Comic, J.W.E.

I Was a Teenage Porn King

2009-04-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

Cosmic Capers, the underground comic that helped send me on my way to a life of juvenile debauchery and infamy.

“And the Cub Reporter of the Year award goes to Jeremy Eaton!”
   Huh? What?
   I blinked, dazed, slumped in my seat like a wilted flower, my mind in a thousand places, not one of which was the drab assembly hall of my high school, that faceless occupation zone of middle American education, situated in the rural humdrum of Western Pennsylvania, some forty-odd miles north of Pittsburgh.
   There I sat there, hardly recognizing that my name had just been announced, even as its amplified broadcast rode over the capacity-filled auditorium like some alien cloud, born of a wind that teased at the frayed edges of the freak flag I carried throughout my latter years of supervised learning, those days of early illumination, when I checked out and checked into myself, navigating the path that would lead me to where I find myself today, a modest earner with a wholly individual occupation, a man with enough personal space to see where I end and “it” begins, that mad caterwaul of competing noise and information we call modern civilization.

The mascot of my final school years was an armored medieval knight, more Monty Python than King Arthur, one occupied by a patchwork student body, a strange mash-up of next generation farmers, always red-eyed and yawning from early morning chores – tobacco-chewing hunters, sporting book-sized laminated licenses on the backs of their bright, safety-orange jackets – small town jocks, all vitamin pill pimples and page-boy haircuts – Lynyrd Skynyrd-worshipping “freaks”, with their scruffy “fuck-you” beards and chain wallets – optimally un-cool geeks in their father’s old dress shirts and flood pants (the Bill Gates army, silently ready to storm society with their digital revenge) – and the occasional oddball outcast like myself, we “the unlabelled”, the aloof canvassers of the adolescent periphery.
   It wasn’t that I was a nerd. I wasn’t picked on or made fun of, I was simply an ethereal visitor, a mostly-silent witness to the testimony of stupidity I saw before me. More often than not, I found myself grouped with the motley freaks, the long-haired dope smokers and their girlfriends – girls who, at the time, matched my idea of the perfect woman, with their wild, kinky hair and slow, sensual eyes, exhibiting an ease with their physicality that whispered the possibility of situations I could only dream about. When not slouched high in the bleachers amongst this rabble of undesirables, I was keeping uneasy company with the future valedictorians, those uber-geeks of science and language arts, my proclivity to writing and creative thought leading me into advanced classes I always felt out of place in, my hatred for the system at odds with their patriotic upholding of its every armored link.

“Eaton! Get up there, jerko! They just called your name!”
   I turned, seeing the gawking faces about me, imploring me to head down the carpeted aisle to the stage, where the school vice principal stood waiting with the award I’d earned for the tepid stories I’d written during my first season with our school newspaper, all toast and cold water in his tweed suit, scanning the crowded room for some sign of a student he’d probably never heard of. It was then that the chant began, slow and soft at first, soon rising, gaining voices, quickly becoming a chorus of freak-fueled bravado, a martial beat that declared “Porn King! Porn King! Porn King!”
   Wincing, perhaps more from the assembly recognition than from the scandalous cheers of my unwitting peers, I stumbled towards the front, thankful for the semi-darkness, shyly accepting a piece of paper I would tear into pieces before I even climbed aboard the school bus at the end of the day. It was both my great distaste for the trappings of my pedagogical prison, and the secret shame of personal betrayal, that gave me my awkward hesitancy that early afternoon back in 1978, my queasy guilt forged in the confused, amplified chambers of a fifteen year-old’s troubled psyche. I was, after all, “The Porn King”, just as they claimed, a criminal of the hallway, my standing with respectability lower than that of the buck-toothed old men who ran their grey mops across the piss and chew-stained tiles of our bathroom floors.

I still remember the cold look in Mr. Tony’s eyes, a look he might well have offered fresh dog shit discovered on the underside of his shoe, a look that said he wanted nothing to do with me, not ever again.
   If we had previously enjoyed an adverse relationship, it might have been easier to shake off such rejection, but I had been his chosen one among the forty-odd students that made up the entirety of his art elective class, the rubber cement-scented daycare for underachiever and overachiever alike, sanctuary to greasy-faced, heavy-lidded boys and above-average looking girls, all professing a “genuine” love of the visual arts, most simply searching for another way to escape the regimented drudgery of public school captivity.
   What had turned Mr. Tony, my one-time champion, the grey-haired Bob Ross of our school, against me? Just what had set a sizable portion of the freak population to blessing me with my infamous title?

It was Mr. Tony who had unwittingly set me on my course to moral condemnation and ruin, some two weeks before, challenging the class to create their own comic strips.
   Already being a certified cartoon junkie, I took the challenge like Michelangelo taking to the Sistine Chapel, expanding the simple mission with an acutely secular fervor, to encompass what I intended to be a fully-realized “graphic novel”, a pencil-rendered work starring my space opera hero, Flip Rhodun, who would later go on to infamy in the greater Pittsburgh area, appearing in his own actual daily strip (see “Confessions of a Comic Strip Terrorist” for the full story of that ill-fated venture into mainstream publication). Mr. Tony, immediately sensing my dedication and understanding of the form, took my first finished page (of an epic story concerning a planet of evil, dentistry-related bandits, no less) and posted it in the showcase located at the front lobby of the school, there for all to see, student and visitor alike. I was then charged with the task of creating a new page each week, which he would pin beside the previous, ultimately creating an entire tableau of my graphite masterwork. There I was, overnight having become an instant artist of local renown, a man who could do no wrong with a No. 2 pencil –until that fateful day, the day I stupidly allowed the latest episode of Jack the Ripper Jr. to slip between the working pages of my showcased triumph.

My enthusiasm for the cartooning project having quickly made me the center of attention, my classmates crowded about me as I scrawled away at my amateur efforts. It didn’t take long for the requests to start, for some burnout to demand I draw something “totally wicked”, which translated to something involving sex or violence, preferably both, that sturdy cocktail of our entertainment culture. Enjoying my sudden ability to motivate such a response in others, I capitulated, turning out a series of clandestine strips featuring an adorable little serial killer named Jack the Ripper Jr., the diapered offspring of London’s infamous gaslight stalker. Inspired by the recent acquisition of an underground comic, the first I’d ever seen, I created these crude toss-offs, all involving Jack Jr. and his never-ending battle with the prudes of the world – the teachers, the principals, the police, the scout leaders, the church figures – any authority figure who called for his head in a noose, simply because he’d inherited his father’s unquenchable desire for blood, especially that of a buxom blonde named Dolly, a timely approximation of Dolly Parton, who was regularly being chopped into tiny bits, only to return, whole again, to entice and scorn poor Jack anew. These were generally quite tame, especially compared to the others I gave away, the raunchy commissions that have all but been lost in the wake of my passing memory, ridiculous parodies of popular cartoons, my uninformed updates of the notorious Tijuana Bibles of the 1930s and 40s, those hastily-crafted booklets featuring familiar cartoon icons doing very unfamiliar things. It was these exploitative works that had labeled me a wizard of pornographic art, a fifteen year-old peddler of cartoon smut, The Porn King of “Corn Belt High”.

“What is this?” asked Mr. Tony, flipping through the partially-finished pages of my space fantasy, coming to a short tier of panels depicting Jack the Ripper Jr. telling a man of the cloth to, in no uncertain words, “Fuck off, priest!”
   I blanched, sinking into the floor, my short-lived glory suddenly replaced with the uncomfortable burden of a pariah.
   “It’s just something else I’m doing,” I replied, my voice fractured with guilt.
   Mr. Tony was silent for a long moment. He seemed to linger on the cartoon, as if it were alive, as if he intended to see its heart stop beating before moving on with his own life.
   “I don’t want to see any more of this sort of thing in my class,” he finally said, handing back my folder of art, but not before tearing up the offending strip, dropping it into the garbage can beside his desk.
   I suppose I was lucky he didn’t kick me right out of his class. Nevertheless, my Flip Rhodun serial disappeared from the lobby later that day, never to return. What went unanswered was the nature of the impetus of my “indelicate trespass” on civility and decency. Was I unearthing some latent need to shock and infuriate – or was my early dabbling with the underground more a reflection of the twisted desire of my captive audience?

I’d encountered my first underground comic book that same year, during the heady, hormonal dizzy spell we call the ninth grade.
   Entitled Cosmic Capers, it was a one-shot anthology published by Big Muddy Comics Refinery, the comix imprint based in New Orleans in the early 70s. It was furtively slipped into my gym bag after track practice by, I later discovered, the star runner of our school, a shifty-eyed troublemaker who often held court in the cafeteria, holding in rapture a throng of wide-eyed hayseed dilettantes, dispensing his stories of such then-exotic heralds of the counter-culture as Bob Marley and Frank Zappa, the poets and prophets of a reality that seemed about as far removed from our rural Western Pennsylvanian existence as could be imagined. An Army brat, the speedy messenger was an outsider like myself, but one built on extroverted mettle. He had traveled not just this country’s urban landscape, but ports abroad, making him a literal svengali of the outside world, those heady neon drags of big city life we’d been informed were full of debauched sex, crime, drugs, music, and artists – the playgrounds of bohemian spirit that made our dull little lives seem just about as dull, and as little, as they in fact were.
   Cosmic Capers was rather benign, certainly by underground standards. It featured neo-realistic stories by third-tier comix artists like Jim Wright (Jesus Christ vs. Godzilla) and Ned Dameron, their art scratchy approximations of silver age artists like Al Williamson, far from the graphic splendor of pen and ink auteurs like Robert Crumb. The one story that captivated me the most was a hoary science fiction tale featuring an astronaut landing on a seemingly-deserted Venus, only to find a naked hippie girl awaiting him, who quickly entices him into removing his spacesuit. Two awkward panels later her vagina is transforming into a giant Venus flytrap, devouring the horny spaceman in a final, EC-inspired image. The man-eating flower girl tortured me, arousing in my budding libido severely conflicting impulses of lust and fear, so much so that I eventually gave the comic away, but not after keeping it stashed in the back pages of a big Batman book, fearful my parents would discover it amongst my otherwise mostly-tepid comics library.

How long after my public shaming I continued producing my own underground-flavored cartoons, I’m not sure, but the strong reactions they generated stuck with me, eventually leading me to investigate the published legacy of comics spelt with an “x”, a journey that would ultimately lead me to my own appearance in alternative comics, which would, in turn, culminate with porn-based titles such as Hump Crazy! and Busy Girls, comics filled with imagery that would surely have made Mr. Tony’s wiry hair unfurl in indignant fury.
   I can only wonder what my less-than-respectable high school readership might have made of them. Then again, I think I know.
   In fact, I can hear them chanting it right now.
   “Porn King! Porn King! Porn King!”
   Who? Me?

The Secret Society of Super Liars

2009-02-18T21:57:00.000-08:00

What exactly is wrong with telling a lie?
   This is a question every fourteen year-old must ponder, the indoctrination of virtue not yet fully ingrained in their fragile psyche, the juices of rebellion still giving crunch to the soul – the primal bite that counters growing civility.
   I was struggling with the ancient moral conundrum, one late spring day in 1978, crouched behind my parent’s bed, the cord of their phone pulled all the way from my father’s dresser, its coils as taut as the truth I was busy stretching. Desperately trying not to giggle, I was conjuring up the cover to The Secret Society of Super Villains No. 14, a comic book that had yet to be published. Carefully describing this phantom of the near-future to my best friend Derek, as if it were the naked body of Bonnie Gramley, the Farrah-Fawcett of our eighth grade class, I was acting on a ruthless cunning nearly the equal of that exhibited by the costumed bad guys in our favorite comic.
   Derek, like myself, was a victim of the four-color obsession, another innocent seduced by the harmful lure of pulp literature. He and I were equals in a ludicrous fascination over one of the more negligible comic books ever published, a title whose concept was so thin it fairly reeked of the marketing room. My great act of deception that boring spring afternoon was merely a symptom of this irrational fixation, one that would forever rupture a friendship, though it could hardly have been known at the time.
   As we grow in this life, we learn that others can be hurt by the utterance of a thing as seemingly benign as a lie, both emotionally and physically, often ruining relationships, reputations, even livelihoods. We discover that the untruth we weave between cunning hands is a cord of infinity, a ligature of probability, one with which we will willingly cut the oxygen from fact, murdering history in the process.

Derek was about my height, with curly, sand-colored hair and heavy-lidded eyes. He always seemed to be somewhere else, his mind distant, slow to respond, especially when we were at his house, the old Craftsman located just down the road from the volunteer fire hall, next to an antique shop that never seemed to be open, its dusty windows stuffed with colorful and enticing things, forever to remain mysteries. His house was marked by a certain strangeness, an air of unease that I could only presume came from his younger brother, who was severely autistic, a boy trapped inside himself, crawling about the house like some injured crab. His thump, as he made his way up the carpeted stairs, digging at each step with his hip, hoisting himself like a sack of potatoes, was a common sound. Often I’d hear it, like Poe’s beating heart, while sitting upstairs at Derek’s bedroom desk, drawing or writing the latest of the numerous super hero fanzines we produced under the banner of DJ Comics. It was an unnerving atmosphere, one only made more so by the presence of Derek’s two older sisters, dark-haired beauties who lingered like sirens in unseen rooms, biding their time, until the day they would lure me into their intoxicating physicality.
   DJ Comics was the glue of my friendship with Derek, an enterprise identical to many others I’d experienced, the creative course to allegiance that has colored my life. We had begun earlier that year, with the first issue of Deadly Duo, a team-up comic featuring two super villains of my creation, SweatBee and Conductor, a production that had me cribbing panels from dozens of Marvel and DC comics, redressing the likes of The Wasp and Spiderman with costumes that Derek had created. This was, in fact, his only real role in the DJ bullpen, apart from hand- coloring the covers to the dozen or so duplicates we’d make on the copy machine at the cluttered department store his father managed. I would write the stories, Marvel-style, making them up as I went along, flipping through our combined comic collections for the next suitable image to swipe, adding the off-the-cuff dialog at the very end of the process.
   It was through such avid devotion to the genre that we first met. Derek had been trading comics with another budding nerd, at the back of the school bus, passing around bright objects that had caught my eye, hinting at the feverish hours we’d wile away together over the next fifteen months or so, the willing surrender to fantasy that would culminate in my lie, and the lurid glee I experienced fabricating a comic I knew would have Derek drooling like an addict.
   Much like our own amateur effort, The Secret Society of Super Villains exclusively featured a roster of “do-badders”. That we were both so attracted to the rogue side of the super-powered equation made my little crime more than a bit ironic. There I was, feeding a mutual desire, the mad anticipation we both regularly suffered, waiting the eternity for next month’s comics to fill the rack at the drugstore. It was a reality wherein the truth was forever held at bay, our imaginations fixating on the tiny blurbs that teased of the coming issue’s content. It was with this impetus of madness that I found myself that fateful afternoon, doing the devil’s work in my fiendish retreat, half-covered by the curtain of my parent’s bedspread, luring my best friend into a wicked trap, having decided that, no, there was nothing wrong with telling a lie. Wasn’t I just using my imagination, after all?
   Perhaps the real question to ask is, just what is pure of fancy? What is free from the shadow of falsity? What action, what thought, what feeling we experience in this maddeningly elusive existence is utterly free from fabrication? How many times a day does the parent lie to the child, doing so only with the child’s good in mind, as much reflected through their own fears as those they imagine belong to their offspring? And how often are we hurt more by the truth than the lie? Who hasn’t used the knowledge of the truth to hurt someone? And to what great sanctity do we ascribe such a truth? Can we save face while acknowledging the noble lie?
   It is circuitous questions like these that have given birth to culture as we know it, this structure of so-called reasoned living we call society, the order of things based on the demarcation of good and evil, of right and wrong. It is this wholly subjective blanket, the companion we clung to as infants, hide behind, hold for confidence, eventually crawling from the crib still clinging to it, that carries with us the rest of our lives, reappointed as morality, the key to gods and heroes and the fiction that reflects their image.

Of all the American comic books I puzzled over as a teenager, it was The Secret Society that spoke to those questions of right and wrong still bubbling in the puritanical cauldron, the artistically tepid title that Derek and I had nevertheless feasted our imaginations on, like Golding’s savages dancing about the head of their slaughtered pig. Published by DC Comics, from June 1976 to July 1978, lasting a mere fifteen issues, it was one of a few titles testing the appeal of the “anti-hero”. This appetite had already been sensed in The Joker, the Batman foe’s own brief, self-appointed title, also Marvel’s bad cop/bad cop curiosity, Super Villain Team-Up, which pitted the infamous Victor Von Doom in cahoots with a different up-and-coming baddie each issue, often turning upon one another by the end, there being no honor in thieves or super villains, it would seem.
   I remember clearly the day Derek showed me his copy of the thirteenth issue of our favorite comic, something I wouldn’t acquire until a week later. I was sitting at his little desk, hunched over the enticing publication, staring at the art, trying not to spoil the story before I had my own copy. So transfixed was I in the doings of Gorilla Grodd, Sinestro and Star Sapphire, that I didn’t even hear the younger of Derek’s two sisters approach me from behind. A plump girl with dark hair, she was as fully bosomed as most mothers. Without warning, she pressed her herself against me, wrapping her arms about my scrawny chest, leaning over my shoulder. “What are you reading?” she asked, her voice a wet purr in my ear. She moved herself against my back, side to side, like a cat marking a banister. “Secret Society,” I croaked, my face burning, not daring to turn and look, feeling her breath on my hair, her warm softness. The fact that, just the week before, her older sister had walked into the same room, wearing only peach-colored underwear (such things one doesn't forget), gasping in a mock surprise when she saw Derek and I huddled over our latest self-publishing project, made me only more nervous. The thoughts I’d been entertaining of her had put a dawning libido on full alert. Slim, but with the same dark, straight hair, the older sister was the true object of my lust, a girl so perfect in form I’d secretly been drawing her every time I traced another panel of Star Sapphire, cavorting about in her pink, evil-doer’s bathing suit. That Derek gave all of our female characters skimpy costumes, enabling me to indicate the luscious lines of meeting breasts, made the sister’s always imminent presence all the more uncomfortable. “Is it any good?” the younger sister asked, now playing with my hair, her full weight against me. “It’s OK,” I managed, closing my eyes, wishing she would go away, the desire to turn and put my face right into her was overwhelming, so much so it terrified me. I was still a year or two away from learning first-hand of that magnetic pull between animals in heat, the compulsion of the sexes, a thing as inherent as our capacity to lie in the face of what we perceive as the truth.

As a fourteen year-old, still navigating a new country, as well as his own increasingly foreign body, the lure of the super-powered individual who chose to turn on society and its demanded code of righteousness, was strong. It played into my general dislike of the “boring characters”, the ever-popular Superman and Wonder Woman, the messiah-like emblems of virtue.
   I generally preferred super villains, plain and simple. I liked the passion they seemed to bring to their work, the sense of humor they exhibited, the keen recognition of irony, their upfront admittance of cowardice and self-interest.
   In myth, we are given the villain in order to define the hero, the divination of light from dark, of dark from light. Each we define by the absence of the other’s characteristics, a notion, in reality, about as practical as cutting the Earth in two in order to halve its burden. That the villain represents the inclinations a good man learns to suppress in himself is a suspiciously accommodating set of circumstances, the very devotional challenge of the hero giving birth to the concept of his existence, like an egg giving birth to itself while the attention is elsewhere. This is the flimsy origin of the man who has risen beyond base influence, the caped wonder drinking apple juice in the Garden of Eden. And such an ideal demands purification of the soul, the squelching of deep-seated desires and contemplations, all natural aspects of our brain chemistry and its shadow play of the heart.

“Who’s on the cover?” Derek asked, short of breath, a fish oblivious to the hook.
   “Gorilla Grodd is punching Captain Comet into a big vat of acid! It’s super cool!” I gushed. “He’s saying: “Perish, Comet! All who defy Grodd shall die!””
   “Wow! I‘ve got to see it! Where’s Sapphire? Is she there?” breathed the innocent victim, my well-rehearsed performance working perfectly. I was a pretty excellent liar. Some will say I still am, but I don’t want to press the issue.
   “Yep!” I replied. “And, man, her tits are almost hanging out! They’re like super duper big!”
   Derek made a funny noise. I bit my tongue, tears in my eyes. I was the king of lies, the master of the burn. I was all-powerful! Bring it on, Grodd, let’s see what you have against the natural momentum of a fourteen year-old in a lying groove.
   “I’m coming over!” Derek almost cried. “Mom! Where’s my bike?” I heard him yell, having left the phone of the hook. His mother, once a cocktail bunny at the Playboy mansion, was also a clandestine source of inspiration for Star Sapphire’s glorious cleavage. That she looked more like her eldest daughter’s peer, than the woman who gave birth to her, only aided this heated fancy. God, how I loved and both feared visiting that house.
   “You can’t!” I wanted to say, but couldn’t, the phone now more like a barbell in my hand. Caught in my mendacity, I was helpless to escape it. “OK,” I said, setting the phone back in its cradle, wondering what I was going to do when he arrived. Creeping from my parent’s bedroom, I had a sudden ache in my gut, the coming pains of a guilty conscience. That Derek lived almost two miles away only made things worse.

Thumbing through the dusty pages of our forefather’s prosperity, the tomes of ancient story that have infected our world, we find men who cannot suppress their wicked inclinations, those emotions we have been trained to hide away. From this comes the root of our curiosity, and the notion of a fall from grace, ever the trope of our mythological language, the very crux of evil’s origin.
   It was with all of this largely unrecognized baggage that I originally came to The Secret Society of Super Villains, immediately enraptured by its core group of buddy bad guys, now the stars of their own book, crowding the stage with their own evil ambitions and conflicts, numerous colorful rubes and trollops, offering me stories where the sudden appearance of the hero was often reason for despair.

