Rants & Raves

LOST CALVIN AND HOBBES?

The Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes strip below, we’re told at platypuscomix.net, has never been published. It’s not in the compendious Complete Calvin and Hobbes; it was never distributed by Watterson’s syndicate, Universal Uclick (nee Universal Press). I can’t vouch for that claim, but if you’d like to try to prove platypuscomix wrong, you might try looking for “11/28” (the date that appears in the last panel) in the first years of the strip as reprinted in Complete. And let me know if you find it. Below the strip, one of Watterson’s charming self-caricatures, at which he was adept. He had to be, because he rarely permitted himself to be photographed. Only two such accomplishments have ever been published (that I know of).

Below Watterson’s self-caricature, my recollection of my favorite Watterson self-impression. The original from Watterson’s hand was hanging on a wall at the Universal Press offices when I visited there a dozen or more years ago: a self-satirical effort, it depicts Watterson evading a camera. Isn’t that exactly how you’d expect to see him? His drawing is better than mine, but mine is a pretty accurate recollection (wouldn’t you say, Lee?)

 

 

BONE TALL TALES

 Jeff Smith will be producing new Bone stories, Bone Tall Tales, which Scholastic will bring out next summer according to a press release from the publishing house. Then that  fall, Scholastic will begin publication of the highly anticipated expansion of the Bone World, the Quest for the Spark trilogy. Written by Tom Sniegoski (under Smith’s supervision) and illustrated by Smith, the trilogy represents the first time Smith has continued the adventures set in the “valley” since the publication of Rose, the prequel to the Bone series, which Scholastic is releasing under its Graphix imprint next month. Book Two of the new series will be out in the spring of  2011; Book Three, in summer that year. Scholastic reports that it has shipped 4.5 million copies of the Bone graphic novels since its Graphix imprint published the first in the series in 2005.

Those attending last summer’s San Diego Comic Con could see a screening of a feature-length documentary about Smith’s life and work. From the press release about the film: “The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone and the Changing Face of Comics” tells the inspiring story of Jeff Smith’s creation of the epic comic book, Bone, hailed by critics as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time. The film follows Smith from his beginnings as a budding five-year-old artist drawing on his livingroom floor through his difficult start-up as a self-published cartoonist and  the 13-year journey to complete the book that he describes as “Bugs Bunny meets the Lord of the Rings.” In addition to discussing Jeff’s early years, influences and philosophies, the film provides a rare inside look at both the art and the business of comics, a field that has gained new respect as a “gateway to literacy” for youngsters and adults who are “reluctant readers.” Other cartoonists — Scott McCloud, Colleen Doran, Paul Pope, Terry Moore and Harvey Pekar, as well as friends, associates, experts and Jeff himself — share their stories of the worldwide Bone phenomenon that began in small comics shops and is now found in bookstores, schools, libraries and the homes of millions of adults and children in 25 countries. The video is now available throughout the media-saturated void.

ETHEL HAYS

Below you'll see one of Ethel Hays’ typically sweet line drawings of a wonderfully svelte young woman done in 1935 for Everyweek Magazine, a newspaper supplement produced by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) feature syndicate; a tiny hand-lettered date reads “8-25-35.” Hays’ drawings were usually rendered with a clean, uncluttered line — the supple line itself, as here, performing all the work. In contrast, another great woman cartoonist of the period, Nell Brinkley, drew equally attractive young women but with a line that was endlessly fussy, encumbered with feathering and hachering of all sorts. We’ll meet Brinkley a few weeks hence when we review a new Trina Robbins’ book from Fantagraphics, The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons from 1913-1940 (136 9x13-inch pages, color; hardcover $29.99), so I’ll dwell here instead on Hays.

Not much has been written about Hays in the usual cartooning histories — the most I know of appeared in the 2005 edition of Hogan’s Alley, No. 13, in a piece by one of comics best historians, Allan Holtz. Hays was born in 1892 in Billings, Montana, a town that had been established only ten years before but grew miraculously due the Northern Pacific Railroad’s tracks through the place. (Among other cartoonists/artists who passed through the town, cowboy artist/author Will James, The Lone Cowboy et al, and strip cartoonist/novelist Stan Lynde, Rick O’Shay and Latigo strips.) After graduating from high school, Hays persuaded her parents to send her to the Los Angeles School of Art and Design where she studied to become an illustrator, skillfully aping the drawing mannerisms of James Montgomery Flagg and others of the most popular illustrators of the day. She won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York and, in due course, another scholarship to the Julian Academy in Paris. But World War I broke out all over Europe, so her Parisian plans fizzled.

