Rants & Raves

COMIC RELIEF

We’d be remiss in these gloomy times if we didn’t remind you of three monthly newspapers full of comic relief:

Funny Times publishes gag and political cartoons, alternative strips, and various humor columns, $25/year, 12 monthly issues; P.O. Box 18530, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118; or with credit card by phone, 1-888-386-6984, ext. 2348.

Humor Times is mostly editoons with a few columns, $18.95/year, 12 monthly issues; P.O. Box 162429, Sacramento,CA 95816

And Cartoon News is all editoons from top cartooners, $25/year, 12 monthly issues, Santa Cruz Comic News,P.O. Box 1335,Santa Cruz,CA 95061; see also thecomicnews.com. Most of these offer a free sample issue.

And if you want to see classic comic strips, do your shopping at specproductions.com. SPEC Productions produces an impressive array of publications reprinting vintage works of comic strip artistry — Alley Oop, for instance, Moon Mullins, Dick Tracy, Smilin’ Jack, Joe Palooka, and on and on. And Missing Years magazine, which reprints such classics as Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, Captain Easy (Leslie Turner’s hard to find opus), Terry and the Pirates (George Wunder’s), and, in rotation, others of equal nostalgic and artistic merit. A just-launched project, a 3-issue series of Kerry Drake featuring the toothsome temptress Madam Adam. 

NEW STRIP: MY CAGE

With My Cage, which launched in May 2007, King Features makes a painfully overt appeal to the “younger generation” — manga fans, most obviously, but also “multi-platform techno-savvy readers.” The strip is clearly engineered rather than inspired: it is a carefully constructed, deliberate effort by the syndicate to give newspaper editors something they all imagine will magnetize their publication for a generation that no longer reads newspapers. Its name parodies the omniscient website “My Space.”

Drawn by Melissa DeJesus, “a well-known and highly respected manga graphic novelist,” saith King’s press release, and written by Ed Power, the strip features a cast of anthropomorphic animals. Its star is Norman, “a 20-something platypus who wants to be a world-famous writer but has found himself stuck in a less than fulfilling middle-management job that pays the bills but eats away a little more of his soul each day” — a circumstance, no doubt, that has its roots in Power’s own life. At the King website, Power describes My Cage as “a comic strip for everyone who gets up earlier than they want to, puts on clothes they wouldn’t normally wear, and drives in traffic to a place they don’t want to be five days a week so they can have the money to do the things they enjoy the remaining two days (provided they’re not too tired).”

I keep running into this situation: too many new comic strips are about frustrated writers or artists. Or so it seems. But the backgrounds of these characters, like that of the writer-designer heroine of Terri Liebenson’s Pajama Diaries, serve mostly to give syndicate publicity writers something to write in press releases: the strip’s action has almost nothing to do with the character’s vocational frustrations. In most of the My Cage strips I’ve seen, Norm is dealing with “relationship issues,” not wearing uncomfortable clothes or struggling through traffic to get to a work place he despises. Norm has a girlfriend, but the relationships he monitors seem to be mostly those among his fellow office workers. He also has a pet — an amoeba named Squishy, who presents another of those completely boring visual experiences like Quentin.

Power thinks manga art is “beautiful ... fluid with a lot of energy ... so different than other artwork on the comics page right now. It will really catch the eye of newspaper readers. ... Melissa’s art is ... really something pretty to look at once readers are drawn in.” Pretty, yes; different, yes. There’s more drawing in any panel of My Cage than in a week’s worth of Ollie and Quentin or Arctic Circle. But DeJesus often repeats a composition from one panel to the next, so there is a measure of visual repetition that can get boring. Presenting static pictures in succession is one way of dealing with a script that is almost always entirely verbal: Power uses the comic strip form to time his characters’ speeches; in his comedy, pictures seldom, if ever, function as punchlines. And Power telegraphs the jokes in the setup panels: the punchlines are usually entirely predictable. Ordinary humor coupled to visual monotony.

