Rants & Raves

THE COMPLETE BLOOM COUNTY

Come October, we’ll see the first of five volumes from IDW collecting the entire run of Berkeley Breathed's Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip Bloom County. Edited by Scott Dunbier and designed by Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney, the five hardcover volumes will be part of IDW's Library of American Comics Imprint, which, so far, has included Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. Despite the success of earlier compilations of his strip, Breathed had resisted the idea of printing new editions for years. "The fact that so much of the content is so badly dated just kept me from getting excited about it," he explained. But IDW persuaded him by saying it would publish “context pages” throughout the books to bring new readers up to speed on the political humor that may not have withstood the test of time. Breathed will also produce a new foreword for the series. "I'm sure I'll have something to say," the perpetually outspoken Breathed remarked. "I always seem to, alas.”

We may expect a few bleak witticisms from him on the state of the art these days. But that will be nothing new. Back when he was writing Bloom County, Breathed kept repeating that the comics page was perhaps the single best venue in a newspaper to put forth political commentary because most readers avoid opinion columns like the plague. But today, Breathed fears that the medium itself may be obsolete. "Nobody under the age of 60 reads any part of the newspaper anymore," Breathed said, intoning his usual funereal assessment. "Editorial pages are rather musty, empty crypts now. The New York Times op ed page is still fun. And they never had comics. I sense a connection."

In his opinion, the comic strip audience has all but dried up and blown away, but then, he hasn’t had much luck in the last two incarnations of Bloom County, Outland and Opus, both Sunday-only strips, and his failure with them may be coloring his opinion of the entire medium. My contention has always been that his kind of satirical comment fares better if it appears daily; his weekly strips simply couldn’t gather the momentum that would produce the adulating readership he once enjoyed. And without that readership, Breathed concluded that the whole medium must be dead instead of concluding that his stew of humor was not cut out for weekly ingestion.

ACCUSED OF BEING RACIST

A cartoon by staff editoonist Sean Delonas that ran in the New York Post on Wednesday, February 18, has been accused of being racist. The cartoon shows two policemen, one of whom comments on the dead and bleeding chimpanzee the other had just shot to death, saying: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next Stimulus Bill.”  Visually, the cartoon references a newsstory on the previous Monday about a celebrity 200-pound chimpanzee named Travis who attacked and mauled a woman, mutilating her face and hands. Police, called to the scene, shot and killed the chimp. The speech balloon ties the image to another current event, the passage the previous week of the monster Stimulus Bill and Barack Obama’s signing the bill into law the day before, Tuesday, February 17. The opinion expressed here is pretty clearly disapproval of the Stimulus Bill and the Democrat-dominated Congress that brought it into being. The New York Post is part of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire, and Delonas is quite comfortable espousing the views Murdoch wants promulgated, and, judging from this example, the cartoonist promulgates with a sledge hammer, finding in any liberal idea a deserving nail.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, however, gave voice to an alternative interpretation of the cartoon. The chimp, he charged, stood for Obama in the racist tradition of linking Africans to apes and monkeys by way of asserting black inferiority — they are only animals, after all, barely out of the jungle. Moreover, it is possible, if Sharpton’s interpretation is accepted, to see the cartoon as urging the assassination of President Obama.

Cartoonist Delonas’ response: "Absolutely friggin ridiculous. Do you really think I'm saying Obama should be shot? I didn't see that in the cartoon. The chimpanzee was a major story in the Post. Every paper in New York, except the New York Times, covered the chimpanzee story. It's just ridiculous. [The cartoon is] about the economic Stimulus Bill. If you're going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it's not."

Delonas’ incredulity is matched by that of his paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Col Allan, who issued a statement saying the cartoon was "a clear parody." Said he: "It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist," Allan said.

Although the Stimulus Bill has become, as Sharpton said, “synonymous” with Obama, thereby encouraging the inference that the chimp is the President, most political wonks and pundits, certainly including Delonas, recognize that the bill was not written by Obama or his staff but by Congress, mostly Democrats, who ladled pork into the basic recipe Obama gave them. It was the Democratic Congress that was Delonas’ target. The cartoonist’s mistake was in assuming that every potential viewer of the cartoon would see it from his perspective — that is, the perspective of a knowledgeable right-wing surveyor of the political landscape — rather than from the viewpoint of a casual citizen who, more than likely, would think the Stimulus Bill was wholly a White House production embodying just the President’s wishes.

Is Delonas’ cartoon racist or not? That’s the unanswerable question. Delonas says it isn’t. But a lot of people think it is. A lot of other people can see how it might be interpreted as a racist slur by some of those who are being slurred. As a white guy, I feel a little disadvantaged in this department: I not sure I can recognize every racist slur I encounter. When I first saw the cartoon, I thought that calling it racist was reaching: c’mon — it’s just a picture of a chimpanzee and a badly conceived cartoon. Pointlessly violent and inept maybe, but racist? I still don’t think it was intentional racism. But even if it wasn’t deliberately racist, it had the effect of an intentional racist statement. Consider all the people who were offended by its perceived racism.

The issue of racism with its implications for how Obama should be caricatured is discussed at Great and Tedious Length at www.RCHarvey.com, Opus 239, for which we have arranged Open Access: anyone with an Internet browser and a mouse can read the entire enchilada, including various other news bits, pieces, shreds, patches and scathing essays.

