Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker (No. 84)

Why I Hate Saturn (1990)

by Kyle Baker

REVIEW BY BART BEATY:

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

Without a doubt the most loaned out comic book I have ever owned is Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn, and each time it's circulated amongst my friends it's come back just a little worse for wear. My copy is dog-eared and battered, it's had drinks spilled on it, part of the cover has worn away for some reason, the spine is cracked,  a couple of pages have fallen out and it smells vaguely of Thai food for reasons I can't ascertain.

And that feels so appropriate.

This story of a young woman recklessly tossed about on the sea of fate, cut loose by a series of coincidences and plot points well beyond her control, used and abused by crazed ex-boyfriends, sisters, and editors belongs in a book that, like its lead character, is just nearly holding it together.

Baker's fashionably hip end-of-the-80s sensibility seemed mildly outrageous a the time (remember the bazooka-wielding finale?) but after the intervening decade it's beginning to look a lot like reportage. What hasn't changed is the fact the rapid-fire dialogue still crackles with life while Baker's hyper-expressive visuals still make this one of the most approachable graphic novels of the past decade.

My copy's in such bad shape because I've yet to meet someone who won't finish the book once they've started it. It's simply too fast, too funny and too difficult to put down. So it gets read and read and read again.

It may not look so pretty up on the shelf, but I'd trade a dozen of those pristine graphic novels that I've read once and then put away for just one more of these books that looks like it's been read by a small army. Because it has been.

REVIEW BY HO CHE ANDERSON:
(from an Instagram post, 2021)
Kyle Baker! This man’s work was like a depth charge going off in my brain. The Shadow was my intro to his stuff; it was only later I discovered his more personal work like Cowboy Wally. Then came this bad boy and Kyle ascended to the levels of Los Bros, and (cough, cough) Woody Allen (this book feels a lot like an Allen-style New York comedy). Hilarious, beautiful, highly recommended.

FURTHER READING:
Kyle Baker's Patreon Page

Kyle Baker's CBLDF Profile

The New Yorker Cartoons of Charles Addams (No. 58)

The New Yorker Cartoons of Charles Addams (1935-1988*)

* New Addams cartoons appeared in The New Yorker well after his death.

REVIEW BY LARRY RODMAN:

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

Charles Addams morbid fancy was just beneath the surface when his first cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1935, but it's possible that the gag - featuring an out-of-his-depth, milquetoast hockey player - hinted at a future career of unsettling, sometimes violent incongruities.

This apparently gentle soul went on to produce disturbing work for over 60 years. In keeping with The New Yorker's perforation of social affection, these cartoons solicited a cruel shock of recognition at the expense of gentility. Behavioural codes (never mind the laws of physics) were completely subverted, artfully suggesting the most uncivilised outcome.

The characters who make up the Addams Family began to appear in his cartoons by 1937, jelling Addams' mordant identity for generations of readers. While they're not the persistent focus of his work, it's easy to see what people responded to in them. They're warped, yet friendly; an eccentric presence within an often threatening framework. His mise en scene conjured the mildew of Victorian gothic conservatories, intimating that forgotten customs, such as laying out the recently deceased in the front parlour, would not be considered off-base to the maladjusted characters in their hedge against the outside world.

Verbally describing The New Yorker single-panel cartoons, with their interrelated captions and drawing, can be a flat, awkward proposition. It's probably unnecessary in Addams' case, anyway. His situational cartoons, in themselves, are familiar icons. Just about everyone has seen his cartoons of ski tracks which run on both sides of the tree. He excelled at captionless "What's wrong with this picture?" cartoons, and drawings of bizarre whimsy and surreality.

Striking a precarious balance of urbanity and malevolence, Addams showed us the banality of evil - in a perky, cheerful manner - which only made things worse.

FURTHER READING:

Tee & Charles Addams Foundation

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (No. 9)

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972)

by Justin Green

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:

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

Binky Brown is the longest, and most profound, piece of sustained narrative to emerge from underground comix. A shocking, riotous, and absurdly moving memoir of Catholic guilt, Binky offers both harrowing psychological insight (into the condition since labeled Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and stunning graphics, the latter courtesy of Green's eclectic vocabulary and dead-on parodic instincts. Rife with pointed symbolism, the pages of Binky riff deliriously on Durer, Crumb, Chester Gould, Superman comics, and scores of other sources, with a superb technique that at times approaches engraving-like texture. The story begins lucidly enough, clearly dividing fantasy from reality, but eventually its finely observed realism collides and merges with antic, dreamlike symbolism. Green's restless, protean style demonstrates that realistic, personal comics need not be tethered to any literal-minded notion of illustrative realism - a lesson not lost on the many cartoonists who have been influenced by Binky's blend of autobiography and graphic fantasy.

Since being published by Last Gasp in 1972, Binky has inspired seminal first-person comics by such cartoonists as Crumb, Kaminsky-Crumb and Spiegelman. On its own terms, it remains an extraordinary achievement: a surreal, bleakly humourous mixture of anti-Catholic polemic and scourging confession. Over its 40 pages, Green uncorks his psyche, examining in harrowing detail the intersection of Catholic doctrine and his own neurotic, guilt-driven personality. Religious fervour and psychological obsession feed into each other, turning "Binky" (Green) into a fretfulzealot whose life is all but consumed by radical self-doubt. Binky is devoted to (and exhausted by) constant checking, double-checking, and triple-checking to make sure no sins are committed - or at least none left unatoned.

Binky's obsession involves imaginary rays of light emanating from his penis, his limbs, and even the material objects around him. These rays must be prevented at all costs from sticking representations (visual or verbal) of the Catholic Church, and in particular the Virgin Mary. This is of course an artist's conceit: the rays threaten to converge on the Virgin in much the same way that, in classical perspective, imaginary lines connect parallel objects to a common vanishing point. The world of Binky is one of grid-like precision, a landscape crisscrossed by invisible vectors of sin. Green's artwork both reflects and resists this linearity, with a riot of mixed forms: rigid and angular versus rounded and fleshy. Indeed, his carefully  worked pages enact a struggle between hard-edged asceticism (in his words, "order, uniformity, rigidity, and obedience") and indulgent sensuality. Binky crackles with this tension.

What makes Binky so bold and effective is the extravagance of Green's visual metaphors. While he faithfully captures the cultural landscape of his formative years, Green also deploys a series of bizarre symbols that capture young Binky's inner landscape just as precisely. At first such conceits are confined to young Binky's dreams and fantasies, but they gradually assert themselves through passages of Green's anti-Catholic argument (eg parochial school students are brainwashed and turned into marionettes, replete with strings). Eventually, elements of fantasy begin to intrude on Binky's everyday life: visual metaphors multiply as Binky becomes increasingly dominated by his obsessive guilt. As Binky's world becomes more and more pinched and cloistral, Green's artwork breaks free, employing a huge arsenal of design conceits, graphic devices and rendering styles. Shifting layouts, labels, signboards and mock-scholarly annotations run rampant, while open, white panels contrast with zip-a-tone grays and densely cross-hatched backgrounds. Those expecting a documentary realism, to authenticate Green's polemic, will be perplexed by his anarchic visual imagination.

Reflexive playfulness characterises Binky from beginning to end. For example, the penultimate panel finds the hero, having spurned Catholicism, eyeing an overdue stack of library books: First Catechism, Perspective and Fun With a Pencil. This single image underscores not only Green's relationship to the Church, but also his grasp of classical art and his dedication to drawing. Even more: in the background, a cartoon by R. Crumb hints at another source of inspiration. Metonymically, Crumb (himself a lapsed Catholic) stands in for the underground comix, then in their heyday, which liberated Green artistically, inspiring him to set forth his own story in comics form.

Of course, the "pencil" in the third title, Fun With a Pencil, also substitutes metamorphic ally for the feared penis, the original source of the rays which have so monopolised Binky's imagination.  Green employs this metaphoric likeness from the outset: the frontispiece is a grimly hilarious image of the naked artist, hands bound behind his back, a pen gripped in his mouth, with a long scythe-like blade poised dangerously close to his groin. Both artist's tool and endangered phallus are impious and inadmissible (Green dips his pen in God's blood; his very word balloon bears a crown of thorns). Here Green, in a confession to his readers, admits that Binky represents an effort to "purge" himself of a "compulsive neurosis." Begging indulgence for focusing on "the petty conflict in [his] crotch", the cartoonist suggests that portraying his neurosis in "easy-to-understand comic-book format" may actually help others similarly afflicted, and thus intervene in a larger social problemm: "If all the neurotics were tied together we would entwine the globe many times over in a vast chain of human suffering."

With this, Green hits on one of the great virtues of autobiography: its ability to expose private trauma as a public issue, and to focus our attention on the relationship between self and society. It is this social dimension which lifts Binky above mere calculated outrage and makes it insightful, provocative, and, finally, wonderfully moving.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

It' s no small thing to invent a genre. I readily confess that without his work there could have been no Maus.

REVIEW BY ROBERT CRUMB:

Justin Green - he's out of his mind. I love every stroke of his nervous pen, every tortured scratch he ever scrawled. He was among the top storytelling artists of the first wave of “underground” comics, a darkly humorous social commentator, and the FIRST, absolutely the FIRST EVER cartoonist to draw highly personal autobiographical comics. Binky Brown started many other cartoonists along the same path, myself included. Few have come close to him in revealing themselves in this medium. For me, there’s nothing more enjoyable than the confessions of a tortured soul, if the story is well-told, entertaining, honest, and then funny on top of it. If that’s what you’re looking for, and if you like it in comic book form, Justin Green is the first and the best!

REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:

Thank God that it’s getting harder to imagine a time when comics were a lowly commercial hack-job for illustrators who couldn’t find work anywhere else. It’s even harder to imagine the effect of a comic book in such a cultural climate by an artist who tore himself to pieces right on the page, trying to get at the core of something that was literally consuming him, but this is what Justin Green did. With Binky Brown, comics went practically overnight from being an artform that saw from the outside in to one that sees from the inside out. His internal struggle can practically be felt in the drawings themselves, the style sometimes changing from panel to panel - sometimes even within the panels themselves - all in an effort to simply arrive at The Truth. Comics wouldn’t be what they are today without this book, and this new edition places it in its proper place in the comics literary canon. Thank God for Binky Brown. And thank God for Justin Green.

FURTHER READING:

Justin Green's Blog

TCJ: The ABCs of Autobiography Comics by Patrick Rosenkranz (2011)

The Willie & Joe Cartoons by Bill Mauldin (No. 85)

The Willie & Joe Cartoons (World War II Era)

by Bill Mauldin

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

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

Bill Mauldin acquired his fame as an anti-authoritarian critic in the most autocratic of societies, the U.S. Army during World War II: in the panel cartoons he drew for military newspapers, he depicted the life of the "dogface" (foot soldier) the way it was. Rained on, shot at and kept awake in the trenches day and night, the combat soldier was wet, scared, city and tired all of the time; and Mauldin's spokesman - the scruffy, bristle-chinned, stoop-shouldered Willie and Joe in their wrinkled and torn uniforms - were taciturn but eloquent witnesses on behalf of the persecuted. Through simple combat-weary inertia, they defied pointless army regulation and rituals: they would fight the war, but they wouldn't keep their shoes polished. 

Their popularity was an affront to generally accepted notions of military propriety, but Mauldin never wavered even after General George S. Patton leaned on him. "I knew these guys best," Mauldin said, " and [the cartoons] gave the typical soldier an outlet for his frustrations, a chance to blow off steam." 

Returning to civilian life a celebrity, Mauldin continued the same satirical approach he'd followed in the military, but cartoons that were critical of post-war America were seen as "political" rather than "entertaining", and newspapers began dropping his feature, saying they had their own political cartoonists.  Then in 1958, he simply became a political cartoonist, replacing the dour Daniel Fitzpatrick at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and suddenly, Mauldin's liberal perspective had a home again. "I'm against oppression," he said, " - by whomever."

JEAN SCHULZ:

(from A Toast to Bill Mauldin, 2020)

Although he was basically reserved, Sparky [Charles M. Schulz] was not afraid to publicly declare his admiration for fellow cartoonists and authors... I am not sure how Sparky and Bill first became acquainted, but I think it is likely that Sparky contacted an editor at United Features Syndicate, which then handled both Peanuts and Mauldin’s cartoons, and asked that an introduction be made. At any rate, Sparky and Bill had a telephone relationship for a number of years, and what I remember most are the times he would come home and share with me the war stories that Bill had regaled him with over the phone earlier that day. One of Mauldin’s best-known cartoons is of the soldier shooting his Jeep. Sparky has a bronze sculpture of that scene in his studio. Sparky admired Bill’s ability to be “in the face” of the officers, always sticking up for the little guy.

TODD DePASTINO:

(Author of Bill Mauldin: A Life Upfront)

Bill Mauldin retired from cartooning in 1991 after an injury to his drawing hand. Stricken by Alzheimer’s disease, he entered a nursing home in 2002. In the months before he died, old veterans and their relatives sent him over 10,000 cards and letters They thanked him for keeping their humanity alive during that most savage of wars. These tributes, more than any honor or award, rank Bill Mauldin as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Bill Mauldin died on January 22, 2003. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

DAVE SIM:

(from a letter to Bill Mauldin, reprinted in Cerebus Vol 16: The Last Day, 2004)

...the Willie and Joe cartoons still hold up as tip-top examples of the cartoonist's craft more than half a century later. Great composition, great expression, great body language, great execution, buoyant spontaneous brush strokes, spotting of blacks. I'll stop now before I start sporting a beret and a pointy little goatee. But to say the least, you always made the most difficult parts of cartooning look easy... If even a handful of my own readers still find my own work half so memorable decades after I have at last put down my pen and brush, I will count myself fortunate, indeed. To use the phrase which always denoted my father's highest accolade, Mr Mauldin, "Y'done good."

FURTHER READING:

Bill Mauldin at The Library of Congress

Bill Mauldin at The Society of Illustrators

Defence Media Network: When Mauldin Met Patton

The Comics Reporter: An Interview with Todd Pastino (2011)
TCJ Article: Another Look at Bill Mauldin (2021)

The Idiots Abroad by Gilbert Shelton & Paul Mavrides (No. 44)

The Idiots Abroad (1982-1987)

by Gilbert Shelton & Paul Mavrides

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:

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

Some say great works of art should be timeless. Here's one that's not only dated, it's dated twice over... and works wonderfully for that reason. As 1960s hippie throwbacks hurled into the cruel world of the 1980s, can the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers survive? Idiots Abroad is the only Freak Brothers epic, spanning three issues of the slower-than-erratic comic. That alone could make it the greatest Freak Brothers story ever, but the length of the story is matched by the scope of the Brothers' travels - and that, in turn, is matched by the scope of Shelton and Mavrides' satire.

What starts as an innocent trip to score cheap dope leads to a worldwide Freak diaspora. Fat Freddy is abducted by soccer players and travels throughout Europe being chased by terrorists (who are in turn pursued by the American military), befriending the eccentric genius Pablo Pegaso and searching desperately for decent American food. Freewheelin' Franklin heads to Central America where he deals with survivalists, banana republic dictators and pirates. And in the genius stroke that would eventually tie together the chaos, Phineas heads to the Middle East and becomes the head of a worldwide religion movement called Fundaligionism ("It sounds like fun... it has a fund... it's got that old time 'legion...") whose followers sing out, "Hallelujah-gobble!"

The counterculture paranoia for authority rings true as greed - for money, power, soccer-shaped bombs - is renewed ridiculously threatening and taken to the illogical extreme of a New World Order government. The notion that organised religion is the tool of an international shadow cabinet has been expressed before (often by those with the same recreational habits as the Freaks), but Shelton has a gift for taking such conspiracy theories and making then hilarious extensions of his characters. As do all great satirists, he doesn't play fair with his targets but shows why fairness wouldn't make any sense anyway. Moreover, his delight in putting his main trio through their paces remains unabated: somehow, the Freak Brothers continue to amuse with their individual quirks and idiocies. Though Phineas turns Freddy and Franklin into the ultimate Renaissance men, the duo turn their back on the Freak World Order and bring the complex weave of plot lines to a glorious crashing finale. The Freaks shall Freaks remain, it would seem - and hopefully will continue to be counterculture throwbacks well into the next millennium. Hallelujah-gobble, indeed.

FURTHER READING:

Gilbert Shelton at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ: Gilbert Shelton In Conversation (2013)

Covering The New Yorker: Chris Ware

 

Still Life

The New Yorker (4 May 2020)

Art by Chris Ware

Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense - or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, ‘For a while, we get to just step back and look.’ And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.

Looking Up

The New Yorker (17 September 2018)

Art by Chris Ware

As the resident stay-at-home cartoonist, stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home laundress of my family, I knew some paradigm had shifted when I could no longer tell my wife’s clothes from my daughter’s. Soon, shirts were being traded. Then shoes. Sounds of footsteps on the stairs became indistinguishable, and I found I had to wait to adjust my speaking tone to see whom I was scolding for not hanging up a sweater. Five years - only five years! - since I was helping my daughter into a bike seat to take her to second grade, and now I could barely kiss the top of her head, though she could now kiss my wife’s. It’s cliché and it’s sentimental but it’s true: parents, when your child asks, “Will you play with me?” - do. Because one day they really will stop asking, just like you did.

Hurricane Harvey

The New Yorker (11 September 2017)

Art by Chris Ware

I lived in San Antonio in high school, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and attended college in Austin, occasionally driving to Houston with my fellow art students to visit museums, and sometimes alone, just for the change of scenery. I liked Houston for its big buildings, its diversity, and its slack zoning laws, which made neighborhoods unpredictable and surprising. One night, my cartoonist friend John Keen and I stopped at a restaurant-bar that was about halfway to Houston, in the very Texas-sounding town of Winchester. The parking lot was locked and loaded with about two dozen pickup trucks, and, as scrawny liberal Austinites, we braced ourselves and pushed open the saloon doors, only to find black and white farmers talking and laughing, playing poker, and shooting pool together. In a corner, an interracial couple quietly ate barbecue. This Winchester bar, we realized, was more integrated than the University of Texas we’d just left.

Stop

The New Yorker (14 March 2016)

Art by Chris Ware

Most mornings, after I drop my eleven-year-old daughter off at school in Oak Park, Illinois, I drive my wife to the west side of Chicago, where she works as a teacher in a public school. Along the way, we’ll frequently pass a few of her students waiting for the bus, huddled in hoodies with their backward backpacks and my wife 0 it’s against Chicago Public School policy for a teacher to offer rides to students - will recognize and wave at many of them, citing an affectionate anecdote (“He’s one of the smartest students I’ve ever had”) or a bracing detail (“She beat up her boyfriend”) or a horrifying story (“His brother got shot”).

Stationed among these students are the crossing guards, all of whom are Chicago Police employees. In the outer peripheries work the Safe Passage guards, hired by the city when fifty schools were closed in 2013, lengthening the daily walks, drives, and bus rides of thousands of students to reassigned schools through neighborhoods identified as gang territory, just because they have streets and corners. Nearly all of the Safe Passage guards are middle-aged African-American women, and they nearly all recognize us and wave and smile, braving icy temperatures for hours every winter morning and afternoon. Our favorite is an energetic lady who spins around and sings to herself in the middle of the street, luring and halting traffic with graceful pirouettes that make it look as if she’s controlling the cars as part of some larger, secret ballet. However, she can turn on the cars just as easily: we’ve seen her scream at disobeying drivers, smacking her stop sign on the pavement with rage. Once, she even yelled at me, tearing through the fabric of our years-long silent code of friendship, when I guess I didn’t slow down fast enough.

Last week, as we gingerly crept through her intersection, my wife noted the sorry state of her sign, new at the beginning of the school year but now showing its battle damage: the top chipped, bent and curled down nearly halfway through the lettering, the consequence of it being slammed to the ground, over and over.

Mirror

The New Yorker (7 December 1015)

Art by Chris Ware

The New Yorker is arguably the primary venue for complex contemporary fiction around, so I often wonder why the cover shouldn’t, at least every once in a while, also give it the old college try? In the past, the editors have generously let me test the patience of the magazine’s readership with experiments in narrative elongation: multiple simultaneous covers, foldouts, and connected comic strips within the issue. This week’s cover, “Mirror,” a collaboration between The New Yorker and the radio program “This American Life,” tries something similar. Earlier in the year, I asked Ira Glass (for whose 2007-2009 Showtime television show my friend John Kuramoto, d.b.a. “Phoobis,” and I did two short cartoons) if he had any audio that might somehow be adapted, not only as a cover but also as an animation that could extend the space and especially the emotion of the usual New Yorker image. I knew that Ira was the right person to go to with this experiment in storytelling form, because he’s probably one of the few people alive making a living with a semiotics degree.

So he sent me an audio story, and, after coming up with a cover image based around it, I set to work with John Kuramoto to somehow animate it. Usually, when listening to a story, one’s mind not only sees but also feels in images; you imagine and constantly revise and update entire tableaux, much the way you imagine things while reading a book. I hoped that our pictures wouldn’t interfere with that ineffable mental dance but would somehow, like my usual medium of graphic novels, complement it. In fact, it seems to me that much of what we “see” in our everyday lives isn’t in front of us at all but within our memories and imaginations. I’ve noticed as my daughter Clara has grown older that the unfocussed “not seeing what’s in front of her because she’s lost in thought” look has become, perhaps sadly, more and more common. Then again, it’s what I do all day.

In the weird synchrony of life imitating art (or at least of life imitating half-finished New Yorker covers), this year ten-year old Clara’s Halloween costume employed as its crucial component the application of “scary/sexy” makeup. You know - black lipstick, green eye shadow. Though it was a sinister look, her strategy had an innocent purpose: she just wanted to try on lipstick. Worried, I did some intel with the local moms and discovered, not surprisingly, that this same costume idea seemed to be a coördinated plan within many of the pre-teen sleepover cells in our neighborhood. But I wasn’t ready for this moment, and neither was my wife; for years, my daughter had yelled at her mom for putting on lipstick because it made her “look fake.” But now, dear God, she wanted to see what it looked and felt like herself - the first application of a fiction to mask her remaining few months of childhood. This led to some convoluted car discussions. “Dad, if you say women are doing it just to accommodate men, then what are men doing to accommodate women? You’ve always said women can do anything men can, right? So, as a woman, I want to wear makeup!” And so on. But - point taken.

The question was complicated even further when, in a chat with a friend, I grumbled, like lots of people at the time, about Hillary Clinton’s seemingly tone-deaf statements about her use of a private e-mail server. “Why can’t she just apologize and play nice?” I pleaded. My female friend, taking a moment, offered, “Well, as a woman she’s being held to a different standard.” Point taken, again. The adage about working twice as hard for half as much. Or: maybe I’m just not as great a guy as I thought I was.

Of course, the most important people here are the subjects of the story: Hanna Rosin (the co-host of NPR’s “Invisibilia” and a writer for the Atlantic and Slate) and her daughter, and they are not at all fictional. But the interpretations that John and I have provided more or less are. Thus, my apologies and thanks to Hanna and her daughter both for any and all liberties taken. The video’s music, by Nico Muhly, was composed and performed especially for this cartoon, so most grateful regards to him as well and to the musicians who recorded it: Nathan Schram, on viola, and Fritz Myers, on piano.

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

Keep up to date with all things 'Neil Gaiman' related here...

Go Visit A Comic Exhibition in August!

UNITED KINGDOM:

Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective
Never-before-seen material from Briggs’ personal archive, revealing the origins of Ug, Ethel & Ernest, Fungus the Bogeyman and The Snowman, featuring over 100 original artworks. More details...
Where: Winchester Discovery Centre, Winchester, Hampshire
When: Now until 18 August 2021

Dave McKean: Imaginings
An exhibition of work by acclaimed artist and film maker Dave McKean, featuring a large selection of work, much of which has never been shown before. More details...
Where: Adam's Gallery, Reigate, Sussex
When: Now until 29 August 2021

Kane & Able
Original art and prints from the latest Image Comics collaboration between Shakey Kane and Krent Able. More details...
Where: Orbital Art Gallery, London
When: Now until 31 August 2021

Quentin Blake and John Yeoman: 50 Years of Children’s Books
A celebration of over 40 books created by Quentin Blake with writer John Yeoman. More details...
Where: Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Derby
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Black Panther & The Power of Stories
Three iconic costumes from Marvel Black Panther film - T’Challa, Shuri and Okoye - sit alongside Marvel comics, historic museum objects and local stories. More details...
Where: Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich
When: Now until 24 October 2021

V For Vendetta: Behind The Mask
This major new exhibition invites you to step inside the story and characters of one of the world’s most iconic graphic novels: V for Vendetta. Featuring original artwork by David Lloyd. More details...
Where: The Cartoon Museum, London
When: Now until 31 October 2021

Drawing Life
A new display showcasing the very best of the Cartoon Museum collection of cartoon art, curated by Guardian cartoonist and Cartoon Museum Trustee, Steve Bell. More details...
Where: The Cartoon Museum, London
When: Now until 31 December 2021

The Political Comics & Cartoons of Martin Rowson
Featuring Rowson’s most powerful political cartoons, caricatures and comics from the past forty years. More details...
Where: Kendel, Cumbria
When: 15 October to 5 November 2021

Beano: The Art of Breaking The Rules
Come face-to-face with the Beano gang through original comic artwork and amazing artefacts, plundered from the Beano’s archive. More details...
Where: Somerset House, London
When: 21 October 2021 to 6 March 2022

NORTH AMERICA:

Dave McKean: Black Dog
Dave McKean drawings from his 2016 graphic novel Black Dog which form a dream-like psychological portrait of British landscape and wartime artist Paul Nash. More details...
Where: Philippe Labaune Gallery, New York
When: Now until 14 August 2021

Three With a Pen: Lily Renée, Bil Spira & Paul Peter Porges
Featuring works by the three Jewish artists driven from their homes in Vienna after the German annexation of Austria, the so-called “Anschluss,” in 1938. More details...
Where: Austrian Cultural Forum, New York
When: Now until 3 September 2021

Hometown Heroes: Steve Ditko
A retrospective exhibit of the legendary Steve Ditko’s career, with original works, production art, prints and memorabilia. More details...
Where: Bottleworks, Johnstown, PA
When: Now until 11 September 2021

Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin & The Art of War
A retrospective of the provocative work by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin about a nation’s time of war, civil rights, and social justice. More details...
Where: Pritzker Military Museum, Chicago
When: Now until Spring 2022

Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life  - 1880 To 1960
Curated by Chris Ware, and Chicago Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson, this exhibition is a historical companion to the concurrently appearing survey of contemporary Chicago comics at the MCA. More details...
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Chicago Comics: 1960s To Now
Telling the story of the art form in the influential city through the work of Chicago’s many cartoonists: known, under-recognized and up-and-coming. Featuring Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Chester Gould and more! More details...
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
When: Now until 3 October 2021

Society of Illustraors: Comic Art Exhibition & Sale
Over 180 pieces of original comic book art from EC, Marvel & DC, from 1935 up to the modern era. More details...
Where: Society of Illustrators, New York
When: Now until 23 October, 2021

Marvel Universe of Superheroes
Celebrating Marvel history with more than 300 artefacts - original comic book pages, sculptures, interactive displays and costumes and props from the Marvel blockbuster films. More details...
Where: Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago
When: Now until 24 October 2021

Walt Kelly: Into The Swamp
Celebrating Walt Kelly and his social commentary through the joyous, poignant, and occasionally profound insights and beauty of the alternative universe that is Pogo. More details...
Where: Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus, Ohio
When: Now until 31 October 2021

The Legend of Wonder Woman
An exhibition celebrating 80 years of DC Comics’ iconic Amazon. More details...
Where: Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco
When: Now until 31 December 2021

Romanticism To Ruin: Reconstructing the Garrick
Focused on the lost buildings of Louis Sullivan. Co-curated by John Vinci, Tim Samuelson, Chris Ware and Eric Nordstrom. More details...
Where: WrightWood659, Chicago
When: 24 September to 27 November 2021

Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross
Featuring original art from his most recent book, Marvelocity, visitors will also learn about how Alex Ross developed into a great illustrator through his childhood drawings, preliminary sketches and paintings. More details...
Where: Canton, Ohio
When: 23 November 2021 to 6 March 2022

COMIC ART MUSEUMS & GALLERIES

UNITED KINGDOM:

British Cartoon Archive
By appointment access to over 200,000 cartoons and comics. More details...
Where: University of Kent, Canterbury

Heath Robinson Museum
A permanent exhibition dedicated to Heath Robinson’s eccentric artistic career. More details...
Where: Pinner, London

Orbital Art Gallery
The gallery space of an awesome comics shop. More details...
Where: Central London

Quentin Blake Center for Illustration
Soon to be home to Quentin Blake's archive of 40,000 works. More details...
Where: Clerkenwell, London

The Cartoon Museum
Celebrating Britain’s cartoon and comic art heritage. More details...
Where: Central London

V&A National Art Library Comic Art Collection
By appointment access to the Krazy Kat Arkive & Rakoff Collection. More details...
Where: South Kensington, London

EUROPE:

Basel Cartoon Museum
Devoted to the art of narrative drawing. More details...
Where: Basel, Switzerland

Belgian Comics Art Museum
Honouring the creators and heroes of the 9th Art for over 30 years. More details...
Where: Brussels

Hergé Museum
Explore the life and work of the creator of Tintin. More details...
Where: Belgium

Le Musee de la Bande Dessinee
A celebration of European comics culture. More details...
Where, Angouleme, France

NORTH AMERICA:

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
The world’s largest collection of materials related to cartoons and comics. More details...
Where: Columbus, Ohio

Cartoon Art Museum
Exploring comic strips, comic books, political cartoons and underground comix. More details...
Where: San Francisco, California

Charles M. Schulz Museum
Dedicated to the life and works of the Peanuts creator. More details...
Where: Santa Rosa, California

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery
Bookstore and gallery space of the publisher of the world's greatest cartoonists. More details...
Where: Seattle, Washington

Frazetta Art Museum
The largest collection of Frazetta art. More details...
Where: East Stroudburg, PA

Norman Rockwell Museum
Illuminating the power of American illustration art to reflect and shape society. More details...
Where: Stockbridge, MA

Philippe Labaune Gallery
Comic art and illustration by emerging and established artists from around the world. More details...
Where: New York, NY

The Society of Illustrators
Dedicated to the art of illustration in America. More details...
Where: New York, NY

To get your comic art exhibition listed here please send details (ie what, where and when) to:
Read [dot] Yourself [dot] RAW [at] gmail [dot] com

Los Tejanos by Jack Jackson (No. 95)

Los Tejanos (1982)

by Jack "Jaxon" Jackson

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

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

Inspired by Harvey Kurtzman's war stories at EC, Jack Jackson has taken his mentor's obsession with the accurate and iconoclastic depiction of history several steps further in a series of impressive historical graphic novels of which Los Tejanos may be the best.

Los Tejanos is the story of the Texas-Mexican conflict between 1835 and 1875. Jackson's view of the conflict is seen through the eyes of the tejano (literally Texan of Mexican, as distinct from anglo, heritage) Juan Seguin. It is through Seguin that Jackson humanises and provides scale for this vast and complex story; the history is filtered through his consciousness. Seguin is a pivotal and tragic figure who, due to inexorable political circumstances and innate nationalistic prejudices, was considered suspect to the anglo Texans and, ultimately, a traitor from the Mexican point of view. The equal opportunity hostility directed toward Seguin allows Jackson the luxury of not taking sides (except perhaps Seguin's) that achieves a kind of passionate, hard-won impartiality toward both (or I should say, including the U.S., all three) sides. 

There is, to all of Jackson's historical work, an unflinching no-nonsense approach, of which Los Tejanos is characteristic; that no side in this conflict is flattered is a testament to Jackson's own independence as an historian. The lineage of Texas' independence and eventual absorption into the Union is a political snakebite, which Jackson navigates with consummate skill and clarity.

Jackson has managed to compress an intimidating quantity of historical facts and information while never losing sight of the narrative's human dimension by refining the language of comics to serve his unique needs as an historian and comics artist: a heavy reliance on captions combined with an aphoristic visual approach whereby each panel serves as a visual synecdoche, summarising incident or motivation, capturing the essence of an historical moment. Such work could only have been accomplished by an artist who cares deeply about the gravitas of both art and history.

GARY GROTH:
(from Remembering Jack Jackson in The Comics Journal #278, October 2006)
...I'd see Jack every summer at the Dallas-Con. We'd always get together for lunch or dinner or drinks at the end of the night. In person, Jack very much reflected his meat-and-potatoes aesthetic: He had a straight forward, no-nonsense approach to conversation, eschewing bonhomie and bullshit, always focusing in on the salient points, never trying merely to score points, always Socratic and probing by nature. He was never a grandstander and never much concerned with status, either. He busted his ass, was never compensated adequately, and remained stedfast in his creative convictions in the face of indifference, hostility and commercial failure. He knew what he was doing had value. I don't have to point out how rare this kind of commitment is...

FURTHER READING:
Jaxon at Wikipedia 
The Jackson Papers

TCJ Review: Texas In My Rearview Mirror by Bob Levin (2016)

Feiffer / Sick, Sick, Sick by Jules Feiffer (No. 6)

Feiffer / Sick, Sick, Sick (1956-1965)

by Jules Feiffer 

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

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

Jules Feiffer began his strip Sick, Sick, Sick in the Village Voice in 1956. He later claimed that it was a cynical move, designed to put him on the map by putting his work in front of the New York book editors who had previously given him the bum's rush. But this doesn't ring totally true when one sits down and reads the strips. It took Feiffer a little while to get up to full steam, but once he did, Sick, Sick, Sick (later retitled Feiffer) became a classic - a razor-sharp satire of the lives of hip young urbanites and the world they inhabited. 

His quintessential character Bernard Mergendelier, a young urban hippie type destined for a life of mediocrity. He craves power over his own life - his love life, his work, his day-to-day existence - and simultaneously worships and despises anyone who does have that kind of power. Hence his ambiguous relationship with his friend Huey, the Brando-esque jerk to whom all the women flock. Feiffer gives Huey some of his best lines: "Put on your shoes, I'll walk you to the subway' is repeated ironically by R. Crumb's loathsome protagonist in Snoid. The sequence in which Bernard is discussing love and respect while Huey makes eye-contact with a "phoney little magazine chick" is a classic comparison of two types.

As Feiffer and the country moved deeper into the '60s, Feiffer evolved into more of a political strip, and Feiffer is still one of the best political cartoonists alive. He works without the symbolic characters that have been the political cartoonists stock in trade since Nast. His approach to political cartooning is original and obviously an influence on younger political cartoonists like Toles and Tom Tomorrow.

It almost seems too much to add that Feiffer is an excellent playwright, screenwriter, and most recently, children's book author. And as a cartoonist, Feiffer's been willing to radically experiment, as best exemplified by the oddly fascinating cartoon novel Tantrum. It is difficult to imagine any other successful strip cartoonist taking such a bold aesthetic risk as Feiffer did with Tantrum. 

But his weekly strip remains his most influential work. In the world of daily strips, it is impossible to conceive of Doonesbury without Feiffer. And perhaps more important, he showed cartoonists that it was possible to have relatively uncensored, adult-oriented weekly comic strips. As underground newspapers evolved into alternative newsweeklies all over America, Feiffer's descendants proliferated. Without Feiffer, there may have been no weekly strips be Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Ben Katchor, Kazans, Carol Lay, Tony Millionaire, Tom Tomorrow and many other. But few of these younger cartoonists have yet matched the brilliance of the first 10 years of Sick, Sick, Sick.

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

Village Voice: Jules Feiffer in Context (2018)

Vault of Culture: Jules Feiffer - The Great Comic Book Heroes (2020)