With the recent debut of a new statue of Superman in Cleveland, there might be an uptick in people visiting the city. Or, at least, people looking to spend time thinking about Superman while they happen to be in the area anyway. So I thought I'd bring this map back out.

My friend Matt Kuhns (RIP) created this "Superman's Cleveland" map back in 2010. It's essentially a tourist map of the Cleveland area with Superman-related highlights called out. It obviously doesn't have the new Superman statue on it -- or, for that matter, the Superman Welcoming Center that was debuted in Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in 2012 -- but it has several other historic Superman-related locations noted. You used to be able to get professionally printed copies from Carol & John’s Comic Shop, although I don't know if they still have them. While Matt's original site is gone, it was captured by the Internet Archive and you can download a PDF copy through them.



For those of you not familiar with the Cleveland area, the new Superman statue is located only about a block away from Location #11 on the above map. Cleveland Hopkins Airport is about 10 miles southwest of Location #8 on the map; the Superman Welcoming Center specifically is near the baggage claim area.

I've gotten a number of comics over the years that were made by folks that were early in their careers as creators, and they'll tell me -- in person if I see them at a convention or just from the messaging on their site or Kickstarter or wherever -- that they're trying to capture the best parts about comics they grew to love the medium on. Doesn't matter how old they are now, or when they got into comics, the stated goal is: I want to make comics like the ones I read [sometime earlier]. Maybe they're thinking about one title in particular they really loved, or maybe a single creator, but it's often a small group of some sort. Not something necessarily indicative of the entire period they're referring to, but a subset that embodied a handful of particular traits.

Not surprisingly, some creators are more successful than others in that regard. They have more talent or more time they can throw at the project or whatever. But regardless of how good/successful their comic is -- however you define "good" or "successful" -- it will still always be just an shadow of that original. You might be able to see echoes of where the creators' inspirations and it might be executed well, but it's derivative by design so it will always be identifed and understood in relation to the original sources.

I don't say that in a derogatory fashion. As I said, they're actively trying to be derivative at some level, so it's going to be treated as such regardless of how well executed it is.

Furthermore, that is an excellent way to learn. When you're first learning to draw, you do what? You try to copy drawings that you like or stand out for whatever reason. Maybe at first, you're literally tracing figures. As you get better, you copy them but having the original off to the side. Later still, you're perhaps copying layouts from one artist but trying to emulate the linework of another. And so on.

Making comics can follow the same basic process, just on a more holistic scale. You "graduate" from copying specific scenes to using story structure and pacing. And somewhere in there is, "I wanted to make comics like the ones I read [sometime earlier]." And that's perfectly fine. You, as a creator, are learning and readers still get an entertaining story. (Provided you've got some level of talent, of course!)

I saw an interview several years ago where Kazu Kabuishi was talking about how he had been reading Bone and was basically trying to copy what Jeff Smith had been doing and doing a poor job of it. Smith, who was sitting right next to him, noted how he had spent much of his early days trying to copywhat Milton Caniff had been doing and doing a poor job of it. The difference between what you're trying to do and what you actually do is your personal style.

The only problem, though, with this approach of trying to bring something of a someone's previous work is that it's difficult to really connect with a solid audience. They can enjoy your work, certainly, but they're connecting with the work of the person you're trying to capture, not your own. The work becomes interesting and readers connect with it when you start speaking for yourself. Sure, you can have your influences and they can come through in your work, but trying to actively make comics like other comics, it's like listening to a cover band. They may be good, but you'd rather see the real deal in concert, right?

My point here is more directed at readers than creators. If you get one of these "I wanted to make comics like the ones I read [sometime earlier]" comics, don't dismiss it because it feels redundant to a bunch of other stuff you read 20 or 30 years ago. Keep an eye on those creators because they're probably close to finding their own voice, and they might then have some really cool and interesting things to say!

Some years ago, I read a blog post that argued that comic strips and comic books, while sharing some of the same basic elements, are significantly different enough that they should generally not be considered together. While they made some cogent arguments and a fair analogy, I has to disagree with them at a fundamental level.

