Category: Reviews

I have no idea why someone said, in the year 2016, “Hey, what this world really needs is a Betty Boop comic book!” It seems like an odd and unlikely thing to say, even if one happened to work in licensing for an entity that happened to own the rights to Miss Boop.

But it must have happened, because that comic book did come out, in four issues, and they were duly collected under the simple and obvious title Betty Boop. (Because, even if this isn’t the first Boop comic ever in the history of the world — though it may well be, for all I know — there’s no possibility of confusion in the marketplace with all of the other Boop collections.)

Luckily, whoever the person who had the brain-spasm in re Betty had the good sense to hire Roger Langridge to write the Boop comic. Langridge has previously translated musical comedy into comics both in his own works (The Show Must Go On , for example) and licensed properties like The Muppets . Since I can’t think of anyone else who has even attempted musical comedy in comics form — most people think not being able to hear the music is an insuperable obstacle, which has never stopped Langridge — he was clearly the best and only choice for the job. The fact that he also has a love for old bits of popular culture, particularly cartoons and comics (see his work on Popeye for another example) is only lagniappe.

There may be people out there who can speak learnedly to the Boop milieu — who will know precisely how canonical her job as a waitress at the Oop-a-Doop club is; when her friends/co-workers Bimbo, Sal, and Koko the Clown first appeared; her tangled relationships with boss Mister Finkle and bandleader Scat Skellington and villain Lenny Lizardlips and her Grampy; what tunes the songs in this book are to be sung to and any relationship those songs have with the historical Betty Boop. I am not one of those people. So I’ll point and say that all that stuff is in this book.

(By the way, the cover is actually a variant from issue 1 by Howard Chaykin and doesn’t quite look like the Gisele Lagace art inside. It also implies a relationship between Betty and Koko that in no way appears in the book.)

I know Lagace’s work mostly from her sexy webcomic Menage a 3 , but others may have seen the work she’s done in comics (for Archie properties mostly, I think). Either way, she has a known expertise for drawing attractive girls, but she’s also just fine with the cartoonier aspects of Betty’s world — and, since this is a Depression-Era world, there’s a lot of cartoony elements. She also manages to keep Betty’s ridiculously oversized head look reasonable and consistent, possibly through secret black arts.

Again, I have no idea why anyone thought a Betty Boop comic would be a good idea, or if this one made more than ten cents total. But it’s a lot of fun, in a not-entirely retro style, and it has the feeling of those bouncing, singing old black-and-white cartoons on the page. It’s a massive success at something weird and unlikely and quirky, which is the kind of thing I like to celebrate.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This time, it definitely is the end. The previous volume finished up reprinting the fifty-year [1] run of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts in twenty-five volumes, two years in each book. (See my posts on nearly all of those books: 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 , 1973-1974 , 1975-1976 , 1977-1978 , 1979-1980 , 1981-1982 , 1983-1984 , 1985-1986 , 1987-1988 , 1989-1990 , 1991-1992 , 1993-1994 , the flashback to 1950-1952 , 1995-1996 , 1997-1998 , and finally 1999-2000 .)

Vol. 26 does something slightly different: it collects related works. It has comic book pages and advertising art and gift-sized books (some of which could be called “graphic novels,” with only a tiny bit of squinting) and similar things — all featuring the Peanuts characters, all written and drawn by Schulz. Obviously, this was culled from a far larger mass of related Peanuts stuff — dozens of hours of TV specials, to begin with, plus major ad campaigns for many products over most of those fifty years, among other things — but Schulz managed and supervised and oversaw (or just licensed and approved) the vast majority of those.

This book has just the art and words that can be attributed cleanly to Schulz personally. Not all of it — there’s plenty of other spot illustrations, and a number of other small cash-grab gift books, that Fantagraphics could have included if they wanted to be comprehensive, but they didn’t. Instead, this is a book about the size of the others, that will sit next to them on a shelf and complement them.

Annoyingly, this very miscellaneous book avoids a table of contents — possibly because the previous books didn’t need one? — so you discover things one by one as you read it. It starts off with seventeen gag cartoons that Schulz sold to the Saturday Evening Post in the late ’40s, featuring kid characters much like the ones in L’il Folks and so somewhere in the parentage of Peanuts. Next up is seven comic-book format stories from the late ’50s that Jim Sasseville (from Schulz’s studio at the time) has identified as all-Schulz (among a much, much larger body of comic-book stories that I think were mostly by Sasseville). These are interesting, because they show Schulz with a larger palette (both physically and story-wise) than a four-panel comic strip — he still mostly keeps to a rigid grid, but there’s more energy in his layouts and he has room for better back-and-forth dialogue in multi-page stories.

Then there’s a section of advertising art, which begins with five pages of camera-themed strips that appeared in 1955’s The Brownie Book of Picture-Taking from Kodak but quickly turns into obvious ads for the Ford Falcon and Interstate Bakeries. The latter two groups are intermittently amusing, but mostly show that Peanuts characters were actively shilling for stuff a few decade before most of us realized it.

The book moves back into story-telling with three Christmas stories, which all originally appeared in women’s magazines from 1958 through 1968 (at precisely five-year intervals — what stopped the inevitable 1973 story?). The first one is two Sunday-comics-size pages; the others are a straight series of individual captioned pictures in order. After that comes four of the little gift books — two about Snoopy and the Red Baron, two about Snoopy and his literary career — which adapt and expand on gags and sequences from the main strip. (I recently tracked down and read the one about Snoopy’s magnum opus, which I still have a lot of fondness for.)

Two more little gift books follow, these more obviously cash-grabs: Things I Learned After It Was Too Late and it’s follow-up, from the early ’80s. These were cute-sayings books, with pseudo-profound thoughts each placed carefully on a small page with an appropriate drawing. Schulz’s pseudo-profound thoughts are as good as anyone’s, I suppose.

Last from Sparky are a series of drawings and gags about golf and tennis, the two sports most obviously important to him — we already knew that from the strip itself. The golf stuff is very much for players of the game, and possibly even more so for players of the game in the ’60s and ’70s, but at least some of the gags will hit for non-golfers several decades later. The tennis material is slightly newer, and slightly less insider-y, and so it has dated a little less.

The book is rounded out by a long afterword by Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz. It provides a personal perspective, but takes up a lot of space and mostly serves to show that Jean loved and respected her husband. That’s entirely a positive thing, but I’m not 100% convinced it required twenty-four pages of type in a book of comics and drawings.

Vol. 26 is a book for those of us who bought the first twenty-five; no one is going to start here. And, for us, it’s a great collection of miscellaneous stuff. Some of us will like some of it better than others, but every Peanuts fan will find some things in here to really enjoy.

[1] OK, a few months shy of actually fifty years — it started in October 1950 and ended in February 2000. But that’s close enough for most purposes.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

If you keep going long enough in a creative field, eventually someone will collect your stuff. If you’re reasonably successful, they’ll even collect the oddball stuff — the one-offs and blind alleys and test-beds and experiments that you made as you were working towards (or in between) the works that you were better known for.

Yes, you too can be the proud creator of an odds and sods collection, if you live long enough and work hard enough and get lucky enough. If your name is Bill Griffith, congratulations! That book was published by Fantagraphics in 2011 as Lost and Found: 1969-2003 .

Griffith has spent most of his career aiming his Zippy the Pinhead character, and associated folks, at whatever Griffith’s current obsessions were. It’s a good model for a cartoonist, actually: if you have a malleable character that you own, and a flexible, large cast around him, you can keep producing work that gives your audience continuity while telling the stories and working with the ideas you really want to in that moment. It’s not coincidental that the major outlet for Zippy stories for the last three or four decades has been a syndicated comic strip: that’s been the model for a huge number of successful comics creators for over a century, a way to reach a large audience with work that can, for the right person, be personal and idiosyncratic.

But that’s what’s not in this book. It has one sequence from the Zippy strip, but it’s mostly comic-book-formatted pages, and it’s mostly from anthologies and magazines and other people’s comics — the stuff he was doing when he wasn’t making Zippy strips and purely Zippy comic-books.

Zippy’s in a lot, though. Griffith developed his cast early, and has used them across all of his cartooning formats. But he’s definitely not as central here as he is in most of Griffith’s work. Lost and Found is heavily weighted towards the early part of Griffith’s career — the 1970s is by far the largest section — and so this is a book in large part showing how that cast first appeared and developed.

Mr. Toad was the original central character in Griffith’s stories, starting off as an Everyman type but quickly becoming the raging id (loosely modeled on Griffith’s father, as he acknowledges later in this book) he was meant to be. So he’s the first main character the reader meets, soon accompanied by some one-off folks from Young Lust (the sex-filled parody of romance comics that Griffith co-edited).

Frankly, the early comics are very “underground” — rambling and navel-gazing in turn, clearly drawn by someone who is still learning his craft and doesn’t have any strong models or guidelines for what he’s doing. To be more pointed, they’re not very good. They’re interesting for people who like the mature Zippy stuff — you can trace the development of Claude Funston pretty clearly, and obviously The Toad — but the first hundred pages of Lost and Found is a bit of a slog for anyone not already seeped in ’60s counterculture.

(As they say, if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. I don’t remember them, but I wasn’t there, either.)

The back half of Lost and Found is more impressive, with one-off stories set in the Zippy universe that appeared various places during the ’80s and ’90s, including an extensive color section. This is the part of Lost and Found that most readers will be looking for: I almost recommend that folks start here, and only dip back into the ’70s section randomly  as they have the inclination. (I don’t actually recommend that, because I’m a fiend for doing things in the right order.)

But, again: this is an odds and sods collection. There will always be sods. It’s the nature of the beast. You gotta take them with the odds. And some of this is quite odd.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Last month, I read a book called Hawkeye, Vol. 1 . This month, I hit one called Vol. 3. In the annoyingly typical way of Big Two comics, the latter follows directly from the former. (One is a hardcover, which in comics-reprinting circles comes typically a year or two after the paperback and combines two paperbacks together. Yes, that’s the opposite of how we old-time book-industry hands are used to seeing things happen, but it seems to work for the Wednesday Crowd.)

Anyway, at the end of Vol. 1, the two Hawkeyes split up, because comics are all about break-ups and changes and new things that can last for six issues or so. (Spider-Man No More! once again.) L.A. Woman follows the younger female Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, who drives a cool car cross country to the city of the title, where she immediately gets caught up in nefarious doings and skulduggery of her own. Presumably there’s a Vol. 4 that features what Hawkguy was doing at the same time back in NYC, and that seems to be about as long as this particular set-up ran.

Kate’s travails form yet another “gritty” and “realistic” superhero comic — no powers, no flying, more-or-less the real world — that descends from the Miller/Mazzuchelli “Born Again” run in Daredevil, the major cliche in this area. Look, comics folks, we all know it’s not hard to put a bullet in someone’s head. And people without superpowers who repeatedly annoy large-scale criminals without actually jailing those criminals find themselves possessors of those bullets-in-the-head sooner rather than later. So talking-killer scenes, and repeated hairsbreadth escapes in noirish colors, just lampshade how artificial your story is. Avoid them. If your villain isn’t going to actually try to kill the hero like an actual criminal would in a real world, don’t go down that road and pretend that the plan is to kill her. We all know that’s not the case.

Speaking of which…Kate runs afoul of a supervillain carefully tailored to her abilities, one who can stymie her and cause her great pain but not blow her away instantly or hire goons to kidnap and murder her family by the snap of her fingers. So she’s in L.A., and she Loses Everything.

That’s OK, comics characters Lose Everything roughly once a year — it’s one of their major shticks. But she’s young and a fairly new character, so this is one of her first Lose Everythings, and it has that element of novelty to it.

By the end of this book, she’s Voluntarily Relinquished Everything — the next step towards Getting Everything Back, And Even Better, Because She’s The Good Guy — and is heading off for the vengeance and catharsis that probably got sidetracked and muted by some stupid crossover or other.

These are good superhero comics, for all that they’re drenched in cliches. It’s not quite as good as the Clint Barton stuff in the earlier issues, maybe because he’s easier to make a sad-sack in the first place. But “good superhero comics” is perilously close to damning with faint praise, along the lines of “a perfectly serviceable category Regency.” I wish readers and creators could aim higher, but that’s life.

If you like stories about superheroes who can’t jump over buildings with a single bound, and like to pretend that such people are “realistic,” you will probably enjoy the stories that Matt Fraction wrote about the various Hawkeyes. This time out, the opening story is drawn by Javier Pulido and the rest by Annie Wu, who are both good at the moderately gritty, real-people thing in their own ways. Go for it: I can’t stop you.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.