Archive for June 2010
It is rare that The Lady Typist makes secretarial mistakes, but it appears as though she ‘posted’ new entries when she thought she was saving them as ‘drafts.’ Dear, dear.
Please forgive her. She is often distracted, as she is learning how to use this new item called the “adding machine.”
Did you know that if you suffer a disabling injury, your employer must either reassign you to a job you can do or realign your job duties? If they don’t, it’s a violation of Federal law.
That’s the ADA, baby. Americans With Disabilities Act. Had I known about it sooner, I’d not be…well, blogging about it today. See, I lost my job because of a disability-related issue. Returning to work after a serious injury, I requested a lighter workload. Not only was that denied me, but I was scolded for being late with a project that was due while I was out on disability. When I contested my employers, they fired me. Had I only known that the law was on my side!
But I forgave myself: When you’re recovering, you’re thinking less about your civil rights than you are about your health. So you don’t know about all the help that’s out there, all the people and resources available to you. That’s why I write today. If you have a disability, learn the law. Start here, at the website for the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Then go to BloggersUnite, the social networking site for bloggers. They’re holding an event on July 24 to ask bloggers and writers to raise awareness. It’s called People First: Empowering People With Disabilities. The organizers surely know that a lot of us are trying to blog for a living, me included. Three years ago, I had an injury to my spinal nerves. Although I have healed almost completely, my gait was affected, and I can’t do any physical job, ever again—which is what I used to do when times were tough. So I work from home as a freelance writer. Like many, I love what I do, but I often work in isolation, and have to do everything I can to get out in my community.
I don’t dislike my life, but I often wonder what it would have been like had I only known the law.
That’s my contribution today. Thank you for listening. Now, back to Winsor McCay!
McCay was drawing at a time when visual artists of all types were using new techniques in study of movement. One was English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose series of photos examining locomotion were very famous. Among them are “the horse photos,” which address the question of whether the horse ever takes all four hooves off the ground while galloping (no, I’m not telling you, you can look it up–or squint at the thumbnail below). This body of work is considered to be “the visual dictionary of human and animal forms in action,” according to Beaumont Newhall in History of Photography.
Another innovator was Thomas Edison, who in 1894 produced a black-and-white documentary short-film showing his assistant, Fred Ott, in the throes of a sneeze.
I hadn’t seen “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” since college. I was reminded of it when I came across Little Sammy Sneeze (1904-05), a fine example of McCay’s stunning talent in capturing facial expressions and body movement. Whether it’s a sneeze or a windblown Rarebit Fiend trying to keep his balance, McCay applies the study of locomotion to serve the story. That should rank his work right alongside that of Muybridge and Edison.
Here are links to the film, the photo series, and to the Sunday Books compilation of Little Sammy Sneeze.
Today’s topic is the cover image of Checker Books’ Winsor McCay Early Works VI.
I’ll just say it: The book is inferior. I bought it only because it contained what I suspected were McCay’s minor works. Artists’ minor works are either tough to find or a pain to access, even with public domain. Little Nemo, no problem. Pie Nerd, meh. Can of Baked Beans Hugging Old Lady, not so common.
Why I Complain
I am a professional editor. I have dedicated my career to the presentation of word and image, and have seen little money in return. But I do have *sniff sniff* principles. And so I must speak up.
The Good: The book does collect, in one edition, a wide variety of work.
The Bad and the Ugly: The paper reflects light away from pictures that are already so faded that one can’t absorb them easily. The dimensions of the book (10.1 x 6.7 inches) do not serve the breadth and fluidity of the cartoons (McCay needs to breathe!). There was no evident attempt to repair, resize, or restore images or type that were fuzzy or illegible, e.g., no footnotes reproducing hard-to-read balloon text. Introductions to the chapters and notes about specific works were so brief as to be confusing.
This book was clearly slapped together. In the field of comics, poorly constructed books are high crimes and misdemeanors, especially if the victims in question are masters of the form.
The Police Blotter
Crime #1.
Checker’s cover image shows a group of men waiting in the entranceway to a talent agency. There’s nothing special about the illustration, no hint to the book’s meaning or content. The original image, found on page 56 of John Canemaker’s McCay biography (2005), includes William Shakespeare. Okay, so now we know: McCay was a social satirist. Get the joke? “If Shakespeare were alive today…” But Checker cropped out the joke. Here’s their cover:
And here is the Canemaker (squeezed for display purposes) bio reproduction.
Crime #2
There’s no reference to the cover image on the copyright page, or any other front-of-book or back-of-book page. I’m a comics nerd, I want to know where the cartoon’s from, especially since the image is not within the book. I got the answer from Mr. Canemaker: ‘Life magazine, August 11, year unknown. A pen-and-ink wash. Series depicting famous people returning to earth.’ Compare this with the copyright page (sorry, a tad blurry, cat sat on scanner) for Will Eisner’s Invisible People. Now that’s provenance!
Crime #3
It’s not uncommon to use a part of an image to front a book. But the image has to have thematic verity. It has to support the content of the book. Will Eisner does it to fine effect on, for example, the cover of Invisible People (below). An aerial view of a crowd of people, backs to us, drawn in black and white, serves to emphasize the book’s themes of loneliness and isolation. We’re not with the crowd, we’re very much apart from it. It’s a signal as to what’s inside. Early Works’ cover art not only is confusing, but isn’t even relevant to the content, which focuses on newspaper cartoons (and not magazines). It’s distracting, as well. I find I’m obsessed with the lower left part of the picture. It shows part of an arm, and I want to know whose arm it is.
Misdemeanor #1
If Editorial, Marketing, Art and Production had professionally communicated with one another, this product would not have seen the light of day. Who signed off on the pages? Who overruled whom? Where was the disconnect?
Misdemeanor #2
The company evidently had not examined its capacity, both human and mechanical, for producing pages of quality.
Misdemeanor #3
The book’s perfect binding is hard to open at 200 or so pages, and you have to crack the binding for good visibility. Not a good idea, with glue. Production should have pushed for a better alternative. There’s no real gutter. Your eye is searching on a white horizon for some, any, boundary.
Misdemeanor #4
Substandard design doesn’t show much respect for the reader: “Here, we’ll just crop the crap out of this image thinking you won’t know or care.”
Mitigating Factors
Listen, I know we live in the 21st century, an era in which the mild, wry humor of McCay passes for Lucian of Samosata when the Kardashians are practicing bikini art. I know publishing is tough. But that is no excuse for literally erasing McCay’s wit.
I also know the quirks of publishing. I understand how bad books make it to print. My last job, which I took to make ends meet, was for a publisher that prized speed over quality. I had a tiny budget and an insane production schedule. You can’t create good books that way. Eventually, I left, partly because it was hard to do my best with coworkers who didn’t care. So I know that…
…somewhere along the line, someone has to care.
Ah, well. Because I am a kind and merciful person, I will forgive Checker, in the spirit of “these things happen.”
…this time.
For all my crabbing about his observations of cartoonists’ productivity (see “Wherever Did They Find the Time?”), I must thank Mr. De Haven for introducing me to the golden age of American newspaper comics. Until I read his 1985 novel Funny Papers, in which I met his sketch-artist-turned-star-cartoonist Georgie Wreckage, I didn’t think a whole lot about turn-of-the-century cartoonists (Funny Papers is inspired by the life of R.F. Outcault, father of The Yellow Kid, a strip that appeared in The New York World in 1895). Weaned on Wacky Packs, Weirdo, MAD, and Raw, I thought the era’s output literally ’19th century,’ with a sensibility and humor very unlike my own. I was a true child of the 1970s–and a precocious little brat, at that; on an average day, you could find the tween me reading something like Zippy the Pinhead while Patti Smith sang ‘Pissfactory’ in the background. Who cared about Winsor McCay? He had nothing to do with people I was reading. (Later, of course, I would realize how wrong I was on that score.)
Plus there was my aforementioned ISSUE with comics nerds, a group that any reader of this blog knows I felt I did not belong to, and which I studiously avoided. My aversion grew worse in college. There I discovered that if I mentioned my interest in comics, I’d get trapped by the keg with someone who would NOT STOP TALKING about inking and overlays and plates and toppers. To get the the comics nerds off my back, I had to tell them that my favorite strip was Dondi.
Fast forward to 1987: I’m a budding journalist living in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side that looks like something out of Midnight Cowboy. My haunts are the Strand Bookstore, St. Mark’s Comics, a neighborhood bar and performance space called King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, and this place called El Cibao, where this Boston Irish lass consumes massive amounts of fritos verdes and cafe con leche and develops her lifelong addiction to latina comida. I am exploring the culture of a city that is not my own, but which is soon to feel very much like home.
Okay, back to the past tense. (I hate the historical present, it reminds me of a Ken Burns documentary.) One day, while browsing in a bookstore on St. Mark’s Place, I came upon Funny Papers. In a moment, 1987 became 1897. I bought the book that day and finished it that afternoon. The book, which has many scenes set on the Lower East Side, changed my view of the city greatly. Walking Manhattan’s streets, I started seeing the past in the present and the fiction in real-life. When I went down Lafayette Street, I saw not only the Puck Building but the Penman’s Club, where the young Georgie Wreckage sought out the company of top-tier illustrators and cartoonists. From there it was only a short hop to Lower Sawdust Street and the boardinghouse where the vaudevillians lived: “Mrs. Bennett’s for Quality People,” read the sign. I knew that in her rooms resided the Irish tenor, the Metal Eater, the Female Hercules, and the Human Lizard.
…the whole book was like that for me. I was ruined. Ruined, I tell you.
###
In posts to come I’ll talk more about the specifics of Funny Papers and of the other two books in the Funny Papers trilogy, Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies (1996) and Dugan Under Ground (2001). Note: Center thumbnail from earlier issue.
“Wherever Did They Find the Time?”
Posted on: June 21, 2010
In the book Masters of American Comics, (Yale University Press, 2005), Tom De Haven, comics chronicler and author of the Funny Papers trilogy, praises the prolificacy of the premier cartoonists of McCay’s era. He marvels at how McCay and his peers “could turn out daily and Sunday strips and often separate Sunday topper strips…but still manage to make it to the racetrack, dance the rumba, carouse with movie stars, chase showgirls, even trek off to Monhegan Island in the summer and paint seascapes,” even though “a surprising number” did not employ studio assistants or ghost artists. How did they do it?
Hell, I can answer that:
Because there was some woman at home doing all the work.
Wife or servant, someone was doing the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, leaving the creator free to create.
Listen, I do acknowledge the extent of McCay’s productivity, for in addition to “Nemo,” he was also cranking out “Rarebit Fiend” (1904-1911) and things like “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” (1905-1910), among other creations. I also know how laborious it can be to put together a strip.
But, come on, there was a woman behind that man! Maude, for one. Who, in turn, was surely supervising a maid or cook or charwoman. Can you imagine how little McCay would get done if he’d contributed to the household work at that time? Ahem: It may surprise you to know I have an answer. Check out Stephen Mintz’s article for Digital History Online, which offers us a glimpse of laundry day for women of McCay’s time.
“On Sunday evenings, a housewife soaked clothing in tubs of warm water. When she woke up the next morning, she had to scrub the laundry on a rough washboard and rub it with soap made from lye, which severely irritated her hands. Next, she placed the laundry in big vats of boiling water and stirred the clothes about with a long pole to prevent the clothes from developing yellow spots. Then she lifted the clothes out of the vats with a washstick, rinsed the clothes twice, once in plain water and once with bluing, wrung the clothes out and hung them out to dry. At this point, clothes would be pressed with heavy flatirons and collars would be stiffened with starch.”
Can you imagine! You should see the descriptions of carpet cleaning…! What misery, for the $182 per year ($3.50 a week), that maids and charwomen and cooks earned then. No surprise that even families who could barely afford servants had them. By the way, in his heyday McCay earned between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, according to his biographer, John Canemaker.
For more on this topic, you might also consult:
Never Done: A History of American Housework, by Susan Strasser; and Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930, by Margaret-Lynch Brennan
Comics Nerd? Not Me!
Posted on: June 21, 2010
Oh, no—if life imitates art imitates life…
It was with some horror that I recently discovered that the “The Simpsons” icky Comics Book Guy blogs about comics. He took it up after his store, Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop, was put out of business by a rival. A fat, balding, middle-aged guy with a ponytail and clothing that doesn’t fit, CBG is the stereotype of a comics nerd. And if we are to believe creator Matt Groening, CBG is proof positive that at least one stereotype has a basis in reality. Groening told TV Guide in 2000 that his fans tell him, “ ‘I know who you based that comic-book guy on. It’s that comic-book guy right down the block.’ And I have to tell them, ‘No, it’s every comic-bookstore guy in America.’ ”
So true, so true. With the exception of the artsy-fartsy places in Cambridge and Boston I go to (think of Coolsville, the store that put the toy-lovin’ CBG out of business), I really don’t like to go into comics stores. Frequently I am the only woman, which makes me feel weird. Then there are the reactions of the male patrons. When they see a woman, their body language changes; they shift and squint and hunch over their comics books as though they’re looking at porn (which, in some cases, they are).
CBG, you make me cringe. How may I count the ways? Well, you probably smell of B.O. and something fried. You only hooked up with your Internet wife because you’re more comfortable with pixels than with people. And you likely would not have dated schoolteacher Edna Krabappel had she not been so lonely she’d have dated an android herself and lived in an actual dungeon–merely to get a ring on her finger.
Finally, CBG, you are why I never expected to blog about comics. Recently, when a friend of mine recently asked me why I didn’t blog, I told her I didn’t know if I had a passion for one topic that was strong enough.
“What about comics?”
I said, without hesitation, “No!”
“Why? You love comics.”
“I do, but I’m not, like, a comics nerd,” I said, thinking of CBG. Please! I am a fortysomething woman.
She shook her head. Can’t tell me a thing, I know.
That night, as I was walking home, I realized that the evidence was stacked against me–much of it on my bookshelf.
- Having raided my older siblings’ comics, by the age of 11 I was as familiar with Zap Comix as I was with Betty and Veronica, and knew that R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat was a take on TV’s Felix the Cat (whose animator, Otto Messmer, was greatly influenced by McCay)
- One of my favorite childhood TV shows, “The International Festival of Animation” (hosted by Jean Marsh), focused heavily on the transformation of print into moving images
- When I first saw “The Simpsons,” I said, “Where’s the rabbit?”
- I know it’s pronounced GRAY-ning and not GROAN-ing
- Samples from my bookshelf include loads of Art Spiegelman stuff, from Maus to the September 24, 2001 black-on-black cover he did for The New Yorker after 9/11; Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth; pretty much everything the Amazing Alison Bechdel has ever published, from the early Dykes to Watch Out For to her award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home; the Luba trilogy (thank you, Gilbert Hernandez!); Lynda Barry’s The Greatest Marlys, which I wish had been around when I was in middle school; and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, a work I had the pleasure of discussing with the author
- I’ve got a signed illustration of Bill the Cat drawn just for me by Bloom County creator Berke Breathed, done when I interviewed him for my college paper ca 1984
- I have dedicated the premier art display space in my home (i.e., the white shelf above the brown chair that the cat has torn up and slimed) to the two-foot high volume of Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press edition of Little Nemo: So Many Splendid Sundays, a book you’ll hear a lot about in this blog
Yup, I guess I’m a comics nerd. Blogging, here I come!
Your Chariot Is Waiting
Posted on: June 17, 2010
It’s been more than a century since Winsor McCay published his first comic strip, but his name keeps cropping up in the papers.
How’s that for longevity?
The most recent piece of news came April 26, when Fantagraphics Books, a longtime publisher of McCay’s works, announced an online partnership with Rosebud Archives, an image bank that owns some of McCay’s print creations. As part of the deal, Rosebud—whose mission is to “celebrate the cultural heritage of the cartoon and graphic arts [through] preservation, scholarship, restoration, quality reproductions,” will make all of its content available on the Fantagraphics site.
And I couldn’t think of a better way to launch this blog. Since the day I first saw McCay’s drawings, I was transfixed, resolving to find some way to promote the work of this superb draftsman, social satirist, and master of the comics form. In the weeks to come, I’ll share more about myself and my mission. Look to this space Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for more news about Winsor McCay and the golden age of newspaper comics.
So it’s off to Slumberland! Make haste! Our chariot awaits!
The Lady Typist
Destination Slumberland 
Why Winsor McCay?
Posted by: winsormccay on: June 20, 2010
In a phrase: Pie Nerd. The very first McCay cartoon I ever saw, “Pieless Boston,” depicted his imaginings of the fallout of the Boston pie bakers’ strike. (The strike was in May, 1904, which tells me that the cartoon probably appeared in the New York Evening Telegram, where McCay was publishing at the time). A central image is of a long-haired, ahem, pie-faced little boy in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. There’s no way through pen and ink that McCay can transmit the reedy, high-pitched and overly enunciated speech of the High Nerd, but I sure hear it in the text of the voice balloon: “For pastry I have a decided appetency, in fact I might remark that my predilection for the flakey felicity is evidenced by my ethnological and facial characteristics. But until the conflict between labor and capital is adjudicated, I shall eschew rather than masticate my favorite dessert.”
How could I not fall in love with this cartoonist? Quickly I scanned the other images in the panel, the Bostonian in me delighted by such other illustrations as the Fanny Farmer-like character hugging a tin of baked beans and moaning, “Thank goodness I have you left!”
McCay can only have been inspired by articles treating the loss of pastry as subordinate to the loss of 600 jobs, as in this story from the May 5 New York Times (free, downloadable PDF here). Under the headline, “PIE FAMINE SMITES BOSTON,” the NYT fairly gasps, “[A] diminution in the supply of pie [has compelled restaurants] to strike this item from the bill of fare.”
Gawh!
Mr. McCay, you had me at “Pieless Boston.” I put the debit card through for Checker Publishing’s Winsor McCay Early Works VI and set out on my journey.
I had yet to meet Little Nemo.