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.
But now look at this year’s annual Holiday Books issue of The New York Times Book Review (Dec. 3, 2006). On the list of the “100 Notable Books of the Year” is Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which the Times helpfully classifies as a “graphic memoir,” solving the problem of what to call a book in the graphic novel format that deals in nonfictional autobiography. Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, including work by Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, receives a review that takes up two entire pages. (The “Speak: Nine Cartoonists” exhibition in New York City earlier this year served as a preview of this book. See “Comics in Context” #122.) The author of this review, David Hadju, writes that “If anyone really qualifies as the voice of the current literary generation, he or she could well be using the language of cartoons, captions and word balloons.” There is a “Holiday” roundup review headed “comics,” covering Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums, and a new volume of George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz, among others, written by Douglas Wolk, one of my colleagues at Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. (It is a pleasure to see the Times assign a comics review to someone who actually has a background in writing about the medium.) Another “Holiday” roundup, on “Drawings,” includes not only a collection of the work of Saul Steinberg, who long ago was welcomed into the precincts of high art, but also caricaturist Drew Friedman’s book Old Jewish Comedians, and a book called The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, which, by Crumb’s own description, contains “adorable, heartwarming, and lovingly rendered drawings.” This makes me think of the “lovingly rendered” drawings of women I was surprised to find in the Crumb section of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit (see last week’s column). Scott McCloud classifies Crumb as an Iconoclast, who strives to convey truth about life rather than artistic craft and beauty; perhaps this book shows not just the sweeter but the Classicist side of Crumb. This Holiday Books edition also includes reviews of Neil Gabler’s massive new biography of Walt Disney (about which I will have more to say next week) and Linda H. Davis’s biography of Charles Addams. There’s even a critique of a book called Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office. And meanwhile the Times continues to run a weekly comic by Seth in its Sunday magazine section.
A decade ago the Times would have run reviews of biographies of Disney and Addams. Regardless of whether or not one admires his work, Disney is recognized as a major figure in American popular culture. Moreover, back in the twentieth century some forms of comics and cartoon art had more cultural respectability than others. One of those categories was the cartoons in The New Yorker, including those by Addams, who donated his artwork to the New York Public Library, which for years has been displaying them in their own gallery (see “Comics in Context” #72). Even when I was a child my local library in a Boston suburb carried book collections of editorial cartoons (including those by Herblock), histories of newspaper comic strips, a 1940 coffee table book about the making of Disney’s Fantasia, and even some collections of comic strips, notably Walt Kelly’s Pogo, whose political satire won it cultural respectability, as Doonesbury would receive later.
Still, the considerable amount of space that this year’s Holiday Books issue of the Times Book Review devotes to comic and cartoon art is mightily impressive. In his review of Brunetti’s anthology, Hajdu writes that “Among the events that helped establish jazz as a serious art was the concert “˜From Spirituals to Swing,’ staged at Carnegie Hall in 1932,” which “brought together an eclectic array of African-American musicians. . . in the same hall famous for presenting Stokowski, Toscanini, and their high-toned like.” Hajdu believes that Brunetti’s book serve the same purpose for comics. To my mind, Yale University Press’s publication of the Brunetti book is merely one of a number of events in 2006 that mark the comics medium’s transition into cultural respectability. This issue of the Times Book Review is another, and “Masters of American Comics” may be the foremost.
It’s not just the museums and galleries of New York City that have been celebrating the comics medium this year. The Friday after Thanksgiving I made a day trip down to Washington D. C. to visit the Library of Congress to see its current exhibition “Cartoon America: Highlights from the Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature,” which runs through January 27, 2007. In connection with the show, Harry N. Abrams has published the book Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress, edited by Harry Katz, the former head curator of the Library’s Prints and Photographs division, which includes original cartoon artwork. The Abrams book has a format similar to that of Yale University Press’s Masters of American Comics catalogue; there is a long essay about the history of comics, in this case by Katz, followed by an array of essays, mostly about individual artists, by an extraordinary lineup of contributors. Whereas the Masters book was a catalogue of the show of the same name, the Cartoon America book does not limit itself to examples of the Wood collection on display, but deals with the Library’s entire range of holdings in original cartoon and comics art.
