Rants & Raves

SCROOGE McDUCK

 

 

 

Scrooge McDuck topped this year’s Forbes’ list of the richest imaginary characters; his wealth, mostly gold in coins, soared 30 percent this year to an imaginary $44.1 billion. Of the fifteen listed, five are comics characters: in addition to Uncle Scrooge, Richie Rich is in fourth place; Tony Stark, sixth; Bruce Wayne, eighth; and C. Montgomery Burns from “The Simpsons,” twelfth.

Scanning a recent issue of the Previews catalogue of comics productions, we see that Don Rosa’s magnum opus, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, is being offered again, and Classic Comics has arrived at yet another of its sumptuous reprint series, John Culllen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt Dailies, 1950-1952, the story of a gentlemanly prize fighter limned by one of the medium’s superlative illustrators.

FORGOTTEN FANTASY: SUNDAY COMICS 1900-1915

 

 

 

 

Sunday Press is back with another in its landmark vintage newspaper-sized reprints, Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915, compiling runs of beautifully rendered strips usually overlooked by fanciers of the funnies — such as Lyonel Feinigner’s Kinder Kids, Winsor McCay’s Wee Willie Winkie, and George McManus’ Nibsy the Newsboy, plus Naughty Pete, The Explorigator — all beautifully drawn and handsomely printed in those golden years of yore, and now painstakingly restored digitally and reincarnated by the man who loves four-color beauties, publisher Peter Maresca

STAN GOLDBERG: SHABBILY SHUT OUT AT ARCHIE

Archie Comics, which has lately astonished the comics world with spectacular publicity stunts (Archie marrying, a gay student at Riverdale) and innovative plans (new superhero comic books with Stan Lee), seems bent on perpetuating its reputation as a callous abuser of talent that has been a touchstone of its operation since one of the company’s founders, John Goldwater, claimed to have invented Archie, a grab at fame equaled only by its disregard of Dan DeCarlo, who established the Archie house style of drawing. After DeCarlo, Stan Goldberg’s pencil has done the most to preserve the way Archie and Jughead and Betty and Veronica look.

Most recently, Goldberg penciled the watershed marriage series in which Archie marries, first, Veronica, then Betty, an ingenuous contrivance by Michael Uslan that has virtually revived Archie Comics and is now being perpetuated in Archie’s marital magazine, Life with Archie: The Married Life. Providing the stamp of artworld approval, Abrams ComicArts reprinted the marriage epic in slipcased hardcover last year, Archie Marries.

Since the mid-1960s, Goldberg has drawn the pictures in virtually every Archie title, including 250 consecutive issues of the flagship title, Archie Comics. As a signal of Goldberg’s place in the Archie firmament, IDW just published The Best of Stan Goldberg, a 15-story compilation of three decades’ work, including specialty art, pin-ups and penciled pages.

While all these laurels were heaping up, the suits at Archie were quietly nudging Goldberg out of the house—without actually telling him what they were doing. Goldberg told Frank Pauer, editor of the National Cartoonists Society’s bi-monthly magazine, The Cartoonist!, who interviewed Goldberg in the recent January-February issue, that he suddenly stopped getting assignments last year. No one notified him officially that he was being “retired” after 41 years with the company, but he began to get the message when, after doing five or six covers a month, he was all at once doing none. And when he inquired about work, he was grudgingly given a couple stories a week to do; then just one story a week; then one a month.

“It’s the name of the game,” Goldberg ruefully told Pauer. “It’s the business [the same kind of insensitive and grasping treatment] that existed with Siegel and Shuster; it existed with Dan DeCarlo.” And now it’s knocked on Stan Goldberg’s door. Shabby.

Goldberg, however, continues to find work at other publishing houses. He’s working with Bongo Comics, and back at Marvel, where he worked as color designer in the watershed 1960s, he did a cover for The Fantastic Four. You can’t keep a good man down.

For more about Archie’s high-handed treatment of talent, visit the Usual Place to see Harv’s Hindsight for summer 2001, wherein John Goldwater’s version of how he created the teenage character and the rest of the Archie ensemble is retailed, plus Rants & Raves, Opus 249 for a quick run-down of the company’s reaction to Harvey Kurtzman’s parody of Archie, concocted as a lampoon of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy but interpreted at Archie as an attack on their iconic character. Sad.

RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE

Random Acts of Violence, a square-spined comic book/graphic novel of novelette length by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray collaborating with Giancarlo Caracuzzo for visuals, came out last spring (over a year ago, I confess; but it’s a graphic novel so it’s forever for sale, somewhere). Despite its age, it resonates a giddy topicality. The central contention is that violent comic books seduce readers into behaving violently. Echoes of Tucson.

Two comic book creators, Ezra the writer and Todd the drawer, have produced what they insist on calling a “horror comic book” about an inhuman, ghoulish serial murderer called the Slasher. To increase sales, they introduce an interactive element in the second issue, inviting readers to imagine a Slasher scene and send it in; the best one will be published in the comic book.

Before that issue comes out, though, the first issue of The Slasher is such a success that it transforms Ezra and Todd into comic book rock stars, and they go forth on book signing trips amongst the fans. This gives Palmiotti and Gray opportunities to portray the wild nights of group sex and booze that we all know comic-cons and comic shop signings are devoted to. Then, in the midst of all the gaiety, grisly dismembering murders begin to happen.

In the final shocker, Ezra’s girlfriend is murdered and dismembered by a crazed personage who imagines himself the Slasher. In the penultimate sequence in the book, Ezra and Todd settle the murderer’s hash, but the book closes on another scene: in the Epilogue, a seemingly simple-minded farm boy is slaughtering people like cattle, hanging their bodies upside down to drain out the blood, believing, still, that he can send in photographs and win The Slasher comic book contest.

It is nearly impossible to read this book without arriving at the conclusion that Palmiotti and Gray believe violent comic books induce readers to commit imitative acts. I wonder if they would come to the same conclusion post-Tucson.

They may, however, believe something quite the opposite of the apparent message of the book: they may believe that the extremity of the proposition as enacted in the book constitutes, in effect, a satire, saying: “C’mon, you don’t really believe that comic book violence produces violence in real life, do you? If you believe that, then here, in this story, is what might happen.”

For us to come to that conclusion, though, we must bring to our reading of the book the belief that Palmiotti and Gray pooh-pooh the Werthamic notion that comic book violence breeds similar violence in real life. I concur in pooh-poohing, but nothing in the book supports that notion; everything in the book trumpets the opposite—namely, that witnessing fictional violence promotes acts of actual violence.

The satire of the book (and I strenuously suspect that it is, indeed, satire) is, in effect, a parody of the proposition that fictional violence begets actual violence. And as it often happens with parodies, it’s difficult to ascertain the author’s actual attitude: the parody, to be a parody, so exactly imitates its target that we can’t easily tell one from the other.

Caracuzzo’s drawings are superb: chunky and linear with flecks of shadow and an almost cartoony ambiance occasionally, the pictures amble easily across the page. It’s a pleasure to watch. I’ll keep this book for the artwork, not for the bloody sermon.

THE MILLION-DOLLAR CLUB

 

 

 

Another comic book has joined the million-dollar club: a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the issue in which Spider-Man debuted, graded 9.6 (Near Mint) by the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), sold for $1.1 million on March 7 in a private sale brokered by ComicConnect.com. This copy, “the highest graded copy to day,” according to Brent Frankenhoff at Comics Buyer’s Guide (CBG), is “the first Silver Age comic book to break the million-dollar barrier and joins only three other comics sold for that amount or more”: Action Comics No. 1 (Superman arrives), $1 million on February 22; Detective Comics No. 27 (Batman begins), $1,075.500 on February 25; and another copy of Action Comics No. 1 for $1.5 million on March 29. Next we’ll hear that Iron Man has joined the club; then Doctor Strange and Scooby Doo. Funny, neither of the illustrious Captains America and Marvel has joined the club yet.

A SURFEIT OF SUPERHEROISM

Writing in the May issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott says he’s had enough. Running through the list of impending/current comic book superhero flicks — “Thor,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Captain America: The First Avenger,” “The Avengers,” “Iron Man 3,” “Green Lantern,” another Superman reboot, ditto another Batman, and on and on — he finds his enthusiasm waning. None of these movies are fun anymore, he says: “The more ambitious ones aren’t meant to be much fun, apart from a finely crafted quip surgically inserted here and there to defuse the tension of everybody standing around butt-clenched and battle-ready. ... The superhero genre is an American creation, like jazz and stripper poles, exemplifying American ideals, American know-how, and American might, a mating of magical thinking and the right stuff. But in the new millennium no amount of nationally puffing ourselves up can disguised the entropy and molt. ... Since Vietnam, whatever the bravery and sacrifice of those in uniform, America’s superpower might hasn’t been up to much worthy of chest-swelling, chain-snapping pride (invading a third-rate military matchstick house such as Iraq is hardly the stuff of Homeric legend). ... The movie that mirrors this post-millennial letdown isn’t a movie at all but Julie Taymor’s Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” savaged and mocked for months by just about everyone with Internet access. ... The haphazard storytelling of the musical muddled Taymor’s vision-idea, but at least there was an idea here to muddle, which is more than most superhero movies have.” 

It’s been a few years since I’ve seen one of these epics, but judging from the last Batman movie I saw, the genre is distinguished by loud noise and exploding visuals, not ideas.

EDIE ERNST: USO SINGER, ALLIED SPY

An absolutely enthralling story of love and sex and the tenterhooks of espionage, Brooke McEldowney’s Edie Ernst: USO Singer, Allied Spy (96 8.5x11-inch pages, b/w; Pib Press paperback, $19.99) reprints the  longest continuity in modern comic strip history. McEldowney’s superb comic strip, brimming, always, with mature topics given a light humorous touch and a profound humanity, 9 Chickweed Lane is what a newspaper comic strip could be if they all grew up. The Edie Ernst story ran an unprecedented 11 months from late 2009 to mid-2010. With its length, McEldowney violated most syndicate dicta about such things, and when he got to Edie’s love life, he also violated syndicate prohibitions against alluding to human sexuality. (But he’s done that before — always with taste and discretion, and for the sake of the story.)

For the book reincarnation, McEldowney dropped some strips because, he says, “they digress from the story in book form.” But “in propitiation, and for the fun of it, I’ve thrown in some new art.” “For the fun of it” probably describes how he approaches doing his daily and Sunday strip: as published, the final product fairly hums with the good time he’s having.

The eleven-month tale is told by the grandmother at 9 Chickweed Lane about her World War II career as a USO singer. Edie, the grandmother, was, during the 1940s, a spectacularly seductive beauty. She was recruited to spy on German POWs and managed to fall in love with (1) her American handler and (2) a German officer who was a superb singer. The former was sent off on a suicidal mission and presumed dead. Edie was separated from the latter at the end of the War. Both, however, show up about ten years later. How Edie deals with two men, both of whose love she returns, passionately, is the rest of McEldowney’s tale, which he tells with his customary narrative flourishes of humor and compassion.

Pib Press is McEldowney’s imprint, so you should order directly from him at either pibpress@gmail.com or Pib Press, P.O. Box 942, Kennebunk, Maine 04043. You won’t regret it.

TOLES AWARDED HERBLOCK PRIZE

When in 2001 the legendary Herblock died at 91 leaving vacant at the Washington Post the editorial cartooning chair he’d occupied there for 55 years, speculation ran rampant through the profession about who would succeed to the nation’s most influential editooning perch. The suspense ended a year later when Tom Toles moved into Block’s old office. A couple weeks ago, Toles picked up, poetically speaking, the rest of his legacy when he was awarded the Herblock Prize.

Mike Cavna at ComicRiffs (which you can find hereabouts among the blog listings) reported that Toles is the eighth cartoonist to win the award, which was created in 2004 "to encourage editorial cartooning as an essential tool for preserving the rights of the American people through freedom of speech and the right of expression." What the Pulitzer is to journalism generally, the Herblock is to editorial cartooning specifically — the most prestigious award in the field. Toles received a tax-free $15,000 cash prize and a sterling-silver Tiffany trophy.

“The Post swept the awards,” Cavna said. “Ann Telnaes, who creates animated cartoons for Washingtonpost.com, was the first finalist to be publicly announced.”

"I walk in Herblock's slippers," Toles told Cavna, alluding the Herblock’s customary garb at work. "I am highly honored."

