Exhibit Review: Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle.

Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism. Nhora Lucía Serrano (curator). Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University. December 13, 2023 to May 5, 2024. https://library.osu.edu/exhibits/depicting-mexico-and-modernism-gordo-by-gus-arriola-representando-mexico-y-el-modernismo

 Some years ago, I had one of those moments when it hits you: you’ve lived long enough to detect a major cultural shift.

I was standing in the order line at Chipotle, a chain which itself did not exist before 1993. Behind me, I heard a nasally voice coming from someone whom I would blithely describe as “central-casting young metrosexual white dude.” He was telling the server what he wanted, which included “some guac and pico.”

His words momentarily threw me. Then I realized what he meant: guacamole and pico de gallo. That’s the way I had indicated said items my entire life, wherever I resided, from deep South Texas to Northern California to Seattle. I felt a tiny flare of outrage at the casual Newspeaky butchering of “my people’s” language, but then I just shrugged. These words aren’t really “my people’s,” anyway. “Taco” has been English for a long time. We live in a country, after all, where around the year when Mr. “Guac and Pico” was born, salsa’s US sales overtook those of ketchup.¹

For this state of affairs we can thank — more than most cultural figures, and certainly more than any other cartoonist — Gus Arriola and his celebrated comic strip Gordo. For more than four decades, it was the Mexican-American Arriola who most helped a mid-century white USA gain a new appreciation for the language, history, culture and cuisine of its neighbor to the South. 

“By including Spanish words [in his strip], Arriola introduced an American audience to Spanish phrases such as ‘piñata,’ ‘hasta la vista,’ ‘ándale,’ and more,” wrote Nhora Lucía Serrano. “He also included traditional Mexican recipes, holidays and pottery.”

I quote from the introduction to “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism,” the first US retrospective on the strip, which Serrano curated. As she further explained, Gordo was syndicated in over 270 publications by United Feature from 1941 to 1985, becoming the “most visible ethnic comic strip” of the 20^th century.

That means Gordo traversed the eras of the Cisco Kid, of Zorro and the Zoot Suit, of Touch of Evil (with Charlton Heston in brownface), of Speedy Gonzalez and Slowpoke Rodriguez, as well as the rise of the United Farm Workers and Chicanismo movements, the Frito Bandito (a 1960s Frito-Lay TV ad campaign featuring a cartoon Mexican brigand who stole your Fritos) and beyond.

How bad did the mainstream representation of Mexican-Americans get in that span of time? Well, how about this little gem: an early 1980s deodorant commercial featuring “an obese, sombrero-wearing mustached figure [who] calls his followers to a screeching stop, reaches into his saddlebag for a small can of Arrid spray deodorant, lifts up his arms and sprays. A voice-over says, ‘If it works for him, it will work for you.” As an encyclopedia of advertising put it, “[T]he campaign was not well received by the Latino community” (McDonough/Egolf, The Advertising: 1059).

A walk through Serrano’s show demonstrated to what an astonishing degree Arriola’s work was swimming against that cultural tide. Drawing from the Billy Ireland’s collections and those of private owners, “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola” presented over 165 items, including 85 comic strips, original drawings, books, photographs, letters, animation by Bret Olsen and even some Gordo merchandise. The exhibit was easily the most scholarly attention paid to this trailblazing 20^th-century figure since Robert C. Harvey’s 2000 book Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. Serrano was the perfect person to pull it off, too. Originally from Colombia, she is a Comparative Literature professor and Director of Academic Technology, Teaching and Research at Hamilton College; a founding board member and Treasurer of the Comics Studies Society; and editor of Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction and Mimesis (Routledge, 2021).

During my visit one chilly February day, I was especially moved by the fact that Serrano presented all the exhibit literature, including item labels, not only in English but also in crisp, proper Español (no “guac and pico” here). Such a bilingual approach doesn’t just honor its subject’s heritage, it represents a model of inclusivity and outreach to non-Anglophone communities in Ohio and beyond. (I happen to have relatives in the region who would appreciate it.)

Gustavo “Gus” Arriola (1917-2008), born in Arizona, started in animation at Screen Gems, then went on to MGM. Gordo was his first comic strip. Envisioned as the Mexican L’il Abner, the series at first capitalized to an unfortunate degree on North America’s profound ignorance and prejudice regarding Mexico. Over time, though, the artist rethought that stance, and began to instead use the strip as a venue to educate as well as entertain. Gordo became a series where you could have a laugh and learn something about another culture — a fabulously rich culture that long predated Columbus. You might even pick up words like “amigo” and “muchacho.”

      Arriola traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1960. As for many Mexican-Americans, a trip to the mother country greatly impacted his sense of identity, making him even more resistant in his work to the neo-colonialist distortions of Latin America in the US mass media. Around then Gordo also got a lot more experimental, especially on Sundays.

In terms of plot and characterization, the strip is straightforward. We follow the doings of Perfecto “Gordo” Salazar Lopez, his nephew Pepito, and their various pets including Señor Dog and Cochito the pig down Mexico way. The debut, published on November 24, 1941, delivers on the poor English and stereotypes Arriola knew his readers expected. As Pepito declares: “An’ you wanna know somteeng? My uncle Gordo ees the mos’ bes’ bean farmer of the world!”

Gordo (“Fat man” or “Fats”) wears a sombrero, takes a lot of siestas, and lusts after women (some of them white).

      In short: the series, alas, leaned hard into the dehumanizing ethnic humor which was such a pillar of mid-century popular culture. It was the age of Amos ‘n’ Andy, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“I don’ have to show you any steenkin’ badges!”), of Fu Manchu and Disney’s The Three Caballeros,² a time when Desi Arnaz, half of the most famous inter-ethnic couple in 1950s television, was breaking ground — but still had to effect an exaggerated, mannered demeanor to match his white audience’s preconceptions of “Cubanness.”

Yet even in this period Arriola was educating his readers. In a December 12, 1948 Sunday strip, Gordo shows his old friend Santa Clos (i.e. Santa Claus) how to make a piñata to meet new demand, spurred by a previous strip on Mexican holidays, for the children’s game. That same year, so many people wrote to request Gordo’s “Beans Weeth Cheese” recipe that a ceramic Gordo Bean Pot embossed with the strip’s characters appeared in stores. (The exhibit had one under glass.)   

Then came Arriola’s 1960 pivot from material that tended to reinforce Mexican stereotypes to his embracing the role of ambassador to south-of-the-border culture, mores and language. For one thing, Gordo dropped the bean farming career and became a sort of itinerant tour guide, ferrying visitors in his colectivo (public bus), dubbed Halley’s Comet, to various interesting country locales. And where else on the comics page were you going to learn so much about the Day of the Dead? The October 29, 1967 Sunday strip presented a lovely exploration of the holiday, featuring sugar skulls, an altar and zempasuchitl, a type of marigold, the traditional flower of the dead. (The stylized, skull-laden title and creator credit to “Góstova Chanss” testifies to Arriola’s playful side.)

Even as he moved away from the more egregious ethnic humor, though, the artist retained much of the visual typage. As he told Harvey, “You needed them to establish certain things … For instance, Gordo would wear his big sombrero only as a sort of costume: if he went to play in his little orchestra or if was going courting, he would put on his charro suit. His costume established this activity as a special occasion. Any other time, he wore his bus driver’s cap. But the symbols had to be there, I guess, for quick recognition of what I was trying to say or do” (Accidental: 189).

Serrano arranged the show more or less chronologically, with areas devoted to various aspects of the strip. I especially enjoyed the part on Gordo’s animals, since these furred and feathered companions often had as much agency and importance as the humans. Another section dealt with homages to Arriola, including a 2008 strip by Alcaraz from his La Cucaracha (1992) and a 2001 tribute by Cantú and Carlos Castellanos, from Baldo (2000).

Among many other pleasures, seeing large-sized Gordo originals gave me a new appreciation for how Arriola’s work anticipates that of the Hernandez Bros, especially Beto’s Palomar stories. The use of silhouettes, the Latin American settings and architecture, the texturing on walls, the characters’ expressions, all point to the future comic art Gordo was shaping, which included Love & Rockets. You can see this especially clearly in the May 28, 1944 Sunday page (which Arriola produced while serving in the army!), in which our hero and his associates, on their way to explore the ancient Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, take a side trip to check out a cenote. As a caption explained: “The greatest part of the state of Yucatan is composed of limestone. The annual rainfall drains through the porous ground and forms subterranean streams! Because of high caverns, sections of surface layer collapse, causing deep pits with water 70 or 80 feet below the surface! – These are called cenótes!!” [sic].

      Apart from Gordo’s ethnographic value, Serrano subtitled the show “Depicting Mexico and Modernism” for a reason. Especially after 1960, no strip since Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley evinced such a modernist ethos — at times ecstatically so.

      Of course, as M. Thomas Inge in his “Krazy Kat as American Dada Art” chapter in Comics as Culture (1990) and more recently Jonathan Najarian remind us, comics and modernism were never really that far apart in their sensibilities: “the divisions between high and low forms of art were never as strong as conventional accounts of modernism made them seem” (Najarian, “Comics”: 5). Gordo, with its strong influences from Frank King and George Herriman, was an instance of film scholar Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism, characterized by what Glenn Willmott describes as “its paradoxical yet seamless fusion of overtly abstract and mimetic effects in cartoon style” (“Entanglements”: 29).

      I’m thinking here of a September 6, 1959 strip in which noisy kids prevent Gordo from enjoying his beloved siesta. Different panels explode with garish colors and abstract shapes denoting their racket. It makes for an intense evocation of sound in a silent medium. Once Gordo finally gets the rowdy youngsters to leave, the final panel glows a bright yellow, with the balloonless declaration: “Silence is golden.” (The lexia in this strip also bear mention for their unconventional proportions, anticipating Chris Ware’s work.) The episode recalls Hillary Chute’s observation that “There’s an excess about comics that makes people uncomfortable, like too much visuality, a plentitude. And this is almost always centered on the expression or representation of the body” (“Afterward”: 305, emphasis in original).     

Not only that; like Picasso, Arriola filtered the ancient through a modern idiom. See for example an extraordinary series of July/August, 1968 Gordo Sunday pages recounting the tragic romance of Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl from Aztec mythology in a style which fuses comics and pre-Columbian iconography. Another Sunday strip, from June 18, 1950, tells its story through character silhouettes on vases-cum-panels, while at still other times the artist evoked Mexican folk art (artesanía), pottery, and Egyptian ideograms.

Arriola could even give Ernie Bushmiller a run for his dinero. In a November 20, 1955 Sunday strip, Gordo finds himself on fire. Pepito quickly puts out the blaze, but in the aftermath they realize that the fire has burned a hole through the newspaper itself. Through it they can see the page underneath — which has a Nancy strip.  

Such bold visual gambits made Gordo among the most experimental mainstream series of its era, which, as Serrano put it, “permitted the Mexican character, and Mexico by extension, to be seen as a more accepted resident of a modernist ethnic America.”

There was another way Arriola sought to affirm his modern bona fides: through depictions of the counterculture. Case in point: Bug Rogers, the always “with it” Beatnik spider. 

“Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism” was a marvelous experience. I wish it would tour the world. It more than validates the trend of academics curating public-facing comic art exhibits (e.g. Ben Saunders, Charles Hatfield, Sarah Lightman, Jared Gardner). It’s a brilliant model to draw in (so to speak) as wide a public as possible to, I daresay, (re)learn what makes America America.

Arriola, through his humble Mexican everyman, taught valuable lessons to a nation that at the time knew next to nothing about its Southern neighbor — and most of what it did “know” was wrong and harmful. I wish I could say we’ve long moved past that issue in 2024. Instead, as I type this a candidate for president boasts about how, when elected, he will undertake the largest deportations of “illegals” in US history. To which I can only say, “Chinga tu MAGA, pendejo.” On the other hand, we do live in the age of guac and pico, which gives me some measure of hope.  

In any case, if we as a nation are ever to overcome retrograde Trumpian thinking, educational opportunities like Serrano’s exhibit will be part of the solution. That the Arriola show took place in the perfect setting of our nation’s premiere comic art repository, well, that’s just the cereza on top.

To Serrano and the Billy Ireland: “¡Muchísimas gracias!”

And pass me some guac and pico, please.