Instead, she began teaching art in army hospitals to amuse and engage the wounded during their convalescence. When one class of soldiers professed an interest in learning how to become cartoonists, Hays confessed she didn’t know the first thing about it, but she subsequently enrolled in the Charles N. Landon correspondence course in cartooning and, staying a lesson ahead of her students, taught them cartooning.

When Landon saw her work, he exulted and promptly touted her talent to the editor of the Cleveland Press, where Landon had worked as art director until about 1912. Suddenly, Hays was a staff illustrator and cartoonist at a daily newspaper. Her first assignment was illustrating the gossipy first-person narratives of a flapper’s adventures written by Victoria Benham; Vic and Ethel debuted December 5, 1923, and Hays was now drawing in the simpler style of John Held, Jr. When Benham left to get married, Hays continued solo, now just Ethel, and her drawings soon shed the Held influence, characters becoming sleek and spritely with solid blacks spotted as skillfully and as effectively as those by Gluyas Williams, another master of the unadorned line.

Coincidence and happy happenstance continued to dog Hays’ steps: the Cleveland Press was one of the Scripps chain, and Scripps also ran the NEA syndicate. Editors at NEA noticed Hays’ work in the Press right away, and she was syndicated by early 1925, her thrice weekly Ethel supplemented by a one-column daily cartoon, Flapper Fanny. Hays married at the end of the year, and by 1930, she was the mother of two and reduced her workload by one feature; Fanny was picked up by another promising woman cartooner, Gladys Parker. Hays and Parker appeared together in tandem until Hays gave it up in 1934, only to come back the next year with a weekly comic strip, Marianne, for Everyweek. That lasted only until 1938, and soon thereafter, Hays devoted her time solely to illustrating children’s books, a vocation she assumed in the late 1930s. Hays died in 1989 at the age of 97. Holtz’s Hogan’s Alley article is nicely illustrated, and you might find even more samples at hoganmag.com or, at least, subscription and back-issue information.

And if you enjoy cavorting through comics history like this, you’ll probably enjoy a department at www.RCHarvey.com, namely Harv’s Hindsights, which is fraught with stuff like the foregoing.

SUPERMAN: CORRECTING MYTHS

The current issue of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego fanzine, No. 88, publishes several interviews with the surviving relatives of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the founder of the comic book company that eventually became DC Comics. Citing letters and other documentation, Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson, son of the Major, has corrected one of the myths about the debut of Superman in Action Comics No. 1, cover-dated June 1938. The myth is that Superman showed up at the last minute just as Action Comics was poised to go to the printer except for the lack of a lead feature. Shelly Mayer, working for Max Gaines at McClure newspaper syndicate, was enthralled with the submission from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and showed it to Action editor Vince Sullivan, who opined that the kids would love it and then published it in Action’s inaugural issue.

Not so, said Douglas Wheeler-Nicholson. The fact, he says, is that his father, who had been publishing other stories by Siegel and Shuster (Slam Bradley, named by the Major, was one of them), saw the Superman creation in the spring or summer or early fall of 1937 and created Action Comics as the vehicle for showcasing the character. So Superman’s appearance in Action Comics No. 1 was no happy accident: it had been planned for months. Another revelation: Siegel and Shuster signed their Superman contract in December 1937 with Harry Donenfeld, not with Wheeler-Nicholson, because Donenfeld, who was already in mid-plot to take over Wheeler-Nicholson’s company, persuaded the two youths that Wheeler-Nicholson was on his way out. This issue of Alter Ego is brimming with new scraps of information about Wheeler-Nicholson and Superman, including nine never before published daily comic strips introducing Superman, written by Siegel but drawn by Russell Keaton, who, we lately learned, Siegel approached to draw the strip when Shuster began to lose heart in the project after so many failed attempts to sell it.

