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A book accompanied by a DVD containing about 16,000 of Herblock's cartoons will be released on Oct. 13, 2009, the 100th anniversary of the late Washington Post staffer's birth, according to ComicsDC blogger Mike Rhode, who says the book, a project of the Herb Block Foundation, will also include a 4,000-word essay by Herblock's former Post colleague Haynes Johnson.
No surprises here: the tallies coincide handily with strip circulation figures. With 36 individual titles still available, Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse is the champion; it runs in more than 2,000 newspapers — still, despite the confusing hybrid format of late. Bill Amend’s FoxTrot is next with 35 titles still available, and that, maybe, is something of a surprise: the strip, at its height before Amend retired the daily version, appeared in over 1,000 newspapers but never approached the 2,000-plus mark. Third is Scott Adams’ Dilbert with 34 titles although only 31 are still available); Tom Wilson’s saccharin Ziggy is fourth with 31. In order, then, here are the runners up: Doonesbury, 29 volumes; Baby Blues, 28; Cathy, 27; The Far Side, 22 titles plus The Complete Far Side; Pat Oliphant’s editorial cartoons, 22 volumes still available. Of those with fewer than 20 titles available, Zits and Close to Home, a panel cartoon, stand first with 19 each, then come Mutts with 17, ditto Calvin and Hobbes, plus The Complete C&H.
Editoonist and Web cartoon mogul Daryl Cagle was traveling through China as part of a U.S. State Department cultural exchange program when the earthquake hit. “The consulate in Shanghai requested an American editorial cartoonist,” Cagle explained on his blog, “and I’m an easy cartoonist to find” because of his high visibility on MSNBC.com. “We felt the quake here in faraway Shanghai,” Cagle reported on May 12. He was scheduled to go the next day to Chengdu, in Sichuan province, epicenter of the quake, but went to Harbin in northern China instead.
Cagle realized from the first of his exchanges with Chinese students that he was perhaps more provocative than the State Department bargained for. “They have never had an American cartoonist participate in the program before,” he wrote, “and since the Chinese don't see American editorial cartoons in their newspapers and we don't see Chinese editorial cartoons in our newspapers, there is a wide cultural divide when it comes to journalism. The students seem to be amazed at the very idea that cartoonists would dare to be disrespectful of their government leaders.”
Excerpts
from Cagle’s report (cagle.msnbc.com/news/blog) follow:
I explain to the classes about "censorship" in America, and that the government never censors cartoonists, but that freedom of the
press belongs to the guy who owns the press and cartoonists often complain
about their editors. I show them examples of killed cartoons. They seem to be
especially interested in this topic. I leave a lot of time for questions and
answers with each group I talk to — they can be shy, but when they get started
they have lots of questions, and I get the same questions wherever I go. Here
are some examples of recurring questions and answers:
Do your cartoons hurt your personal
relationships with the politicians you draw? No, I don't have personal
relationships with the people I draw.
Do you worry that your drawings will
hurt the reputation of someone you have drawn? No, if one of my cartoons hurts
the reputation of a politician that I am criticizing, then I am pleased.
(Sometimes the crowd murmurs when I say this. It doesn't seem to be what they
expect me to say.)
Do you ever apologize for your
cartoons? Sometimes, but only if I make an error or if the cartoon is
misunderstood. Usually the people who are angry about a cartoon are the people
I intend to make angry, and I am happy to make them angry. (The crowd murmurs
at this answer, too.)
Do you ever draw cartoons that are supportive of China? No, I don't draw cartoons that support anything. I just criticize. Supportive
cartoons are lousy cartoons.
Now that you have visited China, and have learned more about China, will you be drawing cartoons that support China? Probably not.
[For more of this fascinating insight into today's China from a cartoonist’s perspective, I recommend that you visit Cagle’s blog, www.cagle.msnbc.com, where I’m sure he’ll continue in the same vein as the foregoing.]
Apparently, the Web posts nearly 18,000 comics every day, a gigantic portion of which are so badly drawn that they are very hard to look at. Even the better drawn ones are not very good looking. Web cartoonists invariably draw lines that are “dead”: because the thickness of the lines doesn’t vary, the lines have no life of their own. They lie on the paper, inert, contributing nothing to the aesthetic appeal of the art. The famed Belgian cartoonist, Herge, drew in much the same way, and by giving the technique a name, “clear line,” fans gave stature to Herge’s graphic mannerism in a purely rhetorical maneuver. But Herge’s achievement in cartooning lays more in the detail of his renderings — in particular, the locales into which Herge’s protagonist, Tintin the youthful reporter, wandered — rather than in the lines themselves. (For an quick example of a “lively” line, conjure up a remembrance of virtually any Al Hirschfeld drawing you may have seen.)
