Sometimes when I spend weeks working on a certain topic for this column, there are moments of serendipity.
For example, currently on Saturday mornings, Turner Classic Movies has been running the 1950 Columbia serial Atom Man vs. Superman, in the course of which Superman is projected into an extradimensional void called “the Empty Void.” Superman thereupon appears in ghostly form on Earth, unseen by the people there. Did this serial, I wondered, inspire the later creation of the Phantom Zone in the comics?
But the serendipity occurred after last Saturday’s (Nov. 25) last episode of the serial concluded. Next TCM showed one of its “One Reel Wonders,” an episode of the MGM short subject series called The Passing Parade. This installment was titled People on Paper, and turned out to be about leading comic strip artists of the mid-20th century. So there, captured on film, were several of the men honored as “Masters of American Comics” by the museum exhibition of the same name: Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), and Frank King (Gasoline Alley), as they looked in their prime. There too on film were Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers), Al Capp (Li’l Abner), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), and Chic Young (Blondie). Had I not been taken by surprise, I would have taped this short. I had never before known this short subject existed, and I suspect neither do most comics historians.
On the day before (Friday, Nov. 24), one of The New York Times‘s art critics, Holland Cotter reviewed the new exhibition “Africa Comics” at the Studio Museum in Harlem and remarked that “I guess there are people who still can’t fit the idea of “˜art’ and “˜comics’ into the same frame. But why? If handmade, graphically inventive, conceptually imaginative images – which describes practically everything in this show – aren’t art, what is?” Cotter refers to these “people” as if they are a handful of artistic reactionaries who have fallen behind the times and are out of step with contemporary thinking. Yet when I started “Comics in Context,” a little over three years ago, the Times neither reviewed nor reported on nor ran comics regularly. The Times ran an obituary for comics artist Dave Cockrum, the co-creator of The X-Men‘s Colossus, Nightcrawler and Storm, on Wednesday, Nov. 28, only two days after his death. Twelve years ago it took the Times several weeks before it noticed the passing of Jack Kirby. The cultural shift regarding comics has happened very quickly, though I suspect it is not as widespread as Cotter assumes.
By the way, I heartily recommend Peter Gillis’s beautifully written tribute to Dave Cockrum. Here are the key lines: “In a better world, Dave, once he was in the place where the universe had intended he should be, should have just continued to do whatever he wanted, because whatever he wanted was just so right. But that’s not the way the Comics Industry works.”
Cotter continues, “In any event, Pop Art and all that followed it long ago wiped out the notion that comics are one-liner sight gags good only for the “˜funny pages.'” As I’ve pointed out before, the conventional wisdom about Pop Art was that artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol had transformed supposedly trashy, banal imagery from the comics into true art. The 1960s Batman TV show remains Exhibit #1 in the case of mainstream culture’s attitude towards comics in the era of Pop Art. Now I am beginning to wonder if the growing artistic respectability of comics will lead to revisionist art history, with people contending that art critics and scholars have been taking comics seriously for decades.
In passing Cotter comments that “”˜Masters of American Comics,’ the ambitious historical survey split between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum, is truly a masterpiece show.” Indeed it is, and it’s noteworthy that now two Times critics have highly praised the show. (The first was senior art critic Michael Kimmelman)
It was through another serendipitous event that I found the key for writing about the last lap of the “Masters” show. On Monday, Nov. 20 cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, gave a lecture at New York University as part of his year-long “50 State Making Comics Tour“ to promote his latest book, Making Comics (HarperCollins, $22.95).
During his presentation McCloud expounded on one of the major ideas from his new book, that there are what he calls four basic “tribes” of comics artists. (See “Understanding Comics Culture” in Making Comics, pages 229-239).
First there are the Classicists, whom he characterizes by “the devotion to beauty, craftsmanship and a tradition of excellence and mastery,” showing panels by Hal Foster, Colleen Doran, and P. Craig Russell in his book as examples.
Next are the Animists, who are characterized by “the devotion to the content of a work, putting craft entirely in the service of its subject,” so that “the teller of the story all but vanishes in the telling.” In the book he presents as examples panels by Jack Kirby (from Fantastic Four), Lynn Johnston (from her comic strip For Better or for Worse) and Dan DeCarlo (of Betty and Veronica).
