Rants & Raves

THE REUBEN AND THE NCS DIVISION AWARDS

The National Cartoonists Society met in Lala Land near Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend and conferred honors on the Cartoonist of the Year (who gets the Reuben trophy) and on winners in the numerous divisions of the cartooning vineyard (who get handsome wall plaques). For the record and because being nominated is an honor in itself, here are the nominees this year, beginning with the Division awards and culminating, amid fanfare and other signs of rowdiness, with the Reuben candidates. I’ve marked the winners by preceding their names with an asterisk (*) and congratulations, herewith.

          Newspaper Comic Strips—Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine; *Mark Tatulli, Lio; and Richard Thompson, Cul de Sac. Newspaper Panel Cartoons—Vic Lee, Pardon My Planet; *Mark Parisi, Off the Mark; and Jeff Stahler, Moderately Confused. Editorial Cartoons—Mike Luckovich (who won the Reuben a couple years ago, the same year he won the Pulitzer), *Michael Ramirez (who has won in this category before, and last year, took home the Pulitzer), and Jeff Parker (who, besides editorial cartoons, does Mother Goose and Grimm on alternate weeks for Mike Peters). Magazine Gag Cartoons—Pat Byrnes, *Mort Gerberg (both mostly New Yorker cartoonists), and Werner Wejp-Olsen. Television Animation—Bryan Arnett, Character Design, “The Mighty B!”; Ben Balistreri, Character Design, “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends”; and *Sandra Equihua and Jorge Gutierrez, Creators, “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera.” Feature Animation—James Baxter, 2D Character Animator, “Kung Fu Panda”; Clay Katis, Supervising Animator, “Bolt”; *Nicolas Marlet, Character Designer, “Kung Fu Panda.”

            Newspaper Illustration—Lars Leetaru, *Mark Marturello, and Sean Kelly. Greeting Cards—Kevin Ahern, *Jem Sullivan, and Debbie Tomassi. Magazine Feature/Magazine Illustration—Daryll Collins, Bob Staake (noted here for his New Yorker cover the week Obama won), and *Sam Viviano. Book Illustration—Jim Benton, Stacy Curtis (otherwise, an editorial cartoonist), and *Mike Lester (ditto). Advertising Illustration—Roy Doty, *Craig McKay, and Jack Pittman.

            And, finally, “Comic Books”—Chris Blain, Gus & His Gang, Matthew Forsythe, Ojingogo, and *Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows. I say “Comic Books” rather than Comic Books (without incriminating quotation marks) because none of the nominees is in this category because he produced a “comic book”; they’re all here because they produced “graphic novels,” which have become the respectable multi-page form that NCS can give awards for. By ignoring comic books, NCS is overlooking such masterfully done comic books as, say, Loveless or Casanova or Army @ Love or 100 Bullets—real four-color visual-verbal fiction, not high-fallutin’ “graphic novels.”  The problem here, it seems to me, is ignorance: NCS is still, as it always has been, chiefly the redoubt of syndicated cartoonists, and the organization has harbored a deep-seated bias about comic books, which, when NCS started giving out awards, were (and still are) produced by teams rather than single creative consciousnesses. NCS wants to award single cartoonists, not teams. Or it did, at the beginning; and the custom has persisted even as animation categories often recognize groups of creators. The titles I just listed are well and inventively drawn, regardless of how written; and one of them, Army @ Love, is both written and drawn by that creative colossus, Rick Veitch. NCS, however, remains stunningly oblivious of such achievements—which means, by the way (although not at all incidentally), that the Society is blind to the cartooning arena in which the most innovative work is being done these days. But let me move on before I whip myself into a froth.

            At last, then, we get to the candidates for the Reuben: *Dave Coverly, Speed Bump; Dan Piraro, Bizarro (both panel cartoonists) and Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine. Coverly, no speed bump he, walked away with the heavy metal statuette. Good on y’, Dave.

            Congrats to all, winners and nominees alike, but especially to the winners. (Cheers, general applause, foot stomping, some shrieks of girlish laughter, trumpets blaring, drums rattling, and assorted kinds of exuberant behavior.)

