Partially due to one of these links basically becoming useless in a couple days, I'm going to start this week off with some links...

• First, and most egotistically, Matt Kuhns has provided the first actual review of my book Webcomics. Until now, I've only heard a handful of comments, but this is the first full-on review I've seen so far. The short version is that he liked, even though he doesn't really like webcomics. Thanks, Matt!
• Danica Davidson interviewed author Michael Howard about his book, The Salaryman. The original book is about his experiences as an American working in Japan, and a new manga edition with art by Rena Saiya was released last month.
  
• On Wednesday, August 5, The New York Adventure Club is presenting a webinar about comic legend Carmine Infantino. It will be presented by Arlen Schumer and tickets cost $10, with the ability to watch the presentation afterwards if you're not able to attend live. They also have similar webinars for Steve Ditko (on August 12) and Joe Kubert (on August 20), both also $10 and presented by Schumer.
• Uncivilized Books' Tom Kaczynski examines Omniverse: The Journal of Fictional Reality, a fanzine that Mark Gruenwald started in 1977. "The entire magazine is devoted to explicating, explaining, and justifying the connections between the various inconsistent realities of the Marvel & DC universes." Some of the ideas that originated here, Gruenwald would later bring into the Marvel Universe when he became a writer and editor for that publisher.
  
• Ben Towle pointed me to this documentary about another comics legend, Alex Toth, is available for free on YouTube.
  

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Death of the Funny Pages!

https://ift.tt/304Qfa5

Kleefeld on Comics: Death of the Funny Pages IRL

https://ift.tt/2DhYUNh

Patreon: Webcomics Book Wrap-Up

https://t.co/jsQLjvHLFF

Kleefeld on Comics: Jim Davis Circa 1979

https://ift.tt/311MNwl

Kleefeld on Comics: The Porch Redux

https://ift.tt/3hR8LsB

Kleefeld on Comics: People Misreading Six Chix?

https://ift.tt/2D43AGQ

I caught this Six Chix comic on Tuesday and thought, "I swear -- fuckin' Karens!"

And then I moved on. I kind of glossed over it because it's not really a joke. I mean, this actually happens. There are people out there who are just so dismissive of issues that Black people face -- that are so dismissive of the aims behind the Black Lives Matter movement -- that they feel free to make jokes at their expense. The "I can't breathe" message came from the last words of Eric Garner as he was being strangled to death by a New York City cop. It seemed like a perfect metaphor for people protesting the murder, as it was endemic of the systemic killings of Black people at the hands of police, as well as symbolizing how no one was listening to them. Garner repeated, "I can't breathe" over and over but Daniel Pantaleo ignored his words and continued to choke him to death. And do you know what the New York Police Department said in response to the protests? "We hear you." Literally, they said, "We hear you" in response to a case about cop who absolutely did not want to hear what Garner said with his dying breath.

So when I saw Bianca Xunise's comic, it didn't strike me as amazingly clever or witty or anything, as it's pretty damn close to what people say to Black people. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn if this literally happened to her exactly as she depicted it.

It turns out, though, that the comic caused a bit of a stir. Apparently, some significant number of readers felt it was trying to say that masks are stupid and useless, and people who do wear them should be mocked. This includes several newspaper editors who have since dropped Six Chix.

Look, the comic isn't that hard to figure out. You can debate about the quality of the illustration, or the originality of the joke, or the nature of the composition, or any of the other technical aspects of the comic. And you can find it funny or unfunny. But if you don't get it? If you misread it as being against mask-wearing during a pandemic? Odds are that you're deliberately not getting it. And you can fuck off because you're part of the problem!

I originally posted this back in 2011, but seeing as I've unintentionally stumbled onto a newspaper strip theme for the week, I thought this might be an interesting piece to revisit.

Several years ago, Derik Badman posted this comic he did as part of a "30 Days of Comics" project...

Now, Badman's comics don't always follow a linear narrative, so this might not be some people's cup of tea. But I want to focus a bit on the art. Specifically, panels 3 and 4. Is there anyone reading this that doesn't recognize that porch? Anyone who didn't immediately recognize that porch?

Think about that for a second. It's an excessively simple backdrop. Almost too simple to recognize for what it is, since it's always depicted with absolutely zero perspective. And it's still instantly recognizable, not only as a porch (or stoop or whatever you want to call it) but as a specific porch. It's the porch.

