I really like Kyle Baker.

I really like Charles Addams. And I really like Bizarro. I therefore really like this Kyle Baker-drawn homage to a particularly famous Charles Addams cartoon that is a variant cover for Bizarro #1, which will be released tomorrow.

Here's Addams' cartoon, if you're not familiar with it (or just want to see it right next to Baker's cover):

I might have personally preferred that Baker's cover replicate Addams' angle and staging more closely (and maybe be in black and white and horizontal; it is a variant after all), just to make the reference as clear as possible, but I like it a lot. Bizarro is a character that slots in perfectly well with that particular gag, even though the reason he's laughing while the rest of the audience is in tears differs from that of the Addams weirdo (who would eventually become Uncle Fester); Bizarro doesn't necessarily think human suffering or sadness are humorous because of what they are, but rather because laughing is the opposite reaction to the proper one.

Anyway, that's three great flavors in a single image. I sure hope the interiors can deliver on the promise of that cover.

Happy Birthday, Charles Addams!

Charles Addams, one of the all-time greatest American cartoonists—and one of my all-time favorite American cartoonists, and an incredible influence on me (though it hardly shows in my own poor work)—was born 100 years ago today.

Just in case you didn't Google anything at all today before stopping here, above is a screen-capture of Google's doodle honoring the occasion. Here's the LA Times story on Addams, which offers a nice overview of his life and career (and a few examples of his work). Here is Torsten Adair's post about Addams at The Beat, which includes a nice selection of New Yorker covers and cartoons. Here's Michael Cavna's piece for The Washington Post, which is full of videos to watch. Here's the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation website. Here is Charles Addams' baby picture. Here is a 2009 post I wrote kinda sorta reviewing Linda H. Davis' biography of Addams, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Lie, which I'd highly recommend (Davis' book, not my post about it). And here's a review of The Charles Addams Mother Goose.

And here is one of his earlier, more famous cartoons:

Politics aside, this isn't a very good cartoon (The politics are pretty dumb though).

I apologize in advance for how dated this discussion probably is. I'm not exactly sure when the above cartoon by Glenn McCoy ran, but from the date in the corner of the above image, it looks like it's from June 15, almost two weeks ago. Certainly based on the subject matter, it's a good half-dozen or so news cycles ago. But I didn't see it until it popped up in Josh Fruhlinger's "Cartoon Violence" column Wonkette today.

So, does McCoy's cartoon up there look familiar to you at all? If so, you've probably seen the classic Charles Addams cartoon it's riffing on, from a 1946 issue of The New Yorker: I don't begrudge McCoy's use of the Addams cartoon as inspiration, even if McCoy is clearly no Addams (A statement I doubt McCoy himself would argue with). I'm sure it was a fun piece for McCoy to work on, to break out a collection of Addams cartoons he no doubt has on his shelf and spend a few hours studying it and replicating the characters in his own style. I can appreciate that, just as I appreciate seeing McCoy's "cover" of an Addams cartoon. I really dig those rare opportunities where you get to see one cartoonist with a very distinct, specific style covering the character or subjects of another cartoonist with a very distinct, specific style.

I have no idea why McCoy might have thought it would be the best choice for illustrating Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's fake outrage over David Letterman's flubbed, dumb joke about one of her daughters though. In fact, I only know that is what the cartoon is about because McCoy included a caption that says "David Letterman makes a vulgar joke about Sarah Palin's teenage daughter."

First, how common is the reference? Addams is undoubtedly a famous cartoonist, but he's far more famous among cartoonists and cartoon art enthusiasts than among the general population of newspaper readers today, who know him primarily as the creator of The Addams Family. Are his individual cartoons so well known? I don't think so, and this isn't even one of his more famous ones, like the Christmas carolers piece (see below) or the one with the skier and the tree.

I suppose it's labeled "thanks to Chas Addams" in the lower right corner (everything's always labeled with these people!), below McCoy's name and a couple other words (The name of his home paper, I think?) But I don't think the specifics of that single Addams cartoon are terribly common. Certainly they're not as instantly recognizable as, say, a riff on Snoopy laying atop his doghouse or a fat cat with a blase expression and half-closed eyes or the blank-faced Keane cherubs might have been (Not that any of those would work better in this particular cartoon; I'm just thinking of more popular cartoon imagery among modern newspaper readers).

