by BK Munn Cartoonist Darwyn Cooke (1962-2016) got his start in the Toronto magazine world back in 1984 when he was hired as the art director for Music Express. He did all the design, graphics and even some photography for that magazine, and its sister mag Metallion, until he left to work for one of Canada’s biggest fashion magazines, Flare, in 1988. Looking at these issues of Music Express, you can see how Cooke was applying a retro mid-century design sense to its pages in a style that nevertheless still retains a very hip 1980s feel. The pages from this 1985 issue are crammed with Cooke’s spot illustrations and there is even a house ad done in the form of a comic strip. This is some of Cooke’s earliest published comics.
"I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through."
I often forget to think of the political and social context of the late-1960s and early-1970s when reading Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics. Sure there are obvious nods to and caricatures of both comics people and politicians of the day in his work, but the comics are also full of the dread and optimism of the day. Kirby was creating during the Vietnam War and the political conflagration of the anti-War movement, the Civil Rights movement, Second-wave feminism, assassinations, the Boomer youth culture, the Cold War and the Space Race. Today is the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders and it struck me recently while looking into where Kirby actually lived that he arrived in California right in the middle of all the Manson craziness.
The story of Kirby’s first house in California has often been told: How the Kirbys built their dream house only to be forced to move by the noise created by the kids on motorcycles driving around in the valley underneath Jack’s studio, and how those same bikers later found there way into Jimmy Olsen as “The Outsiders”. The Kirby family moved from their dream house into another property in Thousand Oaks and that is the house that most people talk about visiting for the next 20 years or so, until Jack’s death in 1994. (Thanks to Mark Evanier we also now know that Kirby’s first house (the “dream house”) on Lynn Road was just down the road from MGM’s Jungleland theme park, and that the Kirby’s drove by it all the time (possibly an inspiration for “The Zoomway” and the “Wild Area” in Jimmy Olsen).)
In reference to Jack’s “open door” policy towards fans who dropped in on his final Sapra Street home studio unannounced, Linda Kirby is often quoted as saying “if Charles Manson came calling, Jack would let him in.” This got me thinking of the milieu Kirby found himself shortly after moving to the Los Angeles area in the late-60s. Shortly after arriving, the Manson murders gripped the city and the nation. Contemporary accounts of the arrest of Manson and his followers in 1969 describe “a band of nude and long-haired thieves who ranged over Death Valley in stolen dune buggies” --more Hairies and Outsiders inspiration, I’m sure. However, one of the great strengths of Kirby’s work during this period is the optimism he invests in the young “hippie” characters he creates (think Forever People et al) at the same time as some of his work explore the darker underbelly of the Summer of Love and the end of the Sixties. Manson finds his way into many of the sadistic and charismatic characters of the New Gods saga, Darkseid and his cultish minions like Glorious Godfrey, Desaad, Wonderful Willik, and many others, but these are always countered by the good natured heroes of New Genesis, many characters based on younger people Kirby met and worked with, including his own children.
Way back in 1994, Cracked Magazine went Canuck-crazy with a special variant edition lampooning Canadian culture, a shameless pandering that only the geniuses behind a bargain-basement version of MAD Magazine could have conceived of (although there was a French-Canadian version of MAD produced by the gang behind Croc around the same period that ran for a few years). Beginning with the cover, instead of the Beavis and Butthead parody U.S. audiences were treated to, the Canadian version boasts a John Severin-drawn hockey punch-up featuring what appears to be legendary Toronto Maple Leafs brawler Doug Gilmour. The rest of the issue is dotted with a smattering of Canadian-themed features, including a generic Don Martin gag with a Newfoundland setting randomly inserted in the title.
by BK Munn Woodcut by unknown artist from frontispiece to The Excellent and Renowned HISTORY of the Famous Sir Richard Whittington, Three Times Lord-Mayor of the Honourable City of London (1690). This is a relatively “late” retelling of the story of Dick Whittington and his Cat, from a widely-circulated London chapbook. I love that this woodcut has the cat speaking in an early form of comic strip word balloon. These types of emanata are usually called “phylacteries" by art and comics historians, after the scroll-like ribbons of text and speech that first appeared in medieval manuscript illuminations. I wonder how many other early “talking cat” images are out there? There were many similar chapbooks devoted to Aesop’s Fables, plays, ballads, various fairy tales, nursery rhymes, morality tales, etc. Is there a Puss in Boots, witch’s familiar, or some other talking cat with a similar phylactery in a book or painting that pre-dates this one?
by BK Munn Rudolph Dirks took the characters of his Katzenjammer Kids strip around the world many times before they more or less settled down on a tropical island, and one of their earliest adventures was a search for the North Pole. As part of this epic 1907 quest, the trio of The Captain, Hans and Fritz travelled through the arctic, battling polar bears and meeting other northern inhabitants, including racist caricatures of Inuit people who speak in gibberish. The Captain, like Dirks himself, just wants to travel and paint pictures, but is constantly pranked by the kids. In the sequence below, he likens the painting of a pine tree to poetry, echoing Robert Service’s "The Pines” and presaging both Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree...”) and the paintings of Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven, notably Thompson’s “The Jack Pine”. Dirks was a fellow traveller of The Ashcan School of painters and was one of the cartoonists who exhibited in the Armoury Show of 1913.
