Stripper's Guide

Doomed by Cartoon

by John Adler with Draper Hill

Softcover, 310 pages, $19.95
Morgan James Publishing, 2008
ISBN 978-1-60037-443-2

I've read several biographies of the great editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast, and I've read a history of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall ring, but what I've long pined for, and considered the most perfectly natural idea for a book, is a history of the Tweed ring as told through Nast's cartoons.

Finally such a book was written, and unfortunately has managed to fly under my radar for over five years. Well, better late than never, I did finally stumble upon it recently, and I'm delighted to say that the book is pretty much everything I could have hoped for.

John Adler navigated through a minefield of potential pitfalls to produce this book, which I consider just about as close to a perfect treatment of the subject as possible. He could easily have gotten bogged down trying to provide a thorough biography of Thomas Nast or Boss Tweed, or offered an exhaustive history of the deeds of Tammany. He resists those temptations, though, and confines himself to guiding us through the entire amazing episode via Nast's incredibly powerful cartoons. He explains all the nuances of what is depicted, and gives us enough of the history and biography of the personages involved to understand the enormity of the events and the genius of Nast's response.

It's a masterful piece of work, and Adler,  with the expertise of cartooning scholar Draper Hill guiding him, deserve a much wider readership than, as best I can tell, they have gotten. These are the most important cartoons ever drawn; I can't even imagine that blunt statement garnering even a whisper of debate. So if you are seriously interested in cartooning, this book is not really optional in your library. It is basically a Cartooning Scripture, explaining how it was In The Beginning. For without Nast, and without Tweed, and the explosive confluence of those two mighty forces, cartoons may never have become synonymous with American journalism, and everything that followed may have changed course in unknowable ways. 

I bring up a few minor negative points only because I'd love to see an even better second edition someday. The layout and design of the book was obviously handled by loving but not always highly accomplished hands. Among other layout problems, the cramped margins and large blocks of whitespace are a trivial annoyance, but they are an annoyance.

The other problem is not so easily corrected. It's a complication that has confounded every book designer when confronted with Nast's cartoons. His large double-truck cartoons, often full of important small details, are all but impossible to appreciate at the size they are reproduced. This book does an admirable job of mitigating the problem in some cases, by blowing up important vignettes for closer inspection. However, it would be ideal if the large cartoons were reproduced at close to original printed size. This would either take a skillful book designer, who could reproduce the double-trucks in their original form (though they would still have to be reduced a bit), or an extravagant budget would have to be allowed for fold-out cartoons. It's probably a pipe dream, but if Nast doesn't deserve the royal treatment, who does? Are there any publishers listening?

Labels: Bookshelf, Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

Backing into Forward

by Jules Feiffer
Doubleday 2010, 445 pages, $30
ISBN 978-0-385-53158-0

I have to admit that Feiffer's memoir sat on my 'to be read' shelf for a long while. Two reasons -- first, the book is rather lengthy, and second, I didn't know that Feiffer's story would hold my interest.

Because Feiffer's cartoons primarily appeared in the Village Voice, my only encounters with him came through reprint books. Although very much impressed with his poignant strips that dredge all the dark places of the human psyche, I found reading the books to make his cartoons seem quite repetitive ("oh great, another dancer..."). I know had I seen the cartoons at the real-time schedule of once per week I would have been a huge fan. But I didn't have access in that mode, and I've never been one to strictly mete out the reading of a book. 

So though in theory I know Feiffer is one hell of a cartoonist (and many other things -- screenwriter, novelist, playwright, etc.) I felt a bit standoffish towards reading his biography.

Once I finally jumped in, it seemed almost as if Feiffer knew that I would be his audience. The early chapters, covering his childhood, are uproariously funny and heart-rendingly touching, where most memoirs have us wondering when the author will jump ahead to the meat. Feiffer makes his readers fall in love with him right from the start, no matter what baggage you carried into the book. From there we go onto his teenage years, and becoming a cartoonist. Here he is self-effacing, droll, instructive, and, of course, talks about my favorite subject. The love deepens.

