Rants & Raves

THE COMPLETE POGO

Coming to a boil slowly on the back burner at Fantagraphics Books, a new, revised Complete Pogo, re-commencing the reprint project begun in July 1992 and interrupted in June 2000 at Volume 11, having reprinted the daily strips through February 2, 1954. This fresh endeavor begins where the first project did — with the Pogo incarnation at the New York Star, where creator Walt Kelly served as art director (which duties included editorial cartooning as well as all graphic decorations and furbelows) — but improves upon the earlier version by including, for the first time ever, the Sundays, in blazing color. The series’ first volume (11x9-inch pages, $35), slated to appear sometime next year, includes a biographical introduction by Kelly biographer Steve Thompson and high-steppin’ footnotes jammed together at the back where the obscure topical references in this satirical masterpiece are explained (by yrs trly).

And that’s probably enough touting of the works and productions of the publisher who sends me checks, occasionally, for my contributions to The Comics Journal, in print and at its website incarnation, tcj.com, for which I concoct a blog three times a week on newspaper comic strips. Just so you know how thoroughly corrupt all this seemingly reasonable exposition is.

THE KAT WHO WALKED IN BEAUTY

In the spirit of an absolute krazy konquest, Fantagraphics Books published in June 2007 The Kat Who Walked in Beauty (114 15x11-inch pages in b/w; hardcover, $29.95), a museum-quality compilation of  daily strips from the 1920s, when, for a short time (March 4 to October 30, 1920), Herriman was investing the daily Krazy with the kind of fanciful backgrounds and varying layouts that elevated his Sunday pages to high art. The book also includes the illustrations Herriman supplied for the program booklet for “Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime,” a 1922 theatrical extravaganza by John Alden Carpenter. Herriman’s drawings reprise the Carpenter action, which, based upon the strip, reenacts the ritual romance that binds the Kat, the Mouse and Offisa Pup together in an eternal triangle with Krazy, whom Carpenter calls “the world’s greatest optimist—Don Quixote and Parsifal rolled into one,” at the apex.

Incidentally, the book’s title, which is probably supplied by Derya Ataker, from whose collection the content is culled (and who edited the book and furnished its introduction), recalls a Navajo poem, a night chant:

With beauty before me, I walk / With beauty behind me, I walk / With beauty above and about me, I walk / It is finished in beauty / It is finished in beauty.

Herriman, who had a deep affection and abiding admiration for the Navajos, whose venues he regularly visited (and depicted in the shifting landscapes in Krazy), would doubtless have appreciated the tribute inherent in Ataker’s title.

MORE KRAZINESS

Fantagraphics reached a temporary plateau in its Krazy Kat project in July 2008 with the tenth volume of Krazy & Ignatz, completing with these 1944 strips (George Herriman’s last) the Sunday reprinting project launched in 1988 by Eclipse, which brought its series through 1924 in 9 volumes. The Fanta book (120 9x12-inch full-color pages; paperback, $19.99) prints not only the last Sunday (published June 25, 1944), an eerily prescient episode about Krazy’s near death by drowning, but two unfinished dailies found after Herriman’s death on his drawing board — inked but not lettered, ghostly pencil lines lurking behind the inks. Alas, Fantagraphics opted to print these strips at what appears to be their actual size, which results in their straddling the gutter, effectively obliterating much of the center panel.

Like all the other volumes in this series, the book showcases extra-curricular color drawings that Herriman made for friends and family (birthday and anniversary “cards”) and two charming page-size strips he did for Vanity Fair in 1930, plus the customary “debaffler page” whereon Bill Blackbeard, Kim Thompson, and Jeet Heer explain otherwise obscure references in some of the strips. Heer, with Michael Tisserand, also supplies this volume’s introduction, “Herriman’s Last Days,” which, unaccountably, fails to note the actual date of his demise (April 24, 1944). The essay, however, does offer insights from Herriman’s granddaughter, Dinah (Dee) Cox, who, at age 74, is surrounded by much Krazy memorabilia, “including a Navajo rug bearing the cartoonist’s name.”

