Long Days

Today on the site:

R.C. Harvey looks at the cartoonist Stan Lynde and finds a complicated artist behind decades of western comic strips.

He realized he had achieved most of those things, but he also found that as time went by, he had to work harder to maintain the image—“not only my public image, but my own image of myself. I found that I didn’t dare look back over my life too closely because I didn’t like what I saw there. The failures, the excesses, the broken marriages, the people I had hurt and disappointed—these were all swept under the rug, but that old rug was getting pretty lumpy, and I knew what was under there—and I didn’t like it.”

Although he didn’t actively consider doing another comic strip, he realized, deep down, he still wanted to do one, but didn’t quite know how to get there.

“My god had failed,” he wrote, “because my god was myself—and it was the only one I’d ever really known. This self-god, the Great Ego, the Almighty Me, had led me through divorce to booze, to attempted suicide, and to most of the known sins. I still couldn’t recite the Ten Commandments, but I had broken most of them at one time or another. And I had done a pretty thorough job of breaking myself, as well.

“I realize that all this doesn’t sound like anybody’s finest hour, but it was for me. I had encountered, at age 46, a brick wall, both personally and professionally; I stopped running, surrendered, and turned to Jesus. Like all those people I used to deride, I became Born Again. And Jesus did more than change my life: he restored it. He enhanced it. And He began the process of repairing the lifetime of damage I had done to it.”

Then in the late spring of 1978, Lynde’s agent phoned him and told him that Dick Sherry, president of Field Newspaper Syndicate, had expressed an interest in Lynde’s creating a new strip.

And we conclude our preview of TCJ 302 with an excerpt from Warren Bernard's look at Wertham and the 1950s Congressional Hearings.

Elsewhere:

The artist and DJ Magnus Johnstone has passed away. I know very little about his life and not much shows up online. I think Ben Jones or C.F. turned me onto to Johnstone's zines maybe 10 years back. Those zines are stirring collections of drawings, sometimes narrative, most often not, but certainly of a piece with what goes on in New England. Most recently I was pleasantly surprised to see his drawings in Alan Licht's book Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Artists like Johnstone kind of hover on the periphery... I never quite knew where to place his work, but I liked it very much.

I asked Chris "Pshaw" Cammett to comment on his colleague:

One of the great misconceptions people had was to quickly judge the drawings of Magnus without thinking. If you didn't consider the intention Magnus wanted to express then you lost a key element in the greater realm his drawings could deliver. Maybe his work was harder to ingest because you had to think. His work had an eerily consistent motif that appeared as if Magnus was channeling a precisely and detailed vision of our primal future. Humans were reduced to infantile adults, surrounded by strange new toys, and entitlements of royalty with all the trappings of our base foundations revealed. Deciding not to apply a little scrutiny to his Manga zines would leave one lacking at seeing reoccurring themes of ironic humor, social psychology, erotic hypocrisy, and political protest evident, to name a few.

From my understanding, I think some artists were shocked by the honesty of his work, and maybe their offhand rejection of his value was more a scorn of their own artistic failing. The craft of his Manga drawings were as true as their expression, and exhibited small signs of any other recognizable inking style. His vision was always on point and well-conceived, delineated in fly-on-the-wall perspectives that were addictive to the eyeballs and the mind.

Here are a few drawings from his site: