Rants & Raves

THE SANDMAN

With The Sandman by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (302 7x10-inch pages, color; DC hardcover, $39.99) historic comic book stories are finally being reproduced as they should be: these pages have been photographed (or, digitally scanned) directly from the original comic books — no bleaching out the color to create scabrous faux black-and-white “art” for clumsy retouching. And the paper they’re printed on is a breed of newsprint. Other reprint tomes have done the same, I ween, but it’s nice to have one in my very own hands at last; this volume presents the Simon and Kirby Sandman in as close to the state of the original issues as possible. The results are sometimes flawed: blemishes on the original comic book pages are reproduced here, exactly; where colors fade or black lines smudge, the same happens here. But that scarcely matters to those of us who buy old comic books in order to read the stories and luxuriate in contemplating the art of pioneering masters: we’re happy with the way the material appeared initially, so a book like this that reproduces that initial appearance exactly is just fine.

The book is introduced by John Morrow, whose TwoMorrows publishing house has produced since 1994 The Jack Kirby Collector, making Morrow one of the world’s experts on Kirby. Morrow tells how Simon and Kirby, wanting to leave Timely, for which they had created Captain America, for more lucrative profit-sharing at DC Comics, made their deal with DC and then moonlighted trying to create new features while still doing Captain America during the day — until Martin Goodman found out and summarily canned them.

The reason for buying this book, however, is not Morrow’s history: it’s the Sandman stories as they first appeared, narrative and art, March 1942 to December 1945, in Adventure Comics, Nos. 72-101, with a couple from World’s Finest (Nos. 6 and 7). And the art is some of Kirby’s most exuberant and animated, ample evidence of the visual excitement that so inspired the rest of the four-color pulp artists in those days of yesteryear. Kirby always did the pencils, but Simon wasn’t always the inker. By Simon’s own testimony in his autobiography, The Comic Book Makers, Kirby was inked by a parade of freelancers and moonlighters. My guess is that Simon inked the first story or so here, then surrendered the brush to others; by the end of the book, the kind of feathering that Simon did has disappeared, and the modeling is done by chips of black shadow, a distinctive Kirby trait.

KICK-ASS

“Kick-Ass,” the movie based on the comic book series by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., opened April 16, and it virtually tied with another cartoon feature, the animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” in box office revenue — both roughly $20 million. For “Kick-Ass,” that’s $5-10 million shy of the amount predicted by wise-guy box office analysts. Millar joined the analysts in the weeks before the movie’s release: “This is a movie about comic fans, made by comic fans.” Just what we need: another niche flick for a neurotic niche. The so-called hero of the funnybook and the motion picture is a teenager who, enamored of superheroes, dresses up like his idols, tries to fight crime, and gets his tuckus trounced. The comic book, according to Entertainment Weekly (April 9), outsold Spider-Man during its 8-issue run, 2008-2010. A preview at last summer’s Sandy Eggo Comic-Con earned a standing ovation and has generated “the kind of buzz that any mega-budget film would envy.”

In addition to “a uniquely self-aware blend of comic action and realistic gore,” the movie brims with foul language of the kind that the thirteen-year-old actress who utters it would get “grounded forever” if she used it in real life, she says. Playing her father in the movie is Nicolas Cage, a man so wrapped up in four-color fantasy that he named his son Kal-El, Superman’s birth name. Director Matthew Vaughn says the burgeoning popularity of “Kick-Ass” derives from an increasingly jaded audience: “Superhero movies are getting too generic,” he says. “Where’s the one that kids can really relate to? For me, that’s ‘Kick-Ass.’” Early tracking reports, saith EW, “show the movie playing as well with women as with men — a rarity in the male-driven world of comic book pics.” But perhaps not all that surprising since the movie ridicules the superhero fixation among the males. And there are more movies of this breed just down the road, “a coming wave of snarky, self-aware comic-nerd movies about real-dude superheroes” — “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (August) and “The Green Hornet” (December).

As the “Kick-Ass” movie headed toward its April 16th debut, it appeared that in spite of its edgy “hard R” content, it was getting mostly positive reviews with a 74% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But not everyone was enthusiastic.

At the Denver Post, movie critic Lisa Kennedy was not amused: “Just because ‘Kick-Ass’ has a winning 11-year-old girl as one of its most unforgettable characters doesn’t mean Vaughn’s crazed ride of a flick is for kids. It so isn’t. It’s potty-mouthed and dementedly violent in the way that films based on comics so often are. R-rated, the movie is best for adults whose inner teen still aches to right wrongs but doesn’t have the skill set to wreak havoc on the bad guys.”  Sounds like she’s been reading Roger Ebert.

