Rants & Raves

AMERICAN HERITAGE / CHARLES SCHULZ'S DAUGHTER AMY

The fall issue of American Heritage used cartoons as well as photographs to illustrate virtually ever article — origin of the Korean War, capture of Jeff Davis after the Civil War, Congress vs. the President. Editor Edwin S. Grosvenor explains: “Time and again, political satirists and propaganda artists got right to the core of issues we were going to bring alive. Political cartoonists sharpened their editorial knives way back to the earliest days of the Republic, as you’ll see.”

Among the cartoons are several embellishing Nat Gertler’s essay on the 60th anniversary of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. No profound insights herein; just a nicely abbreviated biography of the cartoonist and a short history of the strip and descriptions of the main characters (with only one typo: editorial  cartoonist Steve Kelley, whose cartoon on the day after Schulz’s death ends the article, spells his last name with two e’s). But the notable part of the article is the preface by Schulz’s daughter, Amy Schulz Johnson, who writes:

“My father signed with United Feature syndicate believing that his job was to help editors sell newspapers. He started in seven papers. Fifty years later, with the strip appearing in a record 2,600 newspapers, Dad still went to work motivated by that same belief. As I grew up, I regarded my father not as Snoopy’s dad but mine. I wasn’t quite convinced he had a real job like other dads: he didn’t go off to work like other dads but worked in a studio on our property in Santa Rosa, California. He never worked past 5 p.m. nor on weekends. His children would think nothing of walking into the studio, right past the secretary, and into his office. I can picture him looking up and immediately putting down his pen to talk to me. He never once asked me to wait while he finished a drawing or some lettering. Whenever my brothers asked him to play baseball—even in the middle of the day—he happily complied. As much as he loved the strip, he loved his children even more.

“Life gives birth to pure art, and a true artist pays attention to the details around him—not just the details in his life but in all life. My dad’s gift for observation was proven by the fact that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world would wake up every morning and turn the newspaper page to his strip—nearly 18,000 strips in all—because they had grown to love the characters as real people.”

I don’t remember reading any passage like this in David Michaelis’s biography of Schulz.

A NEW SKIPPY BOOK

A news release from Rosebud Archives, whose stated goal is to breathe new life into the rich history of comics and graphic arts, announces a forthcoming expose, Skippy vs. the Mob: The Fight for Vesey Street and the American Soul. Authorized by the Percy Crosby Estate and Skippy, Inc., the book reprints a three-month 1930 sequence in Crosby’s strip in which he, through his juvenile hero Skippy, took on organized crime. Unhappily, according to Crosby’s daughter Joan Crosby Tibbetts, the episode proved the beginning of the end for the cartoonist.

Crosby was about to be embroiled in what has become a debilitating fight with the Skippy peanutbutter people to be compensated for their unauthorized use of his character’s name. (The whole sordid mess is detailed at some length in Harv’s Hindsights for April 2004.) Tibbetts has been carrying on the fight for the last 40 years.

Unbeknownst to her father in 1930, organized crime had corporate ties, as Tibbetts maintains in an introductory essay for the book, apparently with the people who stole Skippy’s name. Her contention, from what I’ve been able to deduce, is that the sequence in the comic strip resulted in the “vendetta that destroyed her father’s career and liberty,” a combined effort by the mob and the Skippy thieves. Crosby would die in an asylum where he had been committed for some behavioral problems that, today, would hardly dictate confinement.

COMIC BOOK STORES

Year-to-date over-all sale of comics and graphic novels through Diamond Comic Distributors are down by 5.79% compared to sales over the first 11 months of 2009; graphic novels show a somewhat smaller decline, 4.35%. “To be fair,” ICv2 reported, “comic sales didn’t suffer nearly as much as most other entertainment sectors during the worst of the great recession in 2008 and 2009. The difference between graphic novels and comics would have been smaller save for what transpired in November. Dollar sales of periodical comics in November were down 10.2% when compared with November of 2009, but graphic novels rebounded strongly with a 14.84% jump over November 2009 fueled by the release of the latest volume of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, which has got plenty of ‘juice’ thanks to the highly popular debut of “The Walking Dead” on tv. ... The first volume of The Walking Dead, which was originally released in 2004, also made the top ten, a sure sign that the tv series is having an effect on sales.”

After reporting declining sales in the Top-Selling 300 comic book titles and in graphic novels in the third quarter, ICv2 got to wondering: what if the decline in the Top 300 category were offset by increases in the rest of the range, all those titles that aren’t in the Top 300? So they did some careful re-casting of figures and formulations. The conclusion? “Sales below the Top 300 may be growing in importance, but when we look at a fairly long period (10 months) either they aren’t big enough in the aggregate to make much difference, or their sales are changing at about the same rate as the Top 300's. If anything, looking at year-to-date numbers, sales on the titles below the Top 300 are shrinking faster than sales in the Top 300, at least in periodical comics.” No rousing news there.

LADY GAGA

The strange gets stranger: Lady Gaga doesn’t want to be a comic book, which is a little surprising because her entire campaign to become a celebrity looks suspiciously like a comic book. But ICv2.com reports that an attorney representing her and Justin Bieber has filed a cease-and-desist letter with Bluewater Productions, the publisher that has added a Gaga funnybook to its Female Forces series, a lineup that actress Betty White is about to join. The 88-year-old tart-tongued actress, currently enjoying a resurgence in her 70-year-long career, will be in good company with Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres in the Bluewater series. So far, she hasn’t lodged any objection.

Bluewater CEO Darren Davis pooh-poohs the Gaga gag order: “We’re 100% within our First Amendment rights,” he told Newsarama. “We knew our rights on this before we jumped into the biography world. These are 100% biographies on their lives.”

Bluewater said the first two printings of Lady Gaga have sold out, and a third printing is in the offing. A sequel is also in the works. Other stars who also have their own comics include David Beckham and Robert Pattinson

Davis said turning White’s long career into a 32-page book wasn't easy. “The biggest challenge that the creative team behind this book faced was figuring out how to include as much of this career as possible in one comic.”

White’s other accolades this year include great reviews for her performance in Sandra Bullock's rom-com “The Proposal,” her seventh Emmy (for guest actress in a comedy series, “Saturday Night Live”), the Screen Actor's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, big laughs for her Super Bowl Snickers commercial, and, later this year, BAFTA LA will present her with the Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy.

She's currently starring in new tv sitcom “Hot in Cleveland.” Female Force: Betty White will be released in November, authorized or not. But my guess is that it won’t be nearly as funny as White is on stage and on screen.

ROUNDUP OF RECENT WATERSHED EVENTS

Free Comic Book Day in 2011 is May 7. For the first several years of this annual event, it was scheduled to coincide with the release of a blockbuster movie about a comic book superhero, but lately, FCBD has plowed a free-standing rut for itself: the first Saturday in May every year. ... Fox has announced that they have renewed “The Simpsons” for a 23rd season, making it the longest running comedy in tv history. ... Martin Sheen has been cast to play the role of Uncle Ben in the forthcoming Spider-Man movie, according to Deadline Hollywood. Sheen will join Rhys Ifans as the villain, Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, and Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man. Sally Field is in talks to be Aunt May. The movie is slated for release July 3, 2012. ... DelawarePunchline.com is a new online humor magazine from editoonist Rob Tornoe; the December issue is up and free and full of humor columns and cartoons of all sorts.

CARMINE INFANTINO

TwoMorrows Publishing has released Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur, a biography and appreciation of “the artistic and publishing visionary whose mark on the comic book industry pushed conventional boundaries. As a penciler and cover artist,” the TwoMorrows press release continues, “he was a major force in defining the Silver Age of comics, co-creating the modern Flash and resuscitating the Batman franchise in the 1960s. As art director and publisher, he steered DC Comics through the late 1960s and 1970s, one of the most creative and fertile periods in their long history. Join historian and inker Jim Amash (Alter Ego magazine, Archie Comics) and Eric Nolen-Weathington (Modern Masters book series) as they document the life and career of Carmine Infantino, in the most candid and thorough interview this controversial living legend has ever given, lavishly illustrated with the incredible images that made him a star.”

FIRST ISSUE: SOLDIER ZERO

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 first title in the much ballyhooed return of Stan Lee to funnybooks is now out, Soldier Zero. But Lee, I suspect, had very little to do with the book: he’s listed as “Grand Poobah,” but the writing credit goes to Paul Cornell with art by Javier Pina (albeit “character design” by Dave Johnson). Lee’s contribution is doubtless confined pretty much to conjuring the concept. And at first blush, the concept looks like Iron Man all over again. At second blush, however, the touted “reality comics” aspect of the Boom series is evident and novel.

The inaugural issue opens with two pages showing an armored being flying through the air, shooting daggers of light from his hands. Iron Man. Then we meet Stewart Trautman, whose service in Afghanistan has left him crippled and confined to a wheelchair. He and another wheelchair personage, a woman, can’t gain access to a grocery store because the store is two steps up from street level and their chairs on wheels don’t negotiate stairs. Part of this concept’s mission, it appears, is to lobby for wheelchair rights. Good work. And, in a later incident in which a helpful acquaintance reaches to the top shelf in the school library to get a book for Trautman, we learn that people in wheelchairs don’t like to think of themselves as helpless, and help of the sort just depicted makes Trautman feel helpless even though he doesn’t think of himself that way. More reality; more good work.

Later, we go on Trautman’s first date with a pretty young woman who, we are persuaded, found Trautman attractive enough to accept a date with him. In the midst of their conversation, they are interrupted by an explosion that buries them under the rubble of the building. Up to his waist in rubble, Trautman is able to hold a slab of concrete suspended over the unconscious body of his would-be girlfriend, Lily, until he is somehow transmorgrified into the armored being that we saw cavorting on the book’s opening pages. We don’t know how, exactly, that transformation occurs. Or why. And in fact, whether it occurs is only dimly hinted at. And the book ends there.

The first issue incorporates at least two complete episodes — the grocery store protest and the date with Lily — and Trautman seems an admirable hero: he’s common-sensical about his disability, which he faces matter-of-factly. We want to know what his connection is with the iron-suited being, and we like him well enough to look into the second issue to learn what that connection might be.

The storytelling — pacing, perspective, panel breakdown — is thoroughly professional: it accomplishes its job without flash or fillagree. And Pina’s drawings are likewise thoroughly professional. Actually, they are somewhat better than the run-of-the-mill professional artwork we see so much of today: instead of a lot of compulsive shadowy modeling, often so clumsily done as to distort facial expression and anatomy — the usual shtick these days — we have naked linear drawing, no shading, no cross-hatching. No linear embellishment at all. Straight-forward, unencumbered linework.

Drawing of this kind readily reveals the artist’s failings whenever he fails, but Pina never does. The nuances of modeling are handled with color, expertly laid in by Alfred Rockefeller.

Altogether a successful first issue — and one that is more appealing than I would have expected with Lee at the helm. He wrote well for his time, but times have changed since Lee’s heyday. Too often since leaving the typewriter at Marvel, he has invented new heroes by simply repeating himself. Here, presumably thanks mostly to Cornell, we have something a bit fresher.

BIG NATE

BIG NATE is following in the Wimpy Kid’s wimpsteps and vice versa. Drawing in a simple wooden style — much like Scott Adams in Dilbert but somewhat larger and with fatter lines — Lincoln Peirce created his comic strip about middle schooler Nate Wright in the early 1990s and got it syndicated in 1991 by United Media. With his distinctive multi-cone hairdo, Nate is a self-described genius, the syndicate publicity says: equipped with only his hairdo, a No. 2 pencil and the unshakable belief that he is destined for greatness, “he fights a daily battle against overzealous teachers, undercooked cafeteria food and all-around conventionality.” Although it runs today in about 200 newspapers, Big Nate is not what the average citizen would call a roaring success. Until the Wimpy Kid books came along and showed just how to make a fortune with simple wooden-stiff artwork.

Last March, HarperCollins Children’s Books launched the first of a six-book series starring Peirce’s character: Big Nate: In a Class by Himself. At least two other titles have been released: Big Nate Strikes Again and Big Nate From the Top. The first two are more-or-less original effusions for the books; the third title begins to exploit the fertile ground of reprints, harvesting its content from the strip’s 20-year inventory. This could go on forever, or at least to within a couple months of infinity.

These volumes are obvious attempts to cash in on the Wimpy Kid Phenomenon. And a certain perverse poetic justice lurks therein. Jeff Kinney, the Wimpy creator, was a big fan of Big Nate, saying: “Lincoln Peirce is one of my cartooning heroes, and Big Nate ranks as a comics classic. Year in and year out, Big Nate is among the best comics on the funnies page.” When Kinney was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland (from whence cometh Frank Cho and Aaron McGruder — the place is a hothouse of cartooning talent), he wrote to the Baltimore Sun, calling Peirce’s strip “the best of the new generation of cartoons that make the comics page worth reading.”

Is it, then, too much to suppose that Kinney, after realizing he would probably not become a political cartoonist, stared at Peirce’s “comics classic” and said to himself: “I could do that.” And did, creating the first of the Wimpy wonders.

DERF

Cartooner John “Derf” Backderf, creator of the uproarious scatologically satiric altie strip The City, was excused from jury duty by an Ohio judge when Derf, responding to a question, said, Yes, he did know someone who had been convicted of a crime. As reported in The Week, Derf said: “I had a close friend in high school who killed 17 people.” That was serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate parts of his victims and froze the rest in his refrigerator. His life story Derf turned into his first graphic novel.

COMICS TO MOVIES

Borys Kit and James Hibberd at Hollywood Reporter announce that The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s comic book series (“considered a seminal work in the medium”) is in the early stages of being developed into a tv series by Warner Bros., which “is in the midst of acquiring television rights from sister company DC Entertainment and in talks with several writer-producers about adapting the 1990s comic.” ...

Will Eisner’s graphic novel, A Contract with God — actually a collection of four short stories about life in New York tenements — is being adapted to a live-action feature — actually, four films, each directed by a different director; all under the auspices of the Eisner estate. ...

The movie “Tamara Drewe” opened at a West End theater in London in early September, destined, eventually, to reach these shores in October. The movie adapts Tamara Drewe, the second graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children's books. The eponymous Tamara, a journalist, returns to her home in a bucolic countryside and upsets the order of things, particularly among a colony of writers seeking their various muses in rural seclusion, by indulging rather enthusiastically in casual rather than committed sex.

The appeal of the graphic novel, however, lies in Simmonds’ exquisite drawings and her tantalizing deployment of the visual-verbal aspect of the medium: she varies the traditional sequential pictorial speech-ballooned narrative with illustrated typeset text for interior monologues. Beautifully done.

About the movie, culturemap.com’s Brandi Lalanne laments that it will not go over big in this country because the heroine’s only superpower is her sexual appetite — no armor, no cape, no leaping over tall buildings with a single bound. After watching the trailer, I disagree: the actress, Gemma Arterton, playing Tamara in short short cut-offs, will easily compensate for the lack of costumed machismo.