Category Archives: Graphic Novel Reviews

August 22, 2023 · 3:30 pm

Bill Griffith Interview: Talking About Nancy and THREE ROCKS

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy. Bill Griffith. Abrams. New York. 272 pp. $24.99

❗Bill Griffith Talks About Nancy Comics: THREE ROCKS Help Explain it All❗

It goes without saying that Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is a highly influential comic strip. It is beyond iconic. That is the starting point. Bill Griffith, known for his own legendary comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, runs with one of comics scholars favorite subjects and reaches great heights with his new graphic novel, Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy (Abrams, available as of 29 August 2023). Mr. Griffith doesn’t have to come out and say he was “influenced” by Nancy. I can see how Nancy makes it way into Zippy in subtle and uncanny ways. One thing to keep in mind about Bill Griffith is that he came into cartooning through the back door of fine art painting and is more ready to speak about artistic influence via painting masters like Reginald Marsh and Edward Hopper. However, at the end of the day, it’s Bill Griffith who is uniquely qualified to talk about the often misunderstood Nancy phenomenon.

The curious case of Aunt Fritzi.

Griffith chatted with me about how his Zippy character is a surreal entity operating in the real world. If Zippy were frolicking in his own surreal world, that would be too much of a good thing. “The two would cancel each other out!” Griffith is quick to point out. But I’ll come back to that. The point is that Bill Griffith knows his stuff and he was compelled to set the record straight on one of the most celebrated, and enigmatic, cartoonists to grace the page.

Bill Griffith and me.

I was in New York and arranged to meet with Bill Griffith to discuss his new book. I took a train to Connecticut, reading an advance copy of Bill’s new book, and then, just as a ferocious summer rain had struck, I was picked up from the station by the master cartoonist himself. Conversation was easy and relaxed. Something led to talk about life in downtown New York. I mentioned the concrete steps to an Airbnb that were more painful to climb that one might expect. Bill readily agreed and it reminded him of concrete steps he had to confront himself. At one point, Bill talked about his wife, the cartoonist Diane Noomin, who passed away about one year ago. Bill created a comic book in her honor, The Buildings Are Barking. I was there to focus on the Bushmiller book. After what seemed like endless winding roads, with torrential rain casting foreboding shadows, we reached the studio which looked to me like a idyllic cottage out of Lord of the Rings.

The paper airplane incident.

From my hotel window back in Manhattan, I had a glorious view of the Empire State Building with the Chrysler Building in the background. I couldn’t help but think of the many vivid scenes in Three Rocks that depict moments in Ernie Bushmiller’s career, like the time he rented office space in the Chrysler Building with some other cartoonists. The guys were throwing paper airplanes out the window and one of them actually managed to hit a police officer, over a thousand feet below, who promptly unfolded the plane to discover the owner of the stationary. What could have been an awkward situation was quickly resolved after the cartoonists created cartoons for the awestruck officer. It is these moments that are the book’s lifeblood: cartoonists as superstars strutting about and giving the public what they want.

“Life is a messy affair. Very little of it is under our control. But not for Ernie Bushmiller. All he needed was a fence, a tree, a sidewalk . . . and three rocks.”

— from the Preface to Three Rocks by Bill Griffith

The origins of THREE ROCKS.

Ernie Bushmiller not only gave the public what they wanted but, like George Herriman and Winsor McCay, elevated the medium, taking it in new directions. Did Bushmiller always know where he was going as he blazed new trails? Maybe and maybe not: at least, it is certain, Bushmiller knew he was onto something. It was during our interview that Bill laid out in one observation much of what is going on in this book. It was during a visit to a Bushmiller comic art show at the Cartoon Art Museum in Rye Brook, New York, in 1990. This was a museum run by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker. “It was in Rye Brook that I saw a sculptural display of the Three Rocks, perfectly hemispherical, and made out of fiberglass looking like they just came out of a Nancy strip. They were plopped onto a perfect square of Astro Turf, and all under glass. I lusted after them. The idea that the Three Rocks had this totemic power never left me. Following this visit, I did many Zippy strips in which Zippy encounters and speaks with the Three Rocks. So, I’d say this experience planted the idea of a book devoted to Ernie Bushmiller in my fevered brain, to await further inspiration a few decades later.”

A Zippy the Pinhead comic strip on The Three Rocks.

Griffith goes on to share that, like many kids, he was devoted to comics. “I did read the Sunday newspaper Nancy page as a 5-year-old growing up in Brooklyn, not so much for the characters or the gags, but because the lettering was so easy to read–and didn’t contain any punctuation. You could say Nancy helped me to learn how to read.” And here we go deeper. Nancy was all about “reading.” Once it fully blossomed, it was not just a comic strip. Ultimately, Nancy is a comic strip about comic strips. If that concept seems too contemporary for something dating back to 1922, this graphic novel clears all of that up. The notion that something is “meta” is not exactly new; nor is something being “surreal” a new idea. At the time, what Bushmiller developed with Nancy was revolutionary and, as fans will tell you, at its best, it is timeless and golden. Nancy was, and still is, the gold standard in comics.

Pursuit of perfection, of pure comics.

Griffith takes the reader on a magical mystery tour, beautifully juggling the need to entertain with the need to explain. Essentially, Griffith’s book is a work of comics about another work of comics that is about comics. A seemingly perfect cerebral cul-de-sac worthy of the best rants from Zippy the Pinhead. Ah, but there is plenty of method to this madness–that’s the whole point. This is the story of an exceptionally ambitious cartoonist who kept paring down and refining to the point where he basically reached the essence of comics. In later years, this pursuit of perfection would drive his assistants to the brink. That’s what is going on here. Nancy became the perfect model for what can be done in the comics medium. And all that follows refers back to Nancy.

