Rants & Raves

WATCHMAN NEWS

Alan Moore, who has regularly re-arranged the aesthetic of comic books since writing Watchmen in 1986-87, never wanted the graphic novel to be made into a movie. Interviewed recently at wordpress.hotpress.com, Moore said: “I’d written Watchmen to exploit aspects of comic book storytelling that couldn’t be duplicated by any other medium, to try and show off what comics are capable of.” Besides which, his experiences with Hollywood have convinced him that American movie-makers are incapable of producing serious work: their overriding aim is to crank out pablum for the American audience that “can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world.” As the interviewer put it: "Moore’s work imbues comic book characters with Shakespearian weight and depth; Hollywood reduces them to the level of one-dimensional stereotypes.”

Understandably, then, the movie version of Watchmen was widely decried from the start: Moore fans, supporting their idol, refused to believe the graphic novel (comic book) could be transformed into a motion picture. Then many of them saw the trailer on the road to Damascus during the Comic-Con in San Diego a few weeks ago and experienced a conversion. Director Zack Snyder apparently proved that Watchmen could, indeed, be a good movie. The latest stumbling block, however, is legal, not aesthetic. Snyder made the film with Warner Bros but 20^th Century Fox now suddenly comes forward with a claim on the film and a request that it’s release be blocked until the claim can be satisfied.

The rights to Watchmen were held, first, by Fox which subsequently relinquished them to Warner Bros, but a proviso lurks in this obscure niche of Tinseltown treaty-making: “Producers who take the project elsewhere are supposed to give the original studio another look at the project anytime ‘changed elements’ (new casting, new director, new script, new budget, etc.) come into play,” explained ICv2. Fox alleges that producer Lawrence Gordon didn’t do what he should have done; Warner Bros says he did.

A trial date has been set for January 6, 2009; the movie is supposed to open March 6, 2008. Nicole Sperling at Entertainment Weekly suspects both parties will settle long before the trial date — and certainly long before the movie’s release date. Saying “there’s plenty of incentive to get a deal done,” ICv2 points to the sales of DC’s Watchmen graphic novel inspired by the screening of the trailer at Comic-Con as a barometer gauging the possible financial fate of the flick:  DC has printed 900,000 copies of the book since the trailer debuted. At DC, President and Publisher Paul Levitz said: “As far as we can tell from our conversations with the book industry people, there has never been a trailer that did this.”

Interested parties on both sides of the Hollywood dispute don’t want to risk losing out at the box office. Said Sperling: “A number of scenarios could occur, including Warner Bros doling out a cash settlement or a cut of the profits to Fox.” Meanwhile, Watchmen fans are up in arms at even a distant prospect that the Fox will succeed in blocking the movie’s release. “They’re taking on Fox,” writes Scott Bowles at USA Today, “ — threatening to boycott the studio’s future movies and, more alarming to studio executives, pirate films. That includes one of Fox’s biggest of 2009, ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine,’ scheduled for May 1.” However irate they are, fans are also deeply suspicious of the timing of Fox’s action: because the studio waited until the $100 million film was completed before bringing suit, their effort seems wonderfully like a sneaky promotional stunt undertaken in collusion with Warner Bros.

A COMIC STUDIES READER

Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester have, once again, performed admirably in producing another compendious survey of comics scholarship. Their earlier effort in this vein, Arguing the Comics (see Opus 220 for review), scanned the historical landscape for essays about comics written by various literary critics and the like; their current production, A Comics Studies Reader (396 6x9-inch pages, some illos in b/w; paperback, $25; unjacketed cloth, $55) — also from one of my publishers, the University Press of Mississippi, which has achieved foremost status as a publisher of comics scholarship — compiles 28 essays by contemporary scholars and critics (including moi) culled from the books in which they were originally published. Some are excerpts from larger works (Peter Coogan’s, for instance, from his book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre; and Charles Hatfield’s, from his Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature); some reprint pieces from collections of essays (like my “How Comics Came to Be,” which appeared first in The Language of Comics), and some are magazine or journal articles. The result is a sort of panorama of current serious thinking about the art of cartooning in all its forms — gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels, with an emphasis upon the last three genres.

I look forward to reading Hatfield’s “An Art of Tensions” when I take up the question of how comics are read differently from how novels in straight prose are read. I’m also looking forward to reading Bart Beaty’s “Autobiography as Authenticity,” Coogan’s essay on Superheroes, and Roger Sabin’s “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar” (mainly because I’ve thought precisely that for some years now, and I want to see if Sabin agrees with me and what his evidence and argument are).

CARTOONING FOR PEACE

According to Karin Kloosterman at israel2lc.org, “It might not look like it on CNN, but the majority of people who live in Israel and the region — Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens along withPalestinians — are rooting for peace,” and she cites several projects that have brought Arabs and Jews together “to show the positive face of the Middle East: Israel has Interns for Peace, Chefs for Peace, Belly Dancers for Peace, bloggers, musicians and even dentists in the name of peace.” One of the latest is Cartooning for Peace, founded a couple of years ago by the French cartoonist, Jean Plantureux (aka Plantu). Last June, cartoonists mounted four simultaneous exhibitions in Ramallah, Bethlehem, East Jerusalem and Holon to show how cartooning can be used for peaceful dialogue among otherwise fractious parties. Said Israeli political cartoonist Michel Kichka, a founding member of Cartooning for Peace: "Cartooning for Peace, or any other professional meeting, gives you opportunities to talk. We are trying to put together people who, let's say, have a common understanding of what should be done with cartoons, or more correctly, what should not be done” — for example, offending readers’ religious beliefs. Kichka believes so-called blasphemous cartooning is the lowest form, but the furor that typically results at the appearance of such cartoons shows how long the road to understanding free speech might be. But along the way, cartoonists must come to understand other cultures. Kichka said the Cartooning for Peace opportunity in Israel and elsewhere “allows us to understand what it means to be a cartoonist in a different country, whether in a country with heavy censorship or a democracy in which dissenters deal with sensitive issues. Each cartoonist brought his own experience with him and together we've put together something unique."