MANGA COURT CASE

Towards the end of March, according to the latest information to come across the rolltop here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer, Christopher Handley, a 38-year-old Iowa comics collector, goes to court, charged with possession of obscene manga. If convicted, Handley could face 20 years in prison. The law Handley is charged with breaking, Section 504 of the PROTECT Act, designed to stop trafficking in child pornography, is a highly questionable matter itself. A district court has already declared parts of it unconstitutional.

As a nation, we have a decidedly confused attitude about sex and obscenity. Our bewilderment is probably rooted in a misbegotten sense of morality fostered by our Puritanical religious heritage, which successfully proclaimed, without a basis in any fact about human nature, that sex is bad or nasty or wrong, somehow, which leads, inevitably, to the sort of confusion Butch Hancock, a songwriter, discovered as a boy growing up in Texas: “Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for someone you love.” Our attitudes are decidedly contradictory, as Hustler publisher Larry Flynt memorably points out: “Murder is a crime; writing about it isn’t. Sex is not a crime, but writing about it is. Why?"

If the PROTECT Act were not in itself a sufficient flouting of American ideals, the way Christopher Handley was brought to so-called justice adds insult to injury by mocking the rule of law. The Postal Inspector opened a package from Japan to discover seven Japanese comic books. After picking up the package, Handley was followed to his home, where agents from the Postal Inspector's office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Special Agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley's collection of over 1,200 manga books or publications; and hundreds of DVDs, VHS tapes, laser disks; seven computers, and other documents. Though Handley's collection was comprised of hundreds of comics covering a wide spectrum of manga, the government is prosecuting images appearing in a small handful.”

I realize that the Postal Service can inspect letters and packages, but how, in this case, did the Postal Inspector determine, without, apparently, opening the package, that it needed to be opened and inspected? Just because it came from Japan? Or had the Postal Service been secretly stalking Handley for weeks, months — years?

"Handley's case is deeply troubling, because the government is prosecuting a private collector for possession of art," says Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. "In the past, CBLDF has had to defend the First Amendment rights of retailers and artists, but never before have we experienced the Federal Government attempting to strip a citizen of his freedom because he owned comic books. We will bring our best resources to bear in aiding Mr. Handley's counsel as they defend his freedom and the First Amendment rights of every art-loving citizen in this country."

There are ways to protest such idiocies. One of the ways in the comics community is to come to the aid of Handley and others being persecuted in this country’s misguided passion for rectitude by donating to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund either via its website, cbldf.org, or by sending a check to 271 Madison Avenue, Suite 1400, New York, NY 10016.

A long discussion of Handley’s case and the issues it arouses can be found at www.RCHarvey.com, Opus 239, which is one of our Rare Open Access issues.

SERIOUS CARTOONS

Four of the top box office earners in 2008 were animated films, we are reminded by Robert Butler at the Kansas City Star: "WALL-E," "Kung Fu Panda," "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" and "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" Their combined earnings, $778 million. And the Oscar nominated “Waltz with Bashir,” about war, guilt and memory as filtered through the experiences of former Israeli soldiers, is violent and deeply disturbing. "Serious" cartoons, mutters Butler — feels like a trend. "It's a lot more than a trend," said Joe Beck, author of The Animated Movie Guide and Outlaw Animation. "It's absolutely here. And it's growing." Said Leonard Maltin, a noted film historian: "The idea that animation can be serious isn't new. You could go back to Walt Disney's ‘Fantasia,' which is hardly a children's film. Or ‘Animal Farm' in the '50s, which was about as serious a film as you could get. But as good as they were, both movies were commercial disappointments."

The last big push toward animation for adults was in the '70s with the sci-fi themed "Heavy Metal" and the movies of Ralph Bakshi," Maltin said, adding: "Bakshi asked why we couldn't do ‘War and Peace' in animation. In his `Fritz the Cat,' there's a death scene. With blood. Bakshi thought anything was possible. But audiences weren't ready yet. At least the mass audience wasn't. And while Bakshi's initial success got other people thinking that they could make animated films for adults, it was followed by 10 years of failure."

Beck meanwhile continues to be frustrated by the "ghettoization" of animated films by the Academy Awards, which began honoring animated features only in 2001 and which has nominated an animated film for Best Picture only once: "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991.

STAY TOONED! -- THIRD ISSUE

Yes, John Read’s successor to the fabled Cartoonist PROfiles has now reached its third outing (so to speak), and you can order your copy at staytoonedmagazine.com —  a mere $9, plus $2 p&h. This issue features profiles of magazine gag cartoonist Benita Epstein, freelance Nebraska cartoonist Paul Fell, character designer Cedric Hohnstadt, editorial cartoonist R.J. Matson, Jim Gasoline Alley Scancarelli, cover artist Richard Cul de Sac Thompson, and webcomic creator Mike Witmer; plus articles by Mark Lio Tatulli, Norm Retail Feuti, Tom Mad magazine Richmond, and freelancer Mike Edholm (who reports on Toonfest '08). Also, the art of John Kovaleski and Stephen Silver is spotlighted. While all of the articles and profiles are engrossing,  Chad Carpenter’s story about cartooning in Alaska is highly unusual. He started his Tundra strip about wild life on the tundra in December 1991, self-syndicating it just to Alaska newspapers. Carpenter was perfectly happy with this arrangement, but fourteen years later, a salesman friend of his, Bill Kellogg, took the strip on the road to the Lower Forty-eight, and the strip’s circulation jumped from a half-dozen papers to hundreds — as of January, 260; and Allan Gardner at the DailyCartoonist says the total is 275 as of February 16. And that’s just the most cryptic sample of the sorts of things you can find in Stay Tooned.

