Despite their popularity in other forms, The Smurfs are, at root, a comic. That's where they originated and where Peyo first drew them in 1958. And while there have been changes and additions to the mythology over the decades, the basic premise remains more or less unchanged.

Historically, they're described as being "three apples high." It comes from Peyo's original stories where he described them (in French) as "haut comme trois pommes." That literally translates as "as high as three apples." However, what didn't make it into English is that that phrase was not necessarily meant to be literal. It's a French idiom that just means someone is small; often it's applied to children who are small for their age. An English equivalent might be "knee-high to a grasshopper."

That said, since Peyo did draw them pretty small anyway, the "three apples high" reference was taken at face value. You can see in the image here, they're drawn only about as high as Johan's knee or Pirlouit's waist. Obviously, apples can vary in size, but if we take that reference at face value -- which seems more or less accurate anyway given how Peyo drew them -- that would put a Smurf's height somewhere in the 7-10" range. The 2011 movie put them at 7.5 inches but I'm going to round it off to 8" for the purposes of this post. (As you'll see shortly, the math works out much easier.)

Although Smurf houses are shown to look like mushrooms, Smurfs' living spaces otherwise bear a lot of similarities to what generally passes for a Medieval era European village. Their houses are mostly two-stories, although cut-away views show that they almost have enough height for three; the top portion mostly being used for structural support. Assuming a 50% ceiling clearance (typical ceiling heights are 9' for 6' humans) that would be each story of a Smurf house at around one foot. Thus a typical Smurf house should be about three feet high, with a few structures (windmills, observatory towers, etc.) likely getting up to four and five feet. The majority of buildings seem to be roughly equal in size across all dimensions, so we estimate a typical Smurf house foundation of about three feet in diameter as well.

The Wikipedia entry on Smurfs lists 97 individually named Smurfs. As far as I can tell, they all have individual homes -- no one seems to share a dwelling with anyone else. Add in a couple communal buildings, and the fact that there are frequently shown any number of un-named Smurfs in background shots, I think we can conservatively estimate that the Smurf village has at least 150 buildings. That's 450 square feet of space if you cram all 150 of those buildings right next to each other with literally no space between them.

We're therefore looking at a Smurf village that has at least as big of a footprint as a good-sized human house (not even counting however much land they need for agriculture) and tall enough that you'd likely get a groin injury if you stumbled into the village blind.

And yet no human can seem to find the thing!

OK, sure finding a single house in the woods is not going to be super easy, and I don't expect people would be tripping over the Smurf village on a regular basis, but you're telling me that Gargamel -- who spends most of his time actively looking for it -- can't find it? Despite living practically next door?!?

I don't buy it! Did Peyo really think this through? Where was his editor when he was coming up with this?

Superman famously leaped into the public consciousness in 1938 with the publication of Action Comics #1. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, however, had been working on the idea for several years prior as is widely known. Siegel had published "The Reign of the Superman" in Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3, a fanzine of the early 1930s. The titular character bore little resemblance to the Superman we know today, possibly most notably in that he was a villain. A re-worked version of the character (now a hero) was offered to Consolidated Book Publishing, but the company stopped publishing comic books entirely just as Siegel and Shuster sent in their submission.

What we're looking at today is some of Joe Shuster's early sketches of the Superman that debuted in Action Comics. But these are from 1936, a full two years before the character's public debut. This was done on the back of some scrap wallpaper. You can clearly see some of the design ideas Shuster was working through -- including giving him a more typical strong-man outfit with a tank top, and using him as a pitchman on a box of whole wheat pancakes. Also visible are lot of notes toying with some of the promotional language including "The Greatest Super-Hero of All Time!" And, is the figure that's drawn sideways Lois Lane?

Robert Beerbohm posted this on Facebook a few years ago and it's worth checking out for some of the close-ups he includes where you can really study the details.

I'm continually amazed how we can still uncover ephemera like this that sheds more and more light on the earliest days of comic books as we know them!

I mentioned Michael Grover's Deeply Dave webcomic a while back as one that I had recommended as a formal Eisner Award nominee when I was a judge. I said, "It was an interesting story and utilized a lot of elements that you don't see as often as I'd like in webcomics... music, animation, infinite scroll... all the things that webcomics can take advantage of that print comics cannot." Grover's other webcomics since then have followed in a similar vein, doing things that can only be done in webcomics. His most recent one is called Jake Spooky and concluded in December. So I have to admit that I was rather surprised to learn that Deeply Dave is now coming out in printed form.

As I said, Grover has taken full advantage of the webcomics medium to do things that can't be done in print. You could certainly tell the same story, but you'd have to make some inherent concessions. There'd be no music, for example. Well, fine, it's mostly atmospheric in nature anyway. And you'd have to lose the animations. Well, okay, any of the animations that are really critical could be broken out into a individual panels if you NEED to get a point across, but most of them are simple cycle animations anyway. And what about the infinite scroll? Well, the story is just vertical so you could break it into tall page chunks without too much re-work, I suppose. And that's basically what's been done. They've taken the story and plugged it into a book format, and then made adjustments for the elements that simply cannot transfer directly across mediums.

I suspect, though, that that seriously underplays the amount of work that's gone into making that transfer, though.

Most of the webcomic panels are animated GIFs that use several animation frames each. Even if you just took those and scaled them for a book format, which of the four or six or eight or however many frames do you choose for the print version? Any one of the frames might look perfectly fine when it only shows up on your screen for a fraction of a second, but it might look bad or even unreadable when it sits static on the printed page. How many of the animations convey something that you'd need to figure out an entirely different manner of conveying? This one panel, for example...

... had to be switched out to six panels in print and still only shows the changes in one direction. The story, as I remembered it, was basically the same but when I started trying to make direct comparison, there are significant sequences that were entirely re-done because they simply would not transfer well.

When I first came across Walt Kelly's Pogo, it was via one of the 1960s' trade paperbacks. I recall noting that it worked better graphically than other newsprint comics I'd seen that had been made available in that format. There weren't loads of uncomfortable dead space or squished panels or any of the other things that underpaid graphic artists did to force the strips into a page format that were absolutely not designed for. I found out later that Kelly did the work himself, frequently extending panel artwork, cropping and re-lettering, and generally re-designing each and every page to made sure it presented well in the trade paperback format. It no doubt added a boatload of work to his agenda, and likely took much longer than his publishers would've liked, but he wanted readers to experience Pogo in the best light possible, regardless of which format they came across.

I feel like Grover has done that with Deeply Dave. He's re-told the story in a form that works better for print. It still has a vertical feel to it (the book is printed "sideways" with the spine at the top to give a much-taller-than-it-is-wide layout) and he's incorporated entirely new elements not present in the webcomic (like different end papers at the front and back, a rambling copyright page, and so on) that help feed the narrative. Unlike a lot of webcomics, he has not just slapped the artwork into a basic page layout and called it a day; this book really has as much effort put into as the original webcomic did.

I'll be honest; I am still partial to the webcomic version. I like the music and the animations and the infinite scroll. Now that could be because that's how I first encountered the story. Or it could be because I literally wrote the book on webcomics and I'm biased to that format. But regardless of the format, the story is fun and entertaining. I said a couple years ago that I wish more people made comics like Grover does, and I still would love to see that. He does comics that I would genuinely have thought could not be done well in print, but he has certainly proven me wrong on that front!

Deeply Dave is being published by Henry Holt and Co. It will be available in hardcover on June 10 for $14.99 US. The publisher provided an advance copy of this book for my review.

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is pretty close to the top of the comics canon reading pile. And that it's been there for something like three decades says a lot about its significance to comics as a whole, not to mention the legions of individual comics creators. There were captivating books about the creation of comics before Understanding Comics and the book has had more than a few criticisms thrown at it since then, but it has effectively never gone out of print because no one has been able to come up with anything remotely like it.

Raina Telgemeier made a big splash about fifteen years ago with her semi-biographical comic, Smile. Originally a webcomic, it was soon picked up for publication by Scholastic and has sold a bajillion copies. Her subsequent books have all sold incredibly well, to the point that there were several years where she was single-handedly selling 5% of all comics in the US, both in terms of volume as well as dollars. Five percent of all comics sold in this country had her name on them! No one has done that before or since for any period of time, not to mention for multiple years back to back! Now sales do not necessarily equate with quality of course but she's clearly doing something right when it comes to making comics that that many people -- many of whom never read comics before in their lives! -- keep buying her books.

So theoretically, if you take these two together and have them work on one book, wouldn't you expect to get an amazingly relateable story that describes many of the root concepts of comic creation, but does so for an audience of pre-teens instead of adults?

Well, not only is that Telgemeier's and McCloud's intention with The Cartoonists Club, but they absolutely nailed it in the execution!

The story is about some middle school kids who are interested in making comics, but have different approaches and skillsets. So they form a club that meets after school to discuss making comics as well as practice. The school librarian helps guide them and the book ends with the kids tabling at a local show at the public library.

The story is about a small group of kids. They're fun and relatable to varying degrees, just like every other of Telgemeier's books. The characters aren't reductive -- even the ones that might seem so at first -- and they all act like kids you know/knew. Telgemeier does her usual great job with the story, and this book fits in smoothly with the rest of her oeuvre. If you've liked any of Telgemeier's previous books, you'll like this one as well.

As for McCloud's part, I'm not going to re-hash the content of Understanding Comics for you. If you're reading my blog, you've probably already read that and, on the off chance that you haven't, I bet it's already on your list of books to check out when you're able. Many of the same basic ideas there are laid out here, just at depth and understanding level of a middle school student, i.e. there are considerably fewer Magritte jokes.

In the back matter, Telgemeier notes that the basic idea with the book was basically to present Undestanding Comics in a more kid-friendly format, so that a twelve-year-old could benefit from that knowledge instead of having to wait until they were considerably older to "get it." That is precisely what this is, and it succeeds enormously well both at re-contextualizing McCloud's work and doing so in an entertaining fashion. If you had any skeptical thoughts around two very different types of creators trying to collaborate and winding up making something considerably less than either of them might make individually, you'd needn't worry -- this is simply the best bits of both creators, fused together in about as seamless a manner as possible.

The Cartoonists Club came out last month from Scholastic. It retails for $14.99 US and should be available from any bookstore.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The Real Anti-Life Equation

https://ift.tt/B0FXMnL

Kleefeld on Comics: Comic Story Idea

https://ift.tt/e89p5tx

Kleefeld on Comics: Thomas Girtin Review

https://ift.tt/mZ1w8fk

Kleefeld on Comics: The Comic Book Protection Cover System
https://ift.tt/Zp75giz

Kleefeld on Comics: Issues with Heavy Metal
https://ift.tt/qwvfLgN

As you may or may not have heard, Heavy Metal -- after a brief hiatus -- is back. They ran a Kickstarter campaign towards the end of 2024, and the first issue of the new series hit comic shops this week... before many (most?) Kickstarter backers received their copy. This prompted an apology from CEO Marshall Lees this morning.

Some of you have been rightfully upset to see Heavy Metal #1 appearing in comic stores before it landed in your mailbox. We’ve heard your concerns, and we want to speak openly about the situation with Issue #1 fulfillment. This was never the experience we intended for you. We committed to backers—our most loyal supporters— that they would receive their copies before anyone else. And while we did begin shipping your rewards before the book hit stores, the scale of this campaign, combined with unforeseen delays, meant we were unable to meet that commitment across the board. For that, we sincerely apologize.

Most of the ensuing comments so far have been critical, with even the most generous ones expressing disappointment in the lack of advance communication. More frequently, the comments seem to be of the "You bastards planned this from the start and you're just offering empty lip service to us" variety. A couple of examples...

Consumers have been around long enough to know when they're being jerked around because companies accidentally showed who they prioritize when mistakes are made.

It's 2025, stop trying to glaze us with these compliments and execute your job mister chief executing officer. Treat us like adults if you want us to treat you like you're worth our money.

... and...

What an absolute C-Suite response.

A stupid town hall where everyone’s probably gonna be muted and the CEO just blows smoke up everyone’s ass? Nah, I won’t be joining that. I just read a bunch of vomit - don’t need to hear it too.

You share the frustrations? Please explain how you as the creator share in the frustrations of the backers, when you as the creator caused the problem...

I don't have any special insights on what actually happened here -- I only know what's publicly available -- and I don't have a dog in this fight -- I didn't back the KS and never planned on buying the book. But this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. More than a few KS projects over the years have made it into the public's hands before those of the original backers. I've been on both sides of the purchasing equation there, where I've backed projects that didn't arrive until well after they were available to the general public and where I've bought items at the shop before the original backers got them. So I do get the various reactions on the consumer side.

From a production side, I get it. There are a zillion production issues that could get in the way, particularly the past few months with regulations and tariffs changing almost hourly. It is feasible that a delay hampers one venue but not another such that a product gets out to the general public before a select one. But I do agree that this has an air of giving the broader, shallower customer base a priority over the smaller, but more devout "well, they'll buy it regardless of how much we piss them off" customers.

I'll also note that Lees' communication here is... not poor exactly, but not great either. That his communication went out after the fact is a reactionary choice; he would've served folks better by being ahead of the actions. He should have reached out the minute he knew that even some backers would receive their copies after comic shops did, even if that was only a day or two in advance. Ideally, he would've said something as soon as the specific timing might've come up as a question at all; a pre-emptive "we just learned our fulfillment vendors are running a little behind and they might not get every one of your copies in the mail before comic shops receive their copies" would've have gone a long way towards mitigating the current agitation.

Additionally, the specific language he does use is, as that one commenter noted, "an absolute C-suite response." That is, it's a lot of words that ultimately say nothing of substance. Corporate language that's carefully crafted to avoid accepting responsibility. While I think people generally bought into the argument that publishers can justifiably use crowd-funding as a means to guage interest, even though their role as publishers is ostensibly to be able to front production costs themselves, that still comes with a fairly high degree of skepticism. A lone creator can be excused for production management 'failures' like this because their expertise is supposed to be in the storytelling itself. But as a publisher, you've got (or at least should have) production experts on staff to handle precisely these kinds of challenges. Ignorance can't work as an excuse, and therefore responsibility will fall on your shoulders. Trying to corporate-speak your way out of that is going to come across in the worst light possible.

Trolling around in the patent database, I came across the patent for a "comic book protection cover system" from 1993. It's basically a zip-loc bag, sized for modern comics, with a pocket on the front to put in a small sheet with whatever details you think are relevant. Supposedly, this "has all the advantages of the prior art bags and none of the disadvantages."

I'm a bit dubious, frankly. Although in large part because of the lousy wording in the document. He has four one-sentence paragraphs in a row that begin...

Still yet another object of the present invention...

Still another object of the present invention...

Yet another object of the present invention...

Even still another object of the present invention...

I don't know that I've ever seen these advertised, much less actually used. But who am I to judge? John and Cindy Merkley have a patent, and I don't.

Here are the full specs of Patent #5,415,290...