Three pieces of cartooning advice from Marjane Satrapi (one of which is secondhand)...

...as gleaned from from Da Capo Press' 2009 book Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics and Culture* by David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague (Hajdu's piece quoted from below—everything in italics is him—was originally published in the October/November 2004 issue of Bookforum)

1.) BE LIKE A LIZARD
"Emile Bravo told me, 'When you are drawing, be like a lizard—be perfectly still, but aware of everything around you. Don't waste your energy with a lot of movement while you're working. Be like a lizard.'"

2.) DRAW IN INK
Dispensing with drawing-class convention, she uses a marker rather than pencil; the ink, being less forgiving, "forces me to concentrate," she says. "Otherwise I would sit here all day and draw shit."

3.) USE CHEAP PAPER
She draws on the most inexpensive paper she can find. "If I use very good paper, I feel like I have to make a masterpiece," she says, "and the best way to make shit is to feel like you have to make a masterpiece. I feel now like the world is waiting for a masterpiece every time I put a brush in my hand, and that is a bad thing. Cartoonists shouldn't have to be too good."



*Mostly music, though. By my count, only four of the 40 articles collected in the book are about comics or comics creators.

Sixteen things I learned from The Ten-Cent Plague

In addition to being an engaging cultural history of a mostly forgotten period, David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America offers quite a bit of food for thought for comic book commentigensia, as the one billion reviews, news stories and blog posts that have begun appearing since publisher's Farrar, Straus and Giroux started sending out their review copies attest. I linked to my review of the book in LVW yesterday (and hey, I just did it again!), but I ended up taking a lot of notes while reading, thinking, "Hmm, if I can't get all this into a three-to-five-hundred-word review, it will probably make for good blog fodder."

Man, I'm always thinking of you guys.

Now please enjoy this blog fodder....

1.) In the mid-1940s, comics publishers sold between 80 million and 100 million copies every week, and the average issue was passed on from the person who purchased it to six to ten readers. It was the “most popular form of entertainment in America.” Nowadays the leading publishers issue press releases to boast of running out of their print-to-meet-demand runs of comics. Anything that sells in the neighborhood of 100K is seen as a blockbuster. So, you know, just a little perspective for you.

2.) Will Eisner was frightening prescient about comics. For example, in a 1941 Philadelphia Reader article, he’s quoted as saying that the comic strip is “no longer a comic strip, but, in reality, an illustrated novel…eventually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best writers and artists…it is already the embryo…of a new art form.”

My God. In 1941!

I like the word “illustrated novel” a lot more than “graphic novel.” I think the terminology conversation is kind of moot, since “graphic novel” is what common usage has decided upon for everyone, but it’s a term that is somewhat loaded, particularly for older generations. It also means something other than a bound comic book. But then, so does “illustrated novel.”

I’m really glad that Eisner survived as long as he did, and was able to see the illustrated novel he was talking about in 1941 become the legitimate medium for the best writers and artists it ultimately has.

3.) “Picture novel” is how Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller thought of It Rhymes With Lust, which was probably the first graphic novel.

4.) According to Hajdu,“Unlike many critics of crime, horror and romance comics in the newspaper columns and state assemblies, Wertham considered superhero comics as dangerous as any others. In fact, he reserved a specially toxic venom for National/DC’s popular trio of heroes, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, whom Wertham saw, respectively, as exemplars of fascism, homoeroticism and sadomasochism.”

I find it particularly interesting that Wertham was one of the few to see harm in the DC heroes; those three are among the only ones to survive the period. Most of those that are still kinda sorta being published—the original versions of Flash and Green Lantern, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel—went away for long periods, and are now more likely to appear as part of ensembles instead of carrying their own books.

The Marvels, excepting only Namor and Captain America, and the newer conceptions of Green Lantern and Flash were all created after the dark days of Wertham.

5.) “It was only in the case of Wonder Woman that Wertham came close to the intentions of the character’s creator (Wertham’s rival in pop head-shrinking, the sexual provocateur).”

Honestly, if it’s there, I don’t see it, and I realize I’m in the minority here. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading through all of the Archives of the original Wonder Woman comics I could find at the library, and while the panels always look insane and full of bondage and sadomasochism taken out of context, I’ve never seen anything terribly sinister or sexual in the stories themselves, beyond a very simplistic love is good, war is bad, women are love, men are war kind of fairy tale politics.

I always assumed that a lot of typing up was simply an alternative to savage violence, of the sort you might expect more of in comics for boys, and the simple fact that tying people up is fun and easy to do. That is, it’s a lot easier to play Wonder Woman around the house than Superman or Batman, as her adventures tended to involve a whole lot of capturing escaping.

I could very well be wrong about that, of course. But I really don’t see anything more perverse or over-sexualized or fetishistic in Wonder Woman comics that I can’t see in other comics of the age, beyond the gender stuff.

6.) The gayness of Batman isn’t simply something peculiar to Wertham’s reading of the Dark Knight’s adventures, although he sure seems to have taken it a lot farther than a lot of other folks (looking for phallic shaped shadows in the background, for example).

Jeet Heer had a pretty funny quote about Batman and Robin’s perceived gayness in his essay for Slate.com that I recently linked to.

Here’s what Hajdu finds from one of Batman’s creators, regarding Batman’s sexual preferences: “[O]ne of the uncredited contributors to Batman, Jerry Robinson, said decades after the fact that there was a ‘tinge’ of the homoerotic in the comics’ portrayal of Batman and his boy sidekick, Robin. ‘What they did between the panels was their own bsiness,’ Robinson joked.”

7.) Wertham sounds almost identical to Lex Luthor in some of his complaints about Superman and superheroes in general. Hadju quotes Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent: “How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.”

How often have comic readers heard Luthor raise these exact same complaints about Superman and the Justice League and the way they bring all of humanity down?

8.) Wertham also saw “Superman as a symbol of Hitler’s despotic fantasies of master-race supremacy. Wertham cracked, ‘With the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.’”


This was, of course, long before 1998 miniseries Superman: The Dark Side, in which it was an S.S.

9.) I did mention this in my review, but I found it particularly striking that comics welcomed creators who “felt more established avenues were closed to them.” That is, women, Italians, Jews, Polish folks, black folks and extremeley young creators could get work in comics, but would have a hard time getting illustration gigs, or working for an advertising firm or selling a comic strip.

10.) Some of the fathers of the comic book industry weren’t terribly attractive men. For example, Harry “A” Chesler, Jr., a packager of comics to sell to publishers, was “stubby and gray-skinned.” M.C. Gaines, who claimed to be the inventor of the comic book for helping put out Famous Funnies, was “a pillowy man who resembled a mole.” And Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the “professional eccentric and small-time entrepreneur” who published New Fun and worked with Jerry Siegel, is described thusly: “His face was round and pale, his nose broad and red, and his teeth green.”

11.) Wertham said, “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.” Apparently, the high school debate rule of “if you have to compare your enemy to Hitler, you’ve lost, because it’s so silly” didn’t exist back then. Kind of ironic, considering comic book foes’ book burnings of the offending materials.

12.) Wertham has widely and historically been regarded as the arch-villain single-handedly responsible for the fate of comics in the ‘50s, but he was but one of the villains.

13.) This book coming out at the same time as Comic Book Comics #1 was pretty exciting, given the overlap in the subject matter. The early chapters of Hajdu’s book deals with the same things Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey cover in the first issue of their new book (although they also cover animation).

14.) It can’t possibly sound right to the people who lived through it, but it seems that the Nietzschean concept that what does not destroy one making one stronger comes into play in a major way with the comics industry.

When umbrage was taken at the amount of sexually suggestive imagery and violence in crime comics, the industry moved to romance, a new genre that helped comics grow up quite a bit, with realistic imagery, more emotion, more real world concerns and settings and costume, for example.

When romance got too steamy and threatened the establishment’s understanding of what was morally appropriate for children’s entertainment, the industry shifted to horror, and Mad-style humor.