Second, applying McCoy's topic to the cartoon is a rather awkward stretch.

The joke in Addams'—and it's just a joke cartoon, devoid of politics—is the disconnect between the ghoulish Addams character (who we now recognize as a pre-Uncle Fester Uncle Fester) and the rest of the movie-going audience. They are all pretty upset by whatever the sad event in the sad movie they're watching is, whereas he thinks it's hilarious. It's just the sort of gentle, quite, observational humor that The New Yorker is known for.

Okay, so let's try to reconstruct the parallel lines McCoy is suggesting. Here, the weird character is "The Left," clearly labeled as such. Is "The Left," defined I suppose as people who think Sarah Palin is a funny joke, really marginalized as the Uncle Fester character?

Is the live studio audience of some dumb late night television show for old people the equivalent of the audience in a movie theater? I...guess...? Because they're both groups of people? Sitting down? In an enclosed space? Expecting to be entertained?

Are Dave Letterman's dumb joke monologues the equivalent of a very sad movie? Um...I don't know?

I wonder how well this cartoon went over with its intended audience. Did people get it? Did they think it funny? Did they think it perfectly summed up the conflict between Sarah Palin and David Letterman?

To be fair, I can't imagine this is an easy subject to ridicule with a political cartoon, but then, picking a target and understanding it is a pretty important part of political cartooning, isn't it? McCoy seems to be implying that Letterman meant to tell a joke about Palin's underaged teenage daughter with a funny name being raped by a baseball player, rather than mistakenly referring to her adult teenage daughter with funny name being impregnated by a baseball player.

Granted, the joke wouldn't have been funny even if he had said "Bristol" instead of "Willow," but it was clearly just a lousy telling of a lousy joke, not an endorsement of child-rape, and as ignorant as Palin may strive to appear in public, she's not actually so stupid as to have thought that Letterman meant to refer to Willow being raped either.

In this cartoon, McCoy does seem to think that—or is at least pretending to think that, and whether he's being ignorant or faking outrage like Palin herself, it's pretty sad.

In addition to implying that Letterman meant to make that particular joke, he's also implying that a) everyone in America is rightly appalled by it, save for b) The Left, who also thought Letterman meant to tell that joke about Willow being raped and also thought it was hilarious.

Man, nobody thinks he meant that joke, not even Palin. And, as a member of "The Left," I can assure you that we didn't think Letterman's accidental joke was funny, or that if it was told correctly it would have been funny, or that David Letterman is ever funny, or that David Letterman is even worth watching.

Besides, The Left is watching The Colbert Report when Letterman is doing his monologue.

*******************

If you would like to read another member of "The Left" respond to the whole dumb Palin/Letterman episode, then check out Jim Newell of Wonkette's analysis. I second his comments. Which will save me form having to write anymore about how fucked up the cynical politics of accusing TV comedians of telling jokes about your daughter getting raped actually are. (Hint: Pretty fucked up)

*******************

While looking for scans of that Addams cartoon (and failing, ultimately having to scan it from a copy of The World of Charles Addams [Knopf; 1993] myself), I came across another, older example of a modern political cartoonist using an homage to an Addams cartoon, and not necessarily doing a very good job of connecting the source strip into the new context:

McCoy was a lot more meticulous in his homage; this one seems like it may have been done from the memory of the Addams cartoon, rather than from looking closely at it while drawing this new cartoon of the press walking up the public's right to know (?) to get to the emails-haunted governor's mansion (?), where some man is apparently dumping a steaming green, viscous liquid called "Ed Martin" on the porch while the slime in the slime cauldron boils.

This is what Charles Addams looked like as a baby:

Monday Morning Man vs. Cephalopod Moment

(A terrible scan of a famous Charles Addams cartoon—although they're almost all famous, aren't they?—that's no doubt appeared in several different publications over the years, but I scanned it out of Linda Davis' Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life, which I highly recommend).

Review: The Charles Addams Mother Goose

The opportunity to edit and illustrate a selection of Mother Goose rhymes came at a good time for Charles Addams, according to biographer Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life.

By the mid-‘60s the New Yorker cartoonist’s income had dipped significantly due to the cancellation of The Addams Family TV show, and he was always reluctant to try his hand at a different medium than cartooning.

His fellow New Yorker artist Robert Kraus had just founded an imprint for children’s books, however, and wanted to launch with the work of the magazine’s cartoonists, staring with Addams choosing his own nursery rhymes and illustrating them how he saw fit. The Charles Addams Mother Goose was thus published in 1967.

The result? According to Davis, the historical record seems mixed. The New York Times “gave the revered cartoonist a rare snide review,” stating that it was “purely a joke; the gruesomeness is familiar, safe and temporary.” The royalties, Davis said, were scant. Simon and Schuster republished in 2002, and that’s the edition I read. For whatever it’s worth, it was only with some difficulty I found a copy. The library I go to most often didn’t carry it, and the Columbus Metropolitan Library system only has one copy.

I was quite glad when I finally did get my hands on a copy, although it’s difficult to honestly, objectively assess a book like this so many decades after its publication, when a reader approaches it fully aware of the artist’s reputation and influence.

It’s certainly a welcome work, for the opportunity it affords to look at Addams’ art in a new context (i.e. a context other than single image New Yorker cartoons or the occasional painted cover of the same magazine), and yet it’s also a rather awkward work.

The particular nursery rhymes are almost all completely beside the point; they’re all only there to give Addams something to match an image to, and many of these images comment on the rhymes in a way to completely change them.

“Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold” is illustrated by an old witch stirring a cauldron of something with a tentacle, a humanoid hand and two eyeballs poking out of it, while two bird-legged little goblins away with long wooden spoons.

“Wee Willie Winkie” becomes some sort of monster, with the cadaverous look of Lon Chaney’s opera phantom, and Nosferatu-esque fangs and ears, dressed in a nightcap and gown knocking on a window like an apparition.

And, for perhaps the best example, here’s Addams’ Humpty Dumpty:


The fact that something hatches from the broken egg man certainly changes the nature of that little nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?

Addams’ efforts to transform, or at least recontextualize the rhymes, is admirable, particularly when he succeeds as well as he does with the Humpty Dumpty illustrations. Less successful are his forced efforts to involve the Addams Family. Wednesday and the mean little boy in the striped shirt we know as Pugsley play the children, Grandma plays Mother Goose herself, as well as a variety of old ladies throughout, and Uncle Fester is give a good half dozen or so roles to play, many of them rather far outside his range.

For example, here he is as the Jack who built the house that Jack built:


The weird family appear as themselves in one full-page black and white illustration, streaming from outside their familiar Victorian manse and into a graveyard just across the street (illustrating the rhyme “Girls and boys, Come out to play, The moon does shine, As bright as day…”), but more often than not they are cast like actors and actresses into different roles, so that Wednesday plays Little Miss Muffet, for example, and Pugsley Pretty John Watts and Tom, Tom, the piper’s son.

And that, above all else, is what makes the book somewhat awkward. Addams doesn’t pick a strategy and stick with it, but offers more or less straight illustration on one page, then an episode of The Addams Family plays Mother Goose on another, then offers a humorous cartoon version of a rhyme (Like the “American Gothic” couple performing “Three Blind Mice”) and then attempts to twist a rhyme into a different narrative.

Based on what’s here to see, any strategy would have worked perfectly well, but vacillating between all four makes for a somewhat frustrating book.


* * * * * * *

The 2002 version contains a six-page “The Charles Addams Mother Goose Scrapbook” including a few photos of Addams from various points in his life, the covers of the various collections of his cartoons, a drawing of a train he did at age four, and an unpublished illustration meant for the book:



The scrapbook includes a few sentences of text beneath this image, saying, “For reasons unknown, this piece was deleted from the book at the last moment.” I can’t tell if that’s mean sarcastically or not. That is a mushroom cloud on the horizon, right? And the shepherd and his sheep are fleeing into a bomb shelter in the face of an atomic bombing? If so, it seems clear why that image might have been cut, although an image of a post-nuclear war landscape did make the cut. (Oddly, in the Davis biography I was referring to, this image is reproduced in black and white, where it loses its menace, and Davis doesn’t seem to read it as a mushroom cloud, referring to the shape on the horizon as “an ominous tomato-red twister mov[ing] in.”)

* * * * * * *

Finally, since we talk about DC Comics super-characters here so often, it wouldn’t seem right to discuss The Charles Addams Mother Goose and not share his two-page, seven-image version of the Solomon Grundy rhyme, chopped up a bit to make scanning of it possible (in the original, Monday through Thursday ran across the top of a two-page spead, and Friday through Sunday beneath them), and, obviously, they don't include the weird shadows that trying to scan the pages without damaging the book resulted in.






I'm not sure exactly what S.G. took ill with, but any disease whose symptoms include mushrooms growing out of your head and climaxes in the disintegration of the afflicted sure is a pretty scary one.

The single most horrifying image Charles Addams ever drew:

(The cover of 1970 cartoon collection My Crowd, which was also reprinted in the backmatter of 1995's The Charles Addams Mother Goose, a reprinting of the 1967 children's picture book published by Simon & Schuster)

A couple of not-really-book-reviews, of one book I read and one book I did not.

When you hear the words “a cartoonist’s life,” what do you think of? Sore backs, anonymity, ink stains and poverty? Or fast cars, a harem of glamorous women, fame, wealth and a lot of fancy parties?

Perhaps it depends on the year, or the cartoonist, but I tend to think of the former, rather than the latter. Perhaps that will change now that I’ve read Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life (Random House; 2006).

I borrowed it from the library on a whim, being between prose books at the time and realizing I knew pretty much nothing about Addams other than that he was a cartoonist and he created The Addams Family, who were on Scooby-Doo (and in a couple of movies from the ‘90s; I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched an episode of the original live action TV show).

Well, now I do know some things about Charles Addams.

While rather leisurely making my way through Davis’ book over the last few weeks—20 pages here, 30 pages there—I read as many collections of his work that I could find in my libraries (The World of Charles Addams, Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One, Chas Addams’ Half-Baked Cookbook ) and even re-watched the two movies.

I’m perhaps ill equipped to assess how good or how bad a biographer Davis is, since I have no special expertise on her subject or on biographies in general. I did find it to be an enormously entertaining read, in large part because of what an extremely colorful life Addams lead (much of which was a complete surprise to me, which no doubt helped contribute to how entertaining I found Davis’ book), which is something a biographer has little control over. I suspect that, as with documentary filmmaking, the choosing of the subject and/or a certain amount of luck ends up playing a role in the finished project.

I do know that Davis did an excellent job of defining and summing up what exactly was so compelling about Addams’ cartoon work (comics being a subject I may also not have any great expertise with, but I at least have lots of experience thinking and talking about). Her focus is on Addams’ life rather than any sort of aesthetic study, but obviously his body of work plays a big role, and whenever she devotes attention to it, Davis writes intelligently and incisively about it.

When I would read her writing on Addams’ comics, comics that I would have just read since I was going back and forth between her bio and his collecions, I would nod in agreement, and, when I came across something in one of his comics that I had just read her talking about, I would recognize it and think, “Oh yeah, Davis was right about that too.”

If there’s any weakness with the book, I suppose it’s one that befalls most biographers—I can’t help but wonder if she goes too easy on Addams. He certainly seemed to have quite a few caddish proclivities, but he’s never portrayed as some kind of selfish monster. Of course, everyone Davis talks to or hears from in some manner or another sure seem to have been terribly fond of Charles Addams, so maybe his many infidelities and way with women in general was forgiven on something approaching a universal scale.

That, and I found myself wanting more pictures. The book includes plenty of reprinted cartoons and some sketches, as well as some photos of some of the players, but I could definitely have used more, particularly of the latter. Davis does a good job of conjuring up Addams’ houses and collections, his friends and family and lovers, but, man, I really would like to have seen some of this stuff for myself, you know?

