The Search for Smilin Ed! by Kim Deitch, a book worthy of attention

As Evan Dorkin and others have mentioned, we’ve had a flood of good (and sometimes jaw-droppingly great) books that haven’t received anywhere near the recognition that they deserve. In response to this sad situation, I’m going to start a feature called PAY ATTENTION, devoted to recent, new and forthcoming books that deserve to be singled out.

The question of why books get ignored is worth puzzling out. Some personal reflections might be in order: when I worked on the first Walt and Skeezix book, I wasn’t sure how it would be received and was pleasantly shocked at the number of reviews it got, often in very prominent places (Playboy, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.) It wasn’t just the number of reviews and their high-visibility that was gratifying. A surprisingly large number of the reviews were very thoughtful and responsive to King’s work.

So why did the first Walt and Skeezix do so well in the public notice sweepstakes? A lion’s share of the credit has to go to the fact that Peggy Burns has claims to be the most talented publicist in comics. Chris Ware’s eye-popping design on the book played no small part in making it a volume that couldn’t be ignored, as did the stellar production work of the D&Q staff. But part of the story is also one of timing. We were early in the reprints game. The complete Peanuts series and the Krazy & Ignatz series had already started, which gave a context for people to understand the book. But there wasn’t a lot of other competition around. Frank King had the novelty factor going for him since no one had seen those daily strips in decades.

I understand why subsequent Walt and Skeezix books, even the spectacular Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, haven’t gotten the same amount of attention. Such is the way of the world: reviewers and editors of book reviews feel, quite properly, that valuable media space should be given to fresh projects being launched rather than a continuing series.

But more frustrating has been the relative lack of attention for subsequent reprint series that I think also deserve notice: The Captain Easy book (which was the first time those Sundays had ever been presented properly), the Doug Wright book that Seth and Brad Mackay did, the King Aroo book that Dean Mullaney and Bruce Caswell put together.

Of course the relative lack of attention to these books is simply an outgrowth of what is otherwise a happy situation, the oft-remarked fact that we are living in the golden age of comics reprints. There are so many good books out there that it’s hard to keep track of everything. The sheer abundance of material is hard not just on reviewers but also readers: I think it’s taking people time to process all these books, which in their entirety are reshaping how we see the history of comics. So it’s no surprise that artists that are a little bit quirkier or off-the-beaten-path aren’t being immediately absorbed. But I’m hoping this isn’t a permanent situation and that Doug Wright and Jack Kent will, in time, have a larger presence in the comics conversation.

So which books over the last few years have deserved attention but didn’t receive it? Off the top of my head I’d say:

The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective by Patrick Rosenkranz.

The Search for Smilin Ed! By Kim Deitch – a delight not just because it gives us one of Deitch’s most deranged meandering tall tales but also because the whole handsome package was designed to highlight the cohesiveness of Deitch’s world-making project, the way his fictional universe and its large cast make up a single unfolding story.

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (McSweeney’s edition). Another example of classic underground art that deserves a second look thanks to the excellence of presentation. The work, of course, is a classic but the new format really foregrounds the rough-hewn, nervous passion of Green’s art.

The Complete Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty. Again, classic material made to look new by being shot from original art. Because of Moriarty’ s background in painting, his work has a tactile reality that most comics lack: the sheer physical effort of the mark making is part of the art itself.

This is just the list that comes to mind from looking at my bookshelf. I’m sure Comics Comics readers have other suggestions. So, fire away in the comments section.

Patrick Rosenkranz’s The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective is a companion of sorts to his previous book on Greg Irons and of course his Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975. What makes The Artist Himself unique is in the title itself — Rosenkranz has constructed a sprawling portrait of Rand Holmes as a man in conflict with the “the artist himself” — a man trying to carve out a way to live that allowed for art (never an easy feat) and an art that somehow made sense in his life.

Holmes (1942-2002) begins as a somewhat lost teenager from a difficult home finding his way in then-isolated and rugged Edmonton, Alberta. He learns self-sufficiency outdoors, falls into hot rod culture, and finds his voice in cartooning. In telling this story Rosenkranz opens up a world — we hear from Holmes’ childhood friends, learn about the ragged car culture of time (and here, again, Rosenkranz excels at describing hot rod life, and how it readily lent itself, to visual art and the nurturing of eccentric talent; see: Robert Williams, et al, for more), and slowly roll into the nascent counter culture, which Holmes finds in the pages of the Vancouver underground paper Georgia Straight. “What happened next”, Rosenkranz writes, “was what you might expect from a fish too big for its pond. In 1968 Holmes saw Zap #2 … Holmes summed up his exodus from Edmonton a few years later: ‘In 1968 my brother turned me onto pyschedelics. I woke up, left my wife and job and split for the West Coast, grew my hair down to my ass, moved into a communal house and vowed to never again do anything I didn’t want to do, especially for money. After I made that simple decision I was suddenly free.’” A “simple decision”, maybe, but as Rosenkranz deftly shows over the remaining three hundred pages of the book, a choice with extreme consequences for the artist’s life and the family he left behind. The author does not left Holmes off easily — he reckons with Holmes’ sometimes self-destructive willfulness, his tendency to wile away an afternoon playing the banjo in the sun, and the problems that come with attempted utopias.

In his work Holmes switched from hot rod cartoons (his funky one-pages for Pete Millar’s CarToons are reprinted here) to Wally Wood-inflected stories, finding the most success with his hippy manque Harold Hedd. We next learn a great deal about Georgia Straight and the hippy culture of Vancouver (all news to me, natch), which is all the more striking because Holmes was alone in his comics. I’d always thought of Holmes as a marginal figure in the underground, despite his exquisite draftsmanship, but I had no idea just how marginal. He didn’t visit San Francisco until 1972, long after the peak (and at the edge of the nadir) of the underground and he swiftly returned to Canada with a few contacts but little sign of the kind of the kind of camaraderie that otherwise is so much a part of the mainline underground story. Fortunately Holmes seems to have been an avid diarist and pretty consistent correspondent with his publishers and friends. So month-by-month and year-by-year we’re privy to his life as he constructs it, which, in published form becomes the most detailed account yet of the mechanics and finances of how a second tier underground artist published and (sort of) survived in a sinking medium. Instead of the usual tale of cartoonist-as-misfit to cartoonist-as-peer to cartoonist-as-success we get a story about one particular cartoonist living a highly individual life on the margins of one culture, but deeply embedded in a life of his own making in places and cultures that, while obviously rich with history and meaning, simply aren’t covered very much (or at all) in a comics context.

There is little inside-comics talk here because, frankly, Holmes wasn’t really so engaged with the medium beyond his own work. He did his thing, and that seems to have been that. He of course knew his EC and such but he was clearly somewhere else most of the time. The work itself, amply reprinted, is good, sometimes great 1970s and ’80s narrative-driven comics in the yarn-spinning Gilbert Shelton tradition. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I am most fond of his single images, like his gag cartoons for the sex tabloid Vancouver Star, his elegant EC-inflected comic book covers, and his highly detailed tableaux for White Lunch Comix and Tales from the Berkeley-Con.

In 1982 Holmes and his second wife, Martha, moved to remote Lasqueti Island, BC to build his own home and make his own art on his terms. At the time the island economy still worked on a barter system, and Rosenkranz reproduces generous amounts of journal entries, plans, and photographs detailing a rugged, sometimes frightening life in the wilderness. But Lasqueti was where Holmes found a measure of peace — where he stayed and painted and drew some more comics, including the incredibly fun “Hitler’s Cocaine” epic and where he eventually passed away in 2002.

Holmes’ last two decades are unexpectedly affecting. As the narrative delves into Holmes’ homesteading and hunting for food, I began to realize the real meaning of the artist’s youthful vow and precariousness of trying to balance a particular kind of life with a particular kind of art. And aside from the obvious benefits of learning about Holmes, I found myself selfishly drawing tremendous inspiration from Rosenkranz as he demonstrated the richness possible in writing the history of comics. He draws the curtain back as if to say, “see, here’s someone you hardly think of, who lived an extraordinary life, and it’s a life that must be reckoned with in the history.” It radically broadens what we think of as a cartoonist’s life, and in that Rosenkranz has given us a great gift.

* A cover story and interview with the mysterious Shaky Kane

* A package on legendary Topps man (and not-so-secret comics guru) Woody Gelman, drawing on research from Patrick Rosenkranz and featuring Art Spiegelman

* An editorial on the declining profile of traditional comic books by Sammy Harkham

* Giant comics and illustrations from Dan Zettwoch, Mike Reddy, and Jon Vermilyea

* Brian Chippendale on all the latest superhero comics

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch on Gerald Jablonski

* Aragones-style marginal comics from PShaw!

* An exploration of Kentaro Miura‘s totally bonkers manga Berserk

* A list from an anonymous but highly regarded cartoonist

* Contributions from Eamon Espey and Benjamin Marra

* More!