ROMA IS LIT!

by BK Munn
Saw Roma (2018) last night. Beautiful film. I think I know the secret to its success: a hidden cameo by Nancy and Sluggo in the film’s final minutes. Part of the film’s metacommentary on movies and childhood, the issue is Periquita #200 (Periquita and Tito were the Spanish-language Nancy and Sluggo), one of several comics seen fleetingly in Roma. I think this issue is an anachronism from 1975  OR 1976 (the movie is set in 1971 around the Corpus Christi massacre in Mexico City). Published by Editorial Novaro, it appears to be reprints of the U.S. Dell comics series, with John Stanley stories. There is a great line in the film when a young couple is about to go to the movies for a make-out session, and the young woman says “I prefer to play in the dark.”

The monthly series began publication in 1960 and each issue consisted of 32 full-colour pages. The dimensions of the comics changed beginning in March 1975 due to the rise in the cost of paper, forcing the publisher to reduce the size of its comics by almost half to 19.5 x 13.5 cm from 25 x 17 cm (this is when the "Eagle Series" logo appears). Some stories may have been written and drawn by Mexican creators.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: ALL THE ANSWERS BY MICHAEL KUPPERMAN

All the Answers

by Michael Kupperman
(Simon & Schuster, 2018)

review by BK Munn

Surrealist humourist Kupperman brings his trademark deadpan cartooning style to the serious story of his father's life, focusing on Joel Kupperman's bizarre career as a child prodigy and star of the 1940s radio and tv show Quiz Kids. The elder Kupperman rarely discussed his childhood with his son, and the book comes across as something of an investigative report into these mysteries, equal parts reckoning and quest, filled with ellipses and unanswered questions, fitting for a biography about a genius skilled in solving puzzles but unskilled in relating to other people, especially his own children. In the sense that the book is the story of a Jewish son probing a recalcitrant father about his life during wartime, I like to think of the book as an anhedonic Maus, but where Spiegleman's book chronicled his father's survival of the Holocaust in microscopic detail, in a scratchy, agonized, diagrammatic style, Kupperman's homefront tale is as cold and distant as his subject matter, the expressionless characters more like cardboard stand-ins, clipped out of old scrapbooks and newspaper articles, that Kupperman is desperately trying to fill up with personality, meaning and answers. A brilliant book!

Little King Comics

I think the consensus is that the Little King comics published by Dell were written and thumbnailed by John Stanley of Little Lulu fame. The Little King is one of the most iconic of comic strips and its creator, Otto Soglow, was a great cartoonist, beloved of little children and adult intellectuals alike (Salvador Dali was his biggest fan). The Dell comic book adaptations, signed by Soglow but not by him, are also great. These comics are playful and actually funny, with a great graphic aspect that echoes the comic strip in its use of geometric shapes, contrast and wonderful compositions. Just beautiful.

These panels are from "The Statue" (Four Color #597: The Little King, 1954)

Read the full story here.

Antique Show Comics, part 1: Canadian Red Ryder Comics

I bought this from a toy vendor this weekend not because I like these comics but because I don't have any of this particular type. You hardly see these Canadian editions of Dell Comics (I wish it was a Little Lulu!). Less pages than the U.S. issues and blank inside covers. Subscription coupon on the back cover. Published by The Wilson Publishing Company, 123 Eighteenth Street, New Toronto. Established during the WECA embargo on U.S. comics, the company kept chugging along until I believe the Comics Code came along.

More on this postwar period of comics publishing in Canada.

Sleepin' Lena by Erich F.T. Schenk

My new favourite comic book character is Sleepin' Lena, the anthropomorphic lady cat afflicted with hypersomnia. Lena was written and drawn by Erich F.T. Schenk, an American journeyman cartoonist who worked for a variety of publishers in the 1940s, and also for the Fleisher animation studio, where he provided surreal background paintings for Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. Lena appeared in only a handful of stories in different titles. In each story, Lena gets a new job but falls asleep and has a dreamlike adventure before getting fired. I love the character especially because of this story where she is hired as a soda jerk in a candy store, just like my store! A truly weird character at the intersection of race and gender. The comics historian Cheryl Spoehr has posited that Lena is a literary "type" based on stereotypes of people of colour, especially broken down maids, found in popular American books and other media of the early 20th Century. Perhaps the name is borrowed from Lena Horne, who was at the height of her early success in the 1940s?

(from Merry-Go-Round Comics 1945, nn --only issue, published by American Comics Group) 

Canadian Cartoonist Project: Joe Cranswick

by BK Munn

I came across an auction for this postcard on Ebay. The seller is a stamp dealer and apparently bought this as part of collection featuring famous and not-so-famous cartoonists. It looks like the sort of project a fan or hobbyist (or burgeoning cartoonist) would do, writing away to every cartoonist with a public address and asking for a free sketch. The collection comes from Abilene, Texas, which makes it all the stranger that the collector tracked down the totally unknown cartoonist Joseph "Joe" Cranswick of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Joe Cranswick was a newspaper cartoonist, but for what Vancouver newspaper I'm uncertain. The card is postmarked 1947, so he must have been at work there at that time. In later years (through the 1960s) he was the editor of Thy Kingdom Come, a magazine published by The Association of the Covenant People, to all appearances a Vancouver offshoot of the Christian sect of British Israelites, which still has a church in Burnaby, BC. (There was a Joe Cranswick who worked as a CBC technician in the 1960s and 1970s in Burnaby as well, but I'm not sure if he's the same).