From there we go on to his rich middle and later years, in which he was politically active and started branching off into his other careers. Now that he had me in the palm of his hand, he feeds me the stuff I thought I didn't care about. What's it like to rewrite a play over and over in Boston? I didn't think I cared. But Feiffer had me. Heck, he even had me talking about his kids and Martha's Vineyard and all sorts of other stuff that should have had me start riffling pages.

Buy it. Even if you're not a huge Feiffer fan, you might well be by the time you finish the book.

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

John Q: The Life and Times of Jim Lange

by Robert Lange
Self-published, softcover, 100 pages, $15.95
ISBN 9780615856902

How do you in good conscience write a negative review of a book written by a son about his dad? I know I sure don't want to be that jerk. But I think it only fair that prospective buyers be forewarned about what they are purchasing .

Based on the title of John Q: The Life and Times of Jim Lange, I assumed that I was purchasing a biography of the Daily Oklahoman editorial cartoonist. In fairness, when I ordered the book on Amazon, there was a 'Look Inside' feature that I didn't bother with. Who needs to see what the inside of a biography looks like?

Well, if I had taken the time, I would have seen that the book consists of short paragraphs on each alternating page, and a photo or cartoon on each facing page. Some of these short paragraphs (some are just a single sentence) comment in some way on the photo or the cartoon, or tell some tidbit about Lange. There is no biography here, just reminiscences plus some accolades written by Oklahoma notables.

If the book had been called an admiring son's memorial or a scrapbook, that would be much closer to the mark. To say the book tells the "life and times" of Lange is nonsense.

I also think the price is on the high side. A bunch of blurry black and white photos and a very small selection of cartoons (I count about twenty-five), and so little text that I could literally read the whole book while standing in a supermarket checkout line -- $16 seems out of line.

I commend Robert for wanting to memorialize his dad, but I think this book is the sort of thing to be shared with relatives and personal friends. It is not really a commercial product that would appeal to cartoon fans or those who fondly remember his work in the Oklahoman.

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

Edgar Ric Burroughs' Tarzan: The Complete Russ Manning Newspaper Strips Volume One: 1967-1969

IDW Publishing 2013
ISBN 978-1613776940
Hardcover, 285 pages, $49.99

Those of you who visit this site regularly know that I have very high (some would say nearly impossibly high) standards for adventure strips. I find 90% of them practically unreadable, usually because of simplistic storylines, less than stellar art, or bad pacing.

I must confess that for me much of Tarzan's seven plus decades in the newspaper falls into the unreadable category. When the art is good, and it often was, the storylines seldom hold my interest. That can be ascribed partially to Mr. Burroughs' creation itself, as opposed to shortcomings in the handling of the comic strip. The assumption that this white man, given the benefit of growing up in the jungle, naturally becomes the lord of the beasts and the native tribes (if they know what's good for them) is far more apt to make me giggle uncontrollably than to be swept away in the adventure. I have no desire to watch the insanity of manifest destiny and the white man's burden played out in the jungle or anywhere else. It certainly doesn't entertain me.

Now before Tarzan fans start screaming for my head, I do understand that there was plenty of lip service to the contrary. You can point out, and rightfully so, that many of the villains in the Tarzan strip are actually white guys, especially as we come into the more enlightened years of race relations. But sorry, to me the ugly writing is always on the wall.

And that's why I can say that I was thrilled to hear that IDW was going to reprint the Russ Manning years of Tarzan, as opposed to the earlier stuff. The Manning years come at a time when the jingoistic and paternalistic ideology of Burroughs was reaching a new low ebb. Manning, who also wrote the strip, goes out of his way to tell Tarzan stories that minimize the unsavory aspects of the Tarzan legend, and he even occasionally goes out of his way to point out that Tarzan is more like a governor of the jungle than a lord (both being ridiculous, of course, but hey, its an improvement).

