Rants & Raves

NEXT MEN

John Byrne’s Next Men is back. Byrne produced 31 issues of this title title from February 1992 to December 1994 and then said he was taking a few months off. He was emotionally exhausted, he said, and needed a change. So he was going to abandon comics for a while to work on a novel and a couple of other projects. Then he’d come roaring back, tossing his characters into “a whole new mess.”

But Byrne took 16 years off, and now he’s back with his team of super-powered beings who were concocted at a place called “the Greenery,” an idyllic sort of scientific Garden of Eden (the first of several Biblical allusions insinuated into the stories). Nathan, who can see through things, is called Scanner; Jack, the strong man, is Brawn; Bethany, who is indestructible, is Hardbody; Danny, who can run faster than anything, is Sprint; and Jasmine (“Jazz”), whose acrobatics defy gravity, is Bounce. Ever since leaving the Greenery, led by a government agent, an African American woman named Tony Murcheson, they’ve been living in a nightmare of menace as various personages, chiefly a criminally inclined former senator (eventually Prez of the U.S.) Aldus Hilltop, who also initiated the experiment that resulted in the creation of the Next Men, sought to enlist their abilities in sundry plots and schemes. Besides Hilltop, there’s a comic book publisher, Dollar Comics, who wants the Next Men to act as shills for its comics. Eventually, they’re all accused of being murderers.

Byrne is one of the most talented creators to work in comic books: he is, first of all, a cartoonist, which means he writes as well as draws his stories. He has a special feeling for science fiction and its associated fantasies, which he evolves in the most grown-up themes. Such as, f’instance — the Next Men were created by activating a “trigger gene” found in all humans; it propelled them to the “next” level of human evolution — hence the name. The dilemmas into which Byrne thrusts his Next Men are not the slam-bang sort that infect the pages of Marvel and DC funnybooks: Byrne’s superheroes are plagued by more sophisticated threats, and they extricate themselves more by intellectual means than physical.

The original series was branded for “Mature Readers,” and it lived up to the brand: the books display some nudity (even male frontal nudity) and some of the characters engage in sexual intercourse, which they originally, while in the Greenery, called “dancing,” betraying a childlike naivety that subsequently gets both Danny and Jasmine in trouble. All achieved in tasteful sequences: nothing salacious, kimo sabe.

More details can be mined at the Usual Place, R&R, Op. 274.

ARCHIE BABIES

Calvin Reid at publishersweekly.com reports: “For the first time in its 70-year history, Archie Comics will publish an original graphic novel later this year — a major change for a company that still leans heavily on newsstand sales of single-issue comics and digests for the lion's share of its revenue. The new graphic novel, Archie Babies, will be written by Mike Kunkel, who wrote and drew the first issues of Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! for the DC Comics' DC Kids line. The artist for the project is Art Mawhinney, who has worked for DC, Marvel, and Nickelodeon. The book will be distributed by Random House. Archie Babies was originally announced as a monthly series, but Jon Goldwater, co-CEO of Archie, said the company is putting renewed emphasis on graphic novels since signing a distribution deal with Random House last September. ‘We are going to put a lot of emphasis on our graphic novels,’ he said. ‘It is a very, very important part of our business here at Archie Comics.’”

Archie’s latest foray into the future resulted in digital versions of its comics being online the same day as print editions hit the newsstands, reports George Gene Gustines at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com. Postings began in April, but already comic shop retailers began raising a ruckus before that, fearing the web exposure will sabotage sales in their stores. Archie titles in print have been published in many different languages, but the digital variety started offering some titles in Spanish, reported the Associated Press. Said Goldwater: “We have an incredible number of fans—not just domestically—who speak Spanish.”

