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Dan’s comments on the Toon Treasury got me thinking about anthology-making, an underappreciated craft. In the entire history of comics, there have only been a handful of great anthologies. Off the top of my head the following come to mind:

1. The Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams. A really great anthology, collecting the best strip comics from the early 20th century: Opper, McCay, Herriman, Sterrett, Gray, Segar, Crane, Gottfredson. This book is the foundation stone of the reprint renaissance we’re living through right now. There is no way, for example, that the Walt and Skeezix books would exist if the Smithsonian volume hadn’t published choice examples of King’s Sunday pages, which led Joe Matt and Chris Ware to collect Gasoline Alley strips. The book is particularly strong on the great long and rousing continuities of the 1930s that Blackbeard grew up reading: giving readers an extended sample of Wash Tubbs, Mickey Mouse, and Popeye at their violently exuberant best. It took me many years to figure out that the book has some limitations. The editors had no taste for adult observational humour panels, so there is no Clare Briggs or Gluyas Williams in the book. And because Blackbeard’s taste was so nostalgically oriented, the book peters out after 1945 or so. Still, this is an essential volume that anyone interested in comics should own.

2. The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Dan has already said what needs to be said about the book. The one point I’d add is that it does a useful job in sorting out a canon of the really great kids cartoonists (Barks, Stanley, Kelly, Mayer) while providing enough material from other artists who did solid work so that readers get a sense of the scope of the genre.

3. Art Out of Time edited by Dan Nadel. This is probably too incestuous but I have to say this book looks better every time I return to it. This is especially true now that we have more books reprinting some of the artists from this anthology: what distinguishes the book is the fact that the stories Dan selected were both striking and emblematic of the cartoonists being displayed. About the only critique I’d make is that the comic book pages looked better than the newspaper Sunday pages reprinted. It might have been better to have two volumes, one devoted to the comic book stories and a larger book to the Sunday pages.

4. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, two volumes, edited by Ivan Brunetti. There is so much that could be said about these books. I love the connections they draw between classic cartoonists (notably Bushmiller, Kurtzman and Schulz) and alternative comics. Like Spiegelman and Mouly, and Dan as well, Brunetti is very smart about how he’s organized the book: the unexpected juxtaposition of certain artists (Forbell and Regé, Teal and Burns) ignites a new understanding of familiar material. And I like that the Crumb material is from his underrated middle period, and not the overly reprinted 1960s stuff. More subtly, Brunetti has a knack for picking out stories that stick in your mind. Much of this book was déjà vu for me, but that’s because so much of it is from the very stories that I’ve constantly been re-reading for the last twenty years.

5. McSweeney’s 13 edited by Chris Ware. All the praise of Brunetti’s book applies to this volume.

Aside from these books, there are a few near great anthologies: books that are very strong but more flawed, including A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (edited by Michael Barrier and Martin Williams) and The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics (edited by Don Donahue and Susan Goodrick). The Smithsonian book suffers mainly from its half-hearted selection of superhero and action material (which either should have been more comprehensive or entirely left out), and the dull coloring of the reproduction. The Apex book gives a good selection of the main underground artists but many of them would go on to do stronger work (notably Spiegelman, Spain, and Deitch; actually also Crumb, now that I think of it). So it’s crying out to be republished in an expanded edition. Or perhaps someone can start from scratch and do an anthology of “The Essential Underground Comics”.

One interesting thing about good anthologies is how autobiographical they are. It’s no accident, I think, that the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics is strongest on those comics Blackbeard and Williams read when they were boys in the late 1920s and 1930s. The Toon Treasury is an outgrowth of the experience Spiegelman and Mouly had as parents, sharing Barks and Stanley with their kids. And some of the selections in the Toon Treasury are either personal interests of Spiegelman (Jack Cole), influences on his work (Gross, Kurtzman) or in one case his mentor (Woody Gelman). The Yale anthologies are really a record of the comics that shaped Brunetti’s own development as a cartoonist.

Anthology-making can thus be seen as a form of autobiography. A good anthologist is moved not just by objective considerations (who are the masters of the genre?) but also personal concerns (what are the works that speak to me?). This personal dimension of anthology-making extends outside of comics: consider Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies, or John Metcalf’s many collections of Canadian short fiction, or Hugh Kenner’s volume of Seventeenth Century Poetry or the Subtreasury of American Humor edited by E.B. and Katharine White. All of these are anthologies that bear the impress of particular personalities, with items selected and organized to sharpen taste and perception.

PS: I should add that there are some very attractive-looking recent anthologies which I haven’t read yet: notably Abstract Comics by Andrei Molotiu. So if there are books that I missed, feel free to list them below in the comments section.

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On several occasions John Steinbeck extravagantly praised Al Capp, calling him the “best writer in the world.” How did Capp repay this kindness? He tried to seduce Steinbeck’s wife. Or at least that’s the story former Capp assistant Stuart Hample tells on the Inkstuds radio program, available here. Very much worth a listen.

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In U and I, a madcap memoir of a freshman writer’s Updike obsession, Nicholson Baker compares a drawing he saw in a philosophy book with some cartoons: “I thought of those several contemporary illustrators whose style was based on the same trembly, Dow-Jonesy contour line: William Steig, for instance, and Seymour Chwast, and whoever did that Alka-Seltzer cartoon commercial in the sixties in which (as I remembered it) a yiddishly unhappy human stomach, gesticulating from an analyst’s couch or chair, it esophagus waggling like an unruly forelock, told its troubles to a nodding murmuring doctor.”

I might be gravely mistaken on this point, but I think the animated ad that Baker remembered was done by R.O. Blechman. Certainly Blechman did other ads for Alka-Seltzer, including one which can be seen here.

Blechman is like that: he’s everywhere and nowhere at once. Even more than Bazooka Joe strips or Jack Chick handouts, Blechman lives at the peripheral edge of perception. He’s been in every magazine on the newsstand (either through his own art or in the ersatz form of his many imitators) yet only the design elite know his name. The very pervasiveness and influence of his art works against name recognition. Even someone as erudite as Baker, who can readily summon up Steig and Chwast, knows Blechman only as “whoever.”

There are two big Blechman books this season. The Drawn and Quarterly career overview of his cartooning work is rightfully getting attention, including some choice praise from Dan, but that might have overshadowed his other fine book, Dear James: Letters to a Young Illustrator. Earlier on this blog, Tim tried to get people to pay attention to this book and it got a nice, observant review from Sarah Boxer in the New York Times. Still, my sense is that many comics people are still only dimly aware of the book’s existence and haven’t really recognized why it deserves their time. I’d be surprised if very many comic book stores are stocking it, despite the fact that it is a perfect gift for prospective cartoonists.

Dear James is several books in one: it’s an informal autobiography, a guide for becoming an illustrator, as well as a commonplace book. But really it is a nifty volume that should be read by anyone who is engaged in a freelance career in the arts, because it is really about how to survive in a commercial environment while holding on to your artistic integrity. Blechman has a well-stocked mind, rich in both personal anecdotes and also choice quotations taken from his wide reading. His prose, like his drawing, is deceptively simple. Glancing at his drawings or skimming his essays, you might fall into the fallacy of thinking that the man is minimalist to a fault. Yet after you’ve spent some time with Blechman’s work and then set it aside, you’ll be surprise by how much of it has stuck with you. He’s a master of giving his audience the core that they need, leaving everything superfluous aside.

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In 1959 Al Capp was still at the top of his game. Li’l Abner wasn’t just one of the most popular comic strips around, it was also one of the most celebrated. In the words of Jimmy Durante, Capp was “duh toast of duh intellectuals.” Although Peanuts was closing in fast and Pogo had its fans, no cartoonist had quite the same cachet as Capp. An extrovert in a profession saturated by shy guys, Capp was the public face of comics, the cartoonist who showed up most often in newspaper and magazine columns, on radio and television and the lecture circuit. The National Cartoonist Society was a great old boys network and Capp was at the center of that clique (along with Caniff and Walt Kelly).

