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Here are a few notes that might help future research:

1. Wolverton. Crumb has often talked about his debt to Basil Wolverton, going back to the sacred cover of Mad comics #11. Interestingly, Wolverton and Crumb both adapted the Bible. I’d like to know how familiar Crumb was with Wolverton’s religious art (now available in the great Fantagraphics book The Wolverton Bible).

Above is a scene from Wolverton’s rendition of the Noah story.

And here is a panel from Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Notice that in both Wolverton and Crumb, the choppy waves have an oddly static look, as if they were sand dunes rather than water.

2. Billy DeBeck. I’ve never heard Crumb talk about Billy DeBeck but Crumb’s big-nosed style, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had a strong touch of DeBeck’s bounciness.

Above are two excerpts from Billy DeBeck’s work, one showing the character Bunky (the very eloquent baby) and the other Lowzie, the bonnet-wearing hillbilly.

And here is Crumb’s Big Baby (from Big Ass #1, 1969).

3. E.C. Segar. The creator of Popeye is much loved by Crumb.

Here is a panel from a Segar Thimble Theatre page (July 19, 1931). Pay close attention to the crowd, a jumble of noses.

And here is Crumb’s cover for Weirdo #14, where he pays homage to Segar’s crowd of fools.

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Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study of a galloping horse.

This is the first of a new series of blog posts I’m going to be starting up under the umbrella title “Research Notes.” These posts will be quick notes on ideas that could (and maybe should) be spun off into larger, more polished essays. But in the research note I’ll just jot down the preliminary notion. Since Comics Comics has a very smart and articulate readership, my hope is that the notes will spark suggestions for how the idea can be refined and developed.

So the first research note is for an essay on “Comics and photography”; the idea was sparked by Dan’s earlier comments on the new Rip Kirby book (and by a subsequent conversation Dan and I had). Some quick thoughts:

Comics and photography were both part of the proliferation of images that occurred in the 19th century, the explosion of the visual made possible by mechanical reproduction.

To what extent were late 19th and early 20th century cartoonists like A.B. Frost and Winsor McCay, who did so much to introduce sequential movement into comics, influenced by the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge?

Winsor McCay’s motion study of a galloping bed.

Frank King was a lifelong shutterbug, at the vanguard of the first generation of middle-class Americans who used the camera to record family life. As Chris Ware and I have documented in the Walt and Skeezix series, photographs were a major source for King, who used family photos as a reference tool. Yet King only very rarely directly copied from photos; rather he used photos as a memory tool. And indeed, even King’s own photos seem somehow not to record so much a moment in time as a slightly-fuzzy memory of a moment. King’s photos are nostalgic and backward looking.

The Sickles/Caniff school is often linked to movies, and it’s true that Sickles and Caniff were great film buffs and absorbed much from the cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, not just classics like Citizen Kane but also B-movies with their slightly darkened sets. Caniff and Orson Welles had a mutually admiring correspondent. A fan letter to Caniff in the early 1940s smartly compared Terry and the Pirates to Casablanca. What hasn’t been investigated is the likely impact of magazine photos: the 1930s were the decade Life magazine took off as America’s leading photo-magazine. The use of photographs to record the news, particularly the darker corners of the Depression and the onset of the war, transformed the world’s visual imagination: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange (who was friends with George Herriman by the way), George Strock, and many others. Caniff was paying attention.

Socially and politically he was very close to many people in the Time/Life staff, who tended to be smart, internationally minded college boys like himself. The Luce magazines often promoted Caniff’s work, since he did the comic strips that most closely resembled their own aesthetic and political outlook.

If Caniff came out of Life, the post-war Alex Raymond was affiliated with Vogue. Depression austerity and wartime rationing were over and Paris was in ruins, so the post-war years were the period when New York became the world’s fashion capital. The first Rip Kirby story involves a fashion model; and the whole ambience of the strip comes from the fashion world. Raymond’s drawings weren’t just done in a photorealist style; they were distilled fashion shots.

If King used photos to pull him back to the past, Raymond was interested in snapshots that caught the present, the sleek and shiny now rather than the blurry bygone days.

Like Caniff, Raymond often photographed models. But when Raymond reinvented his style with Rip Kirby he was able to take this use of models and photos an extra step because of a new invention: the Kodak instant camera. Photorealist comics depended on this new technology.

Even among naturalistic, literal-minded illustrators, not everyone was a fan of photography. Here is Burne Hogarth’s thought: “[Hal Foster] is one of the great geniuses of the comic strip….Other artists were fixated on photographs; this guy worked it out straight out from his eye outward. He solved problems that very few people ever did. I began to realize that because when I had to draw figures that were flying, I sat down and draw those things, for Christ’s sake. I couldn’t have models pose. Milt Caniff many times had model pose. Stan Drake had models pose. The point I’m making is that those guys used Polaroid cameras all the time.” (The Comics Journal, #166, p. 75).

The decline of photorealism as a comics style might have something to do with the parallel decline of magazine photojournalism. During the years when Life was supplanted by television, photorealism lost favour as a cartooning style.

In sum, it’s not just the case that some major cartoonists were influenced by photography. More complexly, as photography evolved, comics followed along; the two art forms developed in tandem.

