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Has the fine art world’s growing interest in comics and cartoons achieved critical mass? If not quite yet, it is certainly rapidly getting closer, as evidenced by the surprising number of shows devoted to comic and cartoon art this fall in New York City, the capital of the American art world, and its vicinity.

At the top of the list is the large traveling exhibition “Masters of American Comics,” which is a collection of mini-retrospectives for fifteen cartoonists whose careers together span the history of the artform in the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First: Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Lyonel Feininger (The Kin-der-Kids), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), E. C. Segar (Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four), Harvey Kurtzman (MAD), Robert Crumb (Mr. Natural), Art Spiegelman (Maus), Gary Panter (Jimbo) and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan).

Curated by art scholar John Carlin and comic strip historian Brian Walker (see “Comics in Context” #66 and 71), the “Masters” show debuted last year in Los Angeles, where it was divided between the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition moved to the Milwaukee Art Museum before arriving in the New York City area, split between the Jewish Museum, several blocks up the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Yale University Press has published the handsomely designed catalogue for the show, which not only includes reproductions of the artwork and a lengthy treatise by co-curator Carlin, but also features a commendable assortment of essays about the individual Masters by a wide array of non-academics, including jazz critic Stanley Crouch on Herriman, cartoonist (and screenwriter for the 1980 live action Popeye movie) Jules Feiffer, journalist Pete Hamill on Caniff, Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell on Schulz, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman on Kurtzman, Simpsons creator Matt Groening on Panter, and novelist Dave Eggers on Ware.

Regular readers of this column will recall my report on the “Masters of American Comics” panel held at this year’s San Diego Comic Con (see “Comics in Context” #145).

And there’s lots more. Accompanying the “Masters” show at the Jewish Museum is “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” an exhibit of original artwork from superhero comics of the “Golden Age” of the 1940s, curated by one of that period’s leading figures, Jerry Robinson (see “Comics in Context” #141). Like the “Masters” show at both museums, “Superheroes” will run through January 29, 2007.

The “Masters” show has inspired controversy since all of the cartoonists selected for this honor are male. But this fall New York City hosted two exhibits of work by female cartoonists. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has staged “She Drew Comics: 100 Years of Women Cartoonists,” curated by Trina Robbins, which continues into early November. The Adam Baumgold Gallery on 74 W. 79th St. just closed its fall show, “Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists” (curated by Dan Nadel and including works by Roz Chast, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and others), which followed its late summer show, “Jules Feiffer: The Strips, 1960-2000.”

Aside from the African-American George Herriman, all of the cartoonists in the “Masters” show are white, but “African Comics“ opens at the Studio Museum in Harlem on November 15 and runs through March 18, 2007.

Until October 21 the Society of Illustrators is running a thirtieth anniversary retrospective of comics published by Fantagraphics (including works by Daniel Clowes, Frank Frazetta, Bill Griffith, Jaime Hernandez, Stan Sakai, and Chris Ware) at its Museum of American Illustration in midtown Manhattan.

Even the United Nations has turned its attention to cartoon art. Thanks to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art getting me in, on Monday, October 16, I attended “Cartooning for Peace,” a day-long series of seminars with political cartoonists from around the world serving as panelists. The introductory speech was made by the Secretary-General himself, Kofi Annan, whom I would previously have considered the least likely person to turn up at an event I covered in my column. (How much more evidence do you need for a cultural shift in attitudes towards cartoon art?) “Cartooning for Peace” is also the name of an exhibit of political cartoons by these artists that is currently being held in the United Nations’ Visitors’ Lobby before embarking on a world tour. (You can also see these cartoons at www.cartooningforpeace.org.)

It may be coincidental that so many exhibits on cartoon art are being held at once in New York City. But this isn’t simply a phenomenon restricted to the fall of 2006. Last winter the Museum of Modern Art staged its exhibition of Pixar animation art (see “Comics in Context” #120) and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery featured “Speak: Nine Cartoonists” featuring work by Crumb, Spiegelman, Ware and others, even including Gasoline Alley‘s Frank King (see “Comics in Context” #122). This year on December 1 the Morgan Library and Museum opens “Saul Steinberg: Illuminations“, featuring the work of the late New Yorker artist whose drawings can be classified as either illustrations or cartoons; this exhibit closes on March 4, 2007. The Baumgold Gallery will also be opening a Steinberg show. On the day that the Morgan’s Steinberg show closes, the Museum of Modern Art will open “Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making,” billed as an exhibit of work by artists who utilize the “visual language of comics”. (Whether MoMA will deign to display work by actual professional comics artists in this show, I do not yet know.)

It’s not just New York City that has caught comics fever. On November 2, “Cartoon America: Highlights from the Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature“ opens in the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington D. C.. The Library recently acquired this collection, which includes works by Feiffer, Feininger, Herblock, Herriman, King, McCay, Schulz, Steinberg, and James Thurber, as well as animation art from Disney classics including Fantasia (1940), and arrays them alongside work by Honore Daumier, the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who has long been accepted into the pantheon of fine art.

Back in New York City, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art will stage its own exhibit of animation art, “Saturday Morning Cartoons,” opening on November 18 of this year. And this seems the appropriate time and place to announce that I will be co-curating an exhibition on the career of Stan Lee that will open in February 2007 at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Right now MoCCA is looking for people who are willing to help sponsor the show and collectors who would be willing to lend original artwork from 1960s Marvel comics for display. If any of you are interested, please contact me through the e-mail address for this column (comicsincontext@aol.com).

But if a cartoon art exhibit falls in a forest, and The New York Times ignores it, did it make a sound? The Times reviewed the Pixar and “Speak” shows last winter, but it has so far ignored all of the fall shows except for “Masters,” which opened on September 15 at the two New York area museums but did not get reviewed by the Times until Friday, October 13. Still, it’s obvious that the Times Arts and Leisure department would put a higher priority on reviewing some of the other high profile art shows on more widely accepted subjects, such as “Cezanne to Picasso” at the Met and “Picasso and American Art” at the Whitney.

And then there’s the problem of the geographical separation of the two halves of “Masters.” The show was divided between two museums in Los Angeles, but Southern California has a car culture; New York City doesn’t. New Yorkers like myself don’t have cars and rely on public transportation instead. It is difficult enough to persuade a Manhattanite to venture into the dreaded outer boroughs; mounting an expedition to Newark, New Jersey would be closer to inconceivable. (It is indeed a lengthy trip, though there are commuters who must do it every workday.) The exception would be going to the Newark Airport, one of the three airports in the metropolitan area; I’ve been to Newark Airport, but I can’t recall ever having been to Newark proper before. Besides, New Yorkers tend to regard Newark, and New Jersey in general, as uncool. (I’ve spent time in some picturesque sections of the state; then again, I’ve also traveled through industrial areas of New Jersey which Peter Jackson could have used for Mordor.) So I suppose that means that a Manhattanite would be more likely to go to Newark Airport in order to fly to London than he would to go to Newark in order to visit, well, Newark.

I’m not just kidding about New Yorkers’ reluctance to visit the Garden State. It even seems that one of the reasons that Art Spiegelman, who helped organize “Masters,” withdrew his own work from the show was that he believed that New Yorkers wouldn’t expend the time and trouble to travel all the way out to Newark to see the first half of the show.

So I can understand that it might take the Times a while to send one of its art critics to museums in two separate cities to cover the same show.

But the Times review was well worth the wait. It was the paper’s lead art critic, Michael Kimmelman, who reviewed the exhibition, and he declared that “”˜Masters of American Comics’ is a landmark and a pleasure. For many people, I suspect, it will be a revelation too.” (Oct. 13, 2006). It clearly was a revelation to him. Kimmelman was also wise enough to recognize his own limitations in exploring a form of art he wasn’t knowledgeable about and to bring along an expert to guide him: Spiegelman himself played Virgil to Kimmelman’s Dante as they descended into (gasp!) Newark.

If you follow the link to Kimmelman’s review, you’ll also find the “slide show” of highlights from “Masters,” several of which I will discuss in the course of my own review. Strangely, the Times “slide show” offers two Eisners and two Kirbys, but no examples of work by Crumb, Herriman or Segar.

I managed to decipher the mysteries of PATH trains and New Jersey Transit sufficiently well to make my own way to the Newark Museum, sans guide, to see the first portion of the “Masters” show: McCay through Schulz. The principal factor in determining how to divide the exhibition between two museums, whether in California or the New York area, seems to be chronological. Jack Kirby started in comics before World War II, but his best work began in the 1960s, so his work was in the Jewish Museum. “Masters” featured some of Chester Gould’s late Dick Tracy strips from the 1960s, but Gould created Tracy in the 1930s and his great period began in the 1940s, so his work was in Newark.