XMAS LIST: AMERICAN PRESIDENTS

American Presidents is more than its title promises. A compilation of caricatures of presidents by David Levine (128 87x10-inch pages, b/w in paperback; Fantagraphics, $19.99), it includes, also, various of the more notorious cronies of U.S. chief executive from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama: “Congaleeza” Rice, Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove, and Ari Fleisher from the Bush League, for example, and Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr (remember these scalawags?), and the Watergate gang (John Ehrlichman, John Dean and H.R. Haldeman), the Kennedys, Dean Acheson, and on and on. Also failed presidential candidates — like Ralph Nader, Al Gore, Patrick Buchanan, Michael Dukakis, and others. Plus a few from ancient American history: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Adamses, U.S. Grant and others of the vintage sort.

The book’s treat, apart from seeing some of your favorite political hoodlums with big heads and little bodies, is in the acid insights supplied by the accouterments Levine gives the caricatures. Eleanor Roosevelt is here — as a swan, if you catch the drift (away from ugly duckling); and Nancy Reagan as a nutcracker; George H.W. Bush appears wearing Wimpy’s clothes (the costume is that of Popeye’s mooching hanger-on but it’s the name not the behavior that Levine is evoking here); Pat Robertson is posed as a gun-fighter from the Old West but with crosses in the holsters, not pistols; and Ross Perot is Mickey Mouse (sometimes Levine’s visual gloss is subtle: here, it’s the three-fingered gloves more than the saucer-like ears that promulgate the cartoonist’s opinion).

]Other of the book’s delights are found in Levine’s occasional comments. Below a caricature of Vietnam-era General William Westmoreland, who’s head is atop an ostrich’s long neck, Levine writes: “Under Westmoreland’s leadership, with his very public rosy assessments of the war, as Neil Sheehan wrote, the United States ‘won every battle until it lost the war.’” His caricature of Jimmy Carter looks more like Mad’s Alfred E. Newman than Carter — Levine’s intention here went slightly askew — but underneath the picture, Levine is more acute: “I saw this idea on The Nation’s cover,” he writes. “By whom? To coin a phrase on Capital Hill, I don’t remember. But I don’t think this went far enough. [Carter] was better than Nixon. His mother had a more radical point of view, but he was a businessman who sold peanuts. And then there was his brother. It took on aspects of Gilbert and Sullivan. Carter play-acted, carrying empty bags off a plane. I wasn’t surprised by the Camp David Accords, but I didn’t believe it either. It was bubblegum, not glue. But he got further than anyone else in the Middle East.”

Bill Moyers abetted by his PBS program’s senior writer Michael Winship supplies a highly appreciative introduction. “Forty plus years of these drawings are a vivid sketchbook of American history, drawn by a man who does not suffer fools gladly. As you flip through these pages, you’re reminded over and over of events large and small and men and women of great or fleeting fame. ... Certainly many of his subjects must have shuddered at the incisive satire — and accuracy — inflicted by his heat-seeking wit and sardonic imagination. ... But remember this, too, about a man who could be so merciless and devastating in his portrayal of our poo-bahs: a great intelligence guided his hand, and also a great heart. Even as he held their flaws and foibles high on the skewer, he never seems driven by malevolence. ‘I love my species,’ he once said. And why not? He could not have had better material.”

The book concludes on a sad note, Levine’s caricature of Obama. Here, the caricaturist’s tragically deteriorating eyesight due to macular degeneration is revealed in a shaky pencil line that fails to find a likeness of his subject.  On the facing page, however, is a John McCain portrait done much earlier. With caustic wit, Levine has captured the Maverick in rendering McCain’s feet: one is an elephant foot, the other a donkey’s hoof. This is a book you shouldn’t be without.

XMAS LIST: BYGONE DAYS

If you’re looking for vintage classics, particularly those panel cartoons by J.R. Williams about cowboys and “the Bull of the Woods,” visit leevalley.com, and look among the listings of tools for titles in the Gifts department: two volumes of Classic Cowboys, one of Cavalry, six of Bull of the Woods, one “sampler” (new) of Out Our Way; even a collection of Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House with Major Hoople. Yes, an unlikely place to find such rarities. But definitely worth a look if you want to relive bygone days.

XMAS LIST: COMICS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

Best Buy: Get Yours While They Last. Sensing that the history of newspaper comic strips since World War II had, by the end of the 20^th century, been severely short-changed, Brian Walker researched and wrote Comics Since 1945 (336 9x12-inch pages, in black-and-white and color; hardcover, $49.95), a book so well-received that its publisher, Abrams, prevailed upon Walker to re-visit that portion of the history of comic strips that others had covered in previous books but not as well, not as thoroughly, not as fact-packed, not as profusely illustrated. And so Walker researched and wrote Comics Before 1945 (336 9x12-inch pages, b/w and color; hardcover, $50), a suitable companion for its predecessor.