Cox was nine when her grandfather died, but she remembers how he lived in his last years: “When I knew him, he was a recluse. His daughter — my mother — had died [in late 1939], and his wife [Mabel] had died [killed in an automobile accident in September 1931]. Then he had a Japanese houseboy who got hauled off to the internment camps. The only person left for him was my Aunt Toots.” At the end of his life, she said, he retreated more and more into his work: “Coconino County and that strip was his reality. He was totally immersed into this world that he created.”

Fanta is also re-visiting the years covered by the Eclipse books (1916-24) in order to produce a uniform set of Krazy for the entire run of the Sundays. The first volume, subtitled “Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut,”reprints the 1916-1918 Sundays and includes rare art, notes about the Kat’s creation, and the usual “debaffler” end notes.

RIP KIRBY

Another of IDW’s classic comic reprints will reach its third $49.99 volume in November, the complete reprinting of all of Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, “the first modern detective,” as it says on the cover. The second volume offered strips from December 6, 1948 through September 22, 1951. The format, 11x10-inch pages, landscape binding, with only three daily strips per page, provides ample display for Raymond’s surpassing artistry with pen and brush. Alas, the reproduction, while superb, is only as good as the source material, and in some of the sources for this volume — but by no means all — Raymond’s more fragile lines have fattened up, robbing the visuals of the high contrast between filagree fine-line and masterfully spotted solid blacks, a hallmark of Raymond’s Rip Kirby. Still, enough of the strips are reproduced from good proofs that we have more than a mere sampling of the cartoonist’s spectacular styling in black and white.

And we have the stories themselves. As in the previous volume, IDW gives credit to Raymond’s co-author, King Features general manager at the time, Ward Greene, who was an accomplished novelist. Greene and Raymond and King’s comics editor, Sylvan Byck, met weekly to fine-tune plotlines and write dialogue for the strip, as Brian Walker explains in the introduction to the inaugural volume.

For this volume, Walker again supplies an excellent introductory essay. In the previous volume, he waxed biographical; here, he offers a truncated history of the National Cartoonists Society, dwelling on Raymond’s connection to the club; he was its third president.

AH POOK WILL BE HERE

Ah Pook Is Here, an experimental graphic novel by William Burroughs, celebrated Beat author of The Naked Lunch, will be published next summer by Fantagraphics, announced guardian.co.uk. Burroughs 
began the project over 40 years ago, teaming with artist Malcolm McNeill to produce a monthly comic strip for the English magazine Cyclops. “After the magazine folded, they worked to develop the concept into a full-length book, which they dubbed a ‘word/image novel’ because the term graphic novel had yet to be coined. But no publisher was interested, and after working on the book for seven years, the pair eventually abandoned it.”

Calling the Pook book not "so much a comic book as an experiment,” McNeill said: "Bill once remarked in an interview that '... nobody seems to ask the question what words actually are. And exactly their relationship to the human nervous system.' It was a concern he dedicated much of his life coming to terms with. Using words essentially to determine what words can do," said McNeill. "In the case of Ah Pook Is Here, he recruited images to the cause."

The Guardian also quoted Fantagraphics publisher and acquiring editor Gary Groth, who said the graphic novel was "quite possibly the last great work" by Burroughs, who he called "one of America's most original prose stylists," to be published. "Burroughs once said that 'The purpose of writing is to make it happen.' We are proud to make Ah Pook Is Here finally happen," he added.

Fantagraphics will also publish McNeill's memoir Observed While Falling, about his collaboration with Burroughs.

ANNE FRANK GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY

Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón are writing and illustrating Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography (Hill and Wang, $30 hardcover; $16.95 trade paperback). It’s “the crown on our careers," said Jacobson. He and Colón, veterans of the comics and graphic novel genres, have become  specialists in non-fiction department, having also created The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2006), After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001) and Che: A Graphic Biography (2009). Their Anne Frank goes beyond the period embraced by the girl’s diary, reports Carol Memmott at USA Today: it relates the story of the Frank family, starting with her father Otto's birth in 1889 and ends with investigation into the deaths of Anne, older sister Margot and their mother, Edith, in concentration camps, and then goes on to detail Otto's commitment to sharing Anne's diary with the world. As with their other non-fiction efforts, Jacobson and Colon aim for absolute authenticity: “Working from letters, photos and documents supplied by the Frank museum in Amsterdam, which commissioned the project, the biography is as visually and historically accurate as possible — down to the clothing worn by the Franks, the military uniforms of the Nazis, the furniture and layout of the Franks' secret apartment, and Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne died in March 1945 at age 15.”

