Nobody does silence like Tom Gauld. It sits heavy on his lonely lunar landscapes, dismantled robots and dilapidated moonbases; it pulls his tiny mute figures even further away from us as they wave proudly at the top of their doomed enterprises. Pages of perfectly paced silence make the few deadpan words he does use weightier, perfectly economised, no more or less than you’ll ever need. It isn’t just the absence of speech: Chris Ware does it too but it feels different, like the silence is in two different keys.

Gauld’s atmospheric world is bleak and lonely but totally funny and full of heart. He mixes heroic events and ideas with small human ordinariness: astronauts bickering on the moon, massive epic journeys in which nothing ever happens except conversations about lunch, and most recently a biblical giant doing the King’s bidding when he’d much rather be doing admin. His books are so human they make you like other humans. There are very few books I will give people and insist they read it on the spot, over dinner, while I sit there quietly monitoring their facial expressions. But Gauld’s books ignite that kind of enthusiasm, and there’s something in them — a sweetness, maybe — that brings you closer to the guy on the train, the people on the street, makes you ache for more of that boring human ordinariness, our innate optimism, and all of our doomed enterprises.

In Goliath, his first long book from Drawn & Quarterly, Gauld retells the story of the biblical character who was largely missing from the original version. Most of the story happens while nothing is happening. It’s Goliath and his sword-bearer — a small boy appointed to wait with him and carry around a pointless bit of armor — sitting on a rock, waiting. Somehow in reading it you forget you know how the tale ends and when it does it winds you. It’s one of my favorite things to come out in years.

The following interview was done by me in my pajamas in a room in East London, and a jet-lagged Gauld on trains, planes, phones and computers during his North American tour. He was very nice about letting me bother him when he was so busy.

HAYLEY CAMPBELL: You’ve drawn more astronauts, space stations and robots that any other cartoonist I can think of. Did you always want to be a cartoonist when you grew up, or are you mourning an unreachable jet pack?

TOM GAULD: Growing up I always (except for occasional ideas I’d be a soldier or doctor and, on one occasion, the Pope) wanted to do something creative which mainly involved drawing: an artist, an animator, a cartoonist, a model maker. Thinking back, I never wanted to be an astronaut, in fact I had very little interest in the reality of space, I was interested in science fiction. I was obsessed by the Star Wars films, toys and comics and I think these influenced the things I like to draw to this day. There is something which interests me about the gulf between our reality now and the optimistic science fiction (and speculative non-fiction) which I saw as a child: space travel, jet packs, flying cars etc. Living on the moon, for example, seems a quaintly old-fashioned idea to me now.

CAMPBELL: Arf! Seriously? The Pope? Why?

GAULD: I can’t remember why, I was quite young. He’d been on TV and I imagine I liked his popemobile. We weren’t Catholics, hardly religious at all really.

CAMPBELL: In some respects I think that would make it easier to adapt a biblical story. I was dragged through Catholic school for the whole stretch and now — even though some of the stories are the most amazing and gruesome and strange stories there are — I just can’t face them. They immediately make me feel like I’m wearing an uncomfortably scratchy uniform and shifting awkwardly in a pew while the priest drones on and on.

GAULD: Yes, I think that’s true. I don’t have a religious faith, but I’m interested in the Bible because the stories are such well-known, common parts of our culture. A few years ago I did a version of the story of Noah (for Kramers Ergot 7) and I liked that I could rely on the reader’s knowledge of the story, and play with their expectations. That story was one of the things which led me to do Goliath. I didn’t want my book to be anti-religious, or even to paint David as a fraud or a villain, but the God (or maybe just strong religious faith) which makes David so powerful is definitely not there for Goliath.

CAMPBELL: I remember the giant being just a fleeting mention in the actual story — hardly top billing. Is that why you picked him?

GAULD: In the Bible version he’s hardly a character at all. He’s more of a list of measurements: How tall he is, how long his spear is, how much his armor weighs. If the story had been more even-handed, or given more detail and character to Goliath, I doubt I’d have been interested in adapting it. I feel that the story was so one-sided that it almost begged for another view. One thing I realized while making the book is that we usually think of the story as “Boy vs Giant,” but it’s actually “Boy and Supremely Powerful Creator of the Entire Universe vs Giant,” and seen like that, you can’t help having a bit of sympathy for Goliath.

CAMPBELL: In this (and a lot of your work) I get the sense that you’re very aware of gaps. I mean, your whole version the Goliath myth takes place in the gap between two verses of someone else’s version. And then the most important bits of your story are happening in the gap, in the unspoken bit. It all seems to happen in the waiting, and the dialogue is so everyday and normal that the big heartbreaking bits are busily breaking your heart in the background.

GAULD: I find that I really enjoy it when an artist leaves me to make a bit of a leap from one thing to the next, rather than leading me along every step of the way. I try to do this in my stories, to leave gaps which the reader can fill in, but not so big that they feel confused. To put it another way, Billy Wilder said that in screenwriting if you “Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.”

I like deadpan comedy, flat dialogue, things happening offstage and inexpressive characters, there’s probably some deep psychological reason for this, but another reason goes back to not wanting to lead the reader by the nose by signposting “THIS IS FUNNY!” or “HOW TERRIBLY SAD!” and allowing some of it to happen in the reader’s mind.

CAMPBELL: You zoom in and focus on one tiny aspect of some great epic, like Roz Chast including the dog’s flea in the family tree. In a lot of articles about you the writer is always quick to liken you to Edward Gorey, and from the cross-hatching you’re evidently a great fan, but I’ve always identified an element of Chast in there.

GAULD: I used to see Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker occasionally but it wasn’t until I bought her big retrospective book Theories of Everything a few years ago that I realized how great she is. So she wasn’t a major early influence but more recently she’s inspired me (particularly on the cartoons I do for The Guardian). Also we both like to do diagrams and lists and there’s some similarity in tone.

CAMPBELL: My favorite thing by you that I’ve seen recently is The Triumph of Death strip that you did for Art Review magazine (above), in which you do just that — you take two (essentially binmen) bit-players and put them center-stage. A painting like Bruegel’s is so cartoony and detailed that every time you look at it you see a new guy, a new tiny tragedy. I interviewed Anders Nilsen when he was in London, and he said you took him to the John Soane Museum to see the Hogarths. As an artist, what is it you like so much about that kind of stuff?

GAULD: Thanks, I’m glad you liked that strip. Earlier this year I went to Avantcomic, a comics conference in Madrid and I also went to see The Triumph of Death at the Prado, it’s in the same room as The Garden of Earthly Delights which I love too. I looked at it for ages, there’s so much going on, such a weird atmosphere and so many stories being hinted at and I decided then that I’d write a story about the two skeletons on the horse and cart. I went to see the Goya black paintings there too, and they are like the really bleak visions of a depressed man, whereas The Triumph of Death is dark, but it’s also funny and Breugel is clearly having such fun painting all these skeletons and crazy atrocities. It’s a bit like Where’s Wally (Waldo) with skeletons.

CAMPBELL: Years ago I became kind of obsessed with Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death stuff. It’s just so nuts and cartoony with the skeletons mocking whoever they’re dragging down by prancing around in the guy’s hat or cape or whatever. Then there’s someone else trying to bribe the skeleton while he nonchalantly looks the other way, or the skeleton tipping a gallon of booze into the collapsed drunk’s mouth. And that’s just the tiny illuminated alphabet. The actual Dance of Death set is even madder. Death taking an ancient old man to see a physician and then handing the guy a urine sample (presumably) as if it’s some kind of challenge.

As for Bosch, I’ve never seen The Garden of Earthly Delights in real life, but they’ve got one of three known sixteenth-century copies of the central panel at the Wellcome Collection. I was staring at it just a week ago. After much thought I decided the best bit is the man sticking a bunch of flowers in the lady’s bottom.

GAULD: I didn’t realize that the Wellcome had a copy of earthly delights, I’ll have to go and see it.

I love Hogarth’s series such as The Rake’s Progress, partly for the lovely drawing and engraving (I prefer his prints to his paintings) and also for the stories. It takes a bit of work to read the story in The Rake but I think that’s the fun: noticing the details, comparing each plate to the next, filling in the gaps.

CAMPBELL: I prefer the prints too. Everyone seems craggier and they pull better faces. Anders said he liked how nuts the Hogarths were, with the crazy unexpected details (“Like pigs tied to people’s heads and stuff,” he said). London’s obviously full of great old prints and drawings — are there any others you like to show visiting cartoonists?

GAULD: I also took Anders to the prints and drawings collection at the British Museum, they have some really great shows there and even though we only had about 15 minuted before they closed we dashed round a German romantic prints show which was full of super-crosshatchy forests and things. I like the British museum generally, I started going quite often as it was opposite Gosh, so I could buy some comics, look at some old etchings (or pots or whatever) then sit in a cafe and doodle.

CAMPBELL: Now, getting back to Gorey for a bit. Sometimes your strips (particularly your older ones) are not really about much but they have an overwhelming sense of atmosphere, which is something Gorey always excelled in too. Is there anyone (in comics or otherwise) who you regard as a master of atmosphere?

GAULD: I do love the atmosphere in Gorey’s work, I suppose atmosphere is a big part of his work. I must admit that much as I love Gorey and think he is an amazing genius, I do sometimes wish there was a bit more depth and heart to his work. I think that Jason’s comics have a wonderfully idiosyncratic atmosphere to them.  I think his stories get better all the time, and the colours that Hubert does for him are so perfect, I think they really add a lot to the stories. Mike Mignola is great at atmosphere too, he’s made a really interesting world in his comics, seemingly by just sticking together all the cool things he likes to draw. Dave Stewart’s colours in that are really good too. I guess with all three of these artists I feel that all their work comes from a distinct, invented place, and I really like it when artists make up their own worlds.

CAMPBELL: I remember reading, years ago, that you were a fan of Ben Katchor and his particularly New York atmosphere in Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer. Michael Chabon wrote a piece — I read it in a collection of his essays but I think it was originally the introduction to Julius Knipl — in which he said Katchor is “more – far more – than a simple archaeologist of out-moded technologies and abandoned pastimes. In fact he often plays a kind of involuted Borgesian game with the entire notion of nostalgia itself, proving that one can feel nostalgia not only for times before one’s own but, surprisingly, for things that never existed.”

I feel the same way about your moon stuff, or The Gigantic Robot. There’s nothing lonelier than a space station but you go one further and do abandoned space stations or moon dwellings. A piece of yours that always stuck in my memory was actually a mistake: the Lost Robot, where you had meant to scan just the robot but ended up with the entire scanner bed thus placing the little guy on the most bleak lunar landscape. There’s a nostalgia there — or at least a sense of the optimism of the past that you mentioned earlier — for a thing that never existed.

GAULD: That’s interesting, I’ve been a fan of Katchor’s work for a long time now, I wrote my MA dissertation (admittedly a short art school dissertation) about his work. I hadn’t seen that connection before but now you mention it I can see it. I think you can feel, upon seeing my robots or technology (or maybe even everything I draw) that things will probably go wrong at some point.

I don’t think I’m saying that life was better in the past, or now, or even in the future. My characters are often just clumsily trying to make the best of things, wherever they are.

CAMPBELL: I was down the pub with Andy Riley the other night and we got onto the subject of your Hunter & Painter. Andy was adamant that it would make a brilliant Aardman short film and I wholeheartedly agree. I know Matt Abbiss has animated your work in the past [a subtitled version exists on YouTube here]. Would you do it again?

GAULD: I’ve worked on animations for commercial jobs and it was fun to see what Matt did with Invasion, but I’d definitely like to work on an original animation one day. When I was at college in Edinburgh, I did some animation in my first year but when I specialized I chose illustration as animation seemed too meticulous. Comics are a lot of work but animation (especially in those less digital times) was too much. I’m wary of, and also excited by, the idea of collaboration. I like that I have almost complete control of my comics but I couldn’t make a film on my own, so it would have to be with the right people.

CAMPBELL: The more I learn about the process of filmmaking the more astounded I am that any good ones ever get made.

Andy would also like to know if you ever break loose and draw something huge. He is a man who has just realized that having bought his own house he can now paint cartoons on the walls if he wants to (and has done so).

GAULD: I never draw things big. Even if something needs to be big, I’d still draw it small and scale it up. I like to draw small (my drawings are not much bigger than the finished, printed comics) as it reigns in perfectionism, and I get a bit of natural wobble and error into the drawings. One problem with digital is that you can zoom in and in forever: but with a pen, the width of the line gives a natural end.

CAMPBELL: So what are you working on now? Did you like the process of doing a longer work and would you do it again?

GAULD: Making a longer book was really hard, but in the end very rewarding. Working on Goliath there were a lot of wrong turns and failed experiments but I learned from it.  I’m just starting to work on a new book which I think will be longer than Goliath and am also working on a collection of the short, weekly strips I do for the Guardian.

CAMPBELL: Can you tell us what it is yet or will we have to wait and see?

GAULD: I can’t really. I have a couple of ideas at at such early stages I may scrap them and do something else. But whatever I do I’d like it to be a bit longer than Goliath was. My next published book will be the Guardian strips collection.

CAMPBELL: Will you ever collect your Time Out strip, Move To the City? I wasn’t in England when it was appearing in the magazine and I never saw it.

GAULD: I think it’ll reprint one day, but not right away. I have mixed feelings about it. It was a great job to get: a paid, weekly comic strip when I was only few months out of college, but the weekly deadline, the fact that I hadn’t drawn many comics before, and was really busy with other things mean that it’s quite uneven. I enjoyed it, experimented with it and learned a lot from it, but I’ll wait till I have a few other things in print before I revisit it. It did come out in French from the Swiss publisher Bulb (and actually appeared as a daily strip in a Geneva newspaper) but that was because Nicolas Robel, the publisher, was very enthusiastic and talked me into it.

I don’t have a religious faith, but I’m interested in the Bible because the stories are such well-known, common parts of our culture. A few years ago I did a version of the story of Noah (for Kramers Ergot 7) and I liked that I could rely on the reader’s knowledge of the story, and play with their expectations. That story was one of the things which led me to do Goliath. I didn’t want my book to be anti-religious, or even to paint David as a fraud or a villain, but the God (or maybe just strong religious faith) which makes David so powerful is definitely not there for Goliath.

We also have a review from the indefatigable Sean T. Collins, who reports in on the latest release from the Closed Caption Comics group, Molly Colleen O’Connell’s Difficult Loves:

O’Connell’s weapons of choice are perspective and detail, throwing enough conflicting examples of both at you at once to make each turn of the page a “wait, what?” experience. Her characters limbs elongate at odd points so that you’re never sure exactly how large their bodies are in relation to their environments — is this some weird, deliberately inconsistent use of foreshortening, or are they just built like warped marionettes?

Elsewhere on the internets…

—Okay, easily the link of the week comes from Gene Deitch, who writes at length (and with copious illustrations, videos, and archival evidence) about his experiences adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are into a short animated film.

—Your Alison Bechdel link of the day comes from Ng Suat Tong, who focuses in on the psychoanalytic content of Are You My Mother?, which is sounding more and more fascinating as the reviews come in. As Dan mentioned yesterday, our own coverage will be coming soon.

—Nick Gazin interviews Diana Schutz about working with Milo Manara in his latest Vice column. (He also falls for that Jack Kirby Spider-Man image hoax, so caveat lector.)

—I missed it on Monday, but the great Bob Levin wrote about his heart attack for the Broad Street Review.

—I also missed the Chicago Tribune‘s excellent coverage of last weekend’s “Comics: Philosophy & Practice” conference.

—The outrage of the moment just over came when McSweeney’s announced a cartoonist contest, which would award a $500 prize to the winner, in exchange for two cartoons a month. This sparked something of a revolt online, mainly from cartoonists concerned about what they perceived as exploitation, which eventually led to McSweeney’s apologizing and canceling the contest. This seems worth mentioning after the fact, if only for taking note of changing comics-community standards, and the force an internet-focused protest can have, at least when aimed at a smaller, community-minded organization.

—Finally, there’s apparently some kind of TV and tabloid frenzy going on over the fact that a few characters at DC and Marvel are about to be revealed as either gay and/or getting married while gay. I wonder how many times those companies can get PR mileage out of this kind of thing; it feels like they’ve already done this multiple times, but the media’s obviously still buying. In the meantime, someone should tell the New York Times about Maurice Vellekoop.

Many CCC comics utilize drawing styles that repel the eye, that prevent it from getting a hold on a page: Freibert’s emphasis-defying uniform line weight and experiments with text-as-graphics, Stechschulte’s shadow plays, the stoned D&D/heavy-metal haze of early Milburn. O’Connell’s weapons of choice are perspective and detail, throwing enough conflicting examples of both at you at once to make each turn of the page a “wait, what?” experience. Her characters limbs elongate at odd points so that you’re never sure exactly how large their bodies are in relation to their environments — is this some weird, deliberately inconsistent use of foreshortening, or are they just built like warped marionettes? Her backgrounds and environments slash across panels in dramatic diagonals, making it still harder to get a read on where you’re at.

Her level of detail can be just as disorienting. She’s not quite on the Brian Chippendale level of horror vacui, but let’s put it this way: It’s not enough for her to have a page covered by dozens of writhing, intertwining snakes — the patterns on their skin have to be a constantly shifting patchwork of patterns, like they’re all wearing long tubular grandma quilts. O’Connell further breaks up the field with little smudges and slashes of ink, like you’re always just a few feet away from a nightmarish ticker-tape parade.

The opening page is a doozy on all counts. It’s a deep-focus fan’s dream: A streetside cafe patron holds an agony-aunt letter in the extreme foreground as a sidewalk meets at a corner and extends diagonally off the page in two directions. A doughy couple prances along, faceless and bespeckled with dots, while trucks and cars cram the street running parallel to the sidewalk. Virtually none of it “makes sense,” strictly speaking, but boy oh boy do you feel like you’ve been dropped into a new world. The tangle of both snakes and gasoline pump lines on the following spread make it even clearer that navigation’s gonna be a bitch.

So that’s the “Difficult.” Where’s the “Loves”? In the story — yes, there is one! — that’s where. A pair of estranged snakes reunite for a trip to Trollhättan, “the first truly erotic city,” where the female hopes to put their lingering issues and complicated, sticky past to rest with the use of psychotropic erotic pottery on display there…but they have to act fast, because pretty soon they’re gonna bulldoze the place and build a strip mall. Would you believe this is enormously affecting, despite the fact that it’s about knitwear-sporting snakes?

In the book’s center spread, the strange effects of drinking from the pots take hold. First they revisit their own painful memories in vivid detail, depicted in a tight, borderless six-panel grid. O’Connell captions each panel with an incisive, evocative phrase that will resonate so strongly with anyone who has some relationship regrets in their own past that for a moment you’ll forget you’re looking at snakes in a bar or on a road trip. “I remember a time I was sick & you left me alone.” “I remember a freezing holiday & just a dial tone.” Next, they magically journey into the life and death of one of the pot’s previous users, a handmaiden buried with her plague-ridden mistress in the reaches of time. Against a rich gray inkwash O’Connell draws a straightforward portrait of the lady abed, her slain horse at her feet; to the left is a block of straight prose, in cursive, recounting the preparation and burial process from the handmaiden’s perspective. Both these pages are literally covered up, occluded by photocopied photos of real pottery by artist Marion Lundgren, printed out on brightly colored construction paper and paperclipped to the pages beneath. You feel like you’re lifting up a curtain, piercing a veil, making the sadness beneath all the more forbidden and vulnerable and poignant. It’s a brilliantly lo-fi way to achieve a sophisticated effect.

Then the whole thing jumps “one year later,” and the place where this mystical journey into profound personal heartbreak and loss happened has been converted to a gaudy consumer mecca. The subtle, almost staid curves and bulges of the original erotic pottery have been commercialized and sensationalized into a series of boutiques with cock and cunt shapes looming and gaping from every pitcher and pot. The originals (snakes still inside them, it seems) are stolen and used as inspiration for the final challenge on the America’s Next Top Nail Artist reality show. The snakes’ lovers’ coil is converted into that kinda gross squiggle of super-long fingernails, their scale patterns are echoed by the scarf of the contestant and the tie of the host, and the final words of the comic are “TRUST NO ONE.” If you really wanna reference Brian Chippendale, this is very very Ninja, with its themes of gentrification, commercialization, and loss of true emotional and artistic freedom. But it’s even more bitterly satirical, with little of Chippendale’s playfulness and ultimately optimism to leaven it. Unapologetically sad and angry and strong. Difficult, yes. Love, yes.

Joe has also apparently been holding out on us. Here’s proof: A blog post described as follows:

Being a series of comments on Episode 0.1 of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, a podcast by Matt Seneca, Tucker Stone and myself.

Is this mutiny? We’ll work to bring you the answer.

Frank M. Young delivers unto us answers about John Stanley in reference to questions you didn’t know you had, and we should thank him for that. This kind of deep comic book archeology is needed. It gets to the weird smudgy bottom of aesthetic developments. So here’s Young on proto-Tubbys.

Here’s a funny thing: A group of documents containing an alternate plot point for The Little Prince was recently sold at auction. It sounds interesting:

In this version of the story, after visiting six planets, the little prince arrives on an alternate-reality earth. One particular line reads as an homage to the melting pot of New York City: “If you brought together all the inhabitants of this planet close together as if for a meeting, the Whites, the Yellows, the Blacks, the children, the elderly, the women, and the men, without forgetting a single one, all of humanity would fit on Long Island.”

Not comics, but TCJ: Tim has a great short interview with novelist Richard Ford, whose new book I’m greatly looking forward to.

And finally, in case you missed it: Chris Ware’s Building Stories is going to be an incredible object.

For readers unfamiliar with her work, it might appear that Alison Bechdel came out of nowhere to receive critical acclaim for her comic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, published in 2006. But her devoted fans, who have been following her career for more than two decades, were well aware of her talent as both an artist and a writer. With its political commentary and spot-on observations of lesbian culture, her enduring bi-weekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, continues to thrive in print and online.

©Alison Bechdel

Bechdel took some time out of her busy schedule of writing, drawing and promoting her new book to talk about her work, her career and having her book banned in Missouri.

— Lynn Emmert

LYNN EMMERT: So far, your graphic novel Fun Home has been named “Book of the Year” by Time magazine, “#1 Non-fiction book” by Entertainment Weekly, one of the top 10 books of by the London Times and New York Times Magazine, and made the New York Times list of “100 Notable Books for 2006”: pretty heady stuff, there. Did you expect this kind of reaction to the book?

ALISON BECHDEL: No. [Emmert laughs.] Well, you know, I say no, and that’s true, but at the same time, I think, I don’t know. Somewhere deep down I knew that it was a good book, [laughs] like it should get attention. You know? So, while I am surprised, I’m also just really deeply gratified.

EMMERT: On your website, you talked about working on the “fringes of acceptability,” and now getting all this establishment recognition.

BECHDEL: Well, yeah. It’s been touch-and-go for me. I really didn’t know until now —January of 2007 — that I really probably am not going to have to get a day job. I’ve just been living with that possibility all these years and it’s been … scary!

EMMERT: Do you think the reading public is now more accepting of work that is outside of their comfort zone?

BECHDEL: I do. I think things have changed a lot in the 25 years since I started doing this.

EMMERT: How long have you been working on Fun Home?

BECHDEL: Fun Home took me seven years.

EMMERT: Wow. [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: I figured it was a pretty lengthy process, just because of the size of the book, but I had no idea.

BECHDEL: Well, I was having to do my comic strip concurrently, so that slowed me down, but I still feel like I needed that length of time just for it all to gestate properly.

EMMERT: So was it hard to work on that kind of project while doing your strip, all through that seven-year period?

BECHDEL: It was always difficult to grind to a halt. I alternated: I had two weeks on the memoir, two weeks on the comic strip, something like that. The transition days were very difficult, because I mostly just wanted to keep doing the memoir, but in the end, I think I would never have finished the memoir if I hadn’t had that constant prod of having to stop and start and switch gears. The memoir was so introspective and personal, it was really good for me to get out of my own ass [laughs], and think about the world and the stuff I write about in my comic strip, at regular intervals.

This cutaway is also featured on Fun Home’s orange cover, under the dust jacket. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: So that was sort of a break in between those periods of introspection. I could see how that would be helpful in some ways.

When you came up with the idea for Fun Home, did you approach your publisher, or did you produce the work and then shop it around? How did you get it published, ultimately?

BECHDEL: I had an agent, and at the point where I got the agent, I had some of the work done, but not very much at all, and it wasn’t really in any kind of coherent form. I had this really wonderful agent who worked with me to get the material in some kind of package so she could shop it around. What we did was, I finally came up with a synopsis of the book, when I was maybe halfway into that seven-year period. [Laughter.] I was able to do a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. On that basis, she was able to sell it.

EMMERT: For the benefit of the Journal readers that have not read Fun Home, can you describe what it’s about?

BECHDEL: It’s about my childhood growing up with my closeted gay (or possibly bisexual) dad. He was a high-school English teacher who was obsessed with interior design and spent all his free time restoring and redecorating our Gothic Revival house. He also worked as a funeral director at the family funeral home in the small Pennsylvania town where we lived.

EMMERT: What was your family’s reaction to the book? Did you let them preview it before you published it?

BECHDEL: Wait. Can I say one more thing about the synopsis? It was an illustrated synopsis, laid out like comic-book pages, because there’s just no way to —

EMMERT: Yeah. Well, with a graphic novel, yeah, that would be hard.

BECHDEL: So I didn’t have a whole lot of the drawing done, but enough to give a sense of what it would look like. OK, now my family. What did you ask?

EMMERT: Well, what was their reaction to the book? Did you let them preview it before you published it?

BECHDEL: Yes, I did. The big hurdle was my mother. [Pauses.] Early on, a couple of years in, I showed her a draft, and that was a very … I didn’t tell her until I’d been working on the book for a year, that I was thinking of doing this, because I didn’t want her reaction to inhibit me, I really felt like I needed to just work on it in that kind of —what am I trying to say? I wanted just some free space in which to think about it, to get a handle on the material myself. It was very difficult for me even to tell her I was doing it, and then to show her the stuff, and then to get her reaction. She never told me not to do it, but I knew that it was painful for her; it was always very upsetting when I’d get her reaction to whatever draft I sent. It was really quite emotionally tumultuous.

EMMERT: Did you do any editing based on your family’s reaction to parts of the book?

BECHDEL: Yes. I changed a few little things. There wasn’t much that they really asked me to change, but most of their requests I implemented. Some of them I didn’t, we sort of argued about those. I wanted them to know what I was doing all along, so I showed it to my brothers, I showed it to my mom. My brothers didn’t have as strong feelings about it as my mother, but it brought up a lot of stuff with them too. We all had very different experiences and stories about our relationships with my dad.

EMMERT: And your own points of view about it.

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: The wave of autobiographical graphic novels in the ’80s and ’90s, it seems to me, was a bigger percentage of independent comics then than it is today. But it sounds to me like that didn’t matter to you, that this was something that you wanted to do, so that wasn’t really an issue for you.

BECHDEL: I always felt like there was something inherently autobiographical about cartooning, and that’s why there was so much of it. I still believe that. I haven’t exactly worked out my theory of why, but it does feel like it almost demands people to write autobiographies.

EMMERT: It’s interesting to me that it looks like all the members of your family had some sort of artistic talents. Is that true for your brothers — well, at least your parents. Is that true for your brothers, as well?

BECHDEL: Yeah. One brother is a musician, and my other brother, he’s sort of an outsider artist. He has great drawing skills, but he doesn’t really do anything with them; he puts all his energy into model cars and planes and things, which I guess is creative in a way, but I see that he can do beautiful drawings, but he doesn’t.

EMMERT: Doesn’t really do anything with them as far as art or getting them out there to the public.

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: One of the themes in Fun Home I picked up on is of course the literature and reading and, in particular, I found that part when you talked about one of the times you felt closest to your father was when you took his English class. Does reading still play an important part of your life: Is that sort of a habit now?

BECHDEL: You know, I feel very bad about this, but I don’t read as much as I used to. And I’m not sure why. But I do think part of it is that the work that I do, you know, doing cartoons is very time-consuming. Especially when I was working on the Fun Home project, I really didn’t have time to read. I know that sounds crazy —

EMMERT: No, I understand.

BECHDEL: But I was working from the second I got up until the second I went to bed on that thing.

EMMERT: Wow. That’s a pretty rough taskmistress, there.

BECHDEL: I don’t know. I guess I am kind of a slow, methodical worker, but I don’t know how else you would do this stuff. You not only have to write it, you have to do all this painstaking drawing, and then you have to do design work, and it’s just all-consuming.

Bechdel and her father bond in Fun Home. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: One of the parts, too, in Fun Home that I like is when you were taking your English courses and you resisted your instructor’s desire to interpret the books you were reading. How does that feel now, though, that readers and critics would be doing the same thing to your work?

BECHDEL: [Laughter.] That’s pretty funny. I was just thinking about that, how hard it was for me to understand symbolism and literary interpretation. I feel like it’s almost like a developmental stage, I think, that people need to go through. Like, 17 or 18, I just wasn’t there yet. I really didn’t understand how things could be about something other that what they appeared to be. But now I’m all about that, kind of: seeing behind the surface.

EMMERT: Certainly, a lot the things that are going on in your family are like that in the book. The surface lives people are living are very different than what’s going on behind that.

BECHDEL: Yeah. Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. And now I do. And now I look at the simplest [laughs] — I’ve just become very cynical and hyper-interpretive. Like, I don’t know, the other day, somebody told me to watch something online: It was this very moving story about a father with a paraplegic son and how the father does all these marathon races pushing the son in a wheelchair. And while it was very moving on the surface and this guy seems like such a great dad, [laughs] I just started coming up with all these twisted psychological motivations for how he was like actually — I don’t know.

EMMERT: Exploiting this situation? [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: Exploiting the kid, yeah. For his own personal gratification. Having this kind of critical perspective makes life very complicated.

EMMERT: In your book, you talk about your father going through therapy. If you’re willing to share that, is that something that you’ve done, and has that helped you, as far as —

BECHDEL: Oh my GOD, yeah —

EMMERT: — putting this book together?

BECHDEL: Yeah, I couldn’t have done the book without having done lots of therapy. I was very clear that I didn’t want the book to be about my therapy. I think that would have been really boring. But, it wasn’t just the emotional benefits I got from therapy, but a whole way of learning to think psychologically. Understanding what we were just talking about, these layers and layers of motivations behind people’s behaviors. Also, I think I even learned a psychoanalytic way of thinking: interpreting my life as if it were a dream. Even to the extent that dreams are a kind of visual language, and I don’t think I could have told this story without images. That was part of my syntax.

The evolution of Bechdel’s attitude toward literary theory. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: And then, did you feel like putting Fun Home together and getting it out there was part of that process, as far as working through your life and trying to get meaning out of it, and that producing this work was part of that?

BECHDEL: Yes. Totally.

EMMERT: It certainly was evocative for me. My life was very different than yours in some ways, but there were a lot of similarities too, and it made me really think about how one’s past shapes one as a person now, and how our relationships with our parents has a very lasting effect on our interactions with other people later in life. So, for me, it was just a really moving experience to read the book. It was one of those things: I bought it, and sat down and just read it all at once. I couldn’t put it down. I had to find out what happened. I really appreciated your willingness to be so out there about your family.

BECHDEL: Well, it’s almost a kind of compulsive behavior. I have this compulsive truth-telling syndrome. You know, there’s a chapter in the book about my obsessive-compulsive stage as a child, when I was terrified of lying. I feel like that’s really true of my life in general, growing up in a situation where there were so many secrets, I think I’ve swung maybe a little too far the other way. [Emmert laughs.]

It’s an incredibly revealing book, and I don’t know why I feel like I want everyone to know these intimate things about me. I know other writers who have told me they can’t imagine doing something that personal. It does feel a little crazy. I don’t quite understand it.

EMMERT: Well, I personally admire your courage for doing it.

BECHDEL: Well, but it’s not courage. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s insanity.

EMMERT: Not necessarily. I don’t think so. I saw it as a very positive thing — for me as a reader, anyway — and reacted to it that way.

BECHDEL: Good.

EMMERT: [Laughs.] I’m sure that’s why all the critics are raving as well, because there is just so much truth there, and that’s something I think, even in autobiographies, is quite frequently missing, that even people telling the stories of their lives don’t really tell it truthfully, in many cases.

BECHDEL: Well, mine’s full of lies, too.

EMMERT: Artistic license.

Bechdel demonstrates her “truth-telling compulsion” in Fun Home. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

BECHDEL: Yeah. I think it’s important in any autobiographical effort to acknowledge the limitations of your methodology, of your ability to tell the truth, and I feel like I did do that in Fun Home.

EMMERT: So what was your reaction to Fun Home being banned in Marshall, Missouri, along with Craig Thompson’s Blankets? [Laughter.]

BECHDEL: My first reaction is: What a great honor! My second reaction is, it’s a very interesting situation, and it’s all about the power of images, which I think is something people need to talk about. I can understand why people wouldn’t want their children to accidentally think this was a funny comic book and pick it up and see pictures of people having sex. I can understand that. I think banning books is the wrong approach. If you don’t want your kids to read it, make sure they don’t get a hold of it. But I do understand that concern, because yeah, drawings are very seductive and attention-catching.

EMMERT: Do you think it had as much to do with the subject matter as it did with the fact that it was illustrated?

BECHDEL: Oh, I think it had everything to do with the fact that it was illustrated. I’m sure that library’s got all kinds of gay material in it. But if they’re just regular books with no cartoon illustrations, there’s not the same kind of concern about it.

EMMERT: I think that goes back to what you were saying about the power of images. I think one of the things, at least in the United States, that so-called graphic novelists have had to struggle with is the idea of the comic book versus the graphic novel, that comic books, in the U. S. anyway, have been so long identified as children’s reading material, or superheroes or things like that, that were pretty innocuous; but then when you combine that with adult themes and adult illustrations, that sort of presses a hot button for folks.

BECHDEL: Yes. I see this Missouri case as part of the whole evolution of the graphic-novel form. In that way, I’m very honored to be a part of the fracas, as the discussion evolves about what this form is.

EMMERT: I don’t know how much you know about European graphic novels, but it’s a very different sort of approach in terms of the culture. When I was in France one time, I was outside of what one would call a comics store, I guess, and people in business suits with their briefcases are walking in to buy their comics. And it’s just a whole different way of thinking about the medium.

BECHDEL: You know, I didn’t know much about the European comics scene until quite recently. I was just in France last fall, and got a glimpse of that and also saw this huge body of work that I had no idea existed. It was incredible stuff, a lot of which hasn’t been translated here. I’ve never seen it.

EMMERT: Right, yeah. One of the things that I will give kudos to Fantagraphics for is the fact that they are trying to bring some of that to the United States, like their translation of Epileptic and Lewis Trondheim’s work, because it’s just totally unknown here. Again, not work for children; it’s for adults.

So it’s something that I would personally like to see, and I think your book does a lot to change that perception.

BECHDEL: Yeah, that makes me happy too, when people just talk about it as a book, and not as a graphic novel. The fact that it was Times’ #1 book, that hasn’t even really quite sunk in, yet, that’s just really mind-boggling to me. It’s very similar for me to my struggles as a marginalized minority artist. I was just living for the day when I could be a cartoonist instead a lesbian cartoonist. That’s very similar to wanting my book to be seen as a book and not a graphic book.

EMMERT: That was one of the things that excited me too, that it was seen as a book, or that it was seen as a nonfiction book —

BECHDEL: Yeah, yeah!

EMMERT: Or that it wasn’t classified as one of the top 10 graphic novels of the year, that it was classified as what it is: literature.

BECHDEL: Yeah. It has made a couple top-10 graphic-novel lists, but I’m kind of dismissive. I know that’s really wrong. I mean, I’m very grateful to be on any top-10 lists, whatever the category, but I can’t help feeling like, “What do you mean? It’s a great book!”

EMMERT: Has the mainstream success of Fun Home been celebrated as a good thing in the gay and lesbian media? Has there been any criticism from the community?

Fun Home ©2006 Alison Bechdel

BECHDEL: I haven’t heard any criticism. Mostly people seem really on board, you know? Really excited to see a subcultural artist who’s been kind of a community fixture for the past two decades cross over to a certain extent. I think the queer community has sort of taken it personally. People feel some ownership, like the book’s success is about them too. And of course it is.

EMMERT: Well, we’ll have to see what happens when all the comic awards come out this year, to see if you make any of those lists, the Harveys and the Eisners. [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: You know, I’ve never even understood those contests or entered any of them. That’s how out of the whole comics world I’ve been.

EMMERT: Well, you might end up in it, this year. ’Cause I would imagine it would be nominated for one of those.

BECHDEL: I haven’t even been to a big comics convention. This year I’m doing the trifecta: I’m going to Angoulême —

EMMERT: Oh wow!

BECHDEL: — San Diego, New York Comic Con, MoCCA.

EMMERT: I’ve only been to the San Diego Comic-Con and I don’t know how you can prepare anyone for that experience.

BECHDEL: I’m a little anxious about it.

EMMERT: It’s actually interesting, if you look at it as sort of social phenomenon. That’s how I do it. It’s easier to deal with than trying to take it all in, because it’s just kind of unbelievable.

I’m curious too, about the sale of your books. Obviously, with all the accolades that Fun Home is getting, has this helped increase the book’s sales, and has it also affected the sales of your other work?

BECHDEL: Well, it is having good sales. I just got a report, it’s like 40 or 45,000 copies, which, I don’t really even know what to make of that.

EMMERT: For a graphic novel, that’s really fantastic.

BECHDEL: When I’ve published Dykes collections, it would be great to sell 8 or 9,000 in the first year. So that’s my framework. So, this is just orders of magnitude beyond my experience. In terms of whether it’s affecting the sales of Dykes, I have no way of knowing that yet. I don’t think so, partly because many of them are difficult to get a hold of, many of the old books. But this is my great hope, that eventually the Fun Home frenzy will translate into more acceptance of the Dykes to Watch Out For books.

EMMERT: Were sales of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections mostly to gay/lesbian and women’s bookstores?

BECHDEL: Well, in the early days, they certainly were. But now there are only a handful of gay and women’s bookstores left. So … sometimes I can find Dykes to Watch Out For on the “gay and lesbian studies” or “gay fiction” shelf in a chain or independent bookstore. But not often. I don’t know where the bulk of them are sold nowadays. Maybe online?

a sample of Dykes to Watch Out For ©Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: How has being published by Houghton Mifflin, a big-name publisher, been different from your work with a small publisher in terms of editorial control and marketing?

BECHDEL: Light years different. I was a little anxious going in about what would happen editorially, whether people were going to try and make the book less … I don’t know. Queer. But that never, ever happened. My editor genuinely wanted this book to be itself, you know? And she really helped me to find its true shape. I’d never worked with an editor before, so that was a huge gift. And the marketing? Man, that was incredible. Partly, this was Houghton Mifflin’s first graphic novel, so I was the beneficiary of a lot of marketing and PR attention. I’d also been worried about getting lost at a big publisher, that I’d just be one of hundreds of authors, but that didn’t happen either. Working with small presses all those years, I worked with dedicated, talented people, but they had tremendously limited resources, and they were usually doing five or six jobs each. At Houghton, I had all these specialists — people focusing on the cover design, the bookstore displays, the media coverage. It was an unimaginable luxury.

(Continued)

To your left you see a modest block of wood — an illustration in relief — that provides the cover for issue #18 of Esopus, a New York-based arts magazine that employs a variety of paper stocks and presentational approaches to add a sense of tactility to interfacing with varied media – there’s posters, pull-outs, facsimile notes, photographs, and many other fragile things sure to raise paranoia in certain readers anxious to make sure nobody has stolen anything that was supposed to be included with a given issue.

Yet while the chips and cracks in the cover refer to a woodblock project by artist Bryan Nash Gill showcased therein, I can’t help but think of the fiber in the pulp of old comics; call me arrested, and unable to countenance a profound, challenging, passionate, political, intellectual history of art separate from my precious funnies, but even the organization of the artist’s project itself — presenting illustrated production notes for an installation at the Esopus Space in Greenwich Village as ‘paneled’ by pull-away wood frames — seemed to suggest a sequence of abstract comic images, a narrative of illustrated chipping via drawings of micro-focused paper, on paper.