The book jacket for Cartoon America features a knockout illustration by Richard Williams (not the animator of the same name), showing Mount Rushmore redone with the faces of Charlie Brown, Ignatz, Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, and Popeye; the original art is included in the exhibition. It’s a gag kidding the elevation of American comics and cartoons into the realm of serious art, but that elevation is real. The introductory wall text for the exhibit, by its co-curators Sara W. Duke and Martha H. Kennedy, reprinted in its brochure, declares that “The Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature. . .is a jewel among the Library’s special collections. . . .”
But, enjoyable as Williams’ redesign of Mount Rushmore is, do Charlie Brown, Ignatz, Zippy and Popeye really convey the full range of American “comic art”? Something seems missing.
In the foreword to the Cartoon America book, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress himself, writes that “Few people realize that the “Library of Congress is home to one of the world’s great collections of original cartoon art.” He explains that “The library began to collect and preserve cartoons and caricatures within decades of its founding in 1800, recognizing their value as vehicles of social and political commentary and as original works of art” (p. 7). This is highly prescient and admirable, although Billington’s description suggests that the Library’s primary interest was in editorial cartooning.
James Arthur “Art” Wood, Jr. is a longtime editorial cartoonist who was also a major collector of cartoon art, compiling what Billington calls “the most comprehensive private collection of original historical American cartoon art known to exist” (p. 7). In 1995 Wood opened the National Gallery of Caricature and Cartoon Art in Washington, D. C. to exhibit his collection to the public; however, due to lack of funding, it closed merely two years later. (Maybe one of the gallery’s problems was publicity: I had heard about it but was never able to find out where it was.) So, instead, Wood donated his collection to the Library of Congress in 2000, which, according to Katz, “more than doubled the Library’s already outstanding cartoon art holdings. . . “ (p. 13). Billington states that the Library has also recently acquired other “notable collections” in cartoon art besides Wood’s.
“Cartoon America” is very different from the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition. “Masters” is, as Times critic Holland Cotter put it, a “masterpiece show” (Fri., Nov. 24), dealing solely with fifteen artists whom it presents as the most accomplished practitioners of the medium; the selection of works, the wall texts and, even more so, the catalogue make strong analytic arguments for the visual greatness of the Masters’ works. Though virtually all the works in the “Cartoon America” show merit exhibition, they are not all on such a high level of achievement. For example, the section about comic strips includes an example of Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy, which would be no one’s choice as a miracle of graphic mastery and beauty; its virtues lie elsewhere, in its wit and perceptiveness. (Now here’s a prime example of McCloud’s Iconoclast school.) The curators included an example of Bil Keane’s The Family Circus, which is infamously banal as both writing and art; I could only justify that on historical and sentimental grounds.
Whereas “Masters” narrowed its focus to little more than a dozen cartoonists, “Cartoon America” seems to aim for a more encyclopedic approach to American cartoon art. Billington writes of Wood, “Over time he compiled an extraordinary collection encompassing virtually every aspect of the genre and every era of our nation’s history” (p. 7). (By “genre” Billington means presumably means “medium,” though his choice of words may be revealing.) In the brochure Duke and Kennedy write that the 102 original artworks in their show reveal “the vitality of an innovative and evolving art form that includes political illustrations, gag cartoons, comic strips, illustrations, animation, and caricature.” Something big still seems to be missing from this encyclopedic survey, though, as we shall see.
Not having been to Washington D. C. since the last century (i. e., 1999), I was looking out for changes, but found few. Well, there was that colossal new building across the Mall from the East Building of the National Gallery of Art; that turned out to be the new National Museum of the American Indian. Just as surprising were the new traffic lights. When the “walk” signal goes on, a lower screen displays numbers that steadily count down towards zero; then the flashing red signal turns on, and another countdown begins, indicating how many seconds are left till the light turns solidly red and the traffic recommences. This had the effect of making crossing the street seem like an episode of 24: if I didn’t make it across in time, would the street blow up? And the countdowns, in turn, reminded me that this was my first visit to Washington D. C. after the 9/11 attacks. Another reminder was the long, slow security line at the public entrance to the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building, complete with metal detector and X-ray machine. So, once I got through security, should I fasten my seat belt and wait for the Jefferson Building to take off? Do they still serve beverages?
The Jefferson Building is actually a monumental and magnificent Beaux-Arts edifice, whose Great Hall is an astonishing, almost overwhelmingly elaborate visual extravaganza of grand staircases, sculpture, murals of mythological and allegorical figures, and inscriptions about the value of wisdom. The “Cartoon America” show has been given a place of honor, along two opposite sides of the Great Hall.
