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/

 

Exhibition Review: Beautiful Monsters: The Art of Emil Ferris

 reviewed by Carli Spina

Kim Munson. Beautiful Monsters: The Art of Emil Ferris. New York: Society of Illustrators’ Museum of Illustration. August 3-October 19, 2024. https://societyillustrators.org/event/beautifulmonsters/

To coincide with this year’s publication of Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters: Book Two, the Society of Illustrators’ Museum of Illustration devoted its main floor and lower level gallery spaces to an exhibition of her work curated by Kim Munson. Munson has ample experience in this arena, having edited the Eisner Award-nominated anthology Comic Art in Museums, curated the museum exhibit Women in Comics, and served as a 2022 Eisner Award judge. Clearly, Munson curated this exhibit with care to ensure that it adds to visitors’ understanding of Ferris and her work. The pieces selected illustrated many aspects of Ferris’ work in My Favorite Thing is Monsters including her character design work, her influences, and the monster magazine covers which feature in both volumes. Pieces from her short work “The Bite That Changed My Life” from Our Favorite Thing Is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which was created for Free Comic Book Day in 2019 were also prominently featured in the exhibit.

Where the exhibit exceled most was in placing Ferris’ work in context. This began as visitors entered the first room of the exhibit where the first case and interpretative text focus on Ferris’ father’s work as a toy designer. His work as a designer of iconic toys, including the Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots, the light-up game Simon, and the Mickey Mouse push button landline phone, where Mickey holds the receiver, were highlighted as an important source of inspiration for Ferris’ work and particularly her repetition of shapes. The influence of toys carried into the second room of the exhibit where an illustration of Granny Smith: Super Crime Fighter was paired with an actual doll with an apple in place of the head, and a label explaining how Ferris grew up creating her own toys from 10-cent items found in the Salvation Army bin. Understanding how these childhood experiences carried into Ferris’ work adds a deeper layer to her artwork and her text.

The exhibit also contextualized Ferris’ references to several classic paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes by bringing these pieces, and some initial drafts, together while listing the works Ferris references. Though this section of the exhibit would have benefited from including reproductions of the works referenced for comparison, it was nevertheless helpful in making explicit the connection between these classic works and Ferris’ art. In keeping with this connection to classic art, Ferris created a large-scale piece titled Scary Starry Night specifically for this exhibit. It is described on the accompanying label as a “tribute to Van Gogh’s 1889 painting The Starry Night” and the piece consists of a large, rectangular illustration that is very similar to the original painting, drawn in the style of Ferris’ artwork for this book with cross-hatching in ball-point pen. Eyes are featured in place of the stars found in the original work and a red set of eyes has been added to each of the black towers that rise in the left side of the piece in this adaptation. To the left of this work, a cutout figure of Van Gogh holding a palette and brushes was positioned as if he is in the midst of painting the larger work. This illustration continues Ferris’ practice of reworking classic art works and more modern popular illustrations in her own style and inhabited by her own characters. At the same time, it also served as an interactive element of the exhibit, given that the label specifically suggested that visitors take their picture with this piece and post it on social media. Such photo opportunities are becoming more common in museums, but this one contributed to the exhibit by serving both as a focal point for the eye upon entering the larger of the two rooms of the exhibit and as an original work specifically created for the exhibit.

While the majority of the works in the exhibit were illustrations from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, the exhibit would still have benefited from more detailed labels in places, particularly for those works that are not illustrations from one of the books. A good example of this was one of the few three-dimensional objects in the exhibit, a mask that appears to be a recreation of one found in an illustration. A recent interview with the author seems to confirm that this mask was created by Ferris’ mother when she was a child,^[1] which an adjacent comic in the exhibit described. However, a label with more details about this would have been appreciated, especially given that greater context is given for her father’s creative career and his influence on Ferris. Given that her mother was also a professional artist,^[2] this felt like a missed opportunity to offer a comparative look at her mother’s influence in her work.

This exhibit offered a chance to experience Ferris’ work, often in a new context that added to visitors’ understanding of her novels but could be appreciated by both fans of her work and those who have not yet read it.

