Rants & Raves

DOG MECHANIC IN LOVE

In NBM’s graphic novel, Salvatore (104 6x9-inch pages, color; paperback, $14.99), we meet Nicolas De Crecy’s eponymous protagonist, a crack dog mechanic, who is repairing automobiles as a way of stealing the parts he needs to build his own specialized all-purpose vehicle that can cross bodies of water as well as expanses of land. Love-smitten Salvatore wants to get to South America where he can rendezvous with the wire-haired terrier of his dreams, Julie. He has almost finished constructing this locomotive contraption as the novel opens, but he needs one more elusive part, and much of the first two “parts” of the final work (which is to be  completed, we assume, in the next volume when it is published) is devoted to his search for the missing adaptor.

Into this proposition, De Crecy introduces a major albeit subordinated thread of narrative about Amandine, a nearly blind pig, whose car Salvatore repairs and who then gives birth to a dozen piglets, one of whom, Frank, the runt, gets lost in the sewers of Paris. Thereafter, whenever Amandine shows up, she’s looking for Frank. Of minor significance is another thread about an amorous cow who owns, or did own—once upon a time—a vehicle that is possibly the final resting place of the last adaptor that Salvatore needs. Eventually, we suppose, these seemingly unrelated strands will be woven neatly together in the novel’s conclusion (forthcoming).

Salvatore is essentially a love story, complicated by the everyday struggles we all endure as we find ways to compromise between morality and idealism and enriched by a strain of satire. De Crecy takes digs at wild-eyed liberal critics of our consumerist society and at various avant garde trends in art, but the fundamental mechanism of his story, Salvatore’s mission to built a vehicle that can take him to Julie, is in the protagonist’s confrontation with ordinary hurdles that he overcomes with outlandish solutions: to seduce the heifer with the adaptor, he needs an inflatable bull costume. Why not? De Crecy’s wispy linework compliments the wistful tale with its own graphic eccentricities.

MR. EASTER

Among NBM’s recent offerings is A Home for Mr. Easter (200 6x8-inch pages, b/w; paperback, $13.99) by Booke A. Allen, a feel-good tale about an overweight, perhaps a little mentally retarded girl named Tesana, who, bullied by her classmates, invents a unicorn friend and, later, takes into her care a rabbit, which she is convinced is the Easter Bunny. Tesana decides to return Mr. Easter to his “home,” wherever that may be, and for the next 150 pages, she makes a heroic attempt to find it, beset by numerous threatening situations — a greedy pet store operator who, persuaded that Mr. Easter is magic, wants to keep him; a bunch of college students who use rabbits as experimental animals; protestors against lab animals; and a con-man magician who may have “owned” Mr. Easter in some previous enterprise.

By the end of the book, after numerous hazardous adventures, Tesana finds a home for Mr. Easter — her own home with her vaguely uncomprehending mother, where Mr. Easter, freshly hatched out of a lately acquired  egg, promises to live with her ever after, happily. Allen applies a splashy brush to good effect, giving the headlong pace of the narrative a harried appearance.

 

 

X-9: SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN

One of the best lines — and truest — in IDW’s X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan (288 10x11-inch pages, b/w; $49.99) as drawn by Al Williamson and written by Archie Goodwin is in the Introduction by Mark Schultz, himself an artist of no mean talent. Writing about his friend Williamson’s surpassing draftsmanship, Schultz calls it “graphic lyricism,” saying also that Williamson is “recognized as perhaps the pre-eminent scion and practitioner” of Alex Raymond’s manner of drawing. No surprise, as Schultz says: while just a boy, Williamson had taught himself to draw by imitating Raymond’s style. Here in this volume, however, we can see that Williamson not only equals his master’s achievement, he often transcends it. The book reprints Corrigan from January 30, 1967, when Williamson and Goodwin took over the classic adventure strip, through August 30, 1969, in the first volume of what IDW promises to be a complete compilation of one of the most remarkable and satisfying collaborations in comics history.

Schultz’s Introduction provides an affectionate and respectful review of Williamson’s career in comic strips, with a short nod to his comic book endeavors, too (the National Cartoonists Society gave him its division award as Best Comic Book Cartoonist in 1967 for his work the previous year in a series of Flash Gordon comics), and Bruce Canwell, associate editor of IDW’s Library of American Comics, supplies a history of Secret Agent X-9 in an afterword, calling the roll of all those who had drawn the strip since its debut on January 22, 1934.

Canwell’s is an impressively workmanlike job on a strip history with an impressive roster of creative talent, and his text is nicely illustrated with samples of the work from many of the artists who participated in that long history. But it’s Schultz who supplies the coda for the volume and for the strip and its creators: “They gave the dying newspaper adventure strips one last blaze of glory. Between Williamson’s remarkable drawing skills, his ability to create an amazing illusion of action and movement panel to panel, his elegant black-and-white design, and Goodwin’s deftly constructed narratives and tight, efficient dialogue, their run on the renamed Secret Agent Corrigan remains one last stand-out achievement in that genre. ... They loved what they created, and it shows.”

“One last blaze of glory” — another true statement at the conclusion of Schultz’s bundle of truths about Williamson and Goodwin. (You can find an exhaustive examination of how Corrigan at the hands of this duo is superior in the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 269.)

ELEPHANT MAN

Greg Houston is back again after the triumph of his outlandish blaxploitation expose, Vatican Hustle (see Opus 253 in the Usual Place), with Elephant Man (80 6x9-inch pages, b/w; NBM  paperback, $9.99), a send-up of superhero comics starring Jon Merrick, perhaps the famed deformity of the 19^th century, who, in his effort to save Baltimore (Houston’s home town, by the way) from the Priest, the Rabbi and the Duck (a trio of unlikely comrades that have become fused together into a single crime wave with three heads through the malfunction of a fiendish scientific device), is undermined at every opportunity by a self-important tv newsman, Dick Denton, eager to prove Elephant Man is all phony and no pony. The so-called plot comes unraveled rapidly, page by page, creating havoc and hilarity on its way through an unlikely romance between EM and the beauteously buxom Tracie J. Bombasso, girl reporter, who decides she’d rather have as a boyfriend a man who can remember her birthday than a deeply tanned, bushy-eyebrowed handsome matinee idol like Denton.

Houston’s haywire drawing technique, spewing distortion and loose-ends, lends its maverick visualization to this equally off-beat tale in a graphic novel that dares to use the word “peckish.” Houston’s work is perhaps best understood as the logical insane extension, in picture and plot, of what “cartooning” once was when Milt Gross and George Carlson were both practicing their craft at the same time. Now, it’s up to Houston. But you have to see it to believe it, so I’ve included a few visual fragments here.

WONDER WOMAN

A new “Wonder Woman” will air on NBC, according to Deadline Hollywood, which adds that the Diana Prince character will be a crimefighter and a corporate executive trying to balance the different aspects of her life. David E. Kelley has been shopping the series around for quite some time, and NBC picked it up on the second time around. Meanwhile, in the funnybook, WW has lost that nifty motorcycle jacket she adopted as her new uniform several months ago: she is now content to wander around, righting wrongs, in her red bustier and black leggings.

FIRST ISSUE: STARBORN

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 third of the so-called “Stan Lee” titles from Boom! is Starborn. The first issue opens on some sort of intergalactic battle between races of superior beings; then we turn the third page and discover that the galaxy, the battle, and the beings are all inventions of a wannabe writer of fiction named Benjamin Warner. Warner, who poaches on his employer’s time and the office computer to write novels during working hours, is awaiting word from a publisher that his first novel has been accepted. He muses for a few pages about how to make the inevitable sequel a better book than the first, Khary Randolph’s pictures deploying different styles to display alternative realities — first Warner’s, then the world of his fiction, illustrating his musing. Warner’s happy daydream is destroyed when a letter from the publisher arrives, rejecting his novel.

In the midst of the ensuing doldrums, Warner sees the flame of his childhood and adolescence, Tara Takamoto, and engages in reverie about her. Back at his work station, he is attacked by an alien being that looks like a fugitive from one of his unborn novels, but Tara suddenly shows up and saves him by shoving him off an upper floor of the office building, which then explodes, leaving Warner and Tara in midair on the plummeting side of a cliffhanger.

Makes you wonder why every writer thinks writers make fascinating protagonists. In this case, at least, Stan Lee’s concept, born, doubtless, of his own experience as a comic book scribe, is at least grounded in a reality we all are likely to recognize. Even if we aren’t writers, we realize that writers live in two worlds, one of their own devising. In Starborn, Lee’s alter ego, Chris Roberson, has constructed a fantasy about being a writer of sf, an inception in which the writer’s reality alternates between those two worlds. Our introduction to Warner, his musings, and the outcome of his first novel’s submission to a publisher constitute the completed episode in this inaugural issue.