I started with the “Animation” section, which not only displays artwork from classic animated films, but also features a video monitor showing corresponding sequences from the actual films.
Here was a drawing of Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur backing away in surprise from a woolly mammoth; Gertie was the first great example of character animation that conveyed personality. This drawing was actually a tracing, made circa 1980, of McCay’s 1914 original.
Here too was a model sheet for Max and Dave Fleischer’s Betty Boop (see “Comics in Context” #116 and 117), labeled as being from 1932-1934. This looked to me like Betty after the movie industry’s Production Code started being enforced in 1934: her dress, with its high neckline, looked considerably more proper and her trademark garters were gone. Nevertheless, she was still in a minidress: in terms of fashion she was thirty years ahead of her time. Oddly, the video monitor showed the scantily clad pre-code Betty from Boop Oop a Doop (1932), fending off the advances of an obese circus ringmaster.
A highlight of this section was a “preparatory drawing” from the Fleischers’ Popeye cartoon Females Is Fickle (1940), showing Popeye, like a more combative Jonah, trapped inside a gigantic, semi-transparent jellyfish and punching his way out: this single drawing captured the dynamism of the full animated sequence, shown on the video monitor.
Here too were cels and watercolors for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (pgs. 15, 25), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia (1940) (p. 194), and Dumbo (1940). The most impressive Disney piece was a remarkable pastel for Bambi (1942) done by Tyrus Wong as a concept sketch, showing Bambi’s father, the godlike stag known as the Great Prince, standing between barren trees, atop a rocky crag (p. 191). The trees are in silhouette, the sky is gray, and the enormous rock is cast into deep shadow, but the godlike stag is lit by an aura of light, and seems almost to blend into it, and to glow.
The only other animation studio represented is MGM’s, through 1940 model sheets for William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s Tom and Jerry (p. 197). But what about Tex Avery’s great MGM animated shorts, and, for that matter, Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies? Mickey Mouse is in this show, but not Bugs Bunny; Hanna and Barbera made it in, but not Chuck Jones. And what about UPA and the whole history of American animation since the 1940s? (If you want to pick up where “Cartoon America” leaves off, go to New York City to see “Saturday Morning,” the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s comprehensive current exhibit on television animation.) Wood’s tastes in animation seem to have frozen in 1942, so the Library has a great deal of work to do to catch up in collecting animation art. But no, this isn’t what I mean when I say that something big is missing from the “Cartoon America” show.
Next came the section designated “Gag & Single Panel Cartoons,” and the examples on display ranged considerably in quality. Particularly interesting was a cartoon by Peter Arno (1904-1968), a “close variant” of which appeared in the September 19, 1936 issue of The New Yorker. It shows a group of apparently prosperous people, one of whom, according to the caption, is saying, “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt.” So these would be wealthy conservatives, probably Republicans, of the time, who were opposed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to aid the masses who were impoverished by the great Depression. They’re heading to the Trans-Lux, a movie theater in Manhattan, to hiss at FDR when he appears onscreen in a newsreel. I suppose the contemporary equivalent would be cheering Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly on as they lash into liberals on talk radio or Fox News. The people in this cartoon are obsessed: they’re going to the movies, not to watch the feature film, but to sneer at FDR, who isn’t actually even there. Moreover, weirdly, Arno has placed these middle-aged and elderly characters in costumes, as if they’re going to a masquerade; what’s especially noticeable is that their legs are in tights, which is not particularly age-appropriate. Is the cartoon’s point that these reactionaries are letting go of their inhibitions, both about exposing their physiques and expressing their hatred for FDR? Or that they’re playing at politics like overage children playing dress-up? Is the cartoon even hinting that there’s something decadent about indulging in this petty political meanness?