BAGLEY BAGS A BIG ONE

Pat Bagley is this year’s winner of the Herblock Prize for "distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous standards” set by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Herb Block during his seven-decade career. The Prize, funded by the Herb Block Foundation, includes a $15,000 after-taxes cash award and a sterling silver trophy manufactured by Tiffany. Both will be presented to Bagley at the Library of Congress on April 2 by Ted Koppel, who will deliver the 2009 Herblock Lecture at the ceremony. "I'm pretty jazzed,” Bagley said. “This is one of the highlights of my life. Short of the Pulitzer, the Herblock Prize is the biggest one you can get."

Bagley, 53, has been cartooning for the Salt Lake Tribune since 1979 but enjoyed no national visibility until he was syndicated a couple of years ago by Cagle Cartoons. Then we started seeing his cartoons everywhere, and I rejoiced: his work is always biting — and hilarious, an important distinction.

Tribune Editor Nancy Conway, quoted in her paper, called Bagley, a "remarkable person" and a "wonderful artist" who holds Utah up to itself for self-reflection.  "And he does that with affection, but with a critical eye as well. He can make us laugh at ourselves and understand our own humanity. That is a gift. Utah, without him, would be less than it is.”

Bagley was the unanimous choice of Herblock judges Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury creator; sometime Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer; and John Sherffius, editorial cartoonist at the Boulder Daily Camera in Colorado. Said Trudeau, quoted in a Herb Block Foundation press release: "If The New Yorker published political cartoons, Bagley would he their main man. His drawings have the looseness of back-of-the-envelope dispatches, yet the speedy strokes belie a rigorous compositional discipline. These are good-looking cartoons," Trudeau said, adding that Bagley's "takes on the passing parade are uniformly deft and witty. With just the right balance of caricature, dialogue and labels, he puts the reader away, lickity split, no fuss."

In addition to his cartoons, Bagley has produced several books: 101 Ways to Survive Four More Years of George W. Bush and two “Clueless George” volumes parodying the children's Curious George books. Chimp-faced GeeDubya stars in the Bagley versions. Twenty years of Bagley’s cartoons are surveyed in The Best of Bagley (1998), in which we can watch as he abandoned the mannerisms of Pat Oliphant and Ronald Searle and developed, his own distinctive style.

His most recent book is Bagley’s Utah Survival Guide, described as containing “more facts and near-facts” about Utah than any other publication in captivity. For instance, after noting that the population of the state is 70% Mormon, Bagley writes: "Far from being a refuge of radical religionists — as originally intended — Utah today is probably the most American place in the world. Think: apple pie (or, in this case, green Jell-O). Think: minivans full of kids unloading at a megaplex theatre in a strip mall. Think: gorgeous multi-hued sunsets that could only be the result of serious pollution. This place is about as American as you can get.” No one, Bagley tells us, has ever explained why green Jell-O is the most poplar snack in Utah. But it is, he assures us. The book brims with Bagley drawings and occasional photographs (like the one of Salt Lake City's LDS founder Brigham Young as a young man; startling). And we also come upon such intelligence as this, about the oft scorned jackalope: “Irrefutable proof that this member of the bunny family exists — and in large numbers — can be found on postcard racks throughout the West.” In other words, Bagley’s Utah Survival Guide is not just for visitors to Utah; you and I can enjoy it, too — Bagley’s verbal as well as his visual wit.

I interviewed Pat in 1991, while both of us were the merest broths of boys. The entire interview is reprised in www.RCHarvey.com’s historical department, Harv’s Hindsights; look for December 2007.)

TOON NEWS

Neil Gaiman, erstwhile comic book scribe cum novelist, best known in this vicinity for his Sandman comic book series, won the Newbery Medal for his young adult volume, The Graveyard Book, which, patterned after Kipling's Jungle Book, is an illustrated collection of stories about a boy growing up in a graveyard and raised by supernatural creatures. Entertainment Weekly for February 20 carries a photo of Gaimen in all his fetchingly tousled, black-clad splendor, seated at his writing table in his rugged Wisconsin getaway cabin. ...   Hollywood trades, we learn from various online sources, are reporting that Steven Spielberg has begun principal photography on the Tintin movie, “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” According to report, Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) is starring as the intrepid, globe-trotting reporter with the funny quiff hairdo, and Andy Serkis will play Captain Haddocks, while Simon Pegg and Nick Frost will portray the hapless detectives Thompson and Thomson. And some new characters have been added to the Herge canon: an American Interpol agent, and those staples of newspaper movies, a rival reporter and a bellowing editor. ... Mike Luckovich made it into The New Yorker again, his second appearance in that august periodical, with a half-page cartoon: it showed a mildly disgruntled GeeDubya leaving the capital under a huge poster of Martin Luther King, Jr. bearing the headline: “Free at last, free at last.” I’m not sure what to make of it. GeeDubya looks somewhat peeved, as I said, but why? Because he’s leaving? Because he’s now free? Because his suitcase is too heavy?

