Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Underground Comix

American comics were almost entirely childish and pretty insipid after the Senate hearings in the mid-’50s. Unsurprisingly there was a reaction to this, and some cartoonists started putting out alternatives, full of drugs and sex and anti-establishment politics. It got very tied in to the burgeoning hippy movement.

Robert Crumb

One all-time comics great came out of this movement. Crumb is a pretty twisted person with various misogynist attitudes - the saving grace is that the comics don’t read as if it’s someone telling you how women are, but as confessions of the creator’s wrongheadedness. This was new. He’s produced tons of great comics himself, and he married another extremely talented cartoonist, Aline Kominsky. He got his start working for Harvey Kurtzman on Help! (his successor to Mad), where Fritz the Cat debuted, and then started putting out his own comics. His drawing is superb, harking back to illustration styles before comics, as well as earlier comics like Popeye, and his writing is scabrous and impossible to ignore. As well as being a great creator, he was also the inspiration for the movement, and an influence on pretty much all of it. Crumb’s work has been extensively collected, and most libraries will have something. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Stretching the Superhero

Having mentioned ’60s superheroes, at Marvel and DC, and Alan Moore, I thought I’d talk about those who tried to take the genre somewhere else in past years.

Steve Gerber
It was Steve Gerber who got me back into comics in the ’70s, after dropping them when younger, and he’s still one of my two or three favourite comic writers ever. He wrote a swamp-monster comic called Man-Thing, making the stories about characters and issues rather than horror or superheroics. In an issue of the gloriously named Giant Size Man-Thing, an odd guest character appeared: Howard the Duck, a cynical and sardonic talking duck from another dimension. He proved popular enough to get his own title, in which he sneered about this world of talking apes and got involved in parodic superhero adventures. It was sometimes terrific satire, but also substantial human drama, with the quiet moments among the best. A great series, and there is a fine Essential collection.
… read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Adventure Strips

All of my favourite newspaper strips were at the comedy end of the market - and it is worth noting here how big an influence Segar’s Popeye was on adventure strips. Nonetheless, there were some great adventure strips, back in the days when there was room for more than talking heads in comic strips. All of them feel old-fashioned these days, it should be admitted.

Roy Crane

As Popeye took over Thimble Theatre, so Captain Easy took over Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs strip - indeed, the Captain appeared just a few months after Popeye in 1929. He was a much more straightforward hero, shifting what had been a comedy adventure strip into more serious territory. Captain Easy was a definitive influence on adventure strips - and comic books too: he was an archetype who is seen in Superman and Batman and many others. He followed this with Buz Sawyer in 1943, a straight adventure strip. Roy Crane, more than anyone else, evolved the style of the adventure strip, in terms of art, story and character. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Horror

EC

It was, more than anything else, EC’s powerful horror comics that led to uproar and US Senate hearings in the ’50s - and for years afterwards, comics were aimed more squarely at children than any time before or since.

They don’t seem so scary today, over 50 years on. The twists are often predictable and kind of repetitive when you read a lot of them, and the insistence on describing everything in captions (the panel outlines and caption lettering were produced before the artists got to start work) is wearing. Nonetheless, they had lots of terrific artists: Johnny Craig, Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, George Evans, Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingels. Ingels was particularly strong on creepy characters and atmosphere, but the general standard was exceptional. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Children’s Comics

The last item (bar a bonus insert) in this series was on European comics. Two of the all-time great children’s creators could have been covered there. It’s worth noting that comics have been a medium aimed overwhelmingly at children, especially in anglophone countries, for most of their existence, so unsurprisingly some of the best cartoonists ever were in that market.

Rene Goscinny

I won’t say too much about him, because everyone knows Asterix (with artist Uderzo, who continued writing it after Goscinny died). His writing is a constant delight not just on this, but on Ompa-Pa (a Native American; artist Uderzo again), Iznogoud (a vizier in a 1001 Nights world; artist Tabary) and especially cowboy Lucky Luke, with Morris. (Asterix is easy to find, but the others are less common, though there are English-language editions.) … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Bonus: Flash

(I thought it was worth adding this review of a recent release as a supplement to the recent piece on old DC superhero comics).

The second Flash volume is, for me, the best Showcase* collection yet. I love Carmine Infantino’s art on these old comics, the cleanness and liveliness and sharpness of everything he draws. I’m also fond of two odd stylistic tricks: the use of little hands pointing and gesturing in captions, and especially the bizarre way he depicts the city: almost everywhere Flash goes, from any angle, there is a huge paved plain, like the biggest city square in the world, with a modern city skyline in the distance, whatever is in the foreground.

The stories are sometimes very disposable: trivial and inconsequential, just another crook with a ridiculous gimmick (mirrors, tops, boomerangs…) captured by our hero. On the other hand, there is plenty of clever stuff, and some extraordinarily bizarre tales, often based on Infantino showing up with a cover idea he liked and John Broome writing something to fit. The one where he is correctly thinking “I’ve got the strangest feeling I’m being turned into a PUPPET!” is an old favourite. There’s a great splash page, also, where the Flash is running towards Grodd (an evil super-powered gorilla - Infantino always liked drawing apes), beaming adoringly, saying “Grodd, you… you’re WONDERFUL!” Sadly he doesn’t actually kiss him. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: European Comics

I remember long ago constantly being told that European comics was a mature artform for adults, to be envied. There is material like that, and material of the very highest quality - but my god there’s a gigantic amount of beautifully drawn or painted drivel, and some of the reason for the ‘adult’ term is the soft porn, which is often very sexist. A few European greats will come up elsewhere in this series (I think I am doing children’s comics next, and I’ll save Pratt for adventure comics), but I want to mention a few who I really like.

Guido Crepax is an exceptional artist who specialises in porn, including adaptations of ‘classics’ such as Emmanuelle and The Story of O. The material is often tedious, but he’s as original a designer of page layouts as I’ve ever seen, and there is real power in his twitchy line. I wish there were more interesting material with his terrific art, but even so they are worth studying. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Alan Moore

Another person who deserves his own entry in this series is Alan Moore, surely the most award-laden writer in the history of comics, and one of the most influential.

He first came to prominence in the early ’80s in Britain, with two great stories in Warrior. Marvelman (later renamed Miracleman) was a ’50s Brit Captain Marvel (the Shazam one) knock-off, but Alan recreated him brilliantly, with beautiful and sharp Garry Leach art (ha, namedropping: I ate with Garry a couple of weeks ago) - Garry was followed by various other artists. V For Vendetta was even better, a lone anarchist against a repressive future fascist British state, a clear comment on Thatcher’s Britain. David Lloyd provided bold art almost reminiscent of woodcuts. This is the earliest of Moore’s works to be adapted for the screen - one of these days we might see a good movie based on one of them, but I’m not holding my breath. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Raw & the Avant Garde

Well, the old avant-garde anyway - I’m out of touch these days, so apologies for talking about yesterday’s pioneers. Raw was a comic magazine, published in a variety of formats, which specialised in the strange and experimental, striving towards comics with values more often applied to modern painting and literature. It wasn’t all successful by any means, but given the experimental nature, it hit the mark far more often than one could have ever expected. The mags (Penguin published some in book format) are well worth reading if you can find them, but I’ll just highlight a few people from that school.

Its biggest name was its editor, Art Spiegelman, who made a huge impact with his narrative of his father’s days in a Nazi concentration camp, interleaved with their current relationship, with all the characters depicted as animals. Maus was an international hit, garnering possibly the greatest praise a comic book ever had in the US, and its status was largely warranted. It’s an unflinchingly honest account, told with rigour and great skill. I have my doubts about the animal aspect, but it had its pluses as well as difficulties. It’s a very impressive achievement, and holds up pretty well stacked against something like Primo Levi’s autobiographical tale of similar experiences. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: War Comics

War is not among my favourite genres, but it has been the subject matter for some great comics over the years. It’s also been the genre for probably the most successful British comics over the years, the apparently endless Commando series, which have had some good stories here and there (the world-great Hugo Pratt drew at least one of these), but I’ve never really been interested in them.

EC

EC was best known for the horror titles which led to the big crackdown on comics in the mid-50s, and for starting Mad magazine, but the originator of the latter, the wonderful Harvey Kurtzman, was also behind a couple of great war comics, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Kurtzman wrote and laid out just about everything, for an exceptional crew of artists to finish. This includes one of my favourite short stories ever, artistically, in which the great Alex Toth (my favourite comic artist ever) shows the difficulty of jet pilots in even knowing which way up they are while flying through clouds - the g-force of the engines overcomes the feeling of gravity. There are a fair number of dull, worthy stories here, especially ones based on real history, but everything is excuted with immense skill, and there are lots of winners too. … read on …