It’s a Cracked Magazine cocktail party, from Cracked #241, December 1988. The magazine was at that time under the editorship of Mort Todd and featured Todd and Dan Clowes’ Uggly Family strip, as well as contributions from Weirdo editor and Neat Stuff/Hate creator Peter Bagge. Doofus creator Rick Altergott was a regular as well. These guys comprised the “kids’ table” at this memorable meeting of the minds that also featured all-time greats like John Severin, Don Martin, Don Orehek, Bill Wray, and many more. Great to see photos of these past and future giants in a casual, but work-related setting!
There's an interesting echo of the origin of Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange in one of the more famous episodes of Seinfeld, 1993’s “The Puffy Shirt”. In the episode, written by Larry David, sad sack George rockets to the top of the hand model game, but just as he feels his life is turning around, his brief career is cut short when his hubris is rewarded with inevitable destiny in the form of a carelessly-placed clothes iron.
George’s vanity is reminiscent of that displayed by high-flying surgeon Stephen Strange, who destroys his precious hands in a car accident and subsequently wanders the world searching for a cure that can restore his skill and dexterity, until he eventually winds up at the hidden Himalyan monastary of the Ancient One who trains him in the mystic arts.
George’s doom is foreshadowed by the tale of a hand model whose story is eerily similar to Stephen Strange’s and also contains a callback to another famous Seinfeld ep, “The Contest”. At his first (and last) photo shoot, George learns of the mysterious “Ray McKigney” who had “the most exquisite hands you've ever seen.”
As the unnamed hand model agent tells it, McKigney fell victim to self-love:
MAN: Tragic story, I'm afraid. He could've had any woman in the world.. but none could match the beauty of his own hand.. and that became his one true love..
(Long pause)
GEORGE: You mean, uh..?
MAN: Yes. he was not.. master of his domain.
GEORGE: (Makes a gesture saying he understands. The man nods) But how.. uh..?
MAN: (Quick, to the point) The muscles.. became so strained with.. overuse, that eventually the hand locked into a deformed position, and he was left with nothing but a claw. (Holds hand up, displaying a claw-like shape) He traveled the world seeking a cure.. acupuncturists.. herbalists.. swamis.. nothing helped. Towards the end, his hands became so frozen the was unable to manipulate utensils, (Visibly disgusted by this last part) and was dependent on Cub Scouts to feed him. I hadn’t seen another pair of hands like Ray McKigney's.. until today. You are his successor. (George looks down at his hands) I.. only hope you have a little more self-control.
GEORGE: (Smiling to himself) You don't have to worry about me. (Nodding, gloating) I won a contest.
The egotistical Ayn Randian superman who is humbled and must painfully learn the lessons of true heroism is a Marvel Comics mainstay, from Peter Parker to Tony Stark to Dr. Strange, and the story of a professional man who suffers the loss of his hands must have had a special resonance for a cartoonist, but the Stephen Strange/Ray McKigney story has other precedents in popular culture. “The Hands of Orlac” is a 1923 silent film that popularized the medieval legend of The Hand of Glory --the disembodied body part of a dead criminal endowed with magical powers. In the film, a concert pianist loses his hands in an accident and has the hands of a murderer grafted on by an experimental surgeon. The film was remade many times, with two versions appearing just before the origin of Dr. Strange was published in Strange Tales #115 in 1963: 1960's “The Hands of Orlac” (with Mel Ferrer as Orlac and Christopher Lee as the magician “Nero”), and 1962’s “Hands of a Stranger”. It’s entirely possible that Ditko and/or his editor Stan Lee saw or read some version of this story before penning the Dr. Strange story. The film was even remade by Oliver Stone in 1981 as “The Hand”, with Michael Caine as a cartoonist (!) who loses his drawing hand in a car accident, only to have the hand return to haunt him as a murderous appendage. The cartoonist’s art in the film was supplied by real-life Marvel veteran Barry Windsor-Smith. Did Larry David encounter any of these iterations before concocting his tale of the masturbating hand model? Who can say...