Although Ebert enjoyed the film’s early scenes, praised the work of Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz, and even acknowledged that the film was indeed a satire, he labeled the movie as “morally reprehensible.” Ebert’s attack on the film, which may have some element of truth to it but is ultimately unfair to the filmmakers, is summed up in this passage: “I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what? The movie's rated R, which means in this case that it's doubly attractive to anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I'm thinking of 6-year-olds.”

But at Time magazine, Richard Corliss was thrilled to his cultural/philosophical/critical core: “To apotheosize the cliches of the genre while subverting them is a neat trick, but the ‘Kick-Ass’ cadre pulls it off. ... The result is a work that spills out of itself to raise issues about all superhero characters, all action pictures. Millar isn’t boasting when he writes in the making-of book that ‘Kick-Ass’ could ‘redefine superhero movies in the same way “Pulp Fiction”redefined crime movies.”

Just what we need—another redefinition that redefines the newly defined. Oh, where will it all end?

The movie includes an animated sequence about the origin of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, which Big Daddy ostensibly is telling as a comic book that he draws. Romita directed and drew the sequence. Jami Philbrick at Buzz Up, asked Romita what the experience of doing animation was like for him. Said Romita: “It’s more of a great story than it is an effort because if someone tells you that you’re going to direct an animated sequence, and then do the art work for the animated sequence, people are going to think that you’re working on it for the rest of your life. What Matthew has is this great computer program that was from the Spielberg dinosaur movie, ‘Jurassic Park.’ It’s the updated version of it that takes simple drawings and 360-degree models, and you can adapt it from that. In other words, you don’t have to draw 64 frames per second. Anyway, he said to me, ‘Frame this section out as you would a comic, and we’re going to animate it.’ ... It’s about sixty or ninety seconds depending, but Matthew’s just tweaking a few of the frames, and I’ve got about sixty drawings left to go.”

The movie, while a sequel to the comic book, is also a prequel to the next Kick-Ass comic book story arc — and it launches the Kick-Ass graphic novel, comprising the initial seven-issue comic book series.

PULITZER GOES TO FIORE FOR ANIMATION

For the first time, the Pulitzer committee on editorial cartooning, not usually the most forward-looking deliberative body on the planet (because there’s usually only one cartooner on the committee), awarded the prize to a cartoonist whose work is all animated, not a traditionally static image in sight. Numerous cartooning kibitzers believed this day was looming, but few thought it would arrive so soon. Mark Fiore self-syndicates his animations to the websites of NPR, Mother Jones, Slate and others as well as SFGate.com, where, saith the Pulitzers, “his wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a high standard for an emerging form of commentary.”

It was a most appropriate accolade: Fiore is not only the first animating editoonist to win, he was among the first — if not, in fact, The First — editoonist to go into animating his cartoons as a full-time enterprise, making the cartoons and marketing them, too, via the Web. His cartoons are not just moving pictures: they are full-bore productions with music as well as dialogue and, sometimes, songs. And he manages to preserve from his static cartoons a limber line that waxes and wanes and even bunches up at corners occasionally, creating a nifty visual hook. He is a genuine pioneer, whose example has inspired an entire profession.

In 2007,  the Pulitzer went to Newsdays’s Walt Handelsman who was the first winner whose submission enclosed animations as well as motionless editoons, and the Pulitzers revised their criteria to embrace the new medium, but, until this year, an editorial cartoonist’s portfolio had to include traditional, static cartoons even if it also contained animated cartoons. Fiore is the first to win for cartoons that are solely animations; and his portfolio comprised no immobile cartoons.

But Fiore doesn’t see animation as the only future for political cartooning.

"I think it's A future," Fiore says. "I hope it's not THE future. I hope there are still traditionally drawn print cartoons by staff cartoonists. ... Judging by what's happened, though, that won't be necessarily the only way."

Finalists in the competition this year were: Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer for “his simplicity in expressing consistently fearless positions on national and local issues,” and Matt Wuerker of Politico for “his broad portfolio that encompasses the nation's historic political year, using rich artistry, wry humor and sometimes animation to drive home his deft satire.” Wuerker won the coveted Herblock Award just a few weeks ago.

In one of those delicious strokes of irony, in the wake of Pulitzer’s announcement about Fiore’s win, it emerged shortly, thanks to a Nieman Journalism Lab blog, that last December Apple wouldn’t let the cartoonist’s iPhone app into the App Store because it “contains content that ridicules public figures.” As soon as that story surfaced, Steve Jobs said: “This was a mistake that’s being fixed.” And, sure enough, Apple asked Fiore to resubmit his app, and it was accepted this time.

Said Fiore:“I think the key passage in the Apple developer agreement that made things impossible was something like ‘ridicules public figures,’ which is, um, like, kinda what we all make our living doing. Methinks that may change thanks to the confluence of media over this crazy week.”

In a sort of backhanded testimony to the potent status of editorial cartoons, the Denver Post, my local paper, has logged only six Pulitzers in its career (the sixth, this year), and two of the six were won by editorial cartoonists: Paul Conrad in 1964 (just as he was leaving for the Los Angeles Times) and Pat Oliphant in 1967 for work in 1966, the year after he arrived at the Post from his native Australia.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

A kerfuffle erupted in the ranks of the nation’s editorial cartoonists because, on more than one occasion, NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Dick Gregory displayed an editorial cartoon without identifying the cartoonist who drew it. Gregory has used cartoons by Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and, a few months later, by Mike Keefe of the Denver Post. In neither case, did Gregory say who had draw the pictures he found so potent. “Too many mainstream media folks treat cartoons like they’re shells found on a beach or forwarded e-mail attachments,” said John Cole, the staff editorial cartoonist at the Scranton Times-Tribune. “They wouldn’t reference a Kathleen Parker or Paul Krugman column without verbally identifying the author, and the same ought to go for cartoons.”

Properly chastised, NBC has reformed, reported Atlantic City Press editoonist Rob Torne online (at cagle.msnbc.com). Henceforth, “Meet the Press” will give full credit to cartoonists, according to an NBC spokesperson: “We love cartoonists and cartoons which is why we like to show them on ‘Meet the Press.’ So often they perfectly capture and get to the heart of the matter. Not mentioning the cartoonists by name has been an completely unintentional oversight and we promise we will give them all the credit they deserve moving forward.”

Editoonists can’t claim many victories — we’re still in Afghanistan despite months of protests by inkslingers, and the health care reform still languishes, stalled by the Party of No — so this one is worth noting.

KING AROO

Just received here at Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer, IDW’s elegant reprinting of Jack Kent’s supremely fanciful King Aroo, which, up until now, has been available only in an antique Doubleday  reprint of 1953. This brick-sized door-stopper re-issue (340 7x9-inch landscape-bound pages, b/w; $39.99) is another of the publisher’s deliciously packaged Library of American Comics — sparkling reproduction from the inaugural strip on November 13, 1950 through November 1, 1952, with delightful and informative introductory material, both text by Bruce Canwell and accompanying illustrations (photos, drawings, sketches, preliminary oeuvre). But it’s Kent’s strip, a whimsical feast of puns, sight gags, and fast-footwork slapstick, all transpiring in Kent’s postage-stamp sized kingdom, Myopia, that will win you over.

HONEY, THEY SHRUNK THE COMICS!

Comic strips in newspapers have been shrinking, often unobtrusively, for years. Before World War II, comic strips in some newspapers were published at gigantic size: some ran across the entire page, side to side. Even in a smaller incarnation—say, five columns wide—strips measured 10 inches from beginning to end. Then came WWII.

In a patriotic ploy to support the war effort, newspapers strained to save newsprint, which was used in the manufacture of munitions. Strips were abbreviated by cropping off the bottom inch or so of artwork. You can find evidence of this maneuver on the original art from the period. Syndicate copyright lines were frequently affixed in two positions: across the very bottom of the artwork, and then again 1-1 3/4 inches higher up, where it would still be visible in print after some newspapers clipped off the bottom portion of the artwork. And the width of strips was reduced, too.

Most cartoonists assumed that their strips would revert to the pre-war size once the hostilities ceased. Alas, no. Having finagled the smaller dimension for patriotic purposes, editors retained it after the war for journalistic reasons: the less space they had to devote to comic strips, the more space they’d have to practice journalism. By 1955, strips that were 10 inches wide in 1940 were only 7 inches wide.

Then an insidious shrinkage set in. Over the years. The width of a newspaper page was reduced by fractions of an inch at a time. Today’s newspaper page is much narrower than yesterday’s newspaper page. So even comic strips that are printed half-a-page wide actually appear at a smaller size than before. And the struggle goes on apace.

At the Washington Post recently, Michael Cavna, whose blog ComicRiffs ponders newspaper comics on a regular basis, confronted the current state of affairs when the Post consolidated its funnies from three to two pages, resulting in over-all shrinkage. Said Cavna: “This reduction is widely perceived by editors to be a necessary evil, the cost of doing business now.” He goes on to acknowledge that by shrinking the funnies, newspaper editors are shooting themselves in their various feet: demographically, newspaper readers tend to be older, and their eyesight ain’t what it used to be. When they can’t see small strips to read them, they give up following the funnies.

“In other words,” Cavna acknowledged, “one kind of shrinkage begets another.” He even reports that one reader wrote in to say: “My wife's given up reading the comics in her 40s because you print them too small."

One of the reasons that Peanuts and Beetle Bailey succeeded so spectacularly in the 1950s (and thereafter) is that they are more simply drawn than, say, Steve Canyon or Judge Parker. Newspaper editors, looking for legibility in the new reduced post-war size of their comics pages, opted for simply drawn strips because they were still readable at the smaller dimension. A vicious cycle soon swung into place. As simply drawn humorous comic strips displaced the more illustrative strips like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Roper, newspaper editors realized they could reduce the size of comic strips even more because they were drawn simply enough to tolerate the reduction. And the smaller the comic strips were printed, the greater the demand for strips drawn simply enough to be published at diminutive size, a size that now approaches that of postage stamps.

HERBLOCK

Mike Peters’ caricature of one of political cartooning’s pantheon, the longtime Washington Post editoonist Herbert Block (Herblock), is hilarious almost beyond description. I don’t know when or why Peters drew this picture, but it speaks volumes. First, it clearly states Herblock’s opinion of Richard M. Nixon: Nixon is a prick. I hesitated, at first, going beyond that in interpreting the image. At first blush, it seems to portray Herblock as a flasher, taking great pride in his genitals — implying, thereby, that Herblock’s reputation is built on his relentless ridicule of Nixon. I think that may sell Herblock a little short: he was a great editorial cartoonist before Nixon took office — and long after Nixon left. But to see Herblock as a flasher applies the psychology of such perversions too literally. Herblock is not “flashing”: he’s “exposing” himself — or, more precisely, he’s exposing Nixon for what he really is, a prick. The imagery here connects Herblock to his unfaltering assault on Nixon in a way that deftly characterizes Nixon and the relationship between the cartoonist and his target.

Peters’ picture is canny enough that it could well serve as the cover of the new biography, Herblock: The Life and Work of the Greatest Political Cartoonist by Haymes Johnson and Harry Katz (304 9x11-inch pages, b/w; Norton hardcover, $35), which volume does, indeed, have on its cover a caricature of Nixon, one of Herblock’s. As Herblock’s nemesis, Nixon is now so frequently associated with the thrice-winning Pulitzer cartoonist that they have become, in the history of political cartooning, a pair, a set, neither half of which can appear as effectively without the other. But the book at hand, spanning Herblock’s 73-year career, happily reduces the part played by Nixon to a realistic proportion of the whole.

The volume was produced in connection with an exhibition of 100 of Herblock’s cartoons at the Library of Congress last year. Intended, doubtless, as a tribute to the cartoonist, the book falls considerably short of being a suitable memorial. The reproduction of the cartoons, for instance, is uneven: some of the drawings look smudged and the linework is sometimes clogged and blotchy-looking — as if the scanner didn’t have enough pixels or, perhaps, the cartoon is reproduced from a version printed on newsprint rather than from original art. Herblock’s message, always powerful and succinct, survives, but no thanks to the editors or publishers of this tome.

Johnson, a Pulitzer winner himself, writes an introductory segment about Herblock, with whom he was a long-time colleague at the Washington Post. Considering the presumed length of their association, the essay is almost entirely devoid of the kind of insightful office anecdotes that would help us to know the cartoonist. Katz, curator of the Herb Block Foundation’s collection of Herblock cartoons and a former curator in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, writes about the cartoonist’s place in the history of American editorial cartooning; he does a somewhat better job at his assignment than Johnson does at his, but the brevity of his essay, necessarily cursory but adequate to its purpose, skimps the subject.

Given the book’s shortcomings, we might well ask why the volume was produced at all. Except for the invaluable DVD that accompanies this book — wherein over 18,000 of Herblock’s cartoons can be found, in chronological order, beginning with his earliest efforts in 1928 as “Bert Block” (the only reason to buy the book) — the book offers nothing that cannot be found better displayed or developed in one of Herblock’s own periodic collections of cartoons (ten volumes, starting with The Herblock Book in 1952, each fully annotated by the cartoonist’s narrative text) or in his autobiography, Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life (from which we learn Herblock feels indebted for the advice once given by Blondie’s Chic Young: “(1) You can tell if the ink on a drawing is still wet by rubbing your hand over it; and (2) If you spill drawing ink on the carpet, it can be removed with a pair of scissors”).

Still, we can glean an occasional gem from this new tome. From a section quoting Herblock, there’s this capsule on the function of the editoonist: “Cartooning is an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty. If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.”

And that, perhaps, is enough — except for Herblock himself, all 18,000 of his cartoons worth, all on a handy DVD for your future perusal.

GARFIELD FROM THE TRASH BIN

Another new arrival here is Garfield from the Trash Bin (128 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w; Ballantine paperback, $14), a round-up of “rescued rejects and outrageous out takes” from Jim Davis’ comic strip factory near Muncie, Indiana. “The book contains gross gags, crass cartoons, sick sketches, and truly tasteless trash” produced by Davis and his collaborators, Brett Koth, Gary Barker, and Scott Nickel with additional artistic support from Linda Duell and Kenny Goetzinger, while ostensibly engaged in the business of generating gags for the Garfield comic strip. Not all gags generated are publishable — especially under the ground rules imposed by Davis, who convenes monthly gag-writing sessions during which he and Koth (and probably others) brainstorm without inhibition whatever seems funny, which, as time and participants wear on, becomes more and more hysterical and less and less suitable for family consumption. The drawing herein is all of the sketch variety — pencils and some quick inks — and is without doubt the liveliest Garfield art you’ll ever see. Koth, who is one of the chief pencilers in this compilation, is a fugitive from animation, and his frenetically moving targets decorate and enhance every page they appear on. But all the art is loose and happy, a treat of vast and hilarious dimensions. This is not a reprint tome: it is a collection of never-before-seen-or-published cartoon art, without, for now, peer.

MANGA AND LIBERTY

Do you know that you can be thrown in jail if your comics collection includes any pictures of young people — perhaps “children”; yes, some young people are young enough to be called “children” — in positions suggesting they are engaging in sexual activity or are about to engage in sexual activity? If you are a scholar studying various kinds of manga, or a fan of manga, you risk your liberty — particularly if, among the manga you are studying, there are lolicon, manga in which childlike female characters are depicted in an erotic manner. In short, do you know that your private proclivities — if they have anything to do with sex — endanger your freedom? That you have, in effect, no privacy whatsoever? That is the lesson we must derive from the case of Christopher Handley, the 39-year-old Iowan with manga in his comic book collection, who was sentenced on February 10 to six months in jail and five years probation because someone thought a minute portion of his collection was “child pornography.”

The prosecution notes, as the defense does in its brief, that there are no analogous cases to use for sentencing guidance because is the first time that comics (or other not-real depictions) have been prosecuted as a federal crime under the new statute. The defense counsel’s brief noted that no actual pornography was found in Handley’s home or on his computer, and that the lolicon material was “only a minute portion of his entire collection, which consisted of tens of thousands of manga and anime, representing all genres of the art form.”

Since this case was pleaded out, we won’t know with any precision its implications for personal freedom let alone freedom of the press and freedom of expression. We do know, however, that sex, without much question, is responsible in this country for the propagation of more injustice per square foot than just about any other human knack with the possible exception of racism.

As a nation, we have a decidedly confused (perhaps insane) attitude about sex and obscenity. Our bewilderment is probably rooted in a misbegotten sense of morality fostered by our Puritanical religious heritage, which successfully proclaimed, without a basis in any fact about human nature, that sex is bad or nasty or wrong, somehow, which leads, inevitably, to the sort of confusion Butch Hancock, a songwriter, discovered as a boy growing up in Texas: “Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for someone you love.”

Our attitudes are decidedly contradictory, as Hustler publisher Larry Flynt memorably points out: “Murder is a crime; writing about it isn’t. Sex is not a crime, but writing about it is. Why?”

Despite our aversion to sex in any form, we exploit our relentless interest in it. Said sociologist Philip Stater: “If we define pornography as any message from any commercial medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.”

Stephanie Black, head of marketing at the Playboy channel, adds: “On TV you can use sex to sell anything except sex.”

In our attitudes about sex, we are unique in the world, as Marlene Dietrich, an undeniable expert, observed: “In America, sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world, it is a fact.”

The law Handley was charged with breaking, Section 504 of the PROTECT Act, designed to stop trafficking in child pornography, is a highly questionable matter itself. Under its provisions, Handley went to trial, charged with possessing an obscenity and/or a visual depiction showing a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund did not provide the defense for Handley, but was a special consultant to Handley’s defense team, providing access to First Amendment experts, recommending expert witnesses on manga, and funding expert research for an eventual jury trial.

"Handley's case is deeply troubling, because the government is prosecuting a private collector for possession of art," said CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein last spring. "In the past, CBLDF has had to defend the First Amendment rights of retailers and artists, but never before have we experienced the Federal Government attempting to strip a citizen of his freedom because he owned comic books.”

Putting the case into context, Burton Joseph, CBLDF's Legal Counsel said: "In the lengthy time in which I have represented CBLDF and its clients, I have never encountered a situation where criminal prosecution was brought against a private consumer for possession of material for personal use in his own home.”

