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Dino De Laurentiis, film producer.

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When Titan’s recent collection of Beetle Bailey landed on my doorstep a few weeks ago, I don’t think I’d read more than half a dozen strips of the title in almost two decades. But throughout my childhood, I pored over the strip (along with everything else in the funnies section) on a daily basis. Considering how long Beetle Bailey & co. have been a part of my mental furniture, I have had a surprising amount of difficulty thinking of what to write about the strip. (Hence my linking to that terrible, terrible cartoon yesterday, for which I apologize.) After all, whatever you may believe about its quality, Beetle Bailey is undeniably one of the most influential comic strips of all time; debuting one month before Peanuts, and six before Dennis the Menace, BB joined forces with those titles to usher in a new era of newspaper funnies. (Usually somewhere in that sentence, a writer would feel obligated to utter that old incantatory phrase, “for better or worse,” but it would be more accurate to say that their influence was for better and worse.) As a sixty-year-old strip still boasting the involvement of its original creator, it is one of our only living links to a now vanished golden age of cartooning.

So why is it so difficult to find something worth saying about it? (more…)

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Today’s post is running late, but in the meantime, please enjoy this related entertainment.
Something to think about the next time someone tells you they don’t make ’em like they used to.

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This month has seen the publication of two anthologies of pre-Code horror comics. One was put out by Abrams, a prestigious art-book house of long standing, and the other was published by a small comics publisher named after the result of mashing together the words “Fantasy” “Fantastic” and “Graphics.” Covering similar territory, both books include several of the same stories, but follow very different presentation strategies—and possibly not the strategies you would expect, at least not based on the previous information.

Last night, it was clear to me which book’s visual aesthetic was preferable, and the contest wasn’t even close. This morning, I am not quite so sure that the matter is a simple matter of right and wrong. But, using images from Basil Wolverton’s classic story “Nightmare World”, why don’t I let you decide? Which do you think is a better way to publish a comic story more than a half-century old? This?:

Or this?:

(more…)

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1. Our own Dan Nadel interviewed Dan Clowes at APE last weekend (armed with questions brainstormed by the CC staff), and from all reports, it went very well. During the conversation, Clowes handicapped the greats (Capp vs Fisher, Swan vs Boring, Cracked vs Mad, etc.), described meeting Al Jaffee and Steve Ditko, and analyzed advice once given to him by Robert Crumb. You can read about it all here, and if the a/v version is ever made available, we will let you know.

2. If you are following along with the CCCBC discussion of Neonomicon (and how could you not be?), a rare Alan Moore essay has come to light that may help illuminate some of the thematic material in that series. If you remember issue 2, when shopping at the Whispers in Darkness store, Agent Brears purchases a copy of The Magical Revival by Kenneth Grant, and later describes the author to her partner Lamper:

This Grant guy, he’s this serious magician who’s still alive in England. He knew Aleister Crowley. … Yeah, well, him, Grant, people like that, they’re serious about all the occult stuff. They treat it like it’s real, you know? Like it’s a science. And Grant, he believed Lovecraft’s whole mythology was genuine in some way. … I just want to see how anybody could actually believe in this stuff.

Anyway, in 2002, Moore used the occasion of a then-fairly-recent Kenneth Grant book to write a fairly lengthy essay on the man and his work, “Beyond our Ken”, which touches on such issues as Lovecraft’s influence, both on literature and “modern magic systems,” magic’s interchangeability with art (“the greater part of magical activity lies in simply writing about it”), and the dividing line between belief and reality. All of these topics obviously come to fruit in various ways within Neonomicon, so those readers not entirely turned off by this kind of arcane subject matter may want to download issue 14 of the occult magazine KAOS, which is available here, and read it.

[via, indirectly]

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Welcome to the first official meeting of the Comics Comics Comic-Book Club. Our topic is Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Neonomicon. Originally the idea was to discuss each issue as it was released, but we’ve got some catching up to do, so this time we’ll tackle the first two issues together.

Have you finished the assigned reading?

First, of course, you need to read the comics themselves.

