Rants & Raves

DUSTIN

Dustin, the new strip about a boomerang kid who returns home after college to live with his parents while he tries unsuccessfully to find a job, has been signed on by 100 newspapers, a benchmark that will assure  the strip’s continuation for the time being. The strip is produced by two cartoonists whose day jobs are political cartooning — New Orleans Times-Picayune’s Steve Kelley, who writes Dustin, and Florida Today’s Jeff Parker, who draws it (and also assists on Mike Peters’ Mother Goose and Grimm). Quoted in Editor & Publisher, George Haeberlein, King Features' vice president for worldwide syndication sales, called the strip “the most successful new comic to be introduced into syndication in recent years,” adding that signing up 100 papers was the syndicate’s first sales target.

MATT WUERKER WINS HERBLOCK PRIZE

Matt Wuerker, editorial cartoonist for Politico, was named the winner of the 2010 Herblock Prize on February 17. Awarded annually by The Herb Block Foundation for "distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous standard set by Herblock," the winner receives a sterling silver Tiffany trophy and $15,000 after-tax cash award.

In a Politico news release, Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris congratulated Wuerker for being “at the top of his game and enjoying it more than ever at a moment when his work matters more than ever,” adding: “Wuerker is funny — the essential prerequisite for a cartoonist. But his cartoons work for other reasons. He assumes and appreciates the intelligence of his audience and never forgets, even when his subjects do, the spirit of public interest that should animate the work of important people in Washington.”

Wuerker’s cartoons have been a Politico signature since its launch three years ago, appearing individually in the newspaper and online, as well as in art accompanying enterprise stories from Politico journalists.

“Herb Block is such a giant in the quirky inky universe of cartooning," said Wuerker to Mike Cavna at ComicRiffs."When I was in the sixth grade or so, it was a book of Herblock's cartoons that first flicked on a little light in my head illuminating the very unlikely career path of the political cartoonist. To get this honor in his name almost 50 years later is truly mind-boggling."

"There are so many wonderful cartoonists working today, producing great, strong cartoons who are certainly equally deserving, many of whom I'm lucky to know as friends,” Wuerker said, adding he was “absurdly lucky to get singled out like this. Most of all,” he continued, “I feel lucky to have been pulled aboard Politico when it set sail. It's been a remarkable ride. The staff here are such smart journalists and supportive friends. And my editors, specifically John and [Executive Editor] Jim [VandeHei], are dream editors for a cartoonist. Their unwavering support of my creative freedom here, and the generous use of cartoons and caricature on the site, are all things for which I will always be grateful.”

Speaking directly to his colleagues, Wuerker said: “Thanks everybody. There are so many of you ink-stained wretches equally and richly deserving this. We all know that these prizes are ultimately somewhat silly exercises in comparing apples with oranges, lumpers with splitters, hatchers with pixelers... that eventually ends with a dart being thrown at a board. I feel absurdly fortunate to get singled out like this. I was joking about now getting to wear a tiara around the office, but then Richard Thompson told me, No, with the Herblock, instead you win some ratty old slippers and get to shuffle around the office in those. I'm honored, humbled and very happy. Cheers to you all!"

Speaking for myself, I’m delighted to see Wuerker get this award. His muscular cartoons, bristling with coarse-grained crosshatch, are almost always sharply pointed and unflinching. And in a day when full-time staff editorial cartoonist positions at newspapers are fast disappearing, it’s soul-satisfying to see a long-time freelancer getting recognition. Before his gig with Politico, Wuerker self-syndicated his cartoons, getting them published in a wide range of periodicals — everything from the monthly newspaper Funny Times to The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation to such mainstream dailies as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — but having a home nowhere. He hustled and he hung on, and it paid off, at last, with the Politico job. And now, with the profession’s most prestigious award.

