Rants & Raves

(TH)INK

 
Keith Knight has a new book out: Too Small To Fail, an anthology of his th(ink) cartoons, the somewhat more overtly opinionated of his oeuvre.

NUMBER ONES

DC Comics says it’s going to “revamp” its stellar lineup, outfitting Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and others for life in the 21^st century. Their costumes and their personalities will be tinkered with, and the whole enterprise will reach the newsstands in a flood of Number Ones in the fall. USA Today reported that the publisher will “renumber its entire DC Universe of  titles.” Geoff Johns, who is writing the Justice League title, the first new Number One (out August 31), says he’ll focus on the “interpersonal relationships” within DC’s trademark superteam: “What’s the human aspect behind all these customers? That’s what I want to explore,” he said.

In September, saith USA Today, an additional 51 first issues will make their debut, introducing stories that are grounded in each character's specific legend but also reflect today's real-world themes and events. Artist Jim Lee spearheaded the costumes' redesign to make characters more identifiable and accessible to comic fans new and old.

"We really want to inject new life in our characters and line," Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC with Lee, told Brian Truitt at USA Today. "This was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience."

Frankly, I doubt any of the presumed alterations introduced in all these Number Ones will last much longer than a story arc: fans may like new stuff, but they also revere the old spangled spandex. And collectors are going batshit bananas: which Superman No. 1 is the expensive one? Surely the moguls at DC know all this. So the entire enterprise looks suspiciously like just another hype to me.

But one aspect of the plan is likely to endure: “In an even more important move in the competitive comics industry, DC is making all of the re-numbered titles available digitally via apps and a DC website the same day they arrive in comic shops. It marks the first time that a major comics publisher has done so with its popular superhero titles.”

WORKING WITH DISNEY

Working with Disney: Interviews with Animators, Producers, and Artists (210 6x9-inch pages, b/w, no illustrations; University Press of Mississippi, hardcover, $55; paperback, $25) was assembled by the self-proclaimed ultimate Disney fan: Don Peri, a Baby Boomer who’s watched Disney films all of his life, met 30-year Disney veteran Ben Sharpsteen in 1974 and collaborated with him on his memoirs, which, unpublished, resides in the Walt Disney Archives. Peri then began interviewing other graduates of the Disney Studio who had known and worked with “Uncle Walt.”

The University Press published the first collection of the Peri interviews in 2008, Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Artists, and we reviewed it at the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 225. This volume publishes another 15 interviews, including those Peri conducted with Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Marc Davis — three of Disney’s legendary Nine Old Men of Animation — Dave Hand (first director, “after Walt,” of short-subject cartoons and of “Snow White”) and cast members at Disneyland on opening day, a couple of Mouseketeers, and others, among them Walter Lantz, who never worked for Disney but was a contemporary in early animation.

The interviews, in addition to offering deep insights into Disney and the operations of his Studio, are laced with other fascinating tidbits.

The Walter Lantz interview sheds new light on the incident of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the Disney creation that was stolen by Charles Mintz, who had insinuated himself into the Disney operation by marrying Disney’s distributor, Margaret J. Winkler, and then, in 1928, finessing Oswald away from Disney by claiming that he, Mintz, owned the Oswald copyright.

Not so, said Lantz: the Oswald copyright was always owned by Universal, for whom Disney as well as Mintz was producing animated cartoons. Devastated by what he supposed was the loss of Oswald, Disney invented Mickey Mouse. “Universal didn’t want any part of it,” Lantz remembered, “ — they said that mice wouldn’t go.”

But Universal wanted its own cartoon department and asked Lantz to set one up. Lantz, who by then had ten years experience in animation, said he would, “providing I could redesign the rabbit. I made him a white rabbit, which is not the Disney rabbit at all.” Disney’s Oswald was all black, and he was reincarnated in Mickey but without long ears.

OLD FARTS

 

Old Farts Are Forever (128 6x6-inch pages, b/w; Andrews McMeel paperback, $9.99) by Lee Lorenz presents the New Yorker cartoonist’s view of aging, gracefully or not. Lorenz introduces this collection with this: “Just as people begin to look like their dogs, cartoonists begin to look like their people. This notion hit me one day when I looked in the mirror and discovered that, after so many years of drawing old farts, I had become one.”

I like Lorenz’s style as much as Sidney Harris’, and in the selection arrayed hereabouts, we can watch as he administers his energetic brush in an increasingly slapdash manner as time weaves its way. But vintage or recent, the pictures are a delight to behold.

101 FUNNY THINGS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

101 Funny Things about Global Warming (112 5x7-inch pages, b/w; Bloomsbury hardcover, $13.95) is a collection of cartoons by Sidney Harris & Colleagues, the colleagues being mostly fellow New Yorker cartoonists, but Ben Katchor is here with a four-page strip entitled “In the Shade” in which persons whose skins are sensitive to sunlight go to elaborate extremes when outdoors to walk as much as possible in the shade of the buildings. Lee Lorenz is in this book, as is Gahan Wilson and, as I said, other New Yorker cartooners, all producing an array of single-panel gag cartoons about pollution, disappearing shore lines, and bare survival in the New Age. But it’s mostly Sidney Harris, whose disjoined line is one of the most amusing and enthralling in the business.

SERGIO ARAGONES FUNNIES

Sergio Aragones isn’t giving up Groo, but he’s got another comic book series, Sergio Aragones Funnies, the first issue of which is due out this month, just in time for a debut at the Sandy Eggo ComiCon. Interviewed by Bill Morrison in the current issue of the Previews  catalog, Aragones said the new series will give him a place to put plots and stories that keep occurring to him but that he has no place for publishing. “I have tons and tons of stories, and this is the perfect vehicle for them,” he said. It’ll be a monthly comic, and in order to do it (and Mad and Groo), Aragones said he’d have to stop doing something—“my gardening and building models and sleeping,” he supposes.

