Wednesday Hoard

Cartoon Monarch, Nancy is Happy, Pete and Miriam: minimalist cartooning heaven! #newcomics

McSweeney's 33: San Francisco Panorama

Pretty excited: just picked up the latest issue of McSweeney's: The San Francisco Panorama newspaper issue, featuring a giant full-colour comics section with strips by Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Seth, Adrian Tomine, and more! To make the week complete, also picked up The Believer's annual film issue. Whew!

3 More Days Until Beethoven's Birthday!

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!

Review: How Sluggo Survives

How Sluggo Survives
Ernie Bushmiller, edited by James Kitchen
Kitchen Sink Press
1989
ISBN 0-87816-067-1
out-of-print, price my vary

I found this book as part of a Mystery Hoard that included, in total, 3 issues of Wizard Magazine and a giveaway Spider-Man comic.

How Sluggo Survives is a collection of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy comic strips that focuses on Nancy' co-star and sometime boyfriend, Sluggo. Sluggo is a tough working class kid with no visible means of support, modeled after the slang-talking, newsboy-cap-wearing inner-city kids of U.S. popular culture, akin to Hollywood's Dead-End Kids and Jack Kirby's kid gangs.

This is a fascinating volume, part of a series of themed reprints published by Denis Kitchen during the short-lived Nancy renaissance of the 1980s, when everyone from Frank Miller to various Underground and RAW alumni were singing the praises of the so-called 'dumbest comic strip' ever. One of the best parts of the book is the introduction by reclusive control freak, painter and RAW Magazine cartoonist Jerry Moriarty. Moriarty sums up the appeal of Nancy for the Underground generation as "brain repair," noting that "[b]eing a reluctant Ernie Bushmiller fan also said something about esthetic renewal and ongoing change and hope." Moriarty's essay is accompanied by notes from his alter-ego, Jack, of "Jack Survives" fame. The conceit of this Jack piece is that Jack has been a living in Nancy's town and has observed her adventures with Sluggo from a distance, although he sometimes feels like he is observing something resembling the activity of another dimension, perhaps the creation of his elderly neighbour Bushmiller.

The strips in How Sluggo Survives seem to have been chosen for the degree to which they reveal aspects of Sluggo's life away from Nancy. Many intriguing snippets of his existence are revealed, including Sluggo's address (140 Drabb St.), his various jobs (office boy, delivery boy, scrap dealer, grifter, goldbrick), and portents of his future --a recurring gag revolves around the fortunes he receives from one of those "weight and fortune" amusements that used to litter the commercial districts of every town in North America. Sluggo is a fascinating, mysterious character: a proto-punk hobo child who oozes America from every inky line.

Since I grew up largely post-RAW, I've always taken for granted the canon-icity of Nancy and so the Nancy naysayers and those who argue that Bushmiller's strip is moronic (or even those who appreciate Nancy in an ironic or, "so bad it's good" sense) have always puzzled me. The strip is well-crafted, charming, and, more often than not, very funny and thought-provoking. Highly recommended!

Snow in the Comics, Part 3: Only 15 More Days Until Beethoven's Birthday!

Snow in Charles Schulz's Peanuts
Part 3 of 3

by BK Munn

I'm sure that Robert Short tackled this in his Gospel According to Peanuts --before the recent Michaelis bio, the most extensive critical treatment of Schulz's work in print-- but I have to wonder if the use of Beethoven's birthday in the strip, coming so close to Christmas, is another aspect of the religiosity of Peanuts, some sort of parable about empty ceremony or advertising. It's funny, I've never really thought about it before. For some, Beethoven is on a Christ-level of greatness (plus, he actually existed), and therefore an apt metaphor for Baby Jesus and his season. I always thought this sign business was hilarious but I also always suspected I was missing something: a function of what Jonathan Franzen called "the koanlike inscrutability" of Schulz's humour.



Anyway, with all this snow, I'm put in mind of how Peanuts seems to contain the most extensive treatment of snow and winter of any comic, with the possible exception of some theoretical Scandinavian or Inuit strip I have yet to encounter. Of course, you could pick almost any subject and Peanuts will have treated it exhaustively, from football to philosophy, from World War I to worms --it was a smart strip that ran for 50 years. (And with the handy index in Fantagraphics' new Complete Peanuts, you can actually look these things up.) Winter holds a central place in the iconography of the strip, not just as a marker for the passage of time and the basis for seasonal gags, but as a metaphor for psychological states and the various major themes of the strip.



I'm sure Schulz liked winter --he certainly liked to play hockey. Sometimes, though, it does seem like he's stretching it a bit, playing on what he thinks other people feel about the season, and poking at those feelings as bit.



Like everything in the strip, snow has its bad side, something capable of instilling terminal ennui and a soul-blackening, body melting, shivering dread.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Canada is ever mentioned in the strip? That would be a grim series of strips. Back to the index...



Next time: the forecast calls for more snow
Part 2
Part 1

Felix the Cat

A friend of mine is selling some older Felix the Cat items ebay.

Cartoonist and animator Otto Messmer created Felix the Cat for Pat Sullivan's animation studio in 1919 and Felix first appeared in November 1919 in a short silent film called "Feline Follies". He was a big hit and some people say he inspired the creation of Mickey Mouse. A comic strip, drawn by Messmer, began in 1923 and ran for decades. he strip was meant to appeal to kids for the most part but it was beautifully drawn and had some great fantasy and slapstick touches. There was a great Sunday strip as well and other artists helped out over the years, augmenting Messmer's genius, including Joe Oriolo. Toys, books, and various household items inspired by the character began appearing shortly after the first animated cartoons --the start of a marketing bonanza that continues to this day. (I think that Jay Stephens was working on a Felix project recently.)

Some of the older Felix merchandise is quite weird --often off-model and frequently scary. I think many people confuse some Felix toys with the incredibly more scarce Krazy Kat toys. The two items up for auction are a jointed wooden figure and a stuffed toy Felix with an insane grimace. I've never seen the stuffed Felix before --he has a wire skeleton and you can stand him up in the classic Felix "walking" pose.