Many of the 18,000 daily entries on the Web are contributed by college students, saith Susie C. at collegeotr.com — “because, really, who else has the free time?” — and she lists what she thinks are the best ones about college life: Nothing Better by Tyler Page, PhD (Piled High and Deeper) by Jorge Cham, Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, College University, 6x9 College by Amber Marshall and 10er (?—typo?) Bradley, Academia by Zackary Downey, and Standard Deviation by Kyle Sanders. All of them deploy the regrettable lifeless line. According to Editor & Publisher, 1,800 of these web comics will be embedded by King Digital, a unit of King Features Syndicate, in a single website, Comics Kingdom, described as “a revenue-generating application widget that can be syndicated anywhere on the Web.”
With a new series of books for children, TOON Books, Francoise Mouly, co-founder, with husband Art Spiegelman, of RAW magazine and, since 1993, art editor for The New Yorker, hopes to get kids interested in reading. “My husband and I both developed our love of literature through comics,” she said, adding that Art says “comics are a gateway drug to literacy.” The series launches with three titles: Benny and Penny in Just Pretend by Geoffrey Hayes, Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenstiehl, and Otto’s Orange Day by editoonist Frank Cammuso and one-time undergrounder Jay Lynch.
Interviewed in Horn Book (hbook.com), Mouly observes a fine irony: “As the medium grew up, kids got left behind. So that’s precisely why, after saying for decades, ‘Comics, they are not just for kids anymore,’ Art and I are now saying, ‘Comics, they are not just for adults anymore.’” ... Apparently not. At the New York Comic Con during a Kids’ Comics Publishers roundtable, reported in PW Comics Week, Diamond’s Janna Morishima said: “Over the past few decades, kids’ comics have become the most underground of underground comics. Only in the past few years has that started to change.” She cited First Second’s children’s line, Scholastic’s Graphix line, “and the growing trend of trade houses releasing graphic novels for children and traditional comics publishers developing titles for children as evidence that the market is growing.”
From Ryan Rosendal at the University of Washington's Daily on May 14 we have a list of recommendations
about how to be a political cartoonist:
1. Watch far too much CNN. A political cartoonist must keep up on current events, and TV news channels such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are excellent sources of information. And by "excellent," I mean "rage-fueling," as you will soon learn to hate all news anchors and pundits.
2. Read your competition. Not only should you carefully study your opponents in your hometown paper, but also your more widely published opponents. Soon, you too can become the next David Horsey rip-off. Really.
3. Put some measure of thought into your political analysis. Believe it or not, having a point that isn't hackneyed or tired is kind of encouraged.
4. Try not to be biased. Look, nobody in comedy is an equal opportunity offender, but you don't have to be super obvious about what side you're for. Be able to make fun of yourself. If you won't, somebody else will.
5. Draw like you've never drawn before. Political cartooning requires copious amounts of sketching, as that is where ideas come from. If you cannot draw, please stay far away from the field, because one more bad Bush caricature is going to drive me over the edge.
6. Know how to tell a joke. Or better yet, make sure to include one. This is a mistake Mallard Fillmore makes on a regular basis.
7. Discover the glory of whiteout. Whiteout is an artist's best friend, as it allows you to eliminate all of those terrible errors you make when inking a cartoon, but as you will make many terrible errors, don't worry.
8. Learn to hate yourself. You know that sense of self-loathing you get after you turn in an essay, thinking you did a bad job. You get to feel that every waking moment of your political cartooning life.
9. Learn how to deal with criticism. For instance, after groups you made fun of, such as Ron Paul supporters or 9/11 conspiracy theorists, attack you, don't angrily write back to them or challenge them to a fight. That almost never works out (it's worth it when it does work out, though).
10. One final tip: Know how lucky you are to be paid for doing something you love that few people ever get a chance to do. And making people angry—that's a plus.
I assume from all this that Rosendal is himself an editoonist. No other breed could have such incisive insights. But I question the wisdom of keeping CNN or any other 24/7 news source humming at one’s elbow: those are “headline services” and soap opera sensation mongers, and one can scarcely gain an understanding of the events of the day from observing them. The cartoons drawn will be, perforce, similarly myopic.
The International Museum of Cartoon Art (IMCA), which has been looking for a home since some of its backers backed out a few years ago, forcing the IMCA in 2002 to abandon the facility built for it in Boca Raton, Florida, has given up looking for a museum setting to house its collection of approximately 200,000 works. Hereafter, the IMCA collection will be archived at the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. According to a press release from the CRL and subsequent Editor & Publisher notices, the advent of the IMCA holdings will make the OSU facility the largest collection of original cartoon art in the world: with the IMCA addition, more than 450,000 pieces, including drawings from all genres of cartoon art (comic strips, comic books, animation, editorial, advertising, sport, caricature, greeting cards, graphic novels, and illustrations), display figures, toys and collectibles, and works on film and tape, CDs, and DVDs.
