"The Book of Grickle" by Graham Annable

Imagine a comic that has a dash of Sergio Aragones, a splash of Charles Addams, a dab of Antonio Prohias, layered with a sheen of Matt Groening. Then erase everything and distill the essence into a living line. This is Grickle.

Graham Annable's "The Book of Grickle" isn't about a particular person, although it has been said that Annable may look like his cartoons, but about a state of mind. The author worked as an animator for most of his professional life, but as more movies became digital he missed the chance to draw on paper.  This book, nominated for an Oregon Book Award in the category of "Graphic Literature," is a culmination of Annable's drive to bring pen to paper.  As he mentions in an interview:

"I started creating short comic stories on the side as a way to keep me drawing something daily. Eventually when I had enough stories I collected them into a little booklet and called it "Grickle"..."The Book of Grickle is a collection of my selected work over the past ten years. It’s published by Dark Horse and it’s all hardbound and definitely the best book to start with for anyone unfamiliar with my work."

"Grickle" is a collection of short stories with subjects bouncing like a superball between science fiction, fantasy, slice of life, romance, murder, and existential crises.  Yet, in all the stories the characters shine much more than the plots.  Through his simple line drawings Annable has distilled the personalities of the characters into fine movements, probably some economy learned as an animator, but also a powerful way to breath life into lines on paper.

If this were a collection of prose stories the closest comparison would be Etgar Keret's book "The Nimrod Flipout: Stories."  For example, in a shorter piece the narrator finds a "wee man" in his car. The wee man is driven to drawing.  As the narrator says "he only stopped for baths and cupcakes." While telling the story Ananable cuts from image to image, dropping two or three words per panel, making a comic book equivalent of a film montage covering many events, days.  Yet, it's done in a way that's most effective as a comic.  It's a classic short story, focusing on the epiphany of the character, cutting to the bone any fat in the narrative.

Another story, "by necessity," rests heavily on a joke about a dead dog, but before you realize it you've been sideswiped by the real story of man unwilling to commit to anything.  I like the small touches: the dog's name "Billy Joel", the way the hero procrastinates yard work by worrying that the rake prongs are bent -- "won't rake properly."

Even as sparse as the art may be, Annable has a distinctive style.  I'd read "dead weight" before, but out of context of "Grickle." It tells the tale of two guys, one desperately trying to get to a party, while the other less-invested dude acts as the negotiator for their ride.  The story was immediately recognizable, and even though I remembered it in a vague way, I had to read it again. The unfolding of the tale to its inevitable end is like picking a scab to see it bleed.

These stories aren't epics. Even when two men go ice fishing and one decides to transcend existence the narrative focus ends with the guy who catches all the fish. "Grickle" can be read as lightweight stories, but the images and themes stick in your head, and re-reading brings more depth.  I suppose that's why the closest comparisons that spring to my mind are the cartoons in the margins of Mad magazine, the eternal struggles of Spy vs Spy, and the reruns of The Simpsons -- they're all just great stories worth seeing again and again.

For more on Graham Annable check out his blog at http://gricklethings.blogspot.com/ or the Grickle website at http://grickle.com.  He's got quite a few little animated shorts posted.  Annable now works for Laika Entertainment in Portland and was a storyboard on the movies Coraline and the soon to be released ParaNorman. Additionally, he worked with Telltalle Games to design a videogame called "Puzzle Agent," roughly based on the Grickle stories.  His twitter feed is http://twitter.com/grickle.

"The Book of Grickle " by Graham Annable has been nominated for an Oregon Book Award in the category of best "Graphic Literature."

Am I Feeling Lucky?

I'm digitizing some of my older comics so I can read them on the iPad.

My basic process is this:

• Use a copy stand with cool lighting
• I have a Canon TR3i digital SLR
• Photograph each page
• Copy the files to my computer and use Picasa to apply the following
• Crop the page
• Use the straighten function if necessary
• Click on "I'm Feeling Lucky"
• Export all the photos as 1600 pixel JPGs with Automatic quality
• Make sure the image files are named sequentially. For example, for Detective 117, the cover is called Detective117-00.jpg, the inside front cover is Detective117-01.jpg, first page is Detective117-02.jpg, etc.
• Compress these files into a .zip file named after the comic (Detective117.zip)
• Then rename the file so comic book readers will recognize it: Detective117.cbz

So far I don't have any problems. The comics look very nice on the iPad. The only thing troubling me, however, is that I'm losing some of the sense of age of the comic. Most people would think this is a good thing -- all the better if it looks brand new.  But something is lost there if Batman is too brightly colored on the page.

This leads me to my question: Should I use Picasa's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in my process, or just leave it?

Here's a split image - the left side is without the "I'm Feeling Lucky", while the right has been slightly brightened.  Which is "better"?

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OBA Graphic Literature Award

For the first time ever the Oregon Book Awards are including a category for comic books. Ok, so the actual category is "Graphic Literature" (neatly avoiding the overused term "graphic novel"), but in my mind they're comics.  But, as Doug Wolk successfully argues in "Reading Comics," they aren't just a genre, like superhero stories, but a medium, like film.  In any case, it seems that the literati of Oregon, which includes the illustrious Strunk & White society, feel that comics have arrived as a literary art.

So, which works are in the running for the 2012 award?

• Graham Annable of Portland with Book of Grickle from Dark Horse Comics.
• Aidan Koch of Portland with The Whale from Gaze Books
• Sarah Oleksyk of Portland with Ivy from Oni Press
• Greg Rucka of Portland with Stumptown from Oni Press
• Joe Sacco of Portland with Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel from Metropolitan Books

From this short list, I've only read "Stumptown" and "Ivy", and I think I'll have to re-read those.  The others look good, although "The Whale" is the biggest unknown to me.  So, I'm setting a goal to read all five books before the Oregon Book Awards ceremony on Monday, April 23rd.

Incidentally, there's a "Reader's Choice" award, so you can vote for you favorite book.  Cast your vote here before April 23rd.

Some other links of note: if you're already a fan of Greg Rucka's work, you can also become a fan on Facebook.  Oleksyk's Ivy is available online for free here.

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Phantom Lady Gets Tough

The first time I learned about Phantom Lady was in the Justice League / Justice Society / Freedom Fighters crossover in Justice League of America #107, published in 1973.  She was similar to the Black Canary, and her only "power" was a black light projector used for blinding criminals. As a kid I thought that was a little weak, and the editors at DC must have thought so too, since in subsequent issues of The Freedom Fighters in the late 70's she gained the power to become immaterial - a true phantom.

In this story from Phantom Lady Comics #5, from 1955, however, our heroine gets a chance to show how tough she  really is. A thug snags her black light project, and she thinks she's sunk, until the pool balls give her an idea. Yowch!  The dialog oddly encapsulates some sort of proto-feminism. PL loses her weapon and her confidence, then falls back on self-reliance.

Thug: "No dame is going to scare me! Go back to your knitting, babe, before you get hurt!"
PL: "My black ray! I'm sunk without it! Should have been so confident in myself..."

Interestingly, the indicia lists this comic as "Phantom Lady Comics (formerly Linda)."  I wonder what happened to Linda?

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"Reading Comics" by Douglas Wolk

"There’s a problem with the way a lot of people talk about comics: it’s very hard to talk about them as comics," explains Douglas Wolk, in his book "Reading Comics."  He continues: "as cartoonists and their longtime admirers are getting a little tired of explaining, comics are not a genre; they’re a medium."

With that sentence Wolk neatly presents the crisis and salvation that comics face today.  In the past thirty years comics have established a foothold in American culture as an acceptable serious medium, yet they’re still mostly thought of as fantasy-fulfilling superhero stories.  Instead we should open our eyes to see them as a vein of the media, like film, art, music or literature, while the stories themselves will fall into genres, superhero or otherwise.  He then takes this thesis and explains how comics are a unique art form.

"Reading Comics" is split into two sections, with the first third comprising an essay called "Theory and History" that covers the aspects that make comic books a unique medium, and the remainder a survey of comic examples that Wolk feels push the edges of the form.  During the essay he puts up a straw man discussion, probably well-tempered from various flame wars on the Internet, of his basic tenets of the comic book medium.  These include his definition of comics (which boils down to "don’t we already know what comics are?"), a brief struggle with the existence of superheroes ("not a week goes by that I don’t read, with pleasure, some glossy corporate superhero comics"), and the gist of his thesis, which is that comics can be read on multiple levels, and hey, some auteurs are putting together comics that need to be read on multiple levels.

