Mike Kaluta started his career in comics in the early 1970s, gaining notoriety doing work on a number of DC's mystery/horror titles like House of Mystery, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, Weird Worlds, The Shadow, and Phantom Stranger. While he spent much of the '80s and '90s working on a variety of different comics for different publishers, including Marvel and Dark Horse, he's kept part of his career active in other industries, illustrating album covers for the likes of Glenn Danzig and Black Sabbath as well as providing art for a RPG publishers like White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast. I believe he's largely retired now -- I haven't seen any new work from him in about a decade, but he's in his mid-70s now so I can't fault him for that!

But what I wanted to bring up is another not-comics work he did back in 1984: the music video for Alan Parsons Project's Don't Answer Me... The style is quite interesting, putting together a blend of stop motion and flat artwork and a bit of claymation to boot. If you're familiar with the different styles of the animation processes, you can probably pick out how they did each part on your own, but I've found a "making of" type of clip from back in the day that provides some additional insights. It's actually considerably more informative than the not-entirely-accurate, short-handed description that's on Wikipedia. (If you're unfamiliar with him, that's Kaluta himself in the video preview shot by the way.) The video was nominated for Most Experimental Video at the first-ever 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and ranked second place in the category of Best Video of the Year at the 1985 Awards, in part because it had been one of the most requested videos on MTV. The song reached number 15 on the Billboard charts in the US, and was the last ever Billboard Top 20 hit for The Alan Parsons Project.

It's not really comics per se, but definitely comics adjacent in several ways and is certainly a curious addendum to Kaluta's comic book career.

Just a last minute reminder that the voting deadline for the Ringo Awards is this Wednesday! If you haven't voted already, be sure to do so now!
https://ringoawards.com

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Across a Field of Starlight Review
https://ift.tt/8uRlmHC

Kleefeld on Comics: In Search of Howie Post
https://ift.tt/nGEJapl

Kleefeld on Comics: A Tale of Three Andy Gump Statues
https://ift.tt/CyQ5SGD

Kleefeld on Comics: The First Computerized Comic
https://ift.tt/T4wMo08

Kleefeld on Comics: Little Rock Nine Challenge Segregation Review
https://ift.tt/lY3BQf8

Last week, I reviewed a graphic novel about the Little Rock Nine and, as you might recall, I really didn't find focusing the story around a white kid appropriate for the subject. This week, I'm comparing that against the version by Myra Faye Turner and Dolo Okecki last year.

The most immediately obvious difference between the two is size. The Marshall Poe/Ellen Lindner book is 128 pages while the Turner/Okecki one is ony 32; clearly they're not going to be able to get into too much detail with the latter. The problem/challenge with telling the story of the Little Rock Nine is that, regardless of your approach, you need to provide a fair amount of context. Because the story is not just that nine Black kids walked into a all-white school for the first time; but it's nine Black kids who walked into an all-white school three years after the US Supreme Court said segregation was illegal and the Arkansas state governor openly defied that by calling in the National Guard to actively prevent them from entering and President Eisenhower had to personally intervene by sending in paratroopers to protect the kids and... The fact that we don't have open segregation now means that you have to lay some contextual groundwork, which Turner is able to do in the first few pages.

Those first few pages are a little staid in terms of storytelling; it's basically written as a prologue, which is serviceable enough but it's essentially just a bunch of illustrated captions. I have to admit, though, that I was a little disappointed to see that approach continue throughout the book. Don't get me wrong; there are a number of dialogue balloons and it is very much comics by pretty much any definition, but the captions do much of the heavy lifting from a storytelling perspective. That also means that we don't get much insight into the protagonists as individuals; we're told a few snippets about each of them, but we don't get many examples of them showcasing their personality or character traits. To be fair, though, there's not a whole lot of characterization you can do for ten individuals (the nine kids and Daisy Bates) in only thirty-ish pages.

