As a comic-reading, video-game-playing kid in the early 1980s, the prospect of a Spider-Man game that I could play in my very own living room was beyond exciting. Even though I wasn't a huge Spider-Man fan, he was a superhero and he had his own cartoon show that I watched every Saturday morning. So when the ads about this new game started appearing, I was eager (to put it mildly) to get a copy.

Here's what a 10-year-old Sean responded to back then... And this sequence... And then there was this TV spot...The game ultimately turned out to be one of the dullest, most repetitive video games ever. Seriously, the only appreciable difference between levels was that they changed the color of the building! Given how bland the actual game was, the ad agencies who worked on these must have REALLY had their work cut out for them!

When I was a kid, we had these four children's books by playwright Eugene Ionesco. They're basically all about this young girl, Josette, who tries to make sense of these surreal tales the adults around tell her. In Story Number 4, it's her father who's distracting her while he's trying to get ready for work. As Josette goes running through the house, a couple of her dolls subtlely came to life and helped by pointing her in the direction her father was heading. The Mickey Mouse doll was immediately recognizable to me, but there was another figure that appeared repeatedly in the book I didn't recognize. It kind of looked a little like Olive Oyl, but not nearly so scrawny and she had what looked like some kind of European milkmaid outfit on. I assumed it was just some character the artist came up with.

Years later, I stumbled across the same character in a poster for 2012's Les Aventures de la Ligne Claire festival. There she was, hanging out with the more familiar Tintin and Jiggs and a dozen other example of characters drawn in a ligne claire style. I figured she must be some European comic character that I'd never heard of.

A few years ago, I came across her again. This time, in a poster promoting The Cartoon Museum's Der Fall Hergé & Co exhibit. Tintin and Jiggs were present again, as was a literal parade of other ligne claire characters. However, now this milkmaid was leading the parade with Jiggs! Clearly, she's a much more significant character than I suspected!

It turns out her name is Bécassine. She debuted in La Semaine de Suzette in 1905, making her the first female protagonist in the history of comics by some accounts! She was created by Jacqueline Rivière and Joseph Pinchon originally as filler material for the magazine. But the character proved successful and Maurice Languereau, under the pseudonym Caumery, began to write deliberate and dedicated stories, which continued to be drawn by Pinchon. By 1950, Bécassine had appeared in 27 volumes, all but two of which were drawn by Pinchon. They are all credited as being written by Caumery, but Languereau had died in 1941 and multiple other authors continued to use the name.

She also appeared three years prior to Les Pieds Nickelés, making her the original character of what is considered modern bande dessinée. It were these comics that stylistically helped to inspire Hergé years later when he would invent Tintin.

The character's popularity waned, possibly due to the difficulties in keeping the character in the public eye throughout World War II. (The 26th volume of the original series wasn't actually published until 1992 because of the war.) Pinchon's death in 1953 didn't seem to help matters and, while the series was given an attempted reboot in 1959, it only lasted three volumes.

Her outfit isn't that of a milkmaid, as I originally believed. It was actually based on a stereotypical peasant outfit of Breton, though it included some non-Breton elements as well. Though she was originally cast in a negative light -- La Semaine de Suzette was aimed at wealthier young girls from Paris who looked down on peasant classes -- her popularity coerced the publishers to depict her more favorably over time.

The name Bécassine, though, remains. It's actually a nickname, ostensibly based on the character's home village, Clocher-les-Bécasses. However, it's also derived from the French word for the number of birds in a family of snipe, and is used as something of derogatory slang for "fool." (In America, "snipe hunting" comes from the same usage.) The character's real name was eventually given as Annaïck Labornez, but she remained more commonly known as Bécassine.

As far as I've been able to determine, Bécassine's adventures have never been printed in the United States, nor can I find any instances of her stories even being translated into English. (Though I suspect she must have been at some point!) But that would go a long ways into explaining why I remained ignorant of her for so long. Nonetheless, she is most decidedly an important figure in comics. Her adventures were adapted into movies in 1939 and 2001, and she was honored on a French postage stamp in 2005. At least the French recognize her importance even if she's largely ignored here in the States.

I was recently reminded of this interview with Frank Zappa from the 1980s.
Now, rewatch it again but replace any references to music executives with comic executives.

Although it was specifically how Marvel handled many of its primary characters that initially got me off "mainstream" comics (which, by the way, is a term I really hate since it's horribly inaccurate on several levels, but I don't have anything comparable to replace it with) there was already a lot of stuff I avoided because it wasn't very interesting. Re-hashes of other stories I'd already read.

What's more interesting, to me, is to see these small, independent creators using their own voices to craft their own stories, not because they think they'll get rich off them, but because they have a burning passion to tell them. The business model is riskier for them; their works are far from the sure bet that Batman or the X-Men are. They're also riskier for the audience; I have a pretty good idea what I'm getting when I pick up a Spider-Man comic -- not so much when I get one by an unknown creator about an unknown property.

People have been making analogies between the comics and music industries for years now and, while they're not exact parallels, there's often something we can learn from looking at one and applying the thinking to the other. Zappa wasn't talking about comics at all, but he may as well have been.

One of the first books I had that discussed comics in anything resembling a historical context was The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, Children's Books to Comics. It was part of a Time-Life series from the late 1970s; I've seen a couple other volumes but this was the only one that held any interest for me. It only had 13 pages devoted to comics, and most of those were filled with imagery, but it was still the only thing I had back in the day that looked at comics comprehensively, talking about them as a medium specifically and noting both comic strips and comic books in equal measure.

It was, for a long time, the most significant source I had about comic strips. I came to learn of other, more detailed books' existences, but my interest back then was in comic books, particularly superheroes, particularly Marvel, particularly the Fantastic Four. I put my resources towards learning about those in order of narrowest interest to widest, so I didn't really start looking at comic strips with a serious eye until I was well into my 20s, if not early 30s.

But one piece from The Encyclopedia that stood out for me was a photo of "Al Capp's Dogpatch Band" in the sidebar on toys based on comic properties. The gadget was a wind-up toy from the mid-1940s featuring characters from Capp's strip, Li'l Abner. The image struck me for two reasons. First, I had never actually seen Li'l Abner anywhere before. It wasn't carried in our local newspapers at the time, and the book didn't show any instances of the strip itself anywhere. I was largely at a loss for what the strip was about. While I was familiar with the Shmoo via some Saturday morning cartoons, that had almost no relation to the strip where the character originated.

The second thing that stood out for me was the complexity of the mechanics. Even though I only had a still picture to look at, it wasn't hard to figure out what the basic movements of the figures were. I realized, even as a kid, that the engineering to tie all of that movement to a single gear was an impressive feat. It was only recently that it occurred to me that someone might have posted a video of the toy in action, and I could finally see how it operated. It turned out to be even more impressive than I imagined, with some clever use of deliberately loose joints to facilitate even more movement. And seeing (in the above photo) that it came partially disassembled makes it even more impressive still! I can't find out who designed this, but it's a brilliant piece of mechanical engineering and I can't imagine Capp not being absolutely delighted with it!

The last time I think I read newspaper strips in newspapers on a regular basis would've probably been in the late 1980s. I was still in high school and living with my parents, who received the two(!) local papers. I don't recall religiously reading the comics at the same time every day or with any sort of ritualistic patterns, but I'd generally wait until after my folks had gone through the entire paper (thereby foregoing the need for me to keep it tidy and/or in order) before swiping the funny pages.

When I got to college, I stopped reading them largely because... well, I was going to say that I didn't have access to a local paper any longer, but I probably could've walked over to the school library to read them. I suppose the incentive to regularly hike to the far side of campus for a page of mostly just mildly amusing comics wasn't compelling enough. I would still read the comics when I went home periodically, but that would only give me a few weeks of strips at the most per year.

By the time I graduated college, the internet was becoming a known thing, although I don't believe most strips had migrated online in any capacity yet. I recall that even as late as 1997 that wasn't a thing yet because Universal's posting of their strips for the Great Comic Strip Switcheroo was a necessary exception for an associated contest they ran along with it, and seeing all those strips online the day they were published was unusual.

It was around that time that my primary means of reading comic strips was buying the book collections. Mostly, I just bought Foxtrot but I did look at a couple Dilbert books as well. I'd had collections before, so the idea wasn't new to me by any means, but they had not been my primary interaction with those strips.

Eventually, the syndicates came around and I read many of the newspaper strips online. Mostly via RSS feeds alongside the feeds of the variety of webcomics I read. I've noticed a difference, though, in how I approach newspaper strips versus most webcomics.

Most newspaper strips size fairly well to my phone when turned sideways. Compared to many of the webcomics I read, which fit much better on a larger montior. Furthermore, the lack of continuity in most newspaper strips means I don't have to read them in any sort of order. Whenever/wherever they show up in my news feed is irrelevant. So what I wind up doing most of the time is saving their reading for whenever I'm sitting around somewhere waiting by myself for a few minutes. Waiting for the train to show up. Waiting in a particularly long line at Starbucks. Waiting at the airport to board my flight. They're easy to fire up quickly, read through quickly, and put aside quickly. There's no trying to remember where you left off, or what happened before today's installment, or sorting through to make sure you read them in order, or notating the last strip you read as you close out. Fire up my app, read through Andy Capp, Herb & Jamal, Pardon My Planet, whoops-there's-the-train-throw-the-phone-in-my-pocket-and-go.

What's interesting, as I think about it, is that I've changed the context of how I read newspaper strips multiple times throughout my life, but it's only this last change that changes my relationship with them. In the earlier instances, I was making a dedicated and concerted effort to read those comics. I would sit down with the newspaper and read an entire page or two of them, or I would sit down with the collection and read a substantial chunk of (if not the entire) book. There was a necessary focus and dedication of some sort with each of those. Even if I didn't care much for The Born Loser, I would still read it because I had already set aside a block of time/energy to read the funnies and that happened to be on the same page as Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side.

But my current approach is decidedly more casual. I'm not setting aside time to read them, I'm using them as filler in a few spare moments I have here and there. They're no longer important or significant enough to devote "real" time to; I can better spend that time reading webcomics I'm actively interested in. No, the newspaper strips are there so I'm not sitting idle. If I don't get to them... eh?

Of course, a lot of that has to do with personal taste, right? I tend to connect more with webcomics because of the nature of their content. But think on this... newspaper comics, by their nature, appeal to a much broader audience. But because they're appealing to that wider audience, their readership tends to not be as devoted. They make money because they're able to reach such a wide number of people. Webcomics, by contrast, tend to make money more off "true fans." Rather than every newspaper strip reader who contributes a half-cent or less, a compartively small handful of webcomics readers contributes twenty bucks. The higher rate of return means you don't have to have as many readers to earn the same amount.

So if newspaper comics have relied on a large number of casual fans in the first place, how does their revenue model work when the online readership is even more casual? Honestly, I don't know, but I hope it's something that both the syndicate folks as well as the creators themselves are thinking about.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Frank Pé's Little Nemo Review
https://ift.tt/3zOU9m2

Kleefeld on Comics: Steve Englehart on the FF
https://ift.tt/3kLnyJt

Kleefeld on Comics: Hocus and Pocus
https://ift.tt/3ojpxqQ

Kleefeld on Comics: Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers
https://ift.tt/2ZKu9Mp

Kleefeld on Comics: Alley Awards
https://ift.tt/3uCeb2b

The original idea for a comic award came from writer/editor/historian Roy Thomas. (Although he had held none of those titles before that point.) Thomas has suggested the idea in a 1961 letter to Jerry Bails as a kind of feature for their then-only-months-old fanzine Alter-Ego. They were originally going to be called the "Alter-Ego Award" but, realizing that no comics award had ever been done before, they decided on the "Alley Award" after the character Alley Oop. Thomas' rationale was that "surely a caveman had to be the earliest superhero chronologically."

Voting was solicited through Alter-Ego and sent directly to Bails who counted the ballots himself initially. By the third year, however, he was receiving so many ballots that he invited several other fans to his house to help. The so-called "Alley Tally" wound up being the first recorded gathering of fans (including Ronn Foss, Don Glut, Don and Maggie Thompson, Mike Vosburg, and Grass Green) and is generally considered a precursor to the first comic book convention.

The first Alley Awards were announced in Alter-Ego #4 and the cover featured a drawing by Foss of the statuette he created. He'd originally carved the sculpture out of wood, made a cast of that, and then produced a series of the finals out of plaster, which he then painted gold or silver.

Beginning in 1965, an actual awards ceremony was held at Academy Con, switching to Phil Seuling's Comic Art Convention when that began in 1968. As both shows were based out of New York City, a number of comic book professionals were able to attend over the years, including Stan Lee, Burne Hogarth, Otto Binder, Hal Foster, Bill Finger, Gardner Fox, Mort Weisinger, James Warren, Roy Thomas (by then having moved to New York and becoming a professional), Gil Kane, Bill Everett, Carmine Infantino, and Julius Schwartz.

By this point, an interconnected comics fandom had become relatively well-established, and Bails' original intentions of getting everything rolling had been very successful. There were several venues open to comic fans, and interest in Alter-Ego and the Alleys dwindled as fans sought other, more narrowly focused options. Both the magazine and awards ended in 1969, with a final awards ceremony for the '69 Alleys conducted the following year.