Neil Gaiman: Bowie by Michael Allred

IF WE CAN SPARKLE HE MAY LAND TONIGHT

by Neil Gaiman

(from the foreword to Bowie by Michael Allred, Insight Editions, 2020)

I read about David Bowie in a newspaper before I ever heard his music. I was eleven. The article in a daily newspaper was about Bowie saying he was bisexual, a term I had never previously encountered. The people who wrote the article seemed more shocked that he wore makeup. A man wearing makeup. Had you ever heard of such a thing?

Not long after that, I heard a song on the radio about a spaceman leaving his capsule on a space walk; it was being played in the school's hobby room, where the kids were allowed to go and make balsa wood airplanes. I didn't really get pop music at that age. I loved Gilbert and Sullivan; I loved songs that were stories, and most rock and pop wasn't. "Space Oddity" was a story, even if it left its ending wrapped in ambiguity, and it was science fiction, and I loved and understood science fiction.

And really, it was the science fiction that was the fishhook in my cheek and dragged me in, as much as the music. Perhaps more than the music. I would listen to music that I didn't love, to tease out the ideas, and play it enough that I loved every beat and bar of it. For me, it was the thread that linked The Man Who Sold The World - "The Supermen" and "The Man" himself - with Hunky Dory - which gave me "Changes" and Quicksand" - and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, a sci-fi journey. It started with a heartbeat that told us that we only had five years until the end of the world and took us to a room where a kid my age was listening to a Starman sending in music from outer space. The other side of the record was the story of Ziggy Startdust and his journey from fame to zombie obscurity, and I was certain that Ziggy was an alien, come to bring us music. The Starman had descended into a world that was ending in five years, and he would finish his life wandering dully, insulated from from all feeling, like Thomas Jerome Newton drinking himself into painlessness.

I was twelve when Aladdin Saine came out, and I was bedazzled and confused, and I wanted to know who the strange ones in the dome were and why Aladdin Saine was going to fight in the Third World War, and I held on to the conviction that this was science fiction. I was thirteen when Diamond Dogs hit, and I was so much in love I went to the school library and took out George Orwell's 1984 and build huge sapphire-coloured post apocalyptic sages in my head out of the rest of it.

At fifteen, I bluffed my way into a showing of The Man Who Fell To Earth, acting old enough to be allowed in, and I bunked a day off school to go to Victoria Station for Bowie's arrival there (I didn't see him, but I met people who were different Bowies at different periods, and I saw copies of Station To Station flung over the wall they had put up to stop us from seeing him, and I felt like I was touching magic). 

The incarnations of Bowie were, in themselves, science fictional. All I was missing was a Bowie comic, and, missing it, I would draw bad Bowie comics myself.

I met Mike Allred around 1989, at (I think) a Forbidden Planet signing. He gave me some of his art, and I loved it. I sent it to Karen Berger, my editor on Sandman, who had him do a tryout page and told him he wasn't quite ready yet. I continued to love his art and was proud that the world rapidly discovered how good he was and that, together, we would bring back the character Prez in the pages of The Sandman: World's End. Later, we would make one of my favourite comics I had any part of: the Metamorpho story in Wednesday Comics, complete with a 1963-style periodic table. There was a cleanness to his lines, a joy in the image and in the construction of each page, aided and abetted by Laura Allred's precise and delightful colouring.

There was a brief moment in the early 1990s when rock-and-roll biography comics were the next big thing. It didn't last very long. None of them were like this. This is pure delight, a book made by fans who were also artists, for fans who are dreamers.

This is a book filled with visual allusions (my favourite is the Hunky Dory "Quicksand" first Spider's gig page). The people in these pages aren't people. They are icons - larger-than-life versions of themselves, filled with resonance. It's Bowie's life as parables and imaginary histories, a beautifully researched re-creation of something that might be better than documentary footage. It's an imaginary reconstruction of the time and lives of an imaginary figure, inspired by the life of the actor, one David Jones, formerly of Bromley and originally of Brixton. 

FURTHER READING:
AAA Pop
Insight Editions
Michael Allred: Conversations (UPM, 2015)

Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean (No. 90)

Mr. Punch (1994)

by Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean

REVIEW BY LARRY RODMAN:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

As an art object, Mr. Punch is a tightly focused, mad pageant of illustrative approaches and techniques. Its initial appeal is the cultural motifs which imply hidden, interior workings; composites of line, paint, photography and typography. Each page of this sensuous, beautiful book had to have been arrived at through different, partially experimental methods. Chromatic elements within each panel - paint and collage with a computer assist - play against a backdrop of black. 

A running symbol in the story is the spark which comes from a person physically manipulating an inanimate puppet or mask, creating a creature which is more than the sum of its parts; something potent with mystery. In the same way that the hand transforms the puppet, McKean's artwork is the life-spirit to Neil Gaiman's story.

It's the off-season in a neglected English seaside resort town, though it seems unlikely that the tide will ever come in again, figuratively. A boy, sent to board with his grandparents, tries to keep from being underfoot, amusing himself in exile. He watches and appraises the adult world; guessing at the substance of the tortured contracts among old men, and the rituals reserved for the diversion of children.

Grandfather is a would-be impresario, with an amusement arcade on its last legs - of less interest to the paying public than to his circle of misfits. The adults subtly correspond to the traditional cast members in the ubiquitous Punch and Judy shows which break the monotony, popping up like brightly coloured mushrooms against the gloom. The flamboyant, abusive spectre of Punch drives the action. Themes of abandonment, secrecy, peril and violence carry through, both in the recurrent puppet shows, and ultimately amongst the human players.