I first encountered Manning's Tarzan work in those great 100-Page Super-Spectacular comic books DC comics issued in the early 1970s. I loved all the oddball (to my young eyes) material in those magazines, and absolutely fell in love with the Manning strips in the Tarzan issues. The art and stories blew me away then, and I'm happy to say that age has not dimmed my enjoyment of these stories, or lessened my admiratiion for Manning's incredible clean line artwork.

The only slight caveat, and its a point of interest only, is that I was surprised how obvious it is when Manning occasionally hits a deadline crunch. It is incredible how little it takes for Manning's work to become obviously and painfully inferior in those cases. A few lines in not quite the right place and you have laughably misshapen characters in anatomically impossible poses. But that just goes to show what a tightrope act Manning was attempting with his highly polished art, and how much care he usually devoted to this labor of love. What an artist!

In addition to three Sunday color stories and two long daily continuities, we get a delightful and informative foreword and introduction about Manning, telling the story behind the story. As for the reproduction, I don't even really need to mention that anymore, do I? If it is an IDW/Dean Mullaney production you can be assured of unsurpassed quality restoration and reproduction.  

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

by Neal Thompson
Crown Archetype, 2013
ISBN 978-0-7704-3620-9

Hardcover, 422 pages, indexed, $26

Cartoonist Robert Ripley had an interesting life that is well worth your reading time in this enjoyable biography by Neal Thompson. Thompson kept me entertained while telling the story of this fellow, one of the most widely recognized cartoonist names in the world. Of course, I imagine the general public today doesn't even realize he was a cartoonist before he became a radio host and iconic ringmaster to all the world's oddities.

In fact Thompson's skillful writing was so effective that I didn't realize until well after I'd finished this satisfying book that I'd been subject to a bit a of a whitewash, likely at the behest of the the Ripley Entertainment corporation. I did notice right off that nowhere in the book is it frankly admitted that Ripley used ghost artists. The closest we come is a remark that King Features was always freaking out over his lateness and on occasion a syndicate bullpenner had to dash off some cartoons at the last minute.

At first I ascribed that omission to simple lack of interest. This is a biography for a general audience, after all, not for cartooning historians, so perhaps the detail was not deemed important. But then I realized that Thompson also never seriously entertained the idea that Ripley was a bit of a creep for making a good part of his fortune off of freak shows. That seems an issue worthy of exploration.

Thompson acknowledges his huge debt to the archives of Ripley Entertainment, and I am left with the impression that Ripley Entertainment did not share all that raw material without exacting their pound of flesh from the author. That's a shame, but considering the wealth of source material that Thompson was able to bring to bear in this biography, I suppose it is an equitable sacrifice. Or perhaps, on the other hand, Thompson simply accepts Ripley at face value, and doesn't see any point in discussing Ripley's possible moral failing of making a very good living off of the deformities, eccentricities and misfortunes of others. I suppose there really isn't anything wrong with leaving it up to the reader to form their own opinion of Ripley's character.

Ethical qualms aside, Ripley's life is fascinating and Thompson tells his story very well. The facts of his cartooning career, and the background to newspaper cartooning in the early part of the century, are accurately reflected. Since I fact-checked an early draft of the book, hopefully I was able to help with that aspect. Thankfully Thompson doesn't gloss over his early cartooning years, as other biographers might, and his cartooning certainly doesn't get short shrift over his later more well-known exploits in radio and television.

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

From the Files of Mike Hammer: The Complete Dailies and Sundays

Mickey Spillane and Ed Robbins
Hardcover, 160 pages, $49.99
Hermes Press 2013
ISBN 978-1-61345-025-3

Before I say anything else about this collection, I think the most important thing is to compliment the folks involved in this book for managing to put together a full run of this very rare strip. That, I can say from years of collecting, was no small feat. They deserve our respect for that accomplishment, no matter any other positives and negatives they'll accrue in the rest of this review.