The IMCA was established in 1973 by Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker, who mounted the embryo collection in a converted mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Opening in 1974, it was the first museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting cartoons. “Two years later,” according to a press release from Jenny Robb, assistant curator at CRL, “the museum relocated to a renovated castle in Rye Brook,New York, where the collection was displayed until 1992. At that time, the city of Boca Raton, Florida invited the museum to construct a 52,000 square foot facility as part of an effort to attract cultural institutions to Palm Beach County.”
The brand new Boca Raton building, designed expressly to house a museum of cartoon art, opened in 1996. Although a popular attraction with “highly acclaimed exhibits, events and functions for the public,” when two of its financial backers went bankrupt a few years later, IMCA sold its building to pay off its debts, and Walker went looking for a new home for the collection. For a short while in 2006, plans were actively underway to raise money to convert facilities on the ground floor of the Empire State Building in mid-town Manhattan, an ideal venue for attracting casual walk-in traffic. But those plans fell through when Walker couldn’t find enough funding. He went looking again, attempting a venue in a west-side Manhattan building at the Circle Line pier. But that collapsed too, and eventually, in what I assume was a painful decision, he elected to put the entire collection at OSU’s CRL. Painful but the best remaining option. “It’s a wonderful place,” Walker told E&P.
Lucy Shelton Caswell, professor and curator of the CRL, said, "We are honored that the IMCA's board has placed its treasures in our care." Efforts are underway to provide increased space for the Cartoon Research Library that will include museum-quality galleries. "It is critical that we have state-of-the-art gallery space to display IMCA's collection appropriately," said Caswell. IMCA’s gift of its holdings to CRL is predicated upon OSU’s providing additional exhibit space on a permanent basis. The new gallery will be named in honor of IMCA founder Walker.
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission is distributing at migrant shelters and bus terminals 20,000 copies of a new kind of travel guide: a pair of comic books packed with horror stories about what might happen to an immigrant bound for the U.S. In one, reported Chris Hawley and Sergio Solache in USA Today, “an migrant gets his legs sliced off by a train's wheels; another is shot by bandits on the Arizona border. Others are beaten and robbed by crooked Mexican police.” The new effort is very different from the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s 2004 comic-book style Guide for the Mexican Migrant “that offered safety tips for those attempting to cross the border, information on their legal rights and advice for living unobtrusively in the USA,” which publication outraged U.S. immigration control groups. One of the two new Migrantes comics is aimed at Mexicans; the other, at Central Americans traveling through Mexico on their way to the U.S. Perhaps it goes without saying that both versions are unabashedly intended to discourage people from crossing the border illegally.
IDW has published the second volume of their sumptuous reprinting of Milton Caniff’s epochal strip, The Complete Terry and the Pirates: 1937-1938 (352 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w and color; hardcover, $49.95). In what we now take to be typical of IDW’s reprint performances, the volume is handsomely produced — three black-and-white daily strips to a page, then a color Sunday, all in sequence and attentively dated; the reproduction of the strips is excellent, not as large as in the pioneering NBM series of yore but fully readable (lines clearly etched and gray tones unmuddied, color an accurate mirror of the original publication on newsprint); end papers reproducing panels of strips, dust jacket carrying a classical image of the strip’s heroes and a few of the femmes fatales, and front matter — an Introduction by novelist/journalist Pete Hamill and an essay by Bruce Canwell, associate editor of IDW’s Library of American Comics, both illustrated with rare visuals culled from the Cartoon Research Library (which was founded when Caniff left his papers to his alma mater, Ohio State University). In a laudable innovation, the front matter offers a page introducing us to the principal members of the cast and two pages that re-cap, in pictures and succinct captions, what has transpired “previously in Terry and the Pirates” — both features undeniably a boon to readers coming fresh to Caniff’s masterwork.
Canwell’s essay supplies some history of the strip, including Caniff’s relationship with Noel Sickles from whom he appropriated the chiaroscuro technique of illustrating the strip, and with New York Daily News publisher Captain Joseph Patterson, who commissioned Caniff to produce an adventure strip for him, resulting in Terry. Canwell puts the strip in its appropriate historical context by reviewing the history of China in the 1930s, including the Japanese invasion that started with a raid at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 and the subsequent colossal “rape of Nanking” later that year in which 20,000 women were raped and 300,000 Chinese were killed.
This volume includes several major developments in the Terry saga. We meet Big Stoop, the towering mute who joins the Terry trio (Terry, Pat, Connie) for the rest of their pre-war adventures, and Terry, growing into adolescence, falls momentarily under the spell of the mature and “experienced” Burma and makes a tentative move on the blonde bombshell in a sensitive sequence that shows how well Caniff understood the romantic yearnings of youth. And with the “invader” (Japan) overrunning the country, the Dragon Lady, erstwhile pirate queen, calls upon her countrymen to join her in a guerrilla army. It was a stunning maneuver: villain to heroine at a stroke. In transforming the Dragon Lady from pirate to patriot, Caniff achieved a dramatic triumph that was both profoundly realistic and marvelously theatrical. The Dragon Lady had always been a virtual warlord. Now, she abandons petty crime to enlist in the Chinese legions mustered against Japan. “This happened often to people such as she,” Caniff told me. “The Japanese were well hated on the mainland of China. This was often true — that someone like her was at heart a patriot, really quite sincerely a patriot, when the issue involved the invading Japanese. As long as the nation was at stake, she was a patriot. When it was all over she went back to her natural role — like everyone else.”
