I don’t know when I first saw an English edition of Barefoot Gen. It was probably sometime in the mid 70s, when I was editing for the modest enterprise that has become the mighty Marvel Entertainment. In those days, a lot of stuff crossed editorial desks and we read most of it, if not all. So: Japanese comics? Sure, I’ll give it a look. It was probably my first experience with manga and I remember feeling a mild taste of cognitive dissonance – a perceived disconnect between subject and form. (I am choosing to ignore, because it’s a bit off-subject, the hybrid of cartooning and illustration that’s most superhero art.)

The subject was grim. Barefoot Gen is the autobiographical tale of a child who witnessed and survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. But it was presented in a visual style I would have described as “cartoony.” Like most American pop-cultch consumers, I associated bright, simple, exaggerated drawings – cartoons – with material that was at least supposed to be humorous, and there was nothing remotely funny about Barefoot Gen. It was, and is, a powerful anti-war document and, because it is that, deeply humane.

It’s creator, who did both art and copy, is named Keiji Nakazawa, and Barefoot Gen is his story. He had this to say about it: “People should be told what happened. If you live through something like the A-bomb, you know that war is too horrible not to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justifications offered for it.”

The work first appeared in 1972 as a serial in a mass market Japanese publication, Shukan Shonon Jampu (and perhaps some kind reader will translate that for us). Later, it migrated to smaller magazines, and later still, it was published in English as a paperback book series. The most recent English iteration appeared in 2004, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

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Well, that headline ought to cause some Google searcher meltdown. But the fact is, right wing poster child Little Orphan Annie has a lot in common with mega-leftie songleader Pete Seeger.

This dawned on me because of the confluence of recent events. IDW released the first volume of The Complete Little Orphan Annie last week. American Masters ran its documentary about Pete earlier this month and, yes, it’s PBS so it’ll be rerun forever. Which is fine; both are absolutely first rate. Both are American legends.

Little Orphan Annie was created by Harold Gray, a man who fit in nicely with his boss, the contemptible isolationist Col. Robert McCormack, a man so far to the right when he disagreed with the politics coming out of Rhode Island he removed their star from the American flag that was raised right above his office atop Chicago’s Tribune Tower. Until he was told he could go to jail for desecrating the flag, McCormack and his employees – including Gray – worked right under America’s only 47 star flag. Both Gray and McCormick loathed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the point of histrionics. Gray’s comic strip fully represented those values; Annie’s Daddy Warbucks even did a little jig on FDR’s grave. (more…)

Born on Governors Island, Manhattan, New York in 1941, Neal Adams attended High School Industrial Art in Manhattan and then went to work in the advertising industry. He had actually applied to work at DC Comics but didn’t get a job offer — Adams did do some freelance work drawing Bat Masterson and Archie Comics but was not credited for it. In 1962 he was hired as an assistant at the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and worked anonymously on several comic strips before being given his own strip, Ben Casey.

In 1968 Adams approached DC Comics again and was immediately hired to draw a Deadman feature in Strange Adventures #207. Adams quickly became well-known for his DC covers. He moved to Marvel to work on X-Men with Roy Thomas, and after the title ended they moved to The Avengers together. In the early 1970s Adams returned to DC, where he and writer Dennis O’Neill teamed up to revamp Green Lantern and Green Arrow, and then Batman. Adams and Dick Giordano formed Continuity Associates to supply storyboards to motion pictures, and around the same time Adams worked on the science fiction stage play Warp, which ran in Chicago, Washington DC and (for one week in 1973) on Broadway.

Adams also helped push the comics industry to more creator-friendly practices, like returning original artwork to the artist. In the early 80s he formed Continuity Comics, an offshoot of Continuity Associates, to produce his own original comics. Adams has won several Alley Awards and was inducted the Alley Award Hall of Fame in 1969. He has also won several Shazam awards, and was inducted into the Harvey Awards’ Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1999.