EDITORIAL CARTOONS INSPIRE READERSHIP

Buttressing the commonplace notion that editorial cartoons are among the most popular features with newspaper readers is the experience at the Omaha World-Herald in December. The paper has been running a “Creative Captions” contest for a long time, printing a new photograph each week and posting it on the paper’s website. Then they posted a cartoon by their staff editoonist, Jeff Koterba, asking, as usual, for readers to submit captions. Koterba drew a space alien sitting in Santa's lap, with a child whispering to another as he waited in line. The word balloon was left blank for readers to fill in. Then came the avalanche of entries — more than twice the usual number of weekly submissions. The winning caption? Filling in the kid’s word balloon:  "An Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator? He'll shoot his eye out." The reference is to a classic "Looney Tunes" cartoon in which Marvin the Martian, intent on destroying the Earth, needs the space modulator for his planet-smashing death ray to work. Bugs Bunny, of course, steals it.

In the same vein, over at the Baltimore Sun, according to its former staff editorial cartoonist Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher, who was laid off over a year ago, the paper is now using his cartoons to promote subscriptions. Said Kal: “It seems that a stash of one of my earlier cartoon collections, Kal Draws the Line, was discovered in the basement of the newspaper building. Someone in circulation decided to put the books to good use. When a subscriber contacts the paper to cancel their subscription, the paper puts into motion a brilliant scheme. The Sun sends the former subscriber a package of goodies featuring a copy of my book in the hope of enticing the readers back. I guess the paper wanted to remind their ex-readers what they are missing.” In case I haven’t made the irony clear, remember that the Sun sent Kal packing more than a year ago.

DILBERTARIANISM

“Dilbert readers tend to be far above average in intelligence,” said Dilbert creator Scott Adams in a telcon with Christine Galt at the Omaha World-Herald, and, he went on, the e-mail he receives from them — which inspires much of the strip’s humor — reflects that. “It’s rarely boring,” he said. The commemorative 20^th anniversary tome from Andrews McMeel (576 pages, $85), Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, includes a quantity of commentary, and Adams also tells, for the first time at length, how he became a cartoonist. “The short version is that my job was a dead-end so I bought a book on how to become a cartoonist, hoping I might make a few bucks on the side. The actual process [of getting syndicated] is as simple as drawing sample comics and mailing them to publishers listed in the book. When United Media saw my submission, they called and offered me a contract to become a syndicated cartoonist. That’s the short version. The longer version has the juicy stuff,” he finished with a peddler’s pander.

Dilbert appears in more than 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries in 23 languages; more than 20 million Dilbert books have been sold; Dilbert.com attracts 1.4 million visitors per month with 15 million page views each month. One of the features of the website is “True Tales of InDUHviduals,” the people “who put the duh in induhviduals. Here’s one, a dialogue between “Me” and “My Hairdresser”:

    Me: I’m surprised the kids get Columbus Day off from school.

    My Hairdresser: Yeah, I thought all of the presidents were celebrated on the same day.

    Me:  [nothing].

This engaging and informative feature is usually followed with “True Quotes from InDUHviduals,” which includes such mutilations of common expressions as these: Please feel free to jump in if I’m right. That’s just a whole different ball of fish. We’re between a pickle and a hard spot. You better get on the boat, ’cause this train’s leavin’ the station. I’m just talking out loud here.

Wonderful.

KNEW STRIP: KNIGHT LIFE

United Feature’s The Knight Life is produced by Boston-born Keith Knight, who found his comedic voice in San Francisco with his signature creation, The K Chronicles. “It was then that I discovered underground comics, people talking about politics, race, sex drugs — a lot of contemporary issues,” he told Angela Hill at The Crisis in November 2004. “I started to add a lot of risque stuff. I knew then that to make it in this business, I didn’t have to draw a cat that loves lasagna.” The K Chronicles is unabashedly autobiographical; and so is The Knight Life. Although usually focused on his own life, the strip’s topics included politics, race, and social issues affecting people of color like Knight.  “It covers everything,” he said recently, “ — cops, homeless, kids, Vegas, supermodels, talk radio. All the weird stuff that happens to me, my friends and family.” Despite his often blunt social criticisms, he insists that he isn’t trying to change the world: “I’d really prefer to take over the world,” he confided to Hill. As he homes in on a topic, he deploys what he calls his “trademark, poorly rendered, barely thought-out, last-minute cartooning style” to convert topics to comedy in the strip.

