What the Harvard Independent says about comics history

A writer at the Harvard Independent tells some history of how comics began as far back as a few centuries ago, and cites one of the most questionable European comics as something her parents got her into reading:

They also gave me a love for comics. Alongside traditional novels, I read the pre-teen series “Percy Jackson,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” and Japanese manga. I remember my dad buying “The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons,” two heavy tomes I spent hours paging through, wondering when I would finally understand the jokes I didn’t get yet.

My enthusiasm for comics is far from unique; many aficionados are far more dedicated to collecting and discussing comic books. “Tintin” has had relatively low popularity in the United States, so I never had much reason—or company—to expand beyond rereading my favorite issues.

That's interesting if Tintin wasn't big in the USA in her time, and considering how severely questionable its ideological viewpoints were, that's why it didn't really matter. It just wasn't all it could've been is probably one way of putting it. Another subject brought up is pretty surprising, however:

The first large-scale combination of pictures and words was—unsurprisingly for the Western world—the Bible. In the 1830s, London mass-printed “The Pictorial Bible.” Though illustrated Bibles had existed since the 15th century, none were as thorough as this version, which featured a picture accompanying almost every major scene; the number of illustrations leaped from around 30 to hundreds. Woodblock carvings, which required a huge initial investment in artists, accompanied biblical verses, but advances in printing technology let printers reproduce them quickly.

The goal of such a labor-intensive yet inexpensive Bible was to reach the largely illiterate masses of the time. Though literacy increased significantly in the next hundred years, only about half of England could read at the end of the 19th century. Even for literate Christians, a widely distributed pictorial Bible would have solidified iconography, characters, and settings in the common imagination.

Though the concept of a “comic” had not been invented yet, this biblical form foreshadows the reasons comics and graphic novels became so popular and pervasive as storytelling methods. They not only help readers understand a work’s core scenes and themes but also create cohesive interpretations. In turn, this makes discussion smoother (though not necessarily broader), allowing tight-knit communities to form around the same story.

I'm surprised a university paper that's bound to be as left-wing as you could expect would be willing to bring up religious themes in the topic, considering how badly minimized the Bible's been for surely even long before the turn of the century. That's certainly one credible achievement this article's making.

It would be a disservice to the genre to fail to discuss comics in the Eastern Hemisphere. Manga, a Japanese form of comics, has gained widespread popularity worldwide in recent years. The history of illustrative mediums in Japan is also tied to religion, as the first widespread pictures were created by a Buddhist monk in the 12th and 13th centuries. As Europeans came into contact with Japan, so did their artistic techniques, including the political cartoon. From then on until World War II, Japanese manga heavily featured political themes, especially nationalist ones, as well as inspirations from traditional folklore.

Japan’s defeat in the war led to a decrease in militaristic imagery, especially with the influence of manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who was inspired by American Disney movies and superhero comics. This movement helped the genre become the world’s best-selling comic format in the 21st century, surpassing the American-born Marvel Comics.

Interesting she puts it that way, because in a way, yes, manga's long surpassed even DC in sales, due to how both company managements destroyed the coherency and impact of their products, with distortions of continuity just the beginning of their downfall. So is it any wonder manga became more popular? Of course, even that may not last, and depending on the subject matter, certainly not if they start taking up the kind of Orwellian tactics that brought down much of USA comicdom.

Though many still dismiss comics as a juvenile genre, the combination of text and visual art can often tell a story more powerfully than either medium alone. “Maus” by Art Spiegelman is an autobiographical graphic novel about his experiences as the son of a Holocaust survivor. The medium allowed him to use animal heads as a visual allegory for different groups of people without ascribing human facial features. “Maus” was introduced as a comic in 1972 and published in book format in 1986, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The recognition “Maus” received helped legitimize the graphic novel in the eyes of the public and academics, allowing future comic artists to tell their stories using this hybrid medium.

I think it was in 1980 when the beginnings of Maus first saw print, but what's regrettable here is Spiegelman's far-left politics, which dampen the impact it could've had, and it's disturbing how Spiegelman minimized 9-11 more recently. If he doesn't consider what occurred a quarter century ago a serious concern, it's hard to believe he's really serious about his concerns over what happened during WW2, or even WW1. Also, why does she say Maus validated the GN, but not the late Will Eisner's A Contract With God, which came much earlier? Seriously, it sounds too much like she doesn't have what it takes to research what could be a more challenging example. Spiegelman's an easy choice.

Anyway, the citation of the Bible is certainly interesting, and quite surprising for what again is surely a left-wing college paper, but apart from that, this is an article that's decidedly too reliant on easy examples, and not enough on harder, more challenging ones, and ultimately doesn't explore how artistic quality was brought down in the mainstream for starters. As a result, it's hard to believe people like these are really fans of the medium if they won't voice concerns about what went wrong over past years.

Jewish entrepreneurs of the past helped build up toy merchandise as much as comics

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote about how Jewish industrialists played as much a part in building up the toy industry as the comics industry:

But even if my family didn’t spend Saturdays in shul, kids’ television immersed me in an unspoken Jewish culture, as Michael Kimmel explains in his new book “Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America.”

It’s a study of the mostly first-generation American Jews who led the toy industry in the 20th century, as well as the Jewish child psychologists, children’s book authors and comic book creators who, he asserts convincingly, invented the American idea of childhood.

“They created the childhood that they themselves never had,” Kimmel told me in a recent public conversation, part of “250 Years of American Jewish Life in America,” an online project of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.

The founders of iconic brands such as Ideal, Mattel, Marx, Hasbro, Kenner, Wham-O and Madame Alexander dolls shared roots in Yiddish-speaking Europe, and childhoods as the sons and daughters of immigrants.

“They were born in poverty on the Lower East Side, and you have all these stories of the scraps that they picked up off the street that they made into things,” said Kimmel. “They had these ideas that children were basically curious and creative, and that they should be nurtured.”

And commodified. Shut out of establishment industries and professions, Jewish entrepreneurs thrived in niches of their own making, capitalizing on and helping propel the consumer culture that exploded after World War I. German Jews ran some of the largest department stores, including Macy’s, Abraham & Straus and Gimbels, and Eastern European newcomers became the manufacturers, distributors and sales force that stocked their shelves with dolls, games, and gadgets.

The list of classic toys and Jews who developed them is almost comically long: Barbie (Ruth Handler), Lionel trains (Lionel Cowan), Mr. Potato Head (George Lerner), Yakity-Yak chattering teeth (Eddy Goldfarb), the pogo stick (George Hansburg), the Hula Hoop (Arthur Melin and Richard Knerr), G.I. Joe (Larry Reiner) and Play-Doh and the Easy-Bake Oven (the Steiner brothers: Albert, Philip and Joseph).

Since they cite Barbie toys, it's a shame a certain filmmaker named Greta Gerwig chose to humiliate them for the sake of a woke agenda attacking the "patriarchy". And it's also a shame the GI Joe toys have similarly suffered in live action filmmaking. I sadly suspect the history book in focus doesn't dwell on any of that, even though that could also provide something to learn from. The comics industry's also cited here, along with children's books, but there's one name in the latter part that's decidedly an embarrassment to include:

The Jewish entrepreneurs not only benefited from such views of childhood, but understood how to turn them into a business model. They were also pushed toward these new industries by a less uplifting force: antisemitism.

Kimmel said that many comic-book artists originally wanted to work in advertising, but advertising agencies in the 1930s and ’40s were notoriously hostile to Jews. Like toymaking, comic books became a Jewish industry. Underpaid Jewish artists and writers — including Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Stan Lee and Lily Renée — dreamed up Superman, Betty Boop, the Spirit, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Spider-Man and The Thing, among dozens of others, often giving these superheroes and comic characters coded or actual Jewish backstories.

The same pattern appears in children’s literature. Kimmel counts 42 titles on the New York Public Library’s list of the 100 most important children’s books of the 20th century that were written by first-generation Jews, including Sydney Taylor, Maurice Sendak, Jack Ezra Keats, Jules Feiffer, Esphyr Slobodkina and Norman Juster.

While it's great the writer reminds us about the comics side of the Jewish industrialists, it's a shame he had to bring up a figure like Sendak, whose children's books, IMO, were tasteless, and worse was his politics. The article even cites the Fat Albert cartoon based on the disgraced Bill Cosby's comedy sketches, and even Lil' Abner cartoonist Al Capp, who regrettably turned out to be a pervert, and I honestly don't think it's such a good idea to provide such figures with citation, even if it doesn't make sense to erase them from history altogether. It only undermines the impact of the article, and if the book by Kimmel brings them up, that can be problematic. At least Capp is long gone, which makes it easier to read his work for anybody who cares.