However, Will Eisner did The Spirit in the 1940s, before Charles Schulz’s creation of Peanuts in the 1950s, but “Masters” placed Schulz with the earlier cartoonists in Newark, while assigning Eisner among the later cartoonists at the Jewish Museum.

Hence, the Newark portion of “Masters” dealt with the evolution of the American comic strip, from McCay to Schulz. The Jewish Museum’s portion of the exhibit instead chronicled the history of comic books, starting with not only Kirby’s Golden Age work for actual comic books, but also Eisner’s Spirit sections, which were effectively short comic books, for Sunday newspapers, and culminating with Chris Ware’s graphic novels.

Of course “Masters” begins with Winsor McCay (1869-1934), who is generally regarded as the first genius of both the comics artform and animation. The Newark Museum’s introductory wall text for the McCay section (written by John Carlin?) asserted that “Winsor McCay did for comics what D. W. Griffith did for movies and Louis Armstrong did for music: he transformed mechanical reproduction into a creative medium for self-expression.” The comparison with D. W. Griffith works for me, since Griffith is universally acknowledged as film’s first creative auteur. I’m not so sure about the reference to Armstrong. Did the wall text’s writer meant to imply that McCay, Griffith, and Armstrong were each the first in his medium to create great works of personal expression? Is that true about sound recordings? What about, say, Enrico Caruso?

Kimmelman interrupts his own discussion of McCay in his review to ask, “Did I mention that Mr. McCay, in his ultra-finicky way, drew like a dream?” That’s a felicitous phrase, since dreams were McCay’s primary subjects: the fantasy worlds dreamed by the title character of Little Nemo in Slumberland and the proto-Twilight Zone nightmares that overtake the hapless sleeping adults in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But Kimmelman is pointing out to the reader that McCay was a master of the craft of realistic illustration. McCay’s prowess in delineating reality in naturalistic detail makes the fantastic elements of his strips look real.

Hence I find it somewhat misleading for Carlin to state in the Masters of American Comics book that “though most Americans were not fully aware of modern art until the Armory Show in 1916″–and actually, I expect that the majority of Americans in 1916 paid no more attention to cutting edge art then than they do today–“they had already seen the essence of modernism in McCay’s comics without knowing it. McCay utilized many of the hallmarks of modernism–figures in motion, twentieth-century machines, and urban architecture–in much the same way as later Cubist and Futurist painters.” But from Cezanne onward, the early figures in the history of modern art were veering away from naturalism, distorting the reality they depicted. McCay’s illustrative realism and his mission to make the fantastic look naturalistic clearly stands at an opposite pole from, say, Picasso’s efforts to deconstruct reality through Cubism. Strictly defined, abstraction does not depict reality at all, yet however much they may metamorphose in his work, McCay was drawing real people and things–and fantastic people and things as if they were just as real. Even in a page included in the show (Feb. 2, 1908), in which McCay impossibly stretches the heads and bodies of Nemo and his companions into fun-house mirror reflections of themselves, McCay is still working from a foundation in reality: what the human figure actually looks like.

McCay’s work is “abstract” only in the sense that, as the examples in the exhibition show, he paid strong attention to shapes and other design elements in constructing his work. Hence, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend page (Sunday, Feb. 9, 1913) that is excerpted on the web page with Kimmelman’s review, the dreamer, a man in formal wear, is running along the street when suddenly, in panel 2, the street curves upward both at the left and the right, distorting the shapes of the tall buildings rising from the street. The dreamer runs like a mouse on an exercise wheel, as the curved street recedes from one panel to the next, until it becomes a multicolored circle, reminiscent of what one might see through a kaleidoscope.

Similarly, consider the Little Nemo in Slumberland page (Sunday, Dec. 3, 1905) that is included in the Times slide show. The topmost panel not only includes Morpheus, the King of Slumberland (looking quite different than in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), but also introduces this page’s circular motif in the form of the moon with a face. But this isn’t a benign Man in the Moon but instead looks vaguely sinister.

The next tier consists of four panels of equal size, the first showing the boy Nemo sleeping in bed. The conventional look of these panels denotes the mundane nature of Nemo’s reality in contrast with the dreamworld. However, these four panels actually show Nemo’s transition from reality into the dreamworld, as his bed rises from the floor and drifts into the night sky.

