In sorting my New Yorkers, which had to be trundled in from all the different rooms where they had taken up residence (and I still can’t find the June 5, 2001 issue), I found that my favorite cover artist was by far Edward Sorel, whose graceful if insecure line is endowed with assurance through his masterful use of color. Forget Steadman, Searle, and Roth; the man who really needs a retrospective of his sloppy-but-sure illustration work is Sorel. Spiegelman comes in second as a matter of course, but his work often irritates me (aside from his routine courting of controversy, which often seems more important to him than the actual merits of the work) because of his lack of a readily identifiable style. With a Spiegelman cover, I always have to look at the signature. Floc’h, Sempé, and the occasional import from the sequential realm like Eric Drooker or Chris Ware round off my favorites.
(I feel as though I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the other New Yorker cartoonists whose work I vastly enjoy. Bruce Eric Kaplan is, in my mind, the only Dada cartoonist in the magazine, with his absurdist puns and hypnotic compositions. Charles Barsotti is a continually-renewing marvel, a sort of Jack Kent channelled by Keith Haring. A new drawing by Steig or Booth is like coming across a ten-dollar bill in your change jar when you desperately need a quarter. And then there are the illustrators, often dull and by-the-numbers but with moments of startling verve. Aside from Istvan Banyai and Edwin Fotheringay (both extreme stylists who constitute a guilty pleasure), my favorite moments are coming across the neo-craftsmen of alternative comics like Seth, Tony Millionaire, and Adrian Tomine in “Goings On About Town.”)
* * *
I still have about a third of the new Krazy & Ignatz book left to read, a circumstance from which I derive no small pleasure. Aside from the merely sensuous aspect (the book even smells beautiful), it has been a revelation. In fact, the reading of the first two-thirds marks the first time I have been able to “get” Krazy Kat, insofar as it is among the things in this world which can be got. God knows I’ve tried before, too: that big volume co-edited by Patrick McDonnell has been subject to numerous raids on its contents, none of which came away with anything more useful than a basic knowledge of the strip’s premise. But this!
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been delving into the work of the two other greatest strip artists of the Twenties, Cliff Sterrett and Milt Gross. (Following Ann Douglas in her mostly-great book Terrible Honesty, about New York in the 1920s, I’m using that decade as an anchor for much that unfolded later: Gross continued into the 1950s, but that manic, pre-Depression vaudeville aura never left his work.) Spiegelman once made an excellent analogy: Krazy Kat as a blues cousin of the white-jazz Polly and Her Pals, a Surrealist Bessie Smith to the Cubist Bix Biederbicke. In that case, Gross completes the triangle of Twenties popular music as the primal Jewish vaudeville barnstormer, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice and the Marx Brothers all rolled into a cross-eyed scribble of happy insanity. Remarkably, even that racial analogy holds up, for both Sterrett and Biederbicke were Scandinavian Midwesterners, while Herriman’s birth certificate read “Negro.”
Comics, as a whole, is short on primal images. Few single strips, cartoons, or stories are so representative of anything in particular that they deserve to be pointed out. Comics’ impact, unlike that of nearly every other art form, is in the aggregate. The exception that destroys the rule is Cliff Sterrett. You know which one I mean. It’s the Sunday Polly from January 30, 1926: Paw gets two drinks for Maw and Polly at a concert. It is, in absolute bald fact, the only single Sunday strip in all of comics that, had Sterrett never drawn another line, would still canonize its creator as one of the great geniuses of 1920s commercial art, the equal if not better of Frans Masereel, John Held, Jr., Lynd Ward, Rockwell Kent, Miguel Covarrubias, Ralph Barton, and, yes, George Herriman. It could be parsed to a sweat-drop-squiggle and remain supreme as the greatest evocation of the spirit of the 1920s ever put to paper.
And then there’s Milt Gross. I was lucky enough to discover a two-dollar paperback copy of He Done Her Wrong before I was even weaned from Kurt Busiek, and it destroyed forever any idolization of the Eisner-Kurtzman-Kirby triumvirate I might later have been tempted to when I discovered that comic books had a “long and glorious tradition.” Gross did this in 1930, forty-five years before A Contract with God, thirty years before Fantastic Four, and twenty years before Mad. His freewheeling fancy adapted easily, even joyously, to long-form sequential art, and he combined things that had never been combined before: the antic slapstick of newspaper comics, the iconography and sheer length of woodcut novels, the detailed caricature of magazine illustration and masterful pacing of a Buster Keaton short—Gross, freed from panels and page limits, invented the cartoon graphic novel.
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I’ve had the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics for a long time now—and it seems like longer, because as a kid I used to check it out almost weekly from the Central Library in downtown Phoenix. (Early warning signs not nipped in the bud; result, comics geek.) But I only recently acquired the Smithsonian Collection of Comic-Book Comics, and appropriately enough, it took an in-library reading of the No Checkout copy to force my hand.