 

¹ And it wasn’t even close; that year US salsa sales beat ketchup by over $40 million (O’Neill, “Apple”: 49). That said, 1992 was also around the time when someone I dated in college (white) told me she thought pico de gallo meant “pick of the garden.” 

²This was part of the Good Neighbor policy, a US government initiative to blunt Nazi Germany’s influence on Central America during WWII. The film has its heart in the right place, but híjole it sure leaves no Latino stereotype unturned.

 

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary. “Afterword: Graphic Modernisms.” Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 301-309.

     Harvey, Robert. C. Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

 Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

McDonough, John & Karen Egolf. The Advertising Age: Encyclopedia of Advertising. Vol. 1. Routledge, 2002.

Najarian, Jonathan. Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2024.

O’Neill, Molly. “New Mainstream: Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Salsa.” The New York Times (March 11, 1992): 49, 54. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1992/03/11/550992.html?pageNumber=49. 

  Willmott, Glenn. "Entanglements” in Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 15-32.

Book Review: The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. edited by Tom Heintjes

reviewed by David Beard, Professor of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Duluth

Tom Heintjes (ed.) The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. Bull Moose Publishing, 2024. $24.99 (Paperback). Available at

https://www.lulu.com/shop/tom-heintjes/the-complete-betty-brown-phg/paperback/product-zm82g7d.html

The field of comics studies stands on the same foundations, now, as other academic disciplines: scholarly rigor and, where possible, objectivity. To study comics really isn’t all that different from studying art, literature, film, mass communication, or other domains of human creative or literate activity.

And yet, there are differences, deep within our disciplinary DNA. For example, where connoisseurship, in art history, is built upon institutional records and practices in museums, in comics studies, the early connoisseurship was engaged by fans, eager to track down the artists on their favorite, unsigned strips. Biographical criticism of comics art often began, in some cases, in interviews conducted at conventions or by fanzines. Beneath the foundation of work in comics studies, in other words, is a layer of sediment created by passion.

The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G., by Tom Heintjes, is an example of such a passion project. (So, too, is Heintjes excellent Hogan’s Alley magazine, which celebrates (and sometimes excavates) the medium in interesting ways. See the website at <https://www.hoganmag.com/>

Betty Brown holds a Ph.G., a now-obsolete pharmacy degree which enables her to be both pharmacist and small businesswoman.¹ The pharmacy profession has changed a lot since the trade publication Drug Topics ran these strips, during the Depression and through the second World War (1934-1948). Betty Brown’s life (dispensing medication, working as the town’s unofficial healthcare provider, while also running a small business faced with cutthroat competitors) is filled with challenges, humor and some larger-than life, almost movie-serial style adventure.

Assembled in part as a passion project during the pandemic lockdown, The Complete Betty Brown appears to be an unlikely subject for a collection. While publishers have collected a lot of comic strips since the paperback’s creation (and more recently in the Library of American Comics series, and, less respectfully, in the quirky anthologies assembled by Yoe Books), no one was clamoring for Betty Brown. It took the Heintjes’ passion to demonstrate that we should have wanted this work. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. completes a picture of the work of its creators, it completes a picture of the medium of comics, and it completes a picture of one of the most important areas of healthcare, itself often overlooked. I mean “Completing the picture” in the sense of:

Completing the picture of the work of its creators, Zack Mosley and Boody Rogers

The creators are some of the most popular in golden-age comica history. Zack Mosley was a comic strip artist best known for the aviation adventures in The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, which ran in 300 newspapers at its height and was a transmedia phenomenon (starring in comic strips, books, radio, and movie serials). Betty Brown gives us a small window into an artist establishing his craft, alongside his early career colleague, Boody Rogers. (Rogers was the subject of a collection by Fantagraphics in 2009, Craig Yoe’s Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers, and a section of The Comics Journal in 2006.) As such, this work fills gaps in their biography.

Mosley worked on early Buck Rogers, and that should give a sense of the art style – the figures are built of undulating lines, curves, and swooshes. Built to live entirely in black and white, the strips use wells of black ink to pull the eye forward and back, left to right, in a way that makes the strips a joy to read – and an important part of our understanding of the developing style of their creators.

Completing the picture of the medium of comics

Our picture of comics, as a medium, tends to drift in two directions – the mass medium, aimed at broad audiences, printed in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies, distributed across vast geographies, and the art comic, aimed at a more intimate audience. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. served a different need.

Printed in Drug Topics, Betty Brown was read only by pharmacists and related professionals inside a pharmacy practice. The series, then, looks like its mass media counterparts, and bears superficial genre markers (oscillating between an empowered woman and a damsel in distress), but fundamentally, the strip was there to echo and to reinforce the ideas the trade magazine wanted to advance. When Betty discusses the best location for her pharmacy, she is parroting the points that Drug Topics makes about proper location for retail pharmacy.

At the same time as it is a marketing and education tool, the strip attempts to generate pathos and excitement and even a few cliffhangers, matching the energy of its mass media contemporaries. The compromises Mosley and Rogers made resulted in an unusual example of the medium, worth a look by any historian of comics.

Completing the picture of pharmacy in the Modern era

Finally, this volume should appeal to historians of medicine and perhaps even graphic medicine. Neither of these two fields focus on pharmacy, which is ostensibly one of the most intriguing professions in modern health care in the United States.

Retail pharmacists are among the only health care professionals who can be accessed without any insurance, anytime. In communities where poverty is high and underinsurance rates are higher, the pharmacist is a first responder, in many ways. The series of strips in 1942, in which Betty Brown helps take care of residents of her small town after a fire, reflects this – pharmacists are healers. (This is even more true today, when pharmacists hold not the antiquated Ph.G. but a Pharm.D. degree.)

And yet, retail pharmacists are also the most invisible in popular culture. While medical dramas are a staple of television and have been a staple of comics (from Ben Casey to the Night Nurse), the pharmacist does their work unseen. Betty Brown fills that gap. As Robert A. Buerki noted in his essay in Pharmacy in History,

Drawing its inspiration from the pages of Drug Topics, radio soap operas, and the pervasive fascination with sensational crime in the 1930s, Betty Brown, Ph.G. presents an unusual, even unique picture of the practice of pharmacy in America during the mid- 1930s and early 1940s.

Tom Heintjes has offered the community of scholars in comics studies, in graphic medicine, and in the history of medicine a gift of immeasurable value. I recommend this book for library purchase for scholarly purposes.²

^[1] “The Graduate of Pharmacy (Ph.G.)” was superseded by the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree (B.Pharm.) in the early part of the 20th century.  The B.Pharm. was itself superseded by the R.Ph. (Registered Pharmacist), which has been more or less superseded by the Pharm. D., though some pharmacists still practice with the R.Ph.

^[2] There are, as Heintjes notes, problematic representations of women and of people of color in this text which limit its usefulness to scholarly purposes. I could not give this book to a friend as a good read, but I could offer it to a researcher as an important source. And that is the spirit within which I offer it to readers of IJOCA.

 Citations

Buerki, Robert A. "The Saga of Betty Brown, Ph. G." Pharmacy in history 30.3 (1988): 163-167.

 

Book Review: Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters by Shawn Conner

 reviewed by Edward Whatley, Georgia College & State University

Shawn Conner. Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21^st Century Blockbusters. McFarland & Company, 2023. 238 pages, $39.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9781476676661. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/superheroes-smash-the-box-office/

In contemporary cinema, superhero films have become a monolithic genre, capturing audiences and box office revenues with unprecedented fervor; however, when superheroes first made the leap from their native comic books onto the big screen, their early appearances were not in feature films but in Saturday serials.  In hindsight, the transition seems logical given the similarities between comic books and serials.  Both formats were aimed at younger audiences.  Both featured episodic storytelling and cliffhanger endings.  In Superheroes Smash the Box Office, author Shawn Conner provides a rather breezy 238-page journey along the long and winding path from cheaply produced 1940s Saturday afternoon superhero serials to the 21^st century blockbuster superhero feature films.

Covering almost nine decades of cinema history is an ambitious undertaking, and Conner explains in his introduction that he found it necessary to restrict the book’s scope to “live-action American movies.” (2)  Chapter one begins in 1941 with the first superhero to appear in a live-action production: Captain Marvel (Shazam to later readers), soon followed by Batman and Captain America. This chapter is easily one of the most interesting in the entire book, as it covers territory that will be unfamiliar to many readers.

Moving on from the serials, Conner expands the scope of the book by spending the next two chapters discussing superhero television shows, namely: Superman starring George Reeves, Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter. He also covers the 1970s Marvel television shows and movies featuring the Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Doctor Strange.

With chapter 4, Conner returns his focus to the big screen to discuss the 1978 film Superman starring Christopher Reeve.   From this point on, the book sticks with feature films through its concluding discussion of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Conner explores how each adaptation—be it a serial, television show, or feature film—contributed to the evolution of superhero cinema. The discussion includes the influence of specific characters and storylines on the genre's development, as well as the impact of technological advancements on special effects and storytelling techniques. Fans of the original comics will also enjoy his discussions of how the screen adaptations adhered to or diverged from the comics source material. 

How successful Conner is in his telling will depend largely on the expectations of the reader.  His writing style is engaging and entertaining.  His deadpan plot synopses are often laugh-out-loud funny. But readers should not expect a very deep dive into any specific films. As I stated earlier, this is a rather breezy reading experience despite the enormity of the topic.  While early chapters offer more (relatively) extensive discussions of their subjects, the pace seems to quicken and the amount of space devoted to specific films seems to dwindle as the number of films grows in more recent years. As the narrative progresses, it feels like Conner is increasingly rushing toward the finish line.

And the finish line approaches rather abruptly. In his two-page epilogue (written in the summer of 2023), Conner mentions eleven recent films that had been released by that time but are not discussed elsewhere in the book.  He cites most of the films’ mixed reviews and lower than expected box office performance as evidence that the superhero film is “at a crossroads, or perhaps at a portal.” (189) Making such a claim but offering so little elaboration on what possibly lies beyond the crossroads/portal makes for a frankly less than satisfying conclusion.

Conner cobbled his narrative together “through books, articles, editorials, audio commentaries, podcasts, reviews and the movies and comics themselves.” (2)  And his bibliography is indeed impressive, although some original interviews might have added to the book’s value. While the book may lack depth, it succeeds in condensing almost a century of film and television history into an engaging and humorous narrative that should appeal to both longtime fans of the genre and general audiences.

Book Review: Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters by Mark Hibbett

 reviewed by Chris York

Mark Hibbett. Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. $110 (Hardcover). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-45173-7

Mark Hibbett’s book is the most recent installment of the Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels series edited by Roger Sabin. The series has a broad, international focus, with a mission to explore “all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, […] through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication,” (ii) and Hibbett’s empirical study delivers on that mission.

Hibbett’s purpose, as he states in his introduction, is “to define a straightforward methodology for empirically analyzing transmedia characters” (1). By identifying and collecting character data in a number of categories from a corpus of texts, researchers should be able to, among other things, analyze character development over time, recognize shifts across media, and empirically identify the core signifiers of a character.

As such, the largest section of the study is the methodology which addresses both the design and implementation of his model for transmedia characters. Though Doctor Doom features in the title of the book, he is simply the primary case study Hibbett uses to illustrate the usefulness of the tool; a thorough analysis of the character is secondary to the explication of the model.

Data-driven analysis is trending within Comics Studies and Hibbett’s intention is to contribute to “database-led methods of corpus analysis” is two ways. First, he is trying to develop a system of identifying and analyzing character-specific signifiers that is adaptable across Comics Studies, and not merely applicable to a single character or storyworld (i.e. a fictional universe in which a story exists, such as the Marvel Universe or Marvel Cinematic Universe). Second, and perhaps more challenging, he is trying to develop a system that is effective for collecting data that is not text specific and, therefore, can draw data effectively for characters and story worlds that exist across different media.

To these ends, the model for transmedia characters records thirteen different kinds of information related to a character, each of which falls into one of four categories: character, behavior, storyworld, and authorship. Character components include appearance, names and titles, physical actions, and dialogue. Behavioral components include perceived behavior, personality traits, and motivations. Storyworld components that were recorded consist of locations, other characters, objects, and previous events. Finally, he identifies references to both textual authors and market authors within the texts.

In creating these components and categories, the author draws from previous attempts to identify essential signifiers for characters and storyworlds. He cites as foundational to his own model the work of Matthew Freeman, Marie Laurie Ryan, Paolo Bertetti, and Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio. In combining elements from all of them, Hibbett believes he has a model that is both practical and comprehensive.

Hibbett is thoughtful in his assignations and provides explanations for how and why he selected the thirteen dimensions for his model. He describes at length, for example, his thought process in constructing his Behavior category. Simply documenting descriptions of a character’s behavior based on language within the text (whether that language comes from the narrator, the featured character, or other characters) is, in his estimation, both inadequate and misleading. Yet, he continues, even a simple description of character behavior by the researcher would risk being neither empirical nor reproducible. He settled, finally, on three components within the Behavior category. “Perceived behavior” and “motivation” rely on language drawn directly from the text. However, the data for “personality traits” is gathered using the 10 Item Short Version of the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI). The three, in combination, provide a meaningful and objective measurement of character behavior.

The case study he uses to test his model is Marvel’s Doctor Doom from 1961-1987. Hibbett selects Doctor Doom for several reasons; since he is generally not the titular character and appeared in a variety of titles, he “would function as a way of sampling the different Marvel storyworlds over time” (54). Furthermore, since Doctor Doom rarely had his own series, Hibbett argues, there was no specific author or authors who ‘owned’ him, which could provide interesting information regarding what creators saw as the essential signifiers for the character.

Hibbett’s model is largely successful, and the case study of Doctor Doom makes it clear how useful of a tool it can be.  He notes that a primary value of this kind of empirical research is providing some quantitative evidence for some of the conclusions that comics scholars tend to intuit. For instance, scholars of the Marvel Universe would generally conclude that Doctor Doom’s character is, to a large degree, consistent over time; Hibbett’s model provides the data to support that assumption in a number of ways.

However, the model can also reveal inconsistencies and changes in character development. For example, Hibbett observes that Doctor Doom’s use of derogatory exclamations like “Dolt!” and “Clod!” were very common in early representations of the character and a feature that many of the people he surveyed identified as central to Doom’s character. However, Hibbett’s data shows that this kind of language diminished over the decades. He speculates; “[i]t could be that such words were used more often in the earlier period because writers then tended to use dialogue as a way to define character more than those in later periods, where other methods such as appearance and actions became more important. It could also indicate a change in writing style…“ (130). While this is an interesting line of inquiry and one worthy of being pursued, Hibbett does not elaborate further. His purpose is not to argue why certain elements of Doom’s character change or do not change. Rather, the goal of this project is to illustrate the effectiveness of his model by identifying these shifts in character.

There are some shortcomings to his case study, which he readily recognizes. One problem is related to the sample size. Because he was working independently and without funding for the project, he catalogued neither the entirety of Doctor Doom’s appearances during this era, nor did he manage a statistically significant sample size. Rather, he looked only at a “representative” sample of texts, chosen randomly from Doctor Doom’s appearances during the Silver and Bronze ages. These problems of time and cost are likely to persist for anyone wanting to use Hibbett’s model. Furthermore, Doctor Doom’s appearances in media other than comic books are very limited during this era, and so the efficacy of this tool across media is unclear.

In an attempt to illustrate the adaptability of the model, Hibbett includes a chapter in which he uses his character model to compare British and American versions of Denis the Menace. The inclusion of this chapter is my only real criticism of the book. The chapter itself is interesting but would have worked better as a separate document. Here, it seems extraneous, given the almost exclusive attention to Doctor Doom throughout the rest of the book. Hibbett, in fact, pays almost no attention to this chapter in either his discussion or conclusion.

That criticism aside, Hibbett has done some very good work. He also shares his data readily. Through appendices he provides both the corpus he used for Doctor Doom and the survey he used for generating his signifier set. Furthermore, he provides full digital access to the complete data for the Doctor Doom study. I very much recommend this book. The model is a useful analytical tool and Hibbett’s thorough explanation of his process will be invaluable for anyone considering data-driven analysis.

A Hulkologist’s Lament - Book Review of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon.

reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

 Johnson, Rich. The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon. Universe, 2022. https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780789341242/

 A Hulkologist’s Lament

The cover of The Incredible Hulk number 1 (May, 1962) by Stan Lee/Jack Kirby famously puts forth the question: “Is he man or monster or … is he both?”

Rich Johnson’s slapdash ramshackle of a book The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon (2022) prompts a different query: “Is it a cynical marketing ploy, a poorly-written/edited rush job … or is it both?”

Johnson is a former DC Comics VP, writer for The Beat and founder of the manga imprint Yen Press. Unfortunately, those industry insider credentials don’t translate into a very informative, incisive or fresh take on the Hulk. The heavy, 225-page tome (which retails at $50) is certainly handsome. It has good production values, quality paper, crisp images and vibrant colors for its copious reproductions of comics pages, panels and covers. The endpapers function as Hulk wallpaper in a color scheme suggestive of our hero’s pants. Cute. But again, good presentation only gets you so far.

The opening pages greet you with full page art by Frank Cho (Red Hulk), Tim Sale (Gray Hulk) and Bill Sienkiewicz (old-fashioned green Hulk). It turns out that these choices signal what to expect in the book as a whole: an almost complete neglect of ¾ of the Hulk’s actual history and especially of the artists most associated with the foundational phases of the character — Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buscema, Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown — in favor of very recent (like, mostly 21^st-century) creators. With all due respect, that’s really skewed.

How skewed? Well, let’s see: Kirby gets six pages, mostly from the origin story. Ditko gets one. Meanwhile, Al Ewing’s horror-fied run on the character, The Immortal Hulk (mostly with artist Joe Bennett, from 2018 to 2021), clocks in at 31 pages.

So, yeah, skewed to the point of doing a disservice to both the earlier creators and the character. It’s particularly galling, since a full appreciation of Ewing’s nostalgia-heavy run demands a familiarity with the long sweep of Hulk history, i.e. the works of said Silver and Bronze-age creators (including writers Len Wein, Bill Mantlo and Peter David).

I realize it’s pointless to argue with this book’s selections of what to cover (most likely Johnson had to bend to the will of his bottom-line Marvel corporate overlords anyway), but it must be said: the Hulk has over 60 years of continuity, and while some of those thousands of stories resonate more than others, it’s hard to credit a history that leaves out or gives exceedingly short shrift to the Hulk as a founding member of the Avengers and as a founding member of the Defenders. We don’t even see a single panel from those stories.