Because Knight’s strip comedy derives from his own life and his observations about the society around him — and because his view of the universe is eccentric — the jokes in The Knight Life are never predictable. Sometimes the humor springs entirely from the cartoonist’s quirky contemplation of the world; at other times the joie de vivre is what brings a smile to our lips.

Fittingly, Knight’s drawing style — a sort of cartooning short-hand, as much sketchy suggestion as actual depiction — is as eccentric as his sense of the human comedy. His drawings are clear and uncluttered. Simple, yes, but bubbling with comedic energy: whenever his characters talk, they are all mouth, usually unhinged, and eyeballs, a perfect evocation of the human visage for comedic purposes. The Knight Life is undeniably the best new laugh- and thought-provoker on the comics page. Not since Calvin and Hobbes has there been so novel an entertainment in the funnies.

EDITOONS: BEST OF 2008

Both of the annual surveys of the “best editorial/political cartoons” of the year 2008 are now out, Editorial from Pelican, edited by Charles Brooks (206 8.5x11-inch pages in paperback; $14.95), and Political from Daryl Cagle, who is joined by Brian Fairrington, who plays the part of the conservative co-editor (286 8x10-inch pages in paperback, $16.99). Both carry “2009 Edition” in their titles — e.g., Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year 2009 Edition.

I haven’t anything new to add to what I’ve said about these books in previous years. They’re both pretty much the same as they’ve always been. More cartoons in Cagle, but they’re reproduced too small; larger cartoons in Brooks, but many (although not all) are by second tier talent, scarcely the “best” of any year, however noble the perpetrators’ aspirations. Cagle’s choices follow the often trivial preoccupations of cartoonists who get their news from tabloid tv, but there are so many cartoons herein that the big issues are present, if not quite as emphasized as in Brooks. But if you want an overview of the year, you oughta get a copy of each. Cagle this year has restored a section missing from the last couple editions, a portfolio of cartoons submitted to the Pulitzer competition by the most recent winner. Probably in the years this section is missing, the cartoonist wouldn’t give Cagle permission to exhibit his cartoons. Last year’s winner, however, Michael Ramirez, a staunch conservative, has no such reservations: his submission portfolio is here entire.

Ramirez also has a book of his own, just out, Everyone Has The Right to My Opinion (282 8.5x11-inch pages, some in color; hardcover, $34.95). This is Ramirez’s first compilation of cartoons, and some of them come from his earliest stint at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis; most, however, are from the last few years, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at the Investor’s Business Daily, where he is a senior editor as well as the staff editoonist. His winning 2008 Pulitzer portfolio is here, and this volume displays it to much greater advantage because the cartoons are all in color. Moreover, the cartoons appear throughout one-to-a-page, a generous display that Ramirez deserves: his cartoons are copiously detailed, and he seems to like drawing huge pieces of equipment, festooning them with gadgets and gizmos — much of which would be lost at a smaller dimension (as it is in Cagle, for instance).

A newcomer to these annual “best of the year” fetes is another volume from Pelican, Prizewinning Political Cartoons 2008 Edition (128 8.5x11-inch pages, some in color; paperback, $15.95). Edited by Dean P. Turnbloom, a former Navy man who’s loved cartooning all his life but didn’t seek publication until he retired from the fleet, the book features the prize winners and their work in many of the editooning competitions: Pulitzer Prize, National Headliner Award, Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award, Overseas Press Club’s Thomas Nast Award, Scripps Howard National Journalillsm Award, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition Award, National Press Foundation’s Clifford K. And James T. Berryman Award, the Herblock Prize, and the Ranan Lurie Political Cartoon Award.

This volume, the 2008 Edition, contains the winners in the 2007 contests and many of the runners-up — Nick Anderson, Clay Bennett, Steven Benson, Matt Davies, Walt Handelsman, Mike Keefe, Mike Lester, Mike Luckovich, Jim Morin, David Pope, Jean Planteureux, Alfredo Sabat, Steve Sack, Mike Thompson, Signe Wilkinson, and Adam Zyglis. It also features short biographies of all the winners, and this, from Joseph Pulitzer, writing about the Prize he endowed: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.” And to foster their professional spirit and dedication, Pulitzer created the awards bearing his name. I’ve quoted Pulitzer at length for the sake of the inherent irony: read it again and think about tabloid tv journalism, the pace-setter for all news media in this hapless land.

2008: A FINAL LOOK BACK

A Few of the Things That Peeved or Pleased Me in 2008

Willie is free at last: the image of Mickey Mouse in “Steamboat Willie” is now in the public domain. (fullsome details at RCHarvey.com. Opus 230)

Diesel Sweeties is no longer desecrating the funnies.

Superman’s birthplace was saved from falling into ruin.

Landmark Publications: Fantagraphics' complete reprinting of Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe; Jackie Ormes biography; Garfield Minus Garfield; reprinting of Charles N. Landon’s cartoon correspondence course lessons.

Anniversaries: Garfield, 30^th; and the two Alleys, Oop, 75th and Gasoline, 90th.

Number of full-time staff editorial cartoonists drops to 87, losing 13 in six months.

Jules Feiffer returns to the Voice by invitation. (Op. 230)

The New Yorker’s Obama cover reveals wannabe cartoonist Barry Blitt’s shortcomings as a satirist; ditto the editors of the magazine, who, apparently, didn’t understand how Blitt’s cover drawing could be misinterpreted; or did they?

Mystery of the year: Who was the guy doing “Bad Cartoonist” and where is he now when we need him?

Stay Tooned, an excellent reincarnation of Cartoonist PROfiles-style magazine debuts.

Peter Parker and Mary Jane split.

Dick Tracy/Chester Gould Museum closes in  Woodstock, Illinois. (Op. 218)

Tenth of February Movement and How It Failed — or not; at least it asked the question: why is there only one comic strip by and/or about a racial minority in most newspaper comics lineups? (Op. 218)

Mort Walker’s International Museum of Cartoon Art holdings go to OSU’s CRL, which now has a new name: instead of Cartoon Research Library it is now the Cartoon Library and Museum, which, they say, better reflects the facility’s mission (particularly with its holdings of original art, the world’s largest. (Op. 223)

Al Jaffee gets NCS’s Reuben.

Spiegel heirs inherit half of Superman. (Op 221)

Endings: Opus ends. Again. Another five years, shot to hell (Op. 231). Loveless ends; ditto Y: The Last Man — I couldn’t make much thematic sense of either series, but they were fun to read. DC finished reprinting all of Will Eisner’s Spirit, an archival treasure in 26 hardcover packages. For Better or For Worse ends original stories and goes into reruns, for better or for worse (Op. 231).

(Note: There is much more in this anyule vein at RCHarvey.com, Op. 235.)

 

The Best Stuff of the Year 2008

I did a longish piece on the “best of the year” for The Comics Journal, No. 296 (out soon), and I won’t repeat that here; I will, however, add a little to it:

Best comic strips of the year: 9 Chickweed Lane, Doonesbury, Zits, Frazz, The Knight Life (best new), Luann (particularly when the Brad and Toni romance is featured); others that are awfully good but usually overlooked: Betty, Arlo and Janis, Zippy (which, after reading daily for 18 months, I now believe I’m on the cusp of understanding).

Best new comic book titles: Rasl, Echo.

Best continuing comic book titles: 100 Bullets, Love @ War, Bomb Queen.