BAD NEWS FOR FUNNYBOOKS

For the first time since March of 2009 no comic sold more than 100,000 copies in August. Saith ICv2.com: “There was no equivalent for July’s X-Men No. 1, which, supported by numerous incentive covers and a heavy marketing push that included launch parties, sold over 140,000 copies. Issue #2, which had considerably less marketing help, sold just over half as many copies, a steep drop even for a second issue. Seventeen titles in the top 25 sold fewer copies than their previous issues, with just six showing increases in circulation.”

Douglas Wolk at techland.com reports on a recent discouraging visit to his comics shop: "It's these four-dollar comics," my dealer sighed as he flipped through my stack at the register. "The more there are of them, the worse we do."

When Wolk expressed amazement — “If the price of a standard comic book climbed from $3 to $4 over the past year or so, that means you're making a third more on each sale, right?” — the dealer explained: "On each comic, yes, but our customers are still each spending about the same total, or even less. Three dollars for a comic might be worth it, four dollars might not, and it's not like there's a boom that means they've got more money to spend."

Which led Wolk into a thicket of economic speculation: “The standard rule of periodical comics sales, as I understand — and this is entirely anecdotal, and corrections to it are very welcome — is that the typical fan who visits a comics store once a week likes to spend roughly twenty dollars a week on comic books. There's something that's psychologically ‘safe’ about that figure: it's not too much money, and for a long time it's been enough to guarantee a pleasant evening of reading. Twenty years ago, the price of a new mainstream comic book was 75 cents, about to make the leap to a dollar, the same percentage they're currently increasing. For a $20 bill, you could get a stack of a couple dozen titles, with some interesting indie experiments thrown in.

“Since then,” Wolk goes on, “the price of comics has zoomed far ahead of the cost of living: $20 in 1990 is the equivalent of a bit over $33 now, while new mainstream comic books have more than quadrupled in price. And what happens when comics abruptly increase their cover prices by a third while adding little or no extra content — and the $20 standard gets you all of five 22-page comic books that take a few minutes apiece to read — is that that value proposition gets a lot less enticing.

“Do sales immediately plummet when prices go up?” he continued. “No; serial comics sales never collapse abruptly unless the product itself drastically changes. They dribble away. In practice, readers quit following particular titles in disgust much less often than they gradually find it not worthwhile to pick them up any more. $4 cover prices don't seem to have tanked any formerly-$3 titles yet, and maybe they're making a little more money in the short term. But look at the monthly sales charts: the slow dribble of sales away from midline titles keeps dribbling, the top-of-the-line sales are nowhere near what they were a few years ago, and the customer base for mainstream comic books is not exactly increasing.”

Wolk concludes that comic book publishers maybe ought to reconsider the value propositions — “ways of publishing new material that are irresistibly inexpensive.”

SYNDICATION: FLAILINGS AND FAILINGS

The July issue of Editor & Publisher was the journal’s annual directory of syndicates and syndicated features, and it is accompanied by an article purporting to survey the fate of syndication in the present newspaper climate of financial desperation. From the syndicate perspective, the situation is conflicted: financial cutbacks at newspapers have resulted in loss of staff, leaving newspapers eager for such content as syndicates can provide; but “the same budget woes that left editors short-staffed and in need of material also left them with less money for new syndicated products.”

Judging from the article, syndicates are reacting by devising ways to help newspapers ramp up their websites, which seems to me counter-productive. The websites are still offering mostly free services, so how can they pay for syndicated material?

Reporter Debra Gersh Hernandez interviewed a couple of Internet-oriented syndicates that I hadn’t yet heard of — Family Features and Content That Works — and United Media and Creators but not Universal or King, two of the industry’s biggest. Both of them, however, are also exploring digital futures allied with newspapers’ doing the same. No one, alas, seems interested in developing the greatest undeveloped newspaper market in the country—namely, the small town (100,000 population or less) daily and weekly newspaper, all of which are financially healthier than their big city brethren.