Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar (No. 11)

Thimble Theatre (1925-1938)

by E.C. Segar

REVIEW BY ERIC REYNOLDS:

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

Comic strips are at heart a narrative medium, and nobody told stories like E.C. Segar. With a fantastic ensemble cast of comic characters Segar fulfilled the self-imposed duel responsibility of delivering a daily laugh while furthering an on-going continuity that would run for months. He made it look effortless. Segar spun wonderful yarns while cracking his readers up every step of the way. The outwardly farcical gaggle of vaudevillianesque antiheroes, bumbling about on picaresque chases (usually for riches more than fame) was actually one of the most intrinsically sophisticated comic strips in history.

All of this takes away from the fact that Thimble Theatre, under Segar and starring Popeye (although Segar's pre-Popeye TT than its obscurity indicates), is really, really funny. Popeye is the ultimate scoundrel with a heart of gold, not to mention a tongue of silver: "My sweet patootie loves me because I yama high-voltage poppa, and she is my hotly-totsy momma!" Popeye's butchered English never becomes obtrusive - its rhythm and internal logic is poetic in its own vulgar way, a fact testified to by so many of Popeye's philosophical musings having entered the vernacular, including "I yam what I yam an' tha's all I am!" and "Well blow me down!" Popeye's oxymoronic moral code (I never hits a man as hard as I kin on account of it ain't right to kill peoples") is riotously compelling, even today. Okay, so he emotionally and physically abused Olive (she dished back in spades), often blew his money on craps games, and resorted to his fists almost always, but he also would do things like open up a bank that did nothing but give money out to the poor (wilfully ignoring the financial impracticality and earmarking patrons of the cute, young, female variety) and literally give the needy the clothes off his back, happy to go around in his scivvies if it helped a friend in need. He was a deserving role model for a roughneck scoundrel. The ultimate rugged individualist, Popeye is the perfect antidote for the endless altruism and comfortable gentility of Mickey Mouse and his brethren. Beside, was Mickey ever "dictapater" of his own country? I think not.

And Wimpy! In him and Popeye, Segar may have created the two greatest characters in comic history. Wimpy stands as one-of-a-kind some 67-years after his creation, the most lowdown and worthless creature to ever grace the comics. Venality was his essence. His worthlessness and selfishness was unparalleled. Still, Wimpy wasn't even a villain! How could you hate him? He couldn't help it. Wimpy'd steal a burger from a starving friend and remain wholly convinced of his own righteousness. He couldn't possibly notice how he was hurting others because he never took his mind off himself. Utterly disloyal but eternally blissful, Wimpy stole the show, committing travesty after travesty, repeating his mantra-like one-liners at every turn: "Come up to my house for a duck dinner; you bring the ducks," "Will you join me in a lunch on you?", "Let's you and him fight," "You are the Acme of femininity, my dear") etc... Wimpy's predictability is precisely what makes him so captivating; it is hard to believe anyone could be so thoroughly stubborn and spineless. Wimpy once said, "The inconsistency of some people is astonishing!" not realising for a moment that his consistency will always be endlessly more so.

Segar's greatness is testified to by the embarrassing limpness of Popeye's adventures in the hands of other cartoonists and in other media. Segar died when he was 38, quite possibly before hitting his prime. But no one has been able to mimic his talent, which is a shame, because it's largely these post-Segar productions (mostly the cartoons) that people think of when the one-eyed sailor comes to mind.

Segar's humour raised the spirits of a generation of depression survivors, but has obviously faded from the collective consciousness of today. It's a shame, because Segar stands among Crumb and Kurtzman as the best cartoonist of their generation and set the standard for greatness that led to the success of Al Capp (creator of another famously invulnerable hick with poor grammatical skills) and countless others. Some say he might have even been the first superhero, paving the way for the genre's creation with Superman's debut in 1939.

ART SPIEGELMAN:

I think of Thimble Theatre as blue-collar Beckett.

CHARLES M. SCHULZ:

The perfect comic strip.

FURTHER READING:

E.C. Segar at Fantagraphics Books

E.C. Segar at Sunday Press Books

TCJ Review: The Pre-Popeye Comics of E.C. Segar

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

Captain Marvel by C.C. Beck & Otto Binder (No. 79)

Captain Marvel (1941-1953)

by C.C. Beck & Otto Binder 

REVIEW BY KENT WORCESTER:

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

Captain Marvel followed in the wake of Superman and for a time was the most popular costumed hero on the American newsstand. His real name was Billy Batson, a kid radio reporter who could instantly transform himself into a big-hearted, red-suited lug by blurting out "Shazam!" The career of Captain Marvel was cut short when the publisher succumbed to pressure from National Periodicals, the owners of Superman, over copyright infringement. The year was 1953. It was an unsavoury coda to the Golden Age.

It is ludicrous to suggest that C.C. Beck, Bill Finger, Otto Binder and the others who worked on the Marvel family of comics were merely aping the Superman formula. Batson/Marvel offered an inner big brother reassurance fantasy that was very different from what was going on with the Man of Steel. Captain Marvel lived in his own worm-ridden, frog-infested, heightening-filled funkadelic universe. And Beck's laconic, sometimes hypertoony pages spoke an easy vernacular that the early Superman teams never quite achieved. Between the stories, which ever more elaborate, and the artwork which assumed a pleasing unfurnished innocence, Captain Marvel implied a very different comic book future from one lead by the march of Superman.

Most comics historians revere Captain Marvel and foes like Dr. Vivana and Mr. Mind's Monster Society of Evil. But only a small fraction of the over 1000 "Marvel Family" comics have been reprinted. Jules Feiffer once described Superman as the "Lenin of super-heroes" and Captain Marvel as Trotsky. "Ideologically of the same bent, who could have predicted that within months the two would be at each other's throat?" But they weren't of the same ideological bent: Superman wasn't an endearing goofball. Given the gaps in our material history, the more apt formulation might be Captain Marvel as Trotsjy and Superman as Stalin.

FURTHER READING:

Hogan's Alley: An Interview with CC Beck

TCJ Article: The Shame of Shazam (2019)

Alter Ego #3: The Real Captain Marvel by CC Beck 

The Kin-der-Kids by Lyonel Feininger (No. 40)

The Kin-der-Kids (1906)

by Lyonel Feininger

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

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

As a painter, Lyonel Feininger would eventually garner the aesthetic acclaim that in a better world would already have been his as a cartoonist. In each area of his creative endeavours, Feininger was attuned to the preoccupations of the fine arts of his day, so much so that biographer and critic Hans Hess noted that a single comic strip sequence "contains the problems of modern art in pure form" as well as Feininger's own solutions to the same.

What will strike contemporary readers of 1906's The Kin-der-Kids is a stunning burst of pictorial imagination informed by cultivated taste and executed with distinct flair. Today we get caught up by the colours and their bold combinations, the clever construction of panel and page, the expressive line work, the stylised design, the purposeful exaggerations and distortions, and we need never be the wiser for the international artistic movements they reflected. Instead we are carried away by the glorious full-page Sunday funnies with Feininger's remarkable crew of kids adventures, dashing across the globe in a bathtub, chased by Auntie Jim-Jams and her dreaded bottle of medicinal fish oil.

Despite its madcap nature, the strip radiates a gentleness and takes time to revel in wonder (commissioned, as it was, to serve as a commercial foil for the furious rough-and-tumble of the Hurst funny pages). In that better world, it would have lasted more than 29 episodes.

The Kin-der-Kids was survived by an even more gentle and wonder-filled strip by Feininger, Wee Willie Winkie's World. With its lyric and pervasive anthropomorphism, sheltered-hamlet sensibilities, quieted graphic idiosyncrasies, and close knit of muted, sympathetic colours, it endures as another all too short-lived fantasy land of the beatific.

FURTHER READING:

Lyonel Feininger at MOMA

The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur by Chester Brown (No. 38)

The Autobiographical Stories in Yummy Fur (1988-1993)

by Chester Brown

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:

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

For all their candour, Chester Brown's memoirs are remarkably discreet. These quiet, artfully-shaped stories, which recall both the urgency of Justin Green and the mundane particularity of Harvey Pekar, exhibit economy, grace and a suggestive - even provoking - reticence. Beneath their quiet surfaces lies a strange disquiet, a probing restlessness which belies their fragile, minimalist drawings. What is left unsaid often matters just as much as what gets put down on paper.

Since their original publication, these first-person stories stories have been shaped into three books: The Playboy, I Never Liked You and The Little Man (a miscellany of tales, some fictional). These three represent an extraordinary period of development, as Brown subdued the extravagance of his early fantasies in favour of an equally provocative sense of restraint. He is still capable of shocking disclosure, but, unlike the latter instalments of Brown's fantasy opus Ed The Happy Clown, never turns aside important questions for the sake of a rude surprise.

Brown's memoirs do more than bare private nastiness to the world: they treat the ordinary, everyday encounters as occasions for the deepest questioning. For Brown, even the confused silences of adolescence are charged with moral significance - as shown, for instance, in the unsparing treatment of his failed teenage relationships in I Never Liked You. That book, which turns on the question of speech but climaxes with an awful, emotionally wrenching silence, is Brown's most affecting work to date, the masterwork toward which the earlier memoirs aim. Yet the earlier tales too are splendid, especially The Playboy and Danny's Story.

The Playboy captures Chester's awkward formative experiences with middlebrow pornography: there is no genuine catharsis, only a closeted shame and, in time, a blank evacuation of feeling. Here Brown ingeniously divides himself into an adolescent character and a gadded adult narrator, the later imagined as a hover, bat-winged devil whose mocking commentary underscores the depth of Chester's shame. Danny's Story, a boarding house anecdote, turns on the unwelcome intrusion of a neighbour whose sense of racial, cultural and sexual identity is entirely at odds with Chester's; it's a small masterpiece  of minute observation, one which turns up some of Chester's least attractive qualities. (It ends with Chester biting his neighbour and slamming the door in his face.) These stories wring significance from the smallest details. Taken in sequence, each successive story finds Brown doing more with less. 

Brown is not one to shy away from unpleasant detail, but seems to have little interest in making a shtick out of his unflinching "honesty". Each of his memoirs poses its own questions; each has its own thematic agenda and its own symmetry. They are all strong narratives, putting the lie to the idea that autobiography is for those who cannot construct real "stories". Taken together, these stories reveal an abiding interest in the ways people are shaped by their environment. Brown's powers of observation and his ability to conjure an environment in all its specificity are constant and breathtaking.

REVIEW BY SETH:

(from an interview in Destroy All Comics #2)

I really think Chester is a genius, and I don't know too many people I would class as a genius. He's a really individualistic thinker. I really feel his work comes out of the intellect... and things Chester has told me have certainly stuck in my mind and made me think about things I'm doing, especially from a technical stand point. I have so much respect for Chester that I will really take his opinion to heart.

DAVE SIM:

(from an interview, The Comics Journal #192)

...I was gratified to see Chester Brown's My Mother Was A Schizophrenic. Here's a comic book writer taking issue with an entire field of experts' opinion on schizophrenia. And, of course, he's reaping the whirlwind with a massive letter from one of those experts, having to patiently dismantle the guy's letter paragraph by paragraph. Chester, making full use of the potential both of the medium and unedited creative freedom. We can use a lot more of that in my view.

FURTHER READING:
Chester Brown at Patreon

Chester Brown at D&Q
Chester Brown Conversations (2013)

TCJ: Yummy Fur Riff by Frank Santoro (2014)
The Comics Journal #135: Interview (1990)

Covering the Modern Classics: Anders Nilsen

Anders Nilsen is the extraordinary author of Big Questions, a haunting postmodern fable which follows a group of birds in a vast open plain confronted with a fallen aircraft, its lost pilot and an inscrutable young boy encountering the world on his own for the first time.  The collected edition was the winner of an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize and listed among the New York Times 100 notable books in 2011. His current on-going comics work is the 10-issue, self-published series Tongues.

The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

Cover art by Anders Nilsen

The Midwich Cuckoos

by John Wyndham

Cover art by Anders Nilsen

The Kraken Wakes

by John Wyndham

Cover art by Anders Nilsen

ANDERS NILSEN:

Some covers I did recently for three of John Wyndham’s mid-century “cozy catastrophes”. Thanks to Modern Library Books imprint of Random House and AD Robbin Schiff.🙏🏻 Available for preorder, out on March 8, 2022. 

BONUS COVER:

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

The New York Review of Books

(November 5, 2020)

Art by Anders Nilsen

ANDERS NILSEN:

Had a chance to do a rare full bleed cover for @nybooks election issue this week. Felt good to get to go full towering apocalyptic... but also get to honor the many real people who are struggling to pull this particular monument down and dump it in a swamp somewhere like it deserves... One version had the monument pullers as more or less actual people. We went more general, but the faces of @staceyabrams and my home town rep @repilhan are still hopefully recognizable. And I guess that second one is sort of still Bernie. Kind of. One thing I found out doing this is that trying to do an actual realistic portrait of the president is weirdly soul crushing. Like staring into the void. Doing him as a sort of inflatable cartoon baby is much more enjoyable. #votevotevote

Julie Doucet: A Fan's Notes by Adrian Tomine

 Julie Doucet: A Fan's Notes
by Adrian Tomine

I first encountered Julie Doucet’s comics at a crucial time in my life, when the superhero comics I’d grown up with had finally, completely lost their appeal, but the far-fetched dream of becoming a cartoonist persisted. I know I was in high school at the time, so I’m guessing it was probably around 1989 or 1990. Based on Chester Brown’s glowing recommendation in his comic Yummy Fur, I sent some cash to Julie’s Montreal address, and a few weeks later I received a meticulously hand-crafted packet of her comics. I had seen a few minicomics at that point, but something about Julie’s in particular had a huge impact on how I thought about comics and, on a broader scale, what I wanted to do with my life.

Aside from being shocking, funny, and beautiful, those early Dirty Plotte minicomics were inspirational because they made cartooning seem both attainable and impossible. The fact that they were so clearly hand-made, by one artist with a one-of-a-kind vision of the world, gave the teenage version of me that wonderfully narcissistic feeling of “Hey, maybe I could do this, too!” That the stories themselves were deeply personal, quotidian, dream-based, and concise only added to that admittedly arrogant but exhilarating feeling. And the fact that the art, the language, the stories felt so new (and in some ways alien) to me made it clear that comics as a medium had infinite possibilities, and that as much as I tried, I could never even come close to what Julie was doing. That was exhilarating in its own way, especially for a kid who, only a few years prior, had no greater ambition than to “draw comics the Marvel way.” There was no going back to superheroes after that, and it wasn’t long before I was printing copies of my first minicomic at the local Kinko’s.

I followed Julie’s ensuing career closely, tracking down and collecting her work wherever it appeared. The evolution of her art and writing through the years that Drawn & Quarterly was publishing Dirty Plotte was staggering. The release of each issue felt like a new album from a favorite band. It was an event. Every development in her drawing style or her storytelling or her sense of design was thrilling, and impossibly, it all kept getting better.

Even fifteen years after she unofficially retired from comics, I still think of Julie as kind of the platonic ideal of a cartoonist. Visually, her work is complex, meticulous, wild, and thoroughly alive, simultaneously building upon and departing from comics orthodoxy. Her style is at once haunting and sweet, beautiful and grotesque, but also completely, indisputably original. Every line, every detail, every person, even every coffee pot is a part of Julie’s universe. The stories, while often dreamlike or even nightmarish, are brilliantly readable, depicting and evoking a wide range of moods and emotions. Even her most mundane story is revelatory by virtue of its specificity, its language, its eccentricity. Most importantly, her comics are self-expression in its purest form, and that, to me, is the greatest possible use of the medium. At this point in her incredible artistic evolution, I’m not sure that Julie would take this as a compliment, but I still think of her as that increasingly rare thing: a natural-born cartoonist, who, when she puts pen to paper, just somehow instinctively does everything right.

I first met Julie in person more than twenty years ago, and we’ve crossed paths a handful of times since then. But to be honest, I don’t feel like I know her that well. I’ve had the good fortune of becoming friends with many of my favorite cartoonists, and while I treasure those relationships, there’s something great about the fact that Julie Doucet is still this mythic force, somewhere far away, creating art that only she could make. Almost thirty years after receiving that packet of minicomics in the mail, I’m a fan, and I’m eternally grateful for that experience.

This essay is taken from Dan Nadel's "The Julies" article which appeared in Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2018. Read Dan's complete essay here...

Donald Duck by Carl Barks (No. 7)

Donald Duck (1942-1965)

by Carl Barks

REVIEW BY KIM THOMPSON:

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

A Disney Studios writer and gag-man (he worked on a number of Donald Duck shorts from the mid-1930s on, as well as the feature file Bambi), Carl Barks was assigned his first comics story in 1942: a shelved Mickey Mouse animated feature. In collaboration with his studio mate Jack Hannah, he converted it into a 64-page Donald Duck comic, which Western Publishing released under its Dell Comics imprint (Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, Four Color #9). Barks, who had worked as a gag cartoonist and illustrator before joining the studio, decided he found comic-book work more hospitable than the rigours of the increasingly regimented studio, quit his salaried job and approached Western about more comics work. He was subsequently anointed Western's Duck chronicler - both in the continuing Four Color "solo" series (longer, more adventure-oriented yarns that usually filled the issues) and in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories.

WDC&S provided Barks' most regular berth: Between 1943 and 1965 he drew and (usually, but not always) wrote over 250 ten pagers. These were originally designed as paper equivalents of the Donald Duck cinematic shorts: strings of slapstick gags in which Donald was portrayed as an ill-tempered, farcical loser battling either his nephews or other malign adversaries - people, animals, or objects. But as Barks gained confidence in his new medium, he began to work up more subtle, nuanced characterisations for his protagonists. 

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

I loved Carl Barks' work since those days of long-lost innocence when I assumed the duck stories were all written and drawn by Walt Disney himself. As far as I was concerned, they were Walt's best work, done on lunch-breaks, when he wasn't making animated cartoons or hosting his weekly TV show. Before that I just believed the ducks were somehow real, and now, as an adult I've reverted to my first opinion: the ducks ARE real. Not the way they look, of course, but they're emotionally real, realer than most people I've met.

FURTHER READING:

The Complete Carl Barks Library at Fantagraphics Books

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb (No. 19)

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb 

(1964 to present)

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

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

Robert Crumb has maintained sketchbooks, which he has written and drawn continually, from the early '60s to present. Seven large, hardcover volumes have appeared from the German publisher 2001 printing sketches datings from 1967, with the most recent one (published November 1998) running up to 1996, representing 29 years and nearly 3,000 pages of facsimile reproduction. Fantagraphics Books (conflict of interest alert!) has published six R. Crumb Sketchbooks to date, which begin three years earlier than [publisher] 2001's (1964) and include more pages from the artist's sketchbooks in the years that 2001 has published. The US editions of the sketchbooks from 1964 to 2000 will comprise over 4,000 pages.

The very conception of a single, unified, organic (and ongoing) life's work, as this is, like Crumb's individual stories and his work generally, sui generis: it is not merely inconceivable that no other artist has felt the inner need to consistently draw in a sketchbook for over 35 years (and counting), but an immutable fact. Not only has no cartoonist done so but I am aware of no artist who ever has (Frida Kahlo's drawn diaries come the closest, but not very); in fact, these sketchbooks are, as a body of work, incomparable in their magnitude, scope and intensity, and there in lies their uniqueness and, in part, their value. (We may assume that other, invariably lesser, artists will follow Crumb's example in the future, of course).

Crumb then, has created an entirely new "genre", but how does one describe it? It is not autobiography in any recognisable or understood sense; it is not a systematic or linear iteration of important professional and personal details, there is none of the "objectivity" we associate with biography such as the customary citation of names, dates, places and so forth. It is, therefore, not so much a chronicle of a life than a chronicle of a life of perceptions, which is of considerably greater aesthetic interest.

What differentiates the sketchbooks from Crumb's finished comics work is that the wedding of perception and technique achieves a degree of purity that the considered and necessarily cohering choices of tonality, style, structure, etc, tend to dilute. It is, among other things, a raw insight into process: how are ideas formed, how are connections made, how is technique and craft honed, how is the ability to truly see cultivated? Art is always mediated by artifice and every artist, no matter how self-revealing or self-lacerating, wears a mask that separates himself from his work. The cumulative effect of these sketchbooks is to narrow the gap between the artist and his art, or, put another way, to create such an intimacy as to render the profound connection between art and humanity palpable.

It also stands as a monumental existential document. Crumb repeatedly expresses, through a variety of penetrating and coruscating visual metaphor, the central existential struggle: to live in the full light of consciousness with all the risk, pain, and suffering that entails.

One can practically become lost in the onrush of caricatures, impeccably rendered portraits, formal practice (such as when Crumb was learning to use a brush in the early '80s), intense self-scrutiny, excerpts from various authors, screeds, comic strips, roughs for strips that never appeared, a visual playfulness that one rarely sees in his comics after 1970, stunning displays of virtuoso draftsmanship, the occasional abstract or surreal vista, diary-like entries (such as one agonising over his relationship with his son Jessie), heart-breaking depictions of his daughter Sophie, worshipful drawings of his wife Aline, his sensual supple line and mastery of form, humour, seriousness, empathy, misanthropy, goofing off and self-flagellating anguish - in short, the full panoply of a life of perceptions rendered with consulate artistry.

ALAN MOORE:

(from an article in The Life & Times Of Robert Crumb)

Crumb's earliest work shows a youthful sense of delight and exuberance, a sense of glee to be working in the comic medium with access to all its varied icons and delights. The characters in the early pieces, however weird or macabre or ridiculous, seem to be purposefully two-dimensional comic characters... His grotesque pranks are told in the same way that any animated character's more innocuous japes would be presented, right down to the sense of a winking camaraderie with the reader in the final panels. In Crumb's piece, though, turning it into something dark and different, raising all sorts of new and unsettling questions about the nature of the form itself... But there was a gradual sense, at least as I saw it, of Crumb becoming impatient or weary with simply subverting the cartoon icons of his youth. It looked as if he felt the need to grow and was looking around for territory to grow into... In his work for Arcade, we see Crumb confidently striking out for new pastures with an assurance that shows in every line... I'd scarcely recovered from the hard, no-nonsense pessimism of Crumb's look at life in This Here Modern America when along came his powerful and affecting portrait of an early backwoods man, That's Life. This piece, which manages to chart the rise and fall of a whole section of the music industry while telling a powerful human story is, I think, one of the best things that Crumb has ever done. A sad and bitter indictment, it is nevertheless accomplished with a real human warmth... Take a look at his sketchbooks and see just how much he's capable of caring about a stack of firewood or the light on his wife's forehead or a corner of his backyard, and if that doesn't make you feel better about the world we live in, then get a friend to try holding a mirror under your nose.

FURTHER READING:

Fantagraphics Books: Crumb Sketchbooks 1964 to 1977

Taschen: Crumb Sketchbooks 1964 to 1982
Taschen: Crumb Sketchbooks 1983 to 2011

The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick (No. 73)

The Cartoon History of the Universe (1990 to present)

by Larry Gonick

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:

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

Larry Gonick is a gifted cartoonist performing a great duty for education: he's teaching us how to laugh at history. This doesn't mean he ridicules history or dismiss its significance - far from it. Gonick takes the events and figures and attitudes of ancient times and makes them accessible through beautifully humorous drawings, a strong sense of narrative, and a mastery of history that can give university professors a run for their money. While Gonick doesn't quite stay true to his title - he starts with the Big Bang, but quickly settles on Earth as his focus - he doesn't limit himself to the West, either. The expected histories of the Greeks and Romans are followed by chapters devoted to various Asian cultures; clearly, Gonick's ambitious project aims to be as comprehensive as it can possibly allow.

Gonick's three strongest assets are a classic Bigfoot visual style, a strong eye for the connecting tissue between events, and research, research, research. The hackneyed metaphor of books as "time machines" is given a fresh dust-off in his hands, mostly because he puts his money where his mouth is and delivers an engaging story from all that he has read and all that he's pieced together. With such a rich, fascinating subject as the history of everything, Gonick has the best material possible for comedy as well education. The Spartan way of life is summed up by a humorous mantra ("I can take it, I can take it...") that leads to an unexpected punchline; the story of the Buddha is recounted with both discretion and an empathic eye for the humanity of the religious figure as a young man. Gonick is equal parts comedian and scholar: physical humour and caricature (ie Socrates is a grimy, old curmudgeon), shatters popular myths, while illustrated foot notes provide further context for complex situations. Comic exaggeration is used to great effect, but also responsibly captures the gist of his lessons. 

Gonick is also willing to poke fun at the process of making history. His introduction to each chapter is charming, there are several enlightening sequences about historical interpretation (including one that satirises the way extrapolation from an artefact can become out-and-out silliness), and he even draws interesting connections between the follies of ancient cultures and our own. That attention to relevancy - in whatever form, in whatever time, in whatever place - helps make Gonick a distinctive comix voice and a praiseworthy historian. With two volumes done and more undoubtedly on the way, Gonick's special brand of edutainment should continue to enlighten and delight for years to come.

WILL EISNER:

Larry Gonick has created a genre all his own. The use of comic art to tell serious history is a brilliant application of the medium. The underlying scholarship in this work reinforces and demonstrates the capability of cartoons as a valid teaching form... Best of all he is wedding learning with fun. Bravo!

FURTHER READING:

Larry Gonick's Official Site