Esopus does boast of a Mr. Daniel Clowes on its advisory board, however, so we can’t say they’re exactly comics-ignorant. Indeed, the new issue #18 proves to be an especially comics-rich issue, if often by way of artworks that can analogize to aspects of the comics form.

Here’s an example, your classic comics-as-part-of-collage, from City, by Mary Lum. I’m not sure of the identity, secret or otherwise, of caped crusader swooshing along the center — amusingly obscured by a window cut-out pattern, as if devoured by a skyscraper’s interior gaze — but we can all be certain that superhero characters navigating tall buildings is a potent image of the City in popular American culture. Blended with what appears to be catalog and illustration snippets and random bits of zip, Lum fashions an archetype, although her city is not immobile, and her incorporation of sequential art not a simple appropriation – rather, City is a sequential collage, a nine-page story comprised of die-cut images that allow the reader to peer through one level and into another, and then flip the page to navigate deeper into the City, into different visual sensations and groupings of subject matter, until you ironically find yourself faced on the last page with a brief cut-up text drawn from works like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Breakfast At Tiffany’s; we have moved from the abstraction of image to the solidification of prose, but even our words for the City are built from a wider cultural context.

Often, however, the Artist’s Projects shown in Esopus are actually production materials from other projects, housed in the gallery/magazine and thus contextualized as standalone pieces of art. The image above is from a 16-page suite of storyboard images artist Bill Burns prepared for his 2011 photography book Dogs and Boats and Airplanes told in the form of Ivan the Terrible, a homage to a Sergei Eisenstein classic itself not uninfluenced by drawn matters, specifically the animated films of Walt Disney, series of still drawings photographed together in a manner that tantalized the montage-minded Russian master. You don’t need me, meanwhile, to tell you of the similarities between storyboards and comics panels, though the particular layout of Burns’ pages adopt a nice, tight grid format — almost always nine panels — in addition to showing linework pleasingly reminiscent of Ben Katchor.

Nobody will mistake an actual movie for a comic, yet putting movies on paper implicates the notions of layout and pacing. Esopus‘ irregular 100 Frames feature breaks a noteworthy film down into 100 characteristic frames, and then presents them on pages clearly informed by comics pacing – some of them in grids, and some of them with blown-up panels meant obviously to control the impact of the narration, because these are very much unique narrations of films, though the people behind the layouts are unknown. This issue features Ode, a 1999 Super-8 short by Kelly Reichardt (of Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff); I was thrilled to see the above use of the classic EC introductory page layout, with a 2/3s splash up top and a tier of panels down bottom, although this is sadly not the beginning of the movie itself. Nonetheless, from here you can see into a world where photo-funnies hit faster and way harder, with the eerie impact shot serving as a watery reflection for the stilted, doomed embrace of the young lovers below; the boy will eventually drown himself in angst over his homosexuality, and will only rise from the dead in the memory of a female temporary focus confused of his confused affections.

All this is prelude, however, to a most curious coincidence. Witness above a Found Object, which Esopus characterizes as a “collage,” assembled by an unknown party and discovered by professional image archivist Rich Remsberg in a Vermont shop sometime in 2004. Hopefully in the quarter bin.

Literally everybody reading this column will understand what they’re seeing in a specific way: a collection of Donald Duck daily strips from the early 1950s, drawn by Al Taliaferro. They’ve been clipped and assembled in order of publication, just as all the fancy hardcover books do now in our Golden Age of Reprints. In fact, it might be assemblages of this sort that provide source materials for those very books, so common in format that they’re barely worth remarking upon save for the specifics of their narrative content.

Esopus, however, contextualizes it as freestanding collage; art by the terms of its construction. Printed in lush color so as to emphasize the coverage of the comics over other materials — apparently bits of magazine below — all attention is drawn to the particulars of the page as a visual presentation, rather than as the novelistic (let’s say) arrangement of daily strips for easy reading in big clumps; novelistic as in set out like a book you can read without interruption from beginning to end. The ‘interruption’ here is the very stuff of the art, in contrast.

I’m of two minds about this approach – Chip Kidd used a similar technique in his Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, which emphasized the age and kitsch in Jiro Kuwata’s comics, accompanying them with adoringly photographed toys and memorabilia, to the effect of denying Kuwata’s art the liveliness it possessed as breathing narrative art of a youthful velocity. On the other hand, I often feel that unencumbered books, arranging strips in perfect order for maximum reading efficiency, encourage a novelistic approach to reading that obscures the appeal of works like Krazy Kat, which operate to my mind on a more poetic, self-contained level, at least in the Sundays.

There’s no easy answer in matters of casual consumption – really, readers should just remain alert as to what they’re reading, and try to be sensitive to the work. At least in an arts magazine, the context in which the work appears can guide the reader’s impression in a more controlled manner, just as those expensive Artist’s Edition books of old comics — again, printed in color, emphasizing there the very act of the creation of the page, arguably more so than the narrative being presented — essentially dictate the manner in which it should best be read. But then, I tend to resist such instruction, grateful as I am for options, and the opportunity to study the variations of presentation that sequential narratives can accommodate.

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PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

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SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

The Comic Book History of Comics: Being an IDW collection of all six issues of the well-regarded Evil Twin Comics series Comic Book Comics, a history-by-way-of-vignettes endeavor that writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey released from 2008 through 2011. It comes to 224 pages in total. Many samples; $21.99.

Judge Dredd: Crusade: This is another Simon & Schuster custom compilation of 2000 AD stuff for the North American market, here focusing for 96 pages on the very bankable superhero names of Mark Millar & Grant Morrison; the latter was not prolific Dredd contributor — and his contributions, mostly written in collaboration with Millar, are frankly not counted among the better of his or the character’s outings — so the less motivated among completists will no doubt be interested. Collects the storylines Crusade (Morrison/Millar, 1995, art by Mick Austin; judges on a quest to find God) and Frankenstein Div (Millar, 1994, art by Carlos Ezquerra; Dredd vs. some huge fucking thing). Note that Morrison’s other two major Dredd stories, Inferno (’93, solo-written, w’ Ezquerra) and Book of the Dead (’93, w’ Millar & Dermot Power) are collected stateside in, respectively, the forthcoming Judge Dredd: Inferno (July ’12) and 2010′s MegaCity Masters 02 anthology. Douglas Wolk review; $19.99.

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PLUS!

Batman, Incorporated #1: In more recent Morrison news, we now see the DC relaunch contort to accommodate storylines that didn’t manage to finish before this no-doubt meticulously-planned endeavor took flight, specifically the finale to the writer’s half-decade-plus tenure on the genre fixture. Art by Chris Burnham, a talented and rapidly-developing visualist who’s already become tightly associated with this iteration of the character. I think this should continue all year. Preview; $2.99.

Dungeon: Zenith Vols. 1-3: Nothing new here, just a re-released package (maybe with a paper ribbon around ‘em) of NBM’s three collected softcover editions for the original 1998-2007 Joann Sfar/Lewis Trondheim series — which is to say, the six albums released in the first series, without the timeline leaping in the future or past — the last two of which are actually drawn by freshly-minted internet favorite Gilles “Boulet” Roussel, which is probably reason enough to get ‘em back in stores. They’re all 6 1/2″ x 9″, note. Various samples; $39.99.

Deadpool MAX: Involuntary Armageddon: For a while, this David Lapham/Kyle Baker reorientation of the fan-pleasing Deadpool franchise of superhero self-mockery — which, as Abhay Khosla once observed, is basically a variant of the old fan-pleasing Lobo franchise of superhero self-mockery, with Family Guy/internet meme-type ‘random’ humor in place of some of the comedy violence — had gotten itself a bunch of attention for its comparatively droll lampooning of the entire superhero idea as the fantasies of hopelessly damaged professional killers, married to some genuinely odd and uninhibited Baker art. Attention fell off as the series proceeded, but tardy sorts can now enjoy a softcover collection of the second third of the series (i.e. Deadpool MAX #7-12) to go along with last week’s hardcover collection of the final third (Deadpool MAX: Second Cut); $19.99.

Marvel Masterworks’ Atlas Era Journey Into Mystery Vol. 4: This is part of Marvel’s never-ending, high-priced line of vintage materials in hardcover, notable here for collecting artist Steve Ditko’s very first work with the publisher — a beneficiary of the post-Code horror artists diaspora — via a four-page shocker from Journey Into Mystery #33 (1956). You’ll recall, of course, that Spider-Man eventually emerged from from a similarly EC-inflected twist ending in Amazing Fantasy #15, which marks that most Marvel of characters as uniquely positioned in Ditko’s storytelling background. But anyway, this is Journey Into Mystery #31-40, with Joe Sinnott, Gene Colan, Bob Powell, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, Bernard Krigstein, Wally Wood and others; $64.99.

Adventures Into the Unknown! Archives Vol. 1: Yet proper pre-Code horror comics are just inches away (in this hypothetical comics shop of yours that stocks everything), as Dark Horse brings a 216-page hardcover collection of the first four issues from the B&I/American Comics Group’s 1948-67 anthology, an early adopter. With art by Al Feldstein, Leonard Starr, Fred Guardineer and others, plus an introduction by Bruce Jones, of a later generation’s horror corps. Samples; $49.99.

Golden Age Western Comics: I’ve never heard of powerHouse Books before today, but they’ve got a 144-page hardcover collection of ’40s and ’50s cowboy comics out this week, and I’m often inclined to give an unfamiliar publisher a flip-through. Edited by Steven Brower, primary textual contributor to the Fantagraphics-published From Shadow to Light: The Life and Art of Mort Meskin (2010). Samples; $24.95.

Youngblood #71: These Extreme Studios relaunch books appear to be getting more orthodox as they go along, but maybe the ’90s children among you will appreciate this 20th Anniversary issue of the original Rob Liefeld creation, now written by comics debutante John J. McLaughlin (among the credited screenwriters on the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan), with artists Jon Malin & Liefeld himself. Note also that Prophet #25 is out this week, concluding Farel Dalrymple’s short run as artist & co-plotter debuting artist Giannis Milonogiannis of Old City Blues, and leading into a solo issue by writer Brandon Graham; $2.99.

Dark Horse Presents #12: Can you call this a relaunch too? Probably – and it’s stuffed full of old-timey treats, including a new Nexus story by Mike Baron & Steve Rude, a new Mister X story by Dean Motter, and an Aliens piece from artist Sam Kieth, written by John Layman of Chew. Other features, some continuing, will fill the 80 pages. Samples; $7.99.

Hero Comics 2012: Being one of those comic book-format benefit anthologies, here a 32-page IDW project for the Hero Initiative. Among the promoted features are an Elephantmen story drawn by Dave Sim(!), a Zombies Vs. Robots story drawn by Ashley Wood, and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story drawn by Kevin Eastman. And, apparently, Darwyn Cooke lettering & coloring Russ Heath; $3.99.

Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics: Finally, your book-on-comics for the week, also from the heretofore mysterious powerHouse – not a standard history, it doesn’t appear, but a series of profiles from writer Christopher Irving and photographer Seth Kushner (both of Graphic NYC), hitting periods of comic book development via Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Al Jaffee, Neal Adams, Art Spiegelman, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, Alex Ross, Chris Ware and Jill Thompson; $35.00.

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CONFLICT OF INTEREST RESERVOIR: What? Ditko? Reprints? Yeah, there’s more of those in Mysterious Traveler: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 3, another 240-page hardcover from editor Blake Bell; $39.99. And another Ignatz series finds itself collected as Gabriella Giandelli’s Interiorae is seen, for the first time in English, in its original muted full-color state; $19.99.

The question was mischievously posed by V.T. Hamlin, who knew perfectly well that science long ago established that humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. But for Hamlin, they did—albeit only on paper in the inked figments of his imagination, the characters of his celebrated comic strip, Alley Oop. Unlikely as his strip’s milieu was, Hamlin surpassed it all in his own life. His birth was inauspicious for a master of one of the visual arts: for the first six months of his life, he was blind—a condition that returned, with bitter poetic irony, the last six years of his life. For the first decade of his adulthood, he was very nearly everything but a cartoonist. He helped build highway bridges, worked with paving gangs, engaged in semi-pro boxing, cranked a movie projector, and drove trucks. He was a map-maker, oil field artist, feature and sports writer, photo war correspondent, art director, general all-around hobo, and newspaper photographer. Outlandish as this combination of experiences may be, it was, apparently, good training for his life’s work. 

“Maybe being a press photographer wasn’t my dish,” Hamlin said later, “but my editorial superiors seemed to think my work was top notch, so I was stuck with it. Looking back, it’s now pretty clear it was from behind a press camera that I got most of my experience and usable knowledge about people that eventually put me onto the comic pages and kept me there for forty years.”

Vincent Trout Hamlin arrived on May 10, 1900 in Perry, Iowa, the son of Frederick Clarence Hamlin, a dentist, and Erma Garland Trout, housewife. Born prematurely, Hamlin was always small (never more than five-foot-six, 150 pounds) but enjoyed playing sports, particularly football. Drawing from an early age, he received little formal instruction until entering college. As a youth, he delivered newspapers and ran the projector at a local movie theater. While in high school, he contributed cartoons to the local paper, learned photography, and, playing football, broke his drawing hand, the first in a series of fractures and injuries that plagued him all his life, resulting, finally, in his claiming to have broken every bone in his body by the time he was thirty.

In April 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and before his seventeenth birthday, Hamlin quit school, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Army with seven of his high school chums. Overseas, he served as a truck driver with the Sixth Army’s 307^th Motor Transport Group. He was hospitalized twice, once with the flu and once after falling into a canal, but was under fire in only the last weeks of the war. Hamlin’s outfit was poised to assault the fortified city of Metz. “My God!” Hamlin exclaimed, remembering the situation. “If we had been ordered to take that under fire, I don’t think any of us would have survived.” But the War suddenly ended.

“On November 11,” Hamlin said, “the firing stopped. It was tremendous! All of a sudden—silence! You have no idea what that silence was like. We had been listening to that goddamn war for days. Then all of a sudden, it was quiet.”

Discharged in the summer of 1919, Hamlin resumed his high school career that fall, lettering in football. He did not finish his senior year or get a diploma, but while drawing cartoons for the yearbook, he met his future wife, the editor, Grace Dorothy Stapleton, who was two years younger than he. He drove a cement truck for a local construction company until September 1920, when, with a veteran’s dispensation in lieu of a highschool diploma, he enrolled at the University of Missouri. Hamlin took courses in journalism, history, and art but was dismissed from the latter after quarreling with the instructor.

The art teacher looked at Hamlin’s conventional rendering of a tiger and said it was “the work of a truly fine artist, but he wants to perjure this God-given gift to become a cartoonist.” Hamlin said: “When she gave me my tiger back, I proceeded to paint on a top hat, put spats on his feet, a cigar in his mouth and a cane in the crook of his tail. After that, I was out.” He left a dissatisfied customer of academia: “I didn’t like the fact that I was spending money to get what I wanted, but [wasn't getting it]. That didn’t make any difference to them: I got what they wanted to give me.”

He completed the semester and then left for Des Moines, Iowa, where he was accepted at Drake University. Working nights as a reporter at the Des Moines Register, he enjoyed the work so much that he quit school altogether. “It seemed,” he said, “I was well on the way—until one evening a smart-mouthed editorial hotshot provoked me to smack him flat onto the night city editor’s lap and got me fired.” Hamlin returned to Perry. One day he went target shooting with his father, an expert marksman, whose gun inexplicably exploded and buried a bullet in his son’s left leg. While recuperating, Hamlin spent a good deal of time getting to know Dorothy Stapleton better. After recovering, he began a peripatetic life, traveling widely for the next eight years in search of jobs and a career.

He hopped a late-night passenger train to Sioux City, but he found no openings in newspapers there or in Omaha. So he continued westward, as he recounted in his unpublished autobiography, The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs: “On a Union Pacific freight train with half a hundred other job-seeking ex-servicemen, I rode the hump west out of Cheyenne, on past Ogden, Utah, Reno and Sparks, Nevada, through miles and miles of snow sheds and tunnels. Times were tough, but they taught me to make a dime do a dollar’s work for a healthy, hungry stomach. Roseville, California, just north of Sacramento, took my last dime for doughnuts and coffee in a little place where one could get the most for his money. It wasn’t too discouraging. I’d met up with some pretty nice guys, learned to wash up in a hobo jungle, along with a gaggle of other bits of important information—like making a serving of soup for free in a stand-up all-night restaurant by crumbling a handful of crackers into a glass of one-half catsup and water. North through Oregon, I dropped off to see my Aunt Mary’s old place in Salem, which I had visited with my mother back in 1908. Although Mary had been gone for many years, the weather-beaten old house by the brook was still there, as was the old Y streetcar line that ended two blocks away at the little grocery where we used to get those yummy cocoanut macaroons.”

From Salem, Hamlin went through Portland to Settle where his uncle, Frank Day, got him a job on the Seattle Star as a substitute for a vacationing reporter. “It was an exciting ten days,” Hamlin wrote, “devoted mostly to coverage of a famous bank robber’s escape from McNeil Island federal prison.” Then the reporter returned, and Hamlin “sadly boarded a string of eastbound flats” through Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota back to Perry, where his mother persuaded his father to finance a correspondence course for him in newspaper art. The “dean” of the correspondence school subsequently recommended Hamlin for a short-lived job with a Des Moines advertising agency and then in the art department of the Texas Grubstaker in Fort Worth, where, on May 29, 1922, he became the cartoonist and head of the department. And a Texan.

Hamlin’s varied journalistic career as reporter, artist and/or photographer continued in Houston and, briefly, in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, as well as in Forth Worth. He also worked in advertising agencies in assorted locales and drew maps of oil fields in Texas. It was in Texas that he took his first airplane ride and subsequently did aerial photography of oil fields. Then he turned to semi-professional boxing for awhile and broke his drawing hand again; “I had glass hands,” he said later. In the spring of 1927, he went to California and took and passed a film test in Hollywood but didn’t find work in the motion picture industry. Back in Texas, he photographed the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston and, in 1929, took his camera to Mexico to cover a short-lived revolution, and survived a plane crash on the return trip. He wasn’t injured, but by then his body had been abused plenty.

Recalling his Texas newspapering career, Hamlin said, “While I was covering newsworthy events in the oil and cattle country with a camera, I fractured my spine, broke my right wrist once and my nose three times. I also stopped hot lead twice.” In later life, Hamlin looked the part he’d played: he was a short man with a lopsided face, and his crooked grin sported a scar on the upper lip.

But his life wasn’t all work and abuse. “Girls?” he asked rhetorically in his autobiography. “You bet. In that business, you meet lots of people, and as any press cameraman could tell you, there’s far more women in the world than men, and a goodly number are young, warm, and good-looking. I dated my share of those fair young Texas lovelies—clerks, students, secretaries, a waitress or two, all nice kids and good company.”

But the memory of “a girl back in Iowa” brought him back to Perry in the summer of 1926. “Perhaps dazzled by her suitor’s opulence, as evidenced by his flashy, six-cylinder buggy, she looked with favor on the suggestion that she become a Texan—legally, of course.” Dorothy became Hamlin’s wife on December 24, 1926, and within a year, they had a daughter; a son was born nine years later. Dorothy was with him on his California jaunt in the spring of 1927, and, as she would countless times in the future, she bailed him out, pawning her engagement ring to get traveling money for their return to Fort Worth. It was a picaresque trip.

“We spent the first night asleep in the car in a driving rainstorm on Donner Pass,” Hamlin wrote. “I don’t remember the exact route or many of the places we passed through. … We had one canvas army cot and a couple of blankets, but we managed to sleep well, warm and snug, through the vast high country. At Geen River, Wyoming, we just had to take on a substantial meal even though it left our treasury with barely enough to make it to Fort Collins, Colorado. A newspaperman’s gift of five dollars helped us along to a telegraph office in Denver, and Dorothy’s mother wired us a bundled to see us from Blossom Bend in South Denver over Raton Pass and Texline, where we once again put our feet under a restaurant table loaded with pancakes and sausage. Fort Worth was not far away, and our faithful roadster was performing like a hungry colt headed downhill for the barn.”

In Fort Worth, Hamlin made a deal with the editor of an oil industry newspaper to supply whatever editorial art he needed in exchange for free office space and telephone privileges. He then “corralled a remuda” of former clients “who seemed pleased to have their map man back.” In the ensuing months while researching illustration material for the Texas Oil World, Hamlin assembled a quantity of paleo-geological knowledge that awakened an interest in prehistoric periods that would finally find expression in Alley Oop, moving from fossil fuel to fossils themselves and the ancient life forms they represent.

Throughout the epic of this decade, Hamlin’s interest in cartooning persisted. In 1923 while at the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, the paper’s circulation manager, Harold Hough, persuaded him to do a comic strip based upon Hough’s daily performance as a comical hired hand on a local radio program. Resurrecting a visage he had concocted as a youth, inspired by the Irish caricature in such comic strips as Happy Hooligan, Hamlin adapted it to Hough’s appearance, and The Hired Hand at WBAP ran as a four-panel comic strip for several weeks, garnering enough popularity to be reprinted in a booklet in March 1924. A minor character in the strip was a secretary named “Dot.”

As Hamlin hoped, the feature attracted the attention of “crusty old Wallace Simpson, the Telegram’s cowboy artist,” and Hamlin was transferred into the art department. There, he did a daily two-column cartoon about the Forth Worth baseball team, The Panther Kitten, whose face, minus a few feline modifications, looked not unlike the simian-visaged Alley Oop would look a decade later. Pictures of the animal conveyed in an instant the fate of the team.

“One look at the Kitten on the sports page,” Hamlin said, “and you knew how the home team fared that day. A happy cat denoted a victory while an unhappy or angry one indicated that some club like Shreveport or Wichita Falls had clobbered them. These cartoons were drawn some time in advance and covered every possible contingency, even rain-outs,” so the editor could slip one into print without delay. When the Panthers’ hopes for a pennant were dashed that summer for the first time in years by the Dallas Steers, Hamlin said, his “damned black cat” got the blame. Subsequently, at the Houston Press late in 1928, he experimented with a strip about a flapper, Flip and Flap, but lost interest and gave it up. In 1929, Hamlin found a position at the Des Moines Register-Tribune as foreman of the seven-person art department, and he got serious about working up comic strip ideas.

“I was turning thirty,” he wrote, “and if I was ever going to get into comics, I had better get started. To get my foot in the door, I knew it was necessary to come up with a subject not only of which I had a working knowledge, but one differing from what was currently running in the comic sections.”

The domestic theme was already being exploited by Toots and Casper, Bringing Up Father, Gasoline Alley, Polly and Her Pals, and others; “kid stuff” was over-crowded with Skippy, Freckles, Reg’lar Fellers, Smitty, Orphan Annie, and so on. Joe Palooka and Barney Google “took care of sports.” The adventure field was on the cusp of its greatest years, but even before Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates, Hamlin saw Wash Tubbs and Hairbreadth Harry and Tailspin Tommy as filling the niche adequately.

Then Dorothy bailed him out.  “My wife,” he explained, “kept insisting I experiment with a comic based on my knowledge of the past.” And suddenly, that seemed to fit. As Hamlin put it: “My admiration for Dick Calkins’ work [on Buck Rogers], a beautifully executed story strip concerned with the distant future, had definitely inspired me [to become a comic strip cartoonist]. The challenge, as I saw it, was to come up with a storyline in such great contrast to Buck’s futuristic tale [that] they would just have to go together. I would go ‘way back into the dinosaur age that only an imagination fueled by geological lore could dream up; an area as yet untouched by the boys at the drawing boards. I called it the bone age. I still do.

“We settled on what we felt would have an outstanding eye appeal. We’d do a strip that featured dinosaurs. That subject would be just the ticket for a couple of ambitious young folks from Texas where Sinclair Oil Company had made the big prehistoric reptiles a startling advertising showpiece. Not only did we choose dinosaurs for their spectacular appeal, but we thought they’d be funny—like the big Plymouth Rock chickens that amused me as a child on my grandparent’s farm. They were funny in their dignified dumbness, and, somehow, [they were] dinosaur-like. They reminded me of the big two-legged variety I loved to draw with mouths full of big sharp teeth.

“So the first character I dreamed up and perfected,” Hamlin continued, “was Dinny the Dinosaur, a big fellow some forty feet long with a row of upright pointed plates along his spine from head to tail, a head more avian than reptile with a big mouth full of tyrannosaurus-type teeth. I can assure you no paleontological dig will ever unearth the skeletal remains of a creature such as my beloved cartoonosaurus.

“In creating Dinny for my story’s purpose, considerable care was taken to construct a creature to look like a dinosaur, but to be distinguishable from all others of that or any other geological period. The body was a cross between a camarasaurus and a diplodocus, the spinal plates slightly similar to those of a stegosaurus and the head, mouth and all, came right off a Bluebook magazine cover illustration by Herbert Morton Stoops, one of the most inspiring illustrators of that grand period of pulp magazine adventure fiction. The critter wasn’t put together all in one day either, but once assembled, I had a feeling he was going to take me and my characters a lot of places—and he did.” Later, Hamlin speculated that Sinclair Oil, in adopting a giant green lizard dinosaur as its symbol, boosted the popularity of dinosaurs in the popular imagination.

Hamlin’s first use of his cartoonosaurus was in a strip about a modern family living in prehistoric times among the dinosaurs, but he soon abandoned that idea in favor of a strip about the adventures of a cave man. Entitled Oop the Mighty, it paired its eponymous protagonist with Dinny. After spending the year 1930 developing it, Hamlin decided the work was unsatisfactory. “And so, before the eyes of my astonished family, my wife Dorothy and little daughter Teddy, I pitched the whole batch into the fireplace and sadly watched them disappear in flames.”

But the caveman idea haunted him during a summer trip [1931] to northern Minnesota, and while taking up fly fishing, Hamlin re-imagined his concept and gave Oop a first name, and when he returned to Des Moines, he produced his first Alley Oop strips. “Dinny was the subject of the feature’s first story,” Hamlin remembered, “which began when our hero, deep in the jungle in search of some choice morsel for dinner, happened upon the huge monster hopelessly entrapped in a tangle of tough—and I do mean tough—undergrowth. Alley’s first thought was that this was a bonanza of good red meat, enough to feed everyone in the kingdom for days to come.” But Oop decides, instead, to free the creature, and when he does, Dinny, in gratitude, becomes the cave man’s devoted pet forever after.

“Sound familiar?” Hamlin wrote. “Yes, it was a definite literary theft, stolen, no doubt, from some Aesop’s fable I’d read about a chap who’d removed a nasty thorn from the paw of a lion.” Hamlin couldn’t remember exactly how he came up with his cave man’s name. Considering his service in France during World War I, though, he once supposed that Oop’s name was probably inspired by a French term used by tumblers (allez oop) because “Oop is really a roughhouse tumbler.” Later, Hamlin discovered a translation of the expression that means “all of us.”

The first story, says Lee Castro, an Alley Oop devotee, was “exuberantly unique—a heady concoction of fast-paced slapstick, elegant farce, occasional satire, and nightmarish monsters served up with an air of wild abandon … a perfectly balanced farcical chase sequence in miniature, complete with pratfalls, reversals, and plenty of thrills, chills and spills. All this and scores of ferociously funny dinosaurs—who could ask for anything more?”

Hamlin took Alley Oop first to the outfit that distributed his much-admired Buck Rogers, but John Dille Syndicate rejected it: saying it “neither fish nor fowl,” they apparently couldn’t decide how to market it. Hamlin then responded to an ad in the Chicago Tribune asking for comic strip submissions, and a small syndicate, Bonnett-Brown, bought Alley Oop. “This little Chicago outfit,” Hamlin wrote later, “was what was known in those days as a patent medicine syndicate. They did a business with small, mostly rural publications, trading various kinds of novelty features for valuable advertising space.”

Dinny and Alley Oop debuted on December 5, 1932, and, Hamlin reported, it quickly “proved to be Bonnett-Brown’s headliner, and in no time at all was being published in some 35-40 papers.” But Bonnett-Brown, struggling through the Depression, did not survive the winter; it went out of business, and Alley Oop ceased with the strip dated March 2, 1933.

But the newspapers who’d subscribed to the strip wanted more of it, and some of them appealed to the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Cleveland-based syndicate, whose editors (one of whom Hamlin had met while covering the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston) agreed that Alley Oop was a good candidate—a brand new “reader tested” strip ready for the taking. But by then, no one knew who to talk to about a contract—or where to find Hamlin. Then one of the NEA salesmen found the answer pinned to the wall over a reporter’s desk in Fairbault, Minnesota—a hand-colored Alley Oop Christmas card, complete with Hamlin’s address. The reporter (whose name Hamlin neglected to mention when telling this story) had been in the bed next to Hamlin’s when he was recovering in an army hospital from the flu in 1918. The two struck up an acquaintance based, at first, upon the other man’s coming from Fairbault, a town not too far north of Perry.

“He wrote letters home,” Hamlin recalled during an interview with Castro (The Comics Journal, No. 212; May 1999), “and I illustrated them for him. He was a newsman, and he suggested that I go into the newspaper business. After Alley Oop got started with Bonnett-Brown, I sent him a Christmas card to prove that I’d followed his advice—even though I’d decided to do that before he’d suggested it.”

Hamlin re-drew and refined the opening sequence of the strip for an August 7, 1933 re-launch with NEA and moved to Cleveland. In those days—until Roy Crane broke the tradition—NEA liked its cartoonists and columnists to live close at hand. Once Dinny is established as Oop’s pet and comrade-in-arms, we meet the rest of the Moovians: King Guz of Moo (who begins a long rivalry with Oop when he tries to steal Dinny), his wife Umpateedle (a formidable battle-axe), and the delectable cave girl, Ooola, Oop’s inamorata. (The name has its origins in the same language that produced allez oop with another expression that American soldiers might have employed when on leave and witnessing on the streets of Paris any particularly attractive members of the opposing sex, “Ooh la-la!”) Oop’s best friend Foozy (who speaks in rhyme, an inspiration of Dorothy’s) completes the initial ensemble; later, Hamlin added a conniving shaman, the Grand Wizer. Alley Oop went on having adventures in the monster-infested jungles and swamps of prehistoric Moo for the next six years. Survival in this milieu required the toughest sort of protagonist, and Hamlin made Oop just that.

Alley Oop of the early strips is an obstreperous, belligerent, club-wielding cave man. And if he isn’t actually looking for a fight everywhere he goes, he nonetheless finds one nearly everywhere. Not only does he have the prickly disposition of a brawler, he has the appearance of a strong man. Hamlin gave his cave man a great barrel chest and a bewhiskered bullet-head with no neck (and no ears), and then he chanced upon the same device that E.C. Segar had used in showing Popeye’s strength (but not consciously imitating Segar). Instead of making Oop’s biceps bulge with power, Hamlin bunched his hero’s muscles right behind his fists in ballooning forearms, a ploy that gave ham-fisted a visual metaphor. Oop emerges at once as a fighter to reckon with.

And his foes must reckon on more than just the cave man’s strength. Dinny’s friendship makes Oop a formidable figure in a scrap: no opponent can stand long against a man who has a dinosaur to do his bidding. His own great physical prowess backed up by Dinny, Oop develops a colossal self-confidence as a fighting man. Supremely secure in the knowledge of his own physical superiority over just about any circumstance, Oop proves to be virtually indestructable. (In one adventure, he stays under water for days without showing the slightest discomfort or alarm.) He’s brave without reservation, and he likes nothing better than a good fight. Although he is occasionally bested momentarily, he almost always triumphs at feats requiring physical strength or military cunning. Pugnacious and cranky—even somewhat peevish—Oop is quite unflappable in a crisis. Unflappable and invincible—and therefore nearly uncontrollable. Only Ooola can control him.

Ooola is a genuine hard case. Although she is beautiful (and Hamlin’s treatment of her costumes always reveals her figure to advantage), she is not at all feminine in the traditional cringing manner of an adventure tales’s damsel in distress. Ooola can think rings around Oop, and if she can’t control him by out-smarting him, she is not above resorting to a swift right hook, which she can deploy as effectively as Oop uses his stone axe.

Hamlin was a little cagey about the relationship between Oop and Ooola. They were pretty clearly emotionally attached to each other: one would display jealousy if the other showed any interest in a member of the opposing gender. Ooola occasionally referred to Oop as her “boyfriend,” so we know they were, in her mind anyhow, more than mere acquaintances. But in the 1930s through the 1950s, one had to be careful about how such romances were conducted and described. Hamlin remembered getting many questions about it. “Ooola was a pretty nice looking dish as females go, about as delectable as I could draw her [Dorothy was Hamlin's model], and it goes without saying that her male companion was a pretty healthy looking animal—and they spent lots of time together. Therefore such questions were not only routine, they were quite flattering as to my ability to breathe life into my pen-and-ink creations.”

But Hamlin never revealed whether the two were, er, intimate. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he never showed them even kissing—or holding hands.

“Alley was just a big blundering chauvinist,” Hamlin told Lee Castro. “Oh, he was a nice guy. He wasn’t a womanizer. He was very careful to keep his hands off of Ooola. I don’t know what he did behind the scenes,” he gave a high-pitched giggle. “I did a script on that one time—I guess it was about 1965—but I showed it to my wife, and she just raised hell about it. She said, ‘Don’t you dare do that!’” To the basic question, he said, “I plead nolo contendre.”

(Continued)

In 1933 a newspaper columnist described Otto Soglow as “a great cutup” who “clowns all over the place” at parties, livening up the scene with magic tricks and jokes. This convivial portrait of Soglow as a merry prankster is reinforced by the photos that adorn Jared Gardner’s introduction to the new collection Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King. One photo shows Soglow cheerfully parading his legs in a mock all-male chorus line made up of members of the National Cartoonists Society. In another snapshot Soglow wears a broad grin as he displays the power of a waterproof pen by drawing his signature character the Little King on swimming trunks worn by a zaftig model.

Soglow clearly belonged to the tribe of tricksters, so it is entirely fitting that he earned a sly tribute from one of the great harlequins of literature, Vladimir Nabokov. In his memoir Speak, Memory (original edition 1951), the novelist describes his younger self surveying his early literary production: “The ranks of words I reviewed were again so glowing, with their puffed-out little chests and trim uniforms….” In a later edition to the book, Nabokov called attention to this sentence and rather kittenishly lamented that not one reviewer discovered that it contained “the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him.” To turn Soglow into “so glowing” is a bit of a strained pun but the sentence as a whole is a nifty encapsulation of the cartoonist’s work, which is rife with shimmering parades of soldiers and guards neatly arrayed in their dapper uniforms with their balloon-like little chests sticking out.

September 9, 1934

Nabokov’s tip-of-the-hat to Soglow offers a clue to the cartoonist’s appeal. Like the author of Lolita and Pale Fire, Soglow specialized in the comedy of the unexpected, the humor of surprise, the mirth of looking at the world from an unexpected angle. The Little King was a long-lived strip — it started as a recurring feature in The New Yorker in 1930 and was syndicated in newspapers as a weekly feature from 1934 until Soglow’s death in 1975. Despite its longevity, The Little King relied on variations of one joke: the King is surrounded by courtiers and subjects who diligently obey the rules of high state which the sovereign playfully subverts.

The Little King is the court jester in his own castle. Here is a rundown of the King’s actions in the first few strips: he uses a banner stretched out before his balcony as a tightrope; he holds up a wet paint sign after his throne room is painted; he parachutes off a plane while seated in his throne; he uses a cardboard cut-up of himself to take over the tedious job of watching soldiers march; he tries to calm his wailing princeling by having the butler push him and the baby in circles in a go-cart.

September 16, 1934

The essence of the carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin has taught us, involves turning the world upside-down, with kings are reduced to beggars and beggars are showered with gifts. In that sense, The Little King is a profoundly carnivalesque strip.

These strips set the tone for the entire run of The Little King. Occasionally Soglow will make a nod in the direction of the daily news, as in 1940 when he introduced Ookle the Dictator, a recurring character for the next few years or in the post-war strips about UFOs. But such topical strips are the exception and Soglow’s focus rarely shifts from the central comedy of the Little King’s carnivalesque upturning of the social order. Soglow’s monarch is a very democratic ruler, a problem-solver with a talent for finding unconventional solutions, a lord who is not afraid of getting his hands dirty and indeed consorts with such lowly subjects as hobos and sewer workers.

May 5, 1940 — the first apperance of Ookle

The gleeful mood of the strip would be impossible without Soglow’s art. As Ivan Brunetti notes in his sharp foreword to this book, “The Little King wouldn’t be funny unless there was some sense that dignity and decorum exist within the strip’s universe. The sleek and concentrated drawing creates a background of rigidity, rules, convention, and correctness, which the titular character impishly circumvents and happily, without malice, violates.”

The puffed-out chests that Nabokov called attention to are a clue as to the way Soglow’s drawings create a clash between hide-bound propriety and irrepressible mischief-making. The puffed-out chests all belong to courtiers, soldiers, guards, and other figures who have their noses in the air as they carry out their appointed rounds. The monarch that they serve, by contrast, is a much earthier figure with his beach-ball belly hanging low to the ground. Since we always see him in profile, the Little King is very close to being a playing-card monarch (and indeed in one strip serves as a model for a playing card). He’s a marvel of character design, with his jutting half-rectangular nose, canoe-shaped beard, and emblematic crown (a triangle and three circles: a nice example of Soglow’s tendency to reduce images to Euclidian geometric purity).

Otto Soglow was one of the major stylists in the history of comics. Along with a handful of other artist — Hergé, Gluyas Williams, Rea Irvin — he was a central instigator in the stylistic revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s that created the clear line style. Of course, early Art Deco-influenced cartoonists like George McManus had laid the groundwork for the clear line, but Soglow and his contemporaries purged Deco of any ornamentalism and developed a cartooning language that united elegance with minimal but forceful line work.

November 19, 1967

One of the great strengths of Cartoon Monarch is that it gives us a very generous sample of Soglow’s work from many facets of his career so that we can see that the clear line style was a hard won victory for the cartoonist. Rather surprisingly, Soglow started off as a student of such Ash Can School masters as Robert Henri, George Luks, and John French Sloan. Like them, he specialized in charcoal-dark representations of urban squalor (some of which appeared in radical publications like The New Masses).

Soglow’s move to the clear line wasn’t a complete break from his earlier art since he continued to do anecdotal art about urban life, but his art started to become more line-focused and less shadowy as he became a fixture in The New Yorker, where the Little King first appeared in 1930. I’d speculate that Rea Irwin was an influence. Contractual wrangling with the New Yorker seems to have prevented Soglow from immediately moving the monarch to newspapers when the Hearst Syndicate hired him in 1933. As a stop-gap measure, Soglow created The Ambassador, who was the Little King in everything except title and facial features (the Ambassador had a bulbous nose and a walrus moustache).

Cartoon Monarch gives us samples of Soglow in his various styles and modes: as a young radical doing proletarian realism, as a cosmopolitan New Yorker artist, as the fixture of mid-century American book illustration and advertising, and finally as the celebrated comic strip maestro behind The Little King (with The Ambassador as an appetizer and a top strip called Sentinel Louis as desert). Deceptively simple as Soglow’s art might seem, the book makes clear how hard he worked to achieve his distilled style. The Ambassador and the early Little King strips even look a little cluttered and bloated compared to the pared down, rapier sharp cartooning that Soglow achieved in his peak years (which to my eyes ran from the late 1930s to the early 1960s).

To create a style where every line counts, where nothing is included in the picture plane that doesn’t need to be there, where words only show up when absolutely necessary while pictures do the heavy lifting of carrying the narrative: that’s what Soglow achieved in The Little King. It’s a legacy that continues to inform the work of many our best cartoonists – notably the aforementioned Brunetti but also Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Mark Newgarden, and Richard McGuire.

September 20, 1970

Cartoon Monarch is in every way a topnotch book: elegantly designed, offering a satisfying tour of Soglow’s long and complex career, adorned with a smart foreword and an eye-opening introduction. Gardner’s essay on Soglow expertly links the biography to the art, and is rich in insight. My only complaint is that it doesn’t give much of a sense of Soglow’s private life, but I suspect that the reason for this is the dearth of sources.

It’s now a cliché to say that we’re living in the golden age of comics reprints. That’s true enough, and many of us are so spoiled that we might take a book like Cartoon Monarch for granted. But the further point needs to be made that the most valuable books in this golden age aren’t the ones that give us more complete editions of the masters we’re already familiar with. Those books are important but they don’t change how we see history. The really crucial books are the ones that recover the cartoonists who have been nearly forgotten or are remembered hazily. I’m thinking here of Dean Mullaney’s earlier book on Jack Kent (with Bruce Canwell’s fine introduction), or the Denys Wortman collection edited by James Sturm and Brandon Elston, or Paul Karasik’s books on Fletcher Hanks. Such recoveries and excavations imperfectly appreciated cartoonists force us to redraw our mental maps of comics history.

Otto Soglow was one of the central cartoonists of mid-century America. He’s never been completely forgotten. Any roll call of the major New Yorker cartoonists usually includes his name and most history of comic strips allot a paragraph or two to The Little King. Still, until this book it was hard to get a handle on why Soglow was so important. With Cartoon Monarch, we can finally begin to gauge his achievement.

Hamlin kept up a merry round of madcap adventures in Moo for the next five years before beginning to feel constrained by the narrow range of story possibilities imposed upon him by his chosen locale. Then Dorothy again supplied a vital prompt: remembering a story her husband had written in high school, she suggested introducing a time machine. If Alley Oop and Ooola could travel through history, stopping here and there wherever a good story seemed likely, the story possibilities would be limitless.

Hamlin’s interest in prehistory had by this time broadened considerably into ancient history (as it would eventually into all history), and time travel enabled him to pursue this interest in the strip. He went to the syndicate editors in Cleveland immediately and, after “the best part of a week” of persuading and pleading, got permission to change the strip, a violent wrench of a change, something no other strip at the time had managed.

On April 6, 1939, Oop and Ooola suddenly fade from our sight in the Moovian jungle; and two days later, they materialize in the laboratory of a twentieth century scientist, Elbert Wonmug (a punning last name celebrating science’s most famous theorist, “en stein” being German for “one mug”). Wonmug has invented a Time Machine, and, seeing the rugged resourcefulness of the prehistoric pair, he subsequently sends Alley and Ooola on “fact-finding” missions through the ages: they become time travelers and have adventures in every famous epoch in history.

Frank Santoro’s back in Pittsburgh right now, and shares Bill Boichel’s new theory about Frank Frazetta.

And Jeet Heer reviews the new IDW collection of Otto Soglow comics. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard more about this book. Soglow is hilarious. Here’s an excerpt from Jeet’s review:

One of the great strengths of Cartoon Monarch is that it gives us a very generous sample of Soglow’s work from many facets of his career so that we can see that the clear line style was a hard won victory for the cartoonist. Rather surprisingly, Soglow started off as a student of such Ash Can School masters as Robert Henri, George Luks, and John French Sloan. Like them, he specialized in charcoal-dark representations of urban squalor (some of which appeared in radical publications like The New Masses).

Soglow’s move to the clear line wasn’t a complete break from his earlier art since he continued to do anecdotal art about urban life, but his art started to become more line-focused and less shadowy as he became a fixture in The New Yorker, where the Little King first appeared in 1930. I’d speculate that Rea Irwin was an influence. Contractual wrangling with the New Yorker seems to have prevented Soglow from immediately moving the monarch to newspapers when the Hearst Syndicate hired him in 1933. As a stop-gap measure, Soglow created The Ambassador, who was the Little King in everything except title and facial features (the Ambassador had a bulbous nose and a walrus moustache).

Elsewhere on the internet:

—Your regular dose of Alison Bechdel profiles/interviews can be taken at both The Guardian and Comic Book Resources.

—By all accounts, the star-studded, Hilary Chute-organized “Comics: Philosophy & Practice” conference held this weekend at the University of Chicago was a huge success. Many of you hopefully found some time this weekend to watch the live streaming video of various panels, but if not, know that many of them will soon be archived at this page at the Critical Inquiry site.

—Creators’ rights issues make their way into the Washington Post by way of Michael Cavna’s interview with Roger Langridge about his decision to no longer work for Marvel or DC.

—Joe Sacco has a short story, “Kushinagar”, in the New York Review of Books(!). (Am I right in thinking this is the first comic strip ever published in that magazine?)

—Talking to The Guardian, Dan DiDio tries to justify DC’s decision to create Watchmen sequels, and responds to Alan Moore’s stated opinions on the matter: “Honestly I can understand why he [Moore] might feel the way he does because this is a personal project to him. He has such a long and illustrious career and he’s been able to stand behind the body of work he’s created. But quite honestly the idea of something shameless is a little silly, primarily because I let the material speak for itself and the quality of the material speak for itself.”

—Ron Goulart takes a look at Jack Cole’s Betsy and Me.

—Tom Spurgeon interviews Faith Erin Hicks.

—Conan artist Ernie Chan passed away last Wednesday.

—Jason Thompson’s manga column, always worth reading, concerns Cromartie High School this time around.

—And finally, assuming those of you who are interested didn’t already see this at one of the many, many places that linked to it over the weekend, Neil Gaiman gave the commencement address at the University of the Arts:

Check out the view from the Copacetic porch – three floors up – on Polish Hill. That’s the church Andy Warhol attended growing up here.

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Below: small press madness – no order – all chaos – ever wonder why art comics aren’t popular? Think about it manga = fixed format. Mainstream American comic books = fixed format. French Bande Dessine albums = fixed format. Mini-comics = madness.

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The best thing about Copacetic is talking to Bill. A motormouth of comic book trivia – I learn something new every time I come in here. Just the other day, I stopped by and Bill was like, “Oh, I gotta show you this–” and he pulls out a copy of Sunday Funnies. He turned to the Bronc Peeler by Fred Harman section and said, “Look at this – who does this look like?” I stared and stared at the spread. “Look at the trees, look at the inset panel, the signature — doesn’t it look like Frazetta?” And it did. It did look like Frazetta.

Basically, Bill’s theory is that Harman was a formative influence on Frazetta. He pointed out the way the large inset panels are like paintings – that Hamlin contained both impulses in Frazetta – the painter and the cartoonist. Plus the little flourishes like the way Harman does trees and especially the signature. “Think about it – these Harman strips would have come out when Frazetta was little – it fits timewise and stylistically. Check out even the way Harman frames things in the inset panels – it’s totally like a Frazetta painting – big dynamic foreground element – like a cliff or a hill – and the harsh shadows. I’m convinced this guy was a big influence on Frank.”

Let’s go to the videotape.

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Check out the inset panels – totally proto-Frazetta

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Doesn’t that signature remind you of Frazetta’s signature?

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Those horses look proto-Frazetta to me…

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Harman’s bear close up – this looks like Frazetta framing, doesn’t it?

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Compare it to the White Indian collection back cover

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Frazetta trees on left – Harman trees on right – very similar to me

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Classic Frazetta sketch with big foreground cliff – reminds me of Harman inset panel in Bronc Peeler strip shown above –

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Anyways. Food for thought. Thank you, Bill. You will always remain my best teacher.

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DON’T FORGET!!

SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE FOR COMIC BOOK MAKERS

SUMMER 2012 – Deadline for applications is May 30th

Email me – capneasyATgmailDOTcom


Also check out Dustin Harbin’s nice write up about the course for the Drawn blog.

Thanks. Over and out.

But let’s see if I can make a little case for myself as an appropriate guest speaker, and I think the simplest way of doing that is to say this: since the age of 7, and I just turned 63 last week–since the age of 7, in my heart of hearts, I’ve always been a cartoonist. My heroes, my greatest heroes and inspirations have always been cartoonists. It’s why I spent 20 years researching the lives and the careers and the profession of American newspaper, comic-book and underground cartoonists to write about them in three novels. I look at you today, you proud, talented graduates, and I’m filled with both delight and unbecoming jealousy. I love your calling. I admire, appreciate and need what you create. And I think: Oh! if only!  If only there’d been a CCS back when I needed it!

As a young comics-crazed boy, and then later as a comics-crazed adolescent, I drew my own strips. I never had any training–I went to a Catholic parochial school in the 1950s and then a Catholic high school in the 1960s, and there was no art instruction, none, nada. All I had were the daily comics in the newspaper and my weekly pile of ten-cent, and later 12-cent, comic books: so, to learn how to draw, I copied. I copied from Chester Gould and Milton Caniff, Irwin Hasen, Wilson McCoy, Roy Crane, Bill Overgard, Leslie Turner, Zack Mosley, Ramona Fradon, Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino and, of course, Jack Kirby. My first comic-strip character, which I created when I was 8 or 9, was named–and remember, this was the 1950s–Be-Bop McCarthy. The actual title of my strip was “Be-Bop McCarthy, House Detective.”  I must’ve heard the term “house detective” somewhere and my young brain just assumed that a house detective was somebody who went door to door, like an encyclopedia salesman, looking for crimes to solve. “Good afternoon, madam, are there any bandits or counterfeiters living here that you’d like me to remove?”

By the age of 10 or 11, I’d discovered, in an art supply store, a bunch of oversized books on how to draw cartoons. This was how I learned about such wondrous things as 2-ply bristol board, brushes, art-gum erasers, India ink, and the most amazing piece of equipment of all: pen nibs. God, did I like buying and experimenting with pen nibs!  Except for introducing me to the tools of the trade, the books themselves were eminently unhelpful. Maybe when you started out, you used those sorts of books yourselves, so you know what I mean. There’d be a lesson called something like “Drawing People,” and Figure One would consist of one long vertical and slightly parabolic line bisected by a shorter horizontal parabola. Okay, I can do that. Figure Two consisted of those same two lines with the addition of one oval at the top,  a larger oval below that and then two long skinny tubes at the bottom.  Okay, got it, got it… But then–every damn time–Figure 3 would show a completely finished human being (always male) with a fully realized head, torso, arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet, toes, the whole megillah. Wait a minute, wait a minute! Now, just how was somebody supposed to make the leap from two lines, two ovals and two tubes into…that?!  I needed 25 incremental Figures and I only got those lousy three!  I needed more, I needed teachers, I needed a school! But there were no schools that I knew about!  How did my favorite cartoonists learn to draw–how did they get their chops?  I needed the answer.

So being a follow-through kind of guy–at least in my youth–I went to the Bayonne, New Jersey Public Library and found everything I could find about cartooning and cartoonists.  Today, of course–and the holdings in your Schulz Library are proof of this–there are vast numbers of books about cartooning and cartoonists, but in those days there were very few:  Stephen Becker’s Comic Art in America, Coulton Waugh’s The Comics, Martin Sheridan’s Comics and their Creators. Those were the first books I got, and I checked them out again and again, and that’s when I fell in love with the romance of cartooning–and it is a romantic profession, no matter what Dan Clowes says.

It was from those books that I learned how most cartoonists up till then had learned their craft. Either they were fortunate enough to grow up in the same neighborhood where a famous cartoonist lived and they just “hung around” and made themselves useful, absorbing everything (the way Bud Sagendorf did it, apprenticing with Elsie Segar), or else–and this was by far the more prevalent route–they took mail-order home-study courses.

The two earliest of those schools of cartooning were the Charles N. Landon School and the W.L. Evans School, both of them based in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s amazing how many of the great and famous 20th century cartoonists learned their craft (not only how to draw, but how to draw for reproduction) from one or the other of those courses. Chester Gould, Elsie Segar, Hank Ketchum and Bill Mauldin, to name only a few, subscribed to the Evans course; Carl Barks, Floyd Gottfredson, Roy Crane, Milton Caniff, Jack Cole, V.T. Hamlin and Chic Young, again naming just a few, subscribed to the Landon School. You could buy the course books for about eight bucks, but if you wanted your work corrected by Evans or Landon themselves, that would cost you an extra 20 to 25 bucks.

The Landon and Evans schools were both long gone by the time I was in need of instruction, but others, similar to them, existed in the 1950s and 60s, the best-known being The Famous Artists School of Westport, Connecticut. It was founded in 1948 by illustrators Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell and originally cost $300 for the complete set of lessons. Full-page ads for the Famous Artists School, which offered courses in illustration and painting as well as in cartooning, appeared in popular magazines around the time I got super-serious about a cartooning career. For aspirants like me the Famous Cartoonists course was the sine non qua of professional instruction. (In the mid-1990s when Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, who’d been married by then for decades, decided to get married again publicly and throw a big party–with Robert Crumb’s band supplying the music–Francoise had this brilliant idea to get the best-ever present for her husband, and she found a pristine set of the original Famous Artists course in their magnificent bright-yellow oversized binders. She gave it to him after the wedding and I was green–green, I tell you–with jealousy. When I spoke with Art a few weeks later, I told him about that bitter, galling jealousy and he said yeah, he could understand that, but…but Francoise hadn’t realized there were three separate courses and she’d ended up giving him the illustration course. Ever since then, I’ve thought, jeez, imagine how great a cartoonist Artie would be today if only Francoise had bought the right course!)

The lessons of the Famous Cartoonists School were written by (or ostensibly written by) such luminaries as Al Capp, Milt Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Willard Mullins, Whitney Darrow Jr., Gurney Williams and Virgil Partch. Of course, I sent away for the informational material, but the cost was prohibitive. My mother worked in a bank and brought home less than $45 a week.  It was crushing blow, although (and this such was a wonderful thing, for which I’m still grateful) my mother looked around on her own and found a far less expensive illustration and cartooning home-study course, the Washington School of Art, out of Port Washington, New York. And she signed me up for it. Twelve booklets and an impressive, to me, box of supplies consisting of two pencils, one brush, one pen staff with three different nib points, a fabulous soft blue eraser, a few charcoal sticks, a Conte crayon, a bottle of ink, and a T-square. I  took that course, imperfect as it was, and I wish I still had all my returned artwork with their taped-on see-through overlays with corrections made in red pencil. Unfortunately, for me, only two of the lessons pertained specifically to making comics, but even so, it was real instruction–and there were real teachers telling me what I’d done right, and what I’d done wrong and how to correct it.

It seemed incredible to me, though, back in my adolescence but also well into adulthood, that there weren’t real brick-and-mortar schools that taught cartooning, that had a living, breathing, talking, hectoring faculty of teachers, actual practitioners, on premises to train students about the tools, strategies and mindset of this astonishing profession. If things had been different 40 years ago, I might not be standing here now talking to you as a visiting civilian–I might very well be sitting over there with James Sturm, Jason Lutes, Bob Sikoryak, Alec Longstreth and the legendary Steve Bissette.

Mentioning Steve reminds me of this: after I’d given up on my dream of being an actual working cartoonist and gone on to write my first novel, and long after I’d abandoned hope of there ever being such a thing as a genuine school of cartooning, I learned about the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey. New Jersey! My beloved home state! When it opened in 1976, I was 27 and hadn’t drawn comics in over five years; even so, I toyed with the idea of applying. But: nah.  Too late. Yet even though it was too late for me, I still was fascinated by the reality of such a place, the same place, I later learned, where Steve Bissette, who was in the first graduating class, learned his craft.

In those days, it was known as the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning and Graphic Art.  And in those days, too, I wrote regularly for a magazine called New Jersey Monthly, so naturally I pitched an article on the Kubert School. I was given the go-ahead, and with my wife and infant daughter in tow, I drove from Jersey City to Dover and met with Joe and Muriel Kubert (we have a photograph of my baby daughter Jessie–who is 33 today–being held by a wide-smiling Muriel, one of the nicest and kindest of women). They took us around the original school, which was a big old mansion. I dropped into several studios and just stood there watching–I vividly remember seeing sporty Irwin Hasen deliver a lecture–watching, taking notes, and thinking all the while, This is so cool.  But also thinking: Damn.

You graduates are so fortunate that James Sturm and Michelle Ollie founded this school in 2005; what I dreamed about in the early 1960s is a reality, here: a bona-fide school with a bona-fide professional faculty, focused on just one thing: making comics. When I first came to White River Junction in 2009, I was stunned.  Not only was this town like a Dylan Horrocks comic book come to life–young cartoonists swarming all over the place–it was as though an adolescent fantasy of mine (one of the non-sexual ones) had sprung to life 40 years later. CCS is not only a cool place to learn your craft, it’s also one of the most serious, demanding and inspiring places I’ve even been. That you’ve “finished the course,” that you’re graduating from such a school, that you’ve learned what you’ve learned and created the work you’ve made, is profoundly impressive. And, again, I’m green with jealousy.

My grandmother was a locally beloved grammar school teacher and when I was growing up, although she was long retired by then, scarcely a month went by that somebody in my home town wouldn’t come up to me on the street and say what a major impact she’d had on his or her life. So I grew up proud about that and also somewhat in awe of teachers, good teachers. Yes, of course, cartoonists were the greatest people in the world, and astronauts weren’t too shabby, and neither were homicide detectives, but teachers–teachers were…special, crucial, and if they were anything like my grandmother, magisterial. While I could pine to become a cartoonist (and, failing that, an astronaut or a homicide detective), I could never imagine myself being a teacher. I was much too shy, too shlubby, too off-in-a-corner-somewhere; well, you graduates know what I’m talking about: you were once kids-who-wanted-to-draw-comics. You know the drill: we were pariahs and proud of it, yeah?

Strange thing is, though, I am a teacher now, a college professor–and have been for well over 30 years. And, like your distinguished faculty, I teach what I practice: I teach fiction writing in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. How did that happen?  How could I have gone from being unable to get out a single sentence in front of a group of people to earning the greatest part of my income from doing precisely that?  Well, I think my grandmother is one of the reasons. And I think my gratitude to the writing teachers I had, and the recognition of how important they were in the creation and enjoyment of my fiction career, is another reason. But I also think that my terrible disappointment about not finding the cartooning teachers that I wanted and needed in my early life is one of the reasons, too. I’d been taught the craft of fiction writing by teachers who’d learned it themselves and practiced it honestly and faithfully; then I, in turn, went on to practice the profession, to follow the calling, and it seemed natural–and a great gift, a privilege–to be able to pass on to others whatever it was I knew from training and experience.

Which, I’m glad to say, neatly brings me to the wisdom (at least I hope it’s the wisdom) part of my remarks.

And the first bit of it concerns teaching. Not all of you will have the opportunity, or the desire, to become professional teachers, but all of you will have the opportunity–and if I may say so, the moral obligation–to pass along to others some of what you’ve learned here/now, elsewhere/later about your art and your craft and your calling. Please don’t be stingy, be generous, be as generous as your teachers here have been.

Six, seven years ago I was teaching a lecture  course on the history of American comics, and I noticed this very scruffy looking guy I knew wasn’t on the roster showing up for almost every class. I used to conduct “office hours” at a local coffee shop, and this young guy–who kept reminding me of Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan circa 1961–used to show up there too, sit down and start asking me questions about old-timey cartoonists like Harold Gray and Chester Gould.  He said–actually he kind of murmured or muttered–that he intended to be a cartoonist himself, and I got the distinct impression that he was intentionally leaving off the descriptive adjective that was on the tip of his tongue, and that adjective, I always thought, was “great.” He wanted to be a great cartoonist. Anyhow, my graduate teaching assistant and I finally said, bring us some of your work, we’d love to see it. And finally he did. And I can remember the moment I opened his sketchbook: my eyes popped out of my head. Holy God. This kid was good. We both told him, look, you gotta send this to a publisher; I kept saying Kim Thompson, Kim Thompson, send this stuff to Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics. Yeah, he said, he’d probably do that some day.  About two years later I was in a comics shop and picked up what seemed to me the fattest graphic novel since From Hell and–in cartooning parlance–I nearly plopped when I saw the author’s name: it was that scruffy Rimbaud/Bob Dylan kid from my class. Dash Shaw. Maybe he’d sent his stuff to Kim Thompson because I’d suggested it, or maybe he’d already shown his stuff to Kim when I knew him and was too shy or ornery to tell me so, but I’ve always been delighted that Dash hung out in my class while he was in Richmond and that I’d treated him well, encouraged him and answered every question he’d asked me. Always do that. Always find the time. Pass it on.

And something else: carefully nurture your career. Know what you want to do with your gifts and your training and go after it, but don’t be afraid to take a detour or two, or three. And know your profession, know how it works, what’s happening in it, who’s happening in it. Be savvy, too–savvy enough to know that once you start putting your work out into the world, you will be categorized immediately as a cartoonist who makes that kind of comics. And be savvy enough to know that there will be a price you’ll pay, often a steep one, if you suddenly surprise that world by doing another kind of comics. Follow up your exquisitely nuanced childhood memoir with a run on “Dial H for Hero,” or vice versa, and you’re going to be kicked right in the blogosphere. Don’t be naive; you can’t afford it.

When I was a novice novelist, I read an essay by Harlan Ellison in which he urged young writers to write in all of the genres, never stick to just one, and I thought that sounded wise; I took him up on it. My first novel was a contemporary fantasy, so I did a realistic crime novel for my second, and an historical novel for my third, a young adult novel for my fourth; then I did a book of novellas. I don’t regret  the trajectory of my career, but my decision came at a real economic and emotional cost: reviewers and readers didn’t know what to make of me; what kind of writer was I?  To surprise and shape-shift is, often, to confuse; and to confuse, often, is to be misunderstood, marginalized, and dismissed. I say this not in any way to suggest you follow one straight path during your career (I think that would be monstrously boring), but to urge you always to keep the realities and pitfalls of a professional career in mind. Do what you want to do, but consider the ramifications of your choices. Otherwise, you’ll turn into a bitter old guy like. (By the way, I once spoke with Harlan Ellison and told him that I’d taken his career advice, lo those many years ago, and he laughed uproariously and said, “Why the hell did you listen to me, you’re an idiot!”)

Another piece of wisdom, or at least advice, is this: if somebody offers you interesting work doing something that you’ve never done before, try as hard as you can not to admit it. You’re a professional and professionals can generally figure things out, given a little time and research. Someone called me up once and wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing scripts for an animated TV show. I said sure I would. Then the guy said, “Are you familiar with television scripts?” and I said, oh yeah, even though I’d never laid eyes on one! But!  But I knew how to write stories, so all I had to do was check out the format for scripts–and that was easy to do; I used the library; you can use the internet. I taught myself in a day or two all that I needed to know–and ended up being a staff writer for “The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.” Great gig.  And if I’d said no, I don’t know anything about television scriptwriting? The same thing would’ve happened that had happened a few years earlier when the film director Penny Marshall took me to lunch and asked me if I’d adapt one of my novels into a script for her. I said, I’d love to, but I’d  never written any film scripts before and maybe it would be a good idea to have a co-writer. She smiled, paid for our meal–and I never heard from her again.

I’m not telling you to lie, mind you–just trust yourself. You have the chops, you have the smarts…which means you can stretch, which means you can do it.

Finally, this: all my life I’ve loved the word “cartoonist.” Because I know exactly what it means and I know what a cartoonist “does.” Lately, though, I’ve noticed that the term is falling out of use and being replaced by the term “comics artist.” A situation that frankly gives me the shivers. Among my graduate fiction students I’ve become known for my impassioned mini-lectures urging them never to call themselves artists, but instead to call themselves fiction writers or short story writers or novelists. That’s what you are, I tell them, that’s what you do. You may well be an artist, but it’s always better to let other people call you that. Call yourself an artist and you might be more inclined to talk about it than do it; call yourself a writer–or, dear graduates, a cartoonist–and you’ll be more inclined, more personally and professionally compelled–to get up every day  and go to your studio to work. And the work, trite as it sounds, the challenge and the pleasure of the work, in doing the work, in making the work, of being present for and in the work, is the only thing that matters.

So to this impressive group of graduates…cartoonists…artists, my deepest congratulations and most sincere wishes for long, satisfying, and truly remarkable careers in the greatest profession on earth.

Thank you all very much.

[Thanks to James Sturm for suggesting we publish this speech - Ed.]

He is probably best-known to American comics fans for co-creating the surly supernatural western hero Jonah Hex with writer John Albano, and the Black Orchid, working alongside venerable cartoonist/editor Sheldon Mayer at DC, as well as for his work on Conan the Barbarian over at Marvel. Tony DeZuniga ultimately achieved legendary status in the comics industry because of the vast volume of excellent work that he produced, first as an inker, then as a penciler, from the early 1970s until relatively recently, when he had to curtail his comics work and convention appearances because of increasing ill health. Although no cause of death was announced, it’s certain that DeZuniga succumbed to various complications brought on by a massive stroke in mid-April of this year. Despite his many years of toiling away in the comics industry, DeZuniga didn’t have enough money to pay all of his hospital bills, so friends and admirers in both the U.S. and Filipino comics community chipped in to help the well-liked DeZuniga pay his mounting medical expenses. Filipino cartoonists pooled their talents on Free Comic Book Day in May to sell sketches and t-shirts to raise money for DeZuniga and his family.

As a child, Tony DeZuniga loved comics, especially Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby, and anything by Jack Kirby or Alex Toth. Breaking into the Filipino comics business at 16 as a letterer, DeZuniga worked alongside his friends and mentors Alfredo Alcala and Nestor Redondo, already established Filipino cartoonists, whom he would later help break into the comics business in the United States. While still living in the Philippines, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in commercial art through the University of Santo Tomas. He first came to the United States in 1962 to study graphic design in New York City, then returned to his homeland as an advertising artist, while still freelancing for the burgeoning Filipino comics industry, drawing for titles like  Hiwaga Komiks, Caravana Klasiks, and Romansa Komiks, for most of the 1960s. DeZuniga finally returned to the U.S. in the late 1960s and broke into American comics with the help of visionary DC Comics editor Joe Orlando. His first DC assignment was inking pencils by Ric Estrada for a romance story (Girl’s Love Story #153). He debuted as penciler with a horror story for House of Mystery #188 (Sept./Oct. 1970) and was allowed to ink his own pencils on that job. From there, DeZuniga was off and running as a DC regular. He was also instrumental in fomenting the “Filipino Wave” of cartoonists when he convinced Joe Orlando and DC Editor in Chief Carmine Infantino to visit the Philippines and scope out the local talent.

DeZuniga moved to the U.S. in 1977 and eventually wound up dividing his time between Marvel and DC for 18 years, drawing not only Jonah Hex and Conan, but also many other well-known characters like Doc Savage, Thor, The X-Men, Swamp Thing, Batman, Dracula, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Red Sonja, The Punisher, and Spiderman. In addition to his impressive comics career, DeZuniga also broke into the lucrative videogame industry, working as a conceptual designer at Sega for 10 years. Among his other freelance accounts were McGraw Hill, Scholastic, and TSR, for which he illustrated The DragonLance Saga Book Three from a script by Roy Thomas, among other projects.

He had recently returned to his signature character, for a new graphic novel entitled Jonah Hex: No Way Back, published to cash in on the release of last year’s unsuccessful Jonah Hex film starring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox.

DeZuniga eventually retired from the comics business to pursue an interest in painting with oils and acrylics and drawing with charcoal, though he was still a familiar face at major conventions such as San Diego’s Comic-Con International in addition to smaller events such as the Phoenix Comic-Con. After retiring from comics, he made his living doing convention sketches for fans, and private commissions and portraits. He also taught portrait painting and taught a class in drawing superhero art at the Lodi Arts Commission.

When DeZuniga was hit with a serious stroke in April of this year, his doctors managed to save him, but he soon fell prey to a series of medical complications. The stroke led to brain damage, and heart failure, and while his doctors labored valiantly to save the talented artist, their efforts were ultimately futile, and he passed away on May 11^th.

Tony DeZuniga will be remembered for his vigorous and attractive figure work, his lush inking, and the sheer volume of work this hard-working cartoonist produced. He is survived by his wife Tina.

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And now, on the site today we have Tom De Haven‘s commencement address for the Center for Cartoon Studies. Thanks to James Sturm and Michelle Ollie for this. Tom discusses his own comics education, as well as that of others, and drops this fine story:

The lessons of the Famous Cartoonists School were written by (or ostensibly written by) such luminaries as Al Capp, Milt Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Willard Mullins, Whitney Darrow Jr., Gurney Williams and Virgil Partch. Of course, I sent away for the informational material, but the cost was prohibitive. My mother worked in a bank and brought home less than $45 a week.  It was crushing blow, although (and this such was a wonderful thing, for which I’m still grateful) my mother looked around on her own and found a far less expensive illustration and cartooning home-study course, the Washington School of Art, out of Port Washington, New York. And she signed me up for it. Twelve booklets and an impressive, to me, box of supplies consisting of two pencils, one brush, one pen staff with three different nib points, a fabulous soft blue eraser, a few charcoal sticks, a Conte crayon, a bottle of ink, and a T-square. I  took that course, imperfect as it was, and I wish I still had all my returned artwork with their taped-on see-through overlays with corrections made in red pencil. Unfortunately, for me, only two of the lessons pertained specifically to making comics, but even so, it was realinstruction–and there were real teachers telling me what I’d done right, and what I’d done wrong and how to correct it.

In less happy news, Steve Ringgenberg contributes an obituary of Tony DeZuniga. Additionally, we have Brad Mackay on The Art of Daniel Clowes and, as ever, and thank heavens, Tucker Stone on the global comic book trend.

I suppose it’s possible you will want to go elsewhere for yet more comics content, in which case you might  be overdoing it. Still, I feel compelled to guide you:

Is there anything more awesome than a Gilbert Hernandez comic book called Fatima: The Blood Spinners? Of course not. Read what the man himself has to say about it.

Thank you, Warren Ellis. Keeping it real.

I also love Frank Robbins. In fact, I love the whole dang Caniff-school of comic drawing. Lee Elias, William Overgard, et al. So good. But Frank Robbins in the ’70s was hallucinatory and great. Milo George has a great appreciation here.

Oh, and I can’t believe I’m missing this. Luckily we have embedded a TCJ correspondent on the ground to bring back all the dirt.

This thought occurred to me about 10 minutes and 38 pages in when I came across a two-page spread featuring images from Lloyd Llewellyn, Clowes’ first comic which was affectionately known as “LLLL” to its cadre of loyal readers. The offbeat series debuted 25 years ago effectively launching the cartoonist’s career, along with, apparently, my infatuation with alternative comics. Though considered Clowes’ juvenilia today, LLLL’s cast of hopped-up 50s hipsters and jittery coffee-fuelled art was like ECT to my teenaged brain; effectively rewiring how I looked at and understood comics.

To me those seven issues of LLLL (six regular issues and a colour special) were proof positive that comics could be sleazy, exhilarating fun without the benefit of capes or cowls. Peering at these images today, in all their nervy Krigsteinian glory, made me realise how Clowes was pretty much single-handedly responsible for making me re-evaluate comics as an art form.

And he was just getting warmed up at this point.

In the quarter-century since Clowes has produced 23 issues of his renowned series Eightball, seven graphic novels (including Ghost World, Ice Haven, David Boring, Wilson and The Death-Ray) and penned several screenplays including his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Ghost World. Somehow The Art of Daniel Clowes manages to cram all of this—along with sketches, original art, photographs, personal artifacts and rare strips—into 224 utterly handsome pages.

Released to coincide with a retrospective of Clowes’ work at the Oakland Museum of California, the book makes a convincing argument to the strength and power of one of comics most successful living practitioners. It also does double-duty as an indulgent trip down memory lane, particularly for anyone old enough to remember Clowes’ early anonymous Uggly Family work on Cracked magazine.

There is a wealth of riches here and the team that assembled this book (co-editors Alvin Buenaventura and Ken Parille and designer Jonathan Bennett) are smart enough to get out of the way and let the reader experience them all organically without a fussy design or overly clever layout getting in your way.

Bennett’s design sense can be evidenced without even opening the book: just remove the dust jacket, which prominently features a meticulous black-and-white Clowes drawing of a woman, and you’re faced with a jumble of art drawn from the artist’s files including half-finished ideas and overlays—not to mention end pages decorated with remnants of Zip-A-Tone, a trademark of Clowes early career.

It’s a subtle but ingenious comment about Clowes’ artistic process and sensibility. Though his finished art is famously slick and often icy-cold, it masks an unconscious hornet’s nest of sweat-soaked neuroses and untidy thoughts (Exhibit “A” being the aforementioned repeat appearances by female derrieres). Not to mention what it says about the cartoonist’s  collector’s tendencies: I mean, who keeps used Zip-A-Tone sheets?

Crack the book further and you’ll find an engaging interview and six essays (seven if you include the introduction by George Meyer), each thoughtful, comprehensive and complementary. The centrepiece of these is undoubtedly Chris Ware’s piece about his long-time colleague and friend. Though a cartoonist by trade, Ware is also a superbly entertaining writer and this critical and personal essay does not disappoint, offering up humorous personal anecdotes, insight into Clowes’ personality (which is often interpreted as aloof) and a practically clairvoyant take on his work. The cherry-on-top is Ware’s appraisal of Wilson, which includes a tantalizing clue to the book’s enigmatic ending—one which completely eluded me.

The visual content here is equally rich and deeply satisfying. There are rare strips (including one based on a failed show Clowes pitched to HBO), thumbnails, layouts, New Yorker covers, business cards, character sketches, Christmas cards, unused OK Soda art and photos of the original “Laffin’ Spittin’ Man.” Even a hand-painted colour guide for the obscure Clowes one-pager “Needledick the Bug-Fucker” makes the cut; thank God for that.

This will sound like critical gushing, but in the end The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist manages to have it all. It’s a deliberate and exacting art book that approaches its subject with the respect he has earned. But it also serves as a comprehensive overview of the cartoonist’s life and career; one that is ensured to make Clowes’ fan-boys around the globe drool.

Thought we’d open up with some pure octane Eat More Bikes from Nathan Bulmer.

Now? COMICS.

Fury: My War Gone By #2
By Garth Ennis, Goran Parlov, Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics

It’s been remarked that this is the most Ennis-y Ennis comic ever made, which will only prove true if someone with a deformity (mental or physical) shows up for ridicule, but thanks to this issue’s against-all-odds mega-slaughter sequence, we’re a little bit closer. There we see Nick Fury, some Nazi, and Ward Littell another guy kill so many people that you can’t help but like them more than you have ever liked anybody. On top of that, the issue opens with a delightful Jordi Bernet sex scene drawn by Goran Parlov, which is a wonderful thing for him to do as Jordi Bernet was stuck drawing that god awful Jonah Hex comic for so long that the sight of the man’s delightful line often meant you had fucked up and bought a Jonah Hex comic again, despite knowing that you were never going to like it because it was always terrible. Of course, maybe you don’t like Garth Ennis–that’s okay! Some people just want to be sad, and left alone to die in fires, and sometimes you have to tie them to a chair and light them on fire while you read your Garth Ennis comics, and that’s why we have the internet in the first place because that way we can find out all of those people’s names and then we can write them down on a sheet of paper for later when the time is right for cooking up some sweet hobo dinner, which is when you put whatever random food you can find in a ball of raw ground beef that gets wrapped in aluminum foil and thrown into the coals of a fire that you started with a human body.

Winter Soldier #5
By Ed Brubaker, Butch Guice, Stefano Gaudiano, Tom Palmer, Bettie Breitweiser
Published by Marvel Comics

There’s nothing about this that isn’t positively wonderful, and that’s no mean feat when the art is this fucked up. That’s the lucky conundrum: Butch Guice has been given no time whatsoever to get anywhere close to completion, making for a comic that’s mostly dependent on colorist Bettie Breitweiser to create the unified visual aesthetic that you usually get out of a penciler. (You used to get them out of an inker, but Marvel’s absurd business strategy of double-shipping comics has effectively turned the single inker into an archaic concept.) Page to page, panel to panel, there hasn’t been a single issue of Winter Soldier yet that lacks some bit of visually incongruent weirdness, be it as minor as constant hairstyle and costume changes, or as major as in the panels where it appears all of the human characters have abandoned their physical cages, leaving behind flattened sheets of buckling skin. But so what, the team says: why not just find a way to trace the tiny moments from panel to panel, and when that won’t work, layer them in hot pinks and candied orange and pump the discord louder? Embrace the acquired taste of a comic like this–one with machine-gun gorillas, old Frederick Forsyth plots, cyborg patriots, and a woman in vinyl who fights with teased-up hair and 8-inch bangs–and go weird. There’s no reason to play nice. Look around: there’s nobody left, and no one is coming.

Fatale #5
By Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Dave Stewart
Published by Image

It’s not often that one reads a new comic and wishes that it could have been longer. Most of the time you wish that everyone involved in a new comic had spent their time doing anything else, like murdering their fanbase while chugging drain cleaner. This issue of Fatale is an exception to that rule, pleasantly enough. Expanding a bit upon a doomed character’s final, exhausted march towards revenge and oblivion would have given that scene’s final twist that much more of a punch, and the fact that the Sydney Carton moment gets a full two pages grates as a result. Have your cake, we’ll join you, but why not cook the thing a little longer? Otherwise, though? This comic is pleasant.

Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand #5
By Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Tonci Zonjic, Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

They didn’t make a big thing out of it, but one of the big pleasures of this Lobster Johnson mini-series was that the pulpy, heavily referential character spent most of The Burning Hand failing to accomplish much of what he set out to, and often ended up being rescued by circumstance and exasperated walk-on characters—except for the times when he just murdered everything he could find. It’s a nice change from the obsession with competence that’s taken for granted as basic fabric in today’s super-hero comics. This guy just KILLS people, with a gun, and sometimes that gun happens to be big. He doesn’t have much of a personality, and he’s surrounded by a cast of supporters who, if we’re being honest about it, don’t have much of a personality (or intelligence) either. Violent people who do violent things, trusting in the forward momentum of destruction and arrogant ideology to cure society of its ills. Lovely to look at, too.

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OH WAIT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE COMICS NEWS THAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK I BET YOU DIDN’T SO HERE IS ABHAY KHOSLA TO TALK ABOUT IT

In the “Too Many Rappers and There’s Still Not Enough MCs” Department, tickets have gone on sale for MorrisonCon, a comic convention at Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel celebrating the persona of Grant Morrison (Vampirella, JLA/WildCATS).   In the past, Morrison famously invited fans of his comic The Invisibles to jerk themselves off in order to energize a magical spell to save the $2.50 comic from cancellation.  For his next trick, Morrison is charging his fans $767 to jerk him off.

So… Abracadabra, bitches.

Yes, $767 for tickets, airfare not included. How much is $767.00? In terms a mainstream comic fan can understand, a four-day pass to the San Diego Comic Con costs about $150, so you could attend a San Diego convention for twenty straight days for that amount– though any longer than two days violates the Geneva Convention.  In terms an art-comic fan can understand, assuming inflation, anticipated increases in the cost of living, and the latest projections from the Office of Management and Budget, $767 is about how much a new issue of Kramer’s Ergot will probably cost three whole years from now.  (It’ll be on paper that’s, like, big…?)  In terms Chester Brown fans might understand, $767 is enough for some hours with a woman who speaks English and even understands what’s happening to her and/or where she’s been taken. See, Appendix MCMXCVIII.

What does a $767 ticket buy you from MorrisonCon? The chance to hang out with comic book luminaries like DC co-publisher Jim Lee and Marvel architect Jonathan Hickman, breakfast with Chris Burnham (who draws), admission to an after-hours party DJ-ed by Morrison, a copy of a Darick Robertson comic book, and for a lucky few, a moment of clarity followed by a lifetime of shame. Musician Gerard Way is attending, and based upon promotional photos, might be cosplaying as Sting’s character from David Lynch’s Dune.

What will happen at MorrisonCon? So far, no schedule has been announced. As mentioned above, part of MorrisonCon will involve promotions for Morrison’s upcoming work for Image Comics with artist Darick Robertson. Morrison explained his Image work in one interview: “I think it’s important for any writer in the comics business to maintain a healthy portfolio of creator-owned material and IPs, and I’m encouraged and inspired by the fact that companies like Image exist to provide that platform.” Inspiring words. Finally, a comic convention that celebrates portfolio-minded comics businessmen and the intellectual property platforms that encourage them. How did we ever live without that?

