Rants & Raves

COMIC STRIPPED

At the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC, original comic strip art from Bob Lubbers’ Long Sam, Snuffy Smith by Fred Lasswell, Pogo by Walt Kelly, and Kudzu by Doug Marlette and others offers an opportunity to contemplate the South’s image in popular comics. Entitled “Comic Stripped: A Revealing Look at Southern Stereotypes in Cartoons,” the exhibit opened in September and will run until April. ...

BATMAN LOBO

Batman Lobo: Deadly Serious is the first of two by Sam Kieth. Kieth is good on a certain kind of picture at a certain scale, but his work reveals its essential grotesque cartoonishness when he draws his characters at a distance from the camera. And his visual invention flags when it comes time to portray outlandish monsters, which Kieth presents here as sort of large-mouth blobs, intricately cross-hatched and shaded. Kieth does the story here, too, and it, alas, isn’t much better. Lots of atmosphere but no articulation. Batman is summoned psychically to discover what is possessing the women in a certain area — a disease? a plague? — where he runs into Lobo and they have a confrontation that comes to naught. While they struggle meaninglessly, a schoolgirl is possessed and wanders off. Kieth follows her, probably so he can try a variety of ways of getting her wardrobe reduced to undies, ending, finally, in a two-page spread where she covers herself with nothing but a sheet.

Not much makes sense in this, the opening issue of a two-issue run. Not even the characters understand much of what happens. That’s part of the plot, I understand, but when Lobo says, “Where’d that ship come from? Oh, who cares!” he infects us with his disinterest. I liked Lobo when he first loomed up on the DC landscape: his raw brutality turned funnybook violence into over-the-top comedy. A match-up with Batman may have seemed like a pairing of equals to someone, but it’s not coming off here, and the contrast between Batman’s restraint in murderous matters and Lobo’s eager inclination to chop his foes into mince has the effect of unmanning Lobo and robbing him of his only redeeming feature — his complete and absolute single-minded ruthlessness. Too bad. What will happen in the concluding issue? Don’t know. And don’t want to find out.

JANI AL-ALI

At the first International Cartoon Contest in Syria, 207 cartoonists representing 29 countries participated, with 13 Iranian cartoonists collecting the top prizes. The event honors Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, saith presstv.ir, “the most famous political cartoonist in the Arab world,” who produced more than 40,000 drawings and created a cartoon character, Handala, “who has bcome an icon of Palestinian defiance.” Al-Ali was shot to death by “unknown persons” in London in 1987; the next year, the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers posthumously awarded him the Golden Pen of Freedom. ...

THE PALM

The Palm was originally a speakeasy in New York. Located on Second Avenue just around the corner from the offices of King Features, the place became a hangout for cartoonists and newspapermen in the 1920s and 1930s, and the cartoonists, falling, occasionally, under the influence of the spirits of the place, decorated the walls with pictures of their comic strip characters. The Palm eventually became a legitimate restaurant and saloon and opened an overflow facility across the street, dubbed Palm Too. Inspired by the second bistro’s success, the founders opened yet another adjunct in Washington D.C. Then in Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver — even San Diego. All have cartoon murals, but the vintage work is in the original joint in New York.

The Washington Palm recently underwent renovation and moved its entrance to the side. It also moved the caricatures from the old entrance to the new one. Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin at the Washington Examiner wondered whether one of those caricatures would mysteriously “disappear.” Would Mark Foley’s mug, which has greeted guests at the old entrance, continue beaming on them in the new entrance? Or would the now disgraced congressional sex fiend be consigned to limbo? Probably, Foley will still be there. “What’s politics without a little scandal?” asked a Palm spokesman. “You can be famous, infamous, or forgotten — with few exceptions, once you’re on the wall, you’re on the wall.” Said Dufour-Gavin: “That also answers the question about former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham’s visage on the restaurant’s back wall, as well. It’s here to stay.”

HITCHED

Mikhaela Reid, a cartoonist, was married to Masheka Wood, a cartoonist, by Ted Rall, another cartoonist. The last time this sort of thing happened, saith E&P, was in 2001, when Cindy Procious, editoonist for the Huntsville Times (Ala.) was married to Clay Bennett, editoonist for the Christian Science Monitor, by Dennis Draughton, then editoonist for the Scranton Times (Pa.).

TALLY

Editor & Publisher’s 2007 Syndicate Directory is out, listing all the features currently distributed by syndicates. A tally of the comic strips on today’s horizon comes to 206; it was 214 last year. But the panel cartoons have gained a little — 150 as opposed to 147 last year. At a time when various pundits are predicting the demise of newspaper comics, this nearly static status is encouraging. ...

LISA'S STORY

Lisa Moore, Tom Batiuk’s doomed character in Funky Winkerbean, died on October 4 of breast cancer. Lisa had survived much in the strip: as a teenager in the 1980s, she had a child out of wedlock and gave it (him) away; then she and Lester Moore got married, and in 1999, she discovered she had breast cancer. After a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was cancer free. Batiuk transformed her ordeal into an uplifting continuity, and the strips were reprinted in book form, Lisa’s Story, for which Batiuk was honored by the American Cancer Society for his sympathetic portrayal of those afflicted with cancer. 

Lisa finished her law degree, opened a practice, and she and Les had a baby daughter. Then in the spring of 2006, the cancer returned and metastasized. Although she died, hers was not a death without hope. Said Batiuk: “For me, there is a miracle in Lisa’s story. It’s not that much of a downer. It’s a hopeful story because it shows how a loving couple treats each other under all circumstances.” I agree: it’s a sad story, but full of heart. And, even, humor. The final chapter in Lisa’s life has been combined with her earlier cancer episode in a volume titled Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe (258 6x9-inch pages in black-and-white; paperback from Kent State University Press, $18.95).

You will probably weep a little as Lisa and Les reach the end of their life together — I did; but in the courageous manner of their meeting that end, you’ll find satisfaction, knowing that people can be like this. They are fictions, but they seem real, a triumph of the storyteller’s art. The book also contains resource material on breast cancer and information about support systems and health care. Incidentally, the strips all carry month and day dates, so we can determine from the sequence the years, making the volume historically important as well as spiritually uplifting.

LEO GARZA

The San Antonio Express, which was one of the few papers in the country with two editorial cartoonists, one liberal and the other conservative, fired Leo Garza, the conservative, in August; John Branch stays on. While budgetary considerations may have been a cause, the newspaper’s management offered no reason for choosing to fire the conservative. Matthew Sheffield at newsbusters.org wrote the paper, asking for an explanation, and received a bland, fact-devoid response, blathering about “the numbers” and asserting that it was “a judgment call.” (“Judgment calls,” by the way, used to refer to a decision reached in an emergency situation where the decider had no time to deliberate; now, at the San Antonio Express and everywhere else, it means, simply, “it is our opinion.”)

Sheffield was outraged and wrote back: “A ‘judgment call?’ ‘About the numbers’? What does that mean? You provide no specifics which gives you no credibility. Don’t you find it the least bit hypocritical that you are refusing to disclose your decision-making process when you routinely publish editorials demanding that government and other businesses do just that? How are you doing anything but using the ‘unfettered power’ (your phrase for the Bush White House) you have over your editorial page without having the respect for the public opinion to explain yourself. You owe it to the public to explain your actions with more than peremptory phrases and dismissive language, especially as a member of our self-appointed ‘fourth estate.’” What, indeed, about the “public’s right to know,” which is so often invoked to support a journalist’s mission? No response from the Express yet.

STAY TOONED!

From Editor & Publisher: A quarterly cartooning publication titled Stay Tooned! is scheduled to premiere in November. "I intend to combine the best parts of Cartoonist PROfiles — telling the stories of professional cartoonists — and The Aspiring Cartoonist — information and instruction for cartoonists," John Read, the periodical's founder, told E&P. "My plan includes marketing it to working cartoonists, aspiring cartoonists, fans of cartooning, and people who buy cartoons." The first and subsequent issues of Read's subscription magazine will also focus on non-newspaper cartooning and cartoonists — including animators, comic book artists, greeting card creators, children's book illustrators, etc.