These twin tomes are the best histories of the medium around; I reviewed them separately when they first appeared in 2002 and 2004 in Nos. 253 and 274 of the Comics Journal (and both reviews appear, magically, again at RCHarvey.com, Ops. 234 and 235). But the reason they are now, in 2008, on a Christmas shopping list is that Abrams has re-issued both books as a single volume, priced, affordably, at a startling $19.99 — available only at Borders stores, though. Nowhere else. Not even at the Borders website. All of the content of each book is here, every detail (a few of which — very few, scarcely worth mentioning — the inadvertently erroneous ones, have been corrected; others, updated). The combined volume bulks not much larger than either of the first two: just shows what using slightly lighter weight paper will do. Comics: The Complete Collection is not only one of the best books on its subject ever, but this year, it’s the Best Buy of 2008.

XMAS LIST: CHILD'S PLAY

To anyone under the age of forty, Berenstain is the name of a rambunctious family of bears in books for children, over 200 of them, by title. At the more rarified altitudes over forty, however, Berenstain is the name of a husband and wife cartooning team, Stan and Jan, that produced rafts of magazine cartoons in the Golden Age of the weekly “general interest” magazines during the decade immediate after World War II — Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Look. A biography of the pair, Down a Sunny Dirt Road, appeared in 2002 but it focused on the more well-known of their accomplishments, namely the bruin books. Now, at long last, we get a healthy helping of their cartooning enterprises in Child’s Play: Cartoon Art of Stan and Jan Berenstain (176 9x11-inch pages, in hardcover and color; $35) by their son, Mike.

Here’s a good sampling of the syndicated comic strip they produced 1953-54, Big Sister, a menace in a skirt with a polka-dot ribbon in her hair, and over 50 pages of the panel cartoon, It’s All in the Family, that they did for McCall’s from 1956 until the early 1970s, when it migrated to Good Housekeeping and lasted there until 1988, long enough that the last few years were ghost-written and drawn by Mike Berenstain. (This family was not at all like the Archie Bunker bunch on tv, by the way: this was a typical Eisenhower-era suburban husband and wife with three kids, a thoroughly wholesome gang with the surname Harvey.)

The book’s big plus is in reproducing all of the covers the Berenstains did for Collier’s, each a color rendering of some disorganized (and therefore highly comic) children’s group activity — visiting a museum, going on a picnic, putting on a school play — in which dozens of third-graders and their frustrated parents and/or teachers are depicted from an elevation slightly below the perspective of a passing bird. Every kid is doing something different, each pursuing his private passion without much thought for the others of his peers at his elbow unless, as is the case with some of the boys, it is to pester a girl. Finally, as a boon to chroniclers of the medium, all the pictures in this book are sourced and dated. Amazing.

Except for the McCall’s cartoons, the Berenstains concentrated on their bear books for forty years, which effort Mike continues, with his mother’s supervision I assume, since the death of his father in 2005. I was never a big Berenstain fan, but this book could make me one. Alas, Mike fails to include the most vital of the information about his parents, the answer to the tantalizing question: which of them drew what? Their cartoons and covers and books were all signed “the Berenstains,” and you could never tell how Stan and Jan worked their graphic partnership. The drawings consistently display the same rendering style. Did she pencil and he ink? Did they switch back and forth? Mike leaves the question unanswered. I, however, found an answer, perhaps, I confess, a spurious one: Jan drew the girls, and Stan drew the boys.

 

XMAS LIST: NOEL SICKLES

The big book of Sickles is out from IDW, Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles (394 giant 11x11-inch pages, some in color, with a sewn-in bookmark ribbon; hardcover, $49.99). No, I haven’t yet read it, but it seems encyclopedic. On pages 144 to 381, it reprints Sickles’ run (December 4, 1933 - November 21, 1936) on the Associated Press comic strip that he made famous by experimenting with drawing styles, one of which was the celebrated chiaroscuro technique adopted by his friend and studio-mate, Milton Caniff, for Terry and the Pirates. Having this panoply of artistic endeavor before us all at once between the covers of a single tome would make the book treasure enough, but it is all prefaced with a long exhaustive biographical essay by Bruce Canwell, copiously illustrated with Sickles’ teenage endeavors and then some of the comic sketches he made of Caniff during the years they shared a studio followed by a generous and impressive selection from the hundreds of illustrations, in color as well as in black-and-white, Sickles made for magazines and advertisements during a long career. Nowhere else can we find as much of Sickles’ work outside of the Scorchy Smith comic strip.

The volume begins with a spritely written appreciation by Jim Steranko and concludes with a helpful list of sources and a “selected” bibliography by Francisco San Millan. It’s an impressive and valuable work that concludes with a poetic grace note. Sickles didn’t like doing Scorchy Smith very much: he hungered for other artistic challenges. In the last strip he did, he may have signaled his feelings at leaving Scorchy: a character frees a pigeon from its cage, and the bird, unfettered at last, takes flight. So did Sickles. For more about Sickles, you can consult Harv’s Hindsight for October 2004, “The Unsung Sickles,” which can be found at the usual place, RCHarvey.com.

XMAS LIST: A PRIMER ON HOW CARTOONS CAN BE DEPLOYED

If, on the eve of the dissolution of the Bush League, you want to spend the holidays screaming with acrid albeit hysterical laughter at what they’ve done to us all and how they did it, this is the book for you: Fringe, A Cartoon History of the George Dubya Bush Years (196 8x11-inch pages, some b/w but mostly lavish color; paperback, $43.99 at Amazon) by Elena Steier is a zestful roiling stew, a delightfully vicious hodge-podge, of all kinds of cartooning, all aimed at revealing just how dysfunctional the depraved administration of George W. (“Whopper”) Bush has been.  Political cartoonist Steier, who claims to be a conservative, is understandably outraged at neocon policies that “have caused untold damage to the American people and economy over the last eight years,” and she musters a war chest of sharp-pointed weapons to her satirical cause: with comic strip parodies, panel cartoons, fake posters, ersatz comic book covers, and just funny pictures she skewers tax cuts, war mongering, idiot journalists, bigger government, wire-tapping, Enron, the righteous religious Right, the politics of the “Just Us” Department of Alberto Gonzales, torturing helpless prisoners, contracting out military and security functions to private mult-national corporations (who make millions while ordinary U.S. foot soldiers draw a comparative pittance in pay), Katrina and the outright failure of government — to name a few of the fiascos that have been elevated to full-scale calamities by Bush League incompetence. Steier unveils the venality at their core.

In one chapter, she sees Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in their true light: “To commemorate our country’s newfound belief in legalized torture, I began drawing members of the Bush administration in sado-masochistic gear.” In that sentence by itself, we have a healthy inkling of the bent of Steier’s so-called mind. And a brilliantly creative bent it is.

This is a book you must see: it is a hilariously exhaustive demonstration of the variety of ways cartoons can be sledgehammers to knock some common sense into our typically lackadaisical and otherwise inert brains.

Steier began her freelancing career for the West Hartford News then went into weekly syndication with DBR Media. At present, she is a “full-time freelancer,” doing illustration. Her political cartoons, which she does mostly for her own amusement, are visible exclusively at the website for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC; editorialcartoonists.com).

XMAS LIST: COMIC ARF

Awash as we have been for quite some time now in graphic novels, it’s refreshing, purely by way  encountering something different, to come upon a happily bubbling stew of novel graphics such as the redoubtable Craig Yoe serves up in the fourth volume of his “Arf” books, Comic Arf (122 9x12-inch pages, color; Fantagraphics paperback, $19.99). The book opens with a 44-page display of Milt Gross goggle-eyed toonery — a sampling of his celebrated manic Sunday strips, That’s My Pop, Count Screwloose, and Nize Baby — including 31 pages of Gross’s lesser known audience participation feature, Draw Your Own Conclusions. This inventive endeavor from the late 1920s was a four-panel strip in which the first three panels set up a dilemma that readers were invited to “solve” by drawing the fourth panel on their own. Yoe sent a couple dozen of these specimens around to various cartooners and invited them to supply the fourth panel: those that responded include R. Crumb, Mort Walker, Gene Deitch, Dean Yeagle, Hunt Emerson, Mike Mignola, R. O. Blechman, Joost Swarte, Sam Henderson, Richard Sala, Al Jaffee, Bill Griffith, Denis Kitchen, Patrick McDonnell, Matt Groening, Art Spiegelman, Bil Keane, Jules Feiffer, and Sergio Aragones, to name most of them. Each page includes a self-caricature of the Concluder and a short biography.

The antics are continued for the rest of the volume with sections of Walt Kelly (a short story in which “Contrary Mary” dreams herself into a vaguely threatening Slumberland, taken from one of Kelly’s seasonal comic books), Dudley Fisher (his bird’s-eye view of neighborhood activities in Right Around Home, the birds being Archie and Alice, who never fail to comment on the puzzling doings of the human [sic] sapiens around them), Gardner Rea’s spidery-outlined magazine cartoons, and Bob Powell’s nightmare visit to Hell — each accompanied by a short biography. But to list the contents in Comic Arf is to overlook the Yoe-charm that infects this volume as it has its three predecessors. Yoe commissioned an assortment of artist friends and associates to produce uncommon caricatures of Kelly, Fisher, et al. And the pages of the book are littered with tiny visual delights and incidental verbal scraps, tucked here and there as if Yoe didn’t want to leave too much unencumbered white space. The book, in short, is not only informative, as most books inherently are, but entertaining in its bibliographic minutiae, as few books dare to be. For an ample preview, visit arflovers.com. And while we’re playing hokey from graphic novels, don’t forget another Yoe-opus, Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings, a charmer.

XMAS LIST: MANY MORE SPLENDID SUNDAYS

Once again for the first time, Peter Maresca transports us back one hundred years to a time when the Sunday funnies were glorious in both dimension and coloration. With the second volume of his celebrated revival of Winsor McCay’s famed creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays (128 giant 16x21-inch pages, all color; sturdy, handsome hardcover, Sunday Press Books, $125), Maresca gives us two complete adventures from the strip’s first run, 1905-1911, plus selected pages from both the subsequent Nemo incarnations, 1911-1914's In the Land of Wonderful Dreams and 1924-1927's return to Slumberland — 115 Nemo strips in all. The extravagant dimensions of this volume and all the other Sunday Press Books are actually ordinary: this was the size the Sunday comics assumed at their first publication — a size generous enough that, lying as of yore on our stomachs on the livingroom floor to read them, we are drawn into the comics four-color universe, just as we were as children. This is how the Sunday funnies are supposed to be, how they were originally conceived and produced.

Maresca has published other Sunday comics at their original sizes — Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, a collection of Frank King’s highly imaginative Gasoline Alley pages from the 1930s, and Little Sammy Sneeze, another McCay festival, and he’s at work on The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek from 1903-1913, all described and offered at SundayPressBooks.com. All the Sunday pages in these books have been lovingly restored digitally, bringing them back as they first appeared — on slightly yellowed paper, not jazzed up by recoloring in gaudy, screaming colors as so many reprint projects are.

