Hermes Press will collect the short lived Mike Hammer comic strip by creator Mickey Spillane in a hardcover collection, retailing for $49.95. Mickey Spillane’s From the Files of Mike Hammer: The Complete Dailies & Sundays, will collect all installments of the strip, which originally appeared in 1953 and 1954 and was drawn by Ed Rollins. Spillane ended the strip when the syndicate objected to a panel showing torture.
He was a curmudgeon who didn’t have children, didn’t especially like children, and yet was probably the most noted children’s book writer and illustrator in the past fifty years, J.K. Rowling notwithstanding. He was Maurice Sendak and he died May 8th at age 83 after a stroke.
Sendak was famous for many books, especially Where The Wild Things Are, a favorite in our house. I got my Mary the full set of the McFarlane figurines and we saw and liked the movie version (many people didn’t but we did, nyah nyah).
He was infamous for books like In The Night Kitchen because its hero is a young boy named Mickey who falls out of his night clothes and runs around naked. As Lewis Black might put it, “Some people see pictures of a little boy’s wee-wee and it makes them want to cry.” It’s gotten the book put on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.”
Banning In The Night Kitchen. Some people need to grow up. Still, if you’re not pissing some people off, you’re not doing it right. Sendak did it right.
Maurice Sendak had a diversity of styles. I have a collection of the two-volume set: The Juniper Tree and other tales from the Brother Grimm, translated by Lore Segal and Randall James. The illustrations are incredibly detailed and are often strange and reflect the source material magnificently. In the same style he also did The Light Princess and The Gold Key, both written by George Macdonald and they are beautifully realized as well. The latter is a particular favorite of mine. In the aforementioned In The Night Kitchen, the story proceeds from panel to panel like a comic book or, perhaps more aptly, like a comic strip: specifically, Little Nemo In Slumberland.
Sendak produced films, including the animated special of his work Really Rosie, and did sets for operas including Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Sendak cited Mozart as one of his great influences along with Walt Disney’s Fantasia.) He was part of the National Board of Advisors for Children’s television Workshop during the development of Sesame Street. He had a rich and prolific mind.
As I get older I get crankier, and so I can appreciate Sendak’s curmudgeonly side. He demonstrated it earlier this year in a wonderful two part interview that he did with Stephen Colbert and that you can watch here and here.
To note Sendak’s death, Colbert played a few additional pieces from the interview this week. My favorite was when Colbert compared Mozart to Donald Trump and Sendak instantly replied, “I’m going to have to kill you.” Funny, funny stuff and I think it was one of Colbert’s best interviews.
Sendak had a concept of mortality from an early age with his extended family dying in the Holocaust. I’ve also known about death from an early age with deaths in my extended family, attending wakes and funerals. Maybe there’s something in Sendak’s art and writing where that comes through and it speaks to me.
Sendak claimed that he didn’t write for children; he wrote for himself and that was part of his genius. As with all good children’s literature, the work speaks not only to children but the child in all of us. We see and we respond on a deep instinctive level. Everyone I’ve known has had a child alive inside of them – not always for good effect. In other words, our inner Max. I have several children inside of me and some of them are brats knowing only that they want what they want when they want it. Sendak knew and celebrated them as well.
Sendak may be gone but his work is there and so the best parts of him are as well. We can still meet our Wild Things and have a wild rumpus in the pages of his books. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that Sendak would be pleased by that; Sendak was too much of a curmudgeon. I think he would nod and then go back to listening to Mozart.
Just don’t compare Mozart to Donald Trump because, then, Maurice Sendak would have to kill you.
MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.
“The secret to Nancy’s success,” the classic story goes, “is that it takes as long to read it as it does to decide not to read it.”
When I heard that gag back in the 1970s, it was attributed to the great artist Wallace Wood. Chillingly, it’s possible it predates Woody’s career by decades. What somehow became synonymous with the bland and the banal started off as the offspring of a cheesecake girlie strip, Fritzi Ritz. It turns out Fritzi had this niece named Nancy who came to live with her. Being a gag strip, I do not believe the details of the demise of the spiky-haired girl’s parents were ever revealed, but it would be uncharitable to assume the spunky, independent girl murdered them in their sleep.
