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

Krazy Kat by George Herriman (No. 1)

Krazy Kat (1913-1944)

by George Herriman

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

Krazy Kat has been the acknowledged greatest comic for so long, by so many esteemed critics, that it becomes tempting to knock it from its throne. At a casual glance, George Herriman's long-running strip seems quaint and antiquated, full of half-realised characters, and Herriman's art may be a half-step behind the visual bravado of Feininger's or McCay's.

But to immerse yourself in Krazy Kat, to yield to Herriman's looping verbal rhythms and lovely-depicted desert backgrounds, to experience his perfectly realised triptych of unspoken and unconsummated love, yields a very, very different result. Herriman's creation is not only great comics, with a wonderful command of the medium's possibilities and strengths, but it is also great art - an affecting exploration of some of life's most basic issues in a way that enlightens and thrills. Every cartoonist who turns to comics as a medium of personal expression follows in Herriman's path, and that is why his is the greatest comic of the 20th Century.

Krazy Kat was the work of a veteran cartoonist in the prime of his career. Born in 1880, Herriman was doing newspaper strip illustration by 1897 and selling stand-alone one-page strips by 1901. Herriman spent most of the first decade travelling from town to town, newspaper to newspaper in much the same manner as a medieval journeyman would do. Along the way, he worked with some of the finest cartoonists in America (the art room at the New York American in 1904 included Frederick Opper, James Swinnerton, and the great sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan), and created several short-lived strips full of vaudevillian humour: Home Sweet Home, Bubblespikers, and the wonderfully titled Mazor Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade. He also created three animal-oriented strips that perhaps more directly presage Krazy Kat: Goosebury Spring, Alexander The Cat and Daniel Pansy.

The characters that would become Krazy Kat and Ignatz the mouse got their start as incidentals in a strip called The Dingbat Family. Ignatz first beaned Krazy in a 1910 strip. Their evolution was extremely organic. They next appeared in their own little strip accompanying that same strip, now re-named The Family Upstairs. They finally graduated to their own strip in 1913. Printed vertically, it presaged what would become one of the hallmarks of Krazy Kat's history: a variety of formats and layouts. From 1925 to 1929 the Sunday strip lost its standard full-page format in favour of a combination of strips and stand-alone illustration that papers could print in one of two ways. And it wasn't until 1935 that Herriman was able to use colour. 

Looking at Krazy Kat with fresh eyes, it is clear how much it benefited from its specific developmental path. Nailing down standard newspaper styles allowed Herriman the freedom to develop his own idiosyncratic approach, and many of the strips - not just the animal-based ones - served as dry runs for areas of Herriman's interest. Similarly, the change in styles kept Herriman at his most inventive, and allowed certain strengths to evolve at their own pace. As noted in Krazy Kat: The Comics Art of George Herriman by Patrick McDonnell, Georgia Riley de Havenon and Karen O'Connell (to which this essay owes the vast majority of its factual information, and a not insignificant portion of its shared insight), the strip developed from slapstick to verbal-based vaudevillian humour as the format changed; similarly, Herriman's use of slightly surreal desert landscapes were dramatically altered by the introduction of colour.

One can also track developments in the relationships between the characters. Although the physical relationship of cat and mouse was the basis of the strip at its origin, its thematic possibilities were not established until the very late '20s. Krazy Kat in its prime focused on the relationship between three characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz mouse. Ignatz mouse hated Krazy Kat, the expression of which was in throwing bricks at Krazy's head. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect her (Herriman actually believed Krazy to be neither male nor female), mostly by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the other's true motivations.

This simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions. Most famously, Krazy interpreted the brick in the head as an expression of love from Ignatz. But there were more nuanced readings to be had: Ignatz's brick as an expression of art or as a necessary curb on Krazy's flights of fancy; Offisa Pup's enforcement of his role as studies in how personal feelings affected vocation or how the world reacts to art and artists. It is that thematic depth to which the critics like Gilbert Seldes and the editors of Vanity Fair reacted to in the early 1920s - even in its initial conception, the role of Krazy and Ignatz as romantic and realist were hard to resist. The fact that Herriman was able to build on these themes, making them deeper and more fully realised, is an amazing achievement given that usually took hold of even the greatest strips.

In Krazy Kat, theme reigns over all other factors. Not that Krazy Kat didn't work as humour, or serial comedy, or even as rollicking adventure. A score of funny, interesting characters inhabited the strip's "Coconino County" in addition to the leads. And Herriman's best-known episode, 1936's Tiger Tea serial, stands with any of his contemporaries' long-running stories in terms of its narrative inventiveness. But because Krazy Kat was so well-anchored, all of these elements only served to further our understanding of the core relationships. Herriman's idiosyncratic use of language, all creative spelling and eloquent babble, delineated Krazy's dreaming, Ignatz's harsh denunciations, and Offisa Pups recriminations in equal stead. Even the great landscapes - beginning in formal play in the strip's early years and continuing through the colour-period - are best known as an expressionistic background for the central drama.

Krazy Kat reminds us that art is achieved from the inside out. Herriman was right: love clumsily expressed is funny and beautiful and fascinating enough to hold our interest for another hundred years.

REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:
(from the essay 'To Walk In Beauty', 2017)
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
The Poet Laureate of comics, of course, was George Herriman (1880–1944) - or more accurately the Comics Laureate. Krazy Kat wasn't much like anything that ever happened in any other medium... Herriman worked variations on a deceptively simple theme for over thirty years. In one of literature's more peculiar love triangles, Krazy Kat's love with Ignatz Mouse who, loving no one but himself, finds no greater pleasure than 'kreasing that kat's bean with a brick.' Though intended as an act of aggression Krazy receives the brick as a sign of love. Offissa Pup is in love with Krazy (who loves everyone) and quite naturally hates Ignatz, who he regularly incarcerates in a jail made of... bricks... Herriman's genius allowed him to give his theme the weight of a poetic symbol. For some it is a strip about Democracy, for others about Love and Sex, for others still about Heaven and Hell. For all, it is about a cat getting hit with a brick.

REVIEW BY BILL WATTERSON:
Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today... Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

FURTHER READING:

Herriman at Fantagraphics Books
Herriman at Sunday Press Books

Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black & White by Michael Tisserand

The New Yorker Cartoons of George Price (No. 87)

The New Yorker Cartoons (1929-1995)

of George Price

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

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

George Price is a remarkably underestimated cartoonist, an amazing thing given the nearly seven-decade span of his career, most notably doing cartoons for The New Yorker. Whereas the art from other cartoonists from that magazine, like Peter Arno's or Chales Addams', might overwhelm the reader with heavy black and fat, ill-filled lines, George Price's delicate style was often so completely subservient to the joke a reader could miss its beauty. It is only on a second look - at the sheer detail in the scenes depicted, at the virtuosity with which Price could draw anything - that one begins to fully realise the extent of his talent. 

The cartoons early in Price's career - best represented to my mind by the book George Price's Characters - showed Price dabbling in variations of his trademark style and displaying a wide range of humour. As the years went by, Price became best known for cartoons about various couples, living amidst a vast avalanche of clutter, making humorous commentary about the matter-of-fact reality of their lives. Those cartoons adroitly acknowledge the gap between self-conception and reality, and did so in a way that could be read as both sarcastic and sweet. They served as perfect grace notes to the extremely image-conscious magazine in which they appeared.

Price was genuinely funny, and his comics were genuinely gorgeous. His strong line work has rarely been equalled, and Price's idiosyncratic sense of humour - speaking to a 20th Century way of American life that is slowly fading from view - has been sorely missed since his death in 1995. Giving Price's cartoons a second glance - even a third, fourth, and fifth - is to grant an audience to a quiet, unassuming, but often great artist who went beyond fulfilling the expectations of his particular niche to helping define one unique corner of American culture.

OBITUARY BY LEE LORENZ:

(from The New Yorker, 30 January 1995)

George Price, who died on January 12th, at the age of ninety-three, was a member of the remarkable generation of New Yorker cartoonists - among them Helen Hokinson, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and William Steig - who, between 1925 and 1935, reinvented American comic art. His happily rendered portraits of lowlifes, harridans, and sourballs added a distinctive, egalitarian note to the magazine's comic drawings, which up to that point had largely focussed on the diversions and rituals of the upper crust. Price's chosen terrain was proudly, even defiantly, lower crust. He claimed that his oddball repertory company was based on memories of his eccentric neighbours in his home hamlet of Coytesville, New Jersey (pop. 400). His father (a carpenter) and his mother (a seamstress) were both employed in the fledgling movie business, which was them establishing a beachhead in nearby Fort Lee.

Another neighborhood resource for the young Price was the painter George Hart, in whose studio Price came to meet such stimulatingly diverse artists as George Herriman and Diego Rivera. Hart encouraged Price's fondness for the offbeat and the picturesque by inviting him along on sketching trips to the crowded public picnic grounds at the foot of the Palisades or, across the river, the steamier corners of Hell's Kitchen. Price's first submissions to The New Yorker were based on these sketches and were published in 1929 as spot drawings. 

Price claiming that he was not an "idea" person, was reluctant to attempt the leap from illustrator to cartoonist, but he was prodded by the resourceful editor Katherine S. White, who assured him the the magazine would keep him supplied with ideas. Never was a promise better fulfilled; of the twelve-hundred odd "Geo. Price"-signed drawings that he created for the magazine, only one, amazingly was based on an idea of his own - it appeared as the cover of the December 25, 1965, issue and showed a covey of frayed, ill-cast street Santas riding the I.R.T. It is a sign of Price's genius that he could transform such a mass of other people's gags and roughs into a life's work of absolutely original, instantly identifiable art. On paper, the Price line was whiplike and beautifully finished; when lasers came along, they at last provided an image that befitted such exactitude. His drawings were elegantly composed, and featured an obsessive and hilarious attention to detail. Who else could make a barstool or the back of a TV set funny. Frank Modell, a long-term colleague, once remarked that Price's rendering of a tenement boiler room could have served as a blueprint for an apprentice plumber.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

George Price's Characters: More Than 200 of His Best Cartoons (2012)

The World Of George Price - A 55-Year Retrospective (1988)

Browse At Your Own Risk (1977)

The People Zoo (1971)

The Spirit by Will Eisner (No. 15)

The Spirit (1940-1951)

by Will Eisner

REVIEW BY GREG CWIKLIK:

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

The Spirit was the seven-page lead-off in a syndicated comic book section which was distributed along with newspaper's regular Sunday funnies. It premiered in June 19940, and was written and drawn by Will Eisner who, at 22, was already a successful comics creator and entrepreneur. although the comic book section was dreamed up to capitalise on the runaway success of Superman, Eisner resisted pressure to make his character into a superhero. The Spirit had no special powers and his "costume" consisted of a blue suit with matching gloves and a mask so tiny it could be hidden by dark glasses. The Spirit was a private eye supposedly killed in a tussle with a mad scientist, but who survived to fight crime incognito, a la the Lone Ranger. The early strips are a bit primitive, and such gimmickry as the Spirit's flying car smacks of Eisner's previous comic book work, but they are imaginative and display Eisner's characteristic lightness of touch. Eisner was drafted in 1942 and when he returned after the war, it was with a new degree of maturity.

The backbone of The Spirit is its urban setting - the big city by day and night. Because of Eisner's penchant for odd perspectives, his city never seems static or grid-like: buildings, elevated train tracks, bridges, stairways, all sway and tilt at animated angles. Wether it's a lonely clock tower or a bustling neighbourhood teeming with life; a dank, smoke-filled hideout lit by a dangling light or a tenement hung with fire escapes and laundry, an unrivaled sense of mood emanates from The Spirit. Eisner was a master of lighting and atmospheric effects; characters are often obscured by shadow or mist; lit eerily from below or suddenly by a bolt of lightening. Much of the strips visual allure is owed to Eisner's pyrotechnics with a brush. Eisner's line work is clean, subtle, strongly nuanced and very lively. The shadows that help give form to his figures are liquid pools of black sharply edged by slivers of backlighting. Eisner was never a master of anatomy, but he certainly knew enough of it to make his figures believable, his slinky femmes fatales are some of the sexiest to grace the pages of any comic strip.

The individual plot lines are interesting, but rarely extraordinary in themselves. The real pleasure in reading The Spirit comes from its colourful characters and the way in which Eisner tells a story in visual terms. His sense of timing - whether for dramatic or comedic effect - is impeccable. The size and style of the lettering, balloons, and panels vary to suit the action. Even The Spirit's opening logo, which could be found spelled out on a billboard, on scraps of paper blowing in the wind, or most uniquely, by blocks of buildings, shows Eisner's inventiveness. The Spirit's relationship with crusty Commissioner Dolan and Ellen, the ever-hopeful love interest, may be the oldest of cliches, but Eisner pulls it off with such good humour that it seems, if not exactly fresh, at least amusing. Some of Eisner's best tales are often hung on the most whimsical framework Lorelei Rox hijacks trucks with her weird siren-song. Another story opens with an explosion at a bank and ends with a beautiful agent from Mars. Eisner's sense of style can be seen in the later tale: sandwiched between a dizzy aerial view of a dark alleyway and a dramatic shot of waves crashing against waterfront pilings is a panel of a stoic Spirit being swarmed over by bratty kids who pulled down his hat brim and tug at his pockets.

Eisner abandoned the strip in 1951. But its enduring appeal derives from Eisner's graphic sophistication and his mix of humour and drama, realism and fantasy.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
(from the introduction to The Spirit Archives Vol 1, DC Comics)
I find it difficult to argue that Eisner is not the single person most responsible for giving comics their brains. I can think of no one who has explored the possibilities of this infant medium so tirelessly and rewardingly, nor anyone who has so successfully managed to evolve a working vocabulary for the parts and functions of the comic strip and the fascinating way in which it can all be fitted together... There is no one quite like Will Eisner. There never has been, and on my more pessimistic days I doubt there ever will be.

REVIEW BY SCOTT McCLOUD:
(from the introduction to the 2017 edition of Will Eisner's A Contract With God)
Even as a kid in high school nearly forty years after its original publication, I could tell how ridiculously far ahead of its time The Spirit had been. Parallel narratives, full-page compositions, noir shadow play, giant logos integrated into physical scenes, long pantomime sequences - the strip was a textbook demonstration of nearly everything comics could do, answering questions about the art form most cartoonists hadn’t even thought to ask yet. And the more I studied those pages, the more I came to understand that Eisner’s approach to comics storytelling had been the foundation upon which multiple generations of cartoonists had constructed their own dreams of adventure in the years and decades that followed.

READ THIS COMIC:
The Spirit has been reprinted in several formats from various publishers over the years. Kitchen Sink Press reprinted a complete run of the post-World War II Spirit stories in a standard comic-book format, which ran for 87 issues between October 1983 and January 1992, and are well worth tracking down.

FURTHER READING:

Will Eisner
The Eisner Awards

Covering The New Yorker: R. Kikuo Johnson

R. Kikuo Johnson is a cartoonist and illustrator born on Maui, Hawaii, in 1981. His award winning drawings and stories regularly appear in books, advertisements, periodicals, animation, and on the cover of The New Yorker - see a selection of his covers below. Johnson divides his time drawing in Brooklyn, teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, and playing the ukulele with his family in Hawaii. He is the author of the acclaimed 2005 graphic novel Night Fisher and his new book No One Else is due for release in November 2021 from Fantagraphics Books.

Delayed

The New Yorker (5 April 2021)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

“The only thing worse than the feeling of paranoia is the sickening realization that it’s not paranoia after all,” the staff writer Jiayang Fan wrote in a recent piece. Fan was studying the shadows of the Asian-American experience—and the experience of Asian-American women, in particular, in which ambient fear can curdle suddenly into outright violence. Her words followed a spate of such violence: a mass shooting, in Atlanta, that left six women of Asian descent dead, and a series of anti-Asian attacks across the country, often targeting the elderly. The air of anxiety is also captured in the magazine’s latest cover, by the artist R. Kikuo Johnson.

Shifting Gears

The New Yorker (26 October 2020)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

As covid-19 infection rates have risen in New York, and the city braces for winter, it can be hard to see a reason for optimism. For his latest New Yorker cover, R. Kikuo Johnson finds one: the welcome surge of cycling across the boroughs.

Safe Travels

The New Yorker (20 August 2018)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

The timing seemed right for a new spin on a classic illustrator’s theme, the family summer getaway. A few summers ago, I passed through a small town in Montana to buy some emergency bear spray for a week of backpacking in grizzly country. Soon after, that same town made headlines as a hotbed of white nationalism. Instantly, the grizzlies seemed like the lesser threat. For the record, I support a hunter’s right to humanely harvest wild food as much as I support a father’s right to wear dorky hats with sandals.

Tech Support

The New Yorker (23 October 2017)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

“I’m not too worried about machines replacing cartoonists,” the artist R. Kikuo Johnson says, about his cover for the Money Issue. Johnson may have switched from drawing with ink, brushes, and paper to using a stylus and a digital tablet, but he isn’t worried that computers will take over the rest of his cartooning process. “When robots are advanced enough to be neurotic, then maybe I’ll be concerned,” he said, “though I don’t think too many of us choose this field for job security, anyway.”

The Finish Line

The New Yorker (17 October 2016)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

R. Kikuo Johnson seldom goes to the gym. (“I prefer to cycle everywhere to get my exercise,” he says.) But the artist was still able to find inspiration for his cover for this week's Fall Books Issue in his daily life: “I don’t have much time to read, but I listen to books on tape or podcasts while I draw. I’m at a desk sixteen hours a day, and I’ll often have a moment like this where I find myself just staring blankly at a screen, not drawing at all but completely consumed by what I’m listening to."

Commencement

The New Yorker (30 May 2016)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

“My first job after graduation was as a waiter in a Times Square steak house. It lasted eight years,” R. Kikuo Johnson said, of his cover for this week’s issue, “Commencement.” “Around this time of year, I’d see lots of caps and gowns coming into the restaurant with their proud parents. Those were definitely moments of reflection.” Johnson graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2003. He now supports himself as an artist and lives in Brooklyn. After an initial move to Williamsburg, he’s on his second combination studio/living space in Bed-Stuy: “My rent is good right now and I’m not worried—the landlord likes me," he said with a smile. He also commutes to Providence, Rhode Island, to teach at his alma mater: “It’s not just me—I’d say most of the other teachers at risd are also alumni. That’s what made me think of this image.”

Closing Set

The New Yorker (25 April 2016)

art by R. Kikuo Johnson

“Everyone in Brooklyn is a d.j., so I rely on my much cooler friends to take me out,” the artist R. Kikuo Johnson says. “I have been taken to many one-night-only warehouse parties—I love dancing—but this was my first time at the Palisades,” he continues, referencing the underground venue in Bushwick that was the model for his cover of this week’s issue.

Covering The New Yorker: Robert Crumb

Thanksgiving Special

The New Yorker, 29 November 2004

art by Robert Crumb

Elvis Tilley

The New Yorker, 21 February 1994

art by Robert Crumb

Robert Crumb reimagines Rea Irvin's Eustace Tilley on the magazine's 69th anniversary.

Gay Marriage

A rejected New Yorker cover, 2009

art by Robert Crumb

ROBERT CRUMB:

(from The Gayest Story Ever Told, Vice, November 2011)

It was suggested to me by the cover editor of the New Yorker that I make a cover for an issue to come out in June 2009. As it was a hot issue at the time, it was suggested that perhaps I could do a cover about gay marriage, which I then proceeded to do. Later, the cover editor explained to me that the chief editor, David Remnick, went back and forth, first accepting my cover design, then rejecting it, then accepting it, then rejecting it. This went on for many months. I heard nothing for a long time. Finally, the artwork was returned to me without explanation, nor was an explanation ever forthcoming. Remnick would not give the reason for rejecting the cover, either to the cover editor, or to me. For this reason I refuse to do any more work for the New Yorker. I felt insulted, not so much by the rejection as for the lack of any reason given. I can’t work for a publication that won’t give you any guidelines or criterion for accepting or rejecting a work submitted. Does the editor want to keep you guessing or what? I think part of the problem is the enormous power vested in the position of chief editor of the New Yorker. He has been ‘spoiled’ by the power that he wields. So many artists are so eager to do covers for the New Yorker that they are devalued in the eyes of David Remnick. They are mere pawns. He is not compelled to take pains to show them any respect. Any artist is easily replaced by another. Fortunately for me, I do not feel that I need the New Yorker badly enough to put up with such brusque treatment at the hands of its editor-in-chief. The heck with him!

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

Spider-Man by Steve Ditko with Stan Lee (No. 35)

Amazing Fantasy #15 (alternate cover, 1962)

The Amazing Spider-Man #1-38, Annual #1-2 (1963-66)

by Steve Ditko (with Stan Lee)

REVIEW BY KENT WORCESTER:

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

The early Spider-Man comics offered a punch-drunk blend of domestic soap opera, workplace comedy, futuristic technology and superhero fisticuffs. Stan Lee was in his element in writing about the tightly-wound teen science whiz who stumbles his way into the Marvel Universe. Steve Ditko generated a storehouse of revelatory images - from the playful dance of Spidey's webbing to faces of hard-nosed criminal underlings. Today, the Spider-Man franchise has become a life support system for some of the most annoying compulsions of the comics industry. But that is no reason for turning our backs on what is surely one of the creative highlights of the Silver Age.

One way of approaching these comics is through the inexpensive black-and-white editions, which bring out Ditko's brooding faces, his euphoric bodies, and his increasingly bold but always controlled lines. Admittedly, these editions obscure the carnival aspect of the original 12-cent comics. But their illusion of transparency calls attention to the visual grammar that structures Spider-Man's movements as he uncoils across a room filled with dangerous men. They also lend an appealing intimacy to Lee's intricate secondary story arcs and his justly famous romance courtship scenes.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole enterprise is that Ditko's maturing artistic aspirations and Lee's preference for light melodrama managed to achieve some sort of ecstatic transcendence on the printed page. While their fundamental sensibilities may have been at odds they were both energised by the lesson that Spider-Man embodied - that "with great power comes great responsibility". No doubt Marvel's corporate owners kept this in mind as they cleaved mainstream comics into a thousand pieces.

FURTHER READING:

Steve Ditko 1927-2018 - The Comics Journal

In Search of Steve Ditko (BBC, 2007)

Ditko Comics Weblog

Ditko Shrugged by David Currie (Hermes Press, 2020)
Cartoonist Kayfabe: Ditko Unleashed

The Fantastic Four by Jack Kirby with Stan Lee (No. 30)

The Fantastic Four #1–102, 108, Annual #1-6 (1961-71)

by Jack Kirby (with Stan Lee)

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

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

Starting with the fourth issue, it build itself as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!" and Fantastic Four was able to deliver this promise in a way no other Silver Age comics could. A great deal has been made of how Marvel characters were more popular than those at their "Distinguished Competition" at the time because Marvel heroes were "flawed" and had "everyday" problems. But these were still superhero comics and we still need to see them doing superheroic stuff. It was the balance between the outlandish and the human which made the FF stand out, the rhythms of storytelling which allowed characterisation to blossom in the midst of world-shaking chaos. Not only were the foundations of the Marvel Universe laid down in these pages - Doctor Doom, the return of the Sub-Mariner, the Black Panther, the Watcher, the Silver Surfer, the Inhumans - this bounty of four-colour imagination was balanced by a great deal of humour, empathy and wonder. The Thing in a Beatles wig, his persecution at the hands of both the hot-headed Torch and the Yancy Street Gang, the Invisible Woman's frustration at Mister Fantastic's absent-minded professor tendencies, Willie Lumpkin's bid for membership... These small touches were what gave the series heart.

And the heart was pumping for the most muscular of Sliver Age spectacles: namely, the visual elan Kirby brought to the series. Silver Age Marvel was indisputably Kirby's finest moment, and the FF was his showcase. Kirby's art grew progressively more polished until it reached the solid, blocky dynamism that remains the standard for superhero comics today. The generosity of Kirby's storytelling, the detail brought to every panel, to every stance, to every fight scene, fleshed out a world he dared us to believe in. Even the photo-collages, quaint as they now look, pushed the limits of what "cosmic" meant for the fanboy imagination.

In short, the versatility of the series - especially within the constraints of a relatively obvious genre - was remarkable. It could be comic on one page and homespun on the next. The coming of Galactus was earth-shattering, but the marriage of Reed Richards and Sue Storm was equally momentous. Few have come even close to re-capturing what Kirby and Lee did on Fantastic Four - and to be honest, the formula hasn't always remained in favour over the years. But this remains the classic model, the superhero comic that all others should be measured against.

FURTHER READING:
Interview: The Comics Journal #134 (Feb 1990)

Jack Kirby Museum

The Jack Kirby Collector

Rubber Blanket Short Stories by David Mazzucchelli (No. 72)

Rubber Blanket #1-3 (1991-1993)

by David Mazzucchelli

REVIEW BY GIL ROTH:

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

David Mazzucchelli made a rather astonishing transition from the 1980s to the 90s. After establishing his name on such highly regarded superhero comics as Daredevil and Batman: Year One, he fell off the comics radar screen for a few years. Rumours may not have abounded, but there was definitely a curiosity as to how he would follow up those works. I don't know if anyone was prepared for Rubber Blanket, the oversized anthology book that Mazzucchelli first published in 1991.

Gone were all the men in tights, as well as the action sequences that Mazzucchelli rendered in his fluid, cinematic style. Instead, he took his art and his storytelling further into expressionism, crafting several memorable stories that stand out even in this decade of impressive talent. When we read Blind Date or Near Miss in the context of Mazzucchelli's career to date, it's no wonder Rob Liefeld's head blew off (or so the anecdote goes) after reading an issue of the series. It's hard to think of another cartoonist who had ignored so much mainstream promise (purportedly an offer to take over drawing the X-Men) in order to pursue his art this doggedly.

This isn't to say that Mazzucchelli entirely abandoned the superhero mythos. His most praised story from Rubber Blanket, Big Man, is essentially a very well-crafted Incredible Hulk story. His best work in Rubber Blanket is actually #2's Discovering America, a fantastic testament to the uprootedness of our times. The story, about a love-struck building custodian and his compulsion to graphically represent the changing world of the early 1990s, perfectly weds Mazzucchelli's think line, his ear for dialogue, his aforementioned cinematic eye. He even manages a great payoff, which is a rara avis for cartoonists nowadays. With this story leading a pack of inventive, visually challenging works, Mazzucchelli's stories easily stand among the top 100 of our age.

FURTHER READING:

Cartoonist Kayfabe: Rubber Blanket #3

Palmer's Picks: Mazzucchelli's Born Again