Today on the site, Alec Berry files an update on the ongoing Cody Pickrodt lawsuit, which now involves a counterclaim filed by Whit Taylor.
Cartoonist Whit Taylor, one of the 11 defendants named in a defamation lawsuit brought by small-press publisher Cody Pickrodt, has filed an answer and counterclaim, making an allegation in civil court that the plaintiff raped her in New York City in December 2013.
Her response, submitted on Nov. 5, 2018 in Nassau County, NY, arrived with answers from cartoonists Hazel Newlevant and Morgan Pielli, who each assert more than 30 affirmative defenses. Eight other defendants offered a motion for dismissal, which questioned the court’s jurisdiction due to their residencies in other states, their lack of business within New York and their having been in other states when the allegedly defamatory statements were made. However, this motion has been withdrawn.
Defense attorney Aurore DeCarlo of C.A. Goldberg, who represents all 11 defendants, submitted the stipulation to withdraw on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018 after Pickrodt’s attorney, Joe Carbonaro of Carbonaro Law, amended his client’s complaint to address the defense’s Nov. 5th filings. DeCarlo described the action as a formality. The motion to dismiss had addressed the contents of the original complaint. A new motion must now be filed to meet the amended version.
The deadline to file a new motion is Jan. 4, 2019, according to the stipulation.
We also have a review of the new Sunday Press collection of E.C. Segar's prep-Popeye Thimble Theatre strips, written by Frank Young.
Christmas came early with the welcome arrival of this new tome from Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press, an important and joyous addition to the comics canon. One of comics’ greatest storytellers, Elzie Crisler Segar created a thoroughly American icon with the addition of the Spooneristic, squinty Popeye the Sailor. Popeye’s 1929 entrance in the daily Thimble Theatre marked a literal sea change in a decade-old strip.
In its first tenyears, Segar’s strip focused on the risible relationship of Ham Gravy, his sweetie Olive Oyl, and her brother Castor. He mined sublime comedy from this trio, but Popeye gave the strip star quality. His quirky can-do mindset was manna for Depression-era America. When the Fleischer brothers’ animated studio began Popeye cartoons in 1933, the mumbly tar overtook Mickey Mouse as the nation’s top cartoon character.
Because most of these pre-Popeye strips haven’t been reprinted, only those with access to the chipping, crumbly original newspaper pages or the courage to squint at microfilm are familiar with much of this work. This 13” x 17” hardcover restores to public circulation an unsung epic of 20th-century cartooning. For two years, Segar took Castor Oyl (and, later, Ham Gravy) out West, in a rowdy, atmospheric narrative that, like its desert landscape, is full of peaks and valleys. Segar wasn’t alone in achieving these mega-stories. Rube Goldberg did a similarly long sequence in his contemporary Sunday strip Boob McNutt—another marathon episode that deserves reprinting.
This sequence marks Segar’s rise as a master fabulist. As Paul Tumey notes in his informative introduction (one of three top-flight pieces in this book), Segar entered comics as a lesser light, and had the good fortune to develop his populist art on the clock. From its inception in January 1925, six years after the daily strip’s debut, the Sunday Thimble Theatre was a down-to-earth, rough-edged physical comedy, shot through with its creator’s school-of-hard-knocks philosophy.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—News. Lion Forge, which has repeatedly made waves with prominent hires and deep pockets, is restructuring, and confirmed to Publishers Weekly that it has laid off twelve employees.
In an interview with PW in September, Lion Forge founder David Steward II said the house had about 60 employees and planned to publish about 130 titles this year.
In a prepared statement, the company said, “We are restructuring from the top down, and across departments to ensure that our organization’s size and structure remains in line with our sales, as well as providing support for future increase in title output."
Former New Yorker editor and founder of the Cartoon Bank Bob Mankoff has launched a similar new site, CartoonCollections.com. It is being billed as "a way to spotlight and monetize thousands of works published in the New Yorker, Esquire, National Lampoon, Playboy and Barrons."
Cartoon Collections will also curate from the half-million works from the library of the recently acquired CartoonStock.com.
Mankoff says he is drawing upon years of hard-won lessons to try to create a destination site as part of a larger licensing business.
“The market for cartoons is large but widespread and dispersed,” Mankoff tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. “It needs a central place where anyone who needs one for any purpose can find what they need.
“Cartoon Collections will be that place,” he adds, “as it aggregates cartoons as Getty or Corbis aggregates photos.”
—Reviews & Commentary. Apollo Magazine has an appreciation of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, to coincide with a London exhibition of art inspired by it, which is also discussed.
In a Peanuts strip from March 1962, Charlie Brown and Linus discuss the nature of criticism. Linus was the strip’s intellectual: a gentle, fragile child, the stripes on whose T-shirt were almost as wispy as the hairs on his head, and whose security blanket D.W. Winnicott wanted to use as an example of the transitional object. The two boys are leaning on a wall, as they often do when waxing philosophical. ‘Of course I realize there will always be criticism,’ Linus concedes. Television in particular and even ‘higher arts’ such as theatre can come in for a rough press. ‘The most recent criticism is that there is too little action and far too much talking in the modern day comic strip. What do you think about this?’ ‘Ridiculous,’ replies Charlie Brown.
Mark Dery's biography of Edward Gorey continues to attract review attention, including new pieces at the New York Times and the New Republic.
One of the virtues of Dery’s book is its reminder that Gorey’s art was far more subtle, diverse, formally inventive, and just plain weird than his reputation for sinister whimsy suggests. In the 100-odd books that he published during his lifetime—books with three-word titles like The Fatal Lozenge, The Pious Infant, The Blue Aspic, The Disrespectful Summons—he experimented promiscuously with format. He crafted abecedaries (alphabet books), postcard sets, pop-up books, “slice books” (in which the reader can mix and match portions of an image to create new ones), and even a variant of the choose-your-own-adventure story (from 1987’s utterly confounding The Raging Tide: “Hooglyboo crammed Figbash inside a vase. If this strikes you as clever, turn to 11. If all this seems too terrible to contemplate, turn to 29.”)
—Interviews & Profiles. GoComics.com talks to Tom the Dancing Bug creator Ruben Bolling.
GoComics: When did you develop an interest in politics? When did you decide you wanted to be a political cartoonist?
I still haven’t decided to be a political cartoonist! Since the rise of Trump, I feel like I’ve been temporarily conscripted into service. Tom the Dancing Bug began as an apolitical comic strip, and I was fairly uninterested in politics when I started it. At some point, I realized that politics is another subject I can use to come up with my weekly idea — one more thing I can try to be funny about each week. As I introduced more and more politics in the strip, I got more attention, and I started to get more personally interested and invested. It’s reached a fever pitch right now, but I still hold out hope that someday soon the comic will start to reach a different equilibrium.
