Comics
Part 1
I love comics, and always have, since I was four years old and my father read the Sunday funnies out loud. Dick Tracy. Little Orphan Annie. The Katzenjammer Kids. Gasoline Alley. Mutt & Jeff. It was words and drawn pictures that took me to another place, a place populated by Donald Duck and his duck family, and Donald was featured in the newspaper as early 1936, and even then his hot-tempered, “furniture-breaking! personality” was in full view. What if there were no comics!?
But there are! And the Donald of 1936 is not the Donald Duck I came to know and love. That Donald needed Carl Barks to illustrate Donald and give him speech. Barks wrote and illustrated 10 comic novels featuring Donald and his growing family: his rich uncle, Scrooge McDuck, his girl friend Daisy and, especially, his three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. In the early years Donald and his nephews tormented each other—a bucket of water on the door jamb, sent to bed with no dinner—except what they snuck in right under their uncle’s nose.
But Barks, and his new illustrator Anthony Tagliaferro, turned every thing around, and a more streamlined Donald became the intrepid captain for the many adventures financed by Uncle Scrooge and written by Carl Barks. And it must be noted that Barks did not write down to his young audience, and these 10 stories were written in a vocabulary unused by most 10-year olds, but still clear enough to be understood and enjoyed. And, I’m pretty sure, my love of words which exists to this day, began on those adventures.
As an eighth grader I was already addicted to Mad Magazine, a satirical comic written and drawn by “the usual gang of idiots” as their masthead declared. I even had an Alfred E. Neumann shirt—What, me worry? (You really had to be there). Mad had lots of stuff going on in the borders and at the bottom of the page. One I remember was a 1/4” square drawing depicting an Aztec-like face and declaring “This is the mortal image of the great King Montezuma and anyone who sees it will die. Too bad if you looked.” That stuff just cracked me up. Most kids at my high school had no idea Mad Magazine even existed.
After high school, a little more maturity beckoned and I became a regular reader of Doonesbury, Gary Trudeau’s decades-long comic strip which had the foresight to ridicule and vilify the current President, showing him for what he was early on. Here’s my favorite example, depicting the Prez inspecting the boudoir in his latest multimillion dollar yacht. The artisans had created beautiful ceiling art with cherubs and angel-like figures—quite nice. The statesman’s comment? “Put more hooters on those nymphs!” What a class act!
This was obviously the more political kind of comic, but just as compelling for me.
These days, in my 80s, Calvin & Hobbs have been freed from the constraints of the shrinking newspapers, and have been published—in dynamic color—in a large format book, some drawings occupying a full page. One depicts Calvin piloting a jet fighter and attacking a huge dinosaur, Calvin’s version of his kindergarten teacher chastising him for daydreaming. Calvin was uncontainable.
Years later, when I had kids (four boys) we all still laughed at Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbs and Gary Larson’s genius bent humor. I still get the annual Larson cartoon calendar and his cartoons continue to make me—and my sons—laugh out loud. And don’t they say laughter is the best medicine?
The next source of cartoons I discovered as an adult were in the New Yorker magazine and I subscribed to it mainly for the cartoons and the movie reviews. Today the New Yorker’s cartoons are not so funny for some reason, and I let my subscription lapse. Cartoons are supposed to be funny or meaningful, and sometimes in the NY they’re not anymore.
A word about cartoons. Cartoons are a one-off, a single panel that works or not. A comic is a string of panels telling a story. Bliss, who appears in the Los Angeles Times and draws lots of adorable and remarkable dogs, also appears regularly in the New Yorker, and is a single panel cartoonist, while Gary Trudeau, a comic artist, draws several panels and tells a story.
Today, Gary Larson’s cartoons are also available in large format, but it’s his wit that carries the day. Like this one: four military generals are sitting around a table of maps, and one of them leans casually back in his chair and says “On the other hand, what if we gave a war and everyone came?” Classic Larson. Want to know the real reason dinosaurs went extinct? Larson’s cartoon showing young dinos smoking cigarettes behind a large rock gives you Gary’s answer. And do you know what’s really nice about this? He has hundreds, maybe thousands more of them, And I defy anyone reading three or four of them in a row not to laugh out loud at least once. You may even fall into the conundrum I have here: how can you write about cartoons without showing them? I will be depending on my good friend and an excellent editor, Rick Thues, to help me with this. And I suspect Rick may be a fan of comics and cartoons as well.)
Until now, I’ve never really examined the relationship between the pictures and the words – I just enjoyed them. But I compare them to popular songs— combinations of words and music that just – work. In the 70s I enjoyed the more serious political cartoons of Paul Conrad in the LA Times, and of Pat Oliphant, a brilliant cartoonist, whose cartoons savage the powers to be in ways we couldn’t imagine without his art. [cartoon]
The 70s also had the scabrous underground comix, but more on them later, and you’ll have to hold your nose for most of them: they couldn’t be printed today.
But with the gradual downsizing of all print, comics may be in danger like the ciggie- puffing dinos, and my hope is that despite any advantage of digital communication, there will always be paper comic books and cartoons by artists who earn their living and fame by their wit and artistry, and despite the desperate conditions of modern society will still crack me up. Here’s a cartoon caption I submitted to the New Yorker when it began inviting the readers to submit a cartoon, and they would then publish the winning one. The way the contest worked was the magazine published a cartoon on the back pages, but it was without a caption—you were to provide the words. The next issue would show three cartoons vying for the honor, and the next issue the winner. The cartoon I selected to submit showed two turkeys (it was around Thanksgiving) talking to each other, and one of them was wearing a sexy black long-net stocking garter belt. My caption? “Do they make me look too delicious?” It didn’t make the back pages, but the New Yorker thoughtfully sent me a copy of what it would have looked like, and it was good enough that I could fib to my friends, and say it got published. (Having been to Catholic school of course I couldn’t do that.) [cartoon] By the way, if I could think of three more things to say between the two turkeys, I’d have a comic.
Here’s what Carl Barks, the genius Donald Duck comic artist (he would say illustrator) tells us in 1936.
First off, let me assure the critics that what they see on the following pages is not juvenile kid stuff. Sure, our stories are enthusiastically enjoyed by children; that is proven by the many fan letters that reach my desk, but the main story forms are for grown-ups – men and women who read the stories first as children then re-read them again after they have reached sophisticated adulthood. The critic could not have known that by the late 1930s the great revolutionary change in storytelling called “comic books” would come along. Nor that this would become a worldwide phenomenon.The 40s and 50s of the last century were the Golden Age of comics, and they told us in drawn pictures about the world we live in, and the people who live in it, and entertained millions. And almost always these cartoons told us much about the times we were living in, and the difficulties encountered thereof. The Doctor is in: 5 cents. (Peanuts 1955–Present—thank goodness for reprints).
The principle of using pictures to tell the reader where the characters are at all times, what the characters are doing, and how the characters feel is there in a comic. In fact, the pictures are so closely integrated with written words that the pages become more related to the theater then to the printing press. [I found this a very intriguing comment.]
Barks continues. Reading a comic book, the critic would realize, is to a great degree like holding a silent movie screen in one’s hands and, with a little practice, he would’ve found that the “POWS,” “BINGS,” and “KERASSHES” make even the silent screen come alive with excellent substitutes for sound.
Comics seemed to have evolved from their original purpose, which was usually newspaper advertising and promotion for cough syrup and other home remedies popular in the 1930s. Smith’s Energy Tablets, for example (primary ingredient: cocaine), would buy the entire Sunday comics section from several newspapers and reprint 52 color pages of the most popular comics of the day, including a page or two of their ads selling their product, and if you noted with amazement that there were 52 pages of comics in 1930s, you can see why that might be the Golden Era. How many color pages of comics are in today’s LA times? Two.
These 52 pages were filled with characters and stories that showed us what was going on in the world and in the minds of our amazing comic artists, and almost always there was humor there. What—me worry?
Who might we meet in these early pages? Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse for sure, because back in the day they were friends, and went on adventures together, and played pranks on each other other. In the 10 comic novels Carl Barks wrote and drew about Donald Duck and his family adventures, this ten-year was transported to whatever exotic island they visited, usually in search of treasure. Uncle Scrooge didn’t swim in 3 cubic acres of money because he stayed home. And I remember, a Mickey Mouse comic (he wasn’t owned by a corporation at the time.) where Mickey sees his girlfriend Minnie with another man—er, mouse. A jealous Mickey finds another lady mouse to stroll in front of Minnie, and he hurts her feelings. When he learns the boy mouse with Minnie was only her cousin, he is rightfully ashamed and apologizes. What is a 10 year-old boy to make of this?! A moral example in a comic, and it’s stuck with me all these years.
To be continued
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