The address on the card still exists in Vancouver. I just started on this mystery, so it's still a work in progress.

Post-"Mandy" Sci-Fi Hoard

This week's antique market find: I fell in love with this small collection (or Mystery Hoard™) of 1970s sci-fi and fantasy digests, about 20 in all. Kara and I have been in a kind of "Mandy" mood all week after seeing the movie and these covers definitely have that acid-drenched prog/metal feel. I used to read Analog magazine every month as an 80s teen nerd but totally missed out on this 70s stuff. Great writers in here, as well as art by Kelly Freas and many others, including an underground comics ad from Last Gasp publishing illustrated by Canadian "Giant of the North" Hall-of-Famer Rand Holmes!

Batman as Capitalist Security Guard by Zach Weinersmith

by BK Munn

I've often written about superheroes as the enemies of the working class and the paucity of actual "working class heroes" in the history of comic books. The working class characters in comics are most often pegged as villains, or, if they are particularly troublesome, "supervillains":

"We search in vain for examples of the working class superhero. With few exceptions, he is nowhere to be found. In his place, everywhere we find the figure of the superhero working on the side of the bosses, whether as an ideological footsoldier in the armies of the mass media (the Daily Planets and Bugles, WHIZ's and WXYZ's), as a representative of the Repressive State Apparatus (the police and armed forces), or even as the boss himself: we need not enumerate how many capitalists seem to moonlight as masked vigilantes, erstwhile Robin Hoods reduced to acting as night watchmen over the money bins of their fellow billionaires.

Ah, but who do they guard against? Who appears to play the role of Beagle Boy opposite the concerted efforts of these super-powered Scrooge McDucks? The superhero's triumphalist rhetoric of truth, justice, and the American Way must not remain unchallenged --nor can the use of force continue to be monopolized by a single comic book class. At last, a dim figure steps forward to take up its historic role of class antagonism.

Enter the supervillain, shambling leftward onto the world-historic stage. As an expression of class anxiety, he is unparalleled in art. From his secret origins as the stepchild of the mustache-twirling Oil Can Harry of melodrama and the grand-guignol grotesques of Dick Tracy, the comic book villain embodies all of the perceived threats to the capitalist utopias envisioned by the comic book creator, a world of shiny metropolises, lorded over by masonic fraternities of top-hatted magicians, fetishistic playboys, and patriarchal circus strongmen."

Cartoonist Zach Weinersmith has made the observation explicit with this humourous rant from billionaire Bruce Wayne aka Batman, who enlightens his ward Robin the Boy Wonder about true role of the superhero. Weinersmith's webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is very funny and (dare I say it?) highly intellectually stimulating.

Notes on Guelph Comics History, Part Two: Tales of a Guelphite

Well, here's Tales of a Guelphite #1, which publisher David J Knight tells me he is planning to turn into a continuing comics anthology. The first issue has no comics but covers some aspects of comics culture in Guelph, and includes my article detailing the secret history of Tragedy Strikes Press. I'm happy that some of this history is now in print, and mostly in the words of some of my favourite cartoonists (thank you: Nick Craine, Jay Stephens, and Dylan Horrocks). It was quite a thrill to be a comic book nerd living in Guelph when these cool underground comics were being published here, and even more of a thrill to talk with the creators who published them, all these years later. A much longer version of this history may appear online in the future, as I had to do quite a bit of trimming to fit the wordcount, and several other interviews didn't make it into the article, but for now you can pick up a copy of the zine at Royal Cat Records.

Little Lulu Billboard in Times Square (with Tubby!)

I was wondering why Tubby, the second-greatest American comic book character of all time after Little Lulu, didn't have his own Wikipedia page, when I stumbled over the following amazing fact on Lulu's page. I have many examples of Kleenex advertising featuring Lulu, but somehow was unaware of this: "Little Lulu was widely merchandised, and was the first mascot for Kleenex tissues; from 1952 to 1965 the character appeared in an elaborate animated billboard in Times Square in New York City."

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.

___

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."

Investigating Comic Books in Canada: Maclean's Magazine, 1948

I finally picked up a physical copy of this Maclean's Magazine article from 1948. The 5-page article "What About the Comics?" by Sidney Katz appeared in the December 1st issue and for its time was a quite thorough look at the moral panic over so-called "crime comics". For the article, Katz corresponded with the New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of the anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, and quotes an armload of other thinkers on early childhood education including Dr. Spock. The article also touches on the crusade to have the sale of crime comics criminalized, and looks at the use of religious and educational comics in the classroom, mentioning many of the then-popular U.S. comic book titles and features along the way. The article is one of the earliest published in the international "mainstream" media to treat with this subject, and comes across as fairly balanced (Katz went on to specialize in award-winning journalism with a focus on psychology and mental illness). The article is well-documented and often-cited in the study of anti-comics literature, and is even still available on the Maclean's site to subscribers, but it's nice to have my own original copy. The best part is the staged photo of the kids reading the comics in front of a Maclean's newsstand. I like to imagine this was photographed in the lobby of the Maclean's building at 481 University Ave in Toronto, perhaps using the well-dressed children of the photographer. The sale of crime comics was criminalized in Canada in 1949 as a result of The Fulton Bill.