john and jana

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

When it comes to legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, there are two paths of interest in his story. One is obvious — as the co-creator of Spider-Man who wrote and drew the first few years of the character’s existence, his skill as an great innovator in the comic book for is of great importance.

There is another side to Ditko, less known to those who might know of him from his work with Marvel Comics decades ago — his unwavering devotion to the philosophies of Ayn Rand and his compulsion to inject those philosophies into his work. It starts out as a guiding principle, but soon Objectivism overtakes Ditko’s talents, commandeering both the stories he told and the career that never seemed to rise to the level it should have.

In “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko,” author Blake Bell mixes up a career history and art critique of the legend with a more intricate study of the apparent psychological and social decline of the man. More importantly, Bell provides the link between Ditko’s often outrageous imagery and the mind that conceived of them.

Ditko’s career was as a rather mild-mannered, working cartoonist of obvious brilliance when he hit what, back in the day, was the big time. Ditko became a major player at Marvel Comics, partnering with Stan Lee (antagonistically) and bringing glory to the company through Spider-Man and his other tour de force, Doctor Strange.

A bad experience with the business end of Marvel Comics sent Ditko on his decades-long spiral that had him exhibit extreme paranoia towards associates and fans alike. Equally, his work began to focus more and more on his Randian beliefs so that characters were created and utilized for the sheer purpose of acting out Randian-fused fables. It was a bizarre descent, one that saw uncompromising principles see public form as erratic and self-destructive behavior and turned his work away from the fresh brilliance of Spider-Man and into screeds often resembling a Randian version of the Jack Chick Christian comics — so much wooden lecture that the words almost crowd the pictures out of the frame.

The real focus of the book, though, is the art and that his handsomely covered through reproduction and discussion. Ditko was a great innovator regardless of his eccentricities and his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the comics medium. No one could depict the psychological landscape in physical form better than Ditko — his visuals were quirky and unique.

Ditko’s demise — he is still with us, but hidden away — is sad and perhaps one of the best arguments against the validity of Objectivism as full-proof philosophy of life. His story, though, is fascinating and his art, as with so many others touched with creative greatness, will outlive his peccadilloes, even as they function as the physical form of his own psychological landscape.

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden

It’s a safe claim to make that comic books are bigger than they have been since the 1940s. Some of that isn’t so much the comics themselves, but their adaptation on the big screen. However, the future of the print form seems assured as graphic novels, through which comics have found their way onto the bookshelves on the world beyond comic book geeks.

One of the great things about the comics medium is how accessible it is as a DIY venture — it’s perfectly acceptable to self-publish, in print or on the Web, and interacting with big-name creators or publishers is as easy as going to their blogs or walking up to them at a convention.

As an encouragement to people who might want to express themselves that way (as opposed to the now more standard dream of make movies, “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond” by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden provides an amazingly thorough home course in the field.

Abel and Madden teach class in comic books at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and have translated their curriculum into book form. The husband-and-wife team address just about anything you can think of regarding the art form of comics, from defining them and their histories to helping your with your art style (or encouraging you to give it a shot anyhow if you really can’t draw) to going over the details of materials and techniques to examining layouts, brush strokes and just about everything you would see in a panel.

Just thumbing through the book will reveal how an art form that has met with disdain and derision through the decades is just plain difficult to create — the uninitiated have probably never given much thought to what goes into a cartoon or comic book. Abel and Madden are happy to meander through the details of every aspect of the production.

Look at the amount of time spent in the book on a subject like pen nibs. There’s a chart of different nibs, illustrating their flexibility and fineness, instructions on how to dip them in the ink properly, examples of lines organized by pen nib make and model, troubleshooting tips, instructions to desk arrangement, posture, exercises for breaks and a rundown of the penwork of professionals.

I’m not even going to get started on the chapter regarding brushes. The couple spends equitable time on the more abstract portions of storytelling, from coming up with characters to plotting out stories. All the information is presented in a very friendly conversational style in the authors’ own voices and is filled with examples provided by some of the best artists in the business. For anyone wanting to pursue comics, from beginners to accomplished artists who want to expand their horizons — or anyone just interested in the mechanics of creating them — this book is a must-have. It’s of a scope and clarity that surpasses any other “how to” book I’ve ever encountered.

Glamourpuss #1 by Dave Sim

It’s no surprise to me that Dave Sim’s new project “Glamourpuss” lampoons the world of fashion, and the magazines that cover that sphere. What does surprise me is that he mixes the satire with an amiable and rather cute sort of cartoonist geekery. At one moment he’s being pretty funny narrating the vapid thoughts of a high fashion model, the next he’s griping while giving a historical rundown of Alex Raymond’s rapidly disappearing thin lines.

In the weirdest sort of way, this dynamic makes “Glamourpuss” a very personal work, though not with the intensity that usually accompanies such items. It’s not intense — it’s jolly. “Glamourpuss” is personal in the sense that it is a comic book representation of one side of a conversation you would have with Dave Sim if, in fact, you were having a conversation with him about the photo-realism cartooning style that kept being interspersed with a few giggles at the expense of haute couture.

That’s perhaps not what people were expecting, considering his reputation precedes him — a reputation for dense, sprawling, and cryptic fantasy series that last almost three decades, and, quite frankly, some controversial views about women.

As I said, though, it doesn’t surprise me.

Years ago, when Jana and I worked on “Very Vicky,” our characters appeared in a few different issues of “Cerebus” in several capacities. The one important to this review is that our main character appeared in a drawing in Cerebus #186.

Cerebus #186 is remembered for one reason and it doesn’t have a lot to do with Jana’s drawing of Cerebus and Vicky sharing a drink — Cerebus is in drag in it, by the way. The issue lives in infamy for the essay which overtook the fiction narrative and made clear some of Sim’s philosophies involving creativity and the genders. The reason this is important to this review is that even as Sim wrote and published that, even as he caught hell from the comic book community, he was privately exhibiting an enthusiasm and amusement for the obsessions of our comic, which included, among other things, cocktails, the Rat Pack, and, by proxy, fashion. Cerebus #186, to me, represents the two sides to one guy in the clearest possible personal terms.

A couple years later, he contributed a pin-up of Cerebus and Vicky and his rendering of our character is not too far afield of his renderings of gals in “Glamourpuss.” Furthermore, his humorous, including some funny ads and a hilarious food page, are very much in the same spirit of our comic’s fashion pages. What I am saying is that part of “Glamourpuss” is very much the Dave Sim I remember — I might even call it “Dave Sim’s Very Vicky” just for a private chuckle to myself.

But there’s another Sim that is burned in my memory — one who experimented with the idea of mixing personal written essays with graphical fiction. It started with the sorts of asides regarding personal philosophies that he wrote back in the day, originally relegated to the letters page, and it culminated in the running commentaries being transcribed in the latter days of “Cerebus.” At it’s most masterful, the practice worked with the graphics and layouts worked with the essay. That is back in “Glamourpuss” and it is a more skillful blend than ever before — the personal work shares space with the narrative, coexisting with the humor bits, and furthering the experimental nature of “Cerebus” into a lighter format.

As such, it is hard to recommend “Glamourpuss” to anyone looking for something straightforward in its presentation. This is not just an experimental book, but an improvisational one, and I feel sure that at the time Sim worked on this, he didn’t exactly know where he was going with it anymore than I know currently — and that’s exciting. There is something very liberating about working that way, especially when shackled to an intense, three-decade commitment like “Cerebus.” I’m very interested to see where he goes with this — if only for some laughs and more information about King Features Syndicate that I never knew before — and if something more comes of it than any of us or Sim imagined, all the better. It’s just nice to see this kind of playfulness in a comic book these days.

What It Is by Lynda Barry

In this primer for cartooning — a sort of how to be creative instructional text book — Lynda Barry takes a very different and very abstract approach. Instead of merely telling you how to fashion ideas and work with them, Barry takes the reader through an autobiographical journey tracing the movement of her brain and consciousness as it learned to fashion ideas and work with them.

“What It Is” unfolds through a bold and abstract presentation, where the subtleties and depth of Barry’s creative process — or, better yet, process to creativity — is echoed through a mix of sharp cartooning layered within intricate collage work. It may be an instructional work underneath all the clutter, but it’s that clutter that does the dirty work, making plain why the instruction makes any sense whatsoever.