Perhaps the ultimate extreme in what Scott McCloud calls the Iconoclast “tribe” of cartoonists is represented by the cartoons of the legendary New Yorker prose humorist James Thurber. In the Cartoon America book another celebrated New Yorker contributor, novelist John Updike, writes an amusing essay titled “Technically Challenged Carefree Ineptitude: James Thurber.” Updike points out that a childhood accident cost Thurber one of his eyes and damaged the other, causing his vision to continue to deteriorate in his adult life. Hence, Updike asserts, Thurber’s “development as a picture maker was arrested at a lively primitivism” (p. 216). Thurber’s limited sight provides a reasonable excuse, although I suppose he may simply have had limited talent as a draftsman regardless of the condition of his eyes. Updike further contends that “some of his best-known cartoons. . .were the product of a carefree ineptitude” (p. 216). He reports that Thurber himself confessed that when he tried to draw a seal astride a rock, the drawing came out looking like a seal inexplicably peering over the headboard of a bed, which proved to be one of his most memorable images (reproduced on pgs. 217 and 221). In other words, Thurber, through his lack of graphic skill, created happy accidents, and his far superior writing ability transformed these graphic lemons into lemonade.
Even so, Thurber’s ability to visually delineate the emotions of his characters can be no accident. In both the show and the book (p. 220), there is a cartoon, circa 1934, that Thurber drew on lined paper, like that of a schoolboy’s note pad. A bald man, his eyebrows furrowed angrily, his upper teeth bared, stretched menacingly over a nude woman, lying prone in the traditional position of an odalisque in art. The man’s left arm curves, as if it has no elbows, and ends in two visible fingers: it resembles not a human arm, but a serpent with mouth agape. His right arm and hand look more like a wing as if he were a bird of prey hovering over his victim. Nonetheless, Thurber’s childlike drawing style, and the man’s baldness, somehow deprive him of a sense of the menace: it’s something like Elmer Fudd posing as Don Juan. As for the odalisque, her face is rather plain, and she seems not frightened by the stalker but casual and nonchalant. “Oh, Mr. Benholding,” she says, “I never saw that look in your eyes before,” a romantic cliché made laughable by the absurdity of the picture. Updike contends that Thurber’s cartoons “were libidinous to an extent that pushed The New Yorker‘s youthful prudery to its limit” (p. 216). This cartoon is indeed about sex, but the joke lies in the contrast between the intense passion being evoked and the comical, sexless ordinariness of the potential lovers.
Though Updike refers to Thurber’s “technically challenged style,” he also points out that Thurber was able to use his graphic limitations to genuinely artistic ends: “His more crudely amateurish successors in minimalism demonstrate by contrast how dynamic and expressive, how oddly tender, Thurber’s art was” (p. 220). If Thurber is indeed an Iconoclast cartoonist, he’s an Iconoclast whose style I like, and this, along with Thurber’s comedic vision, is why. Remember that the “Masters” show called Charles Schulz a “minimalist.” Looking at Thurber’s simple figures and the strong, effective facial expressions and body language he gives them, it’s easy to see a connection between Thurber’s cartooning and Schulz’s.
Next I arrived at the “Comic Strips” section of “Cartoon America,” where several of the Masters reappeared. My favorite piece in the entire exhibition is E. C. Segar’s Sunday, May 12, 1935 page of Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye (which, alas, was not reprinted in the Cartoon America book). Popeye only has a cameo role in this Sunday page, whose strengths are actually more verbal than visual. This Sunday page’s central figure is instead trickster and hamburger obsessive J. Wellington Wimpy. The Popeye animated cartoons, which play down the importance of dialogue, have never done justice to Wimpy; this Sunday page demonstrates what makes him a great character in his own right.
At the outset Olive remarks to Popeye that “I’ll bet you Wimpy has desert madness–probably raving around saying poetry.” Indeed he is, addressing a desert flower sprouting from a cow’s skull out of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Maybe the proper comparison is to Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, for this Sunday page primarily consists of Wimpy’s rhyming soliloquy on his own mortality. “Oh, flower of death. . .so frail, so red/Growing from a thing so dead/Even as I will be quite soon/Merely bones “˜neath sun and moon.” Wimpy’s flowery doggerel is amusing, but he is nonetheless talking about a serious matter that one does not expect to find in a comedy strip like Popeye’s. And Wimpy goes on: “Ah, well/’Tis not for me to break the spell/ That links all things in a mighty plan/That cannot be changed by laws of man.” Now he’s talking not only about the inevitability of death, but about man’s helplessness against fate, and the “mighty plan,” presumably conceived by God, that governs the universe! Yet not even these cosmic concerns can ultimately overrule the dominant passion of Wimpy’s life. He tells the flower that “we both crave meat”; the skull out of which it grows is from the animal that is the source of hamburger meat. The subject of Wimpy’s soliloquy shifts from man’s role in the universe to the hamburger’s role in his diet, and reaching the climax, he finally collapses out of what seems a combination of his frustrated carnivorous passions and his own longwindedness. This is one great strip.