You know how Ernie Bushmiller used to always draw his three rocks? One was just a single rock. Two was a pair of rocks. But three was "some rocks." Any more than three was unnecessary because you'd already conveyed the idea of "some rocks." Well, this porch beats that hands-down! As Badman suggests, it's drawn a little differently each time, but the design elements are so simple and elegant that you almost can't NOT make it look like the same every-porch, without making drastic changes to it. But you don't need to draw any of the characters in, or match the specific line variations, or provide any additional context. That porch comes from exactly one place and successfully represents every porch in America.

Charles Schulz was a genius.

Yesterday was Jim Davis's 75th birthday and Tom Heintjes shared this photo of him...

What I find interesting is how much we can glean from him by other elements in the shot.

First, in the upper right, you can see the bottom of the famous Farrah Fawcett poster, allegedly the single best-selling poster in history. The poster was actually the idea of Pro Arts Inc. who hired Bruce McBroom to shoot Fawcett, who did her own hair and makeup for the shoot as she was still mostly known for small, bit-parts on television at the time. The poster came out in early 1976 and was so popular that it led to her getting a starring role in Charlie's Angels later that year. The poster sold even better after the show's popularity took off. I mention the history a bit here because there's an implication that he kept that poster up for several years, as we'll see in a minute.

The next item of interest is the calendar. Although the date is a little fuzzy, the image helps to confirm it's March 1979. The image is a relatively identifiable Kliban cat cartoon. Bernard Kliban's cat comics first became quite popular in 1975 with his first book, and the first Kliban cat calendar came out in 1977. The first calendar was the best-selling calendar of that year, and Kliban calendars continued to be the best-seller every year through 1981. Although not visible in the black and white photo above, that cat above the March 5-6 boxes is colored orange like Garfield.

Next, there's a comic section from the newspaper visible on Davis's desk. I'm guessing it's The Chronicle-Tribune based out of Marion, IN. Davis, I believe, was actually living in nearby Muncie at the time but the Muncie newspaper is The Star Press, and there seem to be too many letters in the masthead for that. Regardless, plainly visible before the fold are the top two panels of a Peanuts Sunday strip. I believe that's the March 4, 1979 strip; there are only two Sunday strips between 1976 and 1980 that feature Charlie Brown by himself in the first panel, and him with Lucy in the second. (It's possible that it's an even longer timeframe there; that's just as far as I went in either direction.)

So the photo is at the earliest from March 4, 1979, although possibly a little later. Davis would have been a little shy of 34th birthday and likely had that Fawcett poster hanging up for at least a few years by that point.

The Garfield strip Davis seems to be work on, though? We can actually see the whole thing pretty clearly. It actually ran in newspapers on October 29, 1978, about four months prior to the earliest date this could've been photographed.

My guess is that he wanted to use a Sunday strip since those are just bigger and would take up more of his art board, and four months seems that it would be about the right amount of time for a syndicate to get his original art back to him after he sent it in for production. (Recall this is 1979 and you couldn't send files electronically yet.) So I can see it being possible that this was actually the latest Sunday strip he had original art for, but had already been published. I can also see him not wanting to use an as-yet-unpublished strip as that might give away the joke before readers saw the actual strip itself in their newspaper. But I could be over-thinking it, and he just simply liked that strip for whatever reason.

What I find interesting is the three non-Garfield elements we can use to date this photo are three of the most popular pop culture items of their respective genres. The most popular comic, the most popular calendar, the most popular poster. You could say they were the most broadly appealing items of their day. I find it interesting that Davis gravitates towards that so strongly, even in his personal life. Davis was always clear that he tried to write Garfield to be as broadly appealing as possible. In a 1982 interview, he stated, "It's a conscious effort to include everyone as readers. If you were to mention the football strike, you're going to be excluding everyone else in the world that doesn't watch pro football... I don't use rhyming gags, plays on words, colloquialisms, in an effort to make Garfield apply to virtually any society where he may appear. In an effort to keep the gags broad, the humor general and applicable to everyone, I deal mainly with eating and sleeping. That applies to everyone, anywhere."

So that he himself is so strongly influenced by and seeks out the most popular is interesting. What I don't know is that because he just liked stuff that everybody else seemed to like, or was he actually studying those items to determine what made them popular? In that same interview, he also said, "I'd like to say it was some sort of a divine inspiration that created the strip. In fact, it wasn't so much that as a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character. I've been trying to get syndicated for eight years. That's a lot of time to try to figure out what makes some strips go and others fail... It's essentially a formula. I notice dog strips are doing well, and I knew an animal strip would be strong. People aren't threatened by an animal. They have a lot of latitude. Do a lot of things that humans can't. By virtue of being a cat, Garfield's not black, white, male or female, young, or old or a particular nationality. He's not going to step on anyone's feet if these thoughts are coming from an animal."

So did he get that Kliban calendar because he actually likes Kliban cats (I've never heard him mention Kliban as an influence) or was he just doing research for how to make Garfield more marketable? The cynic in me says the latter, particularly in light of multiple times Davis has claimed that he chose to make Garfield a cat because he "noticed that nobody had yet created a popular comic about a cat." It seems hard to claim that when he had a Kliban cat calendar on his wall only a few months after he created the character. I can't find Davis mentioning Kliban at all until 2015, although he clearly had at least an awareness of him early on.

I've kind of felt this way for a while, but I feel it kind of makes Davis seem more and more like Bob Kane, and I'm left thinking he's better at crafting a story about himself than he is about crafting one for the comics pages.

I apparently missed the initial announcement last month, but Stone Soup cartoonist Jan Eliot is officially retired as of this past Sunday when the last strip ran.

By my count, that makes five nationally syndicated comic strips that have been ended by their creators in 2020. I noted Terri Libenson's The Pajama Diaries and Peter Guren's Ask Shagg ended back in January, and Norm Feuti's Retail ended in February. And I missed previously that Bob Weber, Sr. retired Moose and Molly back in April. Stone Soup has been Sundays-only since 2015, when Eliot opted to cut back in order to travel more, and she mentioned travelling again (once the pandemic allows for it) in her retirement announcement. She's 70 years old now -- she was 45 when she first got syndicated -- and that seems like a good way to spend your time!

Five strips in half a year, though -- that seems like it's pretty significant. What's interesting, too, is that you can't really asterisk this away like so many other things in 2020. You can't just add a footnote like you have to with the Olympics to say, "The 2020 Olympics were moved to 2021 due to a COVID-19 pandemic." You can't even just broadly blame 2020 as a shit year. Two of the strips ended within the first week of the year, and Feuti announced his departure only a couple weeks after that; clearly all the decision making happened much earlier. Feuti and Libenson both quit to work on children's books -- presumably because it pays better; they both had multiple such books under their belts before they left their respective strips. Eliot is definitely viewing this as retirement and, while Guren and Weber haven't made any formal statements that I'm aware of, I believe they both left in order to retire as well. (Weber is 86 and I think Guren is in his mid-60s.)

I'm fairly confident this stems from a combination of newspapers doing worse, and syndicates not adapting to changes in the landscape. More than a few cartoonists have noted declining incomes in recent years because of a combination of those two issues. I suspect we'll continue to see this trend of strips just ending increase, and I wouldn't be surprised to see at least another two or three strips finish up by year's end. Mike Peters (Mother Goose & Grimm) is 77; Greg Evans (Luann) is 73, as is Tom Batiuk (Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft); Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) is 72; Brooke McEldowney (9 Chickweed Lane) is 68; Jerry Scott (Zits and Baby Blues) is 65; Kevin Fagan (Drabble) and Patrick McDonnell (Mutts) are both 64... I'm not saying any of these folks should retire, but I suspect many of them are starting to make calculations about how much money they're making doing comics relative to how much effort they're putting into them. And that's not even considering the younger folks who might also be looking at children's or YA books like Liebenson and Feuti.

I expect syndicates are looking at this and blaming newspapers. Newspapers don't care to respond because they've got bigger problems and besides, most readers seem fine with reruns of Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes anyway. But while newspapers are indeed part of the problem, how the syndicates have responded, I think, is a bigger cause. Or, rather, how the syndicates haven't responded. They seem to be largely relying on the same business model they've used for a hundred years. That's been a problem for at least two decades now, and I expect it -- like many other things -- has been exasperated by the economic depression we're in. I don't see syndicates going away -- they're still syndicating those re-run strips after all -- until the newspaper business dries up entirely. But I can't imagine being either a newspaper cartoonist or someone working at one of the syndicates and not being in a near-blind panic about your job right now.