Volume Two of The Complete Terry is a juicy trove of memorable moments. Don’t miss it. You won’t want to miss the last volume in the series either: I’ve been asked to write an essay for it. (Just so you know how thoroughly without self-interest this review is.) Judging from the first two volumes, the IDW Terry is the perfect companion for my Caniff book: Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon..
The latest in the Fantagraphics Peanuts reprint extravaganza is out, The Complete Peanuts: 1967-1969: The Definitive Collection of Charles M. Schulz’s Comic Strip Masterpiece (340 6x8-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $28.95), and it, like the previous eight volumes, is a superb example of the book designer’s craft, here, Seth’s. Nothing in the design draws particular attention to itself and therefore away from the book’s chief function, which is to present the comic strip to the best advantage — in this case, three daily strips to each page, uncluttered and therefore unblemished by any of those self-conscious designer-ish gimmicks like drawings screened to gray tone lines thereby destroying the art that you bought the book to look at or blown up so that the lines are raggedy and unattractive — nothing, in other words, Kiddish at all. Only in the book cover, jacket, and front- and back-matter is Seth’s subtle touch on display, its austerity matching that of the cartoonist’s simple but expressive visuals.
Each cover of the series has carried a bold-line close-up of one of the Peanuts cast, accented with gray tone and bathed in a subdued color, a different one for each book. With the faces, Seth aimed, he said, to “create a small moment of recognition/confusion.” At worldfamouscomics.com in November 2004, he explained: “I want the viewer to see the books in a slightly different light than all the other Peanuts books they’ve seen for the last 40 years. That’s why the color scheme is very low key and the overall design scheme is rather sedate. I want to try to ‘re-brand’ (to use a horrible modernism) the Peanuts strip. Or, really, I should say, I want to return Peanuts to the proper branding — which is sophisticated humor aimed at an adult audience. Too many decades of children’s products and marketing has confused the buying audience into thinking that Schulz was writing for kids. I wanted to get away from the bright colors and so forth, usually associated with kids’ books. Also, I really want this series of books to have some feeling for the sadder human moments of the strip, and I hope the overall design of the books (inside and out) will capture some of that.”
In taking the book design assignment, Seth (aka Gregory Gallant), a cartoonist himself (graphic novels like Clyde Fans: Book One and Wimbledon Green and It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken), wanted “a chance to do something beautiful for Sparky [as Schulz preferred to be called]. It is a daunting task in that sense,” he continued: “The only thing that makes it easier is that there have been many many horrible editions of Peanuts, and his work still goes on unharmed. At the very least, I can’t hurt Peanuts.”
In the May-June issue of History: The History Channel Magazine is a 6-page article on “Wartoons” and a couple pages about Elsie the Borden Cow, another cartoon character. The former, about animated propaganda and aircraft nose-art, is fairly good for a general interest magazine; the latter omits all mention of Vic Herman the cartooner who helped make a decent cow out of Elsie. Herman’s other claim to fame is Winnie the WAC, the pert young thing who wore the uniform and publicized women in the military during World War II. Drafted in 1943 and stationed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland for basic training, Herman soon found himself commissioned by the editor of the base newspaper, The Flaming Bomb, to created a character for the paper. Winsome Winnie was the result. Distributed by Camp Newspaper Service, the same outfit that distributed Milton Caniff’s Male Call, Winnie the WAC appeared in about 1,200 base newspapers.
Before the War, Herman was freelancing cartoons to magazines and working in advertising agencies, among them, the prestigious Young and Rubicam. And that’s where he met Elsie the Cow. Elsie had been a symbol for Borden for years, but she had usually appeared as a real cow. Now, Borden wanted Elsie to have more personality. The assignment was given to a group of cartoonist freelancers who had been working on the Cow account. “When I started working on Elsie,” Herman told me when we talked a couple decades ago, “she was on all fours. And then we stood her up.” And when they stood her up, a problem of some delicacy was thrust into view. “We had to figure out how to cover her up,” Herman continued. “But that’s an udder story,” he finished, delivering the pun that had decorated this story for the better part of a century. The female problem was solved when they put an apron on Elsie, and then the cow and her family became characters in page-long illustrated milk dramas — comic strips. History magazine credits David William Reid with creating the cartoon version of Elsie, which, it is alleged, happened in 1936. But Reid was eventually assisted by Herman and those other freelance cartoonists, the boys with the apron. But that, as Herman always said, is “an udder story.”
