Rants & Raves

INTERLUDE IN CALIFORNIA: TOM YEATES

Jenner, California, is perched on a bluff overlooking the Russian River where it empties into the sea. Tom Yeates has lived here for over 30 years; he’s on his third studio. Yeates appeared first on the comic book landscape in 1982, reviving, with Martin Pasko, the Swamp Thing in Saga of the Swamp Thing Nos.1-23. He’s worked on an impressive gaggle of pop culture icons—Tarzan, Conan, and Zorro (daily newspaper strip version)—plus such titles as Timespirits, Universe X Specials, Claw the Unconquered and Dragonsword, Captain EO and The Outlaw Prince.

Last winter, he was offered Prince Valiant. He’d assisted on the strip when Gary Gianni fell behind, and apparently Gianni told Brenden Buford, King Features’ comics editor, and Buford came up to Yeates at a comic-con one day last year and asked him, straight out, no preamble, if he’d like to do Prince Valiant. Would he? The last and the first of the great illustrated comic strips? Of course. And he’s been doing it ever since, starting with the release for April 1, 2012.

When I heard Yeates lived in this out-of-the-way place, I wondered how he delivered his weekly PV’s to King. Driving into town, I was relieved of that worry when I saw a post office. But I needn’t have worried: Yeates doesn’t rely upon the postal service. He delivers Prince Valiant via the Internet, and at King, a colorist and letterer complete the preparation of each week’s strip.

Even medieval England has surrendered to an alternate reality in the digital ether.

Yeates told a story that purports to explain why Prince Valiant, a viking, has black hair instead of blond. His mother was Italian.

INTERLUDE IN CALIFORNIA: MORRIE TURNER

Morrie Turner's Wee Pals, a paean of gentle humor aimed at raising racial consciousness, started 48 years ago, and Morrie is still doing it, day-by-day. Born 1923, Turner is the first Black cartoonist to produce a nationally distributed comic strip.

In the Army Air Corps during World War II, he drew gag cartoons for base publications—crude artwork, perhaps, but getting printed was an education.

“It seemed easy then,” Turner once recalled. “Sometimes it was humor by committee, and a lot of it was so ‘in’ that nobody outside the base could understand it. But I began seeing the power in it. We could dig at some lieutenant, and nobody could do a thing about it.”

After his military service, Turner took a job as a clerk in the Oakland Police Department and freelanced cartoons to magazines. All the while, he mulled over an idea for a comic strip. Peanuts particularly engaged him, and then once when Charlie Brown appeared in a Civil War cap, Turner pondered: What if Charlie Brown were Black? And what if the cap were a Confederate cap? “Now that,” wrote Tom Carter in the Cartoon Club Newsletter, “was indeed a laugh — a child so naive he could sweep away generations of ill will with one innocent, ironic gesture.”

In 1963, Turner developed a strip about black moppets called Dinky Fellas and sold it to the Berkeley Post in his native California and to the Chicago Defender in the midwest.

In 1964, with the advice and encouragement of Charles Schulz and comedian Dick Gregory, Turner integrated the strip and sold it as Wee Pals, which debuted February 15, 1965. The riots in Watts that summer stalled the strip: newspaper editors were leery of publishing anything that might stir up trouble. But Turner kept on, and in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luthur King, Jr., editors suddenly wanted ways to give race relations a human face. Turner’s daily lesson in tolerance was just what was needed, and sales soared.

But Turner, to this day, has mixed feelings about the sudden success: that his good fortune should have come from the death of King bothers him.

In 1974, King Features took on the syndication; these days, Creators Syndicate handles Wee Pals.

Musing about his craft, Turner added: “Doing a cartoon enables you to step outside and look at yourself. It’s like therapy, and I’ve become a better person for it.”

So, we submit, have the readers of Wee Pals.

Every minority (including the handicapped) is represented in the strip, and Turner promulgates a benevolent message of interracial harmony as well as humor. When Nipper and his racially diverse friends are picking a name for their club, they consider “Black Power,” then “Yellow Power,” then “Red Power,” finally settling on “Rainbow Power” — all colors working harmoniously. 

“That was two years before anybody ever heard of the Rainbow Coalition,” Turner said.

Turner also produces a Sunday panel about African American history called Soul Corner, and he created an animated biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Turner has received many awards for his work in cartooning and in education, including the Brotherhood Award of the National Council of Christians and Jews in 1968 and the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League Humanitarian Award in 1969. And in 1987, Turner, who probably spent more time with kids in schools than at the drawing board, was inducted into the California Public Education Hall of fame.