Barry employs an arsenal of tactics to walk would-be cartoonists through the process. Sometimes it’s straight cartoon narrative — often Barry messes with this, creating a memoir of childhood with handwritten entries alongside the drawings. The journal winds through the personal circumstances of those years — including some sad details about her parental relationships — but the biographical detail provides a road map to the moment where all the circumstances, the doodling and reading and alienation, come together as artistic motivation.

When she’s not functioning as the Ghost of Cartoonists Past, Barry is posing a series of abstract philosophical questions about storytelling, the kind of Zen unanswerables designed to get you thinking without entirely worrying about any conclusion. Questions like “What is the past made of?” and “What are thoughts made of?” serve as springboards for Barry’s energetic and often gorgeous collage work, providing equally abstract images illustrating the journey begun by the questions.

Reading “What That Is” is like diving into Barry’s mind and swimming for a while. You plunge into bits of narrative now and again, but most of it is free form exploration, with your actions working alongside and in contrast to Barry’s own. In other words, Barry actually takes you through the act of creation, rather than just telling you how it’s done — by the end, she’s a guide in the mysterious world of your own creative brain, not just her own. This should be required reading for any teenager drifting into a creative life.

The Complete Peanuts 1967 to 1968 by Charles Schulz

I went through that phase, the one I imagine many others do, where you begin to believe that Charles Schulz and his comic strip “Peanuts” are trite. The funny thing is that it’s not the comic strip that actually brings you to this conclusion — it’s the over exposure.

You trudge through life being mentally bludgeoned by greeting cards and notebooks and Dolly Madison snack cakes all using Charlie Brown and his friends to bring up sales and they begin to obscure your vision to the comic strip itself.

But then you hit a certain point in life where two things happen — you really get Sinatra and you really get Charles Schultz. You know what it is? Everyone walks under dark clouds and a few of those clouds manage to get just close to ground level and obscure your way.

When you’re young, you revel in the darkness, but when you’re older, it becomes so much fodder for other aspects. Sinatra becomes someone to love because he’s been there, too — he’s the poster boy for dark times, but he still comes out ring-a-ding-dinging. Schulz, however, offers something more important — the ability to look into the abyss and laugh at it.

Charles Schulz, as it happens, is deep. Very deep.

This becomes very apparent when you sit down and read many, many “Peanuts” strips in succession — it becomes the sum of very unassuming little parts and you begin to see the other reason you ever thought it was trite at all. At a rate of three or four panels, once a day (six on Sundays!), it becomes something you read and walk away from, you give a little chuckle, you move along. But it quietly builds up in your subconscious and a collection like Fantagraphics’ “The Complete Peanuts” — with its current edition covering 1967 and 1968 — provides a precise road map to what it sneaks inside of you.

A recent biography revealed that Schultz suffered from some level of depression, but I didn’t need a book to tell me that, other than a collection of his work. That fact is as plain as the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. It’s not the depression that’s important about Schulz, though, it’s the fact that the guy expressed it artistically within a popular venue. He dealt with it and provided something many of us could latch onto, a little drip that amassed itself into a flood of reassurance that someone out there understood.

While Schulz crafts his strips with punch lines, he just as often draws them out with despair — some of them are little more than several panels of kids having panic attacks or plunging into depression. Schulz is just as likely to offer four panels of a kid being insulted and humiliated as he is to give you something to chuckle about. Cruelty is the staple in the “Peanuts” universe — and the twist in the knife is the total honesty about any given character’s failures.

Think about it — Charlie Brown frets about his baseball team, about his dog, about the little red-haired girl, about his pen pal, about his kite, about winter, stomach aches, about anything you can think of. He even worries about worrying. He is pushed around by his dog and his sister. He is constantly seeking the advice of an abusive girl who charges him for her insults. Even his so-called friends make sure that they remind him that he is a loser. It would be heart wrenching if it wasn’t so absurdly funny — and it wasn’t something you could identify with.

“My anxieties have anxieties,” explains Charlie Brown.

It doesn’t end with Charlie Brown. His best friend Linus puts his faith in a giant pumpkin that never shows up, his grandmother hides his security blanket, his sister bosses him around perpetually — he is constantly being pecked at until he blows up. His sister Lucy walks around with a grand ego, pushes other people around so much that she has no real friend, is obsessed with a piano player who will not return her affections and actually treats her with disdain and is fixated with anger on the antics of Snoopy to the point that it drives her to explosive fits of anger. It’s all very funny, and when piled up day after day, tragically funny.

In other words, “Peanuts” is a very special comic strip — and Fantagraphics gives it a presentation that such a special work deserves. The design of the book pulls out small bits of Schulz’s world to create a real eye-pleaser, from the manipulated image of Violet on the cover to the minimalist end papers with beautiful mono-color shading.

Even better, Fantagraphics offers an index to the book. This means that you can look up the really important things - a quick scan through reveals listings for “Aaugh,” “depression,” “Minnesota Fats,” “wishy washy” and “Zorba the Greek.” This is certainly the most indispensable index ever.

The packaging reflects the ultimate message of Schulz’s work — there is hope, in fact, there is joy despite everything. You have problems but if you can laugh in the face of despair, then you’re doing okay. It’s obviously what Schulz did in his life and through “Peanuts,” he invites us all to indulge along with him.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” received the sort of accolades that graphic novels usually don’t see. Every once in a while something like “Maus” or “Persepolis” comes along that captures the attention of the open-minded among the literati, and Bechdel’s work certainly deserves its place among that echelon.

It was a book of the year choice in Time, Entertainment Weekly, People, USA Today, the New York Times and loads of others and this is especially significant due to the subject matter and the way Bechdel uses the possibilities of the medium to their fullest potential.

The book is a memoir of Bechdel’s relationship with her father, Bruce, and both the bond and distance between the two, most likely created through two aspects in which they were very much alike — a penchant for the literary and being gay. Bruce Bechdel, having come of age in the 1950s, kept his sexuality a secret and he moved through life as so many did, following the path of the world and resigning himself to that way. As Bechdel discovered right before her father’s death and even more so after, he couldn’t help being himself, and the path of reconstruction — through his life, both secret and public, through his literary obsessions and creative expression — becomes a way for Bechdel to provide a counter narrative for her own life, to widen the local map to a regional one.

Bechdel wraps her investigation around the literary interests of her father — at the time of his death, he was reading Camus’ “A Happy Death” — and illustrates not only how literature acts as counterpoint to our own obsessions and decisions, but how so much alike a human being and literature can be. There are little bits that beg interpretation but don’t always settle in on one meaning, that sometimes reflect the interpreter. Bechdel’s memoir is, in this way, a spin through many classics — “The Odyssey,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Ulysses” — that can serve as guidebooks to her relationship as well as points of reference to help her read between the lines of her relationship with her father. In the works of Colette, Bechdel traces an actual and sensual shared document of exploration between the father and daughter, as if he is giving her a message to not make the same mistake that he was forced into — to follow her muse, whether it be artistic or sexual.

Bruce Bechdel was not able to follow either. Not only was his homosexuality repressed — perhaps he was bisexual, but, either way, the stifling of his same-sex urges created a barrier to self-discovery — but he was also called back to his own town as a young man to take over the family business — he was a mortician — and put the kibosh on his own journey. It’s a depressing bit of symbolism to be called back home to spend your eternity patching up the dead, putting an upbeat face on people’s grief. Bruce Bechdel, it seems from the book, had a much harder time painting a grin on his own.

At the same time, Bechdel traces her own history of self-expression through journaling, comparing it to her father’s letters. In context of this literate memoir, Bechdel is really making the connections between the joy and art of personal communication and the books we look to as our ideal of the same. Her father’s letters are eloquent and wear his literary loves on his sleeve — Bechdel’s journals are primitive and clunky, appropriate to her age — but she traces the journey of her scribing from the innocuous to the points where styles and nuances begin to enter.

Bechdel’s memoir is powerful enough when taken as an examination of gay identity and the repression that society once doled out as the immediate answer to personal feelings for the same sex, but that’s so limiting in scope. It’s investigation of artistic expression aside, Bechdel’s work is also an examination of the personal nature of creativity, of how intimate details and thoughts transform into a communication with an audience of readers and stopping self-expression is a kind of murder in itself.

Despite its extreme personal and honest nature, “Fun Home” is also a memoir for us all, in that everyone spends time examining their parent as they would a novel and attempting to extract the personal meaning with each passage, a biological version of that intellectual give and take. There is a little bit of yourself in that person, there is something to be gleaned about yourself in reading that person with understanding. There are also mounds of mystery to be sifted through, miles of unknown territory that speak to one of the most basic instincts of all human nature — to understand.