Michael Sangiacomo, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is, he says, “Cleveland’s unofficial comic-book ambassador” and always gets picked to squire interested visitors over to the slightly “tattered” Glenville neighborhood and the Kimberly Avenue house where Jerry Siegel was living in 1933 when he created Superman with his fellow teenager, artist pal Joe Shuster, who lived “a short distance away on Amor Street.” Shuster’s house, apparently, has been lost to the ravages of time, but Siegel’s house — the actual place where he dreamed up the Man of Steel — is still there, and its owner, Hattie Gray, revels somewhat in the place’s history: the house is “proudly painted Superman red, yellow, and blue,” Sangiacomo observes.
Last fall, Sangiacomo took cartoonist Tom Batiuk out to the Siegel House, and they found Hattie Gray home, and she graciously let them in so Batiuk could see the third-floor workroom where Superman first saw the light of day. Batiuk took photos of the house because he has planned a sequence in Funky Winkerbean about a comic writer who gets stuck while writing Superman. A friend suggests that the writer visit The Birthplace, and he does. The sequence will run this summer, starting (it sez here) on Monday, August 11.
The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is, apparently, out, and if it’s anything like The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics that surfaced a few months ago, it will fall somewhat shy of including all the “best.” The War Comics included nothing from EC’s Frontline Combat or Two-Fisted Tales, for instance, arguably the best war story anthologies every published in comics. The War book spans a healthy swath of the 20th century though: stories from the 1960s (earliest, 1962) through 2005. The book was first published in Britain, so it logically includes British as well as American comics — and some samples from other countries, notably, “I Saw It!,” Neiji Nakazawa’s recounting of his own experience witnessing the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima, which led, we are told, to “a much larger work, Barefoot Gen,” a classic Japanese graphic novel. Although nothing from EC is included, the work of some of its notable artists — John Severin and Joe Orlando — appears, as do a couple of latter-day stories from Will Eisner and a brace of unlikely creators, Greg Irons and Don Lomax. It may not include EC material, but maybe that’s a bonus: in the range of other material assembled here by David Kendall, we see many powerful pictures and telling narratives, and we learn thereby that EC Comics was not alone in portraying war as it is rather than as the glorious “romantic” mission some, like our own benighted Prez, GeeDubya, would have us believe it to be.
"His artistic ability was unparalleled, but it was the sense of humor that he brought to it that really set him apart," Hugh Hefner, Playboy publisher and a fan of Elder's work since "the early days of Mad," told the Los Angeles Times on Friday, May 16. "He was a zany and a lovable one." Will Elder, the manic creative half of the most spectacular cartooning satires of the century, died at the Jewish Home at Rockleigh, N.J. He had Parkinson's disease. Elder was the other half of Harvey Kurtzman, and the two together created Mad, which parodied American culture and Western Civilization, and then Playboy's Little Annie Fanny strip, which parodied the magazine's fetish for buxom women.
Tom Spurgeon at ComicsReporter.com has an insightful appreciation of Elder, which I’ve borrowed from here: Upon returning from service in World War II, Elder founded a studio with one-time Music and Art classmate Kurtzman and another former classmate and friend, Charles Stern. Elder’s first comics publishing credit dates to 1947. Among the comics talents that worked at or through the Charles William Harvey Studio were Jules Feiffer, Rene Goscinny, Russ Heath and Dave Berg. The studio would move at least once and close its doors in 1948. The first half-decade of Elder's long career in comics was distinguished in by a fruitful partnership with John Severin [who wandered into the Charles William Harvey studio one day with a comic book assignment, complaining that it took him too long to ink his pencil drawings properly. Elder, who was fast at inking, started finishing Severin’s work. — RCH] and the pair worked for Crestwood, National and Nedor before joining EC Comics in 1950. Their lush, muscular comics for Two-Fisted Tales and other EC titles are some of the more fondly-remembered comics from that company's prodigious, well-crafted output. [“Severin and Elder” was one of the few bylines in comic books those days; “Simon and Kirby” was about the only other one. — RCH] Elder also worked with Jack Kamen and illustrated scripts in solo fashion for Weird Science. [And then, in the summer of 1952, Gaines, anxious to keep Kurtzman from leaving, suggested that Kurtzman amuse himself by editing a “funny” comic book. Mad was the result, and Elder, who began contributing to the title with the first issue, was soon producing for Mad work that became so iconic that he and Kurtzman were effectively bound together ever after. Read more in this vein at http://www.ComicsReporter.com. — RCH]
In 1956, Kurtzman left Mad in a financial dispute with Gaines, and Elder followed him to produce the lavish but short-lived slick humor magazine, Trump, published by Hugh Hefner. When Trump failed, the Elder-Kurtzman partnership continued at Humbug and Help! magazines before Hefner commissioned them in 1962 to create what became Little Annie Fanny. The blonde, cantilevered heroine was a staple of the magazine until 1988. With input by Hefner, Kurtzman devised the satirical scripts and drew page layouts within which he composed each panel. Elder finished the art as full-color paintings, often aided by other artists in order to make the ever-pressing deadlines.