Such step-by-step changes from panel to panel must be what Kimmelman meant when he wrote that McCay’s work “married something of [Eadweard] Muybridge’s stop-action photography with Lewis Carroll.” This four-panel segment also exemplifies the Newark Museum’s wall text’s statement that McCay’s “successive action sequences anticipated later experiments in film animation.”

The large middle section of the page is divided into four panels in which the spherical moon, its mouth ominously agape, steadily grows closer and larger with each succeeding panel, while Nemo’s bed rocks about in the air and falls apart, leaving him helpless to escape the oncoming threat. This middle section of the page is dominated by an immense, circular drawing of the face/moon, enveloped within an oval, thus becoming a fifth panel. This becomes the centerpiece of the entire page, bringing the circle motif to its culmination. (I wonder if this sequence might have been inspired by the sequence of a moon with a face in Georges Melies’ famous 1902 short film A Trip to the Moon.)

Nemo was shown in square panels in the first tier. In the next four panels, Nemo appeared in rectangular panels, which were invaded by the curvature of the central oval enclosing the moon; the page design thereby dramatizes how this seemingly threatening fantasy world is disrupting Nemo’s sense of reality. In the central oval, Nemo appears within the circle formed by the face/moon: he has been swallowed up by the fantasy world.

Here the face/moon abruptly turns into a kind of stage set: the servant of Morpheus emerges from the moon’s mouth, as if it were the gateway to a castle, or the backdrop of a theatrical set, to invite Nemo to the king’s court.

In the final tier of panels, the face/moon continues to grow, frightening Nemo, but it is now so large that its full size cannot be encompassed by an individual panel. The panels have returned to square shape, indicating that Nemo is making the transition back to reality, and in the final panel Nemo indeed wakes up from this latest of his nightmares.

As the wall text asserts, “McCay brought an abstract formal dimension to comics, which added to the theatrical action that one sees through the panels. This technique allowed the page to be read both as a story told over time and a relation of design elements printed on a page.” This is true, and the use of the moon as backdrop in that central panel is evidence that McCay was alluding to theater. This seems to be a recurring motif in early strips: E. C. Segar created Popeye for a strip called Thimble Theatre.

But in his review Kimmelman went further, maintaining that McCay’s comics panels “magically blended to make a collective cogent abstraction out of the page: the essence of comics art.” Here we run into trouble.

As readers of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics know, the essence of comics is visual storytelling. Will Eisner renamed comics “sequential art”: the art of conveying a narrative through a sequence of pictures. Kevin Eastman named his comics museum (which is now unfortunately defunct) the Words and Pictures Museum; actual words aren’t necessary to comics, but a narrative is.

In my writing and lecturing about comics, I deal with comics as literature, emphasizing the narrative, but I try to take care to show how visual imagery plays its part in expressing the themes and characterization. “Masters” goes in the opposite direction. In an online interview I have quoted in a previous installment, “Masters” Brian Walker explained that his fellow co-curator “John [Carlin] helped me understand in the beginning that, in this type of [museum] environment, you really have to search for examples of work that are the most visual – graphically powerful. . . . I’m probably a little more content-oriented, and he’s probably a little more form-oriented.” Walker said at the San Diego “Masters” panel that comics storytellers were not included in the show if they were not considered to be important visual innovators “in layouts or design.”

This emphasis on visual design over visual storytelling isn’t a major problem in evaluating the work of McCay, whose narratives usually seem primarily to be pretexts for his visual experimentation.

One of the themes of the “Masters” exhibition appears to be a metafictional approach to comics: comics that are about the comics medium, which draw attention to themselves as fictional constructs, and which draw attention to and play with the conventions of the form.

For example, the show includes a noted example of McCay’s strip Little Sammy Sneeze, a series which, even more than Herriman’s Krazy Kat, sought to wring infinite variations out of a single basic gag: like Clark Kent in the October 5, 2006 episode of Smallville, aptly titled “Sneeze,” Sammy wreaks destruction whenever he unleashes one of his catastrophic nasal discharges. In this particular example (Sept. 24, 1905), Sammy is pictured within square panels with thick black borders. This time when Sammy sneezes, he shatters the panel borders, and in the last image in the sequence, he sits bewildered among the fragments of the broken borders.

Similarly, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend from April 7, 1907, the dreamer finds himself increasingly covered by ink blots from the unseen cartoonist’s leaky pen.

