Today, Ron Goulart returns with the second installment in his "Connecticut Cartoonists" series, this time turning to the men behind Superman.
...[Wayne] Boring stayed on and became the chief artist on Superman. By the 1950s, he was allowed to sign his work. He drew many covers, did about half the comic book stories (with Al Plastino imitating him on quite a few others) and also did the newspaper strip until the late '60s. Editor-in-Chief Mort Weisinger, a man not especially well-liked by many of his employees, was in charge of all things Superman. Boring told me that one day Weisinger called him into his office and fired him on the spot. A bit later, Stan Kaye, who was his primary inker, was also let go. Boring was one of the artists who initiated the trend for superheroes who looked like they worked out at the gym and certainly did a lot of weight lifting. Jim Steranko praised him in his history of comic books.
Boring then became a non-person as far as the then administration of DC was concerned. A hardcover book, Superman: From the 30s to the 70s, was published in 1971 and his well-known hands-on-hips portrait of Superman was used on the cover. There were also over eighty pages of his work in the compilation. But he was not mentioned at all, however, and neither were Siegel and Shuster. A rather strange omission. At a lunch with some Connecticut cartoonist, I brought my copy of the book to show Wayne. He never even knew about it. He went through it, talking about the cartoonists whose work was also included—Paul Cassidy, Leo Nowak and John Sikela. That evening he phoned to say that he was very upset about the fact that he got no credit for his work and nothing in the way of compensation. I suggested he might want to talk to a lawyer.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Craig Hubert talks to 2D Cloud cofounder Raighne Hogan.
Initially it was mostly just Maggie Umber and myself leading this vehicle from 2007-2010. Justin Skarhus, while with us from the beginning, became more involved over time. Roles have been sorta liquid. For our current incarnation, there’s sorta five of us — but we work very directly with the artists we sign, if that makes sense? Like, they work with us on production, marketing, social media, etc — we want them to be part of the conversation with these types of things. It’s important that their voice is a part of the process.
Andy Oliver interviews Austin English.
I also missed any distinction between comics and art books as I was growing up—my mom gave me Tintin, but she also had Matisse monographs laying around which she really loved. Books in general with images in them were very comforting to me as a kid, and somewhere along the line the two worlds blurred for me. I accept that for people in art and people in comics there are very clear borders, but I just never saw it that way.
April Kilcrease profiles Dan Clowes.
On a Sunday afternoon in 2010, the Oakland-based cartoonist Daniel Clowes wanted to watch a movie. But not just any movie. As he described it in a recent phone interview, he wanted to see one of "those weird science fiction movies" that they used to make in the Sixties and Seventies "that were sort of heady and cerebral," like the Russian space station movie, Solaris, which probes ideas of memory, identity, and what it means to love someone, or The 10th Victim, a dystopian Italian film that mixes Pop Art decor with a plot centered on a televised assassination game. "I began thinking, 'I wish there were more of those that I could rent,'" he said. "'I guess I'll do my own.'"
For The Paris Review, Sam Smith explores the history of Alfred E. Neuman.
For the half-length color painting of their red-haired mascot, [Al] Feldstein told Mingo that he didn’t want the boy to “look like an idiot—I want him to be lovable and have an intelligence behind his eyes. But I want him to have this devil-may-care attitude, someone who can maintain a sense of humor while the world is collapsing around him.” MAD insiders referred to the kid by various names—Mel Haney, Melvin Cowsnofsky—but when the magazine won legal rights to the face, he was officially christened Alfred E. Neuman. A pseudonym without a specific host, it was one of many counterfeit names used as running gags in the magazine.
Kim Janssen at The Chicago Tribune visits Quimby's Bookstore.
Even as Amazon has driven far larger bookstore chains into bankruptcy, Quimby's this year celebrates its 25th anniversary as the thriving hub for a community of self-publishers, a handful of whom were devoted enough to work on their zines at the store's annual overnight "Zlumber Party."
"Nobody here is about to become a millionaire," said longtime store manager Liz Mason, 42, who describes the sleepover as her favorite event of the year. "But there are people who come to us from all over the world. They tell us they have a two-hour layover in Chicago and it's just enough time to hop on a train and come down here. We're a destination stop for cool people."
—Funnies. Richard Sala recently began posting a new online series, The Bloody Cardinal. I love his serial work.
