Rants & Raves

AND THERE YOU ARE

Ronnie Del Carmen’s little book, And There You Are (72 5.5x7-inch pages, color; paperback with flaps, $15), is a perfect charmer. Del Carmen, who won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben division award for Feature Animation (he storyboarded “Up”) last spring, is a story supervisor, production designer, writer and director at Pixar. He has drawn children’s books and comic books, and as Paper Biscuit Industries, Del Carmen publishes his own books, of which the one in hand is an exquisite example.

This faberge volume does not so much tell a story as it depicts a devotion. It is about the creation of a character, the delectable Nina, “imaginary and gossamer,” who gradually assumes an appearance and acquires a personality in the pages of one of Del Carmen’s sketchbooks, in which, he says, he makes notes to himself about his plans and appointments as well as pictures of Nina. “Side by side the details of my days move in step with the notes for Nina’s story and somehow one becomes part of the other. And so it goes.” Until, finally, there you are, Nina, cute and perky and perfectly poised, the ideal modern young woman.

The book’s pages offer sketches of Nina in different poses, wearing aspects of her wardrobe. Some of the pictures are pen-and-ink, some are pencil, some are watercolor paintings, or pastel chalkings. Photographs of fabrics drift through the pages. Some of the pages are copied exactly from Del Carmen’s journal; some are paste-ups of fragments of those pages.
Some pages carry snatches of text, prose musings of the artist as he contemplates the work before him, the pages of his sketchbook. “Having Nina there has been such a gift,” he writes in one place. “I have something to draw and explore any time. Like having a model handy. I only wish I can settle her myriad storylines into one book someday. The nature of her stories tend to converge or splay out rather than progress in linear fashion. Much like dreams, I guess.”

On the last page, we have a gentle envoi, evoking and bidding farewell to the romance the artist has lived in his sketchbook. Del Carmen is having coffee with Tess in a favorite coffee shop when he fancies he sees Nina. “She takes off her wool cap and stands in line to order coffee,” Del Carmen writes. “There she is. Like I’ve always been drawing her. A heavy winter coat and a scarf; her hair is short and mussed from wearing the cap and her eyes take the world in as it is. I notice the tall guy behind her as she shows him a heavy cup for sale. Ahhh, she has someone. It all turned out okay. I dare not do this, but I get my camera. Nonchalant pictures taken at a public place of no one in particular. I nudge Tess — does she see this Nina? She does. And she agrees — she looks just like her.”

Perusing this volume is like entering the mind and creative ponderings of the artist. All the groping but delightful confusion of creation is depicted here in its chaotic, fragmentary yet somehow functional disarray. Del Carmen is serious about the creative process, but he knows, too, that in its essential aspect it is playfulness, not purposefulness, that results in a fey woman-child like Nina, enchanted and enchanting. And this tender and delightful book captures and conveys that vital playfulness.

FIRST ISSUE: X-FORCE: SEX AND VIOLENCE

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

X-Force: Sex and Violence No. 1 (of 3) written by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost and drawn by Gabriele Dell’Otto brims with flashy action and stunning art—full painted color, one of the most successfully achieved in this mode: faces are recognizable from panel-to-panel, f’instance; ditto bodies and other forms. Sometimes it seems there are too many full-head masks, obliterating all individuality whenever the bad guys show up; and maybe too many of these hooded hoods are dressed in shiney black wetsuits. But over-all, individual passages are so good we easily overlook such tiny carping reservations.

Domino is badly hurt in the opening scene, hoping Foley will heal her seemingly mortal wounds. Then Wolverine shows up and demands to know how Domino got herself so banged up. In a flashback, she explains that she needed money and got involved with the Assassins Guild for a fee, but she abandoned that scheme in order to rescue some girls that another band of criminals, the Hand, was importing as sex slaves. Then the Guild turned on her and beat the crap out of her for taking their money without performing the contracted-for service. End of flashback. After Foley heals her, Dom and Logan encounter the Guild again and after a smokingly violent exchange, Dom and Logan lock lips and meld bodily forms in a passionate embrace that proves Domino was right: Wolverine wants her “in a big way.” This is the “sex and violence” part of the series: violence is supposed to provoke lust among certain people, and it surely does here with Dom and Logan. But before they can yank their clothes off and begin furious fornication, the Claw shows up and demands a return of the money Domino was paid. We leave them all there.

The complete episode of Dom working with the Assassins Guild and then leaving them to rescue sex slaves displays her morally-motivated character — and the concluding battle with Wolverine at her side reveals her combat resourcefulness and, incidentally, wit, passion, and feminine form. Ending the issue with the Claw’s demand creates enough suspense to catapult us into the next issue. And the artwork is sumptuous.

SIGNATURE WOUND

Signature Wound: Rocking TBI (120 6x8-inch pages, b/w; Andrews McMeel, $9.99) completes Garry Trudeau’s trilogy of Doonesbury books that “examines that impact of combat on American soldiers in Iraq.” In this book, we meet SPC Leo Deluca (aka, Toggle), who is missing an eye and suffering from aphasia, a brand of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that is manifest in an inability to articulate ideas. Doonesbury stalwart B.D., the former football hero who, in the first volume of this series, lost a leg to an RPG, was once Toggle’s commander, and he shows up to help with the recovery and rehab. As Toggle regains some of his function, he meets Michael Doonesbury’s MIT techie daughter Alex on Facebook, and a romance ensues. As with the previous volumes, Trudeau researched his subject thoroughly, both through reading and consultation and by visiting military hospitals and talking with the wounded. The book features a foreword by General Peter Pace, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and raises money for Fisher House.

FIRST ISSUE: SWEETS

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

Kody Chamberlain has been working on his comic book Sweets “for a few years,” he tells us in an editorial at the end of No. 1, “—stealing time way from other projects every few months to inch my way forward.” He did the whole thing — writing, drawing, coloring, lettering. All Kody Chamberlain. The first issue is commendable, and it is nearly a roaring success. But not quite. It is, if we are to judge from the first issue alone, a near miss. Or, rather, a near hit. It almost satisfies all the foregoing criteria. It falls short — just a trifle — in being too cryptic: the mystery that fosters the suspense that will bring us back is so vaguely outlined that we’re not quite sure what it all means. There seem to be two crimes being investigated—although they will turn out to be connected. Happily, the second issue resolves much of the vagary and revives our interest.

The story is set in New Orleans, and the title of the book, Sweets, refers to pralines that a serial killer leaves at the scenes of his crimes. Investigating the murders are Jeff, a black cop, and Curt, a white cop, whose daughter died recently and whose wife is divorcing him. Curt is distraught and not paying attention to his duties; Jeff intercedes for him with their boss, a fat slob lieutenant with a foul vocabulary, getting Curt a reprieve: the lieutenant is about to fire him. Jeff gets Curt back on the job to help investigate the praline murders. These two developments — successfully interceding with their boss and successfully getting Curt back on the job — are the complete episodes in the book. All else is mysteriousness, fraught with too much ambiguity for serial publication.

Chamberlain’s storytelling technique is cinematic, and I don’t mean just camera-angles: it’s pictures and dialogue, no expository captions. And we are plunged into the middle of several sequences without explanations, so we must determine what’s happening from what the characters are doing and saying. This is classically sound storytelling in plays and movies (hence, my “cinematic” accusation). In a movie, this elliptical manner is soon sorted out as the tale unreels: cryptic comments at the beginning are quickly explained by what happens later. But in a serialized story in successive issues of a print medium, ellipsis only muddles matters (“What the hell is going on?”), and we have to wait too long for the next issue — the “later” that will pull it all together.

And Chamberlain’s arty drawing style, although admirable for its line quality and deft with shadows and angles, adds to the confusion because it’s not always clear which characters we’re watching. After a couple panels, it becomes clear; but at first, initially in a scene, we’re not sure.

The bafflement induced by Chamberlain’s storytelling and arty rendering is further advanced by a “cartoony” segment insinuated into the midst of the narrative; nearby, we see the beginning of the segment in the first issue.  The import of this stylistic diversion is not at all evident. And it’s an ingenious device — pregnant with possibilities. We bought the second issue of this title as much to see what Chamberlain might do with this maneuver as to see how Curt and Jeff are doing.

And in the second issue, as I say, the pieces begin to come together. The cartoony segment, for instance, may turn out to be a record of the killer’s early years, an insight into how he became so perverted as to be a serial killer. (I hope the cartoony style does not mean he was corrupted by comics or Saturday morning cartoons.)

The excellences in this title are many, and I’m glad to see Chamberlain beginning to tie up the loose ends in No. 2. When the five issues of this title are re-issued as a graphic novel, it will doubtless be one of the best of the season.

FIRST ISSUE: GORILLA-MAN

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

 

The cover-art for Gorilla-Man No. 1 (of 3) has nothing to do with the interior action. On the cover, the Gorilla-man is surrounded by fawning bimbos in short skirts and plunging necklines; inside, he spends most of his time in a time warp back in the 1930s or in the jungles of present-day Africa. No women to speak of. Except in the opening sequence in which Atlas operative Ken Hale (aka Gorilla-man) foils a Borgia Omega operation to obtain the head of Lucrezia Borgia, floating in a belljar in liquid suspension. The Borgia Omega people are robots and bountiful women in black wetsuits with the front zipper descanted provocatively. The Gorilla-man apprehends one of the loathsome lovelies and carries her off, as we see in our second illustration, ass-end upwards and shimmering in the sunlight seductively. The cover, to belabor its irrelevance, is by the dapper Dave Johnson; the interior is crisply rendered by Giancarlo Caracuzzo and handsomely colored by Jim Charalampidis. Caracuzzo’s is a somewhat angular style, mostly unembellished by feathering and other linear quirks—so it is attractive and smitteth the eye pleasingly.

Jeff Parker’s story, after the opening dispatching of the Borgia Omega crowd, flashes back to Missouri in the 1930s when Ken Hale was recruited as a young boy by Atlas and then alternates between Hale’s early service to the agency and his present assignment, which takes him to Africa where he employs a hologram to transform his gorilla-guise into something more humanoid. In Africa, he meets a fellow Atlas agent, and the two of them are supposed to shut down Mustafa Kazun’s criminal operation that is giving Atlas a bad name.

 The opening episode is the issue’s completed one; the rest are on-going tales, and except for the gorilla-guise, the whole enterprise is a routine fisticuff contest without many surprises or twists. Why or how Hale has been turned into a giant monkey is not explained in this issue, and I’m more likely to buy the second issue to find out about that than I am to see more fist-fights between changling apes and menacing mobs, one of which emerges on the last page, ending the issue on a suitably suspenseful note.

KILL SHAKESPEARE

As Coner McCreery & Anthony Del Col/Andy Belanger’s Kill Shakespeare lurches on, it acquires more Shakespearean characters in the manner of a rolling snowball picking up debris as it rolls. Hamlet is ostensibly the hero of this piece — the touted “shadow king” who will kill Shakespeare so the king who recruited him can acquire the “magic quill.” I’m not sure why he wants it. In the second issue of the series, Iago shows up, playing hooky from “Othello”; ditto Macbeth from the play of that name. There’s
lots of spooky stuff — dead, dying or enchanted personages appearing out of nowhere, betrayals lurking, eyes being plucked out (“Lear”). Lots of bloodshed and silent sequences that reek of import but have none, an unforgivable abuse of the medium’s prowess. The third issue is redeemed somewhat by the appearance of a roly-poly happily carnal Falstaff surrounded by thoroughly lascivious wenches (well wrought by Belanger, whose simple bold lines enliven every page), but it’s spoiled by some terrible double entendres and finishes as a mere interlude, a comedic sop thrown to readers like me who dote on characters like Falstaff.

The title’s concept is intriguing: invent a tale in which Shakespeare is, for a change, the villain and then parade all his creations through the pages as they plot his demise. But McCreery and Del Col don’t dig deep enough here: they’re just dropping names and not making them serve any allegorical or metaphorical purpose. Moreover, their contrivance embodies the mechanics of its own dissolution: bringing into the narrative all those characters bloats the plot until it can no longer be recognized. A bloodthirsty King Richard keeps reminding us of the intended drift of things, but it’s a clanking maneuver; still, the idea is fun to watch uncoil.

Kill Shakespeare probably appeals most to those of us with vague memories of being forced to struggle through the Bard’s Elizabethan verse in high school, but those who have more fully-formed knowledge of the playwright and his plays will be disappointed by the cheap allusion tricks in this tale.

PRINCE VALIANT

For Fantgraphics Books’ current Prince Valiant reprint endeavor, the publisher found better source material than was available for its earlier revival of Hal Foster’s classic Sunday page — to wit, a nearly
full set of pristine color engraver’s proof sheets of almost the entire Prince Valiant run, carefully preserved by Foster and donated to Syracuse University, which provided scans for Fantagraphics’ use. Apart from having higher quality source material than was previously available, advances in digital color technology permit more faithful reproduction. Previous editions of Prince Valiant — the Nostalgia Press effort in the 1960s and Fantagraphics’ 40-volume set (produced 1984-2004) — recolored the pages, but the color didn’t duplicate the appearance of the original publication of the strip, and the linework was often blotchy.

But the present effort is wonderfully faithful to the originals: not only is the color itself much much better, but the linear detail is stunning. The current volumes reprint twice as many pages (124) per book as the earlier Fantgraphics effort and the pages at 10x14-inches are slightly larger than the predecessor’s. But it’s the fabulously high quality of the reproduction that makes these volumes a bargain at $29.99 each; Volume 2, reprinting two years, 1939-40, is now available.

In it, Mark Schultz, current writer for Prince Valiant (being drawn nowadays by Gary Gianni) and an accomplished illustrator in the Frazetta-Williamson tradition and absolute master of the Xenozoic (the completeness of which is soon to be released by Flesk), supplies the Foreword in which he contends that Foster was “primarily a cartoonist, working with and exploiting the opportunities unique to the sequential medium” not, as is often argued, “a traditional illustrator squatting on the comics page while remaining largely aloof from comics conventions.” In support of his argument, Schultz says that Foster, conscious of the capacities of the Sunday funnies in color, deliberately simplified his drawing mannerisms, resorting to simple outline and high contrast style rather than using hachuring and the other tone-building techniques customarily employed by illustrators.

In effect, saith Schultz, Foster is a cartoonist because he used the drawing techniques of cartoonists and did so in the Sunday comics section where cartoonists were published. (Oddly, Gianni swerves off in the other direction, hachuring like an illustrator; nice-looking art in almost any venue but a newspaper’s Sunday funnies section, wherein, alas, Gianni’s Valiant is too often published at a much too small a dimension to enable us to appreciate the artist’s visual effects.)

In any event — regardless of the position you choose to take on the question — the Fantagraphics reprinting of Foster’s Prince Valiant is a high performance achievement, superior to anything that has gone before, and worth every penny, volume by volume, of its price.

THE FLINTSTONES

“The Flintstones” turns 50 this year, and to celebrate, Boomerang, the Cartoon Network's channel devoted to classic animation, conducted a "Boomerock" salute on Thursday night, September 30,  broadcasting the very first "Flintstones" episode ever, Jessica Banov said breathlessly at fayobserver.com. “What makes this time notable,” she effused, “is that it's the exact date and hour of the original premiere in 1960. Nifty, huh? The episode's title, for those interested in such trivia, is ‘The Flintstone Flyer.’ It's about a flying machine that Barney is building, Fred's efforts to avoid going to the opera, and a night at the bowling alley.” The celebration included two more episodes and an animated film, "The Man Called Flintstone." On Saturday, October 2, a 24-hour marathon of "Flintstones" episodes unreeled. Banov disclosed “another fun fact, courtesy of Wikipedia. Wilma's full name is Wilma Pebble Slaghoople Flintstone.”

ODDS & ADDENDUM

This year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will have a new star in its lineup, reports Publisher’s Weekly: a giant balloon bringing the title character of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series to 3-D life will be among the 15 helium spectacles in the legendary parade. ... John Marshall, who draws Blondie for the strip’s manager, Dean Young (son of Blondie’s creator, Chic Young), has an assistant, Frank Cummings. Jodi Marze at the Picayune Item, where Cummings used to work, quoted the erstwhile staffer: “I have loved to draw from the time that I was a little bitty boy, [but] I would never have dreamt that one day I would be illustrating for a comic strip like Blondie." ... Last month, U.S. philanthropist Jay. T. Snyder flew 12 disabled Americans to Damascus to meet Syrians similarly afflicted so their combined forces could invent a new superhero. The result, the Associated Press reports, is a Muslim boy in a wheelchair with superpowers. “He lost his legs in a land-mine accident and later becomes the Silver Scorpion with the power to control metal with his mind.” His appearance has not, as of this writing (September 27) been firmed up. ... Parade magazine, the venerable Sunday newspaper supplement, has for years printed 3-4 cartoons in its Cartoon Parade; for the last three weeks (and maybe more: I started counting three weeks ago), only one cartoon has been on parade in each issue. Is this cartoon venue another of the endangered species?

On an intensely personal note: my book, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, published by the University Press of Mississippi, is continuing to sell well: since being published in 1996, it’s sold 5,224 copies through June this year. No, it’s scarcely another Wimpy Kid Going Rogue, but most university press books sell in the neighborhood of 2,500 copies and then retire to an elephant graveyard. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History of the Newspaper Comic Strip was the next best seller at 4,376 copies; then Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Life and Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola with 3,175 copies. All of these masterpieces (need I remind you?) are sold at this website; and copies sold here come with an inscription from the author hisownself, kimo sabe.

THE PEANUTS PROJECT

Fantagraphics’ Massive Peanuts reprint project is now over the half-way hump and, with the lastest  volume — the 14^th — it’s three years into the last half of the strip’s nearly 50-year run. When the series was launched in February 2004, promising two volumes a year reprinting two years per volume, I had to 
take a deep breath to contemplate a publication schedule that would take more than a dozen years to complete; but now that we’re over half-way there, I can breathe normally again.

In the latest volume, reprinting 1977-1978, the last of the strip’s permanent cast are introduced: Snoopy’s brother Spike (consigned to a life in the barren desert) and Lucy’s kid brother Rerun (condemned to the backseat of a bicycle). Among the book’s highlights (quoting from the FB catalogue): “Charlie Brown, found guilty by the EPA of biting the Kite-Eating tree, goes on the lam and ends up coaching the Goose Eggs, a group of diminutive baseball players ... [and] a tennis-playing Snoopy ends up reluctantly teamed with the extreme type-A athlete Molly Volley, who reappears later in the book, now facing off against her nemesis, ‘Crybaby’ Boobie.”

POPEYE

Fantagraphics Books is another publisher with an ambitious agenda for reprinting classic comic strips, one of which is E.C. Segar’s Popeye. Launched in 2006, the current Popeye enterprise is up to the fifth and penultimate volume in a giant-size 10x15-inch format that permits printing Sunday strips in color at a size approaching that of their original publication; $29.99 each. Sunday pages include the topper, the strange chronicle of its eponymous crank, Sappo, who regularly rails at the world gone mad around him. In the latest volume of the revival, Popeye’s father, Poopdeck Pappy, makes his debut, as does the magical Jeep, which, it has long been rumored, was the inspiration for the name of the military vehicle.

Maybe. Maybe not. Wikipedia says this about the naming: “There are many explanations of the origin of the word jeep, all of which have proven difficult to verify. The most widely held theory is that the military designation of GP begat the term ‘Jeep’ and holds that the vehicle bore the designation ‘GP’ (for ‘Government Purposes’ or ‘General Purpose’), which was phonetically slurred into the word jeep. However, an alternate view launched by R. Lee Ermey, on his television series ‘Mail Call,’ disputes this, saying that the vehicle was designed for specific duties, and was never referred to as ‘General Purpose’ and it is highly unlikely that the average jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with this designation. The Ford GPW abbreviation embraced G for government use, P to designate its 80-inch (2,000 mm) wheelbase and W to indicate its Willys-Overland designed engine). Many, including Ermey, suggest that soldiers at the time were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the Popeye cartoons. Eugene the Jeep was Popeye's ‘jungle pet’ and was ‘small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems.’" Just like the vehicle. At the appropriate Wikipedia entry, you can find other explanations; but I give a segar to the latter.

AL JAFFEE'S MAD LIFE

Just released is Mary-Lou Weisman’s biography Al Jaffee’s Mad Life (It Books, 240 pages, $27.99) illustrated by Jaffee. “The book,” writes Eddy Portnoy at forward.com, “couldn’t have a more apt title. Jaffee’s engaging tales of his mad, mad, mad childhood are even stranger than his long tenure as a cartoonist at Mad magazine. A journey through the Jewish bizarre, Jaffee’s life story starts out as a near-typical one of a family of Jewish immigrants, but then takes a series of crazy twists and turns, one of which lands him on a Birthright-shtetl program.” 

CAPTAIN EASY

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy is another Fantagraphics endeavor in which Sunday strips are published at a suitably larger dimension, 10x15-inch pages. Using color scans of Sunday pages as published in newspapers, these books duplicate with startling effect the riotous hues of the strip’s first appearance. The action is footloose and rollicking, the freewheeling sort that inspired a generation of syndicated cartoonists in the 1930s, and Crane skillfully deployed the resources of the spacious Sunday strip format, varying layouts to give visual emphasis to the action.