 

WILLIE AND JOE

The best book about war, Up Front, was written by cartoonist Bill Mauldin as padding for a collection of his cartoons about life in the trenches during World War II in Europe. What few of us realized upon first opening that volume is that Mauldin’s oeuvre of army life cartoons is much larger than the contents of Up Front suggest. The book culls Mauldin’s cartoons about hook-nosed Willie and pudding-faced Joe from Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, but Mauldin wasn’t on the staff of S&S until February 1944. Mauldin enlisted in September 1940, long before the U.S. joined the hostilities in Europe, and he carrtooned for his unit’s newspaper, the 45^th Division News, for three years, most of it while the 45^th was bivouacking its way around the U.S. Fantagraphics’ two-volume 716-page slipcased Willie & Joe (hardcover, $65) sets the record straight: virtually all of Volume I's 325 8x11-inch pages are devoted to cartoons Mauldin produced before going overseas in July 1943. The eponymous Willie and Joe, as a familiar pair, don’t show up until Volume II’s September 26, 1943 cartoon.

Mauldin initially entitled his cartoon The Star Spangled Banter, and it carried that name as long as it appeared in the 45^th Division News and in civilian newspapers like the Oklahoma City Times and the Daily Oklahoman, to which Mauldin occasionally contributed freelance; his cartoons acquired the title Up Front when they began appearing in S&S in late 1943.

This handsomely designed and presented brace of books is worthy of its subject, one of the nation’s greatest opinion mongers in cartoons. For the whole Mauldin story, visit Harv’s Hindsight for February 2003, which is accessible through RCHarvey.com.

MISSING PRESIDENT BUSH

Rex Babin at the Sacramento Bee said this about a future without Bush to bash: In the weeks since the November election, I have received many, mostly well-intentioned comments that go something like this: "Aren't you going to miss George W. Bush?" The premise being that despite the fact the Bush administration has wreaked havoc with its policies both at home and abroad, at least it provided good editorial cartoon cannon fodder. "Do you hate President Bush?" readers would also frequently ask. The answer, of course, is no. I do disagree, however, with just about every decision ever made by this president. And while his administration has long since become a caricature of itself, which makes drawing editorial cartoons about the Bush gang the equivalent of harvesting low-hanging fruit, my cartoons have always been in response to their policies and their positions on the issues facing the country. In other words, it's nothing personal. Cartoons, after all, are more meaningful when they delve into the heart of issues rather than dwelling on personalities. Rest assured, I will not suffer for lack of characters and personalities. Heck, we've got a bodybuilder-actor as governor and a basketball player as mayor, don't we? And, believe me, I will have my differences with the incoming presidential administration. So here's to a memorable 2008 and to an entertaining and meaningful year to come.

What Will You Miss About Bush? Michael Cavna, who describes himself as a “recovering cartoonist”at his Washington Post blog, ComicRiffs, asked several top editorial cartoonists this question the week before GeeDubya would be leaving office — adding, immediately, that he wanted them to respond not as a U.S. resident or as a voter but “strictly as a cartoonist.” Here are some of the answers:

            Matt Wuerker (at Politico.com): I'm going to miss having a president like Bush who writes all his own political cartoons.

            Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug): Even as a cartoonist, I'll miss absolutely nothing about Bush. After you've mocked his bad policies, you can mock his sticking with bad policies despite bad results, and then you can mock the enormity of the bad results, and finally you can mock your own inability to keep up the mockery despite the consistently enormous bad results. But
then you've got seven more years of his administration, and it can get repetitive.

            Ann Telnaes (cartoonistgroup.com and WashingtonPost.com): His Vice President.

            Matt Davies (The Journal News, NY): ... with President Bush one could always count on a reliably healthy trickle of mind-bogglingly outrageous and cartoon-worthy behaviors: The a la carte approach to the U.S. Constitution, ideological distortions passed off as sensible policy, the dismissal of science in favor of religio-political theory, environmentally destructive directives with deliberately cynical and misleading titles, wars of our choosing, tax cuts for only very, very, very rich people who gave money to the GOP, blatant politicization of horrific national tragedies, Gitmo, the careful loosening of financial regulatory standards, the attempt to dismantle our social safety net, the propensity to link pretty much everything in the pre-existing neo-con playbook to "the war on terror," the childish need to label those with alternate points of view as unpatriotic, the swaggering certainty of having God "on his side," and a total disregard for the 51percent who didn't vote for him in the 2000 election. Oh, and I'll miss his boyish smirk. I will forever be grateful to the man, as, to be fair, I owe my Pulitzer to all of the above.

            Signe Wilkinson (Philadelphia Daily News): Is he still president?

MY NIGHTMARE

My most recent nightmare is that the beleaguered newspapers of America, seeking to cut costs, will reduce their comics sections. I have speculated that even if the fees for daily and Sunday strips averaged only $30 a week ($15 for dailies plus another $15 for the Sunday), dropping ten strips would save a paper $300 a week or $1,200 a month or $14,400 a year. Fees vary wildly: they’re based on the subscribing paper’s circulation (the greater the circulation, the higher the fee) and on the popularity of the strip. My hypothetical “average” is much much lower than an actual average — perhaps only a third or a quarter of today’s average. I’m just guessing, but a big paper like the Chicago Tribune might pay as much as $500 a week for a strip that’s not particularly well-known. So the annual savings might amount to as much as $50-60,000. Real money, as Ev Dirkson used to say.