Then there are the Formalists, who have a “devotion to comics itself, to figuring out what the form of comics is capable of,” and who experiment with that form. In this category McCloud includes Will Eisner (in his NYU presentation), Art Spiegelman (in the book), and himself.
Finally, there are the Iconoclasts, who aim above all for “honesty, authenticity, and a connection to real life”; McCloud points to Robert Crumb’s and Harvey Kurtzman’s work as examples. That seems to describe the Iconoclasts’ philosophies more than their visual style. My take on what McCloud is getting at is this: the Iconoclasts are less concerned with conventional notions of beauty and craft, nor with formal innovation nor with working within conventional story genres. Hence their visual style may look rough or primitive, because they “see art primarily through life’s lens” in McCloud’s phrase: art becomes the means to their end of conveying their ideas about life.
McCloud states that his “four tribes correspond roughly” to psychologist Carl Jung’s “four proposed functions of human thought.” Hence McCloud links Classicists to Sensation, Animists to Intuition, Formalists to Thinking, and Iconoclasts to Feeling.
McCloud writes that “most comics creators” would like to achieve “goals from all four of these groups.” He also observes that a comics artist can display “a strong attraction to two of these ideals”: in the book he classifies Caniff as both an Animist (since he makes storytelling primary) and a Classicist (due to his “impeccable compositions”).
With regard to these four sets of values, McCloud states that “usually, you can tell which one burns brightest for a given creator, and there’s almost always one of the four that burns rarely or not at all for them.”
To McCloud’s great credit, he does not contend that one of the four “tribes” is superior to the others. After all, there are many supporters of Iconoclast and Formalist comics who take a condescending attitude towards the genre comics favored by Animists and Classicists, as any issue of The Comics Journal will demonstrate.
McCloud’s theory of “tribes” should also serve to remind critics to be humble. If no “tribe’s” artistic philosophy is superior to the others, then no “tribe’s” point of view contains the whole truth about comics. To state that “one of the four. . .burns rarely or not at all” for someone suggests that he or she may have a blind spot. There are some comics that he or she does not “get,” but that may be true for everyone.
But how does McCloud’s theory of tribes apply to people other than comics artists? For example, what about museum curators who delve into comics?
The “Masters of American Comics” museum exhibition and its catalogue from Yale University Press are primarily Formalist. That explains why Hal Foster and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), both considered such titans of the artform, were not included in the show: they are first class Classicists. When co-curator Brian Walker stated that “storytellers” such as Carl Barks and Walt Kelly, who were not considered graphic innovators, were excluded, he was saying that they were primarily Animists. Nonetheless, some Animists made it in. Co-curator John Carlin confessed that E. C. Segar (Popeye) was not an innovator but was included because of his mastery of conveying character and comedy. In the catalogue, while Carlin describes “formal” aspects of Caniff’s work, his text primarily praises Caniff as a storyteller. But if Carlin is attracted to two of McCloud’s “ideals,” then they would be Formalism and Iconoclasm, which accounts for the inclusion of the last four Masters in the show: Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware. (Spiegelman dropped out of the exhibit’s New York engagement, so I won’t discuss him this week, but I have previously written about his work in “Comics in Context” #59, 60, 61 and 64.)
I don’t entirely agree with McCloud’s classification of Eisner as a Formalist. True, in his role as comics theorist and teacher, Eisner pursued the formalist concern of studying the visual language of comics. In emphasizing Eisner’s innovative splash pages for The Spirit, the “Masters” show portrays him as a Formalist. But I recall hearing Eisner say, “I don’t want to be in the graphic novel section” of a bookstore (see “Comics in Context” #6). He wanted his books shelved alongside prose novels; this suggests that the story content was more important to Eisner than the visuals. Apart from Eisner’s experiments with splash pages and such, isn’t The Spirit really an Animist work, in which the dynamic visuals primarily serve to convey the story? Is the reason why Eisner’s graphic novels were mostly excluded from the show that they are so Animist?