Anyway, if you’re looking for an interesting biography of an interesting cartoonist, I’d definitely recommend this book, particularly if you, like me, aren’t terribly familiar with Addams.

David Denby’s Snark (Simon & Schuser; 2009) seemed like a book I should read. It’s true it doesn’t have anything to do with comics, but as anyone who spends much time online has noticed, it’s both a word you hear an awful lot in the comics blogsophere and a form of communication you see employed quite a bit.

The sub-title—It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation—made it sound like snark may be a pretty bad thing, so I was kind of interested in what author Denby had to say about it.

That, coupled with a very short page-count (less than 150 pages) and a bright, yellow cover was enough to convince me to reserve a copy of it from my local library.

I didn’t make it very far. I’m really stubborn when it comes to reading and rarely ever stop reading something once I start, no matter how bad it is, so when I say I couldn’t finish Snark, I mean that as a pretty damning assessment. The only other books I’ve started and quit that I can think of at the moment were 1) an Ann Coulter book (I can’t remember which one now, as they’re all about the same—it’s the one about how Joe McCarthy wasn’t really so bad), which I figured I’d try out because hey, a lot of people seem to like her, and if she can continue the same level of insanity of her written columns for 200 pages, that might be interesting to read, and 2) Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? which was given to me as a gift by a relative and Oh my God that guys sucks at writing books too!

Denby’s a little easier to read than Coulter, but even more irritating than Moore, based on how far I got in each of those before calling it quits.

It’s not entirely Denby’s fault that I gave up on him. The day I brought his book home from the library was the same day I saw this post on Wonkette entitled “The ‘Wonkette Part’ Of David Denby’s Book Really Just A Bunch Of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors.”

The gist of the post is that Denby used two examples of Wonkette posts to damn their brand of snark, and neither example he used was true, despite how easy it was to check their veracity. For example, reading the byline to determine whether or not a writer named “Jim” is male or female.

That sure deflated my enthusiasm for the book, as Wonkette’s Jim Newell points out, “Lord knows what else he makes up to fit his narrative in the rest of the book, but of the two (2) Wonkette pieces he analyzed, he got two (2) entirely wrong.”

I made it through the first part though, the introduction to the seven-parts the rest of the work is divided into. Strike Two was his weird understanding of the word “troll” as applied to online communication. Despite keeping a daily web log on comics and contributing daily to Blog@Newsarama.com for just about two months now, I am extremely tech-ignorant. The extent of my online knowledge prior to, oh, 2006 or so was looking up contact info on websites for articles I was writing, Googling shit for said articles, and checking Newsarama.com’s message boards for news about upcoming comics.

So perhaps “troll” used to be used to refer to something else, but it was my understanding that it was an abusive poster on a message board or comment thread, just kind of being a jerk in some form or another.

Denby defines it as some sort of malicious hacker, and references some form of online vandalism by trolls. Like I said, it’s very possible that I’m the one who doesn’t know what a “troll” is in an online context, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it applied to a dangerous hacker.

Strike Three came near the end of the introduction, where Denby tries to differentiate between good, healthy snark and bad, unhealthy snark. The Daily Show’s John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park? That stuff is all great snark. The comedians and writers involved use snark “right.” Some people don’t. Who are those people? I don’t know; I didn’t get that far. But the premise seems to be that good, healthy snark is that which Denby personally finds amusing, and bad, unhealthy snark is that which Denby personally does not find amusing.

Realizing that, even just 125 pages of someone pointing at things and saying funny, funny, not funny, funny, not funny, not funny, not funny sorta lost its remaining appeal. So I put it down, got distracted by reading some other book-books, graphic novels and the daily grind of scanning pictures of superheroes to make fun of, and then the time was up, the book was due, and I returned it mostly unread.

Maybe I’ll try again later at some point, but, if any of you are similarly interested in the subject of snark and/or bright yellow covers, I just thought I’d offer a word or 800 of warning.