Neonomicon is the sequel to Alan Moore’s The Courtyard, which I covered previously here and here. (Writer Antony Johnston wrote in with an interesting comment regarding some of the fundamental language & layout choices.)

Jog has already written an excellent post about issue 2…

…in which he linked to a flawed but fascinating two-part video on issue 1.

And I didn’t mention it, but the re-reading I am assigning for myself before we get to issue 3 is H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, which seems to be the main inspiration for Neonomicon so far, just as “The Horror of Red Hook” served for “The Courtyard”.

Okay, so let’s see if this works at all or if the whole idea is a misfire. Here we go: (more…)

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For the first part of this discussion, see here.

In his opening essay, “The Comic of Cthulhu: Being a Letter of Reminiscence and Recollection Concerning The Courtyard”, scripter Antony Johnston discusses the problems he faced when retelling Alan Moore’s original prose story in comic-book form:

One of the main challenges is adapting prose to a visual medium such as comics is that in prose, it’s perfectly acceptable to engage the reader with an inner monologue, and often for some length. These are necessary for exposition, feeding the information vital to understand the story, because in prose you can’t simply show something as you would in a film or comic. You must describe it.

There’s just one problem; during such passages it’s also perfectly acceptable for nothing to happen.

Even more so than the task of condensing a narrative, or deliberating over dialogue, this is the biggest challenge in any such adaptation. In a comic, something must always happen. It can be mundane, it can be remarkable, it can be somewhere between the extremes. But something must happen, visually, in order to justify the form’s usage and make the story feel like it belongs in the medium.

With a few exceptions, this wasn’t too hard a task with “The Courtyard.” Where Moore makes leaps to new locations in a single carriage return, the comic can make the same journey at a more leisurely pace, using space and sequence to pace out a relevant monologue over something so ordinary as Sax lighting a cigarette, or donning an overcoat.

This sounds like a somewhat plausible solution in theory, but turns out to be a mostly deadening misstep in practice. Sax’s Harrison Ford-in-Blade Runner voice-over generally doesn’t interact with the visuals (which, as Johnston admits, mostly involve uninteresting stage business, not important narrative information), it simply dominates them. For much of the comic, you could cover up the panels and understand everything that is happening without even looking at the drawings. (Incidentally, setting this comic next to Crumb’s Genesis shows just how wrong-headed those critics who found Crumb’s illustrations too literal really were—any panel of that book puts this entire comic to shame.)

It’s no accident that the four pages Avatar has chosen to offer as an online preview illustrate one of the very few sequences in Moore’s story where something actually happens. Let’s compare. (more…)

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Okay, now that Jog has thoroughly exposed me as a lazy fool (by the way, Joe: you’re fired)—and now that I’ve read the second issue of Neonomicon myself (which I liked, but hooboy), I really have to get this CCCBC thing moving. In my defense I got sidetracked by various super-important historical issues, and only Joe’s post derailed me from my planned 50,000-word essay contemplating the aesthetic and political influence of R.F. Outcault on 1980s phenomenon Shirt Tales. So you’ve been spared that at least.

For now, I’ll finish up The Courtyard tonight, and then on Monday we can discuss the first two issues of Neonomicon. If you want to participate, your required reading includes the aforementioned comics, Jog’s post, and the videos Jog linked to within his post (which I found unconvincing, but feature a lot of good ideas all the same). Future posts will be closer to a discussion than a lecture, I hope, though it’s possible I have already irrevocably ruined the whole thing. Anyway, until tonight.

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From Sean Howe’s research files, an historical curiosity. First, a semi-famous page from X-Men.

Specifying this very image, Les Daniels has written that “Neal Adams shattered comic book layout conventions with pages like this one.”

Now look at this Comet page drawn by Jack Cole for Pep, nearly three decades earlier: (more…)

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While I’m embarrassing myself discussing painting and comics, I should take the time to recommend the Charles Burchfield exhibit at the Whitney to any of our readers in the New York area. It’s only open for another two weeks, and it’s well worth the trip if you’re able. And as Guy Davenport has pointed out, Burchfield made plentiful use of comic-strip-derived symbols for certain visual effects. See above and below for examples.