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A while back on Blog Flume, Ken Parille wrote an interesting post deploying Ivan Brunetti’s idea that one of the “common pitfall” of cartooning is the making of “unintentional connections” between images in different panels. (Brunetti made that statement in his great little book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice).

In post and the comments section, the question was raised as to how to decide whether an connection is unintentional or not. Most good cartoonists care about not just what’s inside a panel but how panels relate to each other, not to mention the composition of the whole page.

Here is an example that illustrates the problem: two panels from Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google Sunday page of November 15, 1925. The left facing bull in the first panel does make a connection to the image of the same bull facing right in the second panel: instead of one bull in two panels we seem to be looking at one weird, two-headed monster. More subtly, the sweep of the horizon line in the two panels seems continuous. Was DeBeck aware of what he was doing? Does intentionality even matter, or should we just treasure the overall effect?

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Review of Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (Fantagraphics Books)

Gahan Wilson was born dead but he quickly got better. That sounds like the morbid joke, exactly the sort of queasy punchline that graces many a Wilson cartoon, but it happens to be completely factual: when Wilson entered our world in 1930 the doctor pronounced the baby a still birth, but after being soaked in ice-water the infant proved to be loudly and healthily alive. What better beginning could there be for a cartoonist who would do hundreds of comics about vampires, zombies, flesh-eating plants and many other monsters who carry death within themselves?

Both his parents had artistic aspirations but settled for a more conventional existence: Miriam Wilson as a housewife, her husband Allen as a steel-industry executive. Perhaps due to their thwarted artistic career, augmented by the stress of being a young couple during the Great Depression, both parents were also alcoholics. As Gary Groth notes in a shrewd essay near the end of this exemplary republishing of Wilson’s Playboy cartoons, the lumpy people that populate Gahan’s cartoons, with their ghastly half-melting faces, could easily be a child’s view of sodden, Depression-haunted adults.

As a cartoonist, Gahan Wilson had two fathers: Charles Addams and James Thurber. Wilson’s use of gothic motifs as comedy obviously owes much to Addams (Hugh Hefner admits that he hired Wilson to be Playboy’s Addams). But the lumpiness of Wilson’s characters, the heavy gravitational pull that seems to drag their bodies and faces earthward, is the patrimony of Thurber.

Someday somebody will have to write a history of gothic humour, the re-purposing of ghouls and monsters for laughs. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is clearly an ancestor but the genre seems to have taken off in the early 20th century, with Addams as the premier example but with many other examples ranging from Abbott and Costello to John Stanley.

Generationally, Wilson belong to a small cohort of cartoonists that includes Jules Feiffer (born 1929), Edward Sorel (1929), and R.O. Blechman (1930). All these men were metropolitan cartoonists, at home in the cosmopolitan and worldly pages of the Shawn’s New Yorker and Hefner’s Playboy. As such they were the heirs to the first generation of New Yorker cartoonists, but their work had a critical edge that the more mainstream New Yorker crowd lacked. Politically, these four cartoonists managed the difficult task of remaining radicals in the most conservative era in modern American history, the 1950s. While they lacked the iconoclastic urge and plebeian griminess of the subsequent underground generation, their work reflected the “Silent Generations” disgruntlement at existing norms.

There has been a renewed interest in “black humour” in comics (thanks I would guess to Ivan Brunetti’s superb work in the genre), as witness the current show in Detroit. Feiffer and Wilson didn’t practise “black humor” but rather its immediate ancestor, “sick humor.” To put it another way, sick humor is the middle generation in the family tree that runs from Addams to Wilson to Brunetti.

One of the many nice features of the new Fantagraphics book is that it is chronological and dated, so we can see Wilson responding to the changing social and political landscapes. It’s very evident in this book that the year 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed and Nixon took the White House, hit Wilson very hard. The cartoons for the next few years are much grimmer than before, with the formerly gleeful ghastliness now transformed into genuine dread. One 1969 cartoon shows a gun-and-knife totting madman, his eyes bugged-out with joy as he surveys a post-apocalyptic landscape where everyone else has been killed, issuing a victory cry: “I think I won!”

As a physical object Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons cannot be praised highly enough. Designer Jacob Covey pulled out all stops: three handsome hard-cover volumes, complete with a die cut cover in the form of a bottle of poison, printed on plush Playboy paper, all encased in a slipcase embossed on one side with a plexiglass window on the other side that allows you peek into the front cover (an appropriately macabre photo of the cartoonist pressing his fact against a glass). All of this supplemented by smart introductory material by Hefner and Neil Gaiman, a substantial essay by Gary Groth, who also conducts a long interview with Wilson, topped off by a topical index.

At this point, some readers might ask whether Wilson deserves this royal treatment. Normally this sort of over-the-top lavishness is reserved only for an Everest-level master. I myself initially had doubts, since I wasn’t too familiar with Wilson’s work and gag cartooning in not a genre I’m naturally inclined to love. Yet looking at Wilson’s work at length, eating it up with my eyes, I came to love his work. He is, in fact, a master. He clearly belongs to the rank of Feiffer, Blechman and Sorel, not only in terms of chronology but also in his stature as an artist.

The new books also made me reconsider Hugh Hefner, a figure that I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps ungenerously, I’ve been inclined to think of Heffner as the man who ruined Harvey Kurtzman’s life and career. It’s hard to forgive the middlebrow doltishness of the decision to make our greatest cartoonist spend decades working on Little Annie Fanny. But there was another side to Hefner. Free of snobbery, he knew that there were many great artists working for publications that were widely considered to be trashy, whether it was comic books (Jack Cole and Harvey Kurtzman), or pulp magazines (Theodore Sturgeon and Gahan Wilson) or third rung gag magazines (many of the cartoonists who were recruited for Playboy). These were artists and writers of real talent who were despised by the official culture of the 1950s. Hefner gave them a handsome venue for their work and paid them well. As in the realm of sex, he wanted to show that pleasures that were considered dirty and bad were actually good clean fun, and should be enjoyed as such. Hefner was as much revolutionary in the field of popular culture as he was in his more famous sex advocacy. Whatever one might want to say about the Kurtzman-Hefner relationship, the Playboy publisher deserves our eternal thanks for nurturing Wilson’s poisoned plants, giving them a hothouse where they could flourish for five decades.

Wilson’s long term marriage to Playboy might seem odd (Gary Groth for one has questions about it). After all, isn’t Playboy all about sex while Wilson’s work is all about death? A more synoptic view would be that sex and death are two sides of the same coin: that the reality of death makes life’s pleasures, chief among them sex, all the more important. Or to put it another way, for all their morbidity and ghoulishness, Wilson’s cartoons affirm the value of cherishing life. As inhuman as his characters often are, Wilson is a deeply humane cartoonist.

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I’ve revised my earlier posting on Samuel Delany. Instead of offering up a hard-to-read 7 page scan, I’ve posted the Delany excerpt as a text (thanks to the good offices of Gil Roth, who helped publish Delany’s 1984). So if you are interested in all this, please go back to the earlier posting, here.

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Conventions are a fixture of comic book culture (not to mention science fiction culture, and other related fandoms). Yet they rarely get analysed as an experience. What is the point of going to conventions? How do they reinforce a sense of sub-cultural identity? What do cartoonists and other artists get out of them?

The “Dimension Convention” that took place in New York in the summer of 1984 was an entirely typical and humdrum affair, a mixture of comics, science fiction and affiliated media junk. Isaac Asimov was there as a guest of honour. Stan Lee debated Harlan Ellison over gun ads in comics books (a clash of the titan memorialized in The Comics Journal #103). The usual New York crowd of the time – Chaykin, Wein, Wolfman, Simonson – could be seen loitering the halls.

Yet the very ordinariness of the event, its mundane typicality, makes it worthwhile as a specimen case, a stand-in for a larger set of experiences. We’re lucky to have an in-depth account of the Dimension Convention, written by novelist Samuel Delany, who took part in a panel and moderated the Lee/Ellison talk.

Delany’s report on the events comes in the form of a long letter he wrote on June 28th, 1984 to a friend, which can be found in the book 1984, which collects a large chunk of the writer’s correspondence for that year (with some spillage into 1983 and 1985). Delany is of course a marvelous writer, which is what makes his account of the convention worth reading. With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, he recaptures the hustle and bustle of the crowd, the quick psychological jolts that come from meeting old friends or encountering new fans, and the tawdriness of the commercial tables. Along the way, we get a quick sketch of Lee and Ellison as public performers. Reading Delany’s account, it’s easy to see why conventioneering is both exhaustive and addictive.

With the kind permission of Samuel R. Delany, I’ve pasted some pages from Delany’s letter below. I would recommend them to anyone who wants to think about conventions as an essential pillar of comics culture.

I should also add some words about Delany’s book as a whole. Writers don’t usually publish their letters while still alive (the task is usually left to widows, ex-lovers, and assistants) but Delany has never been one to follow the rules. (Oddly enough the only other writer I can think of who was so similarly bold with publishing his correspondence was E.B. White, who has nothing else in common with Delany). 1984 provides a remarkably intimate picture of Delany’s life during a crucial moment in time. Like Whitman or Melville, Delany is a New York democrat comfortable with all walks of life, as likely to go to hustle for sex in a movie theatre as to party hosted by a millionaire, equally at ease with Umberto Eco as with Stan Lee. 1983 and 1984 were the years that he (and many others) first became fully conscious of AIDS (the disease had only been named in 1982). The onset of this plague had a profound impact on Delany’s literary career: he became one of the first fiction writers to record the impact of AIDS. But aside from being a record of how the gay community in New York processed information about the new disease. Delany’s 1984 belongs to the small shelf of great literary letter writing, alongside Keats, Flaubert, Kafka, and D.H. Lawrence.

Here is Delany’s account of the convention:

And suddenly I had an insight that stopped me where I stood, one foot on one step and one on the step below. The content was not terribly profound. The intensity with which I felt it is a little hard to convey. But I was suddenly aware of the psychological mechanism by which a writer or an actor or a performer becomes addicted to this kind of public feedback. Such public attention is terribly pleasurable. The pleasure lasts for a few days, or even weeks. And under the pressure of such pleasure, even the most dedicated and conscientious artist can have his or her mind move into the configuration — without even realizing it — that connects writing (or anything else) in his or her mind with this kind of pleasure. And that’s a very different kind of pleasure from that which you get in front of the page when you put words on it to organize an intense picture of the universe around you and a self within it, from which, for moments here and there, if you’re doing it right, you can vanish as a pained personality into some universal cascade of order and accuracy. That pleasure you turn to the page again and again for, hoping to find it — and sometimes you do. But it is a rational pleasure, finally. This publicly mediated pleasure, however, you can become truly addicted to: It would be very easy to get yourself in a mental state where you honestly felt you couldn’t write without it. In fact, what I realized is that if you don’t put some conscious energy into fighting it — because finally, in psychological terms, it’s just a matter of following the path of least resistance — you will become addicted to it.