There was also a brilliant Peanuts Sunday from January 20, 1963 (p. 213). It too takes the form of a soliloquy, but in this case Charles Schulz devises a facial expression for Charlie Brown that reflects each psychological turn he takes in this extended monologue. After the introductory top tier of panels, the strip begins like a musical composition, sounding the theme: “Oh, how I hate these lunch hours!” says Charlie Brown, sitting alone, looking unhappily into his lunch bag. Shunned by the other kids, lunch hours just remind him of how much he is disliked; “During class it doesn’t matter,” he will tell us, presumably because then he is surrounded by other kids and can pretend he’s part of the community. He seems trapped in an endless cycle of unchanging, dreary lunch hours. Even the lunch in the bag offers no surprises that would break the monotony: “Peanut butter again.” Charlie Brown fantasizes about his unattainable ideal, the nameless little red-haired girl he loves from afar, and a moony expression comes over his face. But it abruptly vanished, as Charlie Brown’s own insecurities overwhelm him. He finally succumbs to despair: “Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me.” And he finally walks off, his lunch uneaten, as the composition closes by repeating the initial theme: “Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day.” The cartooniness of Schulz’s art style and the small, mundane scale of some of Charlie Brown’s concerns (e. g., peanut butter for lunch) render the sequence humorous, but as my recounting minus pictures should show, this soliloquy is simultaneously quite sad. It’s this balance between the humorous and the heart-rending that characterizes Schulz’s work at its best, as it is here.
In his essay on Schulz in the Cartoon America book, comics historian Robert C. Harvey makes a point about another balance that Schulz created in Peanuts, which I had noted in a previous column (see “Comics in Context” #66): the opposition between Charlie Brown’s melancholy and Snoopy’s joie de vivre. Harvey puts it particularly well: “against this. . .assessment of the human condition, Schulz balanced the fantasy life of Snoopy, a blithe beagle whose seeming brilliant success at every endeavor reassures us that life is not only about disappointment and endurance. It is also about dreams and the sustaining power of the imagination” (p. 214) Does Charlie Brown represent Schulz as the everyman who endures the mundane sufferings of everyday life, while Snoopy represents Schulz as artist, who finds joy in his own imaginative creations?
There’s a good example of Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend from 1906 in the show, but again, unfortunately, not in the book. A cranky man seated at the end of a trolley informs us that “I always like to sit in the corner of a car; then I don’t have people tramping all over me.” But as one passenger after another enters and sits down, the curmudgeon finds himself wedged into a corner. Then the trolley somehow turns ninety degrees, and the crank finds himself at the bottom of the trolley, being crushed by the weight of the other commuters, whereupon he wakes from his rarebit-induced nightmare.
The “Cartoon America” McCay work that I most liked, however, is not in the Library of Congress show but in the book. Co-curator Martha Kennedy wrote a brief essay for the Abrams book called “Winsor McCay’s Political Cartoons.” There is a long tradition in editorial cartoons of using symbolic figures, like the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant which Thomas Nast popularized. McCay went much further with this, creating what Kennedy calls “allegories or parables set in otherworldly, fantastical settings” (p. 148). In my view McCay elevates political and social situations of his time to the level of myth.
For example, in the first cartoon accompanying her essay, from the 1920s, a man labeled as “Mental and Moral Courage,” who appears to be a giant, looks into the stormy heavens at lightning bolts labeled as “War,” “Depression,” “Calamity,” and “Discouragement” (p. 149). Notice that these menaces include not only external perils (“War”) but also threats to psychological well-being (“Discouragement”). Below this picture is a remarkable tier of five small panels, each showing living creatures violently battling one another: first two scorpions, then two sloths, then two roosters, next two dogs, and finally two human boxers. Kennedy interprets this series as “emphasizing man’s ability to overcome physical, animal passions.” I disagree: I interpret the sequence as contending that humanity is prey to the same aggressive behavior as these vicious lower animals. I suspect McCay means to contrast the battling boxers with his giant of “Mental and Moral Courage,” who he shows quietly observing the lightning bolts, presumably deciding on the best course of action to take, rather than simply charging in with unthinking violence.