But that’s just for starters. There’s no serious attention paid to the crucial matter of the Hulk’s psychological divide and how it originated (under Mantlo and David in the 1970s/80s) and how it relates to Banner’s abuse as a child by his father. There’s also virtually nothing on the character’s gray “Joe Fixit” persona, a fruitful era under David and (at first) Jeff Purves. But what the hey, at least we do get several pages devoted to Hulk & Thing: Hard Knocks (2004), a less distinguished and pretty much forgotten effort by writer Bruce Jones and artist Jae Lee.

Oh well, at least Johnson’s writing is penetrating, edifying and fresh. Just kidding, it’s a hack job! It’s all plot synopses, platitudes like “Being a superhero is never easy” and pat takes such as “Maybe the reason the Hulk has been so popular for so long is that he reminds us of the strength we all have inside us.” Actually, I think something like the opposite is true: the Hulk as conceived represented the monster inside all of us, threatening to burst out. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were primary influences. Lee/Kirby’s genius lay in how (like Shelley) they humanized the monster, evoking sympathy, even compassion.

That feels like another big missed opportunity: if only Johnson had interviewed some of the creators and editors involved, or heck, even if he’d just quoted from Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics, we might have had some genuine insights into the Jade Giant, what makes him tick.

Instead, we get the most cursory factoids from Hulk’s early stories, like he was originally gray and changed to green with the second issue, or that at first Bruce Banner would undergo his transformations only when night fell, sort of like a werewolf. “Can’t we all relate to the struggle for control?” Johnson muses.

More disappointment: the book treats things like the character’s catch-phrase “Hulk smash!” as givens, in place of illuminating the reader as to how the phrase emerged, when it was first uttered. Banner’s “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” also gets a shout-out — but why not then tell the reader that it came not from the comics but from the 1970s TV show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno? At times this book seems afraid to hit the reader with that sort of multi-media complexity. It doesn’t shy from talking about the movies, though. But again, in a weirdly selective way: no mention at all of Ang Lee’s flawed but interesting 2003 film, with Eric Bana. If all you had was this book to go on, you’d think the first cinematic Hulk was Ed Norton in 2008.

Yes, yes, I know, they didn’t make this for Hulkologists, but for a mainstream public unfamiliar with the history of the character. But then why leave out so much of that history and lean into those aspects of the Jade Giant with which mainstream readers (presumably those who’ve only watched the movies/TV shows) are already familiar? Why not challenge their view of the Hulk a bit? Johnson takes the opposite tack: devoting short chapters which synopsize the Hulk storylines which most resemble the movies, mostly from recent action-heavy comics which aesthetically resemble movies: World War Hulk, Totally Awesome Hulk, Future Imperfect, Red Hulk, Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Indestructible Hulk, the aforementioned Immortal Hulk.

Jade Jaws is so much richer than that. Like, decades richer.

One other disconcerting facet of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon deserves mention. This book is pretty but sloppy. It arranges material out of chronological order for no good reason. We are introduced to John Byrne’s obnoxious fourth-wall-breaking Sensational She-Hulk long before the original version of that character by Lee and John Buscema. The only justification I can think of is that Byrne’s version is the more famous, and the one that became a Marvel TV show about the time of the book’s release.

In discussing the love of Hulk’s life, Jarella (Betty Ross is Banner’s), we see covers and panels from issues that present the high points: Hulk’s journey to her microscopic home world, K’ai, the profound grief our hero experiences after she’s killed, his eventual return of her body to her people. But the text (more plot synopsis) doesn’t line up with the illustrations. The text in fact doesn’t make it past the first part of the storyline; it discusses neither the death of Jarella in #205 (November, 1976), nor the return of her body in #248 (June, 1980) — as if Johnson simply ran out of room, or some editor butchered his chapter to free up space for more pictures.

When I say sloppy, I mean sloppy.

They twice (on 29 and 105) rerun the same page of our heroine and the Toad Men from Sensational She-Hulk #2 (June, 1989), itself a parody of Hulk #2 (July, 1962). Not that they tell you that.

Johnson’s text ends suddenly on 219 in the middle of a discussion/plot synopsis of the 2007 World War Hulk storyline by Greg Pak and John Romita, Jr. It stops cold. The book’s last words are “… will he be able to have the control to stand down and end the war?” No clumsy conclusion, no silly outro or quippy “Go out and smash, folks!” Nothing. Again, you get the feeling that they met their quota and just said, “Okay, cut it here.”

Reader, they couldn’t even get the name of the book straight. The cover, with a portrait of Jade Jaws by Adi Granov, gives Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon, but the title page throws in the article and adjective.

Things like that show you the book was poorly edited and hastily put together by a right hand that didn’t know what the left hand was doing — in short by folks who don’t seem to know or care much about the subject.

Do I have anything nice to say besides the production values? Well, after mostly ignoring the creators of all these stories, the book does provide credits for them at the very end. And here and there, you get some worthwhile discussion of how the comics inspired/influenced the TVs/movies. It’s thin gruel, however.

In sum: I was expecting little, and that’s just what I got.

 

8/11/2024: updated with copy edits at the request of the author.

IJOCA 25-2 has shipped

I got mine yesterday. It's a full color silver anniversary issue that comes in at 882 pages including an index to the whole run. 

Table of contents and e-book to come.

Book Review: Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons

 reviewed by Sam Cowling, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Denison University

Phil Witte and Rex Hesner. Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons. Globe Pequot, 2024. US$29. https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781633889804/funny-stuff/

     In the event of aliens arriving on this planet, they could do scarcely better than consulting Funny Stuff in their perhaps-less-than-urgent quest to understand the cultural institution of the single-panel gag cartoon. (“Aliens encounter Earthlings” is cliché #1 in the authors’ appendix of cartoon cliches.)