His plan is to do “an extra page a day, which I can comfortably add” to his production schedule. “If I do a little every day,” he said, “—for instance, if the telephone rings, I pick up the page and start drawing little horses and people to fill up the page.”

Making a distinction between stories and single-panel jokes, Aragones said the stories in Funnies will be in color, but the jokes will be in black-and-white. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing it for so many years in black-and-white, and all the collections I have of cartoons from The New Yorker to Ha Ha Magazine to all the freelance magazines, they’re always in black and white,” he explained.

On the new project, Aragones said he’d miss working with long-time collaborator Mark Evanier, who scripts Groo—“because he’s such a clever writer and sometimes he saves the story with his clever humor—but in this case, the stories that I want to tell are the way that I see things. It will be more personal.”

The only recurring character, he said, will be himself. But there will be “historical stories, science fiction, westerns; a little of everything that doesn’t fit into a regular comic.”

We shall rejoice at the prospect of an irregular comic book.

LEARN OUR HISTORY

Former preacher, Arkansas governor and, since 2008, Fox tv host and radio personality Mike Huckabee may not want to give up his entertainer celebrity status for the unholy grind of campaigning for President — he said all those around him encouraged him to make the run but the Almighty didn’t give him a sign — so he’s getting into animated cartoons. He’s launched a new educational company called Learn Our History, saith foxnews.com, “that aims to get kids excited about studying the nation's past. The cartoon “follows the adventures of the Time Travel Academy, a group of young friends who use a homemade time machine to travel back in time to relive America's history.”

Said Huckabee: “America's youth aren't excited about our past because they're being taught history in a way that minimizes what has made America a beacon of hope around the world for over 200 years. It's impossible to overestimate the importance of giving our children a historically accurate and unbiased education that allows kids today to enjoy and understand our history, and build their pride in our great nation.”

The series will doubtless be as accurate and unbiased as any Grandstanding Obstructionist Pachyderm can be. The first in the series spotlights the GOP godling, Ronald Reagan: the characters experience the 1980 presidential election and Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech in Berlin.

In what foxnews.com calls an “amusing and sometimes alarming retrospective of how things went down, the teenagers encounter on the streets of Washington a dark-skinned mugger clad in a ‘Disco’ muscle shirt and armed with a knife, demanding money. Other scenes of violence unfold before Reagan appears like a white knight with a message of hope and optimism.”

Right. “Accurate and unbiased.”

Future installments in the series will focus on World War II, the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror, the American Revolution, Christopher Columbus and the first Thanksgiving. We wonder if any Native Americans will show up at the accurate and unbiased inaugural Turkey-Day-According-to-Huckabee.

TROUBLETOWN

Lloyd Dangle worked for a few years at the Village Voice and others of the ilk, then self-syndicated his Troubletown cartoon, beginning with the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1988. At blog.cagle.com, Daryl Cagle reported that “Dangle grew his list of subscribers to upwards of 30 alternate newsweeklies and lefty political magazines before tough economic times hit the newspaper industry and slowly whittled his list down.” In March, Dangle announced that after more than two decades, he’s “retiring” his strip to move on to other projects; the last strip appeared at the end of April. Cagle interviewed him, asking the obvious question: why quit now? To which Dangle said:

“I have changed over 22 years, and the thrill is gone. Having to read so much news and opinion to stay on top of events is a grind that I would like to be free of. It has nothing to do with the state of the industry though. I’ve been satisfied with my relationships with my newspapers and thrilled that I’ve had the readership I’ve had.”

One of the projects he’ll now have time for is finishing the novel he’s writing. “Of course, [book-] publishing is a crap shoot,” he acknowledged, “but at least I’ll be able to amuse my friends with it.”

Asked about his favorite cartoonists, Dangle named “young up and coming” cartoonists like Jen Sorensen and Matt Bors. “I also love the old timer Pat Oliphant. David Sipress is my favorite of the New Yorker style cartoons.” But he doesn’t think there’s much of a future for cartooning with the models we’re familiar with. “The Internet hasn’t been our friend,” he said. “I hope they find a way to make it work.”

THE COMICS JOURNAL

At last -- the first of The Comics Journal’s semi-annual print edition is out, only 8 months late. In announcing this new species, the publisher also said that each print issue would be an individual,  stand-alone book, designed to reflect its content. This one looks a good deal like a door-stop: at 624 virtually ad-free 7x8.5-inch pages with splashes and pages of color here and there, the Journal is an inch and three-quarters thick. So what does that design tell us about the content? All participants are door-stoppers?

Nearly a third of the book is devoted to an interview of R. Crumb about his Genesis Illustrated and a roundtable discussion of it with Rick Marschall, Donald Phelps, Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, Tim Hodler, Alexander Theroux and Kenneth R. Smith. Three “sketchbooks” feature the work of Jim Woodring, Tim Hensley, and Stephen Dixon.

Warren Bernard takes a long look at the almost forgotten editorial cartoon great John T. McCutcheon and his work, Tim Krieder looks at Dave Sim’s Cerebus, Joe Sacco is interviewed about Footnotes in Gaza, Marc Sobel reviews the decade in comics, R. Fiore returns to take up the matter of racism in comics, I offer a comic strip that Gus Arriola conceived near the end of the run of Gordo but never got published (until now), and the whole of the first Gerald McBoing Boing comic book appears—written by Dr. Seuss, drawn in what came to be known as the UPA style. And more.

Certainly worth the book-like price, $30, at classy comic book stores everywhere—soon; and at fantagraphicsbooks.com.