FUTHER READING:

Mr. Punch at DC Comics

Tantrum: An Appreciation by Neil Gaiman

Tantrum (1979)

by Jules Feiffer 

NEIL GAIMAN:

(from the introduction to the Fantagraphics Books 1997 edition of Tantrum)

There was a Jules Feiffer cartoon in the mid-sixties in which a baby, hardly old enough to walk, catalogues the grievances inflicted upon it by its parents, each indignity accompanied by a soothing "Mommy loves baby. Daddy loves baby."

"Whatever that word 'love' means --" says the baby, essaying its first steps, "I can hardly wait till I'm big enough to do it to them."

When I first discovered Jules Feiffer I was... what? Four years old? Five, maybe. This was in England, in 1964 or 1965, and the book was a hardback blue-covered edition of The Explainers, Feiffer's 1962 collection, and I read it as only a child can read a favourite book: over and over and over. I had little or no context for the assortment of losers and dreamers and lovers and dancers and bosses and mothers and children and company men, but I kept reading and rereading, trying to understand, happy with whatever comprehension I could pull from the pages, from what Feiffer described as "an endless babble of self-interest, self-loathing, self-searching and evasion.” I read and reread it, certain that if I understood it, I would have some kind of key to the adult world.

It was the first place I had ever encountered the character of Superman: there was a strip in which he "pulled a chick out of a river" and eventually married her. I'd never encountered that use of the word 'chick' before, and assumed that Superman had married a small fluffy yellow baby chicken. It made as much sense as anything else in the adult world. And it didn't matter: I understood the fundamental story -- of compromise and insecurity -- as well as I understood any of them. I read them again and again, a few drawings to a page, a few pages to each strip. And I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to do that. I wanted to tell those stories and do those drawings and have that perfect sense of pacing and the killer undercut last line.

(I never did, and I never will. But any successes I've had as a writer in the field of words-and-pictures have their roots in poring over the drawings in The Explainers, and reading the dialogue, and trying to understand the mysteries of economy and timing that were peculiarly Jules Feiffer's.)

That was over thirty years ago. In the intervening years the strips that I read back then, in The Explainers, and, later, in discovered copies of Sick, Sick, Sick and Hold Me!, have waited patiently in the back of my head, commenting on the events around me. ("Why is she doing that?" "To lose weight."/ "You're not perfection... but you do have an interesting off-beat color... and besides, it's getting dark."/ "What I wouldn't give to be a non-conformist like all those others."/ "Nobody knows it but I'm a complete work of fiction")

So. Time passed. I learned how to do joined-up writing. Feiffer continued cartooning, becoming one of the sharpest political commentators there has ever been in that form, and writing plays, and films, and prose books.

In 1980, I got a call from my friend Dave Dickson, who was working in a local bookshop. There was a new Jules Feiffer book coming out, called Tantrum. He had ordered an extra copy for me.

I had stopped reading most comics a few years earlier, limiting my comics-buying to occasional reprints of Will Eisner's The Spirit. (I had no idea that Feiffer had once been Eisner's assistant.) I was no longer sure that comics could be, as I had previously supposed, a real, grown-up, medium. But it was Feiffer, and I was just about able to afford it. So I bought Tantrum and I took it home and read it.

I remember, mostly, puzzlement. There was the certainty that I was in the presence of a real story, true, but beyond that there was just perplexity. It was a real 'cartoon novel'. But it made little sense: the story of a man who willed himself back to two-years of age. I didn't really understand any of the whys or whats of the thing, and I certainly didn't understand the ending.

(Nineteen is a difficult age, and nineteen year-olds know much less than they think they do. Less than five year olds, anyway.)

I was at least bright enough to know that any gaps were mine, not Feiffer's, for every few years I went back and re-read Tantrum. I still have that copy, battered but beloved. And each time I re-read it, it made a little more sense, felt a little more right.

But with whatever perplexity I might have originally brought to Tantrum, it was still one of the few works that made me understand that comics were simply a vessel, as good or bad as the material that went into them.

And the material that goes into Tantrum is very good indeed.

I re-read Tantrum a month ago.

Now, as I write this, I'm in spitting distance of Leo's age, with two children rampaging into their teens: I know what that place is. And I have a two-year old daughter -- a single-minded, self-centred creature of utter simplicity and implacable will.

And as I read it I found myself understanding it -- even recognising it -- on a rather strange and personal level. I was understanding just why Leo stopped being 42 and began being two, appreciating the strengths that a two year old has that a 42 year old has, more or less, lost.

Leo's drives are utterly straightforward, once he's two again. He wants a piggy back. He wants to be bathed and diapered and fussed over. As a 42 year old he lived an enervated life of blandness and routine. Now he wants adventure -- but a two year old's adventure. He wants what the old folk-tale claimed women want: to have his own way.

Along the way we meet his parents, his family, and the other men-who-have-become-two-year-olds. We watch him not burn down his parents' home. We watch him save a life. We watch his quest for a piggy-back and where it leads him. The story is sexy, surreal, irresponsible and utterly plausible.

Everyone, everything in Tantrum is drawn, lettered, created, at white hot speed: one gets the impression of impatience with the world at the moment of creation -- that it would have been hard for Feiffer to have done it any faster. As if he were trying to keep up with ideas and images tumbling out of his head, trying to capture them before they escaped and were gone.