Previous winners of the Herblock Prize so far have been Matthew Davies of the Journal News, Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeff Danziger of the New York Times Syndicate, Jim Morin of the Miami Herald, Jon Sherffius of the Boulder Camera and Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune — a worthy company for a worthy newcomer.

NEWSY BITS

The commemorative Bill Mauldin postage stamp, depicting Mauldin as a callow young WWII soldier next to his iconic Willie and Joe, was supposed to go on sale March 10, they say, at your local Postal Service Station; but it won’t show up until March 31, according to a late report. ... The New Yorker for March 15 carries a two-page excerpt from Daniel Clowes’ forthcoming graphic novel, Wilson, due out in May, that introduces the title character, a thoroughly peevish a-social but satirical humanoid — clever enough but you wouldn’t want to invite him over for dinner. ...  At DailyCartoonist, Alan Gardner cites a report from Mad ’tooner Tom Richmond that the magazine, which went quarterly last year, will vault into bi-monthly publication starting June 15. The change will permit the Mad men to resort, once again, to more topical material. “Mad has been hampered by being completely unable to riff on timely subjects due to its long time between issues. Bimonthly isn’t the same as monthly, but it beats quarterly by exactly 50%!” ... Speaking of venerable magazine venues for cartoons, the March issue of Playboy prints two pages of Eldon Dedini, eight cartoons with his panting satyrs and breathless wood nymphs whose nakedness made Hugh Hefner famous. ... Heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio is the son of an underground comics distributor and grew up reading the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Zap and Weirdo comics. “At a very young age,” he told Craigh Barboza at USA Weekend, “I was exposed to the most hardcore hippie subculture any young man would be subject to.”

FILTHY RICH

Brian Azzarello’s Richard “Junk” Junkin offers no redeeming quality whatsoever. Richard Stark’s Parker at least is adept enough to achieve his goals; Junk is not. He’s every bit the thug Parker is, but he isn’t good enough at it to triumph. He drinks too much to remain entirely in control of himself, something Parker would never do. And in Filthy Rich (196 5x8-inch pages, b/w; hardback, Vertigo, $19.95), Junk kills one person whose only sin, a dubious one considering the amoral inclinations of his would-be sexual partner, is to attempt sex with the woman Junk is hired to protect. Somehow that justifies Junk’s murderous attack. Junk tells us he “snapped,” the usual excuse justifying a crime of passion. But I’m not convinced.

With 100 Bullets and other such efforts, we’ve become accustomed to Azzarello’s metier — unsavory underground types, big and little crooks always out for themselves, all laced with authentic-sounding argot. Herein, he adds sex and debauchery to his formulaic greed and brutality. Junk works as a salesman at a car lot, but can’t seem to make a sale. So he drinks away his frustration, ranting to himself about how he is actually a superior salesman but is being victimized by an unfriendly world.

By the end of the book, he’s so tangled up in his career and sexual frustrations, his failures and his fears, that he murders one of the other salesmen and then the owner of the car lot. Junk’s only punishment here is that he is demoted by his new boss from body guard for his former boss’s daughter to chauffeur. And it isn’t the kind of punishment from which Junk learns anything: leering at Vicki through the rear-view mirror, he goes right on lusting and lurking, a menace waiting to turn a vicious dream into a nightmare. And that brings us back, full circle, to the book’s title, the double-meaning of which embraces both the wealthy bimbo and the unsavory Richard Junkin, who prefers that people call him either “Junk” or “Rich.”

Visualizing all of this is a Spanish artist named Victor Santos, who, the back cover tells us, is the “creator/writer/artist of the hit French series Young Ronin.” In Filthy Rich, he does a very bad imitation of Frank Miller in the Sin City books. The heavy black shadows in Santos’ pictures do not model characters as they do in Miller’s work: they distort and confuse. Moreover, to compound the clumsiness, Santos deploys mannerisms that result in various manifestations of deformed anatomy. Except for the women in the tale. But their identical babydoll faces make them indistinguishable one from the other.

Unlike in Azzarello’s 100 Bullets, which was rendered by a master craftsman, Eduardo Risso, Filthy Rich offers nothing to please the eye by way of redeeming the tale from its wholly unsavory amoralities. Nothing attractive in either picture or story. In 100 Bullets, there were wrongs to be righted; here, there is only a whining self-indulgence that imagines wrongs where none exist.

           

THE HUNTER

Richard Stark’s Parker novel The Hunter has been expertly turned into a graphic novel (140 6x9-inch pages, two colors; IDW hardcover, $24.99) by the extremely able Darwyn Cooke, who both wrote and illustrated the adaptation. Parker is a thief, whose partner, Mal Resnick, double-crossed him, convinced Parker’s wife to kill her husband and then ran off with both the wife and the loot. But Parker wasn’t dead. He survived somehow, and this book is about how he came back from the dead to hunt down Resnick and get back his share of the boodle. He might also want to kill his former wife, but before we know his intentions on that score, he visits her, and she kills herself, saving him the trouble.

The book opens with a stunning wordless sequence as Parker arrives in New York by walking across George Washington Bridge, refusing an offer of a ride, then walks to mid-town Manhattan, takes a subway to the motor vehicle department and acquires a driver’s license under the name Edward Johnson. He stops at a diner to get a cup of coffee and insults the waitress who had smiled at him and given him a cigarette — ungrateful bastard. Then he goes to the men’s room in a tavern, where he “ages” the license and washes his face. We don’t see his face until the next page, the 20^th in the book. Until page 20, the protagonist is a faceless figure whom we see always from the back, lurching, head down, through sidewalk crowds and street traffic, then Cooke arranges a dramatic revelation: on page 19, we see the man’s hands over the sink in the men’s room, under the flowing faucet; then we turn the page, and there he is, ta-da! a full-page portrait — we see him as he sees himself, in the mirror over the sink, water streaming down his face as he stares, full of hate and anger, at his reflection.

Throughout the book, Parker proves himself an absolutely irresistible malevolent force of nature, beating people up, maiming and killing without the slightest compunction. And Cooke proves himself a master storyteller. For this novel, Cooke abandons his typically precise and defining line — no loose ends — adopting instead a sketchy manner in which forms are modeled and shaped by shadows, color swatches and ellipsis. With a sure instinct, Cooke keeps his story dashing headlong to its conclusion, alternating long shots and close-ups for narrative purposes and dramatic impact, deploying pictures for storytelling as well as illustration.

Cooke is reportedly a fan of crime fiction and has often said the Parker books are a great source of creative inspiration. In short, we’ll be seeing more of Parker. The character is not at all an admirable personality: he’s scarcely any kind of a role model; he’s a lout and a thug. But there’s something about him, some morbid fascination that attracts and holds us. Perhaps it’s his ruthless dedication to whatever his purpose is at the moment: nothing diverts him or frustrates his ultimate triumph, however brutal and nasty. Maybe we like Parker because he wins against foes that are almost as bad as he is. And it’s nice to know someone can. It’s not so nice, however, to realize that to win against their ilk, you must become like Parker.

A longer review, with examples, resides at the Usual Place, R&R, Op. 248.

DOMINIC FORTUNE

Howard Chaykin is back, triumphant: Dominic Fortune No. 1, revives the Chaykin rake from the mid-1970s in an orgy of nonstop tasteless, sexist and racist action set in the Depression years of yore. The festivities begin in the air over Paraguay’s capital city where Fortune, a pulp-style “brigand for hire,” and a female adventuress named Delatriz Betancourt (a typical Chaykin exotic name choice) are flying in separate aircraft in a dogfight with Bolivian aviators. Fortune is shot down, but he parachutes onto the rooftop garden of Asuncion’s poshest hotel where Hazel Fontaine is standing, stark naked, next to the pool around which she and some friends are conducting a party. Back in Los Angeles, our lascivious rogue is subsequently hired by Hazel’s husband, Irwin Oppenheim, to serve as a bodyguard for several movie personages, who are still engaged in a seven-year-long drunken party. While escorting a trio of these well-dressed louts through the lobby of a hotel, Fortune is assaulted by a man he quickly knocks out, leaving Fortune to ponder where he has seen the man’s mysterious lapel pin before. The book then ends with Delatriz discussing Fortune’s impending murder at the hands of minions hired by Malcolm Shaw, an anti-Semite.

By way of keeping us interested while ramping up the suspense, Chaykin manages at least three distinct episodes, self-contained mini-adventures — the end of the dogfight, the fist fight in the lobby, and Oppenheim’s hiring of Fortune — and leaves us wondering why Delatriz is in league with an avowed anti-Semite to kill Fortune, a man of the “Hebraic persuasion” who she was ostensibly palling around with in the air war between Bolivia and Paraguay in the opening pages of the book.

The book is full of Chaykin tics and tropes — tall, statuesque people, voice-over transitions between scenes, and characters with insatiable appetites for sex.

Chaykin, who has described himself as “a Jew from the future,” also revels in the current secular fashion of acknowledging Jewishness — a fashion, in comic books, that is often these days more frequently indulged now that so many of the creators of the medium have been revealed as Jews. Chaykin rejoices in this cultural advance, telling Gary Groth during an interview: “I’m no longer afraid, ashamed, or uninterested enough in my personal background to keep it out of the work. I’m no longer a Jew masquerading as a gentile through comics.” He is, instead, eager to put Jews into his work.

Reuben Flagg, the protagonist of the 1980s series American Flagg, was a Jew, overtly but not blatantly. In the current run of Dominic Fortune, however, our hero is defiantly a Jew, and anti-Semites are patently the villains. Fortune’s laissez-faire attitude toward women as orifices to exploit for casual sex may not be particularly admirable in this age of feminist enlightenment, but in most other aspects of his outlaw personality, he is heroic enough to be a role model.

As always, Chaykin’s drawing is bravura, his page layouts dramatic, his pacing headlong, and his dialogue urbane and witty, sarcastic and satiric. The title is a revel in our often not very refined natures and an outrageous assault on political correctness and genteel posturing, so over-the-top as to be vastly amusing in its in-your-face audaciousness.

NEW UNIVERSE AT DC COMICS

At DC, a universe-altering re-organization that has been in the works for some time was announced, pushed forward, no doubt, by the Disney’s acquiring Marvel last fall. At Publishers Weekly, Heidi MacDonald reported that “the home of Superman and Batman will become part of a larger division called DC Entertainment, to be run by WB branding veteran Diane Nelson. The new arm is charged with expanding opportunities for DC's huge library of characters into other media, including feature films, television, interactive entertainment, direct-to-consumer platforms and consumer products. Nelson, who has been successfully handling the Harry Potter franchise at WB for the last 10 years, is looking to hire a new publisher who will take Paul Levitz’ place to oversee DC's comics business.” Paul Levitz, who will be stepping down as DC’s president and publisher to make room for Nelson, will continue his relationship with DC as a consultant, and he will also pursue writing projects for the company.

The new configuration is expected to position DC better to compete with long-time rival Marvel now that the latter has acquired Disney clout. “While Marvel and DC have been four-color comics publishing rivals since the early 1960s, the stakes have intensified in recent years as superhero-based movies have flexed their superpowers at the box office. Warner/DC's ‘The Dark Knight’ is the all-time #2 money winner, but the recent Superman reboot stumbled, and a Wonder Woman movie has been in the concept stages for years. Meanwhile, Marvel successfully launched the little-known Iron Man into a top franchise, and Spider-Man has three blockbusters in his web. Now it's Warners' turn to start mining the DC library of properties and characters, with Nelson in a position to help the entire studio develop DC's properties across various platforms.”