“Where is it? Let me see!” exclaimed Derek, sweat lining his forehead, a wild look in his heavy eyes. I’d rarely seen him so focused on any one thing.
   I grinned uneasily, the previous issue of The Secret Society held at my back, out of view. I had grasped it, in a last minute act of desperation, not knowing what else to do. That it was the very comic he’d first acquired the month before, flaunting it before my eyes the day his sister had offered me such confusing intimacy, only amplified my guilt. “You really want to see it?” I teased, a victim of my own villainous progress.

It was a fine line that DC walked with The Secret Society’s premise, that of super villains combining for their own common good, a device that necessitated still portraying the criminal in an essentially negative light, all the while nurturing reader interest in their well-being.
   If the ultimate precondition of the reader’s identification with a fictional character is that he or she wishes the protagonist not to perish, then followers of The Secret Society like myself were genuinely empathizing with the bad guy. It was the appeal of the “devil”, that red-skinned embodiment of our sin, the mirthful master of the eternal below, the angel thus fallen. In our embrace of this evil, we are told, so do we forgo our virtue and join the hot lord in his fiery, molten playground of everlasting damnation. All sinners go to Hell, all liars are kin to Satan, every fibbing boy an agent of his dark majesty’s wanton designs. Idle hands indicate a scheming mind, both the tools of all wickedness.
   It was with such thoughts, such learned fears, that I presented my best friend with a comic he’d already read untold times, its cover etched upon the lining of his loquacious eyelids. The look of disappointment on his face made me feel my eminent membership in Gorilla Grodd’s gang was all that was left for me in this life. I was a “bad seed”, just like the old neighbor whose peas I’d eaten had claimed to my mother some years before.
   Swallowing his disappointment, Derek lunged at me, calling me the “F” word, shoving me off my feet.
   Moments later we were fighting, a fury of arms and legs, two opposing forces crashing with all the might of our Godly teachings, Derek the Virtuous claiming his moral supremacy over I, the wretched liar, beating me to death, sending me to meet my maker and stand trial for the error of my ways.
   We parted, only the most tenuous of friends. I watched him pedal off down the hill, his slow eyes holding a grievance they would never quite relinquish.
   A couple of weeks later, when I paid my thirty cents for an actual copy The Secret Society of Super Villains No. 14, I didn’t even bother calling him. That it turned out to be the penultimate issue of the series did little to make things any better. I had destroyed the joy of sharing.
   It is of such lines drawn that life is made.
   This we learn, as we navigate our way through the byzantine avenues of our emotional inheritance, leaving friends deceived and foes born, while societies of separation become more than just imagination, they become their own secret shame.

Septimius Versus Power Man on the Living Room Floor

2009-01-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

He wore a tiny, yellow plastic barrel on his collar, in which his vital statistics were stolen, his dog tag for feline invasions into foreign territory.

With his bright yellow shirt lapels direct from the wardrobe of James Brown, his stainless steel tiara the envy of any member of Parliament-Funkadelic, his prison-issue wrist bands and chain link belt, he was easily the most street-savvy and fashionable character in comics during the mid-1970s.

He was named for Septimius Severus, warrior emperor of the Roman Empire from 193 to 211, and for being born in the month of September.

I first stumbled upon him in issue fifteen of his monthly title, back when it was still known as Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. A black, ex-con, mercenary of justice, he was constantly fighting the system and “the man”, about as far removed from the generic superhero template as one could imagine.

Septimius was a sleek ribbon of stealth and attack, a dark dart in the eye of any rabbit too timid to flee, a lashing draft of claw to the sleeping dove, sated on seed.

Too young to have been visiting the theater to catch blaxploitation flicks like Shaft, and Dolemite, Cage was about as close as I came to experiencing the rough and tumble urban milieu of pimps, hookers, and racist cops. His comic fascinated me like no other.

There was no cat in the family tree like Septimius, not brash and strong Tom-Joe, not winsome, wide-eyed Suzie Wong, not noble, warm-hearted Ben, none could match Septimius for his feline prowess. He was the undisputed king of his terrain, and yours too if you weren’t careful.

To a newly-arrived, pre-teen English immigrant, the American inner-city alone was an exotic locale, one peopled with a litany of mesmerizing characters, so often the trope of marginal fiction. Any comic, or book, that offered me a glimpse into this strange world was an attraction, but nothing prepared me for the mother lode of badass histrionics to be found in the pages of “America’s First and Foremost Black Superstar!”, the spearhead of Marvel’s typically over-stated social out-reach campaign.

Seppi, as we came to know him, was nevertheless a loyal companion, in as much the way a cat can ever truly be. He would gaze upon your impatience with a patience of his own, sitting in the sun-baked door, waiting to be let out, or welcomed in. He seemed to recognize our shortcomings and he forgave us them.

Peopled with the likes of Albert “Billy Bob” Rackham, the rabbit-toothed, pig-nosed racist prison guard, who spouted the jargon of a white southern “cracker”, referring to Cage as “That crazy black boy”, spouting dialog as regressive as “Blast the chicken feed luck I been havin’! If that boy Lucas is still as hard-headed as he was at Seagate –”, the early issues of Hero for Hire were the equal of anything I might have seen in the cinema, parading both white and black stereotypes with a manic efficiency.

His eyes were the color of lemonade in a green glass, two luminescent buttons split by black Vs, grey, smoky dark petals that breathed with the advance of color and light, eminent portals that disappeared behind falling lids when the business of being a cat was done.

Interestingly, these initial stories were written and drawn by African-American creators, something I can only believe was Marvel’s attempt at legitimizing the content.

Seppi came with us to America, saying goodbye to the heather and the hills of rural southern Scotland. In a plastic bin he was pinned, hunched shoulder bones angry neo-wings upon his back, his neck long and taut, his sharp cheekbones like echoes of his piercing eyes, the life within him focused on the dark corner of his temporary, yet seemingly eternal cage.

That Hero for Hire ultimately had as little to do with reality as an episode of Welcome Back Kotter was beside the point, it was completely intoxicating to me, so much so that when, with issue seventeen, the title changed its name to Luke Cage, Powerman, and began exhibiting more standard super villain foes and storylines, I was (in a word I’d recently adopted) bummed, but not enough to give up on my favorite character, for he had already become an indelible part of the American cultural landscape I was so eager, and desperate, to embrace.

Septimius Severus Eaton, brother of Septimia Octavilla, a creature I never did see. Septimius, charge of my mother, the bearer of his unusually-distinguished name. Septimius, the pouncer of mouse, the slayer of shrew, the nuisance of untold generations of flies and moths. Loving, brutal machine Septimius.

Such a change in my comics-reading diet would have been hard to imagine, just a few short years prior, when I was still steeped in tea-stained British funny book fare like The Wizard and Hotspur, the America shown in their pages almost chiefly one of a historical nature, the Wild West being, by far, the most prominent in their oeuvre. But an epic plane journey across the Atlantic changed all of that.

You survived another move, didn’t you? This time in a cage that rocked in the back of a station wagon, a vehicle making its way south and west, to the cornfield stretches of Western Pennsylvania, the womb of the family farm, a glacial unearthing of brown grass and busy tree, a wild newness that would not long after become the address of your tomb.

On August 1, 1971, at Prestwick Airport, in Glasgow, Scotland, my family and I boarded a British Airways 747, bound for New York, a three thousand, two hundred and eleven mile-long flight, piloted by one Captain N. V. Bristow. Joining us on our ocean crossing were a rabbit, two goldfish, and a cat, a feline immigrant with short, inky fur, the creature who would, one late afternoon in the year 1976, rake his magnificent claws across the single-most prized component of my Power Man armory.
   Go ahead, laugh if you will, show that you just don’t understand the conflicted hurt of my adolescent fury, its blinding hate and subsequent love for this blessed animal, the brother who had lowered his arms to walk the earth. Ultimately, my devotion to his existence offered me the space in my enraged heart to forgive him his trespass, when, in actuality, none had existed.
   Forever dreaming of one day owing one of the classic spinning racks decorated with the omnipresent Hey, Kids, Comics! placard, the only genuine place to keep my comic book collection, safe from interested fingers and paws, I was left to devise strange substitutes, utilizing everything from the slats in my closet doors, to empty cereal boxes, always inventing new ways to store my ever-growing library of Marvel and DC titles, the garishly-colored totems that magic made from my pocket money, before the numbered eyes of the newsstand register.
   By the summer of ’76, my Luke Cage collection had grown measurably. I had every issue from number fifteen up to number thirty-four, an impressive little archive of hormonal fantasy that I topped with perhaps the single most-loved comic in all of my four-color holdings, the unrivaled glory that was LUKE CAGE, POWER MAN ANNUAL #1, emblazoned with the ridiculously sublime physical theatrics of a Dave Cockrum cover.
   How could I resist displaying this enviable treasury for all to see? How could I not set to laying these eighteen editions of pulp-hewn pleasure upon the living room floor, fanned out about the all-mighty Annual #1, like the multi-colored tail feathers of a peacock in heat? But, equally, how could I ever imagine this was a safe place to leave them, when the long summer nights left the screen door ajar, a space just enough to offer entrance to the warrior emperor, his hands full of knives?
   So fierce was my anger, upon discovering the furry-tailed fiend, sprawled across the legacy of the man born Carl Lucas, the man framed with a pocketful of cocaine and sent to prison, the man who, infused with a bastard strain of the Super-Soldier serum, broke free, only to be hounded by the likes of Rackham, and others he’d squared shoulders with in the maximum security confines of Georgia’s Seagate Prison.

“Comings-together ain’t always time for rejoicing, children.”
– Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #15, November 1973, scripted by Billy Graham and Tony Isabella.

How I desired to thrash the life from Seppi, to punish him for doing only what he was designed to do, scratching away the dead outer layer of his claws, a task to which he’d entrusted the bright red cover of Cage’s first and only king-size annual.
   Lacerated deep, with wounds that punctured through many pages, into the flesh of the spine-bound comic, the lower right half of the cover was in tatters, shreds of dialog and rippling muscle jettisoned across the carpet like the downy breast of an unlucky sparrow.
   But those eyes, those beautiful, accepting eyes, their black Vs now big, round, dark aching orbs of forgiveness, forgiving me my stupidity, my lack of grace under loss, forgiving me my very humanity – how on earth could I stay angry with the breathing mantle of such divinity?
   I love you, Septimius Severus Eaton, I love you still. May you have been shredding king-size annuals all the past twenty-two years since you left us, lying eternally in sunny contentment, the rays of heaven at your back.

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag

2008-12-21T18:19:00.000-08:00

A Mighty Marvel Yuletide Greeting! sang the red italicized lettering, situated within the yellow heart of a Christmas wreath that covered part of The Mighty Thor’s cape. The god of thunder was cast as a reindeer, tethered just behind The Incredible Hulk, who played a green-nosed Rudolph. They were careening across the rooftops of an unspecified city, large snowflakes falling all about them, the sky a midnight blue. Sitting in a green sleigh was The Thing, taking the role of Santa Claus, waving to all the boys and girls, as Spider-Man and Iron Man traversed the periphery. It was one of the Marvel Treasury Editions, a series of tabloid-sized paperbacks that had, since 1974, included an annual holiday collection of seasonal reprints. On the back cover, under a yellow banner that offered an additional “Season’s Greetings”, were assembled Captain America, Giant-Man, The Wasp, The Silver Surfer, Hawkeye, The Black Panther, and The Vision, looking more than ever like a red and green Christmas ornament. Steve Rogers and Hank Pym (the good captain and the giant respectively, to those uninformed), were both smiling broadly, the sort of smiles you find on posters in a dentist’s waiting room. So too was Hawkeye, and the Wasp, held high in Giant-Man's Kong-sized hand, like a seasonally-attired Fay Wray. The alien Surfer and the android Vision were wearing their customarily brooding glares, the holiday spirit clearly not registering in their searching souls. Meanwhile, The Black Panther sat on the edge of a snowy rooftop, his face obscured by his inky black cowl. I can only believe a man driven to sitting during such a celebratory occasion is a man with some holiday-related issues of his own – perhaps one too many pressurized family dinners at the Wakandan homestead?
   This was the publication I was holding onto, that inclement December Saturday in 1976, feeling a strange and horrible guilt, as my father and I drove away from Rishor’s, my favorite newsstand.

Then just thirteen years old, I was a shy and introverted teenager, one under the spell of a keen, if fleeting, interest in the superhero comic book genre. Like other such nerds, I spent inordinate amounts of time obsessively cataloging my personal archive of Marvels, DCs, the occasional Gold Key, even a few Charltons I’d found orphaned in a local hardware store, the top half of their covers roughly torn off, a returns practice I wasn’t privy to. “Why did someone want just the tops?” I’d asked my father, not being able to accept his quick explanation, refusing to acknowledge how patently ridiculous my theory of some top-hording thief was. I would soon become familiar with the distributor system, the following year, when my older brother’s girlfriend would start working behind the counter at Rishor’s. A pretty, blonde cheerleader, straight out of a Riverdale malt shop, she quickly became a distracting element of my weekly trip to the brick-faced storefront, located on one of the snaky arterials that ran west from Main Street, in the city of Butler, a tired little huddle of homes and businesses, located some forty miles due north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
   Having pestered my father without cease that stormy late afternoon, imploring him that I was especially situated to judge the drivability of roads unseen, we’d set off one on of my periodical, periodical treks, my hopes high to find the latest issue of Ghost Rider or The Defenders. Little did I know, fidgeting with my seat belt, watching the sky shifting through varying tones of grey, that I would, in a few short moments, encounter something so unimaginably terrifying the memories of it would still trouble me, some thirty-two years later.
   It wasn’t our first shared meeting with horror. Only a year earlier, in Northern Quebec, we’d seen the dark shape of a man holding his young son, dying in the flame-filled cab of an over-turned hay truck, an image my mind still carries with it, like some morbidly curious panel in a faded comic book. But even that hadn’t prepared me for what I was about to confront, on a wet, snowy stretch of Route 8, the main road leading into Butler.

I’m not sure if my experiences with death and terror have been ordinary in this respect, in that they feature a quilt of memories, some sections as vivid as the screen of my computer, others as hazy as a long ago dream. I have endured, in the past, moments of physical conflagration where I appear to have momentarily blacked-out (scoring a goal in a soccer championship, extreme anger, an early sexual experience), a condition I now ascribe to a latent epilepsy. I have always assumed the patchwork bed of remembrance of this unfortunate afternoon to be subject to such gaps in recollection, if not complete consciousness. This would account for the wrath-like way I seem to move in these memories, like some ashen, caped ghost, floating from scene of horror to scene of horror, hardly feeling my limbs.
   “Stay in the car! Don’t move!” my father had ordered, undoing his seat belt, the car having come to a sickeningly abrupt stop. From the corner of my eye, I watched him open his door and tentatively step out, my attention on the wreckage and debris that now lay only a few feet before us. Sitting there for a long moment, more so out of an inability to move than in heed of the warning, I could feel my heart pounding against the ribbon of nylon strapped across my chest. I was reliving a devastating motion picture, one that had just burned itself, seemingly forever, upon the threshold of my awareness.

Two cars meeting at a right angle, doors bursting open as windows explode, seatbelts flapping about like seaweed in a storm, two bodies jettisoned free, as if the very atmosphere had sucked them out, limbs careening, turning head over heel as they shoot through the air, across a grey sky festooned with sparkling shards of safety glass.

   What compelled me to step out of the station wagon and disobey my father’s stern order I don’t know, my fear of being alone, or my fear of being left inside a car. By this time he had reached the adjoined vehicles. They sat crushed together, nose-to-nose, like brash lovers kissing in a doorway. I had watched him walk out into the center of the two-lane roadway, where a dark brown shape lay across the yellow line, so near I can still see the silver buckle on the man’s boot. It was the driver of the car on the right, the one that had suddenly pulled out of the gas station ahead us, directly into the oncoming vehicle. Whichever one of the two crossed the middle of the road I’ll never know, suffice to say there was a meeting of great speed with sudden obstruction, resulting in grievous harm, doing to the fallen driver something so unappealing it made my father, after stopping and leaning over the body, practically run on to the smoldering cars. It was this thought that gripped me, the moment before my senses must have gone numb, a curiosity born of the primal fear that had descended upon me like the heavy winter sky. On my spectral heels I floated, drawn to the crumpled body, set on its side like a sleeping dog. I can see the brown corduroy coat and the black leather boots, the dirty white fleece of the man’s collar, beside which rested a major portion of his head. The rest, a piece about the size of a grapefruit, hair attached, lay some fifteen feet away. I can’t see the blood involved. That aspect of the grisly scene apparently went right through the gaping maw of my disbelieving mind.
   Fleeing the overwhelming presence of death, I found myself moving towards the wreckage, where my father was busy removing the keys from the ignition of the empty car. As I came upon the second, I could see its driver still sitting, his neck slung to one side, as if it were broken. I then noticed the passenger of the first, his back to me, sitting on the wet road, his head between his legs, his palms slapping at the ground, making a strange cooing sound. As I took a few steps forward, he suddenly sat up, beginning to fall towards me. The rear of his head was a wild mass of black corkscrews, the untidy afro of a white man in his late twenties, wearing a plaid hunting jacket and flared blue jeans. Without thinking, I held out my hands and caught him about the shoulders, steadying him the best I could. He was like a bottom-weighted punching toy, wavering to and fro. I don’t know just how long I knelt there, staring into the thick nest of his hair, before the dark blood began to bubble up, a helter-skelter fountain that ran onto his jacket, warm as soup about my cold fingers. Just then I felt a firm hand upon my wrist, followed by a soft voice in my ear, telling me everything was going to be okay. I turned to see my school bus driver, a middle-aged woman with a motherly face. She took me in her arms and escorted me to the side of the road, where I began to notice other people, my father included, moving around the side of a school bus, as police sirens descended upon the scene.

When we finally got back into our car and strapped ourselves in, I was afraid to meet my father’s eyes. I was still numb. “We have to turn around,” he said, in a thin, distant voice, as if he were on the opposite side of very thick door.
   “Can we – can’t we maybe, maybe still go to Rishor’s?” I asked, my voice no more than a squeak.
   “I really don’t think I can drive through Butler, Jem.”
   “Please, dad, please. You can do it – it’s not very far. Please! I won’t be a minute inside – I just want to see if any new ones have come in – that’s all.”
   I couldn’t help myself. I pestered and pestered him to take me, soon begging the point. It was as if the accident had never happened. He finally relented, driving around the half dozen flashing police cars that were assembled before a roadblock of burning flares. One of the officers gave us a solemn smile, waving us by. I think he was the one my father had spoken to, giving out his account of the accident.
   Only when I was alone inside the newsstand did I begin to feel the horrible guilt. As my eyes ran feverishly up and down the two spinning racks that provided the great majority of my weekly comics fix, it followed me, like the cold eyes of an accusing angel. Finding nothing new to buy, fighting the growing sickness in my stomach, my gaze drifted to the magazine rack where, among titles like Heavy Metal and Fangoria, I saw the brightly-colored tabloid comic, Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag, its festive cover imploring me. I knew it was just a selection of over-sized reprints, but I suddenly wanted it. Grabbing it, I dug into my pocket for the small fold of dollar bills that constituted my comic allowance. As I did, I looked up, seeing my father on the other side of the rack, reading a magazine, grinning at me, like some sad clown lost in a tragedy. He’d followed me in, a thing he rarely ever did.

“Did you get anything good?”
   “No, just this,” I sheepishly replied, lifting the tabloid to show it more clearly, as we pulled way from Rishor’s, the outside of my window thick with condensation, making the buildings of Butler look as if they were lying under ice.
   My father didn’t reply. Regarding the comic with a weak smile, both hands tight on the steering wheel, he turned back to the road, his eyes glistening.
   “I’m sorry it happened,” I managed, almost too quiet to hear, my eyes glued to the gaudy holiday fantasy sitting on my lap, wanting things to feel normal again. It was the last thing either of us said, the entire rest of the way home.
   The accident wasn’t even mentioned that night at dinner, even though I knew my parents had already discussed it, in hushed tones, as I sat in the next room, thumbing through the latest addition to my collection. Nothing was said about it the next day either, or the next.
   And not a word of it has been uttered between my father and I since, not all the days, and years, gone by.

