Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Here's the thing, though... if all these people are unemployed, how do they get the money to afford basic food and shelter, much less the ability to take part in whatever the current fad is?
It's clearly shown in the Judge Dredd universe that not only are most people unemployed, but most people live their entire lives without ever being employed! It's generally assumed that, as a citizen, you will never hold a job of any kind. Trade schools are unheard of, and higher education is all but extinct; what education is given is mostly in the form of teaching kids how to grow up and not be bored out of their skulls. Which I note to emphasize that people don't work for a little while to save up some money, or live off whatever their ancestors saved. The idea of working to earn money essentially does not exist.
So, again, how can they afford food, shelter, and whatever else they get?
Universal Basic Income.
Not surprisingly, the stories don't go into a lot of detail about how UBI was/is set up for people or how it's funded and/or managed, but they do make clear that everyone gets a stipend of some sort from the government in order to live.
So my question, then, is: if one of the most famous dystopias created for comics has, as part of its very foundation, incorporated Universal Basic Income into its overall structure, why is the concept anathema for us here in the US?
Oliver Harrington was a Black cartoonist that started work in the 1930s and is probably best known for his character Bootsie that ran in strip of the same name (originally titled Dark Laughter). He also created strips called Jive Gray, The Lighter Side, Pages from Negro History, Peewee's Off Jive, and Scoop. Most only lasted a couple of years and all of them seem to have been limited to African-American papers. But he's often cited as one of the premier Black cartoonists in America, largely because of his pioneering work on Dark Laughter.
Harrington's first full-time job was as art director for The People's Voice, a weekly African-American newspaper that began in early 1942. I can find little that Harrington himself said of the paper, but he does relay this anecdote in an essay called "Our Beloved Pauli"...
Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics, An Encyclopedic Reference Guide -- while by no means an infallible source, it's the most comprehensive one I have easy access to -- seems to have nothing on what this mysterious unnamed strip might be. But a few years ago, Carol Tilley came across them in her research. She found a few dozen strips called Blues in the News; an insanely topical version of which is included with this post was actually in reaction to the riots in Detroit in 1943.
Beyond the couple scant notes I mentioned above, I have no other information I can find about the strip. I can find no reference to it in Pioneering Cartoonists of Color by Tim Jackson, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation edited by Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, or The Blacker the Ink edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings, although all discuss Harrington and his other work to at least a fair degree. Tilly also noted that she could not find anyone who discussed Harrington's comics in People's Voice. Now admittedly, between myself and Tilly, that's only two people, but I'd like to think that we have access to a pretty wide range of resources between us and those resources include a lot of in-depth, first-hand research. So it would appear what she's come across here is a long-forgotten strip that is almost entirely unknown today, even to comics scholars.
And given the issues Harrington seemed to tackle in those strips, maybe it's time we make those strips known again.
Harrington's first full-time job was as art director for The People's Voice, a weekly African-American newspaper that began in early 1942. I can find little that Harrington himself said of the paper, but he does relay this anecdote in an essay called "Our Beloved Pauli"...
My first real job was as art editor at the People's Voice. Adam Powell, Charlie Buchanan and Ben Davis published that great sheet and one day Adam called me into his office. "Ollie," he said, "there's someone I want you to meet." A beaming giant of a man left his chair, thumped me on the back with a hand as powerful as John Henry's sledgehammer and boomed, "Feller, I just wanted you to know that those cartoons of yours are great." Of course it was Paul Robeson.In his introduction to the book containing the above essay, M. Thomas Inge elaborates very slightly on the work Harrington did for People's Voice...
In addition to the Dark Laughter panel featuring Bootsie, he contributed powerful editorial cartoons, illustrations, humorous panels and features, and, for a short while, even a comic strip.
Beyond the couple scant notes I mentioned above, I have no other information I can find about the strip. I can find no reference to it in Pioneering Cartoonists of Color by Tim Jackson, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation edited by Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, or The Blacker the Ink edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings, although all discuss Harrington and his other work to at least a fair degree. Tilly also noted that she could not find anyone who discussed Harrington's comics in People's Voice. Now admittedly, between myself and Tilly, that's only two people, but I'd like to think that we have access to a pretty wide range of resources between us and those resources include a lot of in-depth, first-hand research. So it would appear what she's come across here is a long-forgotten strip that is almost entirely unknown today, even to comics scholars.
And given the issues Harrington seemed to tackle in those strips, maybe it's time we make those strips known again.
Take a look at the various non-comics productions the characters have had over the years. Whether you're looking at the Flash Gordon live-action movie or the Phantom 2040 cartoon or the Mandrake made-for-TV movie, they all suffer from corners being cut to save money. The individual productions have some talent behind them (at least in most cases) and some have some really interesting and intriguing ideas in place, but there is always some central element that got skimped on. Phantom 2040, for example, has a fantastic storyline, some brilliant character design work, great voice acting... but the animation itself is bad that there are places where you can't even tell what's happening on screen. The Mandrake movie? His magic is almost entirely limited to rudimentary sleight-of-hand tricks to save on the effects budget. Sadly, one of the biggest recurring problems across the board are sophomoric scripts that seem to have been banged out over a weekend, so something could be rolled into production sooner.
Now, clearly, if you're putting out an inferior product, people aren't going to jump on board. For as much as the Flash Gordon movie is loved as a cult favorite, it did poorly at the box office, getting pulled from theaters inside its first month. Particularly in the shadow of Empire Strikes Back which had been released earlier in the year, it did not hold up to any scrutiny as a space epic as, I gather, producer Dino De Laurentiis focused on making it a comedy since it was based on a comic strip. He clearly had either no regard for or interest in the actual source material.
Now how is all this ultimately King's fault? After all, they're just licensing their characters out and it's the various production companies trying to cut corners on scripts and animation and whatever. Well, King is undervaluing the characters and licensing them out for far too little. They're looking at themselves as a newspaper syndicate that happens to own some intellctual properities, and not as a licesning company that holds the rights to some great characters. This was the problem Marvel had for decades and why you saw Spider-Man show up on The Electric Company and why first season of the Marvel Action Hour was absymal and why anyone thought putting Reb Brown in a Captain America costume was a good idea and why someone contracted Roger Corman to produce a Fantastic Four movie. It wasn't until Marvel's post-bankruptcy that they started to look at their IPs seriously and licensing them for their actual value.
What that meant was that movie studios who were trying to do things on a shoestring budget were now priced out of getting a hold of the characters. Now, instead of getting smaller production companies like Grantray-Lawrence or Constantin Film, the only places that could afford to get the rights to the characters were places like 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures. Places with substantially larger budgets that did not need to cut corners to try to produce blockbuster entertainment. Marvel began valuing their characters in such a way that, if you wanted to make a TV show or movie using them, you had to have a ton of money to throw at the project. When they started doing that, we started seeing Marvel movies like Blade from Warner Brothers, Spider-Man from Sony, and X-Men from Fox. Production budgets were now in the hundreds of millions of dollars ($139 million for Spider-Man) compared to maybe a few million from just a few years before ($3 million for the 1990 Captain America movie).
Now, granted, just throwing money at a project doesn't necessarily mean it will be a hit, or that it's executed well. The 1996 Phantom movie had roughly the same budget as the first Blade movie, but was a critical and commercial failure. But perpetually trying to do things on the cheap will almost guarantee that you won't get a hit. And that's largely why none of King's adventure character licenses have held any traction in popular culture for decades. They continue to value the characters as if they're worth no more than the newsprint they had been printed on for decades. But recall that Star Wars -- argueably the most successful franchise of the last half century -- largely came about becuase George Lucas wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie but couldn't get the rights.
But King seems content to let the properties languish. Their respective websites have been culled back to the generic Comics Kingdom template, and both the Flash Gordon and Mandrake comic strips have just been in re-runs for years. Whatever interest that seems to pop up occasionally -- like the Neca action figures that started coming out a year or two ago -- are very much driven by other companies actively seeking out the rights from King in order to expressly focus on a nostalgia-driven idea. (Note that the figures are expressly designed not off the original characters concepts, but the various media adaptations from the 1980s and are marketed towards 40-50 year old collectors.)
If you try to lift the original characters directly from their 1930s' interpretations and drop them into 2023, sure, they won't work. If for no other reason than there's plenty of blatant racism and sexism in those. But that doesn't mean that the core concepts are necessarily invalid. But because King Features has continually undervalued those IPs' worth, they keep getting low-budget (or, worse, low-budget looking!) adapations that reinforce their belief that the characters are best relegated to the funny pages of decades ago. I'm no intellectual property rights agent myself, but I know enough to see that they have not learned any lessons in licensing even after watching Marvel's successes in about the most direct comparison they could possibly have been shown.
In 1893 Postmaster General John Wanamaker came up with the idea of creating a special stamp to honor something, and the first commemorative stamp honored the World Columbian Exposition held in Chicago that year. Since that time, commemorative stamps have been created to immortalize a wide variety of things including the states, the presidents, American heroes, great inventions, monumental days in history, and popular icons. Today's question: how many comic strips and/or comic strip characters have been honored on postage stamps? (I'll keep this US-centric because... well, I only have so much time to research these blog posts!)
Well, my initial search turns up a good chunk right off the bat. In 1995, the US Postal Service created a series called "Comic Strip Classics" consisting of newspaper comics that were created before 1950. There were twenty comics represented in that series:
I was thinking that Peanuts had been something of a mainstay of philately, but evidently, the first Peanuts stamp did not debut until 2001. The most recent ones from 2015 were specifically focused on A Charlie Brown Christmas animated holiday special.
A curious piece I wasn't expecting to find was that, in 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin was featured on a stamp. The stamp features a photo of him, as well as drawings of two of his recurring characters, Willie and Joe from his Stars and Stripes strips.
From what I can tell, the USPS tended to shy away from fictional characters until the 1990s. Prior to that, there were only a few instances where a fictional character was honored, and most of those were of the "personification of an idea" variety: Victory, Freedom, etc. In the 1970s, they started getting a little more in pop culture with the likes of Santa Claus and Tom Sawyer. (Yes, the first stamp featuring Santa didn't come out until 1972.) Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog show up in the 1980s. But it's not until the '90s where the USPS starts anything with pop culture, and it's not until that 1995 release of "Comic Strip Classics" that we start seeing references to pop culture on a more regular basis.
But that's who all I can find. Did I miss anyone? I must've. What other comic strips have found their way onto US postage stamps?
Well, my initial search turns up a good chunk right off the bat. In 1995, the US Postal Service created a series called "Comic Strip Classics" consisting of newspaper comics that were created before 1950. There were twenty comics represented in that series:
- The Yellow Kid
- The Katzenjammer Kids
- Little Nemo in Slumberland
- Bringing Up Father
- Krazy Kat
- Rube Goldberg’s Inventions
- Toonerville Folks
- Gasoline Alley
- Barney Google
- Little Orphan Annie
- Popeye
- Blondie
- Dick Tracy
- Alley Oop
- Nancy
- Flash Gordon
- Li'l Abner
- Terry and the Pirates
- Prince Valiant
- Brenda Starr
- Archie
- Beetle Bailey
- Dennis the Menace
- Garfield
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Tarzan
- Superman
- Batman & Robin
- Wonder Woman
- Spider-Man
- Betty Boop
- Mickey Mouse
- Donald Duck
- Winnie the Pooh
- Bugs Bunny
- Pink Panther
- Raggedy Ann
- The Muppets
- Charlie McCarthy
- Star Wars
- Charlie Chaplin
I was thinking that Peanuts had been something of a mainstay of philately, but evidently, the first Peanuts stamp did not debut until 2001. The most recent ones from 2015 were specifically focused on A Charlie Brown Christmas animated holiday special.
A curious piece I wasn't expecting to find was that, in 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin was featured on a stamp. The stamp features a photo of him, as well as drawings of two of his recurring characters, Willie and Joe from his Stars and Stripes strips.
From what I can tell, the USPS tended to shy away from fictional characters until the 1990s. Prior to that, there were only a few instances where a fictional character was honored, and most of those were of the "personification of an idea" variety: Victory, Freedom, etc. In the 1970s, they started getting a little more in pop culture with the likes of Santa Claus and Tom Sawyer. (Yes, the first stamp featuring Santa didn't come out until 1972.) Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog show up in the 1980s. But it's not until the '90s where the USPS starts anything with pop culture, and it's not until that 1995 release of "Comic Strip Classics" that we start seeing references to pop culture on a more regular basis.
But that's who all I can find. Did I miss anyone? I must've. What other comic strips have found their way onto US postage stamps?
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
I first started reading comics in the late 1970s, but I didn't really get into them until 1983. I got hooked on John Byrne's run on Fantastic Four and that soon expanded to the wider Marvel Universe. (Well, as much as I could afford at any rate!) Within a couple years, I was eagerly trying to coerce my parents to drive me to comic shops and local conventions. Which, to my eternal gratitude, they frequently did.
But in hanging around comic shops, Dad started looking around a bit. He'd never been a big comic fan himself and had little interest in superheroes, but he discovered a number of the independent publishers that were gaining attention at that time. Folks that were putting out everything from Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper to Somerset Holmes and Ms. Tree to Scout and Jon Sable. He started buying many of those comics, and I was able to read a broad swath of these books after I'd gone through the comparatively few books I was getting for myself.
I was quite disappointed to learn Eclipse Comics folded while I was in a somewhat insulated-from-comics bubble of college. I also missed the demise of First Comics and, much to my regret, the death of Jack Kirby! But since I missed the beginnings of Eclipse and it's ending, I figured it's high time I get some background! Who were they?
The company was founded by brothers Jan and Dean Mullaney in 1977. Their first book was Don McGregor and Paul Gaulacy's Sabre, which I talked about before. Their next notable success was the anthology magazine Eclipse, which wound up featuring the debuts of several notable characters including Ms. Tree, Coyote, and Masked Man all of which eventually got their own titles. The magazine also featured Trina Robbins' adaptation of Sax Rohmer's Dope. As the publisher expanded, they brought on Cat Yronwode, who helped to get published Miracleman, The Rocketeer, and Zot!
(For the record, Yronwode was in a relationship with Dean Mullaney, but I can't seem to pinpoint when that began relative to when she started working for Eclipse. Did she offer to help the publisher because they were together, or was she hired and thus spent a lot of time with Dean, I don't know offhand. They eventually married in 1987.)
Yronwode also teamed up with Robbins to publish (through Eclipse) the first book detailing the history of women in comics titled Women and the Comics. She also helped get Eclipse into producing a line of non-fiction, non-sports trading cards. Later, in 1988, Eclipse partnered with Viz to publish some of the earlier English translations of manga such as Area 88, Mai, the Psychic Girl, and The Legend of Kamui.
Eclipse, as you might notice, did a lot of pioneering work. So, what happened? How did they not make it through the 1990s?
Basically, it amounted to a confluence of tragedies in the back half of the '80s and early '90s. First, Eclipse lost most of its stock in a flood. New issues were still going out the door, but any revenue from back issues sales ground to a halt immediately. Between this and the flood damage itself, they began accruing debt. This was compounded by the licensing and translation fees for those Japanese comics. When their primary translator moved (with the licenses) over to Dark Horse, he found what he saw as discrepancies in his deal. And when he asked for Eclipse's own figures so he could properly audit them, they sent over two sets -- one set of real figures and one set of false figures they'd been using for their own book keeping! Needless to say, he sued them for the over $100,000 difference!
Mullaney, for his part, claimed there was a deal that went south with HarperCollins. He claimed they were stiffing him, and went on to suggest (though not outright state) that he fixed the books as a means to ensure his creators still got paid, even if it wasn't everything they were technically owed. However, Mullaney also managed to wipe out the Eclipse account and take off with a new lover, largely leaving Yronwode to clean up the mess. They divorced the later that year.
The lawsuit was a pretty open and shut case, and Eclipse was ordered to pay $120,000, on top of whatever money they had already said they'd owed people. Conversely, Mullaney never really had filed any legal claims against HarperCollins, so Eclipse had to formally file for bankruptcy in 1995. Their assets were auctioned off (primarily to Todd McFarlane!) in 1996 for a paltry $25,000.
As seems to be the case with many companies, a love of the medium does not necessarily mean having a business acumen for it. It would seem that, despite having some great ideas for comics, actually executing those ideas in a financially reasonable manner wasn't the strong suit for Mullaney. Had he hired a formal business or accounts manager, the company might still be around today.
But in hanging around comic shops, Dad started looking around a bit. He'd never been a big comic fan himself and had little interest in superheroes, but he discovered a number of the independent publishers that were gaining attention at that time. Folks that were putting out everything from Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper to Somerset Holmes and Ms. Tree to Scout and Jon Sable. He started buying many of those comics, and I was able to read a broad swath of these books after I'd gone through the comparatively few books I was getting for myself.
The company was founded by brothers Jan and Dean Mullaney in 1977. Their first book was Don McGregor and Paul Gaulacy's Sabre, which I talked about before. Their next notable success was the anthology magazine Eclipse, which wound up featuring the debuts of several notable characters including Ms. Tree, Coyote, and Masked Man all of which eventually got their own titles. The magazine also featured Trina Robbins' adaptation of Sax Rohmer's Dope. As the publisher expanded, they brought on Cat Yronwode, who helped to get published Miracleman, The Rocketeer, and Zot!
(For the record, Yronwode was in a relationship with Dean Mullaney, but I can't seem to pinpoint when that began relative to when she started working for Eclipse. Did she offer to help the publisher because they were together, or was she hired and thus spent a lot of time with Dean, I don't know offhand. They eventually married in 1987.)
Yronwode also teamed up with Robbins to publish (through Eclipse) the first book detailing the history of women in comics titled Women and the Comics. She also helped get Eclipse into producing a line of non-fiction, non-sports trading cards. Later, in 1988, Eclipse partnered with Viz to publish some of the earlier English translations of manga such as Area 88, Mai, the Psychic Girl, and The Legend of Kamui.
Eclipse, as you might notice, did a lot of pioneering work. So, what happened? How did they not make it through the 1990s?
Basically, it amounted to a confluence of tragedies in the back half of the '80s and early '90s. First, Eclipse lost most of its stock in a flood. New issues were still going out the door, but any revenue from back issues sales ground to a halt immediately. Between this and the flood damage itself, they began accruing debt. This was compounded by the licensing and translation fees for those Japanese comics. When their primary translator moved (with the licenses) over to Dark Horse, he found what he saw as discrepancies in his deal. And when he asked for Eclipse's own figures so he could properly audit them, they sent over two sets -- one set of real figures and one set of false figures they'd been using for their own book keeping! Needless to say, he sued them for the over $100,000 difference!
Mullaney, for his part, claimed there was a deal that went south with HarperCollins. He claimed they were stiffing him, and went on to suggest (though not outright state) that he fixed the books as a means to ensure his creators still got paid, even if it wasn't everything they were technically owed. However, Mullaney also managed to wipe out the Eclipse account and take off with a new lover, largely leaving Yronwode to clean up the mess. They divorced the later that year.
The lawsuit was a pretty open and shut case, and Eclipse was ordered to pay $120,000, on top of whatever money they had already said they'd owed people. Conversely, Mullaney never really had filed any legal claims against HarperCollins, so Eclipse had to formally file for bankruptcy in 1995. Their assets were auctioned off (primarily to Todd McFarlane!) in 1996 for a paltry $25,000.
As seems to be the case with many companies, a love of the medium does not necessarily mean having a business acumen for it. It would seem that, despite having some great ideas for comics, actually executing those ideas in a financially reasonable manner wasn't the strong suit for Mullaney. Had he hired a formal business or accounts manager, the company might still be around today.
