The Huge Comics Exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris - A View from Finland

by  Harri Römpötti, a journalist and critic of comics based in Finland, who has been a freelancer for 35 years writing reviews, articles and books about comics among other subjects

Bande dessinée, 1964-2024,  https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/9htHbj4  

Corto Maltese: Une vie romanesqu, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/h0PE028

La BD à tous les étages,
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/zozduYP

Paris: The Centre Pompidou. May 29 - November 4,  2024. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/la-bd-a-tous-les-etages

Comics have taken over the Pompidou Center in Paris. The facility advertises that there are comics on all floors. The entirety of the exhibition is exceptionally extensive, even by the Pompidou’s scale.

   It is also exceptional in the history of comics. The world’s most famous and prestigious museums of modern and contemporary art are probably Pompidou and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Neither has had anything similar before.

   “There have been big comics exhibitions in France, but nothing like this. In the early 1990’s, MoMA had an exhibition called ‘High and Low:  Modern Art and Popular Culture,’ which included comics. But cartoonists led by Art Spiegelman criticized it for its condescending attitude,” says comics scholar Thierry Groensteen.

   Groensteen (born 1957) is known for, among other things, his book Systéme de la bande dessinée (1999, System of Comics in English 2007). He has also managed the comics museum in Angoulême and founded the publishing house Éditions de L’An 2. Groensteen has curated some of France’s previous major exhibitions and is one of the four curators of the Pompidou exhibition.

   Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the comic Maus, is not only an artist, but also one of the most authoritative comics experts in the United States. At the exhibit opening in the end of May, Spiegelman applauded the Pompidou exhibition. “Beforehand, I was afraid of the worst, but this advances the status of the comics by years,” Spiegelman stated.

   The defining of the time period covered by the main exhibition, “Comics 1964-2024” (or “Bande dessinée, 1964-2024”), is interesting. The 60-year period covers the development arc of contemporary comics. Comic books have long been considered children’s culture. In the U.S., newspaper comics were aimed at adults or the whole family. Comic books that only appeared in the 1930’s were mostly made for children. In Europe, the early Tintin and a large part of the rest of the comics were aimed at children. Similarly, manga production in Japan swelled after World War II. The heyday of children’s comics lasted mostly from the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

   After that, artists in many different parts of the world, who grew up with comics for children and young people, started making comics for adults. That’s where Pompidou’s main exhibition begins. “The counterculture highlighted arts that were previously neglected. The boundaries between high culture and pop started to break down,” Groensteen says.

   In France, one of the milestones was Jean-Claude Forest’s erotic science fiction comic Barbarella. In the U.S., Robert Crumb and others broke taboos in underground comics, and in Japan, Yoshihiro Tatsumi and others developed manga into gekiga, dramatic pictures, in Garo magazine. Garo artists didn’t see themselves as part of the manga industry.

   “It was my idea to start from the 60’s and not from the beginning of the history of comics. At first, I thought we’d stop at 2000, because it’s hard to choose the most relevant ones from the latest developments. Then we would have gone from Barbarella to Persepolis, but very few women would have been included. Most of the female artists have established themselves only in the 21^st Century.” Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical success, Persepolis, would indeed have been a rarity in an exhibition limited to the 20^th Century.

   Although the exhibition is breathtakingly extensive, it only scratches the surface. The three main regions of the comics--U.S., Europe, and Japan--appear side by side for the first time on such a large scale. But the Nordic countries are represented only by Sweden’s Joanna Hellgren. Groensteen explains, “I’m the only one of us curators who knows Nordic comics at all. To be honest, we didn’t even consider the others. We had a list of over 200 must-have artists, but we had to cut it down to about 130. The artists’ home country was never a selection criterion. I would have liked to include Africa as well, but we ran out of space.”

   For Groensteen, it was important that next to well-known artists, others were exhibited for the general public. He brought along, among others, the German Anke Feuchtenberger and the Austrian Ulli Lust.

   Groensteen came up with the idea that “Comics 1964-2024” be divided into themes. Chronological order would have brought out the historical development, which now remains obscure. However, the division into themes also creates other small problems. For example, Crumb and Satrapi are not to be found in the room of autobiographical comics--or personal stories, as they are called at the Pompidou. Crumb is in the room of underground and other taboo-breakers, and Satrapi is in comics about history. Of course, they also belong to those rooms, but, many themes are strangely lacking expected cartoonists, when the artists belonging to several sections are in some other one.

   If you’re familiar with comics at all, you’ll miss some of your favorites at Pompidou, even though you’ll find many others. Groensteen says that he has a meter-long list of those left out. The omissions emphasize one of the key messages of the exhibition: that comics art is so vast that even a giant exhibition does not cover nearly everything. “Comics 1964-2024” is a slightly chaotic kaleidoscope that doesn’t even stay within its own limits. The all-time favorites, Asterix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke, are included. “Admittedly, they are rather from a different generation than the core of the exhibition, but, in France, we would never have been forgiven if they were missing,” Groensteen explains.

   One of the achievements of the exhibition is the large number of Japanese originals. Traditionally, it is very difficult to get them for exhibitions. There are also funny details. Maybe only the French could think of putting Guido Crepax’s erotic comics in the section of geometry, even though they fit there based on the exceptional compositions of the pages. Erotica doesn’t have its own section.

    Below the main exhibition, on the fifth floor, there is the museum’s traditional main collection exhibition. Comics have been placed there in dialogue with visual art in the “La bande dessinée au Musée” exhibition. Groensteen participated in its preparation only in discussions, not as an actual curator. The temporal limitation has been waived there. Among others, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and George McManus have their own small but impressive showcases in the corridors between main spaces.

   The works of 15 contemporary comics artists are hung side by side with the big names in art. For example, David B., the creator of the Epileptic, is placed next to the surrealist André Breton, and Joann Sfar, the creator of The Rabbi’s Cat, hangs side by side with Jules Pascin. “However, the purpose is not to justify the position of comics in the museum, because it is no longer necessary,” Groensteen points out.

   Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese has been given its own exhibition in the museum’s library. Marion Fayolle, the author of surrealistic studies on human relationships, has set up a village for the whole family on the terrace of the main lobby.

   The share of actual experimental comics remains somewhat small, although for example Yuichi Yokoyama is prominently presented. The experimental magazine, Lagon, whose authors include Joe Kessler and Olivier Schrauwen, has its own extensive exhibition in the basement.

   The exhibitions were created relatively quickly, in 16 months. Groensteen says the biggest credit goes to Laurent Le Bon, who became director of the Pompidou Center in 2021. “Le Bon is a big fan of comics. For years, he and collector Édouard Leclerc dreamed of a big comics exhibition. Previously, they hoped to get it in the Louvre or d’Orsay. Leclerc has a huge collection, from which about a third of the originals in the exhibitions come from.” Of course, there have been cartoon exhibitions at the Pompidou before, but the giant entity became possible when Le Bon was chosen as the director of the museum.

   The Pompidou Center has also started acquiring its own collection of original comic art. The works of ten artists have been acquired first, featuring David B, Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Nicolas de Crécy, Emmanuel Guibert, Benoit Jacques, Éric Lambé, Lorenzo Mattotti, Catherine Meurisse, and Fanny Michaëlis. Most of the exhibitions are on display until November 4^th. After that the entire Pompidou will be closed for extensive and long-lasting renovations.

[Versions of this article have previously appeared in Finnish newsmagazine Suomen Kuvalehti and will be published in the Swedish Comics Society’s newsmagazine Bild & Bubbla. This article was translated using Google, edited by John A. Lent, and then reworked by the author, and re-edited by Rhode and re-posted on Aug. 26, 2024.]

Book Review: Final Cut by Charles Burns

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

 Charles Burns. Final Cut. Pantheon Books, 2024. 224 pp. US $34.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-0-593-70170-6. https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9780593701706

I first read Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole in my early twenties. Since then, I – like many people – have considered it to be required reading for those who seek to understand the storytelling potential of the comics medium. First published as a series of twelve comics, Black Hole was collected and published in hardback by Pantheon Books in 2005.

