Rants & Raves

IRREDEEMABLE

Mark Waid’s latest endeavor, Irredeemable, is the third of his studied explorations of the nature of superheroism in comics. Says Waid in the book’s afterword: “Kingdom Come was about the ethical price of heroism. Empire was about a world where heroism just flat-out didn’t exist. Irredeemable is, in a way, my third and most complex chapter on the cost of superheroics.” In this one, a superhero simply goes bad;

he changes from undiluted Good to rampant Evil and turns on his superheroic teammates. The book opens with one of the Plutonian’s rampages: he attacks one of his costumed cohorts in his home, boiling off his flesh and that of his wife and children, leaving only skeletons where once there were people. Two weeks later, the Plutonian is inexplicably saving the West Coast in an arena-like confrontation with a giant robot. When the Plutonian triumphs, the crowd cheers as if watching an athletic contest won by their favorite team.

Then the scene shifts and we see some of the Plutonian’s teammates question one of their number, Samsara, who saw something go awry in the Plutonian’s eyes. We see it, too: in the midst of an adoring crowd, the Plutonian hears a smart-mouth teenager saying, “Show-off jerk — just a flippin’ underwear pervert.” Suddenly the Plutonian’s happy face dissolves into something vaguely piqued. The team members resolve to try to find out as much about the Plutonian as they can, hoping in the details of his life to discover what went wrong with him. Suddenly he shows up and attacks; they disperse, and the Plutonian mutters, “Perfect."

Waid’s afterword sheds some light on these goings-on, which otherwise leave us as baffled as the Plutonian’s buddies are: “No one simply turns ‘evil’ one day,” Wait explains. “Villainy isn’t a light switch. The road to darkness is filled with moments of betrayal, of loss, of disappointment, and of superhuman weakness. In the case of the Plutonian, there were sidekicks who sold his secrets. There were friends who preyed too often on his selflessness and enemies who showed him unsettling truths about himself. Irredeemable takes us down that path of transformation in terrifying detail,” he goes on. The book will explain how the Plutonian came to this. “What makes a hero irredeemable?”

Postscript:

The first issue of Mark Waid’s Irredeemable ends with a long admiring diatribe by Waid’s friend and fellow writer Grant Morrison, who expresses his approval of Waid’s “massive turns and reveals in every single scene.” Morrison is talking about the mechanics of a page-turner: how does the storyteller get us to keep turning pages? With “turns” and “reveals ”— plot twists and the steady divulging of detail. Every twist of the plot surprises us and makes us wonder where it will go next. But pure suspense, the skilled storyteller knows, is not enough to keep his readers captive; he must, from time to time, assuage the suspense by offering tiny dribbles of explanation. This maneuver keeps us turning the pages: we want to know what’s going to happen, and we feel confident from the experience so far that the storyteller will eventually tell us what we want to know.

All of which is true. But Morrison leaves out the purely human element. A storyteller’s skill as a mechanic is important, but he must also create characters about whom we care.

ARNOLD ROTH: HALL OF FAMER

A press release from the Society of Illustrators announced that Arnold Roth, famed freelance illustrator and cartoonist, is one of five new inductees elected to the Society’s Hall of Fame. For 50 years, Roth’s work has appeared regularly in nearly every major American magazine from TV Guide and Time to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. Contemporary illustrator Paul Davis and posthumous honorees Mario Cooper, Laurence Fellows and Herbert Morton Stoops were also inducted at a black-tie dinner at the Society’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on June 25.

Throughout his career, Roth has created memorably antic cartoons, advertisements, album covers and book jackets. He wrote and illustrated six books from 1966 to 1998, including Pick A Peck of Puzzles, A Comick Book of Sports, A Comick Book of Pets and Poor Arnold's Almanac, the complete syndicated series of a newspaper comic strip he produced 1959-61 and again 1989-90. He also illustrated books by George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. and created dust jackets for the John Updike books Bech at Bay, Bech is Back and Bech: A Book.

