Of all the books that I received for Christmas last year, The Someday Funnies  was the one I was most looking forward to reading. It’s a mammoth book and filled with all sorts of great artwork by cartoonists that I knew and many that I didn’t. I marveled at seeing some great like Goscinny and Uderzo and Jack Kirby and Kurtzmann all in the same volume. It’s a beautiful book to just flip through. The premise got me as well – a large number of cartoonists and writers gathered together to reminisce about the sixties. Each was allowed a page with what seems like unlimited freedom to draw what they wanted. How could it not be the greatest comic book ever?

When Michael Choquette compiled all these strips and presented the books to publishers, they just didn’t get it: what would be a no-brainer today seemed quite strange. Thus it was shelved, likely to never see publication, until an article about it in The Comics Journal renewed interest in the project. Now it seemed like a no-brainer, and The Someday Funnies, thirty years later, finally saw the light of day.

Does it live up to the hype? Of course not. Is it still enjoyable? Yes, but perhaps not as much as it would have been at the intended date of publication. The Someday Funnies is sadly more of an artifact of its time, a document of what the sixties was like rather than a collection of enjoyable strips. Many are bewildering until you consult the helpful footnotes at the end which provide the context. And some, sadly, appear phoned in by people who may have been too busy to contribute their best work to the cause.

Although the goal of the book was to present a multifaceted appraisal of the sixties, it appears that for many the sixties was all about the same topics: the Kennedy assassination, free love, free drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The drug strips for me wore thin the quickest. However, nothing else about the sixties quite takes advantage of the mind-bending power of comics, so I suppose it make sense that so many would document their exploits with illicit substances.

Here are a few artists that impressed me and a few that disappointed me:

Jack Kirby: A Kirby page of this size will always be a wonder to behold no matter what the content. This one has to be one of the biggest ever.

Tom Wolfe: Who knew he could draw so well? Really cool fibrous ink drawings.

Carlos Jimenez: Not familiar with this guy, but his artwork is an appealing cross between the great Belgians like Uderzo and Wally Wood.

Don Martin: A fun little cartoon.

Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith: An allegory about the Kennedy assassination, one that I was able to discern pretty quickly unlike some of the other ones that were a little more obtuse.

Wally Wood: I’m a big fan of his MAD stuff; not such a big fan of his more perverted work.

Mary Anderson and Tuli Kupferberg: I know that not being able to draw is not a prerequisite to creating good comics, but these pushed the limit for me.

Morris: I’m more of an Uderzo fan, but Morris contributed some fantastic caricatures of Western movie stars. A unique and intelligent take on the sixties.

Gahan Wilson: I like Wilson, didn’t get the strip.

Jean-Claude Forest: I did not know that Barbarella was a comic strip first. The wonderful brush work here made me want to seek out some of them (but only if they are available in translation).

Harvey Kurtzmann: A huge disappointment. An unfunny joke that looked like it was dashed out in a few minutes.

Art Spiegelman: A great concept for a comic that you can read like a choose your own adventure strip capturing the aimlessness of the sixties in a clever format.

Sergio Aragones: A big influence on me as a kid. This one takes the MAD MArginals idea to its extreme. This would be hard enough to follow even in English. This is the one strip I didn’t even attempt to read.

R O Blechman: How can you not like Blechman’s work?

Stan Goldberg and Dick Giordano: Seeing Archie style characters engaging in suspect activities didn’t do it for me (yes, I know they worked on Lampoon, but I like to associate that artwork style with more wholesome behavior.)

And a few that I wish had been included:

R Crumb: Probably the most noticeable absence. Apparently he was originally involved, but declined to contribute to the final product.

Al Jaffee: Would have been at the prime of his career.

Carl Barks: What would he have done with the sixites? What would Duckburg have looked like in this volume?

Wayne Boring: CC Beck is in here. Boring would have been a good addition as well.

Al Capp: I’m pretty sure he was done with Li’l Abner at the time (and I’m not sure he was even alive) but given the conservative crackpot he became, it would have interesting to see what he would have done.

No matter the odds, this is a book that finally overcame insurmountable odds to arrive in publication. And finally the contributors (except for a few that are MIA) finally received their pay.

Here is the first attempt I made, which I actually decided to abandon midway through the inking stage:

This approach probably would have worked fine, but there were a few problems. One was that I never found a good home for the sentences, and to make them big enough I had to crows everything else out. I also was not fond of the “teachy” aspect of the comic – I figured there had to be a better way to do this other than just have one person talking to the reader while another person “demonstrated” what was going on. Don’t kids get enough of that at school?