Best continuing series of comics-related books: Two Morrows’ Modern Masters series.

HUGH "WOLVERINE" JACKMAN

Actor Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman, host for the forthcoming Oscar ceremonies, was interviewed a couple months ago in Playboy and said this about his experience at the San Diego Comic-Con: “It’s as close as a film actor will ever come to feeling like a rock star. You walk out on that stage before 7,000 amped people, and the energy’s overwhelming. ... I owe my career to that [Comic-Con] crowd.” ... “Kung Fu Panda” won big at the 36^th annual Annie Awards staged on January 30 by the International Animated Film Society at the U. of California - Los Angeles, roundly outclassing “Wall-E,” which, according to the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly,  knowledgeable persons everywhere expect to win an Oscar. An upset, yes, but we are, after all, in the season of unexpected victories for slumdogs everywhere.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Waltz with Bashir is an “animated documentary” about the 1982 blood-letting in Lebanon when Israel invaded, the assassination of the Christian Phalangist President Bashir Gemayel, and the subsequent massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film is up for an Oscar as best foreign language film; oddly, it was entered into the competition by Israel. I haven’t seen it, and may not. The animation, judging from only a couple pictures reproduced with a review in the Denver Post, runs a gamut of techniques, some of which, like those being used in tv commercials lately, are all color and no line, obviously “doctored” versions of film of real people.

The reviewer, Lisa Kennedy, was moved by what she saw, but I wonder about the genre here. “Animated documentary.” Animation is always, one way or another, a hand-wrought version of a reality, and as such, it can re-shape that reality to suit the “animator’s” vision. A documentary, on the other hand, takes its place in the pantheon of film making as reportage, filming actual happenings, usually as they happen. This is the stark truth of reality; animation is the re-making of reality. Offhand — again, without having seen the product — it seems to me the terms are mutually exclusive. Or else the documentary part will be subsumed by the animated part. I realize that even raw “documentary” is subject to the film maker’s interpretive manipulation of what he has filmed. But still, it’s not all fiction, not all hand-made. Take a look, though, and tell me what you think.

ON A MISSION

For some years now, cartoonist/columnist/gadfly Ted Rall has been on a mission. The mission is not so much to displace the traditional editorial cartoon with the more unconventional (not to say off the wall) work of cartoonists who mostly supply alternative weekly newspapers as it is to raise the visibility of the latter group, all, in Rall’s view, worthy of greater circulation than they presently enjoy. To this end, Rall has conspired with NBM Publishing to produce three books that each sample about twenty cartoonists we may never have seen before. The first of these tomes, Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, was published in 2002; the second, Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists, two years later. The third in the series, Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists, came out in 2006. Rall also edited individual volumes on Stephanie McMilllan, Neil Swaab, and Andy Singer — all, I think, available at nbmpublishing.com.

Attitude 3 includes the work of several Web cartoonists who can actually draw — D.C. Simpson, Brian McFadden, Matt Bors (lately picked up by United Feature, at Rall’s prompting no doubt), Mark Fiore (online animation), Mark Poutenis, Ben Smith, Thomas K. Dye, and Adam Rust; some who, charitably speaking, don’t draw so much as they diagram  — August J. Pollak, Dorothy Gambrell, Nicholas Gurewitch, Steven L. Cloud, plus Chris Dlugosz and Michael Zole, who make hemispheres and squares talk; M.e. Cohen, who scrawls; David Hellman and Eric Millikin, who smear; and the inevitable clip-art specialists, Robert T. Balder and Ryan North. Their commentary is pointed and often funny; but too many of this breed have invaded a visual medium without a noticeable picture-making skill in evidence.

Rall, a keen observer of pop and well as political culture, introduces the book by noting that cartooning positions at daily newspapers are fast disappearing. And the alternative, the indie weeklies, have reached a saturation point — no more openings for cartoonists there. That leaves the Web. And that’s where Rall looks for this volume. “It’s important to remember,” he says, “that although all of these cartoonists are at least partly defined by their identities as Internet cartoonists, they’re only working online because online is what there is at this particular moment in the development of media. They are cartoonists first, middle, and last,” he finishes, “ — and damned good ones, too.”