 

In the late 1950s, Roth’s cartoons began appearing in Playboy, which published 10 multi-page installments of his “An Illustrated History of Sex” series in the late 1970s. He was a regular contributor of cartoon features to Punch from the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, and had multi-page features in almost every one of the first 25 issues of National Lampoon (1970-1972), until his last satirized the editors of the magazine. Roth also did a stint as an editorial cartoonist and won the Reuben Award at the National Cartoonists Society, of which he was president 1983-85. He’s been recognized previously by the Society of Illustrators with numerous Silver and Gold Stars. Roth’s solo exhibition “Free Lance, A Fifty Year Retrospective” traveled to Philadelphia, Columbus, San Francisco, New York City, London and Basel, Switzerland, 2001–2004, appearing in print in a Fantagraphics book with the same title (and an introduction by Yrs Trly).

TIM JACKSON

For the second year in a row, reported Editor & Publisher, Chicago Defender editorial cartoonist Tim Jackson received the Wilbert L. Holloway Award for Best Editorial Cartoon from the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), also known as the Black Press of America. A Dayton, Ohio, native, Jackson began drawing cartoons dealing with social issues when he was still in high school. A 1985 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he joined the staff of the Defender in 1999 as a layout artist and began drawing cartoons on local issues for the paper the following year. In addition to his work at the Defender, Jackson draws weekly cartoons for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Madison (Wis.) Times; Capital Outlook in Tallahassee, Fla.; the Cincinnati Herald and Dayton Defender in Ohio; Northern Kentucky Herald; and the magazine Urban Life Northwest, based in Seattle. From 2006 to 2008, Jackson's cartoons appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune's Perspectives section. Jackson is currently working on a book of African-American newspaper cartoonists of the early 1900s, due for publication sometime next year. You can get an idea of the content by visiting his website and clicking on “Pioneering Cartoonists of Color.”

PRICKLY CITY, ON THE MOVE

Effective July 12, United Feature Syndicate began distributing Scott Stantis’ Prickly City, which had been syndicated by Universal Press. A mildly but nonetheless acute political commentary strip launched in 2004, Prickly City now appears in more than 100 newspapers. The strip focuses on the friendship of a left-leaning coyote pup named Winslow and a young right-thinking girl named Carmen. Stantis, who moonlights as the editorial cartoonist for the Birmingham News, is an unabashed conservative, but while Prickly City offers a conservative perspective on political and social events, Stantis shows he can needle Republicans, too, lately mocking South Carolina’s randy governor, Mark Sanford: when Carmen returns from a covert trip to Argentina smelling of “wet dog,” Winslow believes she was “seeing another coyote.” Despite their frequently opposing views, Carmen and Winslow are friends to the end — Stantis’ comment on the symbionic nature of politics by political party.

BEETLE'S ABNERISH LOVE LIFE

In case you haven’t noticed, in Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey the title character is dating Miss Buckley — a case, doubtless, of opposites attracting. When I interviewed Walker last winter, he told me that he doesn’t intend the relationship to proceed very rapidly — mostly, he admitted, because Beetle’s too lazy to do anything. He’s a little like Li’l Abner who managed to ignore Daisy Mae’s obvious physical attractions for 18 years before marrying her, and even then, he had to be tricked into marriage.

BY A LEGEND, ON A LEGEND

Al Williamson got to be a legend by working for EC Comics in its glorious heyday, often in collaboration with another legend, Frank Frazetta. Williamson got to be a living legend by doing that — living and being the last of the EC gang to be still working in comics. Williamson’s idol is Alex Raymond, and Raymond’s Flash Gordon is Williamson’s all-time favorite character. Although Williamson was initially inspired to do comics by others, it was Raymond’s Flash Gordon that sealed the deal, sustaining the inspiration to become a professional cartoonist, and when Al became one, he seized every opportunity that presented itself to re-visit the Raymond creation with his own pencil and pen.