Nancy’s best friend was a Dead End Kids wannabe named Sluggo. Had Nancy shaved off her hair, enjoyed a sex-change operation, and donned a striped t-shirt, she would look exactly like her friend. So perhaps it was Sluggo who did the parents in after uncovering the results of a blood test.
Fritzi and Nancy lived in the nice part of town. Sluggo lived in the slums. For quite a time in the 1930s and, less so, thereafter, clearly what separated those neighborhoods was Wackyland. Had those adventures been published in the hippie era, we would have assumed writer/artist Ernie Bushmiller consumed a prolific quantity of LSD.
In fact, I am surprised a Nancy underground comic wasn’t published during those paisley days. Publisher/cartoonist/freedom fighter Denis Kitchen was, and probably still is, quite a fan of the stuff. He even produced a line of Nancy ties; I once wore the subtle power-tie version to a big-deal executive meeting at Warner Brothers, much to the chagrin of DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz.
Nonetheless, I suspect the secret of Nancy’s success was the decision to “dumb it down” for the general audience, a trick that saved Blondie’s ass during the previous decade. Remember, the only reason the even more surreal Krazy Kat endured throughout the ridiculously powerful Hearst chain was the fact that it was William Randolph Hearst’s favorite feature… and he signed the paychecks.
Despite its homogenization, Bushmiller produced a funny and often clever gag strip. The proof of this lies in the strips produced by others after Ernie died: even recycled old jokes looked pale and pathetic compared to the original. At its dullest moments during the later Bushmiller era, Nancy was sufficiently entertaining to maintain its role in the readers’ daily ritual at a time when comic strips gave subscribing newspapers their competitive edge. You know, back when they actually had to compete with other newspapers.
Fantagraphics Books has released a hefty tome reprinting Nancy’s mid-forties run, fronted by an introduction from Daniel Clowes. Given the feature’s undeserved reputation and the plethora of fine newspaper reprint books, I fear their Nancy Is Happy might get lost in the shuffle.
Nancy was good enough to keep our elders laughing through the Great Depression and World War II. Nancy is certainly good enough to keep us laughing through the 2012 elections.
Nancy Is Happy by Ernie Bushmiller • Edited by Kim Thompson • Fantagraphics Books, $24.99
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
At C2E2: Pulp 2.0 Press MPB (Mad Pulp Bastard) Bill Cunningham joined Big Bang co-creator Chris Ecker in announcing a new, color Knight Watchman serialized comic strip story that will feature the storytelling of Shazam Award-winning comic book legend Steve Skeates (The Spectre, Hawk and Dove, Aquaman, Pantha). This new, digital-first weekly comic strip marks the return of not only Skeates, but of the Knight Watchman to eager comic fans.
“Chris has been itching to get back to the drawing board, and continue telling the adventures of the Knight Watchman, Kid Galahad and the rest of the characters who haunt Midway City,” said Cunningham. “While Chris, Gary Carlson and I have had many discussions on taking the Big Bang brand to different media, it was Chris who went out and contacted Steve Skeates and got him on board to do a Sunday “newspaper comic strip” for the web. All the credit belongs to him. I’m just here to make sure it’s realized, and gets into the hands of Big Bang and comic strip fans worldwide.”
“Big Bang Comics has a tradition of working with our veteran comics creators like Marty Nodell, Shelly Moldoff and others. I’m really pleased to have Steve join our ranks and work with him to tell rip-roarin’ adventure stories,” said artist Chris Ecker. “This Sunday newspaper style strip is a new idea for us, but I think it fits in well with the type of stories we want to tell – Golden age stories for kids of all ages. A Sunday strip gives us the chance to reach out to the audience, and let them know what Big Bang and Pulp 2.0 is all about. ”
“I am excited about launching our first digital comic, especially in this strip format which will utilize the “widescreen look” provided by computer and tablet screens, exactly like reading the Sunday Funnies“ said Cunningham. “We’re doing it a bit “old school,” but that’s been part of our tradition from the beginning, bringing the classic “pulp” into tomorrow as quickly and inexpensively as possible so people can enjoy it. Then we’ll collect the color webcomic for print, and add even more value for our readers.”
