I keep saying, "Balaenius Rex!"

If this isn't a New Yorker cartoon, I'll eat my hat.

Don't you find it strange that you don't notice something till it's obvious?  All day I found myself writing 2010.  It wasn't until this afternoon that I realized my autonomic nervous system is more than a year off.  It is 2012 as I write this.

I met a woman named Farrah today.  I said it was a popular name, for babies, when I was a boy.  She said she was named after her grandmother.  I said I wasn't that old.

My house guests departed this afternoon.  They had stayed for nine days.  Lovely folks, they kept me from my usual armchair.  Seven days separated from fine furniture makes one weak.  I put my feet up  on an ottoman.

I was thinking about how Istanbul was once Constantinople, and old New York was once New Amsterdam.  New Orleans has always been New Orleans.  The city's history is silent until it gains its name, then it sings.  New Orleans is a city that begins by being true.  It is forever-new in a way that is eternal.  It is what it is, like nowhere else.  The women look prettier, and the men seem smarter, in New Orleans, Louisiana, especially at night.

How do you illustrate the passage of time?  If life isn't like an S. Kelly cartoon from the Times-Picayune's editorial page, I'll eat a dozen Gulf oysters, puttin' on the ritz, just the way I like 'em.  Between Calliope and Thalia, there is Erato.  I was sitting between two ladies at the Two Muses, on Frenchman Street, two days ago.  A night can move in strange directions in 2012 AD, you only have to wish it hard enough.  I can't tell you more without switching to a romance language in la Nouvelle Orleans!

Another kind of comic art.

It isn't always easy to live a day in the life of Whalehead King.

The State of Comic Books Today

No one asked me to appear in this documentary when they shot it.  60-odd years later, I think I would draw the same conclusions.  Not many children read comic books anymore.  They are intended for adults, often stereotyped as maladjusted.  Horror and crime comics were effectively banned in the 1950s and a Silver Age of Comic Books came about.  An age that contained stories that may have been hackneyed but still taught principles.  A Bronze Age followed and then a Dark Age.  I think we are in a Decadent Age now.  I read an occasional comic book.  I wouldn't gift one to a child.  The violence is careless toward death and repercussions, the relationships between male and female characters represent arrested development on the writers' parts, the artwork is fetishistic.  I read them because I have a fondness for the Silver Age.  I don't read many.  If I did, I would stop reading altogether.


I'm a fan of pulp fiction, a devotee of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.  I am not a prude, but I am an adult.  There is nothing adult about today's comic books.  They are written with adolescent shorthand.  Grown men should be ashamed to produce them for anything but a paycheck.  This includes material published by the two main distributors, Marvel and DC, and also independent firms who truck in shock value.  There is no shock when you expect to be at the bottom of the barrel.  There is only resignation.

Thanks to Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep! for providing this link.

Spending Sunday with the Times-Picayune

I'm going to start a new Sunday feature coincident with one that occurs in the Times-Picayune.  I read the newspaper every day.  It gets delivered amazingly early so it gives me a nice interruption from whatever it is I'm doing at 3:00 AM.   I look forward to Sundays, as I have since I was a child, because I enjoy the big color comics section.

Well, enjoy may be too strong a word.  I do look forward to it but I'm rarely entertained by the comics.  Firstly, there aren't enough of them and secondly, most of the strips don't make good use of the larger space they are afforded.  Comic strips are an indigenous American art form like jazz.  Unlike jazz, improvisation and craftsmanship are mostly missing from newspaper comic strips.   You aren't going to find Little Nemo or vintage Gasoline Alley.

I won't be providing illustrations to go along with my observations.  If you get the Sunday Times-Picayune, you can read along.  All of these strips are nationally syndicated and easy enough to find online if you are curious about the details.  I also won't be indulging in snark or making fun of the contents.  There are plenty of other sites that do that and I don't much need for another.

