Eddie Ahn learned early on that the only way to really make a difference demands hard work and dedication fueled by passion. You see that zeal on every page of his debut graphic memoir. Taken as a whole, the book runs at a steady clip which evokes the life of a bright and sensitive young man determined to help his family and community. What’s remarkable is that Eddie Ahn managed to put in the time and energy to become both a successful environmental lawyer in San Francisco and a brilliant cartoonist. This is the story of the titular advocate and storyteller.
With great humor and insight, Ahn seamlessly takes the reader along for a ride that covers his journey of self-discovery. Comics, especially nonfiction comics, tends to be a balancing act of editing and boiling down to the prime facts while not losing any of the flavor. So, you have here a wonderful back and forth narrative wave dipping down to a granular level then back up to a big picture view and so on. Ahn is not afraid to shift the timeline as needed and do some nonlinear fancy footwork. There’s one segment where the story is comparing events a decade apart: a medical trauma that Ahn experienced in 2008 compared to a medical trauma experience by his mother in 2017 and it works beautifully. A lot of this story deals with family and how one person’s journey is influenced by decisions made going back generations. In that sense, seeing one’s destiny as the culmination of countless decisions, illuminates Ahn’s circuitous path that led him to his relatively unlikely but quite successful career in fighting for environmental social justice.
Coming from a mixed race background as I do, my father Anglo and my mother Mexican, I can certainly relate to Ahn’s point of view as he sees life through the prism of a Korean American. That strangers-in-a-strange-land saga, that is the legacy of the immigrant experience, is evoked so well by Ahn as he shares his parents’ vision, ambition and struggles, always striving for and measuring success. When have you reached your goal? Once you have achieved the American dream of buying a house? Once you have amassed enough wealth that you can easily purchase a new luxury car as a thank you gift to your parents? Ahn dissects all these efforts, misgivings, and calculations along that ladder climb to success. This book, both inspiring and highly entertaining, is his final report card to his beloved parents. Advocate is not what I expected at first. It’s a refreshing and riveting read, just the sort of unexpected read that will make you want to make your own difference in the world.
Advocate is available as of April 16, 2024, published by Ten Speed Graphic, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories. David Small. Liveright. New York. 2024. 175pp. $25
One great way to approach David Small’s delightful new “graphic novel” is as a collection of bedtime fairy tales for discerning adults. And, no, I am not inferring that this is a book to keep away from the youngest readers. There is nothing explicit to be found here. What I mean is that this is a delicious book for world-weary folks who want to be entranced by a dance made up of words and pictures. There’s nothing pretentious to be found here either. Just a very smart, whimsical foray, beginning with the titular tale involving a werewolf who has somehow outlived its purpose, just too long in the tooth.
Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation. Art & Adaptation by Paul Peart-Smith. Edited by Paul Buhle & Herb Boyd. Rutgers University Press. 2023. 180pp. $22.95
Artist Paul Peart-Smith presents the first graphic novel adaptation of a landmark work, a hybrid of cultural studies and personal essay, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. The original work is filled with insight into the Black person’s experience after the American Civil War as well as functioning as a prevailing call to action. Peart-Smith masterfully works with Du Bois’s timeless prose: navigating the “vast veil,” observing with a “second-sight,” and absorbing it all with a “double-consciousness.”
Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Electrified Tesla, Issue 2. Written and illustrated by Cynthia von Buhler, 2021 (Hard Case Crime/Titan Comics) 110pp. $24.99. (Above cover art by Robert McGinnis)
I spotted this ravishing pulpy cover and I immediately made a mental note, “Tesla girl!” I was just doing my usual navigating and took a second look at Cynthia Von Buhler’s Instagram account. The idea of a really quirky take on Nikola Tesla via comics appealed to me. Over the years, Tesla has become a genre all to itself open to new and fun interpretations. This title does not disappoint and led me down an array of intriguing paths.
Cynthia von Buhler is a genuine art geek, to put it bluntly. This comic truly lives up to its promise by thoughtfully doing all the necessary prep work in order to deliver something authentic. I felt that Tesla was really alive on the page, skulking around Bryant Park and whispering sweet nothings to his pigeon wife. Indeed, the mad scientist never married and did develop a curious attachment to pigeons. That peculiarity and many more are faithfully depicted by von Buhler. This respect for the subject matter compliments the crime thriller that ensues.
Feeding the pigeons in Bryant Park.
What von Buhler manages to do is juggle a number of tantalizing facts. It is New York City, circa 1943: Nazis are creeping in the shadows in pursuit of Tesla’s mysterious Death Ray; Josephine Baker, the beautiful bisexual jazz singer and dancer is performing and spying; John Trump (uncle to Donald) is a doctor with plans of his own to take Tesla’s secret weapon. Add to the mix our protagonist, the diehard detective Minky Woodcock determined to crack the biggest case of her career involving the fate of the planet and, for good measure, a chance to bed none other than Josephine Baker.
