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This might only be of interest to Canadians and a few Canuck-ophiles but here goes: Canadian nationalism ebbs and flows but the most recent high tide was from 1967, when Canada celebrated its centennial year as a confederation, to the late 1970s. This was a golden age of nationalist cultural fervor, the period where presses such as Coach House books and the House of Anansi made their mark, when writers such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro gained their fame. Not every writer was a nationalist during this period, certainly Munro wasn’t. But many others were: think of the Atwood of Survival and Surfacing, a novelist and critic very interesting in exploring the geography and mythology of her native land.

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Pekar as drawn by Crumb.

Some jottings from my Pekar notebook:

Pekar and Crumb. When I saw Harvey Pekar earlier this year, we chatted a bit about Crumb. Pekar was very pleased by one thing I said, which was that I thought he was as important in the evolution of Crumb’s career as Crumb was in the launching of Pekar’s career. What I meant was this: that drawing Pekar’s stories enlarged Crumb’s sense of what comics could be, made him more attentive to quiet moments and the potency of a well-shaped narrative. There was a tendency in the early Crumb to go for the easy shock or the satisfyingly quick yuck-yuck laugh. Pekar taught Crumb to trust the audience more, to be more circumspect and less in-your-face. I think the lessons of Pekar can be seen in the strong run of stories Crumb did in the 1980s for Weirdo, particularly “Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis” (Weirdo #7). To some extent Crumb was already heading in that direction (see “That’s Life” from Arcade #3), but Pekar unquestionably pushed Crumb into a more meditative direction. I’m also thinking that Crumb’s habit of adapting classic (Boswell, Sartre, Genesis) might have its root in those Pekar collaboration in the sense that they made Crumb realize that he enjoyed the challenge of coming up with pictures for other people’s stories. In a sense, adapting a classic work gives Crumb the benefits that the Pekar collaborations did without the difficult of dealing with Pekar’s ornery personality.

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B.N. Duncan

The letters in that issue dealt with the David Boring storyline, then being serialized in Eightball. “I hate that mother of David Boring!” Dunan wrote. “I myself had a castrating, slimy, hypocritical dictator-mother who was always against me.” Who responds to comics with this level of naked emotion anymore? Perhaps Duncan shared too much of himself, gave us too much information (as the saying goes) but still his letters reminded us how personal our response to art can be. The internet has supposedly unleashed a torrent of personal voices but too many of them seem to be poseurs of one sort or another, people who adopt a stance because it makes them look cool. Voices like Duncan, so honest as to be embarrassing, are all too rare.

Time moves on. B.N. Duncan is dead and the pamphlet-form alternative comic book also seems to be on the way out.  There is no point in lingering too much on the past since new voices and new comics are all around us.  Still, I’d like to take a measure, briefly and inadequately, of how special Duncan was.

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Michael Tisserand is writing the type of book I’ve long dreamed of reading: a full-fledged, deeply researched biography of George Herriman, based on many hours spent in the archives and a thorough search for every factual nugget that can be found about the creator of Krazy Kat. Now, thanks to the New Orleans Times-Picayne, we can get a glimpse of what Michael has in store for us and also see the few remaining buildings in survive in Herriman’s city from the time of his childhood that he would be able to recognize today. If you click here, you’ll find a three minute video where Michael gives a tour of George Herriman’s New Orleans.

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In 1991, the Santa Monica radio station KCRW broadcast an adaptation of American Splendor.  Dan Castellaneta (a.k.a. the voice of Homer Simpson) was part of the performance, doing the voice of Harvey Pekar.

This Friday at 7:30 PM Pacific Time, KCRW will re-play this adaptation.  Unfortunately, they won’t be able to archive it or put it on their website as a podcast. If you want to listen to this,   there is only one shot. If you live in the Santa Monica area, you can listen to KCRW. If not, you can go their website and listen to it as a livestream. KCRW’s website can be found here.

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Canadian Notes and Queries, re-done by Seth.

As I’ve pointed out before, there is a side of Seth that rarely gets seen outside of Canada, the design work and writing he does for small Canadian literary concerns. A good example of the care Seth puts into these projects can be seen in the new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries (CNQ), a very smart literary journal with a ridiculous title.  Seth has re-shaped the whole magazine from top to bottom. Aside from giving the interiors a new elegance, he also did the cover and supplied a two page comic strip about the magazine’s new mascots, the lumberjack Hudson (“I handle the notes…”) and the dandy Stanfield (“And I deal with the queries.”) This comic can be found here.

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Some of Pekar's best work can be found here.

I’ll have more to say about Harvey Pekar in a future post, but my immediate thoughts on his death can be found in this National Post obituary. An excerpt:

Harvey’s early stories, especially the ones that Crumb drew, remain his best work. With an impressive fidelity to reality, they capture the daily texture of office life, the bickering common to marriages and transient moments of exultation and despair. Thus, a typical story describes the frustration of “standing behind old Jewish ladies in supermarket lines.” This might almost be a stand-up comedian’s routine, but goes deeper when Harvey’s prejudice against “old Jewish ladies” is tested by an unexpected turn of events. Part of what makes these stories so great is Pekar’s fine-tuned ear for all sorts of American dialects, ranging from the many gradations of immigrant accents to African-American slang. Few American writers in any medium have been so responsive to the richness of American speech.

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Back in the Comics Journal #126 (January 1989), R. Fiore wrote about a Plastic Man comic that made a nodding reference to Jack Cole. “It’s especially galling when Jack Cole is one of what I think of as the Prisoners of DC,” Fiore observed. “DC doesn’t think reprinting Cole’s Plastic Man, or Beck and Binder’s Captain Marvel or Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly would be profitable enough for them, but they’re unwilling to license them to other publishers for fear of hurting sales of cold crap like this.”

That was 21 years ago. The situation has since improved slightly, but not enough. DC has given us eight volumes of Plastic Man (alas in their hideous Archives format) and allowed Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd to do their Jack Cole book. There have also been books reprinting Captain Marvel (and I’m eagerly anticipating a Captain Marvel volume from Abrams that Chip Kidd is working on). And there were a few Mayer stories in the Spiegelman/Mouly Toon Treasury.

Of the three artists named by Fiore, Mayer has been the worst served by DC. He did thousands of pages of very entertaining kids comics, most notably Scribbly as well as Sugar and Spike.  In an ideal world, the best of these comics would be reprinted in a format similar to the John Stanley Library D&Q put out. At the very least there should be a thick, 300-page Best of Sheldon Mayer, as rigorously edited as the Toon Treasury or Art In Time. If DC doesn’t want to do such a book, there are other publishers who would be happy to take up the task. Sheldon Mayer spent the vast majority of his life working for DC as a writer, artist and editor (he was actually at the company before Superman was first published). If the people at DC had any sense of obligation to the artists who created their company, they would give Mayer a “best of” volume. But as things stand, Mayer remains in death the most luckless of the “Prisoners of DC”: still trapped in a copyright prison with only the occasional, very brief release into the freedom of republication.

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By some cosmic fluke, the Mark Twain Foundation has just released a previously unpublished essay (written circa 1889 or 1890) by the great writer taking issue with an argument I made in a previous post. The full essay can be found here. An excerpt:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man.

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Gil Kane, an artist whose interviews are always worth reading.

Autodidacts. I often think William Blake is the prototype for many modern cartoonists. Blake was a working class visionary who taught himself Greek and Hebrew, an autodidact who created his own cosmology which went against the grain of the dominant Newtonian/Lockean worldview of his epoch. The world of comics has had many such ad hoc theorists and degree-less philosophers: Burne Hogarth, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Neal Adams, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Lynda Barry, Howard Chaykin, Chester Brown, Dave Sim, Alan Moore. These are all freelance scholars who are willing to challenge expert opinion with elaborately developed alternative ideas. The results of their theorizing are mixed. On the plus side: you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books; Robert Crumb’s Genesis deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible; Lynda Barry’s ideas about creativity strike me as not just true but also profound and life-enhancing. On the negative side: Dave Sim’s forays into gender analysis have not, um, ah, been, um, very fruitful; and while Neal Adams drew a wicked cool Batman, I’m not willing to give credence to his theories of an expanding earth if it means rejecting the mainstream physics of the last few centuries. Sorry Neal!

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