The McCay pieces in the exhibition were well chosen, and include examples from such celebrated Little Nemo sequences as “The Palace of Ice” and “Befuddle Hall,” with its vertiginous architecture. It was a particular pleasure to see exhibited here the original art for the Little Nemo Sunday page (Sept. 29, 1907) in which the title character and the Jungle Imp, both at giant size, clambers over Manhattan skyscrapers to arrive at the bank of the East River. Art Spiegelman included this particular installment in his book In the Shadow of No Towers (see “Comics in Context” #60), and since then, Neil Gaiman reprinted it in his 2006 short story collection Fragile Things.

The “Masters” show also has the same page of Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids, “The Kin-der-Kids Abroad: Triumphant Departure of the Kids in the Family Bathtub!!” (May 6, 1906), that Spiegelman ran in No Towers (see “Comics in Context” #59). But this isn’t the original art for the page. In fact, there are only a few examples of the show of Feininger’s original art for comics; most of what is on display are actual newspaper pages on which Feininger’s Sunday comics were printed.

I was surprised to learn from the labels that these newspaper pages were lent to the “Masters” exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art, to which Julia Feininger had donated them. During its long history the Museum of Modern Art has mostly overlooked comics, but the Museum clearly made an exception here inasmuch as Feininger went on to become an important painter of the early 20th century.

I presume that “Masters” used so many newspaper pages for the Feininger section because the original art for these strips was unavailable. These pages reminded me of a question raised by the Dahesh Museum’s show “Stories to Tell: Masterworks from the Kelly Collection of American Illustration” earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #132). Since these illustrators specifically designed their work to be reproduced in magazines and books, it can be argued that the reproduction is the true artwork, and not the original drawing or painting. The same argument could be made about comics.

Feininger only worked in comics for nine months in 1906 and 1907, creating two strips, The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World. One of the pages with a Wee Willie Winkie strip on display was dated Sunday, September 23, 1906, and there I was at the Newark Museum on Saturday, September 23, 2006, looking at it exactly a century later.

“Masters of American Comics” is such a large and important exhibition that I cannot hope to do it justice in a single week’s column, so I will continue my review of the show next week.

LINKS IN THE GREAT CHAIN OF CYBERBEING
In response to my memorial to the late Mark Gruenwald last week, Peter B. Gillis, once writer of such Marvel series as The Defenders, The Eternals (the unjustly forgotten 1980s revival), The Micronauts and Strikeforce Morituri, has created his own beautifully written an insightful tribute to Mark on his blog. Peter focuses on Mark as a visionary in his approach to Marvel’s fictional universe. If you look further down the section of his blog devoted to comics, you will also find Gillis’s homage to the late, great artist Alex Toth, whom he knew personally. There is also Gillis’s tribute to Charles Schulz, which takes the form of a story about what happened to the lead Peanuts characters when they became adults: it is everything that Dog Sees God, the recent off-Broadway play about the Peanuts characters as teenagers, should have been but wasn’t (see “Comics in Context” #120).

But don’t just read the sections of Peter Gillis’s blog that are about comics. He also does incisive political commentary and even offers (very) short science fiction stories for your perusal. His blog is one of the smartest and richly, masterfully written blogs I’ve ever come across. Read it and you too will wonder why the comics industry was foolish enough to let him leave the field.

Former Movie Poop Shoot contributor Scott Tipton has already done just what I have been advocating lately: a thematic analysis of Mark Gruenwald’s body comics stories apart from Squadron Supreme. You can find Tipton’s perceptive survey, titled “Because It’s Right: Ethics and the Work of Mark Gruenwald,” here.

I’ve written approvingly twice about the Star Wars Fan Film Awards (see “Comics in Context” #5 and #142), so it should not surprise you that I also enjoyed the very similar “Green Screen Challenge” on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. In this case fans constructed CGI videos around footage of the noble Stephen Colbert demonstrating his prowess wielding a lightsaber in front of a green screen. Even George Lucas himself joined the competition, as we learned on the October 11, 2006 episode (to be rerun on October 25). But it was Bonnie Rose, a freelancer here at Quick Stop Entertainment, who triumphed, and I suggest you read her memoir of her experience.

Finally, three cheers for Quick Stop’s Fred Hembeck, whose Cartoon Fred makes his long overdue and dependably amusing return to the pages of Marvel comics in the new Stan Lee Meets Spider-Man one-shot. It’s proof that exile from the House of Ideas need not last forever!

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson