Showing posts with label Winsor McCay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winsor McCay. Show all posts

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Quick Reviews returns: Dirty Pictures, Fantastic Four, Mickey Mouse, Space Boy, McCay, Aimee de Jongh, and Orner's Smahtguy

 ...at least that's what I think I used to headline short review columns.

I caught covid for the first time this past week, probably at work where other people did, and I had just been transferred to the home office from a satellite one where I was one of two people showing up daily. I'm fine, that's fine, the disease is endemic now, and we've got vaccines to make sure most of us don't suffer badly from it, just like I haven't.

But it did mean that I ended up with some free time - at least 5 days in which I had to skip the events I had this weekend, which included a poker game, 2 comic book signings at Fantom Comics, a Pixar Inside Out exhibit preview at the Children's Museum, and a story-telling party. Instead I've been reading some of the graphic novels that came my way.


Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits,Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix
by Brian Doherty, Abrams, 2022 - This isn't a graphic novel. Instead it's a dense history with no pictures which is why I haven't finished reading it yet. Reason magazine editor Doherty's produced a readable, comprehensive history of who knew who, who was sleeping with who, and who was drawing with who, why, and when. This is not for the uninitiated, as it has no images and assumes a familiarity with the field that's a step beyond basic. As such, I'm enjoying it and learning from it, but at times it reads like a Who's Who of underground comix - that's not a bad thing, especially as the cartoonists themselves either died young or are dying now (Diane Noomin within the past month). It does mean that it can be a bit of a struggle to keep people straight, or honestly to pick it up again after putting it down. I've been trying to read a chapter at a time, no more or less, which works for me, but I'm not a major fan of the undergrounds in spite of being dedicated to comics history. If you're similarly dedicated, you should buy this.

Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross, Abrams, 2022 - I got a pdf of this from the publisher (who's been very kind about sending me material), and then was gifted a copy by my buddies at Big Planet Comics so it was clear the universe was telling me to read it. I also love the classic FF. Ross' hyper-realistic paintings have set a standard in superhero depiction for a couple of decades now, but he hasn't done a comic book in years. This time, he did it all including the writing, but not as a painted book. The story leaps off a plot point from FF #51, a Kirby-Lee story in which (here's the Kirby part) a minor character succeeds in copying the Thing's body exactly, fooling Mr. Fantastic into taking him into the Negative Zone, and then sacrificing himself to save Reed Richards. At 64 pages, this is exactly a story that could have been an FF annual in the 1960s. Ross's art is competent, being redolent of Kirby without descending into pastiche (Ross draws a photo-collage rather than making one as Kirby was doing at the time), and is steeped in FF history with respect. (Except for an unnecessary gag about Reed and Sue having sex, and Sue running out naked when the Baxter Building is breached by the negative zone, but hey, it's not 1968 anymore). The plot makes no more or less sense than Lee's ever did, and the hyperbole is cut back for modern audiences. I enjoyed this just fine, but it's a loving salute to a long-gone era. Although Ross does explain Captain Marvel / Rick Jones' nega bands which swapped their bodies in and out of the negative zone in the 1970s for longtime fans. As the first original comic book published by Abrams via licensing from Marvel, I'm sure it was a smart choice due to Ross's fans, but I don't think it'll bring any readers over to the FF.*

Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee by Regis Loisel, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2022 - For years, Fantagraphics has been publishing the adult Disney material that has appeared in the European market. Greg Bennett of Big Planet Comics Bethesda makes a point of keeping me up on it. Loisel first made his mark with a bawdy retelling of Peter Pan - now many years later, he's doing licensed work. This story replicates the feel of Floyd Gottfredson's adventurous Mickey with simulated comic strips set during the Depression. Mouseton is seeing a real-estate speculator trying to buy up a bunch of lower middle class homes to build a golf course, and Mickey, Minnie, Horace, and Clarabelle are in the front of the resistance while Goofy, Pluto, and Donald make minor appearances. The two main villains are the traditional lawyer Sylvester and Pegleg Pete, often seen in the early comic strips. Like the previous book, the story doesn't make a lot of sense and you just need to go along and enjoy the madcap corny and violent story for what it is. The mind-control agents, such as the zombie coffee and 25-cent hamburgers, are typical of the days of the comics in which someone would build a 5-story robot to knock over a convenience store for $25. Loisel did a good job in capturing the feel of the 1930s strip, and I recommend this to those who like the early adventurous goofball Mickey.

Stephen McCranie's Space Boy Volume 13 by Stephen McCranie, Dark Horse, 2022 - I've been enjoying these manga-influenced webcomics collections since the middle of the pandemic when someone at Fantom Comics recommended them to me. It's an American reworking of Astro Boy for the most part, but as will happen with longer-running strips, it's become something of its own too, although this issue returns to a Pinocchio-plot point that can't really be avoided without the book becoming a horror novel. One definitely can't start with this issue, which opens in the middle of a murder investigation and leads to more injuries via exploding roboot, but his art is very assured by this point and I'm enjoying the unfolding of the story in chunks, rather than reading it on the web.

McCay by Thierry Smolderen and Jean-Philippe Bramanti, London: Titan Books, 2018 - somebody recommended this recently and while I don't remember who it was, I respected them enough to pick up a copy. A French work, written by a distinguished historian and comics writer, this is an alternate biography of the ground-breaking cartoonist Winsor McCay, and proposes that he can turn himself into a fourth-dimension (not time) where a version of Slumberland can be built from his dreams. Silas, McCay's pen-name for some strips, is a real person with the same ability, who's an anarcho-Communist determined to kill people he thinks deserve it. The story makes no sense at all, just like McCay's own works, but is lovely - Bramanti wisely doesn't try to emulate McCay and uses a much sparer, yet still lush style. It's a fun read and homage to a master cartoonist.

Aimee de Jongh was at SPX last weekend, and spoke at the Library of Congress about her newest book, which led me to seek her out at the SelfMade Hero table and buy all 3 that she had at the show. 

Blossoms in Autumn, words by Zidrou and art by Aimée de Jongh, translated by Matt Madden - a slice of life story about two older (I wrote elderly until I realized the man is only 2 years older than I am) people - a laid-off furniture mover and a cheese store owner who meet each other, and fall in love. It's not a major work, but a perfectly good read and a pleasant couple to spend an hour with.

The Return of the Honey Buzzard,
by Aimée de Jongh, translated by Michele Hutchison - this one was a bit more confusing because there's some magic realism going on in this and it takes a while to clue into it. On the other hand, it's been made into a movie, so perhaps I was just slow to pick up on the plot. Simon is about to lose his inherited bookstore, and won't go along with any of his wife's suggestions to sell and save what they can, when he witnesses the second suicide of someone around him. In his confusion, he meets a Lolita-like young woman (girl? her age is hard to tell) who needs assistance with school projects, we see the true story behind the first suicide, and begin to wonder if he'll make it to the end of the book. Oh, and the honey buzzard's return is a nature metaphor, not something you need to be watching out for in the corner of your eye.

Days of Sand by Aimée de Jongh, 2022 - her current book, researched here in DC, is off all things for a Dutch cartoonist to do, a story of the 1930s American dustbowl environmental disaster in Oklahoma, told through the lens (hah!) of a Farm Security Administration photographer from New York City. As she noted at the Library of Congress, this story is generally completely unknown in Europe, and largely forgotten here in America except by Steinbeck and Springsteen fans. de Jongh uses real government photos to lead into each chapter, and it's a moving account of a photographer 'going native' as it used to be phrased and becoming more sympathetic to the subjects of his camera than to his employers. The art is fantastic. The story is fine. The main character... a bit under-developed with daddy issues. Still, I'd recommend picking this up.

Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank by Eric Orner, 2022 - I really liked this book. I didn't particularly expect to because it's a partial biography of a gay former-Congressman (by one of his former staffers) and I don't usually read political biographies, although I've been interested in gay cartoonists since moving to DC in 1983 and discovering that such a thing existed at all in the pages of the Washington Blade (back in print but no comics) and the Lambda Rising bookstore (long-closed but a new gay bookstore just opened this year). I was sheltered in 1970s New Jersey, sometimes for the good, and others not [full disclosure: I'm not gay, but didn't meet out people until I arrived at GWU].  Anyway, Orner was signing his book this summer at Solid State Books on H Street, I went, along with many of his former Hill colleagues, and was very impressed by the book. It took me a while to sit down and read it ... it's still a political biography... but it's well-worth reading to see how America has changed from those 1970s and how people like Barney Frank shepherded that change, sometimes by not leading from the front. I recommend this - enough that I interviewed the cartoonist a shamefully long time ago.

That's it for today - let me know if you want to see my trying to get my writing chops back with more.

Still to come - an hour and a half long interview with Eric Orner that's taking me a ridiculously long time to edit.  In my defense, I've been moving an archive for work all summer and it wears one out. This photo is part of the post-move, pre-rebuilding state of it last week, pre-covid. Sigh.

*9/26 - Rodrigo Baeza sent me a note about this comics' history with permission to reprint it -

I read an Alex Ross interview today (from Back Issue #118; February 2020), which happens to be related to the Fantastic Four book you read. In the interview, Ross relates that he decided (on his own initiative, without being asked by Marvel) to prepare a Fantastic Four pitch in early 2017, back when the title was in limbo and in anticipation of Marvel clearing up the rights' situation with Fox Studios.

He came up with a drawing style inspired by two sources: one was a British "Fantastic Four" album from the late '60s that was recolored in "bizarre Day-Glo colors", and the other was the work of Spanish artist ACO on a Nick Fury miniseries done with James Robinson (some of that art can be seen here: https://www.pastemagazine.com/comics/james-robinson-aco/aco-sterankos-the-hell-out-of-nick-fury-with-james/). The idea was to "translate Kirby's work into a '60s pop-art graphic", combined with Ross's realistic rendering. He also decided to base Reed and Sue on the likenesses of two actors from the "Land of the Giants" TV show (Gary Conway and Deanna Lund), and use the logo of the "Fantastic Voyage" movie as inspiration for a new element.

The pitch he presented to Marvel (via editor Tom Brevoort) was mostly focused on the visual elements (with no storylines defined), with the hopes that this would not only lead to a comic-book series (with guest artists like Bill Sienkiewicz and Steve Rude, and maybe Mark Waid as a writer developing Ross's concepts) but that this visual redesign be used in future movies as well (Ross makes the complaint that too many elements of the Marvel movies are based on the Ultimate comics versions rather than the Jack Kirby comics).

Marvel unsurprisingly didn't go for the pitch, getting Dan Slott to write the comic instead. But from what I can see, Ross eventually ended up using all of this conceptual work in the "Full Circle" graphic novel that has now been published by Abrams (even the logo inspired by "Fantastic Voyage").


Tuesday, February 01, 2022

Bruce Guthrie on "Icons of American Animation" in Westminster, Maryland

 by Bruce Guthrie

I went to Westminster, Maryland to visit the new "Icons of American Animation" exhibit which is spread over two different venues there.  The exhibit opened on January 3rd and runs until March 12th.

The main portion, about 60% of the 150+ pieces, are at the Carroll County Arts Council’s Tevis Gallery.  This gallery's largest chunk are Disney pieces (although, like the other sections, there are Disney pieces in both galleries).

The other portion is at the Esther Prangley Rice Gallery at McDaniel College.

The two galleries are 0.4 miles apart and you can easily walk between them.  I parked for free at the college, visited the gallery there, and then walked to the Council's gallery.  Both exhibits are free.

Both venues offer the free 32-page color exhibition pamphlet which includes images of all of the pieces in the exhibit as well as some of the wall text.

The exhibit includes original sketches and animation cels dating back to 1914.  That earliest piece is a sketch from Winsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur" which most of us keep thinking is America's first animated cartoon.  In actuality, McCay himself had earlier made "Little Nemo" (1911) and "How a Mosquito Operates" (1912) and there were some earlier animation experiments done earlier by others. Wikipedia bills the cartoon as "the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur."

Another McCay piece, a panel from his "The Sinking of the Titanic" (1918) is also included.



There is an amazing array of pieces here.  When I was walking between the venues, I was promoting the exhibit to strangers on the street and a Westminsterite lit up and asked if there were any pieces by Ralph Bakshi in the show -- he especially loved "Fritz the Cat".  Well, yes.  There is a cell from that as well as from Bakshi's "Wizards".

To give you an idea of some of the pieces you'll see by decade:

  • 1910s: The two Winsor McCay pieces.
    Curator Robert Lemieux
  • 1920s: Oswald the Rabbit, Steamboat Willie, Out of the Inkwell
  • 1930s: Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Betty Boop, Gulliver's Travels, Flowers and Trees (Disney), The Band Concert (Disney), Porky's Duck Hunt
  • 1940s: Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad, Bambi, Superman (Fleisher), Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, Red Hot Riding Hood (Tex Avery), Mighty Mouse
  • 1950s: Gerald McBoing-Boing, Rooty Toot Toot, Mr. Magoo, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Hound, Crusader Rabbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, 101 Dalmatians, Tom and Jerry, What's Opera Doc, Road Runner Show
  • 1960s: The Jungle Book, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, The Pink Panther, Charlie Brown, George of the Jungle, Droopy
  • 1970s: The Aristocats, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, Wizards, Fritz the Cat, Horton Hears a Who, The Phantom Tollbooth
  • 1980s: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, The Smurfs, Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, The Simpsons
  • 1990s: Aladdin, The Lion King, Tarzan, Mulan, Rugrats, Toy Story 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Ren & Stimpy Show
  • 2000s: Shrek

Obviously, as cartoons increasingly became computer-generated, you're not going to see original cels so the latter years are mostly represented by concept art or storyboards.  The latest piece, for example, was a city design painting from "Shrek" (2001).  One of the pieces (a model sheet) was a lithograph but everything else was original.

Since there are two venues, you'll want to time your visit so you can see both of them in the same trip.  Of course the venues have different hours but here's a combined schedule -- don't go on Wednesday or Sunday!:

  • Monday: Rice 10-4pm, Council 10-4pm
  • Tuesday: Rice 10-4pm, Council noon-7pm
  • Wednesday: Rice 10-4pm, Council ---
  • Thursday: Rice 10-4pm, Council noon-7pm
  • Friday: Rice 10-4pm, Council 10-4pm
  • Saturday: Rice noon-5pm, Council 10-4pm
  • Sunday: Rice ---, Council ---

The exhibit's official home page is https://iconsofanimation.com/  The news release about the exhibit: https://www.mcdaniel.edu/news/major-exhibition-curated-communication-professor-highlights-artistic-and-cultural-significance

I of course did my normal photo obsessive thing, spending about 90 minutes at each venue and some of my photos are below.  My pages for the exhibit:

Both venues require masks but not proof of vaccination.  During my visit, there were two other people seeing the Rice exhibit and three at the Council gallery (two of them being the same two from the Rice exhibit) so social distancing was easy. 





























Thursday, September 17, 2020

Winsor McCay's son returns home from World War I

 The Library of Congress has introduced a new search feature for their newspaper collection's images - News Navigator.


Times Artist and His Soldier-Son
Washington Times March 11 1919

Winsor McCay, the famous cartoonist, whose drawings often appear on the editorial page of The Times, welcoming his son, Sergt. Robert Winsor McCay, jr., who returned from France recently with the Twenty-seventh New York Division. Sergeant McCay was awarded the British Military Medal for gallantry in action during the attack by the Twenty-seventh on the Hindenburg line last September. 


That one's fairly blurry, so here's a later, better print.
 
 
LITTLE NEMO HOME WITH WAR HONORS
4/26/1919 Yerington times.

Sergt. Robert Winsor McKay. Jr., son of Winsor McKay (sic), the cartoonist and creator of "Little Nemo,” lias returned from France with the British military medal won (luring the smash of the Twenty-seventh division on the Hindenburg line last September. Sergeant McKay, who was the inspiration for his father’s cartoon character some years ago, was a member of the headquarters troops of the Twenty seventh. He returned the other on the...

and finally, here's a War Bonds ad he drew from El Paso Herald, Oct 20, 1917.

 



Friday, November 16, 2018

Review: Sense of Humor exhibit at National Gallery of Art

by Mike Rhode

Sense of Humor: Caricature, Satire, and the Comical from Leonardo to the Present. Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings; Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of American and modern prints and drawings; and Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. July 15, 2018 – January 6, 2019. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2018/sense-of-humor.html

Humor may be fundamental to human experience, but its expression in painting and sculpture has been limited. Instead, prints, as the most widely distributed medium, and drawings, as the most private, have been the natural vehicles for comic content. Drawn from the National Gallery of Art's collection, Sense of Humor celebrates this incredibly rich though easily overlooked tradition through works including Renaissance caricatures, biting English satires, and20th-century comics. The exhibition includes major works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, James Gillray, Francisco de Goya, and Honoré Daumier, as well as later examples by Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, and the Guerrilla Girls.
James Gillray, Wierd-Sisters; Ministers of Darkness; Minions of the Moon, 1791
Any exhibit on humor that covers 500 years (from 1470 through 1997), two continents and at least five countries is going to have to deal with the vagaries of what humor actually is. Even within my lifetime, what is considered permissible humor in America has changed, sometimes drastically. The exhibit was divided into three galleries – according to their press release (available at the website) the first "focuses on the emergence of humorous images in prints and drawings from the 15th to 17th centuries. Satires and caricatures gained popularity during this era, poking fun at the human condition using archetypal figures from mythology and folklore. While not yet intended as caricatures of individuals, Italian works reflected the Renaissance interest in the human figure and emotion." To modern eyes, drawings of dwarves or grotesques do not really appear to be either humorous or a cartoon, but the curators make the arguments that the foundations of caricature and satirical cartooning are laid in this period. 
William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, 1738
The second gallery begins featuring artists that most of us would consider cartoonists as it "continues with works from the 18th and 19th centuries, when certain artists dedicated themselves exclusively to comical subjects." In this room one found a good selection of the British masters Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, as well as Goya and Daumier (and oddly enough the painter Fragonard who drew an errant lover hiding from parents in an etching, The Armoire). This is the most interesting part of the exhibit for historians of comics, and the strong selection of etchings and drawings is worth studying since one rarely gets to see the contemporary prints, or even the original drawings such as Cruickshank's pencil and ink drawing Taking the Air in Hyde Park (1865). The release also notes, "Included in the exhibition is Daumier's Le Ventre Législatif (The Legislative Belly) (1834), a famous image that mocks the conservative members of France's Chamber of Deputies," but the exhibit does not note that the sculptures Daumier also made of the Deputies is on permanent display in another gallery of the museum -- a lost opportunity.
The final gallery "focuses on the 20th century and encompasses both the gentle fun of works by George Bellows, Alexander Calder, and Mabel Dwight and the biting satire of Hans Haacke and Rupert García. Works by professional cartoonists such as R. Crumb, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Art Spiegelman are presented alongside mainstream artists like Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Nutt, and Andy Warhol." Of most interest were the McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland: Climbing the Great North Pole) and Herriman (Ah-h, She Sails Like an Angel, 1921) originals, both of which are worth examining in detail. This section also showed the paucity of the NGA's collections in modern comic art. These are joined by a print by Art Spiegelman, and several Zap Comic books, recently collected and described in standard art historical terms:
Robert Crumb (artist, author), Apex Novelties (publisher)
Zap #1, 1968
28-page paperback bound volume with half-tone and offset lithograph illustrations in black and
cover in full color
sheet: 24.13 x 17.15 cm (9 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)
open: 24.13 x 34.29 cm (9 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of William and Abigail Gerdts

The fact that the Gallery still can not bring itself to use the word 'comic book,' the standard term as opposed to paperback bound volume, unfortunately shows that it has far to go in dealing with the twentieth century's popular culture rather than fine art. Still, the exhibit is interesting, and well-worth repeated viewings which are almost necessary to understand the material from the first four centuries of the show.



(This review was written for the International Journal of Comic Art 20:2, but this version appears on both the IJOCA and ComicsDC websites on November 16, 2018, while the exhibit is still open for viewing. For those not in DC, Bruce Guthrie has photographs of the entire exhibit at http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2018_07_29B2_NGA_Humor)

Friday, December 01, 2017

Winsor McCay on communications neutrality... in 1929


In this 1929 cartoon, McCay shows that issues stay the same - now, instead of radio, Internet neutrality is being discarded in favor of corporate media interests.

Photographed from the collection of Warren Bernard. See our earlier post of cartoons here.

Friday, November 24, 2017

Back to the Future with Winsor McCay

by Mike Rhode

Warren Bernard is known to many as the Executive Director of the Small Press Expo, but he's also an indefatigable collector of specialties in the comic art field. He and I refer to these as the "Secret History of Comics." Lately, he's been providing a lot of ads drawn by New Yorker cartoonists to Michael Maslin's Ink Spill. When I visited him recently, he pulled out a whole box of Winsor McCay's editorial cartoons clipped from the Chicago Herald and Examiner. I looked through barely any of the box (there's always something more to see at his house), but what struck me was how sadly relevant are these cartoons dating from 1929-1930 by McCay (who was also creator of Little Nemo, and Gertie the Dinosaur, and a founding father of animation). Almost 90 years later, we're still dealing with many of the same issues and Warren provided scans for me to share with you.

There's a narcotics problem hollowing out the social and civil life of our country....
  

and an international drug problem...

...although it's apparent to everyone that the  War on Drugs dating back to Ronald Reagan and the 1980s has been a stunningly expensive failure.

Distrust and ill will lead to tariffs that block trade and business...

...while a President's speech disrupts international organizations.

  
Schools are failing their students, leading to high levels of ignorance... 

  

... which is infecting the mood of the country...

... leading to an endemic lack of trust in government among certain Americans ...

 ...while also filling prisons, which now are being run for profit, and thus prime for overcrowding. 


Public works projects, including highways, are desired by 'common citizens and tax payers' ...


... but the large companies in the country are using their power to manipulate Congress and the media on their own behalf...


...while farmers suffer from high seed prices, low commodity prices and high debt while big agribusinesses like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland Company get even bigger. 


Meanwhile, there's ongoing probes of the Executive Branch and Congress for sexual, ethical, lobbying and foreign interference issues...


that's going to take a lot of effort to resolve and preserve democracy.


 Meanwhile, 16 years of ongoing wars have led to tens of thousands of veterans, many with medical issues, having problems integrating back into society.



Sadly, I'm afraid that Warren and I could have added many more cartoons if I had time to look through more than a tenth of the box.