Actually, this is the second attempt at a concept. The first never made it past the blue pencil stage. It that one I had THREE characters going: the girl was explaining vague pronouns to the guy while a third character, a little girl, was acting out the sentences. This approach involved too many characters per panel.

I was disappointed to have to abandon this one, as I felt like the artwork was really good. I’m especially proud of the inking. Oh well. Great artwork can never save a bad idea.

So on to the final draft:

Now we’re down to two characters, which is a lot easier to work with. There’s no teaching involved – the characters demonstrate the problem through their dialogue. I was also able to make it funnier this way, and there was now more room to come up with goofy concepts to present the ideas.

Grammar Comics: Sentence Problems can be purchased here.

He’ll give you the basics of good cartooning. I have received more instruction from John’s blog that virtually any other place. He’s a wealth of information on what does and doesn’t work. He has links to lessons based around Preston Blair’s book on animation that are essential for anyone wanting to understand cartoons and how to draw them better. The Blair lessons are primarily geared toward animators – one lesson seems geared toward mastering the ability to correctly duplicate a character, clearly an important skill for any animator – but along the way you will really learn how to draw characters. Many people think cartooning is easy – and John K is very dismissive of those who treat it like it’s easy – done properly, it’s as difficult as any art form.

Here’s a recent post by John that will lead you to the instruction stuff: The Best Tools For Cartoonists.

John K will also lead to discover great new cartoonists. I never would have appreciated the great work Howie Post did for Harvey Comics or the wonderful Gene Hazelton Flintsone cartoons were it not for his blog. (I alos discovered Milt Gross, yet failed to appreciate him, as I’ve mentioned in another post.) He’s always on the hunt for interesting cartoon relics, some from other sites which I followed too eventually. John also links to some great old cartoons from Warner Brothers Max Fleischman, and others. He has little use for much contemporary animation and while he perhaps overstates his case, he does argue persuasively for what’s wrong with the medium.

I can remember reading Watchmen for the first time as a trade paperback in the ’80s. I was an avid reader of conventional superhero comics for a long time, but Watchmen truly seemed like it came from another planet. Along with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, the Watchmen series was one of the titles that for me marked the passage from reading comics as a kid to reading comics as an adult. And to some extent, I feel like Watchmen helped usher in the downfall of comics – now you can’t find ANY comics for kids anymore. I’m guessing that many of the people that still read comics today are the same ones that, like me, were transfixed by Watchmen when it came out.

To some extent I feel privileged to be a part of this watershed movement as it happened, and I’ve read it several times since, and have never tired of it. Obviously I can read it with a great deal more sophistication than I did when I was a teen, and I’ve noticed things I hadn’t noticed before – no sound effects or motion lines for instance, which somehow are associated with regular superhero comics and wouldn’t be appropriate here.

So it’s with a little bit a dismay that I read that DC is resurrecting Watchmen for a new series of adventures that take place in the glory days of the Watchmen back before superheroes were banned. Part of the problem is that Moore and Gibbons aren’t involved and it seems sacreligious to let anyone else handle the characters they created. The outrage that this move has provoked – from fans and Moore – is expected.

However, I do agree with a couple comments made elsewhere. First, you have every right not to read these new comics, especially if you are afraid that somehow these new versions will taint the original. You can always pretend that the new titles had never existed.

Also, Moore has come under fire from the creators of the new series for the comments he has made about using characters he has created – essentially he has done the same thing himself in several of his projects. Hard to argue with that, and clearly Siegel and Shuster had a better argument when it came to the unfairness of losing control of characters.

I respect Moore not wanting to be involved, but he clearly understood the terms of the deal – the Watchmen belong to DC, not him, and they can do what they want. It’s likely all about money anyway; while Marvel continues to spin off their characters into successful move franchises, DC’s only successes have been Batman and the Watchmen. They likely are performing the trick in reverse: using interest in the movie to sell comics.

As for my part, I’m a little interested in reading these new stories, but my comic days are long behind me. I’m more likely to read the original Watchmen again and enjoy one of the finest stories ever created for comics.

And the cover above is REALLY cool.

My uncle Norm was an occasional comic book reader as a kid in the seventies. Somehow those comic books were saved from the trash bin for years (most likely because my grandmother never threw anything away) and I was thus able to spend part of my youth reading them.

