The Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian Part 6

At last! The long-promised, long-delayed, little-anticipated continuation of the Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian! It's been a while; if you want to catch up, here are Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The premise was inspired by a Facebook post in which I wrote:

"Sometimes I turn around real fast to see if I'm being followed by an older time-traveling version of myself. Of course, now I'll be expecting that move..."

These comics are silly spontaneous fun for me to write and draw, and some folks seem to enjoy 'em. Plus, they're all totally true to life, or will be assuming I invent a time machine and set out to meddle with my past dressed like Marty McFly in "Back to the Future 2."

Like all the best characters in all the best memoirs, the girl is a composite. If you're a woman who knew me between the ages of 13 and 19, and wonder if she's you, the answer is Yes.

* * *

I've been mulling over the idea of collecting the Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian in a 'zine, which is a deliberately home-spun comic printed, folded and stapled on the kitchen table. Nothing fancy--in fact, "fancy" is the antithesis of the 'zine aesthetic. Maybe a very small print run, signed-and-numbered limited edition, sold at a price that'd cover expenses. Maybe a little exclusive bonus material.

Any interest in something like that?

Winsor McCay

I've seen a few sites marking the 143rd birthday of cartoonist Winsor McCay today. Now, I've always thought there was something odd about wishing a dead person a happy birthday, and I don't remember any celebrations of McCay's 142nd or 141st, but for the man who's Number One on my personal "Greatest Cartoonists of All Time" list, that's all the excuse I need.

(Long-time readers may notice bits below cobbled together from very old posts. Forgive me. I'm on deadline, and figure if I already captured a thought once, why reivent the wheel?)

If you're a comics fan who's not familiar with McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, you owe it to yourself to get familiar. On a four-color canvas of enormous broadsheet pulp, McCay took his dreamy hero Nemo on the most lavishly illustrated and imaginative adventures in Sunday funnies history. I'm posting a few examples below, and even sizing them as large as I can gives just the merest hint of McCay's fine detail and draftsmanship.

Although I think these comics stand on their own in terms of art and storytelling, some historical perspective helps. McCay did Little Nemo between 1905 and 1914, then briefly revived it from 1924-27. The strip began very soon after the modern newspaper comic was invented (generally, though not uncontroversially, credited to The Yellow Kid in 1895), yet McCay was already doing some very sophisticated formal work. He played with panels, perspective, color--in the last example above, just look at his clever use of word balloons as graphic and narrative elements. If a modern critical darling were doing stuff like that today, he'd be hailed as a genius. McCay did it a century ago.

McCay was also a pioneering animator. In 1914, 14 years before Walt Disney's rubber-legged Steamboat Willie, McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur, a creature with volume, mass, and personality. Gertie breathed. As in his comics work, McCay was decades ahead of his time.

McCay used his Gertie movie as part of a live Vaudeville act in which he interacted with the dinosaur on the screen. She did tricks on command. At one point in the performance, McCay threw a pumpkin behind the screen that Gertie caught and ate on-screen. At the conclusion, McCay himself stepped into (behind) the screen and an animated version of the cartoonist took a ride on the beast. By all accounts, the performance was a sensation.

Until the advent of computers, virtually all animation was done on cels, transparent celluloid sheets onto which the characters were inked and painted. Artists only made multiple individual drawings for objects that moved--sometimes an entire figure, sometimes just an arm or mouth. Because cels are transparent, the animators only needed to create one background painting for each scene, on top of which they layered the cels and shot one frame of film. Then they swapped out the bits that moved and shot another frame. Using transparent cels was an enormous time-saver.

In 1914, they hadn't figured that out yet. For Gertie, Winsor McCay and a single assistant hand-drew both character and background in every frame. Every single frame. They redrew every rock, water ripple, and blade of grass thousands of time on 6 x 8-inch (15 x 20 cm) sheets of rice paper that were transparent enough to allow them to trace a master drawing underneath. Then McCay glued each sheet to a piece of cardboard so they all lined up, and shot them.




There are a few hundred original Gertie cels left. I have one.

I had no idea that any Gertie cels had survived until I saw a museum exhibition of the collection of Mark Cohen, a comics collector and agent (whose widow, Rosie McDaniel, I've been lucky enough to know in recent years). I was taking in Cohen's fine examples of artwork from Peanuts, Luann, Cathy and so on, when I turned a corner and saw Gertie--matted, framed and spotlit. As I remember it, I literally went weak at the knees. Gertie immediately shot to the top of both my Bucket List and Grail List. Years passed; although I had the money to buy a Gertie cel, I didn't think I deserved to have one until I was a real cartoonist. The first check I received for Mom's Cancer was my permission slip.

My cel appears at about the 2:37 mark in the clip above, as Gertie licks her lips after eating a tree trunk. In fact it appears twice, as McCay--no dummy--has Gertie lick her lips twice and re-uses the same drawings for each motion.

I really don't consider myself the owner of this Gertie. I'm just renting it from history for a while, and feel a sacred obligation to be its faithful steward. I must say: you know how you get used to things hanging on your wall and, after a while, just walk past them without a look or thought? Well, sometimes I do. But sometimes Gertie still makes me weak in the knees.

Highly Recommend Reading: Two books published by Peter Maresca that reproduce McCay's "Nemo" comics at their original enormous size: Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays, and Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays. More affordable is a terrific McCay bio by John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (hey, it's an Abrams book!).

Books and Spaceships

Empaneled. Coro got a high chair because he came in late.

I had a really nice time at the Sonoma County Book Festival this afternoon, particularly doing a panel on graphic novels with Paige Braddock, Brent Anderson and Justin Coro Kaufman, moderated by the graphic novel buyer for our local library system, Steve Alcorta. Unfortunately, Coro got caught in traffic driving up from San Francisco and showed up with only 10 minutes left in our hour, but it was a real pleasure to meet him and reconnect with Paige and Brent. We filled the room with around 45 people, said wise and witty things, and sold a few books. I especially appreciated seeing some friends and familiar faces turn up (Marion, Mike, Judy, Warren and Kristin and others). All that plus a knowledgeable moderator = a good panel.

I like talking comics with comics-making people. Letting other people listen in is just a bonus.

Paige, Brent, Me and Coro. My wife Karen got me my t-shirt when she visited the Library of Congress. It's a graphic of books on a shelf with a quote by Thomas Jefferson: "I cannot live without books." Seemed apt.

* * *

The Space Shuttle Endeavour was flown over northern California yesterday, on its way to permanent drydock at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. I didn't see it (too busy working for a living) but my two girls did. Here are a few of my favorite photos of the flight.

Splitting the towers of my favorite piece of civil engineering. I think the angle of this shot makes the Shuttle appear lower than it actually was, but still: cool.

The iconic Hollywood sign is OK, but the winner for me is the historic Griffith Observatory at the right.

The "Soarin' Over California" ride is one of the best attractions in the Disney California Adventure theme park across the way from Disneyland, so this photo of Endeavour . . . well, soarin' over Soarin' Over California . . . is hard to resist.

Endeavour flying over Vandenberg Air Force Base, capturing a big chunk of the history of flight in one image.

Not a great photo of the Shuttle (just above the ridge) but my favorite because it was snapped by my daughter Robin on the site of her archaeology dig.

I've read a few people bemoaning the end of the Shuttle era as a shameful surrender of American space presence. Someone online compared Endeavour's flyover to raising a white flag. I don't really see it that way.

The Shuttles were old, outdated, and deadly. They'd killed before and, had they continued flying, would have eventually killed again. Their mission as originally conceived--essentially as delivery trucks to space--turned out to be more expensive than promised, bad for science (the size of the Hubble Space Telescope was limited by the size of the Shuttle cargo bay), and in many ways just a bad idea. Turning routine spaceflight over to private companies seems like a pretty exciting and smart idea to me, and frees NASA to push other frontiers. Yeah, we've got a small gap here where we need to hitch rides from the Russians, but we had a similar gap between Apollo and the Shuttle that no one remembers now. Give it a couple of years: we'll be back, smarter and safer than before.

I look forward to seeing Space Shuttles in museums but am glad I'll never see one strapped to a rocket again. It's time.

Any Landing You Can Walk Away From

In addition to being a digital artist and cartoonist, Friend Of The Blog Jennifer, who sometimes comments here as "Namowal," is an experienced skydiver. Well, 75 jumps is more experienced than some and less experienced than others, but I'm sure she learned a lot from her latest jump in which she broke her arm and leg, and wound up in the hospital for more than a week.

Luckily, fortune's slings and arrows are mere fodder for a cartoonist. Jennifer has posted Part One of a harrowing yet funny comic describing her accident on her blog. You should go read that and then check back later for Part Two (EDITED later to add: Here's Part Two!). Jennifer's drawing of her left arm flopping uselessly in the wind as she plummets to earth will pucker every orifice you've got.

Namowal, take care and get better--and get jumping--soon!

* * *

I skydived a few times when I was in college 30 years ago. I think it was a different sport then. First, it was a lot more Bohemian and laid back. Second, instead of starting with a tandem jump (strapped to an experienced skydiver) at 10,000 feet, we started with a series of static-line jumps at 3000 feet. The jumpmaster assessed your form and landing, and you gradually worked your way up to pulling your own ripcord at higher altitudes. I never progressed past static line but had good form and landed well, except for the one time I had the wind at my back and plowed a furrow with my face that was later used to plant a half-acre of corn.

The school's instructor and jumpmaster, George, was a character. A Korean War paratrooper, George had a girlfriend half his age and undoubtedly first-hand experience with mind-altering substances, but took teaching and safety deadly seriously. Training was rigorous, and nobody got into the plane until George decided they were ready.

One cold morning, George and a couple of us were gathered around a fire blazing in a steel drum, which George periodically fueled with a squirt of gasoline from a 5-gallon can. We eyed him warily, and I think someone might've even asked if that was such a good idea, but George was cool. Suddenly, an arc of flame leaped up the stream of gasoline to the can and ignited it. Everyone scattered as if a grenade had been dropped--everyone but George, who calmly placed the can on the ground, put his foot over the spout, and stood there like Captain Morgan with flames licking at his boot and pants cuff until the fire was snuffed. That combination of reckless risk and calm crisis management is my enduring memory of him.

As I say, I only jumped a few times and probably wouldn't have done it again even if George hadn't died while skydiving in 1983. But that sealed it. First, George was my jumpmaster, I didn't know or trust another. Second, I figured if a split-second accident/mistake could take out a Zen Master with more than 3000 jumps in his log, I didn't stand a chance. One of the first real articles I wrote in my new job as a cub newspaper reporter was George's obit.

I figure there's enough real risk and thrill in life without me needing to manufacture it, but understand and respect--to a point--those who feel otherwise (that point being a family or real obligations to others, after which I think it's unnecessarily selfish). Ah, but to grasp the strut of a plane's wing, arch your back and step off into space . . . feel the canopy gently open overhead and see the ground rising slowly between your legs . . . now that's a memory to last a lifetime.

Few people are fortunate enough to have photographic documentation of the exact moment in their lives they were as cool as they were ever going to get. I do. Also, if your skydiving school isn't run out of a broken-down VW van, you're doing it wrong.

Thanks to WBZ's Jordan Rich

What a terrific time I had as a guest on the Jordan Rich Show, WBZ Boston, last night! I guess my host agreed, since I was originally scheduled to do 30 minutes and he asked me to stay on to fill the entire hour. Hard to believe how fast it flies.

It goes without saying that Jordan is a pro, but I was impressed again with how smoothly his show runs, how much research Jordan did to prepare (e.g., he read my blog!), and what a good conversationalist he is. You start talking to him and forget you're being broadcast on a 50,000-watt station that covers the eastern U.S. and Canada. I think what I appreciated most was Jordan referring to me a couple of times not just as a writer, cartoonist, etc., but as a "thinker." No one has ever accused me of that before. I liked it.

Unlike my previous appearance, we took a few phone calls this time: one from a woman who'd survived cancer and was still deeply emotional about her experience, another from a man who wanted my opinion on whether future humans might evolve to have wings like birds. I actually loved the latter question; if you just kind of take it on its own terms and roll with it, it's fun to ponder. Best of all, Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane called in (which Jim and I later agreed might be the first time we've ever had a voice-to-voice conversation after a few years of being Internet friends) to say some nice things about my work and ask Jordan and me our favorite "Star Trek" episodes (Jordan: "City on the Edge of Forever"; me: "Balance of Terror"). But it wasn't all "Star Trek." We also touched on the Space Race, optimism, pessimism, science fiction and pop culture as mirrors of society's hopes and fears, graphic medicine, and other topics you'd expect to come up if you invited me onto your major-market late-night radio talk show.

Many thanks to Jordan and his listeners--especially his callers, and especially especially Jim, who got me the gig a year ago in the first place. I lost count of how many I owe you. To quote James T. Kirk (albeit under different circumstances): "It was fun."

The Technicolor Time Machine

Having already waxed enthusiastically about the recovery of lost audio recordings from the 1880s, I could hardly let this pass: the restoration of what may may have been the first experimental color movie from 1902. So early!

This video explains the process invented by Edward Raymond Turner and patented by him in 1899. It's enormously clever and totally unlike later commercial color film processes, which left modern researchers with the same problem they faced with the old sound recordings: no way to play it back. The machines don't exist anymore (and good luck finding a Betamax videotape player in 2112). Also like the old sound recordings, digital techniques and technologies solved the problem.



There are so many things I love about this, I hardly know where to begin.

Because of Turner's color process, the red, blue and green break up at the edges of moving objects, giving the films a blurry, dreamy quality I really appreciate. Turner's inventiveness is astounding, his wheel of alternating color filters very smart. It again reminds me of the recovered sound story, with the same turn-of-the-century explosion of ideas explored by individual inventors in little shops around the world.

Watching these films is a bit like discovering a time machine, isn't it?

In fact, although I'm very happy to have been born precisely when I was, if you held a phaser to my back and forced me into a time machine I think I'd choose to land in 1890 or so. Movies, phonographs, light bulbs, telephones, automobiles, airplanes. Electricity in the home! What a couple of decades that must have been. Mr. Turner's color movies exemplified the era's spirit of fertile, creative, limitless invention. Turner died young (29) and his work, though developed further by others, was superseded and forgotten. As a representative of the 21st Century, I'm pleased to do Turner the honor of remembering it, and marvelling at it, again.

Dramatic recreation of me being forced into
a time machine and sent back to the 1890s.

Shilling

Got a couple of things coming up I want to mention, because if you can't shill yourself on your own blog there's hardly a point to having one:

On the night of Sept. 14/15, I'll be a returning guest on the Jordan Rich Show on Boston radio station WBZ, part of the CBS Radio Network heard from border to border, coast to coast and all the ships at sea. I'm currently scheduled to spend about a half hour talking comics and graphic medicine with Jordan at 2 a.m. Eastern/11 p.m. Pacific. If you're up late and in an area that doesn't broadcast it, you can listen in live online.

I did Jordan's program once before and had a great time. He's a very good host, and a good egg off the air as well. I don't know if we'll talk about it on the show, but Jordan asked me to contribute to his annual "For the Children" fundraising booklet, which he's done for 12 years to benefit Boston Children's Hospital. I put together a page distilling the optimism and inspiration of WHTTWOT that I think will fit in with the essays, poems, recipes, and other contributions Jordan collects from his guests, some of them quite well known. I'll share that page a little later in the year, when the booklet becomes available.

Then on Saturday Sept. 22 at 1 p.m., I'll be part of a panel on "Novel Storytelling: The Art of the Graphic Novel" at the Sonoma County Book Festival, Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa, Calif. Others on the panel will be terrific comic book artist Brent Anderson ("Astro City"), cartoonist Paige Braddock ("Jane's World"), and artist Justin "Coro" Kaufman (all kinds of stuff, including book covers and movies). I know Brent and Paige, and am looking forward to meeting Coro.

NOTE: our panel will be located a block off Courthouse Square at the Share Exchange, 531 Fifth Street. Because holding it where festival-goers will be gathered and might easily find it would be silly.

I like this festival, which I've attended as just a book lover. It's pretty low-key: booksellers, small publishers and self-publishers set up tables around the town's central plaza, with speakers and panels happening at different times and places. It's a neat regional event that draws visitors and participants from not just the county--which is disproportionately lousy with literary talent itself--but the greater San Francisco Bay Area. It's a nice place to meet some folks and sell some books.

* * *

There's a movie coming out later this month, "Looper," whose premise appears to be exactly the same as "The Adventures of Old Time-Traveling Brian" if old Brian were a mob hitman from the future and young Brian were assigned to kill him.



See?! Exactly the same! I think I'll sue.

Friday Frolic

It's the end of the week. You worked hard. You deserve this:

The Prodigal Pages Return, plus Armstrong

Eight pages of original artwork from Mom's Cancer that I haven't seen in nearly five years found their way back home today. These are the pages I loaned to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for their exhibition "LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel," which was probably the best collection of its type I've seen, covering a wide swath of comics history, creators and styles, from Lynd Ward in the Twenties to Eisner in the Fifties to Miller in the Eighties. And little ol' me in the Twenty-Aughts. 


And all professionally matted!

Karen and I attended the opening reception at the Rockwell Museum in November 2007 and had a terrific time. As I recall (and may recall incorrectly), LitGraphic wasn't originally intended to become a traveling exhibition but was so well received that the Rockwell folks decided to put it on the road. It subsequently went to five more museums: the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (where I was invited to speak at the opening), The Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, and the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute in New York. As I too-frequently joked, my drawings live a more exciting life than I do.

At the Norman Rockwell Museum in 2007 . . .

 

. . . and at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2009.



 

Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane put together this terrific video when he and "Captain Girlfriend" Nancy went to see LitGraphics at the Fitchburg Art Museum in 2011.

What a wonderful, heady, unexpected honor it's been! On the long list of things I wish I could tell Mom just to watch her shake her head and smile quietly like she knew it all along, having pages of her story exhibited in art museums is pretty close to the top. Martin Mahoney, Stephanie Plunkett, and everyone I've dealt with at the Rockwell Museum have been extremely gracious and professional, treating my little sheets of two-ply Bristol with the same care and respect they'd give a Van Gogh.

And now the Prodigal Pages have returned! While I'm glad they've had an adventure, I'm surprisingly happy to have them back. I may kill the fatted calf in their honor. Or at least grill a couple of burgers on the BBQ tonight.

* * *

I haven't written anything about Neil Armstrong because I didn't think I had anything original to add, except that the news made me the saddest I can remember being about the death of someone I didn't know.

Of course I'm sorry that the people who did know Armstrong have lost their spouse, father, friend, colleague--but honestly that's a small part of it. I'd be mourning the death of the First Man on the Moon no matter who it had been.

But thank goodness it was Armstrong, who turned out to be pretty much everything you'd want in an American hero. Brave, quiet, humble, quick to credit everyone but himself for his accomplishments. Some writers have observed that, with one or two exceptions, each pair of astronauts chosen to land on the Moon comprised (perhaps deliberately?) a warm, spontaneous, creative pilot working under a cool, methodical, unflappable commander. In essence, NASA manned every Lunar Module with a Kirk and a Spock, but put Spock in charge. Not to deny Armstrong an iota of humanity, he was a wonderful Spock.

Now, I love Buzz Aldrin. I'm glad we have Buzz Aldrin out there punching Moon-hoaxers' noses, dancing with the stars, and woodenly acting with Tina Fey. Buzz hasn't had anything to prove to me since 1969 and however he wants to enjoy the years since is all right with me (not that I haven't sometimes slapped my hand to my forehead and muttered "Oh, Buzz..."). But bless his heart, this is not something I'd want to see the First Man on the Moon doing:




Armstrong wasn't as reclusive as was widely perceived--he taught aeronautical engineering, did occasional speaking engagements, and cooperated with a good biography (First Man) of himself--but he didn't sign many autographs or speak often to the press. Comedian Robert Klein joked that Armstrong would've been set for life if his first words on the Moon had been "Coca-Cola!" but it evidently never occurred to him to cash in (with one blemish: he did a commercial for Chrysler in 1979, explaining that he wanted to support a troubled American auto company and sincerely admired their engineering). As much as I wish I'd had the chance to shake his hand and tell him what he meant to me, it seems even more fitting that he never gave me the opportunity.

Twelve men walked on the Moon; eight survive. They're all old now, the youngest born in 1935. As much as we might wish otherwise, we're going to lose them all soon. And not just them, but the thousands of colleagues who launched them a quarter million miles there and brought them safely home. The body of knowledge that's about to wink out of the world is enormous and irreplaceable. Someday we'll want it back, and it won't be as simple as pulling the old Saturn V blueprints out of the cabinet. An era passes.

Ten thousand years from now, the only person from my lifetime whose name every school kid will know will be Neil Armstrong. I feel as lucky to have witnessed him making history as if I'd sailed with Columbus or hiked with Lewis and Clark. It was a privilege.

Memento Mori

We first noticed this delicate little white flower blooming beside our front walkway when Mom died in 2005 (so long ago yet so recently!). We didn't plant it; don't know what it is. Every year since, it has faithfully blossomed just before her birthday: August 22. This year it did it again.

I don't believe in signs or messages sent from beyond. But if I did, this would be a really good one.

Happy Birthday, Mom. We're thinking about you.

Cul de Sac

In a recent Facebook note about cartoonist Richard Thompson’s decision to quit doing his comic strip “Cul de Sac,” I called it “the best comic strip being drawn today.” That's not praise I lavish lightly. I mean it. Now I aim to defend that opinion.

I’m not going to rage against Parkinson’s disease, which Richard has and is why he's quitting his 5-year-old strip (and was also the reason for the “Team Cul de Sac” fundraising book and art auction, to which I was honored to contribute a page). It’s an awful degenerative disease and it’s terrible that Richard is afflicted with it, and what more can be said? Nor do I have much to contribute to testimonials about what a swell guy Richard is because I don’t really know him. Everyone who does know him says he’s swell, and his peers in the National Cartoonists' Society named him their 2011 "Cartoonist of the Year," to which my second-hand opinion adds nothing.

Instead, I thought I’d explain why I think “Cul de Sac” is the best comic strip being drawn today. What I—someone who loves comics, studies comics, makes comics, and aspires to make better comics—see when I look at Richard’s.

I considered posting and dissecting some of his strips but quickly concluded that wouldn’t work, although I do a bit of it below. Which strips to pick? One mark of “Cul de Sac’s” excellence is that you could choose any dozen strips at random and find something admirable and teachable in nearly all of them. In fact, I simply did a Google Image search and chose the first 30 that popped up, from which I culled these examples. I confess that a recent post by Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon asking his readers to pick their favorites turned up some good ones and was a big help.

I love that borderless second panel of Alice running, her scarf blowing behind her. The first panel is a moment of self-recognition for me: you think your kid is going to be the next Olympic champion when all they really want to do is splash around in the wading pool. And the third panel is the twist: who you think your kids are versus who they actually are.

I have been this parent, although I like to think I always made time to push a swing.

Instead, I want to tell a story on my wife, Karen, which I hope she forgives because this is the perfect time to use it. Way back when “Calvin and Hobbes” was published daily, Karen looked over the top of the newspaper one morning and asked, “Is Bill Watterson a really good cartoonist?”

I assured her that he was one of the best, maybe an all-time great.

“I thought so,” she said. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

I sympathize. Sometimes it is hard to tell! The fact is, you don’t have to be a great artist to be a very successful cartoonist. There was a time you had to at least be a competent one, but those days gave way to valuing authentic authorial voices over skillful rendering. What a creator had to say became more important than how they said it. You can dress it up any way you want, and I strongly defend the proposition that a bad artist can still be a great cartoonist, but the fact remains that some simply can’t draw. Their work looks crude and simple, almost child-like.

Which is exactly how the work of the very best cartoonists can look, too.

How’s the reader supposed to tell?

I have also been this parent. Remembering how much I hated being embarrassed when I was a kid, I'm sometimes amazed by how much I enjoy dishing it out to my own children.

We've all had a kid stare at us like this, but I don't recall any cartoonist or comedian noting it before. Petey's bulbous head and wide eyes peeking over the seat in Panel 4 are the perfect punctuation. Even Mom is sneaking a peek. This situation is not improving.

When I look at “Cul de Sac,” I see the work of an artist who completed the Picassoesque loop from simplicity through mastery all the way back to (apparent) simplicity. Unlike unskilled artists who avoid portraying things they can’t draw (often hands and feet, and I’ve confessed my own challenges with cars), Richard can draw anything. An unskilled artist’s world is small, their settings constrained to the same shapeless couch, office cubicle, or unconvincing shrub. The “Cul de Sac” world is vast—limitless!—and always distilled to its essence so that the reader knows where they are without a wasted detail. His objects have volume and mass, shape and shadow. When his perspective is wonky, it’s wonky with a purpose.

Like they say, he works very hard to make it look so easy.

Beautiful art, costumes and expressions. How far apart can the universes of people living in the same house be? Alice's haunted gaze in Panel 4 slays me. This is one of my favorites.

Richard’s art is a bit of a throwback. Let’s spin that positively and call it “timeless.” He uses dip-pen nibs and ink, favoring the classic Hunt #101 Imperial. Ink-dipped nibs were predominantly used to draw newspaper comics from their invention until maybe the 1940s and ‘50s, when artists like Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”) and Walt Kelly (“Pogo”) made brushes cool. Brushes and nibs shared cartoonists’ affections (and of course many artists used both) for decades.

The Hunt #101

Both tools let an artist vary line width by bearing down or lightening pressure, creating lively lines with motion, mass, personality. Both also take time and practice to master. When you’re in the zone, the nib or brush becomes an extension of your brain. In recent years, more and more artists use technical pens, Staedtlers or Microns (basically permanent-ink felt-tips), or work digitally directly on the computer. Those are easier to control but, unless the artist is skilled and careful, the resulting line art can look uniform, sterile and dead. Pen guys like Richard and brush guys like me are increasingly considered dinosaurs.

Richard’s scritchy pen line is alive with nervous energy. It practically vibrates. It may look spontaneous and sloppy but in fact it’s quite thoughtful and disciplined. Confident. One way to tell: you never have to stop to figure out what something is or what’s going on. Richard would’ve fit right alongside the great Cliff Sterrett (“Polly and Her Pals”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) 70 years ago but shines like a lonely beacon of quirk and quality on the contemporary comics page.

So in the same way a carpenter might admire another woodworker’s fine dovetailing, I see a craftsman who knows how to use his tools.

I am always a sucker for an outer space gag, but the idea of drawing the garbage in orbit literally piling up overhead would not have occurred to me in a hundred years. This is one of those representations that looks easy and obvious until you realize you couldn't have done it yourself.

“Cul de Sac’s” characters have distinct personalities without descending to simple archetypes. They can’t be summed up in one word. Richard calls his protagonist, 4-year-old Alice, a “fireball.” She’s a creative, extroverted, anarchic narcissist. Something I once said about Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid, Greg Heffley, applies to Alice as well: she always tries to do the right thing, as long as it’s the right thing for her. Alice’s brother, 8-year-old Petey, is a neurotic, introspective oddball with a passion for making shoebox dioramas. Mom and Dad mean well but don’t seem entirely up to the challenge of wrangling these two kids, who’ll probably turn out all right anyway. Because most kids do. The strip’s deep supporting cast has its own quirks and foibles, none of them completely admirable but all clearly loved by Richard.

Building complex personalities day-by-day in a few tiny panels that take 10 seconds to read? That’s . . . hard to do. Most cartoonists don’t. Their characters are stereotypes—the lazy one, the grumpy one, the sarcastic one, the clumsy one—easy to define and plug into simple situations. Not in “Cul de Sac.”

"P.J. Piehole's" is funny. Petey's neurotic fear of being crushed by restaurant decor is funny. But the best part is his family's total indifference to his terror. That's a lot of funny (and a little bittersweetness) packed into four panels.

Reminds me of the "Calvin and Hobbes" gag in which Calvin's Dad explained how the world used to be in black and white until the 1930s. In this case, Dad tries to explain the science while Petey gets it wrong (does he believe what he says? I don't know!) and the best part: Mom buys in.

This is Alice's naive friend Dill in an homage to the classic comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," particularly a storyline in which Nemo's bed came to life and carried him away. Thompson is very aware of Nemo; Petey's favorite comic book is "Little Neuro," the adventures of a boy too afraid to do anything.




Little Nemo and his dream-time walking bed (McCay, 1905)

In my opinion, “Cul de Sac” meets the gold standard of relatability—that quality of telling you something you always knew in a way you’d never thought about it—primarily (I surmise) because Richard remembers what it was like to be a kid, turned loose in a neighborhood where every storm drain hides an underground world and a playground slide could be a portal to another dimension. He’s good at taking a surprising left turn that pivots on the perfectly chosen word, or tying up scattered threads of story in a perfectly composed little bow.

In sum, for me, “Cul de Sac” operates at a level of skill and ambition other cartoonists don’t often shoot for and some may not even comprehend. It’s smart, sweet but not saccharine, dark but not cynical, and artistic but not impenetrable. It’s reportedly carried in 250 newspapers, which is respectable but not spectacular. It should be in 10 times that number, and the fact that it isn’t is an indictment of something—I don’t know what. Clueless readers, tasteless editors, modern micro-attention spans, or the slow decline of newspapers.

It is the best comic strip being drawn today, and it will be until the last one runs on Sept. 23. All my best to Richard and his family, with thanks.

SOME LINKS:

Cul de Sac, the strip

Richard Thompson's Blog

A great interview with Tom Spurgeon in 2008

A great interview with Tom Spurgeon in 2010

Cooking and Housekeeping

My wife Karen doesn't eat gluten. Sometime I may write up a little post on the how and why of that, but for today it's enough to know that wheat-based products are usually off the menu at our house.

It's not as great a sacrifice as you might expect. Good corn- and rice-based substitutes exist for most products, such as pasta, and potatoes and rice fill a lot of gaps. Overall, the ban has made us better, more creative cooks. Still . . . when the wife's away, as she was for a business conference last night, the chef likes to play. With gluten.

My favorite gluteny (glutenous? gluttonous?) indulgence is scratch-made pizza and my favorite scratch-made pizza is a Margherita, whose classic ingredients are olive oil, sliced tomatoes (not tomato sauce), sliced mozzarella (not grated), and basil. Clean and simple.

Homemade dough is a piece of cake (heh!). Note that all the measurements below are eyeballed, not precise. For a small pizza, I start with about a cup of flour, a small spoonful of yeast (think 1 tsp), a big spoonful of sugar (think 1 Tbsp), a glug of olive oil or butter, a generous sprinkle of salt, then slowly add warm-hot water and mix/knead. You want the dough to ball up and just begin pulling away from the side of the bowl instead of sticking to it. Balance with more flour as needed. Too wet is better than too dry. Don't work too hard at it.

Set the bowl in a warm place (I float it in a hot water bath in the sink or a larger bowl) a few hours to let the dough rise. You can do the whole "punch it down, knead it and let it rise again" thing but I don't think it's necessary. Plop it out onto a floured board or counter and shape it into a crust. If it's sticky, keep sprinkling flour until it isn't. The ideal result has a smooth velvety rubbery texture and smells fantastic.

Simple ingredients: olive oil, sliced mozzarella, fresh basil from the garden, and sliced tomato (which could have come from our garden except we didn't happen to have any ripe last night). Why, it's practically health food!

Give the dough a light coating of olive oil, then layer on the tomatoes, basil and cheese. I add crushed garlic and a sprinkle of oregano. I also top it with a sprinkle of coarse salt (e.g., kosher or sea salt) so that the crust edge in particular comes out almost like a pretzel.

Assembled.

Get the oven as blazing hot as you can. I have used a pizza stone before but didn't find the results significantly better and the stone is hard to clean, so I don't bother. Pop it in, check it in 8 or 9 minutes, bake until the crust is golden and the cheese starts to brown. Finish with some Parmesan if you want.



Mmmmmm.

This is actually a pretty big pizza for one person, although I managed to plow through it all by myself last night. I think it'd be just right for two, or maybe a dinner and some leftovers for lunch the next day. It's very easy to make; also easy to clean up. Dough-rising time requires some forethought, but the actual time devoted to mixing, slicing, kneading and other hands-on labor is probably less than 20 minutes. Highly recommended!

* * *

"Housekeeping," by which I mean some thoughts on managing and tidying my Internet life.

In addition to my original "Mom's Cancer" website, which is now static and basically just directs people here, I maintain these here Fies Files, a personal Facebook page (yes I will be your friend), and a Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow Facebook fan page. I try to minimize duplication and overlap. For example, I usually only mention WHTTWOT reviews on the fan page, unless they're especially noteworthy. I use my personal Facebook page for chatty little stuff that doesn't merit full blog posts, which I like to regard as more polished mini-essays with a point. I don't always achieve that, but that's the ideal.

Did I just imply that Facebook is pointless? Perhaps I did.

I've noticed a couple of things. One is that the blog draws fewer visitors than it used to unless I post a link on Facebook telling everyone there's a new post. Then they flock. I infer that fewer people check a regular roster of bookmarked sites, and instead rely on Facebook to alert them to new content. That's interesting to me. Now when I sit down to write something, I not only have to decide if it's more appropriate for Facebook or The Fies Files, but whether it's worth a post on Facebook directing people to The Fies Files.

I've also noticed that fewer visitors are commenting on blog posts, preferring to leave notes on the Facebook posts that link to them. That's also interesting to me. Do you start on Facebook, come here to read the post, then go back to Facebook to comment on it? I appreciate a Facebook "Like," which I take to mean "I read it and liked it but don't really have much more to say about it." But I miss the conversation over here. Facebook is so ephemeral: here now, gone in six hours. By comparison, a blog post is freakin' Stonehenge.

Fascinating how we use technology, how the technology trains us to use it, and how that changes what we say to each other.

That's as deep as I get first thing in the morning.

Joe Kubert

A comic book artist named Joe Kubert died over the weekend at the age of 85. I wrote about Mr. Kubert almost exactly a year ago, in connection with a book he and Craig Yoe did on 3D comics, which Kubert helped invent in the '50s. In addition to his more than seven decades in comics (he got his first professional work as a young teen), Mr. Kubert founded and ran a well-respected school for comic arts since 1976, sharing his experience with generations of new talent.

I never met Mr. Kubert and have no special insight into the man and his work except to say that he was a very rare example of an artist whose skills continued to improve right up until the end. Clearly influenced by greats such as Alex Raymond and Burne Hogarth, he was good enough that he could have rested on his laurels for, oh, the past half century or so, but he never did. His work stayed fresh and evolved with the times, but was always supported by a rock-solid foundation of fine illustrative technique that's almost extinct today, to our loss. As much as I respect and admire the work of many veteran creators, I can't think of many I could honestly say did some of their best work, and continued to find work, in their eighties.

If you're interested in learning more about Joe Kubert and his prodigious contributions to comics, the best obits I've seen so far are by Mark Evanier and Tom Spurgeon. He was a great talent who never stopped trying to get better. That's the master's lesson for me.

As I posted this terrific drawing of Hawkman and Hawkwoman, I noticed it was dated last year, when Kubert was 83 or 84. This is just astonishingly good stuff at any age. Aside from the obviously great rendering, it's wonderfully composed (how the figures fill the page, overlap, balance and counter-balance, draw the eye from top left to bottom right, etc.). They don't make 'em like that anymore.