Warner is a nice enough fella, a little naive perhaps (but aren’t all writers a little naive?), and Tara is sufficiently toothsome that we wonder what she sees in Benjamin. The book, however, promises to be an extended allegory about the life and imagination of a writer on the fringe of a world we all live in and can probably identify with — at least, with his yearning for Tara if not with his imagined intergalactic warfare. Might be enjoyable. (And I’ve insinuated into this and the preceding paragraph two clues as to what the possible inspiration for this kind of fiction might be. You get to smoke ’em out.)

Randolph’s storytelling — pacing, focusing, staging — is entirely adequate, even highly skillful, without any particularly spectacular innovations. His style, what I gather is the “urban” version of manganese (square fingers, dental detail as far back as the palate), is crisply achieved in a mostly clean linear mode, and he varies his treatment in three ways to indicate visually that we are in Warner’s fantasy world, his real world, or his remembered adolescence. Nicely done.

THE TERRIBLE AXE-MAN OF NEW ORLEANS

At NBM Publishing in 1987 Rick Geary launched a series of true crime books under the heading, "A Treasury of Victorian Murder Mysteries." Geary has apparently exhausted the 19th century in about nine books, and the series has now morphed into "A Treasure of 20th Century Murder."

The most recent of these is The Terrible Axe-man of New Orleans (80 6x9-inch pages in b/w; hardcover, $15.95). Set in the Big Easy right after World War I, Geary’s tale traces, murder by murder, a series of slaughters of Italian grocers, who are killed in their beds in the middle of the night by someone who enters the premises by breaking a panel out of a door and then, appropriating an axe found in the house, goes right for the heads of his victims, leaving blood splattered all over the place for the police to cogitate over when they discover the crime. Among the puzzles: the hole in the door created by knocking out a panel is always too small for any adult-sized person to enter. The terrible axe-murderer is never found, but, as usual with his painstaking research, Geary offers some speculations at the end of the book.

Apart from the gory fascination of the tale itself, we delight, as always, in Geary’s treatment of his material. His flat, emotionless prose narrative captions are accompanied by his haunting drawings, copiously shaded with parallel lines and hachuring, in which victims (before their deaths) and neighbors and police are often depicted staring into the camera — as if in a police line-up, unspeaking witnesses to terror, frozen in dread of some sinister machination lurking in their future.

Geary deftly creates not only the horrifying atmospherics of the murders but the ambiance of the otherwise jumping jazz scene of New Orleans. It’s always a pleasure to see Geary in action.

FIRST TIME

First Time (112 8.5x11 pages, b/w; NBM hardcover, $19.95) is a collection of ten short stories, each detailing in explicit but exquisite drawings the first sexual experiences of an assortment of women, all written by Sibylline, a woman administrator at Delcourt, a major French comics publisher. “The idea,” she explains in the book’s afterword, “was to provide a means for those who perhaps wanted to draw sex without daring to ask to do so. But we also wanted for it to be something more than a succession of pornographic images. We wanted to show, but we also wanted to tell. Sex is foremost an exchange, an ultimate moment of self-abandon where one must know how to set aside prudishness and anxieties. We have sex because we love it, we discover ourselves, and we teach ourselves. I wanted to tell stories that are reminders that sex is beautiful and to say that what are excesses for some are but a tender normalness for others.”

Each of the stories is written from the feminine perspective. One woman tells of her first time with a man she comes to love. Another fantasizes about doing it for the first time with a waiter she lusts for. Two normally heterosexual girls get it on. A couple find a woman on the internet, who comes to their apartment and makes love to the wife, then the husband joins in. Another girl buys herself a sex toy and uses it for the first time.

Each story is drawn by a different artist, most of them Europeans; four give only their first names—Alfred, Capucine, Vince, Rica; the others are more forthcoming—Jerome d’Aviau, Virginie Augustin, Olivier Vatine, Cyril Pedrosa, Dominique Bertail, and Dave McKean. Some styles are cartoony; others, realistic. All, however, are splendidly achieved—graceful undulating linework, unabashed nakedness, form and function in persuasive detail. But despite the explicit visuals, romance — lust as well as affection — makes all the encounters thoroughly humane, tender and endearing.

NBM also published the complete oeuvre of Reed Waller and Kate Worley, seven volumes of Omaha the Cat Dancer, books over which the puritan among us raised such a ruckus years ago, plus several of Milo Manara’s superior efforts, a title or two from Azpiri, a series of highly comedic one-page sexual adventures in an attractive cartoony style, all under the series title Grin and Bear It, and at least half a catalogue of other erotic enterprises. But my favorites of the lot are those by Ignacio Noe, who draws the best erotic comics on the planet. His pictures are not only breathtakingly fleshy and seductive, but his stories are invariably outrageously funny.

WEIRDEST IN THE WORLD

I ordered Holy Sh*t! The World’s Weirdest Comic Books (128 5x7-inch pages, color; St. Martin’s hardcover, $12.95) from Hamilton or Dover or some other cut-rate outfit (at a price less than the list price) without remembering that its authors, Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury, are both British and likely to cast their net much wider than the usual American product, which is what Scott Shaw! exposes in his slide show of similar stuff with a focus on covers. Gravett and Stanbury scoured the entire planet Earth for examples and found lots, including the U.S. and its undergrounds but also Italy, France, Brittain, etc. Each comic book gets two pages; one to reproduce a cover, the other for text. Herein we can find, for instance, a spread for Italy’s porn-horror version of Spider-Man in which the person bitten is a woman named Virgin Mona, who inadvertently arouses a radioactive spider, which, before it dies, manages to penetrate her, giving her amazing powers — “nymphomania and the unfortunate instinct to strangle her partners whenever she is about to climax.” She dons an “impractical outfit exposing her breasts and hardly concealing her crotch and becomes ‘The Spider Woman,’ doomed never to reach her first organism.”

CUSHLAMOCHREE!

“Cushlamochree!” — and with that exclamation, so familiar to comic strip afficionados who will rejoice the most (including moi), ComicsReporter’s Tom Spurgeon (onetime managing editor at the Comics Journal) announced that Fantagraphics has reached an agreement to publish a major, all-but-complete collection of Crockett Johnson's famed Barnaby. Says Spurgeon: “One of the best comic strips of the 20th Century and one of the most beloved older strips for a generation of devoted adult comics fans, Barnaby had become in the last decade and a half the great unassigned strip collection. The deal was negotiated by Eric Reynolds on Fantagraphics' behalf. The first volume will come out in April 2012 to coincide with the release of Philip Nel's much-anticipated biography of Johnson — The Purple Crayon and a Hole To Dig: The Lives Of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss — from the University Press of Mississippi. Nel will serve as series consultant and write an essay that will be paired with introductions from comics luminaries. Reynolds will be the series editor. Dan Clowes will supply the art direction.”

What a joy! As Spurgeon elaborates, Barnaby, which began publication in April 1942, revolved around a five-year-old named Barnaby Baxter and his fairy godfather Jackeen J. O'Malley. “The basic twist was that O'Malley was as far from the typical fairy protector as one might imagine.” He had pink wings, but otherwise, he was W.C. Fields: he smoked a cigar (which doubled as his magic wand), and his magic-making seemed confined mostly to cons he perpetrated in relationships with several other oddly-depicted members of the fantastic world just beyond our ken — a timorous ghost, a talking dog, and a mental giant. “Barnaby became a darling of those members of the cultural intelligentsia inclined to read the funnies, and was the recipient of perhaps the most unguarded words of praise in Dorothy Parker's long career: ‘I think, and I'm trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American Arts and Letters in Lord knows how many years.’” These may be the most famous and most frequently quoted words Parker ever penned or uttered.

“For all that praise,” Spurgeon continues, “Barnaby was only a moderately successful strip.” It reached just 64 papers in syndication. There were two hardback book collections (1943's Barnaby and 1944's Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley), a stage-play adaptation, and a radio show. In 1985-86, a 6-volume paperback series from Del Rey reprinted much of the strip’s run (through May 1946; Johnson had turned the strip over to Jack Morley and writer Ted Ferro by then), but these books are as hard to find as the 1940s hardcovers. “Barnaby's reputation was of course absolutely enhanced by Johnson's much-loved work in kids' books, including the Harold series kicked off by 1955's Harold And The Purple Crayon.”

Interestingly, Johnson redrew the early sequences of the strip for the reprint projects. And he left out altogether one sequence, which, I will someday demonstrate, he realized violated the essential ambiance of the strip. More in that vein when the time comes.

TED RALL'S NEW ADVENTURE

Ted Rall, having just returned, more-or-less intact, from a foray into the maw of the Afghanistan maelstrom (detailed in the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 270), is embarked on a new stunt just as fraught: his latest book, The Anti-American Manifesto, is stirring up the natives. I haven’t read the book or, even, seen a copy, but I’ve been watching Rall being interviewed and seeing what his cohorts in the editorial cartooning fraternity are saying.

At RussiaToday on YouTube, Rall said: "The Anti-American Manifesto is addressing the fact that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are able or willing to address the biggest problems facing the U.S. today, which are the economy, the environment, healthcare and the wars. And now you have to ask yourself as an American do you want to tolerate the system that is unresponsive and not going to go anywhere, or do you want to change it. The Anti-American Manifesto is not anti-American: it is anti the American government, or more specifically, this American government. We can do better and that's what I want to do."

On Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC show, Rall posited that political change comes about through one of four ways: political process, bond and insurance markets (essentially, an economic revolution, I gather), passive resistance, or violence. Violence, he said, is the last resort. But, he continues, “no meaningful political change has ever taken place without violence or the credible threat of violence.”

The political process has been thoroughly discredited in recent years; its been established as completely nonfunctional, so it cannot achieve change. The money markets have bought and paid for the government and both are co-conspirators in devising ways for the public at large to support the political and financial moguls but not the middle class or anyone else in the lower tax brackets. (I’m guessing that’s about what Rall says in his book—judging his previous diatribes and the current screed.) Yes, passive resistence would be nice, he admits: “If you could get everybody to stop paying their mortgage, say, it would work. But you can’t even get everybody to stop littering.”

That leaves violence. Or the credible threat of violence. “It’s up to the people,” Rall said, and then he quoted John Locke, who maintained that the people have “an obligation” to revolt when government fails. And our government, Rall would say, is failing.

If Rall is seen as advocating violent overthrow of the government, he can get himself into pretty deep hot water with the feds. I asked him if the FBI has been knocking on his door lately, and he said: “Aside from the funny clicking sounds on my phone, I haven't heard from them.” And then he remembered: “But those were there before the book.”

Without having, yet, read the book, I can only suppose Rall dodges the issue by couching his argument as a metaphysical contemplation rather than as a program urging action. We get some hint of the way he may be going in his explanation to Ratigan of his choice of title for the book, The Anti-American Manifesto: “That’s what everyone will call it anyway,” Rall said. He just got there first.

FARLEY KATZ

Farley Katz is relatively new to the pages of The New Yorker — his first published cartoon therein was, I gather, in the issue for December 10, 2007. Interviewed at the blog.CartoonBank.com, Katz said he taught himself to draw by copying the Ninja Turtles and got into trouble in the third grade when he drew an erotic scene with the turtles. He pitched some cartoons to Mad while still in high school but didn’t sell any. At Harvard, he worked on the storied Harvard Lampoon, where he met Zach Kanin, also destined to be a New Yorker cartoonist. After college, Katz went to Los Angeles, thinking he could write for television but ending up writing for the Internet instead at comedy.com. He admits to making “a lot of YouTube videos that are now a source of great embarassment to me. Most of the videos involved eating pizza. They would pay for our props, so we always worked pizza into every video so we could get a free meal.”

Then Kanin told Katz that Robert Mankoff, New Yorker cartoon editor, was looking for an assistant, and Katz applied and got the job, which was mostly sorting out the thousands of submissions for the weekly cartoon captioning competition. It was a privileged position: he sold his first cartoon after only “several months” of submitting; most neophytes submit for so many years that they are no longer neophytes by the time they’re published.

SOLDIER ZERO, NUMBER TWO

The second issue of another Stan Lee invention published by Boom! is out, and my interest there is rapidly flagging. The device of the Afghanistan war vet confined to a wheelchair was interesting at first (that is, in No. 1 of the title), but now, as we get a beginning of the explanation of the relationship between Stewart the vet and the armored Iron-Man entity, I am suddenly adrift in a sea of sf that is too far removed from ordinary reality to sustain my interest. The armored entity is a fugitive from another planet or universe and he is “occupying” Stewart. That much is okay. But as the two entities, Stewart and the armor, start talking to each other, I lost interest pretty fast.

The armor gives Stewart the power to walk, which is mildly engaging as a characterizing device, and the armor has other, unspecified powers, but it’s now fairly clear that Stewart is a slightly up-dated Tony Stark and the armor entity is Iron Man all over again. We’ve already got one of these; do we really need another? There’s more sf here than in the Iron Man version, true; but the sf is a little too outlandish for me. Sorry. I’ll give this title a pass.

EMILY FLAKE

Another new signature on cartoons in The New Yorker is “e flake,” which stands for the unlikely name “Emily Flake.” Asked if that is her real name, she said: “All too real, my friend, all too real.”

When not doing cartoons for America’s most sophisticated weekly magazine, Flake does them for alternative weekly newspapers, usually in the form of a comic strip called Lulu Eightball. Flake calls herself an “illustratrix.” She explained it to fellow New Yorker cartoonist Drew Dernavich, who interviewed her in July 2008: “I hit upon ‘illustratrix’ because technically it just means ‘lady illustrator’ and I thought it would be interesting and memorable. Same reason I like to show up for portfolio reviews bleeding from the eyes, say, or speaking in tongues.”

You can tell right away that this Flake is one tough pastry.

She got into cartooning, she said, “because when I shoot for serious, I hit maudlin, and things get uglier from there.” She doesn’t consider cartooning an art or a craft necessarily. “I consider it a tasty, life-giving millstone hung round my neck. A beloved millstone. Also, maybe a little something like necromancy.”

Occasionally, the editors of altie weeklies take umbrage at some of the Flakey language in her cartoons. “My editor in Birmingham sometimes objects to quirks of accent or wording, questioning my use of the word ‘turlit’ for ‘toilet’in a panel featuring pantsing; and the Charlottesville paper recently declined to run a particularly filthy strip called ‘X-Rated Acts of Tenderness.’ And I have edited myself on a couple occasions, substituting a rash gag for a harelip joke and not using the line ‘The only Chinese things I want right now is rocks and pussy.’ But generally speaking,” she concluded, “I am given a great deal of leeway. I am a lucky girl.”

Operating, I suppose, from the aged axiom that “the style is the man” coupled to another equally hoary myth, “you are what you eat,” Flake believes certain foods make her funnier. “Chocolate cream pie helps me to be hilarious whether I’m eating it or throwing it,” she explained. “Does bourbon count as a food? What about nitrous?”

What about coffee? “I take it black as my heart,” she cooed, “and bitter as my soul.”

End of interview.

ANNIVERSARIES

The first Dark Horse books, publisher Mike Richardson tells us in the December issue of Previews, “were pasted up on the counter of a comics shop, a fitting birthplace for a company born out of the love of comics.” Agreed. To help celebrate the Horse’s 25^th anniversary this year, Richardson announced that they’ll be reviving Dark Horse Presents, an omnibus magazine that introduced new artists and comics. And while we’re horsing around, Dark Horse is partnering with Archie Comics to publish Archie Archives, which will reprint the iconic teenager’s exploits, starting with Volume 1's stories from Pep and Jackpot Comics.

The immediately expiring year marked the 70^th anniversary of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. And it was the 100^th anniversary of Krazy Kat. Two signal events that we ought to have commemorated extensively here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer; but, alas, we nodded off instead. Fault of the gaffer.

We also missed heralding the 100^th birthday of Herge, creator of Tintin, in 2007. In preparation for that, I tried to read all of Tintin and got about half-way through. Maybe some other day. I just got a copy of Pierre Assouline’s Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin, which, by quoting directly Herge’s first wife, substantiates, at last, the innuendoes of previous books on Herge to the effect that his first wife didn’t love him. Since most of the previous biographies were produced by persons with close ties to the Herge establishment, operated to a large extent under the watchful eye of Herge’s widow, his second wife Fanny, their slighting remarks about Herge’s first marriage and wife seemed more like slurs,
perpetrated to enhance the reputation of his second wife — take a breath here — than recounting of ascertainable fact. But Assouline, by quoting the first wife, Germaine, directly, confirms the erstwhile slights as fact.

But in 2007 we did celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Milton Caniff’s birth with the publication of a compendious biography, Meanwhile: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, copies of which are still available from Fantagraphics.

FIRST ISSUE: THE TRAVELER

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.

In the debut of another of the so-called Stan Lee comic creations for Boom!, The Traveler, the star of the show, who calls himself “the Traveler,”descends from the upper reaches of the page to rescue an African American woman from a red-bearded, red-spandexed character who is shooting physical-force light from the palms of his hands. The woman’s connection with the goings-on seems chiefly to provide the Traveler with an excuse to supply some much-needed exposition. He is one of four “split-second” men, he explains, each of whom has a power related to the “fundamental forces of the universe.” Red-beard is electromagnetic; another has the power to decay matter; the third is the Traveler (time-space continuum?). And the fourth, the Traveler elaborates helpfully, “I don’t even want to talk about.”

