Demystifying The U Ray, the better to rewrite the origin myth of Blake and Mortimer

 Éric Dubois

 ODDYSEY to the origins of Blake and Mortimer, Eric Dubois (curator), Brussels: Belgian Comic Strip Center / Comics Art Museum, April 7 – October 1, 2023. https://www.comicscenter.net/en/exhibitions/gallery/oddysey-to-the-origins-of-blake-and-mortimer

What does the ODYSSEY exhibition explain about the origins of Blake and Mortimer?

It shows that The U Ray (Le Rayon U) album is a missing link between comics in the English-language tradition and the Franco-Belgian one. Edgar P. Jacobs was inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, which he had started by plagiarizing in Bravo! magazine before going on to create his own story. The way in which the artist freed himself in a few pages from an American comic strip narrative and graphic codes such as text boxes and no speech balloons, to forge his own cartooning grammar is fascinating to observe, with period tracings and original pages on display as evidence. For his first attempt at a comic story, it's a stroke of genius. At the Comics Museum in Brussels, Jacob’s talent is displayed before our eyes.

More importantly, the exhibition changes the way we look at this album. U is more than the matrix of the characters and themes of the work to come when Jacobs creates Blake and Mortimer. In 1973, for the first collected album edition, Jacobs was not content to reassemble the original 1943 story from by just rearranging the original two panels per tier to three. He “Blake-and-Mortimerized” his U Ray. The album published by the Éditions du Lombard was no longer just the matrix of the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, but became an extension of that aesthetic. The direct comparison of pages from The U Ray album version and earlier plates from The Secret of the Swordfish, Atlantis Mystery and The Time Trap shows us the mythical character of this two-version album.

What are the most emblematic pieces of the exhibition?

The exhibition presents only original material and a majority are unpublished ones. Among the top pieces, the visitor can discover four panels sketched on tracing paper which are as sumptuous as they are extremely rare; two color-enhanced sketches of Flash Gordon, of which Jacobs only drew five pages in 1942; and two others of the two-panel version of The U Ray from 1943. These are the oldest documents from the story, as well as in the career of Jacobs as a cartoonist. Precious handwritten notes from this first story bear witness to the genesis of the names of places and characters. "Rayon V," "Rayon Vert," but also "Olrik," "Flying shark," and further on "Swordfish." We are struck by the premonitory character of such notes. They prove that from the start that Jacobs did not think in terms of comics, but in rather in terms of the novel, indicating "Roman d’aventure genre Gordon" at the top of his page. The exhibition also displays a small paper model of the album, bound by hand, on which Jacobs sketched all the boxes, the page connections, the strips to be redrawn, the new boxes, and so on, a further testimony to the needs of the draftsman to work out the story.

The visitor can view a selection of original pages from The U Ray. When observed carefully, it is possible to understand the full process of the reassembling of the story in an album and its second inception. Collages and overlays in white gouache and Indian ink abound, to house the speech bubbles as well as format the boxes. But above all, for six of the pages printed in sepia in the Journal Bravo! we have the complete redrawing. This is the exhibition’s key treasure.

Next to this black and white original art that has remained in the shadows for so long, the visitor has the chance to lift the veil on a series of sublime polychrome tracings. Abundantly commented on by Jacobs, a meticulous artist, these fragile sheets also testify to the care taken to document his work and constitute his archives. This is a process that will lead, in 1984, to the creation of the E.P. Jacobs Foundation, today in charge of preserving and promoting the heritage of the Belgian cartoonist.[1]

From what angle does the ODYSSEY exhibition approach the album The U Ray?

Six themes make up the exhibit: Under the Auspices of the Gods, A Modern Homer, Theater of the World, The Death Ray, Unknown Earth and The Eternal Return.

The ODYSSEY exhibition considers The U Ray’s comic strip origin, as well as its genesis from the angle of the myth and the great stories of antiquity, especially Homer's Odyssey. The exhibition explores the affiliations between the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer and American comics, in particular Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, while going beyond the model/copy pattern in order further to suggest relationships between the two stories, whose authors, Jacobs and Raymond, drank from the same literary and cinematographic sources. Jacobs' first story as an author appears as the missing link in a history of Franco-Belgian comics under American influence, of which the superhero became the titular figure, but was not when Jacobs began working.

The mythological angle therefore invites us to see Jacobs as a storyteller. It is a bridge between two generations and two cultural shores. There is a genius for storytelling in him, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the references or the tropes used. This means that despite all the analyses, even the most scholarly, there will always be something more to say about his work. Where Jacobs is at his strongest is in his ability to appropriate the narrative codes of the great tradition of storytelling and mythical narrative. We forget their influence - conscious or not - when one reads a Blake and Mortimer comic book. Jacobs is a true storyteller and that's why his stories are timeless.

I think of Jules Verne and his Voyage to the Moon, but also in particular Arthur Conan Doyle with his novel The Lost World. Behind this fantasy story, that has the trappings of a pseudo-scientific novel, hides a sociological study on the brutality of human relations in a civilized environment. I perceive in Jacobs this same universalism in the narratives with a reflexive background. In his stories, Jacobs reconnects with the primary vocation of storytelling, which was to give food for thought by striking the imagination with edifying tales, thereby creating images capable of inspiring or transmitting a certain morality.

The exhibit layout plays a major role. How did you envision it?

My creative process played on radical changes: scale, light, and color, and is inspired by the spectacle side of amusement parks. The exhibition is initially fully lit before darkening and then returning to light, following a ritual symbolism of the return to the starting point. The design is based on large sets playing the role of thresholds. It was a question of giving the space an aura of grandeur, but also of punctuating the visit with twists -- such as acts in the theater. Right from the entrance with its giant octopus, the tone is set. These decorations evoke the fairground attractions of Coney Island in New York, the model of all modern magic and source of inspiration for Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo.

Under the Auspices of the Gods is dedicated to Flash Gordon and the Journal Bravo!. It presents the tracings of the 2^nd and 4^th panels of Flash by Jacobs. Modern Homer concentrates on the characters. Attention is drawn to the "small note papers of Edgar P. Jacobs", which show to the method of reassembly for the album. The Theater of the World emphasizes spatio-temporal exoticism and the art of staging. Color is also evoked as an agent of the wonders of Jacobs’s world. The Death Ray is dedicated to the ultimate weapon which is the McGuffin of The U Ray. The Unknown Land is the famous Terra Incognita of old maps and terrestrial globes. In this part, it is about the ape-men and the perils that threaten the troop led by the Lord Calder character.

The final theme, The Eternal Return, is dedicated to the sequel to U and presents a series of original pages from The Fiery Arrow. This theme closes the time loop by highlighting the return to certain visual archetypes in this sequel, and the way in which, again in mythology, ritual (codified repetition) is the means for humanity to access the divine, and therefore immortality. From The U Ray onwards, Edgar P. Jacobs maintained a delightfully paradoxical relationship with time that was tempting to explore here, not to resolve or reduce it, but to settle in it and savor it.

