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Opus 137: Opus 137 (May 1, 2004). Our celebration
herein of Cartoon Appreciation Week concludes with a brief rehearsal
of the history of this national holiday and the reasons for picking
the first week in May for it and begins with a visit to the annual convention
of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), where we
examine Doonesbury's battlefield casualty and Garry
Trudeau's reasons for perpetrating it, including consideration of the
contention that such tragedies do not belong on the comics page in the
newspaper; we also note, in passing, other strips that have gone to
war in America's bellicose past and pause with Hustler's
publisher, Larry Flynt, who applauds the cartoonists whose freedom of
expression he saved nearly twenty years ago. Before getting to the major
festivities, massive reviews of the first volume of Fantagraphics' 25-volume
reprinting of Peanuts and
of Mutts: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell,
we take note of an international political cartoonist who may (or may
not) be a spy in his spare time, record Disney's acquisition of the
Muppets, mark the transition in Jane's
World, and disclose new depths to Aaron McGruder's machinations.
We also rejoice that the advertising and media worlds are at last being
brought to recognize the purchasing power of us elderly types. Without
further adieu, here we go- POLITICS, STRICTLY
AND OTHERWISE. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) convened
in Lexington, Kentucky, the very week that two comic strips were attracting
attention for their political commentary in a section of the paper,
the comics page, usually out-of-bounds for politics. In Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy, Rob Wilco, the human protagonist,
learns that his cousin Willie has lost a leg in Iraq and goes to visit
him in the hospital. And in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, B.D., the erstwhile football player turned coach then
warrior in Iraq, loses his leg. And for the first time in his 34 years
in the strip, B.D. appears without a helmet or similar head-covering.
The
funnies were certainly not being altogether funny the week that embraced
AAEC's April 21-24 convention. Tragedy struck in the usually placid
and good natured Gasoline Alley, too: cartoonist Jim Scancarelli
spent the week building suspense about the impending demise of Walt
Wallet, the paterfamilias who has been at the center of the strip for
more than eight decades and who is, by the calculus of the first strip
in which characters age, about 104 years old.
At that altitude, Walt is long overdue, and Scancarelli is, it
seems, about to let nature take its course in the strip where nature
has been coursing for 85 years. Meanwhile,
with the consummate irony of which only real life is capable, on the
front pages of the newspaper, pro football player Pat Tillman was in
the headlines: he'd given up a $3.6 million-dollar contract with the
Arizona Cardinals two years ago to join the Army Rangers and the fighting
in Iraq, and he was killed in an ambush while on patrol on Thursday,
April 22. Doonesbury's Pulitzer winning creator Trudeau,
fresh from another Pulitzer nomination for editorial cartooning this
spring (the winner was Matt Davies of the Journal
News in White Plains, NY), was on the speaker line-up at the AAEC
gathering. Others included such editooning luminaries as Pat Oliphant
and Tony Auth, as well as Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt. Referring
to the hundreds of nearly unreported grievously wounded being returned
from occupied Iraq, Trudeau explained the reasoning behind B.D.'s tragedy:
"If I kill off B.D., that is shocking," he said (and he's
killed five characters in the strip over the years), "but it seemed
far more useful to look at these extreme sacrifices, short of death,
that are being made by the troops in the field." To
recognize and make us more conscious of the sacrifices many returning
soldiers are making, Trudeau plans to detail the months of painful and
angry rehabilitation that B.D. will endure. "I want to show the
process of recovery and rehabilitation ... and the impact on family
and friends. It's profound: B.D.'s life will never be the same. That's
why I took his helmet off after 34 years: he's moving into a different
part of his life." Elaborating on ABCNews.com, Trudeau continued:
"B.D. is now on an arduous journey of recovery and rehabilitation.
What I'm hoping to describe are the coping strategies that get people
through this. There is no culture of complaint among the wounded. Most
feel grateful to be alive and respectful of those who have endured even
worse fates. But for many, a kind of black humor is indispensable in
fending off bitterness and despair, so that's what will animate the
strips that follow. I'm sure I won't always get it right, and people
will let me know when I don't." Although
many newspaper readers and editors assumed the sequence demonstrates
Trudeau's opposition to the conflict in Iraq, that is not necessarily
the case. "We are at war," the cartoonist told Elizabeth McKinley
at the Associated Press, "and we can't lose sight of the hardships
war inflicts on individual lives." Telling B.D.'s story, Trudeau
acknowledged, "is a task any writer should approach with great
humility, but I think it's worth doing." Nothing in these objectives
bespeaks an anti-war attitude; pro-humanity, yes, but not necessarily
anti-war. Said Trudeau on ABCNews.com: "This month alone, we've
sustained nearly 600 wounded in action. Whether you think we should
be in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out. We have to remain mindful of
the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name." Based
upon Brian Dowling, captain of the 1968 football team at Yale University
when Trudeau was a student cartooning for the campus newspaper, B.D.
was one of the trio of Doonesbury's
original cast (with Michael Doonesbury and Zonker). His longevity in
the strip gives his tragedy a special poignance. We have known him for
a long time, and like all such comic strip characters, he is an old
acquaintance, a friend, and while not many of us know any of the maimed
soldiers returning from Iraq, many of us know B.D. His fate thereby
personalizes the casualty rates in Iraq and becomes a profound statement
about war and its inevitable consequences. Some
newspapers took offense at this turn of battlefield events in Trudeau's
strip. In Sterling, Colorado, the Journal-Advocate
refused to publish the strips: the community recently welcomed back
a maimed veteran of its own, and, as the editor said, "We don't
need a comic strip to be reminded of the sacrifice." Later in the
week, B.D. regains consciousness in a field hospital and discovers his
leg is missing. "Son of a bitch!" he says. Some papers declined
to publish that day's strip because of the profanity-however understandable
(and realistic) it may be. In Editor & Publisher's syndicate news
section, David Astor reported that at Trudeau's syndicate, Universal
Press, favorable reaction to the sequence outnumbers objections ninety-to-ten.
Syndicate official David Stanford said that the kudos are coming even
from "people who say upfront that they generally don't agree politically
with the strip but appreciate what Garry is doing with this storyline."
An e-mailer from Hawaii wrote that the B.D. sequence "puts a finger
of reality into the cold news of today, and contrasts starkly with the
blather from the White House. ... You have made up for a multitude of
cheap shots at incumbent presidents and other dimwitted ideas. ... I
salute you on behalf of those who know that war and empire are not the
solutions to our problems." A partially disabled vet from Illinois
wrote: "Regardless of your politics, this is a moving tribute to
the service men and women who are daily receiving real, life-altering,
and life-terminating battle wounds in Iraq. This is a damnable affair
and the sooner it is finished, the better." Beetle Bailey's Mort Walker reacted as many readers did: "I got a pain in my
stomach," he told Rick Montgomery at the Kansas City Star. "Any time I see a soldier hurt like that, it
makes me queasy. But that's what happens in wartime. And that's Trudeau's
bit-to shock you and make you think about some things." And
what does Trudeau think about what he's done to B.D.? "Writers
can be amazingly dispassionate about steering their creations into harm's
way," he told Montgomery. "That doesn't mean I make life-altering
decisions about the characters thoughtlessly; it just means I have a
stronger artistic stake than emotional." During
AAEC, I spent several cellphone minutes returning calls from newspaper
reporters who wanted me to comment on the B.D. sequence. One of the
persistent questions was whether comic strips had ever touched on the
subject of war before. They have: Bud Fisher took Mutt and Jeff in uniform
to Europe during World War I (and the cartoonist got himself into the
British Army, where he could secure
an assignment in an information office that permitted him to
continue to draw the strip), but that was for laughs, much like Beetle
Bailey's life in the Army. In WWII, though, comic strip characters enlisted
in throngs-Terry, Captain Easy, Joe Palooka, Skeezix, Barney Baxter,
even Barney Google and Snuffy Smith-and in the serious strips, war was
serious, and characters died. Both Terry and Steve Canyon got involved
in the Korean War a few years later; ditto the Vietnam War, but this
time, patriotic enthusiasm for the conflict was scarcely universal.