Set in Seattle in the 1970s, Black Hole tells the story of a group of teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease, referred to as “the bug” and often read as a metaphor for AIDS. This disease causes sufferers to see hallucinatory, psychedelic visions, before transforming them into nightmarish versions of themselves. As a result, sufferers are ostracised and forced to live in the hills outside town. The haunting images of these grotesque doppelgängers are captured in the book’s end papers, which act as a dark mirror to those in the front papers. In stark black and white, both depict yearbook-style images, their subjects staring at the camera – and the reader – their pre-evolutionary smiles replaced by tumor-like growths and gaping wounds. And yet, the book asks, is it these funhouse mirror-like images that are the true horror, or the plastic smiles of the teenagers within whom these monsters had once lain dormant?

Burns is an eclectic creator. Before the creative and commercial success of Black Hole, he came come to the attention of the comics community as an artist for Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW Magazine. His cover for Raw #4 is dystopian, disquieting and yet strangely beautiful, the perfect visual encapsulation of that issue’s promise to be ‘The graphix magazine for your bomb shelter’s coffee table.’ Since finding mainstream success with Black Hole, Burns has created covers for Time, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker, while he is both co-founder and cover designer for Believer Magazine. He has also continued to explore the narrative potential of comics through his work on X’ed Out (2010), The Hive (2012), and Sugar Skull (2014), a trilogy of short books that use a disarmingly Tintin-like visual style to convey a characteristically disturbing worldview.  

Like Black Hole, Burns’s latest graphic novel, Final Cut, is a teen drama in which supernatural occurrences are an allegory for social and psychological torment. With their parents either absent or neglectful, budding filmmakers Brian and Jimmy have recruited some of their classmates, including the beautiful and alluring Laurie, to help bring their latest cinematic vision to life. Inspired by the 1960s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, the boys' film – which is never titled – tells the story of a group of campers who stumble across an alien invasion and are subsequently replaced with simulacra. In this way, the central conceit is reminiscent, also, of Burns’ previous graphic novel. However, unlike Black Hole, the focus here is on the construction of narrative itself, through the medium of film, and on how creative choices necessarily reflect the desires, biases and limitations of their creators.

While shooting the film, for Brian at least, reality gives way to fantasy, the natural gives way to the supernatural, the terrestrial to the alien. Burns utilizes the medium of comics to reflect this fluidity, switching between different page constructions, artistic styles and colors without warning. A single page begins in a traditional ‘waffle iron’-style, with panels separated by thick black frames and characters presented in muted colors with little shading. Only moments later, this construction breaks down, as a panel – depicting a greyscale still from the 1960s classic film The Last Picture Show - stretches the width of the page. The still itself depicts an almost barren landscape, devoid of people, capturing Brian’s sense of isolation, as well as his spatial and temporal dislocation.

The more attuned we become to Brian’s perspective, the more the book comes to mimic the frames of a movie, which, unlike the panels of a comic, are uniform in size, shape and rhythm. This allows Brian to construct a world that is more predictable, one in which his wishes can be fulfilled. However, the events of the graphic novel are not told exclusively from Brian’s perspective. The reader is also invited, at crucial moments, to see things from Lauren’s point of view. Whereas, for Brian, the events depicted in Final Cut function as an elegy for lost innocence, for Lauren they represent a time of self-discovery – a new beginning. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide which of these perspectives they accept as true. In this way, Burns suggests, the ‘final cut’ is not Brian’s, or Lauren’s, but ours.

 

Author Bio:

Dr. Luke C. Jackson is an author, teacher and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has written novels, films, games, and graphic novels, including Two-Week Wait: An IVF Story (Scribe, 2021). His current research focuses on the spatialities of texts, including comics.

 

IJOCA 25:2 Table of Contents

 Photos only at the moment. I'll replace these bad photos with the text when I get it.

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.