McCloud correctly classifies Kirby as an Animist, but the “Masters” show brings out other aspects of his work. In focusing on Kirby’s experimentation with “patterning,” the “Masters” show reveals his Formalist side. In writing about the sculptural, monumental look of the figures of Galactus, the Silver Surfer, and the Thing on display, I was viewing Kirby as, in part, a Classicist.
How does McCloud’s theory of tribes apply to a critic like myself? Considering that I taught a course at NYU called “Comics as Literature” and that I argued a few weeks ago that the essence of comics is storytelling, it’s clear that I am primarily an Animist in my approach to the visual dimension of comics: the art serves the story. As someone who spends part of most Saturdays visiting art museums, I’m also a Classicist, who appreciates sheer beauty and craftsmanship. (My original title for “Comics in Context” #132, about the Dahesh Museum’s show of classic American illustration, was “Gallery of Glory.”) My training in the comics business is also Classicist. When I interviewed artists John Romita, Sr. and John Romita, Jr., both Marvel mainstays, at the recent Big Apple Con, they both emphasized storytelling above all. Looking at the formal aspects of comics artwork does not come automatically to me, but I can do it, I find it interesting, and I appreciate the Masters book for providing guidance to me in this approach. The flame that “burns rarely or not at all” for me is that of the Iconoclasts. There are major exceptions. I enjoy Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, which tends to use Iconoclast artists (see “Comics in Context” #64, 73). I admire Crumb’s work, though I simply do not become as enthusiastic about it as I do about the work of most of the earlier Masters. But I am left cold by many alternative cartoonists who take an Iconoclastic approach, as with the work in the “Speak: Nine Cartoonists” gallery show earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #122, which I originally, pointedly titled “Gallery of Gloom” before IGN changed it). When I visited the “Masters” show with Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art president Ken Wong, I surprised him by telling him I didn’t “get” Panter’s work. Now I know that it’s outside my tribe: I’m an Animist/Classicist.
This is how I react to the visual side of comics, but how does McCloud’s theory of tribes apply to the writing side of the medium? McCloud says that Animists are intuitive. That applies to my first reading of a comic, when I’m just looking for its entertainment value. But as any reader of “Comics in Context” knows, I take a highly analytical approach to evaluating the writing of comics, delving into the mythic and literary archetypes underlying characters and plots. This makes me a Formalist, which McCloud associates with “thinking” in Jung’s “functions of human thought.” It’s clear that I’m also a Classicist, since I value the traditional genres in comics and cartoon art. So with regard to the writing side of comics, I’m a Classicist/Formalist.
With regard to writing, too, the flame that “burns rarely” for me is that of Iconoclasm, but not because I’m averse to “honesty, authenticity, and a connection to real life,” as McCloud puts it. For one thing, I think that fantasy can comment honestly and seriously on real life; one of comics’ strengths is its ability to create and utilize metaphors for reality. My real aversion to much of Iconoclast comics is due to the attitude that many Iconoclast comics writers take towards reality. As I stated in my review of the “Speak” show, Crumb’s work stood out from the rest in the “Gallery of Gloom” because he leavened his observations with comedy rather than miring himself in depression and despair like the others. McCloud writes that the Iconoclasts look at life “warts and all”: in too many cases, I contend, they fixate on only the warts.
So, as I moved through the “Masters” show, once I exited the Eisner and Kirby room, I was entering increasingly alien territory.
Next came Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993), the creator and original editor and writer of MAD, and the only one of the Masters whom I have not previously written about. This section had the most appalling case of mislabeling in the entire show: here was the cover to MAD #12, featuring a characteristically grotesque female face drawn by Basil Wolverton, that was even signed by Wolverton, and yet the accompanying label attributed it entirely to Kurtzman! A nearby vitrine held various stages in the creation of “Little Annie Fanny in Greenwich Village” for the September 1963 issue of Playboy, credited on the label to Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Russ Heath: there are pages drawn in pen and ink, then a version in colored pencils and watercolor, and finally the printed pages. But the labels don’t explain what the specific roles of each of the three artists were in crafting this strip. The Masters book makes the matter clearer (pgs. 116-118), but still does not sufficiently explain the collaborative process for the benefit of those who don’t know who did what. Another annoyance is the labeling for pages from the story “3-Dimensions!” from MAD #12 (June 1954). Both the show’s labeling and the book (p. 114) credit the pages to Kurtzman and Wally Wood, but again without explaining the nature of the collaboration. (Did Wood draw over Kurtzman’s layouts?) Considering that Wood is a major figure in comics history who could himself have been included as one of the Masters, it seems unjust that the show and book treat him as an unexplained footnote to Kurtzman’s saga.
