Author Archive

Right Comics, Wrong Format: Sugar and Spike


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Tuesday, January 11, 2011


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Normally I’d be overjoyed at the news that DC comics is at long last doing a book reprinting Sugar and Spike, the delightful kids comics Sheldon Mayer started in 1956  and continued working on till 1992. Chronicling the misadventures of two talking babies (who can communicate with each other and other kids but not adults), Sugar and Spike hasn’t received the critical acclaim doled out to Carl Barks or John Stanley, but the series has a real sweetness to it that is worth cherishing.

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Newsflash: New Seth Graphic Novel


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Thursday, January 6, 2011


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Wimbledon Green will be back.

I don’t know why this hasn’t gotten more attention, but a few days ago Bryan Munn reported the happy news that a new Seth graphic novel will be coming out later this year. It’s a prequel to Wimbledon Green, offering a look at the early days of The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. I suspect that the work Seth has done researching the lives of Jimmy Frise, Doug Wright and other classic Canadian cartoonists might inform this work. In any case, this is certainly a title to add to the growing “books to look forward to” list.

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Pay Attention: Late-Period Ditko


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Tuesday, January 4, 2011


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A Ditko Act

Over the last few years, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Steve Ditko’s legacy, thanks in no small part to the various books written and/or edited by Blake Bell and Craig Yoe. This is all to the good: Ditko is, to my mind at least, one of the four or five most imaginative and path breaking visual artists ever to work in the commercial comic book field (the others, for what it’s worth, are Kirby, Kurtzman, and Toth). What tends to get forgotten, though, is the fact that Ditko, unlike the other masters, is still alive and in fact very busy.

Steve Ditko is 83 years old. In the last year he’s produced at least 150 pages of new comics (published by Robin Synder in the series A Ditko Act). By any reasonable measure, this venerable cartoonist much more prolific than many artists 60 years his junior. It’s unfortunate that late-period Ditko tends to be ignored by all but the most hard-core fans. Of course, Ditko himself is partially to blame, since these latest stories follow in the trajectory of his Mr. A work in being both forbiddingly didactic and shorn of any reader-friendly cordiality.  As befits a man of his ideological purity, Ditko demands to be taken on his own terms. And increasingly, Ditko’s visual vocabulary has an abstract and hermetic quality that makes it look like an alien script, one without a Rosetta Stone to help us decipher it. Ditko’s dialogue is also unique: more and more it has a telegraphic quality whereby information is conveyed in short phrasal bursts that don’t resemble anything close to human speech.

The most interesting thing about late-period Ditko how relentlessly stylized it is, achieving a level of cartooning abstraction almost worthy of Sterrett or Rege. To be sure, Ditko has long had a covert passion for abstraction — think of the weird backgrounds in his Doctor Strange stories. But late-period Ditko takes this tendency to a radical extreme. Artists late in life, Irving Howe once suggested, have a tendency to give up all that they no longer need, to offer up art that is unshorn and pure and blunt. I’m not sure if that is generally true but Ditko would make a good case study.

I’m not the writer to do justice to late-period Ditko  — it requires someone more steeped in his career and the history of mainstream comics than I am. But I will say that I hope some smart critic – Matt Seneca comes to mind, or my formidable blog-mate Jog – will look at this stuff and try to explain it. It’s  too interesting to remain the terra incognito of comics. I have a hunch at in the future there will be a general rediscovery of late-period Ditko, just as there has been an upward reappraisal of late-period Kirby.

Steve Ditko's The Madman (From A Ditko Act)

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Pay Attention: David Collier’s Chimo


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Tuesday, December 28, 2010


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Excerpt from David Collier's Chimo

If the past is prologue David Collier’s new book Chimo, which will be widely available in early 2011, will probably receive far less attention than it deserves. For me, the four great Canadian cartoonists are Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet and David Collier. Of the four, Collier has received the least praise and press. So it’s worth inquiring what makes Collier’s work so special and also ask why his appeal, so far at least, has been limited.

Thanks to the Beguiling, I got an early look at Chimo and it has all the peculiar qualities that distinguish Collier’s output. The book is a free-ranging memoir that deals with Collier’s life-long relationship with the army. He joined up in the 1980s when he was in his 20s. He initially did only a few years and then became a full-time cartoonist. Launching his eponymous comic book series Collier’s was published by Fantagraphics in 1991.  But more recently Collier rejoined the army, in part to participate in the Canadian War Artists Program but also to work as a regular soldier.

Collier has already done a few stories about his soldiering career but Chimo offers the most extensive account yet, and is his longest sustained narrative, clocking in at over a hundred pages (with samples of Collier’s earlier military cartooning filling out the book). (more…)

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Pay Attention: A New Feature


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Friday, December 24, 2010


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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.

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High School Confidential


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Wednesday, December 15, 2010


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Teddy Shearer cartoon.

Will Eisner went there, as did James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. Bob Kane went there, as did Bert Lancaster and George Cukor. Bill Finger went there, as did Neil Simon and Lionel Trilling. Stan Lee went there as did Stanley Kramer and Irving Howe.

DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx has a storied past as a hothouse incubator of all sorts of artistic talent, in both comics and elsewhere. So I was delighted to find a website that reprints material from the schools literary magazine from 1929-1941. Go there and see the juvenilia of James Baldwin, Stanley Kauffman and Robert Warshow, among others. For comics fans, of especial interest will be the cartoons of Teddy Shearer and Mel Casson.

Speaking of Warshow, I’ll remind everyone of something Tim usefully pointed out awhile back, that Warshow’s brilliant essay “Paul, The Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham” is available online. It’s a central document for discussing comics history.

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Read CNQ


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Wednesday, December 8, 2010


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Front half of Seth's wrap-around cover, CNQ 80

The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries (CNQ) is now on stands and, as with the last issue, there is much in it of interest for comics fans. Seth’s design work, which premiered in the previous issue, really gels this time around. The writer Kerry Clare recently enthused that CNQ is “is the most beautifully designed magazine in the world right now, and I’m not even exaggerating.” Like the best recent graphic novels, the entire magazine hangs together visually as a total package.

Among the comics related items of interest: a gorgeous Doug Wright scene from Juniper Junction (a very different strip than Nipper or Doug Wright’s Family); Joe Ollmann’s adaptation of Marian Engel’s Bear, a novel about ursine love; and a new Seth strip featuring Hudson and Stanfield (a strip that is intriguingly linked to earlier Seth book). The wrap-around cover that Seth did is much lovelier than the little snapshot I’ve provided here.

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That New Polly and Her Pals Book


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Wednesday, December 8, 2010


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Cliff Sterrett's Polly from 1924, the year before he went wild.

As Jog mentioned yesterday, there’s a new collection of Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals hitting comic book stores today. I wrote the introduction to it, so I risk becoming a Stan Lee type self-promoter if I say too much about it. But really, of the many books I’ve had a hand in, this is high up there as among the best. My introduction runs to 8,000 words and discusses Sterrett’s career in greater depth than anyone else has before. Dean Mullaney and Lorraine Turner had done a stellar job in putting the book together, especially in the care that went into reproducing the strips. The book itself doesn’t just cover Sterrett’s peak years as a creator, but also well-selected samples of the first dozen years of Polly Sunday pages, all of which are impeccably drawn even though they lack that extra edge of crazy energy that Sterrett gained when he decided to compete with Herriman for the laurel of being the greatest comic strip modernist.

For more on Sterret, you can read this nifty article by Jo Colvin about the cartoonist’s roots in Alexandra, Minnesota.

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Hignite on Jaime Hernandez


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Thursday, December 2, 2010


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Moebius clouds in Jaime Hernandez's first Locas story.

I recently read some fairly depressing essays about the Hernandez Brothers, pieces that were so ill-informed that I despaired of “comics criticism” as a valid activity. To cheer myself up I went back to Todd Hignite’s The Art of Jaime Henandez: The Secrets of Life and Death. Beautifully designed by Jordon Crane, filled to the gill with original art and photographs, this has been justly celebrated as an art book. But I’m not sure that Hignite’s writing has received the praise it deserves.

Taken just by itself, Hignite’s text is a wonderfully compact monograph which manages to compress many insights into a small package. The book covers, among other things, Jaime’s family background, the influence of classic commercial comics on his art, his interactions with punk music and lowrider culture, the context of the direct market, and the evolution of Jaime’s art and storytelling.

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Tisserand Talks Sterrett and Herriman


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Friday, November 26, 2010


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Michael Tisserand, who is working on a biography of George Herriman, grew up in Alexandria, Minnesota. As it happens, Alexandra is also where, many decades before Tisserand arrived on the scene, Cliff Sterrett grew up. Michael was recently back home for the holidays and during his trip he was interviewed for a local radio station about his Herriman research and also about the upcoming Polly and Her Pals, which should be out shortly from IDW. You can listen to the interview here. To hear Michael talk, you have to fast forward till the 32nd minute or so of the hour long show (unless you wanted to hear about the local theater’s production of “Little Women”).

Michael mentioned to me that he wasn’t expecting to answer the questions about comic strip history that got thrown at him, so he go a few things wrong because he was caught off guard (i.e., he forgot the fact the color supplements preceeded the black and white strips). So I hope none of the nerds on this blog get too pedantic with him. But the conversation is really rich in Alexandria lore relating to Sterrett and there are good tidbits about Herriman as well. I wrote the introduction to the new Polly book and I wish I had had some of these bits of texture when I was writing my introduction (I’ll put them in the next Sterrett book). So I encourage comics history buffs to listen. As a bonus, the whole interview is conducted in a lilt and lingo strongly  reminiscent of the movie Fargo (set, of course, in a neighboring state).  Interestingly as Michael notes this is the same neck of the woods that gave us not only Sterrett but also Frank King and Charles Schulz. So give it a listen.

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