He said the first issue will have a southern-cartoonists theme, and feature people such as Steve Kelley, editorial cartoonist for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and Creators Syndicate; Marshall Ramsey, editorial cartoonist for the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., and Copley News Service; Scott Stantis, the editorial cartoonist for the Birmingham (Ala.) News and Copley who also does the Prickly City strip for Universal Press Syndicate; and John Rose, who does editorial cartoons out of the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News-Record as well as the Kids' Home Newspaper cartoon/activity page for Copley and the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip for King Features Syndicate. Also: comic creators Mark Pett (Lucky Cow/Universal), Marcus Hamilton (Dennis the Menace/King), Jimmy Johnson (Arlo and Janis/United Media), and Greg Cravens (The Buckets/United).

Read is a long-time cartooning fan who worked as an assistant director and locations scout in the film- and TV-production industry for 20 years after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi. He then became a graphic designer for a sign company in Jackson, Miss. Read has also done freelance cartoons and taught kids how to draw cartoons. His magazine's Web site is still under construction, but, in the meantime, Read can be reached at johnread3@hotmail.com.

ARMY@LOVE

Rick Veitch is one of the most inventive comic book makers of the day. He seems never willing to sit and rest on previous laurels: he’s forever, it seems, examining some new comics storytelling mode or a new aspect of an otherwise old subject. Some years ago, he impressed me with a series of comic books in which he regaled us his visualizations of dreams he was having. Recently, he produced a graphic novel, Can’t Get No, in which he juxtaposes words and pictures in a novel manner: the story is told in pantomime but every picture is accompanied by boxed text, which runs a prose poem parallel to the picture story, complimenting it in a subtle way but not referring directly to any of the events being pictured. Even if the language sometimes soars to pretentiousness, the narrative tension between the verbal and the visual is exquisitely maintained, yielding an unusual reader engagement in the work.

Now, Veitch comes along with a rollicking tale of modern U.S. warfare, Army @ Love (Nos. 1-6, so far), in which sexual licentiousness and heavy doses of nudity almost overwhelm the satire. Veitch puts his soldiers in the fictitious but wholly recognizable Afbaghistan, where the objectives of the military operation are entirely obscured by two overwhelming motivations: sex and money. In the first issue, we meet Switzer, a girl soldier, who, in a free fire zone with a male combatant named Flabbergast, proposes, during a lull in the shooting, that they get naked and “do the dirty,” which, she alleges, will initiate him into the Hot Zone Club, an organization, it turns out, that she has invented solely to get Flabbergast to screw her while under fire — because that makes it all more exciting. Flabbergast eagerly takes her up on her proposition, and they both strip and have at each other. It’s an appropriately lewd introduction to the series, which is unabashed about sex, engaging its cast members in endless couplings, none of which obey the usual monogamous imperatives. Switzer is married to Loman, a bagman for the mob back home in the States; Flabbergast is single but quickly falls in lust with Switzer. The other principal couple introduces Colonel Healey who is married to Allie, who, back home, tries to cure her loneliness by getting it on with Loman. Healey, head and founder of “Momo” (the Motivation and Morale initiative), is a former marketing manager who ingratiated himself to the military moguls by devising a way to increase recruiting for the Army while at the same time keeping morale high — the Retreat.

Held periodically but frequently, Retreats are all-out sexual orgies, and they created the perfect match-up for recruiting for a war that was going on forever, rotating troops back and forth, eventually exhausting human resources. As Healey explains it: “How do I motivate a modern American kid to give up his life of privilege, submit to the military and go to a foreign land to kill people? And the answer is I offer them something they can’t get online or in the movies — something we call ‘peak life experience.’ ... Turns out that the steady diet of movies and video games [among American youth] has addicted them to small amounts of adrenaline, and combat is an adrenaline junkie’s dream.” But Healey’s scheme offered something more — “the secret sauce.” By putting women into combat and inventing the Retreat as a way to break into the danger and monotony, Healey united in one package deal all that young people hunger for — “Danger! Power! Drugs! High tech! Sex!” It’s an adolescent’s dream come true — “spring break on steroids!” No wonder everyone lines up to join. As Veitch put it in No. 1: “My new series ... imagines how surreal the current war might get in five years, focusing especially on how the miliary might have to market it to a new generation of recruits.”