Kimmel's book also makes space for a certain children's TV program on PBS:

Kimmel ends his book with “Sesame Street,” which he sees as a kind of culmination. The groundbreaking children’s show was developed by Joan Ganz Cooney, whose father was Jewish, with the assistance of Gerald Lesser, a developmental psychologist born to Jewish immigrant parents. The show was in some ways an antidote to the world of Saturday morning cartoons. It prepared pre-schoolers for success in kindergarten with the addictive, engaging style of commercial television. And instead of advertisements for toys, its “commercials” offered lessons in letters, shapes, counting, social skills and concepts such as “near” and “far.”

There was a time when Sesame Street, famous as it is for its use of the Muppets, was a great item for children to view and learn from. But that too has been largely ruined in the past decade by wokeness, which would make it another Jewish creation along with mainstream comics that's been destroyed for the sake of leftist agendas. And nobody in the modern Jewish-American community seems to have any issue with the creations of their past brethren being appropriated for the sake of repugnant political agendas and other ideologies.

Kimmel's book may be quite interesting from a historical perspective, but I have a sad feeling it may not build on objectivity from a modern one. And that's decidedly a problem. How are we to fix modern errors if nobody's willing to acknowledge what went wrong since the turn of the century, and nobody in the Jewish community cares what happened?

Frank Miller tells more to the Wash. Post

One of Miller's interviewers said in one of the recent articles about him that he's got no intention of slowing down with his career, even as he's reaching 70, and as the following interview from the Washington Post makes clear, he's not done with his current promotional tour yet:

The pages of a Frank Miller work are filled with crooked cops, murderers, desperate men and unhinged dark knights. You might expect the creator behind all that darkness to be a bit gloomy himself. Maybe he would be a recluse, like his hero, “Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson.

As it turns out, Miller seems to like people. I watched him sign hundreds of autographs at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in D.C. on Saturday. He was gentle, chatty and generous with his time despite the crowd overflowing past its designated space inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Unfortunately, Miller doesn't seem to like conservatives, and one in particular by the name of Donald Trump. You could reasonably wonder if any attendants are right-wing themselves, and if they let know this, what does Miller think of them?

Miller helped redefine the modern superhero with Daredevil and Batman before creating celebrated original works such as “Sin City” and “300.” Pop milestones like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies may not exist without Frank Miller.

His book isn’t a conventional autobiography but a collection of 16 lessons Miller learned while becoming one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Those lessons include knowing your ending, getting your hero into trouble fast and pushing against whatever it is that’s keeping you from what you want to make.

The lessons also include making mistakes: Miller would sketch out many drawings for months before he finally made something that pleased the old master.

But those mistakes don't include apologizing for writing Holy Terror 7 years after its publishing, or blatant attacks on right-wingers, do they? If not, what's his point about trying to stand your ground on the subject of those who'd try to prevent you from developing what you want to make?

“It’s created new opportunities for me to speak more freely to new people who are coming up,” Miller said. “One of the real joys is for me to be looking at drawings and hearing story ideas that people are working on themselves, and to give them some advice on where to go with it.”

I wonder what he'd say to known conservatives? Or anybody who wants to tackle challenging issues? Again, that's not something dwelled upon here.

Miller writes about how his own lessons come from everywhere. He writes lovingly about Adams and his other mentor, Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit,” but he reaches just as readily toward painters such as Francisco de Goya, Japanese manga writers like Kazuo Koike and music.

If memory serves, he wasn't so loving in his take on Eisner when he produced the American Genius documentary. After "cementing" a putdown in a recording, why now is he suddenly and seemingly talking positively about Eisner again? There was even another certain leftist who came from Israel working in video games at the convention Miller attended:

Onstage, I relayed a question to Miller from Neil Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us” game series and HBO adaptation, who said his story wouldn’t exist without “Sin City.” He wanted to know how Miller selects collaborators, particularly when someone is adapting his work. How does he make sure they won’t abandon the spirit of his stories?

“Friendships,” Miller said. “Most of them come from getting to know somebody … and getting a kernel of an idea that I know would be something both of us could feed each other on.”

Wonder what that left-wing Israeli expatriate was doing there, recalling Druckmann exploited the Last of Us sequel for political propaganda? And to think, that he drew "inspiration" from a series of GNs like Miller's. It makes me think of how, not only does nobody like them seem to consider Superman inspirational material, they don't consider the Fantastic Four inspiration either. Miller may have done some illustrations for at least one story in both of the above, but as the bulk of his work since makes clear, he has a darkness problem, and so do some of the folks who say they're inspired by his work from the 1990s.

In the memoir, he describes learning to respect film and its differences from comics. His early comics success led to work as a Hollywood screenwriter. While he appreciated the medium, he would later write his biggest original book, “Sin City,” as a black-and-white novel, in the hope that it was unadaptable to film. He didn’t want it better known as a movie.

And yet, it was adapted in the mid-2000s, though the sequel was a failure, and it doesn't seem to have been revisited on celluloid since. I do think there's only so much from even standard literature that shouldn't have to be known far more cinematically, so some could wonder if Miller sadly failed to resist the tug of Hollywood influence. And then, a certain matter of defeatism comes up in the discussion again:

Before Miller’s memoir, his comics provided the clearest insight into his mind, but his book makes those thoughts explicit, including his regrets. He looks back on “Holy Terror,” a much-criticized story written out of Miller’s anger after the 9/11 attacks. He now describes it as a rant. Would he ever write another such story?

“I hope I’m never inspired to do so again,” he writes.

Miller urges readers to push walls, especially the ones he helped build. He writes that it drives him “crazy” to see that his version of Batman is now enshrined as foundational.

Once again, Miller, in a way, continues talking out of both sides of his mouth - he urges wall-pushing, but he doesn't want to push it any longer with a GN that took on a challenging issue. But what's this, does he really think it's a shame DKR's vision wound up practically ruining the general take on Bruce Wayne in comics proper? Well he sure hasn't done enough to complain about it. Probably because, as I've guessed before, he doesn't seem to care much about most other takes on Batman save for his own. And to date, I can't even recall him ever chatting about Denny O'Neil and Steve Englehart's writings.

“For one thing, the title ‘Dark Knight’ started appearing in all kinds of comic books,” Miller said in our interview. “Beyond that, he became the unpleasant superhero for a long time. I essentially felt that I was in the business of knocking down walls, and I felt like people had used my work to construct new ones.”

Interesting he should tell this, because again, by the turn of the century, DC editors were practically forcing such a personality upon the Masked Manhunter, and only now, long after Batman's potential was ruined along with countless other mainstream creations, does he have the audacity to tell us this? It's too little, too late.

One more thing I thought of regarding Miller's early writings in Daredevil is the negative take he may have had on the Punisher, and the contrasting take he had when he drew an early Wolverine miniseries co-written with Chris Claremont in 1982. Which would make Miller another scribe with a bewildering double-standard on vigilante-style characters who kill, and it's something else he may not have addressed so far, and probably never will. For now, it's a shame that Miller continues to give signs he sticks with a defeatist position, and some could wonder if his recent positive comments on a movie or two drawing from his writings is another sign of the same. And his continued veering towards the darkness, save for certain challenging issues, is another problem he's got that makes much of his resume since the 1990s so unappealing.

A superficial article about Doonesbury history, and a sloppy one

Earlier this year in May, The Forward wrote about how cartoonist Garry Trudeau dealt with Jewish-related issues in Doonesbury, mainly spotlighting Mark Slackmeyer, possibly the 3rd regular cast member who debuted shortly after Mike and B.D in 1970:

Trudeau’s “Megaphone Mark” — who sported long hair and a bushy beard —was modeled on Mark Zanger, the leader of the Yale chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Mark’s first act in the strip is to take over the office of President King, the WASPy president of Walden College, who was based on the actual Yale president, Kingman Brewster. Over the next few months, Trudeau increasingly used Mark’s clashes with his father Phil, a New Jersey stockbroker desperate for his son to “succeed,” to dramatize tensions within postwar Jewish life.

Phil represents a generation of upwardly mobile Jews who believed acceptance in corporate and suburban America required conformity, restraint and the concealing of ethnicity. Mark, by contrast, is openly confrontational, culturally self-aware, and seems uninterested in assimilationist respectability.

Mark’s Jewish identity was not made explicit until the middle of 1971, when he and his college buddy Mike Doonesbury attend a talk by a famous religious crusader. Asked why he has not yet chosen to join the fold and lead a proper Christian life, Mark deadpans, “I’m Jewish.”