9 CHICKWEED LANE

What’s going on in Brooke McEldowney’s ground-breaking precedent-shattering strip? When last we looked in, Edda and Amos, childhood sweethearts, had at last consummated their love in the usual way — although not usual for a comic strip in a family newspaper. Nothing explicit, mind you — but the circumstances don’t leave us in any doubt. This signal event in their young lives took place during a musical competition in Brussels where Amos on his cello would be accompanied by Edda on piano.

Unfortunately — but delightfully so and unbeknownst to the most involved parties — the two young lovers were videotaped during their “most intimate moment” by people drifting by their twelfth floor window in a hot-air balloon. 

The film was then broadcast all over the world in the Belgian  version of Funniest Home Videos. Subsequently, when Edda and Amos performed in the competition, they were extravagantly applauded by the audience, all of whom recognized them as the lovers in the video: everyone loves young lovers. And Amos won the competition. Then, almost at once, the jury reneged and withdrew the award, explaining, “Because you and your pianist were captured on camera and broadcast worldwide in flagrante delicto, an allegation of unfair bias has been directed at the jury.” They were permitted, however, a “do-over” against their chief rival — this time, behind a screen so none of the jury could see who was playing. And Amos won again.

 

This took place just before Christmas. Admittedly, a long time ago, but the epoch-making enterprise continues in other ways, hence this notice. The tale of Edda and Amos and their love had not yet run its course. There was more to come. Alas, McEldowney missed his deadline for the January 5-10 strips, and, overwhelmed with remorse, he posted the following missive on his officialpibgorn.livejournal.com website (which you can find a link for hereabouts on the GoComics menu); here ’tis in its entirety, a history-making event:

 I SMITE MY FOREHEAD
Important Chickweed Bulletin

“Next week, January 5th through 10th, 9 Chickweed Lane will appear for those six days in reruns. On January 12th, the present story will resume. First I must apologize to all of you who come to 9 Chickweed Lane every day. Second, I must explain: I was a half hour late in getting my week's worth of Chickweed completed, and, by so doing, transgressed the sanctity of the deadline. Wheedling and pleas were useless. The syndicate people were intransigent, and imposed reruns, mumbling something, in passing, about God, mercy and my soul. This devastated me, because the story of the competition in Brussels is not over. I did not intend a pause. However, I found myself laboring over some little nuances that might help convey the romance and suspense of the story, and the deadline overtook me, baying and snapping.

This is where you must understand something about syndicate people: they look upon cartoonists who violate the deadline the way state troopers regard a motorist who has been changing into a wedding tux while steering the car with his knees (not that I would personally have experience with such a thing). They — the   troopers and the syndicate people — are implacable, narrow-eyed, unsmiling. You cannot beg. You cannot bribe. You cannot charm. And, when all is said and done, you cannot snivel, at least excessively, when it is all your own fault. And that brings me to the third point: I must apologize again, and ask your indulgence. The cartoon was finished a half hour after the deadline rumbled past; and it has been sitting in the can, ready to be seen ever since. It will return to comics.com on the 12th.  Meanwhile, Amos and Edda are not done yet. Consider next week but a hiccup (not one of Amos's, unfortunately, or it would be remedied so much more agreeably).”

McEldowney’s distress may seem a bit extreme — until you consider where the “rerun” strips landed in the continuity. Saturday’s strip concluded with the audience showering Amos and Edda with flowers and other congratulatory missiles. Monday, then, they would be declared winners for the second time. But instead, Monday began a rerun segment that effectively undermined the emotional current that McEldowney had created. Okay: the Sunday strip, which is not at all part of the continuity, does the same. But in the cartoonist’s mind, Saturday flows into Monday, the same unfolding story.

In any event, McEldowney’s communique must be unique in the annals of comic strip cartooning. And now you have a copy for your file of a genuine unvarnished historical event. (In case you aren’t up-to-date on Amos’ hiccups: it was to cure his hiccups that Edda took him to her bed. It worked.)