INTERLUDE IN CALIFORNIA: PETER MARESCA

In Palo Alto, I called on Peter Maresca. publisher extraordinaire of vintage Sunday funnies. Maresca found a cache of turn-of-the-last-century Sunday funnies years ago and was enchanted. When he couldn’t find a publisher to publish a book of these treasures, he became a publisher himself. Beginning with two volumes of Little Nemo Sunday pages -- printed the same giant size as they appeared when initially published in the first decade of the 20^th century -- Maresca has published six other collections. The most recent is Forgotten Fantasy, over 150 fantasy comic strips from 1900-1915, including such specimens as: Wee Willie Winkie and The Kin-der-Kids, The Explorigator, Naughty Pete, Nibsy, Jungle Imps and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.

Other Sunday Press Books titles include: George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, featuring the greatest Sunday pages from 1916 to 1944 in their original size and colors, with 20 other Herriman Sunday comics, most never reprinted before; Queer Visitors from the Land of Oz, long-hidden treasures from the Land of Oz, the complete Sunday series by L. Frank Baum and Walt McDougall, and the 1904 Scarecrow and the Tinman by W.W. Denslow—plus more full-size Oz and McDougall comics; The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek, the complete run of Verbeek's The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, and Loony Lyrics of Lulu, and select Sundays from Adventures of the Tiny Tads; and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, the best of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley Sunday comics, starting from the very first Sunday in 1921, featuring King’s innovations in art, layout, and storytelling that brought a new warmth and style to the medium at the dawn of the Golden Age of newspaper comic strips. They are all described in loving detail at sundaypressbooks.com.

Pete’s forthcoming volume, Society Is Nix, will include the very first Katzenjammer Kids (in which there are three, not just two, mischief-makers), the first Happy Hooligan, and a few Yellow Kid strips that didn’t make it into any other previous tome. And more.

Here’s a picture of me and Pete, next to a picture of me and Morrie Turner, who we’ll meet at our next posting. Then, at the posting after that, we’ll visit Tom Yeates in Jenner, California.

A FEW WORDS FROM MILTON KNIGHT

About What He Learned at the Recent Dartmouth Comics Conference; to wit:

My visit had a bittersweet taste. New Hampshire was lovely, and so are its people. I was well received at the conference, people bought my books, and the hotel accommodations were fantastic; but the background of the conference, the industry of comics academia, made me sense that I could be a well-loved antique.

The old world of comics is just about dead. In the process of elevating them from ‘junk’ into ‘high art’ (a concept I am perfectly fine with), the fun has been unnecessarily drained away. ... The new ‘mainstream’ is comics that are drab textbooks, nil as entertainment, but a good quick way to chalk up college credits and keep the academic machine grinding.

Now, as a kid, I hated school with a passion. It was prison; it was hell. Today’s graphic novel industry has legitimatized itself by embracing the world of academia, giving the content the stale air of a classroom.

The irony is, this is as much a commercial move as the crassest superhero comic book.
At this time, it’s the autobiographical confessional books the book agents want to see. Creators rush to make them not necessarily to make captivating material as much as to sell books. It’s pandering to a different genre. The new graphic novel arena can be as insular a world as the Marvel offices.

DOONESBURY IN BOULDER

Zonker Harris, a mellow but dedicated stoner in Garry Trudeau’s strip, apparently keeps up with the news of the day, wherein he found that weed is legal for recreational purposes in Colorado (the state in which these wholesome remarks originate). So Zonker is going West, youngsters, where he, with slacker nephew Zipper in tow, plans to become a “bajillionnaire” with a “sweet little grow outside of Boulder.” Boulder is the place that hosts a national “smoke out” (or is it a “smoke in”?) annually.

A monster “smokey” was conducted in Denver’s civic center on April 20 (“4/20,” which gives the celebration its name). The part I liked best about the “4/20" festivity was that at precisely 4:20pm, everyone exhaled, creating a huge maryjane cloud just in front of the state capital building.

GOOD GLUE AT THE NEW YORKER -- AT LAST!

We pause here to recognize an Advance in Civilization. For years as a subscriber, I’ve complained (often to the art director, Francoise Moulay) about the mailing labels on the covers of The New Yorker. The labels cover up a small piece of the cover art. And at least once — on a cover by Sempe — the label covered the visual punchline. And if you try to peel the label off so the artwork can be viewed without obstruction, the peeling rips off a piece of the artwork. This seems negligent to an almost criminal extent. Not only are readers deprived of a view of an entertaining drawing, but the magazine is sabotaging itself. Presumably, The New Yorker pays a bodacious penny for the art on its cover. And yet, it persists in a practice that deliberately blemishes that expensive art.      

Other magazines that I get have labels on the cover, too, so The New Yorker is not the sole offender in magazine journalism. But it is the most egregious because it so clearly values its cover as a showplace for ingenious artistic endeavors.

 I once recommended that the mailing label be affixed to the back cover; and to foreclose on the advertiser’s complaint, a strip across the bottom of the back cover could be left blank for attaching the label — that way, it wouldn’t (the gods forfend!) obliterate a piece of sacred salesmanship. (In effect, the back cover ad would be a few cubic inches smaller, but the magazine could still charge the same fee: it’s position, not size, that makes the back cover desirable.) No one grabbed at that remedy.

Other magazines use mailing labels the glue of which adheres the label to the cover but still permits the label to be peeled off without taking portions of the cover illustration with it. And now — at last! — The New Yorker has joined that throng.

You’d think a magazine of advanced thinking and artistic sensibility would have found a solution to its most glaring (because most visible) problem, but, no, apparently it’s taken years. Ms. Moulay once explained, when I assaulted her with my usual complaint, that the machinery that affixes mailing labels was too complicated to change. Made no sense, of course; but she’s an art critic, not a mechanic.

Now, the machinery (or whatever was the problem—I say, the glue) has been adjusted, and I can peel off the label and see cover art in all its gorgeousness.

Fitnoot: If you find this sort of news and opinion refreshing in an age in which Congress’ approval rating hovers statistically around the margin of error, you’ll rejoice to know that July is Open Access Month at RCHarvey.com where there’s lots more of what’s hinted at here. The online magazine version of this blog, Rants & Raves, as well as archived R&R and the entire Hindsight archive—thirteen years of history, lore, reviews and commentary—is open to non-$ubscribers all month in the hope that they will be so thrilled with what they find that they’ll $ubscribe. Join the happy throng.

ROOM FOR CARTOONISTS

 

No cartoonists made it to Time’s annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” Neither did any of the Mexican drug cartel moguls; surely, they’re influential?

If it’s any comfort, however, Time named R.C. Harvey Person of the Year in 2006 (along with every other Internet user who was creating content on the Web). Ahhh, fame — how fleeting.

BUCK NAKED IN THE 25th CENTURY?

Hermes Press is launching a 4-issue series, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, done by Howard Chaykin, who is reknowned in these parts for scabrous sexual adventure comics. I can’t wait. If past performance is any indicator of the future, we can look forward to Wilma (who, Chaykin protests, is merely Buck’s colleague, not a romantic interest) in garters and bustier and Buck buck-nekkid much of their interplanetary time.

Fitnoot: July is Open Access Month at RCHarvey.com. The online magazine version of this blog, Rants & Raves, as well as archived R&R and the entire Hindsight archive—thirteen years of history, lore, reviews and commentary—is open to non-$ubscribers all month in the hope that they will be so thrilled with what they find that they’ll $ubscribe. Join the happy throng.

TIME TURNS OFF SPOTLIGHT

“As their traditional showcases melt like Arctic ice, the nation's visual commentators have one less mainstream floe to go to,” reported Mike Cavna at ComicRiffs. “Time magazine is discontinuing its popular Cartoons of the Week online feature, according to several sources. The most recent COTW published on Time's site was for mid-June.” Sad, but you have to admire Cavna’s metaphor.

ARCHIE IN THE MOVIES?

Archie, who, at 72, may now be America's oldest teenager, is headed to the big screen for the first time, at least if a new project at Warner Brothers proceeds as planned. Brooks Barnes at the New York Times reported in early June that Warner closed a deal for a live-action adaptation of the small-town adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead.

Fitnoot: July is Open Access Month at RCHarvey.com. The online magazine version of this blog, Rants & Raves, as well as archived R&R and the entire Hindsight archive—thirteen years of history, lore, reviews and commentary — is open to non-$ubscribers all month in the hope that they will be so thrilled with what they find that they’ll $ubscribe. Join the happy throng

DOWNEY'S NOT DONE WITH TONY STARK

USA Today reported that Marvel Studios announced June 20 that Robert Downey Jr. has signed a deal to return as billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark and his superheroic alter ego Iron Man for two more movies: the team-up film The Avengers 2, writer/director Joss Whedon's sequel to last year's $1.5 billion hit, as well as The Avengers 3. They will be Downey’s fifth and sixth times playing Iron Man on the big screen.

FOUND IN A WALL

 A copy of Action Comics No.1, wherein Superman debuted in 1938, was found in the wall of a Minnesota house built during the same year. Found during a renovation, it sold for $175,000, according to comic book seller ComicConnection. It might’ve brought more, but it was graded only 1.5 out of 10 because of a detached cover; a near-mint copy graded at 9.0 sold for $2.16 million in 2011.

