2D Glasses

I would be first in line to buy a pair.

Axe Cop

Axe Cop Comic

As the site says, "Written By A 5 Year Old And Illustrated By His 29 Year Old Brother".

Be sure to read the "Ask Axe Cop" pieces. Question 3 is currently my favourite. If I could, I would relax in the exact same way.

Nick Craine

The above pic is "R. Crumb" by Nick Craine. A bigger scan is to be found on Nick's blog.

Memory lane time: as a Grade 9 (or was it 10? 11?) high school punk, arts-oriented, growing up in the sticks of Southern Ontario, I didn't exactly have direct inspiration in terms of peers. I had to look for it. And so I turned to the local comic book scene in the nearest biggish city- Guelph. That's where Nick Craine was, a comic artist with his very own title- The Cheese Heads.

Nick was kind enough to introduce me to the "urban" lifestyle: coffee, edgy comics like RAW, more coffee. Some more coffee.

He took a look at my modest sketch book with lots of crazy monsters and weird little comics, and simply encouraged me. Nothing fancy, he just said "This is good. Keep going". Proof-positive of how easy it is to influence someone (for their own growth) by simply taking a minute.

Today, Nick has widened his world of art into music, illustration, and film making. His official site is here.

And he's recently started a blog, which is here.

His blog is crafted in a personal and honest writing style, with thought-provoking insights. Not to mention the visual art work (which is wonderful).

Go check it out.

Eyebeam by Sam Hurt

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to inherit 3 collections of a very special comic strip- Eyebeam, by Sam Hurt.

Part of what I love about these strips (which are all from the 80s) is how deceptive they are. You might pass them by... unless you stop and really look.

Their visual style is not flashy. In fact, at times (in the early strips), it's a bit laboured. But that's part of what I like. They have the look of someone who NEEDED to make the comics, whether he was a great visual artist or not. As he went on, Hurt got more polished, but not in the early ones. Today, you see a lot of strips that are drawn by very practiced, trained artists- but that are simply not entertaining in any way. Yawn.

These strips are very honest, visually... and in time, as you keep reading, the rough style itself actually adds to the humour and enjoyment. Things look funny in this world.

But the main attraction is how creative the story lines are. They aren't really like anything else. Essentially, it's a bit of a sit com style, with recurring college-aged kids that inhabit a decidedly surreal landscape. But it's quietly surreal, nothing flashy. It's just... strange, with twists off into pretty crazy fantasy realms. It's nuts, but in a very controlled, funny, mature fashion.

Best of all- the characters are likable, and are sustainable over the long format. They use big, smart words (gasp!), have functioning brains, and spend time pondering the bigger things in life (but never at the expense of a good smile by panel 4).

Super charming, super entertaining... and very much under the radar.

It's also set near Austin, Texas, so it has to be cool.

Here's the archive. It seems Hurt is still working the title, but I haven't really checked the more recent entries out. I recommend starting at the beginning.

It's a lot more fun to read it in print. If you ever come across the collections, grab em all up.

Enjoy!

Pre-Code Horror Comics!

Scooped this link straight from the pages of Rue Morgue, Toronto's own amazing horror monthly.

The blog is thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com.

It features high rez scans of stories and ads from Pre-Comic Code horror comic books. The site is well laid out, loads fast, and is easy to navigate, making the act of reading the comics online pretty pain-free. It's not as good as having the comic in your hands (no wonderful smell of musty newsprint), but it's still a good time. And the blog is full of love for the gory mess that was pulpy shock stories.

Some of these tales are truly nasty and wild, so prepare your eyeballs...mwa ha ha haaaaaaaa...

By the way, as you can tell from the image below, the June issue of Rue Morgue features lengthy articles devoted to stop motion master Ray Harryhausen, so get it while it's in stores.

Seth

Speaking of Seth, here's a nice little essay he wrote for what's basically my fave Canadian magazine these days, The Walrus.

Of course, it also features a nice comic story as well.

Seth's work, generally speaking, is quiet, elegant, and infused with a melancholy that never drifts into self-pity. Well, rarely drifts into self-pity. Wonderful rainy day reading. And what better kind of day to read comics?!

Someday I'll try to pay his work more dues in a longer entry but if you don't know his stuff, consider yourself introduced...

Doug Wright-Canadian Cartoonist

I've been meaning to offer a modest intro to Doug Wright for a while, and sure enough, just as I get around to it, I discover there's a newly released collection of his work now available! Lovely timing...

This is a highly personal thing, as everyone who loves comics and comic art has their own faves. And those faves are often formed in childhood. And that's the case for my and the work of this artist. Quite simply, someone in my family (probably my Mom, and probably at the checkout counter in the grocery store) purchased a collection of Doug Wright's Family strips when I was a kid. I'm sure it went for about $1.00, at the time. That book lived in my house forever, until about 10 years ago when I grabbed it from a pile of old books and magazines, so I could keep it safe.

Growing up, I knew only that Wright's world really seemed like MY world, middle class (admittedly, whitebread as hell, but I am what I am), southern Ontario. The clothes, the houses, the toys, the TV shows seen playing in the backgrounds, the general "feel" of the world was real to me, in a way other strips simply weren't.

Thick knit sweaters in the fall, groceries picked up in big cardboard boxes, furniture by Sears and The Bay, "fruit cellars" used to store canned foods and more exotically, wonderfully stubby beer bottles...I could almost literally see myself in the strips.

Today, as an adult, and with a finer eye to craft and detail, I appreciate his work for how elegant and perfectly expressive it is. To put it WAY too simply, he was just so damn good at what he did! Compared to 95% of current strips, he's a complete master. Nothing is wasted, nothing distracts, but there's heaps of detail to engage the eye. It almost literally feels good, physically, to take in his stuff.

His work makes my eyeballs happy.

And his stories are even more relevant to me now, because I'm no longer the kid in the strip. I'm the Dad, struggling to keep his cool as he carries recycling bins to the garage while stepping on toy blocks and cars my kid has scattered around. It seems I have a life-long relationship with this artist, and how satisfying is that? To not outgrow something you love, but grow INTO it? So often we leave what we loved as kids behind (I'm looking at you, Marvel comics). It's not often we fall deeper in love the older we get.

I'm so happy to see him recognized now, with this released two volume collection. It features an intro by Lynn Johnston (Canadian comic strip superstar), and is collected by good ol' Seth (another masterful Canadian comic artist, and increasingly a huge champion of ensuring comic art is given the reproductions it deserves).

I've included just a couple of Doug Wright's stories, at the top of this entry, to entice you to search out more (and now you can, easily). Be sure to click on them, to enlarge. Enjoy!

And enjoy this CBC interview with Wright. It's a bit corny but hey- there's hamburgers on the BBQ, and that's never a bad thing.

I WAS A ‘50s TEEN AND MAD MAGAZINE HELPED SAVE MY LIFE!- Part 2 of 2

By Jeffrey Paull

THE ‘50s: SETTING THE SCENE
My ‘50s teen-aged world was a newly
peacetime world of corporate culture, mass
entertainment, status consciousness, the TV sitcom
with laugh track, the advertisers’ invention of
teen-agers as a separate market, and the end of polio
and the Hollywood studio system.

‘50s culture, at its sanctimonious worst, gave us uniformity, stereotyped symbols of men’s and women’s possible roles, hypo-cracy, consumerism, a false sense of freedom of choice, and a self-satisfied smugness as a nation that dismissed women, other nations and, as we called African Americans back then, Negros.

DO NOTHING TO ROCK THE BOAT!
DRESS, TALK, THINK, BUY, LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE!
DON'T CALL ATTENTION TO YOURSELF EXCEPT IN WAYS THAT HEW TO CURRENTLY APPROVED MYTHS.
BE ANODYNE! STAY ANODYNE!
BE ENTERTAINED BY ANODYNE!
And if it’s a movie, you can’t use the word
“pregnant”. (!)

I didn’t know that this middle class culture I moved through puberty in was anything other than the way things were meant to be. Like one sun in the sky, that’s all there ever was. This middle-class culture determined how I was supposed to deal with the world, but it didn’t determine how I experienced the world.

MAD MAGAZINE TO THE RESCUE
No wonder there arrived in our lives, the artists and writers and publishers of MAD magazine. No longer a comic book, MAD spoke to middle class white teen boys by humorously puncturing and deflating the self-important corporate and status-seeking parts of our lives. It gave us a way that we teens could question and mock the pushy, dopey (but catchy) ads, our enchantment with “our own” culture, and the everyday irritations of school, parents, and siblings. It ridiculed what we had no power over, and the goody-goody (sexless) expectations that attempted to quench our God-given hormones.

Only later would we understand that the silences, repressions, and hidden gaps in our lives came about because people were afraid to have ideas that were “different” or sensual. “Different” because they might be accused of being “pinkos”, “fellow travelers”, “dupes”, or Communists. “Sensual” because Americans have always sustained a Puritanical streak, and the anarchic energy of sex would have made hash of the simplistic ‘50s myths. So, of course and anyway, sexuality and sensuality oozed through the slick surfaces of our lives like blood through a bandage.

SIGNIFICANCE OF MAD’S HUMOUR
MAD wasn’t just funny-funny, like I Love Lucy or Jack Benny, it was funny in ways that mattered, that were attached to the powerfully convincing and overweening culture that surrounded us. MAD gave us a version of The Outsider’s point of view, and with its humour, gave us kids a way to talk to each other. It was an early clue to a new direction.

Other early clues to that new direction came from the Beat poets, Bridget Bardot’s naked tush, Elvis’s thrusts & Rock&Roll, '50s stand-up (Lenny Bruce and others) – Playwrite Lillian Hellman, song satirist Tom Lherer (he a Harvard - HARVARD! - mathematician!), Playboy magazine, Bettie Page, tranquillizers, and, eventually, the so-called '60s.

MAD taught us that if you used humour, you could shake off some of the oppressivenes of being a teenager living in a culture that wished to be as simplistic and sexless as an early TV sitcom. Like the local Hamburger Heaven, it was an island of temporary respite in a world that saw teenagers as what they weren’t: paper dolls that advertisers and anxious status-seeking parents wanted us to be.

MAD was a way of laughing and finding community rather than complaining. Which we did at other times.

I WAS A ‘50s TEEN AND MAD MAGAZINE HELPED SAVE MY LIFE!- Part 1 of 2

Jeffrey Paull is a life-long student and teacher of images, both
static and moving. His insights will appear on this blog upon 
occasion, and we'll all be the wiser for it, I think. The second part
of this piece will be published next Wednesday.


I discovered MAD magazine just about when I got to
jr. high - 7th grade -1952. This article describes a
bit of the culture back then, that made us kids need
MAD Magazine.

MAD magazine didn’t just happen to happen. The artists,
writers, and publisher who transformed it from a comic
book into a magazine of satire and parody had histories
that led them to think in ways they did. Their history
overlaps my history, which is why I didn’t just love MAD
magazine, I, and millions of other kids my age needed 
MAD magazine. It was a light at the end of a tunnel, an
umbrella during a miserable rain. It gave as much
pleasure as waking up on Saturday morning thinking
it’s only Friday, and then realizing . . .

But that ‘50s  culture was a reaction to the earlier
unstable and unreliable world my parents generation
had lived their lives in.

So my story of MAD magazine begins by going back in
time to the unstable and unreliable world of my parents
to help explain why ‘50s culture was as it was.

Pre-'50s BACKSTORY: MY PARENTS
My parents grew up in a world that seemed filled with
misery. Their parents escaped to the USA because of
pogroms in Poland and Russia. And on a larger scale . . .

- In 1914-18: WWI caused 20 million people to die.

-In 1918-20: The Spanish flu killed  25 million more
people around the world.

- From 1929-36: The Great Depression: about 27% of
Canadians couldn’t find jobs. There was no social
assistance. Nothing.

- From 1931-33: The Great Drought meant that very
little would grow over vast areas of North America,
and a plague of grasshoppers ate most of what was left.
For a sense of the scale, in Alberta alone 47,000 farmers
are driven off the land. In Saskatchewan, farmers’ income
dropped 72%

- From 1942-46: WWII  and the Nazis killed 60 million more
people.

- The Unites States, at war with Japan, dropped two atomic
bombs– “Little Boy” & “Fat Man”- on the cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing about 220,000 people, mostly civilians.

On the bright side, women were found to be quite capable of
working “men’s”jobs in factories, Penicillin was developed,
and Preston Sturges’ classy comedies were poking fun at American
culture.

Pre-'50s BACKSTORY: ME
Before I was of school age, I remember air raid drills and blackouts
during WWII, andthe neighbourhood air raid warden making sure all our
lights were truly out. Myparents, Aunt Evelyn and my grandmother waited
in the blackness for the “all clear” siren.

The war ended as I went to Grade 1, and my awareness of the world began
to extend beyond our house and my street. All I ever knew was peacetime
prosperity and people who looked forward, and never ever talked about
“back then”. This American optimism, however, hardened into a rigid code
of living that became The (Ugh!) ‘50s!, just as I approached my teenagery.

Dismal combo.

Part 2 will appear next Wednesday.

Barnaby- The Sly Little Comic Strip

Barnaby was primarily a daily comic strip, created by Crockett Johnson (who also created the extremely famous children's book, Harold and The Purple Crayon). Barnaby ran from 1942 till approximately 1946, when Johnson turned the strip over to other artists.

The strip revolved around an unassuming little boy named Barnaby Baxter and his fairy godfather, Mr. O’Malley. Long before Bart Simpson coined "Don't have a cow," Mr. O'Malley had his own catch phrase, in the form of “Cushlamochree!” (which is hard to pronounce but a lot of fun to see when printed in a comic strip). Mr. O'Malley was essentially a friendly version of W.C. Fields (with fairy wings), and was a master of self-delusion. Charmingly, Mr. O'Malley always thought he had everything under control, but in fact he only made situations more complicated and messy. And it was often out of that personality trait that the conflicts (and comedy) grew.

Additional characters included Barnaby’s parents who never seemed to be able to see Mr. O’Malley, a fact that was always nicely played for is comic potential, and which leaves me wondering what influence this might have had on Bill Watterson when he developed his world for Calvin and Hobbes. And there was Gus The Ghost, who was very timid and easily scared. He also wore glasses, and fancied himself a writer (yes, a ghost writer).

As you might assume from a strip with a ghost character, the stories were often spooky, autumnal, and a bit mysterious. But they were gently so. Story lines would run for several strips, and involved surprisingly engaging plots of criminal intrigue, mysterious goings-on, strange dark figures who lurked in the shadows… all surrounded by slyly subtle humor, richly layered characters, honest tenderness… and silence.

Aren’t all comic strips silent? Of course, but Barnaby in particular. It might have been due to the strip's dialogue-heavy quality, which made it feel like a written story that just happened to have pictures. Perhaps it was the super-tight, conservative visual style Johnson employed, in which there was little movement perceived between panels. It might have been both facets, working together. But for a strip that contained so much silly, rambunctious adventure, it’s remarkable how it played out in such a quiet fashion. For me, there’s no other strip that I’ve come across that’s like Barnaby, in that it actually seems to define itself, at least in part, by quietness.

Typesetting as opposed to hand-done lettering was another distinctive facet of this strip. In his book Encyclopedia of Comic Art, Maurice Horn states that Johnson used typesetting because it would allow him to cram more words into his strip (I wonder if Johnson would entirely agree with that if he were alive today). The more words you use, the more story you can potentially tell. But comics are a visual language on a very primal level. When words appear in a strip, they possess a visual quality above and beyond the meaning derived from the actual words. In other words (no pun intended), Barnaby had a very distinctive look, a particular visual appeal, simply because the lettering looked different. The typesetting, in my opinion, lent the strip a formal quality which to my young eyes signified “grown up”. It meant this strip needed to be taken more seriously than others. This was no Garfield. This strip meant business.

But of course, the content was very silly indeed. And the resulting contrast between visual style and content (brought about through the use of typesetting) lent Barnaby a dynamic tension between its look and its content. This, much like its use of silence, helped mark the strip as unique.

Then there was the wonderfully balanced tone of the strip. It was so gentle, so perfectly innocent, that even when the characters were “hot on the trail” of what, for all they knew, might turn out to be a cold-blooded murderer, the reader never worried. The reader always knew that in the end it would turn out not to be a murderer, but an ice cream salesman who got lost in the woods. That’s a storyline I’ve just made up, by the way. But it’s fairly Barnaby-esque, trust me. It makes a lot of sense that in Encyclopedia of Comic Art, Horn suggests that some of Johnson’s biggest influences were the films of Frank Capra. There’s a gentle silliness shared by the films and the strip, a silliness that both entertains and maintains respect for the audience’s intelligence.

I’m OK that Barnaby isn’t around anymore as a current strip. I don’t think it could exist in this era, and there’s nothing inherently “wrong” about that fact. The world changes, and in the end it actually serves to make this strip more prized, more distinctive. But what I really do hope for is that someone will soon reprint the strips. The version I knew was published from Ballantine in the mid 1980s (pictured above, which I read when I was about twelve, for you math majors that want to know how old I am). These reprints are hard to come by, and are usually quite expensive. The time is ripe for someone to collect the original Barnaby strips and bring them into print again. And they (whomever these saints might be) must promote the collection appropriately, so that as many people as possible can be touched by this special little comic world.

In the meantime, what are Barnaby fans to do? We can start by praising the efforts of Philip Nel, who has built the go-to place online for Crockett Johnson info, and is working on a definitive biography of the man. In a recent email exchange with Philip, he told me he’s aiming to have it written by the end of this year, if all goes well. Maybe we can hope to see it published in 2009? Hopefully with lots of illustrations, and maybe even a Barnaby strip or two? Or twenty? The bio is actually a double bio, as Johnson’s wife, Ruth Krauss, was a powerhouse storyteller in her own right, having published numerous children’s books, including The Growing Story (1947). It’s a beautiful story about a little boy who can’t wait to grow bigger. It's set amidst the changing seasons on a farm. I chose this particular story to read to my own child, while he was still in his Mommy's tummy.

Start them early, I say.

I sincerely hope you can get your hands on some Barnaby comics. With luck, you’ll come across them on a crisp autumn afternoon, and you can sit under a nice tree amidst the fallen leaves, and enjoy. Say hi to Gus The Ghost for me, if you see him.

But say it quietly. Remember, he frightens easily.