I got this book from my dad last year: P.R. Garriock's Masters of Comic Book Art published in 1978. I don't believe he was reading comics at that time, so I don't know why he had it, but it makes for an interesting look.

The thing about highlighting "masters" of any medium is, of course, that the very nature of the term suggests a subjective grouping. Who's to say one individual is more masterful than another? Coming from that perspective, I generally don't expect to 100% agree with anyone else's choices. But Garriock's list is a curious one nonetheless. His entries are: Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Bellamy, Richard Corben, Barry Winsor-Smith, Jean Giraud, Phillippe Druillet, Wally Wood, Robert Crumb, and Victor Moscoso.

Now, he does call this Masters of Comic Book Art so I can't fault him for not including some folks like Winsor McCay or Milton Caniff, who only worked in comic strips. It's kind of a semantic point, but I get it. He also seems to equate "art" with "illustration" and not necessarily "storytelling" so I can kind of see not including someone like Jack Kirby. (Although the Kurtzman examples shown are almost all of the more goofy, cartoony variety.) And this is also 1978 so newer talents like John Cassaday weren't around; even someone like Howard Chaykin had only just started his career.

The inclusion of several European creators is pleasantly surprising, but Garriock himself is British so that he would be more conscious of them than a typical comic fan of the late 1970s makes sense. However, it's very much worth noting that, despite the more worldly outlook, there are no Asian creators represented. In reflection, even the American creators looked at seem to have more of a European sensibility.

While Garriock does have solid biographies and really well reproduced examples of each creator's work, it still basically boils down to a list of his top ten comic creators. Generally, I'm not all that interested in anyone's top ten, especially if I'm not familiar the person making the list. I have no idea where they're coming from or where their sensibilities lie. Garriock's book is interesting to me only insomuch as that he does have decent biographies of two creators that I'm not very familiar with (Bellamy and Moscoso), but beyond that, it's mostly a curious artifact notating who a British writer might've thought was great comic book art in the late 1970s.

One of the reasons I regularly tout webcomics is their democratizing nature. To get a comic out with an established publisher, whether they're as big as Marvel or someone considerably smaller, you need to gain the attention and favor of their people at those publishers who act as gatekeepers. You can have the best comic in the world, but if Mike Richardson doesn't like it, you will not see it published by Dark Horse. (My understanding is that Richardson himself does indeed have to approve every title.)

But you don't have that on the web. If you want to make a comic, you can put it all together and start throwing pages out online without anyone's okay. If people like it, and respond to it, you'll eventually see traffic increase. If it increases enough, and you're able sell enough ancillary goods associated with the comic, you might even make enough money to quit your day job. Or maybe you can run a Patreon campaign and earn living expenses through that.

However, there are a lot of comics out there that never get much traction. Maybe the writing is bad, or maybe no one likes the art, or maybe they're just working in so small a niche that there aren't enough people who get what's going on in it. Regardless of the reason, people can toil away for years and never see much return for their work.

Not just financially, but emotionally as well. A lot of creators create because of a personal desire to express themselves. To create something that helps them release whatever's rolling around inside their brains. But if no one ever responds to those creations -- if this simply sit idle online without affecting anyone enough to even say "nice job" -- does it make sense to continue?

Obviously, the answer to that is entirely personal and depends a great deal on what the individual creator is hoping to get out of sharing their art. If it were just about the creation, after all, why bother putting it online? If there is a financial "requirement" on the part of the creator, then they should be looking carefully at how long they're willing to go with the comic before it starts earning more than they spend. In typical business plans, it's generally suggested that you plan for at least two years, more like three, without breaking even. I've heard from some webcomickers that four is generally more the rule for them.

But what about the emotional ROI? How little response can you get from your creation and still be satisfied emotionally? There was a lot of talk last week about how Charlie Hedbo was deliberately trying to insult any number of groups, and we know they achieved that goal. But what if no one cared? What if they published cartoons in the hopes of insulting and angering people, and the biggest response they got was, "Meh"? How committed would you have to be to your comic if no one but you seemed to care? How long could you keep working on it if no one ever seemed to have anything to say about your work? I expect, after a while, you'd start to question the validity of continuing. Why bother creating something for people if the people don't care about it?

I expect many cartoonists would love to have problems like so many people hitting the site that you have to pay extra for a more robust server. Or trying to figure out if they can afford to get someone to help moderate their comments section because there are too many conversations for one person to keep track of. But I think most cartoonists know they're not likely to encounter those issues. I think most cartoonists know that they won't ever be as popular as they'd like. The question is not whether or not they're popular enough to receive so much traffic or so much revenue every month; the question is whether or not they're popular enough to satisfy their own ego. And that's a question that no amount of business classes can answer.

If you've read much history on the early days of comic strips (and books) you'll soon discover that many of the famous artists of the medium were self-taught. They would look at other artists' works and try to copy them as best they could. But once comic strips started becoming popular, and were conceivably a career one could aspire to, there were entreprenuers who tried to take cash in on the idea. You might be familiar with the classic "Draw Tippy the Turtle" test as a gateway towards a mail-away instruction course. Charles Schulz was both a student and later an instructor at one such institution: Art Instruction, Inc.

While Art Instruction, Inc. was founded back in 1914, it was originally just a general illustration school. What I came across recently was this book from the 1930s: Comic Strip Magic Drawing Book. (There's no copyright information available, but the "No. 861" corresponds with other numbered books from the publisher from around that time.) From the box cover, it appears to be a how-to manual for drawing your own comic strips.

However, once you remove the lid and open the book, what you find is a series of four-panel comic strips already drawn and lettered. The first three panels of each strip are essentially complete and the fourth (much larger) panel is printed very lightly so that the reader can trace or ink of the existing lines to complete the strip.

Theoretically, I suppose, you could then color all the strips as well, but the publisher intent seems to focus on the finishing.

The quality of illustration isn't bad, but the storytelling and "jokes" are. In fact, of the pages I've seen (I don't own this) the "plots" all center around an animal discovering an object they would like to obtain, only to discover it's false or they've made a mistake. (The fox thinks a feater duster is a rooster's tail, for example.)

Regardless of the quality, this is the earliest instance I've ever seen of a commercial enterprise singling out inking as a separate and distinct discipline than penciling. The Eisner-Iger Shop -- which famously broke down the comic making process into the typical duties we see today -- opened in 1936, and since we don't have a firm date on this book, it's possible it did come out later, but that numbering implies the first half of the 1930s.

So this could be the first instruction book on comic inking?

Well, if you're a regular reading of my site, you probably read a number of other comics-related sites and I don't need to tell you that the offices of Charlie Hedbo, the French satirical newspaper, were attacked by two gunmen yesterday. Twelve people were killed and eleven wounded. From what I'm picking up, that's essentially the entire staff. Check your favorite news source of choice for more up-to-date details.

Needless to say, this is absolutely horrible. There is no justification for murdering people who wrote/drew things you didn't like. I hope the gunmen are brought to justice (not vengeance, mind you, justice) and the families of the victims are able to come to terms with what's happened, emotionally, financially and physically.

I vaguely recall hearing about the Charlie Hedbo offices being fire-bombed a few years back for publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on their cover; depictions of Muhammad are expressly forbidden in some Islamic sects. But by and large, Charlie Hedbo was almost entirely unknown to me prior to yesterday. So I spent a good chunk of the evening playing a bit of catch-up.

The immediate reaction of many cartoonists was that this was a terrorist act to try to silence freedom of the press, and Charlie Hedbo cartoons should be circulated even more widely in retaliation. But I also heard a number of people pipe up to say, "Yeah, killing those cartoonists was terrible and wrong, but their cartoons were racist, homophobic and mysoginistic." Usually a comment along those lines is then followed with several examples, which only helps me a little since I don't read French and have zero notion of context. Even with a Google-supplied translation, I can't tell if the cartoons are referring to specific events or people, or they're addressing something more broadly. Are the jokes simply that they're depicting Muhammad in ways that he wouldn't actually behave, or is there some social statement being made in reference to perhaps a new law that had been enacted?

[Indulge me in a bit of a tangent here for a moment...

There's an even broader issue that I haven't been able to figure out for years. Is it racist to depict a Muslim as they are often caricatured? I haven't been able to figure this out because people seem to argue that point, but from everything I've read, Islam is a religion, not a race. Which means it's a belief system that you elect into. Same with Judaism. They can of course be part of someone's identity, but people can choose how much they want to participate in that religion, if at all. Comic book creators Françoise Mouly and Michael Netzer weren't born into Jewish families; they converted to that religion as adults. Writer of the popular Ms. Marvel title, G. Willow Wilson didn't convert to Islam until she was in college.

That's not to say people can't be persecuted or discriminated against because of their religion -- both history and current news are rife with examples of exactly that -- but I have trouble seeing it in the same light as persecuting or discriminating based on something that an individual has no control over: gender, sexuality, race, country of origin, etc. I don't want to sound callous here, but I simply don't understand conflating them. You can choose your religion, you can't choose your race. I would sincerely appreciate someone explaining how/why religion so often gets equated with gender, race, sexuality, etc.

End of tangent.]

I saw someone bring up the notion that most of us are looking at these Charlie Hedbo cartoons through the lens of our own cultural backgrounds. That some of what we're seeing is simply endemic to French cartooning -- large-nosed characters for example -- and seeing it in a few isolated cartoons provides a skewed perspective. They're not shows Jews and Muslims with big noses; they and the rest of French cartoonists show EVERYONE with big noses. That's just a cultural norm.

But the other aspect to that, too, is that there are cultural norms in France that are more socially acceptable than those here in the United States. That whatever racism, misogyny, etc. we see in Charlie Hedbo is simply a reflection of French society as a whole. Skewed a bit to the liberal side, perhaps, but a reflection nonetheless. It might be akin to looking through US comics from the early 20th century and seeing how African-Americans were depicted. It wasn't viewed as racist within the culture at the time; that was just the standard cartooning convention. That doesn't make it right, of course, but it's a way of stating that maybe what we see in Hedbo is more indicative of broader cultural issues in French society than it is of any of the individual cartoonists.

No one should ever get shot, much less killed, for drawing a cartoon, even if it is deliberately and very consciously offensive. Everbody has the right to speak their mind. And there is absolutely a place for other people to criticize whatever cartoons they care to. But criticism is not made with bullets and fire-bombs.

• Erica Friedman started the new year with, not a resolution per se, but a commitment to supporting your comics ecosystem. She talks about going beyond just supporting comic creators, but also retailers, journalists, and everyone else who contributes to the broader sphere that is comicdom. She also says nice things about me. :)
• Gene Kannenberg recently started a Tumblr experiment called Comics Machine where he intends to do an abstract comic every day. I think few comic fans are even familiar with the notion of abstract comics, so whether you like Kannenberg's specific comics or not, I think it'd be useful to at least take a look through what he's doing.
• Visionary Comics chats briefly with David Gallaher and Steve Ellis on the upcoming Deadlands: Dead Man’s Hand graphic novel from IDW.
  
• Finally, a temporarily mandatory link to the Patreon campaign I just launched. I look forward to your support!

My introduction to highly stylized comic strips -- with heavy, almost noir-ish, emphasis on deep shadows -- actually comes via Sesame Street. Like many kids who grew up in the 1970s and later, Sesame Street was a staple television program educating us on a wealth of topics, well beyond the alphabet and basic counting. And the show introduced me, after a fashion, to the work of Ted Shearer.

Shearer was a Jamaican-born, Harlem-raised cartoonist. He sold his first cartoon work as a teenager before entering the army during World War II, serving as an illustrator for Stars and Stripes. He eventually went on to successfully sell his comic strip Quincy to King Features, and the strip debuted in 1970. I don't recall it being printed in our local papers when I was a kid, though, so I didn't actually see Shearer's work until 1978.

In 1976, Shearer's son, John, published a children's book called Billy Jo Jive, Super Private Eye: The Case of the Missing Ten Speed Bike. Ted Shearer provided the illustrations. The book sold well and a sequel was published in 1977, but more significantly, it had already attracted the attention of someone at Children's Television Workshop. It written up as a series of animated shorts, following Ted Shearer's drawing style, and debuted in Sesame Street episode #1186 in late 1978 with a funky Richard C. Sanders score.

Here's a later installment that's pretty indicative of the series...

At some point later, I recall seeing the same style of art in Shearer's comic strip Quincy. Like I said, it wasn't in our local paper, so my best guess is that it was published in some sort of newsletter that was distributed through the school system. I know that's how I first encountered Luann and I think Quincy may have shown up the same way.

Regardless, I know Quincy stood out because of the heavy spotted blacks. It seemed much more "graphic" than any other comic strips I had seen at that point. (This was before Gary Trudeau started getting really creative with his art, and before I had discovered any of the older adventure strips that were more illustrative. Pretty much everything I was exposed to previously was of the Hagar/Blondie/Marmaduke styles of cartooning.) Shearer's strips were significantly more dramatic looking than anything else on the newspaper page at that time.

It was only later that I realized some of the other things he was doing: constantly changing the viewer's perspective, sometimes radically; including often elaborate backgrounds; giving readers a very distinct sense of place... I don't know that I found the jokes that much funnier than anything else I was reading at the time -- a different style of humor, I suppose, but not really more laugh-inducing than anything else -- but the images were visually arresting by comparison to every other cartoonist I was seeing. The characters were both more fluid and more solid than their peers in other strips.

Shearer retired in 1986, and Quincy retired with him. I've noted before how I'd love to see some of Shearer's work republished. As near as I can tell, none of his Quincy material has been collected since 1978, meaning Shearer produced more strips after that collection saw print than before and more than half of his work on that one strip has never been collected in any form. The Billy Jo Jive books are out of print as well, but are available online. In 2012, John Shearer began work on reviving the Billy Jo Jive property, but eschewing his father's design sensibilities in favor of CGI characters.

It's a pity that such a strong cartoonist is largely forgotten. What makes it doubly-disappointing is that, as I noted last week, comics syndicates would probably be much more successful overall if they did a better job of mining their back catalogs. There's a lot of great work back there that's being unjustly ignored.

I stopped buying monthly floppies a few years ago, largely for budget reasons. My funds were very tight at the time, and the $30-$35 I was spending every week had to be freed up for things like, well, food. That's when/why I started reading webcomics with greater interest and voracity.

Fortunately, my financial situation turned around and I could probably afford a $35 weekly comic book run. But getting out of the floppies habit, and reading so many webcomics, I don't really have a weekly budget any more. I was asked about it the other day, and I've been trying to figure out what exactly IS my comics budget these days. Because my purchases tend to be more sporadic, it doesn't follow an easy-to-figure-out regular rhythm. It's essentially making sure that I pay all my regular bills, setting a certain amount aside for savings, and then picking up a few books if/when I happen to notice I've got some "extra" money in my account.

I learned a few years back that you can deduct hobbies from your taxes, under certain circumstances. At the time, I seem to recall that I'd figured I would need to spend over $2,000 on comics during the year to qualify. But, with my $30-$35 weekly budget, I fell a bit short of that.

This past year, though, I put a lot more money into comics than usual, thanks to building out my library. On top of whatever comics I bought, I also paid to have some custom comic storage furniture built. So even if the minimum I would need to spend is over $2,000 this year (I haven't checked yet) I'm still reasonably sure I've gone past that. Now that 2014 is officially over, I'll be going back through my receipts and bank statements to calculate what I've put towards comics over the past twelve months. I'm curious, obviously for the potential tax break, but also to see what my actual yearly budget was, and how that might compare against what my weekly budget was when I had that.

The disappointing part here is that, after the financial issues I faced a few years back, I should be much more aware of where my money is going. I do follow my bank account closely enough to ensure that I'm not spending beyond my means at any point, but anything in that "extra" category isn't tracked very closely. Looking back on 2014 for tax purposes will certainly help to document that, but I'm hoping it will also allow me to be more conscious and mindful as I go forward into 2015 as well.

I like to think I'm reasonably decent with my money, and I earn a good enough living that I don't have to worry overmuch about paying the bills. But I'm left wondering how other fans manage their weekly/monthly/yearly comics budget, if at all, and what their process is for figuring all that out. If you have a formal budget or keep track of your comics expenditures, I'd be interested to hear about them.

And speaking of spending money, I'd like to remind readers that I recently launched a Patreon campaign, and I'd really appreciate your support. (Don't worry; I won't be keeping these reminders going indefinitely!)