First let's focus on the positive, of which there is plenty. To open the discussion I have to come clean and admit that I am not a big fan of Spillane's writing or of the hard-boiled detective genre in general. I bought the book primarily because I was so impressed at the fact that they were able to amass the strips and wanted to support the effort. I approached reading the strip itself expecting not to be too enthused. I also considered that the newspaper comic strip operates under one of the strictest informal codes of decency possible, so if I were a big Spillane fan, I could expect this strip to be much watered down from his usual work.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find that I quite enjoyed some of the stories. The early dailies, penned supposedly by Joe Gill, were pretty awful -- the plots were so badly constructed. But after Gill's tenure, the daily stories took a big turnaround, and I quite enjoyed the balance of the stories. Artist Ed Robbins says he wrote these daily stories, and I'm certainly glad he took the bull by the horns.

In fact, I'm going to commit heresy here. The Sunday stories, which were apparently penned by Mickey Spillane himself, except for the final one, are better than Gill's, but no match for Robbins' in my opinion. Spillane's stories are too loosely plotted, tend to have too many characters running around to keep track of, and rely incessantly on Hammer's supposed ability to instantly mesmerize women in order to keep the detective alive and point him to the who of the whodunit. On the other hand, Robbins' plots have all the standard Hammer tropes, but they play out in a much more satisfying, logical and inventive manner. Maybe Robbins should have considered a career in writing?

Ed Robbins' art is a great match for the material. The necessary dark and moody film noirish feel is handled perfectly. The character design of Mike Hammer (looking like Spillane himself) and the all-important sexy 'dames' look just perfect in this strip.

I do have a complaint. I really wish the Sundays had not been so garishly over-restored. I can appreciate the tremendous amount of work that went into these restorations, but I feel, and I think I follow the general consensus, that restorers should not remove the original 4-color dot screen colors and replace them with full-process colors. To do so is to subvert the intentions of the artist and colorist, whose plans with their art and color choices were based on how they expected their work to be printed.

Being a comics restorer myself, I have wrestled with this question. In the desire to do everything I can do to make the work look new and fresh, I too went through a short phase where I zapped all or most of the existing colors out of Sundays and recolored them myself. I quickly saw that this was a case of my ego overruling my duty to the material. While it is nigh impossible to restore the colors on old tearsheets to proof sheet quality, it is better to do what we can within the stricture of maintaining the original look of the work. Sunday comics are generally printed badly, and we probably just need to accept that, and recognize that we aren't living in the world of CSI. The recoloring of these strips is an especial shame, because I think the grittiness of Mike Hammer is perfectly suited to the rough treatment of newspaper coloring.

PS: It is worth noting that the strips in the book begin with the daily release of April 20 1953, and the Sunday release of May 17 1953. In an article in  Editor & Publisher (1/10/53), the initial release dates were given as March 9 and March 16 respectively.  I assumed those dates to be correct, and those are the dates I cite in my book, American Newspaper Comics. I'm satisfied that the publishers of this book have discovered the correct starting dates, so you might want to pencil that information into your copy of my book.

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow & The Little King

Edited by Dean Mullaney, introduction by Jared Gardner
432 pages, hardcover, $49.99
IDW Publishing 2012
ISBN 978-1613771488

It's about time that Otto Soglow and his Little King finally got their due. Universally admired for his economy of line and elegant flowing style, Soglow's art is a treat that should have this book on any cartooning fan's wish list.

We couldn't ask for more in this collection. There are more Little King strips in here than you can shake a stick at, so many in fact that we really get to know Soglow's tricks for putting together pantomime gags. Pantomime is the toughest act to pull off in comics, and to get inside Soglow's mind to this extent is an enlightening treat. What is also wonderful is that the strips are chosen from a complete cross-section of the strip's lifespan. Oddly enough, I found the latest material (1975) to be perhaps the most fascinating. By this time Soglow's aging mind seemed to be a little off, and the strips become downright Dali-esque. The surreal element was probably unintentional, but it is quite unsettling work, especially when tackled right after perusing the earlier more lighthearted strips.