Until a schedule is announced, we can only speculate what a $767 ticket purchases. Maybe Morrison will talk about his upcoming storyboards for director Barry Sonnenfeld’s movie about dinosaurs fighting moon-men (or something like that), the latest in the thriving genre of high-concept comics made only in the hopes of fooling Hollywood executives into thinking that some half-formed elevator pitch has “cred” with “geek audiences.” Maybe Marvel architect Jonathan Hickman will talk about how his comics get sold in “death-bags,” in the hopes that a percentage of fans will feel compelled to buy the same comic twice, one copy to read and one to store away in whatever dark, musty place they’ve placed their dreams for a better life, in the desperate hope that Hickman’s pap will someday magically be worth enough money to rescue them from their humdrum lives.  Maybe Jim Lee will talk about how he chose to have the  legacy of his career in comics be Watchmen bondage covers and Watchmen toasters.

“Gee, I don’t know– that all just sounds spiritually deadening,” a one-armed meth-addicted Las Vegas prostitute, selling herself on the doorstep of Slots of Fun, is expected to say. But the good news is Jim Lee can make her toast.

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THAT MADE ME SAD, AND IF THERE’S ONE THAT CURES MY SADNESS IT IS OLD COMICS THAT REMIND ME OF A TIME WHEN MY LIFE HAD POTENTIAL

Vanguard Illustrated #1
By David Campiti, Tom Yeates, Rick Bryant, Joe Chiodo, Steve Rude, Mike Baron, Phil Philipson, Brendan McCarthy, Peter Milligan
Published by Pacific Comics, 1983

It’s one thing to give Brendan McCarthy and Milligan’s bravura first installment of “Freakwave!” the dead-zone last spot in an anthology, it’s another thing when the story is the only good one out of three. The artist’s first American work is described by the duo as “Mad Max goes surfing” and it predates that oddball Waterworld film by long enough that you can bet the farm that there’re at least 200 comics fans convinced these boys done got robbed blind. It’s good shit, teeming with excitement and spastic with wit, the product of a dog being let off the leash. It’s no cat comic, but hey: some poor bastards have to make do with the burden of actual imaginations.

Detective Comics #295
By Sheldon Moldoff, Nick Cardy, Various Uncredited People
Published by DC, 1961

This is a very, very earnest comic about what happened after Batman’s friend–who happens to be a time-travel inventing archaeologist adventurer–discovered some ancient cave paintings that depict Batman murdering giant monsters and generally just being totally awesome. While examining the paintings, the monster-fighting events depicted in them actually occur, and … well, if it was a comic made after the 1960s, it would have turned out to be a mad scientist or something, but nope, this is a comic made in the ’60s, so Batman goes back in time to find out more about these cave paintings, which is around the time he teams up with some young Egyptian pharaoh types to fend off an alien invasion. It turns out that the aliens can’t see the color red, so Batman and Robin douse themselves in paint and get down to the business of what Joseph Goebbels once called “Total War”, and the genocidal aliens bail out frightened and bleeding, never to return. There isn’t a thing about this comic that doesn’t rule, making the Martian Manhunter back-up story–which features that character obsessively ruining some cop’s chance at winning a free European vacation–a bonus on par with the proverbial cherry.

OKAY I FEEL BETTER HOW ABOUT SOME NEW COMICS THAT ARE NOT VERY GOOD

B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: The Devil’s Engine #1
By Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Tyler Crook, Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse

This is the comic everybody was worried was going to get published, the one that readers have been getting hints of for a while: a shitty B.P.R.D. comic. Focusing on a character who couldn’t be less likeable except for all of the times when he starts talking, it spends three pages watching him try to get a girl on a train, flashing back to the part where she says she’d get on a train with him, two more pages of her getting psyched up to tell him she won’t get on the train, then them getting on the train because of circumstances, a five-page flashback to a completely separate story that everybody liked a lot more when it wasn’t being mentioned all the time, and then four pages of the girl wanting him to let her get off the train, and then her jumping off the train even though he doesn’t want her to, and then five pages of the train crashing. PS: It’s called The Devil’s Engine. Get it? Because the comic has a train in it.

Dancer #1
By Nathan Edmondson, Nic Klein
Published by Image Comics

You can just imagine how excited the guys at Image must have gotten when Nathan Edmondson came in and said, “Guys, I got it: you aren’t currently publishing a comic featuring an ex-hitman being pursued by his former employers, with a twist.” Because it was starting to look like that particular blank hadn’t been filled up on the generic product whiteboard over at wherever their headquarters is, and if Image doesn’t have a generic hitman with a twist comic, then we’re one step closer to whatever weird-ass political system it is they have in Iran, you know? That’s how it all starts: Image decides to take a breather on generic hitman-with-a-twist comics, and the next thing you know they’re taking a break on generic superhero-with-a-twist comics, and before you know it Buster Brown might start to pay attention and realize that he doesn’t miss either of them, and then you’ve lost another comic-book buyer and we’re that much closer to the day when we really will have to pick a side in the debate over whether or not Garfield is a homosexual, because all the comics with twists will be long gone, and the only twists will be the color of the drapes in our own private hell.

Justice League #9
By Jim Lee, Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Scott Williams
Published by DC Comics

This comic reads like it was written by a truck, like all the words are trucks, backing up. Beep beep beep, but really slow. That’s what this comic reads like. It reads like the AIDS virus. It reads like the sound of Tom Spurgeon pouring pancake syrup on Jim Shooter’s tits while somebody mumbles the lyrics to The Jungle Book‘s “Bear Necessities” in the background, so the whole thing takes on a hallucinatory oompa loompa quality, but with really slowly moving pistons in a constant, methodical, unchanging pump. It’s flattened, it’s tap water, and so they throw in a break-up scene involving a couple we don’t care about and a torture scene we care about even less. It’s telling, that a huge part of the comic–all of the parts that don’t involve Steve Trevor, who Geoff Johns apparently wants us to think of as some kind of a tragic figure despite the fact that we know almost nothing about him beyond “grizzled whiner who likes to talk about holding hands”–spends fourteen pages or so building up to the moment when a couple of rebooted Justice League villains we’re meeting for the first time refer to the new bad guy by name, and it’s the same name a murderous cripple had from the beginning of the comic. You’re supposed to be interested, to wonder how a dying crippled writer (did we mention this character is a published writer of the “9/11 was an inside job” variety? Because, of course, he is) has become a terrifying super villain capable of capturing and torturing some guy Wonder Woman dumped because she was looking for a guy whose personality had developed beyond choosing not to shave for a couple of days. But instead of getting interested, you just take in the information, rearrange the files inside your brain where this kind of information is stored, and then determine whether or not you will tell people you had positive or negative feelings regarding the flavor of oatmeal that the prison is providing this morning, if they ask, which they won’t, because that brings oblivion closer. It’s like the Harvey Pekar plan in reverse: you go to comics so you can alphabetize some file drawers, instead of the other way around.

UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (TCM)

The eponymous metaphor of Matt Kalesniko’s Freeway is almost too easy: A transportation network that once granted free and effortless mobility that’s become a morass of stagnation and frustration to symbolize an animation business that promised personal expression amid camaraderie but delivers forced mediocrity in an atmosphere of Machiavellian backbiting.  Condemned to a purgatorial traffic jam, Kalesniko’s dog-headed alter ego Alex grinds his teeth to reminiscences about his thwarted career, potentially idyllic but presently in-law plagued romance, and his abortive first expedition into Los Angeles, intermixed with idealized visions of animation’s golden age and premonitions of violent highway death.  A spoilsport might point out that these vehicular calamities, including the drive-by shooting that provides the book’s punch line, require speeds of something more than the glacial pace of a traffic jam, but as all of Alex’s troubles arise from his dreams coming true, a violent death at the hands of forces beyond his control becomes a way of escape.

The Internet Movie Database, an authority some dispute, places Kalesniko smack dab at Disney for the re-birth and re-death of its animated feature division, from The Great Mouse Detective to Atlantis: The Lost Empire, in the role of assistant layout artist or layout assistant throughout, if those are different things.  I’m assuming he finally concluded it was better to reign in comics than serve in animation.  For his fictional Babbitt Jones Productions he takes the setting from the industrial Siberia Disney feature animation was exiled to during the early part of that period and the internal zeitgeist from the what-were-they-thinking/ were-they-thinking-at-all aimlessness of its end.  No one who’s seen the internal strife on the macro level portrayed in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty would doubt the verisimilitude of the fictional office politics on the micro level of Freeway.  Kalesniko never quite puts his finger on the factor that made for the difference between in animation from the 1930s through the 1950s and of today, and that is the phenomenon of seven minute theatrical animated short subject.  The contemporary animated feature is a massive undertaking along the lines of an aircraft carrier or a cathedral.  Each individual picture is a do or die effort costing in the hundreds of millions and needing to rake in hundreds of millions more to pay out, and a failure can crush the career of the people in charge.  Even the vaunted Pixar will pull a project out of the hands of the director who instigated it if the investment appears threatened.  Feature length requires characters who engage the emotions of the audience in a way that throttles the anarchic spirits of the form.

The commercial circumstances of the animated short on the other hand created the environment for the art form to thrive in a way it may never do again.  The business of animated shorts was lucrative enough to support enough accomplished artists to produce it at the highest level.  At the same time the investment in each individual short was modest enough to experiment and take chances.  Sentiment could be courted or disdained as the animator pleased; all that mattered was the laugh.  Feature films of the studio era were created under the iron hand of supervising producers charged with keeping the artists on a tight rein.  Of the great animation studios, Looney Tunes and MGM were supervised by playboy types whose main concern was getting to the racetrack as early in the day as possible, leaving their employees to do their work in peace, while Disney and Fleischer were run by men who were artists themselves, dedicated to developing and expanding the form.  Even a studio as single-mindedly dedicated to mediocrity as Walter Lantz Productions would, in its Swing Symphonies series, give its functionaries a chance to be inspired.

It would be hard to overestimate the salutary effect Disney had on the medium as a whole.  While his artistic achievement would always be circumscribed by his commitment to Babbitry and harmless humor, he created a standard of excellence in animation the other studios were obliged to pursue in order to compete.  Secondly, because Disney so thoroughly dominated the middle ground he staked out, the other studios were driven to what he left on the table:  Violence, sex, urbanity, anarchy and irreverence.  The contrast was never underlined so explicitly as in the opening of Tex Avery’s Screwball Squirrel, which was practically a declaration of war:

And then, just as the Avery unit at MGM and Looney Tunes were reaching their respective peaks, the lunatics got their own asylum: United Productions of America, better known as UPA.  What UPA was seeking asylum from was Disney, formed as it was by Disney union activists who found Walt to be a sore loser.  They would become the first animation studio since the advent of sound that Disney would be driven to imitate.  It was a revolution driven by necessity.  The animated cartoon as defined by Disney sought to convince the audience it was watching living creatures in a living world.  Even if it had been inclined to fall in line, UPA simply lacked the means.  Just as the International Style in architecture refused to disguise its materials to resemble natural forms, UPA resolved not to disguise the fact that animated cartoons were composed of lines but to revel in it.  The UPA ideal, achieved inconsistently but repeatedly, was to reinvent the cartoon with every new release.  Of all the studios UPA is the one where a layout artist (if not an assistant layout artist) could be at the heart of the creative process.

In 1950 the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, which had started out as an award for the best Walt Disney cartoon until MGM got its block voting organized, after which it became an award for the best Tom and Jerry, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks:

For most of the 50s the Best Animated Short Award would be a contest between the UPA cartoon (or cartoons), the other studios’ version of a UPA cartoon, and Tom and Jerry, whose faction remained well organized despite the fashion.  In 1956 the nominees were nothing but UPA cartoons.

It’s hard to recapture the feeling of newness the UPA style had at the time, simply because the strategies the studio developed for making cartoons economically are practiced to this day.  Also like architecture’s International Style, if the hands it’s in are less than inspired the UPA style easily descends into dullness.  When UPA itself tried to do an ordinary cartoon the results tended to be mediocre, as in their early attempts to utilize the existing Fox and Crow characters, or most of the Mister Magoos.  When UPA was inspired the result was like nothing anyone had ever seen, as in their high point, Rooty Toot Toot:

As you can see, UPA was doing something that practically no Hollywood film of any kind was doing, much less an animated cartoon:  Flattering the audience for its sophistication.  In this they were exploiting a heretofore unexploited privilege of the animated short.  While traditional animated cartoons might have worked on a number of levels, one of those levels was almost always Something For The Kiddies.  UPA understood that because the animated cartoon was not the main thing the audience was buying a ticket to see, and because it would be over in seven minutes, it potentially had the luxury of appealing to sophistication, a quality that is normally the hardest sell in mass entertainment.  At their best they made uncompromising cartoons about adult concerns for an adult sensibility.  They were also fortunate in almost immediately coming up with an enduring meal ticket in the form of Mister Magoo, a character who proved that no one ever went broke finding a socially acceptable way to make fun of cripples.

I had feared that the flush times of the DVD boom had, in passing, passed UPA by.  Fortunately Turner Classic Movies has come to the rescue with The Jolly Frolics Collection, a beautifully restored and packaged three-disc collection of every non-Magoo UPA theatrical short (aside from a token appearance of his first cartoon, Ragtime Bear, Magoo is being reserved for another collection coming out later this year from Shout Factory).  At the risk of ingratitude, I would emphasize that the You Tube clips I so shamelessly embed here are not the prints that appear on the DVDs.  It’s something every animation enthusiast ought to have not just for its intrinsic value but because the better it does the more likely TCM is to give Tex Avery and early Fleischer the same treatment.

I can’t tell you that Jolly Frolics is three discs of unalloyed brilliance.  It’s more akin to the box set of a talented musician who dies young, making every false start and partial success precious.  UPA arrived late, their output was somewhat spotty from the start, and the studio suffered a devastating blow when John Hubley, their leading creative light, was forced to leave for the thought crime of having been a communist.  Michael Barrier, a notoriously tough grader, has written that UPA only produced a dozen first rate cartoons.  In the Jolly Frolics Collection I myself only count about ten cartoons that fully live up to the studio’s promise, but I think Barrier’s count included Magoos.  The voice talent was not always stellar.  Their musical scores, though jazz, were not so much bop or even swing as moldy fig, and often feel more off the rack than custom tailored.  For all their stylistic innovation, they wound up proving by negative example the value of Disney imitation-of-life character animation:  Aside from Magoo UPA seldom acquire a life of their own, and even that exception is due more to the performance of Jim Backus than anything the animators did.

Of all the varieties of short subjects that once accompanied the main feature none would survive as long as the animated cartoon.  While the newsreels, travelogues, filmed variety acts, Larry, Moe and Curly Joe all one by one abandoned the silver screen for the glowing box, you could still expect to see a cartoon before the feature until the end of the 1960s.  But surviving wasn’t necessarily thriving.  As rentals and budgets decreased the other studios could follow the cost-cutting strategies of UPA and be on the cutting edge as well.  Every studio would ultimately do its own take on UPA methods.  Here, for example, is From A to Z-Z-Z-Z from Chuck Jones:

SH-H-H-H-H, The last theatrical cartoon Tex Avery ever directed, at Walter Lantz Productions:

Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, from Walt Disney:

The first thing you will notice from these examples is how much more animation the other studios could do than UPA, even in the years of their decline.  The other thing is why, despite their inconsistency and limited output at the peak of their form, UPA is uniquely valuable.  What the other studios sought when they followed UPA was the appearance of sophistication.  UPA would deliver the thing itself.  Like the governor system on an engine, Hollywood film normally had a limit on how sophisticated it could be.  A Hollywood film could be as sophisticated as Ernst Lubitsch, but it couldn’t be as sophisticated as Jean Renoir.  UPA was a rare instance where the governor system was off.  Among the five great animation studios it might not in retrospect rank higher than fifth, but it was in the category of the greats.

No studio followed UPA as sedulously as Disney.  As can be seen in the examples above, other studios would apply UPA methods to their normal cartoons.  Disney seemed to view UPA as a challenge to their supremacy, and tried to do battle on UPA’s terms, and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom would indeed be the first Disney short to win an Academy Award in ten years.  Disney’s most notable ventures into UPA territory are collected on Disney Rarities:  Celebrated Shorts 1920s to 1960s, an installment in the Walt Disney Treasures series that’s still in circulation.  (To those who are looking for Walt Disney Treasures DVDs that are out of circulation here’s a hint:  A Region 2 player and Amazon Italy.)  The end result most of the time is that they would fail to be UPA but cease to be Disney in the process.

In the era of diminishing returns UPA itself would be like the peasant who already has the flu when the plague hits.  By the end of the 1950s it had degenerated into little more than a Magoo factory, and the last theatrical shorts on the Jolly Frolics collection are barely animated at all.  By then the principals of the UPA revolution were fomenting a new one.  In 1959 the Academy Award went to Moonbird, directed by John and Faith Hubley (then credited as Faith Elliot) with Robert Cannon as animator:

Moonbird symbolized a shift from big studio cartoons shown in commercial theaters would give way to personal animation shown at festivals, a trend that would dominate the world of animated shorts for the next 30 years.  It could be said that this was an era where being a communist became an advantage in animated shorts, where the magic name was not Hollywood but Zagreb.

No one who’s seen the internal strife on the macro level portrayed in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty would doubt the verisimilitude of the fictional office politics on the micro level of Freeway. Kalesniko never quite puts his finger on the factor that made for the difference between in animation from the 1930s through the 1950s and of today, and that is the phenomenon of seven minute theatrical animated short subject. The contemporary animated feature is a massive undertaking along the lines of an aircraft carrier or a cathedral. Each individual picture is a do or die effort costing in the hundreds of millions and needing to rake in hundreds of millions more to pay out, and a failure can crush the career of the people in charge. Even the vaunted Pixar will pull a project out of the hands of the director who instigated it if the investment appears threatened. Feature length requires characters who engage the emotions of the audience in a way that throttles the anarchic spirits of the form.

Elsewhere, there are many things to read & ponder.

—Journal columnist Tucker Stone reviews Jean-Perre Filiu & David B.’s Best of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations, and at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Boxer writes about George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (and explores why critics have had such a hard time talking about it).

—ICv2 has an interesting three-part interview with Image publisher Eric Stephenson about everything from digital publishing to creators’ rights. (“If Image comics had been around when Allen Moore and Dave Gibbons wanted to do Watchmen, they would have had someplace else they could have gone to do that type of work. The situation that developed out of what did or didn’t happen with those contracts would have been irrelevant because they would have had a deal that offered them 100% creator ownership.”)

—Speaking of creators’ rights, the recognition of Jack Kirby’s accomplishments in mainstream media continues to slowly grow, with an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, featuring input from Glen David Gold and Rand Hoppe.

—People seem to really be enjoying this “oral history” of DC’s semi-recent series Countdown to Final Crisis, but I found it too depressing to get very far.

—Blown Covers posts the old form rejection letter from RAW, which is amazing.

—Milo George inaugurates a series at Study Group honoring Dennis the Menace artist Al Wiseman.

—Boing Boing has a nice short profile of the Herblock Prize-winning political cartoonist Matt Bors.

—Have we already mentioned the “master class in comics narrative” Paul Karasik is going to be teaching in Vermont this August? If not, we should have.

—Closed Caption Comics has the penultimate TCAF report, with karaoke photos. Chris Butcher has the ultimate one.

—Steven Brower takes a look at changing reproduction strategies for reprinting old comics.

—And finally, Robot 6 has found something of interest for 20th Century Boys fans: Naoki Urasawa singing “Bob Lennon”.

One of the great comics historians, Ron Goulart, begins a new column for us. Remembrance of Comics Past will feature Ron’s correspondences with cartoonists, beginning this week with Howard Sherman. As he explains:

Over the years I persisted, writing to comic strip artists, comic book artists and a few sports cartoonist. I heard from Bill Everett, Bob Lubbers, Will Eisner, Bart Tumey, Norman Maurer, Frank Godwin, George Storm and a host of others. Being a packrat by nature, I held onto the all the letters and drawings that I got. Tacked many of them on my bedroom walls, until I moved across the Bay to play the ad game at a San Francisco agency when I was 22. By the time I left advertising in the late 1960s, I had gathered a substantial collection of letters.

It’s an honor to have Ron aboard.

And Brandon Soderberg reviews the new Conan the Barbarian series from Wood and Cloonan.

Elsewhere:

-A very intriguing account of stolen Joe Simon art.

-Drew Friedman opened an art show in Brooklyn.

-I agree, this is a gorgeous comic book cover.

-Jack Kirby: Dance!

-The time NYC was briefly not in love with Milton Glaser.

Over the years I persisted, writing to comic strip artists, comic book artists and a few sports cartoonist. I heard from Bill Everett, Bob Lubbers, Will Eisner, Bart Tumey, Norman Maurer, Frank Godwin, George Storm and a host of others. Being a packrat by nature, I held onto all the letters and drawings that I got, and tacked many of them on my bedroom walls, until I moved across the Bay to play the ad game at a San Francisco agency when I was 22. By the time I left advertising in the late 1960s, I had gathered a substantial collection of letters.

We—my wife and son—moved to the East Coast in late 1968. I concentrated on writing science fiction novels, initially for Doubleday and Ace. I added mystery novels a few years later. And I started selling nonfiction books, chiefly about comic strips and comic books. I also got to know Jerry DeFuccio, who was an associate editor at MAD. He was a gung ho Golden Age comic book fan and it was his ambition to do a definitive history. He amassed a large collection of material, comic books, letters, original art, etc. But Jerry just could never get around to writing it. In fact, the pieces on C.C. Beck and Norman Mingo that he was supposed to write for the Overstreet guides and which he signed, he could never quite get around to writing. I ghosted them for him. In the final years of his life, when he realized that he’d never do the Golden Age book, he turned over a great many of the letters he’d gathered over to me.

For my initial outing I’ve decided to reprint a letter that I unearthed recently from the stuff DeFuccio had sent me some years ago. It’s dated 11/8/84 and is from Howard Sherman, who co-created Doctor Fate for More Fun Comics #55 (May, 1940). Jerry had asked the artist questions about his work in comic books. I think he was disappointed that Sherman was not as enthusiastic about the Golden Age as he still was. On the envelope he had written  “not much here”. Actually there’s quite a lot of information in Sherman’s four-page hand-lettered reply. Some of it informative, some of it rather sad.

The early Doctor Fate adventures offered somewhat grim, spooky and unsettling yarns to the young readers of More Fun, creepy stories that added some horror pulp criteria to the comic book’s definition of fun. An early caption spoke of the good doctor, who wore a blue and gold costume and a golden helmet that completely covered his face, as “a man of mystery, possessor of ancient secrets.” He dwelled “apart from mankind in his lonely tower north of ghost-ridden Salem” and called “upon ancient sources for the power with which he fights unusual crimes.”

The scriptwriter, and co-creator, was the impressively prolific Gardner F. Fox, who also invented The Flash, Hawkman, Zatara and the Justice Society to name but a few. A dedicated reader and sometime contributor of pulp fiction, Fox borrowed quite a bit from Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft and his followers. Howard Sherman had the ideal style to illuminate Fate’s arcane caseload. In the doctor’s first year or so in business he tangled with a green-tinted wizard bent on destroying the Earth, went for a boat ride on the River Styx, called on someone called Wisdom who had some of the attributes of God, Doctor Fate overcame mean-minded lost souls, invaders from another planet, killer robots, fish-men, an evil Mayan god and a faux leopard woman.

Doctor Fate’s constant companion was an attractive young woman named Inza Cramer. Always well dressed, whether casually or formally, she shared many of his supernatural encounters and he frequently saved her from fates far worse than death. Sherman enjoyed drawing these weird tales; his layouts were inventive and added to the unsettling fantasy elements. He says in the following letter that he was “slower in production than some of the other artists. It took me about 10 to 14 days to pencil and ink 6 pages.” For that two weeks of work, he was earning, according to the early page rate he mentions in his letter, $72.

Despite his meticulous and thoughtful approach, his pages are fast moving and rich in aptly gloomy settings, monumental explosions, huge fireballs, furious storms and many another Saturday matinee serial touches. In the letter you’ll learn quite a bit about his career from a talented artist who labored in comic books during the Golden Age, before anybody was calling it that, then moved on to other things.

NOTE: In 2007 DC added The Golden Age Doctor Fate Volume 1 to its hardcover Archival Editions series. Over 350 pages of Howard Sherman’s work. You might also glance at the few Fate stories done by other artists to get an idea how much better he was than quite a few of his contemporaries.

Don’t look now, but a couple of indie comics nerds are messing around with Conan the Barbarian — and it’s the best thing to happen to Robert E. Howard’s legendary galoot since Marvel Comics retrofitted him for the rogue male-centric mid-’70s. Writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan’s Conan the Barbarian, based on Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast” short story — in which a young Conan becomes romantically involved with Belit, an “ebony-haired,” living breathing angel of death — features a fairly talkative warrior, built more like a long distance runner than a linebacker. This Conan is totally hot — in a youthful badass, Peter Pan kind of way.

Issue #3 begins with a flashback to the disconcertingly slender Conan hunting in his native Cimmeria. It’s a context-free scene from Conan’s past, there to parallel a sex scene later on — making explicit the creation/destruction themes that tug this tale along — and to illustrate Belit’s idyllic vision of the Cimmerian. Also, it’s the only moment of the story arc where we get to see Conan in his natural habitat, doing what he does best: masterfully murdering things. And that’s important because “Queen of the Black Coast” is all about Conan screwing up. Issue #1 starts with Conan forcing himself onboard a ship called the Argus, assuring protection to the angry crew, then confidently and idiotically leading them into the seas patrolled by the vicious Belit and her ship, the Tigress. Everyone on the Argus, save for Conan, is killed by Belit’s crew.

While downplaying the pulpmeister’s worshipful Romanticism, Wood and Cloonan honor the strange contingencies of fate that are at the core of Howard’s tough guy mystical storytelling. “Queen of the Black Coast” is a story about sex and violence, love and reptile-brain attraction, and the brutal fact that we cannot control our base impulses no matter how hard we try. Was it simple hubris, or more mysterious matters of the heart that sent Conan towards Belit’s ship, in the first place? Later on, we learn that Conan would’ve been killed along with the Argus’ crew, had Belit wished for it to happen.

Wood and Cloonan’s approach to the Conan legacy is conservative (see issue #2′s extended fight scene, a gleefully violent mix of cheap thrills and grace under pressure), perhaps even reverential (the narration appears in a typewriter font, reminding readers of the source material), but quietly subversive, as well. When Conan bounds onto the Argus uninvited in issue #1, he pretty much hustles the angry crew into accepting him, first with his sword, and then with some smooth-talking about his predicament: “And perhaps more than a few quarts of ale had passed my lips. You men must surely know the place, the bone in the throat, that inn down the old wharf road?” It’s our hero as fast-talking twerp.

That bit of dialogue isn’t in the original story and here, it’s delivered by a less than cocksure warrior, so everything is slightly shifted and modernized with just enough respect to tradition and expectation. A touching, full page image in issue #3 shows Conan and Belit, post-coitus — their naked bodies comparable in size, subtly correcting to the usually out of control body images present in fantasy comics. With the doom that will inevitably befall their romance in upcoming issues temporarily at bay, the two share a genuinely tender moment. Belit rests on the bed, her foot is half-wrapped around Conan’s leg. It’s a type of intimacy that cuts straight through Howard’s lofty vision of romance as two myths falling in love with one another’s mythos.

Moynihan provides a helpful family tree at the beginning of the book but otherwise plunges the reader square into the mining operation begun on earth by the alien “god” named Mithras in 10,000 BC. Moynihan has a way of quickly catching the reader up on what they need to know through character interactions, but just when the reader seems to have a clear handle on what’s going on, he throws in another new character who further complicates matters. Mithras winds up bedding an earth woman named Gaia who bears a special mark and spawns a number of strange and threatening children. After she defends them by saying things like “they just need more attention” and “they’re sensitive,” Mithras thinks, “These Earth mothers are mentally deranged when it comes to their kids!” That line slew me.

Moynihan connects alien mythology (the aliens in the book are from the planet Dogon, as in the alien conspiracy theory), Greek mythology (in the form of the Titans), and Judeo-Christian theology (Noah as a hilariously sleazy slacker), in the form of the “angels” who come from space but go native under the leadership of trans angel/assassin Serapis—not to mention the presence of Lucifer at the center of the earth. Every one of these origin stories is “true” in the sense that they overlap and influence each other. In between crazy fight scenes, lurid sex scenes, and hilarious dialogue, Moynihan actually explores a number of philosophical ideas. Foremost is Moynihan’s take on language.  The humans in the story initially communicate by a form of pictorial thought-projection before the aliens give them the “gift” of language, and it’s clear that their former means of communication is far more in tune with their environment.

Other themes involve free will vs divine destiny, the will of the individual vs one’s place in the greater whole (which is personified in a debate between Lucifer and the young titan Arges in which Lucifer says, “You’re all high and mighty now, but wait ’till you experience real death. You’ll change your tune then. That shit will rock your ass.”), and the tension between progress and conservation. Many of these topics are debated in almost Socratic fashion, but written entirely in Moynihan’s hilarious modern lingo. Throughout, the further any race tries to interfere on earth, the more resistance they receive in the form of the “Great Beasts” and mysterious forces in earth determined to oppose them.

Midway through the book, the second-rate assassin Atys is introduced to kill the rebellious Serapis, and this musclebound blowhard is by far the funniest character in the book. Intensely jealous of Serapis, there’s an unforgettable scene where he’s psyching himself up in the mirror prior to his mission to earth where he masturbates and covers himself in jism, paradoxically uttering hate-filled epithets regarding Serapis’s status as a transsexual while promising to rape him/her (“RIGHT IN YOUR FUCKING STAR FRUIT, SERAPIS! GET IT MOIST FOR ME!”). Of course, Atys gets his ass kicked and sent packing, tries it again and his dreams of Forced Dry Anal are forced off earth once again. At the climax of this volume, Atys goes through a journey with master assassin Marduk (one of many Babylonian mythological namesakes in this book) and actually has Serapis on the ropes before a mysterious creature in charge of the rebellious beasts announces itself and turns Atys into a rock.

The volume ends with Serapsis’ crazy son Cain finding the power buried in Atys and threatening to become a dangerous new wild card in the various petty conflicts at play. That’s the takeaway from this first volume of the rise and potential fall of Atlantis: that all of the machinations of the “gods” are nothing more than a series of cynical power plays to get at earth’s precious mining resources. When in doubt, follow the money. The book takes an interesting turn when forces present in and on earth are more than willing to take on the gods, though they mostly work behind the scenes in the first volume. Forming may be more accessible and less personal than Follow Me, but it’s a project worthy of his talent and ambition.

Tezuka Osamu, Manga College (August 1950), cover.

The original cover of Tezuka Osamu’s Manga College, which is no longer used for copyright reasons, can be read like a cipher, like a diagram of Tezuka’s artistic identity at around the time the book was published, in the summer of 1950. If you have read Manga College or similar intro books by Tezuka, you know that Professor Manga is basically a wizened stand-in for the artist. Here he sports a cap bearing the logo of Tezuka’s Mushi Pro, at this point just a name not an operation. He has drawn on the chalkboard a fairly faithful image of Mickey Mouse, as if this is where instruction in “Comicology” (the title of a book on his desk) shall begin and always return. Below on the ground is his partner. He is also modeled on Mickey. He has the big shoes, the ears, and generally the face, but he is definitely not Mickey. He is just a rodent. This impostor, this scrawny pot-bellied wise-ass wanna-be, he also makes art. He has drawn a picture of the professor, and it stinks.

What is going on here? Professor Tezuka is so good at cartooning that he can simulate Disney. Pseudo-Mickey is so bad that he makes a mess of Tezuka. This is not teacher versus student, for the students are sitting over here, on our side, facing the teacher and the board. So much is illustrated on the first page of the book, showing a standard college lecture hall, with tiered seats in a semi-circular arrangement, looking down upon the professor and, at his foot, the little mouse. How is it that the fake Mickey is Tezuka’s aide? Or conscience? How is it that he teases Tezuka with maladroit yet effective caricatures?

Is it that Tezuka draws the rodent as the rodent wants to be seen, while the rodent does just the opposite, rendering Tezuka as Tezuka wishes not to be seen?

How is this the face of Comicology in Japan, 1950? Is it significant that in that very spring Tezuka had begun his first serial for a Tokyo magazine, and that perhaps he could begin to look away from his akahon roots and the rodents living within them? Is it significant that just the previous year, Daiei Film Co. President Nagata Masaichi had signed a personal deal with Walt Disney to be the studio’s sole licensing agent in Japan, thereby bringing to Japan the first official Mickeys in bulk in well over a decade?

Tezuka Osamu, Magic House (February 1948), cover.

Thesis: From his arrival in Japan in the early 30s, Mickey Mouse was an icon of humor. To some, he was also ambassador of American ingenuity and American quality in production. But thanks to lax copyright protections for foreign properties, and his rendition by goods-makers that did not necessarily privilege the faithful or even skillful reproduction of his image, Mickey also became in Japan an icon of appropriation and its side effects, like modified personality and degraded design. This continued into the early postwar period. But towards the end of the Occupation, a series of forces colluded to “correct” Mickey’s image. Amongst them was Tezuka Osamu. For Tezuka, rectifying Disney went hand in hand with a number of things. It meant denying the akahon rodent of his roots and the production ethic on which its inventiveness fed. It meant recalling Mickey from appropriation and putting him back in the hands of authorship. It meant repositioning Disney as a light of genius and industriousness, against a mainstream that viewed him primarily as a talented showman and joker. It meant seeing himself more and more in the image of Disney. It meant expelling the rodent from the classroom, however much he had been there for the professor in his youth, and teaching straight from the Mickey on the board.

For what follows, let us take the rodent as akahon and the blackboard Mickey as manga industry at the dawn of the Fifties. This allegory, as you will see, is based on more than my imagination.

Note: On akahon, see “An Introduction to Akahon Manga”

(Continued)

Above we see a detail from Suicide Joe, an enormous 11 3/4″ x 16 1/2″ comic book, just 20 pages, which I picked up from the Danish Consulate General at MoCCA the other week. I was unaware at the time that the Journal’s own Matthias Wivel — or, at least I’m presuming that’s him writing — had previously named it one of the best Danish comics of 2010, though it actually dates from 1984; I’m not sure if it was actually published back then, though it is certainly available now from Fahrenheit. There are many things I don’t know, though I’m certain I like the comic.

The artist is Peter Kielland, presently a contributor to Wivel’s Kolor Klimax: Nordic Comics Now collection from Fantagraphics, though some might recall the 2004 Kim-Rehr Productions release of his wordless Fish. This, in contrast, is mostly in fragmented, elliptic English, following an artist who specializes in desecrating other people’s work and slashing up bodies for exhibition in his lucrative Suicide Gallery. Yet these deaths are demonstration not suicides, and Suicide Joe remains dissatisfied as his lack of comprehension of art, money, life and death, an unease that sets him down a path of discovery through bars, whores, psychologists, religion and medicine, all of it rendered in a slashing style evocative — so Matt Seneca told me — of classic RAW, its large pages accommodating upwards of 23 panels per shot, yet never seeming more crowded than the nervous story requires.

Matt and I are going to get into this a little more pretty soon, so I don’t want to go in too deep, but I have to mention how young and anxious a comic this feels, eager to segue from noisy groupings of panels to comparative quiet, if always crossed through with shadowing lines; there’s never a moment where Kielland’s Joe seems to stop thinking, and so there is never a page where the artist is not anxious about art as desecration, and desecration as nonetheless a failure to grasp something profound. The ending then seems inevitable, as Joe realizes that his art can embodies stillness to him only when divorced from the reality of his creation of it, when placed in a gallery where even sensitive minds and able curators can only analyze what it could have meant to him. From there, the artist too becomes part of the exhibition, frozen in time by the narrative of aesthetics, and truly dead. If Suicide Joe is only now being published in the ’10s, laid down on paper and set out for sale, then maybe it’s finally dead to Kielland, though I wonder if divesting himself of such youth isn’t now a relief.

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PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

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SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

Best of Enemies: A History Of U.S. and Middle East Relations, Part 1: 1783-1953: Certainly the first thing I’d look at this week – a new 120-page SelfMadeHero translation (distributed in North America through Abrams) of a 2011 work by L’Association co-founder David B[eauchard], collaborating with Jean-Pierre Filiu to draw “striking parallels between ancient and contemporary political history,” per the publisher. My understanding is that it blends some of the fable style of The Armed Garden with the essay narration of the artist’s unfortunately stalled Babel, which is to say it’s a completely “David B.” kind of comic, despite its sober ‘relevant political topic’ packaging. Sample; $24.95.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama: And elsewhere in big box bookstore hits & floridly digressive narration, Alison Bechdel follows up 2007′s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic with a 224-page Houghton Mifflin Harcourt examination of her relationship with her mother. Bechdel has since become something of an axiom online, so I find it helpful to recall that Fun Home was not altogether warmly received in dedicated comics crit circles upon its release, in that such chilliness was tied, I think, to the work’s qualities as a constructed narrative; Bechdel is not a ‘natural’ cartoonist by the typical understanding, shooting photo-reference for apparently every panel and drawing her story together as if forming a scrapbook of her past, chapters organized as discreet thematic units — often riffing off some pertinent literary exposure in that segment of her youth — yet pregnant with images and text that recur throughout the work in updated contexts, and a narration that tends to comment reflexively on its own citations. It’s an obsessively analytic approach to comics creation — at odds with the freewheeling, hugely vivid, visceral, iconographic approach of a David B., despite working in an ostensibly similar essay mode — inseparable from the disposition of the work itself, and I’m interested in seeing how it develops. Samples/interview; $22.00.

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PLUS!

100 Months: I’ve highlighted this one before, the final longform work by John Hicklenton — maybe my all-time favorite 2000 AD artist, with Nemesis the Warlock and Heavy Metal Dredd credits of some note — “a parable of environmental devastation” created during his prolonged struggle with multiple sclerosis, which the artist concluded on his own volition shortly after the book was completed. Cutting Edge Press initially released the 172-page hardcover in 2010, but I believe this is the first time any edition has been made available in North American comic book stores via Diamond. Samples; $29.95.

But I Really Wanted to Be an Anthropologist: This is a second SelfMadeHero offering for the week, collecting 176 pages of humorous color comics and illustrations from the Paris-based Margaux Motin, I believe culled from her website. Very pleasing linework on this; $24.95.

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 5: The Happy Prince: Being the newest release from P. Craig Russell, an original 32-page, 8 1/2″ x 11″ hardcover album, its format designed to match prior installments of the series dating back to the early 1990s (though vol. 1, The Selfish Giant and the Star Child, is also seeing new hardcover and softcover editions this week). The Wilde story dates from 1888, concerning money and satisfaction; its adaptation marks Russell’s Opus 66, if you’re keeping track. Preview; $16.99.

The Complete Dick Tracy Vol. 13: 1950-1951: Yep, IDW’s still got this going on; $39.99.

30 Days Of Night: 10 Bloody Years – Treasury Edition: But as much as I like the Library of American Comics stuff, I’ve gotten pretty piqued by this short-form, large-sized reprint effort they’ve been spreading across their wares, offering samples of elsewhere-collected materials in a 9 3/4″ x 13″ glossy format at a pretty low price, presumably due to the already-done state of the work. This time it’s the complete original 2002 Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith vampire miniseries — arguably the work upon which the publisher’s fortune was built — getting the oversized treatment, which should prove interesting with all that blood and smudging; $9.99.

Deadenders: In which DC/Vertigo suddenly reminds you of a project you couldn’t even place exact years on without help, specifically here the 392-page entirety of a 2000-01 series from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Warren Pleece (inked, at different points, by Richard Case, Cameron Stewart and Jay Stephens), concerning combative teenagers of the shitty future. Sixteen issues seems like an enviable run today, given the circumstances; $29.99.

B.P.R.D. – Hell on Earth: The Devil’s Engine #1 (of 3): Notable for marking the return of the series’ arguable primary artist Tyler Crook, following some really striking part-time Hellboy universe contributions by James Harren (of The Long Death) and Tonci Zonjic (over on Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand). Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi, as usual. Preview; $3.50.