Maresca is a generous publisher: every book comes with toothsome “extras.” Opening the shipping container is much like emptying your stocking on Christmas morning. The second Nemo is accompanied by a reproduction of a 1909 flipbook (some assembly required) displaying the antics of Gertie the dinosaur, McCay’s animation masterwork; this version of the flipbook, originally distributed in 1930. And the volume itself prints other bonus material: a reproduction of the original artwork, partially colored as a guide to engravers, for the June 15, 1913 strip (which is also present in its initial published form); the “lost page” of Wonderful Dreams, the strip’s last appearance in this incarnation, not July 26, 1914 as generally supposed, but August 23, 1914, which “poetically ends with the destruction of Slumberland Palace” immediately after Dr. Pill gets dubbed as a Grand Duke—“Duke instead of Doc,” as the Princess says; plus essays by Jeffrey Stanton, Ron Goulart, Brian Walker, and your friendly neighborhood Rant & Raver.

THREE BIG ONES

The world’s longest and therefore most tedious Primary Season yielded at least three notable political products besides Baracko Bama. Pelican Publishing, which has printed a volume of the Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year for several decades, coughed up two, so far, this year: The Race for the 20008 Republican Nomination and, in the interest of bipartisanship, The Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination (both 160 8.5x11-inch pages in paperback; about fifteen bucks each). And Daryl Cagle, with a conservative assist, as usual, from Brian Fairrington, noting the ink-slinging excitement of an Election Year with its Primary Preamble and observing that “our files are overflowing with cartoons for our annual Best Political Cartoons book,” decided to do a second book this year “just about the campaign,” The Big Book of Campaign Political Cartoons 2008 (244 8x10-inch pages in paperback; $16.99). The Pelican collections each publish about 300 cartoons at the rate of two per page; the Cagle book, about 400-425 cartoons, cramming as many as five cartoons on a page but typically only three.

As has been the case for some years now, the cartoons get better display in the Pellican books than in the Cagle volume. The big difference this time is that the Pelican books are not edited by Charles Brooks; instead, the editorial chores were performed by Eric Appleman, who is not, like Brooks, an editorial cartoonist himself; he is, rather, “the founder of Democracy in Action,” a website. Appleman has a degree in politics and communication from George Washington University and may even work there: it’s not easy to find out much about him, and Pelican, apart from confessing Appleman’s management of his own website, ain’t talkin’. But perhaps the two cartoon collections tell us all we actually need to know about him.

The cartoons in both volumes are mostly in the attack mode — the preferred posture of editoonists — showing no favoritism for any candidate: everyone gets his or her share of lambasting. Given the focus of each volume coupled with the well-known ferocity of editorial cartoonists, who tend to level the playing field by shooting everything in sight, it is impossible to detect a political slant in either book. Every candidate is disparaged with equal exuberance. Conservative cartoonists bash Republicans, willy nilly; ditto liberal cartooners and Democrats. And the same can be said for the Cagle book. Which proves, if anything, that we can’t tell the cartoonist’s political allegiance from the thrust of his cartoons.

Both books are divided into sections, some of which focus on the major candidates (McCain, Clinton, Obama, as well as Thompson, Huckabee, Romney, Edwards) and others on various episodes in the marathon — Super Tuesday, Super Delegates, Also Rans, and the like. Cagle has a chapter on Obama’s Rev. Wright and one on McCain’s favorite (female) lobbyist, and while these topics are covered in the Pelican book, they don’t receive as many pages.  Cagle also includes a chapter on the notorious New Yorker cover that shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama dressed as Muslims and terrorists in the White House, “fist bumping.” Cagle explains his verdict, that it was a lousy cartoon, quite simply: “There is no frame of reference in the cover cartoon to put the scene into perspective. Following the rules of political cartoons, I could fix it. I would have Obama think in a thought balloon, ‘I must be in the nightmare of some conservative.’ With that, the scene is shown to be in the mind of someone the cartoonist disagrees with, and we have defined the target of the cartoon as crazy conservatives with their crazy dreams.” Bravo.

The Pelican books end before the conventions; Cagle includes both the Dem Con and the Repub Con, which, in turn, includes McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running, er, mate.

The Pelican books include more cartoonists — about 85, and most appear in both Pelican volumes; only 56 in the Cagle collection, recruited, I assume, exclusively from the gigantic Cagle website at MSNBC.com. Only about a half-dozen of the Cagle cartooners might be described as “well-known” nationally; Pelican scores higher in my wholly subjective assessment — maybe as many as two dozen. Oddly, there’s little overlap. So which one do you buy? If you’re like me, you buy all three. Since there’s virtually no overlap, you, like me, will be able to take sadistic pleasure in seeing our would-be “leaders” dismembered in public, a gratifying experience that no one should miss. And you’ll have a generous helping of the history of the world’s longest Primary Season on your bookshelf forever. Who could ask for more?

XMAS LIST: EISNER REDUX

Eisner Redux. Will Eisner, Denis Kitchen tells us in the Editor’s Note to this book, long intended to produce a trilogy of instructional books. Beginning with Comics and Sequential Art and then Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, he wanted to conclude the series with this volume, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative (190 8x10-inch pages, b/w with occasional blue tints; paperback, Norton, $22.95). Eisner had roughed out a draft of the book’s text and selected much of the illustrative material before going into the hospital in late 2004 for heart surgery, from which he never emerged. Kitchen continues: “Eisner’s family and I determined that Expressive Anatomy was close enough to completion that it should be finished. Peter Poplaski, an artist Eisner had long worked with and trusted — formerly the longtime art director of Kitchen Sink Press [and now a freelancer, sojourning, often, in Europe] — was engaged to finish the posthumous work.”