The weekly comic strip is set to debut in August 2012, to coincide with Pulp 2.0’s release of the first and second volumes of its Big Bang Comics Collection series of books, featuring the classic Knight Watchman comics stories originally published by Image Comics plus bonus features. Artists and writers featured in these stories include: Terry Beatty, Jeff Austin, Jim Brozman, Howard Bender, Randy Buccini, Joe Shannon Denton, Frank Fosco, Paul Frike, Darren Goodhart, John Livesay:, Tony Manginelli: Mike Matthew , Christopher Page, Dan Preece, Ed Quinby, Stuart Sayger, Bill Shelley, Andrew Sheppard, Bob Steve, Frank Squillace, Tim Stiles, Taylor, Ben Torres, John Thompson, Patrick Tuller, Nigel Tully, Shawn Van Briesen, Mike Worley, and Dave Zimmermann.
For more information, or to arrange an interview contact:
Bill Cunningham, MPB
Pulp 2.0 Press
newpulpmedia@gmail.com
323.662.2508
www.pulp2ohpress.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pulp2ohpress
Twitter: @madpulpbastard
Doggone that Martha Thomases, anyway! I was all set to use this week’s column to dissertate on Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip, but Martha stole my idea before I even had it and wrote a piece on the same subject. Probably did a more thorough job, too, but now we’ll never know, will we?
Happy, Martha?
For those of you who have spent the whole of the last week in your local theater watching and rewatching John Carter and so have missed the news cycles, what that scamp Trudeau did this time was to use the platform his strip affords him as a venue for bleak humor about the indignities forced by Texas poobahs – those are male poobahs – on women seeking abortion. Trudeau wasn’t attacking the right-to-lifers per se, but only an unnecessary and humiliating “medical” procedure done down where the stars at night are big and bright.
Trudeau isn’t new at this kind of activity. He’s been doing it for the past 42 years, ever since his work began gracing the nation’s funnysides. He was once called an “investigative cartoonist” and he is that, often calling attention to stories local newsfolk might have neglected. (There’s additional detail in Martha’s piece so go on, read it! I certainly don’t care!)
Trudeau is more than a cartoonist, though – he’s something very valuable; he’s one of our national jesters. I’d nominate him, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Stephen Colbert for jesterhood and I bow to them all and aver that this quartet is worth a long ton of conventional pundits. They use humor to help us swallow some pretty bitter pills. We laugh, but we also swallow.
One example: From Stewart’s Daily Show, I learned that GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum claimed, publicly, that in the Netherlands, the elderly were being euthanized against their will – a lie so egregious that it should have immediately disqualified Santorum from elected office. I didn’t see it anywhere else (though surely Stewart wasn’t the only source of the item. But it wasn’t splashed big in my local paper – the one that’s banished Doonesbury to a website – and it should have been).
These entertainers have a long and honorable provenance. Remember King Lear’s jester, all you English majors? He was a teller of truth in clown’s clothing. And Shakespeare didn’t pull the character from thin air: In Renaissance times, jesters were given license to both jest and criticize their masters. It’s said that Queen Elizabeth the First once chastised a jester for not being critical enough.
You think Rollickin’ Rick got on the horn with Stewart and said something like, “Hey, Jonny, what’s the haps? You should’ve reamed my ass”)?
No, I don’t either.
RECOMMENDED READING: As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, I try not to recommend books I haven’t read. I don’t know if there’s a Doonesbury collection somewhere in this house, but since I’ve been reading the strip on and off for about 40 years, and a lot more on than off for the past decade, I feel confident in urging you to hurry to your local bookstore and get anything with Garry Trudeau’s name on it. If you really scamper, you might get there before Martha Thomases…
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases (go figure!)
This week, the nation’s pundits have focused on a controversy on the comics page. Garry Trudeau’s long-running strip, Doonesbury, has a storyline about a woman in Texas seeking an abortion after the passage of the state’s invasive and insulting new laws. A number of newspapers have declined to run the strip because of the subject matter and the language. A number of others decided to run the strip on their op-ed page rather than the comics pages.
You can find a decent sampling of editorial responses to the controversy here.
Since he started the strip for his college paper in the late 1960s, Trudeau has followed a group of characters, students at Walden College, their extended families and their friends. By 1970, it was a sensation, syndicated in newspapers around the country. From the beginning, it reveled in political arguments, whether among Trudeau’s characters or real political figures, including then-president Richard Nixon.
The Watergate scandal was the first political firestorm I remember being covered in the strips. They were fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that he won a Pulitzer prize for them in 1974.
Over the years, a number of newspapers decided to move Doonesbury to their editorial pages. I’ve always thought it was a cowardly move, but then, I think most newspaper strips have some political content. It may not be as overt as Trudeau’s, but it’s there. Beetle Bailey? Political. Cathy? Political (which is why so many men hated it so much). Prince Valiant? More political now than at any time I can remember.
Still, there is a long tradition of editorial cartooning in this country, much of it exuberantly partisan and foul-mouthed. Most of them are single gag panels, with only a few extending to three or more. None of them include recurring fictional characters, nor do they have anything approaching a storyline. Doonesbury doesn’t really fit in that environment.
I was especially struck by the waffling tone of the Star-Telegram, a Fort Worth newspaper. To me, the key quote is this: “On Wednesday we published an editorial taking to task radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his crass language about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified before Congress about health insurance coverage for contraceptives. Trudeau’s language, accompanied by graphic images, is equally crude.”
Except Trudeau was using the language of Limbaugh, and the Texas legislature. He was commenting on a discussion that was already in the marketplace of ideas. He didn’t make up new words to enflame the situation; he commented. And although it’s only Tuesday as I write this, I have seen no particularly graphic images in the strip.
I suppose there’s an argument to be made that children might see these strips on the comics page and ask their parents about abortion. I’d be more persuaded if one could find any actual children reading any actual newspapers.
Meanwhile, I look forward to Trudeau’s strips about this proposed law, which I hope passes with as much ease as those that apply to women.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
You think you’ve got the pulse of this year’s Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament? Here’s your chance to prove it. If you’re the first person to predict every strip that makes it to the Final Four, you’ll win a $50 gift card from Amazon. Here’s how:
That’s it. If you’re the first person who correctly names the winners of the four brackets, you’ll win a [[[$50 gift card]]] from Amazon. (After all, why should only the winners of Mix March Madness get any money?)
No entries made after 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time on March 16, 2012 will be considered. No purchase required. Contest void where prohibited by law.
Good luck!
The Executive Committees of the Harvey Awards and the Baltimore Comic-Con are proud to present the official Nomination Ballot for this year’s Harvey Awards. Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, one of the industry’s most innovative talents, the Harvey Awards recognize outstanding work in comics and sequential art.
Ballots can be downloaded from HarveyAwards.org and completed forms can be e-mailed to harveyballots@hotmail.com.
Ballots are due for submission by Monday, April 16th, 2012. In addition to being available on the website, ballots will be sent to all major publishers and distributed at comic conventions. We look forward to your participation and input in this process, and we look forward to seeing you at the Baltimore Comic-Con and the Harvey Awards.
Returning for his fourth consecutive Harvey Awards, Scott Kurtz will be the Master of Ceremonies for the awards banquet, to be held Saturday, September 8th, 2012 as part of the Baltimore Comic-Con. “After Scott, Stan Lee, and the Fake Stan Lee brought the house down again last year, we had to have him back! We are thrilled that Scott agreed to come back to Baltimore and help to make the Harvey Awards ceremony as fun and exciting as the last few years have been!” said Marc Nathan, promoter of the Baltimore Comic-Con.
Scott Kurtz has been creating his own comic strips since he got hooked on Garfield in the 4th grade. In 1998, his comic strip, PvP, debuted on the world wide web (pvponline.com) with 700 daily readers. Over the last 10 years, PvP has grown into a genuine Internet phenomenon, growing in readership to an estimated 150,000 readers per day, a monthly title from Image comics, winning a Harvey Award in 2010 for Best Online Comics Work, and winning the Eisner Award for best digital comic in 2006. Scott co-wrote the book “How To Make Webcomics” and co-founded webcomics.com to help assist others in forging their own creative destinies.
Nominations for the Harvey Awards are selected exclusively by creators – those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field. The Harvey Awards are the only industry awards both nominated and selected by the full body of comic book professionals.
This year’s Baltimore Comic-Con will be held September 8-9, 2012. Convention hours are Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM and Sunday 10 AM to 5 PM. The ceremony and banquet for the Harvey Awards will be held Saturday night, September 8th. Additional details about the Harvey Awards and the awards ceremony will be released over the next few months.
[[[Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction]]]
Vanguard Publishing, Trade paperback, 224 pages. $24.95
Introduction by J. David Spurlock
A friend of mine owns the original art to a page of what he (and I) consider the zenith of Wally Wood’s creative genius, “The Mad ‘Comic’ Opera” (MAD #56, July 1960, written by Frank Jacobs). It is a lush piece of work, a cartooning tour de force that causes wide eyed disbelief on the printed page and gasps of astonishment when viewed in its larger, original form. “The Mad ‘Comic’ Opera” is an amazing moment in time, a moment that offered Wood a piece of work which allowed him to show off everything he had learned in his preceding dozen or so years as a comic book artist.
There is not a false note or creative misstep in a single panel of this six-page feature, not in layout or story telling, not in his use of Duotone to bring depth and dimension to the black and white page, and certainly not in his ability to do pitch-perfect parodies–albeit as “real people”–of the comic strip characters populating the story The operatic death scene of Dagwood Bumstead alone would have been enough to cement a lesser artists’ reputation; in the hands of Wally Wood, it was just one panel among some three dozen bits of perfection.
Wally Wood may never have been better, and, in his later and sadder declining years, he often operated at a level that was, in comparison to “The Mad ‘Comic’ Opera,” heartbreaking but which, viewed on their own, were still better than three-quarters of what anybody else was doing. It is also no secret that Wood frequently employed assistants and ghosts to help him turn out the volume of work he produced, but their use was no concession to quality or creative control. As Michael T. Gilbert wrote in the article “Total Control: A Brief Biography of Wally Wood” from Alter-Ego Volume 3, #8, “In the ’50s he mainly worked with Joe Orlando, Harry Harrison, and Sid Check. In later decades he was assisted by Dan Adkins, Ralph Reese, Wayne Howard, Larry Hama, and Bill Pearson, to name a few. No matter. The end result was unmistakably Wood. Helpers or not, the quantity and consistent high quality of the pages were unbelievable. He was always in control of the final product.” (more…)
The erstwhile “Berke” Breathed, who at some point in the last two decades learned what a “berk” was in British slang and decided to extend his professional name, presents one of the most interesting and stark success stories in the history of modern American strip comics: he lept to fame with Bloom County, almost from the moment it launched in 1980. [1] And then he ended that strip in mid-1989 (cementing its role as the quintessentially ’80s strip, for anyone with an axe to grind about that decade), partly for creative reasons and partly for overwork issues, to work on a spin-off, Outland, that never had the wide appeal or impact of its parent, even as it got more Bloom County-ish as it went along.
Every other major strip cartoonist before Breathed had a different reaction to success, creative unrest, and pressures of work: they all corporatized, bringing on gagmen and inkers and ghost pencilers to one degree or another, from the light end of G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury (inked by Don Carlton) to the high end of Jim Davis’s Paws, Inc. Garfield empire. But Breathed wanted to do it all all himself, and, if he couldn’t, he didn’t want anyone else to do do anything. So Bloom County remains entirely a product of the ’80s and of Breathed’s youth: exuberant, frenzied, full of more ideas and gags than it quite knows what to do with. (more…)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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