The Flowers of Evil Vol. 1: This is Vertical’s newest manga series, an ongoing shōnen high school comedy (its sixth volume imminent in Japan) that might seem like a sop to orthodox fan tastes, until you realize that ‘fan tastes’ run to scenarios involving a nervous middle school kid’s accidental theft of a crush object’s gym clothes and his subsequent blackmailing by a foul-mouthed weird girl classmate — apparently based on a real childhood acquaintance of creator Shuzo Oshimi — into situations poised to needle his most severe anxieties. The result is basically male humiliation porn for junior high-schoolers that appears to have won its fit-for-12-year-olds designation solely by virtue of avoiding any on-panel nudity, an effect cheerily enhanced by the f-bombs and miscellaneous other profanities sprinkled over the English translation. Or maybe everyone down at Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine knew it’d be impossible for any real heat to rise from Oshimi’s stone-boring, anime dōjinshi-looking artwork, his anti-heroine enough of a Rei Ayanami/Yuki Nagato fetish clone icon to make one wistful for draconian copyright enforcement. Nonetheless, you probably won’t see another mainstream comic this week depicting a flush-faced schoolgirl ripping a screaming boy’s clothes off and forcing a pair of sporty ladies’ bloomers onto his writhing body, unless Hulk Smash Avengers goes rogue; $10.95.

Saturn Apartments Vol. 5 (of 7): But if that’s a little too rich for you, Hisae Iwaoka has a really soft, round cartoon style I’m always happy to see, and now Viz has another 192 pages of her 2006-2011 slice-of-life-in-space series from its SigIKKI line of older-skewing series. Sample chapter from vol. 1; $12.99.

Kamen: Speaking of digital manga efforts, last year saw the launch of GEN, a monthly collection of actual dōjinshi efforts — which, setting aside my derogatory reference above to anime fan comics, is a term encompassing any self-published Japanese manga — aimed at older audiences. I can’t say I’ve read any of it, but it’s nearly a year old now, and Kamen appears to be the first collected edition of applicable materials, a 258-page story from Gunya Mihara concerning a masked man of justice. You can also buy a digital edition for two bucks, if you so choose; $9.95.

Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo: Finally, your book-on-comics of the week, a 224-page Hermes Press tribute to the man of the title, promising art from the comics and animation arenas, as well as essays, appreciations and other coverage; $49.99.

From his arrival in Japan in the early ’30s, Mickey Mouse was an icon of humor. To some, he was also ambassador of American ingenuity and American quality in production. But thanks to lax copyright protections for foreign properties, and his rendition by goods-makers that did not necessarily privilege the faithful or even skillful reproduction of his image, Mickey also became in Japan an icon of appropriation and its side effects, like modified personality and degraded design. This continued into the early postwar period. But towards the end of the Occupation, a series of forces colluded to “correct” Mickey’s image. Amongst them was Tezuka Osamu. For Tezuka, rectifying Disney went hand in hand with a number of things. It meant denying the akahon rodent of his roots and the production ethic on which its inventiveness fed. It meant recalling Mickey from appropriation and putting him back in the hands of authorship. It meant repositioning Disney as a light of genius and industriousness, against a mainstream that viewed him primarily as a talented showman and joker. It meant seeing himself more and more in the image of Disney. It meant expelling the rodent from the classroom, however much he had been there for the professor in his youth, and teaching straight from the Mickey on the board.

Joe McCulloch refrained from exploring the swamplands this week, and has his usual Tuesday report on the most interesting-looking new comics ready to go.

And Rob Clough continues his tour through the output of Nobrow Press with a review of Jesse Moynihan’s Forming.

Also, we have continued to add new Maurice Sendak tributes to our page for him, many of which you may not have seen if you haven’t looked at the post since last week. Some of the more recent contributors include Megan Kelso, Dylan Horrocks, Cathy Malkasian, and Victor Kerlew.

And of course, the tributes to Sendak have continued to grow everywhere else on the internet, too. Some highlights not previously noted in this space include Chris Mautner at Robot 6, Ellen Handler Spitz at The New Republic, Neil Gaiman at The Guardian, and a whole slew of artists at the New York Times (don’t miss the attached slideshow at that link). Philip Nel, who of course wrote an excellent Sendak obituary for us, has penned another short remembrance at his own site, at the end of which he has also gathered an extremely thorough collection of links to the best and most informative memorials.

It also just came to my attention that Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze’s Tell Them Anything You Want, their 2009 documentary on Sendak, is available for viewing at Hulu:

—Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, the esteemed cultural critic Mark Dery writes about a recent collection of Edward Gorey’s correspondence.

—Roger Langridge has revealed a little more of what was behind his recently announced decision no longer to work for DC or Marvel.

—Derik Badman uses a critical roundtable on Wonder Woman as an excuse to take a closer look at the overlooked, underdiscussed importance of style in cartooning.

—Tom Spurgeon has the first (that I’ve seen) big interview with Joseph Remnant, the collaborator on Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland who has taken a lot of people by surprise.

—Blake Bell continues to cater to that small part of the Venn diagram where superfans of Steve Ditko and superfans of Dave Sim meet.

—Leonard Pierce writes about Pogo.

—And finally, via Mike Lynch, Jules Feiffer reads from “Boob Noir”:

On the site today we have a preview of Gary Groth’s expansive interview with the late Maurice Sendak. It will see full publication this autumn in TCJ 302. And yesterday Frank Santoro reported back to us from deep within cartoonist Jim Rugg’s Pittsburgh-area home. Frank is embedding himself in different locations.

The big story of the moment is perhaps the news that longtime independent cartoonist Roger Langridge, who recently wrote, among other comics, a very popular Thor series, has announced that he will not work for Marvel and DC any longer due to ethical concerns. Langridge currently writes Popeye for IDW besides doing his own comics.

There’s been a whole slew of book previews:

-Eric Reynolds writes about a project he’s very happy with — Significant Objects.

-Gilbert Hernandez’s upcoming Fatima: The Blood Spinners looks pretty great.

-Drawn & Quarterly has a very handsome new petit livre on the way.

-And finally, closest to my heart: There’s yet another new Wally Wood collection coming.

But, to begin at the beginning: I had previously spoken to Maurice nearly a dozen times by phone over the previous three years: initially desultorily, and later, when I decided that I was prepared to interview him for The Comics Journal, more earnestly and purposefully. When I formally approached him about an interview — perhaps in 2009 — he didn’t decline, exactly, but he was standoffish. He told me he didn’t like talking on the phone, and he politely but firmly declined my offer to conduct it at his home, which left me without many (that is to say, any) options. I finally persuaded him to do several short interviews by phone. He asked me how much time I needed, and I explained to him that my interviews could go on for hours because I wanted to do a thorough job. I heard a visible gasp on the other end of the line. He told me he couldn’t talk that long on the phone because he got tired. I quickly regrouped and suggested that we could talk for, oh, say 30 minutes at a time and just do a number of different sessions (hoping, even as I said it, that I could slyly turn 30 minutes into 60). He grumbled. He would commit to a couple. I remember mentioning to him that we’d already been talking that day for 40 minutes without any signs of his slowing down, which was true (I wish I’d had my tape recorder on at the time!), but which didn’t seem to impress him as an argument in favor of two hour interview sessions. Once he’d realized we’d been talking for 40  minutes, he quickly got off the phone.

From King Grisley-Beard; pictures by Sendak

The fact is, we got along incredibly well. We had several 30-40 minute conversations that ranged all over the place, but which usually centered on the state of the world and how much he loathed it. He was quite cheerfully and gregariously grumpy about it all, an attitude and a point of view that I appreciated, and even shared. It was obvious that he took no small measure of delight in inveighing against contemporary degradations, and I have to admit that I took no little delight in listening to him. He would cite specifics about the world going to hell in a hand-basket and I would inevitably, and truthfully, concur. I can’t say we became fast friends, but I can say that we got on and established a genuine rapport. (We also talked about more substantial matters —such as politics— and about things he loved— mostly old cartooning and old films.)

He agreed to sit still for a phone conversation and perhaps more than one. But each time we set a date, something came up to thwart it. He had to cancel twice, once due to a deadline and once due to momentary health problems. On the third date that we’d agreed upon, I was sitting at my desk, my notes in front of me, the recorder plugged in, prepared to keep the imminent conversation chugging for as long as I could. I dialed the number — and discovered that Hurricane Irene had downed his phone lines! Truly, it appeared as though the fates were conspiring against us, or at least, against me. I was becoming demoralized. Perhaps it was not meant to be.

When I casually mentioned to his assistant and close friend, Lynn, that I was planning a trip to New York the following week, she told me to come on up and conduct the interview in person. This surprised me because I’d learned, subsequent to my offering to visit him earlier, that he was wary of visitors and never let anyone he didn’t know visit his home. My theory is that he simply took pity on me and distrusted any future attempt to communicate by modern or semi-modern technology. The following week, on November 8, I boarded a train from Penn Station headed for Ridgefield, Conn. I had with me my trusty three-ring binder full of notes, ready to get as much of a career-spanning interview as I could, but nervous because I wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t throw me out after 20 minutes; he didn’t seem like the kind of artist who would sit still for a conventional interview.

He didn’t throw me out; in fact, quite the opposite, he spoke animatedly all afternoon and into the evening, mostly while we walked around his property, sat on a bench in his sprawling backyard (more like a private park), and strolled down the street, the tape recorder going much the time, and yielding the most unconventional, conversational interview I’ve ever done. (I could’ve left my binder full of notes at home.)

I had an unforgettable time. Maurice and I spoke a half-dozen times since; he’d agreed to a few follow-up questions, but all our conversations were casual, consisting of good-natured badinage. His fatalism was couched in a blithe spiritedness, and he was funny. The last time I spoke to him, in April, he actually sounded robust despite suffering from flu-ish symptoms, and told me to call him back in a couple weeks to ask him short follow-up questions. I put it off, and then learned that he passed. I had hoped to see him again soon, and despite knowing him briefly, I will miss him.

The full interview will appear in the next print Journal, #302, but below are a few choice excerpts.

Gary Groth, May 10, 2012

SENDAK ON HIS COMICS CAREER

SENDAK: I would take my stack of papers back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and Jeff, backgrounds for Tippy and Captain Stubbs. And there would be a weekly down below, one strip, and I would take it and cut it up, and make it fit on a comic page so that I would have to extend the drawing to fit the size of the comic box. Oh, God. I loved it. But I lost that because — What did they ask me to do? They asked me to do a more moderate thing, where the drawing was more Prince Valiant-ish. And girls were sexy, and it’s like, “You can’t draw sexy girls.” I failed. I failed. I loved it. I was really gonna be a cartoonist. I had a cartoon in my high school newspaper magazine. Terrible, terrible shit. [...]

GROTH: Didn’t you work on Mutt and Jeff? In comic books?

SENDAK: Yes, yes: small things like smoke coming out of heels.

GROTH: This is one of the things I wanted to ask you, which was how you became the artist you became and how you had the career you did. When you were a kid, you read comic strips. You must have read comic strips.

SENDAK: Yes, yes.

GROTH: And comic books came along around the mid-1930s, and you read comic books as well. But you didn’t become a comic-strip artist or a comic-book artist. You went an entirely different direction.

SENDAK: I would have liked to become a Big Little Book artist.

GROTH: But they died. [Laughter.]

SENDAK: They died, yes, they died. Although I have my collection.

Kenny's Window, Sendak's first book

GROTH: But I was curious as to why you didn’t — I mean, the dream of many artists back then was to have a syndicated strip. That was the Holy Grail. And those who couldn’t do that went into comic books. And so I’m wondering why you didn’t move in either direction.

SENDAK: I have no idea. I think part of why it happened had nothing to do with the actual craft. It had to do with meeting Ursula Nordstrom at Harper’s [Harper and Row] and knowing instantly my life was with her.

GROTH: I see.

SENDAK: And she said, “You do a book.” I would do anything she said. If she said do a comic book, I would have done a comic book. So she was integral, she was so important to my life. 

IN HIS TIME

SENDAK: We cannot, I think, separate ourselves from our time. Like when I began in the ’50s … Of course, I’d had the privilege of having great siblings. So me as an artist was with my brother as an artist, learning from him, copying him, living in the same house with him. It was unbelievable to have such a brother, and on top of that, I had such a sister. She wasn’t an artist. She had no impulses in that direction, but she was a great sponsor of. She was delighted with me and delighted with my brother and her brother. And then I grew up and lived through all of that Auschwitz time, and then we won the war. Hitler might have won the war, but he didn’t. That doesn’t sound like much now, but it sounded like a hell of a lot then. We won the war! My God! And we ran from Brooklyn to New York City to get ahead of the soldiers, and those doors opened, and we were welcomed. Young people were welcomed. New things were happening, a surge of energy: a surge of hope. A surge of happiness. And now it’s all dwindled. And so I say, look, I’m very lucky that’s when my time was. What a blessing that I could be there then and be with editors and people in the publishing world who appreciated young people and wanted them to be crazy like I was. Nobody wants them now.

WHY SO SERIOUS

SENDAK: Well, I get criticized for doing too serious books. Why is there a dead child in so many of your books? Why is there a chagrined mother? Because that’s the way it is. It works both ways. You either become very superficial, and do it strictly for the money, or you become very serious and turn people off. And if it’s a book for children, my God! I would not know how to write a book for children. I’ve never written a book for children. And yet I’m known as a children’s book writer and illustrator, OK? Why did they define me that way? I used to object much more when I was younger, much more. But I don’t care any more. I’ve thought that’s all part of this third-rate worldly thinking that should not be of interest to me and truthfully it’s not. Thank God I can still read. Thank God I can still hear music. Thank God I don’t mind being alone. I am very alone, and I’m lonely and there are very few people who satisfy me and what do they have to be, they have to be artists, for the most part [rooster crows]. They have to understand what it means to be a serious person in an unserious society.

Drawn while listening to Brahms: from The Art of Maurice Sendak

SENDAK THE ANARCHIST

SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”

GROTH: A group hug.

SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.

GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]

SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.

One of my riffs these days is that cartoonists don’t know how to compose in color. Usually the cartoonist only understands the coloring book approach. Heavy black outlines that contain the color. Color is an afterthought. Composing directly in color in cartooning is uncommon. That’s how I see it anyways. A generalization for sure but so what. A truism in my book.

So seeing Jim Rugg the cartoonist blossom into Jim Rugg the draw-er has been really exciting for this Jim Rugg fan. He is composing directly in color these days, almost exclusively, and the marks he is making in color are far more embroidered than any brushed black outline. He is filling the space in such an interesting way. I can’t wait until this approach seeps into his comics. Go Jimmy Go!

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Jim’s art show in L.A.

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how Jim spends his time

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Jim’s current favorite book – More Things Like This

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selections from Jim’s collection

RAV by Mickey Z

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Danger County / The Dudes

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O.G. Kramers

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Galactic Breakdown

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Yellow Submarine

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Low Jinx #3

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Brian Ralph parody

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2491 A.D.

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Alexis Ziritt original art

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Jim’s ballpoint pen collection – Divine drawing here.

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on Jim’s wall

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PeepoChoo

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Jim and I agree that Hewlett is the greatest. He can do it all. Who else in comics has this reach? Look how simple it is – how clear.

——-

DON’T FORGET

Frank Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers
Summer 2012

New Course Announcement

June 4th start date

8 week course

“Full course” – layouts, color, figure drawing – you will make a 16 page comic over the 8 weeks.

500 bux. Payment plans available. No money down! Totally serious.

To apply, email me and I will explain the submission guidelines.

Deadline to apply is May 30th

Only ten spots available
capneasyATgmailDOTcom

Check out one of my student’s work – he just finished his comic and posted it to his blog.
———–

SENDAK: I think we assume that only children have this incredible flexibility — they talk to newspapers; they talk to tablecloths; they talk to bowls of water; and we say, “How charming, how cute.” We do it, too, but we don’t do it aloud. Because we have grown up and we have gray in our beards and we’re supposed to be adults and we’re all just nervous wrecks, basically.

Children have the privilege because we have endowed them with the privilege of having this fantasy life. So they move in and out of fantasy all the time. But, I think, people always say how wonderful that you can do books for children; you have your childhood intact. They give me this really ridiculous sentimental aspect, because I think we all do; I think it’s a survival tactic; if we didn’t live in fantasy most of the day, we’d all be off your famous [Golden Gate] bridge over here, for the most part.

So I think this trick you’re talking about is no more than the observation of real life.

QUESTION: I was referring, though, to how you can have that baby talk but make it believable. Some of the editors would say, “Well, this is a little contrived to think that a fish can rescue a jade bracelet.”

SENDAK: Well, this conviction has to come from you. If your fish is talking, then it’s got to be a perfectly reasonable thing that your fish is talking. If your fish is talking and it doesn’t come really from you, then your editor is correct. That’s a contrivance. Children will know instantly. Kids know instantly when you’re patronizing them, when you’re giving them ersatz fantasy or it’s coming genuinely from the middle of your gut; they know. They are not impressed with the fact that you’ve won the Caldecott Award or that you like Mozart or any of those things; they could not care less. The book goes flying across the room. You notice from their letters; “Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially…”

We also have the latest column from Tucker Stone on the world of genre comics, which this week includes a report from Abhay Khosla on fans’ reactions to a tepid review of their new favorite movie. Pretty horrifying stuff.

And we’ve finally convinced Dash Shaw to join our roster of contributors. Today he reviews Jeffrey Brown’s cat comics, which gives him the opportunity to discuss what he calls “cat appreciation art” in general.

And of course, there are things on the internet that aren’t on this site.

—Mark Evanier reports the death of Jonah Hex co-creator Tony DeZuniga.

—Another day, another set of Alison Bechdel interviews, this time a brief one in the New York Times, and another on the Paris Review‘s website.

—In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Tolkin, Dallas Clayton, and Howard A. Rodman offer their memories of Maurice Sendak.

Speaking of whom, Stephen Colbert has released more outtakes from Sendak’s excellent appearance on his show:

—Matt Seneca has just launched a new weekly column over at Robot 6 in which he plans to list and discuss what he considers to be the “greatest comics of all time.” First up: Kirby and Lee’s Thor #160.

—Drew Friedman is interviewed by Ralph Gardner at the Wall Street Journal, on the occasion, though I don’t think the article actually mentions it, of Friedman’s newly republished Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Coincidental (co-written by his brother Josh). It’s a beautiful book, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently. There’s a certain brand of mean-spirited, petty humor that’s been pretty popular over the last few decades, in which the main point seems to be laughing at some celebrity or another who no longer has a thriving career. As if failing to maintain A-list status in as fickle and luck-dependent as Hollywood was a valid reason to be mocked. At first glance, some of Friedman’s work, with its cast of has-beens and never-weres, can seem to be another example of this kind of comedy, but it isn’t–most of these strips cut a lot deeper than that. The reader feels the sting and pain of failure and despair too strongly to feel superior. In other words, we’re all Rondo Hatton.

—The movement to properly honor Jack Kirby for his achievements grew a little wider this week, stepping its toes into the mainstream with an Alex Pappademus profile of Stan Lee for Grantland, and a Ruben Bolling strip revealing the plot of the next Avengers film.

—Andrei Molotiu echoes 1965 Susan Sontag with an interesting (if somewhat vague) wish for more demanding, worthy, and artistically innovative comics.

—And finally, Jeet Heer discussed the politics of comics, at a panel with Sean Carleton and Franke James at the LeftWords festival. You can listen to it here.

Friday marked the release of a movie based upon Jack Kirby’s Avengers comic book, featuring various Marvel Comics characters teaming up to “avenge,” specifically by battling various computer-generated skeksis and boogums. The highly anticipated release marks the beginning of everyone’s favorite time of year: Death Threat to Movie Reviewer Season, when scary, enraged superhero comic fans (or as they’re commonly known, “superhero comic fans”) lose their shit over the fact that the “Rotten Tomatoes Score” of a superhero movie has been reduced from a perfect 100% score by a bad review.

This year’s celebration-of-humanity kicked off with a review written by Amy Nicholson of Box Office Magazine, so we got to skip straight to the rampant misogyny.  Here is a brief sampling of the comments her review triggered, in response from BOM and the Rotten Tomatoes site:  

You’re such a joke right now that even major movie and entertainment sites are starting to point out how inept and out of touch you are with the majority of your “peers” and how one tragic hack has brought down The Avenger’s score from a perfect 100% to 96%. … When is this writing thing going to fizzle out, so you can start making your own jewellery? … See internet, this is what happens when you give your PA the change to write reviews because it’s cheaper than hiring a proper male writer… She asked her boyfriend what score she should give. Just stick to rom-coms, bitch… Her boss/lover says it’s better than having her make the coffee and answering phones and besides what else was she going to do with that creative writing degree daddy paid for?…I know the first bad review was gonna come from a woman…she liked Green Lantern because Ryan Reynolds, rom-com mainstay, was shirtless in that film. That’s why she liked it…  self-masturbatory garbage by a self-absorbed cunt … Bitch what the fuck is wrong with you…This broad is dumbass … As Loki might say ‘a mewling quim’ … Clearly MS.Nicholson has an agenda… You must of been looking in the mirror and got confused because yes you have a bad face but the avengers was a great film… your poor ratings (you enjoyed Twilight – enough said) simply prove how much of an ignorant, uncultured cunt you really are. Please get a real job or consider killing yourself… This dumb cunt even likes Twilight for fuck sakes… DAMMIT WOMAN!!… Amy, grow a pair and change the review.

After that, there was nothing left to be said. Well, except to tell other women who expressed concern about the sexualized nature of the complaints to shut up. Here’s a sample of that:  

There is real abuse going on out there in Nigeria, Somalia etc… If you had bothered to read Amy’s review, you would know that her writing skills are not that of an “intelligent woman” lol. … aren’t there more important things you could be writing about? … While the misoginystic comments are out of line, THIS IS THE INTERNET… Sweetheart, do you know WHY she was lambasted by the fans for that amateur ridiculous review she posted, not to mention RT for posting it?? … As an older gal, I will admit I can be pretty harsh on my fellow females, but that’s because I really hate females who give the rest of us a bad name…Though I harshely condemn the kind of language most of the attackers have used for this female journo, but I would also like to ask her “How much do you know about the Marvel superhero universe?” And if your answer is not ‘Everything’ then you shouldnt have written that review. … i bet you blame men for the bad weather… Patriarchy is men being reduced to cannon fodder while women stay safe in their homes. … To be fair though she was a dumb bitch.

Unfortunately, as of press time, the Robot 6 blog at the Comic Book Resources website has not yet picked up on Ms. Nicholson’s perfidy. Commenters on the Robot 6 blog (or as they’re commonly known in my apartment, “those awful maggots”) are expected to explain in precise detail that (1) Ms. Nicholson’s children should be poor, because what did they ever do?, (2) she should have no legal rights to express opinions about The Avengers because of contracts and legal principals and what’s law school?, (3) she and every other person who’s ever written anything all “had it coming,” (4) capitalism is a really great system and is being threatened and quit attacking capitalism and how come you don’t like capitalism, huh, (5) some of us are still waiting for Native Americans to thank us for those smallpox blankets keeping them warm, and (6) all stories ever written were all stolen from Charlton characters that haven’t been published in 200 years, but apparently everyone is a Charlton Comics expert all of the sudden.

This is all, of course, a prelude to the shitstorm that awaits the arrival of the upcoming Batman 3 movie. My guess is the first negative review will be greeted by writers for ComicBookMovie.com wiring the reviewer’s car to explode like the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, while the Merry Marvel Marching Society parades through the streets with the heads of the reviewer’s friends and loved ones placed upon spikes; I have $50 on writer for HitFix, in the library, with the lead pipe, in my office pool.

The fan comments are especially shocking in light of the fact they’re about a movie concerning superheros,  fantasy characters that, as one mainstream comic writer has sold them, speak “loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations.” Sure! Well. Okay, there was supposedly an Avengers comic where Ms. Marvel, like, got raped, then gave birth to her rapist (it’s complicated), who she then shacked up with while the other Avengers looked on approvingly…?  Plus, Hawkeye’s wife Mockingbird got raped. And yeah, there were those Iron Man comics where Maria Hill (or as she’s commonly known, “Kids, Your Aunt Robin”) got “mind-raped” by some robot and ended up in shower all, like, “Oh no no oh no must be clean” or whatever– sure, sure, that comic even won Eisners. Tigra ha her clothes ripped off while she was videotaped getting gang-”beaten” by villains.  There was a cover for whatshername, Iron Fist’s girlfriend, getting tentacle-raped. Girl version of Hawkeye–totes raped. Spider-Man’s ladyfriend Black Cat, raped. On the other hand, the X-Men’s Storm escaped her attempted rape, and Captain America’s ex-girlfriend Diamondback was only “possibly raped,” while being kidnapped, starved, and “abused.”  Et cetera, et cetera.

But besides all of that, it’s a real mystery where the audience learned those kinds of attitudes from. Hopefully, somebody will call Columbo (or as he’s commonly known, the late Peter Falk). But until then, did Ms. Nicholson fully appreciate the value-filled culture of aspirations and longings that she was cruelly attacking when she only gave The Avengers three stars out of five? That is still to be—oh, ha ha, hey, wait, I forgot to mention that: This was all because she only gave The Avengers THREE out of five stars. Fortunately, Marvel Comics has not been distracted by all of this froofrah over Tomato scores and has instead followed the enormous success of The Avengers by getting back to business and focusing its energies on publishing crossovers and firing its long-time employees, a move Robot 6 commenters are expected to describe as an “orgasmic Christmas miracle, like a department store Santa Claus covering my body in sticky Yuletide cheer.”

Congratulations, comics! This is the moment it’s all been leading up to!

Ah, throwing some Nate Bulmer and his Eat More Bikes in with Abhay always hits the spot. We should move onto the comics, right? That’s the system!

Crossed Badlands #5
By Jamie Delano, Leandro Rizzo, Digikore
Published by Avatar

What would happen to you if your father died while you were wrestling with him? What kind of person would you be if you grew up and your boyfriend died from shitty drugs while you were attaching Office Depot binder clips to his naked body while he was tied to a chair for some sweet sexuals? Would you go on to make big dogs fuck Iraqi detainees because that was the only way to get turned on? What if that’s how that stuff happens, man? Why shouldn’t there be a comic book that answers those questions? It could be a comic book that also feature naked sisters who spoon, because that’s what life is like for some people, sometimes. Stories like that might have kayaks, or redneck survivalists who love their dogs more than they love their own flesh and blood. It could have all of those things, and it could include the line “your vag smells like rotten fish,” because sometimes a girl has to say that to her sister, because life ain’t no bed of roses, especially when you’re getting ready to have sex with your sister and she hasn’t bathed in a while.

Too Many Nitrous
By Billy Burkert, Samuel Rhodes
Self-published, 2012

This is a totally unofficial and yet wholly accurate prequel to the Fast and the Furious film series, featuring the up-until-now-unnecessary “origin” of Dominic Torreto, a character played by actor/skin-covered Roomba Vin Diesel. Rife with pop culture references and unusually clever puns, it’s a legitimately funny comic that vastly outshines whatever expectations one might bring to it, even if those expectations are that the book is going to be really fucking good, which it absolutely is. For those of you at the tail end of giving a shit about this useless, banal, horseshit medium, for those of you happy to lose all the arguments just as long as it means you can leave forever and never hear about these people cheerleading their toy ‘n sadness collections for the thousandth time, take some gosh damned heed: a couple of smart assholes have gone and spun a solid yarn. Give that baby another week to get used to its surroundings. Your bathtub isn’t going anywhere.

Fury: My War Gone By #1
By Garth Ennis, Goran Parlov, Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics

This is the American Tabloid to Ed Brubaker’s L.A. Quartet (Fatale), with the Ennis twist being that James Ellroy never had a guy like Nick Fury stalking the blood-stuck mud. Oh sure, Tabloid has oversized badasses who don’t mind stripmining the skulls and ears of Communists with well-oiled chainsaws; if there’s one place Ennis could have lifted Barracuda from it’s the Tiger Kab offices, but the trick with Nick Fury–the trick that only Ennis seems to still have a handle on, as the rest of Marvel seems to be in a race towards infantile regression–is that Nick Fury is what Captain America would be if that super soldier serum made people smarter: a dead-set patriot, ready to carve out their own heart for the cause, but smart enough to know the cause is still under construction. Fury isn’t stupid, cynical, or selfish: he’s passionate. It’s all right here, in an issue where the real action is in matter-of-fact statements of purpose and a wearied snarl. As of right now, everybody else is in the business of fighting for second place.

The End of the Fucking World #7
By Chuck Forsman
Self-published, 2012

The most recent installment in Forsman’s formidable experiment in his contemporary-youth-goes-Badlands series sees his ever more dangerous couple meeting up with that old road movie chestnut, the aging perv with grabby hands, and while the sequence plays out with less bloodshed than expected, the bigger surprise is Forsman’s hell-for-leather commitment to his male lead’s almost autistic sociopathy. Where one expects violence, one instead finds sluggish curiosity, a methodical plodder so removed from his own culpability that it’s becoming more difficult to lay blame on him for his own acts. He’s in a world of his own, but it’s one his fucked up brain chemistry has created; there doesn’t appear to be a lot of choice being made. It’s been a while since comics depicted crazy like it really is: completely unpredictable.

Green Lantern #9
By Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne, Mark Irwin, Tom Nguyen, Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

Okay, it’s report card time. It turns out that the Indigo Tribe–which is the group of Lanterns who “wield the light of compassion” the way the Yellow Lanterns do fear and the Reds do rage–is constructed out of brainwashed criminals, described by one Yoda rip-off as “the worst killers and sadists in the universe” during one of those four-page blocks of pure, uncut exposition that could serve as a master class in what DC’s finest talents seem to think is the best way to write a story. You have to hand it to Geoff Johns, honestly. Like–if you were making fun of Johns as a writer, you’d probably talk about how he’s the guy who came up with an entire army of aliens and people (and an abused house cat) motivated by “rage” who happen not only to rely on magic wishing rings, but also on magic red rage vomit to get revenge and do violent stuff, you’d go off on how every character he throws out there has some kind of horrible violent loss in their past, how he fetishizes things like “aviator jackets” and Chuck Yeager biographies, and if you were going to guess at what he’s going to do in the future, you’d probably say, “Ah, he’ll probably reveal that some Green Lantern had a secret prison where he secretly brainwashed the worst people in the universe (one of whom will be depicted by Doug Mahnke as a giant bat wearing one of those gimp bondage masks) into becoming an actual “army of compassion.” And you have to give it to Johns, because even though that’s the exact kind of story you would make up in a fit of exaggeration to hurt somebody’s feelings, the guy just goes ahead and writes like that anyway. He’s already the guy who has spent the last ten years writing super-serious stories about aging Smurfs who live on another planet and have a crazy billion rules about why emotions are the Worst Thing Ever, he’s already the guy who decided that the obvious name for the living embodiment of Love should be the word “Predator,” and here he is, doubling down for the 8,000th time. You like little Smurf characters? Well, how about an immortal dwarf who dresses like an aboriginal wizard and lives inside a secret purple prison? You like it when people’s family members die? No problem, we’ll get Doug Mahnke to draw a splash page of Sinestro holding the bloody corpse of the love of his life on top of a gigantic pile of bodies, one of which is clearly a small child, another of which is some dude who died mid-scream. PS, because we’re running long and we should repeat this for clarity: one of the nameless bad guys in this comic is a giant bat wearing a gimp mask.

The Punisher #11
By Greg Rucka, Mirko Colak, Dan Brown, Jim Charalampidis
Published by Marvel Comics

It seems like there was a time when fill-in issues came from fill-in teams, so let’s all throw some props to Greg Rucka for delegating the scut work to the (self-described) lesbian in the mirror. This issue is a one-shot tale filled to the brim with the most immediate clichés available; it’s also about zombies in New York, which would push the thing into parody if Greg Rucka had ever told a joke, even a bad one. The structure is one of those “cop getting interrogated about last night’s craziness” things, and it hits all the beats that story always has. The only real twist–zombies can’t count as a twist anymore, not since everybody’s mom started watching The Walking Dead–stems from the quirk factor that ensues when you realize that Mirko Colak didn’t have time to find any photo reference for “when human beings are surprised,” which means that the the only way you can decipher emotional reactions is to see how wide open the mouths are. (Halfway means thinking!) The comic ends with one of a Ruckan staple–undergraduate political skepticism, drink it in–but not before he rips off the best gag in that War Zone movie, strips it of its timing, and uses it to fill up two full pages of comic. Speaking of pages, the Punisher speaks on only two out of the seven he actually appears on, so at least there’s a bright side: you can finish reading this issue very quickly.

The Punisher Armory #1
By Eliot R. Brown, Nel Yomtov
Published by Marvel Comics, 1990

Back in the days when the Punisher was the most popular character in the Marvel universe–also known as “the days when the world made a lick of fucking sense”–Marvel was raking in so much cash that they forget they had the power to say no to every random Punisher-related idea that came across their desk. And while this was a business model that resulted in a whole mess of terrible Punisher tales, it also resulted in this: a 32-page comic consisting of Eliot R. Brown’s self-described “still life-with-notes” pages. The format’s easy to follow: some type of object, most often a gun but not necessarily always a gun, and a diary entry explaining the object. (Notice the hand underneath the refrigerator? That’s the only way this format allows Brown to depict action.) As the cover promises, you’ll get “his thoughts!” and “his feelings!” as well, and while it took a while for the “feelings” part to pay off, they eventually did, in the weirdest way possible. This first issue doesn’t deliver as strongly–probably because this issue is a compilation of reprints–but it’s a good set-up for what became one of the more absurd artifacts of ’90s Marvel.

US-1 #1
By Al Milgrom, Herb Trimpe, Christie Scheele
Published by Marvel Comics, 1983

Everything one needs to know about this comic can be found in the full page explanation for its existence found at the end–trucking was popular in the early ’80s because of novelty songs and morons, Jim Shooter had a raging hard-on for both of those things–but really perceptive readers will probably figure it out on the first page, when they see Shooter credited as “Big Smokey,” while everybody else involved goes ahead with the boring old regular job titles, like “drawing” and “writing.” At the risk of alienating any of the forty-something males in the audience, any appeal that one finds in this comic–which is about a long-haul trucker with a half-metal skull that gets him a CB signal, a CB signal that, combined with the weaponized truck that Marvel was helping the Tyco company hawk, he uses to hunt his brother’s assumed killer–will purely be of the nostalgic variety. US-1 was a thing that existed. Thanks to bags, boards and boxes, it exists still.

While it may be about love, CAA is also like porn, in that it is largely online and in photographic form. Web CAA grew out of pre-internet CAA. YouTube cat videos stem from America’s Funniest Home Videos videos. Online CAA still photos are web versions of cat posters. LOLCats are hacks of the text-image pairings found in dentist office (“Hang in there!”) cat posters. Of course, people have been drawing and photographing cats as long as there have been drawings. And photos. And cats.

Of drawn CAA artists, the most well-known is the Art Nouveau printmaker Steinlen. The guy drew a lot of cats in a lot of different ways. His pussies stand stoically erect, as if carved out of wood, petrified. Louis Wain’s crazy cats don’t putter around either, they pulse in a “cuteness overload” overload.

Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown’s cats aren’t excessively cute and they’re not frozen at all. His focus is on the changing flexibility of cats, and in this way he’s closer in spirit to the 1850s CAA of Utagawa Kuniyoshi who, taking after Hokusai’s observational manga, affectionately documented the activities of felines.

Cat Getting Out of a Bag, Cats are Weird, a postcard set and a journal book are all collections of cat strips Brown calls “observations.” Observational comics are similar to observational drawing, figure and landscape drawing. They probe the everyday, the seen. Cartoonists weave observational comics inside of larger narrative ones, Chris Ware being an obvious example, or the countless mangaka taking pause to draw a drop of dew. You can find a million examples in comics of rendering and extolling the mundane.

Similarly, stand-up “observational humor” highlights a mundane subject (“What’s with airplane peanuts?”) and cleverly, insightfully twists it until the audience laughs: “It’s funny because it’s true!”

Jeffrey Brown’s cat books are the equivalent of a comedian just eating airplane peanuts in front of us — and it’s genuinely funny. The laugh doesn’t come from presenting a mundane activity as a joke. The observation itself, the eating of the peanut, is somehow elevated to a real gag, no twist necessary.

Brown’s talent at composing scenes with an inexplicable comic timing has often been at the service of autobiographical relationship stories (Clumsy) or action genre parodies (The Incredible Change-Bots). These cat books occupy a new territory, unique to him. Newspaper strip humor, from Nancy to Marmaduke, is clever. At their best, these cat comics aren’t clever. They’re akin to a comic strip of Marmaduke just lying down asleep. The strips reserved for the holidays. Here are three books full of them, only with Brown’s skill the strips work as jokes while retaining their poetic mundanity.

Cat Getting Out of a Bag introduces the exercise: observational comics coupled with drawings of cats from photos. These are hard comics to make, especially because the cats aren’t given specific personalities. They just do what cats do. And how much do cats do? They sit. They purr. They lick themselves. They purr again. Humor strips always involve recycling the same relationship or scenario into a thousand variations, but they usually star characters that have character. Even Brown’s photo reference drawings revel in their non-specific generic-ness. These photos could’ve been found in any yard sale picture bin. Their haunting charge is “observational” too: We’re looking at Brown look at a photo of his cat.

These photo-ref drawings serve as essential intermissions. Even a cat nut needs a breather. The gusto required to spend a couple hours reading about cats is tough to muster, and the thought “enough of this” deflates the enjoyment of any work, no matter how good it is. The strips are usually one page but they aren’t consistently titled or divided, so sometimes what we thought was the end of one story is only half-way through a two page strip, interrupting our reading pace and pleasure.

However, with The Cutest Sneeze in the World: 30 Cat Postcards , Brown, or his publisher, Chronicle, found an ideal form for this work.

Cutest Sneeze contains the best Brown cat comics in the best format for them. They’re physically isolated onto separate cards, eliminating the exhausted “enough of this” moment and the hiccups of reading confusion. In Cats Are Weird, Brown lapsed into a couple clever gags — “Where a Cat’s Center of Gravity Lies” diagrams? The “smarter” the jokes are the dumber the whole exercise feels. Those are weeded-out in favor of the best observational comics from the books, plus some new additions. Most revelatory is the conversion from the nine-panel grid of the book to the six-panel grid of the postcard size. This necessitated an editing of previously published strips.

Comics are notoriously frustrating to edit. Let’s look at two versions of the same strip side-by-side…

The back-and-forth ping-pong action of a six-panel comic has an inherent comic timing. The nine-panel grid has a fat center to drag through. The same gags are, startlingly, funnier in their sleeker six-panel form. The “No biting the pen!” moment of the nine-panel version makes the ending more about the cat’s inability to understand language. The two-column vertical format emphasizes the final panel’s close-up more than the clutter of the nine-panel form. Even when converted to a horizontal six-panel format, the comics read easier than their nine-panel square versions. Could it be that rectangles are just funnier than squares? An unfunny, unfun person is called “a square.” Or maybe revisiting and reformatting gave Brown the freedom to look at his old work with new eyes.

No characters. No story. The joy we get from these comics is born from Brown’s ability to transmit his love of cats and extol the banal in well-executed gags. That Brown has created powerful, humorous celebrations of the mundane in the form of the queasily-commercial, CAA “cat book” medium is delightfully surprising and odd and funny, because it’s true.

Someone once said that Maurice Sendak, children’s book author and illustrator, drew “little old people worrying away their childhoods.” It’s true: Sendak’s work is remarkable for its lack of sentimentality and its depiction of childhood as it really is, a time of coming to grips with the sometimes unpleasant and frightening world around you — a reality that children’s literature often tries to ignore. What his work also contains is a genuine sensitivity to the complexity and intelligence of children.

Sendak was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants. He received little formal art training. One of his first professional illustration jobs was filling in the backgrounds for the Mutt and Jeff comic strip after classes in high school. Sendak’s best-known work is Where The Wild Things Are. With that book he perfected his own unique picture book format, characterized by the complete integration of a rhythmic poetic text with engaging and dynamic illustration, a relationship reminiscent of choreography.

