I’m just beginning to feel like, ‘Oh, this is the way you do it.’ I’m having too much fun.”

When Turner launched Wee Pals, most comic strip characters were lily white; he integrated the funnies pages. The message of the strip is constant—using children of various ethnicities to teach humanity how different races can co-exist peacefully. “It’s rainbow power,” Turner said. “People accept words from kids. It’s their pure honesty. They won’t accept [the same] words from adults.” The strip, once syndicated to nearly 100 newspapers, is down to about 40, which Turner says is because there aren’t as many newspapers today as previously. But that doesn’t matter to Turner that much. “I’ll always draw,” he said. “People who retire take up art, don’t they? As long as I can keep up, I can draw when I want to. I love what I do.”

Meanwhile, according to E&P, Heaven Sent Productions is seeking investors to complete a documentary about the Wee Pals creator, “Keeping the Faith with Morrie”; the film will include information about other cartoonists of color—The Boondocks’ Aaron McGruder and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman among them.

HALLMARK

From Animation Magazine’s Ryan Ball: Hallmark, the Kansas City greeting card company, has signed an exclusive, long-term deal with the Cartoon Network to create greeting cards, party supplies and other “personal expression products” based on Cartoon Network properties. Hallmark is a class act. Some years ago, perhaps decades, I was in Kansas City doing a site inspection for a convention, and I took a detour into a shopping mall attached to the Hallmark-owned hotel across from the old Union Station near downtown Kansas City. Winding my way among the shops, I came upon a mini-museum about Hallmark. Admission was free, so I went in.

After passing by glass cases displaying the original art for greeting cards by such notables as Winston Churchill, I continued by exhibits of gadgets that tied ribbons into bows and printers that embossed and other varieties of mechanical contrivances used to produce cards. There was also a documentary movie. Then at the end of the procession of exhibits, was a full-scale fully-outfitted card shop. Rack after rack of Hallmark cards. They had you where they wanted you: after witnessing all the displays, watching cards being made and printed and embossed and wrapped in ribbons—after all that, you were revved up and ready. Ready to buy a card. Lots of cards, one for each relative so you could send them with an inscription saying where you’d bought them.

And then I noticed the signs. Conspicuously displayed in two or three places was a placard with elegant lettering that read: “The cards you see here are for display only. If you wish to purchase a Hallmark Card, visit your Hallmark Card Store.” Classy. They had you where any entrepreneur wants you—primed and ready to buy. But they declined to take advantage of the state of mind that their exhibit induced. Class act, like I said.

BETTER NEWS ABOUT FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

Now that it has developed that Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse will have a future after all, a few details about what that future will be have likewise surfaced. After September, members of the strip’s protagonist Patterson family will no longer age, and the strip will become what Johnston calls a “hybrid”—some new material but mostly old. The narrative focus of the strip will be on Michael Patterson and his young family, which is now in just about the same situation as the first Patterson family—Elly and John and their young son Michael—was when the strip began. Much of the future run of the strip will be reprints of its early years, with Michael recalling his childhood as a framing device. Many readers will never have seen these strips because FBOFW wasn’t running in every newspaper in the country for the first few years. So these recycled strips will be “fresh” to most FBOFW fans. Some of the new material will frame the flashback stories, but some of it will amplify or complete previous storylines according to Eric Harrison at the Houston Chronicle. “For instance,” he said, “Johnston mentions a character, Deena, who was absent from the strip for a long time without explanation. In her head, Johnston knew why Deena disappeared, but she never got around to drawing it. Now she will.”

Come September, Johnston will be the third notable syndicated cartoonist to “retire” within the previous twelve months. About Aaron McGruder, who went on sabbatical from The Boondocks last spring, complaining about the deadlines, and then never returned, and FoxTrot’s Bill Amend who stopped doing the daily version of the strip in December because the constant struggle to keep up to his deadlines was wearing him out after not quite twenty years, Johnston exclaimed: “What wusses! I don’t know whether it’s my age or that I was raised on hard work,” she added, saying her feeling was: “You’ve got a job—do it.”