The next cartoon, “Wheels of Industry,” also from the 1920s (p. 150), shows four giants, who dwarf Uncle Sam, the embodiment of America; these titans wear short skirt-like costumes and sandals, making them look like figures out of ancient Greece or Rome. These giants are labeled “Steel,” “Electric Power,” “Ford,” and “General Motors,” and they are pulling some sort of enormous mechanism with a huge wheel labeled “Industry.” Thus the great economic power of early twentieth century America takes on mythic proportions.
So does its crime. In the architectural fantasy of “City Crime Skyline,” circa 1930 (p. 150), a skyline of skyscrapers includes a brobdingnagian bottle marked “Bootleg Whiskey,” a colossal gun, labeled “Crime,” and a tower that might also be an immense syringe, marked “Dope.”
In the last cartoon, “Fame, Fortune, Wealth” (p. 151), circa 1928 (significantly, just before the great stock market crash), a veritable ocean of people surrounds a dinosaur-sized pig, who is draped with jewelry, and labeled “Fortune Wealth.” Kennedy correctly observes that “the pig alludes to the sin of gluttony and biblical admonitions against the worship of idols and false gods.” The gargantuan hog reminds me of the gigantic beasts of sword-and-sorcery tales. It’s also like Richard Wagner’s dragon Fafnir and other such creatures that obsessively guard treasures, literal monsters embodying greed. But McCay pointedly makes his beast no awe-inspiring dragon, a fit adversary for heroes. Instead McCay casts the monster of greed as a repulsive swine, rendering the people who swarm around it pathetic and deluded. The true heroes are the relatively few in the background who are scaling a difficult, rocky incline to reach a Parthenon-like edifice marked “Fame,” by which McCay surely means the reward for honorable achievement, and not mere celebrity.
I will continue my report on “Cartoon America” in a few weeks; next week is my annual Christmas column, followed by the annual holiday break. As for the mystery of what’s missing from the “Cartoon America” exhibit, if it’s not already obvious, here’s a clue. I recommend you read fellow Quick Stop columnist Fred Hembeck’s November 24, 2006 tribute to the recently deceased pioneering comic book historian Dr. Jerry Bails over at his blog. As Fred said, “Every single one of us who, over the last forty odd years, made the effort to sit down and write something serious (or even not-so-serious) about the once neglected funny book genre–whether in a crudely printed fanzine, a mass produced coffee table volume, or simply on our very own blogs–owes a deep debt of thanks to Dr. Jerry Bails.”
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Now on sale in your local comics stores is the first issue of The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe, an encyclopedia of the characters in Robert Kirkman’s superhero series Invincible, done in the style of the original Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Since I was one of the principal writers of the Marvel Handbook, I was invited to contribute to the Invincible Handbook: the biographies of the various Guardians of the Globe are mine. An impressive lineup of artists was recruited to do the illustrations. It was a fun project to do, and I suspect it’ll be a fun book to read, even if you’ve never seen Invincible before.
–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson
And as soon as I put them on, I loved them. I thought they were cool, I thought they were really lightweight and comfortable. I grew up wearing Vans nonstop. So, to me, they were like a lighter weight Vans and were something different. I liked the style, I was wearing them around and on the last week of my trip I had already contacted a group called 
They just didn’t get it. It made things difficult because they didn’t believe me when I said, to a supplier, “I’m going to buy this much fabric.” Or, “I want to hire you to do this,” and they figured, “Oh, you’re going to make, like, 10 of them and never see you again.” So it was important for me to explain that I was serious and that I had the financial backing to do it. We made the shoes, we made 200 pairs, a couple of little mom and pop makers helped to make the initial pairs. Even after that we just grew upon those and we’re still aren’t in a very large factory; it’s a very small operation.
PEREGRYM: I felt bad that I didn’t have that to contribute because they explained that if I pay the money then they’ll give me a pair and some kid gets another pair too. And, after I walked around, and got to his booth I was really impressed with what the company stood for, and I felt TERRIBLE that I only had $26 to contribute, and I knew there was no way I could take a pair of shoes, I couldn’t even pay for them. So, I was like, “Can you please take my $26 and maybe you can give my shoes to another kid?”
visa to go work with the studio. So, I lost a job, but I couldn’t really cry about it because now I had the chance to go to Argentina.