Another
question was about the appropriateness of the topic on the funnies page.
Editors traditionally view the comics as part of the newspaper's entertainment
section, and they are reluctant to let "opinion" intrude into
entertainment. They are much behind the times in this view, however:
edgy "opinion" has been infecting entertainment on tv for
years, at least since "All in the Family" thirty years ago.
And the comics are no longer stranger to controversy: even if Doonesbury
hadn't introduced the attitude during Watergate, Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse did with the outing
of a homosexual teenager several years ago (followed by the death of
Ellie's mother and the family dog and other real life events). Authenticity
with its accompanying controversy is now quite at home in the comics
section. Wouldn't readers be shocked when they came upon B.D.'s absent
leg in the comics? Not Doonesbury
readers, I said: Doonesbury readers
know they can expect Trudeau to deal with all kinds of difficult topics
in the strip. No surprises there. Get
Fuzzy's readers, on the other hand, must have been surprised although
they were not, apparently, shocked. Reader
reaction to the leg-loss sequence in Get
Fuzzy was "all positive," according to United Media promotion
manager Linda Kuczwaj, quoted by Astor. But she doesn't know what kind
of mail Conley is getting because he has declined interviews in order
to "let the work speak for itself." But the very fact that
Conley did strips on the subject speaks volumes: several months ago,
the cartoonist was quoted as deliberately refraining from commentary
on the issues of the day. He sees the mass media already clogged with
opinion and doesn't want to get into that melee: "I get annoyed
by other's views I don't agree with," he told Brad Stone at Newsweek
online, "and I think that's how annoying my views would be to some
people." But drawing attention to the sacrifices America's soldiers
are making in Iraq is not quite the same as commenting on George W.
("Whopper") Bush's limited vocabulary or Veep Cheney's friendship
with Justice Scalia. In
his presentation to the AAEC, Trudeau talked mostly about his professional
past and the future of comics, not about B.D. Remembering his early
years on the strip, he allowed that he was "the original not-ready-for-prime-time
player" who made the comics safe for bad drawing. "Without
me," he continued, "there would be no Cathy, no Dilbert." In reflecting on his success with Doonesbury, Trudeau decided, not surprisingly,
that he'd reaped the benefit of being in the right place at the right
time. His syndicate didn't take him on because of the brilliance of
his artwork: instead, they saw him as the voice of his generation, and
Doonesbury was "dispatches from the
front line" of the sixties youth-sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Many newspapers, under the thumb of a more staid generation of publishers,
cancelled Doonesbury in the
early years. Trudeau worried about it, but he was reassured by the confidence
of John McMeel, co-founder of the infant syndicate that Trudeau's comic
strip would, pretty soon, put on the map. Said McMeel: "Sooner
or later, these [old conservative publishers] die." Trudeau grinned:
"Damn if he wasn't right. All across the country, publishers who
said Doonesbury would appear in their newspapers over their dead bodies
were getting their wish. My client list floated upward on the tears
of widows and children." Today,
the strip is one of only a handful with a circulation of 1,000 or more
newspapers (Doonesbury is
in 1,400). And Trudeau juggles storylines among 30 major characters-"like
a Russian novel," he quipped. As
for the future, Trudeau acknowledged that young people don't read newspapers-not
even his children. Animation on the Web is the future of comics, he
said. And he showed a 3-minute sequence with Duke undertaking to run
for President, animated by motion-capture technology that "makes
it possible to animate for low cost and in real time. ... But no matter
what the platform or the delivery system," Trudeau concluded, "the
fundamentals of the craft will remain the same." Publisher
Flynt's presentation took
place near the AAEC convention hotel in a downtown Lexington movie theater
where clips from the film "The People vs. Larry Flynt" highlighted
the pornographer's confrontation with the Rev. Jerry Falwell in a 1988
struggle over First Amendment rights. While the AAEC held no brief for
pornography, it had supported Flynt when the case was argued before
the Supreme Court because of the freedom of speech implications of the
case. At issue was a cartoon parody of Falwell, and the Court affirmed
Hustler's right to publish
it. "Had the Supreme Court gone in Falwell's favor," Flynt
told his cartoonist audience, "you all would have been out of business
because all somebody would have to prove, to sue you, is that you hurt
their feelings." Flynt
began by expressing his admiration for cartoonists. "Believe me,"
he said, "no other group in the country could have gotten me out
this week," alluding to an impending book promotion tour for his
new book, Sex, Lies and Politics. "When I go
looking for icons in publishing," Flynt continued, "I don't
look for editors or publishers or photographers. I look for cartoonists.
I've always been fascinated by how a small cartoon can say more than
the entire editorial page of a newspaper. You guys are underpaid, you
guys are underappreciated, and you get too much static from the powers
that be." When he was invited to appear before AAEC, he readily
adjusted an already tight schedule to make the trip possible. Claiming
that he has written more about George WMD Bush than anyone else, including
Molly Ivins, Flynt said his new book contains "good stuff"-new,
too-about Jessica Lynch and the Bush League. He believes the news industry
is much too deferential to the current administration: "The media
has totally sold out," he said. Asked about the often alleged connection
between pornography and violence, Flynt said, "If there were any
evidence connecting porn and violence, we'd have no porn." Confined
to a wheelchair since the assassination attempt that crippled him in
1978, Flynt was shapelessly fat and doughy-faced, and he seemed tired,
speaking in a halting croak; but his mind wasn't handicapped at all.
Hustler very early staked out offensiveness as its special province
in cartooning, a stance for which Flynt is wholly unapologetic. Still,
he regrets a cartoon he published shortly after First Lady Betty Ford
had undergone a double mastectomy. The cartoon depicted a breastless
woman seen in silhouette through a White House window, with the caption,
"All I want for Christmas is my two front tits." That was
over the line, he now admits, upon reflection. "It was insensitive,"
he said, "but everyone knows that tastelessness was part of our
goal." Mike Luckovich, editorial cartoonist for
the Atlanta Constitution (where
he maintains the messiest office in newspaperdom by dropping paper on
the floor), told a reporter after the Flynt presentation that he cringed
at Flynt's descriptions of the crude stereotypical ways Hustler cartoons depict African-Americans, but he also appreciated
Flynt's unabashed comments. "Most celebrities are very guarded
in what they say and speak in bland sound bites. Flynt doesn't hide
his opinions." About
George WMD Bush and the Patriot Act, the publisher said: "Bush's
warmongering aside, his assault on civil liberties and rights is probably
the most damaging thing he did for the nation." And he quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those
who would trade their civil liberties for security deserve neither." I was
talking with Pulitzer winner Ann
Telnaes later, and she said that she agreed with what Flynt had
said about the First Amendment, but regretted that "a spokesman
for freedom of the press and free speech is a pornographer." Writing
later to Joel Pett, Pulitzer-winning editoonist for the Lexington Herald Leader and organizer of the convention, she said: "I want
to thank you for Larry Flynt: between being inspired by his defense
of the First Amendment to being unconvinced by his defense of pornography,
at least now I know I really do believe in Free Speech. You certainly
came up with the ultimate test." Trudeau also commented on Flynt:
"Satire is still protected by the U.S. Constitution. For that we
need to thank Mr. Flynt." Pat Oliphant and Tony Auth showed slides of their non-political cartooning work: Oliphant,
sculptures; Auth, book illustration. Auth said he tries to do one drawing
a day that is not political; it keeps him from forming visual habits-"the
Auth nose," "the Auth ear." Oliphant has returned to
life drawing classes to keep his work fresh. One of only a few editorial
cartoonists without a home-base newspaper (Telnaes is another), Oliphant
said he misses the newsroom. "If I miss anything, it's that,"
he said-the immediate response his cartoon got from colleagues in the
newspaper offices. Referring to a recent cartoon that depicted Mel Gibson
being abused by the nuns of the school he attended as a child (thereby
prompting the movie-maker's apparent passion for associating Christ
with blood and gore) and the outcry the cartoon inspired in Boston (see
Opus 134, click here), Oliphant said, "Readers get more
irate about cartoons on religion than with those on politics,"
adding that "newspapers are becoming more of a bottom-line organization;
they hate controversy because that affects the bottom line." Oliphant,
however, seems to delight in producing cartoons that blatantly attack
the sensibilities of his readers as well as his editors-a delight, by
the way, I rejoice at. Auth said his paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, isn't hesitant about
publishing provocative cartoons. "The only reason to be an editorial
cartoonist," he said, "is to say what you think." Oliphant,
who began his newspaper career at the age of 15 on the Adelaide News in Australia, the first newspaper Rupert Murdoch owned,
was asked about Murdoch, about whom, as is well-known, he harbors no
affection whatsoever. Said Oliphant: "There's a good reason why
people only live so long." Arab
cartoonist Khalil Bendib showed
samples of his cartoons, which pointed out the hypocrisy of U.S. policy
in the Middle East. He also thanked Trudeau for replying to a letter
he'd written the Doonesbury creator when he, Bendib, was
a college student and for "never falling into the temptation of
stereotyping Muslims and Arabs." Bendib's cartoons (www.bendib.com),
which represented the Palestinian side of the tragedy in Israel in an
attempt to balance perspective, emphasized the inherent biases in the
U.S.-for Israel and against the Palestinians. The visual stereotypes
of Arabs in this country are much more pervasive and derogatory than
the stereotypes of Jews, who have been quick in recent years to voice
objection to any imagery that seems anti-Semitic. Bendib's presentation
provoked Hy Rosen, a long-time member of AAEC presently retired, who
objected to Bendib's favorable portrayal of the Palestinian point of
view, condemning all such portrayals because Palestinian children were
being taught to hate Jews in Palestinian schools. Bendib listened but
did not argue thereby embodying the good manners essential to all free
speech: he'd made his point, now it was Rosen's turn. And
Chip Beck, an ex-Marine and one-time CIA operative before becoming a
cartoonist, showed slides of his recent tour of Iraq, noting that "there
is a lot more going on in Iraq than the news media reveal"-by which
he meant, good things that tend to validate the Bush League vision.
As for the missing WMD: "Saddam himself," Beck said, "was
a weapon of mass destruction." A panel
of cartoonists extolled the power of cartoons on "local" (city
and state) topics. Here, they avowed, a cartoonist has real impact.
And everyone in the room agreed. But everyone also acknowledged that
editors usually don't like cartoons on local topics because they outrage
readers more and inspire a froth of irate phone calls. And some local
topics are off-limits because they are too dear to the people the publisher
plays golf with. So the staff editoonist steers clear of this mine field
of potential objection by drawing cartoons on national issues, and once
he starts down that path, he pretty soon gets himself syndicated and
begins shooting himself in the professional foot three days out of every
five (the usual quota of national topics syndicates require every week).
Why should his paper employ him when it can get cartoons on national
issues from syndicates-and a wider range of views, too-at much less
expense? In this fashion, willy
nilly, the editorial cartoonist prepares for his own demise at his newspaper,
contributing his bit to the steadily diminishing ranks of full-time
editorial cartoonists in the U.S. It is widely accepted among editoonists
that there are only about 100 full-timers still working in a field where,
a couple decades ago, nearly 200 labored. But this predicament is, as
I say, due largely to the machinations of the editorial cartoonists
themselves in concert, unwitting at first, with the preferences and
timidities of their editors. In
the hallways between sessions, cartoonists griped about the bottom-line
orientation of publishers and fearful editors. Herald-Leader reporter John Cheves noted that the younger cartoonists,
of which there were many, complained that in a market with a dwindling
number of staff positions, the chances of their finding full-time employment
were virtually nil. Those occupying those positions are all baby boomers,
said Eric Shansby, and they'll stay in their jobs "until they die."
Agreed Mikhaela Reid: "They're like federal judges." By the
time they retire, Shansby and Reid and their generation will likely
no longer be in the business, having been forced to find livelihoods
elsewhere. While attendance at this year's AAEC meeting (about 150 cartoonists)
suggests a reasonably healthy organization, most of those now drawing
editorial cartoons do it part time, squeezing one or two a week out
of an art department production schedule that includes mostly illustrations
and layouts for feature articles at their papers, not editorial cartoons.
Or they freelance by self-syndication, often focussing on state-wide
issues and distributing their work only to state newspapers, weeklies
as well as dailies. The only cheerful prospect on this otherwise bleak
horizon looms in the growing number of weekly newspapers, many of which
are free, living entirely on advertising revenues and fostering an "alternative"
agenda for their readers. A vast number of these periodicals beckon
cartoonists who find the traditional perch at a daily newspaper increasingly
precarious. Dick
Locher rose during the AAEC business meeting to express his sadness
at the recent death of Chicago
Defender cartoonist Chester Commodore, an African-American 'tooner
who started at the Defender in 1948 and continued, even after
retirement in 1981, sending cartoons in to the paper. Locher recalled
the time Commodore had drawn a picture of a Chicago sheriff, indicating
the biases of this champion of law and order by showing him wearing
Ku Klux Klan regalia. The sheriff, irate, stormed into the Chicago
Defender office and demanded to know which of the staffers there
present was Chester Commodore. (Defender
cartoonist Tim Jackson told me that, by turns, they all said, "I'm
Chester Commodore.") The cop finally realized the guy behind the
drawing board was Commodore and went over, waving the paper with the
cartoon at him. "That," said the sheriff accusingly, pointing
at the cartoon, "is yellow journalism." Commodore disagreed:
"No," he said, "that's black journalism." One
afternoon, AAEC members celebrated the venue of its convention by going
to the horse races at Keeneland Race Track. On another afternoon, they
watched a documentary about the life and work of one of its most distinguished
members, Etta Hulme, who, although partly retired,
still contributes her typically hard-hitting cartoons a couple times
a week at her former domicile, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.