Nancy collides with the real world.

Nancy comic strip, early 1960s.

Griffith begins with a process to demystify, to reveal the nuts and bolts of the cartoonist’s trade, and the never-ending challenge to connect with the reader. “When someone goes to a museum to see a Picasso and they don’t understand it, they don’t blame the painter. But when they don’t understand a comic strip, they do blame the cartoonist because people feel it’s the job of the cartoonist to make it an easy delivery. Zippy never did that. I always asked my readers to meet me halfway. Bushmiller is a great example of someone whose career follows the whole phenomena of comics in America. When he took over the Fritzi comic strip in 1925, he was 19 years-old. There had been 25 years of comics before that. But the cartoonists that were in the bullpen, acting as Ernie’s mentors at The New York World, they went back to the early 1900s.

Young Ernie learns his trade at the New York World, circa 1919.

There’s a scene in my book with Ernie, circa 1919, who is a copy boy and is eager to learn. One cartoonist befriends him and gives him the task of erasing his pencil marks. It’s a symbolic moment that I depict. He quickly picked up his skills. Very quickly, he began to take on more responsibilities like blacking in areas and even lettering. He learned by doing. Once he got past the gatekeeper at the newspaper, he started to advance. The ideas for the comic strips, that had to come from within him. All I can figure out is that, and I see it in my own students, is that some people speak the language of comics and some don’t. The ones that do speak the language, that’s because they like reading and like looking at comics from an early age. They become fluent in it, even if they can’t quite yet articulate a complex version of it–but they have the vocabulary and the structure because they’ve absorbed it from reading a lot of comics.”

Ernie Bushmiller and Reginald Marsh.

Ultimately, Griffith returns to the process to remystify, such is the power of art and of comics at its best. Imagine three artists lined up for comparison: Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, and Ernie Bushmiller. Griffith makes the case for including Bushmiller along with two of America’s greatest painters. The connection is the New York art world, the circles involved with learning how to draw and such things. Bushmiller went to the same art school attended by Hopper and so he absorbed similar sensibilities. In fact, Bushmiller and Marsh shared some time together as they both drew from life at burlesque shows. Griffith points out that the Sunday full pages devoted to Nancy had some extra space at the top, just in case the newspaper needed it, and it was here that Bushmiller would include pure art, little vignettes of Nancy, and it held that same charge of stillness that Griffith enjoyed in Hopper paintings.

The stillness of Hopper.

Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, as a surrealist entity, is plenty of wacky fun. However, as Art Spiegelman pointed out to Griffith early in the development of Zippy, the idea of being in an elevator with Zippy was disturbing at best let alone for any longer duration. Zippy‘s zany humor needed a foil, which led to Griffith bringing in a new character, Griffy, an alter ego, who could act as a straight man and corral all the chaos. Zippy and Griffy would become a team, like the comedy act of Abbot and Costello. It is these sort of artistic choices that ultimately led to the world of Zippy just as a similar process of artistic choices ultimately led to the world of Nancy. It is all these choices, involving paring down elements and refining text, that leads to the best work. If for no other reason, Three Rocks is a must-read as a fun textbook on the art of comics. Lucky for readers, it is that and more: a rollicking behind-the-scenes journey into the creative spirit; and a way to get some answers to the meaning of life.

My interview with Bill Griffith is now one of my most cherished experiences coming from my comics journalism. It was delightful and magical. We chatted and then I began to record and finally I did some video. So, this video is brief but brings home a lot of what led to this very special book. In the end, any creative work worth its salt comes back to the creator. Griffith found a way, or discovered a process, that invited him to have Nancy refer back to everything.

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August 21, 2023 · 2:50 pm

THREE ROCKS by Bill Griffith graphic novel review

Nancy, the very definition of a comic strip.

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy. Bill Griffith. Abrams. New York. 272 pp. $24.99

Nancy and Sluggo are such recognizable characters that the two instantly represent the concept of “comics” throughout the world. As the author of this graphic novel has said, “Peanuts tells you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” However, as Bill Griffith (creator of Zippy the Pinhead) makes clear, Nancy’s evolution as a comic strip was every bit as bumpy and uncertain as any other comic strip. One of the joys of this graphic novel is following Griffith’s “fly on the wall” method of keeping the reader right on the pulse of the process. You see it all here, from the unlikely start of one aspiring cartoonist to the unlikely start of yet another comic strip; and you see both, Ernie Bushmiller (1905 – 1982) and Nancy, evolve to a transcendent level.

Griffy lectures on comics.

There’s a lot of fun things going on in this book and you definitely don’t need to know a thing about comics or have any strong feelings regarding the subject. That’s because this is as much an American success story as it is a quirky look at how some things work or an exploration of how we humans process information. Take your pick, there’s something for everyone. And that is how it should be when discussing this most iconic of pop culture phenomena. Who hasn’t heard of Nancy and Sluggo, right? Even the youngest and most detached will likely pick up the signal. Nancy has origins going back to 1922 when it began as a whole other comic strip, Fritzi Ritz, the madcap adventures of a flapper young woman, by Larry Whittington. In 1925, 19-year-old Ernie Bushmiller took over the strip and, along the way, introduced mischievous 8-year-old Nancy, who also took over. By 1938, the comic strip was known simply as, Nancy, and it pursued a process of comics perfection up to Bushmiller’s death in 1982. Griffith’s graphic novel goes about chronicling, dissecting, and analyzing Nancy and Bushmiller with glorious results.

Nancy in its prime, early 1960s.