Once I got down there I was so emotional, and it was so overwhelming to have all these people I cared about, who were dedicating their time and money to be down there to help me fulfill my dream of giving these shoes away to see how touched they were and the joy they experienced in connecting with the kids was the most amazing byproduct of the whole thing.
When you’re working on establishing a brand you, initially, put it in some very unique, select spots and keep it limited to create buzz and that’s what we did this summer. We were in some top boutiques in LA, top boutiques in New York, maybe one or two in Chicago; we kept it kind of limited on purpose to create the buzz. And, now that we have, in the Spring we are going to be in 72 out of 80 Nordstrom’s, we’ll be in every single Urban Outfitters, we’ll be in 30% of the Bloomingdale’s and then we’ll be in over 150 boutiques nationwide.
PEREGRYM: Well, to start something from nothing is not something I would want to do and it’s just difficult because in this industry it just takes a long time”¦you even have an idea of a project it takes years for it to actually go through. I know enough of the right people right now that hopefully this will work out with the next project but it doesn’t really matter what you try to do; it is always in the hands of other people.
While sadly lacking in bonus materials this go round, the sixth season of Roseanne (Anchor Bay, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) is certainly one of its most dense, with Becky’s return (now played by Sarah Chalke), Jackie’s pregnancy, Dan’s reignition of an old flame, the discovery of Roseanne & Dan’s stash, the lesbian kiss, a “White Trash Christmas,” and DJ’s surreptitious churchgoing.
While not entirely accurate (in fact, some of the “natural” action was staged), there’s no denying that networks like Discovery and Animal Planet owe a huge debt to the nature films produced by the Walt Disney Company under the banner True Life Adventures in the 1950’s. The series has been fully restored for the 4-volume “Legacy Collection” editions of True Life – Wonders of the World, Lands of Exploration, Creatures of the Wild, and Nature’s Mysteries (Walt Disney, Not Rated, DVD-$32.99 SRP each). Each 2-disc set features an introduction from Roy Disney (who worked on the series as one of his first assignments at his uncle’s studio), as well as additional featurettes, tributes, and trailers.
Nudity. Prostitution. Adultery. Would you believe that all of this – and more – could be found in Hollywood films of the early 1930’s? Our modern view of early Tinsletown cinema as staid and buttoned-up is the result of the film industry’s adoption of a self-imposed Production Code, which was enacted out of fear that the government would soon begin dictating what was “decent” – a move that crippled American cinema for decades, forcing it to present a largely whitewashed view of how real people lived and interacted. The Forbidden Hollywood Collection: Volume One (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) collects a trio of pre-code films – all beautifully restored – that present a fascinating portrait of how daring early cinema actually was. The three films featured in this inaugural set are Baby Face, Red Headed Woman, and Waterloo Bridge, and the 2-disc set also features an intro from TCM’s Robert Osbourne and the theatrical trailer for Baby Face.
While my assertion that it’s not the holiday season without a pair of very nice Bernardo Bertolucci special editions may seem a bit of a stretch, it is a nice surprise to get feature-laden editions of Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Paramount, Not Rated, DVD-$14.99 SRP) and 1900 (Paramount, Not Rated, DVD-$19.99 SRP). While The Conformist features a trio of brand-new behind-the-scenes and retrospective featurettes, it’s the 2-disc edition of 1900 – featuring the full 5 hour original cut – that really shines, with documentaries covering the story and cast, as well as the creation of the film.
For someone who regained so much of his seemingly long-lost mojo with Match Point – which paired him with new muse Scarlett Johansson – Woody Allen seems to have lost most of his gains with the rather turgid murder mystery Scoop (Universal, Rated PG-13, DVD-$29.98 SRP). Johannson stars as a college journalist who winds up following clues relating to a spate of murders – all of which lead her to a romantic entanglement with a dashing young gentleman (Hugh Jackman) that may pose a hazard to her health.
There’s something so 70’s-era greasy and grimy about the Me Decade remake of A Star Is Born (Warner Bros., Rated R, DVD-$19.98 SRP), starring Barbra Streisand as the titular rock n’ roll star and Kris Kristofferson as the Grizzly Adams-esque object of her affections. This newly remastered special edition features an audio commentary from Streisand, additional scenes, wardrobe tests, and a trailer gallery.
