Rants & Raves

LORD OF THE JUNGLE

Tarzan is returning to comic books after a sabbatical of several years—just in time to celebrate next year the 100^th anniversary of the character’s inaugural appearance in All-Story magazine in October 1912. Writer Arvid Nelson’s version of the Ape Man will be brought to us by Dynamite in December, and Nelson, who confessed to Cliff Biggers at Comic Shop News that he hadn’t read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ jungle tales until quite recently, says he plans to stick to the Burroughs’ version pretty closely. “I was surprised at how far all of the adaptations thus far stray from the original,” Nelson said. “Burroughs’ original concept is actually a lot more interesting than anything that’s been done since. ... [Tarzan’s] true story is so much deeper and more interesting—and that’s what we’re trying to bring to life in Dynamite’s Lord of the Jungle.”

For Nelson, the intriguing aspect of Tarzan is that despite being raised in the jungle by apes, he wants to be part of the human world. “There’s always conflict between his animal instincts and his desire to be ‘civilized.’ For me, that’s what makes him tick.”

The big challenge in adapting a 100-year-old creation is in finding ways to get around the racial stereotyping that prevailed in Burroughs’ world. But “modernizing” is not part of Nelson’s vision.

NAME-DROPPING AND TALE-BEARING

Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment and 1821 Comics introduced Romeo and Juliet: The War at the New York Comic Con (Scoop). ... Art and illustrated book publisher Abrams has signed a letter of intent to purchase SelfMadeHero, the London-based graphic novel publisher of such titles as Johnny Cash: I See A Darkness, already available in the U.S. Following completion of the deal, Abrams will launch a SelfMadeHero North American list beginning in 2012 (PublishersWeekly.com). ... For the first time, a graphic novel, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss, has been nominated as a nonfiction finalist for the US National Book Awards, announced on October 12. An excerpt can be viewed on the author's website, laurenredniss.com (RelaxNews).

COMIC BOOK STRAW POLL

Boom Studios recently concluded the first ever comic book presidential “straw poll.” Concocted as a promotional stunt, Boom’s “Decision 2012" flogs its biographical comic book series, one title for each of nine Republican hopefuls — including Sarah the Palin — plus Obama. According to the announced scheme, the print runs for each title would be determined by orders placed in August. Any comic book ordered by fewer than 1,500 readers would not be published. If only we could apply a kindred rule to political candidacies throughout this heppy heppy land.

With so many cartoon characters running in the GOP race, it seems wonderfully appropriate that the outcome would be determined  by comic books and their fans.

On October 6, a press release announced that Barack Obama had won, beating the entire GOP line-up. Among the Republicans, Sarah Livingston Palin finished first, followed by Ron Paul and then Michele Bachman — cartoon characters all. None of the rest of the titles received the requisite 1,500 orders so books will not be published for (in the order of their finish in the poll) Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry.

A wonderful irony hovers over the enterprise. Despite the emergence lately of graphic novels and big budget movies which give to comic books a certain cultural cachet, comic books still carry the stigma laminated on the medium by an earlier generation: anything deemed comic-booky is somehow juvenile and simple-minded. And that, I hasten to say, may be a perfect characterization of the American political system as it has been conducted the last several cycles: campaigns have devolved into name-calling and the propagation of outright falsehoods. Actual issues and policy matters are left twitching in their death throes alongside the campaign trail. Moreso with the current crop of GOP candidates than at any other previous time.

EIGHTY FOR TRACY

Dick Tracy passed the 80^th anniversary of its launch date on October 12. The bloodiest strip of its day, creator Chester Gould had the titular character kill his first miscreant on November 26, just a little over a month after the curtain went up. The victim was a thug named Crutch who had killed the father of Tess Trueheart, Tracy’s betrothed, during a robbery on the very evening Tracy had popped the question, saying he hadn’t had any breaks “as far as money is concerned,” but with Tess at his side, he vowed to “find a way.” The date of the strip’s second killing — Tracy’s gunning down Crutch — was a holiday that Tracy, standing over the body of the man who’d murdered his fiancee’s father, observed by saying it wasn’t a bad Thanksgiving.

The strip’s current proprietors, artist Joe Stanton and writer Mike Curtis, celebrated the anniversary month by re-enacting the strip’s first sequence — but with a few significant differences. Their frame story is Tracy’s cohort Sam Catchem telling policewoman Lizz how Tracy joined the detective squad.