I’ve written about Will Elder several times over the years. The best short piece, in my never humble opinion, is in Hindsight at www.RCHarvey.com. Entitled simply “Will Elder,” it is a report on his looney appearance at the 2000 San Diego Comic-Con, amplified with biographical and professional details, including stories of the antics of Elder and his studio mates in the late 1940s. Elder also figures in “How Mad Came To Be,” an August 2002 entry in Hindsight. A longer treatment is supplied in Rants & Raves, Opus 135, which reviews Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, embellishing the analysis with biographical matters. And in Opus 181, we review Chicken Fat, a collection of fugitive Elder art and visual antics, more-or-less a perfect companion to The Mad Playboy. Normally, as I’ve said before, Hindsight, a division of Rants & Raves, an online magazine about comics and cartooning, is available only to paid subscribers, but for the month of July, any casual bystander can gain entry to the secret vaults gratis, by deploying Hogan as a User ID and Alley as the Password; capitalize both, which, together, constitute the name of an annual print magazine, Hogan’s Alley, that you can learn more about by Googling the Web.
This one slipped by us, undetected at the time: on or about January 20, Ginger Meggs, Australia’s famed comic strip about the antics of a larrikin (unconventional) red-headed and somewhat mischievous kid, started appearing over the signature of a young cartoonist in Perth, Jason Chatfield, who is but the fifth to produce the strip, which, launched in November 1921 as Us Fellers by Jimmy Bancks, is arguably the third longest-running comic strip in the world (after The Katzenjammer Kids and Gasoline Alley). Bancks was followed after his death in 1952 by Ron Vivian, who kept it up until he died in 1973. The strip was then inherited by Lloyd Piper, who was the first of Bancks’ successors permitted to sign his name to the feature. When Piper died in 1984, he was succeeded by James Kemsley, who died December 3, 2007. Kemsley revitalized the sagging feature: he added daily releases to the Sunday only Ginger Meggs, and through sheer determination and persistence, he increased the Down Under icon’s circulation from a handful of Australian papers to international syndication in over 120 papers in 32 countries. Still, income is modest; Chatfield plans to continue doing editorial cartoons for the Perth Voice and the Loconut.com website as well as the strip. He recalled that Kemsley told him “the whole newspaper comic strip industry is at the mercy of American syndicates”; Ginger Meggs is distributed in the U.S. by Atlantic Syndicate/Universal Press.
Five days before he succumbed to motor neuron disease, Kemsley asked Chatfield to continue the strip, having checked, first, with Sheena and Michael Latimer, Bancks’ daughter and son-in-law, keepers of the Ginger Meggs flame. “This is an amazing honor,” said Chatfield recently, when the strip was picked up by another Australian newspaper. “I’ve worked really hard to honor Kemsley’s memory and at the same time put my own slant on the strip,” continued Chatfield, who was born the year Kemsley took on Ginger. “I’ll certainly be modernizing it. Ginger Meggs will reflect the changes in Australian culture, language and concepts to keep it relevant to readers.” He intends, he said, to keep doing the strip for the rest of his life — “and to keep it going well past its 100th year.”
One of the mysterious features of the strip is the inclusion, every day, of some wry aphorism. The origin of this oddity is explained in my online magazine, Rants & Raves, at www.RCHarvey.com. R&R is a paid-subscription magazine, but during the month of July, you can gain access to it and any of its departments (including archives going back to May 1999) by deploying the User ID Hogan and the Password Alley; capitalize both, which, together, constitute the name of an annual print magazine, Hogan’s Alley, that you can learn more about by Googling the Web.
Near the end of Percy Gloom, the eponymous main character meets a duck-billed crane-like creature named Millicent, to whom, a propos of nothing, Percy says, conversationally, “Say, Millicent, I’ve met some goats who can talk. Can you talk?” To which Millicent says, quite sensibly, “Of course not, Percy — I’m not a goat.” Cathy Malkasian’s graphic novel Percy Gloom (182 8x10-inch pages in sepia, hardcover; Fantagraphics, $18.95, $15.16 at fantagraphics.com) sprinkles softly glowing pearls of wisdom like this throughout as she traces the awakening of her hero, a small man with a sad face and a lazy eye whose hair seems pasted on in swirls. The book, drawn entirely in pencil and printed in sepia, is a fable, perhaps a parable, and the soft pencil shading lends the dreamy aspect of a fairy tale to Malkasian’s surreal setting with its twining landscapes and nursery rhyme houses with peaked roofs and meandering corridors and tilted-arch entryways. Percy has his heart set on becoming a writer at Safely Now, a “cautionary writing institute” where the employees test “seemingly benign” products to discern otherwise undetected dangers “from the injurious ink well to the pernicious pretzel” and then write warning labels (examining a hair brush, Percy discovers “handle-to-ear danger, possible hearing loss”).
