“Prowling” – Juggling the Blues with the Comics, by Michael H. Price

“Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket,” a senior-staff powerhouse named Frosty Sloane informed me after I had landed my first job in a competitive marketplace, back around 1965.

“I thought we were selling shoes,” I answered him. Which of course we were. I had a fleeting mental picture of some Ed Sullivan Show juggling act involving wingtip clodhoppers and stiletto heels. Took a while for Frosty’s metaphor to sink in – but once I had experienced my first stampede of customers and watched Sloane accommodate ten or fifteen prospective buyers while I attempted to deal with one or two of ’em, I caught his drift, all right.

Frosty Sloane was so effective at the craft, with consistently high sales tallies to show for it, that he could afford to be overconfident. He would juggle products while juggling customers: If a shopper should ask to see one style of shoe, Sloane would bring out half-a-dozen selections and wind up selling two or three of those. And he was such a wisenheimer that I wondered how he could get away with some of his sales-floor stunts.

“Y’see, half o’ th’ customers who come in here durin’ a slower stretch – they don’t even know they’re customers, yet,” Frosty counseled me, as if dispensing the Wisdom of the Ages. “They’re jus’ sleepwalkin’, browsin’ away like as if they knew what they were doin’. An’ ya gotta figger out how t’ get their attention.” No sooner had he spoken, than a woman wandered into the department, browsin’ away – just like the man said.

“Watch dis,” Frosty said, “an’ I’ll show ya what I mean by ‘sleepwalkin.’” He strolled toward the browser, nodded in her direction, and then spoke: “Tickle your ass with a feather, ma’am?” He paced the question just rapidly enough to blur its words.

“No, thank you,” she replied. “Just looking.”

Within half an hour, Sloane had waked this sleepwalker sufficiently that she wound up spending a couple of hundred frogskins.

Our shoe-department manager, Byron Motley – he referred to the staff as his “Motley Crew” – had another term for the ratio of a few sales-clerks to any number of simultaneous shoppers and just-browsing loiterers: “Doubling up,” Byron called the process, although it often was more a matter of “quadrupling up,” if not more so.

Now, “doubling up” sounded to me a whole lot like an onslaught of abdominal cramps – a natural response, perhaps, to such responsibilities in a short-staffed workplace with a heavy-traffic clientele – but once I had tackled a few such crunches and rung up more sales than no-sales, the process became a snap. The equivalent modern-day lingo, “multi-tasking,” sounds downright anemic by comparison with “juggling” or “doubling up.”

It dawned on me soon enough that I had been practicing similar tactics since childhood, anyhow – pursuing parallel interests in cartooning and music and writing, juggling school-day and after-school activities – and when I left the retail-fashion trade in 1968 to become a newspaper reporter and editorial cartoonist, I took the lessons of the shoe-store treadmill with me. This experience, combined with a school-days music-biz involvement with rock-and-country producer Norman Petty’s recording-studio activities in Texas and New Mexico, translated well to a newsroom-deadline setting: One reporter might expect to compose a dozen brief stories and a couple of bigger ones, from multiple informative sources, in an eight-hour stretch. The task of answering to one city editor, one chief copy editor, and one opinion-page editor on any given shift seemed a great deal like the opening of a season-clearance sale at the department store.

The juggling abilities came in especially handy as I moved from news reporting into newsroom management while helping out, as well, in the editorial-cartoon department and developing a local-paper comics feature of my own. A busy freelance regimen, including the launch of a series of movie-history books with a colleague named George E. Turner, developed from there, along with a continuation of the recording-studio activities.

The juggling grew to seem less a conscious effort than an automatic response to the demands of a busy marketplace. I didn’t think specifically about Frosty Sloane and his benevolent wiseacre wisdom, so much as I kept it as an anchoring presence in the back of the mind. If it works on the sales floor, then it’s bound to apply to the mass-media arena.

But that shoe-store counsel came to the conscious foreground again in 1986, when a fortunate re-encounter with Timothy Truman during a book-promotion tour drew Tim and me and fellow author-artist John K. Snyder III into a serialized project called Prowler, at Eclipse Comics. Eclipse had recently published a new edition of George Turner’s and my first Forgotten Horrors book. Tim’s involvement with Eclipse at the time included such heroic-adventure comics as Scout and Airboy.

And could my newspaper and music-business commitments accommodate the addition of a comics-production schedule? Well, why not? Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket.

Turned out that the second-nature juggling act lent a greater momentum to the comics venture than I might have expected. Since our first meeting during the earlier 1980s, during Timothy Truman’s breakthrough stretch on GrimJack at First Comics, Tim and I had found in common an interest in indigenous American as a class, and the blues in particular. Blues-plus-comics – how to combine the influences to lasting effect? Tim was already blazing some trails in that direction with the Scout stories, and we determined to carry such hybrid thinking further with the Prowler books. (There was a B-movie influence at work, as well, but I’ve already got too many digressive topics in play, here.)

And hence not only the phonograph-record “soundtrack” inserts that graced both Scout and Prowler at one point or another, but also an overall blues-consciousness within both series. Tim Truman and John Snyder and I, along with Prowler backup artist Graham Nolan, conceived enough blues-rooted storylines to account for a few dozen issues if not more.

The Prowler series had run its published course by 1989, however, before most of these plotting strategies could come into play. One blues-as-comics element left hanging stemmed from a true-crimecause célèbre of the early 20th century – the so-called “Axe Man of New Orleans” case. Tim and I had imagined that our masked-vigilante character, Leo Kragg, a.k.a. the Prowler, might find himself drawn toward a new siege of “Axe-Man” murders, recalling the historic rampage of 1918-1919 and picturing the perpetrator as a deathless spirit more so than any mere-mortal menace.

That “Axe-Man” storyline never materialized as a Prowler adventure (not yet, anyhow) – but Tim composed and recorded an intended “Axe-Man” instrumental track, and I retooled the basic tale into a self-contained short story called “Blues Passover.” That yarn saw print in 1998 in a preliminary version, in a limited-edition anthology called Southern-Fried Homicide.

And why “Blues Passover” as a title? Well, the Biblical-ordeal allusion has to do with a letter that some fool had mailed in 1919 to the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, purporting to be the elusive serial killer known as the “Axe-Man” and making this promise: “On next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans … Every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing.” You get the picture. There must have been plenty of jazz cranked out in response (assuming a willingness to buy into the myth), for that night passed with nary an axe-murder committed.

A generation later in the here-and-now, I find myself back in harness alongside Tim Truman and John Snyder on a fresh run of new-and-resurrected Prowler stories for ComicMix. Plenty of ground to cover, in both a re-presentation of the original-series yarns and some new directions.

Amidst preparations to repatriate the Prowler property during the last few years, a reminder of New Orleans’ “Axe-Man” scare has come to light in a real-world natural disaster – The Great Southern Coastal Panic of 2005. A forcible allegory, perhaps, but an allegory all the same: The act of storytelling often requires an imaginative stretch.

That coastal situation, of course, sent many residents of New Orleans ranging far afield in advance of the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. My home-base city of Fort Worth, prominent among the first Southwestern cities to lend refuge, became as a result a new home base for a latter-day jazz traditionalist from New Orleans named Adonis Rose. And Rose, in turn, is an artistic descendant of those 19th- into 20th-century musicians who had formed the sonic levee that kept the “Axe-Man” at bay during one dark night of 1919. (Still assuming that willingness to honor the myth, natch.)

Adonis Rose, a drummer and composer acclaimed for his work with such artists as Harry Connick, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, has returned Fort Worth’s welcome by settling in as founder of the Fort Worth Jazz Orchestra (www.thefwjo.com), an ensemble dedicated to a combination of preservation and newly commissioned artistry. In his relentless juggling, or doubling-up, of career interests – he also operates a smaller outfit called the N.O. Vaders and has contributed to the soundtrack score of Spike Lee’s disaster documentary When the Levees Broke – Rose has served as something of an inspiration to my efforts with the new Prowler book. That is, in presenting a new multiple-tasker role model and in presenting a steadfast reminder of the blues’ value as a defiant response to urgent, perpetual struggle as a way of life.

But I digress. So what else is new? The short version is that, yes, there is a new Prowler book in the works. And yes, it picks up where the original Eclipse series leaves off, raveled plot-threads and all. And no, it hasn’t skipped a beat in staying apace with the hard-bitten, living-the-blues conception that Truman and Snyder and I had formulated during 1986-1987.

And Tim and John and editor Mike Gold and I are collaborating as furiously just now as if it were still 1987 and we lived within stumbling distance of one another. (Actually, we’ve never resided within stumbling distance of one another, but such comparatively newer developments as e-mail and up-and-download technology bring us somewhat closer together.) I’m still doubling and tripling up with the traffic, with newspapers to feed in Texas and Pennsylvania and that chronic sideline in the music business. There’s a new album in pre-production for guitarist Sumter Bruton’s and my blues ensemble, and I’ve got a hand in preparations for the 2009 tournament of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Nice woik if you can get it.

Not to mention that new Prowler opus. Working title: Blood Kin. Not to spill too much, y’know. Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket. And thank you, Frosty Sloane.

“Recommended reading:” Gumbo Ya-Ya (Bonanza Books; 1984), containing art and essays from the Federal Works Progress Administration’s Louisiana Writers’ Project of the 1930s – and including a detailed account of the “Axe-Man” case.

Prowler and Fishhead co-author Michael H. Price is responsible for the Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books, from Baltimore’s Midnight Marquee Press. Price’s arts-scene commentaries can be found at www.fortworthbusinesspress.com, and in the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.