FATHER OF THE JOKER STILL JOKING, NO KIDDING

Under the heading “At Home with the Joker,” the AARP Magazine for March-April ran a full-page article about Jerry Robinson, explaining how he invented the Joker and Batman’s juvenile sidekick, Robin, and going on to report that Robinson, at 87, is “going strong as an artist, writer, curator of exhibitions, and head of a syndicate, Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate/CartoonArts International, distributing more than 350 cartoonists.” Robinson has two books coming soon from Dark Horse: a revision of his 1974 history, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, and a compilation of the sf comic strip, Jett Scott (starting September 28, 1953; ending in 1955), that Robinson drew over Sheldon Stark’s scripts. Said Robinson: “To live, I have to create. I have to be involved.” He’s also writing a graphic novel for DC Comics about “an older Clown Price of Crime, who ‘has changed, as any person would,’ says Robinson, laughing, ‘and not necessarily for the better.’ ... when people read about heroes who conquer adversity — crime and evil and, from time to time, the Joker—it gives them some hope for the future,” he concluded.

The article is illustrated with mug shots of the Joker (as inspired by Conrad Veidt in “The Man Who Laughs,” Cesar Romero in the 1960s camp TV series, Jack Nicholson in the first Batman movie, and Heath Ledger in the latest) and a photograph of Robinson sharing a coffee break with the grinning gargoyle.

AMONG THE ASTORS

Dave Astor, who, you’ll doubtless recall, was laid off at Editor & Publisher after a professional lifetime of writing and editing for journalism’s trade magazine — a lot of that time covering news of comic strips and editorial cartooning — went home and started polishing an idea for a syndicated humor column like the one he’d been doing for the local paper for some years. He hasn’t found a syndicate deal yet, but his column now appears at HuffingtonPost.com; search under “Dave Astor.” Here’s an excerpt from a recent one:

So when an underpaid cashier looks up from my credit card and asks if I'm one of those Astors, I can honestly say no. I'm not a loathsome, materialistic hedge-fund bozo who tells his mistress "we'll always have Paris" as the bozo's financial victims say of him that "we'll always have parasite." I drive a five-year-old compact car, trim my weed-filled lawn with a manual push mower, and watch a small TV that has an antenna. (Yes, I'll switch my set from analog to dialog when I poke the corner of a $40 plastic converter coupon into my remote's stuck mute button.)

Maybe I should have taken my wife's last name when we married. She has a very nice last name (Cummins) that doesn't sound elitist -- though she and many of her family members are accomplished people. Actually, I did try to take her seven-letter last name, but it had dwindled to two letters after a bank bundled it with other last names and invested them in tricycles retrofitted with jet engines. (Corporations endanger our children's future in so many ways....) The bank got a $15-billion bailout last Christmas, but spent the federal money on three $5-billion fruitcakes.

I do go by "Dave" rather than "David" to slightly soften the aristocratic sound of my last name. But that's like being locked in a bank vault and trying to escape with a chisel made of cotton.

Remember the Titanic scene in which "Unsinkable" Molly Brown shouted "Hey, Astor!" to that John Jacob fellow? When I heard that back in 1997, I sank embarrassedly into my movie-theater seat. Twelve years later, I cringe even more at the recollection of actress Kathy Bates calling out such a highfalutin name. That's because the rotten economy has left me with less money to compensate for having a Gilded Age second name as the second Gilded Age ends.

HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES SCREWED UP

It isn’t often that we get to correct that glorious font of journalistic accuracy, the New York Times, so we take an understandable if perverse pleasure in the occasion. The nation’s newspaper of record announced on Sunday, February 15, that “for the first time in its history, the Louvre is having a comic strip exhibition. The showing, ‘Small Design: The Louvre Invites Comics,’ features the words of five authors,” which are then named — Nicholas de Crecy, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Eric Liberge, Hirohiko Araki, and Bernar Yslaire, all of whom “have used or are using the Louvre as part of their stories.”

But this wasn’t the first time comic strips have hung on the walls of the world’s mustiest art museum. The first time may have been in 1967 when the National Cartoonists Society was invited to assemble materials for a display tracing the history of the art of the comic strip, and the French mounted the show in six rooms of the Decorative Arts Gallery of the museum and issued a 256-page illustrated catalogue. The show’s main emphasis was on the American comic strip, but examples of Egyptian and Chinese narrative art were included as well as American pop artists. Milton Caniff was delighted. “It’s great to be hanging up there with Da Vinci,” he told a reporter in London where he stopped en route to the Paris exhibition. Later, he described the exhibit: “they blew up individual panels. Giant size — three by four feet. Really something.”