 

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^[1] Vitali, Marc. 2024. “Eagerly Awaited Graphic Novel Embraces Chicago, Art and Monsters — Both Real and Imaginary.” WTTW. June 4. https://news.wttw.com/2024/06/04/eagerly-awaited-graphic-novel-embraces-chicago-art-and-monsters-both-real-and-imaginary

^[2] Yood, James. 1991. “Eleanor Spiess-Ferris: Zaks Gallery.” Artforum International. Sept. 1: Reviews 139.

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.

Exhibition Review: Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form

Review and photos by Charles Hatfield

Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form. Paul Gravett (curator). Santa Ana, California: Bowers Museum, March 9-September 8, 2024. Admission  US$28.

https://www.bowers.org/index.php/current-exhibition/asian-comics-evolution-of-an-art-form

     Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form, now at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, is a massive traveling exhibition of comic art and artifacts representing some twenty countries across Asia. Consisting of over 400 works, it takes hours to see thoroughly, and I can attest that it is worth revisiting (I have been four times, but have not exhausted what it has to offer). Launched in Europe in 2017, this is the first international exhibition of its type, and is both instructive and stunning. Asian Comics will be on view at the Bowers until September 8, 2024, and, I gather, may then tour further in the United States. I hope so.

Organized by London’s Barbican Centre, Asian Comics is the brainchild of curator Paul Gravett, a well-traveled comics historian and leading English-language scholar on Japanese manga (I should note that Gravett is a longtime colleague and friend of mine, and that the Bowers comped my first visit to the exhibition). To create this show, a process that started in 2014, Gravett collaborated with the Barbican’s Patrick Moran and more than twenty advisors from various countries. The exhibition’s design, including architecture and interiors, digital installations, and branding, is the work of the London-born international firm Pentagram.

Originally titled Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, the retitled American version of the exhibit consists of roughly half Japanese work and half comics from other countries and areas, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. The blueprint for the exhibit is Gravett’s book Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (Thames and Hudson, 2017). While rightly acknowledging the prevalence of manga as an international influence, the show goes beyond the Japanophilic stereotype implied by the original Mangasia title. National traditions are treated as distinct, not interchangeable, and the show’s text is properly sensitive to the history of conflict and competition among Asian nations (as well as the influence of Western imperialism and the Cold War). Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Indonesian, and South Korean works are particularly well represented.

The show, as Mangasia, toured six to seven years ago, running at the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome (October 2017-January 2018), the Villa Reale in Monza, Italy (February-June 2018), and then Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France (June-September 2018). Its current run at the Bowers marks its American debut and the first time it has been seen since 2018. The exhibit incorporates published comics, autographic original art, digital reproductions, woodblock prints, scroll paintings, digital video, and sundry objects. Published comics are the most heavily represented, but originals are plentiful, and the digital reproductions are exacting (for example, facsimiles of boards from Tezuka’s Buddha fooled me completely). I especially enjoyed those items that stretched my understanding of “comics,” such as two examples of the Kaavad, a Rajasthani tradition in which elaborately hinged boxes covered in sequential art unfold to tell a story—essentially, portable shrines, brought to life by an oral storyteller (as demonstrated in an accompanying video).

My experience of Asian Comics began with a gala opening that my family and I attended on March 8th, a Friday night. A lowkey reception in the Bowers’ sculpture garden was followed by a fairly quick walkthrough of the exhibition, and capped by a well-attended introductory talk by Paul Gravett in the museum’s auditorium. That Sunday, March 10th, Gravett followed up with a more extensive and formal lecture in the same venue, which, again, my family and I attended—and on that day I spent the better part of three hours within the exhibition, where I took hundreds of photos. We returned a third time on Saturday, April 6, for a stimulating lecture on “The Shared Origins of Modern Comics” by scholar Eike Exner (author of the monograph Comics and the Origins of Manga). Again, I spent much time in the exhibit. Finally, we revisited the exhibition on Saturday, July 13, for a sort of refresher course (and much notetaking).

Curator Paul Gravett

Throughout my several visits, my first impressions have not changed. Asian Comics is a triumph of research and design, immersive, transporting, and super-informative. It looks great and is easy to navigate. This is a superbly crafted presentation—evidently a turnkey exhibition, one whose design elements are pre-prepared and provided complete to the host museum, then adapted as needed. Online photos from Italy and France suggest a high degree of consistency from venue to venue despite drastically different spaces. At the Bowers, the show occupies roughly a third of the first floor. It makes for a dense and winding experience—not crowded, but very rich.

Approached through a long, narrow foyer, the exhibit opens with a digital marquee visible from far off, flanked by wall murals referencing Osamu Tezuka, Junko Mizuno, and other artists. Passing between the murals and under the marquee, you enter a corridor overhung with vividly crimson drapery printed with comic art. Japanese work dominates this space, but above my head, the first thing I noticed was Nestor Redondo and Mars Ravelo’s classic Filipina superheroine, Darna. The surroundings—walls and ceiling—are made of paper printed with varied and striking imagery, evoking printed comics and Asian paper craft. The effect is brilliant. From there, you are swept down a tunnel of red and black, and around corners, until you reach a transition to yellow, visually noting a new subject section.

Like the Mangasia book, the show divides into six domains, each clearly themed and color-coded. First comes “Mapping Asian Comics” (in red), then “Fables & Folklore” (yellow), “Recreating and Revising the Past” (white), “Stories and Storytellers” (green), “Censorship and Sensibility” (pink), and finally “Asian Comics Go Multimedia” (purple). This scheme, intuitive and subtly didactic, imparts a holistic design in which I never felt lost. The wall text (plentiful yet never a drag) comes in dynamic panels recalling comics pages, another evocative design choice. Pentagram’s use of paper is a wonderful example of simple materials put to mesmerizing use.

The exhibition tends to proceed from manga to broader views, as if using Japanese landmarks to sketch out the larger field. This strategy, while of course debatable, yields big dividends in terms of narrative and flow. For example, the first vitrine samples diverse manga from a seventy-year span (1937 to 2007) but is paired with a second containing works from a dozen different countries, some perhaps expected (China, India, the Philippines, South Korea) but others surprising (Mongolia, Sri Lanka). Right after this, another vitrine poses mid-19th century Japanese ukiyo-e prints beside contemporary Chinese and South Korean works. Radical juxtaposition of cultures, periods, and genres is the show’s logic—that, and a resolve to find commonality across differences. Admittedly, this syncretic approach presents challenges, not least the danger of flattening “Asia” into homogeneity, but it also highlights transnational themes and affinities.

The “Fables & Folklore” section epitomizes this. Spotlighting depictions of spirits and the supernatural as well as adaptations of ancient and classical epics, this area juxtaposes works by renowned Japanese mangaka like Shigeru Mizuki, Masashi Kishimoto, and Junji Ito with a startling variety of others: for example, influential krasue (ghost) comics by Thailand’s Tawee Witsanukorn (from roughly the early 1970s); various issues of India’s famed Amar Chitra Katha (starting in the late 1960s); many Wajang Purwa adaptations by Indonesia’s S. Ardisoma (from the late 1950s); a beautiful scroll (patachitra) painting depicting Krishna by Bengali artist Gurupada Chitrakar (2004); an illuminated page from the Bhagavad Gita (anonymously created circa 1820 to 1840); diverse depictions of the Monkey King; and various originals in voluptuous brush-inked style from Indonesia and the Philippines. Hanging overhead—a lovely touch—are paper lanterns bearing shadow puppet-like silhouettes of monsters from Filipino folklore (adapted from the book The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo by Tan, Hontiveros, et al., 2022).

If “Fables & Folklore” stresses commonality, the next section, “Recreating and Revising the Past,” highlights difference. Devoted to national histories and international conflicts, this area challenges any synthetic notion of shared Asianness and is, not coincidentally, the show’s most thickly documented portion. With detailed timelines starting in the mid-nineteenth century, it synopsizes generations of divisive and painful conflict, including imperialism, war, and decolonial struggles. Here the show emphasizes the potential of comics as both propaganda and witness, indoctrination and activism. Works on view span from classic manga (such as Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen) to Chinese lianhuanhua to South Korean and North Korean volumes to Cambodian Prum Vannak’s harrowing memoir of enslavement onboard a Thai fishing vessel, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea (2013).