Of course what always caught my eye briefly were the ads for cheap novelties that were sprinkled throughout the magazine. More specifically, I wondered what I would get if I actually placed an order.  I longed for the Ed Roth Rat Fink models and wondered what the shrunken head would look like. I believe I may have attempted to outwit time and inflation and sent in an order for something ten years after the ad first appeared, but to my knowledge I never received anything.

(quick aside: when I was in college my roommate bought some Sea Monkeys for pets. We forgot to feed them regularly and thus the tank became a Darwinian experiment, as the huge colony dwindled to one hardy brine shrimp. This was my only brush with this stuff.)

“Mail Order Mysteries” by Kirk Demarais is a fun and compelling look at what you received in the mail when you replied to those ads. In addition to reproducing the original ads, the author scoured the internet for people selling these treasures, photographed them, and paired the original ad with the junk you actually got. And more often than not, it WAS junk, even though the ad promised something a lot more exciting – something that would truly scare your friends, amaze your family, or humiliate strangers. You could create a whole course on deceptive advertising based on these ads which, upon a second read, deliver exactly what was promised.

There’s no question these companies knew exactly who their market was. Take the Charles Atlas company, for instance, which promised quick results that you could achieve in your own home. Would there be anything more appealing to a gawky adolescent than the ability to become “husky” without being ridiculed while doing so? Spy equipment, super powers, all the stuff of the the teen years.

I was struck by two things while reading “Mail Order Mysteries” which, in keeping with the subject matter, was entirely different than the book I thought I was getting (unlike the subject matter, however, I was pleasantly surprised.) One was that there are people out there who not only collected this stuff but actually had the foresight to keep what so obviously only provided a few minute’s worth of entertainment for posterity. The other is how hard it would be to fleece people in this way today. There would be a website out there put together by some frustrated, yet computer savvy kid (and many comic book reader are exactly that) dedicated to exposing these charlatans. If not sure the comic book novelty market would work today, especially since technology has provided us with plenty of other ways to bilk people out of their money.

Perhaps, though, these trinkets taught kids two important traits: hope that things would be as good as we wish coupled with the realization that in most cases, we will be sadly underwhelmed. Just ask anyone that ordered a pair of X-Ray Spex with the promise of clandestinely looking at womens’ undergarments, only to find feathers that refract light to create suggestive silhouettes.

http://www.comicteacher.com

http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_details.asp?individual_id=273607

I have all the previous editions of the Best American Comics Series and I almost passed on this one because I had been so underwhelmed by the previous years’ editions. However, I decided to ask for it for Christmas yet again, hopeful that this year’s edition would be the one that finally got it right. I have to say it was better than previous years’ but still a little lacking in content.

The biggest problem with the Series is that the editors are forced to select too many excerpts of longer works that either don’t make sense of of context or provide a sampling of what is surely a much stronger work in their entirety. It’s a lot like watching nothing but previews of movies instead of the real thing. Certainly the excerpt from Joe Sacco’s Palestine captures little of the grandeur and scope of that large work. Same thing with the Chris Ware piece. I’ve not read Jeff Smith’s Rasl; given the portion that appears here I’d like to, but the few pages given offer a nice teaser, although I gather from reading the overviews that this portion of Rasl is a poor representation of what Smith is up to in the series. And perhaps this points to a larger problem with the selection process: given space constraints, the editors may only be able to pick those portions that can stand on their own, rather than the best and most compelling parts of that work.

Even so, there is no question that this is some of the best work out there. Kate Beaton’s Gatsby cartoons are a hoot. Peter and Maria Hoey’s cartoon is one of the coolest experiments in design since “Rabbithead” from the first volume. Of course, there are a few things I don’t care for – the Hernandez brothers work always leaves me cold, the Fear and Fire excerpt was a head scratcher, and I was repulsed by the title character of Abbey’s Road.

I have to admit, though, that I’ll probably continue to buy the books in this series, hoping that one year they’ll come up with a volume that stands on its own as a wonderful collection.

And for fun, here’s some rare Bill Watterson that I grabbed off of the platypuscomix site:

Here’s a picture from Watteron’s early illustrating days:

Here’s a sample of a rejected strip called “Critters.” I’ve never seen this before.

And finally a couple of cartoons from a talk he gave at the Ohio State University in which he railed against the syndicates. It was given at the Ohio State University and I’ve seen the transcript somewhere. Watterson famously created the huge Sunday strip after he came back form hiatus, a strip that no one could break up to fit into the regular space. Most newspapers were forced to accommodate Watterson, such was his power.

The rest of the rare stuff can be found here.

One of the first books I read when I was trying to learn the art of cartooning was Mort Gerberg’s “Cartooning,” which is pretty old now, but includes a great chapter on what it was like to submit gag cartoons to magazines. Cartoonists took their work around on a specific day (I believe it was Wednesday) and worked the circuit from The New Yorker to the Saturday Evening Post, to Playboy and then on down to the lower level specialty magazines. Rejection was common and the close-knit group of people who aspired to earn a living selling cartoons would then commiserate at a bar, swapping cartoons and ideas around.

Of course now the gag market has all but dried up, with most of the magazines defunct and only the New Yorker and Playboy really dedicated to maintaining it as a key part of the magazine (Hefner was an aspiring cartoonist.)

I was surprised then to see that the old method is still the best way to get in – go to the office on Tuesday with a bunch of samples and meet with Bob Mankoff who will probably reject everything that you have to offer. However, this time there’s really no where else to go; it’s one stop shopping with your drawings. Of course you could post them online as Sturm did, and hope that they find an audience or even better someone who is willing to pay you for them.

I still harbor dreams of getting into the New Yorker, but really am too busy to think of ideas and am not sure that I can sustain the level of creativity and humor that it takes to really have a go at it. One cartoonist mentions trying for 25 years to get in; I read that Roz Chast always has to deal with the feeling that the newest cartoon will be her last; that she will run out of ideas. Perhaps there’s also a little bit of hero worship going on as well; I look at the cartoonists’ work that I admire and feel like I could never do something as good as what they do (while acknowledging that they probably submit 50 or so drawings for every one the magazine accepts.)

Here’s one of Sturm’s cartoons:

I thought this one was pretty funny, and definitely a New Yorker type of drawing. But Mankoff rejected it, saying that the desert island idea was overdone. Oh well.

I came up with the caption for this cartoon before I came up with the idea for the drawing: Kiana would be sculpting a famous piece of artwork. After asking a few people for the name of a famous sculpture, Michaelangelo’s David seemed like the most likely choice. If you don’t know the sculpture, you don’t get the joke and it just looks like she’s a really good artist. So David it was!

The first obstacle I encountered was how to draw the statue to make sure that it was immediately recognizable for what it was. I didn’t even attempt to draw it freehand. Rather, I printed a picture of it off of a google search and traced the body to make sure I had the proportions exactly right (the hands, if I recall, are a little oversized.) At any rate, the picture I had was good for the body, but did not have enough detail of the face and hair for me to use. So I had to find another picture of the head and trace that, then use Photoshop to combine the head and the body seamlessly so I could then trace it one more time with a non-repro blue pencil for the final.

Of course, the second obstacle was the fact that David wasn’t wearing any clothes and this was intended for classroom use. Even though David probably appears in textbooks that students use as an example of a masterpiece, I didn’t think I could get away with it. So I threw a pair of jeans on him. Now he looks like an Abercrombie model. I figured it would be a good in joke for those familiar with the original.

I’m still not sure it works unless you know the original statue. It would then just look like she’s sculpting a hot guy, some sort of perfect boyfriend or something. But I hope it works either way.

I’m also really proud of the coloring job. Not only did I get the shading pretty close to what I wanted, but I think the shade of blue works perfectly. I don’t think I used any grays for colors in any of these drawings, preferring instead to use a color with some gray in it that fit the color palette and adjusting the opaqueness when necessary.

http://comicteacher.com

Now I’m fascinated by Watterson as a painting recluse, one who knew it was time to leave when he was at the top of his game. He fought the system valiantly and successfully, increasing the size of his Sunday strip and refusing to market his characters into cheap plush toys or T-shirts (the fact that I still see Calvin pissing on car logos indicates how much potential money he gave up.) The fact that Calvin and Hobbes was consistently good during its run is testament to the fact that Watterson know when it was time to hang it up. It still remains one of the crowning achievements of newspaper strips.

So here are some early Watterson strips, before Calvin, when he was doing cartoons for the Mark Twain Journal,

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bxPfq3FfhZ0/TcAV6lme3iI/AAAAAAAAOos/GidGHppMaWQ/s400/04BillWatterson_MarkTwain_PuddnheadCalendar_100.jpg