And when the opponents of the industry and the self-regulating movement finally destroyed crime, horror and counter-cultural humor, the industry “retrenched” with their Golden Age success with superheroes. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and many of their peers were forced from genre to genre for a years, and when they reinvented superheroes in the Silver Age, they brought with them everything that had learned from working in all those other genres.

And the more attention cultural critics and moralists paid to comics, the more creative they forced their creators to be. Just as the Hayes Code helped Hollywood get a bit more sophisticated in talking about taboo subjects, so did the policing of the comics.

And when the Comics Code Authority scrubbed the entire industry squeaky clean, reducing the genres down to just a few, dominated in the decades to come by superheroes, it forced many of the next generation into underground comics. They themselves, and the creators they inspired in the following generation, would give rise to the art and literary comics we are currently experiencing something of a boom of.

Of course, adversity didn’t always make comics stronger.

One of the more intriguing bits of Hajdu’s tale of the rise and fall of EC was that while their horror and humor lines were being dismantled, the publisher was poised to go into the type of drama that now seems more appropriate for television, and which its hard to even imagine comics devoting themselves to today (Comics that aren’t manga, anyway). These included "MD, about medicine; Extra!, about the newspaper business; and Psychoanalysis."

Along with three more standard action titles and a watered down version of their O. Henry-styled horror stories—basically, EC horror stories with all the EC horror stripped out—these comprised the company's short-lived new direction. Obviously it ultimately didn't work—perhaps because no one wanted to read them, or perhaps because no one wanted to buy EC comics of any kind ever again—but I think the idea of pop comics about doctors, reporters and psychoanalysts is a pretty fascinating one.

15.) Given the respectability that the medium and the creators working within it now enjoy, it may be somewhat surprising to learn that The Ten-Cent Plague doesn’t really have a happy ending (I don’t count the tacked-on coda in which Hadju visits R. Crumb).

As Hajdu puts it, the comics survived in part by “retrenching, shifting back to the heroic doings of superheroes, who have dominated mainstream comics ever since. Once television became the dominant media, comics became “specialty items for adolescent boys and collectors.”

Has that changed much since the ‘60s? I think so. I would say it’s changed quite a bit in the last five years. But it’s the way that it’s changed that I think is important.

The ascendancy of the graphic novel in today’s publishing industry and pop consciousness is nowhere near the same thing as comic book’s regaining their hold or influence in American society that they had in the 1940s; comics aren’t back as much as they’re in a different place, more like prose fiction books that a real mass media like television.

The price of comics coming to be regarded as an art form seems to be the sacrifice of their having been a mass media form of popular entertainment. That’s an awful high price for a medium to pay, isn’t it?

16.) Hajdu ends his book with an appendix that’s a full 15 pages devoted to simply listing the names of creators who never worked in comics again after the close of the witch-hunt era. It serves a bit like a monument to the fallen of the half-forgotten culture war, a paper Vietnam Memorial to careers ruined by the anti-comics hysteria.

And man, there is a lot more of interest in there, including lots of anecdotes about your favorite creators and some jaw-dropping instances of their villification. You really oughta read this book; I'm sure your local library will have a copy.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Internet...

—Here’s a short review of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague by yours truly. I’ll probably have another Ten-Cent Plague-centric post here on EDILW over the weekend.


—I don’t have one of those big lists of blogs on the right hand side of my blog there because a) I don’t really know how to do it, b) I don’t want to learn how to do it, c) I don’t want to, like, offend anyone by not including them, nor do I want to therefore link, like, every comics blog in the whole world ever and d) I don’t think any of you care that much about my reading habits. Maybe about my comics reading habits, but not so much my reading about other people’s readings of comics, you know?

Anyway, one site that I do read and recommend is Factualopinion.com My favorite feature there is the “Comics of the Weak” reviews, mostly because I really like when Tucker Stone swears at his comics, and I admire his ability to give completely undiluted opinions on them. For example, his entire review of The Authority: Prime #6 was “This comics is a complete piece of shit.”

At Newsarama.com, we’d say “crap” instead of “shit.” And we’d probably say something like, “I thought this was a complete piece of crap, but…” because there will inevitably be a parade of posters who would embrace it and say we’re pro-Top Cow for having an anti-WildStorm review, and paid off by Image to slam on WildStorm books and, somehow, inevitably, virginity, homosexuality and politics would come up.

But Stone calls a spade a spade, and a piece of shit a piece of shit, and you’ve gotta respect that.

Anyway, that’s my favorite feature there. But I just wanted to point out that this particular installment of Nina Miller’s “Virgin Read” about Secret Invasion is awesome.

Miller’s a self-professed newbie to comics, and an adult female. So, she’s the kind of person that something like a huge story in Entertainment Weekly or a plug on the Colbert Report might theoretically convince to pick up a Marvel comic for the first time. So it’s neat to read her reaction: “I didn’t really realize that it was a Super Hero comic. And, shit, it isn’t just a Super Hero comic. Its, like, The Prom of Super Heroes.”

Mr. Marvel Blurb-Collector, you can stop right there. “It’s The Prom of Super Heroes” is pretty much the perfect cover blurb for a trade collection.

The rest of her piece might not be something the Marvel blurb-collector would want to clip and save, however: “This is, like, for comic people, the equivalent of when the kids I teach go and see Elmo Live. Its like, ELMO! LIVE! And all the others are there too! Big Bird! And Sully! And Zoe! Singing! And Dancing! But ALL TOGETHER.”

Damn, that’s scary accurate. But be careful where you say that kind of thing. I understand some super-comic fans don’t like it when people call them “babymen”, and comparing the Very Serious and Metaphorical Secret Invasion Epic to Elmo Live is getting awfully close to calling its readers toddlermen, which is only a few months of childhood development away from babymen.


—Has there ever been a comic book about a superhero named “Babyman”? I see there’s a guy who goes by the name, but his special talent doesn’t seem to qualify as a superpower. And there’s an IMDb.com entry for, but no real info about The Adventures of Babyman.


—A whole lot of people linked to announcements that the brilliant cartoonist Keith Knight has a daily comic strip in the works. Any new stage for an artist of Knight’s abilities is good news. I’m just shocked he’s doing another strip. Is he going to continue K Chronicles, (th)ink and his other work? Because that’s a lot of gag-writing and drawing to do each week. Here’s hoping The Columbus Dispatch picks it up, although I wouldn’t hold my breath. Or read The Columbus Dispatch. Both activities are pretty bad for your brain.


—Shaenon K. Garrity’s essay about the formulaic nature of Little Lulu is quite astute.

I will take umbrage (whatever the hell “umbrage” is, exactly) with this bit: “The thing about the Little Lulu reprint project is that, brilliant as Little Lulu is, no one really needs 19 volumes of it.”

I do, Shaenon K. Garrity. I do.

Actually, it seems Garrity does too. Garrity breaks down the various categories all Little Lulu comic stories can be assigned into (My favorite is “Tubby the Detective,” and my least favorite is “Lulu Tells a Story;” I usually just skim those sequence and look at the pictures, because Lulu’s stories are always stupid). The very predictability of the comics is part of the charm—Peanuts, for example, can similarly be broken into a dozen or so different scenarios that were repeated over 50 years, with new ones added every decade or so.


—Speaking of Little Lulu, are there any collection’s of Marge’s original Lulu cartoons anywhere? I’d be really curious to see those, if so.

Speaking of Dark Horse reprints, why in God’s name are they charging so damn much for their Herbie Archive? Fifty bucks is a lot to plop down for such a deeply weird comic that looks awesome, but will run the price of roughly four-to-five volumes of Little Lulu. And, sadly, this doesn’t seem like the sort of book that many libraries are likely to carry either. I had the same dillema with Dark Horse’s Shmoo collection, which is still sitting atop that list of trades I’ll buy when I have a bunch of 50 dollar bills lying around (Dark Horse PR folks in the reading audience do note: I do accept comp copies for possible review).

And speaking of Comixcology columns (oh, I guess I didn’t speak of ‘em, but that’s what where the Garrity essay was at), I really like the headline of this one. DC really oughta publish some poetry comics based on their characters.