Anyone going in to Michael Mann’s big screen take on his own 80’s icon Miami Vice (Universal, Not Rated, DVD-$29.98 SRP) expecting the sun-drenched pastels and larger-than-life villainy of yore will be in for quite a shock, as he’s reimagined it as a grim, gritty, overly-realistic slice of urban drama, and Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Crockett & Tubbs are nowhere near their almost-playful 80’s counterparts. If you go into it with no expectations or comparisons, you’ll probably enjoy it for what it is. The unrated director’s cut features additional footage, plus an audio commentary with Mann and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
An incredibly memorable online success story, Happy Tree Friends eventually found a home on G4. You can now snag the 9 episodes that comprise the complete first season of the twisted little cartoon (BCI, Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), plus audio commentaries, a behind-the-scenes featurette, storyboards, and more.
While some titles have been available separately, it’s wonderful that you can now get 7 great flicks from a great director via Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection (Universal, Not Rated, DVD-$59.98 SRP). Those films include The Great McGinty, Christmas In July, The Lady Eye, The Palm Beach Story, The Great Moment, Hail The Conquering Hero, and my personal favorite, Sullivan’s Travels.
You know, I dug Super Troopers. I even found a good deal of humor in Club Dread. But Broken Lizard’s latest, Beerfest (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$28.98 SRP), left me cold. The concept – about a group of Americans banding together to compete in Germany’s secret underground “Beerfest” competition (and for two of the team members to avenge their grandfather and reclaim their brewing heritage) – does have plenty of comic potential, but in execution it’s just… too much. The unrated version, in particular, is a bloated mess. Come on, guys – I know you’re capable of better (and smarter). Bonus materials include audio commentaries, delete scenes, and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
With everyone else getting their moment in the spotlight, it was only a matter of time before we got an Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton: The Film Collection set (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$49.98 SRP), sporting a quartet of the flicks the tumultuous couple made for Warners. The four fully remastered films in question are Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, The Comedians, The V.I.P.s, and The Sandpiper. While all the flicks get vintage featurettes, the real bonus feature bonanza is on the 2-disc Woolf, which contains commentaries, brand new featurettes, interviews, screen tests, and more.
Just when the series began to flag – and Jack Bauer’s adventures in antiterrorism seemed to be sinking into cliché – along came season 5 of 24 (Fox, Not Rated, DVD-$59.98 SRP), which finds a resurrected Bauer (after faking his own death at the end of season 4) trying to figure out who is systematically eliminating the tiny group of people who know he’s still alive. Is it the Russians? Is it an American? Is it even more impressive a reveal? The bottom line is the show felt fresh and energized, and actually ended on a note that had me eager for season 6. The 7-disc set features audio commentaries on select episodes, deleted/extended scenes, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and a season 6 “prequel” featurette.
Though its appeal is completely lost on me, tweeny-boppers have embraced with a fierce, frightening passion The Disney Channel’s original movie High School Musical, so much so that it’s prompted the release of a brand new “Remix” special edition (Walt Disney, Not Rated, DVD-$29.99 SRP). The 2-disc set features a new complement of bonus materials, including behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews, music videos, and more.
Executives at Nintendo are cautioning gamers about swinging their new, Wii wireless controllers as reports of 
Thirty years ago, Howard Shore was a recently transplanted Canadian brought to New York City – 30 Rockefeller Center, to be exact – to be the bandleader for a soon-to-premiere, upstart late night comedy show called Saturday Night Live. Within five years, he done over a hundred live broadcasts, helped Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi put together the original Blues Brothers Band, and much more.
SHORE: Well, I think it was just a way for your work to come out as to what you had created for the film. And the complete recordings really have their own art to them, and they can be listened to in a way that’s never really been experienced, I think, in the films. I think that they have a way… that you can listen in a way you’ve never heard before. And I think that was really part of the reason for bringing them out – and part of it was to allow the complete work to come out so that the relationships and how the piece was created could be understood. Because I don’t know if it was quite well understood in its shorter form. The original CDs that came out were only, at the very most, a third of the entire piece. So nobody had ever really heard the entire piece except in the film. But in the film, you’re also playing against dialogue and other effects, and not always the best place to listen to music.
[CONTENT WARNING] This podcast contains foul language and a complete and utter lack of references to 18th Century Russian literature.
