MASTERFUL MARKS: SIXTEEN GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHIES
Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World—Sixteen Graphic Biographies
Edited by Monte Beauchamp
Abetted by Sixteen Cartoonists/Artists and Two Writers
128 8.5x11-inch pages, color
2014 Simon & Shuster
hardcover
$24.99
This book started with a provocative idea and an admirable modus operandi. Who, Beauchamp asked himself, “were the original comic artists that left an indelible mark upon the world, paving the way for those who followed?” To discover the answer, Beauchamp then divided the cartooning word up into its various genres — comic books, syndicated comic strips, animated cartoons, anime, manga, graphic novels, caricature, gag cartoons, and children’s picture books — and identified “the creators who most influenced or revolutionized each category.”
In the order of the foregoing list of genre, he picked Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, and Robert Crumb, Rodolphe Topffer, Charles Schulz and Winsor McCay (in animation as well as comic strips), Walt Disney, Osamu Tezuka (both anime and manga), Lynd Ward, Edward Gorey, and Herge, Al Hirschfeld, and Dr. Seuss. And he mixed in Charles Addams (for the Addams family, I assume, because Beauchamp doesn’t mention single-panel cartoons) and Hugh Hefner (for Playboy, which fostered single-panel cartooning). Having highlighted two people associated with single-panel cartooning, how come Beauchamp doesn’t mention the genre, what I call the haiku of cartooning?
The list runs heavily to comic books with a quarter of the names (counting Shuster and Siegel as one creator) and skimps shamefully in syndicated comic strips—all the more so because comic books grew out of comic strips. Missing are those comic strip cartoonists whose work most shaped the funnybook medium in its infancy — Roy Crane, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. And there are numerous other quibbles that I could offer. But that is always true of any reader confronting someone else’s “list” of the best of anything.
After concocting a list, Beauchamp did something that makes his list different from all other such rosters: he decided to produce a book about his champions by commissioning short biographies in comics form. Just as the creators on his list exulted comics, so would his book of comics biographies proclaim the value of the form they took.
To this purpose, he recruited a stellar list of cartoonist-biographers: Ryan Heshka/Shuster and Siegel; Mark Alan Stamaty/Kirby; Marc Rosenthal/Addams; Nicolas Debon/McCay; Sergio Ruzzler/Schulz; Nora Krug/Herge; *Peter Kuper/Kurtzman; *Drew Friedman/Crumb; *Arnold Roth/Hirschfeld; Larry Day/Disney; Owen Smith/Ward; *Frank Stack/Topffer; Greg Clark/Gorey; *Gary Dumm/Hefner; Dan Zettwoch/Tezuka; and *Denis Kitchen/Seuss.
I say these are stellar artists, but I’m familiar with only those whose names are asterisked (*). Still, judging from the art in the book, they are all, without exception, excellent artists; their work herein is superb. Not much of it, however, is cartooning, which, by my definition, requires that the pictures contribute to a narrative as much as the words do. In more than half of these biographies, verbal captions carry the narrative almost entirely; the pictures are merely decorations, illustrating the words but adding little or no narrative substance.
Despite these considerable flaws, the book has a good share of highlights. Rosenthal adopts Addams’ drawing style to tell his life story, and the pictures often comment (sometimes ironically) on the narrative in the captions. Krug’s drawings for Herge, grotesque in their simplicity, are hard for me to look at, but she sometimes manages visual interpretation of the droning captions rather than simply illustrating them. Stack does the same with much more appealing drawings for Topffer (somewhat in the manner of Topffer’s art), and Roth’s Hirschfeld is an outright comical interpretation of the caricaturist’s astonishingly successful career—with liberal doses of Rothian humor in visual asides.
Friedman does Crumb by recalling all of his, Friedman’s, connections with the underground cartoonist, illuminating the proceedings with a stunning array of portraits of Crumb. And of Friedman.
Similarly, Heshka manages to elevate Beauchamp’s text-heavy life of Siegel and Shuster through the sheer shimmering suface of his brilliant illustrations—which add to the narrative by depicting the comic book characters and other personages and incidents mentioned in the prose. Clarke’s elegant drawings capture some of Gorey’s weirdness, but otherwise do little but accompany the captions.
Kuper and Kitchen are the best in the book, and they are very good. Kuper draws in the manner of his subject, Kurtzman, and laces the narrative with sight gags worthy of Kurtzman’s life-long collaborator, Will Elder. And Kitchen does somewhat the same in his tour de force treatment of Seuss, shifting from his own style for biographical matter to Seuss’s style to depict the good Dr.’s creations.
Beauchamp’s is an admirable attempt, and even in falling short, it is often engaging and informative.