Rants & Raves

THE HAPPY HARV IN MOTION

A year or so ago, an enterprising tv producer approached me about acting as an on-camera consultant and Grand Comics History Poobah for a documentary on the history of American comic strips. I eagerly agreed. He wanted to get some footage of me pontificating on historical comics matters so he’d have something to show potential backers of the project. He sent around a camera-man to film me extolling, which he did in my downstairs studio.

The project came to naught, but I wound up with an hour of videotape of me talking profusely about comics. The producer asked me questions via cell-phone, and I responded as fulsomely as I could. Alas, due to my hearing loss, I often could not hear what he was asking, and you’ll see me cocking my head to catch his questions. Having forced my children to watch the thing several times, I now have no further use for it. I passed the entire enchilada on to toon-ed.com, an educational cartoon website for aspiring young cartooners, and you can see me holding forth thereat: toon-ed.com/toonhistory.html

Ahhh, celluloid stardom. Or, at least, digital celebrity. Where will we go from here?

 

 

COMICS PAGE WATCH

At Dick Tracy, artist Joe Staton and writer Mike Curtis littered a story last fall with characters from the comics past: cartoonist Vera Alldid, Charles Addams, and a “friend” at the Flash newspaper in a nearby town. The “friend” was a major supporting character from the now-defunct Brenda Starr, Reporter comic strip, reported Brian Steinberg at Examiner.com: “Yes, that's right, that androgynously dressed lady seen in the November 10 episode of Tracy is indeed Hank O'Hair, longtime confidant and pal of Brenda’s.” Steinberg claims to be surprised at Hank’s cameo: “Dick Tracy just told us a few days ago that he no longer reads the comics!” The appearance reminds us that these days an “androgynously dressed” female character would be a stand-in for a lesbian. Dale Messick was before her time in more ways than one. (“Hank of hair,” ha.)

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At a national institution in Australia, cartoonist Jason Chatfield celebrated Ginger Meggs’ 90^th birthday on November 13 (the date the irrepressible redhead Ginge first appeared in a strip then entitled Us Fellers) by drawing caricatures of the four cartoonists who have preceded him on the famed strip: founder Jim Bancks, Ron Vivian, Lloyd Piper, and James Kemsley. In the same anniversary spirit, the Perth Mint has released a commemorative 1-oz silver Australian $1 coin that depicts Ginge on the back of a kangaroo, accompanied by his dog and his pet monkey. At 90, Ginger Meggs is the longest-running and most popular Australian comic strip, currently appearing in newspapers in 34 countries. Chatfield, by the way, is the current prez of the Australian Cartoonists Association, which held its annual awards weekend in Sydney in November.

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Sometimes we don’t need the pictures even in a verbal-visual medium. Here are a couple instances:

In Rob Harrell’s Adam@Home, Adam's son asks him: "When does Superman sleep? Why wouldn’t the bad guys just wait until he’s asleep and then do their crimes? And does he turn on his x-ray vision or can he always see through everything? That’d be sorta gross — to see people’s organs and bones. And the blood. But if he could see through your skin, shouldn’t he look through your organs and bones too? When would his x-ray vision stop? Does he look and see nothing if it’s on full power? Can you explain any of this?"

Adam is nonplused: “Me? I’m still trying to figure out how Betty and Veronica find Archie so darn irresistible.”

And in Mike Peters’ Mother Goose and Grim for November 3, the verbal exchange in the dialogue between two characters is the whole joke:

            “Did you know Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope?”

            “Did it ever get delivered?”

            “Of course it got delivered. He delivered it himself.”

            “I guess he had to. No mailman could deliver it with the address on the back of the envelope.”

A beautiful joke; dazzling word play. Pictures are wholly superfluous.

HARVEY PEKAR MEMORIAL

Only Clevelanders would decide that American Splendor’s Harvey Pekar deserves a memorial in the city and only Clevelanders would successfully raise $30,000 to fund the project. The memorial will be in the city library but it’s not exactly a monumental statue: instead, a functional desk that will be installed and stocked with paper and pencils, providing a place where people can sit and write or draw comics, reported Pat Gallbincea at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“Mounted on the desk will be a sculpted bronze comic book page, with Pekar himself stepping out from a panel.” The tribute will be located on the library's second floor, where Pekar liked to work. "Harvey was here all the time," said Carole Wallencheck, a reference associate at the library. "It was his favorite place to go.” And he’d probably get a kick out of the image. And the fuss. And the fund-raising.

 

BUD PLANT

 

 

 

Bud Plant is going all-out online. Citing “increases in paper, printing and postage costs paired with declining returns on catalog-based sales,” he explained in the last issue of Bud’s Art Books catalog, “we’re obliged to make some changes in order to survive.” Henceforth, the “catalog” will be online only (at BudsArtBooks.com); no print version. In lieu of the printed catalog, an e-mail newsletter is available; it will list new titles, specials, and offer links to download periodic mini-catalogs “and other items of interest.” Orders for books can be placed online or by phone, as has been the practice for some years.

Update: Plant subsequently announced that he is retiring and selling his business.

ANTON EMDIN

Austrialian illustrator and cartoonist Anton Emdin took home two awards, including the Gold Stanley for Cartoonist of the Year, from the Australian Cartoonists Association’s annual Stanley Awards celebration, November 11-12; this time, in Sydney. The other award was for Best Illustrator. Emdin is the only Aussie to receive award-recognition from the U.S.’s National Cartoonists Society: last May in Boston, he received the Reuben division award for magazine illustration.

We’ve posted below a sample of Emdin’s cartooning — the back cover of Mad No. 447. Next to it, Emdin’s likeness (sort of) on the cover of the ACA magazine Inkspot is by fellow ACA member Luke Watson, who accompanied Emdin and ACA prez Jason Chatfield to the Boston Reubens Weekend. A jarring note of their visit to Beantown was that Watson was refused a drink at the hotel bar because he couldn’t prove he was at least 21 years of age. He’s thirty. You can see more of Emdin’s work at his website, antonemdin.com.

PHOENIX JONES

Ben Fodor, the Seattle resident who wears a black mask with yellow stripes and a bulging muscle body suit and calls himself Phoenix Jones, a superhero whose self-imposed duties included patrolling the streets and battling miscreants, won’t be facing charges for pepper-spraying a group of people brawling outside a downtown nightclub. Officials decided not to press charges; they’d initially thought the bulgy Fodor started the brawl by spraying the unruly bunch, but they couldn’t find two of the people pepper-sprayed to testify and without such testimony, they figured no jury would be persuaded of Fodor’s guilt.

Fodor wore his uniform to court in November, removing his mask when asked by a court factotum. And he dramatically removed it again outside the courthouse when speaking to the assembled multitudes: “I will continue to patrol with my team,” he said, “ — probably tonight. In addition to being Phoenix Jones, I am also Ben Fodor, father and brother. I am just like everybody else. The only difference is that I try to stop crime in my neighborhood and everywhere else.”

 

 

THE COMPLETE ORPHAN ANNIE

The Complete Little Orphan Annie: Volume 7, 1936-38:
The Omnipotent Mr. Am!
By Harold Gray
Edited by Dean Mullaney
296 8.5x11-inch landscape pages
b/w dailies and color Sundays
IDW hardcover
$49.99

Reprinting from October 1, 1936 to June 8, 1938, this volume of IDW’s massive Library of American Comics includes the most fantastical Annie adventure of all — her visit, squired by her fabulously wealthy stepfather Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, to the jungle hideout of Mr. Am, an other-worldly being with a Santa Claus beard who seems to have lived forever (and may, in fact, be God Himself). But the other historic event in these pages is the arrival of Warbucks’ second trouble-shooter, the Asp (dubbed “the Grim Reaper”), who on February 21, 1937, joins Punjab as the most trusted of Warbucks’ bodyguards. Punjab “disappears” Warbucks’ most unsavory enemies by throwing a magic rug over them; the Asp just uses old-fashioned firearms.

Jeet Heer’s introductory essay offers a short history of another comic strip with which Annie’s Harold Gray has long be associated: Little Joe, set in the modern American West, started October 1, 1933, as one of several new strips in the expanded Chicago Tribune Sunday funnies. Although signed by Edwin Leffingwell, Gray’s assistant, the strip, Heer maintains, was Gray’s concoction entirely: starring a teenage cowboy, Little Joe revived an early strip idea Gray’d toyed with before Annie began. The 1933 revival was due, Heer argues persuasively, to Gray’s desire to frustrate two people with whom he and Dick Tracy’s Chester Gould had a bone to pick. The first of these personages was Norman Marsh, once a friend of Gould’s, who earlier that year had launched a rank copy-cat detective strip, Dan Dunn. The other offender was Arthur Crawford, the ostensible head of the Tribune Syndicate (distributor of both Annie and Tracy), who was sponsoring a western-themed strip submitted by Marsh for the new expanded Sunday Trib. When Little Joe was selected, both Marsh and Crawford were deflated — which was Gray’s objective.

Ed Leffingwell died in 1936, and his brother’s name then appeared on Little Joe. But Heer thinks Robert Leffingwell probably didn’t draw it; probably Gray did. And Little Joe, from the beginning, was rendered in Gray’s distinctive manner. Be that as it may (and I believe Heer, who interviewed Leffingwell’s nephew and supplies pencil sketches from Gray’s notebook), this volume of the IDW Annie project is a treasure and a continuing testament to the comic strip genius of Harold Gray.