The exhibit ran from April 7 to June 12 and featured panel discussions and seminars, screenings of animated films, and even a fashion show. After closing at the Louvre, the show moved on to Brussels, Amsterdam, Lausanne, and Rome. All of this impressive information has been ripped from the pages of an equally impressive tome, Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon (my magnum opus, you might say, which is still offered for sale at the usual destination, www.RCHarvey.com; merely $35, including p&h).

ROBERT MANKOFF

The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, believes that 98 percent of the magazine's readers look at the cartoons first — “and the other two percent lie,” writes Joseph P. Kahn at the Boston Globe. Mankoff also runs the magazine's Cartoon Bank, wrote The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity, and created the magazine's caption contest, a feature that draws thousands of submissions each week. Kahn asked Mankoff if he personally wades through the caption contest entries. Not exactly, said Mankoff: “A computer program sorts them out, then my assistant gives me 50 or 60, broken into categories. For example, we ran a cartoon of a car that had crashed into a room where two people are in bed. Categories might include Bad Sex and Kid Coming Home. I'll pick three entries and send them to [editor] David Remnick for approval. I try to pick from different ones, like, ‘I thought our sex life was a train wreck, not a car accident.’ And, ‘Well, at least he made curfew.’ But it's very subjective.”

New Yorker cartoons are highly topical, Mankoff said, reflective of the times, which precipitated this exchange between him and Kahn:

Kahn: What about poking fun at, say, economic Armageddon?

Mankoff: Well, we have a cartoon anthology coming out, On the Money, that looks at issues like the stock market and personal finance since 1925, year by year.

Kahn: If anyone has any money left, it should sell like hotcakes.

Mankoff: Yes, although the hotcakes industry is going down the tubes, too. The  United States now outsources all its hotcakes.

Footnit: New Yorker editor David Remnick scoffed at rumors that the magazine is considering cutting back on its publication schedule due to financial trauma. In recent years,The New Yorker’s bottom line has been considerably enhanced by sales from the Cartoon Bank, which, when Mankoff, who invented it, first offered to sell to the magazine, it declined. Later, it thought better of that decision and reversed it.

SIMPSONS STAMPS

A new set of postage stamps features Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie from “The Simpsons.” Designed by Simpsons creator, Matt Groening, the new stamp helps celebrate “the longest running primetime comedy’s 20^th anniversary year this year” reports Georg Szalai at  hollywoodreporter.com. The stamps' release perhaps (the coincidence is too great to escape comment) commemorates the more expensive first class ounce. I suppose that means the beloved Simpsons are worth at least 44 cents. ...

DUFFY FIGHTS FOR HIS ORIGINALS

Editoonist Brian Duffy, who, after 25 years at the Des Moines Register, was unceremoniously dumped by the paper in December 2008, might lose more than his job: the Register has refused to let him have the original art for his cartoons. The paper wants to donate them to the University of Iowa, which, according to a report at kcci.com, plans to preserve more than 100 years of editorial cartoons in the state of. The irony isn’t lost on Duffy: "The editor felt that I wasn't important enough, or my work wasn't important enough, to keep me at the newspaper, yet she wants to keep my legacy alive by donating all of my work to the University of Iowa.”

Duffy, while maintaining that a cartoonist’s work has historically been regarded as the cartoonist’s property, cites a legal-sounding precedent in his case: a book of his cartoons published by the newspaper carries the notice “copyright Brian Duffy and the Des Moines Register, not just the Des Moines Register," said Duffy. "I have no problem donating a large body of work to the University of Iowa. In fact, I'd love to do that." But he wants to do it on his terms not on behalf of the newspaper that shooed him out the door.