Yet Capp wasn’t quite satisfied with his station in life. Despite all the praise and money he received he bridled at the low status of comics compared to the fine arts. And perhaps also, he was getting a bit tired of Abner: at that point he had done all he could with the strip and was increasingly leaving all the grunt work of cartooning to his army of ghosts.

In his 1959 book Comic Art in America, Stephen Becker penned a brief but highly perceptive portrait of Capp. In Becker’s account, you can see all the discontent that was eating away at Capp:

It is hard to say where Capp will go from here. A low rumble of discontent was heard a couple of years after Abner’s wedding, and certainly (as Capp knew it would be) an element of suspense and satire had to be abandoned when he married. Capp’s circulation – he is carried by United Feature Syndicate – remains enormous, and he has other strings to his bow. He is a good writer, and has appeared in national magazines, both egghead and meathead; for years he did the continuity for Roeburn Van Buren’s Abbie ‘n’ Slats, and he now does it for Bob Lubbers’ Long Sam. He is a good public speaker, and a public critic of public affairs. Somewhere in that cluttered, explosive mind more surprises are germinating. Somewhere in the darkness, an outrage lies in wait for some cherished American idiocy. Capp is bitterly resentful of the fact that Americans have become afraid to laugh at each other, and at their leaders, and at their own pretensions, and at their national icons. When that resentment comes to a head, he will strike back. Watch out.

We all know how the story ends: the explosion that was ready to explode was political. In the 1960s, Capp moved to the hard right, becoming one of the most vocal fans of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. As a glib Archie Bunker like pundit, Capp not only lost many of his old fans, he also disgraced himself by the persistent meanness he displayed (as in his famous run-in with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where he went out of his way to insult Yoko). All this topped off by a squalid sex scandal.

Becker’s account of Capp is extremely valuable because it allows us to see what he was like at the cusp, going through a mid-life crisis and wondering how he would re-invent himself. The fact that Capp made all the wrong choices in response to his identity crisis doesn’t negate the fact that he was smart enough and creative enough to know in 1959 that something was wrong, that he needed to take a new tack on life.

We don’t yet have a good, solid account of Capp’s life, one that would answer the question of what went wrong, why did this smart and lively man destroy his own career and reputation? But anyone who wants to crack the Capp puzzle might want to take a look at the year 1959.

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Comic fans who pick up E.L. Doctorow’s new novel Homer & Langley will be interested in a character named Connor who is described by the sight-impaired narrator Homer Collyer in these terms:

Connor, or Con, was monosyllabic and from what I could infer a cadaverous figure with a long neck and thick eyeglasses. He wore no shirt but a denim jacket open over his hairless torso. He spent his time drawing comic strips in which men’s feet and women’s breast and behinds were greatly exaggerated. Langley told me the strips were quite good in their appalling way. A touch surreal, he said. They seemed to celebrate life as a lascivious dream.

Con is clearly a stand in for Robert Crumb. There are thematic reasons for this Crumb cameo. Doctorow’s novel is much concerned with the psychopathology of collecting and the generation of trash by mass culture, both long time Crumb concerns (as in his great Weirdo story on “Trash”). It makes perfect sense that a cartoonist like Crumb, with his fascination for the grungy past, would fall into the orbit of the Collyer Brothers, those arch-gleaners of the ephemeral.

A whole essay could be written on Doctorow’s engagement with comics. As editor of The Dial Press, he shepherded into print Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic-Book Heroes (and indeed the title and original idea for the book came from Doctorow). Doctorow’s 1985 novel World’s Fair has some interesting evocations of the comic strips of the 1930s like Flash Gordon. And more deeply and perhaps more importantly, the staccato rhythm of Doctorow’s fiction, notably Ragtime, where everything is action and surface and color and noise, owes something to snappiness of early 20th-century comic strips.