How did you take into account the interior space of the building of the Comics museum, which is extremely bright?

To ensure the preservation of the works, it was essential to control the luminosity of the interior of the building, first designed by the Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta as an opulent and bourgeois fabrics store, which serves now as a showcase for the Museum. A paper ceiling was created to break the sunlight coming from the iconic glass roof. It also plays the role of the chromatic palette of the exhibition, directly inspired by that of the album. This design device is very significant visually, both for visitors who are below and for those seeing it from the mezzanine of the upper floor. As such, an exhibition addresses the mind as much as the body and create the conditions for an encounter with the work in its very essence, and not only in the materiality of the pages that made it possible.

We must not forget that the original work in comics is the printed and published story in an album. That is what is on display. So this exhibition puts itself forward even more as a true setting in this sense, because with Edgar P. Jacobs, the setting is as important as the action and the characters. I was careful to maintain a kind of sensory and chromatic unity throughout the visit, without forgetting the key contribution of sound to give the exhibition its inhabited character. Once again, my accomplice the composer Bruno Letort, knew how to create an atmosphere that gives soul to the exhibition. Letort is a fan of Jacobs who listens to Blake and Mortimer albums as much as he reads them. For the visitors we hope to have created an exhibition in which all the senses are awakened.

Éric Dubois is a design professor in Paris and has been participating with comic strip exhibitions since François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters set him on the path with their Drawing Machines in 2016 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. After that, he worked with Blake and Mortimer, for which he created several exhibitions with journalists and comics experts Thierry Bellefroid and Daniel Couvreur: Scientifiction (2018), The Secret of the Swordfish (2021), MachinaXion (2022). Dubois is the sole curator of ODYSSEY exhibition on the origins of Blake and Mortimer. This is an exhibition dedicated to The “U” Ray, the first comic book by Edgar P. Jacobs.

 The Belgian Comic Strip Center

The Belgian Comic Strip Center opened its doors to the public on October 6th 1989. In no time this impressive museum became one of the main attractions of Brussels. Every year more than 250.000 visitors come here to explore 4,200 m² of permanent and temporary exhibitions, not to mention its comprehensive documentation center and rich collections. The BCSC collects anything that deals with European comics, from its prestigious beginnings to its latest developments.

Temporary and permanent exhibitions have transformed this Art Nouveau gem into a living and attractive temple. It is a dynamic and exciting place where everything is done to promote the Ninth Art (associated with the creation of the Brussels Comic Strip Route, the issue of Comic Strip stamps, etc...). The Belgian Comic Strip Center also produces, for many partners, conferences, books, creative workshops and counseling.

With more than 700 comic strip authors, Belgium has more comic strip artists per square kilometer than any other country in the world! It is here that the comic strip has grown from a popular medium into an art in its own right. Nowhere else comics are so strongly rooted in reality and in people's imagination.

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[1] Since 2018, first under the aegis of the King Baudouin Foundation which hosted the Jacobs Fund for four years, then under the impetus of a renewed E. P. Jacobs Foundation, several exhibitions and publications have been able to highlight the unique qualities of the work of Edgar P. Jacobs. The work of preserving the archives left by the creator of Blake and Mortimer continues. The E.P. Jacobs Foundation is actively involved in this, in collaboration with the King Baudouin Foundation, which now assists it in this task. Created by Edgar P. Jacobs to guarantee the heritage of his work, it is possible today to look into its archives of unsuspected richness and to discover there the stages of an extraordinary creation. 

Curator’s Notes on Icons of American Animation, the exhibition

by Robert Lemieux

During the first quarter of 2022, I was fortunate to curate a popular animation exhibition, Icons of American Animation. The exhibit spoke to the rich history of one of America’s most popular and influential art forms. The artwork spanned the 20^th century, with over 150 pieces from 30 production studios, and emphasized notable characters, films, and animators associated with both film and television. Included within the artwork were 15 Academy Award winners and 20 films listed in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. By all accounts, it was an astounding presentation of the animation art form.

I contend that animation consists of two distinct, yet very connected, art forms. The first art form is the film itself. This is what most viewers relate to, as virtually everyone has a favorite animated film. The film is a stand-alone piece of art that is accepted as art, complete with a broad cultural reach (e.g., film studies, film critics, film festivals, film history, commercial tie-ins).  

The second art form reflects the ‘art behind the art’ and is less obvious to most viewers. This encompasses the production art needed to make the film – storyboards, model sheets, backgrounds, cels, inspirational paintings, etc. On an intuitive level, we know it exists, but it tends to be overshadowed by the final product, the film. Over the past 35 years, production artwork has become more recognized for its artistic value and has become highly sought by collectors. Our exhibit focused on this production art, as it tells the process of creating an animated film during the hand-drawn era that dominated much of the 20^th century.

As a follow-up to the exhibit, IJOCA invited me to submit an article and discuss key aspects. Much of what follows is a ‘show-and-tell’ of the production process with specific examples from the exhibit. 

Before I show-and-tell, I want to share a few logistical and planning points. To start with, consider the exhibit’s title. Titling can be a drawn-out and frustrating task, as we search for the ultimate representation. For this exhibit, there were two keywords in the title – Icons and American. Let us address the latter word first, as it is the easiest of the two to discuss.

The inclusion of the word American was both strategic and respectful. To simply call the exhibit Icons of Animation, which was our initial thought, would have negated the contributions of international animation. That may seem like a simple point, but it was important to us.

Using the word icons was considerably more challenging. As one colleague noted, “If you are bold enough to use the word icons, you are going to need some really good stuff.” Agreed. Thankfully, with a history that runs for more than 100 years, animation offers plenty of iconic contenders. That said, what does it mean to be iconic? More importantly, what 20^th century American animation would you point to as being iconic?

For ease of argument and simplicity of example, let’s assume we all agree Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is iconic. The film has a running time of 83 minutes. If the film adheres to the standard 24 frames per second, that’s more than 110,000 hand-drawn images to choose from! What single image or set of images best represents the icon that is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Is it the witch with the apple? Surely the dwarfs must be in there and, of course, Snow White. The prince? There are so many iconic elements to that film that it becomes a challenge. Keep in mind that the images we select help shape the exhibit’s narrative. So, in a sense, we determine that which is iconic.

Let us look at another example, Lady and the Tramp. Is it an iconic film? That is perhaps more debatable than Snow White. However, what is less debatable is the spaghetti scene, where Lady and Tramp share a plate of spaghetti. There is not a better image to represent the film and, yes, it is iconic. Even if I see the image outside of its context, I know exactly what it pertains to and where it comes from.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding animation art, iconic or otherwise. Aside from The Walt Disney Family Museum, which houses primarily Disney art, where do you find anything associated with the likes of UPA, Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward, Fleischer, MGM, or many of the other studios from the 20^th century? After considerable research, a fellow curator recommended Mr. Mike Glad, a private collector who has what many consider to be the most comprehensive animation collection. Part of Mr. Glad’s collection has been featured in various museum exhibits, both domestic and international. To be frank, the breadth and depth of his collection is astounding, and it was clear he could satisfy our icon theme.

