Rants & Raves

LYNN WARD PRIZE ANNOUNCED

In a press release last fall, Penn State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book announced the creation of the Lynd Ward Prize for Graphic Novel of the Year. “The Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize honors Ward’s seminal influence in the development of the graphic novel and celebrates the gift of an extensive collection of Ward’s wood engravings, original book illustrations and other graphic art donated to Penn State University Libraries by his daughters, Robin Ward Savage and Nanda Weedon Ward. Between 1929 and 1937 Ward published his six ground-breaking wordless novels — Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years,  Song without Words and Vertigo,” all of which have been re-issued lately by The Library of America in a two-volume boxed set entitled Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, “the first time the nonprofit publisher has included a graphic novelist in its award-winning series.”

The Lynd Ward Prize will be presented annually to the best graphic novel, fiction or non-fiction, published in the previous calendar year in the United States by a living American citizen or resident. The announcement of the award will take place each spring, and the prize of $2,500, the two-volume set of Ward’s novels, and a suitable commemorative will be presented each fall to the winner at a ceremony to be held at Penn State.

COMICS CODE GOES DEFUNCT

With the dawn of the new year, DC Comics has ceased using the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval, which has identified its comics as appropriate for all ages for over 50 years. Instead, it will use its own rating system for DC Universe and Johnny DC titles. That system has four ratings: E - Everyone: Appropriate for readers of all ages; may contain cartoon violence and/or some comic mischief. T - Teen: Appropriate for readers age 12 and older; may contain mild violence, language and/or suggestive themes. T+ - Teen Plus: Appropriate for readers age 16 and older; may contain moderate violence, mild profanity, graphic imagery and/or suggestive themes. M - Mature: Appropriate for readers age 18 and older; may contain intense violence, extensive profanity, nudity, sexual themes and other content suitable only for older readers. All DC’s Vertigo titles will continue to be “For Mature Readers.”

As soon as the news came out from DC, Archie Comics, the last remaining subscriber to the Comics Code Authority, announced that it, too, was getting out. According to Newsarama, Archie had made the decision some time ago and hadn’t been submitting its books for approval for “a year or more,” but held off announcing the defection until DC took the plunge. With these two desertions, the Comics Code Authority is “pretty much defunct,” said Alan Gardner at DailyCartoonist.com.Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code Authority in 2001, and Bongo last year. Without members, the Authority has no funding and therefore can’t function.

It is serenely appropriate that Archie Comics should be the last publisher to leave the Code room, turning out the light as it left. John Goldwater, one of the trio of founders of MLJ Comics out of which Archie emerged, was, as he himself claimed, “the prime founder” of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), which invented the Code and enforced it with a pre-publication review board called the Comics Code Authority. 

From CMAA’s founding and incorporation in September 1954, Goldwater served as CMAA president for twenty-five years until he voluntarily relinquished the office, whereupon the board of directors created the position of Chairman of the Board, in which capacity Goldwater served for several more years. It has been supposed that Goldwater’s enthusiasm for creating CMAA was inspired mostly by his desire to put William Gaines’ EC Comics out of business. (For the entire sordid tale of Goldwater’s aspirations and impersonations, visit the Usual Place, click on Harv’s Hindsight and find the entry for the summer of 2001.)

FIRST ISSUE: THE CAPE

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.

You may have already seen NBC’s new superhero series, “The Cape,” about a framed cop who fights crime by donning an empowering cape. Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker says the show is “steeped in comic-book lore ... [and] melodramatic, sure, but its sincerity takes it far: I felt a kid’s thrill when the Cape sewed his own mask and tied it on for the first time. It’s probably doomed to cult status, but ‘The Cape’ is primal fun.” Well, maybe. But after seeing the first episode, I’ve given up: I can believe a man can fly, but I can’t believe a cape can be made to do the things we see therein. The formula for “The Cape” mixes a little Doc Savage in with leftover Batman plus a villain or so from Spider-Man. Mixed greens at best.

But IDW’s comic book of the same title is not much fun at all in its debut issue. Eric, the narrator, and his friend Nicky play superheroes as kids, and Eric has a cape his mother made him. One day while poised for flight from a tree limb high off the ground, Eric falls and is badly injured. Forty staples to his skull, shunt in his brain and half-a-dozen follow-up surgeries keep him in and out of hospitals for the next ten years, and he still has headaches. He reacts by becoming a complete slacker and a drunk, alienating his girlfriend, who apparently loves him even though he is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. She finally leaves him. And he sulks and drinks some more.

One night, finding the cape of his youth, he wraps it around himself. He is astonished to find that he levitates. He flies. He goes to find his former girlfriend, who confesses she still loves him, and he takes her on a flight. Then, high up in the air, he toys with her: referring to her having “dropped” him, he drops her, and she lands in a concrete fountain, sans water. Smashed to pieces, no doubt. Hovering over her unconscious body, Eric vaunts his prowess: someone has to be the bad guy, he says. 

And that’s bad enough for me. The first issue contains two complete episodes — Eric’s accident and his dropping his girlfriend. But Eric is such a thoroughly reprehensible character, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to continue reading this tripe. Zach Howard’s drawing is slick and attractive, and his storytelling skills highly accomplished. But Jason Ciaramella’s hero is so unlikeable that no amount of good artwork can rescue the title.

Could be that the first issue will turn out to be all a dream, I suppose. But I’m not sure I care enough about that to buy the awakening second issue.

THE BIZARRO ART OF DAN PIRARO

Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, by Dan Piraro (200 9x10.5-inch pages, b/w and color; Abrams paperback, $24.95):

Piraro’s panel cartoon was 25 years old in 2010, and although this excellent book was published in 2009, it is an entirely suitable anniversary celebration. In addition to a generous selection of daily and Sunday panels, the book also offers a sampling of Piraro’s sketches and paintings and hunks of prose tracing his personal and professional biography, including his Catholic upbringing in Tulsa, his first marriage and agonizing divorce and his subsequent marriage to Ashley Lou Smith, the love of his life (and daughter of cartoonist Ralph Smith). He also discusses the various causes to which he has given allegiance both in person and in his cartoon — the environment and animal welfare, to name two of the more conspicuous.

Until 2000, Piraro says he didn’t pay too much attention to the purely political content of the American so-called civilization. “Like most Americans, I followed world events via tv headlines, which don’t tell you enough to make an informed decision about anything,” he writes. “Like the vast majority of voters, I voted for president based on which candidate gave me the best ‘vibes.’ (For the record, I voted for Al Gore in 2000, even though the vibes he gave me were questionable — but Bush actually sucked the vibes right out of me, leaving me with nothing but the willies.) But when I realized that America was rather clearly on the way up Shit Creek and Bush had given all our paddles away to his rich friends, I started following the news more carefully.”

And his political views found their way into Bizarro. But, in an attempt to be prudent, Piraro limited the frequency of his politically tinged cartoons — until the week before the 2004 election, when he ran eight political jokes in a row, after which “I endured a storm of complaints,” he said. In one cartoon slated for publication the previous summer, he showed presidential spokesman at a press conference being asked: “Is that the truth, or the ‘Manure du Jour’?” Said Piraro: “It was decided that this cartoon would be tantamount to saying te president was full of shit and would lead to cancellations, so it was never published.”

Piraro can be particularly virulent on the subject of homosexuality. “The idea that sexual orientation is a choice is so funny I can hardly stand it,” he writes. “Does this mean that Dubya and Jerry Falwell and Rick Santorum chose to be heterosexual but could just as easily have been gay? That would explain why this issue gets them so riled up.”

Throughout the book, in picture and prose, narrative text and captions, we have a splendid array of Piraro’s uncannily off-beat humor and his attractive and boldly hachured drawing style. He won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben last spring as “cartoonist of the year.” He wasn’t there to receive the award, for which he had been nominated several times in the past, but he was gracious in reaction to it: “It’s a great honor, and I’m very happy to see my name on that list [of Reuben winners]. To be honest, I didn’t think that a relatively ‘outsider’ panel like Bizarro would ever be considered for a hall-of-fame-type award, so I’m surprised as well as flattered” — as reported in Editor & Publisher by Rob Tornoe, also a cartoonist. I’m still reading and enjoying this book.

UPCOMING: 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).

RIP KIRBY

Another of IDW’s classic comic reprints reached 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.

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.

FIFTY IN THE STONE AGE

“The Flintstones” turned 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.”

FOR THE RECORD

The latest edition of the Guinness World Records, which goes under the 2011 banner, says unequivocally that the San Diego Comic-Con is the world’s largest comic convention. It has other things to say about the comic book firmament, among them, that X-Men No. 1 recorded the highest print-run of any   funnybook, 8.1 million. The first graphic novel that called itself a graphic novel was Bloodstar by Robert E. Howard; but others came in close — George Metzer’s Beyond Time; and Red Tide by Jim Steranko. Joe Simon, born in 1913, is the oldest living comic book writer. (I suppose it’s impossible to have the oldest dead comic book writer, so that expression — oldest living, which I deployed here — is tautological. Sorry.) The United Kingdom’s Dandy magazine, launched December 4, 1937 and still publishing, is the longest running weekly comic book; our home-grown Detective Comics, dated March 1937, is the longest running monthly comic book, and it’s older than Dandy. The most banned book, which distinction it has enjoyed every year since 2006, is And Tango Makes Three about two male penguins who raise a baby penguin; the cause of the banning (surely you saw this coming) is that it promotes a homosexual life style.

STAN LEE'S STAR

When Stan Lee’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled at 11:30 a.m. on January 4, 2011, the legendary Marvel editor/writer/guru/mogul/publicity tout pronounced himself thrilled.

"Would you believe I'm on the same block as Paul Newman and Sophia Loren?” he asked reporters. “I really still can't believe it. I think they have me confused with someone else, but I'm not gonna tell them!"

Lee, who has enjoyed numerous cameo roles in his characters’ superhero films, also joked that he hopes his Hollywood star will lead to more acting slots, he told contactmusic.com: “One good thing about it: maybe now I’ll be able to get cameos of more than 30 seconds in length. With my new elevation to legendhood, maybe I’ll rate a full minute from now on!”

The Stan Lee star is located at 7072 Hollywood Boulevard. It is the 2,428^th on the fabled walk.

Lee told Alan Duke at CNN that he spends time these days also working on the Stan Lee Foundation, a nonprofit group that concentrates on educating children. “To me, education is one of the most important things in the world," Lee said. "Somebody who isn't educated, it's like running in a race with one leg tied behind them."

He's also still writing new stories for his POW! Entertainment company. “The most important thing in the world is to keep busy, and I'm happy to say I'm lucky enough to still be busy," he said.