In December of 1987, The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco held a symposium on children’s book illustration. The main attraction of the event was a question-and-answer session with Maurice Sendak, an abridged transcription of which follows. At that time Sendak was illustrating a book, based on a Wilhelm Grimm fairy tale newly discovered in 1983, which would come to be titled Dear Mili.

MAURICE SENDAK: In this article, which I saw the other day, which is really very funny, I am referred to as “Morose Sendak” [audience laughter]. Actually, the use of that as my first name has been frequent for people who think the books are over-serious, or that I treat children too seriously, or I’m not comical enough. That has been my name for a good part of my life, including childhood, when my sister used that on me, too.

I can talk about what I’m working on right now. I haven’t illustrated a picture book since 1980. My last picture book was something called Outside Over There, and then I began designing for the stage, sets and costumes for operas and ballets, which is my new profession at this point, with occasional dipping back into books. Only occasionally, because I feel as though  I’ve done most of the books I want to do at this point in my life.

But then this Grimm came up. The Grimm is a fairy tale that’s never been published before, and it was found in a letter, seven years ago, that Wilhelm Grimm wrote to a little girl. Her mother had died and he was trying to console her and, like all adults who are trying to console children, he made a mess of it. He was using language and she was only feeling at this point; she couldn’t figure out his language. So right in the middle, he quit trying to explain this complicated business called death and said, “Just let me tell you a story.”

He told an original fairy tale, which has never seen the light of day because the family kept the letter through all those generations. The letter was sold, got to America, a dealer bought it, got it to a publisher, and I’m now illustrating it. The Germans are fuming. They were very anxious and upset in Europe because this will be the first Grimm tale that has not been published in Germany, or with the original stories back in the early 19th century. I work with the publisher, and so I will thus be the first illustrator to illustrate this story, and America will be the country that will publish it [audience applause].

I agree with you. We keep the story hidden in a vault because would a German passing through New York happen to see it, he could translate it instantly and it’ll get published in Munich before we know it. So there are only three copies. Mine is at my bedside, the other is in a vault in New York, and somebody else has it out in California. Anyway, it’s been three years since I’ve been working on it. I’ve done all the studies, did all the sketches, had problems with it because it’s a religious story, I’ve never illustrated a religious story. Frankly, I have difficulty with that kind of subject. Having spent a year researching it, I vacationed at a monastery in New York State, not because I’m religious, obviously, but because they breed German Shepherds and I’m a German Shepherd freak, so the idea of dogs and monks was terrific. They actually helped me with the story. The father up there is a very — now — excellent friend of mine. For the past year, starting last January, I started painting. I’ve just finished the book, a full year’s work. I have to go home after this trip and do the jacket and deliver the book by Christmas and it’ll be out next Christmas. So this will have been a long three-year job on this book. I’m very emotionally invested in this little girl and in her mother. Like all the people you work with, imaginatively speaking, in a book, I’m going to miss her very, very much.

The story about the Grimm tale I was telling you about is in many strange ways a continuation, at least in my own head, of Outside Over There, because Outside Over There had a mother, two daughters — the elder daughter trying desperately to get rid of the younger daughter, which is typical of households. My sister was nine years older than I, so she was my mother, basically, and both adored me and brutalized me at the same time. When I came to do the Grimm, I couldn’t get rid of the same image of the mother from Outside Over There, so she now comes into the Grimm fairy tale. It’s like Ida, the oldest girl from Outside Over There, has moved to a big town and the baby is now about five or six years old, and so the story takes up with the mother and the baby.

The reason I do this is because I didn’t write the Grimm story, and in illustrating someone else’s book, unless I can find some way of investing myself emotionally into the material, even pretending it’s my story, then I have a difficult time drawing pictures for it. But I have to be inside the book, tremendously. I have to really admire the text very much, the form of the writing, the subject, the emotional content, all of it. If I can get inside to that extent then I’m going to do something that I will enjoy doing. Otherwise I’m going to be just illustrating a book, which is of no interest to me at all whatever at this point in my life.

[Responding to a question about his commenting on how bad his work is.]

SENDAK: My pleasure comes when I officially begin the book. The excitation of starting. Getting the images in my head. That is absolutely the best part, in laying out the book, in designing it, in the characters appearing under your pencil. It’s absolutely true that whenever I finish it doesn’t look anything like what that first vivid impression was. I see all my faults. I see how badly I draw feet. I see how badly I do this. And those are faults which are inherent in my style, which maybe other people — I hope ­— do not see or dwell on as I do, but I really don’t like my pictures when I’m finished with them. I give them away to a foundation. I don’t have anything of mine hanging in the house [except for] a few favorite pictures from books. There’s one of my dog Jennie from Higglety Pigglety Pop. But that’s because it’s her, not because I drew it.

From Higglety Pigglety Pop!

I don’t get pleasure from finished drawings. I get pleasure from finishing the book and the release from having finished it, and knowing that it’s the best I can do. I redraw everything that must be redrawn. I’m not lazy. But even in the end, the totality of it is disappointing to me.

QUESTION: So you see this picture in the mind’s eye and you draw it out, and it never comes out like that?

SENDAK: It doesn’t look like the picture I saw, no.

QUESTION: I have a similar question. When you do illustrated work that deals more with characters than animals or people, do you also see the backgrounds on the paintings?

SENDAK: That’s a curious question, I think, because both things happen. I sometimes see characters, I sometimes see only backgrounds. I don’t often see whole settings with characters and backgrounds. At other times, I don’t see anything at all. I just have a feeling, a very excited, happy feeling, but I have to explore that feeling on paper, and then my hand begins to do it.

If you saw that whole documentary [a film on Sendak from the PBS series American Masters], the best homework I can advise is sketching. It has certainly worked well with me as I sketch to music. Put the record player on, and you take a blank sheet of paper. You start at the top, and you have to finish that sheet of paper by the time that piece of music ends. Since it’s one sheet of paper, it’s best that you don’t work with the symphonies; it’s best that you work with a sonata or a quartet or a popular song, whatever music excites you. But the exercise is, start at the top, get to the bottom when the music is done, and it must be coherent. It must have a plot. But you must not think about the plot. It must simply flow out of your hands, almost like unconscious writing. I find music is such an incredible stimulus to the unconscious. Usually I’ll pick the composer, maybe Mozart or maybe Haydn, whoever. I’ll draw a picture, a little fantasy sketch of them, and then draw about something that happened in their lives. But I must come to the end.

Of course, you end up with dozens of horrendous drawings. But, in fact, you also occasionally end up with some very good drawings that are fresh-cooked right out of the head, and that tell you the direction that you’re going, or that tell you what you’re thinking about. It’s like forcing your dreams out on a drawing paper. That is the only exercise. It’s like playing the piano every day so that when you get to the concert you really play the piano. I think, when you’re illustrating a book, you have to be drawing all the time, and using the muscles in your imagination all the time, so when you get to it you are ready to work.

QUESTION: Have you ever thought about just printing your sketches?

SENDAK: Yes; the sketches always have a freshness, and they’re always vivid. They simply aren’t good enough. Maybe in an art book where you’re showing all the stages of your work, then it would be fun. People who saw the sketches I did for the Grimm said, “Publish it just that way.” Spontaneous. Then people who saw the work pencil drawings I did based on the sketches said, “Do it that way, publish the book this way.” What you have to do is, one, don’t show anybody anything, which was the mistake I made, and two, wait until you know that you have finished with what you’ve done.

I’ve never, ever, ever done sketches that I felt were adequate. They’re all lively, and there are qualities in the drawing which are unrepeatable, we all know that, but there’s something else that’s missing. There’s composition that’s missing, there’s emotional content that’s missing, and there’s something that’s appropriate to the text that’s missing. So in my case, I can’t do it. I keep them; I enjoy them. But I haven’t published them.

[An audience member asks about how Sendak broke into the publishing business]

SENDAK: OK. The question was about my apprenticeship to my editor, how did it begin, how did it work. Her name’s Ursula Nordstrom and she ran Harper and Brothers then. She was enamored of young people and of training young people. I came off the street in New York.

This was the early ’50s, when there was no such thing, really, as big-deal children’s books in America – I was very lucky to have gotten on the ground floor. It was a little pokey department, which they gave to the women in the office. The macho pigs decided, “We don’t want to be embarrassed by running kiddie-book departments, that’s a peculiar thing to do.” They gave it to these incredible women. And had the women been smarter, they wouldn’t have made such a great success of their departments because, eventually, the most ingenious, adventurous, exciting stuff was coming out of the juvenile departments in America, like her department at Harper’s. And we began gradually to make money, which was the beginning of the end, because then we came to the notice of the goons who ran the publishing houses and then these wonderful women were dumped, unceremoniously. Then you had these other people, who maybe were good bankers but not good children’s book editors, coming in. I speak not of the people we know, Barbara. I speak in general.

But in fact, it was an incredibly ingenious time between 1950 and 1965, where we were all trained. Me and Tomi Ungerer and Ezra Jack Keats, and all the people — kids who came off the street. I had no taste whatsoever. I didn’t know anything about bookmaking. I did not have any art training. I was really just an ignoramus. Ursula simply spoon-fed me the time she spent working with me on books. The first book I wrote, Kenny’s Window, in ’57, she was up there every weekend guiding me, and I was at her house working out the text.

The books she gave me to illustrate were all chosen by her, based on what she thought was proper for my development as a young illustrator. I didn’t know how to pick them. I would have done anything because my only interest was to get enough money to move out of my house in Brooklyn and have my own apartment, so I would have illustrated the walls of the subway or the urinals; it would have made no difference. So, without her guidance …

I can look back on my backlist now, and there is not a single dud. I may have done badly illustrated books, but the books I illustrated were all terrific books. I now know that. I didn’t then. I would just do as I was told. And that kind of guidance, which was not narcissistic, which was not egocentric on her part, which was really to bring me out as an artist, to find the things that develop my particular talent, was what she was doing. What maybe half a dozen women of that period were doing at various publishing houses in America.

It was an extraordinary apprenticeship. You got the full blast of these people’s attention and gradually you grew up.

You learned right from the beginning. I read manuscripts at Harper’s. She forced me to read manuscripts, to critique them. I ran errands. I hung around. It’s something I would like to think is true today, but I’m not sure is. I don’t think it is true, actually, because I have taught and I know how difficult it is to get into the business now. But back then it just wasn’t a business. It was an incredible privilege to be drawing pictures and hanging around.

QUESTION: A technical question. I noticed on the film that you were placing an overlay; it looked like an ink-drawing overlay over the painting. Is that the way you always work?

SENDAK: No. Actually, that book was done in four-color process. Meaning, you do the color separate from the line. It is a less expensive way of doing it. And also, to a certainty, your line will be clearer that way, because of the printing problems in doing a book. Most of my books are full color, and they’re printed as full-color works. But I wanted, in Night Kitchen, to really look like a comic strip. I wanted it to look like Little Nemo. I wanted it to be Winsor McCay. I wanted to do a facsimile of a comic book, and in separating you have the perfect clarity of the line, and clarity of the color, and then they’re superimposed on each other, and you’ve got a comic book vividness. That’s why it was done that way.

[An audience member asks how Sendak controls his blending of fantasy and reality]

SENDAK: It’s difficult to tell you what the trick is. What is the turn-around from a fantasy situation into a reality situation in a child’s life? Like Max in The Wild Things. One minute he’s talking to his mother and the next the trees are growing out of the walls, and then he’s talking to wild things. To me, that is a normal day [audience laughter]. I really don’t think that is a trick.

I think we assume that only children have this incredible flexibility — they talk to newspapers; they talk to tablecloths; they talk to bowls of water; and we say, “How charming, how cute.” We do it, too, but we don’t do it aloud. Because we have grown up and we have gray in our beards and we’re supposed to be adults and we’re all just nervous wrecks, basically.

Children have the privilege because we have endowed them with the privilege of having this fantasy life. So they move in and out of fantasy all the time. But, I think, people always say how wonderful that you can do books for children; you have your childhood intact. They give me this really ridiculous sentimental aspect, because I think we all do; I think it’s a survival tactic; if we didn’t live in fantasy most of the day, we’d all be off your famous [Golden Gate] bridge over here, for the most part.

So I think this trick you’re talking about is no more than the observation of real life.

QUESTION: I was referring, though, to how you can have that baby talk but make it believable. Some of the editors would say, “Well, this is a little contrived to think that a fish can rescue a jade bracelet.”

SENDAK: Well, this conviction has to come from you. If your fish is talking, then it’s got to be a perfectly reasonable thing that your fish is talking. If your fish is talking and it doesn’t come really from you, then your editor is correct. That’s a contrivance. Children will know instantly. Kids know instantly when you’re patronizing them, when you’re giving them ersatz fantasy or it’s coming genuinely from the middle of your gut; they know. They are not impressed with the fact that you’ve won the Caldecott Award or that you like Mozart or any of those things; they could not care less. The book goes flying across the room. You notice from their letters; “Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially…”

[Audience laughter.]

So this famous trick you’re talking about just didn’t work, as far as this kid was concerned. They are the most brazen audience, because they will not tolerate being bored. They won’t tolerate listening to your blither. You have got to get to it. They know the real thing from the false thing. This gets lost or fuzzy as they get older, we all know that.

But the same principle upon which they function day by day by day is the same principle upon which we function. It doesn’t change. We just get more astute at hiding it, at pretending that we’re grown-ups. They have the privilege of being natural until we stop them.

QUESTION: Do you ever envision your books pictorially, before the text is developed?

SENDAK: No. I really do think in terms of language. Even though my life has been predominantly as an illustrator and I’ve written a very small percentage of the books that I’ve illustrated, I do think in words. I prefer words. If I weren’t an illustrator, then, why aren’t I a painter? You put me in front of a canvas I’m dead as a doornail. I need language as a springboard, or I need music as a springboard. My work doesn’t generate without language. So when I think of story, I think absolutely in terms of text. And pictures come long after that.

QUESTION: What do you think about developing a story in that manner, where the stories are developed pictorially?

SENDAK: Stories shouldn’t be developed pictorially, initially. They should start out textually. Your stories should be immensely constructed by the time you’re illustrating it. You should only be worrying about your text and making something marvelous. Writing it and rewriting it and writing. Let the pictures come later. They’ll take care of themselves.

QUESTION: Are you saying that if you removed the pictures from the story that it would work just as well?

SENDAK: No. Well, that could happen. But I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

QUESTION: How you do research for a book?

SENDAK: Well, I love doing homework for a book, I like the research part of it. The most obvious case is the Grimm, because I’m working on it. I wanted to set the Grimm in the correct time, which means 1800. It happens also to be my favorite time. It’s Mozart’s time: it’s the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. I like the way people looked then. I think the costumes were fabulous at the turn of the century. And that’s where the Grimm comes from, that’s the air that it lived in. So I’ll do lots of homework, reading about the brothers. I read every book published in English about the brothers. And they’re all very bad; let me assure you. If anybody here publishes books, do a translation of a serious book about the brothers Grimm: we desperately need it. It’s all about these cute brothers who write stories, and it’s fatuous.

From King Grisly-Beard: A Tale From The Brothers Grimm

But I did that, then I looked at costume books of the period, films of the period. Not of the period, but films about the period. There was a movie which I saw, which was wonderful, by a French director named Eric Rohmer, and it was The Marquess of O by Heinrich von Kleist, who’s one of my favorite playwrights. The setting of that movie and the look of the woman in that film was very much the smell and the sense of the Grimm I was looking for. So, you do about as much of that as you wish, and then you start sketching and you start drawing. What you hope is that the homework, kind of like a big blender, goes into the inspiration and comes out into the book.

Continued

From Pierre

Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, is dead at 83. He knew that would be the first line of his obituary, he told me once, in a tone that conveyed more resignation than pride. He was an artist, first: That his work spoke to children was important to him, but he disliked being limited to the realm of childhood alone. That’s why, earlier this year, he told Stephen Colbert: “I don’t write for children. … I write, and somebody says ‘That’s for children.’” Sendak’s work speaks to us all, and his work extends beyond children’s picture books. He’s designed sets for opera and dance productions, illustrated Herman Melville’s Pierre, created album covers, posters and dust jackets for adult books. His inspirations span both genres and age categories: Melville, Mozart, Winsor McCay, William Blake, Walt Disney, Maxfield Parrish, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Yet he’s most recognized for his genius in creating books for the young, winning all the top prizes in the field and beyond it: and rightly so. The illustrator of over 100 books, Maurice Sendak was the greatest artist-for-children of the 20^th century — a century that brought us the astonishing, transformative work of Dr. Seuss, Virginia Lee Burton, Beatrix Potter, Chris Van Allsburg and Peter Sís. Sendak was a giant among giants. He still is.

The book that leads all obituary notices — Where the Wild Things Are (1963) — remains a revolutionary work. As protagonist Max moves toward and then more deeply into the land of the wild things, the pictures command more and more space. When the “wild rumpus” begins, Sendak — for the first time in children’s picture books — provides three two-page spreads without words. Max has left the world of language, and can communicate only through his wordless, wild cavorting. Beyond its formal innovations, the book is unusual in its respect for the natural ferocity of children. Max hangs his teddy bear by the neck, terrorizes the dog, and shouts at his mother. Yet, when he returns home from the land of the wild things, he faces no punishment. He finds “his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.”[i]

From Where the Wild Things Are

The power of Sendak’s work develops from the author’s acute feeling for the dynamic emotional landscape of childhood. When he and Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) shared a stage at the San Diego Museum of Art in 1982, moderator (and children’s lit scholar) Glenn Edward Sadler asked them both to “comment on how much your own early childhood has influenced your work.” Geisel said he skipped his childhood, but used his adolescence; Sendak said he skipped his adolescence, but “profited mightily from my early childhood.” Geisel harnesses the skeptical adolescent’s gift for finding and satirizing the adult world’s many hypocrisies, but Sendak draws upon the basic fears and desires of very young children. As he observed in his Caldecott acceptance speech for Where the Wild Things Are, “from their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions … [and] fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives.” Sendak’s books are about facing those fears and anxieties, documenting the sharp, turbulent, powerful feelings of early childhood.[ii]

In the Night Kitchen: Growing Up in Brooklyn

Born in 1928, the third child of Polish immigrants, Sendak grew up in Brooklyn … though he often wondered if he would grow up. Young Sendak was frequently sick, always aware that — in those days before vaccines — his illnesses might be fatal. Adolescence delivered a different, even darker lesson about our fleeting existence. While Sendak celebrated his bar mitzvah, his father was trying to bring his European relatives to America. None made it to the U.S. The Nazis killed them all.[iii]

American popular culture sustained young Sendak. He loved Mickey Mouse, comic books and the movies — Disney features, Busby Berkeley musicals, Laurel and Hardy and King Kong. A homage to the popular culture of his youth, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (1970) is one of his most autobiographical works, both personally and aesthetically. Dedicated to his parents, the book places a protagonist named for Mickey Mouse in a bed borrowed from Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, which a teenage Sendak first encountered in histories of comics. Like Nemo, Sendak’s Mickey moves through a child’s dream world. Unlike McCay’s hero, Sendak’s is in charge of his dreaming. When naked Mickey lands in batter, a trio of bakers (each of whom resembles Oliver Hardy) mixes him into the cake, which they then put in the oven. If a boy being placed in an oven evokes the Nazi crematoria that killed his relatives (as one German critic has suggested), Sendak’s bright colors and plucky protagonist diminish any sense of fear.[iv]

From In the Night Kitchen

That’s because Sendak’s Mickey is part early Mickey Mouse and part Sendak himself. He has often spoken of his identification with the famous animated rodent, noting that they share more than a first initial and a birth year. When Sendak and his siblings were children, Mickey Mouse was “our buddy” because he did not resemble the golden-haired cinema children (such as Shirley Temple), and neither did they. He so loved Mickey that Sendak’s earliest extant color drawing is of Mickey Mouse, done when the artist was 6 years old.[v]

As a high school student, he took art classes, created a comic strip for his school newspaper and (after school) worked at All-American Comics, filling in background details for Mutt and Jeff. He got his first job as a professional illustrator, creating drawings for the physics textbook Atomics for the Millions (1947). Sendak also made many visits to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wanted to work as a commercial artist. Now was the time to learn as much about art as he could.[vi]

Upon graduation, Sendak worked as a window-display artist, building models for store windows all over New York City. That led him to a full-time window-display job at F.A.O Schwarz. Though it is now merely a toy store, it then also had an outstanding children’s-book section, run by book-buyer Frances Chrystie. She met Sendak, learned of his interest in illustrating children’s books, and helped him make the acquaintance of three people who would become vital to his future career.[vii]

A Book is to Collaborate: Sendak’s Apprenticeship

In 1950, Chrystie introduced Sendak to Ursula Nordstrom, Director of Harper’s Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973. During her long career, she nurtured and published some of the greatest talents in children’s literature: Margaret Wise Brown, E.B. White, Louise Fitzhugh, Shel Silverstein, Arnold Lobel, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. As Selma G. Lanes reports, Chrystie arranged for Nordstrom to stop by the store’s studio when Sendak happened to have his work tacked up to the walls. She “looked intently at the work,” but said very little. The next day, she called him and invited him to illustrate Marcel Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm (1951). He was thrilled. The job “made me an official person in children’s books,” Sendak said.[viii]

After he had illustrated a couple of books for her, Nordstrom asked to see his sketchbook. His illustrations of Brooklyn children playing in the street inspired Nordstrom to introduce Sendak to the second of the trio who would shape his career. Ruth Krauss had just turned in a manuscript composed entirely of children’s words, defining the world in their own language and on their own terms. She had visited the local nursery school, collecting definitions from the 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds there: “a face is something on your head,” “a hole is to dig.” Nordstrom loved it, but potential illustrators did not. Nicolas Mordvinoff, who would win the 1952 Caldecott Medal for Finders Keepers, said that no book or illustrations could be made for “so fragmentary and elusive a text.” Sendak’s illustrations would be perfect, Nordstrom thought. When she showed him the manuscript, he was enthusiastic. Krauss took a look at Sendak’s sketchbook, and immediately said, “That’s it.” A partnership was born.[ix]

Working on the book that would be titled A Hole Is to Dig (1952), he began spending his weekends at the Rowayton, Conn. home of Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson — third in the trio of important professional influences. Born David Johnson Leisk (and known to his friends as “Dave”), Johnson was then famous for his classic strip Barnaby, though he had also illustrated some children’s books — including Krauss’s popular The Carrot Seed (1945). As Sendak remembered in a 1994 Horn Book essay, Krauss and Johnson “became my weekend parents and took on the job of shaping me into an artist. … Ruth and I would arrange and rearrange and paste and unpaste and Ruth would sing and Ruth would holler and I’d quail and sulk and Dave would referee. His name should be on all our books for the technical savvy and cool consideration he brought to them.”

Johnson not only offered design suggestions, but intellectual companionship. He and Sendak discussed books, and Johnson drew up lists of recommended reading. There was no test: Johnson simply wanted to give Sendak a chance to expand his horizons.[x]

©Ruth Krauss & Maurice Sendak

In a very material way, A Hole Is to Dig established Sendak as a children’s illustrator. Ordinarily, an artist would be paid a flat fee, and the author would receive royalties. However, when drawing up the contracts, Krauss insisted that she and Sendak split the royalties 50-50. So, when A Hole Is to Dig became a popular success, Sendak quit his job at F.A.O. Schwarz, becoming a full-time freelance illustrator. During the 1950s, he would illustrate as many as six books a year — and eight by Ruth Krauss. He won his first Caldecott Honor for their next collaboration, A Very Special House (1953).[xi]

In a Nutshell: Sendak’s First Picture Books

After a period of apprenticeship illustrating others’ works, at age 27 Sendak wrote and illustrated his first book, Kenny’s Window (1956). The story reflects his childhood habit of observing the world through the window (a necessity, since he was often sick) and introduces a theme he would explore more memorably in later works like Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There — the permeable boundary between real and fantastic.[xii]

During the 1950s and 1960s, whether creating his own work or collaborating with others, Sendak’s books reflect the ease with which he moves between fantasy and reality, but also his ongoing need to experiment. When HarperCollins responded to the Why Johnny Can’t Read crisis with its “I Can Read” series, Sendak illustrated the first, Else Homelund Minarik’s Little Bear (1957). The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1958) drew inspiration from a real Rosie who coerced her friends to play roles in her staged performances. He followed that with the Nutshell Library (1962), four tiny books that celebrate “children being themselves,” as Selma Lanes has observed. The four books — Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue, Alligators All Around: An Alphabet, One Was Johnny: A Counting Book, and Chicken Soup with Rice — were Sendak’s first big hit, selling 100,000 copies (of the set) in their first year.[xiii]

Sensing the makings of a popular series, Nordstrom pressed him to do more Nutshell books. The resulting argument would lead to Sendak’s first masterpiece. He resisted her suggestion: he had illustrated over 50 books in the past decade, and wanted to try something new. When she proposed that another author create sequels instead, Sendak was upset; the Nutshell Library was his idea. Nordstrom backed off, and Sendak returned to a book dummy he had made back in 1955, during his apprenticeship with Johnson and Krauss — Where the Wild Horses Are. All through early 1963, he kept revising and rewriting the text, finally retitling the book Where the Wild Things Are.

(Continued)

Elsewhere:

Aaron Renier posted a moving tribute to Sendak on his site.

In Marvel news, Tom Spurgeon writes about donating to the Hero Initiative in light of the Avengers movie. And Rob Steibel digs up a 1968 Stan Lee interview from Castle of Frankenstein #12. A relative rarity from the days before the hype vibe completely calcified.

Daniel Clowes is having a busy couple months. Here’s a fine Artforum interview with him, focusing on his current retrospective, by TCJ-contributor Naomi Fry. And now he has a YouTube channel, too!

Speaking of motion, apparently Jodorowsky is crowd-funding his next movie. And Wired asks and answers “how the streaming revolution is changing the Japanese animation industry“.

I grew up with his books, literally from day one. I was Pierre (I didn’t care). Sendak gave me my first literary role model at age zero. And he soon became one himself. My dad was casually acquainted with Sendak and there was a household legend that they had once discussed publishing a children’s magazine together. It probably never went any further than grownups-with-alcohol banter, but it was a heady story to grow up on.

The most important thing about him and his work can be summed up in a headline the Guardian ran with in an interview last October: “Maurice Sendak: I refuse to lie to children.” This might seem sort of obvious but of course it is really anything but. In 2012 when children’s literature is, as often as not, as calculated, pre-formatted, and nutritious as the latest Happy Meal, the issue of what is true— and brave—and right— to actually put into the books themselves can easily get lost between the word count and price point.

Very few others ever did as pitch-perfect, emotionally-connected picture books as Sendak. Whether he actually made them for kids at all, or for himself as he sometimes claimed is moot. He knew exactly what was important, page by page, at all times—better than the editors and publishers and marketing departments and parents and librarians and critics and awarders and all of the other pseudo-superfluous grownups who stand between a children’s book author and his reader. That he was able to do it so well and for so long now seems nothing short of miraculous.

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Mo Willems:

Even if Maurice Sendak (or Morose Sendak as James Marshall reportedly called him) had never created Where the Wild Things Are, he would be in the pantheon of great illustrators for his direct, dynamic draftsmanship (particularly his ink work in the 1950s). His originals are tremendous, all the more so as he usually drew and painted at half the size of the published work.

Where the Wild Things Are is rightly considered the pinnacle of children’s picture books, for its structure, draftsmanship, and content. Certainly, I used the book as a template for my first effort, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Where Sendak increased and decreased the size of the drawings to indicate the slide of emotion from reality to fantasy and back to reality, I used colored backgrounds to underline the character’s emotional state. If you’re going to steal an idea, steal from the best, right?

It is a book that, when deconstructed, teaches you that good design is good storytelling, that it works best on the subconscious (when you notice it, the potency disappears), that posing and strong silhouettes create motion and emotion, and (most importantly) that childhood sucks.

I am very glad he lived and made the books he did.

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Seth:

Maurice Sendak was one of those artists, like Edward Gorey, who sat at the edges of the cartoon world. Not quite cartoonists, but close enough to have influenced at least one generation of comics artists– probably more. He was certainly an artist whose work I adored. I truly love those early books he did with Ruth Krauss. And is there any more impossibly exquisite work (and object) than the Nutshell Library? Like those little medieval carvings of a world in a walnut–so perfect you cannot believe anyone actually made them.

I must admit, I didn’t really grow up with his books. I have a sense that I did read Wild Things once– a vague memory of being frightened, at an early age, by those amazing drawings.  Certainly I recall reading In the Night Kitchen, but whatever impression it made on me was slim. It did stay in my mind. I never forgot it. I wish I had read more of them.

For me, it was in my early twenties that his books came into my life. Around the same time as Gorey and Addams and Steig and Blechman and Steinberg. Everyone knows that the very best children’s books can be as deeply appreciated as an adult as when a child. Often more. That’s true of Sendak’s work. Terrific stuff. Deep. Playful. Maybe even a bit sad.

Sendak seemed like a character as well. From a distance he appeared pushy, egocentric, increasingly disinterested in the modern world … a navel-gazer … crabby. Maybe even self-centered or arrogant. All things that made me like him. His life was an object lesson on how to be a publishing artist, that’s for sure.

I never actually met the man, of course. I saw him once on stage (more than a decade or so ago) at one of those “in conversation” events in Toronto. Afterward I pressed a copy of one of my books into his hand and mumbled a few words of praise. I recall hoping that he might actually read it, not toss it in the hotel waste-basket before heading to the airport. Later, as that book looked worse and worse to me, I hoped he had tossed it. Several years after that, R. O. Blechman made some offhand comment to me about my name having passed casually between the him and Sendak. Nothing extraordinary. Just a remark.

Upon hearing that I felt that odd feeling that you never lose–no matter how old you get–a feeling of wonder. A profound sense of the impossibility that such distant mythical creatures — demigods from your youth (a Sendak or a Blechman ) could have somehow spoken YOUR name when you weren’t around! How did it ever happen?

I encourage everyone to read Caldecott and Co., Sendak’s book of essays and introductions. That’s a good read. That book made as big an impression on me (way back when) as did his beautiful picture books.

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Peter Blegvad:

He and my parents, Erik and Lenore, were on friendly terms in the early 1960s in Connecticut. Fellow members of the community of children’s book illustrators, writers, editors. They saw him in the UK too. I think he was in hospital in Cambridge (was he there to dig the Blakes in the Fitzwilliam?) after his heart attack in the ’70s? I think they visited him then.

Drawing Leviathan, there was a period when I used the cat in one of Sendak’s “Little Bear” books as my model in several strips.

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Charles Hatfield:

I teach Where the Wild Things Are every time I teach my flagship course in children’s literature. I teach it in other courses too. What this means is that I get to renew my acquaintance with the book in an intense way several times a year. I reread it a lot.

There’s nothing original about choosing Wild Things for a children’s literature course. It’s an old choice. Maybe it’s a stale choice. Sometimes I chide myself for getting stale, and tell myself that I’m going to swap Wild Things out in favor of some other, less familiar book.

I never do.

The truth is that Wild Things draws me like a moth to candle. The reason isn’t just that I find it delightfully, endlessly provocative—a book simultaneously so definite and yet so ambiguous, so eager and light-footed and yet so dark and fearsome. The reason isn’t just that Wild Things is an endlessly provoking Rorschach of readers’ attitudes, assumptions, and tolerances. Those are some of the reasons. But another reason, and one that always outpaces my desire for novelty and change, is that Wild Things is the teachable picture book par excellence—a book that contains so many potential lessons in it. By lessons, I mean useful provocations. More than that, Wild Things contains within it a whole picture storybook tradition.

The miracle of Sendak stemmed partly from his understanding of that tradition, which was historical, critical, even curatorial—but not at all scholastic in the starched-collar sense. Sendak knew the tradition in which he was working: not simply as a market genre, nor as a careerist niche, but as a shimmering, dynamic, ever-adjusting tradition in which he was proud and happy to work. When he won the Caldecott Medal for Wild Things the better part of a half-century ago, he gave an acceptance speech that not only unveiled some of the memories that inspired the book but also sang the praises of the artist for whom the Medal was named: Randolph Caldecott, the Victorian genius whose visual-verbal repartee and rhythmic gusto Sendak eagerly sought to make his own. Sendak’s appreciations of Caldecott—reprinted in his splendid book of essays, Caldecott & Co. (1988)—reveal an artist-critic ensconced in a tradition that, even as he celebrated it, he was busy changing. Sendak clearly loved picture books and illustration, heart and soul. His critical appraisals were acutely observed and keyed to the subtleties of form, but also animated by a pure, bounding delight. He reveled in drawing, the rhythmic exchange of word and image, and sheer creative troublemaking.

If formalism gives Wild Things its structure—a tug o’war between word and picture, superego and id, mom and child, domestic reality and far-flung fantasy—then that quality is offset by Sendak’s fearless depth-sounding of the inadmissible, inarticulable feelings that nearly carry Max, his child-protagonist, away. Sendak’s formalism serves to give shape—not only at the level of the page, but even at the level of entire book design—to feelings that, until Sendak, picture books had hardly registered, feelings of rage, loneliness, thwarted autonomy, and the desperate need for love. I’m not talking about “love” earned through some disciplinary calculus that seeks to impress its grinding lessons on the child—apologize, say you’re sorry, don’t act out—but love given openly in spite of our essential fucked-up-ness.

From my teacherly perspective, which I admit leans toward ruthless pragmatism, Wild Things has many potential “lesson plans” in it because it is so many things at once: designingly simple and formally elegant; self-aware about its genre, by which I mean historically grounded yet innovative; ambiguous enough to lure readers into so many different judgment calls; and, perhaps above all, affirming and challenging at the same time, teasing out how we feel about brattiness, selfishness, discipline, a parent’s love, the urge to dominate, and the urge to give in—in fine, about childhood as we’ve come to know it. I can ask students to read this book to one another and thus observe its rhythmic visual/verbal exchanges; to write or recite its text from memory, thus to catch its poetry; to compare it aesthetically to a late Victorian toy book by Caldecott; to think about why the book’s unseen mother is its second-most important character; to disclose how they feel about the book’s resolution (definite? open-ended?) of the mother-child conflict; to compare and contrast it to a range of post-Sendak picture books dealing with similar conflicts and feelings, from Molly Bang’s When Sophie Get Angry—Really, Really Angry… to David Shannon’s No, David!; to interpret the book as sentimental or fierce; in sum, to reread the book again and again for weeks, admiring its grace or confronting its terrors. It is a great, inexhaustible treasure: the quintessential late-twentieth century American picture book.

Sendak did beautiful, affecting work before Wild Things; a survey of his career to 1963 alone would be impressive. (My wife introduced me to the unaffected schoolyard delight of A Hole Is to Dig, Sendak’s first great collaboration with Ruth Krauss, published in 1952.) But Wild Things was the book that unlocked Sendak, freeing him career-wise. This was not only because of its marketplace success—Sendak once quipped that Max was the best kind of child, the kind who allowed his parent to do whatever he wanted—but also because it overturned the last vestiges of obliging timidity in his work, uncorking the dark and unabashedly personal stuff that now defines him. Sendak would later pursue this dark stuff into openly self-indulgent crypto-autobiographical territory, from the McCay-inspired dream comic In the Night Kitchen (1970), with its balancing of homey delights and childhood nightmares, to the frankly chilly, almost frozen Outside Over There (1981), an uncanny horror story about a changeling. Wild Things helped bring many great and startlingly personal books out of Sendak, from Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), a fable based on the life of a beloved dog, to We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), a satiric riff on mega-capitalism based on two traditional nursery rhymes, to the Holocaust-haunted Brundibár (2003), his collaboration with Tony Kushner based on Hans Krása’s children’s opera, which was performed at Terezín (Krása was murdered at Auschwitz, dying in a gas chamber). Kushner and Sendak engineered a revival of the opera as well. Who else has had a career like that? Wild Things was the passport that led to all these boundary-shattering works, as well as Sendak’s design work for operas and ballets, starting on the cusp of the 1980s with a stage adaptation of Wild Things itself.

Sendak, then, was a genuine Renaissance man, whose interests could not be neatly corralled into one tiny box (genre, style, medium). But for me the heart of his achievement will always be his picture book children, those squat, feisty urchins, full of vinegar and fire: feisty, anti-authoritarian, and, yes, wild. He paid tribute to their imaginations by unleashing his own fierce imagination, untrammeled, boundless, and free. Wild Things is the turning point in that story.

Sendak is that rare artist whose pursuit of self-indulgence liberated and humanized an entire field, extending its horizons and enriching its emotional palette. Against pinched, hidebound ideas about what children’s book could do, he depicted childhood in all its confounding mystery, unfogged by sentiment and invested with fear, fury, and joy. His understanding of the picture book form was so complete, his reverence for its history so genuine, that he became America’s greatest practitioner-critic of children’s books. His understanding of the human heart was greater still. He was, in short, an incandescently bright star—and Where the Wild Things Are, I believe, is the thrumming heart of his achievement.

I just can’t seem to get away from that damned book!

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Lauren R. Weinstein:

Few people know how to tap into a child’s deepest emotional life and shape his or her subconscious forever. Maurice Sendak did. My favorite book of his is Outside Over There, and the reasons why keep changing as I get older. In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are seem to explore primal urges and dreams, and are resolved by the characters waking up, or going back to their mommies. I love these books, but in Outside Over There, there’s more at stake.

A baby sister is kidnapped by goblins. The baby is replaced by a changeling made of ice (the scariest thing I could imagine when I was a kid). The mother is absent—waiting for her husband who’s away at sea. Our hero, Ida, probably four or five, has to save her sister using her will, her mother’s cloak, and her wonder horn. The goblins happen to be disguised as babies. Ida entrances them by playing the wonder horn, making them dance so fast that they dissolve into water. Few people could draw this transformation with such naturalism. In the end, Ida is charged with the responsibility of raising her little sister, while her mom stares off to sea, waiting for Ida’s papa to come home. When I was a child, I looked up to Ida. I marveled that a girl could be so brave and save her sister. I longed for one of those big flowing night gowns, and I wanted a sister.

The drawings in this book changed my life. I scrutinized the sunflowers growing up and up and the facial expressions of the portrait in Ida’s room changing slightly. The German Shepherd. The musician and the sailors hidden in the compositions. Sendak’s inspiration seems to have been German and Netherlandish engravers. These drawings don’t take any short cuts. They are very rendered, but carry an emotional weight.

Do I identify more with this book because the main characters are girls? Possibly. The story seems to be more about girls, and what is expected of them. If the protagonist was a boy, would he be expected to raise his younger sibling? Ida has big feet and flowing hair; she’s going to be tall and gorgeous. She’s more in control of herself than the boys in Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. She has grace.

Now we read this book to my daughter. She’s 2 1/2 and I don’t know how much of it she gets, but she wants to hear it over and over. She thinks the goblins are aliens. Maybe she can just tell how enthusiastic about the story I am. Sendak knows he can take children to these dark places, but he builds in the security of the adult reader guiding them along. This book takes childhood seriously. It talks about love and responsibility and heroism, in a way that is never spelled out. I read somewhere that he revised the book over one hundred times, and it shows. It reads like Yeats, like perfect poetry. I don’t mind reading it over and over again to my daughter, always marveling at new details in the drawings.

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Sergio Ruzzier, children’s book author and Sendak Fellow:

I miss Maurice’s voice and I miss his hugs. I miss walking with him and sitting on a stone wall to rest and chat. The last time I saw him was the day before the night he died. He was sleeping peacefully and it feels good to remember him like that.

