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Opus 131: Opus
131 ( STRIPPING.
The Cincinnati Enquirer cancelled Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks in early January as part of a revision of its comic
strip line-up. Sara Pearce, assistant managing editor for features,
explained the decision to drop the controversial strip: "During
the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times
because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper.
We did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly
needed to censor." In other words, since the Enquirer
was frequently appalled by the inflammatory content of some
of the strip's daily installments, they decided just to douse
the source of the fire altogether by dispensing with the whole
thing on a daily basis. No more problems. Newspapers have every
right to do this, of course. But when they do it, they usually
commit the sort of inconsistency that they'd crucify a politician
for. Admitting that the strip "has its fans," Pearce
said it makes others "uncomfortable." I wonder if
she and the rest of the paper's editors apply the same criteria
to the front page or to advertising supplements touting women's
underwear. Even more intriguing, however, is her use of the
word "censor." It's the first time I've seen a newspaper
factotum use the word "censor" to describe what most
editors, under similar circumstances, call "editing."
Curious. The paper also dropped Agnes, Cathy, Mary Worth, and James; it added Red and Rover, Flo and Friends, The Hots, Frazz, and Tina's Groove. Looks to me like Tina's Groove is slowly displacing Cathy as the niche strip featuring the
adventures of a single young woman.
Johnny Hart dipped his toe back into hot
water on January 19. In B.C.
that day, a couple of his cavemen are depicted sitting on a
pile of rocks, one of them reading a book: "Sez here, 'Fred
and Stanley Wong claimed they flew the first airplane.' However,"
he continues, "it has been established that their craft
never actually became airborne." "Proving what?"
asks the other caveman. "Two wongs don't make a wright?"
says the first. Naturally, given Hart's record as a proselyting
Born Again servant of the Lord, some people saw the strip as
a slur against Asians. (Once you've established yourself as
a crusader-for whatever cause-everything you do is suspect.)
Several newspapers, including the Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, and two newspapers in New Mexico,
the Clovis News Journal
and the Portales News-Tribune,
declined to run the strip because they didn't want to offend
their Asian-American readers. "I understand trying to make
a play on words," said Ray Sullivan, publisher of the New
Mexico papers, "but it's just stupid. I don't think this
would go over well in Chinatown." I am not aware of any
substantial Chinese enclaves in the New Mexico towns Clovis
(population, 32,000) and Portales (10,000), but that's just
another aspect of my ethnic myopia, I suppose. Newspaper publishers,
having a much more intimate exposure to such things, have learned
to be cautious.
In the same vein, we'll probably hear an uproar about
the Zits strip for January 20. In a single, strip-wide panel, we see Jeremy
and his buddy Hector leaving the scene at the far right, the
rest of the strip being devoted to a giant display in the snow
of Jeremy's signature in a decorative cursive that would make
John Hancock envious. Hector says, "The flourish at the
end was a nice touch." To which Jeremy, sipping from a
soda-pop container, says, "Long live the 48-oz. fountain
drink." The problem here? The offense to Western Civilization?
Well, I suppose Jerry
Scott and Jim Borgman
can explain that Jeremy squirted his signature in the snow
with the straw he's sipping through, but in my day, adolescent
males wrote their names in the snow with another, more anatomical,
device. Surely, some reader somewhere-some cautious publisher-is
gonna be pissed off.
Then there's Dagwood on January 19, whose pants fall
down, exposing him in his shorts. Or The
Hots on the same date in which the young wife is discussing
her cycle and alluding to her sexual agenda for the evening
with her husband. No end in sight, you might say.
Opus is gathering satirical steam. As the
beloved flightless one left the Antarctica and found himself
in the clutches of civilization again, he has been insulted
by officious immigration gate-keepers and assaulted by the airport
security apparatus. Berke Breathed is back.
One of my favorites from the last month or so is Carol Lay's "Dissent into Hell," in which she fills her
customary half-page strip for alternative newspapers with a
dramatization of this "news item": The Secret Service
has been enlisting local police to keep demonstrators away from
Bush and Cheney events, often confining them to fenced-off areas
far from the media. Lay depicts a band of protesters with their
placards being loaded into a truck to be transported to a "freedom
pen" several miles away from the site of the Presidential
Appearance. They finally arrive at "Corn Hole, Kansas"
and are herded into a chain-link enclosure. One of the placards
reads "We've been Bushwhacked," and one of the protesters
is saying, "Think they'll ever come back for us?"
The sign on the fence reads, "Free Speech Area." Ironic
and bitter and true. Just another revelation of the information
the news media isn't promulgating, despite having been granted
freedom of the press expressly for the purpose of promulgating
information-of all sorts, including that which is critical of
government. Sigh. JUST
HEARD IN NEW YORK. The voice on the other end of the line sounded as if it was
being extruded painfully from an atrophied larynx. Like fingernails
scraping across slate, the voice grated, a groan that was nearly
a grunt. "Jud Hurd, Bob," it excruciated, "-is this a bad time?"
No doubt about it: the sound, the message-indisputably, Jud
Hurd, my friend and editor. Abruptly businesslike-no preludes
or preambles. But, withal, everlastingly courteous and considerate.
No one I have ever known has committed a phone call with Jud's
diffident squeamishness about the instrument's most frequently
overlooked quality, its inherently heedless intrusiveness-its
interloping capacity for barging into someone's life, wholly
unheralded, demanding attention immediately, regardless of what
the surprised and cowed recipient of the phone call might be
doing or might desire or need. Jud recognized this uncivilized
dimension of the telephonic universe, and he invariably sought
to make up for its unthinking invasiveness by being so punctilious
as to unhorse the barbarian. For me, it was never a bad time
to get a phone call from Jud.
Jud's voice is probably the most well-known sound in
the world of cartooning after the sound of a pen scratching
a line on paper. As publisher and editor of the profession's
longest-running periodical, the quarterly journal Cartoonist PROfiles, for 35 years, he telephoned
others of the inky-fingered fraternity often, making several
phone calls a day-interviewing cartoonists, lining up future
stories, talking to syndicate officials, exploring sources of
illustrative material for articles scheduled for a future issue
of the magazine. He also answered scores of questions, from
friends and total strangers, from established professionals
and aspiring neophytes, wanting to know which pen or brush to
use. Most of the questions were about cartooning, but some where
not.
I phoned him one time-secure in my belief that good editors
knew everything-and asked him, without warning, what the districts
of Paris were called. In a blink came the answer: "Arrondisements,"
he said. "Thanks," I said and hung up. (I knew he'd know-and
not just because he was a superior editor. He and Claudia, his
wife, had made nearly a dozen trips to Paris over the years,
and he could hardly have made such visitations without knowing
about arrondisements. And I knew, too, that if he didn't know, Claudia
would.)
Jud's editorial acumen is firmly rooted in a lifelong
involvement in and practice of cartooning as a career. Born
in Cleveland in approximately 1912, Jud discovered, at about
the age of 12 or 13, that Charles N. Landon ran his renowned
correspondence course in cartooning from his hometown, so Jud
went downtown, met Landon, and enrolled in the course. He was
hooked. He subsequently drew cartoons for the campus publications
at every educational institution he enrolled in, junior high
through college, and sold his first cartoon when he was about
twenty-one. He sold it to the Calgary Eye-Opener, a humor magazine which, at the time, was published
in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It promulgated an assortment of jokes
and cartoons of the sort that, today, are so mildly risque as
to be nearly inoffensive if not completely boring. For 1934,
however, the Eye-Opener was a pretty spicy dish. Jud's
cartoon depicted a honeymoon couple in a fancy hotel on January
1, the newly minted husband saying, "Let's start the New
Year off with a bang." Jud was informed of the success
of his assault on the bastions of publication by a letter from
the associate editor, who wrote: "Payment will be three
bucks on publication. Check will reach you in time to buy a
case of Christmas lager or whatever it is that $3 will buy in
Cleveland." The letter was signed Carl Barks, who would,
somewhat later, make Donald Duck famous and invent for Disney's
webfooted waterfowl a miserly mutton-chopped relative named
Uncle Scrooge.