Most of the tale unfolds in its historic pattern except that the hoodlum population of Chicago consists of an inordinately high number of personages familiar to long-time readers (and recent fans) of Gould’s pace-setting strip, a veritable roll call of Gould’s grotesques from future Tracy escapades: Flattop, Blowtop (who, Flattop suggests, is a member of the “Top” family?), Pruneface, the Brow, Mole, Gravel Gertie, 88 Keyes, Itchy, and Shaky, plus Steve the Tramp and the kid who will henceforth be known as “Junior.”

In all, a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane and a notable way to celebrate a milestone in comic strip history. You can witness the entire extravaganza hereabouts at GoComics.

CARTOONS CELEBRATED, NOT

It was recently that time of year again: time for The New Yorker’s annual Cartoon Issue, which arrived bearing the same half-hearted tribute as in previous years. The first such effort appeared in 1997, and it was a whole-hearted tribute: in addition to publishing a special “cartoon section,” the magazine included a couple of text pieces about cartooning. That practice, which genuinely glorified the arts and crafts of the medium, was never again repeated. Subsequent Cartoon Issues contained only a dollop or two more cartoons than usual but no articles about cartooning or cartoonists. Hence, my verdict that the Cartoon Issue is a half-hearted tribute.

And this year is a repeat performance. Apart from an 18-page section entitled “The Funnies” (which title is, itself, a sort of back-handed way of describing the magazine’s cartoons, “the funnies” being a belittling term often used in reference to the “children’s” pages of a newspaper), the Cartoon Issue contains nothing else of pertinence to the practitioners or their artistry. And the editors could have done timely articles on either (or both) of (at least) two cartooning current events.

Steven Spielberg’s Tintin movie has just opened in Europe and will open here in December. Tintin’s creator, the authentically world-famous cartooner Herge, has been reviled lately for his supposed racism and his equally imaginary Nazism. A refutation of both slurs could have been launched in connection with a review of the “performance-capture” movie. But, no — not at the super-sophisticated New Yorker.

Or The New Yorker could have reviewed “Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine,” an exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An article could have examined the careers of such vintage caricaturists as James Gillray or Thomas Rowlandson or Honore-Victorin Daumier, all of whom are present in the show with more than one picture.

But, no — not at The New Yorker, which, founded on the principle that super sophisticates deserve regular ribbing, deserves a little jostling itself.

Whatever else I might be tempted to say about the so-called Cartoon Issue I’ve said before on previous manifestations of the tribute — say, at the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 270 or Opus 250. You can read those again and become attuned to my typical screed, which I could (but won’t) repeat (again) here.

You might be persuaded from the haphazard treatment that The New Yorker is trying its best to ignore the cartoons it’s pretending to glorify. And I suspect that’s exactly the case. The first Cartoon Issue was dated December 15, as if it were conceived as a Christmas present for readers. In subsequent years, the Cartoon Issue has retreated, slowly, away from late December into late November. And then into early November. This year, it’s dated October 31. This is an insidious ploy: by moving the Cartoon Issue back in the calendar a little each year, you eventually can claim that last year’s Cartoon Issue is actually this year’s and thereby avoid publishing one of the things altogether. That’s how the magazine will eventually escape for at least one year performing a duty that it has evidently found odious. It is to weep.

BIG NEW 52 (PART 2)

As for DC Comics’ touted outreach to the New Reader, it’s clear that the reader DC has in mind is not the reader for whom comic books tailored their stories from 1938 until the mid-1980s. The New 52 is aimed at an older reader, not a juvenile audience. The older reader might be a former reader who, as he/she grew older, outgrew (or thought he/she outgrew) comics. Or the new reader might be a former comics enthusiast who enjoyed the movie version of his adolescent heroes and now returns to the four-color pamphlet universe to see how, and if, things have changed. But in any configuration, the new reader is older, maybe with a ravening case of arrested development, but older chronologically anyhow.

The target audience for comics grew older in the 1960s when Stan Lee and Marvel Comics found readers in college. And then the target age leaped forward with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight of 1986, and ever since, comic book readers have been envisioned by comic book makers as older, and the stories have been aimed at that reader. So DC is doing nothing particularly new with its New 52; but it is making recognition of that target much more overt. Alas, it’s doing it with boobs and bomb-throwing and new costumes instead of themes and issues.

The new reader is not necessarily a fan of cleavage and disembowelment to exclusion of all other considerations, but he/she is not the reader that made Fawcett’s Captain Marvel the title that outsold Superman in the 1940s. The new reader is, instead, more like the original reader envisioned by Harry Donenfeld and his cohorts when they took over Major Malcolm Nicholson-Wheeler’s staggering line of comics in 1938. Early comic books, judging from the advertising they carried, were not aimed exclusively at pre-teen readers. With their reprints of newspaper comic strips, early comic books aimed at adult readers—and their children, but chiefly, at first, at the adults who bought pulp magazines. It was Superman who changed that focus.

When Donenfeld learned that the early issues of Action Comics were selling out because they were being purchased by kids who wanted to see what deeds Superman would do next, he and his minions re-focused their efforts, aiming, henceforth, at that pre-adolescent audience. In their eagerness to make a buck, comic book publishers, with Donenfeld’s gang showing the way, abandoned an infant artform’s potential and consigned the form to juvenile literature for two generations.

And now, DC, again eager to make a buck, has made obvious the change that the medium has effected for the last generation, returning to that long ago abandoned adult reader.

THE BIG NEW 52 (PART 1)

DC Comics’ promotional dodge, the “New 52" in which most of the company’s funnybook line-up was somewhat revamped and all renumbered to start with No.1, was a huge success at selling comic books. Whether it achieved its touted purpose, however, is open to debate, and the debate is blogging along.

In various statements that accompanied the re-launch, DC Comics maintained that the New 52 would “energize our existing fan base, reconnect with lapsed readers, and introduce our storytelling to people who know our characters from films and tv but have never read a comic book.'' The idea was to revamp the line-up, outfitting Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and others for life in the 21^st century. Their costumes and personalities were to be tinkered with to reflect today's real-world themes and events, to streamline continuity (presumably to discard pesky fragments of the characters’ fictional biographies that had become too complicated to deal with on a recurring basis), and to develop relationships between and among the characters.

At first blush, it seems that modernizing the DC lineup has resulted mostly in a frenetic deployment of sex and violence. At the Boston Globe, Bella English rang the alarm bell: “Lois Lane shacking up? Superman graphically tortured in an electric chair? Batman and Catwoman having sex on a roof?” Not to overlook the Joker having his face peeled off and nailed to the nut house wall.

But while I agree about a nearly overwhelming prevalence of hooters and hellrazing, carnality and canoodling in the New 52, and I think that DC could have seized the opportunity of the highly ballyhooed re-boot to make superheroes into something other than adolescent power fantasies (laden with heavy-breathing sex fantasies), my perusal of 13 of the New 52 titles was edifying.

Most obviously, the artwork is almost universally delicious. The people drawing pictures for the spandex universe are highly accomplished artists, and their skill does not end with figure drawing: they also draw cityscapes from wildly differing perspectives, unfailingly accurate.

Less obvious is the quality of the writing. Apart from the threadbare narrative device of beginning nearly every superhero narrative in medias res, the stories are taut and dense: word and picture blend seamlessly for the most economic and therefore the most dramatic storytelling.

Sometimes artists resort too readily to cinematic techniques that do not work quite so well in a static medium: alternating close-ups and long shots, the pictures focus too closely on tiny parts of the pictorial possibilities, obscuring the action instead of clarifying it. But the intent is clear: the goal is to tell a story by integrating words and pictures in the best cinematic manner. And today’s creative teams go beyond movies: they deploy page layout as well as panel breakdowns to get the greatest emotional impact out of their stories.

As technical achievements, the books have matured wonderfully, but they have yet to match that maturity with similarly grown-up storylines and themes. (For that, consider such titles as Who Is Jake Ellis?, The Cape, The Misson, The Rinse, Casanova, and the Criminal series from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. See? It can be done.) My detailed (even tediously exhaustive) reviews of the 13 New 52 titles I delved into in depth can be found in the Usual Place, Rants & Raves, Opus 285.

FRANK CHO

At Image, Frank Cho is doing Guns and Dinos, a series that Cho describes as “what ‘Jurassic Park’ should have been.” The series will regale us with stories about scientists trapped in the era of dinosaurs, trying to survive until they can find a way to get home. Cho is also working with Joe Keatinge on Brutal, the story of a female assassin who is, er, very very brutal.

I stopped by Cho’s table in an illustrators “pavilion”at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con last summer, and he told me he’s hoping to direct a movie before too long. He also gave me a copy of last summer’s Washington Post Magazine that pictured him on the cover, riding behind a toothsome Brandy-like wench on a motorcycle. You can still watch a prize-winning video of the process by which the cover art was conjured up here.

“Cho,” writes the Post’s Annys Shin, “has built a career drawing voluptuous women and catering to other men who share his stubbornly adolescent sense of humor.” Shin continues, describing Cho’s first book signing in Paris, where he is “doing something he excels at: drawing women’s breasts. This particular set is spilling out of a bikini top as the young man who requested the sketch looks on. But as the 20 or so other men behind him in line well know, Cho is capable of drawing almost any permutation: breasts in profile, breasts under t-shirts, breasts amplifying superhero logos, and so on. And they all have one thing in common: their disproportionate size. For Cho, 38, who grew up in Beltsville, the son of Korean immigrants, the alphabet starts with two letters, both of them D.

“His clean fluid line and precisely rendered figures, both human and animal, also show off his considerable skills, which have earned him numerous awards, a nationally syndicated comic strip at age 23, and, for the past seven years, a steady gig as one of Marvel Comics’ best-selling illustrators. Now he can add to that lit a following on the other side of the Atlantic.”

The article is an unusually complete and thorough biography for a magazine article: Shin visits Cho at the home of the artist’s parents, discusses his career and his failed marriage and his relationship with his two daughters, ages 6 and 8. “As divorces go, Cho’s has been amicable. She kept the house; he kept his artwork. And they have worked hard to make the transition as smooth as possible for their daughters. Cho still picks them up from school every day and drops them off at his old home. And twice a week, they come for dinner.”

Cho’s rapid rise as a cartoonist and illustrator still amazes him. “I’ve just been stumbling up,” he said. But he wonders how long it will last—“how long before his style is no longer popular. ‘I’m at my peak,’ he says. ‘Maybe my star will fall.’”

But I doubt it. Not as long as there are women and men.

A FLASH OF HUMOR AT SANDY EGGO

At the Comic-Con’s Spotlight session for Jordi Bernet, one of my favorite comic book artists, currently doing every other issue or so of Jonah Hex, Sergio Aragones joined Bernet at the head table. Bernet, a Spaniard, speaks little (if any) English, so Sergio was there to translate. (A stunningly unlikely role, as anyone who has heard Sergio mangle the English accent can attest.) Sergio would listen to questions from the audience, then turn to Bernet and translate them into Spanish; then listen to Bernet and turn back to the audience to translate Bernet’s replies into English.

Caught up in this rhythm, Sergio once translated English into English: after listening to a question, he turned to Bernet and repeated the question in English instead of Spanish. Bernet nudged him back to reality, and Sergio smote himself mightily on the forehead.

One never knows whether fun-loving Sergio does this kind of thing on purpose or not.

FRANK STACK AND FOOLBERT STURGEON

As Foolbert Sturgeon, Frank Stack is one of the legendary fomenters of underground comix: working on a post-graduate degree in art at the University of Wyoming in the fall of 1962, Stack sent one-page cartoons about the modern travails of Jesus back to Gilbert Shelton, a cartooning friend from Stack’s undergraduate days at the University of Texas (and another of the “founders” of comix), who subsequently (in early 1963) caused the Jesus cartoons to be photocopied in modest quantity and stapled together behind a title page proclaiming The Adventures of Jesus, often termed, with perfect hindsight, the “first comix book.”

Stack enjoyed a life-long career as a professor of fine art at the University of Missouri, where he managed the art department gallery, served as chairman of the department for a time, and founded the Comics Collection at MU’s Ellis Library. He once told me that he believes he’s produced more watercolor paintings than any modern artist, and I, having seen a few thousand of them heaped around his home, believe him. Despite his devotion to watercolor and print-making, Stack continues with an almost equal passion to produce comics. His current project, a graphic novel entitled Kiss Me, Jesus! The Passion Story Told by Mary Magdalene, was to be released this summer, but only, so far, in French.

We had dinner together one evening at last summer’s Sandy Ego Comic-Con, where Frank was one of this year’s Special Guests, and I’m happy to report that Stack is as peevish as ever about many aspects of modern life. We agree on virtually everything. Two peevish old coots.

“Comic strips in newspapers no longer appeal to artists,” he pronounced, a pained and thoughtful expression slowly spreading across his whiskery visage as he chose his words, “ — they don’t give you enough space to draw in.”

As for art in general, he anoints Peter Bruegel “the best artist: you can look at him all your life and still not have seen everything in there.”

BALDO CELEBRATES

In celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 - October 15), the proprietors of Baldo, Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos, turned over the Sunday strip for the month to a series of guest artists, all Hispanic. Nice touch. More about that -- and all matters Baldo -- at the Baldo Comics website.

SHEL DORF AND THE SANDY EGGO COMIC-COM

Prolonging the oversight at the celebration of comic fandom’s 50^th annivesary, Shel Dorf, founder of the Comic-Con, wasn’t mentioned in the little booklet handed out at the celebratory soiree. No sign of him anywhere among the canapes. He was, however, commemorated in a spectacular fashion at the San Diego airport, where a cartoon character mural was installed the length of the pedestrian bridge connecting Terminal One to its parking lot.