My Life in the Op-Ed Trenches

2008-12-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

I’d just ordered a glass of orange juice and a plate of hash browns in a well-worn diner at the top of a long hill, a five block walk from the third story room I rented above an old family-run print shop with an imposing brass door worthy of a story by Dickens. It was a wet, cold, early winter morning. Not yet six o’clock, the grey sky lay like a lid over the stretch of historic brick townhouses that climbed Liberty Avenue, a commercial/residential gauntlet that formed the main arterial of the Bloomfield neighborhood, in the city of Pittsburgh. The year was 1987.
   Being awake at such an early hour was unusual enough, having had the wherewithal to position myself at the cracked counter of such a sleepy eating place was unprecedented. I was a late riser, accustomed to wolfing down a frenzied breakfast at home before jumping on my bicycle to race perilously down Liberty into the heart of the city, to the editorial offices of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s long-standing morning paper. My near-miraculous awakening had been spurred by the advent of my latest entry into the editorial pages of the respected daily.
   Having been hired, at the ripe age of twenty-three, as the paper’s sole staff illustrator, I had only recently begun to appear on the Op-Ed galleys, an invitation which had given life to a budding sense of social awareness. Determined to draw with both my mind and my hands, I took these editorial stabs as monumental forums for expression. In my young, overly-idealistic mind, I saw them as the print stage upon which I would enlighten and bring change to the staid order of the depressed industrial settlement I’d called home for much of the decade.
   I had raced out of the gate with my very first such piece, a reactive and cynical criticism of the nation’s cattle farmers and their insatiable demand for federal subsidies. It was a hastily-drawn cartoon, a depiction of a cattleman who looked much like the Hee Haw buffoon Junior Samples, bemoaning his lot, as his cattle starved around him in the heat of a summer drought. It promptly attracted numerous letters from angry and offended local farmers. Taking this hostile reaction as a clear validation of my power to influence, I’d practically lunged at the next such assignment handed my way, a cartoon meant to accompany a piece by Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic, pointing to the hazy ethical arguments of then- Attorney General Edwin Meese, a man who seemed to feel his actions filtered through an intangible alternate universe where scrutiny was left to wholly subjective devices. Seeking to tackle this potent subject with my naïve pluck, I had made it my mission to challenge the paper’s long-standing readership, the working class men and women who sat about me that dour morning, breathing in their black coffee and eggs, pawing through the pages of the Gazette’s early edition. My obstacle to their routine involved more than a shift in perspective or opinion, it was an actual demand for hands-on participation in my art. It was this tactile adventure that had compelled me to set my alarm for the ungodly hour of five, a time for bakers and street sweepers to be roaming the Earth, not editorial cartoonists.
   The interactive hook I’d built my cartoon upon involved optical perspective. Utilizing the old trick of drawing an image in an unnaturally stretched form, I’d rendered my caricature of Meese to run more than three quarters the height of the column. When viewed in the customary fashion it appeared partly out-of-focus, but the caption at the bottom invited the reader to take the paper and hold it so that it was positioned at a right angle to the eye. By doing this, and placing one’s face close to the page, the elongated image would “magically” compress and the identity of the hard-to-pin-down Meese would become clear. Not exactly a groundbreaking premise, but it was nevertheless a concept I had been forced to battle for the previous day, cracking heads with the assistant Op-Ed editor, then the Op-Ed editor, then the editor of the paper himself, before finally finding myself in the cluttered office of the publisher, putting on a cocky show of unearned bravado that seemed to leave each of the previous gentlemen (all old enough to be my father) looking rather bewildered. It was becoming all too apparent that they had hired an illustrator with ambitions far outside the decorative arts (and his own reach). It was an uncompromising desire that would eventually see me packing my things and quitting my post only a few months later, the pathway I’d worn to the publisher’s door having become a trail of increasing frustration and fatigue. But that dreary morning, perched on my counter stool, I was still full of verve, one eye on my greasy breakfast, the other moving about my dozen fellow diners like a hawk, breathlessly anticipating their coming to the editorial page, hoping against hope that they would take my challenge and activate the prescribed action, folding the paper and holding it up to their rough-hewn faces, the steely jaws and ruddy jowls of men and women who I presumed had little time for such artistic conceits.

“Just think about!” I’d declared the evening before, standing in the stately living room of the multi-floored apartment I shared with a photographer and his girlfriend. “I have the power to make everyone in Pittsburgh fold their paper in half and hold it to their face. It could happen all at once. At six in the morning I could make literally thousands of people stop what they’re doing and play my visual game!” I was giddy with the very thought of it, drunk on my own enthusiasm. The afternoon’s victory of will over the paper’s masthead had only heightened my myopic dreams of supremacy. I was a young man who, given an inch, would quickly claim a mile.
   “You’re going to leave newsprint on everyone’s cheek,” grinned the girlfriend.
   “Exactly!” I beamed, failing to catch the sarcasm in her comment. “I’m like the puppet master, pulling the strings. Isn’t it cool?”
   The photographer rolled his eyes. “It hasn’t happened yet. How are you ever going to know, anyway?”
   That was the instant I hatched my little plan of clandestine field study. I quickly settled on the most habitual of all the local eating spots, an aluminum-sided bulwark of more than fifty years of service, a multi-generational hash-slinger with roots as deep as the city’s still-smoldering furnaces of iron and steel. Setting my notepad and pen beside my alarm clock that night, I pushed my head into my pillow, my mind full of romantic notions, imagining myself some Diane Fossey of the working class coffee-sipper, my subjects like gorillas in the mist of the cook’s grill.
   It was a moment I’d never have anticipated just a few weeks before, finding myself living back home at my parent’s house in rural Butler County, some forty-odd miles north of the city, scraping by on what little freelance illustration work I could find. I was, in fact, standing atop a ladder, painting the eaves of the house, the day the unexpected call came from the assistant editor of the Gazette, letting me know that an opening had suddenly appeared in their graphics department. It was, of course, a happening far more complex, and bound in incidental history, than one surprise phone call. My relationship with the Post-Gazette, and its editorial staff, went back to my earliest days in Pittsburgh, to the reckless pursuit of a neophyte’s search for artistic integrity in a city that shouldered far more practical concerns. This was the Pittsburgh of the Reagan era, a defeated metropolis of industry yet to fully acknowledge it had been fitted for a coffin, a city devoid of any real national cultural identity, a place where a dusty warehouse still occupied the block that would become, almost a decade later, the world-renowned Andy Warhol Museum.
   The sad incident that had spurred the phone call was the recent death of the paper’s chief illustrator, a boldly graphic artist whom I had met on my very first visit to the editorial offices, some four years earlier, just a week after I had quit an unhappy and short-lived stint at Pittsburgh’s only commercial art school. Stuffing a series of marker drawings I’d made of the denizens of the city’s pigeon-strewn parks and benches, I’d marched into the bustling newsroom, outfitted in my trademark wool beret and ancient overcoat, commanding the assistant editor’s time, along with most of his desktop. Being a patient and kind-hearted man, he’d heard me out, listening with what seemed genuine interest as I laid out my plan for a Sunday Magazine feature on the city’s street characters, the homeless and aged with whom I mingled every day on my jobless wanderings. Along with copies of my dozen portraits, I presented him with a first-person written narrative of these individuals and the strange world they inhabited. It was a bold move for a failed, nineteen year-old art student with no professional credits to his name. Not surprisingly, the feature was ultimately rejected as being too “narrowly-focused”, but not after it went through the legitimate channels of editorial discussion, the very gauntlet I would regularly face some four years later. Despite this rejection, my debut achieved two invaluable things. One, it gave me a viable contact with an editor, who soon after began offering me freelance editorial illustration assignments. Two, it introduced me to the then-current staff illustrator, the man whose death would create the vacancy I would eventually fill.
   This artist, a forward-thinking individual whose work was just beginning to appear in nationally-prominent periodicals like The New York Times and Newsweek, was the very first person I knew who had a computer and who was utilizing the earliest graphic programs to aid his drawing. He, in fact, on our third or fourth meeting at the offices, offered to teach me the program and, to my great surprise, give me license to mimic his style (one centered on traditional woodcuts, infused with the bold cartoon flourish of the likes of early Charles Burns). He was asking me to be his “ghost illustrator”. He claimed this was needed as he was getting too much outside work, but didn’t want to give up his post at the Gazette. Being a victim of a furious pride, I instantly declined, refusing to even consider such an invisible tenure. Little did I know, this was actually a very gracious, and ultimately heartbreaking, offer from a man who had been diagnosed with multiple cancers and given only a limited time to live, a man who had somehow managed to keep these dire health issues secret from the majority of his co-workers. Upon hearing that he had died, images of him, a relatively young man, arriving for one of our lunchtime art chats with a perceptible limp, leaning on a walking stick, raced back into my mind. I later learned that he had suffered a series of operations to remove parts of his infected vital organs, surgeries that had literally caused his body to collapse in upon itself.
   Thus, there I was, atop a rickety metal ladder, a paintbrush sticking from my shirt pocket, excitedly agreeing to (unbeknownst to me at the time) fill the shoes of the man who had attempted to steer me in that very direction some two years earlier.
   When I was introduced to my desk the following week, and the full tragic story was conveyed to me by the others in the small graphics department, I suddenly felt a weight upon my shoulders, a challenge to live up to not only my own demanding standards, but to honor the kindness of the benefactor I had never truly recognized. I’d like to be able to say that I achieved something of these goals, but my growing frustration working within the rigid structure of such a long-standing daily paper was to get the better of me before I had the opportunity to establish myself in any lasting way. If I managed to forge a recognizable style in those few short months before I quit in frustration, it went unrecognized, even by me, my usual schizophrenic approach to illustration, reacting to each assignment with a different artistic voice, ruling the day. If I did anything, it was to perhaps awaken the editorial hierarchy to the existence of illustrators who desired to achieve more than a fluency of craft, to those who wanted, and needed, to impart an individual worldview in their work. An idealistic notion, to be sure, but one I still stand by.

“Want another refill on this OJ?”
   I was startled out of my reverie, finding the middle-aged waitress leaning across the counter, her fingertips at the rim of my empty glass. I quickly nodded I was, keen to return my hopefully unnoticed gaze to the grizzled-looking gentleman in the hunting jacket and earflaps, who had just settled upon the territory of my scrutiny, the morning’s Op-Ed page. He held the section of paper against his lap, a shield behind which rose a steady tower of steam from his unattended coffee. I caught a squint and a furrow come to his brow as he followed the lines of my clandestine illustration, to the bottom, where he brought his eyes closer to the paper in order to read the caption I had created using rub-off prestype. I watched breathless, seeing him roll his shoulders and begin to lower the paper, positioning it as I had intended. I could hardly believe it, he was actually following my instructions, doing something I imagined he had never been asked to do with a morning paper in his life.
   It was a moment of victory, one I hadn’t expected to see, for it was almost seven-thirty and I had yet to witness a single reader do more than stare perplexed and move on in silent irritation after encountering my “groundbreaking statement of artistic purpose”. But here he was, the proof of my obvious genius, the blue collar Joe, the no-nonsense vessel into which I would pour my ideas. I straightened my back, rising high against the Formica counter. When the waitress slid my third glass of juice before me I almost declared out loud “Do you see that? That guy’s folding his paper and holding it up to his face! And I made him do it – with art!”
   But my elation was short-lived. A moment later, the man was shaking his head in apparent confusion and rustling on to the next page, my monumental achievement pressed again into obscurity between the wrinkled pages of a journal that would soon be mingled with the morning’s coffee filters and cigarette butts, lost at the bottom of a neglected garbage can.

To such events do we ascribe experience, the teeth-cutting to a perspective beyond youthful idealism, the lesson learned of our own insignificance to the greater scheme and unfolding of things, but it is still hard for me to not feel that swelling in my chest, that electric moment when I thought I had conquered the world, when I truly believed the images and ideas generated within my skull could reach out and shape the reality of others, if only in a operatively tactile way. And I suppose that feeling has never quite gone away, not completely, not after all the years between then and now, as I continue to struggle through the mornings, my pen and paper the prime tools of my trade. If I can leave anything of permanence with the work I do, be it the editorial cartoons, the sequential narratives, even the more decorative illustrations I am regularly commissioned to produce, I hope it might be to impart that perseverance is its own reward, that sticking to one’s strengths, no matter how meager the return, is something more than just the foolish bluff of a soul forged through idealism, that it can be the validation of oneself, in a world all too eager to wear that spirit down. I also want to believe that it makes a difference, somewhere, to someone, even those no longer tethered to these unfolding days.

Dedicated to the memory and art of Robert Patla.

The Show That Never Showed

2008-09-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

It was 1982.
   My father, wearing his best shirt and tie, was stationed at the foyer, ready to greet guests and take their coats, before showing them downstairs to the wine and cheese table, which was actually the top of the washing machine, smartly covered with a silk tablecloth. My mother, meanwhile, was busy in the kitchen, cutting cheese into little cubes, diligently skewering each with a toothpick.
   The occasion?
   My very first solo art show.
   The venue?
   My bedroom.
   No, seriously.
   I was, I must admit, not a child. I was eighteen. I’d recently returned to my parent’s house in the country, having fled a self-induced poverty in the unforgiving streets of the North Side of Pittsburgh. It was one of a few such similar retreats I would make during my earliest days trying to forge a life as an artist.
   What compelled my parents to partake in this madness, to play the roles I’d ascribed to them?
   I can only put it down to love, the love of the parent, that great giving resource, those energies kept waiting for just such an undertaking as the one to which they were currently surrendering all their time and dignity.

   “What color wine would you like us to get?”
   “Purple.”
   “I think you mean red.”
   “OK.”
   “You’ve been very noisy up there. Just what are you moving about? Maybe dad could help you?”
   “No, I’m OK. Nobody can see it until the show. Where’s my sleeping bag?”
   “Sleeping bag?”
   “Yeah, I need it to sleep in tonight.”
   “What’s happened to your bed?”
   “I can’t tell you. You’ll see tomorrow.”
   “I hope you aren’t doing any damage, Jeremy.”
   “Don’t worry, I’m not – I promise. Oh, I ran out of sticks for dad’s glue gun. I’m going to need some more.”

That I carried a sizable chip on my shoulder when it came the “art world”, there was no question. My hard feelings towards galleries, the insufferably pretentious scam artist whose work filled them, the inane critics who enthused over their adequacies, and the eager flock of twits that frequented their openings, was probably an inherent outgrowth of the working class roots of my parents, my father’s in particular.
   Raised in the industrial north of England, the son of the delivery man for a local butcher, he knew all too well of the class divide, one his own mother, born into a considerably more wealthy family, only highlighted. She died while he was just a boy, leaving him to find his way out from under the oppressive shadow of the dirty brick council houses that obscured his horizons and stifled his imagination. His ultimate escape came with a pencil. Not the roaming, liberated tool of my existence, it was instead the rigid graphite lengths found in a draughtsman’s kit.
   On the other hand, my mother, the daughter of a vegetable farmer, raised in the rural south in what today will seem like abject poverty (no running water or electricity), was encouraged to seek out her creative heart. She entered art school at a relatively early age, achieving an enviable understanding of her born talent, before marriage and children monopolized her life, causing a reassessment of her priorities for the future.
   It was from these humble, yet knowing, beginnings that I was delivered, destined to further the path my mother had chosen to abort, equipped with my father’s tenacity and awareness of the hedonistic trappings of culture and the supposed wealth it attracted.
   Still just seventeen when I graduated high school, I immediately entered a commercial art school in Pittsburgh, which quickly bought these inherited instincts to the fore. Almost instantly realizing that this particular institute of learning was nothing more than a highly-priced siphon, sucking dry the wallets and outsized ambition of the young and naively artistic, I rebelled, hurrying home after only two weeks, announcing to my shocked parents that I was quitting, that the school was like “a day care for idiots” and that I would find my own way in this world without, thank you.
   They, naturally, set to talking me out of quitting, making me agree to return and give it a little more time. A few weeks later I was failing most classes, especially cartooning, where my projects were ridiculed and ignored by the teachers. Every assignment became an affront, my mind bunkering itself further and further. An expulsion was inevitable.
   I became a furtive ghost student, coming and going as I saw fit, skipping classes, exploring the city with my sketchbook, sneaking back into the school at night for clandestine workshops with two understanding instructors, who acknowledged my frustration and dissatisfaction.
   During this time, I watched those still enrolled prepare themselves for their class shows in the school gallery, bubbly events attended by a patronizing, disingenuous teaching staff of failed artists and bitter journeymen. Like the budding villain in a comic book, or a hungry waif in the dark imagination of Charles Dickens, I watched through the gallery window, witnessing wide-eyed pupils struggling to nibble cheese with the bored pedagogues. Fingering the motley collection of pencils and pens lodged deep within the pockets of my winter coat, I knew my destiny lay in never buying into such a blatantly pointless activity.

   “Where did that tree in the garage come from?”
   “There’s a tree in the garage?”
   “It’s for my show.”
   “You’re thinking of bringing that thing indoors? Not up to your bedroom? You can’t!”
   “I have to, mum, it’s a vital part of my signature piece.”
   “I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish, Jeremy. You need to focus on finding work.”
   “I am, I am, but this is not about that – it’s my statement, you’ll see, trust me.”
   “A statement on what? That you quit art college and can’t afford to live on your own?”
   “No, listen, just listen! It’s about the shallow and phony art scene. I’m going to present a parody of it all, by doing just what they do, but upon matters that I really care about! See how ironic that is? Here’s what I’m doing with the tree, I’ll tell you just that much. I’m putting the tree in a planter of army men, soldiers from around the world, and throughout history – World War II, The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, The Napoleonic Wars – Germans, Australian, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, British, American, Arabian, Ancient Turks, even cavemen with rocks. OK? It’s all about how we perpetuate war, by flourishing from it. I’m doing Jospeh Heller, by way of Andy Warhol, if he was John Muir or Robert Frost! The armed, fighting soldiers will be the soil, nurturing the tree, whose limbs will hold the wounded and dying. It’s going to be amazing, just you wait and see! You have to wait until the show to see the rest.”
   “You’re using your old collection of army men?”
   “Yeah. Why not do something constructive with them? I don’t play with them anymore you know.”
   “That’s a debatable statement.”

It was to be my first great, identifying event, the artistic zenith of my young life.
   I’d spent almost two weeks designing and building the various installations, stealthily assembling the smaller ones in the privacy of my room and hiding them away. I’d invited some two-dozen friends from the city, a ragtag assemblage of artists, students, punk rockers, troublemakers, and self-appointed bohemians.
   I viewed it as a starting point, a growing moment, the very opposite of what I knew my father was thinking. He only saw me refusing to grasp maturity, continuing my childhood, the proposed show being nothing more than another of the fanciful approximations of the adult world I was so fond of in my adolescence: the detective agency (unwittingly helping the township police locate a pot-smoking hideaway in the woods – oh, the shame!), the book publishing empire (setting up office next to my father’s actual office in the house, forever bothering him to use his stapler), the insect zoo (crushing my big toe looking for beetles in the dark), the puppet shows (knocking myself out when I leapt from a chair, hitting my head on the basement beam, collapsing at the feet of the audience, still wearing sock puppets on each hand). In retrospect, of course, I can see his point. It was a continuation of my childhood occupations and fancies, as has been most of my life. It’s what I do, it’s who I am.
   My “Art”, if I can use that lofty, abused word, is an ever-running reflection of what I’m told is the legitimate structure, and subsequent culture, of our “grown-up” civilization. It is an exploration of these accepted functions and particulars, taking the shape of a voice looking in from the outside, a boy forever standing at the gates of the “other people”, those who seemingly have embraced their civilization without question, without reserve, who measure it with a seriousness, a gravity, a purposefulness that I will never ascribe to. That I have meanwhile managed to eek out a living drawing pictures as a commercial artist is beside the point. There is no wisdom gleaned from such activity, no real contentment, no true fulfillment, there is only the knowledge that I have a trade, a talent that can be offered and sold. The years since have taught me that I will not starve if I gather my wits and keep my fingers from the thresher.

   “It’s starting to snow again. The driveway is nearly white.”
   “It’s not that bad.”
   “I don’t think anyone will drive up here from Pittsburgh tonight, Jem. I really don’t.”
   “They will, you’ll see. Maybe we should open one of the wine bottles?”
   “Let’s just wait a little bit for that.”
   “Stay at the front door, dad, in case anyone comes. I want it to be like a real gallery. You’re supposed to be the gallery owner, remember.”

   Why are you doing this, Jeremy? Why aren’t you out there undertaking an entry into the real world like most everyone else? Do you want to be alone like this, to be so different?

   “That jacket is an original. All those different sections, it’s like you spilled a paint box on yourself. Is that a piece of our old curtains from Blanefield?”
   “Where did that bit of a bra come from? Why does it say Urgh?”
   “You really need to start focusing on your future.”

   Are you ever going to relent? Are you ever going to join the rest of us? What are you possibly gaining from all of this, this obstinate living inside of yourself?

   “No one’s coming, not tonight.”
   “I hate to say it, Jem, but I agree with your father. Don’t feel bad, it’s nasty out there, you can’t expect them to drive up here with the roads like that.”
   “I’m going to put the cheese back in the fridge.”
   “No. Just wait a bit more. Someone will come. They have to! It’s not too late yet.”