For me the highlight of the Kurtzman section were examples from his EC war comics. The “online slide show” accompanying Kimmelman’s Times review of “Masters” includes the opening page of “Air Burst!”, illustrated by Kurtzman, from Frontline Combat #4 (February 1952). (See here, or Masters pgs. 113 and 271.) In his essay in the Masters catalogue, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman points out that “Kurtzman’s war comic books showcased his boldest, most abstract drawing. The thick line and copious use of black suggest gouged-out woodcuts. . .” (p. 272). These thick, dark outlines of the figures contribute to this “abstract” element by emphasizing them as simple shapes: the fleeing North Korean soldiers in the first panel are basically ovals with smaller ovals as heads. The emphatic outlines also focus the readers’ attention on the figures’ overall body language and movement. Those two soldiers in the top panel aren’t standing up straight: their backs curve forward, as if they are crouching while at the same time they run forward, as if trying to hide from the bombs bursting overhead.
The “Masters” show and the book (pgs. 110-111) include the entire war story “Corpse on the Imjin!”, illustrated by Kurtzman, from Two-Fisted Tales #25 (February 1952), which Carlin analyzes in detail in the catalogue (p. 112). I was particularly impressed by the way in which an American soldier and a North Korean soldier, battling each other, combine into what becomes a single, united, heavily outlined shape, which could be regarded as semi-abstract, as the American forces his foe under the surface of the river to drown. The Korean’s blood escapes into the water, turning it not red but in Kurtzman’s rendition, black: it is as if the American were plunging his adversary into a black void. Kimmelman declared this combat sequence “turns hand-to-hand combat into pure visual poetry. It’s a model of economy and dark human truth and, above all, of how the best comic artists organize and pace drama and text across a page.” Despite stating elsewhere in his review that the essence of comics was abstraction, Kimmelman recognizes that comics is visual storytelling, too. McCloud may class Kurtzman as an Iconoclast, and he is the progenitor of that school, but Carlin, Hoberman, and Kimmelman perceive his Formalist aspect and salute him as a master visual storyteller as well. So I still felt at home looking over his war comics pages.
Carlin writes that “One of Kurtzman’s most enduring attributes was his development of the self-reflexive, ironic aspect of modern comics. . . .” (p. 114). By this Carlin doesn’t just mean Kurtzman’s parodies of other comics in MAD, or even inserting characters representing the writer and artist into MAD stories, but also his satirical use of the conventions of the comics medium itself. Hence, the aforementioned “3-Dimensions” story ends with the characters toppling out of a panel into blank space on the page; the final page of the story is entirely blank. I am reminded of similar postmodernist stunts in Tex Avery’s animated cartoons (e. g., the Wolf running seemingly right off the frame of the film into a white void). At another point in “3-Dimensions!”, a “hole” is drawn onto a page, enabling characters to see and step through to a following page; whether he was aware Kurtzman had done it or not, John Byrne used a similar gag decades later in The Sensational She-Hulk.
The next Master is Robert Crumb (born in 1943, and the first Master who is still alive), about whom Carlin asserts, “no one before Crumb made comics that were so directly about themselves and their own mental state” (p. 125); this made his work revolutionary, pioneering underground comix and spawning the alternative comics movement.
A particularly interesting selection in the book is “The Many Faces of R. Crumb” from XYZ Comics in 1972 (pgs. 124-125), in which Crumb draws himself in many different guises, each representing a different side of his personality. Carlin writes that this illustrates Crumb’s “fractured sense of self” (p. 126). To me it also suggests, consciously or not, that the many different characters in Crumb’s work might all be based on aspects of himself, and that this by extension may be true for all writers.