At Yale, Trudeau hardly knew Zanger and had much less in common with him than he had with Kingman Brewster, whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower. Trudeau was descended from three generations of Ivy-League-educated physicians. Like his father, the hardworking family doctor Frank Trudeau, the cartoonist attended St. Paul’s — one of the most blueblood of all New England prep schools. And though the young Yalie, like the genteel Brewster, opposed the war in Vietnam, he wanted nothing to do with radical politics.

But Trudeau identified closely with some of the personal struggles of Megaphone Mark. After all, he was also bucking family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a doctor. As Trudeau told me, some of Mark’s quarrels with his father hit close to home. Consider the line that Phil tells Mark in the fall of 1973: “Life is not to be enjoyed, it’s to be gotten on with!” Those words came verbatim from the mouth of Frank Trudeau, though, the younger Trudeau said, “my father and I ended up getting along pretty well and later came to laugh about such harsh comments.”

A key reason why Trudeau saw a part of himself in his Jewish cartoon character is that this ultimate insider also knew what it felt like to be an outsider. For many American Jews of the postwar era, especially those attending elite institutions historically dominated by WASP norms and values, Jewishness came with a sense of conditional acceptance, of not fully belonging. Trudeau had an emotionally similar experience at St. Paul’s, where he felt deeply estranged from the school’s rigid social hierarchy and its obsessive emphasis on athletic status. As the cartoonist later stressed, his four years there were “a tortured time for me.” He hated the school’s culture and never felt fully at home within it.

While this is interesting history, Trudeau diminished whatever impact it had when in the mid-90s, around January 18, 1994, he wrote Mark telling he was homosexual (with Zonker Harris providing a narrative), which is odd, since, while there was a strip around February 10, 1976 where Joanie Caucus was talking to Andy Lippincott, who told her he was homosexual (Trudeau later wrote him passing away from AIDS in 1990), Mark may not have been established as such at the time. What that would suggest is that Trudeau basically retconned one of his strip's established cast members for the sake of an oh-so vital agenda. It adds nothing to the character, and only makes previously established points moot.

Interestingly, if it matters, I'm not sure there were ever any notable lesbian characters highlighted in the strip, unless we consider a cameo by the real life Rachel Maddow, though that's hardly an achievement if it's not a fictional character who could make a more plausible regular. And if there weren't any recurring lesbian cast members in Doonesbury, it beggars the query - why do only homosexual men matter here? And why, if gay men did matter, Trudeau had to turn an established regular cast member into such, but couldn't create a new one like he did with Lippincott back in 1976? Sometimes, I wonder if comics writers like William Messner-Loebs have to shoulder some blame, since he turned the Pied Piper in Flash gay around 1990, rather than introduce a new character who could fill that role. Arguably, Messner-Loebs was one of the earlier examples of a writer who went "woke" in his approach, and it's certainly led to a lot of damage by this point, with Obsidian from Infinity Inc. being one of the biggest victims, since Gerard Jones, who retconned Todd Rice in 1995, turned out to be a criminal, and a lot of the stories Jones wrote were very bad.

Next up, in the past month, the Los Angeles Review of Books discussed the new history book about the now 56-years-old comic strip, and there's at least a few errors here, such as:

Doonesbury’s Slackmeyer came out as gay in 1976. It seems almost quaint now (and then again, not) that Slackmeyer paralleled rock stars like Lou Reed and Elton John, who felt comfortable enough in their own professional spaces to proclaim their queerness with pride. But this was the very first gay character in comics, and dozens of newspapers simply dropped the strip. Their editorial boards deemed it inappropriate for family reading, as if sexual orientation were inherently salacious. Trudeau refused to apologize or put his character back in the closet. He accepted the economic cost of moral clarity. Not content to be absorbed into the system, Trudeau gladly risked loss of distribution for the sake of truth-telling.

Oops, that's incorrect. It was Lippincott, not Slackmeyer, who was the first gay male character in the strip, perhaps also in all comic strips of the times. Most mystifying, I couldn't find any mention of Lippincott in the article. What gives on that? The glaring historical error aside, where do they get off lecturing everybody homosexuality's literally appropriate for children? Have they by any chance noticed what turned up in school libraries in past years? Do tell us about it. And then, there's another potential error here:

In Peanuts, the adult world feels incomprehensible, their speech reduced to onomatopoeia. In Doonesbury, the adult world tilts hypocritical and borderline psychotic, the source of colossal betrayal and moral rot. When Trudeau deployed abstract visual cues to depict presidents—Reagan as an empty brain, Bush Sr. as a “point of light,” Trump as a sentient toupee—he pointed Schulz’s abstractions at a new target: that power is often visually represented by its absence, by the void where thought should live.

I know Trudeau developed a gimmick where he'd depict some politicians as "invisible men", with certain symbols to replace them (Dan Quayle was depicted as a feather, meant to allude to what Trudeau thought of his personality), but I don't think it included Trump, and certainly not of recent, if the panel from last month says anything. But how disturbing that Trudeau's depicting Trump conversing chummily with a character named Trff Bmzklfrpz, a dictator from a fictional country called Berzerkistan, who's supposed to be murderous and antisemitic. Would he have written a leftist politician maintaining such friendships? Something tells me that, despite this, Trudeau doesn't have anything concrete to say about Trump's administration making a deal with Syria's current dictator, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was a terrorist before, and there's bleak signs he hasn't changed. All that aside, the "joke" Trudeau made about Trump believing something's been named in his honor is one of the cheapest I've ever seen in the newspaper strip to date. What's that about "incomprehensible" again?

If Mike represented the political sell-out, Mark Slackmeyer represented something more urgent: the moral witness to governmental impunity. Originally a campus radical and DJ at Walden College’s radio station, Mark came out in 1976, a move that became a watershed moment for the funny pages. But the 1980s deepened the crisis. As the Reagan administration ignored the burgeoning threat of AIDS—the president refused to even speak the word in public, and homophobic legislatures debated whether infected people deserved treatment—Trudeau used Mark to bear witness. While Bible-thumpers attacked the “morality” of the afflicted, treating AIDS patients as deserving of their fate, Trudeau faced the grim realities of suffering and death. One 1985 panel still grates: Mark stands at a closed-casket funeral for a lover, his face a hollow, blank mask of exhaustion. The caption: “I’m just so tired of being brave.”

When they repeat the error with Mark's history twice, it starts becoming funny enough to fall off the couch laughing. Why wasn't the establishment of Lippincott as gay considered a "watershed moment", according to their poorly researched effort? That aside, what proof do they have that "bible-thumpers" took such a denigrating position? According to Religion Dispatches, that was far from the case. And why no provision of the 1985 strip in question, so we can ascertain the given year is accurate? The following isn't very accurate either:

When B. D.—the strip’s resident conservative and permanent helmet-wearer—lost his leg in Iraq, 35 years of character history freighted the injury. This wasn’t a policy abstraction; it was a friend’s tragedy. Trudeau became a fixture on Ward 57 of Walter Reed hospital, interviewing veterans and their families, detailing their trials and the government’s responses. Following B. D.’s journey through PTSD, Trudeau earned the title “archangel of Walter Reed” from the military establishment itself.

But here’s the paradox Kendall fails to articulate: Trudeau opposed the Iraq War vehemently, yet his humane treatment of its victims earned him establishment gratitude. When you become a “humanist,” you often lose your “teeth.” The military appreciated Trudeau’s compassion for wounded soldiers even as they pursued policies that kept wounding them. They could separate the caricaturist of their commanders from the chronicler of their suffering. They used his moral clarity about individual pain as cover for endless wars.

Regarding B.D, we once again have an error at hand, or at least a lack of historical clarity: in April 21, 2004, after 34 years, Trudeau drew the guy's helmet being removed after he lost a leg in the Iraq war. On the other hand, I don't think Duke and Ching Huan have been seen without their glasses in all the time they've been recurring cast members. Whatever, it's disturbing how the reviewer turns to claiming wars are "endless" because of the USA's conduct, not because of the foreign autocrat tyrants and ideologies that begin them. Such propaganda only lets savages off the hook, and proves the journal's not altruistic. Also, was Trudeau's reason for opposing the war in Iraq because he didn't think they were as dangerous as Iran's turned out to be? If so, I have yet to find him actually saying so. His turn to victim-blaming in the past decade after the Charlie Hebdo massacre certainly didn't help matters.

In 2014, Trudeau stepped away from his daily grind to work on HBO’s Alpha House, and most papers carried reruns of his greatest hits. He still writes a Sunday strip. Mike’s daughter Alex entered the cast, while the Duke (a play on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson) lived long past his writerly role model to serve as as the proconsul of an Iraqi city. Like Donald Trump, the Duke acts like a monument to the Great American Grift. By the time Trudeau reached the Trump era, satire entered a predicament that made exaggeration almost impotent. Even late-night comics weary of ridiculing Trump, and logic simply vaporizes in the face of his daily harangues. Trudeau’s solution treated Trump as monstrous subtext—an unstable virus distorting his characters’ daily lives rather than a target for direct parody. It was a graceful retreat, but it also admitted defeat.