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Michael DeForge:

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Megan Kelso:

While I agree that  Maurice Sendak’s work deserves its place in the picture book canon, I feel lucky that I got to discover his books on my own. The imaginary world that feels real—equal parts terror and delight—- belongs to childhood. Only a very few adults retain a grasp on it the way Sendak did. I think having your first grade teacher (or your mom) introduce you to Sendak’s vision of that world somehow diminishes its power. In kindergarten, soon after I learned to read, I remember  going to the library on my own during lunch recess; a respite from the stressful routine of Boys Chase the Girls/Girls Chase the Boys. I remember finding Where the Wild Things Are on a low table stacked with picture books. Max seemed a little older than I was. I did not identify with him, but the book shed some light on the mysterious, somewhat frightening behavior of boys. My favorite part of that book is when the smell of supper lures Max back to his room, so cozy and prosaic after his big adventure. If I were an elementary school teacher, I too would probably not be able to resist reading the gorgeous, perfect prose of Where the Wild Things Are aloud, but I also think that book, and most of Sendak’s work is meant to be read, and pored over,  in solitude. And on a final note, how did Sendak manage to make his simple drawings of food seem so delicious? I think all my favorite Maurice Sendak moments are food related. I love that overflowing pot of noodles when the Alligators are making macaroni ….and in Chicken Soup with Rice, my favorite drawing is when the March wind knocks down the door, blows the soup off the table and proceeds to greedily lap it up and roar for more. I wanted to climb right into those illustrations, live in the funny old houses with Max, Pierre, Johnny, and all the little dogs. When I reached the point with my own drawing where it occurred to me to copy what I admired, Sendak’s were it. May his work live forever, quietly, on library shelves, waiting for children to discover it.

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Dylan Horrocks:

When I heard Sendak had died, even though I knew from interviews he’d given that it was coming, I was hit by the news like a physical shock. It was like when Charles Schulz died. It’s not just because Sendak made such great books (and they really were incredibly good – from the tiny Chicken Soup With Rice to the extraordinary Outside Over There). It’s because – in his work and in interviews – he was utterly painfully candid and honest, full of rage and passion and intensity, compassion and love. He was angry and he fought with life, and life took him to some very dark places. But for anyone who’s ever been a frightened, angry, crazy child (i.e. everyone), Sendak was on our side; he was fighting on our behalf. He was just so goddamn present in the world. And now he’s not.

There are things he said in interviews that will always stay with me: “I refuse to lie to children,” he said. Then there’s the story he told about a young boy called Jim who loved the drawing Sendak sent him so much that he ate it (“That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”).

Of course, it goes without saying that so many things he wrote and drew will stay with me too. Sendak’s books changed everything. Everything.

Maurice Sendak is one of THE great writers and artists of the twentieth century, in any field. And if anyone disagrees, I’ll fight ‘em! In a parallel universe, he’d have won the Nobel Prize. But then, the Nobel Prize is nothing next to that small boy who ate an original Sendak drawing for sheer joy: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

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Cathy Malkasian:

Maurice Sendak seemed destined for an agonizingly full life. He was a special kind of bug, with antennae tuned to suffering and humor. In every careful line, every thin subtraction of light he used to shape an image, there’s a bit of sorrow at the beauty of living and loving too well. His complete honesty—in line, print and speech—can leave you feeling both empty and full. He seemed to understand that oscillation well, and somehow thrived in its fine frequency. His work can look playful and buoyant, but it is heavily weighted, too, and deeper than some parents might be willing to accept. But he wasn’t writing for parents, or anyone who had learned how to be sensible. He was appealing to that very real oscillation—of dark and light, empty and full, terror and bliss—from which children don’t necessarily want to flee.

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Victor Kerlew:

Time ran out on me.

I was at a garden party. Brass band and everything. “I leeeft my looove in Aaaavaloooon.”

“That’s Bacchus,” he said, “god of wine.”

“And revelry,” I added, from my vaults of comic book knowledge.

“Hey, that’s pretty good! I didn’t know any of that shit until I moved here.”

“You know how old the artist was?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Three. Three years old. Her daddy helped her a little, gave her some direction. But yeah, she just took off her clothes, rolled around on that.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

“Fuck yeah it is.”

***

PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

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SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

NonNonBa: A show debut at MoCCA the other week, where I held all 432 pages in my hands, although this 1977 release from Shigeru Mizuki — maybe a more characteristic work than last year’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, given the artist’s renown in Japan as a master of yōkai manga — has already been making the rounds elsewhere in the west, given its capture of the Fauve d’Or at Angoulême 2007. Still, I believe there is some (fantastical) autobiographical content in here, as an old woman acts as a guide to the world of Japanese spirits. Preview; $26.95.

Megalex: Ah, this one brings me all the way back to publisher Humanoids’ 2002-04 attempt to revive Métal Hurlant as a comic book-format anthology for the North American audience – an edition somewhat different, I understand, from a mostly contemporaneous French-language incarnation. Most prominent among the alterations was an attempt to juice up the English release by serializing the first two volumes of this 1999-2008 series from writer Alejandro Jodorowsky — a bankable name working through one of his weakest stories, an autopilot array of nature-based revolution against a drugged technocratic society — and artist Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, who commanded a certain amount of aesthetic pull with the publisher at the time, having already collaborated successfully with Jodorowsky and Zoran Janjetov on The Technopriests, and even inspired an ill-considered re-coloring of The Incal. Yet the extreme of his chilly, digitally-smooth approach was Megalex, rendered entirely via millennial 3D models which, as you might expect, absolutely scream the era of their creation, which is perhaps what moved Beltran to switch to a more traditional illustration approach for the third and final volume, available for the first time in English in this 168-page hardcover package, which also includes its predecessors. Samples; $29.95.

–

PLUS!

Mastering Comics: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Continued: In which authors Jessica Abel & Matt Madden follow up their 2008 ‘how to’ text via publisher First Second with a 336-page sequel intended to deepen the lessons offered prior; $34.99.

Silver Surfer: Parable: Fans of the gradual diminution of artists in the superhero comics process will definitely want a peek at this new 168-page hardcover from Marvel, a reprinting of writer Stan Lee’s 1988-89 collaboration with one Mr. Jean Giraud. Alert browsers will note that the project has actually been paired with a second Lee-scripted tale, 1990’s Silver Surfer: The Enslavers (art by Keith Pollard), transforming a rare Moebius-in-English package into a showcase for the character, or, barring that, the writer. Or, I dunno, maybe it was more cost-effective to bulk up the page count? Anyway, we’ll see if any remembrance for the late artist was put together before press time, though I won’t be expecting the Quentin Tarantino introduction the series so plainly demands; $24.99.

Space Ducks: An Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness: Being a 96-page original graphic novel from musician, artist and documentary subject Daniel Johnston, which can be joined with an audio album and an iOS app for additional content. The publisher is Boom! Samples; $19.99.

Archie’s Sunday Finest: Your Archie for the week, this time a 160-page IDW ‘best of’ release of ‘40s and ‘50s Sunday comics by franchise originator Bob Montana; $49.99.

Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe and the Beatles in Hamburg: Another First Second offering, presenting the story of eventual ex-Beatle Sutcliffe and his continental experiences in a “lush, romantic” (per the publisher) and somewhat seinen manga-inflected (to me eye) style from German artist Arne Bellstorf, who saw the initial release of this 208-page work in Berlin, 2010. Official site; $24.99.

Frankenstein Alive, Alive! #1 (of 13): Clearly the main draw to this new IDW project is seeing artist Bernie Wrightson embark on (a) the largest single comics story of his career and (b) a sequel of sorts to his 1983 illustrated edition of the Mary Shelley novel, albeit here a full comic with writing by frequent collaborator Steve Niles. I’m a bit more interested to see how the process utilized in the publisher’s gigantic Artist’s Edition books — i.e., reproducing the original art in full color, retaining all of the textures and imperfections of the page, which admittedly was not devised by IDW itself, having been used by McSweeney’s in its edition of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary – translates to new work in the comic book format. Samples; $3.99.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Color Classics #1: Another popular trend – colorization! Bone did it, Scott Pilgrim’s doing it, and now the original Kevin Eastman/Peter Laird debut gets (another) treatment, courtesy of one Tom Smith and Scorpion Studios. Preview; $3.99.

Trio #1: And for a throwback of a different, newer sort, IDW brings an all-new big fightin’ superhero comic from writer/artist John Byrne. Preview; $3.99.

Mystery in Space #1: Another one of those fat anthology comic books Vertigo sometimes puts out, this time an 80-page package promising work by Paul Pope, Mike Allred, Kyle Baker and others; $7.99.

FLCL Omnibus: Oh wow, this is something. The worst manga in the world are generally anime or gaming tie-in series, but the once-great animation studio Gainax sponsored several exceptions, among them an expansive (and never-finished) Neon Genesis Evangelion adaptation by the popular show’s character designer, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and this utterly berserk Hajime Ueda rendition of the studio’s 2000-01 critique of the “magical girlfriend” genre, as inside-fandom as a premise can get while nonetheless — under the sure hand of never-better director Kazuya Tsurumaki — dishing out comedy and surrealism and big dirty genre licks in the manner of a top-notch Grant Morrison comic. Ueda’s comic, however, flings the entire affair deep into furious, near-inchoate mark-making of a sort rarely seen in mainline Japanese comics, which is its own type of added rebellion for the sponsor studio. Previously released in 2003 by Tokyopop, and now from Dark Horse as a 392-page all-in-one brick. Samples; $19.99.

The Bible: Finally — and sadly not your DC relaunch of the week — we have a new hardcover reprint of a 1975 treasury format release by the publisher (Limited Collector’s Edition C36), sporting 68 pages of Nestor Redondo drawing Old Testament classics under the direction of Joe Kubert, in a project spearheaded by Sheldon Mayer that never proceeded past issue #1. Note that this edition is 10.3” x 13.6”, which is approximately the original publication dimensions; $29.99.

Cover of the IDW hardbound edition.

Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s Starstruck had almost become the stuff of legend; now it is in print. The first page of Starstruck was published more than 30 years ago, followed by a complicated serial publishing history. The first 200 pages are now collected in one immaculate book, with an almost equal amount of excellent additional material.

From the fan’s perspective, the progress of Starstruck seemed to have stalled some time ago, forever “to be continued,” never to be definitively collected. Now it is collected, and it turns out, Lee and Kaluta have been moving forward with full development of the next two-thirds of the story. Starstruck, as we’ve known it since 1980, really is finally complete, and the rest of the story will finally be told.

Now seemed to be the ideal time to have a long conversation with Lee and Kaluta, both about the genesis and development of the book and about the intricacies of the story itself, which spans decades and is told with the ambition and complexity of Watchmen or a Faulkner novel.

My intent going into this interview was to break with the tradition of reintroducing Starstruck to the uninitiated, and instead simply talk to the creators about their work. There’s never been an extended authors’ preface to Starstruck.

But we’re not leaving those unfamiliar with the story out in the rain. Lee and Kaluta are gradually posting the IDW pages on their website, so you can start reading Starstruck right here.  (The website also includes a glossary for the Starstruck universe, which has been developed far beyond the scope of the comic book pages.)

I’ll preface this first installment of the interview with only a few pieces of backstory: Starstruck started as a play, written largely by and starring Lee, who was an established television actress and emerging writer. Kaluta, one of the most interesting and elusive comic book artists of the Seventies, entered the picture at that point, having become disillusioned by the comics industry but enthralled by the idea of designing Starstruck’s costumes and sets. Before long, Starstruck crossed the event horizon into comic books, Lee becoming a regular contributor to the form, and Kaluta entering into the longest, strangest narrative of his comic-book career.

TCJ: How does it feel to have finally signed off on, and published definitively, the first 200 pages of the Starstruck?

Elaine: Wonderful! I’m very happy with it. And Lee Moyer’s beautiful color adds so much to it.  Of course, as soon as it was out, I saw a few small mistakes we allowed to get past us. It always happens, I suppose. But that really is being very picky. And there will be more! As the Galactic Girl Guides might say, “Trust me.”

Michael: Having the first third of the Starstruck Story in color and published in a massive hardback gives me a “between worlds” feeling. One part of me says “can it BE?” and the rest of me is peacock proud. It’s a heck of a lot of work to have all in one place (but knowing there’s an equal amount of work already drawn, just waiting for the intervening pages to be drawn: well, again a metaphor: like watching the Amazing Sunset from one’s desert island then glancing over one’s shoulder and seeing a full-sized Saturn rising out of the Ocean behind. Yeeeeek!

New page for the continuing Starstruck saga.

TCJ: I’m not aware of any other example of graphic storytelling that was developed in quite the way the work in this volume was. The story in its present form is 200 pages long, but the first and last pages of it are the same pages that bracketed this story arc when it was half that length. After the series’ first American run with Epic (which reprinted the earliest chapters as an early graphic novel, then added six new issues), you decided to build into what you’d already published, rather than extending the story from the point where you’d left off.

Michael: The thought behind doing Starstruck as a Comic Book, back in 1980-81, was that it’d come out in a sort of bi-monthly schedule, or Monthly if in a Magazine, and the story would layer easily with the readers. As it happened, that didn’t happen, and when the story first came out in Heavy Metal, the editors often gave the story arbitrary page lengths, halting the flow in what was already meant to be a challenging storytelling approach. My philosophy at the time was: let them catch up (stolen from Robin Williams)… I knew that there were folks who craved a comic book story that could keep them engaged while entertaining them, and Elaine Lee rose to that with gusto!

Elaine: The decision to expand the story from within was a natural one. When we first decided to do a Starstruck graphic novel, we had to decide how we wanted to do it. We knew we couldn’t do the play. It was just too “talky.” Plays are all about the dialogue. And the play detailed the confrontation between the crews of two ships that meet in space. The story was too small and not visual enough for a graphic novel, much less a comic series. But the characters in the play had each been given a monologue in which they talked about an important incident from the past. We decided to make the graphic novel a series of vignettes, based on these monologues. But, in some cases, years passed between, say, Kalif’s story and Galatia 9’s. So, there were big time jumps in the chronology. When we got the chance to do the Epic books, we started from where we’d left off and continued the story from there. We were supposed to do twelve books, but were told we were being cancelled after the first few were done. So we ended up shortening the story we had planned, so there would at least be some sort of an ending. When Dark Horse picked us up, it made sense to fill in the gaps – to let people know what certain characters had been up to, during those time jumps, and to put planned story elements back in that had been cut when we were cancelled.

Michael: When it came to expanding the stories, adding in plot lines, it turned out that my approach to my “background” characters made fitting the new material into the pacing a lot easier. Like seeing the second Back To The Future film, the expanded Starstruck was the exact same action but with a lot better omniscient viewpoint given to the reader.

TCJ: For the present edition, you’ve again revised Starstuck’s existing pages – both the storytelling and the artwork (including the expansion of each of the first 80 pages). Can you talk about what led to this revision process and how you approached it?

Elaine: We’ve gone back and forth between serialized, graphic novel and comics versions of the work, so that putting it all in one big book was a challenge. The pages were of many different dimensions and, when we put them all together, double page spreads might end up not being on facing pages. So, we had to add to the length of some pages, in some cases giving more room to existing panels, in others adding panels. We added at least one new page of art and, in a couple of places, rearranged art, adding new text. We added a couple of these rearranged pages to the IDW comic series that we decided to leave out of the Deluxe Edition. We had put them in to make the design work out, but didn’t need them in the collection. All the pages will be there on the website, however, both the pages we added to the series and those we added to the collection. There’s room for everything there!

Michael: The largest part of my work on getting the Starstruck Pages ready for publication in the IDW volume was extending about 80 of the pages by 2 and ¾ inches. Given Elaine’s tight storytelling, the pacing of each monologue and dialogue, I couldn’t just put a thin panel in between others to lengthen the pages… I had to make selected panels taller, matching the rendering I did 30 years ago… for the first 20 pages it was a technical struggle: then I hit on a technique: time consuming, but near flawless: scan the art (had been done already, of course) select which panels/panels were to be lengthened: crop the top and bottom lines off the panels in Photoshop, print same (same size as the originals) then draw on the printed paper. Scan that page at the same DPI as the Art, go into the now lengthened page template and replace the previous panel with the taller one. Draw new panel borders and on to the next!

TCJ: I’m curious to hear about what it has been like to live with and to engage creatively with the same work – and your younger selves – across three decades.

Elaine: It’s been a little strange working with Starstruck over so many years. There have been characters I’ve identified with more strongly during certain periods of my life, so that those characters were given prominence within the story. When I was coming up with characters and plot for the original play, I wrote Galatia 9 for myself to play. I was about 5’ tall and weighed maybe 95 pounds at the time, but I wanted to be the Amazon Captain, so I wrote myself one. I was a big Star Trek fan as a kid, but I had hated that last episode in which Kirk switched bodies with a woman who wanted to be a star ship captain – which meant, of course, that she was insane. Kirk’s last line was, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s. If only… if only…” (meaning, “if only she hadn’t had any ambition beyond being a Kirk-smooching, mini-skirted yeoman”). Beyond that, as an actress, I thought it would be fun to play a character that embodied exaggerated versions of all the traits that bothered me in myself. I was flat-chested, so I gave Galatia 9 a missing breast, building the other breast into one side of the costume. I had had surgery for scoliosis, which left me with scars down my back and a slight limp, which I exaggerated on stage, by putting an ankle weight inside one boot. My costume was asymmetrical and I put a big scar over one eye and down my face. Galatia is sometimes blindly idealistic, sometimes paranoid, and she enjoys her booze; traits that I share, but more so in my youth.

Elaine Lee in the Starstruck play, 1980

By the time Michael and I started working on the Marvel graphic novel, I got into Ronnie Lee’s head. In the stories, as they were printed in Ilustracion+Comix International and Heavy Metal, there was no narration from Ronnie Lee. We added that for the Marvel graphic novel. A lot of the frustration I felt, growing up as a girl in a small southern town during the ’50s and ’60s, went into that character. That feeling of being meant for something better than circumstances allowed.

Then, when we started doing the Epic comics, I found that I was getting tired of all the female characters and wanted to add a strong male character to the cast. Enter Harry Palmer. He had been a side character in Galatia and Brucilla’s story, but Michael and I decided to give him his own storyline. It was lovely to spend a couple of issues walking around in Harry. He may be my very favorite character. He’s certainly the most loyal, loving and stable character in the Starstruck pantheon.

We began doing the Expanding Universe books for Dark Horse when I was the mother of a very young child. That was when we started beefing up the character of Mary Medea (AKA Glorianna of Phoebus) and I’m sure my own motherhood played into the scenes of Mary and her mother, as well as Mary with her much younger sibling, Molly (Galatia). Mary was a behind-the-scenes manipulator of much of the action, which is sort of what you become as a mother. You are no longer the main character, but you play a large role in shaping the main character. (By the way, that baby I was tending during the Dark Horse days ended up playing Rootersnoos Ferret Jimmy the Snout in the recent Starstruck audio adaptation.)

By the time we got to the IDW series and collection, I wasn’t making too many changes to the actual pages, but I wrote forwards for the series in the voice of Dwannyun of Griivarr. Dwannyun was a main character in the play, who hadn’t had much chance to breathe in the comics. We had set up a history for him that described him as a complete failure until the time of the play. So, I took him into the future, made him a historian, and had him write a history of the events in the comics, from that future perspective. So, as the character, I was writing a history of this world we had created over several decades. In doing so, I could hint at secrets that Michael and I knew, but that had never made it into the pages.

Michael Kaluta, 1975

Michael: I’d “given up” on comics a few months before meeting Elaine and her sister Susan and falling into their Gravity Well… that what they were up to when met was a play, and what they wanted was a poster (then costumes, because there would be costumed characters on the poster, then Sets) it wasn’t comic books at all! I learned what a Hot Glue Gun was. I learned that Stage Clothing/Costuming wasn’t like drawing, real life or stuff for Films: it could look slapped together up close (and generally WAS slapped together) and look like a million bucks from the audience. Never having designed costumes for folks to wear, it was twice-lucky that Elaine knew Costuming and had all the necessary arcane equipment needed to make spacy-looking stuff. (Leather Punch, Rivet Setting Tools, the Hot Glue Guns and her expertise).  When set design and building came into the mix, skills I’d honed as a kid (dumpster diving it’s now called) came to the fore… and NYC is a Treasure Trove of Interesting Stuff waiting to be appropriated and redefined. I’ll not go on about how finding “things” that could “look terrific from the audience” took over my waking life: Refrigerators: the inside of their doors, turned upside down and painted silver with a bunch of tacks, Legg’s Eggs and Disposable Razors hot glued in series: Voila! An entire wall of Space Stuff! I think Elaine mentioned the Hot Wheels track.. there was a kid’s bowling toy that made a terrific console and card table legs, removed from the table and set upside down along the bottom edge of the console wall became levers Brucilla and Galatia could use to pilot The Harpy.

Elaine: Writing new Starstruck material now doesn’t feel the same as it did in the beginning. In the early days, Michael and I lived Starstruck. We worked together, writing and drawing in the same room. As time went on, each of us worked on our own more. By the time of the Dark Horse series, I was a Mom and we were working separately. Now, I’m a completely different person from the girl who had the idea for the play. But the Starstruck universe is so familiar that I can put myself back in that head pretty easily. I can write it, without being as attached to it. As the pages go up on the website, I am writing new glossary entries that link to the pages. So, it goes on.

TCJ: Let’s spend some time with the first page of Starstruck, which introduces a number of narrative, structural, visual, and thematic traits of the series. Among other things, this page inaugurates Starstruck’s approach to making the reader work harder than usual to understand a comic book. For instance, there are no conventional boxes full of explanatory copy on this page or on any other page of the story.

The first page as it appeared in the 1984 Marvel graphic novel...

...and as it appears in the new edition.

Michael: The first page of Starstruck has always felt exactly right… it was one that adding in another panel to get the page length correct for printing almost didn’t work…  still, I knew that some folks would keep that first scene in their minds as they read on and, eventually, pieces would fall together. Getting to expand the story many years later, it was like affirming to those who “felt” they knew what was happening before the expanded version that they’d been right all along.

Elaine: We weren’t really thinking of omitting or changing any comic book conventions. We were just thinking of doing a story we really liked. Hmmm… maybe we were thinking of doing a story that was fun to create. And we were as much influenced by stories from other media, like film or novels, as we were by comics. In his novel, Dune, Frank Herbert had begun his chapters with excerpts from the writings of Princess Irulan. I’m sure that was an influence, though we used the writings of many different characters to begin our Starstruck chapters. I was a big fan of movie director Robert Altman, who let his story be gradually revealed by moving you through scenes where you would pick up bits of information from the many characters in his large cast. And literary novelists, known for the dark humor of their work, like Thomas Pynchon. Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut were certainly an influence. American comics were probably more of an influence on the play, than on the Starstruck comics. The play had a more straightforward story. And 50s and 60s low-budget sci-fi films and television were an influence on both.

The style of Starstruck was probably shaped by the content, as well. There were certain ideas we were interested in getting across. For instance, people lie. They are mistaken or misinformed. They may understand only part of the picture or they may not be able to see past their own agendas. We wanted a story that reflected that reality. So, you may see an episode in which one thing is happening in the narration (which might be a history, written in a later time) and another, completely different thing is being talked about in the dialogue, but when you look at the art, you see that something altogether different is happening, because neither the future historian, nor the characters living the event understand what’s really going on. Content decides style.

I remember Larry Hama telling me about some of the letters to the editor he’d gotten during his time at Marvel. One reader wrote something like, “In Conan #2, Conan says he’ll never run from a battle. Then, in issue #957, Conan runs from a battle. What gives?” That really made me laugh. So, what Michael and I are saying is: Just because Conan tells you something is true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually true. (And we might even hit Conan in the face with a giant hotdog; just to make sure he and everyone else gets the point.)

TCJ: Right out of the gate, the series announces its interest in the female body as a potentially conventional object of male desire, but in what turns out to be an unconventional plot of female empowerment. You decided to start your script with a woman hatching an elaborate political/economic power play involving mass production of sexbots. Why?

Elaine: The sexbot came first, the plot later. When coming up with characters for the play, I thought it would be fun to have a reprogrammed pleasure droid aboard the space ship, the Harpy. She would have the mind of Spock, the body of Marilyn. At the time, a lot of people in the media were writing about divisions in the women’s movement. Should women be trying to be like men, compete with men, do men’s jobs? Or should the women’s movement instead be trying to change the world, in order to make the world reflect more traditionally feminine values? The character of Brucilla the Muscle was a role reversal, a female version of every hotheaded, gung-ho, young, male space cadet in ’60s sci-fi movies, or war-in-space science fiction novels. And the pleasure droid, Erotica Ann 333, was the traditionally feminine woman to the max. Erotica Ann is brilliant and almost always right, but Brucilla can’t see past her appearance and manner. Bru can’t stand Annie. Of course, the Annie 333 you see on the first page of the comic, along with her “sibling” droids and their maker, Mary Medea, is not the Annie of the play. She hasn’t begun to think independently and she hasn’t been reprogrammed to serve as a crewmember of the Harpy.

In the play, Annie has a monologue, through which she tells the story of being owned by a young Kalif Bajar. She explains that, when he realized the droids were not able to love him, he ordered that they all be melted down in a vat of acid. As she watched her sisters march, one by one, into the acid, Annie had her first independent thought. She thought, “If I stay in this line, I’ll be melted down in acid.” Annie walked away and survived, later to meet up with Galatia 9, who has her reprogrammed to serve aboard the Harpy.

As far as Mary Medea’s schemes go, I think the idea of the seductive female spy has been around for quite a while. The desirable woman who isn’t what she seems. The Annies serve as Mary’s proxies, programmed to get close to their target, then preventing the target from achieving what he might have. Because they look exactly like Mary, they also serve as cover for her. When she wants to go into a situation, she can dress like an Annie and go wherever they are. In this case, that “object of male desire” is a honey trap. He may perceive her as an object, but he is actually enthralled, her slave. Kalif’s sister throws a wrench into the works, however. By the time she’s through messing with her brother’s mind, he’s attached to the headless (thoughtless, speechless) Annie. Like many of us, men and women alike, he would rather invent a personality for his love, than deal with an actual being, even one as pliant as a pleasure droid.

Michael: Kalif gets “his” Annie back after her rebuilt head “changed” her, by echoing his father’s blowing the head off one of the droids. A telling point: the beheading is done to a completely different Anne, #72, as opposed to the original headless Anne #1.  Headless, she is His Annie.

Elaine: The Annie Kalif loves is the one he imagines. As sick as this might be, it keeps him from being “guided” by Mary, through her droids. In the end, it is Ronnie who is enthralled by Mary Medea. She spends her life trying to understand and/or thwart Mary.

TCJ: Michael, in its final form, this first page is a really unorthodox, adventurous comic book page (let alone as a splash page for an entire series). It contains six panels, five of which stretch across the whole page. However, you’ve used the situation being illustrated (many identical female forms/faces) to create the illusion of more than a dozen panels on the page. And you’ve used light and dark areas to create an almost perfectly symmetrical composition.

Michael: I can’t remember my thought processes on the day I laid out the first page of Starstruck… I remember wanting to: 1) Introduce the Character. 2) visually show she was master/mistress, completely in control of the mysterious process being portrayed. 3) show there were a LOT of copies of her. 4) contrast Glorianna’s human movements against the implied mechanicalness of the androids, and 5) allude to Glorianna having a personal interest in one of the androids. Adding in the extra panel for the newest version was somewhat simpler than drawing it: Photoshop is a boon… but, although the Annies are identical, the fluid in the tanks was lowering, the bubbles rising, so there was more than just one cut, copy and paste to get the complete page. Since there were now quite a number of pages following the first page, it seemed important to add a background in the final two panels to give them a sense of belonging to the rest of the strip.

The layout of the page seemed the only way to do it: I felt it was given me in the subject matter. I owe the tracking camera approach to Goseki Kojima, the artist of Lone Wolf and Cub (and he owes that technique to Kurosawa, I’m sure!) That the first page was to be a symbolic opening, immediately followed by the Bajar Throne Room Sequence, allowed me to be more structured with it: by making it appear iconic, it contrasted nicely to the everyday madness going on in the following story.

TCJ: You had drifted away from comics before Starstruck, and you have never been particularly committed to extended comic book narratives. Can you speak to how you re-engaged long-form sequential art with Starstruck, and how your compositional approach to non-sequential art (comic book splash pages and covers, book covers and illustrations, posters, etc.) influenced your page compositions?

Michael: My drifting away from comics was more like me trying to swim away from a whirlpool… at the time I met Elaine and Susan I felt my work had become very stale. And I was also not a very good Worker. The major effect Starstruck had on me was to give me a reason to draw comics: the unique approach to the story intrigued, getting to layer the visuals in service of creating a sense of place for the characters was fulfilling, and the immediate feedback from Elaine on my choices made staying with the art easier than anything I’d done since Carson of Venus (of course, Carson was mostly a 5 page monthly strip… nothing compared with the huge amount of pages to eventuate from starting and committing to Starstruck)

I’m not certain my Cover Work for other comics, nor my illustration work, gave anything major to Starstruck beyond that my ability to draw had improved through the doing. The pacing of Starstruck, the sweep, the set-ups needed to give room for developing sub-plots and surprises gave me challenge after challenge: rising to those challenges made me use everything I’d ever seen, thought, read or heard of. Ideas sparked more Ideas, problems were worked out on the spot. Having to please only myself, and the writer sitting on the couch behind me, made the art grow into the epic it has become. Had I been handed a finished, 300 page script of Starstruck at the time of starting, alone at my drawing board, I shudder to think of what I’d have done.

TCJ: Lee Moyer’s new coloring is a dramatic departure from previous treatments of Starstruck. It is also highly illustrative in its own right. Did you actively collaborate with Moyer on this dimension of the new edition? How did he become the colorist in the first place?

Elaine: Lee Moyer has been involved with Starstruck, since way before he did the color for this edition. When he was a kid, still living at home, he saw Starstruck in Heavy Metal magazine and wrote Michael a letter saying, “If there’s anything I can ever do…” Later, Michael would meet the young Mr. Moyer, when they worked together on a video for by the Alan Parsons Project song, “Don’t Answer Me.” When the Marvel/Epic comics were coming out, Lee sent us examples of android Stark Verse that he and his friends had been writing for each other. Then, when we were doing the Expanding Universe books for Dark Horse, Lee wrote the “what happened in the last issue” pieces for us, signing them as Rootersnoos Ferret, Lee Moyer. During the years that Starstruck was stuck in a holding pattern, Lee sent us three beautifully painted pages. These were pages that had never been colored, from the black and white Dark Horse books. His note said, “If you ever intend to do a digitally painted version…?” By the time we got to the IDW series, it only made sense to ask Lee to do the color. Besides being an incredible artist in his own right, he knows Starstruck inside and out. He probably knows it better than Michael and I do!

Michael: As much as I’d like to take Big Credit for Lee Moyer’s painting of the Starstruck Pages, I can in truth only claim my contribution was in giving color notes to the Spanish Artists who did the airbrush color for the pages that appeared in Heavy Metal Magazine back in ’82 and eventually in the Marvel Graphic Novel from Epic. Basically my contribution was character costume colors. All the rest is Lee! Though I gave out with a few, “Could That Be Green?” and “Maybe That Should Glow?” comments, my involvement was as a fan: I got to go WOOOOOOOO!  And as any creative person can attest: if something allows one to go WOOOOOOO! over one’s own art, it is a blessing!

Oh: I DID tell Lee “Remember, there are over 200 pages of this highly detailed art: Don’t Kill Yourself with the First Pages and then have to match them for the entire 200+” …  of course, he ignored me, to our benefit. As Elaine points out: Lee knew the story backward and forward: I knew he’d know what to accentuate and what to let alone… even better than me, sometimes. It was a rare day when Lee would need to know what it was he was looking at in my panels, though I’ve a suspicion there were more times he crossed his fingers and dived in (to terrific results) than he’ll ever let on. AND: Lee is FAST!!!! Once or twice I sent him line art for the covers, intending to send color notes in the following email, only to have a note arrive from Lee with the finished color cover attached. I’m still agog!

Elaine: I worked very closely with Lee on the “extras” pages for the IDW comics and Deluxe Edition. Michael did new art for many of these pages, but Lee also did some of the art, a few of the mission patches, the Space Brigade poster, and the brochure for the Garuda – the ship that eventually becomes the Harpy. He repurposed and expanded existing art, for the Personalities of AnarchEra cards, as well as posters for the Ramscoop Lounge and the Aguacade. Lee did the design for the inside cover pages. In some cases I would send Lee text and he would design the page, in others we would chat, he would do the page, leaving room for text. Lee and I we worked together on the Book Design for the Deluxe Edition. Besides being incredibly talented, Lee is the consummate professional and very entertaining, and I would work with him again in a heartbeat.

TCJ: Jean Moebius passed away on March 10, 2012. What was his influence on Starstruck?

Elaine: Quite simply, there would have been no Starstruck, if there had been no Moebius. As a kid, I had been a voracious reader of comics, but had given them up as I entered my teen years. Then, in my early twenties, I discovered Heavy Metal and the European comics artists. Moebius was my favorite. At the time, I was living in Manhattan and working as an actress, but was also taking a playwriting class at The New School… a really bad playwriting class! I was given an assignment to write a scene about two people fighting over an object. The two women in my scene were the prototypes for Galatia 9 and her sister Verloona and they were fighting over a box, contents undisclosed. My ex-husband read the scene and said, “This is just like something from Heavy Metal!” I dropped the class, but kept working on the idea.

The Moebius influence.

Now, I’ll tell a story at Mr. Kaluta’s expense. While working on Starstruck, Michael went through a bad patch of artist’s block. Every time I dropped in on him, he was either sleeping or reading and I was starting to get cranky about it. I asked him what the heck was going on. Michael’s answer? “I’ve started to worry too much about whether or not Moebius will like it.”

So, from my point of view, Moebius was both the inspiration for, and almost the end of Starstruck!

Michael: I met Moebius as Jean Giraud when Jean-Pierre Dionnet came over to the USA with a gang of Top Flight French Comic Strip Artists (including Jean-Claude Forest: Barbarella, and the astounding Philippe Druillet). JP Dionnet became our Translator, being able to speak both languages, and brother did he hop from one to another. The first meeting was in the coffee room at the DC Comics/Independent News offices: a smallish room, now full of Frenchmen and Americans, all Comic Book Artists, all wanting to communicate to each other… On our side (if there were sides) there was Neal Adams, Alan Weiss, Berni Wrightson, etc. I can still see Howard Chaykin over my shoulder waving his hand toward Dionnet to come and help his conversation, while I had a hand on Dionnet’s chest, holding him in check until he could speak for me. We all traded drawings.

The Art of Moebius is the benchmark for Brilliant Comic Book Drawing, as well as being a high water mark in the design and characterization areas. I knew when I began Starstruck whatever I’d absorbed reading and studying his work would come out in anything I did that was “sci-fi”, but I did make it a rule not to look at his art while drawing: Moebius had so many elegant solutions to artistic and story-telling hurdles that his work would overwhelm anyone not careful to channel his being while staying clear of copying his results.

One of my quirks: when I draw a subject, my art tends to reflect that subject: hence one not studied in my work would think one of my Tolkien Calendar Illustrations done by someone entirely different than the artist responsible for Starstruck. Because Elaine’s Starstruck story covered (on purpose, note) so many different people, places, things and situations, my work, though uniform in the overall presentation, adjusted to different scenes by, say, softening when we are on New Wyoming (the Arizona Highways World), or hardening when Harry Palmer walks the Voidfront. Of course, the signature of an Elaine Lee Story is: you never get just what’s expected, so, in the Hardware-Driven Brucilla Story, Moebius-like machinery gets to meld with Spin and Marty high jinx, and the art followed suit. When discussing the various stories during the working process, it was often a reference shared from a 50’s TV show, commercial, joke from Boys Life or “something I heard once” that’d imbue an otherwise mundane artifact or scenario with the feeling “Hey, I’ve SEEN that… but where???”

Luckily, the fun we had doing it translated into fun for everyone!

We will have much more to say about him in the following days, but in the meantime, Margalit Fox’s obituary of Sendak in the New York Times is very good, as is the Fresh Air interview with Sendak from last December (which made my wife cry even back at the time). Blown Covers re-published a comic collaboration between Art Spiegelman and Sendak that is very much worth reading. The Guardian has a slideshow of his life in pictures. And Jeet Heer reminded me of an excellent critical look at Sendak that he found a few years ago from Hilton Kramer, of all people. There is much, much more, and we will have further coverage of Sendak’s life and influence up on the site very soon.

On the site today, we present the first installment of John Hilgart’s very thorough multi-part interview with Starstruck creators Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta, about the very strange and unique history of that project. (You may, or at least should, know Hilgart from 4CP.)

Joe McCulloch escaped Louisiana to bring us his column on This Week in Comics!, a little late but no less essential.

And Sean T. Collins reviews Arne Bellstorf’s Beatles book, Baby’s in Black.

But that’s about as much drama as you’re gonna get. Baby’s in Black tells the story of this pivotal stage in the Beatles’ career without storytelling. Bellstorf works tirelessly to sap the mystique out of the Beatles bildungsroman generally, and the oft-told tale of fifth-Beatle Sutcliffe, John’s close friend, ankling the band for an arty life with Astrid specifically. The events are enumerated quietly and chronologically through action and dialogue (lots of simple sentences ending in periods in which characters explain things to one another), until they stop. There are no blow-ups with the rest of the band about the departure, no Byronic tortured-artist moments. Astrid’s mother is supportive to the point of treating Stu like a son after they’ve shacked up. Klaus supports his lovely ex’s decision to date Stu and accepts his missed opportunity to replace him on bass in the Beatles (he’d get his chance later with the Plastic Ono Band) with good grace as well. Aside from the basic components of the look, the art eschews grand romantic gestures as well (aside from one sequence of Stu painting in Astrid’s attic that in retrospect communicates as much about his worsening medical condition as anything else). Overall it’s a good look, though there’s a trade-off involved: The insistent refinement and good taste of it all makes it feel slight where a less decorous, more shoot-for-the-moon take could have hit harder.

Perhaps that’s why the few stylistic flourishes Bellstorf allows himself linger so. When Astrid and Stu have sex, Bellstorf cuts away to a comparatively bright-white forest dreamscape, in which the couple wander (fully clothed) through a mass of entangled trunks and limbs. It’s one of the strangest visual metaphors for sex I’ve ever seen, and its uniqueness made it work all the better somehow, like “Yeah, okay, never thought of it that way before, but sure.” It’s also charmingly demure, which is another strength of the book on a number of levels. Whatever the Beatles became, collectively or individually, here they were just a bunch of friendly kids who enjoyed playing rock and roll music semi-professionally. They enjoyed hanging out together, they were pleased (almost honored) to get gigs playing at bars or recording as an in-studio back-up band for a colleague on the scene, and in particular they were as happy to meet and make friends with interesting, kind, like-minded people their age, like Astrid and Klaus, as everyone else tends to be. Bellstorf shows how it was only context – the seedy bars in bad neighborhoods and stuffed with rough customers that were the only places they could get gigs; an Englishness and a love of American rock music that made them seem enticingly alien; a series of language-barrier-enhanced run-ins with concert-hall managers and immigration-enforcement officials that led to arrests for arson and work-visa violations; much later on, their trajectory toward world domination – that made this quintet of perfectly nice young men seem like the rebel vanguard of an incipient youth revolution. Even their infamous boozing and speeding of the time is pushed off-panel, mentioned in passing by Paul one morning as he bashfully admits they got a bit wild the night before. Since everything that’s gone before has been so stately and reasonable, it’s all the more shocking when Bellstorf reaches the climax of the story, such as it is, and addresses it in lethally abrupt and straightforward fashion. The final panel of the book is its most dramatic, and its best. (That’s a good look, too, and a rare one—cf. Acme Novelty Library #20 or B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground.)

Only as I write this do I think that maybe this is the point, and the message of Baby’s in Black. It’s good to be reasonable, but shocking, sudden, life-changing things happen anyway, for both good and bad. Sometimes they’re both at the same time. Sometimes they’re one thing for you, and something else entirely for the guy on the bass guitar just a few feet away.

Noomin, born in Brooklyn in 1947, may be best known as an early contributor to Wimmen’s Comix and as the founder, with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, of Twisted Sisters Comics, in 1976. In the same period, her work appeared in a who’s who of underground publications: Weirdo, Arcade, Short Order, Young Lust, Titters, and more. But her career has also been devoted to celebrating the work of her fellow cartoonists; she has edited three anthologies, two of them—Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art and Twisted Sisters: Drawing the Line—in the past decade.