And a real temptation to newspaper editors and bean counters, I’d say. But I also hasten to add, as any syndicate executive would say, that numerous studies show that comics are some of the best-read (and most-liked) parts of the newspaper. If papers start to drop them, what’s left — and what’s next to go? Readers would revolt. Some years ago, one of the newspaper chains hinted that syndicates should supply features for free, or at half the current cost — or some such draconian discount. To which a syndicate official might well say, How can we? Cartoonists don’t get a salary — they depend on revenue from syndication for their livelihood. Besides, syndicates have already reacted to the sinking newspaper economy: rates that newspapers pay have declined over the years. When a newspaper weighs the readership benefits of comics (and other syndicated material) versus the costs, comics are a good value to newspapers. Do papers get the same value from staff-written columns and content? I know they are under many financial pressures, but syndicated content is a very valuable asset to newspapers, worth far more than the paltry fees newspapers pay.

TOON NEWS

This year’s Free Comic Book Day will be Saturday, May 2, as usual, the day after a blockbuster superhero flick opens. ... Actor Pat Hingle, who played Commissioner Gordon in Tim Burton’s Batman movies died January 3 at the age of 84, of blood cancer. ... Harvey Pekar, celebrated for his autobiographical comic book and graphic novels and a movie based upon them, has collaborated on a new opera, reports the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette in Cleveland. Pekar wrote the libretto for the opera "Leave me Alone!" that premiered January 31 at Oberlin College. The music for the opera was written by former Cleveland Heights jazz saxophonist Dan Plonsey. “Pekar, a jazz enthusiast and prolific jazz critic, says he did his best to write a piece that expresses his feelings about society's disdain for experimental art, especially jazz.” No reviews of the performance have yet crossed our desk here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer.

MOTHER GOOSE AND GRIMM LAWSUIT

Mike Peters is facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed by the Federation of Colombian Coffee Growers, who allege that a recent Mother Goose and Grimm strip insulted Colombia’s “national dignity.” Peters has apologized if he offended anyone, according to colombiareports.com, and he also explained that the strip in question was part of a week-long series that began December 29 in which the gags turn on the fact that the inventor of the potato crisp Pringles tube had his ashes buried in a Pringles can.

 

Later in the week came the offending strip: Mother Goose sighs contentedly over “fresh Colombian coffee in the morning,” and her wall-eyed dog Ralph then says: “Y’know, there’s a big crime syndicate in Colombia, so when they say there’s a little bit of Juan Valdez in every can, maybe they’re not kidding.” Mother Goose then switches to tea. 

SHRINKAGE AT THE BEE

At the Sacramento Bee, the Sunday comics section was reduced from six pages to four starting January 4. As reported in the paper’s online edition on December 28, when the paper polled its readers about two possible replacements for Berke Breathed’s Opus, the resulting votes revealed an overwhelming lack of interest in either of the candidates that the paper had been testing in recent weeks, Candorville and Secret Asian Man.

So the paper, with the sort of inexorable logic that befuddles anyone but a newspaper editor, just decided not to replace Opus with anything, thereby enabling it to lop off two pages in its Sunday comics. “This reduction in newsprint will also help in our ongoing efforts to trim costs,” the paper explained. “To accommodate this change, we will drop Lio and The Pajama Diaries from the Sunday lineup and reduce the size of other comic strips.” Both Lio and PJ Diaries will continue as dailies. All of which makes a certain sense until we learn that the readership survey produced 10,000 responses. Even if the poll didn’t reveal consumer affection for the two strips that the Bee had tried out, it nonetheless shrieked reader engagement with the funnies. If readers like comics that much, smart editors would not have abandoned altogether their search for a replacement for Opus (which, because of its half-page dimension, opened up a hole for two additional strips). Instead, the Bee’s editors should have broadened their search, introducing other new strips for readers to compare to Candorville and Secret Asian Man. Or so it seems to me. But then, I’m not a newspaper editor, endowed, thereby, with the wisdom of the ages.

The paper’s poll, incidentally, ranked the top ten as follows: Zits, Pickles, Luann, Crankshaft, Baby Blues, Grand Avenue, Sally Forth, Drabble, Blondie and Classic Peanuts. Oddly, some of the nation’s most popular strips running in the Bee didn’t make the top ten; here they are, eleventh through fifteenth: For Better of For Worse, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Dilbert, and Garfield.

“Bee” is an odd name for a newspaper. But Jim Bernhard in his Pocupine, Picayune & Post: How Newspapers Get Their Names makes a convincing case for it as an eminently suitable name for a journalistic endeavor. Bees “generate a lot of buzz,” he observes, “ — always busy, moving constantly from one place to another just as the avid reporter is constantly on the move covering a news beat.” As the bee goes from flower to flower, it cross-pollinates, a function as vital to plant life as the dissemination of news is to a self-governing people. And Bees make honey, “which could be compared to a newspaper’s entertainment sections or maybe to its advertising profits.” Finally, “most telling of all, bees sting — and most newspapers like to think they have the same needling ability when hard-hitting editorials” or truth-seeking investigative reporting is called for. So “bee” is a nearly perfect name for a newspaper. The Sacramento Bee explained itself in an editorial in its first issue in 1857: “The name of Bee has been adopted as being different from that of any other paper in the state and as also being emblematic of the industry which is to prevail in its every department.” The paper, in short, would be as busy as a bee in finding news and spreading it around and, if necessary, stinging. In 1943, Disney was commissioned to create a logo for the paper, “a perky black-and-gold bug named ‘Scoopy’ ... [and] the paper also urges its readers to ‘Bee informed.’” Now we know.