Sounds like somebody wishes the strip continued daily for longer, if that's what it took to ram Trump for ambiguous reasons. I sometimes wonder if Trudeau stopped drawing daily strips because he had little else to tell in this day and age, and his resort to cheap jokes at this point with Trump certainly proves he's way past his prime.

Doonesbury may have run for a longer time than strips like Peanuts, but has since proven overrated and pretentious, as the swipe at Trump makes clear. Even long before that, from what I could tell, it had long hit bottom. So what good does it do to write up a history book about it when the chances are it won't take an objective viewpoint?

Marvel partners with USA Today for a Spider-Man project

Another of Marvel's pointless attempts to gain more publicity includes the following project at USA Today:

USA TODAY and Marvel Comics have partnered to provide USA TODAY’s PLAY digital entertainment hub with access to the most popular comic-book characters in the Marvel universe. PLAY will be the exclusive home for the new vertically formatted “Spider-Man TODAY” Infinity Comic series, which runs for 48 weeks beginning June 16 – with new issues dropping every Wednesday. Readers also will be able to dig into 1,000 curated archival Marvel comics ranging from old-school classics to modern favorites.

“USA TODAY is the largest news publisher in the country, and so that's always exciting,” says Marvel’s Spider-Man editor Nick Lowe. “And then you pair them with the greatest comic-book company in the world, Marvel Comics. I mean, that's chocolate and peanut butter, right? It's the best.”

Lowe sees “Spider-Man TODAY” as “the new incarnation of the Spider-Man funnies” by Spidey cocreator Stan Lee and artist John Romita Sr. that ran in newspapers starting back in the 1970s. “This is us trying to take up that baton and run the next part of the race.”

The new series features a “dream team” of artists Al Ewing (“Venom”) and Todd Nauck (“Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man”) bringing to life a story that “will span the entire Marvel universe and is good for fans of all ages,” Lowe says. [...]

Gee, when a left-wing ideologue like Ewing is involved, what's there to look forward to here? Even Lowe's not encouraging. That aside, why do they think a comic strip that wasn't as well written as the mainstay pamphlets is something to emulate? I seem to recall that, in the last few years before it ended, there was a very atrocious story where both Wolverine and Sabretooth turned up, with the latter incomprehensibly searching for the former, and was even willing to threaten Mary Jane Watson if that's what it took to get Spider-Man to reveal Logan's location (which he didn't know). Then Wolverine turned up and both he and Sabretooth knocked themselves out, and soon vanished again. That storyline, coming as it did near the official end of the original newspaper strip 7 years ago, was so insulting to the intellect, mainly because it didn't depict Spidey unleashing a gale of justified anguish at Sabretooth for threatening his wife. Why should this be just Wolvie's battle? That it was made to look almost absurdly comedic only worsened the tale. I couldn't bring myself to continue reading the newspaper strip after that, and besides, if the comics were already tainted by Joe Quesada, it only figures the newspaper strip was too.

So what's the use of turning out another comic strip that could be similar to ran during 1977-2019? Coupled with such awful writers and editors, that's why this is not something to care about, and could be worse than what the newspaper strip wound up being like. They also hint they've prepared comics, digital or otherwise, that're "modern", and that's another red flag they could be foisting some of the worst of the modern era on the readerships, stuff that could've come after Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage was forcibly annulled. Also, I've never been very impressed with USA Today's overall news coverage, which is little different from J. Jonah Jameson's MO. One more reason it'd be better not to waste time and money on what they now have in store for Spidey. Marvel's done little more than make a business deal with a real life variation on the Daily Bugle.

Comics and cartoon characters featured in illustrated history about the Declaration of Independence

The Orange County Register interviewed cartoonist R. Sikoryak about a new GN titled Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated, which builds specially on use of comics and cartoon characters for exploration of the famous moment in USA history when independence was set in motion in the 18th century:

As he worked on an adaptation of some of America’s essential documents over the past few years, cartoonist R. Sikoryak says one element of the ongoing American experiment became clear.

[...] His new book, “Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated,” combines the complete texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address and illustrates them with characters and scenes from comic books, comic strips and animated films and TV series, including The Simpsons, My Little Pony, Black Panther, Ziggy, the Powerpuff Girls and more.

“People identify with cartoon characters,” says Sikoryak, who skillfully takes on the styles of everything from The Family Circus to Family Guy. “I like that interplay of familiar characters with important texts.”

And sharp-eyed readers will recognize reworkings of iconic comic book panels, including “The New Teen Titans,” “The Invaders” and “The Savage Sword of Conan.”

“I was strictly using American characters, U.S. characters,” he says about some of the restrictions he gave himself for the artwork. “They’re all characters created by, or who represent America in some way. So that was the rule for the book.”

I would assume it's done under licensed permit, but this is a creative way to make use of other known creations for producing a GN about American history, and a lot more than what you see in the actual mainstream today.

Q. Your book is an illustrated version of the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and Gettysburg Address. How do you describe this kind of hybrid?

I grew up making comics and reading lots of comics, and I’ve tried to find ways to take my skills and use them in an interesting way. I used to do strictly literary adaptations, where I would take novels, and I would retell them as comics in different styles, kind of like what I’m doing now,

You could call it a graphic novel, you could call it an illustrated book, but basically, I just like taking the history I love from comics and combining it with texts that I think are important or interesting for people to reevaluate in new ways.

It's certainly pleasant news in an era where patriotic values have been largely rejected by mainstream leftists who don't show any appreciation for themes like "truth, justice and the American way" in Superman, for example, and likely don't celebrate American patriotism in Captain America either.

Q. There can be a friction between people who believe that if you love something, you can also have fun with it, versus those who don’t. Is that challenging to navigate?

I have a certain earnest streak to me, and I think that comes through in the work. Certainly, I will throw in some jokes here and there, but for the most part — there’s some editorializing, I suppose, in some of the image choices — but I am really keeping the text there. I’m not commenting in the text. If you just read the text, there’s nothing in the book that isn’t in the original document.

I’m really trying to be faithful to all my sources, whether it’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote or if it’s what Seth MacFarlane drew for “Family Guy,” I’m trying to represent the perspective of both sides — or the many sides.

One of the reasons I wanted to use the different styles is because you can find a page that feels very patriotic, and it feels kind of solemn, and then there’ll be another page that’s maybe a little absurd, or a little funny, or a little ironic, but that’s the tapestry of America. I really wanted people to feel like something in this would represent them.

In the best sense of what I think the country is, it’s all these people coming together — I know some people don’t think that’s what it is — but in my estimation, it’s really about all these people coming together, that’s kind of what the book represents. You could find specific pages that are nothing but solemn, but there is a certain, I hope, thrill, or as you say, friction, in the combination of all these things next to each other.

The question is whether he ultimately respects what the Declaration of Independence was for, which is why we need to hope the part about "reevaluation" only means whether most believe it's acceptable to employ notable creations from past franchises for a new GN about an historical milestone. Same can be said about the view of "both sides" too.

If the finished product respects patriotic and civilized values, that's what'll make this an admirable project. So if Sikoryak is faithful to those beliefs, then he'll have produced something that can be a breath of fresh air in an era where patriotism's sadly been diminished by leftist ideologies, and this needs to be challenged by showing the courage to present patriotism as a positive value again.

Some history of Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau

The UK Guardian wrote about the history of cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who created the Doonesbury comic strip in the late 60s/early 70s, and how he developed it as a liberal-leaning tale over the years, one where the characters age in contrast to Peanuts, where they don't. And here's an example of the politics it emphasized:

Coming from an all-male prep school, Trudeau arrived at Yale with his own archaic views about women, and his earliest comic strips displayed sexism. However, his worldview was rapidly upended when he began dating a woman hailing from three generations of feminists. “She gave him an education, a crash course,” Kendall notes. “He quickly developed and got it.”

This awakening birthed the character Joanie Caucus, a middle-aged woman who leaves her husband to go to law school, cementing Trudeau as a mainstream advocate for feminism in the 1970s.

This capacity for personal and artistic evolution is, for Kendall, Trudeau’s most defining and admirable trait. “I feel like in this culture right now, there are a lot of people, particularly men, who kind of get stuck in adolescent mode. The one thing about Garry that moves me is his development and growth.”

This extended to his depiction of war. In his early 20s, Trudeau drew strips featuring the character B.D. (named after the Yale quarterback Brian Dowling) going to Vietnam merely to avoid writing a college term paper. Decades later, during the Iraq war, an older, wiser Trudeau depicted B.D. losing a leg and suffering from PTSD – a storyline handled with depth and care.

