Although I have yet to actually attend, I've been a fan of the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning since just about Day One. In part because it is more of a festival than a convention, and in part because of its focus on comic strip creators instead of comic book creators. Certainly nothing against comic book creators -- I'm quite the fan as I'm sure you know -- but there are very few outlets to celebrate comic strip creators any more that I'm thrilled this one exists.
Last week, they announced their 2016 guest speakers: Ann Telnaes, Jen Sorensen, Wiley Miller, John Hambrock, Rob Harrell, and Eddie Pittman. Seems like a good list of talent. One thing I find interesting is that the artists here all have very different types of careers, despite all being basically in cartooning. Of all these, Miller is, I believe, the only one who works exclusively on what most people would call a "regular" syndicated comic strip -- the others also do children's books, webcomics, storyboards, etc. But even then, Miller's Non-Sequitur is something of an odd duck, alternating between an ongoing narrative with defined characters and a modicum of continuity to one-note jokes that have no relation to whatever else has appeared in the strip.
The diversity (in terms of careers) among the guests isn't new. Past guests include Jeff Keane, Tom Richmond, Lincoln Peirce, Denis Kitchen, Darrin Bell, Mark Anderson, and Bill Morrison. This year does seem to have a stronger influence from the web, though. Pittman ran his own webcomic for a while, and Sorensen's strips are likely seen more frequently online than in print. (I know I'm always a little surprised when I hear her strips are seen in papers.) Harrell seems pretty active on Twitter; Hambrock less so, but he's still on pretty regularly. What I think will be interesting is seeing those people who embrace (to varying degrees) the web as a promotional tool, or even a creative outlet, against someone like Miller, who's been actively dismissive of both in the past. Granted, his views may have softened or outright changed but his antagonistic relationship with webcomics, and Scott Kurtz in particular, goes back many years now. I'm really hoping to make it to the festival to hear some discussion (hopefully, intelligent and civil) around this point.
I understand the Festival has been pretty successful so far, and shows no signs of slowing down. So it will be also interesting to see, as it continues, how the web continues to impact the guest lists. In five or ten years, how many creators won't have a webcomic going? Either as an adjunct to their syndicated strip, or using it as a first-run location with the strip showing up in newspapers via syndication afterwards? I think the lines between the two will continue to grey, which will hopefully not making things more challenging for the Festival itself!
Tini Howard has a piece over at Teen Vogue highlighting great LGBT characters in comics. It's in that stupid slideshow format that's absolutely detestable, and it doesn't go into very much depth on any of the characters -- in fact, it's barely anything more than their names and what title they appear in -- but I think it's worth pointing out. Why? Because it's Teen Vogue.
Let me put some more emphasis on this... It's Teen Vogue.
See, in case you weren't aware, Teen Vogue is not actually for teens. Any of those magazines that are ostensibly aimed at teenagers judging by their titles are actually targeted for an audience several years younger: the pre-teen and tween kids from about ages 9 to 13. The magazines are decidedly aspirational in nature; they're trying to shape the impressions of kids before they're old enough to do a lot of clothes and makeup shopping for themselves. By the time they get to actual teenagers, the teenagers are also looking aspirationally by checking out what the 20-somethings are doing in Vogue.
So Teen Vogue is catching an audience JUST as they're hitting puberty, and starting to think about gender and sexuality. So, while Howard's piece mostly focuses on titles that are deliberately just above magazine's audience (I can't imagine any ten-year-old being interested in Strangers in Paradise) there's just enough there that might interest younger readers. The write-up on Lumberjanes even says exactly that, providing a solid cue to the actual reading audience that this might be more their speed.
But what pieces like this do is normalize (well, help to normalize, at any rate) the very idea of LGBT characters. They're saying not only that it's okay to see LGBT characters in comics, but it's almost expected. That this should be something they look for in their comics, and take notice when it isn't there. And that by telling this to a young (read as: impressionable) audience, that will carry through with more weight than if you tell someone who's in their 30s or 40s and set in their opinions.
So kudos to Howard and Teen Vogue for encouraging this. As much as I generally don't like these types of magazines' approach to encouraging consumerism and the superficiality of being pretty, I will absolutely give them props for helping to steer this broader conversation in a positive direction. Especially when they do so using comics!
I made a passing reference yesterday to V. T. Hamlin, the creator of Alley Oop. His Wikipedia entry notes that after he retired from cartooning, he wrote an autobiography entitled The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs. I've read a little about Hamlin, but it's all third-hand information, so I thought it might be good to track down a copy of his autobiography.
I'm wondering, though, does it actually exist?
The Wikipedia article cites this piece as the source of the autobiography claim. Steve Stiles in his piece called "The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs" also notes that Hamlin wrote an autobiography under that title. I've seen the claim pop up in repeated biographies of Hamlin as a sort of coda, but no one ever seems to cite it directly.
Well, almost no one. Robert Harvey does quote from it for his biography of Hamlin that appeared in The Comics Journal. Harvey's a solid historian and researcher, so he's certainly read it, but there's a passing mention in the same piece that the autobiography had gone unpublished. So where did he get it, and why do so many people cite it?
A little more digging led me to the Special Collections at the University of Missouri Libraries. Hamlin's daughter presented a sizable collection of Hamlin's comics work to the library in 1991 and among the listings are a 73-page "unpaged typescript" called The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs and a "transcript by Frank Stack" of something else by the same title. These must be what Harvey saw and others keep referring to.
If the autobiography only clocks in at 73 pages, I'm inclined to believe it's incomplete. I mean, that's fewer pages than one of those 80-page giant comics DC used to do in the 1970s. Seventy-three pages isn't even a thick magazine, much less an autobiography. It's not like Hamlin just cut his stories short or anything either -- he spent four decades telling Alley Oop stories for a living! So I get why it wasn't published before, and why it might remain unpublished. But it seems a shame that the only way to even look at it is to head out to the University of Missouri and flip through the one copy that seems to exist anywhere.
Kudos to any/all comics researchers who are willing/able to travel around the country, or even the world, to different libraries and collections to dig up unique treasures like this!
My buddy Frank Page draws the Bob the Squirrel comic strip. He's been at it for about a decade now and has, by and large, been pretty happy doing it. It's never been a hugely popular strip in the way that, say, PvP or Penny Arcade has become, but he's okay with that. He's met some really cool people through his comic, and he gets some touching responses to his work. Like one guy who tattooed Bob on his arm. Or the other guy who sent him a replica Apollo space helmet out of the blue.
But Frank's got a day job he enjoys and, perhaps more importantly, pays the bills, so he leaves the strip intentionally as a side gig. He's got some strip collections available through Lulu, and some t-shirts through CafePress. He's got a Patreon campaign, and he sometimes takes commissions and sells his originals. Every now and then, I needle him about his work. Not the work itself, as he's quite talented, but how he markets and sells it.
His originals are dirt cheap. Last I checked, his Squirrelosophy originals were going for $40 each. I'm not sure what his Bob strips are going for, since he doesn't have any indication on his site that they're available for sale. I commissioned a piece from him as a Christmas present for a relative -- pen and ink, a realistic representation of two people, 14" x 17", cross-hatching out the wazoo... $100. Like I said, I've pestered him about this, but his response has always been that he'd rather undersell his work so that it gets out to the widest audience possible.
Now, let's turn to Chris Schweizer for a moment. Probably a more well-known name, so his work's probably in higher demand and he can charge more for it. He reminded folks recently that he's got a variety of originals and prints available through his online store. I checked it out (as I have before) and noted that the original of my favorite page from his Crogan series is still available... for $450. He noted that it's probably his priciest work, in part because it's apparently everyone's favorite page, "so I wanted to make sure it goes to someone who likes it enough to consider spending that much on it, if that make sense." Schweizer is basically taking almost an opposite tack. If you want his work, he's going to charge a higher amount essentially as a way to prove that you really want it.
Of course, a key difference here is that Schweizer is trying to make a living at cartooning. Frank is getting paid, too, but he's got a day job to fall back on. He's less concerned with income with regards to his comics work because he can afford to be. If Schweizer charged the same rates Frank did, I suspect he'd be living out of a 1978 AMC Gremlin.
I know a number of people who work in comics who used to charge like Frank does, but don't any longer. In most cases, it was almost out of necessity. They had a day job and did their comics on the side... until their day job went away. There were cut-backs, or the company closed down, or -- in one instance -- they just stopped paying everyone. The creators then looked at their options and decided that, given the economy and job market in general, they had a better shot at making a living if they dove into creating comics full-time rather than bust their ass trying to find another day job that really didn't have any more security than the last one. That's probably not an set of circumstances to alter your approach to pricing under, but sometimes we don't make changes unless we have to.
Sadly, being a cartoonist has almost never been an easy road to fame and fortune. While you can certainly point to huge success stories like Milt Caniff or Todd McFarlane, those are the exceptions, not the rule. For every Jim Davis out there, there's a couple dozen V.T. Hamlins -- guys who did good, solid work for their entire lives but never really achieved a particularly high level of financial success. One can't help but wonder, though, if they would have had better luck just by placing a higher monetary value on their work.
One thing you don't see much any more is how comic strips could influence American culture. Obviously the newspaper used to be a much more prominent part of shaping perceptions; before the advent of television, newspaper were really the only way to communicate anything visually to a mass audience. You'll occasionally run across stories about how Sadie Hawkins Day came out of Li'l Abner or how the Jeep was probably named after the character in the Popeye comics. One that I hadn't seen before is how Harry Hershfield's Abie the Agent was used to fight Jewish stereotypes.
In 1910, Hershfield started a strip called Desperate Desomnd, a parody of adventure melodramas in a similar vein as Milt Gross' He Done Her Wrong from two decades later. He incorporated a Yiddish character into the strip, which proved a positive move and Hershfield's editor encouraged him to start a new strip focusing on the Jewish experience in America. Thus, Abie the Agent was born.
Abraham Kabibble* was a car salesman and, while he and the other Jewish characters depicted used some strong elements of Jewish culture to emphasize their roots, Hershfield was careful to avoid using those elements as part of the humor itself. For example...
Abie is clearly speaking a forced dialect, and the two characters have decidedly Jewish-sounding names, but there's no demeaning of the characters because of that. Hershfield is relying on some stereotypes, but not as the focus of the humor itself. He's basically using the strip to showcase that Jewish Americans are pretty much just like other Americans and weren't deserving of the broad slander that was often cast against them at the time. This was further emphasized in 1917 when Abie enlisted in the US Army to fight during World War I.
Clearly, Abie the Agent didn't change the hearts and minds of everybody overnight, and there would still be anti-Jewish sentiment in some circles for years. But being popular enough to have several strip collections made, two animated cartoons, and a reference in the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers suggest that it did help many Americans begin to accept and understand Jews as people just like them.
Kind of a pity that newspapers don't have that same pull today; maybe we could get a new version called Abhed the Agent.
* As far as I can tell, this is the first instance of "Kabbible" being used as a Jewish name. Merwyn Bogue wouldn't adopt his "Ish Kabbible" stage name for several more years. There was a 1913 song titled "Isch ga-bibble" which Bogue later claimed to have gotten the name from. Whether Hershfield also got the name from the same song is unknown, but it would seem likely as "kabbible" is not a word itself and the song only debuted the year before Abie the Agent.
One of the neat things about people-watching is catching these small nuances of character that make every person unique. The particular way they walk or stand or just hold themselves. Sometimes their actions can be very telling, or at least interesting, even just as a contrast to how you might do those same things yourself. I've heard that a number of creators use people-watching as a way to help develop their own characters in much the same way actors do.
But we don't always have the time or ability to view a single person for a long enough period to pick up on their personal ticks. Maybe we're on the way somewhere, or they're passing through quickly themselves, or whatever. We might get a brief mental snapshot of the individual, and any character judgements we might make would have to be based on some broad generalities. Often, these are stereotypes. Often based on ideas that are socialized through our family, friends, and media at large.
So here's a little game I play. As I'm walking around, I see these people that I'm only able to do a quick read of. The ones that, in passing, I'm going to rely on those broad generalities. But the thought process I run through is, "Now this person is [superficial characteristic] so I'm supposed to think they're [stereotype]."
"This person is Black and wearing a hoodie, so I'm supposed to think they're a thug."
"This person is overweight and their hair isn't perfectly coiffed, so I'm supposed to think they're a lazy slob."
"This person seems to be homeless, so I'm supposed to think they're an irresponsible drug-addict."
I'm doing two things in those statements. First, I'm consciously identifying what trait(s) stand out. In identifying them, I have to compare the person against what society tells me is "normal." And while I don't think through a full list of "normal" traits every time I do this, the culmination of running through this game repeatedly highlights what we're taught to believe a "normal" person looks like. It brings the idea that we are taught this visual very much to the forefront of my mind.
Second, the phrase "so I'm supposed to think" emphasizes that, in the absence of actually knowing the person in question, I've been taught that they are being pigeonholed into a role by someone other than myself. I'm not making my own value judgement; I'm relying on others to tell me how to think about this person irrespective of any actual evidence to their character.
"This person deviates from 'normal' and that deviation is bad."
So here's my ask of comic creators, artists in particular. When you draw some characters into your stories -- not primary characters, but more the background characters that you're using to flesh out your world -- as you draw each one, try running through that same game. "This person I'm drawing is [superficial quality], so I'm supposed to think they're [stereotype]."
This will do two different things, I think. First, it'll force you to consciously think about why you might be using a stereotype for a character. It's possible that it's perfectly appropriate, but then again, maybe it's not. But it gives you at least a moment's pause to consider it. Second, if you find yourself repeatedly saying your characters never have superficial characteristics that suggest a particular stereotype, maybe that's because you cast of characters isn't very diverse and you're only drawing what society has taught is "normal." Again, worth some consideration.