But she agrees that the task of producing a daily comic strip is daunting. Johnston has been doing it since 1979 without taking advantage of her syndicate’s recent policy of granting cartoonists sabbaticals, a practice Universal Press introduced with Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau in the mid-1980s. If Johnston wanted a two-week vacation, she worked twice her usual hours until she’d produced two extra weeks of material; then she could vacate for two weeks. But now, at age 60, she wants time to do things that she’s been putting off all her life. “I want to travel and study and paint,” she told Harrison, “and I want to spend some time with friends and family. We’re starting to get to the stage when you go to funerals and that’s where you reunite with friends, and I want to be able to spend time with friends while they’re still alive.” After 28 years doing the strip, she said, “I feel I’ve done the best I can do for as long as I can do it. It’s time.”

Another factor affecting her decision to cut back drastically on her work is that her hand shakes. She suffers from a neurological disorder, dystonia, which, although controlled somewhat by medication, makes a drawing future problematic. Her hand doesn’t shake as badly as Charles Schulz’s did the last decade or so that he did Peanuts. A long-time friend of Schulz, Johnston had occasionally watched him draw. “He had to hold his right hand with his left hand to keep it still,” she said. Her hands don’t shake badly enough to affect her drawing, she said, but she uses assistants to letter the strip and to ink the backgrounds. She draws everything in pencil and still inks the characters.

When Johnston started the strip in 1979, she had intended to do a gag-a-day; she didn’t plan to tell stories. But whenever she’d write a joke, she told Harrison, “I just kept saying to myself, ‘But what happened then?’” The question demanded an answer, and the answers always turned into stories. Between now and September, Johnston will continue to exercise her storytelling instinct—this time, to finish current storylines and provide an “ending” to wrap up the saga of the Pattersons.

Johnston’s decision to continue FBOFW as a “hybrid” has drawn some criticism according to Editor & Publisher. ComicsReporter.com blooger Tom Spurgeon remarked that if the strip were to end this fall as originally expected, over 2,000 newspapers would have an open slot in their comics line-up, offering opportunities for dozens of new comic strips to try to win an audience. At DailyCartonist.com, blogger Alan Gardner felt much the same and posted comments from readers who agreed. “I love Lynn’s work,” wrote one, “but it’s disheartening to aspiring pros to now hear that the market her departure would have opened is no longer a reality.” Said another: “Why can’t other cartoonists learn from FoxTrot?” an allusion to Amend’s decision to discontinue the daily edition of his comic strip. A third objected to the hybrid FBOFW, saying it would be “like Lucille Ball’s disastrous attempt to extend a brilliant career. Cartoonists are performers as well. And it’s important to know when to get off the stage.” On the other hand, wrote Spurgeon, “Johnston seems genuinely pleased by the [new] direction [she is contemplating], which is always nice, and you want to be supportive of that. ... The 28-year run of FBOFW pretty much justifies her doing any darn thing she wants.”

ZIPPY THE PINHEAD ON DISPLAY

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead strips will be on display in an exhibit called “Living the American Dream: Levittown and the Suburban Boom,” which celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Long Island post-World War II housing development, a little city of cookie-cutter homes mass-produced to provide WWII vets with cheap housing (as long as the residents were white). Griffith grew up in Levittown, E&P reports, and is distinctly not among its fans. When I interviewed him in 1992, he called it a “waste land,” by which he meant a cultural desert. He remembered a nextdoor neighbor, “the only Beatnik in Levittown,” who was “pretty much under constant suspicion by his neighbors because he had a goatee. This was in 1956 when anything that didn’t conform to the norm was cause for suspicion of communism or something. His name was Ed Esmeller, a well-known science fiction illustrator” who signed his work “Emsh” and went on to become famous as an underground and experimental filmmaker.