Tag Archives: books

Notable Books: Little Debbie and the Second Coming of Elmo

Posted on by

One of the wildest comic strip excavations of the last few years is Frank M. Young’s project to resurface Cecil Jensen’s wildly imaginative, dark satire of the late 1940s, Elmo. Jensen was principally B-list editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News during much of the 1930s through 1960s. But his truly bizarre Elmo, launched after WWII, crafted a hapless Li’l Abner-like rube facing the crazy excesses of modern culture of corporatism, advertising and consumerism. The strip proved too strange for many readers and newspapers, as Young chronicled in his excellent 2019 volume Elmo: An American Experiment, which we cited as a notable book that year.

The Elmo saga gets only stranger in Young’s follow up book, Little Debbie and the Second Coming of Elmo: Daily Comic Strips, August 1960-September 1961. It turns out that by 1949 Elmo had been fully kidnapped by the diminutive, precocious Little Debbie Jensen had introduced as an ancillary character a couple of years before. Readers and editors preferred Debbie’s more conventional kid antics, even if laced occasionally with Jensen’s arch humor and surreal situations. For a decade, Elmo disappeared from the strip and the renamed Little Debbie stripped chugged along unevenly and with an unremarkable following. But as Jensen started thinking about retirement, and the strip’s syndication flagged, he took an unprecedented move – reintroducing a forgotten character, Elmo, for a final madcap flurry.

Things get marvelously bonkers in the strip’s last gasp. Elmo engages with corporate inanities, survives an assassination attempt as well as a suicide attempt (jumping from a first floor window). We get an authoritarian snowman, a talking robot, and final extended parody of Schulz’s Peanuts. Jensen’s sense of humor is not uproarious, pointed, screwball or even deeply satiric. It is just relentlessly offbeat and odd.

In reprinting and chronicling these bizarre episodes of Elmo in Debbie-land, Young is a critic not a cheerleader. In a deft and insightful long intro, he recognizes the unevenness of Jensen’s work and the true inscrutability of his imagination. But as he notes throughout this project, Cecil Jensens left us with one of those rare instances where the otherwise buttoned-down mass medium of 50s comic strips produced a true rara avis.

Notable Books for Comics Fans: 2020-2021

Posted on by

It is way past time to review and highlight some of the noteworthy books for comic strip mavens in the last year. For nearly a decade, as an editor at media trades Media Industry Newsletter and then Folio magazine, I did annual roundups of books of special interest to print media professionals. Historically significant comics reprints always played in my mix. Following the diminishing fortunes of the magazine industry in recent years, MIN merged with Folio, which itself folded into oblivion in late 2019. And so I moved the 2019 roundup here to Panels & Prose. I never got around to doing a 2020 edition, because, well, 2020. So over the next week or so I will be calling out my faves from last year and so far this year that I think furthered our understanding of comics history. Today we start with the one title in the bunch that nudges beyond the usual focus of this site on newspaper and magazine comics. But the magnificent legacy of EC is too important a milestone in the American comic arts to exclude.

The History of EC Comics

The annual cinder block from Taschen for comics fans is Grant Geissman’s The History of EC Comics, a massive reflection on and reprinting of the greatest collection of comics artists in history. William Gaines’ EC horror, war and crime comics was the home of Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science and Frontline Combat. Like all Taschen books the sheer scale allows Geissman to pour in full story reprints, some in original art, memos, office photos, even contracts that help bring to life the familiar history of this incredible stable of talent. It is hard to go wrong with a book brimming with Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Johnny Craig, Al Feldstein, Will Elder, just to name-drop a few. Falling into these artists at 14×18 scale is a revelation, even to lifelong fans like me. The book also has an end section reproducing every EC cover where many of these artists hit their peak. Kudos to Geissman’s curatorial skill.

The text history is not as compelling. I think Geissman’s rendering of Bill Gaines’s father, comic book pioneer Max Gaines, is quite good. It has telling detail and foreshadows the psychic burden Bill carried. Otherwise, however, Geissman defers to others for the scant aesthetic evaluations of all this great artistry he has assembled here. Nor is there much about the tropes, themes, attitudes and visual conceits that a more curious and creative interpreter might tie to the zeitgeist. Tashen’s other recent XXL titles on Krazy Kat and Little Nemo, both benefitted greatly by Alexander Braun’s critical acumen. Appreciating and distinguishing among comics styles was central to EC’s success, because publisher Gaines and editor/writer Feldstein meted out the freelance work according to whose style fit the story. This layer of interpretation is missing here. Instead, the history and ancillary images are guided by a collector’s penchant for later market value and rarity rather than aesthetic or cultural significance.

Nit Picky? Not for a tome that is priced and positioned as definitive. Sure, one wishes that such a visually generous and lush, let alone expensive, book on EC was a full-throated celebration and genuine interpretation of its artistry. We’ll settle for this.

Great Moments: Rube Goldberg’s Foolish Questions, 1909

Posted on by
Rubber Goldberg, Foolish Questions (1909)

In 1908, Rube Goldberg continued to look for a comic strip series that captured popular imagination. His first Foolish Questions panel that year caught on almost immediately and it became a series in the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Like many strips in the first 20 years of the form’s history, Foolish Questions hinged on a simple gag repeated in every strip. In this case, the surreal silliness of the come-back to the “foolish question” is what gives the strip its energy. But most striking here is how Goldberg’s cranky, abrasive tone could also move into some gritty, dark places. Witness making light of wife beating. This is chilling, even in historical context, to see domestic violence treated this casually in a family newspaper, let alone seen as a site for screwball comedy.

Foolish Question also exercises a common comic strip trope – grumpy rejoinders to little human quirks. From its earliest years, the comic strip form took a light satirical perspective on everyday human foibles and excesses, the tics and social types that rang familiar with readers. Making fun of braggarts, poseurs, women’s fashion, the latest catchphrases or the middle class vogue of treating house pets like children (imagine!) were among the trends early comics artists poked.

In various forms Goldberg continued to answer Foolish Questions as late as 1939. These are from Sunday Press’ excellent compilation.

Top 2019 Books: #6 Brain Bats of Wolverton

Posted on by
Lena the Hyena – Wolverton’s Winning Entry in Li’l Anber Ugliest Woman Contest

#6 Brain Bats of Venus: The Life and Comics of Basil Wolverton, Vol. 2 (1942-1952) by Greg Sadowski, Fantagraphics, $44.99

Volume 2? You have to wonder if any biographer really needs a two volume bio-reprint to cover the life and art of a single cartoonist. To be fair, Sadowsky’s treatment gives up a massive share of space to reprinting much of Basil Wolverton’s best published work and revealing sketch and spec pieces. But in fact, Wolverton was as singular and curious a character as his art. This volume focuses mostly on his horror and sci-fi work, which was often batshit imaginative. But there is also his caricature art, advertising work, and more. Also interesting and included here are his many failed attempts to break into comic strip syndication with some of his screwball comedy characters of the 1940s like Scoop Scuttle (below). And of course Wolverton leapt from obscurity to fame when his Lena the Hyena caricature won Al Capp’s contest to depict the world’s “ugliest woman.” Wolverton remains a seminal figure. His break from any previous comic art style anticipated (and was revered by) the comics underground more than a decade later.

Wolverton made several unsuccessful attempts to break into what every comic book artist viewed as the mother lode – newspaper comics syndication. Among his several failed attempts to break into strips, he translated his Scoop Scuttle screwball comic book character to a daily format on spec.

Top 2019 Books: #7 Mickey Mouse As Adventure Hero

Posted on by

7. Mickey Mouse: The Greatest Adventures, by Floyd Gottfredson, Fantagraphics, $49.99.

Fantagraphics’ complete reprinting of the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse dailies has been among the most literate and richly contextualized comics history projects in recent years. This one volume color rendering of some of Mickey’s best adventures between 1930 and 1951 is a shorter, more affordable sample. Here is Mickey evolving from scrappy, spunky adventure hero of the 30s to bland suburban everyman of the 50s. Lest we forget, Mickey’s 1930 comic strip launch places him at the advance guard of adventure strips, along with Orphan Annie and Wash Tubbs and Popeye that would bring us 30s powerhouses – Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon et. al. Gottfredson’s penchant for putting movement, gestures, expression and urgency into every panel is matched by his and collaborators’ mastery of story pacing and suspense. While I would quibble with some of the choices (really, no Phantom Blot?), this is a great sampling across eras for those who aren’t up for buying the enture run. 


Top 2019 Books: #8 Elmo…No, Not That One

Posted on by

#8 Elmo: An American Experiment by Cecil Jenson, edited by Frank M. Young, Middletown DE, Labor of Love Press, $14.99

What a find. Young has unearthed and reprinted a darkly surreal strip from the late 1940s by the author of the later Little Debbie strip of the 1950s. It seems like a Li’l Abner knockoff, with the rural rube Elmo encountering urban caricatures. But Jenkens sends Elmo down some of the darkest urban and psychological alleyways of post-war America. Its brief run shows it was too strange for post-war audiences groping to return to normality after WWII. But Elmo suggests a kind of unease to that project that would also come out in 40s noir, crime comics and 50s horror comics. 

Top 2019 Books: #9 Charlie Chan

Posted on by

#9 Charlie Chan, 1938 (LOAC Essentials Vol. 13) by Alfred Andriola. IDW, $29.99

The LOAC Essentials series highlights a full year of classic strips that may not support a full reprint series. And it uses a uniquely narrow format that displays a strip per page for a singular reading experience.  It is an inspired imprint from The Library of American Comics that makes accessible many strips that might be lost to history. Charlie Chan had decent locked-room mystery plotting that channeled the popular novels and films. Andriola, who went on to do Kerry Drake strips for years, took his visual cues from Milton Caniff, even if he lacked the master’s rich talents. Modern sensibilities will need to excuse the daily dose of stereotypical Confucian aphorisms, though.

Here is a little bonus I found at the Charlie Chan Family Home site, which has some samples of both the dailies and Sunday strip. The first week of dailies finds Chan and “Number One Son” on the case.