Feiffer had explored the relationship between the child and the man before, most notably in Munro, his cautionary tale of a four-year old drafted into the US army (later filmed as an Academy Award-winning short). Children populated his Feiffer strip, too -- not too-smart, little adult Peanuts children, but real kids appearing as commentators or counterpoints to the adult world. Even the kids in Clifford, Feiffer's first strip, a one-page back-up to The Spirit newspaper sections, feel like real kids (except perhaps for Seymour, who, like Leo, is young enough still to be a force of nature).

Tantrum was different. The term ‘inner child’ had scarcely been coined, when it was written, let alone debased into the currency of stand-up, but it stands as an exploration of, and wary paean to the child inside.

When the history of the Graphic Novel (or whatever they wind up calling long stories created in words and pictures for adults, in the time when the histories are appropriate) is written, there will be a whole chapter about Tantrum, one of the first and still one of the wisest and sharpest things created in this strange publishing category, and one of the books that, along with Will Eisner's A Contract With God, began the movement that brought us such works as Maus, as Love and Rockets, as From Hell -- the works that stretch the envelope of what words and pictures were capable of, and could not have been anything but what they were, pictures and words adding up to something that could not have been a film or a novel or a play: that were intrinsically comics, with all a comics' strengths.

I am delighted that Fantagraphics have brought it back into print, and, after reading it, I have no doubt that you will be too...

ⓒ Neil Gaiman

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Remembering Will Eisner by Neil Gaiman

Will Eisner's The Spirit

NEIL GAIMAN:

It isn’t yet easy or comfortable for me to write about Will Eisner. He was too important, and writing this reminds me how much I miss my friend Will Eisner. Rereading his stories reminds me that I miss Will Eisner the storyteller, the craftsman, the dreamer, the artist.

When Will died in 2005, he was as respected and as revered around the world as he would let us respect and revere him. He was a teacher and an innovator. He started out so far ahead of the game that it took the rest of the world literally 60 years to catch up.

Will’s life is, in miniature, a history of American comics. He was one of the very first people to run a studio making commercial comic books, but while his contemporaries dreamed of getting out of that ghetto and into more lucrative and respectable places - advertising, perhaps, or illustration, or even fine art - Will had no desire to escape. He was trying to create an artform.

In seven pages - normally less than 60 panels - he could build a short story worthy of O Henry; funny or tragic, sentimental or hardbitten, or simply odd. The work was uniquely comics, existing in the place where the words and the pictures come together, commenting on each other, reinforcing each other. Eisner’s stories were influenced by film, by theatre, by radio, but were ultimately their own medium, created by a man who thought that comics was an artform, and who was proved right.

There are arguments today about whether or not Will was actually the first person to coin the term “graphic novel” for his 1978 book of short stories A Contract With God, the book that kicked off the third act of his creative life. There are far fewer arguments about what he actually did in the 1940s with the The Spirit stories, or about the influence he had on the world of comics throughout his creative life.

I’ll step forward here: I bought my first copy of The Spirit in 1975, in a basement comics shop in south London. I saw it hanging on a wall and knew that, whatever it was, I wanted it. I would have been about 14. Reading it on the train home, I had no idea that the stories I was reading were 30 years old. They were fresher and smarter than anything I’d seen in comics – stories that somehow managed to leave out everything that wasn’t the story, while telling wonderful tales of beautiful women and unfortunate men, of human fallibility and of occasional redemption, stories through which the Spirit would wander, bemused and often beaten up, a McGuffin in a mask and hat. I loved The Spirit then. I loved the choices that Will made, the confidence, the way the art and the story meshed. I read those stories and I wanted to write comics, too.

Two or three years later I stopped reading comics, disappointed and disillusioned by the medium as only a 16-year-old can be, but even then I kept reading The Spirit. I read those stories with unalloyed pleasure and when, as a 25-year-old, I decided it was time to learn how to write comics, I went out and bought Will’s Comics and Sequential Art, and pored over it like a rabbinical student studying his Torah.

And then time went on and all of a sudden, I was writing comics.

After becoming a comics-writing person, I met Will on many occasions, all over the world. I remember watching him receive an award for lifetime achievement in Germany - the thrill of seeing a thousand people on their feet and clapping until their hands hurt and carrying on clapping! He looked modestly embarrassed, while his wife Ann beamed like a lighthouse.

The last time we met was on the north coast of Spain, where the world fades out into a kind of warm autumnal haze. We spent almost a week together - Will and Ann and comics creators Jaime and Koko Hernandez, and me - a tight-knit group of people who spoke no Spanish. One day Ann and Will and I walked down along the edge of the sea. We walked for a couple of miles, talking about the history of comics and the future of the medium, and the people Will had known. It was like a guided tour of the medium we loved. I found myself hoping that when I got to be Will’s age I could be that sharp, that wise, that funny.

This is an edited extract from two essays in A View from the Cheap Seats (2017) by Neil Gaiman.

Pogo by Walt Kelly (No. 3)

Pogo (1949-1973)

by Walt Kelly 

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

When Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was good, he was the best there was. And he was often good. But the pinnacle of his achievement as a cartoonist was his attack on McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Kelly's career included both animation (1936-1941 at Disney Studios) and comic books (1942-1948) before embracing the newspaper comic strip form, and by the time he had finished with it, Kelly had elevated the form to high art in Pogo. 

The eponymous possum had first appeared as one of several anthropomorphic spear-carriers in the first issue of Animal Comics (December 1942 - January 1943). And when Kelly became art director of the short-lived by much mourned New York Star in 1948, he reincarnated his animal ensemble as a comic strip on October 8. After the Star's demise, Pogo went into national syndication, May 16, 1949.