Already a longtime fan of the strip, it didn’t take any more convincing of its greatness for Griffith when, a few years ago, he stumbled upon a home-made scrapbook of Nancy comic strips, circa 1960-63, during an eBay shopping spree. This purchase proved to be a big revelation. As Griffith explains: “Reading through them, I came to a surprising conclusion: These were the strip’s best years. Bushmiller’s diagrammatic drawing style has been honed to perfection, the punchlines work as gags and as a mini-theatre of the absurd, and he allows the world outside of Nancy and Sluggo’s neighborhood to creep in more often. Television, rock ‘n’ roll, and the Cold War are all fodder for satirical gags. But once the outside world enters Nancy’s familiar reality, it becomes Nancy’s. It may be 1962 on the calendar, but–in Bushmillerland, time stands still.” What a gift of insight for Griffith, a master at blending the surreal with everyday reality.

A waterproof ballpoint pen takes the stage.

Time and again, Griffith plucks gem after gem of Nancy insights and Easter eggs. He lets the comic strip speak for itself with numerous examples and, in so many ways, lets his own graphic novel take on a life of its own. Griffith’s numerous re-enactments are so magically loopy that you might remember some later as if you’d daydreamed them yourself. If you enjoy sojourns into now long-gone retro New York, you’ll find plenty of that here. One such example is the depiction of a publicity stunt for a new waterproof ballpoint pen. It takes place at the now defunct Lambs Club on West 44th Street, circa 1950. Bushmiller has been enlisted, along with some of his cartoonist cronies, to take part in an event that showcases a number of swimsuit models posing as the cartoonists draw directly on their bodies to demonstrate the quality of the featured product. The scene is taken in stride by Bushmiller. The photos taken of the event were slotted for a feature in Life magazine but, in the end, the editor pulled the plug on that. It was just another gig for Bushmiller.

Nancy and Sluggo in their later years.

Bushmiller seemed to pay little to no attention to all the accolades to Nancy. Perhaps, in some ways, he was not fully aware of what he had unleashed. It certainly wasn’t because he lacked sophistication. In some respects, Bushmiller simply did it his way. There were some happy accidents along the way that gave Nancy its surreal kick, notably the dynamic of Nancy, an 8-year-old, in the care of Fritzi, a young aspiring actress from a completely different comic strip that the Nancy comic strip had inherited. In interview after interview, Bushmiller downplays any artful qualities to his comic strip. He said he learned long go that most people chewed gum than ate caviar and he sided with the masses. And yet it takes one to know one and it’s easy to imagine that Bushmiller would have approved wholeheartedly of fellow cartoonist Griffith’s tribute to him. He might have shaken his head with an aw-shucks attitude while including a knowing nod. And sure, some things in the book, Bushmiller might have shrugged off as the concerns of a younger generation, like Griffith’s wonderfully loopy epilogue that revisits Nancy and Sluggo in their later years. Nancy, and the study of Nancy, involves the deep recesses of the mind. The ideal guide is someone keenly familiar with the cartoonist’s lot, complete with the repetitive tasks and the never-ending pursuit of perfection. Ernie Bushmiller, the pioneer trailblazer, is an ideal model of the true artist-cartoonist. Bill Griffith, a master himself, proves to be the ideal guide.

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August 7, 2023 · 12:00 pm

ALISON by Lizzy Stewart graphic novel review

Alison. By Lizzy Stewart. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 168pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This quite wonderful comic is a match for Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carringon (also published this year, by SelfMadeHero). Both books are by British artists/scriptwriters. They belong together for at least one intriguing reason: the young women artists in question find their fate, at least in the first phase of creative effort, by hooking up with famous middle-aged fellows who take them as lovers/mistresses but also urge them to practice their developing craft.  In the end, the women need to make their own way.

Armed With Madness is a real-life story, with rich-girl Leonora Carrington both aided and exploited by the famous surrealist painter Max Ernst, during the 1930s.  Carrington leaves England for Spain, suffers multiple breakdowns as the Spanish Civil War explodes around her, and ends up in Mexico, an elderly lady re-discovered by new generations. Alison offers us a fictional version two or three generations later. A young woman growing up in Devon takes and then abandons a husband, at the invitation of a visiting, also romantic and famous, middle-aged painter. She goes on, with his sponsorship, to her artist’s life in London.

Lizzy Stewart, a professional illustrator of children’s books, would not have been considered a comic artist a few decades ago. Walls have broken down since then, obviously, and the use of sequential panels to convey a story easily makes the grade as comic art. Actually, the result here looks more than a little like the drawings of Jules Feiffer in various recent works by the veteran artist. But I digress.

The story is drawn and told quite wonderfully, with the occasional, stunning color page or pages set off from the grey wash of most of the book. It is easy to be convinced that this young woman is flattered to be asked to sit for a portrait, first clothed, then other portraits unclothed, as a relationship develops. It is equally easy to be convinced that she is one of a considerable line of young women falling into the waiting arms of an academic painter at the peak of his BBC-level respectability. He had promised to guide her development as an artist, and for all his drawbacks, he remains determined to do so. He also pays her rent.

Throughout, and this is certainly the feminist angle, Alison is seeking—fumbling and stumbling along the way—to realize herself in every sense. That she had been a hopelessly bored (and childless) housewife in Devon, became a frustrated if developing artist in Bloomsbury and a woman making her own way step by step, is all wonderfully conveyed. Born in 1959 and gone to London in the early 1980s, she finds herself in the midst of radical politics, anti-war, anti-nuke and anti-racist movements, not long before Margaret Thatcher comes to power, ruthlessly crushing all opposition. Worse, Thatcher so successfully converts the political system that even future, corrupted Labour Party leaders accept “privatization” and the practical eclipse of the caring social state as a finality. What can art mean here?

The brevity of the young artist’s wider, militant political commitment may offer insight into the artist-in-progress. Or perhaps we see Lizzy Stewart’s own observation of changing radical politics at a certain moment of time. Serious commitments to art, including the teaching of art to younger generations, merge into the critical concerns in the era of AIDS. She watches as disease and death march through her new milieu. A desperate politics of caring emerges as a considerable portion of the London art world literally finds community through the  struggle for life.

It should not give away too much about Alison to reveal that she finds her own companion in a same-sex relationship that is also interracial and global in its connections. Perhaps our protagonist was going in that direction all the time, without realizing her own path. All this is conveyed by Lizzy Stewart with such painstaking care that we find ourselves flowing along, discovering and rediscovering the narrative as the artist discovers her talent and herself. Near the end, she is the learner who has become the renowned teacher.

Alison’s return in something like middle age to her own Dorset is wonderfully visualized and narrated here. Temperamentally a million miles from London, she experiences a return to the natural beauty that she now appreciates afresh, within her own sense of art in the world and in her world.

There is a great deal more to be said here about the young artist’s path. We learn at one point that her older lover, for instance, had the upper-class background to have his talent recognized in childhood, to be trained in formal terms all the way along. By contrast, Alison must undertake a crash course and find another path to realize her talents. Perhaps this detail offers us the secret of Lizzy Stewart herself, a children’s book illustrator, using comics for story telling. Like others today, she is struggling to create something fresh through a merger of forms that become recognizable through the work of the new generations of artists and comics.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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June 5, 2023 · 5:00 pm

THE TALK by Darrin Bell graphic novel review

The Talk by Darrin Bell

The Talk. Darrin Bell. Henry Holt & Co. 352 pp. $29.99 hardcover.

Darrin Bell does a remarkable job with his new book, in fact, his debut graphic novel. Bell is best known for short-form work: editorial cartoons (won the Pulitzer Prize) and comic strips (check out Candorville). The graphic novel format opens things up in ways that Bell takes to with grace and artistry. The goal here is not only to sum up his life but to go backwards and forwards generations. This graphic novel revolves around “the talk” that Black families have with their children to prepare them to navigate a world of prejudice and racism.

So, why doesn’t it look like a real gun?

Bell begins his book by sharing what “the talk” ended being like for him as a 6-year-old. His parents had recently divorced and so Bell received two separate, and very different, responses from his white mother and his Black father. Bell’s mother was prompted into it after having to explain her choice in fulfilling his request for a toy gun. She chose a bright green plastic water gun. She explained it had to be very obvious it was a toy in order for Darrin not to be mistaken for carrying a real gun by police who were predisposed to assuming he was a criminal with a weapon. What happens next is pivotal. Darrin runs out to play with his new toy and ends up being harassed by a police officer who uses the toy gun as a pretext to still give him a hard time.

We’ve got you surrounded.

Later, Darrin faces another challenge when a white schoolyard bully taunts him about his appearance, calling him, “big lips.” Darrin asks his father what he should do about it and this sets up the father’s turn with talking about race. Bell returns to this moment throughout the book to say that his father had let him down by turning inward, distant, and just staring out into space. However, that’s not exactly what happens. His father may not explicitly respond with a road map on how to deal with bigots but he certainly talks about his experience. It leads to one of the most compelling moments in the book with Darrin’s parents as a carefree mixed race young couple who are abruptly forced to deal with the fact that the local folk are not amused about mixed race couples. That said, Bell lets the reader decide if his father perhaps did the best he could with his more guarded response.

Remember the 2000 election vote count problem?

Overall, I think Bell appreciated the chance to spread out and follow various threads of thought over the span of many pages. I know it’s a balancing act in terms of expressing feeling and citing facts. Every time you present a specific, as opposed to a generality, you make your case that much stronger. Buried deep in the book is one such fact I know still gives many pause: the manipulation of the vote count in Florida that handed the presidency to George W. Bush in the 2000 race. As Bells states: “The Bush campaign’s Florida chairwoman (who also happened to be Florida’s secretary of state, in charge of the election) purged tens of thousands of Black voters from the voter rolls. Reportedly, she used a ‘felon list’ to disqualify them, even though it turned out they didn’t belong on that list.”

Lost in the aether.

Bell speaks of “the aether,” what some believe to be the foundation of our very existence. Bell uses this as a metaphor to describe those in power, the dominant culture, the white culture, inextricably linked to money, power and authority. Bell runs with it in one of the most inspired passages in the book that follows a college workshop of elite white students with Bell, the only Black student, discussing slavery. The white students push the narrative that people simply didn’t know any better when it came to owning slaves leaving Bell to argue that actually, at least 10 million people did know better: the slaves! Later on, Bell is called in by a professor who is threatening to fail him because he must have plagiarized his paper. How could he, an undergrad, possibly write so eloquently about “the aether” and such things when her own graduate students aren’t as articulate?

Why don’t some people have empathy?

I know that there will always be a certain number of readers unfamiliar with the world of graphic novels who are ready to complain that a long-form work of comics could be pared down to just a few pages but that’s not the kind of world I’d want to live in. A graphic novel inhabits its own world where it will expand in order to process and contract in order to highlight ideas in concise ways. I’m sure any experienced reader wholeheartedly agrees. This book is an opportunity to explore issues of race, how Americans have gotten it wrong for so long, what’s at stake, and how do we move closer to a better place. Bell has honed his skills of cultural observation over many years as a social commentator in comic strips and editorial cartoons. He’s refined his skills up to the breaking point and back. This graphic novel is a testament to his efforts.

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April 28, 2023 · 4:15 pm

MS DAVIS: a Graphic Biography review by Paul Buhle

Ms Davis: a Graphic Biography. By Amazing Ameziane and Sybrille titeux de la Croix, translated by Jenna Allen. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2022. 185pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This remarkable and challenging work, translated from the 2020 French edition, offers readers a study in the history of comic or political art by adapting past artists’ work into a new synthesis of narrative. It is not a “biography,” as in “graphic biography,” that readers would expect. We see only the dramatic bits and pieces of Angela Davis’s life, and virtually none of the long aftermath (from the early 1970s until now) that biography readers would expect. And yet capture the drama of Davis’s life, the work does in grand form.

Ms Davis might be contrasted with The Black Panther Party Comic, a well-selling, straightforward visual narrative that a fussy aestheticism of comic art might wrongly call “pedestrian.” This tells the story of the short-lived but extremely dramatic Black Panther Party with suitable details, and would be valuable for anyone who enjoys Ms Davis, which goes the precise opposite direction in so many ways.

In the globalization of comic art, artist Amazing Ameziane and collaborator Sybille Titeux de la Croix credit four American artists: Milton Glaser, Norman Rockwell, Emory Douglas and Bill English. What do they have in common? Less than they have by contrast. Rockwell, who famously celebrated the “American Way of Life” (overwhelmingly the white, middle class way of life in the twentieth century), had moments when he went beyond his assumptions, as in his famed poster art for “The Four Freedoms” proclaimed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in wartime, and still not realized (“Freedom from Want.”) Emory Douglas is the Black Panther Party artist supreme, with his stark, propagandistic drawings. William English, illustrating some of poet William Blake’s works, is as far from commercial illustrator Milton Glaser (best remembered for the 1966 poster for Bob Dylan) as imaginable. And so on. Amezianne/De la Croix pick and choose what they want, in art as well as story.

They invent characters to suit themselves. Angela Davis, growing up in the 1950s South, thereby has an invented black woman friend who stays in Atlanta when Davis moves to New York.  She also has a sympathetic and crypto-feminist journalist pal who struggles with her newspaper bosses to create a news story worthy or at least somewhat worthy of Angela Davis’s incredible life.

To describe the plot is grossly inadequate to the “look” of Ms Davis. Actress Helen Mirren, speaking at the San Diego Comicon after Harvey Pekar’s death, said (in her eloquent way) that Harvey had taught people to read comics “in a new way.”  That is, comics could be about ordinary people in the unprestigious blue collar world of that presumably most ordinary place, Cleveland, around Harvey himself, his troubles and joys, and most definitely his work at the VA Hospital. (That Pekar and his artistic collaborators did this in comic books was another point of originality, following the underground “nothing forbidden” comix.)

The story-telling daily strips, appearing in the Chicago Tribune just about a century ago, made the same artistic and narrative point, more or less. Before 1920, comics readers expected a joke climaxing in the last panel; the following day would begin the story anew. Now readers of the hugely popular dailies would look forward to daily lives that did not change very much, had precious few adventures, but offered a kind of assurance.

How many comics, thinking now on a global scale from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, have set out consciously or otherwise to teach readers to look at comics in new ways, and how many have succeeded? It is an imponderable, although claims could be made in many directions. Sybille Titeux de la Croix and Amazing Ameziane are struggling page by page to make their own large contribution. Their sincerity and their determination, perhaps even more than the expression of their talent, speak for this comic’s value and importance.

Amazing Ameziane: “Ms Davis is the third part of my first SOUL TRILOGY ( Ali / Attica /Angela).”

As history, it can be narrow and even flawed. In its last pages, we learn that Nikita Kruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, in 1956, sent Communism into its “final throes.”  This is more than a little too anticipative. Angela Davis would not have believed so (she resigned from the CPUSA in 1991). The Vietnam War, the survival of the Cuban Revolution, the Communist role in the South African struggle against Apartheid, the claims of China’s leadership….all these suggest something more than a detail absent in the overview. (On the following pages, the book turns our attention toward Neo-liberalism and here the book is accurate. Class society has grown worse.) Does this limitation harm Ms Davis? No, not much.

Perhaps we are not, after all, reading Ms Davis “as history,” but as an artistic statement about history and about the features in Angela Davis’s personal saga that are larger than herself. Drawing upon the most improbable sources of visual inspiration, changing formats almost page by page, Ms Davis is trying to teach us a different way of looking at comic art. Nothing, for me, is quite as stunning as the reuse of Emory Douglas’s styles, seen so vividly in the Black Panther newspaper of yore, so stripped of visual finery, so expressive in its message, artistically quite as if the artist, like the Panthers, invited death at the hands of violent authorities: revolution or martyrdom. How could Emory Douglas be combined with Norman Rockwell, the graphic artist of middle class contentment in “the best country in the world”? See for yourself.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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April 10, 2023 · 4:30 pm

Sparkling Color in Radical Comics: WONDER DRUG and A TRAIN IN THE NIGHT reviews

WONDER DRUG

A TRAIN IN THE NIGHT

Wonder Drug: LSD in the Land of Living Skies, by Hugh D.A. Goldring, Nicole Marie Burton and Dr. Erika Dyck. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2021, 96 pp, $19.99.

A Train in the Night:The Tragedy of Lac-Megantic. By Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny, Christian Quesnel, translated by W. Donald Wilson. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2022. 192 pp, $24.99.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

Time was, and not long ago, that color printing for radical comics seemed too much to demand, either for the publisher or for the hard-pressed artist. That time may be passing, at least for the innovative, less-than-giant Between the Lines publishers in Toronto.

The story of LSD offered in Wonder Drug is a story almost never heard south of the Canadian-US border, and for good reasons. Aldous Huxley’s major collaboration in the early decades of research happened to be a less-than-famous Candian researcher, Dr. Humphry Osmond.  A veteran of WWII, employed at a psychiatric clinic in a London hospital, Osmond met scientist John Smythies, who would become his long-term collaborator. Osmond coined the term “psychedelic,” but the two seem to have “discovered” the value of LSD and Mescaline.

In distant Saskatchewan, in a research center, the two worked on synthesizing peyote, known and used by Indigenous peoples across the Americas for millennia. Mescaline could be laboratory-produced, as they discovered. But they also hit up on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, from an ergot fungus. Research became global back in 1943, separately from the Canadian experiments, when a Swiss scientist accidentally ingested LSD and went on a what we could call “A Trip.” Happily, somehow, he did not fall off his bike when returning home.

Here comes the fascinating political part of the book. Saskatchewan, with its social democratic government, The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (or CCF) set out to attract world scientists for its own version of socialized medicine. Treatments for alcholism among other problems embraced the use of drugs more and more as the decades passed. Dr. Osmund happened to see an ad for a job at the British publication, The Lancet, and snapped it up: the Wayburn Institute was a natural. Osmund also snapped up some LSD.

Enough of the intriguing plot, which carries us foward through better-known territories of the 1960s, official “moral panic” and, everntually, a return to the origins: psychedelics legitimated for the supervised use of psychiatric patients. Onward—says the reviewer—to the way the comic looks and feels. There has never been an all-color comic quite like this one, and we realize it best in the many trippy moments, captured (in my own personal experience) beautifully and successfully, “bad trips” included. The art is therefore a job and a lesson. Better things can be done with comics.

By contrast, A Train in the Night, the saga of a needless train disaster in 2013, offers  the colors of horror. Not so different  in its agonies from East Palestine, the small town in Ohio, USA—if not Trump territory in the Canadian case—the village of Lac-Magnetic is the victim of this story. The former logging town of Lac-Magnetic, if never itself beautiful, stood close enough to the emerging tourist trade in Canada’s majestic northeast to thrive and provide a living for many of its residents.

What is the danger and where did it come from? In an explanatory sidestep, the author/artists take us to fracking and oil in North Dakota, for a few pages. The 2008 economic crisis fell upon all, but hardest upon workers in the fracking operation. A boomtown in an extractive district has grey skies, a lot of heavy drinking by the working people there for temporary well-paying but also dangerous jobs. They risk their lives to extract the oil that goes on trains for destinations far away, with layoffs and health consequences for themselves ahead.

The train that started off in North Dakota, picking up its fracked load, was to deliver the dirty goods to New Brunswick. Lac-Magnetic just happened to be along the way. The train, armored against potential disaster from air breaks, also needed the engine to be engaged for the brakes to work.  Because the company took the short-cut of a one-man crew, the driver himself had not been on hand to apply the hand-brakes. Poor safety regulations and poor maintenance brought 72 tank cars full of crude oil to catastrophe.

As the fire on the train appeared and grew, local firefighters learned to their horror that an earlier problem had been “corrected” with the use of flammable epoxy glue. In the worst possible place, five million litres of toxic explosives went up in a fireball. It was the “the train from hell,” as a  nine-year-old described it. “The fault of one guy who didn’t follow the rules,” as a leading corporate figure responded. This claim was echoed by a raft of similar claims by Canadian authorities.

Less than 200 days later, train service returned with similar toxic loads. Survivors who had abandoned town returned, anxious for their property, enraged that a settlement was so small, for citizens that is. The pharmacies and the supermarket chain got a million Canadian dollars. Investigations were blocked, by leading figures in Canada’s ministry of transport. The railroad corporations across North America basically continue to write their own rules.

The last, beautifully horrible pages of this book are the hellscape/aftermath, with testimony of the victims prominent, and the courage of the survivors our consolation.  At least the corporate and government plan to victimize the engineer himself, part of the project of letting the corporation and government off the hook, is foiled. Some of the strongest drawings of the book capture perfectly the public and corporate officials lying through their teeth, protecting the rich against the public.

It is doubtful that the recent crimes of capitalism have yet been depicted so brilliantly. That the work appeared first in a French edition may help us to understand the levels of Canadian creativity as multi-lingual, multi-cultural. This, at last, may be our consolation.

Paul Buhle

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March 29, 2023 · 1:10 pm

Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer Vol. 1 review: America’s Most Wanted

cover by Courtland L. Ellis

Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer. w. David Crownson. a. Courtland L. Ellis and others. Kingwood Comics. 252 pp. $59.99

The subject of slavery has been depicted and processed in many ways, from critical analysis to cathartic expression. This new comics series takes the reader on a mystical journey led by none other than Harriet Tubman (1823-1913), the famed leader of the Underground Railroad (1850-1860) which led enslaved people to freedom in America. Creator and writer David Crownson gives his story just the right bite, which makes sense for this mashup of genres.

Meet Harriet Tubman, Demon Slayer. Crownson goes all out casting Tubman in the role of a superhero ninja freedom fighter who must do battle with whatever monsters slave owners can throw at her: vampires, werewolves, demons, you name it. This trade paperback is a graphic novel collecting the previous six issues to this series. In this story, we follow Tubman as she is helping a family to freedom. Crownson has done a great job with character development. I was quickly engaged in the plight of the Edgefield family: the young girl Vanessa; her parents Caesar and Catherine; and her brother, Nathan. Tubman, like a mysterious angel, suddenly appears in their lives as they are attempting to flee from slavery. The right amount of action, humor, horror and fantasy ensues.

I was immediately intrigued by this book. The cover art got my attention and the artwork throughout, led by Courtland L. Ellis, kept me turning pages. The book begins with a photograph of Tubman and a quote from her: “Never wound a snake; kill it.” That sets the tone very nicely. From what I know, Tubman appears to have been a very driven, reserved and no-nonsense person. That’s the way that Crownson depicts her. She has a job to do and she does it with speed and precision. She knows exactly how to drop a vampire or werewolf in seconds flat. Out comes the magic sword or the wooden stake and that’s that. It’s cathartic to see how swiftly Tubman takes care of all the villains. In comics, we often find some righteous justice and this comic delivers on that promise.

Harriet Tubman and her son, Chip, battle monsters.

To take a historical figure and then put that person into a fictionalized universe is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a writer. No doubt, Crownson is having a great time with his superhero version of Harriet Tubman. On the creative side, it’s great fun. And you can also call it a sacred privilege. Crownson celebrates and honors Tubman with respect and joyful energy, fully aware of the painful and sensitive subject; fully aware of hope and healing. There’s no record of this anywhere but Crownson includes a character, Chip, a young white man, as Tubman’s adopted son. It’s just part of the story, an uplifting use of creative license, and something that Tubman would probably give a wink to and approve of. I’m confident that she’d approve of this whole audacious comic book series and enjoy it.

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February 7, 2023 · 2:25 pm

Paul Buhle on Comics: The Cargo Rebellion: Those  Who Chose Freedom

The Cargo Rebellion: Those  Who Chose Freedom. By Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson, Alexis Dudden and (artist) Kim Inthavong. PM Press, 2022, $16.95.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

This is a good-looking experiment in a kind of collective art-and-text. So much has now been written about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade—no full blown comic yet—that the subject of the “Coolie Trade” can now seem to have been somewhat neglected. Actually, Asian-American scholars, among others, have been working long and hard on documenting this story. But we have here a effort to bring the story to light for young readers in particular.

Legitimized by the Opium War of the 1840s, the forced opening of Hong Kong to British domination also opened wide labor contracts for impoverished Chinese workers from Hawaii to California and parts South, China to Peru. The artist and writers treat this passage as a slavery-equivalent and they have a point. Like the transport of workers from India to the Caribbean later in the century, it was coercion-or-starvation, albeit one that, for some, would bring integration into economies in post-slavery times, with possibilities of collective struggle emerging sooner in their trajectory.

The comic art helps to propose a different way of viewing struggle on the high seas. The American government wanted the struggle to be seen as piracy, on the basis of a dubious “law of the sea” passed in 1836. The Chinese Quing courts insisted that Americans had deceived and kidnapped the victims. Abraham Lincoln ended the “coolie trade” formally in 1862, although the book asserts on good authority that racial stigma rather than something like Black emancipation prompted the “great emancipator” to take this step.

The traffiking in human lives, Chinese lives, continued in the American West as railroads were built and assorted industries, notably cigar-making, opened the way for underpaid servile labor. Sam Gompers himself, outspokenly racist leader of the newly-created American Federation of Labor (AFL), testified to Congress against the presence and not merely the continuation of Chinese immigration and immigrants.

The Cargo Rebellion closes with a short scholarly essay on the “Robert Boone Mutiny” of 1852 and a commentary on “Teaching Asian Indenture” by Jason Oliver Chang. One could lament that the comics themselves do not take up enough of the pages in this book. But that the larger subject could be tackled with such energy and effort dulls this complaint. It’s a good book.

Paul Buhle

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February 3, 2023 · 2:15 pm

ARCA by Van Jensen & Jesse Lonergan review–clever dystopian graphic novel

ARCA. IDW Publishing. w. Van Jensen. a. Jesse Lonergan. 176 pp. $16.99

Welcome to your next favorite dystopian graphic novel. This is a devilishly good take on the one-percenters behaving badly trope. The focus is on Effie, short for Persephone. She is one of “the settlers,” the youth who are in servitude to “the citizens.” When settlers turn eighteen, they are promoted to something better, although it is unclear what that is. Earth, they’re told, had to be abandoned because of all the usual reasons and so everyone is on this spaceship heading towards “Eden.” But Effie isn’t buying it and it’s up to her to figure out what is really happening.

Things are not what they seem; they never are. The more twisted the reality, the more profound the journey to find out the truth. This is what makes Effie’s journey so dangerous–and compelling for the reader. From the very beginning, I was intrigued by all the heaviness hanging over Effie. Heck, the first page has Effie flying in a plane full of skeletons. She goes for the emergency exit, yanks open the door, and gasps for air when she’s flung out into outer space. It’s a nightmare but, her wide-awake world isn’t much better. Effie is constantly being monitored. People are disappearing. She risks her life every day for the chance to read a book. She’s not even supposed to know how to read.

Van Jensen (Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern) knows how to write a slow burn story with a propulsive bite. Jesse Lonergan (Hedra, Planet Paradise) has a loose and lively drawing style. Together, they bring to life a quirky and moody sci-fi thriller. Everything about this story gives off a disturbing and muted vibe, like you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, finding out secrets you shouldn’t know. In this low-key and understated world, Effie is queen. She is a very reserved person forced to push back, and bit by bit, in a quiet and determined way, she gets closer to her would-be killers. Like any good work of science fiction, you get hooked in by the weird kid in the corner who nobody notices, until they need a hero.

A few notes on the art. I’m really pleased to see Lonergan having fun and experimenting. He spills over all the action, including the atmosphere, into various panels in unexpected and creative ways. There’s a moment when a glass full of eyeballs (don’t ask) is knocked over flinging eyeballs that bounce from panel to panel. This approach is part of Lonergan’s signature style and he does it very well with bookshelves, crowd scenes and things that go boom. The color is also applied in a dreamy and spacey way (soft watercolors that glide and pop)  that compliments this more loose and fluid way of drawing. Nathan Widick brings home lettering and design that is spot on. The final results are fantastic and a joy to take in. I’d love to have him help me with my next comics project.