THE GIBSON GIRL

In the early years of the 20^th century, Charles Dana Gibson drew admirably statuesque women, who were, in the fashion of the day, completely clothed — swathed we might say —  from toe to clavicle. Hair piled luxuriously atop their shapely heads, “the Gibson Girl” set the standard for feminine beauty. Gibson scandalized his admirers when he illustrated “The Common Law,” a story written by a friend, Robert W. Chambers, and serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine from November 1910 to February 1911. In the story, a refined artist’s model consents to pose in the nude. It was “the sex-thriller of that day,” according to Bennard B. Perlman in The Golden Age of American Illustration: F.R. Gruger and His Circle: “There was consequently much criticism aimed at the creator of the Gibson Girl for allowing his famed female to be cast in such a role, [but] Gibson never depicted her undressed. In fact, in all of the huge volume of Gibson’s work, the only nude to be found is in the rendition of a distant statue in a European public park.”

MR. PLAYBOY

The declining number of pages per issue in Playboy accompanied by a concomitant decrease in the number of gag cartoons is not, as loyalists may be tempted to suppose, an indication of a slighting of the medium due to the passing of Michelle Urry, Playboy’s life-long cartoon editor, a couple years ago. It is, instead, but one manifestation of a general decline in the fortunes of the magazine in the Internet Age, when pictures of naked ladies abound on the Web, often accessible for much less than the cost of a single issue of Playboy.

The ups and downs of Playboy’s fiscal fortunes are one of the subjects in Steven Watts’ new biography of the founder, Mr. Playboy, with its pretentious subtitle, Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. A more accurate subtitle would be The Sex Life of Hugh Hefner, the other of the book’s subjects. Pursuing his subtitle rather than mine, Watts decides that Hefner’s magazine has played a key role in four cultural developments in the last half-century: the sexual revolution, the growth of consumerism, the feminist crusade, and the emergence of self-fulfillment as a dominant personal goal. “More than any other single figure in [the last decades of the twentieth century, Hefner] has symbolized the combination of sexual liberation, material affluence, and personal self-fulfillment that characterizes the modern American dream.” Here is a conclusion that Hef can be proud of: his is not a simple skin magazine but a cultural force, “the cutting edge of the mainstream.”

Hef occupies a notable niche in the history of magazine cartooning, but Watt nearly ignores that. The Playboy cartoonists he mentions include Jules Feiffer, Gahan Wilson, Erik Sokol, John Dempsey, Gardner Rea and Al Stine, the latter, scarcely one of Playboy’s most notable although he lurked in the magazine’s pages for a long time. Most of these worthies are named in a single paragraph of roll call, and none of them are mentioned again. Judging from the book’s index, Benjamin Franklin shows up more frequently than most cartoonists — four times in the book’s pages.

Shel Silverstein is mentioned seven times in the book, but while he is identified as a cartoonist, his role in the book is as one of Hef’s “manly” bunch, not as an innovative and contributing cartoonist. Michelle Urry gets similarly off-hand treatment: she’s mentioned just once but not as cartoon editor, only as a friend of the ill-fated Bobbi Arnstein, Hef’s assistant, who, accused of smuggling drugs and harassed by authorities, killed herself. Watt mentions Harvey Kurtzman as he glides by Little Annie Fanny but fails to mention the short-lived Kurtzman-edited humor magazine Trump that Playboy published for two issues. Jack Cole, the most influential cartoonist in determining the visual style of the magazine’s cartoons, is simply mentioned, his influence never noted. And Eldon Dedini, another whose painted cartoons set the pace, evades Watt altogether. It’s as if cartoons were never part of Playboy’s history as a manifestation of its publisher’s psyche. Too bad.

