PIERRE FOURNIER, 1949-2022: Creator of Capitaine Kébec and Red Ketchup comics

Obituary by BK Munn

Pierre Fournier, the iconoclastic Quebec cartoonist, died November 11 of complications arising from Lewy body dementia. 

Fournier was at the vanguard of Québécois artists who began making funny, political French-language comics in the 1960s and 1970s. He self-published the groundbreaking superhero satire Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec and went on to transform the character into a sort of mascot for the francophone comics community, with a a comics-themed tv show, "Les Amis du Capitaine Kébec", as well as more comics and strips. Fournier was among the first contributors to the humour magazine Croc, and introduced another long-running character, Michel Risque, in its pages in 1979. Co-created with artist Réal Godbout, the violent adventure comics parody and its spin-off, Red Ketchup, were intermittently-published in a variety of formats over the following decades (recently reissued in a series of graphic novels by La Pasteque). A Red Ketchup animated cartoon series is set to debut in 2023.

Outside of Croc, Fournier also contributed to the magazine Titanic and the Quebec edition of Mad. He edited his own short-lived humour magazine Anormal in 1991, and was an editor and art director for Matrix Comics. His contributions to comics were recognized with the inaugural Albert Chartier Award and the induction into the Joe Shuster Awards hall of fame in 2008.

As well as writing for film and television, Fournier organized exhibits about the history of Quebec bande dessinée beginning in the 1970s and was something of a comics, science fiction and horror pop culture historian, running a well-regarded blog, Frankensteinia, about aspects of the Frankenstein mythos for many years.

Fournier suffered from a lengthy illness and had been in long-term care since February. His death was confirmed by friends and family through Fournier's page on Facebook.

Dick Siegel,1955-2018

by BK Munn

The writer and cartoonist Dick Siegel died June 22 in Manhattan after a short illness.

Richard "Dick" Siegel was born May 27, 1955 in Los Angeles and attended Parsons School of Design in New York. A lifelong fan of comics and science fiction, some of his earliest work was as a writer and designer of several books packaged by Push Pin Studios. These include Alien Creatures and Fantastic Planets, illustrated with stills and posters from classic science fiction films and tv shows. He wrote and drew a comic strip parodying classic film called "The 4:30 Movie" for The SoHo Weekly News and was the author of two satirical works of fiction. He was for many years a chief contributing writer to the Weekly World News, where he also created the comics features Spy Cat (with artist Ernie Colon) and Matthew Daemon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals (with artist Mike Collins). Siegel had an extensive low-budget filmography as an indy cinematographer and director, produced and directed interviews for The National Enquirer, and wrote the screenplay for Shadow: Dead Riot, among others. He was the creator of the webseries, Smash Moron, Intergalactic Dolt.

Besides freelance work for a number of outlets as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian, Siegel worked as a senior writer and the online editor for The National Enquirer from 2008 until 2015. 

For many years a resident of Staten Island, Siegel is survived by two sisters.

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A 2010 GQ profile of the magazine's staff, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer for its coverage of the John Edwards political scandal, focused on Siegel and his boss Barry Levine, and establishes Siegel's comic book fan bona fides:

Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with colored comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)

"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."

He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."

But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.

"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"

"Heroes and villains, in primary colors. That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."

R.I.P. Mark E. Smith

by BK Munn

Mark E. Smith 1957-2018.

Marvel Team-Up #41-44, by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema (Marvel Comics, 1976). 

In this 4-issue series of stories, the sorcerous super-villain Dark Rider uses Cotton Mather to transport Spider-Man and the Scarlet WItch to the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 in order to lure Dr. Doom and siphon his mystic powers. The story is referenced in The Fall song, "Various Times," the B-Side to the band's second single, "It's the New Thing" (1978). Fall singer and chief song-writer Mark E. Smith was a comic book reader and made many comics references in his art, including nods to Jack Kirby, Brian Talbot, Viz Comics, and, most famously, to the work of Jack Cole in his song "How I Wrote Elastic Man." Smith was something of a prole-art visionary, obsessed with time-travel, the Holocaust, rockabilly, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, 60s Motown, Philip K. Dick, Rasputin, the Witch Trials, and other arcane aspects of U.S. and UK pop culture and history. 

Mark E. Smith died today at age 60. 

The relevant lyrics from "Various Times" are as follows (the lyric also references a novel by science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin, whose death is also being widely mourned today). The song examines racism and ideological extremism during three different points in human history (The Salem Wich Trials, World War II Germany, and modern-day Britain) and ponders how seemingly normal people could become complicit in mass hysteria and horrible historical atrocities.

"Future:
1980
Black windows
And smokey holes
My head is full of lead
And the beer is so weak
Since they got rid of time around here

Dr. Doom
Fresh from Salem
And the witch trials
The Lathe of Heaven
Time mistaken
Three places at once
Human [race]
Don't think, ask him
Ask him
Ask him”

RIP Joe Simon, 1913-2011

Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America with Jack Kirby, has died.

Simon was one of the last "Golden Age" U.S. comics creators still living.

Very few of these men nand women are still with us.

A very short list:

Joe Kubert
Carmine Infantino
Stan Lee
Marc Swayze (co-created Mary Marvel)
Steve Ditko
Al Plastino
Fred Kida
Bob Fujitani
Leonard Starr
Ramona Fradon
Shelly Moldoff
Murphy Anderson
Irwin Hasen
John Severin
Jack Davis
Al Feldstein
Jules Feiffer
Allen Bellman (Timely/Capt. America artist)
and Canada's Gerald Lazare

Obit Writing

So I posted an obit for Barry Blair over at Sequential. I didn't like his art. It was ugly and kind of creepy. He was a graphic novel creator, publisher, and pornographer, sure, but was he technically a producer of kiddie porn because he drew erotica about youths? Dave Cooper seems to have based a creepy molester character on him in his "Dan and Larry" graphic novel. Anyway, I tried to write an objective bio, but it's hard when your not into the subject.

Jim Mooney, Classic Supergirl Artist

Jim Mooney, 1919-2008

by BK Munn

Wow, less than a week after the amazing news that the Siegel estate has regained the Superman copyright comes the sad news that cartoonist Jim Mooney, one of the last remaining artists of the classic Superman Family stories, has died. Mooney died on Sunday, March 30, according to this obit by Mark Evanier.

Mooney was best known for his long association with Supergirl --he illustrated her adventures from roughly 1959 to 1969. Along the way, he was also responsible for delineating many of the most fondly-remembered adventures of the Legion of Superheroes. In the 1970s, Mooney moved to Marvel and worked on Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, and, most famously, Steve Gerber's Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown.

Mooney's Supergirl art developed into a perfect match for the character, with soft lines and many feminine details --like the trademark long eyelashes and frilled skirt he added to the character. At DC, Mooney usually inked his own pencils, controlling every aspect of the finished art. (In contrast, Mooney would usually work either as a penciller or inker when at Marvel, finishing pencils by Romita or John Buscema and being inked by Frank Giacoia).

Before he landed the Supergirl gig, Mooney had drawn humour, girl and funny animal comics, eventually moving on to adventure comics including ghosting Dick Sprang on Batman and illustrating Tommy Tomorrow and Dial H for Hero. His style on Supergirl is in strong contrast to the other Superman artists of the period. These artists (Curt Swan, Al Plastino) preferred muscular, dynamic figures and slick inking. Even Mooney's closest parallel, Lois Lane artist Kurt Schaffenberger, had a slick style with more in common with strip cartoonists like Alex Raymond and Mandrake the Magician's Phil Davis. Mooney's female figures are delicate and his teenagers look like teenagers, not smaller versions of adults. He also had an eye for the humourous, and was responsible for some great goofy aliens and one of the most memorable aspects of the Supergirl strip, Streaky the Super-Cat. According to an 2005 Daniel Best interview printed in TwoMorrows' Krypton Companion, "Streaky the Super-Cat was my design. I think the writer came up with initial idea, but I designed him so he looked a bit more like an animated cat. I fell in love with Streaky from the very beginning. I still draw him. I love cats. But instead of the editor telling me, 'Make him look like this.' or 'Look like that,' I pretty much drew him my own way."

Mooney's cartoon realism blend was the perfect fit for the Supergirl series. While not of the order of Ogden Whitney's bizarre, frozen art style, Mooney compositions and figures often had an underwhelming, pedestrian edge, in keeping with the sometimes low-key adventures of Supergirl. The off-putting, melodramatic premise of the series, that the orphan Supergirl is kept as a secret weapon by Superman, forced to live in an orphanage until she masters her superpowers and can be revealed to the world, resulted in many stories that merely retread ground already covered by Superman and the Smallville-bound Superboy. Thus, like Superman, Supergirl is tested by the Legion of Superheroes and has a mer- love interest. She wears a wig and uses a loyal robot double, stored in a hollow tree until needed (surely, one of the saddest aspects of any comic book ever!). Many of Supergirl's Midvale adventures revolve around the world of highschool and high-school romance. Mindful of the intended female audience for the character, the writers along with editor Mort Weisinger, found many opportunities to threaten Supergirl with marriage to strange aliens or have her develop crushes on cowboys who are really magic flying horses transformed from ancient Greek centaurs.

Conversely, Mooney was responsible for some interesting science fiction imagery and was adept at fanciful costume design --he drew hundreds of costumes for both the Legion of Superheroes feature and the Dial H for Hero back-up. Mooney is responsible for the look of many popular Legion characters including Chameleon Boy, Invisible Kid, Colossal Boy, Triplicate Girl, Phantom Girl, Brainiac 5, Shrinking Violet, Sun Boy, and Bouncing Boy.

Mooney's characters were capable of expressing a broad range of emotion. While the plots of many Supergirl stories often resembled those of romance comics, the fear, sadness and love that the characters expressed facially and the approach to body language, ranging from delicate hand gestures to slapstick double-takes, were unique to comics. On an average page, Supergirl/Linda Lee was likely to move from wide-eyed excitement to creased-brow worry to blissful dreaming to eager determination.

These are some of my favourite children's comics, a beautiful body of work created by Jim Mooney, a skilled, professional artist, who worked in tandem with great writers like Otto Binder and Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel.



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A gallery of Supergirl commissions by Mooney.

500 pages of Jim Mooney's Supergirl for $15.

The origin of Streaky.

A gallery of Mooney covers.

Superman robots

Super-Mom