The gestapo may be knocking on your door next.

We discussed the Handley case and some of its implications in the Usual Place (RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves, Opus 239; Opus 243 reports Handley’s plea bargain and extends the discussion started in Op. 239). I urge you to read both again. It will make you shudder. Handley sounds like a man whose hobby has taken possession of him in ways that are scarcely healthy (and he probably realizes this, hence his plea bargain), but that is neither here nor there. His privacy was invaded, his freedom to be whatever he wanted to be as long as it didn’t infringe upon the liberties of others was ignored. It could be you or me.

Because so much manga features characters with childlike faces, any of those stories that edge into the realm of romance (the kinds of books teenage girls are grabbing up by the bushel) could be seen as lolicon — or, in this country, child pornography.

The gestapo has the ammunition; it lacks only the impulse and the opportunity.

COMICS AT THE RETAIL LEVEL

Brian DiStefano opened his comic book retail store three years ago, but he did some research in the marketplace first, reports Karen Maserjian Shan at the Poughkeepsie Journal. "I visited 20 separate stores … to see how each one of them ran, how they looked, how they felt," DiStefano said of the comic book retailers he checked out before opening his own. "Seventy-five percent of them were dark and dingy environments that were very off-putting, I thought, not only to myself, but definitely to parents and their kids." His store, he resolved, would be different. And it is, reports Shan: Upstate Comics in LaGrangeville, New York is “an inviting space where young and old would find knowledgeable salespeople, get the latest news on their comic book heroes and enjoy conversations about the exploits of Green Lantern, Hulk, Batman and whoever else they happened to be reading about.” And so are the Mile High Comics stores in Denver, I might add: they’re clean, well-lighted, and orderly — just like a regular retail store, not like some fanboy’s basement storage bin.

TOP JOBS AT DC FILLED

Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times reports that DC Entertainment has filled Paul Levitz’s publisher post left vacant in a recent reorganization, naming Wildstorm Studios’ artist Jim Lee and DC’s executive editor Dan DiDio to serve as co-publishers of its DC Comics imprint. Geoff Johns, the writer of comics like "Infinite Crisis" and "Blackest Night," was appointed the chief creative officer of DC Entertainment; Levitz will continue at the company as a contributing editor and consultant. 

DiDio, Lee and Johns.

ZAPIRO

A long-delayed satirical puppet show, the brainchild of South African editoonist Zapiro and producer Thierry Cassuto, hit the screens in South Africa on March 1. The show was yanked two years ago from the South African Broadcast Company’s line-up because of alleged viewer “sensitivities” and some similarly alleged financial setbacks. More likely, the cancellation was caused by fear of  South Africa’s most powerful politician, Jacob Zuma, then a candidate for the country’s presidency — and now, the president. At the time the show was spiked, according to Lyndon Khan at tonight.co.za, cartoonist Zapiro, aka Jonathan Shapiro, said he was not surprised: "The producers of the program had made it clear ... that a large part of the show would be about the lawsuits faced by Zuma," Shapiro said. Shapiro is also facing law suits — all brought by Zuma in an obvious effort to get the cartoonist to stop drawing cartoons about him.

DIARY OF A WIMPY KID

The film adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid came out in mid-March. Walter Scott reports in Parade, quoting actress Rachael Harris, who plays the wimp’s mother, explained how fans might be shocked by the movie: “The obvious difference is that we don’t look like stick figures.”

Incidentally, I must confess that I was wrong about the Wimpy Kid books. Partially wrong. I refused to believe they qualify as comics because the pictures don’t add any narrative information to the prose: they’re decoration, I said, and therefore not comics.

This assertion, however, was based upon a cursory thumb-through of one of the books. Since then, I’ve tried reading one. Because neither the drawings nor the lettering has any particular visual distinction, reading one of these things is fairly close to waterboarding in my list of bad things that can happen to you. But I’ve had to revise my verdict: sometimes, on some pages — maybe on most — these things qualify as comics. Sometimes the pictures act as the punchline to the joke the prose is setting up. But sometimes the pictures don’t do anything for the meaning of the text. That’s why I’m only partially pregnant — er, I mean, wrong.

I doubt that Wimpy author Jeff Kinney would mind my hesitancy about his cartooning. After college he tried to be a newspaper cartoonist but didn’t make the grade. He said he started drawing as a seventh grader, which he denominated his “peak period.” I’m quoting from an interview with him that I heard on NPR one day last fall. He confessed to being something of a wimp himself as a kid. Once, seeking to avoid swimming class, he hid in the boys’ room, but it was so cold, he had to wrap himself in toilet paper to prevent hypothermia. Exactly this adventure is recorded in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules.