Science fiction means a lot of things. Often, we’re working with a vocabulary, both written and visual, going back to classic 1950s pulp-style science fiction. This book is in that spirit and turns it on its head. Effie is a classic sci-fi hero, unlikely and unassuming. But she’s not a shrinking violet. She’s more of a lone wolf. Leave her alone unless you need her. The best science fiction is not just about the future, robots and time travel. No, the best science fiction is about people. Readers want that; they hunger for it. This is a clever dystopian graphic novel following the rhythms of a bookish lone wolf. And remember, she’s not even supposed to know how to read. The elites don’t have a clue who they’re messing with. But now you do.

ARCA is available on July 11, 2023. You can pre-order it here.

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January 29, 2023 · 9:00 am

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham review — Painfully Honest Scenes From a Marriage

Pantheon edition of BLOOD OF THE VIRGIN

Blood of the Virgin. Sammy Harkham. Pantheon, Penguin Random House. New York. 2023. 296 pp. $30.

A quick and apt description of the comics created by Sammy Harkham would be “painfully honest.” While this sentence alone may not mean very much to the vast sea of potential readers, it will resonate with many, not only the comics aficionado but the general reader. This particular work is at the masterpiece level when it comes to full-length graphic novels. Fans and critics alike have been patiently waiting for the various parts they’ve read published elsewhere to all come together and so here we go: a story about Hollywood, its underbelly; in fact, the exploitation scene of the 1970s. Our anti-hero, Seymour, working at one of these cheap movie studios and patiently waiting his turn, has been promoted leaving him in charge of his own movie. This level of responsibility, and relative notoriety, easily consumes him threatening an already shaky relationship with his wife, Ida.

Over a decade in the making.

Like any worthwhile graphic novel project, this book has been many years in the making. The bulk of the book was created in installments and appeared in the author’s own self-published comic book, Crickets, as well as his legendary ongoing comics anthology, Kramers Ergot. Anyone who seriously follows the indie comics scene will at least be aware of Sammy Harkham. Diehards will closely follow his every turn. And, for the vast majority of readers, this will be the first time they are exposed to this work.

Oh, Little Piglet!

Harkham’s cartooning style is a classic approach in the great tradition of working from reality and paring away to the essentials. This style fits in with great comics from the last century like MAD Magazine. It’s a very readable style that embraces personal moments between characters. We see Seymour and Ida, over and over again, at their best and worst. We certainly see plenty of Seymour at his worst. The stage is set early on with the big hint that Seymour doesn’t appreciate his wife and maybe the same goes for Ida. We proceed waiting for the other shoe to drop. The whole business with exploitation movies may as well be one big MacGuffin compared to what happens to these two. Harkham makes us care over and over again.

Hollywood, then and now, has always been a tough business.

Hollywood looms large over everything. That can’t be denied. Seymour is in the storytelling business, even if it’s a very small and cheesy slice of it. Maybe he just needs to be a part of it, a way to live forever. It’s more than half way into the book before there’s any mention of why Seymour does what he does. He claims to love horror movies. Even the cast he’s directing admit they love rock bands more than movies. Maybe Seymour loves the movie-making process more than just movies. That remains a question. Seymour himself remains a question.

Kvetching and kibitzing at Canter’s Deli.

Seymour’s story is about a young man who must do something. If it isn’t making movies, then maybe it would be making comics. Throughout the book, we see him following his passion of making something of himself. He doesn’t really know all that much about movies, about women, about the world around him. All he really knows is that he must do something. One epiphany may lead to another but, while you’re busy living your life, it can look like one big mess. And it is a mess. As Ida puts it, “Even at its best, life is just really annoying.” In the end, Ida and Seymour are an immature young married couple who can’t afford yet to fully appreciate each other, themselves, or even their child. Such is life and Sammy Harkham manages to strike the right chord with each and every painfully honest key.

Is it worth turning your life upside down for five minutes of faux wisdom?

It’s funny how a story that spans a few weeks can take fourteen years to complete. Such is the nature of bringing to life a fully-formed comics masterwork. If you are among the select number of comics aficionados who have diligently followed this story as it came out in issues of Crickets, and think you’re done with it, I encourage you to read the whole thing through now in its collected form. It may not be as you remembered it. Maybe it’s not, at its core, a story about storytelling. Well, that’s only part of it. After giving this a read from beginning to end, I stand by my interpretation that it’s a steady and deliberate look at callow youth trying to make sense of it all. It’s certainly not only about Hollywood ambition. If it was, Harkham wouldn’t have devoted an entire issue of Crickets to Ida’s sudden detour, her visit to see her parents in Auckland.

Portrait of a Young Couple.

This story is exploring the existential crisis we all must confront. Is Seymour going to find salvation in the movie business? Unless he’s really serious about seeking out what is most artful in the horror movie genre, then maybe he’s just as likely to move on to other pursuits. But, at this particular point in time, movie-making is his thing. What is it that matters most to Seymour? Even with his movie passion supposedly locked in, he would be hard pressed to articulate what his priorities are. Other readers will have their own opinions. This is one of those special graphic novels that genuinely invites its own book club! Who knows, maybe Blood of the Virgin will ascend to that most coveted of heights: spoken in the same breathe with Maus and Persepolis. It’s that good!

Blood of the Virgin is now available for pre-order. The Pantheon collected edition comes out May 2, 2023.

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