Comix

Tom Spurgeon on racism in how Obama is portrayed in cartoons:

We unfortunately live in a society with no shortage of avenues for cultural assault on people of color. As this sucks far worse for people of color than it does for people looking for an apt, appropriate visual metaphor shorn of history’s crud, I have no problem expecting people not to employ them, or to be sorry when they do. I refuse to believe it’s impossible to recognize the nature of many of the most troubling images, and to draw a line between imagery with a recognizable rhetorical legacy and those that fall into more traditional realms of caricature and exaggeration and point-making. In fact, recognizing the first strengthens one’s stand on the second. Acting that this kind of thinking is some sort of bizarre imposition contributes to the problem, and ultimately that problem becomes bad cartooning and lousy discourse. If you want to use some loaded piece of visual shorthand, that’s fine — but you should own it. One hopes that our cartoonists and thinkers about cartooning at the very least recognize the more obvious tropes for what they are — unnecessary, unfair, and ultimately a distraction from actual points being made on more concrete issues.

The trouble of course is that the people most likely to use racist imagery to criticise Obama are also the ones least likely to see any problems with that. There’s a lot of innate racism seeping out in the rightwing opposition to Obama which has troubles seeing any Black people as true Americans, hence the Birtherism, hence the racial stereotypes and hence the Obama caricatures that get their imagery more from those stereotypes than from how Obama (and his wife) actually looks. The people most likely to draw or distribute such cartoons as Tom talked about cannot be reasoned with — any hope of them owning their racist tropes is I fear forlorn. Instead the comics community as a whole needs to call people on their shit.

Which we haven’t been doing enough of. It’s always tempting to think of these things as business as usual, partisan politics in which nobody is innocent, of little intrisic interest to the comics blogosphere unless they become a media controversy, as when James Hudnall and Batton Lash were called out for their portrayals of Obama. Even then the emphasis was on the death threats they recieved, rather than on the racist imagery in their cartoons. That whole incident showed how ingrained our reflex is to circle the wagons whenever outsiders attack comics, rather than take a step back and see if they have a point.

Spark Publications was a very short lived comics publisher, lasting from December 1944 to June 1946 and only managing to put out fifteen issues of three titles in that period: two issues of Atoman, eight of The Green Lama and five of Golden Lad. As the names indicate, all three were superhero titles just as the market for them was crashing as comics readers moved on to other genres like true crime and romance. They never had a chance in the cutthroat competition of what we now call the Golden Age of American comics. Spark in other words was just a footnote in American comics history, barely remembered and rarely mentioned even in fan histories.

So why do I bother with them now? Because thanks to the internet and especially the crazy obsessed comics fans over at the Digital Comic Museum even such minor footnotes to the Golden Age are now archived and preserved and sometimes you find real gems in them. In Spark’s case, they turned out to employ three of the very best Golden Age artists: Mac Raboy on Green Lama, Jerry Robinson on Atoman and Mort Meskin on Golden Lad. What’s more, these are artists with a similar style and they give Spark Publications a much more unified look than most publishers had in the Golden Age, a sort of unconscious housestyle.

Mac Raboy is best know for his work on Captain Marvel Jr. for Fawcett. His linework and composition was always elegant, even fey, which works well on the Green Lama, certainly not your typical musclebound hero. Especially his covers, like the one above or this one for issue four are masterpieces of style and elegance. His interior work is weaker, not as good as that of Robinson or Meskin, but still head and shoulders above your average Golden Age artist.

Jerry Robinson is the man who invented the Joker, even if Bob Kane took all the credit for it. Robinson had a long career at DC, but during the Golden Age also worked for other publishers, like Nedor/Standard/Best, often together with Mort Meskin. His work for Spark came after five-six years spent honing his craft and it’s noticable in everything. His art, as in the panel above just oozes confidence. That superimposing of images to show speed here is a bit of sophistication you don’t see often in Golden Age comics, not even by acknowledged masters. And it’s done in an interior panel to serve the story, rather than in a splash page or cover.

Mort Meskin is probably the best of these three artists, criminally underrated and who never quite got the recognition he deserved. No wonder he fled into advertising later in life. Everything I’ve ever seen of him I’ve loved; I’ve never seen him draw a bad comic. What struck me here is how Ditkoesque this looks, with the floating outraged faces and the slightly rubbery anatomy of the central figures.

Coincidence or not, these three artists all have a similar style, one that stresses elegance and clarity of line above raw expression and it makes their heroes look like they belong in the same universe, an early example of what Marvel would later consciously do with their house style. Spark Publications never amounted to much, but the fifteen comics they put out are well worth a look — and thanks to the Digital Comic Museum you can.

For some reason the English remaindered bookstore at the top of Kalverstraat has not just been well stocked with comics trades and hardcovers –I managed to snag some forty Marvel Essential collections there– but with Fantagraphics’ published books. Over the years this has enabled me to buy a hell of a lot of books I could’ve never afforded at full price, the latest example being the beautiful hardcover slipcase collection of Humbug. Originally published at sixty dollars and with Dutch comics prices usually translated one for one dollars into euros, it was now a steal at twenty euros — and they still have some copies left.

Humbug was Harvey Kurtzman’s second attempt at creating a new, improved Mad, after the Playboy published Trump, a slick expensive full colour magazine that only lasted two issues before Hefner pulled the plug. Somehow Kurtzman managed to persuade his collaborators — Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and Wally Wood (but only for the first issue)– to try again, but this time be their own publishers. The end result was Humbug, much more political and grownup than Mad or Trump ever were, but again not commercially succesful, which meant it folded after eleven issues. Kurtzman would try one last time, with Help, which lasted slightly longer: twentysix issues.

To say that this is a handsome collection or that this contains some brilliant satire by cartoonists at the peak of their power is to state the obvious. So let’s not. More interesting is what it feels like to finally hold a collection of such a legendary comics in your hands after having read about it for years, if not decades. These comics had been out of print since the late fifties, with the only way to see even a glimpse of them through reading books on comics history. For me, it was Les Daniels’ early seventies book Comix: A History of Comics Books in America that gave me that first look, together with so many more other classic comics books that I never would be able to see in their complete form, because who was going to reprint these ancient and almost forgotten treasures?

It’s only been the last decade or so that there have been enough publishers mining American comics history that you can be certain almost everything of any interest has been or will be reprinted. But that was not the case when I first got into yankee comics and for most stuff the only realistic option was to read about them, rather than read them. Having something as wonderful as a hardcover reprint of Humbug, something I’ve read about for decades, still amazes me.