Percy Gloom is a fairy tale, a string of events, not a drama. You’ll look in vain for the instant that Percy learns that “death is not a flaw.” We don’t know how it is that he has come to this conclusion; none of his experiences seem directly relevant to its arrival in Percy’s head. And yet all of them are. Percy’s awakening does not turn on a single event; it is, rather, the result of the accumulation of his experiences. The book begins, it seems, as Percy is first venturing out into the world — in search of employment, as we’ve noted. Until the events of this book, we suppose his life has been somewhat sheltered: his mother, an inventor, looks after him assiduously, even pampering him occasionally. And so this timid, sensitive and kind-hearted young man wanders out into the world, persuaded in advance that it is a fearful place, menace lurking everywhere. And his job, writing warning labels, confirms for him the accuracy of his understanding. But then he has many other experiences, some pleasant; some, not. But they are all, he decides, “entertaining.” If life tends, at least, to amuse, then it cannot be all bad. One should plunge into it, not fear it. And one should surely not fear it simply because it ends. We are all more resilient than we imagine.
A more copious (not to say learned or literary) examination of Percy Gloom occurs in Opus 222 of Rants & Raves, my online magazine. Normally open only to paying subscribers, this month, July, R&R is open to anyone who cares to investigate it; just type Hogan as your User ID and Alley as your Password (capitalize both) when dipping into www.RCHarvey.com, and you can browse the entire site, including archival material going back to May 1999 and Harv’s Hindsight, longer essays on the history and lore of cartooning. Hogan’s Alley, by the way, is the name of an annual print magazine, that you can learn more about by Googling the Web.
Cartoonist Ted Key died at his home in Tredyffrin Township just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 3rd. His health had been failing since he was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2006, and he suffered a stroke last September. In his 95 years, Key had parlayed his cartoonist’s skills and instincts into an impressive array of creative accomplishments in a variety of entertainment media.
Born in Fresno, California, son of Latvian immigrant Simon Keyser who had changed his name from Katseff while in South Africa, then shortened it to Key during World War II, Ted, who changed his name legally from Keyser to Key in 1950, attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he was art editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Californian, and associate editor of the campus humor magazine, the California Pelican. After graduating in 1933, Key trekked to cartooning Mecca, New York City, and freelanced cartoons to magazines, soon appearing in Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Mademoiselle, Collier’s, Look, Better Homes and Gardens, Judge (where he was associate editor in 1937), and The New Yorker. And he sometimes wrote for radio.
During World War II, Key worked in public relations in the Army from 1943 to 1946, creating a play to recruit women into military service. At various times according to Wikipedia, he did commercial illustration, created motivational posters and pamphlets, and authored an NBC radio play, three storylines for Walt Disney Pictures (“The Cat from Outer Space,” “Million Dollar Duck,” and “Gus”), and several “classic” children’s books (including Phyllis and The Biggest Dog in the World, which was later adapted into the film, “Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World”). In the late 1950s, Mark Evanier reports at newsfromme.com, Key worked with tv animation producer Jay Ward, creating Mr. Peabody, a time-traveling professor who was a dog, and his little boy sidekick, Sherman, featured on “Rocky and His Friends” (aka “The Bullwinkle Show”). Said Evanier: “Peabody and Sherman quickly joined the ranks of immortal cartoon characters, and a major motion picture of their adventures is presently in the works.” In print in the 1960s, Key produced Diz and Liz, a two-page comic strip that ran in Jack and Jill magazine from 1961 to 1972.
But Key is likely to be remembered most often as the creator of Hazel, the Marine drill sergeant of a house maid who dominated a panel cartoon in Saturday Evening Post. For the entire history of this remarkable cartoon character, we refer you to the online magazine, Rants & Raves (Opus 223 in particular). Normally, access is available only to paid subscribers, but for the month of July, any casual bystander can gain entry to the secret vaults gratis, by deploying Hogan as a User ID and Alley as the Password, at www.RCHarvey.com; capitalize both, which, together, constitute the name of an annual print magazine, Hogan’s Alley, that you can learn more about by Googling the Web.
"Which four creators belong on a cartoonists' Mount Rushmore?" This question, Editor & Publisher reported, was posed on the WashingtonPost.com chat perpetrated regularly by Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post/Washington Post Writers Group humor columnist who won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing last month. Someone suggested Walt Kelly (Pogo), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), and a bunch of other cartoonists as the possible fourth Rushmore honoree. Weingarten responded by taking Schulz off the list, and putting on Gary Larson (The Far Side) and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury). Reporting these shenanigans, E&P said Daily Cartoonist blogger Alan Gardner did a post on the debate, inaugurating more nominations: George Herriman (Krazy Kat), Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Frederick Opper (Happy Hooligan), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Elzie Segar (Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye), and R.F. Outcault (Hogan's Alley, starring The Yellow Kid), among others. “Various editorial cartoonists — including Thomas Nast and Herblock — were mentioned as well. Well, why not? Well, because.