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As everyone who follows his work knows, Seth is a proud Canadian. A major visual theme of his work is the landscape, both natural and man-made, of Southern Ontario; on a more literary level he’s clearly been shaped by such Canadian writers as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence (anyone interested in investigating Seth’s frequent narrative device of having an old person look back on life should read Laurence’s The Stone Angel); his cartoons are heavily sprinkled with Canadian icons (Mounties, igloos, hockey players); he’s been at the forefront of the current effort to recuperate Canada’s comics heritage, designing and co-editing a beautiful book devoted to Doug Wright, co-founding the Doug Wright Awards, and speaking often and eloquently about such forgotten cartooning Canucks as Jimmy Frise and Peter Whally.

Seth’s commitment to Canada also extends to the publishers he works with. Drawn and Quarterly is a Montreal firm, although of course one with an international reach. What non-Canadian readers might not know, however, is that Seth is also closely involved with several other Canadian imprints and magazines, often in his capacity as a book designer but sometimes as a writer. This work is often done for quite small presses, such as the Porcupine’s Quill and Biblioasis (in my opinion two of the best publishers not just in Canada but in the world).

Since Seth has fans all over the world, I thought it might be a useful service to call attention to some of the work he’s done that non-Canadians wouldn’t necessarily know about. If you care at all about Seth’s work, all these items are worth tracking down. Even when working with small specialty presses, he lavishes on each task the same care and attention that he gives to projects for The New Yorker and Penguin Books.

1. For the journal The Devil’s Artisan issue #60 (devoted to “the printing arts”), Seth wrote at length about the artist and book designer Thoreau MacDonald (the essay was earlier delivered as a speech at the Art Gallery of Ontario). This is very much of interest for anyone who wants background on the strip Seth did for Kramers Ergot 7.

2. For the latest issue of Canadian Notes and Queries (#77) Seth writes at length about Doug Wright in an essay taken from the speech he delivered at the first Doug Wright Awards ceremony. This essay is essential reading, I think, for anyone who wants to fully appreciate the new Doug Wright book; and also for anyone who wants to get a grounding in Canada’s particular comics tradition, one that has its own distinct history.

3. For Biblioasis, Seth designed and illustrated a beautiful novelty book called The Idler’s Glossary (written by the intellectual jack-of-all-trades Joshua Glenn and introduced by the philosopher Mark Kingwell). The book is a defence of laziness and slackery in all its forms, a topic dear to Seth’s reverie-loving heart. The drawings are done in the mode of the mid-20th century joke-books that Seth loves so much, the sub-New Yorker style of broad big-nosed stereotypes.

4. Also for Biblioasis, Seth has illustrated a new book by poet Zach Wells: Track and Trace. I haven’t seen this book yet but I’ll pick it up later this week at the book launch.

5. Finally, for Anansi Seth put together an absolutely nifty little book: Derek McCormack’s Christmas Days, witty reflections on the holiday garlanded with many pages of cheerful, uproarious cartooning.

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1. I’m a regular reader of The New Left Review and a constant re-reader of Carl Barks’ duck comics. So I was naturally delighted to see in the latest issue of NLR has a long disquisition by the German belles-lettrist Joachim Kalka on the disappearance of money as a material object, reflections that lean heavily on the writing of Leon Bloy and the comics of Carl Barks. Kalka’s essay can be found here.
An excerpt:

Carl Barks’s comic-book stories of Uncle Scrooge—a spin-off from the Disney cartoon series—offer a canonical encyclopaedia of libidinous relations to money. His Scrooge is obviously related to Dickens’s miser and kindred topoi of European comedy from Molière to Antiquity; but he far surpasses these classical embodiments of avarice. Uncle Scrooge’s famous money-bin contains a hilly landscape made out of coins, interspersed with banknotes, in which he spends his time. He likes to announce the ritualized programme of actions the money-drive imposes on him with reiterated phrases: ‘I dive around in it like a porpoise—and I burrow through it like a gopher—and I toss it up and let it hit me on the head.’ Clearly recognizable in this trio of money joys are three movements of any playful child: leaping into the pond, rummaging under the duvet and—the earliest gesture of delight—tossing toys high up into the air. The impressive massif of Uncle Scrooge’s money, the backdrop and punch-line of so many of Barks’s stories, might by its sheer volume obscure the crucial fact that for Scrooge McDuck (‘world’s richest duck and darn well going to stay that way’) all coins are individual. This gigantic accumulation of ‘dough’—to use the idiom of Scrooge’s disrespectful antagonists, the Beagle Boys, a gang of safe-crackers for whom indeed only its volume counts (which, according to the magical laws of this narration, in the end prevents them from pulling off a successful robbery)—is for Uncle Scrooge a concentrate of intimacy, in which every item is
saturated with memory.

2. This Canadian Business article has already received some attention from the comics world. I just wanted to point out that for any Adrian Tomine completists out there, the print edition of the magazine is worth acquiring since it has a fine full-page Tomine illustration of Chris Oliveros, a portion of which I’ve pasted above.

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Anyone interested in Dave Sim should try and get a hold of copies of Comic Art News and Reviews, a fanzine he frequently wrote for in the early 1970s.

As a teenage fan, Sim interviewed and analyzed many major creators who shaped his art, including Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Jules Feiffer. In retrospect, the Feiffer essays Sim wrote are particularly piquant because the young fan praised the alternative cartoonist for his insights into gender relations. Who knew back then that Sim would grow up to be a character out of Carnal Knowledge?

Equally ironic is an outburst against Jack Kirby that Sim penned in the very first issue of Comic Art News and Review. Sim was upset that Kirby had been given too much artistic freedom by his editors at DC:

I maintain, as I have for some time, that Kirby has little or no talent. His writing disgusts me even more than the early work of Gerry Conway. His creations seem to be of less than human quality. […]

Now for some conclusions on this topic. Why do these characters exist? They are Kirby creations and it is a well-known fact that the only way to maintain Jack Kirby as a staff artist is to cater to his wants. One of these wants is total freedom to change, distort or completely destroy anything in the panel art at DC. He changed Superman into something less than he should be, totally demolished anything it took DC thirty years to build Jimmy Olson into….and left both characters when he was through with them. This is somewhat reminiscent of ushering a spoiled child into a room full of antique toys, permitting him to smash them at will and guiding him to yet another room.

Now, the almighty King demands that he be granted a team of artists at his California headquarters that he might continue his Fourth World Farce. Whom would he take? Neal Adams? Jim Aparo? Joe Kubert? Certainly sacrificing these gentlemen to the pseudo science fiction slop of the Fourth World means nothing…if the King is satiated by it.

At least on the issue of creator rights, Sim became wiser as he grew older. The entire magazine Comic Art News and Reviews testifies to the vital fan culture that existed in Southern Ontario in the early 1970s. A run of the journal can be found in Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. If anyone has access to the library, they should definitely check it out: it’s a goldmine waiting to be opened up.

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In a recent Inkstuds interview, Seth said that that three most influential contemporary cartoonists are Crumb, Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. For Seth, what sets these three apart is not so much the quality of their work, as the fact that they’ve changed the syntax of comics, greatly expanding the range and depth of stories that can be told in the medium. I agree with Seth, with the proviso that Gary Panter and Lynda Barry also belong on this list.

Will Staehle cover of Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs

The type of influence Seth was talking about is fairly subtle: in the case of Ware it means making other cartoonists aware that comics can have minutely delicate shades of emotional meaning hitherto unexplored in the medium. But Ware’s influence on some artists is also more blatant in the sense that he’s clearly informed their style and design sense. Recent examples of Ware-inflected design include the cover for the new Michael Chabon essay collection, an art catalogue designed by Ellen Gould, and a illustration by Mark Matcho from the August 24, 2009 issue of Time Magazine.

Ellen Gould’s design for Imaginative Feats art catalogue

Certainly Ware has raised the bar in terms of design, just as he has done for comics, but it is odd to see Ware pastiches popping up all over the place. I’m divided on how I feel about this phenomenon. On the one hand, most of the Ware-influenced art is quite good: if you’re going to steal a style you might as well do it from the best. On the other hand, in Ware’s work his style isn’t just for show but is integral to the total artistic package. To take use his style for other purposes almost seems like your missing the point of what it is that he’s doing.