In addition to The Little King, we also get a good sampling of The Ambassador, Soglow's 1933-34 stand-in while King Features was waiting for the rights to use The Little King, originally held by The New Yorker. We also get some Sentinel Louie topper strips. An excellent biographical essay by Jared Gardner includes rare early Soglow work, including material in different styles that you would never guess to be Soglow's.The only thing I missed was a sampling of Soglow's short-lived Travelin' Gus strip, but that has been reprinted in Hogan's Alley magazine, so I guess they felt that strip had already gotten its due.

Most of the Little King strips are reproduced in black and white, but there is a color section of nearly a hundred pages. That gives you plenty of the flavor of the feature as it was seen in Sunday papers. Because of Soglow's incredible linework, the switch to black and white for the majority of the book is perfectly fine, as it allows us to bask in Soglow's work without chromatic distractions.

It hardly needs to be mentioned of an IDW/Dean Mullaney production, but the restoration of the strips, and the quality of the presentation, is utterly superb. Thanks to IDW for another great collection!

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary 
by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen

305 pages, indexed. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-60819-623-4

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf

Life on the Press: The Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks
by Robert L. Gambone
University of Mississippi Press, 2009
Hardcover, 284 pages, indexed.
ISBN 978-1-60473-222-1

Gambone's book, which seeks to recap George Luk's life as an illustrator, was published so far under the radar that I didn't stumble across it until just a few months ago, two years after it was published.

Of course I ordered it immediately, because the subject is right up my alley. Anything about the work of a cartoonist who was in the thick of the Sunday funnies phenomenon of the 1890s is like manna from heaven. Of course I do realize that the book would not have seen the light of day had Luks not been famous as a painter, but the blurb reassured me that this book is about his illustration and newspaper work, not his 'fine' art.

And so it is. Although Gambone certainly does discuss Luks' fine art here and there, he does an admirable job of sticking to the task he claims to be tackling in the title of the book. So huzzahs on that account to Gambone. And huzzahs again for the thoroughness of coverage, because Gambone discusses many of Luks' cartoons and illustrations in detail as to style, subject and background, and mentions seemingly practically every major piece he did for a newspaper. So regarding sticking to the subject and covering it thoroughly I give the book an unmitigated thumbs up.

Beyond that things unfortunately go downhill. My problem with the book is that I found myself mistrusting Gambone's judgment about Luks' artwork. In a book as sparsely illustrated as this (keep in mind this is no coffee table art book) it is quite disconcerting to find yourself wondering if the author is really able to judge and explain a piece of artwork realistically and accurately.

I first became concerned early on in the book when Gambone discussed a minor little multi-panel cartoon produced for Puck. This is a strip that is fairly well reproduced in the book. In it we see a dapper rich kid holding a balloon encountering a tough-looking street urchin. The urchin, who is smoking a cigarette, gives the kid a disdainful look and pops the balloon with his cigarette. Panel three finds the pair in a tumbling wrestling match, and in the final panel the foppish rich kid is stalking away with the tough kid's cigarette perched victoriously on his lip while the urchin slinks away, bloody and cowed.

Gambone makes much of a perceived difference in the way the two kids are drawn. He feels that the rich kid is "merely an outline" whereas the urchin is "carefully rendered". Looking at the strip, at least as it is reproduced in this book, it certainly looks to me like Luks put the same amount of effort and detail into both kids. Certainly there is more ink expended on the dirty urchin as opposed to the immaculately clean rich kid, but it takes more ink to show soiling than it does to indicate cleanliness.

Bringing this up would be hairsplitting, except that Gambone uses this perceived difference in the drawing to jump to an utterly ridiculous conclusion. He claims that the quality of the drawing on the urchin proves that it could only have been drawn from life and "this drawing demonstrates that at least three years prior to starting as a newspaper artist-reporter in 1894, Luks developed the habit of strolling about inner-city neighborhoods observing, sketching and devising compositions." Even if there were a vast difference in the quality of the drawing of the two kids, a difference I certainly don't see, drawing such a conclusion is like saying that Alex Raymond must have visited Mongo since he drew the creatures of that world so convincingly. While I certainly don't discount the possibility that Luks might have been sketching street urchins, I can offer a much simpler explanation for a cartoon in which the two characters seem to have a stylistic difference. How about this -- the cartoonist was swiping from different sources for the two characters and didn't make the effort to adapt them to a single unifying style.

For the remainder of the book, now having established his credentials as a spotter of such things, Gambone tells us with assurance many instances when a drawing must have been sketched from life. Another instance when the author's logic in this regard is highly questionable comes with an illustration from the New York Sunday World. The subject is bosses who take their secretaries to lunch, and Luks contributes a large illustration of a restaurant, filled with older men dining with attractive young women. According to Gambone, who notes that the dresses and varying body types seem fully realized, and that the furniture is of a specific design, concludes that the "degree of veracity indicates the World assigned Luks to dine at this establishment and record the scene or else had a photographer make a candid shot that served the artist as an exact model." Oh come now. First of all, any newspaper artist worth his salt could produce such an illustration without moving an inch from his drawing board -- artists were not employed by newspapers if they needed the crutch of live models in order to make a simple story illustration. Second, the illustration depicts a restaurant populated ONLY by twosomes, each consisting of a man and a gorgeous young lady. What are the chances of this ever happening in real life? What, not a single pair of guys or girls going out to lunch? No table just happens to have just a single person or three? The chances against such a congregation of businessmen and their secretaries is astronomical. Third, the women are dressed in such high style my guess is that they were copied out of a Godey's Lady's Book -- it seems very doubtful that a secretary would wear such finery to go to work or could afford to, even if they were the boss' 'special favorite'. And finally, for all the vaunted realism of the scene, Luks has made a royal mess of the perspective. If he were sketching from life, surely he was a good enough artist to not make such a mash-up of the drawing.

These are only two examples, but they're not the only ones. Look, I don't much care whether Luks sketched a given scene from life or not. To me it's not really an important distinction. However, I cannot help but wonder how often Gambone is leading me down the garden path about all sorts of details of Luks' other drawings, the ones that aren't reproduced in the book.Without an illustration which I can judge for myself (which is often since there are few illustrations reproduced), how much of Gambone's description and interpretation should I believe?

Also, to be a bit nitpicky, the book would have benefited from the services of a good proofreader. I don't blame Gambone for the many slip-ups I noted, because everyone has a few holes in their knowledgebase and fingers that sometimes type faster than the brain functions, but a proofreader certainly should have caught the instances of "grizzly" for "grisly", "ground-braking" for "ground-breaking", "sheers" instead of "shears", "lodge" instead of "loge", and so on.

I am impressed and enthused that people from the fine art world would see fit to look beyond Luks' paintings and delve into his commercial art career. Cross-pollination like that is thrilling to me, because I myself rarely think of cartooning in terms of just the lines on the paper or the stories that are told. I am fascinated by the whole universe of thoughts, events and viewpoints that swirl around every piece of newspaper cartoon art. The world reflects the art, and the art reflects the world. To read the perspective of someone like Gambone whose specialty is in fine art is instructive, as so are the perspectives of other disciplines when they intersect with my own personal passion for the history of cartooning. We can all learn something from each other, and increase the sweep of our perspective accordingly. The fact that I think Gambone's book fails on some counts is nothing compared with my delight that this kind of book is being published. More, please more!

Labels: Stripper's Guide Bookshelf