GEORGE SPROTT: 1894-1975

George Sprott: 1894-1975, A Picture Novella by the Cartoonist Seth (96 giant-sized 12x14-inch pages, in various duotones; hardback, $24.95) is a faux biography, like others of Seth’s oeuvre, this one answering the question: Who was George Sprott? — Arctic explorer, tv host, raconteur, beloved uncle? Or opportunist, philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore? Sprott lays the foundation for his tv career by exploring the Canadian Arctic and filming his trips. After which he mostly bores people by telling and re-telling his adventures. Instead of exploiting the vast dimension of the book’s pages, Seth, who also sometimes answers to the name Gregory Gallant, fills the expanses with uniform grids of minuscule panels, sometimes as many as 42 per page, many depicting talking heads in close-up. Throughout, Seth tells his tale as much by book design as by the traditional means inherent in sequential visual storytelling. With this tome as exemplar, Publishers Weekly dubs Seth “one of the form’s masters,” and I agree. Sean Howe in Entertainment Weekly (July 17) says, “It’s hard to believe that [the character] Sprott never actually existed.” But whatever happened to the rest of Seth’s Clyde Fans?

BRINGING FATHER BACK UP

 A press release from NBM Publishing alerts us to the arrival in stores of the third and latest in the Forever Nuts series of classic screwball strips, namely George McManus’ Bringing up Father (192 11x8-inch landscape pages, b/w; hardcover, $24.95). The century’s second longest running daily strip (Mutt and Jeff is first, I ween), “Jiggs,” as the strip is sometimes called (whenever not being denominated “Jiggs and Maggie”), contains some of the finest art deco drawing of the age, here, meticulously restored. And this edition carries an introduction by Yrs Trly, a foreword by comics curator Bill Blackbeard, and notes by comics historian Allen Holtz.

And just on the horizon, another Jiggs reprint — this one from IDW; subtitled “From Sea to Shining Sea” (272 11x10-inch pages in color; hardcover, $49.99), it recycles a classic McManus sequence that lasted for more than a year during  which he took his characters all around the country, painstakingly rendering the familiar locales of notable American cities in recognizable detail. For an exacting appreciation of McManus’ art and Jiggs’ place in the history of the medium, visit the Usual Place and consult Harv’s Hindsights for the happy month of October 2009.

SUPERHERO SATIRE

Caped, a new title from Boom by writers Josh Lobis and Darin Moiselle and artist Yair Herrera, may be the freshest take on the longjohn lunacies since John Kovalick’s Blink. At first, the book seems to be about “Capital City’s Nocturnal Soldier,” a caped and cowled night-time prowler who bears an intentional resemblance to a certain Dark Knight. Named Edge, he arrives too late to save a supposedly innocent bystander in the first issue’s opening pages, a tardiness some observers believe indicates that the Nocturnal Knight is slipping in his old age. The focus, however, quickly shifts to a young would-be newspaper reporter named Jimmy Lohman, who, because he can’t find other journalistic employment, accepts a job as “assistant” to Grant Godfried, a super reporter who has gone through 27 assistants in the last four months.

Turns out — surprise! — Godfried is secretly Edge, and so young Jimmy becomes “assistant” to a costumed crime fighter. Edge shows him his subterranean “EdgeCave” and then takes him to another catacomb underneath an abandoned football stadium, which Edge calls a “superhero precinct” because it is a shelter or workshop for a few dozen superheroes and their assistants, one of whom takes Jimmy under his wing to show him the ropes.

“Stay away from the action,” the guy warns Jimmy, “ — we don’t get health insurance, one of the many ways we assistants get ‘caped,’ superhero lingo for ‘screwed.’” With that, the issue’s episode is virtually completed: we know, now, that we’re in a tongue-in-cheek title, confirming an earlier suspicion fostered when Jimmy asks Edge if he acquired his powers by falling into a vat of chemicals and Edge says, “Why does everyone always assume it’s chemicals” — but doesn’t explain what did endow him with superpowers. Maybe later. The concept of superheroic action, sometimes fumbled, experienced from an assistant’s perspective is tantalizing enough to get me to buy the next issue. This is not a slapstick take on superheroing as is Sidekick; this is an attempt at seeing superheroing at the elbow of a superhero but somewhat more realistically than Sidekick. It’s not satire; it’s human interest.