What Turner does much better than Poe, I feel, is relaying the facts. Poe's version really just uses the event as a backdrop for a fictional story, and he glossed over or even changed several details of the actual events to suit the story. Turner instead relays what happened and includes many elements that, if she had a larger page allocation to work with, she could do a lot more with. And while some of them might seem small, I think their inclusion does speak to the kids' collective character in ways that she doesn't have the time to do individually. Kind of an indirect characterization, you might say. Plus, it also helps to frame the entire episode more completely.

Okecki's art is generally serviceable enough. As I said, the captions do much of the storytelling, and things jump from scene to scene rapidly so she doesn't have much opportunity to show off any storytelling skills. Kids can be hard to draw, and she does so pretty well, keeping them all individually identifiable throughout. I did take issue with how she drew cars, though. I know they can be difficult for artists to get right, they were really not drawn well anywhere here. In fact, there was one panel focusing on how one of the kids had to drive away to escape a mob where I literally could not tell if the car was going forwards or backwards. Even with both occupants clearly visible!

Despite the book being somewhat rudimentary in its coverage (mostly due to its page count) I still found it to be a better and more comprehensive overview than the one I looked at last week. Even more impressive when you consider it's aimed at 8-11 year olds, there's more background and context here than in the longer work. I first looked at Capstone Press's Graphic Library line, of which this book is one of, way back in 2011 and I was impressed then that they were doing a doing a good job covering topics that don't get enough (any?) attention in schools. Not only were they able to cover normally-glossed-over matters, but they did so honestly and fairly, even if the low page count meant that couldn't get into too much detail. I'm inordinately pleased that the line is still going (I noted last week how many such lines are canceled quickly) and still doing a good job covering tough and under-served topics. The Little Rock Nine Challenge Segregation should be available through most bookstores now and retails for $7.95 US.

One thing I need to continually remind myself of is that what has been common knowledge to me for ages isn't necessarily common knowledge for everyone. A while back, I saw, for example, several people on Twitter ... er, X... completely stunned to discover Mike Saenz's Shatter, which debuted in 1985.

This is the reply pic.twitter.com/5mEy6pq7th

— Sean Poppe (@seanrunamok) March 24, 2015

Except I read these in the 1980s when they first came out. My father purchased them, in part out of curiosity to see what the computer he just bought was capable of. The story was very much in a Blade Runner type of vein and, coupled with the computer generated imagery, I was hooked very early on.

Rather than give the full history of the book myself, I'm going to reproduce here editor Mike Gold's notes from the Shatter Special and Shatter #1 before a letters page got started. (Apologies for using cell phone pics; I don't have a scanner handy.)

I don't think I've ever seen mentioned either was that Saenz put together an animated trailer for the comic as well. I have no clue how it was distributed; some variant of sneaker-ware, I suppose. But it was minute-ish long video featuring animations using the artwork from the comics. Kind of like how "motion comics" are created, but this didn't pretend to be comics. It was very much an animated piece that happened to be using art from the comics, much like you would make a movie trailer. I can't find a copy online anywhere, and I'm sure the 1985-level technology that created it would be insanely difficult to port into a format useable today.

Shatter was billed as "the first computerized comic." Everything Saenz (and later Charlie Athanas) drew for the book was done with a mouse. The only thing not done on the computer was the coloring. It's clearly dated in a lot of respects (the fonts they had to choose from were horrible; I think there were only 12 to select from, one of them was the dingbats font Cairo, and they were all bitmapped so you could realistically only use each font at a pre-designated size!) but it was something very special and exciting at the time. No one, and I mean no one, was producing comics like this at the time, and that uniqueness was not lost on even then-teenaged me!

I haven't actually re-read the story in years. I've caught snippets of reviews that say it's only an okay story, but that's like watching a recording of a concert and saying it was meh. A lot of the excitement and exuberance is in particpating in the action as it's actually unfolding. Readers knew they were witnessing something special in Shatter and dove into it for that. It's worth examining today from a historical perspective, but I doubt anyone could capture the feeling we had seeing it hit the shelves back in the mid-1980s.

In 1917, Sidney Smith created The Gumps comic strip for the Chicago Tribune. It's almost immediate and wide-spread popularity directly led the Tribune to join with the New York News to create the first syndicate. The Gumps then became the first syndicated comic strip in 1919. Animated shorts began appearing in 1920 and two-reel live-action pictures debuted in 1922. With associated merchandising, Smith (and the Tribune!) became quite wealthy.

The Tribune was so pleased with Smith and The Gumps, they commissioned a statue of Andy Gump from Michele Bernardini and had it placed on Smith's estate in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. When Smith died in a car accident in 1935 at age 58, the statue was moved to a city park. It wasn't until 1943 that it was officially acquired by the city, however.

Over the years, the statue bore the brunt of some unfortunate events. In 1952, the plaque on the front of the statue was stolen; however, it was eventually recovered and replaced. During a "druken riot" in 1967, the statue was destroyed entirely. The city then replaced it, despite the strip having ended almost a decade earlier in 1959. The replacement statue was then stolen in 1989 and was replaced yet again. Though comparing these 1965 (pre-riot) and 1969 (post-riot replacement) photos with each other as well as contemporary ones (like at the start of the post), you can note several differences in the designs (notably the hat and the length/style of the limbs) presumably reflecting how the character was most widely recognized at the time. I haven't been able to find any information about the artists who worked on the second or third statues.

The statues have all been moved several times, but the current one now resides in Flatiron Park facing Geneva Bay just along Wrigley Drive.

I came across an ebay auction a while back for some original comic strip art where the seller knew little about the piece beyond what was on it.

So the question was, "What is this?" It wasn't a strip I recognized, nor an illustration style. The artist's signature ("Post") is clearly visible, but it wasn't ringing a bell.

I tried Googling "United Feature comic post" but got tons of unrelated hits. "1970 comic post" yielded nothing worthwhile. Same with "comic strip cartoonist post" or "United Feature Post cartoonist." The issue, of course, is that "post" is also the name of pretty much any article that goes online any more, so there's tons of extra noise to filter.

Eliminating the name entirely, I hoped to find a list of comic strips UFS was running in 1970. "United Feature 1970 comic" came back with a lot, but switching to an image search brought in a few comic strips that seemed like the same style. Popping over to the page hosting those images, I was able to see that they were signed in the same way! I'd found my answer.

It was a strip called The Dropouts by Howie Post. Doing another Google search on that specifically turns up Post's Wikipedia entry. The strip itself doesn't have an entry, but Post's bio says that the strip ran for thirteen years beginning in 1968...

The premise of The Dropouts was a variation on the "stranded on a desert island" gag. The two main characters, Alf and Sandy, were indeed castaways, but the island is hardly deserted: One of the strip's running gags was how closely the natives' society resembled Western civilization. Other characters, all natives, included a one-man police force, a doctor, and a chef running a cafe with inedible food. There were other Western characters, including a religious zealot, an angry feminist and a disheveled alcoholic, Chugalug.

Post was more of a comic book artist than a strip artist. He worked for Harvey Comics throughout much of the 1960s, and created Anthro for DC. It was actually the cancellation of Anthro that prompted Post to create The Dropouts. (As an aisde, I suspect the name is a reference to the counter-culture phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out" popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966. The "drop out" portion Leary later explained "suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments." This suggests Post either completely misunderstood Leary's initial meaning -- which many people did -- or he was sarcasitically making fun of the misunderstood meaning. I can't find anywhere where Post notes expressly what his intention was with the title, however.) After The Dropouts ended, he went over to Marvel and drew for their Star line of comics in the 1980s, followed by a stint as editor for Looney Tunes Magazine and Tiny Toons Magazine back at DC.

It doesn't seem like Post or The Dropouts are particularly likely candidates for inclusion in any comic strip histories, and a lengthy biography doesn't seem financially feasible either. So stumbling across the art, and then doing a little digging on my own once again has come up with another fascinating little corner of comicdom that's largely escaped the broader history books.