Although Wolk tends toward a vocabulary that reminds me of an art history class I once had, he does it lightly enough that the pace moves along.  I also appreciated his burst of things that he loves about comics which he presented without much context. I have a shared experience in many items on his list.  Paul Gambi, the "crime tailor" who made costumes for some of the DC villains in the 60’s, for example. The ones I didn’t recognize were presented in a way that made me want to seek them out.

The latter half of the book, where he reviews a range of the most influential artists and works of the past forty years in comics, is more casual, but still just as insightful.  He bounces from Chester Brown to Steve Ditko to the Hernandez Brothers.  Of course he can’t ignore the 300 pound gorilla in the comics world, and so 30 pages are devoted to Alan Moore and the Watchmen series. Unlike Grant Morrison’s chapter in his book on comics history, which turned out to be an autobiography, Wolk presents an organized dissection of the ideas in the Watchmen.  For example, he pulls out the thread of the "The Black Freighter" in the graphic novel, and looks at it from all sides, including a slice of EC Comics history.

"Just as ‘Black Freighter’ is a metaphorical representation of the world of Watchmen, that world is a metaphorical representation of our own, a simplified and caricatured mirror image. Our New York is theirs, without the pretty plug-in electric cars; the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 chillingly recalled the one in Watchmen; most of all, the "destroy it to save it" calculus of Watchmen is the same one it readers face in the atomic era."

Wolk has a way of finding and clarifying the defining characteristic in a work.  His essay on Craig Thompson, for example, put into words the feelings I had after reading Thompson’s "Blankets."

"Where Raina is concerned, though, Blankets is almost as starry-eyed and self-important as Thompson apparently was at the time. He never gives her anything like interiority or suggests that she might have had any significance other than being a perfect, stainless Celia for his work…none of this is as irritating on a first reading as it becomes with later reflection, though, because Thompson is so gifted at sweeping the reader along with him. His drawing has an incredible sense of flow."

When I first saw "Reading Comics" on the shelf at the book store, I thought it was just an imitation of the work already covered in Scott McCloud’s work "Understanding Comics."  Luckily, I overcame that preconception and found instead an insightful book whose goal is to rearrange the way you read comics.  I’ll have to admit, even as a lifelong comic-book reader, this "Reading Comics" opened up my brain to some new ways of seeing, and some new avenues to explore.

The Boy Champions, and other Golden Age Gangs

 

I don’t know whether Jack Kirby got the idea for a comic book about a gang of kids in a tough neighborhood from The Bowery Boys, the Dead-End Kids, from Doc Savage’s team of experts, or even Our Gang, but it seems that there were plenty of examples of street gangs in popular culture when he created his sidekicks for the Guardian.  Nevertheless, Kirby seems to have taken this idea and run with it, spawning multiple examples in his comics: The Newsboy Legion appeared in Star-Spangled Comics, the Boy Commandos fought in the European theatre, later the unseen Yancy Street Gang bedeviled The Thing in the Fantastic Four comics, and even into the ‘70s a 1^st Issue Special debuted the “Dingbats of Danger Street.” 

I was always interested in the kid gang stories, especially when they were set in distant or sci-fi locations, or when they were from the golden age comics, which had an otherworldliness about them.  The kid gangs seemed the next step in the evolution of the sidekick.  As mentioned in this Wikipedia entry, "kid gangs seemed to be the way to go. Teenage sidekicks (Batman's Robin, Captain America's Bucky, etc.) were fast becoming a comics staple, intended to provide young characters with whom the youthful readers could identify.” What’s more natural than to provide a whole entourage of characters as a foil to the hero?   

Kirby wasn’t the only one to create comic-book gangs.  The Golden Age Daredevil had his own following called The Little Wise Guys.  I also have a Thrilling Comic that showcases the Commando Cubs. Commando Cubs were originally group of American kids who were originally sent to England as part of a study of "the effects of the old-world culture on kids of different backgrounds." But when the World War II reached the shores of the British Isles, the kids found themselves stranded. This blog author has put together a nice survey of some of the other gangs, both from the Golden Age, and later years. 

And recently I was reading The Green Lama and found a gang previously undiscovered (by me).  The Boy Champions look a lot like an imitation of Kirby’s Newsboy Legion.  Tuffy is an amalgamation of Scrapper and Gabby, while Mickey could be Tommy without the leadership skills, and Wellington wears the glasses, standing in for Big Words. The time frame, from 1944 to 1946, corresponds closely with the output from Kirby.  The characters are so similar in style, I was curious whether the art was cribbed from Kirby. That is, until I noticed it was Jerry Robinson (best known as the creator of the Joker ) drawing the Boy Champions.  Side-by-side you can see that these aren’t the best examples of Kirby’s work, while the art from Robinson has been cleaned up so it’s almost cartoony.  Mort Meskin wrote the Boy Champions stories, and they appeared in all eight issues of The Green Lama when it was published by Spark Publications.

A typical story is where the Boy Champions are hired by a rich woman to take her spoiled brat of a son out with them and see to it that he engages in good, clean fun. They head for the circus, just in time to spot a robbery in progress.  In a different issue the boys, after being denied the chance to give blood because they are too young, decide to try and get a Red Cross nurse's fiancé to donate himself.  Most of the stories involve being hired for a task, and then accidentally uncovering a robbery and solving it.

 

CBR's Top 100 Comics of 2011

Comic Book Resources has compiled their list of the "Top 100 Comics of 2011," which could double as my "to read" list.  So, as a reminder to myself, I'm reblogging the list here, with a couple of comments on what I've read, and what looks good.

100-76 on the list
I've read Jim Woodring's psychedelic "Congress of the Animals," a twisting wordless tale that's ultimately a love story.  I haven't yet read Chester Brown's "Paying For It," but it sounds intriguing -- or painful (it's hard to tell). Also tempting yet perhaps painful is Mark Waid's "Irredeemable." On the other hand, "Darkwing Duck" is just pure fun.


75-51
I've read the intro to "Archive Meets Kiss," but I'm not sure it's one of the best of 2011 -- I'll have to check it out.  It's interesting that OMAC comes in at #52 on the list -- coincidence? And finally, "A Tale of Sand" written by the late Jim Henson of Muppet fame looks interesting.

50-26
I gave my wife a copy of Sarah Oleksyk's book "Ivy," and I also read the online version. The art is so engaging, and the story equally endearing.  The other comic that I've read from this list is almost the complete opposite: "Chew."  As the blurb says, "Layman and Guillory's insane tale of a cop who can read the history of any food he eats" is a cool premise, skillfully done.

From this section two books that I particularly want to read are "Pepper Penwell & The Land Creature of Monster Lake" and Carla Speed McNeil's "Finder:Voice."  I saw McNeil at Portland's Stumptown Comics Fest, but I failed to get a copy of the Finder book at the time.

25-11
Unfortunately I haven't read any of the comics in this area.  Ray Fawkes' "One Soul" is sitting on top of my "to read" pile right now, so I'm looking forward to that. Also, I've been following Vera Brosgol on twitter, and I'm eager to read her work of a teenage girl who's picks up a friendly specter that slowly turns scary in "Anya's Ghost."

10-1
Out of the top 10, most of CBR's selections are superhero series.  There are three exceptions, all interesting.
I've read some of Kate Beaton's "Hark A Vagrant" online, and new stories of "Love & Rockets" is always a good thing, but Craig Thompson's "Habibi" is the oyster's pearl here.  It's a massive work, years in the making, and a turning point for Craig Thompson. I've read it twice, but I feel I need to read it again before making any further proclamations.

Looking over this list, I evidently need to read a lot more comics.

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"The Best of Archie's MadHouse"

When I was a kid I read a comic-book story that completely baffled and amused me. Not a big deal, since I was often baffled & amused by comics, but this story has stuck with me. It's the story of Snowboy, by Dan Decarlo, originally printed in Archie's MadHouse Comics #22.

Snowboy's origin is a bit unclear, but his situation is he's a high-school student that's a bit different: he's a snow man. At first every one gives him the cold shoulder, but as he shows his sense of humor they start to warm to him. A pal sets him up with a blind date, a girl named Dagmar, and their relationship grows into true love. The more time Snowboy spends with Dagmar, the more his love grows, until finally "the warmth of Dagmar's love did something for Snowboy" -- it melted his snowy exterior revealing a normal teen-ager. Unfortunately, when he arrives at Dagmar's house she's become a snow girl.

This is a basic love story, and a teen coming-of-age story, wrapped within a science fictional setting, presented as an Archie comic. What's not to find amusing and baffling about that? It's an excellent example of the types of stories one would find in any issue of Archie's Mad House Comics. Now a set of these comics has been edited and reprinted by Craig Yoe, in a hardcover book called "The Best of Archie's MadHouse" published by IDW Books.

The volume is a hefty 200 pages, reprinting more than 60 gag pages and stories, and includes about a dozen Mad House covers, and some original art. If you're unfamiliar with MadHouse comics, they were from Archie, but separated in a distinct way. Archie Comics were interesting but predictable - mostly based around various love triangles with the characters of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, Jughead, Moose, Ethel, Midge, and Dilton. MadHouse comics were utterly unpredictable, starting with the Archie characters, adding spoofs from popular music, movies and TV, and letting the Archie artists run wild. Similar to Mad Magazine, but some might say even more unconventional.

Like a MadHouse comic book, "The Best of Archie's MadHouse" is split into sections.

The Teen Age Section reprints some of the earlier Archie-centered gags, as well as the other mid-60s jokes on pizza, rock'n'roll music and dating. Probably the highlights of this section are the stories with Lester Cool and Chester Square. I found it interesting that in these stories Lester Cool is the disrupter, and also usually the victor. Nowadays the stereotype is that the "nerdy" underdog Chester might be the hero of the story.

The Monster Section gives the artists a chance to spoof the horror movies of the day. "The Son of Dr. Jerkyll" is another Twilight Zone-ish story by Dan DeCarlo where the hero attempts to give himself the face of Elvis facsimile Melvin Prestone. That story impressed me enough years ago that it is as clear in my memory as it is when I re-read it in the collection. Other mad scientists appear in this section, such as Dr. Syklops, Boris Karlaff, and a hippie version of Frankenstein's monster, but the most memorable original character from this section is probably Sabrina, the Teen-age Witch.

The "Way Out" section is a grab-bag of oddball stories of mermaids, cavemen and "The Discovery of Sleep." The best story from the "Outer Space" section is from my favorite Little Archie artist, Chic Stone. He takes a stock story of a Martian prince named Zyx on a reconnaissance mission to Earth before the invasion, and provides a wonderfully goofy and artistically rendered "Tale of Wail."

Archie comics originally started out as the MLG group, publishing superhero comics such as "The Shield" and "The Black Hood." "The Good Guy" section gives the Archie artists a chance to recall these heroes, and mix it up with a goofball hero (who nevertheless gets the job done) called Captain Sprocket. When I was a kid I loved these stories, although as an adult I find them less interesting than the other sections. They have a Shaggy Dog tale feeling to them, without any plot twists or character depth.

What I like about this book is that it gives people a chance to read the old MadHouse comics without breaking the bank.

Buying a set of MadHouse digest reprints off eBay would probably cost about $5-$10 per issue. "The Best of Archie's MadHouse" brings it all together for $34.99 (I found it for as little as $20 on Amazon.com). I also appreciated Yoe's introduction, although I felt it was a little light on meaty material. That's a complaint I've had about other Yoe projects, such as his book "The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers."

Another thing I learned is that Dan DeCarlo looks like his drawings, for example Snowboy. There's a photo of DeCarlo in the introduction, and you can see it in the chin, the hair, the smile.

I also liked that each excerpt showed which Madhouse issue it came from, as well as the artist and publication date. Some people, however, may find this information is printed too small.

There are a couple examples of original art in the book, but I would have liked to have seen more.

Yoe has his own quirks in designing books, and a couple of them show up here. All the page numbers are printed upside down, which may be a goof or a joke. Also, the cover has some faint comments embossed on it: "Don't read this" "Don't read this either." Yoe asks the readers if we would like to see more MadHouse, so it seems as if he's planning a series of reprints.

In all, "The Best of Archie's MadHouse" is a great introduction or reading copy for a collection of MadHouse stories. If you're looking for more depth into the background of the artists, the stories, or the Archie publishing group, you'll be disappointed. But, if you want an affordable way to see for yourself the madness that was MadHouse, buy this book. In this cold world of ours, the goofy love you find for MadHouse comics might melt your snowy exterior.

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