Way back in John Byrne's run on the Fantastic Four, he had Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman adopt secret identities to try to raise their child Franklin in a "normal" household. The bought a place in Belle Porte, Connecticut and created the identities of Reed and Sue Benjamin, and eventually had a house warming to invite all their new neighbors over. And, if you weren't aware, their neighbors are largely residents of the newspaper funny pages...

That's Hi and Lois at the door (as you can see, they're specifically identified by name). Going clockwise from there, we have Joe and Ann Palooka (from Joe Palooka), Dick Tracy (from Dick Tracy), Henry Mitchell (from Dennis the Menace), Herb Woodley and Dagwood & Blondie Bumsted (from Blondie), and Loretta & Leroy Lockhorn (from The Lockhorns). In the center are Skeezix (from Gasoline Alley) and Jiggs (from Bringing Up Father). Although Skeezix does look a bit more like Uncle Walt to me, Byrne himself has identified the character as Skeezix.

OK, in any event, the party goes off without a hitch and as Reed and Sue are cleaning up, they're attacked by Elspeth Cromwell, a witch-hunter who mistakenly believes them to be witches. Things go south from there and, by the end of the issue, the neighborhood is being overrun the Knights of Hades, multiple houses are shown on fire, and finally Mephisto himself pops up!

Then Dr. Strange shows up, Franklin uses some mysterious powers to banish Mephisto again, and the good guys win the day. However...

When Dr. Strange first arrives, Reed, Sue, Franklin, and Elspeth appear dead. Their bodies have been recovered by the police, who are apparently still waiting for an ambulance. The officer also notes the neighbors mentioned the house warming party. Most of the rest of the story is then in Mephisto's realm and when the villain is vanquished, Reed, Sue and Franklin wake up while Elspeth remains motionless. Dr. Strange confirms that she is not only dead but that her soul has been claimed by whichever demon she had actually bargained with.

The initial implication is that Elspeth is the only one who perished. But when local busybody Alma Chalmers begs Dr. Strange to recover her, he says he can't and adds, "Remember the terrible price these people paid for your acts!"

THESE PEOPLE. Plural. Not one person. Not just Elspeth. THESE PEOPLE. Multiple people died during this event and we've already identified all the main characters and their respective statuses, so who snuffed it?

There was only one person shown dead, but we had clearly seen multiple houses on fire and destroyed. So the further implication is that SOME OF THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP CHARACTERS DIED!

We can pretty safely say Jiggs wasn't killed -- he (and his wife Maggie) show up in Power Pack #47 a few years later. Hi and Lois probably survived, too; they're identified as living in "the second house on the next block" and while there was a lot of damage in the area immediately surrounding Reed and Sue's house, it doesn't seem to have spread too far. But what about everybody else? You might think, "Well, I can read all these characters in the newspaper every day! Just because they don't appear in Marvel comics any more doesn't mean they died! Byrne was just having a little fun!"

Here's the thing, though: you CAN'T read these characters in the newspaper every day! Not all of them! Blondie? Sure. The Lockhorns? Yes. Dick Tracy? Yup. Somehow, even Gasoline Alley is still going strong! But you know what comic isn't still around? Joe Palooka. It ended in November 1984, just a few months before FF #276! In the final Joe Palooka strips, Joe announces he's retiring from boxing, going to spend a little time with Ann and his parents, and "then... who knows?" He's last seen in the strip driving off into the sunset waving goodbye. The newspaper funnies have never seen Joe Palooka since.

So I maintain that when Dr. Strange said "the terrible price these people paid" he was talking about Elspeth Cromwell and Joe & Ann Palooka (possibly their kids as well). Obviously the situation was still in flux when the police officer first pointed Dr. Strange to the four apparently dead bodies; Joe and Ann must have been found after that during the extended sequence in Mephisto's realm. Were they actually slain by the Knights of Hades, or were they simply caught in a house that had caught fire and/or collapsed? That we don't know. But we do know that they are not seen again, in either a Marvel comic, or in the newspapers where they originated!

There you have it! Joe Palooka, the famous comic strip character dating back to 1930, actually died in the pages of a Marvel comic!