Wait, no they shouldn’t.


—I’d be happy to field that question: No. Some of it can be, the same way some film or photography can be. Definitions of pornography vary from definer to definer, but usually it’s defined as a work primarily (if not soley) intended to sexually arouse. A good clue might be the presence of any nudity and/or sex acts. Barring either of those, then no, no you fools it’s not. That’s lingerie catalogue-level stuff at the absolute worst. Now, should a 12-year-old boy have that material? Uh, I don’t know; he’s not my kid. But to answer your headline, no.


—It looks more like a poster for Shadow movie, if you ask me.


—Apparently, Dr. Seuss doesn’t roll or spin in his grave; he tumbles and grum-humbles in it.


—The eight-page (?!) response thread to Troy’s Newsarama.com review of Titans #1 has made for interesting reading, as it demonstrates that there is absolutely no such thing as an objectively bad comic book. Because that was by far the worst comic I’ve ever read, and there were still people who liked it.

I found two comments particularly interesting, though. One was that it was unrealistic to expect the quality of the title’s Marv Wolfman/George Perez to ever be met again. That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.

I haven’t read every single issue of their run on the Titans books—in fact, I’ve only read a handful—but it didn’t strike me as the absolute pinnacle of comics that no one could ever be expected to achieve again.

I agree that it might be reasonable to expect that the market will never embrace the Titans characters to the extent that it did when Wolfman and Perez were on the book, but that seems to be an entirely different matter than the quality of the title.

The other odd point was this crudely written post by a “uscwamer.” The poster mentions that everyone who reads comics knows that comics sell well when they have, er, big breasts in them.

That’s not true. Some comics might not sell at all if there weren’t substantial amounts of TnA in them (I can’t see Lady Death, Vampirella or Tarot turning a profit if their title characters pudgy, middle-aged-men or teenage boys, for example).

But do any Marvel or DC super-comics sell because of the inclusion of big breasts in them?

Look at The Beat anyalysis of DC’s sales data, circa February.

The best-selling book is All-Star Batman, the last issue of which involved Batman and Robin sitting in a yellow room making fun of Hal Jordan for 11 pages, and then 11 pages of crying. It certainly had its cheesecake-packed scenes earlier in the run, but at this point that was years ago. I think it’s safe to say that JIM LEE! FRANK MILLER! BATMAN! and maybe even BAT-SHIT INSANITY! are getting guys to buy this book more than the possibility of seeing Vicki Vale in her underthings again.

Their number two book is JLoA, which features an insane degree of cheesecake, with heroines always posed to show off their breasts or their asses or both, no matter what the script calls for. Artist Ed Benes also draws their costumes smaller than any other DC artist.

Is that a factor in its sales success? Perhaps. But note that on the chart JLoA #6 is over 130K, back when Brad Meltzer was still on the title as writer. Now it’s down to just under 90K, and Benes is still around. That would suggest its initial sales had more to do with Meltzer than Benes.

Other books with a high degree of panty-shots and near-nudity or inappropriate cheesecake? Well, there’s Countdown to Final Crisis with its sexed up Mary Marvel and Forager and Amazons, which was one of DC’s best selling title in February, but is only at 67K. Wonder Woman, which is more subdued, is at 41K. Supergirl? 34K. Birds of Prey, which is a book about women with Barbie doll figures in tight costumes, only sells in the low 20,000s.

Over at Marvel, which in general was selling a lot more books than DC in February, the top books were X-Force and New Avengers (mixed gender team books), Amazing Spider-Man (now de-Mary Janified) and Thor. It’s not till you get to the #5 book that you get to a book in which cheesecake/boob-showing off might be a factor, what with Ultimates. But then again, you have two A-List creators and a perennial chart-topper of a title.

The Marvel books featuring well-endowed, scantily clad females Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk sold a little over 24,000 and a little over 22,000 in February, respectively.

So can we lay this boobs in super comics = sales myth to rest yet? Or, barring that, can we at least insist on well-drawn boobs? In Titans, everyone seemed to have visited the exact same incompetent plastic surgeon.