And those two legends, Williamson and Flash, will be brought together in one place by Flesk Publications in Al Williamson's Flash Gordon: A Lifetime Vision of the Heroic. The book presents virtually all of Williamson’s published (and several unpublished) Flash Gordon pages and strips — “Everything we can get into 250 pages,” said Mark Schultz, Williamson’s friend and occasional collaborator, interviewed by Michael Lorah at newsaramra.com. “It has all his comics pages and the covers that he did, and that includes the classic King Comics Flash Gordon from the mid-60s; the Flash Gordon adaptation for the 1980 film that starred Sam Jones as Flash Gordon, including a few pages that were rejected and redrawn; and the final comics story is the Marvel miniseries from 1995. Interspersed with all that are other Flash Gordon projects, like a series of advertisements he did for the chemical company Union Carbide. He produced five Flash Gordon strips for the ad campaign, full page advertisements featuring the characters in comic strip adventures shilling Union Carbide products.

"He also has the original artwork for a record album cover he drew that featured Flash Gordon. And the book has various pieces published in fanzines and a lot of work that he did just for his own enjoyment, a whole raft of that stuff. And Al did extensive preliminary drawings preparing for the panels that he eventually committed to the page. Unfortunately, there's just so much of that material that we couldn't fit everything in. There's a lot.” Most of the artwork in the book is reproduced from original art: “Al has retained at least 90% of his Flash Gordon material,” Schultz said.

More about Williamson, his career and his passions, can be found in the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 243.

PERSIFLAGE AND FURBELOWS

Enki Bilal, a French citizen born in Belgrade and the legendary creator of the highly-regarded graphic novel series Nicopol Trilogy, had plenty to say about both art and politics on a recent visit to Istanbul, all reported at hurriyet.com. In the U.S., Bilal has worked only with Heavy Metal, disdaining, we gather, offers from Marvel and DC and the like. "Smart and interesting comics stay in the shadows there,” he said. “The main problem with America is they fit everything into confined frameworks and I am against that," he added. Many of his colleagues aspire to doing work in America, considering it the pinnacle of their careers, he said, but he doesn’t think the cultural level of the American consumer is high enough. "Of course, metropolises like New York do not fit in with what I have just said, but the majority of America is not New York either," he said. Bilal perceives differences between American, European and Japanese comics. "There are three important and different types of comics, but they complete each other," he said. In his opinion, the writer is more important in Europe, the construction of the story comes first for Americans and the Japanese focus on the manga style. "All three scenes produce determined and quality work," he said.

BRIAN DUFFY: SELF-SYNDICATED

Brian Duffy, who lost his job after 25 years as the award-winning front page editoonist for the Des Moines Register, is now self-syndicating cartoons about Iowa issues to Iowa newspapers. "There is one aspect of cartooning that I have missed,” he explained to the Ogden (Iowa) Reporter, “and that is regularly drawing cartoons that deal with this great state. I have visited many if not most of the towns in Iowa — including Ogden — as a cartoonist and the host of the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, better known as RAGBRAI. Years ago,” he continued, “when the Register was truly a statewide newspaper, my cartoons and those of my predecessors, Frank Miller and Ding Darling, could be seen in print river-to-river. My goal is to give newspapers and their readers throughout the state a unique feature that they won't find anywhere else." Duffy’s national-themed cartoons will still be syndicated in over 400 newspapers nationwide through King Features Syndicate, and he draws cartoons for the Des Moines weekly newspaper, Cityview. Moreover, his work has expanded to television, with his cartoons incorporating sound and motion on 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. news programs twice a week.

GOSPEL OF PEANUTS AUTHOR DIES

Robert L. Short, 76, died July 6 in his hometown, Little Rock, Arkansas. Robert was a prolific writer and philosopher, who began an alternate career in 1965 when his book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, became the year's best seller in nonfiction. Translated into 11 languages, reported the Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph, “it has become one of the most popular religious books of modern times.” Subsequently, Robert wrote seven other highly successful books of ‘popular theology,’ several based upon comic strips or cartoons, including Peanuts sequels, The Parables of Peanuts (1968) and Short Meditations on the Bible and Peanuts (1990), and The Gospel According to Dogs (2003) and The Parables According to Dr. Seuss (2008).