I’ve run into Eisner’s basic contention, that body language and facial expression are vital elements of pictorial narrative, many times, but this book adds considerable flesh to the bare bones he’s hinted at before. The first several chapters, however, include much too much about body parts to be useful to a cartoonist. A skeleton supplies the only illustrations in the first chapter; and the next offers several pages that show how muscles are layered onto bones. There’s even a page devoted to illustrating the parts of the human brain. More detail here than is necessary (although the muscles passages are marginally useful). A knowledge of anatomy is essential to portraying body language, no question; but detailed knowledge of a skeleton is probably not vital. We all have them—skeletons—and we all have bodies, and observing ourselves and our acquaintances in action is probably more to the point than studying skeletons.

That quibble aside, by the book’s sixth chapter, we’re on solid Eisner ground: “The Language of Posture and Gesture,” followed by “Human Emotion,” “Aggressive Physical Action,” and so on in a similar vein. Eisner deploys a few pages of drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, but most of the illustrative material is taken from his own ouevre, and while the pictures ably exemplify the principles Eisner urges on us, we must remember that even at his most realistic, Eisner bordered on bigfoot. His propensity was often to exaggerate, just a little — but enough to make the characters cartoony rather than realistic. I don’t mean to denigrate Eisner’s great skill as a comics storyteller, but whenever he slipped into bigfoot mannerisms — which, given his penchant for exaggeration, he did often — his stories teetered on the brink of melodrama and then fell in. The humor of bigfoot cartooning gave Eisner’s work — particularly the Spirit — its great and captivating charm. The Spirit would not be the Spirit without Ebony — or, more to the point, the comically exaggerated Commission Dolan, right of central casting at Mac Sennett studios. Eisner, of course, knew all of this; I don’t think I’m not saying anything he’d disagree with — because he capitalized on these tendencies through a long and successful career as a storytelling cartoonist. I am fascinated to speculate about how much of this aspect of Eisner’s work Frank Miller will capture in his forthcoming movie; I fear, alas, that we’ll see the Spirit in Sin City, not Eisner’s Central City. But that’s another subject. The subject at hand — how to use bodies and faces to tell better stories — is well presented in Eisner’s third of a trilogy on the ways of telling stories in comics.

POLITICAL SATIRE IN THE FUNNIES : PART TWO

By the end of September 2008, before Sarah Palin’s nomination was a month old, Garry Trudeau had introduced into Doonesbury the Sarah Palin Action Doll as a device to attack the Republican vice presidential candidate. Barbie in a Box but with utterances to utter: like her namesake, the Doll spouts clumps of jumbled syntax, each in search of a communication never to be achieved. And for a week in October, Trudeau listed all the lobbyists that worked for McCain, implying forcefully that the erstwhile heroic POW has been corrupted by his associations.

Robb Armstrong’s Jump Start seldom ventures into politics, but it did for a week or so in mid-September — not by choosing up sides necessarily, like Trudeau, but rather in finding a satiric racial target in the presidential preferences of the characters, one of whom, since he was black, was assumed, by the other, who was white, to be, naturally, an Obama supporter. The satire is essential social, not political, but that kind of satire couldn’t have existed before Doonesbury. Darrin Bell has never hesitated to take his Candorville where others have feared to tread. In late September, he began a sequence that attacked McCain for running scurrilous ads brimming with lies about Obama. McCain had apparently left his highly touted honor in North Vietnam, so Bell sent Lemont Brown, his protagonist, up the river in Vietnam in search of McCain’s honor. Upstream, Lemont encounters Anderson Cooper (or is it Cooper Anderson?) on the same errand. The sequence ran all of October.

The week of October 15, Patrick McDonnell ran a campaign in Mutts in support of Proposition 2 on the ballot in California. The project is explained at muttscomics.com: If passed, Proposition 2 will “phase out the inhumane confinement of farm animals in tiny crates and cages where they can barely move for their entire lives on industrial factory farms. Veterinarians, consumer groups and California family farmers all support Prop 2 because animal welfare, food quality and food safety are enhanced by better farming practices. Factory farms cut corners and drive family farmers out of business when they put profits ahead of animal welfare and our health.” McDonnell has spoken out often on behalf of better treatment for animals, but this is the first time he’s ventured into the voting booth. Oddly, Californians approved better living conditions for animals but nixed better living conditions for gays by denying them the right to marry.

In Zippy, Bill Griffith was obvious in his political choices (Obama), and in Get Fuzzy, Darby Conley illustrates how to twist words to achieve a meaning quite different from their lexical intention — a practice at which the McCain combine has become expert in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Amusing, even inciteful, as this tour of the funnies may be, it is also insightful. Newspaper comic strips offer a rough gauge of the temper of the times. As we observed at the onset of this diatribe, syndicated cartoonists don’t want to lose subscribing papers, so they are careful not to wander into places that their readers might find uncomfortable: discomfitted readers will assault the newspaper editors for any sins committed in the comics section, inspiring the editors to drop the offending strip. It is, as I’ve indicated, among the oldest of syndicate cautions. But the other side of the coin is instructive: whatever readers tolerate in comic strips is an indication of the readers’ convictions and inclinations. So if John McCain and his luxuriously garbed running mate are targets for ridicule in the comics, it probably means that the body politic, of which the newspaper reading public is a small but significant bellwether, doesn’t have a very high opinion of McCain and his team. While it’s true that there have been very few Barack Obama jokes on late-night tv or in the funny papers because it’s de rigueur to avoid anything that can be interpreted as racist, it’s also true that McCain and Palin have been the butts of a lot of jokes. For any frequenter of the nation’s funny pages, their loss on November 4 came as no surprise. If everyone’s laughing at you, no one’s taking you seriously enough to vote you into the White House.

