Category: Cartooning Classics

Posted on

Leonard & Larry 4: How Real Men Do It


By Tim Barela (Palliard Press)
ISBN: 978-1884568060 (Album PB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content employed for comedic and dramatic effect.

We live in an era where Pride events are world-wide and commonplace: where acceptance of LGBTQIA+ citizens is a given… at least in all the civilised countries where dog-whistle politicians, populist “hard men” totalitarian dictators (I’m laughing at a private dirty joke right now) and sundry organised religions are kept in their generally law-aware-if-not-actually-abiding places by their hunger for profitable acceptance and desperation to stay tax-exempt, scandal-free, rich and powerful.

There’s still too many places where it’s not so good to be Gay but at least Queer themes and scenes are no longer universally illegal and can be ubiquitously seen in entertainment media of all types and age ranges… and even on the streets of most cities. For all the injustices and oppressions, we’ve still come a long, long way and it’s and simply No Big Deal anymore. Let’s affirm that victory and all work harder to keep it that way…

Such was not always the case and, to be honest, the other team (with most organised religions and minor theological hate-groups proudly egging them on and backing them up) are fighting hard and dirty to reclaim all the intolerant high ground they’ve lost thus far.

Incredibly, all that change and counteraction happened within the span of living memory (mine, in this case). For English-language comics, the shift from illicit pornography to homosexual inclusion in all drama, comedy, adventure and other genres started as late as the 1970s and matured in the 1980s – despite resistance from most western governments – thanks to the efforts of editors like Robert Triptow and Andy Mangels and cartoonists like Howard Cruse, Vaughn Bode, Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs, Gerard P. Donelan, Roberta Gregory, Touko Valio Laaksonen/“Tom of Finland” and Tim Barela.

A native of Los Angeles, Barela was born in 1954, and became a fundamentalist Christian in High School. He loved motorbikes and had dreams of becoming a cartoonist. He was also a gay kid struggling to come to terms with what was still judged illegal, wilfully mind-altering psychosis and perversion – if not actual genetic deviancy – and an appalling sin by his pious peers and close family…

In 1976, Barela began an untitled comic strip about working in a bike shop for Cycle News. Some characters then reappeared in later efforts Just Puttin (Biker, 1977-1978); Short Strokes (Cycle World, 1977-1979); Hard Tale (Choppers, 1978-1979) plus The Adventures of Rickie Racer, and even cooking strip (!) The Puttin Gourmet… America’s Favorite Low-Life Epicurean in Biker Lifestyle and FTW News. Four years later, the cartoonist unsuccessfully pitched a domestic (AKA “family”) strip called Ozone to LGBTQA news periodical The Advocate. Among its proposed quotidian cast were literal and metaphorical straight man Rodger and openly gay Leonard Goldman… who had a “roommate” named Larry Evans…

Gay Comix was an irregularly published anthology, edited at that time by Underground star Robert Triptow (Strip AIDs U.S.A.; Class Photo). He advised Barela to ditch the restrictive newspaper strip format in favour of longer complete episodes, and printed the first of these in Gay Comix #5 in 1984. The remodelled new feature was a big success, included in many successive issues and in 1992 became the solo star of Gay Comix Special #1.

Leonard & Larry also showed up in prestigious benefit comic Strip AIDs U.S.A. before triumphantly relocating to The Advocate in 1988, and from 1990 to rival publication Frontiers. The lovely lads even moved into live drama in 1994: adapted by Theatre Rhinoceros of San Francisco as part of stage show Out of the Inkwell. In the 1990s their episodic exploits were gathered in a quartet of wonderfully oversized (220 x 280 mm) monochrome albums which gained a modicum of international stardom and some glittering prizes. Final compendium How Real Men Do It was released by Palliard Press in 2003, and follows the convoluted, constantly crossing paths of the vast cast until the strip’s painfully abrupt demise…

As previously stated, as well as featuring a multi-generational cast, Leonard & Larry was a strip that progressed in real time, with characters all aging and developing accordingly. The episodes were never about sex – except in that the subject is a constant generator of hilarious jokes and outrageously embarrassing situations. Triumphantly skewering hypocrisy and rebuking ignorance with dry wit and superb drawing, instalments and extended sequences cover various couples’ home and work lives, perpetual parties, physical deterioration, social gaffes, rows, family revelations, holidays and even events like earthquakes and ever imminent anti-gay legislation and even fanciful prognostications.

Following an Introduction from Ron Jackson Suresha and the standard recaps, the highly strung hilarity continues much as it always has…

Leonard Goldman and Larry Evans live together in relatively calm, happily and expressively snide happiness, despite vast family circles and friend groups all at odds with each other. As well as an overwhelming panoply of real life travails and traumas, their existences are complicated by redoubling dreams, weird events and increasingly odd fantasy and dream manifestations, such the ghosts of composers Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his bitter frenemy Johannes Brahms who plague many cast members: acting always as the vanguard of even odder occurrences to come…

The interwoven family tapestry is primarily a comedy of manners, played out against social prejudices and changing attitudes to gay life, but also delivers shocking moments of drama and tension and heartwarming sentiment set in and around West Hollywood. The extensive L&L clan comprise Goldman’s formidable, eternally unaccepting mother Esther – who still ambushes him with blind dates and nice Jewish girls – and Mr. Evans’ ex-wife Sharon: mother of Richard and David (the sons of their 18-year marriage).

Whilst still in school Richard knocked up and wed classmate Debbie, making the scrappy loco parentals and Leonard unwilling grandparents years (decades even!) before they were ready. By this stage the oldsters equally adore baby Lauren and little brother Michael…

Maternal grandparents Phil and Barbra Dunbarton are ultra conservative and stridently Christian, spending much time fretting over all those unsaved souls… and their own social standing. They’re particularly concerned over role models and whatever horrors the grandkids are exposed to whenever the gay guys babysit. Their appearances are always some of funniest and most satisfying as the deviant clan expands exponentially, as in this edition when some of Phil’s own youthful indiscretions are exposed, thanks to one of Larry’s cherished and long hoarded 1970’s gay porn magazines that he refused to throw away…

David Evans is as queer as his dad, and works in Larry’s leather/fetish boutique store on Melrose Avenue. That iconic venue provides loads of quick, easy laughs and many edgy moments, thanks to local developer/predatory expansionist Lillian Lynch who still wants the store at any cost and passing trade who all carry secrets of their own.

David also adds to grandparental burden after he and his bestie Collin help their lesbian roommate Nat get pregnant with the net result that our freaked out oldsters become grandfathers yet again…

The store is also the meeting point for many other couples in Leonard & Larry’s eccentric orbit. Close friend and flamboyant former aerospace engineer Frank Freeman lives with acclaimed concert pianist Bob Mendez and is saddled with a compulsive yen for uniforms. It’s previously come in handy whenever Bob’s sex-crazed celebrity stalker Fiona Birkenstock breaks jail to re-kidnap him, but almost every acquaintance brings fresh wonders to the mix.

L&L’s friends and clients all enjoy expanded roles this time, offering other perspectives on LA life, as the cast broadens ever wider, to include a wave of faded starlets, B-movie actors, workmen, contractors and ever more aggressive anti-gay activists…

Larry’s other store employee is Jim Buchanan whose alarming dating history stabilised when he met a genuine cowboy at one of L&L’s parties. Merle Oberon was a newly “out” Texan trucker who added romance and stability to Jim’s lonely life. Sadly, it got complicated in other ways once Merle became a Hollywood soap star and his agents, managers and co-star convinced him his career needed Oberon back in that closet. That extremely long-running plot thread comes to a most satisfactory conclusion here after Merle comes out in the most spectacular stunt TV sitcoms have ever seen, but also brings fresh perils when Merle’s scheming PA Vicky decides to add poor timid Jim to the list of gay men she’s attempted to cure with her bodily allure and ruthless manipulations…

Jim, by the way, was the original and central focus of the overly-critical dead composers’ puckish visits, but now has to share them with so many others. He’s not sorry about that…

As the demanding ghost composers play pranks on more of the minor cast members, their wild games and snarky comments are always balanced by the slow panic of ever-kvetching aging-averse Larry who is painfully refusing to adapt to being a doting grandad/perennial babysitter while observing his failing facilities. Even the local Gym for “his people” don’t want him: apparently hairy men are so last decade. Larry does, however, find some new lease on life when Leonard has the kitchen redone and he meets the burly contractors toiling hard and stripped down to their skivvies in the fierce Melrose summer heat…

Ex-wife Sharon remains a prime source of hilarious woe having been recently “knocked up” at one of Leonard & Larry’s frequent dinner parties thanks to fine wine and their only straight acquaintance (classical violinist Gene Slatkin). Their brief encounter originally sparked incomprehensible jealousy and primeval macho ownership behaviour in Larry, but now his nights attending her geriatric pregnancy have made him an unpaid babysitter for yet another family addition…

As the Millennium approaches, Larry gets extremely house proud and increasingly voyeuristic, but all hopes for “easy eyefuls” and schemes to arrange for good-looking, similarly minded pretty men to move in next door are disasters, leading to shame, humiliation, Leonard’s sustained mockery, minor injury and the world’s worst case of manifest “be careful what you wish for”…

After losing his safe comfy show, Texan star Merle joins the cast of a Sesame Street knock-off where he learns puppets, puppeteers and kids’ entertainers are a breed unto themselves…

With younger players taking centre stage, the author takes every opportunity to spike not just anti-gay bigots but take on good old-fashioned racism and dated ideas too, such as granddaughter Lauren’s inappropriate underwear moment or via gleefully potent pokes at American fundamentalism, as when the “Christian Coalition” relentlessly pursue anti-gay marriage legislation Proposition 22 and seeks to “turn” Larry’s Lauren into a propaganda spouting angel of good…

The series ended on an accidental cliffhanger as Good God-fearing Christians bought the building complex David lived in and started evicting tenants. Just the ones with same-sex roommates of course…

That was where it all ended back then, but see below for an update…

Leonard & Larry was a traditional domestic marital sitcom/soap opera with Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz – or more aptly, Dick Van Dyke & Mary Tyler Moore – replaced by a hulking bearded “bear” with biker, cowboy and leather fetishes and a stylishly moustachioed, no-nonsense fashion photographer. Taken in total, it’s a love story about growing old together, but not gracefully or with any semblance of dignity. Populated by adorable, appetisingly fully fleshed out characters, the strip was always about finding and then being yourself. It remains an irresistible slice of gentle whimsy to nourish the spirit and beguile the jaded palate. If you feel like taking a Walk on the Mild Side now this tome is still at large through internet vendors. So why don’t you?
How Real Men Do It © 2002, 2004 Palliard Press. All artwork and strips © 2002-2004 Tim Barela. All rights reserved Introduction © 2003 Ron Jackson Suresha.


After decades of waiting, the entire ensemble epic was made available again courtesy of Rattling Good Yarns Press. Hefty hardback uber-compilation Finally! The Complete Leonard & Larry Collection (ISBN: 978-1-955826-05-1) was released in 2021, reprinting the entire saga – including cartoon afterword ‘…Meanwhile Twenty Years Later’ to catch readers up on what happened when the strip shut down. It’s a little smaller in page dimensions (216 x 280mm) and far harder to lift, but it’s Out There if you want it…

Posted on

Willie and Joe: The WWII Years


By Bill Mauldin, edited by Todd DePastino (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-439-9 (PB/Digital edition) 978-1-56097-838-1 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

During World War II a talented, ambitious young man named William Henry “Bill” Mauldin (29/10/1921 – 22/01/2003) fought “Over There” with the 45th Division of the United States Infantry, as well as many other fine units of the army. He learned to hate war and love his brothers in arms – and the American fighting man loved him back. During his time in the service he produced civilian cartoons for the Oklahoma City Times and The Oklahoman, and devastatingly, intimately effective and authentic material for his Company Periodical, 45th Division News. He also drew for Yank and Stars and Stripes: the US Armed Forces newspapers. Soon after starting, his cartoons were being reproduced in newspapers across Europe and America. They mostly featured two slovenly “dogfaces” – a term he popularised – offering their informed, trenchant and laconic view of the war from the muddied tip of the sharpest of Sharp Ends…

Willie and Joe, much to the dismay of the brassbound, spit-&-polish military martinets and diplomatic doctrinaires, became the unshakable, everlasting image of the American soldier: continually exposing in all ways and manners the stuff upper echelons of the army would prefer remained top secret. Not war secrets, but how the men at arms lived, felt and died. Willie and Joe even became the subject of two films (Up Front -1951 and Back at the Front – 1952) whilst Willie made the cover of Time magazine in 1945, when 23-year old Mauldin won his first Pulitzer Prize. If you’ve ever read a Bob Kanigher war story – especially any Sgt Rock and Easy Company – the cast are all wearing their war the Willie and Joe way…

In 1945, a collection of his drawings, accompanied by a powerfully understated and heartfelt documentary essay, was published by Henry Holt and Co. Up Front was a sensation, telling the American public about the experiences of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands in a way no historian would or did. A biography, Back Home, followed in 1947.

Mauldin’s anti-war, anti-Idiots-in-Charge-of-War views became increasingly unpopular during the Cold War between East and West that followed “The Big One” and, despite being a certified War Hero, Mauldin’s increasingly political cartoon work fell out of favour (those efforts are the subject companion volume Willie & Joe: Back Home). Mauldin left the increasing hostile and oversight-ridden business to become a journalist and illustrator. He became a film actor for a while (appearing in, amongst other movies, Red Badge of Courage with veteran war hero Audie Murphy) then worked as a war correspondent during the Korean War and – after an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1956 – finally returned to newspaper cartooning in 1958.

Mauldin retired in 1991 after a long, glittering and award-studded career. He only drew Willie and Joe four times in that entire period (for an article on the “New Army” for Life magazine; for the funerals of “Soldier’s Generals” Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall and to eulogize fellow war cartoonist Milton Caniff). His fondest wish had been to kill the iconic dogfaces off on the final day of World War II, but Stars and Stripes vetoed it…

The Willie and Joe characters and cartoons are some of the most enduring and honest symbols of all military history. Every Veterans Day in Peanuts from 1969 to 1999, fellow veteran Charles Schulz had Snoopy turn up at Mauldin’s house to drink root beers and tell war stories with an old pal. When you read any DC war comic you’re looking at Mauldin’s legacy. Archie Goodwin even cheekily drafted the shabby professionals for a couple of classy guest-shots in Star-Spangled War Stories (see Showcase Presents the Unknown Soldier please link to 3rd June 2020).

This immense, mostly monochrome paperback (which includes some very rare colour/sepia items) compendium comes in at 704 pages: 229 x 178mm for the physical copy or any size you want if you get the digital edition, assembling all his known wartime cartoons as originally released in two hardback editions in 2008. It features not only the iconic dogface duo, but also the drawings, illustrations, sketches and gags that led, over 8 years of army life, to their creation.

Mauldin produced most of his work for Regimental and Company newspapers whilst actually under fire, perfectly capturing the life and context of fellow soldiers – also under battlefield conditions – and shared a glimpse of that unique and bizarre existence to their families and civilians at large, despite constant military censorship and even face-to-face confrontations with Generals.

George Patton was perennially incensed at the image the cartoonist presented to the world, but fortunately Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower – if not a fan – knew the strategic and morale value of Mauldin’s Star Spangled Banter and Up Front features with those indomitable everymen Willie and Joe…

This far removed in time, many of the pieces here might need historical context for modern readers and such is comprehensively provided by the Notes section to the rear. Also included are unpublished pieces and pages, early cartoon works, and rare notes, drafts and sketches. Most strips, composites and full-page gags, however, are sublimely transparent in their message and meaning: lampooning entrenched stupidity and cupidity, administrative inefficiency and sheer military bloody-mindedness. They highlight equally the miraculous perseverance and unquenchable determination of ordinary guys to get the job done while defending their only inalienable right: to gripe and goof off whenever the brass weren’t around…

Most importantly, Mauldin never patronised civilians or demonised the enemy: the German and Italian combatants and civilians are usually in the same dismal boat as “Our Boys” and only the war and its brass-bound conductors are worthy of his ink-smeared ire…

Alternating crushing cynicism, moral outrage, gallows humour, absurdist observation, shared miseries, staggering sentimentality and the total shock and awe of still being alive every morning, this cartoon catalogue of the Last Just War is a truly breathtaking collection that no fan, art-lover, historian or humanitarian can afford to miss.

… And it will make you cry and laugh out loud too.

With a fascinating biography of Mauldin that is as compelling as his art, the mordant wit and desperate camaraderie of his work is more important than ever in an age where increasingly cold and distant brass-hats and politicians send ever-more innocent lambs to further foreign fields for slaughter. With this volume and the aforementioned Willie & Joe: Back Home, we must finally be able to restore the man and his works to the apex of graphic consciousness, because tragically, it looks like his message is never going to be outdated, or learned from by the idiots in charge who most need to hear it…
© 2011 the Estate of William Mauldin. All right reserved.

Posted on

The Dick Tracy Casebook – Favourite Adventures 1931-1990


By Chester Gould, selected by Max Allan Collins & Dick Locher (St. Martins/Penguin)
ISBN: 978-0-31204-461-9 (HB) 978-0-14014-568-7 (PB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Lost in all the landmarks and events of the moment, I’d intended to commemorate and memorialise the anniversary of a true comics giant yesterday, but missed my shot. On May 11th 1985, Chester Gould passed away. On that same day in 1953, latterday Dick Tracy scribe Mike Curtis was born. He wrote the latest exploits of the unflinching super-cop, as collected in Calling Dick Tracy!. Justice may be slow sometimes, but if the comics are anything to go by, cannot be deferred forever…

All things considered, comics have a pretty good track record on creating household names. We could play the game of picking the most well-known fictional characters on Earth (with Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, Superman, James Bond and Tarzan usually topping most lists) but you’ll also see Batman, Popeye, Blondie, Charlie Brown, Tintin, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and not so much now – but once upon a time – Dick Tracy there as well.

At the height of the Great Depression cartoonist Chester Gould was looking for strip ideas. The story goes that as a decent guy incensed by the exploits of gangsters (like Al Capone who monopolised front pages of contemporary newspapers) he settled upon the only way a normal man could fight thugs: Passion and Public Opinion.

Raised in Oklahoma, Gould was a Chicago resident who hated seeing his home town in the grip of such wicked men, with far too many honest citizens beguiled and seduced by the gangsters’ power and charisma. Boy, if they could see how politics today exploits that self-destructive tendency…

Gould decided to pictorially get it off his chest with a procedural crime thriller championing the ordinary cops who protected civilisation. He took “Plainclothes Tracy” to legendary newspaperman/comic strip Svengali Captain Joseph Patterson, whose golden touch had blessed such strips as Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Winnie Winkle, Smilin’ Jack, Moon Mullins and Terry and the Pirates among others. Casting his seasoned eye on the samples, Patterson renamed its stark, stern protagonist Dick Tracy and revised his love interest into steady girlfriend Tess Truehart. The series launched on October 4th 1931 through Patterson’s Chicago Tribune Syndicate and rapidly became a huge hit, with all the attendant media and merchandising hoopla that follows.

Amidst the toys, games, movies, serials, animated features, TV shows et al, the strip soldiered on, influencing generations of creators and entertaining millions of fans. If you’ve never seen the original legend in action this collection – still readily available and originally released to accompany a movie adaptation in 1990 – is a great introduction.

Selected by successor scripter Max Allen Collins & Dick Locher, who worked on the strip after Gould retired in 1977, it re-presents complete adventures from each decade of the strip’s existence to date, offering a grand overview of the development from radical, ultra-violent adventure to forensic Police Procedural, through increasingly fantastical science fiction and finally back-to-basics cop thriller under Collins’ own script tenure.

From the 1930s comes the memorable and uncharacteristic ‘The Hotel Murders’ (9th March – 27th April, 1936) wherein the terrifyingly determined – some might say obsessed – cop solves a genuine mystery with a sympathetic antagonist instead of the usual unmitigated, unsavoury, unrepentant outlaw.

Whodunits with clues, false trails and tests of wits were counterproductive in a slam-bang, daily strip with a large cast and soap-opera construction, but this necessarily short tale follows all the ground rules as Tracy, adopted boy side-kick Junior, special agent Jim Trailer and the boys on the beat track down the killer of a notorious gambler.

The best case of the 1940s – and for many the best ever – was ‘The Brow’ (22nd May – 26th September 1944) in which the team hunt down a brilliant but ruthless Nazi spy. As my own personal favourite, I’m doing you all the favour of saying no more about this compelling, breathtaking yarn, and you’ll thank me for it, but I will say that this is a complete reprinting, as others have been edited for violence and one edition simply left out every Sunday instalment – which is my own definition of police brutality.

By the 1950s Gould was at his creative peak. ‘Crewy Lou’ (22nd April – 4th November, 1951) and ‘Model’ (23rd January – 27th March, 1952) are perfect examples of the range of his abilities. The first is an epic of minor crimes and perpetrators escalating into major menaces whilst the latter is another short shocker with the conservative Gould showing social ills could still move him to action in a tale of juvenile delinquency as Junior grows into a teenager and experiences his first love affair…

As with many established cartoonists in it for the long haul, the revolutionary 1960s were a harsh time. Along with Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy especially foundered in a cultural climate of radical change where popular slogans included “Never trust anybody over 21” and “Smash the Establishment!”. The strip’s momentum faltered, perhaps as much from the shift towards science fiction themes (Tracy moved into space and an alien character – Moon Maid – was introduced) as any old-fashioned attitudes.

In the era when strip proportions had begun to diminish as papers put advertising space above feature clarity, his artwork had attained dizzying levels of creativity: mesmerising, nigh-abstract monochrome concoctions that grabbed the eye no matter what size editors printed it. ‘Spots’ (3rd August – 30th November) 1960 comes from just before the worst excesses, but still displays the artist’s stark, chiaroscurist mastery in a terse thriller demonstrating the fundamental secret of Tracy’s success and longevity… Hot Pursuit wedded to Grim Irony…

The 1970s are represented by ‘Big Boy’s Open Contract’ (12th June – 30th December 1978) by Collins & Rick Fletcher. Although officially retired since 1977, Gould still consulted with the new creative team, and the third outing for the new guys saw the long-awaited return of Big Boy, the thinly disguised Capone analogue Tracy had sent to prison at the very start of his career, and whose last attempt at revenge tragically cost the dutiful hero a loved one whilst forever changing the strip. Despite a strong core readership the series had stalled, especially as improbable, Bond-style villains were utilised to beef up its perceived “old-fashioned” attitudes. Even the introduction of more minority and women characters and hippie cop Groovy Groove couldn’t stop the rot. However, the feature soldiered on regardless…

When Gould retired, 29-year-old author Max Allen Collins (Road to Perdition Nathan Heller, Mike Mist, Ms. Tree) won the prestigious writer’s role, promptly taking the series back to its crimebusting roots for a breathtaking run, assisted by Gould’s insights as his chief artistic assistant Rick Fletcher was promoted to full illustrator. After 11 years, in 1992 Collins was removed and replaced by Mike Kilian – who apparently worked for half the author’s price – until his death in October 2005, whereafter Dick Locher took over story and art, with assistant Jim Brozman assuming drawing duties from March 2009.

On January 19th 2011, Tribune Media Services announced Locher’s retirement and replacement by a new team – Mike Curtis and Joe Staton. You already know where to find them…

Representing the 1980s, the final tale here is ‘The Man of a Million Faces’ (October 5th 1987 – April 10th 1988) by Collins & Locher. Like Fletcher, this illustrator was an art assistant to Gould who took up the master’s mantle. Despite the simply unimaginable variety of crimes and criminals Tracy has brought to book, this sneaky story of a bank robber and his perfect gimmick proves that sometimes a back to basics approach produces the best results.

Dick Tracy is a milestone strip that has influenced all popular fiction, not simply comics. Baroque villains, outrageous crimes and fiendish death-traps pollinated the work of numerous strips and comics such as Batman, but his studied use – and startlingly accurate predictions – of crimefighting technology and techniques gave the world a taste of cop thrillers, police procedurals and forensic mysteries decades before TV made those disciplines everyday coinage.

This is fantastically readable, and this chronological primer is a wonderful way to sneak into his stark, no-nonsense, Tough-love, Hard Justice world.
© 1990 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

The March to Death – Drawings by John Olday


By John Olday with Marie Louise Berneri, edited by Donald Rooum (Freedom Press)
ISBN: 978-0900384806 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times

We tend to remember World War II as a battle of opposites, of united fronts and ubiquitous evil – Us vs Them. In these increasingly polarised days where any disagreement or demurring opinion on any issue is treated as heresy punishable by death or flogging, it’s valuable and comforting to be reminded that even under the most calamitous conditions and clearest of threats, dissent is part of the human psyche and our most valuable birthright.

Comics strips and especially cartoons are an astonishingly powerful tool for education as well as entertainment and the images rendered by London born, German émigré of Scottish descent John Olday (neé Arthur William Oldag) were, are and remain blistering attacks on the World Order of all nations that had led humanity so inexorably and inescapably to a second global conflagration in less than a generation.

Born illegitimate in London on April 10th 1905, the boy Oldag was raised in New York before ending up in Hamburg – in 1913, left in the charge of his German grandmother. By 1916 as the chaos of the Great War unfolded, 11-year old John was an active participant in workers’ strikes and protests against starvation and uncontrolled black marketeering. He was an activist in the Kiel Mutiny and subsequent German revolution (1918-1919) and fled the country when it was crushed. A gifted draughtsman and cartoonist, he graduated from Communism (in the Kommunistischer Jugend Deutschlands/KJD) to find a true ideological home as an anarchist. Unceasingly politically active, he resisted the rise of Hitler and National Socialism before being forced to flee, initially to England before moving to Australia in the 1950s. He died in 1977, having returned to his birthplace.
The March to Death was an unashamed political tract, a collection of antiwar cartoons and tellingly appropriate quotations generated immediately before and during his war service, and first published by Anarchist publishing organisation Freedom Press in 1943. He drew the majority of the images whilst serving in the British Royal Pioneer Corps, before deserting in 1943. For that so-typical act of rebellion, Olday was imprisoned until 1946.

The accompanying text for this edition was selected by his colleague and artistic collaborator Marie Louise Berneri, a French Anarchist thinker who had moved to Britain in 1937.

Still readily available, the 1995 edition has a wonderfully informative foreword by cartoonist, letterer, and deceptively affable deep thinker Donald Rooum painting with powerful precision the time and the tone for the younger and less politically informed. This is a work all serious advocates of the graphic image as more than a vehicle for bubble gum should know of and champion.

Makes you think, absolutely. Hopefully it will make you act, too.
© 1943, 1995 Freedom Press.

Posted on

The Best of Eagle


By many & various including Frank Hampson, Alan Stranks & John Worsley, Harry Lindfield, John Ryan, Charles Chilton & Frank Humphris, Norman Thelwell, Edward Trice & E. Jennings, George Beardmore & Robert Ayton, Alan Jason & Norman Williams, Chad Varah, Frank Bellamy, Clifford Makin, Christopher Keyes, Peter Jackson, Peter Simpson & Pat Williams, George Cansdale, David Langdon, Ionicus/ Joshua Charles Armitage: edited by Marcus Morris (Michael Joseph Ltd./Mermaid Books)
ISBN: 978-0-71811-566-1 (tabloid HB) 978-0718122119 (tabloid TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Currently quite easily to find and well worth the effort is this upbeat pictorial memoir from the conceptual creator of arguably Britain’s greatest comic. Eagle was the most influential comic of post-war Britain, and launched on April 14th 1950, running until 26th April 1969. It was the brainchild of a Southport vicar, The Reverend Marcus Morris, who was worried about the detrimental effects of American comic-books on British children, and wanted a good, solid, Christian antidote. Seeking out like-minded creators he jobbed around a dummy to many British publishers for over a year with little success until he found an unlikely home at Hulton Press, a company that produced general interest magazines such as Lilliput and Picture Post.

The result was a huge hit that also spawned clones Swift, Robin and Girl – targeting other sectors of the children’s market – and generated radio series, books, toys and all other sorts of merchandising. The title and phenomenon also reshaped the industry, compelling UK comics colossus Alfred Harmsworth to release cheaper versions through his Amalgamated Press/ Odhams Fleetway/IPC in the far longer lived Lion (running from 23rd February 1952 to 18th May 1974) and its many companion titles such as Tiger and Valiant.

A huge number of soon-to-be prominent creative figures worked on Eagle, and although Dan Dare is deservedly revered as the star, many other strips were as popular at the time, and many even rivalled the lead in quality and entertainment value. At its peak the periodical sold close to a million copies a week, but eventually changing tastes and a game of “musical owners” killed Eagle. In 1960 Hulton sold out to Odhams, who became Longacre Press. A year later they were bought by The Daily Mirror Group who evolved into IPC. Due to multiple episodes of cost-cutting exercises, many later issues carried cheap Marvel Comics reprints rather than British originated material. It took time, but the Yankee cultural Invaders won out in the end.

In 1969 with the April 26th issue Eagle was merged into Lion, before eventually disappearing altogether. Successive generations have revived the title, but never the initial blockbuster success.

For this carefully crafted compilation Morris selected a wonderfully representative sampling of the comic strips that graced those pages of a Golden Age to accompany his recollection of events. Being a much cleverer time, with smarter kids than ours, the Eagle had a large proportion of scientific, historical and sporting articles as well as prose fiction.

Included here are 30+ pages reprinting short text stories, cut-away paintings (including the Eagle spaceship), hobby and event pages, sporting, science and general interest features – and it should be remembered that the company also produced six Eagle Novels and many and various sporting, science and history books as spin-offs between 1956 and 1960. Also on show here are many candid photographs of the times and the creators behind the pages.

Of course, the comic strips are the real gold here. Morris included 130 pages from his tenure on Eagle typifying the sheer quality of the enterprise. Alongside the inevitable but always welcome Hampson Dan Dare are selections from his The Great Adventurer and pioneering adfomercial Tommy Walls strips.

Other gems include The Adventures of P.C. 49 by Alan Stranks & John Worsley, Jeff Arnold in Riders of the Range by Charles Chilton & Frank Humphris, Chicko by Norman Thelwell, Professor Brittain Explains…’ Harris Tweed and Captain Pugwash by John Ryan, Cortez, Conqueror of Mexico by William Stobbs, Luck of the Legion by Geoffrey Bond & Martin Aitchison, Storm Nelson by Edward Trice & E. Jennings and Mark Question (The Boy with a Future – But No Past!) by Stranks & Harry Lindfield.

There are selections from some of the other glorious gravure strips that graced the title: Jack o’Lantern by George Beardmore & Robert Ayton, Lincoln of America by Alan Jason & Norman Williams, The Travels of Marco Polo by Chad Varah & Frank Bellamy, The Great Charlemagne and Alfred the Great (both by Varah & Williams).

Extracts from Bellamy & Clifford Makin’s legendary Happy Warrior and less well known The Shepherd King (King David), run beside The Great Sailor (Nelson) by Christopher Keyes, as well as The Baden Powell story (Jason & Williams) and even David Livingstone, the Great Explorer (Varah & Peter Jackson), and the monochrome They Showed the Way: The Conquest of Everest by Peter Simpson & Pat Williams makes an appearance.

The book is fabulously peppered with nostalgic memorabilia and such joys as George Cansdale’s beautiful nature pages and a host of cartoon shorts including the wonderful Professor Puff and his Dog Wuff by prolific Punch cartoonist David Langdon and Professor Meek and Professor Mild by Ionicus (illustrator Joshua Charles Armitage).

Also included is The Editor’s Christmas Nightmare by Hampson, a full colour strip featuring every Eagle character in a seasonal adventure that is still fondly remembered by all who ever saw (it and are still kicking)…

These may not all resonate with modern audiences but the sheer variety of this material should sound a warning note to contemporary publishers about the fearfully limited range of comics output they’re responsible for. But for most of us, it’s enough to see and wish that this book, like so many others, was back in print again.
Text © 1977 Marcus Morris. Illustrations © 1977 International Publishing Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips volume 4 (1941-1942)


By Roy Crane with Leslie Turner (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-677-5 (Tabloid HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times

The fourth and final collection of Roy Crane’s groundbreaking, trailblazing Sunday strip completes a quartet of comics compilations no lover of high adventure, action comedy and visual narrative excellence should be without.

Our industry and art form evolved from phenomenally popular newspaper strips born of the first four decades of the 20th century: monolithically powerful circulation-boosting features which could, until relatively recently, dictate success or failure in America’s cutthroat newspaper business. The daily cartoon stories were immensely addictive and thus regarded as invaluable by publishers who used them as a sales weapon to ensure consumer loyalty, increase sales and maximise profits. Many a pen-pushing scribbler became a millionaire thanks to their ability to draw pictures and spin a yarn…

With hundreds of 24-hour TV channels, streaming services, games and apps on demand now, it’s impossible for us to grasp the overwhelming allure of the comic strip in America and the wider world. From the Great Depression to the end of World War II, with no domestic television, radio coverage far from comprehensive and movie-shows a weekly treat at best for most, entertainment was generally garnered from those ubiquitous newspaper comic sections. Funny Pages were a universally shared, communal recreation for millions. Entire families were well-served by an astounding variety of features of spectacular graphic and narrative quality.

From the outset humour was paramount – that’s why they’re called “Comics” – but eventually anarchic baggy-pants clowning, cruelly raucous, racially stereotyped accent humour and gag-&-stunt cartoons palled, evolving into a thoroughly unique entertainment hybrid that was all about the dynamics of panels and pages. At the forefront of the transformation was Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs. It utilised a blend of silent movie slapstick, outrageous movie serial antics, fabulous fantasy and old fashioned vaudeville shtick, but also added compellingly witty and authentically true dialogue and a breathtaking sense of day-to-day progression – in short, serial continuity. There were also plenty of lovely women; what we used to call “something for the dads”…

What separated Crane from his close contemporaries and competitors – who were making similar advancements in the new art form – was that he was blending the fun with stirring, contemporary rollercoaster, implausible heroic action…

Washington Tubbs II began as a typical gag-a-day strip on April 21st 1924, bearing marked similarities to confirmed family favourite Harold Teen (by Crane’s pal and contemporary Carl Ed). Young Wash was a short, feisty and fiercely ambitious shop clerk permanently on the lookout for fortune and fame, but cursed with an eye for the ladies. Gradually his peripatetic wanderings moved from embarrassing gaffes towards mock-heroics, into full-blown – but still light-hearted – action and ultimately rip-roaring, decidedly dangerous hazardous trials, ordeals and exploits. This graphic evolution eventually demanded the introduction of a he-man sidekick to handle the fights the kid was getting into but seldom won. Thus enter moody, swashbuckling heroic prototype Captain Easy in the landmark episode for May 6th 1929…

Slap-bang in the middle of a European war, fast-talking, garrulous Tubbs saved a taciturn, down-on-his-luck, enigmatic fellow American from a cell and a perfect partnership was formed. They became inseparable: comrades-in-arms, roving the globe in search of treasure, lambasting louts and fighting thugs to rescue a stunning procession of wondrous women in assorted modes of distress…

The edgily capable, utterly dependable “Southern Gen’leman” was something previously unseen in Funnies: a raw, square-jawed hunk played dead straight rather than as the mock-heroic buffoon/music hall foil cluttering strips like Hairsbreadth Harry or Desperate Desmond. Moreover, Crane’s seductively simple blend of cartoon exuberance, combining faux-straight illustration with “bigfoot” cartooning (here carefully mimicked and even surpassed by his assistant and creative successor Leslie Turner) was a far more accessible and powerful medium for fast-paced adventure story-telling than the beautiful but stagy style favoured by artists like Hal Foster on Tarzan or Prince Valiant and Alex Raymond with Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim. Tubbs & Easy were much closer to the surreal, absurdly action-packed Popeye or V. T. Hamlin’s comedy caveman Alley Oop: full of vim, vigour and vinegar and seldom sombre or serious for long…

The overall effect was electrifying – and a host of young cartoonists used the strip as their bellwether: Floyd Gottfredson, Milton Caniff, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and especially an impressionably admiring Joe Shuster…

After several abortive attempts at a Sunday feature starring his little warrior, Crane eventually settled on the burly sidekick as his potential star and Captain Easy launched on July 30th 1933. The content was unflinching exotic action: blistering two-fisted yarns set before the two buddies’ first meeting.

This fourth and final fabulous volume covers December 22nd 1940 to July 11th 1943, bringing to a close Crane’s association with the strip. He had abandoned the feature to NEA, joining William Randolph Hearst’s King Features to produce Buz Sawyer – a strip he would own and have creative control over. Turner continued both the daily Wash Tubbs and Sunday Captain Easy (with his own assistants) until his retirement in 1969.

This blockbuster collection opens with an Introduction from Michael H. Price tracing potential candidates as basis for the surly Southerner in ‘Roy Crane and the Man Who was Easy’ before the increasingly eccentric and comedic final pages, a goodly proportion of which were produced during the critical period just before America finally entered WWII.

The material is significant for one salient point – Tubbs and especially Easy are scarcely seen after hostilities commenced. The reason was obvious: all true patriots wanted to defend their country and the heroes enlisted…

The hilarious action begins with the reintroduction of comedy foil Lulu Belle: a homely, cigar-chomping hillbilly lady who had been a circus strongwoman and undisputed Female boxing champion for fifteen years. She had married serial bigamist and all-round bounder C. Hollis Wallis before going home heartbroken to her family, but as they just saw her as a meal ticket too, she was overjoyed when Tubbs & Easy wandered by the old homestead.

Soon she was accompanying them to Guatemala, following an out-of-date advert for workers at a wildcat oil field. Arriving eight years too late, the trio are gulled into joining a bandit gang run by savage and sultry Teresa Grande; a Latin spitfire who’s the most dangerous killer in the country. She, however, is smitten with Easy’s manly charms, and redeems herself at terrible cost when her gang try to steal sacred relics from a remote village and its ancient temple.

Homeless and broke as usual, the plucky Americans then walk to the coast and find passage on a ship run an eccentric who keeps pet tigers. The voyage goes as you’d expect and the trio end up shipwrecked somewhere off Cuba, only to be stalked by a wild Wolf Girl: a lost child marooned and grown wild as she matured in the jungle…

After numerous close shaves and hilarious escapades, Easy captures and partially tames the bestial lass, entrusting her to the care of a vacationing American psychologist, whilst Lulu Belle secures a job as cook in a dingy waterfront dive. It’s there that she meets and is romanced by Easy’s brutal arch-enemy Bull Dawson, and inadvertently lures Wash and the Captain aboard the rogue’s ship. Brokering a tenuous peace, she convinces her friend to work on the “reformed” Dawson’s new job: a jungle reclamation project near the Panama Canal. It’s all a big con, though. The treacherous pirate is actually building a secret landing-field for agents of a certain foreign power and when Wash and Easy uncover the truth the fists and fireworks fly…

Returned to the USA, heartbroken, lovelorn Lulu is taken in by the ambitious schemes of a millionaire who somehow finds the unprepossessing lady irresistible. Of course Akron O. Spratly also has plans to boost the war effort by extracting much-needed rubber from frogs…

After much outrageous flummery and hilarious misadventure Lulu is left even sadder, if no wiser, just as the now partially civilised Wolf Girl returns. She has escaped her collegiate captors and is running wild in the big city: her immense physical strength and speed causing much unladylike chaos in Gentlemen’s clubs, the circus, on sports fields and at the Zoo. She also displays amazing talent for acquiring pretty sparkly items like watches and jewellery…

A very different type of girl appears next as obnoxious ten-time married billionaire Horatio Boardman swears off women again and hires Easy to make sure the pledge sticks. Sadly, local mobsters are determined to introduce the World’s Eighth Richest Man to Baby Doll, a sexily appealing ingénue with the rapacious heart of a viper…

That screwball set-up was good for three months-worth of laughs before Lulu again takes centre stage when a boastful beautician is suckered into a bet that he can make any woman so lovely that she will be photographed in the newspapers…

Reduced to simple straight man by Lulu, Easy soon took third place as the boxing broad accidentally acquired a manic and capacious ostrich named Lucille. The big bird’s astounding appetite led to Lulu becoming the indentured slave of a shady farmer who first had her work off the giant’s gannet’s destructive binges and then sold his guilt-wracked toiler on to other men in need of fields ploughed, clothes washed and chores done… until the outraged Easy came back and dealt with the vile trafficker…

Stony broke but free once more, Lulu then roped Easy in on a culinary affair as she opened a diner in the worst place possible, just as her ne’er-do-well family palmed off a young cousin onto her. Augustus Mervin Gasby was a locust in human form, and his astonishing appetite seemed fit to bust the desperate pair… until the former-soldier-of-fortune found something that the shambling oaf could do really well…

A panoply of ludicrous sporting endeavours eventually led Gus into the Navy whilst on the Home Front Easy and Lulu went fishing and subsequently exposed a huge dope-smuggling ring in one of the last rousing adventure episodes, after which the tone switched back to screwball comedy with the re-emergence of C. Hollis Wallis who weaselled into town in search of another woman to marry and fleece. He wasn’t particularly picky and despite Lulu keeping a weather eye – and occasionally a couple of clenched fists – on him, the louse breezed through a few options before settling upon one eminent prospect who lived in a mansion with many oil-wells attached.

He had no idea she was only the cook…

A secondary plot began mid-stream as Zoot-suit gangster William “Trigger Boy” Scramooch got out of the State Pen and moved into Lulu’s boarding house. Ever prey to poor judgement, she took a shine to him whereas for Easy it was disgust at first sight…

Horning in on Wallis’ potential windfall, Trigger Boy planned a kidnap and tricked Lulu into doing his dirty work. Big mistake…

More single page gags follow, including a clever patriotic sequence where Lulu buys a big gas-guzzling automobile and leads the nation by her sacrificial example after which Easy makes his last appearance (28th February 1943) serving to reintroduce another old pal.

Magician, ventriloquist and escapologist Lonny “the Great” Plunkett pops up once more, pranking the cops and again becoming a target of crooks in dire need of illicit safecracking expertise. Lulu is a natural partner for the sharp guy and together they scotch the hoods’ plan, after which romance blooms again when 600-pound gorilla Roy Boy decides only she can be his ideal mate. When he’s frustrated in his amorous endeavours he smashes out of his cage and rampages like a hairy tornado through town…

The comic capers conclude on a high humour note with a return to C. Hollis Wallis’ ongoing marital scam, which escalates into brilliant farce before the loathsome little Lothario gets what’s coming to him…

Ending this final titanic (with pages 380mm high x 270mm wide) luxury hardback tome is a full-colour correction from volume 3, another hand-painted colour-guide strip by Crane and Rick Norwood’s ‘Transition’: an illustrated article explaining just where Tubbs & Easy went when they faded from Turner’s Sunday pages…

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips is a magnificent undertaking: gathering in a wonderfully accessible form one of the most impressive, funny, exciting and influential comic strips of all time, in books that cannot help but inspire awe and affection. Captain Easy is perhaps the most unsung of all great pulp heroes and his spectacular, rip-snorting, pulse-pounding, exotically racy adventures should be just as familiar to lovers of classic adventure as Tintin, Doc Savage, Allan Quatermain, Scrooge McDuck and even Indiana Jones.

These astounding masterpieces are quite unforgettable: fanciful, entertaining and utterly irresistible. How can you possibly pass up the chance to experience the stories that inspired the giants of action adventure?

Captain Easy strips © 2013 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, all other material © the respective copyright holders. All rights reserved.

Posted on

The Complete Peanuts volume 9: 1967-1968


By Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics Books/Canongate Books UK)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-826-8 (US HB) 978-085786-213-6 (UK HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Peanuts is unequivocally the most important comic strip in the history of graphic narrative. It is also the most deeply personal. Cartoonist Charles M Schulz crafted his moodily hilarious, hysterically introspective, shockingly surreal philosophical epic for half a century: 17,897 strips spanning October 2nd 1950 to February 13th 2000. He died – from complications of cancer – the day before his last strip was printed.

At its height, Peanuts ran in 2,600 newspapers, in 21 languages and75 countries. Many of those venues still run it in perpetual reprints, as they have ever since his death. During his lifetime, book collections, a merchandising mountain and television spin-offs had made the publicity-shy doodler an actual billionaire at a time when that really meant something…

None of that matters. Peanuts – a title Schulz loathed, but one the syndicate forced upon him – changed the way comics strips were received and perceived: proving cartoon comedy could have edges and nuance and meaning as well as soon-forgotten pratfalls and punchlines.

We begin with an effusive foreword from film icon John Waters expressing his utter support of the mighty Lucy Van Pelt and all who sail in range of her, drawing references and similarities to actor/personality Divine I never saw before, but now can’t shift…

Notionally, our focus and point of contact remains quintessential, inspirational loser Charlie Brown who, beside fanciful, high-maintenance mutt Snoopy, remains squarely at odds with a mercurial supporting cast, hanging out doing what at first sight seems to be Kids Stuff and an increasingly hostile universe of perverse happenstance.

Always, gags centre on play, varying degrees of musicality, pranks, interpersonal alignments, the mounting pressures of ever-harder education, mass media lensed through young eyes and a selection of sports in their season, leavened by agonising teasing, aroused and crushed hopes, the making of baffled observations and occasionally acting a bit too much like grown-ups. However, in this tome, themes and tropes that define the entire series (especially in the wake of many animated TV specials) become mantra-like yet endlessly variable, but focus less on Charlie Brown and more on those around him. One deliciously powerful constant that remains and grows more abundant is his inability to fly a kite. Here the war with wind, gravity and landscape reaches absurdist proportions, as a certain tree pursues his adored pastime with vicious violent and malicious venom…

Human interactions still find the boy a pitiable outlier. Mean girl Violet, musical prodigy Schroeder, self-taught psychoanalyst and dictator-in-waiting Lucy, her brilliantly off-kilter little brother Linus and dirt-magnet “Pig-Pen” are fixtures honed to generate joke-routines and gag-sequences around their signature foibles, but some early characters have faded away in favour of fresh attention-attracting players joining the mob. Newcomers sidle in and shuffle off without much flurry or fanfare but in our real world the debut of “Minority” characters José Peron of New Mexico and African American Franklin attracted much attention and drew controversy – because, I guess, there will always be gits and arseholes…

A little girl Lila also debuted, but another white kid wasn’t much of shock to the system, even if she shared a fantastic life-changing secret with Snoopy…

At least the Brown boy’s existential crisis/responsibility vector/little sister Sally has grown enough to become just another trigger for relentless self-excoriation. As she grows, pesters librarians, forms opinions and propounds steadfastly authoritarian views, Charlie is relegated to being her dumber, but eternally protective, big brother…

Resigned to – but far from uncomplaining about – life as a loser in the gunsight of cruel and capricious fate, the boy Brown is helpless meat in the clutches of openly sadistic Lucy. When not sabotaging his efforts to kick a football, she monetises her spiteful verve via a 5¢ walk-in psychoanalysis booth (although supply and demand economics also affects this unshakeable standard), ensuring that whether at play, in sports, kite-flying or just brooding, the round-headed kid truly endures the character-building trials of the damned. She’s so good at it that a certain dog opens up a rival concern…

By this time, the beagle is the true star of the show, with his primary quest for more and better food playing out against an increasingly baroque inner life, wild encounters with birds, skateboarding, dance marathons and skating trysts with a “girl-beagle”, philosophical ruminations, and ever-more-popular catchphrases. Here, the burgeoning whimsy leads to constant glimpses of the dog’s WWI other life, peppered with classic dogfights against the accursed Red Baron, but also focuses on his side hustles: running for civic office, competing as arm wrestler The Masked Marvel and brief but intense time as an Olympic ice skater…

Snoopy also indulges in a protracted period impersonating a vulture, but pickings seem to have been quite slim…

As always, timeless episodes of play, peril, peewee psychoanalysis and personal recrimination are beards for some heavy topics. Rendered in marvellous monochrome, there are crucial character introductions, more plot developments and creation of even more traditions we all revere to this day. Of particular note is confirmation of the soft revolution leaving the wonder beagle and Lucy Van Pelt in the driving/pilot’s seat and head of the table/analyst’s couch…

Health and status became increasingly important at this time and the collection opens with a painfully relevant sequence of gags as Linus and Lucy get their measles vaccinations. It was played for laughs then and all ended well, but the way today’s parental moron sector are playing Russian roulette with kids’ lives is still no bloody joke…

Another trenchant continued gag-series follows Lucy attempts to “cure” Linus of his blanket dependency by playing him off against grandma who will give up smoking if he gives up clutching fabric and sucking thumb…

Snoopy is the only force capable of challenging if not actually countering Lucy. Over these two years, her campaign to curb that weird beagle, cure her brother of his comfort blanket addiction and generally reorder reality to her preferences reaches astounding heights and appalling depths, but the dog keeps trying and scores many minor victories. As always volumes open and close with many strips riffing on snow, food, movie-going and television – or the gang’s responses to it – become ever more pervasive. As aways, Lucy constantly and consistently sucks all the joy out of the white wonder stuff and the astounding variety offered by the goggle-box. Perpetually sabotaged, and facing abuse from every female in their life, Brown and Snoopy endure casual grief from smug, attention-seeking Frieda, championing shallow good looks over substance. Linus is still beguiled by the eerie attractions of his teacher Miss Othmar and Lucy’s amatory ambitions for Schroeder grow ever more chilling and substantive…

Schulz established way points in his year: formally celebrating certain calendar occasions – real or invented – as perennial shared events: Mothers and Fathers’ Days, Fourth of July, National Dog Week strips accompanied in their turn yearly milestones like Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween/Great Pumpkin Day and Beethoven’s Birthday were joined this year by a return to another American ritual as many of the cast return to summer camp. This heralds a greater role for old pal Patricia Reichardt AKA tomboy Peppermint Patty (who debuted in the previous collection on August 22nd 1966); this time around, she becomes a counsellor to younger girls, ousts Charlie Brown from his own baseball team and even replaces him as manager with the beagle…

More endless heartbreak ensues as Charlie Brown fruitlessly pursue his ideal inamorata the “little red-haired girl”: a fascination outrageously exploited by others whenever he doesn’t simply sabotage himself. The poor oaf still has no idea how to respond to closer ties with his dream girl or why even Patty cares…

Sports loom large and terrifying as ever, but star athlete Snoopy is more interested in his new passions than boring old baseball or hockey. Even Lucy finds far more absorbing pastimes but still enjoys crushing the spirits of her teammates in whatever endeavour they are failing at. Anxiety-wracked Brown even steps down from the baseball team to ease his life, but being replaced by Linus only intensifies his woes. It also does nothing to help his kite wielding or paper plane folding…

Linus endures more disappointment in two Great Pumpkin seasons and before you know it, there’s the traditional countdown to Christmas and another year filled with weird, wild and wonderful moments…

Neatly interspersed with the daily doses of gloom, the Sunday page first debuted on January 6th 1952: a standard half-page slot offering more measured fare than the 4-panel dailies. Thwarted ambition, sporting failures, crushing frustration – much of it kite/psychoanalysis related – abound, alternating with Snoopy’s inner life of aviation and war stories, star gazing, shooting the breeze with bird buddies, weather woes and food fiascos. These and other signature sorties across the sabbath indulgences afforded Schulz room to be his most imaginative, whimsical and provocative…

Particular tentpole moments to relish include as always, the sharply-cornered romantic triangle involving Lucy, Schroeder & Beethoven; Snoopy v Lucy deathmatches; Charlie Brown’s food feud with the beagle, and assorted night terrors, Lucy’s unique solutions to complex questions; Valentines’ card coup counting, doggy dreams; the power of television; sporting endeavours; and more…

To wrap it all up, Gary Groth celebrates and deconstructs the man and his work in ‘Charles M. Schulz: 1922 to 2000’, preceded by a copious ‘Index’ offering instant access to favourite scenes you’d like to see again…

Readily available in many formats, this volume guarantees total enjoyment: comedy gold and social glue metamorphosing into an epic of spellbinding graphic mastery that still adds joy to billions of lives, and continues to make new fans and devotees long after its maker’s passing.
The Complete Peanuts: 1967-1968 (Volume Nine) © 2008 Peanuts Worldwide, LLC. The Foreword is © 2008, John Waters. “Charles M. Schulz: 1922 to 2000” © 2008 Gary Groth. All rights reserved.

Posted on

High Soft Lisp


By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-318-7 (TPB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.

Please pay attention: this book contains stories and images of an adult nature, specifically designed for adult consumption, employing the kind of coarse, vulgar language most kids are fluent in by the age of ten. If reading about such things is likely to offend you, please stop now and go away. Tomorrow I’ll write about something with violence and explosions, so come back then.

In addition to being part of the graphic and literary revolution that is Love and Rockets (where his astonishingly compulsive tales of Palomar and the later stories of those characters collected as Luba gained such critical acclaim), Gilbert Hernandez has produced compelling stand-alone tales such as Sloth, Grip and Girl Crazy. They are all marked by his bold, simplified line artwork and a mature, sensitive use of the literary techniques of Magical Realist writers Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez: techniques which he has added to and made his own.

Love and Rockets is an anthology comics publication featuring slick, intriguing, sci fi-ish larks, heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera fantasy and bold experimental comic narratives that pretty much defy classification. The astounding Hernandez Bros still captivate with incredible stories that sample a thousand influences conceptual and actual – everything from Archie Comics and alternative music to German Expressionism and luchadores.

Palomar was the conceptual and cultural playground “Beto” devised for extended serial Heartbreak Soup: a dirt-poor Latin-American village with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast. Everything from life death, adultery, magic, serial killing and especially gossip could happen in Palomar’s meta-fictional environs – and did – as the artist explored his own post-punk influences: comics, music, drugs, comics, strong women, gangs, sex, family and comics, and all in a style somehow informed by everything from Tarzan comics to Saturday morning cartoons and The Lucy Show.

Happily, Beto often returns to Palomar, frequently for new tales involving the formidable matriarch Luba, who ran the village’s bath house, acted as Mayor (and sometimes police chief) as well as adding regularly to the general population. Her children, brought up with no acknowledged fathers in sight or ever looked for, are Maricela, Guadalupe, Doralis, Casimira, Socorro, Joselito and Concepcion.

Luba eventually migrated to the USA and reunited with her half-sisters Petra and – the star of this volume – Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez. This collection was compiled from assorted material that first appeared in Love and Rockets volume II and Luba’s Comics and Stories, with new pages and many others redrawn and rewritten.

Fritz is a terrifyingly complex creature. She is a psychiatrist and therapist, former B-Movie actress, occasional belly dancer, persistent drunk and ardent gun-fetishist, as well as a sexually aggressive and manipulative serial spouse. Beautiful, enticingly damaged, with a possibly-intentional and affected speech impediment, she sashays from crisis to triumph and back again.

This moving, shocking, funny chronicle uses the rambling recollections of one of her past husbands – sleazy motivational speaker Mark Herrera – to review her life from High School punkette outsider through her various career and family ups and downs…

Under the umbrella title of ‘Dumb Solitaire’, what purports to be the memoir of Senor Herrera reveals in scathing depth the troubled life of a woman he just cannot stay away from in an uncompromising and sexually explicit “documentary” which pulls no punches, makes no judgements and yet still manages to come off as a feel-good tale.

High Soft Lisp is the most intriguing depiction of feminine power and behaviour since Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – and probably just as troubling and controversial – with the added advantage of intoxicating drawing adding shades of meaning mere text cannot impart.

Extremely funny and powerfully moving, remarkable and unmissable: no fan of the medium, student of humanity or lover of life in the raw should deprive themselves of this treat.
© 2010 Gilbert Hernandez. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Henry Speaks for Himself


By John J. Liney, edited by David Tosh (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-733-8 (TPB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Created by veteran cartoonist Carl Anderson as a silent, pantomimic gag-panel first seen on March 19th 1932, Henry was one of the most venerated and long-lived of US newspaper comics strips. The feature was developed for The Saturday Evening Post before being picked up by legendary strip advocate and proponent William Randolph Hearst. He brought it and the then-69-year-old Anderson to his King Features Syndicate in 1934 after which the first comic strip appeared on December 17th, with a full colour Sunday half-page following on March 10th 1935. The Saturday Evening Post had to content and console itself with a new feature entitled Little Lulu by Marjorie Henderson Buell. I wonder how that worked out?

Being a man of advanced years, Anderson employed Don Trachte to assist with the Sundays whilst John J. Liney performed the same role for the Monday to Saturday black and white iteration. This continued until 1942 when arthritis forced Anderson to retire. Trachte and Liney became de facto creators of the feature – although the originator’s name remained on the masthead for the next twenty years.

Liney (1912-1982) had started as a staff cartoonist on the Philadelphia Evening Ledger and began selling gag ideas to Anderson in 1936 before landing the full-time assistant’s job. After assuming the illustrator’s role in 1942, Liney took over sole writing responsibilities for the daily in 1945, continuing Henry until 1979 when he finally retired. His own name had been adorning the strip since 1970. He was also a passionate teacher and educator on comics and cartooning, with a position at Temple University. Nevertheless, he still found time to write and draw a comic book iteration of the mute and merry masterpiece from 1946 to 1961.

Major licensing monolith Western Publishing/Dell Comics had been successfully producing comic books starring animation characters, film icons and strip heroes since the mid-1930s, and when they launched their Henry – first in Four Color Comics #122 and #155 (October 1946 and July 1947) prior to his own 65 issue title from January 1948 – they successfully argued for a radical change in the boy’s make-up.

The newspaper strip had always been a timeless, nostalgia-fuelled, happily humour-heavy panoply of gags and slapstick situations, wherein the quite frankly weird-looking little bald kid romped and pranked in complete silence, with superb cartooning delivering all the communication nuance its vast international audience needed.

Now though, with children seen as sole consumers, the powers-that-be felt that little lad should be able to speak and make himself understood. Liney easily rose to the challenge and produced a sublime run of jolly, wild, weird if not often utterly surreal, endlessly inventive adventures – many of which approached stream-of-consciousness progressions that perfectly captured the ephemeral nature of kids’ concentration. He also introduced a captivating supporting cast to augment the boy, and his appealingly unattractive, forthright and two-fisted inamorata Henrietta.

This splendid collection gathers some of the very best longer tales from the comic book run in the resplendent flat primary colours that are so evocative of simpler days, beginning after a heartfelt reminiscence in the Foreword by Kim Deitch. Another pause before the comics commence comes from Editor, compiler and devotee David Tosh who outlines the history of the character and his creators in ‘Henry – the Funniest Living American’. He then goes on to explain ‘The Dell Years’ before offering some informative ‘Notes on the Stories’.

The vivid viewing portion of this collection is liberally augmented with stunning cover reproductions; all impressively embracing to the quiet lad’s silent comedy roots, a brace of which precede a beautiful double-page spread detailing the vast and varied cast Liney added to the mix. Then, from #7 (June, 1949), we discover ‘Henry is Thinking Out Loud!’ as the kid keeps his non-existent mouth shut and explores the medium of first person narrative, inner monologues and thought-balloons, all whilst getting into mischief seeking odd jobs to do…

October’s edition, Henry #9, introduced good-natured, cool but increasingly put-upon Officer Yako in ‘You Can’t Beat the Man on the Beat!’ via an escalating succession of brushes with the law, bullies, prospective clients… and darling Henrietta.

That bald boy still hadn’t actually uttered a sound, but by #14 (August 1950) had found his voice, much to the amusement of his layabout Uncle (rather suspiciously, he never had a name) who eavesdropped on the assorted kids comparing their ‘Funny Dreams’. After a quartet of covers, Henry #16 (December 1950) finds Liney playing with words as ‘Rhyme Without Reason’ reveals the entire cast afflicted with doggerel, meter, couplets and all forms poetic, with Liney even drawing himself into the madcap procession of japes and jests, whilst ‘A Slice of Ham’  #22, December 1951) cleverly riffs on Henry’s ambitions to impress Henrietta by becoming an actor. This yarn offers a wealth of Liney caricatures featuring screen immortals such as Chaplin, Gable, Sinatra and more, whilst introducing a potential rival contender for Henry’s affections in cousin Gilda…

In #24 (April 1952) Henry ‘Peeks into the Future’ by outrageously pondering on his possible careers as an adult, before plunging into Flintstone or Alley Oop territory – complete with cave city and dinosaurs – as a result of studying too hard for a history test in ‘The Stone Age Story’ from #29, February 1953.

After four more clever funny covers, growing up again features heavily with ‘Choosing Your Career’ (#45, March 1956) as the little fool road-tests a job as a home-made cab driver and accidentally slips into law enforcement by capturing a bandit. Henry #48 (December 1956) sees him attend a fancy dress party and become ‘The Boy in the Iron Mask’, before this completely charming compilation closes by reprising that sojourn in the Stone Age ‘Rock and Roll’ (#49 March 1957). Concluding the comedy capers is fond personal reminiscence ‘Henry and Me’ by David Tosh; a man justifiably delighted to be able to share his passion with us and hopefully proud that this book gloriously recaptures some of the simple straightforward sheer joy that could be found in comicbooks of yore.

Henry Speaks for Himself is fun, frolicsome and fabulously captivating all-ages cartooning that will enthral anyone with kids or who has the soul of one.
Henry Speaks for Himself © 2014 Fantagraphics Books Inc. All comics and drawings © 2014 King Features, Inc. All other material © its respective creators. This book was produced in cooperation with Heritage Auctions.

Posted on

Explainers


By Jules Feiffer (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-835-0 (HB)

This book includes some Discriminatory Content included for comedic and dramatic effect.

In January this year we lost one of the few remaining titans of our industry and art form. Bronx-born Jules Ralph Feiffer (January 26th 1929 – January 17th 2025) was always far more than “just a comic-book guy”, even though his credits in the field are astonishingly impressive. Feiffer wrote upwards of 35 books, plays, and screenplays and was frequently cited as the most widely read satirist in America. His creative credits extend far beyond the world of print. Feiffer was one of the playwrights on stage revue Oh! Calcutta! (collaborating with Kenneth Tynan, Edna O’Brien, Sam Shepard, Leonard Melfi, Samuel Beckett & John Lennon) and has created 35 plays, books and screenplays including Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders. In 1961 his animated trenchant antiwar short feature Munro won an Academy Award.

In our isolated, outlier field, Feiffer began his career working for and with Will Eisner on The Spirit and other comics features, before creating his own Sunday strip Clifford (1949-51). He eventually settled at The Village Voice, art directing and crafting a variety of comics for kids and adults. These include Sick, Sick, Sick, Passionella and Other Stories (1959), Feiffer on Nixon, the Cartoon Presidency (1974), Knock Knock (1976), Tantrum (1979), I Lost My Bear (1998), Kill My Mother (2014) and Amazing Grapes (2024).

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, and his many awards include a Pulitzer and Oscar, an Obie, Inkpot, National Cartoonists Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild and Dramatists Guild of America. In 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame and was later recognized by The Library of Congress for his “remarkable legacy as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children’s book author, illustrator, and art instructor”. In 2006 was awarded the Creativity Foundation’s Laureate.

Novelist (Harry: The Rat with Women, a Novel in 1963 and 1977’s Ackroyd), animator, educator, academic, film maker, playwright (why isn’t there a single-word term for those guys?), he officially turned his back on cartooning in 2000, but the 42-year run of his satirical comic strip in The Village Voice ranks as some of the most telling, trenchant, plaintive and socio-politically perspicacious narrative art in the history of the medium.

In 1965 Feiffer kickstarted academic American comic fandom with his celebratory evaluation of the industry’s formative Golden Age The Great Comic Book Heroes, and in 1979 was at the forefront of the creation of graphic novels with Tantrum before scripting Robert Altman’s much-undervalued Popeye movie (released a year later).

After years as a cartoonist, illustrator, pundit and educator, at the age of 85 (having been born in the Bronx on 26th January 1929) he returned to his primary role of storyteller with another gripping and innovative graphic novel – for which read on after the review below…

Originally entitled Sick, Sick, Sick, and latterly Feiffer’s Fables, before simply settling on Feiffer – Feiffer’s Village voice strip was quickly picked up by the Hall Syndicate and developed a devoted worldwide following. Over decades the strip generated many strip collections – the first book was in 1958 – since its low key premiere. The auteur’s incisive examination of American society and culture, as reflected by and expressed through politics, art, Television, Cinema, work, philosophy, advertising and most especially in the way men and women interacted, informed and shaped opinions and challenged accepted thought for generations. They were mostly bloody funny and wistfully sad too – and remain so today.

Fantagraphics Books began collecting the entire run in 2007 – and we’re all waiting patiently for the run to continue and conclude. However Explainers is a magnificent first volume of 568 pages, covering the period from its start in October 1956 up to the end of 1966. As such, it covers a pivotal period of social, racial and sexual transformation in America and the world beyond its borders and much of that is – tragically- still painfully germane to today’s readers.

Explainers is a “dipping book”: not something to storm your way through, but a faithful relaxation resource to return to over and again. Feiffer’s thoughts and language, his pictorial observations and questions on “the eternal verities” are potently, dauntingly relevant even now. As I’ve already mentioned, it is utterly terrifying how many problems of the 1950s and 1960s still vex and dog us today – and the “Battle of the Sexes” that my generation honestly believed to be almost over still breaks out somewhere every minute. Of course, now we have the internet to advise and enrage us further…

Most crucially and compellingly, Feiffer’s expressive drawing is a masterclass in style and economy all by itself.

If you occasionally resort to Thinking and sometimes wonder about Stuff, this book should be your guide and constant companion – and it will make you laugh.
© 2007 Jules Feiffer. All Rights Reserved.