A CHANGING OF THE EARS

From editoonist Rob Rogers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, summing up the year’s adventures:

In case you haven't guessed it, I am going to miss George W. Bush. He has been a gift to editorial cartoonists. We're not General Motors. What's good for editorial cartoonists is not good for the country. In 1999, before I really knew much about Dubya, I drew his ears a normal size. Then, as his outrageous policies and attitude became larger than life, so did his ears. It's odd that someone with such big ears, even if they were cartoon ears, could be so deaf to the concerns of average Americans. The historic 2008 election means 2009 will bring a changing of the ears. Obama already made the mistake of admitting that his ears stick out a little. I am nervous about the future. Not because the economy is in a death spiral or because we're fighting two wars or because the newspaper business is, um, challenged. No, I'm nervous because I'm afraid Obama will be a sensible, thoughtful and intelligent leader. Good for the country, not good for cartoonists.

TOON NEWS

Editorial cartoonist Patrick O’Connor lost his staff job at the Los Angeles Daily News in early January; he was one of several cost-cutting layoffs. This drops the official tally of full-time staff editorial cartoonists in the country from 88 to 87. ... Jimmy Hayward, director of “Horton Hears a Who,” will make his live-action directorial debut with "Jonah Hex," a western based on the DC Comics character, saith Hollywood Reporter. Josh Brolin ("Milk") is expected to star in the film, which Warner Bros hopes to put into production in March or April. ... Coming on the heels of the Pulitzer announcement that it will let Internet news operations compete for the Prize is a report released in December from the Committee to Protect Journalists claiming, according to Reuters, that of the 125 “media workers” presently in jail world-wide, most of them in China, more of them publish online than in any other medium. ...

NEW STRIP: FAMILY TREE

Signe Wilkinson, political cartoonist at the Philadelphia Daily News (where she became the first woman editoonist to win a Puliatzer, in 1992) last year added a daily comic strip to her schedule -- Family Tree. Wilkinson’s drawings, unlike those of so many of the recent influx of new strips, are competently achieved. In her overlapping images, for example, there are no ambiguous alignments or distracting juxtapositions. Wilkinson often jams background detail into her drawings, but we are not confused by her pictures. Her lines separate her images; they don’t mush them together. She uses solid blacks to accent her pictures, and she also makes good use of gray tones, deploying them as background elements that help define figures in the foreground.

Family Tree is about the Tree family, father Ames, mother Maggie and daughter and son, Twig and Teddy, with the maternal grandmother, Agatha Bell, thrown in. But it is not just another family strip. Wilkinson, long a promoter of environmental concerns, makes her comic strip family “live green.”

Ames, for instance, is letting his yard grow wild, thereby annoying his suburban neighbors who trim their lawns to carpet uniformity. “Family Tree combines my interests in raising tomatoes and raising children,” Wilkinson says, “neither of which ever goes exactly as we plan. Even though my husband and I were consistently brilliant parents, we managed to create enough detours from perfection to provide inspiration for Family Tree.”

Wilkinson also has a feminist row to hoe from time to time, and she’s attuned to the various hypocrisies of modern life, all of which she cuts down to size with an acerbic wit of flashing eloquence. She denies that the strip is political in the Republican or Democrat sense, but she tackles with relish social issues that arise from politics. The house next door to the Tree family is vacant but up for sale. Prospective buyers have included a gay couple and a black couple. The kids think the gay couple is “dullsville.” Other residents on the street think the gay couple “looks normal.” What about the Trees? “Are they normal?” asks one of the neighbors. “They think so,” says another.

While Wilkinson’s setups occasionally telegraph her punchlines, they usually don’t; and even when they do, there’s enough possibility for deviation from an anticipated outcome that our expectations are not met with precision. Usually the situations involve controversial topics or fads being tartly put in their place. Wilkinson’s comedy may not be as unconventional as the humor in Deflocked, but her treatment of the topics — and their very introduction into a comic strip — is surprising enough to make her strip’s comedy far from ordinary.

NEW STRIP: DEFLOCKED

Deflocked by Jeff Corriveau is both visually interesting and comedically surprising. A King Features offering, Deflocked throws together four unlikely “outcasts” to see how they will fare. Two of them are dogs: Rupert, whose heart of gold and “raw naivete” reminds me of Darby Conley’s Satchel, and his older and wiser brother, Cobb, the moral and intellectual anchor of this band of outcasts. Tucker is a small boy, “who they are raising as their own.” But the strip belongs to Mamet, “the most derelict, self-absorbed sheep” in captivity, who plots against the rest of the household — not to mention the entire world — with a cranky misanthropy that approaches but does not equal or surpass Bucky the Katt’s. “There are no words to describe Mamet that haven’t already been used in court depositions,” reads the syndicate’s press release. “Armed with the lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance, Mamet is forever seeking universal adoration — or a quick, dirty buck — whichever is easiest.”