I was quite surprised upon seeing a Crumb sketchbook on display. Alternating with drawings of Fritz the Cat were pencil studies of women, which, unfortunately, are not reproduced in the catalogue. Though Crumb is well known for drawing large, massive, formidable females, who seem to simultaneously embody male lusts for and fears of the opposite sex, these sketchbook drawings, softly modulated in pencil, were surprisingly, appealingly beautiful. Here, unexpectedly, was Crumb the Classicist. But as Francoise Mouly points out in her essay in the catalogue, Crumb is a man of seeming contradictions.
Next I advanced into the Gary Panter (born in 1950) section and found myself amidst nearly pure Iconoclasm. All of the Masters from McCay through Kurtzman were creating their work for a general audience, even if, in the cases of Kirby and Kurtzman (at EC), that audience was then considered to consist of children. With Crumb this began to change: originally his underground work was sold through head shops to a niche audience. Spiegelman and the alternative school that followed in his wake aimed at an even more elite audience. As Carlin puts it, “It was not until the contemporary era. notably in [Spiegelman’s] RAW magazine and the artists it helped to promote and nurture, that the graphic character of the comics overtly became as important as story and character. Comics became “˜art’ in a deliberate manner rather than sneaking in through the backdoor of popular culture.” (p. 140). Through its selection of Masters, the show seems to imply that this is the Formalist/Iconoclastic route that comics with claims to be museum-caliber art took after the 1960s. But as McCloud would surely argue, Formalism and Iconoclasm are merely two of the four value sets of comics. To dismiss post-1960s Classicist and Animist comics is a mistake.
With Panter the Classicist ideal of beauty and mastery of traditional craft is abandoned. Carlin refers to Panter’s “scratchy line work” and writes about Panter’s Jimbo Meets Rat-Boy (1979) that “The lettering and line work are deliberately crude and filled with scribbles and seeming mistakes that take on an artful pattern in spite of themselves” (p. 140). You can see for yourself in a page from a later work, Jimbo Is Stepping Off the Edge of a Cliff! from Jimbo circa 1988 (Here, or Masters p. 149). Carlin contends that “The new jagged approach he pioneered created a sense of psychological expression in comics. . . “ (p. 140), and that Panter “expresses himself through the character of his line” (p. 158). It’s like the distortions of expressionism taken to the extreme limit, and the emotions being expressed range from angst into sheer horror.
My Classicist sensibility finds no ground to stand within this ultimate Iconoclasm. But it’s not just the look of Panter’s comics that dissatisfy me, but also the worldview of his writing. Describing the “postapocalyptic world” of Panter’s tales, Carlin writes that “Panter took his stories out of this world into a future that is actually closer to the way we live now than we are willing to express. Jimbo wanders a wrecked zone where nuclear explosion is a metaphor for modern America” (p. 146). I’m not “willing to express” it because I don’t believe it. I simply do not share this utterly negative and nihilistic vision of modern America or contemporary life.
Ironically, I very much like Panter’s work as art director for the 1980s television series Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. In part it’s because his work there on three-dimensional objects has solidity rather than this “scratchy” quality Carlin describes. It’s also because the Playhouse work is in the service of comedy, rather than the over the top apocalyptic despair of his comics work.
The last of the Masters, Chris Ware, was born in 1967, making him a post-Boomer, the only Master younger than myself. With his elaborately, intricately designed division of his comics pages into panels, Ware is very much a Formalist. But in his catalogue essay, novelist Dave Eggers argues that Ware is, in effect, a Classicist as well: “I think it’s beautiful in the way that [novelist Vladimir] Nabokov’s work is beautiful. In both cases it’s clear that the creator believes in beauty for its own sake, and, more crucially, is capable of creating beauty anywhere and always” (p. 312). Moreover, Eggers believes that “Ware looks fondly back to a time before modernism crushed almost all of art’s flourishes, eccentricities, and organic forms. But instead of simply reappropriating old forms, he channels the past by sublimating it, creating a style that, in the end, is sui generis. . . . “ (p. 316).
