Two Bunnies #4
A new edition of Two Bunnies and a Duck has been posted. Kinda gross, but a lot of humor is based on grossness, doncha think?
By the way, we just completed almost a full day of planting and removing different vegetation from our yard. I have just one gardening observation: Ruellia sucks. Don’t plant unless you like things that spread like weeds and leave dozens of densely packed stalks in the ground when you try removing them.
Book Review: Jackie Ormes
I love it when a book exposes me to an event or person that I’d previously known nothing of. This happened recently when a friend sent along an email linking to an article on Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist. This book grew out of author Nancy Goldstein’s interest in a doll modeled after one of Ormes’ comic characters. What emerged from that little pique is this multifaceted portrait of a vivacious lady who channeled the excitement of mid-20th century politics and social issues into her own jazzy drawings.
Actually, cartooning made up only part of Ormes’ life story — between 1937 and 1956, she had a hand in four different comic strips in between stints as a reporter, community volunteer and social hostess on the Chicago scene. Her best-remembered comic was Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger, a single panel weekly which ran in the black-oriented Pittsburgh Courier in 1945-56. It starred Patty Jo, a smart-mouthed little girl whose beyond-her-years wisecracks often startled her mute yet smartly dressed older sister Ginger (the fashionable Ormes modeled Ginger after herself). Although the strip looked innocuous enough on the surface, Ormes used the Patty Jo character to caustically speak on current issues ranging from segregation to the HUAC Communist witch hunts to Dior’s “New Look” fashions. Around the same time, Ormes also drew a full color romantic saga titled Torchy In Heartbeats, a series notable for its independent Afro-American herioine and Orme’s lush drawing style (a distinct improvement over Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger‘s cute but often stilted compositions). Goldstein also devotes a chapter to the highly collectible doll based on Patty Jo.
The book itself is a nice and thorough summary of Ormes’ life and career. My only complaint is that Goldstein’s text often detours into unnecessarily long passages giving context to the times she lived in. On the other hand, I did enjoy her paragraphs describing the often obscure topics covered in each Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger panel. Ormes’ comics are presented in the best possible way, despite many of them only surviving on grungy microfilm reels. All in all, with this book I was left with the impression of getting to know a fascinating lady who lived in a fascinating era.
Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist is published by The University of Michigan Press. Buy it at Amazon.com here.
Bunnies, Comic #3
A new Two Bunnies and a Duck installment has been published, and this time we see the appearance of a third character. Is it the duck? Check it out.
More Bunnies
Posted another installment of Two Bunnies and a Duck today. This new one was done in ink. The lines are darker, making the words easier to read — but I don’t like drawing in ink as much, and the results came out wobbly looking. Back to pencil for the next one. I have several weeks’ worth of comics planned (but not yet drawn).
Two Bunnies and a Duck
The s.o. has been hounding me for the last few weeks to get a comic strip going. Voilà: Two Bunnies and a Duck will be updated every two weeks. Doing a comic strip is harder than it looks. How the #@%≈$ do comic strip artists keep the characters looking the same in every panel? I keep drawing bunny after bunny and they always come out different. Anyways, enjoy the first installment.
Book Review: Art Out of Time
Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 arrived as a Christmas gift from my s.o., who bought it off my Amazon wish list after I blindly put it on there a few years back. Something about the cover design and the concept of trolling through old newspapers for comic obscurities appealed to me. For once a stab in the dark paid off, for this is a beautifully produced book chock full of eye-popping images — not only from the world of newsprint but from short-lived standalone comics as well.
The various comics collected here mainly tell me that the word “visionary” in the book’s title carries a wide definition. In some cases it might be a series that never caught on, while a few pages later a popular and long-running newspaper strip which wound up getting lost over time might be showcased. Some (like Gene Deitch’s Midcentury Modern Terr’ble Thompson) contain brilliant visuals supporting rather dull stories, while others crackle with subversive wit but are ordinarily drawn. A few others, like the work of Rory Hayes and Fletcher Hanks (who recently got his own anthology published by Fantagraphics), are so singularly bizarre they could have only come from one mind. Whatever their origins, all of the included comics are at the very least fascinating glimpses into the times they came from. Dan Nadel arranged the comics non-chronologically in loosely thematic groupings, so paging through them gives the reader an eclectic experience. Nice touch.
On another note, I want to point out how gorgeous some of those early, pre-WWII newspaper Sunday strips were. Being able to lay out a strip on an entire full page must have been a luxury that some artists undoubtedly used to full advantage — and you get to see a lot of lovely examples of this in the book. It’s especially heartening when looking at today’s pathetically scaled-down newspaper comics.
Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 is available now from Harry N. Abrams. Buy at Amazon here.
Teach Me Tiger
The commentary on 25 great Calvin and Hobbes strips encapsulates why this was perhaps the greatest daily newspaper comic strip ever (via Pop Culture Junk Mail). My absolulety favorite time was the c.1990 series when Calvin was making snowmen and explaining his creations the way a fine artist would (i.e. full of hifalutin’ bullshit). Maybe it sprung from the fact that I was studying fine art at the time, but those particular strips really struck a nerve with me.
Drooly Bunny-Chan
We like to do the occasional jaunt to the Japanese-owned dollar store near our neighborhood. Today I was looking at the kids’ items and I spotted the item at right. It’s the packaging for a tiny rubber stamp (not pictured), with the stamp’s impression below. This beady-eyed bunny apparently loves strawberry shortcake so much, it makes him drool. I don’t know Japanese, so what he’s saying on the stamp is a mystery to me — but I kinda like it that way. It has that “goofy/cute/enigmatic” aura that makes Japanese pop culture so appealing.
It embarrasses me to say this, but much of the time when I’m designing manga books for VIZ I can’t tell what the hell is happening with the story and characters. Currently I’m in the middle of desiging two titles for them. Hunter X Hunter is an action-filled tale typical of their Shonen Jump Advanced titles, with saucer-eyed kids racing after monsters and stuff. The other one I’m doing, Reborn!, is quite different. It’s about a middle school kid who is tutored by a baby mobster. It’s my understanding that some of the characters start out as bulbous, Pokemon-like creatures who eventually “grow” into relatively normal looking children. It also sports a saucy infant/adult romantic storyline, which is probably why the books are rated “T+” for older teens. Those Japanese kids get all the cool stuff, don’t they?
Fussbudgets Rejoice
Look at what Fantagraphics will be giving away as part of Free Comic Book Day on May 5th — The Unseen Peanuts, a collection of rare strips which never got reprinted in those ubiquitous old Peanuts paperbacks. Some of these strips have already been collected in the Complete Peanuts volumes, but it’ll be nice to have them all in one place.