ALT COMICS

One of the Denver alt newspapers is Westword, which published the following letter from an annoyed reader, who began by complaining about alt weeklies cutting costs by dropping all the comics and then went on as follows: “From This Modern World to Red Meat and the myriad comedic perspectives in between, the alt-comics are simply among the most important elements of the alt-weeklies.  They provide a core value — a unifying, condensed, surreal connective tissue throughout the culture, a counter-punch to mainstream commentary and meme-crafting; a vital and important reduction of the mania of the other press. They are, in large part, exactly what defines the alt-newspapers as a vital pulse of reason against the mainstream press. They are also the first reason that I, as a reader, pick up the alts. ... I always grab Westword from the stands, first to check in on Red Meat, then for Tom Tomorrow’s reduction of the insanity of the lunatic fringe. The alt-comics are, simply, an important avenue that, simply put, triggered my picking up Westword. ... Please, I implore you, do not cut the entire comics scene from Westword.” And it’s signed Aaron Walker. The Westword editor adds a concluding note: “For the record, Westword has never published Red Meat.on R”

ADVENTURES OF A SYNDICATE COMICS EDITOR

Amy Lago, who has assembled an impressive career as a syndicate comics editor, having edited Charles Schulz while she was at United Feature and Berkeley Breathed while at her present perch at Washington Post Writers Group, knows whereof she speaks when it comes to irate readers and what irates them. “We know that any time religion is mentioned, any religion, it’s a warning flag to readers,” she told Tom Spurgeon, who was interviewing her in September 2007 for Busted! the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund magazine. “It’s as if they become primed and ready to be offended,” she continued.

Spurgeon had been prompted to interview Lago when several newspapers who subscribed to Breathed’s Opus strip had declined to run one or more of the Sunday strip’s episodes in which a character, a somewhat dizzy bimbo as I recall, adopted radical Muslim behavior and attire. Muslims — some of them — don’t take kindly to being depicted in the comics, and it comes as no surprise, then, that some of them were offended when a dizzy bimbo adopts the outward accouterments of their religion. Because comic strips are usually funny and make people laugh, a dizzy bimbo Muslim impersonator in the funnies might easily be interpreted as a rude attempt by the newspaper business to make fun of Islam. No one likes their religion laughed at. And lately in this country, as in most European countries, newspapers have religiously avoided publishing cartoons with Muslim or Islamic references in them because Muslims — some of them — when they take offense have been known to start lobbing explosive devices at the offenders

You have to be pretty fast on your feet if you’re a comics editor for a syndicate, and Amy Lago qualifies. She told me once of a time that Charles Schulz produced a strip over which a warning flag flapped. In it, Peppermint Patty, for some reason or another, warns the African American kid, Franklin, that he needs to modify his behavior or “Your name will be mud.” Having faith in Schulz’s unerring sense of humor, Lago let  the strip loose into the world of raging newspaper readers, and, sure enough, one of them was offended. To connect “mud” — i.e., “dirt” — to the color of someone’s skin is probably, in certain circles, racist. And a reader phoned Lago to protest the slur. Lago responded with confounding alacrity, summoning up an explanation of the origin of the expression “Your name is mud.” Mudd is the name of the doctor who treated a fugitive John Wilkes Booth for a broken ankle that the latter acquired while assassinating Lincoln that night in Washington’s Ford Theater; and ever after, the name Mudd has been associated with someone who manages to destroy his reputation (in Mudd’s case, quite innocently, he being ignorant of how Booth broke his ankle). The irate phone caller was somewhat comforted by this information. I’m sure, judging from her usual performance, that Lago could have calmed the caller without invoking Doctor Mudd, but when she told me the story, it seemed to me an object lesson in how useful odd bits of trivia can be — and how fast on your feet you must be, how resourceful, to be a successful comics editor in the syndicate world.