POLITICAL SATIRE IN THE FUNNIES: PART ONE

Once upon a time — in fact, for almost all of the time of their existence — comic strips were vanilla confections. Not at first, but eventually with the advent of national distribution by feature syndicates. Syndication unhorsed political content. The whole idea behind syndication was to achieve great circulation, to appear in, and collect fees from, as many newspapers as possible. Expressing a political point-of-view might interfere with this objective: if a comic strip leaned Left, say, it would not be popular with newspaper editors who veered off Rightward. And vice versa. An editor might very well drop a comic strip that expressed a political view he didn’t agree with. So if a syndicated cartoonist wanted to keep his subscribers happy — and attract new subscribers, too — he avoided politics. And for the most part, this practice still prevails: most syndicated cartoonists keep their political opinions to themselves. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury is the defiant exception rather than the unrepentant rule.

But Trudeau is standing on the shoulders of some distinguished predecessors. Harold Gray is generally regarded as the first widely syndicated cartoonist to express a political point-of-view in his strip, Little Orphan Annie. Gray espoused self-reliance in his wandering waif: anything short of self-sufficiency for Annie would make it impossible for Gray to tell the kinds of stories he told; and self-reliance seemed in increasingly short supply during the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt wanted government to relieve the burdens of existence for vast numbers of citizens who were out of work through no fault of their own. Gray’s narrative tendency in opposition to the New Deal eventually emerged as a full-fledged political stance. Daddy Warbucks even died rather than live under the regime of FDR; he came back to life after Roosevelt died.

Al Capp was next to jump the non-partisan ship: Li’l Abner seemed liberal because Capp’s satiric targets were institutions of the Establishment, malefactors of wealth and power, and the Establishment, then and now, is usually seen as conservative. But the political postures of Little Orphan Annie and Li’l Abner were determined more by the circumstances of their characters and the sorts of adventures they had than by the political views of their creators. Gray and Capp told stories first; if their tales seemed to acquire a political tinge, that was secondary to the chief function — to entertain with gripping narratives. But Walt Kelly’s Pogo was different: by the time the strip was ten years old, Kelly was producing strips the purpose of which was political satire not storytelling. And Trudeau would follow in Kelly’s footsteps.

Thanks to Trudeau, we can find a good deal more political comment in comic strips these days than ever before in the medium’s history. There’s still more Hi and Lois in the funnies than Candorville: the guiding principle is still to gain and keep subscribing newspapers. But the atmosphere is changing somewhat. More and more these days, thanks to Jay Leno and David Letterman among others, “entertainment” includes political commentary. Sometimes the comments are fairly bland. But they’re there. And they became even more evident in this Election Year.

TINTIN ON THE BIG SCREEN

The first of DreamWorks’ Tintin movies will be based on two of Herge’s books, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Directed by Peter Jackson, not, as previously supposed, Steven Spielberg, said Leo Cendrowicz at news.yahoo, the film will be animated with motion-capture technology, starring 18-year-old Thomas Sangster as the title character and Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings" triology, as Tintin's dyspeptic crony Captain Haddock.

FREDRIC WERTHAM PAPERS

At his website, animated film historian Michael Barrier reported that the papers of the notorious Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, the book that sounded the death knell for comic books in the 1950s, are not available for perusal by researchers. They’re archived in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division but are carefully guarded by bureaucratic officialdom. Barrier jumped through all the requisite hoops to get access to the trove, but his request was, ultimately, denied by the executor of the Wertham estate. When he asked why, since his credentials seemed to be in order, he received this reply from Leonard C. Bruno of the Library’s staff: “For quite some time now, the Wertham executor has consistently rejected any and all requests for access. These are rejected outright, with no explanation, and apparently without consideration of the requestor's intent, affiliation, explanation, supplication, or anything else. Even requests that have been limited or targeted to only certain containers, rather than for total access, have failed. Unfortunately, you have joined a growing group of scholars unable to gain access.” About which, Barrier remarked: “Very odd — but, as Bruno added, the executor's arbitrary sway will soon end: the Wertham papers will come open May 20, 2010. At which point, I'm sure, a lot of irritated researchers will join me in trying to figure out just what it was that the executor was trying to hide.”

NEWS OF THE SPIRIT

Cartoonist Frank Miller, director of the forthcoming film “The Spirit,” told Staci Layne Wilson at  ScifiWire that the film will mix eras and influences. "It's romantic, but as in ‘Sin City,’ you don't know what date it is," Miller said in an interview on the red carpet for Spike tv's third annual Scream Awards on October 18 in Hollywood. "It's a very urban/Zorro story. I tried to make it as timeless as possible, so you will see cell phones and vintage cars and not really know where you are." Miller added: "It's my solo directorial debut, so of course that's exciting. I learned everything I know about directing from Robert Rodriguez [who shared director’s credit with Miller for the 2005 movie based upon Miller’s Sin City graphic novel series]. Everything," Miller emphasized. "Mainly, I learned never to waste anyone's time. When the cameras are ready to roll, then the actors are ready to go [and so on]. No one gets tired, everyone steps lively, and I think it makes for a better movie." Miller went on to extol the appeal of his own powerfully beautiful female lead, Eva Mendes, who, he said, will be even more memorable when "she does her march toward the camera. You really see who's boss in that scene. She is amazing." “The Spirit” opens on Christmas Day.

DICK TRACY DEATH TRAP / TRACY ESCAPES!

 

IS DICK TRACY FACING HIS FINAL DEATH TRAP?

Could it happen? Could Chester Gould’s cleaver-chinned cop be turned out to pasture? Could the yellow fedora be hung on a hook and Tracy disappear forever from newspaper comics? The shame of it is — it could happen.

