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Yesterday's Close to Home by John McPherson...
My first reaction was confusion. There have been 10 actors to professionally voice Porky Pig. Joe Dougherty died in '78, Mel Blanc in '89, Greg Burson in '08, and Joe Alaskey early last year. The rest are all still alive. And creator Friz Freleng passed away back in '95. The character himself continues to appear in Wabbit and seems to be scheduled for shows that haven't even aired yet. So, to borrow another catchphrase, what's up, Doc?
I'm not the only one who expressed confusion either. If you read the comments left on the GoComics site, most of them express similar sentiments. The few that don't seem to be unaware that Blanc died over a quarter century ago.
As near as I can tell, the joke McPherson is going for is just that if the character of Porky were to die, it would be amusing/clever if his famous catchphrase that ended so many Warner Brothers cartoons over the years would be carved on his gravestone. It's made somewhat less funny by the fact that Blanc, who voiced the character longer than anyone, literally has THAT'S ALL FOLKS on his actual headstone.
As I thought about it, though, there's something fascinating about the sense of confusion readers have over the joke. See, the gag here is entirely in the gravestone itself. It works in much the same way the stones at Disney Haunted Mansion ride do -- the phrasing itself is mostly only interesting in that it appears in this morbid context. "I. Trudy Departed" isn't particularly amusing by itself, but if it's the name on a tomb, next to "I.L. Beback" and "I.M. Ready" then it takes on a new, humorous context.
But the fact that readers are so used to seeing the symbolism of a famous character standing in for a real, recently deceased person that it's automatically assumed that any cartoon featuring a moment like this is another one of those metaphors. Sonya Hobbs' gravestone in Momma represented creator Mell Lazarus, Willy Wonka meeting St. Peter stood in for Gene Wilder, Mork from Ork flying his egg to Heaven was for Robin Williams... Think about how many comics you've seen featuring Princess Leia in the past couple weeks. And how many of those also featured Kathy Selden, Debbie Reynolds' character from Singin' in the Rain?
Having the characters stand in for the people who made them famous is understandable. Readers have spent infinitely more time with Charlie Brown and Snoopy than they did with Charles Schulz himself. And while it's these creators who bring their audiences joy, it was most often through those characters. While I know many people who knew and mourn the loss of their good friend Richard Thompson, those who never met him were entertained by Pete and Alice Otterloop. Those characters were avatars for Thompson in the eyes of many of his readers already, so representing Thompson through them makes complete sense.
But that dead-character-as-departed-creator/actor metaphor has been used so much by so many cartoonists over the years that readers can't NOT see the symbolism even when it isn't there! So a grave for Porky Pig must be representative for someone closely tied to the character, probably Mel Blanc. Not only do we so identify Porky with the actor who supplied his voice for decades, but we even more strongly identify the headstone motif with a specific message conveying the passing of the person most closely associated with whoever has been buried in the comic. We so strongly believe in that metaphor that we question the character/real person association more immediately than whether it's even intended to be a metaphor in the first place! "But Mel Blanc died years ago. Did something happen to Billy West?"
That headstone makes for some powerful, powerful imagery there, once you start to think about it.
I'm not the only one who expressed confusion either. If you read the comments left on the GoComics site, most of them express similar sentiments. The few that don't seem to be unaware that Blanc died over a quarter century ago.
As I thought about it, though, there's something fascinating about the sense of confusion readers have over the joke. See, the gag here is entirely in the gravestone itself. It works in much the same way the stones at Disney Haunted Mansion ride do -- the phrasing itself is mostly only interesting in that it appears in this morbid context. "I. Trudy Departed" isn't particularly amusing by itself, but if it's the name on a tomb, next to "I.L. Beback" and "I.M. Ready" then it takes on a new, humorous context.
But the fact that readers are so used to seeing the symbolism of a famous character standing in for a real, recently deceased person that it's automatically assumed that any cartoon featuring a moment like this is another one of those metaphors. Sonya Hobbs' gravestone in Momma represented creator Mell Lazarus, Willy Wonka meeting St. Peter stood in for Gene Wilder, Mork from Ork flying his egg to Heaven was for Robin Williams... Think about how many comics you've seen featuring Princess Leia in the past couple weeks. And how many of those also featured Kathy Selden, Debbie Reynolds' character from Singin' in the Rain?
Having the characters stand in for the people who made them famous is understandable. Readers have spent infinitely more time with Charlie Brown and Snoopy than they did with Charles Schulz himself. And while it's these creators who bring their audiences joy, it was most often through those characters. While I know many people who knew and mourn the loss of their good friend Richard Thompson, those who never met him were entertained by Pete and Alice Otterloop. Those characters were avatars for Thompson in the eyes of many of his readers already, so representing Thompson through them makes complete sense.
But that dead-character-as-departed-creator/actor metaphor has been used so much by so many cartoonists over the years that readers can't NOT see the symbolism even when it isn't there! So a grave for Porky Pig must be representative for someone closely tied to the character, probably Mel Blanc. Not only do we so identify Porky with the actor who supplied his voice for decades, but we even more strongly identify the headstone motif with a specific message conveying the passing of the person most closely associated with whoever has been buried in the comic. We so strongly believe in that metaphor that we question the character/real person association more immediately than whether it's even intended to be a metaphor in the first place! "But Mel Blanc died years ago. Did something happen to Billy West?"
That headstone makes for some powerful, powerful imagery there, once you start to think about it.
- Toni Airaksinen writes about RESIST! -- an anthology comic with the theme of NOT OUR PRESIDENT being put together by Françoise Mouly, Nadja Spiegelman, and Gabe Fowler. Copies will be distrubuted for free at the Women’s March in Washington D.C. on January 21st.
- Twelve year old Simon Rosenbaum has started making comics to help his fellow students understand challenging concepts from their textbooks.
- "The purpose of Haawiyat is to produce a free, Arabic-language comic book for displaced Syrian children."
I'd say that beginning with the Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives, though, things started turning around and publishers really began to see the viability of a strong reprint program. Particularly as they got into chain bookstores, and Amazon came about. Add into that mix the prospect of digital comics, and the need for obtaining every individual back issue in order to read an entire series drops to essentially zero. If you're only interested in reading the stories, you have no need to track down the original issues.
What I find interesting now is how independent creators react to that notion. On the one hand, you have those that take the same basic tactic. They perhaps roll their comic out initially as a webcomic, then send individual issues over to comiXology to view in their platform, and then Kickstart a trade paperback and/or hardcover collection. Their concern is getting their story out there, and they really don't care how you might prefer reading it.
The other approach -- much less common as far as I can tell -- is to embrace the artifactness of the comics they produce. In most cases I'm aware of, there's an element of handcrafting each individual copy. Maybe it's got a unique origami-style folding process built into it, or maybe each copy is screen-printed by hand, or the covers are cut by hand to match the artwork. Chris Ware's Building Stories would be an example of a mass market version of this; he's expressly noted that he's very fascinated with the physicality of the comic as an object itself, and he specifically crafted Building Stories with that in mind. Hence, the variety of formats inside that bulky box.
We're at an interesting point in comics history where we're actively witnessing this transition from comic-as-both-story-and-artifact to comic-as-story versus comic-as-artifact. I dare say we're at the tail end of this transition period. Publishers (driven by readers and retailers) still seem to cater to the comic-as-both-story-and-artifact model -- that's why we still have monthly floppies for stories that are written/designed for "collected" editions. There was a period where creators were still crafting monthly stories, and those would be collected in 5-8 month arcs, but I think we're largely now where they're actively creating longer stories and just try to pace them in a way that breaks up into 20-ish page chunks. I suspect they'd switch over to more of a book format if not for the remaining readers who continue to buy into the monthly "artifact" format, despite the TPB generally being a cheaper option.
The question is mostly a matter of when these monthly readers (who one presumes to be a slightly older demographic) drop off in a significant enough quantity that publishers switch over entirely to the book format, and the comics that will still cater to the artifact aspect will largely be just those hand-crafted books by individual creators.
Yesterday, I caught this piece about Phoenix Comicon essentially charging people who want to volunteer to work at the show. (Technically, they only accepting volunteers that are members of the non-profit Blue Ribbon Army, but since that requires a $20 membership fee, it amounts to the same thing from the 'volunteer' perspective.) Ticket prices for Phoenix Comicon vary between $20-$45 per day, with a four-day pass going for $55. Offhand, I don't see how much work volunteering entails, but it seems to me that if it's anything more than 4 hours, you'd be farther ahead just buying a four-day pass and taking an extra shift at your day job.
See, there's a reason why conventions use "volunteers" who are "gifted" a pass to the show: it's cheap. Obviously, there's not an out-of-pocket expense if they get volunteers instead of hiring temp workers or something, but by using volunteers, they don't even hit up against any labor laws. Because you're "volunteering" for this work, it's considered your free time. You could be at home reading a book, or at the gym, or shopping for groceries, but instead you choose to hang around at a convention hall and ask people to remain in a single file line. And because you're paid with a "gift" of a convention pass, that circumvents enough legal requirements that would make you legally an employee or contractor in the eyes of the law.
Furthermore, a single day pass, to a convention, is effectively worthless. They've spent the time, energy, and money to put the con on in the first place. They've got income from the people setting up booths or renting tables; they're getting income from all the other ticket sales. Whether they have 50,000 people walk through the front door or 50,001 makes essentially no difference at all to them. Even if they have 50 or 100 volunteers, it doesn't change the costs in putting on the show in the first place and has very little impact on their bottom line.
Quick back-of-the-envelope math... 50,000 at $20 a head is $1,000,000. 100 additional people would be an extra $2,000. That's only an extra 0.2% -- and that's not money lost, mind you. That $2,000 was never guaranteed in the first place!
Now, there could be something said about experiencing a convention from behind-the-scenes and potentially have some additional face-time with favorite creators and/or celebrities, but unless the work a con has you doing is exceptionally minimal and/or you don't have a job where you can work a few more hours, I don't see that there's really an upside to volunteering at a convention from the standpoint of the volunteers. All of the "guaranteed" benefits are on the convention's side here, and those on the volunteer's side are ephemeral at best.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