SPIDERMAN ON BROADWAY

In the forthcoming Broadway show, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the rock version of the Webslinger will not be the friendly neighborhood Wall-crawler we’ve grown accustomed to in funnybooks and on the glossy Big Screen. Quoted by Gina Salamone in the New York Daily News, U2's frontman, Bono, explained to a British radio station that "our Peter Parker is much more ...  not Kurt Cobain, but a kind of slacker, a more kind of shy sort of guy.” And: “We've got a new villain. It's a girl. It's a very extraordinary role. We've taken it to a much more dizzy place than you'd expect. We've got big tunes. We're very proud of it." Despite having encountered “an unexpected cash-flow problem” that has halted progress on the production, Hello Entertainment, the show’s producer, says the musical will still begin previews in February as planned.

EDITOON NEWS: THE NEARLY BAD AND THE BAD

For a week or so in early August, it looked as if the number of full-time staff editorial cartooners would drop to an all-time low of 79 (from 101 in May 2008, if you’re pegging these things). Matt Davies, the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist at the Journal News in White Plains, NY, was, briefly, among the 50 employees of the paper whose staff positions were scheduled to be eliminated effective August 28.  Then all of a sudden, the management had second thoughts — or realized what they were about to do — and said, Oh, no, not Matt Davies. And he was back among the living.

Davies, interviewed by Alan Gardner at DailyCartoonist.com, said, somewhat jocularly: “My paper looked down the cold and terrible barrel of not having an editorial cartoonist on staff and just couldn’t do it.” Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple, Davies explained in a less jesting manner: “The paper’s readers owe a big thanks to my editor Henry Freeman who quietly worked to ensure that my position was revived and ultimately kept alive during a particularly bruising round of downsizing in our newsroom. The clear message is that no matter how small a newspaper payroll needs to be in order for a paper to turn a profit, a decent staff cartoonist who connects with the audience is a smart part of that profit strategy. While I am of course personally relieved, my thoughts are with my talented and venerated colleagues who didn’t survive the cuts this week.”

Meanwhile, Gary Markstein took a buyout at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he’d lost his editooning gig several years ago but continued on staff doing illustration and page design. His editoons will continue in syndication, as before, and he also has another job: he draws the comic strip Daddy’s Home, written by Tony Rubino and syndicated by Creators. So Markstein is, in a manner of speaking, employed, even though he isn’t likely to get rich as a syndicated editooner or by splitting the revenue of a third tier circulation comic strip with a co-creator and the syndicate. Since Marstein wasn’t on the May 2008 list of 101 full-time staff editoonists that we’re using to keep score, his departure doesn’t reduce the total; and since Davies is back among the living, the total number of full-time staff editorial cartoonists stands at 80.

ROSTER

Editor & Publisher’s Directory of Syndicate Services, the 84^th, is out, a much reduced version of the annual publication. Previously, the Directory was a square-spine catalog of 150 or so pages, many of them extravagant fold-in/fold-out multi-page advertisements for individual syndicates, which listed and pictured their columnists and cartoon features on slick stock heavier than the directory pages. It was a cumbersome thing to thumb through, but you emerged with a good idea of each major syndicate’s offerings. This year’s incarnation lacks all syndicate advertising. Not a one has a section boasting its products. And the Directory is now a saddle-stitched magazine of 62 pages, about half its size in yesteryear. In one section of those pages, we find a list of syndicated comic strips — 204 of them; in another section, 149 panel cartoons. Despite the gloom and doom infecting newspaper staffs these days. those numbers haven’t changed much. Every year, a few new strips and panel cartoons are syndicated; presumably, a few die off. Births and deaths apparently have achieved an eternal balance. Last year, there were 208 strips; in 2007, 206. There were 143 panel cartoons in last year’s roster; in 2007, 150.