Called, throughout the video production, AAEC's "den mother,"
Hulme's mild southern-fried manner and grandmotherly mein are deceptive. She's a tough-minded political commentator who,
after training with Disney and a short career in comic books (Red Rabbit), started freelancing editorial
cartoons at various destinations in the mid-1950s, took time off to
have four children, serve as Girl Scout leader and Potato Lady for the
Rotary Club lunch ("I have a good recipe but it serves 400"),
and wound up in Fort Worth in the late 1960s. She started submitting
editorial cartoons to the Star-Telegram,
and Hulme, as she puts it, "made a nuisance of myself until they
agreed to print a few on a freelance basis." By the late 1970s,
she was a regular employee and by 1980, she was doing five cartoons
a week, which makes Hulme one of the earliest full-time female editorial
cartoonists in the history of the medium. She tends to pooh-pooh such
distinctions, however, saying, "I've been called an iconoclast
and a harmless housewife. I like to keep my options open, so I'm willing
to agree to both descriptions." Working in her father's grocery
store as a young girl, she got "a pretty good notion of the human
condition," she said. "I learned that the customer always
thinks he is right and how to cut a pound of cheese (within an ounce)."I During
the convention, a video production company announced it would be supplying
PBS's News Hour with an editorial cartoon feature during the Presidential
campaign and solicited permissions from the 'tooners present to use
their cartoons at $25 per use. This year's convention was programmed
by Joel Pett. Mike Ritter of the Tribune Newspapers
in Arizona was president. In September, this year's Pulitzer winner,
Matt Davies of the White Plains (NY) Journal News takes the gavel, and Clay Bennett of the Christian Science Monitor moves into the
President Elect slot, heir apparent. NOUS R Former
Beatle Paul McCartney has
always wanted to get into animation, and his first tentative steps into
that realm are evident in a new DVD, released April 13: "Paul McCartney:
The Music and Animation Collection" includes three animated musical
shorts with Rupert the Bear, Wirral the Squirrel, and an ensemble of
frogs. McCartney, who has harbored this 'tooning desire for over 20
years, creating characters and conjuring up stories, favors the traditional
hand-drawn animation process, but he'd probably use a computer for some
aspects of whatever he produces. ... Disney has acquired the Muppets and the Bear in the Blue House
properties from the Jim Henson
Company; that includes the rights to Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie
Bear, Gonzo and Animal characters, the Muppet film and tv library, worldwide
distribution and licensing rights and all associated copyrights and
trademarks (ditto the Bear in the Blue House creations); but not the
Sesame Street characters, such as Big Bird and Elmo, which remain the
property of Sesame Workshop. ... 20th Century Fox has recruited
an impressive line-up of promotional partners for its forthcoming Garfield
live-action/ CGI feature; opening June 11, the flick will be escorted
onto the big screen by Pepperidge Farm, Wendy's, Ashley Furniture, Valpak,
and Dole. Ashley will launch a campaign based on the fat cat's favorite
recliner; Dole will put special orange feline stickers on its bananas,
thereby driving everyone-well, you know. This crescendo of merchandise
makes perfect sense for the cat who has devoted so much of his life
to licensing. Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury contest to flush out anyone who might be a credible witness
in support of Dubya's contention that he served in the Air National
Guard in Alabama in the summer of 1972 brought forth 1,600 entries,
none of which provided credible evidence. Some, however, supplied fascinating
insights into the minds of Doonesbury
readers. One, for instance, claimed he was with Bush during those
months on "a mission so secret it's taken years of therapy for
me to remember. We were on board an alien vessel ...." Another
claimed to be "a dental professional" with (you should pardon
the expression) "inside information" about Dubya's molars
and bicuspidors. Another "honorable mention" wrote: "I
am an employee of the Nigerian government Toastmaster's Club ... in
hiding while rebels loot my country. ... I was Bush's wingman. I was
with him for his dental exams. I warned him against medical physical
exams. ..." For the full quotations on these, beam up to www.doonesbury.com . Jane's World is being transformed. Paige Braddock's spritely online strip
about the humorous ups and downs of a lesbian's life has gone into reruns
at www.comics.com, where it has
been appearing for the last several years. But Braddock continues to
produce new material-for the Jane's
World comic book. When the comic book started 12 issues ago, it
reprinted strips from the online incarnation; then, after six issues,
Braddock compiled the content into a trade paperback. The trades got
picked up by a regular (i.e., non-comics) distributor and started doing
well in mainstream bookstores in Canada, UK, Germany, Austria, Australia,
and France. The cartoonist discovered she enjoys working in the more
flexible artistic format of paginated comics than in the restricted
horizontal cadences of the traditional strip format, and when the trade
books proved commercially viable, she decided to put her original work
directly into the comics-to-trades stream instead of dipping her toe
first in the water on the Net. Starting with No. 13 of the comic book
(now on a bi-monthly schedule) original Jane
material will appear only in ink on paper, first in the funnybooks,
then in the trades. Lalo Alcaraz, who produces the Latino-emphatic
La Cucuracha and editorial
cartoons for Universal Press Syndicate, received the Speaking the Truth
Award in February from the Interfaith Communities United for Justice
and Peace. The Award recognizes Alcaraz's work in drawing cartoons on
progressive themes, including anti-war sentiments and immigrants' rights.
Last fall, Alcaraz received the Art As A Hammer Award from Los Angeles'
Center for the Study of Political Graphics for his efforts to promote
political poster art. And on January 6, Lalo was presented with a new
baby girl by his wife Victoria. Coming
on the heels of the profile in The
New Yorker, Greg Braxton's extensive April 24/25 piece in the Los Angeles Times on Aaron McGruder adds a few more layers
to the young cartoonist's iconoclastic complexity. McGruder is working
with filmmaker Reginald Hudlin
preparing an animated Boondocks
pilot for tv while, at the same time, they put the finishing touches
on a graphic novel, Birth of a Nation (see Opus 136 by clicking
here), drawn by Kyle
Baker. A while ago, I marveled that McGruder didn't get the Pulitzer
Prize for cartooning in 2001 with his clear-eyed post-9/11 attack on
the Bush League in the strip, but now I discover it wasn't for lack
of trying: his syndicate, Universal Press, nominated him. But the Pulitzer
committee overlooked his achievement, cowed, doubtless, by the national
angst over the terrorist atrocity and, like Democrats in Congress, submissive
to the Bush League's every wish and patriotic impulse, neither of which
would have countenanced a prestigious award to anyone of McGruder's
unconventional views in those troubled months. "I wasn't even a
finalist," McGruder told Braxton. "I care little about awards,
but I felt I deserved it. Other political cartoonists were saying how
good my work was. It was a remarkable point in history, and it was really
frustrating. That was my window, and I don't know if I'll ever get another
opportunity to shine like that." Then, he finished by contradicting
his indifference to awards: "That's why getting the NAACP Image
Award made up for it." (His reaction to that distinction at the
time, "biting the hand that fed him" as Braxton put it, is
detailed in Opus 81.)
At the presentation ceremony, McGruder sat in the same row as another
honoree, National Security Advisory Condoleezza Rice, who, by that time,
was one of the cartoonist's main nemeses. Accepting the Chairman's Award,
McGruder made one of his usual assaults on the Bush League. Afterwards,
he was shocked when Rice came up to him and asked him to draw her into
his strip. "It was an indication of how little I mean to her,"
McGruder said. They had a short hushed conversation, and when they parted,
observers applauded, thinking they'd had a "nice little exchange."
Not according to McGruder: "She couldn't have cared less about
what I had said about her. She's not scared of me. I'm scared of her.
I am not a threat to Condoleezza Rice. What I really wanted to do was
call her 'murderer' to her face." Rice got her wish eventually
when, in the strip, the juvenile protagonist Huey Freeman tries to find
a date for her in the expectation that if she had an active love life
she'd be less inclined to send Americans off to die in Iraqi deserts.
And McGruder eventually decided, apparently, that he had, indeed, called
her "a murderer to her face." Or so he said at a December
banquet celebrating the 138th anniversary of The Nation magazine. About his outspokenness,
he told Braxton: "I've always been aware that I have an opportunity
to say things that nobody else is saying, or is afraid to say. And I
don't want to waste a single opportunity." Still, McGruder is perfectly
capable of tactical maneuvering. Having heard rumors about White House
phone calls to tv networks that result in projects being killed, he
has decided to lay back a bit and cool out until the tv Boondocks
is picked up by a network. Said McGruder: "The gand experiment
of The Boondocks was to take on radical politics
and make it cute. I was able to package it as mainstream. At a certain
point, when we live in a certain time where there are ramifications
for saying things, I'm finding myself in a different position. Now I'm
being judged. Until this show is picked up, it's time for me to take
it down. I don't take back anything I've said, but strategically, it's
time to stop-at least for now. Theoretically, it could hurt the show.
And I can do more with the show on the air than if it is off the air.
Right now," he continued, "I want to err on the side of caution.
If it gets on the air, I'll re-evaluate things. And if it doesn't get
on the air, I'll re-evaluate things." Welcome to mainstream America,
Aaron. Comics Watch. In Stephan Pastis' strip, Pearls
before Swine, the obnoxious rat character has spent the last few
days in "comics re-education camp" learning to be less obnoxious.
At camp, he encounters Earl and Mooch from Patrick
McDonnell's Mutts, the
dad in Jerry Scott/Rick Kirkman's Baby Blues, and Ellie from Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse. This sort of shtick is a great hoot for fanaddicts
like me who are intimately familiar with much of the rank and file of
the comic strip kinkdom. But does every reader of Pearls know Mutts? Or, more
pertinently, does Mutts run
in every paper that Pearls runs
in thereby providing Pearls
readers with the reference essential to the gags? Ditto Baby
Blues. The comedy Pastis is foisting off on us is self-referential
(invoking the realms of comic strips only) to a nearly incestuous degree:
the jokes make no sense unless you are familiar with the strip Pastis
alludes to visually and thematically in the last panel of each of his
daily releases on this tack. Pastis is making a hit with the cartooning
fraternity (judging, somewhat, from his NCS nomination for best comic
strip of the year), but he seems disdainful of his ordinary, non-cartoonist
readers. Pastis has wandered off into this never-never land of self-indulgence
a couple of times before, when he used his off-camera self as a character
in the strip. Here, references to the cartoonist as, simply, "Pastis"
make the assumption that readers know who "Pastis" is, not
a safe assumption: when Pastis signs his strips, his signature is minuscule
and nearly indecipherable. So who is this character "Pastis"?
Funny stuff, yes; but a trifle overweening, methinks. Darrin Bell, who draws Rudy Parks for his writing partner Theron Heir, recently launched his own
solo effort, Candorville,
in which racial minority characters interact and comment on the passing
scene. Both strips are sharply contemporary in their comedy, and Bell,
pressed, perhaps, to meet two deadlines every day, has introduced a
labor-saving maneuver in both endeavors: extremely tight close-ups of
his characters in the second or third panels. Nothing new in that, I
suppose: Graham Nolan in
Rex Morgan occasionally does
the same, giving us a close-up of Nurse June's eyelashes. But Bell's
style is very simple, so a close-up of one of this characters consists,
graphically, of portions of a couple of circles. CIVILIZATION'S
LAST OUTPOST.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who
declined to recuse himself from the Supreme Court's contemplation of
Veep Cheney's secret energy cabal, has recused himself more 190 times
in the past, so it's not as if he would have set a precedent. ... Porn
star Jenna Jameson is having her autobiography done by former New York Times music critic Neil Strauss,
who, before he agreed to do the book, told the actress "that her
life had to be interesting enough that we could write the first 50 pages
and not even mention sex and still have a book that people won't be
able to put down." Since Strauss took the job, I guess Jameson's
non-sexual adventures must be as stunning as her embonpoint. ... Thousands
of Catholics are reported to be petitioning the Pope to make Mel
Gibson a saint for bringing "The Passion" to the masses
(so to speak). "Miracles have already been reported," saith
the Rev. Ezio Lucianelli of the Vatican. For instance, there's the man
in Texas that was so moved by the movie that he confessed to a murder.
Well, of course: it had to be in Texas. Meanwhile, according to one
of our favorite supermarket tabloids, the Pope has actually expressed
a desire to have Gibson succeed him as Pontiff. Perhaps,
opines Bob Garfield in the
AARP Bulletin, the Reign of Perpetual Youth
is coming to a close. For several generations now, the entire civilized
world as we know it (as consumers of mass media) has been founded on
the assumption that advertising should aim for the most active consumers,
those persons between the ages of 18 and 34. And since in capitalistic
societies advertising shapes all content, the mass media have diligently
pursued ages 18-34 with "youth-oriented" material. But no
empirical evidence about the buying habits of the human sapien supports
the assumption that 18-34-year-olds buy more than anyone else; the assumption
is, Garfield discovered, merely "an old chestnut." Flying
in the ointment of the chestnut is the steadily declining circulation
of magazines and newspapers, which, these days, the consumers between
18 and 34 don't buy because they increasingly don't like to read. They
can read; they just don't like to fill
their leisure hours with such activities: they'd rather play video games
and surf the Net. For similar reasons, broadcast media are also in a
swivet: "some 750,000 men ages 18-34 simply disappeared from the
Nielsen ratings between the end of last year and the beginning of this
one," Garfield reported, ignoring, for the nonce, that he was reporting
on what happened between midnight on December 31 and 12:01 a.m. on January
1. Advertisers are necessarily grieved by this wholesale loss of their
traditional target audience. Meanwhile, most of the disposable income-the
kind advertisers lust after-can be found in a somewhat different demographic.
There are almost twice as many households in the 35-55 age bracket,
and their aggregate income is twice that of the 18-34 group. In the
next age bracket, over 55, are almost half again as many households
as in the Youth group, and the aggregate income is about the same. Moreover,
both categories of "seniors" (35-55, and 55-and-over) have
paid off their mortgages and made the final payments on their children's
college educations so they have more disposable income than the erstwhile
"target audience" of the 18-34 age group. The older folks
also continue to read newspapers and magazines and to watch tv. Perhaps,
at last, the entire capitalistic mechanism will begin to court this
older audience, injecting new revenues into the vintage print media.
And newspapers and magazines, anxious to acquire the advertising dollar,
may tailor content for an older target audience. Maybe comic strips
in newspapers will be published in larger dimension in order to make
them readable among the myopic elder citizenry. Wouldn't that be something. Mattel
has recalled 314,000 toy Batmobiles
because the rear fender fins are so sharp and pointed that they constitute
what the Consumer Product Safety Commission nannies call a "hazard"
to young children. I suppose so. This is the same outfit that helpfully
pointed a few years ago that children's jackets with drawstrings present
a "strangulation danger." Surely, dangers lurk wherever we
look. And it seems that, as a people, we are stupid enough to require
a fully funded commission to keep us in a constant state of awareness.
I must confess, though, that I'm glad I grew up a century ago when flying
kites and playing marbles were not health hazards. NATIONAL CARTOONIST
APPRECIATION WEEK. Some years ago, feeling a bit neglected, those of the nation's
cartoonists who are members of the National Cartoonists Society proclaimed
a national holiday-Cartoonists Day. And then, doubtless feeling a little
self-conscious about drawing all that attention to themselves, they
tried to shift the spotlight from the artists to the art and declared
that Cartoonists Day would be surrounded by Cartoon Appreciation Week.
Whereupon, ever after, May 5 has been Cartoonists Day, and the week
in which it falls has been Cartoon Appreciation Week. The precise dating
of the week varies from year to year. It depends upon whether we think
a week begins on Sunday or Monday. Most of us would say Monday is the
first day of the week because Saturday and Sunday are coupled as "the
weekend," and if a week ends on Sunday, the next one must begin
on Monday. QED. This year, then, Cartoon Appreciation Week is just ahead,
May 3-9. Determining
the date of Cartoonists Day is less problematic: May 5 in 1895 was the
day Richard Outcault's celebrated Yellow Kid first appeared in color
in the New York World. This
year, we can celebrate Cartoon Appreciation Week in grand style with
two delectable new books, each a persuasive testimony to the gentle,
hypnotic power of the cartoonist's art. One of these commemorates the
work of the pre-eminent cartoonist of the last fifty years-Charles Schulz,
whose insightful and endearing Peanuts
established new norms for comic strip humor. The first of Fantagraphics'
25-volume project to reprint the entire 50-year run of the strip has
been released just in time for Cartoon Appreciation Week. Schulz
is undeniably the appropriate icon to invoke for such a festivity. He
is one of only two cartoonists to be named among the 25 "most influential
newspaper people of the 20th century" by Editor & Publisher, joining a roster that begins with Pulitzer
and Hearst. (The other cartoonist was Herblock.) Apart from the merchandising
empire that evolved from Charlie Brown and his friends, the strip demonstrated,
at its start (in just seven papers) and throughout its long run, an
unusual approach to humor. The loneliness of childhood, its disappointments
and losses, its vulnerability, alienation and insecurity-its anger and,
even, despair-were the foundation of Schulz's comedic sense. He presented
us with the images of children, but they talked remarkably like adults,
and in this seeming preoccupation with adult concerns, they were funny.
At the same time, we could see our dilemmas in theirs, and, as a result,
we found ourselves laughing at ourselves and achieving a therapeutic
catharsis. Perhaps "unwittingly," as Lynn Johnston (For
Better or For Worse) said, Schulz "helped to unlock a nation's
inhibitions ... he made us look at and into ourselves." And we
laughed at what we saw. And the next generation of cartoonists followed
Schulz's lead, taking real life and authentic human feelings as the
basis for their humor. The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 is a fat
350 6x8-inch page hardback book ($28.95), elegantly designed by cartoonist
Seth, deploying his patented second-color accents in the text sections
(an Introduction by Garrison Keillor, a brief biographical overview
by David Michaelis-who is writing the definitive Schulz biography-and
a reprint of an interview with Schulz from 1987, published in 1992 in
Nemo). The daily strips appear three to a page in the dimension of
their original publication; one of the features of Peanuts in 1950 was that it was smaller ("peanut-sized"?)
than other strips, a distinction that slowly evaporated over the years
as the rest of the comics section shrank. The Sunday strips, which debuted
January 6, 1952, are printed one to a page and in black-and-white, a
concession to the economies of publication but also a nod to Schulz's
own preference for black-and-white over color. Although
much of the Peanuts oeuvre
has been recycled in a 50-year cascade of paperbacks, not every individual
strip, surprisingly, has been reprinted. Of the approximately 680 daily
strips of the first two years, this volume includes 384 that have not
appeared anywhere since their initial publication in newspapers. That's
a whole year's worth. Of 1952's 50-odd Sunday strips, 40 have never
been collected before (although some of them were reprinted in comic
book strip anthologies of the day). Of the 18,170 strips that Derrick
Bang says (in his 50 Years of
Happiness) that Schulz produced during the 49-plus years of the
strip's run, an astonishing 2,367 will be reprinted for the first time
in the Fantagraphics series. That's 13% of the lot, the equivalent of
six-and-a-half years of Peanuts
that we've seen only once! If that. The
series, a daunting undertaking even for the publisher of such archival
projects as the complete E.C. Segar Popeye
and the complete Harold Foster Prince
Valiant, has great value for aficionados of the medium as well as
fans of Peanuts. The strips in this first volume
are not, quite, the Peanuts
we recognize today, and perusing them now, a half-century after they
first appeared, yields an instructive glimpse into Schulz's creative
evolution. In the first year or so, Schulz was finding his footing,
and we can watch him as his steps become surer. Even if Charlie Brown
isn't quite the loser he eventually became and Snoopy isn't quite the
symbolic playful incarnation of imagination, there are inklings aplenty
of what lies ahead. "Good ol' Charlie Brown ... how I hate him"
is the punchline of the first strip on October 2, 1950, and it sets
a tone for the comedy to follow, something quite different from the
hilarities being perpetrated in other strips of the day about kids.
The very first week of strips provoke laughter by employing frustration,
antagonism, violence, mysteriousness, unfairness, and a lack of self-awareness-emotions
or attitudes that, although common enough among children, seldom undergird
humor in kid strips. Females, at the onset, are inexplicably hostile
to males: Patty, on the second day, recites the old axiom about little
girls being made of sugar and spice and everything nice-and interrupts
herself to sock a boy she passes as she declaims. This single strip
enacts every young man's lurking anxiety about the opposing sex. Charlie
Brown probably emerged early in readers' minds as the strip's central
character because he is the only one named at first-and always with
both first and last names; Patty, the second character to be christened,
isn't named until the end of October. Snoopy, who isn't named until
the end of January 1951, was, like most household pets of the canine
persuasion, almost human from the start, but his thoughts were not yet
expressed in words. And Schulz had apparently not yet decided whose
dog Snoopy was: despite Charlie Brown's assertion of ownership in early
November, Snoopy is often apparently "at home" in Patty's
house. And Charlie Brown's trademark shirt with its zig-zag design doesn't
appear until December 21, 1950, after which, he always wears it. I suspect
it was introduced at the insistence of Schulz's editors at the syndicate
as a way of identifying Charlie Brown, who, without it, often looks
much like other kids in the early strips. The book includes a number
of debuts. Lucy first holds the football for Charlie Brown on November
16, 1952 (but she isn't the first of his playmates to play this trick
on him). The reigning genius of the strip, Linus-Lucy's first baby brother-shows
up on September 19, 1952, but he is little more than a rugrat, he doesn't
talk, and his famous security blanket is, as yet, nowhere in evidence.