I’m not dreaming this, am I?

LUANN AT 25

Greg Evans’ Luann passed the 25-year marker in March, and Evans celebrated the occasion with a commemorative Sunday strip in which Luann and her pals appear, fleetingly, as they looked when the strip started.  Lasting this long at a single occupation was probably not what Evans thought he would be doing 25 years ago. By then, he’d taught high school art for four years (“and hated it,” he said), married Betty, who was an elementary school teacher, trekked off to Australia for a while, worked as a tv camera-man in Colorado Springs, and became a robot operator. This was Maxwell, who bears a more than casual resemblance to R2D2 of “Star Wars” fame; Evans traveled with Maxwell all over his native California and other regions, performing at trade shows, malls, promotions, and fairs. He also sold cartoons to magazines so he could say, if asked what he did for a living, “I’m a cartoonist and I run a robot.”

Accounting for his success at keeping a job longer than a couple years, Evans said: “Betty convinced me that I had a good comic strip in me so over a 15-year period, I created several: Flounder Fathers, then Seamy Heights, then Zak ‘n’ Lou, then Mother Goof, Maiden Voyage, Beowoof, Headline Humor — none of which you’ve heard of because all were rejected.”

Then one day, he had an inspiration. “I’d been watching my four-year-old daughter primping with play make-up and acting oh-so-feminine and I thought that strip about a very contemporary little girl was just what the comic page needed. As I worked, however, I found that age four was too limiting, so I advanced her to age 13. Ah, adolescence! Who doesn’t recall their teenage years with a mixture of joy, pain and scute embarrassment? What a rich subject for comedy and pathos! I gave my main character a ‘lovable loser’ quality and created a colorful cast of friends and adversaries. Thus, Luann was born.”

In recent years, Luann’s brother Brad has consumed some of the strip’s storyline: he’s fallen in love with a beauteous fellow fire-fighter named Toni, and they now flirt with the idea of just how permanent this relationship will be. With Toni, Evans proves that his streamlined drawing style can limn a genuinely hot lady. Evans also watercolors with marvelous results. Happy anniversary Greg, Luann, Brad, Toni, etc.

STAY TOONED!

Just heard that the fifth issue of John Read’s Stay Tooned! is now out and about. This issue features profiles of Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey), Jack & Carole Bender (Alley Oop), editorial cartoonist Jeff Koterba, caricature artist Joe Bluhm, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, and Justin Thompson (webcomic Mythtickle); mini interviews conducted by Scott Nickel with Alex Hallatt (Arctic Circle), Sandra Bell-Lundy (Between Friends), Stephanie McMillan (Minimum Security), Stephanie Piro (Six Chix), and Terri Libenson (The Pajama Diaries); a report on the recent USO-sponsored NCS cartoonists tour to the Mideast; plus articles/columns contributed by Tom Richmond, Bill Janocha (who also drew the cover), Don Hagist, John Hambrock and moi, your keyboard man here at Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer. To order you very own copy, beam up to staytoonedmagazine.com  — just a mere $9, plus $2 p&h.

SAN DIEGO MOVING TO ANAHEIM?

Comic-Con International, the world-renowned geekfest for comic book collectors and sf movie buffs and computer gamers, might move from its 40-year home in San Diego to Anaheim, reports Eric Carpenter at the Orange County Register. The Con’s contract with San Diego expires with the 2012 extravaganza, and Anaheim is mounting a bid to attract the event, the continued growth of which is stalled at 126,000 because no more can safely fit into the 550,000 square-foot San Diego Convention Center. Anaheim’s Convention Center has 815,000 square feet of convention space, and the site offers other inducements, most persuasive among them, its proximity to Hollywood-based executives and talent, who, lately, have recognized the Comic-Con as “a required pit stop for film studios, television networks and comics publishers who are preparing geek-friendly projects,” said Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times.

Anaheim says it has more hotel rooms within walking distance of its Center than San Diego and the room rates are typically cheaper, but during the Con’s traditional meeting time, July, families flocking to Disneyland fill a huge hunk of the rooms; the hoteliers, understandably, want to fill the rest of their room blocks and see the Comic-Con as the means of doing so, but, given the occupancy by the Disneyland crowd, my guess is that the Anaheim hotels won’t offer much of a discount on room rates. (Not that San Diego does either.)

Meanwhile, in San Diego, three waterfront hotels hope to beat down the competition in Anaheim by offering 300,000 square feet of their meeting space to the Con free of charge for 2013 through 2015. Comic-Con officials have toured and inspected the Anaheim facilities; a decision by the Comic-Con board is expected in the coming weeks.

HAPPY SEX

The reign of the “doughty French-language comic hero Asterix” is being challenged by a “cheeky erotic comic called Happy Sex reports Lionel Laurent at Reuters. “Humorous bedroom vignettes feature couples spicing up their sex life with bondage gear, role play and menages-a-trois,” Laurent continued, and “the bedroom adventures often have unintended consequences, such as when dirty talk provokes fits of anger or when a vibrator is mistaken for a toothbrush.” Happy Sex has been a hit since it debuted in October and is ranked third best seller in 2009 by the research firm GfK, which also reports that the broader French comic market has managed to resist a year of economic slowdown in France, growing 0.3 percent in 2009.

SIMPSONS AT TWENTY

This season, as most of us realize, "The Simpsons" celebrated on January 10 both its 20th anniversary and its 450th episode, surpassing "Gunsmoke" as the longest-running American primetime tv series. Created by Matt Groening in 1989, the Fox animated sitcom has since become “a living tv legend,” writes Frank Nestor at columbiaspectator.com, continuing: “With fans all over the world, the extent of the influence is immeasurable. In 2001, ‘D'oh’ — Homer Simpson's catchphrase — was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. ... When ‘The Simpsons’ first aired, it was revolutionary. Animation had not been on prime time for a generation and the idea of an adult-oriented cartoon seemed ludicrous. Instead, the medium of animation provided a freedom for the writers to have dysfunctional characters that both embodied and criticized American society. ‘Family Guy’ creator Seth MacFarlane pointed out in the documentary that Bart talking back to Homer was considered offensive 20 years ago, yet this is relatively tame compared to today's standards. MacFarlane and the creators of ‘South Park’ credit ‘The Simpsons’ with paving the way for the satiric and comedic animation that is currently on TV. These newer cartoons are more crass, crude, and blunt than ‘The Simpsons’ has ever been. Such shows use the rude humor to which more recent generations have grown accustomed.

“Homer is still ‘pure id’ and Bart is still a troublemaker with a sassy mouth, and the show is still funny, but some viewers feel it does not pack the same humor it once did. ‘I feel like ‘The Simpsons' doesn't have the same punch it had in the ‘90s,’ said Ari Frydman. ‘All those adult cartoon shows seem like the same thing to me.’" But I don’t think Nestor agrees: “Nothing in American culture is safe from the satiric pens of the Simpsons writers. When they do not care who they offend, ‘The Simpsons’ tends to be its funniest. While this confidence is sometimes lacking in recent episodes, the sitcom possesses one more unique quality: heart.”

THE BEST OF PUNCH CARTOONS

Britain’s venerable humor magazine, Punch, died a few years back, but that is not the end of the magazine’s cartoons. A fresh omnibus compilation of 2,000 of its cartoons, The Best of Punch Cartoons (608 9x11-inch pages, b/w; Prion hardcover, $60) came out in 2008: this is the Best of  Punch Cartoons edited by Helen Walasek, not any of the numerous other collections with virtually the same title.

Walasek divides the content into time periods and precedes the show with the briefest of introductions, which, despite the brevity, manages to explain how the word cartoon, meaning a humorous drawing, was derived from the Italian cartone, meaning preliminary drawing, through the inadvertent machinations of the magazine, which submitted several “cartoons” (mock preliminary drawings) in a contest held in 1843 to select mural decorations for the newly constructed Houses of Parliament. The first of the satirical sketches, by John Leech, was labeled, with startling prescience, “Cartoon No. 1.”  It and its Punch successors in the mural contest were amusing enough to result in all humorous drawings in the magazine (previously termed “pencilings”) being called “cartoons” ever after.

It is a matter of supreme gratification to me to observe that the Leech drawing, the official “first cartoon” in the history of the medium, is one in which the verbal-visual blending is thoroughly interdependent: the meaning and import of the caption, “Substance and Shadow,” referring to the actual wretches in the cartoon and to the paintings, the shadows, they contemplate, is achieved through the picture, and the picture acquires greater significance by virtue of the caption. Neither words nor picture make the same sense alone without the other — a perfect exemplar of the best that cartooning can achieve.

At appropriate intervals through the visual history, Walasek collects a couple pages exemplifying the work of various Punch cartoonists, including several of my favorites—the incomparable Fougasse, and H.M. Bateman, E.H. Shepard, Rowland Emett, Norman Thelwell, Ronald Searle (who, at 90, is still alive and reveals that champagne is the secret to long life in an interview with Valerie Grove at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk) — and, in other short sections, features some of the magazine’s zanier efforts on such topics as Early Motoring, The Space Race, Holidays, and, finally, Lemmings.