PLAYBOY: FEWER TOONS

Playboy, one of the last two refuges of high quality magazine cartooning — The New Yorker is the other one — is steadily slipping off its pedestal. In the September issue only 5 full-page color cartoons laminate the magazine’s pages. The previous issue, July-August’s slyly contrived “double issue” (a cost-cutting maneuver, eliminating printing and postage expense for a month), had only 7 full-pagers in its 166 pages; that’s 1 cartoon every 24 pages. Last February, with 122 pages, the ratio of full-pagers to page count was 1/20. In the current issue with only 130 pages, that ratio is perversely climbing back up: 1/26. The desirable ratio is the lowest, indicating the frequency at which the reader encounters a cartoon. The ratios for the smaller cartoons (roughly quarter-pagers) are no better: February is best at 1/17; July-August, 1/24; September, 1/22. Playboy is desperately imitating the laddie magazines in layout and format, differing only in its insistence on photographs of barenekkidwimmin rather than movie and TV starlets whose epidermises are just nearly bare.

But if the cartoon content is declining, the magazine is also jumping on the graphic novel roller coaster: last issue, it published 5 pages of the graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451; this issue offers 6 pages of the graphic novel incarnation of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” with R.M. Guera’s visualizations of Brad Pitt and the rest. A noble try by a publisher who remains a frustrated cartoonist, but I’m afraid the Web’s porn has forever displaced Hugh Hefner’s once watershed publishing enterprise in the hearts and sweaty palms of the nation’s hormone-ravaged young men.

But the best part of the magazine these days is Dean Yeager’s cartoon: his cuties are every issue.

OUTRAGED AT ARCHIE

 A Dallas comic bookstore owner is so outraged at Archie’s fickle abandonment of wholesome girl-next-door Betty Cooper in favor of the sloe-eyed vamp Veronica Lake that he sold his copy of Archie Comics No. 1. Banking $38,837 was small comfort though: Dave Luebke still thinks “Betty is it. Not Veronica. This is serious.” But Archie editor-in-chief Victor Gorelick told Jamie Stengle at the Associated Press that heartbroken fans should not give up hope: the “wedding” story has six issues to run (Nos. 600-605, presumably) — “You’ll see what happens,” he says, coyly.

THE CARTOONS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

A scholarly book about the Danish Dozen doesn’t include any of the infamous cartoons some of which depicted Islam’s Prophet. The DailyCartoonist tells us that the publisher, Yale University Press, squeamishly consulted with “two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism,” who all agreed that including the cartoons in The Cartoons That Shook the World would involve a risk of reviving the deadly violence that followed the publication of the cartoons in Denmark four years ago. So Yale Press decided not to include them. Religion scholar Reza Aslan, author of No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, calls the publisher a coward: “This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he said. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry,” adding, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”

The author of the book at issue, Jytte Klausen, a native of Denmark who has been at Brandeis University for 17 years and is a specialist on Muslim communities in Europe, argued against Yale's decision, but in the end grudgingly acquiesced, reported James F. Smith at the Boston Globe.  But Klausen thought the situation ironic: "The people who gave advice to the university were not given the opportunity to read my book. They reacted based on e-mailed pictures of the illustrations. What happened here is strikingly similar to when the Danish mullahs were traveling around the world e-mailing their pictures to make people angry. Yale University also, in a similar fashion, removed the cartoons from the context [by asking advice without providing the context of the entire book]. The issue was, should you really ask for that sort of advice [without] providing context? But once you got that advice, and coming from the sources it came from, I don't think [Yale] had much choice. If I was an administrator at the university, I would have pulled the cartoons.''

Yale’s decision is even more reprehensible — and Klausen’s anger less understandable — given her plan for the display of the cartoons. The book would not have reprinted the twelve cartoons as individual cartoons: her plan was to reproduce the whole page from the Jyllands-Posten newspaper where the offending cartoons initially appeared on September 30, 2005. Presuming that her book is of the usual bookish dimensions — say, 6x9 inches — the cartoons would appear in it too small to be readily perceived.

Although Klausen surrendered to Yale’s squeamishness about the Danish Dozen, she did not agree when Yale went further, editing out historical artworks depicting the seventh-century Prophet because, presumably, many Muslims object to any pictures of Muhammed. So the book will appear with an author's note from Klausen, who says Yale's decision is a violation of academic freedom and a case of "anticipatory fear on the part of the university of consequences that it only dimly perceives. The metaphor I use,” she continued, “is the monster in the woods: You can't see it at night but you know it's there, and if you provoke the monster, it's your responsibility,'' she told Smith in an interview this week in her Brandeis office.

In other words, fear rules. Nothing new here: it was ever thus. Even though we’ve pretended otherwise and sometimes acted in accordance with principle despite being fraught with fear. Islamic terrorists have won: Muslim hooligans have succeeded in changing our behavior, altering the principles that have shaped Western civilization for centuries. The rule of the Koran’s blood-thirsty militant Allah is not much different than that of the cranky megalomania of the Old Testament Yahweh, you’ll say, but either one tends to overwhelm with decibels the quieter humilities of the New Testament’s somewhat more permissive protagonist.

VIG IS BACK

For sheer visual inscrutability, nothing matches Tony Salmons on James Robinson’s graphic novel Vigilante: City Lights, Prairie Justice. The book is about a Golden Age favorite of mine, namely the Vigilante, a cowboy-suit-wearing galoot, who was, in his actual fictional life, a movie-star singing cowboy named Greg Saunders, who, when moved by crime and the compulsion to stamp it out, donned a white broad-brimmed hat, a blue tight-fitting cavalry blouse (the kind with a fold-over front that can be removed  after having protected the actual shirtfront from accumulating dust raised by the horse’s hoofs), and matching jeans and boots and then tied a red bandana across the lower half of his face to obliterate his identity. Then he’d jump on his motorcycle and roar off to damage the bad guys, followed, usually, by a kid sidekick named “Stuff.”

My memory of this colorful character with his razor-sharp jaw as defined by the red bandana is determined by the way Mort Meskin drew the character. Meskin deployed a lively line and Caniff-like shadowing, producing memorable visuals. Salmons’ visuals are likewise memorable: his line is erratic, sometimes thin and fragile, sometimes clotted and lumpy, and he splashes blotches of black ink around, obscuring facial detail to such an extent that characters are impossible to identify in subsequent appearances, even on the same page. The artwork, in short, is all about technique: artsy has displaced storytelling as the operative principle.

Robinson’s story, set in the 1940s, sends Vig after a historic figure, the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the man who created Las Vegas as a gambling hell by opening the Flamingo Hotel and Casino there in about 1942-43.  Vigilante is on a mission of vengeance: Stuff has been killed by one of Bugsy’s goons because the kid fancied the goon’s girlfriend, so Vig spends most of the book laying waste to Bugsy’s henchmen as he relentlessly tracks Siegel down. When he finds him, he kills him — blasts him to hell with a shotgun. By then, we are ready to applaud this morally dubious action by a comic book hero because Robinson has convinced us that Siegel is subhuman, another morally dubious artistic achievement. Completing this appalling enterprise, Robinson introduces a DC villain, the Dummy, to no purpose whatsoever. The story, in short, is as much a mishmash as Salmons’ art is. Salmons manages two or three stunning pages of action and a couple of moody sequences, but otherwise, his rendering is artistic to the point of utter incomprehensibility.

OUT OF BULLETS

The comic book series 100 Bullets, having reached its 100^th issue, does what logic in these numerically driven days demands: it ends. It ends, as the New York Daily News reports, with a bang. Not surprising: it’s been banging away for all 100 issues. The “bang” in this case denotes not only the fatal gunslinging events of the story by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso but the issue itself, double the usual length and without interruption by pages of advertising — a measure of the esteem accorded the creators of this unprecedented title by their publisher, DC Comics in its Vertigo incarnation. It probably gives nothing away to say that by the last page of this last issue everyone in this gangster-ridden tale is dead or about to be. The last panel, which Azzarello told the News’ Ethan Sacks he had envisioned from the very beginning in 1999, is a full-page tombstone of a tableau depicting Agent Graves on his knees, affectionately cradling the voluptuous Dizzy with the tear-eyed tattoo, who, though fatally damaged, is holding a gun to his head.

The series, Sacks claims, “reinvigorated the crime genre in a medium dominated by superheroes in spandex.” One commentator said 100 Bullets is not so much about gangsters as it is about power. And I agree — with some additional caveats: it is a classical saga about the corrosive effect of power, how power corrupts and, at last, turns unrelentingly brutal and inward, and destroys itself. From the start, each issue began with Agent Graves giving an untraceable gun and 100 bullets to some poor slob who had cause to seek vengeance for some past abuse; by the issue’s last page, the slob had achieved his heart’s bloody desire. Then the stories started taking more than one issue to unfold.

