Rants & Raves

RIP HAYWIRE

Rip Haywire, the sometimes-square-jawed hero of the strip named after him, commits deeds of derring-do in the manner of Olde Timey adventure strip heroes but at the rate of one adventure a week instead of one lasting six months in the mode of yore. Rip Haywire is one of the strips picked up by United Media through the offices of its (now former) acquisitions editor, Ted Rall, who sought to revitalize newspaper comic strips by injecting off-beat comedy from cartoonists who normally ply the waters of the alternative press or waft about on the Web. Concocted by Dan Thompson and launched January 5 this year, strip rehearses the adventures of the eponymous Rip (great name), a soldier of fortune (an unabashed mercenary, it develops) in the classic mold, “who lives for danger,” accompanied on his travails by his cowardly dog, TNT, and his “venomous ex-girlfriend Cobra,” who, like her former beau, is rendered in geometric visual shorthand — simple lines, simple shapes. Rall found the artwork “stunning” and extolled the strip’s appeals: “Blending melodrama with deadpan humor, Rip Haywire is not only a loving update of thrilling golden-age comics like Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, but is also a witty satire of the action genre in general. Thompson’s masterpiece spoofs all manner of macho icons from action movie heroes like Schwrzenegger to tv shows like ‘24.’ I was instantly hooked,” he concludes.

And so was I when I read a brief description of the strip as a silly send-up of the adventure strip genre.   But I was put off somewhat at first by what seemed to be confused story lines. Each daily installment blurted out a fragment of a story but seemed to abandon plot whenever a joke demanded it. Eventually, however, I figured out Thompson’s contrivance. Plot and continuity are of no concern to him: his objective is to arrive at a punchline that ribs adventure strips and action heroes, and “story” in this context serves merely as a kind of motif, the atmosphere in which such jokes might be made. “Atmosphere” requires nothing resembling a story. Atmosphere is the trappings, the accouterments of action and adventure. To this end, Thompson gives us a couple of panels to establish appropriately exciting atmospherics, and then he springs the joke. The jokes are sometimes lame, and too many of them depend upon TNT and his addiction to kibbles and bits. Dogs aren’t Thompson’s satiric target — are they? But it’s fun to hear the rattle of tiny tin drums and the blat of a bugle calling us to arms and adventure once more on the funnies page.

S.W.A.M.P. SQUAD

E&P reports that longtime Rocky Mountain News cartoonist Drew Litton, one of the last two sports cartoonists still published, announced in early July that he is considering debuting a Web comic that would combine "the Man from U.N.C.L.E. with the Big Easy meets Lethal Weapon." When the News died in February, Litton closed the door on a 26-year career with the paper and then started his own Web site, drewlitton.com, as well as a freelance business, Littoonz Studios. His sports cartoons are still in syndication with United Media. About his latest plan, Litton wrote in the INDenver Times website on July 3: "There is a whole new model for doing a comic strip outside of print media these days, one that I find very exciting and a bit freeing. Cartoonists who are syndicated are often kept on very tight leashes by editors and publishers who get a bit paranoid when they get a single phone call about something that has upset a reader. ... On the internet there are no such restrictions. The problem is monetizing the strip."

His new project, tentatively entitled S.W.A.M.P. Squad, will be set in the Louisiana bayou, he said, "since I love the setting and the landscape." The chief characters are an alligator named Grubbs and an armadillo named Hicks. Preliminary sketches can be found at Litton’s website: look for CreatorsIncubator and scroll down to July 5. And if you scroll around the blog, you can find Litton quoting from a new book, Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who writes: “Everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty, they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back please.’”  To which Litton adds: “I remember early on in my career as a staff artist at the El Paso Times, my cousin dropped by so we could head out to the movies after work. I was just cleaning up my drawing board, picking up scraps of paper and paste and scissors and cartoons, and he just stood there, shaking his head. ‘Kindergarten,’ he said, ‘ — you never left kindergarten.’ He was right, and I want you to know I’m quite proud of that fact!”