The exhibit’s back half gestures in many directions at once. “Stories and Storytellers” focuses on comics creators, from revered auteurs to striving independent artists, and emphasizes markets, struggles for creators’ rights, and material processes. From an unfinished page by Tezuka, to a comic book script by Mars Ravelo, there’s a lot to take in. A roughly 10 x 13-foot installation in the form of a house with glass walls recreates studios used by the late mangaka Takashi Fukutani and by the team behind the popular online manhua Queen’s Palace. Next to this is a drawing station offering visitors a chance to cartoon, a reading area including scores of manga magazines, giant wall photos of Japanese newsstands, and a defiant blurb, “Print is not dead.”

However, this all intermingles with the next section, “Asian Comics Go Multimedia,” which suggests a different sort of triumphalism. Here comic art more or less dissolves out into and informs pop culture at large. This section embraces film adaptations, anime, manga-inspired fashion from collections by Mikio Sakabe and Jenny Fax, and the Vocaloid/virtual popstar Hatsune Miku (shown in a concert video). Nearby, in a motion-controlled installation, visitors can play the role of a huge mech (reminding me of an Iron Man installation I saw in the exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes in 2018). This area marks the exhibition’s big finish, and contains varied delights: for example, a focus on Leping Zhang’s character Sanmao, production cels from Otomo’s film Akira, and the revelation that Satyajit Ray storyboarded his first film, Pather Panchali (1955), in comics form.

Yet the most striking element here, in the show’s back half, is a curtained installation devoted to “images which may not be suitable for visitors under the age of 18”—that is, an adults-only alcove focusing on “Censorship and Sensibility.” This is a potentially controversial thing to include in a show determined to wow a general audience, but I believe it works well.

One could question the logic of this move, as there is much throughout Asian Comics that caregivers might wish to hide from young children. Visitors are advised from the start that the show’s varied “artistic expressions” may include “instances of nudity and violence,” and startling images can be found most everywhere. Moreover, not everything in the curtained “adult” area is explicit; some works seem to have been sequestered simply because they are queer-themed. For example, the selections from Shimura’s Sweet Blue Flowers and Yamaji’s Love My Life, both gentle, character-based queer manga, are quite understated. That said, the curtained area does contain many shocks, from Joji Akiyama’s notorious children’s manga Asura (1970), with its themes of famine and cannibalism, to classic horrors by Umezu and Maruo, to savagely satirical pages by heta-uma icon Takashi Nemoto. Vintage Japanese shunga (erotic art) and muzan-e (“atrocity pictures”) sit beside recent examples of yaoi, yuri, and gay manga of varied explicitness. Some works shown here are elegantly erotic, for instance pages by Chikae Ide, and some are repulsive, like the leering Sleep Rape, a Thai exploitation comic. Some are droll, such as a spread from South Korean Dae-Joong Kim’s “Beautiful Memories of the City of Cocks,” and some overtly political, like Rakudenashiko’s “arrest story,” which recounts the legal persecution of her feminist work on grounds of “obscenity” (a first for any Japanese woman). Cordoning off most of these examples in a separate alcove was probably a wise move, though the differences among them struck me more than anything they had in common.

In sum, Asian Comics is a bountiful, often surprising exhibition, well worth a long visit for scholars and fans who can possibly get to it, wherever it may go in the future. Gravett has cast the net wide, gathering in various artistic traditions under the rubric “comics” and thus affirming the form’s multifaceted cultural and historical relevance (interestingly, Eike Exner’s more specific conception of comics, shared on April 6, contrasted with the show’s inclusive approach). The show’s transnational scope and synoptic ambition are likely to provoke arguments, but the bottom line is, the fields of comics studies and comic art exhibiting are richer for this project. I’ve been exhorting students, colleagues, and friend to go to this show, and I’ll keep on doing that. Go!