For me, 100 Bullets was not so much about power in the abstract  as it was about the power of pictures, the masterful comics storytelling of Eduardo Risso. He deployed pictures, breakdowns, and page layouts in ways not often so adroitly demonstrated anywhere else by anyone else. His pictures were a pleasure to view, to enter into, however raw and gory they were.

I savored Azzarello’s command of ghetto argot, which seemed to me, without doing any authentication at all, to ring truest when his characters were African American thugs, but it was Risso’s surpassing skill as a pictorial storyteller that kept bringing me back. Some of his tics and tropes he eventually used often enough to make them cliche — but only in this title. No one else could do it as well. Besides, every page had enough new visual quirks to engage and entertain, and the last issue was no exception. Afforded more pages, Risso and Azzarello use them to pace the unfolding brutalities, to stage and prolong the final fatal moments of the armageddon of self-destruction they are recording, the brace of concluding disasters taking place simultaneously on alternating pages, then in alternating panels, building to a blazing, exploding crescendo of conflagration — much of which takes place without any talk, no words. Only Risso’s telling pictures.

SPECIAL FORCES

Kyle Baker’s 4-issue Special Forces has reached its conclusion, vibrating on every page with his startling layouts and exploding action in out-of-the-way battles in Iraq. The protagonist, a woman named Felony, has an impressive rack despite her otherwise skinny physique, and she has taken the expression “strip for action” literally, divesting herself of all raiment except a tattered top and an ammo belt serving as a battlefield bikini.

A letter from comics historian and feminist Trina Robbins concludes the fourth issue: an admirer of Baker’s, she read the first issue even though she couldn’t believe Baker did “this.” Says she: “I gave it a chance and read it, and I have to say that I don’t get it and I don’t like it. This is not the Kyle Baker I know. It’s not a statement against the war in Iraq: it’s a violent action war comic starring a sexy babe. What the hell?”

To which Baker responds: “I thought you said you didn’t get it. You TOTALLY get it.” Together, the two sum up the title, leaving me to add only that the exuberance of Baker’s art makes the book worth the look — oh, that and the twist he gives his plots. The four issues will be reissued as a paperback tome.

ART SPIEGELMAN ON THE FUTURE OF COMICS

Even as newspapers are expiring on every hand, taking the newspaper comic strip with them, Art  Spiegelman finds hope for the form: “I like Richard Thompson’s work [Cul de Sac],” he said to Michael Cavna at ComicRiff.com. “They’re good gags, and graphically it’s on a very high level. It really seems like the inheritor of the Calvin and Hobbes mantle. It’s amazing when any strip can electrify and bring life to a form [the comic strip] that is on life support.”

Some prestigious others have applauded Thompson’s strip: he was one of three finalists for the Best Comic Strip division award from the National Cartoonists Society in May. Mark Tatulli’s pantomimic horror-child Lio won in this category; the other candidate was Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine.

I don’t think I’d go so far as to say Cul de Sac is the inheritor of the mantle of Calvin and Hobbes: Thompson’s strip is a unique creation, it’s very good, and I enjoy it immensely. But its humor is of a different sort than Bill Watterson’s in Calvin and Hobbes. In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin behaves as a child would if he knew some of what adults know; in Cul de Sac, the kids behave as kids, seen from the inside without any contamination from the adult mind. The two strips have in common, however, the ability to make us see ourselves as a little less important.

Art Spiegelman’s hopeful assessment of the future for comics does not include newspapers. “Comics in general,” he said, “are doing great. They’ve moved into another cultural space successfully. It’s not really about the newspaper anymore.” He’s talking about comic books and graphic novels; not the newspaper funnies.

Like most observers of the medium, Spiegelman sees web comics as the future: “Online, pages get to crackle in a different way. It’s a different medium — it’s a real difference. As the medium evolves as something that’s on my screen, online comics will become as different from comic books as comic strips are to comic books. The rules are different online.”