Despite the prevalence of nudity and copulation, a second satirical strand permeates the series. Noticing that much of the war effort in Iraq has been contracted out to private agencies, Veitch imagines what might happen if the war is almost entirely outsourced. In Veitch’s war, the country is bankrupt, so the government goes in search of corporate sponsorship for the military. Suddenly, patriotism goes out the window, replaced by corporate greed. Sex and the profit motive animate all the action in Army @ War, and, issue by issue, Veitch finds new ways to twist his satirical knife in the side of modern corporate war-making. Ingenious. And it would be funnier if it weren’t so true. Veitch’s pictures are copiously detailed; inked by Gary Erskine, they haven’t much visual flair, but Veitch is expert at it, and he fills some panels with background action that occasionally functions as a sight gag. It’s clear he’s having a great time, and so are we, watching him at work — and at play.

THUNDER ROAD

Japan has blazed another trail into the future for comics -- comic books on mobile phones. The first comic book to be released exclusively on cell phone in the U.S. is Thunder Road, “a post-apocalyptic adventure” by Sean Demory, drawn by Steven Sanders, and offered initially just a few weeks ago by uClick, the digital arm of Universal Press syndicate, through its GoComics service (where, online, you can find excerpted squibs and scraps of Rancid Raves, should you be so inclined). Reporting for the Associated Press, David Twiddy notes: “For $4.49 a month on Verizon — or $3.99 a month for AT&T and Sprint — subscribers can view nearly a dozen different traditional comic books.” Current offerings include Bone, Teenage Ninja Turtles, and such new arrivals as “the crime noirish Umbra and the Hindu-folklore inspired Devi,” with new chapters or issues for each title added weekly. GoComics displays one panel at a time, reformatted from the print version with larger typefaces in word balloons. Pushing the phone’s buttons advances the view from panel to successive panel, and the reader can also scroll across the larger images. “Mobile comics have been a cellular mainstay for years in manga-crazy Japan, where some titles already begin life on cell phones before going to print,” said Twiddy. Although just starting out in the U.S., Twiddy says uClick claims 55,000 subscribers a month “in the first year of offering its GoComics service.” TokyoPop, which supplies most of GoComics manga titles, is experimenting with animation and “other cinematic touches,” including tie-ins with “manga-themed games, ring tones, wallpaper and other content.” Wireless companies are still somewhat uncommitted, though: “small screens and short battery lives make online reading a chore.” But steadily advancing technology will doubtless erase such reservations.

Sanders admits the small screen presents challenges in devising the visuals, but the new medium also offers opportunities for the cartoonist to control how the reader peruses the story, one panel at a time without being able to skip ahead to the last panel, where the surprises lay in wait. “I think the future of comics itself lies in digital format,” Sanders said. He observes that with the disappearance of the 10-cent comic book of yore, comics are no longer a cheap form of entertainment. From this realization, Sanders draws a startling insight: Comic books priced at $3-4 aren’t likely to attract purchasers other than those who are already “heavily invested” in comics and used to reading them—and buying them at today’s prices. The economics of the funnybook biz seem poised to work against developing a future audience.

KLAN KOMICS

The indefatigable Craig Yoe at his arflovers.com site has uncovered yet another strange fragment of comics history — Ku Klux Klan Komics. Shocked and awed, Yoe notes that in the strip, Our Ku Klux Klan by cartooner Al Zere, the “Klan is kind of a cute, lovable Shmoo-like mob of aggressive masked do-gooders who you call upon, kind of like Superman, to right life’s little wrongs — getting rid of meddling mothers of girlfriends, putting snobby rich dudes in their place, etc.” The strip ran in the New York Evening Post in the early 1920s, demonstrating that the Klan had some sort of followership up north. In fact, Indiana was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s. ...

DARWYN COOKE

Darwyn Cooke, whose interpretation of Will Eisner’s Spirit has been hailed here and elsewhere for its excellence and faithfulness to the “spirit” of the original, will leave the title after No. 12. Cooke’s inker, J. Bone, is moving into other projects, and Cooke doesn’t want to handle the series without him. A new creative team had not, by early August, been named. Speaking of the Spirit led Cooke to comment in dailypop.wordpress.com on what he sees so far in Frank Miller’s work on the movie version of the iconic character: “I think it will be a really fantastic crime movie, and it’s probably going to be visually stunning, but I think his interpretation seems just a little one-sided to me. From what his interviews indicate, he seems to be concentrating on the sex and violence. I always thought the strip had so much more depth to it than that. Those were elements that helped drive many of the stories, but I don’t think they were what the strip was about. And I think at the end of the day, as nasty as the business was that the Spirit gets involved in, it’s a hopeful strip. It’s got optimism at its heart, and humanity. I don’t know that the movie is going to reflect that, but I think it’s probably going to be damn exciting.”

At the San Diego Comic-Con, Cooke had other discouraging words for the medium and its fans. “There is no room in the direct market for new ideas,” he remarked, echoing what others, Grant Morrison among them, have said. Presumably, the major publishers are playing with a deck of what they’re sure will produce winning hands — namely, all the tried-and-true long-john legions. They don’t want to risk anything on something new and different, untried— nothing that isn’t an obvious candidate for Hollywood treatment. And all those blockbuster movies aren’t doing the comic book medium any good, financially. Cooke thinks direct market comics “are on their way to extinction. ... It doesn’t matter how much money the Spider-man movies make if it doesn’t bring anyone in to buy the comics. This theory’s been floating for twenty years now that these movies will bring people back to comics. It doesn’t work that way. Ask any twelve-year-old kid on the street, he probably thinks Spider-man was created for the movie — or for the [Saturday morning tv] cartoon. He doesn’t know it’s a comic book.” And so he doesn’t go looking for the comic book.

Moreover, Cooke said, the monthly comic book itself is becoming “less and less important.” Every publisher is gearing monthly comic book production towards the subsequent compilations that are issued shortly after a given multi-issue story arc ends. The money these days is in graphic novels, and collections of monthly comic book story arcs pass for “graphic novels,” and so they sell, better than their initial publication in monthly format. In my view, one of the most vibrant developments in four-color fiction has been the limited mini-series in which writers and artists focus on a single story arc and the accompanying cast of characters. Storylines and characterizations are refined and focused, yielding books that are inevitably better than the monthly installments of a title that is designed, apparently, to plunge ahead forever, whether the creators have an idea for a decent story or not. One intriguing by-product of this imperative happened at Marvel in the early days of the Second Coming of Comic Books when Stan Lee, unable to think of suitable endings for the handful of stories he was simultaneously scripting in various titles for his artists, simply continued stories from issue to issue, hoping something would occur to him. Usually, something did, eventually, and one story arc would end and another would begin. Cooke sees the evaporation of the monthly series as fundamentally a good thing: “Ultimately, I think we’re going to see graphic novels, manga, superhero books, and everything else in album form [hardcover books in the graphic novel mode], and everything else in album form in bookstore chains, and they’ll have to fight it out with all the other product available, which is, I think, the way it should be.”

Cooke is looking at the graphic novel format for his next projects, he says — rumored to be a fairy tale for children and another that will have “sex, and violence and swearing” and “involves a lot of paranoia and craziness. I think it’ll be a fun read for the adults out there.”

STEVE CANYON

To mark the 60^th anniversary of the Air Force and its one-time unofficial spokesman Steve Canyon, retired Air Force Master Sgt. Russ Maheras has produced a new Steve Canyon strip for Air Force Times, a civilian weekly newspaper that covers that branch of the military. According to E&P, the color strip is "set in the present and follows Brig. General Steve Canyon as he investigates Taliban activity in a remote valley in the mountains of Afghanistan." Canyon's other creator, Milton Caniff, would be celebrating the 100^th anniversary of his birth this year. ...

OPUS

The terrorists are winning. Two successive installments (August 26 and September 2) of Berkeley Breathed’s Sunday strip, Opus, were killed by cautious editors at about 25 of the 200 or so newspapers carrying the feature because they feared the strips might be offensive to Muslims. Or because of a mildly suggestive joke. Or both. In the dubious strips, Steve Dallas, Breathed’s caricature of shallow male chauvinism, confronts his blonde bimbo girlfriend’s equally shallow pursuit of fads. Lola Granola dons a hijab one week and announces that she’s rejecting “decadent Western crud,” which is okay by Steve because if she gives up the American Idol notions of gender equality, he thinks he’ll be the sexual beneficiary of her more submissive attitudes. The next week, Steve commands Lola to doff the burqa she’s donned in favor of a “smokin’ hot yellow polka-dot bikini” for their day at the beach. But when Lola returns, she’s covered head-to-toe in a “burqini,” and she makes a joke about Steve not “getting it,” alluding, on the one hand, to Steve’s inability to perceive the value of Muslim-inspired female modesty and, on the other — we may assume — to the likelihood that she’ll be denying him her sexual favors.

The Washington Post, the flagship paper for the Washington Post Writers Group syndicate that distributes Opus, was one of the papers declining to publish the strips. Several commentators, Eugene Volokh at huffingtonpost.com among them, voiced alarm at the tendency they perceive in such “censorship.” Said Volokh: “It looks like certain media outlets are establishing or reinforcing a social norm that immunizes Islam and Muslims from a certain kind of commentary. And we as readers and writers should try to fight such a social norm, by criticizing those who are acting on it.” It’s fairly clear that it’s the Muslim content of the strips — or, indeed, any “Muslim-related humor” — that gave editors pause.

The week before the first Lola strip, Opus ridiculed Jerry Falwell, and none of the client papers dropped the strip. Other religions clearly do not enjoy the immunity that Islam in U.S. newspapers enjoys. Newspapers have regularly published editorial cartoons poking fun at the inherent hypocrisies of the Catholic Church as revealed by the sexual depredations of its priests; and few complain about it. But editors are obviously intimidated by the violent reactions of radical Islamists. Since the object of terrorism is to strike fear into the hearts of the populace, we must conclude that the terrorists are winning. Even in a so-called secular society. Among newspaper editors anyhow.

On September 16, the butt of the joke (so to speak) in Opus was a fat lady. I’m waiting to see if that inspires protest from obese America. It apparently didn’t intimidate any newspaper editors. The Contragion continues, though, and at www.RCHarvey (Rants & Raves, Opus 211), we investigate other aspects of it — college cartoonists as well as professionals offending various constituencies and, most alarming of all, suppressing the past (Winsor McCay and Herge) because their pictures of different races were stereotypical and wrong despite their being perfect reflections of the attitudes of their times.

PHIL FRANK

Phil Frank, who for 32 years produced a comic strip about his own alter ego, a disheveled newspaper reporter and sometime park ranger named Farley, died September 12 after a long illness brought on by a brain tumor. Farley was unique: for the last 20 years of its run, it appeared only in the San Francisco Chronicle. Frank, a long time resident of the Bay Area who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito for many years, died at a friend’s house in Bolinas at 9:30 p.m. with his wife and daughter at his bedside. He was 64.

Just days before, Frank had announced that he was laying down his drawing pen: his illness made it impossible for him to draw either Farley, his picaresque San Francisco refuge of feral cats, vociferous ravens, clueless park rangers, gurus, wild pigs and political figures, or his syndicated strip, Elderberries. His final Farley strip, the last in the “classics” that have been re-running for almost a year, appeared on September 7. The characters in the Elderberries—crotchety old ladies and gents who live in a retirement home—will live on, but under new management.

At www.RCHarvey.com (Rants & Raves, Op. 211), we run a long appreciative article about Frank by “Carl Nolte, a staff writer at the Chronicle. Other appreciations: At sfgate.com/podcasts, hear a roundtable discussion on Phil Frank's career with Bad Reporter creator Don Asmussen and editorial cartoonists George Russell and Tom Meyer, moderated by Cartoon Art Museum director Rod Gilchrist. At sfgate.com/philfrank, watch Phil Frank playing TV travel guide in excerpts from a Sausalito walking-tour history video presentation.

ZIPPY THE PINHEAD

Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith’s incomprehensibly hilarious comic strip star, was once almost a TV personality. By 1997, the time of an interview Bob Andelman conducted with the cartoonist for Mr. Media, Griffith and his wife, cartoonist Diane Noomin, had produced nine drafts of a live-action movie script over the previous 12 years, but nothing came of any of them. Then they wrote several scripts for a animated tv version of the surrealistic character, famed for saying, among other things, “Are we having fun yet?” The expression long ago passed into common parlance, much like R. Crumb’s “Keep on truckin’,” and, like Crumb, Griffith realizes not a dime for originating the by-word. “The only time it annoys me,” Giffith told Andelman, “is when it’s another cartoon character saying it.” Like Garfield or Dennis the Menace. “The worst of all was a Ziggy t-shirt,” Griffith added. “That rankled for a few minutes.”

Griffith created Zippy for an underground comix title in 1970 and had no expectation of getting into national syndication. The comic featuring Zippy, he thought, was “too hard-edged” for mainstream consumption. “What makes people like something is if they reinvent it themselves,” Griffith said, “ — they make the character become who they think it should be. That’s why the blandest are usually the most successful. The most successful strips in America tend to be the ones that are the least challenging. Zippy is challenging. That’s not what most people what to do when they casually read through the comics. They just want to get through it.” And a classic criticism of Zippy is that you have to read it twice, sometimes even more, before you get it — and sometimes, you don’t get it even then because there’s nothing, exactly, to “get.” What can you make of another celebrated Zippy comment: “All life is a blur of Republicans and meat”? Admirable, awe-inspiring, apt. But what does it mean, exactly?

Zippy got into King Feature’s syndicated line-up almost by accident. Or maybe it was an insidious plot. When Will Hearst III took over the San Francisco Examiner, he wanted something offbeat for his readers, and in 1985, he signed up Hunter Thompson and Zippy, which, at the time, Griffith was self-syndicating to alternative newspapers. A year later, Hearst’s King Features wanted the strip.

Griffith, taken aback and not quite sure he wanted the daily grind of a syndicated strip, responded with a list of non-negotiable demands—“things I would require in order to work for them,” Griffith told me when I interviewed him in 1992. “I had thought of the list as a way of not working for them: they would never agree to these things, I was certain. I said I had to keep my copyright; I had to keep the larger format —  I actually draw the strip out of proportion: it’s taller than any other strip ... so that it has more headroom [for speech balloons]. ... You can’t censor it; you can’t edit it. You have to guarantee me a certain amount of money weekly because I’d be giving up my exclusive deal with the Examiner. I felt like I was taking hostages. A sort of power play. And this guy sat across from me [his name was Alan Priaulx] and said ‘Yes’ instantly to everything.

About six months later, I found out a little more about why he was so agreeable. ... Six months after Zippy started running with King, this guy quit. Which kind of freaked me out a little: I thought maybe I was going to go with him. But everybody assured me that they liked Zippy and that it was doing fine.” Then Griffith got a letter from Priaulx; he was now in a completely different business, “and he said he just wanted to tell me what had happened, how Zippy had come to King Features. He said he’d wanted to leave the syndicate — he wasn’t happy; it wasn’t the right job for him — but he wanted to leave with a bang. And he said he felt that by hiring me and by adding Zippy to the King Features roster, he was leaving a ticking time bomb on their doorstep as he left. He just wanted to shake up King Features. He just wanted to give them the weirdest strip in America.”

The bomb is still ticking; in 1997, the time of the Andelman interview, it was in about 200 newspapers — “185 papers more than I ever thought it would be in,” Griffith told Andelman.

FBOFW

Lynn Johnston’s “hybrid” version of her popular strip, For Better or For Worse, began September 3. As we’ve reported before, Johnston originally thought she’d just end the strip this fall. She’s sixty, she said, and she wanted deadline-free time to do other things that she’d always wanted to do. And she has a health issue: she suffers from dystonia, a neurological condition that makes her hands tremble. She controls it with medication, but it’s still there, lurking. And she’d run through the storyteller’s cycle, as she told Chris Mautner at the Patriot News: “A husband and wife who have children, the children grow up and now they have children. Michael has children who are the same age that he and Elizabeth were when the strip began.” It seemed a good time to dismount from the cycle. I suspect Johnston's syndicate, Universal Press, wanted her to reconsider. Maybe not: Universal is extraordinarily accommodating of its cartoonists’ wishes. Whatever the case, Johnston had second thoughts about stopping, and then she had the hybrid notion: re-run FBOFW strips from its early years as if Michael is telling the family history to his children.

This was a happier solution, happier than stopping altogether, cold turkey. It would cut down on the time needed to produce the strip, freeing Johnston to do those other things she wanted to do; and the strip’s fans would still have the strip to read. (And many of the fans had never seen the early years of FBOFW because it hadn’t been in all that many papers when it started.) Moreover, the hybrid option assuaged the storyteller. Ultimately, she told Mautner, she couldn’t stop in September: “The characters sort of won’t let me.” There are loose ends, danging plot threads. The hybrid permits her to tie them all up, slowly, over the next few years as she mixes new material in with the re-running material. “I’m interested and readers are interested to know what is going to happen with Anthony and Elizabeth,” she said, referring to the divorced father whom Elizabeth dated when they were both in high school. “That resolution can’t happen too fast,” Johnston continued. “They’ve only just started to see each other again after a long time apart. Both have had other relationships and now he has a child and some baggage, and so does she. You just can’t wrap it up too quickly.” The hybrid permits the storyteller to do what she’s always done — to examine her characters, their personalities and motivations, why they do what they do. It was to answer those sorts of questions that she began telling stories: FBOFW started as a gag-a-day strip about a young family, but then Johnson began to wonder — why did Ellie do that? What will happen next because of what she did? The same kind of curiosity drives her now.

“A lot of people didn’t like Anthony,” she said. “But you see, Anthony has never really had an opportunity to be recognized and understood by everybody. He was just a shadow figure. And all the reader has seen is little bits and pieces. And so that’s another reason why the [run of] the strip has to be extended — so that Anthony’s character can be more fully explored. And his [failed] marriage discussed and his relationship as a single parent and his business sense and the things he likes to do. He’s just not a complete character, and it’s hard to accept that Elizabeth, who is a well-known character, should be lost to someone that nobody knows.” Before the current hybrid started, Johnston had Elizabeth explaining the failure of Anthony’s marriage to a friend. The process of understanding Anthony has begun. It will continue, weaving in and out of the story Michael is telling his children of his own childhood.

THE WALKER-BROWNE FAMILY COLLABORATION

Bill Crouch reports that the Westport Historical Society just opened “A Cartoon Legacy: Beetle Bailey - Hi and Lois - Hagar the Horrible, The Walker-Browne Family Collaboration,” an exhibition the title of which looks as if it was compounded expressly to slap opponents of “legacy strips” in the face. Or, perhaps, just to rub their noses in evidences of the kind of superior achievement collaboration can produce even over generations. The show will be on display until January 4, 2008. Visit westporthistory.org

ASOK

Asok, the weirdly brilliant character in Dilbert, is a native of the sub-continent India named after an Indian colleague of Scott Adams, the strip’s creator. I have wondered, occasionally, where the name came from; now I know. Asok arrived in the strip in 1996 as a summer intern. Despite being “mentally superior to most people on earth,” Asok was laid off when his job was outsourced to India, so he joined the company to which his job was outsourced and now works by “Indian Standard Time.” He was earlier denied permission to be a regular employee, reports the Hindu in New Delhi, even though he performed the functions of a senior engineer and was told “as you gain experience, you’ll realize that all logical questions are considered insubordination.” ...

THE K CHRONICLES

The coveted Harvey Award (no relation) for best syndicated comic went to Keith Knight for his self-syndicated The K Chronicles. Editor & Publisher reveals that Keef won over four other contenders: Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), Tony Millionaire (Maakies), Patrick McDonnell (Mutts), and Antiques: The Comic Strip by J.C. Vaughn, and Bredan and Frian Fraim. ...

SNOOPY

The October issue of Vanity Fair, the one with Nicole Kidman, lips parted, baring her bra on the cover, publishes an excerpt from David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. Entitled “American Beagle,” the piece is about Snoopy and how he grew from a beagle to a symbol of the triumph of imagination. (That part, the “symbol of the triumph of imagination,” is me, not Michaelis; although it might be—I haven’t read this part of the book yet.) Vanity Fair, which typically has female skin on its cover but hard-nosed reportage inside, costs $4.50; for merely seven times that amount, you can get the whole Schulz book. But it won’t have bare female flesh on the cover. ...