Toles won the Pulitzer in 1990 while at the Buffalo News. A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, he has also drawn for the Buffalo Courier-Express, New York Daily News, and the magazines New Republic and U.S. News and World Report. Previous recognition of his cartooning excellence include John Fischetti Award, the H.L. Mencken Free Press Award, the National Headliners Award and the Overseas Press Club Thomas Nast Award.

The judging line-up for the Herblock this year included two editoonists, both Pulitzer winners — Politico’s Matt Wuerker and the Philadelphia Daily News’ Signe Wilkinson — as well as Harry Katz, curator of the Herb Block Foundation.

Cavna quotes all three about their choice, and he also quotes their discursive analysis of this year’s candidates, “lifting the veil,” as they reveal aspects of their decision-making process — all of which I quote at the usual place; but you should visit Cavna instead for the most authentic version.

COMICS HISTORY, NEW AND IMPROVED

A BRAND NEW EDITION of Brian Walker’s The Comics: The Complete Collection (659 9x12-inch pages w/color; Abrams, $40) has been out, now, for a little over a month. It is, Walker told me, “essentially the same as the Borders exclusive except for a few upgrades. The two separate indexes were revised and consolidated into a single index in the back. To fill up the space I gave them images of the Abrams limited edition lithograph series that was done in 1978 (six images on four pages). And I added my current favorite Cul de Sac to the sampling of contemporary strips at the end.”

The six images are of characters from Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, E.C. Segar’s Popeye, Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley, Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey, Walt Kelly’s Pogo (a Selby Kelly pencil drawing that does not reproduce well here, too bad), and Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer, in which we see Buz’s sidekick, Roscoe Sweeney, stranded on a desert isle, surrounded by (and happily groping) naked full-bosomed native damsels and saying, as he sees a seaplane on the horizon, “Oh, no—other guys are missing in action for years. Why must I be rescued so soon?”

Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac replaces Lola by Steve Dickenson and Todd Clark in a line-up late in the book. Walker managed to excise Lola, Dickenson, and Clark from the index but evidently didn’t have time to include Thompson or the name of his strip. A teeny tiny factoid hardly worth mentioning, which, of course, is why I mention it. The larger factoid is no factoid: this is the most complete and thoroughly illustrated history of American newspaper comic strips you’ll find.

This version of the tome is selling better than the previous incarnation for Borders — for reasons not quite clear. But it’s a Huge Bargain, not to miss.

At the Usual Place (RCHarvey.com, Rants & Raves), we’ve reviewed this book in great detail in its various stages: when it first appeared as The Comics After 1945; and again when the prequel came out, The Comics Before 1945; and, finally, when Abrams republished both volumes, combining them into a single vast tome in 2008. I repeated both of the reviews when the combined volume appeared; see Opus 234 and Opus 235.

As I said then, the book is full of fugitive special drawings made by the cartoonists for assorted unsyndicated purposes, and most of the comic strips illustrating the text are reproduced from original art. A genuine treasure trove. For anyone interested, even vaguely, in newspaper comic strips, their history and evolution, this book is indispensable. And I say that even as Jerry Robinson’s revised The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art 1895-2010 (394 9x12-inch pages, many in color; Dark Horse hardcover, $39.99) arrives at Rancid Raves HQ.

A preliminary leafing through Robinson’s pages reveals that the revision is a stunning improvement on the initial 256-page 1974 version, which, for its time, was a landmark publication: only two other books of that time even pretended to cover the history of the medium: Coulton Waugh’s venerable The Comics (1947; reprinted by University Press of Mississippi in paperback with an introduction by M. Thomas Inge) and Stephen Becker’s Comic Art in America (1959).

The new edition of Robinson’s book replaces most of the black-and-white illos in its predecessor with new, often different, color pictures, and prints them all on slick paper not the matte-finish of yore, making the whole production much more lavish. And the new book adds 65 pages of text and pictures, taking the history from 1970 to 2010; the text of the preceding pages is pretty much the same as in the 1974 edition.

A distinguishing feature of the book is a series of one-page essays by various cartoonists—Milton Caniff, V.T. Hamlin, Charles Schulz, Mort Walker, Chic Young, Hal Foster and Walt Kelly among them; each cartoonist rehearses the history of his strip and offers insights into his working methods or philosophy of storytelling. To the earlier edition, Robinson has added essays by Lynn Johnston and Patrick McDonnell.