PLAYBOY

Besides The New Yorker, magazine cartoonists have only one other self-respecting outlet for their work. Playboy. Although founded and sustained by a would-be cartoonist, Hugh Hefner, who levitated the artistry of gag cartooning to new full-color heights, Playboy has lately seemed deficient in the single-panel cartoon arena. Quantity, I mean, not quality. I’ve had the impression over the last year or so that Playboy is publishing fewer cartoons. So, dedicated investigative typist that I am, I did a haphazard survey to see if actual numbers would support my suspicion.

I counted the cartoons in a random issue each from 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Randomly selected, remember. Then I counted cartoons in several of this year’s issues. The average number of full-page cartoons in the 1990s issues was 8.5; in 2008, the average number of cartoons per issue was 6.02. A clear drop in quantity. The smaller cartoons also suffered a loss. The average in the 1990s issues was 10.5; in 2008, just 7.

But the latter loss is compensated for by a slight increase in the number of comic strips: in addition to the standbys Dirty Duck by Bobby London and Meaty Myths, by Schwin, the magazine started running an elegantly stylized full-page strip by Juan Alvarez and Jorge G. Despite this addition, however, the number of other-than-full-page cartoons has dropped. Over the same period, the number of photos of barenekkidwimmin has not diminished, as nearly as I can tell without doing a careful, lingering, page-by-page, analysis. And who has time for that?

Distressing as it is to contemplate the dire portent of my survey, the drop in number of cartoons may be a factor in another evident erosion. The total number of pages in each 2008 issue of the magazine is fewer than in the 1990s. These days, the total hovers around 150; a decade ago, it soared into the upper reaches, varying from 180 to 240 per issue. In the 1990s, that meant one full-page cartoon for every 23-26 pages; in 2008, it’s about the same (except for November, when the ratio was 1:38). The December 2008 issue was is back up to 180 pages, but the number of full-page cartoons, just 6, is smack on the 2008 average in spite of the greater number of pages; ditto the small cartoons with just 7 (not counting a two-page spread reprinting some “classic Christmas cartoons”).

RUTU MODAN

Rutu Modan loves to draw. Nothing else adequately explains the pages in Exit Wounds (172 6x9-inch pages, full color; Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) devoted to wordless pictures. The book is not a pantomime enterprise, but Modan knows when to let pictures carry the narrative load, when to use silence to convey mood and to flesh out the personalities of her characters. Her story, set in Tel Aviv in 2002, focuses on a young man, a cab driver named Koby Franco, whose dispatcher sends him one day to pick up a fare who turns out to be a soldier in the Israeli army, a woman Koby’s age, named Numi. Numi tells Koby that his father from whom he has been estranged for two years may have been killed in a recent suicide bombing in Hadera. But she’s not quite sure. The rest of the tale is a mystery: we follow Koby and Numi as they try to find out whether his father is dead or not. They track down and interview survivors, following every clue, some of which are frail scraps indeed. And they learn about each other as they unravel the mystery. Koby learns, to his immense surprise, that the plain-looking Numi is his father’s lover; he also falls in love with her and she, we suppose, with him. But theirs is not a smoothly running romance: Numi is sensitive about her plain appearance, and Koby is still tied in emotional knots about his father, whom he hates, and about Numi’s being his father’s mistress.

Modan is a methodical, nearly plodding, storyteller, and her storytelling is matched by detailed and meticulously rendered visualizations in the so-called “clear-line” manner made acceptable by Herge. The lines in the clear-line style are what I believe Scott McCloud calls “dead lines”: they are all of uniform thickness (or thinness), and their lack of variation makes them lifeless. But the carefully observed details of ordinary living that she includes in every picture redeems Modan’s visual mannerism, imparting all the life there is to her tale. Koby yawns as Numi tells him his father may be dead. As they sit on a park bench, Numi trying to convince him of his father’s possible death, a black dog, possibly a labrador, wanders by, his leash trailing on the ground behind him. Where is his owner? Why is he loose while still wearing a leash? Koby and Numi ignore the animal. The dog and leash have nothing to do with the story: he’s there as part of the setting, the locale. A stray background detail momentarily occupying a piece of the foreground.

