Today we present another excerpt from the latest issue of this magazine's print incarnation, Lew Sayre Schwartz's interview with Roy Crane! A snippet:
I was going to ask you what you thought was the reason that the circle has been completed, 360 degrees, and we’re back to the joke strip. I would assume, and you can comment on it for me, size and the television too, obviously the squeezing down of the comic, the dimensions of the television screen, are given as reasons for this decline in the adventure strip. And it’s probably quite true. But what are your feelings about this?
Well, I feel that continuity strips, at least my strip, Buz Sawyer, which I started during the war, that adventure strips were never stronger than they were during the war. And that certainly goes for [Milton] Caniff, who had his stories tied together and he got quite a lot of impact out of it. But now, the jokes that came after the war, the types of gags that were used in The New Yorker, changed the type of humor.
It became more sophisticated.Yes. And, Chic Young certainly came out with a different way of telling a story, then. He would have his maybe four pictures and the third one would be his gag thing, and then in the fourth picture, he would give the reaction of the people, which is in [John] Gallishaw’s book on how to write a short story. Now that was picked up by a lot of people. I did it in Sunday pages and the like, where you maybe had humor and everybody else did.
Sean T. Collins is here this morning with a review of Johnny Ryan's fourth volume of Prison Pit:
Prison Pit has always been gross, but this volume, in which the unstoppable protagonist Cannibal Fuckface attempt to break free of the subterranean psychemechanical prison ship he was stranded in last time around, was the first that made even a seasoned hand at the rough stuff like me emit weary moans of repulsion and disgust with seemingly each new pustule-encrusted beast that appeared.
Elsewhere:
—News Dept.: Bill Schanes is stepping down as VP of Purchasing at Diamond distribution after 27 years. And the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library announced its new Guide to Multicultural Resources.
—Opinion & Gossip: Paul Constant is a little skeeved out by Neil Gaiman's new campaign for BlackBerry; former Premiere editor Glenn Kenny gives the back story on how someone like David Mamet gets a cartooning gig at a major magazine.
—Interviews: Tom Kaczynski talks to Comics Bulletin, and James Kochalka talks to Panel to Panel.
—Education: Somehow I missed that Lynda Barry is using her Tumblr to post resources and videos and notes for her ongoing class, "The Unthinkable Mind".
—Trivia: Mark Evanier talks about "Alfred" Astaire; the Library of American Comics blog compares the size of a 1928 Gumps strip to an entire comics page from 2013. Also, a picture of Nicholas Ray, reading:
