Posts Tagged ‘Chester Gould’

Harold Gray Unbuttoned


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Wednesday, May 26, 2010


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Before you go any further, please take a look at the ongoing auction in support of this blog….

As Jog noted, there is a new Little Orphan Annie volume out this week: the fifth in the “Library of American Comics” series edited by Dean Mullaney. The volume covers the years 1933 to early 1935. As usual, I’ve foisted one of my longish introductions on the book. In writing my introduction I was immeasurably helped by Jeff Kersten, a scholar who is doing research on Chester Gould. Jeff provided me with a series of letter that Harold Gray wrote to Chester Gould in 1933. In these letters Gray complains at length about the policies of the Tribune-News Syndicate, especially that of publisher Joseph Patterson and Vice-President Arthur Crawford, who Gray thought were “chiselling” their staff cartoonists out of royalties from spin-offs. Gray also gossips a bit about their other cartoonists in the Tribune-News Syndicate such as Sydney Smith.  These letters give us an unprecedented look into the business side of the comic book industry, and both Jeff and I will be mining them for future research.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in the history of comics to pick up the books in the Annie and Dick Tracy series. As an appetizer, I’ve decided to share an excerpt from the first letter Gray wrote to Gould with some annotations:

Harold Gray to Chester Gould, May 23, 1933:

Dear Chester; —

Your letter written Sunday arrived just now and I am delighted to hear from you. Also I am considerably embarrassed, for I have meant to write you long before this and now you’ve beaten me to it. Time and time again in following your strip I have sworn to drop you a line to tell you how sincerely much I like it and how dam glad I am to see you going over with such a solid success. It’s a whale of a strip in every way, and it has tickled me a lot watch you avoid many of the pitfalls many wise guys predicted for you in the handling of the strip and in the handling of yourself.

(more…)

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Voices: Kirby and Crane and … Me?


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Wednesday, January 13, 2010


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I have to admit, even I’m a little shocked by the silliness of the MoCCA statement about this whole Archie credit issue. To wit (and I promise, this is the last time I’ll mention it, since clearly it’s like talking to a brick wall): I emailed Karl at MoCCA 3 times over the course of a month before posting my thoughts on the show. Having curated a show there and done numerous events over the years, yes, that means I can expect a response back, just as I would respond to any colleague who emailed me. No, I couldn’t make it back to the museum itself, but I didn’t need to — I was asking why there were no credits and why it was OK to ignore and perpetuate a shameful legacy. How is a phone call or email not enough to explain that? The fact that I’m somehow being blamed by Ellen in her “statement” is probably self-evidently ridiculous. But just in case: Guys, the issue isn’t whether or not I could make it back over the to museum: The issue is that you don’t act anything even remotely like an educational institution. It’s not Archie (the company’s) fault that you don’t have anyone on hand who can ID the original art–there are at least a dozen historians in the NYC area who could do that; nor is it the company’s fault that you would refuse to even acknowledge the issues at play. Nor is it my fault. Get a grip, admit that you screwed up, and move on. Every commenter (myself included) basically was giving you the benefit of the doubt. By issuing a defensive statement that somehow pulls me in and (again!) ignores the real issues at play, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Anyhow, onto happier matters. Here are a couple of recordings by artists. Y’know, the people that draw comics! Both of these recordings have been linked to but I want to reiterate how wonderful they are. First is Jack Kirby in 1970, with Steranko chiming in occasionally. Kirby sounds like a forceful visionary let loose on a crowd, practically preaching.

Jeet kindly transcribed the following passage, which is one of the best ever statements on cartooning:

Drawing a good figure doesn’t make you a good artist. I can name you ten men, right off the bat, who draw better than I do. But I don’t think their work gets as much response as mine. I can’t think of a better man to draw Dick Tracy than Chester Gould, who certainly is no match for Leonardo Da Vinci. But Chester Gould told the story of Dick Tracy. He told the story of Dick Tracy the way it should have been told. No other guy could have done it. It’s not in the draftsmanship, it’s in the man.

Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It’s in the man.

If you want to do, you do it. If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.

The only thing I can say is: Caniff was my teacher, Alex Raymond was my teacher, even the guy who drew Toonerville Trolley was my teacher. Whatever he had stimulated me in some way. And I think that’s all you need. You need that stimulation. Stimulation to make you an individual. And the draftsmanship, hang it. If you can decently: learn to control what you can, learn to control what you have, learn to refine what you have. Damn perfection. You don’t have to be perfect. You are never going to do a Sistine Chapel, unless someone ties you to a ceiling. Damn perfection.

All a man has in this field is pressure. And I think the pressure supplies a stimulation. You have your own stresses, that will supply your own stimulation. If you want to do it, you’ll do it. And you’ll do it anyway you can.

The Crane interview from 1961 is notable for the heavy shoptalk, Crane’s unabashed patriotism, and his wonderfully intelligent awareness of both his own and his medium’s history. I’d never heard Crane’s voice before – his laconic twang fits perfectly with that plush cartooning of his. Cartoonist Verne Greene is a great and officious host. There is also a Chester Gould interview from the same series. Invaluable stuff.

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More Information Please: The Curious Case of “Boody”


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Wednesday, March 4, 2009


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I should start by saying that I’m thrilled that Craig Yoe’s Boody brings such a nice quantity of superlative material by Boody Rogers into print. After a sampling in RAW and, more recently, my own Art Out of Time, it’s time for everyone else to read more of this great cartoonist. So, I feel like a schmuck when I say the book itself, despite the usual fantastic production job by Paul Baresh, and fine design by Jacob Covey, is a disappointment. Ten years ago I suppose it would have been OK, but in these days of books like Patrick Rosenkranz’s masterful Greg Irons retrospective, Paul Karasik’s personal, insightful Fletcher Hanks book, and the whole body of work by Jeet Heer for Gasoline Alley and Little Orphan Annie, Yoe’s treatment of the material is just not acceptable.

The introduction to the book is written with a blend of fannish glee (“I’m sure as shit”) and oddball imagery (“the stories were as wild as an acre of snakes”) that deflates the comics to which it refers. When work is as “wild” as Rogers’, it’s not necessary to go the extra mile with the prose. It’s self evident. What we need is cogent analysis and solid history, both of which are sorely lacking. I want to mention a few things:

Yoe notes (with good reason, I’m sure, but since no sources are listed, it’s hard to say) that Eric Stanton was, at one point, Rogers’ assistant, but we don’t know when, where, or how, exactly. Stanton later (it must’ve been later, as Rogers left comics in the early ’50s) shared a studio with Steve Ditko. So here we have the definitive bondage/s&m cartoonist/illustrator of the latter part of the 20th century linked to two of our finest cartoonists. But that barely merits a line (and the Ditko connection isn’t even mentioned) in Yoe’s introduction. Stanton could be a hugely important factor here, linking two sui generis cartoonists — if he knows more, Yoe isn’t telling.

Yoe also claims Rogers was a great letterer, but it’s clear from reading the book that later in Rogers’ career he switched to a letraset of some kind, and his unique handwriting vanishes. Why? Also, despite Dudley’s presence in the book, that 3-issue comic book never merits a mention in the intro. What was the nature of Rogers’ work with Zack Mosely on Smilin’ Jack? I mean, when you read the strip you see Rogers all over it, so how did that partnership work? And what effect did Bill Holman have on Rogers? Throughout Babe and Sparky Watts one sees Holman-esque gags: characters in picture frames freely move in the background; signs on the street have their own gags: it’s a loopy, jam-packed menagerie of jokes. But this was not Roger’s invention, and is very much linked to his time in Chicago and his friendship with Holman, just as his action/adventure stuff is liked to Mosely. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Rogers, like Gould and Holman, and later the Hairy Who, belongs to a grand Chicago tradition of the comic grotesque. It’s a loose aesthetic but certainly the distortions at play in Rogers, Gould and Holman are not unique to them: they’re very much informed by that city and it’s own aesthetic vibe. Rogers, coming from Texas (and here we could link him to other Texan yarn-spinners and imagists gone urban and psychedelic like Gary Panter, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Gilbert Shelton, et al) also had that distinct “hillbilly” gift for punning and dialogue. Put that together with the Chicago aesthetic and you have a potent cultural/visual mix (as, for example, Panter combined it with LA and Tokyo). I’m not making these points to reduce Rogers or somehow put a formula on him, only to note that there is a broader art, comics, and cultural context at play that Yoe ignores.

And we’re also missing the basic context for Rogers’ career. The book lacks even a starter bibliography or timeline for Rogers, leaving the full arc of his time in comics a mystery. When, precisely, did he work for Mosely? When was Deadwood Gulch published? When was his final work with Columbia Comics? Hmmm? Yoe repeatedly references having gone through Rogers’ personal papers, finding photos, artwork, etc., and in his own bio refers to himself as the “Indiana Jones of comics”. Well, um, I don’t get it: What’s the point in mentioning you’ve found all this stuff if you don’t use any of it to illuminate your subject’s life and work? Or if you barely show any of it?

And then there’s the running order of the book. There is no table of contents, so it’s a little hard to navigate, but from what I can tell, many of the stories are run out of sequence. For example, the book begins with a story from Babe 1. Then the second to last story in the book is a continuation of that first story from Babe 1. But before we’ve gotten to that story, we’ve read a story from Babe #4 that references events in the second part of Babe 1. Still with me? It’s tough going. In between, natch, there are stories from Dudley and Sparky Watts, also in no particular order. Why not run stories in sequence? Or at least separate out the characters so we can better understand his distinct bodies of work. As is, there’s no rhyme or reason.

Look, Rogers made great work and Yoe has done a service just by compiling some of it. I know how these books can go, and how difficult it is to achieve a balance between scholarship and reprinting, especially with a limited page count. And I hate when people impose their own unreasonable expectations on someone else’s work. Yoe clearly was not interested in writing the kind of text that, say Heer or Rosenkranz might have, but that’s not really an excuse. These days, with all the resources and writers out there, an editor has a responsibility to his subject to make a clear, cogent case for the history and importance of the material at hand, even if it means letting someone else take a crack at it. So, I’m sure choices were made. I just happen to disagree with them, and I think the things left out of the book — basic information, in fact — ultimately sinks it as a useful document. I wish that Yoe had looked past his obvious love of the material and towards preserving Rogers’ legacy in a more articulate and informed manner.

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Books Books


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Thursday, October 11, 2007


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With all the talk about how some people think comics are too influenced by literature, it may be worth remembering that there are people in the literary world who think contemporary fiction is becoming too influenced by comics. No big point here — just that these things get kind of complicated. Personally speaking, as long as the comics work as comics and the prose works as prose, I don’t care what influences whom.

Recently, I’ve read two pretty terrific comics-inflected novels that I thought might be worth pointing out to those interested in such things.

First, Junot Díaz of Drown fame just published his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s been getting tons of great press, but I’ve been surprised that it hasn’t come up for discussion more in comics circles, because it’s probably the most comics-friendly novel I’ve ever read. There are constant references to comics past, from Clowes (one character is described as looking like he walked straight out of the pages of Eightball) to Kirby (the novel’s epigraph is right from Fantastic Four 49: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus??” [bold case and double-punctuation in the original!]).

Díaz has been fairly vocal about his regard for Gilbert Hernandez, recently saying in a Los Angeles Times profile of Hernandez, “For those of us who are writing across or on borders, I honestly think he was, for me, more important than anyone else.” That becomes readily apparent on reading the book, as allusions to Love & Rockets recur at a steady clip. The title character’s Dominican mother is repeatedly compared to Luba, both in terms of physique and personality, and her storyline (complete with gangster boyfriend and political terrorism) is obviously an extended homage to Poison River, among other Beto tales.

But it’s not just in his references that Díaz demonstrates his influence, but in the very structure of his novel, which meanders and jumps in time and circles back to fill in backstory in almost exactly the same way that the Hernandez brothers have done for so long in their Palomor and Locas sagas. Some day, a grad student’s going to have a very easy time writing a thesis about all of this.

It’s also a great, tremendously funny (and sad) novel, and Díaz runs rings around most of his contemporaries with his prose style. Anyone who loves Love & Rockets (actually anyone period) should really read this book.

The other comics-saturated novel I read this summer, Jack Womack‘s Ambient, probably doesn’t possess quite as wide an appeal, though I liked it a lot. It’s a cartoonishly violent, satirical capitalism-run-amok dystopia, sort of like Mad Max-meets-the-corporate-boardroom; Long Island has become the location of a decades-long Vietnam-style military quagmire, and lower Manhattan is filled with a punkish underclass, many of whom have mutilated themselves in a kind of impotent social protest.

Much of the imagery and tone reminds me of Gary Panter, though Womack never refers to him directly. The cartoonists Womack admits to following are Chester Gould (one of the main bad guys has a framed Dick Tracy panel on his wall), George Herriman, and Walt Kelly (the aforementioned “ambient” underclass has developed a patois-like language nearly Elizabethan in its complexity that Womack has said was inspired by the dialogue in Krazy Kat and Pogo).

Some of the elements of this novel feel a little dated now, such as a religion that worships Elvis Presley, though they undoubtedly seemed fresher when the novel was first published twenty years ago. Still I enjoyed it, and plan on checking out the rest of the series. You can probably tell based on the description whether or not this is your cup of tea moonshine.

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