Pogo transcended the "talking funny animal" tradition of its origins. At its core, the strip was a reincarnation of vaudeville, and its routines were often laced with humour that derived from pure slapstick. To that, Kelly added the remarkably fanciful and inventive language of his characters - a "southern fried" dialect that lent itself readily to his characters propensity to take things literally and permitted an unblinking delight in puns. The cast was perfectly content being animals, but sometimes for their own amusement they'd undertake the enterprises of people, adopting the right jargon and costumes but not quite understanding the purpose behind the human endeavours they mimicked. Adrift in misunderstood figures of speech, mistaken identities, and double entendres going off in all directions at once, Kelly's characters usually wandered further and further from what appeared to have been their original intentions. And this was the trick of Kelly's satire: readers couldn't help but glimpse themselves in this menage, looking just as silly as they often were. The animals - "natures screechers" - were blissfully unaware of their satirical function. They, after all, didn't take life as seriously as people did: "It ain't nohow permanent", as Porky the porcupine was won't to say.

Kelly added overt political commentary to his social satire in 1952 when some of Pogo's well meaning friends entered him in the Presidential race, and the strip was never quite the same again. The double meaning of the puns took on political as well as social implications, and the vaudeville routines frequently looked suspiciously like animals imitating officials high in government. Over the years, Kelly underscored his satirical  intent with caricature: his animals had plastic features that seemed to change before the reader's very eyes until they resembled those at whom the satire was directed. And the species suggested something about Kelly's opinions of his targets. Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev showed up one time as a piratical pig; Cuba's Fidel Castro as a goat; the tenacious J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog.

Kelly's first foray into the jungle of politics with caricature as his machete was in the spring of 1953, when he introduced an unprincipled and purely ruthless operative in his swamp, a wild cat named Simple J. Malarkey. As if the syllabic rhythm of his name weren't give away enough, Kelly made the wild cat look remarkably like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the country's self-proclaimed crusader against communist spies, a master of the smear and innuendo with a gift for the self-promotion and an utter disregard for the truth. To create a narrative metaphor for McCarthy's commie hunt, Kelly turned to the swamp's Bird Watcher's Club, and in power plays evocative of McCarthy's manoeuvres, Malarkey intimidates the members of the club into letting him take charge. With his guidance, the Club dedicates itself to ridding the swamp of all migratory birds, and when Malarkey is faced with a number of swamp creatures who claim they aren't birds (because, in fact, they aren't), he proposes to make them all birds with "a little judicious application" of tar and feathers. At one satiric stroke, Kelly equated McCarthyism with an appropriately belittling analogue, tar-and-feathering - a primitive method of ostracising, universally held in low repute. In a delicious finale, a member of the Club shoves Malarkey into the kettle of tar, demonstrating with an unforgettable flourish that those who seek to smear others are likely to be tarred with their own brush.

It was as neat a piece of satire as had ever been attempted on the comics page or anywhere. And the success of it depended upon Kelly's plumbing the potential of his medium to its utmost. Word and picture are perfectly, inseparably, wedded, the very emblem of excellence in the art of the comic strip: neither meant much when taken by itself, but when blended, the verbal and the visual achieved allegorical impact and powerful satiric thrust. High art indeed. At its best, Pogo was a masterpiece of comic strip art, an Aesopian tour de force - humour at each of two levels, one vaudeville, the other satirical - and it opened to a greater extent than ever the possibilities for political and social satire in the medium of the newspaper comic strip.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

In these uncertain times, Pogo feels necessary, feels relevant, feels ever-more-right.

REVIEW BY SERGIO ARAGONES:

Walt Kelly accompanied me from the first moment I saw his work and began to understand not about drawing but about cartooning. He filled me with a sense of what constituted excellence in my chosen field.

REVIEW BY BILL WATTERSON:

(from 'Some Thoughts On Pogo' in The Comics Journal, #140, February 1991)

Pogo celebrated conversation and dialogue for their own sake. The strip rarely had a punchline per se. I can't imagine people cutting out one day's strip and putting it on the refrigerator; it wasn't that kind of strip with a snappy saying in the last panel that makes Mom think of little Junior. Instead, it was a strip where characters talked and talked, inevitably misunderstood each other, and argued. It was a wonderful, rich parody of what passes for communication between human beings. The word balloons were filled with puns, obscure references, inside jokes, utter nonsense, and, once in a while, quiet wisdom. If the drawings in Pogo get better with each re-reading, so do the words.

FURTHER READING:

Walt Kelly at Fantagraphics Books

Tantrum by Jules Feiffer (No. 50)

Tantrum (1979)

by Jules Feiffer

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

At 42, family man Leo Doug has had enough of responsibility, of maturity, of "No give. No give. No give." So one night, like Gregor Samsa with a Peter Pan complex, Leo makes himself two-years old again. What follows is a journey that would daunt any adult, never mind a child: Leo proceeds to abandon his family, tries to return to his parents, seeks help from his siblings, and even encounters an enclave of other two-year-old adults. As it turns out, Leo can't help acting like an adult, though that doesn't always mean he's behaving maturely when he does so. 

The most memorable sequence occurs when Leo seeks out his brother's estranged wife, Joyce. A whole other mind/body corruption is in evidence with Joyce: lost in body-image issues, desperately wishing, "If I could be all essence and no body..." The sick, sick, sick codependency is fleshed out between the two to excellent effect - and not without a touch of empathy for both characters.

Feiffer had previously explored the role of childhood in a supposedly mature world: 1959's Munro, his first extended comic story, was about a child accidentally drafted into the military. Published 20 years later, Tantrum is Feiffer at the height of his powers, and the graphic novel format allows him a scope and bravura that only amplifies the achievement of his weekly strip. Each panel takes up a whole page, allowing Feiffer to fill out the world around his characters (a luxury he often eschews in his strip) and create highly dramatic images. Leo is often drawn to emphasise his metamorphosis, but there are panels where the outsized emotions and ego of our anti-hero are reflected in the choice of angles. Feiffer's distinctive monologue rhythms remain very much in evidence, an incantatory exposure of modern non-communication. Even when facing each other, people rarely hold an actual dialogue in Feiffer's works: they compare their relative lots in life, they antagonise without hearing the other side, but rarely do they desire to connect. Consider Leo's brother upon meeting his de-aged sibling: "Leo! Good to see ya" Looking' good. Lost weight. Got hair piece. Fabulous! Miss Swallow, two Perriers."

Narcissism is just one flaw, and Feiffer delights in all the contradictions of human behaviour. The advice Leo gives a real child remains indisputable: Don't mature! Mature people do the shit work!" But where are the mature people in this story? At best, maturity is a fleeting moment of grace and not a consistent attitude. This lesson is writ large in the ending. Is it positive turn of events, is it a confirmation of our worst fears? It's left up to us to decide. After all, what matters most in Tantrum is the comedy of human passions. And as Feiffer so often reminds us, such passions are frequently misleading, rarely politically correct, and never as obvious as we think.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

(from an introduction to the Fantagraphics Books 1997 edition of Tantrum)

...When the history of the Graphic Novel (or whatever they wind up calling long stories created in words and pictures for adults, in the time when the histories are appropriate) is written, there will be a whole chapter about Tantrum, one of the first and still one of the wisest and sharpest things created in this strange publishing category, and one of the books that, along with Will Eisner's A Contract With God, began the movement that brought us such works as Maus, as Love and Rockets, as From Hell -- the works that stretch the envelope of what words and pictures were capable of, and could not have been anything but what they were, pictures and words adding up to something that could not have been a film or a novel or a play: that were intrinsically comics, with all a comics' strengths. [Read the full essay here...]

FURTHER READING:
TCJ: A Conversation with Jules Feiffer (2014)
TCJ: The Jules Feiffer Interview (1988)
The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer (1965)

Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein (No. 76)

Master Race (1955)

by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
(Impact #1 cover art by Jack Davis)

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Master Race is one of the justifiably exalted comics of the 20th Century, and a stunning showcase of comics storytelling for artist Bernard Krigstein. Intended for an issue of Shock SuspenStories, Master Race appeared in the first issue of the New Direction EC title Impact, and remains its most memorable story.

The script, credited to the underrated Al Feldstein, tells the story of a chance meeting between a former concentration camp commandant and a camp survivor on a New York subway. The encounter ends with the former Nazi's death. As a straight piece of drama, Master Race is a solid, capable work of fiction. Feldstein's script is professionally forceful and provocative, while Krigstein's illustrations serve the story's dramatic highlights perfectly: the depictions of both the chase and the commandants crimes are magnificently expressive without veering into melodrama.

However, Master Race is best remembered for Krigstein's exploration of the possibilities of narrative in comics form. Expanding the script from six to eight pages, Krigstein opened up the story's graphic possibilities. His solutions to various storytelling problems are incredibly sophisticated: radical shifts in perspective between the pursuer and the pursued; building mood through panel size and text placement; switching from objective to subjective viewpoints; and showing dramatic highs by slowing down the action across a series of panels. The panels where Krigstein shows the passing of the subway cars through repeating images within the same panel are so astonishing, so adept, and so perfect they serve as arguments in and of themselves that Master Race is a rare artistic achievement by one of comics greatest forward thinkers.

Master Race is also one of the most studied comics of all time, most notably in the seminal piece of comics criticism "An Examination of Master Race" (by John Benson and David Kasakove, working in part from an Art Spiegelman essay and close reading of the story). A perfect marriage of artist, approach, and subject matter, Master Race rewards the constant reconsideration it richly deserves.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

One of the most important stories in the history of comics and the history of the art of comics...

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

(from Ballbuster in The New Yorker, 14 July 2002)

...I was a cartooning major at Art and Design in 1963. Only vaguely aware of Krigstein's comics, I gave him a wide berth. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a reputation among my illustration-major friends as a tough teacher, humorless and completely dismissive of comics. I was delighted to learn from Sadowski's book that the initials Krigstein used when signing his early superhero pages, "B. B. Krig," stood for the nickname he had earned in the Army: Ballbuster.

I met him only once, in the early seventies. John Benson, the editor of an EC fanzine called Squa Tront, wanted to expand and publish a panel-by-panel analysis of "Master Race" that I had written in 1967 as a college term paper. We went to visit Krigstein at his painting studio, on East Twenty-third Street, so I could read it to him and get his responses. Krigstein at first demurred that those days were long behind him and he didn't remember much about the work. As I began reading, he entered into the analysis avidly, acknowledging a reference to Futurism in one panel, to Mondrian in another, denying a reference to George Grosz in yet another. He basked when I pointed to a visual onomatopoeia that conjured up a subway's rumble. It was as if messages he'd sent off in bottles decades earlier had finally been found.

At the end of the paper, I had compared his approach to that of some important contemporaries whom I also admired, including Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. When I read that paragraph, Krigstein darkened. "Eisner!" he shouted. "Eisner is the enemy! When you are with me, I am the only artist!" He yanked me further into his studio and pointed at the walls. "Look!" he roared. "You see these paintings?" I saw several large, molten, and lumpy Post-Impressionist landscapes in acidic colors. "These are my panels now!" His voice betrayed all the anguish of a brokenhearted lover.

REVIEW BY DAVE SIM:
All they have to do is give him his own book, as they did with Kurtzman, and comic books could have jumped three or four decades in maturity inside of a year. No go. In fact, just the opposite happens. They start cutting the page count. To me it was an object lesson in the fact that innovation and business interests, while completely compatible are seen by businessmen as completely incompatible... If in later years, long after I'm dead, someone sees something in my work that seems - to them - as innovative as Master Race seemed - and seems - to me... Well, I'm pretty sure they will also see that what I achieved was only possible through self-publishing and, hopefully, I will have saved a handful of future creators from hitting a brick wall at their innovative peak that Feldstein and Gaines forced Krigstein to hit at his own creative high point.

FURTHER READING:

Bernie Krigstein: The Right to Silence by Paul Gravett

Why Mater Race Still Resonates by John Freeman

Krigstein at Fantagraphics Books

Master Race
Impact #1, EC Comics, 1955

Original art by Bernard Krigstein

The eight-pages of original art to Master Race sold for $600k in 2018
(Click images to enlarge)

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (No.49)

Understanding Comics (1993)

by Scott McCloud

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

When the venerable Will Eisner (see entries #15 and #57) offered his insightful Comics & Sequential Art (1985), he addressed the student and the academic with a hard-won how-to of explanations and examples that focused on the mechanics of the vehicle. Eight years later, Scott McCloud used comics to explain comics and, in effect, slipped the reader behind the wheel of the powerful and stylish medium. He congenially chatted about the wholly unique properties and wonderful accessories possible even while continually revealing the dazzling scenery that panel-by-panel narrative provides.

Using the vernacular to explicate the vernacular was an audacious, yet ultimately self-validating technique. For matters both philosophically ambitious and precisely concrete, McCloud not only pointed but effectively demonstrated comics' ability to convey and captivate. His topic may have attracted the attention of the cartoon cognoscenti, but it was the comics format that provided the hook for the casual reader. In deference to both audiences, McCloud made his treatise incisive, inclusive, democratic, and accessible, opening up the investigation of mysteries to common sense, common speech and masterful comics. Even as he exposed the tricks of the magical medium, he magnified the artistry involved. As the discussion progressed, McCloud proved congenially yet intellectually rigorous, a cartooning cross between Will Rogers and Umberto Eco. 

While the book may turn down some roads there was no great need to travel, the real disappointment is that McCloud's ruminations have yet to be met - at least in print - with the analysis and vigour they deserve. Perhaps that's why he's self-propelled and pulling away: his next book projected Reinventing Comics, rethinking the "Invisible Art" he'd so freshly fleshed out and animated.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

With Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics the dialogue on and about what comics are and, more importantly, what comics can be has begun. If you read, write, teach or draw comics; if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer at work, you must read this book.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered. With this book Scott McCloud has taken breathtaking leaps towards establishing a critical language that the comic art form can work with and build upon in the future. Lucid and accessible, it is an astonishing feat of perception. Highly recommended.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

Cleverly disguised as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud’s simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I’ve seen in a long time. Bravo.

REVIEW BY WILL EISNER:

Bravo!! Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium. Its employment of comic art as its vehicle is brilliant. Everyone... anyone interested in this literary form must read it. Every school teacher should have one.

FURTHER READING:

Scott McCloud Official Site

Cartoonist Kayfabe Review: Understanding Comics (2020)
Cartoonist Kayfabe Interview: Scott McCloud (2021)

Cages by Dave McKean (No. 46)

Cages (1990-1998)

by Dave McKean

REVIEW BY BART BEATY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

It took several years, two publishers and 500 pages to complete, but it was worth the wait in the end. Cages, Dave McKean's explosive graphic novel, is one of those artistic achievements that you're compelled to stand back from and just marvel at.

Really, it should be a total mess. What starts routinely enough as a tale about a small group of artists (a painter, a musician, a writer) all living in one London apartment building explodes into a vast canvass of dreams, stories, lies and hallucinations. As reality shifts and is shifted time and again, McKean similarly unleashes his prodigious artistic talents, pulling out all the stops - lifework, oils, photos, mixed media, full colour, duotone, you name it - in an effort to find new ways of communicating in the comics form. Seemingly building as he goes along McKean presents a densely structured narrative spiked with odd angles, baroque visual treatments and deceptively unmapped extensions. But you know what? In the end it all holds together.

More than that, it actually works. Sure it's wild and often out of control. But at the same time it's some of the smartest and most elegant cartooning of the decade. Some of it seems slapdash and rushed, while other parts seem coldly calculated and deliberate. And that's the way it should be. This is, after all, a book about creation and creation occurs in all sorts of ways from the spontaneous to the controlled. 

The success of Cages rests in the fact that McKean is one of the rare cartoonists with such a wide variety of tricks that he could pull off such a display. I can think of few cartoonists who could have pulled off a book as big and bold and brash as this one. But I'm certainly glad that I can think of one.

NEIL GAIMAN:
(from Neil Gaiman On Dave McKean)
I never minded Dave being an astonishing artist and visual designer. That never bothered me. That he's a world class keyboard player and composer bothers me only a little. That he drives amazing cars very fast down tiny Kentish backroads only bothers me if I'm a passenger after a full meal, and much of the time I keep my eyes shut anyway. He's now becoming a world class film and video director, that he can write comics as well as I can, if not better, that he subsidises his art (still uncompromised after all these years) with highly paid advertising work which still manages, despite being advertising work, to be witty and heartfelt and beautiful.... well, frankly, these things bother me. It seems somehow wrong for so much talent to be concentrated in one place, and I am fairly sure the only reason that no-one has yet risen up and done something about it is because he's modest, sensible and nice. If it was me, I'd be dead by now.

FURTHER READING:

Dave McKean Official Site

Dave McKean at Dark Horse Comics

Frank by Jim Woodring (No. 55)

Frank (1992-present)

by Jim Woodring

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Perched midway between cute and terrifying, Jim Woodring's Frank stories put a lunatic spin on the familiar "funny animal" tradition. These mute, enigmatic fables, starring Frank - a bucktoothed anthropomorph of uncertain species - have a disturbing yet addictive quality, redolent of dreams, at once charming and a little bit off. Frank's world, an oneiric playscape of wavy lines and fluid sensuous shapes, breeds horror and wonders in equal measure. 

Through these stories Woodring explores desires, frustrations and fears - common things in a suggestive, vaguely allegorical way which makes every insight fresh and acute. Within his handsome lovingly rendered drawings (or behind them, or between?) lurk metaphysical queries of the most disorienting sort. The Frank series offers Woodring a seemingly inexhaustible premise, one which allows him to broach the Big Questions in a subversively accessible format. It also offers some indelible supporting characters, among them Frank's aptly named antagonist, Manhog, and faithful companion animal, Pupshaw.

The Frank cannon is relatively small - most of it can be found in two books, Frank and Frank Vol 2, compiled from several series - but presents a discernible pattern of development. Recent stories such as Gentlemanhog and Pupshaw have retreated from the usual graphic cruelty of earlier tales, but have gained in length and complexity. All of the Frank stories, though, are alarming in some way. The best of them either hint at sone deep, essential dread - there's one set in a crypt full of mummified Franks, for instance - or stick pins in our sense of accomplishment, as in Frank and the Truth about Plentitude. they are shaggy-dog stories in the best sense: elusive, provoking, and deeply puzzling, representing a beautiful union of style and subject.

REVIEW BY SCOTT McCLOUD:

Woodring is fantastic... his stuff will outlast all but one in a thousand of his peers. His stuff is a revelation.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Frank will take you to another world, re-arrange your consciousness and reprogram the inside of your head. It's cheaper than virtual reality, less risky than recreational pharmaceuticals, and more fun than falling asleep.

REVIEW BY CHESTER BROWN:
...for me the joy of reading a good comic book has nothing to do with how long it takes me to read it or how much of a deal it was when I bought it. It probably takes me less than two minutes to read the Frank strip by Jim Woodring... yet I think Woodring is doing some of the best work in comics today.

FURTHER READING:

Jim Woodring's Website

Jim Woodring at Fantagraphics Books

The Illumination of Jim Woodring Documentary

Alec by Eddie Campbell (No. 51)

Alec (1981-2010)

by Eddie Campbell

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Eddie Campbell started his curious autobiographical stories about Alec McGarry in 1981 and they continue to the present. He may have been the first cartoonist to illustrate the slacker lifestyle - Alec is an over-educated character working in a dead-end job and spending all his time drinking in pubs. But don't hold that against Campbell. These are great stories, majestic documents of small events. Campbell's unlabored approach to storytelling draws you in. Even when he writes about misery and despair, as in Graffiti Kitchen, there is always a deceptively diary-like feel to the work.

I say deceptive, because the stories have a structure. They exist in service to their characters - Alec, Danny Grey, Penny, Jane, Georgette etc - and these characters are given flesh the same way an oil painter uses glazes. Each new appearance or vignette adds a little more detail to the character until finally a full-fledged personality - complex and irreducible - emerges. The stories, such as they are, are almost invisible in this process. They inevitably describe the arc of a relationship - the rise and fall of Alec's friendships and love affairs with Danny, Penny, Jane and Georgette. But the means of describing these cycles is so discursive that one might not even see the big picture at first.

Campbell's drawing likewise seems exceedingly casual. The early Alec stories have zip-a-tone, so at least the reader knows Campbell went over them twice. But there is probably no artist who has ever used zip-a-tone in such an impressionistic way as Campbell. In Graffiti Kitchen he drops the zip and the work becomes pure handwriting. Each panel reads as if it were dashed off on a notepad as the events described were unfolding. The drawing has an expressive urgency (even though the story has a typically stately pace) that perfectly matches the heightened emotions depicted.

Alec continues to pop up - in the lighthearted Dance of Lifey Death and most recently in a story being serialised in Dee Dee. This is strong work, and will no doubt comfortably sit with the brilliant work Campbell has done before.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
I like Eddie's stuff because it's Masculist fiction and it demonstrates that you don't have to be published by Virago books in order to have any heart, understanding or human sensitivity. Men feel things too. It just takes them longer. I like it because it doesn't confuse being realistic with being depressing and because it is written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum. I like it because it fills me in on what would have happened to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady if they'd traded in the Lincoln for a Ford Transit and moved to Southend-On-Sea. On The Pier as opposed to On The Road.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that Alec is probably the best book-length comic about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?

READ THIS BOOK:

The collected Alec stories were finally published in one big book in 2010 by Top Shelf Publishing and available from a quality comic shop near you!

FURTHER READING:

Official Site: Eddie Campbell Dammit!

Interview: The Comics Journal #273 (January 2006)
Interview: The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991)

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (No. 91)

Watchmen (1986-1987)

by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
In narrowed circles, Watchmen will be dismissed for merely being the fare-the-well vision of superheroes. True, the 1986 tale is indebted to genre conventions, but it additionally refurbishes devices from science fiction and the mystery novel, specifically the "murder at the club" sub-species. Here, however, the cast of indelibly delineated members just happen to wear masks. With this, the psychological implications of dressed-up heroism are acknowledged, examined, and then folded into richer, more complex patterns of human behaviour than covered in any crime fighter's handbook.

In fact, Watchmen as a whole represented a richer, more complex, and more ambitious narrative infrastructure than serial comics had seen before. Writer Alan Moore consciously fabricated a fastidious, densely layered, and unfailingly smart dramatic milieu. A chilling realism, but one step removed from normalcy, shapes integrated innovations from the momentous (Nixon's fourth term) to the incidental (the necessitated collateral drugs for same). Arch dialogue, aphorism, witticisms, and good jokes pepper a prose that spoke in tongues to multiple purposes and sustained a level of daunting and unprecedented word-smithing.

Dave Gibbons gave the absorbing clash of familiar and alien a reassuring coherence even while embedding the graphic tie-rods and visual lief motifs. Consciously operating within a strict comics grid, his painstaking and efficacious renderings exemplified the S&M adage that with discipline comes freedom. The series' distinctive presentation - of covers, titles, quotes, text addenda - made a strong, unified thematic statement that stood apart from commercial product.

Watchmen remains dazzling, even glaringly brilliant, so much so that it is impossible to gather it all in one reading. (Follow the sugar cubes! Construct the urban intersection at the cross-hairs! How early can you deduce, with absolute certainty, Rorschach's identity? Watch for visual conceits like the blood-splattered smiley-face that broaden into suggestive geometries the circle slashed by line segment, the circle within circles.) Repeated readings reveal how uniquely it shines.

ALAN MOORE:
(from Prisoners Of Gravity, 1991)
I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence, y'know, this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalization of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I couldn't see any point in doing superheroes, from my point of view, after Watchmen. Unfortunately everybody else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones, or not just specifically Watchmen clones, but this would extend to Dark Knight as well, people who were looking at those faintly grim and post-modern superhero comics of the mid '80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like, you know, post-modernism by numbers. You make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like R.E.M. that'll impress your young readers with how hip you are, um, you throw in some garbled sort of psych-, sub-psychedelic philosophy, um, and you've got a modern comic. It doesn't matter whether it has any substance, it doesn't matter whether it has any direction, but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me, the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream... The people who've taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people. They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerously dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Moore's writing is remarkable. He catches the rhythms of speech so naturally, presents his world so seamlessly, that the whole seems effortless… Gibbon's art has never been better. Each panel a semiotician's heaven… undoubtedly the most ambitious work of science fiction since Gene Wolfe's Book Of The Sun, and the most ambitious and, in my opinion, most successful graphic novel ever.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #180, 1995)
For better and for worse, Alan Moore is very interested in structures, and that kind of structuring is what made Watchmen stand apart from other books. It's not the dystopic vision, it's not the Twilight Zone ending, it's the fact that there's something formally at work there that you're only peripherally aware of, as you're reading through this thing, that gives weight and authority to what's being told.

FURTHER READING:
Alan Moore World
Watchmen at Wikipedia

The Recommended Reading List

Comic-creators recommend their favourite comics!
This list is a work-in-progress and will be updated regularly.

CHESTER BROWN:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray

EDDIE CAMPBELL:
Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Prince Valiant by Harold Foster
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh

DAN CLOWES:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman

ROBERT CRUMB:
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Buddy Bradley Stories by Peter Bagge

WILL EISNER:
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

NEIL GAIMAN:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
Cages by Dave McKean
Frank by Jim Woodring
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Pogo by Walt Kelly
Tantrum by Jules Feiffer
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

SCOTT McCLOUD:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Frank by Jim Woodring
The Spirit by Will Eisner

MIKE MIGNOLA:
Murky World by Richard Corben

FRANK MILLER:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson
EC War Comics by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

ALAN MOORE:
Alec by Eddie Campbell
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Arcade: The Comics Revue edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith
Dark Knight by Frank Miller
Grendel: Devil By The Deed by Matt Wagner
Hellboy by Mike Mignola
Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot
MAD edited by Harvey Kurtzman
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore
The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine
The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb
The Spirit by Will Eisner
The Suttons by Phil Elliott
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

CHARLES M. SCHULZ:
Barnaby by Crockett Johnson
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar

SETH:
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown

DAVE SIM:
A Contract With God by Will Eisner
Fourth World Comics by Jack Kirby
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown
The Willie & Joe Cartoons of Bill Mauldin

ART SPIEGELMAN:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
City of Glass by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray
Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward
Master Race by Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Plastic Man by Jack Cole
The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez
The Bungle Family by George Tuthill
The Mishkin Saga by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

ALEX TOTH:
Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy by Roy Crane

CHRIS WARE:
Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz
Zap Comix by Robert Crumb & Others

BILL WATTERSON:
Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Pogo by Walt Kelly