Archie is getting so up-to-speed that politics have intruded into the otherwise balmy afternoons at Riverdale High School. In Archie No. 616, Archie and Veronica are depicted talking environmental issues with President Obama, and Reggie gets his photograph taken with Sarah Palin. “Both political alliances are used for Archie and Reggie to further their campaigns for student-body president,” said Ken Tucker at EW.com’s Shelflife blog.Firmly in the stampede of a hard charge into modernity, Archie launched a mini-series starring the gay character, Kevin Kelly, who was introduced last spring.

FOUR NO MORE

In case you hadn’t heard — although how you could miss it baffles me — in No. 587 of Marvel’s Silver Age flagship title, The Fantastic Four (once subtitled “The World’s Greatest Comic Book,” the book that launched the “superheroes with human faults” trend in 1960, setting the pace for an otherwise moribund industry), one of the fabled quartet dies. After announcing that one of the four would die in this issue, Marvel kept the doomed one’s identity a secret for weeks, and when the book arrived on newsstands, it was encased in a plastic envelope with the number “3" in the team’s shimmering blue circle surrounded by funereal solid black.

Sealed in plastic, the issue could not be picked up, while we stood there at the rack, and flipped through hastily to discover the fatality. Fiendish marketing scheme: you had to buy the thing to get license to tear open the plastic envelope. Ripping it open in an eager albeit morbid frenzy, I read the whole issue (something I haven’t done for years, decades) to learn who would die. It was Johnny Storm — the Human Torch, ostensibly one of the duo (the Submariner was the other) who effectively launched the comic book company that became Marvel by deploying superheroic conflict in the basic antagonistic elements of fire and water. And now the fire has gone out.

Historic with a capital Hiss.

As a marketing maneuver, the death issue worked: No. 587 sold over 115,000 copies, the highest total for a direct market comic book since X-Men No 1 launched in July of 2010. Second best seller of the month, Spawn No. 200, didn’t come close to FF No. 587 — just 73,000 copies sold.

Now minus a fourth, The Fantastic Four title ceased with No. 588, which ends the pacesetting series on a suitably quiet note: no words are spoken for 40 of the book’s 48 pages, as the remaining FF and most of the rest of the Marvel Universe mourn the death of Johnny Storm.  Even Doom shows up and, uncharacteristically, says nothing. The usual volubility of the Marvel minions is muted, silent, out of respect, we assume, for the traditions of mourning: there are no words to express genuine grief.

Fantastic Four will be replaced by another double-f book, The Future Foundation, in which the remnants of the Fantastic Four, Marvel’s First Family of Comics, replace the departed Human Torch with Spider-Man and form a new supergroup known as The Future Foundation — a good trick considering that Spider-Man is dying in his own Ultimate title.

AMERICAN POLITICAL CARTOONS

The latest manifestation of Stephen Hess’s long love affair with editorial cartooning is entitled American Political Cartoons: the Evolution of a National Identity, 1754-2010 (204 7x9-inch landscape pages, b/w; Transaction paperback, $24.95). The book reprints exactly, page for page, an earlier, 1996 tome, Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, which, like the present volume, is co-authored by Sandy Northrop. To this new edition, the authors have added a 39-page chapter, covering the years since the previous publication, 1997-2010.

The book may be envisioned as an essay on political cartooning, the profession and its craft, bracketing a history of political cartooning in America. The first chapter, repeating the previous edition verbatim, talks generally about the social and political role of the editorial cartoon; the “conclusion” to this essay comes at the end of the book, on the last couple pages:

“The political cartoon is the embodiment of the American form of government. Democracy is fed by encouraging a free forum for discussion. Wrote historian Larry Mintz: ‘It takes a confident and aggressive society to consider its most serious problems and reduce them to jokes. It involves a willingness to consider the stupidities and errors of one’s environment as less threatening—as, in fact, survivable.’”

This passage makes explicit the connection between editorial cartooning and the “national identity” of the title; the evolution is implicit in the pages of cartoons, 345 of them, ranging across U.S. history from the time of the Founding Fathers through the election of Barack Obama.