So many writers, on whatever level, already have. How many writers have I talked to over the years who’ve told me: “I can’t work without a contract”? Most of them are particularly high production writers, too: Brunner, Moorcock, Malzberg come to mind. I could probably name more if I thought about it. But this is just the poor man’s version of this addiction. They truly need that “shot” that comes from getting an idea, and having some editor say: “Hey, that’s a great one! I’ll buy it from you! Here’s a contract and a check! Go home and write it!” In fact, one of the weirdest things in the world to me has always been to sit around in some professional party and listen to these guys talk seriously and intently about how much this editor or that editor is crazy about some book or other — of which not a page has actually yet been written!

By the same token, editors learn very quickly that they have to supply this sort of enthusiasm. Lou Aronica, for example, if you went by what he says at lunch, is just as enthusiastic over the unwritten Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities as he is over Stars in My Pocket,which he’s actually read three times now! It makes you kind of wonder.

But how often does a Malzberg or a Brunner or a Moorcock get a Sunday Times review? Once, twice, three times out of a lifetime production of 50 or 150 books or so. It’s not much. And so they become hooked on the editorial substitute. In a way, I’m lucky that I’ve had as much of the strong stuff as I have, if only to see how it works.

And the other source of feedback is, of course, the conventions. In a sense, the conventions are a lot more realistic: For one thing, there the feedback is for work written and published, not an editorial substitute for an addictive craving. And it’s not the inflated sort that comes with mechanical reproduction, i.e., knowing that a few hundred thousand readers, who, indeed, haven’t read your book, are sharing in the praise being heaped on you by the reviewer. The only place where, you realize, there is still a lot of room for misconstruing what is going on around you is an incident of the sort that happened to me at least once at last weekend’s convention: I had been chairing a panel on Visual Interpretation and the Written Word.The participants were (from right to left) Howard Chaykin, Kelly Freas, me in the middle, Walt Simonson, Harlan Ellison, and Richard (The Shattered Stars) McEnroe.

Richard was filling in for Alfred Bester, who hadn’t shown up. He’s young (29?), stocky, serious, and I don’t think he’s done very much of this sort of thing before. The rest of us are all old convention panel hacks, and Harlan is irrepressible and brilliant, and can make just about any audience glitter. And Howie is almost as good. Now we’re all smart. All of as have things to say on just about any topic. Really, our only difference is how much experience we’ve had with (and our personal style in) saying them. I felt the topic itself was a loser. But somehow everyone rose to the occasion, and the whole thing — as a performance — was among the better such I’ve been on . . . not a little because, as moderator, I’d done about fifteen minutes’ thinking before it got started, kept notes while it went along, and I simply wouldn’t let it die.

At any rate, afterwards, while Harlan fled somewhere else as fast as he could run, and the various other panel members dispersed (as friendly as we all are on the dais, a kind of immediate exhaustion sets in the moment the terminal applause is over, and rarely do even good friends speak to each other afterwards, as this one heads off to the bar, or another is beset by a dozen kids wanting autographs, or that one hurries off to take part in another program starting five minutes later, or this one wanders away toward the hucksters’ room, just to walk around in circles for fifteen minutes, to give himself or herself a chance to come down from the buzz of attention, applause, and even that much thinking and feeling in public, if it’s been a Good Show), as I was leaving the curtained-off area of Exhibition B (where we’d been exhibited), some guy about 25, blond, and wearing some light beige sports jacket, stopped me to say: “You know, Mr. Delany, I really enjoyed that panel. I thought you did a very good job moderating, and you really had a couple of very intelligent things to say yourself that I’d never thought about before. Tell me, what do you do? Do you ever write anything? Or do you just go around to the conventions and moderate these panels?” Clearly he only knew my name from the panel itself and, presumably, the “pocket program” where it was listed among those of the other participants.

The feeling was moderately like being kicked in the nuts. I don’t think my public smile wavered, and I probably said something like,“Yes, I write science fiction. Thank you for the comment. It was nice of you to take the time to tell me you enjoyed it.” (That’s my standard response to post-panel praise.) “You’ll have to excuse me, though. I have to get upstairs to another program . . .?”

And smiled.

And left.

But one really negotiates these entire affairs with the feeling that one is a known — even a well-known — personage. And somehow, all compliments, even all attention, are saturated with the fact (at least in your own head) that you are somehow being paid back, socially, for having sweated your ass off for 23 years, making, as best you can, in isolation, fine books; so that to receive a perfectly honest and sincere compliment for something perfectly real that you just actually did, followed by your praiser going on to say, in effect, “And what’s more, I don’t know you from Adam,” somehow leeches the entire narcotic charge; and your gut reaction, no matter how well you maintain your cool, is pretty much the same as an addict’s, who just pushed the plunger on the hypodermic, only to realize ten seconds later that what he’d thought was heroin was only a glassine envelope full of milk sugar.

