Rants & Raves

HAPPINESS IS A WARM BLANKET

All this time, I thought Peanuts would never be produced by anyone other than Charles Schulz. I thought Schulz made it pretty clear: after I’m gone, no one will continue the strip. Well, yes — the strip. But we’ve already had a couple of “new” video incarnations of Schulz’s creation, and on March 29 we had another, a direct to video release of an animated feature, “Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown,” accompanied by a print version with the same title (80 7x10-inch pages, color; hardcover from Kaboom!, the kids imprint of Boom!; $19.99). The hardcover incarnation is written by son Craig Schulz and Stephan (Pearls before Swine) Pastis and drawn by Bob Scott, Vicki Scott and Ron Zorman.

The publisher’s news release posted at the end of February was accompanied by four sample pages, and I’m happy to say that the rendering mimics Schulz perfectly — the way his drawings appeared before his hand got shaky. But the page layouts and narrative breakdowns are a dramatic departure from the usual funnybook format: instead of the standard grid, we have half-page panels, embedded panels, vignettes of characters in “panels” without borders. Worth a look I’d say, but maybe not for twenty bucks.

  Both book and animated cartoon are based on two long 1960s continuities Schulz drew about Lucy trying to break Linus of his blanket habit: she buried his blanket and forced him to dig up the entire neighborhood searching for it, and, later, made the blanket into a kite that blew away.

The movie, saith Charles Solomon, animation historian, who conveyed his review at herocomplex.latimes.com, is, apparently, not so hot: “Despite the solid source material, the story rambles aimlessly.”

Too bad. But it sounds like Sparky knew what he was talking about when he said no one should try to continue his oeuvre: such attempts can only be trying in the extreme.

STAY TOONED: THE MIKE ISSUE

 

The sixth issue of John Read’s cartoonist profile magazine, Stay Tooned, is out and available in single copy ($12) by subscription ($44 for 4 issues) through staytoonedmgazine.com. This is the “Mike Issue,” featuring interviews with editoonist Michael Ramirez (a welcomed long exchange with a conservative master drawer who is seldom as visible as this) and comic books’ Mike Mignola, plus gag cartooner Mike Lynch, The New Yorker’s Michael Maslin, Michael Jantze, Mike Cope, Mike Arnold, and Mike Edholm — plus a couple of laugh-laden stories about Mike Peters by Yrs Trly. John Read, by the way, is the insane person who convinced 140 syndicated cartoonists (of which there is no more notorious a breed of procrastinators) to send him original art for their Sunday releases for a particular Sunday, which Read then assembled into a traveling exhibit, “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages”; next stop, Boston, then Chicago, Savannah, Austin and Pittsburgh.

THE MAN WHO SAVED THE COMICS: BILL BLACKBEARD, R.I.P.

Bill Blackbeard, without question or quibble, is the only absolutely indispensable figure in the history of comics scholarship for the last quarter century — and will undoubtedly retain the title for well into this century and beyond. He died on March 10, sloughing off the mortal coil unnoticed and unheralded; he was 84. His passing was discovered by friends and cartooning aficionadoes by accident.

Publisher Gary Groth, whose Fantagraphics Books has relied upon Blackbeard’s extensive archive of comic strip clippings for many books reprinting vintage comic strips, last week phoned the nursing home where Blackbeard has been living for some time, and when Groth asked for Blackbeard, he was told the iconic collector was deceased. No other information was forthcoming despite Groth’s questions. Not even date of death. I discovered that by googling; the rest, Blackbeard’s benchmark achievements for the history of the medium and an outline of his life, are now presented on the online Comics Journal, tcj.com.

WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES

We are a little late in noting that last year marked the 70^th anniversary of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Hallelujah anyway!

FANTASTIC FOUR NO MORE?

Every one of Marvel’s marching minions who cares about such matters now knows that the member of the Fantastic Four who died in issue No. 587 is Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch. Like many perusers  of the four-color fantasies (including all of us here at Rancid Raves), Andrew “Captain Comics” Smith doesn’t think Johnny Storm, the erstwhile Human Torch, will stay dead for long. In fact, as he says in No. 1677 of the Comics Buyer’s Guide (May’s issue), “I doubt there’s a fan out there who really buys a death in comics any more” so frequently are the dead resurrected.

He offers four “reasons” for Storm’s demise in No. 587 of The Fantastic Four (which title itself disappears with No. 588). First, of course, “to shake things up.” Or, to be a bit more precise, “to stimulate newsstand sales.” Which worked: No. 587 was January’s top-selling funnybook. Second, Storm died because he “needed a vacation.” Turns out the Human Torch is the only member of the FF who hasn’t had time off in the title’s five-decade run. Each of the others — the Thing, Reed Richards and his wife Sue — has “been absent for lengthy sabbaticals.” Third, the Human Torch had to die because there are too many Human Torches loose in the Marvelverse. The original Human Torch and his sidekick Toro are lurking around in the background, never having properly died. Finally, saith Smith, Storm was killed off because he was a “full-blown moron,” his career “punctuated by bad decisions, puerile behavior, adolescent temper tantrums, and just plain stupid moves.” The FF would be better off without him. For a while. Until he’s resurrected.

HERGE

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 about Herge to the effect that his first wife, Germaine nee Kieckens, didn’t love him much, which serves to explain and perhaps excuse Herge’s having an affair with a colorist on his staff while still married to Germaine. Later, after divorcing Germaine, he married his in-house paramour, Fanny Vlamynck.

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, the aforementioned second wife Fanny, the biographers’ slighting remarks about Herge’s first marriage and wife seemed like slurs, perpetrated to enhance the reputation of his second wife—take a breath here—rather than ascertainable fact. But Assouline, by quoting the first wife, Germaine, directly, confirms the erstwhile slights as fact not spiteful fiction. She confirms that theirs was not a love match—at least as far as she was concerned.

Assouline’s book, which I’ve only browsed through, not read with thorough attention, covers Herge’s love life in some detail (although not at all salaciously). In 1960, after 28 years of marriage and a four-year affair with Fanny, Herge left both women. Briefly. Then Fanny forced the issue, and Herge separated from Germaine. But it would take 17 years for her to grant the divorce. “Throughout, Germaine clung to the hope that he would return. He did not abandon her, either materially or morally. Until the end of his life, he would spend Mondays with her in what had been their home in Ceroux-Mousty.”

If the rest of the book is as detailed and fastidious as this, it’s a fine biography indeed. No pictures, though. Not even a photograph — except one of Herge on the dust jacket. Odd.

SALUTE TO P.S.

Joe Kubert and Paul E. Fitzgerald have started a year-long blog salute to the Army’s PS Magazine in honor of its 60^th year. Fitzgerald was the magazine's first managing editor (1953-1963), and is the author of the 2010 Eisner Award-nominated history, Will Eisner and PS Magazine. He will make “best of” selections from the 227 issues Eisner produced over his 21 years with PS; Kubert, who has just completed his tenth year as the contractor for the magazine’s creative art, design and pre-press services, will make selections from all issues since February 2001, and the magazine's existing staff will choose from issues by the six art contractors between Eisner and Kubert.

Of the eight contractors responsible for producing PS, Eisner served the longest; next with 150 issues are Jack and Diane Backes. Murphy Anderson served twice, 111 issues (and he had worked in Eisner’s PS shop). Kubert has so far produced 124 issues and is still the contractor. The blog, which apparently will post new material daily, can be found at thebestofpsmagazine1951-2011.blogspot.com

It was in the Army during WWII that Eisner began experimenting with instructional comics. After the war, Eisner won the contract to produce P.S., the Army’s how-to safety magazine for servicemen/women, which, in turn, led him to developing instructional comics for industries and other non-military entities. 

WIZARD BECOMES WIZARDWORLD

Wizard, the glossy monthly magazine about comics, is no longer in print. Ditto the publisher’s ToyFare magazine. Starting in March, the print Wizard will be replaced by a digital version called WizardWorld. It will cover comic books, toys, and superheroes and the personalities behind them, kittyspride.com announced at the end of January. The publisher recently went public as Wizard World, Inc., and it seems focused now on its program of popular culture shows, the Comic Con Tour, that is supposed to convene all around the country in 12 cities this year.

With the expiration of Wizard magazine, the venerable Comics Buyer’s Guide (CBG) now stands alone as the only monthly magazine about comics. The Comics Journal went digital in December 2009 (at tcj.com), resorting to print only once a year in a “book format,” the first “issue” of which is coming in at around 600 pages and is poised, even as I scrawl this unrepentent prose, to emerge.

At the CBG, editor Brent Frankenhoff can’t help but insinuate a tiny note of victory in his announcement of Wizard’s demise: launched in 1991, Wizard: A Guide to Comics was, Frankenhoff says, “a glossy comics magazine designed to compete with many other comics-related magazines [most obviously, given the deployment of the term ‘guide,’ CBG]. In the years since, all of those publications have changed formats or frequencies or gone out of business.”

CBG changed format, abandoning its weekly newsprint paper format for a slick-paper color-cover monthly magazine about 4-5 years ago; it was an obvious attempt to meet the perceived competition of Wizard. (But Frankenhoff is careful to note that “others may have perceived a rivalry [between CBG and Wizard, but] we’ve always had friendly relations with Gareb and his staffers at his many shows.” Of course; why not be friends? You can be friends with your competition. No law against that. But friendly relations do not eliminate rivalry.) After a few years going head to head, toe-to-toe, now CBG is the last of its breed still standing.

 

ANGOULEME GRAND PRIX HONOR

In early February, maus-man Art Spiegelman accepted Angouleme’s Grand Prix honor, knowing that acceptance entails being president of the Angouleme International Comics Festival next year — and that means guiding the festival's exhibits and conferences and programs. "I don't know whether you should say 'congratulations' or 'condolences,' " said Spiegelman when he was interviewed by ComicRiffs’ Michael Cavna. But, he went on, "I didn't think I could say 'no' without causing an international incident of Bush-like proportions."

The four-day fest, which debuted four decades ago, now draws roughly 200,000 visitors to southern France. Joking aside, Spiegelman recognizes the Grand Prix as a distinct if perhaps (in his case) misplaced honor: "It would have made sense 15 years ago," he said. "I feel like President Obama and the Peace Prize — the timing's all wrong." It might be wrong, but Spiegelman has scarcely left his 1992 Special Pulitzer Prize for Maus behind: his latest project is "Metamaus," a look back at the landmark Holocaust-memoir graphic novel that is still his best known work.

THE GOVERNATOR

Arnold Schwarzenegger, lately of the governor’s mansion in California, is on the cover of the April 8 issue of Entertainment Weekly because he has finally decided what he’s going to be doing next. No more politics, it seems. Instead, Benjamin Svetkey writes, “the man who was recently in charge of the world’s eighth-largest economy will be turning himself into a cartoon character. And not just any cartoon character, but the Governator, a sunglasses-wearing superhero with an Austrian accent who’ll be at the center of an ambitious, kid-friendly multimedia comic-book and animated tv series co-developed by no less a hero-maker than Stan Lee.” The piece is accompanied by photos of Ahnold, including a nifty one laughing with Lee, and some art by Stan Lee Comics. The drawing of the Governator (which also appears as a fold-in back-up cover) is, like most superhero art these days, a little too up-tight for my taste but some of the other renderings (like that of the arch villain Felon-e, the “17-year-old evil genius behind Felonbook, a social network for hackers”) seem somewhat more relaxed and therefore better, IMHO.

The animated Governator won’t arrive until the end of 2012, but the funnybook, published by Archie Comics, will show up sooner: “a prototype will likely be ready to distribute at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con this summer.

The same issue of EW offers a guest column by Rainn Wilson, “actor (‘Office’) and author,” who, based upon his experience in the forthcoming movie ‘Super,’ has decided that

“superheroes are weird”: “Superheroes are a truly strange storytelling phenomenon, specific to the culture of 20^th-century America. Hotties in tight, bright uniforms flying around in masks fighting supervillains, finding kid sidekicks, preserving secret identities, and fostering furtive romances with mortals.” He goes on in this vein for the entire page of his column, pretending he doesn’t understand the conventions of the genre. “What’s with the neon red and kelly green skintight spandex outfits? Do you really think you’re intimidating someone by dressing like a Romanian acrobat from Cirque du Soleil? And what does the cape do exactly?”

REUBEN FINALISTS

Finalists for the "cartoonist of the year” award (the Reuben) conferred by the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) are Glen Keane (animation), Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), and Richard Thompson (Cul de Sac), the latter two strip cartoonists have been previously nominated for the honor. The winner will be announced at the Reuben Banquet during the NCS annual convention held over Memorial Day weekend, this year, in Boston.

Best known for his character animation at Walt Disney Studios for such feature films as “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tarzan,” and “Tangled,” Keane received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation and the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation. Bil Keane, Glen’s father, collected the Reuben for 1982. The last cartoonist in animation to receive the Reuben was Matt Groening who received his for 2002; no other animators have ever won the Reuben.

R.O. Blechman, illustrator, animator, children’s book author, graphic novelist, editorial cartooner, and New Yorker stalwart, will receive the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award. Finalists for other, so-called “division” Reubens—i.e., those awarded for cartooning in various guises, comic strips, magazine cartoons, comic books, etc.—are listed at the NCS website, reuben.org..

THE ODYSSEY

Gareth Hinds, whose self-published graphic novel of Beowulf attracted the attention of the publisher Candlewick, continues his self-imposed project of reinterpreting classic texts in the graphic novel format with his 256-page version of The Odyssey in watercolor and pastel. Hinds and Candlewick hope to find a wide audience in schools and libraries, while still appealing to adults. Since Beowulf, Candlewick has also published Hinds' takes on “King Lear” and “The Merchant of Venice,” the latter of which Hinds had also previously self-published. Hinds notes he is attracted to classic texts because they "have so much depth that I can delve into."

THE NOSE KNOWS

Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s masterful play, has been adapted as a graphic novel by Peter David and Kyle Baker for Papercutz’s Classics Illustrated (64 6.5x9-inch pages, full color; paperback, $9.99), a faithful retelling albeit in Baker’s somewhat exuberant style (nice though); with biographical and critical appreciation essays at the end. The story, in brief, revolves around the love of two men for the same woman: Cyrano, an eloquent (if sometimes bombastic) and talented swordsman, is in love with Roxanne, but he hesitates to approach her because he feels the size of his nose (in most stage productions, a Pinoccio protrubance) makes him so ugly that she will reject him. Cyrano learns that an acquaintance, Christian, a handsome if inarticulate soldier, is also in love with Roxanne, and Cyrano believes Roxanne returns Christian’s feeling. When the two men go off to war, Christian complains that he hasn’t the talent for words that would enable him to write to Roxanne, so Cyrano, whose poetic soul is ever on display, undertakes to write the letters for him.

The letters are so moving that Roxanne’s love for Christian is enhanced, and she’s so devastated when he is killed in battle that she becomes a nun. Cyrano spends the rest of his life visiting Roxanne in the convent to tell her the news of the day. He writes her a farewell letter, and when he reads it to her, she realizes that it was his letters—and, by that token, Cyrano himself—that she had fallen in love with years before. Just as she comes to this realization, Cyrano, who was set upon by thugs en route to visit her, dies of wounds they inflicted. He dies in her arms, proclaiming in his last breath the purity and integrity of his reputation, symbolized by his hat’s flamboyant white plume (in French, panache).

David and Baker manage the death scene deftly, but some of the most memorable poetry of the play is only alluded to. We can expect no more, after all: Cyrano’s wit is revealed in verbiage, but a graphic novel specializes in movement, action — visual narrative not verbal poetry — and the narrative, as I said, is well managed by David and Baker. Some may think Baker’s cartoony pictures are inappropriate to so tragic a story, but Rostand intended his play to be a comedy, and Baker’s treatment is attuned to that objective. 

THE SKELETON STORY

From GG Studios in Italy we have several memorably rendered books, but it was The Skeleton Story I fell for because I am inordinately fond of cartoon characters that look like Mr. Bones. Alessandro Rak’s story is a vagary about a Shadowtown private eye, Will Musil, who is looking for a missing person — perhaps the little girl he chances upon herein — and is pestered by a threesome of bad guys commanded by Old Lady Death. In envisioning his tale, Rak is fun to watch. His page layouts are nicely varied even if his coloring puts everything into half-light obscurity. Down below is a nifty layout, showing Will breaking into a house then through the floor to a lower level. Tilting the second panel emphasizes the violently disorienting breakage that is going on, but it’s the transition from the fifth to the sixth panel that is most satisfying, shifting our point of view to dramatize the fall and them emphasizing the drama with the use of unencumbered white space. Nicely done. The rest of the book follows more routine layouts, varying them but without any similarly spectacular emphasis; focus serves pacing, however, and both together display Rak’s mastery of his medium.

THE COMING OF CONAN

Celebrating its 40th anniversary (right alongside the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide) is Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian. Roy Thomas, one-time editor-in-chief and longtime Conan scribe, remembers discussing the possibility of adapting Conan at Marvel: "Stan Lee had no feel for what sword and sorcery  was, but I had bought (though I hadn't read them) all the Conan paperbacks that had come out to date, largely because of the Frazetta covers." Thomas told Diamond’s Scoop that he wrote a memo to Marvel publisher Martin Goodman saying that a sword and sorcery comic would contain some of the same qualities super-hero comics did—a strong hero, beautiful women, monsters, and villainous sorcerers.

“I noticed in a new Conan paperback that L. Sprague de Camp listed the mailing address of the literary agent for the Howard estate, Glenn Lord," Thomas continued. "I contacted him offering $200 an issue, and he accepted, convinced I suppose by my argument that a six-figure comic book print run might increase the audience for Conan."

Conan No. 1 sold well, but each of the next half dozen issues dropped in sales. Thomas recalled Lee stepping in around the eighth issue. "Stan 'suggested' that we have more humanoid foes for Conan on the covers than giant spiders, man-headed snakes, apes in armor, and women turning into tigers. With Nos. 8-9 and afterward, the sales [consequently] picked up, and afterwards Conan was never in danger of cancellation for another 25 or so years."