ARGYLE SWEATER

On April 6, Scott Hilburn's daily panel cartoon, The Argyle Sweater, celebrated its first anniversary with Universal Press Syndicate (UPS). The cartoon first appeared in December 2006 at the UPS-sponsored website for unpublished cartoonists, Comics Sherpa, and then at GoComics, another UPS-inspired website (this one, in fact). Often compared to Gary Larson’s Far Side, Argyle Sweater is now published by more than 200 newspapers across the United States saith a news release from the syndicate. A situational cartoon involving dogs, cats, cops, bees, wolves, game shows, bears, telephones, sports, zebras, nursery-rhyme icons and cavemen not to mention the occasional evil scientist, The Argyle Sweater: A Cartoon Collection, Hilburn's first compilation, was released last month by Andrews McMeel Publishing, another of the many UPS entities.

THE UPSIDE OF DOWN

Our current financial chill is exactly the sort of climate that Dilbert’s Scott Adams thrives on, Allen Gardner reported at the DailyCartoonist.com.: “In a Q&A with Scott, he is asked why it is easier to write the strip in a bad economy to which, Scott replies: ‘Humor is the flip side of tragedy. So the worse things are, the easier it is to find humor. And I think there is naturally more absurdity. There was a time during the dot-com era that I literally couldn’t get anyone to complain about their jobs. But now, if something is wrong with your life, it’s always someone else’s fault. It’s either the bankers, the politicians or your own managers being greedy and sucking up all the money for their bonus. So you always have someone to blame. And that gives the comic teeth.’”

PEANUTS NEWS

Susanne Cervenka at Florida Today reports that the family of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz donated a 5-foot-tall Snoopy statue to NASA, honoring the space program's 50th anniversary. For 40 years, Snoopy has been the mascot for NASA's Space Flight Awareness Program, an award that recognizes employees' contributions to the space flight success. Less than 1 percent of NASA employees are honored with the "Silver Snoopy," a pin that is flown in space and is awarded by an astronaut. Craig Schulz, the youngest son of the late cartoonist, said his father called the partnership with NASA one of the two most important things in his career. The other was his service in World War II. The 600-pound polyurethane statue depicts Schulz's well-known beagle standing on the moon, donning a spacesuit and holding a helmet.

Snoopy is making the rounds of museums and galleries in an exhibit entitled “Snoopy WWI Flying Ace.” Despite occasional claims in promotions, no original art is on the wall: all the strips are “digitally reproduced from original art.” Copies, in other words. Snoopy first took to the skies in his Sopwith Camel on October 10, 1965 (it sez here on the wall plaque) and subsequently appeared in 400 strips over 34 years, the last published on November 28, 1999. Although some readers saw an allusion to Vietnam in the Flying Ace strips, Schulz didn’t. At first. Later, though, when he saw the possible connection, he stopped sending Snoopy into the blue for a while. “We were suddenly realizing that this was such a monstrous war,” Schulz said once, “ — it didn’t seem funny. So I stopped doing it.” Snoopy took flight again some years later, but not into combat. “I didn’t do him fighting the Red Baron,” Schulz said. “Mostly, it was sitting in a French café flirting with the waitress.”

The latest Peanuts reprint from Fantagraphics takes the strip through 1972 (325 6.5x8-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $28.99), the 11th volume, now at the brink of the half-way point in the publication project.  This volume’s Foreword is a short interview with Kristin Chenoweth, the “pint-sized” actress who won a Tony playing Charlie Brown’s sister Sally in the 1998-99 revival of the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” She never met Schulz, but he sent her flowers when she won the Tony “and told me I was born to play Sally.” The only other comics character she aspires to play is Betty Boop. In this volume, Snoopy maintains his membership in the Beagle Book Club and betrays an admiration for Helen Sweetstory’s series of books about the six Bunny-Wunnies, and he assumes various “Joe” identities — Joe Cool, Joe Eskimo, Joe Family, Joe French, Joe Rock, the “world famous swimmer” who, immediately upon contact with the water, sinks. Like a rock.

NY NO-COMICS CON?

Laurel Maury at npr.org said he walked something like 200 feet into February’s New York Comic Con without seeing a single comic book. He saw “booths for video games, regular books, Dungeons and Dragons, sure. Toys, everywhere. But this year,” he continued, “the four-year-old NY Comic Con seemed to be about everything but comic books.” Instead, he saw premiers of TV shows, t-shirts, corsets, vinyl dolls, messenger bags “even doorbells.”  Said Maury: “It is increasingly clear that big ‘cons,’ as comic book conventions are called, are no longer the comic book geek's natural habitat — they're places to see and be seen, where Hollywood and the gaming industry try to get products into the hands of early adopters.” The New York Times, which famously doesn't have a comics section, had a booth. "We're here because a lot of people are here," the man behind the table told Maury.