Over the course of a breezy ten chapters, Phil Witte and Rex Hesner draw upon a broad and deep familiarity with the form. For years, the two have been writing an online column, “Anatomy of a Cartoon,” to “look behind the gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick,” which is currently hosted by CartoonStock at https://www.cartoonstock.com/blog/category/anatomy-of-a-cartoon/ . The ambition of the book is similar: to “talk about what makes single-panel gag cartoons work, offer insights into the underlying humor, and provide a backstage look at the profession itself.”(ix) On this front, Witte and Hesner are quick to note a key constraint on their pursuit of this ambition—namely, to avoid “crush[ing] the humor out of the cartoons under the weight of excess analysis.”(ix) As they put it later, “[o]ur approach is refreshingly not academic.”(12) There is every reason to think that Witte and Hesner have succeeded in their aims. Their commentary is credible, lively, and appreciative. The menu of single-panel gag cartoons (“cartoons” from here on out) on display is wide-ranging and capably chosen. The efforts to detail the production-side of the practice of cartooning are interesting and illuminating. There are other books that seek to demystify the practice of cartooning—often through more intensive autobiography and individual reflection—but Funny Stuff engages enough cartoonists to throw cold water on the notion that there is a single method common among cartoonists.

Like any book peppered with Thurber, Booth, Chast, and Steinberg, the cartoon enthusiast will find half-remembered gems brought back onto the stage. The reader who happens upon this book with only a limited sense of the form will be treated to a survey of pieces in the orbit of The New Yorker parceled out in a topical ordering. Some chapters discuss formal features, touching upon the role of captions or upon the drawing style of cartoonists. Others map out (to whatever extent possible) the creative process of cartoon-making and idea-summoning. Several chapters focus on the general pursuit of humor and then give pride of place to the notion that humor stems from incongruity, which is then discussed via a happy hodge-podge of examples. Two concluding chapters examine the extent to which a sense of a cartoonist’s “psyche” might be on display in their oeuvre and then take up the question of how the practice of cartooning and pantheon of cartoonists is informed by questions around diversity and identity. Throughout, Witte and Hesner are keen to let the voices of cartoonists shine through in the form of judiciously chosen quotes or via concrete examples from specific creative processes. Readers will find their general sense of the cartoon form, as well as their critical repertoire much expanded, and, of course, they will also have a handful of new cartoonists whose work they are eager to track down.

The most delicate audience for the book is the diehard, the aficionado, or the connoisseur. Such a reader, if unable to summon suitable patience, will find themselves vexed that a favorite cartoon is omitted or that a preferred cartoonist receives insufficient (or, heaven forbid, no) attention. As an intermittently patient reader, I was regularly reassured by Witte and Hesner’s sense of things and, in most cases, the usual and helpfully unusual suspects are touched upon in due course. (Even so, I am unable to resist the urge to commend Mary Petty to those interested in what the authors describe as “lavish” styles, and Sam Cobean as a maestro of captionless, yet thought balloon-bearing, cartoons.)

There is a broader and perhaps thornier sort of complaint well-versed readers might make: where are the kindred, British cartooning voices like Pont and Fougasse? Witte and Hesner plausibly cite The New Yorker as the center of gravity for this art form since mid-century, but, despite this, there are ways to usefully gesture towards the broader history of the cartoon, especially at Punch, without collapsing into the drearily academic. Given the quality of their commentary in this edition of the book, one expects Witte and Hesner would have valuable observations about the differences between a quintessentially American cartoonist like Thurber and his British counterpoint, Pont.

Early on, Witte and Hesner describe Funny Stuff as “a tribute to a unique art form.”(ix) This is a laudable aim, especially in what seems to be an era of declining regard for the form. Even so, there is a tension that emerges from the conflict between, on the one hand, the hope of extolling the virtues and power of cartoons and, on the other hand, the project of deepening our understanding of the form. Even while Witte and Hesner disclaim their discussion as “non-academic,” their efforts are regularly taxonomic, intellectual, and inquisitive—e.g., partitioning out different kinds of humor, sorting cartoonists into rough categories, and cataloguing the kinds of interactions between drawing and caption. Due to the former aim, there is an understandable urgency in this book to showcase as many lovely cartoons as possible. Left unchecked, that would simply deliver another cartoon collection. But, in keeping with the latter aim, there is a clear commitment on the part of the authors to get to the bottom of things (as much as one might). I suspect, however, that this can’t be done solely through attending to the good and the excellent. This reader was unable to find a cartoon in Funny Stuff about which the authors didn’t have a kind word. So, as awkward as it might be in practice and as strange as it might sound in theory, I suspect this book would have been well-served to include a handful of clunkers, coupled with Witte and Hesner’s commentary upon them. As the authors’ discussion of the practice of cartooning makes evident, failure—typically, in the form of cartoons rejected as leaden or inscrutable—is an invisible yet inevitable part of the cartooning world. Partly for this reason, in our pursuit of understanding how cartoons work, it seems that the misfires, the duds, and the clunkers may prove no less instructive than successes.

Then again, who wants to waste time on bad cartoons when there are so very many good ones?

Book Review: Small Altars by Justin Gardiner

reviewed by Liz Brown, Outreach & Instruction Librarian, Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Justin Gardiner. Small Altars. North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2024. US$22. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo221357365.html

Small Altars is an extended eulogy to Gardiner’s brother Aaron, who died of synovial sarcoma in 2019. The literary press publisher marketed it as linked to the world of comic books, blurbing it with “In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.” Aaron “was born with a borderline learning disability” and schizoaffective disorder. The book describes the time Gardiner spent with Aaron during their childhood, growing apart as they aged, then returning to his brother’s side as an occasional caregiver. Threaded throughout are reflections on the activities and fandoms Aaron enjoyed - sci fi novels, Star Wars movies, piano music, Marvel comics and the Cinematic Universe, board and tabletop role-playing games.

However, Gardiner remains aloof and dismissive of the hobbies that his brother enjoyed, viewing poetry as a more “evolved” literary form, more worthy of adult and scholarly attention. Comics and their related franchises are “predictable” and “claustrophobic.” The Gardiner brothers may have watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold side by side, but it is clear that Justin did not probe deeply into what held Aaron’s attention within their stories. Instead, he is perpetually pathologizing his brother, and even random strangers around him, putting forth many suppositions but demonstrating only surface level research into his wayward diagnoses. A love of comics is an escapist route back to childhood, according to Justin- the only time his brother’s behaviors met society's expectations and the only time Justin was not bored, tired, embarrassed, embittered by being associated with his brother. Gardiner veers away from any attempts to more deeply and empathetically understand his brother’s enjoyment of the mediums in favor of describing his own feelings and how uncomfortable he was interacting with his brother. Panel gutters are a looming space where Gardiner is unwilling to venture forth and examine with any kind of serious contemplation.