POWER GIRL

Amanda Conner’s Power Girl (DC Comics) is a pure unalloyed joy to behold in the first issues of what promises to be an on-going monthly title. Conner can ladle in detail with the most copious of renderers, but she doesn’t clutter the scene with fragmentary modeling lines: Conner’s lines are clean and clear. And her heroine is beautiful in face and colossal in form. Particularly in the region of her chest. Power Girl has always been spectacularly endowed in that vicinity, and Conner is one of the champion illuminators of the curvaceous gender. Interviewed lately, by Matt Brady at newsarma.com, Conner was asked about how she deals with the “stigma” of cheesecake that clings to Power Girl. “I embrace it,” said Conner. “It’s one of the things that makes Power Girl Power Girl. It’s part of who she is as a character, and trying to deny it would be like deciding that you don’t like someone’s personality and telling them to change. I like how she seems to have a sense of humor about the whole cheesecake thing and doesn’t take it too seriously. I really love the character,” Conner continued. “She has so much potential, and there is so much personality that you can work with. And she’s bigger than life [an unintended play on words, no doubt] but not so iconic that she has to be perfect, so that makes her way more interesting. ... I try to imagine what most of us regular people would do and how we would behave in a world with actual superheroes and apply that to Power Girl’s environment.”

Apart from her sheer skill at drawing, Conner also, and this is one of her most appealing traits as an artist, has a sense of humor, inserting visual comedy and sight gags into the otherwise purely narrative drift of the art. The book appeals to Conner’s proclivities: she likes to do “big action,” she told Brady, as well as smaller moments. “Action is always a blast,” she said, “but I like the challenge of making the quieter moments incredibly interesting. I like the idea of letting the characters do the acting in a quieter scene.”

Power Girl’s costume was designed by some male chauvinist in the last generation of funnybook creators: while it seems more practical than many such superheroine raiment — body-hugging bathing suit design that permits maximum movement with the least wardrobe interference — the otherwise confining bodice also features a gaping hole of a neckline, intended, without question, to focus our attention on PG’s cleavage. Conner’s skill is such that she keeps the cleavage on display while simultaneously convincing us that PG’s uniform is made of the stoutest fabric, the sort that can actually — successfully — keep those bountiful parts of her anatomy contained, restricting their movement so they aren’t jiggling distractingly. Nicely done. The first issue ends with Manhattan about to be destroyed, but it’s Conner’s pictures of Power Girl — and her ever-lurking sense of visual comedy — that will keep us coming back to this title.

VIRGINIA DAVIS

Virginia Davis died in August at the age of 90. She was the first little girl to play “Alice” in the 56 1924-1927 Walt Disney films that combined live action footage of “Alice” with animated cartoonery for her locale and other characters in Wonderland. Davis played “Alice” in 13 films, including the never-released pilot that Disney made while still struggling in Kansas City, Missouri; when, after re-locating to California, Disney secured a distribution deal for a series of Alice Comedies, he persuaded the Davis family to move to Los Angeles so Virginia could continue her cinematic career.

AND SO IT BEGINS

The Denver Post runs 70 comic strips/cartoons, four nearly full pages every day, half of the lot appropriated last February when the rival newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, expired. In a move trumpeting the value of comics to newspapers, the Post was quick to re-assure News readers — and to convert them to Post readers — telling them that “all their favorite comics” would, henceforth, be found in the Post. At the time, I estimated that the Post’s new comics roster would cost the paper at least $100,000 a year in subscription fees paid to syndicates; a better estimate might peg the amount closer to $300,000. And I speculated about how long it might be before the Post, seeking to reduce this extravagant expense, would start trimming the line-up, dropping first one strip and then the next. The process has just begun, less than six months after the trumpet blew. The Post conducted a readership poll (with in-paper ballot, plus website, voting); with an August 24 deadline for responding, I expect the roster to shrink before the snow flies.