And DC’s roster is more varied than Marvel’s, including non-superhero creations like Jonah Hex and the Losers. Comics scripting veteran Marv Wolfman, who is currently collaborating with Warner Studios on as yet unnamed projects, elaborated for MacDonald: "The bulk of DC's characters aren't superheroes; over the last 70 years they've developed mystery and horror materials and children's comics." This could be even more important down the road, if superhero movies prove to be as cyclical as other once-popular movie genres. "You could take a lot of the other DC characters and succeed with them," says Wolfman, pointing to the huge library of concepts and characters at DC's Vertigo imprint as one example. According to Wolfman, print publishing as the engine for character creation is still key, even for giant movie corporations like Disney and Warner Brothers. "Profits may come from other mediums, but it's the comics that generate the characters. I think you're going to see continued emphasis on the comics because, frankly, it's a very easy way of discovering what characters you have and telling really fascinating stories."

TINTIN MOVIE

As the Steven Spielberg Tintin movie nears its debut, slated for 2011, we see more frequently evidence of legal disturbances on the Herge horizon. Lately, for instance, Bob Garcia, a British  detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado received in November a court order to pay £35,000 or face the prospect of bailiffs seizing his house and belongings. “His crime,” reported Henry Samuel of the Telegraph, “was to have written five essays on Tintin sparked by his boyhood love for the squif-haired reporter and his dog Snowy — a passion he wanted to impart to his own children.” Other Tintin fans have been pressured to cease and desist writing about Herge’s famed boy reporter. They are all the targets of attacks by a British lawyer named Nick Rodwell, who holds “the exclusive rights to the oeuvre of the Belgian Hergé (born Georges Rémi) and Tintin since he married the cartoonist’s widow, Fanny, 16 years ago. In the Garcia case, the court ruled that he had violated the author's moral and proprietary rights,” but the disputation goes on apace.

Tintin fans are lining up on Garcia’s side, accusing Rodwell of a ruthless drive to kill off their harmless and not-for-profit passion in his bid to keep exclusive control of the Tintin brand. Garcia says his supporters had written to Spielberg asking him to intervene. Said Garcia: “Rodwell’s problem is he's walking in the footsteps of a genius and is only ever referred to as the 'husband of Hergé's widow'. It must be very frustrating and may explain his violence towards those that really love Hergé's work.” More, no doubt, will transpire.

SKITZY

Drawn and Quarterly reprints a 1955 tale in pantomime by Don Freeman: Skitzy (100 7x9-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $19.95) in which Floyd W. Skitzafroid is unhappy and keeps his wife awake nights by tossing and turning in bed. By day, however, he is either (1) painting in his studio in Greenwich Village or, simultaneously, (2) in an office uptown, where he works as an accountant. Freeman gives us a visual hint early on about the schizophrenia of his protagonist — both on the cover and early in the narrative, where he shows him splitting in half on the subway as he commutes to work. One half goes to his studio; the other, to the office. Employing a model named Susette, the artist produces a painting of a nude woman eating a cluster of grapes entitled “Grapes Susette” that he sells for $100, which he spends buying a necklace for his wife. She, in turn, presents him with a painting — “Grapes Susette,” that she bought for $800! Seething at the economic injustice of it all, Floyd tosses and turns all night again — until he has the idea of opening his own gallery to sell his paintings, thereby uniting both the artistic and commercial aspects of his personality. This cautionary tale, drawn in a slap-dash, breezy manner, unfolds one “panel” (or picture) to a page, telling the story in an economical way possible only in the cartooning medium, which permits “splitting” the character’s personality in both visual and narrative terms, thereby depicting different activities as if they were taking place at the same time. Freeman, who died in 1978, produced Skitzy while otherwise creating children’s books, publishing the book himself; today, as D&Q demonstrates, he would have found a publisher. And now, he has. A short biography completes the volume.