BREAKING DOWN BREAKDOWNS

The Irish novelist James Joyce, whose medium was words, once, in a flight of linguistic fancy, wrote: Nobirdy avair soar anywing to eagle it. If not high praise, at least acknowledgment of extraordinary achievement. And we may say the same about Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&%*!  (76 10x14-inch pages, many in color; hardcover,  Pantheon, $27.50). My invocation of Joyce is neither facetious nor arbitrary: Joyce, the inventor of stream of consciousness writing, was a formalist, unabashed and unrepentant; ditto, with a vengeance, Spiegelman, but with pictures, not words. And Breakdowns is the par excellence exemplar of his preoccupation. This dubious relationship between formalists has scarcely evaded Spiegelman’s attention: the subtitle of his book echoes that of  Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Breakdowns is part reincarnation: one part reprints the original 1978 48-page book of that title that was almost accidentally — and certainly perversely — published by Belier Press, otherwise a specialist in fetish fantasies, which became the publisher-of-record by paying the printer who had printed the book that Nostalgia Press could no longer afford to pay for; the other part bookends the original publication with two Spiegelman specialties, a prefatory 20-page  autobiographical comic strip and a postscriptive 8-page autobiographical essay.

Spiegelman’s oft-professed love for comics as an artistic medium probably accounts partially for his overriding interest in its “forms.” As he told Dave Welch last fall at Powells.com, the strips in Breakdowns came “from an interest primarily in How pages are made. What is the stuff of comics that makes up its comics-ness?” The book’s title refers to the essential cartooning act of breaking a narrative down into discrete pictorial “moments.”  As a demonstration of the capabilities of the comics artform, the book is usually superior. And the demonstrations are not the stuff of dry classroom lectures: they are entertaining. One-to-three pages long, they’re short and quippy, a little like blackout playlets but often without punchlines.

I spend a couple thousand more words explicating Spiegelman in my online magazine, Rants & Raves, which you can find at the Usual Place (below); the Spiegelman essay at Opus 242. It will also appear at full length in the 300^th “anniversary edition” of The Comics Journal, out early in the fall.

A SHRINE TO SUPERMAN

In Cleveland’s Glenville, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held July 11 at 10622 Kimberly Avenue to dedicate the house as a shrine to Superman: the character’s co-creator Jerry Siegel was living here when, one hot night in the summer of 1933 or 1934 (I say 1933), he re-imagined the villain of his January 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” as a hero. Siegel’s widow, Joanne, who, as a teenager, had modeled for Joe Shuster’s visualization of Lois Lane, was on hand to give a short talk. The house was dilapidated to the point of near collapse when novelist Brad Meltzer saw the place a few years ago while researching his 2008 novel The Book of Lies. The place has been much rehabilitated since, thanks to Meltzer, who helped the city’s Siegel and Shuster Society stage an auction of original art to raise money to fix the falling down parts of the building.

Members of the Siegel and Shuster families flew in from all over the country for the occasion. A plaque explaining the significance of the site is affixed to a brand new burnished steel fence in front of the house; on another part of the fence is a shield emblazoned with the familiar “S” from Superman’s chest. The building a couple blocks away in which Shuster lived when he envisioned his friend’s concept is no longer extant, but another fence there bears another plaque of explanation. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Michael San Giacomo, whose columns had sparked the formation of the Siegel and Shuster Society to save the Siegel home, several hundred fans, many of whom were attending the weekend’s Screaming Tiki Cleveland Supercon, stood in the street in front of the Kimberly house during a brief but torrential rain storm to witness the historic event.

MR. DARCY, VAMPYRE

Publishers Weekly’s Calvin Reid couldn’t help himself: he injected a mild note of wonderment into his report about the impending arrival of a new graphic novel: “It had to happen,” he said, continuing: “Following the success of Quirk Book's best-selling transformation of Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice into, well, a zombie novel, Del Rey Books announced plans to turn the result, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, into a graphic novel” to be published in 2010. Zombies and vampires festoon the newsstands — and now, the bookstalls. Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, Amanda Gange’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennett’s beau/husband reveals his true nature (vampirism is the reason he’s so moody), arrives in early August. Then, still plowing up Jane Austen’s ground, comes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters in which, quoth Carol Memmott in USA Today, Austen’s Colonel Brandon has tentacles growing out of his chin. Coming in December, a pair of Austen enhancements: Darcy’s Hunger: A Vampire Retelling of Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice by Regina Jeffers and Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford. And Grange is working on a Pride and Prejudice prequel about Darcy the vampire. Next, I suppose, the graphic novel versions of them all. It is inevitable: writers and publishers are desperate to find things to write about that won’t make some cluster of concerned humanity angry enough to protest and rush, frothing at the mouth, to the barricades with picket signs. The undead, presumably, can’t protest. And vampires? Well, they’re always out for blood anyhow. But why pick on proper little Jane Austen? She’s probably throwing up in her reticule.