MAN OF STEEL

Man of Steel has almost no redeeming features as a movie. It may, in fact, be the worst action movie I’ve ever seen. The fight sequences were supersonic car crashes with the opponents rushing headlong at each other and knocking one another down repeatedly. And they moved too fast for a viewer to follow the presumed action; all we see is visual representations of a high wind. After a dozen or so of these head-on collisions, ennui sets in pretty numbingly.

Some relief from the noise of the crashes is afforded in several nearly endless expanses of exposition. For an action movie, there were far too many extreme close-ups; we don’t need to count the hairs of Superman’s eyebrows. Apart from the wholesale destruction being wreaked on the cityscape during fights, we were also treated to unremitting sequences of slow moving — but menacing — space craft that looked like metallic crabs or sea turtles or hovering jelly fish, sequences punctuated by belching firey explosions of the highest decibels.

British actor Henry Cavill is adequately stalwart and muscled heavily enough for the Superman role. The Superman’s chain-maily sort of costume is the best thing in the movie, but the cape is too long. Alas, Amy Adams is wrong for the part of Lois Lane: instead of a hard-charging reporter, we have a prom queen. 

Lois and Clark fall in love and, at the end of the movie, they kiss. This development severely alters the Superman mythology, in particular the love triangle that has animated the comic books for 75 years — Lois loves Superman but disdains Clark Kent, not realizing that the two are one and the same. I can’t imagine how DC consented to the violence this development does to the enduring psychic appeal of the character: every pimply-faced adolescent under the spell of the Siegel-Shuster creation can imagine that he, like nerdy Clark Kent, is secretly a champion. This movie blasts that fond daydream to tiny pieces of Kryptonite, thanks to writers Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, ably assisted by director Scott Snyder.

The best scenes in the movie belong to Clark and his mother, feelingly played by Diane Lane. They seem unabashedly fond of each other, and their obvious affection lends their scenes emotional impact — about the only human drama around. All of the rest of the intended drama is drowned in cliched dialogue.

But the movie’s most serious flaw is its relentless seriousness. The idea of a flying, invulnerable super-powered hero is laughable on its face, but most successful superhero movies of late have the saving grace of a self-deprecating sense of humor. None of that here. In fact there are only two funny lines in the two-and-a-half hour flick, and they’re both Lois’. She arrives at some frozen outpost of scientific inquiry to report on it, and endures a typically masculine us-guys-know-it-all-but-you-poor-deluded-female briefing, which she finally terminates with a quip: “Now that we’ve finished measuring dicks, maybe we can begin.”

And the penultimate line in the movie is hers, and it is also humorous with double entendre. At the end of the movie, Clark decides to find a job, and he dons specs and reports to work at the Daily Planet, where Lois is the star reporter. When he is introduced to her, she pretends she doesn’t know him — despite having been gaga over him for the whole movie — stands up and shakes his hand and says: “Welcome to the Planet,” a nice play on words.

The movie also supports what appears to be a stunning irrationality. If Clark is invulnerable because he comes from a planet with a different atmosphere than Earth’s, then all those Kryptonites who come looking for him with kidnaping on their agenda are similarly invulnerable. How, then, are they all killed?

But they are. Some unspecified how. And Krypton’s General Zod laments their death and vows to kill all of Clark’s earthling cohorts in revenge. Clark finally dispatches the evil warlord by choking him to death, the only way he can be killed if he’s otherwise invulnerable. That seems to work. But how were all the other Kryptonites killed?

Oh, and — according to Asawin Suebsaeng at motherjones.com — “one of the most fascinating things about this movie is how blatantly littered with product placement it is — roughly $160 million in product placement and promotions went into its makers' coffers. Man of Steel has over 100 global marketing partners, surpassing Universal's 2012 animated flick The Lorax, which reportedly had 70 partners. So if you have forgotten recently to eat at IHOP or to shop at Sears, this film will remind you to do so in big letters.”

But the most troubling aspect of this production for me is the flying. Advertisements for the first Superman movie of modern times touted the flying: it was so convincingly faked that we would know, the ads insisted, that Superman can fly.

This Superman takes flight like a bullet being fired. No flapping of arms, no quick crouch and then a jump up into the air. Nothing. Just — bang! out of the chute. What propels him? The only thing I can think of is, well, super flatulence. Superman farts himself into flight.

And that seems a suitable end for this review. (Unintended word play—but relished nonetheless.)

Fitnoot: If you find this sort of news and opinion refreshing in an age in which Congress’ approval rating hovers statistically around the margin of error, you’ll rejoice to know that July is Open Access Month at RCHarvey.com where there’s lots more of what’s hinted at here. The online magazine version of this blog, Rants & Raves, as well as archived R&R and the entire Hindsight archive — thirteen years of history, lore, reviews and commentary—is open to non-$ubscribers all month in the hope that they will be so thrilled with what they find that they’ll $ubscribe. Join the happy throng.