Anyone out there have a copy of Fantagraphics book Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me: Crumb letters 1958-1977? If you also have a scanner and are willing to scan and send me a page I need from the book, please email me. Thanks!
UPDATE: I’ve received several kind offers on this request, so no longer need assistance. Thanks to all who replied.
Back in July I appeared on the Michael Coren show as part of the semi-regular arts panel. During the show I talked a bit about my Orphan Annie research. You can see the show by clicking on here. The Annie discussion starts at about 30 minutes into the show.
Hajdu's Ten-Cent Plague
Below is my review of Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, which originally ran in the Globe and Mail on March 22, 2008. After the review there is a brief post-script.
THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
By David Hajdu
Books, if Ray Bradbury is to be trusted, burn at a temperature of Fahrenheit 451; old comic books, printed as they were on cheap newsprint, are easier to kindle. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, thousands of American kids discovered just how flammable comic books could be. Egged on by parents, teachers and such guardians of piety and patriotism as the Catholic Church and the American Legion, countless children (sometimes willingly, but often reluctantly) participated in schoolyard re-enactments of the Bonfire of the Vanities, setting aflame horror and crime comic books that allegedly had the power to corrupt their young innocence and transform them into juvenile delinquents. (It is highly probable that among the comics burned were copies of the EC Comics series Weird Science-Fantasy, which, appropriately enough, published adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories.)
Readers of E.C. Segar will know the characters Alice the Goon and George W. Geezil, who shared the stage of Thimble Theatre with stars like Popeye and Olive Oyl. In his collection Dove Legend (Porcupine’s Quill, 2001), the great Canadian poet Richard Outram wrote an unexpected love poem devoted to the pair. Here is Outram’s “Diapason in Thimble Theatre” (with commentary after the poem).
The new Love and Rockets
WARNING. Normally I wouldn’t put in a spoiler warning for a few blog notes, but this is a special case. I’m going to be talking about Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, which contains what is arguably one of the best comics stories ever, Jaime Hernandez’s “Browntown” (along with the stories “The Love Bunglers Part One” and “The Love Bunglers Part Two” which are essential accompaniments to the main tale). These stories are built around a series of unfolding surprises. The best way, really the only way, to appreciate them is to read them. It’s essential that any commentary be read after encountering the stories. So please go out there and read Jaime’s stories in this volume (and also Gilbert’s two stories) and then come back and read these notes.
Wolk's Reading Comics
A few of my older reviews for various newspapers are no longer easily available. So to give them a somewhat more permanent home, I’m going to be posting them here, sometimes with a few words of after-thoughts.
Below is my review of Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics, from the Globe and Mail, July 21, 2007. After the review, I have a post-script written now.
Clowes's Wilson
As soon as Clowes’s new graphic novel was published I read it one gulp. But I didn’t want to write about it immediately away because it’s a book that deserved careful and slow re-reading. I’ve gone back to it often. Here are a few notes.
Initial impact. It’s hard not to fall into clichéd language of book reviewing: Wilson hit me like a punch in the stomach. Wilson is such a great character. He takes misanthropy to a new height while remaining all too humanly frail. The phrase “painfully funny” gets thrown around but I think Clowes reached a new limit in telling a story that is both hilarious but also sad and harrowing.
Reid Fleming: Working Class Hero
1. In the R. Crumb Handbook, the creator of Mr. Natural writes: “Some of the other comics that Charles and I liked, Heckle and Jeckle, Super Duck, things of that ilk, featured very primitive stories on the crudest proletarian level….The super-hero comics of the 1940s also had this rough, working class quality. A cartoonist like Jack Kirby is a perfect example. His characters – Captain America, for instance – were an extension of himself. Kirby was a tough little guy from the streets of New York’s lower east side, and he and he saw the world in terms of harsh, elemental, forces. How do you deal with these forces? You fight back! This was the message of all the comic strips created during the Great Depression of the 1930s, from Popeye to Dick Tracy to Superman.” Crumb as usual is right: I’d add that the anti-comics movement of the 1940s and 1950s had a class dimension as well. Genteel, middle-class Americans were shocked by the plebian violence, crude sexuality and general spirit of irreverence of the early comic books.
For me, and I admit I have specialized taste, the best news coming out San Diego was the announcement that Fantagraphics is going to reprinting Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse comic strips, which really was during the 1930s one of the great adventure strips. This will be hard for anyone who hasn’t read Gottfredson’s work to believe, but his Mickey Mouse was as rousing as Roy Crane’s Captain Easy and as rich in invention as Barks’ longer Duck stories.
Given the track record of Fanta’s excellent design and editorial team, I’m confident that Gottfredson is in good hands. A word of advice: I’d suggest that Fanta recruit Kevin Huizenga to write an intro for one of these books. Huizenga has a keen appreciation for Gottfredson’s cartooning, as can be seen in this tribute page from Or Else #3. Huizenga, by the way, is completely right about Gottfredson’s profusive use of sweat drops. Gottfredson must have been the sweatiest cartoonist ever (close second: Dan Clowes).
1. In 1947 Stan Lee was virtually unknown, except to the few perverse readers who paid attention to the credit lines of 3rd rate knock-off comics. But Marshall McLuhan, who himself was years away from fame, had a great radar for what was happening in popular culture. He noted a 1947 issue of Writer’s Digest where Lee wrote an article arguing “There’s Money In Comics” (which turned out to be very true for Lee, although much less true for Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko). In his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan used Lee’s article as a jumping off point for talking about middle- and low- brow art.