Carlin, however, emphasizes Ware’s Formalism. Animism has been left behind: Carlin maintains that Ware addresses his audience “in an ironic way that never lets us forget we are reading comics. We don’t get lost in the story the way we do in Spiegelman’s Maus or Crumb’s comics.” (p.158) I’d say that Ware achieves this Brechtian effect through his unusual methods of designing the page, leading the reader’s eye through the narrative by an unconventional route., forcing him to pay attention to the Formal aspects of the art.
Carlin asserts that “Ware’s comics express emotional content through form and design more than just story and dialogue” (p. 154). He quotes Ware as explaining that King’s “Gasoline Alley changed a lot of my thinking about comics. It made me realize that the mood of a comic strip did not need to come from the drawing or the words. . . .The emotion came from the way the story itself was structured” (p. 158). Referring to Ware’s character Jimmy Corrigan, Carlin helpfully observes that “Ware and Jimmy were both abandoned by their fathers when they were very young and then met them briefly in later life without resolving anything before their fathers died. The sadness behind this disconnect is played out as much in the way that the form of the story breaks down time into discrete elements as in the psychology of the characters” (p. 158)
But Carlin goes further and contends that “Ware uses form and design. . .to find new ways to tell stories and reveal human emotions that are appropriate to his generation. In other words, Ware’s abstractions, combinations of apparently ephemeral elements, and lapses in logical continuity are all part of how people now experience the world around them.” I don’t: I’m a believer in logic and tradition, and Ware seems not only to value tradition (as in his respect for King’s work) but also to prize order and structure, perhaps more than any of the other Masters. Eggers writes that “Ware’s work is the most elaborate and the most controlled example of the comics medium yet produced. . . “ (p. 312). As a Classicist I look for constants in the realm of literature and art: qualities which enable classic works to remain vital and relevant through time. The “Masters” show demonstrates that we can relate to the works and ideas of writer/artists from forty, fifty, or even a hundred years ago. I have my doubts that the Younger Generation is this mysterious mutant race that sees life entirely differently than their forebears, or that, even with the omnipresence of mass media that Carlin cites, that life has somehow radically changed in its essentials. Ware may have a new and unusual perspective on the world, but that doesn’t mean that everyone of his generation thinks the way he does. Just look at the rest of contemporary mass culture.
Kimmelman writes that Ware has “a singular, melancholy vision.” Referring to King’s influence on Ware in his Rusty Brown strip, Carlin writes that “Ware brings out the sadness and emptiness of contemporary experience in a way that never came to the surface in King’s work” (p. 162). Here too I disagree. Why is “contemporary experience” characterized by “sadness and emptiness”? Most of King’s strips in the show date from the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, when the world was moving towards war. That seems to me to be a sadder and emptier time for America than the early 21st century. There are always people who lead sad and empty lives, and always people who lead happy and fulfilling ones. My problem in relating to Ware’s work is that it seems mired in depression and despair. As Carlin says, Ware borrows formal devices from King’s work, but not King’s humor or optimism. Carlin points out that Jimmy Corrigan seems modeled on Charlie Brown, but that Schulz’s character is “caught between wonder and worry” (p. 158). Jimmy is left only with the worry, but that leaves out the other half of life.
Eggers observes about Ware that “no amount of success or acclaim seems to diminish the self-flagellating with which he punishes himself” (p. 315). One of Ware’s pieces at the Jewish Museum ironically advised readers how to “Ruin Your Life: Draw Cartoons,” thereby dooming yourself to “decades of grinding isolation.” In this piece Ware broke the cartoonist’s career into four steps: “1. Get to work. 2. Realize Your Mistake. 3. Envy the Other Arts. 4. You Will Not Be Compensated.” Looking this over, I thought to myself: this guy’s work is hanging in a museum. Just how bad can his career be?