Agatha steps in!
The artwork throughout is a delightful homage to gritty pulp fiction, with a steamy semi-realistic quality and a larger-than-life pop culture vibe. There’s both a static and dynamic quality at play, like woodcuts or dolls that have come to life, very eerie and fascinating. Many of the scenes, in fact, would make for beautiful stand-alone paintings. Ultimately, the art naturally fits the book, keeping pace with the narrative. I think of it as moving at a gumshoe detective novel pace: at times melancholy; at other turns, dramatic and intense. Which leads me to mention that, after reading this one, you are going to want more. In fact, there is plenty more to choose from, both in graphic novel format and prose since von Buhler’s book is part of something bigger, the world of Hard Case Crime, featuring work by such modern masters as Stephen King and golden age giants as Ray Bradbury. And, with that in mind, do seek out this gem of a graphic novel by Cynthia von Buhler.
This has been quite a year for determinedly offbeat comic artist Dan Clowes. An interview in the New Yorker followed by a strong review beginning on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, not to mention an NPR interview, nailed down the point: Clowes has hit the big time.
Is this as far as “alt-comics,” somewhere beyond the comic strip and the comic book, can go in becoming “mainstream”? It’s a good question, first raised properly by the reception of the comic art of R. Crumb, then of Art Spiegelman (whose looming presence remains above the scenery somehow), of Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco and others. The work of Ben Katchor, who is now designing comic-like images for Paris Metro lines stretching into the villages of the countryside, might remind us that in France, comics can be art. Back in the US and despite the rising prestige (and commercial success) of some artists, their work remains….comic art! If, admittedly, viewed very differently from the comic art of old: fewer readers but more prestige, as cynics would say.
Clowes, part of the alternative comics that followed the collapse of the 1960s-70s underground comix, saw Ghost World, his creation, become the basis for a film about teenage angst, with himself as one of the scriptwriters. It was a first for comic scriptwriters, even if comic characters themselves had appeared in dozens of older Hollywood films, with several series of low-production films dedicated to the sagas of Blondie, Joe Palooka and even Captain Marvel (a kids’ serial).
These three series actually happened to have been scripted by Lefties who would go on the blacklist (except for the Captain Marvel series, whose writer became an affable Friendly Witness testifying against his former comrades), and lose their careers. The films themselves, now totally obscure, even have a curious, populistic social content, leaving one to wonder. What gives? Never mind. These ancient memories of comics adaptations are also buried beneath the tons of animated films from comics, seen especially at holiday times on television or via DVDs.
We are reminded, in an astute Comics Quarterly essay on Monica, that real-life artist Clowes was abandoned by his mother, and that “loneliness” is a continuing theme with a continuing expression in his aesthetics and a basis in personal life. Monica, the fictional subject of the comic is, to put it mildly, a troubled person. But Clowes is not telling anything so straightforward as autobiography. We experience the novel through her wavering consciousness, sometimes beyond her consciousness, which may be the most helpful of all hints.
“Foxhole,” the first of eight semi-discrete and separate chapters or episodes, goes back to the Vietnam War. A disillusioned GI from a poor background reflects on his disillusionment to his battlefield/jungle setting mate, who is from America’s wealthy classes, while they wait to kill or be killed. The trauma in these three pages is not going away. Indeed, the sense of apocalypse described is revisited, precisely, on the final panel of the book.
Other reviewers seem to run away from this particular as anything like central to the plot, and it makes sense. What we see through most of Monica is the results of the 1960s social breakdowns, the impossibility of a thriving counterculture measured in the broken homes and broken lives, crazed cults and children confused or, rather, disoriented for life. Cynical commentators have always viewed this human tragedy as a loss of traditional morals, socially enforced wage slavery, the dangers of drugs, etc. Clowes knows better, although he will not say so.
Our embittered GI returning, he thinks, to a quiet and happy life, is not. He’s the fiancee of our protagonist’s mother, but never her husband. His foxhole mate, a serious painter who has returned to the US first, turns out to be the actual biological father, or perhaps not. Monica’s mother Penny, a counterculture burnout, stumbles along through life, although she actually launches a business that, much later, her daughter can revive and expand successfully, something that brings no pleasure. The book’s sometime narrator, a friend to Penny, relates and reflects on a not-so-unusual confused single mom experience. And Monica emerges, episode after episode, not only damaged but keenly aware of being damaged. She a modern person, a modern woman, who does not accept fatalism, although to do so might have been a better strategy.
In the following vignette, the seemingly more fortunate one of the two GIs returns to his hometown, years later, and quickly realizes that crucial matters including his extended family and their small capitalist empire, have totally fallen apart. In this odd little world, Monica-the-comic becomes a perfectly recreated EC-comic horror story from the early 1950s, updated and upgraded artistically. And then the drugstore supernaturalism ends or perhaps drifts around, looking for a spot to land.
Monica the protagonist reemerges, alone in the world. Reviewers have found something special and intriguing, or at least narratively clear, in her listening to a radio left behind in a family cabin. The radio broadcasts, unbelievably but believably to her, feature the voice of her dead grandfather and allow her to have unsatisfied conversations with him. Although years dead, he is still an anti-Semite.
A few more vignettes and more than twenty years pass. Monica becomes a successful entrepreneur, but success only exposes the emptiness of her life. Her last-gasp effort finds her in a remote cult that manages to somehow be utterly boring, one more sixties offshoot full of conspiracy theories and compulsory collectivity. Successfully tracking down her mother is a total downer, as we might have expected.
That we find ourselves back in EC horror comics at the end is either the fulfillment of the prologue, one Vietnam vet to another predicting utter horror, or it is a general commentary about the average American life in the twenty first century. The consumer society drags on. Dreams of something different are apparently worse than confused. And we face the cosmos, on the cover of the book, searching for a meaning that is not there (on the back cover, more EC, but leaning toward the famed sci-fi series that borrowed heavily from Ray Bradbury.
The Vietnam War explanation to the book’s mysteries, to the mysteries in Daniel Clowes’s mind. Extraordinary crimes were done in our collective name, and someone must be punished. Then again, as mentioned elsewhere, the aesthetics, such as the darker tinting of pages treating trauma, may work just as well.
Paul Buhle is an editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.
Victory Parade. by Leela Corman. Schocken. 2024 (Pre-order) 177 pp. hardcover. $29.
Leela Corman is a force of nature within the comics community and so it is no surprise that her latest book is quite impressive. We go back to Brooklyn, New York, 1943. Corman takes the reader back in time with her comics that are immersed in the ethos of New Objectivity, an art movement begun in the 1920s in response to the more popular German Expressionism (and ending in 1933 with the Nazi party in power) which brought to the fore such artists as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz. This is art stripped of idealism, concerned with gritty reality, and known for an “expressive” and often cartoon-like quality, a sensibility in tune with many contemporary artist-cartoonists. This particular influence is exemplified in the work of Leela Corman. It is from this darker, beyond world-weary, palette that Corman presents a set of misfits trapped within the gears of a giant meat grinder, caught somewhere between a near death in Brooklyn and a sure death in a concentration camp. Even when the Allies win the war, no one feels like celebrating. In a sense, Corman’s work functions more as painting than a narrative as it is essentially a powerful device with which to evoke this overwhelming despair. There are stories to be told here too, for sure, but I’m just saying that much of this graphic novel’s power comes from its unflinching stare into the abyss.
Don’t expect conventional storytelling here, especially any familiar and reassuring resolution. This is a masterwork by Corman and it is confidently laid out as such. Characters come and go, in precise order. They may not acknowledge how purposeful their steps are and yet seem to know what they must ultimately do with the limited time and resources they have. Rose is going to pursue her affair, while her abusive husband is away at war and even after he’s back. Ruth, the Jew who has found a home with Rose, is going to focus her aggression on a new career as a lady wrestler even if it means she has to be branded as a Kraut monster. And Eleanor, Rose’s daughter, must try to cope amid the dysfunction. Darkness upon darkness. Despair upon despair. And yet beautifully rendered as art and nuanced observation.
If you want to pin this down a bit, you can say that this is graphic novel framed within a family: Rose, the matriarch who works as a riveter; Ruth, who explicitly functions as the Other; and Eleanor who provides the trope of the child’s point of view. And then you have to let in the supernatural because much of this book is about the never-ending conflict between the living and the dead. The dead are always present, either attempting to understand events that led them to the other side or welcoming a constant stream of new arrivals. Death is never too far away. Death turns out to be as real and relevant as anything passing for alive. It is an artist-writer-cartoonist of the caliber of Leela Corman who can conjure upon the stage all of these dancing skeletons and turn it into compelling art.
C.L.R. James’s Touissaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History. Adapted by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee. New York: Verso Books, 2023. 272pp, $24.95.
This is quite a comic! A very intense treatment of the uprising in Haiti that paralleled and deeply involved the French Revolution and yet was treated for centuries as a mere sidebar to world events. Readers will need to think hard, even now, about the reasons why.
But your reviewer gets ahead of the story. This is the graphic adaptation of a play performed on the British stage with Paul Robeson, the phenomenal actor (also and otherwise mainly singer), during the mid-1930s. The author of the play, C.L.R. James, had emigrated from his native Trinidad to Britain in 1931, earned a living as a top-notch cricket reporter, but found himself immersed simultaneously in anti-colonial movements and in the Trotskyist corner of the political Left.
According to contemporary stage critics, the play came across too talky for the drama that it represented, perhaps inevitably: it could have required a cast of thousands. Then again, the subject had hardly surfaced by that time. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), a parallel to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), arose out of his research on the French Revoluition, then grew and grew. It was a story that had hardly been told at all. And if the book received respectable reviews, it fairly disappeared until reappearing as a textbook on campus campuses in the early 1960s. This was “Black History” written like a novel, one of the great successes of the time, definitely parallel to the reprinted editions of Black Reconstruction, one of the later editions introduced by none other than C.L.R. James.
Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee fill the pages with dramatic dialogues (as well as monologues) that draw directly upon the play, and on many pages do not require a dense background. Here and there, we see a remarkable landscape or a vivid crowd scene, but speaking largely moves the story along. Neither the colonizers nor the colonized can be described as unified in their ideas and their actions. On the contrary, events play out with internal agreements astonishingly almost as volatile as between whites, blacks and mulattoes.
James, who also happened to be one of the very first non-white novelists of the English-speaking West Indies, never again had the time, energy or will to write a drama, nor did Robeson (who later captured the stage with his Othello) have the opportunity to play the great black revolutionary hero again. It was a one-time collaboration of giants, after all, but the artists have, in their way, captured both the sense of the play and its deepest meaning. Here, all the contempt of whites for their suppose “inferiors,” against the background of a French Revolution that supposedly broke down all the barriers of inequality. There, the rage of slaves who, contrary to stereotype, did not “go wild” but found their own way, choosing Toussaint as he chose them and following him to the death with a tolerance for suffering that seemed to whites unbelieveable.
Independent Haiti will, of course, be betrayed, by the U.S. among other world powers, isolated and punished for having the nerve to demonstrate the right and capacity for freedom from slavery. The persecution has not ended even now.
But at least the story has been told.
Enough said! Get the book!
Paul Buhle is the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James and editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.
The Bund was a phenomenal uprising of people doing the right thing at a critical time when it was needed most. This graphic novel, or history, (call it whatever you like! It’s comics!) runs with its theme right out of the gate with a sense of urgency that embraces the reader all the way through to the very last page. Think of The Bund as a coalition, a movement, people power at its best. It was there to help people in need, people who happened to be Jewish and living by a thread. Let’s focus on the region, as it could not be more relevant. This is what was known as “The Pale,” what is now Poland and Ukraine. Let’s focus on the era. This is circa 1900 to 1940, covering Tsarist Russia into World War II. The Bund was a Jewish labor resistance movement that pushed back on its oppressors, namely Russia and Nazi Germany; and that cultivated and celebrated a Jewish identity, specifically in nurturing the Yiddish language and tradition. This book provides a history and insights into The Bund. And, if it makes you think of Bundt cake, you are on the right track: a metaphor for a strong and sturdy collective.
What is very exciting to me about this graphic novel is how it is put together as a vehicle to educate while also mindful of keeping the reader engaged. The artwork is pared down to the essentials, for the most part, with the added artistic flourish where needed. I can’t stress enough how important it is to include some personality even in the most straightforward graphic storytelling. If an artist is capable of it, well, go to it. Clearly, Michael Kluckner is in command of a compelling and expressive line.
The individuals behind this book are a creative dream team. The goal here is to provide an entry point, a doorway, into further study or a highly accessible overview. That is what this book does with Sharon Rudahl leading the way as the author. Rudahl is a veteran cartoonist, to say the least, who intimately understands what the comics medium can do. Rudahl is many things, including a passionate activist, along with the book’s esteemed editor, Paul Buhle. In fact, Rudahl and Buhle have a long and productive professional history, highlighted by working together on the Yiddish anthology, Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, published by Abrams in 2011. So, one can see this new book as a continuation of what was achieved with that landmark anthology.
The overriding theme to this book is how The Bund reached out and put itself in the places it needed to be, achieving time and time again the “hereness” that was so desperately called upon. The Bund was HERE! It met the moment, did what it could, and now lives on in spirit. Here we have a book introducing readers to the leaders of The Bund, such as Pati Kremer and Bernard Goldstein. For the first time, we have a concise visual narrative of this highly significant Jewish history. All in all, this visual narrative encapsulates essential history that will inspire new generations. This graphic history meets the moment in its own way, and helps return The Bund to the here and now.
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.
Bill Griffith Talks About Nancy Comics: THREE ROCKS Help Explain it All