Dick Locher, a Tribune Media Services syndicated political cartoonist who also writes and draws the iconic police procedural comic strip Dick Tracy, recently spoke a little wistfully about retirement. He was being interviewed in August by Sandye Voight at the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa — Locher’s childhood hometown — in connection with the opening of an exhibit of his editorial cartoons at the Dubuque Museum of Art. “My 10,000^th cartoon is close,” Locher said. “There are other hills to climb, and it’s been a great run. I’m looking forward to the retirement cake.”

Rumor has it that Locher could be blowing out the candles on that cake at the end of the year. And where does that leave Tracy? No one will say anything for attribution — a journalistic custom as new as Tracy is eternal — but the rumor is that TMS is considering the possible cessation of the strip’s syndicated run. Maybe Tracy will continue in a series of graphic novels. Maybe not. Maybe TMS will do the right thing and find a new steward for its world-renowned comic strip creation. (And if you want to be reminded of why Dick Tracy is an American icon, hie thee to RCHarvey.com and read “Chester Gould and the Morality Play of Law and Order” which we posted to Harv’s Hindsight in the fall of 2001.)

Locher is proud of his 25-year tenure on the strip — keeping the icon alive. “You say Dick Tracy to anybody in the United States, and they know what you’re talking about,” he once told me. “They may not have read all the strip, but they know who Dick Tracy is. Like Kodak. Like Kleenex. You might not use the product, but you know what it is. It’s a weighty, hefty thing,” he concluded: “It’s like if someone took Grant Woods’ ‘American Gothic’ and made a comic strip out of it. You’ve got to protect it.”

But now, it seems, Tracy is in need of protection. He’s in trouble. Death threats for the detective are scarcely unusual. In fact, they’re almost routine. Imagining life-threatening situations for Tracy was Chet Gould’s way of conjuring up a story. “That was his method,” Locher said, “and I give him credit for it. He’d say, ‘Let’s put Tracy’s tail in jeopardy.’ Then we’d have to figure out how to get him out.”

Well, it seems he’s in trouble again now. How do we get him out?

UPDATE:  TRACY ESCAPES!

Dick Tracy is, apparently, not in danger any more (if, indeed, he ever was --- except, of course, in the strip itself). Dick Locher, Tracy's boss, phoned me the other day to say that he's not retiring. And neither is our square-jawed gumshoe. And so that rumor comes to rest. But the rumor did give me a chance to review Locher's career, a notable one and worthy of the attention. Take the rest of the day off, Dick.

BORN TO ANNOY

The ever-irksome Berkeley Breathed went out wearing a mask of banal benevolence that could not, alas, disguise or assuage either his arrogance or his towering capacity to annoy. Opus, his Sunday-only revival of the perpetual Bloom County Outland, ended on Sunday, November 2. But it didn’t end in the funnies. To learn the end, you needed access to the Internet, the very institution that Breathed scorned when he brought Opus back, saying his pudgy penguin could be seen only in newspapers. On the comics page, Steve Dallas, the world’s most ostentatious male chauvinist, enters the County Animal Shelter where Opus has been lately imprisoned. Wearing only a towel, loosely clinging to his genitals, Dallas contemplates the apparently sleeping Opus. Steve smiles a beatific smile when he sees what Opus has in his hands — er, flippers. Then comes the first step in the annoyance: to “see the final panel,” we must repair to a computer and go to humanesociety.org/opus.

There, we learn that Opus has fallen asleep as millions of children have before him, reading — or being read to out of — Goodnight Moon,  the beloved bedtime story written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. In the strip’s “last panel,” the book's nurturing mother rabbit sits in her rocker next to a bed where Opus lies asleep with a stuffed bunny next to him. The final words echo those in the book: "Goodnight Opus / And goodnight air / Goodnight noises everywhere."

Sigh. Breathed could not even conclude the strip with originality: he had to poach the comforting language of a superior children’s book.

Then, to compound the botheration of Breathed’s ending, we are advised that we must now go to the cartoonist’s website, BerkeleyBreathed.com, for his “final message.” And so I dutifully did. Only to discover, as had an estimated 10-15 million other Opus addicts, that the website, which normally gets 1,500-3,000 hits a day, according to Sherry Stern at latimesblogs.latimes.com, had been thoroughly overwhelmed and could not be accessed. At all. For hours.

When, several days later, I managed to arrive at Breathed’s final words, uncrashed, this is what I found: “Opus is napping. He sleeps in peace, dreaming of a world just ahead, brimming with kindness and grace and ubiquitous bow ties. Please don’t mourn him. He lives in all my children’s stories, if you look. I hope to meet you again there. Thank you, truly, for coming along with us on Opus’ 28-year journey.”

A commercial for Breathed’s children’s books. The final annoyance.

SUCKER CITY

Mad magazine hasn’t had it so good in years: a recent issue was banned, albeit only briefly, in 40 Circuit City stores because it included a 4-page spoof of a consumer-electronics retailer called “Sucker City.” If the purpose of satire is to reveal human vice and folly, Mad achieved its purpose here with an uproarious second bounce. Moreover, by being banned, the magazine also scored the kind of publicity coup it hasn’t had in generations. Jim Babb, a Circuit City spokesman, said the banishment was the work of “some overly sensitive souls at our corporate headquarters” and apologized “for the knee-jerk reaction.” The affected stores were directed to put the magazine back on the racks said the Associated Press. At Mad magazine, editor John Ficarra said the usual gang of idiots was caught entirely unawares: “We were shocked and confused by this entire incident,” he said, “mainly because we had no idea that Circuit City even sells magazines.”