Engineered by Matthew Lorentz (and perhaps others of Shel’s friends), the mural’s ostensible purpose (“The Sky’s the Limit”) is to memorialize aviation: the beginning on the left features a drawing of Charles Lindbergh, whose Spirit of St. Louis, the airplane he soloed across the Atlantic in, was built by Ryan Aircraft in San Diego; other airplanes and hovercraft float across the panorama until we get to Steve Canyon, the comic strip aviator whose speech balloons were lettered by Shel for several years, and then, at the far right end, just after a view of Snoopy taking off on his doghouse, an excellent caricature of Shel by Brad Constantine.

 The mural isn’t a permanent airport fixture: it comes down this fall, making room for other artworks, no doubt. But for the time being—for the time of the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con — it was nice to see Shel Dorf hanging around his creation.

ANNIVERSARIES

Every San Diego Comic-Con is thoroughly themed with anniversary festivities. This year, more anniversaries than usual festooned the weekend: the 50^th anniversaries of the Fantastic Four and of Spy vs. Spy, the 25^th anniversaries of Dark Horse, SLG Publishing, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and the 20^th anniversary of Jeff Smith’s Bone. And the birth 50 years ago of “comic fandom.”

The official souvenir book devoted over 30 pages to the Marvelous creation (mostly drawings of the FF), but the second highest page count was fandom’s—15 self-congratulatory pages, heavily laden with illustrations that revived memories of long-departed fanzines. The Golden Jubilee determination for comics fandom is anchored in the debut dates of at least two fanzines, Jerry Bails’ Alter Ego in March 1961 and Don and Maggie Thompson’s Comic Art a few weeks later that year.

The fanzine cover illustrations in this section are numerous — I can’t think of a fanzine not present pictorially (except for the conspicuous absence of The Buyers Guide, Alan Light’s weekly tabloid-adzine, and The Comic Reader; but both are of somewhat later vintage than the 1960s, which is the focus here) — but the dates of the first issues are mostly missing. Too bad: it would be nice to have a complete and accurate historical document. Since most of the pictured covers are not of the inaugural issues, my guess is that the selection was based upon availability: whatever issue the editors could lay their hands on was used to illustrate each publication.

A late Saturday evening party, heavily laden with hors d’oeuvres, celebrated several of the so-called “founders” of fandom: Jean Bails (widow of Jerry Bails), Richard Kyle, Paul Levitz, Dick and Pat Lupoff, Bill Schelly, Roy Thomas, and Maggie Thompson (widow of Don Thompson).

The late Shel Dorf, who was somewhat grudgingly recognized as the “founder” of the Comic-Con after he died in 2009, was barely mentioned in the fandom history recited in the souvenir booklet: the founding of the Con is attributed to “a group of area fans, including the legendary Shel Dorf.” Including? I rigorously refudiate the implication that he was just one of the bunch: he was the leader of the bunch, and if you want to know more about Shel, visit the Usual Place for Rants & Raves, Opus 251, wherein his entire life is rehearsed.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so outraged: in the same slighting sentence, Shel is referred to as “an organizer of the Detroit Fair of 1965, along with Jerry Bails.” Which is true, but others were involved in the Detroit enterprise, too, and they aren’t mentioned: chief among them, Robert Brosch, who, with a couple of others, spawned the prototype in the spring of 1964. The others are named at Opus 251. Ah, well. This “history” isn’t really history: it’s a memoir in which the vagaries of fickle recollection are given precedence over the facts of actual events.

Shel is scarcely the only fandom founder that history as well as memoir have neglected. Who remembers Brosch? And I suspect his memory of his role in comic fandom is tinged not a little by the bitterness fostered by the neglect. I phoned him one time, thinking to interview him about those formative years, and as soon as he heard me mention “comic convention,” he hung up on me. And who remembers Bernie Bubnis who organized the first New York comic convention and coined the term “comic-con”? So Shel is keeping good company: seems to me too many of the founders have become foundlings.

CORPSE ON THE IMJIN & OTHER STORIES

 

 

 

 

Fantagraphics persists in amassing the rights for startling new publishing projects. Having launched the reprint of the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, Fantagraphics’ next big project is reprinting the storied EC Comics, starting in 2012. But instead of reprinting titles in chronological order as Russ Cochran did, Fantagraphics will do books that focus on the work of individual artists. The first, Corpse on the Imjin & Other Stories, will collect Harvey Kurtzman’s war stories; the second, Came the Dawn & Other Stories, will collect Wally Wood suspense tales. Jack Davis and Al Williamson will be next. Four black-and-white EC collections will be released each year.