YOE BOOKS

Craig Yoe’s books will, henceforth, be issued under a new imprint from IDW, starting this fall with The Art of Ditko, a large format book, and The Complete Milt Gross Life Story and Comic Books. A press release from IDW says the Ditko book “features little-seen stories and original artwork and an introduction by Stan Lee. Milt Gross sports a fold-Introduction by Mad magazine's Al Jaffee and scarce ephemera and comics.” Said Yoe of the future for Yoe Books: "I'm looking forward to spitting on my hands, pulling on my briefs, and tag-teaming with IDW. Together, we're going to wrestle some great books to the ground. With my good looks and IDW's beefy muscle, we make a winning team." I’m looking forward to this smack-down too.

SPONGEBOB TENPANTS

SpongeBob SquarePants, the animated so-square-he’s-cool fry cook, celebrated his 10^th anniversary with 50 hours of weekend programming, starting Friday, July 17. Conjured up by Stephen Hillenburg in 1996 after his “Rocco’s Modern Life” was cancelled, “SpongeBob” debuted on Nickelodeon May 1, 1999 but the official premiere was July 17. “It’s a show about a sponge,” said an incredulous Hillenburg to USA Today’s Gary Strauss, “ — I thought we’d get one season.” It’s been the top-ranking kids show since 2002 and appears in 170 overseas markets. “We were just trying to make something we’d want to watch and laugh at,” said Hillenburg. Tom Kenny, who voices the character, agrees. (He told reporter Jayme Deerwester that he bases SpongeBob’s rubbery high-pitched vocalizing “on an angry dwarf. For the trademark laugh, he hits his throat while saying ‘ah.’”) Nickelodeon prexy Cyma Zarghami, who was among the network’s execs who screened the 1999 pilot, knew “it was special. It broke the creative mold.” Zarghami predicts another ten good years for the porous protagonist, which is fine with Kenny: “I couldn’t dream up a gig this fun,” he said. “I feel like I’ve won the lottery.”

COLLUSION IN THE COMICS

I suspect Darrin Bell in Candorville lately of colluding with Stephen Pastis in Pearls Before Swine as they both tried by satiric means to make a case for the value of comics in newspapers, attacking the bailout industry at the same time. If they’re not colluding (in a nice way, of course), how else can we explain the appearance of Dennis the Menace in both strips on the same date, each strip offering an aspect of the same gag?

 

By the end of the sequence in Candorville, the attack has shifted from the abuse of bailouts to the alleged cause of comics’ losing readers — the tepid nature of comic strip comedy — with testimony from website comics characters, who tend to be less timid in their hilarities.

Bell’s criticism of newspapers’ treatment of comics was more direct earlier in the series when Doctor Manhattan from The Watchmen murmurs observations about newspapers and comics as he moves through time. In “February 1895,” he is watching Joseph Pulitzer adding to his paper “the very first comic strip [in order] to tempt young readers to buy his newspaper.” In April 2009, he watches himself “explain to a congressional committee why the newspaper industry is dying.” In March 2009, he watches “an editor who just dropped a full page of comics wonder why young people won’t buy his paper.” 

HALLMARK AND THE HOUSE OF PEANUTS

When 2010 dawns, Hallmark and the House of Peanuts will hook up for a year-long celebration, offering a host of exclusive 60^th anniversary products, according to a sourceless clipping sent in by R&R operative Ed Black. The theme of the festivities, “Peanuts Then & Now,” will highlight the evolution in the appearance of the characters over the decades — from  the early Snoopy with smaller snout and bigger ears, say, and the initial Linus with bushy bangs and a bulging forehead. Another of the partners in this marketing conspiracy is CVS, which gets started early, this fall, as the exclusive retail outlet through the holiday season; then in January, Hallmark will give front-of-store placement to plush, giftware, keepsakes, ornaments and other Peanuts products (Peanuts is promulgated by more than 150 licensees).

MAINTAINING, UNMAINTAINED

Maintaining, the comic strip about the life of a biracial teenager, ended its daily run August 1, creator Nate Creekmore told E&P. Said he: "Unfortunately, Maintaining was never much of a financial success and recent market conditions have only exacerbated the situation. Universal Press Syndicate has chosen to opt out of its contract with my strip and I’ve decided to discontinue the production of the strip in order to concentrate on other projects.” 

Too bad: the strip sounds like just what we need to prolong that conversation about race that Prez Obama has started with his Harvard prof, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the cop who arrested him on his own front porch. Beginning May 7, 2007, Maintaining focused on the "peculiarities and absurdities" in the daily life of Marcus, whose father is black and mother is white. "Marcus and his best friend Anton maneuver through high school and the world with Marcus as the temperamental, inquisitive explorer and Anton as the slightly cynical, level-headed balance," according to Creekmore's official site, Creekification.com. "In the two years the Times Union has run Maintaining, some readers have called jokes poking fun at stereotypes reverse racism," wrote Tracy Ormsbee on the Comics Blog. "Others praised the strip for being 'brave' and 'right on.'" While with Universal Press, Maintaining ran in less than 20 newspapers — and had peaked at about 40, according to UPS' John Glynn, VP/rights and acquisitions.

 

MEETING THE CRISIS: PRODUCT PLACEMENT

In another attempt to cope with the on-going economic crisis in newspapering, Ruben Bolling is auctioning off a product placement in a future installment of his altie strip, Tom the Dancing Bug, according to E&P. In an open letter to “Advertisers, Marketers and Promoters of All Types,” Bolling wrote: "Imagine your product featured in an authentic 'alternative' comic strip that is read by the most desirable demographics: educated young professionals; sophisticated internet users; upwardly mobile newspaper readers; and discerning australopithecine enthusiasts. Your product will be featured not in an ad, to which [the above demographic groups] are notoriously resistant, but within the artistic framework of the comic strip itself!" All bids must be submitted by e-mail to tomdbug@gmail.com. Proceeds will be donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists (which sounds suspiciously like a self-help operation — no, no, no: I’m kidding).

In Mother Goose and Grimm, beginning July 31 and continuing for the next week, Mike Peters partook of the same inspiration: every day, he builds to a punchline that is the name of a product. Nicely devised.

SHREDS AND PATCHES OF NEWS

The author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, due in bookstores in October, is offering a sample chapter, without charge, saith Editor & Publisher; to get yours, according to the DailyCartoonist, just write lookingforcalvinandhobbes@gmail.com. ... The New York Times Graphic Novel Best Seller List can be found here. Updated weekly, I believe. ... Hoping to restore the Sunday funnies to its former glory in the days of yore, a clutch of Minnesota based comic groups — the International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic, and Altered Esthetics gallery — have collaborated to produce an oversized 48-page newspaper comics section called Big Funny. The inaugural publication, saith E&P, features artwork by over 40 artists including Kirk Anderson. For a full list of participating artists, visit the website ... The art of Basil Wolverton, called “the van Gogh of gross-out” by New York Times’ Holland Cotter (who is smitten, no doubt, by the iconic Lena the Hyena, Wolverton’s entry in Al Capp’s contest for portraits of a colossally ugly woman in Li’l Abner), is on display through August 14 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district. ...Anime,Japan’s distinctively styled animated cartoons, are “in crisis” in Japan, reports Jonathan Gadir at radioaustralianews.net.au. The culprit, apparently, is the usual one — the Internet. Anime is popular worldwide, but many addicts get their fixes by downloading from the Web for which anime creators inJapan receive no monetary recompense.

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON - NO LONGER ABOUT COMICS

Comics, historically viewed as the unwanted bastard child of the visual and verbal arts, have achieved a startling respectability as the “graphic novel” gained shelf space in the nation’s chain bookstores, but in San Diego at the Comic-Con International, July 23-26, the bastard is barely acknowledged amid the annual riot of other detritus of popular culture — movies, toys, video games, tv shows, movie stars, action figures, fans in outlandish costumes, and, yes, movies. USA Today wrapped up its week-long coverage of the geek fest extravaganza with its July 27 issue, introducing the story as follows: “Comic-Con 2009 drew 125,000 fans, who traveled many miles and waited in line for hours just for glimpses of favorite stars and sneak peeks at movies, tv series and, of course, comics.”

 Of course “comics.” But that sentence is the only one in a page-and-a-half of coverage that mentions comics. The only appearance I saw in the paper of any comic book-related information was a blurb promoting the Superman serial running in DC’s Wednesday Comics, a weekly publication of 15 “newspaper-sized comic strips.” At usatoday.com, each week’s new Superman installment is featured (written by John Arcudi; drawn by Lee Bermejo with painterly colors by Barbara Ciardo). The fourth of 12 episodes was up the week of August 2; the entire run will not be completed until the end of September (and “back views” are available if you want to catch up).

USA Today’s wrap-up on the Con, like all the other stories the preceding week, focused on movie stars and movies and tv shows: the first page of the paper featured a photograph of Scarlett Johansson. Entertainment Weekly did no better in its August 7 issue: 3 pages of photos of movie stars. No mention of comic books. Or graphic novels. Or cartoonists. Or, even, comic book publishers, including Marvel, which is also in the movie business. Sandy Eggo is now seen by Hollywood moguls as The Place to premiere snips and clips of forthcoming movies: an enthusiastic reception by the fans at Comic-Con translates later into a box office triumph.

Even if comics take much much less display space these days in the cavernous halls of the Con, publishers and producers of the four-color print fantasies often hold off making major announcements until the Con gives them a suitably massive platform. Dark Horse, for example, announced that it has acquired the rights to produce new comic book series using classic Gold Key characters. Newspaper comics were present at the Con, albeit in tiny niches rather than monstrous floor displays. Editor & Publisher reported that the National Cartoonists Society again had a booth, and our own Universal Uclick’s GoComics brought several cartoonists to hold forth in its booth. The featured product at the GoComics booth was Stan Lee’s latest creation: a digital comic backed by Disney called Time Jumper, it consists of serialized five-minute episodes with built-in cliffhangers that will be released every two weeks through December.

The Con restricted registrations to 125,000 again this year for the third or fourth time, leading to the annual speculation that the Comic-Con might move to larger facilities in Los Angeles or Las Vegas. “We can't accommodate the people we need to,” Comic-Con marketing director David Glanzer complained in Variety, the entertainment industry’s journal: “(This year) we had a wait list of exhibitors in excess of 300. We sold out before the doors even opened.” Said Variety’s Gregory Ellwood: “As the event has exploded in popularity over the past decade, organizers have found it increasingly hard to ignore the logistical limitations presented by wrangling more than 125,000 attendees into the San Diego Convention Center , where the show is booked through 2012. From fire-code violations to body-odor issues, overcrowding is the complaint on everybody's lips.” My guess is that the Con won’t move any time soon: it’s run by amateurs who’ve grown professional in only one venue with only one event, and venue and event and experience are bound together. The Con’s organizers aren’t likely to venture into the unknown -- Los Angeles or Las Vegas -- where they can no longer rely upon a sizeable attendance from San Diego citizenry.

70 YEARS OF THE PHANTOM

Hermes Press has announced that it will collect the complete run of daily and Sunday The Phantom newspaper strips, beginning in September with The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies: Volume One 1936-1938 (320 9x12-inch pages, b/w; landscape format, $39.99). This volume will include a 16-page color section with an introduction by comics historian Ron Goulart. The full project will collect over 70 years of The Phantom, from the first Lee Falk and Ray Moore strips to the Sy Barry strips from 1994.