All of this — shooting power bolts from the hands, gritting teeth, posturing threateningly — is fairly standard Silver Age superhero balderdash, inspired, here, by Lee but implemented by Mark Waid, who has been drinking from the same cup. An element of interest is injected, however, when two government agents show up, apparently pursuing the Traveler and any other extra-terrestrial on the horizon. They try to arrest the Traveler, but just then, the master of decay shows up and decays the woman agent by thrusting his hand into her midsection. End of issue.

This is a good first issue by the measure I’ve cobbled up above. The self-contained episode is the rescue of the African American woman and the Traveler’s tantalizing explanation of a few aspects of the situation. The fate of the two government agents, particularly the woman, a comely sort, is provocative enough to furnish the cliffhanger. But otherwise, I’m not much intrigued. It’s the genre, not the treatment that I’m put off by. I’ve pretty much had it with spandex-clad heroic figurines who shoot power bolts from their hands (a device, I suspect, resorted to when the Comics Code insisted there be no bloodshed or death in comics). Chad Hardin’s drawing is better than average — good anatomy, clarity of line, and not too much modeling by distorting shadows on prominent cheekbones, for instance. But his work is not so much different that it alone tempts me to return for another helping of this title.

KLASSIC KRAZY KOOL KIDS COMICS

The Golden Collection of Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Comics, Edited, Designed and Introduced by Craig Yoe (304 8.5x11-inch pages, color; Yoe Books at IDW, hardback, $34.99).

Yoe aims with this collection at the original audience for the comics he collects here—kids. And his introduction, which traces the history of comics created specifically with young readers in mind, is addressed to that audience, although he occasionally slips in a big word (like “menagerie”). The “earliest known U.S. comic book” for kids is The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, an 8-page romp of sequential pictures with narrative text beneath—and no speech balloons — produced in the early 1850s. Yoe’s book reprints the anonymously concocted Mr. Tom Plump in its entirety.

But most of the book’s content is of more recent vintage, the 1940s (lots from 1946), and includes work by legendary cartoonists — Walt Kelly (the charming “Goblin Glen” from 1946), Ken Hultgren, George Carlson (one from Puzzle Fun, No. 1, 1946 — not Jingle Jangle, Carlson’s usual abode; but there’s one from JJ, too), John Stanley (“Peterkind Pottle” from Raggedy Ann, No. 35, 1949, and a stylized dog feature, Jigger), Otto Messmer (Felix, of course), Carl Barks (Barney Bear and Benny Burro from Our Gang Comics, No.24, 1946), Andre LeBlanc (Intellectual Amos), Jack Bradbury, Milt Stein (Super Rabbit), and Dan Gordon (Super Katt) to name most of them; and also some unlikely authors of comics for kids—Dave Berg, H.G. Peter, Mel Casson, Syd Hoff (his somewhat street smarter version of Little Lulu, Tuffy), Jules Feiffer, Harvey Kurtzman (“Pigtales” from 1946; delightful art not at all in his usual manner), Jack Kirby (two funny animal creations), Frank Frazetta, Jack Cole, Mort Walker, Wally Wood (post-EC’s “Goody Bumpkin” from Wham-O Giant Comics, No. 1, 1967). Also within is some strange and wonderful work by John Liney, Dr. Seuss (his newspaper strip, Hejji; a story unfinished in its original appearance but finished for this book by Glizia Gussoni, who wrote the ending, and Luke McDonnell who drew it), Basil Wolverton, and the mysteriously illusive Louis Ferstadt, who was among the first to employ Kurtzman and other greats in the years before they were great. I’ve never seen anything by Ferstadt reproduced anywhere else; he’s surprisingly good, both as a drawer and as a writer.

Every reprinted story is sourced with titles of the comic book in which they originally appeared, dates, author, and a short half-sentence explication (“Kelly dew wonderful fairy tales like this one, but he’s most famous for creating a character named Pogo Possum.”). Pages are reproduced directly from the comic books wherein they wee initially published, cleaned up digitally but not loused up with retouching or garish re-coloring, and the whole production is topped off with a sewn-in ribbon book mark. But the book scarcely needs that touch of class: through and through, it is a classy collection of genuinely funny stuff as done by some of the medium’s top talents when at the top of their games. Yoe may have had children in mind as readers of this book, but comics enthusiasts of all ages will love it.

 

ISLAMIC HOOLIGANISM

Five would-be terrorists were arrested on December 29 in Denmark, where they were about to mount a “Mumbai-style” attack on the offices of Jylands-Posten, the newspaper that ignited the Muslim outcry five years ago by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. None of the five appear to have connections to the botched December 11 suicide bombing in crowded downtown Stockholm, said the New York Times; the bomber had sent a threatening message to Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who rose to international prominence after drawing pictures in 2007 of Mohammed with a dog’s body. “I’m a constant target,” Vilks said.

