Comic-Stripping

In my teenage years I used to say "the comic-strip is to the comics medium as the music video is to the video/film medium." My thinking was (a) length = complexity and (b) something produced mainly for commercial, dispensable uses could only be artistic in the rare exceptions.

That was dumb.

Especially since I grew up mouthing off about the artistic and profound nature of the Stan Lee and/or J.M. DeMatteis Spider-Man. If the comic-book isn't a near equally commercial and ephemeral form to the comic-strip, well... few things are. (Not to mention, the comic-strip was first. As I've noted elsewhere on The Long and Shortbox Of It, the first comic-books were reprinted comic-strips.)

The strip, as a work of small units, has been an excellent format to dive into this year, one of the busiest of my entire life thus far: retail-management, freelancing and on and on.

Of late, to make myself feel like I'm not a complete drop-out from the hard school of reading difficult, brain-breaking comics, I've read the collection of the first year of Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" on the subway. When I'm not sleeping on the N train from exhaustion.

That's as a break from reading the satirically genuine depths of Ben Katchor's comic-strip about travel "The Cardboard Valise." Ben Katchor (@benkatchor), whose previous collection "The Beauty Supply District" (collecting his strip "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer") I am a HUGE fan of, is the creator of the driest, smartest, wittiest comics you'll find in newspapers, books, on the web or any other sequential art delivery method yet to be invented. My discovery of his work at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) in their recently abandoned location in SoHo was the THIRD sign I was a fool for thinking so little of these 'little' comics. (Wait for the other two, they're coming!)

And, as we had a big Batman sale at my store Manhattan Comics & More (@MnhtnComicsMore) recently, I bought a lonely, unwanted, dusty, old volume I'm working through: the Batman newspaper dailies first year collection. The Batman strip is interesting because, if nothing else, it's quite nearly the only Batman material actually drawn by Bob Kane, the character's celebrated 'creator.' (As opposed to his army of in-studio writers and artists responsible for the creation of the Batman comic-books. [See this strange but informative article on Dial B for Blog.]) Most of the Batman stories in the books or the strips were written by the man many now recognize as being the real force behind Batman: Bill Finger.

The SECOND major wake-up call for me was in the early stuff. A college friend showed me a hardcover collection of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay. The realization that a comic in a newspaper could have at one-time been so big, so beautiful, so colorful and detailed! 'You've never read this?!' she said incredulously. (You can read some for free here and I highly recommend you do.) And Lyonel Feininger! I have a collection of his work sent my way by Fantagraphics (@fantagraphics) last year lying in wait. His work lacks McCay's smooth flourish but makes up for it with his sharp angular expressive characters in "The Kin-der-Kids." Those first newspaper strips from the turn of the Twentieth Century are the best ever. Truly, not hyperbole because they were produced before the newspaper strip syndicates arose and determined rich full-color engraving an unneeded expense in a section predominantly for children. I've also perused Milton Caniff's collected "Male Call" hardcover from Hermes Press (@HermesPress), a Christmas gift from a different college friend. Caniff is universally-regarded as among the best to ever have a contract with the syndicates. ALSO bought at the store, it is very much a traditional comic-strip: humour, romance, and a pretty lady at the center of it all.

But all has really just been prelude, -just mere preparation- for the mother of crazy, brilliant, exciting comic-strips: "Dal Tokyo" by Gary Panter. Also, yes, recently purchased from my store. (I'm not a complete retail whore, I swear.)

Although I didn't avoid it or anything, I wasn't a voracious reader of the Sunday comics section as a kid. As I wrote at the top of the post, I looked down on them! But the moment I reached the second corner room at the Jewish Museum of New York in the late Winter of 2oo5 (after the room of Eisner work and the Kirby corner, after the long thin room in which I discovered Harvey Kurtzman and delved deeper into R. Crumb) I saw for the first time in my life, outside of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", the art of Gary Panter. The Masters of American Comics exhibit had on display the full original art pages for "Jimbo at Hiroshima." HOLY CRAP. Life-changing. And several of the "Dal Tokyo" strips in their original art sat in a glass case opposite. Finally, I'd found something that used the slim rectangular block of a mere four panels to smart visual-storytelling effect. 'Why couldn't it all be like this?' I opined. The Masters of American Comics exhibition was the FIRST eye-opener for me. (Not just in terms of strips, obviously. But that's what we're talking about today.) Check this out:

Break a single landscape into panels. Give us four instants that add up into a moment taking place across that landscape. The background becomes a passive but strong frame for the action of the story-- everything feels grounded, more real. Simple idea that had never occurred to me!

Even "Calvin and Hobbes" does something like the reverse of this in small doses but with more flexibility, more child-like fluidity:

The background is merely background, totally blank, the characters in full detail, total character hyper-focus. Watterson's neo-"Peanuts" style plus whimsical internal imagination is a powerful combination that understandably speaks to people of all ages. And it's beautiful.

Watterson cleaves out the background and just lets the characters dance in the spot-light while Panter etches out a detailed landscape to reel in the background behind his characters, grounding them in the setting. Which just happens to be a post-punk post-apocalyptic colonized Mars.

Katchor's work... defies description. Subtle. So subtle sometimes you're almost not so sure it's doing anything. But often filled with such simple eloquent beautiful ideas that you keep coming back for more. (At least I do. I love his work so much I interviewed him for LongandShortbox.com back in 2o11.)

He, too plays with landscape, but it's all about vintage urban ones. And it's more intellectual. Tearing apart and laying bear the little weirdnesses of modern life. Even the strip in which he posits the idea of a minisculey thin but extremely long nation nestled into the border between two other nations uses a New York City-circa-196os-style traveling bus between the two normal 'large' nations. Among Katchor's most famous works is the 23-page-long story "The Beauty Supply District" about a neighborhood that specializes not in fashion nor Indian food, but the application of aesthetics.

The opposite cultural force is at work in this later 2oo1 work by him:

I find a great deal of his work endlessly fascinating! And quietly hilarious.

Kane, too, in the Batman strip is interested in a fictional urban world. Just one entirely focused on crime and punishment. Comic-strips and comic-books, with their geometric blocks in rectilinear arrangement are perfectly suited to describing urbanity. Squares and rectangles.

The classics are the ones I have the most trouble with. The Batman newspaper comic-strip wasn't the first appearance of Batman, but it was the first print appearance of the Batcave (and home is where the heart is!).

The evidence in Milt Caniff's abilities as an artist and storyteller is that I cannot deny that this strip "Male Call" made exclusively for the US Army during World War II as a just-for-the-enlisted-man spin-off of his extremely successful "Terry and the Pirates" war/adventure strip is eminently enjoyable. I do find myself suddenly sucked in much like I do with "Calvin and Hobbes."

The strips can be like candy. Short and sweet. You can't read just one.

These are the pieces that interest me least now as an adult who never fell in love with the comics section... Give me kooky ideas in even kookier settings with meta-commentary on the nature of comics plus a message of beauty and art and truth-- I'm right at home. Three panels of set-up and a fourth panel punchline and suddenly I'm a judgmental 15-year-old again: "There's nothing going on here!" whines the academic in me. But there's something to appreciate in everything. There's even oft-times an element that's excellent to appreciate. Whether adventure, superhero, comedy, romance these strips are bite-sized sequential art explosions of awesomeness! From the childlike charm of "Peanuts" to the brilliantly hilarious biting political wit of "Dykes to Watch Out For" or the radiant psychedelic beauty of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" (that stuff is truly astounding if you've never read it) to the unique cultural perspective of "The Boondocks."

I suppose that's all to say there's unknown depths to art, even when short and ephemeral.

The comic-strip was the first form. Not the first art, but the first artFORM! The first time artistic expression was recorded, trapped, frozen in a physical form, stained on cave walls to be viewed repeatedly. Shared. Preserved. In a simple, short, digestible form. Perfect for the modern man on the go. Or the homo-neanderthal searching for the meaning of the hunt.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ Except for "Doonesbury." Stay away from that junk.
P.P.S. ~ Disclaimer: I have read very little of "Doonesbury." Do not take my opinion of it seriously.

Let Me Check My Case

After reading Jon's interview with Ben Katchor from a couple of weeks ago, I decided I should pick up his new book The Cardboard Valise. It arrived this morning from Amazon and, although I haven't read a single word of it, I'm already giving it a thumbs up. Why? See for yourself:


Yup. It has handles. So you can carry it around like a suitcase.

Talk Over Balloons: comicsmith Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor is among the most honored creators of sequential art alive today. The first comicsmith to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is a standing associate professor of illustration at Parsons-The New School and, perhaps most importantly, was declared by Michael Chabon to be "the creator of the last great American comic strip".

The strip in question is "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer", a unique creation of poetic verbiage and expository narration; urban culture sprinkled with imaginative speculation; truly American in nature but with European roots. The work is stylistically experimental yet the content is so quotidian as to be almost boring. And boring it would be if not for Ben's good humour and sharp powers of observation. His work has been collected in "Cheap Novelties", "Stories", "The Beauty Supply District" (all three "Julius Knipl" collections), "The Jew of New York", and most recently as of this month: "The Cardboard Valise".

The Long and Shortbox Of It asked Ben a few questions about his thinking and his work. He has generously supplied us with answers. Here is the L&S interview with Ben Katchor (@benkatchor):

Jon Gorga: Your stories often take place in a highly dynamic and multi-cultural version of the American urban-center. Different eras' architectures and different ethnicities' traditions mix in a true melting-pot. Do you yourself make daily notice of the patch-work elements of urban life like Mr. Julius Knipl, the specialized real estate photographer of the strip's title?

Ben Katchor: Sure, the great energy and ingenuity of first-generation immigrant neighborhoods and business are always exciting -- a transplanted piece of an Asian or Latin culture, designed according to an individual's sometimes eccentric vision and catering to the tastes of fellow countrymen. The strip of Indo-Pakistani businesses on Lexington Ave., the Dominican businesses on the upper west side, the cheap import/export district around 28th and Broadway make living in Manhattan bearable -- otherwise, it's become a corporate strip-mall.

JG: The only place I've experienced that felt to me like what you portray in strips like "Julius Knipl" is Manhattan's Nolita. North Of Little Italy. Chinatown mixes into it liberally. It's home to the Puck Building (former host to the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival) among other unique buildings. You're a New York City local, are you familiar with the neighborhood? Would you consider it emblematic of a mix you try to represent?

BK: Once a neighborhood in NYC is given a name invented by real-estate agents, it's usually into a social and economic upswing that ruins its character. The business districts I described in Knipl were on their way down. The city invented in Knipl was filled with light industry and lower-middle class families. While the buildings are still intact, the social and economic makeup of that area above Little Italy has changed into something much less interesting over the past 20 or 30 years.

JG: Your work has a poetic storytelling quality to it that I enjoy very much. Ideas flow free-form. I particularly like the simple, but revealing, strips where the last panel alludes to or directly connects with the first, creating a nice 'routine of daily life'-cycle. Like "The First Wife" for example. Is that something you have always done intentionally?

BK: The stories that involve an ongoing situation can usually be evoked with a circular structure. I'm very interested in the kind of free-associative connections that make up the texture of a city -- the distribution of business on a given block or a given floor of a small-office building. If these structures arise through a kind of dreaming, their actual construction on paper is very intentional.

JG: I also enjoy that your work can shift without warning into dream-like speculative territories. I've heard you state publicly at R. Sikoryak's Carousel night that your work is not speculative fiction. How do you reconcile the occasional introduction of a 'novum' (science-fiction's 'the new thing') in your work, with this stance?

BK: I may have said that because I don't like fiction that's concerned with examining ideas at the expense of describing the texture of experience. I want my readers to become highly aware of the invented and improvised quality of the manmade world and, hopefully, become inspired to reinvent it for themselves in some way.

JG: A college professor of mine said that all art's value exists half with the creator and half with the audience. Tell us about the new book "The Cardboard Valise"? Like the Julius Knipl books before it, it's a collection of previously published strips, correct?

BK: It's an absurdist novel in the form of a collection of weekly picture-stories about travel, national identity and print culture. The stories appear in the order they were originally published in weekly newspapers, but have been annotated, or expanded upon, with some new pages.



JG: Does it include the piece you projected on the wall and read aloud at the Carousel night in April about the man who moves house over and over to continue enjoying the most advanced living accommodations possible? That is an example of your work that, to my mind, is both entirely quotidian and yet introduces a few small technologies or concepts not seen in reality. I really enjoyed it.

BK: No, that was from my series in Metropolis magazine.

JG: Ah, I see, they are separate strips. Moving into more formal territory, what do you think of the word 'cartoonist'? Or for that, matter of 'comics'? I noticed you avoid their use in all your bios. As someone whose work is quite far from cartoony or comic-al, and whose primary occupation is in higher education, do you feel the terms apply to you and your work at all? Is there a single word that captures, to your mind, what you do as a creator of "picture-stories"?

BK: Those words seem to have outlived their usefulness in describing the kind of text/image storytelling we're seeing today. Most of the work I like exists outside of, or in opposition to, the comic-strip and comic-book traditions of the recent past. Probably a better description would be autographic writing -- that is, writing concerned with handwriting of words and images.

JG: Interesting. Will Eisner always stressed that he was a writer in pictures and the evidence of the gesture of the hand brings so much both to his artwork, and yours. Now, even "The Jew of New York" was a weekly strip, correct? Any future plans to produce a full-length original graphic novel? And, if not, what's next for you in sequential art? What would you like our readers to know about?

BK: Yes. Almost all of my work has lived in the short serial form. I like the concision demanded by a single page. The novel built only of words needed many pages to evoke a palpable world -- I just need a few drawings. I'm working with Mark Mulcahy on a new music-theater production set in the NYPL on 42nd Street. It will premiere in Oct. 2011.

JG: Exciting! Thank you, Ben, for making the time to answer some questions for us here at The Long and Shortbox Of It!

__________________________________
Ben Katchor's narrative art can be seen monthly in Metropolis magazine and selected strips are available for viewing on their website here.

More information about Ben Katchor's collaborative stage projects (and more sequential art!) can be found at Katchor.com and Ben's elegant WordPress blog. Ben's work is well-worth checking out and he will be speaking with another unique comics-creator, Jerry Moriarty, at the Powerhouse Arena at 37 Main St in Brooklyn, NY at 7 PM TONIGHT. I know I am going to be there.

~@JonGorga

Holy Comic Strips, Cap!

I love Captain America.

Long time readers know this to be true, but it bears repeating- there's no character in comics I like as much as I like Captain America, Steve or Bucky. Imagine my joy, then, in finding out that there was not one new Captain America comic this week, but indeed two! And that second one, far from being a poorly written one-shot or needless mini-series was something... well, a little different.

Karl Kesel's Captain America: The 1940's Newspaper Strip#1 is certainly fun (it's a collection of a faux in-period daily strips that Kesel did for Marvel Digital Comics unlimited) and it's pretty funny, too. Kesel's artwork is expressive and cartoon-y and, even if his writing sometimes falls flat, his characterization is pretty good. All the characters sound and feel appropriately cheesy and there were just enough interesting twists and turns to keep me engaged.

Mostly, I'm interested in two things, here- can this concept (which is serviceable, if not precisely mind blowing) sustain itself without getting obnoxious, first of all, and, secondly, how can comics fans use this book to their advantage?

That's sort of an odd question, I know, but consider this- Peanuts and Captain America are, essentially, the same medium- they're in different formats and run in different mediums, for sure, but they work on the same principles, much like the difference between a novel and a prose serial. Tell someone you like COMICS, though, and I imagine they're more likely to think of the latter rather than the former, as if the two are completely different. I don't know why this is, although I certainly have my suspicions, but books like this are important (even if they're just fun comics, rather than good comics) because they have the opportunity to bridge that gap and, in so doing, close the difference between a comics fan's understanding of the medium and everybody else's.

That Kesel is using the "strip" here is fascinating and, although sometimes it works better than others, I hope to see more like it, or even an anthology of strips like this that comes out once a month, just for something a little different. There's a lot of potential for fun comics here, and there's no need for something like this to be high art: it's great just the way it is.