Oddly enough, George Carlson’s efforts are still as mystifying as when I last read them at the age of ten (if these are comics for kids, the kids in question must have a better education than any American grade-school brat has received in forty years). Meanwhile, Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly just sings with Depression-era optimism, a strip that is in fact more literate, better-drawn, funnier, and more engaging than anything else that would be published in comic books until Cole, Beck, and Wolverton hit their strides. Mayer’s elegant line recalls a whole host of greats, including Roy Crane, E. C. Segar, Harold Gray, and Frank King, but he was also young enough to adapt his strip-founded style to the dynamics of the comic book, resulting in the most compulsively readable comic book work I’ve seen. Ever. I wonder how I could go about forcing DC to reprint the entirety of the Scribbly and related strips in nice volumes that are subject to neither the pricetag nor the enforced ugliness of their damned Archives. It could, in fact, be considered a sort of Kavalier and Clay from the ground floor. Scribbly: A Cartoonist’s Life. Why am I not in charge of the universe?
Did I just say that Scribbly is the most compulsively readable comic book ever? I lied. It’s the second most compulsively readable. First place goes to John Stanley, and I don’t mean Little Lulu. I’ve never been able to grow fond of that cookie-cutter artwork, though the stories are, naturally enough, wonderful. When Stanley finished his own drawings, however, magic happened. Thirteen Going on Eighteen and Melvin Monster are two of the best cartooning manuals this side of killing Los Bros. Hernandez and eating their hearts to gain their powers. The austere simplicity of his brushwork, so simple on the page yet so impossible to replicate, makes Stanley the funnybook version of “Sparky” Schulz, whose characters could never be ghosted. And my God! but Stanley had more wit than he knew what to do with. The back-and-forths between Val and Evie, Val and Judy, Judy and the world, are wisecracks worthy of Anita Loos; not until the The Simpsons hit its stride would American television approach the rapid-fire wittiness of a standard John Stanley comic book.
* * *
Crackpot theories swarm about the Internet like mosquitos in a malaria-infested swamp. One of the more entertaining I’ve read recently is that everyone who reads comics as an adult was either sickly or father-deprived or both during their childhood. Obviously, even Frederick Wertham could debunk that theory with one hand tied behind his back; still, it’s as good a jumping-off point as any to mention that I only got into comic books in a major way after I was in college. (My father was always around; I was rarely sick. I was, however, a bookworm, and no doubt would have been into comics as a kid if I’d had money or known where to get them. As it was, I haunted the 741 shelves in the library and covered sheets of tracing paper with Pogo characters.) Interestingly enough, my point of entry for the world of comic books was DC’s Justice League titles circa 1995; specifically, something called the “Judgement Day” storyline that killed off a minor character named Ice. (Her best friend, wracked with survivor’s guilt, was named—what else?—Fire.) It was, and remains, a loathsome, driveling collection of asinine characterization, obscenely incompetent artwork, and cynical, greed-fueled exploitation of the pathetic interest of atrophied intellects in what had, decades before, been an interesting concept. I was captivated.
There were, in the small Illinois town where I went to college, four places where one could purchase comics: three comics shops, and one bookstore/trinket market that also had several hundred long boxes worth of mostly-crappy comics to get rid of, nearly all published since 1984. For two years, that was my comics diet. I became fascinated with the corporate superhero, the complex iconography and stunted rationality of DC’s “post-Crisis” universe. I engaged in online debates over Grant Morrison’s treatment of DC Universe history in JLA. There is a splendid, homey stratum of comics fandom that exists somewhere between “who would win in a fight, Superman or Hulk?” and “Dude, Strangers in Paradise is really good,” a stratum where one can, with a straight face, bewail the 90s’ impoverishment of the Metal Men or talk reasonably and approvingly about the early issues of John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad.
I’m not particularly interested in the running debate on the merits, or lack thereof, of superhero comics. Partly this is because I don’t feel I can be objective: there remains a secret trigger buried away inside my head that is squeezed, compulsively and irresistably, by those foolish, bizarrely wooden, and only barely heterosexual fantasy stories, with their gauche bright colors and unintelligible “heroic” dialect. Taking themselves seriously is the worst sin superhero comics can commit, and yet there is something outrageously compelling (to me) in the soap-opera-cum-power-fantasy that reached its height in titles like The New Teen Titans.
And suddenly the overpowering sehnsücht associated, at different times of my life, with Dorothy Sayers’ Oxford or Tennyson’s knights or Tolkien’s landscapes or Louise Brooks’ profile comes swirling and wailing down upon me, and I’m trapped. For The New Teen Titans is inescapably and embarrassingly my favorite comic book, the one which has touched me the most deeply and which, of all the comics I’ve greatly enjoyed, I admire the least.