IT WAS THE WAR OF THE TRENCHES

It Was the War of the Trenches
By Jacques Tardi
126 8x10.5-inch pages, b/w
2010 Fantagraphics hardcover
$24.99

Tardi's war book is not a graphic novel in the usual sense of a “novel,” a continuous narrative with a recurring cast of characters. It is, rather, a series of short stories and vignettes. As Tardi says in the Foreword: “[This book] is not the work of an ‘historian.’ This is not the history of the First World War told in comics form, but a non-chronological sequence of situations, lived by men who have been jerked around and dragged through the mud, clearly unhappy to find themselves in this place, whose only wish is to stay alive for just one more hour, whose over-arching desire is to return home — in one word, for the war to be over! There are no ‘heroes,’ there is no ‘protagonist’ in this awful collective ‘adventure’ that is war. Nothing but a gigantic, anonymous scream of agony.”

Tardi calls the Great War, his ostensible subject, “that gaping wound in Europe’s history from which has sprung seemingly every horror that has afflicted us since.” This book has taken longer to complete than any of his other 30-plus graphic novels. It started in 1982 with a few pages in a French comics anthology, continued two years later with more pages in another book but was then abandoned for nearly ten years. Completed in 1993, it has taken until last year to reach an English language version.

Tardi pulls no punches. Deploying a gritty black-and-white graphic treatment, he depicts the horrors of war — the grisly deaths, the soldiers’ bitterness and disillusionment, the patriotic jingoism, the mass hatreds — with a towering revulsion. In each vignette, we meet a new protagonist whose fate underscores Tardi’s message. Binet is a youngster playing soldier; he’s killed before he can grow up. Gaspard, the killer of rats for bounty, is eaten by his prey. Soufflot infects his arm, and when it is amputated, he achieves his objective: he is discharged but can no longer find work at his pre-war occupation. Huet must kill women and children in the line of duty and goes mad. Bouvrenuil is wounded in an open stretch of the battlefield and screams in excruciating pain, but his comrades can’t get to him, so they kill him as an act of mercy.

Another soldier, who falls into a trench and ends up wrist deep in a dead German’s entrails, speculates: “I thought about what an amazing amount of plumbing a man carries around in his belly, and how fragile the envelope that protects it all is. Our bodies really hadn’t been created to withstand the barrage of metal that’s being flung at us.” Then he encounters a soldier sitting in a trench with a wound that spills his guts out; hopeless, he explodes a hand grenade to kill himself. Other stories offer the bitter irony of men dying just as they are about to go on leave — or just as the war ends.

World War I is the first European conflict modernized by horribly efficient killing devices, and it was fought from trenches, employing suicidal tactics: opposing sides periodically left their relatively safe (although squalid) trenches to dash across the open land between the hidey holes and are mowed down by machine guns. With meticulous linework and atmospheric gray tones, Tardi reveals the miserable conditions, blood and guts and gore, in gritty detail. These stories — these situations — will make you sick. And they should.

METAMAUS

Having won the first-ever Pulitzer bestowed upon a work of comics, Art Spiegelman hasn’t been able to escape his opus. Any time his name is mentioned, the prize-winning Maus is appended to it; or vice versa. To some extent, he is reaping what he sowed: whenever he drew himself in the post-Maus years, he gave his self-caricature a mouse head. And now, with the publication of MetaMaus, he adds fresh altitude to the pedestal he claims to resent having been placed upon.

“I’m blessed and cursed by this thing I made that obviously looms large for me and for others,” he told David L. Ulin at the Los Angeles Times. “The result is that I can’t do this thing that seems quite easy, which is: ‘That’s that, and now I’m working on a new thing.’”

MetaMaus, which digs deep into Maus’s creation, collecting interviews and sketches that deconstruct his defining work, proves his point with its very existence. And Spiegelman knows it: “If you can’t outrun it,” he said, “just stare the damned beast down.”

AARON MAGRUDER UPDATE

 

If you’ve been wondering what Boondocks’ Aaron McGruder has been up to lately, wonder no longer: he’s co-writer on George Lucas’ only non-Star Wars movie in 18 years, “Red Tails,” about the exploits of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the African American fighter pilots who battled Nazis during World War II.

GOOD NEWS

If newspapers perish, comic strips will die with them. So any news of newspaper prosperity is worth celebrating. A month or so back, Allan Gardner at DailyCartoonist reported: “Good news for those of us watching print media struggle to gain sufficient advertising revenue as they transition to digital. The Atlantic magazine’s online advertising revenue has overtaken its print revenue for the first time.” Elsewhere, Editor & Publisher reported that the Chicago Tribune has increased its page count by 40 full pages per week: “We’ve added depth, dimension and range to our news report to serve you better,” the paper’s promo said, “ — we’ve strengthened the newspaper for readers who love the printed newspaper and are serious about their news.” No word, yet, on whether circulation or advertising has increased as a result.