Corriveau began adult life as a comedy writer for the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” The Late, Late Show,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “Talk Soup.” But his success at funny words without funny pictures seemed hollow. “It was while penning a string of celebrity-centric cable specials that Corriveau began to question his lot in life,” reads the press release; “as Jeff put it: ‘I simply couldn’t write another Paris Hilton sex joke.’” So he began noodling around ideas for a comic strip. At first, he toyed with a strip based upon “iconic sitcoms.” But when he considered Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and its life-affirming emphasis, he reimagined his strip as relationship epic, fraught with “fragile hopes and moral-less victories.”

His drawing style is in most aspects wholly undistinguished. His line, while not the dead and static strand of Ollie and Quentin or Arctic Circle, often waxes thick without reason: it doesn’t define volume, say, or set foreground figures apart from background details. It simply flexes, now thin, now thick. Irrational though it seems, Corriveau’s line gives his pictures visual variety and, hence, some measure of eye appeal. The pictures are also a perhaps unintended satiric attack on the newspaper practice of publishing comic strips as small as possible. All Corriveau’s characters have giant heads and almost no bodies: it is literally a “talking heads” strip, the only sort of comic strip that present newspaper comic strip space allocation policies permit. And thanks to the irascible twist of Mamet’s so-called mind, we can never quite predict where the first two panels of a strip is going to take us.

POPEYE AT 80

Amid all the excitement leading up to the Inauguration, you may have failed to notice that Popeye, the fabled one-eyed sailor, celebrated his 80^th birthday. On January 17, 1929, Castor Oyl, the pint-sized protagonist in E.C. Segar’s strip Thimble Theatre, hired Popeye to take him to Dice Island, an offshore gambling hell. (The gory details of this origin are commemorated in Harv’s Hindsight for March 2004, which you can reach by trekking off to RCHarvey.com.) Since Popeye’s debut, according to O’Ryan Johnson at the Boston Herald, the spinach-swilling roustabout has spawned 234 theatrical short films, starting with those first produced in 1933 by the Fleischer Brothers.

It was probably the Fleischer cartoons that made Popeye famous: judging from comic strip historian Bill Blackbeard’s experience — he had a hard time finding newspapers that ran the first years of the strip—Segar’s comic strip wasn’t going gangbusters until the Fleischer films made him popular. Until then, spinach never made an appearance in the comic strip. Later, there were more than 500 television episodes, many of which have been dubbed in French, Italian, Japanese and dozens of other languages. In  Italy, he’s called “Baraccio di Ferro" — arms of steel. A celebration is planned for later this year in Chester, Ill, Segar’s home town, where a statue of Popeye stands in the park, gazing down on the Mississippi River and longing, we assume, for saltier horizons.

Meanwhile, according to Adam Sherwin at the London Times, starting January 1, Popeye is in the public domain in Britain under an European Union law that “restricts the rights of authors to 70 years after their death.” And Segar died in 1938. Sherwin continues: “The copyright expiry means that, from January 1, anyone can print and sell Popeye posters, T-shirts and even create new comic strips, without the need for authorization or to make royalty payments. ... Popeye made his screen debut in 1933. According to a poll of cinema managers, he was more popular than Mickey Mouse by the end of the thirties."

“If it weren’t for the Fleischers,” says Jesse Walker at reason.com/blog/show, “it would be easier to argue that no one but a character’s creator should be able to use him. The Fleischer Popeye shows the benefits of allowing artists to tinker with someone else’s invention.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far — Segar’s treatment of the character was, in many ways, superior and certainly more subtle than the Fleischers’ — but the Fleischers made the character surpassingly popular.

White seems to contradict himself, however, when he points out that Popeye after Segar and the Fleishers was “much less impressive” until “underground comix veteran Bobby London took over the strip from 1986 to 1992.” It “got interesting again,” White opines, and then “the suits who ran King Features didn’t like the fact that its franchise was making jokes about abortion and other controversial issues, so London was fired.”Sherwin goes on to note various of Popeye’s tics and tropes: Segar was told to tone down Popeye’s aggression as it was a bad influence on children; Popeye was the first cartoon character commemorated by a statue, in 1937 in Crystal City, Texas, the self-proclaimed Spinach Capital of the World;  Popeye animations, cartoon strips and merchandising generated $150 million a year by the 1970s; the Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits chain was named after Popeye Doyle from the movie, “The French Connection,” but the chain is now endorsed by the cartoon character; J. Wellington Wimpy, Popeye’s mooching sidekick, gave his name to the Wimpy restaurant chain in England.

Sherwin finishes with this: “Though it is a myth that he was coopted to promote spinach by the U.S. government, spinach sales in America rose by a third in the decade after his appearance. A tie-in Popeye Spinach brand is one of the most popular in the U.S.”

Today’s Popeye strip is either in re-runs (for dailies) or, for Sundays, produced by Hy Eisman, who also does another vintage Sunday comic strip, The Katzenjammer Kids.