His brother’s lifelong efforts at playing the piano is similarly deemed a waste of time because Aaron “never composed his own songs or made any money off of it.” Gardiner briefly describes what Aaron did make money off of- working as a janitor for the Pearl Buck Center, a preschool for students with cognitive disabilities and where many of Aaron’s coworkers also had mental health or cognitive disabilities. "I knew full well how important Pearl Buck was to my brother, yet I avoided any direct contact with it..." While those feelings are valid and probably relatable to many people who don't have disabilities, this work does nothing to change people's expectations or behaviors in a way that uplifts the people who share Aaron’s experiences.

Ultimately, this title illuminates a gap in literature for thoughtful investigations into the role fandoms play for adults with cognitive impairments and mental disabilities. The topic is well worth investigating but readers would be better off directing their attention towards more empathetic and well-researched titles, such as The THUD (Mikael Ross and Nika Knight (trans.).  Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001)

Book Review: Let’s Make Bread! A Comic Book Cookbook

 Reviewed by Christina Pasqua, University of Toronto

Ken Forkish and Sarah Becan. Let’s Make Bread! A Comic Book Cookbook. PenguinRandomHouse, 2024. US$22. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697048/lets-make-bread-by-ken-forkish-and-sarah-becan/

When my husband and I started grad school, we got tired of having to regularly buy bread. We were already baking cakes and other sweet treats, so why not try the most essential item on our weekly grocery list? We started with Julia Child’s white sandwich bread and a friend’s recipe for peasant loaf, then dinner rolls, baguettes, challah, and brioche buns. Pizza dough and focaccia were already in our back pocket, thanks to my Italian grandmother, so by the time the pandemic hit, we were baking bread regularly enough that the shift to sourdough made sense. After a few years of trial and error—and with the help of Ken Forkish’s earlier book, Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast (2012)—our sourdough starter and boule baking skills are still going strong. Reading Let’s Make Bread!, co-authored by Forkish and Sarah Becan (illustrator of Let’s Make Dumplings and Let’s Make Ramen), I am reminded that our relationship with sourdough is not an uncommon one. Making bread is a long-term project that requires regular attention and care, is rarely perfect on the first attempt, but always worth the effort, and this comic book cookbook helps explain why.

 

Let’s Make Bread is approximately 150-pages and is divided into five main sections: The First Rise; Basics & Methods; Levain; Recipes; and The Final Proof. “The First Rise” is a short overview of who the co-authors are, what the book will cover, and what you’ll learn by the end of it. The “Basics & Methods” chapter, however, provides more extensive instructions on the equipment, ingredients, and techniques you will need to get started on your sourdough baking journey. For example, it explains how to weigh and mix ingredients, how to work the dough and shape it for either a loaf pan or a dutch oven, how to proof and bake your bread, and what to look out for when determining whether your loaf is done. I particularly enjoyed seeing the anatomy of a wheat berry and learning about the science behind how the dough’s moisture levels and environmental factors, such as time of year and temperatures in your baking area, can affect the outcome of your bread making process.

 

The “Levain” chapter is perhaps the most practical and reflective of Forkish’s bread making philosophy, beginning with a definition of the term: “Levain is the French word for sourdough. Because I don’t want my breads to taste sour,” the cartoon Forkish explains, “I usually use the word ‘levain.’ Both words mean the same thing: a wild-yeast culture made up from many feedings of just flour and water” (44).

 

 

In addition to this lesson on yeast cultures, the chapter includes step-by-step instructions for getting your levain started, how to store, maintain (i.e., feed), share, and reactivate it (especially if you’ve left it in the fridge for a while), all while explaining the fermentation process at the cellular level. The next chapter gets right to the good stuff—Forkish’s tried and true recipes from the simple “Saturday Bread” you can make and enjoy in a single day to more labor-intensive (i.e., multi-day) recipes like the “Country Bread” or “fruity” pizza dough. Tips and tricks for shaping your pizza dough, making the perfect sauce, and choosing toppings are also thoughtfully included, amping up your culinary skills. Many helpful charts are also listed throughout the chapter highlighting everything from essential ingredients to a schedule of day-to-day tasks to ensure success for each recipe. One of my favorite pages from this chapter follows the “Bacon Bread” recipe. I love it not only for its vibrant use of color but also because it extends the reader’s bread making skills to the inevitable (and most important) step in baking: eating.

 

 

This page wonderfully showcases the flavor profile and versatility of Forkish’s bacon bread recipe, teaching the reader how best to serve it through simple kitchen hacks. Who doesn’t love a homemade crouton!? Finally, the book wraps up on a light summative note in “The Final Proof,” reiterating some of the main takeaways: that baking bread is delicious, rewarding, and fun!

 If this is sounding like an instruction manual, it’s because in many ways it is. As an avid reader of narrative comics, I found I was craving a bit more “story” out of this comic book cookbook. There are some elements of this scattered throughout, but it’s not as detailed as some of the food histories that you get in Becan’s other illustrated cookbooks. For this reason, I would say Let’s Make Bread is a companion piece to Forkish’s Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, which goes into much more detail about the author’s career and relationship to bread making, as well as the history of sourdough and its key ingredients. Nonetheless, this comic stays true to the basics of Forkish’s philosophy. Visually, the color palette is simple, but the blue and green accents play nicely off the golden yellows and browns of the breads and the white background used in much of the panel design. The artist’s attention to detail is scrupulous. Every texture, stretch, fold, and crackle of the dough is accounted for, making this a very useful guide for the various sensory elements of sourdough baking.

 

I do less of the bread making and more of the bread eating in my household, so I appreciate how this book helped me understand the basic elements of baking without the pressure to do it for myself or, if I were to attempt these recipes, to be good at it. Instead, Let’s Make Bread! revels in the experimentation process. This comic book cookbook would make a perfect gift for an aspiring bread baker, old or young, especially visually oriented folks who prefer illustrated instructions when learning something new. It’s full of humor, great recipes, and yummy illustrations that will have you baking (and eating) bread in no time.