Pigskin Pete

The Wright Awards nominees were just announced. This year Jimmy Frise, creator of Birdseye Center and Pigskin Peters is being posthumously induced into the Giants of the North Hall of Fame. I don't exactly know what this video has to do with that. (thanks to Sean Craig)

Hype: Complete Peanuts, 1971-72

by BK Munn It's easy to forget that these books are coming out on a regular basis. The temptation is to take them for granted now that the initial interest over the first volumes has largely subsided. Now that two whole decades of Peanuts have been reprinted in the deluxe hardcover format published by Fantagraphics and designed by Seth, we can really get a sense of what a huge achievement this project is and will continue to be for a generation.

The latest volume is number 11 in the series. It features major appearances by Marcie, Rerun, and the ultra-obscure sportsman, juvenile delinquent and class warrior Thibault (featured on the spine). Here is the press release:

Peanuts surges into the 1970s with Schulz at the peak of his powers and influence: a few jokes about Bob Dylan, Women's Liberation and "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" (!) aside, these two years are as timeless as Peanuts ever was.

Sally Brown -- school phobia, malapropisms, unrequited love for Linus and all — elbows her way to center stage, at least among the humans, and is thus the logical choice for cover girl... and in her honor, the introduction is provided by none other than Broadway, television and film star Kristin (Wicked) Chenoweth, who first rose to Tony-winning fame with her scene-stealing performance as Sally in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Two long Summer-camp sequences involve Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty, who has decided that Charlie Brown is madly in love with her, much to his clueless confusion. Snoopy shows up at camp as well, as does Peppermint Patty's new permanent sidekick, the one and only Marcie.

The eternally mutable Snoopy mostly shakes off his World War I Flying Ace identity and turns into Joe Cool, college hipster extraordinaire. And in three long sequences he writes a fan letter to his favorite author, Miss Helen Sweetstory, then goes on a journey to meet her, and finally enlists Charlie Brown's help when her latest opus, "The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out," falls afoul of censors.

Also, Woodstock attends worm school, falls in love with a worm (perhaps the most doomed unrequited Peanuts love story ever!), and is nearly eaten by the neighbors' cat... Peppermint Patty is put on trial for another dress code violation and makes a very ill-advised choice in terms of lawyers... Snoopy turns Linus's blanket into not one but two sportcoats... Lucy hits a home run... and the birth of one Rerun Van Pelt!

Great Caesar's Ghost

Beware the Ides of March!



read more adventures of Great Caesar's Ghost
Super-Caesar
Wonder Woman's creator on Caesar

Sex Guardian

Canadian superhero action figure discusses sex on a talk show, or something.

Craptain Canuck vs Watchmen, Part 2

3 Superhero Comics That Were Better Than the Watchmen Movie

It should come as no surprise that I felt the best part of the recent Watchmen movie was the ending. Specifically, the choice of music played over the closing credits: Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan." No other song could be so fitting. An ironic, apocalyptic song-poem droned by Cohen over a cheezy, 1980s synth-pop track, the piece perfectly sums up the contradictory impulses at work in the horrible film that preceded it. Serving as a nod both to the conspiratorial nature of the film's plot and to the centrality of the ubermensch Dr. Manhattan character, the song's opening lines, "They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom...," perfectly sum up my feelings after sitting through the seemingly interminable movie.

The best part of the recent Watchmen hoopla and hype is that it has re-opened the critical debate on the comic book source material of the movie. Stalwart soldiers for the cause of comic art, like Jeet Heer, take a stance against all superhero comics that are not straight parodies or fun kids' stuff. Others, like cartoonist-critic Frank Santoro, say you have to be a true-believer to even begin to understand where Alan Moore is coming from. Somewhere in the vast middle is Tom Spurgeon who, while he pans the film, still finds several interesting approaches to enjoying the graphic novel.

There is no denying the graphic novel is interesting, a workmanlike, well-crafted, intricately plotted story packed-full of stimulating and often funny ideas about superheroes and politics, but it is essentially a failed masterpiece the parts of which never really cohere in any significant way. A great gaudy graphically complex book, Watchmen nevertheless suffers from Dave Gibbons stiff figure drawing and Moore's shallow characterizations, unbelievable plot, and ambiguous relationship to the material.

In truth, it is extremely hard to take superhero adventures seriously, let alone craft aesthetically sophisticated versions of them for adults. The most successful contemporary examples of mass-market superhero comics seem to straddle a fine line between slick genre exercises that meld aspects of crime fiction to superhero fantasy and utter fannish dreck that would have been rejected by producers of 1970s Saturday morning cartoons. There is only so much metaphor and thematic density a rickety genre about magic boyscouts in circus costumes can support.

For your consideration, another group of superhero-related comics that attempt to do something with the genre, inspired by Sean Rogers' recent Watchmen "Corrective":

1. Trashman by Spain Rodriguez

(collected in Trashman Lives! by Fantagraphics Books)

Originally appearing in 1960s underground press forums like the East Village Other and in Spain's own Subvert comic book series, Trashman answers the question nobody asked, "What if Jack Kirby's Sgt. Fury was a horny Marxist from the future?" Spain re-imagines the traditional superhero story from the point of view of a working-class leftist militant confronted with creeping political fascism and corporate capitalism, confronting it with paranoid drug-influenced page layouts and plotting, clunky post-Kirby figure drawing, heavy black inks, and trippy sloganeering and self-referentiality, all set in a fantasy of revolutionary sex and violence. Trashman is really a prole named Harry Barnes who is recruited and trained by the Sixth International to fight the cops and defend the workers. Trashman has several paranormal senses and the ability to change his shape at will, but he mostly likes to shoot people with machine guns in the service of a disjointed narrative --sort of OMAC meets Che Guevera. The Trashman comics are beautiful and funny love letters to a revolutionary ideal.

2. Archie as Pureheart

by various

(available in 2010 as Archie: Pureheart the Powerful from IDW)

As explained here, the Archie team decided to simultaneously cash in and parody the craze in superhero comics spurred by the 1960s Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko revolution at Marvel and the revitalization of Silver Age superhero products at DC by penning a series of adventures starring the Riverdale gang as a group of superheroes, with lots of tongue-in-cheek fun and beautiful fluid clean cartooning. It's a self-aware kids comics that's not afraid to take a numbskull premise and run with it, without looking back, and without making a career of it. The result reads like a combination of classic MAD superhero parodies ("Superduperman," et al), Ditko and Lee's Spider-Man, and Otto Binder and CC Beck's Captain Marvel/Shazam comics of the 40s and 50s. The sort of superhero comics that Jaime Hernandez would do, minus the sex and punk rock (but still with lots of fishnet stockings and people hitting each other with their butts).

3. Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware (Fantagraphics)

Ware's searing masterpiece puts Watchmen to shame with its ironic distance, convolutions and diagrammatic precision. A reflection on mortality, failure, family, childhood, and an obsession with superheroes, Jimmy Corrigan is a graphic novel that treats the godlike nature of our heroes with a probing wit and academic artistic scalpel. The fact that both almighty god and a washed-up Steve Reeves-style actor appear as a Superman figure is just a bonus. Did any comic do more for and to the genre of superheroes than Jimmy Corrigan? As Peter Schjeldahl wrote for The New Yorker, "Reading 'Jimmy Corrigan' is like operating an intricate machine whose function is not immediately apparent. Gradually, meanings emerge and emotions crystallize. None gladden." The doom that comes to Jimmy is ultimately more banal and overpoweringly wonderful than the boredom of Dr. Manhattan's demise and resurrection.