Burned again.

And it is precisely that aspect of it that, I feel, is ultimately unhealthy — for me, as a writer.

The young man putting on this convention was John Estrin. Six years ago, he was a nineteen-year-old fan running the New York “Empiricons” that were sponsored by Columbia University’s fan group. Today he’s a 25-year-old junior executive at some public relations firm, which was the sponsor for this particular convention. Last summer, John ran “Empiricon” down at the Milford Plaza, on 8th Avenue (where I chaired at least one panel); and simultaneously there was the Forbidden Planet comics/SF con, where I interviewed Van Vogt and did a couple of programs as well.

A few months back I did a convention called “I-con” out on Long Island, at Stony Brook, where I moderated still another panel, also with Harlan Ellison. Harlan is certainly one of the SF community’s best public performers. And though, here and there, I have some minor disagreements with him, I deeply respect the man. Also, I’m just personally very fond of him. Harlan, on a panel, does require a bit of moderating. When you’re dancing that fast and furiously, it helps to have somebody who’ll remind you where the edge of the stage is, so that you don’t fall off into the lap of someone in the front row.

On that same panel, I had one complete public-presentation disaster case, Raymond Z. Gallun, who is in his late seventies or early eighties, is a terribly nice old man, but tends to mumble on unstoppably, for 40 minutes if you’ll let him, about, “How I wrote this, in 1933. And how I wrote that, in 1934. And how I wrote the other, in 1935.” Nor does it matter, particularly, what question you’ve happened to put to him. The answer is the same monologue. (I’m sure you’ve seen the odd aging professor caught up in the same syndrome.) Well, Ray needs another kind of guidance, i.e., every 20 minutes by the clock, you ask him a question to which some portion of his monologue is applicable, let him run on for 50 seconds by your watch (a minute thirty, if he’s actually being coherent), at which point you cut him off at the next comma. (Don’t try to wait for a full period. He doesn’t use them. And even with the microphone, beyond the third row, no one can hear him anyway.)

At any rate, Estrin was in the audience. And, as he called up to say, a few weeks later: “I figured, Chip, if you could keep Ray from looking like a total fool, could keep things from turning into Harlan’s one-man comedy show, and at the same time could keep the subject going and the energy up — well, I figured you could moderate anything! Would you like to moderate a Sunday afternoon debate for us, between Stan Lee and Harlan?”

“Okay,” I said.

On the first day of the convention I arrived at twelve. Stan Lee was doing a solo bit at that time in the Sheraton Center’s Imperial Ballroom, and though I’d had a pleasant talk with him on the phone, long distance, while he was in L.A., about possible topics for the coming debate between him and Harlan, I’d never met him in person, and I had no idea what kind of public self-presentation he had, though I’d heard from a few people that he was very good at it, spent a lot of time going around to colleges and speaking in public, and — from what he said on the phone — he was willing to field just about any kind of question.

The program was late getting started, so I walked into the vast Hucksters’ Room — acres of comic books, many less SF novels, and various SF-related toys and gizmos — which was kind of the social center of the convention. Saw Barry Malzberg for a few minutes. Then,I practically tripped over Ike (Asimov), with his fly-away muttonchops and western string-tie, the actual Guest of Honor, and we stood around and made “great-to-see-you” noises, while fans came up and thrust books between us for him, for me, to sign.

A moment later Harlan came up to me. “Hey, Chip,” he said. “You were supposed to call me, about this debate. Everybody said: ‘Chip’s going to call you!’”

So I cupped my hands to my mouth and called: “Harlan . . .!”

That got him to laugh. There was some odd encounter with a young, black fan whom Harlan managed to mistake for Marvel’s single black comic artist. “I know, I know,” said Harlan with his hand over his face in mock embarrassment, “all you black guys look alike.” People began to thrust books between us. Harlan said: “I’m sorry, but we are in the midst of a conversation, now.” Fans scurried away. And I took a couple of notes in my omniscient notebook (The Notebook That Knows More Than I) on the proposed debate. Then Harlan went off to hug a bunch of young women who seemed to be waiting for him, all in matching beige T-shirts.

When the Stan Lee program was announced over the loudspeaker, I escalatored upstairs again to the Imperial. The organizers were hanging about, clearly worried because only about 500 people had come upstairs for Stan’s “talk,” when they had been expecting a turn-out of close to a thousand. (There must have been another clear thousand down in the hucksters’ area. But inertia seemed to be keeping them below,and they weren’t surging up for the second floor programs as expected.) On my way in, I passed a tall, slender late-middle-aged man who, later, I realized was Stan (I’d never actually seen him before), lingering outside with a couple of people I recognized as among the con organizers. Back-reading a little, I’m pretty sure what they were talking about was some version of the following: Stan was politely suggesting that they let him go on now, since this was the time they’d announced him for; and they were saying, well, gee, no, maybe if they waited another ten minutes, another fifty or a hundred people might wander in.

I took a seat toward the back, and, indeed, in another ten minutes (after a wholly inept young man took the mike and tried, nervously, to keep the audience entertained and expectant, while they waited), Mr. Lee loped onto the stage, took the microphone, and began to present himself in a most personable and relaxed manner. Clearly what he was there for was to plug “Marvel Productions,” of which he is now the “Creative Vice President,” out on the coast. And with a host of funny stories and the dropped names of movie stars and comic book characters, that’s what he did. He was clearly as self-confident as Harlan. Very entertaining. And he obviously knew what he was doing.

No, I didn’t think there would be any problems with him and Harlan the next day.

I stayed for about 25 minutes of it.

Then, suddenly, I was hit by an overwhelming desire to be out of there. No fear or anxiety, mind you. Just a kind of: “What am I listening to this idiocy for . . .? I want a drink and some lunch!”What I’d come to see Stan for was to find out how well he did what he did, how comfortable he was doing it, what his style was, so that I would know how to integrate it with Harlan’s. I hadn’t come to learn anything having to do with the content of what he might have to say. And, really, after ten minutes I had what I needed. So fifteen minutes after that, I left in the middle, quit the hotel, wandered down and across town to 46th Street and Eighth Avenue, and went into Joe Allen’s, where I had a Tequila-Wallbanger and some sautéed chicken with capers, while I worked diligently in my notebook on the long prologue of Splendor and Misery.

Spilled some chocolate syrup from desert (a hot fudge eclair, filled with ice-cream) on my white shirt — which, as I quipped to the actor-cum-waiter who brought me some club soda to scrub it out — “This only happens when you have to perform in front of 300 people in an hour.” Then I wandered back to the Sheraton, in time for my four o’clock panel: the one I told you about, with McInroe, Harlan, Chaykin, Freas, and Simonson. And went home.

The next morning, Sunday, the second day of the convention, I woke up with knotted guts and watery shit. Somehow I’d come down with stomach flu. And there was yet another infirmity, which had plagued me the day before and was to produce unexpected agonies all that day as well —though, frankly, I’m almost embarrassed to mention it. Nevertheless: I’d had a hangnail on my right forefinger the previous day (fortunately I’m left-handed); while trying to bite it off, I’d pulled a sliver of nail loose from the quick. It had bled. It was now swollen and under the tiniest of scabs. And anything that touched it, from another finger to a piece of paper, to a comic book picked up at the wrong angle, sent a shooting pain through my hand and into my forearm.You may assume that, on top of all else I say, such shooting pains indeed shot, quite at random, about every 20 minutes all through the weekend, whether I was wandering by myself in the hucksters’ room, moderating a panel, signing a book, or talking to friend or fan. And I don’t think I acknowledged it once.

A hang-nail . . .?

Well, that’s the kind of pain, as we know, Real Men ignore (while not eating quiche) — especially if they have to run through another day of SF convention.

Frank wasn’t up, yet.

I wondered out to the Associated Supermarket over on Columbus Avenue to pick up a bagel and some yogurt. While I was at the back of the check-out line, a vaguely familiar voice passing by behind me said: “Chip . . .?” And I looked up to see a hefty, white-haired male in a pale blue shirt and silver sunglasses. How I recognized him, I’ll never know, because he’d lost at least 80 pounds since I’d last seen him, and that had been in East Lansing, Michigan, three or so years back at a Clarion. “A.-J. . . .?” I said.

“Yeah. It’s me.”

He smiled behind his shopping cart. (It was A.-J. Budrys!) “How’re you doing, Chip?”

“Fine!” I said, grinning in spite of my stomach; and my hand — which touched something just then. “What on earth are you doing here? Are you here for the convention? That’s where I’m going, as soon as I go home and eat a bagel.”

“Nope,” he said. “I didn’t even know there was a convention in New York this weekend. I’m visiting my mother. I’m just doing some shopping for her — she lives right around the corner from you,” which, by now, I’d actually remembered his telling me once, years ago. At onetime, this area of New York was a Ukrainian/Lithuanian neighborhood; there’s an old Ukrainian Church, a few buildings away from me on 82nd Street that I’d just walked past this morning on my way to the store. A.-J., who’s Lithuanian by nationality, had grown up here — though he’d lived in Chicago most of his adult life. “I’m leaving this evening,” he told me, “to go and see my wife’s family in Connecticut. So I won’t have time to drop down there.”

We enthused a bit more about the chances of just running into each other in the supermarket like this, hundreds of miles away from our last meeting, or indeed, any other of our ten or so meetings in the last twenty years. Then I walked out onto sunny Sunday Columbus Avenue.

I almost lost my very light breakfast three times on the way to the con.

Just before my first panel, I sat around in the art show area with Bob
Whitticker and Jonni Seri, two of the more civilized long-time fans, who seem to have been on the verge of getting married now for going on six years. Jonni gave me a back rub, which I truly appreciated. Between two panels, I had lunch with Denny O’Neil (across from the hotel at the Stage Deli, of all places) and his girlfriend whom I hadn’t met before, a red-headed dance therapist named Maggie. At the same lunch I learned that Larry O’Neil, Denny’s son by Anne, whom I remember as a perpetual six-year-old on East Sixth Street, was now eighteen, a senior at the High School of Music and Art, was still a vegetarian (twelve years ago I’d just assumed it was a passing phase), and was apparently determined to become a comic book artist, somewhat to his father’s chagrin!