Jud attended Adelbert College of Western Reserve University
(now Case-Western Reserve University), where he majored in economics
and became art editor of the campus humor magazine, the Red
Cat. In that capacity, he wrote various cartooning dignitaries,
begging from them drawings of their characters to publish in
the magazine. It was a common ploy among campus humor magazine
editors. By letter, Jud met such steller 'tooners as E.C.
Segar, Frederick Burr Opper, Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman,
and Rube Goldberg.
After graduation, Jud spent a year at the Chicago Art Institute
and then lit out for California. In 1936, he was in Hollywood
working as an inbetweener at the Mintz Studio but aspiring,
all the while, to a career as a syndicated newspaper cartoonist.
By 1937, he had achieved this goal, producing a thrice-weekly
comic strip called Just
Hurd in Hollywood (his actual given name being "Justin")
with "an all-star cast": each strip consisted of a
photograph of a movie star in the first panel followed by several
other panels presenting Jud's cartoon rendition of an anecdote
taken from the star's life. Jud obtained the anecdotes by interviewing
the stars, meeting Joan Crawford, Joe E. Brown, Betty Grable,
Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Lana Turner, and so on.
While in Los Angeles, Jud also met cartooning greats George McManus, George Herriman, and Walt Disney. The die was cast: Jud honed his interviewing skills and
followed his natural inclination to seek out other cartoonists
to hobnob with. But it would be a few more years before he combined
those ingredients into another career, publishing a magazine
of interviews with cartoonists.
Just Hurd in Hollywood was cancelled soon
after it was launched: newspapers were being flooded with studio
publicity material about movie stars, and a single syndicated
gossip column contained many more anecdotes about more stars
in the same space that Jud's six-column comic strip occupied.
Jud went back to Cleveland and joined the art department at
Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), a feature syndicate,
where he produced, among other things, an editorial cartoon
for NEA's weekly service. In those days, many of the NEA cartoonists
still lived in Cleveland and worked in the NEA offices, so Jud
met such luminaries as editorial cartooning great Herblock, Clyde Lewis (Hold Everything),
George Scarbo (The Comic Zoo) and Harry Schlensker
(later Roy Crane's
assistant on Buz Sawyer)
and Bela Zaboly (then doing Our Boarding House with Major Hoople following
Gene Ahern's departure
for King Features and ownership of his feature). Jud went to
New York to seek more cartooning fortune in 1940, drew a baseball
cartoon-type story called "Pie Cobb" (a take-off on
Ty Cobb) for Dell comic books, then returned to Cleveland, where
he learned typing (an invaluable skill for a magazine editor
acting as his own reporting and production staff) at the Spencerian
Business College and met Claudia, who would eventually become
his wife. While in New York, he met Peter
Arno, Bud Fisher (who, in a somewhat alcoholic daze, offered
Jud a job-which, alas, evaporated with the aforementioned daze),
and H.T. Webster.
Drafted into the Army in 1942 for the duration of World War
II, Jud, like many artists and cartoonists, wound up in the
Signal Corps, Intelligence Section, where he did a weekly cartoon
about a dim-witted soldier named Crypto Chris, later reincarnated
as Stew Pid, a character Jud created for American Steel and
Wire Company while operating his Industrial Cartoon Studio in
Cleveland after the war. Like Will
Eisner in the postwar years, Jud produced cartoons and comic
strips for commercial clients who wanted comics to emphasize
safety messages, to enliven in-house newsletters and magazines,
and to instruct employees or to sell products. In the 1950s,
Jud tried, in vain, to sell a couple of comic strips to syndicates;
then in 1955, Children's
Playmate magazine hired him to produce a new "comic
book section," for which Jud created Inspector
Hector, Socko & Jocko, and
Sandy & Dandy features. Finally, in 1959, Jud achieved
national distribution by syndicating himself with a business-oriented
panel cartoon, Ticker Toons, in which, employing (at last)
his education in economics, he posed and answered questions
about the stock market. It debuted in November, and a year later,
it was picked up by the Chicago Sun-Times/Daily News Syndicate.
By then, Jud was already at work devising another informational
cartoon panel, Health Capsules, partnering with a physician, Michael Petti. It was
distributed by United Feature Syndicate, which, later, also
took on Ticker Toons. Ticker Toons lasted 10-12
years; launched in February 1961,
Health Capsules was still going, although Jud gave it up
a couple years ago, after over 40 years.
In 1952, Jud had joined the National Cartoonists Society
(just six years after its founding in New York by Rube
Goldberg and a half-dozen other cartoonists who had been
convening occasionally during WWII to visit area hospitals to
entertain convalescing wounded soldiers), and he occasionally
made trips to New York on business, timing the trip to coincide
with NCS's monthly meetings. In 1964, shortly after he moved
to Westport, Connecticut, Bob
Dunn (They'll Do It Every Time), then president
of NCS, asked Jud if he would take over the editing of the Society
newsletter-"guessing," as Jud usually puts it, "that
I could spell." The assignment appealed to all of Jud's
instincts and employed many of the skills he'd honed over the
years, and he consequently poured more of himself into each
successive issue. By 1968, it was consuming too much of his
time as a volunteer, gratis employment. Jud offered to continue
if NCS could find a way to pay him something. Happily, the NCS
Board of Governors proved to be fiscally conservative (which,
in those days, meant they didn't want to spend any money, no
longer a conservative trait), and Jud then had the idea of continuing
in much the same vein with a publication of his own. Cartoonist PROfiles was born with the winter
issue in March of 1969. It and Jud's two syndicated cartoons
have absorbed his energies ever since. Every day, he goes to
work in the cozy one-room building in back of his home, a studio
about 30 yards from his back door. On December 13, 2003, at its anyule Christmas party held, this year, at the New York clubhouse of the Society of Illustrators, NCS presented Jud with the award it gives to those who have performed outstanding service to the Society and/or have made a significant contribution to the profession, the Silver T-Square. The first Silver T-Square was awarded to Britain's legendary political cartoonist, David Low, in 1948. Others have been conferred on such stellar performers as Cliff Sterrett, Herblock, James Thurber, Milton Caniff, Russell Patterson, Bill Mauldin, Arnold Roth -well, you get the idea: it is a distinguished company. And the initiation of Jud Hurd into it is long over-due. Few have done as much for cartooning. Arnold Roth presented the T-square to Jud, and Jud, taking it in his hands, stood at the microphone for a few minutes, his suit coat hanging like a smock from his shoulders, his hand habitually making small propeller motions as he, ever the editor, sought for the right words to rehearse, briefly, his career, displaying, as usual, his enduring love for cartooning.
In the works, by the way, is a book that will reprint
Jud's selection of favorite articles from the 35-year run of
Cartoonist PROfiles;
from Andrews McMeel, out this spring. We'll tell you here when
it arrives. And we'll soon be offering off-prints of all the
other articles from PROfiles for a modest fee; stay 'tooned.
NOUS
R US. "American Splendor," the movie of Harvey Pekar's comic book life, continues to enjoy the spotlight:
Andy Seiler in USA Today
includes it on his list of the five best motion pictures
of the year, and it took Best Picture honors from the National
Society of Film Critics, which met January 3 at Sardi's in New
York to announced its verdicts for the year. (Clint Eastwood's
"Mystic River" came in second.) And the L.A. Film
Critics have also honored the flick by listing it among its
picks for the best of the year. Pekar, meanwhile, reports that
his wife has kidded him about being a has-been as far as movies
are concerned. "And I guess she's right," he goes
on. "There's no place for me to go in the film business.
"American Splendor" covered my life from when I was
a little kid 'til I reached the age of 62. There's not much
left to make a sequel about. [But] I never got too excited about
the success of "American Splendor" because I figured
it was, as I've said, a one-shot deal. It'd be different if
I had a bunch of film scripts lying around to produce after
"American Splendor," but I don't. I'm very grateful
to be the object of praise and flattery, even if I don't really
deserve it [Pekar credits the movie's makers for its success],
but I'm not going to get my head turned by it so that I'll be
riding for a fall." In the midst of all the excitement
about the movie, Pekar is re-focusing on writing comic book
stories, which, this time, will be published in trade paperback
collections aimed at book store exposure where general readers
can find them. ... Just to keep the honorific ball rolling,
The Library Journal has concurred with
me in naming Craig Thompson's
Blankets one of the "Best Books of
2003." This is the first time a graphic novel has made
the list, and this year, the genre is recognized with a second
tome, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis,
the story of the cartoonist's growing up in Iran during the
Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq. Christopher Reeve, superman both
on and off the screen, has signed to direct a computer-animated
feature film about baseball, "a urban fable" set in
the 1930s. Said Reeve: "Many projects cross my desk but
only a few are truly captivating. With the perfect blend of
warmth and wit, this is a story with universal appeal that both
children and their parents will love." He will oversee
the entire production, from character development, casting and
set design through animation and postproduction. It's due out
in 2005. ... Russell Myers' comic strip, Broomhilda,
about a 1,500-year-old green witch, love-starved and cantankerous,
is the inspiration for a new musical being conjured up by Martin
Charnin, the lyricist who co-created the musical, "Annie."
They're hoping for a Broadway debut in 2006. ... At uComics.com,
a website feature called "Comics Sherpa" ("your
guide to undiscovered comics") permits "aspiring cartoonists
(or established cartoonists with a new idea) to tap into the
huge and loyal readership on uComics.com for feedback and exposure."
That is, Comics Sherpa presents, without charge to the creator
or the viewer, otherwise uncirculated comics for your delection
and edification. ... Herge's Tintin is 75 years old: he first appeared,
not, as usually claimed, in a Brussels newspaper on January
10, 1929, but with his dog Milou ("Snowy" in English)
on January 4; the duo went on to have 23 book-length adventures
that sold 200 million books worldwide in 55 languages. France's
Charles de Gaulle, he of the impossibly grandiose self-esteem,
once said, "deep down," that "my only international
rival is Tintin." ... Max
Allan Collins has produced the second of three untold tales
in the Road to Perdition saga,
Book Two: Sanctuary; more appetizing fodder for the Hollywood
mill. ... And Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest,
which, in 1979, was among the very first self-published comic
books, is being archived by DC; Volume
1 collects the first five issues, among them, the issue,
no doubt, that was the first comic book story that moved me
to tears. ... Meanwhile, Dave Sim's Cerebus, another
of the earliest self-published comics, launched in 1977, is
reaching Sim's avowed goal, issue no. 300, after 27 years and
6,000 pages of aardvark adventures, a genuinely stupendous feat.
King Features is planning a year-long celebration of
Popeye's 75th birthday, beginning the weekend of
January 17 when the Empire State Building in New York bathed
itself in spinachy green light from sundown to midnight. Popeye
first appeared (as a mere walk-on) in E.C.
Segar's loping comic strip, Thimble
Theatre, on January 17, 1929, but the strip had debuted
December 19, 1919 without him. Popeye's fame and his association
with spinach were derived more from the Fleischer Studio's animated
version of the strip, which series started in the summer of
1933, than from the strip itself. Segar had forced Popeye to
consume a bowl of spinach on February 28, 1932, in preparation
for a encounter with an iron-jawed braggart, but Segar didn't
make much of this leafy plot ingredient. )His forte was prolonging
Popeye's idiotic predicaments; Popeye punched people out very
infrequently. In the movies, however, Popeye's very existence
was defined by his pugilistic feats.) The end of the celebratory
year will be marked by the holiday inauguration of a 3-D animated
cartoon written by "Mad About You" comedian Paul Reisner.
Meanwhile, in Segar's birthplace, the Illinois river town Chester,
Ernie Schuchert and his partner Laurie Randall, co-owners of
the Spinach Can Collectibles and Popeye Museum, join their fellow
citizens in believing that Popeye and other characters in the
strip (Olive Oyl and Wimpy) were inspired by local residents-Frank
"Rocky" Fiegel, a one-eyed pipe-smoking layabout with
a penchant for fisticuffs; Dora Paskel, an unusually tall thin
woman who wore her hair with a bun in the back; and Schuchert's
great grandfather, J. William "Windy Bill" Schuchert,
who ran the Chester Opera House, hired Segar as a kid to operate
the lights, and was accustomed to sending employees out for
ample supplies of the hamburgers that he doted on. Segar never
acknowledged these folks as inspirational, but that, it is averred
by local fanatics, is because he died before he could do so.
They nonetheless remember him-and Popeye, the latter with a
six-foot 900-pound bronze statue that overlooks the Mississippi
River and the "Popeye Picnic," an annual festival
in September.
Eleven animated cartoons are in competition for the three
nominations allowed for this year's Academy Award for animated
feature film: Finding Nemo, The Triplets of Belleville, Brother Bear, Jester Til (Till
Eulenspiegel), The Jungle Book 2, Looney Tunes: Back in Action,
Millennium Actress, Piglet's Big Movie, Pokemon Heroes, Rugrats
Go Wild, and Tokyo
Godfathers. Despite Jeffrey Katzenberg's declaration last
summer that traditional animation is passe, Triplets
proves him wrong, according to David Ng at the Village Voice: this new French film is "a hand-drawn smorgasbord
of caricaturized modernity told with minimal dialogue ... rejuvenates
the 2-D genre through an artisanal obsession with detail."
(I suspect "artisanal," a word not in my Funk 'n'
Wagnels, is one of those portmanteau words, in this case, combining
"artisan" and "anal," a particularly apt
packaging to describe the anal retentive "obsession with
detail." But I prevaricate.) Some digital effects lurk,
but the film is mostly hand-wrought. The final nominations will
be announced January 27; the Oscars will be presented February
29. ... Thomas Pynchon, the novelist whose reputation for reclusiveness
is matched only by J.D. Salinger's, will appear in public, in
a manner of speaking, making a guest appearance on "The Simpsons" during the show's
15th season, beginning next month. According to Al
Jean, the show's writer and executive producer, the cartoon
version of Pynchon will be wearing a paper bag over his head.
Cute. He doesn't step out of character then: Pynchon has refused
to permit any likeness of him to be published or to appear on
tv.
The Herb Block
Foundation, funded by the famed editorial cartoonist's estate,
is offering a $10,000 award to the winner of its annual competition.
(And the Foundation will pay the tax on the award so the recipient
will receive the entire amount, a generous gesture befitting
the cartoonist whose fortune established the Foundation.) This
year's winner will be announced March 11 at the Library of Congress,
with Ben Bradley giving a speech in honor of the occasion. ...
Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, 2002's Pulitzer winner, won the Berryman Award for political
cartooning this year. Editoonery
In An Age of High Feelings. It may be that we live in a more vociferous age,
or maybe it's simply that a polarized public is more readily
inflamed by political issues than in times of yore. In England,
for instance, 300 editorial cartoonists from newspapers throughout
Great Britain were accused of anti-Semitism when they awarded
first prize in their annual competition to Dave Brown of the London Independent for a cartoon that mimicked
Goya's famous painting, "Saturn Devouring One of His Children."
In Brown's rendering, it's Israel's Ariel Sharon who is the
naked monster, and the child whose head he is biting off is
a Palestinian. Immediately after the cartoon was first published
last January 27, the Israeli Embassy in London lodged an official
complaint; in rebellious response, the Independent reprinted the cartoon, on its front page, with an assortment
of opinions about it, both for and against. In his acceptance
speech, Brown thanked the Israeli Embassy for its angry reaction,
which, he said, contributed greatly to the publicity about the
cartoon, its notoriety, presumably, being somewhat responsible
for his winning the prize. The Israeli protest, which seems,
at first blush, excessive, was not, given the history of anti-Semitism.
The protest was doubtless inspired not so much by the political
message of the cartoon (Sharon's inhumane treatment of Palestinians)
or by the gross depiction of a bloated Sharon as by the image
itself. The picture of a giant Jew eating a child resonates
with echoes of a hoary and vicious canard, the so-called "Blood
Libel," a wholly baseless fiction of medieval times that
charged Jews with murdering Christian children at Passover in
order to use their blood in matzot.
The first documented instance of this vile absurdity occurred
in 1173, but just because it was "documented" doesn't
mean it is true. It most decidedly isn't. But the rumor has
persisted through the ages to this very day, hence the Jewish
objection to a cartoon the imagery of which can be interpreted
as a veiled reference to this monstrous lie about a people.
Some Jews have detected a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe
and elsewhere, and in such a climate, even veiled references
to antique falsehoods can help fuel bigotry and hatred. IRKS
& CROTCHETS. Angelina Jolie (aka the Tomb Raider) may be the first human
being who, through the induction of artificial augmentations
to her bosom and her lips (not to mention other body parts we
are not yet aware of), has actually turned herself into a comic
book character. ... The House of Ideas, swollen with its own
sense of self-importance, is once again systematically shooting
itself in the foot by publishing its forthcoming issues in a
"preview" magazine that's separate from the Previews
catalogue, thereby making future issues of Marvel comics harder
to discover than the future issues of any other publisher. As
I've said before, time after time, when trying to initiate the
Marvel minions into the mysteries of mass marketing,"Behold
the mall and its myriad shoe stores." All those shoe stores
gather under one roof for a reason, aristotle. ... Reviewing
comic book sales for 2003, Diamond recently listed the top 300
for the year, the listing determined by "orders by dealers
that were actually sold, shipped and invoiced to the dealers"-not
the comics that sold the most copies to consumers. Sounds like
a somewhat meaningless statistic to me, but then I don't follow
baseball either. Marvel appears to enjoy the largest market
share with 39.68% of the unit share, followed by DC with 30.60%
and then Image with 7.77%. After the top three publishers, everyone
else's percentage drops down quickly. Of the top 20 titles,
DC's Batman no. 619
ranks first in quantity, then the first (Marvel) issue of the
4-issue JLA/Avengers series (no. 3 by DC ranked 15th).
Marvel's Ultimate Fantastic Four no. 1 came in third.
DC had 11 of the top 20; Marvel, 9. Ten of DC's 11 titles were
Batman books. With numbers like these, we'd have to be capable
of guessing the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin
in order to be able to discern any significant difference in
popularity between the two houses.
When former Illinois governor George Ryan was indicted
on 22 counts of various sorts of corruption and political chicanery,
the Chicago Tribune,
which is without a staff editorial cartoonist, went to Scott Stantis of the Birmingham News and asked him to produce
an editorial cartoon on the subject. Stantis, who is syndicated
by Copley News Service, drew a picture of Ryan in a Saddam-like
spider-hole. The episode prompted a certain amount of grumbling
in the ranks of the nation's editooners. They've been carping,
occasionally, about the Tribune's
seeming refusal to hire a staff editorial cartoonist to
fill the shoes left gaping by the death of Jeff
MacNelly almost three years ago. The position, at one of
the nation's largest and therefore most influential daily papers,
is a plum, but, as one of the grousers observed, why should
the Trib hire a staff
cartoonist when they can get contributions from the likes of
Stantis by simply asking for them? An unjust question, kimo
sabe: Stantis may be "applying" for the job. RIP.
We
don't commemorate every departure from this vale of tears in
this corner, but the last month has brought news of the demise
of several notables in the world of cartooning.
Martin Sheridan, who wrote the first book about newspaper comics,
Comics and Their Creators, published in
1944, died on New Year's Eve at the age of 89, but he almost
died 61 years ago. In 1942, he was among the 1,000 people in
the posh Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston when a fire broke
out. Almost half the crowd died, trampled, suffocated, or burned.
Sheridan survived after 58 days in the burn unit at Massachusetts
General Hospital, followed by four months receiving skin grafts
for his hands. (In later years, Sheridan regularly donated blood
in order to repay the amount that he had received in transfusions.)
Unfit for military duty during World War II, he become instead
a war correspondent, among the first of the breed to be "embedded"
with combat units. He went on patrol with the submarine Bullhead,
the only journalist allowed undersea while the boat was on active
duty; he was aboard a PT boat during the battle for Leyte Gulf,
landing with the 96th Infantry Division; and he flew
on a B-29 in the firebombing of Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945, supplying
a beer bottle to be dropped with the plane's bomb load. He was
aboard the amphibious transport Fremond in 1944 when he was
approached by a young sailor who, after ascertaining that he
was Martin Sheridan, told the journalist that he was the person
who had pulled him out of the Cocoanut Grove fire. "I was
stunned," Sheridan wrote, "here in the Pacific I have
suddenly found the man who saved my life." Sheridan had
assisted Russ Westover
on Tillie the Toiler in 1936, an experience
that doubtless inspired him to write
Comics and Their Creators. His only other book in a career
of freelance writing and public relations work was about the
sinking of the Bullhead, the last U.S. ship lost in the war:
attacked by Japanese aircraft after Sheridan had left it, it
went down on August 6, 1945, taking its 84-man crew with it.
Ray Gotto, creator of two sports comic
strips, Ozark Ike and
Cotton Woods, died December 28 in Florida;
he was 87. Gotto created his baseball star Ozark Ike McBatt
while serving in the Navy during World War II and, after the
war, sold the idea for the strip to Stephen Slesinger, an agent
who also managed Red Ryder and King of the Royal
Mounted and merchandised Winnie the Pooh. Slesinger placed
the strip with King Features, where it debuted in newspapers
November 12, 1945. Gotto's likable but naive mountain country
athlete was sometimes compared, by those who don't read comic
strips, to Ham Fisher's
Joe Palooka and Al Capp's Li'l
Abner. While it's true that Ozark, like Palooka, was an
athlete, and, like Abner, was a hillbilly, these are wholly
superficial resemblances. Gotto's hero was his own original
conception. Yes, Ike, like Abner, was pursued by a pneumatic
mountain lass named Dinah, whose Veronica Lake hair-do masked
one eye but not any of the rest of her considerable embonpoint:
she customarily wore shorts and a black-and-red T-shirt the
stripes of which looked painted onto her impressive torso, and
Gotto usually posed her in ways that displayed both her torso
and her legs. But unlike Abner, Ike didn't run from women. And,
unlike Palooka, he wasn't a one-sport athlete: in the off-season,
Ike's perpetual financial problems (which inevitably prevented
his longed-for nuptials with Dinah) drove him to play football
and basketball. Most of the strip's stories were weeks-long
depictions of athletic contests, to the inherent suspense of
which Gotto added the human element of some tangential subplot.
Gotto's drawing style employed a bold, flexing line and meticulous
feathering and astonishingly intricate shading, all judiciously
accented with stunning blacks. And it was all so tightly rendered,
every wrinkle and lock of hair in its place, that the strips
seemed to have a glossy sheen, a surface, as Max Allan Collins
so adroitly put it, that "water would bead on." Ozark Ike continued until 1958, but Gotto abandoned it in 1954, the
year after Slesinger died; the rights for the strip were tied
up in the agent's estate, and, as Gotto told Ron Goulart, "after
years of frustration, I decided to back out and move on."
He moved on to another comic strip with an athlete title character,
Cotton Woods, which
Gotto owned. It started July 18, 1955; but this effort, syndicated
by a much smaller syndicate, didn't do as well as Ozark Ike, which appeared, at one time, in about 250 newspapers. Gotto
gave up Cotton Woods in
1958 and retired, moving, eventually, to Clearwater, Florida,
where he joined the art staff of Sporting
News and produced memorable drawings about competitive life
on the playing fields. He also designed the Mets logo in about
1960. Which brings us to Tug McGraw.
McGraw, who led the Mets to its 1973 World Series victory
and was then traded to the Phillies, died January 5, 2003; he
was only 59. His experiences on the diamond and his own considerable
sense of the zany convinced him he could write a comic strip
about baseball. And he did. With the help of two professional
writers, Dave Fisher and Neil Offen. Nothing like Ozark
Ike or Cotton Woods,
McGraw's epic was Scroogie,
about a goofy team, the Pets. Drawn by Mike
Witte in 1975-76, the strip's title character was a relief
pitcher "based on me," McGraw confessed in the introduction
to the Signet paperback that reprinted the strip. But, McGraw
advised, "don't think Scroogie is really me, exactly like
me, Tug McGraw. I mean, I may be a little weird, and crazy things
do happen to me, and like Scroogie, I'm probably the best relief
pitcher in all the baseball world, but-we're not exactly the
same. For one thing, I'm better looking. And for another thing-well,
I'm a lot better looking." According to Witte, who lived
in Greenwich Village at the time and frequented second-hand
bookstores on Fourth Avenue (amassing bound volumes of Punch), "'Scroogie' is the nickname
for Tug's favorite pitch, the screwball, and of course he also
purports to be something of a screwball himself. Tug was the
originator of the idea, and he continues to feed baseball happenings
and background material and gag suggestions every few days to
the gag writers."
George Fisher, editorial cartoonist for
the Arkansas Times,
died at his drawingboard on December 15; he was 80. Fisher is
noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, he didn't start
editooning until he was 40; he'd been running a commercial art
service in Little Rock when a friend persuaded him to take up
the tools he'd sharpened by cartooning for the Stars & Stripes during World War II, which advice Fisher took,
doing occasional cartoons almost as a diversion, but by 1976,
he was the full-time staff cartoonist for the Arkansas
Gazette (which died in 1991, whereupon Fisher moved to the
Times). Second, he was never syndicated. During a time that syndication
began to be regarded as an accolade of success and a sign of
professional status (not to mention a source of additional income),
Fisher scorned it. Syndication requires that a cartoonist produce
a certain number of national issue cartoons every week, and
Fisher preferred the freedom to concentrate on attacking local
issues. He lambasted every Arkansas governor from Orval Faubus
to Bill Clinton. He also took on segregationists and creationists.
But perhaps his most celebrated target was the Army Corps of
Engineers, which he personified in his cartoons as a mustachioed
geezer in a pith helmet and jodhpurs wearing a button that commanded
"Keep Busy." In recent years, we've discovered that
the flood-control fetish of the Corps has created environmental
complications beyond any of our anticipations a generation ago.
But Fisher saw pitfalls and contradictions as early as the 1970s.
In 1974, he depicted his sinister Corpsman in a strip, explaining
his program: "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers builds dams
to slow the flow of water," the old coot says; "then
it straightens out rivers to speed up the flow. It permanently
floods land upstream to prevent occasional flooding downstream.
Any questions?" Fisher's crusade against the environmental
abuses espoused by the Corps of Engineers was the Arkansas equivalent
of Thomas Nast's famous campaign against the corruption and
graft of the Tweed Ring in New York. And Fisher could, if he
wanted to, point to similar success. According to Michael Grunwald
at the Washington Post,
Fisher's opposition to the Corps' plan to "wrestle the
unruly, meandering Cache River into a placid, ruler-straight
70-mile barge canal" prevented the Corps from implementing
its scheme: it managed to convert the lower eight miles of the
Cache to a placid ditch, but the rest of the river was untouched.
(And now, the Corps, having been converted to an environmental
religion, wants to return that section of the river to its natural
state.) Fisher's cartoons also helped foil the Corps' plans
to dam several other rivers in the state. "He had a huge
effect on public opinion," said Dennis Widner, manager
of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge since its opening
in 1987. "This refuge wouldn't be here without him."
Fisher's success in frustrating the Corps of Engineers alone
validated his decision to focus on local issues. But there were
doubtless other successes. A selection of his work over 28 years
was published in 1993 by the University of Arkansas Press, The Best of Fisher ($14.95 in paperback),
and it displays a savage unflinching wit on a wide range of
state issues. In commenting upon the actions and antics of Governor
Clinton, at one time the youngest governor in the nation, Fisher
depicted him as a small child in a sailor suit, riding a tricycle-with
a distinctive mop of eighties-style hair that obscured all of
Clinton's face except his nose and chin. Said Clinton when hearing
of Fisher's death: "He was the best cartoonist I ever saw."
In one famous cartoon, Fisher showed Governor Faubus, then in
his sixth term, standing before a legislative body whose every
member (even the mouse in the corner) had Faubus' face. And
Fisher regularly ridiculed the out-dated attitudes of a bygone
generation with periodic visits to the "Old Guard Rest
Home," on the porch of which lounged ol' Faubus and other
politicians of his machine as well as a band of die-hard segregationists,
all spouting speech balloons in the manner of Gene Ahern's Boarding House cartoons of another age.
At a time when cartoonists aped Herblock's
drawing style or newcomer Pat
Oliphant's, Fisher's drawing style was his own. You could
detect shades of Hugh Haynie or Bill Saunders or, even, Herblock (without a grease crayon), but Fisher's
line was less finicky and much more supple than any of these,
and his shading evoked Bill
Mauldin's celebrated WWII pictures of Willie and Joe. Influences,
perhaps; but Fisher had blended it all together into his own
distinctive home brew. BARBIE'S
TALE. Barbie, Mattel's notoriously mature doll, seems, once again, safely
in the hands of the toymaker. The U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled December 22 that Mattel can move ahead
with a lawsuit to enforce a 40-year-old settlement agreement
with the German company, Greiner & Hausser, which, in 2001,
sued anew, claiming it had been defrauded in the original 1964
settlement. The initial legal action stemmed, doubtless, from
the likelihood that Barbie was based upon a German doll named
Lilli, which was sold to men in tobacco shops. Under the terms
of the 1964 decision, Mattel kept the doll and G&H got some
money. After the December 22 ruling, that settlement still stands.
The Lilli doll was the three-dimensional incarnation
of a mildly risque cartoon character, a sexy young chick, who
had debuted in 1952 in Bild Zeitung. Ruth Handler saw the Lilli doll, evidently, and she
conjured up the memory of it later when she noticed that her
daughter enjoyed playing with paper dolls that were teenagers
and career women. Handler supposed, then, that, as she said
years later, "Every little girl needed a doll through which
to project herself into her dream of the future."
"Every little girl" presumably dreamed of having
breasts, a wasp-thin waist, long blonde hair, bee-stung lips,
and legs that go on forever. Said journalist Froma Harrop: "To
a young girl, the Barbie doll is one scary figurine. Here you
have girls gingerly stepping into the whirlpools of adolescence,
and who comes along to explain the deal but Barbie. 'This is
where you're headed,' the plastic vixen remarks. ... To which
the young girl responds with great uncertainty: 'How do I get
there, and do I have to?'"
Introduced in 1959 and quickly supplanting the traditional
"baby" dolls that little girls played mother to, Barbie
(named for Handler's daughter; Ken, later, for her son) inspired
virulent opinions on both sides of the feminist issue. On one
side, Barbie is said to create in impressionable minds a standard
of personal worth that is wholly physical (and nearly impossible);
on the other side, Barbie was an example of independence for
the girls who played with her, allowing her to lead her own
life-in short, she was/is a feminist icon. "Any toy,"
writes Newsday columnist
Marie Cocco, "that nurtures such dreams is no instrument
of repression."
Perhaps. But maturity among the doll population goes
only so far. To bring up another issue altogether, why did biologists
who discovered a pair of genes that cause male and female fruit
flies to lack external genitalia name those genes "ken
and barbie"?
We know the answer. And it all started with a cartoon
character. BOOK
MARQUEE. If you haven't snapped up a copy of Robert Sabuda's stunning pop-up
version of Lewis Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland, you should; paper engineering has never been
this ingenious, this spectacular. ... Another incomparable treat
is a second volume of Keenspot's Sinfest,
Tatsuya Ishida's masterful web-strip, both
beautifully rendered and delightfully hilarious in its irreverent
wit. I've raved at great length about this before (click here
to be transported to Opus 111), and it's highly satisfying to
have yet another hardcopy volume of the strip because now I
can consult its pages whenever I'm in need of a healthy laugh.
Here's a paperback book (148 8.5x11-inch pages) of college
cartoons from the 1950s. Called
College Cartoons: 50th Anniversary Edition, it
features work by Frank Interlandi, Dean Norman, and Richard Watson, all, at one time
or another in the 1950s, at the U. of Iowa. The book reprints
two other books of cartoons: Interlude
with Interlandi and Doodles
by Dean (books of cartoons they did under those titles for
the campus newspaper while undergrads there), plus a few strays
and a sampling of Watson's "primitive" cartoons. Frank
is Phil's twin brother, and the two of them attended the U.
of Iowa in the early 1950s; Phil sold his first cartoon to the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1952 while still in college; Frank, meanwhile, stuck
to the amateur stuff, cartooning for the Daily
Iowan, the campus paper, employing a distinctive "double-line"
sketchy style. After college, Frank was an editorial cartoonist
at the Des Moines Register, syndicated by the Los Angeles Times. Today he's painting and living in Laguna Beach,
California, where he occasionally runs into another champion
cartoonist of better bygone times, Roger
Armstrong. Norman went on to work for Hallmark Cards, syndicated
his own cartoon to college papers for four years, and wound
up writing and drawing Hi Brows cards for American Greetings,
1960-90. Watson, who was, judging from the evidence here, not
a very facile cartoonist, became a professor of philosophy and
was never heard of again. Since I was cartooning at another
college campus a couple years after this bunch, I had a few
pangs of nostalgia whilst browsing this volume. But the book
is scarcely just a historic tome. While the cartoons reflect
some of the quaint mores of the time, college life itself has
not changed all that much. It still celebrates sex, alcohol,
and cramming all night for an exam. So these cartoons are as
funny today as they were lo those many moons ago. Norman supplies
text commentary occasionally throughout, explaining local references,
for instance, and giving a short history of the campus humor
magazine-once Frivol,
then re-christened Magazine
X (back when "X" didn't stand for sexual shenanigans).
Just $16.25 plus $2.50 media mail from Beaver Creek Features,
3508 W. 151 St., Cleveland, OH 44111-2105.
Maybe the most successfully syndicated cartoon aimed
at the collegiate crowd and campus newspapers was Little
Man on Campus, launched in 1946 by
Richard N. Bibler. By the mid-1950s, the feature was appearing
in 250 college newspapers. One reason for the durable success
of LMOC (as it was usually termed) was doubtless that it was
character-driven by distinctive, hilariously exaggerated personages:
the hapless student Worthal, a buck-toothed victim of every
campus circumstance, and his nemesis, the arch-fiend Professor
Snarf. Bibler himself eventually graduated (from Kansas University,
Colorado State, and Stanford) to become a professor of art on
one of those California campuses.
Son of Faster and Cheaper is Floyd Norman's "sharp look inside
the animation business" (as it sez, right chere, on the
cover), an insider's glimpse of the minds and hearts of animators
and story sketch artists and of the working conditions they
endure in a few of the industry's most hallowed halls. For Norman,
a veteran of 40 years as a story development artist in the animation
business-mostly at Disney but including an early stint at Hanna-Barbera
and a later one at Pixar (notably on "Finding Nemo")-this
tidy little tome (128 5x8-inch paperback pages in black-and-white;
$9.95 at www.afro-kids.com)
is a bulletinboard whereupon he posts the cartoons that he,
following the custom of cartooners in these environs, dashed
off about his workplace for the amusement of others who labored
there. "When I first arrived at the Disney Studio in the
late fifties," he writes in the opening pages of the book,
"I remember all the funny gag drawings that lined the walls
of G-wing in the animation building. The artists enjoyed the
good-natured ribbing of each other as well as the studio management."
Published one to a page, these drawings, like all of those I've
ever seen that have been smuggled out of animation studios,
are lively pencil renderings, quickly and energetically sketched
and deftly caricaturing notables in the places Norman worked.
Norman, he confesses, became "somewhat of an animation
editorial cartoonist," chronicling the daily antics in
the studio and jabbing, occasionally, his bosses. We see ol'
"Uncle" Walt Disney, and Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna,
as well as Michael Eisner and Frank Wells (who appear in a mock
"Frank and Ernest" series dubbed "Frank and Eisner").
Caricatures of Barbera and Hanna stand next to each other,
Barbera saying, "What can I rip-off this season? And Hanna
saying, "... and how fast can I get it done?" Here's
a cartoon posing as a promotion for the animated cartoon "Tarzan."
It shows Tarzan swinging through the jungle with Jane in his
arms, singing "Gorilla my dreams, I love you." The
movie-ad style lettering above them reads: "In Darkest
Africa, Everybody Is White." And below, Norman writes:
"I love the fact that Disney managed to keep this film
'African free.' Not one African was seen in the entire movie.
When your story takes place in Africa, that takes some doing." In the later years-the last pages of the book-Norman's
gags get sharper and edgier as his targets, the managment of
Disney, become more and more bottom-line oriented, steadily
cutting back resources and firing cartoonists, usually without
much ceremony or notice. In one cartoon, Norman's caricature
of Eisner is shown with a huge crowbar, prying the animation
building loose and shoving it off a cliff. "Relax, Roy,"
Eisner says to Roy Disney; "I'm just making a few adjustments."
On a later page, Norman notes sardonically: "Much to my
surprise, I found out [one day] I would soon be retiring from
the animation business." The accompanying cartoon shows
Norman roasting the remains of Mickey Mouse over an open fire
on a desert island; several animators stand behind him, and
one says, "Hey, Floyd: we've voted you off the island."
Norman has been invited back in regular intervals since then,
but Michael Eisner and his accountant minions continue chopping
off the arms and legs of the legendary Mouse House-most recently,
announcing that the animation studio in Florida at Disney World
would be shuttered soon. David Stainton, the new president of
feature animation at Disney, has proclaimed that, in future,
CGI will take the place of hand-wrought animation, thereby putting
out of work hundreds of skilled craftsmen. Five years ago, Disney
employed more than 2,000 in animation; now, only about 600 work
in that venue. Is it any wonder that, here and there, from page
to page, Norman sounds a caustic note of derision? But this
book is a rare volume for reasons apart from its commentary
on the state of the art at Disney and elsewhere: it is also
one of the few book-length publications (perhaps the only one)
of the sort of casually hilarious cartoons that are produced
by animation's cartoonists in spare moments of exasperation
or delight, a gem of a collection. (Well, there's one other
of this genre-the "father" of this one, Floyd's Faster
and Cheaper; for $15, including p&h, from www.cataroo.com).
I visited Disney's animation operation in Florida once,
several years ago, to interview one of the animators there.
I'd made an appointment in advance, so I was expected when I
walked up to the receptionist's desk. She had a name badge all
ready for me, but it was a badge with a secret security function:
she cautioned me about it, telling me that I shouldn't leave
the building until I had accomplished my purpose therein. If
I went out into the sunlight, the cardboard would turn blue,
thus invalidating the badge and making re-entry impossible.
Sure enough: after the interview, I kept the badge on, and as
soon as I left the building, the thing turned bright blue. I
was suddenly a non-entity. Kevin
& Kell and Jane's World. On Monday, January 12, the Atlanta Journal Constitution dropped seven of its comics line-up to
make room for new (well, "different") strips. One
of the new ones is what attracted our attention, but before
we get to that, here are the strips being phased off the page:
Brenda Starr, Judge Parker, Sally Forth, Monty, Nancy, Baldo,
and Ziggy. As do most newspapers in the throes of revising their comics
page, the AJC began
the process by running a reader survey to get an idea of which
strips readers liked most. Baby Blues came in first with 9 percent
of the vote; then came For
Better or For Worse, Zits, Stone Soup, Get Fuzzy, One Big
Happy, FoxTrot, Dilbert, Beetle Bailey and Blondie (to name the top ten). To attract attention to all these goings-on,
the AJC prefaced publication
of the ballot with features editor Frank Rizzo's profusely illustrated
seven-part history of the comics in America that ran September
21 and through the following week. (I was one of those whom
Rizzo consulted for the series, by the way-just so you know
that my reportorial objectivity is seriously skewed here.) That
week, the paper also published the 10 comic strips from which
they proposed to choose new ones: Greystone Inn, Jane's World, Kevin & Kel, Off the Mark, Non-Sequitur,
La Cucaracha, Luann, Lucky Cow, Rose Is Rose, and Rudy Park. The entire enterprise was elaborately
staged and beautifully executed. Tallying the votes and pondering
the implications thereof-and, finally, selecting the new strips
to replace discarded ones-took until just after Christmas. (They
have a paper to put out, too-every day.) The additions to the
AJC lineup are La
Cucaracha, Luann, Non-Sequitur, Rose Is Rose, and Kevin
& Kell. And it's K&K
that prompts my outburst here. But to delay that frenzy one
more instant-the AJC, in announcing the strips that it was dropping, also lobbed a
curve ball at the readers: fans of the cancelled strips will
have one "Last Chance" to save their favorite. They
can phone the paper or go to the AJC
website and vote for one of the cancelled seven. The winner
will be re-instated on January 26.
One of the fascinating things about this operation is
that two of the 10 strips AJC was considering as replacements
for cancelled strips were available only on the Internet: Jane's
World by Paige Braddock and Kevin & Kell by Bill Holbrook.
Braddock's strip, which regales us with the daily trials and
tribulations of a young lesbian and her friends, both homosexual
and heterosexual, has been "syndicated"
on the Web since May 8, 2001 by United Media/United Feature
(www.comics.com).
(And, as you'll see at the end of this piece, Jane's
World is much more than the description I've just given
implies.) K&K is owned as well as operated by
Holbrook at his own site, www.kevinandkell.com.
Holbrook performs the seemingly impossible feat of single-handedly
producing three daily comic strips. Two of them are syndicated
by King Features: On the Fastrack, a jaundiced look at life
in corporate American, started in 1984; Safe Havens, which focuses on children in a day care facility, began
in 1988. Then, as if he weren't punishing himself enough, Holbrook
launched K&K on
the Web in 1995, September 4. I repeat: Holbrook draws and letters
all three strips. Every day. He has assistance only in coloring
K&K, which is
done by Terrence and Isabel Marks; Holbrook colors Fastrack Sundays, and Safe Havens has no Sunday incarnation.
And all three strips are actually drawn-that is, they are not
ruled or French-curved (like, one would suspect, Dilbert)
nor are they scrawled like B.C.
or The Wizard of Id or Drabble. They're drawn. Skillfully. And with different pictures in
every panel: no photocopied dramatic repetitions. Moreover,
Holbrook deploys the resources of the medium for comedic effects
like no one else. His characters often morph into symbols in
the manner of editorial cartoons, the symbols representing,
say, one character's emotional reaction to another. Holbrook
cycles himself from one strip to another, producing three weeks
of each one at a stretch, then going on to the next. Clearly,
he works fast. "On a typical day," he told me, "I'll
begin by writing four to six gags by 2 p.m., then I'll pick
up my daughters at their schools. When I return, I'll begin
drawing, usually doing about four daily strips and maybe a Sunday."
He stays about six weeks ahead of his publication dates, even
with Kevin & Kell,
which doesn't actually require that much lead time. The six-week
cushion is more comfort-factor than requirement.
Kevin & Kell is unusual in another
respect. It's a family strip, and the father, Kevin, and the
mother, Kell, have both been married before. That's scarcely
standard funnies fare, but there's even more unusualness: Kevin
is a rabbit. And Kell is a fox. (I know: that means she's really
hot looking. But she's also really a vixen.) A carnivore marrying
a herbivore is not usual. Holbrook explains, though, that Kell
accommodates her husband by not eating meat in the house. She
concocts vegetable dishes in ways that make them resemble veal,
pork, etc. Kevin and his adopted daughter (a hedgehog) "eat
salads and, occasionally, the lawn." Kell's job with Herb
Thinners, Inc. is "hampered by having to hunt far from
home, so as not to catch anyone related to Kevin (which, considering
rabbits, is pretty difficult)." Kell's son, whom she brought
into the marriage (her previous husband, by the way, was killed
in what Holbrook euphemistically refers to as "a hunting
accident"), is a teenager; and Kevin and Kell have a offspring
of their own, Coney, a bunny with Kevin's looks and Kell's appetite.
"The Internet was bursting out in 1995, and I really
wanted to do something to explore the nature of the medium,"
Holbrook told Rizzo. "I've been able to do longer story
lines [than in his two other strips] because of the online archives.
They allow readers to not get lost in the middle of a story."
As for the stories: "Kevin and Kell are a functional family
in a dysfunctional world, overcoming differences in a place
where there are no rules. I can view all human differences through
this prism, which allows me to comment in a universal fashion."
Incidentally, that this "family strip's" title,
"Kevin & Kell," rhymes with "heaven and hell"
is not, I'm told, accidental.
Despite the high-tech venue for K&K,
the strip is hand-wrought, just as Fastrack
and Safe Havens are.
Holbrook draws with a pen, then scans the art at 600 dpi and
adds shading with Photoshop. At first, K&K
was marketed by Holbrook's friend and partner, Doug Pratt, solely
to Internet forums as a device by which new and repeat visitors
would be lured to the site every day. Said Holbrook: "Online
services are where newspapers were 100 years ago as new printing
technologies created the ability for mass circulation. Then,
an intense competition for readers led to the creation of an
artform designed to hold an audience day after day: the comic
strip. Today, only the medium is different. Online services
are trying to make themselves into a habit, and a feature that
presents an entertaining cast of characters that people want
to visit daily will go a long way toward establishing that."
Since K&K's debut, however, the forum "revenue stream" dried
up; now K&K is
a subscription offering, $20/year to have it delivered every
day in your e-mail. The AJC is the first print outlet for K&K, and while Holbrook doesn't plan to sell it actively in the newspaper arena, he will welcome any increases in the strip's print circulation. And since newspaper circulation is often achieved by feature editors trading information about which strips get the best reader response, K&K may show up in other papers. "Kevin & Kell achieved a large measure of its online popularity through word-of-mouth," Holbrook told me, "and I'd be pleased to see it happen in this venue." And since K&K is a solely owned property, Holbrook won't have to share the leasing fee with a syndicate. Nice work. You can find more of Holbrook in all three of his manifestations in book collections published by Plan Nine (www.plan9.org).
As for Jane's World,
that other cyberspace strip AJC
was considering, it didn't make the cut, but it continues apace
in the digital ether. It also appears in comic book form, where
Braddock adds new full-page panels and gags to reprinted daily
strips. And Plan Nine has published a collection of Jane strips, too. The comic book will change
from monthly to bi-monthly in March, Braddock told me: it'll
be a square-bound book, aiming at a longer shelf life in retail
outlets. And a new trade paperback is due out in February.
Jane is another actually drawn strip, and
Braddock's confidently rendered drawings in her loose, breezy
manner are every bit as visually witty as Holbrook's. Like Holbrook,
she draws the strip with pen (a quill, the Radio 914 nib, the
same that Charles Schulz used with Peanuts -a connection that will emerge
in a few more paragraphs) and scans the art into her computer,
then transmits it to her New York editors. She stays about three
weeks ahead of her publication dates. If she doesn't exploit
the medium as adventurously as Holbrook does (which is not a
shortcoming: no one does what Holbrook does as often as he does
it), she nonetheless produces a warmly humorous and humane strip
that's both fun to look at and to read. Braddock, describing
the strip, wrote the following for Cartoonist
PROfiles in the spring of 2001 (No. 131, September 2001):
"In case you don't know, it's hard to be a female
cartoon character. If you're a female cartoon character, you
are expected to do jokes about dating, raising children, dieting
and anything else that relates to poor body image. But what
if you are a female cartoon character who feels that life is
too short for caloric concerns? What if you are a cartoon character
who chases vampires, needs sensitivity training, requires career
counseling and basically needs to get a life-but doesn't know
it. Well, then, you'd be Jane.
"When I started Jane's
World, I had a vague notion about Jane's personality, but
as the strips spun out in different narrative directions, she
began to write her own story. I found that when I thought up
a situation, and sat quietly with it, Jane would somehow communicate
her response to the situation to me. When that started to happen,
I think Jane's World really started to take shape.
Jane had a story that needed to be told. I'm not trying to make
a political statement here, but for too long, female cartoon
characters haven't had the freedom to be goofy, flat-chested,
androgynous or self-absorbed. Jane is a character whose time
has come ... she's a character for 'the rest of us.' For all
those 'A' and 'B' gals out there who are just trying to figure
life out."
The try-out week's publication in AJC
sparked a certain amount of buzz in the straight and gay
press, both heralding "the first time a gay or lesbian
character has been the primary focus of a comic strip in a mainstream
newspaper." (In the U.S., that is. For a brief time, Jane's
World was published in Sweden, but the newspaper went out
of business.) Rizzo pointed out that other strips- For
Better or For Worse and Doonesbury -have featured gay characters,
but in Jane's World the
lead character is gay. But the strip, he went on, is "about
relationships, not sex." Braddock agrees. The gay content,
she said, is subtle but not obscure. "Jane is a lesbian
living in a straight world, and most of the jokes come from
her interactions with other characters." The cartoonist
doesn't focus on sex or overt lesbian issues in the strip. The
lead character is that durable type, the "lovable loser."
Jane is "an inept lesbian with a knack for getting sucked
into all the wrong situations," according to one fan. Braddock
has described the strip as "Ellen" meeting "Seinfeld":
"It's really about nothing at all. It's about love triangles,
bad jobs, poor communication habits, buying cars on eBay, unexpected
lightning strikes that trigger prom-night flashbacks-we've even
had vampires and alien abductions. I think you could say that
it's a whacked, slice-of-life kind of strip."
As the strip rolled along, Braddock noticed a change
in it. "Although I want there to be some whimsical, character-based
humor each day," she told me, "I basically write the
daily strip with the comic book in mind: each day is really
not a stand-alone strip but one tiny installment in a continuing
narrative. I think the strip has improved since I've been using
this approach."
When Braddock began tinkering with the idea of Jane
in about 1991, she had the notion of doing a strip that would
be the antithesis to Cathy.
At first, she called the strip See
Jane, evoking the scintillating prose of grade school readers-See
Dick, See Jane; See Dick Run, See Jane Run; and so on. The initial
gag-a-day format soon evolved into humorous storytelling as
the characters acquired personalities and took over their own
lives. Like most character-drive enterprises, the strip nearly
writes itself. "The characters are so defined," Braddock
explains, "that I just paint the stage and let it all play
out." Sounds simple, but it isn't: the challenge is in
how to jest at emotional ups and downs: "It's hard to cover
topics that are so emotionally charged and have them come out
light," Braddock said. It helps that Jane is an optimist.
"That's why I think readers get so attached to her. No
matter what happens, Jane never loses hope. ... Jane keeps coming
back for more, and miraculously, with her sense of humor intact."
Jane's world resembles Braddock's. Jane looks somewhat
like Braddock, and the strip, Braddock said, "demonstrates
my personal philosophy-that people should learn to be in the
present, that most people take life way too seriously, and that
there's not enough joy in the world." Although not, strictly
speaking, autobiographical, Jane, Braddock said, "thinks
a lot like me," and the strip depicts a utopian society
that she wishes would exist. "It's partly based on my own
experiences and then partly based on fantasy things I wish would
happen to me," Braddock said.
In giving Jane
a trial run in AJC, Rizzo explained that the paper was
trying to find new readers. "I deliberately went out of
the way to find strips that appeal to younger readers and to
Atlanta's gay population." But
Jane, it turns out, has as enthusiastic a straight readership
as any strip. In the last analysis, the strip's involvement
with relationships is its basic strength. Said Braddock: "I've
gotten e-mails from people who didn't even realize Jane was
gay." She's also gets e-mails from young women who say
the strip makes them feel normal. Jake Morrissey, managing editor
for comics at United Media, predicts that the strip's very human
interest and themes will, eventually, make it a success with
a much larger readership than it presently enjoys. "Successful
strips," he said, "have been the ones which have resonated
with readers-either the ones that reflect reality or which reflect
a reality people want to know more about."
And one of these days, Jane
is sure to break into the daily newsprint medium on a regular
basis in this country. If there's any justice in the world of
art and mass communications. (Ooops. Justice. I forgot: Ashcroft
is in charge of justice these days. Maybe we'll have to wait
a little longer for Jane.) In the hopeful meantime, for more
about the strip and the cartoonist, beam up to www.JanesWorldcomics.com,
where you can find some of the early Jane
strips from the period in 1997 when Braddock was doing it on
her own website three times a week for the love of the work
without, necessarily, thinking of syndication. You can also
read more about Braddock, who doesn't mention there, that she's
Senior Vice President/Creative Director for Creative Associates,
the Peanuts merchandising arm, where she oversees the licensing
of Peanuts characters worldwide. "We get about 4,000 submissions
a month for new Peanuts product. The licensing business was
at an all-time high in 2002, and it was up 30% in 2003, so I'm
expecting this year to be more of the same. The market for Snoopy
and company in Asia is huge." UNDER
THE SPREADING PUNDITRY. When you pause to reflect on it, John Kerry's
surprise victory in Iowa the other day shouldn't be such a surprise.
All those polls that anointed Howard Dean as the "front
runner" included a significant, but usually overlooked,
statistic-sometimes, depending upon when the poll was taken,
as many as 50% of the Iowans polled were undecided. So
Kerry didn't manage an "upset," as the pundits seem
to delight in crowing. There was no upset. For there to be an
upset, someone has to be in the lead. In Iowa, no one was in
the lead. Or, perhaps, "Undecided" was the front runner.
Dean's reputed lead didn't exist:
the polls simply weren't a good indicator because there
were so many undecided. The only upset worth noting here is
the pundits' upset. They were surprised at Kerry's victory.
They'd written him off six months ago. After scoffing at his
long-held and often obvious aspiration to become President-and
making fun of his use of his initials, which are the same as
those of another senator from Massachusetts-the pundits ignored
Kerry. The blathered on about Dean, whose anti-war stance and
fund-raising magic on the Internet made him news-worthy (or,
rather, comment-worthy) and about Wesley Clark (a newcomer and
hence attractive to news hounds and political junkies like pundits),
John Edwards (ditto), Dick Gephardt, and, even, Al Sharpton
(whose wit on the stump is tough to beat and therefore worthy
of wider circulation on the airways). Kerry was a has-been to
the pundits. Old news. An old face. What's more, he always looked
as if he needed a shave; clearly, not presidential timber. (We
all remember Richard Nixon's famous five o'clock shadow and
what it cost him in facing the earlier JFK). So when Kerry won,
the pundits were upset. Their prognostications were completely
wrong. The pundits, however fun they might be to watch and to
listen to, are usually wrong. Or merely opinionated to the exclusion
of fact. (This pundit, too, of course.) To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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