The parallel permits picking at least one of the four as simply a “personal favorite”; all four, in other words, don’t need to be shakers and movers like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The fourth Rushmore visage, that of Teddy Roosevelt, may, or may not, rank with the other three: the monument’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, probably put TR up there because he was a particular fan and a personal friend of the Rough Rider. To echo Rushmore with cartoonists, then, we need three who shaped or preserved the medium, plus one outstanding practitioner whose achievement isn’t quite of the same order. And I’d confine my selections to comic strip cartoonists so we don’t have to haggle about Herblock, Nast, Willard Mullin, Al Hirschfeld, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Jack Cole, and Walt Disney, who did as much for their genre as, say, Jefferson did for his. Bud Fisher, whose Mutt and Jeff established the daily comic strip format, is probably the George Washington of cartooning; and Winsor McCay could be the Thomas Jefferson. Charles Schulz is the Abraham Lincoln of the profession, saving it from a slow death by television. For my personal favorite, then, I’d opt for Walt Kelly or Milton Caniff, each of whom, in their own individual ways, expanded the capacity of the medium with great panache. But which of the two? Alas, I won’t decide. Others who would rank just about on the same level as these two include Trudeau, Watterson, Segar, and Herriman, and if we kick in Harold Gray, we’d have a top ten, that hallowed number. Too many for a mountain top, though.
During the Reuben weekend of the National Cartoonists
Society at New Orleans, over Memorial Day weekend, many cartoonists signed letters about the Orphan
Works Act that NCS subsequently forwarded to the appropriate congressmen.
Pending in Congress, the Orphan Works Act of 2008, if adopted, will modify
copyright law. The letter explains cartoonists’ objections: “Under the Orphan
Works Act, any person or company desiring to use my work for free
need only conduct a ‘diligent search’ for me. If the search fails, the image is
deemed ‘orphaned.’ The key requirement of a diligent search will be to run the
image through privately owned and managed databases. I (the artist) will be
asked to pay to digitize every cartoon I’ve ever published, and then pay again
to have it catalogued in the databases of private for-profit companies. The
average cartoonist has thousands of images, so the cost of compliance will be
exorbitant and most cartoonist simply will not be able to afford it.
Furthermore, regardless of the type of third party use and regardless of my
efforts to register my works with the Copyright Office and private databases,
if I discover an infringing use, I will only be entitled to the amount paid on
the open market between willing sellers and buyers in similar deals. Since
there will no longer be penalties for infringement, the Orphan Works Act
actually encourages, rather than deters, infringement. I strenuously object to
commercial enterprises using my work for free in the pursuit of profit and then
only having to pay me a modest amount if I somehow catch them in the act.”
At posting
time, I don’t know of the outcome of the legislation, which was introduced,
reportedly, at the behest of Google, seeking, no doubt, to extend its
tentacles. For exhaustive coverage of NCS’s festive weekend in New
Orleans — including photographs of the cartoonists parade down Bourbon Street,
flinging bead necklaces at the multitudes thronging the sides of the street — visit
the usual place, www.RCHarvey.com, Opus
224 of Rants & Raves, my online
magazine. Normally open only to paying subscribers, this month, June, and next,
July, R&R is open to anyone who
cares to investigate it; just type Hogan as
your User ID and Alley as your
Password (capitalize both), and you can
browse the entire site, including archival material going back to May 1999 and Harv’s Hindsight, longer essays on the
history and lore of cartooning. Hogan’s Alley, by the way, is the name
of an annual print magazine, that you can learn more about by Googling the Web.
At the weeklong thinktank Conference on World Affairs held at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus in early April, one of the notable thinkers who appeared to make a presentation was Tim Long, a writer for “The Simpsons,” who showed clips that were, by turns, “hilarious, bitter, and off-color,” reported Jerd Smith in the Rocky Mountain News. Fox Network, which airs the tv show, employs a phalanx of censors to “figure out what will get us into trouble and what will not,” Long said. Noting that people can now air their outrages online with the Federal Communications Commission, Long said one of his favorite complaints came from a viewer who found it “entirely inappropriate for the preschool audience that would be watching the show” the broadcast of a commercial about a homosexual encounter Bart had with a space alien. Said Long: “Would a heterosexual encounter have been okay?” The censors also objected to the mention of a sexual act that was performed 1,000 times, saying the number 1,000 was inappropriate. “When the writers suggested using 1 million instead, the censors signed off on the script.” It must be working for them: first airing December 7, 1989, “The Simpsons” is tv’s longest running show at 420 episodes.
