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 Earlier this year, Geoff Pevere wrote a fine article on his Frazetta fetish for the Toronto Star. (Pevere is a Canadian cultural journalist. He was recruited for the Doug Wright Awards jury this year, and at the awards ceremony spoke very eloquently about Seth’s work). When I told Geoff how much I liked his Frazetta article, he informed me he had a slightly longer version. This was shortly before the sad news came of Frazetta’s death. So in honour of the great barbarian artist, here is Geoff Pevere’s full tribute:

If love makes us do things common sense says we shouldn’t, I have loved the art of Frank Frazetta. Briefly, it made me a criminal.

I can’t remember when I first laid eyes on a Frazetta, but it was probably on the cover of Creepy or Eerie in the late 1960s. These were comic magazines for people verging on growing too old for comics, black and white horror anthology collections that happened to have some of the best art and writing in the field.

Not at all coincidentally, much of this art and writing was perpetrated by the same generation that had been instrumental in the rise and censorious crash of the industry during the 1950s. On these pages, these EC Comic-vets were free to let their imaginations run to places Comics Code-approved kids comics could not.

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When Ben Katchor was in  Toronto last week, one of the many interesting things he mentioned is that while reading the new anthology Farber on Film: The Complete Film writings of Manny Farber, he had been struck by how frequently the great movie critic made reference to comics.

As I noted before, Manny Farber had many ties to comics, going back before he could even read. Richard Thompson once opened an interview with Farber with the following anecdote: “In one of his baby pictures, Manny Farber has the costume and the face of The Yellow Kid; as he explained, ‘Our parents used to dress us in costumes from all the comic strips.’” In 1944 and 1951 Farber wrote two brief but extremely perceptive essays on comics (which can be found in a volume Kent Worcester and I co-edited called Arguing Comics). In these essays Farber was among the earlier writers to appreciate Harry Tuthill, Ernie Bushmiller and Stan MacGovern. Farber woud go on to be an early champion of the Warner Bros. cartoons. He also served as an important inspiration to Donald Phelps, whose quirkily written and deeply perceptive essays are among the greatest body of comics criticism we have. And as a painter, Farber incorporated comic strip elements in his work.

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Lately there has been an attempt to flesh out what constitutes good comics criticism. There was a Hooded Utilitarian roundtable on the topic and Ben Schwartz has edited a soon-to-be-released book titled Best American Comics Criticism. But it is worth remembering that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, which is also worth describing and demarcating. For me, one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I’ve ever read was Harold Bloom’s review of Crumb’s Genesis in the December 3, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books.

Perhaps wisely, the New York Review hasn’t made more than a snippet of this idiotic review available. But some early sentences are telling:  “Staring at the women and men of Crumb’s Genesis, I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad magazine. To my untutored view the work of Crumb recalls that publication yet somehow also is touched with what I remember as the doughty proletarian style of Ben Shahn.” As this makes clear, Bloom doesn’t have the background or equipment to say anything useful about Crumb as a visual artist. For most of the rest of the review he talks not about Crumb but about other things that spring to his mind like Thomas Mann’s Joseph books. For a more thorough examination of Bloom’s review, with some choice quotes, see here.

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To continue our notes on comics and cubists:

1. Modernism came to America in 1913 via the Armory Show. One early response was this Mamma’s Little Angel page by Penny Ross , circa 1913 or 1914, where the lead character has “a cubist nightmare in the studio of Monsieur Paul Vincetn Cezanne Van Gogen Ganguin.” (The page can be found in the great Smithsonian book edited by Blackbeard and Williams.) This page is an early example of a common joke, later repeated by Frank King and Cliff Sterrett, where American domesticity and “normality” is turned upside down by modern art.

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Since Art Spiegelman’s name has come up lately in Comics Comics, I wanted to point readers to my recent Walrus piece on “the Holocaust novel.” The essay covers a lot of ground — T.W. Adorno, Natalie Portman, Yan Martel, Anne Frank, Samuel Beckett, Irving Howe, Hugh Kenner — and also touches on the comics of Spiegelman and George Herriman. You can read the essay here.

And here is a taste of the opening:

Few hypothetical scenarios are harder to imagine than a conversation between Theodor Adorno and Natalie Portman. Adorno was the highbrow’s highbrow, the sage Thomas Mann turned to for advice while writing Doctor Faustus, the friend and long-time correspondent of Walter Benjamin, the champion of astringent creators like Arnold Schoenberg, the relentless foe of jazz and Hollywood, the mercilessly pessimistic Marxist critic of modernity whose “negative dialectic” has enriched thousands of scholarly studies. Portman is perhaps best known for her turn as Queen Padmé Amidala in the more mediocre of the two Star Wars trilogies.

Yet on the subject of the Holocaust, Adorno and Portman, both of Jewish heritage, might have found some common ground. In a typically dense 1949 essay titled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno — a refugee from Nazi Germany who had lost the world of his youth to the Nazi genocide — bluntly declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Arguably, Portman is not as deep a thinker as Adorno (who died in 1969, twelve years before the actress was born), but the starlet has been impressively educated at Harvard and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Interviewed by the Daily Mail earlier this year, she complained, “I get like twenty Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre.”

Despite their shared discomfort with Holocaust art, an enormous historical and cultural gulf separates Adorno’s statement from Portman’s…

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A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the subject of Jews and comics: Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Paul Buhle’s Jews and American Comics, along with many other books and articles.

Anyone interested in the topic who is Toronto will want to attend the Toronto Jewish Film Festival next week, which has a special program on Jews and comics. Among the guests who will speak are Ben Katchor, Harvey Pekar, and Paul Buhle (who is that rarest of things, a goyim who is fluent in Yiddish).  

Here is a new angle on the subject: I think writers have been too quick to assume that the Jewish immigrant community, which was very divided on ethnic and class lines, was monolithic.
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I’m fascinated by the on-going process whereby old commercial comics are being reclaimed by revisionist critics. I’m thinking here particularly of Dan’s writings on Wally Wood and Hal Foster, not to mention the Art Out of Time/Art In Time books. I’m wondering if every journeyman artist can so easily be recuperated.

Al Williamson presents an interesting test case. On the pro side, one could argue that Williamson was to Alex Raymond what Alex Toth was to Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles. Toth took the Sickles/Caniff style and whittled it down to a powerful blunt instrument.  Just so, Williamson absorbed Raymond’s already elegant line-work and refined it to the nth degree.
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More notebooks, mostly relating to The Comics Journal:

Panter as Talker, Manning’s Kinkiness. Gary Panter was in Toronto last night speaking at our local art’s college and of course I went to hear him. Among his many other talents, Panter is, along with Lynda Barry and Art Spiegelman, one of the greatest talkers in the comics world, indeed one of the world’s great talkers period. He’s lived a great, rich life and has a storehouse of stories but more importantly he can, like Barry, talk about creativity with a directness and honesty that forces you to rethink all your fundamental assumptions. And, like Spiegelman, Panter knows more about the history of art than the entire faculty of your typical Ivy League university. During the talk, Panter mentioned that as a kid he was attracted to Magnus, Robot Fighter in large part because of the kinky short shorts (or was it a proto-mini-skirt) Russ Manning had the hero wear.

This reminded me of the great Arn Saba interview with Manning which ran in the Comics Journal #203. During the interview Manning asks Saba if he’s read the Tarzan novels. Saba says no and the following exchange occurs:

Manning: It is a superb novel. And in it, Jane is about to be raped by the big ape and that’s just the theme he used all the way through it.

Saba: I was aware of that from reading the comic versions of it, yours included. Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic thing, that imagery, because in this primeval jungle you can take primeval sexuality and symbolize it through all these various creatures: the women with the hairy brassieres and all these things … [laughs] I’m embarrassed to say I notice these things and react to them.

Manning: Well, I hope my readers do.

Saba: The fact that all the women in Opar have these strange, long, pendulous, fur things hanging down between their legs – they’re very penis-like things! [laughs] That’s what they look like to me, anyway.

Manning: Just cloth.

Saba: Cloth, but they’re so long and sinuous. [laughter]

Manning: I don’t know if that came out in just a design sense or instinctual or what. They probably look right, so I drew it that way.

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Joe’s excellent post on thought balloons got me thinking about comics balloons (or text frames) in general: not just thought balloons but also word balloons, narrative boxes, and labels (like the famous arrows in Dick Tracy which diagrammatically call attention to two-way-radio-watches and other items of interest). It would be great to have a history of text frames in comics. There have been stabs here and there by scholars. Thierry Smolderen’s “Of Labels, Loops, and Bubbles” in Comic Art #8 is a good start.

About thought balloons: When did they emerge? I know Harold Gray was very chary of using them: he only used thought balloons a handful of times in his 44 year run on Little Orphan Annie. I think this was deliberate. While his characters where gabby they were also secretive – this is true not just of Warbucks but even Annie, who never says all she knows. Gray wanted to keep his characters mysterious, hence he avoided thought balloons.

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Along with my friends Frank Young and Gail Singer, I just recorded an Inkstuds episode devoted to John Stanley. You can listen to it here.

And below are some excerpts from my John Stanley notebook:

 Stanley as Lulu. Month after month, Lulu had to improvise a story to please that pesky small-fry Alvin. Lulu was adept at spinning out burlesque yarns featuring stock characters – poor girls, kings, witches — and coming up with new scenarios for them to enact. Wasn’t Lulu’s plight the same as Stanley’s? He was on a story tread mill, he had to keep running to make the kids happy, there was no let up or relief for nearly thirty years.

Mummy as Enabler. Is it too much to see Melvin Monster as an allegory about child abuse? Melvin’s always under the threat of violence, sometimes death itself. His chief persecutor is his father, Baddy. The name says it all: Baddy equals bad daddy (a pun related to Blake’s nickname for the God of organized religion: Nobodaddy). Melvin’s mother, Mummy, is all wrapped up in the Egyptian manner. That means she has no eyes to see what is happening. She turns a blind eye to Melvin’s situation. That’s the way it often is with abusive families: one parent is violent, the other a blinkered or self-deceived enabler.

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