Equally important was that Mr. Glad’s collection could tell the story of the hand-drawn era. The collection consists of an array of production art that represents the various stages of the animation process. The rest of this article presents aspects of that process via selected pieces.

Storyboard

Generally, the production process starts with storyboarding. Presented below is an example from Pinocchio (1940, Walt Disney Studios) that uses colored pencil on paper, and features scene and camera designations. Even with something as simple as a storyboard, we see the quality and detail of the artistic process. (Fig. 1)

Animation Drawing

This example is from Flowers and Trees (1932, Walt Disney Studios), which is the first Academy Award winning animated short. If you are familiar with the film, you know it is a love story, where the hero tree battles a villain tree for the love of the female tree. This piece represents part of the final scene. After vanquishing the villain, the hero proposes with a caterpillar ring. If you look closely, you can see they have lightly sketched how the caterpillar will roll into position. Also present is a small audience of flower characters in the background. As an animation drawing, it features the characters. You will notice there are no background details. When the characters are transferred to the acetate cel, this is how they will look. (Fig. 2)

 

Background

              Presented below are two examples that illustrate the beauty of background images. The first is from Donald’s Ostrich (1937, Walt Disney Studios), which is watercolor on paperboard. This is the opening image of the film, and it is on screen for a mere six seconds, as the camera zooms in to the station platform. You will notice that there are no characters. Placed over the background would have been acetate cels that show the motion of the characters, in this case a cow, a pig, and flying birds, which are also part of the opening shot. As the camera settles on the station platform, the story unfolds, and all the remaining action takes place either on the platform or the station’s interior. Those scenes would involve different backgrounds that reflect close-up and mid-shot camera angles. The point is that this single image, with its beautiful artistic detail, establishes the sense of place. It also speaks to the ‘art behind the art.’ As an aside, it was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibit. (Fig. 3)

The second background image is watercolor on paperboard from Pigs is Pigs (1954, Walt Disney Studios), and it also features a train station. However, this image reflects the impact of modern art on animation, post-World War II. During the exhibit, we placed the two train station images side-by-side to show the changing styles. This image appears at the end of the film and, like the image from Donald’s Ostrich, it is on screen for a mere six seconds. (Fig. 4)

 

Layout Drawing

              This piece from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1936, Walt Disney Studios) is an example of a layout drawing, as it combines the features of an animation drawing and the background. The characters and the background are represented. The dwarfs, as well as the squirrel and rabbit, are moving characters that would be on acetate cels. Everything else would be part of the watercolor background. An incredible amount of artistry for a ‘simple’ layout drawing. (Fig. 5)

 

Inspirational Painting

              How is the mood of a scene established? Many artists create mood boards during the early part of the creative process. Similar to brainstorming, mood boards consist of images that an artist collects, and they help direct the artist in his/her creative process. Inspirational paintings are akin to mood boards and, as the name suggests, they are paintings that help set the look and mood of a scene. This example is from Cinderella (1950, Walt Disney Studios) and is watercolor and gauche on paperboard. Although the final scene may not look exactly like this, the image serves as the model. You get a sense of the mood via the colors, perspective, and shapes. This piece was created by Mary Blair, one of the few notable female animators. (Fig. 6)

 

Model Sheet

              Depicted here is a Lois Lane model sheet from Fleischer Studio’s Superman series in the 1940s. A model sheet provides detailed information about a character. In this example, we see anatomy, proportions, motion, angles, attire, and, in the lower right corner, detailed information about her eyes and mouth. A model sheet helps maintain the character’s consistency, especially if there are multiple artists drawing the same character. Virtually every primary character in an animated film would have an accompanying model sheet. (Fig. 7)

 

Color Model

              A color model is, essentially, an animation drawing with color notations. This image is from Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937, Warner Brothers Studios) and reflects how color is attributed. All the notations indicate the colors to be used, whether for clothing, props, or aspects of the character. In this example, we see BR (brown) for Porky’s jacket, blue-grey for the gun barrel, yellow for Daffy’s feet and bill, and two types of red for Porky’s hat. Like a model sheet, the color model helps maintain the color consistency. (Fig. 8)

 

Cel Setup

              This image is from The Band Concert (1935, Walt Disney Studios), and it represents the totality of the process, with everything in place. All the, somewhat muted, colors are associated with the watercolor background, and all the vibrantly colored characters are on acetate cels. This is the opening scene of the film, and the camera slowly zooms in toward the stage over the course of ten seconds. The impressive part is that all the audience members are in motion, as they cheer and clap. Considering the number of characters in the audience, that’s an extraordinary amount of motion that must be drawn, frame by frame. In short, this is a complex image. Thus, the more complex your design, the more complex it becomes to create the image and motion. (Fig. 9)

 

Music

              The roll of music is pivotal in film, particularly within animation. During the 1930s, many animated shorts consisted solely of music, with no dialogue. Disney’s Silly Symphony series, which numbered 75 short films, relied heavily on the musical score to promote the action. Some of the most notable films in animation history come from that series (e.g., Flowers & Trees (1932), The Skeleton Dance (1929), The Old Mill (1937)). Warner Brothers was also active in creating musical shorts, as they attempted to take advantage of their extensive music library. Many of today’s modern feature-length films have produced notable soundtracks (e.g., The Lion King). In short, music is a key component in the production process.

              The example presented below is a music sheet from Fantasia (1940, Walt Disney Studios), and it speaks to the intricacies of coordinating music to image. You will notice how the French horn and the bugle are emphasized in the musical notation and, most interestingly, how it applies to the scene. Below the musical notation is a watercolor thumbnail image of the scene accompanied by the camera shot notations. In this case, it is an exterior long shot of the castle, with a description of the sorcerer’s action. Most impressive is the thumbnail image, which speaks to the quality of the detail and craftsmanship. There were four Fantasia music sheets in the exhibit. (Fig. 10)

 

As popular as the art form has become, in the early 20th century animation was often viewed as an experimental novelty. The labor-intensive process of creating multiple drawings per second of film time was considered inefficient and costly by film studios. Despite these perceptions, it wasn’t long before like-minded animators joined forces, and the early strands of animation’s DNA began to coalesce into Fleischer Studios, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, Terrytoons, and Walter Lantz Productions. This hand-drawn energy would usher in animation’s Golden Era, which would extend for 40 years into the 1960s.

Throughout the Golden Era, most animated films were released as shorts, with running times of approximately seven minutes. The shorts were shown prior to a live-action feature film and, on occasion, proved more popular than the feature. In 1937, with the release of Snow White, the animated feature was born, adding to the art form’s popularity. After World War II, new studios began to emerge, such as Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward, and UPA. In addition to the new material, many older shorts found a second life via a new venue – television. The segue to television in the 1960s also brought about a shift, as the number of features declined and, with the emergence of Saturday morning cartoons, animation became tailored toward children. In the last two decades of the 20th century, the industry rekindled itself with a resurgence of features from Walt Disney, as well as new studios, such as Don Bluth, Pixar, and Dreamworks. Additionally, there was an influx of prime-time animated television shows.

Over the course of the past century, one thing has become clear: The “experimental novelty” has transformed itself into a legitimate art form that continues to animate the imagination.

A version of this essay will appear in print in IJOCA in the fall.

Book review: Anatomy of Comics: Famous Originals of Narrative Art

Damien MacDonald. Anatomy of Comics: Famous Originals of Narrative Art. Flammarion, 2022. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/713632/anatomy-of-comics-by-damien-macdonald/9782080281876

Reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC-Okinawa

The field of comic art has always been an extensive, albeit misunderstood or misinterpreted, one.  There have been multiple attempts to document the historical development of the field, as well as the impact or interpretation of artists and their creations.  To that end, Anatomy of Comics goes into more detail as to the connections between many different media. 

The book is a project of the la Caixa Foundation in Spain which analyzes the cultural aspect of all cultural media, from music to dance to art.  This book is a catalogue of an exhibit, Comics, Dreams and History, curated by MacDonald, which will be on display at nine different museums in Spain. That exhibition was based largely on the collection of Bernard Mahe, with contributions from various artists. The book is a natural extension of the exhibit where each subsection focuses in the intersection of different media, as well as gives examples of each theme. “Anatomy” is the overarching theme of the book though, with a cover illustration of a dissected head by Charles Burns, reproducing his cover of Metal Hurlant #120. Reproductions of original artwork illustrate the book, which is divided into five chapters of different themes, based loosely around that anatomy theme from the title. The book unfortunately does not list the media of the illustration – pen and ink, watercolor -- only the use it was put to – illustration, cover, Sunday Paper.

Section one was entitled “Tongue-in-cheek: A multi-lingual birth process.”  This section went through a discussion of how comics were created.  One quote of interest from this chapter was that the book is a “lover’s guide to the anatomy of comics, rather than a formal dissection.”  While the wording may seem somewhat disturbing, the theme of different origins and different reactions to comics is important.  There is a discussion of Winsor McCay’s work on Little Nemo in Slumberland, as well as Richard Outcault, but also that of Rudolphe Topffer whose first work was published in 1821. 

Further analysis shows how concepts such as shapeshifting characters becomes an integral part of comic book storytelling.  McCay used the concepts of shapeshifting in his work, showing a dragon acting as a carriage for a princess.  MacDonald also argues comic creators had to shift their skills from different media into the comic art process. (p. 21) He noted that originally literature was accepted in the academics’ world, while comics were often considered throwaway work, but now those same comics are studied by academics.  The first school to offer a formal scholastic program of the study of comic books was in Belgium, The Belgian Ecoles Superieures des Arts Saint-Luc in 1969. (p.25)  The shapeshifting of and changes in characters can also be a reflection of the changing persona of the creator, whether they changed their name for more work, or obscured their race or gender to gain access to the market.  It all reflected the dual-identity nature of the characters as well as the creators. 

MacDonald’s additional analysis of characters acceptable mutations as time passed and publishing options changed shows the evolution of cat-based characters from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat to the counterculture creation of Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat and Fat Freddy’s Cat by Gilbert Shelton. Finally, a multi-lingual approach looks at the use of idioms and slang, and he argues this was often used in American comic characters to gain immigrant readers.  This influence went both ways, and creators also added foreign concepts or language – such as Yiddish – into the American lexicon. 

Part II “The Third Ear – the onomatopoeia unleashed” dealt with cartooning as an extension of language, and also discussed the rhythm of comic art and its relation to music.  The chapter noted that some creators such as Robert Crumb or Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius) created album covers that reflected their comic book origins.  Most of the early chapter centers on Will Eisner’s approach to building stories using pacing and tone akin to films to construct effective stories.  In an interview, Eisner said, “I write in onomatopoeia, which relies on instinct rather than just the conscious mind. Most of my writing is done by sound and visual.”  MacDonald takes the first part of the phrase and returns to it again and again to argue that comics creation is always a mixture of verbal and visual parts. The section includes the movement of characters via mechanical means such as airplanes.  Using Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Joe Kubert, Herge, and several others, the concept of travel and movement is explored and expanded. 

Part III “The Mind’s Eye – Mavericks, Rebels, and World-builders” starts off with a quote from Alan Moore about how the reader controls the time and pacing of comics, unlike in film, a point that has been noted by many others.  Many innovative comic creators focused on creating and showing a fantastical aspect of life that couldn’t exist in any other media, which in American comic books culminated in superheroes.  To that end, Macdonald notes that ideas espoused by Nietzsche (the idea of the Ubermensch or Supermen) were co-opted by the Nazis in the 1930s, even as Nazis came to see comic books as a form of degenerate entertainment created by Jews. MacDonald also looks at some early creators with examples of Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy.  An interesting comparison is made with relation to early films similarity to comic books. 

From this point the rest of the chapter centers on the various aspects of an idealized world presented in comic books.  From the images associated with action strips like Tarzan, Prince Valiant, and Flash Gordon, to the European concepts presented in Capitan Trueno, El Principe Encanto, and the Steel Claw, and then John Buscema’s work on many of the Marvel characters in the 1960s and 1970s.  Nods are given to Chris Ware, Phil Davis and Jesus and Pili Blasco, with the culmination of the chapter quoting from Neil Gaiman, who noted that “Batman and Superman are transcendent.  They are better than most of the stories they are in.” (p. 137) To illustrate this point, the examples are extensive and range from Hugo Pratt to Mike Mignola.

Chapter IV “Ink and Paper Sex – Underground put X in Comix” deals with the role of counterculture in society.  Robert Crumb was quoted in the beginning of the chapter and MacDonald then looks at his characters, which are explored in detail for the commentary on race, class, or society embodied in them.  Sex and sexuality are a considerable aspect of comic art from the very beginning, and MacDonald includes how gender plays a part in the medium. He states that is important to understand the time they were created in, and that “[t]oday’s sometimes severe moral judgement of underground comics lacks historical perspective.” (p.190). Additionally, the X in comix may refer to the subconscious, as well as the aspects of psychoanalysis.  Serge Tisserson’s Psychoanalysis of Comics was the first to effectively attempt to understand the meanings behind the comics.  Macdonald also noted the Wertham study and its misunderstanding of deviancy as being caused or enabled by comic books. 

Milton Caniff’s work on Terry and the Pirates and Male Call were done to accentuate the female form for a male readership.  Additionally, several examples were given of creators who pushed their work to play with concepts of sexuality, such as Frank Frazetta.  Even famed Italian film maker Federico Fellini noted that the comic books have a way of propelling the viewer in ways that the movie cannot. 