In the Times‘ online slideshow, Ware is represented by “Superman Suicide,” two panels from Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2002) in which a man costumed as a superhero, rather than flying, falls between two panels to his death on the street (p. 162). In two later panels (not in the slide show but on p. 163), Jimmy looks, perhaps disconsolately, at the spot on the street where the corpse had lain. Carlin calls the superhero in Corrigan a “signifier of lost illusions” (p. 162). The costumed man’s death is an iconic image of defeat, of humankind’s failure to rise above the “sadness and emptiness” of the world.
But you may recall that a superhero falling from a great height to his death on a street below is how Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons started Watchmen, and then they went on from there, to depict a world in which disillusion and despair coexist with spiritual renewal and even the miraculous. Theirs is a more complex and rounded vision of “contemporary existence” than Ware’s.
If you read the Masters of American Art book, don’t skip over the footnotes section. Both there and in the main text, Carlin discusses many cartoonists besides the fifteen Masters, including Alex Raymond, Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Al Capp, Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and more. It’s as if they were receiving honorary mentions. According to the “Masters” panel at the San Diego Con, Art Spiegelman has already suggested doing “Masters of American Comics II.” I hope that they will, and feature other important comics artists. Or perhaps the “Masters” show will inspire other museums to organize exhibits honoring other comics artists. With luck, this is only the beginning of comics in American museums.
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
If you want to read more about Scott McCloud’s talk at NYU, you can read my online report for the Nov. 28, 2006 edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. For the Nov. 14 Comics Week, I wrote about the Jewish Museum’s panel on the Golden Age of Comics, featuring Golden Age cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Irwin Hasen, and Jerry Robinson.
I’ve written another, entirely different article about the late Mark Gruenwald in Michael Eury’s Back Issue #19, now on sale from TwoMorrows Publishing.
My first lecture on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen for “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City was the best attended of the series. (You can read about it here) I will conclude my analysis of Watchmen with another lecture at MoCCA on Monday, December 4 at 6:30 PM.
-Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson
Comedy Central is set to air a new satirical cartoon named Lil’ Bush. The cartoon will follow a younger version of Bush and some of his friends as they make their way through elementary school. To keep the show as authentic as possible the show will remain on the air regardless of whether or not the majority of the United States population likes it.
From its founding right through the end of the twentieth century, The New York Times would not run comics and did not even employ an editorial cartoonist. Presumably the Times considered comics and cartoons too déclassé for a serious, proper newspaper like itself, in contrast to its tabloid competition. The flagrant exception to the Times‘ rule were Al Hirschfeld’s caricatures of Broadway and Hollywood performers in the Arts and Leisure Section, but Hirschfeld reportedly considered himself an “illustrator,” not a “cartoonist.” In the School of Visual Arts’ current Jules Feiffer retrospective, there is a comics page that Feiffer did for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1974 that is satirically presented as the kind of comics the Times would run if it ran comics: titled “Hodgkins of State,” it is an (intentionally) deadly dull policy discussion by two members of the foreign service.
Secondly, I was in Tucson over the weekend. Now, some of you know that I don’t care that much for organized sports, Chicago Cubs excluded as that’s something that exists in my DNA for being 1) born in Illinois and 2) having a predilection for consistently being last in everything.
I took a picture of it and briefly pondered what this really meant to have such a cultural touchstone like the AB fraternity house just disrespected. It should be more than just a place where male students start their journey of pillaging and conniving with their other guy friends, thinly disguising their homosexuality by participating in acts like paddle spanking and elephant walking. I don’t know if I was just being sensitive, overly sensitive, because REVENGE OF THE NERDS was that first comedy which spoke to me on a level that went beyond naked chicks and Dudley Dawson. Shouldn’t there be more awareness of places that should at least be paid some sort of attention and care if for no other reason than to preserve a moment that has meant a lot to so many?
There couldn’t have been a better reason out there for the complete annihilation for this franchise than these two TV movies. What started out as a comedy that really gave us male Gen Xers a movie that we will all be proud of having seen with our dumb little buddies on any given Friday or Saturday night sleepover (Do kids still do these things or have they somehow been outlawed in this age of uncertainty?) and exposed most of us to our first true taste of…exposure of the female variety? I know I can be counted in that vote.
Director: Simon Brand
Director: Various
Director: Joe Carnahan