{"id":1460,"date":"2010-03-18T22:37:46","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T03:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2010-03-18T22:37:46","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T03:37:46","slug":"john-stanley-notebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=1460","title":{"rendered":"John Stanley Notebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

Along with my friends Frank Young and Gail Singer<\/a>, I just recorded an Inkstuds episode devoted to John Stanley. You can listen to it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And below are some excerpts from my John Stanley notebook:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Stanley as Lulu<\/strong>. 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 \u2013 poor girls, kings, witches — and coming up with new scenarios for them to enact. Wasn\u2019t Lulu\u2019s plight the same as Stanley\u2019s? 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.<\/p>\n

Mummy as Enabler<\/strong>. Is it too much to see Melvin Monster as an allegory about child abuse? Melvin\u2019s 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\u2019s nickname for the God of organized religion: Nobodaddy). Melvin\u2019s 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\u2019s situation. That\u2019s the way it often is with abusive families: one parent is violent, the other a blinkered or self-deceived enabler.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ma and Dad<\/strong>. In Stanley\u2019s stories when a kid is trouble there is only one person to cry for: \u201cMa!\u201d Fathers are either violent (Baddy) or ineffectual and subject to suspicion (Mr. Moppet).<\/p>\n

The Arc of Stanley\u2019s Career<\/strong>. With Stanley\u2019s peers \u2013 Kurtzman, Barks, Eisner, Kirby \u2013 we have a sense of the trajectory of their careers, the ups and downs, what the major works were as well as the artistic dead-ends (i.e., Kurtzman\u2019s Little Annie Fanny<\/em>). With Stanley we\u2019re only now, thanks to the reprints from various publishers and the plethora of online stories as well as the excellent analysis of Frank Young, getting a sense of what his career was like. But we\u2019re still mostly working in the dark, hazarding guesses. Little Lulu and Tubby stand out as his major work, and I\u2019d say Thirteen Going on Eighteen<\/em> is a close second.<\/p>\n

Part of the difficulty of evaluating Stanley\u2019s career is he maintained a consistently high quality, with very few drops. Unlike Barks, we can\u2019t pinpoint what the good years of Stanley were (1949-1954 in the case of Barks, especially with the 10 pagers in Walt Disney Comics and Stories<\/em>). Some Stanley stories are outstanding (\u201cFive Little Babies\u201d from Little Lulu<\/em> #38, available in the Spiegelman\/Mouly Toon Treasury<\/em> is probably his single greatest work). And some of the work is inferior \u2013 I\u2019m not a fan of most of the Nancy stories which seem haphazard and lackadaisical (except when they feature Oona Goosepimple). And around issue 94 of Lulu<\/em> he seemed to lose heart, at least for a little bit. But the rest of the work has an even keel that is both admirable and a bit off-putting (at least if you are a critic; it\u2019s great for readers). It\u2019s hard to point to any group of stories and say, \u201cHere is the core of Stanley.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stanley\u2019s M.O.:<\/strong> Stanley had a consistent method which was to look at an existing genre and ask, \u201chow would this look if it were done right.\u201d Thus he looked at teen comics and came up with Dunc & Loo<\/em>, as well as Thirteen Going on Eighteen<\/em> (or as I call it, \u201cBetty and Veronica done by an intelligent writer\u201d). Stanley looked at horror and came up with Ghost Stories<\/em> and Tales from the Tomb<\/em>, at the monster craze and came up with Melvin Monster<\/em>, at Richie Rich and came up with O.G. Whiz<\/em>. This would argue for the modesty of his goals. Stanley was a journeyman cartoonist.<\/p>\n

Journeyman<\/strong>. If Stanley were just a \u201cjourneyman\u201d cartoonist, he was the greatest journeyman cartoonist who ever lived. He brought to perfection a type of modest, anonymous, professional cartooning, something that has disappeared from the world. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Hard to Parody.<\/strong> Evidence of Stanley\u2019s modest craft can be seen in how hard he is to parody, compared to such visual showmen as Eisner or Kirby. Even as towering a cartoonist as Justin Green couldn\u2019t do it. Green did a Lulu parody for Bijou Funnies<\/em> which wasn\u2019t very good at all, and is actually much more dated than Stanley\u2019s work. Howard Cruse\u2019s Lulu parody is also weak tea. The great exception is R. Sikoryak\u2019s mash-up of Hawthorne with the Stanley\/Tripp Lulu. The great merit of Sikoryak\u2019s work, aside from his perfect as usually visual imitation, is that the plot of The Scarlett Letter<\/em> does indeed echo the guilt-and-suspicion family psychodrama of Stanley\u2019s stories where Tubby is a detective.<\/p>\n

The Class War.<\/strong> Stanley\u2019s people are middling types, threatened on one side by the rich (Wilbur Van Snobbe in the Lulu stories) and on the other side by violent plebes (the West Side Boys). This middling position makes their lives precarious. They have a fear of falling into the proletarian class but also resentment towards the snooty rich.<\/p>\n

Humor and Horror<\/strong>. Humor and Horror are closely aligned in Stanley\u2019s work. The horror stories of the early 1960s are only slightly more earnest variations of the tales Lulu would tell Alvin. The great Tubby story \u201cThe Guest in the Ghost Hotel\u201d (available in the Toon Treasury<\/em>) could, with a minor change of key, be a horror story. Laughter is always a way of warding off unease.<\/p>\n

Like a Dream. <\/strong>Douglas Glover: “The best novels are like dreams. They come out of the silence of the page like a dream…Like dreams, novels are available to interpretation; the best novels have a central luminous mystery at their core, which tempts generations upon generations of critics and readers to find new structures and meanings beyond the surface of the words.” (From\u00a0 Branko Gorjup’s White Gloves of the Doorman: The Works of Leon Rooke,<\/em> page. 244).\u00a0Many of Stanley’s stories have a dream logic to them, stories where characters find themselves inappropriately dressed or half-naked in public places (“Five Little Babies” or a Thirteen <\/em>story where Val sleepwalks through the city), stories where characters try to get to school on time or meet another deadline but are constantly delayed by unexpected events, stories where unlikely embarrasing events keep escalating. Stanley must have had a rich dream life, and he wrote like a dream.<\/p>\n

Progeny.<\/strong> Who are Stanley\u2019s artistic heirs? Crumb. Seth. Carol Tyler. Justin Green. Lynn Johnston. Howard Cruse. Jaime Hernandez. Gilbert Hernandez. Kevin Huizenga. Maybe Lynda Barry \u2013 I\u2019m not absolutely sure. She\u2019s too young to have read Stanley\u2019s Lulu but maybe she read some of his 1960s work. All in all, a worthy tribe.<\/p>\n

Stanley motifs<\/strong>. A few recurring things: days at the beach, rainy days, umbrellas, rowboats, screaming.<\/p>\n

Recurring character types<\/strong>. Catchers and collectors (dog catchers, butterfly collectors, monster collectors, truant officers); bewitching girls who are probably no good for you (Oona Goosepimple, Little Horror, Gloria); fat kids; snooty rich people.<\/p>\n

More Stanley notes.<\/strong> See here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: \u00a0Stanley 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 \u2013 poor girls, kings, witches — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[83,454,472,554,591,700,1319],"class_list":["post-1460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-audio","tag-frank-young","tag-gail-singer","tag-heer-notebook","tag-inkstuds","tag-j-stanley","tag-toon-treasury"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}