The last chapter of the book “Skeleton Key – decoding the symbolism of comics” begins with creators known for their work on expanding the world and understanding of comic art: Chris Ware and Scott McCloud.  European cartoonists such as Enki Bilal, Yves Chaland and Jean-Claude Mezieres are included and tied into changing attitudes towards mysticism and androgyny in comics as well as the world.  The last anecdote of the book dealt with a film that never was, a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky, with story boards done by Moebius.  The concept had great connections across the media, from major film actors, to production backing, to music, but all to no end as it was never made but is a classic “what might have been.”  MacDonald ends by noting “Comic book making depends on low tech, ancient methods and materials: Paper and ink, but there has been an intrinsic link between cyberpunks and comics, hacker culture and sci-fi, counterculture and whistleblowers… Let’s hope may freethinking tricksters will use the tools of this medium, and invent a new symbolism that will keep the art popular, while avoiding populism. Let’s hope the dreamwork has hardly begun.” (p. 243) It connects all the chapters well.

From a historical perspective, the book offers new ideas and connections as to how different media play and use one another to push their own agenda.  The book reads as a companion to an exhibit and one gets the feel of the traveling displays.  The two biggest drawbacks to the book are significant but understandable.  First, there are no Asian examples of comic book creators.  This can be understood by being based on one man’s collection.  It should not be taken to mean that Asia has not contributed heavily to the media.

The second shortcoming of the book is that some creators may be overlooked. From an artistic standpoint, one might expect Alex Ross to be included in the book for his style of art.  In my opinion, British creators Carlos Ezquerra and Garth Ennis should also be included as their work in both scripting and illustrating materials is important to today’s comic book industry.  Overall, the book spurs the thought process of various creators and how they might be seen in a different light (Eisner’s work for the military producing educational, military cartoons comes to mind). 

In all, it is a spirited book that makes interesting connections between the realms of art, literature, music and film to name but a few of the disciplines.  It is an approach that offers a reader insight into not just creation directly, but into the connections that make the field all the richer in the long term. 

Review Essay: Chicago: Center of the Comics Universe

Review Essay: Chicago: Center of the Comics Universe

José Alaniz

 

 

Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life. Chris Ware and Tim Samuelson. Sidney Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, June 19, 2021-January 9, 2022. <https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/comics.html >

 

Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War. James Brundage. Pritzker Military Museum & Library: opened May 14, 2021-April 2, 2022. <https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/billmauldinexhibit >

 

Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now. Dan Nadel. Griffin Galleries of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, June 19-October 3, 2021. <https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2021/Chicago-Comics-1960s-To-Now >

For a few months in 2021, Chicago became the center of the US cartoon universe with no fewer than four major comics-related shows going on simultaneously, the majority of them focused on the Chicago scene and industry going back to its beginnings.

A visitor to the windy city, traversing its streets with their magnificent architecture at every turn (a museum in their own right), might well eschew the gargantuan Marvel: Universe of  Superheroes touring exhibition which was also in town (and reviewed elsewhere), and focus instead on the richness that is Chicago comics. Said visitor might come in from the metropolis’ autumn chill to the ornate halls of the Sidney Yates Gallery, on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, for Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life. Curated and designed by Chris Ware, with the collaboration of Chicago cultural historian emeritus Tim Samuelson, the show proved a revelation.

Figuratively and literally, the show had Ware’s fingerprints all over it, its every square inch reflecting his wry sensibility and meticulous attention to detail. The large space was divided into walled-off sub-units to create an interlocking series of mini-exhibits such that you might turn a corner and glimpse something from 50 years later or earlier before resettling your attention on what’s in front of you.   

“[C]omics are a rat maze,” Ware told an interviewer. “Look here, don’t look here, go here, go there. So I designed this show to act as a comic strip itself.”[1]

A rat maze designed by Chris Ware is bound to be crammed with far more information at a glance than any human being could take in, even over repeated viewings on multiple weekends — and that’s just what you got. The walls turned boustrophedon-like, with every step thought out as you penetrated into another sub-gallery. As noted, the twisty-turny architecture encouraged your gaze to wander from the object before you to those on the other side of the hall, all the way to the Chicago skyscrapers and Millennium Park outside the large windows. It felt like negotiating a mammoth 3D crossword puzzle with multicolored walls (82 of them!) spilling over with portraits, period pictures, art implements, video clips, figurines, period advertisements,  reproductions, original art, books, memorabilia, ephemera of all kinds, comics, artists’ furniture and merchandise — some of it hanging overhead. 

Blurbs covering material from Rodolphe Töppfer to the origins of the Chicago industry all the way to the 1960s were written by Ware, Samuelson, Tim Jackson, Caitlin McGurk, Hillary Chute, Warren Bernard, Trina Robbins and other scholars. The sheer amount of artists, editors, publishers covered — and all the stuff — was staggering.  

Much emphasis was laid on the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday comics page, which introduced the world to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1918), Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy (1931) and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1924). You may have heard of them. But what about Charles Lederer? John T. McCutcheon? William Schmedtgen? Bungleton Green? “Where Comics Came To Life” brought those and countless other turn-of-the-19^th-century and later figures, most known mainly by specialists, back from decades-long obscurity. Several were women and/or BIPOC. 

Laid out before us was a vibrant history of graphic narrative in Chicago, a history you literally walked through, with astonishing discoveries at virtually every step. What follows is a shamefully incomplete summation.

Chicago Art Institute alum Schmedtgen, while a staffer at the Chicago Mail in 1882, developed an intaglio process to expeditiously prepare and publish drawings – including in sequences of more than one – in the daily newspaper. Over the course of his career (he would move on to become art director at the Chicago Daily News), Schmedtgen capitalized on further technological advances and oversaw illustrators like McCutcheon and George Ade as they chronicled the life of the city in drawings. In this era they helped create the modern comic strip. Their trajectories complement — and in many cases precede — what was happening in the Big Apple at such publications as Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal. For example, The Chicago Inter-Ocean ­— not one of the New York papers — was the first to publish a color illustrated supplement and cartoons in 1892.

Through the aforementioned myriad effects as well as massive page reproductions taking up whole walls as background to the displays, the exhibit presented dimly-remembered newspaper strip icons like George W. Peck (1856-1916), the “father” of Chicago comics. His “Peck’s Bad Boy” was a transmedial sensation that outlived him, even into the television age. To take in strips like William Donahey’s The Teenie Weenies (1914), Johnny Gruelle’s lush color artwork in his “Mr. Tweedle” Sunday feature (which filled in the yawning gap left by Winsor McCay when he left the New York Herald in 1911) and the early work of Clare A. Briggs, Sydnie Smith and E.C. Segar is to catch glimpses of an era when cartoonists were highly-paid celebrities and much sought-after circulation-boosting stars in their own right. The Chicago Tribune could even make a claim for debuting the first comic superhero, in the guise of Heinrich Detlev Körner’s “Hugo Hercules” (1902).

The show devoted substantial attention to the city’s Black publishers and cartoonists, like Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who founded the seminal newspaper The Chicago Defender (1905). This boasted the largest readership of any Black publication; many credited it as a major factor in encouraging the African-American Great Migration from south to north. For me the stand-outs in this section included Leslie Malcolm Rogers, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute who joined the Defender as its second staff artist in 1919 and the next year launched “Bungleton Green,” the longest-lasting African-American-centered strip produced by an African-American (it lasted until the 1960s under various artists); Daniel Day, the “world’s youngest cartoonist,” who worked at the paper from the age of 12, contributing his strip of observational humor “Spotty” (1927) from the age of 14; and the better-known Jackie Ormes, the first and most successful Black female comic strip artist, who enjoyed a decades-long career and more than a million readers in the Black press, with work often centered on fashion as well as social commentary.

The Frank King section, taking up several walls on its own (about a third of the exhibit), provided an exhaustive, practically year-by-year account of the “Gasoline Alley” (1919) cartoonist’s life from childhood to his career at the Tribune to retirement in Florida. The walls were plastered with larger-than-life- King Sunday comics pages and strips, taking advantage of corners to highlight a color scheme or other effect. These devices recalled Ware’s own constructs, like his Rusty Brown lunch box, comics shop display stands and mobiles.

A visitor here felt as if shrunk down to ant size relative to the art. Looking up at them from close enough, the comics seemed to dominate from horizon to horizon. Comics heaven! As Ware puts it in his gloss, the design was inspired by Walt and Skeezix’s perennial nature walks “through the reds, oranges, browns and yellows of a crisply-rendered midwestern fall landscape.”

The King section also featured such additional material as photographs, a detailed biography, a printing plate of a Sunday strip from 1930, drawing implements, furniture, sketches, diaries, letters, appointment books, merchandise — even a pubescent Skeezix hanging from the ceiling. Some of these touches come off as a bit creepy in that Ware way. Ware has long idolized King and sees him as one of his greatest influences; that adoration was palpable in this show. Remarkably, some of the drawings in King’s sketchbooks strongly reminded me of Ware’s drawings from his.     

A show of Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life’s scope is bound to hold many surprises and discoveries, as I’ve tried to convey. One particularly captivating piece has stayed with me for how it made me rethink what I thought I knew about the history of LGBTQ+ representation comics. The strip “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye” (1905) by Anonymous, which ran in the Tribune for less than a year, used a recurring gag formula not unlike Winsor McCay’s “Little Sammie Sneeze.” Two women keep bidding each other farewell as one departs on a journey. But their utter absorption in and physical affections toward each other tantalizingly hint at something much deeper, even as chaos erupts. For these heroines, arrayed in extravagant Edwardian dress, parting is such sweet sorrow, and not even a tornado will tear them apart. This is comic “female hysteria” veiling what seems a strong same-sex attraction.

According to McGurk’s gloss, some evidence suggests that the artist may have been a man[2] with some awareness of the homoerotic theme’s potential for controversy: “[T]he artist may have concealed their identity to avoid complaint and controversy over interpretation of Lucy and Sophie as romantic friends or lovers.” In theme and execution, “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye” is a landmark work which the exhibit made available to whole new audiences. And it was just one of this event’s many-splendored treasures.

Not far from the Cultural Center one finds the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, site of the second star in Chicago’s celestial comics convergence of 2021-2022,  Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War. Where Ware and Samuelson’s exhibit was an epic with what seemed a cast of thousands, this show was chamber drama exceptionally focused on just one artist. But again, there were many discoveries to be had. 

 Drawn to Combat’s curator, James Brundage (a veteran of the Iraq war), brought together nearly 150 of the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist’s original drawings and published cartoons, along with personal material, documents, merchandise and books from his long career. Before even entering the space of the gallery, you were greeted by Mauldin characters painted on the walls of a long corridor leading to the entrance (Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life used a similar device).

Born in New Mexico in 1921, Mauldin studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and tried his hand at modest gag strips like Cactus Juice before WWII took him to the European theater. Attached to the 45^th Infantry Division, he saw the war firsthand, and was even wounded in the shoulder. He drew cartoons for the army newspaper all the way through the invasion of Sicily in 1943. His beloved “dogface” recruit characters, Willie and Joe, delighted readers of Stars and Stripes, while United Feature Syndicate distributed his work for a civilian audience. After that, his immortality was assured. By the time the war ended in 1945, Mauldin was widely syndicated, had published two booklets and won a Pulitzer Prize. Soon there was even a Willie and Joe movie deal.  

What was it about Mauldin’s war cartoons that proved so compelling for some many people? In a word, candor.

Willie and Joe, ordinary grunts, looked nothing like most civilians’ romanticized notions of corn-fed freedom-fighting warriors. In “Yer Lucky. Yer Learnin’ A Trade” (1944), the brutish Willie, dangling a cigarette from his fingers, matter-of-factly speaks those words to his bare-chested companion, who’s building a road over mud. Bearded, disheveled, loaded down with a rifle, grenades and knives, Willie looks like a walking arsenal, a scruffy Christmas tree of war. The shirtless Joe, dog tags jangling on his chest, looks up with slitted eyes, barely registering the sarcasm. Also unshaven, he almost resembles a hirsute Hulk as drawn by Sal Buscema. The bitter joke is that no skills learned on the front will really help soldiers transition back to civilian life, which might as well be on another planet.

“I Got a Hangover, Does It Show?” (1945) continues in this vein. Our two heroes are dirty, unkempt, what one might expect troops to look like after years of combat but which one rarely sees in the media even today. The men have full beards, detritus (twigs, camouflage, dirt) clings to their uniforms, they look exhausted, lines crisscross their faces. They have mud splotches (let’s hope they’re mud splotches) on their heavy coats. They all seem to chain-smoke, always with a bemused, contemptuous look, especially when an officer shows up. Their common soldier cynicism is a tonic to sham wartime propaganda.

Form echoes content in these cartoons. Mauldin’s confident thick lines and brushstrokes, both calculated and dashed off, seem almost expressionist. A bundle or rolled-up sleeping bag at a soldier’s hip is a mere swirl of thick lines with scratchy accents. Like the grunts digging trenches and shooting Germans, Mauldin’s art may not always be “pretty,” but it gets the job done.

In short, Willie and Joe make the “realistic” infantrymen of Saving Private Ryan look like Jay Gatsby. They in fact expose such hollow “patriotic” representations for the phony, glamorized facades they are. Mauldin’s cartoons conveyed the fact that, even in a “just” war, morale among the rank and file often sucked, for the simple reason that they were abused, taken for granted, undersupplied, overworked and needlessly exposed to danger. Like ordinary troops have been since time immemorial.  

Little surprise, then, that the people who created those conditions, the officer corps, tended to hate Mauldin’s work.

In Luxembourg, General George Patton himself called Mauldin on the carpet over his “scruffy” troops. Patton wanted to censor Mauldin’s cartoons in Stars and Stripes, due to their “demoralizing” effect. (To no avail — Patton’s boss General Dwight Eisenhower overruled him.) Mauldin commemorated the meeting with a drawing[3] of Patton’s open door to his office in what looks like an ornate 18^th-century palace. The great man of history himself (along with his bull terrier) sits sullenly inside.

Had Bill Mauldin died in 1945 or never drawn again after that point, we would still remember him today as a fiercely frank chronicler of war from a common man’s perspective. But in actuality Mauldin would go on to produce his most piercing and substantial work over the rest of the 20^th century, his editorial cartoons attacking such entrenched US evils as the mistreatment of veterans, racial prejudice, inequality of all sorts, the Vietnam fiasco and the environmental crisis. He won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1959, for a cartoon of the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak as a prisoner.[4]

Few things seem to have angered Mauldin as much as the particular brand of hypocrisy exhibited by white Americans who proclaimed freedom at home but denied it those who were racially different from them, regardless of service overseas. Many works just after the war detailed the rampant discrimination against veterans of color who were often denied benefits like the GI Bill’s provisions. A 1946 cartoon shows our heroes returned from Europe, standing before a want ad which requires applicants to “prove racial and religious background.” A clean-shaven Willie, still smoking, still with a caustic expression, says, “I ain’t got a chance, Joe. I had too many blood transfusions overseas.” A child stands next to them, looking at the sign. Mauldin is asking what lessons the nation is teaching the young.

In many similar cartoons, Mauldin brought attention to the racism against minority service members back from the war, who were not allowed to re-enter the society they had fought for — not as full citizens, anyway. (President Harry S. Truman did not outlaw segregation in the military until 1948, though changes were not fully realized until six years later.) Job discrimination was a major theme. In a 1947 work, a Black man stares down a white officer barring his way into a recruiting station. The officer has a black bird perched on each shoulder, one of them labeled “Jim Crow.” “Them old eagles sure spoil that new uniform, colonel,” the Black man says.

Another devastating piece from 1945 shows two white men smilingly conversing at the counter of a fruit and vegetable stand. A sign above them has the words Hitoshi Mitsuki (the former owner) crossed out, with “under new management” beneath. “Naw, we don’t hafta worry about th’ owner comin’ back,” says one man. “He wuz killed in Italy.” The cartoon references the all-Japanese-American 442^nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in the European theater and whose troops faced much discrimination following the war. Even more gallingly, the shop sports a sign with the slogan “Let’s Keep America for Americans” and US flags. In still another work on this theme from 1945, Mauldin draws a uniformed Japanese-American veteran on crutches at a bar. A surly bartender points to a “No J*ps Allowed,” sign and says, “Can’t ya read signs?” Yet another “America for Americans” sign hangs on the counter, though it lies partly in shadow.

In the 1950s Mauldin took a hiatus from cartooning to work on various ventures (including a film career) and to run for congress as a Democrat (he lost). From 1958 to 1962, Mauldin worked exclusively for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If anything, his critical pen only grew sharper in these years and after, one of the most tumultuous eras of US history. In fact, some newspapers dropped his cartoons due to his skewering of racists.

As an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1962 to 1991, Mauldin’s role as chronicler took on a national scope, attaining heretofore unseen heights of outrage, cutting satire and biting denunciation as he commented on national tragedy and cupidity of all sorts.

In this period Mauldin produced his most famous work — one of the most famous editorial cartoons of all time — in response to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He showed Abraham Lincoln (the one at the Lincoln Memorial) with his hands up to his face. The artist dashed off the drawing in less time than it takes most people to have a social lunch.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mauldin deployed his acid wit against the KKK, red-baiting, homophobia, environmental destruction, militarism, the Vietnam war, the My Lai massacre and — less famously — gender/sexual identity discrimination.

For example, in “A Place For Everything And Everything in Its Place” (1978), an aproned woman slaves away at mountains of dishes, her foot shackled to the sink. (This part recalls “Down With Kitchen Drudgery!”, a Soviet propaganda poster by Grigory Shegal from 1931). Another room has the door closed, with a huge lock, which says, “Closets for Gays.”

This is what I appreciated most about Drawn to Combat: learning about the many other causes which motivated Mauldin besides the war. His remained a crucial and fearless voice on national affairs of all sorts right up until his retirement: “You Ain’t Gaining Much Altitude Holding Me Down” (1962) depicts a white bumpkin in wide-brimmed straw hat holding a shotgun, astride the shoulders of a Black man, who himself stands chest-deep in water (delivering the line, the latter looks the more dignified); “Bookmarks” (1968) portrays an extraordinarily violent year (Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy both gunned down) through the visual metaphor of a thick book, its pages crammed with the stocks of guns, hangman’s nooses, swords, knives, guns, with blood trailing down from its pages and the title “The American Way: A Social and Political History”; a 1981 cartoon of a man with a crutch before a personnel officer sitting at a desk, who says, “If you want veteran’s privileges, you should fight a popular war”; another from 1965 with a dead bird in a degraded landscape, factories spewing pollution and a sick-looking fish popping its head out of filthy water to say, “It’s getting so bad, even people are complaining.”

Mauldin died in 2003 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with his extended band of brothers and sisters in arms. Drawn to Combat proved a fascinating portrait of a vital master of US comic art.

    Moving on to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s Griffin Galleries, a visitor encountered white walls decorated by the vaguely art deco stylings of Edie Fake. These fused architecture and comics, with doors akin to panels and speech balloons doubling as decorative motifs. Such was the entrance to Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, an exhibit curated by Dan Nadel which picked up more or less where Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life left off, from roughly the 1940s[5] to the present. It featured more than 40 cartoonists, and like Ware & Samuelson’s show, the design of the rooms sought to overwhelm the eye, with blown-up images and reproductions towering overhead. Walking through the various rooms, one could see into adjacent spaces all the way to the end of the hall, as if staring through panels/windows – comics as screen archway to other realities, other times, other people.

Through the mid-20^th century, the Chicago Tribune had the most widely-read national  comics section in the country. Yet this is only part of the story, since in the same period the Chicago Defender was serving a Black readership which white-oriented papers like the Tribune tended to forget. [6]

Chicago also became, in the 1960s and 1970s, a bastion of underground/alternative comics, and today boasts a thriving scene. “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” told that story through clippings, documents, comics, installations and tons of original art.       

Among the most gripping were large splash pages from “Home Folks” (1954) by Jay Jackson. Anticipating some of Will Eisner’s work of the 1970s, these single-panel portraits of several different conversations, featuring ten or more characters at a party or other such gathering, invite the eye to “pan” over the space, thus forging a narrative. It’s almost a comics version of a busy Breughel painting. Jackson’s “Speed Jackson” (ca. 1933) and his revived version of “Bungleton Green” (1934), which often ran side by side in the Defender, spared no punches in their satirical attacks on US racism.   

Originals by Jackie Ormes’ “Patty-Jo an’ Ginger” (1945) were a delight to lose oneself in, especially for those of us who had only ever seen reproductions. I found remarkable Ormes’ subtle use of dotted screen tones with highlights to achieve varied gradations of dark skin.

Other Black artists prominently featured in the show included National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, represented by his Black Humor (1970) gag cartoons; Richard “Grass” Green,  with Super Soul Comix #2 (1972); and Seitu Hayden, whose Waliku (1973-1974), a Berke Breathed-like strip on the everyday lives of black people, partly reflected the Black Nationalism of the era. In a 1972 strip, one Black youngster says to another,  “I might be a Black Muslim when I grow up ‘cause they help Black folks.” “Yeah, I might too,” says his friend, “if they start wearen’ two tone jumpsuits insteada them ol ugly suits an bowties they got now.” The latter fashionably sports a comb in his natural. (Sadly, today this work exists only as newspaper clippings.)   

Underground comix, published in such venues as The Chicago Seed (1967), appeared in the guise of works by, among others, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. 

The 1980s and 1990s saw the start of the alternative comics revolution in Chicago, centered around Quimby’s Bookstore in Wicker Park. Major figures of this period included Ware, John Porcellino, Lynda Barry, Nicole Hollander and other legendary names. Daniel Raeburn’s highly-regarded comics criticism zine The Imp (1997) covered the scene.  

For those of us of a certain generation whose later formative years coincided with this era and these artists, seeing their works displayed proved both nostalgic and demystifying. Especially to those mere mortals toiling in the comic arts who will never rise to the empyrean heights of, say, a Dan Clowes, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now was a weirdly encouraging experience. What I mean is that, no matter how insanely perfect and polished an artist’s work appears in print, the originals will always show flaws, cover-ups, material traces of rethinkings, hesitations, a tiny misapplied brushstroke and errant ink splatter. They’re human! At a certain proximity, even Clowes and Ware look rough, raw, crude. “Shit, I could draw that,” one thinks of a stray minimalist palm tree in the distant background of a Ghost World panel.

Leave it to Clowes himself, that arch meta-commentator, to opine on this very facet of comic art display in 90s Eightball: “To look at pages at their original size is to occupy the space of the cartoonist at their creation, a vastly different space than that of the printed object, much more intimate and physical.”

Also, who knew Lynda Barry draws so huge? Her mixed-media comics collages come to life even more in person; the gold glitter and plastic eyeballs on that Aswang demon (2000-2002) really stand out off the page.  

Speaking of off the page, Molly Colleen O’Connell’s 2020-2021installation Extra, Extra, Extra reimagined a mid-century Chicago newsstand as a colorful surreal smorgasbord of made-up publications, stacks of fake newspapers, figurines, consumer products and a purple alligator vendor with eyes for nipples: print culture as fever dream.

Other highlights for me were the section on Archer Prewitt’s disturbing Sof’ Boy (1990), a Casper-like character and faux icon with accompanying merchandise (plush toys, plate, pins, figurines, t-shirt) skewering the sort of commercialism of comics characters seen in the Where Comics Came to Life show, like Skeezix figurines and bubble gum. (There was plenty of exhibit-related merch on sale in the Contemporary Art Museum gift shop, too, by the way.)

Some of the most celebrated figures — Ivan Brunetti, Ware, Emil Ferris — got their own dedicated rooms (these only seemed to reinforce canonical hierarchies worth critiquing, but oh, well). Ware’s room had all the cold, disturbing and virtuosic qualities one would expect, with sections for Rusty Brown and other works, all arranged around a creepy mechanical doll/sculpture thing sporting a domino mask, titled God (unfinished, 2012).   

Those were great, but they exposed me to very little I didn’t already know. The value of any decades-spanning museum survey like this — especially one devoted to an art form with as many neglected figures as comics — should ultimately be measured according to how many artists it brings back into the public spotlight for new generations to discover. And in this respect, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now did not disappoint.     

Besides cartoonists like Ormes, Jackson and Johnson — who deserve their own shows — the exhibit highlighted several more recent Black artists, such as Yaoundé Olu, whose untitled 1977  photomechanical print reveals Afrofuturist inclinations that have come to proliferate throughout the mediascape in recent years. We could say the same about NOG, Protector of the Pyramids (1980), an extraordinary series of superhero Afrofuturism by Turtel Onli. It ran in the Defender for a few months in 1979, and Onli self-published a collection of the material in 1981. Looking though Olu and Onlil’s oeuvre reminded me of listening to Sun Ra’s concerts or watching a Janelle Monáe video. I was seeing the Afrofuturist roots of present-day Black artists working in the mainstream, like Ta-Nehisi Coates/Brian Stelfreeze with their Black Panther arc “A Nation Under Our Feet” (2016) and Nnedi Okorafor/Leonardo Romero with Shuri (2019).

Kerry James Marshall, who has been laboring on his graphic novel Rhythm Mastr for over 20 years, was another enthralling discovery for me. This is a work best appreciated at full size, in large inkjet prints on plexiglass displayed in sequence across three walls. Some of the storyline takes place in a jazz club, where across several panels we see a drummer go to town on a solo, all ablur. Marshall’s process is extraordinary: he bases the comics characters on dolls, for which he creates and sews costumes and constructs whole miniature environments (a parking lot, a jazz club with tiny circular tables, prints on the walls). In addition, he works in such a way that reverses standard comics production. As Nadel explains, “Instead of adding color during the printing process [as Jackie Ormes or Jay Jackson would do], his rendering of Black characters is integral to the drawings: black, not the white of the paper, is the baseline color of his cast.”

To repeat, works like those of Olu, Onli and Marshall demonstrate in startling fashion the value of shows like Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now: to shed a national light on creators too-little regarded and in many cases too long ignored, but whose art is nothing short of radical, challenging the underpinnings of US comics history itself.  

The show concluded with a sprinkling of younger artists like Lilli Carré, Anya Davidson, Gina Wynbrandt, Margot Ferrick, Eric J. Garcia and Nick Drnaso. Bianca Xunise was represented by a giant blow-up of a detail from her cartoon Mask (2020), which shows a Black woman wearing a mask and an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt. A bare-faced white woman with a petulant expression tells her: “If you can’t breathe, then take that silly mask off!” Perhaps the most 2020 image of all time.

In sum, the windy city made it worth the trip. As Nadel put it in his introduction to Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now: “Chicago has been a center for comics for decades — a haven not only for making and publishing cartoons, but also for innovating on the medium.”  

I’d put it this way: for those of us in love with this art form, these incredible shows demonstrated that for comics, it really was sweet home, Chicago.

 

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[1] Borrelli, Christopher. “Free Show: ‘Chicago Where Comics Came to Life’ at the Cultural Center is 82 Jam-Packed Walls by Chris Ware and Pal.” Chicago Tribune (July 1, 2021).

[2] Thrillingly, in August, 2021, detective work by staffers at Barnacle Press who were inspired by the show led to the discovery of the artist’s identity, Robert J. Campbell. See https://twitter.com/BarnaclePress/status/1432338728568111110.

[3] Mauldin recounted the story, with drawing, in his 1971 memoir The Brass Ring.

[4] Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year, chiefly for his “anti-Soviet” novel Dr. Zhivago, though he feared leaving the USSR to claim his award out of fear of Soviet reprisals against him and his family.

[5] Despite the show’s title, many works dated back as far as the 1930s.

[6] Nadel also produced a remarkable companion book to the show, It’s Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists In Chicago, 1940–1980, which takes its title from a 1970 Charles Johnson strip of a black artist describing his painting, a black square.