Tuesday, December 22, 2009
One Year Down...
What a crazy, wild trip this past year has been for Graphic NYC. The first week in January will mark the year birthday of what started as a way to get the Graphic NYC book project out there, and its taken on such a life of its own, becoming its own entity.
In the course of that year, we’ve done profiles on about forty comics creators, including a fair share of legends, and have gone beyond with an arsenal of reviews, columns, and comic creator contributions. The site has lived through two revamps as we figure out the nuts and bolts of Blogger and HTML to create as clean a web experience as we can give you, beyond being just another blog by two guys who love comics.
Personally speaking, Graphic NYC is achieving the dream of making comics journalism smarter and sexier, bringing the work beyond the clubhouse of the comics industry or fandom, and giving these creators the exposure, respect, and veneer they deserve. While we could only do this independently, it wouldn't have happened without the support and contributions of several people.
We’ve also gained a fine bunch of reviewers and writers – Miles Archer, Jared Gniewek, and Gene Kogan — and a who’s who of the best comic books have to offer, who have helped us make Graphic NYC better than we’d ever envisioned that entire year ago.
Keep an eye out for the next year of Graphic NYC. We promise it’ll be a doozy, with new features, our new guest editor weeks, and hopefully even more great news and comics goodness. We’ll be back on January 4th, with a profile on the brilliant underground comics mastermind Kim Deitch.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Influencing Comics #4: Ed Piskor's Top 5 Non-Comic Influences
1. Early Hip Hop Culture: This is a subject that I read about and research endlessly for pleasure and inspiration. I absolutely relate to the situation of coming from a barren, dilapidated neighborhood like the Boogie-down Bronx and finding creative ways to have fun for little expense. I love the competition that this early era inspired and the idea that you had to be great, if not the best, to get any respect and if you were weak people would not be afraid to tell you in a second. Throughout my childhood watching my classmates shift from making fun of my whack drawings to giving me props was probably the most character building thing I've experienced to this day. It was a tangible recognition of actually getting better as an artist and this criticism was invoked upon me with a severe attitude that was distinctly early hip hop.
2. Copious Amounts Of VHS Horror Movies At The Local Mom-and-Pop Video Store:
I started to develop opinions and taste based on renting shitty movies that looked cool from "Best Video" as a kid. Before this time, my only exposure was to stuff on TV which was vetted to a certain extent as being entertaining and/or good enough to keep you in your seat so that you watch the next set of commercials. When my dad got a membership card to this exclusive, dreary movie store, it was possible to eventually rent everything in the store which I at least accomplished with the horror section because they had the most interesting covers. By doing this I came to the realization that there are bad movies, boring content, uninspiring flicks,etc. Even at a young age I tried to critically figure out what makes me like a certain piece, what turns me off, what mistakes are being made that keep taking me out of the story, which I try to apply to the work that I do. I always made sure to rewind too, to avoid any surcharge to my pops.
3 Glen E. Friedman's Photography: It turned out that most of the photo's I've stared at of my favorite musicians and skateboarders were all taken by the same dude. This guy seems to be around for the inception of a lot of cool stuff. Almost like the Forrest Gump of Hipness. I have a few coffee table books of his work and I steal facial contortions from his work on a regular basis.
4. John Waters: The gross stuff isn't what I dig most about Mr. Waters. I love that shit too, but if you listen to what he says about his work it is very apparent that each scene and most dialogue is inspired by real life experiences. He taught me to keep my eyes open and absorb everything around me for future use. Beware.
5. In Living Color: I appreciate this show for it's biting satire, extreme parody, different perspective, over-the-top situations, memorable characters....I can go on forever, man. I remember each episode clearly and with great enthusiasm. Almost every silly situation I find myself in I can recall a sketch from In Living Color that is similar to what I'm experiencing. I hope to one day create something that has a fraction of this programs clever edginess and commentary.
Ed Piskor is a hardworking illustrator based out of Pittsburgh Pa. Having fashioned a few graphic novels with his pal, Harvey Pekar, Ed is currently putting pen to paper in his first solo graphic novel effort, Wizzywig, which can be downloaded for free at his site
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Crime Scene: Luna Park
Words: Miles Archer
Luna Park is one heavy graphical novel. Adeptly penned by historical novelist Kevin Baker (the City of Fire trilogy) and beautifully illustrated by Danijel Zezelj (Northlanders), it takes readers on a journey from modern Brooklyn to late-90’s Chechnya, back to early 20th Century New York, and out to World War I era Russia, recreating each of these diverse settings with the richness of a Jacob Riis photograph. While the story gets a bit rocky towards the end, this is an incredibly ambitious project that raises interesting questions about the destructive nature of the human soul.
For this tour of New York’s past and present, I can think of no better guide than Kevin Baker. As the author of the City of Fire trilogy of novels, Baker made his reputation chronicling the exploits of the city’s poor and downtrodden, its immigrants and gangsters, its corrupt policemen and Tammany high muckety-mucks. In that century-spanning series, Carter’s words conjured an image of old New York that is so vivid, so complete in every detail, that the reader feels like he or she has actually seen the shining lights of the Dreamland amusement park in Coney Island, tasted the rotgut from a back alley block-and-fall joint near the Bowery, or smelled the commingled scent of boiling cabbage and human perspiration wafting from an overcrowded Lower East Side tenement apartment.
In Luna Park, Baker manages the transition to graphic storytelling with aplomb, scaling back his normally lush narrative so that it complements Danijel Zezelj’s images, rather than competing with them. Here Baker succeeds in transporting his readers to bygone eras of Coney Island and Novgorod, but he achieves that effect by capturing the dialogue and motivations of those who lived in those places and times, wisely relying upon Zezelj to complete the sensory experience for the reader.
In many ways, Zezelj is an excellent artistic counterpart to Baker for this project. Gorgeously rendered scenes depicting an open-air marketplace on Hester Street, the opulent interior of the Brighton Beach night club Anastasia’s, and the nightmarish Hell Gate attraction at Luna Park (among many others) demonstrate a painstaking attention to detail that is perfectly suited for a Kevin Baker story. Particularly stunning are his depictions of the amusement parks at Coney Island, which Zezelj imbues with their own emotional qualities – whimsical and fantastic in the past, dreary and depressed in the present. Through facial expressions and body posture, he instills his characters with the same dramatic range, skillfully expressing at various times seductiveness and loneliness, love and rage, joy and terror.
Yet as well-matched as Baker and Zezelj are as collaborating artists, and as engrossing as their work is for most of the way, it falls just short of greatness at the end. Ahoy reader – ahead there be spoilers.
Luna Park begins as a contemporary take on the immigrant tale, a genre in which Baker is well-versed. Alik Strelnikov is a Russian veteran of the war in Chechnya now living in present-day Coney Island, where he works collecting protection money for a small-time Brooklyn gangster. Alik is tormented by the wartime atrocities he witnessed and tries to cope using heavy doses of his two favorite addictive substances – heroin and Marina, a fortune teller-come-prostitute enthralled to another gangster poised to muscle Alik’s employer out of the neighborhood. Marina’s nightly visits help Alik to forget the past, but something about her seems to cause him to relive it at the same time. Eventually the pair cooks up a scheme to free themselves from their plight by double-crossing Marina’s boss, but Marina then double-crosses Alik, and he stumbles, bleeding from gunshot wounds, into the Luna Park funhouse.
Here the book takes a metaphysical shift, and we are introduced to another Alik, who immigrates to New York from Russia with his family at the turn of the twentieth century. He grows up and joins the Army to serve in the Great War, and after witnessing horrors of trench warfare war in France, he is deployed to his home town of Novgorod in Russia, in an attempt by the Allies to help Czarist forces repress the Bolshevik uprising. There he ignites an affair with Mariya, an old flame from his youth in Novgorod, who now has a son named Alexander by a husband who was killed in the war years before. This Alik is eventually also betrayed by Mariya and Alexander, and as he lay bleeding out in a bathhouse, Mariya reveals that she is a previous incarnation of Marina, that he (Alik) is a previous incarnation of the present day Alik, and that Alexander would grow up to be the grandfather of that modern day Alik.
This shift in focus doesn’t upset the vibe of Luna Park too much at first, because the story already had a mystical quality to it centered around the old amusement parks in Coney Island. Baker also laid the groundwork for this shift by establishing the link between the present day Alik and the WWI-era Alik through recurring dreams experienced by both which grant each Alik a glimpse into the other’s life. Baker also uses reincarnation as an interesting vehicle to express the idea of betrayal and violence begetting further betrayal and violence in an endless cycle that repeats tragically throughout human history. This vicious cycle is particularly interesting because Baker seems to be focusing on those instances where a woman deceives a man, resulting in his ruin.
The reason why this idea works (initially) in Luna Park is that Baker draws the story arc of Present Day Alik in exact parallel with WWI-Era Alik. Both Aliks have roots in Novgorod and immigrate to New York. Both join an army to satisfy a romantic need to become a hero, become disillusioned by the experience, and then later resuscitate their hero fantasies in attempts to rescue a woman from some desperate circumstance. Both are in the end set up by that woman, and lose their lives as a result.
But these parallels begin to veer off track when Baker tries to extrapolate them out to other events in Russian history. The mass execution of the Drevlian mobility by Saint Olga of Kiev in revenge for their murder of her husband Igor in the mid-tenth century, the destruction of the Rus army by Ogedei Khan in the thirteenth, the death of Anastasia, wife of Czar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth, the bloody suppression of the Decemberists by Czarist forces in the nineteenth – these events are all presented by Baker as instances in which the tormented souls of Alik and Marina have betrayed each other again and again throughout the course of history. Baker then extrapolates this paradigm even further into twentieth century America, reincarnating Alik and Marina again as Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina.
All of these events were violent and a few even involved documented instances of betrayal, but none were shown to be instances of men meeting their demise after being betrayed by a lover. Even in the Oswald-Marina sequence in the book’s final pages, there is never a moment in which it’s implied that Marina had anything to do with JFK’s assassination. Though this would be historically inaccurate, it would seem necessary for Baker to take some liberty there (this is fiction, after all) in order to be able to successfully apply his betrayal paradigm to that historical event. Because he represents the events leading up to the assassination more or less accurately, the delicate and intricate metaphysical model Baker has constructed collapses like a house of cards once the weight of historical context is applied.
But perhaps most importantly, the ending just wasn’t satisfying dramatically. The action shifts from the present to the past with about a third of the book left, and Baker never brings it back before the end. Present Day Alik is led through a door in the Luna Park Hell Gate attraction by Marina on page 102, then the perspective shifts to that of WWI-Era Alik, and again to Lee Harvey Oswald on 152, and the book ends on page 158 without ever reverting the action back to the character who was our protagonist for two thirds of the story. If Baker had elected to show some kind of familial connection between Oswald’s wife and Alik’s grandfather Alexander, he might have strengthened the link between Oswald and Alik and produced a more satisfying end. With only a shaky connection having been made by Baker between Alik and Oswald, Zezelj’s story-ending half-page panel depicting the JFK funeral procession lost the dramatic punch it should have had.
For all its flaws, Luna Park is an attractive book rife with thought-provoking ideas about the nature of humankind and our tendency to repeat our own mistakes across generations. The graphic storytelling medium can only benefit from talented artists like Baker and Zezelj contributing such ambitious works, and through its first two thirds, Luna Park appeared to have the marks of a classic. Here’s hoping that Baker continues to ply his trade in comics and that his next effort is a more complete one.
Miles Archer loves crime comics, old school hip-hop and The Super-Friends. He has profiled some very interesting artists in film, music, fashion and comics for publications such as Mixer, Mass Appeal, YRB and Big Shot. He doesn’t have his own website yet, but hopes you won’t think any less of him as a person because of it. He lives in Harlem with his wife and what must be the last standard-definition television on the eastern seaboard.
Friday, December 18, 2009
For the Love of Comics #07: Cosplay - a photo essay
Cosplay (コスプレkosupure), short for "costume play", is type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea.
It's no secret that I'm a comics fan. If you're reading this, then odds are you are, too. I've been a fan since before I was able to read and have collected weekly for over twenty-six years. But, I have never worn a costume to a comic con. Just not my thing. To me, that is a different level of fandom, and one which I find fascinating. A couple of years back, I decided to turn my lens to such fans, and create a photo series, as a way of examining these Cosplayers. The following photos were taken at several comic conventions.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Graphically Speaking: Seth's Top Books of 2009
Fellow comics journalist, Brian Heater of The Daily Cross Hatch recently asked over forty comics folks (including me!) to list their top five books of the year. See my picks below and everyone else's at The Daily Cross Hatch's The Best Damned Comics of 2009 Chosen by the Artists.
The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert
French cartoonist Guibert tells the story of his friend, photojournalist Didier Lefèvre through a unique melding of his elegant art and Lefèvre’s actual photos and words. The tale of a young photojournalist’s journey through Afghanistan in 1986 is compelling and human, and wonderfully complimented by Didier Lefèvre’s photographs, in moments that feel meditative. The Photographer is a beautiful book, both in its design and it’s content.
Asterios Polyp by David MazzucchelliMuch has already been said about Mazzuccelli’s long awaited graphic novel, so I doubt I would have anything new to add. The book represents a master cartoonist working at the top of his game, using and inventing techniques for maximum emotional resonance. Asterios Polyp deserves and rewards repeated readings and study.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 by Tim Hamilton
adapts it into a new form. 451’s retro future where books are outlawed, feels fresh and topical and Hamilton, a chameleon of art styles, employees one here that allows the story to flow in a natural way. His use of color is particularly effective, sticking to cool muted tones throughout, providing a contrast to the scenes with red and yellow blazing fires. His artful page design, dramatic, edgy art and inventive use of color vividly bring Bradbury’s tale to life.
Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
Darwyn Cooke adapts Richard Stark’s book to great hardboiled and cruel effect. Parker’s opening twenty page, wordless journey into 1960s era New York City is cue to the reader that this is a tour d’ force. Cooke pulls no punches with his characterization of Parker, as sonuvabitch an antihero as one could find. But, it’s Cooke’s storytelling and retro-cool art, stripped bare to only necessary lines, which are the star of the show here. Parker: The Hunter is a terrific work from an artist whose work seems to continue to grow and improve and surprise, even when you thing he’s already gone as far as he possibly could.
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
A.D. is one of those books that are impossible to put down. The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was vividly covered by the media, to the point where one might feel they’ve “seen it all,” but reading only the first few pages of A.D., you’ll realize you haven’t. Neufeld tells the stories of several real life survivors, bringing the reader to New Orleans on those faithful days. Neufeld’s clean art and concise dialogue perfectly compliment each other to tell a truly human story. Most remarkable here, is the pacing. Neufeld builds to the beats and when they hit, they have real resonance and power. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge serves as a reminder of what the medium of comics can be capable of.
Honorable Mention
G.I. Joe: Cobra by Christos Gage, Mike Costa and Antonio Fuso
This is G.I. Joe for adults, as if written by John LaCarre. Cobra, is a hardcore espionage tale that bears little resemblance to the G.I. Joe of our youths. The book follows spy Chuckles, as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of the terrorist organization that will eventually be Cobra. But most of all, it’s a strong character piece and a real page-turner.
Wolverine: Old Man Logan by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven
The best mainstream superhero book this year. Millar seemingly throws every insane idea to the wall, and for me, and they all stick, with much credit going to the expert storytelling and art of Steve McNiven. What begins as a nod to Unforgiven, but starring an aged, pacifist Wolverine, takes us through a violent and imaginative take of a future Marvel Universe where the villains long ago defeated the heroes. The gloves are off and the claws are out and more superhero comics should take the risks that Wolverine: Old Man Logan does.
The ACT-I-VATE Primer by Haspiel, Bertozzi, Cavallaro, Fraser, etc.
A handsomely produced anthology by a mixture of top creators and newcomers, all showcasing their creations from the webcomix site in new stories. Just flipping through one can’t help but notice the variety of work and styles contained between it’s well designed covers. If you can’t find something that appeals to you in The ACT-I-VATE Primer, you probably don’t like comics.
Graphically Speaking: Melvin Monster by John Stanley
Words: Christopher Irving
In 1965, Little Lulu comic book cartoonist John Stanley created a comic book that featured massive amounts of child abuse and neglect, centered around a little boy named Melvin.
At least, that’s how a serious reading of Stanley’s masterpiece Melvin Monster would go. In reprinting the library of Stanley’s comic book work, Drawn and Quarterly has wisely chosen the first three issues of Stanley’s Dell comic book. Melvin Monster is laced with black humor and all types of innocent slapstick “wrongness” that, had Dell published under the Comics Code censorship board, might not have seen print.
Melvin is a cute monster with a pointy hat, kind of a kid ogre, who lives with his Mummy and Baddy. Mummy, wrapped in bandages, and Baddy, blue-skinned with a mean streak, frequently discipline Melvin’s lack of monstrousness. Melvin engages in un-monster like behavior: he wants to go to school, not play hooky, and generally behaves himself. Much of the humor comes from Melvin’s wide-eyed niavete as he torments other monsters with his good behavior (including the witch of a school teacher), or unwittingly scares “human beans” on his trips to their world.
Stanley was king of the running gag: Cleopatra, the pet alligator, always has her mouth open to swallow Melvin; Baddy puts Melvin through a sandbox of quicksand and a slide aimed at a briar bush; Damon always gets Melvin’s name wrong; and Melvin always has a hard time getting into school. His use of language is also commendable, with Melvin talking like an actual kid, as opposed to an adult’s idea of how a kid talks, and both Baddy and Mummy have their own distinct voices.
Drawn and Quarterly has to be commended for such swell packaging for Melvin Monster: the hardcover features silver embossed type, while the thick page stock is colored so as to best give the feel of an old comic. The art design by Seth is classic and top-notch, making Melvin Monster a beautifully-produced package.
In the end, Melvin Monster is more than just a comics curiosity: it’s a presentation of an under-rated and under the radar kid’s comic by a master of the genre.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The ACT-I-VATE Experience
Video directed by Seth Kushner
and Carlos Molina - CulturePopProductions.comOriginal Score by Q*Ball
The ACT-I-VATE Experience, a documentary directed and produced by Graphic NYC's own Seth Kushner and Carlos Molina, (CulturePopProductions.com) gives a behind-the-scenes look at the premiere webcomics collective.
“What began as a promo piece for ACT-I-VATE became an informative film about webcomics, web vs. print, and the future of the industry,” says Seth.
The ACT-I-VATE Experience features interviews with and art by such comics luminaries as Dean Haspiel, Nick Bertozzi, Mike Cavallaro, Simon Fraser, Tim Hamilton, Leland Purvis, Molly Crabapple, Kevin Colden, Dan Goldman, Josh Neufeld and many more.
The film has already premiered at the Baltimore Comic-Con, Brooklyn’s King Con, APE in San Francisco, Quimby's Bookstore in Chicago, and online at Newsarama.com.
ACT-I-VATE, the premiere webcomix collective, features original, serialized graphic novels and is updated daily. ACT-I-VATE's select artists produce their signature work sans editorial oversight and offer their comix for free to an ever-growing audience of loyal readers. In addition to these high-quality comix, ACT-I-VATE is known for having lifted the veil between creation, creator, and reader by providing a forum for spirited dialogue between audience and auteur. The website confirms one of ACT-I-VATE's core tenets: that the artists and writers of this curated comix community are the optimal providers of intellectual properties and original content.
Fletcher Hanks Destroys New York!
Words: Christopher Irving
In the Golden Age of comic book history, when teenagers were scrawling out primitively-drawn comic book heroes for mostly unscrupulous publishers with shady backgrounds and questionable connections, one artist destroyed New York City over, and over, and over…
The mastermind, Fletcher Hanks, repeatedly trashed the city from a small studio in Tudor City, and for a publisher as unscrupulous and crooked as several of the villains in Fantomah or Stardust. Expressively drawn and pulsating with violence, Hanks’ work saw print for Fox Comics, run by the notorious early comics crook Victor Fox. As history would show, Hanks was the definitive tortured artist and Fox the definitive sleazy publisher of the early ‘40s. One has to wonder how an actual meeting of the two minds would have gone.
The legendary story of Victor Fox is that he was a former accountant for the future DC Comics, and that he packed up his papers when he realized how much money was in the funnybooks, and then started his own publishing venture.
Most of the fun of hearing about the Golden Age is the evolution of hearsay into legend, especially in the case of Victor Fox. What is known is that Victor Fox was born in Nottinghamshire, England on July 3, 1893 as Samuel Victor Fox. His parents, Joseph and Bessie Fox, were Russians who had emigrated before his birth, finding their way across the Atlantic to America by March, 1898. They settled in Bristol, Massachusetts by 1900, where Joseph was a storekeeper before making the move to New York City in 1917.
Once in the Big Apple, he started a women’s clothing business, while living on 555 West 151st Street; Samuel inexplicably switched his name to Victor Samuel, and became the head of exporting for the family business.
According to Victor's June 5, 1917 draft card, he had earlier served six months as a First Lieutenant in the Army. The draft card also describes him as being of medium height and stout, with gray eyes and black hair (which corresponds with the general description given by those who knew the man). Apparently not one for military service, Fox attempted to exempt from duty since he exported the military uniforms his father had started manufacturing...a matter of either coincidence or design. His business office was listed as 42 East 20th Street.
Who Was Who in America listed Fox as Chairman of Consolidated Maritime Lines, Inc. from 1919 to 1922, becoming an Industrial Engineer for reorgns. to large corporations until 1935.
April 19, 1927 saw the 27 year-old Fox involved in a lawsuit against the Palmer and Parker Company, whom Fox and Company had subchartered to transport mahogany logs from Gold Coast, Africa to Boston in 1920. Two years later, on November 26, 1929, Fox was arraigned for operating a "boiler room" scheme, where he sold good stocks in exchange for bad ones, and failed to deliver "unissued" stocks. Fox, at the time, was operating under two business names: "Fox Motor and Bank Stocks" and "American Common Stocks, Inc."
Apparently, by 1936, Victor started publishing astrology magazines under the pen name “Zarius Zeus”. Chances are he found enough minimum success with those to encourage him to tackle publishing comic books by 1939. Fox wasn’t alone, as thought balloons with dollar signs erupted all over New York City, with so-called publishers renting out closet-sized offices and farming out the work to exploited kids and wanna-be illustrators.
Luckily for Victor Fox, he had a lead to Universal Phoenix, the first “comic book studio”, founded by a fast-talking businessman named Jerry Iger, and a boy wonder cartoonist named Will Eisner.
Will Eisner & Jerry Iger met in 1936, they produced the short-lived WOW! What A Magazine, one of the earliest forays into comic books with original material. It was only a year before WOW! folded and the two became partners; Because he came up with the $15 capital to rent an office, Eisner got top billing.
Pictures show Iger as a well-coiffed man with pencil-thin moustache and pinstripe suits and Eisner a handsome kid with a high forehead. Iger was born to Austrian immigrant parents in 1903 New York and was then transplanted to Oklahoma for a good amount of his childhood. Returning to New York in 1916, Iger would later land a job at the famous Fleischer animation studios in Manhattan in 1922. From there, he would work for the Hearst-run New York American for a decade as a staff artist. After that, he answered a 1936 ad to become editor of WOW!, where he had his fateful meeting with Eisner.
Bill Eisner (as he was called then) truly was the product of both his immigrant parents: his father had been a set painter and his mother a very practical and business-like woman. Raised with the dichotomy of his father's artistic passion and his mother's practical nature, Eisner developed a shrewd business sense at a young age while functioning as a ground-breaking artist.
Their Universal Phoenix studio was a packaging shop for comics, at first all drawn by Eisner under various pseudonyms. That soon changed when they hired out a bullpen, and the studio was set up in a large room with a row of drawing boards along the wall, with Eisner's being set in the center at one end of the room. Pages would be passed down from penciler to penciler, hashing out dialogue, figures, backgrounds, then another one or two would ink backgrounds and figures. This assembly line process let the studio hash stories out like there was no tomorrow. Eisner jokingly described the set-up like a "Roman galley”.
The stable of talent at Eisner & Iger included legends like Lou Fine (who would go down as one of the Golden Age's true masters), Mort Meskin (who would later enjoy a partnership with artist Jerry Robinson), Bob Kane (eventual co-creator of Batman for DC/ Detective), Nicholas Viscardi (a.k.a. Nick Cardy, known for his run on Teen Titans and a slew of DC westerns), Alex Blum, Jim Mooney, and Bob Powell.
And, of course, Fletcher Hanks.
To call Fletcher Hanks a superstar artist of early comics would be an exaggeration. He has, over the past few years, been recognized as one of history’s best kept secrets, and enigmatic figure who churned out inimitable and oddly-flavored comic stories.
Historian and cartoonist Paul Karasik found his own personal windmill in Hanks’ work. A chance to meet the son of the enigmatic cartoonist led him to the truth about the life and death of Hanks.
Born in 1887 to a Methodist preacher, Hanks grew up in a small Maryland shore town. The spoiled rascal enrolled in a correspondence cartoonist course, and grew into an abusive alcoholic. Married with four children, Hanks eventually abandoned his family, running off with his 12 year-old son’s meager savings. Hanks surfaced in New York City by the late ‘30s, finding a spot in the Eisner and Iger studio.
Where Universal Phoenix was an assembly line set-up, Eisner recalled to Karasik that Hanks was the only cartoonist who did it all, even down to the lettering.
Anxious to start his comics empire on the backs of Universal Phoenix, Victor Fox called on Eisner and Iger’s services.
“[Fox] decided to start his own publishing company, and called and got in touch with Jerry Iger, my partner, and we began doing work for him on a contract basis,” Eisner recalled in 2000.
The Fox line of comics, started by Eisner and crew, featured a bevy of superheroes: Lou Fine’s The Flame, and The Blue Beetle (who eventually became the small company’s star), The Green Mask. Of the Fox characters that didn’t make it to the cover were Fletcher’s Fantomah and Stardust the Super-Wizard.
Maybe it’s because they were just too weird.
To read Fletcher Hank’s work is to feel as if you’re in the middle of a bender or looking in between the stars that come out of a knock on the head by a blackjack. The figures were often oddly proportioned – over-developed if hero or villain – and the villains as distorted as an extra from Dick Tracy.
His two leading heroes were Stardust, the Super-Wizard, and Fantomah the ghostly jungle goddess. Also in there was the lumberjack Big Red McLane, as well as interchangeable spacemen Space Smith and Whirlwind Carter.
The stories are permeated with violence and an odd sense of justice: the heroes, while always aware of the villain’s scheme from the get-go, never arrive until the chaos and havoc have been wreaked. Then, they dispense their odd sense of justice: Stardust turns a fifth columnist into a rat (with a human face, no less), Fantomah throws a mad scientist amongst a pack of his bloodthirsty gorillas (arms and legs flying from the pile of enclosing simian bodies), and spaceman Whirlwind Carter forces an alien race off the edge of a glacial cliff to their doom.
What was the point of these periodically tardy superheroes? Was the reason behind their lateness so the innocents would have reason to witness their powers?
New York was repeatedly the target of a typical Hanks’ baddie: Martian ogres fight over the skies of a blacked out Manhattan; other variations of Martian take over New York, only to be gassed; and in one, a tsunami wrecks the city.
But through all the mutations, distortions, stock punches, and crudely drawn figures, there is a certain beauty to Hanks’ work. Fantomah, when not vamped out with a skull for a head, is a lovely blonde with supple curves. People in his stories, usually under the influence of a cosmic raygun, float upwards into the sky and space. A few of his stories feature figures solemnly floating in the stratosphere above the green and blue Earth – as if Rene Magritte went just a little more cosmic on his canvases. Of course, in typical Hanks’ style, all the figures fall back to Earth in one story, crushed to death by the fall.
His stories aren’t about justice, so much as vengeance, his characters acting as gods or demi-gods, meting out death to their enemies. The only exception to the rule is Big Red McLane, the lumberjack (later turned boxer), who is the only example of strip continuity in Hanks’ entire arsenal, and the only legitimate “good guy”.
Eisner and Iger parted ways with Fox, after the publisher not only failed to pay them, but also over a lawsuit with the future DC Comics. Amongst the first stories for Fox was Wonder Man, a red-clad bulletproof superhero with a magic Tibetan ring. Combined with his timid alter-ego, he was an awful lot like Superman for the time. National Comics thought so, and took it to court. When Eisner refused to testify that Wonder Man was his idea (he had the notes given to him by Fox, outlining the character), Fox withheld their $3,000 payment from them.
Eisner left Universal Phoenix to produce his own comic strip, The Spirit, in a special color Sunday supplement, while Iger kept producing and packaging comic book stories. Victor Fox died of a heart attack in the late ‘50s, after several more years of publishing comics on and off between bankruptcies. Fletcher Hanks stopped appearing in comics after just a few years.
History shows that Fletcher Hanks wasn’t a gentle or poetic soul: he started his life as a brash young man and ended it frozen on a park bench as an old man. He was violent and selfish, a drunkard and abusive father. Chances are, he didn’t give the Fox Comics stories more thought than it took to do them, getting his page rate for the next round at the nearby pub in Tudor City. And, chances are also that we twitch and wrack our brains to find some deeper-seated meaning in his work, looking between the panels of these stories that are pure genius in their bizarre approach and ugly world, and impose our own views of his nightmarish stories.
Chances are, after reading both highly recommended compilations of the artist’s work by Fantagraphics – I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Creation! – back to back, the brain winds up fried and turned to mush, a numbing fix of comics that would have been immensely successful as “comix” twenty plus years later.
For more on Victor Fox, read Christopher's book that details the publishing history of Fox and The Blue Beetle. Also highly recommended is historian Jon Berk's in-depth article on Fox Comics available here.
Also recommended is Paul Karasik's site on Fletcher Hanks, as well as both his compilations from Fantagraphics.
Friday, December 11, 2009
For the Love of Comics #6: The Shadow in the Great Depression
It was in the beginning months of the Great Depression, on the night of Thursday, July, 31, 1930 (not quite a year after the Stock Market Crash of October, 1929) that a sinister laugh first pierced the airwaves of America and began a cultural phenomena that echoed well past the end of the Depression in everything from pulp magazines to movie serials.
Pulp magazine publisher Street and Smith decided to promote their magazines on radio with Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, a thirty-minute program on CBS radio at 9:30 p.m. which featured a story from the Detective Story pulp due out the following day. The voice of the enigmatic host, The Shadow, spoke its first words after that haunting laugh:
“I...am The Shadow! Conscience is a taskmaster no crook can escape. It is a jeering shadow even in the blackest lives. The Shadow knows...and you too shall know if you listen as Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine relates for you the story of...The House of Death.”
In truth, the character was a mere host created by Dave Christman of Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising and writer Bill Sweets, and wasn’t named until fledgling scriptwriter Harry Charlot came up with the character’s moniker (Charlot, in a move out of a pulp, later wound up mysteriously dead in a Bowery flophouse in 1935, and wire services would erroneously credit him as the writer of The Shadow pulp novels). Jimmy LaCurto was the actor who first supplied the sinister voice of the enigmatic Shadow, but was soon replaced by fellow Detective Story regular Frank Readick, Jr., his ominous voice a great contrast to his slight 5’6” and 135 pound frame.
The Shadow stole the show, literally, as listeners raided newstands requesting The Shadow, rather than Detective Story Magazine. The overwhelming demand and request for The Shadow led Street & Smith manager Henry William Ralston to publish a regular Shadow pulp magazine.
Needing a story in a short amount of time, editor-in-chief Frank Blackwell contacted 33-year old magician/journalist Walter B. Gibson to write a Shadow feature novel, with the promise of three more on a quarterly basis if the initial outing was satisfactory.
Gibson had ghosted books for magicians such as Harry Houdini, Blackstone and Thurston, as well as having written many newspaper puzzles, articles, and features. Due to his amazing speed in writing, Gibson had been chosen to first develop a character for the voice that had been both scaring and entertaining America for around a year. Blackwell had started a contest in Detective Story Magazine, dropping clues as to The Shadow’s appearance, at roughly the same time Gibson began writing his first Shadow outing under the pen name of Maxwell Grant. The Shadow had been described, through the clues, as a tall and thin man in his early 40’s, with hawk-like features and blond hair, and a powerful athlete with a keen and powerful deductive mind.
“The Living Shadow,” the first Shadow pulp novel, was finished ahead of schedule, thanks to Gibson’s speedy writing habits: he was known to smoke an average of four packs of cigarettes a day, and typed so fast that his fingers bled. Gibson’s Shadow was a dark figure, clad in black robes and slouch hat, who recruited those he saved as agents. The first scene in “The Living Shadow” involves The Shadow saving a young man, Harry Vincent, from committing suicide by jumping off a bridge. Promising a life of adventure for Vincent, “The Living Shadow” follows Vincent’s adventure, with The Shadow appearing from to rescue him, either as himself or in one of many masterful disguises.
One can easily see the appeal behind “The Living Shadow,” in the times of the Great Depression: not only is the relative bleakness of the period well represented, but for as much of “The Living Shadow” that is rooted in the grim reality of the time, there is an equal amount of semi-believable fantasy involved. The main focus (or proxy hero) of the story is Harry Vincent, who plays the “everyman” to the seemingly omniscient Shadow. The arrangement that Vincent holds with The Shadow is that he will become his field agent in exchange for The Shadow’s seemingly limitless financial support. Work was hard enough to come by in the Depression, and the idea of a philanthropic adventurer/ employer who would usher in a life of excitement was the stuff of dreams.
While The Shadow worked behind the scenes in the early novels, his participation became more active by the mid-1930’s. The second Shadow novel, “The Eyes of the Shadow,” introduced The Shadow’s alter ego as millionaire Lamont Cranston. The following novel, “The Shadow Laughs!” established that the nebulous Shadow used Cranston as only one of many identities, eventually meeting up with the real Cranston when the travelling millionaire returned to the city.
Shortly after his pulp debut in the summer of 1931, The Shadow made his big screen debut with a series of six two-reel films based upon Detective Story radio shows, appearing only as a silhouette. The Shadow crept through radioland through 1935, hosting everything from Street & Smith’s Detective Story and then Love Story Dramas programs! After actor Frank Readick’s vocal portrayal of The Shadow in The Blue Coal Radio Revue on CBS from September, 1931 to June, 1932, The Shadow had become more than a mere host by October of 1932’s Shadow program, often speaking as a character’s conscience. Due to a disagreement between Street & Smith and sponsor Blue Coal regarding the direction of The Shadow program, the show ended on March 27, 1935. Where Blue Coal wanted The Shadow relegated to host status, Street & Smith wanted a program starring the crimefighter; the result was that the character would go on radio hiatus for two years.
It wasn’t until seven years after his pulp debut, in 1937’s “The Shadow Unmasks,” that The Shadow’s true identity was established as missing aviator and spy Kent Allard. Author Gibson had The Shadow employ his true Allard identity (in hand with the Cranston one) for only a few more years, ultimately abandoning it by 1940.
1937 also marked the debut of The Shadow in his own half-hour radio program on the Mutual Radio Network. Orson Welles, then the twenty-two year old “boy wonder” of Broadway, was cast in the title role. Many changes were made in order to translate the mysterious Shadow to the airwaves: the first was that, rather than The Shadow using the Lamont Cranston identity as a cover, he was Lamont Cranston using The Shadow identity. The only of The Shadow’s agents to make it to radio was Harry Vincent, who was only featured in the premiere episode, “The Death House Rescue,” but soon replaced by a new character that would present a contrast to the deepness of Welles’s voice in the next episode. Margot Lane, played by Agnes Moorehead, was introduced as Cranston’s “lovely friend and companion,” who often helped (or was helped by) The Shadow in his cases.
The most distinct change was in The Shadow’s abilities: rather than having an aptitude for skulking in the shadows (as in the pulps), The Shadow now possessed telepathic abilities learned from Tibet, and the hypnotic ability to “cloud men’s minds so that they can not see him.” Due to this new ability, The Shadow did not require his black cloak or slouch hat, as he was always invisible to his villains, often driving them to their deaths with his disembodied taunting.
The Shadow radio program was immensely successful, partially due to the abilities of the young Welles, who received $185 a week for his portrayal of the crime fighter. As part of his contract with sponsor Blue Coal, Welles was not required to attend rehearsals, having the run-throughs attended by assistants Richard Wilson and Bill Alland. Still, Welles, without having read the script prior to the broadcast, managed to pull off an impressive and defining Shadow. The one thing that Welles couldn’t master, however, was The Shadow’s eerie trademark laugh: as a result, all opening and ending segments incorporated a recording of predecessor Frank Readick reciting “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” and “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit...”
Welles left The Shadow program, after having brought it daytime radio’s highest ratings, to start The Mercury Theatre of the Air, which would produce the affecting and landmark adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that sent a nation in a panic. Supporting cast member Bill Johnstone won the role of Lamont/The Shadow, and remained for five seasons, beginning on September 25, 1938, and lasting until well through the Depression. Due to the leaving of script editor Edith Meiser, Margot devolved from an able-bodied agent to the typical damsel-in-distress rampant in most popular fiction. The Shadow had been altered shortly after Johnstone took up the microphone, turning into a kinder crimefighter, as opposed to the almost merciless avenger of Welles' run.
Despite that fact that the radio Shadow, due partially to his not dispensing justice with firearms, remained less violent and graphic, it still managed to reflect the late Depression era culture that so many other programs may have optimistically tried to avoid…or cynically embraced. The grimness of the 1938 Summer episode “The Blind Beggar Dies,” in which The Shadow bands together with a group of hobos and street people (even utilizing the written Hobo language to communicate) to avenge the murder of a blind street singer, steeps itself in the reality of the destitute American drifter who was a normal fixture of the Depression. That’s not to say that The Shadow wouldn’t delve into the realm of the strange and bizarre, however, as Lamont and Margot found themselves against radioactive rays, and even the walking dead. No matter where his invisible feet tread, The Shadow programs always contained a fair share of bone-chilling moments (March 2, 1941’s “Death Rides a Broomstick,” where a dead witch’s curse culminates in the wiping out of an entire ancestral line, still sends chills up this writer’s spine. At the end of the cursed man’s life, the witch’s cackle can be heard, and Lamont assures Margot and himself that it is “just the wind”).
Perhaps the most faithful interpretation of The Shadow (even more faithful than the radio program) came in 1940, when Columbia Pictures produced a fifteen-chapter serial starring actor Victor Jory as The Shadow/ Lamont Cranston. Jory carried himself convincingly as Cranston, and fairly well as The Shadow, mostly due to his hawkish, yet handsome, features and commanding presence. Throughout fifteen chapters, The Shadow battled the invisible Black Tiger through collapsing rooms, wrecked cars, and exploding substances. However, where most serial heroes escaped their cliffhangers, The Shadow just lived through them, escaping in only a handful of the chapters (he survives roughly six collapsing rooms, only to get up and dust himself off in the next chapters!). Rather than a playboy and amatuer detective, Cranston was an established criminal scientist, with Veda Ann Borg’s Margo as his lab assistant and Roger Moore’s Harry Vincent as his chauffeur and right-hand man. A few elements were culled from “The Living Shadow”: one of The Shadow’s undercover aliases in the first pulp adventure was an Oriental named Ling Chow who worked at a curio shop in Chinatown, while Lamont Cranston’s only alias (aside from his black-garbed alter ego) was Lin Chang, an underworld contact who owned a small curio shop. It could also be argued that, due to his invisible nature, the Black Tiger was a stand-in for Shiwan Khan, master of invisibility, and archfoe of The Shadow’s from the pulps.
Also in 1940, aside from the movie serial, The Shadow creeped upon the comic strip sections. Newspaper comic strips were, in the Great Depression, a relatively affordable and popular form of entertainment. The Ledger Syndicate had both Walter Gibson and artist Vernon Greene produce a Shadow daily comic strip. The strip didn’t quite last two years, as paper shortages caused after Pearl Harbor (when America joined World War II) sounded its death knell. The Shadow comic book by Street & Smith, which also adapted from the Gibson pulps, lasted into 1946, featuring both newly produced stories and repastings of the strip.
The Shadow radio show eventually had effected the pulp novels. June 15, 1941’s “The Thunder King” novel opened with Margo Lane waiting for Lamont Cranston, establishing her as one of The Shadow’s primary field agents and a companion to Lamont in the remaining novels. The Shadow himself had started to become less mysterious and bloodthirsty, and more emphasis had been placed upon his role as a crimefighter rather than a force of justice and vengeance. The ultimate example of the radio show influence was when, in “The Star of Delhi” (the novel following “The Thunder King”), The Shadow utilizes arch-enemy Shiwan Khan’s ability to become invisible and “...produce the semblance of a power through which he could cloud men’s minds.”
The Shadow continued to prosper throughout the war years, with the pulp magazine folding in 1949, and the radio show ending on December 26, 1954 (surely a rotten late Christmas present for Shadow fans!). The Shadow lived through series of paperback novels, comic books, and a big-budget movie in the 1990’s. While he established the multi-media hero (along with the likes of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet), The Shadow still lives on in spurts, appearing in one form or another, but only enjoying a limited degree of success each time.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
David Mack Post Script
Graphically Speaking: Dark Horse Reprints Casper the Friendly Ghost
Casper the Friendly Ghost just turned 60 this year, and Dark Horse Comics celebrates with a hardcover reprinting two of his early comics appearances: 1949’s Casper the Friendly Ghost #1 from St. John’s Publishing, and 1952’s Harvey Comics Hits #61, published by the ghost boy’s eventual permanent home.
Casper had a rather convoluted origin: he was created by cartoonist Seymour Reit and animator Joe Oriolo in an unpublished story, The Friendly Ghost. The Friendly Ghost became a 1945 cartoon from Paramount’s Famous Studios (the in-house animation studio that took over the Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons). Launching a series of cartoons, Casper didn’t actually gain a name until he first saw a four-color non-life in the St. John’s comic book.
The Dark Horse volume gives Casper’s first appearances in comics, reproduced in full color on slick paper, and reproduces both issues in their entireties, back-up stories included. When you consider that it only costs a few cents shy of ten bucks, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
The typical Casper story has the central conflict of Casper not fitting in with the spooky world of ghosts, and going out to seek friendship in a world scared of ghosts. The first story in the St. John’s issue is no different, with Casper setting out, scaring everyone from horseback riders to roosters, and finally making friends with a young prince. It turns out that the prince’s father has just been killed by his crooked uncle, and Casper steps in to save the day, frightening the uncle and executioner henchman off After a Herman and Katnip story (think Tom and Jerry, but not vocally challenged), Baby Huey, and a couple others, we find Casper flunking out of ghost school, and then saving a new human friend’s dog from an evil dogcatcher.The stories in the St. John’s Casper #1 the same pattern of social rejection, departure, and then acceptance in the outside world after a good deed (either Casper’s scaring the evil uncle away, or Baby Huey defeating a chicken-hungry fox).They are, simply, fun children’s comics. Not Walt Kelly brilliant, but fun enough.Casper’s world changes when he goes to Harvey: rather than living around real-life humans, his world is populated by anthromorphic animals. It’s a bit weird when, in one story, he scares two bears in swimsuits on a beach, and the next story a vicious killer bear in the woods. Casper would “live” at Harvey for decades to come; the stories from the first appearance there are beautifully delineated, and just a real joy to read. Casper goes from good deed to good deed, whether it’s finding a boy lost in the woods, or nabbing two bank robbers.
The only downside of this volume is the lack of biographical material: no background copy is provided. While it’s understandable that the credits may have been lost to both time and the anonymity of staff artists and freelancers not able to sign their work, some background on Paramount, Reit and Oriolo would be a great addition for the older readers.But the kids? They’re going to love it as is. And that is a great thing.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Q and A: Sgt. Rock's Robert Kanigher in 1999
This interview with the late and great Robert Kanigher was conducted in 1999, right as I was starting to research the Golden Age Blue Beetle comic book (later the basis for my first book, The Blue Beetle: His Many Lives from 1939 to Today). After initially refusing an interview, Mr. Kanigher then decided to go ahead. He was mercurial, brilliant, and well-spoken, and the results of our insightful chat are below.
CHRISTOPHER IRVING: I wanted to see if you had any insight that you could offer me.
ROBERT KANIGHER: I wrote 100 pages a week. I created The Bouncer, the first character I created. After that, I created the rest for DC, probably 100 characters, from Sgt. Rock to Metal Men, Black Canary, Star Sapphire, Rose and Thorn, The Fiddler was a villain. Lee Elias complained; he played the fiddle and said “I can’t use the fiddle like a bow and arrow.” Every time he did the strip, he kept complaining about it. I also created Poison Ivy, who became a movie star.
CI: Yeah, Uma Thurman in Batman and Robin.
RK: Yes, that single character made her a movie star. She went from there to other pictures. Schwartzenegger bought the movie rights to Sgt. Rock and Easy Company.
CI: Do you know if he’s doing anything with it?
RK: I did about 420 stories about Rock and Easy. They were so realistic that I received mail from servicemen who claimed to have served with Rock. I received a letter from Vietnam; the sergeant said he was calling himself Sgt. Rock, they had renamed themselves Easy Company, and the other men were taking the names of the characters that I created: Little Sureshot, Loudman, Bulldozer, Canary (Canary sings the birds out of the trees). Anyways, they changed the names of an entire frontline company!
CI: That’s something else, that has got to be pretty flattering.
RK: It’s unbelievable. I just found out that, all of a sudden, I seem to be getting Internet messages: I seem to be in the Internet! I don’t know who did it. I don’t bother to seek those sources...I like it, because it ranges from somebody from Montana [to Snyder] “I understand that you received a letter of recommendation for Kanigher’s story..do you like it?”
“Like it? I’m rabid about it! I have a friend who is even more so!” Another one came that “Kanigher should be stood up against a wall and shot for writing Blitzkrieg and Enemy Ace and Panzer.” I wrote that from the German point of view. Enemy Ace is considered (I’m quoting and not making it up) “...a world-wide achievement. There is nothing like it in Europe or anywhere in the world.” I made a sympathetic character who kills French, British, Americans. Neal Adams told me that, in Europe, they consider him the most psychological, complex character in all of American comics.
CI: You said that you wrote some The Blue Beetle stories...
RK: [This magazine] is called The Comic World: Vol. 1, No. 18; bimonthly by Robert Jennings, RFD 2, Whiting Rd., Dudley MA. 01570. This is September, 1978. Victor Fox was the publisher.
CI: He was a former accountant at DC.
RK: Fox had nothing to do with DC.
CI: I’d heard that he was an accountant back in the day.
RK: An accountant!? Oh. Jack Liebowitz was an accountant for Harry Donenfeld, who was a certified alcoholic. There are so many things that they get wrong, that it’s unbelievable.
CI: Did you write the first The Blue Beetle story?
RK: “Kanigher may never have written for comics before,” it’s true; I never wrote comics, I never read comics. I never looked at comics. “But he was a natural-born storyteller with an ability to build fast-moving plots and intricate subplots into the framework of a short comics story. Once he ironed out his weak points, he began to turn out stories by the hundreds. He sold work to the MLJ titles, and then some to DC. He sold so many to DC, and they were of such consistently high quality that he eventually landed a job as editor there in 1945.” I didn’t land a job, they called me up and invited me as a writer/ editor. Liebowitz and Shelly Mayer invited me as an editor. I said “I can make more money without even getting out of my pajamas at home.”
They said “We want you to be a writer and an editor; to be a staff editor and to be a freelance writer.” Anyway, Jennings writes “...mixed in with the bad or foolish were occasional episodes that really stand out. Episodes that were so good, it seems incredible that any Fox character, even The The Blue Beetle, should be entitled to that. One such adventure involved a scientist with a substance called ‘homodesiline,’ which has the ability to clone double cells of animals and humans. In other words, rapid cloning process.”
I was the first for many things.
There are some things that Jenette Kahn killed. I could have been with the first female astronauts. This is why I left. I was the sole editor and writer of Wonder Woman for 22 years. Remember, I never read or saw a comic book. Even after I began writing them, I never looked at them. Once I proofed a book of mine, I never looked at it. Or anything that anybody else was doing while I was there as an editor-writer, or at Marvel.
I was visiting Marvel, Joe [Kubert] told me to come over. When [Jim] Shooter heard my page rate was $50 a page. Giordano didn’t want to give me more, but Giordano said something [sort of] crap. Carmine [Infantino] said that they wired up the sales; war books were very high sellers consistently.
Anyway, Jim says “$50 a page for you? You’re getting $65 -- my rate, retroactively.”
I don’t know why you’d want to write about the The Blue Beetle.
CI: I’m doing a comprehensive story because nobody has before. There’s been an issue recently as to which artist created the character...
RB: I’m a painter, and when I say painter, there is no artist in the field. There are no artists in the field. They are ILLUSTRATORS, they ILLUSTRATE the written or verbal word. I am a writer and an artist. I’m an artist because I start with a blank canvas. I promised Ross Andru the wedding present of an oil painting. This story is legendary.
So, I brought along paints, pigments, a brush, a pallete knife, and a stretched canvas. It was after work and people gathered around. I got down on my hands and knees (that’s the way I do oils, on the floor). He said “Where’s your sketch?”
I said “No sketch.”
“What’s your subject matter?”
“No subject matter.”
“What are you going to paint?”
I said “The painting will tell me what to do.” I always start with a wet canvas. In less than an hour and a half, I had a painting.
He said “If I painted like that it would kill me.”
He’s very famous, and he became the head of an Oregon advertising agency.
He said “Kanigher eats artists for breakfast and spits them out for lunch,” which is ridiculous! I say I’m a writer because I start with a blank page. No plot. That’s why Fox hired me. I know nothing.
I answered an ad (things were very bad at our house, economically) and walked into an office about a mile long. At the end of it is a desk about the size of a football field. Behind it is a bald head.
The bald head tells me “Tell me a story.”
Without breaking stride, I said “A skeleton is driving an open convertible from Times Square (not someone in a costume, but a real skeleton) and people are running in sheer panic.”
He said “I like a man who thinks on his feet.” C.W. Scott, my editor. That was it.
CI: That’s something else. Great, I really appreciate your help, Mr. Kanigher...
RK: When I started Rock and Easy Company thirty years ago, as I was writing, I realized what I had and said “Look, Joe, I’m going to write a novel of Rock and Easy--a NOVEL for Random House, or Putnam, and you’ll illustrate it. It had never been done before, and the movies would grab it because it’s all down there. My captions and dialogue and your illustrations are all the same, it’s what Hitchcock is like scene by scene.”
But, he was building his house. We could have been first.
Anyway, that’s it.
CI: Thank you so much, I appreciate your time.
RK: Is there anything more?
CI: No, I don’t think so, since you can’t recall who Nicholas was.
RK: Oh, God.
CI: Would you happen to know who Chuck Cuidera was?
RK: No. Let me put it this way: My work is in comics, I was never in comics, but I would never read comics. I never ate with, drank with, gossiped with the comic people. Their world is comics. That’s why comics is a bunch of crap. They know nothing of the outside world. They know nothing of art, of music. Everything I learned from Rapheal (you name it)...I put in my stories. NOT pedantically, but inside they gave me levels which they can know nothing about, because all they do are rewriting comics. The illustrators (or as you would call them: artists) copy from each other and, if you go back long enough, you get some intelligent ones that copy from Beardsley or DaVinci, but they don’t know that. What you’re getting is SHIT.
Mort Meskin is the guy that said “If I painted like that, it would kill me.”
You see, there are a lot of people...demonology is spread about me, which is untrue. A lot of people think I fired Alex Toth. I would never fire talent--number one. Number two--Alex Toth was drawing my Johnny Thunder, the western Johnny Thunder. I also created The Trigger Twins. Anyway, Julie Schwartz was the editor.
I couldn’t have fired Alex if I wanted to (and I wouldn’t have), because I wasn’t the editor. Julie fired him for this unbelievable reason. We shared an office together. I had nothing against him. Whenever he got into a jam, he asked me for a script. What I did was, since our offices were ass to ass, I built a tiny wall of books between us so I didn’t have to see his face. He was very methodical: he always ate in, and he would play cards with Milty Snappins. Alex used to come in at noontime for work he’d already done. His check was in Julie’s desk, in the top drawer. All he had to do was open it and give it to him.
How long would that take? Five seconds. He refused to give it to him because he “dared to enter the office of an editor at lunchtime.” Alex started to yell, Julie started to yell, and Julie fired him. Julie didn’t have the GUTS to say that he fired him, not me. But people thought that, since I created Johnny Thunder (which Alex drew) and I created The Trigger Twins, and I designed all the covers (I always designed the covers of any books that I edited and any feature stories that I always did; I happened to have the gift for that).
When Joe Kubert left to do The Green Berets, I took one look at the strip and said “It’s a still-life, it’s not as good as any of the Easy Company work that he did. There is no passion, there is no emotion, there is no movement.” Despite all of the publicity, and John Wayne posing for Joe, it bombed.
Who did I have to do Rock and Haunted Tank? Russ Heath, who had been in Chicago doing [Little] Annie Fanny. I sent him scripts, and when he said he started it, I knew he hadn’t started it. When he said he was halfway through, I knew he had started it. When he mailed it, I knew he hadn’t finished it yet. I described the covers (this is over the phone) and, as Joe said, I speak in pictures. He said he could draw, without having ever been there, something I described. The covers came back from Russ: perfect covers, over the phone, while he had been in Chicago. That’s never been done before. Have you ever heard of it?
CI: But I have to say that your skeleton driving put a pretty vivid picture in my head.
RK: Metal Men, there is a legend about Metal Men. I produced it in ten days, from a single sentence. With editors, assistant editors, conversations, tapes -- they can’t put out a book in two months. I, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito...I stopped by Irwin Donenfeld and he said “I know it’s not your turn to do Showcase [I did two to three times as many Showcases as the other editors], but they haven’t come up with a Showcase, and we need a Showcase. Do you have any ideas?”
I said “Metal Men. I’d write them with human characteristics but, nevertheless, keeping their metallic characteristics.”
He said “Do it.” So, I took my daughter...on Saturdays to Juliard for ballet. My Buick Convertible had the top down in Winter (laughter) and I started writing in the notebook. Do you know how many characters there are in Metal Men?
CI: Five of them, right? Lead, Mercury, Gold, Tin, and I want to say Aluminum but I know it’s not right.
RK: Tina, Platinum! Dr. Magnus, and the villain was Chemo!
Anyway, I did the twenty-three pages on Saturday. My wife typed it up on Sunday. I had called Ross [Andru] to come in Monday morning. He came in Monday morning. I gave him page one of the script, and I gave him a single page of blank typing paper. I said “Go into production. No matter how many panels I may have, I want you to get it all on one page. When you’re finished, come back to me. You can give me a vertical line for a figure, horizontal for horizon, a circle for a head. I don’t give a damn what, just do it.”
I was then conducting my editorial business. He came back to me, and I told him I wanted to rough, so I was able to make one panel across out of three or four, or three or four across out of one. I was able to make a vertical out of a horizontal, or a horizontal out of a vertical. I was able to tell him “I want you to make this panel one inch shorter or one inch less than the regular size, so that you’ll be able to have an action break through the panel.”
I read Mark Evanier’s column [and] he said that he interviewed Ross, and knew that Ross was unhappy with the work that he did. There was always something more that he wanted to do. Ross said (I don’t have it here, so I don’t remember exactly what he said) “When Bob gave me the script to THE Metal Men, I knew that I had an impossible deadline, but I also knew that if I could get it in in the time he gave me, it could be mine. Of course, I was sure there would be a series, and [Kanigher] designed it so that it would never be able to do again! The one thing I couldn’t understand, was why did Bob create characters which engendered 7,000 complementary letters for the first issue, why did he kill them all in the first issue!?” (Laughter)
I did it because I didn’t want to do another one!
CI: Yet they brought them back.
RK: I didn’t have a choice. What gave me the idea? A single sentence. I never took science, I regret to say. I prefer to make up my own world of science. I read in a science book, before I started. It was a battered old volume. It said “A single strand of hair can be stretched the distance of a mile.” That told me how to handle them all.
I used their characteristics, metallic characteristics for all those wierd shapes. All I could remember about Mercury was that my mother stuck it in my behind when I was a kid and it went up and down. When Mercury got mad, he went up and steam came up from him and so on. He thought he should be leader.
Tin, I made him with an inferiority complex. How did I show it? I gave him a stammer. That’s the way I write. It flows, and I never plot. I start form a line, and it just flows. I don’t know how they do it.
CI: I know people who will toil away at something for years, and keep writing and writing with the belief that if they keep plotting it will make it a good story. But it’ll be crap if you don’t start out with a good idea.
RK: Like Meskin, who saw me do a completed oil in an hour and a half and say “It wil kill me if I tried to paint that.” I am highly complemented in the world. I feel that there is some force inside me, using me as a conduit. There is no hesitation that just flows. I write poetry. I look at it ten minutes later, and I don’t know how it got there. I just don’t know.
I can’t tell you anything more about The Blue Beetle.
CI: I do appreciate everything you’ve told me, Mr. Kanigher. It’s really tough to find any first person accounts. Unfortunately, not too many writers or artists are easy to find or even around anymore -
RK: They’re all dead! God dammit! It’s shocking, out of all nine editors at DC, two are left. It’s a tragedy, and people like you are trying to get the so-called Golden Age. You know that I’m responsible for the Silver Age?
CI: Are we talking about the Barry Allen Flash in Showcase #4?
RK: Correct.
CI: That’s mighty impressive.
RK: Not only that, but I designed the legendary cover.
CI: The film strip with Flash bursting out of it.
RK: That’s right. Julius told everyone that Carmine did it. Carmine denied it twice in a great big interview. I forgot the name of the editor, but he called me up and I said “no” before he asked me what he wanted to. He questioned Carmine twice about The Flash, and said “Kanigher all the way.” Not only that, but he gave me a rough of the cover that everybody credits me with. You see, there’s a lot of things going on comics because of stupidity, lack of integrity. If I were to tell you the truth...
I took the place of an editor who died. At breakfast I came in. Naturally, I called switchboard and said “Reroute all my appointments and calls to his office. I’m setting up HQ here.” I look to see what inventory he had. I found out that he kept every carbon of mine for the past several years, drew a line through my title. He also got kickbacks from DC: $76,000. You’d never know it, no one would know that.
CI: My God!
RK: I saw it first. I picked up twelve scripts of mine. I said “I’m not gonna tell anyone, I don’t want to embarass the family. I’ll write one script a month with his title, because the inventory people won’t have a script. They only have the ones that I did. All right, that’s not bad, I’ll do one a month.”
Then, twelve became twenty, became thirty, became fifty. I called Mort and Jay and said “For God’s sake, come in here.”
They said “You ought to speak to Jack.”
“I can’t do it.”
They said “You’ve gotta do it.”
Do you know that? Nobody knows that, it was kept secret.
Dash Shaw Gets Animated!
We're happy to spread the news and work of Dash Shaw, auteur of Bottomless Belly Button, and one of the first subjects covered on Graphic NYC. Dash has just started The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century, a series of web cartoons for Independent Film Channel (IFC) that contain the dreaminess and whimsy of a Michel Gondry film with the sci-fi cerebral quality of a Philip K. Dick.
Kabuki and Daredevil's David Mack: Breaking Panel Borders
Monday, December 7, 2009
Influencing Comics #3: Michel Fiffe's Top 5 Non Comics Influences
As soon as I was asked to cite my non-comics influences, a few people immediately came to mind. I tried to think of others, some lesser known folks deserving more recognition or even some recently appreciated genius that is currently influencing me. That would've been cheating, though, because the few names that initially popped in my head are clearly the ones that have made a profound impact on me. In looking back, I noticed that I had stopped following their work at one point or another, only to eventually rediscover them and still be enthralled by their brilliance.
Mike Patton, musician, songwriter, producer:
Sure, there's a part of me that wouldn't mind if Patton rapped over some funk metal while wearing fluorescent clown gear, but the thing that sets him apart is his genuine passion for music and sound, his prolific and diverse projects, and his incredible vocal ability. C'mon, he's Mike Patton!
George Groszartist, painter:
I immediately fell in love with his art when I flipped through an Art History book in high school. He's one of the major reasons I relate to ink work the way I do. Grosz mastered paint and collage, but it's his bold, choppy line that makes me want to break my nibs and start over again. On top of that, he was on Hitler's shit list. Grosz's art put his life at risk, and yet he still created it in the face of chaos.
More on Geroge Grosz.Ayn Randnovelist, philosopher:
I think a lot of people mistake "do your own thing" as a license to be an asshole when reading Rand's work. However, her first opus about rational self-interest, The Fountainhead, was perfect for a frustrated young man like me. Through the book, Rand reassured me that I needn't apologize for my ambition or give up my dreams. I may not agree with her politics, but her fiction still reminds me that "doing your own thing" is a noble endeavor.
Stevie B, singer, songwriter:
Wedged between early hip-hop and dance music was "Freestyle." Stevie B remains the undisputed King of "Freestyle". Car radios would fill the Miami airwaves with his hit Spring Love when I was a kid, preparing me for heartbreak yet celebrating the promise of tomorrow. You had to be there.
David Lynch,filmmaker:
It makes me extremely happy that a creator of Lynch's stature is still challenging himself and as a result, still creating compelling movies. I'd also say that he "bucks the system", but I kinda hate that phrase. Don't let the pundits fool you; his most recent movie, Inland Empire, is ambitious, intimate and beautiful.
© 2009 Michel Fiffe
Michel Fiffe is the creator of the ACT-I-VATE webcomics "ZEGAS", "PANORAMA" and "FUT MISO". He has worked on the mini-series "BRAWL", frequent issues of "Negative Burn", "Fall of Cthulhu" for Boom! Studios, and was a contributor to Smith Magazine's "Next Door Neighbor" Project.