NEW STRIP: HOME AND AWAY

The humor in Steve Sicula’s strip for Washington Post Writers Group, Home and Away, is passable: it’s predictable only about a third of the time. But Sicula’s drawing mannerisms are awkward when they are not also ill conceived. The strip concerns the Szwyk family, a name choice so off-beat as to be typical of the American melting pot. But it might well stand as a totem to the rest of the strip’s blatant appeals to niche readership, not to mention the clumsiness of its comedy and the cloddishness of its artwork. The Szwyks are describes as “typical parents juggling careers and child care,” but since Sam’s career keeps him at the computer and at home, where he manages the household chores and their two children, I doubt the family is “typical.” Not yet. Someday all our families will work like this, but not enough of them do yet to constitute “typical.” Sandy, the mother, leaves the house to pursue her career, which is high-paying and requires her to fly around the country a lot. Apparently, all of this is only too real to the cartoonist: “Home and Away is a window into my wife’s and my life,” he explains in the press release. “For the last twelve years, we’ve had to juggle travel schedules with everything else that goes on when raising a family. Our friends would ask us how we were able to do it. Just like everything else, we just adapted. Some would call it ‘mutated,’ but I prefer ‘adapted.’”

In rendering his strip, Sicula has managed to mix pictorial conventions, producing a visual jangle: Sam in shape (bell) and appearance (narrow, vertical head with unkempt hair, resembling a badly used shaving soap brush — which, I realize, no one uses anymore, thereby rendering a perfectly useful comparison pointless) echoes Dilbert, a stylized grotesque of the human anatomy. But the rest of the cast is drawn in a wholly unstylized manner, Sicula’s pictures attempting to approximate the actual appearance of people. This schizoid approach to image-making Sicula perpetuates in the way he draws eyeballs. Sometimes, eyes are just simple black dots; sometimes, they’re regular eyes — circular with pupils. Any cartoonist who opts for the former device is faced with the inevitable difficulty that the latter mannerism surmounts with a single bound — namely, depicting a variety of facial expressions. Black dots don’t do that well. Moreover, Sicula’s compositions are often static and his line is tentative. In short, his drawing ability is mostly not on display.

TEK JANSEN

Comic books with a political agenda are not at all scarce. Almost all of them reek with it, but we don’t notice because the politic in question is “truth, justice, and the American way.” Superheroes embody this ethic; ditto Donald Duck. In a free enterprise, capitalistic society, the consumer is king, and if a publisher wants to sell product, he must, perforce, appeal to the consumer. The consumer, meanwhile, is a product, too — a product of his upbringing in the aforementioned capitalistic society; and his upbringing imbues him with the “values” that will perpetuate the society itself: belief in “the American way,” free enterprise and the profit motive, certainly, but also “truth” and “justice” and “individual liberty.” Consumers will buy products that reflect and promote “the American way,” and so funnybooks inevitably do just that, whether their casts wear longjohns or the upper half of a sailor suit.  But with Oni’s new 5-issue series, Tek Jansen, which purports to present the exploits of the space opera hero whom Stephen Colbert often invokes so affectionately, I thought we might have something more overtly political. Since Colbert is so deft at ironic political satire, wouldn’t a comic book about his hero engage in the same shenanigans? Apparently not.

Tek Jansen is no more political satire than the early Mad comic book: genre is the object of the satire, not political doctrine. Tek Jansen bears a not-altogether-vague resemblance to Colbert, but that’s where the subtleties of Colbertian irony ends. In one of the two stories in the first issue, Jansen, in the grip of his usual wrong-headed stubbornness, decides to disobey his superior and save Alphalon-7 from the invading hordes of Optiklons, who want to cure the Alphalons of all physical ills and psychological disorders, converting their society to a utopian enclave of “love and beauty and perfection.”

Jansen, gripped, as I say, by his customary contrarian impulse, detects in this plan something that “stinks” and resolves to interfere with it, which, ultimately, he does. Awakening suddenly one morning after an all-night romp in the hay with “a hot Skelatahn babe,” Jansen realizes that he’s “late for interferring,” adding, in one of the issue’s best pseudo-sf lines, “no time to radioshower, lasershave or autodress.” So he dashes off to “do good” in what is later, in the other of the issue’s best lines, described as a “naked act of unprovoked aggression.” Yes, Jansen is wearing only his birthday suit as he defeats the Optiklon mission, which, in turn — inevitably — precipitates an intergalactic war.

Tek Jansen, in other words, is that threadbare comedic device, a fatuous oafish bumbler, destroyer of worlds, motivated to commit mindless errors by his own exalted opinion of himself, which proves, time after time, impervious to even the slightest modification despite the supposed lessons of reality that, time after time, defeat and deflate Jansen’s arrogant self-esteem. The satiric target is the heroic space opera hero as a generic type. Tek Jansen is exactly the sort of comic book hero that the Colbert of “The Colbert Report” would admire extravagantly; in that sense, then, the comic book is a successful perpetuation of the tv show’s ambiance. Jansen is Colbert: convinced of his own rightness, he ignores any contradictory realities.

But compared to the triumphant subtlety of the sustained irony of Colbert’s adroit on-the-air political satire, the comic book — written by John Layman and Tom Peyer and Jim Massey — is tepid tea. All remnant of subtlety is gone. And nothing much political at all. Mad shtick throughout. And do we need another Mad? Illustrated by Scott Chantler and Robbi Rodriguez, the visualization is wholly adequate; I prefer the somewhat bolder linework and angular style of Chantler, but neither artist manages a manner than is particularly distinguished. We’re now up to the third issue of the title, and not much has changed since the first — except for more emphasis upon Tek’s sexual appetite. More on this matter at RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves, Op. 234.