MAJOR GRANT FOR OSU'S CARTOON LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Jean Schulz, widow of  Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, gave $1 million to Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University and promised to match an additional $2.5 million in a “challenge” to others. Schulz’s gift will support the renovation of Sullivant Hall, the future home of the world’s most comprehensive academic research facility dedicated to documenting printed cartoon art. According to a press release from OSU, “the planned renovation will provide 40,000 gross square feet of space for the new Cartoon Library and Museum that will include a spacious reading room for researchers, three museum-quality galleries, and expanded storage with state-of-the-art environmental and security controls,” much of which is necessitated by Mort Walker’s gift to the Library and Museum of the holdings of his now defunct International Musem of Comic Art.

“Due to its outstanding reputation, growing collection and a surge of scholarly interest in comics and cartoons, the Cartoon Library and Museum — formerly known as the Cartoon Research Library — is a destination location for researchers from around the world. With the addition of the IMCA’s extensive permanent collection, the Cartoon Library and Museum now houses more than 400,000 works of original cartoon and comics art, 35,000 books, 51,000 serial titles, 2,800 linear feet of manuscript materials, and 2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages. Moving into its new home from its current location, a 6,800-square-foot basement north of Mershon Auditorium, will allow more of the Collection to be displayed and readily accessible.”

DISTRIBUTING TRACTS

 A Christian couple in Singapore, the smallest nation in the Malaysian peninsula in Southeast Asia, were arrested January 30, 2008, and went on trial, finally, last spring, charged with distributing seditious and objectionable publications to at least two Muslims. Elena Chong of the Straits Times reports that the couple, who attended Berean Christian Church at the time, also face a charge of possessing such seditious tracts Who is Allah? The Pilgrimage, Allah Had No Son, Are Roman Catholics Christians? Why is Mary Crying? and The Little Bride, all comics-style pamphlets produced by Chick Publications, the notoriously fundamentalist Christian proselytizer. Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, the wife, apparently also distributed the comics tracts to twenty of her Muslim colleagues over the past 20 years. Asked by the Deputy Public Prosecutor if the purpose of her exercise was to convert her Muslim colleagues, she replied: “I am sowing the Gospel seed, but it is God that converts.”

Although the couple has recently been replenishing their stock by ordering online, they claim as their defense that they thought it was safe to distribute those tracts as they were sold openly in Christian bookstores in Singapore. Reporter Chong explained: “Sedition laws are meant to ensure racial and religious harmony, and this is the first time such a case has gone to trial. ... The prosecution asserts that the couple knew or had reason to believe that the contents had a seditious tendency to promote feelings of ill-will and  hostility between Christians and non-Christians in Singapore. If convicted for sedition, they each face a fine of up to $5,000 and/or a jail term of up to three years on each [of three] charge[s].” Under the provisions of the country’s Undesirable Publications Act, they could face a fine of up to $5,000 and a jail term of up to 12 months. Possession is punishable with a fine of up to $2,000 and/or a jail term of up to 18 months.

CELEBRITY COMICS

After his initial success as a comic book character during the presidential campaign, Barack Obama is showing up with alarming frequency as the heroic protagonist in four-color fiction. Two from Devil’s Due Publishing: Drafted, “DDP’s original sci-fi drama returns starring Barack Obama, and Barack the Barbarian, which has a variant cover of “Red Sarah” Palin. IDW offers Barack Obama: The Road to the White House (right). And from Mercury Comics comes an Alex Ross poster showing Barack Obama ripping off his shirt in the classic Clark-Kent-to-Superman pose, disclosing under his shirt blue tights emblazoned with a giant red “O” the center of which is yellow. Now that the comic book industry has discovered the market value of political celebrity, titles in this vein threaten to become a cascade. Bluewater continues its exploitation of famous femmes with Female Force: Caroline Kennedy, a title conjured up, doubtless, when Caroline Kennedy was in the running to fill Hillary Clinton’s senate seat, but now — who cares? Then here’s Emotional Content comics with its variation on the celebrity theme, a 180-page “biographical novel,” Mother Theresa. I’m not quite sure whether this next title fits onto this band wagon, but I’m sure there’s a band wagon somewhere for it: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a 320-page tome, “the hit of the 2009 New York Comic Con, [featuring] the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action!” What’s next then? A zombie Barack Obama?