Noomin’s talents extend off the page as well. In 1981, she put DiDi to work onstage, in a production with Les Nickelettes theater group called “I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else: The DiDi Glitz Story.” The costumes—fishnet stockings, gold lamé pants, and leopard-print rompers—were courtesy of Noomin, and the backdrops were created by friends, including her future husband, Bill Griffith. The year before, Noomin herself donned the blonde bubble wig to film an episode for the “Zippy for President” series produced by San Francisco’s KQED. At the close of the episode, DiDi and Zippy wake up in bed together, in what may be the most surreal cross-comics hookup.

I met Noomin for lunch last month on Manhattan’s west side, while she was in town for an event in conjunction with Yeshiva University Museum’s “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” an exhibition that includes Noomin’s work. Midway through our conversation, a semi truck ambled down Ninth Avenue and eased to a stop at a red light, just in front of the restaurant’s windows. On its flatbed reclined a thirty-foot gold-painted statue of David, his gaze heavenward. DiDi most certainly would have approved.

Did you study art in school?

I went to an art school for high school—the High School of Music and Art in New York—and at Pratt, I took photography and sculpture courses. I wound up working in the Pratt library, in the art section. So I’m pretty familiar with art history.

Did it work its way into your early cartooning?

No, I think my cartooning had to work its way through the art, because when I went to school, they were trying to turn everybody into Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock juniors. They once showed us a film where somebody was throwing paint onto a canvas on the floor and then rolling balls into it, and this was High Art! The worst thing you could be was illustrative or narrative, which of course defines comics. They told you how to look at art—you’re looking for the movement and all this stuff. In order to be a cartoonist I had to try to forget all that. I had a student pass to the Museum of Modern Art, and I’d cut class and try to look at art the way we were taught to.

When did you start drawing?

I think I’ve been drawing my whole life. When I was a kid I used to trap friends, cousins, my sister into drawing contests, because I knew I’d win.

Were you interested in cartooning when you were at art school?

No. I loved comics. I grew up reading comics. I loved Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge, and whatever comics books I could get my hands on, but I never contemplated being a cartoonist. It never occurred to me.

Why not?

[Laughs.] I have no idea!

But that changed when you met Aline.

When I went out to San Francisco in 1972, I carried a little black notebook, where I wrote a lot of poems and made doodles and drawings. So I was heading to cartooning without realizing it. I showed it to Aline at a party and she said, “We’re starting Wimmen’s Comix. You should come down.” The first issue of Wimmen’s Comix was being finalized, so I wasn’t in the first issue—I was in the second issue—but I was in on it from the beginning, and it was very exciting. Suddenly I realized the whole world was material. I could do comics about anything!

How difficult was it to do your first strip?

Actually, it wasn’t difficult at all. I didn’t include it in the book because it’s kind of a continuation of an illustrated poem, and that’s in Women’s Comix, no. 2. Then, in Wimmen’s Comix, no. 3, I started to get more satirical, critical. That story was called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Shayna Madel.” That issue of Wimmen’s Comix was the part of the impetus for Twisted Sisters—Aline and I were getting very fed up with the politics of the women’s comix “collective.” That’s in quotes.

Sharon Rudahl, a Jewish woman, was the editor, but basically the editors did all the shit work, and Trina [Robbins] pulled the strings behind them. That was my perception. Anyway, Trina was Jewish, Sharon was Jewish, and I handed in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Shayna Madel.” Aline did a “Goldie” story, and Sharon told her that they had too many Jewish girl stories in there and they rejected it.

Is that when you and Aline broke with Wimmen’s Comix?

I think it took a little longer, but there was a lot of in-fighting and a lot of really unpleasant stuff that was going on in Wimmen’s Comix aimed at Aline and me.

Why you two in particular?

I think it’s because we had famous boyfriends. This was a feminist collective and some people—mainly Trina—had a lot of trouble getting into comics they wanted to get into, like Zap or Young Lust, and they felt they were being kept out by the boys’ club. That hostility got transferred to us, since Robert did Zap and Bill did Young Lust. The funny thing was that almost all of the women had cartoonist boyfriends. Every single one that I can think of, including Trina—and that wasn’t an issue. Then Trina got a friend of hers to write an editorial in the Berkeley Barb basically calling Aline and me “camp followers”—whores. The writer was the girlfriend of the cartoonist Guy Colwell. I once was so pissed off about the “camp follower” thing that I made a list of all the male cartoonists who were connected to women cartoonists.

Did you think there was a boys’ club?

I don’t think I really thought about it in those terms, because I was lucky—everything fell into place for me. I didn’t have that experience. I think it’s a valid experience that Trina had—I’m not saying it wasn’t—but I didn’t have it. I don’t think Aline had it.

So we just created our own comic. We went to Last Gasp and asked Ron Turner if he would do Twisted Sisters. It was just Aline and me. She did the front cover, I did the back cover, and we each did a story as long as we wanted and that was it.

Were there good things about being in the collective?

The good thing was getting work in print. The bad thing was that people didn’t notice it.

How was it distributed?

In head shops and wherever underground comics were distributed. I think it’s better known now, even though it’s out of print, than it was then. I’ve always thought that, aside from the small distribution, one of the problems was quality. When I did Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art for Penguin, I got all these people saying, “Where did all these great cartoonists come from? Where were all these strong women cartoonists?” A lot of them came from Wimmen’s Comix and Weirdo. Weirdo got more attention, but the good stuff in Wimmen’s Comix was drowning in the bad stuff, in my opinion.

What do you mean by the bad stuff?

There were very strong cartoonists who published work in Wimmen’s Comix, but—I’m not very diplomatic—there were also comics in there I didn’t like and that weren’t up to the same standards as the really strong stuff that I chose for Twisted Sisters. And I think that was proved to be true because when it was separated, it really stood out, and people started paying attention to Krystine Kryttre, Mary Fleener, Penny Moran Van Horn, and Julie Doucet. Julie did a great story in Wimmen’s Comix that we reprinted in Twisted Sisters, about drowning the city in menstrual blood. Wimmen’s just didn’t get enough attention. I think Weirdo got attention in the comics world because it had Crumb covers, and that helped.

What was the relationship between women cartoonists and men cartoonists at the time?

I had no problems. I really didn’t. When I went out to San Francisco, it was kind of a “wild and crazy” time, and someone would throw a party when they published a book. I remember when Insect Fear came out, there was a huge party with kegs of beer and everybody was dancing—it was fun. When I first got there, I met Bill and Art Spiegelman and cartoonist Michelle Brand. Michelle was nice and really helpful. She was married to another cartoonist, Roger Brand. I wouldn’t say that Roger was helpful because Roger was just in his own world, but Michelle was, and Art was very helpful, very supportive, and so was Bill.

In a way, it was like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, “Let’s put on a show, kids.” If you wanted to, you’d say, “Let’s put on a comic, kids!” and you asked all the people you liked to be in it. Bill and Art had started Arcade and I was inspired. I wanted to edit a comic book, so in 1978 I edited a comic book called Lemme Outta Here!: Growing Up Inside the American Dream. It has a cover by Michael McMillan and a back cover by MK Brown, it has long stories by me and Aline, and Bill did a story called “Is There Life After Levittown?” And Crumb did a story about Treasure Island. Robert was obsessed with Treasure Island when he was a kid. I just asked cartoonists I liked if they’d be in a comic book and they said yes.

But there was a very strong need for feminism across the board in this country. When I was looking for work after high school, there were jobs called girl Fridays, and there were separate want ads for men and women. Hillary Clinton could not have run for president. Even though Geraldine Ferraro did later run for vice president, it was still a shock. I think a lot of younger women don’t have to think about it today, so that earlier stuff can come across as strident, but that wasn’t my interest in doing comics. My interest was in personal stories.

But I didn’t have that experience of not being able to get into comics. It seemed to me if you wanted to and you did enough work, you could ask a publisher and they would put a comic out. There was a time when it was easy to get things published, and Wimmen’s Comix was during that time. It’s also been a very long-lasting title, and I’m grateful for all the work I got into it. I was surprised at how much was there. And in Weirdo. Weirdo first was edited by Crumb and then by Peter Bagge, and then by Aline.

Had you read the underground stuff before you started doing your own work?

I read every comic I could get. And when I lived in New York and a new Zap came out, it was a huge deal—Far out, let’s read the new Zap! Let’s get stoned!

What made you move to San Francisco?

I had separated from my first husband, and I decided that the Upper West Side wasn’t far enough from Brooklyn.

Also, I came back from the summer of meeting Aline to my one room, fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side, and to a shrink who told me that I should not go to San Francisco and draw comics, I should stay where I was and put bars in my windows and deal with all my issues about men. And I said, “I’m going to California!”

Your issues about men?

I didn’t like that guy. I had a shrink I really liked, a woman, and she—I always intended to do a story about this—she ran a group-therapy session. This particular group had rules, like you don’t know last names and you don’t fraternize outside the group. But then she left—she said her husband got a job in Washington D.C.—and we all took it badly when she recommended this guy to take over the group and do personal therapy. And when he did, chaos reigned. I had an affair with a guy in the group, and then another woman in the group had an affair with a guy in the group, and we started having meetings at our houses without the shrink and serving drinks and the whole thing turned into anarchy. [Laughs.]

So you went to San Francisco and met up with Aline again.

Yeah, I had relatives who lived out there, so I lived with them for six months before I found a place on Clipper Street. My roommate was Lela Janushkowsky, who was Kathy Goodell’s best friend from high school. Kathy was Robert Crumb’s girlfriend for a very long time. She was an artist and sculptor and she was not happy about Aline’s relationship with Crumb.. So I was Aline’s close friend and I was living with Kathy Goodell’s best friend. It was interesting.

That must have been complicated.

It was fun, though. Lela was a good-time girl. I’d never lived with a good-time girl, so I went along in her wake sometimes.

How did DiDi come about?

She started as a costume for a Halloween party at Gilbert Shelton and Lora Fountain’s house and quickly took over. There’s photo of me in DiDi drag in “Canarsie Creeps” in 1973. It’s an eight-pager—we used to call them eight-pagers. A lot of people were putting them out. Justin Green did one, Bill did one, Art Spiegelman did them. Everybody, just for fun, was putting out these eight-pagers that sold for seven cents and were two 8 ½ by 11 sheets of paper that were folded four ways and configured so you had eight pages.

In 1974, I did a full-fledged DiDi story for Wimmen’s Comix. It was four pages and was called “She Chose Crime”, and when I was putting this book together I realized that DiDi came out almost fully developed. She hasn’t changed, she hasn’t grown or anything like that. If I look at that first story, the drawing has changed and I’d like to think that certain things have gotten better, but in that story, DiDi’s persona is it. I don’t think I’d realized that.

How did she make it from costume to cartoon?

I put myself in the costume in “Canarsie Creeps”, and then, as I was drawing comics, I was influenced by a photograph of what looked like complete desolation in suburbia by a photographer named Bill Owens. Titters, which was an anthology put out by Deanne Stillman and Anne Beatts in the early seventies, I published a two-row strip about DiDi describing her décor. It’s called “I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else”. So that was my first DiDi strip, but very soon after that came “She Chose Crime”.

I could never understand how Aline could be so autobiographical. Aline’s method was, “I’m going to say everything bad about myself that anybody could say before they say it and put it in my comics.” It’s basically like, “Fuck you. Yes I’m with Robert Crumb, yes, my drawing doesn’t look like his.” I was incredibly impressed by that. And she was very influenced by Justin Green.

They were the first two to start doing autobiographical work. She was the first woman.

She gives Justin credit for that. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary had a powerful effect on her. For Aline, that was just a natural approach, and for me, DiDi became the natural way to do things. I could do satire and use real-life situations and have DiDi experience them in her way, so that I’m one step removed. It took a long time for that to change, although there were intervals along the way where I did do personal stories, like “Coming of Age in Canarsie” or “The C-Word”, about abortion—C, at that time, meant choice.

That was for a pro-choice book that Trina Robbins edited, it was a very hard story to do, because I had had an abortion soon after the affair with the guy from my group, who had a long blond ponytail and wore black leather pants. But I didn’t know who the father was. It was a confusing time. It was after I had left my husband.

How hard was it to get an abortion then?

It was the first year it was legal, so it was not hard at all. I went to the Margaret Sanger Clinic, and everything was very above board and easy. Scarily easy.

Were there protesters?

There weren’t. Legal abortion didn’t have a high profile yet. When I was in San Francisco I was involved with a theater group called Les Nickelettes, and they did a play called “I’d Rather Do Something Else: The DiDi Glitz Story”. As a group, we decided to do a benefit for Planned Parenthood—this was in the eighties, and there was a lot of demonstrating and fire bombing. When we were planning the benefit, we went to the Planned Parenthood offices in San Francisco where they had intense security and it was a little scary to be there. In San Francisco, of all places, I didn’t think it would be like that, but it was.

There’s a lot of sex in the DiDi comics.

There is. I was surprised at how much when I started to put Glitz-2-Go together,

But thinking about the time you did them, the mid-seventies, it’s not the kind of sex you’d expect to see from that period. It’s not feel-good, wild experimentation sex. DiDi can’t get an orgasm, and she can’t find a good lover. And in trying to solve her problem, she consults a woman’s group, where they talk about loving yourself.

It’s very San Francisco. In one of my favorite panels, a naked woman wearing rubber gloves jumps up out of a communal hot club shouting, “It’s my wrists, my gross, fat, disgusting wrists, gloves don’t help anymore…!” [Laughs].

But in the end she’s just completely true to herself. And the contact paper…

What could be truer for DiDi than riding contact paper to an orgasm?

I love that ending. Is that your favorite DiDi story?

It might be. I mean, I don’t really have a favorite but that’s a good, pure DiDi story. And it was fun. I got to send away for catalogs of vibrators.

The good kind of research.

Yeah.

How much does her lifestyle resemble that of Canarsie, where you grew up?

It wasn’t personally similar. I moved to Canarsie when I was twelve, going on thirteen, and I had to learn how to be a teenager in about two weeks because the mores were so different in Brooklyn. In Long Island, I was climbing trees, I was a kid. And in Brooklyn I was going to make-out parties, so it was pretty shocking. And my experience growing up in Canarsie was very different—but I wasn’t satirizing my family, I was satirizing the neighbors. We had a neighbor who had white shag carpeting, and you had to take your shoes off before you came into the house. I had seen the houses of my friends in junior high school, and then I went to Music & Art, and I became a real snob. Canarsie was so bourgeois. So, Canarsie did feed a lot of it.

My experience on Long Island was unusual for suburbia because my parents were communists. They moved to Long Island to go undercover, although they didn’t change their names, so I can’t figure that one out. They moved to an integrated neighborhood—what they and the Communist Party thought was an integrated neighborhood in Hempstead but actually was a neighborhood experiencing white flight, so more and more black people were moving in. It was a much poorer neighborhood, but I did end up having some black friends who protected me from other black kids who threatened to beat me up.

So I didn’t experience the kind of incredibly luxurious but fraught childhood Aline had. She lived in the five towns and had the cashmere sweaters and the Capezio shoes. I never had that.

When did you find out your parents were communists?

I got a clue when the FBI started questioning our neighbors in Canarsie, but we didn’t talk about it until I was in my thirties. I did know during the Vietnam War, when I went to march on the Pentagon, that my mother was in Women Strike for Peace. So I knew they were left wing and liberal, and I was proud of them, but the commie stuff was all secret.

They were working for the Communist Party of the United States?

Yes.

(continued)

But on the site today we have Nicole Rudick’s interview with the great Diane Noomin, whose collection of thirty years of her stories, Glitz-2-Go, is out now and a great read.

Elsewhere all around:

TCJ-contributor Chris Mautner on why he isn’t seeing The Avengers.

Timothy Callahan has a MoCCA Festival round-up with a list of promising new books.

There are some very psychedelic and deeply strange Edgar Allen Poe illustrations by the pulp artist Harry Clarke over at 50 Watts.

Design and illustration historian Steve Heller is interviewed at Design Matters.

And finally, just what you’ve always wanted: Early Dave Berg!

Then, we present a preview of Dan Zettwoch’s new Birdseye Bristoe, which feels to me like a potential breakout book. I have always really enjoyed Zettwoch’s work, and the way he tirelessly experiments with formats, panel breakdowns, and storytelling techniques of all kinds. What’s also nice is that his stories work. (Some cartoonists who create “experimental” comics don’t seem to notice or care when their experiments fail, and just publish the results no matter what. This might be the correct response if comics was a science instead of an art.)

We also have Rob Clough’s review of the latest Jason collection, Athos in America.

—Speaking of Jason, the National Post has a short profile of the Norwegian cartoonist.

—The Doug Wright Awards were announced, with Kate Beaton, Ethan Rilly, and Michael Comeau taking the top prizes. (For those who like comparing and complaining about comics awards, it is worth noting that Best Book winner Hark! A Vagrant was not nominated for an Eisner this year.)

—Speaking of Canadians, Tom Spurgeon has a long interview with Jam creator Bernie Mireault.

—Octopus Pie creator Meredith Gran talks to Gary Tyrrell.

—Newspaper History department:

1. Frank King explains where he got his characters for Gasoline Alley.

2. Peter Huestis has posted a whole bunch of difficult-to-find old Jimmy Hatlo cartoons.

—Adrian Tomine immediately jumps to the head of the list of cartoonists who have created covers for Thomas Pynchon novels.

—Chris Mautner has a photo diary of the MoCCA festival.

—James Romberger has a new online strip.

—Jason Thompson provides an excellent in-depth overview of Shigeru Mizuki, the artist responsible for Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. You should know about him.

—Daniel Best continues to do the Lord’s work, gathering and posting legal documents related to the Superman case. The latest is a letter from attorney David Michaels, who had been previously been suspected of stealing various documents from Marc Toberoff and leaking them to DC. He gives his side of the story in the letter at the link.

—For a certain kind of person, the next two links—blog posts written by Steve Ditko biographer Blake Bell about his relationships with Ditko, Dave Sim, and Jesus Christ—will be the most interesting things they read all day.

—And finally, via Mike Lynch, a documentary about the infamous Jack Chick, posted in its entirety:

Dan Zettwoch’s work occupied a unique space in comics — they’re ingenious contraptions that show precisely how things (mechanical, social, geographic) work, and spin out narratives from those demonstrations. His first graphic novel, Birdseye Bristoe, is about the construction and destruction of an enormous cellphone tower on land owned by an old man known only as Uncle in the titular town. It is also about, of course, invention, the midwest, family, and corporations. According to Zettwoch, “the premise came from a mini-comic idea that had been stuck in the back of my head for a long time. I’d think about it as I drove the lonely stretch of I-64 between Louisville and St. Louis, which I’ve done hundreds of times. The construction stuff, fold-out, maps, homemade shrines, decrepit roadside Americana stuff, I tried to engineer a story around stuff I wanted to draw.”

And the drawings in this book are gorgeous — they are Zettwoch’s finest work to date, marking a turn towards a more organic style. The artist reports that “the pages are all ballpoint pen, colored pencil and white-out pen on tan typing paper. That’s how I’d been working my sketchbook, liking the results and also the speed at which I could crank out finished pages. (If I was going to have to go through the pencil>ink>computer color process there’s no way I would ever finished.) I also liked the idea of the color being more involved with the act of drawing – be able to color over ink, white-out over top of that, etc.”

So click through and enjoy the scenery.

Any comic by Jason is going to have some familiar components. The humor will be deadpan, the body language of his characters deliberately stiff and cold, and their visual appeal heightened because of their status as anthropomorphic animals. That tension between image and action has always been at the heart of the emotional content of Jason’s comics. It has also made it easy for genre tropes to coexist with the mundane elements of his comics. Above all, what his comics have in common is Jason’s fascination with structure and performance. By “structure,” I mean that he’s interested in the ways in which genre stories are expected to develop and resolve—and in how to subvert those expectations. He does this either by introducing unexpected twists or else introducing some absurd but deadpan element that changes everything. By “performance,” I mean that he’s fascinated by the ways in which genre characters and roles can be exaggerated in a way that’s not unlike an actor chewing the scenery in a film. Jason is interested in classic cinema, and his animal characters are his own little repertory company for the stories in which he’s director and writer. Despite the frequent lack of affect on the part of his characters, it’s Jason’s characterizations that ultimately provide the most memorable moments in his comics, not his plots.

Both the opening and closing stories of the book revisit characters from Jason’s past work. “The Smiling Horse” is a good example of Jason’s fascination with structure and expectations, as we revisit the criminals from the story “&” from Low Moon. This is a pulp fiction narrative with two desperate criminals and the woman they’ve kidnapped, and the sense of doom they feel when they learn that someone named the Smiling Horse is after them. Jason subverts expectations here by never revealing the specifics of any scene: how someone dies, how someone escapes, or even who the Smiling Horse is. At the same time, the reader gets the sense that these kidnappers are in way over their heads, and the sad-sack antics they got into in “&” become deadly very quickly.

After opening with this grim attention-getter of a story, Jason shifts gears with “A Cat From Heaven”, which is described as a “Bukowski pastiche” in the promotional materials. In it, Jason portrays himself as a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-living artist who has a love-hate relationship with his live-in girlfriend. After yet another explosive fight, Jason kicks her out, gets drunk, goes to a comics reading (late, of course), goes to a party, picks up a girl in the least romantic way possible, and then can’t perform when the time comes (imaginary newspaper headline in his head: “Famous Cartoonist Can’t Get It Up”). Finally, Jason is beaten up, then gets back together with his girlfriend, before winding up back at the drawing board, with plenty of fodder to write about. This is one of Jason’s more broadly funny strips, one that focuses on the fantasy element of being something that he’s not while satirizing the ideal of a Bukowski-like lifestyle. It’s the details that make it work, like Jason pulling a switchblade on a fan who mutters something while walking away from him. This is an example of a story where performance is everything.

Jason’s love of classic cinema and genre-bending reaches its most inspired heights with “The Brain That Wouldn’t Virginia Woolf”, a pastiche of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jason tells this story in reverse chronological order, and the reader gets the brunt of both the sci-fi weirdness of a head being kept alive in a lab as well as the brutally toxic but co-dependent relationship of the husband and wife. Things get more tragic as we see them struggle with the ethical ramifications of him finding her a new body, the failures he encounters, their initial courtship, and the accident that puts them in this situation. The cleverness of the set-up and the way Jason manipulates emotion make up for the ways in which the characterization is more rote and reliant on its source material, as the strip’s protagonists chew the scenery like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

“Tom Waits On The Moon” is Jason’s take on Robert Altman-style narratives with multiple unconnected characters. Each page features a single character without dialogue, just thought balloons. Each character expresses his or her own sense of grief, regret,or pure self-loathing (here disguised as misogyny). One of the characters is a scientist working on a teleportation device, and all four characters are slowly brought together for an explosive and tragic conclusion. Once again, Jason balances structure and characterization, as the reader must gather clues from their interior monologues as to their motivations and actions while the actual momentum of the story moves very slowly, speeding up only at the very end. Along the way, the plainness of the characters’ thoughts adds an emotionally raw and revealing element to the book that’s not in the other stories, giving nuance to the importance of performance in his work.

“So Long, Mary Ann” is another Jason gangster story, a genre that seems to hold a particular interest for him. Half of the story about a convict who breaks out of prison with the help of his girlfriend focuses on that couple and the odd woman they pick up as a hostage along the way. The other half of the story concerns the boss he’s trying to get money from, who is comically violent over the least of offenses (he eventually kills his right-hand man for blowing his nose). After he leaves his girlfriend and runs away with the hostage, the convict realizes just how deadly ridiculousness can become. This story again balances Jason’s interest in story structure with straightforward character motivations, but this time adds an absurd comedic element to the mix that nonetheless does little to ultimately lighten the drama.

Finally, the titular story brings back the star of The Last Musketeer, a great character that Jason seems to have been born to write. Jason re-introduces a single absurd element–that Athos the Musketeer is both immortal and now bored–and spins its story mostly off-panel. The story is really about Athos leaving America after having foiled a crime (allowing the structure of high adventure to have its moment in the story) and having failed to get his career in Hollywood off the ground. It’s a decidedly downbeat and even anticlimactic note for this book to end on. Of course, since this story is a prequel to The Last Musketeer, it serves the purpose of adding a bit more depth and soul into the character of Athos, making that other book all the more poignant as a result. Despite his style, Jason is quite effective in modulating emotion from story to story, going from gags to violence to tragedy, sometimes all in the same story. Jason is in total control of all aspects of his storytelling, and, even after a decade straight of ambitious publishing, it seems as if he’s just getting warmed up.

Here I am – Pittsburgh PA – the thrill of exiting the tunnel from route 79 going into Pittsburgh and the the immediate view that pops into space – unlike any other approach or reveal of a city. Exit the tunnel and you are on a bridge with a spectacular view of the three rivers. The two that make one. Perfect cool still light evening humid buzz of the city. I turn on the parkway headed upriver and the road goes along eye level with the water. A coal barge half a city block wide and three blocks long pushes towards me – I can see the pilot – is he looking right at me? We are even, squared off facing each other for an instant across the water and concrete before the road slopes up and away. Everything is new again to these old eyes. Pittsburgh. I miss you even when you’re here.

Always arriving. Always leaving. That’s what it feels like anyway. Funny how coming home reminds you who’s here, who isn’t, who’s died, who’s moved away. Every time I came back into town, the old man would greet me the same – “There he is: the wandering ghost. Where the hell you been?” 

“I’ve been in New Mexico and I’m on my way to New York.”

Going to New York for animation work. Going to set up my summer studio which I share with Aaron Cometbus. Every year since 2000, me and Aaron have sublet an art studio in lower Manhattan. It is a big empty white room with a window. Two tables and a radio. That’s it. No living there, no hoarding or filling the place with useless junk. Art uber alles. Even when I lived in Pittsburgh, I would come up and spend part of the summer in NYC. It is the most constant thing in my life. I’ve had that studio longer than any other space I have inhabited. And Aaron is the perfect person to share a space with because he works so hard and produces so much that I push myself just to keep up.

I will be offering a new correspondence course in June. Check out the info below. Please pass this info on to anyone you know who may be interested in my workshops or course. Thanks!

Also, this summer, I am going to have a comic book back issue blowout sale. Since NYC is the worst city to be a comic book back issue enthusiast – I am bringing the comics directly to you poor souls hungry for hard to find comics. That’s right folks, every Saturday in June, I will be holding a mini comic book convention in my studio. Replete with workshops, special guests, giveaways and, ahem, panel discussions. Come on down and find all the alt, indy and mainstream comic book back issues that you never see in NYC. I am an expert at this shit, folks. No one knows where to find obscure comics like I do. I should have my own reality tv show where you see how I find and then flip comics. Even if you don’t buy anything – come on down and check it out. You will see comics that you have never seen before. I have traveled the country to bring you the best in obscure back issues. Every Saturday in June. Stay tuned for details.

———–

Frank Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers
Summer 2012

New Course Announcement

June 4th start date

8 week course

“Full course” – layouts, color, figure drawing – you will make a 16 page comic over the 8 weeks.

500 bux. Payment plans available. No money down! Totally serious.

To apply, email me and I will explain the submission guidelines.

Deadline to apply is May 30th

Only ten spots available
capneasyATgmailDOTcom

Check out one of my student’s work – he just finished his comic and posted it to his blog.
———–

Storytime

When I was at Kevin’s looking at mini-comics for hours on end – I found an old mini that advertised a publication titled Comics Comics #1 Check it out:

Front cover of the mini:

Back cover of the mini – check out the ad for Comics Comics #1:

I don’t ever remember seeing this and definitely had never heard someone say “Comics Comics” before Laris Kreslins suggested it to Dan, Tim and I as the title of our “magazine about comics” we had concocted back in ’05. Anyways, if Tim Corrigan (well known as editor and publisher of Small Press Comics Explosion which was a sort of cross between Factsheet Five and the Comics Buyers Guide) is out there wants to “claim” this comic – I’d like to hear from you. When did you make this thing? Comics Comics as advertised here was acollection of classic strips from The Comics Buyers Guide – if anyone out there has one of these Comics Comics please email me. Thanks!

———

Be nice to those whom you love. You’ll miss them someday. Over and out.

As Tom Spurgeon notes, TCAF is an ideal occasion to enjoy not just a superb comics festival but also a great city. So here’s a tip for Toronto visitors who want to see a little bit more of the city’s culture, while also enjoying a  comics-related jaunt: take some time out to go to the Tony Calzetta exhibit at the De Luca gallery (217 Avenue Road – about a ten minute walk from the main TCAF building).

Calzetta cartoons on the canvas, which puts him in a now venerable tradition of comics-inspired painters. Unlike Roy Lichtenstein, Calzetta doesn’t do cool, detached appropriations of illustration images from romance comics or war comics. Rather, Calzetta is closer in spirit to Philip Guston, doodling with his paint brush to evoke the warm, scribbly free-spirited iconic forms of early 20^th comic strips. But where Guston’s stubbly, cluttered paintings called to mind the slightly-claustrophobic world of Mutt and Jeff, Calzetta’s open  spaces and bold colors evoke the antic play of George Herrimans’s Krazy Kat.

Having spent a happy afternoon with Calzetta’s paintings, Herriman was never far from mind. Partially it was a matter of capering shifty shapes that are never content to settle down but are always transforming themelves before your eyes – the stumps that could be elephant feet or steep desert mountain, the upside down umbrella which could also be a ship or a mushroom, the trees that weirdly have branches growing at right angles making them at times look like chimneys with blowing smoke. Herriman’s also present in the way Calzetta stages his paintings – often putting a not-quite-rectangular border within the painting itself, calling to mind Herriman’s play with panels and placing of his characters in a proscenium theatre within the strip (and indeed in earlier painting Calzetta placed his images within a proscenium theatre). And of course, there are the colors – often circus bright in the foreground but set against a darker background.

Beyond all these surface similarities, there is also the feel of Calzetta’s work. Like Herriman, he’s an artist who makes me cheerful even when the work deals mournful themes of loss and separation. The joy that these artists provoke is not a naive pleasure and doesn’t come from the denial of pain. Rather, they have the special gift of returning art in its primordial roots of childhood play even as they grapple with adult concerns.

To say that Calzetta is a Herriman-esque artist is very high praise, but I think anyone who sees his work will realize that he deserves it.

(Calzetta’s paintings will be available for viewing on Friday May 4th and Saturday May 5th).

Anyhow, you may have noticed TCJ was offline for a bunch of hours yesterday. Sorry — the Internet broke for a little while. Then it was fixed.

So: on the site today:

We have a recording of an April 12th discussion about comics at The Art Institute of Chicago featuring Neal Adams, Ivan Brunetti, Geof Darrow, and J.J. Sedelmaier , moderated by Richard Holland. That is one very diverse line-up. Please note that the audio is a bit soft, so we recommend head phones and concentration for this one.

And like every Friday, Tucker Stone brings sunshine to your morning with his prose report on all things comics. This time we get a little extra helping of Moebius and depravity, too.

Elsewhere in our great web nation:

-I always have time for Wilhelm Busch.

-I also always have time for these illos by Takeo Takei.

-Ray Johnson is also someone I have time for. Special guest appearance by Karl Wirsum doesn’t hurt.

And that’s really all I have time for.

NOW FOR THE BUSINESS

Gladland #1
By Oliver Schulze
Published by Good Vs Evil/Hirntrust Grind

A little bit of Tim Vigil and a whole lot of something else, this black-and-white comic features some of the most challenging examples of Can You Handle It? drawing this side of sanity, the most intense being a nude bodybuilder who has a standalone vagina resting on his pompadour, an erect penis (with intact sac) sprouting out of his tongue & drooling mouth like some kind of a mid-chin dick-unicorn, and a couple of deformed naked ladies apparently growing out of his arm. One of those ladies is wearing a ball gag, and the other one is masturbating. It’s not totally clear if pages like these—and there are a few pages “like these,” one even comes with a yellow sticker covering … something (I haven’t removed it to check, because I’m an emotional cripple)—are part of the plot, or if the pages that seem to have a plot (which is about a guy whose face became crystalline and was then hospitalized when it became necessary to hammer an air hole through the crystal) are a break from the drawings or just, you know, fucked up drawings, but forcing Gladland into a narrative box would possibly strip it of some of its charm, which, despite its foray into the grotesque, it definitely has.

Moebius 8: Blueberry
By Jean Michael Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
Published by Graphitti a while ago

Also referred to as “Lieutenant Blueberry” and featuring the stories “The Iron Horse”, “Steelfingers”, “The Trail of the Sioux”, and “General Golden Mane”, this collection is an excellent installment of the sorts of pleasure Blueberry stories have to offer. It can be a bit difficult for some to stomach for lengthy periods of time, as these tales have a tendency to smash its lead character three steps back for every two he’s permitted to take, and after a while, all that deus ex bad luck can get irritating. The art is the obvious American draw, and as such, there’s little disappointment to be had on that front. Horses, cowboys, and trains, all three drawn in such a way that points more to museum visits and less to pictures–everything has a density to the way it saddles the panel, and it can take effort to linger. Moebius lathered on a lot of care, but it’s hard to ignore the character’s desperation, to abandon that hope that success might be just coming up on the next page. Considering the decades of time clocked, Giraud clearly felt the same.

Diah H #1
By China Miéville, Mateus Santolouco
Published by DC Comics

Although it definitely wins some sort of consolation prize for not sounding/reading exactly like every single other mainstream cape book on the stands, Dial H may be the unfortunate herald of a terrifying future: crappy imitations of Grant Morrison comics. Sponsored by slumming, Dial H is written by some guy who writes those kinds of fantasy novels that look more respectable than Dragonlance books but aren’t respectable enough not to be shelved alongside them, and it’s drawn by another one of those DC artists who never saw a picture he couldn’t add way too many extraneous lines to. It’s about a fat guy with a friend, a rotary phone booth that turns people into random super-heroes, and it’s probably qualitatively better than most DC comics currently available while still not being half as aesthetically successful as the last two YouTube videos somebody emailed you links to. This will be the favorite thing of exactly no one, but it will probably be a few people’s number seven.

Short Cuts: Volume 1
By Usamaru Furuya
Published by Viz, 1998

A little book consisting of one to two page humor pieces centered around ko-gal, which the author defines as “a Japanese high-school girl with attitude.” It’s very funny, and some of the comics in here–most notably, “Cut 7”–manipulate the basic visual language of manga upon the reader to unexpected, rewarding ends. (Cut 7 and Cut 10 are worth whatever effort it takes to track this collection down, the former because of its ingenious visual manipulation, the latter because of its as-ingenious verbal trick; both are too special to spoil.)

Intruder #1
By Tom Van Deusen, Ben Horak, Billis Helg, Jason Miles, Tim Miller, Marc Palm, Nikki Burch, Tony Ong, Aidan Fitzegarld, Alexa Koenings, Max Clotfelter, Marc Palm
Published by Intruder

A free newspaper with one-page contributions from a variety of cartoonists, some of whom wear their influences more obviously than others. There’s some clear differences between everybody’s current level of skill, and some pages that seem like they’d be more comfortable existing as stand-alone prints to be sold to the I Prefer Stand-Alone Prints audience, but in the grand pantheon of shit that you can be occupied by, free comics newspapers that don’t descend into genre parody or cutesy “all-ages” animal shit for 43-year-old men still angry that they grew pubic hair … these comics aren’t the enemy, you know? Some smirky kid looking at Paper Rad way too often is always going to be preferable to another self-righteous webcomic about how hard it is out there for single 30-somethings who miss the Go-Bots and Totally Hates The Racisms.

Love and Rockets #2
By Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

A fucking knock-out, really. This wasn’t even stuff that yours truly ranked that highly– “Mechanics”, “Radio Zero”, “Music for Monsters”, and “Somewhere in California”–but reading it in this contained format, without the universally celebrated “good stuff” that the longer digest collections yank you foward with, it’s weirdly excellent. Maggie’s impossibly beautiful, striking classical pose after classical pose, while Rand Race and Penny Century keep falling into every different kind of romance-engorged tableau that ever went to paper. There’s so much to love in here, and Gary Groth’s overly excited, Gaddis-quoting essay really sets a wonderful tone. This thing stinks of comics, it’s wet and messy. The Punisher of feelings, and thighs.

Daredevil #12
By Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

The External Hard Drive Crossover (featuring Spider-Man, Bearded Punisher, and Greg Rucka Fantasy Lady Version 3.0) concluded in last week’s Daredevil with Daredevil still wearing the external hard drive around his neck, but Waid and Co. seem to have decided they’re going to maximize whatever mileage they’re getting out of that particular storyline, meaning that this issue only mentions it in passing. More carrying a glorified address book around excitement to come! In this issue, they instead choose to tell the story of Daredevil’s first date with some lady who Bullseye will probably kill the new district attorney, and it turns out Matthew Murdock knows how to show a lady a good time, and by showing her “a good time,” I mean he tells her some fucking story about that fat piece of shit he hangs out with all the time, because there’s nothing a lady likes more on a first date then listening to the dude drone on and on about the moment in college when he realized he was becoming best friends with some guy she doesn’t particularly like that much. Waid and Samnee try their best to uncover a secret awesomeness to a bunch of clichés, but this issue–like the three-issue crossover that preceded it–is another dud . Marvel had a clear winner on its hand with this title not that long ago, but over-shipping, overwrought crossovers, and an abysmal series of fill-in artists have turned Daredevil into the exact kind of mindless filler it spent its first seven issues acting in stark criticism of. Then again, it’s fucking Daredevil, and if there’s one thing this title has historically been great at (besides murdering girlfriends), it’s brief moments of good in between years and years of the opposite.

Batwing #9
By Judd Winick, Marcos To, Ryan Winn
Published by DC Comics

Although DC is in the middle of cancelling a bunch of their “New 52″ titles, this one is not only dodging the axe but getting itself included in the “Night of the Owls” crossover sprawling out of the successful Scott Snyder-led Batman title. Batwing is a weird, weird comic, almost unreadable in its initial installments, all of which were card-carrying members of the hilariously offensive variety of super-hero comics–a short-tempered black man sponsored by a rich white Westerner fights a villainous African warlord who cuts off the heads of children with a Darfur-inspired machete and openly refers to himself as “Massacre”–but this issue just sees the character dumped off in Gotham City, where he fights off some random storm trooper type by blowing the dude’s arms off.

Detective Comics #597
By Alan Grant, Eduardo Barreto or Eduardo Baretto, Depending on Which Part of the Comic You’re Looking At, John Wagner, Steve Mitchell, Adrienne Roy
Published by DC Comics, 1989

This is the second part of a two-parter, and yet it would have read as a far smarter comic if this was the only issue that existed. It opens with a splash page featuring Gotham’s richest (well, except for Bruce) preparing to watch the latest in a series of Advanced Bumfights: The Batman Installment. We then see the fight and its aftermath, which is one of those weird passages that’s gone extinct in today’s hunger for faux-realist super-hero stories, a passage where Batman goes to the hospital and is treated by doctors who allow him to keep his mask on. Then Batman drives around in broad daylight, thus setting an all time record for the most-obvious suspect tailing of all time. It’s a one-trick pony, this comic, and there isn’t a note you won’t see coming. There’s some pretty drawings, but that’s it. This is the sort of comic that a childless man reads only to realize that no, he’s never going to read this to a little boy, and if his own father was still alive, he would call and tell him that they should have played a little two-hand touch instead. Life is a meaningless spiral into oblivion, there is nothing beyond the mortal realm, and average super-hero comics are far worse than those that are merely bad.

Apart from that, there are almost too many links to link.

—Secret Acres has their now-traditional semi-disheartened wrap-up of this year’s MoCCA festival.

—Paul Gravett takes a look at the recent Madrid career retrospective of Spanish cartooning legend Max (and interesting read in conjunction with our Berenguer obituary from yesterday).

—In Alison Bechdel news, John Horgan has another interview with her, and Dwight Garner reviews her new book for the New York Times.

—BK Munn had a really good May Day-related post featuring Dr. Wertham and Ernie Bushmiller the other day.

—In Salon, Steven Brower writes about the generation of comic-book artists who switched to advertising.

—Print has another gallery of Françoise Mouly’s collection of rejected New Yorker covers.

—And finally, Vice visits Johnny Ryan in his home: