Eddie Campbell

2012-01-26T12:53:00.002-05:00

I'll be at the Ca et La booth in Angouleme at the Espace Le Nouveau Monde marquee afternoons, Fri Sat Sun. Then in Paris at Super Heros, 175 rue St. Martin on Jan 31 at 16.00 o, clock. Friday 3 feb at Gosh but that,s all booked up. See you there. Typed on my iPad in Angouleme. Now i'm off to dinner.

2012-01-23T14:11:00.002-05:00

Where have all the book illustrators gone?

"I think a) it's (out of) fashion", he says trenchantly. "And b) there aren't that many great illustrators. It's rare you can come across someone who can draw. Even when you're looking for someone to do book jackets, it's hard to find someone who can draw the human figure – it seems to be unfashionable now."

-Book editor Dan Franklin quoted in the UK Independent. He must be looking in the wrong place.

2012-01-12T19:01:00.003-05:00

I missed this on Hallowe'en. Cal's Girl friend Chloe Turner dressed up as a Lichtenstein painting, complete with speech balloon attached to her hat. Brilliant!

One cannot say Lichtenstein any more without hearing shouts about plagiarism My mind turns to a couple of recent lawsuits that I didn't follow to their conclusions. Firstly, Richard Prince daubed paint on Patrick Cariou's Photographs and called them his own. The judgement of March 2011 went against Prince, but he's appealing:

NY Times December 28, 2011

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works.

What were Mr. Prince’s intentions in re-using the Rastafarian pictures taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou and why did he choose them? For the sake of parody? For criticism? Or did he just pick something that inspired him, for reasons as difficult to plumb as any those of many postmodern artists?...

Mr. Prince replied, “The message is to make great art that makes people feel good.”

He also made it clear that he was not making art that commented on Mr. Cariou’s work itself. (Judge Batts ruled that for a work to be transformative it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works” it borrows from, a test she said Mr. Prince’s work failed.)

In an interview Daniel Brooks, Mr. Cariou’s lawyer, said that if such a subjective principle for borrowing as Mr. Prince’s were to become the legal standard — and in parts of the art world it is already much more subjective in practice — there would be no way to protect copyright.

“It can’t just be random, that he ‘liked it,’ because there’s no practical boundary to that,” he said.

It is also noted: "In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved." Two years ago Australian pop band Men at Work were sued for stealing five or six bars of the tune titled 'Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree'. they lost that but the appeal came up in October last:

The Australian October 07, 2011

The High Court denied the band's bid to appeal a federal court judge's earlier ruling that the group had copied the signature flute melody of Down Under from the children's classic Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Kookaburra was written more than 70 years ago by Australian teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition. The song went on to become a favorite around campfires from New Zealand to Canada. The wildly popular Down Under remains an unofficial Australian anthem.

Ms Sinclair died in 1988, but publishing company Larrikin Music - which now holds the copyright for Kookaburra - filed a copyright lawsuit in 2009.

Last year, Federal Court Justice Peter Jacobson ruled that the Down Under flute riff replicated a substantial part of Ms Sinclair's song.

The judge later ordered Men at Work's recording company, EMI Songs Australia, and Down Under songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert to pay fove per cent of royalties earned from the song since 2002 and from its future earnings.

The court didn't specify what the five per cent penalty translates to in dollars. Larrikin wasn't able to seek royalties earned before 2002 because of a statute of limitations.

It remains arguable where the line should be drawn but for now, Larrikin are 'greedy opportunists' in the words of Hay, and Prince is a wanker. That was my word.

Still on the subject, I was re-reading an interview with Comic book artist John Romita made by a couple of old small press pals of mine, Ridout and Ashford, and published as a hardcover book by Marvel in 1996:

Romance was quite dull stuff. We called it the popcorn genre. A lot of guys had gotten into the habit of doing the tears in the shape of popcorn. then we were getting ripped off by guys like Lichtenstein, blowing up our panels and representing them as their own art, and we were pissed off. We almost had a class action suit. Not only that, I heard there was whole school of German artists blowing up the panels like Lichtenstein and cashing in in Europe. I saw some of my panels line for line.

I wiil say one thing, Lichtenstein actually didn't stick religiously to it. In fact, he was almost critical. he picked out some things and made fun of them in his panels. he not only blew up the dots, but he made ragged lines where there weren't ragged lines; he made them look bad, almost when he's blow them up the lines would get ragged and blotchy. He was sort of saying that this is trash and i will now turn it into quality art. that was his philosophy and I respected that in a way., but from what I could see of the german artists, they were taking panels and blowing up religiously, following every line and making them clean. I remember one. The girl's hair was blowing in the wind and I had this pathetic expression on her face. Well, this guy did that panel. Every single shape including the placement of the balloons, everything was exactly as I did it. he blew it up and did it in the same color, only with the dark more visible. I saw a picture of my panel and the painting together in the museum of Modern Art.

So we went through that period, and a lot of guys- Bernie Sachs and a few others- wanted to get together and file a class action sit against Lichtenstein and some of the other artists. I was not too interested. I said first of all, i don't want to contribute money to lawyers. I didn't want to get involved in it. I even foolishly told them that I was somehow flattered by the fact that they would consider these panels so good that they felt it was worthy of a painting. And, of course, the thought I was crazy. "Flattered?! they're ripping you off!" I never felt ripped off. I felt like it was a different art form. I wished they would say 'from a drawing by...', but they never did.

About four or five years ago (1990) the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibit for the express purpose of showing the connection and the similarities and the derivation. We spent hours being interviewed: they got all sorts of copies of my panels and the dates and the paintings. They said they were going to have an exhibit finally showing who inspired all these paintings. I thought, well, thirty years after the fact, we were going to get some kind of credit and tribute. The exhibit ended up being clalled 'High and LOw'. Another slap in the face.

They got all their facts wrong. They attributed artwork to the wrong artists, they got the dates wrong, everything was wrong. The fact that they called comic art 'low' drove me crazy!. And then if you'd gone to the show, the bulk of the comic book part of the exhibit was down in the basement, which was on the lower level. So we were really given another slap.
I went there. they gave me an invitation. I got a tux and everything. It was a wonderful dinner. I shook hands with Garry Trudeau. He thought it was great thatw e were given some time. But by the time the dinner was over and I looked at the book and heard some of the speakers- they were putting us down again... I was just so hurt by the whole thing.

I found Moma's fact sheet for the event. And this review by Hilton Kramer, critic with a modernist bias who, it should be noted, is the same generation as Romita:

The New Criterion, December 1991

Now with the debacle of the exhibition called “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” which Mr. Varnedoe has organized in collaboration with Adam Gopnik, his former student at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York and currentiy the art critic for The New Yorker, this roster of disas ters that have already been visited upon the museum in a very short time begins to look like a mere skirmish in the war against moder nism that is now in progress at MOMA. Both in its conception and in its realization as well as in its reigning ethos, the “High & Low” exhibition is the kind of full-scale event that signals a new era at MOMA—an era in which, among other things to be deplored, the achievements of modern art are subor dinated to a sociological analysis of them. Taking his cue from the ideological initia tives that have lately reshaped the study of all the humanities in our colleges and univer sities, Mr. Varnedoe has clearly set the museum on a course that conforms to the practice of supplanting aesthetic categories of thought with those drawn from the social sciences. By this approach, art becomes a mere coefficient of material culture, and is thus denied precisely that element of aes thetic autonomy and transcendence that has been one of the hallmarks of the modernist spirit.

What this means for museological practice is perfectly clear. The epoch of the anaes thetic curator is upon us. In the “High & Low” show we are given a vivid demonstra tion of what results from a view of art that is completely removed from aesthetic con siderations. There is a great deal of intellec tual passion at work in the exhibition and in the massive—and massively foolish—cata logue that accompanies it, but very little of this passion is guided by aesthetic intelligence. At every turn in the history of their subject, the curators are so utterly agog over the minutiae of popular culture—so in fatuated with what might be called the ar chaeology of it—that its role in shaping modern art ceases to make a primary claim on their attention and becomes a merely inciden tal aspect of a headlong compulsion to ex plore the archaeology itself. Not only modern art but art itself is accorded an indif ferent and precarious status in this inquiry. All the energy is elsewhere engaged.

2012-01-11T04:26:00.005-05:00

Booklovers everywhere. May you enjoy this remarkable piece of animation as much as I did:

"Uploaded by crazedadman on Jan 9, 2012
After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago, my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto (883 Queen Street West, (416) 366-8973).
Grayson Matthews generously composed the beautiful, custom music.
(full credits at first link)"

Related: BOOKSHELF PORN
Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world

2012-01-07T07:09:00.002-05:00

Self publishing comic books! A revealing passage in Tom Spurgeon's holiday interview with Jeff Smith!

I didn't know even Jeff was having problems circa 2001. All through the '90s all you had to do was keep putting your periodical out and you stayed in business. Even Steve Bissette (Interviewed two days earlier in the same place) could have done well if he'd just kept putting out the comics instead of throwing up his arms in despair as early as 1994. It was that simple. Well, when I say simple I mean I was in freefall the whole time. Every now and then an updraft would instantly take me back to a higher position, but then a minute later I'd be in freefall again. The thing was that it was measurable and predictable. You could draw a graph with the curve heading toward the floor and make a serious plan of running your book into the ground within a specific number of years, months and weeks. Gary (Strangehaven) Millidge used to get mad at me when I'd talk like that, seeing it as defeatism, which it certainly never was.

However, around 2001 it all got complicated. To stay on top of things it was necessary to get into the bookstore market, and start dealing with returns and all the horrors that entails. I got out of publishing my monthly comic in 2002 and left the lucrative From Hell book under Top Shelf's management. Shortly after that our bookstore distributor went bankrupt. Then our printer went bankrupt, no doubt partly due to everybody getting out of printing the regular black and white comic books (even Cerebus had come to a close). Jeff in time solved the bookstore problem by going with Scholastic, but here he is in 2001:

SPURGEON: Is there an example of a bad time? Because your career path looks pretty positive from the outside-in.

SMITH: [laughs] Well, good. I'm glad. [laughter] 2001 was a bad year for me. We had a lot of money troubles. I got into these rows with Dave Sim and Linda Medley, and it was very demoralizing. I forgot how close we came to going out of business. We put a bunch of money into toys -- toys were really big -- in 1999 and 2000. We didn't lose any money in the long run, but it tied up a whole bunch of money for a long time... I was slowing down my output right around that time, because I was getting into the heavy parts of the story and it was hard to write. Just a lot of factors came together. I forgot how tough that was. We had to let all our employees go. We had to leave our office. I completely forgot that there was a year when Vijaya and I and Kathleen -- Kathleen Glosan, our production manager -- the three of us were all in my one-room studio above the garage trying to survive. Eventually we did.

I was never operating on the same scale as Jeff, but in 2003 we had to turn my home studio into a bedroom. The intention was to build a shed next to the house for me to work in, or for somebody to sleep in, but that looked like being too expensive, so I moved my operation onto the far end of our dinner table, a big eight foot long polished oak object. For a year or so my life consisted of going from one end of the table to the other.

Then another upheaval changed everything all over again. That's how it goes in this nutty business.

2012-01-06T21:37:00.002-05:00

Oddity by Morrison and Grist from twenty years ago. A Romance subject, "Romeo 4 Juliet'. Was it just the one page?

Just in time for Christmas, a piece of Grant Morrison ephemera unseen since its original publication. 'Juliet 4 Romeo', with art by Jack Staff's Paul Grist, first appeared in Letterbox, a spiral bound book given away as a prize to schoolchildren in a letter writing competition circa 1990.

2012-01-01T07:15:00.002-05:00

Wishing everybody a happy new Year!

Todd DePastino co-founded the Veterans Breakfast Club...

"Though their experiences are often distant, their memories can be vivid, and their storytelling seems to cause what novelist and World War II veteran Gore Vidal calls one of those "strange slips in time" when the present turns into "a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live."

And perhaps, for those of us who never served and have not yet reached old age, that's what's most extraordinary about listening to the stories of those who are now in their 80s and 90s. What to me is the past is still their present. They live, in a sense, as strangers in our world, for their world, the one that shaped them, is gone, as are so many of the people whom they once knew and loved. This is why stories are so important, for through stories people can wake the dead, if only for a moment, while those of us who listen can touch the past and connect with those who are, quite literally, from another time."

linked from Tom Spurgeon's interview with Todd
Todd is the author of a biography of The great Bill Mauldin

2011-12-31T19:05:00.000-05:00

Rounding up outstanding arguments. The two people who were following my theoretical ramble about integrating all the aspects of a comic into a reading of its meaning should note that I concluded my train off thought off the premises. There follows a summary, including the entire post that you probably missed:

here. 5th December:

First let's look at this notion, common to both quotations above, that you can separate everything else from the 'story' ...

here. 22 December:

These critics do not go much beyond a simplistic 'what happens' in it. I mean on the level of a statue being naked rather than on the finesse of its chiasmos. ...

Hooded Utilitarian. 28 December (on a long thread my comment addressed a habit of criticizing a comic's story and art as though they are things that can always be separated. Persepolis and Habibi had been so discussed and both found wanting in one or both aspects):

An essential demand of the newer kind of comics under discussion, in which a unified whole is presumed, is that we find a more apt way of talking about them. Satrapi’s Persepolis, when it opens, is the first person narrative of a ten year old girl. The drawing is perfectly right for the story; it expresses the world view of a ten year old girl living anywhere. Characters are simplified in a way that is charmingly naive and perspective is nearly non-existent. Whether Satrapi is capable of a different kind of drawing is not relevant to a discussion of the book. The artist is not a musician being hired by a symphony orchestra that expects her to be able to play the whole classical repertoire. She is giving us a record of her personal experience. She has a natural grasp of what is important in telling a story, which unfolds with simplicity. By the end of the first book we are surprised by how much information we have taken in, as we weren’t aware of taking it in. We thought we were listening to a child talking.
The authentic voice of the original can be appreciated by comparing it with the more professionally knowing treatment of the material in the animated movie, as in this excerpt:. Some parts of are
excruciatingly embarrassing:
The professionals who worked on it will go onto their next gig and we may hope they will be teamed with material more suited to their outlook.

As to Habibi, Matthias shows that there is nothing in Thompson’s art that is not in the overall meaning of the book. To praise the art separately is the reflex of the critic who has unconsciously recognized the ‘generosity of intent’ that is all over the work and doesn’t want to end on a rude rebuke. That intent is as much the CONtent as anything in the book that appears to be about the Arabian world. Looking at it again two months after I first opened the work, what I see is a cartoon romantic fantasy. I’m incredulous that it has inspired so much argument, or that in a medium that produces a mountain of crap over and over every year anybody could think this is among the “worst” that comics has to offer in 2011.

As always, the criticism against Thompson is that he didn’t make the book that thinking folk wanted him to make. I recall that the title of the TCj review of Blankets in 2003 (2004?-Tcj is never timely) consisted of those words more or less (‘Why Blankets isn’t the book… ?) Here it’s that Habibi is not a complex poem about modern life as reflected in the travails of the middle east, and also he didn’t draw it more in the manner of Blutch.

I remain however dubious about the remark that there is an implicit assertion that the book is more than broad melodrama. I thought that Nadim’s observation that there was more of Disney’s Nights than Burton’s was apt. And the ecological message isn’t more profound than ‘we need to look after the world because it’s where we live’.

While the lavish attention to tangential information raised hope of profundity, some critics have had trouble with him breaking up the linearity of the story unnecessarily. But I see that as just a Tarantino thing. A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink. There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go. Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting. I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work. We are a society that is weary with it all. We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history. We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom. Lists. the Months of the calendar of pregnancy, the names of the rooms in the palace, the planets, the nights of Sheherezade, the walk-ons of the Cheshire cat, the ninjas of Frank Miller, the Goddess Bahuchara Mata. Witty juxtapostions: the prophet at the farthest limit of human understanding plays out over the slave putting a spanner in the works in the Rube-Goldbergian plumbing inside the heart of Wanatolia. it’s a play-bauble being turned around and viewed from every possible angle. It’s not the ink line that is the virtuoso show, but the cartoon invention, the prodigious flow of ideas. The ink line serves the demands of clarity, of the ‘control’ that has been discussed above, and it speeds in comparison to Blutch’s because that also is demanded of it. It is liquid, and the ideas run as though out of a tap that has been left on, spilling out the supply of water necessary to quench the thirst of a careening dash through this Arabian fantasy.

And as with Satrapi, that is why Thompson’s drawing is inseparable form everything else in the book. There is certainly much that I find odd in it, including a coy Middle American sense of humour, as in the farting little man in the palace. Isn’t farting viewed differently in Arabia? And the convoluted treatment of sex in Thompson’s work will certainly one day attract a separate study.

2011-12-30T17:58:00.003-05:00

I sat through some awful films over the last few days. None of them were my own selections. I just arrived to find somebody else watching them. Inception (2010) I had to fast forward to make it more interesting. The Killer Inside Me (2010) I had to leave the room twice. If it had been a public cinema I'd probably have kept going till I was out the building. At the end (SPOILER) he's poured paraffin or petrol all over the inside of the house, and when the police come in, nobody's olfactory alarm goes off?
The only film that pleased me, and pleased me no end, was the humble little French film whose poster is at left, Shall we Kiss (2007). It is a masterful piece of honest storytelling.

2011-12-28T02:39:00.004-05:00

As is my habit, I went to look at one of my favourite reading sites, ilovecomics.com only to find that it is down. This site archives all the great old newspaper comic strips from decades ago. They recently put up a bunch of 1961 color sundays of Apartment 3G that I've never seen before, and earlier, a whole load of old 1940s Mary Worth pages. Nobody cares enough about this old stuff for there ever likely to be book collections. But they've got everything. Right from the beginning. It all needs to be preserved and made available outside of museum storage for folks who are not accredited scholars. Its value is beyond measure. The site charges a minimum fee for downloads, just a small thing toward the cost of keeping the site going. That's not not for reading; you can read all day for free. The reason it's gone:

As many of you may have noticed this is not the former archive site. After a three week battle, with many emails to say the least, my 3 year host Smugmug pulled the plug on us. They stated and I quote "All the images I've seen on your site look to be owned by others and you've been selling them for a profit. We'll need you to send back the written releases that give you the authority to post and sell images that are owned by others"

The webhost is bending in fear of SOPA. Small vid, skip the ad like I always do.

It's just comics- part 15

2011-12-26T19:27:00.006-05:00

Three or four years back I was to appear on a TV arts program which intended to explain the idea of 'the graphic novel.' When I arrived I realised that my words had already been planned for me. I was supposed to say that comics used to be about superheroes and now thay can be about anything. I refused to say this and it all went badly after that. The fact is that you find the greater variety in comics the further back you go. As I have explained already, I've always valued comics which communicate something about real experience and I'm finding a measure of what appeals to me in a few of these old ROMANCE comics, though you have to sift through a lot of stuff to find one as good as the one I'm going to write about here. It's simple and unpretentious and remarkably naturalistic for its genre and once again it's from Quality. It falls in the second of the three phases I described last time, between the Love Glut and the establishment of the Comics Code. In terms of its outlook, the period of experiment and exoticism is gone; the romances generally are now very domestic. Here's the splash page:

Love Confessions #29, Apr 1953, lead story, 9 pages

As to who wrote it, we'll never know. There are many instances in art history of which all we know is what we can glean from the body of written complaint that accompanies every age. Take, for example, this passage from Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954, the year after the story under current scrutiny:

Their ambition is to write a "Profile" for the New Yorker, or articles or stories for national magazines, or to write the great American novel. The scripts or scenarios they write for comic books are not anything which they wish to express or anything they wish to convey to their child public. They want to get their ten dollars a page and pay the rent. They do not write comic book stories for artistic or emotional self-expression. On the contrary, they write them in the hope of finding eventually the chance for self-expression somewhere else.
The ideas for their stories they get from anywhere, from other comic books, from newspapers, movies, radio, even jokes.

Believe it or not, some comic book writers are good writers. And the paradox or the tragedy is that when you read a comic book story that is a little better it does not mean that a bad writer has improved, but that a man who was a good writer had to debase himself...

But of course, like comic book vendors, they have to be afraid of the ruthless economic power of the comic book industry. In every letter I have received from a writer, stress is laid on requests to keep his identity secret. I have one letter from a man, evidently a very intelligent writer, who mentions this three times in one letter!

I imagine that I catch a glimpse of the kind of writer I spotlighted in my parts 12 and 13 in the above, and It's logical to assume that there would be well known writers of the latter half of the 20th century from tv and books who anonymously wrote comic book stories in their early days. We would undoubtedly be surprised to find out, just as we are surprised the first time we hear that artist Kinstler, whom I discussed in part 9, went on to paint presidential portraits.

Artists are easier to place. Our story is pencilled (an educated guess) by Charlie Sultan, who was stylistically in Lou Fine's shadow in the early 1940s. Sultan's career path is typical of the first generation of comic book artists. As young guys just out of school they enthusiastically rendered the muscles and poses of the first superheroes. They worked in 'shops' as part of a team. We can catch glimpses of this artist in the background of George Tuska's rememberings, working in the Eisner-Iger shop, and then Harry Chesler's. By the late 40s/early 50s you find the same artists working at home on short stories: crime, romance, horror, war, western, science fiction, alternating them for variety. I like looking back at many of these artists becoming family guys and developing a more rounded sense of the human situation, as in this story.

These artists would visit the city with regularity to pick up assignments from one or more of a large number of comic book publishers whose offices were all situated fairly close. That's speaking from today's perspective, from which a bunch of thirty publishers all in Manhattan sounds pretty damn amazing. At this time, most of these publishers would assign the whole art job to one artist. But Quality, as I outlined in part 11, used a coterie of favourite inkers by which method they maintained a tightly controlled house style. The inker on this one is known in my files as 'fat line inks.' They look not unlike the fat lines used ten years later by Chic Stone, an artist whose movements in the early fifties are not well documented. But I wouldn't be so bold to make an attribution as I get that sort of thing wrong at least twice a day.

The splash page above is a great view of rural America, unusual in a romance comic as hard work does not usually play a part in the proceedings. The woman appearing in bare feet and ragged hem overstates the case somewhat, but by convention the splash is a nutshell summary of the argument.

At the beginning: in the flush of young love, Don and Phyllis are married and he supports her with his job at the filling station. They've obtained 'a cute little attic flat' (this is the first time I've noticed the word 'flat' in a US context)

One of the set-pieces of the genre is an early close up of the protagonist, as strikingly beautiful as the artist can make her, but that doesn't happen here. The guy is remarkably ordinary too. I like that these characters are regular people without any glamorization about them. There are no attractive leads to seduce us into inhabiting this story vicariously.

They're having a hard time making ends meet, but he'll 'think of something, Phyllis.'

The first thing he thinks of is buying a farm with his buddy 'Jim', and going into business.

It doesn't last long. Jim bails out and Phyllis is about ready to give up too. Don got into rabbits in a big way and they don't have enough money to feed them. For a whacky business idea in our own times, publishing your own comic books would serve the same narrative purpose.

She gets a neighbor to drop her in town in his pick-up. There's a casual detail at this juncture where the neighbour mentions he noticed the delivery of catalogs about raising hamsters. None of Don's crazy schemes are working out.

Don holds his ground and sticks with the farm. Back home, Phyllis starts seeing another guy, Paul. he's dependable if somewhat predictable.

This is the point at which the story veers into territory that wouldn't be permissible after the Comics Code, 'with its strict rules about the depiction of marriage', as Michelle Nolan noted. In particular, divorce could not be depicted as desirable, and the above image of the married woman kissing another man would be unacceptable. But in 1953, Phyllis gets a divorce so she can marry Paul:

She's already having misgivings before she's out of the church. The misgivings are spreading like weeds as she lies in her bed at night (a separate bed, as in the movies of the time.)

Over four panels they have a baby girl who grows into a toddler.

Then things get thrown out of shape. Phyllis hears that Don is visiting the old neighborhood.

She can't stop herself from contriving an accidental meeting.

She realises she has made a big mistake.

She should have stuck with Don and his daft business ideas.

Something I mentioned before (part 11): Quality's colouring at this time was always so carefully done that they could drop a bright red in where you wouldn't think it belongs, without causing any disturbance, as in the park bench at night-time in the above scene. Relatively absent after the title header, here it underlines a frisson of danger as once again she's in the arms of the one she's not married to, except the positions are reversed now.

The romance story typically involves a dilemma. You will have noticed it in the story of the magistrate in my part 12 where she was lured away by the cheeky charlie but came to know that the District Attorney was the guy she should have been sticking with. John Benson has pointed out that it is often the fallacious 'false dilemma' or a choice between a and b, when in fact there is the option of neither.

However, Phyllis does appear to have gotten herself into a difficult one here since it now involves not just two guys but also a child. The story problem is usually weighed up in the set-piece in which the woman lies on her bed in her solitude. There is no hint of voyeurism in the one above. She has made the decision to go back to Don when a bunch of flowers arrives and jolts her into a realization:

This is not your mad Heathcliff and Catherine whirlwind-of-destruction kind of romance. Nor has anyone yet made commonplace the option of a later era, of 'doing your own thing'. Phyllis has to make a pragmatic decision.

She mails her final letter to Don and having done it, the story ends with a silent panel of her standing, framed in the shape of the cloud, in tears by the mail box.

Michelle Nolan, who knows more about such things than I do, notes that of the 36 stories published in Love Confessions in 1953, this is the only one that doesn't end with the romantically afflicted in each others' arms.

entire story at the digital comics museum

2011-12-24T17:17:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas to all!

Uploaded by newhumanistmagazine on Dec 22, 2011
Interviewed backstage at Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, 18-23 December 2011 at the Bloomsbury Theatre, by Adam Smith.

2011-12-22T21:34:00.010-05:00

I have been recently instructed on how to fix the pictures of the books in the sidebar so that if you click on the image of one it will take you to Amazon.com. I did as I was instructed and then clicked on Alec it and sure enough there I was at Amazon. While I was in the neighbourhood, I thought I'd check out what reviewers were saying about the book. One fellow gives it a good four stars and says "In spite of all my caveats..." One of his caveats is that life is somewhat boring and a comic about life (he's speaking generally rather than specifically about me at this point) is likely to also be boring, unless...

"...let's say, Aleister Crowley or William Burroughs or Charles Manson, to name a few, were to write an autobiographical comic, *that* would be interesting. People who's lives and perceptions are really wacked out, they would make interesting subjects for autobiographical comics. ...
... Can't we say that unless you're a real unadulterated unapologetic jerk and willing to expose yourself at your inhuman human worst don't bother writing an autobiographical comic?"

I've been at pains in several posts lately to find a semantic for separating the aesthetic experience of a comic from the routine details of 'what happens' in it. While it is true that this is an understanding of the medium achieved by an adult reinventing his interest in an artistic form introduced to him or her when they were a minor, I would argue that this minor's interest (mine) in The Bash Street Kids, to pick an example, involved an understanding that it was drawn better than other comic strips. Well, let's not introduce the concept of 'art' this early; let's say that I knew this was funny not so much because of what was happening, but because of *how* it was happening.

In fact, I would have been happy to tape portraits of these characters on my wall without them being required to say or do anything. I loved them as cartoon inventions, to phrase it in a way that would have been beyond my understanding. To me they were pals named Danny, Plug, Smiffy, Toots and Sid, Wilfrid, Erbert, Spotty and Fatty.

This is still some way from a *purely* aesthetic appreciation of a comic, and to prove that such a thing exists before moving on I could cite my contemplation a couple of weeks back of a certain technique used to render hair that only happens in comics, or Daniel Clowes scanning and cloning the aged colours from old comics and then using these to make up his own 'palette'. This can't be separated from 'reading' comics because we only arrive at such an affection for them from years of reading the things. It may be compared to a scholar of music listening to the 'voicings' where somebody else might just hear a 'tune' (or lack of one).

We come to love the look of a comic, and the feeling expands to a general one of enjoying the way comics are drawn and composed, and even of the ink and paper. We want to make one. And having made one we're not entirely happy with it. Let's say that we've taken a notion to introduce a naturalistic element. So we base our figures on people we know. But the problem is that the things they're saying and doing are not quite authentic. So let's base these aspects on actual situations that we have observed. And so by increments we've put ourselves in the work.

The purpose of the endeavor was not to tell the world how interesting we are and to compete with all the world's monsters for the attention of a sensation hungry public. The purpose was simply to make comics, and to find ways of improving them vis-a-vis the subtlety of the things we wanted to say. It was, Godlike, to create little people who persuade that they live and breathe in their inky environment. And if they say and do no more than you or I, then that should be enough to endear them to a reader, because commonplace life is agreeable enough that we should like to hold onto it. Grant Morrison, to justify his outlandish fantasy worlds recently said "We already have real life, why should we need to duplicate it?" (quoted from memory) Well, yes we have it today, but today's is gone tomorrow, and if nobody was paying attention, then it is gone forever.

You may say that naturalism doesn't belong in comics and that might be an argument worth having. But introducing naturalism, in large measure or small, is not a new idea. It's been there at least (to pick one that everybody has heard of) since Frank King decided in 1921 to make Skeezix age day by day in real time from a baby to an adult. And, while there will inevitably be many days when not much is happening, that, when you think about it, is a very ambitious thing to attempt.

While I was writing the above, Matthias Wivel has developed an earlier observation of his from a couple of months back into an lengthy essay at the Hooded Utilitarian:

"...such criticism is often informed by a kind of ideological Puritanism that has gained traction in our current culture of taking offense — a Puritanism often blind to aesthetic quality, resistant to uncomfortable discourse, and prone to censorious action...
In the case of Habibi, it seems to me facile and unproductive to harp for too long on its sexism and Orientalism. Yes, it offers both and it suffers from it, but why does that have to be the full story? It is simultaneously, and obviously, a book so generous in intent and so voracious of ambition, that such criticism risks coming off as petty and, more importantly, ends up lacking in resonance."

These critics he refers to are not unlike the first one quoted above, whose interaction with an artistic work does not go much beyond a simplistic 'what happens' in it. I mean on the level of a statue being naked rather than on the finesse of its chiasmos. Allowing for exceptions of course, they do not have a concept of what the 'aesthetic' aspect of comics might consist of beyond being obliged to acknowledge that Thompson is very good with the pen and brush. It's as though the Thompson who drew it might have a different worldview from the one who typed it, or from the other one who thought it all up in the first place.

(Bash Street Kids)

Them other Eddie Campbells

2011-12-20T23:07:00.008-05:00

There's a book by somebody named Eddie Campbell, titled 44 Horrible dates:

Eddie has been on more terrible dates than entire villages. Now, for our amusement, our intrepid dater relates 44 of his most hilarious, unbelievable dates, ranging from the guy who immediately farted upon entering his car to the guy who drove him to a fast-food burger joint (Eddie is a vegetarian) before admitting he was high on cocaine.

I presume it's NOT by the Eddie Campbell who wrote the book about the TV soap opera Days of Our Lives, but Barnes and Noble have used HIS photo and MY bio, thus conflating three Eddie Campbells all in one promotional page.

How difficult can it be?

(link thanks to Aziz G in comments yesterday)

During the year I wasn't blogging there was another Eddie Campbell who became famous overnight after being arrested for having sex with an armless mannequin in a public park. He is not to be identified with any of the above-mentioned Eddie Campbells.

When the deputy moved closer, he found a shirtless Campbell sitting on a bench with his pants down around his ankles. On Campbell's lap was an armless mannequin - The apparent recipient of Campbell's lewd acts.

2011-12-19T18:50:00.001-05:00

That's m' boy!

When he first appeared on this blog, wee Cal looked like this:

2011-12-16T05:55:00.003-05:00

I was quoting Joe Simon on Wednesday, the day he died. He was 98.
LA Times Obituary

Simon died Wednesday night in New York City after a brief illness, according to a statement from his family, and his death adds a solemn final note to the 70th anniversary of his greatest creation, Captain America, who leaped across the big screen this summer with the Marvel Studios film "Captain America: The First Avenger." The film grossed $369 million in worldwide box office and earned strong reviews despite early skepticism about the 21st century pop culture potential of a Roosevelt-era character who looks like a walking American flag.

The obit talks about the '40s and jumps to the 60s. No mention of the romance stuff. they use that great photo of him and Kirby though.

2011-12-16T01:39:00.004-05:00

As hinted earlier, I'm going on tour for a couple of weeks. I still don't have ALL the dates, but things are starting to fall into place. I'll be in Angouleme from Thursday Jan 26 till Sunday Jan 29.I'll be interviewed onstage by Paul Gravett somewhere in there. Then you can find me in Paris, where I'm supposed to be doing a signing between Monday Jan 30 and Weds Feb 1. Then it's off to London where I'll be appearing at Gosh on Friday 3rd Feb. But Phone up and book a seat as they will be limited. I'll do a version of the stand-up picture show I did in one of the studio stages of the Sydney Opera House back in August. Here's a photo from it that may not have been online before. Obviously it won't be a huge big cinema-size screen at Gosh, but I'll make up for it in other ways. Well, you know what I mean. I tried something similar in Spain recently and the sound wouldn't work for a short film I had (nothing works in Spain- I had the nerve to say that and everybody applauded. 'Yeh, you tell em, they won't listen to us!'), so I had to improvise a voice over, which turned out to be funnier that the original anyway. You never know.

More details later.

2011-12-15T22:55:00.002-05:00

Charlotte Brontë manuscript bought for £690,000 by Paris museum
Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits purchases miniature booklet created by author when she was 14 at auction

The manuscript is set in Glass Town, a fictional world created by the teenage Brontës, and contains 4,000 words over 19 pages small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Formerly in a private collection and previously untraced, it contains ideas later fleshed out in Brontë's novels.
One scene, says Sotheby's book specialist Gabriel Heaton, anticipates one of the most famous episodes in Jane Eyre, in which Bertha, Mr Rochester's mad wife, tries to kill him by setting fire to the curtains in his bedroom.

There's a photo of the little wee book at the link. Isn't that amazing.

It's just comics- part 14

2011-12-14T02:40:00.004-05:00

My copy of Michelle Nolan's book, Love on the Racks, took a whole month to get to me from Amazon.com, otherwise I'd have given it a proper mention here earlier. Nolan is especially good on statistics and at highlighting the loony business manoeuvres that led to what she aptly calls 'the Love Glut,' which I want to examine in a minute. Her book is a fine summation of all the printed evidence, including her collection of comics going back to the beginning, as well as stuff from before that, from the romance pulp magazines. We still need a book that examines the art and puts more names to the people who made the things, but we can't have everything all at once. The subject is woefully understudied and we need to take one step at a time. Nolan's book lays the foundations. It marks out the territory in very logical order and any further advances would have to refer back to this. It's 200 pages of solid information which I consumed over a few days.

The timeline of the romance comic can be divided cleanly into *three* separate phases. Firstly there is a rise to a market glut from 8/1947 to mid 1950, following which there is a collapse. Not a complete discontinuity, but the sudden wiping away of over 60% of the furious activity. then there is a second phase, 1951 to April 1955 which is the month that introduced the stamp of authority of the Comics Code Censorship body. Thus the history of comics comes to a crucial divide where we must talk of of 'pre-code' and 'post-code'. Many companies were forced out of business in 1955 and '56 and in general, much that could previously be written and drawn in a romance comic was now proscribed. The first phase was the most experimental and intriguing from our perspective, as I have attempted to show in previous posts. By the second phase the nature of a romance comic was more narrowly defined, but remember that this phase includes the Toth and Frazetta stories I've already described. By the third phase it was reduced to a set of cliches and it becomes very hard to find worthwhile exceptions. It's this phase that we picture when we think of the romance comic; it's the one we see quoted in the Lichtenstein paintings.

How to make a glut : a study of the loony business side of comics. This is how Marvel did it. Marvel were the first to follow Simon and Kirby's initial success with the genre (see my part 4) with My Romance #1, a whole year later in Sept. 1948. They had four romance titles going by Jul 49, and between then and jan '50 they added another 27 individual series. Some of them had interesting, one-word titles:

Faithful #1, Nov 1949; Loveland #1, Nov 1949

Cupid #1, Dec 1949; Honeymoon #41, jan 1950

If you can get close enough to that last title (click to enlarge) You'll notice it has a number 41 on it. The First forty issues were a humor comic titled Gay Comics. My understanding is that a publisher could save itself the expense of paying for a postal permit for a new title by using the numbering of a discontinued one. Thus Marvel did not officially cancel the Human Torch but continued it under the new title Love Tales #36 (5/49). In the scramble to get as many love books onto the market as possible they turned their extant superhero titles into romances. Blonde Phantom became Lovers #23 (5/49), Sub-Mariner became Best Love #33 (8/49)(see my part 8). The last one standing, Captain America, was turned into a horror comic (10/49).

Publisher Fox used this technique extensively. There's a wicked humour to making a list out of these, so I'm going to quote them all, and if you are a lover of insanity it's worth working through: Meet Corliss Archer became My Life with #4 (9/48); Zago, Jungle Prince became My Story from #5 (5/49); Zegra (a jungle girl) became My Love Life with #6 (6/49); Phantom Lady became My Love Secret with #24 (6/49); Rula (another jungle girl-this was an earlier fad) became I loved with #28 (7/49); Western Outlaws became My Secret Life with #22 (7/49); Western Killers became My True Love with #65 (7/49); Jo-jo became My Desire with #31 (8/49); Western Thriller became My Past with #7 (8/49); All Top Comics became My Experience with #19 (9/49); Captain Kidd became My Secret Story as of #26 (10/49); Women Outlaws became My Love Memoirs as of #9 (11/49); Murder Inc. became My private Life as of #16 (2/50). And to meet what they imagined was an insatiable demand for love comics, they also started a few at #1. Altogether Fox had 21 Romance comics in the market.

The art in those books is, as far as I've seen, all dreary and clumsy and if you look at too much of it you'll lose the will to live. The covers on the other hand are always striking though rarely in a pleasant way. They invariably shout 'FOX' just from the feeling they leave you with. Sometimes it's a feeling of imminent mayhem.

My Love Memoirs #11 feb '50 My life #13 mar '50

Other times the mayhem's already under way.

My Secret Romance #2 Mar'50, My Great Love #3 Feb '50

But whatever's going on, it's never any of that sweet stuff you see on the Marvel covers above.

My Intimate Affair #1 mar '50, My Love Life #9 dec '49

You don't need a business degree to know it was all bound to go wrong. The funniest account of the glut and the fall-out appeared in, of all places, a romance comic book. Publisher EC's contribution to the love genre was remarkably restrained and also short-lived. It consisted of fifteen issues under three different titles. This was their final offering.

Modern Love #8, Aug 1950

In which they reveal quite early their delight in mockery that would later be their salvation. In the oddest story ever to appear in a romance comic, Gaines and Feldstein lampooned the Love Glut. It was drawn by Feldstein in his usual charmless and wooden manner. The old geezer on the left is supposedly the EC publisher; he's having an affair with a sweet young thing and he has decided to put love into the comics:

It's a brilliant idea and all the women in America have got to get a copy.

But that's not enough. We don't need the stupid crime comics!

Let's take everything we publish and turn it into a romance comic!

Now Feldstein introduces caricatures of his rivals. First Victor Fox, here named V.Wolf.

Here's Lev Gleason (Love Greasin), publisher of the enormously successful first Crime comic, Crime Does Not Pay. He actually only published two romance titles, one of which would run for 57 issues all the way into 1956.

The GLUT!

The returns start coming in:

Fox is feeling the pinch

Jack Lyman and Joe Curry, alias Simon and Kirby. In this version they've followed EC into the Love Glut. The public isn't to know the truth of such matters. Two panels later they throw themselves out the window to their deaths.

The sums are done and it's looking ugly:

A gun is produced and everybody commits suicide. exeunt

whole 8-page story link

When market congestion caused the roof to fall in, Marvel cut its 31 romance titles down to 7. Quality cancelled all 14 of its titles and brought back three of them six months later in 1951. The other companies either scaled down the romance thing or got out of it. There were even a couple who had published moderately before the glut and continued moderately after it. But what about Fox? Fox got rid of all 21 of its love books, mostly by converting them into other genres: My Love Affair became March of Crime at #7 after only six issues; My past continued as Crimes Inc after #11; Women in Love became Feature Presentation after four issues; My Experience changed again, this time to Judy Canova after #22; My Love story became Hoot Gibson; My Great Love became Will Rogers Western; My Secret Affair became Martin Kane , Private Eye from #4; My Secret Romance became Star Presentation from #3; My intimate Affair changed to Inside Crime; My Private Life became Pedro Fox at #18 after previously being Murder inc. ; And Murder inc. got a comeback, following the numbering of My Desire at #35.

It is argued that it was the Love Glut that put Fox out of business. Joe Simon said of Victor Fox:

"The man was insane, absolutely insane. He would go off on a speech like, “I’m the King of the Comics, and I’m not playing school here with chalk on the blackboard, I’ve got millions of dollars tied up in this business!…The man was mad.” He was a “short, round, nattily dressed man in his late forties, with a rasping voice that would shrill to frightening crescendos when he was excited. And he was excited often."

Like the EC chaps, Will Eisner also drew Fox under a pseudonym, Vincent Reynard. This was in his 1986 book The Dreamer and accounted for Fox's earlier bandwagon jumping when he published an imitation of Superman , titled Wonderman (here changed to Heroman, just to help muddle our memories forever) and got thoroughly sued for it.

He's the sort of publisher that if it wasn't one thing that put him out of business it would have been another.

Ken Quattro's detailed account of DC vs Victor Fox

2011-12-12T19:29:00.003-05:00

The publisher of the Dapper John App is Panel Nine, an imprint (do we say imprint when talking of apps?) of iEnglish.com operating out of Tokyo. The guy behind that is Russell Willis. Russell goes all the way back to the Brit comics small press of the early 1980s. In fact, one of his publications was obliquely mentioned in the Big Alec book in the How To be an Artist chapter. He had interviewed David Lloyd in the first issue of his little journal Infinity. I picked a fight over something David said and the argument continued in each issue of the magazine after that. I was argumentative in those days. Russell was interviewed at DownTheTubes.net in Sept 2008 when he released a nostalgic ninth issue of Infinity, being the one that had remained unpublished since 1985, containing final salvos from both Campbell and Lloyd. Some of his lines in the interview take me back to the ramshackle but vital small press days.

"The first issue was 40 copies, photocopied then stapled on the steps of Central Hall where the Westminster Comic Marts took place. I met a brash, young Warren Ellis (while) stapling on those steps.

(image from the 1993 Fantagraphics intro pages, contained on the app, see yesterday)

2011-12-11T21:02:00.004-05:00

And here it is! This exists only as an app! Whatever an app is. This is one of my earliest books. It was last published all in one place in 1993. All the extras take the page count up to twice the original!

Itunes USA*******UK******Australia

In the Days of the Ace Rock'n'Roll Club was a book, or an ongoing series of 7-page stories which I drew between March 1978 and March 1979. The stories interlocked in various ways, with characters from one piece showing up in another. The 'arc', as we say nowadays, came to a logical conclusion after the eighth story, by which time Dapper John had emerged as the main character. A proto-Alec MacGarry appears as the second key character. It was in these pages that I started to get the idea of using autobiography as a starting point for a big serious book.

(The artistic observer might notice that this is where I started all that experimentation with the zip-a-tones.)

I had self-published an earlier book in 1975 (when I was 19) and with that I had realized the hard fact that I knew no way of selling 500 copies of a book. Unwilling to venture into that again, but still clinging to the notion that I was a comics author of some merit, the completely finished art for the ACE book sat on the floor of my Southend bedsit in a neatly folded bright blue plastic laundry bag for the next three years. The parts first saw the light of day in the years 1982-83, in random sequence, in a variety of small press photocopied booklets. Alan Moore was writing a review column (in addition to his many more important endeavors) in 1983 and he reviewed one of these little chapters. This was the first contact between me and Alan, and well, you know where that led.

The package contains, in addition to the core stories, all the relevant small press covers, with their hand-colouring, the Alan Moore review in full, a couple of 7-page tangent stories, all the extra introductory pages in comics form both for the Harrier 1988 printing (cover and six pages- never reprinted), the Fantagraphics 1993 collected edition (cover and three pages, which was the last time I ever drew Dapper John until the cover for the App above), a wise introduction by me at the front and a decent interview with me at the back in which my editor attempts to extract exactly what that 'Rock'n'roll' thing was all about. There is a selection of old photos and news cuttings relating to the subject, with a running humorous commentary by me. And the interview is adorned with some previously unseen pieces of painted colour art. My editor was so pleased with all the extra stuff I supplied that he bought me an ipad! Now I can find out what an app is. When I get the thing off my daughter Erin.

2011-12-10T01:00:00.004-05:00

BBC video interview with Art Spiegelman, in Gosh comics in Soho, London.

"Never mind Metamaus, who gives a brass razoo about that? No this is the important one here, this Alec." (points)

"You mean this one?" (points)

"Yup, that's the one. that Campbell, he's the bear's spectacles"

"You've never given me a bum steer before, Artie, so I'll just grab a copy." (grabs with both hands)
"You'll thank me"

2011-12-08T16:46:00.001-05:00

They're almost here.

***************
When Freud met Bacon: British postwar painters – in pictures

A new exhibition, The Mystery of Appearance: Conversations Between Ten British Postwar Painters, examines the influence on their work of the personal relationships between artists ranging from Freud to Bacon to Hockney. Here, curator Catherine Lampert introduces some of the key works from the show. At the Haunch of Venison gallery in London until 18 February 2012

It's just comics- part 13

2011-12-07T16:03:00.002-05:00

This time around, I'm analyzing the bejesus out another whole romance comic. It's a fable on a grand scale, by which I mean it isn't the complicated life made simple, a shepherd and nymph, a tortoise and hare, though one of these animals gets a passing mention. This appeared the same month as the previous, in a different one of Quality's 14 romance titles. It could well be another piece from the anonymous writer I looked at last time, because this one also sent me on a search. He may even have walked in with both scripts on the same day. If he wrote more, I haven't found them yet, but it would be nice to do so. The penciller and inker appear to be the same too, Sam Citron (?) and the 'tidy hair' inker, though he isn't given a lot of hair to work with in this one. The story is titled 'Turmoil.' Untypically, it's written in the third person.

Franklin Pierce is in the doldrums.

Heart Throbs #7 Aug 1950, lead story, 9 pages.

We get a bunch of financial-world references: "International Reaper... General Dyes... United Communications... I've got a finger in every one. I can't lose, can I, Hughes?" he laments to his personal secretary,
"I don't understand, sir. Your investments are very sensibly distributed."
Pierce gets all the classical allusions out in one rush: "I've tried to lose, but I can't! I've got the Midas touch! I'm a tin-horn Croesus turning to yellow gold against my will. I'm like the tortoise who died of shame because his shell was studded with jewels."

(I did a quick search and found: the Indian moral tale of the Sadhu and the tortoise, here compressed to a couple hundred words),

"What kind of king am I? I have all the wealth and power any king can crave. Every pleasure and comfort is mine, yet I feel alone and lonely. Friends, I have none! I cannot trust my ministers and courtiers. All are crooked and double faced. I need a friend close to me." The king summoned his advsiors and sent them to find a certain honest man...
“Most revered sage, are you Sadhu Shubhananda?" The Sadhu slightly nodded his head. The ministers told him: "Kindly, know that the king has sent us to call you to his palace. He wants you to be his friend and trustworthy companion. The King offers you all his possessions, his wealth, his comforts, his pleasures”
"Do you see that tortoise over there, so still, so quiet? This tortoise, though so quiet, and so still, is fully alive, and enjoying the sun, the water, the nights and days. It's free. Has the King any such tortoise in his palace?"
"Oh, yes!" The envoys replied, "The King has a big tortoise like this in his room. It is studded with gold, diamonds, pearls and precious gems. It’s worth a fortune."
"Hmmm! Now, tell me," asked the Sadhu: "Do you think that this tortoise over here would like to exchange places with that tortoise in the King's palace?"
There was a long silence.

After another dreary day on Wall Street, Franklin Pierce heads for home.

He confides in his friend Dr. Lister:

He tells Lister he wants to find a simpler life.

"Socrates, Plato, Aristotle," says Dr. Lister, "Great guys, all of them. They spurned material things and wove a philosophy of simplicity that lives till this day."
And then there is Donna, first appearing at the bottom of page 3 of her own story:

"He kissed her, searching desperately for a spark of compassion and sympathy, but he found only a coldly yielding body built around a core of tempered steel."

The circular panel is a '40s thing that is fast going out of style by this time, but the artist can't pass up the chance to do this little trick he's thought of, in which the embracing couple form a heart-shape. Note also how the artist gives us quite a different treatment of the appearance and body language of Donna, agressive and decisive, in comparison to Helen, dignified but uncertain, in the previous story.

Come away with me and leave all this behind, he says. Not on your Nelly Duff, she replies, or words to that effect. The millionaire gives Donna the whole kit and kaboodle. Then he parks the car at a desolate strip of beach

He arranges the telltale clothes and walks off along the beach. The moon looks like it's in the script. Identifiable with the feminine principle, it emphatically rises on a new era in the Pierce fortunes:

Donna takes over from here.

Nothing short of the ruination of everybody else will make her happy.

Her rapacious actions create tremors in the world's money markets.

"Like a stalking panther, beautiful, graceful, deadly, she took the diamond studded, continental society by storm." She's going to have her turtle and eat it too. In Paris she finds herself introduced to the one industrial magnate she hasn't been able to topple.

Edward Dubois. She gives him the sweet talk, and the glad eye, and when the sweet talking's done,

She tells him that she'll never forget the amazing stories he told her about his intriguing financial manipulations. and how she envies a man of his cunning. Then she nips down to the telegram office. "there will be an extra charge for the coded message," the clerk tells her. And the deed is done.

Dubois pulls out a pistol and is seized by the gendarmes just as he is about to murder the American financier.

The bystanders at the airport shun her. Her reputation has preceded her like a consuming fire of suspicion and disgust. When she gets home, everything is falling apart:

Even Hughes is packing his bags.

'I have everything I can ever want! I'm rich, rich, rich!'

Tormeneted by her reverie, Donna faints, and in a moment of touching theatricality, Franklin, waiting in the wings, steps from behind the curtain to catch her. She has come to realize that her love for him is more important than all the other baloney. As with the other story, there was an obligatory clinch, but again early in the piece instead of here at the resolution. I find myself moved by this guy's faith in Donna, based on nothing that is mentioned in the story, and I like the fact that this isn't spelled out.

Again with the moon. It emphatically descends as together they disappear along the beach where before he had done it alone.

'They walked away into the night, leaving behind them turmoil and confusion, knowing that somehow a pattern of new life would form from the shambles of the past.'

The story in full at the Digital Comics Museum

2011-12-06T17:24:00.000-05:00

Coming to a seafront near you.

2011-12-06T17:13:00.002-05:00

In conversation: Neil Gaiman talks to Shaun Tan

NG: Your stuff is always laconic. One of the things I love about it is that a picture is worth a thousand words and you make your pictures work very hard.

ST: The text illustrates the pictures – it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do so it's easier to edit words – I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures. I always overwrite, really awful, long bits of script and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does I feel that that's a successful story. I don't know if that's an important principle but it's helped me structure things.

2011-12-06T16:47:00.004-05:00

Announcement. I only have half an idea how the awards work at the annual comics festival of Angouleme. I think they have a long list of about fifty books, from which half a dozen are selected for award. Anyhoo, Alec: Integrale, published by Ca et La is on the list.

And it looks like I'm going to be there! I have no idea about any of it, but wee Paul Gravett has been saying he'll be interviewing me, so it seems to be official. I mean, I've booked a flight, just don't expect me to know where you can find me. Tell me in comments if you know any more than I do. I'll be showing my face in Paris also. I'll update as the fog clears.

It's just comics- part 12

2011-12-05T22:42:00.006-05:00

In the previous chapter of this endless disquisition on the subject of the 1950s ROMANCE comic book, by which it is my plan to alienate all my readers, I dwelt specifically on the product of the publisher Quality. This time I'm examining a single story at some length. It was published by Quality in August 1950. It caught my eye because the protagonist, Helen, is a magistrate. It's the only time I've ever seen such a thing in a romance comic.

Love Confessions #6 Aug 1950, lead story, 9 pages

Trina Robbins in A Century Of Women Cartoonists, wrote about romance comic books: "With few exceptions, the stories in these books were hackneyed and cliched, but the art was often stylish and elegant..." The problem with that statement is that it implies that other kinds of comic book are not also hackneyed and cliched. Trina probably recognises this, but her real problem is, I would guess, the one that James Romberger spells out when reviewing the Alex Toth book I wrote about here in part 3:

"the romance comics do give the artist a chance to draw a range of emotions and choreograph more intimate stagings, but they are also intended to program young girls to be subservient. In most cases, it is only that Toth drew these stories that elevates them from a justified place in the dustbin of comics history."

It makes no sense to attribute a programming 'intention' to comic books when it was already being done, neither consciously nor cynically, by the state, the church and social history. A cheap commercial artifact such as a comic book can hardly have any interest in changing the world. Its only interest is in selling enough copies to come out again next month. I'll come back to the business of changing the world before I'm finished here today.

First let's look at this notion, common to both quotations above, that you can separate everything else from the 'story.' There really are only a handful of story archetypes, or of romance story archetypes (and a handful of western stories, of horror, etc) and what you are reading is a performance of one of them. To draw a comparison, the tango is one dance, but every performance of it is unique (and both the archetype and the performance are a 'dance'). The tango may be different from a waltz, a quadrille or a four hand reel. As different as each performance of one of these may be from every other performance of it, each ends in its prescribed way, bar mishap. As an example, lest I'm not making myself clear, I see there is a new performance of Spiderman on film. You already know the story. Since the last time they performed it was only ten years ago, I cannot imagine that anybody half interested could not already know it.

So, the story is the abstract of how it started, who did what, and how it ended. Everything on the page, and things not on the page including the writer's instructions to the artist, comprise the performance. The story may already exist somewhere else, in a movie or in prose in a pulp or a slick magazine. Be that as it may, that's one performance and this is another. If you go and tell it later over the dinner table, then that's another performance again, and yours could be better than all the others.

Let's look at this one. I do not know who wrote it and probably never will. The lettering is by the Leroy mechanical process, but I'm thinking it wasn't put on the page pre-artwork in the EC manner, based on looking hard and comparing things. Judging by comparisons with other work not too distant in time and place I'm guessing the pencilling is by Sam Citron, an artist who earlier worked on Superman. Inking is by the 'tidy hair' inker mentioned in the previous instalment. The hair sits on the heads better here because the pencilling is superior. Here's a close up.

This is Wade, the District Attorney. That's him entering from the left in the splash panel spread showing a crucial scene from later in the story. Otherwise, here he is in the opening scene stating the argument. Is Helen to be a magistrate or a woman? And if she decides to be the latter, will she give him a tumble? She takes it under advisement.

Here she is in the courtroom being swayed by the boyish charms of a likely lad, a larrikin, a cheeky charlie.

She lets the guy off but then can't shake the thought that she did it for womanly reasons.

One of the set-pieces of the romance genre is the scene in the girl's bedroom in which she takes stock of the situation. In this scene she is invariably dressed in her smalls and is in a relaxed position. It's usually only one panel and it calls for a nicely observed figure study. There was a period when it was suggested that this is because comic artists are mostly male and they like drawing this sort of thing. That period was the one in which women weren't about to let anybody get away with anything.

So Helen reads a book to get her mind off the cheeky charlie. I'll come back to this panel before I'm done.

Next day, the crafty character invades her chambers. She tries to close the door on him, but he forces his way in.

There is authority in the drawings of Helen. We never for a minute think that the artist has imported a photographic reference. In fact he has probably used a number of stills of an actress from a single film in order to get such impeccable consistency. The challenge is to make it all look seamless.

Subtleties of body language make the difference between a good romance comic and a dull one. Notice the instinctive way she draws her arm across in front of her in the above. Another important set-piece is, of course, the clinch. This is not an easy thing to draw, and this artist shows skill in the way he has his figures coming at oblique angles to each other through, rather than across, the pictorial space. The crushed curls of hair are nicely observed. But storywise, this clinch represents a moment of panic, of danger, rather than emotional resolution.

Now she can't help herself and has been drawn into his web. In the romance comic, so much happens at close personal quarters that the artist must be on the lookout for a chance to get a full figure into a picture (see elsewhere, my 'feet rule'). He takes it here, getting out of the car, and has to extend the picture vertically at left to make it work (one of the reasons I deduce that the pages weren't pre-lettered).

Chuck takes Helen to a party, but it turns out to be the house party of a hoodlum.

Now she knows things have got out of control

She resolves to break off this association with Chuck, but next day, before she can tell him, he phones to say he's on his way round. He arrives with the whole gang in tow.

She realises too late that she has been used. There's been a hold-up and she's to be the alibi.

Suddenly there's a knock at the door. It's Wade and two detectives. She courageously identifies the villains, knowing they have guns trained on her.

All Hell breaks loose and Helen gets winged.

It's a nice touch that the piece doesn't end with an obligatory clinch, leaving the uncomfortable one above, and as presaged in the splash panel, the only one in the story. However, in the final panel Helen bows to male superiority, a 1950s thing that has all but died out in our time.

At this stage I'm thinking, you guys have gone to a lot of effort to make the protagonist of this story a very impressive figure for a comic book character, too much to leave her with that last bit of dialogue. I did not expect 'That rare woman, who has won acclaim in a man's world', to cave so easily. The 'performance' leads the reader of 2011 to expect a better resolution than the 'story' is obliged to deliver. You could delete everything after "I've been a fool" and the comic, in our eyes, would be much better for it. One could speculate that it was added in editorially; in virtually every book I've done with a big publisher there's been a line or two added in that I feel changed the meaning of something I wrote. Even The Fate Of The Artist has got a change I wasn't happy about after I discovered it (quite apart from the funny one I have talked about). It's what happens. But that's pointless speculation; the writer would presumably have wanted to sell another performance the following week. Let's just accept that he took the job and saw it through.

I kept returning to this comic (the complete thing is here, by the way at the Digital Comics Museum.), looking at it hard and thinking how easily it could have been a great piece of work rather than one that gave up at the final hurdle. Then I fastened on the seventh panel above, the one in which she is reading while lying down, the box of chocolates to one side. The book is a legal one, with the title is on the back cover. Perhaps the writer instructed the artist to make sure he got that title on there, and the artist had already composed his picture when he remembered the instruction so he stuck the title illogically on the back cover. 'Cady on Torts.'

I looked up Wikipedia. Daniel Cady was a Justice of The New York Supreme Court in the mid-1800s. He once served on a land dispute case with Abraham Lincoln. But he is perhaps best remembered for being the father of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an important leading figure of the early Women's Rights movement. I located her autobiography at Google Books. There follows a passage from it.

Eighty years and more: reminiscences, 1915-1897. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published by T. Fisher Unwin, 1898
(page 31)

As my father's office joined the house, I spent there much of my time, when out of school, listening to the clients stating their cases, talking with the students, and reading the laws in regard to woman. In our Scotch neighborhood many men still retained the old feudal ideas of women and property. Fathers, at their death, would will the bulk of their property to the eldest son, with the proviso that the mother was to have a home with him. hence it was not unusual for the mother, who had brought all the property into the family, to be made an unhappy dependent on the bounty of an uncongenial daughter-in-law and a dissipated son. The tears and complaints of the women who came to my father for legal advice touched my heart and early drew my attention to the injustice and cruelty of the laws. As the practice of the law was my father's business, I could not exactly understand why he could not alleviate the sufferings of these women. So, in order to enlighten me, he would take down his books and show me the inexorable statutes.

So when, from time to time, my attention was called to these odious laws, I would mark them with a pencil, and becoming more and more convinced of the necessity of taking some active measures against these unjust provisions, I resolved to seize upon the first opportunity, when alone in the office, to cut every one of them out of the books; supposing my father and his library were the beginning and end of the law. However, this mutilation of his volumes was never accomplished...

Without letting me know that he had discovered my secret, he explained to me one evening how laws were made."When you are grown up, and able to prepare a speech," said he, "you must go down to Albany and talk to the legislators; tell them all you have seen in this office- the sufferings of these Scotchwomen, robbed of their inheritance and left dependent on their unworthy sons, and, if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be a dead letter." Thus was the future object of my life foreshadowed and my duty plainly outlined by him who was most opposed to my public career when, in due time, I entered upon it.

The writer of the comic may have just picked 'Cady' off a shelf of lawbooks. Perhaps he didn't send me to find the above, and it's all a coincidence.

Here's another. While I was writing the above, the episode of Two and Half Men, which I consider a very well written sitcom, in which Charlie is introduced to a lady judge came up as a repeat. Charlie tries to impress her but makes a mess of it. Three times he leaves a voice message for her. Then, having failed, he goes out on a bender. Arrested for being drunk and disorderly, he is brought before the judge, who happens to be Judge Linda. 'Please tell me you did not get yourself arrested just so you can see me?' she asks in disbelief. Charlie thinks about that for an instant and says 'ummm... you got me.' "Will the accused please approach the bench'. So he does, whereupon the judge says she'll call him and then gives Charlie a $500 fine. I mention this anecdote to show that the false dilemma is no longer cited. You can be both a judge and a woman. You can even find a soft spot for the accused without it being a betrayal of your profession. Dramatically speaking I mean. I can't guarantee you won't get hauled over the coals by the judicial conduct commission.

2011-12-03T19:48:00.002-05:00

I haven't had a new book out this year, but things have moved rather quickly on an unexpected little item.

2011-12-03T19:32:00.002-05:00

The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 2: The Occupy Movement, Frank Miller, and Politics

Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I’ve barely looked at for the past twenty years. I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time. Since I don’t have anything to do with the comics industry, I don’t have anything to do with the people in it. I heard about the latest outpourings regarding the Occupy movement. It’s about what I’d expect from him. It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say centre-right. That would be as far towards the liberal end of the spectrum as they would go..."

2011-12-03T02:06:00.002-05:00

A year of beautiful books
This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks.

Publishers have responded by building their marketing strategies around form rather than content. The Everyman Library, which is coming up to the 20th anniversary of its modern relaunch, makes much of its books' elegant two-colour case stamping, silk ribbon markers and "European-style" half-round spines. In 2009, to celebrate its 80th birthday, Faber republished a collection of its classic poetry hardbacks illustrated with exquisite wood and lino cuts by contemporary artists. Not to be outdone, Penguin will next year be reissuing 100 classic novels in its revamped English Library series in what its press release describes as "readers' editions". What other sort could there be, you might wonder? The press release elaborates that these will be "books you will want to collect and share, admire and hold; books that celebrate the pure pleasure of reading".

It's just comics- part 11

2011-12-02T02:48:00.006-05:00

continuing my informal look at ROMANCE comics

It took me a while to warm to the romances of the publisher Quality Comics, which is odd as I would now say that the better ones are among the best that ever were. You can find a large number to read at the Digital comics Museum and a timeline history of the company here. The thing that kept me cool about them was the veneer of slickness that is spread over all the stories, a barrier against my search for the thumbprints of individual artists and writers that is largely what motivates me to rake through the old stuff. I enjoy seeking out my artistic forebears and seeing how they lived and worked, and observing their movements in their striving to make a living in this cockeyed medium I have made my home. Those stories have for a long time been of more interest to me than the ones in the four-colour pages.

Diary Loves #5, May 1950

Quality launched 14 romance titles amounting to a total of 83 issues published between August 1949 and October 1950, at which point everything temporarily collapsed because of what Michelle Nolan, in her excellent Love on the Racks: a history of American Romance comics, calls the Love Glut. I don't have access to every single one of them, but I'll stick my neck out on a generalization and and say that in the 350 stories approximately that appeared therein, not a single one carried a writer or artist credit. This is odd, because the company showed credits in, for example, its Modern Comics in 1948 (to refer to one I've looked at recently), where it enjoys showing off ts range of very individualistic talents. This is even more the case a bit further back, in Police Comics #1 of 1941, in which all eleven stories have a signature, even if one or two of them are pseudonyms. However, by the time of the romance books there seems to be a policy at Quality of leaving out the signatures. (there was one artist in the seven year span of these books who signed his name, but let's ignore that anomaly for now)

I don't think an editorial entity sets out to manufacture a 'house style', but it is likely to have a picture in its head of the ideal work, which may look more or less like the best one of recent times or it might even look like one that doesn't exist yet, which would attribute to the editorial entity some artistic vision. Such an imaginary construct might consist of the best quality of each of the available talents. The idea is not new. In ancient times, Lucian imagined the perfect female statue made up of the best qualities of other known statues. The obvious problem with this is that the personalities of the various artists, their quirks and oddities and peculiar poise, the things I said I was looking for above, are carpeted over.

Before even getting to the part that involves the qualities of this or that artist, a house style can start with the simplest considerations; let's say a concept of graphic decorum that requires margins and gutters to have the manicured edges of a bowling lawn. This is Carmine Infantino, from the recently posted archive interview at the Comics Journal:

The following summer I got a job over at Quality Comics. That was the Ray, Black Condor, and that group. My job was to erase pages and white out any lines — Busy Arnold, the owner, didn’t like any little black lines sticking outside of panels. He had a fetish about it.

Quality's line-up of talent at different times included some of the top guys in the business whose work was always immediately recognisable to those interested in such things: Will Eisner, Jack Cole, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Paul Gustavson, and others including Bill Ward. Ward was an all-round artist who anonymously drew a lot of the action series Blackhawk when it became more than Crandall could handle:

"However, things worked out great. Reed Crandall was given (Blackhawk in) Military, changed now to Modern Comics, and I was given the Blackhawk book. Unfortunately, there was one difference for us: We were just to do penciling – inkers were to take over from there.
A few words about "inkers." I’ve always contended, perhaps unfairly, that an inker was an artist that couldn’t handle a strip on his own, that all he had to do was go over the pencil lines with a brush. I was very disappointed with the way my Blackhawks turned out. They weren’t nearly as good as the complete jobs I’d done before the war.
If it affected me, it affected Reed Crandall far more. Never again was he to create the classic Blackhawks that he did in 1941-42. His bold yet simple inking style was lost as the inkers butchered his penciling. He and I were destined to go on doing Blackhawk this way for 7 years." (from an autobiographical account)

Ward was also top-notch in the humorous style. His strip Torchy, which started appearing in Modern comics in 1946, was a very striking piece of work. These were days when comics were funny and filled with characters like Berp the Twerp and Granny Gumshoe. Torchy was a blonde who was dumb in the way of blondes back then, but who always somehow came out on top in whatever situation she found herself in. Being stylistically outre seems to have been the goal in the humorous stuff of the late '40s.

Modern Comics #63, July 1947

Torchy is elongated like a Barby doll and looks like she's going to be made of the same stiff plastic, but somehow Ward gets in little observational details that make his female figures very appealing. Torchy was to get her own comic book:

"Then disaster struck, the greatest disappointment of my career. I had finished the cover and the lead story for issue No. 1 when George Brenner phoned and told me they were taking me off Torchy! Romance comics had come on the scene at the same time and they were instantly best sellers. None of the other artists, due to the fact they had had no experience doing women, could handle it – it had to be me. They planned on a bunch of books, and I was to do the covers and lead stories. It meant lots more money for me, but I was furious!
I phoned Busy and pleaded with him that Torchy was my baby. I just wouldn’t turn her over to another artist. We ended up with a compromise. If I could find the time, he would let me do as many of the covers as I could manage, plus the same with the lead stories.

Thus, since Ward was already drawing a female character he was made the mainstay of the Quality romance comics, doing the covers and lead stories in all the books at first. This is the first page of the first story (the scan looks like it's been tweaked to bring out the colour contrasts):

Heart Throbs #1, Aug 1949

As I said in an earlier post, they got the idea of doing romance comics from the romance pulps, but it took a while to figure out what a romance story was supposed to look like when it was in a comic, and even who the readers were supposed to be. By the time of this later example, also by Ward, you can see that they were getting a clearer idea about it.

Campus Loves #2, Feb 1950

Within a couple of years Ward, ironically, was being used as an inker on the romances, bringing the work of diparate pencillers closer together. At least that seems to be the case. Nobody seems to know for sure. The panel at the top of this post is from a story posited to be inked by Ward over Sid Greene (?) pencils. Question marks appear after all such guesses. A house style has been successfully created. You can figure out how it happens. The editor could combine his best penciller, penciller A1 with inker A1, but the company, having put itself in the position of having to deliver an implausibly large number of comic books, reasons that it would be something of a waste to have the best people going over the top of each other. It would make more sense to have Penciller A1 combined with Inker A2, and inker A1 working over penciller A2. Inker A2, after working over the excellent pencils of penciller A1 for six months, it's now felt that he may have picked up enough of A1 's stylistic tricks to reproduce them hismself. Let's move inker A2 up to pencilling, and have inker B3 go over him. After a couple of years of this kind of thinking, you can imagine that all the personal qualities would have been evened out. But what if your people are so good that even inker B3 would be top at any other company? Imagine the overall level of slickness that could be achieved. This is Quality Comics at its organisational peak at the end of 1950.

If I had to describe the Quality style at that time, I would say that its hallmarks are, to begin with, the lettering, mechanical Leroy lettering for a short time, with the nice touch of lower case in the captions (I mentioned this earlier in connection with a different publisher. I suspect it may have started at Quality);

Hollywood Secrets #5, Jul 1950

The colouring is distinctive too. I wonder if this is due to a particular printer used by Quality. Red often sits nicely on the page without looking gaudy, and the paper itself often appears to have a cool greyness about it. If you look again at the panel at top, there are two shades of red with a cool green between them, which strike me as a tasteful Quality effect. And I see the same agreeableness in this Lady Luck page form 1945, from a handful of Klaus Nordling stories posted by Ger Apeldoorn last week.

There was also a fetish among the Quality artists for elaborately rendered hair, which you can see in the glossy blonde hair of the standing figure of Torchy in the second illo above, and in the following, for which I have notated a recurring inker named 'tidy hair inker'. (these are two particularly exaggerated examples to make my point)

Campus Loves #4, Jun 1950

Hollywood Secrets #6, Sept 1950

In fact, when they draw for other publishers they take the hair with them, it seems. This is Fred Guardineer drawing for Eastern Color. His credits at Quality are usually given as ending in 1944, but i wonder if he's not 'tidy hair inker', assigned at one time or another to cover just about every penciller in the stable during 1949/50.

Movie Love #4, Aug 1950, (Eastern Color)

Romance comics are still inadequately catalogued. I can open up file after file at the Grand Comics Database and it's all just story title and then question marks for all the creative people. Some 26 artists names have been posited for half of the stories in that first year of Quality romance. After that it gets harder still. Jim Vadeboncoeur has done a lot of work recently to put some names in place and Ger Appeldoorn is to be applauded for identifying a number of stories attributable to a young Gene Colan. There's one 1953 story for which three experts have each attributed a different penciller, which in my experience usually indicates a new artist swiping figures from a number of places to construct his story.
Next up I'll examine a single story that I think is rather good.

2011-11-30T19:23:00.003-05:00

Nobel author Gabriel García Márquez wins 17-year legal fight over murder classic
Colombian court rules against man who claimed author used his life story for main character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

...In its ruling on Tuesday, the court agreed. "Hundreds of literary, artistic, and cinematographic works have had as their central story facts from real life, which have been adapted to the creator's perspective, without this being an impediment to [the author's right] to claim economic rights over them."
The court also dismissed Palencia's demand to be credited as a co-author. "Mr Miguel Reyes Palencia could never have told the story as the writer Gabriel García Márquez did, and could never have employed the literary language that was actually used. The work is characterised by its originality."

2011-11-28T20:44:00.002-05:00

Obituary of Gerald Laing, one of Britain's best-known pop artists of the 1960s

His painting, still based on photographs, developed a sour edge during the Iraq war in studies of atrocities such as Abu Ghraib, illustrated by a toothpaste advertisement model taking the place of the grinning female soldier in a scene of torture. It did not impress the media. He professed himself mildly embittered by the absence of critical esteem in his later years, and began to despise the whole notion of the avant garde.

2011-11-28T18:01:00.003-05:00

Alec reviewed on the tv at France24.com. Augustin Trapenar on 'le roman graphique avec deux livres monstrueux', including Alec par Edee Combelle. And they show some of my plonches.

Over there they've titled it 'Alec: Integrale", I guess because 'The Years have pants' doesn't mean anything in French.

**************
Pippa Middleton and the survival of the preposterous publisher's advance

Times are tough in the book trade. But some star-dusted projects can still apparently attract serious money. Pippa Middleton, sister to Kate, party planner – and most recently, lucky recipient of a reported £400,000 book deal from Penguin's commercial imprint, Michael Joseph.
The title? How to Be the Perfect Party Hostess.

2011-11-11T19:38:00.002-05:00

At comicartfans.com, Sven-Hendryk Magotsch is showing a sketch I did for him at the front of his copy of the big Alec book. I couldn't figure out what the hell this was at first, whether the picture on the wall is a glued in original from elsewhere, but it's just the regular book. He must have paid me to get me to do that much work on it, just in case anybody else is thinking of asking.

2011-11-10T00:41:00.001-05:00

Here's a blast from the past. From the 1980s small press scene in fact.

Battle Of The Eyes burnt briefly but brilliantly in 1985 as an ‘ideologically insane’ post-punk art-gang, whose extreme flagship tabloid, sneeringly named Nyak-Nyak!, trampled borders between the trash culture of hot rods, monsters and comics, and the British music scene from which the trio sprang.

Paul Gravett is telling us that they're back together:

The results were their first Predatory Life images about the fight for survival, one showing a two-headed turtle locked against a mutated baboon, another a horned hyena cackling amidst radioactive devastation.

it's just comics- part 10

2011-11-08T16:41:00.000-05:00

In Part 4 I wrote about the swift rise of the romance comics genre: "By the middle of 1949 things were building to a glut," with the peak happening around Dec '49/Jan '50. That makes it sound like they were throwing every kind of junk into the market, but in fact one of the most beautiful looking comic books I have ever seen came out at the peak of this glut.

It was published by St John (last seen here in Part 6), and titled Adventures in Romance. It was cover dated Nov 1949. A second issue with the title changed to Spectacular Adventures had the date Feb 1950 and then that was the end of it. The comic was deliberately different, beginning with its slightly larger format (I've only seen it online, so i'm quoting the historical record on that account) and promising on its contents page: "Thrilling action, good-humored comedy, and heart-warming romance, are combined for the first time in this brand new, exciting magazine." the cover and lead story were drawn by Warren King, an artist who I think swiftly 'moved up' to doing paperback book covers

The knockout feature in this comic is that, as well as having art spilling out into the margins of the pages, each of the stories opens with a double page spread:

Adventures in Romance #1- Nov 1949

I love the fresh, bright and healthy quality that emanates from King's artwork.

Note also that the stories are not told in the first person, which would become de rigeur in the romance books.

Of the other three stories, one is a 'western-romance', a genre hybrid that had a short popularity, another is a light comedy and a third has a 17th century historical setting. When the smoke cleared after the glut, this kind of variation became rare. Of these other three stories, two 8-pagers were drawn by Leonard Starr, last seen in this series of posts doing assignments for Simon and Kirby earlier in 1949. In a period when most comic book stories were drawn anonymously, the artists have signed their names proudly in this book.

I'd love to see the second issue, in which Starr is in Caniff territory with a 20-page(!!) story titled China Bombshell. The other artistic contributor is Frank Bolle who I think nowadays is to be found drawing Apartment 3-G in the newspapers. The Grand Comics database gives the writing of this one to Dana Dutch. Furthermore, in a time when so many of these publishers were resorting to the formalities of Leroy mechanical lettering (if you look back over these posts you'll see it in the pages from Avon, EC and Famous Funnies. Quality were also using it), look at how smart the calligraphy is in this story. Perhaps the artist did it himself, since it is so perfectly integrated into the job as a whole. Look for example at the way the motif of the raised eyebrow in the final panel is inverted in the initial 't' of 'the end' that runs beneath the panel.

I read it and sampled the pages at The Digital Comics Museum, an online site that is a real education in old comics. I salute them! This particular book must have been scanned for a mint copy or somebody knows more about digital restoration than I do. That does not look like 62 year old newsprint. in fact, now that I look again, there are no staples showing in those spreads. Well done, whoever it was!

St John threw another gem into the bubbling glut, and again it only lasted two issues, Oct. and Dec. 1949. this was Hollywood Confessions and its appeal is that it has Joe Kubert all over it. He did the covers, and where he didn't draw some of the stories by himself, he inked over pencils by Joe Giunta and Hy Rosen. the result is a stylistically cohesive and attractive package.
That's the second issue's cover at left. (found at the Grand Comic Book Database, another invaluable source for comic book history.) The idea of a book of romances with a Hollywood angle may even have been Kubert's idea, and he may have put the whole thing together himself too. ( A little later he would be a creative force at St. John, with Tor in the world of 1,000,000 years ago and the very first 3D comic book.) On the other hand, it wasn't to be a unique idea. Quality Comics had two new comics out with Hollywood in the title over the following two months, and neither of them lasted more than six issues.

Hollywood Confessions #1 Oct 1949- art by Kubert

The above sequence is very unusual in a romance book. And the following story's pencilling by Giunta is full of unpretentious charm:

ditto- art by Giunta-Kubert

2011-11-07T02:30:00.003-05:00

Hayley Campbell's at McSweeney's, in their section titled 'OPEN LETTERS TO PEOPLE OR ENTITIES WHO ARE UNLIKELY TO RESPOND'

Dear Sir,

Listen, I know you won’t speak to me but just come over here and let me bend your waxy ear for just a second. Don’t wait for my colleague to come back from lunch so you can ask him about that Green Lantern comic. I work here too.

It's just comics- part 9

2011-11-06T00:07:00.002-05:00

One of my intentions with this series of posts is to look at the other publishers of the early 1950s and see how they matched up to the vaunted EC comics. And there were a hell of a lot of publishers in the game. As already noted, not all the publishers got into ROMANCE, but there were at least 38 that did. I find myself now looking at some of the comics published by Avon.

I'm arriving at subjects by way of random connections rather than any order of importance. I arrived at this one through the clipped loose pages of a story in my files that I find attractive. It's one of a bunch of stories reprinted, in black and white, by Malibu (or a small company of that ilk) in the 1990s.

Realistic Romances #4- Feb 1952

This would have been the original cover of the issue. There tended to be an animal lustfulness about Avon's romances at this time, with people eating each other rather than gazing longingly. At least, that's the impression I'm getting from the handful of issues viewable at the Digital comics Museum. 'Realistic', to judge from some of the stories, means tales of beautiful women falling for gangsters. For example, in #16, the female protagonist of the first story ends up in court, being judged guilty, after a shoot-out at a gas station; the heroine of the second is behind bars after the FBI walk in on the perfume counterfeiting racket; and of the third she's being taken out of a sanatorium after being cured of 'reefer madness.' Years later Avon would lead the way in the modern ROMANCE genre in paperbacks when "in 1972 they put out the first single-title romance to be published as an original paperback" (according to wikipedia... this isn't the sort of thing I would otherwise know). Founded in 1941 as an early publisher of paperbacks, they published a line of comic books between 1945 and the mid-50s, but I'm thinking that, at least as far as the romances go, they weren't weren't quite in step with the rest of the field.

Here's another cover, just to underline the point.

Romantic Love-#13-Nov 1952

The art inside their romance comics often has a rather old fashioned look about it. This didn't occur to me with the story signed by Astarita above because of its World War 2 setting (though that is part of the 'deception', the girl in uniform being a Hollywood actress), some ten years earlier than the publishing date. I looked for some details on the artist at Jerry Bails' who's who of comic books. There I find that Rafael Astarita was born in 1912 and was working in comic books from the beginning (New Comics #1 Dec 35). During the early 1950s he worked mostly for Avon and St John. The dress and mannerisms of his figures suggest a man who would have been fashion-aware in the 1930s rather than the 1950s. But it goes deeper than just the recognizability of period clothes or automobile styling. In the following splash panel, also by Astarita, even the pictorial construction, and the way the eye is lead into the composition, belong to an earlier period.

Intimate Confessions-June (?) 1952

Contrast with this title panel by Alex Toth, an artist 16 years younger and very much a a 1950s guy. You'd swear it was published more than just one year later.

New Romances #17- published by Standard -Alex Toth- Aug 1953

The other artist I associate with Avon is Everett Raymond Kinstler. He was something of a virtuoso with the pen and brush , but while Kinstler was an artist of Toth's generation rather than Astarita's, the trouble with his virtuosity was that it emulated the penmanship of those other guys who owned three names, Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg, artists who made their mark in the opening decades of the twentieth century. He liked to fill his page up with as much ink as possible:

Realistic Romances #16 -June 1954

Sometimes I feel that the self-conscious inkwork has been laid over a rather commonplace comic book conception, as suggested by this face:

Before long Avon had him doing as many covers as they could get out of him for the whole line, of which the romance titles were just a small part:.

Romantic Love-July 1954

Let's get a close-up of the pen technique:

Romantic Love- #20-March 1954

While the jarringly aggressive covers of the earlier phase have gone, still Kinstler is never going for the classic iconic representation of love in these images. There's always some little detail that makes it a specific moment rather than a general expression. Nor is there a sense of narrative. I suppose that the girl in the red dress is inviting the guy in for a coffee rather than telling him never to darken her doorstep again and he's taking it like a trouper. But the pictorial syntax doesn't ask us to care, or at least not in the way it does in the panel by Astarita at the top of this post.

I tend to feel closed out by Kinstler's fussy story art, but I'm drawn to these covers. While they feel like old pulp illustrations that have been unnecessarily coloured in, they do have a muscular and unsentimental simplicity about them.

Realistic Romances- #16- June 1954

After comic books, Kinstler became a celebrated portrait painter and painted many famous Americans. Here's his Richard Nixon.

more portraits by Kinstler at The Greatest American painters gallery.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture - 1942-1962. [Hardcover] (2005)

Amusing postscript:

I.W. was a company whose thing was to reprint comics previously published by other companies, sometimes without permission reportedly. There were so many publishers out of business following the introduction of the Comics Code that they all must have had more important things to worry about. I.W. plied this trade for about five years, 1958-63 (I have one of their Spirit reprints). They put out several issues of Avon's Romance titles, and led off with a more up to date cover, see left,

(circa 1958)

How half the day gets lost

2011-11-03T17:23:00.001-05:00

Iwas listening to a disc of old Artie Shaw radio transcriptions from 1937, including his band's rendition of Raymond Scott's Twilight in Turkey, a piece of ersatz exotica which incorporates that old tune that says: you are in a jokey version of Egypt. You know the one. Sometime it's called 'the snake charmer song.' I thought to myself, did this thing originate with Scott, well known composer of novelties, or is it older? And once I had the thought, I have to go and find out. I tracked it down to an 1895 song titled The Streets of Cairo (link,including sound), written by James Thornton (When you were Sweet Sixteen, My Sweetheart's the man in the moon). Though even at that there seems to be an earlier claim to the tune by Sol Bloom who purportedly put it on at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Anyway, forget all that. while I was looking I found this other thing by Raymond Scott, whose work you must know from a squillion Looney Tunes. It's titled Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies.

It's just comics- part 8

2011-11-02T17:54:00.006-05:00

While looking for those colour Frazetta stories in part 5, I found, right next to the first one, this story drawn by Bill Everett. It solved its narrative problem in the exact same way as the story illustrated by Frazetta in the following issue. The protagonist sees an opportunity to humiliate her rival by causing her to nearly drown, and then decides she is not really evil and has to help rescue the girl. It's getting so that as soon as I see the swimsuits I get a bad feeling.

Personal Love #24 Nov 1953 (link)

But what held my attention long enough to get through it was the thought of Bill Everett, not only moonlighting away from Marvel (probably why he didn't sign it), but doing a love story, even if it was in his element- water. It seemed so unlikely, and yet anybody making a living in comics between 1949 and 1954 could hardly avoid it, so popular was the genre. Everett was there almost at the beginning of comic books, with his Sub-Mariner, and I'm sure he'd rather have been doing that character still. But times were changing. Sub-Mariner was cancelled in 1949 and now it was all all HORROR and CRIME short stories, and of course ROMANCE.

I wondered if he had done more, and in these days every artist has his chronicler. Everett has a whole appreciation society. With regard to our present subject there's a blogger named Doc V. In two posts (one, two) he has accounted for 36 romance stories that Everett drew for Marvel (under its Timely imprint first, then Atlas). Both of these posts are exhaustive epics that scroll down for about three weeks each. And each contains all the pages of a half dozen selected stories. it's a real reading feast, and Doc V's analytical notes are good.

The thing about Everett is that he never slacks off. If he is not enjoying the job, there is no way that you could tell. He goes at every job he has ever drawn with an equal intensity. Everything gets his full attention: foreground, background, skin, clothes, bricks, mortar, leaves, grass.

Love Diary #9- Oct 1950

Love Adventures #9 Feb 1952

Once he got his head down he didn't look up till it was finished. I think this tended to make his work look quite old-fashioned by the mid-1960s. Perhaps an artist with his head down is apt to miss the look of a changing world. But that kind of application often produced results which were grotesque, which made the artist especially right for horror stories. He drew many of these for Marvel in the early '50s. There are several complete stories at comic book attic. Some of them have the obsessive detail of a Hieronymus Bosch:

Venus #17- 1951

In these romance stories that quality is useful when a brooding intensity is required, such as in this story in which a woman ensures that her wheelchair-bound sister remains a prisoner of her disability. "The anguish meter is pushed into the red zone!" yells our host, Doc V. Sometimes with these things I imagine I'm reading a parable, a metaphor for general application in psychological matters. Interestingly, this one was scripted by Carl Wessler, whom I praised highly for a crime story in part 2 of this series of posts. Every now and then in one of these things I get a feeling that a measure of real observation and understanding has gone into it, that somebody is telling me something.

Lovers #51- Sept. 1952

Sub-Mariner #35-Aug 1954
Namor, the Sub-Mariner, was revived in his own series in April 1954, and Everett happily returned to drawing his adventures. It only lasted until October 1955.

When I was about 19 I put my favourite photos of my childhood and my family and friends in an album. I put word balloons coming out of people's mouths and captions and stuck in travel tickets and bits of maps and tv personalities and other circumstantial evidence. And for the frontispiece I cut out a panel of Namor plunging down an elevator shaft, opressive with every brick and wooden plank drawn in. In my teen-age nihilism it seemed to me to encapsulate the trajectory of life. That's it at left. On the flipside of the cutting he's back to fighting a green scaly monster, but hey, I can cut a panel out and imagine it went a different way if I like. who's going to stop me?

It's just comics

For me the sea prince never got out the elevator shaft.

I don't think Everett did either.

Last year Fantagraphics published a monograph on the artist, written by Blake Bell. There's an audio file of a presentation that Blake gave about the artist in Toronto. In it he also interviews Everett's daughter, Wendy, who was 20 when Bill died at the age of 52 in 1973.

It's just comics- part 7

2011-11-01T16:13:00.004-05:00

The Negro Romance mystery received its due coverage in the comics blogosphere a few months back, but I'll do a summary here so it can be a part of my informal survey of ROMANCE comics.

Gerald Early, noted scholar in the field of African American studies (I recognise him from his contributions to Ken Burns great documentary series on the history of Jazz) approaches PBS TV program, The History Detectives, with a curious comic book. It is coverless, but titled on the first page indicia, Negro Romance #2, August 1950, published by Fawcett comics. Growing up in the 1950s, he never saw a comic book about black people and wanted to know more about this comic that he has bought in an online auction. How did it come about? Who were the writer and artist? Were they white or black? On the program, historian Gwen Wright proceeds to track down the story of this comic book, finishing by putting names to its writer and artist. You can see the fifteen minute segment online (scan to the bottom for the complete story 'Possessed' from the comic), and if you don't want to spoil a good detective yarn, then watch that before reading on. It's 'good tv' as they say.

There are thousands of comics for which we don't know who wrote or drew them, particularly ROMANCE comics. Nobody has ever cared enough to look into it. You can see for yourself at the Grand Comic Book Database (even a Simon-Kirby title that I was talking about in part 4 has mostly 'skeleton data only'). It just needed somebody to ask about this particular one. Me, I'd have lobbed the question in among those guys who are interminably writing the history of Fawcett comics in the back pages of Alter Ego magazine (FCA- Fawcett Collectors of America they call themselves). Nowadays you can get to the heart of things overnight on the internet.

But the program must make it look like an investigation. That's their schtick. So first our investigator gets Professor Bill Foster to meet with them at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in Manhattan. Bill's area of study is the depiction of the African American in Comics and popular culture. Here he is when I met with him at one of my favourite bars a few years back, during his visit to Australia. He happily spent the day looking in second hand Brisbane bookshops for things with very embarrassing and racially dodgy titles. I love the way that, in the world of comics, we all know each other.

In the video, Bill creates a picture of the black as depicted in comics in the 1940s and 50s and then, since they need another lead to continue with, he suggests they talk to a romance comics expert. So next they fly Jacque Nodell, romance aficionado, to the Geppi museum in Baltimore. Jacque shows us examples of the genre circa 1950, with some observations about Fawcett's particularities. She talks about the experience on her blog, where she says that they wanted the Geppi location because it has a copy of the 1955 Charlton reprint of Negro Romance. However, they decide to omit their footage they of that, perhaps because it will make Early's copy appear less of a precious artifact, a Maltese Falcon.

The final connection takes them to Shaun Clancy, one of those Fawcett Collectors of America. Clancy has interviewed the editor of this and many other Fawcett titles, Roy Ald, still living at age 90, (said interview still to be published, presumably in Alter Ego?). Ald apparently wrote the comic himself, and has credited, as the artist, one Alvin Holligsworth, a young African American aged 22 in 1950. Gerald Early is visibly moved when Gwen tells him of this. He couldn't have had a better result.

Here are a couple of pages. It's good solid craftsmanship:

Negro Romance #2- August 1950

The series only lasted three issues (cover gallery and note that #2 no longer has 'skeleton data only'). Why it did not go further is beyond my ability to speculate. So far as I can see there is nothing out of the ordinary about the stories, except of course that the characters are uncompromized depictions of black people, which is way out of the ordinary for 1950. And the art as such is not of a sort that it would be collected for itself. Except. That the artist went on to do other things of interest.

Harry Mendryk counts four stories that he drew for Simon and Kirby, though none of these were romances. MensPulpMags.com looks at some illustrations he drew for that field.

negroartist.com has a big selection of stuff, though it's all very low res. he appears to have drawn some newpaper strips though I have no information apart from the observation that by this time he had developed a considerably more sophisticated style:

He became a fine painter

And he appears to have been very outspoken:

Of one subject he painted, an African Jesus Christ, he told Ebony magazine in 1971, "I have always felt that Christ was a Black man," and said the subject represented a "philosophical symbol of any of the modern prophets who have been trying to show us the right way. To me, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such prophets." (wikipedia)

From 1980 until retiring in 1998 Hollingsworth taught art as a professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He died in 2000.

thanks to michael in comments yesterday for linking me to the video.
more romances still in my drafts folder

2011-10-31T17:39:00.006-05:00

The interview that Gary Groth was going to do with Robert Crumb at the Graphic festival in Sydney, has been done by phone and put online instead. Groth was a guest of Graphic the previous year.

GARY GROTH: Do you have any regrets about not going to Australia?

R. CRUMB: Well, I didn’t until you told me that the streets were full of Crumb girls. [Laughter.]

Groth: Which they are.

Crumb: That’s when I started regretting it. [Groth laughs.] That’s about it. Otherwise, I didn’t want to go that badly. I wouldn’t have even thought of going at all if Jordan Verzar had just asked me outright, but when he sent me those photos — that was it.

Jordan showed me those photos on his iphone in Tasmania in January when we took the Neil reading down to the Mona Foma festival. I laughed very hard. He had hired a number of models in the shape of the girls that Crumb likes to draw and did a photo-shoot to persuade the artist to come over. It was all very witty and done just right.

Since I wasn't blogging in January, here's a photo from Mona Foma (more here):

2011-10-31T05:47:00.003-05:00

How the Joy of Sex was illustrated
By Cordelia Hebblethwaite BBC

"There was some difficulty finding a workable Plan B. As the project approached a dead-end, it was the book's other illustrator, Charles Raymond - responsible for the colour artwork - who came to the rescue. He volunteered to do the modelling himself, with his German wife, Edeltraud.

Chris Foss has not looked at the original black and white illustrations he did for the book for almost 30 years. Snapping open a sturdy little grey suitcase, he starts to root through.
What does he attribute the book's success to?
He stops and lingers on an image of Charles and Edeltraud, stretched out post-coitally on a rug.
"That's very tender isn't it? They are obviously having a relationship. You can just tell by the way her body lies."
He pauses for a moment. "I think the fact that they were in love had something to do with it."

It's just comics- part 6

2011-10-31T00:02:00.000-05:00

recap. I'm no expert in the history of ROMANCE comics, a genre that had its apex in the early 1950s, went into a decline after 1956 until it completely disappeared in the 1970s. I'm just looking around to see how we can piece together a picture of the best of it. In part 3 I looked at the romance comics Alex Toth drew for Standard 1952-54; in part 4 I surveyed the Simon-Kirby shop's output in the romance genre for Prize, and it was they who started it in 1947, don't forget; and then in part 5 I expressed a fondness for Frazetta's handful of romance stories for the Famous Funnies publisher 1953-54.

Long gone publisher St John's line of ROMANCE comics has a chronicler in the person of John Benson. He edited the book at left from Fantagraphics in 2003 (amazon). He argues that this line was superior to just about everybody else's line of romance comics and he is good at peopling his argument, particularly in a second book he put together in 2007. It contains interviews with all the players he could still find alive and well, which alas did not include any of the three principals.

Firstly there was Archer St. John himself (a thorough history of his company here). He appears to have had a strong idea about publishing romance comics that would avoid the absurd sentimentality that was the norm, 'pain and suffering in a glamorous setting' as his editor Irwin Stein described it. He found his leading writer in Dana Dutch. Dutch has left nothing with a signature on it, but Benson has made a diligent project of reconstructing the oeuvre of this mysterious character, sketching him from fragmentary remarks: 'he looked Irish', 'he talked like a hoodlum'.

The crux of the matter is that Dutch's heroines were not the teary eyed girl that was the staple of the genre, but a more resilient female type. For a good example of this, a blogger has posted a whole seven page story titled Without a conscience (from Teen-age Temptations #3, 1953), very nicely restored. The heroine makes some outrageous mistakes, including lying about her age in the marriage register, before rejecting both men in the piece, including the one she already married, whose heart seems to be in the right place. Not that that's any reason to marry a guy of course.

The art (sample left) is by Matt Baker, the third of the principals mentioned above. St John built the line around Baker's style and kept the artist very busy during these years. Benson has posted a checklist of all the St John romance comics, about 180 in all, with credits where identifiable or guessable, and it only takes a cursory glance to see that Baker's name is the backbone of it. Dutch and Baker together made up the house style for the St John romance books.

Matt Baker was a handsome African American who died in 1959 of a heart attack at the age of 37. He was entered into the comic book hall of fame in 2009. This is Baker and St. John in a photo taken in Hollywood:

The art in Baker's storytelling is always solid and functional; there is rarely a weakness in the composition:

Wartime Romances #4-Jan 1952

Teen-age Temptations #8- June 1954
(There's another whole story, Was he ashamed of me? at Pencil ink)

But occasionally on a cover Baker would go much further, creating a riveting image of the sort that makes fellow artists envious.

Teen-age Temptations #2 June 1953

Teen age Romances #43- May 1955

Twomorrows are publishing a monograph on the artist:

"Edited by Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington, Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour presents an impressive career cut tragically short. It features a wealth of essays, interviews with Baker's friends, family, and co-workers, and a treasure trove of his finest artwork, including several complete stories, at last giving the wonderfully talented artist his full due."

(192 pages, due Feb 2012)

more soppy romances to come.

2011-10-30T22:28:00.003-05:00

I don't care for lists. they remind me of the Lord High Executioner. ("They'll none of them be missed, I've got 'em on the list"). But Rachel Cooke has put up her list of '10 best graphic novels' ('graphic novels that transcend the comic book medium') at the Guardian/Observer. Fom Hell is on it. Rachel Cooke is a good commentator on the scene. I linked to her interview with Art Spiegelman last week.
I had a list of my own some time back but I destroyed it. This appeared as the final chapter of How to be an Artist and consited of about three dozen books. Of course it was out of date by the time I corralled Alec: the years have Pants. But Ray Davis says I threw out the baby with the bath water and has posted, with my permission, the three-page framing sequence of that chapter. There's a nice little idea in it that got edited out, about an artist having his own little preservation society, and I took the trouble to set t up early in the book. the setting up is still there, but the resolution isn't. But what can ya do?

2011-10-27T15:43:00.005-05:00

There are a few buzzwords around that alternately amuse and irritate me. 'tropes' for instance sounds to me like something we should eat, perhaps with sausage. Sausage and tropes. Another is 'arc' as in 'story arc.' Did my good friend Charles Hatfield use it intentionally when he was writing about the story arc of the character Noah in Habibi?

"Yes, that chapter reads like a lost Eisner work, particularly Noah’s arc from naive optimism to icy pessimism to renewed faith."

Noah's arc? That's the Round table discussion of the book at the Comics Journal. Wee Hayley Campbell is in it and holds her end up quite well in the company of Hatfield, Mautner, McCulloch, Heigele, Hart.

***********
Phil Elliott and Paul Duncan interviewed about Second City, a comic from twenty-five years ago. Phil used to hand separate the colours on these covers (and also for the covers of the comics I myself made under the Harrier imprint). That means he would cut zipatones and overlay them on four transparencies. I have always wanted to ask him what exactly went into that shade of blue on the clock face (given that the blue at the top edge is pure cyan).

*************

14 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. "Where have you been all my life, the Interrobang‽ Less so, the Asterism, despite the awesome name. How many of these did you know already? Be honest"

2011-10-26T17:08:00.006-05:00

Loris Z finds a comics-themed cafe in Santaigo, Chile. From hell is an Irish coffee:

Sean Collins says let's you and him fight

Damluji argued that in treating the Orientalist art and literature of the past as just another genre to play with, Thompson ended up perpetuating some of the very stereotypes he presumably set out to subvert ... Eddie Campbell responds that Thompson’s interest in these topics...

a Tweeter comments:"I haven't read Habibi, but I can't help it: all I see here is "Insensitive Cartoonists Defend Insensitive Cartoonist."'
Tweeter, don't read the book whatever you do!

Did I ever mention that I like how they've put the Snooter over in France?

It's just comics- part 5

2011-10-25T18:11:00.002-05:00

Frank Frazetta was one of the leading comics stylists of the early 1950s, but he was unwilling to settle on anything for long. Like Toth, he drew little for EC, only one solo story, one solo cover and a handful of co-signed things with Al Williamson. That cover had been previously rejected by Famous Funnies for being too violent. He drew other things for Famous Funnies (otherwise known as Eastern Color Print co.), including a group of five ROMANCE stories for their Personal Love title (cover at left; as noted before, photographic covers were all the rage). These have been gathered together more than once. Russ Cochran put four of them in an oversize collectible, shot from the original art and printed on bristol board, in 1973. I treasure it.

I am very fond of that EC story too, "Squeeze Play" which I mentioned here in part 1. I'm writing from memory here, but I recall that the first place I read about it (probably in the EC HORROR anthology it was in) said the story was 'nothing special.' I presume the commenter was an unabashed fantasist, of which I have encountered many. Steve Moore once told me he was one, unabashedly. But in the mid 1970s I was looking for a kind of comics that got away from everything supernormal. I felt that it could only lead to tedious absurdity, and time has borne me out.

Nothing that happens in it couldn't happen tomorrow. It is a romance story gone wrong, a fatal wrong turn in the adventure of finding a life-partner. It's set in an urban seaside resort town and concerns a girl and her guy. It's drawn more or less in the same style that Frazetta used for the romance stories. Just imagine the following with a first person narration instead of third.

Harry's girl tells him she is pregnant and he takes the situation in hand by pushing her off a roller coaster to her death.

Shock Suspenstories #13 Feb 1954

First he he has to drag her onto the roller coaster, screaming, and the passers-by think how cute, young love. But that's shown in flashback. When the story starts all of that has already happened and Harry is trying lose himself on the crowded beach:

He successfully attaches himself to a gaggle of girls, and then things go awry when they drag him into the surf, because he can't swim.

The whole story is at the link.

I've never heard of any connection between Toth and Frazetta until Setting the Standard (reviewed here in part 3). In the intro, Sadowski shows us the original art of the title page of the Toth-drawn story, I Struck it Rich from Personal Love #11, Sept 1951. He tells us that the page was owned by Frank Frazetta before 1958. One might presume that the editor passed it to Frazetta as a style guide for the stories he was to do for the same title, and by 1958 the company was gone and he was free to give it away. Just speculating.

With the romance genre hugely popular at the beginning of the '50s it's no surprise that Frazetta would have been working up samples to get work in that area. I found this one on the Comic-Art-fans site: it could have been drawn as early as 1949:

By 1953 he had mastered the romance thing. this is a panel from his daily strip Johnny Comet, from January 30 that year, the second last strip before the syndicate pulled the plug in mid-story, from the original art (this makes then repro in the old Eclipse collection of the strip look very rough).

The group of Love stories falls between Nov 1953 and April 1955, the Digital Comics Museum is a great place to look for old Romance comics.

Personal Love #25- Jan 1954- Too Late for Love

Personal Love #27- June 1954

There's an extraordinary energy and vigor in these panels. I also like the house lettering style, with the captions in lower case and the dialogue in upper. I was only able to find the first three stories in colour. Two years back, Mr Door tree posted all five in black and white. Four are scanned from the Russ Cochran book mentioned above.

Personal Love #25- Jan 1954- Too Late for Love

By the fourth story, my favourite of the group, Frazetta's personality is fairly boiling the lid off the pan. Look at the way the sculptural objects in the room are hinting at the torrid emotions being kept in check.

Personal Love #28- Aug 1954

Frazetta's fifth and final romance story tends to be the favourte of his fans, due to its exotic location, on safari in Africa.

Personal Love #32- Apr 1955

Such exoticism was very unusual in the genre, where a longing for domesticity was always the driving theme. The settings of the romance comics were always a contemporary urban or suburban environment (leaving out the hybrid genre of western romances.) Also, at this time, 'overseas' probably still had overtones of guys being sent off to war. The attraction of the African location in this instance is to be explained by the 1953 movie, Mogambo, starring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.

Frazetta would have made a much better job of that poster than whoever it was that did it.

no shrinking violets among THAT lot! More soppy romances to come.

It's just comics- part 4

2011-10-24T17:59:00.006-05:00

recap. in part 1 I lamented that for years what we saw of 1950s comics was largely limited to HORROR and/or the EC Comics company and said I'd rather read a ROMANCE comic. In part 2 I cast a brief glance at EC's CRIME comics and then in part 3 I looked at the romance comics Alex Toth drew for Standard.

Somebody said to me not all that long ago, well probably before the Masters of American Comics exhibition, that he just didn't get Jack Kirby. I then realized that he only knew about Kirby from the comics he had read in the late 1970s, which nobody would ever claim were the artist's best years. Naturally I told him to read the work of the 1960s. But then I had lived through that decade, and also understood Kirby 's work from the early 1940s because Marvel and DC both got into reprinting most of it, Captain America on the one hand and Sandman, Newsboy Legion and the Guardian on the other. But hey, I know hardly anything about his doings in the 1950s.

The period that was the most lucrative for Kirby has remained largely uncharted for me. I could have told you the titles of the books he worked on in the late 1940s/ early 50s: Bullseye, Foxhole, Justice Traps the Guilty, Headline, Black Magic, and I could have repeated the information that I had read that Simon and Kirby introduced the ROMANCE genre to comics with their Young Romance. In itself that was no big deal; if they hadn't done it somebody else would have. All the popular genres of the pulp magazines acquired their comic book counterparts in the years following World War 2, after the superheroes went out of fashion. However, not only did they get in early enough to make a killing, they also made a profit sharing deal with Prize Comics (an imprint of Crestwood), another of those publishers who are now long defunct.

(Wikipedia quoting Richard Howell) Launched with a September 1947 cover date, the Prize Comics title Young Romance signaled its distinction from traditional superhero and genre comics with a cover banner stating the series was "designed for the more adult readers of comics". Told from a first person perspective, underlining its claim to be recounting "true" stories, the title was an instant success, "becoming Jack and Joe's biggest hit in years" and selling "millions of copies" and a staggering 92% of its print run. Crestwood increased the print run by the third issue to triple the initial numbers, and well as upgrade the title from bimonthly to monthly through issues #13-72 (Sept. 1949 - Aug. 1954).

Young Romance #4- March 1948. art by Kirby. See all the covers at the Grand Comics Database. After #12 they mostly used photos of young actors instead of artwork.

Harry Mendryk has written an enormous account of the Simon/Kirby Romance era, a series of 38 continuous blog posts analyzing the material in three-monthly blocks all through the period '47-'60. The Art of Romance is a remarkable document, a vault of specifics, of date and attribution, market analysis and interviews with one of the two key players, Joe Simon (now aged 98). (links to all chapters are at the foot of each post). Mendryk crunches the numbers and shows that the artist who would create (or co-create with Stan Lee) the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men and all the characters that are now shoring up Hollywood, spent most of his time in the the 1950s drawing ROMANCE comics.

"To put some perspective on it for the period spanned by this serial post (cover dates September 1947 to December 1959) Jack Kirby drew a total of 3855 pages of art. At 1936 pages, romance was by far the greatest part of that work."

The comics industry was slow to get on the band wagon, but by the middle of 1949 things were building to a glut:

"The peak occurred at January 1950 where there were 126 romance titles out! This is followed by an almost equally dramatic decline in love titles until a low of 45 titles is reached in November 1950.

(Mendryk refers us to Matt Thorn's list of the titles of All the Romance comics ever published, in which the number of publishers involved comes to 38, leaving out two or three that were post-1950s reprints and/or attempts to revive the genre.)

We think of Romance comics as having a very distinctive style, favouring elegance and an attention to gesture and stylish clothing, with the stories always written in first person. Later it would have its cliches, with the tearful girl sobbing on the cover and the splash page. You've seen the Lichtenstein paintings, but remember the painter was working quite late, in 1962-63, by which time the ROMANCE genre was in decline. The thing about the ROMANCE comic in 1947 was that it hadn't found its own style yet. This had to be worked out on the job. The soap opera genre had still to take hold in the field of newspaper strips, but Mary Worth was already making good headway in a sub-Caniff style. Rip Kirby had started in March 1946, introducing the 'photorealist style' to comics that would be picked up by Stan Drake for the soap opera genre in Juliet Jones in 1953. Otherwise, Simon and Kirby were looking at a blank page. They had to start by throwing out all the action techniques, the airborne figures extending beyond the panel borders, the exaggerated foreshortening. At the beginning they still have a residue of that kind of thinking, then they start focussing more on facial expression and pattern.

Young Romance #16.-December 1949- art by Jack Kirby (This and the images below have been excellently restored by Harry Mendryk and are used here with permission.)

Most of the artists who would become players in the newspaper strip field in the '50s and '60s started in the comic books, and a few even worked for Simon and Kirby. The pair were contracted to supply several titles for Prize's comic book line, and to this end they set up a studio and employed other artists on either a staff or freelance basis to make up the package. For instance you can find John Prentice, who took over Rip Kirby after Raymond's death in (1956-1999), and Leonard Starr who started his own strip Mary Perkins On Stage (1957-1979), both supplying Simon and Kirby with artwork for complete stories.

Young Romance #11- May 1949- art by Leonard Starr

Mendryk has an extraordinary eye for recognizing the touch of this or that artist in unsigned stories, of which there are both a huge number of stories and also quite a parade of artists in the pages of those books.. He also, more importantly, goes about it with a disciplined logic. Too often this kind of sport is spoiled by rampant opinioneering. He has also reduced the Simon/Kirby house style to a number of quirks and procedures such as 'picket fence shading' which makes perfect sense when you see it explained.

Young Brides #4- April 1953- art by Mort Meskin

Mendryk has cunningly deduced that Mort Meskin worked bodily in the studio for a time. He's an artist of the period deserving of much more attention that he has so far received.

I asked Harry if I could use three of his restored pages, but I'm going to push my luck and steal a fourth. The one below is something of an anomaly, with all those cartoon characters in a marvelous splash panel by Marvin Stein, yet another artist I would like to know much more about.

Young Love #25- September 1951- art by Marvin Stein.

While I have just focussed on Romance here, Harry Mendryk has written on every possible aspect of Simon and Kirby and their studio, so if you have a conundrum to figure out about the period, or you just want to get lost in another time for an hour or two, make his blog at the Kirby Museum your first stop.

The book cover at the very top is a new publication from Fantagraphics coming in Jan 2012. Michael Gagne explains how he has been putting the project together since 2003. The book contains a selection of the best of Jack Kirby's stories for the Romance books, 20 of them, covering all the years 1947- 1959, with a 12 page cover gallery. I can't wait. amazon

still more soppy romance to come.
And hey, it's just comics. They can't be any stupider than the ones you're reading now.

2011-10-23T16:48:00.003-05:00

There's a very fine interview with Art Spiegelman by Rachel Cooke at the Guardian on the subject of Metamaus, the 25 year anniversary book about the book.

My favourite part of the book, though, is the section in which Spiegelman reproduces the rejection letters he received when his agent, Jonathan Silverman, first sent Maus out to publishers. Oh dear. This is embarrassing. Behold New York's literary taste-makers acting like a bunch of cowardy custards. "Thank you for letting me see Maus," says Hilary Hinzmann, of Henry Holt. "The idea behind it is brilliant, but it never, for me, quite gets on track." Gerald Howard, at Penguin, is a little more up front, but still, he won't quite take all the blame for turning it down: "In part, my passing has to do with the natural nervousness one has in publishing something so very new and possibly (to some people) off-putting. But more crucially I don't think Maus is a completely successful work, in that it seems in some way conventional."

...But unimaginable suffering, Spiegelman wants us to understand, doesn't make a person better; it just makes them suffer.

..."Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it;

"Our big problem when we did RAW was the business end of things," he says. "We found it difficult to get up before the banks closed."

Some books want to be petted. The books that have a right to be books make use of their bookness. Graphic novels – who knew that term would stick! – continue to do well because they use their bookness.

Dammit, I can't remember when he was last this quotable.

2011-10-23T03:41:00.002-05:00

From BBC news, with comment from David Lloyd:

The sinister Guy Fawkes mask made famous by the film V for Vendetta has become an emblem for anti-establishment protest groups. Who's behind them?
From New York, to London, to Sydney, to Cologne, to Bucharest, there has been a wave of protests against politicians, banks and financial institutions.
Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations may have been struck by a repeated motif - a strangely stylised mask of Guy Fawkes with a moustache and pointy beard...(more)

*****
The Browser's Fivebooks guest is Ben Katchor. He picks five great pictorial narratives but I kept wanting to pick arguments with him. He spends too long arguing about a descriptive term for the books he's picking and confuses more than illumintes with his dates for printing techncalities, but go look. Toepffer, Glashan, moriarty, Panter, Blegvad. Two of those hardly ever get mentioned outside of the UK.

************
Aintitcool's complete collection of Behind the scenes Pic of the day. Hundreds of them. every fim you can think of. Go look

2011-10-22T00:33:00.000-05:00

Obituary of Barbara Kent.

"It is in the nature of cinema that an actor who made her last film appearance more than seven decades ago, and who retreated from public view in the late 1940s, refusing photographs and interviews ever since, can still be appreciated on screen as young, as lovely and as fresh as ever. Barbara Kent, who has died aged 103, was one of the last surviving stars of the silent era. She appeared in the last great silent American film, Lonesome (1928), Paul Fejos's masterpiece of urban poetry. Kent played Mary, a switchboard operator, who meets Jim (Glenn Tryon), a factory worker, in Coney Island. They spend the day together, fall in love, and then lose each other in the crowd. The simple tale of "little people" is raised by the sincerity of the performances and by the director's expressive use of location, camera movement and montage."more, the Guradian

2011-10-21T00:37:00.004-05:00

CLowes' Mister Wonderful is a great read. A whole book describing the events of a single blind date. It took me a long time to warm to Clowes work as I never liked the gallery of grotesques in his early books like A velvet Glove cast in Iron. But from Ghost World on he has been a world class 'graphic novelist'. What bugs me now is that I didn't have the courage to make The Playwright a long horizontal book. I mean look at this; he's got two inches on me:

You see, I was so wishy-washy about the horizontalness of the art that I put padding at the top and bottom of the pages so I could try to slink around the walls of the ballroom without attracting too much attention.

Mister Wonderful is a gathering up of the serial that Clowes made for the New York Times when the venerable old lady was running a 'Funny Pages' section

The section has been criticized for being unfunny, sometimes nonsensical, and excessively highbrow; in a 2006 poll conducted by Gawker.com asking, "Do you now find — or have you ever found — The Funny Pages funny?", 92% of 1824 voters answered "No."
The Funny Pages are no longer published in the magazine.

Mister Wonderful was published a couple of months back by Pantheon. this month Drawn and Quarterly have gathered up his Death Ray (originally published as Eightball #23). he's talking about it at the AV Club:

AVC: How much research do you do to get a time period or a place right? Like in The Death-Ray, there’s a panel in which a character is holding a little photo-cube, which is such a perfect little ’70s décor detail.
DC: Often I’ll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn’t have to for the ’70s. [Laughs.] That was sort of the height of my powers of observation, those years. I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly. And that was something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the ’70s. It’s like the early half of the ’70s is still the ’60s, in that there’s still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It’s possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to ’81 or ’82. So I really wanted to capture that, because those were my formative years, and I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that. One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, “Let’s put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones.”

it's just comics- part 3

2011-10-20T01:12:00.002-05:00

I was looking forward to this new book a/ because it's Alex Toth and b/ because it reprints 60 stories, Toth's entire contribution to the catalogue of a long defunct publisher whose material we rarely see reprinted. And c/ because I was guessing at least half of these stories would be in the ROMANCE genre. The rest are HORROR, CRIME and WAR, but how rare it is to get a big set of Romance things in one package. (video preview)

The Wikipedia entry for Standard Comics just talks about the publisher's superhero characters of the early 1940s, none of whom are of any interest to me. The company got into the Romance line on the bandwagon (more on that in a future post) in 1949, and Toth arrived there in 1952. I saw a couple of these stories reprinted by Eclipse Comics about twenty years ago and I thought they were lovely. They suggested ways in which comics could be made closer to real experience. Toth himself favoured the genre.

"Romance was very special. It dealt with emotions in a different way than the slam-bang adventure stuff. There are a lot of things under the surface...a line of dialogue could say 'this', but the expression of the person would say 'that'... there were all these little nuances of line readings, acting, reacting, interpretation, layers of character personality, integrity... that was very grown-up."

Intimate Love #21- feb 1953

Of course, all of that went out of fashion in the comics:

In his later years, among the things that distressed Toth about modern comics was a lack of everyday natural emotion. he once wrote to an aspiring cartoonist: "How do comic book friends and colleagues and lovers, and parents with their kids, express good and loving feelings? Think about it-- so rare an event in comic book fare-- positive emotions-- why so? Do your characters relate to each other? Touch? In ways other than the usual punching and pounding superjock jazz wipeouts? Is that the limit? Little things mean a lot-- friendly hugs and shoulder pats and evident body English when two or more characters relate in a scene or throughout a story-- as we do in our own lives. or didn't you know? Or never connect the dots? Or never give a damn?"

Toth's work has long been admired for its distilled simplicity of black and white design, but these early pages fizz and bubble with life.

Popular Romance #22, jan 1953

Intimate Love #26- Feb 1954

The influence of of Noel Sickles on Toth has been analysed, but this work shows a multitude of influences rubbing shoulders as though at a party, the first party of summer where you can be absorbed enough just circulating and looking at what everybody is wearing:

Thrilling Romances #24- Jan 1954

"I enjoyed doing the stylish thing, well-dressed men and women. Inspired by Parker and Whitcomb, plus fashion magazines to bone up on the latest thing, to smartly dress men and women. It was fun."

I speak above of these stories as the product of a publisher. One publisher is only different or superior to another in respect of the creative people that it attracts into its orbit. Some of the stories in the book are fairly routine fare, but the best of the romance stories were written by Kim Aamodt, and have a level of insight and craft not often found in comics, never mind romance comics, the worst of which of course are as bad as anything you can think of. One of the best stories in the book can be read online. Lonesome for kisses (you'll just have to get used to these titles) is a ten pager that appears to have been reprinted in something called Buried Treasure #2 in 1986, in black and white, probably from photostats with zipatones added. There's nothing in it that could not have really happened.

Intimate Love #26- Feb 1954

The other name making these pages sizzle is that of Mike Peppe. Toth's work is invariably at its best when he does the whole job himslef, but to get the most out him, the editors assigned him mainly to pencilling. Assorted inkers were tried until Peppe filled the bill. that's his inking in most of the samples above. That effect of lushness that we don't expect to find in Toth is no doubt partly his doing.

The Publisher, Standard Comics, went out of business in 1955 or 56 at the same time as so many others in the field, just after the introduction of the Comics Code censorship body. Somebody bought up all the artwork or something and it occasionally turns up around the place. The book under discussion is from Fantagraphics, with the original printed pages restored in all their colours by Greg Sadowski, who put the whole package together with extensive notes from which I quoted the above snippets. The Eclipse sampling from twenty years ago was presumably from original art and had sharper linework (Sadowski shows us about a dozen original art pages for revealing comparisons) but the up-to-date colouring they applied tends to distract. so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

One other thought. Sadowski's book opens by reprinting an excellent old interview with Toth that I've had in my files for years. It first appeared in Graphic Story magazine, and took place in 1968. The issues of this magazine are where the 'graphic novel' came into being as a thoretical idea. They ask Toth:

Someday graphic novels will take up where comic books are leaving off, but what about the artst who has to sit down and draw them? If someone came to you with a 200 page pictorial novel to illustrate, and if the money was okay, do you think you'd be interested?
I'd probably blow my brains out... etc.

Note that both the interviewers and Toth see the business of comics as one where an artist goes to the publisher (or the publisher comes to him) for an assignment. Time has shown us that with the 'graphic novel', things work quite differently. An artist conceives the thing and pushes it uphill. At some stage they may tap into some money in order to get the thing made, but we're talking about self-motivation and a constant reinvention of the whole idea. The artist doesn't just do one and then line up for his next one. He has to resell the whole idea of a graphic novel each time around. 'This is nothing like your last one.' That's because it's THIS one.' And so on. Interesting to look back at when it was still just an abstraction.

addendum. Tom Spurgeon on Setting the Standard, three weeks ago

more soppy romance next time.

2011-10-19T00:06:00.005-05:00

Matt Seneca writes passionately about the latest volume of the reprinted Prince Valiant (1943-44). Damn right he is I say!

Of course, critical judgments of a comic stop mattering once you read it. A few pages into the fourth of Fantagraphics’ beautifully reprinted new editions of Hal Foster’s masterpiece and it’s difficult indeed to remember that this isn’t the greatest comic ever.

Prince Valiant does not tend to shape up to contemporary laboratory theories about what 'comics' is supposed to be, which is a shame. Here's part of a favourite sequence of mine. These three panels are actually taken each from a separate Sunday page over three weeks in early 1956, not from the book Matt is reviewing but from a 1979 Pacific Comics Club reprinting. Those guys paid no attention to the original colouring, but never mind that for now. Vikings are ransacking the fort, where Aleta is. Val and his party are returning from somewhere and they hasten to the rescue. The impatient Val decides to go down the mountain more or less vertically.

2011-10-19T00:03:00.001-05:00

Since my upcoming book will be about money, The Lovely Horrible Stuff, I have been uncommonly interested in the stuff of late. Leif peng has been doing a bloody wonderful series of posts specifically about the business of making money from Illustration, going way back to 1924, then coming forward the 1960s. Fully illustrated as always.

post of October 11

Five thousand dollars! Using any one of a number of online currency converters, we can quickly recalculate Albert Dorne's income as being nearly one million dollars per year when adjusted for 60 years of inflation. His $5,000 ad art fee comes to $46,436.23 in 2011 dollars

post of October 13

Its not surprising then that, at a time when the average annual family income was just over a thousand dollars, Rockwell describes being able to put ten times that amount into savings in a matter of months.
Liberty magazine's publisher may have failed to sway Norman Rockwell's loyalty to George Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post... but the demon of temptation proved too powerful for another illustrator - Rockwell's friend, Leslie Thrasher.
"Some months later Thrasher came to my studio asking advice about an offer Liberty magazine had made to him. It was a five-year contract calling for Thrasher to do fifty covers a year at one thousand dollars a piece. "I can live on ten thousand dollars a year," said Thrasher, "so I can save forty thousand. At the end of five years I'll have two hundred thousand dollars. I'll be well off and secure for the rest of my life."
"After eight or nine months his house burned and he was so run-down and tired from overwork that he caught pneumonia and died."

post of October 17

The 1960's would prove to be a challenging decade for Marvin Friedman and virtually every other illustrator trying to pursue a career in magazine illustration. As television stole away advertising revenue, page counts went down and magazine editors increasingly turned to photography in place of illustration. Only the truly determined artist could hope to snap up some of the fewer and fewer assignments. "I had to brown-nose," says Marvin, "I had to send liquor out at Christmastime - it was like any other business - you had to do what you had to do to get the work."

It's just comics- part 2

2011-10-18T00:16:00.006-05:00

After dismissing the big Nostalgia EC HORROR book in my previous part, I remembered there was another story worth mentioning. It was crime story that evoked the style of what would later be called 'film noir.' It was one of a group of stories by a writer named Carl Wessler, made after Gaines and Feldstein started out-sourcing some of the scripting in 1953. This is from Shock Suspenstories in the last year of EC's colour comic books. It has those huge blocks of text that make EC problematic for the comics theory purists, but they've never bothered me unless they're tediously written, which was more often than not. This one does the tough first person voice-over appropriate to type. The narrator has been hired for 500 bucks to bump a guy off: 'a five-c-note for a couple'a hours work.'