Then we went up to the con’s hospitality suite, where the pros could, presumably, escape the fans. The clutch of rooms was dominated by Marvel Comics’ resident “Spider-Man,” a very nice, 26-year-old actor-cum-body-builder, a Peter Parker look-alike whom Marvel retain sat such functions to zip around in blue long-johns with a redhead-mask over his face, throwing nets and climbing things. He’s really quite bright, knows the character well, and sometimes even leads tours through the Marvel offices, here in the city. He’s personable, and good at answering questions. Most of the afternoon, however, he was bouncing about the Sheraton’s pale egg-shell 29th-floor suite, three-quarters naked (between costumes), combing his hair a lot, while his petite blonde girlfriend in designer jeans hung on his impressive biceps, and generally being friendly and decorative.

I can’t remember his name.

Denny, Maggie, and I were talking in the corner. I sipped a bit of ginger ale to settle my still-queasy stomach and ate a totally uncalled for chocolate cookie. Ray Gallun sat down to join us — and created that crashing lull that sometimes happens among even the most lively and witty conversationalists when someone interrupts the flow of repartee with an intensely mumbled account of something terribly important that occurred in (as best I could make out) 1932.

Quarter to five, and I took off downstairs for the Georgian Ballroom, with Ray still tagging along. In the ballroom (Imperial: read “modern.” Georgian: very “traditional,” with red drapes along the walls, much copper, hanging “crystal,” and gold) there were about 800 kids and lots of confusion. George (Mr. Sulu) Takei was just finishing up his program, plugging Star Trek III. (I’d ridden out with him to I-con a couple of months back. He’s a truly nice guy and as big-hearted as they come, if just a bit hyper in a perfectly understandable, actorly sort of way.) Harlan was swamped with fans at the front. No one quite knew where Stan was.

No one was announcing anything, so I went up on the stage, took up the microphone, and, well, created order.

Stan was just waiting out of sight, of course, for something to happen. There he came, loping up.

There was Harlan.

And we launched in.

I introduced them with cute anecdotes, to loud cheers. And we were off and flying. Both were in fine form. About a third of it was serious (a debate about gun advertising in comic books, which really got the audience hopping) and about two-thirds of it was tap-dancing (what’s wrong with movies; are comic books good for you) — which, it was clear, was just about the proper proportions such an audience could handle. And when it was over, just to be different, I managed not to go running off, but broke through the ring of autograph seekers to say thanks to both of them, while the applause was still going on: Harlan was fighting his way downstairs to get to the limo that was to take him to the airport. Stan was signing veritable mountains of comic books but, over the hubbub, shouted me a smiling invitation to visit him, next time I was in L.A.

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A Comics Studies Reader, an anthology of comics criticism and scholarship edited by Kent Worcester and myself, has just won the 2009 Peter C. Rollins Book Award. The Award is given annually to the best book in Cultural Studies and/or American Studies. I’m very proud of the Reader, both for the work Kent and I put into it and also for the quality of the contributors (who include Art Spiegelman, Ariel Dorfman, and Anne Rubenstein).

I thought it might be interesting to give a concrete example of how the Reader might illuminate the broader conversation about comics, held not just but academics but also by cartoonists, journalists, fans, and free-lance intellectuals.

In The Comics Journal #300, there is an interesting conversation about the idea of “pure comics” where Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga thrash out the possible meaning (or meaninglessness) of the term. Here is an excerpt:

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The Creation Convention which opened on February 28, 1981 in New York city was a pretty bread-and-butter comics affair. Walking through the 18th floor of Statler Hotel you could see the usual mix of back-issue dealers and fan favorites, swords-and-sorcery buffs and baseball card mavens. Stan Lee stalked the halls complete with his sleazy lounge-lizard moustache and receding hairline. Terry Austin was on hand to offer the lowdown on his falling out with John Byrne over the inking of the X-Men (apparently Byrne didn’t like Austin’s habit of adding jokes in the background).

If you were very alert and had an eye for the new, you might have noted a table with three young men, gawky, gangly lads who didn’t quite seem to belong at the convention. The three were selling a self-published comic called Psycho Comics. What was it about these guys that made them seem like interlopers, oddballs even among a hotel hall of oddballs? It was something in the eyes, a glint of mockery and mischief. And their hair was more coiffed, albeit in a punk fashion, than was the norm at a comics event.

A photo from Amazing Heroes #1 (July 1981) gives us a snapshot of the trio. Two are well known: Dan Clowes and Rick Altergott. The third called himself Dr. Death. Who is he? Mort Todd? Charles Schneider? Any advice from readers would be appreciated.

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Clare Briggs, March 20 1913.

Modern art famously came to America in a burst at the Armory Show that opened to scandal and praise in New York on February 17, 1913. The story is often told and it’s true enough. But not quite the complete truth. In fact, there had been exhibits of modern art as early as 1911 in W. Scott Thurber’s gallery in Chicago. And on February 25, 1925 the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an “Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art” which can be seen as strongly paralleling the more famous New York show.

Frank King April 24, 1913.

For our purposes what is important is the number of top notch cartoonists who went to the show, including Frank King, Clare Briggs, and John T. McCutcheon. The show was much mocked in the press but was a popular success, attracting many ordinary Chicago residents (including Frank King’s wife Delia who went to see it by herself).