Hess has been surveying this landscape for a long time. Writing in the History News Network (hnn.us), Hess confesses that he fell in love with editorial cartoons in 1959 “by accident.” He went to the Library of Congress to find “filler” for a book about presidential candidates that he was writing with his mentor from Johns Hopkins, Malcolm Moos. At the LOC, Hess met curator Milton Kaplan, who opened his eyes to the vast resources of the prints and photographs collections.

With eyes wide open, Hess saw: “Ben Franklin was the first American cartoonist! Paul Revere drew cartoons when colonists couldn’t afford to buy his silverware! Currier & Ives cartooned contentedly for competing sides in any dispute, including slavery! There were the cartoonists in combat with the bosses. Thomas Nast vs. William Tweed. Homer Davenport vs. Mark Hanna. Plus the presidents who must have been created especially for cartoonist’s pen: Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.”

Kaplan convinced Hess “that the world needed a history of American political cartoons. After about twenty rejections, Macmillan decided to take a chance. The Ungentlemanly Art was published in 1968, complete with illustrated endnotes” — the most valuable part of the book.

The new last chapter of the present 2010 version of the 1996 book starts by plunging right away into the profession’s present-day plight — alarming attrition in the ranks of full-time staff editorial cartoonists. Only about 75 full-time positions remain, Hess says. In the 1968 Ungentlemanly Art volume, he put the number at about 100; in the 1975 version, he’d upped it to 130. Hess does not dwell long on this dire dilemma; he goes on to muster cartoons on the major events since 1996: Clinton’s impeachment, Bush’s election, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, 2004 election, and the emergence of animated editorial cartoons on the Internet

More about all, including anecdotes from Hess recalling his adventures with Paul Conrad and Pat Oliphant in assembling the content for the 1968 manifestation, this can be found in the Usual Place, Opus 274.

BILLY IRELAND CARTOON LIBRARY & MUSEUM

Lucy Shelton Caswell has been curator of the Cartoon Library since it was called the Milton Caniff Research Room at its founding in 1977. The Library is now called the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum because it has outgrown a “room” and now archives much much more than Caniff’s papers, the donation of which instituted this unique special collection of the Ohio State University Libraries. After 33 years, Caswell announced her “semi-retirement” as of December 31. The new curator is Jenny Robb, erstwhile Caswell’s assistant (and onetime student), who left the OSU campus briefly to be director of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco (cartoonart.org). But Caswell will re-appear in the Cartoon Library as curator of special projects, chief among them, the renovation of Sullivant Hall as the new home for the cartoon holdings. (That's the dynamic duo, Lucy and Jenny, above.)

When it opened, the Library for Communication and Graphic Arts (a more dignified, institutional name than Milton Caniff Research Room even though the latter was on the bronze plaque at the door) occupied two converted classrooms in Ohio State's Journalism Building at 242 West 18^th Avenue. From this inauspicious beginning, Lucy Caswell spent the next three decades building the Library into “the widely renowned facility it is today, one of the most admired and sought-after caretakers of legacy collections” as press releases put it.

Thousands of donors have contributed to the collection, with gifts ranging from one item to tens of thousands, including dozens of cartoonists seeking a secure place to deposit usefully the remnants of their life’s work. The Will Eisner Collection was established in 1984 and additions were received following his death. Other cartoonists who have their work archived in the Library include Nick Anderson, Jim Borgman, Eldon Dedini, Edwina Dumm, Walt Kelly, and Bill Watterson. The Jay Kennedy Collection includes more than 9,500 underground comic books, one of the most extensive in the world. The records of several professional organizations—the National Cartoonists Society, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, Newspaper Features Council, and the Cartoonists Guild—are archived in the Library.

In 1998, Bill Blackbeard, director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, donated its collection, the largest aggregation of newspaper comic strip tear sheets and clippings on the globe. In 2007, the entire holdings of the Mort Walker’s International Museum of Cartoon Art (IMCA), numbering more than 200,000 originals, was transferred to the Cartoon Library and Museum with the caveat that the art be regularly displayed in a suitable permanent gallery—hence, the Sullivant project.

With the addition of the IMCA's extensive permanent collection, the Cartoon Library now houses more than 450,000 works of original cartoon and comic art, 50,000 books, 61,000 serial titles, 3,000 linear feet of manuscript materials, and 2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages. The Library also has an extensive collection of Japanese manga.

Now arguably the world's largest collection of cartoon art and comics material, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is currently located in the lower level of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts complex. Its new, permanent home in Sullivant Hall will expand its space from the current 6,808 square feet to more than 40,000 gross square feet, with a spacious reading room for researchers, three museum-quality galleries, and expanded storage with state-of-the-art environmental and security controls. The addition of exhibition galleries dedicated to cartoon art will facilitate public display of the Library's extraordinary collection and satisfy the IMCA’s proviso.

Preparatory to the move and coincident with the renovation, the Cartoon Library acquired a new name, possibly in recognition of the $7 million given in support of the Sullivant Hall project by the Elizabeth Ireland Graves Foundation, managed by Billy Ireland’s granddaughter, Sayre Graves. The gift resonates with a peculiar and reflective poetry. For Lucy Caswell, it may be said to have rounded off her thirty-year dedication to the Library, closing the circle: Billy Ireland was closely connected to Milton Caniff, the gift of whose papers began to trace the circumference of Library’s scope. Ireland was arguably the chief instrument by which Caniff gained a college education. And according to legend, at a crucial juncture in Caniff’s life, Ireland persuaded the young man to choose cartooning over acting as a career.

For more about Billy Ireland and his Caniff connection, consult the Usual Place (RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves, Op. 274).

CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS

Civil rights pioneer Congressman John Lewis of Georgia is writing a graphic novel about his lifelong crusade for human and civil rights. Despite being arrested over 40 times, physically assaulted and severely injured repeatedly, Lewis remained unwavering in his commitment to non-violence. Entitled March, the graphic novel will be a history of the civil rights movement as well as Lewis’ personal story. It will be published by Top Shelf in 2012.

Lewis is writing with his Congressional aide Andrew Aydin, a comic book fan who is the one who put it all together, said Top Shelf Co-Publisher Chris Staros, who lives in the Congressman’s home state Georgia. Inspired by the historic importance of a comic book called The Montgomery Story about the Montgomery bus boycotts, Adyn started pestering his boss to do a graphic novel about his life. Lewis wasn’t persuaded until Adyn, hearing a volunteer campaign worker mention something about comic books, asked one more time. This time, Lewis said he’d do it if Aydin would write it with him.

None of my sources here, USA Today and newsarama.com, named an artist who would produce the visuals from the Lewis-Aydin script.

A CARTOONING THOMAS JEFFERSON

I was wandering through the bowels of the Rancid Raves Book Grotto the other day and my moistly rolling eye fell upon a magazine that had, inexplicably, strayed from its appointed place to lie on top of a stack of old Saturday Evening Posts. The errant magazine was the February 1937 issue of College Humor, and, picking it up to restore it to its rightful place somewhere else, I thumbed a page or so, then, sitting down to lavish a little leisure at the pastime, I came upon a two-page spread by Thomas Jefferson Machamer.

Machamer may be the oddest of his breed: known as a girly cartooner (or, as Jim Linderman puts it at his blog — employing as the blog title the only swear words his father ever used — “a fine gag, gam and garter artist”), Machamer drew women who usually looked startlingly mannish, unless he was overtly imitating Russell Patterson, which, as occasion demanded, he sometimes did. Drawing in a slapdash manner that skewered his figures with stickery lines, Machamer produced bristly-looking cartoon characters for over thirty years, won the first annual Vintage Sleeze “Lead in His Pencil” Award (probably a Linderman invention), and yet I can find almost nothing about him on the Web.