 Maury tried to analyze the situation: “Part of the problem is that kids don't read comics anymore. It takes about 15 minutes to read a comic book. At $2.95 to $3.95 a pop, that's a pricey quarter-hour for a 10-year-old who can get his mom to spring for a video game that will keep him occupied for two months. These days,” he went on, “kids who read comics tend to buy graphic novel collections, and the kids reading manga lean toward manga journals like Shojo Beat. So selling comic books is now about video-game tie-ins, toys and movies,” Maury concluded: “It's as if, just at the moment the comic book is gaining appreciation as a real art form, it's losing its vitality.”

HARD TIMES IN THE COMICS

The spate, lately, of layoffs at newspapers inspired events in at least two comic strips. In the venerable Brenda Starr, the feisty and glamorous redhead reporter was “furloughed,” said Alan Gardner at his DailyCartoonist.com, quoting Mary Schmich, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune who writes the strip, who told Editor & Publisher: “The budget cuts inside Starr’s fictional newsroom reflect the bottom line at real-life newspapers, which are slashing staffs and  freezing salaries in the face of steep declines in advertising and circulation.” She added: "As far-fetched as some of the plots in Brenda are, I do like to keep it topical." She notes Starr's life "is a fantasy with nuggets of reality tossed in. But even fantasies need some grounding in reality, and right now, economic crisis is the reality that colors everything else at pretty much every newspaper."

In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, likewise inspired by the current blight in newsrooms, arranged for Rick Redfern, his newspaper reporter character, to lose his job at the Washington Post, where he’d worked for 33 years. No one said much when the strip retailed Redfern’s fate in 2008, but when the sequence was recycled this year at the end of February, the Washington Post censored the strip, dropping it on a Wednesday; then, embarrassed by its own gaffe and realizing, as Tim Reid said at timesonline.com, “that it risked looking thin-skinned, the newspaper ran the final three segments and issued an apology. It blamed the initial decision on ‘an internal miscommunication of a sort Rick Redfern would no doubt appreciate.’” Probably, some supersensitive Post editor thought it best not to call attention to the industry’s current predicament, which is manifesting itself in the closing of newspapers, massive chain-wide layoffs, and other manifestations of dire financial ailments.

GOOD ALBEIT IRONIC NEWS

Here’s some good albeit ironic news: Editor & Publisher notes that at United Media Syndicate, which  distributes opinion columns and games as well as comic strips, profits jumped 36% in the fourth quarter last year, the same quarter that Scripps, United Media’s parent, offered the Rocky Mountain News for sale, closing it in February 2009 because it couldn’t afford to continue losing money in the newspaper division. United Media’s revenue for the last 2008 quarter increased 20% to $30.9 million, compared with $25.7 million in the year-ago period, Scripps said.“Scripps attributed the United Media profit increase to the decision by the ABC television network to air 13 ‘Peanuts’ specials in the quarter. United Media syndicates Peanuts, Dilbert, Marmaduke and about 150 other comics and features.” You’d think — wouldn’t you? — that an advantage to being part of a huge communications enterprise is that the profitable elements in the operation would support the unprofitable parts, seeing them through such hard times as ours. Not at Scripps.

Scripps, which owns 16 newspapers around the country and 10 TV stations, told its legions of employees that they can expect pay cuts soon and a suspension of retirement benefits, reported David Milstead of the Rocky Mountain News, the only Scripps property to escape the cuts (because it died soon after Milstead’s article was published). Senior managers and corporate executives already took pay cuts of 5-15 percent in January. That’s a switch: in these belt-tightening times, the higher the rank, the less probable a belt.

And one more happy economic note: according to the Denver Post’s account, Action Comics No. 1 recently sold for $317,200 in an online auction. The previous owner, who bought it when he was 9 in
1950, paid 35 cents for it. Only 100 copies of this old funnybook are said to exist.

GLORIOUS HUMBUG

And now, let's talk about the glorious Fantagraphics reprint of the entire run of Harvey Kurtzman’s satiric masterpiece, the little magazine entitled Humbug, that was published from August 1957 until its sad demise 11 issues later in October 1958. The glory of the project is first evident in the package: a slip-cased two-volume set, each glistening shiny-cover volume approximately 230 7x10-inch pages, most with a second color throughout (reproducing exactly, in other words, the pages of the original publication).

In addition to including every page of the fabled magazine, these two volumes also include a long (35-pages plus) interview conducted by John Benson in December 2005 with Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, the two surviving Humbug partners (Will Elder is gone; Jack Davis, who survives, was not a partner although he contributed voluminously), an introduction by Benson and Gary Groth that rehearses the magazine’s history (it was doomed at the start by its smaller size and low cover price, which combined to baffle retailers who didn’t know where to display it and weren’t realizing enough profit to make it worth their while to overcome the inherent limitations) and discusses the contributions of the partners and the founder, Kurtzman, a section of annotations that explain the now-forgotten cultural events of the 1950s that Humbug so copiously satirized, and illustrated notes about how the pages of this treasured antique were restored.

 "Restoration” is the operative term. Humbug was printed on the cheapest, lumpiest newsprint of the day, and the quality of the artwork and typography was often degraded by the paper’s capacity for absorbing and then spreading the ink. The reprint pages do not just “copy” the original publication, page-by-page: the original pages have been computer-restored by Fantagraphics’ "Production Maestro” Paul Baresh, who removed blemishes and flaws — no easy task considering that some of the artwork and type overprinted a second color. No wonder it has taken so long to bring this project to fruition: its publication date was initially over a year ago, but Fantagraphics' pursuit of perfection doubtless delayed the production until just now. Hoorah.

Benson and Groth describe Humbug as “the strongest, most sustained run of satire in Kurtzman’s whole career ... [at first] unusually topical for him.” Thanks to the everlasting invention of the satirical artists who believed in the project and pooled their money to finance it, Humbug came awfully close and then surpassed the objective, “their artistry transcending the topicality of their satiric targets.” In Humbug we find the predictable parodies of movies and TV —  shorter now, and therefore more biting  — and spoofs of advertising, but we also encounter the blithe spirit of controlled lunacy for the pure sake of antic comedy. In No. 9, for instance, we read, in large type on a right-hand page: “The following four pages are like nothing you have ever read in a magazine before.” This announcement is followed by two pages that are completely blank except for a line of italic type at the bottom of the second page that says, “Continued on page 31,” and when we get to page 31, we find it is also entirely blank except for a screaming headline: “April Fool!” This issue, oddly, is denominated the May issue on the cover, but the indicia say, reassuringly, that it’s the April 1958 issue. But “April Fool” would work, actually, at any time of year.

A somewhat longer (and illustrated) version of this review is available to paying subscribers at www.RCHarvey.com/Rants & Raves, Opus 240.

VIZ BIZ

Icv.2 reports that Viz Media, North America’s leading manga publisher, has announced a restructuring plan that includes layoffs. A statement from Viz Media CEO Hidemi Fukuhara: “Viz Media is in the process of refining its focus and is restructuring to adjust to changing industry and financial market realities. Viz feels confident that with these changes, the company will be more streamlined to face the current economic climate.”

MORE MADNESS

 MAD magazine, which, for some inexplicable reason, doubtless Kurtzman-induced, always names itself in capital letters, has been reduced from monthly publication to quarterly. Another sign of the pervasiveness of the Great Recession. Henceforth, we assume MAD will be simply Mad. In passing along this intelligence, Jonathan Bresman, erstwhile senior editor at MAD, announced that March 27 was his last day in that position. The last monthly issue will be the benchmark No. 500, which will appear in April. The Madhouse may be slowly crumbling into the  economic miasma, but its editor, John Ficarra, is scarcely wallowing in a slough of despond. Explaining the tectonic shift to George Gene Gustines at the New York Times, Ficarra was nearly jocular in tone (or is that jugular?): “The feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD  is funny. So we decided to just publish those.” Typical Madness, in other words. A grace note for the transition. Nicely done.