Mark Matcho illustration for Time

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The Comics Journal, as I noted in an earlier posting, needs to re-invent itself to make it relevant for the new era we’re in, a period where there is a much greater public interest in comics combined with a much more fragmented discourse about comics (found mostly these days the internet). It looks like the editors of the Journal were thinking along the same lines as I was, because they’ve decided to radically change the magazine by upgrading its web-presence while transforming the Journal itself into a twice-yearly upscale publication.

These are promising changes, although much will depend on the execution. I think one way to guide the magazine forward is to look at what it does right. Here is a list of highlights from the most recent incarnation of the magazine (the more compact, literary magazine format they started with issue #288 in February of 2008).

The Deitch family issue (292) was the stand-out interview. By conducting separate interviews with Gene Deitch and his three sons, Gary Groth created almost a new genre: a family saga in the form of oral history. With each Deitch offering conflicting accounts of their family life, we got a rounded image of their careers, one that read like a novel. This was one of the best issues ever. There have been other strong interviews (like the ones with Trevor Von Eeden, S. Clay Wilson, and Jason) but the Deitch interviews stood out for telling a cohesive story.

As for the critical essays, I think the Journal was strongest when its stalwart critics wrote long think pieces. Gary Groth’s novella-length, keen-eyed piece about the relationship between Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman was superb as both portraiture and analysis. It gave a much livelier sense of what Thompson was like than the recent documentary Gonzo, or any of the other films about the notorious journalist.

Although many found it too long, I though the symposium on the Michaelis’ Schulz biography was important and necessary (full disclosure: I participated in the symposium). There were serious problems with that much-praised book, and it was good to get Monte Schulz’s objection to it in print for the record, so that future students of Peanuts won’t treat Michaelis as gospel.

Other strong pieces of writing were R. Fiore on Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague and Tim Kreider on Bill Mauldin. In general, Donald Phelps is the magazine’s most genial and idiosyncratic voice, although he often writes about things other than comics. I know many people have a hard time with Phelps’ rambling, quirky, allusive prose but his essays always give me a new way to look at art, something few critics can achieve. I have to confess though that I’ve never developed a taste for another dense Journal stylist, Ken Smith.

The strength of the magazine is in presenting essays that have a depth of analysis that can’t be found elsewhere. Most writing on comics tends to suffer from a shortness of breath: small reviews and bite-size blog postings. The Journal, at its best, doesn’t settle for such small snacks but offers a full-course meal.

Among its reviewers the Journal has a contingent of solid, trust-worthy writers: Kent Worcester, Rich Kreiner, Shaenon Garrity, and Kristian Williams, but they tend to get drowned out by crankier and less-informed critics, writers who mistake abrasiveness for insight. The magazine’s review section does seem too diffuse and scattershot. I’m never quite sure why some books get reviewed and others don’t. There’s a lot of good critics on the web now – Rob Clough comes to mind right way. The most promising prospect for the next incarnation of the Journal is to recruit these writers (I know Clough has already signed on).

Visually as well, the magazine has improved greatly in recent years. But if it comes out less frequently, there is more room for growth and experiment. Fantagraphics has a great design team which consistently puts together wonderful looking books. A Comics Journal that looks more like a book would be really exciting.

In terms of the print magazine, my strong sense is that the Comics Journal has always been strongest when Gary Groth has been most involved with it: his interviews with cartoonists have always set the gold standard in terms of being informed by the deepest research and asking the most searching questions. I’m thinking here of the classic and memorable conversations Groth has had with Chaykin, Crumb, Gil Kane, Jules Feiffer and many other creators. Now Groth is of course a very busy many with many broths to attend to, so the amount of time he gives to the Journal has wavered. But with two issues a year to put out, he should be able to reshape the magazine into something more closely resembling his own sensibility.

The Journal has often been accused of being just a mouthpiece for Groth’s opinions. To my mind, it’s regrettable that the Journal hasn’t often enough been Grothian enough.