College Humor, by the way, was no longer very collegiate by 1937, if we are to judge from the specimen at hand. My understanding of the magazine is fairly primitive, but, withal, when it started in the early 1920s, it mined college humor magazines and carted off cartoons and humorous essays and short stories and reprinted them, without permission or recompense to the originators, who, being mere college sheiks and shebas of the flapping era, were doubtless thrilled to see their work in a National Publication. (Well, if they were paid, it probably wasn’t much — certainly not as much as if they’d been adult professionals.)

This issue lists dozens of “Our College Editors,” but the cartoons within, a plentitude, are almost all by known professionals — Otto Soglow, Jay Irving, Dorothy McKay, Lawrence Lariar, Gregory d’Alessio, Syd Hoff, Ty Mahon, George Shellhase, and Peter Arno. (I bet you thought, like me, that Arno cartooned only for The New Yorker; we’re both wrong.) The magazine staggered on through the early forties as a thin bimonthly, dying, finally, in the spring of 1943.

BONE: QUEST FOR THE SPARK, BOOK ONE

 

 

 

 

Rich Clabaugh at csmonitor.com reports “good news” for Bone fans: Scholastic is releasing a new series of graphic novels that take place in the Bone world. Bone: Quest for the Spark, Book One (recommended for ages 9-12) is the first in a planned trilogy written by Tom Sniegoski with a cover and interior illustrations by Bone creator Jeff Smith. Meanwhile, Smith, DailyCartoonist.com tells us, has hinted on his blog that he’s working on a Superman project for DC Comics. The mention is on his blog along with a sketch of the man of steel.

HUFFPOST DEAL

When Arianna Huffington sold her online newspaper Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, there were a few (albeit very few) moments when those who had been contributing gratis to her parasitic website thought maybe she might trickle down a token or two of monetary gratitude to the toilers whose labors had made her and a few of her inner circle rich. The giant spurt of revenue seemed suddenly to undercut severely HuffPost’s rationale for using articles and art without paying for them, protesting that there was “no budget” for such payments. Is there now? Not likely, it seems. HuffPost’s senior PR veep Mario Ruiz claims the windfall wealth is being distributed, in some fashion or another, among some 200 contributors. But I know at least one of them, who says he’s yet to see any of this alleged largess.

Most editorial cartoonists avoided the snare that HuffPost and other aggregating websites presented when they first emerged: operating on the Internet economic model that since content is free no one can afford to pay for content, HuffPost and others of the same ilk asked for content to be “donated,” contending that the “exposure” a cartoonist received thereby would lead to more remunerative engagements. Pulitzer-winner Mark Fiore was one such, and he said (when interviewed by ComicRiffs’ Michael Cavna): “Huffington Post approached me years ago when they were first starting out, but when they explained that they did not pay contributors, I failed to see the point of joining their merry band of anti-Capitalists. Apparently I’m missing something because it seems to have worked out quite well for them. I’m all for the HuffPost/AOL deal if it translates to healthier distribution of quality journalism online. I hope more dollars and more eyeballs means more journalists can pay the rent.”

New Yorker cartoonist Drew Dernavich told Cavna: “I don’t see how any working artist can be excited about the success of the HuffPost deal. It relates to the whole ‘information is free’ mantra movement, which I thought was idiotic.”

Daryl Cagle of Cagle Cartoons said: “Fascinating that content has such a high value on the Web — but not for the columnists, whom the Huffington Post doesn’t pay.”

In short, it seems no working cartoonist is likely to join the contribute-without-getting-paid band of HuffPost-like websites. Good thing, too.

ZAPIRO AND ZUMA

The South African Human Rights Commission has dismissed a complaint brought by the Young Communist League and its national secretary about the “Lady Justice” editorial cartoon by Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro) that depicted the current President of South Africa Jacob Zuma unbuckling his pants in order to rape Lady Justice. The commission, reported the DailyCartoonist, found the cartoon was “free, open, robust and even unrestrained criticism of politicians by a journalist.” The complaint described the cartoon as offensive because it depicts Zuma as a rapist. But Zapiro isn’t all the way out of the woods yet: Zuma, angered by the cartoon, has filed suit against Zapiro for “damage his reputation and dignity.” That case is still in the courts. For more about Zapiro and Zuma, see R&R, Ops. 241, 263, and 271 at the Usual Place.

LEGAL HAZARDS OF COMIC BOOK ART

The following is a press release from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has received an increasing number of reports from travelers who have been stopped, searched, and/or detained by customs agents because of comic book art.  In one recent incident, an individual was detained at the U.S.-Canada border while en route to an anime/manga convention. He was handcuffed and held briefly on charges of child pornography, and his materials seized.  Such tactics, focusing on expressive materials that are presumptively protected by the United States Constitution, are even more troubling to the extent border searches are not limited to hard copies of materials in a traveler’s possession. 

Customs agents also may search for information stored on electronic devices, including cameras, laptop computers, cell phones or other storage devices, or on electronic media, such as flash drives or DVDs. Such searches may be conducted at random, with or without reasonable suspicion, and are becoming increasingly common. According to information revealed pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, over 6,500 people traveling to and from the United States between October 2008 and June 2010 had their electronic devices searched at the border. Nearly half of those searched were U.S. citizens. These developments also cause special concern because few legal protections exist with respect to such searches.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has published an advisory document "Legal Hazards of Crossing International Borders with Comic Book Art." This Advisory generally discusses the phenomenon of border searches of expressive materials, describes the basic legal framework governing such searches, and offers some general suggestions for international travelers planning to transport expressive materials; it’s posted at cbldf.org.

EDITOON AWARDS

The Denver Post’s editoonist found himself on the front page of the paper on Tuesday, April 19, as the Post announced that he’d won journalism’s highest honor for editorial cartooning: “Just when he figured his window of opportunity had closed, longtime Denver Post editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe on Monday won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning,” wrote reporter Kevin Simpson.

"I am gobsmacked," said Keefe, 64. "In recent years, the Pulitzer has gone to much younger folks who are newer in the business. I've always done pretty classical editorial cartooning. I thought my day had passed."

Unlike that younger generation Keefe referred to, he does no animations. His cartoons appear Wednesday through Sunday, and on Sunday, he and letters editor Cohen Peart do a weekly "Name that 'Toon" feature to which readers contribute captions to Keefe's drawings. Off campus, he and retired (involuntarily from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) editorial cartoonist Tim Menees create satirical news and visual commentary at President Ruttles website, ruttles@sardonika.com.

 Finalists in editorial cartooning were Matt Davies of The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., and Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. Both have previoulsly won.

This year's National Headliner Award for editorial cartooning went to Mike Peters; second place, Stuart Carlson, and Adam Zyglis came in third. Mike Thompson won the Scripps Howard Award for Editorial Cartooning with a submission containing traditional editorial cartoons as well as his animation; he takes home $10,000 and a trophy. Ted Rall and Steve Breen were finalists.

THOR

Superman isn’t the only superhero to achieve status through the movies and cover treatment at EW. Batman’s been there; ditto Captain America. And in the “Superman issue” of EW (February 25), we find a handy role call of forthcoming superhero movies, a positive orgy of status symbols: Thor gets the season off to a hammering start on May 6 (the door-opener for this year’s Free Comic Book Day on May 7); “X-Men First Class,” June 3; Green Lantern, June 17; Captain America, July 22. Next summer’s offerings are all apparently definite enough that EW can announce opening dates for all but the Wolverine flick: the Avengers will debut on the silver screen on May 4; Spider-Man’s back on July 3 and Batman on July 20. And more — many many more — are doubtless in the offing.

Thor is being played by Chris Hemsworth, who, for USA Weekend (April 15-17) recalled the first time he donned the requisite costume: “I walked onto the set, and Anthony Hopkins and I were in our full get-ups. We looked at each other, and he said, ‘Well, there’s no acting required here, is there?’”