Today on the site, cartoonist/scholar Mark Newgarden returns to interview another great cartoonist/scholar, Eddie Campbell. Campbell's latest book, The Goat Getters, is a uniquely innovative history of the hidden origins of newspaper comics.
I’ve been collecting all kinds of stuff for years and have developed my own concept of the history of cartooning, of which "comics" is just one aspect. In my head I have always had a sense of the story in it, but I tend to groan when all those "History of Comics" come out and as time has moved along they have got narrower in their focus. I felt it was time to get back and look at the actual material and not just all the history books that have accumulated, in which more often than not the writer is reiterating the conventional old narrative of the previous one. Also, when some of these histories get to joining up the dots, they are seeing only the dots in a narrow window and thus missing the real connections that are invisible to them. So there was a pressing need to see the old comics and cartoons in their context, to see the newspaper as a holistic environment in which cartoonists could be moving this way and that and working in several sections of the paper at the same time and not just the comics pages. If you go at it all without the usual prejudices, a quite different story can be drawn out. Indeed many different stories present themselves.
at love-making, meaning courtship back then, should be taught in schools.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The Daily Beast has a deeply sad interview with the 95-year-old Stan Lee and his daughter J.C., regarding the many allegations against various figures surrounding the man.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but there have been stories out, and at least one upcoming story with allegations of elder abuse on you by your daughter.
STAN: I wish that everyone would be as abusive to me as JC.
J.C. LEE: [Interjecting] He wishes everyone was so abusive.
STAN: She is a wonderful daughter. I like her. We have occasional spats. But I have occasional spats with everyone. I’ll probably have one with you, where I’ll be saying, “I didn’t say that!” But, that’s life.
Keya Morgan has been going on to me, and other reporters, about how abusive J.C. is to you. I know he was with you up here for a good amount of time. He claims he was with you for ten years.
J.C.: No. He was with him for six months—that period of time. And a year or two before.
STAN: As Joanie says, he was with me for about six months. I found out that he wasn’t really what I signed on for. So, I let him go.
Does it surprise you that, now that he’s banished from your life, he’s leveling all these accusations at your daughter?
STAN: I don’t know that he was. But it wouldn’t surprise me, no.
The most recent guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is Jason Lutes. Lutes was also interviewed on Vermont Public Radio.
I believe we may have mentioned this before, but it's worth reiterating that SPX has posted video from many of this year's panels.
—News. This year's Harvey Award winners have been announced. Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress was the winner of the biggest prize.
—Reviews & Commentary. Ariel Dorfman writes about co-authoring the Marxist comics-crit classic How to Read Donald Duck, which is being newly republished.
I should not have been entirely surprised when I saw How to Read Donald Duck, a book I had written with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, being burned on TV by Chilean soldiers. It was mid-September 1973 and a military coup had just toppled Salvador Allende, the country’s president, terminating his remarkable experiment of building socialism through peaceful means.
I was in a safe house when I witnessed my book – along with hundreds of other subversive volumes – being consigned to the inquisitorial pyre. One of the reasons I had gone into hiding, besides my fervent participation in the revolutionary government that had just been overthrown, was the hatred the Donald Duck book had elicited among the new authorities of Chile and their rightwing civilian accomplices.
We had received death threats, an irate woman had tried to run me over and neighbours – accompanied by their children – had stoned the house where my wife, Angélica, and I lived in Santiago, shouting: “Long live Donald Duck!” It was later discovered that the 5,000 copies of the third printing of the book had been taken from a warehouse by the Chilean navy and cast into the bay of Valparaíso.