Shock Suspenstories #17- Oct 1954 Wessler/Evans

Typical of an EC story, you don't need to read the whole thing to get the point, though I would be happy enough on any day to look at six pages of George Evans drawings with no story attached at all. Going straight to the end, the assassin chases his prey all over the place, finally down a stairway and into an unlit room. Suddenly the lights go on and he finds himself fatefully onstage in a small theatre. "It turns out I've walked in on the opening scene of a play about President McKinley and the guy what shot him. It's called "The Assassin". There's a twist, huh? Whose picture do you suppose is on a five-c-bill? Yeah..."

The EC CRIME comics as a whole were actually a cut above other publishers' attempts, due entirely to Johnny Craig being the editor/writer of Crime Suspenstories. He also drew one of the four stories in each issue. Here's an example of a daring splash page by Craig. There's something about the colour doubled under the black lines on the figures that creates a very unusual 3D effect, visible even in this scan. It would be easy to characterize this as a happy accident, but I can think of many messes that have been made by colourists mistakenly thinking that any colour combined with black will be invisible. (this is a reprint and may not reflect the original presentation).

Crime Suspensetories #2- Dec 1951- by Johnny Craig

The story is about a criminal who realises he looks just like a certain millionaire who is ailing in a rest home. He kills the guy, takes his place, and makes a swift recovery. Taking over the guy's life, he now realizes the rich guy got rich by devious financial practices and is not well liked. A trio of brothers whose father has just committed suicide on account of the rich bloke, come visiting and haul the 'rich guy' out into a very secluded spot, with the obvious intention of doing him in. The guy spills his guts about how he's not the rich guy but just a chancer who bumped him off and took his place. He's a ringer in other words. The trio are not sure whether to believe him and shoot him anyway, finishing with the punchline, "Now he's a DEAD ringer." And so you see the EC practice of building an entire story around a pun.

I haven't seen any crime comics that were half as good as Craig's, but for further reading, Santiago Garcia, recently transplanted to the USA and findiing himself at the Baltimore Comic Convention, picked up a handful of issues of Crime Does Not Pay, published by Lev Gleason, edited by Charles Biro, the first of the CRIME comics (1942-54) and wrote three long appraisals of them (read from the bottom up). I can't look at those Biro books without wondering how he thought all that garish colouring was a good idea. Marie Severin coloured the EC books in a more thoughtful way, though if she did every one of them I can't imagine there was much time for thinking.

But hey, It's just comics. They were churned out like a factory product. The things that make them still work, if they do, are almost accidental, the choice of an artist, or a story that is good in spite of itself, or somebody cared more than they needed to.

(I'm still adrift from my original destination... more to come)

2011-10-17T01:22:00.004-05:00

There is a theory being proposed that Van Gogh didn't die by shooting himself, but got caught in a crossfire between a couple of school age cowboys in the cornfield that day.

Or something like that. It's all in Googledutch.

This hypothesis will present the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, now in their biography of Van Gogh, Van Gogh: The Life. That would be the gunshot wound in the belly of the painter and explain that the weapon, but his painting stuff, never recovered.

(brought to my attention by h.n. in comments)

*****
Just out. 1001 comics you must die before you read. I wonder if I'm in it.

It's just comics- part 1

2011-10-16T01:09:00.009-05:00

In which I try to put the early 1950s in perspective (it started as a simple plug for a book and grew into a monster- the book will be in part 2).

In my post of April 22 2008 I quoted a passage from Eisner/Miller, published by Dark Horse in 2005, in which Miller referred to a fact that EC was the best comics publisher of the 1950s and disregarded the older man's challenge of his assumption. It's one of those things that comics fans have always taken to be a truth even though for most of them (including Miller) (and me) it all happened before they were born. I'm not saying it wasn't so, but I've always thought it was a claim in need of questioning. The claim no doubt arose due to that syndrome in which history is written by the survivors. While many comics publishers disappeared in the mid-1950s, EC survived via Mad and the later leasing by Gaines of the entire catalogue of stories for publication in deluxe albums for collectors, by Russ Cochran, and then subsequently as regular comic books all over again.

The first celebration of EC that I observed (outside of fanzines, which were invisible to me in my youth) was the big Nostalgia Press Collection of 1971. It was a sampling specifically of the HORROR genre, and the cover sported a corpse getting out of a coffin, drawn by Al Feldstein.

I would have been prepared to accept that this was a selection of the best of EC comics across the board except that in the very same year, in Comix: A History of Comic Books by Les Daniels (described here) there was a complete reprinting of the 7-page Harvey Kurtzman war story Big If (in black and white), which was superior in every way to anything in the horror collection, not counting the classic Master Race (which didn't originally appear in one of the 'horror' comics so titled). (here is the first page of Big If as a reminder. You can find the entire story here, scroll down past the gallery of Kurtzman covers)

Fontline Combat #5 May 1952- by Harvey Kurtzman.

The mystery prevailed: why show all that horror stuff when there is presumably a wealth of better comics to make a collection out of? To be fair, there were good items in it, such as Pipe Dream, drawn by Krigstein, Squeeze Play by Frazetta, the above mentioned Master Race and others, but the accent on horror meant that Williamson was badly represented with a vampire thing and in general some awful nonsense was included. I realize I am probably in the minority in regarding horror, at least as it has appeared in comics, as a very low kind of storytelling; a kind of ugly joke in which the material turns in upon itself at the climax and you realize you have invested your attention in a narrative that wasn't worth your time. Most of the better artists had a low opinion of it too, such as Williamson, and Kurtzman and Krigstein (If this were a formal essay I'd find the references). It was designed to appeal to 14 year old boys, who had not yet discovered girls, and was perpetuated by adults who had not entirely gotten over being 14 year old boys.

That in itself is not an original observation, and not wishing to leave this on a cliche, I have often wished that there were more archival projects that preserved the best of the ROMANCE genre.
(more tomorrow)

2011-10-15T00:48:00.001-05:00

If I were in Manchester I would go to this exhibition of the work of Adolphe Valette. He was a French painter in the Impressionist style who made his home in Manchester, England. If he is remembered at all It's for having befriended and influenced local art hero L S Lowry. Thus the title of yesterday's Guardian article, Exhibition for 'Monet of Manchester' who inspired Lowry, in which our artist is an unknown location, pinpointed in ideaspace by using three other proper names as coordinates.

Valette, self portrait circa 1917.

2011-10-14T17:43:00.004-05:00

This has been around at least a year so you may already have seen it, but I need something quick for today:

as to its origin, who knows, but Craig Ormiston saw it posted on the set where he was working in sept 2010. His blog is full of picked up down-home wisdom like You look stupid with too many hats on. (give a few away)

2011-10-13T04:38:00.006-05:00

New Steve Moore book coming up. Glycon has the gen.

The cover , which you can see at left, is by the amazing John Coulthart, who has long been a friend of this blog. I wrote about him specifically here.

John has just been celebrated in the latest issue of Eye magazine by design scholar Rick Poynor (mentioned in this blog on at least four previous occasions).

‘His blog is kind of like finding a first edition of the Necronomicon three to four times a week.’ I know how this writer at the Dangerous Minds website feels. He is talking about John Coulthart’s Feuilleton, an extraordinarily committed undertaking even by the standards of the most compulsive and sleep-deprived bloggers. Coulthart set out, in February 2006, to post an item every day and so far as I can tell from random searches in his archive, and incredible as it might seem, he has stuck to this arduous programme, though he does down tools at Christmas for a brief respite. more...

This week on his blog, John has discussed 15th century woodcut initials, the German feature film Die Farbe and a vandalized collection of books at the Islington library:

I was going to title this post “Fucked by Monty” but thought that might give the wrong impression. The phrase was one of several titles added to the cover of The Collected Plays of Emelyn Williams by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell when they were happily defacing the books of Islington Library, London, in the early 1960s. Despite the outrage of the librarians at the vandalism most of the defaced books were put aside and are now prized items in Islington’s collection. This week the library announced an exhibition of the books, Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. The Guardian has a gallery of the covers here (and there’s more at Joe Orton central), rare examples of what might be called “guerilla collage”. links and more

2011-10-13T04:35:00.000-05:00

From Hell is now available as a purchasable download from itunes and Comixology and other places. Price $14.99 US.

2011-10-12T15:30:00.002-05:00

Critiquing the critics.
I believe it is absolutely right that the critic freely expresses his or her opinion about a work, but what is it with Ng Suat Tong?

"For my part, I found Habibi utterly repugnant and well deserving of a place on a list of worst comics of 2011."

A few months back:

"Glidden’s comic is a work of self-condemnation; a “warts and all” cautionary to all those who would seek to traffic in their trifling insights, for therein lies undistinguished banality. It is the rotting carcass of the autobiographical genre in comics."

Way back in the day, Top Shelf once stopped sending review copies to the Comics Journal because the magazine kept giving them to this guy to review. "We can see no purpose in it" they said, quite logically. "But he keeps asking for them," replied the Journal.

Now, Suat is a nice enough bloke whom I have met on occasion, and I'm concerned for him. Something must have happened in his past. Did his mother make him wear his hair in ringlets until he was fourteen? Did his father spank his bare bottom in front of all the relatives?

Please attach your personal observations in comments, though if they cross the line of good taste like mine just did, I will probably have to remove them.

2011-10-11T18:26:00.005-05:00

The way they draw women's feet in comics has always been a mystery to me. they look like plaster casts of the insides of high-heeled shoes. Here's a couple of typical examples from way back in the 1940s:

We might conclude that these renditions are the product of a culture in which men only ever see women's feet encased in shoes, and that the bare foot is forever unknown. But I once read an American book on anatomy that recommended a falsification of the evidence, that the female foot should be reduced in size as much as one can get away with. I wish I'd scanned the page. Even when faced with actual photographic evidence, somebody like Milt Caniff still chooses falsehood over truth.

To my eyes, Summer Canyon looks deformed in that Steve Canyon promotional picture from the mid-1950s (scanned from RC Harvey's excellent biography). I won't even try to get into the psychology of reducing the female to such a flimsy thing. Frank Frazetta on the other hand was a fifties man. He knows how to get that big and bold style of footwear down confidently. His girls look strong and vigorous, with their feet planted firmly on the floor:

Today, Craig Thompson is the man who draws feet right. They are muscular appendages that can conceivably do the work that is normally asked of feet.

In getting them down he may occasionally give them more space than they are entitled to, but that's okay with me. It's such a relief to see them done correctly. In an online interview somewhere a few years back, he mentioned that James Sturm had criticized this, the size of them, and I felt very annoyed with James Sturm. 'Mind your own business!,' I shouted at the computer.

ps. I apologise to James Sturm, who has done only great things, for using him as the punch-line in my balonious rant about feet. (smiley face, etc.)

2011-10-10T18:06:00.005-05:00

Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I'm glad I read the book before I read Nadim Damluji's nicely considered review The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi at the Hooded Utilitarian. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to look at the expanse of desert on the rear endpapers without seeing it as an editorial cartoon minefield, with submerged bombs labelled 'orientalism,' 'ethnocentrism,' 'primitivism,' 'exoticism' etc., or be able read the book without being in a tense state of 'how's he going to get all these worms back in the can?'

Thompson's own remark in a recent interview creates more problems than it solves: "But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.” As a cowboy, I myself shot a dozen indians in the infamous incident at Glasgow Gulch, and to this day, fifty years later, when I see casual slaughter in the movies, and in kids' video games, I feel nauseated.

The thing about Craig Thompson is that he kind of exists in a state of blessed innocence. I can think of no other artist who could draw so many pages of nakidity and you come away thinking 'aw, he's such a sweetheart.' I even find myself wanting to protect him from all those jackals at the Hooded Utilitarian.

But let's not do that. I shall take a different tack altogether.

Thompson's need was not to tell us all about the geographical or political Middle East, either of today or yesteryear, but to find a narrative body that would carry him through the next stage of his development as an artist. For me, many years ago, Greek mythology served a similar purpose; I had no special interest in the subject prior to that. I just needed an engine that came ready built with all its interconnecting parts in place, that enabled me to encase stories within other stories right from the kick-off. The theme that commands Thompson in this early phase of his oeuvre is LOVE. He has taken it from the childlike cute of Goodbye Chunky Rice through the 'first love' of Blankets. And now a big subject was required, something with epic potential, a grand romance, something bigger than the familiar and the everyday. He sought and found it in the idiom of the Arabian Nights, with its sultans and harems and slaves and eunuchs. But more than a single linear story, Thompson wanted to erect a colossal structure with a baroque encrustation of teeming narratives. To this end he uses the literature of the Middle East, in both subject, using the Qur'an the bible and Arabic poetry, and in form, through the rich calligraphic tradition of the literature. At this point you would have to ask: is this guy nuts? Where did he get the courage to take on all of that?

The funny part is that I always mentally filed Thompson with a newer wave of artists, like Kochalka, who rejected the byzantine complexities of Alan Moore's Watchmen and From Hell and plunked for a straightforward heart-on-sleeve, decompressed, uncomplicated brand of storytelling. Habibi is continually backtracking and jumping forward and freezing for analogical insertions and philosophical digressions. A calendar of pregnancy, an explanation of ancient chemistry, numerology, a cut away diagram of a ship, pictorial nods to 19th century painters such as Rossetti, Ingres. And that's just off the top of my head

One of Damluji's criticisms:

Wanatolia represents the heart of Habibi’s most problematic elements. In the sense that Habibi is a fairy tale (which Thompson has stated he was intending to create) it is understandable that the city is constructed as “timeless.” In other words, the majority of Dodola and Zam’s story isn’t tied to an analogous timeline. The problem arises when in the latter chapters of the book Thompson reveals that the same backward setting of Wanatolia (which houses the harem filled palace of the Sultan) dually houses a modern urban city. When Dodola and Zam return to Wanatolia after escaping the palace and recouping with a fisherman, we see the city in a completely new light: it is now a vibrant bustling city with billboards for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, SUVs, and free women pushing strollers...
...The entire events of the book are retroactively a modern reality in the wake of an urban Wanatolia.

This strikes me as an overly linear reading of the work. By the time you get to that part of the book, with all its parables and tangents, It's difficult to think of the action as taking place in a city or a time in any real sense. Will any reader think that the sea of junk, for instance, is supposed to be literal? It's all in ideaspace, to refer to Alan Moore's concept, where one thing and its opposite tend to exist in immediate juxtaposition. And it fits perfectly with the tradition of the Nights (without getting into the complications of how they got the way they are):

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict Jinns, Ghouls, Apes, sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real individuals and geography, not always rationally...

Next time, some thoughts about the art in Habibi.

2011-10-09T20:19:00.003-05:00

Milt Caniff used to talk about how good the engravers at the Tribune News syndicate were and how he could count on them to get subtle colouring effects onto the printed page. This is Burma in a panel from a May 1941 Sunday page of Terry and the Pirates.

2011-10-08T01:19:00.002-05:00

The editor's job.

2011-10-07T06:01:00.015-05:00

I wanted to post something about Habibi today, but i got sidetracked doing some checking in Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights: a companion:

"Burton shared Payne's enthusiasm for Rabelias's Gargantua and Pantagruel. More specifically, Burton had a passion for the first three books of that work, as translated in 1653 by the eccentric Scottish Cavalier and linguistic theorist Sir Thomas Urquhart. Urquhart was an advocate of logopandocie- that is, readiness to admit words of all kinds into the laguage- and his translation of Rabelais took on the character of a verbal riot, something resembling a surrealist reworking of Roget's Thesaurus.

Logopandocie. I had to check that elsewhere (as posted apropos of nothing by 'teapeebubbles' on a forum somehwere.

"the worthless word for the day is: logopandocie
The system of admittance to these hallowed grounds,
by reason of its logopandocie, may deservedly be
referred to as adfenestration."

right, that'll be me back out the window. Habibi tomorrow maybe, if I don't get lost again.

2011-10-06T23:47:00.005-05:00

Truest thing I've read today.

Seth, from Palookaville #20, 2010

2011-10-05T21:11:00.002-05:00

After talking about 'graphic novel' two days ago, i was reminded that a pal recently emailed to alert me to his referring to me as 'the cantankerous writer/artist Eddie Campbell' in a piece he is writing about 'the graphic novel', noting that he had taken care to avoid calling me a 'graphic novelist' (cantankerous seems to be a given).

I wrote back:

Let
'say something positive that cannot be later made to sound negative.'
be your guiding principle. If you said 'Eddie Campbell does not like 'graphic novel' then you would have said something negative. If you said Eddie Campbell says it means one thing but somebody else says differently, then you would have said something negative. There is room in the world for what Eddie Campbell says as well as what the next guy says. Pick one, or pick both, but do not make an argument of it. The rest of the world does not have to hold itself to Eddie Campbell's standards.

Anybody who says 'comics and graphic novels' is causing confusion because they are saying that graphic novels are not comics. Thus that simple phrase implies a negative. Say what you have to say, examine it from every angle and make sure it does not contain a negative.

If you say 'the term graphic novel embraces all that is pretentious as well as all that is progressive in the field of comics' then you will have conveyed useful information. Nothing negative there. By negative I mean writing or talking that is a waste of time, that cancels itself out.

2011-10-04T21:44:00.004-05:00

While looking for something else I stumbled upon a piece of work that has quite captivated me. It has been theorized for some time that the writers of the New Testament gospels were drawing on earlier texts, hypothetically identified as 'Q', a 'sayings gospel', and an earlier passion narrative. This lost passion work, a short narration based on the arrest, interrogation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ would have formed the basis of all later accounts. Livio Stecchini (1913-1979) theorized a lost play by the Roman dramatist Seneca as the original source and then went to some lengths to reconstruct a thorough account of the work. It was edited and completed by Jan Sammer, and published as a book I think circa 1987, then put online around ten years ago. Sammer has popped up on bible discussion forums from time to time to draw attention to it, but it has never got as much as it deserves, not counting an occasional poo-pooing, and casual dismissal. It's even more preposterous than From Hell, as well as ingenious. And when confronted, it demands not fact checking and nit picking, but robust applause. A story is a story. It may never have existed in antiquity, but it does now, and it is an engaging piece of creative scholarship. A paragraph from the opening, and one from near the end, regarding what was in the sponge:

The Gospel According to Seneca

The nine tragedies of Seneca formed a philosophical whole, beginning with The Mad Hercules, in which some weighty moral questions are posed, and culminating with Hercules on Oeta, where the soul is at last liberated from its bodily prison. It is reasonable to assume that this series originally included a historical drama, a fabula praetexta, in which the lessons expounded in the nine tragedies were applied to a contemporary subject. It is our hypothesis that this historical drama, which is now lost, was Seneca’s tragedy of Jesus. When Lucilius decided to omit the tragedy of Jesus from the collection of Seneca’s works, he substituted for it his own recently completed Octavia, a play for which he could expect to find an appreciative audience in the wake of Nero’s overthrow. But while Lucilius’ Octavia is a vitriolic piece of political propaganda, having no organic relationship to the nine extant plays of Seneca, the tragedy of Jesus, as we reconstruct it in this book, was an eloquent summation of Seneca’s philosophical ideals and a monument to his mastery of the dramatic art.

The authors use the classical stage conventions, such as the unities and the chorus, etc. to explain the comings and goings before the high priest and Pilate et al. In particular, this hypothetical play, written in Latin for an audience of Roman culture, gives possible explanations of the anomalies and conundrums that exist in the four Gospel accounts of the Passion, written in Greek by writers from a different cultural background:

Poisoned wine.
Mark, unable accept Seneca’s version, preferred to understand medicatum vinum as meaning wine treated with myrrh. Matthew, realizing that Mark’s account does not make sense unless it is a matter of poisoned wine, changed the interpretation of medicatum vinum to the more correct one of wine mixed with gall. In order to make clear that it was not a desirable drink, such as wine with myrrh would be, he added that Jesus refused the drink after having tasted it.

Seneca’s text must have included the word fel which in ordinary Latin means gall, or bitter substance, but in poetic language is frequently used in the sense of poison. Seneca uses fel as a synonym of venenum poison. The clearest example is his Medea where Medea completes the preparation of the poisoned robe by mixing in the fel of Medusa (line 830); two lines below this the other ingredients of the fateful robe are called venena. Matthew caught the word fel, but missed that it was being used in the sense of poison. I have mentioned that the Greek equivalent of fel, which is cholê, may also carry this sense in poetry. Both Greek and Latin poets use these terms particularly in referring to the poison of serpents. But because the usual meaning of fel is bitter substance, Matthew understood that Jesus refused the drink after having tasted it.

The gospel of Luke contains only a brief reference to the episode of the drink. Luke was confronted with the problem of choosing between the report of Mark and that of Matthew. He realized, as Matthew had, that if one follows Mark’s report, it must be inferred that Jesus was offered poisoned wine and died of poison. Hence, Luke cut out the entire episode except for a passing reference.

I can get lost all day in such analytical complexities.

But I have work to do.

2011-10-03T19:17:00.000-05:00

The 'graphic novel' is an evolving process, though an account of the whole of it from the beginning would be a big undertaking. But for instance, there was a very distinct phase between 2003 and 2006 during which a number of New York book publishers adventured into the arena.

Doubleday, an imprint of Random House managed to get three books out before it axed its graphic novel line (march 28 2003)
Reed Graphica, imprint of Reed Communications, was even more short lived (dec 12 2003)
Scholastic Launched New Graphic Novel Imprint (July 13 2004) and did well with Jeff Smith's Bone and Shaun Tan's The Arrival, both of which had been previously published elsewhere. If you look at their web page you'll see that they associate the form with young readers. This was a trend among the NY book publishers that worried me. On the other hand, Norton commissioned Genesis from Crumb (2 Sept 2004) First second, an imprint then of Holtzbrinck, now of MacMillan, made its debut in Spring 2006. Hill and Wang, imprint of distinguished literary house Farrar, Straus & Giroux launched its series of non-fiction comics works fall 2006. And so on.

An aspect of this wave of activity was that for the huge 224 page book commissioned from Crumb we'd have to wait five years, till 2009, and even longer for Craig Thompson's Habibi, commissioned by Pantheon in the same year. (Pantheon is the book publisher with the longest success with comics, beginning with its series of '...for beginners' going all the way back to 1978.) Habibi, at 672 pages, was a long seven years in the making. Such a thing was very rare even as recently as the 1990s, when it was a given that a comic of such length would have to be be serialized first. I think Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs (1998 Jonathan Cape) and Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco (2000 Fantagraphics) were the first occasions when works of impressive size were published straight to book, though i have probably overlooked one or two (City of Glass, 1994...The Jew of New York, 1998...).

I've noticed a new phase in which individuals of the generation associated with the 'graphic novel' now find themselves the subjects of attractive monographs. last year there was the lovely The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death by Todd Hignite, from Abrams, this year Ilex's book on Alan Moore by Gary Millidge, and next year I see we can look forward to one on Daniel Clowes, also from Abrams.

The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, will be published in April 2012.

The book will be edited by Alvin Buenaventura, publisher of the highly-regarded independent comics publishing house Buenaventura Press, and will feature essays by book designer, editor and comics expert Chip Kidd, acclaimed cartoonist Chris Ware and others. “Alvin Buenaventura has pulled together an exciting collection of art and essays, all of which have come together beautifully to showcase Dan’s considerable talents,” said Kochman. This year Clowes was also awarded the Pen Center USA's 2011 Literary Award for Graphic Literature for an outstanding body of work.

The 'graphic novel' has now travelled so far along its course of evolution that we even have a whole book about a single book:

2011-10-01T19:43:00.001-05:00

In general I have nothing against critics, but this makes me laugh:

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves".-Brendan Behan

2011-09-30T17:02:00.003-05:00

Tintin in the Congo' racism trial opens
(AFP) – 4 hours ago

BRUSSELS — A Congolese man pleaded with a Belgian court on Friday to remove "Tintin in the Congo" from bookshelves, arguing that the comic book is littered with racist stereotypes about Africans.
"It is a racist comic book that celebrates colonialism and the supremacy of the white race over the black race," Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo said as he arrived for the opening of the civil trial in Brussels.
"Will we continue to tolerate such a book today?" asked Mondondo, whose case against Tintin's publisher is backed by a French anti-racism group.more

2011-09-28T00:29:00.000-05:00

While I'm waiting for my copy of Craig Thompson's Habibi to arrive from Amazon, here's a review of his Carnet de Voyage that I wrote for the Comics Journal in 2004. In that book he did some travel research for Habibi; it's still available from TopShelf. I've used some ready-scanned images from the internet.

Craig Thompson
Carnet de Voyage

The travel book.
I once had a memorable conversation with my fellow cartoonist Glenn Dakin (mentioned in my intro to his Abe; wrong for all the right reasons) on the subject of whether the comics medium would be the perfect vehicle, so to speak, for a 'travel book.' I don’t mean to say that we should do every kind of worthwhile type of literature into a book (hey! Nobody’s done a cookery comic!), adding notches to the lectern as we go. But the travel book we arrived at by a perfectly earnest route. To begin with, we both seemed to be getting around a great deal and were full of stories about it. And the travel book as a type has a worthy history and has always lent itself to a combination of written and pictorial jottings. On my shelf in front of me I have Eric Wharton’s Wine dark Seas (1937) illustrated by its author with some 38 ink drawings. And one of my favourite antecedents of the graphic novel is The Foreign Tour of Brown, Jones and Robinson (1856) by the great Punch cartoonist Richard Doyle. In eighty pages printed on one side only, with tissue interleaves (mimicking a watercolour sketch-book of its time?), it is a bona fide travel book (rather than a spoof of one) as well as being a great adventure narrated through drawings (with brief captions). It has all the classic situations of the travelogue: the humiliations of the customs check, the discomforts of alien toilets, the falling afoul of the local constabulary, the hint of a romantic dalliance, odd personages met on the road, astonishing scenery and archaic side-trips.

But quite apart from having a noble lineage, my reason for seeing a good prospect in the travel comic is that it offers a chance to momentarily shake the medium out of its convention-bound structural formulae. Even autobiography in literature tends to be governed by procedural templates. The memoir of a battle against alcoholism and the story of an industrialist’s success may each employ the george-and-the-dragon scenario, or the latter might opt for the david-and-goliath etc. etc. Harvey Pekar’s great achievement was to scorn the whole process of off–the-shelf scenarios in his super-ironic American Splendor. I remain unsure what to make of Our Cancer Year; his move into large scale did not result in success from this point of view. The translation into a movie oddly was a more resounding, and perhaps ultimate, victory. So my point, which I am in danger of wandering away from and having it seized by the authorities as unattended baggage, is that the travel book, since it is written on the run, offers an opportunity to avoid stock scenarios, which is not to say that it does not have a bunch to choose from. But let’s look at specifics…

Craig Thompson.
Thompson’s Blankets was an interesting success from many angles, my favorite being that here was one of the bright young crowd merrily adapting a bunch of Eisnerian approaches into his own very individual style. Eisner’s kind of storytelling has tended to be seen in more than one decade as old-fashioned, only for a later crowd to come along and find it useful all over again. So once again we see a young artist picking up on the emotionally wrought figures, the expansive brush style, the centering of the image, letting a bit of random chiaroscuro account for the corners. Or not; it’s all loose. Thompson has a way of drawing the sexy girl that is all his own, first hand and on the spot. His set of serigraphs titled Melissa, from a French publisher, is a gorgeous, heart-melting little package in which his subject is not the girl as a figure study, or the girl as a sex object, but his total adoration of the person in front of him. We care not whether it is an undying long-term association, only that it existed and was put on paper, and perhaps that we got to see, or better, keep, one of the 333 copies of the limited edition so that we may wistfully visit her by proxy (or at least his re-creation of her, which is of course a different thing in the final analysis, though the artist may not always admit it.)

Carnet de Voyage.
Craig Thompson says at the outset that this is not his ‘next book’, in spite of it being a more mature and, in my opinion, superior work of art to the earlier Goodbye Chunky Rice and Blankets. We should conclude that he, or his publisher, is being canny in heading off what might be considered the expectation of a sequel to the sentimental appeal of Blankets across America. But let me take the admonition at face value for my own purposes. We find ourselves with a dead area in the imaginary map of our art of the graphic novel. We have no common term for our informal works and ‘sketchbook’ suggests itself as a last resort. A sketchbook is where we work things out; the marginal calculations, the thought we must pin down before it evaporates, the variation to see how it looks, the spontaneous doodle, the fragmentary glimpsed detail for which we may later find a home. Crumb’s sketchbooks are the real McCoy, but Thompson’s Carnet is no more a sketchbook to my eyes than was Seth’s Vernacular Drawings, or Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries and I believe the integrity of the work is somewhat undermined by the designation. I would not be surprised if the market potential was also weakened. Dupuy and Berberian’s F (from the same publisher as Melissa) presented itself more confidently. It’s a gorgeous artefact. Like the Seth book it’s a series of drawings united by theme and a single vision (which is not the same thing as a single artist). When I recently declared on the TCJ message board that these two works were the best of our comics medium in the last year (2002) I elicited the response that they should be filed instead under ‘Art Books.’ In configuring the map of our art entirely around ‘sequence’ we have left no room for ‘series.’ There was a time when our medium did embrace print portfolios, such as Eisner’s City Portfolio. This approach tended toward the pretentious certainly, but no one ever suggested that it was a separate art and should be filed down the street. The medium has always had its own pop culture formats for collected images, the box of trading cards for example, such as the Sinkiewicz-illustrated Friendly Dictators set, or the book of pin-ups, such as Vertigo puts together from time to time, but we remain at a loss as to how to incorporate the phenomenon into our conceptual map.

If Thompson thought he was ‘sketching’ in Carnet then I am reminded of Monet and Renoir painting La Grenoulliere in Paris,1869, popularly regarded as the moment of the birth of Impressionism, a movement in painting whose essence was the capturing of fleeting atmospheric states while working in situ. At this stage, the evidence suggests, both men thought they were still making preparatory studies for larger, more conventional works that would subsequently be painted in the studio. But I would guess that Thompson knows Carnet is not a sketchbook because of the precise formalities he has put in place, such as its thoroughly organised lettering; its drawings cleanly presented, with reproduction the intention from the outset; its unity of instrumentation (at one point Thompson loses his brush-pen and has to temporarily switch to a cheap felt-tip; he makes a feature of the aggravation.) I suspect he also may have automatically changed the names of some parties in the work for the normal purposes of its publication as a kind of fiction. But above all, the book is written as a narrative by one who knows. Knows what? That he is a man of destiny and that his story is merely waiting for him to step into it. After 224 pages he finds a logical place to conclude it, following the resolution of an amorous encounter, though he passes it off as having simply filled his page quota. These are age-old storyteller’s tricks.

I used the expression ‘on the run’ above. Most travelogues are intended to convey the ease and relaxation that your average traveller is seeking when he ‘gets away from it all’. Thompson in fact brings it all with him. He arrives into his book burdened with the ache of an ended love, which we shall expediently associate with the subject of Blankets until he gives us another that fits the space. He arrives indeed at high speed, as though off a chute. In Carnet he has a more acute sense of his physical presence in the world than in his previous books. In fact we see it as a developing quality over the three of them. In Chunky he had a cartoon stand-in in a story of endless shy variant metaphors of real situations. In Blankets he moved up to an actor of sorts, albeit a well briefed one. Here he at last in Carnet he has the confidence to fill his own skin. He is hungry to see everything and record it, even when his hands hurt from the effort, and this is one hell of an effort, 224 pages of exact and faultless drawing in three months. He has to see a French doctor for the ache and is told that such advanced arthritis is rare in one so young. There is something in this revelation that is neither simple honesty nor unmanly complaining, but a kind of holy suffering. I think of Beethoven’s deafness before the obvious is laid before me in a drawing: Renoir in old age with his paintbrush tied to his arthritic fingers. We do not think of him as presumptuous in evoking such comparisons. He has tacitly declared himself to be our man of destiny, and we have accepted the proposition. And Renoir also filled his picture space with persons and places from Paris to Morocco.

Thompson is not a camera-bedecked ‘tourist’ and wants us to know it. In a coda at the end he informs us that he used no photographs (exceptions not worth mentioning here) to aid him in putting down his record of Paris, Morocco and all the people and stops in between. As I have oft put it: you may have seen the Eiffel Tower, but did it see you? Thompson leaves marks of his passing, often in the form of likenesses drawn and given away, (never to be seen by us) but we feel that he probably also left a lot of good feeling in his wake as he always leaves us, his readers, in good spirits.

I have long felt that all of our rules and principles for constructing comic book are all designed to keep intact the suspension of disbelief within a time-governed narrative system, like cinema in other words. It is arguable that cinema is too much of an internalised way of our natural ‘seeing’ for it to be separated from the complex of our inner eye, but I would say that as long as we describe a picture of a face as a ‘close-up’ rather than, say, a ‘portrait’ then we are a willing slave to this semantic conditioning. The travel book, as I have been envisioning it here and as Thompson has rendered it, enables us to bypass such considerations. The journalistic date headings emphasize the passage of time, but otherwise pacing and ‘timing’ are of no interest here, unless the artist sections off some little cartoon six-panel sequence in a kind of sidebar to the main progression of the work. His approaches are many and effortlessly sewn together. The immediate impression is pictorial, with the words running a helter skelter obbligato, picking up anything neglected by the image, including people’s names, which Thompson collects avidly, as though they are endangered folk melodies. And things are named and described for the sheer pleasure of it, without needing to be tied into a plot (the most tedious of all fictional constructs) and brought back at the denouement. Sometimes these words do not bother to integrate, but always they are as hand-made as the pictures, lovingly so in many instances. And what pictures! Here he stops to lavish attention on a study of a girl (often, many, different) who has posed for him, there he lingers over an expanse of rooftop detail, later a whole market stall of attention arresting oddities. But he also brings along his bag of cartoon tricks such as various alter egos who must have their say when the truth cannot be expressed otherwise. His friends are cartoonists too and where he meets them they are invited to ‘sit in’ (in the old jazz parlance) for a page. An early review described Thompson as ‘lonely’ and I had to look back to see if we were talking about the same book. The protagonist of Blankets is lonely (and autobiographical or not we must always take care to separate an author from his protagonist), a young man who has not yet found his peers. In Carnet he is a prince among his fellows. We read and we envy. We would break his goddamn fingers if we ever thought that the success of our own books could give us half as much pleasure as we get vicariously from the success of his.

Craig Thompson's blog posts about making the book

2011-09-27T02:13:00.002-05:00

Brought to my attention:
"A short film about New York architect Andrew Berman's dream project.
Commissioned to design a writing studio in the woods in Long Island, he took the challenge and created a building which seems to float in a sea of foliage.
The film, while informative conveys the tranquility of the building by simply inviting you to enter and experience the pace of the writer's world inside."

Private Library from David Vegezzi on Vimeo.

Via the casual optimist

2011-09-26T06:03:00.004-05:00

For some reason until now i did not notice that BIFF (Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd), mainstays of the British small press comics explosion of the early 1980s, have a website with a huge archive of old cartoons. I just wish they'd stick dates on them all. I vaguely recollect that this is an early one, though I never saw it in colour before.

And the following is later, though I don't remember ever seeing it before at all because I left England in 1986, and they got their regular spot in the Guardian just before that. They stood in for Posy Simmonds in 1985, but after her return they hung around for another twenty years. They currently appear in other assorted mags. This is an apt expression of their modus operandi. (click to enlarge and read)

In a 2007 press release for a retrospective collection, Chris Garratt wrote::
Raised on a diet of Hymns Ancient and Modern, Sartre and Joe Meek hits, Goldfish Virgins of the dodgems, Intrepid Riders of the Waltzers, wags of youth club literati and pioneers of skiffle, the Biff boys belong to a generation that said goodbye to trilby hats, pipes and National Service and ushered in the Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues, Existentialism and Vietnam. Their early work, retrospectively recognised as anglicised Situationism with its artless articulation of image and text détournement, montaging comic strip and philosophy, angst-riddled soliloquies and cowboy drawls, featured prominently in the sprawling publications and smudged ink mags of the Counter Culture.
Holding up a cracked and peeling mirror to a cracked and peeling generation of new adults who exchanged WRP for SDP, beanbags for Habitat and IKEA, Biff eschewed the tedious route of “political satire” and its toothless ranting-to-the-converted in favour of a bewildered but first-hand commentary on the mapless aspirations, pretensions and farcical antics of the baby boomer meritocracy. Threaded through this nonsensical catalogue of faux-academic posturing, management-speak, Baudrillardian ramblings and psychobabble set in the deathly milieu of wicker furniture and avocado dips was a continuing fascination for new frontiers in astronomy, particle physics, psychology and the arts, deliberately colliding such “serious” endeavours with the loonier fringes of self improvement such as cushion-bashing psychotherapy, astrology and sweat lodges.

Biff continues in much the same manner, except without so much glue and scissors. Here's the opening panel of a recent strip (go check them out):

2011-09-22T16:24:00.004-05:00

On and on it goes. Apparently Scotland Yard is suppressing information that could lead to the unmasking of Jack the Ripper.

The cold, cold case of Jack the Ripper LA TImes Sept 20

A retired homicide detective is trying to force Scotland Yard to release uncensored versions of files that might offer fresh leads on the identity of Britain's most notorious serial killer.

The volumes contain tens of thousands of tidbits on the Yard's dealings with the public and police informants in the years that followed the Ripper's grisly two-month killing rampage in 1888. The shadowy figure is alleged to have slain five women in London's seamy Whitechapel district, slitting their throats and, in some cases, eviscerating them with almost surgical precision.
But the Metropolitan Police Service, as Scotland Yard is formally known, has staunchly refused to publish the documents in unexpurgated form, without names blacked out.

Alan Moore and I intended to do an update of the dance of the gull catchers (or ripperologists), a further appendix indeed, on the tenth anniversary of the realease of From Hell, which would have been two years ago. But we never got around to it.

2011-09-21T17:18:00.001-05:00

My old pal Phil Elliott decided to post in his blog after not touching it for over a year. What makes people do that?

2011-09-21T16:51:00.000-05:00

I'm more interested in the similarities between writers, or artists or whatever, than their differences. While reading Rene Girard's The Scapegoat ( Le Bouc émissaire 1982), which I suppose would come under the heading of philosophical anthropology, I find myself sidelined into looking into the picture of his life and times when i come across this paragraph:

Girard began to develop a new way of speaking about literary texts. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover their common structural properties after noticing that characters in great fiction evolved in a system of relationships otherwise common to the wider generality of novels. But there was a distinction to be made:
"Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is." etc.

**************
Online gamers crack enzyme riddle

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or World of Warcraft: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.
The exploit was detailed on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where - exceptionally in scientific publishing - both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.
Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.

2011-09-20T03:11:00.007-05:00

I intended to write about Paco Roca's Arrugas before long, but circumstances have encouraged an early post, as I'll explain in a minute. Arrugas means 'Wrinkles', is Published by Astiberri, Spain, 2007,now in its seventh printing, and is the story is of Emilio and his fellow residents in an old people's home. Specifically, the narrative looks at the effects Alzheimer's disease, sensitively but not without a lot of humour. There is great charm in the way characters are in and out of each other's delusions as in the following scene, in which we see Senora Rosario permanently on the Orient Express.

Emilio is befriended immediately upon his arrival by Miguel, who practices an unending number of wheezes to separate his fellow residents from their cash, as you can see in the fifth and sixth panels below, to the horror of Emilio, who in his workaday life was a bank manager.

Compare the above samples with my previous look at Roca and notice how he devises a particular style for each new project. Observe the shapes of the balloons and their tails for instance, and though you can't see it in these scans, each of his books is printed on a different choice of paper. I discussed his work in the context of the 'novela grafica' which the artist has said he sees as a concept that offers a liberation from ready-made conventional formulae of format and approach. Each project defines its own.

With El invierno del dibujante and Arrugas, Paco Roca has shown himself to be a graphic novelist of the first order. In an ideal world, Drawn and Quarterly would be publishing him in English Language editions. Tell them I said so.

Yesterday's issue of the Spanish daily, El Pais has a report on an the premiere of the full length animated film based on Arrugas, first announced I think in 2009 : (we're back in GoogleSpain I'm afraid. I'll try to fix it):

'Wrinkles', a unique comic book, an outstanding film

At 87 minutes the session ends. Applause. The first spectators run out and lose a gift. Rosa Lema, 101, senile dementia, sang a song, a treasure found by a sound engineer who visited the residences.

I think they're saying there was a surprise after the end credits got rolling.

As the lights cam e back on, Roca breathed a sigh of relief, "Of course things change, even the characters [there are even different nationalities among the players], but the spirit's there. They got what I wanted to tell." He turned right and embraced Ferreras (the producer or director I think), who was eyeing him with some caution. "Congratulations."

A frame from the film.

Santiago Garcia argued recently that Roca is even better when he is being casually funny than when he is trying to draw the great graphic novel, as in a new collection of his weekly strip titled Memoirs of a Man in Pyjamas