Meanwhile, Kurt Westergaard, the Dane whose cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb turban is the most notorious of the twelve incendiary pictures published in Jylands-Posten, has written his autobiography, The Man Behind the Lines, which contains a new version of the infamous drawing: in it, the artist, glancing at his 2005 cartoon, has a bomb on his own head, a fairly effective metaphor for the menace that has hung over him ever since.

Although Westergaard does not regret the publication of his Muhammad cartoon, he said: "It travels around the world and is used and misused, and the cartoon gets a status as an icon, as I do sometimes, and I am not so happy about that. I'd like back my good old identity as an average, reliable cartoonist who pretty much never missed a deadline," he added at a news conference launching the release of his book.

But he maintains that the Danish Dozen (as I call them) “have contributed to starting a necessary debate on freedom of speech. That has caused friction between Muslim and Western Christian democratic cultures and that is something we need to get through. But it should preferably happen peacefully.” His book, he told Reuters, is more than an autobiography: it is also a defense of freedom of speech, adding: “Self censorship is dangerous because you cannot see it. It is not bureaucratic as it is going on inside the heads of people."

STAN LEE'S SPIDERMAN ADVICE

Rick Marshall at MTV News asked Stan Lee what advice the co-creator of Spider-Man might have for actor Andrew Garfield, lately chosen to play the part in the next Web-slinger movie. Said Lee: "The best way to bring Spider-Man to the screen is to make it seem very natural—just to be a very simple, everyday, ordinary kid who happens to be good at science and wishes he were more than he is. He wishes he were more popular with the guys. He wishes the girls would pay a little more attention to him. He wishes he could make more money because he worries about his aunt who has to pay the rent, and it's kind of tough for her. He doesn't want her to lose her house."

According to Lee, Marshall said, “the essence of playing a believable Peter Parker is not so much in the super-powers and snappy comebacks, but in finding your inner, awkward teen.”

Lee continued: “He should have the kind of concerns that so many teenagers have. The thing about Spider-Man, one of the things that makes him so popular, is the fact that you can relate to him. He's not that different from the average guy, except he's able to crawl on walls and swing on webs." Lee laughed.

LUANN: 25 YEARS

Luann: 25 Years, By Greg Evans (276 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w mostly, some color; sold only at TheCartoonistStudio.com/Greg, $39.95)

This is another of those rare reprise tomes in which the reprinted strips are accompanied by the cartoonist’s commentary. A selection of highlights from Luann’s quarter century appears at the rate of three strips to a page, a design that permits ample display of the artifacts with room left over for Evans’ insights whenever he is disposed to offer them, which is often. And every strip is dated, a boon to historians and other compulsives. Reuben winner Evans showcases fragments of narrative sequences, milestones in his heroine’s young life, some of which are legendary: Luann getting her period, for instance.

Evans does not shy away from potentially controversial subjects as he explores the lives of his characters, and as a result, the strip resonates authenticity. And humor. For a conspicuous instance of comedy and reality, there’s the time a condom drops out of Luann’s brother Brad’s wallet when he is buying tickets for himself and his date to go to a movie. And she sees it!

For most of the strip’s run, if we are to judge from the examples herein — and as a regular reader of the strip, I can vouch for their being faithfully representative — Evans reveals the sure touch of a master storyteller: he can couple comedy to genuine emotion with great skill, producing both chuckles and empathy in his readers. While there are ample instances of his talent at this kind of thing throughout this collection, my favorites are those sequences depicting the increasingly serious romance between the now-mature but still nerdy Brad and beauteous Toni Daytona.

In the book’s introductory section (printing the only color in the book), Evans waxes autobiographical and includes numerous photographs (among them, one of Maxwell the Robot, an R2D2-clone that Evans inhabited at one stage in his pre-cartoonist career) and samples of his earlier attempts at comic strips. He’s also included a tantalizingly brief sample of his superior ability at watercolor painting — exquisite.

For fans of Luann, this is a must-have book, but anyone who enjoys cartooning should add this volume to his/her library: with Evans’ running commentary paralleling his expert performance as a cartoonist, this book is without quibble one of the best books about syndicated comic stripping around. And in a time when the brittle comedy of Pearls Before Swine and Dilbert seem to reign supreme in the funnies, it’s profoundly gratifying to encounter a strip that humane and caring as well as unfailingly funny.