I went to see King Kong vs. Godzilla at the Prytania last night and it bothered me that some members of the audience wanted to talk to the screen and titter at the special effects.  I went to enjoy the movie, not to listen to someone trying to be clever.  I enjoyed the film: Japanese artistry.  It wasn't as good as when I was in the third grade and I would discuss it in the schoolyard with my chums, but it had its charms.

I am going to review the comics the same way I watched the movie, trying to enjoy them for what they are.  I admit, some of them are hard for me to enjoy and there are days when I skip whole pages.  I doubt I will dissect them, just view them with a critical eye.  You'll soon learn what I like and what I don't as will become apparent shortly.

Rather than take up too much space in the coming weeks, I am going to spend the first few Sundays describing the layout of the pages, and my general impression of the strips, one page a week in the beginning.  So, let's begin...

Page one of the T-P's comics section holds the following:

Down the right hand side, vertically, is "Dilbert."  This isn't a bad strip.  At first, I was put off by the simple and static artwork but it's grown on me and I find it is expressive of the workplace ennui it depicts.  It is well written and clever.  What it lacks in visual interest, it more than makes up for in guile.  This is one of the better strips being put out today.

The rest of the strips on the front page are in horizontal format.  From the top is "For Better of for Worse." The natural lifespan of this strip has run its course.  Rather than let it die a dignified death, the creator is running reprints in chronological order from the beginning.  It isn't bad but it isn't particularly good either.  Someone obviously thinks people can't get enough of it and so here it is, another legacy strip taking up space.  This will become a recurrent theme as we go along.

Next is "Zits."  This isn't bad either and uses the conventions of comics very nicely.  It is based on teenager-parent differences.  While the subject matter holds limited appeal for me, I appreciate the artistry and effort put forth.

"Baby Blues" is a crudely drawn story of a couple with three young children.  I don't usually skip over this one so much as read it to say I've read the whole first page.  I can't recall ever liking an episode.  It's just kind of there, neither adding to nor subtracting from the luster of the Sunday comics (or any other day for that matter).

Lastly is "Drabble," a strip which gets my bile up.  It seems to be drawn with a ball point pen without any preliminary sketching.  The artist is an adult but the artwork is what you would find on elementary school walls or in elementary school notebooks.  I wouldn't be surprised to see blue lines running through the pictures.  Compared to "Drabble" everything else in the Sunday comics seems to have been written by Voltaire and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.  I don't understand why anyone would be paid to create this day after day after day.

...And that is the first installment of what will be an ongoing feature.  Just laying the groundwork now, folks.  I know it's a bit dry for what should be a dynamic medium.  Perhaps this is a reflection on me or it may be a reflection on the subject matter.

Tomorrow, we bring you a review of Roman Chewing Candy.  I had my first taste the other day.  Bought two sticks for a dollar apiece.  See you then.
WK



    

More Fun Comics in Carrollton

Let's admit that it is unfair to stereotype every comic book store employee as having poor social skills.  Let us also admit that there may be a kernel of truth in the law of averages.  More Fun Comics is located on Oak Street in Carrollton.  Though I don't buy a lot of comics, I like to go to a comic book shop maybe once a month.  I'm not their target clientele but I appreciate the art form and, if there were more comics I liked, I would be a more regular patron.  If I miss an issue I don't lose sleep.

I've been to More Fun a few times.  The clerks are more interested in their own conversations or reading material than in assisting customers but I've come to expect that.  My wife was with me one time and she was interested in a hardcover book that had obviously been more than gently used even though it was being sold as new.  The clerk told her that they used to have two copies but he'd already purchased the one that wasn't manhandled and dog eared.  Ha! Ha!  She bought it on Amazon for a discount rather than pay full price at smug More Fun.

I was there yesterday and a portion of the racks were empty.  A new shipment had arrived.  New comics were strewn all over the boxes of back issues.  Two clerks were on duty.  One was inventorying the new stock.  The other was watching a vintage 1980s Eddy Murphy movie on the television.  Ha! Ha!

There was a woman about my age in the shop when I arrived.  I stepped in and no asked if I needed assistance.   As I wandered along the edge of the shop I thought the inventory clerk would say, "If you can't find what you want in the empty shelf space, it might be here."  Maybe, when he saw me looking over the back issue boxes that were his workspace he could have said, "If you want to see anything, I'll be happy to move this out of your way."  I did want to look for some back issues.  The conversation didn't revolve around how customers might find what they want to purchase.  Instead it consisted of this: "Eddie Murphy is funny when he says fuck!"  Ha! Ha!

After a few minutes of obscenity-laden, tepid, juvenile, DVD humor the lady left without buying anything.  I followed soon afterward.  The clerks were too busy to notice or bother.  They were busy watching their movie and guffawing every time Eddie Murphy said fuck.  Great fun for them perhaps but it wasn't much fun for me.

There's a comic shop on Freret Street that I'm going to patronize instead.  It's a bit out of my way but it just landed on my regular errand route.  When I walked in the door I didn't even have time to scope out the layout when the clerk asked what I was looking for.  Not really wanting to look at all the variations of Batman and X-Men on display, I told him and he fetched what I wanted off the shelf.  We had a nice conversation about comics in general and the title I bought in particular.  He told me that one book I was following was being cancelled, which is usually the way.

There aren't any comic shops on Magazine Street that I've been able to find.  Hence my voyages to Freret Street.  No worries.  New Orleans is flat and bicycle-friendly.  Any trip is a pleasure unless, of course, it's a trip to More Fun Comics.

Better comics, please, Times-Picayune.

This is a recent edition of the daily comic strip F Minus.  It appears in many newspapers of national repute, a class in which the Times-Picayune deservedly belongs.  I think it's a pretty good strip, one of the better ones on the market.

The Times-Picayune features a full page of comic strips and for that I'm grateful.  Some of the choices are a bit lackluster, however.  When I was a kid, we called the comics pages "the funnies."  The Daily News (New York) had the best comics pages on Sundays and my grandfather bought that paper.  When the grandchildren would visit on Sundays, we would fight over who had dibs on the funnies and the losers had to settle for the Danbury News-Times.  I doubt anyone is doing that with the Times-Picayune since its the only paper in town.  It's the only "funnies" there are.

The unfortunate thing is that about half (I'm being generous) of the strips featured in the T-P (and I use this abbreviation for all its implications as far as comic strips are concerned) are not funny.  They are not amusing.  They aren't even mildly interesting.  If the comics editor (my dream job) wants to continue Blondie for old times' sake, I don't have an issue with that.  If he or she wants to include Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, and Hi and Lois...well, this is another regrettable, daily disappointment I face every morning.  One I can understand.  Since they are all created by the same people and they are all as dull as dishwater, I don't see the point, even if all the creators live in my neck of Connecticut and I've met most of them.  More power to them, but I don't think you should be paid to sleepwalk your fathers' creations.

Curtis is probably the worst strip on record and while I understand why it is published, I can't understand why at the same time.  It stinks.  It has always stunk.  If it never gets any worse but it also never gets any better.  The bar for this one is so low, it can't get worse.  I have a two word review for every episode of Curtis: Pee You.

I have a system when I read the T-P's comics.  I start with the worst and I meander over the page in a semi-clockwise direction to do my penance for subscribing to home delivery while looking for a few gems amid the dross.  They're there more often than not but the bad outweighs the good.  The abysmal outweighs the acceptable.  The humdrum counterbalances the brilliant.  I'm left feeling empty rather than amused.

Thanks to Tony Carillo for the strip above.  For anyone looking for a job in this market it is more relevant than the tedious, dead end "hi-jinx" portrayed in Curtis.  The T-P is due for a comic strip revolution in my opinion.

Thanks for bearing with me.
WK