One of their primary arguments was that the inherent form of comic strips is significantly different than that of comic books. That comic strips are so short and have so little room for character development or extended plots, that they are effectively a different animal than comic books. While I agree that you can't really place Beetle Bailey in quite the same category as Detective Comics much less something like Maus, those are all specific examples. If you take "comic strips" to mean "contemporary daily comics printed in newspapers across the country", I can see where their thought process makes sense. However, the inherent flaw in that thinking is that they're limiting their definition of comic strips a bit too much. Even if we don't include the potential of online comics, there were any number of comic strips "back in the day" that could easily fall under the same categories in terms of character and world development. Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat both spring immediately to mind.

Both were comic strips that had long-running and complex character relationships, and spent as much time on developing their worlds as anything else. Granted, they had more narrative room to work with than you'll find in Garfield but that limitation current comic strips artists have is specific to newspaper syndicates. Marvel and DC publish 32 page pamphlet books, but there's no reason that another publisher can't choose to make a 36 page book. Or a 28 page one. The specifics of the form, while common, are still based on the current dominate players. Should someone desire, there's no reason a newspaper strip couldn't have more space allocated to comics, allowing creators to be more expressive or original in their form and layouts. Little Nemo and Krazy Kat (and many others) are rife with examples of unusual and experimental page layouts.

So just because current practitioners of comic strips often limit themselves to three and four panel gag strips with little to no continuity, I find that a flimsy argument to remove the whole milieu from the discussion.

Further, taking their argument to it's logical extension in the other direction, wouldn't that mean that we should separate discussions of comic books from those of graphic novels? After all, there's so much more a creator can do working in the substantially longer format and non-standardized page size of a graphic novel than what can be done in a typical 32-page pamphlet. Could you imagine even someone as talented as Will Eisner trying to fit A Contract With God into a serialized pamphlet format? (No doubt he could do exactly that, but it would assuredly generate a different result!)

But, then, where do long-form stories like Cerebus and Bone fall? They were written with an eye towards the ultimate collection, but were originally released in pamphlet form. Or Watchmen -- a work that is most often experienced as a graphic novel, but was in fact written specifically for a serial format? And The Dark Knight Returns which came out a series of 52-page square-bound volumes?

Oh, geez, and where would Action Comics #1 go? That was written as a newspaper strip originally, and then repurposed (literally cut and pasted together) for a comic book! Is it a strip because of its original design, or a book because that's the format it first saw print?

And I still haven't brought up web comics!

There absolutely is validity in discussing comic strips against other comic strips, and discussing comic books in relation to other comic books. And there's little direct connection between Hi and Lois and Persepolis. But these are individual titles by individual creators whose intents are radically different -- that we shouldn't normally talk about the two side by side has nothing to do with the outlet itself, but with the content. It's the same reason we don't really talk about Hagar the Horrible in the same breath as Doonesbury. They have very different purposes with very different creative voices.

Yes, there are some differences in how comic strips and comic books are generally read and understood today, but I don't think that necessitates talking about them in mutually exclusive discussions. That the method of delivery is different is no reason to separate comic strips from comic books. The fundamentals of storytelling and artistic expression are the same, and they use the exact same visual language.

Is it valid to compare Chaucer to Frost to cummings? There's more differences among them than not, true, but we're pulling out specific examples, and it's like trying to compare Beetle Bailey to Detective Comics. You can pull out any number of specific examples to showcase vast differences in style and approach, but in doing so, you're assuming that Beetle Baily (or whichever strip you choose) is a perfect representation of all comic strips and that Detective Comics (or whichever book your choose) is a perfect representation all comic books. Neither is true. They might be representative of THAT PARTICULAR TYPE of strip or book, but I think there's probably more similarity between Beetle Bailey and Detective Comics than between Detective Comics and American Splendor.

My point is that whether or not it's valid to discuss two works of sequential art has nothing to do with the venue in which they're first seen, but by the content itself. Who created the work and why should be the criteria, not whether it was sold to King Features or DC Comics. In fact, I find it hard to believe anyone would even dispute the validity of comparing Sky Masters of the Space Force with Challengers of the Unknown. Yes, the bland gag-a-day strips that are commonly thought of when people mention "comic strips" have little in common with the bland superhero-fight-an-issue books that are commonly thought of when people mention "comic books" but neither are the end-all-be-all of even their respective genres, much less their venues. I don't see how they're still not all considered "comics" and worthy of discussion in the same forum.

Firefly remains my all-time favorite TV show. It is, without a doubt, the only show I've watched deliberately and repeatedly start to finish. It's one of the few shows where I've watched every episode more than once, and certainly the only one where I've sought to watch every episode more than once. (As opposed to, say, Gilligan's Island which got recycled ad nauseum on cable back in the 1980s and you almost couldn't help but see the same episodes repeatedly!)

[EDIT: Upon reflection, I realize that I've also done this with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series from 1981. I first saw it on our local PBS station sometime in the '80s and they aired it pretty much like a single movie during one of their pledge drives, hence I tend not to think of it as a TV series. I also have watched through Dirk Gently's Holisitic Detective Agency from 2016-2017 multiple times; I also tend not to think of this as a TV series, but I couldn't tell you why. Something to do with Douglas Adams warping my sense of reality, I suppose?]

Let me clarify as well that I'm not especially a Joss Whedon fan. Oh, I like his work well enough and I think he's pretty talented. But most of what he says with his work doesn't particularly speak to me very much. Firefly was different, though, and his vision in that show really resonates with me.

This past week, I just sat through watching all of the episodes again on DVD. Two or three every night. And I followed it up with the commentary track version of the last episode, "Objects in Space."

Now I've listened to all the commentary tracks before. Most of the episodes' commentaries provide insights and anecdotes about the behind-the-scenes of the show, as most commentary tracks are designed to do. But in the track for "Objects in Space" if you haven't heard it, Whedon spends most of the time talking about philosophy, how he began thinking about existentialism and how objects can be divorced from their commonly-ascribed utility.

Personally, I haven't read much in the way of formal philosophy. What I have studied is primarily more filtered, like the novels of Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky or the documentaries by Alain de Botton. And comics.

It was curious that I never really caught this in the "Objects in Space" commentary before, but I noticed tonight a couple instances where Whedon does actually speak to the specifics of the scene being displayed and expressly remarks how the actors brought things to the table that he hadn't necessarily intended, but helped the overall story and symbolism, and that he appreciated that collaborative nature of television. What struck me in particular about that is that is precisely why I don't like television in general. I don't want to see a collaborative effort involving writers, directors, actors, special effects crew, set designers, costumers, musicians, editors, and on and on. Every one of those people is bringing something to the table which impacts the show. The way a writer imagines a character's voice inflection might not be how the actor chooses to speak. The way a set designer creates a room might not be conducive to how the director wants to frame a shot. All of those decisions across the board affect the final product.

That's not to meant to be a negative per se. To Whedon's point, multiple people with their specific areas of expertise can bring things to the table that enhance the overall work. And it also brings with it multiple perspectives; it brings other people's ideas into the mix. By design. Everybody collaborating together to ensure that a good product is made, but also that you don't accidentally piss somebody off.

"Wait a minute! That thing you just did with your hands? I think that's a gang sign. Can you just give a thumbs up?"

"You know the line at the top of page seventeen? I think that might be a slur in some segments."

"You know, if we go this route with the character, we could alienate a large group of religious viewers."

But the type of work that's very collaborative like that also means that you're filtering the message of the piece. So the message you hear is the joint effort of many people trying to say (hopefully) something similar to one another. And that, to me, ends up muddying the message. I would much rather hear what a single person thinks. What's important to them AS AN INDIVIDUAL? What motivates them AS AN INDIVIDUAL? What do they have to say AS AN INDIVIDUAL?

What I liked about Firefly is that, despite being worked on by a diverse group, the show came across as Whedon's own vision. It very much felt like his show, and the other folks working on it were just channeling him.

And that's why I like comics. They're individually done by such a small group of people that each piece comes across as the vision/message of a single individual. (Well, usually. There are some works, I suppose, where the writer and artist were working at cross purposes, but those tend to come across as just really poorly executed.) I like that singularity of vision, that sense that I'm getting what the creator wanted (and had the ability) to convey.

There are thousands of TV shows and movies out there. By and large, they're made for mass audiences and, as such, they try to speak to a broad appeal with generic (and banal) messages.

Call me selfish, but I want entertainment and media for me. I want something that speaks to me. Not some trite pap tarted up in the newest window dressing. Now, obviously, not everything is going to be made for my benefit and there's going to be plenty out there that I won't like or consider relevant. But with the ability to micro-segment these days, it's much easier for comics especially to target me.

There are strips out there which are more about what the creator wants to say than what their audience might like to hear. And that is the what I find so wonderful about comics. Being able 'speak' to someone else in that manner is special and unique. To hear other people espouse their personal philosophies through images drawn on the page is a brilliant way to find out about how others think, whether I agree with that thinking or not.

I've found myself checking out Three Stooges shorts lately as a way to combat the seemingly never-ending barrage of hatred and maliciousness coming out of Washington DC these days. The Stooges were something of a staple while I was growing up with our local UHF station frequently running one or two of them before their regular Saturday noon-time B-movie monster matinee. (All presented by Marty Sullivan a.k.a. Superhost!) I enjoyed the shorts, but never to the point where I became particularly obsessed with them as seems to happen with some of their fans. Between that and the sheer volume of shorts they made, I'm certain I've never seen all their work. So watching them now is still newly entertainly despite their often recyclying of jokes. There's obviously a childish appeal to the Stooges' brand of nonsense violent comedy, which is a quite welcome distraction.

With that setup, I recently caught (for I believe the first time) Tassles in the Air in which, owing to both the Stooges' incompetence and a bit of coincidence, the trio of basic tradesmen are mistaken for a highly sought-after interior decorator. The expected chaos ensues and the short ends with the Stooges having full paint buckets dropped on their heads. But of note for my purposes here is the opening shot, in which actor Bud Jamison is seen relaxing while reading the comics portion of the newspaper...

He's shown reading the funnies specifically to set the character up as Jiggs-type of person. That is, he's wealthy but only very newly so and he still enjoys the pleasures of his working class roots. Note also that he's got his shoes off and his feet kicked up. That, and reading the comics, are all signs that he's not a "real" artistocrat and when his wife enters, her intention to hire a famous interior designer becomes one born more of making appearances than an actual interest in aesthetics.

But, hey, that's a reasonably clear shot of the back side of that newspaper! Can we figure out what he's reading?

As it turns out, yes, pretty easily in fact. Because of those aforementioned obsessiveness of some Stooges fans, we know this particular short was filmed between November 26–30, 1937. So the newspaper is likely from around that time. Secondly, a good portion of the comic's title header is visible. The letters "POLEON" are pretty legible. And what do you know? There was a comic called Napoleon and Uncle Elby that ran from 1932-1957! It's also pretty clear the comic takes up at least half the page, so we're talking about a Sunday strip most likely. So, in theory, all we have to do is look at the Napoleon Sunday strips from November 1937!

And, hey, we're in luck again! "Jon the Scanner" has uploaded scans of all the Sunday strips for 1935-1937 to Comic Book Plus! Working backwards from the last strip, we soon come across one that has a header image that looks strikingly like what we see in the Stooges short. The pipe and deerstalker profiles are pretty unmistakable!

You can see the strip is clearly dated October 31, 1937 so the timing mostly lines up as well. (Although, if filming started on November 26, I don't know why they'd be using a newspaper that's nearly a month old at that point. I would normally have expected one from November 21 or maybe 14. Although maybe using a slightly older one meant the paper was more supple and less likely to make noise picked up by the studio mics?)

Question asked and answered!

I'll note, too, since Napoleon and Uncle Elby isn't especially well-known these days, the strip was created by Clifford McBride in 1932, originally just titled Napoleon. McBride had actually introduced the characters as sporadic regulars in his previous strip Clifford McBride's Pantomime Comic before spinning them off into their own feature. The Uncle Elby character was in fact there at the start but only given title billing after the first year. The strip has basically the same setup as Marmaduke -- a large ungainly dog doing doggish things much to the consternation of his owner -- although McBride often kept his strip wordless, leaving the actions to stand on their own. McBride continued the strip until his death in 1950 (or '51 -- I've seen conflicting dates) at which time his wife, Margot Fischer McBride, picked up writing the strip while hiring at various points artists Roger Armstrong, Joseph Messerli, and Ed Nofziger to illustrate it. The Sunday strip ended in 1955 and the daily one in 1960.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Happy 80th Birthday, Jim Davis
https://ift.tt/HYNxqAQ

Kleefeld on Comics: Marvel and Byrne Proving My Point
https://ift.tt/GQLloIR

Kleefeld on Comics: The Adventures of Lion Man Review
https://ift.tt/BxWsJFo

Kleefeld on Comics: Why Marvel and DC are Losing the Webcomics Fight
https://ift.tt/BiyD1Oa

Kleefeld on Comics: Me and Schaffenberger
https://ift.tt/mD3Ryb6

Kurt Schaffenberger holds an odd place in my brain as far as comics artists go. The comics I read at a very young age were largely DC books from the early to mid-1970s. Mostly their big heroes. So lots of Curt Swan and Neal Adams and Jim Aparo and all those cats. Looking back, it strikes me as interesting that, except for Batman, it seemed that every time I picked up a book with a certain character in it, it was drawn by the same guy. I wasn't actually reading the credits at the early age, but every time I saw Superman, he was drawn by Swan. Every time I saw Green Arrow, he was drawn by Adams. Every time I saw the Flash, he was drawn by Irv Novick. There was, as far as I was concerned, only one way to draw Superman and that was how Swan did it.

(Curious side note, my Batman comics of that time alternated between Adams and Aparo. But I was apparently too young to discern any appreciable difference between them, and I've held more of a melded image of Batman in my head at that time. I think I had a few Nick Cardy drawn stories, too, which I could tell were somehow different but, I think, only in that Batman's cape seemed a little short.)

While I had a decent range of DC superhero comics back then, I did not have any of their then-recent revival of Captain Marvel. I somehow missed the Filmation cartoon and the live-action series (although I must've seen at least one episode of the latter as I do have extremely vague recollections of Les Tremayne's role in the show for some reason). Most of my familiarity with the Marvel family came from a set of ViewMaster reels and the Little Golden Book pictured at the right.

Shazam: A Circus Adventure was published in 1977. It was written by Bob Ottum and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger (misspelled "Shafenburger"). It was, as I recall, a silly story of the Marvel family stepping in to perform all the acts in a circus because the regular performers had walked out. They did a trapeze act with no trapezes and some old school lion taming, and there was a particularly embarrassing looking clown outfit for Captain Marvel himself at one point. But because of the superhero angle, it held the longest shelf-life of any of the Little Golden books I read as a child.

Now what struck me, at least a little while later, was when I picked up Super Friends #32, which also features art by Schaffenberger. I recall noticing that, not only did Superman not look like the Swan version I was familiar with, but he looked a lot like Captain Marvel. A lot. As in, "That's not really Superman, that's Shazam in Superman's costume!" (Bear in mind, I was eight years old at the time, so not only did I not understand the distinction between Captain Marvel and Shazam, but I also couldn't accept that Superman might be drawn by somebody other than Curt Swan. Although, I strangely never seemed to have issues with reprint material by the likes of Joe Shuster and Wayne Boring.)

I have another vague recollection of re-reading Super Friends a couple years later, and realizing then that it obviously wasn't Captain Marvel wearing red and blue tights, it just happened to be the same artist who worked on both stories. And by then I had seen Schaffenberger's work in a few other places. (Notably Jimmy Olsen. In fact, one of Schaffenberger's Olsen stories stood out so strongly for me visually that I wound up purchasing some of the original art for that story!) Rarely any of the big name titles, and usually characters whose "look" was defined (for me) by other artists.

Today, decades later, I still don't have a very large collection of comics featuring Schaffenberger art. But I'm always quick to notice his style, probably as he was the first comic artist that I recognized beyond a single character. There always seems to be a classy simplicity about his work and, as I think about it, probably helped to pre-dispose me to the elegant brushwork of Joe Sinnott once I started reading Marvel titles. It also helped define how the Marvel family "should" be drawn, and Schaffenberger's version remains my default visual for Captain Marvel.

Even when he's wearing Superman's costume.