I understand that amiable comic strips about two punk rock guys who have clever punk-themed conversations about life, enthuse about their punk rock record collections and make fun of punk rock bands is going to have limited appeal. That doesn’t stop me from liking it and definitely not from recommending it. It might even open up some avenues for the uninitiated but adventurous.
“Nothing Nice to Say” is web cartoonist Mitch Clem’s ruminations on all things punk as mostly seen through the eyes of Blake and Fletcher, with a supporting cast of characters who pop up now and again, including Clem himself.
Clem’s humor is built around a mix of sarcasm and self-deprecation — Blake and Fletcher are often the vehicles for the former, but Clem puts himself through the ringer for the latter. There are often sudden realizations that are charming for their naiveté, usually having to do with the fact that punk isn’t always as against commercialism as a committed hardcore fan would wish it was, but also following the inherent goofiness of the nice guys who love it and have a band.
Some of my favorite gags include the recurring “Old Time Comedy Hour,” which has the two main characters dressed up for Vaudeville and telling corny jokes with a punk sensibility, and the stretch in which Clem’s one reader storms in and takes over the strip, resulting in stick-figure tirades about sellout bands.
I don’t know if Clem would like this, but I’d say that he’s made punk cute. Thirty-years ago, when I was a little kid, punks scared the living daylights out of me — now they just make me sigh and smile and “Nothing Nice to Say” isn’t doing much to change my reaction.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 7:57 pm by John. Add a comment
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.
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago at 9:37 am by John. Add a comment
Here’s a little something you don’t see mixed often enough and you certainly don’t expect to find it in a comic strip half a century old: sweetness and biting wit. That’s just not a typical combination, but “Moomins” are not typical creatures — nor is Tove Jansson a typical cartoonist. The “Moomin” comic strips present light-hearted and lovable characters amidst an absurdist fantasy of social commentary. In fact, after reading them, you’ll wonder how you ever did without them.
The title refers to a family of bouncy looking creatures — kind of like hippos, but not nearly as dangerous — who live a life that is idyllic and easy going. They’re the ultimate bohemians, but without the gratuitous cynicism — that is reserved for the sharp wit of their creator, Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson, who steers her characters into playful confrontations with authority figures of all types. Many of the stories contained in these collections have to do with some dictatorial idiot — whether it’s domineering athletes or vacationing famous millionaires coming along and institutionalizing something that interferes with the Moomin way, which is one of easygoing improvisation. As the father proclaims, “I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream,” which is also etched into the back cover of the first volume as a manifesto.
By the end of the two volumes, Jansson turns the tables and introduces a religious cult that out-Moomins the Moomins and puts them into the role of authority figure — and manages to meld this turn with their natural tendency to happy chaos. That’s the power of Jansson’s clever humor.
In some ways, the Moomin tales are the classic Beverly Hillbillies scenario — there are certain people in the world who just cannot tolerate disorder on any level, especially as presented through something they see as lacking in refinement. The audience, however, always sides with simplicity, largely because no one likes a pretentious boob. The Moomin are anything but that, and their large, bulbous appearances are physical illustrations of their facile souls and the larger than life bombast that lurk within.
The series began not as a comic strip at all, but as children’s books, with the character of Moomintroll first appearing in the 1945 book “The Little Trolls and the Great Flood.” At some point, Jansson had released a cartoon adventure for a Swedish-Finnish newspaper and, in 1953, began the comic strip presented in these volumes for the Associated Press in England. It ran for five years until Jansson gave it up, essentially realizing that there was a lot of Moomin in her and she just couldn’t keep up with the schedule any longer. It’s no wonder — Jansson was raised in a family of eccentrics who kept a pet monkey and served as inspiration for the Moomin characters. She became a beloved and thoroughly decorated writer in Sweden and Finland.
Sadly, the Moomins were never well-known in our country, but Drawn and Quarterly has done a remarkably beautiful job in collecting the comic strips — and an important one as well. These are great comics for kids — intelligent and whimsical, they offer much to laugh about, as well as plenty to consider. Jansson’s writing — and the characters who benefit — are playful, but wise, and each story offers something profound underneath the silliness. In this manner, Jansson has much in common with the best of children’s works — the best comparison I can think of with Russell Hoban’s tender and worldly book “The Mouse and His Child” — but with an absurdist comic turn that is distinctly Scandanavian. Jansson’s work holds up just as well next to the best of Charles Schulz and fans of his early work will, I think, be delighted by what these volumes of Jansson reveal.
The phrase “hidden treasure” is bandied around about as much as the word genius. As overused as that, they are the two words most appropriate to Jansson’s work.
Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 11:41 pm by John. Add a comment
Cartoonist Jack Cole is best known in comics for his work on “Plastic Man,” while out in the real world, he defined what we think of when we envision a Playboy cartoon. Cole’s work was fluid and energetic, filled with visual wit. In the collection “Betsy and Me,” Fantagraphics gathers his final major work, a weekly comic strip that was by all accounts the pinnacle of his career — how odd it was that he should commit suicide after completely only two and a half months worth of the strip.
While this bit of background is not mandatory to the enjoyment of the strip, it does give it a dark edge that wouldn’t be apparent otherwise — on the surface, the whole thing seems so innocent, so sprightly suburban, so 1950s. No one characterized it better than Art Speigelman, that with the knowledge of Cole’s untimely end, the strip “reads like a suicide note delivered in daily installments.”
Indeed, it does at times, but this isn’t necessarily unusual — comedians are humorists often the darkest of creatures and there was certainly something haunting Jack Cole.
But what of “Betsy and Me” without the grim epilogue?
Cole’s strip involves a fellow named Chet Tibbet as he rattles off small talk about his daily life to the cartoon-reading audience. During the course of the strip, Tibbet covers his engagement and marriage and the subsequent birth of his son, a child genius. While rendered in the traditional three panels — and certainly delivering some level of punchline at the end of each strip — Cole lays the topics and themes across days and days of entries. The arcs might have to do with purchasing a car or dealing with their friends or moving to the suburbs, and by doing this Cole creates very interesting hybrid — part Blondie, part Mary Worth.
Coles jokes are calm, his art airy. For all the compilations of “Plastic Man,” here he has stripped down his work to fewer lines, though extremely well-chosen. One curve speaks volumes here and as the strip continues, the art becomes more spare, yet more precise.
“Betsy and Me” comes off as a good-humored strip and reminiscent of some of the television comedy at the time, with its apparent gentle jabs at middle class living. The problem is that the jabs here aren’t that gentle at all — in fact, they’re downright subversive. Tibbet is presented as a man on a track that he can’t quite get off of once he eyes the right girl — and a victim of life, though a genial one. Not that his existence is horrible — it’s just not an exciting one and Tibbet is left to make it seem so by telling tall tales that, through the miracle of cartooning, he often comes off as the rube of his wife, his child, his boss, his neighbors.
Is Chet Tibbet another everyman — or is there a little bit of Jack Cole in there?
As R.C. Harvey’s thorough and fascinating forward flat-out states, there’s a lot of speculation, but far fewer answers. What is left is “Betsy and Me,” amusing and friendly, what seems like an example of someone laughing in the darkness — except Jack Cole stopped laughing and, therefore, so did Chet Tibbet.