Beginning with the first Captain Easy strip, July 30, 1933, the book concludes with the Sunday for December 1, 1935 and includes many engaging lagniappes and revealing sidebars along the way.

Crane’s first foray into the Sunday paper was one-tier gag version of Wash Tubbs (which we saw first in NBM’s 18-volume reprint series that started in 1987 and ended in 1992), but, as Jeet Heer tells us in his Introduction, Crane grew weary of the antics of his pint-sized Harold Lloyd hero and concocted the Sunday Captain Easy, focusing on the footloose soldier of fortune that Wash had met in a comic opera prison on May 6, 1929. By 1933, Crane was committed to telling rip-roaring adventure stories, and the Sunday Captain Easy would be the exclusive province of that sort of enterprise.

Easy inspired a host of imitations in both his appearance and his modus operandi, in effect setting the pace for adventure strip heroes. When Joe Shuster drew Slam Bradley, he was pretty clearly inspired by Easy’s rugged physiognomy; ditto, Shuster’s Clark Kent/Superman, who looks like Slam Bradley/Captain Easy. Before Easy, there weren’t any other strictly speaking “adventure” comic strips; after Easy, there were a lots.

Incidentally, if starved for more about Crane and his successor on Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, the undeservedly ignored Leslie Turner, you can find more at the Usual Place in Harv’s Hindsight for July 2002 and October 2004, respectively.

DOONESBURY AT 40

On October 26, Doonesbury reached the 40th anniversary mark, and festivities broke out all over. Rolling Stone’s November 4 issue has a long interview by Chip Kidd with creator Garry Trudeau, and SLATE is featuring a dozen articles, including several with nicely provocative titles and annotations: “Me and Uncle Duke: What happened when Hunter Thompson told me Garry Trudeau was spying on Him" by arch conservative Nicholas Von Hoffman; “Uncle Duke is My Hero” by Walter Isaacson; and another interview with Trudeau
(on his stamina, the difficulty of satirizing Obama, and “the most bizarre attack on his strip ever"). SLATE also invites us to enter a 14,600-strip archive and wander to our heart's content. “For two weeks (until November 7), this vast labyrinth of storytelling and interconnected lives, a chronicle of popular culture and politics, is open to all comers.” Visit SLATE.com for details. In addition to all that effusion, two coffee-table style books came out last month: 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, an 11-pound tome that gathers, according to Trudeau’s estimate in his introduction, a mere ''13 percent of the over 14,000 published strips” with 18 accompanying character essays from the cartoonist; and Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau, the only one of the two that I’ve actually seen (272 9.5x11-inch landscape pages, b/w and color; from the University Press of Trudeau’s alma mater, Yale; $49.95) by Brian Walker, who says, in an intro accompanying a slide show at SLATE: “I have long felt that Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau hasn't received adequate recognition for his talents as an artist and graphic designer. His strip, which earned a reputation for being poorly drawn in its early days, has been one of the most graphically innovative strips on the comics pages since the mid-'80s. And Garry's art has never been confined to the strip. In 1983, I curated the Doonesbury Retrospective at the Museum of Cartoon Art. While researching this exhibition, I had seen illustrations, sketches, and designs Garry had done for special projects. I knew there was a wealth of other material waiting to be uncovered.” And he has uncovered lots of it. This book, which I’ll review at greater (and doubtless more tedious) length later — when I also get my hands on 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective — will lay to rest, finally, the contention that Trudeau can’t draw.

KRAZY SKETCHBOOK

The Fantagraphics Books series of Krazy Kat Sunday reprints is appropriately capped with a stunning find, Krazy & Ignatz: The Sketchbook Strips, 1910-1913 (160 12x18-inch pages in “color” — mostly b/w pencil sketches, I suspect — hardcover, $75), reprinting Herriman’s preliminary drawings for the “basement” kat and mouse strip with which he infested The Family Upstairs strip, wherein a tiny Ignatz first beaned a miniature Krazy with a microscopic brick. Herriman’s practice in producing the strip was to draw a complete and detailed version of each strip in a sketchbook before re-drawing it for publication in The Family Upstairs; this tome is that sketchbook, an amazing cartooning artifact. I haven’t seen this book yet, but the Fanta catalogue tells us that it includes an essay on Herriman and, for comparative purposes, a generous sampling of the strips as published. Fantagraphics plans to publish a complete collection of The Family Upstairs eventually.