My father poured two plastic cups of wine, handed one to my mother and followed me, up the stairs and along the corridor to my bedroom door.
   I must have looked like a Peter Max painting, standing there in my pop art jacket, my head adorned with a tweed beret to which I’d affixed a plastic cardinal outfitted with baby doll arms (an assemblage I wore often). My heart aching horribly, feeling like the biggest fool the human race had ever known, I steeled myself and opened the door, flicking on the lights.
   There was a terrible, damning silence.
   My bed, sitting on one end, was climbing towards the ceiling, literally covered with black ants, which I’d drawn and cut from paper. The two-dimensional insects streamed from under the covers, across my pillow, about the bedcover and over the headboard, where they marched up the wall and onto the ceiling, ending in a confused jumble about the overhead light. The sliding doors of my walk-in closet where partly removed from their tracks, left hanging like November’s leaves, revealing a torrent of old drawings, childhood renderings I’d taped to every surface within, a snowstorm of my past. The curtains at my window were similarly caught up in some invisible gale, held aloft by fishing line that ran clear across the room, to which I had attached various tokens of my past; cub scout clothing, baptismal certificate, report cards, immigration papers, all liberally interspaced with intended symbols of the damning world; magazine pages of car accidents, flooded cities, police actions, begging children, army recruiters, racist gatherings, hunters displaying their trophy dead, gloating businessmen with cigars. Beneath all of this, situated about the room, were the main events of my youth, trophies of Christmas mornings past, readdressed to confront what I saw as the injustices of the world, all with a knowing wink and a sharp elbow to the gut of artistic pretense and superiority.
   There was the piece entitled The Infantree, featuring the dead arm of branches that I’d pulled from the woods, sprouting from a large planter, growing in its fertile plastic battleground, dozens of tiny injured effigies glued to its spidery limbs, bandaged American GIs lying on stretchers, fallen Union soldiers clutching at head wounds, shrieking Arabs dropping their scaraboid knives.
   Then there was Modern Hell Mountain, the two-foot tall plastic Guns of Navarone Playset that I’d covered with paisley fabric and game pieces from an assortment of “conformist” dictates, old board games like Life, Go To The Head of The Class, The Dating Game, and, of course, Monopoly. Inside sat a tape player, spewing out the cacophonic noise recordings I’d made throughout my teen years.
   Every component of the installation was dutifully labeled, in suitably pretentious prose. I had left little to spare. Even the light sockets were decorated with logos of “evil corporate power entities” like General Electric and Westinghouse.
   My poor parents, taking deep, simultaneous breaths, proceeded to stroll about the mess, sipping their wine, smiling awkwardly. I stood nervously in the doorway, trying to imagine what they must have been thinking, just what it was that I was thinking.
   I spent the next day taking it all down, restoring order to a world I desperately desired to destroy. I wondered if the whole planet wasn’t laughing at me, if my supposed friends in the city weren’t foremost among the grinning mob.
   It was only later that evening, when I received a phone call, an apology for not having been able to risk the wintery roads, that I began to feel I might survive. My spirit still resolutely crushed, an ache still deep within my heart, I sat on my bed, eating cheese cubes, declaring to myself that I’d never again undertake such a foolish performance, wondering what career my father must be lining up for me, in what factory I was to toil away the rest of my days.
   Not long after, I dragged myself back to the city. Once there, I returned to the madness of a broken artistic culture, one I raged against daily, with new vim, indulging again in an unpredictable life of personal design and poverty, which I’ve essentially kept at to this very day, carrying that aching heart with me, forever seeing my parents moving slowly about the wreck of my room, witnessing the tropes of their hard work literally upended, the furnishings of an ordinary life desecrated, the objects of their accomplishment treated as the villainy of normalcy, all in the name of irony, and a young man’s bleeding self-esteem.
   Though the intervening years have seen my work displayed in a variety of shows, in galleries here and abroad, though I’ve met the fleeting embrace of our popular culture, I’ve kept to my promise to never again open myself up so completely, to make my very home a venue for artistic consideration. That was, until just two weeks ago, when I decided to shake the festering monkey in the painter’s smock from my back, once and for all.
   Ignoring the old feelings of ridicule and disappointment, I set to creating new work, designing a personal gallery space and sending out invitations to some two-dozen friends, inhabitants of the city I now call home.
   I bought cheese too. And wine.
   I’ll tell you how it all went, in about twenty-five years.

“By Crom! I've Been Scamped!”

2008-08-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

“I told you those were collectibles! Why didn’t you listen to me, momma?” declared the thickly-built woman, her frail mother shrinking into a pile of pink and brown knit blankets. “I’ve been scamped – scamped good!”
   The old lady offered some unintelligible reply, quivering under her lint tomb, turning from her daughter’s angry spew, surely wondering just what all the fuss was about.
   I wasted no time getting from the porch to my bicycle, ushering along my younger sister, Soapie, whispering for her to hurry.
   Her name wasn’t really Soapie, but I refused to call her anything else.
   “Scamped! Scamped!” continued the irate woman, standing amidst the assembled items of her porch sale, her big face going the color of stomach medicine. “Johnny said keep the good ones out of the box, momma! He said!”
   Securing my backpack about my waist, I mounted my bike and rolled from the curb onto the street, making sure Soapie was following. The new weight pulling at the straps of my pack felt like a pirate’s treasure, an unexpected jackpot on what, until that point, had been nothing more than my weekly ride to Rishor’s newsstand, to look for new comics.
   “Why was that lady so mad?” Soapie asked, straining to keep up with me as we zigged and zagged through tight, dog-legged streets lined with old red brick buildings, half-expecting the crazy porch lady to be pursuing us in the purple Pinto with the cardboard rear window, the one in the driveway we’d leant our bicycles against.
   “I’ll show you at Rishor’s!” I replied, my mind already feverish with my anticipated new wealth. “I scamped her!” I thought happily to myself, pedaling harder and harder. “I scamped her good!”

“How much?”
   “Holy COW!” I gasped, my finger tracing the listings in the 1976 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. “TWENTY DOLLARS in mint condition!”
   “Is yours mint?”
   “Close, I think.”
   “Take it out and look.”
   “No,” I replied, looking nervously towards the front window of the newsstand, relived not to see any sign of a purple Pinto. “When we get home.”
   “What do you have?” asked a friendly, familiar voice.
   I turned to see Janet, the pretty blonde girl who worked at the newsstand. Little did I know it then, but two years later she would accompany my older brother to the high school prom.
   “Jem got Conan number three!” my sister piped highly.
   Janet gave me a sweet smile. I dropped my head shyly, sure she was going to reach out and pinch my cheek. She was that kind of a Janet. “Conan number three? Really?” she inquired, with stage-like enthusiasm, drawing the open price guide towards her. “Conan, the Barbarian, Oct. 1970 to present, Marvel Comics Group. #3 (low distribution in some areas), $10.00 good condition, $15.00 fine condition, $20.00 mint condition.”
   “Jem scamped a lady on a porch. She was super mad at her mother,” Soapie offered, ignoring the scowl I was sending her way.
   Janet gave me a slightly reproving look. “You scamped someone?”
   “I didn’t, not really,” I tried to explain, suddenly afraid that I was going to have to give up my treasure. “The box said 5¢ EACH. I asked the old lady and she said yes that was the price. The other lady wasn’t even there then. She was inside the house, looking for her smokes.”
   Janet peered into the top of my backpack, where the broken zipper had begun to come open. “Goodness – you’ve got quite a few in there! All for 5¢?”
   “5¢ each. That’s what the box said,” I reiterated, feeling defensive.
   Janet smiled warmly, giving my sister‘s cheek the squeeze I’d been fearing. “I think the lady and her mother had a misunderstanding, that’s all. You didn’t scamp anyone, not really, you just had some good fortune. Lucky you, eh? Any other valuable ones in there?” she inquired, touching the backpack.
   I swiveled about, instinctively protecting my mother lode. Janet laughed, making a funny face at Soapie, who giggled.
   “Some, I think” I said, not wanting to give away too much. Even nice Janet, who let me go into the storage room of the newsstand and take the new comics out of their plastic wrapping, wasn’t above suspicion. Maybe she even knew the pink-faced lady with the purple Pinto and was going to phone her any minute and let her know just how much the comics were actually worth. I’d be made to give them back, I was sure of it.
   “He got a Captain America and a Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and a Daredevil,” Soapie happily announced, grinning up at me. Taking sides with pretty blonde Janet wasn’t out of the question, her loyalty to me only went so far and I was wise to know it. “I think you got a SubMarine too, right, Jem?” She never could get the name Sub-Mariner right. She was, after all, a comic book novice, only having recently begun collecting. Her “buy list” was as oddly diverse as it was short. Who else spent each week looking for the latest issues of House of Mystery and Howard the Duck with the same obsessive intensity?
   Janet gave me another big smile, the sort that would eventually make my brother a victim of her every inclination. “Well, I’d say you’ve had quite a day already, any interest in seeing what new ones arrived yesterday? I think our distributor did a bit better than they did with Conan number three.”
   I nodded with excitement, following her through the swinging half-door beside the cash register.

“Jem scamped a lady in Butler.”
   “I did not! It said 5¢ each.”
   My mother gave my father a quick look. He seemed to be studying the steam steadily rising from the beef casserole sitting in the middle of the dinner table. His silence made me nervous, reminding me of the time it was discovered that I was taking money from the kitchen coin jar to buy candy before school. He’d marched me up the street to return all of the uneaten candy, making me explain to the lady at the shop what I had done and why I was never ever going to do it again. “It pays to read every sign at a garage sale,” he finally said, offering me a quick smile.
   “It wasn’t a garage sale, dad, it was a porch sale,” Soapie explained.
   “And it pays to read every sign at a porch sale,” father continued, reaching out to rub the top of Soapie’s head. She grinned happily, revealing the gap where her tooth had been knocked out while tree climbing, just the week before. “If the lady made a mistake then it was in Jem’s favor. He was being sharp to have noticed the price.”
   It was my turn to grin triumphantly. I glanced down at the stack of comics sitting on the chair beside me. “I bet Conan number three is going to be worth a thousand dollars in five years!“ I declared, bumping the table with the ends of my fork and knife.
   “What have I told you about that?” my mother declared sharply. “And didn’t I tell you not to bring comics to the table?”
   “He’s reading Defenders while he’s eating!” announced Soapie, leaning under the table for a look.
   “A thousand dollars in five years, eh?” father chuckled. “That sounds perfect. You’ll be all ready to graduate from school in five years, we can put the money aside for college.”
   “Art school,” I corrected, giving Soapie the evil eye.
   Mother shot me a stern look. “Take the comics up to your room and hurry back,” she instructed.
   “Scamped,” father intoned, shaking his head. “That’s definitely a local expression.”
   “Fuckin’ scamped!” Soapie whispered, leaning towards my chair.
   A great silence suddenly fell upon the table. No one said a word. I didn’t dare move, my eyes glued to the stack of comics now on my lap. Mother gave Soapie a withering look.
   “But that’s what the older lady said when we were on the porch steps. I heard her.”
   “We don’t use that word in this family,” father stated.
   I began to giggle. It was impossible not to.
   “Jeremy?”
   My heart jumped, the way it always did when my mother addressed me by my proper name. It was never good.
   “Do you know what that word means?”
   Oh, God, I thought, don’t, please don’t.
   “Do you?”
   “Of course – I’m almost thirteen, mum,” I groaned, my face going hot. Mother seemed to relish picking the worst possible times to educate us about such things. And she was always a few years behind our learning curve, which I’m sure would have horrified her to know.
   “Take the comics to your room, like your mother asked,” father suggested, giving me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “I wonder what’s for dessert?” he quickly added, winking at Soapie, clearly keen to change the subject.
   A moment later I returned to the table, avoiding my mother’s eye.
   “Well, that was quite some day you two had, eh?” exclaimed father, smiling.
   “Perhaps we should think some more about this whole art school idea,” mother sighed, speaking to no one in particular.

How I Nearly Cooked Marvel's Bacon

2008-07-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

PAGE ONE
FIRST PANEL: Peter Porker is eating lunch at his desk when J. Jonah Jawsome rushes out of his office, holding a phone.
Jawsome: “Porker! Grab your camera and get down to fourth and Herriman! They’re about to parade the fattest living woman in Swineville – Gorgeous Edacity Binge!”
Porker: “But, JJJ, I’m still eating my lunch!”
SECOND PANEL: Jawsome takes Peter’s lunch and eats it himself. Peter looks glum.
Jawsome: “Now you’re finished! Get going – if you want to see another paycheck!”

This is how, in early January, 1988, at the ripe age of twenty three, I began what was to be my first, and last, scripting assignment for Marvel Comics.
   Having been offered the writing reigns of a particular red and blue, web-slinging, wise-cracking superhero, I promptly proceeded to offend, bewilder, dismay, and otherwise utterly confuse my editor, so much so he refused to even speak to me, instead putting his assistant on the phone to read me the riot act, while I sputtered explanations, desperately trying to justifying my cause, having less effect than a brine shrimp arguing before the maw of a hungry whale.
   My crime? I had tampered with the sacred structure of one of America’s preeminent publishing empires, an ignoble gesture, I was told, which had sullied the intricate groundwork laid before me by generations of hard-working writers.
   Entrusted with the narrative care of a treasured commercial property, I had quickly set to all but eradicating its every recognizable trait. It was as if, having been asked to write a James Bond novel, I’d instead turned in a manuscript concerning a ninety five year-old Englishman who spares the world imminent destruction by accidentally spilling his cup of tea. Though, in my defense, it needs to be noted that the “cherished” character I had been asked to chaperone into new respectability was a pig.
   That’s right, a super-powered, masked pig.
   To those of you not currently residing in your parent’s basement, the title Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham will mean very little. To those of you who are, it will also probably mean very little. Spider-Ham was Marvel’s “funny animal” parody of their popular Spider-Man character. Initially part of their Star Comics imprint, a clumsy attempt at cornering the massive market for children’s comics held by Harvey Publications and Archie Comics (I’m being sarcastic here), Spider-Ham endured seventeen issues of his own bi-monthly title, before being cancelled and relegated to a five-page back-up feature in Marvel Tales, a repository for reprinted Spider-Man stories.
   Which is where my genius came in.
   Having sent a sample script to Marvel editor Jim Salicrup, one featuring my own character, Buster Crook, a one-eyed, long-haired dwarf adventurer/crime fighter who traveled the globe in a car shaped like a cow, I’d received a fairly prompt reply, one making an offer I’d not bargained for. Salicrup, not seeing much commercial potential in my Buster Crook premise (just why I can’t fathom), nevertheless spotted something in my “imagination and inventive sense of humor”, enough to suggest I might be the one to help reinvigorate Spider-Ham, who was by then spoiling away in the back pages of Marvel Tales. He explained that “the character has never been handled well and I’ve been searching for someone to give the strip an identity of its own, to make it more than a funny animal version of Spider-Man. It would be great if it could be funny too.”
   I suppose being tossed such a wastrel of the Marvel Universe, a pig dressed as a man bitten by a spider, was an appropriate trial for an untested rookie, much like batting for a junior farm league team somewhere in central Ohio, but I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit “utilized”. I was, after all, a writer, a writer of uncommon good taste, a writer with ideals to meet, lofty principles to honor. The funny animal genre was a mongrel I’d hardly even raise a foot to, especially the sort of thing that was then passing for the form; sour, leaden, four-color tragedies like Spider-Ham and Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew!, titles whose humor hinged upon animal-related puns so horrible entire species were regularly taking offense. I aspired to something a bit higher on the ladder of respectability, even if it had to involve animals wearing pants.

   “You changed J. Jonah Jackal’s name to Jawsome,” declared the indignant assistant.
   “Well, right, that’s because he’s not a jackal any more,” I replied.
   “He’s not a jackal any more? Then what is he?”
   “He’s a pig.”
   “You changed Mary Jane Waterbuffalo to Mary Jane Majestic.”
   “Right.”
   “She’s a pig too?”
   “Everyone’s a pig – that’s my big change.”
   “You can’t just make everyone a pig! What about continuity?”

Taking Salicrup’s plea for something more than a funny animal parody to heart, I had set out to craft a ten-page story that would forever imprint upon the collective comics-reading consciousness a character so unique, so unexpected, so utterly unheralded it would make even the collected works of Alan Moore seem mundane by comparison. Happily digging through my sizable morgue of reference and inspiration, I had built a template for a new spider-powered pig product, framing it with the time-tested conceit of one of my very favorite cartoonists, Carl Barks. As Barks had done so successfully with his stories featuring Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, I chose to simply ignore the beastial appearance of my character, thus eliminating the whole premise of Spider-Ham even being a funny animal comic. If making it more than a funny animal parody was desired, I had reasoned, then why not make it something altogether beyond one?
   To accomplish this ritualistic “de-swining” I followed Bark’s lead, but took it to its logical conclusion, making all of Peter Porker’s friends and relatives members of the order sus scrofa. I quickly saw to it that there were no supporting characters of indeterminate origin like the Beagle Boys, who had always confused me. Were they, in fact, beagles? If so, how could one help but conclude that all of Bark’s similar-looking characters were canine also, setting up a reality with a bizarre, two-pronged zoology, a world of dogs and water fowl only?

   “You changed Star City to Swineville?”
   “Yes. It’s a city full of pigs now. I thought it would be a funny name.”
   “You turned The Daily Beagle into The Daily Testimony.”
   “Right. Beagle seemed wrong for pigs.”
   “Why – why did you think you could just do all of this?”
   “Uh, well, you asked me to make Spider-Ham different, and better, so I did.”

Wanting to give the series an edgy milieu (a late 80s comic book phrase if there ever was one), I’d quickly decided to tweak my initial premise, allowing for a literal allusion to my character’s piggish appearance, creating a bogeyman or, more succinctly, death, an oft-alluded-to (but never seen) “butcher”, a grim reaper who would, when one’s time was up, offer you a one-way “ticket to Chicago”, referring to that city’s noted history in the slaughterhouse trade. I soon had grand ideas of making Swineville a city-sized metaphor for the meat industry, making each day, and night, an exercise in surviving the inevitability of that ride to Chi-Town. I imagined rooftop soliloquies, a graven Spider-Ham casting his weary gaze out into a thunderous sky laced with lightning, my lavender prose evoking the sound of “butcher’s knives sharpening against stone”. But, after a few days tooling with this approach, I soon realized it would only appeal to comic book readers who were as religiously devout as I in their current vegetarianism. Which meant me, and a lonely, fifteen year-old girl living in Poughkeepsie.
   So, I shifted tone once again, this time opting for a more, well, a more “Disney” approach. My mind racing for that something special that would set my treatment aside from all others, I though “why shouldn’t I treat Spider-Ham as if indeed it were the latest Barks-influenced Disney property?” Why not set it up to catch some of the attention that then-popular cartoons like Rescue Rangers and DuckTales were garnering? In other words, I wasn’t now just ignoring funny animal comics, I was altogether ignoring the general readership of funny animal comics. It was mutiny.

   “But your sketches, in the layouts you made, they don’t even look like Spider-Ham!”
   “Well, you know, the old Spider-Ham looked more like an aardvark – a lot like Cerebus the Aardvark, in fact.”
   “I don’t agree.”
   “I think kids will relate to a more traditional pig shape.”
   “Kids?”

Well, isn’t that what Marvel, in all its infinite wisdom, was essentially reaching for with the Star Comics line? Of course, no right-thinking American boy or girl would be caught dead with an issue of Planet Terry or Royal Roy (forever Donald Trump to Richie Rich’s Bill Gates), but the “House of Ideas” seemed oblivious to this, thinking they could saturate a weak market with inane knock-offs and a web-spinning pig.
   Working diligently for the next two weeks, positive I was onto a sure thing, I ended up with ten, finely-tuned pages of a script entitled “An Ample Infatuation”, a chummy, kid-proof little tale chronicling how Spider-Ham is snared into an “arranged” marriage with Gorgeous Edacity Binge, the fattest woman in all of Swineville. The story introduced three new regular characters, of my own design: J. Jonah Jawsome’s irritating nephew, Winchester, who only spoke three words: Pow! Pow! And Pow!, Morton C. Exposure, Peter Porker’s new adversary in the freelance photography biz, and last, but not least, Snappy, Peter’s sentient, talking camera. Clearly, this was an unimpeachable bit of classic comic book writing, a fully successful introduction to a vastly improved Spider-Ham, one which was funny, exciting, and cute – and most definitely not a parody.
   Brimming with anticipation, convinced I would soon be writing regularly for Marvel, I prepared an elaborate package for Salicrup, going so far as to draw a complete panel-to-panel layout for every page, which I included with the typewritten text. Also, wanting to make my “Barksian” approach clear, I photocopied a variety of pages from Donald Duck stories, offering, about the margins, a running lecture on the virtues of Bark’s genius and just why I felt it would save Spider-Ham. Placing all of this in an envelope I’d decorated with cut-out photographs of real pigs, colored to look as if they were wearing the familiar red and blue costume of everyone’s favorite web-slinger, I hurried to the mailbox, imagining the glory that was soon to be mine.

   “You changed almost everything.”
   “Right.”
   “You can’t do that. We wanted a different take on the characters we had.”
   “Oh. Well, maybe mine’s just a really different take?”
   “Sorry, this isn’t going to work.”
   click

That was it, my audition was over. I had been extinguished. My star would never shine amidst that constellation of monthly and bi-monthly titles known as the Marvel Universe, never would I share a bench with all the comic book greats in the Mighty Marvel Bullpen. I did, however, a few months later, receive a partial script for something called West Coast Avengers, asking that I might try my hand at “making it work”. I didn’t even reply, having, by that time, exhausted my enthusiasm for writing anything close to a conventional super hero comic. I was already embarking on a journey to a real alternative universe, one where I could write, and draw, the sort of comics I wanted to, pigs and continuity be damned.

A Sleepyhead Tale: Riding the Bludgeoning Carousel

2008-07-04T00:49:00.000-07:00

Having been interviewed only very rarely in the twenty years that I have been a published, working cartoonist, I have a less than tenable relationship with the form and its experience. This absence of external narrative I must partly attribute to my stubborn adherence to content over form. I have always allowed for story to dictate drawing, resulting in a wide variety of styles, which I am sure has helped dilute any lasting impact I may have had on the collective memory of the comics reading public. Add to this a hesitancy to share too much of myself outside of my art, and the dearth of interviews in my resume is quite understandable.
   In the summer of 1990, at the outset of my cartooning journey, before this trend of unintended silence had crystallized, I was approached by a tiny art fanzine from Los Angeles called Inklings & Musings, interested in learning more about my weekly strip, A Sleepyhead Tale, which, at the time, was running in both the LA Reader and the San Diego Reader. The request coming during the pre-internet age, and the print run of Inklings being extremely limited, this peek into the twists and turns of my creative mind has subsequently been seen by very few.
   Recently having reread the interview, not having looked at it since it was first published, I was surprised to see how little I have changed, while, conversely, the world about me so drastically has. During the time of the interview, I was regularly riding my bicycle some nine miles, to the only decent photocopy store, making copies of my art, then pedaling back home to package it, before riding another three miles to the post office. Now, I simply scan my originals and e-mail them to their destination. I can only wonder what has been lost in this transition, apart from the obvious sweat and toil.
   A Sleepyhead Tale, which ran from April 1989 to March 1992, attaining a height of only four papers, was fueled by the ambition and the anger of being young, the energy that one simply cannot sustain through life, the burning of resources that one learns to moderate in order to survive. Each strip was an exercise of literal self-flagellation. I allowed my general disgust and bewilderment towards life to take form in Sleepyhead’s outrageous anxieties, letting him explore a particular issue, always making a fool of himself, if not ultimately killing himself. This was not an arc of self-destruction he traveled alone. I was consciously following, staring down the reality I saw, prodding it relentlessly, until it inevitably struck out, knocking me for a loop, every last time. I survived this personal bullying by learning to laugh at the darkest of discovered truths, a refuge that made my cartoons – well – cartoons – and not some exhausting series of profusely-illustrated suicide notes.
   Eventually realizing I had created a narrative structure akin to a carousel where the operator heaved a bludgeon, a course from which I, and my characters, would never return, I set about rectifying Sleepyhead’s repeating dilemma and, in the final year of the strip, offered the imperiled protagonist of the poisoned pratfall a chance to grow, to overcome the impetus for never-ending ruin that had so defined him. I was, in essence, giving my cartoon creation a way out of his “cartoonhood”, something, which, through fifty-odd episodes of a serialized novella I entitled “The Island of Dr. Moral”, he did, finally reaching the point of self-awareness that I had engineered to be his escape (albeit his enlightenment was no guarantee against the whims of fate). Finishing the final strip in the Spring of 1992, I vowed to never again write or draw the character, something I have held to for the last sixteen years, apart from one pre-written appearance in the second issue of my quarterly comic Whotnot!.
   Presented here now, for the first time since its initial publication, is the aforementioned interview, my very first, conducted at the height of my ride on the “bludgeoning carousel”. I have slightly edited certain passages for clarity.

Inklings & Musings: How old are you?
Jeremy Eaton: I’m 26 years old.
Where were you born?
England.
Did you attend Art School? College?
Nothing like that. Just doing it for myself, year after year.
Did you collect comic books? Which ones? Do you collect anything else?
My first American comics were those sold in plastic bags, three to a pack, at KOA camper’s shops, next to the miniature soaps and disposable toothbrushes. Titles like Strange Tales, Jungle Action, The Invaders, Kamandi, War of the Worlds and, oh, many others. I read them in the back seat of the car on long trips, traced my favorite figures, put new costumes on them. Pretty normal stuff. This was all back in the 1970s, of course, with The Osmonds and The Jackson 5 bubble gum cards, Wacky Packages, those little, bug-eyed parachuting toys, the “fuck you” cover of MAD magazine, banana seats and popping wheelies…
Were you into “punk” music? What kind of music do you like? What was the last record or CD you bought?
Throughout the late 70s and early 80s I was too stupid and too shy to notice. I knew the names of some obscure bands but not their music. But I did once hitch a ride on a potato truck into London to see the Bad Brains. If music doesn’t inspire my mind, it sweetens my tongue. I’d be embarrassed to divulge my fancies.
What jobs did you have before you broke into cartooning?
Oh, many silly things; bicycle messenger, clown, artist’s model, sign painter, children’s storyteller, puppeteer, staff illustrator at a daily newspaper and, well, I was a giant Andrew Carnegie, making my appearances at various museum functions. A lot of hot and bothersome things.
Is “cartoonist” a title you accept? Is there a title you prefer? Like “Graphic Novel” vs. comic book, is a rose by any other name just as sweet?
I strive to become a cartoonist. This may sound goofy, but at this stage I feel like I am really just illustrating my stories. Cartooning is a massive language I am beginning to learn, in bits and pieces.
How did you break into a syndicated comic? Do you distribute it yourself? How do you do it? Is the pay OK? Worth it?
Sometimes it’s hell, real hell. Other times? It’s the best thing in the world to me. It’s always worth it in the end though, always. I didn’t have any great moment of inspiration and I didn’t have to pass any life-threatening audition. A Sleepyhead Tale exists in its own little way purely because one person wanted it to. I started by working up a batch of about ten strips, this took about four months, maybe five. I didn’t have any addresses at the time, didn’t know where to send it, other than the Village Voice. I called their art director and learned that there was such a thing as the A.N.N. (the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies). I wrote to them and told them of my objectives and they sent me their latest membership roster. I’d suggest anyone with a strip to shop around should write to them like I did. So, with my list of about sixty newspapers printed on a weekly basis in north America, I started stuffing envelopes and awaited any replies. I also found the courage to cold call people like cartoonist Ben Katchor, to get any advice I could. I was once told, by Lynda Barry’s business assistant, that for every one hundred submissions sent out, you will be lucky to receive one positive response. Does quality have anything to do with this? The answer terrifies me. Don’t even think about the mental competency on the receiving end of your submission, just persevere. Don’t stop and your chances won’t either. When it first happens and you suddenly find yourself having to produce a weekly cartoon, then you quickly learn a system and become a vegetable, strapped to a drawing table. Make your deadlines comfortable and find the best way of getting your work there safely. Recently, I’ve shouldered the extra expense of having to overnight my work. The U.S. Mail sometimes puts deeps creases across my brow. I’ve lost my faith there and try to stay away from it as much as I can.
   The money earned from this cartooning is purely based upon momentum. To start with, you shouldn’t expect to earn very much. I earn little more than one hundred dollars a month. Yes, a month. I have earned as little as eight dollars a strip and as much as fifty dollars. The rules just don’t exist. Expect everything and everything will be expected. I manage financially by currently living at my parent’s house and by doing one or two newspaper illustrations each month. But, with me, the inspiration does not come from the potential bags of money beyond the horizon. I cartoon because there is nothing else I can do at this time. I guess I lied about this being a real “hell”, heck, when you don’t have any choice about it, life is easy! I rarely take a day off and when I do I begin to itch to get back to my work. Initially, this as a choice that I made, but, now, sooner you ask me to chop off my left arm than to quit cartooning/storytelling. I guess I’m just sick.
What size is your original work?
My originals are about 11“ wide by 13“ deep. I can’t go any larger than that because I send out photocopies to the newspapers and most copiers won’t take an original wider than 11“.
Who carries A Sleepyhead Tale? If my Chicago friends want to see it…
It currently runs in the San Diego Reader and the Los Angeles Reader. It has also appeared in the first two issues of BUZZ, a comic magazine put out by Kitchen Sink Press. It ran in a paper out of the Boston area, but that paper died very quickly. A Sleepyhead Tale in the Chicago Reader? I wouldn’t mind it. They’ve yet to take a bite. I guess you’d have to write to the editor and just demand it. Who knows?
What gave you the original idea?
It started out as direct interpretation of dreams, Sleepyhead was a nameless figure who suffered the travails of my own dreams. Quite different from where the strip is now. I let it take its own course.
When did the first Tale see print?
It first appeared in late April, 1989, in the San Diego Reader.
If I wanted to buy an original, what would it cost? Do you have a dealer or a gallery to get in touch with? Is there a waiting list for them?
Ahhh…no, no gallery, no dealer, no waiting list. Just a stack of Bristol board to my immediate left. I couldn’t bring myself to part with any of the originals because, well, they’re important to me. Sorry. (NOTE: I’ve since fitted myself for the heels of a whore, offering a few select pages of this strip at Comic Art Collective).
Who are your art/illustration influences? Walt Kelly’s Pogo? Will Eisner?
Many, many subconscious influences, I’m sure. Conscious ones? Let’s see, first and foremost is Jack Kirby (from way back to my KOA days), his composition, dynamics, spotting of black areas, storytelling, all really solid. I don’t care what sort of comics you are drawing, you can learn from Jack Kirby. Also Roy Crane (building a consistent reality, a sense of atmosphere, his subtly), Ronald Searle (letting your hair down and letting the ink flow), and Robert Crumb, of course (for all those sweat beads, tear drops and other things), and others, I’m sure I’m forgetting, like, oh, of course, Wally Wood and Bill Elder (sound effects and that ethereal language of cartoon action). How’s that? I feel like some Tinkertoy creation looking back on that list, not that I’m able to match the above-mentioned, but I am aiming, or at least I think I’ve spotted the target.
Which comic strips do you like now? What do you think of Lynda Barry? The Simpsons? Are there any comic books you like or buy?
I really like Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl and Julie Larson’s Suburban Torture. Bill Watterson understands cartooning better than most today. Bill Griffith is an inspiration, with stamina from another planet (I sometimes fear I’m stepping on his toes, or maybe stuck between his toes). The same goes for Kim Deitch. Lynda Barry is a great writer, a great cartoonist. She’s created her own sort of cartoon. That’s really something. The Simpsons? Honestly, I’ve never watched The Simpsons, but I have heard it from another room and it sounded quite funny. I don’t buy comics right now, haven’t for a long time, but I would like to find some issues of JIM and Yummy Fur and Dirty Plotte. I’m curious about these. Also Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell.
Do you do any painting, writing, or anything else art-related? What do you do for fun?
I am writing constantly, but at the moment it’s all unconstructed phrases and ideas and chunks of dialogue. One day I’ll bring it all together. The illustrations that I do for various newspapers are usually an interesting diversion, but I do feel a need for something completely non-structured. I used to make painfully horrible homemade recordings, but that has stopped. I sometimes do get the time to make doll-like sculptures from discarded plastic. Painting is something I have never done, but the interest never goes away.
How far do you see this going? Sleepy-themed Nintendo games? Bootleg T-shirts? Molded plastic, battery-operated toothbrushes? Do you want to do it as long as possible or do you want to get into other things?
No products, please. Please? I think the cartoon is enough in that regard. At the moment, this is my outlet for the stories that I want to tell. Who knows what may change? Will the pictures become redundant? Will the words? Will it all? I’m glad that I don’t know.
Are you interested in animation?
Not really. Cartooning is cartooning, animation is animation, you know? It’s apples and oranges. I don’t think the apple is sitting there waiting to be an orange. And I can’t imagine trusting my stories and characters to anyone but myself. It just wouldn’t work. I know I’d regret it.
How is Sleepyhead being received now?
I hear very little from the outside. Doing a short interview like this is quite a “stepping out” for me, believe it or not.
Do you have trouble coming up with ideas? Do you get most from newspapers, television?
No. I’m actually afraid of having too many ideas and losing the better ones in the pile. The input comes from anywhere and everywhere, but what I rely upon is the filter in my head that distills it all.
A cliché question, I know, but do you have any advice for anyone interested in entering the cartooning profession?
Well, I don’t want to sound presumptuous, I’m a novice who’s just finding his own legs, but there is one thing I have to stress and that is perseverance. It’s essential. Unless, of course, you happen to land smack into the nation’s warm embrace with your first doodle, a situation I can’t even ponder. The blood drains from my body. Other than perseverance, I’d suggest finding out just what a cartoon is, why it is, so that you can ask yourself if it’s really a necessary thing for you to do. I don’t think that a cartoonist is someone who can draw a funny face and I don’t think a cartoonist is someone who can tell a funny joke. That’s a caricaturist and a comedian, respectively. A cartoonist is something else completely. I guess that’s about all the advice I have, oh, one more thing – find yourself a hard, straight-backed chair. Your posture will be the better for it in the long run.

An Open Letter to George Clooney (in the form of Stan Lee's infamous Marvel Bullpen Bulletins)

2008-06-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

ITEM! Great gregarious greetings, Gorgeous GEORGE CLOONEY! By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the noisily notable news of this year’s biggest, most bombastic, superific hit of the silver screen, the cinematic debut of a certain gold and red iron-clad avenger, the irresistibly Invincible IRON MAN! Then again, being twice voted the “sexiest man alive” (where was my placing, I most humbly have to wonder?), perhaps you’ve been too busy, tanning your ten million dollar toes poolside, in all your popular pimpin’ playboy splendor. Well, Georgie Boy, let me tell you, the marvelous minions, from coast to shining coast, are literally going lunatic, lapping up Rip-roaring ROBERT DOWNY Jr. in his career-changing role as millionaire inventor, industrialist Tony Stark (Momma Stark’s mustachioed pride and joy). This dandy little picture show has already raked in a cool two hundred and ninety million buckaroos! And that’s just the sauce around the beans, effendi, because everybody’s green-skinned gamma-gilded giant is next, followed by a whole healthy helping of four-color goodies (doth someone sayeth Asgard?), culminating in an epic only Camera-wieldin’ CECIL B. DEMILLE could have conceived. That’s right, my aggressively attractive Armani armadillo, the AVENGERS themselves will be assembling at a theater near you, just a few short summers from now! It’s a complete and utter Marvel Universe lovefest out there, Georgie, one a wise and savvy Hollywood auteur like yourself should be a part of. No, I’m not, in all my humble cunning casting capacity, suggesting that you doff your Ralph Lauren for a tight-fitting bodysuit (though I gotta say you’d make a terrific Nighthawk). No, friend, what I’m suggesting is you turn your keen directing skills in the direction of this accelerated adrenal action and tell the story everyone in America is going to be clamoring for. That’s right, I’m talking about the Marvel Story itself, the overwhelmingly outta-site origin of the omnipresent HOUSE OF IDEAS! Of course, this is a tale centering around one Stanley Martin Lieber, STAN “THE MAN” LEE to all his true believers. Trust me, Georgie, Stan Lee’s made for the big screen, he’s a flamboyant, eccentric, linguistic, ego-rich milkshake, equal parts Pugnacious P.T. BARNUM, Horny HUGH HEFNER, and Bookish BILL MOYERS. You’ve already proven yourself with such intelligently insightful and energetically entertaining documents of our country’s media culture as Good Night, and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, just think what you could do with this super-sourced slice of American publishing history. Picture Lee’s rise as the verbose public face of Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, surrounded by a cast of groundbreaking genre geniuses and elusive eccentric energumen like Jolly JACK KIRBY (the absent-minded, delusional WWII vet with visions of inner-space), Shy STEVE DITKO (the reclusive, paranoid master of creepy thought and comment), and Jaunty JIM STERANKO (the suave, avant-garde ladies man), whom he sold to a generation of young readers as “the Merry Marvel Bullpen”. Now imagine his pop-art histrionics of the late 60s and early 70s, when he and Marvel were the toast of colleges and the news media, embraced by painters, rock stars and Playboy magazine, Lee himself prancing about the country like a Woodstock-flavored Peter Pan, flaunting his perpetually-groomed porn star moustache and onerously-open shirts. You’d find yourself behind the camera of a hugely entertaining, strange, and funny fable, one that made household names of Iron Man, Spider Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men, to name a few. But, that’s not all, for locked within this pleasantly perfect pompous parade of pop culture hoopla, fanned by Lee’s supremely sensational shrill salesmanship, would be the real story, that of the secret struggles and all-too-human aspirations of the artists and personalities involved in this “marvelous” mayhem, the lives carried, and buried, by the monstrously manic company hyperbole, most pointedly the equally respectful and rancorous relationship twixt Lee and Kirby, the prince of patter oft clashing with the king of comics, the senses-sizzling sparks they generate giving the unsuspecting world a visionary plethora of punch-ready protagonists and pulse-pounding plots! As for historical authenticity, you would be wise to play it as loosely as Lee’s own infamous writes and rants, dropping more ingenious innuendo and salacious supposition than the master of modern myth himself, drawing in such peers of popular personage as Artful ANDY WARHOL, Preening PAUL McCARTNEY, Far-out FEDERICO FELLINI, and Krazy KEITH MOON, all who were affiliated with, or enthusiastically affected by, the Marvel legend. So, Georgie, my boy, what do you say? Are you going to let such a unique chapter of our country’s cultural identity pass you by? Or are you going to grab the no-prize and see that this simply searing story is captivatingly captured for generations of true believers to come? The choice is yours! Let’s do lunch and discuss! EXCELSIOR!

ITEM! THE HOUSE OF IDEAS, the upcoming film based on the early years of the Marvel Comics Company, to be produced and directed by Gorgeous GEORGE CLOONEY, has just announced its leading cast and, boy, is it a doozy! Set your Mighty Marvel peepers on this list, pilgrims:
Smilin’ STAN LEE – Joltin’ JOHNNY DEPP (the only rationale choice)
Jolly JACK KIRBY – Wincin’ WILLIAM H. MACY (near perfect casting, I’d say)
Shy STEVE DITKO – Slippery STEVE BUSCEMI (who does “uneasy” any better?)
Jaunty JIM STERANKO – Likable LEONARDO DICAPRIO (a moustache, a turtle neck)
Jazzy JOHN ROMITA – Jocular JASON BATEMAN (goofy smile, rolled-up sleeves)
Swingin’ SAM ROSEN – Simperin’ SETH MEYERS (is that not the face of a letterer?)
Happy HERB TRIMPE – Nerdy NEIL PATRICK HARRIS (he’s got the Hulk’s forehead)
Merry MARIE SEVERIN – Heavenly HELENA BONHAM CARTER (the dark, inky eyes)
Fabulous FLO STEINBERG – Minxy MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL (one word – secretary)
Artful ANDY WARHOL – Carrot-topped CONAN OBRIEN (he can stoop to conquer)
Preening PAUL McCARTNEY – Preening PAUL McCARTNEY (you still look 21, Paul!)
Far-out FEDERICO FELLINI – Jumpy JIM BELUSHI (trust me on this one – I think)
Krazy KEITH MOON – Malleable MIKE MYERS (he’s already worn the English teeth)
Horny HUGH HEFNER – Smilin’ STAN LEE (it’s practically in the bag!)

ITEM! The above-mentioned film concept, THE HOUSE OF IDEAS, has been submitted in writing to the Screen Writers Guild of America and is therefore a protected creative property of the author of this blog, Comic, J.W.E. Any usage or misappropriation of said concept will result in a team of supremely-gifted lawyers descending upon your house, legal briefs in hand, ready to practice the ancient litigious arts they learned while studying at the Acrimonious ART BUCHWALD School of Courtroom Proceedings. ‘NUFF SAID!

Confessions of a Comic Strip Terrorist, Part Two, Friends Of the Webbed Legend

2008-05-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Editor,
Regarding the expulsion of Donald Duck from the comics pages of the Butler Eagle: We have waited long enough! Appease the silent majority by returning Donald to his rightful place. The city of Butler has not been the same since old Don was evicted, an ill wind blows down Main Street, hear its plea.
The Growing Numbers of F.O.W.L., Butler Chapter

Catching my breath, I drop the letter into the dark bin, listening for its envelope to hit bottom. I’ve just pedaled some six miles to this particular street corner, one adjacent to a huddle of miserable-looking, red-brick buildings situated at the north east end of Butler, a tired precinct of “spit an’ comb” barbers, moribund five & dimes, and deer skinning boutiques. Pushing away from the mailbox, casting a steady eye about me, I reassure myself I haven’t been seen. Reaching the curb, the front wheel of my bicycle hitting the road with a pleasing thud, I begin to head for home, my mission accomplished.

It is late summer, 1990. I am twenty six years old, the sole member of a secret terroristic organization known as Friends Of the Webbed Legend, an affiliation that places me alongside such notorious agencies of change as The Weathermen and The Black Panther Party, the only difference being that F.O.W.L. is dedicated to reinstating change to the comics page of a daily regional newspaper, not the social and political climate of the western world. That paper, The Butler Eagle, is still helmed by the editor who, some ten years earlier, published, and subsequently possessed, my own comic strip, Flip Rhodun. F.O.W.L. is, in part, my revenge on this philanthropic thief, my method of toying with the sacred structure of provincial journalism.
   I’d begun some two months prior, penning my first letter of protest and outrage, mere days after Donald Duck had been replaced by Geech, a generally uninspired look at small town life created by the late Jerry Bittle. The Duck strip was an anonymous vehicle of the Disney Corporation, the sort of capitalist beacon a militant cabal like F.O.W.L. should have stood in defiance of, and yet, here I was, championing this faceless cartoon, claiming to admire its classic simplicity, demanding its return through a series of letters to the editor, each increasing the urgency of the matter, issued with a more strident tone.
   It is patently obvious that Donald Duck has become a surrogate for Flip Rhodun. It is the rising face of a decade-old grievance, a grudge that will take me to rare extremes as I attempt to spare the bird the axe.
   At first, I simply sign my communications with the F.O.W.L. acronym, claiming no allegiance, or affiliation, with Disney. At least one a week appears in print. Soon, desiring to more deeply insert my fabrication into the workings of the paper and its community, I begin to craft responses to my own letters, crediting them to equally make-believe inhabitants of Butler, and the greater Pittsburgh area, colorful locals like Dom and Tam Diggs, married truck drivers who profess their love for the famous duck, even asking to join F.O.W.L.
   To authenticate this expanding skullduggery, I bicycle some twenty-odd miles, posting the Diggs’ letters where the postmark will stand scrutiny. It isn’t long before I’m pedaling about the county, dropping my “feathered missives” with increasing frequency, spreading my editorial terror. Many never make it to print, but each is an integral chapter in my story, helping to realize the world I am creating.
   As F.O.W.L.’s demands become more urgent, now appearing on “official” photo-copied stationary, letters from actual supporters begin to crop up, more than one following the cryptic literary bent of my own, taking an even more strident tone, threatening to cancel their subscriptions and boycott the paper.
   I have quickly become Dr. Frankenstein, F.O.W.L. my duck-shaped monster. The only way to stop what I have created, it seems, is for the editor to capitulate and return the sailor-suited drake. This would have been a perfect end to my tale, but, alas, it is not to be. Donald, like Flip before him, is never again to grace the pages of the Eagle. The Friends Of the Webbed Legend fails to meet its sworn objective.

Eventually, I cease the letter-writing, my sympathizers following suit. The ink-stained campaign of public influence quickly fades from view, even as a very different crusade of coercion captures the attention of the country, George Herbert Bush pointing to his vinegary lips, American tanks rolling into Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein testing his former benefactor’s will by annexing the oil depot known as Kuwait.
   As the vicious heart of a nation reveals itself, grandmothers calling for blood, a small city in Western Pennsylvania simultaneously succumbs to the iron-fisted rule of a newspaper tyrant, an editor who sees fit to banish a webbed legend from its cultural diet.
   Wisely recognizing that my days as a comic strip master of terror are over, I bid the rascally fowl adieu, unaware that my little exercise in media manipulation will one day come in handy, when I am to venture fresh escapades of literary deception, letting my mind run in wild new places, but that is yet another story, for another time.

Confessions of a Comic Strip Terrorist, Part One, “Flip'ed Out” (A Prelude)

2008-05-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

It was early summer, 1981. I was a seventeen year-old high school graduate, living near the small Western Pennsylvania city of Butler.
   Named for Major General Richard Butler, a loser in the 1791 Battle of the Wabash River (the worst defeat in U.S. military history), it was a faded, but proud, no-nonsense, predominantly white, working class municipality, birthplace of the Bantam Jeep, the first all-steel railroad car, professional wrestler Big John Studd, and Bret Michaels, lead singer for the rock band Poison. A community steeped in the legacy of its manufacturing past, it was left brewing in its current economic woes. Its main street, imaginatively named Main Street, was less than two miles long, an impoverished stretch of vacant storefronts and dying businesses, buttressed on one end with patriotic car dealerships, the other with an aging steel bridge straddling the second most polluted river in North America. Situated in the middle of this grim gauntlet of collapsing commerce was the Butler Eagle Building, its beaux-arts, white stone eagles perched in testament to past prosperity. The Butler Eagle, one of the few family-owned newspapers in the United States, was a highly-functioning organ of an otherwise expiring system, an eighty year-old daily boasting a circulation of nearly twenty two thousand. It was within these austere walls of parochial journalism that I was to sow the seeds of my future reign of domestic terror.
   There I was, on a warm May afternoon, sitting in the editor’s office, perspiring nervously, trussed up in an uncomfortably over-sized tweed wool suit, a copy of that morning’s paper poised unopened on my knee, a cup of unwanted black coffee shaking in my hands. “We’re going to give you Bud Blake’s spot,” the wide-faced and balding, chummy editor explained, slipping into his wide desk drawer the two large pieces of construction board upon which I’d mounted the initial twelve episodes of my masterwork, a daily comic strip entitled Flip Rhodun, one featuring the adventures of a wise-cracking space marine in the 23rd century. “That’s Tiger you’re replacing, you understand,” smiled the editor. “You’ll be on subordination, a trial arrangement. Being printed alone is quite an honor for a young man like yourself.” I simply nodded, my cup clinking on its saucer. One clumsy, sweaty handshake later, I’d naively agreed with the spendthrift, small-time baron of the fourth estate that my first contribution to the history of cartooning was worth more to the people of Butler than me, thus depriving myself the compensation due the creator of a daily comic strip in one of America’s long-standing regional newspapers. For the next eight weeks I gave him the entirety of my creative self, providing a new strip every Monday through Saturday, receiving not a dime for my effort.
   My indentured servitude going smoothly, I was more than happy, despite the fact that the transition from teenage doodler to one of America’s “premiere men of the funny pages” was not quite the bonanza of social mobility I had imagined it would be. What attention it aroused among my peers was negligible. I continued turning out my amateurish strips, perpetually bewildered to find them printed each and every day, sitting beside the likes of Broom Hilda, B.C., Mark Trail, and Blondie, until, all of a sudden, at the beginning of my second “story arc”, I was unceremoniously dumped, booted at the urging of two angry letters from purported fans of Mr. Bud Blake. The ride was over, my first career in non-profit cartooning had been cut short. I was so unworthy of my former publisher’s attention, I found it impossible to even retrieve the original art to my forty-odd strips, the editor’s office, and its complimentary coffee and papers, now seemingly closed to me forever. I was locked out, forgotten, washed-up, an inkpot has-been at the ripe old age of seventeen.
   Not surprisingly, the experience changed me.
   Acquiring a sense of injustice, I soon grew to realize how I’d been utilized by the machinery of an industry that existed, quite literally, to improve its own circulation. I was the “local boy made good” who was quickly made to disappear. I’d entered that regal building an innocent, aspiring boy cartoonist, but I’d left, almost two months later, a man with a grudge, another artist who’d faced the inevitable sparsity of a newspaperman’s soul.
   Carrying the sting of this marketplace baptism with me, I strode into the maw of the capitalist system, regularly confronting new villains and fresh adversity, biding my time, secretly plotting revenge as I methodically empowered myself with knowledge that would serve me well, a decade down the road, when I would return to the hallowed halls of The Butler Eagle, this time armed, transformed into a diabolical, terroristic mastermind.
To Be Continued

The Art of Interaction, Seattle's Cultural Black Eye

2008-05-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

If cities were cartoons, if their personalities were engineered by cartoonists, I would put extroverted metropolises like New York City, Baltimore, and Chicago, firmly in the hands of Roy Crane and Elzie Segar, the creators of Captain Easy and Popeye, two of the most pugnacious characters in the annals of comics history.
   A city like Seattle, on the other hand, could only be the creation of a contemporary creator like Daniel Clowes or Adrian Tomine, that modern breed of cartoonist whose characters generally think the majority of their interactions, contemplating action and confrontation, rather than actually encountering it.
   I was recently reminded of this diametrical difference between North America’s urban clusters when I was accosted by three burly, bearded toughs, shanghaied on the city docks, pummeled silly in a hovering cloud of dust, arms and legs flitting about me like mosquitoes, the air blue with spirited cursing, lovingly-drawn skulls and crossbones, daggers, and little bottles of poison hanging over me, all this dynamic interaction leaving me with a battered, bruised noggin’ and popsicle stick, plus a black eye as perfectly splendid in form as anything the funny pages can offer. Really. Honest. It happened.
   OK, I’ll admit, I’m lying. I wasn’t actually roughed up by tuffs. That sort of thing happens in Hoboken, not the “comfy slipper” of urbanity we call Seattle. The truth is I received my multi-hued blemishes and muscle aches after foolishly attempting to pull on a pair of gloves, speeding down a nighttime street while riding my bicycle, the sort of prank better men than me would have accomplished with aplomb. No Buster Keaton am I. Nevertheless, my tell-tale black eye was brilliantly in evidence the next morning, growing and shifting as the hours and days passed, migrating like an epidermal oil spill, closely followed by the cuts and swelling, all forming a very “cartoony” picture, to say the least.
   Having had my moment of pulpy interaction, seeing stars, my hat and glasses flying off my head, no less, I proceeded about my business in the Emerald City, this demure town I have called home for some fourteen years. I visited the bank, the grocery store, the post office, the zoo, the bicycle shop, the tavern, even the optometrist, and not once was I asked about my royal shiner, my splendiferous shanty, my gorgeous goog. Not even a subtle hint or polite whisper did I receive. The fine, reserved gentry of Seattle simply avoided it altogether, as if it didn’t even exist. It was a systemic politeness, a courtesy unchecked, a decorum gone mad I decided, after a full week facing this deafening aphonia. I appreciate tact, of course, and don’t wish to have complete strangers poking me in the eye on a regular basis, but this stony wall of avoidance was a bit too much. It made me wonder if Seattleites have any comical spirit at all. What are they so afraid of, I had to wonder.
   Even in a fatgiued municipality like Pittsburgh, my previous haunting ground, where economic realty has taken the wind out of many a once-vociferous windbag, I would have been on the butt end of at least one good ribbing from a stranger. “Whatcha doo, buddy? Slip in the pisser? Try kissin’ a keyhole? Wake up on the wrong side of yer Granma? Haw, haw, haw.” It would have been downright unfriendly not to have been greeted, at least once in the afternoon, by such a comment. But Seattle had nothing to offer, not even a mundane “I hope the other guy’s eating hospital food.” Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zero.
   Jet City ain’t go no zip in its lip, I tell ya. Can this town really be so twisted up in its liberal identity that it’s taken all of the fun out of the inherently comical mishaps of life? Are we so afraid of coming off as something less than a politically correct model of civility and sensitivity that we’ve lost our whimsy, our spirit, our sense of humor? Really, how bad could the truth be, how terrible, how absolutely awful that it makes a city, one known for pointing out the elephant in the room, both political and social, clam up like kids before a broken window? Was it presumed that I’d lost a fight, the subsequent embarrassment having placed me on the teetering edge of suicidal recourse? Or perhaps my wife or girlfriend had given me my “purple mouse” with an impressively-aimed remote, on account of me insisting we watch David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things in lieu of America’s Next Top Model. Maybe I did try to kiss a keyhole (meaning I caught my eye with the doorknob, for those of you who didn’t quite get that one). Or, geez, maybe I really was punched by a loved one or family member, the two being mutually exclusive in such an event. As they say in the “less-enlightened” territories, folks, shit happens, you just have to learn to roll with it. Anyone who has ever been through great adversity or grief knows how precious humor and laughter is, knows that acknowledgement, even in the form of a little teasing, is far better than uneasy silence.

My parents lived through Hitler’s bombardment of England. When I ask them about it they never fail to laugh at the memories; my mother’s father, Papa to me, with his ill-fitting helmet and unwieldy rifle, waddling off up the nettle-lined country hillocks to defend the Queen’s soil, his corn-addled feet the pride of the Home Guard, even as my mother shielded herself under the kitchen table, only a candle for light, German “doodlebugs” shaking the roof of the little farmhouse as they shattered the heavens, on their way to an explosive collision with the buildings and people of London. My father finds great humor in how inadequately prepared Britain was for Hitler’s forces, how easy it would have been, he claims, for the Germans to have crossed the Channel and have taken another sovereign nation, poor Papa not being much to object if they had. Anguish, horror, tragedy, these are the birthplaces of comedy, as any true cartoonist or comedian knows. Even the term doodlebug points to this, the comical moniker having stemmed from the sound the loose shrapnel made as it whirled about inside the Fuhrer’s missiles of destruction.

A man with a black eye wanders into a bar, see? The barkeep gives him one look and reaches out and slugs him in the other eye. “Whot you do that for?” cries the man, sprawled on his keister beneath the bar, blinking like a raccoon. “Saving,” replies the bartender. “Savin’?” asks the man, hugging a stool as he staggers to his feet. “Savin’ whot?” “Saving me the trouble,” grins the keep. “And saving you the cost of a few beers.”

You see, Seattle, you just need to loosen up a little bit. By all means, be sincere, be concerned for the welfare of others, take note of the injustices and inequalities of life, of our plundering civilization and its cadre of rubes and charlatans, and do your good deeds, please, but don’t forget where comedy comes from, don’t suppress that laugh when misfortune offers its moments of slapstick, because it’s going to, whether you like it or not. The news on the front page might well be a crying shame, and most usually is, but that’s why they put the funny pages in the back, to give you some relief. The next time you come across someone with a nice shiner, at least grin and offer them a consoling “Ouch, that’s gotta hurt!” What are they going to do? Punch you in the eye?

(In fond memory of Mike Royko, 1932-1997, a writer who knew when to laugh, and what to laugh at.)

I Held Walt Whitman in My Arms

2008-05-07T00:35:00.000-07:00

I held Walt Whitman in my arms that day I first found him, sequestered within the dirty, dusky confines of an antique mall located in a turn-of-the-century feed barn in the tiny borough of Harmony, Pennsylvania, a settlement founded in 1804 by German pietist Johann Georg Rapp.
   It was spring and he was lying on his back, held fast beneath an overbearing J. Edgar Hoover, his spine abutting that of a haggard-looking Vincent Van Gogh. He came cheaply, costing me less than I would shell out for a decent road map today. They all, in fact, came easily, and so I took them, Walter, Edgar, and Vincent, cradling them against my chest, atop nameless others, carrying them from the barn, into the daylight of a time they would never know, a world where, perhaps, their individual wounds of repression and guilt and torment would be allowed some healing. I brought them home, opened them up, and let them into my life, each for a different reason, each serving a purpose of their own.
   Of all my new companions, I soon grew most enamored of the old man, the poet with the haywire, paper-white beard, the sleepy, morning eyes, the quietly devilish crook of a nose. I sought not to judge him, only to show respect for the effort he put forth in building a life from nothing more substantial than his own muse, but what I subsequently learned of his nature lead me to question and challenge him, just as I had done his moral counterpart, Herbert George Wells, some half dozen years before, when I found the father of modern science fiction coupling with tawdry imposters on a greasy metal shelf in Pittsburgh. For every hour of fading day that Whitman pondered the lines of the hands upon his lap, secretly picturing those of another, Wells was dragging his adulterous carriage across numerous bed chambers, letting loose his boisterous seed, a discharge of genius and pomposity.
   “There's old H.G. Wells, lying in bed with his new housekeeper, hot squid by their side, glowing with pride, flushed with exhaustion” – Robyn Hitchcock, from his song “Victorian Squid”.
   This was 1990, a time of encroaching moral repression in the rural township in which I lived. Even though the evangelical Christian crusaders of The Moral Majority had all but dissolved their organization by the time George Herbert Bush stepped into the White House, there was a righteous fever in the air about my community, a heated desire to vanquish all heathen urges, America’s puritan heart reasserting itself at the end of the century.
   These signs of a “Babylonian collapse” materialized themselves as a small, concrete-block building on the old highway running directly south to Pittsburgh. This bunker-like structure held our township’s very first adult book shop. It didn’t take long for a local, torch-wielding mob to form, gathered about the fervent ministrations of a local man of the cloth. Soon, they had the police making regular raids upon the tiny business, eventually arresting the tending clerk for selling immoral materials, a nefarious charge stemming from recently-drawn anti-obscenity laws. It didn’t seem to bother any of the moralist vigilantes that the individual who took the brunt of their attack, who spent more than a few months in prison, was a fifty eight year-old grandmother.
   Angered and frustrated by these events, I one day noticed a new billboard, appointed roadside prominence not more than two miles from where the now-shuttered bookstore stood. It was part of a national campaign designed to humiliate the “users” of pornography, to shame those who, through personal and societal circumstance, sought to facilitate their natural sexual compulsions the only way available to them: through magazines and films. One tag line of this witch hunt, “Real Men Don’t Use Porn”, was emphasized with a line-up of stern-looking women, Olympic Gold Medalist Jackie Joyner Kersee among them, all standing shoulder-to-shoulder, looking out from the gaudy tableau of outdoor signage, giving all who passed by the reproachful stare of a shocked and disapproving schoolmarm. This atmosphere of moral turgidity swirling about me, I immersed myself in the book which was resting atop the tall pile I’d exited the dark antiques emporium with that late spring day; Walt Whitman, A Life, by the masterful biographer, Justin Kaplan.
   An astonishingly intimate and admiringly thorough account of the life of America’s “poet of democracy”, this 432 page volume led to my reading and absorbing all I could of Whitman, revisiting the weathered paperback copy of Leaves of Grass I’d had since my early teens, steeping myself in what I soon realized was an ultimately sad and repressed existence, Whitman never being able to make tactile his longing for the young men who accompanied him on his various literary pursuits and undertakings. His was a desire uncorked, passion left to simmer and boil its way into the very heart of his poetry, those magnificent, earthy, delicately-rooted plots of verse that evoke so much of what he dared not speak with his tongue. It was only a matter of time before these fascinating realizations found their way into my cartooning.
   I began in 1993, with “Walt Whitman’s Super-Hero Daydream”, appearing in the first issue of Whotnot!, my quarterly comic from Fantagraphics. Here I offered a coy commentary on Whitman’s self-repression, as viewed through the lens of Dr. Fredric Wertham’s infamous Seduction of the Innocent, his investigation of the “morally-unhinged” comic book industry, harbinger to the 1954 Senate Committee Hearings to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, and the industry’s formation of its own dubious Comic Code Authority. It was a cartoon I was later informed had been enjoyed so much by a literature professor at Auckland University that he’d photocopied and enlarged it, displaying it on his classroom wall. The next Whitman piece I felt compelled to create was entitled “Young Walt Sees A Skull With Hair On It”, a somber, one-page rumination on the poet’s early career in journalism, a cartoon I shelved, deciding it wasn’t appropriate for the tone of Whotnot! I next utilized Whitman in 1994, featuring him as one of four sad sack bards in “Poetry Does Not Pay”, a centerpiece from Whotnot! #4, the last issue of the series. This was a four-page parody of the pre-Wertham crime comic milieu, specifically the title Crime Does Not Pay and its strident, righteous tone, one ironically echoed in the “Real Men Don’t Use Porn” campaign. A year later, I eventually found a home for “Young Walt”, placing it in the first issue of my new series, A World Of Trouble, published by Black Eye Productions.
   It was this story in particular that recently caught the interest of Robert A. Emmons Jr., Associate Director of the Honors College at Rutgers University-Camden, and a teacher of film, media studies, and comics history. As a regular contributor to the respected online academic journal, Mickle Street Review, a quarterly publication dedicated to the study and illumination of Walt Whitman’s work and life, Emmons has written a exceptionally thorough examination of the three above-mentioned cartoons and my work-born relationship with the man who is held by many to be America’s foremost poet of the emotional, that ever-confounding and fascinating junction of what we call the brain and the heart. I recommend visiting Mickle Street Review Issue 19/20: Sights and Sounds, where you will find Emmon’s insightful piece, as well as many other fascinating articles upon the influential poet.

Letters From Hell, You Dig?

2008-05-04T20:39:00.000-07:00

All of the attention garnered by my post, that concerning Wendy Wilson and the letter she sent to me back in 1977, has inspired me to investigate other saved ephemera in my dusty morgue of curiosities, notably publications that feature letters from readers. Filing through a great variety, everything from a 1939 issue of Popular Mechanics, to British, soccer-themed comic books from the 60s, to the March 1970 issue of Aramco World Magazine, featuring Nabil Fawzi, the Saudi Arabian Superman, I eventually came across one periodical, the letters of which I found to be astonishingly rich, missives steeped in the linguistic, social and geo-political nuances of their time, magnificent cultural blips that flippantly, but strikingly, mark the epoch of an era we know as the Vietnam War.
   The publication in question is the July 1970 issue of Hot Rod Cartoons, a magazine-sized comic book title that was published from 1965-1974, by the Patterson Publishing Company of Los Angeles. This is an item from my own youth, part of an accidental, and temporary, divergence in my reading habits, one resulting from confusion on my mother’s part when confronted with an extensively-stocked magazine stand, intending to buy her sick, bed-ridden son something with which to ease the boredom. It was the first issue of Hot Rod Cartoons I had ever experienced.
   It wasn’t that I didn’t like cars. Quite the contrary. I had as many Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars as anyone on the block, perhaps more. I made models of Don “The Snake” Prudhomme’s famous dragster, I incessantly drew “souped-up” hot rods belching clouds of smoke. I was, like most boys my age, of the general mind that cars were pretty darn cool things. What made me unfamiliar with Hot Rod Cartoons (and its sister title, Car Toons) was its strange, off-putting nature. The content of the stories being cars, and the people who drive and race them (often at the same time), made for narratives built entirely around a mature populace. There was hardly a child to be found within their pages. But, unlike Marvel or DC, and their ever-growing litany of super hero titles, these were cartoons of a familiar, pedestrian nature, mainly featuring grown men tinkering with their garaged hot rods or troublesome, driveway-devouring jalopies. They were speaking directly to car enthusiasts. They were, in essence, comics for adults, or near-adults, an all but unique thing on the American landscape of the early 1970s.
   The end of the war still some three years away, it isn’t hard to imagine copies of Hot Rod Cartoons stuffed into the mud-caked field packs and ammo belts of young GIs, the Camaro and Charger fans mired in that wretched mess. It is their letters I’ve come across, numerous pages of them, the editors of HRC apparently recognizing the extraordinary lot of the majority of their readership, posting these war-scene missives as a public service, a newsprint bulletin board, a means by which the torn, and tired, and homesick, could share an unquestioning love for their cars and their girls, those universally-held, potent reminders of a world they had been so irrevocably removed from.
   Contemplating the fascinating variance of public correspondence, while reflecting on my own past experiences in this realm, and the recent rash of blogging comments and e-mail communications I have been receiving, I thought it might be illuminating to take a look back, some thirty-eight years, to a time when computers weighed as much as Chevy, and were about as big. The following selection of letters comes from the very issue of Hot Rod Cartoons I disappointedly flipped through that long day home from school, a seven year-old whose cognizance of the reality of war extended no farther than the tiny bandages he’d wrap about his G.I. Joe, daringly pricking his own finger to draw blood in order to authenticate his soldier’s wounds.
   In order to make things a bit more interesting, I’ve fabricated a small percentage of the letters. It’s up to you to see if you can enter the mindset of these young writers, and the epoch of their times, enough that you might be able to spot the forgeries. The list of fakes can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the right hand side column. But let me warn you, it isn’t going to be easy, for the actual letters are often as surreal and obtuse as anything I, or anyone, could imagine.
   NOTE: In keeping with the spirit of the times, I have included the full names and mainly military addresses, just as they were printed, feeling that if all were “cool” with it then, they wouldn’t mind now. My apologies to any who aren’t. I’ve left in any grammatical slang, but have attempted to fix all misspellings. It seems that good proofreaders were hard to find in 1970. Perhaps they were all in the fields and jungles of the Indochina Peninsula, desperately trying to cover over someone else’s mistakes.

• I’m a grunt in Vietnam. I’m the guy who finds the bunkers, pursues the enemy, captures the village, crosses the swamps, and kills the mosquitoes. I’m also the guy most people have seemed to forgotten. I’m infantry all the way. I found your cool mag one day (in the middle of nowhere). So, here I am. I’ll write to anyone – male or female, 5 to 500 years old.
– PFC DANNY ISLAS

551-78-8210 1st Cav. Div. (AM) Co. D, 5th BN, 7th Cav. APO San Fran., CA 96490

• I’m 22 and in the hospital for wounds I received in Vietnam. I dig V.W.’s and Fords. Split window Volks are especially my bag, ’54 and below. Any gals 16-1600, none older please, care to write?
– SP/4 DAVID COHEN

Dewitt Hospital 2-A, Fort Belvoir, VA 22060

• Air Force, that’s me, dropping the Uncle Sam everywhere I go. Over here for the Nam and thinking about my ‘Vette back stateside. Reading Hot Rod and Toons every chance I get, but bustin’ merits and tradin’ cigs ain’t much of a life. In dig on anyone, especially gals, who knows a Ford’s place on the road is the shoulder, dig? Write and I’ll reply, guaranteed.
– SGT. JOE KAZMAN FR

129-96-8003 Box 9447 APO San Francisco, CA 93623

• Isn’t there any way you can keep them little kids from writing in and giving a bunch of bologna about what tuff cars they got and how they drag everybody around? Personally, I groove on Fords and V.W.’s. Last but not least, all I want to say is “shame” on all you guys that write in and beg a bunch of weird girls to send you letters, just so you’ll be getting something in the mail.
– PATRICK NICHOLS

4900 W. 17th Ave. Denver, CO 80204

• I think your magazine is great. I am a 17 year old girl, and I would like to write to boys 18 and over, from anywhere.
– ANGELA BELTON

185 Victorial Rd., Oulton Broad, Lowestoft, Suffolk, England

• I want to let everyone back home know that dragsters in the muck over here don’t have any chutes. It’s all straight racin’, you don’t stop until you drop. Pappy, I’m homesick and miss the girls from Cuyahoga. Write this schmuck and make it better, alright?
– PFC DREW MAGGIO (18)

G-3 Combat Operations C USASATR, Fort Devens, Mass. 01433

• We’re just a couple of slap-dillin’-slobbies just skitchen yore rag. Durin’ our eyeballin’ session we taught about having a couple of skibby gails type friends who rubersap Fords and need Chevies to Live & Love. Help! We need scribbles from dolls!
– SCOTT HARISON, DANNY GILLIS

U.S.N. Hospital, Pavillion 13, Newport, RI 02840

• I’m a G.I. from Florida. And I’m not having much mail coming my way. Any gals from 8 to 80, dumb, deaf, or crazy and would like to write, I’ll be sure to answer your letters. I’m 18 years old and dig fast cars. Any of you gals like Chevy’s?
– PFC TERRY L. BROWN

263-96-4332 4th Ord. Co. APO New York, N.Y. 09059

• What a wild scene, Pappy! I’m an amateur racer and my plugs are shot! What’s a guy supposed to do to get a subscription to your groovy mag? I’m finished with Uncle Sam but track work is hard to find. Would appreciate a gurl with a home I can settle into, no steady place currently for this bug-slapper from Kentucky. I’m 27 and like them younger. Believe in the truth and I’m yours, baby.
– RICK BRADLEY

c/o R.C.W.H Shelbyville Hwy. Murfreesboro, Tenn. 37130

• Hey, you Mini-T Dropout; what’s the bad scene with the subscriptions gig? Like I’m heading for the Great Big War soon, and then what do I do, huh Brain? You gotta help me, Pappy. A couple of well chosen words for Ford people: You had better write your will, baby, Chevy rules! Any girls, please write. Especially Debbie from Tampa, Fla.
– AIC BOB BODINE, JR. CMT

Box 5094 Homestead A.F.B., Fla. 33030

• How goes the world? I was just setting here in my sand bagged underground bunker at F.S.B. JANE (Fire Support Base) in the middle of the jungle, killing you’d never guess, FLIES! Hoping that maybe you’d print a thank you note for the November ish of HRC. In reply to my ad I got 133 replies. Unfortunately, though, one nice looking chick that’s a movie star forgot her address. I don’t even know her name. But she lives in Hollywood Hills, California. Any girl type out there wanta write to a PFC in the Artillery that’ stuck out in the boonies right near Cam Boonies? If I can’t answer it, I’ll find someone who can.
– PFC KEVEN CABRA

C. Btry. 6/27th ARTY APO San Francisco, CA 96221

• I’m a Mopar lover from way back, but what I miss more than those big hemi’s are the big beautiful girls that I seem to remember from back home. Memories are all I have left. Would appreciate any sweet young thing who would devote a few minutes of her precious time to refresh my memories. I’m from Indianapolis, Ind. But regretfully, have been in Germany for about a year.
– AIC R.O. BORING CMR

Box 64436CSG AF 68114787, APO New York 09132

• To put it straight, I’m out here in Nam and need some LETTERS!
– A1C ED RAFALSKI

19 TASS Bx 11205 APO San Francisco, CA 96227

Answer Me Back Real Soon

2008-05-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

Note: This will be my final post directly concerning Wendy Wilson, the girl from Jamaica, the girl who came into my life, some thirty-one years ago, through the letters page of The Incredible Hulk, a girl whose romantically-potent letter I was afraid to answer. If you are not familiar with the story, please read my postings of April 25th and April 28th, where you will find links to many of the places this innocent little story traveled, growing tangents as it traversed the electronic byways of the internet, finally bringing me to the world of radio, specifically KIRO 710 AM’s Too Beautiful To Live, where, this very evening at 7:30 I am scheduled to offer a farewell commentary on my long ago, paper-bound affair with a girl named Wendy Wilson.
   In a way, I suppose I’ll miss Wendy. How can I now ever truly forget my high-achieving mystery girl from the islands, the future ground hostess and professional singer, her black hair and black eyes, her “lovely built with slim shape”, or was that “slim built with lovely shape”? Does it really matter? We’ve moved on now, we’re both theoretically touching the middle of our existence, the current of life having carried us so far from the late 1970’s, those long, endless days when a boy and a girl could wile away the hours, reading comic books and writing letters, imagining possible futures, offering up gift lists, craftily positioning themselves for marriage into an American family, dreaming of a future in that fabled land of opportunity, where the roads are gold and the jewelry shops never close, where men are men and have the courage to answer the letters from strange girls. Ah, the innocence of youth, where ever has it gone?
   To bring some sense of closure to this strangely-protracted relationship, one I inadvertently renewed while entering the world of blogging, let us travel back to those idyllic, adolescent afternoons, and imagine a different course was taken. Let’s pretend I had the courage and curiosity to have penned a reply to Wendy’s letter. Let us witness the correspondence of a thirteen year-old boy named Jeremy, a boy who appreciated those rare, quiet moments in the life of The Incredible Hulk.
   A weird kid, I know, but I guess he was Wendy’s type.

Hi Wendy,
   I am cool. It was neat to get your letter. I think you read my name in The Hulk. It was my first published letter. I wrote to Marvel Two-in-One and Ghost Rider too but they didn’t print those ones. I told them they ruined Ghost Rider when they changed him from a chopper to a racing motorcycle. What comics do you read? I guess you read Hulk because you saw my letter in it. Do you read Marvel and DC, or just Marvel? I mostly read Marvel these days, but still collect some DCs, but only if they're good, like Secret Society of Super-Villains.
   I started becoming a collector just a few months ago. Comic collectors collect comics for trade and sale and also to try to get every one. Do you have collectors in Jamaica? The DC titles I collect now are because I got their #1s and decided to begin collecting all of them. It’s fun, though sometimes it isn’t easy. I had Steel The Indestructible Man #1 but missed #2 at the newsstand where I go on Wednesdays to get new comics. My brother is going to the prom with the girl who works there. She lets me go in the back and open the packages of new comics before anyone else. But I still didn’t get Steel #2 because she didn’t get it either. She says it’s up to the distributor to send them but they didn’t. Anyway, I finally got it because my dad had a business trip and found it in a coffee shop at the airport. He got two of them, one for me and one for my little sister. She started collecting when I did but didn’t even like comics before. She only collects Steel The Indestructible Man, Firestorm, and Howard the Duck. I think she’s just copying me. She doesn’t write to letters pages or anything like I do. She couldn’t walk for a while because her knees were growing wrong and she had to have cortisone shots in them and stayed home from school. I had to stay with her because my grandfather died and he lives in England and my mum had to go there for the funeral and my dad was away on business. We had soup and sandwiches on the living room couch and made paper airplanes, the coolest ones in the world, that my art teacher showed me how to make. We drew our favorite heroes on them and then had a contest to see whose could fly farthest across the living room. I had to fetch every one we threw because my sister couldn’t get up, but I didn’t mind. It was fun. Her best plane was Spider-Woman. She likes Spider-Woman too.
   Anyway, this is my letter back to you. I live in Western Pennsylvania. We have big cornfields everywhere and raccoons and wild turkeys and giant vultures that eat dead things on the road. I play soccer on a local team. I used to live in Strathblaine, Scotland, GB, where we played soccer all the time, but we called it football. Do you play soccer in Jamaica? I have black hair like you, but it’s shorter, I think, because I’m a boy. I also run and race my bike. My dad and big brother and little sister all race our bikes. We travel hundreds of miles and usually miss school part of Fridays and Mondays during racing season. On TV I like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Man From Atlantis, Gemini Man, Lucan , The Return of Captain Nemo and sometimes The Hulk, but it isn’t as good as the comic. The Hulk on TV is too small and not really very strong. I do art and writing for my hobbies and will be a comic book artist and/or writer when I am older, also I will have an inground swimming pool and my own zoo that’s just for insects. I got an ant farm for being brave when I got my tooth out in three pieces, but the bottom came loose and all the sand trickled down into my book of The World of Military Tanks and Machinery, because that’s where my ant farm was sitting on top of. The sand made the pages go all brown and sticky. My dad says it was because the ant’s poop in the sand, but I was mad it happened. I have a Planet of the Apes garbage can. It’s from the TV show, not the movies, but they cancelled the show when I was still liking it. For music I like T Rex, Procol Harum, Sweet, Elvis Presley, The Lemon Pipers, Boris Pickett, The Beatles, Frankenstein by Edgar Winter Group and Disco Duck. I also like my big brother’s records of Deep Purple, but he always stays in his room so I can’t get them.
   Well, this is my first letter. I hope you like it and write back. I didn’t put a picture in because I didn’t tell my mum and dad I was writing to you and they have all our school photographs in their closet where I can’t get them.
   From, Jeremy

PS I like your slim built with lovely shape.

Thank You, Mr. Crumb, Part 2

2008-04-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

2008: I’m standing before ten framed pages of a story entitled Patton, a trenchant, visceral, graphically brave and liberating cavalcade of cartooning by underground icon Robert Crumb. Originally published in 1985, in the eleventh issue of the seminal comic book Zap, this sensitive telling of the turbulent and violent life of legendary bluesman Charlie Patton, is hanging on a white wall in one of the large back room galleries of Seattle’s Frye Art Museum. It is merely one small part of R. Crumb’s Underground, the impressively complete retrospective of the cartoonist’s career, which came to a close this past Sunday, April 27th, after a successful ninety-three days, up to a thousand people having passed through the noted institution’s doors most Saturdays and Sundays.

As I marvel at the art displayed before me, my head begins to spin, making me feel as if I’m back in the summer heat of Western Pennsylvania, reliving my self-education in the art of cartooning. The 17” x 22” sheets of Bristol board Crumb used to create Patton are marked with what I feel are some of the most effective drawings of his career. This is the real “good stuff” I decide, smiling to myself, recalling my Crumb-entwined origin, feeling the rush of the intervening years, how appearing in two issues of Kitchen Sink's Buzz led to a bound collection of my A Sleepyhead Tale strip from Fantagraphics Books (Crumb’s own publisher) and a subsequent quarterly series, Whotnot!, followed by nearly a dozen other books and comics from a variety of publishers. And how, in 1994, at the behest of my editor, Fantagraphics co-owner Gary Groth, I took a train across the country to Seattle, the city in which I have lived and worked for the past fourteen years. Though my cartooning output has steadily depreciated over that time, due to both financial and personal considerations, I have always kept my brush in the inkpot, the driving ambitions of my younger days never having completely left me, something I am now reminded of, standing amidst such a wealth of significant cartoon art.

I’ve spent some two hours, this Saturday afternoon in mid-April, absorbed in the collection, my final return to a show I first viewed on January 26th, its preview night.

I am enthralled with the Patton art. This is what I had been hoping to find in such an exhaustive exhibit of arguably the world’s best living cartoonist; comic book pages that rise above their traditional, restrictive, print-ready trappings, graphic art that survives the formality of its museum crucifixion. What is perhaps most striking about this mid-career tour de force is that Crumb has eschewed his usual employment of dense cross-hatching, the turn-of-the-century style most readily recognizable with his art, instead throwing himself into a field of solid black shading and silhouette, evoking a look that in some ways reminds me of the late 1930s and 40s work of Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and The Pirates. Crumb seems to have lost himself in the story, no small feat for a man who has built his career, and its subsequent celebrity, on parading every wrinkle and fold of a prickly id, making himself a literal Woody Allen of the inkpot set. But with Patton, he has become a character actor, suppressing his own identity for the sake of a vivid narrative, the areas of solid ink adding an unprecedented weight to the figures and settings.

I find it leagues ahead of earlier work like Fritz The Cat, a comically violent parody of the Disney milieu that, though clearly designed along different ambition, pales when I compare it to Patton’s stoic tale of real murder and mayhem.

It brings to light the disappointing fact that I find much of Crumb’s other work to be somewhat static in this environment. Like much of the original comic book art I have experienced in similar settings, it may be expertly functional, but fails to reach beyond the perimeters of its form. Beads of perspiration and bulging eyes are indeed highly effective tools of visual communication, and offer a playful counterpoint to much of Crumb’s heavier, darker bouts of self-degradation, but they are merely narrative glyphs when compared to the gravitas of images like the last panel on PG. 2 of Patton, where the artist portrays the fatigued, forlorn musician, his guitar heavy upon his shoulder, walking like a dead man through the world he once knew, a world all but gone, destroyed by the great Mississippi flood of 1927.

It is an amazing, sad, and quietly devastating image, one that pulls upon all of Crumb’s storytelling mettle, but avoids the adopted, old school, slapstick cliché that permeates much of his work.

This consideration of the impact cartoon pages can have, when framed and hung on a wall, was one of my major points of contemplation upon first viewing the show. I must admit, though I kept it to myself, I came away from the preview with a taste of disappointment, something I am sure will put me in a very small minority among those who have visited the collection. This sense of disillusion did not stem from the exhibit itself, which I feel is a well-designed and successful overview of Crumb’s career, views I’ve previously evoked in an article written for the Beacon Hill News on Feb. 1st. Rather, my disenchantment arose from seeing, for the very first time, the original art to images I was intimately familiar with on the printed page.

As a practicing cartoonist, I was thrilled to see how dense the ink appeared, how sparingly Crumb employed correction fluid, how delicate the cross-hatching was, how close to print-size he’d drawn much of his earlier work. Playing the pulp detective, I noted he often pasted-on his showcase and title lettering (indicating a lack of confidence in this discipline, or just another facet of the man’s well-documented, general neurosis?). I also observed how he seemed to be drawing on whatever paper was available during the various stages of his long career, from an abundant rash of graph paper pages throughout 1968, to a literal tear through a spiral sketch pad during the late 70s, a time when he was, perhaps, most out-of-favor and forgotten, certainly in the United States.

This was all fascinating to speculate upon, but I was looking, even expecting, to find something else, a force, a sense of the sheer verisimilitude his best narratives effect in their printed form, comics that have thrilled and inspired me for so many years. I literally wanted to be knocked out of my socks, great, greasy beads of sweat ejaculating from my brow, my pupils touching my brain. Ironically, I only derived this result from viewing the inversely naturalistic Patton.
I left the show, mulling this over, finding it hard not to feel a little bit “had”, if only in the sense that Crumb’s own, oft-quoted, self-dismissive comment “It’s just lines on paper, folks” was now ringing wickedly and ironically true.

Carrying this thought with me for the next few days, I couldn’t help but turn my ear when I came across the following quote from cartoonist Jim Woodring: “Seeing that exhibit silenced a gong that's been ringing in my head for 45 years.” I wondered if Mr. Woodring, in his deceptively obtuse manner, hadn’t meant this as a critical observation. Perhaps he had, in fact, been inferring the very personal disappointment I was feeling, a thing we all, of course, experience, to varying degree, when encountering that which has heretofore only been legend. I pointedly haven’t asked him, wishing not “to apply form and time” to his intriguing, elusive remark (to paraphrase a wise observer from a previous posting).

Many of these concerns still fresh in my mind, I recently arranged a chat with the Frye’s head curator, Robin Held. I asked her thoughts on the relationship cartoon art might have with the traditional viewer of museum art, imagining, even as I spoke, that stereotypical urban sophisticate, readily kneading his whiskered chin in rumination as he stands before a heavily-framed canvas from one the “masters”.

Surprising me, by echoing my own, unspoken feelings, Held opined that comics are, in essence, “made for private viewing, on a bus, a couch, it being a personal experience” and how “potentially distancing hanging it on a wall might seem.” It was this very insight that led her to creating the effective, and amusingly ironic, reading area, an alcove adjoining the exhibit, one that features a wonderfully Archie Bunkeresque mustard and brown, plaid couch, accompanied by a standing lamp, both preceded by a coffee table casually strewn with Crumb’s comics and book collections. No mere prop, it is purposed to be a place to excuse oneself from the museum setting, to sit down and experience Crumb’s work in its intended form. Held explained how she “wanted to create an environment where that relationship with the form was in evidence”, which she feels the couch accomplished, along with the books availability in the gift shop “adding to that natural connection with the printed form of the work”. I couldn’t help but notice how utilized the comics on the coffee table appear, their covers bent back, their pages ruffled, just as the couch cushions sit rumpled, forced into the springs, making it all look like more than one shared living room from my past, where no one housemate feels compelled to straighten up. Which brings me to my observations on the crowd, at this, my last afternoon with R. Crumb’s Underground.

I was eager to witness how the greater public, those not familiar with Crumb, or underground comics, would behave when confronted by such potentially offensive works as How To Have Fun with A Strong Girl, Crumb’s notorious illustrated essay, featuring some of his most graphic portrayals of sex, starring himself, and a seemingly somnambulistic girl.

First, I watched a couple, both in their twenties, showing no hesitation as they approached the twelve large, individually-framed pages, the woman apparently the most comfortable, stooping low and close to the art, reading every word. Next I witnessed an older couple, both perhaps in their late fifties. The woman stood back, never getting closer than five feet from the art, her arms crossed stiffly. She soon became impatient with her husband, who had been standing about two feet from the art, craning his neck to investigate, a look of the hunted about him, as if he expected to be caught any moment, doing something that was clearly wrong. His wife sighed deeply, before setting off to meet the next offensive barrage, clearly a visitor to the rose garden who hadn’t considered the predominance of thorns. The moment her husband realized he was alone, he inched forward, having one last, better look, before backing off, quickly following his “better” half. I wondered if they’d ever discuss what they’d seen; Crumb’s nerdy, haggard self-depiction, climbing atop the sleepy, giant girl, in order to force his engorged penis into her mouth.

According to Held, even some at the Frye were uncomfortable with Strong Girl, a situation necessitating a inter-staff meeting to discuss reactions to the piece. Knowing this, I had to grin a short while later, when I found the following remark in the public comment book, functionally placed on a pedestal among the art. Addressed to Crumb himself, it read: I don’t think you’ll ever read any of this. However, if you someday do, know that you pissed off a fair number of very reserved Seattleites.
Having less than fifteen minutes to go before closing time, I stood by the comment book, surveying the crowd still milling about, hearing nervous laughter and titters, seeing a few men of Crumb’s generation, sporting grey ponytails, smiling knowingly as they wander from piece to piece, clearly lost in personal recollection. I spot one female attendee who seems to have literally walked right out of one of Crumb’s panels, walking her Rubenesque form like a badge of pride.

Held commented that many girls, women, who had come through the exhibit, were clearly being empowered by Crumb’s representation of strongly-built females, as noted by comments in the book like You can draw me anytime, though I thought This show makes me wish I had more powerful thighs was perhaps more telling. I find the whole positive spin on this a bit willfully idealistic, in that the women in Crumb’s cartoons are the manifestations of an obsessive and patently unhealthy fixation, one readily acknowledged by Crumb himself. Nevertheless, as Held stated, it was encouraging to see such a broad cross-section of the public taking in the art.

She also explained how pleasantly surprised she was at the “multi-variance the images offered”, how many different interpretations the public was able to glean from them. Which brings me back to my own feelings about the effectiveness of cartoon art in such a setting, making me realize that my view is perhaps something of a special case, one that could only possibly be held by the very few of us who can honestly list cartoonist for an occupation on our tax forms.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that most people do not regularly deal with a working vocabulary that makes commonplace phrases like “word balloons” and “spotting your blacks”. The cartooning profession is a peculiar lot to find oneself in, one which more often than not requires an equally peculiar individual, be it during the form’s early twentieth century infancy, the heady rush of the 1960s, 1989, or today. It can be a very lonely discipline, requiring an inordinate amount of the practitioner’s time. For most, the demands are many, the rewards few. Those who do it claim they have no say in the matter, that it is a calling, a compulsion. It was clearly an obsession I too felt, back in those humid days of the late 80s, imagining myself on that sunset drive in the cartoon jalopy, sitting between Robert Crumb and Bud Fisher, watching Crumb reach behind the rumble seat to produce a bulging, untidy envelope…

“What you got there, Crummy?” asks Fisher, his cigar dancing at the corner of his mouth.
   “Ahhh – just a bunch of lines on paper!” Crumb replies dismissively, holding the envelope over the passing road.
   “Lines on paper?” inquires Elzie Segar, his eyes on the way ahead.
   Roy Crane, sitting beside Segar, turns to regard me with a steely look. “Bob's got the baton,” he says. “It’s his turn – that’s the next generation in his hands.”
   “Whose got bad glands?”asks Jack Kirby, absent-mindedly toying with the door ashtray. Everyone just ignores him.
   “What you gonna do with it, Crummy?” Fisher presses, reaching across me, stretching for Crumb’s arm.
   “Ahh, what does it matter what I do with it? I told you – it’s just lines.”
   “There’s something written on that brick,” offers George Herriman, popping up behind me, having been asleep in the rumble seat. “Sez “THE GOOD STUFF” – I think.”
   “The good stuff?” Fisher queries, swiping for the envelope, which is now dangling precariously between Crumb’s thumb and forefinger.
   “Go on, Bob, we’re almost there, get your pitching arm in order,” declares Crane, pointing to a small, red building, suddenly appearing on the horizon. I see a sign outside. It reads: Cotati Volunteer Fire Department. “Hit the doormat, Dimaggio, the kid’s counting on you!” he urges, giving me another look, his eye softening.
   “On account of WHOSE glue?”
   “NOW, Bob, NOW!” cries Crane, as we rumble by the firehouse.

   Crumb sighs, lets the package fly and turns to me, not checking to see if he hit his target. Crane lets out a victorious hoot. Herriman pats Crumb on the back. Segar turns about in his seat for the first time, catching my eye, nodding in Crumb’s direction.
   “Well, what do you say to Mr. Crumb, kid?”
   I stare at my hands, suddenly feeling quite shy. “Thank you, Mr. Crumb,” I manage, keeping my eyes on my lap. “Thank you very much.”
   Crane coughs loudly. “You’re damn right you thank him, kid!” he exclaims, waving goodbye to the little firehouse, with a theatrical flair. “He’s just done you the favor of your life!”
   I grin sheepishly, looking up to catch Crumb’s eye, his usual jaundiced glare evaporating for the briefest of moments. “Just lines on paper – just lines on paper,” he yawns.
   I lean back, closing my eyes, noticing a buzzing sound, growing in my ear.

“Cicada time,” chuckles Herriman, pulling a pine needle from my hair. “My very favorite time of the year.”

How The Hulk Got Me on the Radio or Dear Hulk, I Love You, But Maybe This Whole Thing Just Isn’t Working

2008-04-28T23:35:00.000-07:00

I love you, Hulk.

I love how easily you smash through the divisional barriers of our “puny media”.

I love you, Hulk.

I love how you bound from the blogging epicenter of Boing Boing, to the far reaches of Pacific Northwest talk radio, your seismic leaps upsetting all reason, giving audience to the simple story of Wendy Wilson, a shy, thirteen year-old boy’s comic book siren.

I really love you, Hulk.

I really love how you force me to perpetuate the grammatically clumsy “got me” theme to yet another post title, how your noisy internet rampage has found the ear of Seattle’s KIRO 710 AM, and Jennifer Andrews and Luke Burbank (is that your real name, Luke?), the folks behind Too Beautiful To Live, the nightly, 7-10 buffet of culture and whimsy. Do you realize they're crazy enough to have me on the air throughout this week, at 7:30, telling, once again, our cheap tale of newsprint debauchery, the sordid love triangle of a boy, a girl, and a gamma-poisoned monster. OK, sorry, I meant “misunderstood” gamma-poisoned monster.

I think, Hulk, I think that I might actually be falling in love with you.

Hulk?

Are you listening to me? That “in” is really important. Do you know what it means? It means I’m going to start making demands of you, Hulk, it – it means I need you to be attentive, it means I need you to stop seeing Wendy Wilson.

Hulk?

Don’t you dare pick up that backyard, Hulk, I just MOWED it!

Look, Hulk, I’m WAY over Wendy, her black eyes, her black hair, her slim, lovely shape, she’s just a meal ticket now, big guy, a beautiful, exotic, brown-limbed (stay with me, I’m still working under that assumption) meal ticket that’s going to make us FAMOUS. Honest she is.
Hmm? Oh – right – well, OK – so you’re already kind of famous. What’s that? Which one of us doesn’t have a multi-million dollar movie coming out later this summer? Oh, nice, Hulk, way to GO, making a thirteen year-old kid feel like a miserable wastrel of society. Good job you don’t have any kids, you insensitive, radioactive, upright, bipedal spinach farm! I love you!

Seriously, Hulk, Wendy's going to make you even more famous, she’ll make you forget all about having to share a trailer with Edward Norton, I promise she will.

Hulk?

I didn’t mean what I said about preferring it when you become Bruce Banner, really, I swear I didn’t. Doesn’t the fact that I never answered Wendy Wilson’s letter mean anything to you? What does Wendy have that’s so great anyway? Bracelets? Necklaces? Her “Gibbs Brother’s” records? Come on, Hulk, she’s just using you anyway, I hope you realize that.

What was that?

You think I’m using you? Hah! You make me laugh, you really do. You know what? I don’t need this kind of treatment. Go back to your 30¢ hovel, you great, green galoot – I’m finished with this whole affair!

Well, almost. First I’ve got to polish my impressive speaking voice for tonight’s “big show”. I think this Jennifer lady kind of likes me. No, seriously, she does.

Love Always - Jeremy

Thank You, Mr. Crumb, Part 1

2008-04-25T23:48:00.000-07:00

1989: It’s early July, a typical mid-summer day in rural Western Pennsylvania, cicadas are slicing the muggy air, their shrill, metallic wing-song guitar to the bass growling of a dozen mowers, while, high above, chickadees and chickarees do battle, a pained orchestra of squeals and squawks issuing from the waving wall of conifers that line three sides of the tidy garden I am standing in, leaning into the shade of a large oak, staring at a postcard I've just pulled from my parent's mailbox. It's from Aline Kominsky-Crumb, cartoonist and wife of Robert Crumb, the king of underground comix.

I've recently moved back into my parent’s house, a semi-occasional event, one customarily preceded by a year or two in the city of Pittsburgh, living in artistic poverty, scraping together rent and food money with a variety of unusual jobs. I've fumigated mushroom-strewn, flea-infested slum apartments, posed clothesless before university art students, appeared at wine and cheese functions dressed as a nine-foot tall puppet of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, ridden a messenger bike, emptied cans of cigarette ash and carbon paper, scrubbed toilets, sold records, painted horrible murals at health spas (one featuring a bench-pressing Hulk, no less), and loitered about downtown dressed as a clown. I even held a short-lived stint as staff illustrator for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A sundry of ultimately miserable gigs, activities that crushed and hardened a young heart.
Having endured yet another run through this odd gauntlet of servitude, broken in both pocket and spirit, I literally headed for the hills, the rolling, thickly-wooded, glacial cuts of Northern Butler County, rural territory among which I’d spent most of my teenage years. Successfully turning twelve months of lunch breaks into a crash course in cartooning, immersing myself in numerous old books on the classic American cartoonists; Roy Crane, Elzie Segar, and Bud Fisher, among others, I'm now determined to focus on a career in the great inky art, the only thing I can contemplate doing for the rest of my life.

I’d made my first step towards this goal earlier that year, in April, when the editor of the San Diego Reader had accepted half a dozen strips I’d prospectively mailed her way. These appeared under the banner “A Sleepyhead Tale”, containing quasi-humorous, mostly surreal depictions of my actual dreams. Hesitant, but serviceable, they nonetheless proved popular enough with San Diegans to land me a regular weekly feature, one which ran for almost four years, picking up a few precious additional papers as it went.

The note Aline Kominsky-Crumb has scrawled across the back of the postcard expresses interest in running a handful of my A Sleepyhead Tale strips in the next issue of Weirdo, Crumb’s infamous and influential cartoon “scrapbook”, a publication both revered and reviled for his generously catholic editorial policy. I'm to be included in issue #27, which Robert and Aline are co-editing.
I am, understandably, ecstatic at this news. Here is recognition from the “man”, R. Crumb, the godfather of alternative cartooning.

My head spinning, I stride about the garden, reading the card over and over, the hum of the cicada now just an echo to my own wing-song of victory. I‘ve made it, I think giddily, seeing myself heading straight to the top of my chosen profession. A few weeks of perseverance in the clammy studio I’d arranged in my parent’s basement, struggling with a pen, quickly migrating to brush, dutifully attempting to master my chosen craft, and here I was, ready to take my place in the back seat of an imagined balloon-tired jalopy, one driven by Elzie Segar, creator of Popeye. I'd soon be finding myself cavorting, smoking stogies with co-passengers like Roy Crane, Bud Fischer, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, and Mr. Robert Crumb himself, all of us legends in our field, all jammed together, happily bouncing along, headed towards a brilliant cartoon sunset.
“JER-A-MEE!” comes a sudden, shrill cry, instantly splintering the divine, shattering the stained-glass panels of my four-color daydream. “MY LETTUCE!”

“Sorry!” I quickly reply, pocketing the postcard, my brain still racing down that funny paper pathway. I’ve walked right across my mother’s vegetable garden, a minor calamity I should have taken as the first sign of a less-than-smooth ride ahead, for it seems fate has other plans for this rookie ink-slinger.

   It isn’t long before I find myself in the dreary waiting room of expectation, every day looking for another card, word on the imminent publication of Weirdo #27, but none arrives. The endless, muggy days crawl by, turning into weeks, soon a month, and still no news. Disappointment begins to gather about me, great grey bulkheads, burying my hopes in their shadow.
   Being an all but penniless twenty three year-old, holding neither a driver’s license nor the money to travel, I am stuck in the wholly uncultured northern fringes of the American rust belt, my only connection to the greater art and cartooning world coming in the form of a subscription to the popular trade publication, The Comics Journal. It’s here, in late summer, that I read the crushing report of the Crumb’s sudden termination of Weirdo and their own flight to the hills, those of rural, Southern France.
   This news leaves me a wreck, a Schleprock of my own ambitious overdrive, carrying the thunderous, yellowy-green skies of August with me, my heart as heavy as the humidity that seems to cling to the entire world. Nevertheless, having a weekly strip to produce, I carry on, reluctantly bidding farewell to the far-reaching boundaries of my own hope.

It isn’t until late fall of that same year that I find myself racing back to those outer reaches of aspiration.

I receive a phone call, from a friendly-sounding gentleman who introduces himself as “a volunteer fireman and amateur cartoonist from Cotati, California”. His name is Mark Landman and he’s contacted me after having been sent a thick envelope, a bulging, paper pierogi of cartoons, marked on the outside with a concise “THE GOOD STUFF”. It was from Robert Crumb. Inside were photocopies of all the comics he’d had set aside for that final, fatal, aborted issue of Weirdo. This strange, trans-Atlantic offering had arrived on Mark’s doorstep due to the fact that he’d recently been corralled, by publisher Denis Kitchen, into editing a new comics anthology, a Weirdo surrogate to be named Buzz. Two pages will be set aside for my work, putting me in the company of artists like Daniel Clowes, Jim Woodring, and Drew Friedman, along with Mark’s own pioneering, computer-drawn strips.
My heart rejoices. The cicada are humming again, even buzzing, you might say. I can make out the snowy peaks of Hope, breaking the horizon. My mind racing, I rush to catch up with that speeding jalopy…

“Slow down, Mr. Segar, I just lost my hat!” I cry, bounding into the back seat, finding myself shoulder-to-shoulder with Robert Crumb.

“Hat schmat, kid, thank yer lucky stars spinach-brain here saw you in time to slow down,” comes a gruff reply. I look to the front, to see Roy Crane, the creator of Wash Tubbs and Cap’n Easy. “Well, are you going to thank the man or not?” he asks.

My mind still reeling from the news of my imminent publication, I turn nervously to Crumb, barely whispering, “Thank you, Mr. Crumb, thank you very much.”

Crane shakes his head. “What are you thanking that low-brow hippie for?” he grunts, pointedly ignoring any reply I might have in me.

But I don’t care, I think to myself, I’m on my way, I’m really on my way!

Wendy Wilson, Comic Book Siren, or How The Hulk Almost Got Me Laid

2008-04-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

Hulk #208 was different. I like the idea of Hulk becoming Bruce Banner again and living like a normal person. It’s a nice change from all of that violence with different villains coming and attacking Hulk.
   That was the extent of my first letter published in a “real” comic book, real meaning Marvel, sometimes DC. Anything else was fairly contemptible to the thirteen year-old connoisseur of the form I considered myself to be, back in those halcyon days of the mid 1970s. I was a “true believer”, a pocket money-offering pilgrim to the mighty Marvel Comics Group, a division of Cadence Industries Corporation.
   The first acknowledgement of this privileged arrangement was the above incisive commentary, written to the editor of Green Skin’s Grab Bag, the appropriately-titled letter’s page column of The Incredible Hulk. It was the June, 1977 issue, #212, the first appearance of Frank Payne, the super villain known as The Constrictor. Of course, I had to look this up on the internet. I mean, it’s been a few years, I’ve moved on from my comic book relationship.
   Sorry, Hulk, I guess I just outgrew you. Or maybe you changed. It’s hard to say, but the truth is I’m not a nerd anymore, at least not the comic book-reading variety. Really, I’m not. Besides, this little story isn’t about gamma-irradiated giants and costumed bad guys, it’s about a girl.
   Yes. That’s right. You heard me. A GIRL.
   I told you I wasn’t a nerd anymore.
   Her name was Wendy Wilson. That’s her actual name, I haven’t changed it to protect anyone’s supposed innocence. I actually don’t believe there was anything innocent about my affair with Wendy, not on either end.
   Wendy lived in Kingston, Jamaica. Her letter arrived in early August, just a few weeks after I’d first discovered my name and address had become a part of the Marvel Universe. Her envelope, a delicate, soft, airmail blue, cut like a cyclone through my introverted, adolescent existence, spewing a flurry of feminine considerations. She told me of her eyes. Black eyes, she said, with a poetic force beyond her years. She told me of her hair. Black hair, she teased. She told me of her body. Slim build, with lovely shape, she smiled, seeming to literally breathe from the lightly-scented, decorative note paper, stationary that featured an illustration, in the lower left-hand corner, of two Keane-styled children, a boy and a girl, dressed respectively in overalls and a petticoat, tromping barefoot through a pasture of bright daisies. This idyllic drawing was accompanied by a script-written quote: “We’re not the only ones in love… we just think we are”, to which Wendy had coyly added Remember m, remember e, put them together and remember me. She went on to inform me she was, in no uncertain terms, a very pretty and attractive girl, very romantic and fun-loving. She told me her favorite sports were lawn tennis, table tennis, and basket ball (two words in Jamaica, apparently). She told me her ambition was to become an airline stewardess, “otherwise known as a ground hostess”. She told me that, in her spare time, she would be a singer.
   Nearly twelve months my senior, Wendy was, in essence, a fourteen year-old siren, a rock I’d gladly have smashed into, ultimately perishing of starvation, thirst, and delirium. In my already-fevered imagination, one fed on the hyperbole of Smilin’ Stan Lee and the voluptuous curves of Jack Kirby (the curves of his female characters, not his), I saw Wendy calling me onward, urging me to leave my 25¢ vessel, a flimsy, pulp-hewn, four-color yacht held together by staples, to join her, to lose myself in her smooth, brown limbs.
   Were they, in fact, brown? I’ll never know, but I saw them that way, it helped fulfill the fantasy of a shy, white kid living in rural Pennsylvania. It also did wonders helping me forget the frustration I was currently feeling concerning the lack of focus in David Anthony Kraft’s writing on The Defenders (that’s one for the nerds out there – hey, fellas? – your mom’s calling you, her walker’s stuck in that gap on the porch again).
   Wendy’s amazing letter continued. My exotic new pen pal princess informed me that she was crowned 1977 Queen of the Year, at Queen’s High School (that seemed a bit too convenient somehow), that she won a medal for singing and acting, that her favorite gifts were rings, bracelets and necklaces, that her favorite singers were The Jackson 5, Donny and Marie, Olivia Newton John, Johnny Mathis, Debbie Boone, and The Gibbs Brothers (not the Bee Gees in Jamaica, apparently). She also told me her favorite TV shows were Starsky & Hutch, Switch, Happy Days, Little House on The Prairie (that explains the note paper), Medical Center, Family and, inexplicably, something called Testimony of Two Men, which we didn’t get in America.
   By now, you’ve more than likely deduced that Wendy’s seemingly out-of-the-blue declaration of romantic union was, in fact, nothing more than a crazed plea from a raving, island nation lunatic.
   Well, okay, perhaps it was really just a young girl dreaming, fancying herself capable of landing a gullible, younger man, an inhabitant of the all-powerful United States of America. Reading an A-lost title like the Hulk, I clearly came from a rich, well-established family. Regardless of my current address, we’d obviously be vacationing in daddy's summer home in Nantucket.
   Still, whatever her intent, I was lost at sea, clueless as to how and why I was on the receiving end of such interest, awash in a terrifying mix of fear and lust, two words I only knew from comic books.
   Hi Jeremy, How are you? her missive began. As for me, I am cool. This is my first letter to you and I have seen your name in the magazine.
   The magazine? What magazine, I asked, curled on my bed, secretively reading her letter for the twentieth time. What was this crazy, Jamaican girl talking about? I’m not in any magazine!
   Then it hit me.
   The Incredible Hulk #212. The first appearance of Frank Payne, The Constrictor, a cover by Rich Buckler and Ernie Chan, the very issue that heralded my short-lived run as an overly-effusive comic book letter writer. I quickly ramped it up from this nervously concise debut, in the weeks to come finding myself rhapsodizing ineloquently to Chris Claremont about the “emotional power” of The Man-Thing mythos, then digging at the editors of Mike Grell’s The Warlord for causing me to become so enraptured by the storyline that I let my bowl of Rice Krispies go soggy while reading in bed – true story, I swear.
   Ah, to live again the life of a teenage comic book fan, to so lovingly sculpt my little communiqués, posting them with the hopes that people I didn’t know might verify their existence by reading them, perhaps even to comment upon them. Sigh. How desperately quaint we were, not so long ago. How much we’ve all changed. But, please forgive me, I’m completely forgetting my lustful longing for Wendy Wilson.
   How could I do that?
   I’m sorry, Wendy, I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll buy you a bracelet, tomorrow, before you jet in from your Tokyo layover, to join the cast of Switch, on stage at Radio City Music Hall. Man, that Eddie Albert can sing.
   But, seriously, I’m talking about Wendy Wilson here. Wendy, the girl who offered herself to me, body and gift list. Wendy, the girl who helped fuel my budding interest in the partly-veiled nooks and crannies of the female body (I love you, Alfredo Alcala) I was able to glimpse in the “mature” black & white comics magazines I was just beginning to sneak into the house.
Wendy. Wendy Wilson. 5 ft, 3 inches tall, weighing 115 lbs. Can you ever forgive me for not responding to your letter, Wendy?
   You have to understand. I was thirteen, I was scared, I was still reading Super Friends for Christ’s sake! I just wasn’t ready for you.
   Look, I’ll be honest, I was a virgin. One embarrassingly brief letter to The Incredible Hulk was not the experience you were looking for. I know that now, I suppose I knew that then, but things have changed.
   Wendy, my crowned queen of the stewardess lounge, my sweet, dark, table-tennis nymph, I’ve grown, I really have. My letters found their emotional power in the murky swamps and the soggy cereal of an adolescent ride that has brought me to this, my very first blog post. I’m a MAN now, Wendy, a man who is ready to buy you rings, and necklaces, and Gibbs Brothers records, and run barefoot with you through the daisies. Wendy?
   Wendy Wilson? Are you out there?
   Write sometime, OK?
   You can be coy about it, tell me you ran into my blog by chance. You needn’t admit you’re really a lonely, frustrated, attractive, forty-something, Hulk-reading, singing, Jamaican stewardess, who found me while Googling “kinky green stuff” on a Friday night. I was listed right beneath nude composting. Nothing to be ashamed of.
   Just let me know you’re out there, that’s all I ask.
   And, Wendy?
   Whatever happens, regardless of if we’re ever to meet, regardless of if I ever have a chance to show you all that Mike Grell taught me about romancing a beautiful, scantly-clad woman, high atop a prehistoric tree, promise me, Wendy, promise me you’ll remember one thing.
   Remember m. Remember e. Put them together, baby, and remember me.
   And answer back real soon, OK?
   Love - Jeremy