We forget, I'm sure, that both Lucy and Schroeder began life in Peanuts
at very early ages (Lucy on March 3, 1952; Schroder, May 30, 1951).
Lucy can talk, but Schroeder is still an inarticulate infant. And he
doesn't get his piano, the first schtick in the strip, until September
24; Beethoven's bust shows up November 26. Most of the humor for all
three arises from their infant actions. The book's most intriguing accouterment
is an index at the rear. Here we are referred by page number to the
first time Charlie Brown says "Good grief!" and to the first
time he's called "blockhead" and to countless other bits of
the strip's mythos. Very
early, Schulz's unique contribution to comic strip humor surfaced-what
he called "the slight incident," some trivial albeit everyday
event that has a comic dimension. Charlie Brown's shoes being laced
too tight; Snoopy tracking his owner by the scent of the ice cream cone
he's eating; Charlie Brown's decision not to enter Patty's house on
a snowy day because he doesn't want the bother of cleaning the snow
off his boots and overcoat. One of the other benchmarks in the history
of cartooning established by Peanuts is simplicity in drawing style,
which set the fashion for successive generations of cartoonists. But
in 1952 with the advent of the Sunday Peanuts,
Schulz started adding all sorts of background details-in the Sundays
particularly, but often in the daily strips, too. Outdoor scenes were
festooned with trees in the distance, even neighborhood houses, fences
and shrubbery; indoors, doorjambs multiplied, and bookshelves, patterned
curtains at the windows and other elaborations. Eventually, the Sunday
strips would lose such visual embellishments, but for awhile, Peanuts
looked remarkably more cluttered than I'd remembered. I suspect
that Schulz added background detail at the urging of his syndicate.
The theory, if I'm guessing aright, would be that without the variety
of colors that background details fostered, the strip would seem comparatively
colorless, visually bland. So Schulz obliged. For a time. And for the
sake of visual consistency, he added more background detail to some
of the daily strips, too. In
the next volume of this prodigious publishing effort, Linus gets his
security blanket, Schroeder proposes Beethoven's birthday as a school
holiday, and we'll meet Pig Pen, the kid who just can't stay clean-all
Peanuts institutions that fostered the strip's popularity until it
soared beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Schulz,
when interviewed, often said that anyone could get to know him by reading
the comic strip: it was he, and he was it. Everything he was-what he
believed and loved and disliked and feared-was in Peanuts,
reflected in the comings and goings, aspirations and disappointments,
of Charlie Brown and the others in the cast. We could say the same about
almost any work of art, but in Peanuts,
the personality of the creator was closer to the surface than in many
other endeavors. In a similar way, the personality of Patrick McDonnell,
creator of the comic strip Mutts,
invests his work. And in a sumptuous coffeetable book published
by Abrams just a few months ago, the connection between cartoonist and
his cartoon is rendered transparent. Moreover, in this volume we have
ample evidence of not just McDonnell as a person but McDonnell as a
cartoonist, as artificer. And for that reason, browsing through Mutts:
The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell (216 giant 11x12-inch pages in
hardback, $45) is a perfect way to engage in a celebration of Cartoon
Appreciation Week. When
Mutts was launched in 75 newspapers
on September 5, 1994, McDonnell says, "I felt that I was finally
doing what I was meant to do." Intended as an exploration of the
life and adventures of the stray dog that had appeared in McDonnell's
illustrations for years, the strip evolved into "a portrayal of
the relationship between me, in the guise of my mustached character,
[the dog's owner] Ozzie, and my real dog, Earl." At the strip's
core is the "special bond" between people and their pets.
Said McDonnell when the strip started: "I study my dog every day
and if I can capture just an inkling of his free spirit, his joie de vivre, in my strip, I will be quite
proud. And then," McDonnell continues, "a cat, yet to be named
Mooch, wandered into the works and, as cats tend to do, immediately
took over." Earl and Mooch talk to each other-and to other animals-but
not when humans are in the picture. "I try to keep the animals
as animals," the cartoonist explained. "I want readers to
relate to them as they do their own beloved pets. When the people characters
in the strip are engaging with the animal characters, the pets behave
as such. But when the pets are alone together, they communicate verbally
with each other. The secret world of pets. Who hasn't looked at their
furry friend and thought, What is that little guy thinking? Here I will
delve deep inside those peanut brains for some answers." His contemplations
are not without philosophical reflections: "Cartoonists and dogs
are similar," McDonnell writes,"-we spend our days at home
in our favorite spot, are set in our ways, and love routine. The strips
of Earl alone with his Ozzie tend to be autobiographical." In
the book's opening pages, McDonnell describes his life as a cartoonist
and captures its solitary excitement: "I sit at the drawingboard
and stare into white space. I dip a fountain pen into a bottle of India
ink. I make marks on bristol paper. I watch them come alive. I've always
wanted to be a cartoonist. I love comics. I love black and white, pen
and ink, words and pictures. I love their code. I love the rhythm in
a line, the rhythm of dialogue, the rhythm of a gag. I love their simplicity,
immediacy, intimacy, and absurdity. I love their pie-eyed optimism.
I love their potential." Because
McDonnell not only draws a strip about a dog and a cat but advocates
for the welfare of pets and animals in general, he was interviewed in
the winter issue of The Bark,
a magazine of equivalent devotion. In prefacing his interview with the
cartoonist, Bark's publisher, CameronWoo, urged us to think of the Abrams book
as "liner notes," explaining that liner notes on a record
album typically describe "the process" by which the musicians
created a piece of music. "That's exactly what McDonnell has done
with this beautiful book," Woo continued: the volume offers "an
engaging array of creative artifacts that allow the reader a peek behind
McDonnell's special genius." A scrapbook of keepsakes, the book
includes many of McDonnell's favorite strips, but it is also generously
sprinkled with insightful sketches and charming doodles and fragments
of autobiography and snatches of philosophy and analysis. This compendium,
as Woo says, "is like a perfect jazz set-something familiar, something
revelatory, with just too many notes of pure joy to convey in words."
Woo's choice of simile is not entirely happenstance. McDonnell's talents
include those of a jazz musician, and he readily elaborates on the kinship
of music to his art: "It is about timing and improvising, being
in the moment. It's like jazz in the sense that in the comic strips,
you have a theme-sort of how jazz musicians have a theme or a structure,
and every day, like a saxophone soloist, you do a variation on that
theme and a little solo." The
book is exactly what we've come to expect from Abrams, a handsome exacting
production-color throughout, and touches of design that modulate the
reading and enhance the viewing experience. Present in profusion are
McDonnell's Sunday strips, noted for the large opening panel that varies
week to week, each time mimicking in cartoon terms a different celebrated
painting or some other visual detritus of popular culture that is then
echoed in the rest of the strip. (McDonnell actually does the strip
first and then scours his knowledge of fine art to find some visual
image that will serve as introduction, but the effect is that the strip
echoes the introductory picture.) The book's endpapers augment the interior
pages by presenting a selection of the most recognizable of these artful
openers. McDonnell calls these effusions "tributes" and says
they came about partly "as a result of my having been a fan of
Frank Zappa, [who] filled his compositions and his album liner notes
with quotations from his musical influences. This was the start of my
music education, opening up to me the worlds of classical and jazz.
Frank's sharing of his favorites has inspired me to do the same with
mine." And so McDonnell laminates every Sunday strip with homages
to his favorite fine artists and to the imagery of popular culture-the
covers of children's books, comic books, magazines. Andrews
McMeel has just brought out a new collection of the Sunday Mutts, all in color, Mutts Sunday
Afternoons: A Mutts Treasury (144 8.5x11-inch pages in paperback; $12.95).
Herein, the opening panels are often given a full page to themselves,
facing the ensuing strip. Because
of the relationship between these two elements, the Sunday strips seem
more thoughtful than the dailies. It's a deceptive illusion, but one
that adds to the pleasure of reading these strips. The coloring of the
Sundays is exquisitely managed, and the gently frolicsome, ruminative
aura of the Sunday strips hovers over these pages like the mist of a
humid August afternoon in a meadow. Were I a doctor of the human heart,
I'd prescribe this volume, fifteen minutes a day, to eradicate the blue
funk of hopelessness into which we inevitably descend when "the
world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending,"
piling up dire consequences on every hand. With Mutts on Sundays, we
can find restorative joy in the simple complexities of life and art.
I'm tempted to say that I wish McDonnell would supply, at the end of
these Sunday Treasuries, a list of the sources of his splash panel homages
so we'd know, exactly, to what they refer instead of having only vague
cultural memories of them. But, no: if there were such a key, we'd spend
our time finding "the answers" to the puzzles instead of simply
letting the sensation wash over us. McDonnell
studied Al Hirschfeld and R.O. Blechman to learn about "the economy
and beauty of the pen line"; and "A.A. Milne's insightful
Winnie-the-Pooh stories and E.H. Shepard's charming illustrations for
them have been a major influence on the general tone of Mutts."
His strip, McDonnell says, "celebrates the simple. It remembers
the familiar, friendly faces we see for maybe just a moment every day-the
neighbor walking his dog, the bird on a branch, the shopkeeper behind
the counter, the cat in the window." Due in part to this commemoration
of the ordinary and in part to the disciplined simplicity inherent in
the visual playfulness of his graphic treatment and, finally, to the
intimate but laconic drift of McDonnell's prose, the book has about
it the same air of quiet but joyful serenity that infuses the strip.
Here, also, are the visual antics of a cartoonist at play-at play in
his strip as well as in this book. And from the display of what the
cartoonist does with his strip and from his description of his life
with it, we arrive, by sidling up to it, at an insight into the artistry
of the medium as well as the mind of a cartoonist. McDonnell's conclusion
to the book is as poetic as his strip: "Comic strips are ephemeral.
They come into being in our daily newspapers and then disappear into
recycling bins. They are fleeting daydreams trying to capture simple
moments of joy. I've always wanted to be a cartoonist." Like
many of today's younger cartoonists, McDonnell reveres Charles Schulz.
There's poetry in that reverence: McDonnell, too, reveals himself in
his strip, and in this book, we see the essence of both cartoonist and
his cartooning. It's exactly the sort of book that devotees of the artform
should keep handy and dip into, here and there, from time to time, as
recreation mostly, but also as a gentle reminder of what the smiling
spirit of cartooning is. WHO'S ON FIRST.
It sounded like a routine from an old Abbott and Costello movie. At
the April 13 presidential press conference, George WMD Bush was asked
why he and Veep Cheney would be testifying together before the Nine-Eleven
Commission. "The
Commission wants to ask us questions," Dubya answered, "and
we want to answer them." "No,
Mr. President," persisted the reporter, "-why are you going together?" "Well,"
said Dubya, "they want to ask both of us questions." He
even had the puissance to grin. All
this time, I thought George W. ("War Lord") Bush was stupid.
No way. It takes brilliance to manufacture a comedy routine on-the-spot,
standing on your feet in front of a hostile crowd. Smart feller. A few
minutes later, of course, his presence of mind deserted him completely
when asked if he had ever made a mistake. He said, after flailing around
for several minutes in vain, that he certainly has made mistakes. He
just couldn't think of any. I can
sympathize. I thought I'd made a error once, and then I realized I was
mistaken. The
arrangement for the joint appearance before the Nine-Eleven panel specifies
that no official record of their testimony be kept-no recording, only
informal individual note-taking. And neither witness will be under oath.
Right. It's been established by the previous administration that a politician
can be impeached for lying only if he lies under oath. BOOK MARQUEE. Dan Piraro, award-winning
syndicated cartoonist (Bizarro),
vegan, animal rights activist, and one-man show ("The Bizarro Baloney
Show," a two-hour "extravaganza of songs, puppets, art, music,
cartoons, costumes, verbs and nouns") reveals, at last, his true
political colors in a hardback book
The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (Thomas Dunne, $12.95).
Posing as a children's book (big pictures on every page surrounded by
large albeit brief text), it is, as you can doubtless tell from the
title, a jeremiad on the Bush League swinishness, a tortured re-configuration
of the age-old tale in which the pigs, instead of building three houses,
one of brick, one of straw, and one of mud, deconstruct the brick White
House they inherit, removing the bricks and replacing them first with
mud, then with straw. To prevent anyone from noticing this transformation
from solidity to fragility, they create a succession of distractions
involving various Big Bad Wolves. The trio of pigs hogging all the wealth
of their country are snout-nosed caricatures of three well-known public
personages: Dubya, a witless shill for Dickey, the brains of the operation,
who is assisted by the ruthlessly combative Rummy. The only one to penetrate
this inner circle is Ari the Weasel, who bursts in every once in a while
to announce in a hysterical shriek some new threat to their looting
scheme-the Big Bad Wolf who blew down a couple of buildings, the discontent
of the people when no WMD are found, and so on-each alarm initiating
the launch of a new distraction and more looting. More audacious than
clever, the book is nonetheless both-and a satisfying allegorical satire
skewering of the reign of the Bush League. It ends with Ari's replacement,
Scott the Armadillo, bursting in "all a-twitter" with a new
alarm-the results of the Presidential Election. And with that, the start
of a new narrative cycle, Piraro ends his tale; he doesn't tell us the
results of the Election, but, in the book's concluding "information"
page, he urges his readers to "vote against Republicans whenever
and wherever you can." Last
week, Piraro was doing his standup act in San Francisco, where he was
interviewed on the Doonesbury
controversy by James Sullivan at the San
Francisco Chronicle. Said Piraro, veering off in a slightly different,
but related, direction: "I've often said I'd rather be a poor guy
making a stand than a rich buy who never says a word. There is so much
injustice in this administration, so much lying and really dangerous
politics. It's impossible to be a thinking, creative person right now
and not comment." The
second volume of Winsor McCay:
Early Works is out from Checker Book Publishing Group, a matched
pair of 7x10-inch 200 page black-and-white volumes, each at $19.95.
These are marginally better than the same-format Until
next time, metaphors be with you. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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