BIG CHEERFUL NEWS

The big cheerful news of the month is that the Chicago Tribune finally hired an editorial cartoonist to replace Jeff MacNelly who died in 2000. Scott Stantis, staff editoonist at the Birmingham News for the last 13 years, is the lucky pick. Stantis has done occasional local-interest cartoons for the Trib over the last decade, repeatedly inquiring about the vacant chair; in addition to his political cartoons, Stantis produces the daily comic strip, Prickly City, the mildly conservative slant of which features a right-leaning little girl and a left-leaning coyote. According to a news release from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), “The Tribune's hiring of Stantis reflects the paper's renewed commitment to return to its roots as a ‘crusading newspaper,’ which it believes readers want and will lead to increased profitability.” The Trib, which has been lolling in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for months, just sold the Chicago Cubs for $900 million, which, speculated one wag on the AAEC List, gave it enough discretionary cash to hire a staff editorial cartoonist. Which, quoth another AAEC List wag, it didn’t think it needed until the Blagojevich scandals exploded and the paper had no one on staff who could focus on this big local story. (Not exactly true: Dick Locher, who was on the Trib’s staff until just a few years ago when he retired from active daily editoonery into Tribune Media Services syndication, lives just down the road in Naperville.) Another comment on the AAEC List observed that the lead in the Trib’s story announcing Stantis’ hiring was smugly self-congratulatory: “Bucking a trend in newspapers in which editorial cartoonists have become something of an endangered species....” Ha, saith the wag, “the Trib was leading the trend it is now bucking.”

 In a more serious vein, AAEC President Ted Rall said: "Competing with the Internet requires newspapers to showcase their editorial pages and to use edgier, more graphic content. Editorial cartoons are a vital part of that formula, especially the local- and state-issue cartoons that only a staff editorial cartoonist can provide. The Tribune's decision is notable since Scott Stantis is respected by his peers as a thoughtful, edgy and daring cartoonist."

Stantis, a former president of AAEC, said: "The Chicago Tribune is bullish about the future of newspapers, and so am I. The Tribune believes that editorial cartooning is an integral part of that future, and I am therefore thrilled and humbled to be given this opportunity."  Encouragingly, the AAEC noted that the Birmingham News has said that it intends to fill the position left by Stantis.

 

CHARGING FOR ONLINE CONTENT

The Boston Globe will soon begin charging readers to use its Web site, Boston.com, quoth E&P. Ditto both Philadelphia papers, the Daily News and the Enquirer. And Rupert Murdoch announced that his company, News Corp., would begin charging for access to all its news sites, including the New York Post and the Times of London. Meanwhile, the New York Times confirmed that its New England Media Group, which includes the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette was up for sale. The Globe's Beth Healy reported that Platinum Equity, a private equity firm which last year purchased the San Diego Union-Tribune, had offered $35 million for the group.

WORK FOR THE UNEMPLOYED

Editorial cartoonist Robert Ariail, who recently took a buyout from The State in Columbia, S.C., will continue to be syndicated by United Feature Syndicate's Newspaper Enterprise Association, saith Editor & Publisher, and he has launched a website, robertariail.com, where he’ll be posting new cartoons as well as an archive of his 25-plus years with The State.

Steve Greenberg, recently involuntarily departed from the Ventura County Star, looked around Los Angeles and couldn’t see any local topic editoons. Both the Daily News and the Times have eliminated editorial cartoonist staff positions, and the L.A. Weekly eliminated its cartoon content earlier in the year. With nobody doing local-issue editoons in the nation’s second-largest city and metro, Greenberg saw an opportunity and jumped in, doing local cartoons for LA Observed, a blog website devoted to the city’s news and politics conducted by career journalists. So far, his is a venture with no money, he explained, but he hopes to attract buyers and expand from his other local gigs, Ventura County Reporter and Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. “Ironically,” said he, “my career began with locally-oriented cartoons for the Daily News three decades ago. I felt there would be an audience for local cartooning commentary in a huge market that's ripe for lampooning — and there was no place left to go in print — and that it could lead to useful exposure or other opportunities.” He reports that he’s already had some response — possible freelance assignment and the like.