Ah, what a relaxing two weeks of child care and Olympian detachment from the comics internet. I wonder what's been going on in my absence?
Ha ha ha. Good cop/bad cop works again.
Elsewhere on the site, R.C. Harvey is here with a new column on Gluyas Williams.
Williams was soon also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, which had been launched by Harold Ross in February 1925. Although Ross began soliciting cartoons from Williams almost at once, the cartoonist did not produce anything for the magazine until 1926. “Ross would write,” Williams told Marschall, “but I’d say that I was based in Boston and I didn’t know enough about New York to be of any use. And then he finally sent me a cartoon idea about the house wrecker who has the wrong address.
“I did it and sent it over, and Ross sent it back and said that it won’t do: he said to get more fun into it—have a woman taking a bath while they’re taking the bathtub out and like that. [Cartoons with women in bathtubs were standard fare in the Ballyhoo magazine comedy of the period, but I doubt Ross thought along those lines. He did, however, make suggestions that Williams couldn’t accept, whatever they were.—RCH]
“Ross said to change it and put those things in it, and he’d buy it. I sent it back just as it was and said, ‘No, I wouldn’t touch it because my idea of humor was understatement rather than slapstick.’ And Ross wrote—oh, how I wish I’d kept that letter!—it was a wonderful letter, saying, ‘You’re perfectly right. I’m going to change all my ideas on drawings. Of course that’s much subtler your way and better.’
“And after that letter,” Williams concluded, “I thought to myself that this was an editor I’d like to work for.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are too many links I've missed, so I'll dole them out.
—News. Longtime great New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler has passed away. Here is the NY Times obituary.
Some of Mr. Ziegler’s subjects were recurring ones, like the Lone Ranger, hamburgers and comic-book characters.
Superman appeared more than a dozen times. Mr. Ziegler depicted him changing his clothes in a telephone booth while a cat (or is it Batman?) surreptitiously watched from a nearby window, going to therapy to face intimacy issues with Batman, and being forced to hand in his cape after testing positive for anabolic steroids.
Mr. Ziegler was not a big fan of the Man of Steel, he wrote in a New Yorker blog in 2013, but “he’s a guy in a cape and a body stocking and he can fly, which makes him amusing and fun to draw.”
Richard Gehr interviewed Ziegler for this website in 2013, and their conversation is well worth revisiting.
I went to the Fillmore a few times and saw the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and…I don’t know if we actually saw Quicksilver. There were a couple of concerts in Golden Gate Park. The last apartment we had in San Francisco was on Stanyan Street, right across from the park, so we used to be there quite a bit. That’s when I started doing cartoons and figured I should move back East if I wanted to be serious about this.
I also took six months off to try to write. I completed this novel I thought was good when I was writing it, but turns out it wasn’t.
While I was doing this writing, or trying to be a writer, Brian [McConnachie] was in New York and he was also trying to be a writer. He was also doing cartoons on the side, but he can’t really draw. He’s a terrible artist but he has funny ideas, so he started selling stuff to National Lampoon. And he said, “I can’t even draw and I’m selling cartoons. You can actually draw. Maybe this is something you might wanna think about.” So I did. I started kind of fiddling around with it, and then I found that I really enjoy doing it. I mean, I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I found I could do it. So I started doin’ that and then thought maybe this would be a way to make a living without having to sell my soul in some awful job.
I was doing a lot of cartoons in San Francisco. I think I sent some stuff out and it all got rejected. Then I thought maybe I should go to New York and actually visit some of the magazines and do an in-person thing. So I went to New York for like a week, and stayed with Brian and his wife. That’s when I decided we should move back there. If I’m ever gonna make this work, it’s not gonna happen in San Francisco. We packed up the bus again, got a U-Haul, and attached the bus to the back. Jean-Anne and I had a kid at that time – the first kid, Jessica. They flew back to Chicago and I drove from San Francisco to Chicago and met them there, spent a weekend, and then drove the rest of the way to New York. Once I got settled in New York, they took a plane and followed. It was just me and Blanche, the dog, in the truck. That was a good trip.
Marvel sales VP David Gabriel gave an interview to ICv2 in which he blamed falling sales of Marvel titles on reader disinterest in diversity.
What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity. They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales.
We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.
Check that same link for Marvel's later scramble to clarify Gabriel's comments and reverse the PR damage.
This of course sparked a lot of outrage in various corners. I'll share just one viral response (to another response), G. Willow Wilson's.
If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.
There's much more out there.
I don't believe Dan linked to the Bloomberg profile of Dilbert creator (and Trump-whisperer) Scott Adams a couple weeks back, but it's a must-read if you missed it.
Adams’s house is a shrine to the cartoon character that made him rich. One section, visible from the pool area outside, clearly resembles Dilbert’s head, with two oval windows for eyes, connected by a thin line that suggests spectacles. “They look out from the cat’s bathroom upstairs,” Adams told me. The structure is full of indulgent quirks. In the kitchen, Adams installed three microwaves so he “can make a lot of popcorn at once.” Nearby, he transformed a bar area (Adams doesn’t drink) into a display case for Dilbert books and paraphernalia. Other features include a 10-seat movie theater, a gym, and a room filled with beauty salon equipment, where his ex-wife (now Adams’s personal assistant) used to host spa days for friends. Off to the back is an indoor tennis court.
Slate announced the nominees for its annual Studio Prize.
Alison Bechdel was named Vermont's latest cartoonist laureate.
Okay, there's a baby spitting up in the corner I have to attend to, so that will have to be enough links for today...