Trudeau also demonstrated a sensitive understanding of race and religion, mainstreaming Jewish characters like the radical student leader Mark Slackmeyer, and capturing the nuanced generational divides between assimilationist parents and their radicalised children.

Be that as it may, his left-wing view of issues like the Vietnam war and even the Iraq war, which seemed to be that they should never have been carried out at all, is dismaying in hindsight. Why, surely "radical" isn't also a concerning description? The way Mark's characterized looks awfully absurd by today's standards, where you have school students radicalized against figures with backgrounds like his. Come to think of it, does Trudeau even still care about whether children are radicalized, if he ever did at all? And if you needed another clue what's wrong with Trudeau's approach, it's what he thinks of Donald Trump, and has for a long time:

Currently, Trudeau is only producing fresh Sunday strips – with the dailies existing as “Doonesbury Classic” reruns – and about a third of his new output focuses entirely on Donald Trump.

Trudeau has been tracking Trump since 1987, recognising him early on as an outrageous, narcissistic character, frequently placing him in adventures with the Doonesbury gang. Kendall says: “Trump is a very colourful character. Trump’s hair and various body parts are fun for the cartoonist. I guess he wants to talk about the effect of Trumpism on the Doonesbury gang and how it’s affecting the baby boomers, not just American politics, but American culture as well.” [...]

This is a tough moment for baby boomers who won struggles for feminism and civil rights in the 1960s only to see many of those gains stalled or reversed by Trump, the Republican party and a rightwing supreme court. Can Trudeau remain optimistic about America? His biographer thinks so.

Wow, so all Trump's capable of doing is taking apart supposed achievements made by feminists, which really wasn't much, or they let deteriorate themselves after they were fine with LGBT activists taking apart anything to do with women's safety and dignity. I once read Doonesbury many years ago, but today, can't say I'm so impressed with it in hindsight, realizing Trudeau followed a leftist anti-war narrative that was sadly cemented by the disastrous way the Vietnam war was handled, one that never sought to dismantle the commie leadership in the country's north. I do recall a few strips where Trump was drawn in, depicted acting chummy with figures like Duke, who was depicted as a drug addict, and was in some ways meant to be a de facto baddie, perhaps even a caricature of conservatives. Well, no surprise, really.

I really don't see the point of Doonesbury today, based on how pretentious Trudeau really was in the long run, and Trudeau lost his way morally over a decade ago. I'm sure there's politically emphasizing comic strips on the market worth reading, but at this point, I wouldn't consider Doonesbury one of them.

Even a UK collector only thinks of selling his trove through auctions and not donating to museums

The BBC covered the story of a collector from Newcastle, who's got a sizable collection that he too can only seem to think of selling through auctions now that he feels he'll have to part with it, and doesn't consider contributing to a museum any more than his USA counterparts:

Many children collected comic books, from The Topper to Roy of the Rovers, The Dandy to The Beano.

But Peter Hansen never stopped, with his haul growing into one of the country's largest private collections of British comics.

Now at the age of 70, he is starting to part with the bulk of his beloved books, which are stored in a barn in Northumberland.

Two recent auctions saw parts of his 45,000 item collection sell for more than £250,000.

"After all this time, I think it's time to let go," Hansen said.

Well boy, did he ever. To the point where he doesn't think future generations should see any of these famous publications on display at a museum. What a sad farce this is. And the biggest irony is that:

His collection became so prestigious he often loaned material to institutions such as the Cartoon Museum and the National Centre for Children's Books.

But he wouldn't fully sell or contribute his collection to them? That's what makes this auction sale all the more ridiculous. Many of the buyers at auctions likely won't read the stories, and only keep them locked away tight; that seems to be the norm these days, and it's quite frankly atrocious. It's a real shame this auction farce continues even overseas, because it's not furthering the medium, but rather, perpetuating its obscuration, and taking up valuble space in the news that could be filled by articles arguing why comics have to make the shift to paperback/hardcover instead of pamphlets or issues of an anthology. How much longer will this absurdity continue even in Europe?

What Alan Moore says about Frank Miller and the industry

Alan Moore, having long had little to do with the comics medium for years already, was interviewed by the UK Observer, and has rather unsurprisingly unflattering words to say about Frank Miller. But first:

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.

They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen?

Well if he realizes why, more importantly, apocalyptic stories only built upon pessimism can be discouraging when you hammer away at them with no brighter side to balance, at least that's something. Though it doesn't excuse that he's such a leftist, and unfortunately, as the following suggests, he hasn't risen above this in real life:

With the [Guy Fawkes] mask from V for Vendetta, you created a symbol for resistance.

It’s one of the works that I’ve disowned, although I am very glad if that mask has been useful to a global protest movement. I was glad that Occupy could find a use for it. I was optimistic when I saw Tunisian school kids wearing it at the start of the Arab Spring, but that replaced the old governments with worse ones and led inexorably to [war in] Syria. If the old world refuses to die, the new world cannot be born.

What do you mean by ‘the old world’?

The ferocity of the rightwing push that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. I can’t really attribute that to anything other than a desperate sense that they and their politics have no part in the future.

What a groaner. He just won't let go of the whole notion on right-wingers could be a problem, but not left-wingers. And does he turn a blind eye to the dangers of Islam, which is consuming the UK even now as we speak? If he believes the "Arab Spring" really had any positive impact in Egypt, reality contradicts that. And how come he denies Watchmen and V for Vendetta were meant to be predictive? Is it because he feels that part alludes to more recent world issues he never actually meant to write a metaphor for? Also appalling is his continued favorability to the Occupy movement, years after the fact, and if that's how he's going to opine, there's no chance he sees anything wrong with how things are really going in Syria now, and the disaster its current autocrat is inflicting upon anybody considered a "kuffar".

How did you get from learning in the library to writing Future Shocks, a sci-fi cartoon strip in 2000 AD?

I asked my friend Steve Moore, who had been working as a comic script writer. He taught me the basics, and I started submitting stories to Doctor Who weekly and 2000 AD. The 2000 AD editor rejected them but liked my style, so gave me Future Shocks. They were a great way to learn how to tell a story. I don’t acknowledge them [now]. The companies have lawyers and will fight you in court until you are destitute. I don’t want to be associated with the comics industry, which is poisonous.

OK… a couple of questions about that poison. The Dark Knight’s Frank Miller, who I think you fell out with…

He’s one of the reasons I’m embarrassed to be connected with the comics industry.

There is one year, 1986, when he releases Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, you release Watchmen, and it changes comics for ever. He’s now worth $45m.

I’m aware of this. Comics are a wonderful medium but the industry is corrupt. One of the reasons I disowned that work is because it is owned by DC Comics. They can give it to any writer. There was a TV series called Watchmen and my only connection with that was receiving a parcel with a powder blue barbecue apron bearing the hydrogen symbol and a letter that began, “Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen…” I wrote back a brief letter, saying that this work has been stolen from me so, as far as I’m concerned, it is unauthorised.

Okay, so he's seriously discouraged based on his experiences with a company that came to rip off its contributors more than once, recalling how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were at one point being short-changed by DC on Superman until they went public about it in the mid-70s. A big difference is that, as the creators of the first prominent superhero, they had some backing in their time, including the late artist Neil Adams IIRC (but who knows if they'd find it now?), while Moore, by contrast, didn't find anything of the sort, if at all. And I guess he resents that, but again, his leftism is making it difficult to care.

As for his beef with Miller, I assume it's because Miller by contrast went on to work in films to some extent, even though in the end, Miller didn't have much more success than any adaptations of Moore's work did, recalling the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen films were disasters, and so too was V for Vendetta, IIRC.

Screen Rant addressed this in turn, and they unshockingly take Moore's side regardless of where Miller's been going lately, telling that:

However, that friendship was already seemingly over by 2011, when Moore was harshly critical of Miller's public comments about the Occupy protest movement in an interview. Both before and after that, Moore has criticized what he considers the "misogynistic," "homophobic," and "fascist" overtones of Miller's work. Alan Moore clearly came to dislike Miller's later comics, like Sin City and 300, but the root of the issue, on and off the page, is political.

[...] Frank Miller is frequently described as a conservative, though he disavows that label himself. Meanwhile, Alan Moore is a self-avowed anarchist and magician. But one thing they share is how much their personalities, and their ideologies, drive what they do on the page. Which makes their creative and political differences indistinguishable. Then add a professional layer to that: Miller embraced the comics industry, while Moore forsaked it.

Yes, for nearly a decade, Miller's been doing everything he can to back away from any such labeling, even going so far in his recent documentary to say he's sorry for attacking the Occupy movement. Assuming Moore knows this, it just shows that the whole notion he's going to forgive and forget so easily is exaggerated. For if the Observer interview is any suggestion, he won't change his mind anytime soon.

Anyway, now that DC owner Warner Brothers has come under the same ownership as Paramount, one could wonder, will they provide Moore with compensation, if he really deserves it? And given that the mogul who owns both is pro-Donald Trump, one can validly wonder if Moore will even accept any offered? If not, what was his whole rant about in the first place? All I know is that it's just too bad Moore has to be such a far-leftist, and it makes it hard to credit much of his resume outside of a handful of items.

Politically obsessed British writer decided to turn back to comics reading to get his attention away from Donald Trump

Here's a writer at the UK Guardian who says he decided it was better to stop "doomscrolling" about all the stuff he didn't like to hear about Donald Trump, and turn to comics reading instead, which he had done in his youth:

I’d been a voracious comic book reader as a youth, growing up in the early 1990s on a diet of the Beano and Dandy, before graduating to The Adventures of Tintin and Asterix. From there, I moved on to my father’s 2000 AD collection – which, to a young teenager, held a rather illicit thrill due to its intensely violent strips. I then devoured anything I could get my hands on. Preacher, The Sandman, Watchmen, Batman – I’d read the lot.

But as an adult in my 30s, I wasn’t the devout reader I once had been. That changed in late 2024, when I finally decided to ditch doomscrolling. Spurred on by the online furores that surrounded the imminent second term of Donald Trump, I realised that I needed to preserve my mental health and make new routines before I became entirely consumed with fear and anger. And who knows more about self-care than your inner child?

Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life.

I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling. Inspired by the colourful imagery and ideas I found in comic books, I was able to channel a newfound sense of creativity into my own work as a journalist. I also felt less of an urge to check in on work channels after I left the office, as this had become valuable comic book time.

Wow, isn't that amazing. He wisely took the path of absorbing himself in reading comics, rather than waste time railing against Trump, as appears to be the case. Too bad he wasted time on what I assume is the disgraced Neil Gaiman's oh-so masterful Sandman series, though. I would think the smart reader would set a better example by looking for archives of the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, instead. And hopefully, they will eventually be reprinted in DC Finest archives. Simultaneously, the columnist suggests he's unfortunately the kind of reader obsessed with all that's dark, noticing all the USA-published series he cites are darkness-laden, and similar observations can be made about 2000AD. And while it may be impressive if he's willing to avoid obsessing about Trump for now, it's a shame if he's the kind of fan who thinks darkness solves everything. Though such leanings do make it worth wondering if the anti-Trump crowd really is that obsessed with darkness, selectively or otherwise.

Maybe this kind of news could present a good example of what better to do than obsess over what a right-winger supposedly did wrong while excusing all a left-winger did wrong. But the only problem of course, is that the propagandists writing such items have to reevaluate whether it's doing any good to be pushing darkness, and only embracing brightness with political strings attached. Only when they consider that, and why comedy can also make a good pastime, will anything improve.

British comics editor Barrie Tomlinson dies at 88

The BBC announced that Barrie Tomlinson, editor of the sports comic Roy of the Rovers has passed on at the age of 88:

Tributes have been paid to the editor of classic British football comic Roy of the Rovers.

Barrie Tomlinson, who was born and lived most of his life in St Albans, died on Tuesday, aged 88, his daughter Jennifer Tomlinson said.

He "absolutely loved doing the comics" and was known for portraying the character of Roy Race as a real person who was "his best friend", she added.

Race, a star striker for the fictional team of Melchester Rovers, initially appeared in the comic Tiger in 1954, and later in his own standalone title until its closure in February 1993.

The Roy of the Rovers strip then featured in the BBC's Match of the Day magazine until its closure in 2001.

Tomlinson, who was also editor of Tiger, wrote the Scorer football strip, which appeared in the Daily Mirror for 22 years, and authored two books, Real Roy of the Rovers Stuff and Comic Book Hero.

He had a great idea to produce sports comics, something I don't think the USA's mainstream has ever seriously capitalized on till this day. The news also tells, interestingly enough:

Book publisher Simon & Schuster UK said Tomlinson was a comics writer and former group editor at IPC Magazines, who wrote strips including Death Wish and Turbo Jones for Wildcat.

He was also involved with Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Scream! comics.

Curious they use the "hero" substitute for "ninja", recalling that's what the UK government under Margaret Thatcher imposed when the merchandise based on Ninja Turtles was first sold in Britain nearly 4 decades ago. If that restriction was eventually abandoned under later governments, isn't it rather silly to continue its use when most people today know the word "ninja" is part of the original title, even in the UK? But, I won't be surprised if Mr. Tomlinson had to make use of the PC retitling years before when he was a comics editor.

Anyway, it's a shame he's gone, but his contributions to sports comics are appreciated, and perhaps the mainstream of the USA should consider putting more emphasis on sports like soccer too in the future.

How Frank Miller failed Will Eisner's most notable comic strip

ComicBook wrote about a movie on which Samuel Jackson and Scarlett Johansson worked prior to the Avengers movies, that being Frank Miller's adaptation of the late Will Eisner's 1940-52 Spirit comic strip (which was revived in some form or other in later years):

What many casual viewers have forgotten, however, is that Jackson and Johansson shared a screen in a superhero film before either of them ever set foot in the MCU. In December 2008, the same month The Dark Knight was cementing a new benchmark for the genre, the two actors appeared together in The Spirit, a neo-noir adaptation of Will Eisner’s iconic newspaper comic strip. The film holds the distinction of being the only feature directed solely by Frank Miller, the writer and artist whose previous credits as a co-director on Sin City had led to enormous commercial and critical goodwill. That goodwill, combined with the star power of his assembled cast, gave The Spirit every possible advantage heading into release. Unfortunately, the film used it poorly.

Why No One Talks About The Spirit Nowadays

The Spirit arrived on Christmas Day 2008, a release date that placed it in direct competition with high-profile awards contenders and family films. Unsurprisingly, it opened to $6.4 million over its first four days, landing ninth at the box office. Plus, without a great word-of-mouth to reverse the catastrophic opening, the film’s final domestic gross reached only $19.8 million, with a worldwide cumulative of $38.4 million against a reported production budget of $60 million. Add market costs to that calculation, and The Spirit remains one of the biggest superhero flops ever. The critical consensus was equally severe. The Spirit holds a 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 114 reviews, with an average score of 3.6 out of 10, and a Metacritic score of 30 out of 100. Finally, audiences gave it a CinemaScore of C-, one of the more toxic grades a wide release can receive.

The creative failure at the center of The Spirit traces directly to Miller’s decision to apply the visual grammar he developed for Sin City to a property that was never designed to support it. Eisner’s original comic strip thrived on a fundamentally humanist tone, as its protagonist was a street-level everyman whose power derived from his vulnerability and moral clarity. Miller’s version replaced that framework with the stylized nihilism and noir excess of his own comic work, producing a film that felt like a lesser imitation of Sin City rather than an adaptation of a distinct property.

Well, it certainly proved, if nothing else, that Miller was no better a director than he was a screenwriter, recalling he was credited to the Robocop sequel in 1990. And he didn't just fail Eisner with the movie adaptation, he also failed him with his betraying remarks in the recent American Genius documentary. I just don't see what Miller's apologists see in him. If he's got any "style" in his work, the problem is that, in the end, there's no substance.

Incidentally, Miller's Spirit movie wasn't even the first time Eisner's strip was adapted to live action. In 1987, there was a failed TV movie intended as a pilot for a possible series, so Miller was doing little more than attempting it all again theatrically. But if Dennis Colt was now being depicted as a near immortal, courtesy of a chemical injection, all that did was push the creation into too much sci-fi territory. Creative liberties are okay, but when somebody as over-the-top as Miller can be applies it with such heavy-handedness, it's no surprise it fails in the end.

And while the first Sin City movie may have been a success, the sequel several years later tanked. So again, what's all the fuss about regarding Miller anyway? Eisner's family should never have approved of what Miller was doing, and certainly not if Miller was later going to put him down in the aforementioned documentary. As I've said before, there's little from Miller's resume I care about, with Daredevil and some of his work on the flagship Batman books being the few I ever found worthwhile. And if the Spirit movie says something, he's made an otherwise dreadful filmmaker.

The 90th anniversary of a notable Scottish comic strip

The BBC looks at the history of Orr Wullie and the Broons, a notable comic strip from Scotland that debuted way back in 1936:

Jings! Scotland's favourite "spiky-haired loon" and best-loved family are celebrating their 90th anniversary - and looking good for it.

Oor Wullie and The Broons began creating chaos across the pages of DC Thomson's Sunday Post in March 1936.

Since then, Oor Wullie has spent nine decades perched on his famous bucket, while The Broons have portrayed the joys, chaos and heart of family life in 10 Glebe Street.

Now The Sunday Post is set to publish a commemorative supplement, featuring a national comics competition and guide on how to draw the spiky-haired boy in dungarees and hobnail boots.

Oor Wullie and The Broons were the creations of former DC Thomson managing editor Robert Low and sprung from the pen of illustrator Dudley Watkins.

The comic strips share tales of working-class life and community through mischief, family humour and their distinctive Scots language. [...]

The comic strip was loved by many for its portrayal of traditional home values - from Maw's wisdom and Paw's blustering to the antics of the bairns and romances and mishaps of Hen and Daphne. [...]

Thomas Hawkins, editor of The Sunday Post, said: "Very few fictional characters have lived as vividly in Scotland's imagination as Oor Wullie and The Broons.

"For 90 years they've mirrored Scotland back to itself - its humour, its grit and its sense of community and this anniversary is a chance to celebrate where they've come from, and the new stories still to be told.

"From boosting morale during the Second World War to putting a smile on readers' faces during the Covid pandemic, Oor Wullie and The Broons have been a reassuring constant in a world in flux."

What's impressive about a comic strip like this is that it's an important example of being proud of a country's national culture, and could doubtless make a great asset in an era where national cultures were massively damaged by political correctness. This is the sort of concept you may not have always seen in the USA, even in decades past, and it's surely something to learn from.

This kind of history may be eyebrow raising, but is it really "wild"?

The Saturday Evening Post wrote about 10 stories from comics history they describe as "wild", and while that may be the case for some, I don't think such a description fits the bill when it comes to the following about a certain late cartoonist:

In their heyday, Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka, and Al Capp, the creator of Li’l Abner, were superstars of the comics pages. They were also bitter enemies who engaged in a years-long feud over the origins of Li’l Abner that ultimately destroyed them both. Their animosity came to a head when Fisher, in a pique, accused Capp of hiding pornographic images within the panels of Li’l Abner. Almost no one believed the accusation, and it destroyed Fisher’s reputation. He was drummed out of the National Cartoonists Society and took his own life shortly after. But Capp was no saint. In the 1960s and ’70s, several women accused him of sexual impropriety. Capp pled no contest to certain accusations, which led to hundreds of newspapers dropping Li’l Abner from their pages.

Yes, I know all about that sad history regarding Capp, who also offended actress Goldie Hawn decades before. And what he did is much worse than what the now deceased Scott Adams was accused of. Capp may not have concealed smut of the sort Fisher accused him of, but I do recall seeing an illustration or two from Capp's work that were troubling in terms of implied male-on-female violence. And that certainly doesn't reflect well on his reputation viewed in context of the sexual offenses he was accused of.

That said, this particular history isn't what I'd call "wild". It's just sad and disgusting. Here, Capp could've made an effort to stick to a more positive path, and instead, he became one of the earliest examples of a comics specialist who did horrible deeds, and now, if Lil' Abner's obscure by today's standards, it shouldn't be a surprise.

A co-founder of the CBDLF sides with anarchists in Minnesota

The Comics Journal did a very biased interview with Greg Ketter, the owner of a specialty store in Minnesota who was a co-founder of the CBDLF years ago, and what's told here is a very disturbing example of how leftist the magazine and their interviewee are, in how they view divisive issues like illegal immigration, and rioting. They also distort specific facts about 2 antagonists:

In the now-famous protest photo of Greg Ketter by Theia Chatelle, Ketter is poised, tree-like, in mid-stride, his body clouded in mists of tear gas. Moments earlier, he had given the quote to the TV cameras that wrote itself into a part of cultural and political history: “I’m 70 years old, and I’m fucking angry.”

Ketter had come out on that Saturday not to protest, exactly, but to be a part of the Minneapolis community confronting ICE and CPB. He had been drawn out, initially, by the killing of Renée Nicole Good earlier in the month, and when ICU nurse Alex Pretti became the second Minneapolis resident killed by federal authorities in the space of three weeks, Ketter felt compelled to stand with others at the site of the murder. "I got there about an hour after the murder and went right up to the intersection that ICE had taped off and stood guard. There were perhaps 50-100 of them and several hundred observers/protesters milling around. Some were right up front yelling and swearing. I became one of them," Ketter wrote on his Facebook page.

Ketter is a comic shop owner, and a notable one: his shop DreamHaven Books, founded in 1977, is the oldest continuously operating comic shop in Minneapolis, and among the oldest in the United States. And while the extent of national attention has been somewhat new to Ketter – he spent the three days following his appearance on the news fielding interviews with national and local press – it is not the first time he has stepped into the media spotlight. In 1987, he became one of the founders of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and remained on the board of that organization for the next two decades. In 2020, his shop was damaged during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, prompting Ketter to reluctantly open a GoFundMe to support the store’s recovery.

This is easily one of the worst articles I've ever read coming from TCJ, and compounds the far-left vision they appear to go by. From what's been reported, this Good tried to ram an ICE agent with her car, all for the sake of a petty political position. And the agent she attacked had previously been struck by an illegal immigrant who was a child rapist. And Mr. Ketter's taking the side of the anarchists? This is a most embarrassing moment for comicdom and its marketing division. Also notice how the magazine and interviewee also obscure Floyd's disturbing criminal background. And they expect everybody to view them as a serious news source for comicdom? Why, how does being foul-mouthed make one a better person? Here's more from the interview itself, and it's such a groaner:

For people who aren't in Minneapolis, can you try to describe what it's been like, and what it’s like now?

Well, I guess in Minneapolis, we really do care about community. We care about each other, and people have been tremendous about the whole thing. And we like immigrants, overall. I mean, unfortunately there's been news about the fraud and everything else, which was a very tiny percentage of people and a smaller percentage of immigrants, but they happen to be involved and that's a shame. But overall, people are just very pleased that we have the immigrant populations that we have.

How did you kind of get involved in...it feels wrong to call it a protest. But how would you describe what you were doing out there?

I was there for several reasons. For some reason, I wanted to be present. When they killed Renée Good, I went to the memorial that evening, and that was just thousands of people getting together to show respect. And there was a lot of “Fuck ICE,” and everything else going on, but really I think it was just to show support. And Saturday, I went down there because I felt I should be there and I hadn't actually witnessed ICE at all. Amazingly, I hadn't seen any of the things going on. I'd been to other gatherings. I'd been to strategy meetings and things like that, but I hadn't seen ICE itself in the flesh. So I went to watch, to see what was going on.

Had you been involved with any political activism in the past?

A bit. I mean, I was a co-founder of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which we started in response to prosecution of [the Illinois comic shop] Friendly Frank’s back then. And Denis Kitchen called me, and right away, and we started fundraising, and then we started the permanent CBLDF. I was on the board for the first 20 years, and then I moved on. I've always been a free speech advocate. That's been my main thing.

And what if it turns out that Mr. Ketter vehemently refused to give Mike Baron any backing on his part when the veteran writer of Nexus had to file a lawsuit over a left-wing news site's incitement against him for publishing an indie comic titled Private American? Some "free speech advocate" Mr. Ketter is then. It's clear the CBDLF's operated almost entirely according to their political standings, and that doesn't help at all. Let's also recall the same outfit was also once managed by Charles Brownstein, who was accused of sexual misconduct in the past 2 decades, so it's not like they were ever clean as a whistle even on those particular matters. And then, look how Ketter downplays the Somali Muslim community fraud scandal that was discovered in Minnesota, and no mention made how widespread it's been said to be, with a number of arrests already made. And again, how does repellent profanity make one a better person, or reflect well upon the mob Ketter joined? Based on this, no sane person, in comics or out, should seek the services of the CBDLF with people like him in charge. Mr. Ketter also brought up more of his MO, political or otherwise, and this too is telling:

It’s a bookstore market versus a periodical or a collector’s market.

Right. I try not to cater just to the collector market. I do have collectors comics; I have back issues of certain things. I buy some of them, and we have a decent selection of some older comics, but I don't go out of my way for that. I've been doing underground comics. I've always been into underground comics, and we have the best selection around here, certainly in the Midwest. And I like unusual things.

So do you sell mostly comics these days, or mostly sci-fi prose books?

It's a pretty good mix. LGBTQ+ comics and graphic novels are huge. We're selling everything in that realm. I was just a guest of honor at Gaylaxicon that was put on here: it's a traveling convention for gay science fiction and comics fans. And I'm straight, I've been married for 40 years to a woman, but they made me a guest because I've always been very supportive of the community. But those books are our bestsellers. We're selling lots and lots of good graphic novels.

It wouldn't be shocking if the underground comics he's written have been viciously political too. What are the chances that, in contrast to LGBT causes, he's never been supportive of the Jewish community Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Jack Kirby came from? Or even the Armenian community? And where's the sales figures for the LGBT comics he speaks of, or even the GNs? Interestingly, he also says:

Because you sell graphic novels and books, you probably weren't affected by the bankruptcy of Diamond quite as much as other shops.

Not in the same sense. I mean, I never did open up accounts with Lunar or any of those. I would still order DC comics or a few Marvels, and I just gave them up. I just said, "After all this time, I can't order one or two comics from them." I didn't have the volume to order from them, so I didn't bother. And I get almost all my stuff from Ingram now. It used to be Baker and Taylor, but now I get it from Ingram, and I've actually just started buying a few things direct from various publishers. So I guess I have to go back to that. I mean, I've been at this long enough that I used to do that a lot.

Does he mean he hasn't had any luck selling modern DC/Marvel comics? Well at least we know how and why LGBT stories he speaks of eclipsed sales he had of those, in a way. But based on how leftism seems to be his motivation, that's why I can't give him credit for allegedly not relying only on the speculator market. Nor can I really appreciate when he brings up the following:

What do you think made you dial back your involvement with the business as a whole?

Some of it's the disillusionment, like I said: the commodification of some of the comics. I hate multiple covers, and all the variants, and all that kind of stuff. People didn't seem like they were necessarily reading them anymore. They were just accumulating them. I like to have people read.

We're kind of in a residential area. And the neighborhood just loves me, because I have children's books, children's graphic novels. I've been expanding that section all the time.

But does the neighborhood think it's a healthy example to be selling LGBT propaganda in the same store, considering some of it was pushed into school libraries? What if he wants children to read the propaganda, including anything as political as he's taken part in? As for variant covers, hey, I find it hugely dismaying too, how they've become such a norm in marketing, with the worst part being how any company that's specialized in them could be doing it in hopes it'll distract from political propaganda they're turning out. But Mr. Ketter, in all his leftist biases, doesn't seem to dwell on whether that's one of the problems, and that's why his argument rings hollow.

What are the big sellers in that area?

Amulet, the graphic novel series, Phoebe and the Unicorn. Amazingly, Calvin and Hobbes is still one of our bestsellers after all these years. 10 year old boys can't get enough of Calvin and Hobbe. We still sell a lot of Bone. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has picked up again quite a bit for us. I kind of missed the beginning of the trend, but they're doing well now.

You were one of the shops that first sold Eastman and Laird’s initial issue, weren’t you? You got in early on independent comic publishers.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. [And] I had Dave Sim in a couple of times, and he was always supportive. He wanted me to open up a Cerebus-only shop. He insisted that that would work really well: it'd be all Cerebus all the time. And I was like, "I don't think so.” I was there very early on with Elfquest. At the time, I was selling the collections that they were doing, and I had sold more than the entire B. Dalton's chain had sold at the time.

What's that? The same Dave Sim who was mostly shunned by the turn of the century because his work was considered misogynist? Gee, that sure is some "show of responsibility" right there. I thought some of the material I'd found in past years from Cerebus and such by Sim was embarrassingly bad, including an early "parody" of Red Sonja, and if that's the kind of "underground" fare Ketter considers okay, something's terribly wrong here indeed.

With this, the Comics Journal has really clarified what kind of left-wing news source they really are. I wouldn't buy at Mr. Ketter's store even if he offered tons of paperbacks and hardcovers for free if this is the kind of political advocacy he's going to uphold. And all the while, people like him turn their backs on the horror story in Iran, proving just how disrespectful they really are of the messages of the Marvel/DC comics of yesteryear. I don't know about the citizenry of Minnesota, but I will not buy at a specialty store run by somebody like Mr. Ketter. He's only giving the sales segment of comicdom a bad name, and making a case for why specialty stores may be outmoded at this point. What he's espousing is exactly what specialty store managers need to avoid if they don't want to tarnish the reputation of comic stores. And no sensible person should waste money on the CBDLF either.

When sci-fi artists were more creative

The Camden New Journal covered an exhibition at a London museum:

THEY are words an artist must just love to hear – there are no budget limitations and you create whatever you want, and on whatever scale you want. The only shackles are your imagination.

This isn’t a fantasy pitch from a collector or commissioner – just what comic book artists writing sci-fiction could enjoy as they sat at their drawing boards and worked out story lines.

And an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, in Well Street, Fitzrovia, illustrates how the creators of seminal sci-fi had carte blanche to let their imaginations run riot – no matter how big the idea.

Museum curator Hannah Whyte has played a key role putting together The Future Was Then.

“With comics, you are drawing on a page and your budget is essentially limitless – unlike TV and film, where the costs of creating a massive spaceship might be prohibitive,” she says.

“If you can draw it, you can make it happen.”

Sure, but when you consider what cancel culture of the past decade led to, that's why, unless improvements are to be found now, what good will this do from a modern perspective? Again, as I've noted before, the past won't provide lessons unless we recognize they apply to the present/future as well. Yet in the past decade, there were only so many Orwellian mindsets in the press who wouldn't acknowledge how censorship in creativity made a comeback, tragically enough, and when it affects our favorite creations that now have the misfortune of being corporate-owned, that's really sad.

So again, when is anybody going to admit the past decade underwent a terrible situation that could've been prevented if they wanted? For now, all they care about is sweeping that problem under the rug. We have to hope that now, the situation will improve, and 3 years ago, Queen Camilla did make a case why authors shouldn't be impeded by modern PC. The same goes for comics artists and writers. So let's hope they follow her advice, and be as creative as those of the 1950s were.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams dead at 68

NBC announced Scott Adams, once famous as cartoonist of the Dilbert comic strip, has finally died of prostate cancer at 68. The leftist press, however, has certainly spared no expense in tearing down on his image, even if there is valid grounds on which to take issue with his MO:

Scott Adams, the "Dilbert" creator whose cartoon was dropped by hundreds of newspapers after he made racist remarks, died months after revealing his diagnosis with prostate cancer, his family said on Tuesday.

Adams told fans in May last year that he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones.

He'd recently been in hospice care in Northern California.

"Unfortunately, this isn't good news," his ex-wife Shelly Miles told Adams' fans on YouTube on Tuesday. "He's not with us ... anymore."

In a statement he penned on Jan. 1 and shared by Miles on Tuesday, Adams said he hoped his work brought joy to "lots of lonely people."

"I had an amazing life," Adams said. "I gave it everything I had."

Well I don't deny Dilbert had its values, but did Adams make racist statements against Blacks? What I definitely did think at the time was that he was painting a whole segment of society with far too broad a brush as though they were all the same. His statement was dreadful and went after easy targets, when here, he had a big chance to take issue with the leftist education system and the indoctrination it resulted in. How does it help to merely take issue with the Black community itself as a whole? It does not. And there are other troubling things Adams did, if the following says anything:

If Adams had harbored any far-right theories, he had largely kept those thoughts to himself as his cartoon flourished in popularity.

But then Adams questioned the scope of the Holocaust in 2006 and compared women to "children and the mentally handicapped" in 2011.

Adams in 2023 said Black Americans are members of a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.”

What he said about the WW2 Holocaust and women was uncalled for, and when viewed in the context of those incidents, that's one more reason why his statements about Blacks were uncalled for as well. Did he believe that all research and documentation on the Holocaust was invalid? Did that even sum up what he thought of the Armenian Holocaust during WW1? Who knows? Adams had a chance to acknowledge poor education is a culprit in how people think, resulting in whole generations rejecting Martin Luther King's arguement that people should be judged by color of character, and not color of skin. Yet he took the easy way out, instead of proving he had the courage to confront the really challenging issues. He may have apologized for his statements since, but it's a horrible shame he didn't consider the damage he could end up doing before.

But perhaps the following news at Breitbart could explain why Adams took such a questionable approach and made stupid statements that weren't informed:

Adams had been publicly fighting a metastasized form of prostate cancer. Early reports indicate that the day before his passing, the former atheist converted to Christianity.

Could it be he screwed up in his approach to Blacks, women and the Holocaust because he lacked faith before? Good question. Of course, he's gone now, and so, it's now moot. His conversion to Christianity prior to his death is admirable, and it's to be hoped he showed remorse for what he said about the aforementioned groups, instead of taking issue with the education system, and whether it had anything to do with corrupting any particular segment of society. And Dilbert, for all we know, might regain better status and be admired by more people over time.

Update: Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart talks about how the MSM's smeared Adams soon after his passing.