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The New York Times, which has never carried regular comic strips, ran a feature last Friday called “See You in the Funny Papers.” Credit for bringing this to my attention goes to my well-read friend Morris.
The Times being the way it is, access to the article may be iffy, so here it is. Please note that the illustration above is of Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay, which has been featured twice already in this blog, here and here.
- October 13, 2006
Art Review | ‘Masters of American Comics’
See You in the Funny Papers
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
“Masters of American Comics” is a landmark and a pleasure. For many people, I suspect, it will be a revelation too.
Organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it made a splash, it has come east cut in size and split between the far-flung Newark and Jewish museums, in which it looks cramped. Art Spiegelman, one of the masters, who helped instigate the exhibition, felt so aggrieved by the circumstances that at nearly the 11th hour he pulled his work.
This was a pity, for the obvious reasons, and also because the Jewish Museum scrambled to fill the gap he left by appending a half-baked display of superhero comic artists, some great although in general reinforcing the exact cliché about comics just being schlock for kids that the exhibition was conceived to undo.
Good grief.
Still, the show shouldn’t be missed. It spotlights artists like Chris Ware and Gary Panter, amazing state-of-the-art talents and endearing in the tradition of all those shy, gifted kids who drew endlessly in their rooms when other kids wouldn’t play with them, dreaming about someday telling the world, “I told you so.”
Well, that day has come. Mr. Ware’s craftsmanship and supernatural ability to draw serve a singular, melancholy vision that mixes allusions to mechanical drawings, bygone comic artists, Charlie Brown and Superman (the caped crusader “as signifier of lost illusions,” as the show’s co-curator John Carlin, puts it). Jimmy Corrigan is one of Mr. Ware’s title characters and alter egos; the work is surpassingly sad and beautiful.
Mr. Panter, also a virtuoso, but rooted in punk, riffs on Goya and Picasso and Ukiyo-e prints and medieval illuminated manuscripts along with Dick Tracy and the Fantastic Four. His “Jimbo” comics turn Mr. Panter’s evangelical past (raised in Texas, a missionary in Belfast), with an evangelist’s stress on storytelling, into wild postapocalyptic fantasies. Forget Batman and Robin fantasy. Think Bosch and Blake.
But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. The show tracks a century of formal comics invention (in Newark, mostly early strips; at the Jewish Museum, different comic book incarnations) through what are meant to be mini-retrospectives. This means Elzie Crisler Segar’s “Thimble Theater,” which introduced Popeye (he was far, far darker than the spinach-addled television cartoon), and Milton Caniff’s superstylish “Terry and the Pirates.” It means Frank King’s languid “Gasoline Alley” and Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” which set the standard for hard-boiled grit and packed a visceral punch that came from tightly organized colors and shapes (Mr. Spiegelman calls it “blueprint Expressionism”) until Mr. Gould went kind of gaga and launched Tracy into outer space to fight bad guys on the moon in a rocket-powered garbage can.
“Peanuts” is also in the show, in Newark, where Mr. Spiegelman (he and I visited there the other day) pointed out how its creator, Charles M. Schulz, designed the strip to be readable on a small scale and in different formats: either laid out left to right or in a box.
The elegance of all great comics is that they capitalize on the medium’s shifting limitations. Mr. Schulz drew for the new tabloids. He invented a kind of graphic minimalism, which came, chronologically, to dovetail in the most unexpected way with art world minimalism. The warm-puppy side of Charlie Brown disguised the strip’s consistent psychological depth, until Mr. Schulz ran out of steam. Its simplicity belied the sophistication of his gossamer line.
As a commercial enterprise, Mr. Spiegelman added, “Peanuts” was what he and underground artists of the 1960’s and 70’s like R. Crumb thought they were rebelling against. Now, he said, he can see the strip’s finesse thanks to younger artists like Mr. Ware.
Mr. Schulz aside, comics aficionados will argue about which masters have been grievously excluded from the show. (Where’s Charles Burns? Daniel Clowes? Lynda Barry? Milt Gross? Jules Feiffer? Alex Raymond?) That’s a sure sign of the vitality of a field that has produced a slew of great artists over a century who haven’t had their due in museums.
American comics arose partly because of new color-printing technologies that fueled circulation wars between Hearst and Pulitzer. The comic strip’s first genius back then was Winsor McCay, a Midwesterner, born just after the Civil War, a sign painter who developed a vaudeville routine painting outdoors high above a paying crowd, and who also drew carnival posters.
Mr. McCay was as innovative an artist as America had at the turn of the 20th century. Working at The New York Herald, he early on drew a Sunday half-page feature called “Little Sammy Sneeze.” In it a toddler’s “ka-chow!” cracks the black-outline frame of the comic’s panel, as if it were a window, a joke exemplifying Mr. McCay’s fixation on the artifice of his craft.
His strip also conveyed a Midwesterner’s goggle-eyed perspective on the metropolis. “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which took over The Herald’s Sunday supplement cover in 1905, married something of Muybridge’s stop-action photography with Lewis Carroll to invent a phantasmagoric vision that guided a viewer’s eye seamlessly across differently shaped candied panels. They magically blended to make a collective cogent abstraction out of the page: the essence of comics art.
Did I mention that Mr. McCay, in his ultra-finicky way, drew like a dream? With “Nemo” he did other strips like “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” in which a top-hatted dandy dashes along a city street that suddenly curves up and in on itself, becoming a tunnel, from which the bewildered fop slides (from one panel into the next) onto the seat of a bus, as if down a rabbit hole, saying he must have been dreaming.
A slew of second-rate imitators and a few genuine pioneers followed Mr. McCay. One pioneer, the German artist Lyonel Feininger, briefly worked for The Chicago Tribune and also explored the medium’s formal devices. He turned the blank spaces between comic panels into architectural motifs, so that his pages had the look of late-19th-century buildings. And he drew changing landscapes that exploited the subtle color range of the early large-format Sunday supplements.
Mr. Feininger had what you might call a German sense of humor. In Newark his work is a little lusterless sandwiched between “Nemo” and George Herriman’s great “Krazy Kat,” about which there is not much to add to a long history of praise except that it looks as fresh and modern as ever.
All great art invents a universe unto itself, and Mr. Herriman even invented his own language (a crazy quilt of Spanish, Yiddish, English and slang). His slapstick strip, anticipating Beckett, unfolds in a desert landscape whose surrealism also beat Surrealists to the punch. Rooted in doodling, Mr. Herriman’s scratchy, elastic line revolutionized the art of comics, as did his canny psychologizing. You can see the influence throughout the show, particularly on Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine and Mr. Crumb’s “Zap” comics.
It’s too bad that both Mr. Kurtzman and Mr. Crumb are shortchanged at the Jewish Museum. Mr. Kurtzman altered not just the comics business, with his taboo-stomping Mad, but helped liberate a whole generation of rebellious teenagers. He deserves better than a Mad cover or two and a “Little Annie Fanny” spread from Playboy, the gig that marked his decline.
Where are his thumbnail sketches, his early short humor comics, which were seeds for Mad, and which were in Los Angeles? At least one of Mr. Kurtzman’s great war comics about Korea is here. “Corpse on the Imjin!” — eschewing gung-ho propaganda — turns hand-to-hand combat into pure visual poetry. It’s a model of economy and dark human truth and, above all, of how the best comic artists organize and pace drama and text across a page.
As for Mr. Crumb, he’s still the Picasso of comics: the unavoidable influence on all younger artists. His early drawings here, done with his brother Charles, are shockingly good. If he can be a little fastidious sometimes, he’s always ingenious and himself. The Jewish Museum cut out some of his racier works that had been in the exhibition in Los Angeles, lest they offend delicate visitors. Never mind the offense their exclusion does to the public’s intelligence and the show’s integrity.
I can’t forget Will Eisner, master of the comic sweatshop. The show includes one of Mr. Eisner’s drawings for a “splash,” or title, page of his “Spirit” strip, and the printed version of it, each of which has its own aura, and raises the issue central to comic art: What is an original? “The Spirit,” which had snappy cinematic ambitions, was full of vertiginous views of the big bad city. Mr. Eisner’s later career as a graphic novelist, a term he coined, led him toward maudlin stories ruminating on God, but before that, he set a standard for the industry.
And last but not least: Jack Kirby, whose “Fantastic Four,” “Captain America” and “Thor” crashed through Marvel Comics’ gaudy pages into the 1970’s. Their radicalism was plain to see. Being visual space busters, they have done more or less for the art of comics what Cubism did for painting.
Forgive me. Mr. Kirby doesn’t need Cubism to justify his work any more than the other masters here do. They’re all heroes of an American tradition based on creative pragmatism.
Superheroes, that is.
Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company