I don't know what comics meant to you, but if you're reading my blog or have found this entry through one of the other blog rolls, I suspect they were pretty integral to your esthetic growth. While long-form comics are going through some meliorated good times (even as the comic magazine or "book" might be in trouble as a form, the graphic novel is doing fine, and not only as it rides the commercial coattails of the explosion of US and general foreign interest in Japanese manga and European fumetti and their offshoots), the newspaper strips are in the kind of trouble that being associated with a dying form can bring (the other day, a bit of improvisational jam between daily strip cartoonists got essentially no attention that I was aware of, beyong the strips themselves...a dragon in Lio reaching over and eating the eponymous Fred Bassett out of a neighboring strip, for example...)...but also are one of the forms of newspaper-related entertainment that can easily flourish on the web...and have certainly flourished, when they have made the "cut" of collection in book form, in the literary marketplace. Hence these lifelong favorites of mine, two folks who are infrequently credited, but should be, with helping to establish the "graphic novel" as a form even if they didn't use the term initially.
In fact, most of Jules Feiffer's early relevant work was more like graphic novelets, notably "Munro", about a child drafted into the post-Korean War US Army, and early on adapted for an animated short (and first collected, I believe, in Passionella and Other Stories). Fantagraphics Books, that enterprising if maddeningly non-punctual publisher, has produced several collections of of a set of the Collected Works, the first of which is already out of print (and collects strips which, I believe, predate "Munro" and the famous strips collected in the book under consideration)...and they have offered Explainers, which is still in print but hardly seems to have taken the world by storm commercially, despite being an apparently complete collection of the first decade of strips he began running in The Village Voice in 1956 and eventually elsewhere in syndication. Such collections of these as Sick, Sick, Sick once were potent commercial properties, and were much prized by me when I came across them. The mockery of (would-be and actual) sophisticates as well as the kinds of folks who bedevil those sophisticates is sometimes here still in larval form, but usually still carries a punch, and the historical interest of even the few weak strips is stong...this is the work that led to such other good work from Feiffer as his plays (such as Little Murders, somewhat unfairly overlooked in its film version and even better as a play), his nonfiction (about comics and other matters), and just the continuing good work that the latter-day Voice (and Washington Post) were fools to let go.
While Feiffer was blazing a trail in the "alternate" papers, Walt Kelly was famously doing much of the best satirical work in the daily press, his Pogo being one of the most fondly remembered strips by the diminishing number of folks who were able to catch it before Kelly's death in 1973...which was just before I stumbled across this, the last of his (slightly) augmented collections of the daily strip to be published during his life (at least, the "original," non-cherry-picking retrospective collections, as Kelly also issued), and one of the best-distributed (I'm not sure that too many of the others were ever released in mass-market paperback). Pogo and his fellow humanoid/(mostly) literate/humanoid animal denizens of the Okeefenokee Swamp were hugely influential, somewhat unsurprisngly, within the fantastic-fiction community, but also beyond it...only Al Capp, with L'il Abner (also set in the rural Southesst albeit with a mostly human cast), seemed to get in nearly as much trouble or have a very similar impact in their time (even if Charles Schulz and Johnny Hart might verge on their territory from time to time, and Gary Trudeau and his heirs were clearly their children). The strips in Impollutable Pogo took on Spiro Agnew when he was still a potent, if foolish, attack dog for the Nixon Adminsitration (and thus portrayed as such), particularly in tirades against popular culture and any form of dissent...and, as collected, were a fine vehicle for yet another illustration for one of the most pervasive of Pogo catchphrases, "We have met the enemy, and He Is Us." It was my introduction to the strip, and I quickly picked up as many of the collections as Simon and Schuster was still keeping in print in the '70s, and finding what I could among the older, OP titles. You could do similarly...any collection, particularly such Kelly-compiled volumes as I Go Pogo (including his volumes of long-form stories that were released originally in book form, such as The Jack Acid Society Black Book), could be a fine introduction, where one is needed. Perhaps Fantagraphics will be able to get around to Kelly soon (as they've promised)...even as the Schulz/Peanuts and Love and Rockets collections help keep them afloat in these tough times...
For more "forgtten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog...
8 comments:
Will you hate me if I say I never read comics in the newspaper? Just Archie and Veronica and the Superhero types. Great fan of those.
I would say that you were simply on the leading edge of the curve...but why have you boycotted the newspaper strips? Too little dolloped out at a time (I think it was Spider Robinson who noted it thus, "Imagine telling a story one paragraph per day." Hello, Twitter novels)?
Or did none of them appeal to you, even when collected? That would surprise me, given that you like the stuff apparently when presented in six-page-story formats (the Archie and DC and/or Marvel comics models). Did Philly have any papers with THE SPIRIT supplements back when?
I don't know why I didn't read them. We got the Bulletin in those days and I never got in the habit. A book always seemed more satisfying somehow. I didn't like the dollops of info-funny since I write ss now.
Ah, you beat me to it, Todd. I was working on a review of The Jack Acid Society Black Book for next week. For art and for biting satire, it's hard to top Kelly.
Jerry, that one has the little Klan kid story in it, I think, doesn't it? The baby animal under the junior-sized sheets parrots magnolious evil for a few lines. stuff passed along by his parents For His Own Good and Safety, of course, then quietly appends, "My parents love me." Kelly wrote that he never did anything that touched Lewis Carroll or Anatole France. I'd say, Close enough.
I wouldn't let my citation stop yours...
Of course, I've just listened to the inadequate FRESH AIR review of THE ART OF HARVEY KURTZMAN, from Kitchen Sink Press, that other uderfunded but doughty comics publisher. (Milo Miles thinks that HELP! didn't have much to do with comics. He's frequently that dull-witted.)
(A Feiffer that is in the same league as that Kelly is the VOICE strip in which a somewhat geeky More Sorrowrul Than Angry Young Man observes a woman he's attracted to from across a cafe or nightclub, predicting that her involvement with the man she's flirting with will be as unsatisfying as the others he's observed her initiating, over the weeks, we gather, that he hasn't bothered to speak to her. "While I, who understand her so well, have been here all along," he congratulates himself in his self-martyring smugness. Notable how many young men I've met don't get the last twist of Feiffer's knife there.)
Todd, you're thinking of The Pogo Poop Book, which comes later than Jack Acid. JA is a knock on the John Birch Society: Deacon Mushrat publishes a newsletter under that name, with his frequent co-conspirator Molester Mole writing as Bobby Base. As the Deacon puts it, "Bobby Base and Jack Acid come together for some salty doings... heh, heh."
"So that means," says Pogo, "the society is half base and half..."
In contrast, Poop goes after a variety of targets: fascists left, right and center; the Klan, as previously noted; automation; and religions of every stripe.
Also it's worth noting that Pogo is getting the Complete treatment, same as Peanuts, Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, Mickey Mouse and Hagar(!). Two hardbound collections have ben published by Fantagraphics so far, printing every Pogo strip in chronological order.
Hmm...I'm not sure I had the POOP BOOK, but bet you've looked at your copy more recently than I have mine.
I have picked up the first POGO volume from Fantagraphics, and will be catching up with the others with all deliberate speed (I hadn't been paying enough attention to note the second one had been released...).
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