Let me be plain here. I do not mean that Marv Wolfman and George Pérez are great artists or unrecognized geniuses or anything like that. (They’ve been overrecognized, in fact, long and well enough.) I mean that, for roughly six years, on this one title, and only together, they managed a sort of alchemy not only rare but practically singular in my experience. The dross lies interspersed among the silver, and is painful to witness (nearly all of it is in the scripting). But that silver! Pérez has done something in this strip that no one else has ever done for me in comics (though often enough in prose and film), and that is to create a world that not only works on its own terms, but that I seem to remember, and want to return to. The very texture of his environment seems to evoke a readymade nostalgia. And I know—I know!—that the characters are cardboard puppets, cheesy stereotypes that exist as wish fulfillment tropes for the authors. (No one, I think, could fail to remark the visual likeness between Marv Wolfman and the man Wonder Girl marries in issue 50—not coincidentally, my cutoff issue.) But despite all this, or even because of it, the characters manage to take on a life truly unique in my experience of supehero comics. There never has been a woman like Starfire, and there never could be; but it seems necessary to our psychological health that we posit her. Similarly, Victor Stone’s balancing act, halfway between blaxploitation and The Cosby Show, somehow turns out to be the most honest portrayal of race a white comics writer made in the 1980s.
I know now that much of what resonated with me when I first read The New Teen Titans was my lack of experience with the science fiction and fantasy tropes that were old hat by 1982 (and with which I have no intention of familiarizing myself). As C. S. Lewis noted, you can only go to Mars so many times before the wonder pales. But even after the pulpy sludge is sifted out, there remains a phenomenal amount of crystal-clear detail, the only comic that ever got me to the edge of believing that superheroes and the real world were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
* * *
So I sit here in the quiet front room, and the White Stripes have long since been overtaken by silence. I look around to see what other comics have been part of my mental furniture for the past few months. And on the trunk beside this big comfortable chair, under the Georgette Heyer and Roald Dahl novels, the Herriman, Sterrett, and Gross books, the Jughead digest, the Bible and the X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga collection, are the two big Drawn and Quarterly annuals, volumes 3 and 4. Oh, yes.
I went to college as an English Literature major, because I’ve always liked reading and had, in high school, learned that I enjoyed Elizabethan drama, dignified and serious novels, and vers libre quite as much as, perhaps even more than, the junky genre fiction on which I had reared my intellect. Oddly, though, it hasn’t been until fairly recently that I’ve actively sought out the comics equivalents of elite literature. Only a rare few complete works stand out as comparable in structure and effect to what is considered the best in literature. Even Los Bros. have not produced a singular work that could be fairly compared to a novel (although Blood of Palomar comes close, it is also just another story arc in a long serial). I’m not suggesting that this is a failing, or that any cartoonist should follow the older and possibly outdated structures of prose fiction; but it is a fact of the comics world, and one that is sometimes oddly at variance with the oft-stated aim of making comics that rise above genre trash to take their place among the serious fiction of the world. If the structural models are those of the soap opera (Love and Rockets) and the variety show (anything by Crumb), expecting recognition from a society trained to receive enlightenment from novels (or films, or nowhere) and entertainment from radio and television is a wan hope at best.
All of which has little to do with Drawn and Quarterly, by far the most literary anthology in all of comics. Though I appreciate and admire Raw, I can’t like it the way I do Drawn & Quarterly, which may say more about my latent inhibitions than about my critical taste. D&Q (if I may be pardoned such familiarity) has a small-press literary magazine’s aesthetic, a mixture of autobiographical essays, humorous sketches, intelligent fiction, fragmentary tableaus (called poetry when written), and historical reprints—all in cartoon format—with extraordinarily beautiful production values, a design sense lifted from high-end art galleries and auction catalogues, and the highest hit-to-miss ratio ever seen in a comics anthology. From the homegrown Canadian talent—Maurice Vellekoop’s striking color work alone deserves more than just this mention—to significant alternative creators who use it as an outlet for literary short stories—David Mazzucchelli’s “Rates of Exchange” and Graham Chaffee’s “Johnny and Babe” are two of the most evocative—to an impressive array of European cartoonists—so far I have been unable to decide whether Dupuy & Berberian, Pentti Otsamo, or Max have impressed me more—it is a showcase for everything I love about modern alternative cartooning. Adult without being adolescent (something not always managed by the alternative comics scene), with a high standard of graphic excellence combined with a playful attitude towards cartooning (witness R. Sikoryak’s genre-bending stories) and a deep-set respect for the medium’s history and power, Drawn & Quarterly is, in my opinion, comics’ best bid at being recognized as a legitimate artistic medium by intelligent, reasonable people. Insofar as that is one of comics’ goals, anyway.
* * *
There’s so much I haven’t touched on—from the addictive nature of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy to my gradual disenchantment with Alan Moore’s entire body of work to overlooked British cartoonists such as Ionicus and Nicolas Bentley to the giddy pleasure afforded me by Bobby London and Shary Flenniken (the only even mildly underground cartoonists I have any enthusiasm for) to my surprise and disappointment at discovering that a gag cartoonist from the 50s who signed himself “G. Pichard” was the same person as Eurosmut superstar Georges Pichard to the subversive joys of Jimmy Swinnerton’s Mr. Jack comic strips at the turn of the century. Just off the top of my head, you understand. But even stray thoughts have to come to an end, and I certainly feel better for having got all this off my chest.
The front room is quieter than ever, the White Stripes but a distant memory, and my back is beginning to ache ever so slightly from sitting too low in the chair to type. Good night, then. And may your favorite comics haunt your dreams.