Modan’s story is full of such engaging but nonessential asides. However much Modan relies upon pictures to tell her story, we are scarcely prepared for the ending, which is all picture. It may or may not impart meaning to the tale, but it is dramatic enough and unexpected enough to have great impact: if it doesn’t explain the novel’s title, nothing else does. No, I can’t tell you what it is: that’d ruin the story for you. Suffice to say, the mystery is expertly evolved and pursued and will keep you turning pages even if the blooming romance seems doomed.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

 Editor & Publisher reminds us that the medium’s longest running continuously published panel cartoon celebrated its ninetieth anniversary on December 19, when, in 1918, a sports cartoonist at the New York Globe filled his space with “Dubious Athletic Achieve- ments.” It was popular enough to prompt repetition, and when it went beyond sports oddities, it was re-christened “Believe It Or Not.” Robert Ripley’s story is regaled in the third of Harv’s Hindsights long ago and far away in May 2000 (or was it 1999?).

ABSOLUTE RONIN

Interviewed in Playboy’s November issue, Frank Miller talked about the reissue of his 1983 watershed book, Ronin, now entitled Absolute Ronin: “The dirty secret of most cartoonists is we make up stories about things we want to draw. Notice I loaded Sin City with vintage cars and beautiful women. In the early 1980s there was an explosion of creativity coming from France, led by Jean “Moebius” Giraud. And in Japan, Koike and Kojima were doing a series called Lone Wolf and Cub. I wanted to bring those influences together, yes, but mostly I wanted to tell a rollicking yarn about urban life inAmerica. ... At the time, we were still stuck on newsprint [for comic books], with hand-separated colors. Frankly, comic books looked like they were ashamed of themselves. We wanted to bring American comics up to speed to show the Europeans we could compete.” For more, visit playboy.com/frankmiller.

WONDER WOMAN

Beyonce Knowles has revealed at nzherald.co.nz that she aspires to be the first black star to play Wonder Woman. The singer has met with representatives of DC and Warner Bros. “I want to do that type of movie and what would be better than Wonder Woman? It would be great. And it would be a very bold choice. A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing. It's time for that, right? I love Wonder Woman and it'd be a dream come true to be that character." …

SUITS

Dick Tracy is alive in the courts as well as (for now) on the funnies page. Actor Warren Beatty has sued a unit of the Tribune Company, which owns the comic strip detective, to prevent the Tribune from taking back the TV and movie rights to the character. Beatty starred as Tracy in the 1990 movie that earned more than $160 million, and he says he’s now at work on a TV Dick Tracy special. According to the agreement he secured in 1985, he retains the rights to the character for “a certain period of time” after which the TV and movie rights revert to the Tribune. The Tribune maintains that it gave Beatty a “period of time,” two years, on November 17, 2006; Beatty says he started work on the TV special November 8, 2008, within the specified framework. But the Tribune says it has the right to terminate Beatty’s rights. We don’t know, yet, what’s left.

And New Orleans’ Time-Picayune editorial cartoonist Steve Kelley is also bringing suit — against his former employer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which, his brief alleges, has coerced his successor editoonist, Steve Breen, into abandoning a plan to collaborate with Kelley on a comic strip to be called Dustin. According to the voiceofsandiego.org, Universal Press Syndicate agreed in 2006 to a development contract that might lead to syndication, but when Breen withdrew, the deal fell through. Breen already does a syndicated comic strip, Grand Avenue, in addition to his editorial cartoons (for which he won a Pulitzer in 1998). Kelley, who also works as a stand-up comic, has had a somewhat acrimonious relationship with the Union-Tribune: he was sacked by the paper in 2001 when his editors mistakenly thought he’d “sneaked” into print a cartoon that had not been approved. (Details in at RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves, Opus 62.)