VILLAGE VOICE FAUX PAS

Greenwich Village’s crusading tabloid devoted its entire April 6 issue to what Politico cartoonist Matt Wuerker called “the irony of cartooning being hugely popular while cartoonists have a hard time making ends meet.” The Voice’s “Comics Issue” headline read: “If Cartoons Are So Big, Why Don’t They Pay?” But the crushing irony was committed by the paper itself, Wuerker scoffed, noting that Roy Edroso, who wrote the article, admitted halfway through it that many of the cartoonists whose work illustrated the piece “aren’t getting paid but have contributed work for the exposure.” Said Wuerker: “Sums up the new media economy perfectly. It’s so ironic it would make a funny cartoon.”

At first, Voice editor Tony Ortega explained with a straight face, telling Poynter’s Jim Romenesko: “This was a special issue celebrating and commiserating with cartoonists on the tough state of their industry. In order to fill it out with so much art, we asked some artists to donate their work. We then felt we couldn’t do that without disclosing publicly [they weren't paid]. I figure it’s better to speak up about something like that than do otherwise.”

A confused noblesse oblige at best. The next day, Ortega wiped the egg off his face, apologized and said all the cartoonists would be paid. “I wanted to have a big special comics issue, but I had a limited budget. So in a well-meaning effort to make this work, I asked some cartoonists to provide work without compensation. In the last couple of days, it's been pointed out to me quite clearly that this was not the best way to help out the cartooning industry. The thing is, we're not a company that expects people to work for free for the exposure. And I'm making this right: I'm paying all of the artists in the special issue. And hopefully buying them beers and working with them again soon.”

Fine. Now that the episode has been cleansed of its peccancy, we can quote Edroso about the ludicrous conditions under which freelance cartoonists — no, make that most cartoonists—labor. Details abound at the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 276.

MARRIAGE A LA MODE

In honor of the royal wedding of Prince William and commoner Kate Middleton, London’s Cartoon Museum mounted a special exhibition of satirical drawings about the monarchy and nuptials through the years. “The Cartoon Museum,” writes Sophie Grove at herocomplex.latimes.com, “is a quirky converted dairy in a back street tucked behind the British Museum with a library and a permanent exhibition of around 2,000 cartoons, caricatures and comics from 18th century engravings to modern-day animation and comic strips.” The special  exhibition, "Marriage à la Mode: Royals and Commoners In and Out of Love,” is “a revealing, barbed view into changing attitudes toward marriage, class and morality in British society.”

Among the pictures on display is William Hogarth's 1743 series of scathing caricature engravings titled "Marriage à la Mode.”

The exhibition runs a little thin beginning in the Victorian era, Grove observes, when “the shenanigans of the upper classes were deemed off limits to the press.” The blackout lasted through the early 1930s when the press displayed remarkable restraint in not mentioning the affair that the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, was conducting with the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, whom he later gave up the throne to marry. But by the 1970s with the savage advent of such visual excesses as those produced by Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, satire was back.

“The visual vitrol” that plagued the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer “makes today’s images of Kate Middleton look mild,” said Grove, citing the remark by the show’s curator, Anita O’Brien: “So far, Kate has been exemplary in her behavior: she hasn’t put a foot wrong.”

Too bad for cartoonists.

Satire, however, was scarcely dead at the Royal Wedding. It was perched on the heads of most of the ladies in the crowd. Any time the Queen is in attendance, British women are expected to wear hats. The Queen always wears a hat when she’s out in public, and her hats are always remarkable — plain, unadorned, but notably large. Otherwise undistinguished, you might say — if you didn’t opt for “ugly.” For the wedding of William and Kate, she wore a bright yellow hat with a wide brim and a crown of surprising altitude. It came close to rivaling Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. Perhaps as a subliminal critique of Her Majesty’s choice of chapeau, the women in Westminster Abbey and beyond were wearing the most outlandish headgear — swirling knots of cloth, riots of fake flowers, off-kilter tilts, lopsided brims of vast circumference, frizzes and fizzes, curls and loops. Acts of stand-up comedy, every one. If they weren’t staging a satiric protest against the dictate of custom that required them to wear hats, they should have been. It sure looked like satire to me.