John T. McCutcheon, April 3, 1913

For months afterward, cartoonists would use cubist and futurist imagery in their work. Intriguingly, many of these comics weren’t done in the typical philistine “you call this art” mode. Rather, these artists seemed to be affectionate to the new art, and tried to assimilate it into more homespun, familiar experiences, notably Briggs’ jest that the quilt maker was the first cubist. Another cartoon showed a bear cub (symbol of the local baseball team) done in a cubist mode: “our own little cub-ist.” In effect these cartoonists were domesticating modernism.

L.W. Newbre (?), March 25, 1913

Frank King of course remained obsessed with modern art for many years, leading to the great Gasoline Alley Sunday pages where Walt and Skeezix enter into the world of abstract painting. In his personal papers, King often alluded to Picasso.

There has already been one academic paper written about the 1913 show and Chicago cartooning. Alas that paper is as yet unpublished. But more work remains to be done. The crucial question I think is this: was their a hidden affinity between comics and cubism? Did the encounter with modern art liberate King and other cartoonists to free themselves from illustration and become more abstract and cartoony? This is a story that has yet to be written.

NOTE: Robert Boyd makes an important point in a comment posted below. The Armory Show travelled to Chicago. This would explain all the cubist cartoons printed above, except the Clare Briggs one which ran before the show moved from New York to Chicago. This renders moot my speculation that the artists might have seen modernist art in earlier gallery shows. Oh well, we can still enjoy the cartoons.

So to clarify: Briggs, who did at least 2 cubist inspired cartoons, might have gone to the Armory Show in New York. King, McCutcheon and L.W. Newbre probably went to the Armory show in Chicago. The show that Delia went to was the Armory show in Chicago, not the earlier exhibit of contemporary Scandinavian art.

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The Comics Journal 300 carries a conversation between Kevin Huizenga and Art Spiegelman. During the course of the interview, Kevin brings up the idea of a Midwester school of cartooning, something that I’ve discussed in various essays on Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley. The conversation goes like this:

Huizenga:In one of the recent Annie reprints, Jeet Heer talks in the introduction about this idea of a Midwestern, or Chicago school of cartooning that was more preoccupied with everyday life and the quiet rhythms of everyday life. The style was quieter and more repetitive. I think you can definitely see how Ware fits in that tradition, and also he’s called more attention to that kind of cartooning. Visually, it might look boring, at first, to some people, but it’s a form that’s fitted to content. What they’re doing is comics about mundane things like talking to your wife, or whatever — the “little things.”
Spiegelman:I guess. But I think rather than just Midwest, I would make it Protestant, you know. Like they don’t have those ornate crucifixions.
Huizenga:I have those two strikes against me, I guess, here. [Laughter.]
Spiegelman:It’s definitely suspicious of ornament and exuberance…

A few points can be added to this discussion. I elaborate one what I mean by the Midwestern comics tradition in an interview with Tom Spurgeon in the Comics Reporter, where I talk about this school of art and how it links together Harold Gray and Chester Brown. Here’s a relevant part of that interview:

The geography of rural Illinois left a strong mark on Gray’s imagination, as can be seen if he’s compared to his Wisconsin-born colleague Frank King. In King’s work, the country-side is always rolling and sloping, with cars constantly sputtering up hills or flowing down valleys. In the early Little Orphan Annie strips, by contrast, once our heroine leaves the city, the countryside is as flat as a quilt spread out on a bed, each acre of farmland its own perfect square, with stacks of hay and isolated silos the only protrusions on the land. The flatness of the prairies, the prostrate manner in which the horizon spreads out as far as the eye can see, spoke to something deep in Gray’s imagination: it perhaps explains his sense of the isolation of human existence, the persistent feeling of loneliness his characters complain of, and their commensurate need to reach out to Annie and create strong (although temporary) families, with the orphan as their child.

Brown of course didn’t grow up in the prairies, which are the setting for Louis Riel. His childhood was spent in the very different landscape of Quebec. But I do think that appropriating Gray’s style helped Chester capture the landscape of western Canada, especially the flatness and isolation of the region. I do think there is a tradition of mid-western cartooning, a family tree that is rooted in John T. McCutcheon and extends to Clare Briggs, Harold Gray, Frank King (with a crazy branch that includes the grotesque approach of Chester Gould and Boody Rodgers). The latest branch of this tree is the alternative comics of Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, and Kevin Huizenga. Brown is interesting because he’s not from the mid-west at all, in fact is not even an American, but has absorbed the aesthetics of this
approach.

A few other points:

1. Spiegelman is on to something when he says that this is a Protestant tradition. What I’d say is that the tradition of Midwestern comics brings together various strands: partially regional tradition of vernacular, low-key literature (the line of George Ade, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner) with its focus on small town life, partially from the low church Protestant tradition of plainness, partially out of the Chicago Tribune’s populist stance. So I prefer the more expansive term Midwestern cartooning, which seems to bring most of these things together. But perhaps we could also say that this is Midwestern Wasp cartooning?

2. If we were doing a genealogy of ideas, credit for the concept of Midwestern catooning should go to Gilbert Seldes, who talked about the “Chicago school” in his 1924 book The 7 Lively Arts. In the 1980s, Richard Marschall revived the idea of Midwestern cartooning in a few scattered essays in Nemo magazine. I’ve tried to give a third life to the idea by linking up the great Chicago Tribune cartoonists of the 1920s with their modern counterparts like Ware and Huizenga.