Exhibit Review: Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing (2024) at American University Museum

 by Mike Rhode

fig. 1 self-portrait

Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing. Sadie Williams (Ralph Steadman Art Collection director) and Andrea Lee Harris (exhibition coordinator). Washington, DC: American University Museum at the Katzen. September 7 – December 8, 2024. https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2024/and-another-thing-steadman.cfm

Ralph Steadman (fig. 1) is a British cartoonist and illustrator who has been active since the late 1950s but broke through in America with his collaborations with Hunter Thompson for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s. He is a trenchant and engaged observer of politics, but also illustrates classic books and alcoholic beverage labels. His distinctive style, augmented with watercolor splotches, is immediately recognizable to those who know his work. One pleasure of this exhibit is seeing earlier works, before that style solidified. When he begins working in color regularly on a large scale, his artwork is amazing, and it is fascinating to see originals of material usually meant for smaller illustration reproductions.

This exhibit was conceived as a follow-up to 2018’s successful Ralph Steadman: A Retrospective (see https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2018/ralph-steadman-retrospective.cfm ). The first exhibit was curated by London’s Cartoon Museum’s Anita O'Brien. This one is curated by Steadman’s daughter, Williams, and Harris, a professional exhibit designer. Steven Heller[i] asked about the creation of this exhibit which included “149 artworks and memorabilia,”

Heller: Sadie, as co-curator and also Ralph’s daughter, how did this exhibition come together?

Williams: Between 2016 and 2019 we were touring a retrospective of 110 original artworks to venues in the USA, including the Society of Illustrator in New York and the Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum in Eugene, OR. It was incredibly well-received, but in 2020 the pandemic meant we had to cancel the last two venues. That exhibition was sponsored by United Therapeutics because their incredible CEO, Martine Rothblatt, is a fan and has become a friend over the years.

Early in 2023, Martine said she would like to see a new exhibition put together and that, once again, United Therapeutics would sponsor it. It was great to assemble the team again including co-ordinator Andrea Harris (she’s a force of nature), and start booking in venues. It is so special to launch it at the AU [American University] Museum, where we had such an amazing reception in 2017, and also get the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine into the schedule, as that was one of the venues we had to cancel.

 I recommend reading the rest of the interview to understand more of the thinking that went into this exhibit. As with the earlier show, an excellent catalogue is available https://www.ralphsteadmanshop.com/products/and-another-thing-catalogue-soft-case

fig. 2

fig. 3

 To reach the exhibit on the upper third floor of the museum, one either takes an extremely long set of stairs (they run the entire length of museum), or a nondescript elevator. This is not a metaphor, but it does point out a couple of problems with this otherwise excellent exhibit. The Katzen building, of which the museum is a small part of acting as an endcap at an entrance to the campus, is a brutalist concrete building that is really designed for large pieces of modern art, and not for a paper art show. The walls are curved and very high and the building is starkly white. If you brave the steps, which I believe is the intended way to approach it, at the top you were greeted with five pieces (three are clearly labelled reproductions) from Steadman's most famous collaboration, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (fig. 2). A small caricature sculpture of Hunter Thompson was also displayed here and appeared out of place… so much so that I paid no attention to it, but literally as I was writing this review, an edition of 25 reproductions of it went on sale for £975 each.  (fig. 3)

 

fig. 4

However, if you take the elevator, you come out and what appears to be the back of the exhibit, facing Steadman’s student and early work (fig. 4). The other problem illuminated by either of these approaches is that none of the artwork’s groupings was labeled and it was left to the viewer to deduce where they might fit in his career. The building complicates this because there are no clear demarcation lines and very few walls. If you did go up the steps and see the five pieces at the top, you then had to turn about 60° to your left to actually enter the exhibit. (fig. 5) 

fig. 5

 

And then you’re faced with a choice. There were walls to either side of you, as well as a right-angled temporary wall in front of you. If you're an American who’s old enough to drive, do you head to the wall on your right? Or do you follow the wall on your left because you’re standing closest to it?  Or do you go up the middle to the two painted temporary walls?  If you chose to follow the driving conventions, you ended up at a part of the exhibit (fig. 6) that covers Steadman’s children's books, as well as other books such as Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland, (fig. 6a) and his work with journalist Will Self. Several of these children's books on the long, curved wall and the temporary wall facing it, such as Little Prince and the Tiger Cat (1967), are done in styles at one would not have normally recognized as his work ((fig. 6b, fig. 6c).

 

 

 

fig. 6

fig. 6a

 

 

 

fig. 6b

fig. 6c

 If you went along the other wall (fig. 7), you saw book illustrations for Treasure Island, Fahrenheit 451, The Curse of Lono, and I, Leonardo. The color artwork was absolutely enthralling especially on projects he obviously loved such as the Leonardo book. This section then included more Will Self collaborations, and then an exhibit statement from the curators (fig. 8e). This statement should have been placed both at the main entrance by the stairs, and on the wall by the elevator. As it was, it was in the middle of the exhibit in about as nondescript spot as could have been chosen.

(fig. 7)

 

fig. 7a

 In the middle, between the two book sections, on blue-painted temporary walls (fig. 8) was political material. One wall was caricatures of American presidents (and John McCain) (fig. 8a) while the other contained issues that caught Steadman’s attention such as famine in Africa or American aggression (figs. 8b-d). The people I saw the exhibit with, experts on other types of comics, were particularly unhappy with the lack of labelling of the subjects, which have faded in memory as political cartoons or caricatures frequently do.

 

 

(fig. 8)

 

 

fig. 8a

 

fig. 8b

fig. 8c

fig. 8d

fig. 8e - Exhibit statement

 As noted, on the other side of one of the temporary walls were children's book illustrations (fig 6c), while on the reverse of the American president’s section was early commercial material. Most appears to be from fairly early in Steadman’s career when he was working with Private Eye magazine (fig. 9) and doing far more work in straight black and white, without the colored ink spots and splotches he would become known for. If he had continued in this style, my personal feeling is that he would be far less known and appreciated than he is today. Facing this temporary wall were portraits or caricatures commonly of British subjects (figs. 10, 11), that blended into other commercial work and ended with his recent work for the Flying Dog Brewery (fig. 12). An exhibit case at the end of this section shows off many of the commercial pieces he's done as well as some tools of his trade such as photographic references, 1970s newsprint editions of Rolling Stone, a horse racing sporting magazine, a Breaking Bad Blu-ray cover, and the like (fig. 13). He has had a long career and continually re-invented himself (there are two NFTs in the show but they are repurposed from existing art, fig. 14), but at his heart, Steadman is always a commercial illustrator.

fig. 9 Private Eye pages

fig. 10

fig. 11

fig. 12 beer label

fig. 13

fig. 14 - Trough of Disillusionment NFT

 The rest of the exhibit is in what, on a different floor, is a separate room. On this level, it is not walled off, yet functions as a distinct space. As noted, if you exited the elevator here, you would see Steadman’s early work including samples clipped from newspapers of his Teeny pocket comic (aka comic panel) and school drawings including dinosaurs in a museum. The two anatomical drawings are highlighted as being the beginning of a theme that runs through his works to the current day. One cartoon in particular is shown twice as it shows how he decided to stop using a typical British non-de-plume of Stead, in favor of signing his full name. (figs. 15-18)

fig. 15 Teeny pocket comics

 

fig. 16

fig. 17

fig. 18

 There was also an exhibit case in the side area with other tools of his trade -- lots of pens and material from his archives -- as well as three pieces of jewelry which, as befits a commercial artist, will be for sale in a new venture that he has arranged with the jewelry maker. (fig. 19) The final corner nook of the exhibit features some of his environmental work done in collaboration with Ceri Levy on endangered or extinct (but also non-existent) birds and mammals. (fig. 20) “Paranoids,” a very small selection of manually manipulated Polaroid prints (fig. 21) showed an interesting experiment that probably had no real future or practical application, but was remarked upon by some viewers when I walked past. There was also a very long shelf, a pre-existing feature of the building’s architecture that overlooks the atrium/stairway, that has an example of about 15 or 20 of the variety of books he's worked on over his career. (figs. 22-24)

fig. 19

 

fig. 20

fig. 21

  

fig. 22

fig. 23

fig. 24

fig. 25 - overview facing backward into the main exhibit

fig. 26 - Thompson statue

The exhibit, with a wealth of original art, was marvelous, but would have benefited from a firmer hand curating it (or perhaps one less personally embedded in his life) and better labeling. Frequently the viewer was left to deduce what part of Steadman’s career one was viewing, and how important that particular art work/style was to his whole career. If one read all the individual object labels, you would have a good overview of his career, but that is a very demanding way to see an exhibit. Actively working to bookend the previous exhibit also meant curatorial choices were made that might have benefited from additional labels or text. In the Heller interview, Williams said, “Anita O’Brien did such an amazing job with the original exhibition that I used that as a template. I am quite practical in these things, and I find having something visual to work with very helpful. I literally took one of the old catalogues from the last exhibition and replaced like with like, sticking in print-outs of pieces to replace the existing ones with. Then I pulled in a few additional pieces to bulk out some areas, like the writers, and the presidents of the United States.” In some ways, the exhibit probably catered too much to those with pre-existing knowledge of Steadman’s art and career. Since so much of his work is commercial illustration, more explanations of the original art on display versus the final product of a book, or advertisement, or magazine illustration would have been useful. However, this was an exhibit of excellent art by a long-standing master cartoonist and illustrator, and it was a true pleasure to see these treasures of original art. The fact that there is a catalogue for the show is a significant added benefit. I for one would be pleased to see this exhibit duology turn into a trilogy.

Published concurrently on ComicsDC and IJOCA blogs.

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[i] Heller, Steven. 2024. “’Serial Polluter’ Ralph Steadman Gets the Last Laugh,” The Daily Heller (October 2): https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-ralph-steadman-exhibition/ . Also worth reading is “Ralph Steadman on Art, Poetry, and Hunter S. Thompson's Mean Streak,” Rolling Stone (August 25, 2024): https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-pictures/ralph-steadman-illustrations-hunter-thomson-art-1235084502/george-orwell/

 

IJOCA Sighting: Stockholm, Sweden

On a recent business trip to Stockholm, I had the pleasure of being guided to the library at the Kulturhuset where an impressive collection of comics and manga was waiting to flabbergast me. A cursory walkthrough of the numerous shelves revealed an acquisitions policy that was very nicely alert to the broad international comics landscape. This collection offers incredible opportunities for anyone interested in the richness and the history of comics to not only read these texts but to also appreciate the tactile experience of the books as design objects themselves. And of course if you are a resident, it's all free to borrow!  

The coup de grace was seeing a copy of the latest volume of IJOCA on prominent display behind the main circulation desk, alongside its neatly shelved preceding volumes.   

The shelf behind the circulation desk of the Kulturhuset library.

 

 Gratitude to the Kulturehuset!

-Nick Nguyen

 

Book Review: From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics

 reviewed by Brian Flota, Humanities Librarian and Associate Professor, James Madison University Libraries

Neale Barnholden. From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: The Materiality of Cheap Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2024. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/F/From-Gum-Wrappers-to-Richie-Rich

 I was immediately drawn to the title of Barnholden’s book because of my role as an academic (comics) librarian. Librarians, particularly those working in or with Special Collections, are especially attuned to the materiality of comics, and often juxtapose them with materials more commonly associated with rare book reading rooms–such as illuminated manuscripts, illustrated hard-bound books, broadsides, serialized novels, early comic strips in newspapers, and dime novels, for example–to demonstrate for students the evolution of the form and its continuity with these earlier material forms. In a recent book chapter, Michael C. Weisenburg, the Director of Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, discusses how, in 1977, Pizza Hut restaurants gave away six DC Comics that reprinted Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman issues from the 1950s as part of a promotion. Despite the claim, on the back cover of these books, that “these comics are identical to the originals with the exception of the paid advertising,” Weisbenburg notes, “the format, cover, and other elements beyond the ads were also changed due to basic differences in production and distribution of the issues” (116). He concludes his discussion by arguing, “The point is not to scrutinize the historic claims of either DC or Pizza Hut but to show how diffuse comic books were during this period and to illustrate how being mindful of the bibliographic elements of any given copy might teach us unsuspected things about comic books and their history” (116).

This is a roundabout way of demonstrating the affinities between a librarian working with comics and Barnholden’s thesis in his book. In the introduction, he rightly acknowledges the slow turn towards the materiality of comics in Comics Studies. He is also correct when he observes, “although book history methods are present in comics scholarship, auteurism is still the predominant mode of comics criticism, and stories rather than editions are the common units of study” (17). As such, Barnholden selects four case studies to show how a cultural materialist approach to Comics Studies can deeply enhance and contribute to the interpretation and analysis of comics. The book’s four main chapters focus on the Uncle Scrooge story “Back to the Klondike,” which first appeared in Four Color #456 (March 1953, Dell Comics), the DC Comics series Watchmen (1986-87), the comic books associated with Harvey Comics character Richie Rich, and Dubble Bubble Funnies, the free, tiny comics given away with individually-wrapped pieces of Dubble Bubble Bubblegum. With each example, Barnholden provides rich material analyses, unraveling how meaning can and is changed in these properties over the course of time.

His first two examples, “Back to the Klondike” and Watchmen, pierce through the auteurist approaches that have been broadly applied to these works in Comics Studies scholarship. Barnholden traces the printing history of the notable Uncle Scrooge story over time from its first appearance in 1953 in a comic book that cost 10 cents to its inclusion in Vol. 12 of hardcover series of books published by Fantagraphics titled The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library in 2012 with a cover price of $35. When it first appeared in 1953, its artist and writer, Carl Barks, was unknown to all, recognized by Walt Disney comics obsessives as ‘the good duck artist.’ He is not credited at all in Four Color #456. The credit goes to the Walt Disney brand instead. In subsequent 1966 and 1977 reprints, Barks is again uncredited. These two reprints come in slightly different sizes, have different stories packaged with them, are colored differently, and have different advertisements. After Barks’ identity becomes known, the nature of subsequent appearances of “Back to the Klondike” changes drastically. Barks claimed pages were cut from the original issue, and since the original art for the issue no longer exists, it was recreated by Barks in the early 1980s and added to later reprints of the story. Barnholden discusses in great detail the changes made to this story, its recontextualization over the decades, and how contemporary readings of Barks’ work remove the “lowbrow” context which they were originally part of and replace it with the prestige afforded to the “graphic novel.” This first section is a great example of Barnholden’s approach, one in which materialist approaches successfully blend with close readings, and one he will repeat, with different emphases, in the chapters that follow.

In his chapter on Watchmen, the emphasis shifts, because, unlike the Barks story from 1953, the twelve-issue DC Comics series, written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons, was “an instant classic,” immediately recognized as a significant work upon its publication in 1986 and 1987. Commonly considered part of the highlights of 1986 which led to the popularization and codification of the “graphic novel” trade paperback–which in time would become the primary printed means of reading comics–along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight, Watchmen did not appear as a bound single-volume collection until late 1987. Due to the popularity of the series in this format, and writer Alan Moore’s unwillingness to participate in its subsequent rebranding and corporate canonization by DC Comics, Barnholden argues that reprints of the series that follow, containing added material, commentary, and pricier “prestige” editions, impose a highly-manicured edifice around this instant classic. In one interesting aside, he notes that the first trade paperback printing adds the Juvenal quotation “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“Who watches the watchmen”) after the text, which did not appear in the original twelve-issue series. The quote is added in the context of the long-forgotten Tower Commission report on the Iran-Contra scandal, which is referenced nowhere else in the series. Barnholden argues, “The citation places Watchmen in conversation with the world around it in an unusually direct manner, part of the trade paperback’s agenda of positioning Watchmen as a weighty graphic novel with something to say about ‘real life’ using the debased genre of superheroes” (55). In these ever-evolving attempts by DC to shape the continuing sales of Moore and Gibbons’ comic, Barnholden writes, “Watchmen has come to exemplify a certain kind of prestige comic book, one that transcends its genre subject matter and context through the use of realism and becomes timeless rather than remaining dated” (80). I think this gets to the core of his project: using cultural materialism to unmoor the perceived and/or received timelessness affixed to canonized works by the cultural and corporate monoliths who have ascribed those values, by pointing out the (possibly contrary) systemic values in place at the time of their original production.

 The next two chapters are not quite as engaging, but that is mainly the result of Barnholden choosing subjects–the character Richie Rich and Dubble Bubble Funnies comics–which lack the fan and critical apparatus afforded to the works of Carl Barks and Alan Moore. Barnholden is not trying to “rehabilitate” or canonize these two comics series, but rather illustrate how these two different cultural artifacts have been relegated to figurative and literal dustbins of (comics) history. In the case of Richie Rich, a “glut” of product in the 1970s and 1980s–at one point over thirty different Richie Rich titles were in production at Harvey Comics simultaneously–led to the company’s demise. Barnholden cites how subsequent rehabilitations of the character (such as the 1994 live action movie, directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Macauley Culkin as the titular character) failed to resonate, culminating in the contemporary use of “Richie Rich” as an insult. His analysis shows how this is at odds with the ways the character is portrayed in the comics, suggesting a complex and strategically misremembered cultural memory regarding the character.

 In his analysis of the Dubble Bubble Funnies, he differentiates them from Bazooka Joe, another tiny comic given away with pieces of Bazooka bubblegum, because comics and art world luminaries such as Art Spiegelman and Wesley Morse were, at times, involved in their production. He discusses these comics in terms of “trash”: “While Bazooka Joe made a return from the trash through the operations of nostalgia and the association of several famous creators, Pud [the main character in Dubble Bubble Funnies] remains in the cultural sphere of garbage” (125). The role of trash is important for his discussion. He astutely observes:

 The rhetoric of trash also existed for comics creators. The attitude that, in the words of historian David Hajdu, comics were “a diversion that may serve a purpose for a time but is best considered abandoned before too long,” could also be expressed with the same rhetoric of rubbish put forth by [comics historian Les] Daniels, [historians George] Perry and [Alan] Aldridge, the Senate [S]ubcommittee [on Juvenile Delinquency], and [Helen] Meyer [the longtime president of Dell Comics]. Of course, this rhetoric also reflects the material fact that as ephemera, the majority of comics and comic books were literally trashed [...] [T]he evaluative words used here indicate a midcentury conversation in which people with a variety of relationships to comics, from fans to politicians, could agree that there was something trashy (and not booky) about comics, a move that eventually had to be undone by salvage. (127, ellipses added)

 By commenting on the trashy and disposable nature of most comics throughout history, Barnholden’s project also seeks to highlight how many Comics Studies scholars have been guilty of positioning the subjects and objects of their study as prestigious and exclusive ones, and, in the process, reinforce the notion that all comics are trash save for a select certain few. The deliberate erasure of the history of comics as lowbrow cultural objects and transformation from cultural product to literal trash from these analyses obfuscates the trashy roots of comics, and that is something Barnholden has no patience for!

Because of the lack of a critical apparatus around either Richie Rich or Dubble Bubble Funnies, Barnholden employs some novel techniques for reading them. In the case of Richie Rich, he painstakingly attempts to capture every variation (he counts 43) in the drawing of Richie Rich’s face on the 1,723 covers he appeared on. His distant reading of the covers, which prove that Richie Rich’s appearance on the covers of his comics show him “luxuriat[ing in his wealth] in a way that the Richie of the stories seldom does” contributes to the fact that “Richie Rich” is now a term of derision for those with inherited wealth (104, 110). Sadly, it is a fairly laborious read to have him arrive at this rather anodyne conclusion. To assemble the collection of 175 Dubble Bubble Funnies he analyzes in the final chapter, he describes buying a one-kilogram bucket of Dubble Bubble gum to get a large and representative sample of the comics (134). (In the Acknowledgements, he writes, “thanks to everyone who has, over the years, helped me eat the bubble gum”! [ix]) This approach, random distribution, yields better results, though these one- and two-panel comics do not offer much to actually analyze, but Barnholden does his darnedest. While he was quick to point out Richie Rich’s renovated signification as a specific contemporary popular slur, he misses the fact that the name of the protagonist of Dubble Bubble Funnies, Pud, although created in the 1930s, has  slipped into the vernacular as a slang term for “penis” and “loser” in the 21^st century. I feel this is ripe for commentary as well. These criticisms are fairly minor though.

Barnholden’s first book is a fascinating, intriguing, well-researched and -theorized read that rises near the top of the heap of Comics Studies monographs. My only other criticism is that I wish it was longer! To return to Weisenburg’s example at the beginning of this review, I would love to read Barnholden’s take on those Pizza Hut giveaways from 1977, for example. I think even Barnholden would agree, as he writes, “Comics offered as ‘premiums’--inducements to consumers to purchase items–are an undertheorized material form of comics, where the cultural values associated with the materiality of ‘the book’ or ‘the magazine’ are replaced by the visibility of consumer culture in such marketing schemes, and by the related concept of trash” (113-4). Another example that comes to mind is the IDW-produced mini-comic that comes with Anchor Bay’s 2004 4-DVD “Ultimate Edition” of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. I would love to read Barnholden’s analysis of this packaging, the synergies between movies and comics, and the history of film adaptations. But now I am just giving him more work to do, work that I or any other Comics Studies scholar could (or should) take up. That this book is inspiring such ideas as I write this is a testament to the quality and originality of the slim but dense volume From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich.

Works Cited

Weisenburg, Michael C. “Bibliography, Print Culture, and What to Do with Comics in a Rare Book Library.” Comic Books, Special Collections, and the Academic Library, edited by Brian Flota and Kate Morris, ACRL, 2023, pp. 103-119.